A response to the Spectator article about Pen Farthing's animals

This is a limited, very personal part-response to this Spectator piece expressing anguish about the evacuation of Pen Farthing’s animals from Afghanistan, and calling it a “moral abomination”. (I wrote a bit about Farthing's books here.) As often happens in these cases I’m caught between feeling sympathy for the basic concerns expressed in the piece while also being aghast at how the whole thing is founded on the comfortable certitude that animals are innately less important than humans; that they can’t be sentient in the way that we are; that we don’t have a huge responsibility towards them, especially during catastrophes manufactured by our species.

I’m cynical enough to know that this is a pointless exercise (apart from helping me articulate some of my feelings), that nothing I say here will make a whit of a difference to anyone who hasn't had the firsthand experience of seeing how “human” — or more than “human” — an animal can be. But here goes anyway, picking on a few specific things.

About this:
“…a perfect example of esoteric domestic western priorities being put ahead of the people we were supposedly there to help, the sort of behaviour that dooms our efforts overseas and alienates the rest of the world.”

“Esoteric domestic western priorities”? Recognising that non-human animals are capable of the same degrees of suffering that humans are, that they can have comparable emotional lives — and that in a world chockful of human-constructed disasters and conflicts, we might have as big a responsibility to living, feeling creatures that have been domesticated and made dependent on us as we do to our own species: that’s an “esoteric priority”? Politely, no. And it shouldn't be.

I also find the conflating of this with “Western/First World” — and the implication that this is all about privileged/bored people and their prioritising of “cute puppies” over suffering humans — very condescending and strange. Especially since I am involved with “esoteric” pursuits every day in the context of street dogs and the conversations/arguments around them in India; conversations that most “developed” Western countries wouldn’t even be having since they have zero tolerance for such animals.

About this:
“Consider that many Muslims consider dogs to be impure. Now imagine how it must look for us to airlift them out ahead of our human allies.”

IF that first sentence is true in some sweeping, general sense, maybe the problem lies with the people who hold the view. In an ideal world (definitely not in this one), it might be amended at some point with the aid of some education, including emotional education. (Though plenty of non-Muslim anthropocentric “liberals” are in need of this emotional education too, as one can tell from the worthies who have been endorsing the Spectator article.)

If I were to make a statement like “My belief system considers Muslims to be impure” or “…women to be impure” or “…Dalits to be impure” (or insert whatever other human group you like), I would understandably be cancelled for all time (at least by the members of any circles I might want to belong to). But when faced with the possibility that a culture or religion considers *dogs* to be impure or beneath contempt (and the horrible consequences of this in countries like Afghanistan have been well-chronicled), we are expected to be mindful of it (or completely kowtow to it) in the interests of tolerance or cultural sensitivity. Or, well, realpolitik. The piece certainly carries the implication that we should respectfully tiptoe around such “beliefs”. 

(Amusingly, that paragraph begins with the line “Even setting morality to one side…” and in my view that’s what the writer ends up doing by the end of the para — though he almost certainly didn’t intend it to be read that way.)

About this:
“…as one interpreter asked me a few days ago, why is my five-year-old worth less than your dog… I didn’t have an answer. What would your answer be?”

Not that anyone asked me, but my answer would be: not worth less, worth *the same* as my dog-child. (Privately I have always felt that my maternal love for Foxie and later for Lara has been deeper and more involved than the love that many fathers of human children — mine included — feel for their offspring; but that kind of judgement has no place in a piece like this.) What we have in Afghanistan — and in many other places at various times in history — is a horrible situation where it’s a given that some people (through a combination of influence, position, circumstance, contacts and of course sheer luck) will get away relatively unscathed while others won’t. Let’s hypothesise that non-human animals weren’t part of this equation at all — that only humans were involved at every level. In that case, we would STILL have multiple situations where the parent of one five-year-old human child would be able to ask the parent of another five-year-old human child: “Why is your child worth more than mine?” There's something — I'll just use the word "mischievous" while I think of a better word — about framing the question in the particular way that Ashworth-Hayes does in his piece.

Without going on nitpicking about other things in the piece, here’s a bit that caught my eye as I was skimming over it again:
“I don’t particularly blame Pen. I’d probably want to get my pets out of a warzone too.”

“Probably”. That tells me everything I need to know about Sam Ashworth-Hayes’s understanding of what a human-animal relationship can be. I hope he doesn’t actually have any pets of his own, or that if he does have any — as status symbols or house decor or whatever — they are being looked after by someone who is better equipped to do it. Anyway, it’s obvious that the Spectator piece and the approving conversations around it are for people who have never been able to see the worth and individuality of animals (outside of their usefulness on a plate).

P.S. one last thing — I actually agree with the first sentence of the Spectator piece. There are no genuinely meaningful "feel-good" stories from Afghanistan at the moment; in the sense that every such tale of rescue is offset by a dozen other tragedies (for all sorts of creatures). Even we tunnel-visioned animal-rights activists know that.

My old Ladybird books (and a magic stone soup, or a story about stories)

From the nostalgia pages: these are a few of the dozens of Ladybird books I have – among the earliest books in my life. By the time I was four I could manage “Reading Level 5”, though many of the cultural references or colloquialisms were well beyond my grasp – sometimes I got a vague sense of what certain things were intended to be (“gingerbread man”, “billy goats gruff”) without fully understanding or relating to them. (A couple of years later, this would happen again when I read about the “scones”, “eclairs” or “potted meat” consumed by the Famous Five at their picnics.) 

 

A few days ago I took out these Ladybirds and, flipping through them, found that I vividly recalled many of the images and even some of the specific phrases and conversations – though I was seeing them for the first time in nearly 40 years. How strange the human mind is, especially our dormant/long-term memory. 

 

 

 

Some of the pictures here: the creepy (pre-internet) troll coming out from under his bridge to terrify passing goats; the building of the cosy winter’s cave in Swiss Family Robinson (an image I always loved for the sense of warmth and security it provided to go with the family’s adventures); the enormous stack of mattresses on which a young woman is required to sleep to prove she is a “real princess” because she is delicate enough to be bruised by the pea far below (not the most politically correct of stories, of course, and it strikes me now that around the time I read this book Princess Di was being expected to undergo a virginity test before her wedding to Charles – in that weird faraway land we call the Real World).

 

 

 

I remember the swell of pride when I learnt the meanings of words like “apprentice” (from The Sorcerer’s Apprentice) or “cauldron” or “tapestries” or “parsley”, or learnt how to pronounce complicated names like Rumpelstiltskin. Looking again at the drawings in the Rapunzel book, I remember wondering if her hair really was longer than my mother’s.

 

And then there is The Magic Stone, a story I was fascinated by at the time, and which (unlike most of the other titles here) has never been very far from my mind. Perhaps because I think of it as a fable about the nature of storytelling. Here is what happens: a tramp seeks shelter for the night in an old woman’s house. She claims she is poor and has no food for him, but he sees that she has a well-tended garden and a well-stocked kitchen. He offers to make them a delicious magic soup with just a pot of boiling water and a single stone taken from her garden. As he stirs the “soup”, he tastes it, pronounces it excellent but casually adds that it would be even better with a bit of onion – then a pinch of salt, then some turnips, and so on; the woman, increasingly excited by this display, rushes off to get those things as he mentions them. Until what they have is a full-fledged broth made up of delicious ingredients from her garden and kitchen. (Plus one stone, essential and redundant at the same time.)

 

I loved the way this story, though repetitive or circular in its structure, grew and grew, like the soup itself; an ingredient here, a layer there. And how the illustrations too became more colourful and elaborate as the “menu” expanded from a single round stone to the full table “fit for a king” that the old woman sets out in gratitude. I was a year or two away from my encounters with Indian mythology – including the tales from the Mahabharata and the Puranas that have grown and shape-shifted through oral retellings over the centuries – but I think the fable of the stone soup gave me an early insight (even if I couldn’t have articulated it back then) into how a story may be constructed over time so that it is constantly a work in progress, never “final”. And how, even when a story *does* have a clear ending, an enthusiastic reader is free to keep taking it in new directions.

"No one perceived the beauty with which my heart had become acquainted" - on Mahadevi Varma and her non-human family

(It's been a while since I did a longish review-essay for Scroll, but I was very taken by this translation of Mahadevi Varma’s 1972 book Mera Parivar – a collection of pieces which suggest that her growing attentiveness to the world of animals and birds was central to her development as a writer. Here’s the piece)

Reading the lovely new book My Family – a collection of short pieces by the celebrated Hindi poet Mahadevi Varma about the animals and birds in her life, originally published as Mera Parivar in 1972 – two early passages leapt out at me. Taken together, they are indictments of how often and how easily the bond between humans and non-humans is underestimated or glossed over.

The first is from the introductory note by the translator, writer-academic Ruth Vanita. Some of Mahadevi’s biographers and critics, Vanita tells us, barely acknowledged Mera Parivar in their studies of her life and work. Even as they tried to understand Mahadevi through her other writings, or offered psychological profiles of her as a repressed or unfulfilled woman “longing for companionship” (presumably because she remained unmarried and lived in a hermitage-like environment for most of her life), they didn’t attach much importance to her relationships with non-human creatures.

And yet here is Mahadevi Varma herself, in her “Atmika” (preface), describing – with intensity and precision – a life-changing moment she had as a child, when she rescued a little chick that was destined to be cooked for dinner. She writes of her initial inability to understand why the chick had been taken away, the anguished helplessness she felt when she realised its intended fate and thought it was too late to save it. (I was reminded of Patricia Highsmith’s “The Terrapin” – one of many great stories about the innate concern that many children feel for other life forms – about an animal that couldn’t be saved from a cooking pot, and how a little boy is scarred as a result.) Most tellingly, Mahadevi explains how this incident led her to note down identifying marks for the animals and birds she knew and cared about. It’s as if she felt a moral duty to imprint their distinct features and personalities on her mind’s eye. “I had no other way to prove that I was their protector.”

Here, then, are the building blocks of a writing life: learning to observe, record and articulate. As Vanita puts it in her Introduction, “Mahadevi’s acclaimed portraits of humans, whether villagers, vendors, domestic workers or fellow writers, develop from her first recording of a non-human fellow being’s individuality.”

Despite Mahadevi’s immense stature in twentieth-century Hindi literature, and despite the importance that she herself attached to her inter-species relationships, this translation marks the first time that Mera Parivar is available in English – another reminder of its neglect. And a travesty, because every page of My Family is evidence of the centrality of the animal world not just to her daily life but to her artistic development.

*****

A cliché goes that art expresses the human condition, that the best of it is rooted in humanism, broadly defined as the transcending of the many divides, the many forms of “othering”, that cause conflict in the human world – class, gender, religion, race, caste. What doesn’t get acknowledged enough in these conversations is that such prejudice and discrimination can be extended to our collective treatment of other species; empathy for “others” can equally apply – both in the interests of our humanity and in the broader interests of the ecology and environment – to the non-human world.

Creative people have addressed this in many ways – such as through the anthropomorphising of animals in literature, painting and other arts. One can understand and respect this approach while also recognising its limitations. When done well, in children’s literature for instance, it can help in the early sensitising of children to the possible inner lives of other species; but there are pitfalls attached, such as a child’s disappointment when a real-world animal turns out not to be “smart” or “entertaining” in the way that we humans define those concepts.

Either way, one can keep looking closely at animals, noting the markers of sentience and personality (things that usually leap out at you once you make an honest and concentrated effort), recognising the ways in which their behaviours can be similar to ours in some ways and very different in others. Forming relationships with them. This is something Mahadevi began doing early in her childhood, but it also became a lifelong endeavour, each new experience embellishing and adding new meaning to the ones that had come before it.

There are only seven chapters in the main body of My Family, each a pen-portrait of a specific animal or bird (except for the last chapter, which is about three creatures who played an important role in the author’s formative years). Once you have finished reading the book, you might well feel that Mahadevi could have easily written another dozen such pieces about her non-human companions. And yet, what is contained in these page is a universe of detail and observation, in fluid prose that is full of humour and warmth.

Here is a peacock named Neelkanth picking up baby rabbits by one ear with his beak (“He would often sit down in the dust with his wings spread out, and they all would play catch-as-catch-can in his long tail and thick wings”) while also being hassled by the competing affections of the peahens Radha and Kubja. And here is the baby mongoose Nikki of Mahadevi’s childhood, described as “an anarchist like us” – much like little Mahadevi and her siblings, Nikki had sneaked away from his parents in the afternoon to seek new adventures. (When Mahadevi’s mother orders her to return him to his parents’ burrow, she feels deep sympathy for the little creature. “If our father were to make us sit in front of him in a small room night and day and keep teaching us, while our mother sat nearby stitching and knitting, how would we feel?”)

There are clear-eyed, unsentimental views of the random violence inherent in the natural world: a cat finding its way into a burrow and tearing to pieces a family of rabbits; a much-loved Himalayan dog being killed by a hyena while out running errands for villagers; the cruelty of a cow being fed a needle by an envious milkman; a bad-tempered rabbit named Durmukh showing a version of toxic masculinity by attacking his own wife and children. And there are poignant descriptions of more natural deaths, such as that of the squirrel Gillu who holds on to Mahadevi’s hands on the last night of his life.

Amidst the conflict, there is beauty and tenderness. A dog named Neelu gently holds fledglings in his mouth until they are brought to safety. The peacock may be a “martial vehicle” – the steed of the war-loving god Karthikeya – but he is also, through his dancing, a practitioner of art and grace. In one of the philosophical asides scattered through the book, Mahadevi contemplates that if humans communicated only with their eyes, many arguments would come to a quick end. “Perhaps it is because of this that one’s spirit, wounded by human voices attacking one another and by the burden of meaningful words, longs to be healed and consoled by the sandal paste of these wordless beings’ fluid, affectionate gaze.” Of the languorous movements of a cow named Gaura, she writes, “There is beauty in speed, but not as much beauty as in a slow pace. The speed of an arrow can dazzle the eyes for a moment, but a flower’s slow, circular movement in a gentle breeze is a feast for the eyes.”

Here and elsewhere, it is easy to see what she means when she says that “all my memoirs have sprouted, budded and bloomed from this childhood prose expression”. The elegance of Vanita’s translation notwithstanding, many passages made me yearn to read the Hindi original. (A description of the lustrously white Gaura with her red calf – evoking snow and fire – was originally, as Vanita tells us: “Mata-putra donon nikat rehne par himrashi aur jalte angaarey ka smaran karate thay.”)

****

As someone who has developed a close interest in other life-forms while living in a harsher, less animal-friendly urban environment than Mahadevi did, reading My Family was a source of both envy and fascination for me. My limited interactions with animals in recent years, though centred on a confounding variety of street dogs, has occasionally extended to monkeys, peahens, crows and squirrels. (And rats, which can be very personable creatures. When I take a freshly trapped rat to a nearby park and let it out, I now look for the particular way in which it leaps out of the opened trap, whether it scuttles off in a blind panic without trying to take stock of its new environment, or whether it pauses for a bit, looks around contemplatively – there I go “anthropomorphising” – and then picks the wisest exit strategy.) Mahadevi’s pieces felt like motivation to observe even more closely, within the constraints of my environment.

Reading this book, I was also reminded of the title of a 2008 essay by Vandana Singh, “The Creatures We Don’t See: Thoughts on the Animal Other.” Singh writes:

“It seemed as though humans were so intensely obsessed with their own concerns that they didn’t ‘see’ other life-forms, let alone recognize their significance […] Just as being blind to the oppression of women creates conditions where this oppression continues unchecked, being unable to ‘see’ other creatures allows us to go about blindly and stupidly destroying the ecosystems on which we depend...To not recognise the connection between us and other species is to suffer from a sort of mass autism.”

In this light it is telling that many of Mahadevi’s biographers and critics failed to “see” the creatures she wrote about, or the attentiveness with which she wrote about them.

As Ruth Vanita notes in her introduction, these pieces record a kind of Indian urban modernity that encompasses ways of interacting with nature that are now gradually disappearing. It’s too much to hope for a meaningful return to that idyllic world (I certainly wouldn’t be optimistic about it, given my daily encounters with “respected” members of my neighbourhood who seem to view most animals and birds as pests that should be removed from their sight), but a book like this is a reminder of what such a world could look like, and how much we have lost on the road to “development”. It is also a nourishing look – as valuable as a good autobiography – into the mind of an important writer who came to view all life as part of a single shared consciousness.

[My earlier Scroll pieces are here. And a related post: wolves, humans, colony dogs] 

UPDATE: Just adding a clarification. Mahadevi Varma *was* married as per tradition at the age of nine, but at the time of her gauna after college she refused to go to her husband's house. Her open-minded father, remorseful, offered to convert with her if she wished to get divorced and remarry (Hindus in their community were not allowed to divorce), but she refused this, saying she had no intention of remarrying. For this reason she remained technically married, but as Ruth Vanita implies in her Introduction, she never thought of herself as married and didn't conduct her life along such lines. It was in this poetic sense that I referred to her as "unmarried" in the piece (which was also mentioned only in the context that some biographers/critics made sweeping psychological evaluations of her based on this).

Thanks to Annie Zaidi for pointing out that this needed to be clarified...

Helen on the rocks (and other "frozen" women)

[a version of my column for the Sunday Economic Times -- this one about how a gripping Malayalam film subverts the "fridging" theme]  

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When is a woman in a refrigerator more than just a woman in a refrigerator? The answer can vary with your perspective or interpretation – but the reference, in case you’re wondering, is to a term coined by the comic-book writer Gail Simone. Also known as “fridging”, it describes a certain trope in literature and film: an imperilled, murdered or generally non-functional woman character becomes the pretext for the emotional development (or the plot-furthering emotional devastation) of a man.

In many of these cases, a token effort is made to create empathy for the victim, but she’s basically a cipher for plot purposes, and it’s all about the fellow’s journey. (Comatose or dead women are particularly useful; they can’t even complain that a man is man-spreading his way across the narrative.) Formulaic vigilante-revenge films use this frozen woman, and so do more nuanced stories. A recent example I saw was a scene in season one of The Crown: old Winston Churchill has a personal epiphany – leading to a shift in prime-ministerial policy – during the Great Smog of 1952 as he regards the fate of his secretary Venetia (a character created and killed off specifically for the show).

Venetia’s body is laid out on ice in the morgue in that scene, but fridging doesn’t have to involve an actual fridge or ice slab. Even a film like October, written with sensitivity and attention to detail by a woman (Juhi Chaturvedi), can fit the theme for those who like to use such lenses in their assessments: after all, the story is about a young woman (whom we might initially have expected to be the film’s “heroine”) having a terrible accident within the first 15 minutes, and a young man coming of age and gaining in sensitivity and experience because he feels somehow responsible for her in her vegetative state.

Which is to say that one can argue endlessly about what constitutes fridging, whether it fits a particular case, whether it is done well (following a story’s internal logic) or cynically – and whether it should even be required for a victim, woman or man, to have any “agency” in such a narrative, given that this is often not the case in real life. (Or in far-away galaxies: remember Han Solo frozen in carbonite at the end of the second Star Wars film, his mouth open as if someone yelled “Statue!” when he was mid-wisecrack?)

But one of the sharpest takes on fridging that I have seen is in the 2019 film Helen. This is among many recent Malayalam films that do intriguing things with their narrative arcs: just when you think the film is about to settle into a predictable (if engrossing) story “type”, the screenplay takes an unnerving right turn, a new character or complication is introduced – and somehow, all this is pulled off without altering the film’s basic grounded tone.

These shifts in arc make it hard to discuss such films in spoiler-free terms, but I’ll try. For reasons you’ll understand when you watch Helen, the protagonist (played by the very likable Anna Ben), a Christian with a Muslim boyfriend, ends up as a refrigerated woman around 45 minutes into the story. Alive, more or less functional, but in big trouble. What happens to Helen can be viewed in symbolic terms: thanks to a run-in with police a day earlier when she was with her boyfriend Azhar, she is already in a tight spot, feeling trapped and helpless; her father is giving her the cold shoulder (or putting the freeze on her).

But what happens is also presented in realistic terms, with a plausible build-up – one that involves our familiarity with the nature of Helen’s work, the equations between her colleagues, the workplace routine. The circumstances of her life both facilitate the incident and hinder attempts to rescue her. (A callous policeman goes out of his way to delay the investigation because he disapproves of a young woman associating with a boy from another community and keeping late hours at work.)

However, Helen turns out to be the antithesis of the fridged woman as defined by Gail Simone. Though a number of men, including her despairing father and boyfriend, are out looking for her – all primed to become male saviours – she gets the most screen time and her survival is as much a matter of her own resourcefulness, her ability to draw on past experience, to stay in the moment and think things through. And personality: at one point crucial help comes from an anonymous man who remembered her because she was friendly to him.

The result is both a slice-of-life story about regular people and an unusual, nail-biting survival thriller. It’s also a rare example – at a time when too many films wear their social consciousness or political correctness on their sleeve – of a movie that subverts an old motif without coming across as laboured in its progressiveness. It makes one want to tell the more overtly “woke” filmmakers to take a chill-pill, or at least to sit in an icebox for a bit. 

[Last month's Economic Times column -- about Haseen Dillruba -- is here]

The "30 years ago" series: my Guinness Encyclopaedia

This big fat single-volume encyclopaedia was one of the most exciting things that happened to me in the summer of 1991. If it looks new for a book that has been collecting dust in a corner of my room for decades, here’s one reason: last week, for the first time, I removed the thin plastic jacket that had been wrapped around the book (with scotch-tape!) to prevent it from early wear and tear. (I don’t remember now if this is how the book was delivered to us, or if it’s something my mother did after it arrived – we middle-class soft-socialists routinely did such things to car seats and even sofa covers.) When the cover was off, along with the dirt trapped in it, the encyclopaedia was bright and shiny apart from a rip or a scratch here and there.

I don’t remember where we first saw an ad for it, but I know it was ordered (by “demand draft”, courtesy a visit to the Malviya Nagar post-office) sometime in early 91, and I had to wait many weeks before it was delivered – on April 30, my diary tells me. Other things I was doing that week included: watching a videocassette of Ajooba for a second time and feeling rueful that the film had been confirmed a “flop” (I wrote about this a few months ago); watching Afsana Pyaar Ka with its lilting “Tip Tip Tip Tip Baarish” song (in later years I keep confusing this film in my head with the Aamir-Madhuri-starrer Deewana Mujhsa Nahin); buying and obsessively listening to the audio-cassettes of soon-to-be-released films like Lekin and Saajan; continuing my discovery of writers like PG Wodehouse and Saki and Somerset Maugham; nurturing my recent interest in serial-killer literature, especially Jack the Ripper (and being very scared by the miniseries starring Michael Caine and the London fog); fretting about class tests and diligently listing the marks of at least 15 of my classmates whenever the results of any test, however minor, came out.

All of that faded into the background for a while when the Guinness Encyclopaedia arrived. I returned one afternoon from school to find it on my bed, and spent most of the rest of that day greedily flipping through it, marveling at the vividness of the photos and illustrations, the quality of the paper, the sheer size and breadth of the thing. (It was unquestionably the most expensive book that had ever been bought for me, priced close to 2000 rupees if I remember right.)

“The Guinness Encyclopaedia is a completely new kind of single-volume encyclopaedia,” began the introductory note by the editor, Ian Crofton. While other single-volume encyclopaedias were arranged as A to Z listings, “useful for looking up a quick reference or checking a fact, but unable to present the reader with a complete overview of a subject”, this one was divided into 12 main sections – the physical sciences, animals and plants, history, the visual arts, and so on, with each section then sub-divided into a series of indepth articles on key topics. "It does not just list facts – it explains them, and puts them in context." I remember being very impressed by this claim, and by the large, elegantly laid out Contents page that confirmed it.

Some of the inside pages you see here are among the ones I returned to very often. When I opened the book recently – for the first time in years – the very sight of these pages (just the arrangement of the photos, the familiarity of the captions, a memory of seeing an action image of John Wayne in Stagecoach, long before I had watched the film) was a Proustian trigger. (Inevitably, since my Old Hollywood obsession began in earnest around the same time that the encyclopaedia arrived, I spent a lot of time looking at the film pages – not that there were many of them. A couple of the other, more prosaic-looking encyclopaedias I bought around the same time – the A-to-Z ones, like the Hutchinson Encyclopaedia – served the important function of telling me about the birth dates and years of the film personalities I was interested in.)

I don’t think my fascination with the book lasted more than a few months – and I never read a whole section of it from beginning to end (it was more about browsing through it a lot, and revisiting specific pages or sections) – but it had pride of place in the house for the longest time. It had a specific spot on a small table, and was never left lying around like the Wodehouses or Maughams or magazines or Archie comics. While other books could be reached for while lolling on the bed, picking up the Guinness and carrying it to a table to pore over it was a full-blown ritual; the size and weight ensured that. I had no idea back then what a coffee-table book was (and I’m sure we didn’t have any others in the house), but the Encyclopaedia was treated with the same care and respect that a very expensive coffee-table publication would be. I’m not sure it would make any sense to put it on a list of “My Favourite Books”, but it was certainly one of the most special.

Ten years later, when I left my first job at Encyclopaedia Britannica, a parting gift was the 32-volume set of the EB. Highly valued as that set is (both as a prestige possession and as an oversized memento of my time at Britannica), it was relegated first to a steel cupboard and later to a box-bed, and has stayed out of view for months at a time. But the Guinness Encyclopaedia remained in my room long after I had ceased reading it, usually in plain sight, as one of those things that can help raise a small table to a desired height, or as something to keep my laptop on. (Try doing that with Wikipedia.)

[Earlier 1991 posts: two murders; Ajooba; my movie guide]

A discussion about Satya with Uday Bhatia (plus a bit on Jaane bhi do Yaaro)

My friend Uday Bhatia has written an excellent book about the making of Ram Gopal Varma's 1998 Satya, a film that opened new gateways for Hindi cinema and had a crew of people who would play a big part in the subsequent development of the "indie" or multiplex-era movie. With the book available for pre-order now (link here), I thought it would be interesting to have a conversation with Uday about the film, how it came together, and the larger context of the Bombay gangster movie (or the gangster genre more generally).

When I was exchanging emails with Uday during the writing of his book in the last few years, we were struck by the little similarities with the making of Jaane bhi do Yaaro, another cult film -- and a "Bombay noir" -- which I had written a book about a decade earlier. So we thought we'd weave a bit of that into the discussion as well (though the focus will remain on Satya).

 

This online conversation will be on Saturday, August 14 at 7.30 pm India time -- it is open to all, and participants can ask Uday questions about the book. Please try to make it. The Zoom link is below:

Topic: Talking Satya with Uday Bhatia
Time: Aug 14, 2021 07:30 PM Mumbai, Kolkata, New Delhi

Click here.

Meeting ID: 820 9295 0096
Passcode: 336705