As they lay dying: caregivers and patient in His Three Daughters

(my latest Economic Times column)
----------------------

With 20 minutes left in the new film His Three Daughters – a superbly performed chamber drama about three women looking after their dying father in his final days – there is a notable narrative shift. I won’t give away anything important: it’s enough to say that after an hour of storytelling centred on the three daughters, who are negotiating their own complicated interrelationships and personal histories, we meet the father for the first time. Before this he has been a barely glimpsed, immobile presence on a bed in an inside room. Now, as they wheel him into the dining area, he is only half-conscious, only just capable of posing – mechanically, through pain and discomfort – for a selfie with his children; but he is at least a recognisable, flesh-and-blood person.

And then something else happens that briefly shifts the needle even further from the caregivers to the patient – to his inner life and dazed thoughts, which may have nothing to do with the things his daughters have been preoccupied with for the bulk of the film.

This is one of those risky, tone-altering devices that can take a viewer out of a film. But I think it’s an intentional, carefully thought out rupturing, and it fits a theme that emerged a short while earlier: the unknowability of people, or how a person’s entirety can (perhaps) only be processed through his absence – as opposed to the many disconnected bits you experience at different times and in different contexts while he is alive. Shortly after we see the three daughters trying to find the right words for an obituary, the father stops being an abstraction for us and becomes real. We even get a hint of something about him that the protagonists didn’t know.

In an online session some years ago, a friend and I discussed how illness-centred films are often more about the caregiver than the patient: especially if the latter is in the final stages of terminal illness, unresponsive or catatonic. We spoke about Shoojit Sircar-Juhi Chaturvedi’s October, and about a possible ideological criticism of this generally admired film – that it might be seen as employing the “Women in Refrigerators” trope, where an incapacitated woman becomes a cipher for the playing out of a male character’s personal growth. About other films such as Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers (which His Three Daughters reminded me of). And about how caregiving in general can seem like a self-absorbed, self-congratulatory act even when seriously discharged.

The women in His Three Daughters (one of whom isn’t a biological daughter of the patient) represent different faces of the caregiver: from the ones who worry from a distance, offer financial help and sometimes over-control, to the one who is there round the clock, shouldering most of the burden, knowing things the long-distance progeny can’t know – and who has earned the right to behave erratically once in a while, to seem remote or uncaring. I can relate well to this latter version. During my caregiving years for family members, many dimensions in my personality competed for space on a daily basis: the attentive and the mean-spirited, the vulnerable and the contemptuous. I also saw a great deal of the process through which a once-sentient human being becomes a shell, so that it’s easy to forget that a complex, multi-layered person had inhabited this eroding body and mind: whether it was my grandmother, one of the sharpest people I knew, trying feebly to get things done while confined to bed in her late eighties, or my father – once aggressive and dangerous, now helpless, at the mercy of attendants (and a son who, while discharging his duties, might also on some level have seized his chance to be the bully, taking revenge for earlier times).

The most proximate and intimate caregiving, though, was for my mother, and I think often about the final days when she wasn’t quite there, incapable of doing anything but gasping sporadically for breath with her eyes closed (even when she was sitting up in bed, in a position that was least painful for her). The toughest moments were the ones when Lara, our canine-child whom mum loved immeasurably, would walk past her line of vision and I would see (or imagine I saw) mum’s eyes briefly flickering – I would wonder then if in the midst of all the pain and disorientation she was also worried about the people and animals she loved, and how they would manage without her. I wanted to believe that she had completely slipped out of consciousness, that she wasn’t aware of anything.

I thought of this again while watching that dissonant late scene in His Three Daughters, and it felt vaguely therapeutic: it offered the consoling possibility that in her last days my mother’s mind was somehow in a space free from wracking pain and worry, perhaps turning over memories of remote things that had nothing to do with her immediate situation; things I had never known about and would never know about. Even the most dedicated caregivers, control-freaks as we sometimes are, don’t have to be on top of everything.

Coming of age in the video era: a new book evokes 1980s memories of Newstrack, Lehren and other relics

(Wrote this personal essay around a new book for Mint Lounge)

-----------------

On hearing about the recent death of media magnate Nari Hira, I was reminded of the first time I heard that name as a child (briefly thinking it designated a company rather than a person) and of the wave of “video films” that Hira produced in the mid-to-late 1980s. These were quickly made, visually unambitious movies of varying quality that were shot, edited and distributed on video, and heavily promoted in his magazines like Stardust and Society. They didn’t seem to fit any of the usual Hindi-film categories; indeed, one was unsure if they were even “cinema”.

The longest chapter in Ishita Tiwary’s book Video Culture in India: The Analog Era provides some back-story about these films, through a process of discovery by a much younger person who hadn’t lived through the period herself. Tiwary says she had no idea such video films existed, and a few people she spoke to didn’t remember them either – details were slowly uncovered.

“It is possible to imagine that the consumption of content in the private space of one's home allowed middle-class women to become the primary spectators of these straight-to-video erotic thrillers,” she proposes. “Video made possible a new imagination of the spectator as not just male.” This might, with hindsight, seem a large claim, given how fleeting the video-film interlude was (and also that satellite TV, with much more permissive content, was just a few years away). Yet, to someone who was a child in 1986-87, it feels plausible. My mother and her friends watched some of Hira's films: I wasn’t allowed to, this being “adult” stuff, franker than mainstream Hindi cinema. But in the whispers around these video films, and in stolen glances at the tape covers, many of us kids saw exotic-seeming names (“Shingora, starring Persis Khambatta”) and heard of such plot points as a woman being involved at separate times with father and son (all this predating the arrival of The Bold and the Beautiful).

More broadly, Tiwary’s book analyses four manifestations of the video culture that changed the viewing experience for us in the early 1980s – making us participants with the illusion of some control over the media we consumed (long before new forms of control and manipulation arose in the internet and smart-phone age). The video film is one of the chapters. The others are the marriage video; the video news magazine (mainly Madhu Trehan’s Newstrack) which offered a different treatment of news compared to the state-run Doordarshan; and video as playing a part in the growth of the Osho Rajneesh cult, presenting the guru as simultaneously an accessible figure and a grand one.

In covering these uses of video technology, the book offers insights into the differences and similarities between video and glamorous big-screen cinema. Tiwary notes the “darshanic” gaze that video films afforded of Rajneesh, contrasting it with visual presentations of movie stars like Vinod Khanna, who was one of his followers. Or how the marriage video, though similar to a home movie, “also had intricate connections with Hindi cinema through its use of film songs and other representational practices”. We see how amateur wedding photographers learnt on the job, through trial and error: how to film a bride as opposed to the groom, family members or guests; how to turn up the glamour quotient with in-camera editing and lighting effects that might seem tacky to us today, but could be very exciting to a middle-class family seeing themselves in a video for the first time. Some videographers even became “directors” during a wedding ceremony, instructing participants to repeat a gesture mid-ritual for the camera.

Engaging as all this is, for me the book also provided triggers to video memories that don’t fall directly within the ambit of Tiwary’s study. Though we didn’t have a video player in our own house until I was ten, by the mid-1980s the bulk of my contemporary-film-watching was on cassettes – including pirated ones – rather than in halls. Video may have created a parallel structure to the mainstream Hindi film industry, as Tiwary points out, but for many viewers of the time the lines were very blurred: we watched larger-than-life films like Shahenshah on small screens with animated ads dancing over the action. Even after the advent of satellite TV in our home in early 1992, video played a big role in my viewing – I filled dozens of VHS cassettes with my favourite music videos, old films or TV shows.

Which means I relate to Tiwary’s point about video combining an immaterial experience with a material or physical one. The process of keeping one’s finger poised above the “Record” button, waiting to press it at just the right moment – and capture the opening seconds of a much-sought-after music video that was likely to play next on a countdown show – was thrilling; it conferred a sense of Godlike power and agency that earlier generations of viewers didn’t have. This was equally true about fast-forwarding a song while watching a film, or setting the timer recording for a TV programme (while keeping one’s fingers crossed that the power wouldn’t go). Or there was the commingled dismay and hope of lifting a cassette flap and blowing at real or imagined dust on the film, to remove “snow”. Tiwary also mentions the story (which came to her second-hand, but which we denizens of that time remember well) about the infamous interrogation scene from Basic Instinct – the uncrossing of Sharon Stone’s legs – becoming worn out on cassettes as viewers rewound, paused and replayed it.

Other things covered here touched a chord too: memories of the video magazine Lehren, a filmic version of gossip magazines, which introduced us to the behind-the-scenes of movie production, including cheap-looking “mahurat” shots. Or Newstrack’s coverage of the anti-Mandal Commission protests, with its reminder of a nasty moment where police callously picked up and manhandled an injured young man lying on the road – and of my mother and aunt watching the screen and expressing indignation at this visual, all of us becoming briefly politicised by the starkness and immediacy of the footage.

Video Culture in India is more accessible than many other academic books, largely shorn of the echo-chamber jargon and repetitiveness that makes many such publications a slog. It could have been much better copy-edited, and there is an occasional randomness in its linking of different video cultures. But the book is valuable as both a chronicle of a particular, evanescent moment in India’s visual-media culture and as a memory-reviver for my generation, growing up in that narrow band of time between the 1970s – when films could only be seen in cinema halls – and the early 1990s, when it first began to feel like you never had to step out of the house at all.

A discussion around political/paranoia thrillers

My online film group is conducting a Zoom discussion around political/paranoia thrillers on the evening of Friday, Oct 4. Please mark the date and drop in if you’re free and willing.

We will be broadly looking at films centred on political assassinations/attempted assassinations/cover-ups/conspiracies. The starting point for the discussion will be Costa-Gavras’s Z and Dibakar Banerjee’s Shanghai, which are adapted from the same source text – but we will also touch on a number of other films, including some key American political thrillers of the 1960s and 1970s. Among them: The Parallax View, The Manchurian Candidate, Winter Kills, Executive Action, Seven Days in May, JFK.

I have sent downloadable film links to my email group – if anyone else wants to be on the mailing list, please mail me (jaiarjun@gmail.com) or leave your ID in the comments here.

A note on Rahul Bhatia's The Identity Project

The photos here are of author Rahul Bhatia, human-rights activist Usha Ramanathan, and Nisar Ahmad (tireless striver for justice after losing his home in the 2020 Delhi riots) during a very thoughtful conversation last evening, around Rahul’s new book The Identity Project: The Unmaking of a Democracy. This is a wide-ranging work – journalism and narrative non-fiction – about the development of India’s enormous biometric identification project, and how it has intersected with the growth of Hindutva/militant and exclusionary Hinduism over the past three-and-a-half decades.

It took me just two days to read The Identity Project, which was very unusual because my (non-work-related) reading has been almost non-existent in recent times. But this is a testament to the directness and gentleness of Rahul’s writing, qualities I have been familiar with ever since we became acquainted 20 years ago (even back then, when so many of us were trying to be “writerly” to impress – first on blogs, later when opportunities for long-form feature writing opened up – there was an immediacy about his work that was enviable). I began reading the book mainly to revisit and more fully understand those chaotic months in 2019-2020 when the anti-CAA/NRC protests were followed by the anti-Muslim riots in north-east Delhi (and all of it was soon overshadowed in many of our minds by the pandemic and the lockdowns); but I just went on reading, as the narrative moved back and forth in time – from Dayanand Saraswati and the Arya Samaj 150 years ago to LK Advani’s rath yatra to contemporary times where men like Nisar (a protagonist and guiding light in the book) found their family’s lives threatened by long-time neighbours, including men he had seen since they were children. The historical back-story in the second section was particularly important for me since I knew very little about figures like Balakrishna Shivram Moonje (whose life, I realise with some interest, ran almost exactly parallel to Mahatma Gandhi’s – 1872 to 1948. His idea of Hinduism, and ultimately of India, was very different from Gandhi’s, though).

In between all this, there are terrific pen portraits of Nandan Nilekani, Advani’s personal aide Deepak Chopra, and others. And a sinisterly entertaining passage where Rahul visits a shakha and briefly becomes a sort-of honorary RSS member himself – the bits here about a game called “Mantriji” reminded me of the whistle-blower accounts of Ku Klux Klan meetings, about grown men playing childlike games, having fun with code-words and phrases, while also posturing and nursing their grievances.

All this means the book is structurally complex – having many balls in the air – but it stays lucid all the way through because the writing flows so easily. Do look out for it, and for other conversations around it.

Bees saal baad

This blog turned 20 years old a couple of weeks ago. (*Cliche alert* Very strange to think about this - it feels like yesterday that I started writing a few scattered posts with no clear sense that it could lead to anything, or that it would play such a big role in my life as a writer.)

But something else that’s more surprising: since September 2004, not a month has gone by without a post. That’s 240 straight months with some activity, however meagre. (Last month I just maintained the streak, putting up my Economic Times column - the only post - near the end of the month. And now this post has taken the streak to 241.) This despite the fact that in the past decade I have used the blog mainly as an article storehouse and often not visited it for days on end (and my column/review writing reduced greatly during this period, so there often wasn’t much to post anyway). Also, in the last few years there have been many mini-posts/whimsical reflections/updates/event photos which I didn’t put on the blog at all - only on FB or Instagram or on email/WhatsApp groups. 

 

But I guess The Streak means I’m still possessive enough about this big green space to keep it somewhat functional. Even if there are only one-and-a-half readers left, and the page rank is now so low that the blog rarely shows up in the first few pages of Google search results...

 

(P.S. here is a post from September 2005, when the blog had just turned one, and I was behaving as if it was the biggest landmark imaginable!)

Seasons in the sun: how an Anglophone boy failed to engage with (or misheard) Hindi song lyrics

(My latest Economic Times column. It also mentions the bulky new anthology The Swinging Seventies – co-edited by Nirupama Kotru and Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri – which has had many promotional events over the past few months. I have been involved with quite a few of them, mainly in Delhi but also elsewhere. Please look out for the book)
---------------------

Last month, in Bombay, I participated in a few cinema-related panel discussions featuring a number of writers, critics and filmmakers. There was a conversation with director Vishal Bhardwaj and the talented young actress Wamiqa Gabbi about their Khufiya, a spy thriller that in the typical Bhardwaj style also manages to be an unusual love story and a wacky dark comedy. There were also a few discussions around the anthology The Swinging Seventies, a collection of essays about 1970s Hindi cinema.

All this was fun, given the inevitable constraints of a 40-minute session where five or six movie-nerds must condense their thoughts. There was camaraderie, over-the-top fandom, and unexpected links were made. During a tribute to Shyam Benegal, while speaking about a cherished Benegal film Charandas Chor, I took the opportunity to tell fellow panellist Ketan Mehta that his debut feature Bhavani Bhavai was one of my favourite films – artfully melding cinema with folk theatre in much the same way that Charandas Chor did.

But there was one session where I felt like an impostor – or at least that I should stay quiet and listen to what other, wiser souls had to say. This was a talk about lyrics in our film songs.

Ironically my own piece in the 1970s book had centred on a song – “O Saathi Re” from Muqaddar ka Sikander – which I loved so much as a child that I tried to record myself singing it (before sadly conceding that posterity would be better served by the Kishore Kumar version). But speaking generally, much as I loved film songs while growing up, my engagement with them was more at the level of tune than lyrics. The music would often embed itself into my head even though I hadn’t quite registered the words.

I could, of course, understand an old song with the surface simplicity of, say, “Mera joota hai Japani” or “Nanhe munne bachhe”– and closer to my own time, I loved the lowbrow wordplay of the Tom and Jerry song in Sharaabi (“Khel rahe thay danda gilli / Chooha aage, peechhe billi”), or lyrics that were accessible and integral to a narrative situation, e.g. “Chal mere bhai” from Naseeb. But even today, I can say little of worth about the differences in meter and philosophy in the poetry of, say, Sahir Ludhianvi and Majrooh Sultanpuri. Loving masala Hindi cinema – with its dialogue-baazi and dhishoom-dhishoom – was one thing, but it was quite another to process Hindustani or Urdu phrases of a certain complexity or literariness.

I don’t know if this is a left brain-right brain thing, or something that can be explained by the fact that I grew up in an Anglophone environment, with English as a first language. (Later, in my teens, encountering English lyrics by Dylan or Cohen or even Eminem, I memorised the words of entire songs without even consciously trying.) Or it could be because mainstream Hindi film songs of the 1980s tended to be lyrically formulaic, with endless permutations of “pyaar”, “ikraar”, “deewana” and “parwaana” – and this encouraged laziness as a viewer. As a child I loved romantic songs from films like Love Story, Betaab, Hero, Pyaar Jhukta Nahin and Ek Duuje ke Liye, but then a line like “Yaad aa rahi hai / teri yaad aa rahi hai / yaad aane se, tere jaane se / Jaan jaa rahi hai…” couldn’t be accused of lyrical ambitiousness, whatever else it was. Years later, listening to something like the catchy Govinda-Neelam song “Pehle pehle pyaar ki” from Ilzaam, it was impossible to miss the parts where they went “Pyaar! Pyaar! Pyaar!” in a growing crescendo – but that didn’t require intense concentration on my part.

One offshoot of this was the comedy of misheard lyrics when it came to “deeper” songs. For instance, I spent years wondering why Amol Palekar in “Ek akela iss shahar mein” was always searching for Sabudana, and it came as a relief to learn that other friends had made this mistake too – Gulzar’s “aab-o-daana” being too high-flown for us youngsters. But there is one blooper that’s uniquely my own. It involved a song from the film Sindoor, where Jaya Prada lists the seasons thus: “Patjhad, Saawan, Basant, Bahaar”. The first of those words was so indecipherable for me that I made no effort to understand the meaning of the line – and then, as an insular South Delhi kid, figured that the last two words were “Vasant Vihar”. For a few days I felt a strange pride that a Bombay movie had acknowledged a posh Delhi colony in this timeless way.

Naturally, this was a disclosure I avoided making in the discussion last month, in the presence of Vishal Bhardwaj and many other maestros of song.

------------------------------------

(And a couple of other photos from the sessions, here)

Khufiya session with Shantanu, Govardhan Gabbi, Wamiqa Gabbi and Vishal Bhardwaj

With Ketan Mehta, Rajat Kapoor and others

 

  

On the Art-vs-Artist discourse – and why mirrors (including the mirrors provided by “nasty” art) are important

This essay I wrote for an Outlook magazine special is a condensed version of many discussions I have had over the years about the "art-vs-artist" debate. (I find that debate to be annoyingly reductive in most of its current forms – very few conversations/analyses seem to grapple with the possibility that even when someone has done terrible things in one context, they might have other, more exalted, more sensitive places that can produce worthy art. That their work, including their empathetic and ennobling work, can be as much a part of who they are as the things they have done at their very worst. That it is all an organic part of the mess.
Anyway, here is the piece; as always, there is much more rambling to be done along these lines.)
--------------------

As an adolescent movie buff in the early 1990s who became fascinated by old cinema initially through the work of Alfred Hitchcock, I had read enough to know that Hitchcock’s treatment of some of his leading ladies (and his gay or bisexual leading men) could be sadistic. And that Tippi Hedren in particular had been a target of much bullying during the filming of The Birds and Marnie. However, it wasn’t until a decade ago – partly through the Donald Spoto book Spellbound by Beauty – that I learnt of Hedren’s stronger allegations: that Hitchcock made clearly inappropriate demands on her, “expected me to make myself sexually available and accessible”, and played a role in damaging her film career when she didn’t acquiesce.

Some thoughts that flitted through my mind as I processed this:

-- If everything Hedren said was true (and there seemed no reason to disbelieve her, especially since she also stressed that the man had other, benevolent sides to his personality) – then, in a fairer world than the one we actually live in, Hitchcock should have been held to account in some clear-cut way, depending on the magnitude of the offence: if not prosecuted by law, then at least prevented from further unmonitored exercising of power and control.

(Of course, this is hypothetical: whether it’s a supposedly backward 1963 or a supposedly enlightened 2024, powerful people with connections routinely get away with crimes. And allegations that by their nature involve private encounters have to be proven, which can provide loopholes to the culpable.)

-- Meanwhile, another scrambled thought: there had been whispers about Hitchcock’s nasty behaviour (did it border on criminal behaviour?) towards other performers like Vera Miles before he worked with Hedren. If he had been brought to book earlier, landmark films like Vertigo and Psycho may not have been made, or not made in the way that they were. This would have very large implications for film history, including the important critical arguments of the early 1960s, which often centred on the value and depth of genre cinema.

It would also have had strong personal implications for me, because much of my life as a film obsessive – and eventually, a writer – dates back to that time, at age 13, when I became deeply moved by Psycho, related to the sadness and darkness in it, and disappeared down a rabbit-hole of cinematic analysis. Without that film to stimulate and console me, it’s likely that my personality and life would have developed in other ways than they did (this could be for bad, or for good, or a mix of both).

And that’s okay – if it helped some meaningful form of justice to be served, c’est la vie.

****

For me, that’s the pragmatic way of looking at these things. What I have *never* felt, though, is that in such cases the director’s films become tainted by association or have to somehow be detached from him, as if their finer, more elevated qualities – which many of us responded to – were independent of the “monster” who helmed them.

Hitchcock apart, I have always been particularly interested in creative people who put a great deal of themselves – their lives, their scars, their best and worst dimensions – into their work. And this may be why I find most iterations of the art-vs-artist debate unsatisfying. The anguished question “Can we separate the art from the artist?” has become a lazy formulation that tends to be answered in one of two ways:

1) I cannot separate the person from his art. Therefore I will not consume any more of his output – for ethical reasons and out of unwillingness to contribute to his income. The art must be rejected as unsavoury;

or, 2) I can separate the art from the artist, and have no issues with continuing to consume it. But this is with the understanding that the art exists in some vacuum, and has little or nothing to do with the artist’s “reality”.

Both positions are fine as statements of intent. But they also carry a buried implication: that when an artist who has done terrible things creates a film (or book, or song) that shows positive human values, it means he was being hypocritical while creating it – concealing his true (bad) self. While there can be some truth to this in specific cases, on the whole I find it a problematic view (to deploy a favourite Woke word). However repulsed we may be by someone’s actions, are we really saying that they couldn’t have more reflective, sensitive sides that they tapped into when doing their best work?

I have been using the pronoun “he”, since male artists are far more often the subjects of such discussion – but the most recent teeth-gnashing centres on the writer Alice Munro and her part-complicity in her daughter Andrea Skinner’s victimisation (by her stepfather, Munro’s husband). And once again the language involved has been the smugly judgemental one that involves labelling someone as a “monster” – as if that was Munro’s sole, defining reality; and the difficulty of squaring this with her much-loved short fiction, known for its wisdom about people and their relationships.

But what does “separating art from artist” even mean, when it comes to creative people who have produced what we think of as personal art – a novelist or painter working alone, or a studio filmmaker picking at and reworking themes within the constraints of his working environment, or a more independent writer-director who has the freedom to make almost anything?

How can you possibly “separate” Hitchcock from (to take just one example) his most critically acclaimed work Vertigo – a film that gets so much of its power from the fact that its depiction of male sexual jealousy and insecurity (and the darker, more possessive aspects of “love”) seems to reflect how Hitchcock himself felt about some of his actresses? How do you separate VS Naipaul from An Area of Darkness? Woody Allen from Annie Hall? Or Marlon Brando – who, by many accounts, participated in the exploitation of Maria Schneider during the Last Tango in Paris shoot – from that animalistic shriek of “Stellaaa!!” in A Streetcar Named Desire: a scream that may come from a little boy terrified of losing his wife, or a patriarchal man who has just attacked that same wife, or both those people cohabiting in the same mind and body.

And how do you separate Roman Polanski from his work when he embedded his own history, fetishes and traumas into almost everything he did – not just in obviously personal films like the Holocaust-themed The Pianist but even in work adapted from enshrined literary material, like Macbeth (with its gruesome visualisation of the line “Macduff was from his mother’s womb untimely ripped” – just a year after Polanski’s heavily pregnant wife Sharon Tate was murdered).

In Polanski’s case, the facts of criminality are clear and damning: he actually pleaded guilty to unlawful sex with a 13-year-old minor (probably to escape a bigger conviction) and has been a fugitive from the US justice system for over four decades. It is completely reasonable to wish that he had been prosecuted and tucked away in the late 1970s – so what if that halted an illustrious film-making career. But even if you see him mainly and above all else as a predator, erasing his connection with the films he *did* make is a very strange position.

To be clear: apart from the importance of legal reckoning and fair conviction, I understand that someone might be so triggered by the details of the lives of Polanski (or Hitchcock, or anyone else) that they wouldn’t further engage with their work – that is a personal, moral choice, and I have versions of those triggers myself (which aren’t shared by many since they involve non-human-animal welfare more than homosapien-centred issues). What I don’t understand is the removal of Polanski’s name from a 50th anniversary Blu-ray edition of Chinatown (as was done recently), with the virtue-telegraphing pretence that an “evil” man must have no connection with a great film even though so much of what makes it “great” comes directly from him.

******

During a monologue at a recent stand-up performance in Delhi, actor-comedian Vir Das stated that there are two types of people: the ass****s and those who have to deal with the ass****s. The audience laughed and cheered (most of us were probably self-assured that we belonged to the latter category, and could picture any number of our tormentors in the former). “And both those people,” Das continued, “are the same.” This time the chuckles were still there (some of us laugh reflexively whenever any sort of punch-line is delivered), but more muted, as if people didn’t fully comprehend – or like – Das’s point about monsters within and outside us.

In intellectual circles, the line “everyone contains multitudes” is an oft-uttered one (plurality being a liberal commandment) – but looking through my online feeds, and articles written by people whose work I have long admired, I feel very few of us face up to the full, unnerving implications of that idea. Why, for instance, is it so hard to believe that people who have done heinous things in one context are also capable – over a long lifetime – of producing thoughtful, moving art; and doing this *honestly*?

Linked to this aspect of the art-artist debate is something that has been common in recent cultural discourse, perhaps because of how social media encourages swift judgements: a growing intolerance for creative works that are very dark, pessimistic or non-affirmative in their worldview, or prominently use the lenses of unsympathetic characters. More than once, I have heard versions of the question “Why was it *necessary* to make this?” (The recent film Animal has been the subject of many such conversations, and some of the “liberal” bullying has been so shrill that a few perfectly sensible and normally thick-skinned people I know who liked the film – or could at least engage with it – have opted to keep their feelings hidden.) Well, one answer is: it isn’t “necessary” to create any art at all – negative or affirmative. But if you do choose to create, with serious and rigorous world-building, it is fine to tell a bleak, cynical story that doesn’t have comforting takeaways. Such art can make the world a little better not by offering “hope” in some obvious way, but simply by being very well done, presenting a particular way of looking and living, and leaving us with uncomfortable questions that we might or might not be equipped to address.

Like many others who were seriously invested in books or films from an early age, I grew up believing that one of the important functions of art is to discomfit us and warn us about facile binaries such as “moral” and “monstrous”. But during the recent Munro discourses, I have learnt that it is okay – during an online discussion involving apparently sensitive and intelligent people – for someone to casually label, say, Patricia Highsmith “a horrible person” *and* to posit that this is somewhat understandable given the nastiness or the darkness-bordering-on-nihilism of the stories she wrote.

In creative-writing classes, when the subject of ideology comes up, I occasionally discuss – or conduct a thought experiment around – the novel The Glass Pearls, by the great screenwriter Emeric Pressburger. Here was a Jewish man who had to flee Germany in the 1930s, whose mother died in a concentration camp, who lived in fear of Nazi persecution… and who also wrote this thriller about a Nazi in hiding in 1960s England, where the narrative’s impact hinges on us being able to feel for the protagonist – not to think that Karl Braun is a “good” person who should escape justice, but to see that he is a multi-dimensional human being with qualities all of us can relate to. We feel his genuine sense of paranoia and persecution, his grief for a wife and child who died, his boy-like excitement at a new romantic prospect. And these are all *honest* emotions. But many of the people who hold forth these days about art and artists, or draw a clear-cut line between “toxic” and “progressive” films, wouldn’t know how to deal with Pressburger’s book – or thousands of others like it.

One of the more sensible things I have read in Munro-related chatter is from the writer Brandon Taylor, who points out that what most people love about Munro’s fiction is “the way she reveals how, at bottom, we are capable of true ugliness and viciousness” – and yet, despite this, the same readers are confused when they learn of “the common smallness” of someone they admired. “That, to me, betrays a lack of understanding of human nature, particularly the one advanced by Munro’s work,” Taylor says, and I agree. More pertinent than that hoary “art-artist” question is this: how has it become so easy to ignore the mirror, to outrage constantly over instances of misbehaviour that most of us would be capable of given the right (or wrong) circumstances – and to fail to recognise the things that good art (including the art made by people who do bad things) can tell us about ourselves?

-----------------

(Related posts: glorification vs depiction, etc; The Glass Pearls)

Dog time: on Snowy/Whitey, an old lady of Saket (2007-24)

You can measure time in your own life through a dog’s years, even if it’s a creature you didn’t know too well. Consider this community dog variously known in Saket’s D block as Snowy, Whitey, Heeru or Cheeku. She died early yesterday morning, aged 17 or 18, and I took her to Sai Ashram to be cremated.

 

For most of her long life, “Snowy” and I hadn’t interacted at all; it’s only yesterday that I learnt her many names. And yet she was central to my memories of this part of Saket – because in 2007, just after we moved to D-block, she was the first puppy I noticed. I wasn’t seriously interested yet in street dogs (this was a year before we adopted Foxie and my life took a new, maternal turn), but we indulged this pup when we saw her during evening walks – she was being looked after by a guard, was small and very alert and friendly. I seem to remember the guard noting our fondness and asking if we would like to take her home, but I’m not sure. Anyway, that’s a parallel-universe tale.

In this universe she ended up spending her life along a 150-metre span of colony road, near the 2-3 houses where people were fond of her. Whenever I saw her in the distance, I would think “She must be 10/12/15 years old now, because that’s when we moved here.” And I would think about some of the signposts of my own life – good and bad – in these last two decades.

The first video above, from three years ago, is the only video (or photo) I ever took of her. It was January, someone had put a jacket on her – but then it rained and as so often happens no one was around to take the jacket off and prevent it from getting badly soaked and affecting her health. So I approached her, taking a video for the animal groups as a caution, and got it off. As you can see, she was nervous and didn’t remember me (in dog years it must have been 7-8 decades since her childhood interactions with me).

Yesterday morning a neighbour who didn’t have a car handy called in distress to inform me of Snowy’s death, and I’m glad I got the chance to take her on her final journey – it was an important journey for me too. The pics below are of the last rites – as you can see, there was a solemn-looking abandoned pitbull at the shelter who hung around watching…

 

 

(Also see this post about our Kaali - one of the most important dogs in my life - who died in February this year)

All you need is 15-love: on Challengers, a superb film about passion and tennis

(my latest Economic Times column, about one of my favourite films of the past year. And published just as Rafa Nadal – aged 38, back from his latest injury setback, ridiculously wins a 4-hour match against a much younger opponent; and then wins again the next day. Meanwhile, the robot who creates columnist pics for ET did one of me with a Nike shirt and a very oddly positioned tennis racquet - you can see that at the bottom of this post)------------

“Why are you so upset with me?” a man asks his girlfriend in one of those funny pictorial memes that are always doing the rounds. “There are 14 reasons why,” she spits back angrily, “Plus, your tennis obsession.”
“That’s 15, love,” he says with a goofy grin.

Tennis and love are the subjects of Luca Guadagnino’s brilliant Challengers, which I watched on the big screen earlier this year – and that’s the only way to watch it, to respect the kinetic, uninhibited energy of a movie that refuses to play it safe. You can call this a mashup of lush romantic drama, erotic thriller and sports movie about overvaulting ambition. Either way, it makes something like King Richard (about the early struggles of the Williams sisters and their dad) look even more ordinary, even insipid, than it already was.

But what is a “tennis film” exactly? Aren’t great real-world matches epic films too? I think so, having spent the last two decades obsessively watching men’s tennis, with my Rafael Nadal super-fandom as the fuel. A “favourite films of the year” list I made for 2022 included Nadal’s come-from-behind victory in the Australian Open final; it was the closest any recent “content” has brought me to jumping around excitedly, making tribal noises. (No feature film, whether made by Wim Wenders or Anees Bazmee, has had that effect.)

Watching Challengers – a story about the changing fortunes and personal relationships of three young tennis pros over a decade and a half – was a comparably visceral experience, thanks to the pace and boldness of the storytelling, the lead performances and the pulsating music score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. (An amusing but understandable phenomenon on recent Twitter tennis discussions: whenever someone shares a video of a great rally in a match, or something shot from an unusual angle, a bunch of people say it should be set to the Challengers score – or they do the required editing and re-post the clip.)

Spanning various incidents and encounters between 2006 and 2019, Challengers darts around like a time-traveling tennis ball; but chronologically speaking it begins with two teen friends, Patrick and Art, playing a doubles final together. (2006, incidentally, was also the year that Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray, still only 18, played doubles together at the Australian Open.) Patrick and Art are on the same side of the net, dependent on and trusting each other, as doubles partners (and close friends) must. Then their relationship with the talented Tashi (Zendaya) brings sexual jealousy and intrigue into the mix and leads them in opposite directions, personally and professionally. It might be said that the whole film is about the journey that leads to Patrick and Art getting back on the same side of the net (in a very different context) in a rousing final scene set 13 years later.

There are many ways of looking at the relationships that play out between these three. It would be easy to objectify Tashi by thinking of her as a symbolic ball moving between two men, but that would ignore her centrality in this story: she is manipulator and motivator, girlfriend, femme fatale and nurturing maternal figure all rolled into one, even before her own tennis career is cut short by a nasty injury.

Challengers seems to get that tennis love (whether you’re an active player or just a crazy spectator) can be as intense as romantic love, and as hormone-driven. It is about the things we do to each other in the heat of passion, how we volley feelings back and forth, go from defence to aggression (or vice versa) in the wink of an eye; about the convoluted journeys that both platonic and romantic love can take; the strategies and mind-games involved in negotiating intimacy and emotional dependence. It is a very sexy film, not because it has plenty of nudity or explicit sex scenes (it doesn’t) but for how it depicts the workings of attraction, and how fully its three leads throw themselves into doing this.

And yes, it’s about tennis too. As a metaphor, sure, with all that smashing and lobbing and sliding in every long rally; but also about the ebbs and flows of the sport. (The stars practiced long and hard with celebrated coach Brad Gilbert, to be convincing in those play scenes.) “It’s nice to see you lit up about something – even if that something is my girlfriend,” one of the friends says to the other, “It’s what’s been missing from your tennis.” And later, when a heavy-breathing dialogue in one of the film’s steamiest make-out scenes starts to become ambiguous, the guy asks “Are we talking about tennis?” and Tashi replies “We’re always talking about tennis.”