Girl, cocaine, maida – thoughts on Good Luck Jerry

(Reviewed this pleasant but messy new film – now on Hotstar – for Money Control)
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You know those musical sequences that accompany the closing credits in Hindi films now? The ones where the actors go from performing a song straight to breaking character, so that you can’t tell if this is a promotional spot or a collection of goofy outtakes or an elaborate home video made for future generations of the crew’s family. I usually tune out of those scenes quite fast, but with the new film Good Luck Jerry – a comedy-thriller about a young Bihari woman who works for Punjabi drug dealers to raise the money for her mother’s medical treatment – I watched the closing-credits sequence all the way through.

The song is called “Snake Bite”, wherein Janhvi Kapoor and Deepak Dobriyal strike hip-hop poses while animated neon designs – serpent tongues, hearts, bat-wings, a Jughead Jones hat – bedeck them now and again. The scene has only a very tenuous connection with the film that preceded it, but this seemingly mismatched duo is having fun: Dobriyal is always good to watch (we see so little of him anyway these days) and Janhvi made a few naagin gestures that reminded me of her mom, and it’s all nice and goofy in a good way. It made me wish there had been more of this particular brand of zaniness in Good Luck Jerry.

What there is – in a story adapted from the Tamil film Kolamaavu Kokila, and transposed to a still-very-much-udta Punjab where one can now apparently find drug-runners under every rock – isn’t bad. It would be difficult to make a poor film anyway when you have performers like Dobriyal and Mita Vashisht in important supporting roles, an appealing enough Kapoor in the lead, a colourful cast of characters, a quick-paced plot, and Raj Shekhar lyrics that smoothly incorporate words like “paracetamol” and lines like “Beauty beauty beauty beautiful tu / Tootte sitaaron waali dhool tu” in describing this small-town milieu and the state of mind of the aspirational characters in it.

Jerry (Kapoor) is working in a massage parlour as the film opens, to the disapproval of her mother Sarbati (Vashisht) who makes and sells vegetarian momos for a living (“Darjeeling ke hain, bana Bihari rahe hain aur pel Punjabi rahe hain”). Worse is to come for the family, though, when Sarbati is diagnosed with lung cancer – curable, but the treatment will cost over Rs 20 lakh. After Jerry and her younger sister Cherry (Samta Sudiksha) inadvertently have a run-in with cocaine dealers, Jerry discovers that transporting the maal can be very lucrative business, and thus begin her adventures with various oddballs, from the smitten Timmy (Jaswant Singh Dalal) and his gang to the distributor Malik (Saurabh Sachdeva) who trades not just in drugs but also in fish metaphors (and even places Jerry’s cellphone in an aquarium to ensure that no one eavesdrops on them).

Meanwhile, each of the women has a swain in waiting: an elderly neighbour has a soft spot for the widowed Sarbati, a young man perpetually dressed as a groom wants to marry Cherry, and of course there is the nominal “hero”, the swaggering roadside Rinku (Dobriyal, with a wider palette of colours in his hair than Janhvi has in her clothes). But part of the film’s purpose is that these male characters – who might have been protectors in another sort of narrative – are destined to remain side-kicks and more often than not turned into comic figures, while the women are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves. This motif will reach its logical conclusion in a promising but overlong scene where a lecherous villain, a possible sexual threat to Jerry and her family, is efficiently dealt with by them (while the three suitors wail away outside as they imagine what might be happening).

Good Luck Jerry has a few enjoyable moments, especially the ones involving a limited number of characters: the family scenes between Jerry and her mother and sister (after her cancer diagnosis, the pragmatic Sarbati gets all made up for a photo-taking session for the picture to be used after her impending death; may as well do it now, she says, while my face is still healthy). Or the ones where the over-confident Rinku keeps misunderstanding everything and coming up with the explanations that suit him best (“Oh, she doesn’t want me to drive the van because she wants me to sit with her”)… until the tables are turned on him and he realises that “his” girl has been leading a more adventurous life than he could imagine.

But there are a few too many supporting characters trying too hard to be eccentric in their different ways, and things inevitably get diluted as people randomly pull out guns and wave them around (an elderly drug-dealer named Daddu is treated as important by the script, but he did nothing for me). The film also has a tonal problem: on the one hand, it seems to want to be an out-and-out black comedy with cartoonish undertones in the vein of a Delhi Belly (also a story about innocents caught up with unsavoury types), but on the other hand the mother-child-cancer story can’t avoid making a few detours into sentimentality.

Hindi cinema has set a low bar for itself in recent times, and a moderately entertaining, sincerely made film like this one probably deserves some respect. But Good Luck Jerry is too often inert, and weighed down by the conflicting tones and the busy-ness of its plot, much like the bed filled with dozens of little bags that Jerry has to transport around in one sequence – a few containing the promised stimulants, others just salt or powdered sugar or maida. 

(My other Money Control pieces are here)

The brusque writer and his polite creation: thoughts on RK/RKay

(Did this review of a strange and compelling new film for Money Control)
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The first shot of Rajat Kapoor’s new film gives us a dimly lit corridor (in a run-down hotel, perhaps?) with glimpses of a man and his clones entering and exiting doors until the screen is busy with RKs moving back and forth, each oblivious to the others. Watching the scene, I was reminded of images from the Coen Brothers’ Barton Fink, set largely in a purgatory-like hotel where a playwright settles down to try and find his writing muse.

This seemed a random link at first, a visual coincidence, but as RK/RKay continued it felt a little more like a deliberate homage. Much like the beleaguered Barton, who learns that “the life of the mind” can be fraught with disillusionment and peril, writer-director RK (played by Kapoor) is a tortured artist struggling with the creative process – with his inner demons and insecurities (that opening shot may well depict the dusty nooks and crannies in the maze of his mind) as well as the problem of being surrounded by plebeians who (in his view) don’t understand him.

Consider RK’s lowbrow producer Goyal (Manu Rishi). In a particularly funny scene, RK is screening his almost-completed film Mera Naseeb – a strange period concoction set in the indeterminate past, probably the 1950s, complete with a heroine named Gulaabo (Mallika Sherawat) and a villain named KN Singh (Ranvir Shorey). “Picture Urdu mein banaayi hai?” Goyal says, looking unimpressed as he hears the ornate-sounding dialogue for apparently the first time (surely it’s too late for a producer to have such an epiphany!) – then he mutters something about such a film being “difficult” for the “common man”. Another assistant chimes in by telling RK “This film is not as third-class as your last film”, and follows this breath-taking proclamation with “Keep the faith.”

As if all this weren’t deflating enough, RK’s insecurities seem to take a tangible form when Mehboob, the lead character in Mera Naseeb, escapes the movie and emerges into the real world. Since Mehboob is played by RK himself, what we now have is a doppelganger tale with two Rajat Kapoors trying to make sense of each other’s existence and personalities: one is courtly and old-world and speaks in elegant Urdu (and makes superb biryani at short notice), while the other is impatient, curt and understandably frustrated by this turn of events.

The interplay between the writer-director and his fugitive creation is revealing. The fictitious-now-real Mehboob has a habit of starting sentences with “Mere Abba kahaa karte thay…”, whereupon the exasperated RK begins grilling his character: “What IS the name of this Abba whom you keep quoting,” he asks Mehboob. “And what did your Ammi look like? Do you remember?” The answer is no, of course, because Mehboob only has the information he is required to have for the purposes of the film; he is a blank slate otherwise. But this exchange also finds its counterpoint in a later scene where Mehboob gets back at his creator with an equivalent of the question “What about you? Who is writing your script?”

A crisis involving a double, the slow blurring of identities through role-play, the fickleness of memory, the illusory nature of the self… these themes were also at the heart of Kapoor’s 2008 Mithya, which still needs to be rediscovered as one of the best Hindi films of its time. At least one scene in RK/RKay – where Mehboob, persuaded to go back to the world he emerged from, realises that he is meant to die and strongly resists this fate – reminded me of Mithya. But RK/RKay is also, importantly, about the relationship between an artist and his creation, which can acquire a life of its own and get away from its parent. “Even the character you wrote doesn’t listen to you,” goes one observation in the film, “Marzi ka maalik hai.” But beyond the specific fantasy scenario presented in this narrative, isn’t that observation true for any artist who sends his work out into the world and then finds he has lost all control over it; that readers, viewers, critics will respond to or interpret it in their own ways?

Related to this is the constant reminder of artists as creators operating in a higher realm vs artists as everyday people. With writers, for instance, a big gap can exist between the deep feelings they express, the poetry they are capable of, and their “real”, prosaic (or even unlikable) selves. RK is the one who writes intense romantic lines for his protagonist, but Mehboob is the one who really feels and lives those emotions (while RK himself, in regular life, seems a detached, unromantic sort – his wife certainly seems more taken by the fictional creation). I was reminded of how often starry-eyed readers – at a literature festival, for instance – have been disappointed by a real-life meeting with their favourite author, and found it hard to imagine how this sullen, uncommunicative creature could have produced words that touched them so deeply.

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RK/RKay is the sort of film that has one constantly on the look-out for allusions to other works – from Shakespearean soliloquies (Mehboob spouts versions of “As flies to wanton boys…” and “If you prick us do we not bleed” – a reminder that his creator RK, much like the real-life Rajat Kapoor, is likely a Shakespeare buff) to Milton’s “Did I beseech thee, Maker, from my clay / To mould me man?” (which was also used as an epigraph for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein). And of course, cinema: there is a very cosmetic similarity to the Buster Keaton masterpiece Sherlock Jr (as well as later films in its vein, such as Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo) but there are also the films whose posters and stills bedeck RK’s editing room, from respected classics like Fritz Lang’s M to 1930s genre movies like The Invisible Man or The Mystery of Mr X. (RK and his creation are both invisible men in different ways. Mehboob vanishes from the world of the film he is in – the scenes he was in play out exactly as before, except that he can’t be seen in them; on the other hand, RK himself is probably feeling invisibilised by the reactions to the film he has so passionately put together.)

It’s easy to use descriptors like “philosophical meditation” for such a narrative, but what’s equally important (especially given that this is a rare instance of a subdued, non-mainstream film that has got a theatrical release before making it to OTT platforms) is that RK/RKay is fun and engaging and can probably work even for a viewer who doesn’t care too much about the philosophy or the references. Apart from the dark humour built into the general premise, there are laugh-out-loud moments and lines like “Hero hee nahin baith raha film mein toh audience kya baithegi?” Or, when RK is first told about Mehboob’s disappearance and is assured that there isn’t a technical issue: “Machine theek hai toh kya problem hai? Existential?” (Kapoor brings the same knowing sarcasm to this line reading and a few others as he did to his best scenes as the CBI investigator in the series Scam 1992.)

The film is fun for the most part, anyway: I thought it slowed down in its final leg, with a few random and forced moments involving the fictitious villain KN Singh, and a stretched-out ending that wasn’t hard to guess at. But then, such is the deeply self-referential nature of this film, it’s possible to imagine that even that may be part of RK/RKay’s design. As someone tells RK after watching Mera Naseeb, “The film is lagging a bit in the second half.” I’m not sure any filmmaker would deliberately make a portion of his film uninvolving just to be “meta”, but if anyone is perverse enough to do such a thing it would probably be Rajat Kapoor. 

(My earlier Money Control pieces are here)

Reluctant hero – on Ashok Kumar and other early movie stars

(My latest Economic Times column)

In an early scene in the 15-part series The Story of Film: An Odyssey, a few thoughts are offered about the birth of screen personalities in cinema’s first years. A woman is shown facing the camera; when she turns around there is a cut so her face can still be seen (the camera has “jumped” to the other side to follow her). Then there is a sudden close-up, and narrator-director Mark Cousins notes that at some point in film history the actor rather than the set became central. The possibility of a star – a performer whom an audience could relate to, feel drawn to – arose. As close-ups of eyes and faces, images of people “thinking”, became common, viewers began projecting their own feelings onto these celluloid Gods.

And it followed that the first stars played interesting characters – Chaplin’s Tramp – or had striking personal qualities, like Buster Keaton’s deadpan athleticism or Douglas Fairbanks’ rakishness or Lillian Gish’s ability to make everyone feel protective. Or they might be singularly good-looking, features made more luminous by imaginative lighting and costuming. This wasn’t restricted to fiction films either: the Inuit man in the classic documentary Nanook of the North, gazing out at us with a frank smile in his first scene, is a natural movie star too.

To varying degrees all these people were confident in their own skin, they liked acting and savoured the attention of the big bulky camera. None of this applies to the man generally regarded as Hindi cinema’s first major male star, Ashok Kumar (originally Kumudlal Ganguly) – who, as a much-told tale has it, was a very reluctant “hero”, nervous and diffident when he was plucked out of a laboratory job at Bombay Talkies and asked to work opposite Devika Rani (because her leading man, with whom she had had an affair, was no longer available).

That story, and many others, are in Nabendu Ghosh’s Dadamoni: The Life and Times of Ashok Kumar, first published in 1995, now out in a revised edition with a new Foreword and Afterword. As a rare instance of one important film personality (Ghosh was a celebrated screenwriter) writing about another as a friend, this book is warm and conversational while also showing a breadth of knowledge about its subject’s personal and professional history – the tone often reminded me of Garson Kanin’s memoir about his close buddies who also just happened to be Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy.

When he first watched Achhut Kanya in 1936, Ghosh tellingly says, “we were struck by Ashok Kumar’s genuine innocence compared to the sophisticated ‘innocence’ of Devika Rani”. By the time he met the actor fifteen years later, Ashok Kumar wasn’t so “innocent” any more – he was an established star and producer, a key figure in the Hindi film industry.

“Dadamoni” has, of course, made appearances in other cinema books before and since; and given his long career, it is fascinating to see the different avatars that appear in these publications. Dev Anand’s autobiography describes the young Anand meeting his idol – the Ashok Kumar of these pages is a suave, confident figure sitting in his office and blowing smoke rings at his starry-eyed visitor. Kishwar Desai’s book about Devika Rani offers amusing glimpses of the shy young man who was terrified of his co-star, with whom he had to perform intimate scenes. ("Kumud tried, over and over again, to wriggle out of the commitment, including pretending to fall sick and threatening to chop off his hair.") Saadat Hasan Manto’s 1940s essays present his friend as a man who was sometimes irritated by attention but also aware of the benefits of fame (and Nandita Das’s film Manto depicts a suit-clad Ashok Kumar swishing his way through a party held to celebrate India’s independence: clinking glasses, making speeches, socialising effortlessly).

All this adds up to a story about someone only gradually becoming acclimatised to the new role he was forced to take on. And it’s a reminder that while stardom can be an elusive, alchemical thing (where a mysterious relationship immediately arises between a screen persona and the audience who encounters it in a dark hall), it can also have very mundane origins and can build over time. What a vast gap there was between the young lab boy of the 1930s who felt the urge to rush off to the toilet every time he had to shoot a difficult scene, and the Ashok Kumar of the first scene of Mahal a decade later, the subject of one of Hindi cinema’s great star-reveals: a disused chandelier is pulled up to the ceiling and the camera simultaneously tracks in to show a man who had been hidden from sight – rapt in attention as he listens to the ghost story being told to him, but also very much a star in a stylish pose, aware of the effect his first appearance will have on his audience.

Partners, adversaries: a short review of Guilty Minds

(Another post that I’m putting up here belatedly – this is a review of the Prime Video courtroom series Guilty Minds. Wrote this for Reader’s Digest)
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The first episode of this often-gripping legal drama ends with one of the protagonists, the bright young lawyer Deepak Rana (Varun Mitra), doing something inappropriate during friendly banter at a nightclub. At the receiving end is the equally bright Kashaf (Shriya Pilgaonkar). Her response makes it clear that she has been offended, and Deepak’s act might seem especially startling since they have just been on opposite ends of a sexual harassment case – with him defending the accused and Kashaf representing the accuser. But as so often happens with a multi-episode series, we have much to learn about these characters, their personal relationships, back-stories and private demons.

To start with, the basic binary we have is this: Deepak, part of a venerable firm of lawyers named Khanna and Khanna (he is the only non-family member to have been admitted into the fold), is pragmatic, willing to play around in grey areas; Kashaf, on the other hand, the daughter of a famously honest and scrupulous judge, is very upright and idealistic. (Her legal partner Vandana, played by Sugandha Garg, seems a little more laidback but is razor-sharp when it comes to research and legwork.) But again, things will turn out to be more complex than that binary suggests.

Legal dramas have had a very long history on television in the West, but Guilty Minds is also very much a product of the ongoing OTT zeitgeist in India. Its format might remind you of another Prime Video series, the wedding-planner-themed Made in Heaven (and not just because there is a slight resemblance between Shriya Pilgaonkar and the earlier show’s lead Sobhita Dhulipala). Both shows are made up of episodes that deal with standalone situations or cases, but each is also anchored by a few protagonists, and as we follow their personal arcs we learn things that we might not have guessed at. The back-story of Deepak in Guilty Minds is comparable in some ways to that of Tara Khanna in Made in Heaven – here are two people whom we first encounter in urbane settings, speaking fluent English, seemingly at home in posh environments and offices; but over the course of the show new information presents itself and our perspective broadens.

Guilty Minds moves between the individual cases and the lives of the main characters (Vandana, for instance, is in a lesbian relationship that will potentially scandalise her lover’s family). Some of the cases derive from hot-button issues – sexual harassment by an older man in a position of power, the potentially destructive power of video games, a cola company cannibalising a village’s water supply, an IVF company possibly indulging in sex selection for its clients. A few have a hint of cautionary science fiction to them: for instance, the one about a driver-less car company being sued after an accident.

The contrast in that case is between the programmed actions of a cold automaton (the car) and the unpredictable, variable behaviour of a human being in a very Indian situation (a villager imprudently crosses a national highway to feed a cow on the other side). And in a sense, this contrast also applies to the show’s larger picture: on one hand there is the letter of the law, and the lawyer’s code of not passing judgement but simply representing their client with the facts as presented to them; on the other hand, there are the ethical dilemmas that cause uncertainty and crises of conscience. Lawyers are human too, and this show is at its most compelling when it occupies the spaces between their personal and professional impulses.

Sweet Cocotini: in which Shirley MacLaine rolls back the decades

(Wrote this tribute to Shirley MacLaine for Mint Lounge, after seeing her brief appearance in the second season of Only Murders in the Building. My review of the first season is here)
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In a droll scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1955 film The Trouble with Harry, a talkative old Captain, believing he has accidentally killed a man, hopes to be alone with the corpse so he can figure out what to do; unfortunately people keep showing up, even in this secluded Vermont forest. When a painter sits down and begins drawing the dead man, it’s too much for the Captain, watching from behind a tree. “Next thing you know they’ll be televising the whole thing,” he mutters, and you have to feel for him – don’t an unwitting murderer and his victim deserve some privacy?

Television, being quite new at the time, could be used as shorthand for intrusive new technology – but one wonders what this ancient crab would make of our current era where podcasters-cum-investigators can reach out to a large online audience in real time, breathlessly relaying information even as a crime is being committed or a suspect pursued. As in the enjoyable new show Only Murders in the Building, season two of which has begun streaming on Disney-Hotstar.

I draw this line between these two generally unrelated works because they have one delightful thing in common. Shirley MacLaine made her movie debut in The Trouble with Harry (as Jennifer, a young single mother who recognises the dead man as her ex-husband… and is none too perturbed about it). Now, nearly ninety, she makes a guest appearance in the new series (as the mother of another murder victim). The two roles are separated by seven decades, or more than half of film history; and yet one of MacLaine’s signature traits – a knowing, world-weary, vaguely suspicious glint in the eye – is still intact.

Her entry in Only Murders in the Building – idly wondering who killed her daughter, then asking for a Cocotini and complaining when someone hands her a chocolate syrup concoction instead of a coconut cocktail – adds a layer to a story that has already derived much of its humour from generational interplay. Of the show’s three protagonists, Charles and Oliver, played by veterans Steve Martin and Martin Short, are in their seventies; then there’s the millennial Mabel, played by Selena Gomez. This unlikely trio, true-crime podcast addicts living in a posh New York building, team up to solve murders (or bungle investigations). And with MacLaine’s arrival, the goalposts briefly shift, because Steve Martin now looks like a boy in comparison.

Actually, he could have played Jennifer’s little boy in The Trouble with Harry – the one who draws her attention to the deceased man. “Thank providence! That’s the last of Harry,” she says with a smile, and then tells her son she will make him some lemonade when they get home – a wholesome young mom in a wholesome, Eisenhower-era America. From her very first scene in her first film, MacLaine combined an ice-wouldn’t-melt-in-her-mouth surface with an honest, unaffected sweetness.

She was an unusual Hitchcockian heroine for this period, considering that he made this film in the middle of three films with Grace Kelly – all silky elegance, primed to become a real-life princess. There are many ways of emphasizing the contrast between these two women: through the clothes, for example (see the simple grey dress worn by MacLaine in TTWH and compare it with the haute-couture wardrobe that Kelly brings to James Stewart’s apartment in Rear Window). If Kelly epitomised the mysterious Hitchcockian blonde, feminine and reserved on the outside, but with a sly side waiting to emerge, MacLaine was the opposite: made up to look boyish, she had a frank, insolent gaze and a sharp tongue, but there was a current of warmth underneath. And she was breathtakingly poised for a 20-year-old, with a straight-faced playing of outrageous moments that must have pleased Hitchcock: a climactic scene where she explains the complicated chronology of events to a doctor is done with an assurance that a senior actor might have envied.

MacLaine’s high tide as a star-actress came a few years later, with Vincente Minnelli’s Some Came Running, and then most notably with Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, a classic portrait of a wisecracking, seemingly self-reliant working-class girl who is also emotionally vulnerable, ripe for exploitation by powerful men. Her performance brings a devastating charge to scenes like the one where her character is callously handed a hundred-dollar bill for Christmas by the married man who is stringing her along. To cite a modern reference point, it is easy to draw a line from MacLaine’s elevator girl Fran to the characters of Peggy and Joan, working in a male-dominated office environment in the series Mad Men, which is set around the period that The Apartment was made in. One early Mad Men episode even referenced Wilder’s film. (Though it’s also worth pointing out that the young working women played by MacLaine and by Janet Leigh in Psycho the same year – also getting unwelcome attention from her boss’s crass buddy – could sometimes seem more in control, more capable of using wry humour to deflect bad behaviour.)

In the 1960s and 70s, when MacLaine’s kid brother Warren Beatty was becoming a big star, there was a sense that Hollywood didn’t quite know what to do with her; even at a time when women’s roles were more varied, she may have been too kooky and self-deprecating a presence. Many of the films she did during this period (among them The Yellow Rolls-Royce, The Bliss of Mrs Blossom, and Sweet Charity) acquired cult followings (my mother and her south Bombay friends remembered them fondly decades later) without ever entering the “essential movies” canon. She made an unexpectedly funny pairing with Clint Eastwood in the Western Two Mules for Sister Sara (perhaps the first time Eastwood appeared onscreen opposite a strong or unpredictable woman) but the shooting wasn’t smooth and director Don Siegel felt she was “unfeminine”.

Yet she never stopped working, and inevitably the worthy roles in decent films (along with salvaging appearances in clunkers) came every few years: from The Turning Point in the late 70s to an Oscar win for Terms of Endearment, and author-backed parts in Steel Magnolias and Madame Sousatzka. The qualities that had set her apart from the more conventionally glamorous female stars of her age (Sophia Loren, Elizabeth Taylor, Natalie Wood, Audrey Hepburn), and had made her more difficult to cast, also aided her longevity. She could effortlessly match shoulders with someone as zany and volatile as Jack Nicholson. She could stare down Eastwood’s macho cowboy, even determining the form of a film (a comical zoom shot to capture the astonishment on his face as he realises this nun isn’t quite a nun), or adeptly play comedy with a man thirty years her junior (Nicolas Cage in Guarding Tess).

And she’s still around, and still bringing a distinctive energy to the frame. “Your husband’s dead?” Jennifer is asked in The Trouble with Harry. She nods and asks: “Is your lemonade okay? I like it tart.” That’s what Shirley MacLaine has been for decades, but with a touch of syrup – like chocolate added to a Cocotini – when you don’t expect it.

[An old post about Two Mules for Sister Sara is here]

Cat people, dog people, books, and shirts – photos from the last few months

Thought I’d take out the time for a personal/photo post about some of the events and signings I have participated in for the two animal anthologies that came out a few months ago: Cat People, edited by Devapriya Roy, and The Book of Dog, edited by Hemali Sodhi. This is also, of course, another reminder about these two splendid books, which have some excellent writers and excellent pieces in them even if you don’t specifically identify as a “cat person” or a “dog person”. (More information in this post.)

Be warned that these photos feature a series of animal-themed T-shirts bought specifically in the enthusiasm of having these books out.

Cat book signings with Devapriya Roy and Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan at Khan Market bookstores – specifically Full Circle, Bahrisons and Faqirchand.
Apart from the cat shirt, you can see my Tom & Jerry mask on display here.

 

After the signings we met Samit Basu (who isn’t in the book but who used to prowl the blogosphere as Putu the Cat many decades ago) for a good solid lunch at Andreas.

 
(Coincidentally it was at Samit’s birthday party in December 2019 that I got to hear of the cat anthology for the first time – through a casual chat with Simon & Schuster editor Himanjali Sankar, after which I pestered Devapriya to let me be in it. “I thought you were a dog person!” she said… quite reasonably, given what my social-media posts of the past few years have looked like. But the cat essay, which I worked on during the first lockdown, became one of the most satisfying personal pieces I have written, being as much about my mother as about the cats in our lives.)

Book of Dog signings with Hemali Sodhi, Aanchal Malhotra, Ananya Vajpeyi, Rajdeep Sardesai, Bulbul Sharma and Sumita Mehta – at Oxford Bookstore in Connaught Place, Bahrisons Khan Market, and The Book Shop in Jorbagh. 

 

 

 

Also a pic with old friend and fellow dog person Udayan Mitra, my editor for The World of Hrishikesh Mukherjee in what now feels like another lifetime. 

Cat People book signings at Bahrisons Vasant Kunj a couple of months ago – this one with a few of the other contributors to the book, including Vangmayi Parakala, Aneela Zeb Babar, Maneesha Taneja, Anukriti Prasad, and the youngest writer, Arhaan Babar. Please don’t miss the cat shirt here, it is the brassiest one I have (so far). 

 

 

And a cosy little Cat People event at the newly opened Kunzum store in Vasant Vihar just yesterday. Contributors Aditi Sriram and Gayathri Sankar joined us for this one, and Maneesha, Aneela, Arhaan and Anukriti were there too. 

 

 

Finally, a few mix-and-match photos…

In a cat shirt with dog-lady Hemali Sodhi
 

In a dog shirt with cat-lady Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan (and a very noir-ish photo this is too). 

Lara and Kaali with the books. 

 

An online discussion about the cat book with a few contributors who couldn’t be there for the later physical events. 

And in my catty sweater last December, when Cat People had just arrived.  

Now, try to forget about the flashy apparel and go buy the books...