'If a plumber said she had plumber's block, would you condone it?' - a Q&A with Jerry Pinto

[Did this interview for Scroll]

Introduction: Earlier this month, Jerry Pinto’s 2012 novel Em and the Big Hoom was awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize, which recognizes the work of English-language writers from around the world, across three categories: fiction, non-fiction and drama. Pinto, a journalist and professional writer for close to three decades, has written or edited many other books across categories, including the National Award-winning Helen: The Life and Times of an H-Bomb, Surviving Women, Reflected in Water: Writings on Goa, and the children’s books Monster Garden and Phiss Phuss Boom. He speaks about the prize, his body of work, the many challenges facing a writer, and his newfound interest in translation.

Was this prize more gratifying in a way because you didn’t know you were in the reckoning? How rare that is in a time where authors are constantly expected to be in the public eye, competing furiously, playing the double role of marketing person.

The Windham-Campbell Prize is the kindest of prizes. You don’t know you are in the running. You don’t know that you’re on the shortlist. You are protected from that opening-of-the-envelope moment. Your life goes on pretty much as it always has and suddenly someone rings you up or emails you with the good news. I think that this is one of those rare prizes that doesn’t seem to need to turn the writers into gladiators at an arena, that isn’t about betting and odds-on favourites, there’s no bitterness about not being nominated or your book not being sent for it…nothing. I understand why the other prizes do that sort of thing. Sponsors aren’t coming along handing out all that lovely lolly for the good of writing. They want the bang for their buck. No issues with that. I see what the logic is but I don’t like it. Which is why I am so honoured and so happy to have received this one.

Em and the Big Hoom has been so widely acclaimed – it is the most high-profile of the many books you’ve done – and yet it has its roots in a personal and distressing subject, your mother’s real-life illness. It had a tortuous journey too, taking years before you got it in its final shape. Is there something bittersweet or unnerving about winning a big prize for this particular book?

I have all kinds of feelings about this book even now that it has passed into my history as a writer. To begin with, I wrote it so many times, I often felt that it was some kind of burden that I was fated never to put down. Then I had to talk about it again and again because it was born into the era of literary festivals and I tried my best to go wherever I was invited because I wanted to give the book my best push. I was deeply involved with everything, including the cover, which features my artwork thanks to the kindness of Bena Sareen and Ravi Singh at Aleph.

Oddly, when I was writing it, I never thought it would become the catalyst for conversations about mental ill health. I thought it was a novel. I have no problems, may I say here, with people talking about it as if it is non-fiction. Because that seems to be an accolade, a novel that reads like it happened.

But then the readings seemed to turn into encounter groups or something very similar. People would get up and tell stories about a friend who had said he would kill himself so often that no one believed him when he was sitting alone in his apartment with a bottle of rat poison; about the girl-next-door who vanished because she liked to sing and walk about naked even though she was in her late teens; about the brother incarcerated in his own room for five years because he heard voices. I did not know what to make of these testimonies. I tried to make the space as non-judgemental as possible but then that is not always possible. Besides, I am not a trained professional and I was wary of being taken for one. And the good Lord knows I’m not a paragon of virtue.

So a friend suggested that I encourage them to tell their stories, to create a book out of these survivor accounts, of people who have someone in their world with a different mind. And Ravi Singh now has the manuscript for A Book of Light which should come out from Speaking Tiger later this year.

I have been honoured and humbled by the honesty and the self-implication that so many of the writers have shown. They are torch-bearers and they’re showing us that it isn’t six degrees of separation between people seen as normal and people seen as ‘mentally ill’. It’s often one degree away or zero degrees. For if there is a person who has not suffered a moment of imbalance, of madness of one kind or another, then you might have finally stumbled on to a rare case of fully functional normality, so normal a normality that it should be pathologised perhaps, called a normalism.

The prize must be very pleasing purely at the level of the honour and recognition involved, but the money isn’t a small part of it. You have been quite vocal – in conversations, Facebook statuses and so on – about writers not getting paid as much as they deserve (whether they are independent journalists or authors struggling for decent advances from publishers). Do you see that changing anytime soon?

I hope it will. I trust it will. I wouldn’t put money on it. Here’s the thing. Every year, the journalists of my acquaintance march into their editors’ offices and argue for raises. They cite the usual bunch of reasons: the high cost of living, the lure of better pay in other jobs and other professions, how much hard work they do. I do not think one of them ever says, ‘And when you’re budgeting my pay hike in, why do you not think about raising the rates we pay our freelance writers?’ I didn’t do it when I was a full-time journalist though I have to say that when I started a travel dotcom, we paid writers well, we insisted that every staffer should travel, we worked on equity.

But writing as a skill is hard to quantify. So the editors have to fight hard to tell the moneybags men that they need to pay X more because she writes better. The moneybags say: ‘Then get someone else, na? My chichi has a flair for writing and she won’t even charge, she’ll be so happy to have her name in print. Shall I give you her number?’ There are entire magazines run on that kind of writer and this supply and demand situation always causes a problem. Many years ago, a freelance journalist called Parag Trivedi invited a whole bunch of journalists to form a union. It didn’t work.

Right now the best way to get paid well in India is simple: you should have a non-Indian passport, preferably a foreign passport and you can ask for a dollar a word. And editors will pay it too, some of them.

The other problem is that so much of freelance writing bases itself on old friendships and old relationships. How do you tell a buddy that s/he can’t afford you? How do you say, ‘Look, why don’t you simply hire a bunch of young people and then spend the rest of your life rewriting their work, training them and then losing them to the competition?’

For the rest of us, it’s the usual four-rupees-a word to ten-rupees-a-word. I must make an honourable exception for the Malayala Manorama group that actually pays well and pays on time and does not make one jump through hoops by creating an invoice, signing it, scanning it, sending it back and then waiting.

You have been an incredibly prolific writer… poetry, fiction (for both adults and children), non-fiction (on subjects ranging from cinema to gender relations), translation, anthologies, columns, reviews. Does any one sort of writing count as “relaxed, take-a-break writing” for you – the sort of thing you find easy to do when things aren’t going too well?

Okay, secret. It’s almost always fun. It’s almost always misery. The idea is the fun thing, the movements in the head, the connections, the links, the oh-that-might-also-fit-there sensations. Then there’s the first fine flush, that lasts for the first draft, when it’s always great to start off again, to open a notebook and return to word-making and world-making. Then comes the tough bits, the pruning, the editing, the rewriting. That takes me about twice as much time as the writing. I wrote three drafts of Murder in Mahim and I thought it was done. I came to Delhi inoffensively and met Ravi and he said, ‘Just a few more things I want you to do’ and I am holding on to the myth that it’s just a few more things when it’s not, it’s another draft because you change a word and that changes a sentence and that changes a paragraph and suddenly like a chain of bicycles, everything is in a heap and you’ve got to start again.

A related question: Isaac Asimov, discussing his prolificacy, once said that it helps to be working on different projects simultaneously because it makes writer’s block less likely; if you get fatigued with one sort of writing, you move on to something else. Has your experience been similar?

Yes, it works like that for me as well. I am always working on a poem. I am always working on some non-fiction. I am always working on some fiction. I am always working on some translation. I am always editing some student assignments at the SCM department where I teach journalism at the Sophia Polytechnic. I have a manual right now to look at for MelJol (an NGO for empowering children). I have a brochure to edit for a fund-raiser at the People’s Free Reading Room and Library. If you have several things going at once, you’re less likely to get bored of one thing. But there are often times when I will take a day off and only focus on one thing, such as reading a friend’s manuscript or editing someone’s translation or reading a draft.

But even so, writers’ block is a problem for me and I get over it by writing mechanically. I berate myself constantly. I say, ‘If you had a plumber who said she had plumber’s block, would you condone it? If you had a cook who said he had cook’s block, would you accept that he should not cook and you should go hungry? And if you are not as important an artisan in the creation of civilization as a cook or a plumber, you should not be a writer.

Then I start to write mechanically putting words down. They are dry desiccated words, words without meaning or significance, words without juice, over-used words forming into armies of clichés and I am often tempted to judge myself harshly, ‘You’re no writer. You’re just another hack’ but I write on. Now I am an ice-breaker and I pushing against the icefloes and soon, soon, it’s open flowing water and the words are back and now it’s dancing. But I have found that without the robotic writing, without the heartless-faithless-spiritless writing, you don’t get out into the open.

When I first encountered your writing, a lot of it was about cinema – the short-form journalistic stuff in particular, but also the Helen book which was so detailed and for which you watched dozens of films closely. What has your relationship with cinema, especially mainstream Hindi cinema, been like? And has it had an effect on your writing?

I loved Hindi films. I loved everything about them. But I could also see what they were not. They were as much vehicles for modernism and nation-buildings as they were Trojan Horses for patriarchy and cheap sentiment. Something about this encounter with popular culture shapes us in different ways, I think. Some people look at a title like Dulhan Wohi Jo Piya Man Bhaye and think yes, yes. Some people look at it and think, patriarchal bullshit. Some people look at it and say: Oh is that so? Not the woman with the certificate but the woman who makes her lover happy? Some people say: The songs are good so let’s go see it. And then there’s us, the critics, the reviewers, the ones who stand at a distance, looking but also sighing.

I think many critics have said that Em and the Big Hoom showed I have a feel for dialogue. I think that might come out of my encounter with cinema.

Children’s writing in India used to be (possibly still is) characterized by people writing down to children – being pedantic, trying to spoonfeed them ideas and messages, undermining the value of a fun story imaginatively told. Tell us something about your own approach to writing for children.

Children are a nasty bunch. They’re completely led by their instincts. They don’t really care what’s good for them or bad for them. They want to read what amuses them. The problem is that they have no economic control over their reading. The books available to them are decided by adults, by librarians and teachers and parents and gift-giving aunties who choose improving books and pedantic books and message stories and the kids give up on reading and the cry goes up: Oh, they don’t read, children have given up reading. That’s not their fault, it’s our fault.

Next, children are monkeys. Monkey see, monkey do. If they see their parents coming home to slump in front of the television, that’s what they’ll want to do when they relax. If they see their parents hunched over a smart phone, that’s what they’ll want. Don’t blame the monkeys.

Finally, I don’t write for children. I write for me. When I’m done, someone, usually a publisher says: oh this is a children’s book because it has a teddybear in it. And then they sell it to the chaps, like Mr Hall and Mr Knight in that wonderful poem about the algebra text book.

As readers – or as consumers of your work – how are children different from adults? What have your interactions with young readers been like?

I try not to interact with children too much. They do your ego no good. “Did you write this book?” a girl asked me, holding up ‘Talk of the Town’ which I wrote with Rahul Srivastava. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s very boring,’ she said. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘You’re welcome,’ she said because she was a well-brought-up child.

Other great questions I have been asked: ‘Why aren’t you J K Rowling?’ and ‘Have you written any books like Captain Underpants?’ and ‘I don’t like the cover of this book. It’s too yellow. Do you have a pink book?’

As a teacher, what advice do you give to young writers who are struggling to find their own voice?

I tell them to read a lot, to be patient, to read some more, to write a lot, to rewrite a lot, to talk to people, to connect, to volunteer, to seek out experience, to try and see the virtual world as one possible source of excitement and not the entire world.

You have done a lot of translating in recent years. What stoked this interest, and what determines your choice of texts? Has translating changed you in any way as a reader and as a writer?

I always say that I wish other people would translate so that I could just sit back and enjoy what comes out in other languages around the world and in India. Now, around the globe, things seem to have sorted themselves out for the Anglophone world. Is there a book on early on-set Parkinson’s disease in German? It’s available in English. And every writer from Basho to Undset is available in English. But Baluta, a modern-day classic in Marathi, one of the first autobiographies by a Dalit? That had to wait thirty years. So we have so much writing around us but we don’t have enough translators.

So for me this is an urgency because it feeds into my view of a pluralistic diverse India, where we speak so many languages and live in so many different ways and we learn each day in the living of it how much we need to do to keep this wonderful country going. I began to translate because I was hoping to be a bridge-builder. That’s what translation does: it builds a bridge between two linguistic islands. Yes, languages are never islands; the bilingual already form footpaths at low tide between them and the sea around cross-fertilises them but permit me my metaphor.

What are the challenges in translating (especially translating a potentially controversial book like Sachin Kundalkar’s Cobalt Blue), compared to doing your own writing?

Right now, Jai, it seems as if every book is potentially controversial, no? Anyone might be offended. Anyone can sue. Anyone can take offense. Anyone can rouse a community by saying, ‘S/he’s insulting us’ even when that Anyone hasn’t even read the book. So every act of bookmaking is now fraught with peril but how else will we fight the peril but with each act of civilization?

Right now the book I am translating is Maine Mandu Nahin Dekha by Swadesh Deepak. Deepak was a magnificent playwright whose Court Martial was performed across the country, in Kolkata and in Mumbai and in Delhi. He had a serious mental problem and tried to kill himself. He spent seven years in an agony of silence and fear. And then when he recovered, on the urging of his friends, he wrote Maine Mandu Nahin Dekha. When I heard of this book—his son Sukant Deepak is one of the contributors to my anthology Book of Light—I was fascinated and when I read it I was completely enthralled. There is such a strange quality to the book; it has all the hallmarks of great writing and great mental unease. I have read nothing like it in any other language. Here is a bridge, I thought, a bridge between Hindi and English, a bridge between the world of those who are seen as mentally healthy and those who are seen as mentally unwell, a multipurpose bridge beautiful and ugly and mysterious and built at great personal cost.

How great a cost? After it was published, Swadesh Deepak rose one day and went for his morning walk and never came back. He has been missing since.

You told me once that you write on paper and then get it transcribed. Is that still the case? What for you are the advantages of such an approach?

My first draft is always hand-written because this helps me in a number of ways. I can type very fast and that isn’t always a good way to write: fast. I like to think I am part of the slow writing movement as I start work with pen and paper. I like to think that this gives me time to consider the line forming in my head before it is set down on paper.

I know it has taken you forever to get a smartphone. Are you becoming more tech-savvy, in terms of writing/editing a piece on a phone or some other infernal little device?

There’s a great section in Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll. The Red Queen and Alice have been running and running and when they stop, they’re in the same place.

"Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else—if you run very fast for a long time, as we've been doing."

"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

All I can say is I am from a slow sort of country.

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[My review of Em and the Big Hoom is here]

More notes from Hamburg

At the Kinderbuchhaus, contd: a short Q&A with the freelance illustrator Katrin Engelking, who has worked on more than 40 children’s books for publishers like Oetinger and Ravensburger. Engelking has illustrated the new editions of Astrid Lindgren’s famous Pippi Longstocking books.

What is your working routine like? Do you work on more than one picture-book at a time?

Normally I work on one big project at a time, but one has make adjustments. One thing that happens is that publishers typically want you to send a book cover in advance – for the catalogue and other promotional material – before you’ve even started working on the main body of the book. So there have been times when I’m doing the inside illustrations for a particular book but also simultaneously working on the cover illustration of my next project. And if the two books require different styles, it can be tricky to shift back and forth!

Once I made a cover and they used it for a promotional CD but later I ordered it back and added a few little elements, because by that time I had a clearer idea of what the rest of the book was going to be like.

How much time do you need to finish a picture-book?

Lots of time! I have two children so I can only work until 2, which is when they come home from school. Earlier, before I had started a family, it was possible to work all sorts of odd hours, but not now.

What are the main challenges for a freelance artist?

There are no contractual problems, except that obviously you can’t draw the same characters for different publishers. But you have to manage your time and your deadlines. In my case I’ve developed a good relationship with Oetinger and we fit together very well, so I mostly work for them now. Earlier I handled two or three publishers together, and it was sometimes dreadful! (Laughs) You have to be accountable to so many people.

You must have been very excited when you were asked to do the new editions of the Pippi Longstocking books?

I was very enthusiastic about it, sure, but it was scary too. I mean, I was reading these books when I was growing up, like nearly everyone else – Pippi is such a famous character in Germany, she’s been around for over six decades and generations of people have grown up with her. Everybody loves her and knows what she looks like, so it was daunting to do these new drawings. I had to do over 50 colour illustrations, but I enjoyed every bit of it.
When you illustrate stories written by other authors, what is the extent of collaboration?

It varies. Once I told an author – whom I knew very well – that I had looked at the moon one day and thought I saw a rabbit shape on it. So she developed that idea into a story and I illustrated it! But we worked separately: she wrote the story first and then I took over. You don’t want to start interfering with each other’s work.

When I’m doing both the text and the drawings for a book, I write the story first and then work out how much space there is for the illustrations.

Is it important for a children’s book illustrator to go through a professional course?

I don’t think so, although I did study at the College of Design in Hamburg. It depends on how good you are – if you come out of nowhere but your pictures are good enough to impress a publisher, that should be enough.

On the other hand, when you’re doing a professional course, there are many talented people working together and competing, which is a useful environment to be in. The option should certainly exist for budding artists.

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I also exchanged a few quick words with Isabel Kreitz, who is very shy when she’s amidst a large of people but eloquent in a one-to-one conversation; she told me that her real area of interest is writing/drawing comic books for older readers, but that she earns money by doing children’s picture-books. “Picture-books require a different artistic approach,” she said. “You have to put everything into one picture, which could perhaps be a really big double-spread – it’s like an extract. You can’t use sequential art in a very creative way, like you do with comic-book panels – so the mindset has to be different.”

“I wish I could collaborate with authors when I’m working on picture-books, but most of them are dead,” she deadpanned (because she often works on new editions of books written a long time ago), “or the book is already made and I’m just expected to add something to it.”

Otherwise, our session with the illustrators involved several people talking at once, and a certain amount of translation going on too. Peter Schössow told us that when he does illustrations he sometimes get fed up drawing the same character again and again, and wants to create variety to make things more interesting. “Sometimes I do three illustrations featuring a particular character, then I think to myself, my god, how on earth am I going to do another 71 pages!” For this reason he finds it useful to switch between drawing characters and writing a story. “If you’re stuck with one you can move to the other, refresh your mind a little and then come back.” It reminded me of something Isaac Asimov once said about never being afflicted with writer’s block: he wrote so many different types of books (sci-fi, history, mystery stories, popular science) that if he ever got tired of one genre he could switch to a different kind of writing for a while. Needless to say, this doesn’t work for everyone!

Here’s the cover of an all-drawing Pixi book done by Peter:


And, much to the delight of the Indian contingent, the opening page of a book by Ole Konnecke, about a kid trying to learn to do magic:


(Ole’s uncle was a professional magician and had a large collection of posters – including this one of P C Sorkar)

Why freelance writers prefer packet milk

From the “When movie dialogues coincide oddly with my own sad life” department:

In a scene in Nicholas Ray’s Bigger than Life, school teacher and middle-class family man Ed Avery (played by James Mason) reprimands the neighbourhood milkman Andy thus:

“This isn’t the first time you’ve gone out of your way to annoy me with your jingle-jangle in, jingle-jangle out. Why do you do it?”

“I can’t help it if the milk bottles make noise,” protests the surprised Andy, whereupon Ed produces a gem that all creative poseurs should keep in their kit-bag of ready-to-use lines:

“Don’t lie to me, it’s deliberate! You’re filled with envy and malice toward me because I work with my mind. So you make it impossible for me to concentrate.”

Actually the milkman isn’t at fault: Ed is paranoid, having become addicted to the cortisone that was prescribed to him as a pain-killer, and his behaviour is already verging on psychosis (soon he will be eyeing his little boy and recalling the story about God ordering Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac). But speaking as a freelance writer forever plagued by ringing doorbells and other unwelcome intrusions (and looking for ways to justify my current inability to get any worthwhile writing done), the words and the frustration behind them are easy to relate to.

So the next time an over-friendly grand-aunt pops her head into my room and marvels that I spend all my time at home doing nothing, I will channel Ed. (I can’t imitate James Mason’s menacingly silken purr, but I can snarl like an angry cat.)

All this is a complicated way of saying that I have new Criterion discs, and Bigger than Life is among them. (The others: Sansho the Bailiff and Au Hasard Balthazar.) Also that I hope to get back to doing some long pieces about old films soon – have plenty of unstructured notes lying about everywhere but haven’t yet found the time or the mental focus to turn them into something comprehensible. Cortisone might help.
 
P.S. Author Jonathan Lethem talks about Bigger than Life – one of his favourite films – in this excellent long interview at Cinema Scope. There’s also a fine video introduction by Lethem on the DVD.

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.

A guide for aspiring freelance journalists

A shout-out for Everything You Wanted to Know about Freelance Journalism, co-written by Kavitha Rao and Charukesi Ramadurai. Plenty of useful information in here for writers trying to break into the world of journalism and get their features and stories published. The official launch is in Bangalore on March 7 (Landmark, Forum Mall, Koramangala at 6.30 pm) and the book can be bought online here and elsewhere.

I answered a few questions about my freelancing career for an appendix at the end of the book, and allowed myself to get a bit crabby when asked how lucrative it is to write book reviews. Here's part of the relevant answer.

Making book reviews pay: that’s a laugh! One of my biggest peeves is that one usually gets paid a pittance for something that requires so much time and energy and discipline (if you do it honestly). To me, reviewing a book properly means reading it from cover to cover, and reading it well (these are things that some “reviewers” I know don’t bother to do, by the way; and little wonder, given the ridiculously short deadlines they get). It means making lots of notes along the way, working out what you want to say, trying to bring in personal insights, and expressing them as well as possible. All this takes time and effort, and yet one rarely gets paid more than Rs 5 a word for a book review.**

Having been both a reviewer constantly waiting for his (meagre) cheques and a books-page editor for a magazine that took months or years to send cheques out, I have had firsthand experience – from two vantage points – of the pariah treatment given to reviews. During a conversation with a magazine editor – a respected journalist of long standing, who was once a books-page editor – I was startled to hear her say “Oh come on, it’s just a book review - why do we need to pay more than 3K for it?” I think this is representative of a wider attitude in mainstream media: an inability to really understand the function or scope of criticism (whether on books or films). I can’t count the number of times I have heard variants on that self-serving statement “Critics are eunuchs in a harem – watching but unable to participate”, or the idea that writing a review is something that anyone can easily do, it doesn’t require rigour and skill. This also creates a vicious cycle: there isn’t much space for reviews in mainstream publications, so even potentially good writers end up doing sketchy, 400-word pieces; youngsters reading these pieces get a very limited picture of what a review can be, and set their own standards low; and editors don’t think of review-writing as a specialised discipline that needs to be worked on and encouraged.

 ** On reflection, that "Rs 5 a word" was optimistic - a miscalculation on my part.

This gun for hire

Big professional development: I’m joining the growing tribe of freelance journalists. Have a retainership agreement lined up with my paper wherein I’ll be able to work out of home for much of the time, and will be free to write for others. It’s a decent deal, the good part being a fixed monthly cheque that will ensure a minimum amount of financial security - very important for someone who’s just cutting his teeth on the big bad world of freelancing. Plus my computer in office stays in place, which means I can come in and use office resources anytime. Again important, because friends with experience in this line tell me the shift from office-enforced discipline to self-discipline is a difficult one, and in the early days the solitariness can be tough to cope with.

I’ll probably discover the downsides to freelancing as it happens, but for now I’m enthusiastic about this change, it’s something I’ve been looking forward to for a long time. The knowledge that I’m not cuffed to one organisation means a lot, for one reason or the other.

[Collected bagfuls of advice from freelance pros like Devangshu, Nilanjana and Peter the Griffin at a get-together last night where Samit also sang his version of the Bubbly song for the benefit of those of us who know not what is television and haven’t heard the original. I was rechristened Jam-sandwich Jabberwock at this gathering, for reasons that have nothing to do with jam sandwiches or anything else.]

Will concentrate on Business Standard assignments for the first few weeks, while I figure out time management issues. Then will follow up on a few contacts, look at options in other places. Book reviews/profiles/features/a couple of columns will be the focus to start with but eventually I’m hoping to get back into the movie-reviewing business too; haven’t written an official film review for over a year now. And – dare I suggest it – perhaps even something on cricket, another of the areas I’ve neglected.

P.S. One definite disadvantage: the sound of screeching Pom at home, which will have to be muffled (though right now I’m unsure how best to do this. Suggestions welcome).

Review deferred, and other sad stories

There are few things more annoying than spending the better part of a day (and a Sunday at that, not that there’s anything special about a Sunday if you’re a freelancer) writing a long review of a book, getting set to post it on the blog and then being told at the last possible minute by Mean Publisher Lady that there’s an embargo on reviews until a few weeks later, because she neglected to inform you about launch dates, exclusive arrangements with international media, etc. So it turns out I’m going to have to wait a while before sharing my thoughts about Aatish Taseer’s Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands. Will post it when I get the green light or when I’m sufficiently drunk to want to get Mean Publisher Lady sued by the international publishers.

Meanwhile things have been slow on the work front for various reasons and there's a big backlog of books to get through. Among them: Amit Chaudhuri’s The Immortals, Biman Nath’s Nothing is Blue, Rana Dasgupta’s Solo, Indu Sundaresan’s In the Convent of Little Flowers. Too many books, too little time. Through experience I’ve discovered that the thing to do is such a situation is to put all these books aside and instead direct your attention to something you definitely won’t be asked to review – like Noddy and the Magic Rubber. This is what I’ve successfully done, along with reading a randomly selected chapter of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers (the one about how the high power distance index in countries like Korea is responsible for gruesome plane crashes because the first officer keeps nodding and smiling politely at the captain when he should be saying “You’ve missed the runway by three miles, you dolt!”).

Also, and I’m afraid I can’t provide further details, I woke yesterday morning from uneasy dreams to discover that I had mailed the following paragraph to someone who wanted a short synopsis of Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom:

A freelance photographer by day and a murderer of stockinged women by night, Mark’s modus operandi involves photographing his victims at the point of death. Soon we learn that this unusual personality trait developed because when he was a child his domineering father would torment him by dropping lizards on his bed. Not the best way to raise a child, as the grown-up Mark’s victims would no doubt agree, but then why raise a child at all? This film is the best condom ad you could hope for. Even better than Noddy and the Magic Rubber.

(More tales from the crypt soon)

Golden Age crime, contd: Death from a Top Hat

When I saw that Clayton Rawson’s 1938 novel Death from a Top Hat – one of the best-regarded locked-room mysteries of its time – was available online at a not terribly inflated price, I ordered it immediately. I knew I was taking a slight risk – a few of the reviews I had looked through, including on blogs run by Golden Age Crime Fiction experts, suggested that this book’s reputation was inflated, or that it didn’t hold up so well when read today. Or that it was a little convoluted or esoteric (which was plausible, given that the narrative is populated by professional and amateur magicians – including the main sleuth, The Great Merlini – and other specialists in the arcane arts).

Anyway, I finished it yesterday and am glad I bought it. Apart from its quality as a whodunit (and a howdunit), I knew within a few pages that I was going to enjoy it purely at the prose level. The narrator, a freelance writer named Harte, starts by mentioning an essay he is writing on the “modern detective story”, which we read excerpts of: with a listing of famous fictional sleuths – from Poe’s Auguste Dupin to the present day, i.e. the 1930s – as well as murder methods. But then he is interrupted by noises coming from the hallway outside, and discovers three strange people and one dead body. A man has been murdered in the opposite apartment… in a locked-room situation.

Much of the fun in the ensuing chapters comes from the banter between Merlini, brought in to investigate (it helps that he is professionally acquainted with some of the suspects), and the police chief Gavigan (who is no mug himself – definitely not the caricature of the over-confident cop who exists only to be a foil to the genius detective). Along with the narrator, they puzzle over alibis and motives – and, of course, methods, given the puzzling nature of the crime setting – but their speculations are soon complicated by a second murder. And so it goes.

Along the way there are snippets of information about conjurors, their tricks, and the history of the profession. There are amusing footnotes, not imperative to the plot. Gavigan rolls his eyes in despair whenever Merlini gets a little pedantic or goes into a mystical-sounding explanation. One chapter, a discussion of impossible-crime methods, specifically cites the "Locked-Room Lecture" from John Dickson Carr’s The Hollow Man, which had been published just three years before this book.

There are some enjoyable chapter-ending cliff-hangers too (including funny ones), and a neat little mystery-within-the-larger-mystery, involving the disappearance of a man from a taxi after he had been seen getting in. And as for the final solution – I liked it a lot, and I thought Rawson had practised the fine art of misdirection well enough that it was rewarding to go back to the earlier chapters to see what one had missed the first time.

So this is well recommended, for the fluidity of the writing, and the humour, as well as for the mystery. (The second half of the book does sag a bit in places, but picks up quickly enough.) I’m told that Rawson’s short stories are very good too – I have a couple of them in anthologies, and will get around to them soon. 

(Another recent Golden Age crime post is here)

“Venom, to thy work!” How Agatha Christie committed her murders

[Did this review for Scroll]

I don’t know what the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot would make of noisy, crowded, grimy Ludhiana, but it was in that city 27 years ago, over the course of an unforgettable summer afternoon, that I became acquainted with his skills. The occasion was a fortnight-long family reunion involving aunts and cousins, to which my main contribution was corrupting the younger children with Friday the 13th videocassettes. Then one day, while the others settled in to their siesta, I settled down with my very first Agatha Christie novel Murder in Retrospect (original title Five Little Pigs, as I learnt much later).

All these years later this still counts among my most intense reading experiences: by the time I reached the last page I was spooked, afraid to turn my head even though it was daytime and street sounds were drifting through the curtained windows (not to mention the snores from adjacent rooms). The image that most haunted me was the one of an artist painting his muse in the final hours of his life, unaware, at least at first, that he was dying; that a slow-moving poison was working its way up to his heart. At what point did awareness come, if it came at all, for poor lovelorn Amyas Crale – a few minutes before the end, when paralysis had set in, or only in the final seconds?

Vivid though my memories of Murder in Retrospect were, I didn’t remember, until I read Kathryn Harkup’s A is for Arsenic, that the poison in Christie’s novel was coniine, extracted from hemlock – the same plant that was also famously used in Socrates’s death in 399 BC. Nor did I know that Christie’s choice of killing method was a carefully thought-out one, based on the nature of the story and the time-frames involved.

If, as the cliché has it, you should write the book that only you and no one else can write, then A is for Arsenic, subtitled “The Poisons of Agatha Christie”, might be described as a near-perfect marriage of author and subject. Harkup, her profile tells us, is a chemist, an Agatha Christie fanatic, and a “freelance science communicator, specializing in the quirkier side of science”. This put her in a very good position to author a work that – whimsically and thrillingly – combines popular science and trivia with a form of literary commentary. She looks closely at fourteen of the poisons used in Christie’s novels and short stories, from well-known ones like cyanide, strychnine and phosphorus to relatively obscure ones like monkshood (a saintly name for Aconitum variegatum) and ricin (lethal in tiny doses, less than 1 mg being enough to kill an adult human). While discussing the part they play in the stories, she also casts her net wider by providing contextual information about the poisons – their history, effects, symptoms, antidotes, molecular makeups, real-life cases involving their use.

This means the book has many balls in the air: to enjoy it in its entirety, to read each page with enthusiasm – as opposed to glossing over a few pages every now and again – you have to be an Agatha Christie buff while also having some aptitude for technical explanations of biological and chemical processes. Though a keen reader of popular science, I couldn’t always keep up with some of the stuff about chemicals and alkazoids. Sentences like “Myasthenia gravis patients produce antibodies circulating in the body that block acetylcholine receptors” and “Ricin is a toxalbumin, a poisonous protein formed from two chains, A and B, which are linked by a single bond between two atoms of sulfur” are unlikely to produce a throb of excitement unless you were paying closer attention than I was during chemistry classes in school.

What helps, though, is that Harkup never dwells on the heavy stuff for long; she intersperses it with juicy trivia or speculation. How intriguing it is to hear that digitalis – an extract from the foxglove plant – might have played a part in the halo-like sheen associated with the paintings in Vincent Van Gogh’s “yellow period”. Or that the use of arsenic-based dyes in wallpaper – common in the 19th century – may have contributed to Napoleon’s death. Or that rats in lab tests had to be physically stopped from pressing levers to enjoy nicotine’s effects, because it was keeping them from eating or sleeping. There are also droll stories such as the one about a defence lawyer doomed to be known as “Apple-pips Kelly” for the rest of his career because he committed the gaffe of suggesting that a murder victim had died after accidentally ingesting cyanide from apple pips. (Thousands of such pips would have had to be eaten – and well-chewed too – for this to happen.)

Agatha Christie, with her training as an apothecary’s assistant during the First World War, was careful with the facts while detailing poison use – even in novels where much detail wasn’t required – but Harkup mentions the rare occasions where she got something wrong: for example, in the short story “The House of Lurking Death”, a victim is bumped off with a dose of ricin in a cocktail; but in reality, the high alcohol content would have led the protein to unfold, losing much of its potency. Even here, though, Christie’s mistake can be pardoned given that when she wrote the story not very much was known about this poison, and there wasn’t even a test available to identify its presence.

Harkup keeps her own book as spoiler-free as possible, but her plot discussions sometimes let slip a little too much information. Ocassionally a spoiler alert is provided: while discussing Sad Cypress (“O is for Opium”), Harkup warns us that she has to disclose the murderer’s identity, because “explaining how a poisoner can kill only one person at a lunch where three people ate the same food, without revealing the murderer, would result in some very convoluted descriptions”. Which is fine: you can easily skip the last three pages of that chapter and return to them after reading Sad Cypress. But things get a little trickier elsewhere, as in the chapter “D is for Digitalis”, which deals with another of my favourite Christie novels, Appointment with Death: there is no spoiler warning here since Harkup doesn’t actually name the murderer, but the last two paragraphs of the chapter give the reader crucial information that helps in eliminating a large number of suspects.

Which means you have to be careful while reading this book. But that’s a small price to pay for such an engaging ride. Being a true-crime buff (in addition to a Christie fan), I particularly enjoyed the references to poisonings of the past: such as the 1850 murder of Gustave Fougnies by his brother-in-law and sister (this story shows that committing and covering up a murder, even when you’re using a non-bloody method like poisoning, and even when you do it in the privacy of your large chateau, can be a messy and risky business); or the labours of psychotic Graham Young who killed his stepmother – thallium was his weapon of choice – as a 15-year-old, and after his release from psychiatric hospital dedicated himself to poisoning one person for each year that he had been incarcerated.

These nasty anecdotes are reminders that with all her attention to detail and meticulous plotting, the Queen of Crime was – at least in the gruesomeness stakes – often upstaged by real life. That apart, Harkup’s book will almost certainly deepen your appreciation for the spadework and thought that went into the breeziest Agatha Christie thriller.

[Related post: murder in collaboration]

Private luxury: doing your own thing

[Did this piece for M magazine’s section on what the word “luxury” means to different people in an intimate, personal sense]

I have a friend who works for a bank in London. He’s doing well for himself but he thinks of his job as a necessary evil, something that must be survived for 10 hours each day while he tries to make time on the side for the things he really likes doing. His real passion, going back to our school days, is acting, and when I last met him he had just returned from a weekend trip to Ireland, to play a role in a short experimental film directed by a former classmate.

He loved the experience and couldn’t stop talking about it. “I wish I had the luxury of traveling to Dublin to be with those guys every week, he said, “or even just participating in three or four shows of a theatre performance in London each month. But it isn’t easy to juggle this along with the other stuff.” Looking at his eyes, I could see that the strain of the weekend was making itself felt. We parted after an early dinner; he was very tired and he needed to be at the bank – for “the other stuff” – at 9 AM.

It probably says something about the life I lead that such encounters come as minor jolts. At risk of causing serious annoyance, let me tell you something about myself: for the past seven years, my “work” has largely consisted of reading books, watching movies, and writing about them – all activities that I enjoy. There have, of course, been many commissioned assignments – which means often having to plough through less-than-engaging material – but after I established myself on my beat it became easier to pick and choose. Thus spoilt, I have to be regularly reminded of one of the most basic facts of human existence: that most working people in the world keep their professional and personal lives in separate, airtight boxes, and baulk when the two things chance to overlap; that they meticulously plan their weekends and weekday evenings (assuming they aren’t working late nights) and feel a bitter sense of loss if they don’t succeed in squeezing maximum utility from those precious pockets of “leisure time”.

Four years ago, I made another important career decision (with the help of a generous retainership offer from the newspaper I was employed with) and began working out of home, on my own time. Freelance writing may not be as lucrative as many other professions, but I rarely have to spend on books any more, and that’s where most of my money went in my pre-journalism days. It also means freedom from the ball-and-chain routine, freedom from neat and sterile office routines that make little sense to the writing life (what if the Muse goes AWOL between 9AM and 6 PM and comes calling at midnight instead?). It means being able to avoid the stress and the time-wastage associated with being stuck in Delhi traffic for over two hours each day.

I can spend quality time with my dog. I don’t have to shave every day, or every third day for that matter. Nor attend meetings or conferences, things that rank very high indeed in the long list of pointless manmade inventions based on the pretence that it’s possible to make sense of the world. Best of all, I don’t have to don formal clothes. (When I was a child, I wanted to be a vet. This partly had to do with love for animals, but I’ve come to believe that the real reason was the notion I had that vets weren’t required to wear ties or suits.)

And – to return to the all-important point with which I began this piece – there is no discernible divide between my “work” and my personal interests. I can spend my morning reading a great new novel by Orhan Pamuk (which is in fact what I did today), then watch a couple of films on DVD in the afternoon and evening (occasionally pausing to make little notes), and truthfully claim that I've spent the day adding value to my skill-set as a columnist/reviewer. My banker friend, who earns a lot more than I do, would probably agree that that really is luxury.

I see you turning green, reader, so here are a few crumbs of consolation: each of the benefits I’ve mentioned above comes with small minefields. It’s easy to become addicted to being anti-social. Getting out, even to go to the neighborhood mall, can feel like a chore. On the rare occasion that I do get into my car and travel a long distance, I find that my driving skills have deteriorated through disuse. Self-discipline is paramount in my line of work, and at times when it isn’t all coming together I find myself yearning for the extra shove that can only be provided by a martinet-boss. My dog is over-pampered and sulks mightily when I’m away for even a few hours. Power cuts, and visiting relatives who assume that because you’re home, you’re free, must be hazarded.

Turning something you enjoy doing into a career can be a tricky business in other ways; it can easily lead to a situation where you’re never really switched off from your “work”, and this can affect your family life. This is something I have to consciously guard against. My wife has standing instructions to smack me on the side of the head if things get out of hand. (Thankfully she’s a feature writer herself – albeit an office-going one – so she understands something of the compulsions of this life. But she’s afraid of discussing movies with me because I’m too “analytical”.)

All that said, would I trade this in for a regular working routine, or a high-paying job that I couldn’t be enthusiastic about? No way. Whenever I even consider it, I think back to a remote time in my past, a time when I had just graduated in Commerce from college and seemed set for a career in chartered accountancy (because it was the done thing, the inevitable thing. I’d been good in Maths and Accounts in school, so what else was there?). There’s a vivid memory of interning for my Articles in a middle-rung CA’s office, reading out and making tick-marks against debit and credit entries in an office ledger under the supervision of a genial man with whom there was nothing I could really talk about, while I secretly daydreamt of the movies I would rent from the British Council library later in the evening... if I got out in time.

When I think back to those days and reflect on the life I’m probably leading in a parallel universe right now, I can only thank my lucky stars.

Peter Joseph’s cult Internet film Zeitgeist posits a near-Utopian world (and a very improbable one) built on a high-technology, resource-based economy rather than the debt-perpetuating monetary system that all of us take for granted. One of its many conceits is a future where people won’t have to spend their lives chained to jobs (described as “paid slavery”) that they aren’t inherently interested in, but would find their own niches, adding value in little ways by doing things that are personally satisfying and meaningful to them. I like to think I'm already halfway there.

Catching up with AKB

A very pleasing encounter at Kunzum, Greater Kailash-2, a few days ago: I met AK Bhattacharya (or AKB as we always refer to him), the Business Standard editorial director, after what must have been 15 years. From this person flowed many of the kindnesses that enabled me to get started on a freelance career in 2006. He was the big boss who made me the offer I couldn’t refuse - a retainership with Business Standard that would allow me to work independently and write for others - but even before that, at a more personal and friendly level, he had been very encouraging about my blog and would often come by my desk to mention a post he had liked (or something he wanted to correct me about, mainly pertaining to Satyajit Ray). Given the big hierarchical gap between us in office, such interactions were unusual, but he pulled them off warmly and without fuss - and he greeted me much the same way at the bookshop yesterday (where I also got my signed copy of his new book about India’s finance ministers between 1947-77).

Great to see him looking as fit and spry as I remembered, and to find that he often uses the metro for traveling (something that many of the much younger people I know regard with disdain, as if it lowers their status or some such). We’ll catch up again soon, possibly in his lair, the Business Standard office...

A locked-island mystery: Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy

[I mentioned Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy a few posts ago. Here’s a piece I did for Business Standard]

The Scandinavian chill is almost a tangible presence in Stieg Larsson’s excellent thriller The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the first in a posthumously published series of crime novels known as the Millennium Trilogy. Much of the book is set in the small (and fictional) Swedish town of Hedestad, where a journalist named Mikael Blomkvist is investigating the possible murder of a young girl decades earlier. Blomkvist isn’t in the best of spirits when he begins this freelance assignment – an exposé he recently did on a prominent industrialist backfired, resulting in serious trouble for the magazine he publishes – and the miserable weather (the temperature drops to minus 37 degrees at one point) both mirrors and intensifies his inner gloom.

This cold, dark nighttime of the soul is vital to the book’s effect: some passages have the atmospheric quality of the Norwegian film Insomnia, about a detective unable to sleep both because he’s haunted by his conscience and because of the midnight sun. For Blomkvist, his stint in Hedestad amounts to a sort of voluntary exile, though the task at hand is intriguing enough to keep him going. What secrets are being harboured by the large Vanger family, and how did they lead to the disappearance of Harriet Vanger 40 years ago?

At any rate, the novel's pace picks up when Blomkvist teams with a researcher named Lisbeth Salander, a young woman driven purely by the self-preservation instinct, with no regard for society’s laws or moral codes – all of which makes her useful for her hacking skills and other unconventional methods. As they start to make inroads, the weather begins to improve too, but for the reader The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo remains shiver-inducing on other levels. Though the case is initially described by a character as “a locked-room mystery in island format” (because Harriet had disappeared from an island that was cut off from the mainland due to a bridge accident), it soon becomes clear that this isn’t a cosy mystery novel.

Those of us with a dim outsider’s impression of the north European countries tend to think of them as quiet, manicured, law-abiding places with shockingly low population densities and crime rates, and an unhurried pace of life. But there’s nothing prettified or mundane about much of the detective fiction that has emerged from the region in recent years – books by writers like Henning Mankell and Liza Marklund that reveal the darkness which can lie buried beneath calm surfaces. In the Millennium Trilogy, this largely involves the masked but often vicious misogyny prevalent in Swedish society: in fact, the first book’s original title translates as “Men Who Hate Women” (which the publishers of the English-language edition probably thought was not very marketable for a work of genre fiction). Each of its four principal sections opens with a statistic about violence against women in Sweden; the dated mystery that Blomkvist is investigating gradually broadens into a much larger narrative involving gruesome ritualistic killings that continue to the present day; and there is a parallel thread about the delinquent Salander’s experiences with her sadistic male guardian.

As a realistically plotted and paced detective procedural, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo rivals the classic Martin Beck series written by the Swedish husband-and-wife team of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. At well over 500 pages, it covers a wider range of themes than the the slim Martin Beck books do (an important sub-plot involves big-business corruption and the irresponsibility of financial journalists), but like them it’s driven by character development and procedure rather than by quick thrills – to the extent that it frequently jettisons plot elements that other genre writers might have spun a cottage industry out of. Without giving too much away, some of the crimes Blomkvist and Salander find themselves investigating involve literal interpretations of Biblical passages, but Larsson makes this incidental – he doesn’t turn it into a little game where the sleuths are trying to work out what each murder means, with pages full of long-winded exposition. He’s more interested in showing us how the amateur sleuths go about their business and what their work reveals about the society they are investigating.

The dramatic back-story to the Millennium Trilogy is that Larsson, who was himself a journalist, died of a heart attack shortly after delivering the manuscripts for the three books to his publisher. The English translation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (by Reg Keeland, who has also translated thrillers by Henning Mankell among others) has already become something of a publishing phenomenon and the second book in the series, The Girl who Played with Fire – about sex trafficking and the exploitation of underage girls – is on its way to achieving similar status. The concluding part, The Girl who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, will be published at the end of this year and the trilogy, all told, will run to over 1500 pages. It might be hyperbolic to call it the Swedish War and Peace, as some international reviews have done, but there’s no denying that this is a powerful, sweeping work that combines the best of genre writing with sharp social commentary.

Backstage Lords – a documentary about Hindi cinema’s neglected musicians

In the Introduction to his book Behind the Curtain: Making Music in Mumbai’s Film Studios, Gregory D Booth evokes two men named Anthony Gonsalves: the hugely popular fictional character played by Amitabh Bachchan in Amar Akbar Anthony, and the real-life Gonsalves, an arranger and composer who worked prolifically in Bombay’s film-music industry between the 1940s and the 1960s but was little known outside those circles.

“This dual identity of Anthony Gonsalves is at the heart of this book,” Booth writes. “As a film persona [jumping out of a large Easter egg and launching into song] he embodies the enormous cultural presence of both the Hindi cinema and its music. As a real but almost unknown music performer, composer, and arranger, he embodies the anonymity of his profession and his many colleagues.” He quotes the real Anthony Golsalves as saying, “We were always hidden, always playing behind the curtain. No one knew.” Hence the book’s title (which, in a little coincidence - and coincidences are integral to the Manmohan Desai universe - translates to “Parde ke Peecche”, part of a lyric from another Amar Akbar Anthony song).

Behind the Curtain emphasises the role of the neglected foot-soldiers of Hindi-film music: the people who played the instruments, arranged scores and in many cases made as vital a contribution to the final product as the music directors did, without getting a fraction of the recognition. Booth covers the transition from the studio system of the 1930s to the independent-producer system, and the concurrent shift from salaried orchestras to freelance orchestras, so often made up of musicians who had enjoyed prior careers in jazz bands (among them Cawas Lord, who played a big role in introducing Latin beats to Hindi film songs such as “Gore gore o banke chhore” and “Shola jo bhadke”). He also casts a sympathetic but practical look at the changes wrought by new technology – synthesizers, computer-based recording – in the 1990s, which made recording and arranging a much more impersonal process and led to a generation of old-school musicians being swept away by the winds of change.

Now we have Rudradeep Bhattacharjee’s moving documentary The Human Factor, which was inspired by Booth’s book (and features him as a talking head), but narrows its focus to the Lord family – the late Cawas, referred to here as the “Bheeshma Pitamah of film music”, and his two sons Kersi Lord and Buji Lord – with only a few brief sound-bytes from other musicians such as Enoch Daniels and Homi Mullan. This approach could have made the film a limited-scope project, but it works – first, because the Lords were important figures in the music industry for over four decades, and second, because this particular family is used to shine light on a larger universe. Scenes like the one where Kersi’s daughters crack up while recalling his sudden decision to get a Mr T hair-cut - a mid-life crisis if there ever was one - might seem self-indulgent if you view this film as a straight chronicle of the music industry. But what it is doing is presenting real people with their families, personal histories, whimsies, disappointments - and by extension letting us see that there were hundreds of others like them, working in those studios in difficult conditions in the pre-synthesiser world. (When singers and musicians recorded a song in unison in the same space, a small mistake made by a single member of the orchestra would be mortifying; the whole recording had to be started again, doubling the work for dozens of artistes, apart from adding to the producers’ costs. The flip side was the enormous job satisfaction that came with getting things right. “That period of five or six minutes where no one makes a mistake,” says Enoch Daniels with visible pride, “the unity achieved in that period is what creates the soul of a song.”)

There are different personality types within the Lord family. Here is Kersi, almost consistently jovial, ending his sentences with a distinct, musical little “na”, chattering away openly, yet also showing how seriously he took his work: at one point he wonders if it would be acceptable for a retired surgeon to be asked – during a party – to perform an impromptu operation just to show off his skills. Buji, on the other hand, is a man whose professional experiences left him somewhat embittered. Old photos and video footage show a dashing youngster on drums, touring the Caribbean with Mohammed Rafi and getting newspaper headlines to himself (“Buji Lord Steals Limelight”), but in the present day one sees an old man who has put his past behind him, to the extent that even his little granddaughter (nicely used as a refrain in the film) doesn’t know that her granddad once used to play for movies. 
 
Despite Kersi’s charm, Buji is the most interesting figure in this documentary, the necessary counterpoint to romantic notions about how beloved films and songs come into existence. Though polite throughout while answering questions or talking about his work, there is a clear reserve: he is sad about the lack of recognition given to the behind-the-curtain musicians (no mention in the film’s credit titles: “producers would tell us, what is the problem, you are getting ready cash – as if the others who worked on the film didn’t get cash”) and about the underhandedness in industry dealings. And he makes it a point to say – in a defensive tone – that he didn’t derive joy from his work; it was nothing more than bread and butter (“and maybe jam”) for him.

The most obviously poignant scenes involve their father Cawas: fragments of interviews from 2004, when the grand old man was nearly 90, looking confused and vulnerable, and unsure about why these people want to ask him so many things. Did he participate in the scoring for India’s first sound film Alam Ara? He can’t be sure – he worked on the second sound film, he knows that. Did he enjoy his work? We enjoyed it while we were playing, he says, but he appears to know or care little about the final product – he wasn’t the sort who went to movie halls to see the songs. In fact, as Naresh Fernandes – author of Taj Mahal Foxtrot – points out in the documentary, many of these musicians didn’t even know which song would be appearing in which film. Their experience as creators and performers was at a vast remove from the experience of millions of Indian movie-lovers who have been enthralled by this music for decades; viewers who, when they hear “Maang ke saath tumhara”, think reflexively of Dilip Kumar and Vyjayanthimala on the horse-cart instead of wondering who played the instrument that simulated the clip-clop of the horses’ hooves.

Those who love Hindi film songs usually think of their favourite numbers in terms of the contributions of the music director, the playback singer and the lyricist. But watching The Human Factor, I was reminded that hierarchies exist even in the ranks of the overlooked. A talking point during my recent conversation with Akshay Manwani about his book Sahir Ludhianvi: The People’s Poet was that lyricists have tended to get short shrift compared to composers, singers, or the actor performing the sequence on the screen. For instance, most viewers associate the classic “Main zindagi ka saath nibhaata chala gaya” with Dev Anand’s upbeat, twinkling star persona (which is fair enough: the song and the sequence were designed with that persona in mind) – relatively few would think of it predominantly as “a Sahir Ludhianvi song”. And yet, Sahir was a celebrated, high-profile name compared to the musicians who brought that song to life on their instruments. 

Try to imagine its effect without the mood-setting opening bars that were played by Kersi Lord on a Glockenspiel freshly imported to India. And then watch Kersi in this film – an extroverted, unruffled man at most times– saying he felt flustered when he had to go up on a stage recently to collect an award, because he had never experienced live applause during his working days.

P.S. via The Human Factor’s Facebook page, here is a short video from a 1976 concert where R D Burman and his orchestra play the magnificent opening-title track of Sholay. You can see Kersi Lord in the background around the 1.30 to 1.50 mark, and Buji Lord on drums around 2.20-2.25.



On this page, you can see some of the videos referenced in Booth's book, including interviews with musicians.

And my piece on the use of the song in Hindi cinema, done for Himal.