As mentioned earlier, I have been putting up lit-fest reports on Facebook rather than on the blog (those are public posts, I think you can see them even if you don’t have an FB account) - but every once in a while, it makes sense to post something here too. So here goes. I had a very nice discussion with Sharmila Tagore and Balaji Vittal at the Kolkata Literary Meet on Jan 25. Sharmila ji was gracious as usual, and in a good mood too. One highlight: her recalling an incident during the Satyakam shoot near Jamshedpur where a bunch of youngsters tried to disrupt the shoot/generally misbehave. Dharmendra pulled one of them across by his collar, Sharmila ji told us (“and have you seen Dharam’s hands?”) and gave him a couple of slaps. “Because we did that sort of thing in those days,” she added drily, to much laughter (and I thought about Sulekha being teasingly called a “Communist” because she carries her own bags from the bus in Chupke Chupke).
Also, in response to an audience question about her famous bikini shoot in 1966: “I did it because I thought I looked good. One should do these things at the right time, no? I mean, there would be no point my wearing a bikini today.” Watching her on stage, and speaking with her before we went up, it was very hard to believe that this year marks the 50th anniversary of Anupama, An Evening in Paris and Nayak.
My favourite Sharmila moment though had nothing to do with the filmi discussion. It was just before we went up on stage when, right in the middle of an interview, she stopped, pointed at one of the Victoria Memorial’s stray pups sitting nearby, and asked if someone could give it some water because it looked thirsty and unwell.
The pic below is courtesy the Sorelle Grapevine blog, which also has a nice writeup about the session, plus a short video. See here.
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Got to sign copies of my three books at the little stall outside Victoria Memorial. It was nice to see The Popcorn Essayists there. (Treat this as a re-plug for an anthology containing some very good pieces by Anjum Hasan, Rajorshi Chakraborti, Namita Gokhale, Amitava Kumar, Kamila Shamsie, Sumana Roy, Manjula Padmanabhan, Madhulika Liddle, Sidin Vadukut, Manil Suri, Musharraf Ali Farooqi and Jaishree Misra.) In this pic, the Popcorn Essayists, Jaane bhi do Yaaro and Hrishikesh Mukherjee can be seen in the company of many worthies, including Anirudha Bhattacharjee and Balaji Vittal’s two books, and Amitava Nag’s new book about Soumitra Chatterjee.
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Then there was the session with Javed Akhtar and Zoya Akhtar, which went off well, I’m told. (I can never judge these things while up on stage.) Javed-Saab was looking a bit like the angry young man the couple of times I ran into him in Jaipur (and later at the Kolkata airport, where people peremptorily came up and took selfies with him without even saying a proper hello, as if he were a wax statue or something) - but he was in good form at the Kalam session, especially when dealing with audience questions near the end.
------------------------ And here are pics from the sessions at the Jaipur Literature Festival, where Anuja Chauhan and I played musical chairs with the moderator’s seat. First, “The Craft of the Bestseller” with Anuja, Ravi Subramanian and the massively popular Ravinder Singh who continues to thrill crowds and readers despite his repeated admissions that he doesn’t read books himself. And then, “Jaane Kahaan Gaye Woh Din: New Books about Old Bollywood” with Rauf Ahmed and Anuja.
The video of the “Jaane Kahaan” session is here. At one point during the first half of the session, Rauf saab seemed to forget that the panel was only 45-50 minutes long (and that most of the audience would need some context for the inside references he was making to old-time movies and movie-stars), but Anuja deftly got things back on track, and I got to speak a bit too.
[Don’t have time at the moment to do detailed reports of any of the sessions, but will try at a future date]
[Did this for my Forbes Life books column – around the time I was part of the jury for the children’s fiction prize at the Goodbooks Awards] ---------------------------------------
Discussions about literature for children and young adults often pivot around the question: should young readers be spoon-fed? Do messages and morals have to be spelt out? Some parents and teachers seem to think so, but there are others who give pre-teen readers more credit and point out that the best way to engage a mind – and to provoke some thought in the process – is to tell a story really well, to make the characters and situations involving. Ideas can lie embedded within a “fun” narrative. Besides, as the writer EB White once put it, “Children are the most attentive, curious, eager, observant, sensitive, quick, and generally congenial readers on earth. Anyone who writes down to them is wasting his time.” A related observation is that it makes little sense to shield children from “dark” subject matter, especially at a time when content of all sorts is so easy to access. Having recently read a number of new young-adult (YA) books by Indian authors, I was pleased to find that many of them – some to a greater degree than others – steer clear of pedantry. Even the ones that are set in a school environment and deal with a vulnerable but intelligent child beginning to make sense of the world, working his way through notions of right and wrong, seeing a friend or classmate through fresh eyes and learning about empathy.
A good example of this is in Payal Dhar’s Slightly Burnt, which begins by cleverly misdirecting the reader: the narrator, a 16-year-old named Komal, has just had her life turned upside down, because her best friend Sahil (and she only wants them to be friends, nothing more) has said three little words to her. We think we know what those words are, but soon we discover that we were wrong; we then follow Komal on a journey to understanding and acceptance. I won’t provide big spoilers here, but this novel addresses an important subject – the marginalization of people who are unconventional in some way – with lightness. You won’t at all feel you are being preached to. Which is also the case with Samit Basu’s delightful The Adventures of Stoob: Testing Times. If you’re in a solemn mood, you might tell someone that this book’s lesson is: It Isn’t Good to Cheat in Your Exams. But that wouldn’t begin to convey the strengths of this fluid narrative about a boy who has a rich inner life, and who is so nervous about his exams that he nearly crosses over to the dark side. In a smart demonstration that “doing the right thing” can be cool, some of the most fun passages have Stoob and his friends thinking up ways to prevent another friend from cheating during a test. The writing aside, I enjoyed Sunaina Coelho’s illustrations, which complement the text wonderfully – as in the drawing of Stoob being chased by weapon-wielding Hindi alphabets, or the hilarious one of him and his parents depicted as mythological characters from an old, melodramatic movie.
Another of my recent favourites in the school sub-genre was Shabnam Minwalla’s The Strange Haunting of Model High School. Though set in south Mumbai – with references to real-world landmarks such as Churchgate station – this book might remind you a little of Enid Blyton’s St Clare’s stories, with a supernatural twist thrown in. The characters here include a lonely girl-ghost who has been floating around the school’s corridors for over a hundred years seeking a piece of information that will put her mind at rest, a conniving deputy principal named Mrs Rangachari, and the three protagonists – BFFs named Lara, Mallika and Sunu – who set out to help the ghost even as they prepare for an inter-school production of the musical Annie.
One of the incidental themes in Minwalla’s novel – a less-privileged girl attending a posh school – is handled more directly, and a little more self-consciously, in Kate Darnton’s The Misfits, told from the perspective of an American girl named Chloe who has recently moved to Delhi with her parents. When Chloe encounters another misfit, the dark-skinned Lakshmi, who is very Indian but not of the “right class”, she gets an insight into the workings of the adult world, and gets to play savior as well. Darnton’s book is sensitive and engaging, but since it seems to have been written in part for a non-Indian readership, some of the content might feel over-expository, and just a teeny bit patronizing, to an Indian reader. (Chloe’s parents, who used to be hippies in their own youth, keep shaking their heads indignantly at the class prejudice they see around them.) Another, breezier story about an 11-year-old girl is Judy Balan’s How to Stop Your Grownup from Making Bad Decisions, written as a series of blog entries by “Nina the Philosopher”. A few dramatic things happen here (Nina and her friend Aakash blow up the school swimming pool with stolen chemicals; her single mom has a serious accident and must also be kept from getting married to a seemingly unsuitable boy), but the overall tone is that of a chatty diary entry – Nina isn’t trying to write a thriller for us, she is simply going through life and negotiating things as they happen. In the process she shows the clear-sighted wisdom one might expect in an intelligent child, but which some adults might also envy. “People who THINK all the time should have their own rooms,” she observes, making a case for introverts who need a lot of space to themselves, even when they aren’t doing anything observably important.
At one point, Nina says she feels like she is the grown-up and her mom the teenager in the house. A more literal version of this situation can be found in Andaleeb Wajid’s No Time for Goodbyes, which operates at the intersection of YA fantasy and teen romance: after glancing at a Polaroid photo, 16-year-old Tamanna finds herself back in 1982, where her future mom is a little younger than her, and where she has to pretend to be a visitor from Australia (while dodging questions such as why the Harry Potter book she has brought along has a “2000” publishing date). A nice nostalgia trip for those of us who remember the times Wajid is writing about, this is the first in a three-book series (the sequel, Back in Time, is out too), and I’d be interested in seeing how she manages to stretch out this one-note premise without getting too repetitive. One thing she does well is to invoke the pang of knowing that the person you want to be with may always remain inaccessible or out of bounds – in this case, literally belonging to another dimension. Looked at that way, notwithstanding the time-travel angle, this book is about the very universal “outsider” emotions that are also evoked in real-world narratives like Slightly Burnt and The Misfits. [Other recent posts on children's/young adult books: Manan and Ela; Tik-Tik, the Master of Time]
The Hindu Young World-Goodbooks Awards for children’s books were announced yesterday at the Lit for Life festival in Chennai. Manjula Padmanabhan, Anil Menon and I were the jury for the fiction category, and after some fun email exchanges we gave the prize to Venita Coelho’s wonderful Dead as a Dodo, a travel-adventure in which three special agents (a human, a tiger and an overenthusiastic monkey) set out to rescue the world's last surviving dodo. But I’d also strongly recommend the other books on the shortlist: Mohit Parikh’s Manan(which I wrote about here), Mathangi Subramanian’s Dear Mrs Naidu and Samit Basu’s The Adventures of Stoob: Testing Times. Plus another book I enjoyed hugely while I was reading the initial list of submissions: Shabnam Minwalla’s The Strange Haunting of Model High School.
If you haven’t watched Bejoy Nambiar’s Wazir yet and intend to, you may want to skip this column for now. (I’m not convinced a spoiler alert is really needed, but possibly I’m overestimating your deductive skills.)
At the halfway point, the title character – a goon hired by a minister to strong-arm people – makes his showy appearance. Or… he doesn’t. Because we subsequently learn that Wazir never existed: he was fabricated by master strategist Omkarnath Dhar (Amitabh Bachchan) as part of a convoluted, and very improbable, revenge plan. In the flashback that accompanied Omkarnath’s story about being attacked late at night, we saw Wazir all right (and gawped at Neil Nitin Mukesh’s scenery-chewing in the role), but now it turns out that the whole scene was a lie. Which means that in a sense, our eyes – with the movie camera as their guiding spirit – had played us false. The scene got me thinking about other such sequences – where we are shown a person who doesn’t exist, or an incident that never took place – and to what degree they might be said to have misled the viewer. After all, film is a powerful and persuasive medium; once you have seen something on a screen, it is difficult to “un-see” it.
The conundrum of the unreliable flashback, for instance, goes back a long way. In 1950, Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright earned some notoriety for a flashback scene that turned out to be a murderer’s false account. While many viewers and critics felt cheated (and Hitchcock himself conceded the point during an interview with Francois Truffaut), defenders of the film felt the device was justifiable: when a person creates a cover-up story, he internalises his own lies, and that is what the viewers were shown in this case.
The construction or framing of a scene can make a difference. In a film I otherwise enjoyed a great deal, Sujoy Ghosh’s 2012 Kahaani, I had a slight issue with the scenes where Vidya Bagchi (Vidya Balan) tells the police about her missing husband Arnab. As she relates her story, we see glimpses of them together in a happy past, but it later turns out that the man we saw in those supposed flashbacks was not her husband but her quarry. Friends have assured me that the scenes represent the images in the minds of the policemen listening to Vidya’s kahaani (she has shown them a photo of the wrong man), but I’m not convinced: the shots in question are bookended by close-ups of Vidya looking misty-eyed, which to me indicates that they are meant to be her memories. And if that is so, the film is pulling a fast one on us.
Normally, when we see a character on screen, we take his or her reality – within the given context – at face value. There are exceptions to the rule – when watching a supernatural story, for example, our scepticism meter is set high. But even in such cases it is possible to be fooled. M Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense was an overrated film in some ways, but its first viewers will never forget the shock of realizing that Bruce Willis’s Dr Malcolm was a ghost; never mind that “I see dead people” was the film’s most famous line. One of the tricks – deceits? – used here was that Malcolm always looked normal, while the other ghosts shown in the film telegraphed their spectral state from miles away, being pale or otherworldly, or still carrying their death-wounds. What about when a seemingly realistic narrative takes a sudden right turn to reveal a supernatural element? One recent example was in Reema Kagti’s Talaash (2012), a police procedural which builds to the revelation that the Kareena Kapoor character Rosie isn’t just an informer who keeps showing up to aid Inspector Surjan (Aamir Khan) – she is from another dimension altogether. The impact of this reveal depends on the viewer being kept away from the possibility that Talaash could have anything “magical” in it – the narrative structure and characterisations establish it as a grounded, real-world story, and the pre-publicity didn’t hint at anything else. Which was a clever ploy, but it also accounts for the annoyed reactions by people who felt the filmmakers had stepped outside the internal logic of their own story.
Of course, a reviewer who wants to justify a movie’s choices can always turn to the life-jacket of subtextual analysis. Thinking about the introduction scene of arch-villain “Wazir”, it struck me that Mukesh’s performance had a touch of Cheshire Cat about it (he even looks like he is suspended in mid-air at one point, a broad grin plastered on his face) – perhaps this was the film’s way of telling us we were in Wonderland, so don’t take anything at face value. Or maybe it was just poor acting and writing after all.
----------------------------- [An old post about Kahaani is here - with a long and intriguing comments discussion]
[Did a version of this review - about one of the most well-observed novels I have read in recent months - for Mint Lounge]
Reading Ratika Kapur’s new novel, I had the refrain from Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man” playing in my head: “You know something’s happening but you don’t know what it is / Do you, Mr Jones?” Or, “Mrs Sharma”. This book’s beguiling voice belongs to a 37-year-old woman who works as a receptionist for a well-heeled doctor, lives with her parents-in-law and her teenage son Bobby in one of south Delhi’s more modest crannies while her husband is away working in Dubai – and who could be on the brink of a relationship with a man whom she has met at the Hauz Khas metro station. Throughout her telling of this story, there are ambiguous moments that will make you wonder: is Renuka Sharma lying to us, or fooling herself, or being forthright in her own mysterious way? Does she know what’s going on? Do we?
Consider the passage where she tells us she decided not to go for a cricket match with her family: “I did not want to go, so I said that I was tired and had to take some rest at home.” But in the very next paragraph we learn that she went instead to meet her new friend Vineet. Stealth is involved – “since everybody was going for the match, I thought that this would be a good chance” – even though her tone is matter-of-fact and she maintains that this is a platonic relationship, nothing more (“he could have just been a Vineeta to me”). Or take the scene where Renuka, having spent a few days looking after her son who has been very ill, meets Vineet and feels she has to explain why she hadn’t been in touch. “I told him that I had been sick, and that was hardly a lie,” she says, “A child’s illness is also his mother’s.”
“Hardly a lie.” But we know that she is in no rush to reveal her marital status, and as the narrative proceeds the sophistries add up. Some words and phrases are tellingly repeated. She uses “Actually” and “Obviously” a lot, and defensive-sounding formulations like “I should say here that…” and “I don’t think that it was wrong” and “I think that what I want to say is…” In a different sort of book, this may have felt like unimaginative or careless writing. But the choices are deliberate, they are perfect for this protagonist, and for all its apparent simplicity this may be one of the most carefully constructed novels I have read in a while. It reminded me at times of Kazuo Ishiguro’s work, his sympathetic but unreliable narrators: the bereaved mother looking back on her past in A Pale View of Hills, the emotionally repressed butler in Remains of the Day, the elderly painter defending his country’s belligerent history in An Artist of the Floating World. Kapur’s book has a similar tremulousness, a sense of a life being lived on the brink, even though the tone remains outwardly composed.
But this is also a very Indian novel, if there is such a thing. Mrs Sharma shows some of the contradictions you’d expect in a person living in a churning society. She is liberal in some ways, insular in others (note her throwaway references to Muslims, who, one senses, are another species of beings who exist on the periphery of her consciousness, barely registered except as her husband’s employers or as people who fly planes into buildings). She was encouraged by her parents to study and pursue a career; her husband always listens to her advice, she tells us, “even though I am a woman”; she condemns her son for the sin of drinking alcohol, but she understands and seems to accept that “like all boys, and all men”, he looks at dirty pictures on the internet; she shows sexual frankness, even admits to touching herself once in a while. Just when you think you have her pegged, another bit of information slips in and provides new food for thought. And one of the achievements of this book for me was that despite her many vacillations, I never felt like passing judgement – so credible are her responses to her circumstances.
I could mention so many small, marvelously realised moments in this story, but one I have close to hand just now is the one where Renuka and Vineet are talking, he is giving her advice about how to handle Bobby, and she says jokingly: “You know a lot about all this. How many children are you hiding from me?” The scene works on different levels: it could be a subconscious admission of guilt because, of course, Renuka is the one who is hiding a child from Vineet (at this point she is letting him think Bobby is her brother) – but her nervous joke, where she raises the possibility of him being a married man who is leading her on, is also a pointer to her real feelings, which she hasn’t as yet made clear to us.
The Private Life of Mrs Sharma is a lovely portrait of a person caught between duties and desires, conformity and self-expression, between yearning to fly freely and being the worried house-lizard who is afraid to take an outing (“who will hold up the ceiling?”). It is a low-key book, not the sort that is likely to be hailed as one of the year’s “important” publications (I’d be glad to be wrong about this), but it opens a door to a very particular inner world, while dealing with a universal human theme: the need to pursue little moments of pleasure in the midst of a difficult, responsibility-filled existence – and dealing with the guilt that comes with that pursuit.
After a relatively placid three or four months, I have been back to spending a great deal of time on hospital duty, and generally being on call for medical emergencies. Without getting too dramatic about it, this sort of thing is physically and mentally exhausting, leads to very little work getting done, and also means that I can't make travel plans with any confidence.
Still, I have my fingers crossed that I'll be able to get away from Delhi for two or three days near the end of this month, to participate in lit-fest sessions in Jaipur and Kolkata.
On January 24, at the Jaipur Literature Festival, Rauf Ahmed and I will be speaking with Anuja Chauhan about our film books (Ahmed’s book on Shammi Kapoor is out this year). The morning after that, I’ll be at the Kolkata Literary Meet, in conversation with Sharmila Tagore - the session is called “The Babu Moshai in Bombay” and will be about Hrishikesh Mukherjee and other Bengalis who worked in the Hindi film industry between the 1950s and the 70s. Balaji Vittal is anchoring that conversation. And later that day, I will be moderating a conversation between Javed Akhtar and Zoya Akhtar. The Kolkata Literary Meet website is here, and the schedule for the Jaipur lit-fest is here. Please come across for the sessions if you're around, and spread the word to anyone else who might be interested.
Reading movie magazines as a child, it seemed to me that whenever a Hindi-film actor was asked about his or her favourite Hollywood performances – “Hollywood” being a broad term used at the time to denote any non-Indian cinema – a few names were mentioned with dull regularity. Among them was Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady. In fact, Hepburn’s Eliza Doolittle – also cherished by some of my aunts and uncles – was so iconic, it came as a shock when I learnt that though the film had swept the 1964 Oscars, she wasn’t even nominated for best actress. (In the pre-internet era, it also took some doing for my nerdish teen self to convince adults of this.) Various reasons have been suggested for this omission – one being that Audrey was too sweet and refined, too much a lady, even in the early scenes where Eliza is meant to be rough-hewn; another being that there was resentment in some quarters about her having been cast in a part that Julie Andrews had made her own on stage. But the most widely accepted explanation is one that can be gobsmacking for a Hindi-movie viewer: Hepburn’s performance was deemed “incomplete” by the voters because her singing voice had been dubbed by Marni Nixon.
Can you imagine such standards being applied to Hindi-film performances? Playback singing is something we take for granted, and many of our stars are remembered by the musical numbers pictured on them but sung by someone else. (Note the repeated references to the song “Lag Jaa Gale” in last week’s obituaries for our own Audrey-like fashion icon, Sadhana.) Out here, on the rare occasions when actors with no professional musical training sing for themselves, it becomes an event – or seems like sly commentary, as in “Kayda Kayda”, sung by Rekha in the 1980 Khubsoorat. This song about breaking the rules is set in a fantasy world where fish fly in the sky and laddoos grow on trees; the sort of world, one might add, where a Hindi-film star can sing in her own voice!
When I was growing up, the quintessential Amitabh Bachchan singing voice was represented for me by songs like the beautiful “O Saathi Re” and the rambunctious “Khaike Paan Banaraswala” (sequences that also featured some of Amitabh’s best performances) even though I knew that the voice was Kishore Kumar’s. That made no difference – in fact, it suited the inner logic of mainstream Hindi cinema, where songs led us into a new, hyper-emotional plane. And I remember how strange it felt to experience Bachchan’s own singing voice for the first time in Mr Natwarlal’s “Mere Paas Aao”. Even if you accounted for the song’s gentle, lullaby-like quality, the vocals seemed a register lower than Amitabh’s baritone in the dialogue scenes; strange though it might sound, Kishore Kumar, Yesudas, and in later years, Sudesh Bhonsle, seemed to capture the “Bachchan voice” in song better than the actor himself did.
But “Mere Paas Aao” also had the effect of making the Angry Young Man seem more vulnerable, as if a new side of him had been opened up to us. And this is still the case when one of our top stars makes a bold leap into playback singing. (It’s another matter that current technology makes it possible for an amateur singer to sound better than he is.) When Salman Khan, so often mired in controversy for his off-screen adventures, sang the title song for Hero, the widely watched music video emphasized his reflective, down-to-earth side. Here was sensitive, bespectacled Salman, confined to the recording studio, far removed from the world of sleeping pavement-dwellers and black bucks, in touch with his finer emotions simply by virtue of being a singer. The video had obvious merits as a public-relations exercise.
Pushing an otherwise confident, well-known actor outside his comfort zone can also add layers to a film’s narrative. One of my favourite examples is from the 1957 Musafir – Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s first film as director – where Dilip Kumar sang in his own voice. The scene in question is a wistful, underplayed one where Kumar’s character Raja and his former lover Uma (Usha Kiran) recall the old days and then turn to a shared memory of a song. They exchange glances and he begins tentatively singing “Laagi Nahin Chhoote Rama” – then the camera pans to Uma, who doesn’t sing but remembers herself singing in the distant past, which is the cue for Lata Mangeshkar’s voice to join in.
So here is what is going on in this scene: on the one hand, Kumar’s untrained voice brings verisimilitude to the present-day moment; on the other hand, Lata’s assured, melodious voice transcends this present moment and give us a glimpse of an impossible, romanticized past when Uma and Raja were something close to the typical Hindi-movie hero and heroine, looking forward to “janam-janam ka saath”. It’s a lovely demonstration of two states of mind co-existing in the same frame.