Madhuban Fine Dining, and PVR memories

Wandering about the PVR Saket complex after more than a month (London interlude, general busyness), I sensed something different in the air, like there had been a sudden shift in the coordinates governing the place. Then I turned a corner and saw these words blinking at me from a garish green neon board:

“Madhuban. Fine Dining.”

Now I’ve seen a lot happen to the PVR complex during the 18 years I’ve lived in this area. I’ve seen it transform bit by bit, layer by layer, from a modest, bare-boned little colony centre into a bustling hub of Delhi yuppie/puppie-dom. But looking at that new board I realised once and for all how irretrievably things had changed.

A little background here. I’ve lived in Saket since 1987. Anyone who’s only ever seen the complex as it’s been in the last few years will have trouble picturing what it was like back then. It wasn’t the PVR complex in the first place - the hall was called Anupam and we never went there, it had a seedy feel about it and we were the video-junkie generation anyway. A good decade before the Nirulas and McDonalds started moving in, there were maybe just six small shops scattered around the whole complex – and that’s counting the huts with the creaky photocopy machines outside. Where there is now a Barista, a Buzz, a Café Coffee Day, a Pizza Hut and a Subway, there was then only a bleak, anonymous line of office doors that seemed forever to be locked. The description of a red-letter event in the complex’s history was one muggy day when the He-Man barbershop (where you’ll still find me at 9.30 AM on every eighth Sunday) got an air-conditioner installed and people cheered and gave each other high-fives outside the shop – now that was Progress.

And right from the beginning there was Madhuban, this little eatery with “Indian. Mughlai. Chinese” proudly written outside. Back then, it was the closest we had to a fine-dining restaurant in the complex, hell, anywhere in Saket. Never mind that it was so dimly lit as to induce immediate somnolence in anyone who entered it. Never mind that six tables were squeezed tightly together in a space meant for three. Never mind that the surly owner sat at a tiny makeshift reception two feet away from the nearest table and glowered at his customers. Or that the “Chinese” was classic Punju-Chin (or Chinjabi as we call it): greasy noodles and fried rice; over-salted sweet corn chicken soup besieged by heavy doses of Ajinomoto and prepared so carelessly that I once found half an egg submerged in my soup bowl; and that most infamous of culinary inventions, the “chicken Manchurian”. It was still the only restaurant we had within a three-km radius and we loved it – and even when we realised that going there to eat wasn’t a very cool thing to do, it became our favourite home-delivery joint.

But what I’ll always remember Madhuban for is its tandoori chicken and daal makhni: for good or bad, my idea of what those dishes should be like has been defined for life by the way Madhuban prepared them. The chicken pieces weren’t as large or juicy as you’d get in more expensive restaurants, but they were more substantial than the scrawny things you’d find at most dhabas: just the right size as far as I was concerned. The preparation was basic – no excessive masala-smearing or self-conscious attempt to create a nouvelle-north Indian cuisine; the tandoor was allowed to do most of the work, and it did just enough to ensure that the natural flavour of the meat came through. And the daal was just creamy enough. The combination was superb value for money.

In the mid-1990s, strange things began to happen in our colony. Rumours grew of a light from the east, of a man named Bijli who had tied up with an Australian company to set up India’s first “multiplex” here. Rich relatives in other countries sent secret missives disclosing that multiplexes were cinema halls with three or four screens instead of one. We gaped in disbelief. Anupam shut down, then several months later we saw scaffolds and workers and large tarpaulins obscuring the building. In mid-1997 PVR Anupam opened and I went to see the first film shown there, Jerry Maguire, nothing of which registered because I was too busy alternately leaning back in the plush sofa-chairs and sinking my feet into the carpeted softness of the floor. Things would never be the same again in our modest little Saket which had, only 30 or so years earlier, been a forestland where men would go rabbit-hunting.

But somehow, through all the changes of the last few years, Madhuban soldiered on. It continued to exist in its squalid, poorly lit state, it refused to accept credit cards (I’m assuming it will now, in its new avatar) or to make any sort of effort to step up its publicity. It became an anachronism in this now-hep commercial centre and it was obvious that change – or closure – was inevitable. The only thing I’m surprised about is how long it has taken.

A spacious new dining area has now been created on the first floor, above where the restaurant used to be. The surly owner will probably be relegated to a back-room, replaced by someone more adept at flashing friendly smiles. Electricity will be introduced so diners will be able to see their food as they eat it. But I don’t expect many changes other than these cosmetic ones. There will be no elaborate launch. The food critics will stay away. If the Empress of Food Writing (and the Empress too of Bad Punning) in Delhi condescends to include it in her annual food guide, she’ll probably end a dismissive review with the line “There is nothing Madhur about this Van”. And all this is just as well. I don’t want a new lot of customers competing for that tandoori chicken, and perhaps urging the owners to jazz up the food.

I am a little miffed about the new name though. As far as I’m concerned, Madhuban has been fine dining for the best part of two decades. Why spell it out now?

Resonant, controversial, untitled

If you were to read the little box on Italian director/screenwriter Lina Wertmüller in Hindustan Times’s supplement on IFFI 2005, you might think Wertmuller wasn’t very imaginative when it came to titling her movies. One para in the box reads:

In 1970, she directed a string of pictures that are still resonant and controversial, despite occasional heavy-handedness. '' (1972) was a witty look at the link between sex and politics. Her follow-up '' was the hit foreign film of 1973. She had another success with '' (1974). In 1975 she directed the enormously popular '' and in 1976 hemmed her masterpiece ''. The other titles are: '' (1979), '' (1983), '' and '' (both 1985), '' and '' (both 1986), '' (1989), '' (1990) and '' (1993).

Whew, that's some filmography!

Won’t joke about this too much though because, having been on a late-night copy-desk myself, I know how these things work. The correspondent in Goa probably sent the copy to the Delhi office in this state, asking the desk to do a quick search on the Internet Movie DataBase and fill in the movie names. Someone failed to read the email properly. Someone fell asleep. Someone put the page in the “Released” basket. And today, someone is laughing.

Or maybe it has to do with the fact that the real titles of some of those films include:

Scherzo del destino in agguato dietro l'angolo come un brigante da strada (English: A Joke of Destiny, Lying in Wait Around the Corner Like a Bandit)

and

Fine del mondo nel nostro solito letto in una notte piena di pioggia, La (English: The End of the World in Our Usual Bed in a Night Full of Rain)

Another IWE (groan!) debate

I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard/participated in discussions about the sad lack of solid, no-frills writing about contemporary life in India – the lack of stories about the experiences and concerns of a readily identifiable generation of people, told without faux-exoticisation, without pandering to a western market. But some things are always worth hearing again, so here’s a fine article by Jaideep Varma in today’s Times of India: "Why the Indian English Publishing Scene is Worse than Bollywood".

Most of Varma’s points are good ones (and as a debutant novelist with a low-profile publisher, he certainly has reason to be upset about the lack of attention given by media to the Small Books) but I have to wonder where he got the idea (expressed in the last para of the piece) that Indian literary blogs have a reputation for being progressive alternatives to the mainstream. This is certainly true of lit-blogs internationally (my first-choice literary news sources today are blogs like Maud Newton, The Elegant Variation and The Reading Experience over even The New Yorker and The Guardian). But the only Indian literary blogs worth the name that I know of are Kitabkhana and The Middle Stage, both of which have not been updated too frequently in recent months (and maybe a couple of other link-oriented ones like Prufrock’s Page). And it’s worth remembering that the authors of these sites, Hurree Babu and Chandrahas Choudhury, also review extensively in the mainstream. In fact Ravi Singh, the Penguin India publisher, recently told me that while he enjoyed reading some lit-blogs, he felt that we all often seemed to be saying the same things – perhaps because we are the same small group of reviewers who write for the mainstream as well. So it’s unfair to first put literary blogs on a pedestal that they haven’t staked any claim to, and then diss them for not providing enough of an alternative to mainstream media. The Indian litblogosphere hasn’t reached such lofty heights yet.

BTW, Hurree Babu and Chandrahas are friends of mine and I think they’ll agree that the literary community is an incestuous little hellhole. But given that we are regularly bombarded with new titles from the big publishers (some of which, Jaideep, are genuinely good books); given that we have very limited review space in mainstream media and limited time to blog about new titles; that we can only read so many books in a week, and that this number includes older books read for pleasure rather than for work: given all this, we’re doing the best we can. Yes, it is a pity that smaller titles get lost in what must, to the outsider, seem like a dreadful publisher-media-blogger nexus – but realistically that scenario won’t change until newspapers decide that they can dedicate more than one page a week to books. Maybe that will open the floodgates and you’ll then see many more dedicated reviewers of the quality of Nilanjana, Chandrahas and Uma – both in MSM and in the blogosphere.

Anyway, the above discussion is my cue to put up a couple of related mini-reviews. Varma’s own recently published Local was an attempt to fill this very large gap in Indian writing in English (or IWE – yes I know, I dislike that term as much as you do!). It’s the story of Akash, a copywriter in an ad agency in Mumbai who hits on the idea of spending his nights entirely on Western Line trains – this being cheaper than renting an apartment and not as inconvenient as you might think, assuming you can cope with shady characters and irregular sleep patterns (trains must be switched in the middle of the night: walking on the overbridge connecting the platforms, Akash has “the tangible sense of moving from yesterday to tomorrow”). Local is a provocative account of life in a bustling metropolis and of the madness of the advertising industry. It’s occasionally uneven longer than it should have been and needs better editing, but it’s very readable on the whole.

And another such book I see a lot of promise in is Siddharth Chowdhury’s Patna Roughcut, which I’m halfway through. It’s about the lives of a disparate group of people in Patna’s Kadam Kuan and while the narrative structure has elements resembling magic realism, the writing has a pulse and rhythm very suited to the book’s setting.

P.S. Not directly related, but also read Nilanjana’s latest Speaking Volumes: "Dial B for Bestseller". What she says at the end - “better editors please” - might seem obvious but it’s extremely important, both in terms of editors willing to approve manuscripts that don’t fit in the time-tested categories and in terms of better sub-editing on those manuscripts (tighter editing would have made Local a better book, for instance).

P.P.S. And oh, don’t get me started on book titles: the depressing stock of words like “spice”, “cinnamon”, “frangipani” and many others that are invariably used by publishers to accentuate a book’s exoticism – even when, as Varma points out, the actual writing eschews exotica.

P.P.S. If I've overlooked any good Indian lit-blogs, a thousand apologies. Send me the link.

Steve Waugh’s 800-page autobiography...

...spanking new, gorgeously green, weighing a ton, has just arrived at my desk. I’ve been very sad the last few days because I had to pass up on this event (which I couldn’t plan for because of the London trip) - but now I’m happy again, as the poet said.

This book (Out of My Comfort Zone) really is massive and I’ve spent the last hour turning it over in my hands and studying it from all angles (this sounds foolish but it’s very good exercise). And anyone who knows about Waugh’s career-long habit of maintaining tour diaries will know this should be one of those rare cricketers’ autoBs that isn’t ghost-written. Much fun ahead.

Tigers in Red Weather

(Excerpts from an interview I did with author Ruth Padel, and a part-review of her new book; in this week’s Business Standard Weekend)

Journeys, literary and otherwise, must necessarily begin with a single step as the cliche goes. For scholar and poet Ruth Padel, that step was the painful end of a long relationship a few years ago. Suddenly adrift and desolate, she turned to a dormant interest in wildlife to help keep her mind occupied. The result: a two-year journey through the tiger reserves and jungles of India, China, Russia, Bhutan and many other countries.

One of the many remarkable things about the book, Tigers in Red Weather, that emerged from these travels is how it moves from being an intimate, very personal story into a magnificent study of an animal whose fate is more relevant than the world realises. Padel's journey may have begun as therapy for a broken heart - "I was being pulled towards the great animal solitary…Tigers are about surviving, alone" - but it soon turned into an obsession in its own right. Writing the book as part-memoir, part-travelogue, part-wildlife primer was a literary risk - it could easily have opened her to accusations of using an important topic to exorcise her own demons - but Padel pulls it off beautifully. "Mine was a journey of learning," she says, "and I wanted to root the reader in my own life to help provide a personal perspective."

If you're a layperson, with little or no knowledge about the issues surrounding tiger conservation today, you'll be drawn into the book for this very reason. More knowledgeable tomes on the animal have been written by men like Valmik Thapar and Ullas Karanth (both of whom feature in Padel's book) but they are so close to the subject, having spent so many years studying tiger conservation, that their work can be daunting for the casual reader. Tigers in Red Weather, on the other hand, is an exploration - from the simplicity of the writing and the careful articulation of things that experts would take for granted to the lovingly detailed index, which took Padel three weeks to put together. Throughout the book, we accompany Padel on her quest, learn with her, feel the wonder and dismay that she does. It’s comforting (even if much of what we learn isn’t).

Every country Padel travelled to has a unique set of problems. In India there is the depressingly familiar issue of corrupt middlemen and collusion between poachers and officials. Beginning her journey in the Panna reserve in Madhya Pradesh, Padel gradually learnt about the inefficiency that cripples the forest service. "There is no centralised body for wildlife," she says, "Some of the best scientific minds in the world are right here in this country but they end up persecuted when they try to make a difference." Like Ullas Karanth, whose move to radio-collar tigers – a reliable, modern method of monitoring wild animals - led to accusations that he was spreading cancer amongst them.

Even so, Karnataka, where Karanth operates, is relatively well off because of the strong network he has built across the state. "Similar networks are badly needed in places like Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh," Padel says. "People need to be trained at the lower levels. If you can have armed police guarding banks...well, forests harbour greater treasures."

In Russia the issue is one of political instability and of an enormous country struggling with too many internal conflicts to count. In China the tiger has traditionally been revered as a symbol of power but has simultaneously been betrayed like nowhere else. ("China is the black hole pulling in all dead tigers," Padel was moved to write.) This is where the greatest demand comes from: for tiger meat, tiger bones for dubious medicinal purposes, tiger skins for the nouveau riche, even tiger-whisker toothpicks! This is where grinning tourists get their adrenaline rushes by sitting atop bound and drugged beasts and posing for photos. This is also where denial has been turned into an art form. "If China is to be the economic model for the world, wilderness is doomed."

And everywhere, around the world but especially in poorer countries, there is the problem of apathy - human beings looking out for their own short-term interests without caring that tiger protection and forest conservation can only benefit them in the long-term. "Forests are protectors of the great rivers," says Padel. "The fall of civilisations through the ages - from Babylon down - can be traced to the destruction of forested land. Saving the tiger means saving everything in the ecosystem - right down to the smallest butterfly."

"But how does one expect a poor villager, who has children and grandchildren he has to feed now, to understand or care about the larger picture? And when the authorities themselves are too myopic and greedy to educate and help people, this becomes a losing battle."

Padel's own ability to see that larger picture can be traced, at least in part, to her genealogy: she is the great-great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin, whose famous vision was that of balance and harmony in nature, and who helped us understand how the various parts of an ecosystem – humans and tigers included - interlock and sustain each other. But even this vision is easily misinterpreted. Traveling in China, Padel was perplexed by a Shanghai novelist's statement that Darwin represents human progress. "Darwin had made our relation to animals central to our vision of ourselves, made us see ourselves as connected to other animals," she writes, "If you take him to stand for human progress, that connection is lost." Later on the same trip, she was dispirited by a visit to the Jade Garden: "This was nature squeezed and planned, not the natural balance of animal and plant..."

Isn't it idealistic though to see the world today in terms of that grand vision? Hasn't human selfishness already tipped us too far over the edge? "But we have to try and save what there is left," Padel insists. "In India, for instance, less than 4 per cent of land is forested. Surely it isn’t much to ask that in just that territory the interests of the tiger should be allowed to override short-term human benefit?" Even this would be a sad compromise. A century and a half after Darwin dreamt of a vibrant, interdependent ecosystem, Padel herself will continue to see the tiger dreams she describes so vividly in her book, knowing that the wild tiger might soon exist in only those jungles of the imagination.

Alas, poor Y...

Many thanks to Shailaja and Jason for the great CD they gave me containing the 34 comics that make up the Y: The Last Man series. It’s about a young man named Yorick and his pet monkey who find themselves the last surviving males in a world where all other Y-chromosomes have been mysteriously destroyed. Despite my reluctance to read for long periods on a computer screen, I’m looking forward to getting through the whole thing soon - Jason says it’s better than Sandman, which is a very big claim. (Incidentally a knowledgeable little birdie tells me the series doesn’t end at #34.)

Lots of other on-computer reading to do as well. The New Yorker DVDs have been gathering dust for the last three weeks and there’s something else I can’t mention here, which I want to try and finish before December. And of course there are always blogs – being Internet-deprived for 5-6 days at a stretch (as I recently was) can be scary when you have around 120 Bloglines subscriptions and you know there will be 600-odd unread posts a-waiting when you next log in (even if 150 of those are from Boing Boing and can be skimmed over).

A tribute to Spartacus

When I started watching American and British cinema seriously, around 1990-91, my entry point into those movies (like that of most viewers who aren’t intrinsically interested in a technical aspect of filmmaking) was through the world of actors. For the longest time I was obsessed with star filmographies from Classic Hollywood (anytime between the late 1920s and the late 1960s). I would scan video-library catalogues for epic films with large star casts (and if the plot involved a historical period I was interested in, all the better) - which was how I came to see, in those very early days, movies like Judgement at Nuremberg, The Longest Day, Becket and How the West was Won. And most memorably of all, Spartacus.

Having just finished a minor school project on the decline of the Roman Empire, I had reason enough to be interested in the story of the slave revolt and its enigmatic leader, who almost brought the Empire to its knees in the 1st century BC. But there were other, less lofty reasons. To begin with, what a cast! There was the film’s producer, Kirk Douglas, in the title role (though to be honest, I thought Douglas was the most unobtrusive member of the cast at the time). A way-too-waiflike Jean Simmons as Spartacus’s lady love Varinia. Tony Curtis as the dreamy young poet Antoninus, who joins the slave revolt (I learnt later that the role had been written in for no better reason than that Curtis had told Douglas he wanted to be a part of the project!). And best of all, a great trio of British actors: Laurence Olivier as the Roman general Marcus Licinius Crassus (who was historically a member of ancient Rome’s First Triumvirate along with Pompey and Julius Caesar – though this doesn’t figure in the film); Charles Laughton as his political rival, the senator Gracchus; and the multitalented Peter Ustinov (who won the supporting actor Oscar for this role) as the wily slave-trader Batiatus.

And those were only the leading players. The supporting cast was equally interesting to me, since it included actors I was familiar with from other films, even in those early days. The woodenly handsome John Gavin, who had a small role here as the callow young Julius Caesar, had played Sam Loomis in Psycho. Also in a supporting role was John Dall, who was one of the homosexual killers in another Hitchcock film, Rope. All this helped make Spartacus a comforting experience, quite apart from the fact that I was enthralled by the movie itself.

The films we have a deep affection for as children rarely live up to our memories of them. Our tastes evolve as we get older (more so when film-watching is more than a hobby, as in my case), our gaze becomes more analytical and self-conscious on a repeat viewing, so that it’s possible to be slightly embarrassed by performances and dialogue that one originally had a very high opinion of. A scene that one’s memory had inflated into something very grand and elaborate turns out to be a trifle, lasting just a couple of seconds, when one re-watches it; it’s like returning to that mansion-like house you had visited as a child and finding that the halls and stairways are much narrower than you expected.

Over the years, when I returned to Spartacus, I was able to see the little flaws more easily – the Hollywoodisation (read: cheesiness) of some scenes, the incessant, manipulative music score, the fact that occasionally (but only occasionally) one gets so fascinated by the acting bouts between titans like Olivier and Laughton that one forgets about the characters they are playing. But in essence, my high opinion of it hasn’t changed. This is one of the best-written, best-acted, most intelligent epics of its time, superior in most ways to others of its time and genre (Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments, Quo Vadis?, The Fall of the Roman Empire). Part of that superiority comes from the fact that there are no religious overtones in the story at all (this was something that made many of the period epics of the time both maudlin and distracting) – the focus is entirely on the internal politics in the Roman senate.

The Stanley Kubrick quandary

I find it annoying that Spartacus has suffered a decline in critical appreciation for a reason that doesn’t have much to do with the actual merits or demerits of the film itself. The facts are these: the movie carries a “directed by Stanley Kubrick” credit and Kubrick, as most of us know, was one of the great directors (more crucially, a great auteur-director). But on Spartacus he was a pawn – he was hurriedly brought in after the original director Anthony Mann had quit, and throughout the shooting he not only had to be subservient to Kirk Douglas’s vision, he also had to deal with the massive egos of the British actor-directors working in the film. By all accounts it was a traumatic experience for him and in subsequent years, short of actually disowning Spartacus, he did everything to make it clear that it wasn’t “his” film. And over the years, as Kubrick’s own reputation as a master filmmaker (deservedly) grew, some critics and moviegoers turned their resentment to this one film he never had full control over.

But this is silly reasoning. Just because Spartacus isn’t a good Stanley Kubrick film doesn’t mean it can’t be a good film on its own terms. Agreed, there are certain kinds of movies that would fail miserably if their directors weren’t allowed full control. But this isn’t one of them. It was already in production long before Kubrick arrived on the sets, it had been carefully scripted and planned by some of the most dedicated people in the craft (including the writer Dalton Trumbo, who had been on the Hollywood blacklist for Communist affiliations and who Douglas permitted to use his own name on the project) – and the results are there for all to see. This film is a remarkable collaborative effort between some of the most talented people (across all fields) in the film industry of the time, and a movie that somehow managed to shape up coherently despite a long and very problematic filming process.

However, there’s something else that gets overlooked. When a great artist contributes to a work, no matter how half-heartedly, it’s inevitable that he’ll leave his stamp on it. Notwithstanding Kubrick’s own resentment of the film, Spartacus does also contain a few ideas and visuals that foreshadow his later work – notably the theme of the conflict between humanity and mechanisation. Spartacus postulates that the practice in ancient Rome was to turn human beings into machines through the practice of slavery - world dominance was maintained by stripping people of their humanity and turning them into cogs in the machinery that kept the Roman Empire running. Some scenes (the clinical, relentlessly efficient Roman battalions intercut with the disorganised slave camp; the cold gleam in the eye of the sadistic slave-master who was once a slave himself) palpably come from the same hand that gave us Dr Strangelove struggling with his own mechanical arm, Alex being systematically transformed into a Clockwork Orange, and the magnificent image of Dave Bowman dismantling the computer HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Over 1200 words. Lots more to say but will stop now.

P.S. As I mentioned in the previous post, the special features on the DVD are awesome, especially the commentary by Kirk Douglas, Peter Ustinov, Howard Fast, Saul Bass and restoration expert Robert Harris, and the long interview with Ustinov where he supplies some uproarious impressions of Olivier and Laughton. Excellent DVD review here, by the way.

And if you’re interested in knowing more about the film and its shooting, do read Douglas’s wonderful autobiography The Ragman’s Son.

Vignettes from the wedding

We’re on the coach drive to the Oshwal Centre in Hertfordshire (where the wedding ceremony will take place) when another of the many Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham moments happens: a CD of the film’s soundtrack is miraculously produced, a bottle of whisky is passed around, and as “Shaava Shaava” resounds through the coach my cousin, the groom, does an impromptu little poker-faced Balle balle. With only the upper part of his body, of course (we’re not allowed to undo our seatbelts - the stern British driver has an eye on us).

Back in the innocent 1980s, when Neal stayed with us during his infrequent visits to India, one of his favourite pastimes was to mute the sound on “Chitrahaar” and imitate the dances (Jeetendra and Jaya Prada were especially mimickable). Twenty years on, watching him in the coach (and on many other occasions during these long, busy days), I realise the practice has served him well. He’s lived his whole life as a UK citizen, he can’t speak a sentence of Hindi, but he can shake his booty with the best of Bollywood’s item guys and gals. None of those awkward, jerky movements you associate with a foreigner doing an Indian dance: the rhythm is unbelievable. (His non-Indian friends - from South Africa, the US, Australia – are equally good, and equally enthusiastic.) And he’s determined to enjoy himself through this week’s madness. “See, I know I’m going to have to do a lot of stuff I don’t understand or relate to,” he told me when I reached London, “But it’s only for a few days. Might as well do what it takes to keep everyone happy – and have some fun myself in the process!”

An admirable, wholesome attitude, and one I could never have to a long wedding ceremony myself – which is one reason I planned my trip so I’d miss the sangeet, the most rambunctious of the many rituals on offer. (“Why can’t you come for the sangeet? The whole family will be there!” hollered my uncle on the phone, thereby neatly asking a question and answering it in the same breath.) But any delusions I had about being able to get away with attending only the two main functions (the wedding and the reception) were quickly scuppered.

The thing to understand when a large Punjabi NRI family has been given the opportunity to organise a lavish wedding is this: there can be no half-measures. In the days leading up to the Big Day, every evening will be given over to some ceremony or other. Even when a dinner for close friends and family is all that’s been planned, it must be turned into an Event and designated a Name. “Tonight will be Dandiya Night,” one of the elders will pronounce, and in keeping with this theme some of the more enthusiastic guests will arrive bearing little sticks, with which they will draw figure eights in the air for a few minutes before moving to the more important business of mixing their drinks. Another day will be Mehndi Day, when the women who know a little Punjabi will sing half-verses of ribald songs while the people who don’t will stand around nodding courteously, with no clue about what’s being said.

Not that Dandiya Night at my uncle’s place isn’t fun in its own grotesque way. Exactly one person there knows anything about how to perform a real dandiya: she pirouettes and swirls all by herself while the rest of the party ignores her, preferring an unintended imitation of Death and his followers dancing in the final frame of Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. “This must be the Dandiya March,” a wag comments. (No, not me – I’m standing on the periphery, smiling and nodding courteously.)

Surviving a wedding house

My uncle’s house is a big one but it doesn’t seem that way when there are around 10 guests staying in it, in addition to the main family. With only two bathrooms on the first floor, early-morning strategising becomes important. I wake up at 6 each day (more trying than you’d think, since no one sleeps before 1 AM), cunningly lie in wait in the hallway shadows until I see three or four people heading downstairs for tea, and then make a bounding leap for the nearest washroom.

Dozens of visitors enter and leave daily. There are endless phone calls. People run up and down stairs carrying bags of laundry and shouting instructions to each other (unlike in India, there’s no domestic help; you have to do everything yourself). In the dining room below three aunts loll on sofas, watching Zee on cable TV, playing Greek chorus, commenting blithely on everything that’s happening around them. In his bedroom upstairs my bleary-eyed cousin sits at his computer, planning and re-planning and re-re-planning the seating arrangement for the reception (over 600 people, 60 round tables). You want to know about tradition and modernity coexisting? The bride and groom aren’t allowed to see each other for the week leading up to the wedding, and they follow this rule scrupulously…but they’re still chatting on MSN Messenger, mailing Excel files to each other, arguing online about table planning.

Surrounded as I am by hugs-shugs, tears-shears, happy-shappies etc I find much solace in the company of an embittered old uncle who speaks in aphorisms. “Love is the dawn of marriage, but marriage is the sunset of love,” he intones as people bustle past him carrying balloons and other items of joy and celebration. His own wife is sitting at the table. “Don’t get married,” he tells me (a welcome break from hearing “it’s your turn now” from all quarters). He also has strong views on the proliferation of the species. “If you do get married, don’t have children. When I look at these two here,” he says, waving his hands to indicate his wastrel sons, also sitting at the table, “I reckon I should have had myself neutered 40 years ago.” All this is a bit embarrassing at first, but he’s a nice man and I like going for walks with him the few times I can get out of the house.

Endgame

The reception is the best part of the week, and not just because it marks the end of all things. The speeches are superb, especially the taking-the-piss one made by three of the groom’s best men, where they spend 20 minutes recalling every embarrassing moment in their friend’s life for the benefit of the large audience. (Placed beforehand in an envelope on every table are old photos from a costume party, Neal dressed in drag: “You aren’t losing a daughter,” one of the best men shouts out to the bride’s father, “you’re gaining one.”)

I’m on one of the 60 round tables, sitting next to Gareth Evans, a short-film director with whom my cousin has worked (and whose team won the Satyajit Ray award at the London Film Festival earlier this year). He was very touched by the ceremonies, especially the way the meaning and significance of each ritual was explained at the wedding. “Is this nearly as elaborate as the weddings in India?” he asks innocently. I want to tell him most homegrown ceremonies couldn’t hold a candle to this one, but that would entail saying ungracious things about NRIs going overboard with their celebrations – and over the course of the evening some of my own cynicism has dissipated. So I decide to be nice for once and say no, most weddings in India are a lot flashier.

My cousin definitely knows how elaborate his wedding was. He hasn’t had more than three hours’ sleep on any night for at least a week and now, at last, it’s all over bar the honeymoon. “I’m never getting married again,” he tells me as I leave, and in a flash the real rationale behind all these complicated nuptials hits me between the eyes. In times past I had jested with friends that Jayalalithaa’s foster son (and later Lakshmi Mittal’s daughter) would never be at liberty to get divorced, so expensive and elaborate were their weddings. But there’s more truth to that joke than I’d realised. This is the secret to a long and successful married life: wear the bride and groom out so much that they’ll never, ever consider untying the knot.

P.S. Not that anyone asked, but I slept in the attic; here’s a picture of my bags on the side, with much wedding paraphernalia on the right corner. And no, no bandhgalla pics yet.

DVD update

I’ve said this before, lots of times, and I’ll say it again: if you’re more than a casual movie-watcher – if you’re even slightly interested in the filmmaking process or in film history – then the Extras on DVDs are treasures beyond compare. I particularly love the audio commentary tracks – when done well, they are a boon to any movie buff.

My one hour at the HMV store on Oxford Street (yes, that’s all the time I got away from the wedding madness) ended with the acquisition of the following films:


- Visconti’s The Leopard (Il Gattopardo)

- Special two-disc edition of Hitchcock’s Psycho (long overdue; always owned the videocassette but never had a DVD)

- Special two-disc edition of Spartacus

- Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line

- Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith

- A David Lynch triple bill: Mulholland Drive, The Lost Highway and Eraserhead

- A Coen Brothers box set: Barton Fink, The Big Lebowski, Blood Simple and The Hudsucker Proxy

- Dario Argento’s Suspiria

- George Romero’s original Night of the Living Dead

(When you add the last two titles and Eraserhead to my existing collection, I now have a sizable number of cult horror titles. But more on that later.)

That was a static list of movies. Now let’s look at some of those titles again, this time listing the bonus material on each disc:

The Leopard
Feature-length audio commentary by David Forgacs and Rossana Capitano (this is a three-hour film set in mid-19th century Italy, a period of crucial social and political change, and an understanding of historical context is important).
Half-hour interview with actress Claudia Cardinale

Revenge of the Sith
- Three full-length (30-minute-plus) documentaries, including a superb one titled “Within a Minute”, which takes a sixty-second scene from the climax of the film and then examines the painstaking effort that went into creating every aspect of it. It’s a real eye-opener; you’ll never look at a Star Wars action scene in the same way again.
- Six deleted scenes with introductions and context
- Full-length audio commentary by George Lucas and members of his technical crew

Suspiria
A second disc with a 76-minute documentary on Dario Argento, that Italian master of the horror genre (and a director I’m fascinated by)

Night of the Living Dead
Two audio commentary tracks – one by Romero, the other by cast members – providing completely different perspectives on the filming (the actors' experience of shooting a horror film usually is very different from the director's)

Psycho

Interview with Hitchcock, plus footage from the American Film Institute's tribute to him - speeches by Ingrid Bergman, Jimmy Stewart, Cary Grant and Henry Fonda among others

And best of all, Spartacus, which has an absolutely enthralling commentary track featuring Kirk Douglas, Peter Ustinov, novelist Howard Fast and others, as well as a scene-by-scene analysis by screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (who had been famously blacklisted in the Commie-hunt of the 1950s) and another delightful interview with the multi-talented Ustinov, a great raconteur and mimic. (Separate blog on Spartacus coming up soon.)

The DVDs in the box sets are a little less exciting but even those have a couple of short interviews scattered here and there.

My only problem with discs with so many goodies on them is that I’m often tempted to ignore the actual film and watch all the extras instead – or to keep switching to one of the commentary tracks instead of listening to the original soundtrack, even on a first viewing of the film. Note to self: must overcome this habit. Take it one disc at a time.

Plug for Jet, and Chupke Chupke

If you’re traveling to London from Delhi or Mumbai anytime in the next 2-3 months, I strongly recommend Jet Airways. The service was excellent, the food good and best of all was the in-flight entertainment facility. Large choice of movies and music albums to choose from; I spent half a flight listening to REM’s Around the Sun, The Best of Asha Bhosle and The Carpenters’ Greatest Hits (if you’ve never heard that lovely song “Yesterday Once More” during a takeoff, please arrange a trip expressly for the purpose) and the other half watching films, including Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s delightful Chupke Chupke (which I last saw when I was maybe eight) with the great Dharam paaji. (Really, it’s high time someone wrote a thesis about the superb chemistry between him and Amitabh; they were so much more effective together than AB’s two-hero stints with Vinod Khanna, Shashi Kapoor or Shatrughan Sinha.)

Also saw Hum Tum (much better than I’d expected – had thought it would be overly hip and gimmicky in the way that so much of New Bollywood is) and Batman Begins (so-so; self-conscious, trying way too hard to be a Serious Superhero Movie).

Of course, there is such a thing as being over-enthusiastic about providing good service. The pilots turned the descent to Heathrow into a leisurely tourist show, asking us to “please look out of the windows for a beautiful view of the Thames”, and generally gliding this way and that for optimum effect instead of just getting the damn bird down fast. The view was beautiful to be honest, but personally I prefer touchdowns to be relatively quick once we’ve broken through the clouds. As it is, it’s such a busy airport and it's enervating to see other planes below taking off in your general direction while you’re still 12,000 feet up admiring Westminster Abbey.

(By the way, the reason I’m being conservative and recommending Jet only for the next 2-3 months is because having just started operating along these routes it’s predictable that they’ll have their best wing forward in the early days. I have no idea if they’ll be able to sustain this level of service - if they do, well, serious competition for Virgin, British Airways and especially Air India.)

P.S. Everyone who’s watched Chupke Chupke knows what a fine comedy it is but I was surprised at how frankly sensual a couple of scenes were – especially the one where Dharmendra, masquerading as a driver at his wife Sharmila Tagore’s family house, sneaks into her room for the night and it becomes obvious that she finds this role-playing exciting and wants to engage in some driver-malkin banter even when they’re alone together. Sexual role-playing and kinkiness where you’d least expect it. Ross and Rachel and the Princess Leia gold bikini fetish had nothing on this.

Bigotry and confusion in NRI-land

Something that never ceases to amaze me is how single-mindedly insular large pockets of London’s NRI community can be. Not to mention confused and deluded. There’s more truth than one realises in the clichés about these people being stuck in a time warp.

I don’t usually need to look much further than my uncle and his social circle of rabid right-wingers. During my visit last year I was amused to see the dismayed response of this group to the news that a Congress-led government was coming to power in the home country. Some of us had gone for dinner to an Italian restaurant around the time it seemed certain Sonia Gandhi would become prime minister. There, my uncle clowned about with the unfortunate waiters. “You must be very happy-o,” he sing-songed, “now that an Italian-o is becoming prime minister-o of India-o?” The waiters grinned uncomprehendingly. It might have been possible to dismiss the whole thing as a joke (albeit a sad one) if it weren’t for the genuine angst in the conversation that followed, about this terrible thing the Indian voters had done in ejecting the BJP. “A foreigner becoming prime minister,” they shuddered. “What has gone wrong with the country we loved and left?”

And then, after dinner, this same bunch came back home and sat about until past 2 discussing a fund collection to help canvass for a gentleman (I forget his name) who was in the running to become London’s first mayor of Indian origin. Now while I appreciate that the role and responsibility of a PM is very different in scale from that of a mayor, there was a definite parallel here, and it was interesting that no one noticed the schism between what they were saying and what they were doing.

It’s difficult to understand how people like these – citizens of the world, people who have lived and worked in another country for years – can be so small-minded. Sure, they’ve probably all taken hard knocks, especially in the early years of their life here – faced racism, discrimination, loneliness. But on balance their adopted country has been very good to them – good enough for them to want to stay on for decades. One would think it would be easier for such people to look beyond the narrow domestic walls that Tagore lamented. Unfortunately, they seem more shut in than the rest of us.

When you’re bored of being parochial about your country, you can always turn to race or community instead. On the same trip, I was in a car with another uncle when he made an inadvertent wrong turn, causing a black driver to make angry questioning gestures as he passed us. For the next 10 minutes I was treated to a fuming dissection of the “negroid race”. “The trouble with these people is, they have small brains which can only accommodate a limited number of thoughts,” uncle said, speaking with all the force and authority of the 1864 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica. “They’re not civilised, like us.”

Last week, during my just-concluded visit, it was a time of much Gujarati-baiting by the Punjabis. To cut a long story short, earlier this year when my very-eligible cousin announced that he wanted to marry his girlfriend of many years, a girl from a Gujarati (and vegetarian) family well out of my uncle’s social circle, it caused more than a flutter. After weeks of emotional blackmail, threats and tears, the elders finally reconciled themselves to the fact that there was no stopping the young couple. To be fair, the wedding was a nicely organised affair with much bonhomie from both sides, especially when there were cameras in shooting distance. But within the groom’s father’s clique of friends and relatives, the “Gujju” jokes still haven’t stopped. I’d repeat some of them here, but everything else apart they aren’t very good jokes.

Our aarti can beat up your shlokas

I’ve never seen a more comical instance of religion being used as a tool of one-upmanship than at one point during the wedding ceremony. After most of the rituals had been concluded, the MC (yes yes, there was an MC!) announced that a lady would now recite some Jain shlokas for the benefit of the girl’s family. The recital lasted maybe a minute, during which time the guests on the bride’s side maintained a respectful silence, hands joined and heads bowed. But this threw my dear uncle into a frenzy. “If they can have their bloody Jain chants, we’ll have our Arya Samaj too!” he bawled, and next thing I knew after a quick conference between him and the MC, our entire side of the hall had risen as one and commenced singing “Om Jai Jagdish Hare” in robust Punjabi style.

It was loud and boorish, and it didn’t sound like a prayer at all. It sounded like defiance. Above all, it sounded like a counter-attack.

Update (a part-response to some of the comments on this post): One of the things I didn’t mention is how internally confused some of these people are, despite being such confident, swaggering types on the surface. While they do go on about Indian culture and traditions, when it suits them to they spend an almost equal amount of time extolling the “civilised” western way of doing things. For instance, one of them was lecturing someone else about how we must all be dressed in traditional Indian clothing for the main ceremony; but then, a mere 10 minutes later, he was holding forth on how the seating-arrangement system at formal functions in the UK was “the right way to do these things. Everyone has a fixed place with a name-tag. It isn’t like bloody India where if you want to talk to someone else on your table you can casually get up and change your seat”. Ha.

Off for a few days...

Having just finished a blogging story that will no doubt have both journos and bloggers baying for my blood, I’m doing the only dignified thing left to do: flee the country.

Just kidding – am leaving for London tomorrow night, to attend a cousin’s wedding. It’s mainly a family obligation thingie but it might be interesting in some ways: typical ostentatious NRI affair straight out of DDLJ or Bend it Like Beckham, with many functions, annoying relatives (including at least one evil uncle), choreographed dances (which I’ve sternly instructed my cousin to leave me out of) and colour-coordinated sherwanis, one of which I’ll have to wear, alack (also a bandhgala, for the reception). Unfortunately, I probably won’t have access to a Net connection at all – some of this would be eminently photo-bloggable. Maybe later.

Will probably just be cooped up in the house most of the time, or drifting from one function to the next, or helping out, or intervening in drunken brawls or generally marveling at human idiocy. Don’t have many expectations otherwise but am hoping to get one afternoon to myself so I can skip down Oxford Street to that big HMV store where I spent so many happy hours last year. Yum.

Back on the 14th. See you then.

P.S. Am disabling further comments on the top few posts while I’m away – hate-mail has been on the rise and I don’t want nastiness littering the site when I’m not around to monitor it. My email ID is jaiarjunATyahooDOTcom – kindly direct all abuse thither.

Cricket in Oz

Every year, around late-October-early November, I start feeling a strong sense of anticipation. It’s partly to do with the first stirrings of winter (okay, won’t romanticise this much because I also invariably get change-of-weather flu!) but there’s something else I associate with this time of year – the start of the Australian Cricket Season. Each year, it helps me fall in love with the game all over again.

I became a serious cricket watcher around 1996 and in the early winter of that year I clued in to the fact that if I got up at 5.30 am and switched the TV on I’d be transported to this beguiling land where cricket was so much fresher and more compelling than the proliferating one-day tournaments in the subcontinent. It was the start of my appreciation for Test cricket as well as of many of the finer points of the game. I loved every detail of Channel 9’s breathtaking coverage – the telecast did full justice to the beautiful grounds and the quality of cricket. Sporting pitches too! An even contest between bat and ball. (This was a concept wholly new to me after watching Aamir Khan swing nondescript bowlers out of the park in Awwal Number - and also months of real-life run-gluts between on dead subcontinental pitches where the bowlers needn’t have showed up.)

Each season, one could look forward to some technical innovation or other. And the commentary team, headed by cricket’s Master Yoda, the great Richie Benaud, was nonpareil. Even Tony Greig, who could be so boorish and headache-inducing when he hollered about the exploits of Jayasuriya or Afridi during a Sharjah series, was relatively restrained when sitting next to Benaud. The commentary always managed to be fresh and insightful.

I loved Australia’s contribution to making the game so attractive to watch (both through the coverage and the brilliance of the team’s play). I admired the fact that though the Aussies had laid the groundwork for the ODI revolution in the early 1980s (through the Packer circus), they couldn’t be accused of neglecting the five-day game; Australia has attained a near-perfect balance between its Test and one-day calendar, while other teams still have so much to learn about proper scheduling. I admired how the team usually managed to bowl its quota of overs in time despite relying largely on pace bowlers; it spoke volumes of their professionalism and their sense of purpose.

There was a time when I wouldn’t miss a day of any of the Tests played during the Australian season. I became obsessive: even when working a tiring evening shift a few years ago, I would reach home at 3.30 in the morning, sleep for a couple of hours and then be up in time to watch Australia-New Zealand or Australia-South Africa. Most of the excitement came from the quality of play of Mark Taylor’s (later Steve Waugh’s) team. It was the beginning of an almost irrational idolatry (and of course, all the great idolatries in cricket must be irrational) and for 10 years now I’ve been an Australia supporter. (As a few dismayed friends know, I might have been the only Indian who was sulking on the last day of that Kolkata Test in 2001.)

And now it’s that time of year again, but I’m feeling some trepidation this time. This Australian side is probably on the decline, and if the standard of their play falls considerably I wonder if the cricket season Down Under will ever be as attractive as before. As it is, I’m concerned that Tendulkar’s retirement will mark the end of my interest in the game. An unexciting Australian cricket season would be a serious double-blow.

But it’s time to set those thoughts aside. As I write this, Brian Lara has just come in and is facing up to Glenn McGrath. For now, it's all good.

Mouse-mulling

It’s scary how fast one gets used to things. When I bought my laptop a few months ago I made sure I also got an external mouse as an accessory - since (like most new laptop users) I wasn’t comfortable with the pointing stick or touchpad that’s part of the machine. Well, last week the external mouse stopped functioning and around this time I was working out of home for four to five days straight - so I made the adjustment to using the pointing stick (with that annoying red "nipple" on top).

It was slow and uncomfortable and made my index finger sore, but I must’ve gotten used to it - because when I came in to office after a week yesterday, the external mouse felt unwieldy in my hand. It was like a throwback to 1995 when I used a mouse for the first time at a friend’s place and never thought I’d get a grip on it.

Reminds me of something I read once about evolutionary changes occuring in the human wrist and fingers because of the demands of rapidly changing technology (mouse use, SMS-ing, etc). If anyone has any info on that subject, please share - haven’t been able to find much on the Net.

(DD?)

Inscrutable readers - and reviewers

Here’s a characteristically acerbic review of the Chetan Bhagat book by Kishore Singh (who is my immediate boss, and who reads this blog - so maybe I’m setting myself up to be Dooced!). Not going to nitpick about the review (which is typical of what most critics will say about this book anyway), but here's a quick disclaimer: I never said the book was "brilliant" or "full of witty one-liners" (I’m the colleague referred to in the third para). For shame, Kishore! This is careless misquoting of the same sort as done by blog commenters who extrapolate a simple sentence like "This is an entertaining, fast-paced read" into "Jabberwock thinks this is a great book." (What I have said about it is still here for all to read.)

Just one other point regarding "this is a thoroughly entertaining read (oh, I give it that) but must it have pretensions to literature?" But of course it doesn’t. It probably wouldn’t be selling hundreds of thousands of copies if it did.

Two links

John Updike’s review of the new Marquez, here (Updike is that rare creature, a top-drawer novelist who’s also a great critic. I love his reviews – though this one isn’t among his very best) ;
and Ian Jack on the semi-colon, here (thanks for the link, Nikhil).

Schizophrenia, incest, moving in circles

(Have cross-posted this on We the Media, a new blog started by Peter Griffin for those of us who straddle journalism and the blogosphere.)

I've been thinking about the various little circles I find myself in, thanks to both my work and my interests.

First, there’s journalism, which as the cliché goes is an incestuous profession. There’s a lot of truth to that cliché. For a group of people who are expected (by the very nature of their work) to be an informed lot, sensitive to and aware about everything that’s going on in the world, it’s remarkable what a sniveling little bunch of myopic sneaks many of us really are. Many of the mid-level journos I’ve worked with spend all their free time bitching about others in the profession, trading conspiracy theories about why so-and-so left this newspaper and shifted to that magazine, and so on. (If you’ve been in the profession for at least four or five years and changed jobs even once, there will be at most two degrees of separation between you and practically any other journo in town. So there’s plenty of scope for frustration-fuelled gossip where you’re trying to impress younger colleagues with “insider knowledge” about another organisation.)

A subset is features journalism, about which the less said the better. And then there’s the literary circuit, a more bearable lot on the whole (though naturally I’m biased) – but lit-journos very easily become a part of the community they cover (through friendships with like-minded publishers, writers etc), and that leads to even more incest. More than once I’ve found myself at a get-together that includes a) a recently published writer and b) three to four people (including me) who have reviewed his/her book. On the surface it’s all very relaxed and comfortable, but I always find it a bit icky. Am probably being too conservative, but well...

And now, on top of all this there’s the blogosphere, which by comparison is a much more eclectic, dynamic group of people – except that most of the bloggers I interact with on a regular basis happen to be journos as well! So that’s what my life has become – one incestuous circle intersecting another to make a cosy little Venn diagram, and the upshot is that in the space of a single week I might easily end up meeting the same set of people (including some I’m not even very friendly with) in several different contexts. A book launch/reading. A press conference for a non-literary event. Film preview. Bloggers’ meet. A get-together at a mutual friend’s place.

People on the outside of these intersecting circles think all this must be such great fun, but those of us on the inside (even those who are a lot more social than I am) know how trying it can be. When it becomes too much for me to handle, the one surefire antidote is to catch up with old friends from my pre-journalism days - the ones who are not in any way associated with media (okay, a couple of them are in advertising), or blogging, or literature. They aren’t particularly interested in my work, most of them don’t know I blog (it would never even occur to them to Google my name) and most mercifully of all they never read – except maybe a Dan Brown or a Sidney Sheldon once in a while. It’s always a relief to meet them. Keeps me sane.

P.S. A couple of things got me started on this train of thought. First, a conversation at The Book Shop, Khan Market reminded me of how small and closed the literary circuit really is. I’d picked up The Complete New Yorker from the shop last month, and I asked the owner how the DVDs were selling. “Oh, they’re doing quite well,” he said, looking pleased, “we’ve sold three already.”

Three. One of those was to me, another to Hurree Babu. And here I was thinking that everyone I knew had been rushing to The Book Shop (the first place the DVDs were available in Delhi) in droves to buy those delectable discs. It was quite an eye-opener. Now I’m wondering who that third freak could be.

The other thing is, I’m currently working on a biggish story on – you guessed it – blogging. I’m very ambivalent about such stories because they make me feel schizophrenic. On the one hand I have to be a good journalist and write a piece that will fulfill the requirements of mainstream media (explaining everything for the layperson, setting down facts and figures, etc). But on the other hand, as a dedicated blogger myself, I don’t like oversimplifying the concept for the easy consumption of readers who aren’t Net-savvy. The blogosphere is so varied and amorphous, it doesn’t feel right to define it in simplistic terms. Also, because it’s so vulnerable to being misunderstood or dismissed by those who are on the outside, I feel protective about it – which isn’t the best way to be if you’re writing an MSM story.