Pop Goes the Slop

The Music Room.

2012-01-25T20:30:00.000-08:00

No, I’m not thinking of Satyajit Ray’s superbly visual movie, Jalsaghar (1958). I am thinking of a book. The world of books is populated by two kinds of denizens. So far as the first kind is concerned, you want to part company with them as soon as possible. With the other kind, you never want the tête-à-tête to end. Namita Devidayal’s The Music Room (St. Martin’s Press, New York, 2009) belongs to the latter sort. It is history told to perfection in the style of a fictional tale. You could perhaps best describe it as an enchanting, almost seductive, personal narrative encrusted with details recalled with care and love. In the process of telling the life story of her music teacher, the author skilfully weaves in the history of Hindustani classical music with panache and an eye for exactitude in the many sub-narratives she offers. I’m a bit puzzled, though, by an obvious slip in this regard when she describes a peace concert at Shivaji Park after the demolition of Babri Masjid (6 December 1992). She writes that she was “all of seventeen” then (page 113). If she was born in 1968 as the blurb on the back fold of the cover slip states, she must have been twenty four at the time of the Artist Against Communalism all-night vigil. Mistakes happen. This minor lapse does in no way devalue the worth of her irreplaceable contribution to the cause of Indian classical music. I recommend The Music Room to anyone who is even remotely interested in music. A stupendous read, believe you me.

Wish you a long life, friend.

2012-01-25T20:19:00.000-08:00

“Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities.“ (TS Elliot, Gerontion)

We happen to know a doctor – a successful and proficient eye surgeon − who is petrified by the thought of growing old. She quizzed Ujwal and me closely about our attitude. Our casual shrugs seemed to puzzle her. Frankly though, immortality is a non-starter with me. Living forever would bore me to death which would refuse to oblige as is its wont. While reading Robert Ludlum’s posthumously published thriller, The Sigma Protocol (Orion, 2001), presumably based on the myths and mysteries surrounding the Bilderberg Group, I came across a mention of the Galápagos tortoises that reputedly lives for two hundred years. This triggered off my recall of the end of Aldous Huxley’s After Many a Summer. where a band of immortality seekers comes face to face in a dungeon beneath a British stately home with the man-ape whose lifespan has been artificially elongated. Good grief! For once, I disagree whole-heartedly with this Woody Allen utterance: “I don't want to achieve immortality through my work... I want to achieve it through not dying.”

Con of the Millennium: Bharat Ratna for Sachin Tendulkar.

2011-12-16T02:29:00.000-08:00

Whoever masterminded the campaign to get the Bharat Ratna conferred on Tendulkar must be a PR genius (or “guru” if one were to use a contemporary marketing buzzword). Imagine the amount of work that must have gone into whipping up the clamour in the media to nominate the player for the honour. The quantum of lobbying with the sports, culture and home affairs ministries and the PMO – all the foxy manoeuvres – must have required a phenomenal amount of money, influence and patience. Then came the imaginative master stroke to cloak the ludicrous proposal in a mantle of credible provenance: the enrolling of the late Dhyan Chand as his fellow conferee for the coveted award. Strike the right emotional chords. After all, Dhyan Chand played in all three Indian field hockey team winning the Olympic Gold in a row in 1928, 1932 and 1936 − the first two times as a player and in the last instance as a playing captain. He deserves to be a Bharat Ratna without doubt. Field hockey happens to be the poor cousin of cricket in India. By implication, Dhyan Chand is the underdog with whom the Master of the Universe is willing to share the crusade to win the country’s highest honour. What magnanimity! (By the way, is this the same large-hearted Sachin Tendulkar who sought in 2003 to get a Rs.1.1-crore Import Duty and Excise exemption for the Ferrari gifted to him by the manufacturer?) Even Anna Hazare, Middle India’s current hero and poster boy, and Asha Bhosale are demanding a BR for ST. The brainy Babus who have broadened the eligibility criteria for Bharat Ratna to include excellence in all fields of human endeavour need to ask themselves a simple question. Shouldn’t Har Gobind Khorana (1922 - 2011), the winner of the Nobel Prize for his role in the discovery of RNA vis-à-vis the genetic code not be the first in the queue? There is a precedence for this: Khorana’s Indian-British compatriot and fellow Nobel laureate, Prof Amartya Sen, got it in 1999. Is discovering RNA any less of a human achievement than scoring 99 centuries?

Getting caught is the only crime.

2011-12-02T05:15:00.000-08:00

Call me cynical if you must. But, as a lifelong fan of Leslie Charteris’s The Saint http://tinyurl.com/c4tw8y, I’m hugely amused by the scathing criticism being heaped on Quentin Rowan. His crime? Copy-pasting an entire debut spy novel, Assassin of Secrets, and getting it published by Little, Brown’s Mulholland Books under his alias Q R Markham. His “sources”, according to his own confession http://tinyurl.com/6nyjthh, were Charles McCarry, Robert Ludlum, John Gardner and Adam Hall. MediaBistro’s Galleycat http://tinyurl.com/dypty5m has copy-pasted this now no more extant bio-sketch of the author from his British publisher’s website: “Markham has been a parks department employee, laundry-truck driver, door-to-door knife salesman, telemarketer, rock ‘n’ roll bassist, literary scout, book-reviewer, small business owner, and consultant. His writing has appeared in the Paris Review, Bomb Magazine, Witness, The New York Post, and more.” To this impressive pen portrait of a “man of many parts”, Publishers Marketplace’s News Director Sarah Weinman added the precious nugget of information of his status as a co-owner of Spoonbill & Sugartown in Williamsburg. Galleycat also gives a relevant excerpt from Rowan’s essay published in October (“9 Ways That Spy Novels Made Me A Better Bookseller”): “From the great fictional spymasters like George Smiley, I learned how to be cold in my mind: free from values and concerned with nothing but the results of an action” There’s the nub of how his mind works, if you get my drift. Now even the 5 glowing reviews of Assassin of Secrets are missing at the websites (Bookreporter.com and Goodreads) where they were originally posted. You can find their skeletons at Google Books http://tinyurl.com/bv5pwqe, although the excerpts of the novel are missing. Is all this literary snobbishness, a desire to be on par with the proverbial Caesar’s wife or what? Remember the Oprah Winfrey-James Frey fracas http://tinyurl.com/ck7h7f2 back in 2006? That one was about fraud and not plagiarism, be warned.

How men dominate. The inside scoop.

2011-11-29T02:47:00.001-08:00

Ijust finished reading what turned out to be an extraordinary novel. It’s Dancing with Kali (Niyogi Books, Delhi,2010) written by the erudite architect, Lalita Das. She sure had me fooled.Because it started off like one of those simple social novels that used to bepublished in the Diwali issues of Marathi magazines in the late forties andearly fifties. What it gradually evolved into, though, was a cogent and lucid expositionof how the Indian patriarchal system works. No serious sociological tome couldhave explained the subject better. The chief protagonist is the matriarch of aNorth Goan Hindu joint family. Once she realises the nature of the beast andhelplessly watches her only daughter being sacrificed on the altar of familyhonour, she concocts a rather fiendish plan to take over the reins of thefamily in order to bring up her granddaughter as a free bird. In my humbleopinion, this novel deserves to be read widely instead of the trash that passesoff as good reads. It is also my wish that a film director with socialconscience makes a movie out of it. The story-telling is very visual and can easilybe adapted for the silver screen. The novel also deals with a lot of Hindu beliefslike karma in a simple language. All in all, a remarkably rewarding read.

VRI: Hum Aapke Hein Kaun?

2011-11-16T17:15:00.000-08:00

Victoria Regina Imperatrix (queen and empress) would have loved the Internet, especially email, sms and chat. Like Gandhi, the Empress of India was an inveterate letter writer. She would probably have hogged the cell phone too. She talked and talked at the drop of a hat … oops, crown. At least, that’s how she comes across in Shrabani Basu’s Victoria & Abdul: The True Story of the Queens’s Closest Confidant. Eerily though, the narrative bears a lot of resemblance to a current-day Indian soap opera as well as a reality show like Big Boss. Abdul Karim, a lowly assistant clerk from Agra went to London to serve as the Royal khidmatgaar (personal attendant) at the time of the Golden Jubilee celebrations and rose to become her closest confidant as well as her Munshi (Hindustani tutor). As he ascended in the Queen’s esteem, he also accumulated a horde of powerful enemies at the Court. They were insanely jealous of his success and his closeness to VRI which he made a point of flaunting in their faces. The Court intrigues that followed read like episodes straight out of Big Boss. The Munshi’s behaviour was undoubtedly far from exemplary. He was overbearing and obnoxious. He also managed to parley his closeness to the Queen into a continuous stream of Page 3 mentions in the European press on both sides of the English Channel. The astounding part was the downright mean-spirited and vicious manœuvres by the snobbish British aristocracy, the Viceroys, including the Keeper of the Royal Exchequer, the Queen’s Personal Physician as well as her own offsprings all behaving no better than common guttersnipes. Victoria tried to shield her Munshi at all cost, accusing his detractors quite perceptively of colour and race prejudice. As the Great Game between Britain and Russia was always afoot on the Afghan border, the conspirators even tried to implicate Abdul’s friend Rafiuddin, a journalist, as an informer to the Afghans but with no success. By the way, one of VRI’s favourite gestures of showing favour was to have the favourite person’s portrait painted by a well-known painter. Both Abdul Karim and Rafiuddin got the treatment. The book is an entertaining read and could well be turned into an absorbing mini-series for television.

Too scared to look.

2011-11-13T19:48:00.000-08:00

The recent reports of an asteroid (2005 YU55) http://tinyurl.com/bvodg4t passing too close to the earth for comfort reminded me of a childhood incidence. I must have been four or five years old when there was a report that a comet with a long tail was to be sighted from India. The fool that I was, I denied myself the sight of the century out of fear. There was a distant relative of mine, a kite-flying bum about whom I have written earlier. http://tinyurl.com/7jj5cbn . He spun to me a fantastic yarn about a monstrous comet with a fierce moustache and a fiery tail out to devour little boys. When I cross-checked with my parents , they kind of smiled indulgently and shrugged leaving me thoroughly puzzled. I’m sure they wanted me to be brave all by myself and conquer my fear of the unknown by staring the so-called ogre in the skies right in the eye. But born coward that I was, I slunk to bed early and refused to step out on the terrace http://tinyurl.com/csvd4jl for the next couple of days. My cowardice has not disappeared with age. It has only ripened into a set pattern of behaviour. Even today, I tend to turn my back on the unpleasant, unsightly and unacceptable facts of life. Curiously though, movie monsters don’t scare me. They make me laugh.

Rear Window.

2011-11-07T19:26:00.000-08:00

Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window based on a Cornell Woolrich short story (“It Had to Be Murder”) http://tinyurl.com/5vymtfo hit the US cinema halls in 1954. Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine was launched in 1955. Alfred Hitchcock Presents, produced by his Shamley Productions, was launched on CBS the same year. The first successful TV soap in the US, Search for Tomorrow (CBS), had debuted three years prior to Rear Window’s theatrical release. To Charlotte Chandler who wrote It’s Only A Movie, Hitch described Rear Window as “a movie about a peeping Tom” and likened it to a tabloid (“a kind of peeking”). I wonder, though, if Hitch ever thought of Rear Window as the perfect metaphor for television. He described it as a “close medium” where you had to get “in close as fast as you can” and where you had “to write with the camera” rather than go “photographing dialogue”, i.e., tell the story visually. This does not answer my query. It’s possible that Hitch, living up to his taciturn nature, did not articulate his thoughts about the nature of the medium which had made him “an instantly recognizable celebrity all over the world” like Elvis Presley.

Agatha and Alfred.

2011-11-04T02:27:00.000-07:00

Apart from the initial letter of their first given names, they shared a British pedigree, an ability to thrill and mystify – she with her novels, short stories and plays and he with his œuvre in cinema and television – and the curious coincidence of both having only one daughter. Both of them also shared a Victorian-Edwardian outlook by the accident of being born in the last decade of the 19th century. She was his senior by nine years, though. But what struck me as the most astounding coincidence is that both of them have at least one biography celebrating their respective lives which uses a similar literary device to tell the story. In The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie, Charles Osborne unfolds the professional and personal life of the Queen of Crime using her books and plays as the milestones along the way. Charlotte Chandler follows Osborne’s example when she tells the life story of the Master of Suspense in her It’s Only A Movie. Both the books are excellent examples of how to write a biography that takes you close to the subject without slipping into a hagiographic muddle.

Positive thinking is fine. But, good grief, this is ridiculous.

2011-08-12T21:43:00.000-07:00

“The actions of the few are not a true reflection of our city. This, what you see here, is our London. Communities coming together to clean up, reclaim, and revive the neighbourhoods they live and work and live in.

”Let it be shown that the positive action all over the city far outweighs the destruction.”

(Opening statement at This is our London http://tinyurl.com/4yvyy25)

Sorry if it sounds like I’m sneering at the great tragedy that the UK is suffering at the moment. I am not. It’s only that I’m disturbed by the pompousness and the sheer naivety – nay, asininity – of the opening statement – not to mention the bad grammar (“the few” instead of “a few”; actually “quite a few” seems more apt given the situation). I guess that, in the great hurry to put the website together (“in just 8 hours”, according to the AdAge Global http://tinyurl.com/3gh28o7), a cub got the opportunity to display his/her wit and wisdom in the opening salvo – most likely, without proper guidance and quality check. What resulted was: “This is our London (in denial)”.

What was intended to be conveyed, I’d guess, was along these lines. Our city is in the throes of a serious crisis. There is a lot of death and destruction in many areas. Yet, there are also isles of hope springing up in the midst of the chaos: spontaneous acts of generosity and ingenuity by the city dwellers coming together with an abiding faith in the community’s future.

Reading the intro made me cringe also because it reminded me of something that keeps happening back home. The loose talk about “the spirit of Mumbai” that is bandied about in media and public for a every time the megapolis faces a crisis makes me want to puke too. Good grief!

Meaning is what we make of it. Momentarily.

2011-06-28T21:53:00.000-07:00

“To live in the world without becoming aware of the world is like wandering about in a great library without touching the books.” (Manly P Hall, The Secret Teachings of All Ages, 1928.)

Finding meaning is a thankless and purely human preoccupation, often amounting to obsession, come to think of it. Imagine the worst-case scenario of a man lusting after an inaccessible woman plucking petals from a hapless flower and going “She loves me, she loves me not”. Jesus Christ! Coming to terms with the likelihood of life being totally, blissfully meaningless is beyond the ken of most people. (P.S.: The “meaningless” hypothesis is also capable of taking coincidences in its stride.) Our family physician is a guy who would rather short-change himself than overcharge a patient whenever he happens to be short of change. On the other hand, I know another general physician who declares that many of his patients are crooks. They often diddle him out of his modest fees and don’t keep “firm” appointments fixed over the telephone. So, his relationship with this wretched lot is governed solely by his own interests, Hippocratic Oath or no Hippocratic Oath. For instance, when planning a pleasure trip, he doesn’t give a damn about how they will cope in his absence. He doesn’t arrange for a reliable locum, either. Those days are gone for good, he avers. (My niece who has her own clinic in Canada could not come to India to visit her ailing sister for a long, long time because she could not find a trustworthy locum.) If you want to read meaning into these random happenings according to conventional wisdom, the former as also the doctor from Canada are selfless and noble healers and the other Indian doctor, a selfish, conscience-less scoundrel in perpetuity. Then, there’s the curious case of a placebo doing the work of a medicinal drug to bring about a cure. Here, the patient’s faith and trust in the doctor and his prescription impregnates the make-believe medicine with meaning to make it do the job of the real thing, as it were. Trying to find meaning may well be a trespass into an alien culture at times. Picture, if you please, a Martian hopping into a Mumbai cab and, after being taken on a long and bumpy ride by the cabbie, concluding that all Mumbai cabbies are crooks. Or, alternatively, think of the same ET quitting the cab sans his weird-looking hand-held Meltdowner 5.0, receiving a call from the cabbie about his forgetful faux pas, retrieving his invaluable weapon and reaching the diametrically opposite conclusion about the integrity and honesty of the cabbie tribe in the megapolis. Then there’s an ad currently on the idiot box that has a somewhat plump, attractively attired and distinctly flirty young woman literally bumping into a young man in a mall to catch his eye and his fancy and then flitting around to lead him into a merry chase all over the place. Were they to be quizzed, I bet the ad agency and the client would try to pass it off as an innocent fun ploy to sell the soft drink. But the way she behaves on camera with cloying, come-hither coyness, she could well be a high-priced sex worker successfully turning a “trick”. Finally, the recent controversy about the pejorative label “slut” points to the temporality of meaning. The word was originally used to describe a dirty, slovenly or untidily dressed woman. It donned its offensive sense in as late as the late 19th century. Attire is still very much the context, though.

David & Goliath, circa 2011.

2011-06-27T18:55:00.000-07:00

The Biblical title sounds a tad clichéd, I admit. Nevertheless, it is particularly apt. The story I’m going to tell you is about the current battle between Indie US booksellers and Amazon.com’s publishing arm. JB Dickey, who owns Seattle Mystery Bookshop situated in the district burned to the ground by the Great Seattle Fire of 1889, has taken up the cudgels for it by refusing to stock the Amazon Mystery Imprint (Thomas & Mercer). http://tinyurl.com/6e46voc. A reader (Dave) http://tinyurl.com/6bppr2y (‘On Dave’s Thoughts’) writes that Amazon is not a monster-sized Darth Vader out to get the puny Indie Jedi. It is at a marked advantage merely because of a better, more reader-friendly business model conforming to the contemporary lifestyle and benefiting the book shopper. Likewise, a new whodunit author seeking a signing session at SMB urges JB Dickey to go with the flow. All this seems to make eminent sense. Yet it does not gel in my “forest killer” book-loving heart that harks back to the time when remaindering was magically transformed into an honourable pursuit by an astute South Bombay bookseller. http://tinyurl.com/65mb9qz. In India, this sort of a grim scenario is probably far, far away in the future. My biblioidolatrous heart http://tinyurl.com/3orucp8 continues to bleed for the Indie Davids in the US of A. Meanwhile, there’s no denying the disturbing findings of a recent Cornell University investigation. A June 2011 paidContent.org article (‘What Shoppers Don’t Realize About Amazon’s Reviews') http://tinyurl.com/6a9tzz7 reveals the following behind-the-scene secret: “How do you become a top 1,000 Amazon reviewer? A new study by a Cornell professor Trevor Pinch shows that the website's elite reviewers "do not always make independent decisions about which books and other products they write about.... the reviewers in many cases acknowledge that in order to maintain their high rankings and continue to receive free products (one of the perks of being a top reviewer), they have to make surprisingly calculated decisions about what to review and what to say about those product.”

Nature of the beast. (Hollywood, Bollywood and other wonderlands.)

2011-06-16T05:12:00.000-07:00

The movie business, I’ve always suspected, is run by sub-humans and morons who strut around like geniuses and God’s own gift to mankind. Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon, the duo who wrote the made-for-the-summer-holidays blockbuster, Night at the Museum, and its less successful sequel, Night at the Museum: Battle for the Smithsonian, as well as two notable bombs, Queen Latifah’s Taxi and Lindsay Lohan’s Herbie: Fully Loaded, admit as much in their soon-to-be-published how-to-do-it guide, Writing Movies for Fun & Profit: How We Made a Billion Dollars at the Box Office and You Can, Too! (2011). http://tinyurl.com/3wew6cr. They say stuff like: "There are a lot more idiots than smart people. The president of the studio is usually a very smart woman. . . but there are executives who have to approve your script. Smart people give good notes, dumb people give bad notes." And: "The position of producer is one for oversexed, megalomaniac uber-humans who for some reason feel the desire to play wedding planner to a group of dim-witted rodeo clowns, who are also, for the most part, oversexed and megalomaniacal, … Note: Throwing a phone, paperweight or fax machine at an intern is never acceptable in Hollywood. Unless your last movie made a shitload of money. Then - go nuts." They explain the failure of Herbie: Fully Loaded thus: "The president of the studio loved our take. She had one note. It was too sexy for Disney. We took out the sexier stuff and turned it back in -- and here's where it gets interesting/horrible. We were now dealing with the studio executive under the president. . . dumb as a stump and mean as a rattlesnake. We did about ten drafts for this executive: dumbing down the plot, making everything cuter, taking out things that made the movie make sense." They got fired somewhere along the way and were followed by a row of 24 writers/script doctors. In his Adventures in the Screen Trade, William (Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid) Goldman summed up “Hollywood's collective idiocy” thus: “Nobody knows anything.” This is said to have led to his virtual boycott by the industry. He stopped getting screenplay writing work afterwards. Let’s hope G&L are spared that kind of hounding. Back to Fun & Profit revelations, though. Here’s their description of how the studio steers script development: "You have a Volkswagen Bug. You sell it to someone. He says, deliver it in eight weeks. Make it pink. Then that person's underling says, 'I know we bought a Bug but all the other studios are buying SUVS this year, so lets make it a big SUV. Then: 'I read an article about boats today and how they're going to be popular this year - let's make this thing kinda like a boat.' Then they say, 'Terminator made a lot of money, let's make this thing kinda like Terminator.' Then. 'Make it green.' You go back to the person who bought a pink Bug and they say 'What the hell is this giant green Terminator boat?'” And, some truly worthwhile advice for the would-be screenwriter at the time of facing the studio critique: "Write down everything they say. Keeping your hands busy like this will help prevent you from making the 'rage faces' that you will be inclined to make when you hear their crappy ideas. . . Don't be argumentative. It's way too easy to get fired. Be thoughtful. Practice turning your 'mad' face into an 'I'm thinking about it' face." Reading between the lines of the drivel dished out in fanzines, on the idiot box and movie-related websites in India, one senses that things are no different in Bollywood. Here directors get thrown out on their butts in mid-production (remember Amole Gupte?) or denied their due credit (remember Anusha Rizvi?) The stories one hears about script-reading for the benefit of the stars and the producers along with the quality of the final product are also telltale giveaways.

What the dickens! Great expectations? Duh!

2011-05-21T21:20:00.000-07:00

Did I pick up Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations with – ahem! – great expectations? You bet I did. The reason was my immense enjoyment of his Oliver Twist when I read it last year. My copy of Great Expectations is hardbound in green imitation leather (or, is it leatherette?) with gold embossed lettering and design on the front and the spine. Pity, the inside does not match the pomp and show (howsoever faux) of the outside. (Never judge a book by the cover, huh?) The paper it is printed on is rough and recycled and already turned near yellow. The front and back endpapers are brownish pink with a floral motif. The front one is decorated with an Ex Libris (“from the library of” in Latin) crest which is a book owner’s identification label. (A literary aside: The Ex Libris label often used to carry admonitions like “The ungodly borroweth and payeth not again”, or “Neither a borrower nor a lender be…”; Sir Walter Raleigh’s bookplate had this whimsical comment: “Please return this book; I find that though many of my friends are poor mathematicians, they are nearly all good bookkeepers.”) The book somehow exudes decadence, decay, near-death, much like Pip’s passage in the story. The publication data is mum about when it was first published. Great Expectations was published as a serial in Dickens’ own weekly, All The Year Round http://tinyurl.com/6lc62nw in 1860-61. Around this time Dickens’ marriage was floundering and he was embroiled in an unhappy affair with a young actress. The original version of Great Expectations had an unhappy ending just like its unhappy beginning and unhappy middle. At the behest of Edward ("The pen is mightier than the sword") Bulwer-Lytton, his friend and a novelist, Dickens changed it to a conventional happy ending (“no shadow of another parting” from Estella). The narrative in the beginning and the middle is laced with a lot of what seemed to me wry humour. For instance, hilarious is what I felt was the repeated reference to Pip “being brought up by hand” by his sister. I understood it instinctively to mean she never speared the rod as far as her young brother was concerned. The other sense in which the phrase is interpreted refers to the rearing of an infant who is spoon- or bottle-fed – not breast-fed. http://tinyurl.com/642f9ao. “You will not have to complain of the want of humour as in the Tale of Two Cities. I have made the opening, I hope, in its general effect exceedingly droll. I have put a child and a good-natured foolish man [Joe Gargary, Pip’s brother-in-law], in relations that seem to me very funny,” Dickens confided to his friend, advisor and biographer, John Forster. (Please see the sidebar: Story Foretold. http://tinyurl.com/44nfvyo.) After the identity of Pip’s real benefactor is revealed, the story-telling turns a bit too over solemn for my liking. For some readers, Great Expectations is Dickens’ darkest work. To me, it was by and large quite enjoyable yet overfull of coincidences the most prominent among them being Estella’s parentage. STOP PRESS: Grave Expectations, the soon-to-be-published mash-up of Great Expectations by Sherri Browning Erwin, has Pip as a werewolf pitted against Estella as a vampire slayer. Help! Even Dickens has finally fallen prey to the monster mash-up mania. Will it push the teenagers to read his novel? I’m not too sure.

Plan B.

2011-05-11T21:30:00.000-07:00

Middle India loves its wayside chaat and pani puri, never mind Ankita's on-camera whistle-blowing leak. http://tinyurl.com/42tctlh. Sharp-eyed Ankita Rane spotted the culprit at mischief from the window of her Naupada home in Thane. Her family and neighbours were skeptical when she told them. To prove her credibility, she videocammed the bum. Now her story is she was following her conscience according to her Afternoon Despatch & Courier (11 May 2011) interview. http://tinyurl.com/426cnz5. A little white lie? Memory lapse? Who knows? Meanwhile, the culprit’s excuse to his erstwhile customers was the lack of a urinal within easy reach and his reluctance to dirty the clean colony by peeing in the open. Very creditable and civic-minded, don’t you agree? Moral of the story: if you must patronize a roadside chaat and pani puri seller, at least make sure there is a public toilet nearby. Another healthy hint to Middle Indians who drool over Chinese food: never pick a fight with the restaurant owner if you don’t want to be served soup garnished with his fresh, just-cleared-the-throat spit. Moral of the story: skip the soup; better still, skip Chinese altogether if you're in a pick-a-fight mood.

Saint and sinner.

2011-04-30T21:11:00.000-07:00

Venal, graft-riven, gimme-more-minded Middle India with so many sinister secrets tumbling out of its closet of late might as well lay a claim to Ludwig Wittgenstein as its saviour saint. Wittgenstein was seriously flawed, disturbed and tortured – nay, anguished by an awareness of sin and guilt and the need to do soul-searching aloud. In point of fact, he was the self-confessed sinner who aspired to sainthood. He was also phenomenally gifted so much so, in fact, that the Cambridge Apostles as well as the Bloomsbury crowd were duly deferential to him. Some of his biographers have revealed his “penchant for disciples” and his eagerness to dominate, cow down and virtually terrorize his followers as well as be venerated by them. Fania Pascal, his Russian tutor in the 1930s and later his colleague in Cambridge where he was the lionized philosophy professor described a bizarre incidence. Wittgenstein once insisted on reading to her, on a priority basis at a time when one of her children was ill, a written confession of his sins, viz., his failure to tell his friends about his Jewish ancestry and his denial of having physically abused a former pupil. To her irritated query halfway through the stiff recital: “What is it? You want to be perfect?” he answered with a thunderingly affirmative retort: “Of course I want to be perfect.” The other “father confessor”, Rowland Hutt, was equally uncomfortable listening to Wittgenstein’s loud recital of his purple misdemeanors delivered across a table in a Lyons café. That very year, i.e., in 1937, Wittgenstein went to the village of Otterthal (Austria) to apologize to the parents of the children who had been at the receiving end of corporal punishment meted by him in his capacity as an elementary school teacher from 1924 to 1926. His open intolerance for his intellectual equals prompted his disciples into jeering at contrarian views. Mrs Pascal, though, thought of Wittgenstein as “remarkably unself-conscious”, oblivious of his capacity to wound others or arouse fear in them. He was unimpressed by class, status and temporal success. He was as demanding on himself as on others. He seemed to her the least neurotic of men: single-minded, resolute and steel willed. All this, in her estimation, would “… make him stand out as a prophet … not intrigued or amused by human nature ... [but] sure this nature was evil; and his attitude to it was one of despair.” To her, he appeared as a “free” man, one who had given up wealth, community, close national ties, pretence, adaptation so that he inspired awe among others. To John King, a student at Cambridge and friend, Wittgenstein was “a man of high moral, intellectual and artistic integrity ... tolerant of those who had less ability than himself and never censorious except of what he considered humbug, hypocrisy, affectation”. In his view, his teacher “saw a high seriousness and purpose in life”, and said: “Of one thing I am certain – we are not here in order to have a good time.”

Penny dreadful. Utterly awful.

2011-04-30T06:21:00.000-07:00

A couple of days ago, I finally finished reading The Sexton Blake Casebook: A Collection of Adventures featuring the other world famous detective compiled by Mike Higgs (Galley Press, Leicester, 1987). I had acquired this curious volume off the footpath on Hornby Road http://tinyurl.com/68gn8cy back in the eighties. The hardcover volume in a large format has a slip-jacket sporting a woodcut illustration of Blake in a red nightgown smoking a pipe presumably in his Baker Street flat. It also has five novellas: [1] The Mystery of Glyn Castle (The Sexton Blake Library, No. 269, 31-01-1923, 4 d.); [2] The Case of the Society Blackmailer (The Sexton Blake Library, No. 12 New Series 31-08-1925, 4 d.); [3] The Crime in the Wood (The Sexton Blake Library, No. 104 New Series, 30-07-1927, 4 d.); [4] Down and Out (The Sexton Blake Library, No. 174 New Series, 03-01-1929, 4 d.); and [5] The Missing Millionaire: The Very First Sexton Blake Story (Halfpenny Marvel, 1893, Price not stated.) After plodding through these shoddily plotted and clumsily written tales set in sylvan Victorian surroundings about status-driven perils suffered by British toffs (blackmail, kidnapping and the like), understanding why Sexton Blake was anointed “the prince of penny dreadfuls” and “the office boy’s Sherlock Holmes” was simplicity itself. It is amazing how Sexton Blake, Tinker and Pedro the bloodhound have managed to survive from 1893 to the late 1970s not only in penny dreadfuls but also in comics, stage plays, cinema, radio, a 78 rpm gramaphone record and a set of playing cards. If Blakiana http://tinyurl.com/ cm9zyp is to be believed, the saga carries on regardless even in the Kindle era. There’s no accounting for popular tastes, I guess.

Civil as in…

2011-04-25T20:27:00.000-07:00

“Civil society” is the phrase making the rounds in the Indian news media these days. I wonder what sense “civil” conveys here. Webster’s http://tinyurl.com/6cc7atu defines the adjective six ways. In the first sense, it means “applying to ordinary citizens as contrasted with the military” as in “civil authorities”. In the second, it means “not rude; marked by satisfactory (or especially minimal) adherence to social usages and sufficient but not noteworthy consideration for others” as in “civil behaviour”. In the third sense, it denotes “of or occurring within the state or between or among citizens of the state” as in “civil affairs”, “civil disobedience”, “civil strife”, “civil unrest”, “civil war” and “civil branches of government”. The fourth sense signifies “of or relating to or befitting citizens as individuals” as in “civil rights” and “civil liberty”. Fifthly, it signifies “legally recognized in ordinary affairs of life” as in “the civil calendar” and “civil marriage”. In the sixth sense, it conveys “of or in a condition of social order” as in “civil peoples”. Though Webster’s does not mention “civil society” and “civil life” to illustrate the first and the sixth senses, my guess is that either of those must be the intended meaning of the current usage. But given that Indians are partial to their own choice of vocabulary, I cannot be too insistent that I’ve hit the nail on the head. After all, we’re prone to saying “rubber” when we mean an “eraser”; “flat” when we mean a “residential apartment”; “eve teasing” when we are thinking of a woman being harassed sexually by offensive words. We also use “tight slap” for “hard slap”; “pindrop silence” for “total silence”; “hill station” for “mountain resort”; “redressal” for “reparation”; “expire” for “die”; “prepone” as the opposite of “postpone”; “allopathy” for "conventional medicine"; “loose motion” for diarrhoea; "charity" for "philanthropy"; and "corruption" for "graft". Indian English tends to be in an on-going state of civil disobedience or civil strife, I guess.

Humbug? Bullshit? Claptrap? Hokum? Drivel? Balderdash? Travesty of truth? Fibbing? Fraud? Swindle? Fakery? Hoax? Or, plain lying?

2011-04-15T18:08:00.000-07:00

A beautiful young woman, on an international flight, spoke to the priest sitting in the adjoining seat, “Father, may I ask you for a favour?”

”Of course you may, my child. What can I do for you?”

“Well, before boarding the flight, I impulsively bought this expensive electronic hair dryer in the Duty Free Shop. But it is well over the Customs Duty limit and I'm afraid that they'll confiscate it from me. Is there any way that you could carry it through the Customs for me? Under your robes perhaps?”

“I would love to help you, child. But let I warn you: I shall not lie.”

“With your honest face, Father, no one will question you.”

When they got to the Customs barrier, the young lady let the priest walk ahead of her.

The Customs Officer asked, “Father, do you have anything to declare?”

“From the top of my head down to my waist, I have nothing to declare.”

The Officer thought this answer strange, so he asked, “And what do you have to declare from your waist to the floor?”

“I have a marvelous little instrument designed to be used on a woman which is, till date, unused.”

Roaring with laughter, the Officer said, “God bless you, Father, go ahead.”

Moral of the story: Never tell a lie. Use your mind.

Question to ponder for the Catholics: What will the priest tell his father confessor? (“Father, forgive me. For I’ve sinned by fibbing the Customs officer at LAX…”?)

Question to ponder for all readers: How would you describe the Father’s reply to the Customs Officer? Your options are in the heading of this post.

Hints: (1) A helpful definition: “HUMBUG: deceptive misrepresentation, short of lying, especially by pretentious word or deed, of somebody's own thoughts, feelings, or attitudes.” http://tinyurl.com/3wjqrkj. (2) “Bullshit” is never well crafted or carefully wrought. http://tinyurl.com/bxtbyg.

One more recent instance of probable fakery: Did Sarah Palin fake Trig’s birth just prior to running as the VP mate in John McCain’s 2008 US Presidential bid to cover up, maybe, for her daughter, Bristol? http://tinyurl.com/3c24vge. Also: http://tinyurl.com/3dyqwep.

What’s in it for me?

2011-04-14T21:53:00.000-07:00

It may seem churlish and unfeeling to cite the following two examples that illustrate Middle India’s persistently pathological sense of entitlement. Item #1: 5 members of the family of a SAIL employee who died in 1994 took poison because the Bhilai plant refused to give a job to his son. http://tinyurl.com/6le8xbm. Item #2: Arunima Sinha, an up-and-coming volleyball player, lost her leg in a chain-snatching incidence on a train in UP. The Sports Ministry offered her Rs.25000/- as interim compensation, Rs 2 lakhs for hospital expenses and a job in railways – and still face the wrath of the athlete as well as media. http://tinyurl.com/6dh4cbj. What I find astonishing in the first instance is that the SAIL ex-employee’s family – which till date has not vacated the government premises to which he was entitled as a staff member – feels also entitled to continued employment of at least one family member by the steel giant. In the second instance, I find it equally flabbergasting that the victim holds the railways and probably both the Government of India and the UP Government responsible for her sorry plight. If a chain of responsibility must be traced, I would say the fault lies principally with the goldsmith who made and sold the gold chain she was wearing and with her for buying it and flaunting it in a manner that tempted the thieves to snatch it. If it comes to that, she need not have resisted the chain snatchers. A limb is any time more precious than a gold chain. Passing the buck and pointing fingers at others ought to stop.

The baksheesh culture.

2011-04-11T18:25:00.000-07:00

It’s time to celebrate the birth of Rama, the mythological king of Ayodhya who stood for all that’s just, moral and righteous in this world. It’s also the right time for Middle India to seethe with righteous indignation and rile at the ten-headed demon of corruption. What an Indian means by “corruption” is “graft”. Or, “baksheesh” in street parlance. If history is any indication, we Indians have been giving and receiving baksheesh with guiltless impunity from time immemorial. It stems from our feudal past that has seamlessly extended into our present. Again, if history is any indication, it will continue to extend effortlessly into our future too. The Middle Indian housewife who was excitedly waving a candle just yesterday to support Anna Hazare will hand out baksheesh to the peon in the school where she is seeking admission for her darling son to help her jump the queue for the admission forms the very next day − without blinking an eyelid. In the bad old days of Socialist India, it used to be fashionable to curse the licence-permit-quota regime for nurturing the baksheesh culture. It is ironic that, in the times of liberalisation, Middle India has become even more liberal with baksheesh. The baksheesh culture, further bolstered by the spread of rentier capitalism, has an insidious way of spawning an endemic sense of entitlement even among non-performers and marginal factotums. The queue of ministers, bureaucrats, go-betweens, petty officials and other hopefuls at the receiving end grows longer by the minute. Can you imagine the lewd obscenity of the baksheesh announced for the World Cup heroes. As if they were playing for peanuts in the first place!

Lost and found.

2011-04-07T13:02:00.001-07:00

This, believe it or not, is a story with a happy ending − the ‘Lost and Found’ story, not The Cloud & The Kite tale. You may find it hard to accept the happy ending assertion simply because this blog, which as a rule tends to be subdued and cynical rather than over-the-top optimistic, says so.

The story started, if memory serves, in 1977. I was working in Everest Advertising at the time. The comprehensive dummy of the children’s book The Cloud & The Kite, written by me and illustrated by my friend Sanat Surti, was lying in a drawer in my cabin in the office. Then, one day, it suddenly went missing along with the typed manuscript or original text. This dummy had had the rare distinction of having travelled all the way to Japan and back. http://tinyurl.com/3m3aga2.

Yesterday morning, believe it or not, I found the carbon copy of the long lost original text at home. It was lurking in a long forgotten bunch of papers tucked away in a drawer that had not been opened for years. If only, hoping against hope, I can now persuade Sanat to redo it, we may be able to take a crack at getting it into print as a children’s book.

Meanwhile, I am going to post the entire original text here so that, even if it doesn’t get published, it will get read by at least a few people. I have always felt that The Cloud & The Kite is a children’s book that deserves its place in the sun and that even some grown-ups with their inner child still extant may relish it.

By the way, the story-propelling device used in it is what you may call the plodding “if not this, then what” trial-and-error modus operandi of deductive reasoning. Read it and you’ll know what I mean.

[The Cloud & The Kite original text starts here …}

The Cloud & The Kite

By Deepak Mankar

Pictures by Sanat Surti

©Deepak Mankar 1976. Pictures ©Sanat Surti 1976.

A little cloud was wandering all alone in the sky one day. His name was Meghashyam.

“Oh, how I wish it were the monsoon,” he thought. “Then I would have lots of friends for company.”

But the rainy season was still far, far away. The sky was clear and blue but for Meghashyam.

“I shall change my shape and watch my shadow on the ground,” said he. “That will surely pass the time and keep me happy.”

First, Meghashyam turned himself into a rabbit with long ears and a cotton-bud tail.

“Ha, ha, ha,” he laughed. “Look at the funny bunny. Just look at his long, long ears and short, short tail.”

“Ho, ho, ho,” answered someone suddenly. “Bunnies are white and fair, not grey and dark like your silly shadow.”

“Who said that?” cried Meghashyam angrily.

He looked and looked but could find nobody.

So he went back to his game. He changed the rabbit into a flower with tiny petals and a short stem.

“Ha, ha, ha,” he roared with laughter. “This time, it is a cute little flower with a short tail. Just take hold of the tail and you will get a beautiful flower.”

“Ho, ho, ho,” jeered the same voice again. “Flowers are pink and fair, not grey and dark like your silly shadow.”

This time Meghashyam looked longer and harder than before. But he still could not find the owner of the voice.

“My ears are playing tricks on me,” he said.

“No, they are not,” said the voice shriller than before. “I am right here, behind you.”

Meghashyam turned round and noticed a kite flying smartly and shining brightly in the sunlight.

He had never met a kite before. Kites do not fly in the rainy season, do they?

“My name is Meghashyam. It means a dark cloud,” he said politely. “And, who are you?”

“Why don’t you find out for yourself,” asked the kite, smiling mockingly.

“Are you a balloon? You shine like a balloon,” Meghashyam told the kite.

Then he turned himself into a balloon and looked at his big, dark shadow on the ground.

“No, you are not. A balloon looks like this, not like you,” he said.

By now, the kite was giggling unabashedly.

“Try again, you silly cloud,” he shouted.

“If you shine like a balloon but are not a balloon, are you a butterfly? You are full of pretty colours like a butterfly,” said Meghashyam.

Then he changed his shape to resemble a butterfly and looked at his big, dark shadow on the ground.

“No, you are not a butterfly, my friend. A butterfly looks like this, not like you,” said he a wee bit sheepishly.

By this time, the kite was guffawing brazenly.

“Try once more, you woozy goose,” he cried.

”If you shine like a balloon but are not a balloon, and if you are colourful like a butterfly but are not a butterfly, you must be a bird. Your tail flutters like a bird’s tail,” Meghashyam told the kite.

He at once took the shape of a bird and looked eagerly at the big, dark shadow on the ground.

“Oh, no. A bird you surely are not,” he said disappointedly. “A bird looks like this, not like you.”

That remark made the kite go into even louder peals of laughter.

“Try one more time, you oaf,” he taunted Meghashyam mercilessly.

“If you shine like a balloon but are not a balloon, if you are colourful like a butterfly but are not a butterfly, and if your tail flutters like a bird’s tail but you are not a bird, you must be an aeroplane. You fly like an aeroplane,” said Meghashyam hopefully.

Then the cloud became an aeroplane and looked expectantly at his big, dark shadow on the ground.

“Oh, no. You are not even an aeroplane. Because an aeroplane looks like this, not like you,” he wailed bitterly.

The kite was about ready to split his sides with laughter.

“Try really hard this time, you numbskull,” he screamed scornfully.

But Meghashyam was feeling sorry for himself and in no mood to oblige. He started crying.

“No, I will not. Sob, sob, sob. I give up. Boo-hoo, boo-hoo. I do not even want to know who you are anymore.”

You know what happens once a dark cloud begins to cry. It just cannot stop until it has shed all the tears.

The cloud was no more his former sneering self. Now, for the first time, he felt a tinge of fear. He knew that once he got wet and soggy, he would never be able to fly again.

“Please, oh, please stop snivelling, Meghashyam,” he pleaded. “I am really, really sorry I made fun of you. I take back all the wicked things I said. I will even tell you who I am. But please stop crying at once. There’s a good boy.”

But, try as he might, Meghashyam just could not stop crying.

So the kite got wet and soggy and nosedived alarmingly.

On his way down, he got caught in a huge tree and could not free himself.

That day everyone in the neighbourhood wondered how it had rained so heavily when the rainy season was still far, far away.

Nobody thought of asking the kite caught in the tree.

But then nobody could tell he was a kite anymore.

Because he did not shine like a balloon anymore.

Because he did not look colourful like a butterfly anymore.

Because he did not have a tail fluttering like a bird’s tail anymore.

Because he could not fly like an aeroplane any more.

Well, well, well. Even Meghashyam did not find out who the kite was, remember?

[The End.]

Love thy nemesis.

2011-03-26T23:14:00.000-07:00

MK Gandhi did what no other Indian leader had done before him. He turned India’s struggle for freedom from the British Raj into a mass movement in a relatively short time. But, with his emphasis on religion and non-violence, he also managed to acquire a gamut of enemies. His most relentless enemy was, perhaps, the erudite Dalit leader, Dr BR Ambedkar. The good Doctor never forgave Gandhi for his chosen nomenclature for the Dalits (literally, “down-trodden” or “crushed”), viz., Harijan (“children of God”). He saw it as a devious and hypocritical ploy to keep the Dalits captive within the confines of the Hindu religion. After India became free, Ambedkar even led a mass exodus of the Dalits to Buddhism. He also never forgave Gandhi for opposing, in the early 1930s, the grant by the British of a separate electorate for the Dalits by embarking on a fast unto death. Gandhi was also hated by the orthodox Hindus for “favouring” the Muslims; by the fanatic Muslims for insisting on Hindu-Muslim unity (they saw it as a way of perpetuating Hindu dominance); and by the revolutionary radicals who thought of him as a reactionary and a coward for shunning violence. Contrast this with what happened in Lancashire which Gandhi visited during his voyage to Great Britain to attend the Round Table Conference in 1931. The boycott of British textiles that he had called for in India had been partly instrumental for triggering the unemployment of the British textile workers. Nonetheless, when he confronted them, while some of the out-of-work hecklers booed him and threatened to tear his eyes out, many others somehow sensed his innate goodness and cheered him as “Good old Gandhi”. Amazing, considering this was their first and only sighting of Gandhi.

Men in White (Khaddar). A KK Covert Op.

2011-03-22T04:36:00.000-07:00

The WikiLeaks about the Congress Party MP Satish Sharma spilling the beans and his assistant Nachiketa Kapur taking a US Embassy staff member on a guided tour to view the chests of cash for buying votes to ensure Parliamentary approval of the Indo-Us nuclear pact in July 2008 remind me of the antics of Mack Sennett’s totally incompetent Keystone Kops. The best way to keep a secret is to let as few as possible be privy to it. Simple? Apparently not. S&K made it absolutely sure that there would be every chance of a leak or two by doing a show-and tell for their American friends. The latter made it even doubly certain by promptly sending a jubilant cable to Washington D.C. If the Corps of The Queen’s Couriers operating since the 15th century http://tinyurl.com/6kkhqd6 had not fallen under the axe of the jittery HM Government’s fiscal axe, cloak-and-dagger communications delivered personally by a “silver greyhound” would stay under wraps. Likewise, if Uncle Sam’s nephews and nieces had emulated their cousins across the big pond by instituting The President’s Courier service modeled on the successful UK prototype, there would have been no need to worry. Well, well. These days there’s no dodging the Keystone Kops lurking in the corridors of power and diplomacy the world over, I guess.

And so it goes. But whither?

2011-03-21T05:35:00.000-07:00

Admit it or not, like it or not, India is still in a loosely federated semi-feudal flux. At the centre rules a royal family anointed by history. Currently, there’s a much maligned puppet regent. The various states (erstwhile “provinces” and “princely states”) are now fiefdoms – some of them supporting and others hostile in varying degrees to the central rule. There are pockets of armed revolts notably in the North East, Kashmir and the Naxal corridor. Frankly, things haven’t changed much since the days of the British Raj. There has only been a transfer of power from the departing British to their chosen Indian successors: the English- speaking middle class and crony capitalists. Some of these worthies insist that India is a successful working democracy despite evidence to the contrary. Fortunes are being made by hook or crook and the guilty seldom get punished. Juggad (innovative resourcefulness, improvisation, ingenuously devised jerry-rigged solution finding), resilience and survival tactics are much valued in a situation of perpetual shortage of wherewithal particularly among the less affluent. The recent WikiLeaks about the Congress Party buying votes to get the Parliament’s nod for the Indo-US nuclear pact on 22 July 2008 give a surreal tinge to what goes on in this country. Is the tsunami of corruption, abuse of political and economic power the tsunami of corruption of frightening proportions, ongoing abuse of political and economic power, unbridled private expropriation of public wealth with government collusion, lack of access – particularly for the poor – to public services and, last but not the least, ever-present terrorism and militancy as a reaction to the unbearable injustice of it all turning India into a full-fledged banana republic? Is the “India Shining” hubris of Middle India also a major contributing factor? Take a guess.

Aberrant exit.

2011-03-18T14:01:00.000-07:00

The literarily inclined may well have noticed the startling proximity of locations that the two novels dealing with the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust caused by World War III have. Both of them – Nevil Shute’s On The Beach (1957) and Aldous Huxley’s Ape and Essence (1948) – are set in neighbouring Australia and New Zealand respectively. In the former, human life has become so unbearable and unsustainable that the government is nudging citizens to suicide by cyanide. (No public interest litigation to stem the tide of suicides, thank you.) In the latter, life limps along somehow. Obviously, in both these fictional scenarios, the end comes with a nuclear bang. But, maybe, TS Elliot describing Guy Fawke’s demise on the gallows in the aftermath of the failed Gunpowder Plot in his epic poem The Hollow Men (1925) strikes closer to the truth if one were to judge the end-of-the-world predictions in the light of the recent events in the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan:

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

The course of events also suggests that at work is the deft hand of a wily Indian soap writer team adept in the craft of dragging the tale by its tail much like Scheherazade. http://tinyurl.com/5sn3a7w

God of gall.

2011-03-15T02:08:00.000-07:00

I'm often flummoxed by how people cunningly and adroitly make hay while the sun shines. Yesterday, I was off-colour with a touch of flu and took total bed rest after visiting the family doctor. After gulping down the first dose of tablets and capsules (5 in all), I picked up a book that Ujwal had got from her cousin, Vibha. The latter’s husband is a Trustee of an ancient Ram temple in Ramwadi, Kalbadevi. The book is purportedly written – or, shall we say haphazardly compiled? − not only for commemorating the more than 200 years of the temple's existence but also for establishing beyond a shadow of doubt its place in the history of India’s independence struggle. The Chaphekar Brothers assassinated Rand and Ayerst in Pune on 22 June 1897 when the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria’s imperial reign was being celebrated all over India. The provocation apparently was the high-handed misbehaviour of the British troops in the exercise of the emergency powers vested in them for controlling the Bubonic Plague epidemic raging in Pune. The Brothers used to be the musical back-up for the daily kirtan performed by their kirtankar father in Ramwadi. They quietly vanished for a couple of days to do their appointed task in Pune and then returned to resume their daily routine in the Ramwadi temple as if it was business as usual. Later they were betrayed by a desi Judas called Dravid, arrested and sentenced to death. By the way, one of the Chaphekar Brothers had earlier tried to enlist, was rejected on account of his caste (Chitpavan Brahmin) and held a grudge against the gorra admi. A plaque honouring the Brothers was installed in Ramwadi in early 1987. All that is splendid but does it call for a disjointedly compiled, shabbily produced volume full of factual errors and quite a bit of atrocious writing to drive home the point ? The needle of suspicion veers towards vested interests. The principal compiler and contributor, a State Award-winning historian, who also happens to be the chief honcho of the Trust that owns and runs the Ramwadi temple seems to have seized the opportunity to guide the flow and components of the narrative for his own ends. The volume reads like a self- and sire- hagiography vanity-published at the cost of the hapless Pathare Pradhu temple Trust. He misses no opportunity to show how kind, considerate, humane, virtuous and far-seeing he and his dearly beloved father who is no more happen(ed) to be. If you take the drivel he shovels at you at face value, they are/were manna from heaven. Good grief, Charlie Brown. Remember Lucy’s immortal words: “I never made a mistake in my life. I thought I did once, but I was wrong.”

A steady diet of kitsch and later.

2011-03-10T20:14:00.000-08:00

Today, I suddenly realised that I had been on a steady diet of kitschy books for quite a while. A recent break was Kiran Desai’s 2006 Booker Prize winner, The Inheritance of Loss. The one huge benefit I got from my erstwhile diet was that my enjoyment of Desai’s novel was that much more heightened. On second thoughts, though, there was no way I could not have enjoyed the book immensely in any event. The main reason for it is personal. I am more than familiar with the historical background against which the story unfolds and find Desai’s even-handed portrayals of the Indian (for that matter, Third-World) “losers” – those who stay back as well as those who break away – something I can empathize with. Of late I also happened to be thumbing through Alfie Thompsons’s Lights! Camera! Fiction! A Movie Lover's Guide to Writing a Novel (Running Press, 2006). Thompson is clear about who her guide is meant for: only those wanting to author “popular, an-editor-will-be-interested-in-buying-it, written-for-readers stories”. What she has in mind is the product of what the Marxist art theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer called “culture industry”. This happens to be the culture mass-manufactured to satisfy “false” needs created by Capitalism, pandering to what Virginia Woolf designated as middlebrow tastes. Here readers buy books that are on bestseller lists rather than for their intrinsic literary value. According to her view, art, beauty, form, integrity and value don’t matter. What moves the merchandise is the so-called experts’ nod: The Book-of-the-Month Club, the NY Times Top 10 list, Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club and so forth. If memory serves, Russell Lynes, the erstwhile editor of Harper’s Magazine, made fun of the Woolf hypothesis but nonetheless subdivided her middlebrow category into upper-middlebrow and lower-middlebrow. According to him, the former were art patrons as well as owners and administrators of museums, operas, art galleries, orchestras and publishing houses – in short, all that comprises the fountainhead of consumable culture created by the highbrow set. A member of the lower-middlebrow set would use art to improve her minds as well as her lot in life. Today’s Middle India seems to have a surfeit of these worthies.

Fake will do.

2011-03-07T22:14:00.000-08:00

Simply amazing! I'm referring to the perspicacity of whoever chose the Kishore Kumar number “Pal bhar ke liye koi hame pyar kar le, jootha hi sahi” from Johny Mera Naam (1970) as the finale of the “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bangalore” episode of The Simpsons. This episode, by the way, happened to be the 17th of the 17th season. It was first aired in the US on 9 April 2006 and recently telecast in India. The song of which the punch line gives a grudging nod to momentary love of the fake kind is an apt and telling footnote to the American attitude toward exotic mysterious India (cf. Raiders of the Lost Ark: Temple of Doom) as well as the Middle Indian propensity to accept anything Western (especially American) as manna from heaven without bothering to determine its provenance and authenticity. In India, fakery even when tinged with mediocrity gets celebrated mainly by default. This was proved decisively once again by the gushing obit outburst after the recent death of the so-called pioneer of Indian comics. This worthy had the gall to unleash, in the late 1960s, on his unsuspecting compatriots a spate of badly written, shoddily produced, garishly and unimaginatively illustrated and tinted comic books based on simplistic and cliché-ridden depiction of Indian folklore, mythology, religion and history. This may well have done untold harm by conditioning an entire generation of Middle India particularly to think of Indian historical and mythological narratives and characters in two-dimensional (good/evil, hero/villain, virtue/vice) terms of reference insidiously implanted in their minds by years of reading these contemporary, seemingly canonical word-and-picture spin-offs.

Worst-case scenario. Worse than a dirge.

2011-02-23T20:22:00.000-08:00

There was actually a time in the Hindi film timeline (much before “Bollywood” became the vogue word) when really big-time stars did not flinch at being paired off with non-stars. The most glaring examples were Geeta Bali matching dancing steps with the erstwhile stunt star Mater Bhagwan in Albela (1951) and Shriman Satyawadi (1960) where Raj Kapoor consented to acting with Shakila without batting an eyelid. In those days, star earnings were not counted in crores of rupees but in single digit lakhs. They also did not have any product endorsing or ambassadoring opportunities and idiot box appearances to fall back on. Life was simple and honest and so was moviemaking. Middle India, the chief consumer of Hindi movies, too was not as greedy and self-indulgent as it has now become. To get an idea of how much of a turn for the worse things have taken since then, you should listen carefully to Middle Indian preteens slurpingly describing the food spreads they’re frequently privy to or their mall and multiplex visits. When I was their age, I did not know enchilada from my elbow. And, although I was clued in to Hindi and Marathi movies and cricket from a fairly early age, my role models were neither film stars nor cricketers but fictional characters like Robin Hood and Sherlock Holmes. I was totally ill informed on the availability of goodies of all sorts and didn’t really crave for them probably because there were not too many of them around. (The only stuff I craved for was the unattainable 25-cent novelty items advertised in American comics.) I’m not saying that I was particularly virtuous, moral, principled, just, straight, honorable, honest, upright or incorruptible. I was just too dumb and deprived of temptations. I didn’t either know or use the F-word till well past puberty. Times sure have changed.

Chawls of Mumbai. Revisited.

2011-02-10T00:45:00.000-08:00

In the Overview section in The Chawls of Mumbai: Galleries of Life (ImprintOne 2010), Sandeep Pendse, Neera Adarkar and Maura Finkelstein remark that “the current rulers [of India shining!] certainly prove themselves to be more ‘colonial’ in mentality than the white British. They too wish the ‘natives’ were not there, as citizens; that they would quietly perform their tasks and disappear into the woodwork”. The quote is lifted from Eunice de Souza’s 11 February Mumbai Mirror book review http://tinyurl.com/4dfda5c. The “born in the USA” flunkeys of the present rulers emulate their masters unflinchingly. McDonalds and Dominoes, for instance, refuse to home-deliver their exorbitantly priced junk to denizens of the chawls in Girgaum at least to the best of my knowledge. This is ironical considering the fact that the delivery persons probably hail from a chawl or, even worse, a zoparpatti. Apart from “warehousing people”, meaning ordinary folks, the Mumbai chawls have also been accused of “warehousing criminals”. For instance, there is the Dagdi Chawl, literally a chawl built with stone, at Saat Rasta, Byculla. It used to be the fortress of Arun Gawli, formerly an MLA and currently a resident of the Arthur Road Jail. As far as “warehousing future cinema stars” is concerned, there is “Jumping Jack” Jeetendra – who claims to have been a Diwali kandeel (lantern) making champion in his childhood – from the chawl abutting the Girgaum Portuguese Church near Central Cinema and Rajesh Khanna from a chawl in Thakurdwar. Contrary to the rumours you may have heard, Lohar Chawl is not a building where ironsmiths reside but an area close to Crawford Market where you can shop for mainly electrical goods but also a lot else besides. The Purple Foodie confesses to having found her blow torch at Saria Steel in Lohar Chawl, in fact. http://tinyurl.com/4dfda5c

Lie to me. Once more with feeling.

2011-02-09T01:48:00.000-08:00

Now that Maria Schneider (Last Tango in Paris) is no more http://tinyurl.com/4dokmot, Bernardo Bertolucci, who directed it, belatedly expressed regret for robbing the actress of her youth. Sophie Taylor who wrote the above-cited article in The First Post on 4 February, writes that both Schneider as well as her co-star felt exploited and humiliated by their participation in the movie. The actress of course was a newcomer and, presumably, inexperienced when she got her $4000 break in Last Tango because Bertolucci’s first choice, Dominique Sanda, went hors de combat owing to an ill-timed pregnancy. But Brando was no starry-eyed ingénue. He was a veteran and quite capable of judging the implications of his role. In any case, this kind of talk from actors and directors makes me want to puke. As Hitch and Ashok Kumar would have said, it’s only a film for heaven’s sake. http://tinyurl.com/4gt4fkg. What you do on screen is acting. It has nothing to do with what you happen to be off screen. In the snippet of Last Tango I saw on YouTube http://tinyurl.com/dk8j8h, both Brando and Schneider seemed to have got under the skin of their respective characters – real troopers that they were! – and enjoyed themselves while they were doing this crucial scene. So why all those pious after-thoughts, I wonder.

Lie to me. One more time.

2011-01-31T15:29:00.000-08:00

Those who have been trashing Arundhati Roy because of her “seditionist” views on Kashmir and the Maoists have probably never heard of Ferit Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist and Nobel laureate, whom the Turkish government had imprisoned for his interview in the Swiss Das Magazin in which he said: "Thirty thousand Kurds have been killed here, and a million Armenians. And almost nobody dares to mention that. So I do." Once again, I’m reminded of what George Orwell wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) about truth: “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” Pamuk too had to face a hate campaign and even flee Turkey for “insulting” the Motherland. He said he was fighting for freedom of speech and Turkey’s last chance to come to terms with History: "What happened to the Ottoman Armenians in 1915 was a major thing that was hidden from the Turkish nation; it was a taboo. But we have to be able to talk about the past." Another Orwellian interjection is in order: "He who controls the past, controls the future."

Chawls of Mumbai.

2011-01-24T03:48:00.000-08:00

Every time I think of a chawl in Mumbai, I’m reminded of a couple of lines from Phoebe’s Smelly Cat:

“Smelly Cat, Smelly Cat what are they feeding you?”

And, no offense, but:

“And you're no friend to those with noses.”

I also think of Patrick Geddes’s apt description, c. 1930, of the primarily industrial workers’ overcrowded living spaces as being not for housing but for “warehousing people”.

My first visit to a chawl was at age 8 or 9. A classmate in my first school − Sirdar High School – took me to his home in a chawl within walking distance of the school as well as 233 Khetwadi Main Road http://tinyurl.com/48tnw4. This chawl − it still stands in the 3rd Khetwadi Lane, close to Wilson High School which I attended later on http://tinyurl.com/45c9zxw − housed families of betel leaf sellers and a few white collar workers. On every floor, there were several single rooms along a common balcony at the end of which were a shared toilet and a bathroom for all those living on that floor. On an average, 5 – 10 people lived in each room measuring probably six square metres or less and having a little mori (enclosed washing space) inside it with a faucet connected to the municipal water supply. The presiding smell here was overwhelmingly verdant leafy.

The other two chawls I was familiar with in my childhood had mostly white collar workers and were near Prathana Samaj http://tinyurl.com/6kph3qfand in Kandewadi close to Khotachi Wadi http://digbig.com/5bbrww respectively. The all-pervading musty smell in both was of stale daal (lentil) stuck to the bottom of a cooking vessel.

In Tales from the chawl http://tinyurl.com/6hawqab Neha Thirani calls PL Deshpande’s Batatyachi Chaal http://tinyurl.com/6bh9jvj a romanticised view of the Mumbai chawl. To me, it has always been a satirical, nearly Orwellian but wittier depiction of the plight of the white collar lower middle class family trying to eke out a bare existence in heartless Mumbai. The “musty smell … of stale daal (lentil) stuck to the bottom of a cooking vessel” is very much there.

My friend Rajan describes his recent visit to the chawl near the Matunga Road Station where he had spent 26 out of his 29 years in Mumbai. He found the building dilapidated and mostly deserted but did talk to an old couple of his acquaintance there who had nowhere better to move. The experience was overall “depressing”. http://tinyurl.com/4uaw4ww.

There are many more chawls in Mumbai that I’ve been to other than the three I described here. Maybe, I’ll talk about them sometime later.

Sound of Money.

2011-01-23T18:06:00.000-08:00

There was a gushing piece about a soon-to-be-staged production of Sound of Music at NCPA in a morninger recently. It brought to mind my watching the Julie Andrew movie at the Sterling sometime in the late 1960s. The pleasurable experience I had was probably as close to the one with My Fair Lady or The King and I. Watching the movie later on the idiot box came nowhere close to the real thing. It had nothing to do with big screen/small screen but my state of mind at that time. I have always felt that the reviewer’s state of mind at the time of watching a movie or a stage play has a lot to do with what sort of a review it gets – good, bad or indifferent. This may not be true at present when many producers don’t mind paying for the reviewer’s time and good mood. A post-preview table spread, for instance, may well act as an added mood improver. Why are Indians so greedy, easily corruptible and mendacious in all they do?

Not everybody loves Sachin Tendulkar.

2010-12-19T18:41:00.000-08:00

Reading The Hindu’s and The Telegraph’s online reports of his 50th Test Century this morning, I thought of the neighbours Sachin will soon have when The Tendulkars move into their new home. It is now under construction off Carter Road, close to Otters Club – which, in June 2002, turned down Sachin’s request for membership − and Jogger’s Park, in Bandra West. Right now, the builder’s crew is making so much of a din and a nuisance of themselves that the folks staying around are just about ready to throw up in a manner of speaking. This – despite the fact that Sachin had sent them a letter in advance begging for their indulgence for the inconvenience that was going to be let loose on them! Well, almost nobody can get universal adoration, I guess. Didn’t a psychotic fan shoot John Lennon in New York in 1980 just because he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time?

Lie to me.

2010-12-13T02:55:00.000-08:00

Don’t know about you but I can still remember the time when there were no senior citizens about, no differently abled folks. There used to be old people and disabled people. Movies were movies then, not franchises. Governments used to be as vicious and ruthless in dealing with citizens acting against their diktats, i.e., not toeing the official line, as they happen to be today, though. Had Julian Assange or Arundhati Roy or Dr Binayak Sen been around then, they would have been hounded as relentlessly and mercilessly as they are being hounded right now, no quarters granted. Little white lies were the better part of valour, then as now. Demonizing or criminalizing the enemy of the State used to be the favourite gambit. It continues to be likewise. This brings to mind what George Orwell wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949): “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” Also, for people who love to rewrite History to suit their own ends, here’s another Orwellian gem: "He who controls the past, controls the future."

My good self at a Clarion reunion.

2010-11-27T16:17:00.000-08:00

Excuse me but I’m a bit allergic when it comes to reunions. I don’t quite fancy gassing about good ol’ times half of which I cannot quite recall with guys I once knew well but have been out of touch with for a long time. I don’t mean to hurt anyone’s feelings when I state this. But then as time goes on, people change. I am not the Deepak I used to be in Clarion-McCann. http://digbig.com/5bcrrq. Anyway, an email invite from Rajan, a follow-up call from Jitu Kothari and a not-so-gentle nudge from Ujwal sent me scurrying to Pritam Restobar in Dadar – a place I don’t much care for – on Saturday, 27 November, a day after the second anniversary of 26/11. It was good to meet the Clarion crowd, though, despite my apprehensions. There was good ol’ ARK Pillay, then accountant now heading several NGOs, reminding me that I was somehow responsible for getting him his first landline connection through my friend Vairale. There was young Bhawsar, then art director now graphic designer/"tutor", gushing about how active he is at his age despite his heart condition and diabetes and how he will be going for the umpteenth time to the US of A next year. There was Jitu who hadn’t lost his talent for keeping in touch with people out of genuine affection and who reminisced about a crisis he faced when the journalists he was herding did not reach a CIDCO inaugural function in time because of a mix-up about the address of the site. There was Robin, then an Account Executive and eternal victim now a happy retiree in Goa, sounding really excited over the cellphone about hearing my voice. There was one gentleman who apparently joined Clarion much after I’d quit and whose name I didn’t quite catch. And, there was ever-smiling Rajan, then AE now heading his own ad agency in Chennai and an acknowledged expert in rural marketing all over India, telling me how much he had enjoyed living his life, handing me a copy of his self-published autobiography and asking for a feedback. Mrs Rajan was there too watching the proceedings with a half smile. A couple of mugs of draught and a vegetarian meal rounded it off. Short, sweet and memorable.

The Chicago Manual of Style.

2010-11-22T20:54:00.000-08:00

The Windy City and I are not even on nodding terms. My only and somewhat tenuous links to it are the eponymous Oscar winner and The Chicago Manual of Style. I happen to possess the 14th Edition of it in a rather shabbily brought-out Indian reprint by Prentice-Hall of India, New Delhi, in 1996. I managed to get one of the advanced copies through the kindness of my late friend, Shoiab. The reason I’m reminded of it (Can’t say I’ve used my copy very much – I had to really search in my book cabinet to find it!) is because the 16th Edition with “state-of-the-art recommendations on editorial style and publishing practices in the digital age” went on sale in the US end-October. As the very idea of an authoritative and seminal guidebook on style and usage has always fascinated me, I thought that a timeline of how The Chicago Manual of Style evolved was worth looking at. http://digbig.com/5bcxtt.

1891 The University of Chicago Press with own compositing room and experienced typesetters opened for business. A common set of rules for the process of typesetting to ensure consistency in usage and style (a style sheet) was evolved. It later became “the University Press style book and style sheet”.

1906 The 1st Edition of Manual of Style: Being a compilation of the typographical rules in force at the University of Chicago Press (200 pages) was offered for sale for 50 cents plus 6 cents for postage and handling.

1949 The 11th Edition of the Manual went on sale.

1969 150,000 copies of the copiously rearranged, expanded and updated 12th Edition of the Manual were sold matching the combined sales of the all the earlier editions.

1982 With the publication of the 13th Edition of the Manual, the nomenclature was changed to The Chicago Manual of Style as at present. Among the then current issues it addressed were the new US Copyright rules, the emerging typesetting technology and the PC and word processor.

1993 The 936-page 14th Edition dealt more systematically with the style, usage and technology issues concerning the wide spread use of PCs. Sales soared to 500,000 copies; cumulative sales to over one million copies. (I own a copy of this Edition.)

2006 The Chicago Manual of Style Online debuted attracting more than 200,000 recurring visitors by 2010.

2010 The latest Edition appeared in October simultaneously in print as well as web formats.

History of India after 1947. Redux.

2010-11-15T19:10:00.000-08:00

There’s much chest-beating and heart-burning every time Arundhati Roy’s recently expressed view that Kashmir was never a part of India is discussed. If you were to realistically and unemotionally look at the geopolitical status of pre-Independence India, it was as follows. The British Raj consisted of British India directly governed by the Governor General – and, later, Viceroy − of India for the Emperor of India and close to 590 Native Princely States under suzerainty of the British Crown, supervised by Residents. There were also Portuguese India comprising Goa, Daman, Diu, Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Pondicherry (now Puducherry), Karikal and Yanaon making up French India. India was pretty much balkanized as of then as it used to be before the East India Company took over the governance. Come to think of it, even with the so-called Mughal Emperor in Delhi or prior to that reign, balkanization was the rule rather than the exception. The Undivided (except for Pakistan) Independent India was an idea of those to whom the absconding British transferred power in unconscionable haste in 1947. These latter worthies with eminently Middle Indian values, sensibilities and concerns used the stick and the carrot route to fashion a federation out of it. Along with the transfer of power, the departing Imperialists also left behind with their successors their arrogantly domineering Imperialist attitude and style of governance. The inheritors promptly picked up where the British Raj had left off. For their own first colonial conquest, they chose the native aborigines and tribals and the rural masses to play the role of the victim. Arundhati Roy summed it all brilliantly in her The Greater Common Good. "The Indian State is not a State that has failed. It is a State that has succeeded impressively in what it set out to do. It has been ruthlessly efficient in the way it has appropriated India's resources – its land, its water, its forests, its fish, its meat, its eggs, its air – and redistributed it [sic?] to a favoured few (in return, no doubt, for a few favours). It is superbly accomplished in the art of protecting its cadres of paid-up elite, consummate in its methods of pulverising those who inconvenience its intentions." And: "India lives in her villages, we're told, in every other sanctimonious public speech. That's bullshit. … India doesn't live in her villages. India dies in her villages. India gets kicked around in her villages. India lives in her cities. India's villages live only to serve her cities. Her villagers are her citizens' vassals and for that reason must be controlled and kept alive, but only just." (pp.14-15, IBD, 1999) There have apparently been 60 million oustees ever since 1947 as a result of these river dam projects. Numerous atrocities have been and are being perpetrated by forestry department’s official, police personnel and contractors on tribals with impunity. The first one of them was at Pararia in West Bengal in 1991 where the guilty went scot-free. In the second instance, a few years later in Sagbara District in Gujarat, the two policemen who raped Guntaben, a young tribal, were imprisoned for ten years thanks to the intervention of Amnesty International on her behalf. The other instance happened in Nandurbar, Narmada Valley, where the tribals were displaced four times, literally hounded by the officials all the time. The motive for the horrendous treatment is to demoralize the hapless victims who have nobody to turn to, nobody to fight on their behalf. (The Dalit at least have a champion in the shape of a political party to take up their cause.) In the very first major river valley project, Hirakud in Orissa, the oustees living on open land were relentlessly harassed by the forestry personnel. The story repeats itself in Singrauli, also in Madhya Pradesh, where the tribal oustees were displaced at least three times in three decades. Felix Padel, the co-author of Out of This Earth (Orient BlackSwan, 2010) and the great-great grandson of Charles Darwin, hazards a guesstimate of displaced persons in India since Independence at 60 million and in Orissa alone by the Aluminum Cartel at 3 million. Given the scenario of virtual genocide of the tribals and the continuing armed occupation of Kashmir, why should the Maoist upsurge and the Kashmiri call for azaadi outrage us?

Would Ripley believe it? Or, not?

2010-11-11T19:52:00.000-08:00

There is a self-confessed manic depressive living in Colorado, US of A. His name is Philip R Greaves II. His claim to fame is The Pedophile's Guide to Love and Pleasure: A Child-Lover's Code of Conduct. This self-published work became available for download as an eBook last week at $4.79 a pop in the Amazon.com Kindle store and immediately whipped up a storm. It attracted 100s of angry reviews, calls for boycott of the website unless it stopped selling it − and just one sale according to the author. Although Amazon.com has refused to comply on the grounds of its opposition to censorship, freedom of expression (First Amendment?) and the customer’s right to choose her/his own reading material (they say they won’t sell porn, though; apparently, they don’t think this book belongs to that dung heap), the download link does not seem operational right now. The 404 Error message reads: “Looking for something? We're sorry. The Web address you entered is not a functioning page on our site” and redirects you to the Home Page. Would Ripley believe it? Or, not? Believe it not, Mr Ripley, in early October, the United States Justice Foundation had faulted Amazon.com for "contributing to the potential rape and molestation of children" by offering for sale Understanding Loved Boys and Boylovers by David L. Riegel and threatened it with protracted litigation if the book was not removed within 30 days. The link is still operational at the time of writing. There is even a “Look Inside” option there.

Next of kings.

2010-11-07T19:07:00.001-08:00

I’m at my wit’s end. To get to the bottom of my puzzlement, you’ll have to scroll to the bottom of the list (please see below) at the bottom of the recent email I received from “Coca-Cola Company”. It informed me that my email address had won £500,000.00 in the “just concluded annual final draws held on the (21st September, 2010) by Coca-Cola in conjunction with the British American Tobacco Worldwide Promotion”. To claim the prize, I had to send them the following details:

“1. Full Name:
2. Country:
3. Contact Address:
4. Telephone or Mobile:
5. Marital Status:
6. Occupation:
7. Ticket Number:
8. Sex:
9. Email:
10. Age
11. Ballot Number:
12. Next of kings:”

Could it be a case akin to a serial murderer leaving clues so that the investigators can catch him? I rest my case, members of the jury.

“Let my people go.” Fate of Kashmir.

2010-11-01T23:08:00.000-07:00

I’m no Old Testament fan. Leonard Cohen, Woody Allen, The Marx Brothers, Mel Brooks, Albert Einstein, Leonardo Da Vinci, MC Escher, George Gershwin, Dorothy Parker, Jerry Seinfeld, Larry David and the clueless Rabbis in the hilarious Rabbi jokes are some of the Jewish folk I admire. So, why am I quoting from Exodus 7:26 wherein God orders Moses to tell Pharaoh to “let my people go”? Syed Ali Shah Geelani as Moses, the Indian State with its occupation forces in Kashmir http://digbig.com/5bcstf as the Pharaoh and India’s multiple vicissitudes in the valley as the ten plagues let loose on Egypt by God somehow seem to be the perfect metaphors for the current scenario. You cannot keep an entire tribe captive against its wishes indefinitely. The Pharaoh learned it the hard way. So has the Indian State. It has tried the carrot (Special Status within the Indian Union) and stick (armed occupation) approach. Now it’s probably the time to follow in the Pharaoh’s wise footsteps and bid adios to the crisis. Give the Kashmir Valley the “azadi” it is clamouring for with a clearly agreed proviso that once it leaves the Indian Union, both of them shall have nothing whatsoever to do with each other: no military and financial aid, for instance. A clean break is most likely the best solution.

News’s doppelgänger. (I’m stupid or what?)

2010-10-30T19:28:00.000-07:00

Now that I think about it, teaching myself to write good ads did not come easy. In Clarion-McCann which I joined in 1965 http://digbig.com/5bcrrq I became obsessed with making the print ads I wrote resemble news as closely as possible. This was because I thought naively that an ad qua news (even spurious news) may command greater credibility with newspaper and magazine readers than an ad with no such pretensions. I remember working on a Forhan’s Toothpaste extension product ad for more than two months on my own time at night and early mornings to develop the “perfect” editorial ad. Call it persistence. Call it stupidity. The ad got plenty of praise from the finicky client as well as within the agency. Unfortunately, the new product launch got canceled. This, however, did not dampen my spirit or my resolve to write credible ads. I looked for affordable inexpensive books, mostly paperbacks, to teach me how to write crisply and to the point. Among them were Rudolf Flesch’s The Art of Plain Talk (1946), The Art of Readable Writing (1949) and The Art of Clear Thinking (1951). For a while, I became an ardent admirer of the Reader’s Digest house style with its technique of neatly compressing stories into bite-size info-bits. In the sixties, the magazine was at the zenith of its popularity and success selling more than 20 million copies a month the world over. I got over the infatuation after a brief flirtation, though. In the process, I developed my own style and also learned a few tricks about how to vary the style for different types of ads and products. I gradually mastered the technique of converting raw facts into persuasive writing fairly quickly. Simultaneously, I searched for a reliable technique to generate ideas speedily. The one described in James Webb Young’s A Technique for Producing Ideas (1975) worked for me. (Young, by the way, was J Walter Thompson’s VP for creative work and an Advertising Hall of Fame inductee.)

Dysthymia.

2010-10-29T22:23:00.000-07:00

For those of you who are like Maya, a great singer, a devout Shahnaz Husain fan and my copywriter colleague in Everest Advertising http://digbig.com/5bcqyf, I will give you something to worry about. Before I tell you what it is, I shall try and explain to you why it would worry Maya. In Kitab Mahal of which Everest occupied the entire top floor, there was a wholesale book distributing agency on the first floor accessible by the back staircase. I used to go there almost daily and pick up books at discounted prices. Once I picked up a Dictionary of Symptoms and took it up to my room where I dropped it seemingly carelessly on my desk to catch the eye of any visitor and after a while called Maya on the pretext of discussing a copywriting assignment. I knew she was like me an avid book reader who couldn’t pass a book within reach without picking it up and browsing. As soon as she arrived, I left my room saying I had to pee in a hurry. By the time I returned, she was already scanning the book looking worried. I pretended not to have noticed and started chatting about this and that. Mayamemsaab was not listening. She had got up from her chair and was pacing behind it with the open book in her hand. Then, she asked me if she could borrow it for a while. She had swallowed the bait, hook, line and sinker. The next few days were hell for her. Every now and then, she would come to my room and check with me if she was looking all right. She kept on dropping dark hints of suffering from some new malady every few minutes. I also caught her off guard checking her pulse once. Others too noticed her unease and we all had a big laugh about it. She never returned the “borrowed” Dictionary and I did not bother to remind her. The ghastly deed had been done! In retrospect, though, I was thoroughly ashamed of myself. I had played the dirtiest trick one could on a hypochondriac. Which brings me to the very same dirty trick I’m about to play, with advance warning, on those among my few and far between readers who are in the habit of imagining that they suffer from some rare psychological malady. In this case, the malady on offer is “Dysthymia”. http://digbig.com/5bcryg. This deadly sounding condition is defined as “a mood disorder characterized by chronic mildly depressed or irritable mood often accompanied by other symptoms (as eating and sleeping disturbances, fatigue, and poor self-esteem) – called also dysthymic disorder”. Any self-respecting hypochondriac can easily delude herself into believing that she is the victim of this scourge – thanks to the vague “one size fit all” wording of the definition, just the kind of stuff a bestselling Dictionary of Symptoms is full of. Want more food for thought? How about “Dysrhythmia”? http://digbig.com/5bcryh.

What do you expect from an army of occupation?

2010-10-27T12:37:00.000-07:00

The recent “Breaking the Silence”/Facebook exposé of the callous abuse of hapless Palestinians by Israeli soldiers reminds me of the acrimonious and blasphemous label Arundhati Roy recently used to describe India after Independence: a “colonising power”. Her choice of the epithet was guided, no doubt, by the Indian State’s attitude toward and behaviour with the tribals at the time of building the dams and granting mining rights to business interests as well as by its armed occupation of Jammu & Kashmir. The well documented human rights’ abuses by the Indian Army behind the protective shield of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958 are no doubt a result of their brutal role as an army of occupation just like the Israeli Army amidst the Palestinians. That is how guardians of disputed property tend to behave. If possession, as the well-known adage goes, is nine-tenth of the law, is it any wonder that the Indian Army personnel look upon the Kashmiris as their inferior – by no means their equal? To me, the Kashmiri cry for “azadi” sounds like a desperate plea for justice and fair play as also sheer survival: “Don’t kill our children and innocent bystanders at the slightest excuse. Leave us in peace.”

Lower your expectations. Even, aspirations.

2010-10-23T23:22:00.000-07:00

Curb your enthusiasm, enthuses Larry David. He ought to know. He curbed his, quit Seinfeld at its zenith, went on to HBO and greater heights with Curb Your Enthusiasm and later on to the lead role in Woody Allen’s Whatever Works. Recently, when I was in the US, I was witness for the spell of a few hours to the family life of a guy whom I had met before on a previous trip there and also in India. He is a trained architect from India. He is married to a white Caucasian who works as a nurse part time and owns a dressage horse she rides herself. They have two pre-teen school-going children, live in the Topanga Canyon in the Greater Los Angeles area. Theirs is a rather cluttered house built on a hillside and seems to reflect their belief in sustainable living. The lunch they served was far from fancy, no liquor – not even beer or store wine. What I saw there was a contented family. I mean, really, really contented – no stress at all. This guy is far from successful, seems to be making his living with little chores nobody else wants to do. But his Third Worldliness seems to stand him and his family in good stead. They have lowered their expectations as much as they can in the pressure-cooker, cut-throat LA environs. Alas! If only more of Middle India were to do it instead of aspiring to First World life style in India and resign to the fact that India is a Third World country that’s likely to remain in the Third World for a long, long time. Take my own case when I joined Everest Advertising http://digbig.com/ 5bcqyf in October 1976. The Chairman of the ad agency, which was run along feudal lines, was a pseudo: a total fraud with pretensions of being a socialite. He dropped names, including brand names. He was surrounded by his inner circle of ardent sycophants who treated him as the ultimate oracle on trends and life style. Since I used to work on Swissair, I had to constantly interact with him. This meant I had to appear to be as suave and well-informed as the next guy in his coterie. Fortunately, there was a Swissair annual publication that used to come to me as a part of the brief. This amazing compendium used to carry advertising of the latest life style products as well as nuggets of curious information on Swissair service, year after year. Given this arsenal and my propensity to read, I could gather enough ammunition to outtalk the best of the pretenders among the courtiers. In the process, though, I began to crave a faux life style and, for a while, even lived it – thin imported cigarellos, Bacardi with soda, the works − until the scales fell from my eyes somewhere along the way. I realised that lowering my expectations as well as aspirations was a sure way of saving me from disappointment, especially since I was a Third Worlder living in a Third World country.

In these biblioclastic times.

2010-10-18T05:06:00.000-07:00

I love reading. I adore it to distraction in all its exclusionary, anti-social, selfish, I-me-myself glory. You could call it bibliolatry. Well, almost. Some of the books I read transport me to where nobody can follow me. What’s more, I love every “forest-killer”, turn-a-page book as noumenon, “thing-in-itself”. http://digbig.com/ 5bcqef. Let me loose in a well-stocked Borders or Barnes and Noble and watch me go giddy with delight like a kid in a Toys”R”Us. So, the latest ruckus about Such A Long Journey ought to make me fume, don’t you think? Strangely, I’m unperturbed. My personal preoccupation with books has nothing to do with what happens in the world. Come to think of it, the world – especially, the Third World – may well get along better with a little fewer books on the shop shelves, for all I know. Right now, what this country needs is, maybe, a really delicious 5-rupee wada pau. Now don’t give me all that talk about being facetious and not supporting freedom of expression and the rest of the rot. The moment you allow these humourless and witless twits to get your goat, all is lost. Let us instead drool over all the extra sales that apro Rohinton’s Indo-Nostalgic novel must have drummed up thanks to the much ado about nothing. By the way, good ol’ Rohinton is no stranger to a bit of brouhaha. Back in 2002, in the course of his US tour to promote Family Matters, he and his wife were racially targeted at every airport (he had the looks of a Muslim in the eyes of the US Immigration officials) and had to even cut short his long tour. I’m happy for him now that the local goons in his erstwhile home town have targeted his book and pushed up his sales. The only worry is, in the process, the Indo-Nostalgic nice guy that he is may well metamorphose into an Indophobic boor – although, with him, it seems highly unlikely.

New meaning for old.

2010-10-10T20:10:00.000-07:00

The wonderful thing about the English language is that not only does she willingly admit new words into the Oxford English Dictionary but also readily accept old words acquiring new meaning. The latest example of the cheerful adaptability of the English language is “dogging”. Remember the time when a determined sleuth used to dog a desperado? Well, you can forget it already. To learn the new not-so-innocent meaning of “dogging”, please go here: http://digbig.com/ 5bcpcy. (Want a clue to what you’re about to learn? Think where cats differ most from dogs and pigeons, particularly in shamelessness.) For even more enlightenment, go here: http://digbig.com/5bcpda.

Lame duck? Devil incarnate? Choose one.

2010-10-07T22:10:00.000-07:00

Not a day passes without someone pointing out the linkage between crime, terrorism and the “minority community”. Whenever this connection is made, I’m reminded of MS Sathyu’s Garam Hawa (1973) and Saeed Akhtar Mirza’s Salim Langade Pe Mat Ro (1989). The former film deals with the turmoil in the mind of the Agra resident Salim Mirza (Balraj Sahani) in the midst of the post-partition tumult around him until the time he makes up his mind to stay back in what Quaid-i-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah had for a while been calling “Hindu India” and joins the mainstream in the final shot. The other Salim living in latter-day India is a victim of poverty and prejudice. With little education under his belt, he has turned to petty thievery for survival. His tragedy is that, after seeing the error of his ways, despite his best efforts, getting on the right side of law and out of the clutches of his former criminal colleagues in order to earn an honest living seems simply out of his reach, mainly because of his religion. Whereas Salim #1’s saga is deathly serious, being as it is set in the aftermath of a monumental blood bath, Salim #2’s saga is laced with a lot of humour, somewhat like Mirza’s tele-serial, Nukkad. Both of them are very relevant to the Indian reality as of now.

Goodness gracious! A lion in my lap, no less.

2010-09-24T21:26:00.000-07:00

If memory serves, I saw Bwana Devil (1952) at the Strand Cinema in Colaba, wearing the special polarized specs, in either 1953 or 1954. The tagline in its publicity material, I distinctly recall, was: A lion in your lap! A lover in your arms. This Natural Vision movie kick-stared the 1952-54 3-D craze in the US as a kneejerk reaction to the TV threat to cinema, the others being CinemaScope and the 3-projector Cinerama. But the makers of Bwana Devil were so hell-bent on proving its three dimensional credentials that the ingredients which make a movie (plot development, acting and the rest) were ignored with disastrous results. Most critics in the West mauled it mercilessly. Even I who used to be quite naïve about English movies then found it intolerable. A better-made 3-D movie, I’m told, was Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder (1954) using the process to bring out the depth of field instead of wasting it on gimmicks such as stuffs being hurled at you. It was released in India in the 2-D format as also was the horror flick House of Wax (1953) made in the alternative StereoVision 3-D process with its paddleball man and cancan girls showing off the 3-D edge. For that matter, even The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) and It Came from Outer Space (1953) came to India minus the 3-D. All this chitchat reminds me of a character in the sci-fi comedy Back To The Future (1985) set in the mid-fifties who wears the red/blue 3-D glasses to remind us from which era he hails. He is called 3-D. Coming back to 3-D and me, though, I later realised that, in the West, from the 1860s to the 1920s, almost every middle-class home owned a Holmes stereoscope and stereo cards. http://digbig.com/ 5bckrx. In the 1920s, it seems a couple of movie halls in New York City had mounted on the seat in front a pair of gooseneck rotary-shutter viewers somewhat like the present liquid crystal shutterglasses. http://digbig.com/ 5bckry. Again, I read about the 70s sexploitation 3-D movie, The Stewardesses (1969) and the critically acclaimed Andy Warhol's Frankenstein (1973) purely by chance. There was apparently a brief revival of the 3-D fad in the 1980s with Jaws 3-D (1983) and Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone (also 1983). Finally came the 3-D revival in the new millennium spearheaded by the 2009 magnum opus Avatar. Alfred Hitchcock briefly toyed with 3-D (Dial M for Murder) but did not persist with it. He went nowhere close to CinemaScope with its aspect ratio of 2.35:1. He did experiment with VistaVision in To Catch A Thief (1955), Vertigo (1958) and North by Northwest (1959) before returning to the good old aspect ratio of 1.33:1 in the standard (Academy) format for the black and white cult classic, Psycho (1960). Makes sense and works for me too.

Life across the board. Mine, to wit.

2010-09-13T03:04:00.000-07:00

Truth to tell, I haven’t been much of a game player most of my life. Neither the board nor the outdoor variety. Among the earliest board games I played were Snakes and Ladders and Ludo, both among the more popular children’s board games. As a child, I used to persuade my mother or father to buy me a combo set of Snakes and Ladder-Ludo-Chinese Checkers-Draughts every year we visited the Navi Wadi jatra (fair) or went Christmas shopping. http://digbig.com/5bchts. One of the reasons for doing this was that, after a few days of use of the new purchase, most of the play counters used to go missing and we had to make do with unsatisfactory substitutes like buttons. All this had become a sort of ritual, almost. And, being the pampered son that I happened to be, my wish was my parents’ command and mostly granted. I must have graduated to Monopoly when I was about ten. Scrabble too must have come into my life around the same time. Draughts (Checkers) had been a part of my early board gaming. I distinctly recall a Mankar family heirloom predating my birth: an exquisitely crafted black wooden box with large red and black Draftsmen stored inside. You opened the box, turned it on its innards and it became a Draughts or Chess board. I stumbled upon Chess much later in life. In 1972, if memory serves, when the Fischer-Spassky world championship made Chess the flavour of the month. Since then, I’ve spent many pleasant moments playing it. For instance: http://digbig.com/5bchtt. In fact, I became quite a Chess aficionado acquiring quite a few fancy Chess sets including one, purchased in Nepal, with the Chess pieces resembling warriors, elephants, camels, horses and so forth as well as the board wrought in brass. Also, a large number of (mostly unread) trade paperbacks on play analysis. One book on the game I enjoyed most, though, was the story of the Fischer-Spassky world championship I bought from my friend Shoiab. My board game playing in the 21st century has been mostly confined to playing with Armaan http://digbig.com/5bchtw and Anika http://digbig.com/5bchtx. Both of them don’t like to lose and, until recently, used to get terribly upset if I burst out laughing at the turn of events. Armaan has his own innovative approach to board gaming. He makes his own rules as the game proceeds.

Lust is in the eye of the voyeur.

2010-09-11T03:23:00.000-07:00

Renato (Giuseppe Sulfaro) of the puppy-dog eyes and halting speech, a resident of the Sicilian small town of Castelcuto as yet wearing a humiliating pair of shorts, is about to come of age. He becomes the proud owner of a bicycle on 10 June 1940 − the day Il Duce declares war on the Allies. On the same day, he joins the gang of bicycle-owning oglers of the daily spectacle of a stroll through the village square by the callipygian Maddalena Scordia (Monica Bellucci), aka Malèna, a recently widowed school teacher who is the daughter-in-law of their Latin professor. So infatuated is he by the unwitting siren that he begins to stalk her. In the process he becomes a voyeuristic witness of her secret life and a raconteur of her tragic tale. Her widowhood makes her an “available” target for all the lustful men and an object of hate for all the women in Castelcuto. Imaginations run riot. Tongues wag. Gossip gets spun. Malèna’s name is mud especially after she sells herself to the German Army officers out of desperate destitution because the town has ostracized her. Once the war ends, the women of Castelcuto turn vengefully on this sinner among them and, after a merciless beating despite Renato’s valiant attempt to shield her, virtually force her to leave town. When her husband, wrongly presumed to be dead at the start of the war, returns looking for her, Renato writes him a quasi-anonymous note assuring him that, no matter what happened, Malèna had always loved him faithfully. He points him to her probable destination. A year later, the Scordias return to Castelcuto. They stroll through leisurely across the town square, she a little plumper now, demurely handing on his arm. The townsfolk seem to be in reconciliatory, let-the-bygones-be bygones mood. They gradually accept Malèna whom Renato wishes the best of luck after he lends her a final helping hand to pick up the oranges she has spilled from her overstuffed shopping bag. This in a nutshell is the moving narrative of Malèna (2000) written and directed by Giuseppe “Cinema Paradiso” Tomatore http://digbig.com/5bchtr I happened to chance upon the other morning on Star Movies. Lucky me! I even found the exceedingly apt adjective “callipygian” in the Online Dictionary by sheer accident.

Once a delinquent, always a delinquent.

2010-07-13T01:18:00.000-07:00

One morning recently, out of the blue, I had a bout of nostalgia. It was about a friend who is no more. He was my colleague for three years in Clarion-McCann http://digbig.com/5bbsqw when we became firm friends. He had to leave his job because he could not get along with his boss. Although I used to be quite serious and solemn about work and the world in general in those days, I made an exception in his case and got to be quite fond of him. He used to address me as “DW” (short for “Deepak Waman” Mankar) – a very British trait (“TS” = “Thomas Stearns” Eliot and so forth) he had acquired during his years of stay in London for higher studies followed by a job in advertising. He did it to nobody else, though. I was his chosen victim probably because I used to be such a square and a crushing bore in those days. The bloke was straight out of PG Wodehouse, full of pranks all the time. PG was also one of his favourite authors as he was mine. Our other shared reading preference was Edgar Wallace http://digbig.com/5bcadw. We used to hunt for PG and EW books jointly in shops stocking old books, magazines and other scrap as well as pavement stalls on Hornby Road and Lamington Road. He also loved Topol and "If I were a rich man" from A Fiddler on the Roof . He watched it several times when it ran at the Sterling in the eighties. Later on, we discovered that he had been Ujwal’s contemporary in St. Teresa High School which he had to quit after rustication as a reprisal for what he himself described as a “dastardly” prank. He finished school in St Sebastian. Though a devout church-going Catholic himself walking almost a mile to attend morning mass at the red St Teresa’s (Portuguese) Church, Girgaum, he apparently never got along with the priests running both the schools and even St Xavier’s College. One of his abiding passions in life at that time, besides chess games on the terrace of 233 Khetwadi Main Road http://digbig.com/5bafde and spending the whole day in the David Sassoon Library in Colaba, was the World War II history. He used to regale me with thrilling accounts of the various battle theatres. One event of the era we disagreed about was the Holocaust. He didn’t think the accounts of it were grossly exaggerated although he agreed with me that history is mostly written by the victors. Somewhere along the way, he had acquired a taste for locally brewed hock in spite of his years of pub crawling in London. It probably had something to do with his dire financial straits. He had his own unique style of downing his poison. He would take a fairly large swallow of his drink, make a face, take a lick of salt, quickly pour his next shot, bolt it down and make his exit. He also got into the habit of carefully hoarding stubs of cheap cheroots to later crumple them and smoke the tobacco in a pipe. One of this prankster’s weirdest – and stupidest − pranks cost him the opportunity offered to him on a silver platter for a late comeback into advertising. A newly launched ad agency floated in the late 1980s by his friends had hired him as the operational head. Had he taken the tide at the floods, it could well have turned out to be his swan song, his last hurrah. Alas! It was not to be. Instead of concentrating on marketing and client acquisition, he frittered away scarce resources on ads released on a whim and also alienated a few clients. Then came the point when he had no other alternative except to resign. For several years before his death a couple of years back, we had lost touch. When we came to hear of his hospitalization, both Ujwal and I went sick-visiting almost every day. We even attended his final service held at his younger brother’s flat in Bandra.

Nostalgia on steroids.

2010-07-02T22:26:00.000-07:00

Namrata Dutt Kumar, the elder daughter of Nargis and Sunil Dutt, writes well, even cogently. She is the chief narrator of Mr and Mrs Dutt: Memories of our Parents (Rollibooks, 2007). She wrote it in tandem with her younger sister Priya Dutt, according to their joint admission in the Foreword. I’m impressed by the élan with which they shrug off, also in the Foreword, the responsibility to be truthful and to avoid veering toward hagiographic excesses: “Seen from the eyes of their children, an objective and impartial view [of the parents’ lives] is perhaps an unrealistic expectation.” I loved the master stroke at the bottom of the Foreword: their handwritten signatures appearing below their photographs from early childhood. I was not looking for 100% honesty and authenticity when I picked up the book. As an ardent admirer of the actress par excellence though (I thought − and still think − she was one of the greatest talents ever to have graced the silver screen pre- and post-Independence), I was looking in the narrative for the Nargis I remembered vividly from those days. I found some of the Nargis I remembered in her movie stills. I could at a stretch accept Namrata and Priya's portrayal of her and her bubbly buddy Shammi clowning around like Lucy Ricardo (Lucille Ball) and Ethel Mertz (Vivian Vance) from I Love Lucy (ibid., pages 66 -71 and page 90). But pre-Mother India Nargis without even a fleeting shadow of Raj Kapoor is like Hamlet without the ghost in Act I, Scenes 1, 4 and 5 of the eponymous play, especially considering the trouble they've gone to piecing together the antecedents of both their parents. I find it incredible that the son and daughters of Nargis never heard by sheer chance, if nothing else, at a wayside tea stall or over Radio Ceylon maybe the Lata Mangeshkar-Manna Day all-time hit: “Pyaar huwa iqraar hua hai, /Pyaar se phir kyoon darta hai dil?/Kehta hai dil, rasta mushqil, /Pyaar ki hai kahaan manzil?” (Love happened, vows were exchanged, /Why then is the heart so spooked by love? /The going’s arduous, says the heart, /Who knows where the trail of love leads?) Apocrypha has it that even poor Morarji Desai got a first-hand glimpse into the Fifties’ First Romance when he was the Chief Minister of the then Bombay Presidency. That of course was much before the Dutt progeny came on the scene. All this ducking and dodging and sticking one’s neck into a hole in the ground like an ostrich reminds me of what Erica Wagner wrote about Sharon Dogar’s soon-to-be-published novel for young adults, Annexed. This is a fictional account of Anne Frank’s life when she was hiding from the Nazis and incarcerated in the concentration camp to which the Anne Frank Trust has taken a strong objection because of graphic accounts of the narrator Peter van Pels’ desire for Anne and intimate scenes between the two. “When does history become history?” Wagner asks. “How do we draw a line after which speculation — factual or fictional — becomes permissible and unlikely to cause offence to anyone? Living memory? Longer? Who gets to decide?” http://digbig.com/5bbwxr. Wagner goes on to confess that she found it difficult to find a “true version” of any event while writing Ariel’s Gift: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and the Story of Birthday Letters, her non-fiction book about Ted Hughes’ account of his life with Sylvia Plath in a series of poems. Did the truth vanish in thin air then?

The Croupier.

2010-06-17T22:12:00.000-07:00

The following is a real story. Once upon a time, for one enchanted evening, I was indeed the honoured guest of an honest-to-goodness croupier working in a London casino in Great Russell Street (for all I know). I never got to watch him actually working in the pit: dealing the cards expertly or raking in and pushing out chips with his long T-stick across the green felt surface of the gambling table, though. By the way, the guy happened to be the elder brother of an ex-colleague of mine from the time I was in Forward Markets Commission in the early sixties. http://digbig.com/5bbsqt. Clarion-McCann http://digbig.com/5bbsqw, where I worked for a little over 11 years from 1965, sent me to London in 1971 for 3 months’ training. This was the time when the ex-colleague offered to inform his brother in London of my visit and make sure he entertained me suitably. I had been unaware till then of the brother’s existence. The reason for keeping it hush-hush became clear only after I met him. In London, I was rooming with an old school pal who was writing his Ph D thesis in Chemistry. This was in the attic of an old house in Drayton Park, Islington, in North London with its own taciturn London landlady in attendance. The eponymous tube station was on the Northern City Line, 5 minutes away from where I was rooming. Anyway, the mystery brother called me one Friday to say that a limo would pick me and my friend up the coming Tuesday at 7 in the evening. He said Tuesday was the day of choice because it was his weekly day of rest. The designated Tuesday arrived in due course. On the dot at 7 pm so did the promised limo. The aforementioned landlady was startled out of her habitual stupor to express her astonishment at its appearance to my friend and me. To cut a long story short, we rode in the limo to an unknown destination which turned out to be the restaurant and watering hole attached to the casino where the mystery brother worked. There we were treated to a most lavish spread of dinner with champagne flowing. My friend as well as the mystery brother and his cheerful sari-clad wife were teetotalers. So, I was the only guy guzzling. From what little they told us, it turned out to be the classic black-sheep-of-the-family story but with a happy ending: the ne’er-do-well finally making his pile in faraway London. I was puzzled why the couple was going out of their way to impress someone whom they had met the first and, most likely, the last time in their lives. I reckon they must have wanted me to carry a glowing report of the royal treatment I had received to their family in India. I did my bit out of gratitude. A few years later, I heard from my ex-colleague that his brother had passed away and his widow had opted for living in London rather than going back to India. I guess it made sense. The couple had no children and also no emotional ties left in India.

Work fascinates me. I can watch it for hours.

2010-06-07T01:49:00.000-07:00

This morning, I went out wearing my canary yellow T-shirt with the “Work fascinates…” legend emblazoned across the chest. That, by the way, is not “by the way”. I’m upset at the way Mumbai opens up for work later and later as time goes by. As late as the early eighties, shops in our neighbourhood used to be open by 8 am. Now you can count yourself as lucky if the shutter is up by 9. By one of those bizarre happenstances, all my chores today got done earlier than I had thought and despite taking a really leisurely walk via Khotachi Wadi http://digbig.com/5bbrww to my final chore I reached the spot 45 minutes too early. There was no alternative – no good bookshop within easy reach – to while away the time on hand. So I strolled aimlessly through a sudden but brief cloudburst around the once familiar neighbourhood most of which seemed so alien thanks to the new shops and new multistoried buildings. I finally landed up in the Cosmopolitan Restaurant & Stores http://digbig.com/5bbrwx for a cup of tea. After taking my order, the lady who now seems to be in charge of the Irani Café started scolding someone for being late. He happened to be the man from the raddiwala there to collect the used cardboard cartons and plastic bottles for recycling. His lame excuse for being late was the cloudburst I mentioned earlier. I watched him as he went about his task systematically while I sipped my tea. He seemed to be good at it the way he unhurriedly undid every carton and flattened it out to arrange layer on layer. It took him as long to finish his chore as it did me to finish my cuppa: all of fifteen minutes. My last chore saw me again admiring someone taking ten minutes and a lot of chitchat on the side to do a job that should have taken no more than two minutes at the most. That’s the way the cookie crumbles these days, I reckon.

Category error.

2010-05-31T20:30:00.000-07:00

Something is categorically amiss – nay, noxiously rotten – in the erstwhile State of Porbandar. That, by the way, was the principality where the grandfather as well as the father of the Father of the Nation did duty as Dewan or Prime Minister once upon a time and where the latter was born. Porbandar, on the nose of the uniquely shaped landmass of Kutch and west of Ahmedabad and Sabarmati Ashram, was categorically not on the Dandi March route. That salt-bound trail of 241 miles wound its way southwards along the mainland coast.

But that’s neither here nor there. Except perhaps for the fact that the 241 miles that Gandhi and his 79 Satyagrahi followers covered in 24 days inspired Montblanc of Germany to launch a limited edition of 241 hand-crafted Gandhi fountain pens. Tushar Gandhi, MK’s great grandson, found nothing wrong with the idea. According to BBC http://digbig.com/5bbrea “[h]is charitable foundation has already received a donation of $145,000 from Montblanc and will receive between $200 and $1,000 for each pen sold.” Tushar, I reckon, thinks like the bania that he is and his great grandfather was.

Banias are from the trader/merchant stock. According to Jafar Mahmΰd (Mahatma Gandhi: A Multifaceted Person, page 53) http://digbig.com/5bbreb, Gandhi once admitted that he was a bania and there was no limit to his greed. On page 64 of the same book, there’s an account of how he was not averse to raising money by auctioning the gifts he received. A lime went for Rs.10/-; a cotton garland for Rs.201/-; a golden takli (drop spindle) for Rs.5000/-; a thrice-auctioned ring worth Rs.30/- for Rs.445/-; a casket for Rs.1000/-. Imagine what these bids would be worth at the 21st century prices. When it came to raising funds for his causes, Gandhi was also a shameless beggar.

Dijo Kappen of the Centre for Consumer Education, Kerala, does not agree with Tushar Gandhi’s bania logic. The Centre stopped the sale of the Montblanc product by filing a suit in the Kerala High Court evoking a 1950 Indian law prohibiting the improper use of emblems and names. “It is a mockery of the great man and … an insult to the nation … to use him as a poster boy,” argued Kappen. Are there haves and have-nots among NGOs and are there internecine rivalries and jealousies out there too, one wonders.

The text on the Montblanc website http://digbig.com/5bbrfj clearly says that the $25,000 (£16,000) gold and silver limited edition pen is homage to the 241 miles travelled by Gandhi on the Salt March from Ahmedabad to the coast.

Is there what is known in philosophy and semantics as “category error” lurking here?

I’m reminded of my mythical friend Henry Root’s daughter, Doreen, a student of philosophy and sociology at the University of Exeter in the sober seventies when Mrs Thatcher ruled the roost in Britain. http://digbig.com/5bbrfk. Young Doreen used to be rather adept at spotting logical faux pas.

She would probably have posed the question in the present case as follows.

Can a profit-making product pass off as homage to a man who made a fetish out of living in poverty although it took a lot of money to keep him there, said Sarojini Naidu?

Or, can a self-serving act pose as homage to a selfless person?

Funny things happened on the way to the mash-up.

2010-05-23T16:37:00.000-07:00

I’m an avid reader of the old-fashioned “forest-killer” book. I like to hold it firmly in my hands. I enjoy the tantalizing smell of fresh glue in my nostrils as I flip the pages. (Occasionally I read eBooks on my computer when there’s no other option but am not happy with them. No, I do not own an eBook reader like Kindle, thank you.) What’s even more significant, I’m from the Third World. My mind is soaked in the Third World reality of scarcity and poverty and deprivation. It’s in my ‘acquired’ nature to get the books I want at the lowest possible price even when I have the extra spare cash. Ergo, I don’t mind a second-hand book provided it’s not too dog-eared, not too worn out for wear. Every time I do this, I know I’m depriving the author and the publisher of their share of the spoils. Too bad!

In Los Angeles this April, I went to a Saturday sale of discarded books at the local library (#32 Eagle Rock Branch) right across from my grandson Armaan’s school. The room was jam-packed with eager bargain hunters jockeying for space. The senior citizens running the sale were generous to a fault in pricing the books on sale. They would give every shopper a free paper bag and tell her/him to fill it up and take it away for just $3.00. Between me and my daughter-in-law Anita, we picked up some 20 odd books, many of them in near-mint condition − and two badly battered and nearly torn shopping bags − for the princely sum of $6.00. That really perked up my Third-World soul.

Then I remembered from my distant past lived in good ol’ South Mumbai the Strand Book Stall with its 20% discount on all books no matter what. TN Shanbhag, its owner, was really astute to have zeroed in on the buy-wholesale-sell-retail stratagem as early as the early 50s. The Padmashree he got from the Government of India as well as his UNESCO-recognized award were both well deserved. Single-handedly and no doubt with the best of intentions, he turned remaindering into an honourable pursuit.

You can spot a remaindered book by the unsightly telltale slash on the bottom of the pages next to the spine, by the way. You can see the stigma on most marked down books. Only hardbound and trade paperbacks are fortunate enough to be remaindered. Normal pocket books get “stripped” (i.e., shorn of their front and back covers) or burned or pulped. This practice, I understand, conforms to the sound accounting principle of using the available warehouse space optimally by not carrying too huge an inventory for too long. In the entrance portals of Borders and Barnes and Noble bookshops I walked past the line-up of books at marked-down prices − as sure a sign as any that they were on their way to the remaindering warehouse. This sight too reminded me of the late Mr Shanbhag and his standard 20%-off-on-all-books policy. I also remembered a friend of mine in the book trade who used to always blame the Strand Book Stall owner for having “screwed up” their business by using remaindering for marketing leverage.

Why does a book get remaindered? Probably because it did not sell as well as somebody at the publisher’s expected it to. That somebody goofed up big time. It turned out to be a turkey, one of “[t]he Edsels of the world of moveable type” if one were to borrow from the inimitable Clive James’s poem, 'The Book of my Enemy Has Been Remaindered' ”. http://digbig.com/5bbpxc. But, wait a sec. Maybe I’m oversimplifying, though. Didn’t I see several books of bestselling authors like James Patterson and David Baldacci hugely discounted in the entrance portals of Borders and Barnes and Noble bookshops, ostensibly on their way to the publisher’s backlist? Some of them were at that moment being hailed in the newspapers and on the Internet as top of the charts. Maybe, they were not down-sliding into a backlist slot after all. Maybe, their presence in the entrance portal of a Borders or a Barnes and Noble bookshop had something to do with that particular store’s inventory status.

On the other hand, aren’t the sales of some books resurrected at times by something happening somewhere faraway or a chance remark by someone? There are the classics among books of course, the perennial good sellers. But the average book, it seems, loses steam after the initial spurt of a few weeks after launch. Then it becomes a has-been, a part of history; in other words, a part of the publisher’s backlist. If it continues to sell in trickles, the publisher may decide to keep it in print and in the warehouse – provided the remaindering logic works in its favour. Also, remember: the fewer the copies of a given title in the warehouse, the more difficult it is to keep a track of them and to keep them in shipshape.

In publishing, there’s an entire slew of rights to sell (territory, audio book, large print, translation, paperback, movie, video game) to shore up the publisher’s and the author’s earnings. Successful authors have their own websites to keep the fans keyed up and asking for more. So, I suppose that, in some cases, remaindering may simply be a tactic rather than a sign of failure. For all you know, remaindering on the massive scale like what The Works in the UK and BookCloseOuts and BooksAMillion in the US practice may well be working as a covert channel for reaching out to the Third Worlders living by default in the First World but who are keen on books − especially in the current state of the economy over there. Pardon me for sounding like a conspiracy theorist, though.

Fear of remaindering has not deterred publishers from experimenting with new genres, mind you. Once you start thinking of a book as a product, the next logical step is to treat it like a product right from the time of its birth. For quite a while, ongoing series − The Saint, Mike Shayne, James Bond, Ellery Queen, Sherlock Holmes and the like − in the mystery/spy thriller genre were being written by writers other than the respective designated authors. In fact, when you think of the art of successful collaborating or finessed ghost writing in recent times, the first name that comes to mind is James Patterson. http://digbig.com/5bbpxh.The idea is to make the most of the popular brands like James Bond, by getting new books written about him. The same principle holds good for movie franchises. http://digbig.com/5bbpxm.

The latest debut in this field is what’s known as the mash-up. It started, I would imagine, with somebody’s brainwave to do what the music industry has been doing for decades: cover versions of hit songs. They borrowed a leaf from their musical colleagues and picked on the perennially popular Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen to remix into a novel of the gothic horror genre featuring the original characters peopling living, in the cover version, in an alternate universe.

The advantages, once one gets down to counting them, are many. Firstly, the Pride and Prejudice copyright lapsed long ago. It’s been in the public domain for quite a while. (So are Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park and Emma. So too are Jane Eyre, Huckleberry Finn, The Wizard of Oz, The War of the Worlds, Alice in Wonderland, Little Women, Robin Hood, Romeo and Juliet, Dracula, Sherlock Holmes and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde for that matter.) No one can stop you should you choose to reuse the content, even remix it. Secondly, a pre-teen in middle school is likely to have already read Pride and Prejudice and one or more of the other classics for a book report assignment. If not that, she may at least have heard the name of the book and also the name of the author.

Already, there is a Stephanie Barron-authored Jane Austen mystery series sporting such antique-sounding titles as Jane and the Unpleasantness at the Scargrave Manor, Jane and the Man of the Cloth, Jane and the Wandering Eye, Jane and the Barque of Frailty and so forth, written in authentically Austenesque style and language. ”. http://digbig.com/5bbpynIn it, Jane Austen is a sleuth like her other namesake, Jane Marple. The remixing concept has also already been applied to Sherlock Holmes.

The next incremental step in the mash-up evolution was to make a contemporary writer collaborate with Jane Austen. The cover of the mash-up sensation that started the trend reads:

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
AND ZOMBIES
by Jane Austen and
Seth Grahame-Smith.

The Jane Austen moniker is defender-less. Nobody has a financial stake in it, either. A while ago, her distant descendents did bitch about being denied their slice of the Jane Austen pie, i.e., the material benefits of her continuing popularity and the slew of movies and television series based on her works. ”. http://digbig.com/5bbqan.

The Austen collaborator Seth Grahame-Smith (née Seth Jared Greenberg) followed up his New York Times bestseller Pride and Prejudice and Zombies debut as a mash-up auteur with the equally successful Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter. This hit remix has its roots in US history and the American Civil War. Grahame-Smith is an accomplished television producer and writer. That he can sound exactly like Austen in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies becomes evident with the very first sentence of his pastiche with panache:

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.”

Compare this with Sentence #1 in Chapter 1 of Jane Austen’s original:

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

Ironically, emotional succor for the deprived descendents of Austen came with the publication – in the remix genre itself – of Michael Thomas Ford’s Jane Bites Back. In its sixth chapter, Jane Austen, the book shop owner with vampire fangs, actually spared Seth Grahame-Smith for the way his Pride and Prejudice and Zombies had done her in in her non-vampire avatar.

Jokes apart, a spell of walking the aisles of Borders and Barnes and Noble bookshops and the less strenuous alternative of Googling rewarded me with the bounty of a list of literary mash-ups or remixes of classics now in public domain. This is by no means the definitive line-up. By the way, some titles in the list were published long before the mash-up idea caught the imagination of the publishing industry. They are nevertheless included because they conform to the concept. So, here comes the mash-up line-up, ready or not:

Mash-ups − a tentative list

1. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies – This novel kicked off the mash-up genre and is considered the best of the lot so far. It uses the original text of Jane Austen's famous novel with all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action added. The Pride and Prejudice mash-up franchise is currently in two flavours:

1a. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance - Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem! by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith (Quirk Classics)

1b. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls by Steve Hockensmith (Quirk Classics) In this prequel Elizabeth and her sisters learn the martial arts and battle the dreadful undead. ”. http://digbig.com/5bbqbh.

2. Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters by Jane Austen and Ben H Winters (Quirk Books)

3. Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith (Grand Central Publishing)

4. Little Vampire Women by Louisa May Alcott and Lynn Messina (HarperTeen)

5. Mr Darcy, Vampyre by Amanda Grange (Sourcebooks Landmark)

6. Vampire Darcy’s Desire: A Pride and Prejudice Adaptation by Regina Jeffers (Ulysses Press)

7. Mansfield Park and Mummies: Monster Mayhem, Matrimony, Ancient Curses, True Love, and Other Dire Delights by Jane Austen and Vera Nazarian

8. Emma and the Werewolves by Jane Austen and Adam Rann (Coscom Entertainment)

9. Android Karenina by Ben H Winters (Quirk Classic) Probable release: June 2010.

10. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Zombie Jim: Mark Twain's Classic with Crazy Zombie Goodness by Mark Twain and W Bill Czolgosz (Coscom Entertainment)

11. The Undead World of Oz: L Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz Complete with Zombies and Monsters by L Frank Baum and Ryan C Thomas (Coscom Entertainment)

12. Robin Hood and Friar Tuck: Zombie Killers - A Canterbury Tale by Paul A Freeman (Coscom Entertainment)

13. Alice in Zombieland: Lewis Carroll's 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' with Undead Madness By Lewis Carroll and Nickolas Cook (Coscom Entertainment)

14. Queen Victoria: Demon Hunter by A E Moorat (EOS)

15. The War of the Worlds Plus Blood, Guts and Zombies by H G Wells and Eric S Brown (Coscom Entertainment)

16. Jane Slayre by Charolette Brontë and Sherri Browning Erwin (Gallery Books)

17. Romeo and Juliet and Vampires by William Shakespeare and Claudia Gabel (HarperTeen) Probable release: August 2010.

18. Dracula The Un-dead by Dacre Stroker and Ian Holt (Dutton Adult)

19. Sherlock Holmes and the Plague of Dracula by Stephen Seitz (Mountainside Press)

20. Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula by Loren Estleman (I Books)

21. Dr Jekyll and Mr Holmes by Loren Estleman (I Books)

After snookering you with all this crypto-literary malarkey for so long, I shall now deliver a sobering reminder. Back in the late fifties through middle seventies when Hammer Film’s Dracula franchise was in full thrall, I remember reading a couple of hastily produced and badly written Dracula books by authors other than Bram Stoker, published by Pyramid Books most likely. (In case you were wondering, Dacre Stoker whose Dracula The Un-dead features in the list above is Bram’s great-grandnephew.) I already pointed out earlier that books about pop series characters like The Saint, Mike Shayne, James Bond, Ellery Queen, Sherlock Holmes and the like have been ghost-written for decades.

Maybe, the French critic-journalist-author Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr got it right the first time. "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose," he proclaimed grandly. (The more things change, the more they remain the same.)

In other words, nothing new under the sun, eh?

Thingamabob = thing-in-itself? Ask Bob, Bart and Immanuel.

2010-05-06T14:22:00.000-07:00

The reason I’m positing the question, boys and girls, is simple. Or, maybe, not so simple. Bob Newhart, with his presumably put-on stammer, is such an antithesis of what you’d expect an all-guns-blazing, red-blooded, brimful-of-Testosterone American male to be, so subversive to Truth, Justice and the American Way in a way. The subtext doesn’t quite gel right. To give you a concrete instance, on page 25 of his book, I Shouldn’t Even Be Doing This! (Hyperion, New York, 2006), he writes about his childhood: “I really didn’t get much recognition from my father. I don’t think it scarred me for life; it’s just the way it was.” (Italics mine.) This admission reminds me of Homer every now and then throttling Bartholomew Jojo Simpson with his “Why you little…” snippet of angry outburst and his fourth-grader son insouciantly ignoring the repeated indignity and nonchalantly ─ nay, coolly ─ taking it all in his stride and being disrespectful as ever of authority. I don’t mean to say Homer is not paying Bart attention. It’s attention of the wrong sort tantamount to no attention at all and therefore bound to be psychologically scarring to the child according to any right-thinking American’s way of thinking. The same, I reckon, would be true of the lack of paternal recognition Bob writes about. In fact, the way Bob describes his childhood and youthful selves in his book, he sounds like a self-proclaimed underachiever like Bart. On page 109 of I Shouldn’t…, Bob confesses to not having a driving license at age 32, even after he had “… finally moved to Los Angeles, with its crisscrossing ribbons of freeways”. But that’s where the similarity to Bart ends given that, at age 10, Bart can drive a car and already holds an official driving license given to him by the Springfield powers-that-be for having saved the town from fire. (Even before he got it, Bart used to drive a vehicle with fake papers. But that’s neither here nor there.) I found another link between Bart and Bob, though, on page 233 of the latter’s book. Bart has been a lifelong fan of Krusty the Clown. In the episode of The Simpsons dealing with Krusty’s death, Bob was one of the speakers at the funeral. It’s a small world in the idiot box universe too. My acquaintance with Bob goes back to the 1990s when Newhart revolving around the life of the inn keeper-writer Dick Loudon used to be telecast over cable in Mumbai. The quirky Bob somehow caught my eye ─ and my fancy ─ there and then. Back to the future: 15 years later, I get to borrow his book from the #32 Eagle Rock branch of the Los Angeles Public Library and enjoy it. What luck! Who wouldn’t believe, given the circumstances in the existence of noumenon, “thing-in-itself”, in other words, a posited object or event as it appears in itself independent of perception by senses. Thank you, Immanuel ─ to wit: Herr Kant in case you didn’t recognize the given name of the author of Critique of Pure Reason.

Comics for big boys (and girls?).

2010-04-28T11:43:00.000-07:00

Correct me if I’m wrong. These days, the syndicated comics strips in your daily and Sunday newspapers (Calvin and Hobbes, Dennis the Menace, Peanuts, Dilbert, Garfield, for instance), so full of irony, angst and other trendy stuff reminiscent of Woody Allen’s Annie Hall days, are strictly not for kids. That goes for many of the full-length animated cartoon feature films showing your local multiplex like Shrek and Ice Age.

Some of the contemporary comic book superheroes from the Marvel Comics family, to wit: Thor, Xena, Valkyrie, Elektra, Hellboy and X-Men's Jean Gray, are known to have Wagnerian antecedents ─ in many cases in the Asgardian universe ─ and operatic connections too. They are most likely to appeal to grown-up sensibilities, agreed?

A question for culture vultures: Are many adult readers of comic books in the US opera aficionados?

Forgive me but I, as is not unusual for a recently arrived stranger, don’t really know the answer.

I googled for comic reader demographics surveys, though.

Among those I found on the first page of my search results, a 1995 DC Comics survey http://digbig.com/5bbmbp described them in the following terms: 92% male; 80% ages 18-39 (median age: 29); a little over 70% attended college; 60% single (never married); 37 spending $100 or more in a month on comics (on an average 50 comics bough every month).

Another one http://digbig.com/5bbmbn ─ circa 2007 or thereabouts probably but hotly disputed ─ portrayed the average mainstream (superhero) comic book reader as ‘Male, 20-25, video-game player, disposable income, “techie”, single‘. More than 90% of the readers, it said, were male. There was some debate here on whether it was due to the predominance of T&A content. (Sidebar queries: Don’t you see a lot of it in the Marvel and Japanese Manga Comics? Doesn’t it suggest a preference for soft porn [Girls Gone Wild anyone?] ─ presumably an important cultural cue?)

However, whatever may be the exact nature of the latter-day US comics reader constituency, the most demography-sensitive marketer, Hollywood, has acknowledged its importance and significance as a body of consumers worth its focused and undivided attention. In the recent past, many of the successful movie franchises (Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, The Hulk, X-Men, Daredevil), television series (Smallville, Witchblade) and video games (Spider-Man) have had their roots in comicsdom or graphicnovelville. As a matter of fact, Hollywood has been the saviour-in-chief of the comics book industry after the lean times it went through in the 1990s. In a late 2002 article (“Comic Books: Bang! Wham! Pow!”)http://digbig.com/5bbmbq, Bill Jemas, President, Marvel Enterprises, was quoted as describing comic book reader as ‘bell cows’ — opinion leaders and adding that they “may not be socialites, but they're certainly affluent and influential and ... they’re enthusiastic about the things that they love." They are consumers of “… other entertainment media, especially music, movies, TV, and video games … and packaged snack foods, candy, and cereals”, according to David Ward, the columnist who wrote the cited article.

While I still do not know the answer to the riddle, what I see in LA book shops and libraries http://digbig.com/5bbmbr and read in the LA Times nudges me to wonder if superheroes and fantasy are very much a sine qua non of the contemporary American psyche or not. To continue in the belief that you’re the leader of the world, you cannot have anyone less than superheroes for icons. The more, the merrier.

That Middle America gets near-orgasmic pleasure from mere hints of the likelihood of American culture spreading especially among people in the Third World whom they believe the US was appointed to “save” from fates as varied as Communism earlier and Islamic terrorism now is fairly evident when you read rave reviews like this http://digbig.com/5bbmtb. Bahman Ghobadi’s Farsi feature film about how rock and roll gets dispersed in the Iranian youth underground, No One Knows about Persian Cats, was shot “on the run in just 17 days and without a government permit” (as film critic Betsy Sharkey gleefully reports) and became “a favorite on the festival circuit after winning Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2009”. All these frills add extra value to its provenance and gravitas in American eyes ─ a bit, I suppose, like converting films shot originally in the 2-D format to 3-D in post-production (Alice in Wonderland and Clash of the Titans, to cite two recent examples) in order to be able to justify $3 extra slapped on to the movie ticket price.

In my youth, during the post-World War II decades when the US was taking over the mantle from the UK, France and other lapsed Imperialists and those posted on US Government duty abroad to handle this newly acquired “white man’s burden” were vilified by the much shunned Ugly American nomenclature chiefly thanks to their insensitive and heavy-handed treatment of their charges, the symbols of American culture for me ─ not necessarily in chronological order of appearance on my mental landscape ─ were Coca Cola, comic books, denim jeans, Hollywood, hot dogs and rock and roll (kicked off by Bill Haley and the Comets in Rock Around the Clock I watched in the Strand Cinema in South Mumbai’s Colaba neighbourhood in the early 1950s). Those were the six principal conduits through which I remember distance-learning ─ and imbibing ─ American culture from across the oceans. These were, again for me at least, gradually reinforced over time by Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Eartha Kitt, Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Glen Miller, Jim Morrison, Simon and Garfunkel, Elvis Presley, Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany’s to Answered Prayers), Woody Allen (and Annie Hall), The Groucho Letters, Erica Jong, Kurt Vonegut, Andy Warhol, John Updike, John Irving, Mad Magazine, The Simpsons, Seinfeld, even Ellery Queen ─ and, last but not the least, by those dishy 1950s black and white sci-fi movies in which men in crumpled white lab coats kept muttering to one another: “There’s no hope. We’re doomed, Professor!” as well as by the equally scrumptious pulp fiction from those great times that are gone forever.

"Life is full of loneliness, misery, suffering, and unhappiness ─ and it's all over much too quickly," is what Woody Allen’s middle-brow Jewish comedian Alvy Singer confides in us somewhere at the beginning of Annie Hall. What better way to drown the resultant post-modern angst than slumming with the ever pumped-up-for-action superheroes in fantasyland, pray tell?

Signs.

2010-04-19T12:47:00.000-07:00

The signs I have seen almost throughout my stay in the US so far, first in New Jersey from 13 March to 2 April and later in Los Angeles, have made me feel the recovery in selective perception. Wherever I've been I have seen Middle America spending money and having a rollicking time. On Saturday afternoon, I went with my young son Abhi, and his even younger children Armaan, 9, and Anika, 7, to the Dodger Stadium to watch the local team being outplayed and getting clobbered by the San Francisco Giants by a wide margin. (To their credit, the Dodgers avenged the defeat the very next day to gladden the hearts of the local followers,) Two home runs by the Giants I could understand - one done with a deft tap to land the ball close-by - but not much else. I am ignoramus as far as the rules of baseball go. The cheering and the general prevailing mood of bonhomie got to me, though, I am happy to confess. The fans really knew how to have a good time in spite of everything else. We were sitting plumb behind the catcher in - what seemed to me to - exorbitantly priced seats ($90 a pop), consuming unconscionably steep priced food and drinks and ice cream and what have you. We reached late (the Dodgers' first inning had already begun) and left early at the beginning of the sixth to avoid the rush hour traffic. It was, if I may hazard a guess, a bit like attending an IPL Twenty-20 cricket match back home. Anika in her wisdom wanted to know why we could not have watched the game on the idiot box in the evening. Very astute of her, considering her tender age. For me, it was a first of sorts and also a rare insight into the American psyche and culture. On Sunday, I got the opportunity to once again watch Middle America at play, this time in a swimming competition for school-going kids who were cheered by their enthusiastic parents, grandparents and peers. Armaan did really well for himself coming third and then second in the first and second of the three events he participated in. During the evening visit to the Glendale mall, the Borders bookshop and dinner at the Outback Steak House, the signs seemed all hopeful. By the way, I also got a virtually touchy-feely glimpse into the wondrous world of the iPad and the iPhone, courtesy of Anita's friend, Sheena. She teaches Gender & Women's Studies at California State University, Northridge and, to my untutored eye, looks like a spare-time techie. More importantly, she qualifies as a favourite "aunt" of Armaan and Anika.

How to turn the kiss of death into Midas touch.

2010-04-19T12:42:00.000-07:00

The seemingly sudsy saga of Conan O’Brien is a classic example of sympathetic “positioning”. Positioning, if you care to recall, is the advertising canon (“how to be seen and heard in the overcrowded marketplace”) evangelized by Al Ries and Jack Trout originally between the late sixties and early eighties.

For his much flaunted martyrdom, the underdog in the present scenario has no one else but his erstwhile-mentor-turned-Judas and his own banishment from the idiot box till September 2010 to thank for. It is to O’Brien’s eternal credit that, instead of moping around and shedding copious tears over his tragic exit from the NBC late night line-up, he turned the setback into the “Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television” tour. His audacious coup reaped for him a bountiful harvest of support from his loyal fans in the shape of monumental Twittering and the “I’m with Coco” blitz on Facebook.

Meanwhile, he also managed to net the 11.00 pm spot on the TBS cable channel effective November 2001. In the process, the Red Skeleton look-alike (at least that’s how he has made an impression in my memory bank) did unto George Lopez, the incumbent of the said slot at TBS what he had refused to let Leno do to him at NBC and got fired for his effrontery. The far-seeing Lopez in his wisdom saw O’Brien’s stupendous young following as a desirable asset capable of adding an extra zap to the young but limited fan base of his still-in-the-rookie-stage “Lopez Tonight”. Does his ready and willing acceptance of O’Brien reflect his belief that one plus one is greater than one plus zero? Or, is he harking back to the tried and tested logic of Vaudeville and stand-up comedy artistes that the later acts in the evening continuum gain momentum from their predecessors?

Ries and Trout would applaud the O’Brien stratagem and his “NBC and Leno done me in” positioning whole-heartedly, I would think. What’s incredible, creditable and remarkable is that he did it all by subtle indirection: not a single Jay Leno joke, I understand, in his on-the-road comedic routine. This would be a sure way to earn him greater goodwill of and credibility with his loyal fans. As well as respect all round.

Better safe than sorry in the times of the Internet. (Or, how vulnerable r u, m8?)

2010-04-11T08:11:00.000-07:00

Read very, very carefully the scary ─ I say scary because it has an eerie “it could happen to you and me” feel ─ Chapter 8 (pages 51 to 58) of David Baldacci’s Hour Game (Pan Books, London, 2005), America. Especially if you want to learn how easily and effortlessly a criminal can steal your personal details. In the course of these eight pages, a hooded killer in a “virtually untraceable” blue VW ─ who happens to be the real-life Zodiac killer copy cat ─ is able to acquire, within a highly productive twenty-minute span, the following information on three potential victims he spots in the shopping district.

1. He sees an old couple tottering out of a super market and notes the license plate number of their relatively new Mercedes station wagon. (After an Internet search, he would have their home address.) He already knows from the condition of the car and the logo of a country club on the man’s cap that they are not living off mere Social Security. The fact of them doing their own grocery shopping tells him they have no live-in help or grown children living nearby.

2. Next he notices an attractive thirty-something woman stepping out of a pharmacy carrying a large shopping bag. She withdraws cash at the nearby ATM and thoughtlessly throws away into the trash bin the receipt which he later retrieves. From this veritable treasury of personal information, he knows right off her name (D. Hinson) and would later get her home address from the phone book and her workplace details from the business listings. From the vanity license plate on her bright red Chrysler Sebring convertible (‘DEH JD’; JD = Juris Doctor, i.e., Doctorate of Jurisprudence), the current-year American Bar Association bumper sticker, the absence of a wedding ring, her healthy tan and a gold anklet on her left leg, he deduces she is a still-single, well-heeled practicing lawyer probably just back from a vacation.

3. Finally, there is the scatter-brained careless soccer mom her T-shirt bellows her status to the whole world!) of three kids (the baby strapped and totally unguarded in the back seat plus plenty of telltale clues about the other two strewn in the messy interior of the van). While doing her shopping, she has left her car unlocked, her keys in the ignition (he takes a putty imprint of what look like her house keys) as well as her cell phone in the holder (he takes shots of all the pages of her phone book with his mini digicam). By then, he knows enough about Jean and Harold Robinson and the names and phone numbers of those who matter to them. He also has in his possession the impression of her house keys.

So where do we go from here? Here are some simple safety precautions suggested by common sense. In the 21st century, the “If you got it, flaunt it” advice from good old Salvador Dali dispensed in a 1967 TV ad for Braniff Airlines http://digbig.com/5bbjyn has become as extinct as the airlines itself. (Braniff went kaput in 1982, remember?) And, totally unacceptable as well. There’s a time and place for everything one does. Wear your country club hat when you’re going there, not when you’re buying your groceries. Vanity license plates may be good for your vanity but not necessarily for your health and safety. Do not ─ repeat NOT ─ throw away your ATM receipts. There’s no such thing as being too careful with your car keys, your house keys, your cell phone and your baby when you go shopping. Be very caution of what you post on Facebook, Twitter and the like, too. Please, please do not tempt fate. Mack the Knife may be sneaking round the corner.

Jane Austen Redux. And how?

2010-04-05T10:58:00.000-07:00

When last heard of, Aunt Jane is thriving merrily under the solicitous and caring tutelage from her great grand nephews and nieces across the big pond, wonder of wonders. Now she is solving crime – it’s Austen and not Marple I’m talking of, mind you – in Stephanie Barron’s Jane Austen mysteries sporting such antique-sounding titles as Jane and the Unpleasantness at the Scargrave Manor, Jane and the Man of the Cloth, Jane and the Wandering Eye, Jane and the Barque of Frailty and so forth. Their authentically Austenesque text reads thusly: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that the expectation of pleasure is generally preferred to its eventual attainment – the attainment being marred, at its close, be the resumption of quotidian routine made onerous by the very diversions so lately enjoyed.” (Jane and the Man of the Cloth, Chapter 1) More recently, Aunt Jane has made inroads once again into Regency-era England this time set in an alternative universe and infested by the persistently pesky undead (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies). Her other foray into Regency-era England set also in an alternative universe features sea creatures arrayed against humankind (Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters). Both the pastiche mash-ups in the gothic horror genre got fairly good (read “enthusiastic to middling”) response. PPZ is slated to spawn a series of spin-offs: a graphic novel, a video game and even a movie. This plethora of multi-media parodies seems to me to be an apt stratagem to lure contemporary young readers, game players and movie-goers to Austen.

All this reminds me of June 2006 when I found re-reading Pride and Prejudice after more than four decades somewhat daunting. I cannot quite recall what I had thought of Austen when I first read Pride and Prejudice, if memory serves, in the 1950s. In the late summer of 2006, I found her 18th-century spelling as quaint ('chuse', 'teaze', 'shew', 'stile', etc.) but her dialogue and storytelling impeccable, to be sure. Imagine keeping me riveted – in eager anticipation – to the exploits of young damsels in rural Regency-era England seeking desirable husbands! Austen's most popular and well-known novel was originally written between October 1796 and August 1797 (qua First Impressions) but published only in 1813. In 1811, her Sense and Sensibility was published and became an instant success. After that, she revised First Impressions and it was published a couple of years later. At the well-organized and copiously informative website http://digbig.com/5bbhrq, you’ll find more about Austen’s P&P characters, timeline and locales. Don't forget to take a good look at the 1895 edition illustrations by Charles E Brock, either.

Meanwhile back at 3252 Romulus St., L.A.

2010-04-04T15:33:00.000-07:00

Arrived at LAX, 4 p.m., Good Friday. Haven’t posted till today, i.e., Sunday. Excuse? Just as I reached the Newark Airport, Friday morning, heard about Suresh, Anita’s dad, being on life- support at Holy Name Hospital, Bandra. Anita was already on her way to Mumbai when I reached LAX. I was picked up by Abhi, Armaan and Anika. No hassles about the baggage reclaim. Abhi’s place is fabulous, like something out of one of Shoiab’s coffee table books on American architecture I used to write folders for in the good old days if there ever were such times I lived through. Nonetheless, I’ve been off mood generally with Suresh’s condition being unstable ─ something everybody else seems already resigned to. I guess I’ve grown to be quite fond of the guy over the sixteen years since I got to know him. Never realized to what extent, though. Didn’t get much sleep Friday night/Saturday morning. Felt awfully cold, tossed and turned in bed. Went out yesterday afternoon to the park with the kids and Abhi for a couple of hours or so. This morning too for a few of their weekend chores, e.g., visit to the library. All’s as well as can be under the circumstances.

Alarming.

2010-03-26T13:48:00.000-07:00

Home is where mishaps are. Especially for a mishap-prone person. Like me. Take his morning, for instance. I’m supposed to leave 541 Sayre Drive, Princeton with Nandini to while away 4 hours at Barnes & Noble at the Market Fair mall. It’s drizzling outside. At the last minute, I change my mind and decide to do a bit of writing at home instead. Nandini leaves for work. I get myself some pineapple juice and cereal. After working on my writing assignment for a couple of hours in the basement, I lie down in bed reading and nod off to a not-too-deep sleep. Suddenly, footsteps on the upper staircase nudge me half awake. I’m not quite sure if I really heard them. I get up, walk up from the basement and try to open the garage door. The security alarm goes into an overdrive with the siren wailing loud enough to wake up the dead, let alone the slightly groggy me. I get a call from the security company to enquire if all’s well. I say Yes. The siren continues to wail. In due course, firemen and cops arrive. In the meanwhile, my repeated attempts to get in touch with Nandini and retrieve the code to put the fire alarm off are in vain. Finally, she arrives in person quite perturbed. Apologies are offered and the mystery gets solved. The footsteps I heard earlier were Aditi’s. She came to get her iPod, found the fire alarm was off and, thinking nobody was home, turned it on along with the motion sensor. Had I continued with my snooze, stayed put and not gone up to investigate, there would have been no problem. Well, the mishap had to happen. And, like it or not, it did.

Love story. Chapter 11.

2010-03-22T04:54:00.000-07:00

Romeo & Juliet. Beckham & Posh. John & Yoko. Superman & Lois Lane. Sonny & Cher. Homer & Marge. Penny & Kenny. Of the seven couples cited on the cute card from the hitched-for-25-years-"serious love"-birds-and-shoe-makers I found in the DSW Shoe Warehouse on Sunday, three are fictional. The Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection filed on 31 July 2009 in New York by Penny & Kenny ("... we LOVE shoes as much as you do!") is not. “Marge, it takes two to lie. One to lie, one to listen.” http://digbig.com/5bbgme And you thought love meant never having to say you were sorry?

Alexander the Great, Porus and the Walls of Jericho.

2010-03-20T03:20:00.000-07:00

The Alexander-Porus confrontation happened long, long ago, in July 326 BC if you want the exact date. Does it really matter now? Is it really necessary for a school student to mug it up? In the 1962 movie Anpadh (literally “uneducated”), the young Kalu (Mohan Choti) wonders about it so much that finally he breaks into a song: “Sikandar ne Porus se ki thi ladaai/ Jo ki thi ladaai to mein kya karun?” (If Alexander the Great fought Porus [once upon a time] where do I come in?”) In other words, do I need to even know about it? Point taken. Which brings me to the Walls of Jericho. A school super drops into little Johnny’s classroom unannounced. “Who broke down the Walls of Jericho?” is his rather stern query to Johnny. “I don’t know,” confesses Johnny, “But it wasn’t me.” Appalled by the student’s lack of basic Bible knowledge, the super marches up to the school principal’s office to report the matter only to hear him say: “I know little Johnny and his family and can vouch for them. If he says he didn’t do it, I believe him.” Even more incensed by the school head’s ignorance, the super goes to the regional head of education and spills the beans. After listening to the complaint, that worthy says soothingly: “Take it easy. Why don’t we call for three quotes and get the darn wall fixed? Our insurance will cover us.” (P.S.: In the alternative version, little Johnny’s dad offers to get the wall fixed.) Just in case you’re wondering who really did it, it was Joshua, the son of Nun, according to Elvis Presley. http://digbig.com/5bbghb. Good ol' Josh did it with his 12-foot spear when he went into battle. Some infidels say the Walls were washed away by rain, though. Others claim they never existed.

P.S.: Finally comes my “Eureka!” moment with Jef Mallett’s Frazz in the Calendar section (p. D15) of Los Angeles Times, Thursday, April 8, 2010:

Mrs Olsen: '8) Define “platitude”.’

Caulfield: 'A duck-billed, web-footed mammal’s approach to life.’

C to Frazz: 'She gives me a word I don’t need. I give her a definition she doesn’t need.

Frazz to C: 'You give, you get.’ http://comics.com/frazz (Please search by date.)

Gloriously goofy.

2010-03-19T07:38:00.000-07:00

What can you say when an author whose name spells to you thrills and suspense decides to give you goose pimples with romance? That he probably lost his marbles? That he is now in his second childhood? The plot kinda thickens when you realize that James Patterson has been called "the absolute pits, the lowest common denominator of cynical, scuzzy, assembly-line writing" by Patrick Anderson, a reviewer for The Washington Post. Either Patterson is the incredible writing machine with no writer’s block or he is the most skillful manipulator of the conjuror’s trick called ghost writing. The latter seems a distinct possibility because he has more than one publication, stand alone or series, in a single year to his credit. Plus, he caters to both sexes, all ages. Admit it or not, he is a big success in pop lit, someone Forbes keeps track of. He is quite the opposite of the failure-prone Orson Welles. http://digbig.com/5bbggq. Patterson has been criticized for using collaborators frequently to write on a prolific scale. But, remarkably, his many co-authors share an authorship credit on the cover. The co-authors agreement with Patterson has a non-disclosure clause about the terms of their working relationship, including the extent of Patterson’s involvement. My guess on the gloriously goofy Sundays at Tiffany’ in tandem with Gabrielle Charbonnet, principally a children’s book specialist, puts his plotting contribution at 100% and writing at zilch. In other words, I feel in my guts he is the mastermind but not the craftsman in this case. I could be totally off the mark of course. But there you are, boys and girls. Patterson is J Walter Thomson's former CEO, the ad pro who thought up the "Toys R Us" slogan, ergo presumably well versed in product development. I rest my case

Good 'air Day.

2010-03-15T03:49:00.001-07:00

Life teaches you to expect the unexpected. There I was prepared for the worst as I boarded CO-49 on Friday night in Mumbai. Here I am in the 541 Sayre Drive, Princeton basement writing this post at 8:30 am Sunday, 14 March, safe and sound, not much the worse for wear except thoroughly exhausted. I did not sleep a wink on the flight, watched Citizen Kane and a bunch of idiot box comedies including The Simpsons, Back to You and stuff to while away the 15 odd hours up in the skies, not forgetting this traveller’s progress on the Flight Map. The only bad break in the Good ’air Day feeling was the bit of struggle at the baggage reclaim to get one of my two heavy bags off the carousel in Terminal C, Newark Airport, Saturday morning. Help arrived in the shape of a fellow traveller and I was out of Terminal C and into Ashu’s Toyota in a matter of minutes. The CO-49 cabin crew screwed it up a tad by serving cold veggie breakfast and handing out the US Customs and Security forms too close to the landing time. Everybody is happy to see me. Ujwal and Abhi are told of my safe arrival. It's a day of freak rains. After a bath, brunch and a 2½ hour nap, I go with the 3 A’s of the Princeton Mankars to a pet shop to look at crossbred pups who are cute like all young ‘uns. Looking at them reminds me of the 1950s Patti Page hit: “How much is that doggy in the window (arf, arf!) /The one with the waggely tail? How much is that doggy in that window (arf, arf!)/ I do hope the doggy’s for sale.” Nobody but me seems to know of it or the singer. http://digbig.com/5bbftk. The night is a dinner get-together with Nandini’s friends. Nice and relaxing except for a pinch of excitement added by Aditi and Nupur getting stranded for a couple of hours on their way back for the DVD rental shop because of flash floods. For a country yokel like me, it’s a big surprise to witness blackout and floods in the Land of Milk and Honey. All in all though, as they say, Saturday, the 13th was a lucky day for this 22-born. P.S.: At the end of it all, I cannot help but marvel at the fact that among The Mankars at 233 Khetwadi Main Road http://digbig.com/5bafde, I was the first one to fly in the early fifties. The rest of them, though well-travelled by the then prevailing standards, had done it by rail and road.

F for Fake. F for Failure.

2010-03-05T16:24:00.000-08:00

“For it can be very hard to live with the belief that nothing matters in life, that nothing is solid or real, that everything is a show in the egotist’s head. It loses friends, trust, children, home, money, security and maybe reason. So it is comforting indeed, late in life, to come upon a proof that the emptiness and the trickery are valid and sufficient. A very sweet, shallow serenity is left.” (David Thomson, ROSEBUD The Story of Orson Welles, Abacus, 2005, p. 409)

Welles and I have at least two things in common, as far as I can fathom. Both of us never reached our full potential and were failures in worldly terms. (Pauline Kael wrote: "When Welles was only thirty-six, the normally gracious Walter Kerr referred to him as 'an international joke, and possibly the youngest living has-been.’” http://digbig.com/5bbejc) There is also the mutually shared belief so eloquently spelt out by Thomson in the quote above. This probably explains the strange affinity I have always felt to Welles without really having been a fan. I saw Citizen Ken and Carol Reed’s The Third Man when I was in London in 1971 and duly admired both the films, especially Welles’s contribution. Earlier, I had avidly sought, read and enjoyed the study of the CBS’s The War of the Worlds radio broadcast (Halloween 1938) by Hadley Cantril, Professor of Psychology, Princeton University (Invasion from Mars). In the meanwhile, I had started to think of myself as a film buff http://digbig.com/5bbehw. My cinema aficionado’s reading list included Pauline Kael’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. It was inevitable that I soon came across her 2-part New Yorker article (1971), Raising Kane, which accused Welles of being a credit stealer. This rekindled the ancient controversy about Welles having tried to deny credit of Citizen Kane’s authorship to Herman J Mankiewicz as well as The War of the World radio show’s authorship to Howard Koch. Both accusations had an element of truth in it. F for Fake (1973; 85 minutes), co-authored by Welles and Oja Kodar, is his retort to Kael. Here’s one terse summary of the film: “F for Fake opens with a couple of magic tricks, segues as though by sleight-of-hand into the story of master art-forger Elmyr de Hory and his relationship with biographer Clifford Irving (a sequence ‘remixed’ by Welles with extant footage from François Reichenbach’s documentary work-in-progress, Elmyr), then hones in on Irving when word gets out that his purported biography of recluse-mogul Howard Hughes is a first-class hoax in its own right. Here the film erupts in all directions, as Welles contrasts the sprawl of ‘70s Hollywood with the halcyon Tinseltown that produced Citizen Kane; contemplates the continent that provided him with an artistic refuge some 800 years after the anonymous construction of the cathedral at Chartres; and, lastly, recounts a meeting between that most un-anonymous of artists — Pablo Picasso — and Welles’ companion Oja Kodar, which took place in her youth…”. http://digbig.com/5bbejb. Rosebud (page 409) describes Kodor as “the naked lady who makes a monkey out of Picasso…”. Apparently, F for Fake is Welles’s definitive statement on contemporary reality. “Trust nobody. Beware especially of (s)he who asserts his/her authority without any proof or basis” is the message. “Ladies and gentlemen, that’s the end of the story” is how Welles would have summed it up.

Enormous audience of one.

2010-02-20T19:56:00.000-08:00

I joined Clarion in 1965 soon after its collaboration with McCann Erickson. http://digbig.com/5bbcpa. One of the so-called benefits conferred on the Indian ad agency was the training of the creative, media and research staff by a “visiting faculty” from McCann. These Firangs would come and regale us as well as our clients with paens to their own intrepid exploits. Actually, this was a way to offer free junkets to the reigning favourites of the McCann international management at the expense of the Indian “partner” – a new twist to the time-tested imperialist ploy. What Clarion got out of it was the PR mileage. One of the worthies from out west was a Creative Director – I cannot recall his name – whose self-proclaimed secret of success was to write and design print and cinema ads to talk to the “enormous audience of one”. To prove his thesis he even had a 30-minute slide-and-sound show (an ancestor of the PowerPoint presentation) with examples culled from (hold your breath!) Keats, Byron, Wordsworth and the Bard of Avon set to music. What the Great Man did not clarify was how one was supposed to achieve it in the enormous clutter of ads in print and at the movie hall. The implication probably was that clever media placement could clear that hurdle. Being an impressionable rookie then, I was quite taken up by his act which further fortified my belief that I was engaged in a “creative” pursuit. It was much much later that I realised the common thread running in all these “winning” formulae. Zero in on an attention-grabbing key word (“positioning”) or phrase (“enormous audience of one”) and offer it as the secret ingredient for advertising success, a panacea almost. Remember what Dr Samuel Johnson said ? “Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement.” Bingo!

The joke’s on me.

2010-02-12T02:39:00.000-08:00

This story is from my 233 Khetwadi Main Road days. http://digbig.com/5bafde. In 1952, after SSC, I joined the Sydenham College. My FY B Com class used to be then held on the third floor of the now demolished Sukhadwala Building almost diagonally across the Excelsior Cinema http://digbig.com/5bbbxe. No more than a block away towards Victoria Terminus was the Capital Cinema. In the same building in the lane leading to the New Empire Cinema was a book stall selling magazines, comics books and paperbacks. I always used to go there to browse. One day, a joke book by Powers Moulton, Best Jokes for All Occasions, in the Perma Books edition caught my eye and my fancy. It was a canary yellow hard bound pocket book with the edges of the pages tinged blood red. I can “see” it even today. What I liked most about the joke book was the "just applied" smell of the glue used by the binder. I can almost “smell” it even now. To cut a long story short, albeit the fact that I was at that time almost totally devoid of a sense of humour, I became the proud owner of it after shelling out probably Re.1.75 for it. The price was 35 cents, I reckon. Though I cannot swear by it, a dollar used to cost 5 rupees those days. End of story. But since we are on jokes, here are some squeaky clean ones that I find really amusing.

{1}
A medium was busy summoning people back from the netherworld. A nine-year-old kept insisting he wanted to talk to Grandpa.

“Quiet!” she shushed him more than once, quite annoyed.

“Grandpa! I want to talk to Grandpa,” he persisted.

“Very well, little boy,” she conceded, making a few hocus-pocus passes. “Here he is.”

“Grandpa,” said the boy. “What are you doing out there? You ain’t dead.”

{2}
A meek little man timidly touched the arm of a man putting on an overcoat in a restaurant’s cloak room.

“Ex - cu - se me,” he stammered. “Do you happen to be Mr Smith of Newport?”

“Certainly not!” said the man impatiently.

“Oh - errrrr – well,” replied the other. “I am. And, that’s his overcoat you’re putting on.”

{3}
Proud mom: “My son’s only 3 but can already spell his name backwards.”

Skeptical neighbour: “So what’s his name?”

Proud mom: “Otto.”

{4}
An English teacher assigned her class the task of writing four lines of dramatic poetry.

When the students handed in their papers, she chose the verse of her star pupil and read it out aloud. It went:

“A boy was walking down the track.
A train was rushing at him fast.
The boy stepped off the track
To let the train whizz past.”

“Ten out of ten for rhyming, Raju,” said the teacher. “But zero out of ten for drama. Do try again.”

Raju’s next effort at dramatizing the event left her speechless, though:

“A boy was walking down the track.
A train was rushing at him fast.
The train jumped off the track
To let the boy walk past.”

{5}
Hiker: “Can I catch the 6:45 if I cut through your field?”

Farmer: “If my bull sees you, you might even catch the 6:15.”

{6}
A college dean received a diffident letter from the father of a prospective entrant enquiring about the chances of his son attending the institute.

“Frankly,” wrote the father, “Henry may not be leader material but he gets along well with everyone.”

“Please send him along,” read the dean’s reply, “we need him. We now have 985 leaders in our freshman class. One follower would be a breath of fresh air.“

{7}
Hired hand: “I’ve been with you for 25 years and never asked you for a raise before.”

Farmer: “That is why you have been here 25 years, my man.”

{8}
Psychiatrist: “Do you have trouble making up your mind?”

Patient: “Well – yes and no.”

{9}
A man was woken up by the phone at his bedside ringing stridently at 3:00 a.m. It was the neighbour shrieking in his ear: “Your dog is barking so loudly I can’t sleep.”

Before he could protest, the neighbour hung up on him.

The next morning, at 3:00 a.m., the man rang up his neighbour. “I don’t have a dog,” he said and promptly hung up.

{10}
“Dad,” asked the son looking up from the book he was reading, “what does ‘diplomatic phraseology’ mean?”

“It’s like this, son,” said his Dad, “if you say to a homely girl, ‘Your face would stop a clock’ that would be plain stupidity. But if you said instead, ‘When I look into your eyes, time stands still’, that would be ‘diplomatic phraseology’.”

{11}
A veteran bank robber much hassled by his wife's demand for cash tries to placate her: "Just wait till the bank closes, dear, you shall have all the cash you need."

{12}
Then, there is the much harassed lawyer who keeps calling home and finds the line busy. So, he summons his secretary, tells her to take down a telegram for his daughter, Sue. "Send it by express wire," he tells the secretary. "Get off the line this instant, Sue," his telegram reads.

Guess which two of these jokes are past their expiry date? http://digbig.com/5bbbxk.

Losing the plot.

2010-01-14T16:43:00.000-08:00

The last time I met Avantika, Ashu’s younger daughter, was when she came here last November-December to attend a big fat Punjabi wedding in her mother’s family. It was then that, in my time-tested arrogance, I had the temerity to recommend to her Padosan as a comedy worth watching. She had already seen it. “I didn’t like it, Dada,” she said matter-of-factly. It suddenly dawned on me there and then that this business of the older generation’s experience benefitting the younger generation is a non-starter. Avantika is a Digital Native from New Jersey. I’m at best a Ludditesque, reluctant, late-adopting Digital Immigrant ill at ease in the fast changing world. http://tinyurl.com/43fygl. In other words, my experience is of no use, value or consequence to her. For her, it’s maybe cool to pay Rs 320/- to see 3 Idiots in a multiplex and an extra Rs 50/- for a tub of pop corn. For me, it’s idiotic, nay criminal. Get the drift?

The Gift.

2009-12-30T03:17:00.000-08:00

Pop culture has an entire mystical edifice built around 'giving’. The Biblical-sounding admonition, “’Tis better to give than receive” sums it up. Christmas is the season of giving. It’s the Christmas spirit, see? http://digbig.com/5bawdt. Santa Claus is also a part of it, I guess. What’s his role in the whole season-of-giving rigmarole? Frankly, he’s the guy who sits in a mall to act as a conduit of children’s wish lists. The marketing suits hire him. So, he owes them one. Things got murkier when ol’ O.Henry from good ol’ Greensboro hopped on the giving wagon with his The Gift of the Magi. http://digbig.com/5bawdw. This short story ranks with the best in the genre. O.Henry − William Sidney Porter in real life − was the son of Algernon Sidney, a physician, and Mary Jane Virginia Swaim Porter. His great-uncle, Jonathan Worth, was governor of North Carolina from 1865 to 1868. Dogged by bad luck, he was incarcerated between 1897 and 1901 for alleged embezzlement of bank funds. In1910, O.Henry died of diabetes and cirrhosis of the liver in New York. Five years earlier, he wrote The Gift of the Magi in the bar of Pete’s Tavern, extant even now, in the Gramercy area of Manhattan. http://digbig.com/5bawed. Giving is a sign of love was his message. But a sign to whom? In Della and Jim’s case, there was no need to prove their love for each other. In buying the gifts they could scarcely afford they were merely conforming to a pop-culture ‘tradition’ fuelled chiefly by commerce. Were the Magi’s "gifts of gold and of frankincense and of myrrh" to the new-born in the manger a wise and thoughtful choice? Frankincense and myrrh were probably for the baby’s body rub. What about gold, though? Was it a tribute to the perceived royalty and divinity of Jesus perhaps? P.S.: This morning, purely by accident, I happened to watch on the MGM Channel a 1988 movie called Masquerade. http://digbig.com/5bawfj. It’s about Olivia, a recently orphaned heiress swept off her feet by a dashing yacht racing skipper (Tim). To start with, his courtship is a part of a conspiracy to wed and kill her and share her wealth with his co-conspirators. But as their relationship grows, he begins to love her in right earnest so much so that, after marriage, he voluntarily gets his name removed from her will without her knowledge. He wants nothing from her, in short. He even sacrifices his life to save hers. How about that? (I know. I know. It's only a movie.)

Babes in the woods? Tiger lurking!

2009-12-18T03:08:00.000-08:00

If what Jamie Jungers says http://digbig.com/5batwk is not an experiment with truth http://digbig.com/5batwm, Tiger has walked willy-nilly into the Mahatma league. He is now on par with MK Gandhi no less. (AN AUTOBIGRAPHY OR The story of my experiments with truth, Chapter 8: My Father’s Death and My Double Shame, p.16). How come nobody noticed it?

Amar Akbar Anthony, anyone?

2009-12-17T18:19:00.000-08:00

Recently, one morning, I was listening on my iPod to Mohamed Rafi singing the qawali ‘Pardah Hai Pardah’ from Manmohan Desai’s Amar Akbar Anthony. It suddenly occurred to me what an ass I had been not to have made friends with Desai when I had the chance. I used to bump into him in the late fifties in our mutual friend’s (Vinay’s) den in the Bhagini Samaj building virtually next door to 233 Khetwadi Main Road http://digbig.com/5bafde. We somehow never hit it off. By all accounts, he was a gem of a guy whereas I used to be, in those days, an opinionated oaf who took himself too seriously. I remember thinking of him as a wastrel because he had quit college and was doing nothing. He used to borrow comics books from Vinay because he did not have money to pay the circulating library fees by his own admission. Then he disappeared from the scene. Vinay told me that he was probably assisting his brother in film production. In 1960, MD directed the Raj Kapoor and Nutan starrer Chhalia. It had hit songs and did quite well at the box office. His magnum opus unarguably was Amar Akbar Anthony (1977). I enjoyed it when I saw it in Apsara Talkies in spite of the innumerable cinematic clichés he peppered it with. For instance, in the opening scene under the credits, blood from the three long-separated sons of different religions flowed into the veins of the mother (Mother India?). Then, in the unabashedly exploitative ‘Shirdiwale Sai Baba’ sequence, the son’s prayer triggered a miraculous recovery of the mother from the jaws of death. There was nevertheless an infectious joie de vivre he managed to inject in the movie that made it a fabulous fun flick. The story, by the way, was credited to Desai’s wife who was from the Khetwadi Main Road neighbourhood. Even after MD’s success, the couple continued to live in the same neighbourhood. What was incredible in the Manmohan Desai saga was the ending totally out of synch with his persona. He jumped to his death from the terrace of his building abutting the Bhagini Samaj building. Inexplicable!

Alternative History: freedom or transfer of power?

2009-12-03T21:40:00.000-08:00

Come to think of it, the Congress Party at the outset was almost a non-starter. It debuted, on 28 December 1885, somewhat anemically under the baton of Allan Octavian Hume, Esq., formerly of the Indian Civil Service, a decorated veteran of the 1857 rebellion and coincidentally also a noted ornithologist, with the aim of keeping a watch over native civil unrest and collaborating with the British Imperialist administration. The idea was perhaps to act as a facilitator for the Indian accommodation to the powers that happened to be.

I just finished reading Freedom Struggle Betrayed: India 1885- 1947 (originally entitled Indian National Congress: How Indian? How National?). Described by its publisher as a search for answers to basic political and economic questions, it tells a story about how India won freedom and what role the Indian National Congress played, quite different from what we read in school history and other popular narratives. The thrust of the argument here is that what we learned about what happened is a huge and horrendous lie.

The Indian National Congress was always a collaborator or comprador of the British Raj right from the beginning with a program of lukewarm petition politics. It was so when Dadabhai Nowroji, Gokhale, Sir Phirozeshah Mehta and like-minded moderates − closely linked with the Indian businessmen, financiers and landed gentry − were running it in the early days. It remained so even when Mahatma Gandhi took over the reins of the Party and steered it right till 1947. The book cites evidence, chapter and verse, from various published sources to make a case for the betrayal of the freedom struggle by the Congress Party at every step of the way. It points a finger at Gandhi as the principal villain. Among his many trespasses cited in the narrative are the famous Champaran campaign, his intervention in the Ahmedabad textile strike and the Kheda episode. In all these instances, Gandhi persuaded the victims of injustice − the working class and the peasantry − to settle for less than what they had fought for. The beneficiaries of his intervention were the exploiters who got away with having to pay less than the rightful penalty. Similarly, in other instances where Gandhi claimed to be agitating against the British Raj, he would stop the movement when it had gained momentum but before it had really started to hurt the Raj. The famous example was the Chauri Chaura incidence. All these are seen by the authors of the book as an abject continuation of petition politics at the cost especially of the downtrodden masses, i.e., the working class and the peasantry. Gandhi is also accused of manipulating the Congress Party to suit his will and whims. There is a long list of transgressions in the book to his debit. The book is sharply critical of Nehru as well for his socialist “pretensions” and his claim that he was a champion of the rural masses. But once again the blame is shifted to the puppet master or Svengali aka as the Mahatma for manipulating Nehru on many policy issues favouring the other side. The trouble with Nehru was that he was a fairly decent writer with probably a writer’s ability to deceive himself and others.

My own take on reading the alternative history of the Indian freedom movement and thinking about it in the light of what little I’ve managed to learn on my own about Gandhi is that there could be quite a bit of truth in what it says. Reading Girja Kumar's BRAHMACHARYA Gandhi & His Women Associates is a big eye opener. One of the grossest instances of his interference in the lives of his associates is how he punished an adopted daughter Jeki for her sexual transgression involving his own son Manilal. http://digbig.com/4yaae and http://digbig.com/4yaaf. In one of my earlier posts http://digbig.com/5basgm, I had written, inter alia, as follows: “This [Girja Kumar’s] narrative is based mostly on Gandhi's own writings. In it, the so-called Mahatma comes out as manipulative, pathologically obsessive about sex and sin as well as power-crazed. His logic sounds circuitous, serpentine and often self-contradictory and specious, at times even inane. He apparently played God with the lives of those close to him. He was too intrusive and interfering.” He could have lived up to the image the report in question accords him, in short.

Did India wake up to freedom at midnight on 15 August 1947? http://digbig.com/5basma Or, was there simply a transfer of power from the British Imperialists to their equally ruthless Indian compradors?

Take your pick or toss a coin.

Conspiracy by omission.

2009-11-15T20:19:00.000-08:00

As a rule, I distrust and shun conspiracy theories. Today, I’m going to spin one. It has been bothering me for a long time. The more I try to shoo it away, the more it refuses to vamoose. It concerns the last months of Gandhi’s life. He had become something of an embarrassment and a liability to the powers that happened to be then and there as well as to his colleagues. His mahayajna – his by then notorious Brahmacharya experiments, to be precise − had infuriated his close associates including Sardar Patel who had accused him of committing adharma – of being guilty of moral and spiritual decadence, in other words. Long time colleagues like Kishorelal Mashruwala and Narhari Parekh and even Devdas Gandhi joined in the protest. Thakkar Bappa, a top associate of Gandhi, journeyed to Noakhali in December 1946 to dissuade him from continuing his mahayajna. Gandhi felt completely isolated. “For after all I am not God, “he wrote to Birla. “I can commit mistakes; … this may prove to be my biggest at the fag-end of my life. … all my well-wishers can open my eyes if they oppose me. If they do not … I shall go from hence even as I am … Whatever I am doing here is a part of my yajna.” He was totally transparent. “… when I take M[anu] in my lap, do I do so as a pure-hearted father or as a father who has strayed from the path of virtue? What I am doing is nothing new to me: in thought I have done it for the last fifty years; in action, in varying degrees, over quite a number of years.” In February 1947, he spoke of publishing the findings of his research but nothing came out of it. His honesty and courage to follow his convictions did not cut ice with his followers. The old man had to be punished with at least a slap on his wrist if nothing worse. Meanwhile his intervention on behalf of the Indian Muslims and his recommendation to the Government of India to pay Pakistan her share of the pre-partition finances (Rs 55 crore) had raised the hackles of the Hindu fundamentalists in and out of the Congress Party. Several attempts had already been made on Gandhi’s life. B G Kher, the then Chief Minister of the Bombay Presidency and a close confidant of the Central Home Minister Sardar Patel, had been apprised of the plot by Dr J C Jain after he had got an inkling of it from Madanlal Pahwa, one of Godse’s fellow conspirators. Balukaka Kanitkar, a well-respected Congressman from Pune, learned of the plot from G V Ketkar – a former editor of Kesari. He wrote a registered letter to inform Kher. The intelligence was passed on to the authorities in Delhi and yet the security was not beefed up. http://digbig.com/5baqge. The Godse Brothers, Apte, Madanlal and their colleagues were just some of the conspirators apparently. There were more who collaborated by omission. Culpable negligence, anyone?

Misguided?

2009-11-06T21:39:00.000-08:00

In the typically self-deprecating, understated RKN style, Rasipuram Krishnaswamy Iyer Narayanswamy once described how his renowned novel The Guide written in his room at The Carlton during his 1956 Berkley (California) sojourn on a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship was reduced to a distorted caricature by Bollywood’s preference for the “canned” instead of the genuine and the sanitized instead of the raw. For instance, he wrote how, after condescending to take his guided tour of authentic ready-made locations peopled with authentic ready-made crowds at the time of a fair to replicate Malgudi, the director and the lead star preferred specially erected, exorbitantly expensive sets in Jaipur and a cast of thousands of junior artistes called “extras” in those days before political correctness came to our shores. They also soft-pedaled on the adultery angle. The eponymously titled essay where Narayan wrote about how his The Guide metamorphosed into Vijay Anand’s Guide happens to be in a collection of his non-fiction I own that is right now out of my reach. A friend who borrowed it quite a while back has not returned it so far. Be that as it may, I quite enjoyed Navketan’s Vijay Anand-directed Guide (1965) particularly for Sachin Dev Burman’s music. I read The Guide much, much later. In retrospect, what had transpired, I guess, was that Vijay Anand could not break away from the then prevalent norms and style of film making – contrary to RK Narayan’s expectations. Had the director lived up to the author’s standards, maybe an art movie would have been born instead of the box office bonanza that Guide turned out to be.

Obsessed with Bom Bahia?

2009-10-27T23:25:00.000-07:00

“The trouble with poetry is that it doesn’t call a spade a spade. Anthropomorphic language tends to confuse every issue. For instance, if you call a piece of real estate motherland or fatherland, you’re bound to confound the confusion by believing yourself in the role of her/his gallant son/daughter and transferring a host of human attributes and emotions to her/him.” http://digbig.com/5bamsx. This applies to a city, as well. No matter what anyone says, in the final analysis, it is no more than a swath of real estate. Like the city named Mumbai, the erstwhile Bombay, believed by some to be the Anglicization of the Portuguese name ‘Bom Bahia’ (= good bay or good harbour), when it changed hands from Portugal to Great Britain as a part of Catharine de Braganza’s trousseau when she married Charles II in 1662. The Portuguese first visited the good bay in 1509 and grabbed it from Bahadur Shah of Gujrat in 1530. Citing documents dated from 1525, a leading Portuguese etymological authority, José Pedro Machado, traced the origin of the name to the Marathi term ‘Mumba Devi’, the city deity. From it came the name Mombaim later modified to Bombaim and probably further to Bom Bahia, he argued. Be that as it may, when the British got their hands on Bombay, it was an archipelago of seven islands: Colaba. Little Colaba, Bombay, Mazgaon, Parel, Worli and Mahim from South to North. After Shivaji’s plunder of Surat in 1664, the East India Company shifted its operation to Bombay in 1668 paying an annual lease rent of £10 sterling to the Royal Family – an arrangement confirmed by William III in 1669. A securely fortified area for the British officials’ work and living spaces – known as ‘Fort’ even today – was built on the largest island, Bombay, with only three gates (Apollo Gate to the South, Bazaar Gate to the North and Church Gate to the West) as the sole access to it. Within the Fort, there were offices, shops, commercial establishments, warehouses and churches. The locals, among them quite a few Pathare Prabhu Sokajis http://digbig.com/5bamtc, used to enter the Fort in the morning and quit it in the evening using the North or the West Gates. A step in 1860 to consolidate the seven islands was the building of the Colaba Causeway (now Shahid Bhagatsingh Marg) from Sassoon Dock at the South end to Museum at the North. Around 1782, Lord William Hornby, Governor of Bombay, started the Hornby Vellard project as a first step to connect all the islands north of the Bombay island. Ramji Shivaji Parbhu, a Pathare Prabhu contractor, got the contract. The idea behind it was to construct a bund that would prevent sea water from flooding the areas neighbouring the Worli Creek at high tide. According to one legend, during the construction, the sea wall kept collapsing till a Laxmi idol was recovered from the sea and was consecrated in the specially built Mahalaxmi Temple close to Haji Ali. The second stage of the reclamation was to fill in the shallows between the islands of Parel, Worli, Bombay, Mazagaon and Mahim with a bund to stop sea water intruding into the nearby areas. The Governor went ahead with the project in spite of the Company Directors saying No to his proposal and was reportedly sacked for his insubordination.

Irony of ironies.

2009-10-20T04:42:00.001-07:00

Cliché of clichés! What to do? Jawaharlal Nehru wrote on p.333 of his An Autobiography (London, 1953) that he was “attracted to the idea of losing the house [the ancestral Anand Bhavan in Allahabad]. I felt that would bring me nearer to the peasants who were being dispossessed…”. This was the state of his mind after his father Motilal’s death on 6 February 1931. Jawaharlal had been active in the cause of the peasantry since 1920. He had walked with them under the scorching sun, listened patiently to their tales of exploitation and dispossession and even managed to lessen their misery to some extent owing to the moral pressure exerted on the Goverment and the landlords by the agrarian movement of which he had become a part. In fact, his first glimpse of the UP peasantry had, according to his own admission (ibid., page 52), filled him “with shame and sorrow, shame at my own easy-going and comfortable life and our own petty politics of the city which ignored the vast multitude of semi-naked sons and daughters of India, and sorrow at degradation and overwhelming poverty of India.” Nonetheless, after independence, the same Jawaharlal thought nothing of dispossessing the Indian peasantry for building his temples of modern India (mega dams and mammoth public sector undertakings). He did nothing to stop the ruthless and venal Indian State from appropriating all the national resources with impunity and in the process dispossessing the already impoverished masses. http://digbig.com/5bamam.

Worse than yesterday and today.

2009-10-20T04:30:00.005-07:00

I’m no futurologist. Neither am I a born pessimist. What I’m about to write is based on observation. I could be totally off the mark when I say that life will get worse and worse – never better hereafter. Ever after. That is going to happen because mankind has been profligate all along. What’s more, we refuse to learn from our mistakes. In Mumbai, for example, water will become scarcer and scarcer as high-rises keep rising all over the landscape and people callously insist on taking long showers, soaking in tubs and using high-end washing machines that waste water. Soon, power cuts may become pandemic even in South Bombay – oops, Mumbai. The recent Congress Party’s call for austerity should have been contextualized properly. They should have placed it squarely in the framework of the coming drought of resources which is likely to last for a long, long time in the absence of a miracle like a technological breakthrough or a major geological find. In the interim, we have to make the best we can of what is available. Greed (sorry, Mr Gordon Gekko http://digbig.com/5bakah) is no more good. It’s time we cease and desist outdoing the Americans in greed, profligacy and venality and learn to husband our scarce resources and share them with the less fortunate among us. This is not a sermon, mind you. It’s merely an opinion and a reminder.

Cat’s whiskers.

2009-09-15T14:38:00.000-07:00

If you’re one of those who think “intellectuals” are cat’s whiskers, better stay away from Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals (Harper & Row, New York, 1988). My friend, Manohar Mason of Pentagon Communications is probably the most logical people I’ve met so far. Don’t believe me? Just read this: http://digbig.com/5bahag. He is also a huge fan of Bertrand Russell. Whenever we meet and end up talking about (Ahem!) intellectual and philosophical stuff, good ol’ Bertie pops in the conversation. If memory serves, Manohar told me more than once that he had read Bertie’s autobiography and spoke of it in glowing terms. I wonder if he would go into a Fahrenheit 451 mode were he to read Chapter 8 of Johnson’s tome. Johnson runs through the gamut of this brainy specie right from Rousseau, Shelley, Marx, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Brecht, Russell, Sartre, Wilson, Gollancz and Hellman – with a quick worm’s-eye view of fellow sinners like Connolly, Mailer, Tynan, Fassbinder and Baldwin. His main grouse is that these worthies do not practice personally what they preach publicly. They have clay feet, in other words, as well as being guilty of all the major sins not excluding greed, lust, envy, pride, mendacity and venality. He pitches at us shovelfuls of dirt on each and every one of them in an entertaining and highly readable romp. I rather enjoyed it but then I have always been a sucker for historical gossip. For example: http://digbig.com/5bahba and http://digbig.com/5bahbb. At times, though, Johnson sounds a wee bit waspish, condescending and holier-than-thou. To me, it’s a simple matter of so what. But for most of the time and most of the people, to err is human; to forgive, out of the question.

Second thoughts.

2009-08-27T23:04:00.000-07:00

The other day, while watching Deepa Mehta’s 1947: Earth, it occurred to me that the only victim of partition I witnessed at first hand was a hapless hack Victoria driver being butchered in the 13th Khetwadi Lane facing my 233 Khetwadi Main Road terrace. http://digbig.com/5bafde. Why the “cracking” of India as Bapsi Sidhwa called it could not be achieved without bloodshed and strife and monumental human tragedy is something that has always puzzled me.

Looking around for clues, I’m dumbstruck by the unconscionable haste with which partition was announced and carried out. On 4 June 1947, quite out of the blue, Lord Mountbatten announced at a press conference http://digbig.com/5bafnh that the British would quit the sub-continent by 15 August of the same year, i.e., in less than 3 months − instead of the earlier set deadline of June 1948 for the transfer of power. Eleven months earlier, on Jinnah-decreed Direct Action Day, 16 August 1946, policemen in Bengal were allowed to go on a holiday by Governor Fredric Burrows with Lord Wavell’s tacit assent. The Calcutta massacre went on without police or military intervention for three days. http://digbig.com/5bafng. It is as if the British Raj had washed its hands of the erstwhile Jewel in the Crown and wanted to get the hell out of India at the earliest without involving itself further in the emerging mess.

Had Churchill been the British PM instead of Attlee, the holocaust might have been avoided or at least postponed for a while given that he would never have agreed to the colony’s independence readily. That would have been a blessing in disguise as it might have given the Indian leaders time to think up a cogent and workable plan of action for an orderly partition and the massive migration involved when the moment arrived.

Gaslight.

2009-08-18T22:26:00.000-07:00

When I was growing up at 233 Khetwadi Main Road http://digbig.com/5baehr gaslights used to light up the streets of South Bombay. A runner with a long pole in his hand would trot from street lamp to street lamp and fire them up one by one. The darkness of the dusk would then gradually yield to the white-yellow glow of the street lamps. I’m talking of the 1940s and maybe even the early 50s, mind you. As dusk approached, the Vanita Vishram Garden behind our house would be filled with twittering birds joyously heralding for almost a quarter of an hour the approach of darkness and time for repose. Some evenings, I used to take my bicycle http://digbig.com/5baenb to the Garden and ride a few leisurely laps around its periphery listening to the soothing chatter of the birds. Those were also the days when tramcars – double as well as single deckers – used to ply on the streets of Bombay from dawn to midnight. http://digbig.com/5baena. The other noteworthy feature of South Bombay life that is no more was the daily washing of the streets at dawn by bullock carts fitted with sprinklers. In those days, by the way, the minimum fare for the yellow top taxicabs was 6 annas (= 38 paise approximately). Those were the days, boys and girls, believe you me.

Come again?

2009-08-17T05:50:00.000-07:00

It caught my eye one Saturday morning near Crawford Market where I had gone shopping with Ujwal. Called Bokoma, it has a stylish plastic handle out of which sprout a dozen curved springy wire “fingers” of varying lengths ending in tear-drop finials −a kinky kitchen tool or claw look-alike. It must have something to do with acupressure, I thought. It seemed to me that it would make a cool art deco doodad/thingamabob/gizmo http://digbig.com/5baekg were it to be stuck in a bottle. The boy hawker was asking Rs.80/- for it. I haggled him down to Rs.30/-. Its smart-looking tapering carton printed in German with the unbelievably exorbitant price of €19. 50 (= Rs.1355/-) marked on it and the underscored legend “Das Original” in red intrigued me. My first reaction was someone was pulling a fast one. Maybe, it was a locally made product passing off as an imported one. This impression was further reinforced when I heard that Bo was being hawked for Rs.20/- near Sicca Nagar, close to where I live. Then I stumbled on to this:http://digbig.com/5baekh and this: http://digbig.com/5baekk. Pay Rs.100/- or Rs.125/- for Bo plus shipping charges. Hold your excitement in check for seven days till you get delivery. Instead, why not zimply come to me and I will take you to where you can lay our hands on it instantaneously at a mere fraction of what the shopping site is selling it for. By the way, they http://digbig.com/5baekj are claiming Bo can do you a lot of good: “Originally developed by the to obtain a complete body relaxation, today it still serves that purpose and is a strong and positive source of new energy to you.” P.S.: Times Shopping mentions Pick N Sell as the seller of Bokoma and the only Pick N Sell that I found was a wholesale super market in Bangalore:http://digbig.com/5baekm. I couldn’t trace the Bokoma seller at Rediff Shopping (e-bizwizard). Bokoma’s cousins are congregated here: http://digbig.com/5baekn. Bokoma is also a place situated at 0° 22' 19" South, 17° 8' 23" East in Congo Republic (Africa). http://digbig.com/5baeks. What’s more, Semi Document: Bokoma Kegasu is a Japanese romance-porno movie. http://digbig.com/5badws.

The lament of the lover boy in Rangoon, circa 1949.

2009-08-17T05:41:00.000-07:00

I saw Patanga (= moth) in my early teens at the Imperial Talkies http://digbig.com/5baehq. It was within easy walking distance of 233 Khetwadi Main Road.http://digbig.com/5baehr. I had nary an inkling then what an NRI or an expat was. The terms were not in vogue at that time. It was maybe 30 years too early. The rollicking joke in the movie was around the prediction made at the time of the hero’s birth. The astrologer said that he would be surrounded by droves of cars. (“Iss ke aagey pichey motor gaadi daudegi.") Everyone and his aunt took it to mean he would be a rich man and said: “Bahut khoob!” In the very next shot we saw him in the uniform of a traffic cop directing traffic at a busy junction. Later in the movie, he tried to break into moviedom. That’s when he and his co-star performed the song concerning an Indian expat in Burma. In those days, a lot many Indians used to go to Burma to work in the timber − mainly teakwood – trade. (Remember The Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation? http://digbig.com/5bbtcl) It was a well-paying job. Anyway, the movie song sequence within the movie had the lovelorn young man calling from Rangoon his wife in Dehra Dun. An overseas phone call was a big thing then, costing virtually a bomb by the then prevailing standards. Even sending a telegram was not very common. It was considered the harbinger of bad news. History http://digbig.com/5baehd tells us that the Indo-Burma Radio Telephone link was established between Madras and Rangoon in 1936 – the year I was born. In 1949, the Own Your Telephone plan was introduced. Also, the surcharge on trunk telephone calls was raised from 40 to 60% by the Honourable Finance Minister, Shri RK Shanmukham Shetty, in the 1948-49 Central Government Budget. http://digbig.com/5baehf. By the way, the Japanese occupied Burma in March 1942 and China invaded Tibet in 1949. All this is now in the dustbin of history, of course. Coming back to the song it had a prose preamble wherein the caller identified the originating town as Rangoon for the benefit of the Dehra Dun trunk operator and asked to talk to his wife. After that, the proud wife took over to tell us the story of her husband having gone to Rangoon, boasting that he had made the trunk call just to tell her that he missed her terribly. The husband admitted he had made a big blunder by not taking her with him to Burma. He then went into a detailed description of how he was suffering in a mock serious, even somewhat naughty vein. The lyrics in Hindustani can be read here: http://digbig.com/5baehs. The lyric writer was Rajinder Kishan whose greatest claim to fame was the all-time single biggest jackpot pool of Rs.48 lakh he won at the Mahalaxmi Race Course in 1971. http://digbig.com/5baewf.

Incredible India II.

2009-08-13T19:23:00.000-07:00

At the end of the last post, I wrote: “The saga of incredible India goes on…”. It did. The visit to the VP Road Police Station yesterday was a big surprise and revelation. PC Nalwade was the very antithesis of his colleague who had paid me a visit on Tuesday: smiling, polite, soft-spoken, knowledgeable. His colleague, a woman PC, matched his demeanour perfectly. The questions were respectfully put, the answers smilingly recorded. They explained that my passport reached me prior to the police enquiry probably because of my age. Getting it police-checked was optional, the risk being I could be prevented from flying if they noticed on the computer screen that I had not been police-checked. Fair enough. If only all of Mumbai Police behaved like these two …

Incredible India.

2009-08-10T21:24:00.000-07:00

Will wonders never cease in incredible India? On 5 August, i.e., last Wednesday in case you are not in a Gregorian mode, I searched the India Passport website http://digbig.com/5badws and was duly informed that my passport was ready and was expected to be sent to me by 04-09-2009 subject to all documents being in order. On the afternoon of 5 August, i.e., of the same Wednesday in case you are still not in the Gregorian mode, a Speed Post person dropped in at home when I was out on work and left an intimation for me to pick it up from the Kalbadevi Post Office the next day between 10.30 am and 2.00 pm. Which I eventually did as directed! Incredible India had one more surprise in store for me. Yesterday, i.e., on 10 August, in the afternoon while I was once again away on work, a policeman dropped in to do the police check – a pre-condition to the issue of a passport. He was told I was out and the passport had been already received. I wonder if there are more wonders to come in incredible India.

Update: No sooner had I finished and poasted the above than one more wonder came my way from incredible India. It was in the shape of Police Constable Hanurkar from VP Road Police Station. After comparing my mug with the picture on the form in his hand as well as the one on my new passport, he invited me to present myself on Thursday morning at the said Police Station to meet a certain Mr Nalwade with two copies of all documents submitted with my passport application and three copies of my photograph. When I protested that the passport was already in my hand, he said “they” had to “complete” my file – whatever that means. He also broadly hinted that he had had to make two trips to my residence on my account. The saga of incredible India goes on…

Sepia tone.

2009-08-05T21:35:00.000-07:00

In the 1967-released Bonnie and Clyde, when Clyde meets his brother, the film is still in full colour. But when Bonnie overpowered by nostalgia and missing her mom terribly finally takes the gang to meet her family, Arthur Penn shoots the entire Parker family reunion in sepia tone. Why?

If only I could've emulated Penn I would have done that very thing to this press note I found in my old papers. It’s about The Last Gandhi Movie website’s performance between 09-09-1998 and 30-06-1999. It’s also about a gambit that failed owing (in retrospect) to the lack of timely follow-up and inability to provide sustained support mainly because of inexperience and over-optimism. I thought I would reproduce it here for nostalgic reasons:

32181 hits in 295 days* is ‘jolly good show’ for a niche Gandhi novel website.

Mumbai, 20 July:- He wrote a novel, ‘The Last Gandhi Movie’, cross-p0llinatin Gandhi’s life with Hollywood lore. Then, instead of chasing literary agents and querying publishers, he opted for the internet route, to take the pulse of fiction readers. Last September, as soon as the site was up, he sent out ‘visit this book site’ e-appeals to some of the readers who had posted book reviews at Amazon.com, in addition to ‘listing’ his site with search engines and directories.

Interest is where you find it.

The Internet is a great leveler. Ask nicely and you shall be given. ‘The Last Known Address of MK Gandhi, Esquire’ at www.addgandhi.com is a living proof of it. Here, you get to read sample chapters of the novel and e-mail them to friends. You can also meet the cast of characters – a bevy of unusual suspects, get to know the chronology of events, and play an interactive role-switch game. A fair proportion of the people who visited the site came from search engines like Alta Vista. They asked to be taken there out of interest or curiosity is what it means. The highest point in the hits curve coincided with the time span when the e-mailing was done. The next high point came when the posting to search engines and directories was intensified. No banner advertising, just e-mailing and site listing!

What they have been saying about addgandhi.com.

Here’s an assortment of comments from the site visitors. “Who is publishing The Last [Gandhi] Movie? When and where will it published? Who is your target audience? Your site is graphically very exciting.” (neeta@eartheweb.com, 05-11-98) “… if you are the maker then you have it in you. The very essence of looking at things differently, think separately and mere fun of speculating ‘What ifs’ and ‘What if nots’. I really do like your style and appreciate your work.” (anirvan.sen@tipeur.ge.com, 12-11-98) “I checked out your site and it’s interesting. I’m not really into role-playing games or Gandhi, but I enjoyed it just the same. I’ll visit again…” (infringer13@ hotmail.com, 24.10.98) “I very much look forward to your forthcoming novel. Please keep me apprised of its publication schedule.” (hharwood@sps.edu, 23.10.98) “Hi, I really liked your site. I heard about it from a friend… Very interesting, will it be published?” (sing2@fas.harvard.edu, 23.10.98) “I was pleasantly surprised at your site. I do intend to read your novel some time … where can I find it in bio-degradable format?” (s_bandyopadhyay@mgmt.pudue.edu, 20.10.98) “… your site is lovely, informative, and with attitude.” (india2.0@hindustantimes.com, 14.09.98) “Brilliant site by the way, haven’t laughed so much for a long time and that was only after visiting it for a short time … can’t wait to get back and see what else is there.” (010544.255@compuserve.com, 15.09.98)

No bells, no whistles.

In keeping with the essential simplicity of Gandhi, the site is devoid of gimmickry. The only concession to the ‘movie’ of the book title is a preamble with a smiling Gandhi on a ‘screen’ pop-up. The tone and the writing are upbeat and literate like the novel it showcases. The site has RSACi’s seal of approval for content, has a link to Amazon.com via a books and music section and a Recommend-it link as well. Deepak Mankar who wrote the novel created the content. DBS Internet Services Private Limited designed and host the site.
[*From 09-09-98 to 30-06-99]

To date The Last Gandhi Movie remains unpublished. You can find the scattered remnants of The Last Known Address of MK Gandhi, Esquire at http://digbig.com/5badqn, though.

Don’t get me wrong.

2009-08-02T18:19:00.000-07:00

There is one amusing ad making the rounds of the idiot box just now. Its subtext is completely out of kilter with its own original intent. In trying to persuade the Indian metrosexual to take to a fairness cream, it unintentionally pokes fun at two desi demigods: cricket and people born with safed chamdi, preferably from abroad.

In it, the pretty girl busses the metrosexual businessman because he has apparently used the product with positive results. In the process, she pointedly ignores a star Indian cricketer as well as two white skinned colleagues of his.

Kya yaar, Doni?

Evangelist.

2009-07-31T22:02:00.000-07:00

All those who crib and gripe about Hindi movies neglect to mention their one monumental achievement.

Almost single-handedly, they did what the national government couldn’t.

They made Hindi acceptable all over India so much so that even its most vociferous opponents eventually joined the band wagon.

If that isn’t something, tell me what is.

Now the Hindi movies made for the Indian Diaspora as well as the domestic multiplexes are probably doing for Hinglish what its mom never thought it being capable of.

Becoming global.

Kya yaar, Doni?

Wrong again.

2009-07-29T21:10:00.000-07:00

I have been doing things for the wrong reasons all my life.

Take travel, for instance.

I have never been a great traveler. I remember a ditty from my childhood that said something to the effect that travel made a person wise and well-rounded. I don’t think I quite believed it. Still, as a child, I travelled quite a bit and even made myself enjoy it. Or, more accurately, made myself believe that I enjoyed it. Somehow, around that time, I got hold of the notion that important people travelled a lot. And, that they did it mostly by air.

In my Clarion-McCann stint, as a senior writer and later as Creative Controller, I got to travel quite a bit on work and found colleagues envying me for it. This and the fact that a promotion as Creative Director with unlimited travel among other mouth-watering perks was dangled as a bait to prevent me from quitting Clarion-McCann further strengthened my belief in the equation “travel = important persona” and vice versa.

In my Everest days, both as Creative Chief and later Creative Consultant, I got to travel way too much and stay at the best of hotels and found myself to be the target of envy of colleagues.

Later, I flew twice to the US of A to visit Abhi and Ujwal and twice to Sri Lanka on work.

Somewhere along the way, though, I lost my zest for travelling and finally, late in life, came to terms with the fact that I was a lousy traveler. I didn’t really enjoy it. Never did. I did not have the stomach for it. Never had. I would rather stay put in South Bombay. I feel safe and out of harm’s reach in SoBo, something I may not feel in Soho.

Sometime in the future, I shall be travelling to the US. I’m not looking forward to it, I’m afraid.

Give me five.

2009-06-19T21:45:00.000-07:00

Frank Sinatra’s fan, I ain’t. I don’t care much for Lata Mangeshkar, either. Give me a Noor Jahan http://digbig.com/4yxxb, a Suraiya, a Geeta Dutt, a Suman Kalyanpur or a Shamshad Begum http://digbig.com/4yxxd any time. But that’s neither here nor there. The story I’m about to tell you is of the very first song in English I remember hearing being played on the family gramaphone http://digbig.com/4yxxe at 233 Khetwadi Main Road. http://digbig.com/4xyxy. The 78 rpm disc had, if memory serves, a blue or green EMI label. The singer probably was young Sinatra. This was in 1946 when I was just ten. He had apparently recorded what may have well been a cover version of the Gordon ‘Tex’ Beneke hit single Give Me Five Minutes More. Tex was the lead singer of the Glen Miller Band in those days. The song in the blues/jazz genre was originally sung by Phil Brito in a B-grade movie called Sweetheart of Sigma Chi. http://digbig.com/4yxxf. The Tex Beneke hit was on the charts for five weeks at the No.4 spot in the US, it seems. I distinctly remember the refrain of the song:

Give me five minutes more, only five minutes more.
Let me stay, let me stay, in your arms.

P.S.: The reason I went to the trouble of Googling the old song is that I have a strong feeling that there is some happy memory connected to it. Try as I might, though, I cannot fathom what.

Poor princess.

2009-05-02T05:02:00.000-07:00

A few days back, I happened to watch purely by chance Mona Lisa Smile in which Julia Roberts plays Katherine Watson, a feminist and forward-thinking Art History instructor in Wellesley, a women’s college in the US in the early 1950s. Though smacking at times of the feel-good chick flick http://digbig.com/4yrbx aroma, a key sequence in the movie in which Katherine’s most committed student keen on joining Yale for a law degree suddenly does a 360-degree turnaround to opt for instant marriage instead made quite an impact on me. It reminded me of Grace Kelly. To me, Kelly’s abdication of a most promising career in insecurity-laden Hollywood just a year after winning an Oscar for The Country Girl (1955) and turning down the marriage proposal of co-star Bing Crosby to wed Prince Ranier III of Monaco has epitomised the compromise women the world over make in favour of marriage offering long-term security and a future as a virtual broodmare. Monaco, by the way, was a little known (till then) principality – and tax haven – in Europe which “in those pre-Jet Set days catered to the frantically idle über-rich and the Eurotrash who clung to them in an altogether more discreet way than it can today”. http://digbig.com/4yrby. Like Kelly, I have seen plenty of women sacrificing their career and future on the matrimonial altar. For instance: http://digbig.com/4yrca and http://digbig.com/4yrcb.

The Sagamore Saga.

2009-04-28T17:41:00.000-07:00

Seven-year-0ld Billy’s Uncle Sagamore in Charles Williams’ The Diamond Bikini (Simon & Schuster, London, 1956) is quite a character. As usual, I happened to have this gem of a book lying unread for years in one of my cupboards. What a treat it is. First of all, this (to me) unknown mystery writer has a great knack for story telling. Secondly, he uses Billy, the son of Sam Noonan. an itinerant race course tout, to tell it. This makes the narrative rip-roaringly hilarious because Billy recounts every shenanigan of his uncle with a straight face without understanding the deviousness behind it. Sagamore has a genius for making money without doing an honest day’s work. He sells moonshine, runs the gambling racket and even the whorehouses in the nearby town in the Deep South of the US of A in the early fifties. What’s more, he does it while claiming to be always cooperating with the law and manages to duck out of every confrontation with the Sherif, whom he calls "Shurf", unscathed. When a nightclub singer - and the star witness in a gangland killing - takes refuge on his farm and then goes missing in the wilderness wearing nothing but a diamond-studded g-string, he masterminds a whole carnival around the search for her and literally mints money. The law finally catches up with Sagamore who is incarcerated for a long, long time. In the jail too, he organises all sorts of money-making rackets until the thoroughly disgusted jailor and the State Governor conspire to have him pardoned claiming a mistrial. It’s a laugh riot.

Ray of no hope.

2009-04-26T23:07:00.000-07:00

I am ashamed to confess that I was no fan of Satyajit Ray to begin with. http://digbig.com/4yqkf. When I joined Clarion-McCann back in 1965, the Bengalis there with whom I had to hobnob used to speak of him in a hushed, deeply reverential tone. That must have kind of put my back up. I started to almost despise Ray for no reason at all but did not articulate my views to fellow Clarionites for obvious reasons. It was only later when I started to understand the rudiments of what cinema was all about http://digbig.com/4yqkh that I did a complete about-face on Ray. This morning I read a piece in Mumbai Mirror (Interval by Chako) about a free screening of a Satyajit Ray film, Charulata, in fact, in – hold your breath! – Kolkata recently. There was only a solitary person in the auditorium – a homeless vagrant who had wandered in for the free air conditioning. Even he wanted to walk out half way but was detained by the two Ray enthusiasts who had organised the show. By contrast, the Satyajit Ray retrospective at the Lincoln Centre, New York, this April, organised by the eponymous Film Society, draws huge crowds of cinema aficionados with seats sold out weeks in advance. http://digbig.com/4yqkj. Chako also draws our attention to the fisticuffs in Venice between a female professor and a male journalist over the last ticket of Devi, a part of last year’s local Satyajit Ray retrospective. “A Ray film invites you in, but also demands that you accept it on its own terms. And those who open themselves to Ray's method are in for some of the richest experiences the cinema has to offer." This is the opinion of Richard Pena, the Film Society's director of programming. Pauline “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang” Kael described Pather Panchali, the film that brought Ray to the world’s notice, "beautiful, sometimes funny, and full of love". Akira Kurosawa wrote: “The quiet but deep observation, understanding, and love of the human race, which are characteristic of all his films, have impressed me greatly. Not to have seen the cinema of Ray means existing in the world without seeing the sun or the moon.” “Ray's magic, the simple poetry of his images and their emotional impact, will always stay with me,” wrote Martin Scorsese. All of which brings me to the question that has always bothered me. Why are Indians so grudging in accepting genius amidst them? Why are we so petty minded? The problem, I reckon, lies in Ray’s propensity to portray life at its most humdrum as he sees it (“a 5-minute close-up of water being poured from a pitcher”). “We don’t go to the multiplex except to be bedazzled and razzmatazzed, man. We want kitsch-laden, glitzy tripe, man. Hang realism, man. For us, reality Tv with Rakhi Sawant is the only reality we can face. We are Indians. We are like that only.” Chako lays to rest the usual, most-bandied accusation against Ray that he got his fame by selling India’s poverty to the world. He points out that only the first Ray film was about the rural poor. The rest of most of his ouvre was about the affluent and educated Kolkatan Bhadralok of which he happened to be very much a part.

Fin de siècle.

2009-04-22T17:19:00.000-07:00

The French, they say, always have a propensity to put across things rather stylishly. Literally speaking, “fin de siècle” means “end of the century”. The phrase contains a hint of a suggestion, though, of the end of an era and the onset of the coming one as well as of a time of degeneration and a time of new beginning. In a broader and worldlier context, it connotes a sinister mixture of decadence and opulence. All of which sounds a mouthful and bombastic and pretentious. Reading Hanif Kureshi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (Faber and Faber, London, 1990) is one entertaining way to get an insider’s view of a fin de siècle. The Whitbread Prize winning novel is set in a decaying London just before the onset of Thatcherism when Britain was said to have become totally "ungovernable”. The protagonist, Karim Amir, a second-generation British-Indian, is the bi-sexual son of the Buddha of Suburbia, Haroon ("Harry") Amir, who had emigrated from India in the late fifties or early sixties. Pop music in the times of the Punk Rock supremacy, theatre, art, deceit, fast-changing sexual mores, race relations, fake gurus, social climbing and “moving away” from the decaying suburbs are what The Buddha of Suburbia deals with in an often farcical vein.