Jabberwock

Putting the "act" in action: Black Friday, Sword of Doom

2012-01-27T00:16:00.000+05:30

When we think of master-classes in film acting, we usually envision performers firing sharply written lines at each other in intense dramatic confrontations or (less often) comic setpieces. Or scenes that have little dialogue but where the silences are soaked in meaning; where each pause, each glance, is somehow significant; where “understatement” rules the moment. For a good sense of what is commonly thought of as a performance highlight, look at the short clips chosen when the acting nominations are read out at the Oscars. Watch enough of them and you'll see definite patterns emerging (and that’s without taking into account the Motion Picture Academy’s fondness for certain types of roles – physically or mentally disadvantaged characters, for instance – rather than the performances in them).

One thing that is usually not associated with acting chops is the high-voltage action sequence: fight scenes or chases are usually perceived as fillers or tempo-raisers, and that's what they often are (and in many of them, stuntmen substitute for the actors anyway). But every once in a while, an action scene does afford opportunities for fine performances as well as for character development within a narrative.

Recently I watched the Extras on a DVD of Anurag Kashyap’s masterful film Black Friday, about the investigation that followed the 1993 Mumbai bomb blasts. Among the movie’s highlights is the superbly choreographed and shot sequence where a group of cops pursue a suspect, Imtiaz Ghavate, through a slum area. “Anurag told me he wanted a performance from me in this chase scene,” says the actor Pranay Narayan – who plays Ghavate – in the “Making of” documentary, and a performance it certainly is. Over the course of this long scene, Imtiaz goes from being a menacing bhai figure (the first time we see him he is shot from a low camera angle, looming above us, looking blasé and in control) to a snivelling wreck being bullied around by the police; by the end it’s almost possible to feel sorry for him.

The scene begins on a purposefully energetic note, as you’d expect, but gradually becomes something of a comic routine, as the policemen and their quarry move in circles and get worn out. One hysterically funny shot has an unfit cop calling out “Imtiaz, ruk ja” as both men pant breathlessly – by this point they are lurching rather than running, and the effect is that of two quarrelling lovers trying half-heartedly to make up. It’s a fine depiction of the banality of police-work, humanising both cop and criminal – a considerable achievement given that this is a story about terrorist attacks that killed hundreds of people. It’s also a significant step away from the traditional depiction of cops and robbers in Hindi cinema. And the performances help make it compulsively believable.

Good acting is even rarer in full-blooded fight sequences. In her book Looking for the Big B: Bollywood, Bachchan and Me (which I reviewed here), Jessica Hines observes that in Bombay to Goa, made before he settled into the Angry Young Man image, Amitabh Bachchan seemed awkward during much of the film and then came alive in the fight sequences at the end. I’m not sure about this specific example (the fights in Bombay to Goa aren’t so much properly worked out action scenes as vignettes of various people knocking each other about in speeded-up motion), but not many people would disagree that Bachchan was extremely convincing in his really well-staged fight sequences in films like Sholay and Kaala Patthar.

One of my favourite “action performances” in this vein is by the great Japanese actor Tatsuya Nakadai in the climactic scene of the 1966 film Sword of Doom. Nakadai plays a sadistic swordsman named Ryunosuke who spends much of the story killing and plundering. At the end, as he sits alone in a geisha-house, he is visited by the ghosts of his victims as well as by real people who want him dead; turning completely psychotic, he slashes wildly at these phantoms over the course of an extraordinary, bloody 10-minute sequence.

Jaw-dropping in its length and persistence, this scene is the perfect apocalyptic finish to a story about a cruel and violent man facing his demons - it’s almost Shakespearean in its suggestion of the past haunting the present, and Nakadai (who would play King Lear for Kurosawa years later) is outstanding in the way he seems to be simultaneously a sentient person and a zombie. At times his movements become so mechanical one gets the impression that his arm is being driven by his “evil” sword. His eyes are hollow and lifeless, he flails unthinkingly at the air, but then he comes alive again and seems briefly conscious of what is going on around him; and then again he retreats into his own private world, while his arm continues slashing away.

Nothing in this sequence (or in the Black Friday one) would make it to those smooth Oscar acting clips, but these performances are integral to the films’ effectiveness. They are reminders that some action scenes require a little more from a performer than a grunted, expressionless “I’ll be back.”

[Did a version of this for my Business Standard film column]

In defence of the favourable (aka "dull") review

2012-01-23T23:18:00.000+05:30

You may have heard about the Hatchet Job of the Year Award, a newly instituted prize for “the writer of the angriest, funniest, most trenchant book review of the past twelve months”. The official manifesto – which I read with much interest – says the aim is to improve the standards of professional criticism and to encourage greater honesty in book reviewing.

That sounds like a good cause: I approve of anything that seeks to raise the profile of reviewing and to remind us that good criticism must aspire towards being good literature in its own right. But I was puzzled by some of the phrasing in the manifesto and in news reports about it. Consider this quote from an editor of the Omnivore website, which instituted the prize: “We are celebrating reviews that are well written, that have a point, that are insightful and also are entertaining. There are too many reviews that are a bit bland.”

Implicit here is the idea that negative reviews are the ones most likely to be “well-written” and “entertaining”, and that positive reviews are dull. There is a sliver of truth in this. Almost anyone who has reviewed professionally for some time knows that writing a snarky negative review is usually more fun – and more satisfying as a writer – than doing a favourable one. The tools of language tend to aid the angry critic more than the benevolent critic: the former has a broader and more exciting range of adjectives and analogies at his disposal; there are more opportunities to write inventive, striking prose. For similar reasons, almost anyone will find a well-written negative review more fun to read – and more impressive – than a well-written favourable review.

More problematic, though, is the widespread tendency to think of unfavourable reviews as automatically more sincere or authoritative. In his seminal essay “Towards a Theory of Film History”, written in the 1960s, Andrew Sarris noted the popular perception that the toughest reviewers were the best reviewers. “A reputation is made and measured by the percentage of movies the reviewer pans. The more movies panned, the more ‘honest’ the reviewer. Everyone knows how assiduously the movie companies seek to corrupt the press. Hence, what better proof of critical integrity than a bad notice?” Things haven’t changed much since then. A phrase commonly used in the reports I’ve read about the Hatchet Job award is “...to promote integrity”.

I admit a slight bias when it comes to this subject. My own attitude towards reviewing doesn’t involve a perception of myself as a cultural watchdog or an arbiter of taste, sternly telling people what they should or should not read. (A good reviewer with a breadth of reading experience will inevitably help some readers set standards for themselves over a period of time, but that’s another matter.) My main “responsibility”, as I see it, is to be honest about my feelings and to express them as clearly as possible. And the books that I find it most rewarding to write about are the ones that stimulated me in a largely positive way. (When I don’t care for a book, it feels like an unconscionable waste of time to do a review of it – I’ve already squandered too many precious hours reading it. In any case, if I haven’t already committed to doing a review, I might not bother to finish a book that doesn't hold my interest.)

Just to be clear, I’m not implying that there is anything inherently worthier about a positive review. Good reviews are the ones that are honest, informed and well-written, irrespective of whether they are complimentary or scathing. But I do often get the impression that favourable reviews are underappreciated (by people other than the reviewed author and his publishers, that is!). All power to the Hatchet Award – may their shortlists provide us with much entertainment in the years ahead, and also encourage professional reviewers to look deep into their hearts before getting down to their work. But equally, I hope that the publicity attached to the prize doesn’t tempt some writers to suppress the good things they see in a book, in an overzealous effort to write a hatchet review.

[Did a version of this for my Sunday Guardian column]

"The freedom to say unpopular and shocking things"

2012-01-22T21:12:00.001+05:30

Today, one of India’s greatest novelists, Salman Rushdie – a writer whose work enshrines doubt as a necessary and valuable ethical position – has been prevented from addressing this festival by those whose certainty leads them to believe that they have the right to kill anyone who opposes them [...] There are many rights for which we should fight, but the right to protection from offense is not one of them. Freedom of speech is a foundational freedom, on which all others depend. Freedom of speech means the freedom to say unpopular, even shocking things. Without it, writers can have little impact on the culture.

From the statement read out by Hari Kunzru during his session at the Jaipur Literature Festival two days ago. Also read Hari’s post about the events of that day, including the short Satanic Verses readings by him and Amitava Kumar, and the subsequent intimation that they might be in serious legal trouble if they stayed on in India.

I didn’t go to Jaipur this year, but – like everyone I know who cares about freedom of speech and worries about the increasing hegemony of the easily offended (the "bleeding-heart illiberals" as Rukun Advani cleverly put it in another context recently) – I’ve been feeling very dispirited about the events of the past few days. (This report about the police fabricating a terrorism threat was particularly mindboggling, but also completely believable.)

Earlier today in Jaipur, Nilanjana helped organise a petition to unban The Satanic Verses; I’m sure an online version of the petition will be up soon, do look out for it. Meanwhile, here are some relevant links: a fine piece in The Hindu about “the slow-motion disintegration” of a secular state; a clarification by JLF co-organiser William Dalrymple; and Salil Tripathi on India's "sepulchral silence".

Update: the online petition is here. Please sign and spread the word.

How to write about films - a workshop

2012-01-17T11:38:00.000+05:30

Advance notice about a two-day workshop I’m conducting on film criticism at the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival in Mumbai next month. Dates: February 11 and 12. Time: 10 AM to 5 PM each day, with an hour off for lunch. Venue: the Bombay Natural History Society auditorium.

We are looking at a maximum of 25 attendees, and one thing I’m very keen about is that the participants have a serious interest in cinema and in the many issues surrounding film-related writing (even if they don’t intend to become professional critics themselves). As far as possible, we want to avoid a situation where people saunter in for a few minutes and then saunter out again as they become bored with film-theory talk or with screenings from old or “obscure” movies. And that’s one reason I’m putting up this post: because I know this blog’s readers include many movie buffs who might be interested in a workshop of this sort. This will hopefully be an interactive process, not a one-way “lecture”.

I’m still putting together notes for the workshop (and probably will continue doing this right up to the day it begins!), but here’s a quick and incomplete list of what you can expect:

- Thoughts on different types of film writing (from short-form mainstream reviews to long-form criticism, academic writing, trade writing etc), the contexts in which each exists, and the functions that each can serve.

- The qualities of an ideal film reviewer/critic.

- The important difference between story and storytelling – the “what” and the “how”; thoughts on how to read a film.

- Discussions on various aspects of screen craft, including acting, cinematography, writing, editing and music.

- The Auteur Theory and the many arguments around it: the differences between “personal” and “commercial” cinema, and the points where the two things intersect.

- How style or technique can enhance a narrative, and the approaches of different directors to the same subject matter (e.g. cinematic treatments of Shakespeare by directors ranging from Kurosawa to Polanski to Vishal Bhardwaj).

- A couple of writing exercises.

Fuelling these discussions will be short screenings from a variety of movies – both Indian films like Sholay, Charulata, Jaane bhi do Yaaro and Maqbool as well as international films made by such directors as Hawks, Godard, Welles, Ozu, Tati and Scorsese. I’ll try to pack in as many clips as possible, because there is really no better way to discuss movies and how to write about them.

Anyone who wants more details, feel free to write to me at jaiarjun@gmail.com.

Nightmare of Ecstasy, a good book about a very bad director

2012-01-15T09:01:00.000+05:30

There’s a lovely scene in the 1994 film Ed Wood – a romanticised biography of the legendary “bad movie” director Edward Wood Jr – where Wood meets his hero Orson Welles. The sequence is fictional but it has a poetic aptness. Here is a man who made a series of eye-poppingly terrible movies (including the one facilely called the Worst Film of All Time, Plan 9 from Outer Space) and here is one of cinema’s greatest artists, the director of some of the most influential movies ever made – and yet they are kindred spirits in some ways: they share a boyish passion for the form and its possibilities, and their personal visions are constantly being messed with by other people who lack that passion.

The differences are more revealing though. Welles once mused (perhaps in an attempt to cheer himself up) that the absence of limitations was the enemy of art; that good art usually came out of constraints, not from unlimited freedoms. In Wood’s case, the many constraints (though they never produced anything resembling art) are what gave his story a romantic sheen. If he had received big-studio funding for scripts early in his career, his incompetence would quickly have been exposed and he would probably have ended up a tiny footnote in Hollywood’s long list of has-beens and never-weres. Instead, he independently made a number of barely financed, barely written D-grade movies, and some of them developed cult followings. Unwatchable as most of them are, they remain a mighty testament to what can happen when incredible zeal meets an equally incredible lack of talent. (“I am the patron saint of the mediocrities!” cries the composer Antonio Salieri in Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus, painfully aware that despite his lifelong love for music he has none of Mozart’s talent. But compared to Ed Wood, even Shaffer’s Salieri was a genius.)

Last week a friend gifted me the book on which Ed Wood was based – Rudolph Grey’s Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D Wood Jr. It’s a remarkable biography, being entirely made up of reminiscences by people who knew Wood, and with no authorial intervention or commentary (apart from a short Introduction). These reminiscences are presented in the style of a book-length conversation – with each quote preceded by the interviewee’s name – and this patchwork structure seems to mimic the disjointedness of Wood’s films, which were full of individual scenes that had seemingly little to do with one another.

Reading the very first page, you dive headlong into his life and career: you’re exposed to a flurry of opinions by various people, some of whose identities are not obvious (an index at the end explains who all the interviewees are). But the chatty tone turns out to be very appropriate for this material. Consider this deadpan, hillbilly quote from Wood’s mother: “Junior was born October 10, 1924, at 115 Franklin Street, off the main highway. Yep.” I love the scrupulous inclusion of that “Yep” at the end.

Wood spent most of his life and career off the main highway too. A man of many fetishes – cinema and angora sweaters being just two of the major ones – he thought up outlandish scenarios involving zombies, alien invaders and cross-dressers and wrote laughably trite scripts for them (in his universe they might all be found in the same living room or cemetery, looking confusedly at each other). He shot on minuscule budgets, with discarded props and stock footage; little wonder that this book contains several matter-of-fact utterances like “The octopus had to be covered so that the broken tentacle wouldn’t show.”

The stories and perspectives vary wildly (“Ed Wood was a crazy genius, way ahead of his time,” says one interviewee. “Ed had poor taste and was undisciplined. [His movies were] dingy, third-rate, fringe-type films,” says another) and this gives the book the feel of a diabolical jigsaw puzzle that resists completion. As Grey writes in his Introduction: “Conflicting versions of biographical incident are often charged with meaning and moment. Discovering the objective ‘truth’ of an individual’s life may be impossible beyond a schematizing of life events.” I think Wood himself would have smiled approvingly at these words – not least because they might easily be from the promotional material for one of his favourite movies, Welles’ Citizen Kane, the story of a futile attempt to understand a single life.

P.S. An inside-page blurb for the book – by Phantom of the Movies – reads “The literary even of the year” instead of “The literary event of the year”. It was most disappointing to discover that this was merely a typo, not a deliberate attempt at copying the earnest ineptitude of a Wood movie!

[Did a version of this for my Sunday Guardian column]

OMCAR conference on social media

2012-01-10T16:36:00.001+05:30

I'll be speaking for a bit about my experiences with social media (this blog, basically) at the OMCAR 2012 conference at the India Islamic Cultural Centre, Lodhi Estate on Jan 13. The programme schedule and registration details are on the official website.

The maali who weeded out myth

2012-01-08T10:18:00.000+05:30

[From my Sunday Guardian books column]

Early in A Gardener in the Wasteland, a new graphic novel based on the work of the 19th century social reformer Jotiba Phule, there is a deliberately provocative panel about caste discrimination. 1840s Poona, the text tells us, was “a hellhole of a town. A mob runs it: a Brahman mob”. The words and the imagery evoke the lawless American Old West, preparing the ground for the advent of Phule as a Wyatt Earp-like figure who will help clean things up. The drawings show decadent, hoodlum-like Brahmins (“Pass the Gangajal, will you,” one says to another, crudely probing his ear with his finger) lording it over the “lower castes”. One of them – shamelessly usurping the peasants’ hard-earned money – is depicted with bags of loot and a bank robber’s eye-mask.

These depictions can be mildly discomfiting even to readers who unconditionally denounce casteism (I admit to being briefly taken aback when I first saw them, and a friend who flipped through the book thought some of the content was extreme), but subtlety is beside the point here: this book is based largely on Phule’s polemical tract Gulamgiri (Slavery), which was an attack not just on the caste system but on the very foundations of the Brahmin way of life. He was quite the abrasive, first-strike radical, definitely not above expressing strident views if it helped make a larger point about social hypocrisy. Consider his skewering of the creation myth about the four castes being born from Lord Brahma’s mouth, arms, groin and legs (did Brahma menstruate in all four places, he asked sarcastically), or his irreverent deconstructions of the Vishnu avatars. (The Matsya avatar, he said, was a pointer that the invading Aryans came by sea.) Some of his arguments may seem muddled today, but one must never forget the context in which they arose, or the righteous anger that fuelled them. As an example of whimsical means being used to achieve a desired goal, I personally find them less objectionable than Mahatma Gandhi's suggestion that the Bihar earthquake was divine punishment for Untouchability.

Deeply influenced by Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, Phule was sceptical of the idea that freedom from British rule would be a good result for all Indians; surely the non-Brahmins would be worse off than before? Writer Srividya Natarajan and artist Aparajita Ninan juxtapose his ideas with their own modern-day journey towards understanding the issues around caste discrimination, and with other historical struggles such as the Civil Rights Movement and the French revolutions. (One drawing based on the Delacroix painting “Liberty Leading the People” has a dark-complexioned Liberty followed by a very motley group of people ranging from Martin Luther King to Karl Marx to the Buddha!)

There are minor weaknesses in the narrative, among them the unevenness of the role played by Jotirao’s wife Savitribai. The authors wanted to stress her importance in her husband’s life – and as an activist-visionary in her own right – but because there is so little historical information on her, they were reluctant to fully incorporate her into the story, and she ends up making filler appearances (to inform us, for instance, that her husband too had subscribed to the Hindu way as a young man). Another passage that didn’t quite work for me was the paralleling of the Parashuram story (genocidal, axe-wielding maniac slaughters his enemies wholesale) with the 2002 Gujarat massacre. The intent here was probably to suggest the potential for violent oppression when a group of people becomes too powerful, but the linking is problematic because it implies a specific strain of brutality in the DNA of Hinduism – when in fact any form of isolationism (or religious fundamentalism) can cause similar atrocities.

Ultimately this book is a reminder that no old story is sacrosanct; that “history, like myth, changes depending on who writes it and who reads it”. We have had a few such reminders in recent times, but the furore over A K Ramanujan’s Ramayana essay suggests that we need more (and dare one say it, perhaps a few of the liberal voices need to get as shrill as those of their opponents). A Gardener in the Wasteland is also a useful introduction to Phule – it has certainly motivated me to get hold of a Gulamgiri translation soon. For quicker access to some of his writings, you can try the excerpts included in Ramachandra Guha’s fine anthology Makers of Modern India, including the intense essay “The Condition of the Peasantry”. (An interview with Guha about that book is here.)

Fizz in film: how Coca Colonised cinema

2012-01-05T09:23:00.002+05:30

In-film advertising is a common thing these days – much too common (I sometimes fall asleep in a hall even before a movie begins, in the time it takes for the list of sponsors and media partners to display). But what happens when a brand is so big and so representative of a way of life that its very appearance in a film – however fleeting – can add layers to the narrative? Take the case of Coca-colonization, a term that links the world’s most famous soft drink with American cultural imperialism (and with enterprise, vitality, crassness and all the other supposedly American qualities that infuriate and fascinate people around the world).

Coca-Cola and cinema are roughly the same age (the drink was first bottled in 1894, a year that also saw the first copyrighted American film, Fred Ott’s Sneeze) and they have had many pleasing meetings over the past century. Once in a while, Coke has been central to a film’s plot – Billy Wilder’s One Two Three has an executive trying to get the drink into the Russian market during the Cold War years – but more often it has made humorous cameo appearances, as in Wolfgang Becker’s Goodbye Lenin! where a bed-ridden German woman, unaware of the fall of the Berlin Wall, is startled by an enormous Coca-Cola banner outside her window.

In movies by directors as different as Jean-Luc Godard and Frank Capra, Coke has been used to denounce or celebrate aspects of Americana. Sometimes both things have been done in the same sequence: in I am Cuba (which I wrote about here), a distraught farmer sets fire to his crop when he learns that his land is being sold to capitalists; but simultaneously, in a joyous scene set at a nearby bar, we see his children drinking Coca-Cola and dancing at a jukebox playing rock music.

A lovely early sequence in the 1946 British film A Matter of Life and Death takes place in a black-and-white Heaven where deceased soldiers from battlefields everywhere (rugged Sikhs and excitable Frenchmen among them) are just arriving. When a group of Americans burst in, the background music becomes loud and strident, almost as in a radio commercial. The soldiers survey this strange new place, then point excitedly at something; the camera draws back to reveal a Coke machine, and the Yanks are feeling right at home again.

In a film that is largely about the differences between the English and the Americans (and the need to come together for a common cause during WWII), this good-natured but wary scene suggests the ambivalent attitude of the former Empire to the brash young country that was about to become the next superpower. ("Officer's quarters, of course," says one of the armymen, Coke bottle still in hand, to Heaven's receptionist. "We're all the same up here, Captain," she replies stiffly.)

****

I confess to not having seen the 1950s Hindi film Miss Coca Cola, but the oldest instance I know of the use of Coke branding in a non-English-language movie is in the Ozu classic Late Spring (made in 1949, which was coincidentally the year Coca-Cola came to India for the first time). It’s just a two-second shot – as the heroine Noriko cycles with a male friend, we see a Coke ad in the foreground – but a notable one in a movie made just a few years after the war, and by a director who was known for calmly observing his society’s gradual shifts toward a more westernised way of life. (Here is a post about another later Ozu film Good Morning, in which television comes to Japan in the 1950s.)

My favourite cinematic Coke moments though are the ones that align comedy to subtle social observation. In the uproarious The Gods Must be Crazy, Kalahari bushmen discover an empty Coca-Cola bottle that introduces them to the concept of personal property; when this ferments feelings of envy and possessiveness, they decide that the ghastly object must be chucked off the edge of the world. But an equally funny – and more caustic – reference to Coke as a symbol of the Capitalist Way came in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove. With the nuclear destruction of the world looming, a British group captain named Mandrake must get a crucial code across to the US president. He needs loose change for the phone booth, so he asks an American colonel, Guano, to destroy a nearby Coca-Cola machine and get a few coins out.

“That’s private property,” Guano bristles, “You’ll have to answer to the Coca-Cola company!”

The words are said with such reverence that there’s no missing the point: even at a time like this, corporate profit gets right of way. And when the Coke machine is eventually shot open, it’s almost like an apocalyptic prefiguring – because not long after this, the film ends with the planet blowing up. What we thought was just a fizzy drink turned out to be a cornerstone of our civilisation.

[If you remember any other notable Coke scenes in movies, please share them here]

Felanee: An Assamese tale, tarnished by drab storytelling

2012-01-01T18:24:00.000+05:30

[This is from my Sunday Guardian books column. Also in the latest issue: this fine review by Aishwarya Subramanian of a new Ramayana retelling]

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

Arupa Patangia Kalita’s The Story of Felanee (English translation by Deepika Phukan) is a novel about a woman who spends much of her life being buffeted by the winds of ethnic violence in Assam. This is promising material given the relative meagerness of English-language fiction from that state (and especially, the lack of writing about the sufferings of Bengali-speaking migrants in the 1970s and 80s), but I was disappointed by the dryness of the telling. Little thought is given to novelistic structure or flow, and the prose mainly follows the arrangement “This happened. Then this happened. And immediately after that, this happened.” (Sample: The boys departed. All was quiet. Suddenly she felt warm. There was a splitting sound. The dry heap right on top was on fire!)

In certain contexts this sort of writing can be very effective. It can, for instance, be used to convey horrors so profound that the only decent way to express them is through a deadpan narrative (or one that discerningly builds towards an emotional crescendo, as in William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice). But the inertia in the early chapters of Felanee doesn’t seem harnessed to a larger cause, it’s merely stultifying, and I’m not sure if this is a weakness in the original writing or in the translation. The story arc is odd too: the first, ten-page chapter is a static account of the lives of Felanee’s grandparents and then her parents; the chapter ends with the newborn baby girl being rescued, and before we know it Felanee is grown up and herself the mother of a seven-year-old boy. It’s at this point that the major action of the novel begins (with the agitations of the late 70s, which uproot Felanee and her family) but the meandering structure does little to create empathy for the book’s protagonist, or to even give us the impression that we know her.

I found these flaws instructive because they are reminders of the effort needed to create good fiction “based on real-life events” (and another reminder that story and storytelling are two different beasts). Many terrible things happen in Felanee: it contains descriptions of people being skinned alive, their fingers fed to dogs; of baby corpses split down the middle; of entire villages being massacred. There is no question that real people have had such horrors visited on them – in Assam, as elsewhere - but even the most responsive reader can become inured to a sequence of tragedies presented in the style of a textbook. Insensitive though this might sound, it isn’t always enough to know that ghastly things really happened - a good novel (and most good narrative non-fiction for that matter) has to make the reader invest in its characters. The more I read Felanee, the more I thought about an aphorism tossed off by Teju Cole at the Goa literary festival: “If it is well-written, it is true. If it is poorly written, it is a lie.”

****

In fairness, the narrative does pick up after the first 50 or 60 pages: as it becomes more conversation-driven, Felanee and the other characters – mainly women from the refugee camps who are in the same predicament as her – feel a little more fleshed out. There are some strong pen portraits – such as one of a shrunken old woman with a prolapsed uterus – along with sharp reminders of how removed these lives are from the mainstream Indian experience. (When Felanee hears about the killing of the Prime Minister – Indira Gandhi – she can only think about this distant, unfamiliar woman in terms of her own life and reference points: “Who could have killed her? And for what? Could she have had enemies? What would her children do now? Did she have a husband, or parents?”)

But the missteps in the book’s first few chapters cast a long shadow, and even as I list the strengths I feel like the faux-objective reviewer who is trying too hard to be “balanced”. Felanee may have something to offer a reader seeking a strictly functional account of Assamese insurgency and militancy. It might work – just about – as a non-fiction book where the main aim is to provide a glimpse of a historical moment. But it isn’t what I would call a good novel.

A year-end list (sort of)

2011-12-31T12:20:00.000+05:30

I try to avoid reading (or doing) any of the countless best-of lists that fill newspapers at this time of year, but here's a little something I did for the Telegraph - nothing like a comprehensive or authoritative list, just five books and five films I enjoyed across genres this year.

(Ignore the article headline and sub-heads.)

The casino, the brothels, the beggars, the rebels: notes on I am Cuba

2011-12-29T14:32:00.000+05:30

A recent conversation with a non-Indian acquaintance who was seeking recommendations for “definitive” Indian movies – “the ones that best capture the ethos of the country” – had me thinking: is it possible for a filmmaker to convey everything important about a place in a two-hour feature? Well, the short and honest answer is no, of course, but if you attempt it you might look at a country that is on the cusp of a historically vital moment – and then you might turn for inspiration to the 1964 film I am Cuba.

Made by the Russian director Mikhail Kalatozov as a celebration of the Castro-led revolution (and of socialism in general), this is a tremendous visual essay on a place and a zeitgeist, and a classic example of no-holds-barred, avant-garde filmmaking. Formally speaking, it’s one of the most inventive movies I’ve seen, right from the lengthy opening shot, a stunning aerial view of the coastline and a forest of palm trees. (Martin Scorsese even proposed that movie history might have been different if I am Cuba – which was out of circulation for decades and only recently restored – had been widely seen by filmmakers and film students 45 years ago.)

Less interesting is the film’s ideology, including its relatively uncomplicated view of revolution and change, oppressors and victims. The narrative is made up of four vignettes: a sweet girl named Maria works as a prostitute-escort for crass Americans at a nightclub (where she uses the more modern name Betty); an old farmer, Pedro, destroys his carefully cultivated sugarcane crop when he learns that his land is to be sold to capitalists; youngsters in Havana lead demonstrations against the Batista regime; and another farmer, initially a peace-monger, joins the rebels in the mountains when his home is destroyed. (This last episode reminded me strongly of Ingmar Bergman’s film Shame, one of the most effective depictions I’ve seen of sudden violence changing people who want nothing more than to lead anonymous lives. Like the apolitical musicians in that film, the farmer Mariano wants to live in peace, he doesn’t want to go to war – but the war comes to him anyway.)

I didn’t think any of these stories set out to be particularly nuanced. For instance, the Maria/Betty episode is an allegory of Cuba as the Virgin (Maria) despoiled by capitalist tourists, and the Americans are portrayed as caricatures with hyper-exaggerated accents (but then again, who can tell, given the types of rich Havana lifestyles being depicted here). It’s simultaneously repelling and amusing when a big dumb Yank drawls “All men are created equal” and starts drawing lots to divide the girls up among his friends. (Nothing is indecent in Cuba if you have the dough, he says, though Maria briefly tries to defy these words by refusing to sell her crucifix to a souvenir-collector.)

A face of the country that is hidden from these revellers comes into view when the setting shifts from the posh nightclub to Maria’s rundown shack in a slum area. Her client – looking most incongruous in his white suit – tries to escape this hellhole of poverty in the morning, but finds himself mobbed by bands of little children begging for money. As he stumbles about in confusion, the segment-closing voiceover begins. “I am Cuba,” it goes, “Why are you running away?”

You came to have fun. Isn’t this a happy picture? For you, I am the casino, the bar, hotels and brothels. But the hands of these children and old people are also me.

The sentiments expressed here and elsewhere might appeal to someone with a polarised view of the world where Che Guevera stands proudly in one corner while America and Capitalism glower in the other. But a more discerning viewer might also wonder if this elegantly filmed sequence with its mobile, handheld camera doesn’t amount to poverty porn – the sort that made so many people uneasy when they encountered it in Slumdog Millionnaire.

Throughout I am Cuba, pedantic ideas mix with gorgeous imagery, but thankfully there is much more of the latter. The stock words overused by reviewers to describe a beautifully shot movie – “poetic”, “hallucinatory”, “hypnotic” – are entirely appropriate for this one. Nearly every scene is heavily stylised. The camera never stops moving, there are visual flourishes and a playfulness – a willingness to push technique as far as possible – that I always associate with the best work of Orson Welles (Citizen Kane of course, but also Touch of Evil, The Magnificent Ambersons, F for Fake and Othello).

Like those films, this is a highly self-conscious work. Kalatozov and his cameraman Sergei Urusevsky use canted angles, very long takes, wide-angle shots that appear to stretch the landscape, and unusual lighting effects that draw attention to themselves (in the first scene I could barely recognise the palm trees for what they were because they were made to look unnaturally pale). There are so many lovely sights and sounds. The melodic chant of a young fruit-seller, and the close-up of his betrayed face when he realises his girlfriend has traded on her virtue. A hypnotic (yes, that word again!) vision of a revolutionary in a maelstrom of smoke and hosed water, his face appearing to dissolve as he falls towards the wet ground (with the camera looking up at him). The apocalyptic scene of the old farmer setting fire to his crop, with the moon appearing to recede as he looks up at it. Shadows of falling pamphlets, like little angels of grace gliding above the characters. If a movie has to err on the side of “too much style”, this is the way to do it.

In the film's best scenes, though, the technical showing off is integral to the narrative. A breathtaking sequence of a martyr’s funeral procession – with the camera climbing upwards and sideways, past buildings, and then floating in the air above the parade – has a heady, liberating quality completely suited to what is being depicted; it has the effect of bringing us closer to the heart of the revolution and to the people in their balconies, cheering the rebels on. Another enduring image towards the end is that of the weary but exhilarated faces of arrested rebels. When asked for the whereabouts of their leader, they chant “I am Fidel” in turn (it’s like a version of “I am Spartacus”), and the way the scene is orchestrated, “Fidel” comes to stand for something much more than a single individual – it’s the ideal that makes everything worthwhile for these people.

At moments like these the film transcends its narrow doctrine and becomes a much more universal document of the human spirit. Whether it tells us everything we need to know about Cuba is of course another question entirely.

P.S. One of the most narcissistic things a reviewer can do is to quote himself, but well: in this post about Michael Powell’s 49th Parallel, I mentioned that propaganda often doesn’t gel with dynamic, imaginative filmmaking; that movies made with the chief aim of educating or rousing an audience will usually emphasise content over form. When I wrote that, I definitely wasn’t thinking about I am Cuba. If you see it, do yourself the favour of not seeing it on a small computer screen. And try to find a version where Russian dubbing doesn’t overlap with the original Spanish voice-track. (The one I saw has both playing at the same time, which is distracting, even though the film doesn’t have much fast-paced conversation.)

P.P.S. Here’s an old post about a great documentary – Nanook of the North – that provided an idealised (and partly manufactured) view of a particular people. And a post about another visually striking propaganda film – Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will – is here.

Talking crime with Zac

2011-12-26T10:43:00.002+05:30

Here's my latest Sunday Guardian column - partly an account of a "crime fiction" session with Zac O'Yeah at the Goa fest. It's fairly snippety, as behooves this time of year when newspapers don't get read much and feature writers/columnists content themselves with year-end lists. Will try to do something more elaborate on crime writing at some point.

P.S. My review of Zac's book Once Upon a Time in Scandinavistan is here.

"What a Character" on NDTV

2011-12-24T10:47:00.001+05:30

I’ve done the scripts for a few episodes of a new NDTV 24X7 show titled What a Character, about famous protagonists from Hindi movies. Two episodes (I think) have already been telecast but you can catch the others on Sunday nights at 10.30 and Saturday mornings at 9.30.

The writing is fairly basic, of course, intended as small bytes for TV voiceovers – nothing like the reviews I do here. But it’s been an interesting experience, and challenging in its own way. (Write a sentence like “Amitabh Bachchan first played an angry young man named Vijay more than 15 years before Agneepath” and you’re asked not to be so academic. Being an academic has been one of my life's many thwarted ambitions, so this made me feel all warm and Christmassy.)

So keep an eye out for the show. The line-up of characters includes Munnabhai, Gabbar Singh, Umrao Jaan and the deceased Commissioner DeMello from THAT film.

Goa fest videos

2011-12-22T13:55:00.001+05:30

Some snippets from my chat with Teju Cole in Goa are on Youtube now – here and here. I hope they put the whole thing up at some point. The discussion went well, but it was a pity that we were abruptly cut off when we could have carried on for another 15-20 minutes – especially given that the day’s last session, scheduled after ours, was cancelled anyway.

Also, here are a few minutes from my session with the redoubtable Zac O’Yeah. It was originally meant to be Zac in conversation with Kjell Eriksson about Swedish crime fiction, but Eriksson couldn’t make it because of visa issues, so Zac asked me to put on my best Swedish accent and fill in. He anchored the session and was both erudite and funny.

And one of the best things about the festival was Amitav Ghosh’s lovely speech at the opening ceremony. It's in this video (starting around the 2:25 mark).

On Dave Prager's Delirious Delhi

2011-12-21T11:28:00.000+05:30

[Did this for my Sunday Guardian column]

If one of the uses of literature is to make the familiar seem unfamiliar, parts of Dave Prager’s book Delirious Delhi gave me a new way of looking at the city I’ve spent all my life in. For instance, I thought I knew south Delhi like the back of my hand, but “division by boulevards” is not a phrase I would have ever thought to use for it. On reflection, though, it makes sense given Prager’s experiences as a foreigner living in Hauz Khas and travelling to his Gurgaon office – by taxi – every day. For someone like him – daunted by the traffic and bemused by the lack of “bridges” from one boulevard to the next – it’s understandable that each south Delhi locality would feel cut off from its neighbours.

And so, Green Park was just a five-minute walk from where he and his wife Jenny were staying, but “because we rarely dared to dash across that dangerous street, and because the same journey by autorickshaw would have included a frustrating gauntlet of red lights and U-turns, we hardly ever went [there].” The structure of each south Delhi neighborhood, observes Prager, is such that it focuses life “squarely towards the centre. Residents are both figuratively and physically forced to turn their backs towards everything outside. It’s introversion by municipal design...we can’t help but see south Delhi as isolated islands separated by seas of traffic”.

I can empathise, though my own experience of the city has been considerably different – at least back in the days when I was driving around a lot more and had friends and family staying in the different “boulevards” of south Delhi, with the result that no neighborhood was completely unfamiliar. (In more recent years the Metro has changed the way many Delhiites use their city, but the south Delhi phase wasn’t operational when Prager was living here.) Subjectivity does have its limits though: I was puzzled by Prager’s observation that most restaurants in south Delhi are empty by 10 pm.

****

Delirious Delhi is a mixed bag overall. Prager has a broad sense of humour that usually works, his enthusiasm is infectious and I enjoyed his obsessive interest in such things as the intonations of the word “bhaiya” by women trying to hector sabzi-wallahs. But he is a little too keen to differentiate his Delhi narrative from the ones found in “most books about India written by Westerners”. Apparently most Westerners hate India at first but then learn to love it: “At first they’re horrified by the poverty but then they ‘find spirituality’ in every speck of dirt.” Unless Prager has been reading only the sketchiest travelogue-epiphanies, this sounds a bit like a straw-man proposal.

In any case there is nothing especially distinctive about his experience: “We were to vacillate back and forth between the two extremes – love India, hate India, love India, hate India – until we found equilibrium. We learned to love the things that should be loved, and hate the things that should be hated.” But isn’t this how most sane people experience not just life in a particular place but life in general? And a subsequent observation – “Delhi is whatever you make of it...In Delhi, all things are true at once” – is really just a tiny variant on something that writers (Indian and non-Indian) have been saying about this country for decades.

I mean this less as a criticism of the book (which is very readable if occasionally long-winded) and more as a criticism of a tendency in non-fiction writing to make pronouncements and create easily digested narratives rather than simply follow the principles of good termite art (or at least the “show, don’t tell” dictum). The nearly 400 pages of Delirious Delhi are more than enough to show that Delhi is a place where anything (and its opposite) is possible, and in fact this book is a little like the city itself: sprawling, unruly, continuing to expand alarmingly just when you think you might have reached the border (or in this case, the end of a chapter). But it may have worked better as a free-flowing collection of anecdotes, related in a deadpan style and less weighed down by commentary.

[Some Delhi-related posts here]

Literature in Goa

2011-12-14T08:37:00.003+05:30

The programme schedule for the Goa Arts and Literary Festival (Dec 17-21) isn't on the website yet, but I have it on reasonable authority that at 6 pm on December 17 I'll be in conversation with Teju Cole about his hugely acclaimed novel Open City (my review here) and his writing career in general. At some point on the 18th or 19th, I might be speaking for a bit about film criticism. And there might also be a reading from Jaane bhi do Yaaro: Seriously Funny Since 1983 and The Popcorn Essayists. If you're in the vicinity, do drop by and say hello.

(General info about the Goa festival - participants, venue, registration etc - is here)
Update: part of the schedule is online now - here's the link (PDF).

On movie technique, criticism and Kael

2011-12-13T20:07:00.001+05:30

One wants very much to talk about what makes Tolstoy uniquely Tolstoy and Renoir uniquely Renoir -- and that's their technique, their vision -- not just their stories or their themes. You can't "distinguish form and content for the purposes of analysis," because (as we all know) the form is the content, and what the artist has done is how the artist did it. You can't perceive the whole without taking notice of the specifics, any more than you can absorb a novel without reading the words or see a movie without looking at the images.

Almost dislocated my neck while reading this piece by Jim Emerson, because I was nodding so vigorously. If you're at all interested in films and how to think or write about them, do take the time to read it. Also read the footnotes. And the links to earlier posts he has provided at the end.

[Slightly related: here's a piece I did about Pauline Kael a few weeks ago]

Literary carnival notes 2: book-to-film adaptations

2011-12-11T14:44:00.000+05:30

[Did a shorter version of this for my Sunday Guardian column]

At the Times of India Literary Carnival, I participated in a panel about books being adapted into films. Adeptly moderated though the discussion was – by author, screenwriter and all-round funny man Anuvab Pal – there’s no way an hour-long session can cover all bases on this wide-ranging topic. Still, it was a good excuse to put together some of my scattered thoughts about adaptation. Here goes:

One of my peeves as a film buff is that too many reviews these days discuss movies almost exclusively in terms of their plots. Overemphasis on story has the effect of neglecting how the story is told with the techniques that cinema has at its disposal (and which differentiate it from literature). It also fosters a culture where some reviewers (both in mainstream and online media) don’t even feel the need to be acquainted with the most rudimentary camera movements: the difference between a pan and a tracking shot, for example, or between a match cut and a jump cut.

If you even mention these things while discussing a film, you might be accused of getting “too technical”, but this is basic moviemaking grammar. It would be unthinkable for a professional book reviewer to not know the difference between active voice and passive voice, or between a first-person and third-person narrative. (Actually a good book reviewer would be expected to know much more, but I’m deliberately setting the bar very low here!) It’s a pity then that movie critics are held to much lower standards simply because cinema is such a popular and egalitarian form.

Anyway, this may be something to keep in mind while assessing the quality of an adaptation and the ways in which a film deviates from the book it was based on. One of the things that came up during our discussion was that the high quality of a literary work does not necessarily translate into high quality in the movie made from it. (If that were the case, a stationary-camera recording of a good stage production of Hamlet would automatically be a great film.) As our co-panellist Sooni Taraporevala, the screenwriter of such films as Salaam Bombay and The Namesake, put it: “A film mustn’t simply be an illustration of the book.”

I also liked the term Sooni used – “spiritual DNA” – to refer to the essence of a literary work, which is what an adapting screenwriter should mainly be concerned with. Thus, a good adaptation might capture the essential theme or mood of a book even if superficial details of period, setting and character names are altered. Shakespeare is a good example: there have been Japanese, Russian and Indian film versions of his work, made in languages that are arguably twice removed from the 16th century English he worked in. There have also been modernised versions, such as the 1995 Richard III which shifted the action to the pre-World War II years and included a scene where Richard speaks part of his “winter of our discontent” soliloquy while standing at a men’s urinal.

If you’re a purist, such changes might seem sensationalistic, but I think the film catches the essence of Shakespeare’s memorable protagonist: the self-loathing mixed with self-pitying, the insatiable appetite for scheming and deceiving, the need to avenge himself on everyone around him. (Another example in a similar vein: in Roman Polanski’s excellent Macbeth, Lady Macbeth does her sleepwalking scene in the nude. It has been cynically noted that the film was co-produced by Playboy, but I don’t think there’s anything gratuitous about the scene itself; it works quite well as a depiction of the sudden vulnerability of a character who has been so thoroughly in control for most of the play.)

But often, spiritual DNA isn’t easy to define, especially when adaptation involves a big change in period or setting. John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola adapted Joseph Conrad’s 1903 novel Heart of Darkness into Apocalypse Now, significantly updating the story – Conrad’s themes of imperialistic hegemony, exploitation and the savagery in human nature were set in a story about a man from a “civilised” country (England at the height of its powers) journeying into a “place of darkness” (the African Congo), and the film placed these ideas in the context of what America was doing to Vietnam in the 1970s. Yet the differences between the two works are just as important: Conrad’s book is full of darkness and despair, but it has a moral compass – a sense that one can visit the darkest areas of the soul and return with one’s sanity intact – whereas Apocalypse Now is a more nihilistic work – it’s very much a product of a century that had seen two world wars, nuclear destruction and the greatest horror of all, the Holocaust.

****

Earlier at the festival, I spoke with the Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid, whose novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist is being made into a film by Mira Nair. “I didn’t realise writers and filmmakers were such different sorts of people,” he said jovially, relating his admiration for how attuned Nair was to the activities of every last person on her set. Working in seclusion is central to what writers do, whereas film directors – even the relatively introverted ones – have to be adept at managing groups of people. This personality conflict between writers and directors (and occasionally between writer-directors and money-minded producers) has shaped the course of movie history, providing some hugelyentertaining anecdotes along the way. (Walking through a long hotel corridor that morning before leaving for the fest venue, I had a vision of the apocalyptic, burning-hotel climax of the Coen Brothers’ Barton Fink, a film about a hapless screenwriter coming to Hollywood and ending up, quite literally, in Hell.)

But there are also times when a serendipitous collaboration occurs between two people who might seem very different “types”. Consider Ruskin Bond and Vishal Bhardwaj. Bond’s writing style is genteel in the old-fashioned English way, the prose Spartan and direct; Bhardwaj’s films tend to be baroque, set in the Indian hinterland and peopled by rough-speaking types. The two men barely speak a common language, but I watched them in conversation at an event earlier this year and realised that in some things – notably in their shared penchant for black humour – they were on exactly the same wavelength. This helps explain their friendship and frequent collaboration, most notably on Bond’s children’s story The Blue Umbrella, which Bhardwaj made into a film that was much lusher in tone than Bond’s story (right down to the claustrophobia-inducing close-ups of Pankaj Kapoor as the greedy shopkeeper). It’s an example of a really good adaptation that doesn’t try to be slavishly faithful to its source material.

On the question of slavish faithfulness: when a literary work is being turned into a commercial or semi-commercial film, it’s almost inevitable that there will be changes that the original writer doesn’t care for; there will be a certain amount of pandering to the star system, and so on. During the audience Q&A, someone mentioned the “Dola re Dola” song in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s version of Devdas, which brought together Paro and Chandramukhi, two characters who have nothing to do with each other in the original story. Even defenders of Bhansali’s opulent filmmaking style would probably concede that a large part of the motivation for the scene was having Madhuri Dixit and Aishwarya Rai together on screen for a spectacular, paisa-vasool dance performance.

I wrote in this post about R K Narayan’s sardonic essay about the making of Guide. The process of “glamorising” his small-town story and its characters would have begun at the point where Dev Anand and Waheeda Rehman – big stars with established screen personas – were cast in the roles of Raju the guide and Rosie the dancer. And of course, many changes were made to the story itself. But however much one admires and sympathises with Narayan the writer, the film must ultimately be judged on its own terms (and many movie buffs would agree that the Hindi version of Guide is an outstanding achievement in commercial filmmaking). There are many instances of movies that are excellent in themselves while being less than satisfying as adaptations.

*****

During our session Sooni spoke interestingly about how, when turning a novel into a screenplay, she had to find an exterior expression for the interiority of a character’s thoughts. This must have been especially relevant to her adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, because the book had surprisingly little dialogue; mostly it took the form of an omniscient narrator telling us about the lives and thoughts of Gogol and the other characters. Sooni had to create voices for these people, who had to be depicted on screen by flesh-and-blood actors who would actually talk to each other.

Writing aside, there are thousands of instances of a seemingly minor decision by a filmmaker adding layers to the story he is adapting – from Satyajit Ray’s use of Ravi Shankar’s shehnai music at key emotional points in Aparajito (based on Bibhutibhushan Banerjee’s book which, needless to say, did not use music of any sort as an accompaniment to a dramatic scene!) to Stanley Kubrick filming a frenetic orgy in fast motion (and with a fixed camera impassively recording the action) in A Clockwork Orange (based on Anthony Burgess’s novel, which was widely believed to be unfilmable). I'll be putting up a few more notes on this subject in the coming weeks, with more examples. Meanwhile, here are some earlier, related posts: Susannah’s Seven Husbands from short story to script; R K Narayan and Guide; The Namesake; Polanski’s Macbeth; my Yahoo column on story and storytelling.

Notes from the ToI fest

2011-12-06T17:08:00.001+05:30

While I was at the Times of India Literary Carnival, I got an SMS from a friend wondering if there was anything genuinely wrong with the fest, given the criticism she'd been reading on social media, or if it was mainly kneejerk ToI-bashing. I had hardly been online in the previous two days and didn’t know exactly what she was referring to, but this was my reply: “Nothing particularly wrong at all. Very professionally organised, sessions proceeding quite smoothly. There are of course irrelevant/banal things being said every now and again, but that happens in any such lit-fest.”

I’ve done my share of (considered, not kneejerk) ToI-bashing in the past and intend to continue whenever I think it’s required, but lots of credit must be given here. If anything, I thought the festival organisers may have sold themselves short by labelling it a “carnival” and stressing that it wasn’t meant to be just a serious literary event but a celebration of various things Mumbai loved. (Strangely, this candour failed to deter idiots of the sort who stand up and ask at the end of a session “Why have you invited celebrities here instead of writers?”, never mind that the “celebrity” on the panel is also the author of a dozen books.) The best sessions here – and there were many good ones – were every bit as serious-intentioned as the ones I’ve attended at any other lit-fest. (And the other lit-fests that take themselves more seriously can be just as carnivalesque in parts.)

– One of the highlights for me was the session that had Jug Suraiya interviewed by his wife Bunny ("Jug's Bunny", it was cheekily titled). A nice idea to start with, it was executed with restraint – no unnecessary in-jokes or distracting banter, just two people having an engaging, affectionate conversation about various things: the nature and ethics of humour (Jug: “The shafts of humour should always be pointed upwards. My legitimate targets are the people who are more powerful and privileged than I am. And if you don’t genuinely find yourself an absurd creature and worthy of ridiculing, you have no business being a humorist”); giving offence; censorship and liberalism; changing mindsets in Indian journalism (“When I first started working at the ToI 25 years ago, Girilal Jain was awestruck when he saw my byline in the New York Review of Books. That wouldn’t happen today”); new technology (“machines stop working when I come near them”) and the legacy of the Junior Statesman, which provided a means for young people around the country to communicate with each other and to be magazine "prosumers" decades before the Internet.

There were one or two nice personal asides too: at one point Jug mentioned that he had made a career out of pissing people off, including Jayalalitha, Amitabh Bachchan and others. “And me of course,” Bunny said, to which Jug replied, “But see, that proves my point about humour being directed upwards – you’re a much more formidable personality than I am!”

Jug is tremendously likable anyway, but one thing I find especially charming is his schoolboy-like habit of standing up, hands behind his back, to answer each audience question. Even when he’s being gently sardonic. (Asked if he was in a position to criticise writers like Chetan Bhagat and Shobha De for “taking liberties with the language” when he occasionally did so in his columns too, he replied: “There’s a difference between taking liberties with the language knowingly and unknowingly.”)

– It’s useful to remember that there are inherent weaknesses in the format of a time-bound public discussion with four or five people on stage (including perhaps a mix of reticent speakers and overconfident loudmouths – all of whom must share time and condense complex thoughts into quick sound-bytes): the participants might go off on a tangent, the panel topic might not be strictly adhered to, and even when it is, such a discussion is rarely going to have the depth of a long one-on-one interview or a talk given by an individual. But the quality of any given session ultimately depends on the panellists and especially the moderator. A nod to Jonathan Shainin who did a fine, professional job of moderating a session about journalists working on narrative non-fiction books – and an equally good job of keeping the audience honest during the Q&A. Anyone who might have wished to ramble on about his own life for 20 minutes instead of asking a straight question (this often happens at lit-fests) would have quickly been dissuaded by Jonathan’s warning – issued in an authoritative, evil-white-man voice – that he would NOT permit commentary, only questions.

– Journalism was a running theme in some of the sessions I attended. In the one moderated by Jonathan, Samanth Subramanian and Rahul Pandita (discussing their books Following Fish and Hello Bastar respectively) said interesting things about the ways in which literature and journalism intersect. Speaking about her book Death in Mumbai: A True Story (about the Neeraj Grover killing) Mumbai Mirror editor Meenal Baghel reflected on Janet Malcolm’s remark about the “moral indefensibility” of journalism. “There is something deeply troubling about what we do,” she said, recalling a time when she found herself practically chasing a distressed old man – the father of the murder accused Emile Jerome – down a spiral staircase in a courthouse, then stopping to ask herself “What am I doing?” And this quote from Vinod Mehta about journalists being in bed with politicians and businessmen: “You have to be in bed with one businessman – the one who’s running your paper.”

(More notes soon)

Time out of joint: Stephen King revisits a "foreign country"

2011-12-05T09:49:00.003+05:30

[Did a shorter version of this for the Sunday Guardian]

Entirely without planning, Stephen King became a major theme in my reading last week. It began with his fine short story “The Dune”, included in the Granta Horror special (here's a post about that book). Then, despite my reluctance these days to commit to a really bulky book, I became hooked to King’s new 740-page novel 11.22.63, which is a time-travel story sprinkled with social observation about the late 1950s and early 60s – a key time (it can be said with the benefit of hindsight) in America’s social, cultural and political development. The date in the book’s title – November 22, 1963 – is of course a historical touchstone, and it must have special significance for an American of King’s age; he was 16 when John F Kennedy was killed in Dallas.

A romantic view of things has it that if the hugely popular president had lived and won a second term, the long-term effects for his country would mostly have been positive – for instance, the Vietnam War, which set a pattern for American hegemony around the world and created deep psychological scars for the Baby Boomers of King’s generation, might have been avoided. It’s easy then to see an element of wish-fulfilment in King’s story about a man who has the tools to change history: a good, inventive novelist is well-placed to engage in vicarious wish-fulfilment of this sort. But I think 11.22.63 came equally from his desire to simply revisit the world of his childhood and to imagine what that distant world might look like to someone who never experienced it firsthand. (Even though I’m only in my thirties, I can relate to that manner of nostalgia. I sometimes think what fun it would be to take some of the smugger 18-year-olds of today and deposit them into the pre-Internet, pre-satellite TV, pre-cellphone India of 1985, without any warning about what to expect!)

King’s protagonist is Jake Epping, a 35-year-old English teacher who gains access to a portal that opens into September 1958. The rules of the game are quickly established: a traveller can go back in time, stay for as long as he wants to, and return to the present via the portal; only two minutes will have elapsed in 2011 (regardless of how long he was away), but he will have aged by whatever period he spent in the past. And crucially, each time he uses the portal will mark a “reset” – as in Groundhog Day, all of his encounters and actions in the previous visit will be erased.

The discoverer of the portal, a diner-owner named Al, is old and dying; he has lived nearly five years in the past, attempted and failed to prevent the Kennedy assassination, and he doesn’t have the option of going through the process again. So he turns to Jake for assistance. And it’s here that King introduces a sub-plot that makes his book more complex than you might think if you read just the back-cover blurb. Jake’s initial motivation for time-travelling involves something much more low-key (in the larger scheme of things) than the Kennedy killing: he has recently read an essay written by an old janitor, Harry Dunning, whose mother and siblings were murdered by his violent father on Halloween 1958, and this seems like a god-sent opportunity to alter the destinies of that poor family.

In other words, the “watershed moment” that stirs Jake most isn’t the one in American history textbooks – it’s the one in the personal history of this anonymous old man. This tension between Big Events and seemingly unexceptional lives will become one of the most interesting things about the novel.

The subplot about Frank Dunning, the ticking time-bomb, serves a purpose both within Jake’s story and for King as a novelist gradually building suspense, shifting from one meter to the next. It’s a dress rehearsal of sorts for Jake, with Dunning cast as the relatively small-time adversary he must face before the much more tricky business of dealing with Lee Harvey Oswald and his possible associates. And for King, it helps set in place one of the central ideas in this novel: that the past is “obdurate” and resistant to change. The bigger the stakes, the more difficult Jake’s mission will become. (On the day he has to stop Dunning, he wakes up with a crippling stomach infection that almost renders him immobile; so how much worse will things get when he has to alter the destiny of the US president?)

****
The first 250 or so pages of this book – which includes two excursions into the past and two attempts by Jake to stop Dunning from killing his family – are pure thriller, laced with period detail, and it’s this section that is most likely to appeal to the casual reader. (With a few minor changes, I think this first third could have made a fine novel in its own right.) To fully enjoy the rest of the book – where Jake starts tracking the movements of that young, Russia-returned malcontent Oswald and his perplexed wife Marina – it helps to have a basic interest in the Kennedy assassination. But it isn’t imperative. In a way, JFK and Lee Harvey Oswald are Macguffins: King is really building our interest in his fictional creations, starting with Jake, Al and the mentally feeble janitor whose world fell apart when he was just 10 years old – but eventually also Sadie, the woman Jake falls in love with. Beyond a point, I stopped thinking about real history and instead became involved in this imagined world.

On the question of whether 11.22.63 needed to be as lengthy as it is, I’m undecided. King is a master of the brisk narrative, but at times I found myself losing patience and skimming over paragraphs; there are a few dispensable subplots and details, and careful editing could have cut this down by 100 to 150 pages without losing the qualities that make it such a good novel. At the same time, this is a very large canvas and a case can be made that it deserves epic treatment.

As a work of speculative fiction, this novel plays with such ideas as the Butterfly Effect and the ever-tantalising “What if?” question. (Jake and Al assume that the prevention of Kennedy’s assassination would have positive long-term effects, but what if saving the president changes the future in countless other ways that couldn’t yet be imagined?) It raises the possibility that history is full of mysterious recurrences and echoes (the past harmonizes with itself, Jake muses to himself, as he notes little connections between the people he meets and the inadvertent repetitions in his own actions). It’s also a persuasive love story, with a lonely man finding a home – and an intense, meaningful relationship – in this new world and wondering if he even wants to return to the place he came from (or even if his life in 2011 was an elaborate hallucination).

And of course it’s about the idea of the past as a foreign country, where (to quote L P Hartley) people do things differently. One of Jake’s first tangible sensations of 1958 is the wholesome taste of beer: “I sipped through the foam on top and was amazed. It was... full. Tasty all the way through. I don’t know how to express it any better than that. This fifty-years-gone world smelled worse than I ever would have expected, but it tasted a whole hell of a lot better.” Other details build up, with references to advertisements, TV shows, popular culture and the social mores and prejudices of the time; Jake has to process 1950s slang and accents whenever he speaks to anyone, and must be cautious himself about using phrases that have not yet come into existence. But there is also a caution against idealising an old way of life. In one significant passage Jake is shaken out of his living nostalgia for the “fresher” world of 1958 when he sees a makeshift outdoor toilet for “Coloured” people, located near a clump of poison ivy. He also has firsthand experience of the ugly nature of small-town gossip in a society that is still very conservative in many ways.

King must have had a great time working on this book, supplementing his boyhood memories with hard research. His affection for the period and his reluctance to over-romanticise it come through in equal measure, and at its best 11.22.63 is a terrific mix of the usual time-travel paradoxes and light social commentary on a bygone time. You need a bit of patience to read the whole thing though.

Cinema and the underdog

2011-12-01T08:58:00.000+05:30

[Did this piece on Jagannathan Krishnan's documentary Videokaaran for The Caravan. But for something much more enjoyable in the latest issue of that fine magazine, see Mihir Sharma's outstanding analysis of the Suhel Seth phenomenon]

---------

The young man looks at the camera, points at two trees growing by a wall across the railway tracks. That’s where our video theatre used to be, he says in Mumbaiya street argot. And this is where the entrance was... (the camera pans to record the empty space, as if daring the viewer to imagine the demolished theatre back into existence). “Yeh hum log ka set-up tha. Idhar se entrance dikhaane ka. Magar raid ho raha hai toh back-side se jaane ka. Saamne se bhaagega toh idhar patri hai, bhai – mar jaayega.” (“If people ran out from the front entrance during a police raid, they could get killed because of the rail tracks” say the subtitles, catching the gist of his monologue but little of its colour.)

The cops could come from that gali there, Sagai Raj elaborates. Or they might come from the other side. And all because he was showing films without a government permit. But what’s wrong with charging five rupees for a full-length Tamil movie? How would someone who earns 50 rupees a day take his family to a regular theatre at Rs 80 per ticket?

Though the streets depicted in Jagannathan Krishnan’s Videokaaran are those of a modern metropolis, the typical view is that from inside a moving autorickshaw as slums race past outside and the soundtrack plays a fragment of one of the shrill, tuneless songs (with lyrics like “Na koi chhota, na koi bada hai”) that were a paisa a dozen in the 1980s; the auto might as well be a time machine. This energetic documentary details a world that urban multiplex-goers – even the ones who are serious movie buffs – know very little about. It’s a story about the many ways in which underprivileged people watch and relate to movies, and how their lives and personalities are moulded by their cinematic adventures. It encourages us to think about what a video theatre might mean to people who don’t even have electricity in their village – wouldn’t it be like a magic show, comparable to the bioscopes of a hundred years ago?

But there’s nothing abstract or impersonal about this film – it places the viewer right amidst its characters, with the handheld camera darting from once face to the next, mimicking the eyes of an outsider who has been taken into confidence. Scenes shot in ghostly night-light add to the feeling of intimacy, creating the sense that Krishnan and his team spent a great deal of time with their subjects – and indeed, this 73-minute film was culled from dozens of hours of footage of conversations.

Its beating heart is one of the most compelling “heroes” you could hope to see in a well-scripted fictional feature, much less a documentary. Sagai is part philosophising raconteur, part giggling sociopath, a street savant with a hint of vulnerability. His laugh, an endearing mix of nervousness, brashness and a genuine desire to please, resembles a horse’s neigh, and he is capable of holding forth on just about any subject. When we first see him in a grainy night shot, he is sombrely explaining, “Cinema aur mere mein connection bolega na, Rajinikanth se hai.” (“My connection with cinema is through Rajinikanth.”) But soon the anecdotes grow. He relates stories about smuggling a stack of pirated DVDs by passing the package off as a “Mother Mary statue” and placing it in the luggage of his brother, a well-dressed man whom the police wouldn’t suspect. (“Woh mujhse bilkul opposite hai. Jaise main bilkul normal hoon na, woh bilkul formal hai.”) He shares gyaan about the intricacies of film editing and says “Mere ko cannibals bahut pasand hai” as a horror film plays on the screen. Porn isn’t bad for society, he explains, because watching a blue film can help a man read women accurately. “Woh calculation kar lega ke main kaunsi ladki ko pataaoonga. Uss ko rape karne ki zaroorat nahin hai – ladki khud uss ke paas aayegi.”

It’s possible to wonder if Sagai is too colourful a protagonist – his presence turns Videokaaran into a study of a single person. But it's also apt that this man of the streets has that indefinable thing called “star quality”, for part of the point is that Sagai is largely a construct of the movies he loves. In much of what he says, one sees the self-mythologising process at work. My birth father was a don, a criminal, he reveals at one point. Gory films seem childish to him because he’s seen far worse in real life. (When they showed Passion of the Christ, everyone else ran out but he sat and watched it coolly.) He analyses the behaviour of policemen, and studies people so closely that “even when I look at a shadow I know who it is. When we were screening films we had to monitor the audience and be alert all the time”. He and his friends have been so influenced by movie stars that they are already natural performers – the swagger and the smart lines come easily to them.

In the film’s first prolonged sequence, they discuss the relative merits of Rajinikanth and Amitabh Bachchan and rib each other good-naturedly, their street slang sprinkled with improbable English words – “hardcore” used as an exclamation point, for instance. (“Rajinikanth ka Basha. Kya movie hai na – hardcore!!”) A film speeds up whenever Rajinikanth makes an entrance, Sagai says. “With Amitabh that doesn’t happen – you wait for him to open his mouth and do dialogue-baazi.” On one level, this is classic fanboy talk, with the relative “speeds” of two superstars being used to make some kind of judgement on their mass appeal and effectiveness. But it also shows a film buff’s eye for observation – an understanding of different star personas and the types of viewers they cater to.

For these young men, Rajinikanth is comparable to a God (“Rajinikanth ka picture hum pause kar ke usska aarti uttaarte hain”) – but he is an accessible God; a Krishna-like avatar, perhaps, who might show up in the guise of a rickshaw-driver, dancing with his mates and winking at the camera. As you’d expect, a fan’s relationship with such a deity is ambivalent. One minute Sagai will irreverently explain why South Indian heroes need big crowds for their song sequences: “Background ke liye accha rahta hai. Agar hero akayla naachega toh chootiya lagta hai, cameraman ko baar baar cut karna padhta hai.” (“The hero will look like a cunt if he dances alone – he won’t be able to pull it off.”) But the next moment, he’ll be deferential: “Apun kuch nahin hai ke hum unn logon ke baare mein baat kar sakte hain” (“We are nothing compared to them, we shouldn’t even talk about them.”)

So enthusiastic are these youngsters, so involved does one become in their movie-love, that it comes as a deflating blow when Sagai shakes his head and says, “Jab se video theatre bandh ho gaya, hum picture nahin dekhte.” Today he runs a photo studio, and many of the pictures he takes are of lower-middle class people trying hard to pose like their favourite movie stars – for a modelling portfolio perhaps, or to show off to friends, or just for personal pleasure. “Aadmi apne image ko bilkul khubsoorat dekhna chahta hai,” Sagai the sagacious tells us – another reminder of how millions of “ordinary” people try to cover themselves in cine glitz.

****

Halfway through Videokaaran, Sagai describes how he and his tech-savvy friends would splice scenes into a movie to make it more appealing to their audience. “We could edit even original DVDs, insert porn even into a Schwarzenegger film. And it would be such a hit that if the original director saw our version, he would wonder why he didn’t think of doing that himself.”

Here and elsewhere, one feels that in a parallel world Sagai might have tried his hand at movie-making – but as it happened, he ended up making a video recording of his theatre being torn down. Videokaaran draws to an end with this footage interspersed with a montage of Rajini and Amitabh singing inspirational songs, and Sagai reflects once again on his “spiritual connection” with his hero. “Bachpan mein jab family troubles tha, toh Rajini ka movie dekh ke khush ho jaata tha. Usska message hai ke jeet milega hi agar struggle karega toh.” (“Rajini’s message is that if you struggle, you will always triumph.”)

Is this false hope? What does it really mean when a millionaire superstar pretending to be a coolie or an autorickshaw-driver sings out from the screen, “Renounce the world and the world is yours”? The temptation is to dismiss such “messages” as opium for the masses. But watch Videokaaran closely, see the pride and defiance in Sagai’s eyes as he describes the filmi circumstances in which he set up his photo studio – opposite the studio of the man who had turned him away without even looking closely at his work. “Eventually he saw how good I was and then he wanted to hire me, but I told him no, I’ll open a studio right in front of you.” It’s a nice little triumph-of-the-underdog story. For all the deprivation it shows, Videokaaran leaves you with the thought that Sagai is a survivor – someone who will take his opportunities instead of brooding about his misfortunes – and that he has his celluloid dreams to thank for it.

Laughing zombies, dead mothers, undead poets, bloodthirsty plants...Peruvian terrorists?

2011-11-29T09:54:00.004+05:30

[Did a version of this for Business Standard]

The cover of the new Granta has the word “Horror” in a vaguely Gothic font beneath a drawing of a fibrous blob with gooey things peering from its depths – the sort of thing H P Lovecraft’s Cthulhu might have birthed on a cold day. This could lead a reader to expect a collection of supernatural tales in the classic horror tradition, but what emerges is something subtler and more wide-ranging – perhaps too wide-ranging at times. When the word makes its first appearance inside the book – in Will Self’s “False Blood” – the reference is to the author’s long-time drug addiction (“that horror has cast a long shadow over my lives and the lives of my family, and infiltrated my fictive inscape, poisoning its field margins, salting its earth”). A theme is established: these pieces aren’t just about malevolent spirits that might assail us from without – they are also about inner betrayals of mind and body.

Thus, “horror” can mean looking down at the dead body of the woman who gave birth to you. (From Paul Auster’s “Your Birthday Has Come and Gone”, an excerpt from his forthcoming memoir, written in the second person: “You have seen several corpses in the past, and you are familiar with the inertness of the dead...but none of those corpses belonged to your mother, no other dead body was the body in which your own life began, and you can look for no more than a few seconds before you turn your head away.”) It can also mean being in a sleep-deprived, drunken state two days after the cremation, answering a phone call to find yourself verbally assailed by a sanctimonious cousin who disapproved of the dead woman’s character and has no compunctions about expressing her feelings.

Nearly as intense as Auster’s account is Julie Otsuka’s poetic “Diem Perdidi”, about another mother suffering from Alzheimer’s, while Kanitta Meechubott’s “A Garden of Illuminating Existence” is a series of hypnotic illustrations that tell the story – in nine intricate colour plates – of her grandmother’s bout with cancer of the womb. In an eerie echo of Auster’s “the body in which your own life began”, the very place that is meant to nourish life becomes a sort of hell where “the pain spreads like a great forest fire”. What greater horror could be imagined? (You can see Meechubott's illustrations here.)

I thought the most intriguing pieces were the ones that mixed tones, weaving genre tropes into real-world narratives. Self’s essay, for instance, is a reminder of how versatile a thing blood can be, mundane, mystical or terrifying depending on the context – it’s a life-force but also a traitor, and an enduring prop in the horror and gore genres. He begins with the words “Sometime over the winter of 2010-11 I began to be gorged with blood, or rather, my blood itself began to be gorged with red blood cells.” (This isn’t good news for him, but what wouldn’t a vampire give to be similarly “gorged”?) The piece also includes a morbid anecdote about a man who used his own siphoned-out, iron-rich blood as a fertiliser for pumpkins (“vampiric gourds”) – a detail that is tantalisingly close to all those pulp stories about carnivorous plants.

“Is vampirism a matter of the overly self-conscious being awakened to life by the vitality of those who are barely self-conscious at all?” wonders Mark Doty in “Insatiable”. But mark the context: this is from Doty’s book about the poet Walt Whitman, and it builds on the possibility that Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, based his vampire on Whitman. (The sentence immediately after the one quoted above reads: “Is that why Whitman liked stevedores and streetcar conductors and Long Island baymen, the big guys at home in their bodies, who would never think to write a poem?”) How could “the embodiment of lunar pallor” emerge from “the quintessential poet of affirmation”, Doty wonders, and attempts to answer his own question in a piece that touches on the bloodsucking implicit in art, and on the hints of vampirism in the relationship between a poet and his readers. (“Great poets are, by definition, undead. The voice is preserved in the warm saline of ink and of memory.”)

There are a few fiction pieces, of course, and some of them concern horrors of the mind. Joy Williams’ “Brass” and Don DeLillo’s “The Starveling” are about different kinds of isolated people: the first is in the voice of a small-town father whose boy will become a sociopath; in the second, an obsessive movie-watcher follows a woman who could be a kindred spirit, a doppelganger or perhaps just a creature of his imagination. And Sarah Hall’s atmospheric “She Murdered Mortal He” is mainly about the inner turmoil of a woman on the verge of a break-up, but leaves us wondering at the end if her emotions might have summoned up a bloody vengeance.

Meanwhile horror buffs with a sense of humour should enjoy Roberto Bolano’s “The Colonel’s Son”, which is essentially a plot description of a C-grade zombie movie so bad it’s brilliant.

“...there’s only the sound of biting and chewing until the door opens and Julie appears again with her lips (the whole of her face, actually) smeared with blood, holding the Mexican’s head in one hand.

Which makes the other Mexican crazy; he pulls out a pistol, goes up and empties into the girl, but of course the bullets don’t harm her at all and Julie laughs contentedly before grabbing the guy’s shirt, pulling him towards her and tearing his throat open with a single bite.”

(Also see this animation inspired by Bolano's piece)

But the piece that best fits the conventional definition of a horror tale is Stephen King’s “The Dune”, about a nonagenarian judge who has been obsessed since age 10 with an island a short rowing distance from his Florida estate. What draws the judge back to this place is something we learn as the story proceeds – and it builds to a conclusion that should satisfy any genre fan – but as in all of King’s best work, there is a deeper current. This story, which begins with a reflection on how human bodies deteriorate with age, touches on our foreknowledge of mortality and the attempt to beat it off; it’s also a reminder of how fleeting our lifetimes are when measured against larger forces. (I thought there was a moving subtext here: the old man has changed immeasurably, accumulating a lifetime’s worth of experiences, over the 80 years he has known the island, but the island itself remains as still and unchangeable as ever, and will continue to be so long after he is gone.)

There’s little to fault in this book if you consider just the quality of the writing, but I had a minor reservation about the two reportage-driven pieces – Tom Bamforth’s chronicle of a UN mission in Sudan and Santiago Roncagliolo’s personal account of terrorism in Peru. These are good long-form journalistic essays, but do they belong here? If the broadest possible meaning of “horror” is to be used, then of course the answer is yes. But a thematic collection that accommodates such a wide spectrum of fiction, personal memoir and reportage is a little too diffused for my liking. (For a really broad interpretation of the word, why not include one of P G Wodehouse's Blandings Castle stories on the grounds that the absence of Blandings from the real world is the most terrifying thing one can think of?) Besides, the book’s back-cover quotes Arthur Conan Doyle as saying “Where there is no imagination there is no horror.” But I'm not sure the Sudan and Peru essays, matter-of-factly listing real-world monstrosities, require quite the same level of imaginative participation from the reader as the other pieces here do.

The Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize for 2011...

2011-11-28T16:41:00.000+05:30

...goes to Jamil Ahmad’s The Wandering Falcon. I was on the jury and though the decision was “unanimous” (in the sense that all three of us were satisfied with the final choice - we weren't jumping up and down and pulling each other's noses), it wasn’t at all easy arriving at it. To begin with, the shortlist was an especially strong one. With most literary-award shortlists I've seen, it has been possible for me to immediately identify one or two books that I wouldn't seriously consider for the prize. But that wasn’t the case here: by the time I had finished reading the last of the six books, I knew it would be painful to have to pick one of them as the winner (and that my negative feelings about competition in the arts would resurface at some point).

Part of the difficulty was that these books cover a variety of themes, styles and approaches to writing about a subject, from the assured, unshowy storytelling in The Wandering Falcon to the cleverly metafictional narrative of Chinaman. (And those are two books that at least fall together under the broad head “Fiction”. There were also three extremely good non-fiction titles in the list, all with different virtues.)

In short, it felt like a pity that such a range of books had to be pitted against each other – but such are the inevitable hazards of any award process and one must accept them. Hearty congratulations then to Jamil Ahmad who (at the age of 78) is probably among the oldest writers ever to win a First Book prize. And to anyone who hasn’t read the other five on the shortlist: you could do a lot worse than pick them all up.

History of a forward-looking studio

2011-11-27T14:39:00.002+05:30

[Did a version of this for the Sunday Guardian]

Hindi-movie buffs have many reasons to be grateful for the production house Navketan, founded in 1949 by the Anand brothers Chetan and Dev – the former an established director who had won an award at the inaugural Cannes festival, the latter on his way to becoming one of Indian cinema’s best-loved leading men. Without the breezy unselfconsciousness of this studio’s best films, its refusal to get too mired in ideology – and, of course, Dev Anand’s urbane and upbeat star persona – 1950s Hindi cinema might have been suffocated by quasi-realist social dramas filled with tragic heroes and martyrs, and by a limited idea of what “Indianness” had to mean.

“In the 1950s filmmakers were involved in the ‘national project’, which inevitably involved the village in some form or the other,” writes journalist-author Sidharth Bhatia in the Introduction to his book Cinema Modern: The Navketan Story, “But the urban world of Navketan, created by the sensibility of the Anands, was as much about the Indian reality… The difference lay in the fact that their early films looked at urban India in an entertaining rather than a disaffected way.”

Personally, when I think of the early Navketan films – such as Baazi or Taxi Driver – and compare them with the more overtly socially conscious cinema of the period (some of the work of Raj Kapoor and Bimal Roy, for instance), I’m reminded of the critic Manny Farber’s distinction between Elephant Art and Termite Art: the latter (especially relevant to high-quality genre films) doesn’t self-consciously set out to make a strong statement but creates something meaningful and abiding through an accumulation of fine talents jointly doing their best work. It bears considering that while Dev Anand wasn’t taken too seriously as an actor in his own time, some of his early performances hold up better today than the work of more highly regarded dramatic performers. And the genre films directed by his prodigiously talented younger brother Vijay – Jewel Thief and Teesri Manzil among them – have a fluidity and cinematic assuredness that was often overlooked because of their lack of “serious” content.

****

As you can guess from its title, Cinema Modern: The Navketan Story is a history of this studio and its films. It’s a terrific-looking book, full of rare photographs and stills, but it sits – sometimes uneasily – on the ridge separating coffee-table publications from conventional, text-driven histories. The research is efficient, the writing lucid, but there is also evidence of the Repetition Malaise that hits so much of our non-fiction: on many occasions, exactly the same thought is expressed multiple times, with only minor changes in word arrangements. To take just one offhand example, the section on Taxi Driver finds different ways to provide identical information about Sylvie the dancing girl (also referred to as “Sylvie the Anglo-Indian dancer” and “the dancer Sylvie”, all within the same three or four pages). She “goes with clients to the Taj Mahal Hotel, the unattainable bastion of the upper classes” and “she likes to spend time at the Taj Mahal Hotel, the watering hole of the city’s elite”. Plot synopses do tend to be vulnerable to such repetition, but it isn’t all that hard to avoid. I also thought it a little puzzling that almost every reference to Dev Anand (and there are hundreds, as you might imagine) uses his full name. Given the book’s candid tone, a simple “Dev” might have sufficed.

On the positive side, I was glad that Bhatia doesn’t pass off every Navketan film as a classic; he is frank about what he regards the failures, and also about Anand’s embarrassing post-1970s directorial ventures. (“The treatment of the women was often gratuitously voyeuristic; the scripts were shoddy and the plotlines thin.”) But the principal mode is that of casual, one-line judgements – a limitation probably imposed by the book’s format. Of the early film Afsar, he says (having watched just the surviving three reels), “the overall effect is stagey and immobile”. He writes disapprovingly of the 1951 Aandhiyan that it “was shot in dark overtones”, that it “was unrelieved by any lightness” and that it “was designed to make you think” – as if these things in themselves make for a poor movie. Reading this, one would almost conclude that the good Navketan films were mindless entertainments that followed a fixed formula (and that is far from the case).

Which means that as a history this book is a passable addition to the meagre literature on popular Hindi cinema. The best things about it are the photos and the posters: I particularly liked the delightful illustrated advertisements for Afsar, the stills from lesser-known movies like Humsafar, and the shots of Dev Anand and Nutan from Tere Ghar ke Saamne, but you'll have a good time picking your own favourites.

A boy and a ship: unstructured thoughts on Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table

2011-11-24T18:50:00.000+05:30

[Notes for a review I may or may not finish writing - as you can probably tell, I have conflicted feelings about the book]

– On a large ship travelling from Sri Lanka to England in 1954, an 11-year-old boy makes the first significant journey of his life; it will be a rite of passage too. Three weeks are to be spent at sea and he is for all practical purposes travelling alone: a distant acquaintance who happens to be on board keeps an eye on him, but she is a First Class passenger while Michael – along with two boys his age and a few scattered adults – has his meals in the least privileged section of the ship’s huge dining room.

The good thing about being placed at the “cat’s table” is the sense of independence and vague disreputability it creates in one so young. Michael spends his days mostly in the company of his two new friends, the self-assured Cassius and the introverted Ramadhin, and their paths intersect with those of the adults around them: a botanist who is transporting a whole shimmering garden in the ship’s hold; a half-Sicilian pianist named Max Mazappa; an acrobat with the stage name The Hyderabad Mind; a quiet teacher going to England for the first time; the enigmatically spinsterish Miss Perinetta Lasqueti; and most thrillingly, a shackled convict who is believed to have killed a judge.

– “Once we climbed the gangplank onto the Oronsay, we were for the first time by necessity in close quarters with adults,” says the grown-up Michael, narrating the story decades after the journey. Over the course of this novel (written by another Michael – Ondaatje – who also happened to be on an ocean liner from Ceylon to England in 1954), we are left in little doubt that his shipboard experiences have resonated throughout his life and become reference points for him. (As a married man, when Michael sees his wife dancing with someone else and making a casual gesture that implies intimacy, he is reminded of seeing a similar gesture made on the ship’s deck years earlier. There are many other echoes of this sort.)

But even while The Cat’s Table recognises the ways in which people are shaped by – and return to – their early experiences, it is perceptive about the huge gulf between childhood and adulthood. At one point, Cassius suggests that the boys keep their backgrounds to themselves. “He liked the idea, I think, of being self-sufficient. That is how he saw our little gang existing on the ship.” It’s a reminder that this is how so many of our earliest friendships play out, with the participants being unaware of, or uninterested in, family and background details that will later come to mean a great deal.

– This book is also about the impossibility of knowing exactly how and when you pass from one life-stage to the next. (When sailing through one vast body of water after another, the boundaries are necessarily imprecise. There are no signposts to tell you exactly where this sea ends and that ocean begins.) Even as Michael spends his time blithely adventuring with his friends – “being a child”, in other words – there are passages where he shows the self-awareness one associates with growing up. A significant moment between him and his older cousin Emily, who is also on the ship, carries a hint of sexual awakening before resolving itself into a more conventional scene of a distraught child being consoled by a relative. On another occasion, briefly coerced into assisting a thieving Baron - his body covered in the oil that allows him to slither through a narrow cabin window - Michael sees himself in a mirror. “This was, I think, the first reflection or portrait that I remember of myself,” the adult Michael tells us, “It was the image of my youth that I would hold on to for years – someone startled, half-formed, who had not become anyone or anything yet."

(This reminded me of Pip in the graveyard in the superb opening pages of Great Expectations: “My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening...”. Incidentally The Cat’s Table contains a brief but important reference to Dickens’s convict Magwitch.)

– What slightly muddied my appreciation of The Cat’s Table is that this is two different novels in one, and they cut into each other’s space. The first is a pure adventure tale, a boy’s voyage of discovery on board an unimaginably big ship where many exciting things happen and many intriguing people are met. The second is a more reflective attempt to link these events with Michael’s future, and while this is done with care and insight, the two modes don’t always come together seamlessly.

Initially it seems the story will be set exclusively in the distant past (and aboard the ship), but then the first of many “flash-forwards” occurs – a bracket-enclosed, page-length paragraph in which Michael mentions a further acquaintance with Ramadhin in London. Later, midway through the book, we are taken off the ship for 30 pages and given extended information about Michael’s subsequent life, including a relationship with Ramadhin’s sister Massi; and there is another long detour towards the end. I found my attention drifting during these sections. The Cat’s Table has many lovely passages and a real feel for how people and their relationships change over time, but the minor disconnect between its two halves make it as choppy in places as the ocean Michael crosses on his way to a new life.

– Some of the flash-forwards do work well on their own terms, adding new layers to our perspective on the ship days. For instance, though Michael appears to be closer to Cassius than to Ramadhin while they are together on the Oronsay, we learn that he will lose all contact with the former after they disembark. This is believable at a strictly realist level: we all know about intense childhood friendships which, when freed from the contexts in which they were formed, were quickly forgotten. But since The Cat’s Table constantly invites us to read it at a metaphorical level (with the three-week journey representing the wonders and uncertainties of childhood), I think it’s worth considering that Cassius stands for something latent in Michael – a feral side, perhaps, that he brushes against on the voyage and then turns away from once he reaches cold England. (At one point, recalling a subsequent adult visit to Cassius’s art exhibition – where they don’t meet – Michael uses this intriguing sentence: “Some grains of Cassius had after all remained in my system.”)

Echoes from a floating dream

– I don’t usually pay much attention to book-jacket texts – they can become traps for a reviewer – but there’s a striking phrase in this one: the Oronsay is likened to “the floating dream of childhood”. Ondaatje isn’t subtle about the symbolism of a large ship moving through the great unknown, but he very skilfully evokes the amorphous quality of our childhood recollections. The 21 days at sea don’t come to us in chronological order – the fragmented memory of the book’s narrator does not permit this. Two events – or encounters with different people – that might have occurred on the same day are narrated several chapters apart as Michael gives them a context. The three weeks become a cornucopia of colourful incidents, so that it’s difficult to pin down the order in which they occurred.

And of course, this is how most of our childhood memories work. Those of us who have held on to diaries we kept at a young age, or who have an unusually acute memory for dates, might theoretically know that two significant but unconnected incidents took place in (say) the same week 22 years ago; but when we actually try to recall them, our minds might find it impossible to fill in the other details of the time-span in which they occurred – or to even believe that they happened so near each other.

Towards the end of The Cat’s Table, the adult Michael muses: “Looking back, I am no longer certain who gave me what pieces of advice, or befriended us, or deceived us.” Throughout the book there is a sense of barely remembered conversations, or events that echo one another, so that the possibility arises that Michael’s memory is conflating one experience with another (which, again, is something we all do when attempting to recapture the past).

For example, at one point the adult Michael reads a letter written by Perinetta Lasqueti, where she mentions dressing up as Marcel Proust – complete with a slim moustache – at a fancy-dress party in her youth. This feels like an echo of an incident earlier in the book, when the child Michael describes Perinetta similarly disguised as a man during a port of call at Aden. It leads one to wonder: did the Aden episode really happen as he remembered it? (And could the Proust reference be a sly nod – by Michael Ondaatje the author – to the whimsies of memory?) There are other little recurrences in the writing (such as two references, a few pages apart but in completely different contexts, to the application of unguent on a skin wound) and they probably aren’t accidental, coming as they do from the pen of such a careful and organised writer.