Adilshahi in Everest.

Does History repeat itself? I guess it does sometimes in strange (read “outrageous”) ways. When I joined Everest Advertising in October 1976, I was hired by the 20^th century reincarnation of either the 4^th or the 6^th Adilshah of Bijapur, judging solely by the coincidence of their first name being identical with the Everest despot's surname. I did not realize it then and there, of course. The scales fell from my eyes only later when I recalled how the place had been run like a Sultanate with an iron fist in a faux ambience of camaraderie and shared authority. The short-statured Sultan was a triumph of sartorial artistry par excellence, always impeccably attired in pin-striped suits and well groomed to the hilt. His smoke was Dunhill in the maroon and gold twin pack. The everyday facial expression he wore when he strutted about among us minions was a regally supercilious scowl. It did a disappearing act, though, when he was in the presence of a client. In his durbar, there was a pecking order among his courtiers, some being more equal than others. The Sultanate had been subdivided among jagirs. These had been handed over to various courtiers who enjoyed privileges commensurate with the extent of loyalty they showed to the Sultan. Queer sort of a fellow was our Sultan, both figuratively and literally. Those were the days when, for a person in his socio-economic situation, the whole world was his closet. He had a lot of fellow travelers in the advertising business. When he was interviewing me for the job of a creative chief, he had, I remember, stoutly taken umbrage over a press ad series for room air conditioners in my portfolio that I happened to be rather proud of. He found them objectionable, he said, because the headlines addressed to the family head used sexist phrases like “Lord and master”. I tried to explain that it was tongue-in-cheek as could be judged from the tone of the rest of the text. He disdainfully brushed aside my argument. Ironically, as the Sultan himself revealed in a weaker moment during one of his daily walking tours of the Sultanate, he thought the secretaries of his courtiers-in-chief were “office wives” and expected them to display the same degree of fealty as their real-life wives. It was rumoured that, in at least two cases, his word was literally taken as God’s own truth by the minions concerned. At the time of my joining, Everest was in a creative trough. People thought their ads were so-so. Or, to call a spade a spade, mediocre. When I started writing for the agency, my work especially for Swissair suddenly caught the eye of the market. Clients started ringing the doorbell. The Sultan was happy but excessively frugal in his praise and rewards. He had learned his statecraft well from the British. Divide and rule. He decided in his infinite wisdom to divide the creative jagir down the middle making me the copy head and leaving the art honchodom in somebody else’s hands. To put me in my place so to speak, he invited the Court Jester to the Swissair plans board. But, do what he might, the fact remained that his annual all-expenses-paid junket to Zurich needed my best efforts. Fortunately, for an unusually long stretch of 13 years, the success run of Swissair creative continued. A few years after my adieu to Everest, the Sultan met his Waterloo at the hands of a bizarre Nelson: the daughter of Everest’s founder.  His own trusted courtiers-in-chief including the Court Jester too betrayed him. The bells tolled tumultuously no more for the strutting tyrant. 

The Music Room.

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.

WWW = World Wide Waste?

In the dustbin of history, one often stumbles upon all sorts of gems, well almost. In my cache of old stuff in the D: drive, saved in July 2005, I found this scintillating bit of wisdom from Bill Coleman, senior vice president, Salary.com gleaned from a survey of 10,000 US workers conducted in May and June 2005. “Our results show that workers on average are wasting a little more than twice what their employers expect", i.e., 2.09 hours spent online daily, checking e-mail and surfing Web sites, to be exact. The second biggest time waster, in the opinion of the volunteer respondents, was socializing with co-workers. This was before social networking became the next really, really big thing, mind you. [Social networking timeline: http://yasns.pbwiki.com/.] I wonder what the WWW figure stands at as of now. http://www.salary.com/careers/layoutscripts/crel_display.asp?tab=cre&cat=nocat&ser=Ser374&part=Par555.

Rad humanist, who me?

I just came across a reference to MN Roy’s Radical Humanism in a translated-from-German book on Fearless Nadia. And I remembered my father used to read one of his books bound in maroon cloth at 233 Khetwadi Main Road http://digbig.com/4xyxr a little after 1947. Around then, he was also reading a biography of Joseph Stalin. His interests were wide ranging from political theory to Sufi mystics and bhakti poets (Kabir, Tukaram, Dnyaneshwar and the rest). I guess that’s where I must have got my eclectic reading taste from. My reading as a child was fairy tales n English. But I also read a lot of social, historical and sword-and-sorcery stories in Marathi, regurgitating some of the latter in my class magazine. http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/05/english-yes-english-grammar-no.html. Later, I switched my loyalty to pulp fiction in Marathi and in English. http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2008/03/genre-pulp-fiction-avatar-marathi.html. I also flirted with the self-improvement genre at one point in my life. http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/search?q=self-improvement. Literature absorbed me most of my adult life. http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/05/never-judge-book-by-its-title-cover-is.html. Now, my interests are more non-fiction: geopolitics, sociology, history (particularly the subaltern stream), cinema. http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/search/label/Arundhati%20Roy. As I said earlier, I came across this book on Fearless Nadia, originally titled in German “Zorro’s Blonde Sister” according to a blog post I found here: http://bmukhtiar.blogspot.com/. It is written by Dorothee Wenner, a Berlin-based filmmaker, writer and curator for the Berlin International Film Festival, with incredible insight into Indian socio-political, cultural and film history. I don’t agree with the political and feminist subtext she “reads” into the Nadia repertoire, though. I reckon she goes a bit too overboard there, almost to the point of sounding like a hagiographer. Yet she fills in the background of the Nadia story brilliantly with appropriate vignettes of personalities at various points (MN Roy, Mridula Sarabhai the not-quite-feminist Gandhi, for instance). Here’s what Wenner says about Nadia (aka Mary Evan): “For a blonde, blue-eyed, busty white girl to capture the collective imagination of Indians in the pre-Independence era, was no mean feat! Add to that the stunts she did! She was, along with the Wadias, a pioneer in the Stunt Film Genre in India. I pride myself for being a feminist, but Nadia represented a fearlessness with a dash of sparkling wit, that’s unmatched in any actress of any era.” http://saritharao.blogspot.com/2006/01/true-blue-bolly-interview-with.html. There’s a spiel about JBH Wadia’s desire “to make movies that touted the strength and emancipation of women” on this website. http://memsaabstory.wordpress.com/2008/01/28/fearless-nadia/.

Monkey business.

I’m afraid there’s been in the Harbhajan-Symonds imbroglio a serious “category mistake". Doreen, Henry Root’s daughter http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/05/rooting-for-henry-well-done-mate.html would have most probably described it so. The reason, I daresay, is either ignorance or sheer sloth. The parties concerned know neither their Darwin nor their Australian history. What's worse, they have not taken the trouble to find out. Darwin’s view needs no elaboration. Australian history does. Owing to the British law’s proclivity in the 18th century to view the newly discovered Australian continent as the ideal dumping ground for the scum of the earth, a penal colony was born with just one woman for every four convicts as it turned out. http://www.cultureandrecreation.gov.au/articles/australianhistory/. I’m surprised neither ICC, ACB nor BCCI have bothered to consult non-cricketing experts on the facts. No lawyers or journalists seem to have caught on to the glaring discrepancy fairly staring them in their face. If only they would take a deep breath, stop thinking like boys playing galli cricket and take a wider world view of the incidence!

Change, change, change.

The more I think about it, the more amazing I find it. I must have been born under a forward-looking star that ordained that I would see so much change and so much history in the making in a single lifetime. http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2007/04/pain-and-suffering.html. For instance, as a child, I saw MK Gandhi at fairly close quarters at one of his prayer meetings in Mahabaleshwar. I wrote about it in my still unpublished novel http://www.addgandhi.com/original/ on Gandhi and Hollywood, The Last Gandhi Movie. A few years later, I listened to Nehru’s famous eulogy at his funeral (“the light has gone out of our lives”) on our 5-valvr Bush radio. http://www.eulogywriters.com/ghandi.htm. So even if I rank among the lesser mortals who do not make history, I have been a mute witness to history in the making. Some of the late 20th landmarks I watched at more than six degrees of separation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation were Nehru’s death, the infamous Emergency interlude, Operation Bluestar and its aftermath, to mention the most noteworthy. I witnessed India’s progression from a colony to a state capitalist economy to a free economy. I saw at least one hack Victoria driver being butchered from my third floor terrace at 233 Khetwadi Main Road http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/07/morgue.html in the 1946-47 riots as well as Muslim houses behind as well from across my present residence in old Thakurdwar being put to flame in the 1992-93 massacre following Babri Masjid’s demolition. Apart from these, I saw my own family graduate from the coal choolah and the kerosene stove to bottled cooking gas and from the coal-fired water heater to electric heater. http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/06/heat-of-days-long-past.html. I saw the valve radio making way for the transistor powered one. http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2007/03/clueless-in-mumbai.html. I saw my portable typewriter making way for the PC in a span of forty years. http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/06/my-portable-typewriter-tale.html. And, I also saw myself graduating from the milk in a bottle and later in a plastic bag that needs boiling every morning http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/06/neo-luddite-relents-sheepishly-shame.html to the milk in a carton that needs no boiling at all. The Internet, e-mail, IM. SMS, Wen 2.0, cellular phones, CDs, DVDs, the likelihood of the end of the civilisation as we know it and of the institution of marriage … good grief, Charlie Brown, where are we headed?

Dan Brown’s ‘truth’.

As a child, Dan Brown (born in 1964 – which puts him bang in the so-called Conscious Revolution era, a time of spiritual awakening in American history, demographically speaking – Viet Nam protests, feminism, ecology, a rebellious counterculture, that sort of stuff http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness_Revolution) had what might be called a ‘proper’ Christian upbringing. He used to attend Sunday school and summer camps run by the Church. He also used to sing in the Church choir. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Brown. Yet he grew up to write the bestselling novels, The Da Vinci Code (1993) and Angels & Demons (2000). Fiction though they claim to be what they’re saying strikes an echoing chord in the mind of anyone who knows his history. I think they’re popular not because they’re racy thrillers but because they offer a premise that seems reasonably plausible. The fundamentalists will do anything to keep their monopoly of knowing and dispensing truth. Kill, torture, maim, character-assassinate, lie, twist facts… you name it. All of which reminds me of what Aldous Huxley wrote in Ape & Essence:

Church and State.
Greed and hate.
Two baboon persons
In one supreme gorilla.

Also, of the incidence earlier in the same novel where there are two groups of apes facing each other with a different flag waving behind each one. Each group of apes has an Albert Einstein, on his hands and knees, on a leash. Each of these Einsteins is facing the other and speaking of how terrible their exploitation is. The scene ends with the announcement of the death of modern science by suicide.

Cinema meets India. India meets cinema.

By a strange twist of fate, Salon Indien happened to be the name of the venue for the very first public show of Cinématographe Lumière at one franc a head on 28 December 1895. It was a tiny hall with a sitting capacity of one hundred located in the basement of the Grand Café at 14 Boulevard des Capuchines, Paris. The first show of the Lumière Brothers’ six short films (Entry of Cinematographe, The Sea Bath, Arrival of a Train, A Demolition, Ladies & Soldiers on Wheels and Leaving the Factory) – each 17 metres long – was held on 7 July 1896, a night of thunder and lightning, in South Mumbai at the Watson Hotel opposite Kala Ghoda and the Jehangir Art Gallery, within walking distance of the Gateway of India. Seven days later, the venue was shifted to the Novelty Theatre where the show had twenty four features including A Stormy Sea and The Thames at Waterloo Bridge. The 32-day Mumbai run of the Cinématographe Lumière at both the venues, described by The Times of India as "Living Photographic Pictures in Life-Size Reproductions by Mssrs. Lumiere Brotheres" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinema_of_India ended on 15 August 1896. http://www.indiaheritage.org/perform/cinema/history/inscene.htm. But certainly not India’s tryst with cinema. Or, mine for that matter. I remember making magic lanterns and, later, even movie projectors out of shoe boxes and reels and drawing pictures on stiff tracing paper to make my childish movies. I also recall visiting most movie houses in my neighbourhood – there were at least a dozen within easy walking distance – for zanana (women and children only) shows with my sister. The ticket prices then were one rupee and five annas for stalls and two rupees and ten annas for a seat in the balcony or in a box. Those days, you could buy a garishly printed booklet containing the story of the movie in outline and the songs in their entirety for the princely sum of 4 annas or a quarter of a rupee. Or, you could buy for just 1 anna a crudely printed booklet with songs only in Hindi as well as Urdu scripts. I’m not quite sure when they stopped printing and selling these booklets. It was probably some time in the late sixties. Now they try to palm off on you lavishly produced books about the making of the movie you’re about to watch, often written by firang writers who claim to be teachers and/or researchers in a film faculty abroad but sound like publicists on the payroll of the producer.

Reads just like a novel.

"Oh, yes, I'm the great pretender
Pretending I'm living well
My need is such,
I pretend too much
I'm lonely but no one can tell."
(The Platters, Buck Ram)

I read Intimate Lies a couple of years back. It's the story of the F Scott Fitzgerald-Sheilah Graham liaison retold by her son. He wrote it a few years after her death to set the records straight. It reads rather like a novel, as a seasoned blurb writer would put it. robertwestbrook.com For all we know, it is a novel. Else, how do you explain the way he describes her state of mind at various times in her life as if he were living inside her head? Truth to tell, I don't mind. To me, all memoirs, history, biography and autobiography are pretence if not outright lies, at times unintentional. That's also why the so-called rewriting of history doesn't bother me. [You'll find The Great Pretender song lyrics at either of these websites: queenwords.com or persweb.direct.ca.]

Missionary impossible.

L Ron Hubbard was a moderately successful sci-fi writer. He said he was a World War II hero. History says the US Navy sacked him for incompetence. L Ron also 'invented' Scientology. This dianetics-based cult with 'applied religious philosophy' has always held a strange fascination for me. Its eccentric, sci-fi like, totalitarian theology does not appeal to me. What intrigues me is the list of its adherents. It reads like a high-achiever Who's Who. (Tom Cruise and John Travolta are two examples. No business like show business, what?) I read on the Web how the 'Church' used the much criticised and much feared Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) forcing Google to expunge from its database URLs of several Norway-based Xenu.net's pages [xenu.net] containing "mirrored excerpts from sacred texts which the cult guards jealously as its intellectual capital." (Thomas C Greene in 'Scientologists gag Google'.) theregister.co.uk. Also read a related Reuters report ('Google revives Scientology Web page') at news.com.com.

Are we like that only?

Imagine! A cursory Bollywood history (of sorts) tells you Kishore Kumar was “a relatively unknown actor” before Padosan (1968) – and banking on our willing suspension of disbelief against all hope! This sloppily written and shoddily edited paperback makes no mention whatsoever of Rajesh Khanna and V Shantaram. If memory serves, Kishore Kumar was a renowned comedian of long standing much earlier. Remember Chalti Ka Naam Gaadi released exactly a decade before Mehmood’s cult classic? The omission of Rajesh Khanna too is curious, almsot callous – especially considering his singing voice was Kishore Kumar in most of his movies. (RK scored eleven hits in a row followed by eight flops.) Shantaram’s Duniya Na Maney is considered a landmark in societal filmmaking. Could it be a case of selective amnesia, I wonder? Considering the high editorial standards of the book’s renowned publishers (after all, they’ve India’s No.1 print columnist-novelist on their marquee), it’s also irritating to come across such erratic but obvious blunders as “Dean Martin and Bing Crosby’s Road series”. Well, to err is human, I guess, and we all are like that only.

Legendary story telling. Wire to wire.

Born to write. Poetic prose. Word magic. Sorry, I’m bogged down in clichés trying to tell you about one of the greatest reads I came across in a long, long time. I sensed this was it when I was glancing at the ‘Acknowledgements’ section of Laura Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit: An American Legend in Strand Book Stall. I’m almost as good a judge of books as Tom Smith, Seabiscuit’s trainer, was of horseflesh. No empty boast that one, believe you me. There’s first-rate story (and history) telling in those 314 tightly written pages, not a word wasted. By contrast, another ‘legend’ book I read recently about Kishore Kumar paled in comparison. It seemed overwritten, plodding, bordering on hagiography. Maybe, I’ve a weakness for well-crafted narratives where every well-chosen word adds to the forward march of the story and reading pleasure. More about the Seabiscuit book at http://www.seabiscuitonline.com/index1.htm. More about the KK book at http://kanaad.blogspot.com/ (16 July 2003 post). By the way, what makes Seabiscuit so special is that Hillenbrand researched and wrote it while suffering from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome all throughout the four years of toil. Her grit and courage matched her subject’s, stride for stride, till the winning post. Seabiscuit was on the NY Times bestseller list, at No.1 for about a month.

Reporting history. As he saw it happen.

Hands-on, “breaking news”, eyewitness history, anyone? Try Durga Das’s India From Curzon to Nehru and After (Rupa & Co, New Delhi, 2004, Rs.295/-). Or, if there’s a Strand Book Stall near you, Rs.236/- only. It’s one of the best ways of updating one’s knowledge of recent history. Durga Das’s writing, happily enough, is objective, sane, even-keeled, fast paced – and without rancour or malice even when he’s telling a tale of the wickedest villainy. He has told whatever happened as he “saw” it happen. As an Associated Press of India employee and a close associate of KC Roy, the news syndication pioneer in India, right from the time of Curzon’s viceroyalty, Durga Das apparently had an intimate access to the high and the mighty. He used his opportunity to advantage and did a great job of news gathering and dissemination for a long, long time. The book is an insider’s take on and a view from the wings of twentieth century Indian history. Absolutely edge-of-the-seat reading, far more exciting than the most thrilling of thrillers! Read a sample excerpt here: http://www.hvk.org/articles/1196/0039.html.