Pet control

Spam filters aren't what they used to be. Write a nostalgia piece on the Pet Shop Boys and sooner or later you're sure to get a comment from a veterinary clinic.

Phillum noir: Manorama Six Feet Under

Navdeep Singh’s Manorama Six Feet Under is another in a line of very interesting, relatively low-profile films that haven’t done too well on commercial release but which seem likely to acquire cult followings on DVD. Other notable recent movies of this type include Sriram Raghavan’s Johnny Gaddaar and Anurag Kashyap’s No Smoking (posts on these here and here). These are films made by directors who are unafraid to play auteur, bring very personal visions to the big screen, and who are serious movie buffs themselves – as much students as practitioners (much the same way as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and the other “kids with beards” were in the late 1960s, and the French New Wave directors a decade earlier). They know a lot about other cinemas and about a variety of filmmaking styles and genres, but are secure enough about their own talents to be able to openly acknowledge their influences and to build on them. (Raghavan actually played a couple of minutes from the early 1970s film Parwaana to show how its plot inspires his protagonist, but this didn’t at all make Johnny Gaddaar seem jaded or derivative.)

Manorama Six Feet Under works with the template of Roman Polanski’s superb “neo-noir” film Chinatown, but it uses that template selectively and intelligently. Chinatown, about a private eye investigating corruption in the Los Angeles water department while also trying to figure out the motivations of the woman who has hired him, was an uncompromisingly cynical view of human nature that didn’t give the viewer a shard of hope, let alone a silver lining. Manorama doesn’t end on a comparably bleak note (in fact, it’s possible to argue that the last few minutes are a bit of a cop-out), but otherwise its tone is very similar to Polanski’s film. At the same time, one never gets the impression that the plot of an American movie has been arbitrarily picked up and moved to an Indian setting with incongruous results - the shift to a small desert town in Rajasthan here is done just as convincingly as the placing of Othello in the Uttar Pradesh heartland in Omkara.

The opening scene is assured, compact and immediately sets the mood. A brief glimpse of a large elevated water tank standing alone in the middle of the desert is followed by a tracking shot that includes ants scurrying over the parched ground, a group of children huddled together near a small fire, and finally an overhead view of junior engineer Satyaveer Randhawa (Abhay Deol) exiting the door of a Public Works Department site office and walking unhurriedly to his new motorcycle. In voiceover, Satyaveer tells us that his own life is as arid and uneventful as his hometown Lakhot. The place goes unnoticed by the outside world for most of the year, he says, making news only in the height of summer when hundreds of people die because of the extreme heat, and in the height of winter, when an equal number die because of the cold.

This sequence is the first of many reminders that film noir doesn’t have to be all about dark shadows or smoky black-and-white cinematography. The nighttime here (noir being French for “black”) is principally the nighttime of the soul and, as we’ll soon see, some very dark transactions can occur in the Rajasthani desert in blinding sunlight. The film’s trajectory is from small transgressions to increasingly serious crimes, and no one is innocent. For starters, it’s implied that Satyaveer’s new bike was purchased with ill-begotten money. He has been suspended by the department for taking a “commission” (everyone does it, but he was silly enough to get caught) and now he’s sitting at home with his wife and their little son, waiting for the result of the inquiry – and waiting also for the muse to strike so he can write another pulp detective novel, which is what he does in his spare time.

But a junior engineer taking bribes is a minor, almost feeble misdeed compared to other things that are going on in the area. Things start to escalate when a woman who says she’s the wife of a powerful local minister asks Satyaveer to play detective himself and bring evidence that her husband is cheating. By the time he discovers she was faking her identity, he’s already caught in a labyrinth of deception and counter-deception that resembles not only the plot of Chinatown but briefly nods at Antonioni’s Blow-Up as well. (Some shots also reminded me of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, with the severed ear in the ground and the suggestion of a tranquil surface hiding unsavoury things.) Circumscribed small-town lives, corrupt politicians and cops, social workers with their own agendas, femme fatales, chuckling goons who enjoy bantering nearly as much as breaking people’s fingers – all these elements soon come together with deadly results.

This is a confident, accomplished film. My one reservation (not counting a couple of minor, ignorable loopholes in the plot) is that it’s self-consciously slow-paced in places – occasionally suffering from what I’ve come to think of as a hangover from the made-for-Doordarshan features of the early 1980s: characters enunciating sentences more solemnly than strictly required, and with many Significant Pauses. Also, the big fish/little fish/small pond imagery is slightly overdone (it requires suspension of disbelief too; I kept wondering why so many people would have large aquariums in a town that has serious water-supply problems). But the script and performances are good throughout. Abhay Deol is proving to be one of the more interesting actors of his generation and his performance as Satyaveer is the least starry you could possibly imagine from a Deol. He’s the picture of the small-town everyman, getting by from one day to the next, convinced that he is meant for better things but not sure where the break is coming from – and eventually, not driven enough to worry too much about it. Gul Panag is good as his wife and the ubiquitous Vinay Pathak has a grand old time as his brother-in-law, a foul-mouthed cop whose personal motto “Zaraa si saavdhani, zindagi bhar aasani” (“A little precaution makes life easy”) derives from a condom ad jingle but soon acquires more sinister connotations for Satyaveer.

One thing I liked was the film's refusal to neatly tie up all its loose ends - it leaves us in the dark about a couple of plot details. Without disclosing too much, there’s an unnerving late scene when a peripheral character (about whom we know almost nothing) bursts into morbid laughter and it's left to the viewer to fill in the gaps. There’s also a question mark around the background and motivations of a woman named Sheetal (Raima Sen), who becomes Satyaveer’s confidante when his wife is out of town. All this adds to the ambiguity and discomfort that are so vital to this genre; we come away with the sense that there’s more going on than has been revealed to us – though, equally importantly, what has been revealed is sufficient to satisfy the curiosity of a viewer who’s watching the film as a straightforward detective yarn.

P.S. DVDs of many Hindi films have started including special features now, which is a welcome (and overdue) trend, and one that is particularly well-suited to films like Manorama Six Feet Under. There’s a “making of” feature (which I haven’t seen yet) on this DVD, as well as a few deleted scenes, at least two of which I thought should have been left in the film. Also, I like the imagination and flair shown in the film’s publicity material – for instance, the poster of four of the main characters standing inside what looks like a miniature model of the town, with serrated boundaries; the publicity still (not a scene from the film) of Satyaveer being lowered, head first, into a grave; and best of all, the poster that’s broken up to look like a jigsaw puzzle of photographs.

Generally

Blogging might be infrequent for some time – have been very busy, both with work and because of various family matters, and that will probably continue for at least the next week. (Will try to keep putting up stuff that I’m writing professionally.) It was particularly unfortunate having to miss the Jaipur Literature Festival this year – would have liked to be there for the whole week, beginning with the Translating Bharat conference, but in the end couldn’t make it at all. Oh well, c’est la vie. However, I’ll be in Mumbai for 2-3 days for the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival; am participating in two panel discussions, one on online writing on Feb 7, the other on banned books on Feb 8. (KGAF schedule here.) More soon.

Hazards of book launches and other winter parties

Moderating a discussion at a high-profile book launch can be a nerve-wracking experience, as I discovered when Penguin Books recently asked me to conduct a Q&A with Manil Suri at the India Habitat Centre. Having greatly enjoyed Suri’s The Age of Shiva, and knowing I would have to meet him for a profile at some point during the week anyway, I agreed, but as the day drew nearer the goose bumps swelled, quivered, popped and crackled – often all at once.

“Just think of it as a regular author interview – you’ve done loads of those before,” a friend said. It was a well-meant suggestion, but no explanation was forthcoming about how I was supposed to think of this as “just another Q&A" when dozens of people would be sitting in a brightly lit hall, gazing intently at the two of us perched on chairs atop a stage like zoo animals up for exhibit. As a journalist, I feel uncomfortable when even a single PR person is present during an interview. Needless to say, a public book discussion is a hundred times more daunting: it amounts to turning a “one-on-one conversation” into a spectator sport.

There’s another problem. High-profile book launches tend to include the generous dispensation of alcohol and tasty snacks once the formalities are over. Attendance is known to swell when the invitation card says “The launch will be followed by cocktails”. (“The launch will be preceded by high tea” is not as effective, though it serves as a magnet for samosa-lovers.) This makes the discussion side of things rather tricky. Sustaining a lengthy talk about a book – picking on specific passages, asking the author meaningful questions about this or that character – becomes much more awkward when all the while you know that most people in the audience haven’t read the book and never intend to. And that most of them are thinking: “When will these two idiots shut up so we can get to the drinks?”

It can be even worse when some people in the audience are interested enough to raise their own questions after the discussion. These are usually earnest types who are genuinely pleased about this opportunity to ask a well-known writer about his work, but it can get irritating when a nuanced discussion that has covered most aspects of the author’s writing career is followed by audience questions like “Why do you write fiction?” and “How autobiographical is this book?” At such times, sitting up there on the podium like Exhibit B, I’m thinking: “When will these idiots shut up so I can get to the drinks?”

Anyway, book launches aside, winter is the time when even the most unsocial amongst us (read: me) find ourselves trapped into going to dinner parties and other ghastly celebratory events. Theoretically it’s possible to have a good time at some of these, especially if the food is good and no one bothers you. But in practice, one encounters various types of boring people. (I wouldn’t mind so much if they were boring in the same way that I am, but they always turn out to be boring in all sorts of other ways.) At recent parties I have been assailed on more than one occasion by the prototype of the Loquacious Marketing Man, usually the husband of the sister of a friend’s friend. This person insists on reciting the unabridged history of his Internet marketing company - growth, decline and triumphant resurgence - between those eventful years 1998 and 2003. Words like “boom”, “bust”, “strategy” and “retrieval” are thrown about. He is unmindful of Scott Adams' pearl of wisdom “When you are the only one talking, it is a clue that no conversation is occurring and it is time to leave.” Worst of all, he looks carefully at me from time to time to make sure I’m paying attention.

Over time, I’ve discovered there are certain phrases you can cleverly use in such situations. My current method is to wait for a brief pause in the soliloquy and then cut in with the sentence, “Yes, but would you say that’s a lucrative revenue model?” It ALWAYS works. Glint in eye, the marketing man embarks on another long exposition and I don’t have to worry about what he’s saying for the next 10 minutes.

(And no, I wouldn’t recognise a revenue model if one slithered up to me and puked gold coins all over my feet.)

Then there’s the host who won’t let you leave before 1 AM. Never mind that he knows you have 30 km to travel to get home on a foggy night with homicidal drivers careening all over Delhi’s streets. Never mind that the party is brimming over with people and your absence won’t even register (in fact, by the next morning he’ll happily have forgotten he had invited you at all). But a misplaced sense of hospitality combined with general drunkenness will make him cling to your sleeves, insisting that your early departure will void his life of all meaning.

One solution is to offer to tend the bar for a while. Then break as many bottles as you can, especially the ones that contain expensive wines. After this, he will smilingly see you to the door.

If this doesn’t work, it’s okay to slip away without telling anyone. Remember, etiquette is a grossly overrated quality at winter parties.

Bhasa's Mahabharata plays

Just out: a new edition of The Shattered Thigh and Other Plays, an English translation (by A N D Haksar) of six plays by the great Sanskrit dramatist Bhasa. These are all based on episodes in the Mahabharata. Reading “Pancharatram” (“Five Nights”), which begins with Duryodhana, having performed a great sacrificial ceremony, seeking the blessings of his elders, I was struck by déjà vu. From the opening page:

Duryodhana: Preceptor, my salutations.
Drona: Come, my child. But that is not in order.
Duryodhana: Why, what is the order?
Drona: Don’t you see? You should first salute the blessed Bhishma. I don’t consider it in order to be saluted before him.
Bhishma: No, no, sir. You have precedence over me for many reasons. I am born of a mother, your birth was immaculate...

For more on “immaculate” births in the Mahabharata, see this post. One must wonder now if the Kuru elders spent all their time discussing each other’s fantastic origins and precisely where they should be placed in the respectability hierarchy.

Bhasa is one of the major names in classical Sanskrit literature. Though there is no consensus on when exactly he lived, it’s known that he preceded Kalidasa, who praised him in the prologue of one of his own plays. (It was a somewhat backhanded compliment though: Kalidasa asked the rhetorical question “How can the work of the modern poet Kalidasa be more esteemed than that of established worthies than Bhasa etc?” and then supplied his own answer: “Everything is not more praiseworthy just because it is old, nor should a poetical work be dismissed just because it is new.”)

Reading The Shattered Thigh and Other Plays, it’s interesting to see how Bhasa uses creative license to extrapolate dialogues and imagine scenes that were not in the original text of the Mahabharata, but which are largely consistent with the tone of the epic. This is, of course, something that interpreters of the vibrant epic continue to do more than 2,000 years later (Pratibha Ray’s Yajnaseni is one example among many of books that tell the story through the eyes of a particular character; and there are more conventional translations, such as the beautiful one by Kamala Subramaniam, which expand the dialogues and internal dilemmas). Also notable is his treatment of the characters – for instance, Duryodhana is frequently depicted as a noble, generous prince mindful of family honour (he is also the tragic hero of the title play, "Urubhanga") while Bhishma sometimes comes across as manipulative. It’s a recognition of how complex and many-sided the people in the epic are, something you won’t find in some of the condensed translations (such as the overrated one by C Rajagopalachari) or in that TV soap made by B R Chopra in the late 1980s.

The one notable deviation Bhasa makes from the original story is in “Pancharatram”, where Duryodhana agrees to return the kingdom to the Pandavas after their exile, provided their whereabouts can be discovered within five nights. This play appears to end on a reconciliatory note, but subsequent plays like “Duta Vakyam” (“The Envoy”) and “Karnabharam” (“Karna’s Burden”) indicate that the great war did take place after all. Much of Bhasa’s work has been lost; I wonder if he had dealt with the Mahabharata more comprehensively and if perhaps there were other works that bridged the gap between the events recounted in “Pancharatram” and those in the later plays. We'll never know, of course.

The anti-Slam

This is funny. I especially like the idea of someone “successfully defending an anti-Grand Slam”. Maybe, just maybe, it'll be Federer one day (like in the year 2018).

Notes on the Aus Open '08

It’s the lowest-profile of the four Grand Slams in tennis, and it’s played on a surface that’s a bit tricky for my favourite player, but I love the Australian Open. For starters, the timings suit me: it’s very stimulating (purely on a short-term basis, of course) to get up at 4 AM (at which point I can also, ahem, switch on the booster for the 3.30-4.30 AM water supply), take out the laptop and get down to work, and put the TV on at low volume after an hour or so. Sipping a cup of hot tulsi tea, writing notes for a review or interview, whooping and waving one's fist at the TV screen...it’s the very definition of multi-tasking. And the wonderfully atmospheric late-night matches take place in the evening (India-time) which is also very manageable.

The surprise element is often greater here than in the other majors, since this one comes immediately after the off-season and conventional wisdom about form, fitness etc has to be discarded – unless the player in question is Federer, that is. Dark horses who have trained really hard during the off-season often do well despite not being ranked very high and there have been a few surprise finalists in the last few years (Fernando Gonzalez and Marcos Baghdatis in the last two editions).

I’ve seen a few matches so far, including three marathons (Baghdatis-Safin, Roddick-Kohlschreiber and Federer-Tipsarevic, all superb in different ways). Eyedrops have been pressed into service: watching even four straight hours of power tennis – long rallies with the ball darting back and forth – can be harder on the eyes than a couple of days of Test cricket. Also, the way this particular Open has been going, the action often stretches to 16 straight hours (the Aussies are so sports-mad they actually started a third-round match at midnight Melbourne time – it finished past 4 AM) and my tired eyes have also been surfing the thousands of comments on Pete Bodo’s Tennis World blog, which are far more entertaining and informative than any news report could be.

Some favourite moments so far this year:

The human Fed: It’s well-established by now that Roger Federer is an android, but we saw him doing a fine impersonation of a person during his match with veteran Fabrice “The Magician” Santoro, a very popular medium-rung player who is in his last season on the tour. The android won comfortably and was always in control of the match, but it was seen to be laughing its head off during the many points where the nimble-footed Santoro repeatedly floated the ball back into play, even after Fed had hit seemingly clear winners and smashes. (Take a look at this point.) At the end of the match, Federer actually climbed over the net and hugged the Frenchman. I wonder if there was a short-circuit in the system or he had actually been programmed to do these things, just for this match? Either way, it was very nice to see.

- The new Plexicushion surface used this year has been a big subject of debate with commentators wondering whether it will play faster or slower than the earlier surface and how it might advantage or disadvantage different types of players. Sitting in the Star Sports studio, Vijay Amritraj and Alan Wilkins waited breathlessly to see what the world’s best player has to say about the finer points of the new turf. Cut to a Federer press conference where he says, very gravely:

“Well, I sort of liked the green surface better, you know. This shade of blue is hard on the eye – the reflection from the overhead lights is more difficult, though maybe that’s because we haven’t got used to it yet. In general, I like green better than blue...”

And he goes on for a minute or two about the differences between the two colours without mentioning how the surfaces compare in other respects. Basically, this is the android telling his opponents: “It doesn’t matter if we’re playing on quicksand, I’ll still beat all of you in straights.”

- For an awkward, lumbering American tree that has little personality on the court, Andy Roddick has a sense of humour off it; his press conferences/post-match interviews are often quite piquant, especially when he loses. After his five-set loss to Philip Kohlscreiber, an over-enthusiastic reporter says to him:

“You tried a lot of ways to get into his service games...Especially the last set, seemed like you were climbing uphill the whole time trying to get the ball back in play, and then he was dictating pretty quickly, and then that went on for a few games...”

And Roddick cuts in:

“Is that a question or are you having, like, a monologue here?”

With my thesis-length questions, it’s a good thing I’ll never have to interview him.

(Some earlier tennis posts: Thoughts on complete dominance, Dealing with the Federer problem, Mixed singles, Perceptions)

Miniatures in a mural: Ammi, and a chat with Saeed Mirza

Filmmaker-scriptwriter Saeed Mirza is speaking with a friend when I arrive for our appointment at the India International Centre. The details of the conversation escape me, but it has to do with the ongoing month of Muharram and its attendant rituals. “So this can only be done on the ninth day?” Mirza is saying, “It can’t be, say, the 14th day – or the 5th day? I see.” The tone makes it apparent that he doesn’t see, but it’s only mildly sardonic, his eyes are sparkling and he’s quick to change the topic. It’s a moment that captures two things about the man: he’s iconoclastic, questioning, not particularly respectful of traditions that don’t make sense to him; but he’s disinclined to push the rationalist point too hard. As a staunch Leftist who admits to being spiritually influenced by Sufism, he understands the value of contradictions. And besides, how does a rationalist justify writing a book-length letter to a woman who has been dead for 18 years?

Mirza’s Ammi: Letter to a Democratic Mother has been billed as a novel, but this is an inadequate description. Though the first half includes a novella-length section where he reimagines the early lives of his parents and the unusual circumstances that lead to their wedding, this restless, engaging work is also part-memoir, part-travelogue, part-film script and a number of other things besides, with reflections on the injustices of history, the perceived clash of civilisations, and the importance of learning lessons from the past. All this combines to form a long letter addressed to Mirza’s mother, who died in 1990 – so that Ammi, though polemical in places, remains very personal, very conversational throughout.

In his preface, Mirza likens the book’s form to “miniatures set in a mural” and admits that he doesn’t know whether it will work for most readers. “My wife Jennifer felt it lacked cohesion after reading the first two drafts. She likes it better now, but she’s probably just saying that because she’s exhausted!” How did he settle on such an unusual structure? “This form was the only way I could encompass everything that was going through my mind,” he says, “The idea for the book came from the way certain words are casually bandied about in today’s world – words like ‘democratic’ vs ‘undemocratic’, “civilised” vs “uncivilised”, ‘rogue states’ vs ‘law-abiding states’, and so on. I wanted to look at how the meanings of these words have been lost or distorted.”

The longest section in Ammi is the tale of Jahanara Begum, a girl from a Mughal background, and Nusrat Beg, a Pathan, who meet in Quetta in the early 1930s. “Fictionalising the lives of my parents in this way,” says Mirza, “created a background for the parts that are more explicitly about my own family and childhood.” The result is an absorbing mix of fiction and non-fiction – it’s as if a line has been drawn down the book’s centre, separating the Nusrat-Jahanara story (which is abandoned at the point where the couple are about to start a family) from the autobiographical sketches of later years: the one about his parents’ stoical reaction when he unwittingly ate a ham sandwich in school, for instance. (“A sinner is someone who sins against people – not because he eats pork,” his mother hesitantly concludes after thinking things over for a while, though she quickly adds, “But in my house there will be no pork!”)

“That dividing line was important to me,” Mirza says. “The book’s structure begs the question: could this woman (Ammi) have been Jahanara? Could this man (my father) have been Nusrat Beg? I thought that would be an interesting way of telling a story. It also makes it more universal, rather than being a particularised account of a specific couple. There were many couples like Nusrat and Jahanara – people who came together from different backgrounds and who had to struggle with issues of faith, conservatism, the importance of education and freedom. These are ordinary lives and we tend to deny the incredible grace and dignity of the ordinary.”

More than anything, Ammi is a cry for inclusiveness, for being able to absorb various things from around the world while retaining the flavour of one’s own culture (and Mirza himself is quite capable of linking disparate things – like invoking the lyrics of John Lennon’s “Working Class Hero” in the context of the story of the underprivileged Ekalavya). At one point, Nusrat asks the conservative elders in Jahanara’s family, “Do we want to live in a well from which we can see only a patch of sky or do we want to live outside the well and see the world?” Later, she tells him she decided to marry him because she didn’t want to live in a well, “even if seeing more of the sky would bring pain”.

“That frog-in-the-well analogy is a peculiarly Eastern one,” Mirza says, “and it’s a pity how the West, on the other hand, has been playing up this paranoia about everyone else being The Other. People like Samuel Huntington, with their insistence about the ‘clash of civilisations’, have helped to ghettoise minds.” It’s also a pity, he feels, that modernity (“another word that has lost its meaning”) is defined by the Western model. Ammi is full of pointers to the spirit of radical thinking in Islam, something Mirza feels has been suppressed or misrepresented. He includes stories about the scholars Ibn Senna and Ibn Rushd, who were among the world’s first freethinkers – holding that faith was not the only way to truth, maintaining their religious beliefs while at the same time daring to suggest that “the design of Allah needs to be studied further”. He discusses the great tradition of Arabic literature from a thousand years ago, which later found echoes in the works of many European masters. And he throws in parables about the legendary figure of Mulla Nasruddin, perpetually astride his donkey, “a genuine international folk hero...the classic Fool, who poked fun at royalty and pomp and protocol, who attacked mindless ritual and orthodoxy and everything that stifled the spirit of man”.

“I don’t think these aspects of Islam are in danger of being lost,” he says, “They exist in Turkey, on the Arab streets, but they don’t exist with the leadership, and they get misconstrued as being Islamist.” Is it difficult to be both a Muslim and a rationalist in today’s world? “It does become an issue at times, but I’ve been fortunate,” he says. “My mother took all my anti-religious talk with incredible equanimity. Liberals tend to scoff at spiritual-minded people, but I wonder if I would have been as tolerant if the situation were reversed!” Smiling, he recalls an incident from when he was just 10 years old. “My father and brother were climbing up the steps of a mosque and I suddenly decided that I didn’t want to pray. So I called out and told my father that I had stopped believing in God.” His father’s response was to look back for a moment and say, “Okay, but stay there until we return, don’t go near the road, there’s traffic about.”

Mirza is best known for his work in films: he was a major figure in what was known as the parallel-cinema movement in the 1970s and 1980s, the writer-director of movies like Mohan Joshi Hazir Ho!, Albert Pinto ko Gussa Kyon Aata Hai and Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro and the co-director of the popular TV serial Nukkad. He’s starting work on a new feature next week, after a hiatus of more than a decade. “It’s time to get back to work,” he jokes, “I’ve spent the better part of the last 10 years traveling – within India, in particular, learning about how different people live and think.” Some anecdotes from these travels have made it to the book, such as the ones about “the laughing, unpaid tea-garden workers”, “the young poet of the high mountains”, and the truck drivers who put a huge painting from the Sohni-Mahiwal story on the back of their vehicle, because “nowadays no one has time for true love. So much tension! How to earn money! How to get a job! So much fighting about religion! Since we have to travel around the country, we thought why not spread this message?”

“When you travel for 45,000 km on the smaller roads of this country, avoiding the highways,” says Mirza thoughtfully, “you realise how utterly insignificant you are, how foolish your arrogance is, how little you know of the world. In a sense this book is also my private apology to some figures from my past – like my Hindi teacher Sharmaji, whom we used to make fun of, even as he told us it was tragic that we knew nothing about the work of Premchand and other great Indian writers. Those of us who are more educated, and educated in a certain way, think we are philosophically superior to others – we don’t give enough consideration to someone who has come from a different background.” It’s clear that even at the age of 64, he’s eager to keep expanding his horizons, to escape the frog’s eye view.

P.S. The book's cover design has been done by the very talented Moonis Ijlal - here's an earlier post on his work.

The Age of Shiva - a review

[A shorter version of this appears in this week’s Tehelka.]

What would happen if Shiva never returned from his ascetic wanderings? Would Parvati and her boy spend the rest of their years in each other’s company? Leading a life that had need for neither husband nor father, that was fulfilled and immutable and carefree? Or would time change things? Would she notice his lip sprouting, his voice beginning to crack...Would her own beauty fade, her step begin to waver, the wrinkles start to form over her skin? Perhaps he would want to strike out on his own, explore the world beyond, leave the forest and his aged, unattractive mother with it?

Two ancient myths, both involving the children of Shiva and Parvati, flow under the surface of the modern story told in Manil Suri’s beautiful new novel. The first is the myth of Ganesha’s creation – Parvati fashions him from the sandalwood paste on her body because she wants a sentinel who will be answerable only to her, not to Shiva – with its subtext of a father being excluded from the private world occupied by mother and son; the son even assuming at least one of the father’s responsibilities (that of protector). The other story, darker and more explicit, has the deformed Andhaka being separated from his parents and becoming smitten by his own mother when he grows to adulthood.

Central to Suri’s The Age of Shiva are the many facets of the mother-son relationship, including the ones that don’t normally come up in polite conversation. The book establishes its tone right away: its opening two pages contain a startlingly intense description of breastfeeding that emphasises the erotic connotations of the act – in fact, it’s only a few sentences in that you realise this isn’t a lovemaking scene but a prolonged, careful first-person account by a mother feeding her baby.

Your tongue pulls against my nipple. So practiced, so persuasive, so determined, how does it know what to do? I feel myself responding. Each tug brings liquid flooding up, engorging my breast, pushing out into your insistent mouth...There is nothing, I think to myself, as you let go and turn to me, filled. Nothing that can be as satisfying as this.

This opening passage drew me straight into the book – not so much because of the quality of the writing or characterisation (that came later), but because it was so intriguing that a male writer had been brave enough to attempt a scene like this, much less pull it off. (Pop psychology alert: I subsequently learnt that Suri is gay; I don’t know whether that's connected with his being more in touch with his feminine side than most men are, or having greater empathy for women, but it might be worth keeping in mind.) As this tender yet disturbing book unfolds, the magnitude of his achievement comes into full focus: he has created a credible female narrator-protagonist and convincingly portrayed the various dimensions of her life – as a supportive but often unhappy wife, a rebellious daughter and most crucially a single mother raising a son through the awkward phase of adolescence.

Meera’s story begins in 1955 when, still a teenager, she meets her future husband Dev, an aspiring singer. Happenstance determines her fate, a minor tryst and a misunderstanding leading to an early marriage, sending her down a path where she will continually be manipulated by both her father and her husband. Her son Ashvin – the baby in the prologue mentioned above – is only born halfway through the book, but the 200 pages that go before help prepare the ground for his appearance, allowing us to understand the vital role he plays in his mother’s otherwise lonely life (“You are the hope and the fire, the absolution, the purifier”). Meera’s love for her son is also intensified by memories of an earlier child she was forced to abort, and whose shadow continues to haunt her. She is never as happy or as fulfilled as when she spends time with Ashvin, but her emotional over-dependence on him can have murky consequences.

Suri has a real talent for shining new light on familiar everyday incidents and, conversely, for showing the mundane side of extraordinary happenings - a carefully planned suicide attempt, for instance. The chapter describing Meera’s first karwa chauth in her new home is one of the most vivid in the book – comical, even frightening in places, if you don’t know much about the custom – as is the passage detailing little Ashvin’s mundan ceremony, traumatic for both the child and his mother, yet considered a necessary rite of passage by everyone else (because “the hair a child is born with is unclean from the mother’s womb”). He is also very perceptive about the nature of relationships in a large family living in cramped quarters – the demands of adjustment, the power struggles, the rigid observance of societal customs, the subtle overtures made to a new bride by her brother-in-law.

At the same time, he doesn’t make an easy target out of orthodoxy. Meera’s father Paji is a determined rationalist, very liberal on the surface (and so anti-tradition that he snaps the heads off any youngsters who bend to touch his feet), but his influence has just as stifling an effect on her life as anything else does. There’s a passage that can stir conflicting emotions in a reader who feels squeamish about the tradition that requires an Indian woman to touch her husband’s feet on certain occasions: Paji promises to help Meera on the condition that she won’t perform this subservient act during a particular ritual, and she instinctively rebels against his diktat when the moment arrives; in this case, her way of asserting herself (and breaking free from his hold) is by doing something that many of us would see as demeaning to women.

The Age of Shiva is full of such little moments that blur the lines between tradition and modernity, conformity and defiance. Despite not being a hefty 900-pager, it’s a true epic, full of interesting, well-delineated characters, moving between two very different cities, Delhi and Bombay, and spanning nearly three decades between the 1950s and the early 1980s (while also reaching back to include Partition and its effects on the psyches of millions of people). We stay with Meera throughout, but her story is placed against the backdrop of significant developments that transformed India – the wars against China and Pakistan, and the Emergency among them – and for the most part the personal and the political merge very well. It’s possible to argue that the book meanders in a couple of places and that a subplot involving Meera’s brother-in-law Arya, who works with a right-wing Hindutva organisation, detracts from the main thread of the story. But these are minor flaws in a work that is consistently engaging, compassionate and insightful.

Manil Suri, Saeed Mirza

Two books I’ve just finished: Manil Suri’s beautiful second novel The Age of Shiva, and filmmaker/scriptwriter Saeed Mirza’s oddly structured but often very engrossing Ammi: Letter to a Democratic Mother. As sometimes happens when I’m reading books in quick succession, my vagrant mind amused itself by making little connections between them (it’s a childish little habit but on occasion it helps heighten my engagement with them). While the narrative of Suri’s novel takes the form of a mother addressing her son, Mirza’s book is a lengthy letter written for his mother, who died in 1990. (Actually, it’s part-novel, part-memoir, part-film script and a number of other things all at the same time.)

This is just a teaser/pointer, I’ll write about both books at length soon; will also hopefully get to talk with the authors in the next few days. For now let me say that I loved The Age of Shiva: this is no time to be thinking of “best of 2008” lists, but this tender yet disturbing novel about a woman's life over three decades - as a wife, a daughter and most vitally as a mother - will almost certainly be in my personal top 5 at the end of the year. About Ammi...I had a couple of reservations about the second half, but on the whole it’s a thoughtful work, full of wisdom about the quirks and injustices of history, the forces acting on the world today, and the importance of learning from the past. It's very personal and makes me want to revisit Mirza’s films – the only one I remember well is Mohan Joshi Hazir Ho (saw Albert Pinto ko Gussa Kyon Aata Hai and Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro a very long time ago), though I have fond memories of the TV serial Nukkad, which he also directed.

Like I said, will post longer reviews of the books as soon as possible. Lots of writing to do in the next few days.

The boywunder revelations; Q&A with Samit Basu

The Unwaba Revelations is out, completing the Gameworld Trilogy begun by little Samit many, many years ago. I was at his book launch on Wednesday (where he screened a few short videos that he had put together himself - a montage of his influences, ranging from Japanese pulp fantasy of the 1950s to the Amitabh-starrer Ajooba) and was stricken when he loudly told the audience “I think of Jai when I write porn” (no, not providing the context here). Revenge will have to wait; meanwhile here’s a short, informal Q&A I did with him for the Sunday Business Standard.

What’s an unwaba?
It’s a chameleon – borrowed from a similar creature in the Zulu tradition – that performs a sutradhar role in my book, commenting on the action, telling the characters what’s going to happen. It’s a stand-in for all writers, really.

Is this your preferred animal? If you had a daemon/animal spirit, what would it be?
A walrus, but mostly because of the size and the tusks.

You’ve just turned 28 and you’ve already finished a trilogy of fantasy novels that runs to nearly 1,500 pages. Are you hungover?
Haven’t had time to be. I finished this book eight months ago and since then I’ve been neck-deep in other projects, so I haven’t even been able to think about how much I’ve written so far, the size of the trilogy or things like that. It’s only at book launches where I see the three books piled up one on top of the other and think to myself, “I could kill people with these big fat things.”

How satisfied are you with the trilogy now that it’s finally over?
As an SFF fan, I’ve been disappointed with the third volume of almost any trilogy – authors tend to use convenient escape routes and not to see things through. I’ve tried to avoid those pitfalls and on the whole I’m happy with the way it’s ended. I probably had the least fun writing Unwaba (the first book was the most fun), but in my view the writing is better than in the early books. There’s lots of stuff crammed in there, as you know – battles, many different characters and types of characters – and resolving all of it was difficult.

Has fantasy writing in India changed much since The Simoqin Prophecies was published in 2003? Any promising new writers in the genre?
The landscape has changed in that more publishers are looking at fantasy now – the same way the graphic novels market opened up when Sarnath’s (Banerjee) Corridor was published. The science fiction/fantasy writers I’ve seen seem to be following the traditional SFF route of doing short stories first, rather than jumping head-first into big books or series’. But there is some very promising talent: I was editing a sci-fi anthology recently and was impressed by the stories submitted by Indrapramit Das and Swapna Kishore – they’ll both probably produce novels at some stage.

You’re working on projects with Duran Duran (the popular 1980s band) and director Terry Gilliam (Brazil, Twelve Monkeys). What are those about?
Those are comics I’m scripting for Virgin – the Gilliam one was based on one of his many radical ideas that couldn’t be filmed. I can’t say too much about them at this stage – they’re nowhere near ready for publication – but it’s been a good learning process.

Incidentally, I also want to start writing Bollywood films soon. And there’s a book I’m doing for Tranquebar, but don’t ask me about it.

How do you find the energy to work on so many projects simultaneously? Do you get time for a social life? Not counting cocktail-party book launches.
The multi-tasking has been fairly insane – there have been long stretches of staying shut up in my room. But eventually I hope to clamber up to a platform where I can do one thing that I really want to do.

There is a social life, but it’s restricted to a few close old friends. There isn’t much generic partying – my daily life is pretty much like what you’d imagine any busy writer’s life would be.

The most annoying question a journalist has asked you?
“What’s your book’s USP?” I mostly just splutter in reply. It’s also amusing when people challenge me to say something that will convince them to read SFF. It’s done in the campus-interview style – “Sell yourself (and your genre) to me”. The only answer I can possibly give is, “If you don’t want to read fantasy, don’t read it.”

Notes on Taare Zameen Par

The comments section here turned into a part-discussion of Taare Zameen Par, so thought I’d move some of that to a separate post. I wasn’t planning to blog about the film, because I didn't have to review it officially (that’s usually the pretext to write an expanded piece for the blog) and things have been very rushed lately. Also, if a film has been extensively written about (as TZP has), I prefer not to add my two bits unless I badly want to make some points that I haven’t seen made elsewhere.

The other thing is, I wasn't as hugely taken with the film as most people I know were, but at the same time I wasn’t comfortable writing something that would over-stress its weaknesses. Because for the most part, those weaknesses (the occasional preachiness, the shift in tone in the second half, Aamir Khan’s star persona briefly threatening to dominate proceedings) were almost unavoidable given what this film was trying to accomplish. “Message movies” that reach out to a mass audience can’t afford to be too understated – they sometimes have to spell things out – and Aamir probably needed to be in the film to draw that large audience in the first place.

Besides, though I was annoyed by a couple of things (the caricaturing of Ishaan’s father, the validation of Ishaan after he wins a competition at the end), there was nothing that seriously put me off. Given the film's subject and the way mainstream Hindi cinema has handled these things in the past, it was restrained and tasteful. Darsheel Saffry was superb, as was the music and the way it was used. And on the whole, Aamir and Amole Gupte managed to sensitively convey their empathy and concern for children, without rubbing it into the viewer’s face. (Clarification: if I was reviewing TZP officially, I wouldn’t refrain from stating my view that it played like a public-service documentary in places – but as things stand, I can afford to suspend the critical faculties and appreciate it for its good intentions and other pluses.)

One thing I found interesting was the association of dyslexia (which is a specific learning disability that can be appropriately dealt with) with symptoms that could arise from general introversion/shyness. The first half of the film, seen mostly from Ishaan’s perspective (his imagination-driven interior life being more compelling than most things in the real world around him), isn’t really about a dyslexic kid at all, despite the scene where he tells his teacher “The letters are dancing”. It’s a much more generalised story that would be recognisable to just about anyone who ever felt isolated as a child or had problems with the staidness of formal education.

And I wonder if this could be problematic – whether it might end up providing false hope to parents whose children are reticent or distanced for reasons other than a tangible medical condition. After watching this film, the uninformed (and overambitious) parents of any child who happens to be a loner or deeply sensitive might think he has dyslexia, and when they find out he doesn't, it could be even more confusing for them and worse for the kid. (As if we introverts don’t have enough to deal with already, both as children and as adults!)

[Tasteless humour alert]

Watching the first half of Taare Zameen Par and noting how often something occurred that either my wife or I could relate to from our own childhoods, I drifted into another of my short reveries, where I imagined the following murmurs rising from different parts of the hall:

“I used to be fascinated by the way gobs of paint ran into each other on a palette! I must have been dyslexic too!”

“I failed Math when I was nine! Now I know why!”

“I would get up late and spend my time staring out of the window at flowers and birds! I must be dyslexic!”

And so on. Like the famous scene in Spartacus where the rebellion leader’s loyal men stand up one by one announcing “I am Spartacus!” when the Romans ask them to give up their chief. In my reverie, everyone in the theatre shouted “I was dyslexic!” so that the chorus rang through the building and out on the street, each voice trying to drown out the others. (Ironic, considering that one of the film’s points is that dyslexics see things differently and aren’t part of the competing herds.)

P.S. Remember Dawkins’ suggestion that atheists were the new gays – coming out of the closet, bringing their beliefs (or disbeliefs) into the open? In India, if you looked at newspaper supplements in the days just before and after TZP’s release, it was possible to wonder the same thing about people who had dyslexia as children. Or people who thought they had dyslexia as children. They were tumbling out of closets everywhere, hardly a day passing without some minor celebrity (a TV actor, a sports personality) spilling the beans about his own traumatic and misunderstood childhood. I wonder how many of these cases were simply people who...just weren’t that good at Math. (No disrespect meant to those who genuinely struggled with dyslexia, etc etc.)

The Golden Compass, and thoughts on fantasy adaptations

It’s a tricky thing transferring a high-quality fantasy novel to the big screen, even given all the advances in computer technology – and sometimes because of those advances. When we've used our imaginations to give shape to unfamiliar vistas and characters (or even, if we choose, to keep them nebulous, as I do with Tolkien’s The Silmarillion) and they are then given a definite form on screen, the results can be problematic. I know this can be said of any book-to-film adaptation, but personally it affects me most when it’s done in fantasy.

Much as I admired the grand vision of Peter Jackson’s 10-hour filmisation of The Lord of the Rings, there were times when the images in my head simply refused to make peace with what was on the screen. When the Dark Lord Sauron (bereft of corporeal form in the books and all the more menacing for it) was turned into a giant roving flashlight – wistfully scanning Mordor for stray hobbits – in Jackson’s The Return of the King, the Tolkien nerd in me wept. It wasn’t really the filmmakers’ fault – it’s hard to see what else they could have done to visually convey the Eye of Sauron looking out for his (its?) enemies, especially given that the film was reaching out to a mass audience, including people who hadn’t read Tolkien – but that points to the difficulties of bringing a richly imaginative book to the screen. When Christopher Tolkien said his father’s works were "peculiarly resistant to filming", he wasn’t necessarily being over-conservative.

(Sometimes I think the only Lord of the Rings film that would really satisfy me would be a black-and-white one made in the jerky, otherworldly style of movies of the 1920s, like Fritz Lang’s Siegfried. At any rate, this is the only way The Silmarillion could acceptably be filmed.)

I had a similar response to a few scenes in The Golden Compass, the movie version of the first book in Philip Pullman’s celebrated His Dark Materials trilogy. For instance, one of Pullman’s most notable conceptions is that of the “daemons” – physical manifestations of people’s souls, which take the shape of animals, birds or insects. It’s a very effective idea on paper, but when depicted on screen it can occasionally become jarring. In an early scene where children are running about (accompanied, naturally, by their chattering little souls), what I saw was an assorted bunch of kids and small furry animals all apparently in danger of tripping over each other. And when daemons in the film take the shape of talking cats and mice, the special effects used to make the animals’ lips move had me thinking of the cheesier scenes in Stuart Little and Babe. (Note: using technology to anthropomorphise cute animals is just wrong.)

Pullman’s trilogy is a hugely ambitious work about, among other things, the dangers of organised religion and threats to individual freedom. A running theme is that of children (their minds not yet put into boxes, their souls not yet "fixed") in danger of being corrupted; in fact, some of his concerns about youngsters being moulded and stripped of their individuality reminds me of Richard Dawkins’ point in The God Delusion that children shouldn’t be seen as belonging to any religion. (Inevitably, children are also saviours, the chief agents for the creation of a better world.)

In the film, the anti-religion themes have been softened into a more general anti-authority tone. The story is set in a parallel world not too unlike ours and the central character is Lyra (Dakota Blue Richards), a headstrong young girl who has, in the tradition of Frodo Baggins and other "little people" of the genre, been saddled with momentous responsibilities. She must rescue a friend who has been kidnapped by a vicious group known as the Gobblers, take custody of a truth-telling device called an alethiometer, help an armoured polar bear regain his self-respect and his kingdom, and foil the plans of a powerful, oppressive organisation called the Magisterium. Perhaps most importantly, she must decide whether or not to trust the inscrutable Mrs Coulter (Nicole Kidman), who has taken a special interest in her.

The Golden Compass is a brisk film – perhaps too brisk for its own good, given how much it tries to pack into a running time of under two hours. This ensures that there’s nearly always something intriguing going on, but it can also make the sequence of events confusing and the characters emotionally uninvolving, especially for someone who hasn’t read the book. This is a problem when you consider that audiences will have to wait a year for the next instalment in the trilogy. Characters come and go in the blink of an eye, relationships are formed and explanations given too rapidly, no scene is milked for its full dramatic potential (I was especially disappointed by the throwaway handling of one of the darkest, most chilling passages in the book, where Lyra encounters a boy whose daemon has been torn from him) and even the big action setpiece, a bear-fight, is slightly anti-climactic. Perhaps this would have been better as a three-hour movie.

To an extent the film does work as spectacle, consistently providing beautiful scenic visuals, even if you’re never sure where the breathtaking real-world Norwegian landscapes end and computer effects begin. It also shows some imagination in the scenes where Lyra reads the alethiometer and in its depiction of the way different people’s daemons interact with each other depending on the prevalent mood. Richards and Kidman are both good too, though the latter doesn’t really have a sustained role, and there are a few genuinely creepy moments involving Mrs Coulter’s monkey-daemon.

Ultimately a movie must be judged on its own terms, not those of its source book, but I’m not sure how well this film will work for a viewer who isn’t familiar with Pullman. Seen in isolation, it’s just another good-looking but average entry in the Hollywood fantasy canon, a poor cousin to Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, which is now the standard against which all such films will be judged. Too many scenes in The Golden Compass are reminders of better movies of the past. The prologue, with its solemn voiceover, is very similar to the expository opening of The Fellowship of the Ring; a late scene plays almost like a parody of the famous climax ("I am your father") of The Empire Strikes Back. Also, what’s with the tiny appearance by Christopher Lee? The next time he plays a dark wizard/threatening authority figure in this sort of movie, his character should be named Dejaa Voo.

P.S. In full disclosure, I read His Dark Materials several years ago and enjoyed the books, especially the first one, but I’m not a fevered fan. Also, I liked the trilogy principally as a very skilful, richly imaginative fantasy/adventure – I wasn’t too interested in the deeper, more philosophical subtexts, which may be why I was slightly underwhelmed by the final book, The Amber Spyglass, which deals with nothing less than the death of God as we know Him and the creation of a new republic of heaven.

P.P.S. Discover your own daemon at the film’s official website. Mine is sleek, black, solitary and - surprisingly - "a leader". Meet Xanthia.

Chak de Nadal...

...says a banner held up by one of the spectators during this fantastic semi-final between Rafa and Carlos Moya at the Chennai Open. 6-7, 7-6, 7-6, a three-set match that lasted nearly four hours (the longest three-setter since 1993), and consistently high-quality tennis by all accounts. (I missed most of it, will try to catch the repeat.) Some quick highlights on YouTube here, as well as footage of Nadal using a cricket bat to hit tennis balls into the crowd. And a meeting of giants - good old Charu Sharma (about whom more in this old post) interviews Rafa and asks him penetrating questions like "So, did you expect to get broken early in the third set?" (Video)

Update: Rafa almost got double-bagelled by Youzhny in the final. Clearly Charu's fault.

Flyovers down under

[From my Metro Now column]

I’ve concluded that the multi-level underground parking lots in Delhi’s newest malls are versions of the clover leaf-shaped flyovers that are staples in big cities around the world. In fact, if you can picture a clover flyover that goes deep down into the ground, it’s practically the same thing.

Many of us still have trouble understanding the logic that dictates the construction of flyovers, especially the complicated, winding ones. But in a large urban centre where the vehicle count rises exponentially while the geographical area stays constant, one way to prevent an eternal traffic pile-up is to keep increasing the road length within a restricted area. (The other ways are too gruesome to mention here.) Simply using direct routes to get from point A to point B is no longer feasible, so roads must constantly be elevated. Or designed in fancy shapes where you no longer simply turn right if you have to go right. This is what you do instead:

Turn left.
Then turn right thrice.
Next, turn left two more times and take four consecutive U-turns.
Now make your car jump up and down like the jeeps in cops-and-robbers scenes in Hindi films of the 1980s.

If you follow all these steps carefully you’ll find yourself back where you started – and now you can turn right and go down the road that will take you to the next clover-shaped flyover.

The multi-level underground parking lots in the Select Citywalk mall in Saket and the Great India Place mall in Noida are based roughly on the same principle: keep vehicles moving in circles for as long as possible while vaguely maintaining the illusion that they will get somewhere in the end. On my last visit to Select, I spent close to 15 minutes driving about in a subterranean maze: making countless hairpin turns, following what must have been dozens of “Vehicle exit” signs and encountering dozens of parking attendants with arms outstretched (unless it was the same parking attendant trying to be funny) before my car finally saw the light of day. Exiting, I noted that the total mileage I had clocked up in the parking lot was 3.2 km; I also noted that the spot where my car had been parked was approximately 40 feet away from the point where I eventually escaped the dungeon.

I dream of a future where this city will have multiple flyovers, one piled up on top of the other, with new mini-cities constructed on the topmost ones, so that a flyover eventually becomes not the means to an end but the end itself. And where people will visit malls not for the shopping but for the thrill of being able to zip around in underworld labyrinths for hours on end, because the city roads outside will all be jammed.

How to reply to New Year SMSes

The most exciting thing about the changeover from December 31 to January 1 is the flow of SMSes that accompanies it. Among the many text messages I received on New Year’s Day was the following, reproduced exactly as it appeared on my handset screen:

“I wish the SUN to WARM U, MOON to CHARM U, ANGEL so nothing can HARM U, LAUGHTER to CHEER U, True FRIENDS near U, & GOD to hear U.”

This message is problematic on many levels. First, the completely random use of capitalised letters. The pattern is okay until the “laughter to cheer you” bit, but after this why is “friends” capitalised whereas “true” is not? And what’s with the pariah treatment given to “near” and “hear”, though they serve more or less the same function as “warm”, “charm”, “harm” and “cheer”?

Also, how can laughter cheer u (you)? Shouldn’t it be the other way round – that is, something cheers you up and this in turn begets laughter. And how disrespectful is it to use an ampersand just before “God”? (Just asking - I don't know.)

However, what really brings a discordant note into the reading experience is that though this SMS is written in the broad style of a nursery-school poem, “warm” doesn’t rhyme with “charm” and “harm”. Is it so difficult to find words that sound alike? This greeting would have been so much more harmonious if it had read, for instance: “I want the Moon to charm you, minions to ‘Salaam’ you, Prozacs to becalm you, Egyptians to embalm you.” (In fact, this was the reply I sent.) It would have created a nice little melody inside the recipient’s mind and kept him entertained for the few seconds before he deleted it.

In other words, if you must use random verb arrangements that don’t mean anything, try to make them rhyme.

It’s much harder to deal with the relatively restrained SMSes, the ones that don’t say anything obviously absurd. For example: “Best wishes for a prosperous 2008 to you and your family!” I usually take the simple route of ignoring these wet blankets unless they happen to be personally addressed to me (as opposed to Send Alls), in which case I reply with a sinisterly terse, “And to you.”

But the most stimulating New Year SMSes are the ones that freely use words like “resplendent” and "bountiful" and make multiple references to flowers, rivers, sunshine and mountains. Such messages are excellent because they allow you to engage in complementary nonsense prose. For example, when someone writes "May blooming flowers be everywhere and may you be as tall as mountains", I immediately reply with something like: "May flowering bloomers dot each day of the magically munificent year ahead. May the mountains bring Mohammed to you and may all the rivers run resplendently. May effulgent sunshine shine all over your bountiful person."

I sent a few of these on the night of the 31st. The recipients were probably too drunk or stupid to read them through properly or understand the spirit in which they were written, and it’s possible that they blindly forwarded them to other people. So if you received one such, you know where it all began.

On diary writing, and memories of 1990

[Long personal post. Go away]

Yesterday evening I pulled out my 1990 diary from the dusty old mini-cupboard it’s been in since...well, since December 31, 1990, I should think. It’s the first of my 18 diaries, most of which have entries on every page. The ritual began almost by accident when I was 12 years old. In late 1989 my grandparents, aware of my Mahabharata obsession, ordered a diary for me (I’m not sure about this, but I think it came with a subscription to India Today). It had a graceful cloth binding and a velvety bookmark, and told the story of the epic in very basic, Amar Chitra Katha-like prose and illustrations – the pictures and text took up the top fourth of each page, while the rest of the page was for entries. Initially I thought of it as a nice decorative item (it didn’t work as a book; I already had far more extensive versions of the Mahabharata), but at some point on the night of January 1 it occurred to me that it might be fun to actually write something in it.

And so it began. In my terrible, no-chemist-could-read-this scrawl, I wrote the opening sentence: “Today was the first day of the year, and I was so excited!” The entry went on to mention games of cricket and hide-n-seek played with a long list of neighborhood friends, many of whose faces I can’t even recall today; the buying of audio-cassettes (the soundtracks of “Chandni”, “Mitti aur Sona” and “Khoon Bhari Maang” among them) and books (Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge, an Agatha Christie); and the evening viewing of what I described as “the movies Star Wars parts I and II, and a part of Star Trek IV”. In all, the entry was around 200 words long, written in full sentences, no shorthand, though I misspelt the word “tuitions” (“tutions”).

Soon I was addicted to journal-writing and this was the beginning of a habit that would last 16-and-a-half years. Between January 1, 1990 and June 2006, I wrote an entry every night. It was usually just a log of the day’s events, with maybe a few “deep” thoughts scattered here and there, and the occasional jokey philosophical aside, but it was a very important part of my life, helping me to organise my thoughts, make some sense of the things (however seemingly insignificant) that happened each day. Whenever I went anywhere for an overnight stay, the diary was the first thing I would pack. Friends, especially the ones who weren’t really into reading or writing, would give me amused looks when I took the thing out at the end of a late-night chat session. (I think it was perceived as a girlie thing to do.) Buying a new diary featured at the top of my to-do list in the last week of every December (it wasn’t always a straightforward task because many stationery shops kept only executive diaries where Saturdays and Sundays have to share a page, whereas I needed one that had a generous amount of writing space for each day of the week). None of the post-1990 diaries were as colourful or as good to look at as the Mahabharata one, but that no longer mattered.

A year and a half ago, I finally discontinued the daily writing. The main reason was that I was writing too much anyway (at the time I was doing between 12-18 stories/reviews/columns per month, in addition to a large amount of blogging) and feeling jaded; I had to cut down on something. Also, I had begun to question the usefulness of the diary-writing. Over the years, there were times when it had become a chore – I was doing it not because I had something interesting to write about (or an interesting way in which to write it) but simply because it had to be done. I frequently treated it as something to finish before going to bed – a quarter-page of scribbled lines, dashed off in two or three minutes, which said nothing much more substantial than “Got up at 7. Spent most of the day reading. Went for a walk in the evening” and suchlike. It made sense to stop.

Since then I’ve written only sporadically, the last occasion being a couple of months ago when a dear old friend from post-grad came to Delhi and stayed over for a few days, and I got nostalgic, pulled out my 1998-2000 diaries, went through them, and then sat down and filled a few fresh pages with “Then and Now” musings. (A couple of this blog’s readers will know why those years were so important.) Revisiting those ghosts from the past, I was suddenly glad that I had kept the practice going for so many years. There isn’t much chance of my going through all the old diaries frequently or in great detail (especially with the handwriting being the way it is!), but it’s reassuring to know that I have all these records at hand – to refer to, perhaps, when one has lost track of a date or a sequence of events, or just to open at random and remember something that had slipped completely out of memory. As Salman Rushdie said once, “Writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things – childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves – that go on slipping, like sand, through our fingers.”

Take the 1990 diary, which I had a lot of fun going through. Reading it, I discovered many surprising things about my younger self, including that I appear to have had a healthy irreverence towards the gods long before I could call myself a non-believer (possibly before I even knew it was an option at all) or articulate serious thoughts about religious faith. In the illustration of the scene where Duryodhana and his men try to capture Krishna, who then reveals his cosmic self to them, I’ve scrawled all over the page: a giant Krishna is standing there with miniature versions of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva contained within him, and I’ve added a speech-bubble that says, “Will you silly asses get off my chest?” (I know, it isn’t sublimely witty, but what the heck, I was 12 and couldn’t even spell “tuitions”. Though I did come second in a school Spelling Bee that year, and the ten-rupee note that was my share of the Rs 500 prize divided among our batch was preserved in the diary's pages, 18 years old but still crisp.)


1990 was also the last full year of my childhood obsession with Bollywood. (It was in mid-1991 that I became sated with Hindi films and began looking elsewhere for my entertainment – more on that in this post.) But what a magnificent obsession it was! It’s common knowledge today that some of the crappiest Hindi movies ever were made in the late 1980s, but I have very fond memories of most of them; for some reason, nothing makes me more nostalgic than thinking about the early Salman Khan films that followed Maine Pyar Kiya (Baaghi, Sanam Bewafa, Pathar ke Phool, all of whose soundtracks I loved), though I wouldn’t want to see any of them again today, and though I wasn’t a Salman Khan fan at the time. (I used to look down on my friend Amit, who was.) In the 2-3 years leading up to and including 1990, I watched nearly everything, rushing to the nearby video library every Friday afternoon for prints of the latest release. (One randomly picked Friday entry gushes: “Din Dahade, Gunahon ka Devta and Solah Satrah have all released today!” Does even Great Bong remember those films?) I also indiscriminately bought audio-cassettes of any movie with a halfway-decent (or halfway-terrible) soundtrack, and the diary carefully records all this. In between all the cheerfully plagiarised badness, there were of course gems like the Lekin soundtrack (“Yaara Seeli Seeli”, “Kesariya Balma”), which for some reason I still associate with the taste of the Cadbury “silky” chocolates that were briefly available in those days.

Kittu, our cat of eight years (who plays a supporting role in this old post about my other cat Sandy), first came into our lives in early 1990, cannily usurping the house a few weeks after my mother began feeding him on the stairs outside; throughout my diary that year, I refer to him simply as Cat. Going to the local magazine library for mum in the evenings was a daily feature, and each of those visits is chronicled as if it were a matter of national importance (“Went to the library and picked up the latest Society”, “Got a Showtime today”). Then there are references to nighttime TV serials (“Gaurav” and “Noopur”) that I have almost no recollection of today. (I remember B R Chopra’s Mahabharata, of course, which I enjoyed but also regularly scoffed at for getting things “wrong” and for its many descents into melodrama.)

In the October 9 entry, I describe being sent on some errands by our class teacher – which meant walking from the St Columba’s middle school building to the senior school building – and finding out later that night that a 14-year-old Delhi schoolgirl had been forcibly immolated within her school premises during the Mandal Commission protests. (This made my own jaunt earlier that day seem very heroic and fraught with danger.) I must have read Jerome K Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat and Three Men on the Bummel in the second half of 1990, because for a few weeks around that time each diary entry is headlined by a brief summary of the day’s highlights, written (or so I must have imagined) in the humorous style of the chapter-heads in Jerome’s books. (November 8: PM goes missing [a reference to V P Singh’s resignation the previous night], 4 marks cut from test, of Gagan’s digestion problems, cat scratches and a bad bus ride.)

I can go on, but I’ll stop here – just realised that I still haven’t bought my 2008 diary. Am strongly motivated to do it now. Also, a couple of resolutions: to get back to journal-writing, not daily but at least once every 2-3 weeks; and to go through my other old diaries, beginning with the 1991 one. Who knows what dastardly things I’ll discover about my life and times.