The movie star as auteur

[From my Business Standard column]

Anyone who studies cinema – or reads film literature at a level beyond magazine gossip – must sooner or later stub his toes on the Auteur Theory. The debates around it are too many to properly discuss in this space, but here’s a condensation: in the 1950s, a group of French critics – who championed popular American cinema and drew attention to the high levels of artistry in many genre films – proposed that some directors brought a unified artistic vision to their movies, even while working within the constraints of the studio system or under the watchful eye of a money-minded producer. Thus, though filmmaking is a messy, collaborative process – with specialists in different fields working with and against each other – certain movies could be seen as bearing the stamp of a single distinct personality. Cinema, even commercial cinema, could be a deeply personal art form.

Though the theory initially helped reassess the worth of popular films, it has seeped into the tradition of academic criticism, with the result that it seems almost intimidating today. In movie-related discussions with friends, I sometimes try to imagine how it might be applied to popular Hindi cinema. For instance, can it be used to understand the themes of role-playing and subterfuge that ran through Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s large body of work? (Or the startling similarities between the protagonists of two of his most austere films, Satyakam and Alaap, which are on the face of it based on very different types of stories.) How about Vijay Anand’s interest in elegant long takes? Or the oeuvre of a full-blown mainstream director like Manmohan Desai, whose best work was built around rosy ideas about national integration? More importantly, does the theory help us to meaningfully assess the work of these directors and their creative development over a period of time? (As that famously self-positioned anti-auteurist Pauline Kael suggested in her snarky essay “Circles and Squares”, obsessively searching for motifs in a director’s body of work can sometimes amount to a parlour game, an exercise in self-indulgence that doesn’t necessarily tell you much about the quality of a particular film.)

In a commercial movie culture founded on the star system, actors can sometimes be the real auteurs – their personalities shaping not just a film but in some cases an entire filmic movement. A classic example is Amitabh Bachchan as Vijay, the outsider-vigilante of the 1970s. In Deewaar and Trishul (to name just two key films that are closely related), Bachchan played a Vijay constantly haunted by an injustice-ridden past. Both narratives are built on the theme of a son trying to erase his mother’s sufferings by rising in the world, even literally (to the extent that he can sign deed papers for new skyscrapers, the sort of constructions she might have once worked on as a labourer). Both were directed by Yash Chopra, but few people I know would think of Chopra as their chief creative force. Their mood – which also became the dominant mood of mainstream Hindi cinema in that decade – was created by the writing of Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar in conjunction with the many tangible and intangible aspects of Bachchan’s personality; the two things came together in a way that became a fine expression for the societal and political frustrations of the time, proving cathartic for lakhs of viewers. ***


Equally, there are cases where a forceful star personality can work against a writer’s vision. Take Salim Khan’s son Salman as the policeman Chulbul Pandey in the hugely popular Dabangg last year. Dabangg is a startlingly dual-natured film: Chulbul is a super-hero out of a cartoon and his action scenes are like parodies of the dhishoom-dhishoom cinema of an earlier time, revamped for an age of computer effects (scenes like the one where he casually shoots a fellow cop in the shoulder are played for laughs, but I cringed, because my mind hadn’t yet made the full switch to the Tom and Jerry viewing mode). But in its quieter scenes, and especially the moments where Salman isn’t winking at the camera, it comes across as a grounded, character-driven movie – the sort that might have been categorised as “Middle Cinema” in the 1970s - with a real understanding of its milieu and people.

I wasn’t at all surprised to learn (from sources who must remain unnamed) that writer Abhinav Kashyap’s screenplay was originally darker and more consistently understated: it involved the policeman committing an underhanded murder to get the hand of the girl he loves, and having to face the repercussions. A residue of that vision has survived in the final work, as in the scene where Chulbul quietly tells Rabbo that he hopes, for her sake, that her wastrel father dies soon. But when Khan and his brother Arbaaz – who co-produced the film – became involved with the project, Chulbul became the latest in a line of indestructible, wisecracking heroes played by Salman in recent years, and this altered the very texture of the character and the movie. It’s the sort of back-story that helps explain why unified visions – and evenness of tone – are sometimes hard to find in our mainstream films.

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*** Susmita Dasgupta’s book Amitabh: The Making of a Superstar has some interesting thoughts on Bachchan as the “author” of his roles, and on the complex ways in which the star system functions. Also see this post by Vinay Lal – author of the Harper Collins Deewaar book – on “the dialectic of the footpath and the skyscraper” in that film.

[Notes on auteurism and on the star system are scattered throughout the archives of this blog, but here are some related posts: Izz all well; two David Fincher films; story and storytelling]

Jis desh mein manga bikhti hai... stupid Japanese guy meets terrifying Indian city

In a recent piece, I mentioned the pitfalls of writing simplistically about poverty and squalor in India. That’s relevant to a reportage-driven project, where the writer has a responsibility to understand historical and cultural context, but there are other types of writing where an individual’s honest account of his impressions can take precedence over providing a “fair” or “balanced” view. Take the case of a Japanese comic artist in his mid-50s who decides, almost on whim, to travel to India (a country he knows practically nothing about) to sell Hindi translations of manga publications. He lands in Delhi, fumbles through immigration, can’t locate the airport exit, is horrified to find his bags dumped near the conveyor belt, outraged to see a man using a simple calculator at the foreign-exchange counter…and all this in the first few minutes. The business of actually living in this country without being able to speak English or Hindi still lies ahead of him.

Little wonder then that Yukichi Yamamatsu’s graphic novel Stupid Guy Goes to India – an account of his India stay in 2004-05 – contains such observations as “It’s like the ground was entirely made of cow turds” and “People were eating something that looked like potato, out of something that looked like tree bark...with their hands!” Little wonder too that parts of this book feel like a horror story about an innocent abandoned in a crepuscular forest, even though most of it is set in Old Delhi in broad sunlight (and the people around aren't monsters but speak a strange language presented as geometric symbols in speech balloons).

In fairness, Yamamatsu makes not the slightest pretence of being worldly wise. Uninformed and provincial, he is devastated to discover that homegrown Indian comics exist (he was expecting to single-handedly introduce a new art form to the country!) and this shock is conveyed in one of the book’s more amusing panels, where Yukichi’s head appears to be sliced by a samurai sword. He gets fleeced, goes around in circles and flies into existential rage when he learns the cost of printing a comic - he had figured it would be no more than 20 or 30 Yen, things being famously cheap in India. The more I read, the more I felt that the “stupid guy” in the title wasn’t just a sweet exercise in self-deprecation.

Still, I liked this book’s resolutely unsentimental tone. Yukichi is in India with a single-point agenda. He isn’t interested in the local culture beyond how it helps him achieve his ends (before his trip he half-heartedly goes through an India guidebook, but soon forgets most of what he’s read). Age may have something to do with it: this isn’t a spry youngster looking to discover an exciting new place; this is an irritable elderly man who is set in his ways and who worries about walking around for long periods because of a bowel incontinence problem (it doesn’t help that the ubiquitous song “Dhoom Machale” sounds to him like “Unko Tare”, meaning anal leakage!). When he describes playing an impromptu game with street kids, it’s more a way of passing the time than an attempt at being friendly (or at least being friendly in the elaborate Indian way). There’s even an irreverent, unexpectedly pornographic passage when he acts on a friend’s suggestion that Indian women are “probably pretty good for sex”, and makes a trip to GB Road (he proceeds to detail his inability to sustain an erection, which led me to happy thoughts of Stupid Guy ... being placed in the children’s section of bookstores, something that often happens with adult comics).

But the lack of sentimentality doesn’t necessarily make this a cold, detached narrative. Part of its charm comes from how Yukichi, in spite of himself, gets absorbed into the Indian way of doing things, such as the vague bob of the head that indicates direction (and which he dramatises with a "wik" sound). He is often very funny when he describes his struggles to have conversations in broken Hindi, and hyper-dramatic wails of “Nahin!” punctuate the story when he gets stressed (which is often). And since he is so passionate about what he does, one comes to feel invested in his heroic attempts to get comics translated, properly lettered and typeset. The magnificent culture of manga will bring a new dawn to India, he exults at one point, in the foreground of a drawing that shows the sun rising above “the cold, dark Himalayas”. The effect is mainly humorous, but by the end it’s a conceit almost worth buying into.

Stupid Guy Goes to India is a breezy tale that begins quite slowly (especially if you’re not enthralled by descriptions of a foreigner making his first acquaintance with spicy food, low-budget hotels and auto-rickshaws) and becomes more involving as it goes along. But it also worked for me on a level that the author may not have intended. We are surrounded by self-congratulating India narratives these days – even the ones that aren’t explicitly about The Shining tell us that the rest of the world looks towards us with respect for our cultural wisdom, our glorious past, our economic future, our ability to manage social complexity, our film-stars, our graceful, sari-wearing women. There is more than enough affirmation for those of us who seek it. Amidst all this, it can be useful to sit down and read a book by someone from a nearby country who isn’t particularly impressed by us, and who makes no bones about it. Sometimes it’s good to be tersely told “Indians tend to barge into your room without warning.” Or that “Indian marbles are smaller than Japanese ones and they are not perfectly round but flattened”. (Yukichi is really talking about marbles here, but again, who knows.)

P.S. This English translation of Stupid Guy Goes to India (by Kumar Sivasubramanian) has been printed in the traditional manga style, meaning it has to be read from right to left. (Perhaps the idea was to make a non-Japanese reader feel as disoriented as Yukichi felt in Delhi!) I found this reasonably easy to do when I read it the first time from beginning to end, but not so easy when I tried flipping through passages later to refresh my memory.

[A shorter version of this appeared in The Sunday Guardian. And here's an old post about Osamu Tezuka's excellent Buddha series]

An anthology of cinematic moments

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

Conducting a workshop on film criticism at the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival last weekend, I faced a minor dilemma. The workshop would last around 12 hours – enough time to show a couple of full-length movies and build elaborate discussions around them – but there was a long list of talking points to be covered, and I couldn’t think of specific films that could illustrate them all. It seemed far more useful to show clips of individual scenes – between 5 and 20 minutes long – from a number of different movies, made around the world in various genres and styles.

A part of me rallied against doing this. Was it fair to show selected bits of a film to people who might not be familiar beforehand with the work, and who would therefore not have a proper contextual appreciation of the sequence? And would that in turn mean spending long minutes explaining a back-story to a befuddled audience – using dry words to describe how the scene they had just watched connected with others that they hadn’t seen?

There was never going to be an easy resolution to this problem, but a chance visit to the fine new bookstore Kitab Khana – a 5-minute walk from Kala Ghoda – helped me make up my mind (in addition to providing one of my best purchases in weeks). In the cinema section was a sumptuous, thick book titled Defining Moments in Movies, part of the Cassell Illustrated series. This 800-pager, edited by Chris Fujiwara, is packed with photos spanning over 110 years of cinema, as well as ideas contributed by leading film writers from around the world. And one of the entries – by the critic and curator Paolo Cherchi Usai – seems to sum up the value of the book. In a piece about the sensuous silent movie The River – only 50 minutes of which have survived the ravages of time – Usai laments that this beautifully shot film was not widely considered one of the classics of the medium. “Cinema aficionados hate fragments,” he notes:

If the same criterion were applied to the other arts, the Victory of Samothrace would be buried in the basement of the Louvre; the Colosseum would be ignored by all; there would be no interest in the poetry of ancient Greece; no orchestra would perform Schubert’s Tenth Symphony. The River is cinema’s Venus de Milo.

It’s true enough that most critics tend to think of films as wholes. But as David Thomson observes in another context, it should be possible to watch movies in such a way that “we could build an anthology of moments, while admitting that elsewhere a film rests or glides downhill”.
 

The Cassell book isn’t just a collection of scenes though – it includes key events that may have altered film history, and some of the selections are fascinating. Consider this entry, early in the book, dating circa 1905: “Alfred Hitchcock sent to prison”. The reference is to the famous story about six-year-old Alfred being sent to the police station by his father as punishment for having done something naughty. This is an oft-repeated anecdote (and possibly an over-stated “explanation” of the recurring motifs of guilt and injustice in Hitchcock’s cinema), but how interesting to find it included here – it gives the perusing reader an immediate sense that this isn’t just an antiseptic collection of over-familiar sequences.

Indian cinema is surprisingly well-represented too – with Rays, Ghataks and even south Indian films included – though a reader who has grown up with Hindi movies is unlikely to find much new here. There is some repetition: was it necessary, for example, to include both “Amitabh Bachchan lands his first punch in Zanjeer” AND “The fight scene in the warehouse in Deewaar”? (Both are explained as being key scenes for similar reasons: they changed the image of the Hindi-movie hero and the idiom of fight scenes, made Bachchan a superstar etc. They were chosen by two different writers – Jerry Pinto and Rachel Dwyer respectively – and the non-Indian editors probably didn’t realise how similar these moments were.)

But that’s a small quibble – I’m going to be dipping into this book for a few weeks to come. Look out for scattered references to it as I try to get back to more regular movie-related writing.

P.S. Gratifyingly, as I flipped through the book on the plane back to Delhi, it turned out that some of the more offbeat inclusions were scenes I had independently opted to show at the workshop. Such as the opening of Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World with the young American girl dancing to an old Hindi-film “rock video” (from THAT film): at the workshop this was a starting point for a chat about how people who are on the fringes of their own society can find it cathartic to watch movies from different cultures. It was pleasing then to read the entry’s summary, which says the scene is key because “the way outsiders seek their identity in cultures other than their own is wittily shown”.

P.P.S. The excellent Jonathan Rosenbaum is one of the many contributors to Defining Moments in Movies. On his blog are two posts about the entries he wrote for the book: here and here.

New ways of writing about books

In which blurb writing - that fine tradition of the publishing industry worldwide - skyrockets to new depths. The invitation card for the launch of Anupam Kher's book The Best Thing About You is You! includes the following note of approbation by India's leading literary celeb of the past month:

"What a powerful title. I believe it."

- Oprah Winfrey

I love the mental picture this blurb conjures of Oprah being led through the publisher's warehouse and handed sundry book covers which she studies intently before pronouncing judgement for generations of readers to come. I also like the Khushwant Singh blurb just below hers (and look forward to his full review, which will no doubt be a chatty account of how he knew Anupam Kher's grandfather in Lahore in 1925).

Annawadi, "by heart": on Katherine Boo and Behind the Beautiful Forevers

[Did a version of this review-cum-interview for The Sunday Guardian]

One is almost conditioned these days, while reading a book (or watching a film) about the Indian poor, to expect clichés, generalisations, facile commentaries and quick-fix solutions. And so, around 20 pages into Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers – a non-fiction chronicle set in Mumbai’s Annawadi slum – I felt a very particular sort of trepidation. It’s what happens when you’re starting to be seriously invigorated by a book but also thinking, “This is too good to last.”

Surely, at some point, these carefully observed vignettes would devolve into a pat story about a kid pulling himself into a better world through pluck and initiative? Or perhaps there would be some gratuitous sentimentalising – a banality about how happy these children were, how their smiles were warmer than the smiles of more fortunate people elsewhere?

It doesn’t happen (and to be honest, it wasn’t until the last page that I sighed with relief). This intimate, novelistic work manages not to strike that fatal wrong note, and it achieves this while telling the interlinked stories of many different people, all of whom “know” that there are three main ways out of poverty: entrepreneurial initiative; politics and corruption (the two things being inseparable); and education. The first is the path chosen by a teenaged garbage trader named Abdul, the eldest son of the large (and, by Annawadi standards, well-off) Hussain family. On a different route is the 39-year-old Asha, who is in a power struggle to become the unofficial slum boss (“chosen by local politicians and police officers to run the settlement according to the authorities’ interests”). Her college-going daughter Manju “by-hearts” her way through mystifying texts by Virginia Woolf and Congreve, but conscientiously teaches other children in her hut during her spare time. Meanwhile a resourceful 12-year-old named Sunil reckons that he must become a better scavenger if he wants to “jump-start the system”.

Photo: MANOJ PATIL

In various ways, the lives of these residents of the “undercity” (a phrase that reminded me of Gorky’s The Lower Depths and one of the many films based on it, Chetan Anand’s 1946 Neecha Nagar) intersect with the privileged world outside. The threat of demolition hangs over the slum and the future must be thought about, but there is also the matter of securing the here and now, seizing each moment as it presents itself. Thus, even as Asha’s son Rahul boasts to his friends about his temporary job at the Intercontinental Hotel (“we laid this thick white carpet – you stepped on it and sank down”), he is alert enough to spot – and make a beeline for – a plastic kite stuck in a nearby tree; he might be able to sell it for two rupees.

I didn’t much care for this book’s precious-sounding title when I first heard it, but it’s easier to appreciate when you know the context: a wall advertisement for stylish floor tiles that hides the slum from the view of cars heading to the nearby international airport. There are only a couple of fleeting references to this artificial boundary – Boo doesn’t turn it into a heavy-handed symbol. More importantly, she doesn’t just take us “behind” the Beautiful Forever sign (in which case we might still have had only a brief aerial view of Annawadi, a snapshot of poverty porn) – she takes us to ground level. It’s the perspective a movie buff might remember from the chase sequences in Black Friday and Slumdog Millionaire) – but this isn’t a short-lived pursuit, this is life unfolding at its own unhurried pace. And the triumph of this book is to catch the many complexities of the Annawadians in such a way that the most complacent reader can no longer hide behind comforting “us” vs “them” distinctions.

To achieve this, Boo – who is married to the writer-academic Sunil Khilnani – knew that she needed to make a very long-term commitment of time and energy. When I meet her, the first thing I learn is that she had all sorts of misgivings. “I feared being a laughing stock,” she says, “I was embarrassed to talk about it with other people because it felt like such a cliché: white woman in an Indian slum, hanging around sewage lakes.” And this coming from someone who has impeccable credentials in writing about underprivileged people: she won a Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for a Washington Post series about group homes for mentally disadvantaged people, and a National Magazine Award in 2003 for a New Yorker feature about “marriage classes” in a poor Oklahoma community. “As a journalist, you know there are some things you can do well,” she says, “I knew I wouldn’t be any good interviewing politicians, but here’s something I could put my heart into.”

Photo credit: JORDAN TIERNEY

Growing up, she had learnt from her parents – who were very involved with the Civil Rights Movement – that much of what got written about the poor was simplistic. “So much reporting involved people hooking up with an NGO, which would pick a success story and get them to write about it. The way the world looked in a newspaper was not the way the world really looks to people who are making choices every day.” Her own first piece – for a shoestring magazine called the Washington Monthly, which she later edited – was about how, when a fire broke out in a New Orleans housing project, everyone made a fine show of outrage and the residents were given fire detectors; “but when you went back a few months later, the things were still in their boxes. In moments of crisis, people would come in, do their work and leave – but what was going on in ordinary times wasn’t being chronicled.”

One reason why the prettifying of poverty occurs in so much literature and reportage, she points out, is that many reporters are content to slip in and out of a place – “and naturally, in that situation, there is much excitement, people laugh and point and tell you about themselves, and if you leave immediately you only come away with that happy picture.” She didn’t want to be the tourist-reporter collecting sound-bytes as souvenirs. (“The ‘real story’ doesn’t emerge from my sticking a tape recorder into a poor kid’s face and asking him about the philosophy that keeps him going.”) The way to do it was to spend so much time with the Annawadians that she could go from being the weird white woman – a conspicuous, warning presence – to becoming part of the furniture, someone in whose presence people could be themselves. And so, aided by translators (three of them, at different points in her research), Boo made the slum her second home for nearly four years, filling notebooks and tapes with conversations and observations.

Photo: MANOJ PATIL

Remarkably, given the free-flowing nature of her research (“for me the process of reporting is a giving up of control – you have to let the day happen and adjust to it”), Behind the Beautiful Forevers pivots around a dramatic event: the self-immolation of a one-legged woman named Fatima, querulous neighbour to the Hussains. This tragedy cast a long shadow over the family's lives; Abdul and his father were arrested for being complicit in Fatima’s death, and the case dragged on. Since all this began eight months into Boo’s time in Annawadi, she had to refocus her narrative. “I had no idea going in that this would happen, or that I would be following the trial or investigating death. But when those things happen, you can’t say: let that be.” Later, when another youngster died in suspicious circumstances, she became deeply involved again. This also means that the ghosts of many other stories lie between these pages; some of the peripheral figures in the finished book - such as Raja Kamble, a once-respected man fallen on bad times and in need of a new heart valve - are people whom she could easily have written about at much greater length. "There was so much other material - and of course the final reader doesn't see the many blind alleys that I encountered."

That the story is told in the third person (Boo keeps herself firmly out of it) comes as a surprise given the level of her involvement. There have been excellent reportage-driven works in recent times – Sonia Faleiro’s Beautiful Thing and Aman Sethi’s A Free Man come to mind – where the writer is very much part of the narrative, and this can be very effective if it’s well-executed: for instance, A Free Man gains from the reader’s sense that Sethi the narrator is growing as a person as he tries to understand the life of his protagonist, the “small man” Mohammed Ashraf; that he is subtly changed by the things he is writing about.

But while Boo is an admirer of both books, she says this approach wouldn’t have worked for her. “I would have been conscious that every word or sentence I used up on myself was something I was taking away from the Annawadians.”

This does raise questions for a reader, though. In many passages – records of conversations and encounters – it’s clear that Boo was present, and the writing is a descriptive account of what she saw and heard (thus, Abdul says something sharply to his mother and “A rich silence followed”). But there were other times where she had to reconstruct what had happened through the not-completely-reliable accounts of witnesses. “We investigated the hell out of Fatima’s death,” she says, “Even though I was already close to the Hussains, we didn’t just presume they were innocent. We interviewed dozens of people, made sure the stories matched, fact-checked compulsively.”

“And the other thing I’ve always tried to do in my work is that if I cannot establish something, I put that in the narrative too. You have to be upfront with the reader, you can’t bluff your way through it.”

Being completely upfront also means that all names in the book – including those of corrupt or incompetent policemen and corporators – are real, and naturally this was risky. “I did feel threatened,” she said, “and there was one night with the police that was not a good night. In retrospect I realised the danger. But in general, my curiosity is greater than my fear. I don’t feel afraid till much later, because I get so involved in trying to figure things out – that’s part of the losing control that comes with reportage.”

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There has been much talk recently about the increase in narrative non-fiction in India, but some of the best books in this category don’t create “narratives” in the most specific sense of that word. These are not stories with a definite beginning, a definite middle and a neat summing up: Sethi’s and Faleiro’s books, for instance, both end with their subjects (a labourer and a bar-dancer respectively) moving out of the reader’s line of vision, to a place where even the sympathetic reporter-writer can no longer reach them, their eventual fate uncertain. Much of the books’ power lies in their refusal to peremptorily tell the “India story”: even when small details point to larger truths (about the state of a society, a nation, the world, or the human spirit), it’s done quietly, in the manner of what the critic Manny Farber called Termite Art (“immersion in a small area ... concentration on nailing down one moment without glamorising it”), and without any pretence that this is all there is to be said.

Photo: MANOJ PATIL

To an even greater extent than those books, Behind the Beautiful Forevers left me with the impression of being an ongoing, uncompleted story (and given the story behind its writing, how could it be otherwise?). One sees at the end that many different possibilities lie ahead for Abdul and his family, for Asha and Manju, for Sunil and the other children – and which of these possibilities will come to pass depends on a combination of several factors, including the one that flies in the face of every glib narrative: blind, meaningless luck.

It’s important to Boo that her readers recognise this, instead of buying into the comforting notion that the difference between rich and poor people is purely a measure of innate intelligence, talent or the “will to make it”. “We construct such reassuring stories for ourselves,” she sighs, “Even people who were born into lives of privilege, sitting on the wealth of generations, are convinced that they have motored their own successes. And one way of doing this is to think of the poor as a separate species.”

Even literally. “Where’s your Dalmatian?” a friend asked her after reading part of the manuscript, meaning: if you don’t give the reader a sweet, fluffy person to pet, why will they care? “But if you can only relate to these people as stereotypes, I’m not going to make it easy for you,” Boo says. “They are every bit as complex as you or me, and they are smarter than you realise. This isn’t an alien world where you lift the curtain and see wondrous new things. I see so much of myself in the people I write about.”

Indeed, by the time you reach the last page, the under-city and the over-city have melted away – what’s left is a long continuum leading from one way of life to another, and it’s possible to see the people of this book, Boo and her readers included, as occupying various positions along that line. Behind the Beautiful Forevers may begin as a very specific story about a scared young man hiding in a little hut to evade the police, but it ends as a powerful reflecting mirror.

Kala Ghoda festival 2012

Most of the programme schedule for the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival is online now - here is the Literature schedule (PDF), which includes my two-day workshop on film criticism on Feb 11-12. The other events - in theatre, music, visual arts and so on - can be found here.

I think we are fully booked for the workshop now, but if you're in Kala Ghoda on either of those days, do feel free to drop in at the Bombay Natural History Society and say hello. I'll be the guy lugging around a big bag with dozens of DVDs in it, looking nervous because I'm expecting local cops to arrest me on suspicion of piracy.