“It was reassuring. You could tell by holding the book in your hands that there were many pages to go, many adventures to share” – critic Roger Ebert on the comforting bulkiness of J R R Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings
And so the English translation of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest brings Stieg Larsson’s posthumously published Millennium trilogy to its close. I turned the last page of this book feeling deep satisfaction as well as melancholy, the latter emotion compounded by the knowledge that there will be no more sequels (Larsson died of a heart attack shortly after completing the three manuscripts, totaling nearly 2,000 pages) – unless, of course, it turns out that the publishers have been withholding information from us. (Doubtful but fingers crossed!)
An epic series usually follows a trajectory that leads from the small picture to the large; the first book tends to be relatively intimate, establishing the key characters and their immediate setting, and then, as the series proceeds, a fuller, grander canvas unfolds. (Which first-time reader, encountering Bilbo Baggins’ eleventy-first birthday celebrations in the cosy Shire, can possibly anticipate Sauron’s forbidding wasteland of Mordor, much less the vast mythological landscape of The Silmarillion?) This is how the Millennium trilogy played out. The first book, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, began as a standard-issue thriller, centering on the investigation of a 40-year-old murder, but soon journalist Mikael Blomkvist and his research-assistant Lisbeth Salander (a.k.a. the girl with the dragon tattoo) discovered that this was a fragment of a much larger puzzle involving ritualistic killings and a trend of violence towards helpless women immigrants. The darker undercurrents of life in contemporary Sweden stood to be uncovered, including corruption and sleaze in big corporations, and the limp-wristed collusion of financial journalists.
The sullen, anti-social but frighteningly efficient Salander was the most interesting character in this novel, but her back-story really took centrestage in the second book The Girl who Played With Fire, which was even more ambitious in its cast of characters and range of subjects – the story involved an extensive exposé of the Swedish sex-trafficking industry, the murder of the enterprising young writer who was to carry it out, and the revelation of a connection with Salander’s early life. The girl who played with fire was now officially in the eye of the storm.
The Girl who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest picks up at exactly the point where its predecessor dramatically ended, with Salander, a bullet lodged in her head, admitted in the critical care unit of a hospital. Though soon out of danger, she is still a suspect in three murders and a high-profile trial awaits. Meanwhile, Blomkvist – who isn’t allowed to meet her in hospital – must work against time to unearth the details of a three-decade-long cover-up by an organisation within the innermost circle of the Swedish secret police. (Hence the book’s clever title, which evokes the closed hives of secret agents.) Other parallel strands involve the activities of an aged former “spook” named Gullberg, the increasingly hectic professional life of Blomkvist’s best friend and former Millennium editor Erika Berger as she tries to cope with a new job as editor-in-chief at a daily newspaper, and the independent investigations conducted by authorities who are partly sympathetic to Salander.
Larsson’s novels are very detailed and full of information about the workings of, for example, magazine and newspaper journalism, the police force and big business (to this list, we can now add the morally ambiguous world of spies, their activities so shadowy that they are often hidden even from the upper echelons of government). In fact, it’s possible to offer the mild criticism that they are too detailed, sometimes to the extent of being flabby. Some of this probably has to do with the circumstances of their publication: if Larsson had lived to discuss them with his editor, I think some of the deadwood would have been eliminated. Much as I enjoyed the first two books, more than once I got the impression that he had written the manuscripts mainly for his own pleasure (the self-indulgence does work in places, such as the cameo appearance in the second book of the real-life Swedish boxer Paolo Roberto), not really worrying about tightening them for eventual publication; and that his publishers, excited by their potential, had rushed them into production and translation after his death. I thought the second book in particular could comfortably have lost eighty or so pages.
Happily, The Girl who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest is much more focused than its immediate predecessor, and a genuine page-turner all the way through. After establishing the background in the initial chapters, it kicks into maximum gear once Blomkvist (somewhat implausibly) manages to smuggle in a hand-held computer – along with Internet access – to the incarcerated Salander (who, as we already know, is an expert hacker with an army of anonymous online contacts). This is where the book really delivers: once Salander has that computer, she is as omnipotent as Salman Khan in Wanted. There’s nothing she can’t achieve, and a point arrives, around three-fourths of the way through this 600-page novel, when the reader realises with a warm flush of excitement that everything is going to turn out all right, that the bad guys are going to get their comeuppance and that we’ll have the satisfaction of watching them squirm.
You might think that such an epiphany would be detrimental to the effect of a thriller, but this isn’t the case here: the suspense in this book isn’t so much a matter of what will happen but how it will unfold. Besides, with a character as moody and anti-social as Salander, you can be sure that things will never be allowed to get too comfortable or happy. She remains an enormously compelling protagonist even when she spends much of the book physically immobile, and it’s a pity that we won’t get to see the further twists in her complex relationship with Blomkvist. On the other hand, perhaps the legacy of the Millennium books will lie in their not being extended into an endless, ultimately compromised series. Three novels usually aren't enough to secure an author's place in genre-fiction history, but this is what Larsson has achieved, years after his passing.
[An earlier post on The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Swedish crime fiction here]
[Did a version of this review for The Hindu]
The central premise of J M Coetzee’s Summertime is that the South African writer John Coetzee – a Nobel laureate, author of such novels as Dusklands, Foe and Disgrace – has recently died in Australia and that a young Englishman named Vincent is trying to write a book about him. However, Vincent’s book is a limited, even whimsical undertaking: it will focus only on the mid-1970s – a time when Coetzee was living with his aged father in the suburbs of Cape Town – and it won’t be a comprehensive biography so much as a collection of impressions gleaned from five people who knew Coetzee to varying degrees during this period.
These people include a Brazilian dancer named Adriana who believes that Coetzee was attracted both to her and to her young daughter (whom he taught English), a married woman named Julia, with whom he had a liaison, and his cousin Margot. Summertime consists largely of their recollections – including a narrative rendering by Vincent of what Margot tells him – and the portrait that emerges of Coetzee is an unflattering one: a dull, asexual, socially awkward, self-absorbed man. One respondent describes him as a sphere, a glass ball, because "there was no way to connect to him...he wasn’t made for love, wasn’t constructed to fit into or be fitted into". "He was not a man of substance," says another, likening him to a block of wood that has neither rhythm nor soul. He is variously derided or pitied.
Inevitably, the discussions reveal at least as much about the interviewees themselves as they do about Coetzee. One woman insists, somewhat shrilly, that John was nothing more than a peripheral character in her grand life-story; another uncomfortably wonders why Vincent wants to know so much about her life when the book should really be about John. The question of why a celebrated author’s life should inherently be of more value or interest than the lives of “ordinary” people runs through Summertime, as does the question of whether one should even attempt to “understand” an author outside of what his work tells us about him.
Vincent has with him excerpts from notebooks maintained by “John Coetzee” in the 1970s, excerpts where the author (speaking of himself in the third person) hazily reflects on the troubles of his country and on his own lackadaisical attempts to achieve immortality through his writing. “Why does he persist in inscribing marks on paper, in the faint hope that people not yet born will take the trouble to decipher them?” At one point Vincent explains that he doesn’t want to rely on his subject’s diaries and letters, because “he was a fictioneer. In his letters he is making up a fiction of himself for his correspondents; in his diaries he is doing much the same for his own eyes, or perhaps for posterity...if you want the truth you have to hear from people who knew him directly, in the flesh”.
To which one of Vincent’s interviewees asks, “But what if we are all fictioneers, as you call Coetzee? What if we all continually make up the stories of our lives? Why should what I tell you about Coetzee be any worthier of credence than what he tells you himself?” As a reader, it's possible to get so involved with passages like this that you might briefly forget that Summertime is written by (the real-life) J M Coetzee, who is very much alive, and that Vincent and his respondents are the fictional creations. I found this happening on more than a few occasions.
So what is Summertime, really? It’s been widely described as a "fictionalised memoir”, and at times it reads like an exercise in masochism, a harsh self-examination that is dismissive not only of the man but also the writer. (“He had no special sensitivity, no original insight into the human condition,” says one of Coetzee’s colleagues, “Nowhere in his work do you get a feeling of a writer deforming his medium to say what has never been said before.”) The reticent Coetzee in this book could be a version of the real-life author (who is known to be reclusive and unsmiling), but some important details don’t match: the real Coetzee was married and had children at the time, for example. And there’s no particular reason to believe that the interviewees are based on real people.
For all these meta-complexities, this is best treated as a novel that eventually tells us as much (or as little) about Coetzee as his other, more obviously fictional books do, and with all the qualities that mark his best work. Coetzee has never been known for richly descriptive prose, yet his writing, through its interiority, vividly depicts a place, a time and a mood (in this case, the inertia of life in the African veldt). Despite its spare structure and conversation-driven narrative, Summertime is a book of ideas, full of reflections not only about the relationship between an artist’s life and his work, but also about the functions, possibilities – and limitations – of literature itself. It’s a reminder of how difficult (perhaps impossible) it is to satisfactorily transform the complexities of human experience into words on a page (“Something sounds wrong, but I can’t put my finger on it. All I can say is, your version doesn’t sound like what I told you,” one of “Coetzee’s women” tells Vincent). And it’s both ironical and entirely appropriate that this reminder comes from someone who does it better than most others.
In his excellent 1944 book Film (a lucid, intelligent study of cinema - including popular film - at a time when there wasn't enough literature on the subject), Roger Manvell made the following observation about Charles Laughton:
“Men of the great acting quality of Laughton and [Leslie] Howard are often accused of being themselves at the expense of their parts...[but] a man is often chosen for his first lead because he has the right face and physique for the part: Laughton passed through a series of parts for all of which his physique and remarkable face were of great plastic value. He has great versatility within his own range – Henry VIII, Captain Bligh, Rembrandt, Quasimodo, Ginger Ted, Ruggles, all different and yet the same photogenic Laughton mannerisms in all.”
The first thing you notice when you watch Alexander Korda’s biopic Rembrandt is how closely Laughton – aided by basic makeup, including an untamed set of whiskers – resembles the great Dutch painter. But the resemblance becomes incidental after a while, as the focus shifts to the actor’s wonderfully subdued performance, several shades away from his scenery-chewing Henry VIII. But then this is a quiet film, different in tone from The Private Life of Henry VIII (also directed by Korda), which played almost like a parody by comparison. (And who could blame it, given its subject matter!)
In Rembrandt, apart from a short scene or two (such as the one where the painter, on a visit to his hometown, briefly regains some of his vigour and even gets into a brawl in a local tavern), the emphasis is on the character’s discontent: his melancholia after his wife’s death and his subsequent relationship, driven by loneliness, with a shrewish housekeeper; his difficulties in dealing with the demands made by the noblemen who commission his work; his struggle with the question of vanity and where it leads an artist ("it's no greater than and no less than when a shoemaker makes a pair of shoes" he says, responding to praise for one of his works); and his nostalgia for (but also inability to return to) his humble roots in a milling family.
This isn’t an exhaustive or well-rounded biography – it’s more like a series of snapshots (if that isn’t an inappropriate word to use in connection with a 17th century painter), starting at a point where Rembrandt, already a highly regarded artist, is in his late 30s. There aren’t many specific insights into his work, apart from an episode where he depicts members of the Civil Guard as posturing buffoons (and, when confronted, tells them “Vanity and stupidity are written all over your faces – the only distinguished things about you are your hats and breastplates”). However, there’s a key scene where he convinces a beggar to pose as King Saul. “You can’t be a good painter then,” the beggar says when approached, “Decent painters paint decent people.” But as he poses, Rembrandt tells him about Saul and David, and the beggar, now dressed as a king, is so moved (by the story of Saul being moved by David’s harp-playing) that he wipes a teardrop from his cheek with a corner of his robe. The shot powerfully connects with the real-life Rembrandt’s painting of Saul and David but it also shows a painter cleverly getting his subject “into character”. A short while later the roles will be reversed, as the beggar tries to playfully teach the artist the tricks of his own trade. (“Look miserable...but not too miserable, or they’ll think you’re past helping. When your right eye waters, let your left eye twinkle, so as they say ‘Look at that fellow, he may be starving but he’s got a merry air’.”)
Another couple of scenes like this, and Rembrandt could have been a really great film. As it stands, it’s a pretty good one. It has depth and feeling, and it’s elegantly shot in black and white; you’d think colour would be a better choice for a movie about a famous painter, but this doesn’t really make a difference, even when there are vivid references to colours, such as Rembrandt imagining what a ruby-red necklace would look like on his wife’s white neck. (Sidenote: watching the beggar-as-Saul scene, a whimsical question popped into my mind. Which is truer to life – a black-and-white photograph, or a realistically coloured painting?)
But dominating everything is the Laughton performance, his fluid face running the gamut of emotions from frustration to quiet pride to sorrow. Incidentally his real-life wife Elsa Lanchester plays Hendrickje, the woman with whom Rembrandt finds love. She’s a fine actress but I always feel a disconnect when I see her playing anything other than the Bride of Frankenstein!
I had a talk once with a veteran art director, a man who handled the set design for many theatre productions at the NSD, and he spoke about the mental adjustments he had to make during a brief assignment on a movie. When doing up the interiors of a small room, he would be instructed not to bother about every square inch of space, or every shelf on every wall; the exact camera set-up had been decided beforehand and the film’s audience would only get to see a specific portion of the room. It took some time for our man to get used to this slapdash approach. After all, he had cut his teeth on lavish stage productions by Ebrahim Alkazi and others, where set design was not only of utmost importance but also had to be treated holistically: what if a viewer chanced to look at a prop placed at the edge of the set, instead of fixing his gaze on the centrestage action?
But of course, unlike the theatregoer, a movie viewer is at the mercy of what the camera chooses to show him. This is self-evidently true for films that have rapid-fire cuts or camera swooshes – but it can be equally true for sober productions like (for example) Hitchcock’s Rope, which was made up of only nine or ten long takes and set entirely in a three-room apartment. On a casual viewing, you might think Rope is like a filmed play, a “static” movie, and that as the viewer you’re in control, but this is far from the case: the camera movements are subtly orchestrated to enhance the suspense at key moments; the movement of characters from one room to another and the placement of props (notably the wooden chest that is the focal point of the action) are strategically planned. It’s really a very “cinematic” film (in the widely used and restrictive sense of the word “cinematic”, but more on that later).
Watching Jacques Tati’s Play Time reminded me of this chat about the freedom available to a theatre viewer vis-à-vis a movie viewer. Tati’s film is a work that demands multiple viewings if you want to appreciate it fully, for the simple reason that many sequences have several different bits of action going on within the same frame (and most people have only one pair of eyes). There are fixed long shots where the viewer is free to look at whatever he chooses, and this freedom is heightened by the fact that the film has no “story” as such; it’s made up entirely of tiny sub-plots. (Synopsis: a number of people, including many tourists, wander about a large airport, an office complex and a trade exhibition in a Paris that's all pristine glass-and-concrete buildings; as if intimidated by the architecture, they walk in straight lines and turn at right angles. The “old” Paris, with its sightseeing attractions such as the Eiffel Tower, is never seen directly, only reflected in glass windows as if it occupies a parallel universe. Eventually, most of these people and a few others go to a posh dinner party, where things get increasingly busy. That's pretty much it.)
There are no protagonists whose actions can serve as focal points for us – instead, several groups of people walk in and out of the frame, so that some of their faces gradually become familiar (though never too familiar) to the viewer. Tati himself does play his trademark role, the kindly, distracted Monsieur Hulot, bumbling about the place with his pipe and his umbrella, but even Hulot is just one of the many characters, not the centre of attention (apart from two early scenes). All this adds up to an unsettling, even distancing experience for the first-time viewer. Even in a film by Ozu, where a camera might unblinkingly record a whole sequence from a fixed position, there is at least a definite narrative: in a lengthy medium shot of a crowded room, we would know what to watch out for, whom to direct our eyes towards. But Play Time offers no such cues, especially in the superb 45-minute-long restaurant sequence that takes up most of the movie’s second half.
With its eye-popping accumulation of characters – diners, waiters, bouncers, musicians, a maître d’ – all busy doing different things, and a gradual transition from controlled order into chaos, this is one of the greatest movie setpieces I’ve seen; it's so intricate, the mind boggles at how difficult the whole thing must have been to conceptualise, rehearse and shoot. Light and good-natured though the sequence is, I also thought it had some of the dark, anarchic force of Luis Bunuel’s The Exterminating Angel, which begins with a group of sophisticates engaging in polite, superficial conversation and ends with the breakdown of civilisation. Tati’s vision is cheerier: when things spiral out of control in Play Time, the effect is liberating, as if the warmth of human nature has been allowed to break through a cold, sterile world. And there is plenty of liveliness in this long sequence: much of the joy of seeing it a second or third time comes from noticing little things – characters’ gestures, quirks of personality – that one hadn’t seen before.
A day before Play Time, I was watching another favourite film, Brian De Palma’s Sisters, an exuberant, full-blooded psychological thriller by a master of such techniques as the split-screen (used brilliantly in this film) – and a master also at the art of using camera movement to conceal things from the viewer (or, in some cases, to give us half-glimpses of things that we can’t be quite sure about). De Palma is one of the great visual storytellers, and I think he was once quoted as saying he had little patience with films that depended too much on words; films that were “basically just pictures of people talking”. I wonder what he thought of Play Time, a film that contains hardly any dialogue (and doesn’t at all rely on words to get its point across) but which is also, visually speaking, static and minimalist – at least when compared to De Palma’s own kinetic, highly stylised approach to moviemaking.
Personally speaking, I’m very grateful for both types of movies. And the many other types in between.
P.S. As you can see this is a rambling sort of post, but I'd appreciate any thoughts on the subject of the camera-viewer relationship, or tips about films that resemble Play Time in style or concept.
[Did a version of this review for Crest]
Anjum Hasan’s first novel Lunatic in my Head – one of the solidest, most assured debuts I've read in a long time – was about three people, unrelated to each other, living in Shillong and stifled in different ways by the pace of life in this misty northeastern city. One of those characters was an eight-year-old girl named Sophie Das, who spent much of her time in the world of her imagination. "Fat raindrops flecked her glasses and things turned blurry; car lights melted into streaks of gold, people were coloured blobs, bobbing on the surface of the world's dark sea."
In Hasan’s new novel Neti, Neti, Sophie has the floor to herself and her world is still in many ways a blur, though the setting has changed. She's 25 and has been in Bangalore for a year at the point the book opens, working for a US-based company that outsources the subtitling of DVDs (dialogue-transcribing, background sounds for the hearing-impaired) to India. This life is faster-paced than Sophie’s life in Shillong was – it’s a world of glitzy malls, late-night parties and office politics, a consumerist culture where people regularly spend beyond their means (an important subplot is about the repercussions of people defaulting on loans). Her boyfriend Swami – to whom she tries to introduce one of her favourite books, R K Narayan’s Swami and Friends - works in a call centre and keeps American time. Sophie has, in a sense, moved from one country to another; we are reminded that the north-east is frequently thought of as not being part of India at all. (At one point, beginning a journey from Bangalore to Shillong, she sleepily thinks to herself, “I’m not coming back to India”.)
This is a book with a dry, often dark sense of humour, especially in the sections where Sophie has to deal with a conservative landlord who frowns on a single woman coming home late at night (and who demands that she “remove her underwear” from the clothesline). Or the passage where she reluctantly attends a satsang - a spiritual meet held in honour of a new-age Guru – with freshly purchased beer bottles nestled in her bag. (It probably says something about me that I chuckled out loud at a passage that introduces the bereaved parents of a little boy who died in a mall, but the context, involving a clueless character who is trying too hard to enliven proceedings, really does make it funny.) It’s also a book of vignettes and moods, with chapter titles that often reflect Sophie’s state of mind, and in this it briefly reminded me of David Mitchell’s excellent, underrated novel Black Swan Green.
I thought Neti, Neti was an easier read than the introspective Lunatic in my Head, which was driven more by the interior lives of its three characters than by plot movement. This could partly be because the tones of the two books were dictated by their respective settings: the first was about feeling weighed down in a city where nothing seems to move, while this one is set in a world where too much seems to be going on at once. But this isn’t a facile tale about a young girl attaining personal freedom, escaping to a more liberal world and having the time of her life. Bangalore and Shillong, located 3,000 km apart, may represent two very different aspects of the Indian experience, but there are contradictions within each of these worlds as well, and Hasan’s precise, controlled prose does a fine job of portraying Sophie’s disaffection with both the places she has known. (The book’s lovely title is a Vedic chant that means “Not This, Not This”, but this literal translation doesn’t quite capture the deep sense of restlessness, the world-weariness, evoked by the phrase; the sense of never quite being satisfied by anything.)
There has been a debate in Indian literary circles recently around a magazine essay that claimed our fiction lacks ambition and a sense of the Larger Issues – that it’s more about navel-gazing than anything else. This is a simple-minded argument to begin with (and it deserved to be explored in a much larger space than the 900 or so words that were available to the article), but Hasan’s two books, taken together, are good examples of how the personal can give depth and shade to the bigger picture; how individual lives can be used to map the life of this vast, varied country and the many subcultures that coexist within it.
...is happening on October 31. Just a day long, but there are some good sessions scheduled, and it's part of the annual Pushkar fair, which means lots of exciting side-shows. Full programme here.
I've written earlier about my love for DVD extras, especially audio commentaries by the people who worked on a film, or video introductions by enthusiasts. I don't get to see as many of these things as I'd like (given general lack of time and the fact that the priority, sadly, is to watch the actual film first, with its own soundtrack!), but when I do I’m reminded that well-put-together extras can be a real education for any movie buff. This is one reason why I prefer to buy DVDs from Palika Bazaar (or from the legit outlets when there's a generous sale on) rather than look for online streams.
Some enjoyable DVD experiences I've had in the last few days:
- watching Jacques Tati's magnificent Play Time with selected scene commentary by movie historian Philip Kemp, as well as a video introduction by Terry Jones, both of whom assure us that the only way to see - really see - Tati's grand 70 mm vision is on a big screen. And even then, Play Time is a movie that needs multiple viewings if you want to appreciate everything that's going on: there’s plenty of detail in nearly every frame, lots of long shots where different sets of characters can be seen doing different things. (I've seen it twice on a 25-inch screen; now I can't escape the feeling that I haven't really seen it at all.)
- A short Introduction by Orson Welles to D W Griffith's Intolerance (one of my prize acquisitions). Welles tells us in his deep, sardonic voice that “much too much literature is written on the subject of movies. And a lot of it has been written about me, as it's written about all sorts of people who don't deserve it, and they give me credit for innovations that I'm not responsible for...but the film you're going to watch now deserves all the credit possible...there's almost nothing in the entire vocabulary of cinema that you won't find in it”. I'm reminded of James Agee gushing that “to watch Griffith's work is like being witness to the beginning of melody, or the first conscious use of the lever or the wheel; the emergence, coordination, and first eloquence of language; the birth of an art.”
- An interview with director Mike Figgis about Godard's Weekend (a film that, incidentally, was made around the same time as Play Time and dealt with a similar theme - alienation in the modern world - though in a very, very different way). Also, audio commentary by critic David Sterritt, who has interesting things to say about the shooting of some of the film's key scenes, such as the lengthy, eye-popping shot of a traffic jam on a country road.
- On my DVD of Roman Polanski's Repulsion, there’s a commentary track featuring Polanski and Catherine Deneuve, who played the neurotic young Carol, plagued by nightmares and hallucinations in a London apartment. This isn't a case of the participants sitting together in a room watching the movie and talking to each other; Polanski's and Deneuve's observations were recorded separately, and they discuss different scenes. When it comes to the scene where Carol sits on a sofa with her nightdress bunched well over her knees while her middle-aged landlord looks down at her leeringly, this is what Deneuve has to say:
I think that's the image Roman had of Carol - like a Baby Doll, being like a little girl but not realising or not wanting to see that she had a body, that she could be sitting in a position that was normal to her but was indecent to men, and attractive to them at the same time. That's very much Roman...an image which mixes innocence with perversion. He has a great desire for showing very young women in love scenes because I think his impression of love is related to purity and virginity in a way. In all his films you find that image of the woman being very pure and romantic and naive, and the object of desire.
No, I’m not turning this into a simple game of Connect the Dots, given the Polanski-Geimer controversy - and besides, a lot has already been written about the nature of sexuality in Polanski’s films and how it connects with his private life. But I thought it was an interesting bit of business nevertheless. Also see this photograph of Polanski directing Deneuve in Repulsion.
[Some other DVD-related posts here, here and here. And earlier posts on two of my favourite Polanski movies: Macbeth and Fearless Vampire Killers]
From a newspaper article today about how caring Delhiites can be:
Delhiites are a compassionate lot when it comes to stray dogs. The survey says 66 per cent of the respondents actively feed dogs.
The reasons given are here:
"My panditji has asked me to feed a black dog."
"I feel I do good business when the first thing I do in the morning is feed the dog sitting in front of my office."
That's it, just those two reasons; or maybe there were others but the paper felt they were too boring/irrelevant to include. Also, no mention of whether panditji asked the respondent to spell "dog" with an extra "g" to ensure even more good luck. ("If you do this, you will record a bestselling hip-hop album and become quickly rich. That will be Rupees Five Thousand for consultation please.")
While on newspapers, can someone please teach Mr Bachchan a thing or two about the concept of birthdays? The man has been wagging his finger at journalists and telling them that today is his 68th, not his 67th - with the result that this is what has been widely reported. Um, wrong. If you were born on this day in 1942, you turn 67 (2009 minus 1942) today. "Turning 67" or "celebrating your 67th birthday" is another way of saying that you have completed 67 full years of existence. Which means you will begin your 68th year tomorrow. But it's still your 67th birthday today.
In other words, the day you were born was NOT your first birthday. It's a bit confusing at first, but it shouldn't be too hard to grasp for someone who read and understood the scripts of films like Eklavya: The Royal Guard and Sarkar Raj.
[Did this for Outlook Traveller]
“At times I’m convinced he’s some sort of swimming robot,” river guide Matthew Mohlke says of Martin Strel, and it’s easy to see why. Strel, the Slovenian endurance swimmer, is a fearless conqueror of great rivers, the holder of the Guinness records for swimming the Yangtze, the Mississippi, the Danube and finally, in 2007, the Amazon. The Man Who Swam the Amazon is an account of the last of those marathons, a potentially deadly 3,274-mile journey that took 66 days.
This isn’t a travel book in the conventional sense; we learn the names of various anchoring spots along the river in Peru, Brazil and Columbia, but no real details about most of these places – which are hardly regular tourist attractions anyway! It’s more a collection of diary entries recording each day of the swim. Few of these entries run longer than two or three pages and this makes for a quick read, but it also means that things get repetitive – for all the fear of river pirates, crocodiles and other predators, there are days when nothing very exciting happens. Mohlke gets around this by detailing the many challenges facing the crew on the support boat: outdated maps (in a terrain that can barely be mapped anyway); the need to store buckets of rancid pig’s blood to divert attacking piranhas, and condoms to protect against the notorious candiru fish, which have a nasty tendency to make themselves comfortable in the human urethra; constant bouts with illness; the shifting moods and personal equations on board.
I wished the book contained more passages like Mohlke’s warm description of a logrolling competition between him and Strel during a rare, lighthearted moment in between swims. But he does give us a few snippets about Strel’s life and describes how the swimmer deals with the exhausting sessions in the water: by telling himself stories for long stretches of time, cutting himself off from the world around him and retreating into personal memory palaces. Even as the support crew is armed with laptops and other modern equipment (something Mohlke admits to feeling ambivalent about, because it seems to take away some of the purity of this primal journey), Strel single-mindedly ploughs on, spending up to 12 hours each day in the water. “It’s just him and the river. It’s like the whole world collectively sleepwalks through their day-to-day routine and he’s the only one left on the planet who’s still living like a caveman.” This is a very lightweight book, but in these passages at least it creates a portrait of a portly, middle-aged man who dreamt a mad dream and then went on to live it.
Spotted in Rishikesh this weekend, the Dr Burger restaurant:
Click to enlarge. In case you still can't read the text underneath the topmost "Dr Burger", it says "Be Happy if U Feel Hungry".
Actually, just seeing this banner was enough to make me feel happy. It's strange on so many levels, especially in a town that's all-vegetarian. Does this restaurant cater only to doctors? Or do you require a doctor's services after consuming their food? Or do they serve burgers with doctors inside them? If so, were the doctors vegetarian? Best of all is the random little penguin figure at the bottom. Is it the restaurant's logo? If so, why? If not, why is it there?
People go to Rishikesh seeking answers, but I only find more questions.
[More Rishikesh pictures - from three years ago - here. And some perplexing signboards from Mussoorie here.]
A quick shout-out for a new bookstore and a fine new book: Anjum Hasan’s second novel Neti, Neti (Not This, Not This) is being launched this week and I’ll be speaking with her about it at the newly opened CMYK book shop in the Meher Chand Market on 7th October, at 7 pm.
I wrote about Hasan’s first novel Lunatic in my Head here. Sophie Das – who was an eight-year-old living in Shillong (and in the world of her own imagination) in the first book – is a young woman of 25 in Neti, Neti. She has been living and working in Bangalore for a year, having effectively moved from one country to another, and Hasan does an excellent job of portraying her growing disaffection with both her present and her past life. The second novels of writers who scored a hit with their first are often disappointing, but this one isn’t. I thought it was an easier read than Lunatic in my Head (which isn’t meant as a judgement on either book) and this may partly be because their tones are dictated by their respective settings: Lunatic... was about three people feeling weighed down in a city where nothing ever seems to move, while Neti, Neti is set in a world where too much seems to be going on at once.
Come for the event if you can. And do look out for the book.
And so the English translation of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest brings Stieg Larsson’s posthumously published Millennium trilogy to its close. I turned the last page of this book feeling deep satisfaction as well as melancholy, the latter emotion compounded by the knowledge that there will be no more sequels (Larsson died of a heart attack shortly after completing the three manuscripts, totaling nearly 2,000 pages) – unless, of course, it turns out that the publishers have been withholding information from us. (Doubtful but fingers crossed!)
Larsson’s novels are very detailed and full of information about the workings of, for example, magazine and newspaper journalism, the police force and big business (to this list, we can now add the morally ambiguous world of spies, their activities so shadowy that they are often hidden even from the upper echelons of government). In fact, it’s possible to offer the mild criticism that they are too detailed, sometimes to the extent of being flabby. Some of this probably has to do with the circumstances of their publication: if Larsson had lived to discuss them with his editor, I think some of the deadwood would have been eliminated. Much as I enjoyed the first two books, more than once I got the impression that he had written the manuscripts mainly for his own pleasure (the self-indulgence does work in places, such as the cameo appearance in the second book of the real-life Swedish boxer Paolo Roberto), not really worrying about tightening them for eventual publication; and that his publishers, excited by their potential, had rushed them into production and translation after his death. I thought the second book in particular could comfortably have lost eighty or so pages.
