Kalamkaval (and the perks of being a leading man who doesn't age)

I liked Jithin K Jose’s Kalamkaval a great deal (though it was a bit surprising to see that a couple of 5/6-year-old kids were in the hall for this serial-killer film). I had gone in worrying that it would be another of those self-consciously “slow-burn” or existential thrillers that get fetishised a lot these days (nothing against that mode – I have enjoyed many such films, especially Malayalam films, in the past few years – but I wasn’t in the mood for something like that on the day). Was glad to find that it was stylish, moved at a good pace, and found interesting ways to cross-cut between the (past and present) activities of the psychotic protagonist and the cops on his trail. This jigsaw puzzle-like structure could have become convoluted, but they kept it clean and easy to follow. Some very good lighting in the indoor scenes (which have an incongruously warm texture even when the protagonist is doing creepy things). And Mammootty and Vinayakan were both terrific.

Even as a big Mammootty fan, I have sometimes felt that in this very productive recent phase of his career, he (and the writers-filmmakers working with him) might be trying a little too hard to tick every possible box: from playing a “respectable” family man trying to come out of the closet in a conservative social environment in Kaathal, to the monstrous glowering chathan in Bramayugam (a horror film I had high expectations of but couldn’t stay invested in), to the childlike but also paranoid and dangerous Kuttan in Puzhu. Some of the choices can start to feel contrived at times. But all that goes out the window when he is on the screen, giving a solid performance in a well-written and structured film, and that was the case with Kalamkaval.

P.S. yes, that inter-title *does* say “The Perks of Being a Subjective Nihilist”, but don’t worry – the chapter heads are mainly playful ones.

P.P.S. I have probably said this a few times in conversations, on my film group etc - but it is extraordinary how Mammootty can so easily pass off as being three-plus decades younger than he is. He is completely plausible as a 45-year-old, and this isn't so much because of boyish features or a super-fit-seeming physique (obviously he isn't a Tom Cruise), but just because of his movements and gestures and body language - all of that belongs to a much younger man. I can't think of anyone else who can pull this off in quite the same way. (Someone like Robert De Niro is very fit and alert, but it was discomfiting to watch him play a character half his age in The Irishman, notwithstanding the "de-aging" CGI used there. With Mammootty, on the other hand, it is currently hard to imagine what a believably 75-year-old version of the man would be like.)
 

Pupdate

A follow-up to my earlier post about these pups in Saket, who need a good and caring home. It is getting very cold, they are in a hostile neighbourhood, the mother is struggling to gather food, no one is really looking after them, and cars are still speeding along the lane at all hours. So please spread the word to anyone who might be interested (*and* has an understanding of the responsibilities involved when one adopts a dog).

P.S. one of the pups got very lucky last week when Dr Parul Saxena from Dwarka saw my Instagram post and then came all the way to Saket to adopt her. She is being well looked after by Dr Parul and her two little daughters, and it’s great to see the photos. (The last pic here is of Dr Parul when she came here to take the pup back home. I wish there were more such people.)

Some love for Fredric Brown and The Dead Ringer (and travelling carnivals)

In between all the intense crime literature I have been reading of late, a more laidback book that I loved was Fredric Brown’s 1948 novel The Dead Ringer – the second entry in a mystery series about the teenage Ed Hunter and his kindly uncle Ambrose. I had read the first book in the series, The Fabulous Clipjoint, some weeks ago, but The Dead Ringer works as a standalone too. And one of the reasons I enjoyed it so much was its carnival setting: Ed is assisting his uncle, who works at a travelling “carny”, and as the narrative begins they are touring various towns in the American Midwest (Evansville, Louisville), staying a week or so in one place before moving on.

Much in the book reminded me of my childhood fascination with the circuses in Enid Blyton stories. Back then, reading about this itinerant life – the caravans which served as both cosy homes and as vehicles for the circus-folk, the bonhomie and sense of community between people and animals, children who had just arrived warily into this world and were learning to settle down – created a weird, nostalgia-like sensation for a place and time I hadn’t actually experienced myself (I would later learn that “anemoia” is the word for this; the Blyton circus books were among the first of many books and films that would evoke this feeling in me).

Later, of course, there were other carnival stories in my reading and viewing life – including the darker iterations to be found in the work of Ray Bradbury or Richard Matheson, or in horror/noir films like Freaks or Nightmare Alley or Dr Caligari. But the interesting thing about The Dead Ringer is that though it begins with the discovery of a murder in the carnival premises on a gloomy, rainy night (and there are two further deaths to come), the book doesn’t feel nasty or dangerous in the way that the narratives mentioned above are. There is a gentle, conversational quality to Brown’s writing even when he is presenting noirish elements – and there is something very comforting about the relationship between young Ed (the narrator) and his uncle Am, who has taken him under his wing.

Both this book and its predecessor (in which Ed and Am had investigated the murder of Ed’s father) are primarily coming-of-age stories. In both, Ed learns not just about sleuthing/crime-solving, but about life in a more general sense – about thorny relationships (including the ones he himself gets into with complex women, who may or may not be femme fatales), or about why people might take a certain path as they negotiate hardships.

I think of these as slice-of-life mysteries – meaning that even as the investigation is on (and we know that Ed and Am have to conjecture and find things out), there is an unhurried naturalism to the telling. For instance, rarely if ever do these books have the chapter-ending cliff-hangers you’d expect in most thrillers or suspense novels. (One of the few big dramatic moments that Ed experiences firsthand in The Dead Ringer –where he sees, or thinks he sees, something unnerving outside a trailer window – occurs right in the middle of a chapter, and he is quite drunk at the time, so there is a haziness about the whole thing.) More often, what happens is that Ed and Am saunter about, having a drink or two at multiple joints along the way, talking, turning things over in their heads, making further appointments. There are occasionally passages where you might expect something to happen that will significantly further the mystery – or provide an important clue – but it turns out that the chapter is simply about a night out on the town. (Though something said during the chat *might* turn out to be significant later.) And none of this was disappointing for me: I enjoyed the pace, and the constant sense that there is room for other things in these characters’ lives.

That said, the actual mysteries are very satisfying too. The plot of The Dead Ringer, since I haven’t said much about it, concerns the stabbing of an unidentified midget – followed, some days later, by the possibly suspicious death of a chimpanzee belonging to the carnival… meanwhile Ed finding himself getting involved with the beautiful young woman, a carnival “poser”, who had discovered the first body.

This could be called “soft-boiled" noir, with a reassurance that things will turn out okay in the end – though Ed might have his heart broken a bit, in a way that will make him more resilient for the future, and for the next journey that he and his uncle take. (I believe the later books in the series have the two of them officially starting a detective agency together. No more carnival, which is a pity.)

P.S. a bit more about Fredric Brown: long before I had read either of these novels, I had read a few of his short stories, two of which are collected in two of my favourite anthologies. Brian Aldiss’s A Science Fiction Omnibus has a wonderful “short-short story” by Brown, less than a page long – it is called “Answer”, and you can read it here – it will take only a minute or so. Consider that it was written in 1954, and then think about its implications in a world that will soon come to be even more dominated by AI and Big-Brother technology than we currently are.

The other Brown story is much longer, and is one of my favourite impossible-crime mysteries: “The Laughing Butcher”, about a “no-footprints-in-the-snow” murder and the subsequent lynching of a much-despised man by townsfolk.
I also have Brown’s collection Nightmares and Geezenstacks, which contains many of those short-short stories – will be getting through that one in the coming days.

P.P.S. see this pic for an Indian connection in The Dead Ringer: reading a very local/provincial midwestern newspaper, Ed sees a mention of riots in Calcutta. Well, all this IS happening in late 1947/early 1948.

Loved the third Knives Out film...

Wake Up Dead Man is excellent. And not just because it contains explicit tributes to John Dickson Carr and the locked-room mystery (somewhat expected given how much of a Carr fan Rian Johnson has become in recent years). Or because Josh O’Connor’s hangdog expressions are always so sexy. This one is well paced, funny when you don’t expect it to be (given the ecclesiastical setting, and Benoit Blanc’s lack of belief, they have much fun with dialogue like this: “We’ve got to nail the real killer… I’m sorry, I mean catch him…”) … and also poignant and empathetic when you don’t expect it to be. (A scene where O’Connor’s Pastor Jud interrupts important business to take time out to provide solace to a woman who has started unburdening herself on the phone… it could have been pedantic, or an obvious attempt to make a point about the young priest – but it manages to feel right and be moving.) And of course there are some nice twists towards the end. Very good stuff. 

 

P.S. Rian Johnson’s love for Carr notwithstanding, he does offer a greatly simplified version of the “locked-room lecture” from The Hollow Man. Gideon Fell is very clear while delivering the lecture that he isn’t covering anywhere near all of the possibilities and solutions.

Big-screen Sholay (and a fire scare)

A surreal thing happened while watching Sholay (the new Film Heritage Foundation restoration) at PVR Select Citywalk on Friday night: as the Holi attack scene began, there was a fire-alarm scare and we all had to rush out of the exit doors (for a minute, before they gave the all-clear again). This was an annoyance, coming right in the middle of one of the film’s most immersive scenes, but it was suitably dramatic too, and amusing: our exodus mirrored the one on screen, the villagers fleeing in panic.

I can say a lot about the overall experience, from the perspective of both the eternal fanboy whose personal mythology is so tied up with this film, and the more detached observer who doesn’t unconditionally love everything in it (e.g. the Asrani and Jagdeep scenes take up too much time at a point when we need to get to Ramgarh) – but will try to keep it short. (I have written two Sholay pieces this year anyway, one of which is yet to be published.) Either way, even beyond the film’s actual quality, this is always such an emotionally overwhelming experience. All the associations. The earliest evidence of my mother leching at Dharam (while being very fond of SK and AB in a more sanskaari-mahila way). The observations she made to me: look how big Dharam’s hands are when he is holding the dying Jai’s head; countless other things.

Anupama Chopra in her book mentioned how the Sippys first realised it was going to be a blockbuster, after a slow start – because viewers were too shellshocked during the interval to go out and buy popcorn etc. I can believe it. Even today, the build-up to the intermission is so intense, and Amjad Khan’s performance so scarily believable (even as he plays a mythic-allegorical-no-shades-of-grey character) – it must have been incredibly dark and unpleasant for viewers in 1975. (As I keep saying, Dharmendra’s and Hema Malini’s superb performances bring so much essential positive energy to a film that is otherwise quite morbid.)

And yes, I have decided that I do prefer the “original” ending that has now been restored and screened here – with Gabbar killed and Thakur breaking down in Veeru’s arms. Makes much more sense overall, and completes the emotional arc of Sanjeev K’s performance (as Chopra also pointed out in her book).

Anyway, enough for now. Please try to watch it on the big screen.

P.S. as mentioned here, the last time I watched Sholay on a giant screen was in 1983 or 84, and we missed the first 10-12 minutes then; I properly got to see the great opening-credits scene, with the wonderful RDB score, only in adulthood. Though I do the bulk of my film-watching alone, this latest viewing wasn’t intended to be a solitary outing – it just turned out that way. Not ideal. But I stayed the duration despite originally thinking I would watch only half the film and come back for another show (since I had a very early morning the next day).

William Brittain's short mystery stories

Continuing my adventures with vintage crime fiction, and an enjoyable new find: the cosy short stories of William Brittain, who was a regular contributor to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine in the 1960s and 70s. These two collections (published by short-mystery specialists Crippen & Landru) include dozens of Mr Strang stories – about the deductive skills of an elderly, (mostly) gentle science teacher. My favourites so far include “Mr Strang Finds the Answers” (which is suspenseful, well-plotted but also strangely moving in its premise of Mr Strang having to figure out which of three students stole the answer keys for an upcoming exam - and bringing their fathers, also his ex-students, in for a chat), “Mr Strang versus the Snowman”, “Mr Strang Accepts a Challenge”, "Mr Strang Picks up the Pieces", "Mr Strang Sees a Play", and “Mr Strang, Armchair Detective”.

But there are also 11 stories from Brittain’s “Man Who Reads…” series (see the contents page here), and for very obvious reasons I leapt right into the first one, “The Man Who Read John Dickson Carr”. This is a concise tale about a young man, obsessed with John Dickson Carr, who sets about plotting a locked-room murder of his own. And does a very clever job of it too… until he doesn’t. Delightful stuff, with a superb closing sentence.

 

P.S. if you zoom in on the cover of The Man Who Read Mysteries, you’ll see that the book being read is Carr’s The Problem of the Wire Cage – which, coincidentally, I read just last week. Tribute-literature can be such fun when it’s well-executed and has a distinct personality of its own – as is the case here.

 

Ritwik Ghatak, Unmechanical: photos from the Delhi events

A few images from Shamya Dasgupta's Delhi trip to promote his big Ritwik Ghatak anthology. 

Four Mayabazaaris and one Gulaabo gaadi. Shamya and I with the intrepid and resourceful Shillpi Singh (who recently translated Piyush Mishra's memoir into English), Yasir Abbasi, and a pink Ambassador at the eye-popping Museo Camera in Gurgaon – just before the Ghatak discussion, expertly moderated by Sanghamitra Chakraborty, on December 4.

Museo Camera is run by Aditya Arya, who was the young stills photographer during the making of Jaane bhi do Yaaro in 1982, and it’s always good to meet him and experience his continuing enthusiasm for his film and theatre days. (An old post about him here.)

The talk went well too, I think – Shamya is quite the pro now when it comes to talking Ghatak, and sounds very much like a seasoned film critic at times despite his protestations that he doesn’t know much about cinema. (You can see and hear him discuss the book in this long session which I hosted on Zoom a few weeks ago.)

At the Museo Camera session I spoke a bit about the things I have written about in the anthology – about being underwhelmed and annoyed when I experienced Ghatak films in poor prints and without adequate context around 20 years ago; and my very pleasing re-engagement with his work earlier this year, when Shamya encouraged me to watch the 1959 Bari Theke Paliye (followed by an experience of really good prints of Ajantrik, Meghe Dhaka Tara – and, of course, the wonderful Subarnarekha). 

A Ghatak talk (by Ira Bhaskar) at JNU the next day, in a packed room…

… followed by Shamya, Ira and Kaushik Bhaumik in conversation at India Habitat Centre on the 6th.

And finally, Shamya and I with a few of our Encyclopaedia Britannica colleagues (including Padma Pegu, who was first our post-grad friend before we were all at EB together).

(Unmechanical: Ritwik Ghatak in 50 Fragments is available here)

 

A hazy photo of a fondly remembered teacher

There was much St Columba’s School nostalgia at the big book launch of Ajay Jain's school memoir Charlie’s Boys at India Habitat Centre a few days ago. I’m not exactly a school sentimentalist (don’t have many good memories, didn’t have any of the rambunctious fun that the extroverted boys did, spent most of my time in a haze of petrified shyness even though I was always doing well academically) but it was nice to see the displays from the pages of old Columban magazines. Including images of nearly-forgotten teachers, especially from my Junior School and Middle School years.

In the picture here: my Class 3 teacher Mrs Ray (extreme right), who was so fond of me she visited mum and me a few times when we had left my father’s house and were staying with my nani in the mid-80s. Mrs Ray brought me some books to read when I was ill once, including a very gripping Arabian Nights-style fantasy novel (I don’t remember the name now) that I never expected a prim classteacher to endorse.

 

Also, supplied at the event, a whistle in the school colours! And Phantom sweet cigarettes of yore.

 

Puppy alert - in Saket, New Delhi

Spreading the word about these sweet and currently VERY vulnerable puppies - they are around a month and a half old now - in Golf View Apartments, Saket. Two litters were born around the same time to two unspayed dogs, making it the first such population increase in over 12 years in our colony. (I won’t get into details of this unfortunate occurrence - it involves both irresponsibility on the part of a particular dog-carer and the mess that is caused by unsterilised dogs straying into new territories after abandonment or a firecracker scare.)

Anyway, there were around 16 pups to begin with - only five or six are left now, most of the others having either died in the cold or having been run over at night when cab-drivers (or uncaring residents) speed through the colony road. They spend most of their time huddled together inside one of our naalas (where they were born), coming out a couple of times a day. With the two mothers dashing about frantically scavenging for food and inevitably getting into fights with other territorial dogs. 

 

I am not personally involved with the pups (have seen them only once) but I have put together a group to collect updates and to try and get them adopted or sent to a good boarding facility for the winter. (The latter course is always dicey: if four or five of them have to be brought back to the colony after a month or two, now larger in size, they will not only find it very difficult to adapt but will also be on the receiving end of hostility from a very dog-unfriendly RWA.)

 

Please spread the word about them so we can try to get a few of them adopted, and then get the mothers spayed once they have stopped lactating. For adoption, obviously we are looking for people who are serious and understand the responsibilities involved - not someone who will impulsively pick up a cute-looking pup and then abandon it after a few days. 

 

If there are any leads at all, or if you’re interested yourself, please mail me (jaiarjunATgmailDOTcom) or get in touch through my public posts on Facebook or Instagram. Thanks.

15 John Dickson Carr mysteries for your reading pleasure

A sequel to the previous post. Here is a listing + tentative ranking of the John Dickson Carr novels I have read so far (around 10 of these in the last two months alone). Many of these I thought brilliant, and none of them has been a clunker. (There have been times when I was underwhelmed by the solution, or thought Carr had gone too far down the rabbit-hole of the overly convoluted or improbable plot – but even in those cases the quality of the writing and the setting up of the puzzle was entertaining enough that the book as a whole worked for me.)

Category 1: my absolute favourites so far. Up there with the best Agatha Christies or who-have-you.

– He Who Whispers (wrote a bit about it here)

 – The Black Spectacles, a.k.a. The Problem of the Green Capsule

 – She Died a Lady (Unlike many Carr fans whose reviews I have read online, I enjoyed the passages of slapstick comedy in this one, including a scene where Sir Henry Merrivale, rattling along noisily in a wheelchair, stirs up the unwelcome attention of every dog in the village centre. I’m surprised that many devoted Carr fans turn their noses up at such humour, especially since it so often balances the darker aspects of a story.)

– The Burning Court (This is one of JDC’s most discussed novels, and among his most divisive… mainly because of a four-page epilogue which seems to not only overturn a perfectly satisfying denouement but also takes the book into territory that is discomfiting for many fans of “fair-play detective fiction”. I loved it, though, and I think the ending can be interpreted in two – if not three – different ways, all of which can work for the open-minded reader.)

– The Four False Weapons (One of those mysteries where, as new revelations and red herrings keep turning up in the book’s final third, you have to laugh out loud at the author’s audacity and confidence. Carr is having *so much* fun here.)

– The Plague Court Murders (A classic locked-room, or locked-hut, situation. With a solution that is inventive but easy to understand and satisfying – though you might wonder how practical it would be to carry out. If you intend to commit a locked-room murder, I mean.)

Note: The first three of the above titles I would have no problem recommending to someone who has never read Carr, is a big Agatha Christie fan, and prefers a relatively cosy/traditional mystery narrative. The last two… it’s probably better that you acquire a taste for Carr’s pyrotechnics first. The Plague Court Murders, for instance, is very heavy on dark atmosphere.
I’m unsure how to categorise The Burning Court along these lines: on the one hand it is a cleanly written book, with a lucid, easy-to-follow plot, a single setting, and a small group of characters; on the other hand, the tightrope it walks between the rational and the supernatural might not work for some readers.

Category 2: not my grade-A favourites, but I love many things about them; highly recommended overall.

– Till Death Do Us Part (A village-mystery Carr that would probably work very well for a Christie fan.)

– The Hollow Man, a.k.a. The Three Coffins – sadly the only Carr novel to have been consistently in print over the decades. Includes the legendary “locked-room lecture” by the harrumphing Dr Gideon Fell.

– The Seat of the Scornful, a.k.a. Death Turns the Tables (This is the one with the indoor swimming-pool scene that I’m convinced influenced a famous scene in the 1942 film Cat People. I would have placed the book higher except that the “how-dunit” or “how-it-happened” is just a little too complicated for my liking.)

– The Ten Teacups, a.k.a. The Peacock Feather Murders (With not one but *two* murder solutions that really stretch plausibility; but it’s very exciting for all that, and there is one moment near the end, involving the discovery of a body – not saying any more – that is as morbidly, eye-poppingly funny as anything else I have read in Golden Age crime-fic.)

– The Corpse in the Waxworks
– It Walks by Night
(These two are among Carr’s first novels, featuring his first series detective Henri Bencolin – and these books, both set in Paris, have a distinctly creepy quality, call it Grand Guignol or Gothic or whatever, that you won’t find in most of his later works.)

Category 3: liked these, but that’s about it.

– The Judas Window (Note: this is the only Carr novel that I have read *online* – and on my laptop, at that, which is not the most fulfilling experience. I mention this because it is one of his most widely admired works, and my relatively subdued feelings about it may have to do with the circumstances of my reading. I am thinking of reading a physical copy soon.)

– The White Priory Murders (As many Carr fans point out, this one has a terrific solution – a simple, uncluttered one – to an “impossible” footprints mystery. But the road to that denouement is sometimes laboured and uninvolving.)

– The Eight of Swords (A wonderfully well-hidden murderer; but again, some of the midsection is a slog to get through.)

I’m sure I’ll be talking Carr again within the next 2-3 months, since I have ordered a few more books, including some that have cult followings…

Rian Johnson on John Dickson Carr

For those of you who know and like Rian Johnson’s work – the Knives Out series, his direction of some major Breaking Bad episodes, etc – I wanted to link to this piece by him, about one of the mystery writers he most admires (who has also lately become one of my favourites).

This is Johnson waxing eloquent on the great John Dickson Carr. It was good to see this because, as mentioned in recent posts here, my reading life in the past few months has largely entailed a discovery/re-discovery of Carr’s work (thanks to some of his novels slowly coming back into print), and I have been staggered by the quality of his output during his peak years: the early 1930s to the mid-40s. One of the big literary injustices I can think of is that while Agatha Christie has been among the bestselling authors of all time worldwide, Carr (whose crime-fiction oeuvre at least for the period mentioned above was every bit as impressive and probably more varied) was almost entirely out of circulation for many decades – with many people who think of themselves as whodunit fans barely knowing his work at all.

I would have preferred to avoid comparisons since these writers have different strengths and weaknesses, but at the present moment I find Carr’s work more stimulating. That said, I also get why Christie’s books travelled better overseas, were more easily adapted to film, and were more accessible to younger readers. (I read most of my Christies for the first time between the ages of 11 and 15; I don’t think I would have found Carr as appealing at that age. This is another reason why I should avoid qualitative comparisons: my reading of these two has been at completely different times in my life, more than 30 years apart.)

Anyway, read the piece. I agree with what Rian Johnson says about Carr’s prose here: “The first quality that blows your hair back in any of Carr’s novels is so fundamental that it’s easy to take it for granted: beyond the plotting or the puzzling, beyond the mystery itself, first and foremost the man is just one hell of a writer. Like walking into a well-put-together room, when you’re in the hands of a good writer you can just feel it…”

Interestingly, the book he is mainly discussing here – The Problem of the Wire Cage – is not rated too highly by serious Carr fans. But I plan to read it soon, and I’ll get this edition which has the Johnson intro. 

P.S. I didn’t realise that the 1972 film version of Sleuth included an allusion to the murder in The Problem of the Wire Cage.

P.P.S. here, on a very good Classic Mystery blog, is a comparison of Carr and Christie.

(Coming soon, a listing/ranking of the JDC novels I have read so far)

Subarnarekha in a great print (at last)

Super experience at IIC Delhi watching Ritwik Ghatak’s Subarnarekha in a really high-quality print. Subarnarekha, which I watched twice in May this year, was one of my major motivations when writing an essay for Shamya Dasgupta’s big Ghatak anthology (and I began my piece - short passage in the image below - with that marvellous nightclub scene near the end, Abhi Bhattacharya with the crazy head-dress, Bijon Bhattacharya rambling drunkenly on about ambrosia and apsaras). But the print I watched yesterday was easily the best of the lot, and it transformed the film again for me (much as I had already admired it). Too many great images to list, but sharing just a few here.

These campus dogs...

A couple of photos I had taken of the campus dogs at OP Jindal Global University during my teaching stint there in 2022-23. One of the first things I noticed whenever I went there was the attachment that many of the students had to the dogs, and the early lessons in compassion and responsibility they were getting (particularly important in my view for this demographic of privileged young people) in the process of looking after animals, or getting vaccinations and sterilisations done. (Or even - in the case of those who didn’t like the animals - learning to share their spaces with things that made them uncomfortable, an equally important lesson in some contexts.) For me personally, one of the first times that Jindal felt like a warm, welcoming place was when I saw a couple of students (assisted by a teacher) rushing an unwell dog up the stairs to a room where it could be medicated.

During my time there, I also had a few chats with students who were dealing with anxiety issues, along a spectrum from general everyday deadline stress to pronounced bouts of depression. Completely understandable if you’re an undergrad living and studying in a high-achievers’ environment like this (or just a sensitive young person, period). So I haven’t been surprised at all to see some of the recent messages - on Instagram and elsewhere - from current students, talking about how the dogs’ presence has a calming and focusing effect on them. (For those of us who know what it’s like to form powerful inter-species bonds, this sort of thing is a no-brainer anyway.)

Amidst the recent instances of animal-care groups in educational institutions sending out official letters asking for their (sterilised, vaccinated) campus dogs not to be taken away, it has been very distressing to read about the stance of the Jindal University administration, refusing to speak with protesting students on this issue. As always, one hopes that some common sense and compassion prevails. But for the situation to come to this, that too with a harsh winter approaching and with the real possibility that docile and well-integrated dogs may be dumped just about anywhere around Sonipat/Haryana with no accountability or tracking… this is horrendous if you have any idea about the potential suffering involved. 

 

Anyone who has suggestions - or better yet, concrete help to offer in terms of boarding or fostering possibilities for the more vulnerable JGU dogs - please get in touch and I’ll pass the word on…

To bee or not to bee? A lost dog, firecracker psychos, Bugonia, and the joys of misanthropy

(I wrote last month about my harrowing Diwali-week search for my lost building dog. Couldn’t resist letting off some steam by writing an Economic Times column around it too. Here it is.
Also... see the second image below for my Sherlock Holmes avatar, created by ET's friendly resident robots)
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It was my third visit in two days to this unfamiliar colony – including one that had extended till midnight, and another very early the next morning. A space eight kilometres from my home, and from his – a space he had somehow arrived at in disoriented terror as the sounds of firecrackers exploded all around him. I was searching desperately, based on just one sighting mentioned on an animal-care group, and slender hope. Fatigued and demoralised at the sight of other lost dogs running helter-skelter on the roads (occasionally turning back to approach me, since they were looking for friendly humans), I was about to head home when the call came.

It was from a local dog-walker whom I had just happened to run into an hour earlier, shown a photo to and left my number with. He had seen my Pandey, one of countless victims of the noise terrorism of the past month; could I come quickly, he said. Heart pounding (because I knew how fast this particular dog could vanish when nervous), I got there just in time. Pandey ji whined accusatorily when he saw me, as if all this had been my fault. The wounds on his paws may have prevented him from going further afield, in which case I would probably never have seen him again. Small mercies.

This story may not seem to belong in a film column, but my lost-dog search had elements of popular cinema: drama, tragedy, some unintentional comedy – with spots of guilt and recrimination, hope rising and ebbing, two good Samaritans encountered at crucial moments, and an emotional reunion deserving a Hans Zimmer score.

It could so easily have been something else instead: an “arty”, non-narrative film with no clear beginning or end; no closure, only bleakness. But this was mainstream, a box-office smash full of action. And loud bombs too, spread over many evenings. Along with caricatured villains who had mwahaha-d callously at me – and encouraged their children to laugh too – when I confronted them a full ten days before Diwali and asked them not to burst so many loud fireworks; tried to tell them about the hyper-sensitive hearing of the sentient creatures who shared our spaces. These were people who hid their most toxic impulses behind the cloak of “our tradition”, and claimed they were celebrating Rama while behaving like the worst of Ravana.

Anyway, for Pandey, this was a happy ending. And a few days after this, I was watching Yorgos Lanthimos’s brilliant new film Bugonia, which also closes on a happy note – happy, I hasten to clarify, for the misanthrope, for the endangered honeybee, and for many other animals across the earth. It’s a marvellous sequence, scored to the plaintive “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” (the Marlene Dietrich version) – the effect is comparable to watching parts of the great animated film Flow, or the ending of Dr Strangelove, where Vera-Lynn’s lovely voice sings “We’ll Meet Again” over images of mushroom clouds bedecking the planet.

What I have written here might be deemed a spoiler for Bugonia, but the joys of this film (if it works for you, that is) lie in many other places, not just in its ending. This story about two men who abduct a CEO, believing she is a malevolent alien, has Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons displaying a Buster Keaton-worthy talent for deadpan humour in utterly absurd situations. It has the controlled lunacy that marked some of Lanthimos’s earlier work, including Kinds of Kindness (which also featured Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone in a story where the former believes the latter is something other than human) and Poor Things.

To reduce a zany film like Bugonia to a “message movie” would be a boring thing to do: Lanthimos’s universe resists such classifications and takeaways. But our responses to films, especially controversial or off-kilter films, can depend on our state of mind at the time. When I watched this one, I had just come off those hellish firecracker days when I was even more of a people-hater than usual; in ugly confrontations, trying to respond to sub-humans who coolly informed me that “our children’s pleasure is more important than animals”.

The last minutes of Bugonia – a tapestry of humans frozen in the middle of mundane actions, including religious ones – were therapeutic, because they allowed me to live out a personal fantasy I always re-live during the Diwali month: that some of the worst offenders in our colony would have a vagrant bomb explode on their hand or in their face as they were lighting it. Judge me for that if you like. Pandey and countless others like him would approve. So would Bugonia’s honeybees.