In praise of naram Dharam

Saw bits of Sholay on Zee a few nights ago, through poor cable reception. Like many Indians of my generation, I can’t remember a time when this film wasn’t part of my life. And though I’ve watched so many movies from around the world -- in every genre and on every rung of the ladder of Cinematic Importance -- since that anonymous day in Bombay sometime in the early 1980s when I first saw Sholay (I’m assuming there was a first time that I saw it; logic dictates there must have been), I still can’t think of any other film in which all the parts came together so perfectly.

Most Sholay-lovers I know feel much the same way. Watching it again though, I mulled one opinion I have about the movie that no one else seems to agree with (or at least come out of the closet about). But surely I’m not the only one who thinks that the second-best performance in the film (after Amjad Khan as Gabbar; that’s something no amount of pseud revisionism can change) comes from good ol’ Dharamendra?

Always given (and this is a point that can’t be made too often) that Sholay is much greater than the sum of its parts, I’ve often guiltily felt that Dharmendra’s rakish, exuberant Veeru is the beating heart of the film. He supplies a joie de vivre the movie badly needs; take him away (or replace him with a more stereotyped, humourless macho lead) and the film might’ve tilted right over into gloom -- what with Gabbar’s evil, the Thakur’s morbid waiting for his day of revenge, the doomed relationship between the Widow and the soulful harmonica-playing second lead, the stench of waste and decay that generally hangs over the film.

The conventional opinion (alas, tired, mediocre convention!) is that the Actors’ Bout in this movie was fought between Amjad Khan and Sanjeev Kumar, as the Thakur. But this perception has more to do with the role – the Thakur is stiff and solemn, a "serious" character, not your standard romantic, fighting leading man – than with Sanjeev Kumar’s workmanlike performance. Extended, this critical myopia is also responsible for Kumar’s exaggerated reputation as one of India’s greatest actors; he was often credited for Intention -- he eschewed ‘hero’ roles for tight-lipped ‘character’ roles early in his career -- rather than for Execution. (This is a universal malaise: Nicole Kidman might have given a number of fine performances wearing her own face in mainstream movies -- check To Die For -- but put a prosthetic nose on her, dowd her down and get her to play Virginia Woolf in a dreary, deadeningly portentous film -- and wham! there’s the best actress Oscar all stitched up.)

One of the neatest pre-packaged bytes used to explain the "greatness" of Sanjeev Kumar’s performance is: it’s so difficult for an actor to emote without the use of his hands, he had to rely only on his eyes. Well, yes, Timothy, got that, profound observation, clap clap etc, but did you ever bother to stop and see what Dharmendra actually does with his hands in the ‘chakee peesing’ scene or the scene in the temple where he ‘plays God’? This is a superb physical performance by a man who – I’ll admit -- was never a consistently good actor. He is the film’s clown prince and its hero rolled into one, and he balances the two parts flawlessly.

Dharmendra’s long, many-phased career is among the most interesting in Indian cinema, and it has been shamefully neglected. In recent months we’ve seen a spate of biographies on Bollywood stars of the past, including three -- three -- on Dilip Kumar, another slightly overrated thespian who, for one reason or another, has become the Patron Saint of every Hindi film actor with "serious" aspirations. I don’t know when we’re going to see a dedicated biography of Dharmendra, one that examines his place in Hindi film history, but I suspect it won’t be anytime soon. He was relegated to non-actor status a long time ago and late in his career he made a series of incredibly puerile choices, playing a revenge-seeking, red-eyed, snorting bull in a long line of mediocre multi-starrers. His entire career seems now to have been condensed into a series of SMS jokes (Question: Why are Indian dogs so thin? Answer: Dharmendra has drunk up all their blood) and caricatured radio soundbites. (The man himself happily went along with the lampooning, in the tradition of aging Punjabis who start behaving like children when the younger generation shows any sort of interest in them. Result: statements to media like "I’ve acted with heroines in the 1960s and 1970s, then I acted opposite Sunny’s heroines and now I plan to act with Bobby’s.")

But there’s much more to his career. He may have been an average performer with a limited range, but it wasn’t as limited as legend has it. Even very early in his career, still raw, he gave a decent enough account of himself when pitted against the great Balraj Sahni in Haqeeqat. And I had myself seen far more films from Dharmendra’s "badle ki aag" phase than from his early days when I got an interesting and unexpected insight from my mother. In the late 1960s, she told me, when the Rajesh Khanna madness had just begun, the girls, at least in her school and extended friends’ circle, were decidedly polarised. Dharmendra was the serious woman’s crush, the intense, poetic hero who appealed to the mature schoolgirl, while the giggly, giddy-headed ones could have their Rajesh Khannas and their Jeetendras.

Twenty years before he committed himself to divesting dogs of their blood, Dharmendra was potentially one of Indian cinema’s great romantic heroes. Think about it, it isn’t so far-fetched. This is the man who Meena Kumari – epitome of brooding gravitas among Hindi film heroines – was involved with offscreen. And in Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Guddi, one of mainstream Hindi cinema’s most searching commentaries on the relationship between life and art, another serious, level-headed actress, Jaya Bhaduri, played a young schoolgirl besotted with a movie star (Dharam, essentially playing himself). Bhaduri’s character was the sort of well-grounded, mature schoolgirl my mother imagined herself and her small circle of friends to be like. Try imagining Guddi with Rajesh Khanna as the object of her adoration!

There’s much more doubtless that can be said here by people who have studied trends in Hindi cinema more closely. A point can be made that even in that egregious late-1980s phase of his career Dharmendra showed he could do interesting things when challenged (I’m thinking of J P Dutta’s underrated gangland movie Hathyar in which Dharmendra, Sanjay Dutt and Rishi Kapoor were all in peak form). And of course there’s little doubt that given good direction he was an excellent comedian.

But I’m content to stick with Veeru. Still reiterating that Sholay is far greater than all its constituents; but if one does get around to analysing the individual parts, Garam Dharam shines among the brightest. It’s an iconic performance by a man who has never got the attention he deserved.

P.S. (being forced to write this by colleague holding a Swiss knife and frothing at the mouth) Sanjeev Kumar fans, I’m not saying the man wasn’t a good, (arrgh, knife cut) okay very good, actor, just that he wasn’t as good as his reputation suggests. And anyway, my point is that his finest moment might easily have come in a movie where he played the conventional, singing, dancing hero -- but if it had, it would never have been acknowledged as such, even by the actor himself.

More opening credits: Jaal, Chhupa Rustam and Bombay Talkie

(A follow up to this post)

I had a memory of seeing the 1986 film Jaal in a movie hall, probably Green Park's Uphaar: it was a standard-issue potboiler starring Rekha, Mithun Chakraborty and (surprise surprise) Jeetendra in yet another Special Appearance. But what I didn’t remember – until reader Ahmad Tookhi brought it to my attention – were the opening credits of that film. I won't go so far as to say this sequence represents the acme of creativity and artistic ambition in 1980s Bollywood, but it comes close enough. Watch for yourself (it goes on till the 3.40 mark).

Vinod Mehra was a dependable actor at most times, but I think he deserved a special Filmfare Award just for keeping a straight face during these scenes. What must it feel like to see “Colour Consultant”, “Dress Designers” and “Makeup” neatly printed on a door that’s just been slammed in your face? I also enjoy the way he subtly draws the curtain aside so that “Anand Bakshi” is fully visible, and how he appears to have a breakdown on seeing “Annu Malik” written on the wall. (And I wonder how Tanuja felt about having her name written on the road and then coolly stomped on.)

But here’s another inventive title sequence, from Vijay Anand’s 1973 film Chhupa Rustam. (The “money shot” begins a little after the 5-minute mark.)

Have to admit, this is a one-note concept compared to Jaal. Besides, watching it made me dizzy. (It also made me think of Dev Anand’s train reminiscences, as described here.)

Finally, on a less corny note, here's the video of one of my favourite title sequences ever – the beautiful opening of Merchant-Ivory’s Bombay Talkie. Do keep the volume turned up; Shanker-Jaikishan’s music is ethereal.

(I wrote about the sequence, and the film, in this old post, but the video wasn’t online back then.)

How Richard Dawkins might explain a tennis coincidence

[Did this for my Sunday Guardian books column]

“Look into a mirror for a lifetime,” said the poet-filmmaker Jean Cocteau, “and you see Death doing its work.” Having watched nearly half of the eleven-hour match that John Isner and Nicolas Mahut contrived to play at Wimbledon last year, I’d say no mirror is necessary.

If you follow tennis, even casually, you may have heard about the gasps of astonishment at the Wimbledon draw ceremony last week when Isner and Mahut were again drawn to play each other in the first round. This has opened the conspiracy-theory floodgates. Their 2010 match, soul-annihilating though it was, probably got more media coverage and public attention (especially outside sporting circles) than any Slam final. “Arranging” a sequel could be good for ticket sales – so was the draw rigged?

Personally I doubt it: the draw process is a transparent one and the ceremony very public. But the rhetorical question “What are the chances of such a thing happening just randomly?” continues to be asked by tennis fans everywhere – the implication being that this couldn’t have been a coincidence; that organisational (or occult) forces had to be at work.

Actually, the odds aren’t close to astronomical. I won’t bore you with the calculations, but keeping in mind that Isner and Mahut were both among 96 unseeded players, the chance that they would play each other works out to something like 1 in 140, or 0.7 percent. Improbable, yes, but hardly mind-boggling as these things go. Even if you calculate the chance of their meeting in the first round in successive years, you don’t get wildly unlikely numbers. (In fact, the coincidence of the same two players meeting in the 1st round in consecutive Wimbledons has occurred eight times since 1970.)

My favourite writings on the phenomenon of coincidences and how the human mind can get excessively excited about them are in Richard Dawkins’ Unweaving the Rainbow, specifically in the chapters "Hoodwink'd with Faery Fancy" and "Unweaving the Uncanny". Dawkins begins with a simple enough incident: a four-digit personal code number issued to him by his college was exactly the same as the safety code he had just chosen for his bicycle lock. The probability of this happening is 1 in 10,000 – seemingly very large odds – but as he points out, “the number of people in the world is so large compared with 10,000 that somebody, at this very moment, is bound to be experiencing a coincidence at least as startling as mine. It just happens that today was my day to notice such a coincidence.”

Each ordinary day that you or I live through is an unbroken sequence or events, or incidents, any of which is potentially a coincidence. I am now looking at a picture on my wall of a deep-sea fish with a fascinatingly alien face. It is possible that at this very moment, the telephone will ring and the caller will identify himself as a Mr Fish. I'm waiting...

On another occasion his wife bought an antique watch as a gift for her mother, then discovered that the watch had her mother’s initials – “M.A.B.” – engraved on the back. Many people I know, if faced with this situation, would hasten to invoke supernatural causes (presumably because the invisible pink unicorn in the sky has nothing better to do with Her time than spring pleasant little surprises on randomly selected homosapiens), but Dawkins takes out the phone book, checks the frequency of names beginning with M, A and B and then sets about his calculations. It turns out that if each of the 55 million people in Britain bought an engraved watch, we could expect nearly 20,000 of them to experience a coincidence of this magnitude.

Much heft is added to Dawkins' argument by the concept of the PETWHAC (Population of Events That Would Have Appeared Coincidental), a term he coins to show how the pattern-seeking mind can make coincidences appear even more remarkable than they are. (If his wife had discovered the initials of her mother’s maiden name on the watch, or her own initials for that matter, it would have seemed just as impressive – but it would also mean a broadening of the PETWHAC, which would further increase the probability of a coincidence.) Public “mystics” and “psychics” dine out on this sort of gullibility and pattern-seeking all the time.

(More about the PETWHAC here)

Incidentally the title Unweaving the Rainbow comes from John Keats’ observation that science had destroyed the beauty of the rainbow by “explaining” its colours. Dawkins’ response is that the natural world as revealed by scientific understanding can be beautiful and awe-inspiring. “Disarming apparently uncanny coincidences is more interesting than gasping over them,” he says. Whether or not you agree with him, I’d say analysing mathematical probabilities is much more interesting than watching another Isner-Mahut match. Even if you hate maths.

[Here's an old post on Dawkins' Climbing Mount Improbable. And a little more about Unweaving the Rainbow in the postscript of this post.]

Update: Just realised that the Serious Men post I linked to above was written on this day exactly a year ago - now there's another good coincidence for you! (And I swear it wasn't planned.)

Outside of a dog...

A shout-out (or woof-out) for How Cheeka Became a Star and Other Dog Stories, which is the first publication in Natraj’s Wagging Tales series. This is an extremely well-produced and designed book, full of nice illustrations, cartoons and dog-related trivia. The contributors include a few professional writers/journalists like Ruskin Bond**, Pavan Varma and Jug Suraiya, but also people from other fields such as actress Gul Panag and Jay Panda – most of whom have this in common: their lives were, at some point, taken over by a canine friend, sibling or child. The result is a varied (if slightly random) collection of short pieces ranging from full-fledged reminiscences to enjoyable trifles like Maneka Gandhi’s "Why do Dogs Go to Heaven?"

The book’s title comes from advertising executive Sneha Iype Varma’s account of how the Vodafone pug became a household name. I felt ambivalent about that one, given how the pug craze led to a surfeit of irresponsible impulse buying by that hideous breed of humans who are prone to abandoning pets. But the more personal stories here – such as Nafisa Ali Sodhi’s “Born Again” and Shirin Merchant’s “Price of a Life” – should be of interest to most animal lovers. Personally, I could relate to Dhiraj Nayyar's Editor's Note about his tentative steps into the world of dog-dom, since I wasn't quite a "dog person" myself - in the sense of having developed a really close bond with any one dog - until three years ago. But since then...

---------
** Ruskin Bond’s story is the one he wrote for the Tehelka Excess special that I co-edited in 2008

Speech therapy and love in The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai

[Did a version of this review for Biblio]

In a typically candid piece for Vanity Fair magazine recently, Christopher Hitchens reflected on one of the most painful aspects of his bout with cancer: the deterioration of his vocal chords. “Deprivation of the ability to speak is like the amputation of part of the personality,” wrote the man who has been among the smoothest, most eloquent public speakers of his generation:

To a great degree, in public and private, I “was” my voice. All the rituals and etiquette of conversation, from clearing the throat in preparation for the telling of an extremely long and taxing joke to trying to make my proposals more persuasive as I sank the tone by a strategic octave of shame, were innate and essential to me.

Ruiyan Xu’s novel The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai centres on a similar loss. The victim, Li Jing, isn’t a public figure like Hitchens, but he’s a smooth-talking businessman whose professional success depends on his ability to influence clients. Understandably, then, his world turns on its head when a freak accident – caused by a gas-pipe explosion in a hotel – leaves him with a peculiar form of aphasia where he can no longer speak in Chinese. Li Jing can still talk with near-fluency in English (which was his first language because he had lived in America until the age of 10), but that’s small comfort – the continuation of a meaningful relationship with his wife Meiling depends on his being able to converse in his native tongue.

Without this ability the two of them are, for all practical purposes, strangers, stealing glances at each other from across a room, wondering if they ever knew each other at all. (Not being able to say her name right feels like the worst betrayal, as if his stupid brain is determined to elide her from his syntax, from his memory. As if she isn’t his to hold on to anymore.)

Enter Rosalyn Neal, an American neurologist brought to Shanghai on an eight-week fellowship to help Li Jing get back to normal. Rosalyn has demons of her own – she recently underwent a painful separation from her husband – and travelling to a new country is an escape from the haze that her life has become. However, she finds the going less than easy in Shanghai. (The foreign city and the exotic patient had only been abstractions before, but now they are real and waiting, with their own thorny demands.) With much at stake in her patient’s professional and personal life, she is expected to be a miracle worker, but the depressed Li Jing has retreated into a world of silence. Nor do Rosalyn’s expressions of frustration and short bursts of temper go down well with people from a less emotionally demonstrative culture. Soon she comes to resent both Shanghai and Li Jing for shutting her out.

But at the same time, the introduction of Rosalyn energises the novel and brings its themes into clearer relief. When she does make her breakthrough with Li Jing, there’s a ring of deus ex machina about the situation – it’s a little too neat and contrived – but it leads to personal liberation for both of them. For Rosalyn, the breakthrough coincides with her discovery of the expat community in Shanghai and the formation of a new circle of friends. One senses that, like Li Jing, she had become withdrawn – that she needed to open up and reach out to others instead of feeling sorry for herself. And soon we see the parallels between their situations: here are two people who are – in different ways – trapped in a strange world, with little means of communicating with others. This prepares us for the turn that their relationship will eventually take.

Meanwhile, circumstances have forced Meiling – a books editor – to enter the corporate world in an attempt to salvage her husband’s now-headless company. She handles this responsibility with composure, but soon she must also deal with the unusual intimacy that seems to be forming between Li Jing and the American woman – an intimacy that she herself is partly responsible for, since she insisted on Rosalyn extending her stay in Shanghai and moving into their house.

The narrative now starts to move between these three people, so that we come to understand their separate fears and insecurities, and the hold that memory has on each of them. Their dilemmas are all moving in their own ways: particularly compelling are Li Jing’s recollections of coming to China for the first time as a child with the American name James, struggling to adjust to the new setting and the new language – and his shifting relationship with Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, which he had loved as a boy and could barely recognise as an adult. But near the end of the book, a subtle change also occurs in our perceptions of the two women. Rosalyn, who in some ways was our entry point into the story as well as its putative hero, becomes less sympathetic – perhaps a little too hedonistic and self-absorbed – while Meiling, who has been a distant figure, slowly grows in stature. Her recollections of the early stages of her relationship with Li Jing are revealing and help make her a more accessible, sympathetic figure.

He was the gregarious one at the centre of their social group ... How he seduced her was with words ... Conversations accumulated between the two of them until one day she discovered that his words had built an entirely private universe between their two bodies.

****

Stylistically, The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai doesn’t begin on a promising note. Xu’s writing is initially strained and over-descriptive, with jerky sentences and awkward phrasing (all he wants is just to find a way out). I thought her account of the hotel’s collapse was exasperatingly florid.

The ground shifting like a pre-historic animal. Fire in the kitchen stretching out its wings, flapping, frantic. Fissures mutate in the walls, mapping out an eventual collapse [...] On the facade the metallic swans glare through the smoke, their bodies adrift, desperate to hold on. One of them loosens its hold on the other, breaking the heart in between their necks, swinging its body downward with reckless velocity and swinging back the other way, its upside-down head like the pendulum of a clock, swerving through a wide arc just above the doorway.

This sort of detail might be understandable in a disaster novel like The Towering Inferno, but it’s out of place here, given how incidental the explosion is to the actual meat of the story. Even if the swans are intended as an elaborate metaphor for the fissures in Li Jing’s world, the writing at this point is overblown.

There are other small irritants. When Li Jing is lying in bed, struggling to deal with his condition, we are privy to his tortured thoughts about being unable to say “Meiling” despite understanding the syllables and hearing the tones in his own head. But then we get a sentence – “A synaptic collapse between the frontal lobe and the operculum” – which strikes a false note in a passage meant to be describing Li Jing’s internal perspective; it’s an if an omniscient narrator has suddenly intruded with medical terminology for our edification. There is also an unconvincing episode where a visitor to Li Jing’s hospital room – ignorant of his condition – goes on talking for a few minutes without realising that he is getting no response.

These are weaknesses, but as Xu slips into the natural flow of the story and focuses on the interconnected lives of her characters, her writing become smoother. Some of the book’s best passages are the ones that make little observations – without underlining the point too thickly – about the centrality of language in our everyday lives. Thus, when Rosalyn chances to meet another southerner, we are told in a throwaway sentence that she is so happy that she (perhaps subconsciously) lengthens her drawl. At another crucial point, she addresses her new friend (and potential lover) Danny as “Ben”, which is her ex-husband’s name.

I also liked the perceptive use of a translator named Alan, whose detachment becomes a counterpoint to the fraught lives of the central figures; his placid and emotionless renderings of tense conversations are amusing, but they are also pointers to the importance of tone, pitch and enunciation, and how complicated the business of talking really is. With all its little flaws, Xu’s book is a graceful reminder of the countless ways in which we are defined by our ability to speak: the stressing of syllables, the injection of feeling into an abstract or innocuous sound like “um”, even the slips of tongue that reveal hidden places in the mind. This is a story about language and speech, but it’s also about other things we take for granted, and the delicate threads that hold some of our strongest relationships together.

On Philip K Dick and the "vile" Victorians

[Snippets from my Sunday Guardian books column]

“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold,” goes the famous opening sentence of Hunter S Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Immediately after this the near-delirious narrator sees enormous bats swooping around in the sky above his car and hears a voice screaming, “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?” The voice is his own, but he doesn’t know that. Never mind. This is just the start of an unforgettable road trip where the line between what is real and what isn’t soon becomes irrelevant. The labyrinths of the drug-addled mind are so much more interesting than anything Las Vegas can offer – or perhaps it’s all the same anyway.

Philip K Dick’s A Scanner Darkly begins on a comparable note, recounting absurdities in a seemingly calm and collected narrative voice. “Once a guy stood all day shaking bugs from his hair. The doctor told him there were no bugs in his hair.” The guy in question, a relatively minor character named Jerry, is addicted to a drug called Substance D (for Death), and after some extensive "research" he's figured out that the bugs are aphids and that they are in his lungs as well. Naturally it makes perfect sense to stand under the shower all day with his dog (who also has the bugs).

The partly science-fiction world of Dick’s novel is populated with dope addicts as well as narcotics agents trying to convict them. But can you really tell one from the other? The agents wear identity-concealing “scramble suits” (which turn a wearer’s body into an amorphous blur) and even their superiors don’t know their real names. Besides, their jobs require them to engage in the sort of substance abuse that can quickly disorient their minds. So what happens when a narcotics agent named Bob Arctor is assigned to spy on the activities of a suspected drug dealer named... Bob Arctor?
 

Arctor is understandably confused by this development, and by the suspicion that the two halves of his brain are concealing things from each other. (If he can’t trust himself, how can he possibly trust anyone around him?) At one point, contemplating his dual role as the watcher and the watched, he wonders, “Which of them is me?” In Dick’s hands even this profound philosophical query is laced with wryness. He was a genre writer – and one of the cult heroes of modern science-fiction – but his best books are every bit as demanding as high-quality literary fiction. They deal with questions of identity, with the paranoia of being an individual in a cold, corporation-dominated world, and the ways in which people interact with technology. If he were alive in the Internet age, I’m sure he would have written some fascinating stories centred on social networking and virtual role-playing.

P.S. In addition to being one of the most imaginative novelists of the last few decades, Dick was astonishingly prolific. As A D Jameson pointed out in this masterful skewering of Christopher Nolan’s film Inception, Dick wrote dozens of far superior “psychological/postmodern/mind-fuck narratives” – and even produced five novels in a single year, 1965, including the excellent The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.

****

A straight history and a “horrible history”, best read side by side

One of the best books I’ve read about a historical period is A N Wilson’s The Victorians – a sprawling, magisterial account of seven decades that came to shape the modern world in so many ways. Wilson examines the political, social, scientific and cultural developments of the Victorian era – and their resonance for our lives today – in detail, and his mini-biographies of figures like Robert Peel and Charles Stewart Parnell make a fascinating tapestry. This is the sort of biography that wins highbrow literary awards, gets multiple mentions in “Books of the Year” lists, and is described in blurbs as “a magnificent portrait of an age” – all of which is well-justified.

But now consider another book about the Victorians that is never likely to be feted thus, though it provides its own special insights: The Vile Victorians in the “Horrible Histories” series. The series motto is “History with the nasty bits left in”, and true to form this wicked little book is a collection of unsavoury facts about epidemics, infant murders, gruesome sports and military disasters, mostly related in a faux-scandalised tone; there are stomach-churning anecdotes such as the one about the young Queen Victoria walking by the Thames and wondering about the pieces of paper floating in it. (Hundreds of sewers used to empty untreated waste into the river.)

You start reading something like Vile Victorians in a very particular mood – perhaps you want something that’s easy to flip through, or perhaps you’re in a masochistic mood. And indeed, the tone of much of the book is deliberately mean-minded and the drawings are a little juvenile (though a few are genuinely funny). But it would be a mistake to think there’s nothing to be learnt from it. When I read about “the vile Victorian Dr Meyers” and his infernal Tapeworm Trap (a small metal cylinder which had to be swallowed by patients – eventually resulting in the deaths of more humans than tapeworms), I was convinced it was a made-up story until I looked it up and discovered it was true. There is much good trivia here, even if the presentation is offbeat (to say the least).

At times – as in the short story “The Monster of the Mine”, which illustrates the horrors of children being made to work in coal mines – the book’s tone becomes almost sympathetic. It doesn’t last though. The very next page is about another manifestation of Victorian cruelty to children – by giving them “vile” names like Abishag and Lettuce!

[Some earlier odds and ends from my weekly column: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Heard a good story?

(Thoughts on form, content and other bothersome things)

My latest Yahoo! column is one of the most difficult pieces I’ve written in a long time – and possibly one of the most self-indulgent and pedantic. But these are notes that I've wanted to put down for a while, and I think the topic should be of interest to most serious film buffs. Here's the piece - if you have more thoughts on the subject, do write in or comment here.

P.S. Think the column is long? It was twice this size before I started editing it in desperation.

The empress's new clothes

All book-lovers have funny stories about display goof-ups in bookstores - whether it's Vikram Seth's The Humble Administrator's Garden being placed in the shelf labelled "Gardening" or Alan Moore's sexually explicit comic Lost Girls showing up in the children's section, at the eye level of a four-year-old. Twice now I've seen The Popcorn Essayists in a "Food and Cookery" shelf, and one learns to smile bravely in the face of these injustices. But yesterday, at the Om bookstore in Saket's MGF mall, I saw a particularly inappropriate case of book-placement. Prominently visible in the section marked "Textiles" was:

How to Make Love Like a Porn Star, by Jenna Jameson

(Perhaps she left her hat on?)

Up above the world so high...

One of the many pleasing things about Hindi cinema’s multi-starrer culture in the 1970s was the phenomenon of the “And Above All” in the title credits. This was fuelled by ego clashes and by a general tendency to fawn and mollycoddle: when two or more stars were equally popular and had been in the industry for around the same length of time, who would get top billing?

Such insecurity wasn’t peculiar to Bollywood, of course. In his book Tracy and Hepburn, Garson Kanin observed: “Billing appears to be as important as breathing to some actors and actresses. Important films with ideal casts have fallen apart on this issue.” Old Hollywood came up with inventive methods to keep prima donnas happy – for example, two names might be lettered in the shape of an “X” so that neither star could be said to have taken precedence. (If “Humphrey” was placed above “Ingrid”, at least “Bergman” was above “Bogart”.)

But in our movie industry “Above All” was the preferred solution, and if that failed it was always possible to proclaim a “guest” or “friendly” appearance – even when the actor in question had a substantial role. For a good example of title credits gone awry, I offer you Raj Kumar Kohli’s magnificent horror film Jaani Dushman, about a werewolf-like Shaitan with chest hair that would make Anil Kapoor look like the Glaxo baby.

The film’s title sequence begins well enough with straightforward “starring” credits for Sunil Dutt, Sanjeev Kumar and Shatrughan Sinha (the hierarchy of seniority being apparent enough in this trio), but then things get murky. The next credit has Vinod Mehra with a parenthetical “Special Appearance” next to his name, almost as if he were reluctant to get too deeply involved. Likewise Rekha and a bevy of starlets including Neetu Singh, Bindiya Goswami and Sarika (all playing village belles ripe for abduction). But doing a solo number in the middle of all these special appearances is poor Reena Roy, whose name appears without any qualifiers at all. Possibly her agent failed to read the fine print?
 
Then comes a “Guest Artists” series – Yogita Bali, Aruna Irani and suchlike – followed by one of the more intricate credits I’ve seen:

And Above All
Jeetendra
(Special Appearance)

And so it goes. Briefly, here is a movie whose opening titles could be the subject of a thesis. (You can see them halfway through this video, but to get there you’ll have to watch Amrish Puri reading “The Sixth Pan Book of Horror Stories” and making a monstrous transformation. The scene gives new meaning to the phrase “that book made my hair stand on end”.)

Come to think of it, Jeetendra had quite a romance going with special titles; his “Above All” billing in The Burning Train conjures images of the actor sitting mournfully by himself on the roof of the train compartment while the rest of the cast travels in comfort. (Alas, the credits of this film were so preoccupied with the male stars that they turned the luscious Parveen Babi into a man by spelling her name “Praveen”. Unforgivable.)

In that awful decade commonly referred to as the 1980s, some films exhausted all their creativity within the opening five minutes. Watching something called Do Qaidi on TV, I discovered the title “Dynamic Appearance by Suresh Oberoi” imposed on a still of the thus-honoured actor (who played a fairly inconsequential part in the film). What, one wonders, were these performers and their families thinking as they watched preview screenings? Did little Vivek Oberoi beam with delight when he saw daddy’s name appear on the screen? Did he tell himself, “I’ll grow up and become a movie star too, and then everyone in the whole wide world will call me Dynamic Vivek?” If so, think of the human tragedy unleashed by five words that appeared ever so briefly in a long-forgotten film. It gives new meaning to Larkin's verse about man handing on misery to man.

P.S. Here is Kanin on the subject of Spencer Tracy’s name always appearing before Katharine Hepburn’s in the films they did together:

Tracy’s position as a Metro superstar meant that there was nothing to discuss [...] It was always “Tracy and Hepburn”.

I chided him once about his insistence on first billing.

“Why not?” he asked, his face all innocence.

“”Well, after all,” I argued, “She’s the lady. You’re the man. Ladies first?”

“This is a movie, chowderhead,” he said, “not a lifeboat.”

Two links

1) An interview that Spark magazine did with me, mainly about films and film writing. (Here's the PDF version of the magazine.)

2) A review (PDF format) of Jaane bhi do Yaaro: Seriously Funny Since 1983 in the new issue of the journal Wide Screen.

PoV: at the other end of the camera

From Subhash Ghai to Vittorio de Sica, and Karan Johar to Roman Polanski ... my Persistence of Vision column this week is about directors in unusual acting roles. Here goes.

Boy and wolf: thoughts on Stanley ka Dabba

The figure of the Big Bad Wolf is central to fairy tales about the fears and trials of childhood, and there are many variations on the character. The Wolf doesn’t have to be the villain-in-chief: he can be watching from the shadows, a potential rather than explicit threat. Or he might be revealed to be something very different from the bogeyman of the child’s nightmares (see Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird, for example). But that doesn’t necessarily make the nightmares any less vivid.

In the Red Riding Hood story the Wolf has big, sharp teeth and reckons that the little heroine might make a tasty dinner. The villain of the new film Stanley ka Dabba isn’t that fearsome, but he’s a nuisance at the very least – a school-teacher with a wolfish appetite, who bullies children into sharing their tiffin lunches with him. The role is played by the film’s writer-director Amole Gupte, who also wrote the very popular Taare Zameen Par (and was originally going to direct that film, before Aamir Khan took over the production). In the Acknowledgements, Gupte mentions director Vishal Bhardwaj, with whom he has worked in the past – and indeed his own shifty-eyed portrayal in this film reminded me of the avaricious shopkeeper in Bhardwaj’s The Blue Umbrella, a man who thinks nothing of taking a little girl’s precious umbrella away from her.

Gupte plays a “khadoos” in Stanley ka Dabba, but his own empathy for the interior world of children is visible throughout this well-written and acted – if somewhat unevenly paced – film. It’s about a boy named Stanley (wonderfully played by Gupte’s own son Partho), popular among his classmates for his storytelling skills – though none of them realise just how good he is at making up fictions about himself. We sense early on that something is wrong when he tells a colourful but unconvincing tale about fighting with a bigger boy, and when he makes a hurried phone call to an unseen mother to tell her he’ll be late coming home from school. But things come to a head when Verma, the Hindi teacher, insists that he bring his own lunchbox to school (mainly so he put his own grubby hands in it). In the face of adult hegemony of this sort, the happy-go-lucky boy starts to wilt.

(Minor spoiler alert) As it turns out, this story is building up to the revelation that Stanley is an orphan who spends his non-school hours performing menial tasks at an uncle’s rundown little dhaba. The closing credits turn this into a commentary on child labour in India, complete with relevant statistics, and I was ambivalent about this ending – I thought it was a little too hurried, with too much centred on the revelation. But there’s no doubt that the film’s structure as a whole is a clever and effective exercise in viewer manipulation – it pulls the carpet out from under the feet of the urban, English-speaking viewer, by giving us a seemingly middle-class, Convent-educated boy to identify with and then presenting him in an unsettlingly different avatar at the end **.

But what I personally found more interesting than the ending was something the film chooses to be nebulous about: the way it hints lightly at Verma’s human side. This isn’t done in an obvious or sentimental way, and there is no real attempt at redeeming the character – certainly, his back-story is never revealed to us in the way that Aamir Khan’s teacher in TZP was revealed to have been dyslexic himself. But many of the scenes involving this gruff, hairy man make it possible for us to wonder about his own background, and where his great hunger springs from. It’s possible even to speculate that he and Stanley might have more in common than either of them realise. In any case, he is by no means the only – or the most dangerous – wolf in the little boy’s life.

** Note: there is of course a distinction to be made between 1) “viewer manipulation” as done in an artistically satisfying way, without upsetting a film’s internal equilibrium, and 2) yanking indiscriminately at the heartstrings of the most easily manipulated viewer. But there are times when the line can be a surprisingly thin one, and I thought this was one of those times. (While on that, do read this excellent piece by Trisha Gupta.) Stanley ka Dabba has greater integrity in some ways than Taare Zameen Par, but it does make its own small compromises; there's no losing sight of the fact that it was made specifically for a complacent multiplex audience.

P.S. Gupte's performance as Verma can be included in a (very lengthy) hypothetical postscript to my Yahoo! column about directors in acting roles.

In which Philip channels Groucho

One of the funniest things I’ve read in a while – the Independent’s list of 90 gaffes by the peerless Prince Philip. Some of this stuff is deeply offensive (while also being very funny) and some of it isn’t particularly funny at all – but I thought much of it was plain brilliant. In any case, how can you not admire a man - and a Royal at that - who invites the editor-in-chief of a newspaper to a press reception and then tells him “Well, you didn’t have to come!”

Some other favourites:

"What do you gargle with – pebbles?" To Tom Jones, after the Royal Variety Performance, 1969.

"Aren't most of you descended from pirates?" In the Cayman Islands, 1994.

"You have mosquitoes. I have the Press." To the matron of a hospital in the Caribbean in 1966.

"Your country is one of the most notorious centres of trading in endangered species." Accepting a conservation award in Thailand in 1991.

"So who's on drugs here?... HE looks as if he's on drugs." To a 14-year-old member of a Bangladeshi youth club in 2002.

"Reichskanzler." Prince Philip used Hitler's title to address German chancellor Helmut Kohl during a speech in Hanover in 1997.

"It's a vast waste of space." Philip entertained guests in 2000 at the reception of a new £18m British Embassy in Berlin, which the Queen had just opened.

"I'd much rather have stayed in the Navy, frankly." When asked what he felt about his life in 1992.

In a world that can get idiotic at times about political correctness, this is equal-opportunity insulting of the highest order, and some of it is worthy of Groucho Marx. I can just see the Queen standing next to her errant spouse during some of these very public exchanges, rolling her eyes like a long-suffering Margaret Dumont.

Speaking of which, here are two versions of the same photo.

Welles, Laughton, Ozu and other goodies

It's been a very difficult couple of weeks for various reasons, so it's good to have something to smile about. My friend Tipu, who gently nudged me towards the honest life last year by helping me buy original Criterion DVDs (details in this old post), continues the good work. Just yesterday I laid my paws on these treasures:

- The Night of the Hunter: with a two-and-a-half hour documentary on the making of the film, titled "Charles Laughton Directs" - really looking forward to seeing that.

- Late Spring (Ozu): I love Ozu's three "Noriko" films with the beautiful Setsuko Hara, and while I have pirated copies of Early Summer and Tokyo Story, I thought I'd indulge myself with this one. Also included in the DVD-set: Wim Wenders' tribute film Tokyo-Ga.

- F for Fake (Orson Welles): an old favourite which I look forward to seeing again. The mouth-watering list of Extras, including the documentary Almost True: The Noble Art of Forgery, is here.

- The Complete Mr Arkadin (Welles): easily the most daunting of these disc-sets, a 3-DVD package with three different versions of Welles' enigmatic 1955 film Mr Arkadin. Again, plenty of Extras, including a novel that may or may not have been partly written by Welles himself.

- La Jetée/Sans Soleil (Chris Marker): the 30-minute La Jetée, made almost entirely of black-and-white stills, is a longtime favourite, but I haven't seen San Soleil yet.

- Cronos (Guillermo del Toro): just to remind myself that movies have been made in the past 30 years as well!