Behind the Beautiful Forevers.

The book title is clunky. It doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue. When ordering my copy from Infibeam I typed ‘Beyond’ instead of ‘Behind’ in the search field. The search engine promptly amended it, though. The title comes from an advertising hoarding for Italian floor tiles that used to be on the since demolished wall behind which the by now world-renowned slum abutting the Mumbai airport, Annawadi, exists. Though clunkily named, the book is far from clunky. It reads like a Charles Dickens novel set in present-day Mumbai, though fiction it most definitely is not. Katherine Boo has done an exceptional job of making us feel – albeit at second hand − what it’s like to exist like a virtual nobody at the bottom of the social pyramid of Heartbreak City with the most tenuous “temp work” link with the life in the legitimate metropolis − and with all the cards in the deck stacked against the subsister. No names have been changed to protect anyone’s privacy or to ward off the peril of getting sued for defamation. The book is a piece of pure reportage devoid of judgemental subtext – an admirable feat rarely achieved in chronicling life, high or low. Being an outsider may have helped Boo to reach this state of equanimity while telling the Annawadi story. It certainly seems to have lent a down-to-earth perspective to the narrative. Will the publication of Behind the Beautiful Forevers make a difference to the lives of Annawadians? Local politician and 'slum boss' Asha Waghekar doesn’t think so. http://yhoo.it/GCn7bq. Her neighbour, Akhtar Husain, a younger sibling of Abdul who is one of the main ‘characters’ in Boo’s book, agrees with Asha. Boo is hopeful that the publicity garnered by her work may work in favour of Annawadi and other slums particularly because she has removed the cloak of invisibility from the unconscionable injustices heaped on the innocent slum dwellers. http://bit.ly/GEzqWg. Let us hope she is right. Only Time will tell, I guess.

Bad to worse. Then better, maybe.

“We are headed for a Malthusian crisis,” he said, with professorial confidence. “Plankton levels are dropping. Bees are dying. There are tortilla riots in Mexico, the highest wheat prices in 30-odd years.” He paused. “The question we have to answer is: How do we kill four of the world’s six billion people in the most just way possible?” http://nyti.ms/wPL7Ah


In early 2007, 75000 Mexicans rioted over the sharp rise in the price of tortillas, staple diet of the poor. This was not front-page news. http:// aol.it/zpnUlE Yet a sharp-witted troll in the US blithely cited the civil disturbance as one of the noteworthy symptoms of the coming global crisis. Trolls are member of a growing Internet subculture which is marked by a fluid morality and a disdain for pretty much everyone else online. If the reading of the situation by the troll sounds like loony tunes, please remember that it is the opinion of someone who lurks in the underbelly of the Internet and hardly ever comes in touch with normal folks. Come to think of it, there is more than an iota of truth in what he said although his final solution may sound extreme. Take a country like Incredible India of the Economic Miracle fame. Its citizenry is blessed with more mobile phones than access to toilets, more cars than roads to run them on, more electrical appliances than electricity to power them. Iniquity, inequality, corruption, make-believe ‘garibi hatao’ programs, child abuse, delayed and/or miscarried justice, hell holes doubling as prisons, orphanages, hospitals… such is the proletarian lot. Is the Malthusian crisis is at the root of it all? Even if it is, there may be a more humane alternative to the troll’s prescription of decimating the numbers of the lesser god’s progeny. How about asking old Karl Marx’s ‘opiate of the masses’ to ride to the rescue? Renunciation is a virtue in the Hindu scheme of things. So it may just do the trick. This way, the powers that be are also spared the worry of the likelihood of a bloody rebel. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World had soma, a tranquilizer without after effects. Should Brave New India not emulate the shining example?

Neither poison pen nor mudraking all the way. Good fun, though.

The Mitford sisters and I – we go back a long way, literally speaking. I first came across them in March 2009 http://bit.ly/x7dPDE after following the exploits of the Rt Hon Unity Mitford, whom I described in a recent Tweet as ‘a U Brit brat + a Winston Churchill relation + a Hitler “groupie”.’ The Mitford sister younger to her was Jessica (aka “Decca”), the adventurous one with leftist inclinations who ran away from her stately home to fight in the Spanish Civil War and was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party in the US for a while also happens to be JK (Harry Potter) Rowling’s self-acknowledged “heroine”. After reading Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Mudraking (Alford a Knopf, New York, 1979) - rescued by me as usual from my consigned-to-the-back-rack-and-conveniently-forgotten book collection - I couldn’t but concur with Rowling’s summing-up of her as “[i]ncurably and instinctively rebellious, brave, adventurous, funny and irreverent”. I can vouch that Poison Penmanship is a series of delectable (what I’m tempted to call) belles-lettres. From among them, I would rate the following as strictly falling in the “mudraking” category of investigative journalism in the US, at times accidentally so: You-All and Non-You-All, the 3 funeral pieces, Maine Chance Diary, Let Us Now Appraise Famous Writers, My Short and Happy Life as a Distinguished Professor, and the 2 Sign of the Dove pieces. What comes across from her writing is what Rowling told us: “I love the way she never outgrew some of her adolescent traits, remaining true to her politics – she was a self-taught socialist – throughout her life.” And, “… she liked nothing better than a good fight, preferably against a pompous and hypocritical target” like the funeral trade, San Jose State University, Famous Writers correspondence school. Elizabeth Arden, the American South in the fifties, you name it. All told a rip-roaring read.

Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool.

There I’ve gone and done it once again. Excavated from the inner recesses of one of my many bookcases a very readable and moving account of a Hollywood star’s last days enshrined in a Chatto & Windus (1986) hardcover first edition − that’s what I have done – no less. I must have picked Peter Turner’s Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool off the DN Road footpath probably near its Flora Fountain end in the mid-90s, merrily chucked it in one of my numerous bookcases and forgotten all about it. The book, I confess, may not be everybody’s cup of tea. With me, it qualifies one hundred per cent because it is (a) in the historical gossip genre which has been my perennial favourite – I simply relish it; and (b) about a minor Hollywood film noir star of the 40s and 50s invariably typecast as a floosy with a heart of gold. Gloria Grahame caught my eye and my fancy in the Humphrey Bogart starrer, In A Lonely Place (1950), and The Big Heat (1953). By a strange coincidence, Gloria’s private life happened to match her screen persona perfectly. To put it mildly, she lived her life along unorthodox lines with a string of failed marriages and stormy affairs. The book depicts her as being quite quirky, living in a trailer parked in a caravan park in California, not possessing too many clothes and accessories, forever anxious about keeping her awkward feet covered in socks and so forth. It is written by her lover in a cougar relationship, the Liverpudlian stage actor Peter Turner who was 29 years her junior. The narrative intertwines two distinct streams: one of nostalgia and the other describing pre-death rites of care and comfort. It is surprisingly racy, tragic, at times unintentionally funny, very visual and very, very believable. There is no flourish or fanfare used in the telling. I feel it would make a great movie. What’s more, it deserves a wider reading public as well. P.S.: By the way, the book title comes from a chance remark by the author’s bête noire when informed of the impending demise of a Hollywood star in the hometown of The Beatles.

Manneys and I.

There was a time in my life when every visit to Pune included a visit or two to Manneys. Before the old Manneys set in a sprawling and dilapidated colonial bungalow on the Moledina Road in the Cantonment area was renovated in mid-80s, it had a charm all its own. You could lose yourselves for hours in the rows of shelves browsing to your heart’s content without anyone bothering you. In the late 60s and early 70s, I bought quite a few books there. Many of them are still stuck in my memory. One of them was a hardcover copy of Napoleon’s Book of Fate & Oraculum for which I must have paid not more than rs.70/-. (Today, the on-line bookshops are charging around Rs.1000/- for a paperback copy of it. Pity, I lost my copy. I could have got a bit of money for its antique value.) I cannot remember the titles and/or authors of a couple of memoirs of lesser known American ad professionals that I picked up there in my zeal in those days for knowing more and more about advertising. One of my other finds from there was a collection of humorous fiction and essays of the British-Canadian writer, Stephen Leacock, in a rather elegant hardcover Bodley Head edition in an offwhite slipcase. http://bit.ly A2CWzY Unfortunately, I lost all of these books somewhere along the way. I never spoke more than a few words with the proprietor who, according to the various articles about Manneys, was always very helpful and forthcoming. Were I to muster all the nostalgia at my command, I still cannot say that the closing down of Manneys will leave a dreadful void in my life. I’m sure it won’t.

Ho-hum! So what else is new?

Among the American Founding Fathers, John Hancock was said to be a smuggler in Boston; Henry Laurens, a big-time slave trader; George Washington and Ben Franklin were supposedly involved in land grabs of dubious legality. Ben was known to have been equally successful at wooing French women as well as French financiers of the American Revolution. Thomas Jefferson had a love slave − literally: Sally Hemings, a woman of mixed parentage whom he owned. James Buchanan, who was the President immediately prior to Lincoln, was allegedly in a three- decade relationship with a southern Senator and slave owner. His illustrious successor too was believed to have similar proclivities. Coming closer to the present, Dwight Eisenhower had his “pretty Irish driver”, an Englishwoman named Kay Summersby Morgan. He wanted to marry her after divorcing Mamie, according to President Harry Truman. Ike even went so far as to request the Pentagon to relieve him of his command so that he could follow his heart. He was threatened with dire consequences if he indulged his romantic inclination. It fizzled out and, despite Ike’s solemn promise to take her to Washington as his secretary; Kay got the sack after he left Europe. In short, she lost both her man and her job, poor dear. Monica Lewinsky, the White House intern in the notorious Blue Dress, was only one of Bill Clinton’s many peccadilloes, in and out of the Presidency. That JFK took frequent and brief breaks from his high-pressure job with his numerous flings, including the one with Marilyn Monroe, is an open secret too widely known and accepted as an integral part of US Presidential lore and unlikely to raise any eyebrows anymore. So why should we be scandalized by the recent revelations by Mimi Alford, now a 69-year-old grandmother and retired New York City church administrator, about her 18-month-long affair with Kennedy in 1962-63 during her White House internship at age 19? Why indeed? http://nyp.st/yKC9bn The reader reactions to an article http://bit.ly/zV3vul about a soon-to-be-published tell-all memoir of the secret life of Hollywood stars of the swinging 40s and 50s – long before AIDS and gay liberation, Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars (Grove Press) by the self-proclaimed “facilitator” Scotty Bowers is along the same lines. No big deal how people chose to live in private. Anyway, who the devil cares about a bunch of ancient has-beens? P.S.: The cover page image at Amazon.com website shows a 3-word excerpt from Gore Vidal’s comment that lends a semblance of credibility to the 88-year-0ld Bowers’ book, though. The full comment reads: “I have known Scotty Bowers for the better part of a century. I’m so pleased that he has finally decided to tell his story to the world. His startling memoir includes great figures like Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. Scotty doesn’t lie — the stars sometimes do — and he knows everybody.” http://bit.ly/ yZRZEo, http://bit.ly/xO704s

Kill Bill.

I had always thought of man as a polluting animal, first and foremost, who leaves a lot of mess, physical and/or emotional, in his wake. Then I chanced upon Philipe Gigantès’s Power and Greed: A Short History of the World (Robinson, London, 2002). That really made the scales drop from my eyes, big time. PG introduced me to the villain of the human continuum: the Grand Acquisitor. (He writes in a footnote that there is no such word as ‘acquisitor’. I found it on the Internet, though. http://bit.ly/z0A4a7. It looks like it has been lurking unobtrusively on page 16 of Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary [1913 + 1828].) The moral of PG’s thesis is man has been an acquisitive brute all along. His mate has been his worthy partner-in-crime. The pantheon of the Grand Acquisitors includes all the historical figures who have been hailed by orthodox historians as heroes and saviours. To me, this suggests that man’s past as a hunter continues to haunt his present and his future. We cannot help being marauders and practising one-upmanship whatever we are doing. Like Gordon Gekko, we too begin following the “Greed is good” mantra. Has the time come to pay for our historical blunders? Your guess is as good as mine, I guess. Aldous Huxley summed it up rather lucidly in Ape and Essence:

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

In short, kill, torture, maim, character-assassinate, lie, twist facts, go on a bull raid in the stock market … you name it. Anything to be hailed as the Top Dog, Chief Honcho, Numero Uno, Big Boss.

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.

Wish you a long life, friend.

“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.

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.

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.

I just 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 be published in the Diwali issues of Marathi magazines in the late forties and early fifties. What it gradually evolved into, though, was a cogent and lucid exposition of how the Indian patriarchal system works. No serious sociological tome could have explained the subject better. The chief protagonist is the matriarch of a North Goan Hindu joint family. Once she realises the nature of the beast and helplessly watches her only daughter being sacrificed on the altar of family honour, she concocts a rather fiendish plan to take over the reins of the family in order to bring up her granddaughter as a free bird. In my humble opinion, this novel deserves to be read widely instead of the trash that passes off as good reads. It is also my wish that a film director with social conscience makes a movie out of it. The story-telling is very visual and can easily be adapted for the silver screen. The novel also deals with a lot of Hindu beliefs like karma in a simple language. All in all, a remarkably rewarding read.   

VRI: Hum Aapke Hein Kaun?

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

“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.

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.)

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.