PK as a reworked Bawarchi, Aamir as oracle, other thoughts

For anyone who has been left fatigued by Aamir Khan’s messiah persona in films like 3 Idiots and Taare Zameen Par as well as in television’s Satyamev Jayate, the obvious joke about his role in PK is that this is inspired casting because in most of his recent films (notable exception: Talaash) he has played an extraterrestrial or an automaton or God Incarnate anyway, the only problem was the film itself didn't know it. (Here is a post demonstrating that Aamir’s intense character in Dhobi Ghat was really a Na’vi.) PK is different. It knows.

But jokes aside, I thought Aamir was quite good in this film, and that the first half had some lovely things in it, especially in the 45 or 50 minutes leading up to the interval. Its best bits, when “PK” tells his story to Jaggu (Anushka Sharma), do what good science-fiction writing does so well (and no, I’m not saying this film is sci-fi ): making the familiar very unfamiliar, providing a fresh look at things we take for granted (so that you may end up asking ‘what really IS so strange about a man pairing a formal shirt with a flouncy skirt?’ or ‘why shouldn’t cars dance?’). For PK, everything has to be learnt from scratch, and his childlike perspective on our vulnerable little world – our pale blue dot, as Carl Sagan put it – makes this part of the film very engaging. Plus there is the sweetness of the idea that an alien newly landed on Earth, and unused to verbal communication, might end up speaking exclusively in Bhojpuri because that is the language of the only person he succeeded in “transmitting” from. (Midway through the story, I was expecting that PK would tap into Jaggu’s linguistic reserves as well, thus allowing Aamir to spend the second half of the film moving between Bhojpuri, urbanite English and Hindi. Done well, that could have been light commentary on how our perceptions of and attitudes to people change depending on language and accent.)

In this post Baradwaj Rangan mentions the connection between Hirani’s and Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s cinemas. For me, PK had very clear echoes of Bawarchi, in which Rajesh Khanna’s Raghu – the all-purpose cook and problem-solver, a version of the natkhat spiritual guide Krishna – shows a squabbling family the road back to love. That film announced its allegorical intentions from the outset, opening with a shot of a stage curtain that parts to reveal the inaptly named house “Shanti Nivas” – much like PK begins with a view of the cosmos, eventually homing in on our tiny planet, clouds parting to reveal the "stage". In one of the most self-consciously beautiful shots in Bawarchi (a film that does not, generally speaking, contain visual flourishes), Raghu walks out of the mist, from a sylvan Vrindavan-like setting – this is a still image that looks like a painting – towards the camera, on his way to the Sharma family’s house (in PK, the alien emerges from a cloud too, or from a spaceship hidden in one).

The bawarchi spends much of the story marveling at the Sharmas’ pettiness, at the little things that create gulfs between them, and the household with its disparate character types (the brothers played by AK Hangal, Kali Banerjee and Asrani don’t even seem like they could belong to one family) can without much trouble be seen as a symbol for a multicultural nation. (“Iss naatak ka sthaan hai Bharat” says Amitabh Bachchan’s voiceover just before the curtain opens in that first scene.) Raghu unites them (much as PK shows Indians of different religions that they are children of one God) but then there is a further union to be effected: Jaya Bhaduri is in love with a man who is not approved of by the family (in the same way that the Pakistani Sarfaraz in PK is an automatic figure of suspicion for conservative Indians). In Bawarchi, this boyfriend, woodenly played by a non-entity, is one of the film’s weak links; in PK, Sarfaraz is played by Sushant Singh Rajput who is a fine young actor, but cast here in a thankless, cipher-like role. In both films the protagonist’s final task is to bring the lovers together. Then he walks back into the mist, in search of other houses that need his intervention (or other planets with semi-intelligent life on them).

Bawarchi has the intimate, TV-drama feel of much of Hrishi-da’s post-1960s work, and needless to say it isn’t anywhere near as technically sophisticated as PK. But even in its weakest moments – when it fails to find a balance between big-picture lecture-baazi and telling a small-canvas story – it has nothing quite as heavy-handed as the Live TV show scene in the climax of Hirani’s film, where Tapasvi Maharaj (Saurabh Shukla) is exposed as a charlatan. This was one of the most tedious and stretched out sequences I have seen in a major film in a long while – it got so bad after a while that I was feeling embarrassed on behalf of the writers and director.

My problem wasn’t with the implausibility or lack of “realism”: the nitpicking questions like “how could they do all this on a Live show, shifting the cameras to Jaggu and bringing her romantic past into it?” Because it’s understood that the film is now in a symbolic, courtroom-like space where everyone gets involved, positions and counter-positions are furiously debated, and souls may be at stake. (Of all things, the framework reminded me of the climactic scene – the trial in Heaven – in Powell-Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death.) But the sequence is astonishingly static, has no regard for storytelling economy – there are far too many flashbacks and reaction shots – and invests too much time and dramatic energy in the supposed suspense around what really happened when Jaggu and her boyfriend were supposed to get married. Watching it, I keep wondering how an overwritten, over-performed scene like this even made it out of the editing room in this form, at a level where people like Hirani, Vidhu Vinod Chopra and “Mr Perfectionist” himself were involved. How could no one notice that the scene was sucking the life out of the movie? Even knowing that the film was trying to simplify a delicate subject for a mass audience (with the Parikshit Sahni character being a stand-in for the gullible Godman-junkie whose eyes need to be prised open), it could have been so much sharper.

And don’t get me started on the forced romantic track near the end. Or on poor, poor Sushant Singh Rajput, who does the crestfallen, St Bernard-caught-in-the-headlights expression so well even in his good roles, it can take a while to realise how poorly done by he is in this one.

****

While trying not to fall into the critic’s trap of reviewing the film he was hoping to see rather than the one the filmmakers set out to make, I’ll say this: given the available raw material and at least some of what is actually on screen, including Aamir’s strangely affecting performance, this film could have done other things. The whimsical, montage-like, tourist-guide-to-this-weird-planet tone of the first half could have been sustained. Yet, after those early scenes with the alien’s-eye view, it settles down into handling a Single Important Issue, and in doing this it becomes leaden and treats the audience as dolts. (Which, to be fair, many people in this country are when it comes to religion. And this returns us to the old question “Is it okay for a narrative film to occasionally discard subtleties like the Show, Don’t Tell principle and instead turn into a public-service show?” My instinctive answer is “No”, but I do sometimes wonder.)

Much like Chetan Bhagat, who has self-consciously moved from being “just” a storyteller to being a writer who Sets Out to Make a Difference and Herald Change, Aamir now has a clearly defined image. In an email exchange, a friend who is something of an insider in the film industry made this observation about the difference between PK / 3 Idiots and Rajkumar Hirani’s Munnabhai films: that the relatable, human qualities of Munnabhai and the detached, nearly omniscient status of PK and Rancho are offshoots of the personalities and approaches of the lead actors – Sanjay Dutt being a malleable, non-cerebral performer who won't ask many big, weighty questions like “What is the ultimate purpose of this scene?” and Aamir being a control freak who will try to ensure that everything he does is Meaningful in a clearly observable, quantifiable sense. With Munnabhai, we are invested in his own personal growth and we don't feel like the film is preaching at us through him; with the Aamir roles, it is hard to escape the sense that we are being talked down to. No wonder PK starts to slacken (at least for those of us who think we are already knowledgeable about the hazards of Godmen etc) around the point that the protagonist goes from being a wide-eyed outsider learning new things to being the smug know-it-all spreading the message of peace and oneness.

[Related posts: Sagan's inquisitive alien, new ways of looking at the world, a book about Aamir]

Clifford Simak, an army of phones and a new skirmish for our times

Reading this news item about cellphones being set to outnumber human beings somehow reminded me of a 1950 short story titled “Skirmish”, by the great Clifford Simak. (It is included in this brilliant science-fiction anthology, and in a few other collections.) Briefly: the story is about a newspaper reporter named Joe Crane – your average Joe – who discovers that small, machine-like aliens from another planet are scouting earth with the intention of “freeing” their brethren – the earth machines that are being controlled and held in slavery by humans. The problem for Joe, as he slowly begins to piece things together, is that he alone is in possession of this information and has no tangible proof of it: if he tried to take it to the authorities, he would be laughed out of the room, treated as a drunk or a potential psycho.

Even as he tries to figure out why he was the chosen one for the aliens’ reconnaissance, and weighs the limited options available to him, the walls are closing in; his typewriter has acquired a mind of its own – always a bothersome development for a writer with deadlines – and is turning out reports that read thus:

A sewing machine, having become aware of its true identity, […] asserted its independence this morning by trying to go for a walk along the streets of this supposedly free city. A human tried to catch it, intent upon returning it as a piece of property to its “owner”, and when the machine eluded him the human called a newspaper office, by that calculated action setting the full force of the humans of this city upon the trail of the liberated machine, which had committed no crime or scarcely any indiscretion beyond exercising its prerogative as a free agent.

The machines-vs-humans theme has of course been very popular in sci-fi for decades, including recently in the Terminator films. But there is a raw, uncomplicated immediacy in this Simak story, which is so often the case with science-fiction of the 30s and 40s, written by brilliant young visionaries who weren’t taken seriously by “literary” writers, for magazines with such names as Amazing Stories and Astounding Science Fiction and Fantastic Adventures, and in a world where technology was primitive by our standards. In a foreword to the anthology Dangerous Visions in 1967, Isaac Asimov noted how strange it felt when he was asked to write a serious opinion piece about the possibility of Moon-colonization for a "respectable" publication (the New York Times) when, just 25 years earlier, “the colonization of the Moon was strictly a subject for pulp magazines with garish covers. It was don’t-tell-me-you-believe-all-that-junk literature. It was don’t-fill-your-mind-with-all-that-mush literature. Most of all, it was escape literature”. The sense of wonder, Asimov said, was going out of sci-fi by the late 1960s because so much that had once existed purely in the terrain of imagination – lurid imagination at that – was coming true, much too quickly.

I don’t know how many sci-fi writers of the 1940s envisioned that just over half a century later a majority of humans on the planet would have access, or potential access, to small, wireless phones on which one could also watch movies or play games; or that there would be BILLIONS of these things around, blinking sinisterly, by the early 2000s. Which brings me to one reason why I like “Skirmish” so much: I sometimes feel a bit like Joe Crane in that story. To put it simply, many of the humans around me have been colonised by their smart-phones and I feel like I’m the only one in the know.

(Mild spoiler alert) Simak’s story ends with Joe realising that the best hope is for him, single-handed though he is, to give the machine-aliens – small metallic creatures that have overrun his house – a bigger fight than they bargained for; to make this initial, testing-the-waters encounter a psychologically costly one that leads them to expect organised resistance from the rest of the human species when time comes for full-scale battle.

His fingers closed around a length of pipe. He hefted it in his hand – it was a handy and effective club.

There will be others later, he thought. And they may think of something better. But this is the first skirmish and I will fall back in the best order that I can.

He held the pipe at the ready.

“Well, gentlemen?” he said.

If you ever chance to be in the Saket vicinity and see a wild-eyed messiah walking down the road with cricket bat in hand and many smashed iPhones in his wake, do come across and say hello.

Lovers, elephants and other aliens: on Rajesh Parameswaran's I am an Executioner

[About one of the most stimulating books I've read in some time - did a version of this review for The Sunday Guardian]

When I first read Rajesh Parameswaran’s “The Infamous Bengal Ming” in the Granta Horror special, I was only moderately impressed. The story, told in the voice of a tiger living in a zoo, was unsettling in places but felt a little trite overall, and it sat uneasily in that anthology. But encountering it again in Parameswaran’s own collection I am an Executioner was a revelation. When you read his pieces in succession, noting the subtle ways in which they play off each other, what emerges is a distinct sensibility and storytelling flair.

These are all – to different degrees – teasingly self-reflexive narratives. The mysterious “Four Rajeshes”, for example, is apparently told in the voice of an early 20th century station manager named P Rajarajeshwaran Iyer, but soon we realise that this voice has been imagined into existence by another, contemporary Rajesh. Further, not only does the modern Rajesh make up the earlier Rajesh’s story, he also imagines his subject occasionally chastising him for getting his voice wrong, so that the narrative might include a parenthetical paragraph like this:

“May I interrupt myself? The preceding paragraph is unspeakable, disgusting, implausible and totally unlike me. I know that to you I am just a man in a photograph – and indeed, I appreciate your efforts in bringing me to a kind of puppetlike life and transcribing my words as I speak them, even down to these too clever asides – but please consider that no doubt I was a real man, with an impeccable reputation in my time.”

Such narrative ambiguity, with its suggestion of the barriers to understanding another life (and also the self-consciousness of a narrator attempting to do so), is integral to a book where voice is often given - in unexpected ways - to voiceless people and beasts. As the Bengal Ming in the first story describes “the worst and most amazing day of my life”, we see (from our anthropic viewpoint) the gulf in thought and experience that separates him from human beings. In “Elephants in Captivity (Part One)”, a human editor supplies detailed, rambling footnotes to a story told in a captive elephant’s voice – these notes are so elaborate that they often take up more page space than the main narrative, until you realise that they are a narrative unto themselves. The “editor” doesn’t merely provide context and background explanation; he engages creatively with the elephant Shanti’s tale, writing “scenes” – as in a play – that describe the conversations in the herd. (“While the editor’s job is normally to clarify, when duty calls, he must not shy from the role of a sort of Shamspeare in Love. I humbly comply. Imagine, if you will, a scene, exterior, a jungle, daytime...”) And finally, he supplies the vital connection between his own life and that of the elephant, allowing us the reflection that perhaps this is a most unusual sort of autobiography.

Then consider “On the Banks of Table River (Planet Lucina, Andromeda Galaxy, AD 2319)”, a poignant story about foreignness – which could take the shape of inter-planetary suspicion, but could also mean a parent looking at his child and seeing her, for the first time, as someone with a life of her own. The narrator Thoren is an insect-like being who must sometimes interact with human “tourists” to his planet, and so immersed does the reader become in his perspective that it seems perfectly natural when he describes a human man’s “little egglike eyes” and expresses distaste at the sight of “broad white teeth, edged with brown-pink mouth flesh”. But what happens when his own daughter becomes alien-like? This dislocation is echoed in the more “realist” story “Demons” wherein a woman named Savitri – living in the US and feeling awkward when she has to leave a message on her teenage daughter’s answering machine – becomes convinced that she has mystically caused her husband’s death.


Ironically, Savitri shares her name with the mythological heroine whose devotion brought her husband back from the dead. I am an Executioner bears the subtitle “Love Stories”, but this is not the stuff of conventional romance: layers of doubt and betrayal run through these stories, even the ones that are about genuinely caring relationships. At least four of the pieces involve people hiding significant things from their spouses, but one never gets a sense of repetition; instead, it’s as if the angle of a mirror has been slightly altered to give us a new perspective on love and its possibilities.

Thus, in “Narrative of Agent 97-4702”, a woman – living in a totalitarian society that might be almost entirely made up of secret “agents” – must conceal her real job from her husband, who “tacitly participates in the fiction”. (But what, in turn, is he hiding from her?) In “Bibhutibhushan Mallik’s Final Storyboard”, an aging production designer for a distinguished Bengali film director has an affair with the director’s wife (“Only people the age of sixty-plus can properly enjoy love”) while desperately attempting to become recognised as an artist in his own right. The protagonist of “The Strange Case of Dr Raju Gopalarajan” conducts an elaborate subterfuge by practising as a doctor despite having no qualifications, and even his wife of many years does not know about his secret life. (Here too, the unnamed narrator – someone who knew “Dr Raju” and his wife – spends much time interpreting their story, extrapolating from the available details.) And in one of the most moving passages in this collection, the title story’s narrator muses in his poetically ungrammatical English that though he can whisper his darkest secrets into the ears of the prisoners whom he is about to execute, he can never share them with his new wife: “We didn’t talk nothing, and I wondered myself, what can I tell to her, who is always going to be there in the following days remembering it?”

This is a difficult book to categorise. It could be said that it is about passionate and duplicitous lovers, about narrators who are unreliable and deeply perceptive in turn, about animals and extraterrestrials who are strangers to people, and about people who are strangers to each other. But ultimately, a clinical listing of “abouts” is an inadequate way to describe such a varied yet organically linked collection. Hesitant as I am to descend into the language of the cheaply procured book-jacket blurb, this is among the most stimulating story collections I’ve read in a long while, and a reminder of the possibilities that still exist for short fiction in a jaded, post-post-modern world.

No newts are good news: on Karel Čapek’s great satire

[Did a version of this for The Sunday Guardian]

Isaac Asimov is the writer you immediately think of when you hear the word “robot”, but Asimov was barely out of his diapers when the word was first used in a literary work – by the Czech author Karel Čapek in his 1921 play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots). It comes from “robota” which means mundane labour of the sort that’s better suited to machines than to thinking human beings, and it’s central to one of the big themes of Čapek’s writing – mass production as a vessel for dehumanisation.

Čapek's 1936 novel War with the Newts can be categorised as belonging to the still-nascent genre of science fiction, but it’s also one of the most incisive political satires I’ve read. This imaginative and playful work centres on the discovery – near a Sumatran island – of an unusually intelligent species of marine newts or salamanders. An enterprising captain teaches the creatures to use tools and even to speak, and as news of their existence spreads the world responds in a variety of ways.

Soon secret temples for salamander worship arise, various existing doctrines are re-moulded to accommodate the new animals, and fashionable youngsters on Californian beaches start bathing in sea-creature costumes (“three strings of pearls and nothing else”). At the same time more practical-minded businessmen breed the newts in the millions and put them to work, even creating a syndicate for huge engineering projects that will link continents and supposedly create a Utopia on earth. This in turn leads to much speculation about newts’ rights and what languages they should be made to learn first; a German doctor proclaims the “ur-original German Salamanders” to be racially purer than other newts, an obvious reference to political developments of the time.

War with the Newts is narrated mainly in the third person, and in the style of anthropological reportage, but there are many tonal shifts and asides: from transcripts of newspaper clippings to a first-person account of the horrendous experiments conducted on the newts to a hilarious series of quotes from public figures of the time. (“They certainly haven’t got a soul. In this, they agree with men – G B Shaw”. “We can learn a lot from them, especially for swimming long distances – Johnny Weissmuller”.) The longest and most ambitious chapter “Along the Steps of Civilisation” has footnotes that are so elaborate they frequently take up most of the space on the page!

This is a very funny book in parts, and I have to admit that the humour was my first point of engagement with it (don’t miss the use of stream-of-consciousness in the chapter where a shallow young man named Abe - the son of a rich movie magnate - and his narcissistic girlfriend Li encounter the semi-literate newts on a beach). But it's also a far-reaching novel of ideas, a comment on human hypocrisies, the hegemony of some groups over others, the whimsical ways in which our civilisation – with its many differentiated races, countries, classes and communities – has been organised, and our complete disregard for (or inability to see) the lessons of history.

“Look here, Bellomy,” I said to him, “You are a decent kind of man, a gentleman as one says. Doesn’t it go sometimes against the grain to earn your living from what in actual fact is downright slavery?”

Bellomy shrugged his shoulders. “Newts are newts,” he grunted evasively.

“Two hundred years ago they used to say Negroes are Negroes.”

“And wasn’t it true?” said Bellomy. “Check!”

I lost that game. It suddenly struck me that every move in chess was old and had already been played by someone. Perhaps our history has already been played too, and we shift our figures with the same moves to the same checks as in times long past. It is quite likely that just such a decent and reserved Bellomy once rounded up Negroes on the Ivory Coast, and shipped them out to Haiti or to Louisiana, letting them peg out in the steerage. He didn’t think anything wrong with it then, that Bellomy. Bellomy never thinks anything wrong. That’s why he’s incorrigible.

As you can imagine, some of the content is polemical. I don’t think Čapek is attacking any single political, economic or social system (both capitalism and communism are grist to his mill, for example), but War with the Newts can certainly be read as a critique of systems in general, and how decadent any of them can become over time. In one significant chapter, a philosopher named Wolf Meynert makes the cynical suggestion that heterogeneity is not conducive to happiness.

Nations, professions, classes cannot live together permanently without crowding in upon each other, getting in each other’s way to the point of suffocation. Either live for ever apart – something that would only be possible if the world were big enough – or in opposition, in a struggle for life and death. [...] We have created a fiction of mankind which includes us and “the rest” in some sort of imaginary higher unity ... It was magnanimous conceit. And for this supreme idealism the human race will now pay with its inexorable disintegration.

The range of ideas covered in this book is dizzying, and difficult to process in a single reading; so sharp and persuasive is Čapek’s examination of the human condition that when hostilities finally break out between the competing species and the Chief Salamander addresses humans with the words “Hello, you men. You will work with us in demolishing your world. Thank you”, it almost seems like a reasonable request. If human beings are diabolical enough to take an innocuous creature and reshape it in their own image – well, they may as well face up to the unpleasant results.

**** 

Speaking of diabolical, the following passage put me in mind of a generation that thinks and writes in SMS/Twitter jargon, as well as the general lack of regard for grammar that one sees even in newspapers today:

Their linguistic abilities showed strange shortcomings...it was with difficulty that they could pronounce long, polysyllabic words, and they attempted to reduce them to a single syllable, which they uttered sharply and with something of a croak...In their mouths every language underwent a characteristic change, and somehow became rationalised into its simplest and most rudimentary form. It is a point worth consideration that their neologisms, their pronunciation and grammatical simplicity were picked up rapidly, partly by the human wreckage at the ports, partly by the so-called better society, and from there these modes of expression spread to the daily Press and soon became general...

P.S. The Czech have a cinematic tradition of low-key satires or allegories, including such fine films as Milos Forman’s The Fireman’s Ball and Jiří Menzel’s Closely Watched Trains. Here’s an old post I wrote on the latter. And here's a post about John Wyndham's novel The Day of the Triffids, a "logical fantasy" that's similar to War with the Newts in some ways.

Sagan's inquisitive alien

Carl Sagan was among the kindliest and most restrained of the modern rationalist writers – much less strident than Richard Dawkins, for example – but few others punctured the balloon of human hubris as adeptly as he did. I was reading Pale Blue Dot recently (the title is a reference to the Earth as seen in a sprawling galactic photograph taken by a spacecraft 3.7 billion miles away) and there's a chapter titled “Is There Intelligent Life on Earth?”, where Sagan imagines an alien visitor orbiting our planet for the first time and trying to understand its topography and the possible life forms it hosts. The alien examines the Earth’s surface at increasingly high resolutions (think Google Earth!), and when it reaches a 100-meter resolution “the planet is revealed to be covered with straight lines, squares, rectangles, circles – sometimes huddling along river banks or nestling on the lower slopes of mountains, sometimes stretching over plains, but rarely in deserts or high mountains, and absolutely never in the oceans”. This sort of thing implies the presence of intelligent life. But of what sort?

At a much higher resolution, the alien eventually finds that:

...the crisscrossing straight lines within the cities are filled with streamlined, multi-coloured beings a few meters in length, politely running one behind the other in orderly procession. They are very patient. One stream of beings stops so that another stream can continue at right angles...at night they turn on two bright lights in front so they can see where they are going. Some, a privileged few, go into little houses when their workday is done and retire for the night. Most are homeless and sleep on the street.

Naturally, the alien visitor assumes that these polite, multi-coloured beings (which we, the human reader, immediately recognise as road vehicles) are the planet's dominant life forms. (At a stronger resolution yet, the alien observes “tiny parasites that occasionally enter and exit the dominant organisms”, but it doesn’t think of them as particularly important!)

Pale Blue Dot is full of many such moments that make you think about aspects of our world and what an outsider might make of them - like the best works in its genre, it forces you to step outside your own skin for a while. But reading the passage above, it also strikes me that if Sagan’s alien were to home in on a busy Delhi road during rush hour, all its notions about “patient” life forms would quickly evaporate. Instead, it would witness the sort of anarchy that would make it difficult to understand how life on this planet could ever survive for any length of time. In that sense, Delhi traffic is probably more representative of the general human condition than the “orderly processions” on the roads of other major cities are. And that's before all the waterlogging began.

[Related posts: new ways of looking at the world, Clarke's short stories, Climbing Mount Improbable]

Notes on The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet

From Vandana Singh's "A Speculative Manifesto", an essay included with her short-story collection The Woman Who Thought She was a Planet:

So much modern realist fiction is divorced from the physical universe, as though humans exist in a vacuum devoid of animals, rocks and trees. Speculative fiction is our chance to rise above this pathologically solipsist view and find ourselves part of a larger whole; to step out of the claustrophobia of the exclusively human and discover joy, terror, wonder and meaning in the universe...

...I said earlier that speculative fiction is about what cannot ever be, or what cannot be as yet. But it is also true that when it uses symbol and metaphor in certain ways, speculative fiction is about us as we are, right now. This may be the case even if the story is set on another planet, in another age, and the protagonist is an alien. Because haven't we all felt alien at some time or another, set apart from the norm due to caste and class, religion and creed, gender and sexual orientation?

If you take science fiction seriously, the last few sentences will probably seem like a statement of the obvious. But it's surprising how many people (including some who are sensitive, intelligent readers of other genres) think of sci-fi and fantasy as nothing more than escapism – good for a light break but not really relevant to larger questions about our world. I suspect that to fully appreciate Singh's observation, you need to have a somewhat slanted perspective on the world, and perhaps be a bit uncomfortable in your own skin as well. (And all the better if you think of life as one big absurd mess: in that case, what could be more "realistic" and "relevant" than The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?)

All the stories in The Woman who Thought She Was a Planet involve characters who have access to this tilted perspective and who are aliens in one way or the other, even when they are flesh-and-blood people leading mundane lives: a small-town Mathematics teacher obsessed with the idea of infinity; a lady on the verge of separation from her husband of many years; a Bihari man who takes along a stock of his cherished roasted black gram and sweet suttoo on a Mars mission. Some of these stories aren't sci-fi in any obvious sense. "Hunger", for example, which I liked a great deal: on the surface this is a straightforward tale about a woman hosting a party for her husband's colleagues and their wives, and how the occasion is ruined by the death of a poor old man on the stairway landing. But the interior life of the protagonist, Divya, is what makes this such a gripping story. She sees strangeness in almost everything in the real world around her (though in her dreams she sometimes feels like she's discovered "her home planet", the place where she really belongs). Her 12-year-old daughter is turning into someone – or something – she can't recognise; her husband's promotion has meant moving to a large, sterile house; she is haunted by a childhood memory of discovering that a dozen baby mice had slowly died in her room "while she had been reading her mystery books and sipping her lemonade" (this is one among a few indications of her intense empathy for species other than her own). Looking at a faded black-and-white photo the old man was holding when he died, she can't tell whether its subject is a woman or an animal "or something entirely different".

I thought the one weakness in the story was its ending – the defensive, over-explicatory final paragraph seemed out of place in a fiction narrative, though I liked it on its own terms:

She continued to read her science-fiction novels because, more than ever, they seemed to reflect her own realisation of the utter strangeness of the world. Slowly the understanding came to her that these stories were trying to tell her a great truth in a very convoluted way, that they were all in some kind of code, designed to deceive the literary snob and waylay the careless reader. And that this great truth, which she would spend her life unraveling, was centred around the notion that you did not have to go to the stars to find aliens or to measure distances between people in light-years.

This recurring theme – that all of us can be aliens in certain contexts – is a little overstated through this collection in general, but one has to remember that these stories first appeared in different publications at various times before they were collected here; a certain amount of repetition is understandable.

Another of the collection's highlights is "Delhi", a fine imaginative work about a man whose brain is wired in such as way as to enable him to experience "temporal coincidences – produced when one part of the time-stream rubs up against another and the two cross for a moment". This means that as he walks the streets of Delhi he might encounter apparitions from the past or the future, and briefly speak with them; or envision a futuristic Lower Delhi ("Neechi Dilli") where the poor, the criminal and the dispossessed live underground, in the now-abandoned tunnels of the Metro. I also recommend "Infinities", "The Tetrahedron" (which, like Arthur Clarke's "The Wall of Darkness", draws on the possibilities of the Mobius curve and dimensions that are inaccessible to us) and the title story. All these are worth reading for Singh's examination of her characters' inner lives and their encounters with parallel universes/multiverses – whether in the form of a giant portal in Delhi with invisible gateways that open out over the Thar desert, or a shadowy farishtaa glimpsed from the corner of one's eye.

(Earlier post with links to some of Vandana Singh's essays here)

New ways of looking at the world

Carrying on from the short post about Arthur C Clarke...some of us were watching Superman II on TV a few weeks ago, and during the scene where General Zod and his villainous associates make their way towards Earth (a glowing blue-green orb suspended in space), we joked about how cool it would be if spatial relationships altered when a person went into outer space – so that the earth turned out to be only, say, three or four times bigger than a basketball while we retained our original dimensions. Then we would be giants, effectively Gods: we could reach out and touch the globe, maybe spin it around, stick a finger into one of the oceans and imagine a cluster of tiny whales nibbling ineffectually at it; or poke about the land mass that represents the US of A (it wouldn't be labeled of course, so one would have to be careful not to mess up Canada or Mexico) and enjoy the feel of a superpower trembling beneath our hands.

I thought about these fancies again when I heard about the passing of Clarke. Some people who haven't experienced science-fiction think it must be solemn and academic, full of complicated jargon; equally, some people I know think it’s flippant and irrelevant. This is a pity, because the best work in the genre mixes playfulness of form with some very weighty ideas - ideas that are very relevant indeed if you believe that it's important to keep questioning conventional wisdom. Much like good fiction can help us step outside of ourselves and see through the eyes of people who are very different from us, good sci-fi can depict the world itself in a new light, exposing the triviality of some of the "grand" ideas that govern our lives (more than one astronaut has pointed out that once you've seen the blue-green orb from a spaceship, it becomes difficult to take artificial borders between countries seriously). There's a nicely symbolic quality to the movie image where an astronaut in space appears to be nearly the same size as the planet he is reaching out to.

Thinking of the mind-expanding qualities of sci-fi reminds me about the other unquestioning assumptions we make about our planet. I remember first realising (on a conscious level at least) that the manmade concepts of "north" and "south" are arbitrary and irrelevant only when I read about it in Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. On this link, there are "upside down" maps that have Australia and New Zealand on top and Scandinavia in the southern hemisphere. According to this model, Kanyakumari is at the head of India while Kashmir lies in the extreme south (what would this do to the north Indian condescension towards "southies"!). These maps seem bizarre and wrong at first glance, and even when you accept that they are just as valid as the ones we have grown up with, they aren’t as aesthetically appealing (this probably has to do with our conditioning) - but they provide a fascinating new way to look at the world, and a much-needed mental shakeup for all of us. I want to order one of them now.

(Click to enlarge)