Jack London and the people of the abyss

From the slimy sidewalk, they were picking up bits of orange peel, apple skin, and grape stems, and they were eating them. The pips of green gage plums they cracked between their teeth for the kernels inside. They picked up stray crumbs of bread the size of peas, apple cores so black and dirty one would not take them to be apple cores, and these things these two men took into their mouths, and chewed them, and swallowed them; and this, between six and seven o'clock in the evening of August 20, year of our Lord 1902, in the heart of the greatest, wealthiest, and most powerful empire the world has ever seen.

Jack London’s The People of the Abyss – an equal-parts wry and harrowing journalistic account of the time he spent living in the most poverty-stricken areas of London’s East End in 1902 – has been one of my favourite reads in the past few months. I’ve been meaning to write about it for a while but haven’t had the time, so I’m taking the lazier option of just pointing you to it. The full text of the book can be accessed here. (I have a hard-copy myself and prefer reading that way, but it’s always good to have the other option.) You’ll find most of London’s other writings on that site too.

Incidentally I first learnt about this book from a reference in the footnotes of Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s magnificent graphic novel From Hell (which is not just one of my favourite pieces of literature but – ponderous though this might sound – one of my most cherished works of art; a book I turn to again and again for affirmation of what the human mind can achieve, individually and in collaboration). Two short posts with artwork from From Hell (and links to Eddie Campbell’s blog) are here and here.

Also, here’s a post on Katherine Boo and her book about Mumbai’s Annawadi slum, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, which represented a journalistic project not too dissimilar to the one London had embarked on more than a century earlier.

To Rome with Love and Death: thoughts on aging stars

Two Woody Allen moments, more than 35 years apart. In the newer one, from To Rome With Love, an old man – a shuffling, white-haired version of one of modern cinema’s most recognisable profiles – delivers a quasi-philosophical monologue in a familiar, nervous-tic-ridden style, ending with a little shrug and the remark that, of course, death probably won’t come to him for another 40 or 50 years at least! The line invites laughter, but the chuckles stick in one’s throat.

In the other scene I’m thinking of – from the 1975 film Love and Death – a much younger Allen, playing a character named Boris, speaks directly into the camera. Having just undergone execution by firing squad and now preparing to trail the Grim Reaper into the great unknown, Boris is understandably preoccupied with such subjects as Death, Life, God and insurance salesmen, and he offers us a deadpan meditation on these things (“the key here, I think, is to not think of Death as an end, but to think of it as a very effective way of cutting down on your expenses”). In one of the funniest closing shots of any film - a parody of the final scene of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal - Boris and the Reaper then perform a demented Danse Macabre through the woods together. (See video below, especially the last three minutes.)



One can of course cite countless other similarly toned moments from Allen’s large body of work. (Remember the one set in a biology classroom in Manhattan, where Allen’s Isaac chastises a friend about an extra-marital affair, then points to a particularly ugly skeleton and says, “We’re going to end up just like him – and he was probably one of the beautiful people in his time”?) One could even go back to the 1960s when, as a stand-up comedian, he was trading in self-consciously morose humour on the same set of existential subjects.

And yet, for me, the two scenes mentioned above produce very dissimilar effects. Watching a 76-year-old pontificate about death (as in To Rome with Love) is a markedly different experience from watching the same man doing so in his 30s or 40s. It’s less easy to smile at.

Allen himself would not condone such a treacly attitude – the very idea would probably be distasteful to him – but for a long-time viewer these feelings are inevitable. One can spend half a lifetime admiring certain movie-stars for their (mental or physical) toughness and their lack of sentimentality (“lack of sentimentality” itself being a meaninglessly broad category that can include Woody Allen’s Borises, Alvys and Isaacs as well as Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harrys and Blondies, to name just two venerably aged American actor-directors) – but as time passes they become vulnerable in one’s eyes. They may continue doing the same things onscreen but the way we receive and interpret those things changes. As Pauline Kael wrote in a related context about Katharine Hepburn and Bette Davis in 1968, “The two great heroines of American talkies have both gone soft on us, become everything we admired them for not being. They have become old dears – a little crotchety maybe, but that only makes them more harmlessly lovable.” Implicit here is the idea that the viewer’s perception is as important as what the actor is consciously doing.

When actresses begin to use our knowledge about them and of how young and beautiful they used to be – when they offer themselves up as ruins of their former selves – they may get praise and awards, but it’s not really for their acting, it’s for capitulating and giving the public what it wants: a chance to see how the mighty have fallen.

There have been a few exceptions: film artists whose work grew determinedly less sentimental with age – the most notable perhaps being that wily old surrealist Luis Bunuel, who made some of his sharpest films in his seventies when awareness of coming oblivion seemed almost to have fine-tuned his sense of the absurd. And indeed there are Bunuel-esque touches in To Rome with Love, such as a scene where an apparently shy, star-struck young woman accompanies a famous actor to his hotel room and ends up romping in bed instead with a thief who has broken in. But despite these moments – and despite the overall pleasantness of the film – I found it hard to shake from my mind the images of a frail-looking Allen, the skin on his face sagging, the eyes slightly more unfocused and the speech just a little slower than it used to be.

I felt a similar odd sensation a few weeks ago while watching the US Open men’s final, a five-hour marathon between Andy Murray and Novak Djokovic that must (partly because of the playing styles of the two men) have been nearly as fatiguing for the spectators as it was for the contestants. In the audience was Sean Connery – Sir Sean Connery – lending his support to fellow Scotsman Murray; he looked as spry and bright-eyed as ever, but I may have spent as much time worrying about his health as I did thinking about the match itself. At some point, as the rallies wore on, he transformed in my mind’s eye from being one of the world’s most charismatic movie stars, the original 007 and a continuing object of adulation (the Twitter accounts of Murray and his team would soon be full of photos clicked with him) to being a crabby old man needing to take yet another toilet break and wishing these kids would get on with it. You can be the fittest 82-year-old in the world but you’re still, you know, 82 years old.

As for Amitabh Bachchan turning 70 next month – that’s such an incogitable prospect for my generation of Hindi-movie viewers, I won’t even address it in this space. It may require a book-sized lament.

P.S. To Rome with Love repeatedly contrasts “ordinary” people with people living in the public glare: two of its four plotlines (including the riotous one about a middle-aged undertaker who can sing like a world-class tenor only when he’s in the shower, necessitating bizarre productions of famous operas) deal head-on with the idea that people are alternately drawn to and repulsed by the celebrity life.

In a way this is a poignant reminder of how those who achieve stardom often cling to it at all costs, past their sell-by date. Some do it with a measure of dignity. The other day I was watching the iconic sequence in Limelight with Chaplin and Buster Keaton on screen together for the only time. Both men were around 60 then and had already been performers for five decades, having begun their vaudeville careers as children. You’d think after a lifetime of this sort of thing the old enthusiasm might have begun to wane, but not a bit of it. On the other hand, perhaps it was the only thing they knew how to do.

The Big Indian Picture

A big shout-out for The Big Indian Picture, a new online magazine on cinema and culture (and congrats to a fabulous team that includes Pragya Tiwari, Kavi Bhansali and Rishi Majumder). The launch was held in Mumbai last evening and the site is now live - some content is up, with lots more to come, including essays, artwork, interviews and videos. So go ahead and bookmark, subscribe, follow etc. Here's the link again.

Thugs, terrorists, survivors: two novels about violence and its echoes

[Did this composite review for The Sunday Guardian]

Discussions about contemporary Indian fiction in English often touch on the lack of truly startling work that aligns stylistic experimentation with political engagement. Meanwhile, those who read more widely point out that these qualities are still to be found in the literatures of other Indian tongues. Such generalisations can be misleading, but two of the most provocative books I have recently come across are just-published English translations of a Hindi and a Malayalam novel. Coincidentally both works are, in different ways, about destruction and its effects – on perpetrators, victims and survivors – and about violence that transcends boundaries.

Geetanjali Shree’s The Empty Space (original Hindi title Khali Jagah; translated by Nivedita Menon) begins with a bomb exploding in a college cafe, reshaping human beings, inanimate objects and victuals. Body parts mix grotesquely with food items from around the country; this is a truly egalitarian act of slaughter. As the narrator puts it, “Ashes, fire, flesh. Fans, gulab-jamun, pav-bhaji, idli, vada, all whirling in the air, like an argument gone astray in the cosmos. You know how cafes are these days. You get everything everywhere now. Idli-vada in the North, pav-bhaji in the East. As for bombs – anywhere, at any time.”

An echo of these words can be found in P Sachidanandan’s The Book of Destruction (original Malayalam title Samharathinthe Pusthakam; translated by Chetana Sachidanandan). Reading a long letter written by a man named Seshadri, whom he briefly knew 45 years earlier, the nameless narrator comes across this formulation: “All those who respect the philosophy of destruction become brothers irrespective of their caste, religion, ideology and profession.” The destructive impulse, in other words, binds the human race.

Despite a shared emphasis on nihilistic violence, the contexts of the two stories are different. The blast in Shree’s novel is something the modern world is all too familiar with: a terrorist attack. But Sachidanandan’s book – written under his pen name Anand – deals with a more ritualistic mode of killing. Seshadri belongs to the ancient cult of Thuggee, which practises murder as “an act of sadhana”, and he is baffled by terrorism, which seems to acknowledge the "purity" of destruction but also deviates from old customs (while thugs respectfully dig graves for their victims, suicide bombers crassly join them in their final resting places, he observes). Perhaps the difference reflects changing times and attitudes. “Does this mean that mankind has finally begun to see clearly and accepted the fundamental and basic role destruction plays in life – to the extent that secrecy has become superfluous?”

Both The Empty Space and The Book of Destruction are formally inventive works with abstract, often elusive, narratives; though their prose is uncomplicated, you need reserves of concentration and patience to read them. The former appears at first to be driven by a conventional plot: an anonymous three-year-old boy (also the book’s narrator) is the sole survivor of the cafe blast and is taken home by a family who lost their 18-year-old son in the tragedy. But the story – characterised by staccato sentences and very short chapters – soon takes on a fragmented, dreamlike quality. Like Oskar in Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum – stunted at a similar age – this boy refuses to speak to those around him, but his narrative creates for us a world of pain, resentment and a macabre merging of identities. Though the book’s title ostensibly refers to the space in which he was found amidst the post-blast carnage, it also denotes the physical space formerly occupied by someone who no longer exists. The picture of the murdered son on the wall, his phantom voice on the phone answering machine, the unreachable grief of the parents who celebrate their adopted son’s birthday on the birthday of the dead boy...these are among the constituent elements of this harrowing tale.

Compared to this claustrophobia-inducing premise, Anand’s novel has a larger canvas and is more overtly a book of ideas. Its narrator, having just come to terms with Seshadri’s musings on thug practices, finds himself in a series of surreal situations involving the bombing of a hotel discotheque, a mysterious stranger whom he regularly meets during train journeys, and the possibility that the artistic process is itself an act of destruction wherein an artist is colonised by his creations. The prose is breathless and searching; there are hardly any detailed descriptions of people or settings (“The darkening Bengal countryside stretched in all directions…one side of the dirt road bordered the fields and the other, mango orchards” is about as far as it goes) and one surmises that Anand is more interested in inner lives and in theory than in external details. But by the time the story reaches its third act, where a tailor is cannibalised by the people whose personalities have been shaped by the clothes he stitched, it becomes clear that this meditative book is not for all tastes. Though admirable for its directness and ambition, it is also a little laboured and repetitive in its critique of social conformity.

It can be said that The Book of Destruction presents a way of looking at violence as something that is hard-wired into us, the symptom of a large appetite for cruelty and savagery. (Implicit here is the idea that destructiveness doesn’t have to take a form as extreme as murder or terrorism; it can be manifest in the everyday threads of human relationships, and even "respectable" people from all walks of life participate in it.) The Empty Space, on the other hand, gives us the consequences of that destructive impulse, in the form of a family who live in permanent stasis and a young boy who can never be a person in his own right. If literature holds up mirrors to what we inherently are and what we are capable of becoming, these two books, read together, provide a fascinating look at the shadowy places in the human mind.

True crime in Forbes Life

The new issue of that splendid quarterly magazine ForbesLife India is now on the stands. It has my long essay about true-crime books (including Meenal Baghel’s wonderful Death in Mumbai, Capote’s In Cold Blood, Julian Barnes's Arthur and George, S Hussain Zaidi's Mafia Queens of Mumbai and Alan Moore’s magnificent From Hell) plus, as always, lots of good writing on a range of subjects. Do look out for it.

Barfi!, and the anatomy of a reaction

There is a paradox built into the reviewing process: the films one really enjoys or really dislikes are such immediate emotional experiences that there is something almost dishonest about exiting the hall and trying to express your thoughts in writing a few hours or days later. By this point one has had enough time to analyse or intellectualise the experience, which in itself is not a bad thing – it is part of the process of critical engagement and articulation. But what sometimes happens during this period is that the emotional effect begins to wear off: the things you really liked about the film might become less tangible and the little flaws that didn’t much affect your enjoyment while you were watching it might now begin to colonise the mind.

I have touched on this before in my many rambling posts about reviewing. I have also touched on how one’s response to a film depends on an unquantifiable or unknowable combination of things – from the mood you are in on the day you see it to whether you’re seeing it alone or with company; the lingering effects of something you’ve just read, or a conversation you’ve just had, or something you’ve recently lost.

So here is... not a review, but a small (and necessarily inadequate) attempt to make sense of why I was so affected by Anurag Basu’s Barfi! despite the fact that I can easily make a list of its weaknesses and irritants.

One of those irritants is the film's romanticising of the lives of people who aren't “normal”, and central to this romanticising is the use of the idiom of silent-movie comedy to tell the story of a man who can't hear or speak. Thus, the very first sequence is a funny chase performed in the Keystone Kops style, complete with the famous Chaplin gag of a large statue being inaugurated to reveal the underdog perched on it. The prettifying conceit here is that in some way perhaps the world really does play like a soundless comedy film for the protagonist; all will be well if you can perform a few pratfalls, or evade your pursuers by playing see-saw on a ladder, to a lilting background score.

“Khamoshi pyaar ki zubaan hai,” the film’s narrator/leading lady Shruti tells her mother at one point, trying to make the case that she and Barfi can be happy together, and indeed much of their courtship is presented in the language of sweet silent-era romances. Later, even a bank robbery – where Barfi is trying to get hold of money for a vital kidney operation for his father – is shot in this mode. But in a way, this has the effect of undermining Barfi’s deafness and muteness: as a viewer immersed in this charming silent-movie world, one almost comes to believe that he is speechless not because he can’t talk but because this is the way the film is. In any case his condition is treated as a relatively minor detail, the way we might be told that he is left-handed or that he has an extra thumb. One rarely gets a sense of the effect it has had on his personal growth and personality – it’s something of a plot MacGuffin.

Nitpicking further, one can point to the film’s unnecessarily convoluted narrative structure and its facile incorporation of a mystery subplot just to keep the viewer in prolonged suspense about what will eventually become of the central relationship. (I was relieved that Saurabh Shukla’s policeman was around to clarify the plot chronology at a vital stage.)

This sounds like a very negative “review”, doesn’t it? And yet, oddly, none of the things mentioned above were deal-breakers for me because the film’s stronger moments worked so well and because I was usually happy to treat it as a collection of lovely vignettes rather than as a consolidated story with properly developed characters and perfectly tied up loose ends. One reason it may have worked for me is that I’m a big fan of wordless storytelling: if I were to make a list of my favourite movie sequences, very few of them would be dialogue-heavy. And on a scene-by-scene basis, the silent moments in this film are quite expertly handled.

Psychoanalysing my own reaction further, I have to say that these days I’m more vulnerable than usual to sentimental – even saccharine – movies. Life has been that way for the last three months; sad songs continually play in my head. More specifically, I felt a personal connect with an aspect of the central relationship in Barfi! – the Barfi-Jhilmil bond, which doesn't hinge on the things that are usually very central to human lives: being able to discuss common interests, for example, or even speak with each other in conventional language. (This is explicitly set against the commonsensical advice Shruti’s mother gives her: that she should spend her life with someone who can understand what she’s saying.) Without spelling things out too much, I have had recent experience of the ending of such a relationship – one of the most meaningful in my life – and if personal experience of that sort won’t inform your feelings about a sentimental film, what will?

Of course, I’d like to think this chord wouldn’t have been struck if these scenes in Barfi! were poorly executed. And so, to return to a quasi-“objective” analysis: I liked that this film sidestepped so many of the obvious minefields in its path – that it kept its head in moments that might easily have turned farcical through over-acting or over-writing, or just by showing one more reaction shot than was necessary.

Take a commercial project with glamorous, big-name stars cast in deglamorised roles and you’re treading on thin ice; the fourth wall between the film and the viewer becomes very fragile. Priyanka Chopra’s performance as the autistic Jhilmil could easily have sent the whole edifice crashing down with a single false note: for example, a self-consciously giggly response to one of Barfi’s antics that might have brought a scene dangerously close to a conventional, coquettishly romantic moment between “Ranbir Kapoor” and “Priyanka Chopra”. Instead – and I’m sure good direction had a part here – she plays Jhilmil as a girl whose limited attention span never lets her stay in a moment for more than a few seconds at a time, even when something key is happening in the context of the narrative. And it works. If you have to be critical, I suppose it’s possible to call it a one-note performance, but I think she handled that single note well – and to my eyes at least, the deglamorised look didn’t feel gimmicky.

I liked a few of the visual touches too. There are some nice little sight gags – beginning with the opening shot that has “Muskaan” written atop an arch that resembles an inverted smiley (a pointer to the bittersweet nature of the story that is about to unfold)? There is also the slightly fetishistic use of the distorted mirror/dark glass motif. This is a film full of glass surfaces that provide imperfect views of things, or surfaces that don’t exist: from the paperweight that Jhilmil looks through to Barfi's first glimpse of Shruti's future husband as a ghostly reflection to a night-time view of what seems like the headlights of a single car but is revealed to be two bikes riding together. In less literal terms too, the characters often see through a glass darkly – losing touch with their real feelings, not being able to understand the full picture. In the end, perhaps this is why there is something appealingly direct and honest about the Barfi-Jhilmil relationship, even if it is an idealised one: they know they are happy in each other’s company, and that’s good enough.

Certainly it was good enough for me. At another stage in my life, it might not have been.

“I’m a cartoonist who can’t draw” – a conversation with Manu Joseph

[This is the longer version of a Q&A I did with author and journalist Manu Joseph for The Hindu. I loved Joseph’s first novel Serious Men – as you might gather from this post – and have also enjoyed many of his columns, particularly relishing his ability to be clear-sighted and funny at the same time. The main subject of this conversation was his new novel The Illicit Happiness of Other People, about a man named Ousep Chacko trying to understand why his teenage son Unni, a cartoonist, killed himself three years earlier. That’s an essentially sad premise, but Joseph brings to it his talent for humorous observation, creating a multi-layered story about how the mind works, the difference between “madness” and “normalcy”, and the aspirations of young people in 1980s Madras.
 
Since our chat was very free-flowing, this has required a bit of structuring for clarity. Apologies for repetition, abrupt jump-cuts, etc]

Photo: RAUL IRANI

Writers often say that second novels are very difficult to do. Was this one hard, especially given that Serious Men was so well received?

Not at all. I rate this higher than Serious Men – maybe writers tend to do that with their latest work. This is actually a completely different book. It is called a comic work chiefly because the first one was like that and because of some of my earlier, journalistic work. But if you look at this as a book that isn’t comic, then it’s easy to see why it’s so different.

When I was writing large parts of Serious Men I didn’t even know how to write a novel – I just knew when some things weren’t working. That’s the only gift I have. Ironically – given the theme of this new novel – I’m not delusional, so I can see delusions very easily. That was one of the reasons for this book: I have always been fascinated by the power of delusion in people who are clear-headed in other ways.
 
At the time of the first book I was younger, more angry, and just emerging from my own urban poverty. I also had a certain contempt for the artistic side of writing a novel, because I thought a lot of pretentious stuff was being passed off as literature. But by the time I wrote The Illicit Happiness of Other People, I was more confident and self-assured.


It’s a very complex book – it is about many things, including pseudoscience, morality and parental grief. What was your chief imperative while writing it?

I had many objectives, but one theme I’m fascinated by is the pointlessness of everything. Updike said life might be pointless but the novel might not be - I don’t agree with that, I feel life is pointless and by that logic the novel is too. People often hold on to one thing, hoping it is precious, but there are those among us who can see pointlessness very clearly: a child does not do anything to them, love does not do anything to them. I don’t say a lot of these things directly in the book, because that would make for a very bad novel. But that was the chief driver.

To me, the shell and the message are equally important. And I wanted to tell this story by taking characters through the process of investigation and resolution: to me, it’s a mystery novel. But the starting point was my interest in the humour and the melancholy of pointlessness.

It can also be described as a Madras book, in a way. It is set in a pre-liberalisation time when you were growing up there, when most young boys in the city were busy conforming – preparing for IIT etc – but there were also exceptions, like Unni in the book.

It’s all real, I haven’t made up anything. There is a particular type of adolescent boy – I’m sure this wasn’t just a Madras phenomenon – who gets deeply into philosophy, and people find this very amusing. But a friend of mine got deeply sucked into it, and much later I realised that he had shown many of the symptoms of schizophrenia. One of the book’s themes is that we all talk about clarity and sanity all the time, but the truth is it’s very dangerous. True clarity and sanity won’t allow you to do anything – it will just make you jump off the building. The pursuit of truth itself is a psychiatric condition.

Do you relate to Unni in any way? Did you ever feel you were close to the edge?

At 17, I too was in a certain phase and I knew what someone like Unni was about. I was a silent, removed, isolated person, wandering in the night for hours – I was comfortable with myself. Ultimately boredom plays a big part too, especially when you’re young and growing up in Madras: you can’t touch girls, you can’t go out with girls, it’s a shit city, all the fuckers are doing entrance exams. But if depression is a condition, I would argue that inexplicable happiness is also a mental condition. Cartoonists often deal in diametrical opposites. I had moments of inexplicable happiness.

Still, I did briefly lose my nerve when I was 20 – I wrote some of those MBA entrance exams, went for the XLRI interview. I remember they asked me what is the difference between “basilica” and “cathedral”? But fortunately, circumstances ensured I would come back to journalism.

How did that happen?

I had met journalists and thought they were such losers. But I had to make a living. I saw an ad saying that Magna Publishing was looking for people, I went there and there must have been a hundred candidates. (Laughs) People forget how things used to be back then in India. Anyway, the person interviewing me asked “Do you believe in God?” and I replied I don’t believe in such shit. So she hired me only because she wanted to reform me. It worked out perfectly.

If you had merely said a timid “No”, she would probably have lost interest!

Yes.

One of your strengths is a knack for seeing the funny side of solemn situations. In one passage a woman comes home from shopping, looks through the door and sees her husband, who has died of a heart attack while she was away. And she tosses a brinjal at him to check if he is alive. You just slip that line in, you don’t make a big deal of it, but it is there all the same. Does this quality come naturally to you or do you have to work hard at it?

I like the juxtaposition of humour and tragedy. You see more of it in movies – in the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man, for example (no relation to Joseph’s first book). I’m always fascinated by why people laugh when there is turbulence in a plane and you fear you’re going to crash. I’m terrified of flying and I think that’s the last thing you should be doing – laughing. But it’s such a serious thing – laughing.

One important thing I believe about humour is that at its core is accuracy. When you’re extremely accurate about something, it becomes funny.

You have a line like that in the book… “Humour assaults us with a slice of truth.”

Yes, and there is also a mention in that passage of the evolutionary origin of laughter – it came from a ferocious face that early man made when he wasn’t sure that a danger had passed.

I think the most underrated humour writer in the world is J M Coetzee – his eye is so uncompromising, his observations are so exact. In Disgrace there is a passing comment about how this part of the leg (bending down and indicating the part just above the calf) is the ugliest thing in a woman’s body. I don’t find most people very funny, especially the guys. The chap who walks into the room and says I’m going to tell you something funny is never as funny as someone like Coetzee can be, from whom you just don’t expect it.

What happens with me is that if I meet someone really big and important – like V S Naipaul, or the prime minister – beyond a point I cannot be in awe. You begin to see the many layers of a person that have accumulated over time, and you dismiss the whole thing in the first five seconds.

It’s interesting you say that, because this is what good cartoonists – like your absent protagonist Unni – do. They cut through the clutter and see the essence of a person or a situation.

Yes, I rate myself as a cartoonist who does not have the talent to draw.

Writing humour is a natural process but it’s also difficult – like long-distance running. It’s not like one is constructing a sentence for one hour, but I find the process of choosing quite difficult. I’m so aware of bad writing that I know when it’s my own, so there’s constant rejection. This would have been a one-million-word book if I had accumulated everything I wrote. But people don’t want to know everything you want to say. The very definition of a bore is that he is unaware of what is interesting and what isn’t.

Writers also tend to invest a lot of effort in creating characters, and then they try to showcase those characters in every scene. But I think there is a place for cameos. Apart from the four main characters, this book is full of cameos – there was a Tarantino-esque influence in the structure. An important character, a neuro-psychiatrist named Iyengar, is a cameo. He is very important to the resolution of the novel: he is trying to prove that sanity is not a majority condition; that you cannot consider a majority delusion as accepted human nature. If this had been my first novel, he would have had a prominent role right from the beginning. But while writing this, I was confident enough to bring him in towards the end.

Also notable is your use of sharply humorous analogies. This is the sort of thing that can get tediously overdone in writing, but you do it so well that it gives the reader a fresh, clear-sighted way of looking at something. For instance, two girls at a cartoonists’ meeting survey the others with the amused look of the newsreader who has just got the “serious” political news out of the way and is about to announce that a zoo lioness has delivered four cubs. It creates a mental picture immediately and one understands something about these characters and how they fit in - or don't fit in - with their surroundings.

The maturity of girls used to annoy me a lot when I was growing up in Madras – the way they would hold a kerchief like this in one hand (makes a gesture to show what he means). And the condescension of newsreaders also annoys me: why put on that smile when you’re about to move from “hard news” to “features”?

Do you come up with funny descriptions in "real life" too, during casual conversation?

I don’t know. Only girlfriends comment that you’re funny – a wife never says her husband is humorous. And I’ve been married for 10 years, so I don’t know how funny I am.

Incidentally, I learnt from reading about neurology that the part of the brain that contributes to analogy-based humour is very different from the part responsible for puns. Puns to me are the lowest form of humour and I’m so glad that the two things are separated. I was reading V S Ramachandran’s The Tell-Tale Brain, where he mentions that.

Something you’ve done better here than in Serious Men is the creation of a well-rounded woman character – Unni’s mother and Ousep’s wife, Mariamma.

Yes, I wanted to come at Unni from various angles, through various people. What I liked as I was writing it was that everything you know about Unni was through other people. About the process behind woman characters: I’m generally more fond of women than men, and more curious about them. They are infuriating at times and I don’t like a lot of things about them, but I’m very curious. It’s a tough process though. The character of Mythili (a 16-year-old girl in the book) would have been more fleshed out if I had been a woman, but I couldn’t get enough material or insight into her. Mariamma is someone I know very well – someone I know for decades. In fact I had to make her milder, just to be credible.

JOURNALISM

Reading your novels, I feel – and this is a compliment – that you should be the editor of something like MAD magazine, or a parody website…

I’d be pretty good!

…and yet here you are editing a weekly current-affairs magazine (Open). Your fiction has a nihilistic quality: one of Unni’s cartoons described in the book involves the appearance of an envelope which has the meaning of life written inside, and everyone laughs when they read it. You often lampoon the self-importance of people and the absurdity of the narratives we create for ourselves. How do you reconcile this with journalism, which is about trying to make sense of what is happening in the world?

There is a conflict. Nothing comes close to the process of writing a novel. But what my day-job has done is that... (long pause) being an editor trains you to accept failure, strangely. You’re not so isolated as an artist that you have a moronic interpretation of failure. What is professionalism? A professional falls, he gets up and continues to walk. And I find that some novelists are not always trained for that – I really feel they should spend some time in a profession, in an office. I was at a writers’ conference in Edinburgh and it struck me that there is something childlike about writers – it can be scary. An artist who is a rebel in his or her own field, and who is constantly questioning, might still be naïve enough to not use the same faculties in another context.

Being the editor of a magazine helps me be less naïve, so I don’t start respecting things unnecessarily, or saying simplistic things like dictators are bad and people are good. And I try to use that as a writer. I use everybody and everything for my process of writing. Of course, I can also see the benefit of being a novelist who isn’t an editor: everything you write comes as fresh work to the reader, nobody presumes they already know your opinions and your political stance.

There is an irreverent quality in your journalism too. I can’t think of many others who would write a wry sentence like “It is important for a revolution to be enjoyable” (while discussing the failure of the Anna Hazare movement) in an editor’s commentary. It reflects a very particular sensibility.

Think of (Pakistani writer) Mohammad Hanif’s journalism. Take the recent piece he did about blasphemy in Pakistan – one of those Harvard-returned journalists might have done a bleeding-heart piece, which of course is also journalism. But Hanif has such a different sensibility. It comes from a certain way of looking at things – he’s a delinquent, he can’t help it, and I find it very appealing. I think journalism is strongest when you don’t convert everything into lament.

I’ve worked at different levels in journalism, and I feel an editor should have people smarter than him around him – don’t be in competition with your own writers, don’t be scared. Eliminate mediocrity as much as possible – it can never be fully eliminated if you’re working with a team of more than 50 people. But within some broader boundaries, let the magazine be a platform rather than having a particular agenda.

Having said that, quality is not negotiable – of course that’s subjective, but it’s what I decide is quality. For instance, we wouldn’t have – just in the name of freedom of speech – carried Subramanian Swamy’s moronic essay (on “how to wipe out Islamic terror”) which DNA published.

Your feature writing does sometimes intersect with your novelistic work. The very tongue-in-cheek profile of John Travolta, for instance, which touches on the fact that his son died at age 17 following a seizure, and Travolta’s own belief in Scientology, which tries to “liberate” people from “the illusion of their physical prisons”. Weren’t you already well into writing this novel by that time?

Yes, I was – and I wasn’t as fascinated by his son’s death as by the Scientology thing. He’s a gone case. You see this so often with successful, rich people: they go through life and do some things well enough but they are deluded. I’m not surprised by Scientology itself. If you take any religion and describe it in one paragraph, it looks totally loony. Honestly when I meet people who are really, deeply into a single idea, even if it’s socialism or something else, it takes me back to that line in the book: “Maybe the actual dominant species are thoughts, which have colonized human bodies.”

You have said before that you are not very interested in contemporary Indian-English writing and the narratives that surround it. Certainly, you have never set out to write the mythical Great Indian Novel. Who are your influences?

I went through a destructive period in my 20s when I thought only style is writing, and writers who don’t have it are pretenders. I should have been more accommodating and less arrogant. Of course, in today’s climate where the non-stylish have become so powerful that they are making it look like style and content are two different things, I get tempted to be hostile with them as well!

To me, the opposite of style is Coetzee. If Marquez is one end of the spectrum – I’m only talking about the good stuff now – Coetzee would be the other end, and what we call good literature would fall between those two poles. I’m also influenced a lot by cinema, I use melodrama when I have to use it. As an Indian I’m not afraid of it. That’s another thing about the corruption of western publishers – that’s a society that doesn’t comprehend melodrama like we do. They don't even cry at funerals, I don't know what the fuck is wrong with them. I told someone in England recently, “Hysteria is a dialect of Tamil.” When I see too much sensitivity and elegance and sophistication, I get impatient.

Yes, your prose does have an informality about it, which rallies against over-sophistication. You often begin sentences with “And”, or use an extra word like “actually” to create a naturalistic, speech-like effect. These aren’t things that are always approved of in western models for literary fiction, but one often sees it these days in good English translations of Hindi or Malayalam literature.

Yes, it isn’t a conscious process. I’m straight-batted in many ways, I like the beauty of the straight bat. Of course, I do like the Sehwag moments also – that’s one of the best things about art, how it can surprise you. I also use “also” very often. It’s convenient also from a technical point of view – many of my paragraphs are really one sentence that has been broken up into many sentences. I don’t like using semi-colons; I try to avoid them. I hate exclamation marks. In Open I’ve banned the exclamation mark.

Any Indian fiction writers from the last decade whom you have special regard for?

It’s a question I dread. I think Arundhati Roy’s novel deserved all the acclaim it got. I’m not a fan of her journalism – I think she’s an example of those naïve writers who became naïve because they didn’t have a job. If she had worked as a journo for some time, she would develop some weapons – you can’t be someone who keeps getting slapped around, mostly by yourself. And sometimes when you’re just theorizing, it gets tricky – information is so vast and hard to access. Just like those early Brahmins never used to write anything down because they wanted to convey everything through the ear, I think academics can be lousy because they want to guard the information – they want money from the publishers but they also want to guard the info. Anyway, that’s a different matter... I also think Rohinton Mistry is top-quality stuff.

I’m not going to press you about this because the two names you’ve mentioned are already a generation or so earlier than I had in mind!

(Laughs) One serious problem I had was I could not have a conversation with other writers, because they were so much into the craft of writing, they had read SO MUCH – I don’t know where they found the time to read so much. And when I would read their copy, it was shit. Why are you talking so much about the craft of writing when you don’t know how to write? So I had a low opinion of this whole process of theory. What I really wanted to know honestly was how I was going to buy those Adidas shoes for Rs 1000.

Maybe it’s turned out to be a good thing that I don’t quite have the writer’s personality. My own central character – the way I am – is probably not a writer. I’m probably a failed long-distance runner, or a cartoonist, or a filmmaker who’ll never get funds to make films.

What next, book-wise?

I know the third book will be very contemporary. One misfortune is that I live in Gurgaon and would never have the heart to set a novel in Gurgaon. Nothing I write will be like this one, in terms of subject matter etc. I haven’t begun yet, I’m waiting for the moment. Right now I’m attempting some short stories to get into that frame of mind.

I’m impressed with how much of an asshole I was when I was writing this – I took a sabbatical from work, wouldn’t meet anybody, lost some friends. I was at home, just working on this.

Well, to quote another line in the book: “The misanthrope alone has clarity.”

Yes, that’s something I believe in. The thing is, if I were younger I would have explained that over 3000 words – which wouldn’t have been good for the book.

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[An excerpt from The Illicit Happiness of Other People is here, and some of Joseph’s columns and essays are here]

[A few earlier conversations with authors: Amitav Ghosh on language and opium; Mohsin Hamid on hyper-nationalism and the divided self; Anita Desai on an earlier literary age; Vikram Chandra on cops and gangsters; Rajorshi Chakraborti on surrealism and being adrift; Ramachandra Guha on makers of modern India; Hari Kunzru on My Revolutions; Manjula Padmanabhan on Escape; Roddy Doyle on working-class heroes]

An online chat about Jaane bhi do Yaaro

As some of you may have heard, the NFDC-restored print of Jaane bhi do Yaaro is getting a theatrical rerelease next month – it will be shown at selected PVR halls. The print is part of the excellent “Cinemas of India” project, which I wrote about in this essay for Caravan.

Anyway, just to say I’m doing a webchat on the CNN-IBN site tomorrow, about the film and my book on it. At this point I have successfully erased most memories related to the book, so the chat may turn out to be a damp squib. But show up if you’re interested - it begins at 3 pm IST and this is the link.

How many great directors does it take to change a lightbulb?

An amusing excerpt from Manik & I, a new English translation of the memoirs of Satyajit Ray's wife Bijoya:

I can’t begin to explain how blissfully unaware Manik was about the domestic details of everyday life [...] Once, he was lying in bed, reading. Suddenly the bulb’s fuse went off. He remarked, ‘The bulb’s gone. What will we do now?’ By then I’d already taken out another bulb from the cupboard and when I went to the table he asked ‘What will you do?’

‘I’ll fix a new bulb.’

He said anxiously, ‘No no, don’t do it yourself. Ask them to do it.’

‘Them’ clearly referred to one or the other of our domestic help.

I turned the switch off, put in the new bulb and switched the light back on. Turning to him, I said, ‘Is that all right?’ Amazed, he asked, ‘Where did you learn to do this?’

‘There is nothing to learn, all you have to do is insert the bulb in the groove, and twist it!’

He never once touched the air conditioner in our room. If he entered the room for a rest and couldn’t see me anywhere, he’d shout out, ‘Where are you? Please switch the AC on for me.’ Such was my husband.

[More on the book in a future post]
 

Half a girl – notes on Jalpari: The Desert Mermaid

In the fine new film Jalpari: The Desert Mermaid (directed by Nila Madhab Panda, who also made I am Kalam), a Delhi-based doctor named Devendra takes his two children, the tomboyish Shreya and her little brother Sam, to his ancestral village. At one point Shreya (played by the excellent Lehar Khan) gets into a fight with the local kids – all boys – who don’t even realise at first that she’s a girl. The adults intervene; a village elder disapprovingly remarks that a chori should behave like a chori, and Devendra sharply responds “Maine chora-chori ka pharak nahin sikhaaya apne bachon ko.” (“I haven’t taught my children the difference between a boy and girl.”)

Within the context – and given the film’s themes of sexual discrimination and female foeticide – one completely approves of these words. On the face of it, all Dev means is that he treats his daughter and son as equals. It’s an attitude that explains his alienation from a place where girl-children are viewed as a burden, and by the film’s end we certainly understand why he denounced the village chiefs as regressive and the village itself as banjar (barren). But for me this scene raised another, very subtle question. It’s possible to wonder: is this sensitive, caring father carrying his own demons? Has he become so frustrated by the treatment of women in his village that he has played a small, unconscious part in moulding his daughter’s personality – in keeping her out of touch with her feminine side?

It’s a contentious thought and I feel hesitant bringing it up. After all, there is nothing wrong with Shreya being a tomboy if she is also happy and emotionally secure (which she certainly is; Dev – a widower – is a great dad, and theirs is a well-rounded family life). Perhaps this is just one of those phases that children from not-very-strict families go through at an age where gender distinctions seem irrelevant. Or perhaps she hero-worships George/Georgina from Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books, a couple of which we see in her room. But I think this story about gender inequality and its far-reaching effects does draw our attention to situations where a girl can achieve (a superficial form of) respect and parity only by being “one of the guys”, or by practising a particularly male form of aggression.

In one of the film’s first scenes we see Shreya dressed as a mermaid for a school dance performance, and enjoying herself, but there’s something about this scene – filmed like a fantasy sequence – that places it outside the ambit of the film’s “realistic” narrative. Within that main narrative, we gather that Shreya has a strong aversion to girls’ clothes. In the village, she gets the better of the local boys by meeting them on their own turf and beating them at their “boys’ games” – but later, when she is dressed up for the kanjak puja, they smirk at her and we can tell that she feels suddenly vulnerable. The mere fact that she has been seen in a salwar kameez enables them to exercise some hegemony over her, and even leads directly to a scene where her own adoring brother is willing to exclude her from the marble games he is playing with the other boys; it’s as if, in his eyes, she has become a creature from a different species.

Notwithstanding the initial discomfort of the kanjak ritual, Shreya does concede – when shagan money and sweets come her way – that “profit hai ladki banne mein”. But though the local men pray to a goddess, it’s obvious that there is not much “profit” in being a regular human girl here. This is a place where women are mainly anonymous, confined to their houses, performing an ornamental role during festival dances or traipsing down a path behind a water-divining sadhu, faces covered, chanting mystical songs like Homer’s sirens. (Or like mermaids – which, one might remember, are women who are only half-people.)


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Dev, the children and their nani (Suhasini Mulay, still as radiant as ever) have come here for something of a holiday but also for Dev to get work underway on a proper hospital for the village. Taken on literal terms, there is something discomfiting about the idea of an “enlightened” family of city-dwellers brushing away the cobwebs in the collective mind of a “backward” village – it’s a simple-minded polarity. But it’s possible to argue that the film has entered fable mode and this is not so much a “typical village” as a representation of the darker, more oppressive corners of the human mind. The children fantasise about an idyllic setting with “bade bade trees, lush green fields and ducks in ponds”, but they are soon disabused of such ideas: “Pond toh kab ka sookh gaya hai”. There is very little water anywhere (what there is will be shown to be poisoned by prejudice and murder). There is resistance – not least from the local vaid – to the encroachment of modern medicine. And the children hear about the existence of a wicked witch who lives near a mysterious taalaab over the hill.

I suppose a spoiler alert should come here, but I don’t think I’m giving too much away by disclosing that this taalaab is eventually revealed to be a gruesome bog into which unwanted female life is flushed away. And that the fearsome daayin turns out to be a Boo Radley figure: the outcast turned into a bogeyman by the sort of rumour and gossip that is really a cover-up for unpleasant things being done by supposedly “respectable” people.

The reason I don’t think a spoiler alert was needed is that there are enough cues strewn through this well-observed film. The wordless glances during tense scenes involving the sarpanch’s pregnant daughter-in-law, for example. And some of the children’s interactions, which play like dress rehearsals for their grown-up lives. The village kids are led by the cocky Ajith (a super performance by Harsh Mayar, who was the lead in I am Kalam) who says “Inn choriyon mein dimag hee kahan haiga” (“These girls don’t even have a brain”). Though it’s tempting to dismiss this as childish prattle, one immediately senses the sorts of conversations this boy has grown up hearing from the adults around him – and also the sort of adult he is likely to become himself.

A few things didn’t work for me. The Dev character is a first-generation migrant to the city (he slips easily from his urban twang into the village dialect), but he is also relatively young and I thought it implausible that he has, in a very short span of time, built such a prosperous and cosmopolitan life for himself in Delhi. I also felt the ending was poorly paced, with everything being wrapped up a little too quickly and neatly. Given that the final 15 minutes have the feel of a dark fairy tale (complete with a stygian swamp for discarded souls), the horror-film potential might have been realised at greater length.

But perhaps Panda and his team didn’t want to make the film too creepy given that it was intended to draw in younger audiences. In any case, at the very end, it returns to the cosy idea of being a child's adventure story – something out of the Famous Five perhaps – where nothing really bad can happen to the main characters. It was a mazedaar holiday, Shreya writes to a pen-friend in the closing scene. But feel-good though this ending is, one doesn’t forget that she is among the privileged ones, free to choose her clothes and her personal identity. Most other choris – or mermaids – aren’t so lucky.