Jabberwock

A shout-out for Boong

2026-03-10T11:57:00.000+05:30

Good to see a fairly packed hall (at PVR Select Citywalk) for Lakshmipriya Devi’s Boong, about a Manipuri boy setting out to find his missing dad – the recent BAFTA award probably played a part in raising the film’s profile, but hoping word of mouth will take over. It’s a lovely film, quirky and engrossing throughout – right from the opening scene where little Boong recites Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” at his school assembly. Very fluid mix of the personal and the political (the absentee-parent trope can obviously work at both levels, given the treatment of the more marginalised Indian states by the Centre ) – though you don’t consciously have to think of any of that while watching this. Wonderfully performed by Gugun Kipgen, the other children, and Bala Hijam as Boong’s mother.

There’s a good chance it will play for another few days now, what with new shows having been added in Delhi halls mid-week – but either way, try to go for it soon.

P.S. one of the images here is from an amusing scene where a local pradhan surreptitiously watches Hindi films (banned in Manipur) in his screening room - and is threatened with exposure. Ah, the many Indias…

My unexpected life in quizzing continues...

2026-03-06T10:57:00.000+05:30

Last week saw another solidly conducted pub quiz by whysoQrious (Adittya Nath Mubaiyi and Mudita Chauhan-Mubayi), this being the inaugural (and Delhi-themed) quiz at Fort City Brewing in Hauz Khas. I had been invited there as one of eight “mentors” – in the company of such hefty names as my friend Trisha Gupta, young Eshan Sharma, Swapna Liddle, Anant Raina, Saif Mahmood, Vidyun Sabhaney and Nitin Sreedhar – but I don’t think the teams, being mostly made up of avid quizzers, needed our wisdom. (I must shamefacedly admit to knowing/deducing the answers to only two or three of the questions asked.)

There was plenty of buzz in a crowded room, lots of jingle-jangling too – since the “pouncing” here was done not with light-sabres, as at the Depot48 quizzes, but with tambourines that had the team names on them (mine was Mehfil-e Mehrauli).

One entertaining question was about the Rajendra Kumar character from the 1965 film Arzoo claiming to be from “a very improbable place”, as the quizmaster put it. (Keep in mind the questions were all Delhi-centred.) This happens when he is being introduced during a skiing competition, early in the film.

Only one person in the room – a member of my team – knew the correct answer, and this was because he recalled his dad enthusiastically showing him the scene decades earlier. (I was reminded of my Spartacus moment from this quiz a few months ago.)

This is how the Rajendra Kumar character is introduced:

“Mr Sarju, from Okhla Village.”

Mentos! Mentors! Minotaurs!

Anuja Chauhan, the answer to the last question

Snippets: another fine 1940s noir

2026-03-04T12:38:00.000+05:30

A few weeks ago I had a very good time watching the 1948 noir Sorry, Wrong Number (adapted from a successful radio play by Lucille Fletcher) in my Teesri Manzil screening room. I had a dim memory of the film from decades ago, and had mis-remembered that it was a static work, largely set in a single room, with Barbara Stanwyck confined to bed, trying to save herself from murder – but there was a lot more going on in terms of camera movement and location filming. With one phone conversation after another opening up new revelations and relationships, flashbacks within flashbacks, and so on. (My friend Satish Padmanabhan and I had a little chuckle over what contemporary viewers might think about the many scenes that could only have been built around clunky old rotary phones, the phone-operator system, the possibility of crossed connections etc.)

I get the argument made by some people that the film over-expanded (or over-padded) the plot of the 25-minute-long radio play to make a feature film, and that consequently the suspense wasn’t as tight – but I was gripped almost all the way through. One of those terrifically nasty noirs where you can’t root for anyone in the end (even though you think you should be able to). It helped that I have been a big Stanwyck fan forever – she is super, as always. Burt Lancaster, only two years into his film career, is appropriately callow given his role, but already has the physical presence that would serve him so well in years ahead.

(In the interplay between their characters – ambitious small-town boy getting a ticket to a “better” life after meeting the heiress to the pharmacy empire – one sees a recurring trope from the noir/suspense melodrama of that period in American literature and film. Ira Levin’s superb debut novel A Kiss Before Dying, which I wrote about here, came out a few years later, the story centring on an amoral young man pursuing a rich copper magnate’s daughters one by one. But there are many other books and films around the upward-mobility/ticket-out theme.)

P.S. the famous 1943 radio episode of Sorry Wrong Number, with Agnes Moorehead in the lead, can be heard here. I haven't listened to it yet, but Satish did and liked it very much. (It may be time for me to get into this sort of thing + podcasts.)

A breathless tribute to a goofy young genius

2026-03-02T22:47:00.001+05:30

Fin de Cinema. The end of cinema. Here is Jean-Luc Godard (as played by Guillaume Marbeck) in the last scene of Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague, watching the last scene of Breathless.

On one level, Linklater’s film – about the making of Breathless – is an obvious candy-treat gifted by a nerdish cinephile to nerdish cinephiles. The sort of movie that a movie-history buff like me might feel guilty for liking so much. Watching it, I kept thinking of Orson Welles’s admonition that too many filmmakers were in danger of absorbing too many films and then making films that would be homages more than anything else. I think Welles already had reservations about the young French auteurist-critics-turned-directors: Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol etc. I wonder what he would make of a fanboy-tribute film that is about the early work of those fanboy-tribute-making-directors?

But I still loved Nouvelle Vague for base reasons: it is about a film I know well, about a period and people that I (think I) know well, it is the sort of affectionate homage I personally enjoy; it depicts a (possibly inaccurate) version of behind-the-scenes events, and I have spent a lot of time living in various such landscapes (including imagined versions of what it must have been like when my favourite films were being made).

Also, the humour, and the presentation of Godard – a forbidding figure for many of us who got into “serious” cinema in our teens – as a goofy young man, full of aphorisms about film and life but also a bit hesitant and awkward, and capable of taking a joke directed at him. (As in a scene where Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo direct *him*, and mock him a little too, in his brief appearance as the informer.)

Maybe Nouvelle Vague simplifies and postures, but so what? It’s only red, not blood.

Buddhist relics at Qila Rai Pithora

2026-02-27T17:31:00.001+05:30

Images from the Qila Rai Pithora complex: both the park, which has been a favourite walking space for me for around 15 years (it’s a five-minute walk from my house in Saket), and the new exhibition “The Light and the Lotus: Relics of the Awakened One”, which is currently hosted here. Well worth going to, whether or not you have a special interest in Buddhist history.

I visited the exhibition yesterday and was impressed by the work that has gone into turning the previously unremarkable interiors into a full-fledged (though temporary) museum space. (Of course, there is also the inevitable “pre-2014 vs post-2014” PR work being done there for the government, with videos of Pitamah Chhappan looking sagacious and busy.)

In the past few months, when renovation work was going on here, and then when Modi came for the inauguration, my main concern was about the possible relocation of the aged Pithora dogs. Thankfully that didn’t happen. The park is looking neat and clean, and there are plenty of visitors every day including groups of monks and foreign tourists. (One could have done with fewer machine-gun-wielding security people, but that can’t be helped I guess.) The exhibition is on for another 3-4 months. Delhi-ites, and people visiting Delhi, try to go across soon.

Perchance to dream: grieving parents in Hamnet and Train Dreams (and other films)

2026-02-25T15:34:00.000+05:30

(My latest Economic Times column. I only touch briefly here on the haunting Train Dreams, which is probably my favourite of the award-season films - hope to write more about it soon)
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Parents and children became an unplanned viewing theme for me last week. It began on a light note with the 2009 college comedy Easy A, which I enjoyed most of all for the goofy, irreverent relationship between Emma Stone’s character and her parents, who often say outrageous things apropos of nothing. This gives their scenes an eccentric quality, guarding against over-sentimentality, but also making it clear that this unconventional family is rock-solid and grounded when it comes to the important things.

But then came a 180-degree shift to much grimmer terrain: Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet (which releases here next week), an intense adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel about the death of an 11-year-old boy – the son of William Shakespeare and Anne (or Agnes) Hathaway.

Films about parental grief aren’t easy to watch, even when (or especially when) they are brilliantly done. Last year I hosted an online discussion about this subject, and the many ways – determined by culture, personality, or filmmaking approach – in which it has been treated onscreen. For instance: the way in which the narrative of Manchester by the Sea (which I watched for the first time last year) moves imperceptibly between past and present, never signalling when a flashback is about to begin or end – thus indicating that the protagonist’s horrendous tragedy is always with him, paralysing everything, even as he puts up the surface appearance of being functional. That there are things you don’t get over.

There are distinct little moments, markers, epiphanies in each such story. Such as a scene in the series Trial by Fire where a mother, rendered uncommunicative after losing her children in the 1997 Uphaar cinema fire, rushes to another woman for solace because she thinks the latter’s child has also died; and her sense of shock, even betrayal, when she realises this wasn’t the case. Or a scene from In the Bedroom, where a woman who lost her sole child responds in a distracted, mechanical fashion when she hears about another woman who lost one of four children; it is almost as if she is thinking to herself “What could *she* know? It isn’t the same thing at all.”

But coming to Hamnet: there is much to admire in this stately-paced film, from the superb production design to the central performances by Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal. I was intrigued by the purported link between the real-life tragedy and Shakespeare’s most famous play. The link can seem tenuous (and has been criticised by scholars who dislike facile connections being made between life and art) but it is also resonant in a way, even if you don’t want to play connect-the-dots. Here is a depiction of a man (who has neglected his family) reaching out – the only way he knows, through his art – to a spouse in a moment of mutual grieving. (Of course, his wife, though illiterate herself, has performed her own, more potent “creative” act in giving birth – and the film underlines this with a visceral, prolonged childbirth scene.)

The film’s final passage involves an early staging of Hamlet in London, with Agnes and William finding different forms of catharsis. What we see here is that a father, haunted by a son’s ghost, has reversed the roles and written a drama about a son haunted by a father’s ghost. (While also playing the Ghost himself on stage, implying that he is both haunter and haunted.) In Hamlet the play, the dead don’t want to be forgotten by the living; in the real-life story (as presented here), the living don’t want to be “forgotten” by the dead. Which suggests a mystical, not fully knowable view of the after-life being as real as the world we know. I was reminded of George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, a superb book where the liminal space, or bardo, where Lincoln’s little son finds himself after his death is just as real as the “real world” occupied by his grieving parents – and perhaps more alive and dynamic.

My Hamnet experience was oddly complemented by another Oscar-nominated period film, the gorgeously shot Train Dreams, in which a taciturn logger deals with filial bereavement. There is a big gap in the specifics: Hamnet is built on the conceit of a great playwright, destined to be remembered through the ages, writing one of the most celebrated literary works ever as a part-response to his tragedy; in Train Dreams, an “ordinary” man, leading an unremarkable life, not practising any sort of creative expression, grieves quietly alone and fades away when his time comes. But the anonymous logger’s story is no less potent or moving than that of the Shakespeare family, and as a viewer watching the two films together you may be fascinated by how they seem to converse – or parry like Hamlet and Laertes in the final act – offering contrasting perspectives on one of the profoundest human experiences.

P.S. I also liked that some of the Hamlet lines used in Hamnet were slightly different from the ones we have in the “finished” version of the play. With some dialogues even shifted around a bit. A writer searching for the right order in which to set his words, like parents searching their way through the thickets of grief and catharsis...

Experiencing a whole new world at the Bharatpur bird sanctuary

2026-02-23T19:16:00.000+05:30

I had a tremendous time at the Bharatpur bird sanctuary (Keoladeo National Park) over the weekend – thanks largely to the company and guidance of friends who are experienced birders but also very laidback, not at all pedantic or demanding, and knew the guides and the best spots to visit. Particularly stunning was an expanse of wetlands near the forest lodge, where tourists don’t normally get to go. (The region was populated by hundreds of brilliant painted storks. Some of the photos here and below are from there: you can basically shut your eyes and point a camera nearly anywhere and capture something that looks like a gorgeous painting. And yet, these pics don’t begin to catch the actual experience of being there, soaking in the landscape and the sounds.)

I have been very interested in the “Umwelt” (distinct sensory perceptions/experiences) of other species for a long time now, but this was the first time I got to observe the behaviour patterns of so many of them up close. With binoculars (and on occasion through a telescope, with the guide managing to take a few passable camera-phone photos through the telescope lens). For a first-time birder this has naturally been overwhelming – I’ll take some time to process and think about all of it, and maybe write about it later.

Two quick highlights for now (among countless others): 1) We got lucky enough to see a pair of Sarus cranes even though their numbers have been dwindling rapidly in the park (only four are left apparently). Also the well-camouflaged nightjar, which is very hard to spot.

2) Having never known anything about the Oriental Darter before, this bird – constantly seen perched on a solitary branch with its wings spread out to dry, and distinctive silvery streaks on the back – became one of the most familiar sights for us on the trip. Leading to “ghar ka Darter daal barabar” jokes. But it never stopped being fascinating either, often epitomising the stillness/thehraav we saw in so many of the birds here. (A couple of Darter photos are below.)

More soon. And again, the photos here represent just a fraction of everything one can see, and hear, and feel, in this setting.

Quick thoughts on Hamnet (and Hamlet)

2026-02-15T20:23:00.000+05:30

Much to unpack after watching Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet last night (followed by some stimulating discussion today with friends on my film groups). Quick notes for now:

– I mostly loved the film. Very intense (which is sort of given with the subject matter, the death of the 11-year-old son of Will Shakespeare and Agnes/Anne Hathaway). This is a stately-paced work that takes its time and demands some patience: lots of still frames and elegant long-shots where a moment is held for a little longer than you might expect it to be in a regular narrative film. The art design was excellent, as was the cinematography (by Lukasz Zal, who also created many memorable static frames for The Zone of Interest).

– I get what a couple of friends mean when they felt Hamnet had a somewhat emotionally distant quality, given the great trauma at its core. But of course there can be many different ways of processing/dealing with even something as unthinkable and personal as the death of one’s child. And many different ways of treating it in art (also based on cultural norms or ways in which grieving is expressed in different societies).

Some of us had a thoughtful chat about the final portion of the film – the staging of Hamlet in London, with Agnes and William both finding different forms of catharsis – and if the purported link between the real-life tragedy and Shakespeare’s most famous play was convincingly made. I’m a little undecided (I also haven’t read the Maggie O’Farrell novel, which might elucidate some of this in ways that the film doesn’t). Initially I felt that the theatre scenes came close to making forced links between the play and Hamnet's death, only steering clear of this in the end – instead becoming a more abstract depiction of an artist-husband (who has neglected his family) finding his own way to reach out, the only way he knows, through his art, to a spouse in a moment of mutual grieving.

Later, after reading a comment by my friend Nikhil Kumar (who has read the novel), I felt that the link with Hamlet was subtle but solid enough. Put in very basic terms: a father haunted by a son’s ghost reverses the roles and writes a drama about a son haunted by a father’s ghost. (While also playing the Ghost himself on stage, implying that he is both haunter and haunted.) In Hamlet the play, the dead don’t want to be forgotten by the living; in the real-life story (as presented here), the living don’t want to be “forgotten” by the dead. Which of course suggests a mystical/not fully knowable view of the after-life being as real a place as the world we know. (I was reminded of George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, a superb book where the liminal space, or bardo, where Lincoln’s little son finds himself after his death is just as real as the “real world” occupied by his grieving parents – and perhaps more alive and dynamic.)

In this context I’m also thinking of Hamlet’s first soliloquy in the play - “Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother / Nor customary suits of solemn black / Nor windy suspiration of forced breath… That can denote me truly”, which - if directed by the actor to an audience member - might be read as a spectral son reaching out to a grieving parent from the great beyond. (Though it’s interesting that the film didn’t use most of this soliloquy - if I recall right they used a modification of the lines as they now exist.)

– I have been a big Jessie Buckley fan for years, she is terrific here, but given everything I had heard about her centrality to this film, I was a tad surprised that she had a diminished role in the final passages. Anyway, this is an obviously author-backed part, and she is the clear Oscar favourite, but I have liked her equally in some of her earlier work, e.g. I’m Thinking of Ending Things, Men, Women Talking, The Lost Daughter, and even her small role in Chernobyl.

– I also liked the fact that some of the lines used in the staged performance of Hamlet were slightly different from the ones we have in the “finished”/current version of the play. With some dialogues even shifted around a bit. A nice reminder of how many drafts of these plays – as performed on stage – must have existed in WS’s time, with plenty of improvising until they got to the versions collected in the First Folio.
A writer searching for the right order in which to set his words, like parents searching their way through the thickets of grief and catharsis. Felt like there was a link there…

Machismo, lightness, gentleness, and the spaces in between – another Sholay essay

2026-02-09T15:04:00.000+05:30

(I have written a lot about Sholay over the years – more than I ever should have – but when Frontline magazine asked me to do a piece for their e-book about Sholay, I wrote a little something about my relationship with the film's depiction of “heroism” and “cowardice”)
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The earliest image-fragments in my head are of the two heroes standing side by side, one with a pistol, the other with a machine gun, taking on the bad guys. Veeru and Jai, eyes razor-focused, foreheads furrowed, sweat glistening: Dharmendra and Bachchan, inhabiting this hyper-dramatic, larger-than-life canvas so well, their performances a reminder that action sequences (much like song sequences) need good acting if they are to work well.

Can you picture Rajesh Khanna or Shashi Kapoor, Jeetendra or Rishi Kapoor in these roles? Well, maybe you could if you have a very rich imagination, but in my view the whole edifice would fall apart. No one could fill these shoes as well as Dharam and Bachchan did: the first a brawny “He-Man” (as so many one-note obituaries recently told us – but more on that in a bit); the second a tall, intense fellow who performed fight sequences with more conviction and wiry energy than anyone had before him.

In other words, this was the ultimate image of machismo if you were watching Sholay either when it first came out – or (like me) in the early 1980s, on videocassette or at a theatrical rerun.

That scene, with the two of them shoulder to shoulder, happens during the Holi attack. I had misremembered that there was a shot like this during the first action sequence on the train – but there wasn’t. In the train scene, Veeru and Jai are operating independently as they fight off the marauding dacoits: the former manages the engine, playing the fool, chugging from a liquor flask; the latter handles the rearguard action along with Sanjeev Kumar’s Inspector Baldev.

It is still a testosterone feast, though. And it begins with the banter between the three men, and all that talk about courage.

“Shaayad khatron se khelne ka shauk hai mujhe”, says the inspector slowly and deliberately. (“Maybe I enjoy playing with danger.”) “Hum 15-20 mein toh bhaari padenge,” boasts Veeru. (“The two of us can take on 15 or 20 in a fight.”)

And then, as the danger arrives, the gauntlet thrown down: “Kyon jailer saab, bahaduri aazmani hai?” (“Want to test our bravery?”) Followed by the iconic image of the cop aiming his gun at the handcuffs binding his two prisoners, shooting, and only then saying “Lekin bhaagne ki koshish mat karna” (“Don’t try to escape”) – because he is so confident in his ability to apprehend them again if necessary. This is swagger raised to the power of three, though Sanjeev Kumar was no one’s idea of a rugged man.

Even as a very young viewer high on adrenaline, two questions may nag you:
1) Why does he shoot at the cuffs, instead of unlocking them? That too on a moving train where a bullet gone awry could result in one of the two heroes becoming as handicapped as Thakur himself will be later? (Also, wasting a bullet!)
2) Why do Jai and Veeru offer to help fight the dacoits? Is it self-preservation combined with the opportunity to escape, or is there a deeper nobility, setting these two small-time rogues as morally above the attackers?

A quick and easy way of answering both questions is that such are the workings of mainstream cinema: you need the dramatic gesture, the big eye-catching moment; and you need to see the leading men as basically likable heroes, even if they are operating outside the law. Whatever the case, at this early stage Sholay is already investing a lot in bravery and decisiveness. (Words like “bahadur” or bahaduri” would occupy a prominent position on the screenplay’s tag-cloud.) And it continues. Later we will have:

“Loha hee lohay ko kaatta hai.”

“Loha garam hai, maar do hathoda.”

… and so on. Heaps of buff imagery: men made of iron, forged in the sun.

One can note that the dacoits are very brave too, or very desperate – relentlessly clambering onto the train even with bullets coming at them. Later in life, more “realistic” films like Paan Singh Tomar or Sonchiriya would give us a sense of these outlaws (Bandits? Baaghis? Naxalites? Some combination of all these?) as having their own imperatives and tragic back-stories. But the Sholay universe is an allegorical one: Gabbar Singh – when he arrives – is such a force of pure mythic evil, transcending realism, transcending all banal notions about shades of grey, that it is natural to see his men (and other dacoits like them) in similar terms; and to see Veeru and Jai in comparison as not just “brave” but also “good”.

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In his very first scene, Gabbar channels Shakespeare’s Caesar: “Jo darr gaya, samjho marr gaya.” This thought – it is better to die brave than to live a hundred years as a coward – is repeatedly affirmed through the film. Look at the dramatic moment, a terrifying lull before an action-storm, where Gabbar orders Veeru and Jai to put their heads at his feet. Jai seems to comply, drawing an aghast exclamation from his friend. Of course, it’s a ploy to blind Gabbar with Holi powder and resume the fighting – but the very idea that these two “heroes” could bow and ask for mercy… that’s unthinkable.

And yet, Sholay also has that key sequence – tense, wonderfully shot and choreographed – where the villagers respond with dismay to the escalation in violence, pleading that they are simple farmers who cannot afford the dacoits’ retribution. They make a case for ahimsa or non-violence; the Thakur equates this with cowardice and responds by saying that a valiant person can’t bend, he can only die. One is reminded of the Gandhi quote – “If I have to choose between cowardice and violence, I will choose violence” – that opened Mera Gaon Mera Desh, the 1971 Hindi movie that is seen as a thematic and visual forerunner to Sholay.

Thakur does of course get his way (as do we action-lovers), but a case can be made that the opposing argument is never quashed. Imaam saab, an important authority figure, may tell the villagers that an honourable death is preferable to a cowardly life, but this is after he has already lost his child. He has nothing more to lose, but the others do. And by the film’s end, even if one accepts that the fighting was necessary, the costs paid may have been too great. For many people watching Sholay, the unforgettable closing image remains that of the widow Radha, bereaved once again, closing the window as Jai’s pyre burns in the distance. The original ending where Thakur kills Gabbar – now in the newly restored prints – was described by Anupama Chopra in her Sholay book as depicting a hollow, Pyrrhic victory for Thakur Baldev Singh, who gets revenge but no real satisfaction.

As for “cowardice” – when I think about my childhood fascination with Dharmendra and Amitabh (and yes, I can still be almost as stirred by their action scenes), I also think of real-life encounters with bullies, and how there was usually no option but to back away. From aggressive residents in the neighborhood who got physically threatening when I tried to dissuade them against bursting loud firecrackers before Diwali, to the young boys who came too close, breathing menacingly down at me after our side-view mirrors had rubbed against each other in a narrow lane. Fear was my first response in these situations – and it may well have been even if I hadn’t been outnumbered four to one – along with the mundane thought that I was vulnerable since I was wearing glasses; what if someone took a swing near my eyes?

Such are the practicalities of the cowardly life. Such is the big gap between fandom and our own real-world attitudes to confrontation.

It’s well known that vigilante scenes in mainstream Hindi cinema played a cathartic-escapist role for us viewers – fantasies that would help us inhabit the avenger’s space for a few hours, feel better about the possibility of justice. But what adds a dimension here is that Sholay’s violence isn’t cartoonish: it is supremely well-choreographed (with a team of international stuntmen brought in for verisimilitude) and performed with seriousness of purpose, from the larger action sequences to the individual fights. (Watch the claustrophobic close-ups in the final fight between Veeru and Gabbar.) Action scenes in other films of the time feel quaint and synthetic next to this. The (comparative) believability of Sholay’s action makes it possible to imagine that Veeru and Jai could really exist, that one might aspire to be like them.

But at the same time, Sholay moves gradually from vagrant, untethered action towards a settled communal domesticity. Even as Veeru and Jai use their guns and fists, they are becoming more rooted, more sensitive to notions of family, community, adjustment. Scenes like the “match-fixing” one between Basanti’s mausi and Jai are played for comedy, but even this is part of the film’s arcing towards a traditional, socially approved life for its two leads. (Dibakar Banerjee’s pithy description of Sholay is “Anaath bachchon ko family milee.” Two orphans find a family.) Veeru and Jai speak of exchanging their guns for ploughs, settling into village life – and when they do, might they not adopt a cautious, pragmatic approach too? When you have children to worry about, can you afford to be constantly “brave” in the sense that is repeatedly lionized in the film?

If one can speculate along those lines, it is partly because Dharmendra and Bachchan, though such convincing action heroes, are much else. My mother added to the He-Man mythology when I was a child by pointing out how big Dharmendra’s hands were when he cradled the dying Jai’s head in them – yet she also loved the introspective “naram Dharam” of an earlier time. The same year as Sholay, the two stars appeared together in Chupke Chupke (a “small” film shot in quick time long after Sholay had begun production) – playing bhadraloks whose weapon of choice was linguistic playfulness, not guns.

There is no denying that Sholay is a very “macho” film on the surface. But it is also a film where, of the main characters, the only one earning a living as an honest, hard-working professional is a woman, Basanti. (Even Thakur, when he is a cop, airily says he doesn’t need to work – he has ancestral land.) It is a great action movie, sure, but it is also one where the boisterous hero shows a soft or goofy side, not only in romantic or comic scenes but in the dramatic ones. (Watch Dharmendra’s little facial expressions – eyes wide, constantly turning to his friend like a child seeking counsel – in scenes such as the ones where Thakur outlines their strategies.) In Sholay conversations over the years, I have often made the point that if you want to really see this for the multi-layered film it is, you need to appreciate the brilliance of Dharmendra’s and Hema Malini’s performances – rather than view them (as was too often done when I was growing up) as the glamorous adjuncts to the more “serious” actors. Their presence brings much-needed positive energy to a film that may otherwise have been unbearably heavy, even morbid. They open Sholay up, make us see its lighter possibilities.

Perhaps, then, in some faraway alternate universe, there is a sequel that isn’t an action movie at all, but simply a gentle yarn about two friends and their wives living a bucolic farming life in a small village, having adventures that could come out of a series like Panchayat – and with no grandstanding about bravery or cowardice, because that isn’t needed. The child-me may not have wanted to see that film, but I could probably find some time for it now.

Short review: I Met a Man Who Wasn't There

2026-01-29T15:54:00.001+05:30

Arunava Sinha celebrated his 100th book as a translator recently, a staggering achievement even for someone whose work ethic many of us have been in awe of for a long time. One of his comparatively minor achievements of the past week – still a hefty one, though – was dragging me out of my 1930s/1940s crime-fiction reading into a more contemporary mystery, Sakyajit Bhattacharya’s I Met a Man Who Wasn’t There (translated by Arunava from the Bengali original Shesh Mrito Pakhi). I finished the book in less than a day and was gripped throughout, even though I wasn’t all that enamoured by its central character.

Having said that this is a contemporary work (the present-day narrative being set in 2019 Darjeeling), the story deals with an attempt to solve a much older mystery, the murder of a young poet named Amitava 44 years earlier, and the cloud of suspicion that has since hung over Amitava’s one-time friend Arun Chowdhury, who went on to become one of the country’s best-selling crime novelists. This story, now as mist-covered as the terrain it unfolded in, comes to us through the investigations of a reporter named Tanaya, who has travelled from Delhi to Darjeeling to uncover new material and a fresh perspective on the case for a series she has been writing about unsolved mysteries. What Tanaya can’t anticipate is that almost as soon as she begins her interviews, she is presented with a confession – as well as a never-published manuscript written by the long-dead Amitava, a murder mystery that may contain important clues to the real-life crime.

This means that for a large portion of I Met a Man Who Wasn’t There, we are moving between two stories: Tanaya’s own investigation, and the story contained in the manuscript she has been asked to read, about the locked-room murder of a possible blackmailer sometime in the mid-1970s. As parallels gradually emerge between the crimes, she must figure out how they dovetail, what is reliable and what is misdirection.

This was a solid page-turner. Tanaya and her precociousness got a little annoying at times (she only half-jokingly likens herself to Mycroft Holmes at one point, never mind that most unlike Mycroft she 1. gets out and about a great deal, 2. makes a series of mistaken assumptions and faulty deductions) but this didn’t really affect my enjoyment of the book. At one stage in the second half I did worry that this might be an anti-narrative that would turn out to be more about sociological observation and political commentary than the actual mystery (much of the 1970s back-story has to do with the Naxalbari conflicts in the region involving the local police and dissident youngsters), but that wasn’t the case: though there is some thoughtful commentary about the arrogance of the privileged, and how easily some people become dispensable in certain situations, the resolution of the whodunit/howdunit is satisfying and well-worked-out too; even though the final explanation could have been shorter.

*And* there are little references to golden-age crime fiction and even to Shin-Honkaku, as you can see in the image included here – coincidentally two of the books I set aside so I could read this one are the Alice Arisugawa mentioned here (The Moia Island Puzzle) and Carr’s Death-Watch.

Calcutta photos: the Alipore Jail, the lake, friends, and an old dog

2026-01-26T15:49:00.001+05:30

I made a very brief trip to Calcutta, mainly to attend my friend Shamya’s sessions around the Ritwik Ghatak book at the Kolkata Literary Meet. Walked around the Rabindra Sarobar lake area with Shamya and another old friend Arijit (who had once famously danced in glee around my car after we watched Godard’s Pierrot le Fou at a Delhi film fest). Had a decent time in the Alipore Jail/Museum grounds where the fest was held, a space with many striking murals and statues and probably a few ghosts too. (Arijit and I passed snarky comments on what was said at some sessions, and had a running joke about a flogging statue being a convincing depiction of lit-fest organisers and recalcitrant speakers.)

Also had a solid Bengali dinner at Tero Parbon with friends including Soumik Sen (whose new show Jazz City will begin streaming in March); caught up, too briefly, with friends and acquaintances from the lit-community, including Jashodhara Chakraborti, Salil Tripathi, Sandip Roy, Arunava Sinha, Sohini Chattopadhyay, Kanishka Gupta, Manu Joseph, Jerry Pinto and others (there is only very limited photo evidence of all this); and spent a bit of time in Shamya’s Jodhpur Park flat, which I last saw, and stayed in, a full 27 years ago during post-grad.

Sharing a few pics at the bottom of this post. But before that: one of the highlights of my stay was getting to meet Arijit’s 12/13-year old Muzu, who came with him to Shamya’s house - a tad battle-scarred from a fight with a cat - and whom you see here. (Not that she paid me much attention.) She is clearly very well looked after and cared for, but in her eyes - with traces of incipient cataract - and general demeanor (looking a bit lost when her human was out of sight for a moment) I recognised the characteristics of the ageing, vulnerable dog. Things I have noticed a lot with some of our older community dogs in recent years (many of whom get badly neglected at precisely the stage when they need the most care and reassurance) - and which I had my own closest brush with when looking after our Kaali in her final debilitated months.

When I returned to Delhi, I saw a similar watchful vulnerability in Lara’s eyes for pretty much the first time. Something that felt subtly different from the more general nervousness that has always been part of her personality. She is 11 this year, the clock is ticking, I have been giving her daily kidney supplements for the past few months after some worrying test results, and it’s easy to anticipate (especially given her increased weight) that regular joint supplements will soon be needed too; that her movements will get slower and more strained. (She already makes very human-like complaining grunts once in a while when jumping on or off the bed.) For many years now Lara has been the most important “person” in my life (and certainly the only constant now) - and grateful as I have been to have her around so long (especially after having lost Foxie when she was only four), I also have to be in a regular state of preparedness for the end, and for everything that will precede it. It’s something I think about every time I see a really aged dog - whether one that’s feebly fending for itself on the streets or being well looked after in a comfortable home.

Here is a link to my Kaali tribute post from February 2024. And the other Cal pics are below.

(Pics from the Ritwik Ghatak Delhi events are here. And here's a 2009 post about the film Paa, and my speculations about Foxie living to an old age - which of course didn't happen; it may or may not be relevant to what I wrote above)

At Jantar Mantar, for the dogs

2026-01-23T10:07:00.000+05:30

(From my occasional sharing of a few things I had only put on Instagram and/or FB earlier)

Jantar Mantar was buzzing on the afternoon of Jan 4: I was there for the events organised on behalf of community dogs, but there were other protests going on too - about the Ankita Bhandari murder case and the US attack on Venezuela - and the many rousing speeches, made just a few dozen meters apart, often overlapped with each other. (I shared a video on my Instagram page.)

At the animals protest, some heartening and sensible things were said by Manavi Rai, Gauri Maulekhi, Ambika Shukla, Anjali Gopalan, Navtej Johar and others - all of whom do an incredible amount for community animals in their respective spheres. Others on the stage included a 10-year-old boy who feeds at the NSD campus; a woman who feeds at Jamia; others who have been assaulted/beaten up for standing up for animals.

The speeches ranged, as one would expect, from the no-holds-barred, angry ones that directly took on the venom of BJP governments across the country (with Rekha Gupta and cohort described as no different from Aurangzeb in terms of tyranny) to the quieter, more circumspect ones: Anjali Gopalan spoke of the need for “animal-lovers” to move out of their own silos and to form larger coalitions with other marginalised groups - Dalits, housing society groups, LGBTQ groups etc. Navtej Johar said the ABC of Animal Birth Control should be modified to ABCWL (ABC With Love, something that the authorities haven’t come close to managing in the past). Scientific arguments were laid out, historical context for human-animal coexistence was discussed. There were some musical performances. And cautious optimism about what is to come on January 7 and afterwards…

P.S. Of course, nothing to be particularly optimistic about happened at the hearings from Jan 7, extending till Jan 20, except that animal-carers, who had already made payments earlier to be allowed to present their cases to the SC, were finally given some sort of hearing; with the judges of course regularly interrupting with sarcastic or uninformed remarks. The fight, such, as it is continues - and meanwhile, with everything in limbo, there are plenty of reports from around the country, Telengana especially, of dogs being taken away and killed en masse.

In praise of Christianna Brand's Tour de Force

2026-01-15T11:46:00.001+05:30

Excursions in Golden Age crime fiction continue, and here is one of my favourite reads from the past couple of months: Christianna Brand’s 1955 novel Tour de Force, which is not only an immensely satisfying murder mystery (with at least three solid false solutions presented to the reader before the true one emerges) but also an amusing travel book full of droll, witty descriptions of how a bunch of (largely insular) English travellers might experience a guided Mediterranean tour. Especially when they have to contend, among other things, with blithe displays of corruption and inefficiency amidst the local cops on a self-controlled island republic called San Juan el Pirata – “with a tiny parliament and a tiny police force and a quite remarkably tiny conscience in regard to its obligations to the rest of society; but with a traditionally enormous Hereditary Grand Duke…”

This place is a hotbed of open smuggling and other activities frowned upon in much of the rest of the world.

The charming Puerto de Barrequitas, Port of the Little Boats, sends forth its fishing fleet night after moonless night and in the grey dawn welcomes it back with its contraband cargo; all hands, including such members of the international anti-smuggling police as have not been out to sea with it, turning to, to help with the unloading. But even so, it has proved, since the war, impossible to feed the insatiable maw of the contraband-hungry tourist trade without recourse to the mainland, and San Juan reluctantly smuggles in the Swiss watches, American nylons, French liqueurs and Scotch whiskey especially manufactured in Madrid, Naples and Cairo for this purpose. These are exhibited in the local shops with “Smuggled” in large letters printed on cards in various languages…

When a member of the English touring party is murdered, the others in the group soon realise that 1) modern crime-investigating methods, such as fingerprinting and forensics, are barely known of in this little fiefdom, 2) all of them, including Brand’s series detective Inspector Cockrill, are now vulnerable because the local authorities quickly want to identify a halfway-plausible suspect and put him or her away for good. (Cockrill does in fact get arrested at one point – but he simply saunters out of the jail because the people in charge forgot to lock it.)

Many of you, even if you deem yourselves crime-fiction fans, will barely have heard of Christianna Brand, much less read any of her novels. (But then, there is a sizable population of us who erroneously *think* we are classic-murder-mystery fans even when the only author we have properly encountered from the 1920s-to-50s period is Dame You-Know-Who.) I was in that league until around four months ago; since that time, I have read three Brand novels (I posted here about her medical-hospital mystery Green for Danger) and a few short stories, and have gathered from perusing Golden Age crime websites that she is regarded as being in the highest tier of writers from that period; and that possibly the only reason she isn’t as revered as Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr is that her output was very small compared to those two.

Based on the evidence so far, her reputation makes sense to me. I enjoyed all three of the novels I read (Green for Danger and Suddenly at His Residence being the others), and intend to revisit them soon – during a first read, it can take a bit of time to really get into Brand’s writing, especially because of how she moves from the headspace of one character to the next; from one third-person-subjective narrative to another. (This entails some very skilful writing, given the varying degrees of guilt or innocence involved.) Her stock in trade is the closed-circle crime: there are basically seven or eight main figures in the story, it is understood that one of them will turn out to be the murderer, and at some point each of these people is examined for motivation and opportunity. (Interestingly much of this examining/speculating happens in the form of playful conversations between the characters themselves; though they have cause to be wary or afraid of each other in the given circumstances, there is some kinship or friendship between them, much bantering, and usually some complicated romantic relationships too.)

All this suggests that there can be no sudden blindsiding, or making the killer someone whom the reader couldn’t possibly have suspected (for whatever reason: airtight alibi, apparent irrelevance, etc). And yet, craftily, Brand ensures that the solution *is* surprising. Even if you have, as a seasoned reader of whodunits, looked carefully at each character in turn and imagined them as the murderer, there will always be a key missing element, something she misdirected you with. A motivation that turns out to be very different from what may have been expected for a particular person; or an unexpected “how they did it”; or an event or conversation that can be interpreted in two or three different ways.

Naturally it’s hard to discuss this without giving away plot details, but here’s a spoiler-free example, as abstract as I can make it. Near the end of Tour de Force a certain dramatic incident, involving most of the main characters, occurs: it involves an object being dropped. Shortly afterwards, when Inspector Cockrill provides one of the false solutions to the mystery, he explains how his epiphany was based on something he observed during the above-mentioned incident. It makes perfect sense as a connect-the-dots – and yet, when Cockrill eventually provides the *real* solution, it turns out that this one *also* hinged on a separate observation he had made during the very same incident. With each of the two revelations, you’ll find yourself flipping the pages back to the description of that incident, looking first at one detail and then another. This is brilliant plotting, and there is much else like it in this expertly structured book.

And, like I said, there’s the humour. A couple of amusing passages are below.

Thoughts on Ikkis (and on watching Dharmendra and Asrani together one last time)

2026-01-07T11:30:00.000+05:30

(My latest Economic Times column: only partly a review of Ikkis, more a reflection on how our relationships with onscreen personalities can impact our feelings about a film)
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Going in to watch Ikkis, most well-informed Sriram Raghavan fans knew they should probably not expect a typical Raghavan film – “typical” meaning twist-laden noir-suspense, with doses of dark humour and affectionate tributes to the pop culture that has influenced Raghavan the movie nerd. Ikkis, it was understood, was going to be different from Andhadhun or Ek Hasina Thi or Johnny Gaddaar, more sober and perhaps self-consciously respectful – being a dramatisation of the real-life story of Arun Khetarpal, a martyred hero of the 1971 India-Pakistan war.

And yet, as a Raghavan fan nervous about the possibility of this being an impersonal, workmanlike project that almost anyone else might have helmed, I felt on safe ground the moment I saw an Asrani tribute appear before the film started – alongside a more expected tribute to Dharmendra. “Hum aapke qaidi hain” says the text, below an image of Asrani as the jailer in Sholay – and I thought to myself, that’s Raghavan’s voice all right. The boyish cinephile.

The two veteran actors (who died just a month apart) appear briefly together onscreen when Dharmendra, as Khetarpal’s old father, visits Pakistan. With Asrani playing an Alzheimer’s patient here, this is a moment that works neatly within the diegesis of a narrative about memory and forgetting (or letting go), about conflict and shared Indo-Pak culture. But it operates at another level too, for a movie buff invested in the personalities whose work he has been stimulated by over the decades – as a sentimental tribute, a swansong to two major performers of an earlier age.

Watching Dharam and Asrani, I thought about the first time they had shared screen space, 56 years ago – in Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Satyakam – and of the moment in that heartfelt, hopelessly idealistic film where the Asrani character, clowning about, sings the words “Aadmi hai kya? Bolo, aadmi hai kya?” (What is a man?) and Dharam’s Satyapriya, all ponderous and solemn, replies that man is an elevated creature capable of love and friendship and compassion.

Those higher human potentials are the warp and weft of Raghavan’s film too. I was a bit worried – based on things I had heard beforehand – that Ikkis would try so hard to be “humanist”, to set itself in opposition to more strident, bellicose, chest-thumping narratives about nation-love and evil enemies, that it might feel contrived. Well, as a war film that is also an anti-war film, encouraging introspection about the better angels of our nature – especially in moments where individuals get a chance to bond – Ikkis IS everything you’d expect. It ticks every box that would make liberals feel warm and fuzzy inside, with (probably over-simplistic) ideas about universal brotherhood, and about fair fighting on both sides in 1971. But what could have been cloying pacifism is treated here so organically, so matter-of-factly, that it works. Even for someone like me who is always a little suspicious of virtuous cinema.

Ikkis does this by focusing consistently on the small picture rather than the big one – the war scenes give us not large statements about what Pakistan and India are doing to each other, or about the deeper histories of Hindu-Muslim conflict, but instead just a ground-level view of soldiers at a specific point in time, thrust into extraordinary, surreal situations, driving giant armoured vehicles across dusty terrain in which a “dushman” wants to kill them. The taking and passing of orders, staying entrenched in the moment, the razor-sharp focus as one does one’s job as best as one can, for the motherland – all this is part of the film’s DNA, as it is in more aggressive war films; one difference being that we see the same impulses play out on the other side too, with the dushman also speaking the language of patriotism, duty, and “god on our side”. The messy randomness of what might happen on a battlefield is encapsulated in a shot where our protagonist might easily have been blown away from the side by another young man, his Pakistani equivalent, who has his tank in his sights. But the chips just happen to fall the other way – and not because of heroism alone, or because one of them has the moral upper hand.

On the whole this didn’t feel like a film that was practising sapheaded wokeness for the sake of it, without adequate reflection, without at least some hard-won cynicism about the darker sides of human nature. To me it felt honest, apart from one scene that came across as too pat: the one where Deepak Dobriyal as an embittered Pakistani soldier who loathes Indians is quickly won over by a few gentle words. This felt like idealism taken to extremes. Surely a film that is otherwise so warm and empathetic, and so mournful about war, could also allow some space to one character – who appears in a single, short scene – who isn’t willing or able to forgive?

But to return to a point made above: one big reason why I could fully open myself to Ikkis was that speaking as a Dharmendra acolyte, his screen persona was central to the film’s effect on me. This effect was strange and multi-pronged: on the one hand Raghavan is, with some verve, telling a real-life story about an actual former Brigadier who travels across the border to the place where his son died in action thirty years earlier; but at the same time, this man is played by one of our most beloved movie stars at the very end of his career; and the real-life story merges somehow with Dharmendra’s reputation as a son of the soil, a Punjabi who as a child had known undivided India, a Sikh who has written poetry himself in Urdu (with one of those poems being movingly used in the film too). It was impossible not to be sentimental about his scenes in the film – and those scenes are about a hopeful, affirmative view of the world. I couldn’t dissociate any of this from that scene in Satyakam where Dharmendra’s Satyapriya tells his friend Naren: if we don’t have idealism, what do we have left? Or words to that effect.

So I’m happy to endorse Ikkis with a “Jai Sriram” – the Sriram here being Raghavan and no one else – but before that I must channel Utpal Dutt’s gleeful exclamation in Guddi: “Jai Dharmendra!”

P.S. while on Raghavan as purveyor of cultural references... Satyakam was released in 1969, which is a year that falls roughly within the “past” timeline of Ikkis – this being when the young Arun was just getting primed for his duties as a soldier. Within this narrative, the year is represented by references to the films Aradhana and The Wild Bunch (as well as Irma la Douce, made much earlier but perhaps released belatedly in India because of its risqué content). And, of course, Raghavan the Vijay Anand/Dev Anand fanboy also manages to include a talismanic image of Dev in this canvas.

A coexistence mela at PVR Saket

2025-12-29T12:08:00.002+05:30

With a few members of our Stray Buddy family at the little “Coexistence Mela” organised at the PVR Anupam complex on Saturday. There was a waterbowl painting contest, a lucky draw, memory games involving dog names, and a crochet stall featuring the work of one of our most pro-active members, Shely, who does more for the PVR dogs than anyone else. And there were puppies, hopeful of being adopted, brought all the way from Noida.

And most of all there was plenty of enthusiasm and bonhomie - much needed in these tough times for community-dog-carers. I was especially pleased that all this was done with the cooperation of the PVR market association, and that two officials (not connected with Stray Buddy or any other animal welfare group) made brief speeches emphasising the importance of all life forms and the need for compassion and empathy. Hoping for many more such events in the near future.

(Meanwhile, in my neck of Saket - Golf View Apartments - things have been crazily stressful in recent days thanks to an unsterilised male dog having been let loose in the colony by an irresponsible "animal-lover". Trying to get the situation sorted, having just got a few of the surviving puppies adopted. People who don't have firsthand experience of these things have no idea how time-consuming and energy-sapping it can get. But one perseveres until the inevitable mental/emotional collapse happens...)

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

2025-12-20T00:38:00.000+05:30

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

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

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

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

Pupdate

2025-12-19T12:48:00.003+05:30

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

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

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

2025-12-16T16:11:00.000+05:30

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Loved the third Knives Out film...

2025-12-16T07:46:00.000+05:30

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

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

Big-screen Sholay (and a fire scare)

2025-12-14T10:05:00.001+05:30

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

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

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

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

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

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

William Brittain's short mystery stories

2025-12-12T16:26:00.001+05:30

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

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

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

Ritwik Ghatak, Unmechanical: photos from the Delhi events

2025-12-07T11:05:00.000+05:30

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A hazy photo of a fondly remembered teacher

2025-12-03T12:42:00.000+05:30

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

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

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

Puppy alert - in Saket, New Delhi

2025-12-02T17:26:00.000+05:30

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

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

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

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

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

15 John Dickson Carr mysteries for your reading pleasure

2025-11-22T22:05:00.001+05:30

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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