Leaving on a Jet Plane

I'll be flying in a couple of hours to New York, where I'm being sent by work for two weeks of corporate training....I will have blog & email access, but work schedules threatening to be what they are, I'm not sure if I will get time to update...



So I guess I'm ending this on a Bollywood in New York note...

Image courtesy: Bollywood Mantra

We Won! We Won!

The results for the voting for the Seven New Wonders of the world came in yesterday...apparently, the Taj Mahal made it as well! :)

Check out the list of winners here

Don't Try to Bleed Me...

Long days, late nights... lots to do, things to plan, events to manage, deals to execute, friends to meet, passions to fulfil....lives to live.

One small life, with too much to fit in. Where is there room to let up? I'm alive, but sinking in the living of it...

And so its late on Thursday night, or really early on Friday morning, I got back from work a little while back, and all I can think of is about a black-winged bird ...

When I think of heaven (Deliver me in a black-winged bird)
I think of flying down into a sea of pens and feathers
and all other instruments of faith and sex and God
In the belly of a black-winged bird
Don't try to feed me
I've been here before and I deserve a little more

I belong in the service of the Queen I belong anywhere but in between
She's been crying I've been thinking And I am the Rain King

Mama, why am I so alone?
I can't go outside
I'm scared I might not make it home
I'm alive but I'm sinking in
If there's anyone at home at your place
Why don't you invite me in
Don't try to bleed me
I've been there before and I deserve a little more

I belong in the service of the Queen
I belong anywhere but in between
She's been lying
I've been sinking
And I am the Rain King

Hey, I only want the same as anyone
Henderson is waiting for the sun
Oh, it seems night endlessly begins and ends
After all the dreaming I come home again...

When I think of heaven (Deliver me in a black-winged bird)
I think of dying Lay me down in a field of flame and heather
Render up my body into the burning heart of God in the belly of a black-winged bird
Don't try to bleed me
I've been here before and I deserve a little more

I belong in the service of the Queen
I belong anywhere but in between
She's been dying
I been drinking and I am the Rain King.

Lyrics by Counting Crows

Democracy in Action

An earnest request to all readers - you have only 11 more days to vote for the Seven New Wonders of the World. The short list of monuments is over here, so exercise your democratic right and go choose the seven monuments that you think ought to be included.

Just to make a subtle point, my list of seven included the following:



So, as they say in India,

आपसे यह आग्रह है कि आप अपने मत का उचित प्रयोग करें और हमारे चहेते ताज महल को विजयी बनाए!

And as they also say in India,

भोट फ़ॉर ताज!

Thanks goes to fellow Desicritic DesiGirl for jogging my memory and reminding me to vote through her post

Image pinched from Incredible India!

How now, Sir Salman?

Given the hullabaloo in our literary orchards recently over the be-knighting of the writer formerly known as Salman, I was trying to get my head around why I think he deserves the honour. Because when I heard that news that he was to be made a knight, I didn't think it out of place, or disagree with it at all. It just seemed appropriate. So while I was chewing over why I think its a good idea, I thought it would be good to try to express why I supported the knighthood.

Sunny Singh, however, managed to capture my thoughts pretty succinctly. I'm sure they're really her thoughts, but I just agreed with everything she said. So rather than repost, or try to say it all over again, I'm going to cop out and just redirect you to her article instead.

Oh, and by the way, can you imagine Padma Lakshmi as the first supermodel/ TV celebrity chef to become a lady? If only she'd married the man when she had the chance!

Anyway, snide comments aside, the one thing that really bugs me as a liberal Indian capitalist is the fact that India continues to be one of a handful of countries that maintains the ban of The Satanic Verses. (Most of the others are tin pot Islamic fundamentalist whackos like Iran & Pakistan). It goes against every grain of what it means to be a democracy to put in place bans like that. And that extends to ridiculous things like the MF Hussain mess, the Chandramohan fiasco, etc. What is with the stupid moral-religious police?!?! I find actions like that incredibly invasive of my personal decisions to read what I want, say what I like, and basically express my fundamental rights of freedom of choice & expression.

I'm tempted to start a campaign to un-ban the book in India...so watch this space.

(Image pinched from Ultrabrown)

What happens After Dark?

Children of the night; dark alleyways. Lives small and limited, but simultaneously interconnected and expansive. Coincidence, destiny, chance encounters, randomness.A series of unrelated concepts & events unfolding through the course of one night. Spare, precise prose. Japanese minimalism, white walls, brushed sand, polished river pebbles.

But perhaps, most of all, a haze. That slightly nauseating dizziness, a sense walking through clouds, where images don't seem quite solid, when moving figures seem lose shape as they pass through air thicker than mercury, where the boundaries that define images begin to blur, when nothing seems real anymore. The intoxication brought on by insomnia, by fatigue, by watching the change from dark to light as a new day breaks.

All of these permeate After Dark, Haruki Murakami's latest novella. And it is a novella of several firsts. For starters, it is a short work by most standards, but doubly so for one by Murakami, whose novels tend to be long and complex narratives that allow the reader the luxury of many, many pages of the sparse prose so characteristic of his writing. Another departure for Murakami is the time span of the story, starting just before midnight and ending soon after dawn breaks the next morning. The one thing that Murakami retains is his the simplicity and honesty of his characters; their utterly ordinary lives, which are at the same time unique & quixotic.

If that seems oxymoronic, it is, because in true Murakami style, while initially each character appears, at least on the surface, to be totally unexceptional, it is when you get under their skin that their unique circumstances paint them in a more unique light. It's almost like you're walking down the street and ignore the ordinary masses all around you, but suddenly have one deconstructed in front of you to reveal the complexity within.

And then, there is the emergence of Murakami the voyeur, the film-maker. His prose veers eerily close to the tightness of a crafted script, minutely filling out the mise-en-scene; the music in the background, the colour of her jumper, the half eaten sandwich on a plate. There are directions for the cameraman, of when to pan out and take in the room, of when to focus in on the twitch of her lips as she sleeps.

What is the story? To be honest, it doesn't matter. The specifics of the events that take place during the night are irrelevant to the overall writing. There is meaning and symbolism in everything, but at the end, do the events of the night make a difference?

Ask someone who spends the entire night awake, only to see the morning wipe away all the fantasies that the darkness allows.

Shopping...

So after finishing my exams last week, I finally have control over my own free time again. No more needing to lug study notes around on the London tube, or wake up on weekends workplanning my study schedules for the day. So to celebrate, I walked into a bookstore earlier this week, and sort of went a little mad...

First I saw this, which I just HAD to buy...


And my excitement was further heightened when I saw this one:




I was somewhat disappointed to know that this one isn't going to be out in the UK until September, but then soon overcame that when I realised I could buy it from Amazon and have it shipped out from the US.



So that came in today!

I'm already almost through with the Murakami - and I find it fascinating to see how his writing style has evolved over the years. It's still the same spare, whittled down prose that is classically Japanese in its minimalism, but he is suddenly so much more attentive towards the mise-en-scene. At times I get the sense that I'm not so much reading a novel as I am a screenplay - each scene, each frame is composed in his mind and almost effortlessly communicated...

Watch this space for the reviews....

Waxing Poetic...

A classic from ee cummings...

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart) i am never without it (anywhere
i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)

i fear
no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want
no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)

This one's been done to death in popular culture (remeber Cameron Diaz reciting this to Toni Collette in In Her Shoes? Or Abby reciting it to Luca in ER) Despite all that, it's still an amazing poem, and one worth sharing...

I think I just found my perfect holiday....



" This wild and rugged 11-day trek begins at the edge of the wide open plains of Argentine Patagonia and proceeds into the rugged mountains, forests and volcanoes of the Chilean Lake District. Ride through ancient larch, beech and monkey puzzle forests while learning the real meaning of the word ‘bamboozled’ as you forge a path through the bamboo thickets with experienced guides. The huge rock formations, towering overhead give rise to the myths and tales about secret cities hidden here in the Andes. The breathtaking peak of Lanin Volcano at 13,000 feet is an inspiring backdrop to this adventure."

(Check out the tour at here)

(Image courtesy Riding Tours Blog)

Cairo Claustrophobia

It's funny, isn't it, how travelling to a place always somehow makes something written that much more real and identifiable? I always find that once I've been to the place that a particular novel is set in, the stories that I may have read before become that much more magical for me when I read them again. Perhaps all I do is colour in the narratives in my own head with what I now know of the place, but in any case, I somehow find the second reading so much more intimate.

This is exactly what happened with a book I'd read some months back, but hadn't thought to write a review of. But after my whistlestop tour of Cairo, which only served to whet my appetite for going back, I picked up The Yacoubian Building again. The book itself was a gift from a friend who was passing through London from Cairo last year. When I'd read it originally, it had seemed a good read, but nothing exceptional. But after spending just over 36 hours in Egypt, with a hotel view that looked out over Garden City towards Mohandiseen & the Citadel, I was somehow drawn back to the novel, and picked it up again last week.

First published in 2004 in Arabic, The Yacoubian Building is the work of Egyptian author Alaa al Aswany, a dentist by profession. The story traces the lives of several characters, each from different walks of life and different social strata, with very little to connect them to each other other than the fact that they all live in The Yacoubian Building, a typical Egyptian residential block in the old city. While the more affluent & powerful residents live in the large apartments in the main building, the roof contains small rooms which are inhabited by the poorer characters in the tale.

The story reads like a mosaic, moving fluidly between multiple narratives and tracing the ordinary lives of its protagonists, each of whom is in a unique way a victim of their own circumstances. There is Zaki Bey, an affluent man from a landed family, who was destined for power and influence, but had that deprived by the 1952 revolution. Taha just wants to be a police officer, but his humble antecedents deprive him of a place in the academy. Busayna does her best to earn enough to feed her widowed mother and younger siblings, but ends up in all her jobs as the victim of sexual exploitation. And there are many, many others.

Through all of their troubles and worries, the Yacoubian Building is the recurring leit motif. The story takes place in many locations, but at several points the scene is set in one of its apartments or on the crowded rooftop. On the whole, the story is not particularly cataclysmic, and there the ending of the story is somehat abrupt, leaving you feeling as if you were being led along, but were not given any catharsis. The small joys and sorrows that are spread through the novel continue until the end, perhaps appropriately illustrating what the realities of its characters must be like to live through. But there are two things I found remarkable about this novel, and more so after my trip to Cairo.

The first is this incredible sense of claustrophobia that pervades the novel. The overwhelming sense of entrapment, of being stuck in a situation from which you cannot get away, is one that affects each and everyone of the characters. Whether due to a lack of money, or for other, more complex circumstances, each protagonist is a prisoner of their own reality, unable to break out of a cycle of corruption, fraud and exploitation, whether a perpetrator or victim. While this claustrophobia came across even the first time I read the novel, it was magnified after I went to Egypt, and could see the streets and city for myself. Like so many developing countries, people in Egypt are either extremely rich or extremely poor, with very few individuals qualifying as "middle-class". And associated with these extremes are the classic cycles of exploitation, whether economic or sexual.

The second point that, at least for me, was quite unusual, was the sexuality of the writing. The Yacoubian Building was originally written in Arabic, and was for some time a best seller across the Arab world. Perhaps this is symptomatic of my own ignorance of the region and its multiple realities and complex social mores, but there is a frankness in dealing with so many things that I would have thought would be taboo. Whether it is the detailed exposition of Busayna's exploitation at the hands of her many bosses, the extensive lovemaking between various couples (never graphic or titillating, nor even erotic, but suggestive) or in the extensive description of the gay scene in Cairo, I was suprised by the extent to which Aswany deals with what I would have thought taboo, especially in a country like Egypt.

Finally, and perhaps appropriately for our present day realities, there is one subplot that is worth mentioning. Aswany describes in one of his subplots the evolution of an Islamist, one who is motivated by the desire for change in what is perceived to be a corrupt and decadent establishment to one that is fair, egalitarian and just. The sense of inevitability that surrounds the birth of the extremist is handled adeptly, but also sensitively, without going into any moralising or political grandstanding. Aswany reminds us that there are no black & whites - just one really confusing grey.

Dreaming of Dublin

So these stupid exams are doing my head in. Not only because I have to study, but because my life seems to have stopped until they're over. Not much travelling, not too much socialising, no movies, no theatre, no partying...nothing. Just getting to work in the morning, trying to leave early, and coming home to study...

So today I was flipping through some old photos and found a few that I really liked. They're from a business trip that I made to Dublin, Ireland, back in January 2005. It was cold, dark and incredibly windy, but the city had a welcoming feel to it...

So tonight I'm thinking of Dublin...on a chilly spring night in London...

Nursery Rhymes

This is another slightly gratuitous post, but in light of our good बहन मायावती winning the UP elections, क्या करें, control नहीं होता!

I got this in an email from a relative in Lucknow, and thought it was worth sharing...



( Full disclosure - as a quarter Bihari, three-quarter UP wala, I have full authority to post Bihari jokes ...so if you want to pick a fight, go find Sheila Dikshit, okay?!)

Dreaming of Istanbul...

Okay - this may be cheating, but given that between work and study (I have an exam coming up in June) I haven't really done much interesting stuff for the past month. So in order to spare you folks the agony of my currently boring life, I'm recycling something very cool that I did back in the winter of 2005 - it was my trip to Istanbul. I had sent a travelogue-esque email to friends with pics when I came back, so I'm reproducing excerpts for you to read below (especially since a reader asked for a detailed travelogue). I really want to go back - don't think I've gotten Turkey out of my system just yet!

Just got back after five fairly hectic days in Istanbul (and if you're Greek, that's Konstantinoupoli to you...) It's a fascinating city, and one that I was almost being haunted by. For those of you who haven't heard the stories, here's how it goes.

Basically, I've always been intrigued by Istanbul - it was such a historic place, with so many stories and myths and legends and events attached to it - truly one of the few great historic places in the world. I think somewhere deep inside I always wanted to go there, but over the past year, it felt as if I was being haunted by the city. Every book, movie, music, novel, you mention it, seemed to have a connection to Istanbul. I think I had the decision to visit made for me the weekend I rented three movies - a Bond film (The World is Not Enough), a German movie (Gegen Am Wand, or Head On) and a Jackie Chan movie (can't remember the name) and all three of them ended up in Istanbul. I was like, OK FINE I'LL GO!!!! I mean, seriously ... Jackie Chan??

So finally I went there in December 05 with a good friend who coincidentally is Greek. We got there on Sunday evening, after a rather turbulent flight (we were flying British Airways, and while passengers in the row next to us were clutching to their arm rests and praying with tears streaming down their face, the pilot said, "I'm sorry this isn't a very comfortable flight!" Ah, the British) Anyhow, the turbulence was caused by a ridiculous storm that had turned the streets (and runway) of Istanbul into rivulets of water and mud that cars threw up at pedestrians as they raced by. (By the way - if you go to Istanbul, be warned - the traffic is MANIC, so avoid driving)

We got to our hotel, reasonably dry thanks to the taxi, and after checking in, decided to be gung ho adventurous tourists and go out and walk along Istiklal Caddesi, which is a pedestrianised avenue in the Beyoglu/ Pera district (I don't have a Turkish keyboard, so you'll just have to pretend). However, given that we were slightly disoriented and that it was still POURING down with rain, we actually only ended up wandering around in almost zero degree monsoon style rain and got thoroughly soaked. Suitably chastised, we spent the rest of the evening in the hotel, warming up with hot showers, food, and really bad Turkish TV.

The next day was cloudy and damp, but adventurism was alive and well. We decided to take a ferry across the Halic (I probably need a quick geography sketch here. Istanbul is split into two parts by the Bosphoros into Europe and Asia. The European side is further split into a North & South by the Halic, and we were in the northern part, while the old Ottoman & Byzantine city was on the Southern side). Anyway, we decided to go to the covered Egyptian Bazaar (in that weather, we weren't too concerned about the shopping, but the word "covered" really appealed to us.) After walking through what felt like Chandni Chowk in Old Delhi with really tacky touristy goods, and swarthy Turkish shopkeepers trying to sell me Indian saffron, we got out and decided to follow that big dome we saw at the top of the hill to get to Sulemaniye Mosque. Unfortunately (or fortunately) the dome ended up being Hagia Sophia, which we had been trying to avoid since we knew it was closed on Mondays. Forty minutes later, outside the Hagia Sophia, we're like, right! And then we got accosted by a Turkish carpet seller. I decided to humour him, and got ten minutes in his shop and a hot cup of apple tea for my pains, but also really sore ears as he tried to sell us Turkish carpets & kilims. Best of all, he was talking in sterling!

Extricating ourselves from his oily grasp (okay that's a little cliched, but seriously - he looked greasy) we went to the Byzantine cisterns, which are a remnant of Roman Constantinople, and are actually quite nice, if a bit humid and really drippy (seriously - watch your head and where you put your camera). But they're quite beautiful, and as long as the drops of water don't fall on you, the sound of the water is quite therapeutic. There are also two Medusa's heads on two pillars, carved there to ward off the evil eye.

Post-cistern, we decided that we might as well go to Topkapi Palace, the old Ottoman palace, and ended up spending a fair bit of time (almost four hours) inside, because its so big and also because you need to take a tour to see the harem section. I think the best part of the Topkapi tour for me was seeing the Peacock Throne. For those not in the know, this was the old Mughal throne from India which was looted and taken away by Persian marauder Nadir Shah, and then gifted (!) to the Ottoman sultans as a present. Not having realised that it had ever left Persia, I was not prepared to see it in the Treasury at Topkapi Palace, but there it was in all its glory.

After finishing up at Topkapi, we went to the Sultan Ahmet mosque, which I think was the first mosque that I've ever been inside. And its going to be a hard act to follow, I'm afraid. Built to rival the Hagia Sophia (like most big Ottoman mosques in the city) its quite spectacular.

We also managed to squeeze in a trip to Kapali Carsi, the covered "Grand Bazaar", which was again like being in Chandni Chowk. My haggling skills from Delhi came in quite handy though. Funnily, most people thought we were Turkish, and when they realised we didn't speak much Turkish, they guessed that my friend was Greek, but their next judgement for me was that I was Iranian. Only when that was knocked out did they think "Indian"?

The next day was sunnier (and warmer) and we spent this going to Dolmabahce Palace, which was built in the 1850s to demonstrate Ottoman glory to the Europeans. It is consequently decorated alternately in Baroque, rococo & Ottoman styles, and the results are spectacularly HIDEOUS! Complete sensory overload, and very over the top - definitely worth a see, but don't blame me if you come out an advocate of minimalism....

After that, and a quick trip on the Istanbul tram, we were back at Hagia Sophia, which I must admit is not as spectacular on the outside, except for its size. The only thing I could think of outside it was how large it is. But on the inside, its a lot more serene and quite tranquil really. The mixture of Roman brickwork, Byzantine mosaic and Ottoman calligraphy is eclectic, and quite sweet really. That building really feels like an old, old person, someone who's weathered a lot of things, and is really tired and almost spent. A large part of the central dome was taken up by scaffolding as they renovated it, but it was still quite impressive.

A quick coffee and snacks later, we ended up in Sirkeci railway station, in the Grand Exhibition Hall next to the historic Orient Express bar for a Sufi music concert and sema, or ceremony. Even if it was a bit touristy, the mixture of the music and the whirling did make it fairly mystical. I was intrigued to see that of the seven dervishes, four were women, since I had always assumed them to be male...but definitely a good experience.

After that rather whirlwind tour (no puns intended) we ended up in Kurucesme for dinner. We were meeting someone who is a friend of a friend of mine and while she was quite busy with work, she really wanted to catch up so we were chez hers for dinner. Her mother had cooked a really fantastic meal, and it was a really pleasant evening to sit down with a Turkish family and see what life is really like in Turkey. Also, their living room looks right onto the Bosphoros, and the view is fantastic. I mean, how many people can say they live in Europe and their view is of Asia? Our hostess was also really friendly and warm, and gave us some good tips on clubs and bars to go to - something that I don't trust the Lonely Planet on, because the last thing I want to do when on vacation is end up at a bar with tons of grubby backpackers.

We spent two more days walking around different parts of the city (we went and visited the Greek Patriarchy and the Bulgarian church as well - I'd like to think that I'm probably the first Indian to go to either; the caretaker of the Bulgarian church definitely thought) and we also got lost walking around in the old Fenar & Balat districts, which are amazingly like Dariba Kalan and Karol Bagh in Delhi.

But the best experience of the last two days had to be the Galata House restaurant. After trekking around on the Asian side and seeing yet more mosques, we headed back to Galata, and decided we needed lunch. Our trusty Lonely Planet assured us that the Galata House restaurant had to be visited, and so we did. It was definitely worth it. Housed in the old British civil prison, the building was restored by a husband & wife architect couple in the last decade, and they've also opened a Georgian restaurant in it. They both are quite the traditional hosts, and Mr Goktug, the owner & restorer, spent a long time chatting to us and telling us stories. His wife was equally charming - they were like a picture out of the old world, with the restored building and the furnishings. Most interestingly, they have left pieces of plaster untouched from the prison cells to show off the graffiti that prisoners drew on it. My favourite one was a quote "A terrific wind has caught the ship of my destiny and brought it to this strange shore"....

Till next time....

Loving the Land of the Pyramids

I was in Egypt for a couple of days this past week; not enough to really get around, but just enough to be able to see the Pyramids from the hotel in the daytime, and then attend the sound & light show in the evening. Work constraints meant that I could only attend the show that's done in French. End result is that I spent minutes listening about "le roi Tootanchamoon", "la pierre Rosette" & "la belle Neferteetee".... quite surreal, but nonetheless a fantastic experience. I really loved buzz that Cairo has; it seems like a fascinating place, and somewhere I have to go back to soon!

Love Twinned with Darkness

Buying novels at an airport can either prove to be serendipitous or they can be terrible finds. Either you end up reading another rehash of the Da Vinci Code ilk of writing, or you can often find some hidden gems. Airports in India especially seem to favour selling copies of Pablo Neruda right alongside Dan Brown, Borges next to Barbara Cartland. The eclectic organisation of books can be either frustrating or entertaining, but never dull.

It was during a frantic rummage while my flight was being called that I stumbled across Amos Oz' autobiography, A Tale of Love & Darkness. A quick glance at the backflap, coupled with the heft that would guarantee the consumption of several hours of flying time(and did I mention the dirt cheap price?) made the purchase an easy decision.

I didn't manage to get around to reading the book until many months later, but the decision still remains a good one. Oz's story traces the origins of his family in Eastern Europe, where as Polish & Lithuanian Jews they are persecuted over several centuries. Subsequent migrations, to the USA, Odessa, and finally to Ottoman/British Palestine in the early 20th century are traced in the first part of the novel, as Oz builds up through a mosiac of stories the extended history of a family. Oz narrates the story along multiple chronologies, moving between family history in the "old country", while his "present" traces the development of the state of Israel in the 19030s through to the late 1950s. Stories of how the Irgun, Stern Gang & Haganah begin the process of British resistance are counterpoised against the tales of industrious ancestors running flour mills in 1800's Poland.

More disturbingly, the entire narrative is an attempt by Oz to understand and explain his mother's suicide in 1952 through an overdose of pills for her depression, a time when Oz was an incredibly intelligent & sensitive 12 year old. Oz takes us through both the origins of his family and the present of his mother's time to deconstruct the sources of her depression, her loneliness and the marital discord between his parents that eventually drove his mother to take her own life. By reconstructing the events, both political & personal, that eventually led to her death, Oz tries throughout the narrative to understand why his mother would choose to abandon him.

Perhaps the strongest emotion that comes through the story is that no matter what the circumstances of our existence, and our daily realities, the greatest asset & burden we all have is the legacies of our personal histories. The legacy that Oz carries has helped feed his writing, his characterisations, his creativity; for his mother, they became a large part of what finally drove her to take her own life.

The centrality of the narrative is on the development of Oz's identity, and that of his family, as Israeli Jews. While focusing primarily on the implications of what it meant to be Jewish from the 1930s, and by focusing on the individual stories of what his own family goes through, Oz manages to describe a broader sociopolitical phenomenon - that of the construction of a national identity. The one insight that was perhaps most interesting for me is the realisation that despite being returned to what was their original "home" 2000 years ago, most European Jews were unable at the time to divorce their Jewish identity from their European one. Auteurs, musicians, artists, intellectuals, people who heard Mozart & Rachmaninoff, studied Spinoza & Kant, and often spoke several European languages, many immigrants to what was then British/Ottoman Palestine were distressed and horrified at being returned to what was clearly the "Orient". Palestinians weren't only just Muslims who were against the resettlement of Jews in their lands, they were also clearly Orientals who didn't understand the justification of the Israeli state. Ah, what it must have been to be European and full of the "white man's burden" back in the 1900's.

The book is surprisingly easy to read; possibly a result of being a translation from the original Hebrew, which is itself a more grammatically directive language than the obscurities & tangentiality afforded to the writer in English (amazing what you can do with an infinitive, isn't it?) Despite its considerable length (thankfully not as long as some novels, but easily crossing 500 pages of small font) the book can be one that you can choose to linger over, savouring the stories on each page, or one that you can blaze your way through.

A poignant, nostalgic and emotional look back at a personal history, A Tale of Love & Darkness, promises a lot, and thankfully delivers.

Hazaaron Khwahishein Aisi

What was it like to be a young, educated Indian in the late sixties & seventies? What was the circumstance of your daily life, watching the hopes, dreams & desires of so many shattered by a corrupt regime? What did it feel like to be helpless in the face of such extreme brutality, darkness & despair?

Hazaaron Khwahishein Aisi tries to answer some of these questions. Using the incredibly tumultuous political landscape of 1970's India, when the Naxalite movement was in its early years, when Indira Gandhi had started tightening her grip on power, and when Delhi had begun its descent into the nefarious web of power broking, coteries and political intrigue that marked it through the 80's and much of the nineties (and from what I've heard, has started to resemble again under the current regime) the story tracks the lives of three individuals - Siddharth (KayKay Menon), Geeta (Chitrangada Singh) & Vikram (Shiney Ahuja). Siddharth & Geeta are a couple, but whose relationship is ended by Siddharth's political activism and desire to move away from the sloganeering & banner waving of the city, to a more participative approach by fighting with the Naxalites in the villages of Bihar & West Bengal. Vikram is the lower middle-class son of an idealistic Congressman, madly in love with Geeta, but unable to gain her attentions as anything more than a friend.

Through the ups & downs of the six years between 1969 & 1975, the story tracks how the three are continually separated and brought back together through circumstance. Against the backdrop of the political upheavals of the time, each of the main protagonists is woven in a tightly crossed web of friendship, sex, emotional interdependence and love with the other two. Reaching out to each other at the most unusual of times, the letters that the three write to each other form a recurring leitmotif of the narrative. Siddharth's letters to Geeta are about idealism, a desire for revolution & changing the system. Geeta writes to both Siddharth & Vikram, talking about love to the one, and of confusion to the other; often interchangeably. Most importantly, all of them write about their desire & urge to make sense of the despair that surrounds so much of their daily lives.


And yet, despite the darkness, there is hope & a need to bring change that keeps them going. But perhaps more than the desire to change the world is the desire to understand themselves; the need to accept their own aspirations and shortcomings that make the three lead characters so amazingly human, believable and empathetic. Siddharth is driven by an ideology, but also perhaps a fear of failure; Geeta doesn't want to change the world, but she is drawn further and further into the movement through her love for Siddharth, until finally the movement becomes the greatest of her all loves. Vikram is the money minded "fixer", the man who plays the power circuits and gets things done. He is driven by his love of Geeta, for whom he goes to extreme lengths, even if only to help her meet a fugitive Siddharth. But he is also motivated by what he describes in a letter as a need to make it. "You guys are all trying to get out," he writes in a letter to Geeta, "while I am trying to get in".

There are some beautiful moments & dialogues in the movie; scenes that are brief, often only glimpses, but enough to bring enough colour to the narrative. A subtle shot of a man's silhouette against a rising sun in a field in Bihar; red blood on grey stone cladding swept away by a barefoot sweeper after a communal riot in Meerut; the blare of sirens as a fleet of white Ambassadors drive down a tree lined road; these are enough to capture the moment.

But what Hazaaron Khwahishein Aisi does best is talk about the lost generation of India - thousands of young idealists, for whom the only option was to stand up and be counted in the protests against a regime that was seen to be oppressive, exploitative & corrupt. People who went to fight in the villages, endured police brutalities, and often died unsung, almost pointlessly. People who are easily forgotten because to remember makes what they died for equally remembered, and some memories are easiest to deal with by forgetting.

In so many ways, watching this movie was an incredibly emotional experience for me. Starting out as it did in Delhi University, filmed extensively in my alma mater of Hindu College, the film started out by bringing so many amazing memories - of times well spent with friends, hours whiled away on the lawns with endless cups of tea, the faint remnants of the morning's fog still adding a cold nip to your breath. Extensive panning shots of Library lawns, the front of the building, VT, Hindu hostel & the chemisty faculty brought those days, now so long past, right back.

But that's not all; the scenes of the movie relating to Bihar were probably equally resonant, but for completely different reasons. For my family, the Naxalite movement was never a good thing; hailing from a landowning family, my idea of Naxalism is stories of the village house being barricaded from within; of hearing stories of small private militias that were springing up all over the countryside; of my aunt, barely aged 7, grabbing a bhaala and following the men of the house as they ran to tackle another confrontation (she was spotted by her uncle who promptly sent her packing.) Conflict, you see, is never unidimensional. Naxalism was never an easy nut to crack; the issues that it tackled were so complex that it was never going to be black & white.

And then of course, the scenes of the Emergency. I was spared the anguish of those times by being safely born after what many have called the darkest period in India's democratic history. But I grew up hearing such stories - of how my grandmother hid the local student union leader in the bathroom, while she went out to deal with the police who had come to check the house on an anonymous tipoff. Stories of my uncle who was a closet journalist during those years, knowing where the secret printing presses were hidden in Kamla Nagar behind the university in Delhi. Stories of a cousin whose grandfather was an opposition party leader in Assam, and who described watching her grandfather being interrogated in his own living room by the same police inspector who would salute him until the day before.

This is a brave movie, for tackling the complexities of the issues it chooses to, and it succeeds in humanising the issues. Go watch this movie - it will make you think, it will chill you to the bone, and it will break your heart. And when its all over, it will make you think all over again.

I know that I am.

Kalidas

The Maharashtra Tourism Development Cooperation has taken to organising the Kalidas Festival, which aims at celebrating the cultural heydays of the Vidarbha region, and also where the legendary poet penned some of his works. My personal favourite from Kalidas is Meghdoot.

In many ways, Kalidas is about the monsoons, and the unique place that they have in Indian culture. The ad campaign for the 2006 festival, run by Mudra Communications, did an awesome job of bringing out the vividness of the rains, and also tied in so well with the idea of Kalidas...

Eklavya - Throwing Seats at the Screen

I'll confess - I knew very little about Eklavya before I went to see it. I didn't know much about the cast - just that it starred Amitabh Bachchan, and just that it was directed by Vidhu Vinod Chopra. Chopra is capable of either producing a real gem, as he did with Parinda & Mission Kashmir, but also very easily capable of producing what can only be described as bilge - as he did with Kareeb. It's like watching Sehwag go out onto the pitch - you can never tell at the start of the innings if he's going to knock a century or be out for a stupid shot in single digits.

Eklavya has to be one of the worst Bollywood movies I've seen in some time. I just knew that the good run I've had watching Hindi movies in cinemas over the past six months just couldn't last. After Omkara, Kabul Express, and even Dhoom 2, which at least qualified as a total time-pass movie, Eklavya will be my statistical correction. It has to be the single most reductionist, essentialising view of a world that is so unbelievably anachronistic as to be laughable. The entire movie is set in a royal palace (as a Rajput and someone with some genetic sense of what a fort actually is mean to be, I will NOT dignify the pleasure palace they filmed in with the term "fort", despite the insistence of the characters to do so) and is predicated on a great & terrible palace secret - that the heir to the throne is not the son of the King, but rather of one of the guards, Eklavya. The King opens the movie by reading Shakespeare, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" to his dying wife, in what seems to be an act of touching love, until we see him strangle her when in her dying delirium she keeps calling out for the guard, not him. Nice, isn't it?

Things steadily go downhill from there. There is palace intrigue, the King isn't impotent (as was earlier implied) but rather more interested in his stable boys than his wife (aha, that prediliction, do I hear you say) Saif Ali Khan emerges to play the London - returned heir apparent (i.e. pretty much playing the nawabzada that he is in real life), there is a love sick girl from a lower family (Vidya Balan, who is stunningly expressive & just gorgeous on the big screen, but has REALLY flabby arms!!!) and also a demented sister who paints her mother in broad oil strokes reminiscent of Anjolie Ela Menon & M.F. Husain.

Throw into this cocktail some long winded tirades about what dharma really means, a letter from a dying mother to her son explaining who his father is, and possibly the most ill-quoted phrase from the Mahabharata (Dharmah Matibhyah Utghratah - dharma is that which is born from reason & rationale) and voila - one orientalist fantasy with eerie Shakespearean intrigue thrown in for good measure. Eklavya, the title character, has been described as Bachchan's tour de force. Unfortunately, while Bachchan is definitely a good actor, even he cannot save his character from descending into what appears to be an almost Al Qaida like fanaticism of what his dharma truly is, and how dharma is above all reason, all question, all challenge. Besides, he's an incredibly weepy man!!

The real tragedy of the movie is that aesthetically it is quite beautifully shot. But to quote a fellow film goer, give a five year old a camera and some Rajasthani landscapes, and you'd get some amazing visuals. There are also some good performances from several characters - Boman Irani, a favourite after Don, plays an incredibly Shakespearean King, while Sanjay Dutt in his cameo as the untouchable who became a cop is a breath of fresh air. It was good to see Parikshit Sahani back on screen, but alas, even heavy hitters like these are unable to save Eklavya from becoming the hash that it truly is. I am truly surprised by the reviews that this movie has gotten from international critics - but I suspect in so many ways the movie becomes much more accessible to a western audience that is immediately able to relate to a film that can so easily help reinforce an Orientalist stereotype. There are palaces, there is royalty, there are long speeches about honour, there are evil landlords who annex the lands of poor farmers - all in all, welcome back to the Raj.

I won't even GET started on the factual inaccuracies, because we could be here for some time, and I feel terrible about having wasted three hours of my life on this movie already. So I will finish this post with the following two comments:

1. DO NOT WATCH THIS MOVIE unless you are totally mascochistic

2. DO NOT WATCH THIS MOVIE unless in the words of a fellow movie watcher you want to see if you will actually be forced to rip your seat off the floor to hurl it at the screen...

(PS - No images because I could not be bothered to waste my time looking for them on the internet. Go to the official film site, Eklavya The Royal Guard, if you're interested)

Memory & the Art of Writing

No matter how hectic my schedule, there is always time to read in it - either while commuting on the Tube, or in bed before falling asleep. I usually read very quickly as well, and I can go through several books in one weekend, or on a long flight.

It therefore always surprises me when I find books that force me to slow down and really spend time turning the pages. So it was rather a bizarre coincidence to find not one, but two books, both borrowed from a friend, that managed to do just that. In fact, I probably took over four weeks to really go through them - a completely surprising thing, given that cumulatively they're only about six hundred pages.

I think what really forced me to slow down and take the time to go through these at leisure is that they both wrote so eloquently about something that is usually so complex and multidimenstional that it is difficult to capture completely in work - the act of remembering.

The Memory Artists and The Museum of Unconditional Surrender are written by Canadian Jeffrey Moore & Croatian Dubrovka Ugresic (I am unfortunately missing some critical diacritical marks from the second name) Both write about very different circumstances & realities, with very different structures and plot elements, but are essentially connected with the power and helplessness of memory, and how in so many ways it forms an integral part of our worlds.

The Memory Artists is set in the narrative of an immensely talented character who is diagnosed at a young age as being a hypermnesiac synaesthete - his memory is startlingly accurate, but he sees words as colours in his own head. Moore spends many paragraphs spinning out how simple words and sentences can trigger chains of association in the protagonist's head, a myriad of colours, shapes, images, all carefully and tumultously documented as we're taken on a tour of the mind of a synaesthete. Noel's "normalcy" is severely hampered by his synaesthesia, but his ability to remember the most minute of details is unerring, allowing him to remember detailed conversations had many years ago. Once Noel experiences something, it is as good as graven in stone, for him to be able to recall at a later date.

The counterpoint to his own unfailing ability to remember is his mother, who's descent into Alzheimer's disease is probably the single most disturbing part of the novel. The complete inability of Noel, who has more than enough memory for the both of them, to be able to "save" his mother, is completely heartbreaking. Unwilling to let his mother slide into oblivion, Noel starts frantically to search for a cure in the basement of his house, aided in his pursuits by a friend who is unable to feel disappointment, and the occasional interludes from Noel's doppelganger, Norval.

Moore's writing is crisp, and even though the prose flows quite easily, he provides enough weight in a few sentences to keep you preoccupied. Using a multiple of narratives, diary entries and conventional dialogue, the story progesses, pieced together towards an ending that is muted in its joy, but is also equally poignant. The acknowledgements at the end describe how both of Moore's parents were victims of Alzheimer's, and I was forced to go back to the passages that discussed Noel's mother's condition, and which suddenly became even more tragic.

Contrasted to Moore's idea of what it means to remember, and to forget, Ugresic's writing is in some sense much more personal - it almost feels like sitting in someone's head, reading their thoughts, as she flits from one idea to the next. The story is abrupt, and in real terms, there is no plot. That would have been the most damning thing for me to say about any novel, but in Ugresic's case, the lack of plot provides the perfect platform to exercise in the act of remembering.

Told from the perspective of a Croat exile who flees to Germany to avoid the ethnic conflict in erstwhile Yugoslavia, The Museum... is one long lament. It is the keening of a woman mourning the loss of a life, a heritage, and a country. Compiled from a set of vignettes, the story starts and end in Germany, cutting back to the Balkans and in time to coalesce into a mosaic describing the lives led by some very ordinary people in ordinary times, only to have that mosaic shattered by events. In many ways painful reading, Ugresic's work is very, very quietly written. She is not one for bombastic or "powerful" writing. But the strength of the work lies in the quiet turmoil that conveys the anguish in the writer.

I know that most authors hate to be asked whether their writing is somewhat autobiographical - it is the most cliched of questions you can possibly ask, but somehow, in both these cases, there are clear glimpses of painful memories that both writers have chosen to deal with, not because they cannot find any way to obliterate them, but because the writing process becomes a cathartic experience - by writing it down, you can purge it from your system. And both The Memory Artists and The Museum of Unconditional Surrender are just that - incredibly poignant, powerfully written stories that leave you disturbed out of your shell, and usually traumatised by the author's act of catharsis. But unlike Greek theatre, there is no dramatic denouement that can help the reader perform his own purge - the internalisation that takes place during the novel cannot be that easily removed.

That takes its own time - enough time for the memory to fade just a little bit.

What I'm Listening To...

I've gone through yet another period of being terrible at updates - but I blame work, really! One really good development is that I've now figured out that I can access online streaming music websites from work, so I can carry out all that corporate financiering with the strains of the latest Hindi music blasting away!

A recent discovery, and likely to be promoted to the category of "all time favourite" is the song Maula Mere from the film Anwar.

Normally I don't post a lot of videos on this blog, but this one just had to come in...I love the visuals in this clip as well - you can almost feel the dust in the air, the heat of a warm day in a small Northern India town...