The Devil and Ms Proulx

I’ve been enjoying Annie Proulx's new short-story collection Fine Just the Way It Is. Proulx, who wrote “Brokeback Mountain” (and probably regrets it now – see the last bit of this interview), sets most of these tales around the farms and ranches of Wyoming, and if you don't know much about life in rural America some of the colloquialisms can take getting used to. But these are very well-paced stories about weather-beaten people struggling with the vicissitudes of life in the outdoors; the especially notable ones include “Them Old Cowboy Songs” and “The Great Divide”.

Also, three notable exceptions to the contemporary-Wyoming rule: “Deep-Blood-Greasy-Bowl”, in which Proulx imagines a bison hunt that might have taken place 2,500 years ago on the same land where her own house now stands; and two droll stories about how Satan passes the time. In “I’ve Always Loved This Place”, the Devil decides to remodel Hell by adding a tenth circle (“to accommodate an increasing number of Total Bastards, most of them American businessmen”) and by creating a particularly hazardous obstacle course for the many pro cyclists in his (His?) domain. And in “Swamp Mischief” he has some fun with residents of the virtual world.

Fetch some e-mail," said the Lord of Darkness. Although he rarely received any messages himself, the Devil had ordered a few of his hackers roasting over eternal fires to collect strangers' e-mail from the Upper World. He had been bored the last few hundred years with very little to do but wait ever since he had put certain observations of steam kettles into the head of a young Scot inventor. The kettle epiphany had booted a species – selfish, clever creatures with poor impulse control, suited to hunt, gather and scratch a little agriculture – into a savagely technological civilisation that got rapidly out of hand and sent them blundering toward The End.

Meanwhile he bides his time by manipulating these poor humans in various ways – such as sending forth a swarm of pterodactyls to confound a group of biologists somewhere in the Midwest. It isn’t immediately obvious what the two Devil stories are doing in this collection, but Proulx has a lot of fun with them. And then again, why not? After all, some of the things that befall the characters in the more earthbound tales could well have been engineered by a diabolical Fallen Angel. Here's a passage from "The Sagebrush Kid", in which a childless woman's attempts to adopt a piglet and a chicken end in tragedy – following which she directs her maternal feelings towards flora.

Mizpah Fur, heartbroken and suffering from loneliness, next fixed her attention on an inanimate clump of sagebrush that at twilight took on the appearance of a child reaching upward as if piteously begging to be lifted from the ground. This sagebrush became the lonely woman's passion. She surreptitiously brought it a daily dipper of water (mixed with milk) and took pleasure in its growth response, ignoring the fine cactus needles that pierced her worn moccasins. At first her husband watched from afar, muttering sarcastically, then himself succumbed to the illusion, pulling up all grass and encroaching plants that might steal sustenance from the favoured herb. Mizpah tied a red sash around the sagebrush's middle. It seemed more than ever a child stretching its arms up, even when the sun leached the wind-fringed sash to pink and then dirty-white.

Time passed, and the sagebrush, nurtured and cosseted as neither piglet nor chicken nor few human infants had ever been – for Mizpah had taken to mixing gravy and meat juice with its water – grew tremendously. At twilight it now looked like a big man hoisting his hands into the air at the command to stick em up.

From here, the story proceeds in an unexpected direction. I’ll only say that the Venus Flytrap is a meek little tulsi plant compared to this sturdy young sagebrush, and that you need long branches if you’re dining with the Devil.

Murder most refined

In other news, guess which hugely popular book turned 75 this month?

I’ve been asked to do a short feature about Agatha Christie for The Hindu. This is a bit daunting because it’s been at least 15 years since I read the last of her books, but it’s always nice to revisit something like Murder on the Orient Express. It’s such a good example of Christie’s talent for taking a vicious murder and spinning a genteel, homely whodunit out of it. The premise of this book – a victim with 12 stab wounds, a snowstorm that prevents anyone from entering or leaving the train, thereby narrowing the list of suspects to the people who are on board – is inherently claustrophobic, threatening and unpleasant, but in her hands it becomes a refined mystery where Hercule Poirot’s deductive powers have the reader gripped and reassured at once. And where even the murderer, once unmasked, is likely to be ruefully courteous rather than dangerous. They don’t write them like that anymore.

P.S. Some of my favourite Christies, not that anyone asked: Murder in Retrospect (the first Christie I read), And Then There Were None (original, politically incorrect title Ten Little Niggers), Crooked House, Taken at the Flood, Death on the Nile, Hercule Poirot’s Christmas and Appointment with Death. Incidentally the last two involve large families and the killing of an elderly person whose domineering personality gave many different people motives for murder. (Both books also end on a comforting note for the reader, confirming the uprightness of all the likable characters and allowing the basic fabric of the family to stay intact. Perfection!)

Jaipur Literature Festival ’09

A shout-out for this year’s edition of the Jaipur Literature Festival, which is taking place from January 21-25 at the usual venue, the scenic Diggi Palace. Details are on the official website, including the (not fully updated) schedule of events. Many big names in attendance, including Michael Ondaatje (still to be confirmed, I think), Vikram Seth, Pico Iyer, Colin Thubron, Tina Brown and Nandan Nilekani, but as always many of the lower-profile sessions will be worth attending – and easier to find seating space for. Some potential highlights:

- “Writers’ Chain: Found in Translation” – a session that comes as a follow-up to a week in Neemrana, where four poets from the UK spent time with four Indian authors, exploring each other’s work through translation.

- “Celebrating Vijay Dandetha”, a tribute to the Rajasthani writer, with the screening of a short film about his work

- A reading by the Malaysian author Tash Aw

- “Shehar dar Shehar”, with Alka Saraogi, Govind Mathur, Satya Narayana and Udayan Vajpeyi

- “Pabuji and the Bhopa”, featuring Mohan Bhopa, practitioner of a traditional storytelling art of Rajasthan, and William Dalrymple

- “Where is Sanskrit?”, a conversation between Sheldon Pollock, Alok Bhalla and Ananya Vajpeyi

I’ll be there for four days; am moderating the Hari Kunzru session on the 22nd (the focus will be his fine novel My Revolutions, which somehow didn’t attract much attention in India) and co-moderating the Chetan Bhagat session on the 23rd (wherein I hope to ask Chetan many incisive literary questions such as “You’re the first ever author to have been played by Salman Khan in a film. How does it feel, you lucky dude?!”).

See the full programme, and keep checking for updates.

[Some posts about previous editions of the festival: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Notes on Stanley Kubrick's The Killing

Alfred Hitchcock once referred to the swamp scene in Psycho – where Norman Bates attempts to sink the car containing Marion’s body – as an example of the viewer being made (at least temporarily) complicit in the carrying out of a morally undesirable act. In the long, intense, wordless sequence before this one we’ve watched Norman, a likeable young man, meticulously cleaning up traces of a murder committed by his vicious mother; if we’re really involved with the film at this point, chances are that we acquire something of an emotional stake in his efforts. So we want the swamp to swallow up the whole car. Besides, wouldn’t that be a good way to get the plot moving forward?

There are even better instances of such audience manipulation in other Hitchcock movies (Rope and Strangers on a Train among them) but for an example of a whole film that creates this effect, you probably need to watch one where nearly all the characters are crooks or wannabe crooks. Like Stanley Kubrick’s solid 1956 thriller The Killing, about a group of men carefully planning a racecourse heist, a plan that then begins to unravel on different levels.

The Killing is a very economical film with hardly a wasted shot, and given its short running time, it’s notable that even the minor characters are well-defined. (Key example: the Russian wrestler Maurice, who delivers an interesting monologue about gangsters and artists being the same in the eyes of the masses. "They are admired and hero-worshipped, but there is always present an underlying wish to see them destroyed at the peak of their glory.”) The narrative isn't chronological; instead, a fatalistic voiceover details the movements of different people at different times, in the style of a newsreel documentary. This technique feels a bit gimmicky at times, but it creates a sense of urgency and dread, and it fits the theme of each character being like a small piece in a jigsaw puzzle, vital to the successful completion of the project but unable to see what the larger picture will look like (an analogy that is explicitly made in an early scene). The one person who can see most of the puzzle is the plot mastermind Johnny Clay (played by Sterling Hayden, an underutilised actor), but even he spends much of the film on tenterhooks, clearly aware of everything that can go wrong.

And sure enough things start to get messy, not all at once but in small increments that accumulate dangerously. There are little miscommunications and errors in timing (how did people ever carry out heists in the days before cellphones?). A man hired to shoot a racehorse in order to provide a distraction finds himself pestered by an over-friendly parking attendant. Most crucially, one of the conspirators, a mild-mannered racecourse clerk, tells his wife about the scheme in a weak moment, and she passes on the information to her young boyfriend. Not everyone in the group seems to understand that to live outside the law you must be honest.

All of this leads to a superb climactic scene set at the airport where Johnny and his girlfriend are trying to make a getaway. I won’t give away the scene, but it’s a real lesson in how to build tension by putting a number of different elements in place beforehand (a large suitcase stuffed with dollar bills; an official who’s a stickler for the rules; a talkative woman and her yappy little dog; a plane taxiing onto the runway, its giant propellers whirring) and then combining them for a knockout punch. If you admired the way Johnny and his associates planned and executed their operation, this ending is a real heartbreaker too; the Scene Selection menu on my DVD labels the track “Crime doesn’t pay”, but just for a few moments you wish it had.

P.S. The Killing was one of the many films that influenced Sriram Raghavan’s excellent Johnny Gaddaar. Johnny Clay can be seen as a distant cousin of Raghavan’s Johnny, though there aren’t many similarities between the two men beyond their names and their involvement in a money-making scheme. (It’s typical of Raghavan’s playfulness and his knack for paying tribute simultaneously to multiple influences that the Johnny in his film borrows his name from the Dev Anand-starrer Johnny Mera Naam, and that “Johnny Gaddaar” itself is a riff on the title of another 1950s film Johnny Guitar, in which Sterling Hayden played the title role – how’s that for a complicated set of associations!) Incidentally another film that owes a small visual debt to The Killing is last year’s box-office smash The Dark Knight. (Two hints: “clown-mask” and “currency notes”!)

[Earlier posts on Kubrick films: Paths of Glory, Dr Strangelove, Spartacus]

Bharat ek Khoj on YouTube

In recent weeks things have been happening to revive happy memories of my Doordarshan-cocooned childhood. First I discovered Shemaroo DVDs of the beloved TV serial Yeh Jo Hai Zindagi, which used to be a Friday-evening fixture in the mid-1980s. Shortly after this, I found that several episodes of Bharat ek Khoj, Shyam Benegal's visualisation of Jawaharlal Nehru's Discovery of India, are now up on YouTube.

I shamefacedly admit to not following the show regularly when it first aired 20 years ago – it was too subdued for my taste. (What I did love, and made sure never to miss, was Vanraj Bhatia's beautiful soundtrack for the opening credits, accompanied by words from the famous creation verses in Book 10 of the Rig Veda, which are a rare instance of agnosticism/sceptical inquiry in ancient scripture.) But I'm enjoying it now. Haven't seen all the YouTube clips yet, but I've got through the Mahabharata ones along with a few others. Almost needless to say, Benegal's presentation of some of the epic's key scenes, spread over two episodes, is much earthier than the B R Chopra opus (which, incidentally, is also available on YouTube now). It draws on various artistic interpretations of the Mahabharata over the centuries, including a Kathakali performance that depicts, with gory relish, Bheema tearing out Duhshasana's entrails and using them to bind Draupadi's hair. Notable too are these two clips that show the dying moments of a repentant Duryodhana (played by Om Puri), in the company of Balarama and Ashwatthama as well as his grieving family – his blind parents, his wives and his son Durjaya. This scene is directly taken from Bhasa's play "Urubhangam" ("The Shattered Thigh"), which I mentioned in this post.

Also enjoyed little touches such as Roshan Seth's Jawaharlal Nehru primly stepping over broken weapons and other debris as he walks right onto the deserted battlefield before settling down to explain aspects of the epic to the viewer. (Note: excellent as this serial is, it isn't exactly faithful to Discovery of India – instead it uses the book's framework and Nehru's commentary to examine various facets of India's heterogeneous culture.)

P.S. While on Nehru, a quick recommendation: Walter Crocker's short, lucid biography Nehru: A Contemporary's Estimate, first published in 1966, just two years after Nehru's death, but now reprinted by Random House India with a foreword by Ramachandra Guha. Crocker was the Australian High Commissioner to India during much of Nehru's tenure as prime minister, and his is a sharply perceptive but affectionate portrait of Nehru as man and politician. Reading it, I had to keep reminding myself that the book was written very close to the events it describes - this is often hard to believe, because the level of observation and analysis (including philosophical reflections on the nature of power and the challenges it would present a man like Nehru) is such that you'd think it would have required the passage of several years. (Also hard to believe: some of the initial Indian reviews of the book thought Crocker was being too harsh. Perhaps it was because he didn't shy away from matter-of-factly noting what he felt were Nehru's shortcomings.) More on the book soon.

Something vaguely resembling a year-end list

Won’t do a detailed post about my favourite books and films of 2008, but here’s a quickly thrown together list. Generally speaking, there was a decline in my reading and (especially) movie-watching this year, but even so there’s been plenty to choose from, and I’m sure I’ve missed a few names here and there. Wherever applicable, the titles below are linked to blog posts I've written about them earlier. (For the titles that aren't linked to...well, do a Google search if you're interested enough!)

Favourite new (that is, published in 2008) read of the year: Musharraf Ali Farooqui's excellent translation of the Hamzanama, The Adventures of Amir Hamza.

Favourite books published earlier but read for the first time this year:
Climbing Mount Improbable – Richard Dawkins
Unweaving the Rainbow – Richard Dawkins
Nehru: A Contemporary's Estimate - Walter Crocker (first published in 1967, reprinted this year)
The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan - Robert Kanigel
The People's Act of Love - James Meek
No Country for Old Men - Cormac McCarthy (a little pretentious in places, but very lyrical)
Last Evenings on Earth – Roberto Bolano
Austerlitz - W G Sebald
A Science-Fiction Omnibus – edited by Brian Aldiss
Phantoms in the Brain - V S Ramachandran
Same-Sex Love in India: A Literary History – edited by Ruth Vanita, Saleem Kidwai
Trying to Grow - Firdaus Kanga
The Summer that Never Was and In a Dry Season - Peter Robinson
The Music of Chance - Paul Auster

Other favourites among books published in 2008:
Empires of the Indus – Alice Albinia
Home – Marilynne Robinson
A Case of Exploding Mangoes – Mohammed Hanif
Netherland – Joseph O'Neill
The Age of Shiva – Manil Suri

Honourable mentions: books that I hesitate to put in something as important-sounding as a year-end list, but which I enjoyed a great deal
Sea of Poppies – Amitav Ghosh
Unaccustomed Earth – Jhumpa Lahiri
The White Tiger – Aravind Adiga
His Illegal Self – Peter Carey
Derangements – Rajorshi Chakraborti
Wild City – Ranjit Lal
Indignation - Philip Roth
Escape – Manjula Padmanabhan
The Zoya Factor – Anuja Chauhan
The Woman who Thought She was a Planet – Vandana Singh

Favourite movies released in 2008:
Anurag Kashyap's short film "Pramod Bhai 23" in Mumbai Cutting
Zibahkhana (Pakistan's first slasher movie. Rebellious teens, psychopathic killer in a burqa. So bad it was superb. Easily the best watching-with-an-audience experience of the year.)
Wall-E
Mithya
Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!
Aamir
The Fall (by Tarsem Singh, that great visual artist)

Favourite non-2008 movies watched for the first time this year:
No Direction Home: Bob Dylan
Manorama Six Feet Under
The Lives of Others
The Satanic Angels (Moroccan musicians arrested for playing hard rock and for other “anti-Islamic” behaviour)
Jhoom Barabar Jhoom
Juno
Summer Interlude (Ingmar Bergman)
Zodiac (David Fincher)
Bonga (Kundan Shah's manic diploma film, made in 1976)

Favourite films re-watched (after having last seen them a long, long time ago):
Greed (Erich von Stroheim)
Sherlock Jr (Buster Keaton)
(Between them, a good indication that cinema might have been better off without the invention of sound)
36 Chowringhee Lane (Aparna Sen)
Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch)
Sullivan's Travels (Preston Sturges)
Stalag 17 (Billy Wilder)

Honourable mentions:
Bachna Ae Haseeno
Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na
Rock On!

Freelancer perils continued: the credit-card application

(A belated addendum to this post)

Or: How banks go from deference to derision in the wink of an eye when they discover that you’re self-employed.

The story begins with a call from a bank where I have an account (one that was opened when I was working full-time). The representative offers me a new credit card. I say no, once, twice, but he persists. It’s a very simple process, he says. There are no hidden costs. Please take the card, sir. He doesn’t actually weep, but the general impression given is that his family’s future and well-being are contingent on my decision.

So I throw my hands up and say yes, after pointedly telling him that I’m never actually going to use this card or even carry it in my wallet. Soon someone arrives at my house to collect an ID proof and to get me to fill what has been described as “a very basic application form – it’ll take only a minute”. An hour later, I’m on page 27 of this basic form, scrawling out the names, diets, ailments, litter-box colours and collar sizes of every cat I have cohabited with since 1981.

When I write “Same as home” in the “Office address” field, a small frown appears on the man’s face. He doesn’t say anything at the time, but a few hours later there is another series of phone calls, and the tone this time is just as authoritarian and disdainful as the tone of the initial calls had been meek and imploring. Each of these conversations follows an interrogatory pattern. By the fourth call, I’m on auto-pilot.

“Mr Singh?” says a voice, “You just made an application asking our bank to give you a credit card.”

“No,” I reply, “I did not make an application. I merely broke down and signed an application form under duress, because your salesman vowed to hunt me to the ends of the earth until I gave in.”

“Anyway, sir,” the voice interrupts, “I need to verify some details. Can I have the name of the company you work for, and your office address?”

“There is no company,” I say mechanically, “There is no office. I am self-employed. I work out of home. I have lived with five cats.”

“Sir?”

“I’m a freelance journalist!” I shout, “Freelance journalist! Why won’t you people understand this?”

“Just a minute,” says the voice, “let me note this down. Your company name is C Lal Associates?”

The conversation has now entered a surreal dimension, a place where the usual rules don’t apply. Having just read V S Ramachandran’s Phantoms in the Brain, I know that the human mind searches for ways to fill gaps that it can’t deal with. But I still can't imagine where the man got the “Associates” from.

“Look,” I say, “Just send me the card. I promise I’ll even use it. But no more phone calls, please.”

“Sorry,” the voice says, “but we can’t process your application. The details are not satisfactory. Please try again after a few weeks.” He hangs up, leaving my Christmas stocking empty.

So I’ll try after a few weeks. As no wise sage said, there’s only one thing worse than getting what you don’t want, and that’s not getting it.

Translator's note

Overheard recently, an enlightening conversation between my cancer-afflicted nani and her attendant Dolly, a Christian lady. Dolly was relating the story of Christ in shuddh Hindi and at one point the following sentence occurred:

“Yeshu ki ma Kumari Maryam thi. Unhone koi ganda kaam karke Yeshu ko janam nahin diya. Woh kumaari hi rahi.”

(“Jesus’s mother was the Virgin Mary. She gave birth to him without doing any dirty work.”)

On that immaculate note, season’s greetings to you all.

'Excess' update

The fiction anthology is now available online (14 of the 15 stories, that is - one was left out of the web version on the author's request). Here's the link. Do try to get hold of the print version though - the layout is easier on the eye and the illustrations look better.

(Montage borrowed from Nisha's blog)

Ruskin goes to Select (and journalism vs facts)

(Carrying this theme forward)

Witnessed at the Crossword bookstore in the Select Citywalk mall, just a few minutes before a book reading by Ruskin Bond: a chirpy young TV reporter, mike in hand, asks children facile questions about Ruskin and his books:

Reporter: So tell me, isn’t it exciting that you’re GETTING TO MEET RUSKIN BOND TODAY? (She widens her eyes dramatically and simulates excitement with a series of facial contortions, clearly intended as a cue for the kids to do the same)
Stoical child: oh it’s nice, but you know, my brother and I met him at a book fair just last year, so...
Reporter (puts mike down, bares teeth): Look, just say you LOVE HIM and are THRILLED TO BITS about being here! All right? All right?

(Precocious child quivers briefly, complies)

Yet another instance of journalism holding up a mirror to society. I shake my head in sadness – partly because that serious-faced boy could have been me 25 years ago.

But I should clarify that the overall response to Ruskin’s session was very enthusiastic. Dozens of wide-mouthed children listened to the reading and asked questions, dozens of adults (including one magnificently energetic middle-aged sardarji) tripped over themselves in a bid to capture the “author-saab” on their camera-phones. Don’t recall seeing anything quite like it even when Salman Rushdie was at the Jaipur festival. Poor Ruskin looked a bit ill at ease, and who could blame him: he spends most of his time in the quiet hill-town of Landour, which is very poor preparation for a Select Citywalk crowd on a Friday evening.

(This seems like a good time to mention that Ruskin’s story submission for the Tehelka anthology was written in his own hand – he doesn’t use even a typewriter – and sent across by courier, since email is out of the question. The handwritten original is with me and I have no intention of parting with it.)

Tehelka's fiction special

I’ve been helping the good people at Tehelka put together their year-end special, an anthology of short fiction. The authors we commissioned were given no brief other than the word “excess” and the result is a varied and exciting collection of pieces about (among other things): a vampire flummoxed by the system of faith prevalent in India; a pacifist vegetarian dog in South Africa; a group of people setting off from various parts of the country in an attempt to escape excess; a surgeon who likes working on cancers of the mouth and also enjoys videos of anal sex and facials; a little boy playing a mushroom in a school play. The contributors are Altaf Tyrewala, Ambarish Satwik, Amruta Patil, Anjum Hasan, Kalpish Ratna (Kalpana Swaminathan + Ishrat Syed), Manjula Padmanabhan, Mridula Koshy, Rana Dasgupta, Rajorshi Chakraborti, Ruskin Bond, Sarnath Banerjee, Sudeep Chakravarti, Sunetra Gupta, Tishani Doshi and Vivek Narayanan.

The issue will be on the stands by the 26th or 27th of this month, so do look out for it. The redoubtable Nisha Susan, who has been anchoring the special and generally bullying me into doing things I’m very bad at (brainstorming, attending meetings, calling up and speaking with people), will also put up something about it on her blog soon.

[Earlier posts on some of the contributing authors and their work: Patil’s Kari, Chakraborti’s Or the Day Seizes You and an interview, Kalpish Ratna’s Nyagrodha, Swaminathan’s Ambrosia for Afters and Bougainvillea House, Padmanabhan’s Escape and an interview, Dasgupta’s Tokyo Cancelled, Narayanan at Jaipur, Chakravarti’s Tin Fish.]

Update: just saw all the pages before they were released and the illustrations accompanying the stories are stunning; the Tehelka design team has done a fabulous job. I'm feeling excited about the special all over again - this thing could be a collector's issue just for the artwork.

Across the world, By Any Means

The name Charley Boorman looked familiar when I saw it on the book By Any Means (which Outlook Traveler sent across for review) but it took a Google search to figure out why. I didn’t know about Boorman’s work as an adventurer and TV series host, but I saw him as a child/adolescent actor in three films made by his father, the director John Boorman: Deliverance, Excalibur and The Emerald Forest. Once the connection was made, an old memory returned to me: a striking shot from The Emerald Forest, a fine “eco-adventure” set in the Brazilian rainforest, about an American dam engineer whose little son is abducted by a local tribe. Charley played the grown-up version of the boy and the scene in question is his first appearance in the film, a dramatic moment where he encounters his biological father again after a decade; you can see a bit of it in this trailer on YouTube. (I remember the scene well, because its tone and effect were similar to the moment in John Ford’s The Searchers where Ethan sees his grown-up niece – kidnapped by Indians years earlier – for the first time.)

Back to the present. Boorman is a motorbike enthusiast and his expeditions with the actor Ewan McGregor have been made into books and documentary series under the titles Long Way Round and Long Way Down. The idea for a new series arose when Boorman, while planning a trip to Australia to participate in another safari, realised that he wasn’t enthused by the thought of simply jumping onto a plane and flying from Ireland to Australia. “How about this,” says his friend Russ Malkin, “We go to Australia by any means we can other than taking a plane from Heathrow. We pick a route and cross each country, each piece of water, using a different form of transport. We jump on trains and old buses: we hitch a ride with some long-distance lorry rider somewhere.”

As it happened, Boorman and Malkin ended up experiencing many more forms of transport than these. Their journey from Wicklow, Ireland to Wollongong, Australia spanned more than 20,000 miles and took them through 25 countries over a period of three months (April-July this year). It also involved a staggering 112 different forms of transport, including a 12-foot Laser dinghy that took them across the English Channel; a tractor in Iran; a Delhi auto-rickshaw (which he describes as a “Bajaj tuk-tuk” in the book); an elephant in Nepal; a bamboo train in Vietnam; and, just to add a dash of luxury, the Orient Express from Paris to Venice.

The book version of By Any Means, though detailed and competently written, is very much a companion piece to the BBC TV series that emerged from Charley and Russ’s travels. There’s something superfluous about it, especially if you have access to the series. (Note: there are clips available on YouTube.) It doesn’t quite work as a travel book; it’s too rushed for that. At one point Boorman writes “On this trip the journey is the real destination”, but he might more accurately have said “On this trip the itinerary is the real point.” One gets the sense that this book is entirely fueled by the novelty of the concept: traveling through all these countries in all these different ways. At times it reads like a diary record of Charley and Russ’s attempts to meet this or that deadline, to get from a station to a port on time and to smoothen out last-minute visa hassles, all the while keeping their fingers crossed when they hear news about a natural calamity or political tensions in a country they are about to visit. The actual schedule (rather than the time spent in a particular place) is so much the point here that though we’re told, for instance, that they were in Dubai for a few days, we don’t get even a paragraph about what they did there; instead the book fast-forwards to the container ship that will take them across the Arabian Sea to their next port of call, Mumbai. (On the other hand, we do get whole paragraphs about mundane details such as when Charley very briefly loses a key in his Orient Express cabin.)

The few observations about the countries they pass through (“visit” would be overstating it) are fleeting and not particularly insightful. We learn that Tehran has a few women cab-drivers and that Charley and Russ had a conversation with one of them. (“Thank you so much, Fariba,” Charley tells her earnestly at the end of the ride, “You’re an amazing driver and what you’re doing for women is terrific. That’s the safest I’ve felt so far in Iran. Thank you.”) There’s a visit to a large Mumbai slum (Dharavi, though it isn’t named in the book). Boorman observes wisely at one point that “I’ve been to a few places around the world and I’ve noticed that the less people have, the happier they are to share.” When the boys pick up a passenger named Farti while driving a large van through Turkey, they make gentle digs at his name (while simultaneously apologising for their lack of cultural sensitivity) – on paper this doesn’t seem particularly offensive, but when you watch the relevant clip Charley and Russ look like a pair of frat-boys.

It would be well-nigh impossible for a book like this not to have a few interesting bits – I liked the Cambodia and Vietnam sections – but as a whole it isn’t worth the price (Rs 650 for the India edition, the cover of which shows an Indian tractor, an Indian ramshackle truck, an elephant and a Delhi auto-rickshaw). Watch the series instead. Or even better, watch John Boorman’s Deliverance.

(The official By Any Means website is here, with photos and videos from the trip.)

God in the machine: notes on Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi

It feels a bit silly reviewing a Yash Raj Films opus starring Shah Rukh Khan. You know that the film is going to find its audience regardless of what you think about it; that you're being a killjoy and a pedant if you point to flaws of logic or to the thousand plot loopholes (you're simply not supposed to notice these things); and that if you didn't at least think of the film as decent paisa-vasool, you're best off not discussing it at all. But a professional reviewer doesn't have that option, and so the thing to do is to find some talking point and stick with it until the requisite word-count has been met.

So let me focus on the deep sympathy I feel for Tani, the heroine of Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi. Not because she loses her husband-to-be and his family in a bus accident within the first five minutes of the film, and is subsequently orphaned when her father suffers a heart attack on hearing the news. No, these tragedies are quickly glossed over. The really tough thing about Tani's life is the decision she is expected to make towards the end of this exhausting movie. Choosing between two men can be difficult in itself, but when both men occupy the same body and you're expected to plump for the one with the bad haircut rather than the one with the six-pack abs...What's a girl to do?

The trouble begins when Tani's boring replacement husband Surinder, who works with the Punjab Power board, decides to electrify her life with an elaborate masquerade. He undergoes a makeover that involves shaving off his moustache, changing his hairstyle, wearing tighter clothes, acquiring a new set of biceps and generally looking a little more like Shah Rukh Khan than he did before; in this new avatar as the "hep" Raj, he becomes Tani's dancing partner in a local competition. (In the fine tradition of short-sighted heroines from Lois Lane downwards, Tani fails to realise that the mousy Surinder, with whom she stiffly has dinner every night, is the same person as style-boy Raj with whom she greedily consumes gol-gappas and goes on bike rides through the narrow lanes of Amritsar.)

Now here’s the rub (rab?): having gone to ridiculous extremes to create an exciting new persona that he knows will appeal to his wife more than his "real self" ever could, Surinder/Raj takes the higher ground and decides that his wooing of Tani can be deemed successful only if she falls in love with the dullard Surinder, not with his alter-ego. The basic flaw in this premise is for anyone to see: imagine Christian first passing off Cyrano's poetry as his own and then insisting that Roxane passes the "test" only if she loves him for his own bilge. (For this analogy to be fully satisfying, Christian and Cyrano would have to be the same person and Roxane would have to be short-sighted, but you get the drift.)

Anyway, given Tani's nascent feelings for Raj, the big question is: how does the film arrive at an ending that will satisfy everyone and uphold all the moral requirements? The solution is stunning in its simplicity. (Obligatory Spoiler Alert, though if you really want a spoiler alert for this film, you’re a loser and need a makeover.) In a short, unfussy scene set at the Golden Temple, Tani experiences an epiphany where she realises that her "Rab" (God) is Surinder. No, really – that's it. This movie has been invoking Rab's divine will at regular intervals long before this moment, but it's usually been done in an offhand sort of way, so we aren't quite prepared for a scene where He literally enters the confused girl's mind, fiddles with her synapses and sees to it that she makes the "right" decision. This is God as the ultimate Deus ex machina.

Which is not to say there’s nothing good about Rab ne.... At least 20 of its 170 minutes are watchable. There are a couple of charming vignettes, such as an early scene involving a rose stem, which hints at an unseen romantic side to the reticent Surinder, long before his makeover happens. Vinay Pathak could easily have phoned in his performance as Surinder's hair-stylist buddy Bobby, but in the context of this film it must be counted as a bright spot. In the Surinder-Bobby relationship and in Surinder’s remark to Tani that "maine kabhi lady se pyaar nahin kiya" ("I have never loved a lady"), we see glimpses of the ambiguous form that male bonding can take in small towns where interaction between the sexes is restricted before marriage. But this isn't particularly explored elsewhere in the film. Incidentally, the scene where Bobby introduces the word "macho" into a Punjabi sentence and then turns it into a refrain may prove to be a landmark moment in the history of profanity in mainstream Bollywood. Especially because Pathak does the bucolic Punju accent with gusto and the script requires him to say sentences where the word immediately following "macho" begins with a "D" sound.

But the best thing about Rab ne... is the voiceover with the "honeymoon in Japan" postcards that accompany the closing credits. If you've already bought tickets for this film, you should consider entering the hall three hours after the starting time.

P.S. I’m looking forward to the next Shah Rukh movie that isn't a meta-film with references to his Raj image and the obligatory song sequence where a bevy of SRK's favourite heroines (Kajol, Rani Mukherjee, Preity Zinta etc) fawn over him. The fantasy song sequence "Phir Milenge Chalte Chalte" looked like an outtake from Om Shanti Om.

After the fall

The normal thing to do would have been to cordon off the section of the battlefield where Bheeshma lay on his bed of arrows. But since he had fallen on a spot right in the heart of Kurukshetra, this wasn’t feasible (try playing football with the centre circle completely out of bounds). Then someone suggested moving him elsewhere, but this too was problematic – the arrows were deeply embedded in the earth, and besides, all the talk about this particular patch of ground being Bheeshma’s “karma-bhoomi” would have made a shift awkward. One didn’t want sages buzzing about the place, yelling about protocol and generally disturbing the peace while the war was still on.
 

“Never mind, we’ll continue fighting around him,” said Drona, “just keep those elephants away.” So for the next eight days foot-soldiers tiptoed nimbly about the grandsire’s body even as they parried their enemies’ thrusts and blows. Unfortunately a couple of the servants hired to fan the pitamah and provide him with refreshments had their heads lopped off by stray arrows, but this was treated as collateral damage. The bigger problem was that as the war grew more intense, the facade of respect began to peel away. In the afternoons, when tiredness set in, soldiers developed the habit of resting their swords against the arrows sticking out of Bheeshma’s chest, and even taking a quick nap under his shadow. Some of the cheekier ones exchanged vulgar jokes – about how the old man had finally got "laid" at the age of 90 – within his earshot. 

 

“I’m no longer sure that celibacy oath was worth it in the end,” the aged scion of the Kurus thought to himself as he sipped on some flavoured Ganga-jal, “but at least the service is good.”