Entry open to all, on first-come-first-seated basis:
Senin, 28 Februari 2011
Writers, Etc with Namita Gokhale
As part of "Writers, Etc", the Alliance Francaise's exciting new platform for writers, I'll be in conversation with Namita Gokhale on March 3 at Alliance Francaise de Delhi, Lodi Estate. Namita will speak about her long and multifaceted career as a novelist, non-fiction writer, magazine publisher and festival director. She will also do a short reading from the essay "Super Days", which she wrote for The Popcorn Essayists (and a translated version of the excerpt will then be read out for the French-speakers present - you haven't really heard the line "Rajesh Khanna was maha cool" until you've heard it said in French).
Entry open to all, on first-come-first-seated basis:
Entry open to all, on first-come-first-seated basis:
Jumat, 25 Februari 2011
Popcorn in stores - buy while it's hot and crackling
The Popcorn Essayists: What Movies do to Writers is in bookstores now, so please do spread the word to anyone who enjoys high-quality film-related writing.
It was quite a thrill to see the book prominently displayed in the Bahrisons at the DLF mall, Saket yesterday, all the more so because I never experienced this pleasure with the Jaane bhi do Yaaro book. (No, don't ask why. You'd think there was greater promotional scope there, given that it was part of a series of film books that could have been marketed and displayed together. But we'll let that pass.)
[Both books are also on Flipkart, of course: here and here]
It was quite a thrill to see the book prominently displayed in the Bahrisons at the DLF mall, Saket yesterday, all the more so because I never experienced this pleasure with the Jaane bhi do Yaaro book. (No, don't ask why. You'd think there was greater promotional scope there, given that it was part of a series of film books that could have been marketed and displayed together. But we'll let that pass.)
[Both books are also on Flipkart, of course: here and here]
Kamis, 24 Februari 2011
Sunday Guardian snippets: on euphemisms, R K Narayan and a wordless comic book
[From my weekly books column; some earlier snippets here, here and here]
The evolution and use of language is vital to any study of our species, and for an insight into the human tendency to tiptoe around delicate subjects, you can’t do much better than consider the history of euphemisms. It goes back a long way. Thousands of years ago, predators were alluded to rather than directly named; since people couldn't always distinguish between spoken words and the things they stood for, they feared that simply saying “tiger” aloud would result in the undesired appearance of the beast. (Candyman, anyone?) Today we are a wiser lot – in some ways, anyhow – but plain-speaking is still well beyond our skill set, especially when it comes to subjects such as sex, death and bodily excretions.
Ralph Keyes’ book Unmentionables (originally published as Euphemania and now subtitled “From Family Jewels to Friendly Fire – What We Say Instead of What We Mean”) is an entertaining look at the history of euphemistic language, ranging from ribald Shakespearean lines (Iago to Desdemona’s distraught father: “Your daughter and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs”) to Winston Churchill being told by an American lady at a dinner party to say “white meat” instead of “breast of chicken” (a probably apocryphal story goes that he sent her a corsage with the message “Pin this on your white meat”). Along the way, Keyes reminds us of the often-surreal consequences of indiscriminate bowdlerising, such as the Associated Press article that changed the name of the athlete Tyson Gay to Tyson Homosexual, or the email filter in the Internet’s early days that prevented residents of Scunthorpe from registering themselves online. (Why, you ask? Check the second to fifth letters of the town’s name.)
Unmentionables starts to wear a little thin after the first few chapters (the book is primarily a trivia-trove), but I liked its recurring motif that certain words come to be perceived as “good” or “bad” as their associations change over time. Steven Pinker and other experts on language have written about how (for instance) the word “nigger” was once used benevolently – including by progressive-minded people who campaigned for equal rights – but eventually became taboo because of its widespread pejorative use by bigots. Many of its "politically correct" replacements have become similarly corrupted through association with prejudiced attitudes. In a world entirely free of discrimination, censorship of this sort would be unnecessary – but then, reading and writing would be drabber processes too. As it is, it’s fun to speculate that many of the words we today regard as being innocuous will have sinister connotations in a few decades.
****
It’s been a good month for classic Indian fiction – Penguin’s new editions of R K Narayan books were followed by Random House India’s Classics Series, with Arunava Sinha translating Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Durgeshnandini into English. The Narayans gave me a chance to catch up with a writer whom many Indian readers of my generation take for granted – if your memories of Malgudi are restricted to short stories in class 6 textbooks, rediscovering him is quite an experience.
One myth about Narayan should be quickly dispelled: that his writing is “simple” in the sense that you can just pick up one of his books and race through them. This notion has been perpetuated by some of today’s mass-market writers who seek to validate their own non-literariness through association. For example, Chetan Bhagat has admitted to being influenced by Narayan’s no-flourishes style, which might create the misleading impression that Narayan can be read in the same way that you can read a Bhagat novel (it took me barely an hour to finish Five Point Someone). Certainly there is a basic directness in Narayan’s prose – an emphasis on narrative rather than “style” – but sentence by sentence, his best work has the refinement, the carefulness, the knack for observation and description, that you expect in good literary fiction. There’s little that’s casual about it.
Consider this early passage from The Vendor of Sweets:
****
“We wanted to challenge certain notions about what a comic is, about what it can do and should do,” says the editor’s note for a slim new graphic novel titled Hush. The book’s title couldn’t be more appropriate – this story about an unhappy, angry schoolgirl with a gun in her hand is completely wordless, propelled not by written text but by vivid black-and-white drawings. The experience of “reading” it can be initially unsettling, but as I turned the pages for the second time I found the images speaking with the force of a good, visually inventive sequence in a silent movie – a film made in an era when directors could aspire towards pure cinema.
Hush – based on a story by Vivek Thomas, and drawn by Rajiv Eipe – is the first title by the independent publishing house Manta Ray Comics, set up by former engineering students Dileep Cherian and Pratheek Thomas. Cherian and Thomas are big fans of graphic novels, but as the former tells me on email, they feel the need for more mature material in the genre in India. “We think we can produce original material rather than rehashing mythology for a Western audience, and we want Manta Ray to become a platform for original creators, artists and writers.” If one of their goals, as Cherian says, is “to amplify the voices of interesting people”, they've made a good start.
The evolution and use of language is vital to any study of our species, and for an insight into the human tendency to tiptoe around delicate subjects, you can’t do much better than consider the history of euphemisms. It goes back a long way. Thousands of years ago, predators were alluded to rather than directly named; since people couldn't always distinguish between spoken words and the things they stood for, they feared that simply saying “tiger” aloud would result in the undesired appearance of the beast. (Candyman, anyone?) Today we are a wiser lot – in some ways, anyhow – but plain-speaking is still well beyond our skill set, especially when it comes to subjects such as sex, death and bodily excretions.
Ralph Keyes’ book Unmentionables (originally published as Euphemania and now subtitled “From Family Jewels to Friendly Fire – What We Say Instead of What We Mean”) is an entertaining look at the history of euphemistic language, ranging from ribald Shakespearean lines (Iago to Desdemona’s distraught father: “Your daughter and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs”) to Winston Churchill being told by an American lady at a dinner party to say “white meat” instead of “breast of chicken” (a probably apocryphal story goes that he sent her a corsage with the message “Pin this on your white meat”). Along the way, Keyes reminds us of the often-surreal consequences of indiscriminate bowdlerising, such as the Associated Press article that changed the name of the athlete Tyson Gay to Tyson Homosexual, or the email filter in the Internet’s early days that prevented residents of Scunthorpe from registering themselves online. (Why, you ask? Check the second to fifth letters of the town’s name.)Unmentionables starts to wear a little thin after the first few chapters (the book is primarily a trivia-trove), but I liked its recurring motif that certain words come to be perceived as “good” or “bad” as their associations change over time. Steven Pinker and other experts on language have written about how (for instance) the word “nigger” was once used benevolently – including by progressive-minded people who campaigned for equal rights – but eventually became taboo because of its widespread pejorative use by bigots. Many of its "politically correct" replacements have become similarly corrupted through association with prejudiced attitudes. In a world entirely free of discrimination, censorship of this sort would be unnecessary – but then, reading and writing would be drabber processes too. As it is, it’s fun to speculate that many of the words we today regard as being innocuous will have sinister connotations in a few decades.
****
It’s been a good month for classic Indian fiction – Penguin’s new editions of R K Narayan books were followed by Random House India’s Classics Series, with Arunava Sinha translating Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Durgeshnandini into English. The Narayans gave me a chance to catch up with a writer whom many Indian readers of my generation take for granted – if your memories of Malgudi are restricted to short stories in class 6 textbooks, rediscovering him is quite an experience.
One myth about Narayan should be quickly dispelled: that his writing is “simple” in the sense that you can just pick up one of his books and race through them. This notion has been perpetuated by some of today’s mass-market writers who seek to validate their own non-literariness through association. For example, Chetan Bhagat has admitted to being influenced by Narayan’s no-flourishes style, which might create the misleading impression that Narayan can be read in the same way that you can read a Bhagat novel (it took me barely an hour to finish Five Point Someone). Certainly there is a basic directness in Narayan’s prose – an emphasis on narrative rather than “style” – but sentence by sentence, his best work has the refinement, the carefulness, the knack for observation and description, that you expect in good literary fiction. There’s little that’s casual about it.Consider this early passage from The Vendor of Sweets:
The bathroom was a shack, roofed with corrugated sheets; the wooden frame was warped and the door never shut flush, but always left a gap through which one obtained a partial glimpse of anyone bathing. But it had been a house practice, for generations, for its members not to look through [...] A very tall coconut tree loomed over the bath, shedding enormous withered fronds and other horticultural odds and ends on the corrugated roof with a resounding thud. Everything in this home had the sanctity of usage, which was the reason why no improvement was possible. Jagan’s father, as everyone knew, had lived at first in a thatched hut at the very back of this ground. Jagan remembered playing in a sand heap outside the hut; the floor of the hut was paved with cool clay and one could put one’s cheek to it on a warm day and feel heavenly.The prose here is functional, but it’s also assured and humorous, and commands the reader’s full attention (the passage is randomly selected, by the way; you can open the book almost anywhere and find another like it). One also senses a pioneering Indian writer in English trying to create a visual picture of his world for the foreign readership that he knows his books will reach - it’s ironical that many people take jingoistic pride in the idea that Narayan was a provincial man who never wrote for the West.
****
“We wanted to challenge certain notions about what a comic is, about what it can do and should do,” says the editor’s note for a slim new graphic novel titled Hush. The book’s title couldn’t be more appropriate – this story about an unhappy, angry schoolgirl with a gun in her hand is completely wordless, propelled not by written text but by vivid black-and-white drawings. The experience of “reading” it can be initially unsettling, but as I turned the pages for the second time I found the images speaking with the force of a good, visually inventive sequence in a silent movie – a film made in an era when directors could aspire towards pure cinema.Hush – based on a story by Vivek Thomas, and drawn by Rajiv Eipe – is the first title by the independent publishing house Manta Ray Comics, set up by former engineering students Dileep Cherian and Pratheek Thomas. Cherian and Thomas are big fans of graphic novels, but as the former tells me on email, they feel the need for more mature material in the genre in India. “We think we can produce original material rather than rehashing mythology for a Western audience, and we want Manta Ray to become a platform for original creators, artists and writers.” If one of their goals, as Cherian says, is “to amplify the voices of interesting people”, they've made a good start.
Urban Shots short-story competition
Grey Oak Publishers and Landmark are inviting entries for a competition of short stories set in urban India. Details available here. The selected stories will be published in the next edition of Urban Shots.
Selasa, 22 Februari 2011
"जाने भी दो यारों" की तलाश में
I was very pleased to read this article by Mihir Pandya, written for the Hindi magazine Kathadesh - not just because he says kind things about the Jaane bhi do Yaaro book but for the overall quality of the writing and the observations. Among other things I liked his remark about the silhouette scene between Satish Shah, Pankaj Kapoor, Neena Gupta and Satish Kaushik on top of the building being a visual 
representation of their "kaale kaarnaame" (as I've mentioned in the book, it was a happy accident - brought on by a hurried schedule and a setting sun - that the scene turned out that way) and how Jaane bhi do Yaaro's dark view of the city is echoed in such disparate works as Anurag Kashyap's Black Friday, Dibakar Banerjee's Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! and Ram Gopal Verma's Satya.
Even if you're out of practice reading Hindi (as I am), do try to make the time for this eloquent piece.
representation of their "kaale kaarnaame" (as I've mentioned in the book, it was a happy accident - brought on by a hurried schedule and a setting sun - that the scene turned out that way) and how Jaane bhi do Yaaro's dark view of the city is echoed in such disparate works as Anurag Kashyap's Black Friday, Dibakar Banerjee's Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! and Ram Gopal Verma's Satya.Even if you're out of practice reading Hindi (as I am), do try to make the time for this eloquent piece.
Minggu, 20 Februari 2011
A sad detective in tandoori marinade: Zac O'Yeah's Scandinavistan
[Did this review for Biblio. The table of contents for the latest issue is here - many fine pieces, which can be read on PDF after free registration]
Detectives in noir fiction are frequently described as “hardboiled”, which suggests a tough, cynical man carrying the baggage of a tragic past but soldiering on regardless – masochistically working on unpleasant cases that deepen his view of things, tailing scoundrels and femme fatales through shadowy places that serve as metaphors for the darkness in his own soul.
This adds up to a brooding figure of the sort played in films by charismatically world-weary actors such as Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum and Robert Ryan. But now consider Public Intelligence Officer Herman Barsk, the lead in Zac O’Yeah’s novel Once Upon a Time in Scandinavistan. Eighteen pages into the book, when confronted by evidence of cannibalism in a restaurant kitchen where he himself has just eaten, Barsk does “the only thing an old cop could do in a situation like this: he shat his pants”. It’s an early clue that he might not be the typical noir hero. As the narrative progresses, we will get many more.
But then O’Yeah’s novel is hardly straight-faced crime fiction, or straight-faced anything. A genre-hopping work of speculative fiction (as the title suggests), it’s set in the near future, in a world where most of continental Europe has not just been rendered tropical or desert by global warming, but also colonised by India, with some very ulta-pulta results.
In this desi-fied Sweden, India and Indianness impinge on the local culture in the most unexpected ways. Roads have been renamed (and have “randomly blinking traffic lights”), the Ashoka Pillar dominates town squares, and Committing Nuisance in a Public Place is against the law. Rowdy kids have access to “Thums-Up bottle bombs containing an explosive cashew-fenny kerosene mix”, cries of “Hain?” merge with the local “Höh”, and a policeman chasing a female hooligan might yell “Hey, goondi!”
Extremely entertaining though all these details are in themselves, there is also a plot – it centres on the dead bodies found by Barsk in the tandoor and involves a group of murderously sociopathic girls, a mysterious ashram, a cheap restaurant that serves food to the poor, and a British submarine preparing to “liberate” Gautampuri. Barsk himself is in love with a married Indian woman named Kumkum, and the personal stakes rise for him when he discovers that her husband is connected with the murder case.
Actually, I didn’t think the storyline was the most compelling thing about this book: it sags a little midway as subplots proliferate, suspects and stool pigeons flit in and out of sight, and chapters end in the patented style of pulp thrillers – “Presently, he became aware of a shadow sneaking up behind him” – with a few (deliberately?) corny analogies thrown in: “It was the sound of the silence one might hear while balancing a trampoline over purgatory”. The plot gets confusing near the end; I had to revisit the final few chapters to confirm how everything fit together.
But Once Upon a Time in Scandinavistan is a winner because of its premise and especially because Barsk is such a memorable character. We stay with him for each of the book’s 400 pages, as he trips morosely from one misadventure to another. At one point we are told that when he volunteered to donate his organs, his body was rejected as “not usable”. (He has poor eyesight too; trying to identify a lurker at a crucial point in his investigation, he wishes balefully that he had got himself a pair of spectacles.) Constantly aware that the only reason he exists is that his prostitute mother “had been so drunk she had forgotten to take an abortion pill the day after the condom burst”, he spends much of the book swallowing Loperamide tablets to keep his bowels in order, and mooning about his recently deceased dog.
In short, there is nothing remotely dashing or heroic about Barsk. He isn’t even the sort of character who is sometimes referred to as a “little hero” – the Frodo Baggins-like underdog who triumphs against the odds. The few times he does come good, it feels more like an accident of karma than anything he might reasonably be credited for.
Of course, his actions and responses are defined by the chaos that continually unfolds around him, and the narrative is full of passages of inspired absurdity (a dead horse being perfumed by a coolie on the location shoot of a Hindi film - don't ask), funny asides (“In the Masti Mela amusement park, a pyromaniac had set the ghost house on fire and several ghosts had to be hospitalised”) and too many clever ideas to keep track of. (A less imaginative writer might have developed a whole sub-plot around the theme of the Nobel Prize being renamed the Reliance-Nobel Prize, but in this book it gets exactly one casual mention.)
O’Yeah himself is of Finnish ethnicity but he has married into India and lived in Bangalore for the last few years, and his writing suggests a basic affection for the country combined with the bemused perspective of someone who comes from a vastly different cultural landscape (and who must still sometimes feel like he’s been thrust into a Terry Pratchett novel). He has a ear for the cadences and peculiarities of middle-class Indian speech, such as the young corporal calling a potential trouble-maker “Uncle” even while preparing to arrest him. At other times, there is light caricaturing of Indian “types”: a popular movie actor is named Phillumappa Ishtarjee, a yoga teacher is Swamijee Consultantwallah, and Kumkum’s husband is – what else – Patiparmeshwar Gharwallah.
Occasionally one gets the sense that the vision presented here isn’t fully thought out; that the author, having defined the broad contours of his world, is basically having fun as he goes along, throwing in eye-popping bits as they occur to him. Some details read like O’Yeah thought them up in a trance while he sat typing, so that you have to go back a few pages to confirm that you read what you thought you read – was there really a reference to butter-chicken-flavoured condoms? What’s with the remote-controlled camera that looks like a mutton samosa? Some of this stuff gets outright silly at times. Take this reference to a recently colonised Mars:
Rereading the Mars passage in this light, I thought of the times I’ve joked with friends about how Delhi’s suburbs might engorge and devour the entire country some day, given the relentless expansion of the National Capital Region in all directions. Then one wonders: given a scenario where India takes over the world, is it so hard to believe that things would become as anarchic and outlandish as described here? Would anything be off-limits? Probably not – by the end of the book, it seems almost normal that a naked, marinade-coated Barsk should be running down Bangla Marg with a sword in his hand. I hope O’Yeah revisits Scandinavistan and its endearingly ungallant hero soon.
[More information on O'Yeah and his earlier work - including a Gandhi biography that is still available only in Swedish - can be found at his official website]
Detectives in noir fiction are frequently described as “hardboiled”, which suggests a tough, cynical man carrying the baggage of a tragic past but soldiering on regardless – masochistically working on unpleasant cases that deepen his view of things, tailing scoundrels and femme fatales through shadowy places that serve as metaphors for the darkness in his own soul.
This adds up to a brooding figure of the sort played in films by charismatically world-weary actors such as Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum and Robert Ryan. But now consider Public Intelligence Officer Herman Barsk, the lead in Zac O’Yeah’s novel Once Upon a Time in Scandinavistan. Eighteen pages into the book, when confronted by evidence of cannibalism in a restaurant kitchen where he himself has just eaten, Barsk does “the only thing an old cop could do in a situation like this: he shat his pants”. It’s an early clue that he might not be the typical noir hero. As the narrative progresses, we will get many more.
But then O’Yeah’s novel is hardly straight-faced crime fiction, or straight-faced anything. A genre-hopping work of speculative fiction (as the title suggests), it’s set in the near future, in a world where most of continental Europe has not just been rendered tropical or desert by global warming, but also colonised by India, with some very ulta-pulta results.
When the European Union was being liquidated, and its member countries sold off their industries and privatised their highways and railroads, international conglomerates with head offices in Asia bought up pretty much everything. Sweden was given away as a special discount offer when Germany and Switzerland were sold – perhaps due to the fact that most people could not really tell Sweden and Switzerland apart. These things happen in a global economy.Thus, the restaurant Barsk has his epiphany in is called the Tandoori Moose; it’s one of the few non-vegetarian joints still operating in Gautampuri (formerly Gothenberg), because vegetarianism is the dominant lifestyle choice in this world, and Buddhism the key religion. Concepts like reincarnation and karma are taken entirely at face value, and why not – after all, “the weather had transformed alongside the political and economic changes, bestowing a sense that it was fated to happen – that all was pre-destined”.
In this desi-fied Sweden, India and Indianness impinge on the local culture in the most unexpected ways. Roads have been renamed (and have “randomly blinking traffic lights”), the Ashoka Pillar dominates town squares, and Committing Nuisance in a Public Place is against the law. Rowdy kids have access to “Thums-Up bottle bombs containing an explosive cashew-fenny kerosene mix”, cries of “Hain?” merge with the local “Höh”, and a policeman chasing a female hooligan might yell “Hey, goondi!”
Extremely entertaining though all these details are in themselves, there is also a plot – it centres on the dead bodies found by Barsk in the tandoor and involves a group of murderously sociopathic girls, a mysterious ashram, a cheap restaurant that serves food to the poor, and a British submarine preparing to “liberate” Gautampuri. Barsk himself is in love with a married Indian woman named Kumkum, and the personal stakes rise for him when he discovers that her husband is connected with the murder case.Actually, I didn’t think the storyline was the most compelling thing about this book: it sags a little midway as subplots proliferate, suspects and stool pigeons flit in and out of sight, and chapters end in the patented style of pulp thrillers – “Presently, he became aware of a shadow sneaking up behind him” – with a few (deliberately?) corny analogies thrown in: “It was the sound of the silence one might hear while balancing a trampoline over purgatory”. The plot gets confusing near the end; I had to revisit the final few chapters to confirm how everything fit together.
But Once Upon a Time in Scandinavistan is a winner because of its premise and especially because Barsk is such a memorable character. We stay with him for each of the book’s 400 pages, as he trips morosely from one misadventure to another. At one point we are told that when he volunteered to donate his organs, his body was rejected as “not usable”. (He has poor eyesight too; trying to identify a lurker at a crucial point in his investigation, he wishes balefully that he had got himself a pair of spectacles.) Constantly aware that the only reason he exists is that his prostitute mother “had been so drunk she had forgotten to take an abortion pill the day after the condom burst”, he spends much of the book swallowing Loperamide tablets to keep his bowels in order, and mooning about his recently deceased dog.
Bobby used to come and sniff his sweaty socks, but the mongrel (75 percent Husky) had died after accumulating too much negative karma from pissing on every lamp-post on town. Bobbylessness was hard. All that remained were the memories of pattering paws and claws scratching the creaky floorboards. Time healed no wounds, at least not in Barsk’s soul.Even when, against all expectations, he finally gets to undrape Kumkum’s sari, the potentially erotic moment is described thus: “It came off a layer at a time. Kumkum turned like a tandoori chicken on an automatically rotating skewer, Barsk thought, and the analogy made him hungry.”
In short, there is nothing remotely dashing or heroic about Barsk. He isn’t even the sort of character who is sometimes referred to as a “little hero” – the Frodo Baggins-like underdog who triumphs against the odds. The few times he does come good, it feels more like an accident of karma than anything he might reasonably be credited for.
Of course, his actions and responses are defined by the chaos that continually unfolds around him, and the narrative is full of passages of inspired absurdity (a dead horse being perfumed by a coolie on the location shoot of a Hindi film - don't ask), funny asides (“In the Masti Mela amusement park, a pyromaniac had set the ghost house on fire and several ghosts had to be hospitalised”) and too many clever ideas to keep track of. (A less imaginative writer might have developed a whole sub-plot around the theme of the Nobel Prize being renamed the Reliance-Nobel Prize, but in this book it gets exactly one casual mention.)
O’Yeah himself is of Finnish ethnicity but he has married into India and lived in Bangalore for the last few years, and his writing suggests a basic affection for the country combined with the bemused perspective of someone who comes from a vastly different cultural landscape (and who must still sometimes feel like he’s been thrust into a Terry Pratchett novel). He has a ear for the cadences and peculiarities of middle-class Indian speech, such as the young corporal calling a potential trouble-maker “Uncle” even while preparing to arrest him. At other times, there is light caricaturing of Indian “types”: a popular movie actor is named Phillumappa Ishtarjee, a yoga teacher is Swamijee Consultantwallah, and Kumkum’s husband is – what else – Patiparmeshwar Gharwallah.
Occasionally one gets the sense that the vision presented here isn’t fully thought out; that the author, having defined the broad contours of his world, is basically having fun as he goes along, throwing in eye-popping bits as they occur to him. Some details read like O’Yeah thought them up in a trance while he sat typing, so that you have to go back a few pages to confirm that you read what you thought you read – was there really a reference to butter-chicken-flavoured condoms? What’s with the remote-controlled camera that looks like a mutton samosa? Some of this stuff gets outright silly at times. Take this reference to a recently colonised Mars:
The Red Planet had since become an overpopulated suburb of New Delhi, renamed NOIDA Phase 819, and due to its colour it was a favourite retirement destination for old Maoists who demonstrated every other day and called for bandhs to have the planet renamed “Maors”.Given that the fictional world described in Once Upon a Time in Scandinavistan is not one of notable technological advancement (Internet connections are still slow, for example, and the “holophones” used by people have to be knocked about before they yield a dial tone), the passage above doesn’t seem organic to this setting. But that might be the wrong approach to reading this book. As I went along, I found it useful to think of Scandinavistan not so much as an internally consistent fantasy universe created from the bottom up with meticulously defined rules and limits of its own, but as a hysterical, hyper-exaggerated rendering of the idea that India – with all its chaos and contradictions – might become a world-dominating power someday (an idea that in any case doesn’t belong exclusively to the realm of fantasy these days – just read newspaper editorials).
Rereading the Mars passage in this light, I thought of the times I’ve joked with friends about how Delhi’s suburbs might engorge and devour the entire country some day, given the relentless expansion of the National Capital Region in all directions. Then one wonders: given a scenario where India takes over the world, is it so hard to believe that things would become as anarchic and outlandish as described here? Would anything be off-limits? Probably not – by the end of the book, it seems almost normal that a naked, marinade-coated Barsk should be running down Bangla Marg with a sword in his hand. I hope O’Yeah revisits Scandinavistan and its endearingly ungallant hero soon.
[More information on O'Yeah and his earlier work - including a Gandhi biography that is still available only in Swedish - can be found at his official website]Jumat, 18 Februari 2011
3 items on "naïve" readers
Item 1: Chetan Bhagat often gets letters from readers who don’t understand what a novel is – for example, the person who sorrowfully reprimanded him for revealing the name of a girl who engages in pre-marital sex in Five Point Someone: “You’ve ruined Neha’s life; her family and others will guess who she is; who will marry her now?” (More in this post)
Item 2: Aarushi Talwar’s father tells a policeman that his murdered daughter had been reading Bhagat’s The 3 Mistakes of My Life. The cop responds: “Hah, you’re saying she was reading this book because she has made three mistakes in her life? What were the three mistakes?” (As reported by Patrick French in India: A Portrait; also excerpted here.) A case of a policeman clumsily bullying a suspect? Probably, but also possible that the man had little understanding of a book as a work of fiction unconnected to the circumstances (or mental state) of the person reading it.
Item 3: Orhan Pamuk discussing certain types of literal-minded readers in his new book The Naïve and the Sentimental Novelist: "Completely naïve readers always read a text as an autobiography or as a sort of disguised chronicle of lived experience, no matter how many times you warn them that they are reading a novel."
But at the other extreme, Pamuk tells us, are "completely sentimental-reflective readers, who think that all texts are constructs and fictions anyway, no matter how many times you warn them that they are reading your most candid autobiography. I must warn you to keep away from [both types of] people, because they are immune to the joys of reading novels."
Item 2: Aarushi Talwar’s father tells a policeman that his murdered daughter had been reading Bhagat’s The 3 Mistakes of My Life. The cop responds: “Hah, you’re saying she was reading this book because she has made three mistakes in her life? What were the three mistakes?” (As reported by Patrick French in India: A Portrait; also excerpted here.) A case of a policeman clumsily bullying a suspect? Probably, but also possible that the man had little understanding of a book as a work of fiction unconnected to the circumstances (or mental state) of the person reading it.
Item 3: Orhan Pamuk discussing certain types of literal-minded readers in his new book The Naïve and the Sentimental Novelist: "Completely naïve readers always read a text as an autobiography or as a sort of disguised chronicle of lived experience, no matter how many times you warn them that they are reading a novel."
But at the other extreme, Pamuk tells us, are "completely sentimental-reflective readers, who think that all texts are constructs and fictions anyway, no matter how many times you warn them that they are reading your most candid autobiography. I must warn you to keep away from [both types of] people, because they are immune to the joys of reading novels."
Kamis, 17 Februari 2011
Popcorn on Flipkart
The Popcorn Essayists: What Movies do to Writers is now available on Flipkart, so get thee forth and order copies for yourselves, your friends, family and pets. More about the book here.
Selasa, 15 Februari 2011
Thoughts on Bollywood's use of gaalis
Sometime in the early 1990s I briefly became very taken with Michael Medved's Hollywood Vs America, a book that strongly condemned the violence and explicit profanity in modern American movies (and pop music), arguing that this was eroding family values and adversely affecting the behaviour of young people. My own biases 
probably led me to attach more value to some of Medved’s points than they deserved: being obsessed (then as now) with old Hollywood films, I enjoyed his rose-tinted view of the “simple” cinema of the past, and his observation that it was once possible to make great movies about unsavoury people (gangsters, for example) without subjecting audiences’ ears to the foul language that these people would have used in real life. Why couldn’t today’s films be better-behaved, he asked rhetorically.
It seemed like a good argument at the time, but gradually I understood that Medved was a conservative political commentator – often motivated by religious orthodoxy – and that his book was shrill and one-dimensional, presenting just a single side of a complex topic. (Studies have indicated that screen violence can also have a cathartic effect on viewers, making them more passive and less inclined to emulate what they see.) There will, of course, always be movies that use violence or bad language gratuitously, or in a way that contributes nothing to narrative or character development – but it’s equally possible for such work to push boundaries and to shake viewers up by using options that were not available to artists in a more conservative time.
As Martin Amis pointed out in his fine essay "I am in Blood Stepp'd in So Far", when the Hollywood censorship code was revised in 1966, “film edged closer to being a director’s medium, freer to go where the talent pushed it”.
Watching recent films like Ishqiya, Yeh Saali Zindagi and No One Killed Jessica, it seems like Hindi cinema is somewhere near that uncertain place where the American cinema was in the late 1960s. In the past couple of years, the censorship rules pertaining to profanity have become less rigid, and many films – especially the edgier ones set in the hinterland – now routinely use language that would once have been unthinkable in a mainstream movie.
Naturally, the results are mixed – new freedoms always bring missteps and over-indulgence, but there are also the occasional moments that feel just right. Take the early scene in No One Killed Jessica, which establishes the spunky character of the TV reporter Meera: when a co-passenger on her flight gushes on stupidly about the Kargil war being “so exciting”, she shuts him up by smiling sweetly and saying “Aap wahaan hote toh aapki gaand phat jaati”.
The scene is hugely effective for a number of reasons: 1) the startling use of a once-severely taboo word in the midst of a laidback conversation, 2) the fact that the word is preceded by the respectful "aap" and spoken by Rani Mukherjee, who has played mostly vanilla characters (in terms of their speaking habits, at least) in her career up to this point, and 3) the guy on the receiving end so clearly deserves to be put in his place that we in the audience feel vicarious pleasure in his public humiliation. The balance between the "bad word" and the faux-polite tone is perfect; a putdown expressed in milder language (or in an angrier voice) wouldn’t have had anywhere near the same impact. The moment also adds to our perspective on Meera and the contrast between her and the film’s other protagonist, the mousy Sabrina.
With Sudhir Mishra’s Yeh Saali Zindagi, on the other hand, though I liked the film, I wasn’t convinced that it would have been less effective if it had slightly cut down on the maa-behen gaalis sprinkled through the script. They fit certain characters perfectly – such as the crooked policeman wonderfully played by Sushant Singh – but at other times their use felt forced, as if the film was trying too hard to be gritty. But on the whole, I think we can look ahead to some exciting times as scriptwriters and directors work out how best to use the new liberties available to them.
probably led me to attach more value to some of Medved’s points than they deserved: being obsessed (then as now) with old Hollywood films, I enjoyed his rose-tinted view of the “simple” cinema of the past, and his observation that it was once possible to make great movies about unsavoury people (gangsters, for example) without subjecting audiences’ ears to the foul language that these people would have used in real life. Why couldn’t today’s films be better-behaved, he asked rhetorically.It seemed like a good argument at the time, but gradually I understood that Medved was a conservative political commentator – often motivated by religious orthodoxy – and that his book was shrill and one-dimensional, presenting just a single side of a complex topic. (Studies have indicated that screen violence can also have a cathartic effect on viewers, making them more passive and less inclined to emulate what they see.) There will, of course, always be movies that use violence or bad language gratuitously, or in a way that contributes nothing to narrative or character development – but it’s equally possible for such work to push boundaries and to shake viewers up by using options that were not available to artists in a more conservative time.
As Martin Amis pointed out in his fine essay "I am in Blood Stepp'd in So Far", when the Hollywood censorship code was revised in 1966, “film edged closer to being a director’s medium, freer to go where the talent pushed it”.
As we now know, the talent pushed it away from the mainstream of America and towards the mainstream of contemporary art, while playing to its own strengths - action, immediacy, affect...(The complete essay can be read here)
...Does screen violence provide a window or a mirror? Is it an effect or is it a cause, an encouragement, a facilitation? Fairly representatively, I think, I happen to like screen violence while steadily execrating its real-life counterpart. Moreover, I can tell the difference between the two. One is happening, one is not. One is earnest, one is play. But we inhabit the postmodern age, an age of mass suggestibility, in which image and reality strangely interact.
Watching recent films like Ishqiya, Yeh Saali Zindagi and No One Killed Jessica, it seems like Hindi cinema is somewhere near that uncertain place where the American cinema was in the late 1960s. In the past couple of years, the censorship rules pertaining to profanity have become less rigid, and many films – especially the edgier ones set in the hinterland – now routinely use language that would once have been unthinkable in a mainstream movie.
Naturally, the results are mixed – new freedoms always bring missteps and over-indulgence, but there are also the occasional moments that feel just right. Take the early scene in No One Killed Jessica, which establishes the spunky character of the TV reporter Meera: when a co-passenger on her flight gushes on stupidly about the Kargil war being “so exciting”, she shuts him up by smiling sweetly and saying “Aap wahaan hote toh aapki gaand phat jaati”.The scene is hugely effective for a number of reasons: 1) the startling use of a once-severely taboo word in the midst of a laidback conversation, 2) the fact that the word is preceded by the respectful "aap" and spoken by Rani Mukherjee, who has played mostly vanilla characters (in terms of their speaking habits, at least) in her career up to this point, and 3) the guy on the receiving end so clearly deserves to be put in his place that we in the audience feel vicarious pleasure in his public humiliation. The balance between the "bad word" and the faux-polite tone is perfect; a putdown expressed in milder language (or in an angrier voice) wouldn’t have had anywhere near the same impact. The moment also adds to our perspective on Meera and the contrast between her and the film’s other protagonist, the mousy Sabrina.
With Sudhir Mishra’s Yeh Saali Zindagi, on the other hand, though I liked the film, I wasn’t convinced that it would have been less effective if it had slightly cut down on the maa-behen gaalis sprinkled through the script. They fit certain characters perfectly – such as the crooked policeman wonderfully played by Sushant Singh – but at other times their use felt forced, as if the film was trying too hard to be gritty. But on the whole, I think we can look ahead to some exciting times as scriptwriters and directors work out how best to use the new liberties available to them.
Jumat, 11 Februari 2011
The absent spinner: cricket and life in Shehan Karunatilaka's Chinaman
[Pure coincidence that this is the second novel with a cricket theme that I've read recently; wrote about the first here. Though both books involve the making of a film about an underappreciated cricketer, they are very different in most ways]
That narrator is a 64-year-old sports journalist named WG Karunasena (“Wije” or “Gamini” for short), and as the book opens we learn that he is dying, his liver ravaged by years of alcohol abuse. Soon we will gather that Wije’s personal list of his life’s proudest moments includes (in no particular order): his wedding; the birth of his son (named Garfield, after Sobers); being awarded Ceylon Sportswriter of the Year; watching his son hit three sixes at age eight; and “watching Wettimuny at Lord’s in 1984, the first time I realised that a Sri Lankan could be as good as anyone else”. We also learn that a disagreement about the legitimacy of Muttiah Muralitharan’s bowling action turned into the ugliest argument Wije has ever had: “More foul-mouthed than when Ceylon Electricity overcharged me Rs 10,000. Angrier than when my wife found out I had been fired from my third successive job.”
Generally speaking Wije has no illusions about having led a particularly consequential life, but in the tradition of tragic protagonists who have a date with the Reaper, he has one magnificent obsession: he wants to make a documentary about the 1980s spin bowler Pradeep Mathew, whom he considers an unsung hero, the greatest cricketer Lanka ever produced. With the help of his closest friend Ari Byrd, and financial support from a former English cricketer, Wije gets the project off the ground, but there are snags - for one thing, it turns out that Mathew may no longer be alive. And if he is, he’s doing a bloody good job of being elusive. Wije’s search for this enigmatic man will lead him to meetings and conversations with disparate types ranging from cricketing coaches to match-fixers to a mysterious underworld figure.
Among the many notable things about Chinaman is Karunatilaka’s spot-on portrait of the interior life of an old man searching for fulfilment – his loneliness and cynicism, his regrets about his estranged son, his relationship with his wife and friends. (A lovely, unexpected passage three-fourths of the way through the book relates a beachside conversation between Wiji and his wife Sheila that rings so true it’s hard to believe it was written by an author only in his thirties.) Through all his trials, Wije also retains a broad, nihilistic sense of humour – lying on a hospital bed near death while a nurse adjusts his bedpan and his wife smothers him in kisses, he reflects that this moment “is the closest I have come to a ménage a trios in my wretched, uneventful life”.
Absorbing and believable as this voice is, the book’s non-linear structure – darting about like a ball on an uncovered, crater-ridden pitch – is just as effective. The plot is interspersed with little subsections containing asides and bits of information about the game, even drawings; less adeptly done, this sort of thing might have impeded the narrative, but here it allows us to glimpse the inner world of a man who has spent much of his life thinking about the game.
Fact and fiction mix in intriguing ways here: there are references to matches that actually took place – such as this one in the 1985 Benson & Hedges World Series, which was Lanka’s heaviest defeat – but with minor alterations. (In Karunatilaka’s revised version of the match, the eventual result is the same, but Mathew takes five wickets.) There are several mentions of real-life cricketers, but there are also names that mash two or more real-life personalities together, such as “Graham Snow” (a former English captain who, in an amusing passage, bawls about his personal problems to WG and Ari, thinking they are psychiatrists) and “Mohinder Binny”. I thought the use of these composite names was gimmicky, but much more effective is the tantalising way in which Karunatilaka incorporates himself – or at least a character named “Shehan Karunatilaka” – in the book’s last section, which could be a comment on the relationship between a fiction writer and his creations, or the relationship between fiction and non-fiction. Does Pradeep Mathew really exist, it makes us wonder. Who or what is he?
Well, on one level it’s easy enough to see Mathew as a cipher that enables other stories to be told. He can also be viewed as a wish-fulfilling device, a representation of the idea that Sri Lankan cricket could have had a genuine world-beater even in its sorry 1980s – a true force of nature, a bowler who could dismiss such batsmen as Allan Border and Dean Jones with "miracle" deliveries. (Karunatilaka has gone to some lengths to create an online world for the fictional cricketer, including a webpage with photos, stats, articles and a fake Cricinfo profile.)
However, Mathew is also a tragic figure, a victim of countless external factors, and a reminder that sporting genius doesn’t ply its trade in isolation. In the alternate universe described in Chinaman, he bowls one of the great spells in cricketing history against New Zealand – such a brilliant spell, in fact, that it leads to the pitch being declared unfit and all record of the match being erased from the books! He takes on a supercilious Yorkshireman during a TV interview, an improbable instance of a cricketer from a diffident team giving it back to a white supremacist. Years later, he encourages Arjuna Ranatunga to beat the Aussies at their own game by sledging them back, advises Muralitharan not to change his action, and insists that Jayasuriya, the new one-day opening batsman, be allowed to play his natural game and hit over the top in the first 15 overs. None of these priceless contributions to Lankan cricket become public knowledge.
In a fairer world, Mathew might also have been a uniting force in a country sundered by racial conflicts – a cricketing superstar who happens to be the son of a Sinhala mother and a Tamil father. But then sport at its best, Chinaman postulates, can make the injustices of the real world more tolerable, sometimes even balance them out – even if its effects are temporary. “I have been told by members of my own family that there is no use or value in sports,” Wije says at one point. He retorts that there is little point to anything. “In a thousand years, grass will have grown over all our cities. Nothing of anything will matter. Left-arm spinners cannot teach your children or cure you of disease. But once in a while, the very best of them will bowl a ball that will bring an entire nation to its feet. And while there may be no practical use in that, there is most certainly value.”
An entire nation was, of course, brought to its feet when Sri Lanka won the World Cup in 1996, and the Chinaman narrative covers the sense of wonder and triumph of those days (“Sri Lankans across the world stand taller, believing that now anything is possible. The war would end, the nation would prosper and pigs would take to the air”), while never losing sight of the possibility that it might turn out to be an illusion – a flare of light in the midst of a continuing darkness.
But what a flare!
“Wasting talent is a crime,” says Graham.I don’t know if Shehan Karunatilaka’s Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew is “the Great Sri Lankan Novel” (as some of the publicity has suggested), but it’s a tremendously moving and funny book that works on many levels. It deals with big human subjects such as mortality, regret and self-actualisation, but does so with admirable lightness of touch. It’s a highly engaging cricket book too, one that uses the sport to examine aspects of Sri Lankan history, politics and contemporary life. But cricket isn’t just a MacGuffin in this story. To appreciate Chinaman fully, you need to have at least a very basic interest in the game, even if you don’t live and breathe it the way the man who tells the tale does.
“A sin,” concurs Ari.
I think of Pradeep Mathew, the great unsung bowler. I think of Sri Lanka, the great underachieving nation. I think of WG Karunasena, the great unfulfilled writer. I think of all these ghosts and I can’t help but agree.
That narrator is a 64-year-old sports journalist named WG Karunasena (“Wije” or “Gamini” for short), and as the book opens we learn that he is dying, his liver ravaged by years of alcohol abuse. Soon we will gather that Wije’s personal list of his life’s proudest moments includes (in no particular order): his wedding; the birth of his son (named Garfield, after Sobers); being awarded Ceylon Sportswriter of the Year; watching his son hit three sixes at age eight; and “watching Wettimuny at Lord’s in 1984, the first time I realised that a Sri Lankan could be as good as anyone else”. We also learn that a disagreement about the legitimacy of Muttiah Muralitharan’s bowling action turned into the ugliest argument Wije has ever had: “More foul-mouthed than when Ceylon Electricity overcharged me Rs 10,000. Angrier than when my wife found out I had been fired from my third successive job.”Generally speaking Wije has no illusions about having led a particularly consequential life, but in the tradition of tragic protagonists who have a date with the Reaper, he has one magnificent obsession: he wants to make a documentary about the 1980s spin bowler Pradeep Mathew, whom he considers an unsung hero, the greatest cricketer Lanka ever produced. With the help of his closest friend Ari Byrd, and financial support from a former English cricketer, Wije gets the project off the ground, but there are snags - for one thing, it turns out that Mathew may no longer be alive. And if he is, he’s doing a bloody good job of being elusive. Wije’s search for this enigmatic man will lead him to meetings and conversations with disparate types ranging from cricketing coaches to match-fixers to a mysterious underworld figure.
Among the many notable things about Chinaman is Karunatilaka’s spot-on portrait of the interior life of an old man searching for fulfilment – his loneliness and cynicism, his regrets about his estranged son, his relationship with his wife and friends. (A lovely, unexpected passage three-fourths of the way through the book relates a beachside conversation between Wiji and his wife Sheila that rings so true it’s hard to believe it was written by an author only in his thirties.) Through all his trials, Wije also retains a broad, nihilistic sense of humour – lying on a hospital bed near death while a nurse adjusts his bedpan and his wife smothers him in kisses, he reflects that this moment “is the closest I have come to a ménage a trios in my wretched, uneventful life”.Absorbing and believable as this voice is, the book’s non-linear structure – darting about like a ball on an uncovered, crater-ridden pitch – is just as effective. The plot is interspersed with little subsections containing asides and bits of information about the game, even drawings; less adeptly done, this sort of thing might have impeded the narrative, but here it allows us to glimpse the inner world of a man who has spent much of his life thinking about the game.
Fact and fiction mix in intriguing ways here: there are references to matches that actually took place – such as this one in the 1985 Benson & Hedges World Series, which was Lanka’s heaviest defeat – but with minor alterations. (In Karunatilaka’s revised version of the match, the eventual result is the same, but Mathew takes five wickets.) There are several mentions of real-life cricketers, but there are also names that mash two or more real-life personalities together, such as “Graham Snow” (a former English captain who, in an amusing passage, bawls about his personal problems to WG and Ari, thinking they are psychiatrists) and “Mohinder Binny”. I thought the use of these composite names was gimmicky, but much more effective is the tantalising way in which Karunatilaka incorporates himself – or at least a character named “Shehan Karunatilaka” – in the book’s last section, which could be a comment on the relationship between a fiction writer and his creations, or the relationship between fiction and non-fiction. Does Pradeep Mathew really exist, it makes us wonder. Who or what is he?
Well, on one level it’s easy enough to see Mathew as a cipher that enables other stories to be told. He can also be viewed as a wish-fulfilling device, a representation of the idea that Sri Lankan cricket could have had a genuine world-beater even in its sorry 1980s – a true force of nature, a bowler who could dismiss such batsmen as Allan Border and Dean Jones with "miracle" deliveries. (Karunatilaka has gone to some lengths to create an online world for the fictional cricketer, including a webpage with photos, stats, articles and a fake Cricinfo profile.)However, Mathew is also a tragic figure, a victim of countless external factors, and a reminder that sporting genius doesn’t ply its trade in isolation. In the alternate universe described in Chinaman, he bowls one of the great spells in cricketing history against New Zealand – such a brilliant spell, in fact, that it leads to the pitch being declared unfit and all record of the match being erased from the books! He takes on a supercilious Yorkshireman during a TV interview, an improbable instance of a cricketer from a diffident team giving it back to a white supremacist. Years later, he encourages Arjuna Ranatunga to beat the Aussies at their own game by sledging them back, advises Muralitharan not to change his action, and insists that Jayasuriya, the new one-day opening batsman, be allowed to play his natural game and hit over the top in the first 15 overs. None of these priceless contributions to Lankan cricket become public knowledge.
In a fairer world, Mathew might also have been a uniting force in a country sundered by racial conflicts – a cricketing superstar who happens to be the son of a Sinhala mother and a Tamil father. But then sport at its best, Chinaman postulates, can make the injustices of the real world more tolerable, sometimes even balance them out – even if its effects are temporary. “I have been told by members of my own family that there is no use or value in sports,” Wije says at one point. He retorts that there is little point to anything. “In a thousand years, grass will have grown over all our cities. Nothing of anything will matter. Left-arm spinners cannot teach your children or cure you of disease. But once in a while, the very best of them will bowl a ball that will bring an entire nation to its feet. And while there may be no practical use in that, there is most certainly value.”
An entire nation was, of course, brought to its feet when Sri Lanka won the World Cup in 1996, and the Chinaman narrative covers the sense of wonder and triumph of those days (“Sri Lankans across the world stand taller, believing that now anything is possible. The war would end, the nation would prosper and pigs would take to the air”), while never losing sight of the possibility that it might turn out to be an illusion – a flare of light in the midst of a continuing darkness.
But what a flare!
In 1996, subcontinental flair overcame western precision and the world’s nobodies thrashed the world’s bullies. Sixty years earlier a black man ridiculed the Nazi race theory with five gold medals in Berlin before Mein Fuhrer’s furious eyes.[Here's an old post about my relationship with cricket, which coincidentally began just before the 1996 World Cup. And here's a piece I did for Cricinfo about the two cricket-loving fops in Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes]
In real life, justice is rarely poetic and too often invisible [...] In real life, if you find yourself chasing 30 runs off 20 balls, you will fall short, even with all your wickets in hand. Real life is lived at two runs an over, with a dodgy LBW every decade...
...Unlike life, sport matters.
Kamis, 10 Februari 2011
On Aditya Sudarshan’s Show Me a Hero
I’ve written earlier about the spate of mass-market novels authored by young students/graduates and published by low-investment houses like Srishti** – mostly simplistic stories about youngsters who learn hard truths about life through friendships and romance, and eventually grow up (or, in some cases, achieve the all-consuming goal of losing their virginity while remaining just as mentally stunted as before). The majority of these novels move at a brisk rate, with lots of conversation but very little description. Rarely if ever are the protagonists genuine introverts or loners, though in some cases they think of themselves as such.
This is no surprise: many of these writers pride themselves on not being avid readers themselves (see this old post); what matters is that they think they have a story to tell and that they’ve mugged up thesauruses so they can (mis)use “big” words while expressing simple-minded ideas.
On the surface, Aditya Sudarshan’s Show Me a Hero might seem like the standard-issue youth novel, what with its dramatic subtitle “Lights, Camera, Cricket...and Murder” and its mass market-friendly plot about a group of young people trying to make a film about a controversial batsman who once played for India. And sure enough, this book is quite a page-turner in its way – especially the second half, which centres on a mysterious death and an investigation, with a few red herrings strewn about. However, Sudarshan is a wise reader himself (he’s done some fine literary criticism for the Hindu and other publications) and this makes itself felt in the book’s central voice. The narrator Vaibhav, a thoughtful young man with a mature head on his shoulders, spends a lot of time observing the people around him, trying to make sense of the world and his place in it, analysing (sometimes overanalysing) his own reactions to situations.
Vaibhav comes from a well-to-do family and has had a sheltered childhood, but as the story begins he is living in a rented room in a Patpatganj apartment while half-heartedly holding a low-paying job with a wildlife organisation. A hint of excitement enters his life when he reencounters an ex-classmate named Prashant, a mercurial young man on a mission. Prashant turns out to be obsessed with the former cricketer Ali Khan, who had stirred hackles during his playing days because he didn’t conform to the expectations we tend to have of our public figures (wear your patriotism on your sleeve, say all the politically correct things, respect the tradition you were born into). As Prashant, Vaibhav and a small circle of friends begin the shooting of a film about Khan, their paths cross with goons who want the project scrapped, and tragedy soon follows.
Show Me a Hero isn’t a completely satisfying novel, but (and this might sound strange) I don’t really mean that as a criticism. The thing is, it’s dressed up as a work of genre fiction - and marketed to seem like more of a cricket novel than it is, presumably to cash in on the World Cup - but it doesn’t provide the reader with the comforts, the cosy tying up of loose ends, that genre works are expected to provide. Sudarshan has a real feel for the uncertainties of sensitive youngsters trying to deal with a complicated world (and with the hegemony of older people), and his writing doesn’t involve neat resolutions. He has the courage to reach for a downbeat ending, whether it involves a man who might not have been the proud, individualistic hero everyone thought he was, or the likeable girl who gently turns down a likeable boy just when it seems they are “destined” for the perfect romance.
There are some good character sketches here too: an intrusive landlady, a typically belligerent Delhi driver who is ready to “kill” someone because they dented his beloved car but who turns into a fawner when he meets a former celebrity, a grief-stricken mother who wants to believe the best about her abrasive boy. At times I felt a minor conflict between the self-conscious solemnity of Vaibhav’s narration and the demands of a fast-paced story, but on the whole Show Me a Hero does a fine job of ignoring the hazy line between “literary” and “genre” fiction. It’s good to come across a youth novel that has some interiority.
--------
** For more on such writing, see the last two paragraphs of this post
This is no surprise: many of these writers pride themselves on not being avid readers themselves (see this old post); what matters is that they think they have a story to tell and that they’ve mugged up thesauruses so they can (mis)use “big” words while expressing simple-minded ideas.
On the surface, Aditya Sudarshan’s Show Me a Hero might seem like the standard-issue youth novel, what with its dramatic subtitle “Lights, Camera, Cricket...and Murder” and its mass market-friendly plot about a group of young people trying to make a film about a controversial batsman who once played for India. And sure enough, this book is quite a page-turner in its way – especially the second half, which centres on a mysterious death and an investigation, with a few red herrings strewn about. However, Sudarshan is a wise reader himself (he’s done some fine literary criticism for the Hindu and other publications) and this makes itself felt in the book’s central voice. The narrator Vaibhav, a thoughtful young man with a mature head on his shoulders, spends a lot of time observing the people around him, trying to make sense of the world and his place in it, analysing (sometimes overanalysing) his own reactions to situations.Vaibhav comes from a well-to-do family and has had a sheltered childhood, but as the story begins he is living in a rented room in a Patpatganj apartment while half-heartedly holding a low-paying job with a wildlife organisation. A hint of excitement enters his life when he reencounters an ex-classmate named Prashant, a mercurial young man on a mission. Prashant turns out to be obsessed with the former cricketer Ali Khan, who had stirred hackles during his playing days because he didn’t conform to the expectations we tend to have of our public figures (wear your patriotism on your sleeve, say all the politically correct things, respect the tradition you were born into). As Prashant, Vaibhav and a small circle of friends begin the shooting of a film about Khan, their paths cross with goons who want the project scrapped, and tragedy soon follows.
Show Me a Hero isn’t a completely satisfying novel, but (and this might sound strange) I don’t really mean that as a criticism. The thing is, it’s dressed up as a work of genre fiction - and marketed to seem like more of a cricket novel than it is, presumably to cash in on the World Cup - but it doesn’t provide the reader with the comforts, the cosy tying up of loose ends, that genre works are expected to provide. Sudarshan has a real feel for the uncertainties of sensitive youngsters trying to deal with a complicated world (and with the hegemony of older people), and his writing doesn’t involve neat resolutions. He has the courage to reach for a downbeat ending, whether it involves a man who might not have been the proud, individualistic hero everyone thought he was, or the likeable girl who gently turns down a likeable boy just when it seems they are “destined” for the perfect romance.
There are some good character sketches here too: an intrusive landlady, a typically belligerent Delhi driver who is ready to “kill” someone because they dented his beloved car but who turns into a fawner when he meets a former celebrity, a grief-stricken mother who wants to believe the best about her abrasive boy. At times I felt a minor conflict between the self-conscious solemnity of Vaibhav’s narration and the demands of a fast-paced story, but on the whole Show Me a Hero does a fine job of ignoring the hazy line between “literary” and “genre” fiction. It’s good to come across a youth novel that has some interiority.
--------
** For more on such writing, see the last two paragraphs of this post
Minggu, 06 Februari 2011
Two literature surveys
The honourable Peter Griffin (Caferati co-founder, curator of the literature section of the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival, general all-round Internet superhero) has a couple of surveys for book-lovers - the first is on Essential Indian Books and the second is an Informal Readership Survey. Do take out the time to fill these in - shouldn't take more than 5-10 minutes. Both surveys are also on Peter's blog.
Kamis, 03 Februari 2011
In the Little Tramp's footsteps
Hard as it is to believe, we are nearing the hundredth anniversary of the start of one of the most important movie careers ever. A while ago, in this book, I came across some transcripts of inter-office memos by Universal Pictures, circa 1912 - the memos have people in high positions discussing the worth of a young comic who had applied for a job at the studio, and the first one reads:
“Interesting eccentric comedian. Better in sketches with dialogue than sight gags. However, not outstanding enough to warrant either testing or sending to coast.”
And later, when the test did happen after all (because there was an unanticipated vacancy):
“Many objections have been raised to the use of the derby hat...also, the moustache must go. And do not allow him to walk comically. This may look all right on English music hall stages but for mass audience we must try to avoid offending people who are bow-legged, or crippled.”
Happily, Charles Spencer Chaplin won the battle to keep his hat, his moustache and his walk, and here we are a century later, still marvelling at the effect he had on a new art form that was searching for direction – most popularly as a performer, but just as vitally as a filmmaker and all-round creative genius, one of the first true auteurs.
Eagle Home Entertainment has recently made available a series of Chaplin’s feature-length movies in good, restored prints, and it’s been a good excuse to catch up on films that I took for granted when I was a child. There are many gems here, including The Gold Rush, Modern Times and, from later years, Limelight and Monsieur Verdoux, but if I had to pick a favourite it would probably be the lovely City Lights, which Chaplin determinedly made as a silent film at a time when talkies were all the rage. (A sly opening scene has pompous officials speaking gibberish while inaugurating a statue – probably a reflection of what Chaplin himself felt about talking movies!) This story about a tramp who falls in love with a blind flower girl while also managing an oddly intimate, on-again-off-again friendship with a drunk millionaire, combines all the
best qualities of his work: imaginative physical comedy (notably the superb boxing-ring scene), unforgettable little gags (the "lucky" rabbit foot, the spaghetti and the streamers), gentle romance and pathos.
To watch the classic Chaplin films is to marvel at the influence they have had on cinema over the decades – and to discover, almost from one scene to the next, how strongly his work has seeped into popular culture across the world. (It's a bit like realising that a favourite novel - say, Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury or Richard Matheson’s What Dreams May Come - gets its title from a phrase made popular by a Shakespeare play.) Everyone knows about the effect he had on Raj Kapoor’s work, for example, but watching the beautiful last scene of City Lights where the tramp meets the girl, her sight now restored, I was reminded of the final moments of the Kamal Haasan-Sridevi tearjerker Sadma, where a man finds that the girl he had cared for through a mental ailment no longer recognises him now that she has regained her memory.
The City Lights sequence is (somewhat uncharacteristically for Chaplin) very understated, while the Sadma one belongs to a tradition of high melodrama, but the emotional link is so strong that it almost doesn't matter. To my eyes at least, Haasan almost comes to resemble Chaplin in that scene; even his moustache seems to droop in a similar way. But then, optical illusions of this sort are part of the Little Tramp’s legacy - you find traces of him in the unlikeliest places.
It also barely matters that the first film ends on a seemingly hopeful note whereas the latter's ending is sad and pessimistic; in the Chaplin universe, the possibility of melancholy exists in the most joyful situations, and vice versa. In any case, the viewer's knowledge of the Tramp's screen persona - the fact that he's a drifter perpetually bow-legging it from one situation to the next - makes it difficult to imagine a genuine romantic union between him and the flower girl, and this could be one reason why the last scene of City Lights is so movingly ambiguous. As Andrew Sarris put it, the final close-up is "the definitive image of a man who feels tragically unworthy of his beloved". It's a classic Chaplin theme.
[From my film column in Business Standard Weekend]
“Interesting eccentric comedian. Better in sketches with dialogue than sight gags. However, not outstanding enough to warrant either testing or sending to coast.”
And later, when the test did happen after all (because there was an unanticipated vacancy):
“Many objections have been raised to the use of the derby hat...also, the moustache must go. And do not allow him to walk comically. This may look all right on English music hall stages but for mass audience we must try to avoid offending people who are bow-legged, or crippled.”
Happily, Charles Spencer Chaplin won the battle to keep his hat, his moustache and his walk, and here we are a century later, still marvelling at the effect he had on a new art form that was searching for direction – most popularly as a performer, but just as vitally as a filmmaker and all-round creative genius, one of the first true auteurs.Eagle Home Entertainment has recently made available a series of Chaplin’s feature-length movies in good, restored prints, and it’s been a good excuse to catch up on films that I took for granted when I was a child. There are many gems here, including The Gold Rush, Modern Times and, from later years, Limelight and Monsieur Verdoux, but if I had to pick a favourite it would probably be the lovely City Lights, which Chaplin determinedly made as a silent film at a time when talkies were all the rage. (A sly opening scene has pompous officials speaking gibberish while inaugurating a statue – probably a reflection of what Chaplin himself felt about talking movies!) This story about a tramp who falls in love with a blind flower girl while also managing an oddly intimate, on-again-off-again friendship with a drunk millionaire, combines all the
best qualities of his work: imaginative physical comedy (notably the superb boxing-ring scene), unforgettable little gags (the "lucky" rabbit foot, the spaghetti and the streamers), gentle romance and pathos.To watch the classic Chaplin films is to marvel at the influence they have had on cinema over the decades – and to discover, almost from one scene to the next, how strongly his work has seeped into popular culture across the world. (It's a bit like realising that a favourite novel - say, Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury or Richard Matheson’s What Dreams May Come - gets its title from a phrase made popular by a Shakespeare play.) Everyone knows about the effect he had on Raj Kapoor’s work, for example, but watching the beautiful last scene of City Lights where the tramp meets the girl, her sight now restored, I was reminded of the final moments of the Kamal Haasan-Sridevi tearjerker Sadma, where a man finds that the girl he had cared for through a mental ailment no longer recognises him now that she has regained her memory.
The City Lights sequence is (somewhat uncharacteristically for Chaplin) very understated, while the Sadma one belongs to a tradition of high melodrama, but the emotional link is so strong that it almost doesn't matter. To my eyes at least, Haasan almost comes to resemble Chaplin in that scene; even his moustache seems to droop in a similar way. But then, optical illusions of this sort are part of the Little Tramp’s legacy - you find traces of him in the unlikeliest places.It also barely matters that the first film ends on a seemingly hopeful note whereas the latter's ending is sad and pessimistic; in the Chaplin universe, the possibility of melancholy exists in the most joyful situations, and vice versa. In any case, the viewer's knowledge of the Tramp's screen persona - the fact that he's a drifter perpetually bow-legging it from one situation to the next - makes it difficult to imagine a genuine romantic union between him and the flower girl, and this could be one reason why the last scene of City Lights is so movingly ambiguous. As Andrew Sarris put it, the final close-up is "the definitive image of a man who feels tragically unworthy of his beloved". It's a classic Chaplin theme.
[From my film column in Business Standard Weekend]
Tender Leaves, and some book recos
Just to direct readers' attention to a new online book rental service called Tender Leaves - you can read about how it works here. Sudarshan Purohit, who co-founded the service, asked me to provide a few recommendations of cinema-related books for their blog, which I've done here. (Those are only a few of my favourite movie books, more titles will be added to the list soon.)
Selasa, 01 Februari 2011
A sneak preview: The Popcorn Essayists
What happens when you gather a line-up of established authors who don't write professionally about cinema and ask them for personal essays about a cherished film or film-related experience?
This happens:
[Click to enlarge]
The anthology will be out in a month or so, but here's a quick summary of what the pieces are about:
- How do you "read" a film, how do actors recapture the immediacy of their feelings when they dub for a scene months after the original shoot ...and other questions that movie buffs ask themselves ("Jellyfish" - Manjula Padmanabhan)
- A tongue-in-cheek analysis of a cult Punjabi film as a Bible for foot-fetishists ("The Foot-Worshipper's Guide to Watching Maula Jatt" - Musharraf Ali Farooqi)
- On dreamlike vistas, from Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill Jr to a surreal chase scene featuring Kader Khan and Vinod Mehra ("Perchance to Dream" - Rajorshi Chakraborti)
- How the Bihari actor Manoj Bajpai passed himself off as a native in an archetypal Mumbai movie ("Writing my own Satya" - Amitava Kumar)
- From watching Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire to reading Michael Cunningham’s ‘White Angel’ - how does the language of film differ from the language of prose? ("Two Languages in Conversation" - Kamila Shamsie)
- On the tumultuous romance between a man and his car in Ritwik Ghatak's Ajantrik ("Gaadi Bula Rahi Hai" - Sumana Roy)
- Why a middle-aged male author performed a Helen dance in drag after a public reading in Brooklyn (Manil Suri's "My Life as a Cabaret Dancer", which you can read here)
- Secret agents, suave detectives, fake ghosts ... on Hindi film noir and thrillers from the 1950s and 60s ("Villains and Vamps and All Things Camp" - Madhulika Liddle)
- What the silences in the Kaurismaki brothers' movies reveal about Finland and its people, and why an Indian writer should be so interested ("Going Kaurismaki" - Anjum Hasan)
- When you're starved for moviegoing experience, a Charlie Sheen thriller can be "the greatest movie ever made by man" ("Terminal Case" - Sidin Vadukut)
- On why being scared is a good thing ("Monsters I Have Known", by yours truly)
- A novelist recalls her time publishing a gossip-driven film magazine in the 1970s, steeped in "a Film Lok parallel to Indra Lok" ("Super Days" - Namita Gokhale)
- A writer who worked for the British Board of Film Classification on the occasional need for - and her ambivalence about - censorship ("The Final Cut" - Jaishree Misra)
And here's the video of the Popcorn Essays session at the Jaipur lit-fest, where four of these writers read from their pieces.
Updates to follow as the release date draws near.
This happens:
[Click to enlarge]
The anthology will be out in a month or so, but here's a quick summary of what the pieces are about:
- How do you "read" a film, how do actors recapture the immediacy of their feelings when they dub for a scene months after the original shoot ...and other questions that movie buffs ask themselves ("Jellyfish" - Manjula Padmanabhan)
- A tongue-in-cheek analysis of a cult Punjabi film as a Bible for foot-fetishists ("The Foot-Worshipper's Guide to Watching Maula Jatt" - Musharraf Ali Farooqi)
- On dreamlike vistas, from Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill Jr to a surreal chase scene featuring Kader Khan and Vinod Mehra ("Perchance to Dream" - Rajorshi Chakraborti)
- How the Bihari actor Manoj Bajpai passed himself off as a native in an archetypal Mumbai movie ("Writing my own Satya" - Amitava Kumar)
- From watching Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire to reading Michael Cunningham’s ‘White Angel’ - how does the language of film differ from the language of prose? ("Two Languages in Conversation" - Kamila Shamsie)
- On the tumultuous romance between a man and his car in Ritwik Ghatak's Ajantrik ("Gaadi Bula Rahi Hai" - Sumana Roy)
- Why a middle-aged male author performed a Helen dance in drag after a public reading in Brooklyn (Manil Suri's "My Life as a Cabaret Dancer", which you can read here)
- Secret agents, suave detectives, fake ghosts ... on Hindi film noir and thrillers from the 1950s and 60s ("Villains and Vamps and All Things Camp" - Madhulika Liddle)
- What the silences in the Kaurismaki brothers' movies reveal about Finland and its people, and why an Indian writer should be so interested ("Going Kaurismaki" - Anjum Hasan)
- When you're starved for moviegoing experience, a Charlie Sheen thriller can be "the greatest movie ever made by man" ("Terminal Case" - Sidin Vadukut)
- On why being scared is a good thing ("Monsters I Have Known", by yours truly)
- A novelist recalls her time publishing a gossip-driven film magazine in the 1970s, steeped in "a Film Lok parallel to Indra Lok" ("Super Days" - Namita Gokhale)
- A writer who worked for the British Board of Film Classification on the occasional need for - and her ambivalence about - censorship ("The Final Cut" - Jaishree Misra)
And here's the video of the Popcorn Essays session at the Jaipur lit-fest, where four of these writers read from their pieces.
Updates to follow as the release date draws near.
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