Scary story.

Sometimes, a story scares you without warning. I'm reading one just now. It's called The Anderson Boy. Joseph Hansen wrote it. Hansen's chief claim to fame is that he created a gay private eye character, Dave Brandstetter. I have not read a single one of the 12-book series. Apparently, they are very good. This is the first time I'm reading his work. The story line he uses in it is to confront the perpetrator of a past crime with its victim who is suffering from amnesia. The anticipation of what will happen any moment is what raises the fear quotient. Also, there is a seeming similarity in the circumstance of the past event with the circumstances of the present. It's very like what Hitchcock used to do. Raise the anticipation of the shape of something dire coming soon. The reader's mind does the rest.

Flick. Movie. Film. Cinema.

The two rhyming pejoratives in Chicks on Flicks, the Sony Pix review show title, took me back to the days http://digbig.com/4xypw when I could, and would, distinguish between movie, film and cinema. According to my then received ideas on the French theory, here is how it goes. The "filmic" facet of the art concerns its relationship with the world. The "cinematic" aspect deals with the aesthetics and the internal structure of a film. "Cinema" may turn out to be high art, for all you know. "Movie" delineates its role as an economic commodity or a marketable product. You watch a movie just like you eat pop corn and drink soda now sold in the multiplexes at as conscionably high prices as those of the movie tickets. If you dare me to spout some more of my borrowed wisdom, I would bore you with the definition of "auteur" again according to the French theory. The French word means "author". When it is applied to cinema, it means a film maker whose individual style and total control over all elements of production give a film his or her personal and unique stamp. Hitchcock http://digbig.com/4ybhd was considered the quintessential auteur although he worked in the British and, later on, in the Hollywood Studio System. Ask Francois Truffaut, the originator of the auteur theory. John Ford and Howard Hawks too sailed in the same boat as the Master of Suspense. Woody Allen may also fit the bill. http://digbig.com/4ybhe. If you're still not bored to distraction, let me enlighten you on what a chick flick is. Simply put, it's a movie specifically designed to appeal to a primarily female audience, the exact opposite of a guy movie. Two recent chick flicks had either a made-in-India (Monsoon Wedding, 2001) or a British Indian Sikh expat (Bend It Like Beckham, 2002) bias. Was Chak De India a chick flick?

Maya.

The first thing my son Ashu said while giving me his copy of The Palace of Illusion was: "I wish somebody would make a movie of it."

After having read it, I couldn't agree less.

While there's plenty of spectacle, action and drama in Chitra Banerjee Devakaruni's novelisation of The Mahabharata - in other words, what a shrewd filmmaker looks for in a novel before deciding to make a movie of it - most of it "happens" in Draupadi's mind. How do you show it except, maybe, using the current by-now already clichéd device of switching to (say) black and white footage from full colour to depict what she "saw" in her mind's eye?

Not good enough, if you ask me.

While the event horizon of the novel broadly resembles the Vyasa epic's, Devakaruni's reference point seems more in the vicinity of Dr Irawati Karve's Yuganta: The end of an epoch. She mentioned it as one of her secondary sources in a recent Sunday Mid-day interview. Chapter 7 of Yuganta, by the way, is about Mayasabah, "The Palace of Maya".

The closest a movie can come to a book is by suggesting instead of actually showing. Alfred Hitchcock knew this well. He never forgot the unique movie screen and projector each one of us possesses. His was the conjuror's art.

This is the kind of stuff The Palace of Illusion and The Mistress of Spices are made of. When you read them, you can run your own movie in the privacy of your mind.

Just after I started reading The Palace of Illusion, I thought it was a bit overwritten. I changed my mind on that score soon enough. In fact, whenever push came to shove, I found Devakaruni at her deftest. She knows her craft really, really well. She knows when not to overdo it. She is the Mistress of Spices. And, of Illusions. She is the supreme sorceress of subtlety when it comes to story-telling. Draupadi's swayamwar, her disrobing, the 18-day war and its aftermath are all written with great restraint using the power of suggestion.

The Palace of Illusion, a Vyasa redux in one sense, makes light even of its load of Advaita sagacity. Try to remember that you are the instrument and I the doer, Krishna, her platonic boy friend, tells Panchaali when he comes to help her soul's final journey.

(By the way, I owe the Krishna="boy friend" equation to Dr Irawati Karve's Marathi eponymous essay written in 1970, the year of her death. She described how her son-in-law called Vithoba of Pandharpur her "boy friend" once after her return from her journey there. http://tinyurl.com/5h2tvq. It puzzled her first, she writes. On reflection, she found the descriptive tag appropriate. After all, had Vithoba (an incarnation of Vishu) not been called "mother", "father", "companion", "relative", "sweetheart" and the like? So what was wrong with "boy friend"?)

Earlier, when told to confirm if Sikhandi's narration of his past is true, Krishna says: “He believes it to be so. Isn’t that what truth is? The force of a person’s believing seeps into those around him – into the very earth and air and water – until there’s nothing else.”

In reply to Panchaali's final query Are you truly divine?, he laughingly replies: "Yes, I am. You are, too, you know!"

No drum roll. No trumpets. The world is maya after all.

Got it?

P.S.: Devakaruni's feminist and pacifist concerns make their presence felt throughout, though. For instance, the initiative taken by the women of the Pandava clan as well as Gandhari to rehabilitate the widows of the war is strongly reminiscent of Maitri, the helpline for Asian women in abusive situations that she established in 1991.

Afterthought: Avantika, 15, Ashu's younger daughter, a Digital Native from New Jersey, a good writer for her age but a lazy and reluctant reader, was given the first option on The Palace of Illusion by her dad before it was passed on to me. I hope she decides to read it someday soon.

Not even a startle.

When I was in Guam http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/06/stinkeroo.html for a couple of months in 1991-92, I met a jovial American architect, a friend of my son Abhijeet. Apart from a body odour sharper than his wit and a stunning Scandinavian live-in girl friend, his most unforgettable characteristic was his love for and intimate knowledge of the sci-fi movie genre. I remember going with him for a sci-fi movie (most likely The Terminator – I seem to have forgotten the movie’s name as well as the avid movie goer’s) and listening to his almost non-stop commentary about the lore and the treatment as if it was a matter of life and death. I almost cited to him Ashok Kumar’s “It’s only a film” comment borrowed from Hitch. http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/06/its-only-film.html. I was reminded of the incidence while watching Batman Begins Friday night on HBO. That the movie did not dazzle me, did not get a startle response from me means nothing at all, really. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startle_response. The original intention of the movie maker was to undo the damage done to the Batman myth and lore by the spectacular box office and critical flop of the expensively mounted trio preceding it, I guess. According to all indications, Batman Begins marked the beginning of the success of the Batman franchise in moviedom. The gamble to make the Batman myth as preached by the Batman Comics more credible and more human has apparently paid off. For instance, how Batman became so adept at combative skills. (Ans: By joining the League of Shadows.) How and from where he got his costume, his weapons, his armoured vehicle, his hang glider cum cape and so forth. (Ans: From Wayne Enterprises’ experimental lab.) Central to the tale, though, is the theme of Brue Wayne’s fear of bats. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_bats. He got it when he fell into a well as a lad of eight and was startled by the drove of bats. He overcame it under the hallucinogenic influence of a mountainside blue flower during his spell as a League of Shadows rookie. The introduction of Bruce’s childhood girl friend Rachel Dawes early on and her continuing presence in the narrative may be interpreted as a ploy to lay to rest once for all the lurking suspicion that he is gay. (It seems George Clooney wittingly, unwittingly, or maybe even mischieviously, resurrected the gay ghost by telling Barbara Walters that in Batman & Robin he played Batman as gay. "I was in a rubber suit and I had rubber nipples. I could have played Batman straight, but I made him gay." Barbara Walters laughed, then asked, "George, is Batman gay?" To which he responded, "No, but I made him gay." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Wayne) Emulating the excellent Hitchcock and equally admirable Ashok Kumar, I would like to remind all those who take such matters seriously: “It’s only a comics character, for Pete’s sake.” P.S.: A couple of months ago, I resisted the temptation to buy an expensively produced paperback about the movie. Bully for me.

The trouble with Harry.

Not Hitchcock’s second favourite film out of his own ouvre, the black macabre eponymous comedy (a capital T in ‘trouble’, though) about the corpse that wouldn’t stay put in one grave. Harry as in ‘Tom, Dick and Harry’, meaning you, me and whoever. The trouble is, we live in linear, sequential, serial Time. Unlike in the digital realm, you cannot undo. http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/06/undo-way-to-go.html. Or, retrieve the past to amend and relive it. Then why do we have alumni meets? Are we just aping the West? From what I can gather, these occasions are looked upon even there more as opportunities to show off how better off you are and how much better you have fared than all the rest of the lousy losers? It’s no problem for a guy like me blessed with an easily and swiftly erasable memory. And, no envy. I’ve listened to the heart-rending confessions of battled-scarred veterans just back from one of these journeys down the memory lane. Full of self-pity, regret, jealousy, a sense of failure. If you cannot handle the aftermath, why accept the challenge in the first place? Because someone dared you? Avoid. Run. Duck. No pain is gain too. Less is more, hombre.

Way to go, Sir Alf.

"I had a letter from a man who wrote, 'My daughter after seeing the French film Diabolique would never use the bathtub. Now having seen Psycho, she won't take a shower, and she is getting very unpleasant to be around. What shall I do?' I wrote back, 'Dear Sir, send her to the dry cleaners.' " This is what Hitchcock told Merv Griffin on the latter's television show once. I've no way of checking the veracity of the event. It sounds like truth being stranger than fiction in a very Hitchcockian way, though. (Seinfeld fans may like to read the script of 'The Merv Griffin Show' episode. drodd.com.)