Policeman, framed - an Ardh Satya poster

Around the time The Popcorn Essayists was at the editing stage, the great Manjula Padmanabhan gifted me a couple of posters she had designed for Govind Nihalani's Ardh Satya in 1982, including a close-up of Om Puri's weary, haunted face, done in yellow and dark blue. Took the longest time to get around to having the poster framed (apart from anything else I was petty enough to wonder if I really wanted a 4 ft by 3 ft picture of Om Puri on a wall - so much for being a Critic and appreciating good art, focussing on form as much as content etc), but have done it at last and it looks super.

There's a bubble-wrap around the poster here (will put up a clearer photo later), but you get the gist of the drawing. It suggests the inner turmoil of Puri's character Sub-Inspector Velankar so effectively, with the dark strokes seeming to cast shadows across his face and exaggerating the lines on his forehead. Velankar looks scruffy and unshaven - something you never see in the actual film, where he is neatly turned out from beginning to end. There is a poetic rather than literal realism on view here, and it's perfect for the character.
 
(And while on the art of Manjula P, here is my proud appearance in her comic-strip Suki.)

A comfort cushion

Had a decent time at Tehelka's THiNK fest in Goa last week, but the unexpected personal highlight was the acquisition of... this cushion cover.

The illustration on it was done by Sudeep Chaudhuri for the cover of the year-end Tehelka special I co-edited with Nisha Susan in 2008 (later published in book form by Hachette), and I remember how delighted I was when I first saw the picture all those years ago: Foxie was just a few months old at the time, and it was a lovely coincidence that the dog in the illustration resembled her so much - the posture, the long limbs, even the red collar she wore as a pup. (The resemblance became more pronounced subsequently, with her illness and emaciation.) It is still a source of strange, irrational comfort that a book with my name on it has this picture on the cover.

[More on the anthology here, for anyone interested. And here is one of the stories, Manjula Padmanabhan's piece about a vampire in Delhi]

A sneak preview: The Popcorn Essayists

What happens when you gather a line-up of established authors who don't write professionally about cinema and ask them for personal essays about a cherished film or film-related experience?

This happens:



[Click to enlarge]

The anthology will be out in a month or so, but here's a quick summary of what the pieces are about:

- How do you "read" a film, how do actors recapture the immediacy of their feelings when they dub for a scene months after the original shoot ...and other questions that movie buffs ask themselves ("Jellyfish" - Manjula Padmanabhan)

- A tongue-in-cheek analysis of a cult Punjabi film as a Bible for foot-fetishists ("The Foot-Worshipper's Guide to Watching Maula Jatt" - Musharraf Ali Farooqi)

- On dreamlike vistas, from Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill Jr to a surreal chase scene featuring Kader Khan and Vinod Mehra ("Perchance to Dream" - Rajorshi Chakraborti)

- How the Bihari actor Manoj Bajpai passed himself off as a native in an archetypal Mumbai movie ("Writing my own Satya" - Amitava Kumar)

- From watching Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire to reading Michael Cunningham’s ‘White Angel’ - how does the language of film differ from the language of prose? ("Two Languages in Conversation" - Kamila Shamsie)

- On the tumultuous romance between a man and his car in Ritwik Ghatak's Ajantrik ("Gaadi Bula Rahi Hai" - Sumana Roy)

- Why a middle-aged male author performed a Helen dance in drag after a public reading in Brooklyn (Manil Suri's "My Life as a Cabaret Dancer", which you can read here)

- Secret agents, suave detectives, fake ghosts ... on Hindi film noir and thrillers from the 1950s and 60s ("Villains and Vamps and All Things Camp" - Madhulika Liddle)

- What the silences in the Kaurismaki brothers' movies reveal about Finland and its people, and why an Indian writer should be so interested ("Going Kaurismaki" - Anjum Hasan)

- When you're starved for moviegoing experience, a Charlie Sheen thriller can be "the greatest movie ever made by man" ("Terminal Case" - Sidin Vadukut)

- On why being scared is a good thing ("Monsters I Have Known", by yours truly)

- A novelist recalls her time publishing a gossip-driven film magazine in the 1970s, steeped in "a Film Lok parallel to Indra Lok" ("Super Days" - Namita Gokhale)

- A writer who worked for the British Board of Film Classification on the occasional need for - and her ambivalence about - censorship ("The Final Cut" - Jaishree Misra)

And here's the video of the Popcorn Essays session at the Jaipur lit-fest, where four of these writers read from their pieces.

Updates to follow as the release date draws near.

A plug for Friendicoes

From Manjula Padmanabhan’s blog, a post about a Friendicoes rescue – a reminder that there are scattered pinpricks of light in the unfathomably dark and lonely universe of uncared-for animals.

I’ve only interacted with Friendicoes a few times, but each of those encounters has been very positive. The first set of vaccinations for the litter of pups that Foxie belonged to was done by them. Shortly after we adopted Foxie, we decided that her mother Rani and older sister Nanno (from an earlier litter) had to be spayed, otherwise generations of pups would be starving or getting run over by cars near our house in the years to come. So we called Friendicoes to pick up the two dogs for the operation. Shankar, the watchman who had been looking after them, was very reluctant to let the ambulance take them away – he feared they’d take the easy way out and put them down – but four days later I received a call from the ambulance driver, who was on his way back to Saket with Rani and Nanno in the back-seat. I rushed across, took charge of them; they were composed, in good health, very happy to be back, and their reunion with Shankar was one of the most joyous things I've seen.

Foxie has been in poor health for the last few months and we’ve been consulting the Friendicoes doctor, among others. A few days ago we had to show him some X-rays and get a couple of prescriptions written out, so we visited their office near the Defence Colony flyover market, and a friend who does volunteer work there showed us around the shelter where injured dogs, cats, monkeys and birds are housed. It was obvious that space and resources were limited, but also that these people are doing the best they can.

Friendicoes rescues abandoned animals – animals that were taken in as pets on a whim by people who had no idea what a big responsibility this is (I’d venture to suggest that these are the sorts of people who have rarely had to think too deeply about anything for most of their lives), and who “discovered” within a few days that the little things make too much noise for their liking, or are too messy. The result: boundlessly loving creatures dumped on the roads by the only family they knew. The city shelter has dozens of these uncomprehending victims of human cruelty – animals who are so starved for affection that their bodies quiver in delighted gratitude when you so much as reach out and touch them inside their cages.

Needless to say, they need whatever help they can get from animal-lovers, so anyone who’s interested, please do weigh in. Cash and cheque donations are welcome, of course, but even visiting the shelter once in a while with a supply of biscuits or rice helps enormously. Their website has details.

[An earlier post about cruelty to animals here]

Aghaat, and Govind Nihalani’s use of actors

Recently I discovered Govind Nihalani’s 1984 film Aghaat on a surprisingly well-produced Shemaroo DVD. It isn’t as well-known as the director’s Aakrosh or Ardh Satya but it’s a solid film – stark and talky, as you'd expect from Nihalani, but very well written (by Vijay Tendulkar) and acted. It begins with a dark, hypnotic opening-credit sequence – a dance performance with one set of masked figures symbolising oppressed workers and another set representing their profit-obsessed bosses (sidenote: I was pleased to learn that the masks were designed by Manjula Padmanabhan). Naturally, the dance ends with the success of the Revolution – red flags aloft, wicked management prostrate on the ground, the worker class triumphant.

The audience, comprising trade union leader Madhav Verma (Om Puri) and hundreds of factory workers, applaud heartily; they've just won a minor battle of their own, getting bonuses raised by 17 per cent. But as the film will show, the real-life battle isn't a straightforward one with sides clearly defined. There are ideological differences and selfish agendas within the worker class, and the management is more than happy to divide and rule.

The official authority of Madhav's union is challenged by a rival group led by the shadowy figure of Rustom Patel and his broad-shouldered henchman Krishnan. While Madhav has the long-term interests of all the workers in mind – and is willing to allow benefits to accrue at a steady pace, keeping the future in mind – the rival group succeeds in getting people on its side by promising them quicker, more dramatic changes; so what if a few workers end up being retrenched along the way? Soon this ugly internal conflict begins to play itself out around the personal tragedy of a worker named Chotelal (Pankaj Kapoor), who has lost his legs in an accident. The human side of the story is quickly lost, so that even Chotelal’s funeral late in the film will become a pretext for one-upmanship. Among the others caught in the situation are a conscientious human resources employee (Salim Ghouse) and a woman hired to improve the company's public relations (Rohini Hattangadi).

There’s an essay waiting to be written about Nihalani’s use of Om Puri in the early 1980s. Brooding intensity is sometimes an overrated quality in actors, but Puri’s performances as the mute victim of caste discrimination in Aakrosh and as the introspecting policeman in Ardh Satya are outstanding. His piercing eyes and lined features – often filmed very effectively in half-shadow – as well as the poetic realism of his speech (though in Aakrosh he barely speaks at all) are inseparable from the overall impact of those films. As Madhav, a sincere man who begins to despair of the moral ambiguities he finds himself facing, he dominates Aghaat, which is some achievement considering the many acting heavyweights on view here. (The Malayali actor Bharath Gopi, as the menacing Krishnan, is another standout.)

Madhav’s opposite number is Rustom Patel, whose presence hangs over the film – people are constantly talking about him and his actions move the plot along – though he isn’t seen until the final 10 minutes when he shows up (in a white Fiat!) to deliver a much-anticipated rabble-rousing speech. This short role is played by the biggest name in the cast, Naseeruddin Shah, whose appearance we, the viewers, would similarly have been anticipating. This could have been gimmicky, but it’s the second time Nihalani has used Shah as a sort of doppelganger-cum-nemesis for Om Puri's Man of Integrity, and to good effect.

In Ardh Satya, Shah has a small but very effective role as Mike Lobo, a former police inspector who had to leave the force because he couldn’t deal with the compromises the job required, and who now spends his time getting drunk on cheap liquor and pathetically begging for money. The character makes short appearances four times in the film, each time providing a distorting mirror for Om Puri’s sub-inspector Velankar – when Velankar looks into Lobo’s bloodshot eyes he sees a portent of what he himself might become. In Aghaat, Rustom Patel performs a similar function for Madhav Verma. For all his voiced concern about worker welfare, Patel is palpably cut off from their lives and it’s obvious that he has his own agenda; whereas Madhav moves from one crisis to the next, handling things personally, making sure he’s around for anyone who needs him. By the end, he has seen enough to know what he must do to avoid becoming another Rustom – though the film itself is open-ended about what lies ahead for him.

P.S. The Shemaroo and Moser Baer DVDs are helping me rediscover a lot of these movies and make up for an anomaly in my personal development as a movie buff. Up to the age of 12 or 13, mainstream Hindi cinema made up the bulk of my film-watching (everything Amitabh, but just about anything else with lots of dhishum-dhishum in it), with only occasional, reluctant asides into the “parallel” films that got shown on Doordarshan. Then, sometime around 1990, I discovered Hollywood classics, and shortly afterwards the major French, German and Japanese filmmakers – and I drifted away from Hindi films of almost any description for a decade. Result: for the past 5-6 years I’ve been trying to catch up with the non-mainstream Hindi cinema of the 1970s and 1980s, which I only fleetingly experienced as a child (when I wasn’t best-placed to appreciate a lot of it). Films by Shyam Benegal, Mani Kaul, Govind Nihalani and others of course, but even the more accessible stuff by people like Sai Paranjype and Basu Chatterji – much of which was only a dimly remembered world for me. (On the other hand my wife, who has seen many of these films multiple times on TV over the years, can recite pages of dialogue from movies like Chashme Baddoor and Albert Pinto ko Gussa Kyon Aata Hai.)

P.P.S. Aakrosh and Ardy Satya are on YouTube, for those of you who can bear to watch films that way.

Q&A with Manjula Padmanabhan

[Excerpts from a Gmail chat with Manjula Padmanabhan, mostly about her new novel Escape. G-chat is not a forum that’s very conducive to an organised, linear discussion, so I’ve had to restructure a lot of the conversation.

A quick summary of the book: Escape is set in a land where women have been eliminated and where cloned generals maintain a smooth-functioning dictatorship. A young girl named Meiji, who has been secretly brought up on an estate, makes a perilous journey to a distant city in the company of her uncle Youngest. Along the way, she must understand her own uniqueness and deal with ideas that she was never brought up to imagine. Meanwhile, Youngest’s own internal conflict – his moral sense of his responsibility to Meiji clashing with the fact that his body is aroused by her proximity – makes the book more than a straightforward morality tale. More in this earlier post.]

Like your play Harvest – about organ-selling in an imaginary future India – Escape is a bleak dystopian tale. What does this type of story help you achieve as a writer?

I don't think I set out to write dystopia-lit. It's sort of the other way around – an idea occurs to me, e.g. the organ transplant trade in Harvest, and as I try to frame a story, it becomes necessary to reach outside the frame of current reference.

In the case of Escape, the idea presented itself originally as a newspaper "middle", which would take the form of a page from the diary of the last Indian woman left alive. It was just the fingerprint of an idea I had around the turn of the millennium, when there was talk of the Year – or Decade – of the Woman and I kept thinking that despite all the positive stuff going on, it seemed more likely that women – Indian women anyway – appeared to be on the decline.

So that was the context. I didn't get around to writing that middle, but around 2006 I began to think of turning that idea into a novel. While looking at it from that angle, the woman's age dropped down, she acquired uncles, the world changed around her... and so on.

The cover jacket suggests that the declining sex-ratio of the real world provided a starting point for the novel. What concerns you most about attitudes to women in less-developed countries?

Well, book jackets tend to say things like that, and maybe, in a certain way it's true – because after all, the idea presented itself as being about "the last Indian woman" precisely because the declining sex-ratio suggested that there might some day be an end-point. But I'm not sure I see issues in such macro terms. I mean, I don't think I entered the space of the story as a sociologist. More as an...explorer. When an idea – or a character – presents itself for exploration, my attitude is one of curiosity: I follow it to the extent that it interests me. I don't start with a series of concerns about, e.g., women's issues.

One way of putting it might be that the statistics of female infanticide and the starkness of the choices facing families and mothers-to-be of daughters created an emotional climate that brought the book into being. But you know, in the end the context is just that – like the "soup" in a petri dish, it provides an environment in which an idea can grow.

We once discussed the film Matrubhoomi, which took a similar idea – a world where women are in short supply – and made it trite, painting all men as caricatures. In Escape, the portrayal of Meiji’s uncle Youngest adds complexity to the story.

The creation of Youngest was very spontaneous ...a defining incident right in the beginning occurred, a scene between him and Meiji, and his development and his relationship with Meiji curved outward from that point in a very natural way.

I still haven’t seen Matrubhoomi, but reading your blog entry reminded me of my own response to Daayra, and I can quite imagine what the treatment was like. It seems to me that there's a genre of film which appears to be about supporting women's issues but are instead used as a method of showing women being humiliated one way or another, for entertainment.

Escape is a very adult work. In India, science-fiction has often been seen as a genre for young readers. Is this something you believe is changing?

I don’t know. I suspect this book may well be dismissed as SF, but I can't help that. I anticipate that serious readers over the age of 40 will find it hard to engage with it, because the older generation of Indian readers tend to comprise people who think of reading as a sober activity – perhaps because it used to be a medium for scholarship and study rather than for personal entertainment. When I think about people in my age-range (I'm 55) there aren't very many I know who read science-fiction or fantasy on a regular basis. That's certainly changed for younger, post-Independence-era Indians.

It’s a pity that "serious" and "entertaining" are often viewed as mutually exclusive.

Yes...I don’t know if Escape is an entertaining book, but it's not scholarly either. It requires the reader to stretch his/her imagination. It offers a type of pleasure that (I believe) is specific to literature – not funny-haha entertaining, but it tickles nerves that all of us have, but not all of us can access consciously.

For instance, I found it quite weirdly pleasurable to write it. It was like a continuous adventure, exploring this WORLD.

Given that some younger readers might pick this book up, do you ever feel self-conscious when you are writing the edgier passages – such as the bathing scene between Youngest and Meiji?

No. I feel my responsibility as a writer is to be true to the moment. That doesn't mean that I throw in every bit of salacious detail that I can scrape up but I won't flinch away from what must be described. I don't tiptoe around those scenes as if they were different to any others but I do look for inconsistencies in language that may arise out of the very different expectations people have when thinking about or describing intimate matters.

I am not especially worried about young readers innocently wandering into this book. It doesn't look like SF and I think its pace wouldn't be inviting to teen-readers. Of course there's a constant risk of books being picked up and read by the "wrong" audience, but as an author I must hope that parents won't leave books lying around for their young children to pick up, if they feel their children might be damaged by them.

Who are your favourite authors in science fiction and fantasy? Do you follow any of the newer Indian writers in the genre?

I reviewed an early book by Priya Sarukkai many years ago, but aside from that, no I haven't read these young authors. I used to read much more science fiction than I do now (age? Hmmm) – there was a time when it was what I always sought out. But I read much less in general now. I read omnivorously and tend to graze a lot. I liked Iain Banks' The Algebraist. I was an extreme (Star) Trekkie for a while and also a total Star Wars groupie. Then there’s Doris Lessing's Shikasta quintet, which left a very deep impression, as did Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange. But I don't think I especially respond to influences. I tend to be very alone with my writing.

You’ve worked as a cartoonist (the comic strip Suki), playwright, novelist, a writer of children’s books and dark science fiction. Is there anything you haven’t done that you’d like to do in future?

I don't set out challenges for myself. I think of myself as an extremely lazy, slow-moving entity for whom the slightest effort is a chore. (I believe that I belong to a little-known branch of the evolutionary tree, descended from the Primordial Sloth.) So I never peg out a course of future activity. I wait around for ideas to come along and ride me – force me to my feet and get me to the destination they want to go to.

I don't, by the way, think that I wear different hats – I believe all my work, writing or drawing, is pretty much the same material, but presented in different forms. If you strain very hard, you can hear echoes of Suki humour in the way Youngest speaks.

I really rather adore Youngest, I have to admit.

Interesting you say that. Did you at any point feel that you had to choose between him and Meiji as your story progressed? They are both strong characters with their own internal dilemmas, and there is friction between them by the end.

No, I don't struggle over who gets to lead in a dance of characters – I wait for the logic of a situation to work itself out. The places where I paused, thought over and back-tracked were (for instance) the Swan's Nest episode, when I felt I was veering off course, following storylines that weren't relevant. But with interactions between the characters, I take the view that once I've set them up on the "board" they have a certain amount of autonomy. I give them personalities and then create mini-movies in my mind of how those characters might behave. Then I describe those scenes in words.

Have you begun work on the sequel?

*nervous grin* Err ... well ...I know what will happen, let's put it that way.

Actually, I only began to realise the potential for a sequel around the time I reached the Swan's Nest episode. I had expected to describe Meiji and Youngest's life in the City in some detail, but by the time they got to the City the book was already quite long. No way I was going to be able to complete the cycle in this book!

But there'll only be a sequel if this book does well. Whatever that means. I can't bear the thought of writing a book for which there's no market. This happened with the second of the two "Mouse" books – Macmillan Children's Books – and I absolutely do not want to repeat that experience. If this book just vanishes into the gloom, I will simply close shop (on this story) and write something else.

[Some earlier conversations with writers: Vikram Chandra, Kiran Desai, Amitava Kumar, Mohsin Hamid, Anita Desai, Amitav Ghosh]

[Manjula photo by Priyanka Parashar]

No woman's land: Manjula Padmanabhan's Escape

“What I like about science fiction,” wrote Manjula Padmanabhan in the Introduction to her short-story collection Kleptomania, “is that it offers a writer the opportunity to go directly to the heart of an ironical or thought-provoking situation by setting up a theoretical world. It’s a bit like writing a problem in mathematics, reducing reality to a tangle or pipes and cisterns or a group of three people traveling at varying speeds up a mountain, in order to reveal the relationships between matter, time and space.”

The situation in Padmanabhan’s excellent new novel Escape is that the story is set in a land almost entirely bereft of women. We make gradual discoveries about this setting as the plot progresses; the use of words like paratha and veena suggests that this could be an alternate/future version of India, but at any rate it’s a country that underwent a great Change a couple of decades earlier. Now it exists in a bubble, cut off from (and ostracized by) the rest of the planet, and run as an autonomous, smooth-functioning dictatorship by generals who are clone-brothers to each other. They view themselves as sculptors who have re-shaped reality and their attitude towards the now-extinct women, referred to as the Vermin Tribe, is symptomatic of the death of individuality in this land. “Females are driven by biological imperatives that lead them to compete for breeding rights,” explains a General in an interview with an appalled reporter from the outside world, “In order to control breeding technology and to establish the collective ethic we had to eliminate them.”

The one survivor – or the one survivor we know of – is a young girl named Meiji, who has been raised on an Estate managed by her three uncles, called Eldest, Middle and Youngest. They have so far succeeded in keeping her existence a secret from the local General and his servants, but eventual disclosure is certain and the brothers realise that Meiji’s minuscule chance of long-term survival rests with her being transported into the world beyond. This entails first making a long journey across a wasteland to a distant city, and Youngest has the difficult task of escorting her on this trip. Along the way, he must maintain her disguise as a boy, shield her from curious eyes and, perhaps hardest of all, help her understand her own uniqueness and deal with concepts and ideas that she was never brought up to imagine. Throughout, he must also hold himself in check, for he knows - and fears - that his baser instincts are capable of overriding his avuncular affection for Meiji.

Escape works on many levels: as a solid adventure yarn, a well-realised work of speculative fiction, and a sensitive character study. Padmanabhan nicely balances Meiji and Youngest’s internal conflicts with the external details of the places that they travel through and the people or creatures they meet – from the sadistic but dimwitted groups of Mad Max-like riders called the Boyz (who blow each other up at the slightest provocation) to the mechanical slaves known as drones. (“Drones are what the Vermin Tribe should have been: servile, dumb and deaf”, reads one of the many quotes taken from fictitious manuals – presumably written as guidebooks by the regime – that are provided at the head of each chapter.) But the book is driven by conversation and character development. Especially notable is the sensitivity with which it depicts the confusion in Meiji’s mind: her exchanges with imaginary friends, her predicament as the innocent abroad, so accustomed to living in confined quarters and familiar settings that she is afflicted by agoraphobia when faced with the “crushing limitlessness” of the outside world:

It was not possible, she realised, to own this kind of formless space, with no walls or ceiling to define it. It could never be befriended or tamed. In every direction, the alien endlessness engulfed and annihilated her. She could not so much as control how far her own steps would take her, or the sound of her voice upon the air. Even her shadow, that kindly, friendly companion that had danced with her upon the walls of her room, allowing her to fashion it into antlered deer and knob-nosed swans, had here become a stranger, a monstrous giant.

One of the things I most admire about Padmanabhan as a writer is her unselfconscious ability to create disturbing, morally complex, even cringe-inducing scenes; there’s an honesty and transparency to the most shocking passages in her work and you never get the impression that she’s making a deliberate effort to shock. (For a sense of what I mean, see the unflinching description of an exploitative sexual encounter between an older man and a “smooth-skinned and beautiful” 14-year-old boy in the title story in Kleptomania. Or another story in that collection, “Betrayal”, where a character reflects that a woman’s body can betray her during a rape. Or just read Harvest, her dystopian play about organ-selling in an alternate India, which should really be more widely available than it is.)

Escape is for the most part a gently flowing narrative, with graceful, reflective passages such as the one where a group of men sit about recounting their dreams and wondering what they mean, or a lengthy account of a juggler plying his trade. So the edgier passages, when they do appear, are all the more effective. There’s the description of a prosthetic penis that Meiji must wear to pass off as a little boy, and of her first period. A sudden, entirely unexpected burst of violence directed at a helpless creature. A passage where a character recounts a distant memory of a woman’s vagina in threatening terms, as “a great scarlet gorge, ringed with writhing black serpents”.

Meiji and Youngest – equally compelling and sympathetic characters with their own internal dilemmas – inevitably become distanced from each other as their journey nears its end (at one point Meiji’s draws a parallel between the Generals’ callous reshaping of reality with her uncles’ sculpting of her own life), and this adds to the complexity of the tale. But an earlier passage that acutely captures the book's moral ambiguity is the one where the two of them are bathing together and though Youngest’s feelings are not explicitly spelled out for the reader, a throwaway sentence indicates that he has become aroused by the naked girl; that in spite of his conscious ideas about right and wrong, his body is instinctively responding to hers. These sexual stirrings are a source of discomfort for both him and the reader (it’s inappropriate – by our conventional notions of propriety – because of his status as her blood relative and guardian), but the ambivalence of this passage comes from our knowledge that he is capable of these stirrings because he can see her as a human being, an equal, rather than as an object of loathing; for others like the General, she is nothing more than a vermin. Here and in other such passages, we see that it isn’t easy to separate our finer human qualities from what mortifies us about ourselves.

All of this adds up to make Escape difficult to classify. As an adventure and a work of imagination, it has more than enough that will appeal to younger readers, but it is an intrinsically adult book, and very much a novel of ideas. In India, science fiction and fantasy are still often thought of as genres for children, though this is slowly changing: Padmanabhan is one of a number of Indian writers – Samit Basu, Vandana Singh and Priya Sarakkai Chabria are among the others – who are shifting boundaries that were once firmly marked, and expanding the possibilities of what can be achieved in the genre.

Escape ends on a note that makes it obvious that a sequel is on the way. I was slightly disappointed because it amounted to being cut off from Meiji and her story midway, and I was unprepared for this. I can only hope Padmanabhan finishes the story: during an email exchange a few days ago, she told me that she would write the sequel “only if this book does well, whatever that means. I can't bear the thought of writing a book for which there's no market”. These temperamental writer-types...

[Manjula's blog is here. Also, can't resist re-linking to my graphic encounter with Suki a few years ago]

The jabberwock appears in a comic strip!

Please visit Manjula Padmanabhan’s blog for the dope on what happened when the legendary Suki came out of retirement for an illustrated interview with Yours Truly. This appeared in Business Standard’s Weekend supplement on June 18 and I’m glad Manjula’s posted it on her site, since I have zero-proficiency when it comes to putting up pictures on mine.

Here’s the link again. *burbles proudly*

Update: and here's the strip (click to enlarge)

Double Talk: more Indian comics please!

One of the most enjoyable things I read this weekend was Manjula Padmanabhan’s Double Talk, a collection of some of the comic strips that appeared under the same name in the Sunday Observer, Bombay, between 1982 and 1986. The strips were built around the character of Suki, a free-thinking, 20-something young woman, who, as her creator puts it, “started life as an alter-ego but soon developed a persona of her own”.

One tends to be patronising about the (lack of) with-it-ness of previous generations, about how we’re so much more clued in today than people were earlier. Which is why I was surprised to find that a comic strip like this was possible in the early 1980s; “Double Talk” is wryly irreverent (and consequently insightful) about topics like work, feminism, atheism, vegetarianism and political correctness in general, and it’s easy to see why it generated so much hate-mail (the book’s back cover includes a collage of the letters to the editor, variously accusing Padmanabhan of self-indulgence, swollen-headedness and a good many other things).

While the collection tapers off towards the end - some annoying characters, like a lovesick frog and an extraterrestrial get too much space for my liking - it’s still great fun on the whole. I also liked what the author says in her Introduction:

“Unless local strips are actively critiqued and appraised by their readers, local cartoonists will remain minor curiosities, never becoming the pop-sociologists that the best international strip cartoonists are. More than anything else, cartoonists need engaged and intelligent readers.”

It is a bit strange, this lack of quality indigenous comic strips, especially considering the large fan following here of international strips like “Calvin & Hobbes”, “Dilbert” and “Non Sequitur”. Quite likely it’s because this country has so many sacred cows that talented writer-illustrators prefer to stifle their creativity rather than risk getting into trouble with the moral police. And of course, I’m not sure how much encouragement would be forthcoming from the editors of mainstream newspapers anyway.

A final word of endorsement: Double Talk took me less than 30 minutes to get through (though of course it will be reread soon, as all good comics should be). That isn’t the best thing about the book, but it’s a major bonus where I’m concerned.

P.S. Manjula Padmanabhan’s blog is here.