The Akshara Ramayana

A shout-out to theatre enthusiasts in Delhi: Gopal Sharman’s acclaimed play The Ramayana is being performed at the Akshara Theatre between October 1-4 (starting 7 pm). Sharman’s play centres on specific episodes from the epic – such as a long conversation between King Dasharatha and his queen Kaikeya – and central to its performance is the katha vachaka or storyteller, who is initially seated in the audience but then takes the stage, articulates the questions raised in the narrative, and eventually transforms herself into the characters. Naturally, this is a complex task for an actor, and Sharman’s wife Jalabala Vaidya has given highly praised solo performances – modulating her voice to bring the Ramayana’s characters to life – in over 2,000 performances worldwide, including on Broadway and the West End.

The Akshara production won’t be a one-woman show this time – it has a cast of young actors – but Vaidya will continue to play the katha vachaka and also perform the Dasharath-Kaikeya samvaad as well as the intimate final act between Rama and Sita. For details regarding tickets, timings etc check the Facebook page or call at 9313994368, (011)23361075 or (011)32910427.

‘And if you gaze into the abyss, Rahul gazes into you’

It’s probably accurate to say that this blog hasn’t been kind to Jeetendra and his progeny over the years. I’ve written flippant posts about the films he has appeared in – Dharam Veer, The Turning Brain and Nagin among them – and mocked the tendency to credit him “Above All” in movies where he had an inconsequential role. I’ve commented on the pointlessness of Tusshar Kapoor and written rude things about Ekta Kapoor’s serials (including her mangling of a beloved epic: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) as well as a skit about her encounter with the Goddess Kali. Rereading some of these posts makes me feel like a lowly earthworm wiggling through slush, much like Jeetendra and Reena Roy in that snake dance, and my conscience makes a “tuk tuk” sound like the shuttlecock popping against Jeetu’s badminton racquet in that Humjoli song. But I digress.

Despite my own record of misdemeanours on the subject of Jeetendra, I have now read something that makes me feel deeply sorry for him: this hilarious post from an American humour site about “the 8 manliest foreign movie posters ever”. At number 1 is a Jaani Dushman poster, and don’t miss what the writer has to say about our hero, whom he recasts as a generic “Rahul”. (He also describes poor Sunil Dutt as "an Arabic Ron Jeremy".)

This post has been going viral on the Net. Given its popularity, it’s probable that long after Jeetendra’s distinguished body of work (Ekta and Tusshar included) has been forgotten, he will be remembered in distant countries as “Rahul, who wanted to rape the wolfman”. Would you wish that fate on him? (Take a deep breath before answering: remember, Rahul’s eyes are watching you.)

P.S. Much as I’d like to take credit for the title of this post, it comes from one of the comments on the Cracked.com piece.

Mini-review: Rakhshanda Jalil’s Release

[A snippet from my weekly books column]

Rakhshanda Jalil’s slender short-story collection Release is described on the jacket as exploring “the lives of Indian Muslims, not the marginalized or ghettoized Muslims of popular stereotype but ordinary, mainstream ones”. I felt this was a case of a publisher trying too hard to brand a book: in most of these stories, the religious identity of the characters is beside the point. For bubble-wrapped readers who have an extremely narrow view of what Muslims are like, I suppose it may come as a surprise to learn that a jovial, hard-drinking raconteur who runs a hill-station hotel could be named Yousuf. Or that a Zainub Begum could be a successful scriptwriter, happy to share salacious gossip about movie-stars. But Jalil’s book deserves a more sensitive and intelligent readership than that anyway.

These are stories about character-revealing choices as well as unexpected encounters and disclosures – some of which don’t have an immediate effect but could prove life-changing in the long run. A man is taken aback to discover that a shy girl he had known decades earlier has become garrulous and assertive; a plain-looking, middle-aged lady finds herself being stalked by a young boy; an affluent man comes to a mountain getaway each year to indulge himself in a most unusual fashion. All these pieces are elegantly written but the one I liked best – a minor classic, I thought – was “The Failure”, in which a vacationing couple in the 1970s stumble on an impeccably maintained but desolate resort run by a sahibzada. This is a fine pen portrait of a regal but uneasy man (his chinless face takes on the appearance of “a sea buffeted by severe storms” whenever he is asked an awkward question) who might be ahead of his time – or who might, like some of Jalil’s other protagonists, simply have failed to seize a vital moment.

Shakti Bhatt prize shortlist

The shortlist for the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize for 2011 has been announced. I've read three of the books on the list and will be reading the others in the next few weeks. Here are my posts about Jamil Ahmad's The Wandering Falcon and Shehan Karunatilaka's Chinaman. And a post about Shakti here.

Seen, not heard: R K Narayan on a movie set

The long relationship between literature and cinema is full of anecdotes about writers feeling demeaned, patronised or outright bullied by a medium they couldn’t relate to – from George Bernard Shaw’s crabby reaction to winning a screenplay Oscar for the filmed Pygmalion to countless stories about authors hired to adapt screenplays and then standing by as their work is butchered. But one of the best first-hand pieces I’ve read about a reticent writer’s brush with commercial cinema is R K Narayan’s essay “Misguided Guide”, now excerpted in the Jerry Pinto-edited collection The Greatest Show on Earth.

This is an account of Narayan’s association with the production crew (comprising Indians and Americans) that set out to film his novel The Guide – their initial fawning over him followed by a series of events which made it clear that his original vision was irrelevant to their needs. Here's his description of an early conversation with the director Tad Danielewski:

“He brushed aside my comments and went on with his own explanation of what I must have had in mind when I created such-and-such character. I began to realise that monologue is the privilege of the filmmaker, and that it was futile to try butting in with my own observations. But for some obscure reason, they seemed to need my presence, though not my voice. I must be seen and not heard.”

Narayan isn’t usually thought of as a comic writer, but here he uses his characteristically dignified prose to convey an ever-escalating series of goof-ups, and the results are hysterically funny (the picture that came into my mind was that of the poker-faced Buster Keaton at the heart of a storm as things collapse all around him). Ideal locations near Narayan’s home-town Mysore are explored, heartily approved of ... and then bypassed in favour of incongruous north Indian settings. (“We are out to expand the notion of Malgudi,” he is peremptorily told. “Malgudi will be where we place it, in Kashmir, Rajasthan, Bombay, Delhi, even Ceylon.”) Meetings take place on the edge of a hotel swimming pool, an unnecessarily expensive set near Delhi is washed away when the Yamuna rises, a romantic scene runs into trouble (“the hero, for his part, was willing to obey the director, but he was helpless, since kissing is a collaborative effort”), a surreal attempt is made to get Lord Mountbatten to promote the film in England, and when the author protests that a scene involving a tiger fight wasn’t in his story, he is assured that it was.

Reading all this, I wish Narayan had got his revenge by writing the script for a movie about the making of Guide. It might have been just as entertaining as any other good film about the shooting of a movie, such as Shadow of the Vampire (with its witty line “I do not think we need... the writer”). And of course, a 70-year-old Dev Anand would have been happy to play the 40-year-old Dev Anand.

P.S. The Greatest Show on Earth also carries a typically goofy-narcissistic excerpt from Dev Anand’s autobiography (I wrote about that magnificent book here and here), which presents a somewhat different account of Anand’s first Guide-related conversation with Narayan. Without comment, here is some of it:

The receiver was picked up and I heard a voice say: “R K Narayan here.”

“Dev Anand!” was my reply.

“Dev Anand!” He was curious. “Which Dev Anand?”

“Dev Anand, the actor!” I clarified.

“Are you sure?” He did not seem to believe me.

“Yes, it is me!” I assured him.

“Nice talking to you, Mr Dev Anand,” he said warmly. “Where are you calling from, Mr Dev Anand?”

“I frantically tried to get hold of your number in New York…” I said.

“You did!” he interrupted me, getting interested when he heard the word “frantically”.

“Couldn’t get it from anyone, but now I am calling from Los Angeles, California,” I finished.

“I see.”

“Hollywood,” I emphasized.

“Hollywood?” he said quizzically.

“A name associated with the best of show business!” I enthused.

“Of course, Mr Dev Anand,” he played with my name and gave a friendly laugh.

After some more of this the conversation ends, as everything must, and Mr Dev Anand wraps up his chronicle with this priceless sentence:

The receiver was put down with a bang, which seemed to indicate his excitement.

More likely, Narayan was making a wild dash for his anti-stress tablets.

Rafa: the war within?

It’s difficult to gauge exactly how one forms a connection with a particular sportsperson – fandom is a thick brew made up of many secret ingredients – but one possible explanation for my interest in Rafael Nadal’s game and personality presented itself last year...

To read on, go here. This is a piece I did for First Post - it's about Rafael Nadal as perpetual underdog, my own identification with an aspect of his personality, and the frank self-analysis in his new autobiography. Of course, it's a bit ironical that this piece is appearing just as Rafa is almost certain to lose the US Open final to his 2011 nemesis Novak Djokovic (being a masochist, I will be up watching the match later tonight), but that's how things go in sport.

P.S. For any regular blog-readers with feedback on the piece - I'd prefer you leave comments here, not on the First Post site.

[Two earlier tennis-related pieces: From a Rafa fanboy and Deuce: On tennis narratives and rivalries]

On a documentary titled Videokaaran, and its memorable "hero"

A few years ago, while doing research for a story, I found myself at an Old Delhi movie theatre called “Moti Talkies”. The communal film-viewing culture in this part of the city was fading. Families rarely came together to watch movies now, one of the theatre’s employees told me – “it's mostly people from the labour class who drop by once in a while, and they are okay with watching a film while sitting on the steps” – so there was little motivation or money for revamping. The barely maintained hall with its decrepit seats now specialised in irregular screenings of Bhojpuri films, though the manager half-heartedly claimed that they sometimes showed the latest Hindi releases.

It was a world very far removed from the one I’ve inhabited for the last few years as a multiplex-goer watching the slickest new mainstream films, thinking little of paying Rs 180 for a ticket. But even halls like Moti Talkies seem plush compared to the milieu depicted in an excellent new documentary titled Videokaaran, directed by Jagannathan Krishnan. Shot largely with a handheld camera, this film is about the world of underground video parlours, where viewers gather to see films on the cheap in makeshift settings, and cinema is a passion as well as a business.

The establishing sequence in Videokaaran shows a filmi discussion between a group of working-class young men. Discussing the relative merits and fan followings of Rajinikanth and Amitabh Bachchan, they rib each other good-naturedly; one of the boys defensively mutters that he doesn’t get worked up when someone says something bad about his favourite actor. Occasionally the scene seems staged, rather than the impromptu documentary-interview it purports to be; but then you realise that these are kids who have moulded themselves after movies and movie stars, so that they are already natural performers – the swagger, the cockiness, the smart lines come easily to them.

One face takes over the scene – a young man explaining that every Rajnikanth film has a “message” for society. For instance, when Rajini plays an autorickshaw driver, he resolves that if he sees a pregnant woman walking on the road, he will give her a lift for free, even if it means telling his current passengers to get off. "Usne yeh message diya hai ke tum bhi aise karo ... Aur jo log gharwalon ki baat nahin sunte, woh uske picture dekhke uski baat sunte hain."

The young man is named Sagai Raj – he used to run a video theatre near a Mumbai slum but he now works in a photo studio – and his personality plays a big part in making Videokaaran such a compelling experience. Partly philosopher and raconteur, partly giggling sociopath, Sagai is capable of holding forth on just about any subject. He relates stories about smuggling a stack of 40 porn DVDs by passing the package off as a “Mother Mary statue”, and about splicing scenes into a film to make it more appealing to an audience (“our marketing is more effective than that of filmmakers who spend crores”). He shares his gyaan about film editing, and why certain scenes are shot the way they are. (Heroes prefer to do dance scenes with a group of back-up dancers, because then everyone can look at each other and get the steps right.) Horror and gore films (including Passion of the Christ!) seem childish to him, he boasts, because he’s seen far worse in real life.

Even though this is a documentary and Sagai is “playing” himself, it’s hard not to think of him as a “character”. He’s a savant of the streets, cocksure at most times, with just a hint of vulnerability; his laugh is like a horse’s neigh, a strange mix of nervousness, brashness and a genuine need to please. He is our entry point into a setting where films can be character-building but can also become endorsements for perversions and misconceptions. (Watching a blue film, he says at one point, can help a man “read women accurately” – “ladki ko sahi pehchaan ne ka raasta blue films se hai”.) The way of life portrayed here is one where, even in moments of extreme crisis (such as when the video theatre is demolished by the authorities), one can get succour from the inspirational songs sung on screen by larger-than-life heroes. Videokaaran is a story about people whose relationship with cinema is immediate and intense, in ways that most multiplex-goers wouldn’t be able to fathom.

P.S. Videokaaran hasn’t yet got the distribution it deserves, but it has got a small word-of-mouth following and the filmmaker is trying to arrange a public screening in Delhi. For news and updates, see the film’s Facebook page. And the trailer is here.