Thoughts on Bollywood's use of gaalis

Sometime in the early 1990s I briefly became very taken with Michael Medved's Hollywood Vs America, a book that strongly condemned the violence and explicit profanity in modern American movies (and pop music), arguing that this was eroding family values and adversely affecting the behaviour of young people. My own biases probably led me to attach more value to some of Medved’s points than they deserved: being obsessed (then as now) with old Hollywood films, I enjoyed his rose-tinted view of the “simple” cinema of the past, and his observation that it was once possible to make great movies about unsavoury people (gangsters, for example) without subjecting audiences’ ears to the foul language that these people would have used in real life. Why couldn’t today’s films be better-behaved, he asked rhetorically.

It seemed like a good argument at the time, but gradually I understood that Medved was a conservative political commentator – often motivated by religious orthodoxy – and that his book was shrill and one-dimensional, presenting just a single side of a complex topic. (Studies have indicated that screen violence can also have a cathartic effect on viewers, making them more passive and less inclined to emulate what they see.) There will, of course, always be movies that use violence or bad language gratuitously, or in a way that contributes nothing to narrative or character development – but it’s equally possible for such work to push boundaries and to shake viewers up by using options that were not available to artists in a more conservative time.

As Martin Amis pointed out in his fine essay "I am in Blood Stepp'd in So Far", when the Hollywood censorship code was revised in 1966, “film edged closer to being a director’s medium, freer to go where the talent pushed it”.

As we now know, the talent pushed it away from the mainstream of America and towards the mainstream of contemporary art, while playing to its own strengths - action, immediacy, affect...

...Does screen violence provide a window or a mirror? Is it an effect or is it a cause, an encouragement, a facilitation? Fairly representatively, I think, I happen to like screen violence while steadily execrating its real-life counterpart. Moreover, I can tell the difference between the two. One is happening, one is not. One is earnest, one is play. But we inhabit the postmodern age, an age of mass suggestibility, in which image and reality strangely interact.

(The complete essay can be read here)

Watching recent films like Ishqiya, Yeh Saali Zindagi and No One Killed Jessica, it seems like Hindi cinema is somewhere near that uncertain place where the American cinema was in the late 1960s. In the past couple of years, the censorship rules pertaining to profanity have become less rigid, and many films – especially the edgier ones set in the hinterland – now routinely use language that would once have been unthinkable in a mainstream movie.

Naturally, the results are mixed – new freedoms always bring missteps and over-indulgence, but there are also the occasional moments that feel just right. Take the early scene in No One Killed Jessica, which establishes the spunky character of the TV reporter Meera: when a co-passenger on her flight gushes on stupidly about the Kargil war being “so exciting”, she shuts him up by smiling sweetly and saying “Aap wahaan hote toh aapki gaand phat jaati”.

The scene is hugely effective for a number of reasons: 1) the startling use of a once-severely taboo word in the midst of a laidback conversation, 2) the fact that the word is preceded by the respectful "aap" and spoken by Rani Mukherjee, who has played mostly vanilla characters (in terms of their speaking habits, at least) in her career up to this point, and 3) the guy on the receiving end so clearly deserves to be put in his place that we in the audience feel vicarious pleasure in his public humiliation. The balance between the "bad word" and the faux-polite tone is perfect; a putdown expressed in milder language (or in an angrier voice) wouldn’t have had anywhere near the same impact. The moment also adds to our perspective on Meera and the contrast between her and the film’s other protagonist, the mousy Sabrina.

With Sudhir Mishra’s Yeh Saali Zindagi, on the other hand, though I liked the film, I wasn’t convinced that it would have been less effective if it had slightly cut down on the maa-behen gaalis sprinkled through the script. They fit certain characters perfectly – such as the crooked policeman wonderfully played by Sushant Singh – but at other times their use felt forced, as if the film was trying too hard to be gritty. But on the whole, I think we can look ahead to some exciting times as scriptwriters and directors work out how best to use the new liberties available to them.

The absent spinner: cricket and life in Shehan Karunatilaka's Chinaman

[Pure coincidence that this is the second novel with a cricket theme that I've read recently; wrote about the first here. Though both books involve the making of a film about an underappreciated cricketer, they are very different in most ways]

“Wasting talent is a crime,” says Graham.

“A sin,” concurs Ari.

I think of Pradeep Mathew, the great unsung bowler. I think of Sri Lanka, the great underachieving nation. I think of WG Karunasena, the great unfulfilled writer. I think of all these ghosts and I can’t help but agree.

I don’t know if Shehan Karunatilaka’s Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew is “the Great Sri Lankan Novel” (as some of the publicity has suggested), but it’s a tremendously moving and funny book that works on many levels. It deals with big human subjects such as mortality, regret and self-actualisation, but does so with admirable lightness of touch. It’s a highly engaging cricket book too, one that uses the sport to examine aspects of Sri Lankan history, politics and contemporary life. But cricket isn’t just a MacGuffin in this story. To appreciate Chinaman fully, you need to have at least a very basic interest in the game, even if you don’t live and breathe it the way the man who tells the tale does.

That narrator is a 64-year-old sports journalist named WG Karunasena (“Wije” or “Gamini” for short), and as the book opens we learn that he is dying, his liver ravaged by years of alcohol abuse. Soon we will gather that Wije’s personal list of his life’s proudest moments includes (in no particular order): his wedding; the birth of his son (named Garfield, after Sobers); being awarded Ceylon Sportswriter of the Year; watching his son hit three sixes at age eight; and “watching Wettimuny at Lord’s in 1984, the first time I realised that a Sri Lankan could be as good as anyone else”. We also learn that a disagreement about the legitimacy of Muttiah Muralitharan’s bowling action turned into the ugliest argument Wije has ever had: “More foul-mouthed than when Ceylon Electricity overcharged me Rs 10,000. Angrier than when my wife found out I had been fired from my third successive job.”

Generally speaking Wije has no illusions about having led a particularly consequential life, but in the tradition of tragic protagonists who have a date with the Reaper, he has one magnificent obsession: he wants to make a documentary about the 1980s spin bowler Pradeep Mathew, whom he considers an unsung hero, the greatest cricketer Lanka ever produced. With the help of his closest friend Ari Byrd, and financial support from a former English cricketer, Wije gets the project off the ground, but there are snags - for one thing, it turns out that Mathew may no longer be alive. And if he is, he’s doing a bloody good job of being elusive. Wije’s search for this enigmatic man will lead him to meetings and conversations with disparate types ranging from cricketing coaches to match-fixers to a mysterious underworld figure.

Among the many notable things about Chinaman is Karunatilaka’s spot-on portrait of the interior life of an old man searching for fulfilment – his loneliness and cynicism, his regrets about his estranged son, his relationship with his wife and friends. (A lovely, unexpected passage three-fourths of the way through the book relates a beachside conversation between Wiji and his wife Sheila that rings so true it’s hard to believe it was written by an author only in his thirties.) Through all his trials, Wije also retains a broad, nihilistic sense of humour – lying on a hospital bed near death while a nurse adjusts his bedpan and his wife smothers him in kisses, he reflects that this moment “is the closest I have come to a ménage a trios in my wretched, uneventful life”.

Absorbing and believable as this voice is, the book’s non-linear structure – darting about like a ball on an uncovered, crater-ridden pitch – is just as effective. The plot is interspersed with little subsections containing asides and bits of information about the game, even drawings; less adeptly done, this sort of thing might have impeded the narrative, but here it allows us to glimpse the inner world of a man who has spent much of his life thinking about the game.

Fact and fiction mix in intriguing ways here: there are references to matches that actually took place – such as this one in the 1985 Benson & Hedges World Series, which was Lanka’s heaviest defeat – but with minor alterations. (In Karunatilaka’s revised version of the match, the eventual result is the same, but Mathew takes five wickets.) There are several mentions of real-life cricketers, but there are also names that mash two or more real-life personalities together, such as “Graham Snow” (a former English captain who, in an amusing passage, bawls about his personal problems to WG and Ari, thinking they are psychiatrists) and “Mohinder Binny”. I thought the use of these composite names was gimmicky, but much more effective is the tantalising way in which Karunatilaka incorporates himself – or at least a character named “Shehan Karunatilaka” – in the book’s last section, which could be a comment on the relationship between a fiction writer and his creations, or the relationship between fiction and non-fiction. Does Pradeep Mathew really exist, it makes us wonder. Who or what is he?

Well, on one level it’s easy enough to see Mathew as a cipher that enables other stories to be told. He can also be viewed as a wish-fulfilling device, a representation of the idea that Sri Lankan cricket could have had a genuine world-beater even in its sorry 1980s – a true force of nature, a bowler who could dismiss such batsmen as Allan Border and Dean Jones with "miracle" deliveries. (Karunatilaka has gone to some lengths to create an online world for the fictional cricketer, including a webpage with photos, stats, articles and a fake Cricinfo profile.)

However, Mathew is also a tragic figure, a victim of countless external factors, and a reminder that sporting genius doesn’t ply its trade in isolation. In the alternate universe described in Chinaman, he bowls one of the great spells in cricketing history against New Zealand – such a brilliant spell, in fact, that it leads to the pitch being declared unfit and all record of the match being erased from the books! He takes on a supercilious Yorkshireman during a TV interview, an improbable instance of a cricketer from a diffident team giving it back to a white supremacist. Years later, he encourages Arjuna Ranatunga to beat the Aussies at their own game by sledging them back, advises Muralitharan not to change his action, and insists that Jayasuriya, the new one-day opening batsman, be allowed to play his natural game and hit over the top in the first 15 overs. None of these priceless contributions to Lankan cricket become public knowledge.

In a fairer world, Mathew might also have been a uniting force in a country sundered by racial conflicts – a cricketing superstar who happens to be the son of a Sinhala mother and a Tamil father. But then sport at its best, Chinaman postulates, can make the injustices of the real world more tolerable, sometimes even balance them out – even if its effects are temporary. “I have been told by members of my own family that there is no use or value in sports,” Wije says at one point. He retorts that there is little point to anything. “In a thousand years, grass will have grown over all our cities. Nothing of anything will matter. Left-arm spinners cannot teach your children or cure you of disease. But once in a while, the very best of them will bowl a ball that will bring an entire nation to its feet. And while there may be no practical use in that, there is most certainly value.”

An entire nation was, of course, brought to its feet when Sri Lanka won the World Cup in 1996, and the Chinaman narrative covers the sense of wonder and triumph of those days (“Sri Lankans across the world stand taller, believing that now anything is possible. The war would end, the nation would prosper and pigs would take to the air”), while never losing sight of the possibility that it might turn out to be an illusion – a flare of light in the midst of a continuing darkness.

But what a flare!

In 1996, subcontinental flair overcame western precision and the world’s nobodies thrashed the world’s bullies. Sixty years earlier a black man ridiculed the Nazi race theory with five gold medals in Berlin before Mein Fuhrer’s furious eyes.

In real life, justice is rarely poetic and too often invisible [...] In real life, if you find yourself chasing 30 runs off 20 balls, you will fall short, even with all your wickets in hand. Real life is lived at two runs an over, with a dodgy LBW every decade...

...Unlike life, sport matters.

[Here's an old post about my relationship with cricket, which coincidentally began just before the 1996 World Cup. And here's a piece I did for Cricinfo about the two cricket-loving fops in Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes]

On Aditya Sudarshan’s Show Me a Hero

I’ve written earlier about the spate of mass-market novels authored by young students/graduates and published by low-investment houses like Srishti** – mostly simplistic stories about youngsters who learn hard truths about life through friendships and romance, and eventually grow up (or, in some cases, achieve the all-consuming goal of losing their virginity while remaining just as mentally stunted as before). The majority of these novels move at a brisk rate, with lots of conversation but very little description. Rarely if ever are the protagonists genuine introverts or loners, though in some cases they think of themselves as such.

This is no surprise: many of these writers pride themselves on not being avid readers themselves (see this old post); what matters is that they think they have a story to tell and that they’ve mugged up thesauruses so they can (mis)use “big” words while expressing simple-minded ideas.

On the surface, Aditya Sudarshan’s Show Me a Hero might seem like the standard-issue youth novel, what with its dramatic subtitle “Lights, Camera, Cricket...and Murder” and its mass market-friendly plot about a group of young people trying to make a film about a controversial batsman who once played for India. And sure enough, this book is quite a page-turner in its way – especially the second half, which centres on a mysterious death and an investigation, with a few red herrings strewn about. However, Sudarshan is a wise reader himself (he’s done some fine literary criticism for the Hindu and other publications) and this makes itself felt in the book’s central voice. The narrator Vaibhav, a thoughtful young man with a mature head on his shoulders, spends a lot of time observing the people around him, trying to make sense of the world and his place in it, analysing (sometimes overanalysing) his own reactions to situations.

Vaibhav comes from a well-to-do family and has had a sheltered childhood, but as the story begins he is living in a rented room in a Patpatganj apartment while half-heartedly holding a low-paying job with a wildlife organisation. A hint of excitement enters his life when he reencounters an ex-classmate named Prashant, a mercurial young man on a mission. Prashant turns out to be obsessed with the former cricketer Ali Khan, who had stirred hackles during his playing days because he didn’t conform to the expectations we tend to have of our public figures (wear your patriotism on your sleeve, say all the politically correct things, respect the tradition you were born into). As Prashant, Vaibhav and a small circle of friends begin the shooting of a film about Khan, their paths cross with goons who want the project scrapped, and tragedy soon follows.

Show Me a Hero isn’t a completely satisfying novel, but (and this might sound strange) I don’t really mean that as a criticism. The thing is, it’s dressed up as a work of genre fiction - and marketed to seem like more of a cricket novel than it is, presumably to cash in on the World Cup - but it doesn’t provide the reader with the comforts, the cosy tying up of loose ends, that genre works are expected to provide. Sudarshan has a real feel for the uncertainties of sensitive youngsters trying to deal with a complicated world (and with the hegemony of older people), and his writing doesn’t involve neat resolutions. He has the courage to reach for a downbeat ending, whether it involves a man who might not have been the proud, individualistic hero everyone thought he was, or the likeable girl who gently turns down a likeable boy just when it seems they are “destined” for the perfect romance.

There are some good character sketches here too: an intrusive landlady, a typically belligerent Delhi driver who is ready to “kill” someone because they dented his beloved car but who turns into a fawner when he meets a former celebrity, a grief-stricken mother who wants to believe the best about her abrasive boy. At times I felt a minor conflict between the self-conscious solemnity of Vaibhav’s narration and the demands of a fast-paced story, but on the whole Show Me a Hero does a fine job of ignoring the hazy line between “literary” and “genre” fiction. It’s good to come across a youth novel that has some interiority.

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** For more on such writing, see the last two paragraphs of this post

Two literature surveys

The honourable Peter Griffin (Caferati co-founder, curator of the literature section of the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival, general all-round Internet superhero) has a couple of surveys for book-lovers - the first is on Essential Indian Books and the second is an Informal Readership Survey. Do take out the time to fill these in - shouldn't take more than 5-10 minutes. Both surveys are also on Peter's blog.

In the Little Tramp's footsteps

Hard as it is to believe, we are nearing the hundredth anniversary of the start of one of the most important movie careers ever. A while ago, in this book, I came across some transcripts of inter-office memos by Universal Pictures, circa 1912 - the memos have people in high positions discussing the worth of a young comic who had applied for a job at the studio, and the first one reads:

“Interesting eccentric comedian. Better in sketches with dialogue than sight gags. However, not outstanding enough to warrant either testing or sending to coast.”

And later, when the test did happen after all (because there was an unanticipated vacancy):

“Many objections have been raised to the use of the derby hat...also, the moustache must go. And do not allow him to walk comically. This may look all right on English music hall stages but for mass audience we must try to avoid offending people who are bow-legged, or crippled.”

Happily, Charles Spencer Chaplin won the battle to keep his hat, his moustache and his walk, and here we are a century later, still marvelling at the effect he had on a new art form that was searching for direction – most popularly as a performer, but just as vitally as a filmmaker and all-round creative genius, one of the first true auteurs.

Eagle Home Entertainment has recently made available a series of Chaplin’s feature-length movies in good, restored prints, and it’s been a good excuse to catch up on films that I took for granted when I was a child. There are many gems here, including The Gold Rush, Modern Times and, from later years, Limelight and Monsieur Verdoux, but if I had to pick a favourite it would probably be the lovely City Lights, which Chaplin determinedly made as a silent film at a time when talkies were all the rage. (A sly opening scene has pompous officials speaking gibberish while inaugurating a statue – probably a reflection of what Chaplin himself felt about talking movies!) This story about a tramp who falls in love with a blind flower girl while also managing an oddly intimate, on-again-off-again friendship with a drunk millionaire, combines all the best qualities of his work: imaginative physical comedy (notably the superb boxing-ring scene), unforgettable little gags (the "lucky" rabbit foot, the spaghetti and the streamers), gentle romance and pathos.

To watch the classic Chaplin films is to marvel at the influence they have had on cinema over the decades – and to discover, almost from one scene to the next, how strongly his work has seeped into popular culture across the world. (It's a bit like realising that a favourite novel - say, Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury or Richard Matheson’s What Dreams May Come - gets its title from a phrase made popular by a Shakespeare play.) Everyone knows about the effect he had on Raj Kapoor’s work, for example, but watching the beautiful last scene of City Lights where the tramp meets the girl, her sight now restored, I was reminded of the final moments of the Kamal Haasan-Sridevi tearjerker Sadma, where a man finds that the girl he had cared for through a mental ailment no longer recognises him now that she has regained her memory.

The City Lights sequence is (somewhat uncharacteristically for Chaplin) very understated, while the Sadma one belongs to a tradition of high melodrama, but the emotional link is so strong that it almost doesn't matter. To my eyes at least, Haasan almost comes to resemble Chaplin in that scene; even his moustache seems to droop in a similar way. But then, optical illusions of this sort are part of the Little Tramp’s legacy - you find traces of him in the unlikeliest places.

It also barely matters that the first film ends on a seemingly hopeful note whereas the latter's ending is sad and pessimistic; in the Chaplin universe, the possibility of melancholy exists in the most joyful situations, and vice versa. In any case, the viewer's knowledge of the Tramp's screen persona - the fact that he's a drifter perpetually bow-legging it from one situation to the next - makes it difficult to imagine a genuine romantic union between him and the flower girl, and this could be one reason why the last scene of City Lights is so movingly ambiguous. As Andrew Sarris put it, the final close-up is "the definitive image of a man who feels tragically unworthy of his beloved". It's a classic Chaplin theme.

[From my film column in Business Standard Weekend]

Tender Leaves, and some book recos

Just to direct readers' attention to a new online book rental service called Tender Leaves - you can read about how it works here. Sudarshan Purohit, who co-founded the service, asked me to provide a few recommendations of cinema-related books for their blog, which I've done here. (Those are only a few of my favourite movie books, more titles will be added to the list soon.)

A sneak preview: The Popcorn Essayists

What happens when you gather a line-up of established authors who don't write professionally about cinema and ask them for personal essays about a cherished film or film-related experience?

This happens:



[Click to enlarge]

The anthology will be out in a month or so, but here's a quick summary of what the pieces are about:

- How do you "read" a film, how do actors recapture the immediacy of their feelings when they dub for a scene months after the original shoot ...and other questions that movie buffs ask themselves ("Jellyfish" - Manjula Padmanabhan)

- A tongue-in-cheek analysis of a cult Punjabi film as a Bible for foot-fetishists ("The Foot-Worshipper's Guide to Watching Maula Jatt" - Musharraf Ali Farooqi)

- On dreamlike vistas, from Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill Jr to a surreal chase scene featuring Kader Khan and Vinod Mehra ("Perchance to Dream" - Rajorshi Chakraborti)

- How the Bihari actor Manoj Bajpai passed himself off as a native in an archetypal Mumbai movie ("Writing my own Satya" - Amitava Kumar)

- From watching Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire to reading Michael Cunningham’s ‘White Angel’ - how does the language of film differ from the language of prose? ("Two Languages in Conversation" - Kamila Shamsie)

- On the tumultuous romance between a man and his car in Ritwik Ghatak's Ajantrik ("Gaadi Bula Rahi Hai" - Sumana Roy)

- Why a middle-aged male author performed a Helen dance in drag after a public reading in Brooklyn (Manil Suri's "My Life as a Cabaret Dancer", which you can read here)

- Secret agents, suave detectives, fake ghosts ... on Hindi film noir and thrillers from the 1950s and 60s ("Villains and Vamps and All Things Camp" - Madhulika Liddle)

- What the silences in the Kaurismaki brothers' movies reveal about Finland and its people, and why an Indian writer should be so interested ("Going Kaurismaki" - Anjum Hasan)

- When you're starved for moviegoing experience, a Charlie Sheen thriller can be "the greatest movie ever made by man" ("Terminal Case" - Sidin Vadukut)

- On why being scared is a good thing ("Monsters I Have Known", by yours truly)

- A novelist recalls her time publishing a gossip-driven film magazine in the 1970s, steeped in "a Film Lok parallel to Indra Lok" ("Super Days" - Namita Gokhale)

- A writer who worked for the British Board of Film Classification on the occasional need for - and her ambivalence about - censorship ("The Final Cut" - Jaishree Misra)

And here's the video of the Popcorn Essays session at the Jaipur lit-fest, where four of these writers read from their pieces.

Updates to follow as the release date draws near.