Help needed for Pratima Devi and her dogs

Anyone who has contacts among animal-welfare NGOS, please do help or circulate. Pratima Devi a.k.a. Amma, the beautiful old woman who looks after street dogs near the PVR Saket complex, needs a full-time assistant to stay with her and help her with the feeding of the dogs and other related things (treating injuries, being around when the van comes to take them for sterilising, and so on). She had a couple of boys who were helping out, but they left, and often being in poor health herself, she needs someone who is reliable, sensitive and needless to say, a dog-lover. A decent salary will be paid, of course (this is something a few of us are trying to help out with), and there is enough sleeping room (and even a small cooler) in Amma’s shack.

The best place to look for someone appropriate might be an NGO, but if you know someone else who might fit the bill, please do get in touch. My email ID is jaiarjun@gmail.com, or you can leave a comment here.

[More about Pratima Devi here and here]

More from the TV Mahabharat - a stylised blooding

Not that I’ve done any research on this, or intend to, but I wonder if episode 248 of the Star Plus Mahabharat – telecast on Friday night – represents a new frontier in the depiction of violence and gore in the history of Indian television. I suspect it does; I was startled by its vividness, even though one knows that the killing of Dushasana is not something that lends itself to refined, non-bloody treatment. In fact, even the YouTube version of the episode (which you can see here) is censored – some shots, including one where blood bursts like a geyser out of the dying man’s chest, have been excised. (This was also the case in earlier episodes involving the killing of Jarasandha and Shishupala.)

I have had a very complex relationship with this TV show over the months (and I intend to write about this at much greater length in the future sometime) – there have been some brilliantly conceived moments, some fine visuals, good performances and even intelligent writing, but there have also been far too many slack, simplification-riddled scenes, as well as internal inconsistencies and terrible pacing (nearly 10 episodes for the game of dice, followed by a hurried four or five episodes to depict the Pandavas's entire 12-year exile). However, I think there was much in this episode that was extremely well done, especially from around the 16-minute mark where Draupadi enters the battlefield and Bheema – who is practically in a trance at this stage, calling out to her in a hollow, robotic voice – begins the macabre ritual of washing her hair with Dushasana’s blood.

If you don’t like gore, you’re thinking: I don’t want to watch this, or even continue reading this. But (speaking as someone who does like gore, so possibly I’m not the best “objective” judge) I don’t think this scene is as viscerally revolting as it might have been. And the reason is this: it is heavily stylised. Everything about it is excessive and Grand Guignol – even the “blood” glistens and gleams, like the pig’s blood in the climactic scene of Brian DePalma’s Carrie – and while one could have seen that as a flaw in the production, in this case I think it perfectly fits the theatrical mood of the scene.

After all, this IS one of the most brilliantly hyper-dramatic passages in the Mahabharata. Apart from its importance as retribution, it is, from Bheema’s point of view, his moment in the sun – it represents a converging of almost every emotion he has experienced with regard to Draupadi, not just since that terrible day in the dice hall 13 years earlier, but also in larger terms: feeling unappreciated, second best, having to know that she feels much more deeply for Arjuna than for him. And here he is now, and here she is, and he alone is to be the agent of her long-desired vengeance, the one who will get to stroke and bind her hair after all these years of denial, while the other husbands and the other protagonists in this drama – even the puppet-master Krishna – are reduced to mute spectators, watching a performance. At the surface level, this is a depiction of a wronged woman being avenged (and the show has often drawn facile and somewhat problematic parallels between Draupadi’s story and the current public discourses about rape and capital punishment in India) – but at a deeper and darker level it is another vindication of the patriarchy, a depiction of a beast-like man asserting control and possession over a woman. And while this serial has hardly ever been radical about such things, I do feel that this subtext slips through in the scene. 

I never thought I’d say this about an Indian television actor (much less someone who was apparently cast in a role because of his physique and his experience as a wrestler), but I think the actor Saurav Gurjar, who plays Bheema, is pitch-perfect here. And the tone of the scene in general is very close to the many stylised depictions of this episode in our traditional dance forms like Kathakali. You can see one of those performances here, in an old episode of Shyam Benegal’s Bharat ek Khoj, starting around the 2.20 minute mark. It used to give me nightmares as a child.

[Earlier posts on the Star Plus Mahabharat: Bride of Frankenstein; Kryptonite Karna; the benevolent patriarchy]

Music, fantasy and colour in V Shantaram’s Navrang

V Shantaram’s 1959 film Navrang is, true to its title, one of the most brilliantly over-the-top explosions of colour and classical music in Hindi-film history, but it begins with a black-and-white sequence that is almost subdued. The opening credits appear over a stationary shot of a door, as a song with the refrain “Rang de de” (“Give colour”) plays alongside. It is more like a hymn, really – as if the singers are beseeching God (or the film’s director) to give a fresh coat of paint to this monochrome canvas. And he obliges: as the words “Screenplay and direction by V Shantaram” appear on the screen, the door opens and the man himself emerges, a deity giving darshan. Addressing us directly, Shantaram relates how he nearly lost his vision while shooting the scene with the bull in his previous film Do Aankhen Baarah Haath. A strange thing happened during those weeks when my eyes were bandaged, he says – I began to experience colours more vividly than I had before, and through this new movie I want to share some of those experiences with you. Upon which the screen transforms into a cornucopia of bright colours that spell out the film’s title. There will be no going back.

Narrative-wise, Navrang has many balls in the air, which gives it a certain unevenness, but also a pleasingly capricious quality. It begins in the 19th century, in a British-ruled Indian town, with an old man singing the stirring patriotic number “Yeh Maati Sabhi ki Kahaani Kahegi”. From his earliest years, Shantaram was a social-reformist filmmaker (he has a reputation as a proto-Bimal Roy in some circles) and pride in one's own culture and "maati" will be a central theme through this film. But as we go into flashback and meet the younger version of this man, Diwakar (played by Mahipal), the main plot point is introduced.
 
Diwakar, a struggling young poet, is disheartened by how quickly his wife Jamna (Sandhya, who was married to the director in real life) has slipped into her mundane domestic roles – looking after the house as well as his father and sister – and wants her to be more indulging of his fantasies. Disconsolate that she thinks it is shameless to dress up in colourful clothes, to do shringaar for her husband (“chhodo yeh vaahiyaat baatein!”), he starts daydreaming about Mohini, an enchantress with Jamna’s face but a markedly more playful attitude to romance, music and dance. (One might say that like Shantaram colouring his canvas in that opening sequence, Diwakar takes Jamna’s expressionless visage and projects his own desires on it.) “Mohini” becomes his muse and leads him to professional success as a court poet, but also ironically threatens his marriage, since Jamna becomes convinced he is in love with someone else.

Consequently, there are some intriguing scenes about the nourishing (but also potentially harmful) power of fantasy. “Zara muskura do,” Diwakar tells the apparition-like Mohini: he “directs” her to dress up just so, to cock her head in a particular way (some of these early moments may remind you of the obsessed Scottie in Vertigo, giving similar instructions to Judy, fitting her to the image he carries in his head) and even imagines her dancing about in a shiny blue outfit while going about her work in the kitchen, where she uses the chulha like it is a musical instrument. (A woman who can be glamorous even while she cooks delicious food for the family! What more could a man want!) But one can also see the fragility of these daydreams and the consequences they might have for the family and for Diwakar’s work. Nor can one forget the old Diwakar in the film’s framing narrative, telling a British baker he needs to take some food back home for his ailing wife.

Alongside this personal story are reflections on the relationship between art and the marketplace – does the latter destroy the former’s integrity, but then can one be an artist on an empty stomach? These are, of course, concerns of another major film of the time – Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa – but they are handled in a lighter way here. (The rabble-rousing pitch of “Yeh Maati” is similar to that of Pyaasa’s “Jinhein Naaz Hai Hind Par”, but the tones of the two films have little else in common.) One of Navrang’s liveliest sequences takes the form of an informal sammelan where Diwakar’s friend, himself a composer of lowbrow verses, performs “Kavi Raja Kavita se” (sung, incidentally, by the film’s lyricist Bharat Vyas) about the impracticalities of being a poet (“Yeh sab chhodo / dhande ki kuch baat karo / kuch paise jodo […] Kavi raja, chupke se tum bann jao baniya”). It’s a lovely scene, with plenty of camaraderie between the singer and his audience, and a wonderful performance by Agha as the friend (watching him here, one can see where his son Jalal Agha’s vivacity came from), but of course Diwakar and the others do have to deal with the very real repercussions of the art-commerce debate. And things will go downhill for him when, after the British take over the country, he refuses to toe the line by singing encomiums to the colonists.

But to discuss this film principally in terms of its plot might mean overlooking what a visual and aural feast it is. C Ramachandran’s score is full of gems, from the duet “Kaari Kaari Kaari Andhiyari” to the Holi song “Arre ja re Hat Natkhat” (which reaches a crescendo when Sandhya dances simultaneously as a man and as a woman) to the popular “Aadha hai Chandrama”. And Navrang contains some of the boldest use of colour I have seen in a movie. Watching its elaborate musical scenes, I was reminded of the Powell-Pressburger classic The Red Shoes, especially the magnificent ballet performance at the centre of that film. But no other film I can think of has anything comparable to the costumes worn by Sandhya in this film’s many fantasy sequences. One scene has “Moti the Smart Pony” in something of a dance duet with the actress, and the animal seems almost in awe of this bizarrely costumed two-legged creature in front of him (if you wove random images from the Star Gate sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey together into an outfit, and then stitched a few unconscious peacocks on it, you might get something close to what Sandhya is wearing here).

If you have no taste for the deliberate theatricality and artifice of Shantaram’s staging, or if you can only take so much of dancing ponies, peacocks and wonder elephants spraying coloured water about, this film might not work for you. I loved most of it though. It must have been some big-screen experience back when it was released.

Angels and rooms, flying chairs and dressing tables - an anthology about women writers

An excerpt from Mishi Saran’s essay “Split in half, six ways”, one of my favourite pieces in the new anthology Shaping the World: Women Writers on Themselves:

I had this strange notion that when they ask you to write about writing, it’s all over, because they are not asking for a poem, or a novel.

They are saying, “Tell us what you do all day long.”

There is no good, clean answer for this, since the backstage of writing is a cluttered, blood-spattered arena, overrun with escaped ghosts, dented friendships, the stink of lost battles and a tenuous sense of self.

Besides, it’s not what I do all day, it’s what I am, and what I am is split in half, six ways.

First, there’s me, walking, looking, chatting, eating, sleeping, cooking, living in Shanghai.

Then there’s the dwarf clamped to my shoulder – a mini-me – hissing into my ear: “You could use that.” Very few moments in my day are purely, fully, simply lived, because each one must be dissected for its potential to feed the blank page.

Edited by Manju Kapur and featuring 23 writers from the subcontinent – all published novelists, many of them poets and non-fiction writers too – baring their souls, analysing their relationship with their craft, this is a valuable collection for anyone trying to understand the nuts and bolts of writing (whether from a safe distance, with no intention of treading these waters themselves, or as an aspiring writer). But some of it also works if you’re simply in the mood for a good horror story. “Writing is a narcissistic and powerful and self-absorbed God; it will take all we can offer and leave dead, dry shells behind,” writes Lavanya Sankaran. “Having written is a powerful fulfillment, but the act of writing is not a nice thing to experience,” says Meira Chand, who also offers an account of the simultaneous terror and exhilaration of waking up at 2 in the morning with new words crowding one’s head, and the knowledge that two hundred labored pages must be discarded in order to facilitate a fresh beginning.

“When the novel is done I feel I have come out of a long sleep,” says Shashi Deshpande, “The world looks different: I see things I had missed for months; I see colours which had somehow seeped out of my vision until then.” Bina Shah believes writing is like walking a tightrope – “the minute you stop what you’re doing to look down, you start to wobble and sway.” And here is Saran again: “The successful (read ‘sane’) writer must navigate two worlds. She must hop around the hubbub and arc lights of quotidian life, then pull apart those red velvet curtains – carefully, for it turns out they are edged with hard wire – a and she must dive into the darkness of ropes and pulleys. She must go from one land to another without too much flesh torn in transit.”

Some of this – and the many other passages in this book about the agonies and ecstasies of writing – can sound self-important and precious, but any writer who has experienced these things will understand. (I have, and I quickly lose patience with anyone who says this kind of talk is just a way of needlessly romanticising the creative process.) And though the details of the authors’ life experiences are naturally very different, each essay makes it clear that whatever the difficulties, these writers wouldn’t have it any other way: they need to do what they are doing. (“Nervously I count how many more years I might live,” writes Kapur in her own piece, as she contemplates the possibility of not being able to write again, “How will I fill them?”)

Included here are accounts of early influences and inspirations, and anyone who grew up in the subcontinent, reading in English from a young age, will find much to relate to: for instance, both Janice Pariat and Moni Mohsin mention the effect Enid Blyton’s Famous Five had on their early reading and writing lives, despite the unfamiliarity of such things as potted meat sandwiches and galoshes, or such exclamations as “Golly!” Consequently, these pieces are also about gradual shifts in perspective and self-knowledge, about negotiating cultural identity and discovering new interests. So Namita Devidayal writes of believing in flying chairs that could transport a bored child to a magical new world, or expecting to find “little foreign elves” in the garden – but also how, years later, journalism grounded her, taught her to be respectful towards the seemingly mundane, to discover magical possibilities as a writer in everyday things. And Anita Nair relates her initial struggles to find the right voice (given that she was writing in English but telling stories set in suburban and rural India) and on the puzzlement of her first book Ladies Coupe being labelled a feminist novel when Nair herself had no such conscious ambitions for it – she was simply writing, as honestly as she could, a book of stories about women.

Of course, women writers are confronted by labels – beginning with “woman writer” – to a greater degree than men are. (Some have to deal with labels twice over: what does it mean to be a “north-eastern writer”, Pariat wonders.) And in a relatively conservative society, there are other challenges. No wonder the ghost of Virginia Woolf makes repeated appearances through this collection, with many writers alluding to her famous essay “A Room of One’s Own” – about the financial independence and the emotional and physical space a woman needs in order to write – or her sharp dismissal of the idealised “angel in the house”. But George Orwell’s “Why I Write” is referenced a few times too, which is a reminder that many of the discussion points in this book are gender-neutral ones. More than one writer underplays the distinction between “male and female literature”. “I think in some sense writers lose their sexuality when they walk into the world of words,” says Nair. “Once I sit at my table to write, I am just a writer; nothing else remains,” says Deshpande. And Sankaran amusingly incorporates this blurring of sexual identity into the form of her own piece; discussing the importance of taking a break, she says, “I need to spend some time with my eyes crossed and my tongue hanging out, scratching my balls and picking nits out of my beard”. Yes, you think – writing can do that to you!

Or, you can simply continue toggling between your many selves. During a session at a literature festival a few years ago, a (male) moderator asked the women panelists a flip, patronising question about how it felt to spend one’s time at a writing table instead of at a dressing table. The session was problematic in conception anyway - its raison d’être being the bringing together of “three female writers” even though their work didn’t have much in common - and the moderator’s question implied a clear line between the writing life and the things a woman is “supposed” to do, or expected to be interested in; that one thing excluded the other. Yet here is Amruta Patil, in her illustrated essay, divulging that even if she has a full day of working ahead, involving no human contact, she dresses up immaculately each morning, “earrings coordinated, every detail in place”. The image with this text is of a woman in a summery dress sitting at a table, a kettle of tea in the foreground, a reminder that being a female writer – or any writer – doesn’t necessarily mean letting go of one’s other identities; that you don’t have to be the stereotype of the unshaven (or unwaxed) slob, completely lost to the world.

Many women writers don’t have that option anyway, often having to juggle their work with domestic obligations – but real or figurative rooms can always be sought out. Saran describes leaving her home for her writing sanctuary each morning, against the objections of her little daughter - I pick her up and rub her nose with my nose and say, “Baby girl, I’m a writer. It appears that I’m happier when I’m writing, I’m even a better mum when I write” - and Jaishree Mishra feels guilty about completely forgotting about her child – arriving home by the school bus – thanks to an intense writing session that spanned many hours, but also admits that “All maternal and domestic concerns fell right away, inconsequential, trivial even in the face of this, my new love.” In any case, children don’t have to be made of flesh and blood: Patil describes her text and image as “monozygotic twins, born of one egg, identical of DNA, but quite apart. They run holding hands. One leads, the other gamely tries to catch up. Sometimes one steps back to allow the other centre-stage.”

Other epiphanies include Anjum Hasan finding unexpected resonance in the work and life of Pablo Neruda (“this is still part of me: an image of Neruda eating sour plums alone in a tree, thinking of a book, nestling within the experience of me on a bed, reading about Neruda eating sour plums…”) and Mohsin learning that it is possible to be deeply affected by a book like Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas, but to eventually find one’s own voice in a satirical newspaper column titled “Diary of a Social Butterfly” (“The Butterfly freed me as a writer … I had always thought that if I ever wrote it would be ‘serious stuff’, and yet my most convincing fictional creation has been this ditzy airhead. But over time I have come to realize that funny is not necessarily non-serious.”)

Some of the essays here ruminate on process and rituals, on time, place, mood: Ameena Hussein recalls working not in hallowed silence but while playing music by Guns ’n Roses and Depeche Mode. Kapur’s piece is a firsthand account of the frustrating, dead-end-ridden process by which a novel may slowly find its final (or almost-final) shape – how ideas coalesce, how an incident or perspective works its way from the middle of a story to the beginning. Others look at the big picture, at the arc of English-language publishing in the subcontinent: Anuradha Marwah posits that until the late 90s, women novelists were mainly overshadowed by “Rushdiesque writing – grandiose and phallic”, and that even the space created for women’s voices “is hijacked by the market that prioritises glamour and femininity over the writers’ activist impulse against patriarchy”, while Deshpande expresses the non-activist view that a novel has no space for ideology – “that to bring an ideology into a novel, that to use a novel to send out a message, is to destroy the novel”. And Tishani Doshi points out that even a dark, self-absorbed, seemingly pessimistic poem is a gift, “an act of reclamation. It is saying, Even though I was born out of a howl in the dark I am offering you a song.”
 
All of which means that though such a book can seem circumscribed (a bunch of writers navel-gazing?), there is enough variety here in the insights, in the experiences, and in the writing itself, to make it more than worthwhile. Some pieces – Saran’s, Pariat’s, Hasan’s among them – are carefully constructed, with the rigour of a good literary essay, while others are chattier, more informal, like a free-flowing compilation of thoughts or a linear description of a writing career, but they are all candid and revealing in different ways. The one minor lack I felt (it is covered to an extent by Mohsin’s thoughts on her flighty Lahore socialite) was that of a piece by a popular, commercial writer who operates outside the ambit of “respectability”, working in such genres as the derisively named Chick Lit. In the current publishing scenario, such labels can be equally limiting (and again seem to attach themselves to women writers more than men) and the obstacles just as many, even if we sometimes convince ourselves that popular writing doesn’t require similar levels of effort or introspection.

[Also see: Ann Patchett on killing her butterfly. And an old conversation with Anita Desai, which touches on some of the issues facing a woman writer in India]

Dadasaheb Phalke, Benaras and a fading past - on Kamal Swaroop’s Rangbhoomi

I won’t pretend I enjoyed or liked Kamal Swaroop’s cerebral new film Rangbhoomi – if those words imply feeling engaged during the actual viewing process. My attention wandered, the seats in the Siri Fort auditorium seemed much more uncomfortable than they had been when I was watching Fandry a couple of days earlier, and for a 10-12-second stretch around the middle of the film I felt this intense need, apropos of nothing, to plunge a very sharp, pointed instrument repeatedly into the cranium of the man sitting next to me, all the while screaming “I’ll show you the life of the mind! I WILL SHOW YOU THE LIFE OF THE MIND!”

The moment passed (and besides I only had a Reynolds ball-point pen), but perhaps this was part of the director’s intention: to bore you first and make you think afterwards, as images spool through your mind long after the screening is over. Rangbhoomi is an abstract, structurally intricate film about a phase in Dadasaheb Phalke’s life when the pioneer turned his back on cinema, went to live in Benaras and wrote a play titled “Rangbhoomi” – but it is equally about Swaroop’s own efforts to understand those years in Phalke’s  career. It is a film about its own making, as well as a comment on the relationship between theatre and cinema, and between a creator and his creation. At one point we hear a voiceover about Phalke having intended his play “for progressive people, not for the common man”, and the images accompanying these words are blurred or upside down (or possibly both), with long, held shots of an oar cutting through water. It is as if Swaroop is saying that his film, like Phalke’s play, is meant for persevering, intellectually “uncommon” viewers.

Though it often meanders, Rangbhoomi does notable things with form. It begins with Swaroop on a set, telling someone there is more magic in theatre than in cinema. “As youngsters in Ajmer, when we read the great Russian writers like Dostoevsky and they spoke of a bridge in Moscow or a canal in St Petersburg, we pictured the little canals and pulls we were familiar with. In theatre too, we are free to imagine. But in a film you have to show the actual thing, otherwise it won’t work.” And yet, in Swaroop's own film, there are a number of scenes whose meaning is open to interpretation. Early on, there is a shot of him sitting in front of a blown-up black-and-white photograph of Phalke and his unit, and it is almost as if he is part of the frame himself. Such juxtapositions will run through the film – shots of the director and his young team, for instance, reading from the text of Phalke’s play, with the camera placing them against different backdrops in Benaras (perhaps the very places where Phalke wrote and envisioned his drama) and one image dissolving into the next.

Much of what follows – as Swaroop begins his investigations – is about how the old intersects with the new. Shots of sadhus giving counsel to their followers on cellphones while sitting on the ghat are set against grainy, jerky black and white images from mythological films made a hundred years ago. Phalke’s 1919 Kaliya Mardan is projected from a glossy new Mac laptop. The film’s baby Krishna – played by Phalke’s own daughter Mandakini – frolics amidst the coils of the giant snake Kaliya while seemingly dressed in a striped kurta-pyjama; elsewhere Vishnu sits on Shesha, chatting merrily with Lakshmi, a makeshift sudarshan chakra whirring on his finger, and occasionally slipping off. Here is evidence of primitive motion-picture technology as magic, bringing ancient stories alive. Back in the present, old women speak vaguely of there being someone in a nearby house who is a hundred years old – as old as these films Swaroop is showing them – but we never meet this person.

In a sense, Benaras – so often the setting for exotic photo-shoots about India – is the perfect city for such ruminations. Past and present are in constant communion with each other here… and yet, for Swaroop and his team, getting information about things that happened just 90 years ago is a difficult matter, full of dead ends. Rangbhoomi is a constant reminder of time's ravages. An old man says he used to have magazines that published stories by Narayan Hari Apte (one of Phalke’s associates) but a flood washed everything away. (“Kuch varsh poorva” says the man, when he really means more than 20 years ago, and one senses that he has lost track of the passage of time.) At a rundown archive, young people are discouraged from going through ancient files containing newspapers and journals because “research karne waale log files ko phaad dete hain”. In a dimly lit store-room, a chance discovery or two is made (and there is a nice shot of impossibly old, barely preserved parchments being flipped, each looking like the craggy surface of a just-discovered planet), but mostly this is a needle-in-a-haystack situation; and a reminder that this country, which is so proud of its (real and imagined) past, is so bad at documenting its history.

In another scene they visit an old, disused building that may once have been a theatre in which Phalke’s plays were staged (they even liken it to a beautiful European theatre, but this is an optimistic comparison). A peacock sighted on the roof of an old naach ghar is considered an auspicious sign, but again the building itself is like a ghost house. No one remembers anything about Phalke here, another old man says, because the generations of people who might have had firsthand memory of such things have all disappeared. Here is an irony: the development of moving pictures and screens has reached a point where little boys, playing near the Benaras ghats, might watch bits of a cricket match on a cellphone – and yet there is little reliable information about the life of the father of Indian cinema.

Which is what makes Swaroop’s Phalke obsession ultimately so worthy of praise. I don’t think I could be dragged back to see Rangbhoomi a second time, but I’m glad for its existence – and for the existence of Swaroop’s book Tracing Phalke (more about which here). He is apparently planning a biographical film about Phalke now – one that is likely to be relatively linear – and I think Rangbhoomi might be more satisfying when seen as an accompaniment to that film (perhaps a DVD supplement) than it is as a stand-alone.

[A post here about Harishchandrachi Factory, a much more accessible – and often fantasist – film about Dadasaheb Phalke]

Sunday morning plugs: Cricket Changed My Life and Satyavati

Just spreading the word about two new books by close friends. First, Shamya Dasgupta’s Cricket Changed My Life: Stories of Hope and Despair from the IPL and Elsewhere, a collection of reportage-driven profiles of a number of young Indian cricketers – from relatively famous players like Shikhar Dhawan (whose name is familiar even to me, though I haven't followed cricket at all for most of the last decade) to lesser-known names like Hokaito Zhimomi, the first man from Nagaland to have played first-class cricket (though not for his own state, which doesn’t have such a team).

Being completely alienated from the current cricket scene – and still ailing from the ennui/cynicism that led me away from the sport in the first place – I haven’t read the book yet, but Shamya has had a long and very honourable career as a sports journalist, and I’m sure this is a fine read for anyone who cares about cricket. More about the book here, in Shamya’s own words, and some reviews in the media here.

Also: very pleased that the Kindle edition of my friend Karthika Nair’s “Satyavati” is now available as part of HarperCollins' “21” series. This is an excerpt from Karthika’s forthcoming book Until the Lions, which retells the Mahabharata in verse form, in the voices of numerous characters ranging from Satyavati and Amba to a sceptical dog named Shunaka! And this is not something I would say lightly, but based on the poems I have read so far this book should be in the absolute top rank of Mahabharata revisitings – a must-have for fans of the great epic as well as for lovers of vivid, descriptive, psychologically incisive poetry.

A little more about “Satyavati” here, on Karthika’s blog, and here is an excerpt from one of the other poems in the book, published in Caravan two years ago.

P.S. If this lifetime permits, Shamya and I will co-write a book about Anita Raaj, while Karthika and I will publish our lengthy email disquisitions about the Mahabharata in book form. I know you can’t wait.