We began the elephant leg of the tour at the Pinnewala elephant orphanage just off the Kandy road – a key tourist attraction for anyone visiting non-coastal Lanka.
There are shops here that sell products made of elephant dung. On average you get 4 kg of dung from each elephant per day, and that’s enough to produce 48 poster-sized sheets of paper.
Even if you know that the dung-processing is very efficient and scientific, and that the raw material is basically reduced to a collection of fibre after being boiled and treated for a few hours, you can’t help some Beavis-and-Butthead snickering at how proud the shop-owners are of dung products. “Sir, this notepad is more expensive because the pages are all made of pure elephant dung – see!”
Two weeks ago I would never have guessed that I’d be photographing a pile of elephant poo, much less putting it up on my blog, but one learns new things about life every day. In the background are the rectangular frames that are used to mix the dung fibre and pulp together, and make coloured paper.
An elephant skeleton in the shop factory. Just so you know what it looks like.
On a happier note, live elephants on their way to the nearby river for their afternoon bath. It’s a major tourist attraction out here – you can see some of the paparazzi in the background.
This chap’s something of a local legend. One of his front feet was blown away by a landmine and he limps around on three legs. Treads very cautiously and stays near the edge of the river, doesn’t go in too deep. There’s talk of getting him a prosthetic if money can be raised.
One of the mahouts takes a quick nap under the shelter of a rock – it was a hot day.
A family appropriates one of the rocks for itself. The little one was very enthusiastic throughout.
Lady elephants are better at public displays of affection, much the same way it is with humans. This one kept nuzzling her husband's belly with her trunk. He seemed to enjoy it but he didn't reciprocate - looked straight ahead.
Abhilasha feeds a baby elephant. After seeing the photo my mother, in the tradition of all good mothers-in-law, remarked that they have exactly the same smile on their faces, though Abhi is definitely missing a trunk.
From our “brave and adventurous” elephant safari in Sigiriya. Sitting on the guy’s neck was quite an experience – very powerful muscles = free butt massage. Don’t miss his crossed hind legs.
He took us into the lake as well.
In the background is the Sigiriya rock fortress – more on that in the next post.
(Click photos to enlarge)
Am putting the pics up in random order over a few posts, along with some commentary. (Click photos to enlarge.)
Nearly everywhere we travel, we manage to do some impromptu “cat tourism” and the pattern continued in Lanka; our guide was befuddled by the greater interest we showed in the feline-life than in the monuments and sculptures he was pointing out. The most impressive of the kitties we encountered was this little model of piety in the Ruwanvelisaya stupa complex in Anuradhapura.
He/she remained in this position all the time we were there – arms stretched out in prayer, feet folded in a distinctly yogic posture. Didn’t move at all. I also like the expression on the woman's face.
Another languid (but not as saintly) cat outside the Arunalu Spice and Herbal Garden, just before Kandy.
Once we were done tickling this one’s belly, we dutifully spent some time inside the garden, admiring the plants, learning about the preparation of the very distinct curry powder that is used in nearly all Lankan cuisine. (The yellow daal was consistently excellent, though it isn’t for delicate stomachs.) Had some fine herbal tea too – very fresh, like all the tea and juices we had in the country.
But still running with the animal theme: here’s a bedraggled mongrel on a cold and damp day in Nuwara Eliya.
I was very taken by the topography of this place. Had thought it would be like a north Indian hill station, situated on a mountainside so that you have to negotiate steep and winding roads uphill or downhill even to travel just a few kilometers. But Nuwara Eliya is on a plateau, so even though it’s 2,000 metres above sea level there are vast patches of flat land, including the area occupied by the lake you see in this photo. Much more relaxing on the whole for people who suffer from motion sickness on mountain roads. Some of the scenery also reminded me of the Scottish highlands; these photos don't really do it justice.
Hanuman temple in Nuwara Eliya. The people who built it claim this was the spot where Sita was kept captive by Ravana, and where Hanuman found her.
Naturally, this means that they have a spot on one of the rocks marked with yellow to show that this was the indent left by the deity's giant foot when he landed here.
Also, one of the lake-beds in this region has a black-ish tinge, which has to mean that this is where Hanuman dipped his tail after it had been set on fire. (More on tourism overkill in a subsequent post.)
Next to the temple, there's a flower nursery dedicated to the abducted goddess, with her name spelt very differently from the north Indian style.
One of the performers in the mask dance, part of a cultural show we saw at the Kandy Arts Association Hall. Picked up a few of these masks later.
And the Raban dance, which involves the balancing of several spinning drums. Very impressive. Apologies for the picture quality though - dark hall, poor vantage point.
The ancient capital of Anuradhapura is full of old buildings and ruins, not all of which seem very well-maintained. We had a decent enough time there but it could have been better: we were there at the hottest time of day, there was very little shade and lots of walking to be done, much of it barefoot. This is the Isurumuniya temple, dating from the 5th century, along with a famous carving of forbidden lovers.
Also from Anuradhapura: a section of the semi-circular moonstone in the Abhayagiri monastery, with its motifs of buffaloes, lions, horses and elephants - some say the animals stand for the four stages of life, though there are other interpretations too.
(In the miniature versions that we saw in souvenir shops, the swans looked like Donald Ducks.)
Also, a guardstone, with the guard carrying a pot of plenty, representing prosperity and fertility.
More pics to follow, including several that involve elephants.
Well, the vacation happened and it was nice, which is just as well since tough times loom ahead – the family situation is getting more intense generally. Shortly after touching down I learnt that my grandfather had passed away around 36 hours earlier. My dadi, one of the strongest, most pragmatic people I know, decided not to call and inform us because she felt it would spoil the last day of our stay and anyhow we couldn’t have made it back to Delhi more than a few hours before we were scheduled to. We missed the cremation, and that’s something I feel very bad about. My last memory of dadaji is of him wishing us well, telling us to “have a good time in Ceylon”. He turned 90 this March and much of his natural poise and authority – which impressed so many people during his lengthy army career – had been undermined after a stroke a couple of years ago. But he was still very alert given his age and circumstances, and still partial to a peg of scotch every evening.
Also, the vaguely old-world British style of speaking English was in place till the end. “How are you, my dear?” he would say to dadiji each morning in a clipped but warm voice, though most of their longer conversations were in Punjabi. They would have celebrated their 60th anniversary later this year and I worry about how she will cope. She had been prepared for his passing for a long time, and often voiced her hope that he would be the first to go (since he was so dependent on her), but dealing with the actual loss is of course a completely different matter. They had been together since she was 20 and he 30, and though it wasn’t a love marriage in the often-myopic way that we use that term today, it was built on respect, an attachment that kept growing over the years and an understanding that adjustments had to be made (in both directions, not just on her part) given their very different natures. They traveled the world together on his postings, on one occasion living for years in another country with no other family to depend on; they brought up a son who was to be a constant source of disappointment and trouble, and later in life they did everything they could for a grandson who couldn’t always be around for them. It’s difficult to imagine the strength they must have derived from each other through all the good and bad times.
Most people don’t have to wait till their thirties to experience losing a grandparent for the first time, but in my case one grandparent (my nana) died before I was born and the other three have had extremely long lives. This has had its good and bad sides. On one hand, it’s been painful to see them get old and fragile, constantly afflicted by illnesses, dependent on domestic help on a day-to-day basis while also dealing with other family woes that I won’t mention here. When Abhilasha and I got married last year, my dadi joked that she wished it had happened when I was in my early or mid-20s since they would have been in better shape then, and would have been able to pamper their granddaughter-in-law the way they would have liked.
On the other hand, their longevity has meant that I've been able to spend some quality time with them in the past few years – something that wouldn’t have happened if they had left earlier, when I was in the much more self-involved phase of growing up and working hard to establish myself in my profession. I’ve cherished this extra time, the fact that it’s helped me fulfill a few of my responsibilities towards them, or even make them happy through little things like seeing my name at the top of a newspaper article.
Though I’ve lived with my mum and nani since I was a child, I’m also the only grandchild of my dada and dadi, and for all practical purposes their only immediate family too – so the level of responsibility has been high, especially in the past few years as they have grown more infirm. (I should clarify that for most of this time, my dadi has been astonishingly resilient and very determined that my life and work mustn’t be compromised on their account, except in the most extreme situations.)
Am going to do what I can to persuade her to stay with us now, but there are many complications, many things that have to be settled first, and none of it is going to happen quickly. It looks like I’m going to be spending a lot of time moving between houses and dealing with tetchy matters in the foreseeable future. Might also have to cut down on work after I’ve finished with the few assignments I have pending.
Will post a few old photos of my grandparents once I have them scanned, and will also put up some pictures from Sri Lanka soon, but otherwise it looks like activity here will continue to be sporadic for some time. More updates when possible.
...for a week. Or Ceylon, as my dadi persists in calling it. Much-needed break after all the family illnesses/troubles of the last few months (don’t even want to think about how many enticing travel assignments I’ve had to turn down in the past year).
Will mostly be in the highlands and non-coastal areas: Kandy, Nuwara Eliya, Sigiriya, Dambulla, Anuradhapura. Won’t have Net access for most of the time I’m away, but will hopefully have some pictures to put up next week. Back on the 28th. Bye-bye.
The 12-disc extended edition of The Lord of the Rings trilogy is available in stores in India now. I picked up the set a couple of days ago and it looks sumptuous. As anyone who reads this blog often will know, I make a lot of noise about DVD extras and the need for directors to use the medium to provide value-addition for home-viewers (rather than simply have the film on the disc along with a “songs selection” feature, as many DVDs of Hindi films lazily do). Well, what Peter Jackson and his team have accomplished with this disc-set represents the most thoughtful use of the medium I’ve yet seen; it’s obvious that they've relished the opportunity to show off the behind-the-scenes material that piled up during the many years of shooting. “Specially created for home viewing” says the package, and the booklet accompanying the set adds that with no constraints on running time, each film was extended by between 30 and 50 minutes (sounds a bit like a 600-word film review being expanded on a blog!).
But rather than simply inserting deleted scenes, Jackson approached this Extended Edition as if he were creating a whole new version of the film. He and editor John Gilbert carefully evaluated material to be integrated into the film, and then worked to bring each scene up to the same polish as the rest of the feature – visual effects were completed, dialogue was recorded and sound effects created.
Based on what I’ve seen of the discs so far, these are no idle claims. Each of the three films in the trilogy – The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of the King – has its own box with four discs. Two of the discs in each box are labeled Appendices and Jackson himself introduces these, explaining the bonus features and how the menus should be navigated. The features include dozens of good-sized documentaries about various aspects of the filming; galleries with thousands of categorised images (storyboards, artwork created for the production, behind-the-scenes photos); four separate feature-length commentary options (by the director and the writers, the cast, the production and design teams, each group providing a specialised perspective on participating in one of the grandest movie epics ever); and detailed interactive maps, based on the ones that Tolkien created for his books, which allow the viewer to trace the routes taken by various sets of characters (a mini-screen simultaneously plays part of the relevant scene from the film, so the various complicated place names can be easily related to the landscapes in the movies). Whoever put this material together must have had a lot of fun doing it.
Of course, to get through all these features you have to be an obsessive fan of the trilogy, or a Tolkien-nerd, and also have an obscene amount of free time on your hands. It’s staggering to think of how much time would be required to navigate everything on this set. The films by themselves add up to around 12 hours and if you were to listen to all four of the commentary tracks (I did say you have to be obsessive), that means a cool 48 hours spent in front of your TV screen. The documentaries run into several hours too, and it’s impossible to estimate the amount of time needed to see all of the images in the galleries or to study all the map routes.
I doubt I’ll be able to do all of this anytime soon, but for now I’ve watched the extended version of The Fellowship of the Ring as well as bits of The Return of the King, and the extra material has been quite good, especially the quieter scenes that punctuate the grand moments (this is something I occasionally thought was missing in the films when I saw them on the big screen): such as the melancholy scene early in the first film where Frodo and Sam watch a group of ghostlike, fading elves marching slowly towards the ships that will take them to Valinor; or the confrontation between the heroes and Sauron's sarcastic messenger (known as the “Mouth of Sauron”) outside the Black Gates of Mordor just before the final battle begins.
More info here, here and here.
It’s not often that I’m struck dumb in a restaurant, but this happened at the Smoke House Grill in Greater Kailash a few days go. We had been warned by food-journo colleagues that the place is basically a bar that makes a very half-hearted effort at serving meals, but we were meeting friends on a short time-frame and our preferred haunt in the complex (Mainland China) had a long waiting queue, so we plodded across to Smoke House instead.
There were four of us. Since we weren’t hugely keen on the appetizers, we decided to order two soups and split them. All went well up to the moment we were placing the order and the phrase “1 into 2” was used. At this, the waiter smiled sadly and shook his head.
“Sorry sir,” he said, “Our soup portion is too small and it cannot be divided further.”
Coming from a member of the serving staff at a high-profile restaurant, this was a startling proclamation, but we recovered our poise. “Never mind how small it is,” said my wife, “We’ll make do. Just bring it in two bowls.”
“Ma’am, no!” he replied, with greater conviction, and the overall demeanor of a man who has fought these battles before and emerged triumphant each time, “It is very, very small. We don’t have bowls that are small enough.”
After he left we sat about muttering at each other, marveling at this conundrum of the indivisible soup. He was probably exaggerating, we decided, or maybe he was in a bad mood and taking it out on us; or this was a management ploy to get diners to order extra dishes (if so, we had foiled it by sticking to our original order). At any rate, the portions couldn’t be THAT small – we figured we could still pass the bowls around the table. But then the soup arrived and it turned out that the waiter knew his beat.
It was served in one of the most impressively designed pieces of crockery I have seen. Imagine a largish dinner plate – 14 or so inches in diameter – with a tiny bit in the centre hollowed out to make a circular cavity that can accommodate around 40 ml of liquid. Into this hollow was poured the soup, very carefully, so that not a drop would spill out onto the rest of the plate. One of the soups was tomato and it must in fairness be said that it was aesthetically pleasing: a blob of orange surrounded by acres and acres of white plate – like a fried egg with an exceptionally small yolk. But they should have given us a complementary magnifying glass.
Providing a visual break was a tiny piece of maida floating despondently in the middle of the thin, translucent liquid. They called this a dimsum, but that’s a bit like calling Frodo Baggins the Great Khali. We suspect that the only reason the chefs allowed this food item to be pried from their grasp was that it would displace the volume of the liquid and raise the soup level, thus giving the impression that it was three spoonfuls instead of two.
“You didn’t have to bother with the big plate,” one of my friends called out, “You could have served the soup in a ladle instead.” The waiter simply grinned and walked away – it was obvious that this wasn't the first time he was hearing this joke.
But the restaurant did make amends for the small soup in the end – the bill was a large one.
P.S. While on food, a recommendation for Delhiites interested in Malaysian cuisine. There’s this very promising new place called Kayalan (website here) – it’s based in Neb Sarai in extreme south Delhi but it does home-delivery far and wide (even up to central Delhi as far as I know). I’ve tried their Nasi Goreng (which is a staple order for me at an Oriental restaurant), Otak Otak (steamed fish fillet in banana leaves) and marinated Pandan chicken, and all of it has been very good. Abhilasha, who ordered from there with her office crowd a few days ago (the ball-and-chain routine has a few side-advantages!), also recommends the Char Kway Teow, which is a stir-fried preparation of rice noodles with prawn or crab. You’ll find the details on the Menu section of the website.
I think I lost around 10 years of my life watching this match yesterday - almost feel like I played the thing myself. Warrior moment for Rafa, holding on to his number 2 ranking in the face of some absolutely superb clay-court tennis by Djokovic. Great match from both guys, great last game (which went on for something like 20 minutes). Rafa meets Federer in the Hamburg final today, but I really don't care whether he wins or not. Yesterday was enough.
I spend a lot of my spare time on the Tennis World blog and it's been interesting to see how the arrival of Djokovic in the last few months seems to have united Federer and Nadal fans. Roger's groupies were actually cheering Rafa on yesterday (though that's partly because if Rafa had lost the number 2 spot, he might have been seeded to meet Roger in the French Open semi-final this year instead of the final, and that would have been frazzle-inducing for any Federer fan). The camaraderie between both groups of fans has been quite remarkable in recent months, especially given all the rancour that used to be directed at Rafa when he first came on to the scene. (More on that in these posts, about sports-fans and their perceptions.) A lot of that rancour is now being directed at Djokovic, who is seen as the cocky young upstart trying to overturn the established order, but I think he'll start building up goodwill for himself in the next few months. So it goes in sport.
P.S.: if none of this makes any sense to you, look away. I usually do a good job of keeping my very intense life as a tennis fanatic away from this blog, but have to unburden every once in a while.
I had very low expectations going in to see Bhoothnath (I feared it would be the culmination in a series of dreadful films – U, Me aur Hum, Goal and Jodhaa Akbar being among the others – that Tehelka has asked me to review in recent weeks) and the first half-hour lived down to these expectations. After a five-minute preamble that could have come out of any B-movie about teens in a spooky mansion, we meet a family of three, newly arrived in Goa. Aditya (Shah Rukh Khan in a relaxed cameo) is a cruise-ship engineer who is setting sail soon, leaving his wife Anjali (Juhi Chawla) and their little son, the unfortunately nicknamed Banku (Aman Siddiqui), in an old haveli rented by his employers. It’s a very large house and much is made of its largeness (“Upar chhat bhi hai!” the freshly arrived tenants marvel in unison, leaving us to imagine what the place might have looked like if it had been otherwise). As Banku discovers late one night, it’s haunted too: the ghost of a former owner, Kailash Nath (Amitabh Bachchan), doesn’t want people straying into his personal fiefdom and will do everything he can to scare them off. But he hasn’t reckoned with Banku, who starts bossing him around instead.
The early scenes had a very amateurish feel about them, as if they had been written and shot in two or three days. The slapstick, built around Satish Shah as a school principal who covets the children’s lunches, was tedious – you could point out that I’m probably not the target audience for this anyway, but there were a few kids sitting in my row in the hall and they appeared just as unimpressed by the onscreen tomfoolery (they were more animated when an Etam lingerie ad played just before the film began). And while I don’t think it’s possible for Juhi Chawla to be less than likable, she looks tired and worn-out here, a reminder that it’s been exactly 20 years since QSQT and that we too are growing old.
Watching Amitabh in his early scenes, I mused that he may have taken on this role only because he was playing Babban Singh in RGV’s Aag at the time and he could simply step into the studio next door without changing his clothes or washing up. (Personal hygiene is not high on Bhoothnath’s priority list and in the first few scenes he strongly resembles Babban in Aag. Even some of AB’s facial gestures – scowling menacingly at the camera, sticking out his tongue and wiggling it around – play like outtakes from the earlier performance. Bhoothnath’s attempts to scare Banku are just as ineffectual as Babban’s efforts to convince the audience that he is the ultimate bad-ass villain.)
But then, almost imperceptibly (and much to my surprise), the film found its footing and started to improve. As Bhoothnath and Banku develop an unlikely bond, Amitabh slowly sinks his chomps into his role and you sense that he’s enjoying himself (which is an impression I haven’t got in some of his other recent work) in the company of young Siddiqui. There are some good visual effects – I liked the scenes with the dry leaves and the furniture rearrangement, and the goofy touches such as Bhoothnath gliding through the gates of the haveli as if he’s doing the moonwalk. The highlight of the film’s middle section is the gentle, nicely shot song “Chalo Jaane Do”, sung by Amitabh and Juhi in their own voices. (Another song, “Mere Buddy”, where ghost and boy groove and hip-hop with glamorous back-up dancers, isn’t as melodious, but it had me wondering if the support staff were Bhoothnath’s friends from the spirit world – if so, this could be the first convincing explanation for the extras in a Bollywood dance number moving like zombies.)
The genre-change trick
In earlier reviews, I’ve touched on the schizophrenia of many current Hindi films – the tendency to split themselves down the middle in a simplified attempt to provide viewers “the complete package”, so that the movie you see post-intermission is completely different in tone from what went before. (U, Me aur Hum was the worst offender.) This happens in the final half-hour of Bhoothnath too. When the ghost's back-story is revealed, what started as a fantasy for children changes direction to become a family melodrama – full of teary-eyed speeches and recrimination – about demanding parents, insensitive progeny, the importance of forgiveness and the even greater importance of performing ceremonies around a sacred fire.
I had a mixed response to this change of tone. It’s jarring and inconsistent with the first half of the film, and my feelings about religion and the religious indoctrination of children being what they are, I strongly disapproved of the climactic scenes where Banku is made to participate in a shraadh ritual to help Bhoothnath’s atma find mukti.** Personally, I would have been happier with a climactic martial-arts confrontation between Bhoothnath’s ghost and his evil, westernised daughter-in-law (the source of much of the old man’s misery while he was alive).
But if you accept that this is the film's premise, the dramatic scenes – however misguided in their conception – are well-executed on their own terms. Director Vivek Sharma and his writers seemed more assured and on firmer ground with the family-drama material than with the kiddie stuff that precedes it. Of course, this means that Bhoothnath ends up being something of a hotchpotch, but are we really looking for narrative unity in this movie anyway? The later scenes might feel out of place, but you can just as easily say that about the fantasy song early on, which has Banku and the other schoolkids dressed in colourful cargo pants, vests, headbands and cheerleader outfits, and carrying basketballs and pom-poms.
In the final analysis, the question that must be asked of Bhoothnath, as of many other mainstream Hindi films, is not "Is this movie internally consistent?" but "Does it have enough 'paisa vasool' scenes in it, even if those scenes are randomly dispersed and should logically belong in several different films?" My answer to the second question is yes, but only just, and as always it depends on what your definition of paisa-vasool is.
** Footnote: there IS humour to be found in the shraadh scene, if you know where to look for it: the almost diabolically gleeful expression on little Banku’s face as he pours stuff into the divine fire gives the impression that he’s offering burnt flesh to a very vengeful God. Also, with all the speculation about the testy off-screen relationship between Shah Rukh and Amitabh, there’s something cheekily appropriate about SRK participating in a ritual that will send AB packing to an indeterminate other-world. (At the end of the film, when the ghost disappears and Banku dolefully asks his dad “Papa, mera Bhoothnath kahaan gaya?”, my wife preempted Shah Rukh’s reply: “Tere Bhoothnath ki aisi ki taisi! Ab saare endorsements mere!”)
At the Metro construction site in Saket. Not sure what it means but it sounds profound in an awkward sort of way.
Those boards you see towards the left contain elaborately detailed commandments - lists of dos and don'ts - for the construction workers. Very impressive stuff, such as "Kindly do not accept drugs and alcohol from strange persons".
Last week I treated myself to a couple of mini-film festivals at home, watching (mostly re-watching) a few films of a particular director or actor. The honorees included James Stewart (whose birth centenary is next week) and Akira Kurosawa, and the festival high point, apart from re-experiencing the gorgeousness of Vertigo in its restored print, was watching The Seven Samurai after many years. It was like catching up with old friends. Jaded film buffs often tend to undermine a director’s iconic movies in favour of less-discussed works, but I can’t get over what a timelessly awesome film The Seven Samurai is, and how well it holds up to multiple viewings despite its length. So what if this is Kurosawa’s most popular movie: it’s still arguably his most organic and satisfying too. (Dare one say: "best"?)
A confession here: when I first saw The Seven Samurai (the full-length, 3 hour 20 minute version), I was slightly underwhelmed. This could partly be because I’d been expecting a full-blown action movie and didn’t realise that the first two hours would be dedicated to build-up, character development and strategy. Also, being aware that Samurai was among the many inspirations for Sholay, I probably expected a clearer delineation of the heroes and villains and wasn’t quite prepared for the ambiguity about class relations and the parallels the film draws between marauding bandits and noble samurais. (For viewers unfamiliar with class conflicts in 16th century Japan – the mutual distrust between warriors and peasants – it can take a while to appreciate these nuances anyway.) It was only on a second viewing that I was better able to see the film for what it was and everything fell in place. (Later, Donald Richie’s essay in his excellent Kurosawa book provided a deeper understanding of context.)
Among the many strengths of The Seven Samurai are its economy and directness, which the film sustains throughout its long running time. These qualities are evident right from the opening scene, where a group of horse-riding bandits look down at a hillside village and decide that they will attack it once the crop has been harvested. A terrified peasant overhears these plans and reports back to the villagers. After consulting with a wise elder, they decide to hire itinerant samurai to protect them from the bandits, in exchange for food. They travel to a nearby town in groups to look for master-less samurai (ronin), but their offers are rejected. Then they happen to witness a rescue operation performed by a composed, elderly samurai named Kambei; he agrees to help them and sets about assembling a band of warriors for the task. We are introduced to these recruits one by one, and we also meet the swaggering, clownish Kikuchiyo, a man who was born a peasant but is trying desperately to cross over to the warrior class – to become a samurai by dint of his actions. He is eventually allowed into the group and preparations begin for the battles ahead.
I was wrong to think of “action” in The Seven Samurai purely in terms of the actual battle scenes; Kurosawa’s mastery of shot composition and sweeping camera movements bring a kinetic energy to even the quieter scenes. The film is full of superb setpieces, such as the shot of Kikuchiyo sitting on a rooftop with the samurai banner in his hand, suddenly looking up at the hills and seeing dozens of bandits riding down towards the village. But remarkably, each of these scenes also has a built-in intimacy. Never do you get the sense that the action in this film exists in isolation – it is informed by, and enriched by, what we gradually learn about the characters.
Take the master swordsman Kyozu, the most Zen-like of the samurai, a man devoted to the perfection of his art for its own sake, rather than to material rewards or the pleasure of battle. There’s a quietly beautiful scene where Kyozu and the excitable Kikuchiyo are on a stake-out together, waiting to ambush three bandit spies. While Kikuchiyo keeps a lookout from atop a tree, grimacing and making dramatic gestures, Kyozu sits in an almost meditative state underneath, picking a flower and gazing at it. When the bandits arrive, he calmly rises, draws his sword and dispatches two of them with unhurried professionalism while Kikuchiyo elects to play the fool, jumping on the third man clumsily and beating him with his hands. (Note: in a video essay about the film on my DVD, the narrator observes that Seiji Miyaguchi’s’s deadpan performance as Kyozu recalls the “impassive gravity and grace” of Buster Keaton! The comparison makes me giggle, for various reasons.)
Shimura and Mifune
Like Sholay, The Seven Samurai is much greater than the sum of its parts. Still, the personalities of its two most prominent characters, as well as the performances of the actors playing those roles, make for a fascinating contrast: Takashi Shimura as the charismatic, soft-spoken but authoritative Kambei, who inspires and leads the samurai; and Toshiro Mifune as his polar opposite, the loud-mouthed but endearing Kikuchiyo, who constantly betrays his insecurities by trying too hard to impress. If Kambei is the cerebral force of the film, Kikuchiyo is its emotional centre, its beating heart, and Shimura and Mifune (whose roles in the earlier Kurosawa films Stray Dog and Drunken Angel are worlds removed from their roles here) are both exemplary.
As played by Shimura, Kambei exudes integrity and discipline, but he never comes across as humourless or dictatorial. The warm, self-effacing smile on his face is the smile of a man who has learnt, through hard experience, to be stoical about many things, and it’s easy to see why the others hold him in reverence. Mifune, on the other hand, makes the most of the flashiest role in the film – this is one of the greatest comic performances I’ve seen (and one that Dharmendra’s Veeru in Sholay owes a big debt to, as Anangbhai points out in a comment on this old post). Scenes like the one where Kikuchiyo sounds the alarm in jest and then makes fun of the villagers’ panicked response, or when he steals a gun from one of the bandits, or tries to master a recalcitrant horse, all make for superb physical comedy. Time and again, we get evidence of what Kurosawa meant when he observed once that Mifune “could convey in a single movement what it took most actors three separate movements to express”.
A favourite scene
My favourite 30 seconds in the film begin with a shot of Kikichiyo sulking by himself on a rock shortly after he has delivered an impassioned monologue to the other samurai, expressing his ambivalent feelings about both the farmer and warrior class. Now he’s sitting alone, heavily (and somewhat ridiculously) clad in the armour that the villagers have stolen from other samurai in the past, and even as a still image this is a lovely, poetic composition: a bear of a man hunched up in a defensive position, arms drawn tightly around himself, eyebrows furrowed in wrath. (The expression on Mifune’s face is so uncomplicatedly angry here that I can easily picture the shot as a panel in a maanga comic, with a little wisp of smoke drawn over his head to indicate blackness of mood!)
At this point, the young ronin Katsushiro – unaware of what has transpired between Kikuchiyo and the other samurai – approaches, starts to say something in a friendly tone and draws back as Kikuchiyo snarls and waves a spear at him. Kikuchiyo then jumps up and stalks away. The village children come running after him (he is, after all, the most accessible of the samurai and the villagers have become charmed by his constant buffoonery) and in a very judicious use of sound editing, we hear the children’s combined cries of delight before we see them enter the screen from the left. (It's a bit like bird sounds.) Kikuchiyo turns, stomps his feet at them and continues walking away; even though he should by rights seem like a threatening figure here, his movements are childishly petulant, and the scene is a reminder that this is a boy in a man’s body.
There is immense energy in this nearly wordless sequence, made even more forceful by the dust sweeping across the background, a reminder of the strong wind constantly blowing through the village, dramatically heralding the action that lies ahead. (Heavy rain plays an equally vital role in the final battles.) And it defines Kikuchiyo’s character (his internal confusion, his uncertainty about his place in the world) more effectively than pages of dialogue could. But like I said, it's only 30 seconds in a great three-and-a-half-hour film.
P.S. for more about the film’s subtexts – including the story’s relevance to early 20th century Japan – see this lengthy review on the DVD Verdict site. And Donald Richie’s book is a must-have for any Kurosawa fan.
P.P.S. Anyone interested in doing me a good turn many kindly gift me the three-disc edition of the film released by Criterion, which has a treasure trove of supplementary material. The DVD I own only has a shortish video essay.
[A post on Kurosawa's Yojimbo here, and one on Donald Richie here.]
[From my Metro Now column – another in a series of trying-hard-to-be-optimistic pieces about the traffic situation in Delhi]
Every dark cloud has a silver lining, we are constantly told, but the adage forgets to add that at times the lining must be surgically attached. This can be accomplished by grabbing the squirming cloud, pinning it to the ground, stitching the silver lining painfully into its side and then adding a few layers of cellotape as extra precaution.
The silver lining for the satirically named “bus rapid transit” corridor – a cloud that has been brooding above Delhi for the last few weeks – is that it will eventually free up a lot of retail space in our city. The reason is that many offices will empty out as people decide to make productive use of traffic jams and convert their vehicles into workstations. This is the most efficient solution to the current problem of south Delhi-based worker ants leaving their homes early in the morning and reaching their central Delhi offices in the late afternoon, just as things are beginning to wind up for the day. (All you can really do in office at that time is to go out for a long coffee-and-gossip break, which – as all conscientious and disdainful freelancers know – is the only thing offices are good for anyway.)
As more of these rapid-transit bus corridors mushroom across the city, I foresee a huge change in Delhi’s working culture. Since the government is too pigheaded to reverse a plan it has already set in motion, it will be forced to do the next best thing: equip all vehicles with free wi-fi, enabling people to turn the clogged roads into office spaces and their cars into cubicles (I only hope some nameless planning committee doesn’t decide to supply broadband cables with “special corridors” for different frequencies). Eventually, we will even be permitted to reserve specific spots along the road. Since auctions are the in-thing these days, public bids can be made for these spaces. I can just see it now: “How much for that 10ft x 8 ft spot in the shade beneath the large gulmohar on Josip Broz Tito Marg, right opposite house number 21? You, sir, in the brown safari suit?” School buildings will become redundant too, because it will be found that classes can just as easily be conducted in vans and buses (which can take a U-turn and drop the kids back home in the afternoon).
As the sage said, show me a city with a BRT problem and I’ll show you a city that can live and work on its streets.
What’s the point of getting out of the house at all, you may ask. Simple – after finishing your work for the day (which is around the time the traffic jams will start to clear), you can carry along the usual route and make it to office in time for evening conversation with friends. The rate at which Delhi is "developing", this will soon be the only way people will get any socialising done.
[Earlier posts on roads and traffic: A Hitchcockian road rant, Cutting Bluelines down to size, Jaywalkers]
The text on some DVD covers is bad enough, as previously noted, but what’s on the actual disc can be much worse. Can anyone tell me why the English subtitles on old Japanese films are consistently ludicrous? This is something I first discovered while watching Star Movies’ “100 Years of Cinema” telecasts in the early 1990s, and it hasn’t changed through years of going to film festivals/DVD-watching. Even the discs produced by the British Film Institute have subtitles that appear to have been written by someone who took a crash course in Japanese and English the previous weekend and is now acquainted with exactly 10 words in each language, not counting proper nouns.
For example, my disc of Kurosawa’s Ikiru – about an elderly bureaucrat, Watanabe, discovering he has stomach cancer and just six months to live – nearly manages a difficult feat: spoiling the impact of this very elegiac film. One problem is the incongruous use of slang (“I wanna die earlier, but I cannot die!” bewails the melancholy Watanabe), but those sentences are at least comprehensible. What to make of this exchange?
Woman: Dad is punctual to go out.
Visitor at doorstep: But he has not applied into work, that’s why I come here.
[Translation: The woman, Watanabe’s housekeeper, is saying, “Dad left for work early today.” The visitor at the door, Watanabe’s colleague, is startled to hear this because the bureaucrat has not been coming in to work for a few days.]
Then there’s the bit where Watanabe’s son finds out that his father has withdrawn a large sum of money from the bank, and a family friend speculates that he is out having a good time:
Family friend: 50,000 dollars! It is great to spend it on women!
Son: No, wouldn’t be!
Family friend: That would surprise you? I think he is erotic. He does all good for you for 20 years. Now, it is his time to explode.
Family friend’s wife (speculating that Watanabe hasn’t been looking well of late): He become skinny with rough skin.
Meanwhile, Watanabe, distraught that he has cancer (and also that he is being discussed in such terrible translation), meets a writer at a bar and tells him about his illness.
Writer: You should not drink the wines! It is like committing suicide if you know yourself of cancer.
Watanabe (in keeping with the Noh tradition of adding an ‘s’ to nearly every word): Sometimes wines helps forgets unhappy things.
Upon hearing this, I hit the Pause button, poured myself a large glass of wine and then resumed watching. A few minutes later, the words were making much more sense.
With minimum comment, here are selected sentences from Khalid Mohammed’s review of the film Anamika, in today’s HT:
Ananth Narayan Mahadevan’s Anamika treats Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940) as if it were chewing gum. Chomp, chomp, chomp till it’s tasteless and tiresome. Surely Hitch would have gone burp re burp.
[I don’t know whether the italicized Hitch is a copy-desk goof-up or an attempt to somehow link Hitchcock’s nickname with the Will Smith film. Also love the “1940” after “Rebecca” – so particular about details, aren’t we?]
The plot roast thickens. A cop (Gulshan Glower) eats kilos and kilos of goose liver. You get fever. His wife keeps going “Quack, quack” as if she were in a quackie movie.
[Might this be a "quackie movie"?]
and
Dino Morea and Minisha Lamba must be making Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine rock and roll in their graves.
[Interesting that reviewers who use phrases like “rock and roll in their graves”, and pride themselves on writing for the casual moviegoer, think it’s okay to drop Olivier and Fontaine into a piece like this without clarifying who they might be]
Update: Joan Fontaine is still alive.
Take this news item from Turkey, about a misplaced character in an SMS sent by a husband to his estranged wife resulting in two gruesome deaths. Of course, a language where the omission of a single dot in a single word can completely change the meaning of a sentence is begging for trouble, but this is a universal problem. Those of us who use the Dictionary facility on our cellphones will know that a particular arrangement of letters can create two or more very different words, e.g. “awake” and “cycle”, or “ocean” and “madam”, and that this can cause confusion. If the sender isn’t careful, a perfectly harmless sentence like “Federer just crushed Djokovic in the semis” can come out reading “Federer just brushed Djokovic in the penis”. (Don’t ask me how I know this.)
This puts me in mind of an incident from a few years ago. Some of us had been invited to a colleague’s place for a debauched late-night party – it didn’t have to be debauched (you could choose to be well-behaved, sip a mocktail and check out by 11 PM), but the possibility was always open. It was an all-night affair at a large house, the sort of place where a hormonally charged couple seeking privacy might at any time stumble into an empty room together, accidentally bolt the door from within and then get down to playing “Doctor”.
One friend who didn’t know the host very well had a younger sister with no plans for the evening, so he asked someone else to check if he could take her along (since they weren’t planning to stay very late, he figured she wouldn’t be exposed to any of the murkier sub-plots that might ensue). “Can we bring Amit’s sister?” typed Rajesh into his phone, except that he wrote “Amits” as a five-letter word without the apostrophe and didn’t closely read what he was typing, so that the message that went forth was “Can we bring bogus sister?”
To make matters worse, our host, an expert in all sorts of shady party requests, interpreted “bogus sister” (or “fake sister”, take your pick) as “a girl of pliable morals, whom you wouldn’t want to publicly introduce as your steady – or even friend – but who is good for fooling around with at binges”. Human beings can be wonderfully inventive when it comes to slang and euphemism.
Thus it was that Rajesh, Amit and the latter’s sweet and innocent sibling had barely arrived when the host – already high on some obscure weed – leeringly asked her if she wanted an empty room immediately and if she would take turns with her two escorts or handle both of them at once. He also recited a short poem he had made up on the spot, which employed a series of salty Punjabi words and, at one point, rhymed “sister” with the Hindi “bistar” (bed). A nasty scuffle resulted – one that could certainly have turned out worse if there had been weapons at arm’s reach. It didn’t end as unhappily as the episode in Turkey, but there were no more parties (or at least none that our group came to know about) at this house for several months.
Not that we ever learn from these incidents. In an earlier post, I’ve mentioned the time I bought the DVD of The Pink Panther and hurriedly dashed off an SMS to friends asking if they wanted to see it over the weekend, only to have one of them call back and ask why I wanted to show him pink panties on a Saturday (or any other day for that matter). More recently, I conducted a fruitless online search for an intriguingly titled book after a friend messaged to ask “Have you read Phobia Deer, new book, sounds interesting”, only to discover that he was asking about Shobhaa De’s latest.
There are shops here that sell products made of elephant dung. On average you get 4 kg of dung from each elephant per day, and that’s enough to produce 48 poster-sized sheets of paper.
Even if you know that the dung-processing is very efficient and scientific, and that the raw material is basically reduced to a collection of fibre after being boiled and treated for a few hours, you can’t help some Beavis-and-Butthead snickering at how proud the shop-owners are of dung products. “Sir, this notepad is more expensive because the pages are all made of pure elephant dung – see!”
Two weeks ago I would never have guessed that I’d be photographing a pile of elephant poo, much less putting it up on my blog, but one learns new things about life every day. In the background are the rectangular frames that are used to mix the dung fibre and pulp together, and make coloured paper.
A family appropriates one of the rocks for itself. The little one was very enthusiastic throughout.
From our “brave and adventurous” elephant safari in Sigiriya. Sitting on the guy’s neck was quite an experience – very powerful muscles = free butt massage. Don’t miss his crossed hind legs.
He took us into the lake as well.
In the background is the Sigiriya rock fortress – more on that in the next post.
