Of all things, I found myself thinking about V S Naipaul while watching the Martin Scorsese-directed rockumentary No Direction Home: Bob Dylan on DVD the other day. It’s been instructive to see the gleeful reactions from media and public after the publication of excerpts from the new Naipaul biography. “Naipaul admits to torturing wife!” screamed reductive headlines, making it seem like an ancient crime demanding immediate and merciless prosecution had come to light. You had to read the reports more closely for the less dramatic picture to emerge: that of a man describing a marriage gone wrong, expressing the guilt he still feels for his part in it, and acknowledging that he was a very bad husband. Human nature being what it is, it’s inevitable that such revelations about a public figure should be followed by smug, self-righteous outrage, even from those (dare one say, especially from those?) who are different from Naipaul only in that they lack awareness of their own faults. (By the way, here’s one of my favourites among the long line of uneducated comments on the good old Rediff.com messageboard: “We should take away his Noble and throw him out of India!!!”) But what's interesting is the way people have gloated over the supposed contrast between the greatness of Naipaul’s work and his failures as a man, in a private relationship. Accusations of hypocrisy have been bandied about: this writer who so masterfully held the light up to our foibles, how dare he have any human shortcomings himself? I thought there were small parallels in No Direction Home, a wonderful two-part documentary that covers five of the defining years in Bob Dylan’s career: between 1961, when he came to New York City, a gawky, aspiring folk singer doing covers of musicians he admired and throwing together a few of his own tunes, and 1966, by which time he had taken up the electric guitar, adopted a (possibly ironic) mainstream rock-star persona and in the process alienated many fans of his early work. By the mid-1960s, Dylan had come to represent the counter-culture: some of his early songs had become anthems for the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-war feeling that was spreading across America because of the developments in Vietnam; they gave a voice to disaffected youngsters and captured the zeitgeist of a fascinatingly turbulent period. Given all this, it isn’t hard to understand why there were cries of anguish when he went electric and began playing with a loud back-up band. His folk-music followers claimed that the “real” Dylan, the “pure” Dylan, was the shy troubadour who strummed an acoustic guitar, wrote and sang straightforward lyrics like “Masters of War”, “With God on Our Side” and “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” – earnest, easy-to-label topical songs. They couldn’t reconcile themselves to the pouting rock star who penned surreal, allusive lyrics about Ezra Pound and T S Eliot fighting in the captain’s tower while calypso singers laughed at them and fishermen threw flowers, and Ma Raney and Beethoven unwrapping a bed roll where tuba players now rehearse around a flagpole. What No Direction Home makes clear is that by 1966, Dylan was very, very tired of all the attention, the constant scrutiny, the second-guessing of his motives and the fact that people didn’t understand his need to take new artistic directions rather than remain pigeonholed by others’ expectations. My favourite bits of the documentary are his interactions with reporters. At press conferences, over-earnest journalists ask him about the “subtle messages” in his songs. He pays them little heed, looking at them in a glassy-eyed way, occasionally working up just enough interest to mock their questions. (Question: “How many protest singers would you say there are today, who use their music, and use the songs to protest the social state in which we live today?” Answer: “I think there’s about one hundred and thirty-six. Either that or one hundred and forty-two.” Question: “What do you have to say about the recurring motorcycle imagery in your songs?” Answer: “Um, I think we all like motorcycles to some degree.”) They get angry. They insist that he acknowledge the effect his work has had on people, define his own impact and importance as an artist. “What do you want me to say, man?” he whines back. They ask him to explain the significance of the T-shirt he wears in the photograph on the cover of Highway 61 Revisited, and he laughs. They ask him if he thinks of himself as a musician or a lyricist. “I’m a song-and-dance man,” he replies.
Interspersed with all this is footage of distressed fans at his England concerts, claiming that he had “sold out” or “gone commercial”. (The frequent cries of “it’s all roobish” made me wonder if a young Geoffrey Boycott was at Albert Hall in 1966.) Later, there’s a brilliant moment where a reporter asks him, “Would you agree that your earlier songs were much better than the recent work?” and Dylan, after discovering that the reporter is a Frenchman, deadpans, “You’re French? See, that’s probably why you think the earlier songs are better.” (I read this as Dylan’s wry commentary on the tendency to impute convenient motives to everything, e.g. “You went electric because you’ve sold out to the Establishment.") Over the past four decades, people have analysed Dylan’s lyrics ad infinitum, especially the stream-of-consciousness ones on Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, but Dylan himself has reserved the right not to have to explain his work – an attitude that has often served as a defence mechanism for artists across fields. (I think of Hitchcock confounding his defenders by dismissing Psycho as “a fun picture, made mainly with the objective of earning lots of money around the world”.) Dylan also reserved the right to be selfish and self-absorbed; to not personally take part in the rallies and causes that his songs had become so closely associated with. In the documentary, Joan Baez, nearing 70 and lovely as ever, admits being greatly disappointed – as a friend and fan – by his refusal to show a political conscience. But she also admits that it was foolish to expect anything of him beyond the songs themselves. (Incidentally Baez also recounts Dylan’s amusement when she told him her interpretation of one of his songs: “They’ll be discussing those lyrics for decades,” he replied, “and I don’t even know why I wrote it.”) No Direction Home is notable for its exploration of the enigmatic relationship between an artist and his audience; how certain people can become symbols for other people’s hopes and dreams, and how thin the line can be between worshiping someone and feeling betrayed by them. (A cry of “Judas!”, one of the strongest denunciations you can find in the Christian world, rang out at a Manchester concert.) This is something that even viewers who aren’t particularly fans of Dylan, or don’t know about his career trajectory, should be able to appreciate. But the film is also very enjoyable for fans of the music of the period, with glimpses of the work of Dylan’s idols and contemporaries, including Hank Williams, John Jacob Niles, Odetta (who appears much too briefly), Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, as well as interviews with Liam Clancy, John Cohen, Dave Van Ronk, and of course Baez (who is introduced in a haunting, blurry black-and-white shot, the camera moving in on her as she performs “Virgin Mary” – here’s the video, taken from the documentary). There are nice anecdotes such as the one where Allen Ginsberg recalls being in a room with Dylan and the Beatles, and marveling at how “these spiritual leaders were so young, so unsure of themselves”, and some superbly quirky scenes like the one where a touring Dylan reads a few random signs outside a shop and then goes berserk twisting the words around to make crazy half-sentences and phrases.
The interludes of Dylan performing are mostly from the Manchester concert, and I enjoyed them greatly too – I’m in the tiny minority that thinks Dylan’s songs are best performed by Dylan himself (exceptions include Lou Reed’s version of “Foot of Pride”, The Clancy Brothers’ “When the Ship Comes In” and Eddie Vedder’s intense, grunge-ish “Masters of War”). And though Blonde on Blonde is my favourite among his albums, I like his acoustic work nearly as much as the three masterpieces of 1965-66. So it was all good. P.S. Parts of the documentary – especially the bits where an aging Dylan, circa 2000, expresses disinterest in analysis and explanation – reminded me of a passage from Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost. It’s a letter-within-the-book, written by a very bitter old woman, the widow of a long-dead writer whose personal life is being scrutinised by a wannabe biographer:
If I had something like Stalin’s power, I would not squander it on silencing the imaginative writers. I would silence those who write about the imaginative writers. I’d forbid all public discussion of literature in newspapers, magazines and scholarly periodicals. I’d forbid all instruction in literature in every grade school, high school, college and university in the country. I’d outlaw reading groups and internet book chatter, and police the bookstores to make sure that no clerk ever spoke to a customer about a book and that the customers did not dare speak to each other. I’d leave the readers alone with the books, to make of them what they would on their own.
P.P.S.Here’s an old, righteous post about Naipaul that I’m very embarrassed about today. (Ah, I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.) And here’s Nilanjana on the Naipaul controversy.
Carrying on from the short post about Arthur C Clarke...some of us were watching Superman II on TV a few weeks ago, and during the scene where General Zod and his villainous associates make their way towards Earth (a glowing blue-green orb suspended in space), we joked about how cool it would be if spatial relationships altered when a person went into outer space – so that the earth turned out to be only, say, three or four times bigger than a basketball while we retained our original dimensions. Then we would be giants, effectively Gods: we could reach out and touch the globe, maybe spin it around, stick a finger into one of the oceans and imagine a cluster of tiny whales nibbling ineffectually at it; or poke about the land mass that represents the US of A (it wouldn't be labeled of course, so one would have to be careful not to mess up Canada or Mexico) and enjoy the feel of a superpower trembling beneath our hands.
I thought about these fancies again when I heard about the passing of Clarke. Some people who haven't experienced science-fiction think it must be solemn and academic, full of complicated jargon; equally, some people I know think it’s flippant and irrelevant. This is a pity, because the best work in the genre mixes playfulness of form with some very weighty ideas - ideas that are very relevant indeed if you believe that it's important to keep questioning conventional wisdom. Much like good fiction can help us step outside of ourselves and see through the eyes of people who are very different from us, good sci-fi can depict the world itself in a new light, exposing the triviality of some of the "grand" ideas that govern our lives (more than one astronaut has pointed out that once you've seen the blue-green orb from a spaceship, it becomes difficult to take artificial borders between countries seriously). There's a nicely symbolic quality to the movie image where an astronaut in space appears to be nearly the same size as the planet he is reaching out to.
Thinking of the mind-expanding qualities of sci-fi reminds me about the other unquestioning assumptions we make about our planet. I remember first realising (on a conscious level at least) that the manmade concepts of "north" and "south" are arbitrary and irrelevant only when I read about it in Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. On this link, there are "upside down" maps that have Australia and New Zealand on top and Scandinavia in the southern hemisphere. According to this model, Kanyakumari is at the head of India while Kashmir lies in the extreme south (what would this do to the north Indian condescension towards "southies"!). These maps seem bizarre and wrong at first glance, and even when you accept that they are just as valid as the ones we have grown up with, they aren’t as aesthetically appealing (this probably has to do with our conditioning) - but they provide a fascinating new way to look at the world, and a much-needed mental shakeup for all of us. I want to order one of them now.
[More than a year and a half after I went to Rishikesh and Ananda Spa to do stories for Outlook's Wellness guide (posts from that time here and here), the book is finally out. Very readable too: many informative and nicely written pieces on Ayurveda, Yoga, naturopathy and other therapies, plus several loving descriptions of various types of massages (free massages being the chief attraction for the unprivileged freelancers who worked on these articles). Congrats to commissioning editor Juhi Saklani, who did a wonderful job putting the thing together.
Am doing the storehouse thing now and putting up the "yoga in Rishikesh" piece I did for the book. Will post the Ananda one later.]
There must be something to that parable about making an arduous trek to the top of a mountain to seek a holy man's advice, reaching there after weeks of toil and discovering that you have become the holy man you seek – for the journey was the destination. I consider this while panting and wheezing up many a steep road (some of which are inclined at almost 45 degrees in places) during my visits to Yoga classes in Rishikesh; the very act of making these trips should qualify one to become a master in the spiritual arts.
As in the best stories, I do indeed find words of wisdom at the top. For instance, in the office of the Yoga-Vedanta Forest Academy run by the Sivanand Ashram, the secretary, Ved Prakash Grover, tells me that three vices – kama (lust), krodha (anger) and lobha (greed) – open the gateway to hell, and that the aim of the Yoga course is to combat these. Unfortunately, foreigners are disallowed from conquering their sins, the course being open only to Indians. "We find that the tourists are an undisciplined lot and cause problems," explains the secretary. "They believe in free sex and alcohol. They kiss as freely as we do namaskar. Their women stand arms akimbo." (He places his hands on his hips.) "No respect for elders. Etc."
In a town that’s widely known for its tourist-friendliness, this attitude is an incongruous one – but then Rishikesh, as I soon discover, has many shades. The overriding impression is of a place in constant flux, not always sure what to make of its own status as a major Yoga centre. But major centre it undoubtedly is. The town is known in some quarters as the Yoga capital of the world, and you'll see markers of this if you take a stroll around the vicinity of the Ram Jhula and the Laxman Jhula, two of the holiest spots in the region. Certain words are ubiquitous on signboards and banners, no matter where you look. One of these is "Ashram", another is "Yoga", and you'll often see the two in conjunction. Which is why it's initially surprising to find that many of the older sadhus in the area give you blank stares when you say the word or ask for directions to Yoga classes. The most likely explanation (not counting deafness) is that they know only the Sanskrit root "Yuj" (meaning "to unite"). The term "Yoga" is believed to have been coined when the form began to get widely commercialised a few decades ago. This is why many members of the old school have either never heard of the neologism or stubbornly refuse to acknowledge it.
In fact, the very definition of Yoga is somewhat nebulous. The uninformed city-slicker (read: yours truly) carries the image of a few complicated exercises, mostly done in the sitting posture. But you'll be surprised how many different forms there are. In nearly every nook and cranny of the town, there are classes advertising bhakti yoga and hatha yoga, jnana yoga and raja yoga; there's pranayama, there are innumerable asanas, there are "special light yoga" courses that can be completed in a day. There's even laughing yoga and dancing yoga.
Given the basic idea behind Yuj (achieving harmony between the body and the mind), the most open-ended interpretations of Yoga can include just about any activity that helps a person do this – even if it's something as basic as lying down on a mat and clearing your mind of all worldly thoughts. My most memorable introduction to this attitude comes from Swami Vishnudas of the Kailashanand Mission Trust, an admirably laidback and no-airs teacher who admits that he doesn't really care for most Yoga techniques despite actively practicing them. "See, the basic idea is to achieve Paramatman," he says (and yes, I'm quoting exactly), "and people can do this in many different ways. When a young boy wishes to achieve a young girl, he tries various techniques: he uses fragrant body powder, dresses up smartly, leaves a good impression by presenting a sensitive side of himself. Likewise, the people here try different techniques – bhakti yoga, asanas, pranayam, meditation – in order to achieve God. It's exactly the same thing, really."
The more orthodox teachers would be aghast at the idea of using such an analogy to explain the serious business of "achieving God". If there's one thing that most people in Rishikesh are parochially proud of as setting their town apart from other Yoga centres, it's the "spirituality" quotient. The term is a common byword; I lose count of the number of times I hear it during my peregrinations from one school to another. "Rishikesh has a reputation for being the Yoga City because of its spiritual touch," says Vivek B Gour, a Yoga-naturotherapist and holistic healer who works with the NGO Bharat Heritage Services. "There are many other places where people practice Yoga during the day and then go off and party late into the night. Here, it's different: we understand that Yoga isn't just about doing exercises to keep the body fit. It's about maintaining discipline; it's about an entire way of life."
Gour is being sincere, but in practice things aren't so cut-and-dried. Attractive though the prospect of hordes of Westerners escaping their decadent lands to come here and find Moral Salvation may be to some people, it doesn't always work that way. Many of the tourists who come here for lessons do take Yoga very seriously, stay for months and carry detailed instructions back with them so they can continue to practice it at home; but for the majority it's a pastime that gives them a "flavour of India" during a short vacation. It's no coincidence that Rishikesh, apart from being a spiritual centre, is also a vantage point for mountaineering, river rafting and other pursuits that are attractive to tourists (unlike, say, nearby Haridwar, where you don't find as many foreigners).
This contributes to the sense of schizophrenia one sometimes gets while soaking in the Rishikesh atmosphere. On the one hand there are gurus preaching about how Yoga must be complemented by discipline in general – "no late-night partying or drinking" – while on the other hand many of the students who attend classes conducted by these very gurus move on to the more fun aspects of vacationing after "sampling" the Yoga culture.
The actual courses range from those conducted by long-established institutes (with martinet codes of conduct and provision for accommodation) to short-term ones run by casual operators looking to make a fast buck off a fad. The latter are spread all over the place: even in residential areas, you can check for indicators of makeshift Yoga courses – just look out for motorbikes parked by the side of the road and discarded shoes and socks lying nearby, and soon enough you'll see a signboard with the familiar words in the undergrowth. But there's a randomness about these non-professional "schools". Often you'll find a sign advertising a course, but you'll go to the given address to discover that classes have either been discontinued or "this isn't the right time of year, there aren't enough students". The same teachers freelance their services to different "schools" and timings are often erratic, so it's difficult to pin down their schedules and movements. One limitation, Gour tells me, is that the region does not have a proper school of Yoga that operates around the year. Typically, classes are held on a fragmented basis, in accordance with the level of tourist activity and interest at the time.
This casualness leads to many mutterings of disgruntlement. At one of the largest, most picturesque ashrams in Rishikesh, the riverside Ved Niketan, I meet a wrathful gentleman named Rajiv who has strong views on the commercialisation of Yoga. "The influx of foreigners has done this," he says. "Since there's money in teaching Yoga, just about everyone feels free to start a course and put up a big board – whether or not they are properly qualified. Ever since the firangs glamorised spirituality in the 1960s, things like pre-marital sex, smoking and drinking have gone hand in hand with Yoga. Today, even the yogis at many of these ashrams lead very materialistic lives."
Most people don't look at the spiritual aspect of the form, a couple of gurus explain, they treat it more like P.T. exercises in school. But while physical asanas make for the superficial structure, real Yoga cleanses internally. Likewise, Vivek Gour disapproves of the flippant approach to Yoga in the metros, "where bored socialites just treat it as a sporadic exercise or as a pretext to wear fashionable gymwear and pose for magazines". Tellingly, modern concepts such as "Yogalatis" – where Yoga asanas are combined with Pilates – are almost unheard of in this town. "We don't like to mix pure Yoga with other, newfangled things," says Gour. But the influence of the “metro socialites” may slowly spread here too, he worries; after all, if tourists keep coming here and making enquiries about Yogalatis classes, sooner or later someone will decide to pander to their demands. And what then will become of Rishikesh’s integrity?
The more established schools – the ones that hold regular classes, at fixed timings, and provide facilities for accommodation – tend to be quite rigid about codes of conduct and about maintaining their privacy. At the Yoga Niketan, I overhear a conversation between an earnest African youngster (a former student) and the secretary, who is having trouble following the thick accent. "I want to make a film about Yoga in Rishikesh," implores the young African, "I will try to sell the rights to American TV, or maybe put it up on the Internet." We don't believe in commercialisation, retorts the secretary, wagging his finger sternly, we won't allow your cameras into our meditation halls.
At these organised teaching centres, there are different schools based on methods followed by past masters of the form: the Iyengar school is more physical, for instance, concentrating on the asanas and known for its use of props such as belts and blocks, while Sivanand classes focus on such aspects as savasana (relaxation), Vedanta (positive thinking) and dhyana (meditation). But they usually manage to coexist without any major conflicts, and it isn't uncommon to see the same group of students attending two or more different sessions (in different schools) on the same day. "As long as we agree that Yoga means to become one with the soul," one of them explains, "how does it matter what methods you use?" It seems you can't have too much soul food. And besides, as the always-irreverent Swami Vishnudas puts it, "Now that they're here, they have to pass their time somehow!"
Peek into a session and you're almost certain to see a majority of non-Indians. Speaking to foreigners heading purposefully from one Yoga class to the next, one realises how much truth lies behind the clichés of "tourist-talk". It's all too common to hear sentences like "Yoga has helped me get in touch with my Inner Self, it's changed my energy and my aura." Why do so many tourists flock to Rishikesh when Yoga can be practiced anywhere in the world, I ask. A few look uncertain. "The original masters were all from this region," one ventures, "and they went out into the world and popularised the form." Another giggles: "Is it because of the Beatles, do you think?" It certainly isn't beyond the realm of possibility that at least a few of the tourists who visit each year are on a pilgrimage of a very different sort – to see the place where the iconic White Album was conceptualised during the Fab Four's 1968 visit.
"Yoga is very costly in their countries, so they come here instead," Swami Vishnudas deadpans when I bring up the subject with him later. But Torte, Danish by origin, a London resident and on her first trip to India, insists it's all about the spirituality. "I became acquainted with Yoga in the UK," she explains, "but coming here has been a completely different experience. It's amazing to hear the guru explain the principle behind every movement even as we do it."
"You're a journalist?" she asks, giving me a sympathetic look. "I was in the crazy world of media myself for several years. Then one day I tried to get up from my bed and found I could barely walk. The stress had finally got to me." That provided the impetus to change her lifestyle – to "live from the heart" as she puts it. "Yoga helped me become more mindful of everything I do – even the way you breathe during the exercises is aimed at making you conscious of the breathing process." Now, she says, she's succeeded in giving up alcohol and cigarettes, "but I still can't do without coffee in the morning. That's next on the removal list!"
(As ever, Swami Vishnudas has a perspective that runs contrary to accepted wisdom: according to him, Yoga is better for people who are already reasonably balanced – "because it makes you more sensitive and it can be harmful for people who are already disturbed in some way".)
Yoga is all about self-realisation, goes the popular refrain, which is why it can be very beneficial to people with high-stress careers where one is constantly in a competitive frame of mind. "It helps you internalise your feelings, act on your own strengths, without worrying about what others around you are doing," says Torte's friend and traveling companion, Melanie. "It takes away the negative feelings that come with too much competitiveness." Later, at a Yoga class, I see some of this firsthand: the students aren't self-conscious about what the others in the class are up to, and whether they can match up. They simply do the best they can and try to improve within their limitations. This session takes place in a large hall at the Yoga Study Centre, where Guru Rudra is the teacher. I've been warned that he's a forbidding man, but maybe I've come on a good day; the guru is all smiles and chuckles during a special farewell lecture he is giving for a batch of his students. Nearly all of them are foreigners and though they shift uncomfortably in the cross-legged sitting position that doesn't come naturally to them, they hang on to the guru's every word. "Swamiji has given Yoga such a simple, direct form," one of them tells me later. "He makes each movement seem natural – it isn't like an instructor telling you 'Left, right, left, right'."
Rudra's method involves a lot of complicated asanas, at least at the advanced stage, but at the Omkaranand Ashram in Tapovan Sarai (in the vicinity of the Laxman jhula) Guru Ashish takes classes based on the more contemplative Sivanand style. "Our students come from different parts of the world and different professions, and we look at their individual needs before we start classes," he says. "Ninety per cent of them say they want to do Yoga to escape stress. Then there are cases where people have been let down in love, or were sexually abused as children. We hear their stories before deciding what the best treatment for them would be."
Ashish is the unlikeliest guru I've met here, a clean-shaven young man with a perpetual shy smile on his face, fidgeting with his mobile phone every now and again – even showing me SMSes he received from a French student who continues to do distance therapy with him even after returning to Paris. "I allot a time, we both get into the zone thousands of miles apart, and I then help solve her problems," he explains. The gratitude-filled SMSes run along the following lines:
"Wow guruji, I totally felt the warm waves of sensation just now!"
and
"That's amazing! How did you know I moved?" (when she failed to maintain a yogic position and he reprimanded her)
Ashish was an engineer once, he tells me, he worked with Hindustan Aeronautics for three years before being drawn by "an inner calling" to come to this town. In fact, that’s a common enough refrain with many of the people I meet. Ved Prakash Grover of the Vedanta Forest Academy is a retired college professor from Jaipur. And K S Rana, advisor, Yoga Niketan left a busy army job in Delhi to, as he puts it, “come here, mingle with saints and merge my soul with mother Ganga". He sounds the spirituality gong too. "You keep yourself – your body, mind and soul – fit by doing Yoga and in the process you keep mankind fit as well. No other discipline teaches this."
At the best of times, it's difficult to reconcile the many definitions of and approaches to Yoga. But here's a last word from our friendly neighborhood non-conformist: in the classes he takes at the Kailashanand Mission Trust, Vishnudas claims to have developed something called "Just Be Meditation", which he describes as an "effortless meditation" based on the invaluable principle of staying still – no unnecessary wastage of energy. "When I was young, I developed the habit of lying down silently and clearing my mind of all thoughts," Vishnudas tells me. "I realised only years later that what I had been doing was a form of reflexive meditation – and, effectively, Yoga." Frankly, his description sounds more like sleep to me, but I don't venture my thoughts. In the final analysis, it's about whatever works for you.
[Note: I haven't included addresses and phone numbers of yoga institutes in this post. Anyone who's interested, please email.]
To enjoy Abbas-Mastan’s Race, you have to quickly make peace with the rules of the film’s very particular universe. Among the most important of these is that no time need be wasted on subtle characterisations. Everyone comes with convenient identification tags: in the opening voiceover we’re told that Durban-based stud-farm owner Ranvir (Saif Ali Khan) lives life on the edge, and to drive home the point there’s a shot of him skirting his car dangerously close to the edge (get it?) of a cliff. Ranvir’s brother Rajiv (Akshaye Khanna) is a down-on-his-luck alcoholic and we know this because he carries a flask all the time and because a steward brings him a glass of beer instead of bedside tea in the morning. (The steward wears a cowboy hat to remind us that the brothers live on a ranch, with all the space in the world to drive their fancy cars in and to generally behave like spoiled brats. Akshaye’s jacket is borrowed from a 1950s B-western.) When femme fatale Sonia (Bipasha Basu) enters the picture, we know she belongs; she passes the film's Coolness Quotient test by saying “anyways” instead of “anyway”.
Ranvir and Rajiv lead privileged lives but they don’t seem to realise it, because they spend most of their time taking sibling rivalry to hitherto unplumbed depths. The driving force for this is an insurance policy where, if one of the boys dies in an accident, the other stands to gain double. An endless spiral of double-crossing (and triple- and quadruple-crossing) follows.
If you’re silly enough to believe in family values like brotherly love (at one point someone compares our heroes to Rama and Bharata, though this only ends up making the point that they are half-brothers), this film can be mistaken for a lengthy anti-insurance advertisement – an effective counterpoint to all those jeevan bima spots where a moist-eyed, greying lady mulls how much more difficult her life might have been after her husband’s untimely death. Watch Race and you’ll agree that all families would be a whole lot better off if insurance had never been invented. (At a stretch, the film could also have been a good ad for birth control, with Amitabh Bachchan making a cameo appearance at the end as Saif and Akshaye’s dad, shaking his head at all the tomfoolery and telling us in his baritone that he should have used condoms all those years ago.) Or maybe the policy is a Macguffin and these boys are really just bored of their regular activities, which include earning vast sums of money at racecourses, cavorting in nightclubs, blowing up cars containing disloyal jockeys and ignoring the lovelorn advances of mini-skirted secretaries who happen to look like Katrina Kaif. These things must get tedious after some time.
With its half-baked script and goggle-eyed attempts to depict the lives of the rich and decadent, Race is a film that’s easy to dismiss once you exit the hall and allow cold logic to override reflex feelings – so let me admit that I enjoyed a lot of it. (In full disclosure: I didn’t spend my own money; my expectations were very low going in; and I’d had a terrible day leading up to the screening and almost anything would have been an improvement.) It’s well-paced, good to look at and, unlike many other recent “paisa-vasool entertainments”, it doesn’t require you to take more than one toilet break. I thought Saif did the oily intensity well (there’s something unsettling about the way his effete voice offsets his brawny appearance), making Ranvir a genuinely menacing guy whom you wouldn’t want to meet in a stable late at night. The ladies look good enough in their high hemlines and much of the music is hummable, though the lyrics include eloquent implorings like “Zara zara touch me touch me touch me/Oh zara zara kiss me kiss me kiss me” and thoughtful admissions such as “Race is on my mind/Race is in my soul/My heart is racing on”. (The one song with full-fledged Hindi sentences – the soulful “Pehli Nazar Mein” – is incongruously picturised: a goofy Akshaye sings it to Bipasha as they cruise around in a red racecar and the sequence ends with one of those familiar moments where a group of watching foreigners burst into spontaneous applause, because they’re so pleased that these dramebaaz Indians have come all the way to their land to sing and dance.)
Sensitive eardrums are advised to stay away, for this is a very loud film, full of jarring background noises (“Aage bhi wahi shor, peeche bhi wahi shor” goes another song aptly). Also, I didn’t like the shrill, often vulgar comedy track that emerges in the second half, with Anil Kapoor as fruit-munching detective RD and Sameera Reddy as his dim-wit secretary, whom he tells to “chooso” his gana at one point. (Note: the rule of majority suggests that my sense of humour isn’t evolved enough – most people in the hall guffawed each time there was a fruity joke.) But thankfully these are marginal characters.
Questions, questions
The cliché has it that we should leave our brains at home (to keep the sensitive eardrums company) when we go to watch movies like Race. I've never fallen for that one: it's so much more fun to take your brains along for the ride, to contemplate the many questions that pop up now and again. For example, what’s with that inexplicable split-second shot of a little white boy catching a half-eaten apple that RD has chucked away? (Does it symbolize the Loss of Innocence, the Man passing the corrupt fruit of Eden to the Child?) Why does a downcast Rajiv ask his brother, “Sonia jaisi ladki meri zindagi mein kaise aa sakti hai?” when just a few seconds earlier he had been engaging Sonia’s scantily clad form in an MTV Grind-style dance (an integral component of the mating ritual for any self-respecting young lad and lass in this movie). Weren’t the jokes in that tedious scene with Johnny Lever as a marriage bureau registrar lifted directly from an email forward about the differences between wives and cellphones? Speaking of marriage, given the determinedly debauched universe of this film, what’s with the peculiar morality that insists on a relationship being complete only when the guy “proposes” to the girl? (As the narrator coyly puts it in one scene, “Yeh ek doosre ke bahut kareeb aa gaye the. Bas, sirf propose karna baaki tha”. Or do they mean “propose” in the vague sense that college lovebirds in Delhi use the word, i.e. “will you ‘go around’ with me”?)
Also: what’s the point of the carefully provided explanations, like the one involving Ranvir’s supposed fall from a skyscraper, and a morgue scene, when these explanations only raise more questions than they answer? Most puzzling of all, why would a film where everyone is essentially indestructible - repeatedly surviving perilous situations for the sake of a new twist – feel the need to actually kill off two of the main characters at the end? It can’t have anything to do with moral comeuppance – that’s irrelevant here, the people who do survive are just as bad, and in the Race universe the only thing that justifies your continued existence is how good you look in leather jackets or minis.
But happily, they all come back to life in the end-credits dance sequence, reminding us yet again that in a movie like this no one can ever really come to harm as long as they know how to walk towards the camera stylishly or make hip boy-band gestures at us, the rapt audience.
[A much shorter version of this review is in this week’s Tehelka]
The Tata Sky programme schedule has a new spin on the Oedipal undercurrents in many Hindi films. The synopsis for the cult Mithun musical Disco Dancer reads thus:
After his mother's death Jimmy finds himself unable to perform. Will he be able to recover from the tragedy and start performing again?
(And some memorable quotes from the film here, including the pathos-laden "He's got guitar phobia. A guitar killed his mother." Beats Deewaar's "Mere paas ma hai" hollow.)
In unrelated news, remember this post about the frantic rearrangement of dates of birth whenever a Bollywood celebrity approaches a milestone age like 50 or 60? Now the fudging enters brave new dimensions: not only do we find that real sisters Dimple and Simple Kapadia were born two months apart in the same year, the Wikipedia entry on Simple even cheekily informs us that she is a month and a half younger than her sister. (It neglects to add that this makes their mother the greatest multi-tasker of all time.)
My favourite newspaper stories are the ones that begin with the words “New research findings indicate that...”. Especially when the findings in question overturn previously held wisdom (which had, of course, been established by earlier research findings). For example, we’re now told that wine isn’t good for our health after all – it shrinks the part of the brain called the hippocampus, thus impairing the time-tested human ability to make intelligent decisions (such as naming a part of the brain “hippocampus”). The news item includes the following laugh-out-loud sentence: “The findings will come as a particular blow to middle-class drinkers, many of whom drink wine for its supposed health benefits.” Apparently people who used to wash down their daily vitamins with a bottle of Pinot aren’t feeling too good about themselves right now.
I also remember another research finding from a few weeks ago, which stated that watching violent films or playing violent video games is good for people after all, because it gives them an outlet to expend negative energy, resulting in fewer real-world crimes. Think of all the millions Stanley Kubrick would have made if they had released this finding back in the 1970s, before A Clockwork Orange was banned. His estate should definitely sue.
In short, one simply doesn’t know what to believe anymore. Here are some other research findings I expect to read about soon:
Smiling is bad for the face A positive correlation has been established between excessive smiling and the incidence of stretch marks around the lower-mouth region that can cause ugly sores and dangerous skin fissures. “It’s common knowledge that people who smile a lot and preen each time they see a camera tend to spend 60 per cent more on face creams and scrubs,” said the dermatologist heading the project, “but we always figured this was a narcissism thing. Now we know there’s a scientific reason for it. The fact is, smiling erodes the face like nothing else.”
The good news is that it’s okay to frown. “Since frowning involves the use of muscles located in the upper half of the head, it helps stimulate the brain, while also protecting the more delicate lower regions of the face,” explains the report. “We recommend that people practice this activity more often.” So the next time someone drops that old platitude “It takes lots of muscles to frown but only two to smile”, tell them “Yes, but we could all do with a work-out.”
God exists, but doesn’t give a flying f*** about us In a discovery that has left atheists and rationalists everywhere shamefaced, valuable documents have been released proving the literal truth of all religious myths. “Adam and Eve, the bridge-building monkeys, the ascent of Muhammed on his horse – yup, it all really happened,” said evangelist-turned-research head Jabber Wocky, “though probably not all at the same time or in the same places”. The bad news? Efforts to contact the Gods, superhuman beings caught up in the internal politics of their own parallel-universe, have revealed that they don’t care what becomes of puny mankind.
“They’re not interested in us at all,” said Wocky, scratching his beard in pious contemplation, “and you can’t really blame Them. Each of Them has His or Her own issues and conflicts - when you have temperamental types like Jehovah and Shiva getting mad at each other, well, it could take months to resolve. I mean God-months, of course, and that’s another problem: one unit of Their time equals a million of ours. This means one of Them could take a quick toilet break and come back to find that while He was away the earth has gone from being ruled by dinosaurs to being ruled by Microsoft. It must be hard for Them to keep track of our events.”
“Turns out we are even more alone and insignificant than we thought. In retrospect, the atheist position wasn’t so bleak after all.”
Beef consumption helps people stay spiritual Meanwhile, an astonishing and sacrilegious study claims that Hindus who eat beef are more likely to be true believers. The starting point for the research, funded by a missionary trust, was the rhetorical question: “Don’t Christians consume bread that symbolizes the body of Christ? So why wouldn’t the same logic apply to people who worship cows?” Subsequent reports have it that the local Shiv Sena is diverting part of its funds to the construction of abattoirs, though some members of the party are asking "Why bother?", seeing that God doesn’t give a flying f*** either way.
97 per cent of adults are allergic to children It was previously thought that babies and children are a menace only in certain contexts, such as train journeys, shared online photo albums, restaurant dinners and movie screenings. But research has now determined that children below the age of 13 give off enzymes that exacerbate existing ailments in the majority of adult humans. “Needless to say, immediate action must be taken,” concludes the report, prepared by Nihilists Incorporated, “One possible remedy is to have all newborn babies quarantined in remote areas and brought up under the supervision of the 3 per cent of adults who are children-resistant. If they agree, that is.”
But according to the team, the most effective solution is for people to stop having children altogether. “In the long run, this measure has the added benefit of eliminating the species, thus putting an end to other man-made problems such as religion, large weddings and Meg Ryan movies. We’re working on it.”
As I’ve mentioned in earlierposts about the Mahabharata, I find the great epic least interesting when it’s presented as a straightforward morality tale with a God-figure in the lead role, a puppet-master showing the good guys the Right Way. Comic books, short translations and TV soaps have done their best to simplify/sanitise matters (as they have with most ancient texts), but when you draw deeper into the vast well of stories that make up this sprawling work, you realise just how rich and complex it is – full of moral ambiguity, constantly raising questions about the contradictions in human nature without providing any easy answers. As Amartya Sen points out in one of his essays in The Argumentative Indian, even when we’re submerged in the authoritative wisdom of the Bhagwad Gita, the pacifist argument Arjuna makes to Krishna is never quite lost; in our own age, when we know something about the dangers of righteous certitude, it may be even more relevant. Among the many lesser-known sub-stories in the Mahabharata is one told by the sage Lomasha to the exiled Pandavas, about a king named Yuvanashva who drinks a potion meant for his barren queens and ends up pregnant himself. For Devdutt Pattanaik, a medical doctor, marketing consultant and mythologist (!) deeply interested in the relevance of old myths in modern times, this was an instantly intriguing story. Pattanaik has written several books on myths and rituals already, but The Pregnant King is his first work of fiction, a retelling of the Yuvanashva tale to examine gender roles, the blurring of lines between parental duties and the malleability of Dharma to fit a given situation. The result is a sporadically successful book that tells an engrossing, subversive story but meanders a little too much. According to the Mahabharata, Yuvanashva, king of Vallabhi, lived many generations before the Kurukshetra war. The Pregnant King situates the story at the same time as the central narrative of the epic, making him a contemporary of the Pandavas and Kauravas, and one of the few kings who doesn’t participate in the war (because he’s preoccupied with the more important business of siring an heir). This shift in chronology allows Pattanaik to use episodes in the epic as parallels or counterpoints for the Yuvanashva story. The characters in this book make chatty references to the lives of their more famous contemporaries in Hastinapur, and the effect is a little like Delhi Times readers discussing the latest on Aishwarya-Abhishek or Saif-Kareena (“ooh, did you know Kunti is rumoured to have had a son out of wedlock?”). The question of whether the impotent Pandu and the blind Dhritrashtra were fit to become king are set against similar dilemmas involving characters in Vallabhi. Shikhandi, who was born a woman but procured a penis from a yaksha later in life, has a small but important role. There is some healthy irreverence on view: when a messenger arrives with the momentous news that the war is over, no one in the kingdom is particularly interested, being more concerned about internal matters. When the hero Arjuna makes what amounts to a guest appearance and is asked about a story Bhishma narrated to the Pandavas before he died, his reply is a curt, “I’m sorry but I remember no such story. He said so many things” – a neat dismissal of the ponderous Shanti Parva, Bhishma’s long deathbed discourse about a king’s duties. Expectedly, wry humour runs through the story. Long before Yuvanashva finds himself in the family way, the kingdom has had to permit the bending of convention: his mother Shilavati, widowed at a young age, is a proxy ruler, and the Brahmana elders are disturbed because “they were not used to a leader who nursed a child while discussing matters of dharma”. (It’s notable that the unconventionality of Shilavati’s own life doesn’t make her any more tolerant of her son’s situation later on, which underlines the point that non-conformity/anti-tradition can take many shapes, and these aren’t always kindred spirits.) There are multiple references to bulls, fields, soil and seeds as euphemisms for sex and conception, and to illuminate the vexing question of “ownership” that arises when a woman is made pregnant by someone other than her husband. And then there are those troublesome dead ancestors, the “pitrs”, waiting for the arrival of a child so they can be reborn in the land of the living. Taking the form of crows, they perch outside bedchambers, waiting for quick results, flapping their wings impatiently when foreplay goes on for too long. (“Does it not bother you that your son’s seed is weak?” one of them indelicately asks Shilavati.) The Pregnant King isn’t a consistently satisfying work – it is overlong, full of staccato sentences (“That’s what they were. Vehicles of an idea. Two ideas. No. One idea, two expressions. Two halves of the same idea. Mutually interdependent”), the occasional forced attempt at informality, and some philosophical mumbo-jumbo towards the end (“Within you is your soul, Adi-natha as Shiva, silent, observant, still. Around you is matter, Adi-natha as Shakti, ever-changing, enchanting, enlightening, enriching, empowering”). Also, readers whose engagement with ancient texts runs along orthodox lines might not be too interested in a modern myth about the amorphous nature of the world and its laws. But in a sense, this book is meant for just such readers. At its best this story about “the imperfection of the human condition, and our stubborn refusal to make room for all those in between” is a cautionary tale for our own times. If only it had been a hundred or so pages shorter. (You know what they say about attention spans in our Kalyug.) [A version of this review appears in this week’s Tehelka]
Arthur C Clarke has left. Coincidentally, after making the 2001: A Space Odyssey reference in my last post, I flipped through some of my favourite Clarke stories, including "The Sentinel", which was the seed of the 2001 script. I haven't read any of his longer works but I'm a big fan of his short stories - when I first encountered them many years ago, they opened my eyes to the ways in which good science fiction can engage with our world more closely than laboured, fact-obsessed non-fiction (this sounds paradoxical, but anyone who's opened themselves to the genre will understand). Also, its incomparable ability to put our lives in perspective and to hold up a large cosmic mirror in which we can see the pettiness of some of the concepts we've created (patriotism, for instance). None of this means that Clarke is insensitive to the minutiae of human lives, or to our deepest feelings: his beautiful, sentimental "Dog Star", about an astronaut having to part with his beloved dog when he goes to live on a lunar observatory, is about the closest any short story has come to moistening my ever-dry eyes. (It's also one of a few examples in Clarke's work of a rational mind struggling with an experience that borders on the supernatural, and never coming completely to terms with the scientific explanation.)
Here are some of my other favourite Clarke stories, all of which are good starting points for a reader new to SF. Among the more serious ones: "The Wall of Darkness", "Out of the Sun", "The Forgotten Enemy", "The Star" (one of his most acclaimed pieces, with a genuinely frisson-creating twist), "The Shining Ones" (a nice riff on the "Squid" chapter in Moby Dick) and "Dial F for Frankenstein". Among the humorous stories, "History Lesson" (minor spoiler: you'll never look at Donald Duck the same way again), "A Slight Case of Sunstroke", "Let there be Light", and "Reunion". There are dozens of others - you'll find them all in this book.
I was withdrawing money at an ATM a couple of days ago when the machine became unsolicitedly chatty. “It’s been a pleasure servicing you,” said the display screen, “Have a nice day and don’t forget to take your cash.” Now, with a little effort I could overlook the inappropriate “servicing”, which made me feel like a bachelor in a lap-dancing club, but the second sentence took things too far. “Don’t forget to take your cash”? Really? Did this machine imagine I had popped into the booth to pay it a courtesy call, or to experience the unique high that comes from randomly pressing buttons? If I had a display screen on my own chest, I would have replied, “OF COURSE I won’t forget to take the cash, you iron-brained moron – the cash is why I’m here. And what do you know about ‘nice days’ anyway? You’re just a stationary pile of nuts and bolts and magnetic chips. You’ll never walk in a garden, smell flowers, hear birds singing, blah blah...” (No, it isn’t relevant that I don’t get to do any of these things myself, spending most of my day in the company of a personal computer.)
This whole business harks back to an ancient fear of machines, combined with the important childhood lesson that one mustn’t talk to strangers. I was terrified of computers when I first encountered them in the late 1980s in school. The first time I (mis)heard the term CPU, I thought the thing would look like C3PO from Star Wars, and while it was a relief to find that it was just a passive rectangular box, my fears weren’t completely allayed. Those were the years of DOS and the large floppies that lived up to their name (not like the smaller, more compact versions you get these days...oh wait, you don’t get any floppies these days), and I dreaded the practical classes, freezing at the act of inserting a floppy into C3PO, never sure which end had to go in – strangely enough I didn’t develop the confidence to do it myself even after watching it being done several times. (A friend usually helped with this and other infernally complicated processes, such as typing things on the keyboard, and I revered him as a tech-wizard because the expression on his face when he sat at the computer wasn’t that of someone watching The Evil Dead alone in a dark room.)
I also come from a generation that vaguely remembers what it was like to stand in a long queue in a squalid, state-operated bank with a cheque in hand each time we wanted some hard cash (which was more often than today, because – pay close attention, little boys and girls, and get out your smelling salts – we didn’t have credit-cards back then either). It was part of our psychological conditioning that withdrawing cash from a bank had to be a tedious, sweaty, hard-won process, nearly as difficult as earning the money in the first place. So it was that when the first automatic teller machine came to our neighborhood, it took us days to believe that such a thing could be. When we stood outside the booth and peered inside, we were like the chimps in 2001: A Space Odyssey, gazing at an alien monolith in fear and wonder. Once we actually found the nerve to enter the booth, it took courage to figure out the right way to insert the card into the slot (the first time we did it wrong and the machine made a series of indignant beeping sounds, we were convinced the world was coming to an end, or at least that the contents of our bank account were about to be chewed up).
Even after I stopped being afraid and learnt to coexist with machines, I retained the idea that one should keep them at arm’s length. But now the things talk to us in our own language and treat us like equals. This is difficult for my central processing unit to absorb.
P.S. Nostalgia and disconcertment have been running themes lately. Earlier this week I had occasion to visit the new campus of the institute where I did a post-graduate communication course almost exactly a decade ago. Peeping in at the ongoing classes, it occurred to me that everyone in the current batch has a cellphone and that these young men and women probably spend a lot of time texting each other during lectures the way people in our batch used to pass around hurriedly-scribbled-on paper chits 10 years ago. It’s one of those things that can make you feel unexpectedly old – a reminder that generation gaps will never cease to exist, even if you were once naïve enough to believe that your own generation has seen it all and can never be surprised or made to feel obsolete.
Don Siegel’s offbeat 1970 Western Two Mules for Sister Sara has what must be one of the unlikeliest pairings in movie history. The film begins with Clint Eastwood (playing a laconic mercenary drifter, a role he had patented in Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns) rescuing a woman (Shirley Maclaine) from three lowlifes and discovering, to his great astonishment, that she is a nun. (Eastwood’s expression here, captured in a hilarious zoom-in that will be repeated in another scene near the end of the film, is priceless; it’s the most elastic I’ve known his face to be in the first half of his career.) Moreover, Sister Sara is such a compassionate nun that she insists on giving the dead villains a decent Christian burial: they are “creatures of God” after all. But the Eastwood character, Hogan, doesn’t want to hang around and dig graves under the hot sun, so he points at the vultures circling above and speaks the most uncharacteristic lines to come out of a Clint Eastwood drifter’s mouth:
Sister, cast your eye heavenwards. Are those not God’s creatures? Would you deprive them of all this convenient nourishment?
Whereupon Sara decides to dig the graves herself, muttering that this man is as stubborn as her mule and thus setting up the film’s tongue-in-cheek title. As the two characters banter their way through the desert and become involved with a group of Mexican revolutionaries, it becomes obvious that Hogan has indeed been relegated to the position of Sister Sara’s mule (she makes quite an ass of him too, as we see at the film’s end). It’s fun to watch one of Hollywood’s iconic macho men playing second fiddle to a woman, especially in a film that comes from such a male-dominated genre. (I enjoy genre-inversions of this sort, especially in Westerns. I think it started happening from the 1950s onwards, with films like Johnny Guitar and the Anthony Mann movies, but my favourite example of a Western where the woman frequently gets the better of the leading man is much older – the 1939 Marlene Dietrich-James Stewart starrer Destry Rides Again.)
Two Mules for Sister Sara is an uneven film but it has many enjoyable moments, mostly involving the interplay between Eastwood and Maclaine, and the quirky little touches, such as the use of ecclesiastical music in a scene where “Sister” Sara sneaks away to smoke a cigar. Watching it on TV earlier this week, it occurred to me that Clint Eastwood’s early career is more varied than is usually thought. The conventional view is that he was a completely passive, one-dimensional actor who never stepped beyond a certain type of role (slipping quickly from the Man with No Name persona to Dirty Harry), and that his work became varied only much later, after he found his feet as a director. In fact, Pauline Kael didn’t even credit him with being a one-dimensional performer. “He isn’t an actor, so one can hardly call him a bad actor,” she observed in a 1974 essay about new trends in screen violence, “Eastwood’s wooden impassivity makes it possible for the brutality in his pictures to be ordinary, a matter of routine. He may try to save a buddy from getting killed, but when the buddy is hit no time is wasted on grief; Eastwood couldn’t express grief any more than he could express tenderness.” (I wonder if Kael would have changed her mind if she had seen Million Dollar Baby, where in my view Eastwood the actor was even more impressive than Eastwood the director.)
I compared Eastwood unfavourably with the Great Mifune in Yojimbo after seeing him in the Leone westerns, but I’ve grown to like a lot of his early work, and I think the idea that he didn’t have a sense of humour or that he was trapped in a macho image is overstated. Though he was never a versatile actor, his choice of films even as early as the late 1960s revealed a willingness to experiment or to send up an established screen persona (it’s another matter that these usually weren’t commercial successes). Incidentally another notable film in this league is The Beguiled, a bizarre, unclassifiable story about an injured soldier stirring up romantic – and increasingly pathological – feelings amongst the occupants of an all-girl boarding school. (Warning: the climax of this film is so deflating that Eastwood fans might feel the need to reenergise themselves by watching the climactic shoot-out of The Good, The Bad and the Ugly and the “Make my day” scene from Dirty Harry in quick succession. Keep those DVDs at hand if you watch this one.)
Turns out the story about Dev Anand modelling himself on Gregory Peck was a myth. Watching the classic 1939 film of The Wizard of Oz on DVD yesterday, I discovered the truth behind a screen persona that has haunted Hindi cinema for over 60 years now.
It's true! Just watch the film. Especially the scene where Dorothy meets the Scarecrow for the first time and Bolger nods his head in that frantic, goofy style, like his brains are made of straw (which of course they are). And the way he crosses his arms in front of his face so that the right hand is pointing leftwards and the left hand rightwards. The jack-in-the-box mannerisms, and his voice, which often seems just on the verge of turning into a yodel. Imagine what an impact all this would have made on the young Dev when he first saw the film at age 16 or 17. "This is just the kind of thing the studios are looking for," he would have said to himself, shaking his head wildly and rushing to catch the next train to Bombay. This may or may not have been the same train in which he discovered "the opening to an ecstasy", as detailed in this post. (Another post on Mr Anand here.)
P.S.The Wizard of Oz DVD has some great extras, including a documentary on the careful restoration of the film and a "Wonderful Wizard of Oz" storybook read by Angela Lansbury. The film is mostly as great as ever too, though some bits towards the end didn't hold up as well as I'd remembered. (The wizard's chamber looked a bit like a villain's den in a low-budget 1970s Hindi film.) Old age. Sigh.
Circumstances have only permitted light reading in the last few days and I was in the mood for some solid detective fiction, so I’ve spent some time in the company of Peter Robinson’s excellent series of police-procedural novels featuring the complex Inspector Banks. The local Crossword bookstore has a number of Robinson omnibuses, each one collecting two of the Inspector Banks novels, on sale – they’re priced at just Rs 200 each, very good value for money, and I’ve picked up most of them.
I read my first Robinson, Aftermath, a few years ago (in fact this was one of the first books I reviewed for a print publication) and was very impressed by it. The title has a double-meaning, the immediately obvious one being that it’s about an investigation that takes place after a notorious serial killer has been unmasked (the suspense in this case arising from the discovery of bodies that can’t all be identified, and from the question of whether the killer’s wife was complicit in his crimes, and to what extent). The less obvious meaning of the title, as we learn late in the book, is that almost everything that happens here can be viewed as the bleak aftermath of another, much older crime, which has caused the lives of the people involved to spiral endlessly into ever-darker places.
Aftermath was a reminder that a good detective tale doesn’t require a thrill a minute. There are no shocking revelations; so meticulous is the investigation that nearly every possibility is set before the reader well before the denouement, and what surprises remain come from minor twists. What made the book so effective were Robinson’s storytelling skills and pithy character sketches, his attention to the details of police-work and the way he creates a very real sense of human tragedy. One of his biggest strengths as a writer is the way he evokes the atmosphere of small-town England through his fictional Eastvale: the Yorkshire dales and moors, the market square and the pubs, the local gossip, the unexpected glimpses of conservatism, the youngsters with stars in their eyes wanting to escape this quiet setting and move to a big city, the banter between policemen and small-time criminals, and the internal politics in the police department. And the drystone walls, which can provide a stress-busting hobby for a police chief on the verge of retirement – but can also double up as a concealment site for a murderer.
The books I’ve read in the past few days have been in chronological order, beginning with Gallows View (1987), which introduces Alan Banks, a 36-year-old Detective Chief Inspector who has recently moved with his wife and children from London to Eastvale. Banks, we soon learn, is a man with a wide range of interests, especially in classical music and literature; we are told of him and his wife Sandra that “neither was an academic or intellectual, but both pursued self-education with an urgency often found in bright working-class people who hadn’t had culture thrust down their throats from the cradle onward”. He is a man of many moods, as we discover with each successive book – moods that are determined by such things as the quality of the pint at a newly opened pub, or the progress of his efforts to cut down on smoking. He’s also insightful about human nature and critical of his own occasional failings as a husband and father. But most importantly, he’s a bloody good copper, with a knack for unconventional methods and for risk-taking.
Gallows View is one of the cosiest entries in the series (like Banks coming to terms with the different, much more personal nature of crime in small towns, Robinson was probably finding his feet in the genre). There’s a little map that gives us the basic layout of Eastvale, and the three converging plot strands involve a peeping tom, the accidental killing of an old woman, and youngsters breaking into homes for valuables that can be sold in the grey market. It’s all very quaint and small-scale at this point, but the later books get more expansive, often moving beyond the town’s borders and dealing with more craftily plotted crimes. Robinson’s writing also becomes more assured and ambitious, culminating in the outstanding In a Dry Season, which moves between a modern-day investigation and a narrative from the World War II days.
At their best, the Inspector Banks books combine the most satisfying qualities of genre fiction and literary fiction (note: I’m not very interested in these classifications myself, but I’m referring to their conventionaldefinitions). These are fast-paced, conversation-driven books that don’t spend too much time on description – though that’s partly because Robinson is gifted enough a writer to convey a lot about a person or a setting in very few words – but they are also literate, reflective and gritty. Every now and again, a genre cliché does intrude (“I’m a snowball running down the hill, picking up dirt so you can sit safe and warm at home,” Banks tells someone at one point, though knowing him you have to wonder if he’s being a little sardonic), but those are exceptions rather than the norm.
Reading the books chronologically, it’s also possible to appreciate the technological changes that occurred between the late 1980s and 2003 (that’s when The Summer that Never Was, the last of the books I’ve read, was written) and the way they facilitated both police investigations and criminal activities. Cellphones make an appearance, the Internet becomes a vital part of life, even in this laidback setting (one of the novels, Cold is the Grave, begins with a chief constable discovering a photo of his runaway daughter on a porn website and hiring Banks to discreetly track her down), and as the cosy, Miss Marple-ish mood of the first book becomes a distant memory, one gets a sense of irrevocable change in the boondocks. If Banks were to return to London today, he might find that things aren't all that different.
If you’re a fan of the genre and you haven’t read Robinson yet, get started immediately. It’s probably best to read Gallows View first, just for the introduction to Banks and his world, but after that it isn’t imperative to read the books in order. (Especially recommended: Dead Right and In a Dry Season.)
Of all things, I found myself thinking about V S Naipaul while watching the Martin Scorsese-directed rockumentary No Direction Home: Bob Dylan on DVD the other day. It’s been instructive to see the gleeful reactions from media and public after the publication of excerpts from the new Naipaul biography. “Naipaul admits to torturing wife!” screamed reductive headlines, making it seem like an ancient crime demanding immediate and merciless prosecution had come to light. You had to read the reports more closely for the less dramatic picture to emerge: that of a man describing a marriage gone wrong, expressing the guilt he still feels for his part in it, and acknowledging that he was a very bad husband.
What No Direction Home makes clear is that by 1966, Dylan was very, very tired of all the attention, the constant scrutiny, the second-guessing of his motives and the fact that people didn’t understand his need to take new artistic directions rather than remain pigeonholed by others’ expectations. My favourite bits of the documentary are his interactions with reporters. At press conferences, over-earnest journalists ask him about the “subtle messages” in his songs. He pays them little heed, looking at them in a glassy-eyed way, occasionally working up just enough interest to mock their questions. (Question: “How many protest singers would you say there are today, who use their music, and use the songs to protest the social state in which we live today?” Answer: “I think there’s about one hundred and thirty-six. Either that or one hundred and forty-two.” Question: “What do you have to say about the recurring motorcycle imagery in your songs?” Answer: “Um, I think we all like motorcycles to some degree.”) They get angry. They insist that he acknowledge the effect his work has had on people, define his own impact and importance as an artist. “What do you want me to say, man?” he whines back. They ask him to explain the significance of the T-shirt he wears in the photograph on the cover of Highway 61 Revisited, and he laughs. They ask him if he thinks of himself as a musician or a lyricist. “I’m a song-and-dance man,” he replies.
In the documentary, Joan Baez, nearing 70 and lovely as ever, admits being greatly disappointed – as a friend and fan – by his refusal to show a political conscience. But she also admits that it was foolish to expect anything of him beyond the songs themselves. (Incidentally Baez also recounts Dylan’s amusement when she told him her interpretation of one of his songs: “They’ll be discussing those lyrics for decades,” he replied, “and I don’t even know why I wrote it.”)
