Jabberwock

Non-paying jests, a reluctant review

2009-06-25T07:39:00.000+05:30

After weeks of being unable to go to a movie-hall to see a film that I might actually have wanted to see, I get asked to review Paying Guests. This is how life kicks you when you're down. Watching this rowdy comedy, I wondered if the producer-multiplex war had stretched on for so long that mediocre B-movies are now being hurriedly scripted and filmed within four or five weeks, just so they can fill the gaps before the (equally mediocre) big releases come roaring back.

Paying Guests opens with three bachelor friends – Bawesh (Shreyas Talpade), Sukhi (Javed Jaffrey) and Daljit (Aashish Chaudhary) – who live in Bangkok as tenants in the improbably large “Kiska” mansion (named purely for its punning utility) until one day they simultaneously lose their jobs and their accommodation (in both cases, their fault, though I think we're supposed to root for them). Along with a new addition to the group, a bumbler named Karan who’s just flown in from India, they contrive to become paying guests in the house of a Sikh restaurant owner Ballu Ji (Johnny Lever in a performance that makes every role he has done in the past 20 years seem like an acting-class in restraint) and his golden-hearted but rust-brained wife Sweety. Since this traditional-minded couple won’t have single boys staying in their house, Bawesh and Sukhi show up in drag as Karishma and Kareena, the wives of the other two. Loud, forced, headache-inducing slapstick comedy ensues.

It’s a pity in a way, for there are traces in this film of a certain economy of storytelling – such as in the compact opening-credits sequence and the neat little scene where the friends tell each other that at least there can’t be any more problems headed their way and there’s a quick overhead swish to the plane that’s bringing more trouble (in the form of Karan) for them. In these and other moments, one sees an unfussiness about the direction and editing which suggests that a better script (or any script for that matter) might have resulted in an entertaining movie. But sadly the technical competence is at the service of some of the silliest attempts at humour you’ll ever see.

This is a film that tries to extract belly laughs out of a scene where a deviant with a speech impediment (played by Chunky Pandey, no less) pronounces “rape” as “lape” (“Yeh totla hai,” we are repeatedly told, as if to assure us that this is meant to be cute). In another scene, a wife tells her husband that they’ve been invited out for “foreplay” when what she means is that they’ve been invited to a stage production comprising four back-to-back plays. Some of the attempts at setting up situation comedy would be embarrassing for a school-level skit (if someone straps you to a chair and forces you to watch this, keepyour eyes open during the tedious build-up to the scene where Sweety mistakenly thinks “Karishma” is pregnant). By the time Paying Guests reaches its messy, overlong climax – a nod to the famous Mahabharata scene in Jaane bhi do Yaaro, with a "Mughal-e-Azam" stage production overrun by all the principals dressed as Spider-Man, Ravana, Gabbar Singh, Umrao Jaan, Osama bin Laden and even Tulsi from the saas-bahu soaps – the viewer is the only one wailing “Yeh kya ho raha hai?”

Even worse than the bad humour is when the film tries to strum heartstrings, as in the scene where the three dolts talk about how they have hardly any money left because they have to send their earnings back to India to keep their families afloat (as the sad background music started to play, I reflected that said families would probably be happy to forgo the earnings as long as these guys signed an agreement never to return to India).

One thing I thought notable, given that this is screwball comedy with a line-up of pretty starlets – Celina Jaitley, Riya Sen, Neha Dhupia – whose main function is to be eye-candy, is that it refrains from running its heroines through a gamut of exploitative, demeaning situations (small mercies, I know). But that doesn’t mask the fact that there is a lot of tastelessness on view, mostly reserved for Talpade and Jaffrey when they are dressed as women. Here is the unfortunate sight of two decent actors (both of whom are noted for their mimicking skills – remember Jaffrey in Channel V’s Timex Timepass years ago?) hoping that the rest of the film will somehow catch up with them. Asrani and Paintal – veteran comedians who have seen better days – are also left to flounder in roles that no performer could possibly salvage. This is not a script that’s kind to actors – or to the audience.

From the “Overheard in the hall” series: sick but quite nice

Expectedly, there were some people in the hall laughing their guts out at jokes that I didn’t understand, for such is the human condition, but I was particularly impressed by a trio of girls in my row. Though they guffawed from start to finish, they were willing to be accommodating of views different from their own. Normally, when you hear people discussing a critics’ review that they disagree with, the standard rationalisation is that the guy must have been “paid off” (by the film’s producer if the review was favourable; by the “rival camp” if it was negative). However, these girls showed an astonishing spirit of tolerance:

“This is such a good film yaar, I didn’t understand why it got just one-and-a-half stars in that newspaper.”

“Arre, critics ke point of view se achi nahin hogi. Kaafi sick movie hai waise. (After a moment’s pause) But it’s quite nice too.”

“Ya ya, it’s quite nice,” they trilled in chorus, until they were sure consensus had been reached on this all-important matter and that the world was safely in its orbit. Then they returned to their popcorn.

Fantasies of an aging anarchist

2009-06-22T11:38:00.005+05:30

One of my very favourite memoirs, and a book I often return to, is Luis Buñuel's My Last Breath. It isn't an "autobiography" - that word would imply a structure that this book never aims for. It's a delightfully free-flowing work, much like some of Buñuel's later films (The Phantom of Liberty, The Milky Way), more a mix of reflections on various subjects than anything else: death, cigarettes, village life in Spain, Catholicism, atheism, the evils of the free press. This means it's possible to pick it up in the middle of a day, open it at random and immerse yourself in a passage or two before returning to duller things.

With blogging being at a standstill these days, why not share passages from My Last Breath, just for the heck of it. So here are two that I read this morning, both pointers to the anarchist in Buñuel, a man who often fantasised about the destruction of what we call "culture" and who once said that the ultimate Surrealist act would be to go into a street and shoot indiscriminately into the crowd:

I have a horror of newspaper reporters, two of whom literally attacked me one day while I was walking down the road not far from El Paular. Despite my pleas to be left alone, they leapt around me, clicking as they went. I was already far too old to take both of them on at once, and only wished that I'd been foresighted enough to bring my revolver.

(Suggestions for a better world: make it legal to shoot journalists. It bears mentioning that the next paragraph begins with the line "Whereas my feelings about reporters couldn't be clearer, I confess to mixed emotions when it comes to spiders.")

And the second passage:

Where Picasso's concerned, his legendary facility is obvious, but sometimes I'm repelled by it. I can't stand Guernica (which I nonetheless helped to hang). Everything about it makes me uncomfortable - the grandiloquent tehnique as well as the way it politicizes art. Both Alberti and Jose Bergamin share my aversion; in fact, all three of us would be delighted to blow up the painting, but I suppose we're too old to start playing with explosives.

I love that throwaway "which I nonetheless helped to hang". Mental pictures appear of a young Buñuel wrinkling his nose in disgust as he puts up the legendary work while Picasso, hands still wet with paint, shouts "No no, it's the other way round!" What some of us would give to have kept the company Buñuel did in the 1920s and 1930s, around the dawn of some of the most exciting cultural movements. And it turns out that all he really wants to do is blow up one of the greatest works of art to have emerged from that period.

(More on Buñuel in this old post about my brief meeting with the writer Jean-Claude Carriere, a longtime associate of Buñuel)

Thoughts on Ishiguro's Nocturnes

2009-06-17T18:22:00.000+05:30

As a long-time enthusiast of Kazuo Ishiguro’s work, I thought his new short-story collection Nocturnes showed a subtly different side to his writing. Ishiguro is one of the most elegant prose writers around, each of his six novels marked by a simple, immediately recognisable style – so unobtrusive that it doesn’t even appear to be a “style” at first glance - and this continues to be the case in the Nocturne stories. But I felt that the narratives here were, generally speaking, more informal in tone than the mannered, emotionally reticent voices of his earlier protagonists (such as the self-deceiving butler Stevens in Remains of the Day and the elderly Japanese painter trying to deal with changing social attitudes in post-WWII Japan in An Artist of the Floating World).

No doubt some of the casualness in the new collection comes from the fact that the narrators in this story cycle are relatively young people who are passionate about music, with interests ranging from old American Broadway songs by Irving Berlin to folk music to jazz. There’s the guitar player who performs in a Venice piazza, the hopeful songwriter taking a break from the city by helping out his sister who runs a café in the hills, the saxophonist who realises that his “loser ugly” face may be keeping him from stardom. There is a contemporariness, an accessibility, in all these voices, but Ishiguro’s old strengths as a writer are in place – notably the delicacy with which he makes the reader aware of things that even the narrator seems oblivious to, and his ability to show (rather than tell) us that life-altering moments don’t have to be dramatic (or accompanied by a musical crescendo) but can slip in and out of our hands before we realise it.

Like many great artists, Ishiguro obsessively reworks the themes he finds interesting, using new prisms and perspectives through which to examine them. Music is a binding force in Nocturnes and we see how it can create common ground between people (witness the transformation of the ill-tempered Sonja in the story “Malvern Hills”), but these short pieces aren’t really about music. They are about (professional and personal) successes and failures, fading relationships, attempts to maintain a hold on the past, and the different ways in which people deal with life’s disappointments.

In “Crooner”, a young guitarist encounters the aging singer Tony Gardner – an old favourite of his mother, who managed to procure American pop records despite living in a communist country – and is drafted into the crooner’s plan to serenade his wife Lindy. In “Come Rain or Come Shine”, the narrator Ray is invited to stay with an old friend and his wife in London, only to discover that the couple are barely on speaking terms with each other and that his own visit is an awkward ploy by the husband to rectify matters. “Cellists” gives us a moving relationship between two very different kinds of music-lovers. And when a middle-aged musician couple talk about their uncommunicative son in “Malvern Hills”, it feels like an extension of the strained filial relationships in Ishiguro’s most ambitious novel The Unconsoled (a book in which music frequently creates barriers between people).

One of the things I thought notable about this collection is that it contains some very amusing passages. Ishiguro’s sense of humour tends to be under-appreciated, perhaps because it’s usually very subtle or morbid or both – The Unconsoled, which is the most obviously funny of his books with its many surreal interludes, is also the most emotionally exhausting, and its funniness is never de-linked from the essentially weary state of its narrator, a celebrated pianist whose life has turned into a circular Kafka-esque nightmare. The humour isn’t the sort that allows you to laugh out loud, or even chuckle to yourself; it permits only sad smiles of recognition. But in at least two of the stories in Nocturnes, Ishiguro gives freer rein to his talent for the absurd, even allowing it to tip over into slapstick. In “Come Rain or Come Shine”, unfortunate circumstances lead the narrator to put an old boot to boil on the kitchen stove while waiting for his host to return home; his attempt to see the world through the eyes of a paper-masticating dog results in one of the drollest sentences in Ishiguro’s oeuvre: “I’d fallen into my earlier error again; I’d not merged sufficiently with Hendrix”. And in the story “Nocturne”, a midnight outing in the bowels of a five-star hospital where celebrities recuperate after plastic surgery ends with the concealment of a prize trophy in a turkey’s interiors.

In these passages, bordering on low farce, one gets the impression that Ishiguro is exploring ways to offset the poignancy of his themes – almost like a musician moving between registers to keep a piece from becoming repetitive or too intense. Unlike many other "thematic" short-story collections that give the impression of bringing together discrete pieces simply to make up the numbers, Nocturnes has the rigour of a carefully composed and balanced symphony.

[An earlier review of Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go here]

Future reloaded: the new Star Trek

2009-06-13T17:48:00.000+05:30

If you were growing up in the monopolistic shadow of Doordarshan in the early and mid-1980s, Sunday mornings were dull things – or at least it seems in hindsight that they should have been. Actually, there was an hour or so of post-breakfast anticipation until the TV screen resolved itself into a black background representing the vastness of outer space, with tiny white dots speckled across it. The theme music we had been waiting for filled the room and our eyes strained to identify which of those little dots would turn into the comforting shape of the Starship Enterprise as it hurtled towards us from the depths of the blackness. “Space: the final frontier...” began the sonorous voiceover.

Those of us who watched Star Trek on black-and-white TV sets didn’t know that Captain Kirk’s shirt was yellow and Mr Spock’s was blue; these were things we found out later. (I had to wait until I saw a videocassette of “The City on the Edge of Forever”, one of the show’s very best episodes, at a US-returned aunt's house.) Nor did we know about the series' history: that it hadn’t been particularly successful in its initial, three-year run on American television in the 1960s but had developed a staggering fan-base in subsequent years – a following that led to Trekkie conferences, a number of feature films (which we had mixed feelings about because the characters looked older and wore more sophisticated uniforms) and later, more intelligently scripted TV shows featuring new characters, e.g., Star Trek: The Next Generation, which substituted the iconic line “...where no man has gone before” with the more politically correct “...where no one has gone before”. (Didn't work.) When popular demand or sentiment necessitated a reappearance of one of the older characters, the results could be sad – William Shatner, the original show’s lithe Kirk, was embarrassingly corpulent in his much-hyped guest role in Star Trek: Generations, made nearly 30 years after he first played the Enterprise’s captain.

Given the tortuous and expectation-laden history of the Star Trek franchise, it’s a minor miracle that a new movie has done a more than respectable job of returning us to Kirk and crew as we remember them from the original show, and to have them played by youngsters who closely resemble the prototypes. It doesn’t seem like a very good idea in theory, but J J Abrams' film (titled, simply, Star Trek, though the tagline “The future begins” has become something of an unofficial sub-title) pulls it off. Riding on a complicated plot involving the opening up of a time continuum by the embittered Romulan leader Nero, it begins with the birth of James T Kirk (on a day when many other tumultuous events – not always easy to decipher – take place) and follows him through the years, to his decision to join the space academy and his acquaintance with his future First Officer, the half-Vulcan Spock. (There's something very amusing about the solemnity of the place-titles that alternately read "Iowa" and "Vulcan" as the film tracks their parallel stories.)

For boys of a certain age and temperament watching the original TV series, the cucumber-cool Spock – briskly efficient in a crisis, invulnerable to cheap human emotion – was always more fascinating than the relentless skirt-chaser and macho-man Kirk, the same way Jughead was always cooler than Archie. At any rate, it was the contrast between their personalities – the friendship, the friction, the banter – that drove the show. And one of the areas where the new film scores is in its depiction of the grudging, even resentful (and competitive) dawn of the Kirk-Spock relationship.

This is where prequels play a special role in epic sagas. Done well, they can provide a tantalisingly off-kilter view of character development and personal destiny; of how a character got from Point A to Point B, and what was gained (or lost) along the way. Watching the trajectory of Jedi hero Anakin Skywalker’s slide into darkness in Star Wars Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith is doubly poignant because the viewer already knows – from having seen the original trilogy – that Anakin will become the evil lord Darth Vader, and that he will find redemption in the end. (The Anakin-Vader story wouldn’t have been so compelling if it had been told in chronological order.) Similarly, the new Star Trek adds depth and dimension to both its protagonists. Chris Pine’s outstanding performance as Kirk gives us a barroom brawler from the American Midwest whose cockiness conceals an intelligent young man born to be a leader (but who has to be given a nudge in the ribs every now and again), while Zachary Quinto’s Spock is a vulnerable misfit on his home planet who must learn to balance his human and Vulcan sides. These are two young men with chips on their shoulders, and the different ways in which they learn to shoulder their responsibilities, adjust to their circumstances – and, eventually, slip into the roles that we already know they are destined for – adds up to a very satisfying climax.

Notably, the script and the performances achieve this without seriously compromising on the pulp tone of the original show. Of course, there’s no denying that this film looks very different from the original series (which was, let’s face it, a sometimes-campy 1960s show that didn’t have sophisticated special effects; as a viewer, you knew the characters were in trouble of some sort if the sets began shaking and people started falling all over each other). But it captures something of the old spirit, which is no mean task in this day and age. There are nifty in-jokes, such as the one involving Dr McKoy’s “bones”. And you don’t need to be a hard-core Trekkie to feel a frisson of excitement when Kirk and McCoy catch their first ever glimpse of the Enterprise as the shuttle they are traveling on prepares to dock on the giant starship. Or when the “older Spock”, played by the wonderful Leonard Nimoy (who has spent a lifetime in this role), makes a short but crucial appearance to make sense of all the time-travel madness.

The one element this Sunday-DD nostalgist thought was missing from the film? The music score of the original show, sans any orchestral frills. The end credits just felt wrong without it.

[Did this nostalgia piece for the Sunday Business Standard]

Khamoshi, and the conundrum of the wildly uneven film

2009-06-11T14:54:00.002+05:30

I was talking with someone recently about various aspects of movie-reviewing and book-reviewing, and one of the things that came up was the idea of unevenness: how it’s possible for a film to be transcendentally beautiful in some ways while at the same time containing scenes that are embarrassingly awkward or silly; or for a single aspect of a movie (a performance, a brilliantly written scene) to be so high-quality that it’s at complete variance with the elements that surround it. And how this sort of thing presents a special challenge to the reviewer - especially when you’re writing a lengthy, analytical piece about the work (as opposed to a 300-word overview made up of checklists and an accompanying “star rating” that will be more useful than what’s written in the review anyway).

A few days later I saw Asit Sen’s 1969 film Khamoshi (a remake of his own Bengali film Deep Jwele Jaai) and found that it was an extreme example of a movie that contains bizarre shifts in quality – to the extent that you’re almost watching two separate films, each unaware of the other’s existence.

I had heard a lot about Khamoshi from my mother years ago, but what really prompted me to search for the DVD was when I saw the beautifully filmed song sequence “Woh shaam kuch ajeeb thi” on the Space Black channel in Mumbai some time ago (see the video here). As it happens, this four-minute scene brings together the three finest things about the film: Hemant Kumar’s music (complemented by Gulzar’s lyrics), Kamal Bose’s stunning black-and-white photography, and Waheeda Rehman’s luminous, can’t-take-your-eyes-off-her performance as a nurse who begins to lose her own emotional equilibrium as she cares for mentally ill patients.

Well, that was the good stuff. The first alarm bells rang when I discovered that the film is set in the “National Psycho Analytical Clinic” (sic), run by a Colonel Sahab who works on the assumption that women are capable of any magnitude of sacrifice for mankind. Or men. And that, in fact, perhaps their principal role in the world IS sacrifice. (In a strange flashback sequence, he recounts a wartime experience that taught him this valuable lesson.) Accordingly, he develops a unique form of psychiatric treatment wherein beautiful nurses are encouraged to provide maternal or romantic care (or both, simultaneously) to handsome young male patients, especially the ones who feel betrayed by their girlfriends or mothers (or both).

It took cinema a fairly long time to learn how to portray psychiatric care with sensitivity and intelligence, and this movie will probably not be remembered as one of the milestones along that route. Anyway, the Colonel's approach to healing launches Khamoshi on its twofold path. On the one hand there’s Waheeda Rehman as Nurse Radha, her eyes more expressive than pages of dialogue, weighed down by the emotional demands of her job, haunted by the memory of what happened the last time she fell in love with a patient and by the realisation that she might be falling into the same trap again (with a new patient played by a very young Rajesh Khanna). On the other hand there’s Colonel Sahab and his two stooges (played by Iftekhar and Lalita Pawar, who somehow manages to seem irredeemably evil even when playing a hospital matron who isn’t actually written as an evil character) walking purposefully about the corridors, discussing which patient they ought to administer an “electric shock” to next. (Electric shocks are all the rage in this film. One suspects that whenever Colonel Sahab is feeling slightly bored he turns to a lackey and says “Still two hours to go before closing time? Let’s go and give patient number 18 an electric shock. 2,000 volts at most. By the way, where’s that new generator I ordered?”)

There are also (wouldn’t you know it?) attempts at comic relief, mainly built around the fact that the inmates have the run of the institute. No supervision, they go wherever they please – and so, when a patient’s relative visits the institute and runs into a doctor, each man briefly thinks the other must be a “paagal”, and situation comedy of some form develops. (When the misunderstanding is cleared up they chuckle with relief, secure in the knowledge that they are both sane after all. Deluded loons.) Meanwhile the real patients spend their time making facial gestures lifted straight from the Dummies’ Guide to Playing Mental Patients. (As one of the wards, a young Deven Varma manages to retain much of his dignity, but that’s about the best I can say about these scenes.)

It’s hard to explain how all this puerility can possibly coexist with the delicacy of the Rehman performance or with some of the restrained directorial and cinematographic choices made by the movie (such as the decision to show Dharmendra’s face only very fleetingly in his crucial guest role as Radha’s earlier ward; when he sings “Tum Pukar Lo”, we see only a back view of the character, in a dimly lit room). But they do coexist, and this makes Khamoshi a confounding film. In particular, there are moments in Rehman’s performance when she seems to be working almost in isolation, oblivious to the pompous, self-centred silliness of the man she calls boss; some of the scenes between her and Colonel Sahab are a textbook demonstration of how the sublime and the ridiculous can share the same frame.

P.S. Also see this post about Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers dance routines that transcended the films they were in.

Anand Mahadevan’s The Strike

2009-06-04T01:39:00.001+05:30

(Did this short review for Tehelka)

Trains are a central motif of Anand Mahadevan’s debut novel, set mostly between Nagpur and Madras in the mid-1980s. The prologue, fittingly titled “Asai (Desire)”, introduces us to the young protagonist Hari – the son of a railway engineer – who wants nothing more than to ride in a train engine. Towards the end of the book, this wish will find morbid fulfilment, but in between is a nicely paced coming-of-age story about a boy dealing with the strangeness of family and friends.

Up to the halfway point, The Strike is a book of engaging vignettes: a grandmother dies in tragi-comic circumstances, necessitating a trip to Benares; an orthodox family must accept an American daughter-in-law; there is a confrontation with language militants who want Hindi-speakers out of their state. In all this, rail journeys play a recurring part and there are careful descriptions of the cold metal of railway tracks, the thick fabric of connecting gangways, and the electric poles, 25 to a kilometre, running parallel to the train – all seen through the fascinated eyes of a 12-year-old. But there is also a sense of a train as a comforting cocoon, a solidifier that brings different people together and into which the divisions of the outside world rarely impinge. It’s easy to see why this is reassuring for Hari, who (much like his friend Anamika, a Bengali girl who can barely speak her ancestral language) is more fluent in Hindi than in his mother tongue Tamil, his time in central India having left him unmoored.

Mahadevan is good at capturing the more fearful aspects of a precocious child’s world, including growing sexual awareness (as manifested in the threatening sexuality of older women who become uninhibited during Holi celebrations, the meagrely dressed Mandakini in the hit film Ram Teri Ganga Maili, the young playmate who seems to have matured overnight, and an attractive young actor on a train). There are depictions of patronising adult hegemony when a tradition is questioned (if the Ganga purifies everything it touches, why should a Brahmin be forbidden from eating the fish that live in it, Hari asks) and an understanding of how the smallest misstep can beget disproportionate guilt in a child, making it seem like he is somehow responsible for everything bad that is happening in his world.

Unfortunately, when the Tamil Express carrying Hari and his mother to Madras is brought to a halt by protestors mourning the death of the legendary actor-cum-chief minister MGR, the narrative enter a period of stasis as well. The hysterical deification of south Indian filmstars-turned-politicians is very amusing (“What is there to live for when MGR is dead?” howls a protestor; a young man who initially had a crush on the actress Jayalalitha starts thinking of her as his Amma when he learns that she is involved with MGR), but the plot as a whole begins to meander. We sense that something bad is about to happen, but the book never quite summons the sense of urgency that this portion of the story demands; instead it gradually cuts us off from Hari’s perspective, a decision that compromises the final quarter of the story.

Consequently, as The Strike judders to a halt, it’s difficult to escape the feeling that it lost a thread somewhere along the way. This isn’t an unworthy debut by any means, but it could have been a more focused one.

More notes from Hamburg

2009-06-01T11:20:00.000+05:30

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are the main challenges for a freelance artist?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-------

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes from Germany 2: the Kinderbuchhaus, thoughts on illustrations

2009-05-29T11:57:00.001+05:30

One of the most enjoyable sessions during the trip was our visit to the Kinderbuchhaus (Children’s Book House) in the Altona Museum in Hamburg. It’s a charming place that conducts activities geared towards getting children (and their parents) more involved with books. For instance, there are workshops where children are shown how to bind books – something that helps them appreciate the process that goes into the creation of the picture-books they would otherwise take for granted; to see a book as something that has to be carefully put together so that they can enjoy the end product. Enthusiasm levels run high at these workshops: project coordinator Heike Roegler told us that children are very proud – and very possessive – about the books they make themselves.

Also held here are exhibitions of framed, original versions of children’s book illustrations, so that visitors can see these drawing as works of art in their own right. On the day we were there, a Peter Schössow exhibition was on (Schössow himself was there too, as mentioned in the last post). Illustrations like this one – a child’s-eye perspective of a little cat in the foreground of a big city – look spectacular when you see them in their full-size versions:

Looking at high-quality illustrations for their artistic value, you realise there’s a lesson here for the many Indian parents who instinctively judge the worth of a children’s book by the amount of text it contains (all the better when it’s placed in the service of a pedantic moral lesson), failing to realise the role a series of beautiful drawings can play in developing a child’s imagination. (“Ismein padhne ka toh kuch hai hi nahin” is the typical response when a parent opens a book that’s full of beautiful drawings but very little text. But as Atiya Zaidi, publisher, Ratna Sagar, and one of the most entertaining members of our party, says, “You want value for your word-count? Buy a newspaper.”)

Earlier in the day, I had spoken with Zubaan’s Anita Roy about the often-haphazard way in which illustrations for children’s books are put together in India. “The Indian arts scene is actually lively and brilliant,” Anita said, “but there’s a lack of understanding of how children’s picture-books work. Illustrators are so central to the children’s publishing industry everywhere except India, where they get sidelined. They are not used to having publishers involving them in the creative aspect of putting a book together. It’s usually done very mechanically: an author will send in a story, the editor will say okay, this needs illustrations, and she’ll choose an illustrator and a format and send the text across and say we need 10 drawings of this size. And then someone else will put the text and illustrations together – a typesetter, or a designer if you’re very lucky. Everyone works in isolation, not much thought is given to layout, which is a crucial part of the process.”

“Most children’s publishing houses in India don’t even have a proper art director, so decisions about art design, layout etc are taken by editors like me, which is not the best way to do these things. Words persons end up having to learn how to think visually. Putting together a good picture-book requires an understanding of how text and visuals have to play off each other, but this is a neglected field in India.”

(I should mention here that Young Zubaan has just published one of the best-looking Indian picture-books I’ve seen, Mister Jeejeebhoy and the Birds by Anitha Balachandran. Lots of lovely drawings, notably a two-page spread of a sweet-shop that you just can’t tear your eyes away from. I first saw some of the illustrations at Bookaroo last winter and have been looking forward to the book ever since.)

The German Book Office in Delhi has now launched a programme called Jumpstart for children’s publishing in India, and among its initiatives is a series of intensive workshops for professionals involved in children’s books: writers and editors, illustrators, librarians and teachers, and marketing personnel. These will be held starting in July this year - mainly at the Max Mueller Bhawan, Delhi - and will hopefully address some of the issues facing children’s publishing in India. Anita tells me that as far as she knows none of the design colleges or art schools in India have courses that specialise in children’s book illustrations - certainly there's nothing that's comparable to the rigour with which these things are done in the West. The Jumpstart workshops should be a step in the desired direction.

(More about our meeting with the illustrators in another post)

Notes and photos from Germany: children's books and other goodly things

2009-05-26T18:54:00.001+05:30

A few photos and commentary from the Germany trip. Apologies about this being a mishmash of children’s publishing and sightseeing - too lazy to do separate posts. Will put up more notes when I get around to doing the official pieces.

(Click pictures to enlarge)

Our first two days were in Frankfurt, which is full of these strange juxtapositions – walk about the town centre and you’ll find the scenery changing every 20 metres or so; parts of it are like something thought up by a hallucinogen-affected mind. Down the road from our hotel was this vista: a quaint, Legoland-style tower (the Eschenheimer Turm, it’s called) in the foreground, with an oversized modern glass building just behind it.

To my (no doubt untrained) eyes it was the Turm that seemed the newer, more artificial construction. The impression I got was that someone had decided to erect the little tower as an afterthought, as a contrast to the gleaming glass-and-concrete buildings. Later I was told that it really is the oldest construction in the area, dating back to the 15th century. I’m sure there’s been some refurbishing though; the thing definitely couldn’t have looked exactly like this 600 years ago. I mean, how old is Lego?

Our stay in Hamburg was brief but it was a much more picturesque place – lots of nice lakes and bridges. This is during a walk around the warehouse district, or the Speicherstadt.

Lots of, um, old warehouses, but all very good to look at. The weather was great too. And Hamburg is something of a pilgrimage spot for me because of the tennis Masters series of 2008. (If the Hamburg Masters hadn't been downgraded and replaced by the Madrid Masters this year, I would have been in the city just a couple of days after the final!)

The TV tower in Berlin...

...and a close-up of the graffiti on its sides (including “Berlin, Ich liebe dich!” or “Berlin, I love you”). East Berlin is full of colourful graffiti and building-length artwork.

The Alexanderplatz, where I took a long and most satisfying walk one fine evening.

The Brandenburger Tor, one of the city’s most famous sights and a popular congregating ground for hundreds of tourists. Also just a short walk away from an Indian restaurant called the Bolliwood.

Cafes on the waterfront. One of the buildings on the right is the theatre set up by Bertolt Brecht (who I'm told is better known in Calcutta than in Germany).

A German Shepherd with his human at one of the cafes.

I liked the fact that pets were allowed almost anywhere - into the local trains, in shops and restaurants - and that many of them weren't even wearing leashes while out on a walk. You see a collared dog coming out an alley and ambling about by himself for a bit, and just as you're wondering if they have strays in Germany you notice a human trailing behind as the dog looks back impatiently.

The German Cathedral and Concert Hall, near which much ginger ale was consumed.

At the “speed-dating” session we had with a few German publishers’ representatives in Berlin. On the right is the redoubtable Anita Roy (Young Zubaan). With her is Susanne Pfeiffer of Ravensburger AG.

Susanne holds up a Ravensburger picture book that uses flaps on every page.

Peel back the flap on the right page here and the exterior of the aircraft’s cockpit gives way to reveal the pilot and the first officer sitting inside, fiddling with knobs and levers and looking immensely cheerful, like they’re in Disneyland or something.

Renate Reichstein of Oetinger poses with the resourceful cat Findus who stars in Sven Nordquist’s Old Man and the Cat books.

An Oetinger book that comes with a DVD containing an animated version of the story.

Atlantis Verlag, an imprint of Orell Füssli, has a picture-book titled Mutig, Mutig (literal translation “Brave, Brave”, official English translation “The Test of Courage”) about various animals in the forest deciding to undergo suitable tests of courage to “prove” themselves.

When the sparrow’s turn comes he refuses to participate, saying he doesn’t need to prove anything, whereupon the other animals recognise that “saying no is a form of courage too”. Very nice little lesson, I thought – particularly apt for those of us whose lives are not governed by an urgent need to win MTV Roadies.

Love this picture of the frog, the sparrow and the rat patiently waiting as the slowcoach snail returns after performing his task.

Books for girls aged 12 plus.

The one on the right translates as “Love, Chaos and Summer Kisses”. These are relatively “clean”, I was told (“girls dream about boys but nothing really happens”), but there are a number of books for readers aged 12 and upwards that deal more explicitly with sexuality. Apparently it’s quite the norm for parents and teachers to get such books for their children because the kids are embarrassed to be seen buying them!

Before our ferry ride in Hamburg: Sayoni Basu, director-publishing, Scholastic India (and big sister to Samit the Duck) with our super-efficient tour guide Katrin Hoenemann.

At the Carlsen office, a company mascot holds a basket full of the little “Pixi” books that have acquired national-heritage status in Germany over the past few decades.

Quite a working environment, this: inside one of the Carlsen offices. These sightings caused much envy among the members of our group, most of whom spend their days in very drab offices. And yes, that's a Robbie Williams cutout in the far corner.

Inside the Tatzelwurm, a prize-winning children’s bookstore in Frankfurt. (Picture courtesy Arun Erik Wolf of the Frankfurt Book Fair office)

It’s a small space but very efficiently used. Lots of supplementary activities are conducted here to keep children interested in books, e.g. they occasionally have groups of youngsters coming in to loll about in sleeping bags and listen to audio books.

(Left to right) The children's-book illustrators Katrin Engelking, Peter Schössow, Isabel Kreitz and Ole Konnecke, whom we met at the Kinderbuchhaus (Children's Book House) in Hamburg.

We had an informal chat with these fine artists over tea. Peter also narrated the story of his marvelously detailed picture-book Baby Dronte, about a little dodo who gets himself adopted by a ship's frog-captain.

(For more on the illustrators and their work, see their websites: Peter, Isabel, Katrin)

Incidentally, one of the things we learnt is that there’s a cultural resistance in Germany (and other European countries) to the French style of illustration, which tends to be more distorted, surreal and not instantly pleasing to the eye (if you’ve seen the animated French film The Triplets of Belleville, you might get a sense of this). More about that later.

Watching Last Chance Harvey on the flight

2009-05-25T15:05:00.001+05:30

I haven’t seen most of the non-Hindi film releases of the past few months, and haven’t been too clued in about them either, so I had only vaguely heard of the Dustin Hoffman-Emma Thompson starrer Last Chance Harvey. But on the flight to Munich I sank happily into this low-key romantic film about two misfits – an elderly American jingle writer named Harvey and a middle-aged British spinster named Kate – whose paths cross. It’s been a while since I’ve encountered a movie that’s driven mainly by characters and conversation, and this one was mostly a delight.

Its success owes almost entirely to Joel Hopkins’ sensitive screenplay and what the two leads do with it. Emma Thompson was one of my favourite actors back in the days when she was working prolifically in films (the Carrington/Remains of the Day/Dead Again/Much Ado about Nothing phase) and watching her endearing, self-conscious klutziness was like catching up with an old friend. But I was especially impressed by Hoffman, an actor whom I had slotted in the De Niro/Nicholson category of onetime greats who have become victims of their own stature so that it’s impossible now to watch them in a film without thinking primarily of the actor rather than the character. Working with naturalistic dialogue and a strong script that allows him to play a (relatively) normal guy, Hoffman is excellent as Harvey, whose growing despondency in the film’s first half hour is very believably done.

In London for the wedding of his daughter (who is closer now to her step-father than to him), Harvey checks in at the hotel he is supposed to go to, expecting the entire wedding party to be guests there, but then finds that everyone else is staying at a house rented by his ex-wife. At a pre-wedding dinner he is clearly out of his depth in the presence of sharply dressed youngsters who engage in social conversation and business talk; his daughter and son-in-law, though affectionate in a superficial sort of way, don’t make an extra effort to make him feel like part of the family. In these scenes, the writing and Hoffman’s performance creates a powerful dual effect: on the one hand we cringe for Harvey (anyone who's ever known social awkwardness will sympathise with him in these early scenes), but on the other hand it’s possible to see why this man estranges people and makes them uncomfortable, and to realise that he was probably a less-than-ideal husband and father. This brings a certain urgency to his relationship with Kate, whom he meets at an airport bar where he’s brooding about his misfortunes. (The “last chance” of the title refers to an assignment that might salvage Harvey’s teetering career, but his meeting with Kate gives the words a second meaning.)

I thought the film’s first half was outstanding, the second half slightly less so as it started reflexively drawing on the clichés of romantic films: a missed rendezvous (a la Love Affair and An Affair to Remember), second thoughts, a reconciliation. There was also a subplot about Kate’s paranoid mother and her next-door neighbour that was superfluous at best. But these things didn’t much matter given the Hoffman-Thompson chemistry. It’s wonderful to see two performers of this caliber in such good form, and playing off each other so well, especially given that one of them is in his seventies and the other doesn’t do much movie work these days.

(Also watched on the flight: The Reader, which I had heard mixed things about but which I liked a great deal. Maybe planes are the new multiplexes.)

A quote and more plugs

2009-05-15T12:45:00.002+05:30

One of my favourite newspaper quotes from recent days is this one by Abhishek Bachchan, in a coochie-coo cover story done by HT City:

I still wake up in the morning and revel in the fact that I share the same room as Aishwarya Rai.

Why not simply "Aishwarya" or "Aish"? "Aishwarya Rai" makes it sound like little Abhishek is still the 17-year-old boy who gawped at the freshly crowned Miss India World back in 1993 and thought "How cool would it be to have HER as a roomie?" Now I imagine the first thing he does after getting up each morning is fist-pump and yell "Yes!" She even pays the rent on time, he probably thinks to himself.

(Going by this story, I think S Sreesranth would approve of AB's choice of roommate.)

Anyway, this is silly nitpicking. While on dream couples, here are two plugs for my wife (who has never once told a newspaper that she revels in sharing the same room as Jabberwock Singh). First, a wellness blog she recently started; it's still at an experimental stage but expect lots of spa reviews in the near future, and possibly a guest post by me about my Ananda stay three years ago (but definitely nothing about this experience). Second, a link to Abhilasha's page on Muziboo, where she's uploaded a couple of her songs. She hasn't seriously pursued what could have been a very promising singing career, but I'm hoping she does at some stage.

Back on the 24th. Blogging will or will not resume then.

Updates, plugs

2009-05-11T18:18:00.002+05:30

Apologies again for the copious amounts of non-blogging I've been doing lately (ya, I know, who even notices or cares in this age of Twitter and Facebook). It'll probably continue like this for a while - as mentioned earlier there hasn't been much reading and movie-watching time recently, which in turn means that there isn't much to blog about (yes, my life is that interesting). Plus I took a minor break from writing and in the process discovered that non-blogging is nearly as addictive as blogging and requires less energy, so there.

The to-read list is being conscientiously dug into, or at least cautiously prodded. Two of my favourite bloggers, Amit and Falstaff, have books out: My Friend Sancho and études respectively. Amit and I became friends a few years ago, shortly after we both started blogging, but I had been a fan of his nuanced yet clear-sighted feature writing (as encountered mainly in Cricinfo and Gentleman magazine) long before that. And Falstaff's short prose - which you'll find scattered through his blog archives - is as delightful as his erudition is daunting. ("I can't help it, everything interests me" is one of the epigraphs on his book, and I can see why.)

To balance things out, one must occasionally read books by people whom one doesn't personally know. I discovered a lovely-looking Vintage Books edition of Patricia Highsmith's Strangers on a Train at The Book Shop in Jorbagh. (Here's an old post on Hitchcock's superb film of the book, and another one on Highsmith's writing.) Also, Alan Moore/Brian Bolland's Batman: The Killing Joke, which I picked up from Landmark in Mumbai, and a couple of Henning Mankells. And I'm eagerly awaiting my copy of Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro, one of my favourite contemporary writers.

Most of these are slim books, which makes them good traveling companions, and they should come in handy next week. I'm going to Germany for a few days from May 17 - the trip is part of an initiative by the German Book Office to facilitate interactions and tie-ups between publishers of children's books in India and Germany, and I'm playing the role of the bastard hack in the group. Will be visiting a few publishing houses, meeting illustrators, going to a small book fair in Berlin. Should be interesting.

Anything I write about that trip will of course find its way onto this orphan site at some point. And other blogging will happen as it happens.

Notes on The Story of a Widow

2009-05-01T00:26:00.000+05:30

Have been reading Musharraf Ali Farooqi’s delicate, finely observed novel The Story of a Widow, about a Karachi-based woman discovering romance relatively late in life. As a huge fan of Farooqi’s English translation of the Dastan-e Amir Hamza (see these earlier posts), I couldn’t help thinking about the contrast between that book and this work of original fiction. The Adventures of Amir Hamza is a big book in every sense – a larger-than-life epic featuring impossibly grand and heroic characters, and written in florid language that replicates the style of medieval campfire storytelling. The Story of a Widow, on the other hand, is a gently unfolding contemporary story about subtle shifts in relationships, the quiet workings of family politics and emotional manipulation in a conservative society. It’s written in a sparse, conversational style, and even the chapter titles are minimalist: “The Widow”, “The Man Next Door”, “The Letter”, “The Family” and so on. (Just by the way, here’s a typical chapter head from the Amir Hamza book: “Of Buzurjmehr’s Relating the Emperoro’s Dream at the Appointed Hour, and of Alqash’s Life Being Claimed in Retribution”!)

The novel’s central character is a woman who would have been decidedly out of place in the company of Hamza and Amar Ayyar: a middle-aged widow named Mona Ahmad who, as the story begins, is coming to terms with her newfound independence and mulling the end of a secure but loveless (and generally boring) married life that had lasted three decades. She doesn’t have much to complain about, her deceased husband Akbar having left her well provided for; but he was financially conservative during his lifetime and now his large portrait seems to frown upon her when she indulges in a bit of impulse shopping.

Just as Mona is settling into her new life, a man named Salamat Ali moves into her elderly neighbour’s house as a tenant and begins to show an interest in her – an interest that culminates in a formally worded marriage proposal. Now she has to assess her own feelings about the matter while also dealing with the various ways in which the people close to her will be affected: her married daughters, her sister and the more orthodox elders in the family. Questions of impropriety and dishonour are raised; another attempt at matchmaking is made; a daughter who was particularly close to her father becomes resentful when she realises that her mother wasn’t happy in her marriage.

I thought Farooqi’s portrayal of Mona’s emotional turbulence, her vacillating feelings about Salamat's discreet but cheeky courtship methods, the many insecurities – all of which seem more suited to a college girl in love for the first time than to a woman of her age – was done with particular sensitivity. But equally notable is how we are made to realise that Mona’s decision to accept Salamat’s proposal – though apparently a sign of a progressive willingness to get on with her life – might simply be a kneejerk act of defiance, and that it could lead to a different sort of enslavement rather than deliverance from social strictures. What does it really mean to be independent, and to what extent are our actions determined by others' expectations of us (even when we think we aren’t answerable to them)? By the time Mona's story reaches its bittersweet conclusion, she has probably had occasion to think about these questions. It's a very engrossing journey.

P.S. A special word for Moonis Ijlal’s beautiful cover design. And here’s an interesting little piece by Farooqi that touches on a novelist's complicated relationship with his creations; it's best read after you’ve read the book.

More doggie thoughts

2009-04-29T13:35:00.001+05:30

This post by Sonia struck a chord; she’s said many of the things I frequently think about. For starters, this depressingly familiar business of people getting pets because it’s fashionable (or because their idiot kids bawl “Papa papa, puppy chahiye”), only to discover that it isn’t the same thing as having a stuffed toy lying about the house, and that there are serious responsibilities attached. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard about pets being abandoned because their owners couldn’t invest the time and attention (let alone love) that they needed. In our colony there’s a young Labrador with a very glossy black coat who is let out of the house gate, unattended, for an hour or so each evening, because no one can be bothered to walk him: he bounds about near the park looking perplexed, his size belying the fact that he’s a puppy, trying to make friends with the local strays who naturally snarl at him. There’s always the danger that he’ll be hit by a passing car, and one gets the sense that his humans don’t care much either way if he doesn’t return someday.

Anyone who really cares for animals (as opposed to feeling a vague affection for the pets they happen to have about the house as a form of interior decoration) will know that dogs who are well looked after and well-loved come to acquire a very particular set of characteristics – there’s a softness in the eyes that suggests a sense of security, a feeling that nothing really bad can happen in their little world; it’s understood that frenetic tail-wagging is the correct response to the sight of any new human. At the other extreme, there’s the perpetual wariness, the suggestion of fear hardened into aggression, on the face of the stray dog who knows that he’s liable to be kicked or have a stone thrown at him any second. And somewhere in between, in some ways worst of all, is the confused, cagey expression of the pet who lives in a house where people give him food and water and look after him in a detached sort of way, but where affection is in very short supply: a dog who isn’t allowed anywhere near the beds or sofas, who spends most of the day tied up on a short leash and who was quite possibly smacked hard the first time he chewed on a chair leg. One of my most cringe-inducing memories is visiting a former colleague’s house and seeing a Pomeranian that looked nervous, even frightened, when I put out a hand to pet him, as if he had no experience of that sort of thing. There was no softness in those eyes.

My sensitivity to these things has heightened since Foxie happened. I’ve never been this close to a dog before, though my mom has had many over the years (and has always accorded them higher status than the human beings around her). Cats were a different matter, of course; when Sandy disappeared 15 years ago I decided that I’d be careful not to get too close to a pet again, but you can’t plan these things beyond a point. Foxie wormed her way into our lives and though the initial days were more about the strong sense of responsibility we felt towards her than a deep attachment, this changed as she gradually developed a very special personality of her own. Today, she’s no different from a daughter for us. And now, whenever I see a scruffy, uncared-for, snarling mongrel on the road, it occurs to me that but for a tiny quirk of fate Foxie could have been that dog. And then she wouldn’t be the sweet, gentle, good-natured and trusting pup we know but something entirely different. Knowing how many strays there are on the roads – all of whom could, if their circumstances had been otherwise, made wonderful, loving pets – makes me feel ill-disposed towards people who pay large sums of money for “breeds”. And who, as Sonia points out, don’t even bother to do the basic groundwork.

P.S. And what about this habit that some pious people have of feeding a black dog once or thrice a week – on specified days, I think it is – because their resident goddess/astrologer has told them it’s good for their punya or karma or some such thing? Another addition to the long list of admirable traits in the religious and the superstitious.

Alert: baby pics ahead

2009-04-25T16:42:00.000+05:30

Time for a few photos of Foxie (who was introduced here and here, for those who missed her). She turned 10 months old on the 23rd and continues to be the joy and life of our household etc etc. Please note that the change in the spelling of the name is to make her sound more feminine; it wasn't an ideal name to begin with, but I explained its provenance in this post, and it stuck.

(Click pics to enlarge)

Sprawled out on the living-room sofa after a hard day's work, with the cooler in proximity:

Slightly more awake, and camera-conscious as always:

With Abhilasha, in the long-lost days of pup-dom. Can't believe we could actually carry her around then. She's absurdly big now. Foxie, I mean.

This is from when she woke abruptly because of some noise at the front door and came out into the living-room still entangled in her razaai. As the cliche has it, Indian women look best in saris.

Rebelling against said sari:

And two of my favourite photos; Foxie with her dadi. This is the classic "give me food NOW or else" stare. My mom usually blinks first.

And this is the satisfied-Lala, "it's okay to look at the camera now" pose, after dinner has been consumed.

Artists and dabblers: thoughts on Amit Chaudhuri’s The Immortals

2009-04-24T10:24:00.000+05:30

I’m finding it hard to articulate my feelings about Amit Chaudhuri’s new novel The Immortals: though I admired it a lot, it was difficult to get through. Part of this is circumstantial – things have been busy lately, there’s been some traveling and some travel planning and other things to keep me preoccupied, and as a result I’ve a) cut back on official reviewing for a bit, b) sidestepped serious literary fiction in favour of relatively light, fast-paced reading (exhibits: John Wyndham, the Millennium Trilogy, Simon Majumdar’s Eat my Globe, Surendra Mohan Pathak’s The 65 Lakh Heist). The Immortals was the exception, and what a hefty exception it turned out to be!

There’s always been a distinct, easily identifiable stillness in Chaudhuri’s work, which I find very appealing: a ear for the sort of quiet conversation that family members might have during their more unguarded moments when nothing of pressing significance is being said; little passages that might not appear to be “about” something in the conventional sense of carrying a plot forward, but which gradually reveal things about people and their circumstances, through the accretion of little details. The Immortals takes this form to a new level: it’s so marked in its refusal to be driven by a plot that even “slice of life” can seem like an over-dramatic way of describing it. There’s no question of picking it up for 15-minute sessions at various points in a hectic day – it’s demanding, requires patience, and is not recommended for the reader who needs a story with a beginning, a middle and an end (which has been the case for me these last few weeks). This book is all middle, like a fragment of a poem - the narrative is drifting and non-linear, the chapters aren't numbered or labeled, there isn't a definite resolution. Even Chaudhuri’s abundant use of semi-colons (where a comma would suffice - “She knew she could have been famous; but she had opted for the life of a Managing Director’s wife”) creates poetic pauses in the writing and conveys the sense that there are things left unsaid.

The Immortals moves between the lives of three people over the span of a few years through the 1970s and early 1980s: a young dreamer named Nirmalya Sengupta who acquires a strong interest in Indian classical music (at a point in his life when he’s trying to decide between studying economics and philosophy); his mother Mallika, the wife of an upwardly mobile businessman, and a woman who might – if circumstances were different or if she had been more ambitious – have become a renowned singer herself; and her music teacher Shyamji who, being the son of the revered guru Pandit Ram Lal, lives in the shadow of his father’s reputation, a permanent Salieri (“he’s only four annas compared to Panditji,” someone says matter-of-factly). Through the different levels of engagement of these people (and others) with classical music, a whole spectrum is revealed – a spectrum that extends from the rigour of Ram Lal’s early life and training to the more superficial interest in music seen among the cocktail-party crowd in south Bombay, where Nirmalya’s family live.

It occurred to me that though this book is specifically about classical music, its devotees and dilettantes, the questions it raises apply to other art forms too, including literature itself. We live in a world where art is losing its exclusivity and being “democratised”, where everyone wants to participate rather than merely observe. (Look at mass-market publishing, and look at how blogs have made it possible for nearly everyone to fancy themselves as writers.) At one point Chaudhuri describes a sammelan where Shyamji’s disciples – “from young struggling ghazal singers to businessmen’s wives, hot but bright in their saris, naked ears dressed provocatively in gold, whose husbands had put a full-page advertisement in the souvenir” – are interested not so much in the performances of the professionals (who have devoted their lives to their calling) as in usurping the stage themselves, to become performers, if only for 15 minutes.

Their relationship with music had begun embryonically, in their prehistory as listeners; they’d hummed along in an undertone with the artists they loved best, or loudly, solitarily, to themselves; and then, at some point, they’d asked themselves the unimaginable, something that wouldn’t have occurred to them six months before, or which they didn’t have the courage to admit: “Can’t I be a singer? Can’t it be me?” Why should they only listen; why shouldn’t they be listened to?

In the other corner are those who have come to symbolise an older way of life that has all but faded: people like Shyamji’s brother-in-law Pyarelal, who claims to have danced in Raja Man Singh’s court when he was four years old and who is described as “a jetsam of the old world, part of the coterie of artists that had been disbanded with the palaces...[he had] a bit of the stardust of the vanished courtly life around him”. And, perhaps, people like the now-forgotten music director who gave the young Lata Mangeshkar a memorable tune. When the elitism – and specialisation – associated with the higher arts has been diluted, where do these people stand? In such a world, do meaningful benchmarks for judging the quality and long-term worth of artists still exist? Who are the “immortals”?

There are other questions about artistic integrity. In two key passages, separated by half the length of the book, we get first Nirmalya’s and then Shyamji’s perspective on a conversation about whether it’s possible to dedicate oneself wholeheartedly to art when one has to think about the basic necessities of life. “Baba, you cannot practise art on an empty stomach – let me first make enough money from the lighter forms, then I’ll be able to devote myself to classical,” says Shyamji. “That moment will never come,” replies Nirmalya fiercely, “the moment to give yourself to your art is now.” Is this the simple-minded idealism of youth pitted against the experience of age and its understanding of compromise? Or is it the hard-edged stance of the genuine artist against the relatively lackadaisical attitude of someone who has given up too soon?

The non-insistent, gently probing way in which the book raises these questions is very effective. But if you do decide to read it, make sure you have plenty of time - and no distractions - on your hands. You can't read it with anything less than full concentration.

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

2009-04-21T11:58:00.000+05:30

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Diploma films: Bonga and The Eight-Column Affair

2009-04-16T12:32:00.001+05:30

[A longer version of my column in the Sunday Business Standard]

“Every film you make is a shadow of the film you had wanted to make,” writer-director Kundan Shah told me during a recent conversation, pointing out that the movie-making process is so full of compromises that the final product might – for better or for worse – have little to do with the original vision; that a scene raised to iconic status by the movie’s eventual viewers might have slipped in accidentally, or been the subject of severe dissatisfaction during the actual shooting.

I thought of Shah’s remark about compromises while watching Bonga, the 22-minute “diploma film” he made at the end of his three-year stint at the Film and Television Institute of India in 1976. Like many of the other FTII diploma films (Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s Murder at Monkey Hill and Sriram Raghavan’s The Eight-Column Affair among them), Bonga is now available on DVD – on a collection titled “Master Strokes”, or, alternatively, in the “Indie Corner” section of Palador’s World Cinema titles. Giving this manic little movie a cohesive summary is very difficult, so here instead are disjointed nuggets of information. It’s a tribute to the silent-screen comedies of Keaton and Chaplin as well as the American gangster film, with a nod to Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless and Bande à part.** It has no dialogue but is driven by a lovely, whimsical music score by B Chandravarkar, a perfect complement to outstanding performances of pantomime and physical comedy by a cast that includes a clean-shaven, surprisingly fleet-footed Satish Shah and an almost-slim Rakesh Bedi (nearly a decade before they appeared together in the well-loved TV comedy Yeh jo Hai Zindagi, also directed by Kundan Shah). There are tiny roles for the young Suresh Oberoi (hilarious as a bank teller) and Om Puri, who were students at the FTII at the time. The story, such as it is, involves five people attempting a bank robbery, but plot descriptions are almost irrelevant; what matters is the film’s rhythm and exuberance, which has to be experienced firsthand.

Naturally, such movies provide a template for what is to come. Bonga was made seven years before Shah’s most famous film Jaane bhi do Yaaro, and in the period between the two movies he did very little film work (in fact, he spent a couple of years after FTII working as a typist in England), but there’s a strong connection between them – the use of slapstick and absurdity to heighten the reality of a situation; goofiness interspersed with moments of stark emotional truth; scenes that play like a visual representation of the most inspired nonsense verse.

So too for Sriram Raghavan and The Eight-Column Affair. Twenty years before he made the brilliant heist film Johnny Gaddaar, Raghavan showed his visual inventiveness with this short film about a romance set within a newspaper’s pages: a marathon runner featured on the front page falls in love with a pretty tennis star on the last page, which means that he has to travel through the length of the paper to meet her before midnight strikes and it’s time for the next edition. Along the way, he must negotiate the obituaries section, the matrimonials, the crime pages and the crossword; he nearly gets run over by a motorbike in an advertisement for tyres.

What's notable about these early movies is that they are carry very little baggage. They were made collaboratively by young students who loved films and who had enormous fun pushing the limits of their creativity, throwing ideas at each other, improvising and multi-tasking. ("Even when we had to make a two-minute silent film, we would throw ourselves into it as if it was going to be the last film of our lives," Shah told me.) No squabbling with producers about financing; no ego hassles involving big stars; no fretting about whether this or that scene will be accepted by the mass audience. Poorly preserved as they are, these diploma films are valuable relics – they have much to tell us not just about the roots and early struggles of many of today’s leading filmmakers but also about the idealism of youth; about a stage in an artist’s development when it was possible to work purely on creative adrenaline without being trammeled by other considerations.

[You can watch Bonga online here, though the sound is behind by around 3-4 seconds and this makes a difference because the music is perfectly in tune with the slapstick]

** One of the actors, Chand Gupta, strongly resembles Jean-Paul Belmondo from certain angles. Also, Shah tells me he never saw Bande à part in its entirety but was very taken by the little dance scene in the café – a scene that, incidentally, also inspired Quentin Tarantino when he wrote the dance between Uma Thurman and John Travolta in Pulp Fiction.

A brief theatrical digression: Lakeerein, The Sunshine Boys, The Skeleton Woman

2009-04-14T16:48:00.000+05:30

One thing Abhilasha and I regret not doing enough of is watching plays, especially with so much decent theatre activity at the India Habitat Centre, the Kamani Auditorium and other places. (Perhaps I have a deep-rooted fear that I’ll be tempted to turn it into a beat – it’s difficult enough to find time for all the books and films one wants to experience without accumulating new interests.) Anyway, as it happens I watched as many as three plays in the past three weeks – all sparse, performer-and-script-driven productions, nothing very elaborate in terms of set design. Quick, amateurish notes on them (and this is from very sketchy memory):

- Lakeerein, directed by Salim Arif: saw this at the Prithvi Theatre during a trip to Mumbai last month and enjoyed it a lot (thanks, Praba!) though it had been a rough day and I was exhausted at the time. It's a collection of vignettes based on Gulzar’s Partition-themed writing: in one, the writer/journalist Kuldip Nayar tells Gulzar about the invisible, strength-giving presence of a “Pir Sahib” in his family’s life (you can read an English translation of the story here); in another, soldiers at the Indo-Pak border mull the connections between their countries and discuss their own shared personal histories (there was a superb, show-stealing performance by Yashpal Sharma as an Armyman who gets in touch with an old friend after years); and a giddy-headed actress takes a “Border Tour” and plays around with a rifle much to the chagrin of the soldiers around. All this is interspersed with fine sutradhaari by Lubna Salim (the director’s wife) and haunting short recitals of poems and songs by Seema Sehgal. Very intimate production, perfect for the small Prithvi auditorium.

- The Sunshine Boys, directed by Percival Billimoria: corporate lawyer Billimoria adapted Neil Simon’s play to an Indian setting for the maiden production of his theatre group The Amateur Performers Bureau, and it’s been done with great verve though I thought it flagged slightly towards the end. Billimoria himself is really good as the crabby old comedian Fali Daruwala (the Indian version of Willy Clark, famously played on screen by Walter Matthau) and so is Sanjeev Johri as his former stage partner Guri Galgotia. I realised belatedly that the part of Fali’s young nephew who wants to reunite the two men was played by the writer Omair Ahmad (whose new book The Storyteller’s Tale is on my current reading list).

- The Skeleton Woman, directed by Nayantara Kotian: this was among the more high-profile productions at the Habitat recently, mainly because of the presence of Kalki Koechlin, who played Chanda in Anurag Kashyap’s Dev D. Koechlin and her co-star Prashant Prakash wrote this two-character play based loosely on an Inuit folktale – it’s about a writer who’s obsessed with the sea, and his long-suffering wife who tries to get him to snap out of his many interior worlds and finish some of his stories for a change. Meanwhile, she becomes part of those inner worlds every now and then. Nice performances and set design, including a large boat sitting incongruously in the living room (also a toy goose and a skeleton's arm). I liked the little shifts between real-world and fantasy, the poignant contrasting of the realities of the two protagonists, and the reference to Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, a story whose meaning the husband and wife disagree about (does it mean that everything is futile and meaningless in the end, or that effort is more important than the final result, or neither?).

P.S. Anurag Kashyap produced the play; I had a brief chat with him before the show began and was surprised by how relaxed and chirpy he is. Didn’t match the image of the auteur-director who makes intensely personal films and whose early work has run into a lot of trouble. Might do an interview/profile of him soon, but that’s another story. Besides I really need to watch Gulaal first – one of the many things that’s been on the to-do list forever.

Blind new world: John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids

2009-04-13T12:31:00.000+05:30

I saw the 1960s film version of The Day of the Triffids around 15 years ago – it was part of a horror-film festival by the then-new Star Movies – and what I remember is a campy, moderately entertaining monster movie about carnivorous walking plants (known as triffids) that go on the rampage shortly after flashes from a meteor shower have blinded most of the world’s human population. It was very specific B-movie horror, emphasizing the predatory triffids and the immediate danger they posed to flailing homosapiens. Much swishing about of tentacles and such, which made me think of that famous line from The Thing, “An intellectual carrot – the mind boggles!” Also some Fay Wray-like screaming by the victims if I remember correctly. (Check for yourself: the full film is on Google Video.)

The source material, John Wyndham’s novel, is more contemplative and deals with subtler terrors. For one thing, despite the title, the triffids play a relatively small part – for around three-fourths of the book they are fleetingly mentioned and the full extent of the danger they pose to the suddenly disadvantaged human species is not clear (despite a character pointing out early on that sight is the only real advantage humans have over them). Even when they come into their own in the later chapters, the tone of the narrative remains sober and pragmatic rather than sensationalistic, as narrator-protagonist Bill Masen – one of the few sighted people left on earth – and a small group of survivors examine their dwindling options.

Far more frightening than the stinging triffids is Wyndham’s account of the special problems facing a world where nearly everyone has suddenly lost the power of sight – and how completely civilisation would break down in such a situation. The premise here is more complicated than that in H G Wells’ famous short story “The Country of the Blind”, about an isolated mountainside community made up entirely of blind people who have successfully adapted to their state over the generations, to the extent that the concept of sight becomes incomprehensible to them. In The Day of the Triffids, the people affected have been thoroughly dependent on sight all their lives, the change takes place overnight, and the future of the species is at stake. In almost no time, the systems in charge of power generation and water-purifying stop working and people take to the streets in panic, blindly smashing shop windows in the hope that there might be food inside. Near-universal blindness turns out to be a great leveler, wiping clean the slate of protocol that led a lower-class person to be deferential towards someone more privileged. Some of the more resourceful blind people start taking sighted people captive, to help them procure food and lodging.

Many difficult decisions must be made: is it better to make a desperate, “humane” effort to save and provide for everyone in the short term or to accept that long-term planning is the way forward, even if that means making hard-hearted choices? When there is to be a complete reordering of society, to what extent should the old laws and norms be adhered to? During a lengthy discussion, a character named Coker stresses the importance of large communities rather than small groups, because certain people – teachers, doctors – must be left free to do their own specialised work rather than spend their time in mundane daily labour:

Where everybody has to work hard just to get a living and there is no leisure to think, knowledge stagnates, and people with it. The thinking has to be done largely by people who are not directly productive – by people who appear to be living almost entirely on the work of others but who are, in fact, a long-term investment…A community of our present size cannot hope to do more than just exist and decline. If there are children we shall be able to spare only enough time from our labour to give them just a rudimentary education; one generation further, and we shall have savages or clods. To hold our own, to make any use at all of the knowledge in the libraries we must have the teacher, the doctor, and the leader, and we must be able to support them while they help us.

The genesis of the triffids and the appearance of the mysterious “comet debris” that causes the wide-ranging blindness are two unrelated events, separated by 20 years, and in theory this would make Wyndham’s novel more far-fetched than a science-fiction work built around a single fantastical occurrence. But it isn’t that way in practice: the triffids are presented as an exaggerated outcome of genetic engineering, and there is speculation that the deadly dust could have resulted from an accident involving the many dangerous satellite weapons circling the earth (the book was written while the Cold War was on). As he often did in his work, Wyndham begins with alarming real-world possibilities, extends them to weave what he called “logical fantasy”, and then, using a realist narrative, sets down the responses and actions of different people. This is very much a book of ideas and I thought its overall mood was closer to Camus’s The Plague, with its restrained, methodical account of a community struggling to remain organised in the face of calamity, than to pulp fiction; Marsen’s narration in places reminded me of Dr Rieux’s.

This is the third Wyndham I’ve read, the others being The Midwich Cuckoos (briefly mentioned here), which was also filmed in the 1960s, as Village of the Damned; and The Kraken Wakes. But I’ve recently accumulated many of his books, The Chrysalids and Trouble with Lichen among them, and hope to finish the lot soon. Penguin's brightly designed new editions are worth getting - see this.

Persistence Resistance '09

2009-04-09T18:38:00.000+05:30

I've been caught up with various things and it'll probably take a while for regular blogging to resume, but here's a shout-out for the 2009 edition of Magic Lantern's Persistence Resistance film festival. If you're in Delhi between April 17-19 it's worth checking out. (See this post about some of the films that were shown at last year's fest; many of those will be screened again.) Alongside the standard auditorium screenings, there will be video parlours, as there were last year, and the "Filmmakers' Parlours" will showcase the work of Paromita Vohra, Sanjay Kak, Madhushree Dutta and others. The full schedule is here.

Away...

2009-03-21T14:54:00.001+05:30

...for a few days and won’t have regular Net access, so little or no blogging for some time. Haven’t been able to do much reading lately and almost no movie-watching (had been hoping to catch Firaaq, Baraah Anna, Revolutionary Road and Milk), but here’s some of what I have got through:

- Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – the first book in the posthumously published Millennium trilogy of crime novels. Extremely well-plotted, character-driven thriller about a journalist in disgrace, now hired to investigate the disappearance and possible murder of a young girl decades earlier. Very atmospheric too - the Scandinavian chill (and the gloom that it causes) is a character in its own right. A bit too long though. More on this soon.

- Jay Rayner’s The Man Who Ate the World: In Search of the Perfect Dinner – the award-winning food critic sets off on a worldwide hunt for “the ultimate meal”, determined to show that the world’s great chefs can preserve their individuality and creativity even in the face of homogenizing globalisation (and that the worldwide food revolution isn’t merely about providing safe consistency to the ultra-rich). He eats his way through Las Vegas, Moscow, Dubai, Tokyo, London and New York, before ending up in – where else? – Paris, where he conducts a heroic weeklong eat-a-thon at seven of the world’s fanciest restaurants. (You’re thinking you want his job, but the man assures us he was seriously jaded by the end of the adventure.)

The thing to accept first up about a book like this, written by someone who eats for a living (and who has become famous for doing this), is that it can’t be of much practical use to those of us who are serious foodies in a non-professional capacity. (To Rayner’s credit, he acknowledges the advantages and constraints of his job, both of which distance him from the ordinary diner: having access to important contacts in every city he travels to; eating in the presence of a high-profile chef or restaurateur who’s scrutinizing his every move; having to man up for a 12-course meal even when he isn’t feeling very hungry or enthusiastic.) However, this book does provide a solid insider’s view of the fine-dining world. There are many anecdotes about culinary history, like the one about the Moscow restaurant that discontinued its Chinese cuisine after the souring of Sino-Soviet relations but allowed diners to eat Russian sausages with chopsticks. Rayner also discusses the morality of eating obscenely expensive food while millions of people around the world are starving, explains why this doesn’t prick his conscience and expresses strong views on such subjects as “authenticity” being prioritized over quality (“Dishes lauded for their authenticity are either created out of necessity – would I>ouzi laban have been prepared with dried yoghurt if fresh yoghurt had been manageable in the desert climate? – or they those eaten by poor people, and most poor people’s food is not pleasant.”)

On balance, I empathised more with his wife Pat, who halfhearted accompanies him to fancy restaurants that are more about the “experience” (and the money you have to pay for it) than the food. “The first time you try high-end food it’s astounding, but after that you are just grading your experiences against themselves,” says this sagacious woman at one point. I wouldn’t mind reading a notepad filled with her perspectives on the perfect meal.

- Have also been re-reading Watchmen (earlier post here) in anticipation of the movie, which I don’t have very high hopes for.

- Also, finally got around to watching Nina Paley’s delightful Sita Sings the Blues, a jazzed-up animated version of the Ramayana as seen through the eyes of Sita (whose eventual abandonment by Rama is contrasted with Paley’s own estrangement from her husband). After reading some angry blog comments about how the beloved Indian epic had been shallowly appropriated by a foreigner, I was unprepared for how closely this film sticks to the mainstream version of the Ramayana. You have to be hopelessly literalist or thin-skinned to be offended by it. I especially enjoyed the three chatty narrators, portrayed as Indonesian shadow puppets, a reminder that a tradition of Ramayana storytelling that’s completely different from the Indian one exists in that country (and others such as Thailand). The puppets relate the story in casual dialogue (“So Kaikeyi, she asked Dasharath to send Rama away for 14 years, thinking that’s a pretty long time – if you go away for 14 years, you’re pretty much out of sight, out of mind, right?”), fumbling over details, stopping to correct each other.

The use of mixed media, including Annette Hanshaw songs from the 1920s, helps free the epic from a narrow cultural context, which is always a good thing. (Related post here.) I also loved Paley’s tribute to the Ramanand Sagar TV show, the “Sagar zoom” in the scene where Sita rebuffs Ravana's advances, and the camera keeps zooming in on him dramatically.

(While on Indonesian Java puppets, check out the last sentence of this Wikipedia entry on Kripacharya: “The picture above is a puppet form of Kripacharya and does not resemble the actual character.”)

Downloads and other online-viewing options for Sita Sings the Blues available here. I saw it on Youtube.

Until next week, or later...

Updates from Indian Wells and ToB

2009-03-19T16:31:00.000+05:30

Can't believe the lad pulled this one off. After facing an opponent who's a terrible match-up for him and who hammered him in their last two matches. After looking well and truly beaten in the first set and then facing five match points in the second set. (I had already written a score-update SMS to a friend saying "Nalbandian wins 6-3, 6-4" and was about to press Send.) Then he comes back and takes the final set 6-0. Someday Rafael Nadal will be hauled to court for causing someone's head to fall off because they were shaking it so hard.

In other, vaguely related news, the Tournament of Books is on and Hari Kunzru's My Revolutions has just beaten Marilynne Robinson's Home (for the record, I loved both books). Netherland, The White Tiger and Unaccustomed Earth are some of the top seeds to have been knocked out so far, but there are some intriguing match-ups to come. And some notable judges, including Junot Díaz.

Stranger to History: Aatish Taseer on Islam's 'enclosed world'

2009-03-18T07:56:00.001+05:30

At one point in his travelogue-memoir Stranger to History: A Son's Journey Through Islamic Lands, Aatish Taseer finds himself in the streets of Damascus on the day that the city's Danish embassy is burnt down by furious mobs protesting the cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad. How can anyone have the freedom or the right to insult the Prophet, an acquaintance asks him, and observing the chaos around him Taseer realises that

The offensive cartoons could not have been understood Islamically. The democratic rights and interlocking institutions that protected them were outside the faith's compass. I couldn't explain how one could have the right to insult the Prophet unless I was to step outside the circle in which it was written that it was wrong to make graven images. To explain to Nedal, I would have to ask him to suspend his faith for a moment and believe in sanctities greater than that of the Prophet and his Book...It could be said that the systems that protected the cartoons now had been set up in part to protect public life from the excesses of religion. The cartoons came from places that considered it an achievement for religion to be able to take a joke. It had not always been that way.

Taseer's own childhood couldn't have prepared him for such encounters with the certitudes of religious fundamentalism. Born of a short-lived relationship between the Pakistani politician Salmaan Taseer and the Indian journalist Tavleen Singh, he grew up with his mother in Delhi and had an irreligious upbringing. When he writes "As a child I made my way through all the sub-continent's major religions...Shiva remained the focus of my devotion until I discovered He-Man", he could be speaking for many Indian youngsters brought up in liberal households where religion, if it played a part at all, stayed on the fringes of everyday life (and where it was possible to revere the comic-book version of Lord Shiva not because he was divine but because he was such a bad-ass, with the serpents and the trident and the ganas). Later, he studied in a Christian boarding school in south India, "adding the final coat of paint to a happy confusion that was as much India's as my own". He didn't properly meet his father until a visit to Pakistan in 2002, and then the relationship was a strained one.

The starting point for this book was an angry letter Taseer received from his father in response to a magazine article he had written. As a young, London-based reporter visiting Beeston – where most of the perpetrators of the July 2005 bombings had hailed from – Taseer had been struck by the generational divide in the British Muslim community, by the need of the youngsters to forcefully assert their cultural identity. "Some were dressed in long Arab robes with beards cut to Islamic specifications. They lacked their parents' instinctive humour and openness; their hatred of the West was immense and amorphous... The younger generation was adrift: neither British nor Pakistani, removed from their parents' economic motives and charged with an extra-national Islamic identity, which came with a sense of grievance...their story began in rootlessness and led to the discovery of radical Islam."

Returning to London, he included these observations in a cover story for a British political magazine but was unprepared for his father’s strongly critical reaction, accusing Aatish of spreading anti-Muslim propaganda and failing to understand the "Pakistani ethos". The interesting thing was that the senior Taseer had been offended as a Muslim, despite being an irreligious man himself – he ate pork, never fasted or prayed and once said of the Koran that there was nothing in it for him.

"The question I kept asking myself," Taseer writes, "was how my father, a professed disbeliever in Islam's founding tenets, was even a Muslim. What made him Muslim despite his lack of faith?" Stranger to History: A Son's Journey Through Islamic Lands is an account of the journey he undertook to try and answer these questions. The arc of countries on his route included secular Turkey, where Islam had been banished from the public sphere since the 1920s; Arab-nationalist Syria, which had become the most important destination for radical Islamists; Iran, which had experienced Islamic revolution in 1979 but still had a clear idea of its past before the coming of the regime; and, of course, Pakistan itself, a country that bears the burden of having been created specifically in the name of a faith, and where even secular people live with a confusion about their history.

The result is a varied travel narrative. In protean Istanbul, Taseer visits the religious neighborhood Fatih Carsamba, a little world that has closeted itself off from the forceful secularism that was Ataturk's legacy. In Damascus's Abu Nour, with its mosque and colleges teaching the "correct face of Islam", he attends a Friday sermon that is unexpectedly political. In Tehran he encounters a covert group of Hare Krishnas and meets people who have been "made corrupt, stunted, twisted, criminalised by the tyranny of trifles" as the regime uses the faith as a pretext to pry into the private details of people's lives. And in rural Pakistan he spends time in the company of a landlord referred to only as the Mango King. Running through all these encounters are questions of what exactly it means to be a Muslim, the difference between religion and culture, and how politics and history can affect personal relationships.

Taseer's writing is thoughtful and understated and I liked many of his descriptions (a view of the Indus river reduced to a ribbon of green water; the showpiece Imam Khomeini airport as "the Islamic Republic in miniature...the world had to be kept out for it to look as it did") and little observations (a glimpse of a Muslims-only McDonald's), but I also felt that some passages had too much extraneous detail – which may be an offshoot of the author's journalistic training – and that this interfered with the narrative’s progress. (When he enters his hotel room in Hyderabad with a Pakistani-Hindu contact – a passage that exists only to make a quick point about the status of Hindus as a minority group – do we really need to know that “the room had a large white plywood bed with a satiny bedcover and thin, dirt-encrusted carpeting”? There are many other such examples.) Also, the personal bits – the details of Taseer's relationship with his father, which are interspersed with the travelogue – aren't always compelling in their own right, though they provide context and help ground the larger story.

This is very much a book where the personal and the political commingle (the very title can be seen as a reference to the different ways in which the author and his father are strangers to their histories), and towards the end Taseer attempts a summarising explanation of his father's position as a "cultural Muslim". However, Stranger to History is best seen not as a work that provides solid answers but as one that attempts to understand the very complex history of a religion and its effect on various people. It reads best in the passages about the beliefs and dilemmas of individuals. In a richly engrossing chapter, Taseer meets a man named Abdullah who tells him that being a Muslim is to be "above history", but who shows a touchingly vulnerable, conflicted side when he tries to reconcile his beliefs with the more desirable aspects of the modern world: Marlboro cigarettes, technology. A mention of Iranian cinema leads to a near-surreal discussion about the camera and the question of how its existence can be "sanctified" by making it represent something in the Islamic worldview - a scary rationalisation process that lies at the heart of many fundamentalist beliefs.

For Taseer, this is an insight into Islam's enclosed world of "prescriptive and forbidden action, which was more detailed than most other religions, but in the end could only cover those things that were common to the world of today and the Prophet's world in Arabia". As his later experience in Damascus shows, this enclosed world can become a vacuum where modern concepts like freedom of speech hold no meaning.

Little wonder then that he counts himself fortunate to have both India and Pakistan - their combined histories, garbled though they are, still preferable to "violent purities". In this, he has a kinship with Saadat Hasan Manto, some of whose short stories he has just finished translating into English (and a writer whose most famous creation Toba Tek Singh ended up finding a spot for himself under the barbed wire separating India and Pakistan). As Taseer reminds us in the closing chapters of Stranger to History, the world is richer in its hybrids.

[Also see: the Johann Hari controversy]

Chris Cleave and Little Bee

2009-03-16T13:01:00.000+05:30

Not a full review but a shout-out for Chris Cleave's fine novel The Other Hand (also published under the title Little Bee). Things didn't look very promising when the book first came in – it was accompanied by the sort of publicity material that can give any reviewer the shudders: a candid Editor's Note that compared it to Cloud Atlas and Schindler's Ark and said “as publishers, naturally we only publish books we love but every now and then something comes along that is so special it gives us goosebumps”; a back-jacket that avoided getting into plot details because “this is a truly special story and we don't want to spoil it ...the magic is in how it unfolds”; and a cutesy illustrated introduction by the author depicting his two children dressed as superheroes, telling the readers things like “The book is funny and beautiful but also horrific. There is no way dad will let me read this book until I'm older!”

I don't know if The Other Hand lives up to that level of hype (and that probably isn't relevant anyway), but I enjoyed and admired it a good deal. It combines lightness of touch (the narrative is quick-paced, conversational, even darkly funny) with seriousness of purpose – provocative observations about how people live in different parts of the world and what can happen when those lives collide, the attempt to reach for personal dignity in the worst situations, and whether it's possible to achieve true empathy for another person. But most importantly, it does this without drowning the reader in clichés or making self-conscious efforts to extract sympathy.

The story is told by two women who take turns narrating chapters – a Nigerian girl who calls herself Little Bee and a British magazine editor named Sarah – and these are very believable voices (it's achievement enough for a male author to create a single well-rounded female narrator, but what Cleave does here really is creditable). We learn early on that the connection between these women, whose paths might otherwise never have crossed, is that they met in horrific circumstances on a Nigerian beach years earlier. The book takes its time to disclose the specifics of that incident and its aftermath, but the payoff is worth it, and thankfully the non-chronological structure doesn't feel contrived.

Little Bee, who has spent two years in a detention home because she is an illegal alien in Britain, is the book's emotional centre and one of the most memorable characters I've encountered in fiction recently, as she negotiates the business of living in a new country, speaking the "Queen's English" the way British people speak it, trying to work out how she would explain this place to the folks back home. Her narrative, mostly addressed to the first-world reader, is often mesmerising: there's a wide-eyed sense of wonder but also a hard-won, unforced wisdom about the workings of the world. The deep sadness and fear inside her only occasionally rise to the surface as the definition of the "bad men" who are coming for her gradually broadens to include not just the hunters back home (who want to kill her because of a massacre she witnessed) but also the people in this "civilised" country who want her deported. There is whimsical humour - and the true survivor's lust for life - even in the passages where she describes working out ways of killing herself whenever she enters a new place, in case greater horrors lie in wait.

One day the detention officers gave me a copy of a book called Life in the United Kingdom. It explains the history of your country and how to fit in. I planned how I would kill myself in the time of Churchill (stand under bombs), Victoria (throw myself under a horse), and Henry the Eighth (marry Henry the Eighth). I worked out how to kill myself under Labour and Conservative governments, and why it was not important to have a plan for suicide under the Liberal Democrats. I began to understand how your country worked...

I knew they planned to deport me so I started to imagine killing myself back home in Nigeria. It was just like killing myself in the detention centre but the scenery was nicer. This was a small and unexpected happiness. In forests, in quiet villages, on the sides of mountains, I took my life again and again. In the most beautiful places I secretly lingered over the act. Once, in a deep and hot jungle that smelled of wet moss and the excrement of monkeys, I took nearly one whole day to chop down trees and build a tall tower to hang myself from by the neck. I had a machete. I imagined the sticky sap on my hands and the sweet honey smell of it, the good tired feeling in my arms from the chopping, and the screeches of the monkeys who were angry when they cut my trees down...It was a big day’s work for a small girl. I was proud.

For more of Little Bee's voice, here's the first chapter of the book from Chris Cleave's official website. And here's a Q&A with the author, though it's probably best read after you've read the novel.