Chatnoir: A Mumbaikar in Melbourne

Clarkson goes potty over India: let's be outraged but for reasons other than the HCI's

2012-01-16T09:01:00.001Z

Here's why I can't agree with High Commission of India, London's, demand that BBC apologises for Top Gear's offensive portrayal of India on their 90-minutes Christmas Special.

If we don't give others the right to make fun of us, we must also give-up the right to make fun of others. And I dearly don't want to lose my right to make fun of the British: their terrible food; their inability to hold down a drink (evident in the all the puke you see on the streets on Saturday and Sunday mornings); the Katie Price-inspired fashion that dominates Picadilly Circus; the quixotic British train system that breaks down at the mere mention of snow, rain or autumn leaves; the famous British bureaucracy and the mad Prince Charles.

Remember, if we don't want the British to laugh at the Top Gear episode, we have no right to laugh at this scene from our own beloved Kabhie Khushi Kabhie Gham.

This, after the British Government so kindly allowed us to shoot half our film in their country!

Besides, here's something I don't get about stereotypes? Is a depiction still a stereotype if it is true?

Ok, so the Top Gear showed street dogs and Indian men pissing on the streets of Mumbai, long queues in front of Railway ticket counters, they talk about tourists in India getting the trots (or diahorrea), the dangerous highway between Delhi and Jaipur. But aren't they true depictions of our lives. I can't remember a single day in my fifteen years in Mumbai (or 22 years in India) when I didn't see street dogs and men pissing in the open. And yes, public toilets in India are a shame. I challenge the High Commissioner of India to England to use the public toilet at Kurla Terminus in Mumbai. These are not generalisations, these are the realities of living in India. It is just that the Top Gear depicts them in their standard cheeky style.

The Top Gear team also showed the lively street stalls and enterprise of Mumbai (in fact, Clarkson and team come sloppy seconds against the dabbawallas), Delhi's glitterati in their incredibly expensive cars and the beauty of the Himalayas.

The show hosts also constantly make fun of Britain. The whole exercise shows the British products as awful and poorly constructed, and themselves as buffoons in the garb of Britain's representatives. And they are happy to make fun of themselves. (In fact, over the years, they have made more fun of Britain than of any other culture, country or people).

If I do have a quibble, it is this. Their's jokes - whether on us or themselves - were so contrived. The Top Gear humour is at its best when it is spontaneous and full of surprise. But over the years, the character of the three hosts has become so fixed and the dynamics between them so predictable, that one can foretell the result of all their pranks before they have played themselves out. That is just bad television.

If we must protest, it is over this. That even with all the chaos, crowds, surprise, and fodder for humour that India provided them: Clarkson, Hammond and May couldn't really give us a genuine moment of spontaneous humour. We deserved better!

Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu: Or the new-found zaniness of Bollywood's heroines

2012-01-07T08:15:00.000Z

Oh God! Not another "zany" Bollywood heroine!

It was sort of fun when Kareena played the exuberant, irrepressible, rebellious (read: zany) Geet in Jab We Met in 2007. But the success of that film led to an avalanche of bordering-on-mad heroines, almost all of them coupled with long-suffering but essentially sensible heroes.

Think Aditi from Jaane Tu... Ya Jaane Na (2008) who Wikipedia describes as "a highly aggressive, impulsive girl. She abuses. She scratches." In other words, zany.
Think Aaliya (Deepika Padukone) from Break ke Baad (2010). She was loud, unpredictable, smokes, get drunk and is generally impulsive. In other words: zany.
Think Dimple (played by Katrina Kaif) from Mere Brother Ki Dulhan (2011). Again bold, mischievous, impulsive and good at keeping her hero in a permanent state of alarm. What's that word again: yes, zany.
And then there was Tanu (Kangana Ranaut) from Tanu Weds Manu (2011) who was practically bordering on psychotic, as far as I am concerned.

And now, there is Kareena Kapoor in Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu, due to release in February 2012, threatening us with her "zaniness" again if the trailer is anything to go by.

Apart from extreme loquaciousness and boundless boldness, the heroines' "zaniness" also tends to include smoking and getting dead drunk at some point in the film (give or take a few films). Luckily, our long-suffering hero is always near by to rescue her when she passes out. Rebelliousness doesn't include rescuing yourself, it seems.

Our hero, in contrast, is sensible, responsible and generally good at toeing the line. This, we are supposed to see as repressed. Our heroine's zaninesss, then, is really about releasing the inner Marlboro Man in the hero. So while our hero rescues our heroine from drunken scraps, our heroine rescues him from life itself. (Also for some reason, it is a role Imran Khan is determined to colonise, playing it in four of the five films I mentioned above).

In most parts, I don't mind the zaniness, except in three respects.

First, why is it that so many rebellious heroines seem to have no careers or jobs. Geet, Aditi, Dimple and finally the horrifying Tanu: none of them showed any interest in gainful employment. They were all just waiting to get married, hoping to bag a guy through their exuberant personality alone. Between Aaliya and Kapoor (in Ek Main...), one wanted to become an actress and the other a hair stylist. Obviously, careers like law, IT, journalism etc are not zany enough.

Second, zaniness and all is fine but I do mind watching smoking as somehow being emblematic of rebelliousness. It is a generally accepted as a harmful and somewhat disgusting habit and is becoming increasingly unfashionable in the West, from where we picked up the notion that it is fashionable in the first place. In fact, I can't remember the last Hollywood Rom-Com, in which the heroine smoked. Do we always have to remain a step behind the West all the time? Can't we just buck the trend for a change.

Third, after so many films, zaniness is turning into a bore.

Let's hope, Kareena Kapoor, who started the trend with Jab We Met, will bring it to an end with Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu.

***
Here's a previous blog, I wrote, about the Bollywood heroines: Dil Chahta Hain: Or Where Have All the Bollywood Feminists Disappeared.

Granta 112: Pakistan - or does Pakistan have a literary scene?

2012-01-05T11:35:00.000Z

Voices from Pakistan

Reading the Granta Publication on Pakistan - a collection of fiction and non-fiction works by Pakistani writers - I was reminded of an event on Pakistani literature I attended a couple of years ago. It was a talk at the Asia Society in London with three new rising literary stars from Pakistan: Nadeem Aslam, Kamila Shamsie and Daniyal Mueenuddin.

At one point, the moderator commented on the recent rise of the Pakistani literary scene. The garrulous Ms Shamsie pounced excitedly on the subject stating how and why it was Pakistani-English writers' time in the sun. After she had gabbed on for a while, Mueenuddin, who had been remarkably taciturn throughout the evening, suddenly quipped that to say Pakistan had a literary "scene" was an exaggeration. If it existed, he certainly hadn't come across it. The room erupted into embarrassed titters and Ms Shamsie looked decidedly put-out.

After reading the Granta collection, I am inclined to agree with Mueenuddin.

The first sign of a lack of a vibrant literary scene is that all the three above-mentioned rising stars appear again in the collection. Obviously, the editor of the collection wasn't exactly spoilt for choice.

But more curious is the strange uniformity of voice that emerges from the collection. Barring two pieces - Leila in the Wilderness by the British-Pakistani Nadeem Aslam and Butt and Bhatti by Mohammed Hanif - the rest seem so stridently liberal. Don't get me wrong. I have no sympathy for fundamentalists. But how can all the writing arising out of a country so steeply diving towards fundamentalism sound so confidently, one-sidedly liberal?

Of course, the writers acknowledge that Pakistan is the gripped by a violent Islamization movement. But they can clearly see whose fault it is: Zia, America, Jinnah, military and ISI. And they can clearly see who all are affected by it: everyone. But how have the writers remained untouched by the phenomenon? Are they untouched by it? It is the absence of the voices from the middle that strikes me as strange.

Could the uniformity of voices be a result of the rather similar background of all the writers? Either, they moved to Britain or the US early on in life (Nadeem Aslam, Sarfraz Mansoor) or they all seem to belong to the incredibly privileged Pakistani elite. Ms Shamsie writes of visiting her cousins in London every summer and Aamer Hussein of spending childhood summers at Hyde Park. Daniyal Mueenuddin's family still owns huge farmlands in Pakistan. And Fatima Bhutto, well we all know where she stands in the Pakistani social hierarchy. Almost all of them have had long exposure to Western universities and cultures.

How representative are they of the culture they write about? Moreover, do the writers in such a collection need to come from diverse backgrounds?

Either way, writers with very similar backgrounds and attitudes becoming representative of the country's literature reek more of a clique than a literary scene. Of course, if you are inside the clique, it often appears like a scene to you, which may explain Ms Shamsie's enthusiasm.

***
Here's an interview with Daniyal Mueenuddin in which is comments on how most of his peers do not have access to rural Pakistan, where his own stories are set. Perhaps, that is why he holds different views on the existence/non-existence of a Pakistani literary scene.

Don 2 or MI4: Which is a more Indian experience?

2012-01-04T03:45:00.000Z

Last night, in a bid to introduce Sid and my very-soon-to-pop-out baby to some Indian culture, we went to watch the super slick Don 2: The King is Back. Unfortunately, culturally and aesthetically the film was so derivative of Hollywood that we would have been better-off watching MI4: Ghost Protocol, the twenty minutes-climax of which is set in squalid Mumbai and even features one of its famous traffic jams.

The film reminded me of a corny dialogue from a late-80s Bollywood-starrer Jamai Raja. It had Shakti Kapoor eulogising a prospective son-in-law with: "woh breakfast London me khate hain, lunch Paris mein, aur dinner New York mein. Bus su-su karne India aate hain". (He eats his breakfast in London, lunch in Paris and dinner in New York. He only comes to India to pee). Don doesn't even dignify India with his precious pee.

Everything about this super-villain is foreign: his empire, his clothes, his cars, his toilets, his targets and his ambitions. Only, the language in which he operates is clean, unaccented Hindi, which in turn forces the film to place Hindi-speaking Indian characters in unlikely settings: as Interpol officers in Malaysia, heading German banks, or as computer hackers or contract killers in Berlin.

There is a lot of talk of how the film can match any Hollywood thriller in its production values. Yes, it can. But all of it is great imitation at best: Don 2 never uses the foreign locales, settings or aesthetics to say anything original or authentic. But then again, Bollywood film-makers rarely use Indian locales, settings or aesthetics with any imagination so why should they accord the respect to foreign locales.

The good news for us is that it doesn't matter. Western film-makers are slowly discovering India as a possible setting for its films. (MI4 is the latest example). Once, they discover us and find an aesthetic language to cinematically represent our strangely ugly-beautiful cities, I'm confident we'll quickly rediscover our streets. After all, it only took Farhan Akhtar two years to recreate Bourne Supremacy's (2004) fabulous car chase in Goa for his 2006-film Don: The Chase Begins Again. Others will take even less.

***
Here's a great spoof of MI4 featuring Anil Kapoor. I couldn't resist...

Lagerfeld's Bombay: Is he lazy or insightful?

2011-12-09T01:28:00.001Z

Image stolen from Guardian.co.uk: Sorry Guardian

Karl Lagerfeld, the creative director and head designer of the French fashion house Chanel, has just unveiled his pre-fall collection in Paris. And guess what? It's theme is "Paris-Bombay".

Bombay here stands for entire India, of course, much the same way that Bombay and Delhi did for the Centre Pompidou's blockbuster summer exhibition on Indian contemporary art: "Paris-Delhi-Bombay". Two black points to France for unimaginative titles.

What makes Lagerfeld's collection - replete with bindis, bangles, tikkas and pearl necklaces - still cheekier is that fact that he has never actually visited India, let alone Bombay. "It is much more inspiring not to go to places than to go," he reportedly quipped backstage.

Now there are two ways to interpret this act. First, Lagerfeld is lazy. He has put a whole collection together based on his idea of India rather than the reality of the country: much like the Lonely Planet writer who authored a guidebook to Columbia based on the information collected from his Columbian girlfriend without actually visiting the country.

On the other hand, maybe, Lagerfeld is being honest. Perhaps, he just knows his limitations. He is, after all, into the business of inspiring and selling luxury, decadence and aesthetics - three things famously absent in Mumbai. We have immensely rich people in Mumbai but I have never seen the rich live in more discomfort anywhere in the world than they do in Mumbai. Perhaps, Lagerfeld is intelligent enough to recognize that what he is looking for simply doesn't exist in Mumbai. Sometimes, it is indeed more inspiring not to go to places and to live with your myths than to actually visit it and have them crushed.

The FHM Cover: Pakistan outraged, but what about us Indians?

2011-12-08T04:08:00.001Z

Here's one thing I don't understand about the FHM India controversy. Sure, Pakistan is outraged at both Veena Malik's nudity and the ISI tattoo. But what about us Indians? Isn't there any debate in India over this cover and its presence in our horrifyingly repressed Indian society?

No, I am not a social conservative nor am I bore. Unfortunately, I am an Indian woman who has to navigate her way through the streets of India and doesn’t find it fun. Let your guard down for a minute, and there’s sure to be a random male body part brushing past you. Wear anything remotely provocative, and just the leers will make you run for cover. Even as women on screen and magazine covers compete to shed their clothes to get noticed, I find myself wishing for Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak to walk Mumbai’s streets.

No, this is not a tirade against the Indian man and his roving hands either. I feel sorry for Indian men. They are amongst the most sexually repressed in the world and it couldn't be fun for them either. It leads to all kinds of perversities, the need to harass women on the streets being one of them.

Lads magazine have similar covers in the West too. But they exist in a different sexual context: a context where men are not repressed and women know they can walk the streets without feeling violated. These covers merely act as a bit of fun and titillation here.

But within an Indian context, how exactly should we view such covers, shoots, item numbers and porn stars on Bigg Boss doing pole dance numbers? Whom are they really liberating? Certainly not me, as I stand surrounded by leering men next to a Wheelers at Mumbai's train station with Veena Malik hanging naked above me. And certainly not the Indian man, for all he is getting is another image to take to toilet as he silently jerks-off to it.

Meanwhile, Malik sues FHM for 100 Rupees, and FHM countersues her for 250 million rupees.

indiancompass.com: Directing Indians around Europe like no guidebook can

2011-03-17T12:10:00.000Z

It has been silence on my blog for so long.

But my life has been noisy, chaotic, busy, exciting and full of challenge. I am no longer jobless, footloose and fancyfree in London.

No, no. Nobody offered me a job. But I have created one for myself. I am now - Gentlemen and Ladies - the founder and editor of a travel website: indiancompass.com. It’s purpose: To Direct Indians Around Europe Like No Guidebook Can.

I can say without any doubts that my site - which I started along with a friend and Erasmus-Mundus alumni, Sakshi Ojha ten days ago - is the first site connecting Europe as a holiday destination to Indian tourists in a dedicated way.

You will roar, Come On! What about Lonely Planet? What about Time Out? What about Conde Nast Traveller?

And my answer is, what about them? They are not written for Indians. Most guidebooks are written with Australian and American backpackers in mind. Will you ever find a reference to Bollywood, Indian history, vegetarianism, travelling with one’s old parents and most importantly, VISAS in these guidebooks. Nope. Because they don’t “do” Indians in these guidebooks.

Which leaves us with the LP and CN Traveller magazines. These magazines will help you find destinations to travel to - exotic, far-off, mysterious, seductive, expensive destinations. But they won’t tell you how to deal with the realities of travel: how to get to these destinations, how to book for accommodation smartly, which visas to apply for, how to get the best of Rs--Euro exchange rate, how to get your public transport from the airport to the hotel, where to take taxis and where not, how to make the best of just a day in a new city, how to survive as a vegetarian in meat-dominated countries, and many such details that confuse, harass and worry us through our travels.

And my experience is that lesser these niggles, the more travel becomes a pleasure.

So I, along with five experienced Indians who have travelled around Europe, will do the honour.

My venture arises out of my frustration. While publishing in India is growing exponentially, most of it is aspirational, and little of it is arising from within. Yes, it is good to give people aspirations. But you should also give them the necessary tools to achieve those aspirations. My website is that practical, down-to-earth, riddled-in-reality tool. And I am damn proud of it.

My project has arms, legs and brains. Will it have luck? That will depend on you.

Visit my site, Indian Compass. Use it, read it, comment on it, criticise it - if you must - and help me make it something useful.

And if you like it, go to its Facebook Page called Indian Compass, and like it there.

Site: indiancompass.com

Twitter account: indiancompass

Facebook page: Indian Compass

email address: info@indiancompass.com

Events in Egypt: Whose revolution is it anyway?

2011-02-03T09:01:00.000Z

So for the seventh day in a row, all the front news on British newspapers (BBC News, Guardian, The Independent) is dominated by events in Egypt.

I wonder why British newspapers think it is critical for Britons to follow the Egyptian uprising against its dictator so painstakingly, giving it greater importance over anything that is happening in their own country for days on end.

Mind you, I am not saying that the events are unimportant. They are momentous – but for the Egyptians. Not the Britons. I can understand coverage. I don’t understand coverage in exclusion to everything else. I am sure British people are excited for the Egyptians, and wish them well. But they play no material role in the success or failure of the revolution. That will be up to the Egyptians. And either way, life in Britain will go on as before without people feeling even a speed bump.

Yes, Middle East is strategically important to the West. But that is of greater concern to the governments not the people. The British people accepted the fact that Middle East was run by dictators. It didn’t stop them from going there on exciting holidays or shopping trips. Yes, they disapproved – especially at dinner parties – but accepted it as a reality. Now, as these countries become democracies, they will accept that too, and continue with their holidays.

I don’t think the British people share the rushed, amazed excitement of the journalistic community over the events.

I would put the sustained coverage to two things.

Journalists are excitement-junkies. They need to believe that what they do is exciting and important, and what is more exciting and important than a suppressed majority rising up against their evil dictator. Never mind, that neither comprise their readership.

And second, an empire hangover. Somehow, Britain is unable to accept that the welfare of half of the world is not up to them. They don’t decide the fates of people beyond Britain. That there was a dictatorship in Egypt and Tunisia was not Britain’s doing. That its people rose up against them wasn’t either. It is their history, struggle and victory. British media can cover it, discuss it, explain it – but Britain can’t share it. So get over it!

Google: Why despite a tough year, I believe in its longetivity

2011-01-23T14:42:00.001Z

Google says "I will survive".

Ok, it might sound like tom-toming, but honestly, if others won't acknowledge your cleverness then you have to do it yourself.

Eric Schmidt is stepping down as google's CEO. And here's what The New Yorker has to say on how Google's 2010 year has been: "...Google was becoming defensive. All of their social-network efforts had faltered. Facebook had replaced them as the hot tech company, the place vital engineers wanted to work. Complaints about Google bureaucracy intensified. Governments around the world were lobbing grenades at Google over privacy, copyright, and size issues. The "don’t be evil" brand was getting tarnished, and the founders were restive."

Only, I asked if the same was about-to-happen to Google in December 2009 on this blog. The date was Dec 27, 2009. Now everyone seems to have asking the same question.

But I think I have moved on. Given all that has happened in 2010 - and yes, I include Facebook's incredible 50 billion dollar valuation in it - I think Google is going to regain its pre-eminent position as a tech company.

There are two reasons why.

The first is Google's Watch This Space campaign and its efforts to promote online advertising. As I wrote in a blog entry in October last year, Google has figured out that it needs to help the "creatives" to make online advertising an attractive, measurable and exciting opportunity, something that it is not right now. And it has thrown its might behind making that possible.

Only someone who is in the media - jobless like me because print is not selling, and online media is not profitable - knows that everyone needs smart, online advertising to take off. And Google is focussing its energies on convicing advertisers that it is possible.

Already, in the last one year, I have seen several sites move on from ugly banner ads to more attractive, interactive and expandable real media ads - something Google talks-of in its campaign. The clutter seems to be giving way to neater, more navigable sites with attractive, non-intrusive, advertising. See Londonist (which has revamped itself so attractively), or Time Out (which too looks so much neater after its revamp) or Times Crest in India.

Yes, social media will be the way to go for small businesses. But big businesses - the colas, cars, fashion brands etc - will still need the big platform to attract customers and fight out competition. They will still need advertising and that is where the big, indecent bucks lie. Small businesses may begin with promotion over social media, but at some point they will have to go beyond the friends-of-friends and reach out to the masses in a single sweep. And attractive online advertising will be that platform, and Google is ahead of others in making that happen.

The second reason is Android. Yes, we love the Iphone. Sid & I bought one. But we don't like the way Apple straight jackets you into an Apple personality narrowing your choices to its own software and hardware. We have heard good reviews of Android from our tech friends - it is easy, dependable and most importantly is customisable with different products. Between Sid & myself our second smart phone will probably be the Android. If Sid & I - who are very mainstream buyers - are coming to this conclusion, so must many many others. Sales figures certainly seem to support this prognosis.

I think once Iphone has milked its first mover's advantage, Android will overtake it by simply being a less suffocating buyer to deal with.

And this is why I say: more power to google, my friends. As we say in Hindi: It is a "lambi race ka ghoda" (a horse meant for long races).

William Dalrymple: are literary credentials not enough?

2011-01-17T15:28:00.004Z

William Dalrymple at a book launch at India Habitat Centre

I was a little surprised today to find an article in The Independent about a minor literary slugfest going on in India. I thought that Hartosh Singh Bal’s article in Open magazine, accusing the Indian literati of a colonial hangover, was a brave and interesting stand. But I didn’t expect to read about it in a British newspaper.

Bal made some pertinent points in his article. Is the British-author William Dalrymple the best person to organise the premier literature festival of India? Can’t we find someone home grown to head it? And what’s up with this British fixation – why don’t American authors or American books make as much news? And when did foreign correspondents become the expert commentators on India and everything that happens there, in the first place? Aren’t we Indians better placed to make that assessment?

But I also have three problems with Bal’s article.

First, the standard of English newspapers and magazines in India is rather low. The entry requirement for people wanting to become English language journalists in India is a basic ability to read and write in English. A bit of training in reportage and writing is preferable but not critical. The problem is that without training in good, sharp reportage, commentary sounds empty.

A few months ago, I wrote a blog pointing out the appalling language gaffes habitually made by the National Cultural Editor of the Hindustan Times, one of the largest selling English language newspapers in India. A number of comments in his defence basically asked why pick on him when everyone else is equally bad. To me that says a lot about the sorry state of Indian English newspapers – and I say this, fully aware of the irony that I myself was trained in the same industry. I am open to the idea that perhaps, I am a terrible writer too because I am the product of the environment around me – and it wasn’t generally a very invigorating environment as far as English language or reportage are concerned.

It would be dishonest of me if I didn’t accept that the standard of research, reportage and editing of British newspapers is far superior. Maybe that is why British foreign correspondents’ books on India inspire greater confidence among both Indian and foreign readers: A well-written copy is just more acceptable than a more authentic but poorly written one.

Bal also seems to have ignored the role British Council has played in encouraging a cultural scene in India. For the longest time in Mumbai, the only place I could turn to for any literary or cultural consumption was the British Council. There were no bookshops, good libraries, or clubs to turn to for book festivals, readings, book launches and panel discussions. And the Council embraced Indian authors in English with great enthusiasm: In fact, I was introduced to the writings of many Indian English authors at the British Council, not at school or college or through the Indian media.

But naturally, the Council also encouraged British authors and artists in India. But if the toss-up was between having British authors being promoted in India and not have any platform for Indian authors at all – I would each time choose the former. The British Council's dominance may be waning now, but I am still grateful to it for maintaining an oasis of art in an otherwise fairly unstimulating cultural scene of Mumbai till the 1990s.

Perhaps, the greater visibility of British literature in India over American literature is simply the result of a British Council being more active than the American Cultural Centre.

Finally, Dalrymple may be British, but all his books on India have been thoroughly researched and beautifully written. His knowledge of Indian culture is far superior to many Indian cultural writers. He is also a tireless and passionate ambassador of South Asian culture – whether that is self-serving or not is another debate all together. And he is an incredible networker and marketer. On the whole, he fulfils the categories necessary for organising an Indian literature festival.

If ones ethnicity and background were such an important criteria for selection, why didn’t we all protest when Fareed Zakaria was made the editor of the Time magazine?

The King's Speech: Or why I want to fight the tyranny of romantic love

2011-01-17T07:44:00.003Z

I came out of the theatre last night after watching The King’s Speech feeling... literally... breathless. Colin Firth played the stammering King George VI so convincingly that every time he stuttered on screen, he would engulf me into his breathlessness, suffocation, shame and desperation. Since the whole film is about words trapped inside his throat struggling to come out, I felt like I had spent an hour-and-half locked inside a windowless cell struggling to breathe. Little wonder that he won the golden globe last night for the best dramatic actor of the year.

Now that I am happily married and sorted, I find my choice of films greatly diminished. I enjoy films about people, their predilections and preoccupations. But the only emotion that Hollywood (and Bollywood for what its worth) thinks worth exploring is romantic love. Only, I am fairly happy and conflict-less regarding that aspect of my life and would prefer to engage in dramas beyond that.

Which is why The King’s Speech was a lovely change. The King was happily married, like me. His conflict was essentially occupational – as royalty, his biggest responsibility was public appearances and speeches, and a stammer essentially rendered him useless. And can't we all relate to that feeling: haven’t we all, at some point or the other, felt not up to the job given to us?

We all have a life beyond love. Our relationships extend to brothers, sisters, friends, parents, colleagues, children, and most importantly, ourselves. And yet, such few films ever look at the vicissitudes of these relationships.

That made me think of my top 5 emotional, human drama films that were not about romantic love (yes, in case you are wondering, I just finished Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity).

The King’s Speech – because it is so fresh in my mind.

In Her Shoes – because it looked at the love between sisters, one of the most ignored relationships in films, and managed to say something interesting about it. As one of three sisters, I connected to it immediately.

The Darjeeling Ltd – because it was about brothers and that intangible sibling bond that can survive so much upheaval, distance and long periods of non-communication.

Taare Zameen Par – Ok, I concede it was a grossly exaggerated, Bollywood-style, emotional drama. But the struggles of the bright but dyslexic, misunderstood child made me cry by the bucketload.

Lost in Translation – Because it was about the most important relationship in our lives, the one we have with ourselves.

If you have any additions, suggestions and deletions you are most welcome to share.

***
Virginia (see comment section) has reminded me of Little Miss Sunshine and Royal Tenenbaums. Royal Tenenbaums was definitely a contender in my mind, but I decided to go with The Darjeeling Ltd for look at sibling relationships. But missinng out on Little Miss Sunshine was definitely a gaffe on my part. All the same, I can't decide between LMS and In her Shoes, so need help through your votes.

Otolith Group and the bane of being intellectual

2011-01-15T10:50:00.005Z

Otolith III at Tate Britain

I wrote an article about The Otolith Group, the British artists who were nominated for the Turner Prize this year and are now showing in India. It was commissioned to me by TOI Crest in October, I actually did it in November and it is out in January - talk about gestation period.

You can listen to the entire interview here, if you have the patience for it. Despite my misgivings about my voice, I am putting it out there because I really enjoyed interviewing them. Besides, raw date is all the rage these days, you know. What with Wikileaks and all.

Interviewing The Otolith Group by chetna prakash

Guardian called their works "unabashedly erudite". Some other papers, were less charitable calling them pretentious. I could sense Eshun's blood pressure rise up a notch, when I asked him the question. And he went on a lengthy explanation about the difference between complex and incomprehensible, and why should their works be about one simple idea, in the first place. Wouldn't that be boring?

When did we turn into a society where one has to defend oneself for being erudite and intellectual.

Look at Barack Obama, throughout his presidential campaign he had to constantly play down his excellent education, his obvious intelligence, his articulateness. And in contrast, Sarah Palin was constantly playing up her gal-next-door credentials, her homilies and claims to common sense. She still does, and it seems is still very popular. While Obama is still struggling to get himself heard and understood.

Another obvious trap is to be entertaining. As Andrew said to me while we were discussing our favourite film critics, you must be funny. Being intelligent is not enough. You must be entertaining. That's the only way you can get your point across. But isn't there a joy to engaging with the difficult, figuring it out and feeling good about it. What's wrong with being sincere, anyway. Isn't that a good thing?

Obviously not. Otherwise, The Otolith Group would have won the Turner Prize.

A funny, funny world we live in.

On Cultural Stereotypes: Immigrant parents, Amy Chua & Jack Straw

2011-01-11T18:30:00.003Z

I just can’t seem escape Amy Chua and her Chinese mothering tips.

First, my mum-in-law sent me Chua’s essay – Why Chinese Mothers are Superior – published in the WSJ last Saturday, in which she rhapsodised over the benefits of the strict, demanding parenting exercised by immigrant families in America. She credits this parenting style for Chinese (and other immigrant) kids outperforming American kids in general. Then, The Times, yesterday ran an interview with Ms Chua, and today, the Independent, discusses the merits-demerits of Chua’s dictator-style parenting model. And just a few minutes ago, New Yorker uploaded a piece inviting three Chinese-American high-achieving women to give their views on Chua’s assertions.

What I find really interesting is that none of the four articles above mentioned the dreaded words: “cultural-stereotyping”. They discuss the merits and demerits of Chinese-style parenting. But none of them point out that asserting that there is something inherently different about the way a minority community brings up its children – and worse, that the parenting style has definite consequences on how such children will relate to society around them – amounts to stereotyping.

Contrast that with the furious response met to Jack Straw’s statement that young Pakistani men are sexually repressed and are made to think that white women are easy. Thus, they are likely to prey on them. Almost every respectable newspaper in town, and every respectable British-Asian community leader, was discussing the perils of cultural stereotyping even before the merits of Straw’s accusations could be judged.

Why is it that if no one has problems believing that the strict parenting practiced by immigrant parents results in high-achieving immigrant kids, it is unacceptable to suggest the opposite: that if immigrant kids grow up with the notion that white girls are trashy and easy, they may act on that belief. (I don’t have a problem with people picking holes in Straw’s argument – and there are many holes to pick. But I have a problem with the discussion being scuttled under the bogeyman of what “cultural stereotyping” can do to immigrants.)

What the responses to Chua and Straw say to me is that the press and minorities are perfectly fine with stereotypes, provided the stereotypes are positive!

***
Stand-up comedian Russell Peters on another kind of strict immigrant parenting.

Vogue and our schizophrenic Indian lives

2011-01-08T09:52:00.006Z

Vogue vagueness

New year, new article by me – this time in the Vogue magazine. It is a profile of the British Indian restaurateur Geetie Singh. Unfortunately, it is not a terribly good article. It seems I had a particularly bad bout of my on-again-off-again sickness COMMAtitis and littered the copy with all sorts of misplaced commas. As for the magazine’s copy editor? Perhaps, he is a fellow sufferer.

So I am really hoping that most women pick up the issue for the same reason that I ever buy the magazine – to look at the ads. I remember my first look at the British edition around the time the buzz around Vogue’s possible entry into India was growing. I was transfixed – but mostly by the advertisements. Beautiful women in the most gorgeous clothes and accessories made by brands I had only ever seen as fakes in India: Donna Karan, Hermes, Chanel, Calvin Klien.

The articles were as visually stunning as the ads and referred pretty much to the same brands – in fact, it was difficult to tell apart the articles from the ads. It rendered a visual consistency to the magazine and converted it into a stunning temple to fashion. So much so, that by the time I turned the last page, even I – a girl so stubbornly proud of her frizzy hair, kurti, and baggy jeans – was feeling a deep yearning to be slim, beautiful and Chanel adorned.

But this is where I find the Indian Vogue diverging from its international counterparts: its incredible paucity of beautiful ads. To begin with, of the 67 full page ads in its latest issue only 3 refer explicitly to clothes – Levis, Monisha Jaisingh and Ritu Kumar. The largest chunk of the ads, 17 to be exact, belong to Indian jewellery stores: the Manubhais, Nothandasses, Gehnas, Shristis etc etc. And no, the ads don’t show smart, modern everyday wear. It is all heavy, traditional, stone-studded, ready-for-wedding wear. Jewellery is followed by watches (9), furnishing (6), skin products (5) and hotels (4). After this it all goes random with whiskey, chocolates, mid-range Australian wine, hairbands, yachts and even realty companies all finding a corner in this Indian temple to fashion.

What makes the magazine experience surreal is that articles and photo shoots – especially, the photo shoots – continue to refer to D&G, Nina Ricci, Christian Louboutins, Roberto Cavalli and gang as if the Nanubhais and Nothandasses never happened.

To me this gap between the ads and the articles of Vogue says a lot about the wide gap between the reality, pretentions and aspirations of middle class India, and the resulting schizophrenia. We already believe that we are a world superpower without acknowledging the illiteracy, poverty, dirt, pollution and corruption endemic to our lives. Instead, we simply ensconce ourselves in air-conditioned bubbles inside our flats, cars, offices, malls, restaurants, hotels and nightclubs dreaming our rose-tinted dreams of a time when Nina Ricci and Christian Louboutin will be just down the road.

Maybe, that time will arrive. I only hope that the road leading to these stores will not be jammed with traffic, beggars in tatters, dust and pollution.

Heathrow's breakdown

2010-12-21T11:33:00.000Z

Snowed in for Christmas

I was meant to fly to India for a short Christmas break today. Only I am not. Because it snowed over the weekend, and clearly that was too much for one of the world’s oldest and busiest international airports of one of the world’s richest countries to handle.

Heathrow isn’t the only transport link to be affected. Eurostar is working on reduced capacity and is urging people to cancel bookings. Trains all around the country have been affected with more than seven to eight hour delays and cancellation.

Mind you, no sudden volcanoes have erupted anywhere this time. No, no, no. It is just snow in a country far up in the northern hemisphere where snow is not unusual. It snowed last year as well, and we faced the similar chaos (with BA workers threatening to go on strike just to add to the fun).

Why doesn’t the government just say it upfront: please don’t travel during December, we can't handle it. It might be Christmas and it might be holiday time, but really, if you travel, it is your problem. We can’t be bothered. We’ll make all the right noises -- listen to BAA CEO's useless apologies -- but not the right choices.

It is like living in India again! Only without the warmth of the climate or the people.

On Tayyab's and the paucity of good Indian restaurants in London

2010-12-20T14:55:00.007Z

Another one bites the dust

Sid's and my perennial search for a good Indian restaurant led us to the famed Tayyab’s this weekend. I had reasons to be optimistic. Whenever, we mentioned the general hideousness of Brick Lane's Indian fare, people whispered of Tayyab’s as an authentic alternative. And the Time Out London Food & Drink guide had nice things to say about it.

The snaking queue at the restaurant gave us more reasons for hope. Though the chaos was not conducive to a relaxing night, it was a positive indication of the kitchen’s efforts. Luckily for us, we were the only people in line for a table-of-two and found ourselves seated soon enough and being served by a polite, dishy-looking Pakistani émigré waiter, his soft Punjabi accent yet to be sandpapered away.

Unfortunately, he turned out to be the dishiest thing in the restaurant that night. My guess is that the saag gosht, fried daal and paneer tikka that we ordered were very tasty when they were initially made, but each subsequent reheat through the day had taken something off the flavour. So by the time it reached our table at eight in the night, I could almost taste the oil and spices crying in protest against the day's torture. The naans were tasty but without the reinforcement of good curry they couldn’t save the night.

It is really funny that the closest we have come to truly yummy, value-for-money Indian food in England is at a Burmese restaurant (Mandalay on Edgeware Road) and a Nepali one (Yak Yeti Yak in all the way in Bath).

Sid says that the popularity of any foreign cuisine is inversely related to its authenticity. The reason our Nepali and Burmese restaurant have been able to maintain their high standard is because they are the only ones in the market – a small niche clientele is enough for them to survive. But the more ubiquitous a cuisine gets, the more a restaurant finds itself pandering to popular tastes in order to attract patrons – even if it means playing fast and loose with authenticity. So it is to the very popularity of Indian food in London that we can blame for our inability to find a good Indian restaurant in London.

But that is our theory. If you have any others, feel free to share.

***
On the most interesting Indian place we have found in London, Dishoom in Leicester Square, read this.

On Blake Edwards, Breakfast at Tiffany's and happy endings

2010-12-17T14:50:00.002Z

Dear Mr Blake Edwards,

May you rest in peace. For now, I never will.

You died before I could ask you the one question that has been killing me ever since I watched your Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

Why? Why did you change Capote’s novella ending for your film? Why did your capricious Holly Golightly had to have a sudden change of heart, character and temperament in the last five minutes of the film and agree to… agree to what… a nice, suburban life with our writer hero?

It was to give us a happy ending, wasn’t it?

Was it worth it? Was it worth killing everything that Golightly stood for – free spiritedness, eccentricity, independence, risk, adventure and total and utter selfishness? Didn’t you know that she couldn’t have been as charming, funny and unique if she wasn’t all those things first? What kind of a story-teller were you to not know that?

No, no, no. I am not a pessimist. I like happy endings too. And I believe that they happen in real life. What I don’t believe is that life has sudden delightful surprises in store for us. No, no Mr Edwards, happy endings have to be worked for and people seldom escape the price of their actions or their patterns of behaviour. Capote understood that, why not you?

But you did understand that, didn't you? But you decided to go with a happy ending anyway because you thought we girls are silly, right? And you thought we wouldn’t have loved your film as much if you had Holly leave her cat and lover in a filthy alleyway and embrace the life of a fugitive. But then, if she was that sort of girl wouldn’t she have still been Paula Mae Burns married to Doc Golightly tending to animals in hick ol’ Texas?

Perhaps, we girls are silly. Perhaps, we want our cake and eat it too. But why were you silly enough to reinforce our rainbow-washed dreams?

I wish, instead, you had taken a chance on us. I wish you had given us a real ending. Perhaps, we would have come through for you and loved Golightly anyway. But now we will never know.

Rest in peace, Mr Edwards.

For now, I never will.

Chetna

Hacktivism: Civil disobedience or guerrilla warfare?

2010-12-11T15:10:00.001Z

There was a cheeky pleasure to watching the hacktivists bring down Mastercard, Visa and the Swiss Bank in retaliation to Assange’s arrest and freezing of Wikileaks’ accounts and servers. For I think that the strategy the governments’ around the world have collectively come up with to tackle the Assange problem is sneaky and underhand.

Assange opened up a big question about transparency before world democracies. And how did the best minds of our times respond? Instead of arresting and trying him for the crime they claimed he had committed – theft and release of US diplomatic cables – they are trying to shut him by implicating him in a sex scandal and by attacking his finances and infrastructure. On no, I may not agree with what Assange did, but I am certainly don’t approve of what the governments are doing in retaliation.

But how exactly should we characterise the actions of these anonymous, amorphous group of people revolting against their own institutions? After all, the majority of hackers who are downloading the hacking programme are Americans and Europeans, whose governments are trying to censor Wikileaks.

Lokulin, in a comment to a previous post, suggested that what we are witnessing is a mass civil disobedience movement on the lines of the civil rights movement and Indian independence movement. Essentially, the hacktivists are regular citizens showing their displeasure against the establishment by bringing down the social and civil systems that the establishment depends on to run society efficiently – our credit cards, paypals, twitter accounts etc.

We can draw an analogy between hacktivists and say, Gandhi and his civil disobedience movement. Essentially, the rulers need the co-operation of ruled in order to function effectively. But if the ruled stopped co-operating – follow the rules and the laws set before them – then no government can function. That is how Gandhi fought the British colonial government: by encouraging people to openly but non-violently defy the British government. And his philosophy inspired other political leaders such as Mandela and Martin Luther King. That is what the hacktivists are doing too – they are defying and challenging the institutions that run our societies.

But then again, an important aspect of civil disobedience movement was its openness. Its moral supremacy arose from the fact that people defying the governments did is openly and publicly and were ready to face the consequences of their actions. In fact, Gandhi and Mandela both spent a goodish part of their lives in jail. But the calm and patience with which they accepted the punishment is what gave them moral authority, convinced others of their stand, and inspired others to follow them.

There is no such openness to the hacktivists. They attack anonymously. We don’t know who they are, and we only have a vague notion of what is driving them. Revenge comes across as their most important motivation as they are only specifically attacking the institutions that cut their connection with Wikileaks. They are not trying to inspire any larger debate or build a following or convince people of their stand. All they are doing is threatening institutions that break ties with Wikileaks with revenge. And how strong their convictions are, and how much they are ready to sacrifice for it – we don’t know yet.

In that sense, they are closer to guerrilla warriors than Gandhi or Mandela.

Does it matter? I don’t know. But somehow I prefer the moral certitude of the likes of Gandhi, Mandela and King than the ambiguity of PLO and Hamas. It took time for the former to win their wars but they left us in doubt about results they achieved.

On Philipsz who won the Turner Prize and Otolith Group who should've

2010-12-08T14:45:00.014Z

Susan Philipsz and her sonorous sound artwork Lowlands Away has won the Turner Prize 2010, and it is so hard to quibble with the judgement. Her spare work is more than just about her sweet, untrained, incredibly haunting voice. It makes you think of music in terms of volumes, shapes, movements and spaces rather than merely sound and thus transcends to sculptures, as they are often called.

Yet, quibble I must. For I wanted the Otolith Group to win, which considering my utterly bewildered first reaction to their works at the Turner Prize exhibition is surprising. Their works are not easy. As Adrian Searle, the guardian art critic commented in a video-article: “they are throwing a big fat, heavy book at you and saying - read this, look at this.” But the point is if you do read this big, fat book, as I did – if you engage with the works, read and think about them, go back and review them – you’ll find yourself filled with all kinds of novel ideas about reality versus fiction, story-telling, images, memories and how they are affected by time and distance. Layer upon layer of meanings and ideas will unfold as you start digging into their works.

Let’s look at Otolith 3 – a film they made in 2009 which is currently being exhibited at the Turner Prize exhibition.

The artists began with a whimsical idea – what if four characters from an abandoned film project called The Alien by Satyajit Ray stepped out of the script and demanded to know why they were never made. Then they created a voiceover script for these four characters plotting of ways to accost Ray, take him to task for abandoning them, and find a way of making the film for themselves independently. Their narrative plays to a dreamlike video that stitches together film footage from Ray’s films from the ’70s, footage of London shot by Sagar’s father in the ’60s, and more by Eshun and Sagar shot in the ’90s.

At a very basic level, the artists are interested in the haunting, unsettling presence of ideas and projects which were once talked about with vigour but never realised. What is their status in our lives – are they real because they live in our minds, or they are unreal because they never came into being? They are interested in the anxiety and frustration that the unfinished leaves inside us.

But it is the clever way in which the artists use film and images and painstakingly combine them with audio to create that sense of haunting and powerlessness inside us that takes their work to the next level. The carefully selected images and footage, the way they are edited and put them together in a loop – each time returning to the same image and story, but with a slight difference – makes us, the audience, experience the anxiety they are talking about and not merely think about it. Indeed, they have a mastery over the medium they are commenting on.

Their works are no less haunting that Susan Philipsz, but they manage to combine several more media, ideas and thoughts about story telling, narratives and film-making into them.

Some art writers like Jonathan Jones have dismissed their works as pretentious and indigestible. But as Eshun said in an interview that I did with him: “pretentious for us just means a work that aspires to make statements about the condition of reality that we all live in”. But Eshun and Sagar don’t just aspire to make these statements, they actually manage to make them through their works.

As I said, I didn’t get their work at first go. But, upon suitable reflection, I digested them and found them rich and intriguing. Perhaps, Jones just didn’t bother to ponder over them long enough.

The Otolith Group's works are serious, challenging and decidedly unspectacular. But what's wrong with serious anyway? To me, it only reflects the serious, challenging and spare time that we are all facing.

***
For those more interested in The Otolith Group, here is a podcast of the raw interview I conducted with the Group over the telephone.

Interviewing The Otolith Group by chetna prakash
***

Julian Assange Vs Lisbeth Salander

2010-12-07T11:35:00.002Z

Julian Assange: Or should we say Man with a dragon tattoo?

I recently read a profile of Julian Assange in the New Yorker. As a friend said in a comment to a previous blog on Wikileaks: "it had the effect of watching a thriller with elements of drama."

It reveals a troubled childhood, a genius mind, an amazing ability with computer hacking, problems handling relationships, trouble with authority, a leaning towards paranoia, a slight air of vulnerability, a fierce desire to fight for justice and all sorts of curious links with Sweden (his most important servers are based out of the country). And then it struck me. Julian Assange is actually Lisbeth Salander: the famous girl with a dragon tattoo.

Fact and fiction seem to diverge on one important point though: Lisbeth Salander was a victim of sexual abuse, and Assange is accused of commiting it in Sweden.

On Wikileaks and government's right to privacy

2010-12-05T15:06:00.005Z

The Wikileaks' now-famous US diplomatic cable dump has stirred a whole new round of debate on what’s private and what’s public in a democracy.

The big question, as the New Yorker’s Amy Davidson and George Packer have raised, is do governments have a right/priviledge to privacy? If democratically elected governments are essentially an extension of their citizens, then don’t the citizens have a right to know all their private thoughts, discussions and correspondence?

I tend to disagree. Yes, governments are made for us and by us but they are entities in themselves too with a certain identity of their own. Otherwise, we would never be able to hold them to account as all their actions would essentially be the actions of each and every citizen of the country. If we were to say that they had no separate identity of their own, then in essence, they could never be brought to books.

As an individual, I have a right to private conversations and correspondence before I act publicly. And a lot of these private discussions, opinions and conversations may be contradictary, difficult, unsavoury and questionable according to the prevailing moral standards of the time - but it is only through these contradictions that I am able to arrive at a position that I am ready to assume publicly on issues. Governments, too, have that right.

However, on certain occasions, my privacy will be breached because doing so will be in the benefit of the community that I live in. But, as I live in a democracy, I hope that there will be a strong enough reason to do so, and as far as possible, it will be done through the right channels. Any democratically-elected government, too, deserves some degree of the same respect.

In this particular instance, Wikileaks - and the five newspapers involved - have played fast & loose with both these parameters. However, as Wikileaks has made its name out of this kind of conduct, let us focus our energies on it. There are three things that strike me about the what, why and how of Wikileaks' actions.

To begin with, Wikileaks has never attempted to use the right channels – the laws provided within the democratic set-up – to gain information about any government. Yes, it is difficult, painful and long-drawn to use these channels but they exist. However, Wikileaks has never been interested in using them. Instead, it has consistently used underhand, Robinhood-style ways to gain private information. To put it in plain ol' English, they have indulged in theft of the cables.

This in itself could be exonerated, if indeed we learnt something that could be used to take some conclusive steps forward. I am with George Packer when he says that this is not the case with Wikileaks' latest cable dump.

Richard Adams of the Guardian has listed seven of the most important revelations made by the cable dump till now. Let’s tackle them one by one.

Silvio Berlusconi 'profited from secret deals' with Vladimir Putin
What the cables tell us is that the US government suspected he might have profited so and was investigating him. His guilt itself remained inconclusive. And by revealing the investigations to the world before any conclusive evidence could be gathered, Wikileaks has done Berlusconi a favour. It is going to be tougher to pin him down since the investigations may never be finished now, and he is extremely good at riding out rumours about his corruption anyway.

The US pressured Spain over CIA renditions and Guantanamo Bay
What I understood from the cables is that the US diplomats had several conversations with the main public prosecutor of an important human rights case being fought in Spain. Yes, but the US government was not doing anything illegal – there were no kickbacks, frauds or bribery involved. So other than knowing that the US government tries to influence officials around the world - something that was not news in itself - we have not learnt anything particularly usable.

The scale of Afghan corruption is overwhelming
This might be news to Wikileaks and Adams, but the rest of us didn’t need a whole government machinery to be violated in order to learn that. There were enough media reports in the public domain suggesting the same.

Hillary Clinton queried Cristina Kirchner's mental health
So? Embarrassing, yes. Illegal, no. And honestly, after all the megalomaniacs we have seen become world leaders, I’d say it is better to keep tabs on the mental health status of all politicians.

The Bank of England governor played backroom politics
So he is not politically neutral and must go. But why punish the US government for it by compromising it? And is it a matter of earth-shattering importance justifying stealing and leaking of private documents?

The British government remains in thrall to the US
To be in thrall is one thing, but did the British government do anything illegal for the US government? Nothing in the cables suggest that.

US diplomats spied on the UN's leadership
This is the only potentially damaging revelation because it could amount to a breach of international human rights. But again, “could” is the operative word out here. We don’t know for sure yet. Besides, if the same investigation had revealed that some of them had "profited from secret deals" with Vladimir Putin - how would we then view the investigation?

None of the revelations show the US government actually doing anything technically illegal on which it could be brought to books. We have always known that government’s play games, use undue influence, meddle and indulge in espionage, and now we have evidence of it. But if the US government's actions are morally ambiguous but not illegal, where does that leave us in macro-terms?

Which brings me to the last point: the manner in which these cables have been dumped on to the world. Wikileaks didn't feel the need to sift through the documents itself and question what was indeed worth revealing instead of unleashing them all over the internet. If that destabalising international relations and/or the effectiveness of an entire government department - who cares? Certainly not Assange & Co.

Some would argue that it was an impossible task to sift through tens of thousands of cables. But if the government is an entity with some rights, and only the circumstances decided whether or not those rights can be violated - how did Wikipedia even know what the circumstances of the case were, if it hadn't actually gone through all the cables itself?

If any decent person was to find a gossip-ridden letter of mine doing the rounds, unless it contained a confession to murder by me, I would expect the person to return it back to me – not plaster it all over the Internet. Why should the US government expect any less?

***
Here's a profile of Julian Assange from his pre-cable dump days: No Secrets by Raffi Khatchadourian published on June 7, 2010.

In particular, I liked this quote: "Soon enough, Assange must confront the paradox of his creation: the thing that he seems to detest most—power without accountability—is encoded in the site’s DNA, and will only become more pronounced as WikiLeaks evolves into a real institution."

On Rosa Parks, racism and India

2010-12-01T20:18:00.016Z

Rosa Parks: Just another Negro in India?

A momentous thing happened on this day – December 1 – fifty years ago. Rosa Parks refused to vacate her bus seat for a white man. She had paid for it, and she was damn well going to sit on it.

Being Indian, I never paid much attention to her courageous action for at least the first 27 years of my life. For contrary to popular opinion, we Indians have no concept of racism. We understand discrimination in terms of language, community, religion, and caste but seldom colour. Because, you see, unlike in Africa, when the British left India, they left it lock, stock and barrel leaving behind a uniformly brown race to take care of itself.

That was 1947: eight years before Rosa Parks’ action avalanched into the civil rights movement in America. By that time, we were too busy with our own internal problems to pay anything more than lip service to the events shaping the world.

Our cluelessness about racism, and the politically correct way to handle it, can lead to many faux pas. For instance, until I quietly corrected him, my father would quite happily describe his granddaughter (my niece) as “chinky-looking” to all his friends. That “chinky” is a nasty, derogatory American slang for Chinese had never been explained to him. He overheard it somewhere, and as far as he and his friends were concerned, it was a rather nice, affectionate way to describe people of “slanted-eyed [his words not mine]” ethnicities.

On another occasion last year, my ears nearly burnt to cinders, when a middle-aged Indian I met in Vienna nonchalantly referred to a British Airways stewardess who had served him as “Negro”. Again, he meant no slight or offence and was merely trying to explain that she was black. It’s just that he was completely unaware of the horrifying political incorrectness of the term’s usage.

After I got over my initial shock, I started thinking how could he have possibly known. He was a 60 year old man who had spent the better part of his life in a small Indian mining town reading the Indian newspaper The Times of India to shape his world view. And with so many close-to-home problems to discuss, the newspaper is not going to waste its ink on politically correct ways to refer to people of different races that its readers may or may not meet.

But the point is that more and more, they are going to meet. Like my Indian acquaintance who was now visiting his son, who had recently migrated to the US. I imagined him quite innocently dropping the dreaded “N” word into conversations there and wondered who would be the first to correct him.

Sometimes, our ignorace of what racism is can get uglier. A former colleauge at Time Out, Che Kurrien, had once done an insightful story about the discrimination and rudeness that two Nigerian immigrants to India constantly encountered in Mumbai. For example, they were quite openly referred to as Habshis (a kind of Indian slang for Africans) by their neighbours. I know that it is possible because several of my parent's acquaintance use that word openly and find it funny.

Which is why, when Indians cry racism against themselves – as they seem to more and more these days (think the Australian fiasco and then the CWG comedy) – I am not sure whether to laugh or cry. For even though we are so quick to judge others on how they treat us, we have absolutely no self-awareness about how racist we can come across to others.

After all, far as many, many Indians are concerned, Rosa Parks may be an international heroine but she is still a Negro.

Snowfall & Disney promises

2010-11-30T10:38:00.005Z

It is not quite December and it is snowing outside.

I grew up with wistful visions of lovely snowfalls. Very few parts of India see snow. And since my economical parents wanted to save money on woollies, they made sure we never visited them in winter. But snowfalls still sneaked into our lives, thanks to Hollywood and all the Christmas releases. No wonder I thought that snowfalls always come packaged with romance, comedy and Christmas lights.

All that changed circa, February 2008, Amsterdam. And I learnt the hard lesson that snowfalls usually come with slush, annoyance, traffic jams, misery and, if you are really unlucky – a broken hipbone. In England, it usually comes with broken public transport as well, just to add to the fun. Needless to say, I am cured me of snowfall sickness forever.

England, for some odd reason, seems to be in denial about its proximity to the North Pole. In other Northern European countries that I lived in, people seemed more at peace with their winters. All houses compulsorily came with double-glazed windows, and as soon as the trees would start shedding their leaves, people would start bulking-up. Fashion was given a short shrift as they all bundled-up in their excellent, expensive winter coats, gloves, thermals and hats. By the time, the snow arrived – nobody even noticed it.

London’s Picadilly Circus knows only one season: that which requires girls in mini-skirts and sheer tights. Winter coats are designed more for fashion than for heavy snowfalls, and places like M&S don’t even stock real woollen cardigans. What you find are sweater lookalikes made out of synthetic mixes. Everything is cheap and most of it is useless. And all the three houses we have lived-in in London have had no double glazing. Public transport breaks down every winter and gas prices soar. And the worst part is: everyone appears shocked by the cold – every year!

But I have made my peace with winter. So if you see a tent waddling its way around London, do stop to say hi!

PS: My favourite winter memory relates to the song Hey There Delilah. Mostly because the Turkish-German cafe in Hamburg that I spent most of my 2008 winter in was always playing this song. So I always somehow associate winter with Hamburg, descending darkness outside, a cappucino cup warming my fingers and Hey There Delilah playing in the background. Here's to winters and Hey There Delihah.

Stopping by the hood on a snowy evening on PhotoPeach

Evening Standard vs Talulah Riley: Who's playing whom?

2010-11-27T13:36:00.002Z

Talulah Riley on the Evening Standard magazine cover

I am not a fan of celebrity magazines. I have nothing against them, only I find my own thoughts and ideas more interesting than anything that celebrities offer, so don’t see the point of reading them. But the one magazine that I can’t quite resist week-on-week is the Evening Standard magazine.

Mostly, I am intrigued by its peculiar criterion for selecting its cover celebrity – she has to be the wife or at least the ex-wife of someone fabulously wealthy and famous. Seldom are these women personalities in their own right. They usually land up saying lots of faintly ridiculous things with a straight face, which is faithfully presented with such extreme seriousness that it makes me suspect mockery. And yet, I can never be sure – which is what keeps me intrigued.

This Friday, it was the turn of 25-year-old Talulah Riley. As an “also appeared” in the films Pride & Prejudice and St Trinian’s, she was on her way to become a footnote to starlet history. Luckily, she caught the fancy of billionaire Elon Musk – the founder of PayPal and now space entrepreneur – who wooed her for a whole of 12 days until she agreed to become his second wife. His billions came with 5 boys [in a set of twins and triplets] from his previous marriage.

I felt quite sure that the journalist, Ms Hermoine Eyre, was mocking her, when she quoted Ms Riley saying:

On her husband’s space exploration projects --“I’d love to get involved with designing habitat systems on Mars – like housekeeping on a grand scale.”

On Musk and his five boys – “When I was little girl I told everyone I would marry a very clever scientist and have ten children. I would always draw the children and they included twin boys whom I named Theodore and Fredrick, Teddy and Freddy for short. It became a family joke, but.. Griffin and Xavier are those blonde-haired twins.”

On meeting Musk for the first time – “There he was, smiling this very big smile and talking about colonising Mars. I was already interested in that kind of thing – the Goldilocks zone of habitable planets and so forth.”

On how she told her father about Mr Musk – “Daddy, I’ve met the most amazing man who makes rockets.”

On her virginity until she met Musk – “I’ve never slept with anyone apart from Elon, which is nice. I mean, which is great.”

About herself – “I am very shy. I don’t drink. I had a gulp of alcohol once and it was disgusting – so bitter. I don’t drink tea or coffee. I’m like a child, I like fruit juices and sodas and creamy hot chocolate.”

Of Elon’s buddies, Facebook creator Zuckerberg and Google creators Larry Page and Sergey Brin.– They are “good people, doing good things... which is comforting, seeing as they could create an artificial intelligence to destroy us all.”

Why would Ms Eyre pick these exact quotes except to present Ms Riley in her full, glorious dumbness?

But then I start suspecting that she is actually buying into Ms Riley’s ridiculous Princess Di-meets-Marie Curie self-image, when she writes:

‘She [Ms Riley] rarely had boyfriends and was more interested in quantum mechanics. So in order to get a grounding in Newtonian physics, she was studying in her spare time at the Open University.’ [err… quantum mechanics is what people do their Phd in and Newtonian physics is what we study in eight grade in high school. Doesn’t Ms Eyre recognise the difference?].

Or

I remember meeting her on the red carpet a few times at this point in her life [her pre-Mrs Talulah Musk days], and she always came across as withdrawn, but poised and perceptive.’

‘Throughout our interview, Talulah exudes calm happiness, not showing-off so much as simply pointing out her spouse’s qualities.’

‘Talulah, I am sure, holds her own [before Musk]. Last Christmas, just to tease him, she filled his stocking with coal.’

Who is playing whom? Is it that Talulah Riley recognises Ms Eyre for an idiot and is feeding her with all kinds of rubbish? Or does Mr Eyre recognise Ms Riley for a dumb blonde and is playing her along? Or is it that they are both idiots taking each other on face value?

Such a Freudian intrigue – how can I resist it?

No, I still think Louis Vuitton is pulling a fast one on us

2010-11-26T09:39:00.001Z

Louis Vuitton in Paris

It seemed like a good idea to view the exhibition on Louis Vuitton’s history at Museé Carnavalet in Paris. Andrew had recommended it. Besides, given my previously-expressed cynicism about the brand, I felt I owed it one chance to try and understand the secret of its unceasing popularity. Then again, we were in Marais, one of the most fashionable neighbourhoods I’ve ever visited, and it seemed somehow appropriate.

The exhibition traced the luggage-maker’s history since 1835 when 14-year-old Louis Vuitton undertook a two-year trek from his hometown Jura to Paris to become an apprentice for a luggage store on 4 rue des Capucine. It took him only another 18 years to set up his own eponymous store in the capital. But interestingly – and here’s where my respect for the company grew – the first 100 years of the luggage company were as much based on innovation as branding exercises.

Think about it: 1850s to 1950s is when the means, modes and quality of travel changed dramatically. From horse-drawn carts we sswiftly moved to ocean liners, trains, automobiles and airplanes. Naturally, a change in transport necessitated a change in our luggage designs – and Louis Vuitton constantly innovated to keep up with modern lifestyles.

Luggage and writing desk rolled into one

It started with changing the shape of our trunks from domed-tops to flat tops, which could be easily stacked on top of each other. Then they changed the material used for trunks from leather to coated canvas – less prestigious but sturdier. The House also started cleverly compartmentalising spaces inside to optimise usage. They created slim cabin trunks that could be slipped under the bunks of ocean liners and trains. They created drop leaf cases (where the front end would also drop along with the top) for picnic cases, once automobiles became fashionable. These picnic cases came complete with set-to-size cutlery inside. Among their more outlandishly innovative designs were suitcases with pop-up beds and built-in writing desks for longer exploratory journeys.

The designs were exciting because functionality and not just aesthetics lay at the heart of their creation.Interestingly, after the 1950s, such functionality-based innovation petered out and aesthetics, branding and marketing exercises took over. (It is also the time when the company moves out of family control after three generations of Louis Vuittons at the helm.) It is telling that barely two percent of the exhibits included designs made between the 1950s and now. These exhibits include the luggage custom-made for Damien Hirst, Karl Lagerfeld, Zaha Hadid and film maker Wes Andersen for his film, The Darjeeling Ltd. So their wow-factor had more to do with brand association than with design innovation.

My problem with Louis Vuitton is that even when it comes to aesthetics, the brand is stuck to one look, coming up with gazillion permutations and combinations within that narrow framework. It was Gaston Louis Vuitton – second in the chain – who came up with the brand’s distinctive lazenge motif in 1888, inspired by Japanese design which was all the rage in Paris at that time. But today, the distinctiveness and prominence of the motif has made the brand an extremely easy prey to forgers – for we live in a world of easy duplication. And yet, LVMH Group seems loathe to innovate their design which is a cash cow for them. It is a far call from the days when Louis Vuitton decided to replace leather on his truck cover with coated canvas – a decidedly less prestigious but lighter and sturdier material. He took a call based on functionality, and the canvas in elegant grey went on to become the company's signature design.

Sid says, travel hasn’t changed much since the 1950s. It is still aeroplanes that we travel in so what could they possibly innovate over? Well, the speed, frequency and quality of our travel has changed dramatically. We travel more, for shorter distances and with far lesser luggage. Surely, that requires a new attitude towards luggage making. For example, if Louis Vuitton once came up with a case with an in-built writing desk, then why not one with an in-built laptop board, a device that has attached itself to our beings?

It is because the brand is no longer about innovation in luggage making. It is just another corporation looking for the easiest and safest way to cash-in on the hard-earned reputation of its founding fathers.

FT, Martin Parr and whether ex-Mumbaikars suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome

2010-11-24T22:24:00.004Z

I finally got around to reading the FT Weekend Magazine on my way back from Paris.

The tantalising cover and the bold “Seven Days in South Asia” had me most excited. I mean, how often do you see a North Indian woman in a violent pink sari and comic sunglasses on the cover of FT?

Unfortunately, the story was a let-down. It was written in the style of a diary of the FT editor Lionel Barber about his weeklong trip to India and Pakistan. During the eight days – yes, it was eight days but I guess, “Seven days in South Asia” just sounds better – he essentially hobnobbed with the rich and the powerful of the two countries starting with the governor of West Bengal, followed by Mamata Bannerjee, Mukesh Amabani, Anil Ambani, Anil Agarwal of Vedanta Group, Ananda Mahindra, Ratan Tata, PRS Oberoi of Oberoi Hotel, the Ruias, Jyotiraditya Scindia, Manmohan Singh, the governor of Punjab Salman Taseer, and finally Asif Ali Zardari. As all these interviews had to be reduced to a four page story, what we get is mostly his impressions and a few quotes to support those impressions. All that is fine by me. But why the comic, cheeky cover image which suggested insights into the self-perceptions of ordinary Indians? To me, the cover seemed disingenuous and misleading.

The image was shot by Martin Parr. Chirodeep, a photojournalist friend of mine, had first told me about him. Then in a space of a week, I found myself gazing at this works twice. First on the FT cover, and then again at an exhibition at Maison Européenne de la Photographie, which was a part of a month-long photography festival in Paris. Parr’s photographs at the exhibition were from one of his early acclaimed series published in 1986 about British tourists holidaying at Brighton.

The exhibition was about extreme photography: or images that pushed either the photographer or the audience to the extremes of their physical, social, imaginative and/or emotional abilities, and how just by doing so, made the experience a little bit mundane.

Which is why this image by Gabriele Basilico stayed with me for long after I had left the exhibition. It caught my eye the moment I entered the room, mostly because from a distance it looked like Mumbai to me. A densely packed neighbourhood with mid-rise buildings in a semi-ruinous state, where else could it be? It turned out to be shots of bombed-out Beirut from 1991. But honestly, even at a closer look, it kind of looked like Mumbai on an ordinary day to me. It was appalling to think that we Mumbaikars live in what most people would consider “extreme conditions” on an everyday basis.

But don’t extreme conditions come with some form of associated trauma? Which makes me wonder whether I am suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome, now that I am not living in Mumbai anymore?

What would its symptoms be? If I had to guess, they would be:
A)    A rush of joy at the sound of traffic noise
B)    Tap water-related paranoia
C)    Morbid fear of silence
D)    And a constant bursting into happy tears at the sight of crowds

If you have any other suggestions, feel free to leave to use the comment space.

A discourse on prejudice: Or why I love coming to Paris.

2010-11-21T17:43:00.001Z

What I love most about being in Paris is that I can’t understand a word of what anyone is saying. So everyone sounds intelligent and educated to me. Besides, how stupid can they be – they SPEAK French!

In England, I can eavesdrop and am constantly reminded of the general pettiness of human race. Because really, all that people ever do is complain and bitch. Like the two ladies who sat next to Sid & I in the Eurostar to Paris. Three hours! For three hours, all they did was bitch about people, including ironically the girl for whose hen’s party they were visiting Paris.

Worse, in England I can detect accents. And it gives me a sense of people’s background and education – if not of their intelligence. I try, I really try not to judge them on the basis of it. But despite my best efforts, if someone sounds like Katie Price aka Jordan, it is likely to be a short acquaintance. Because I have only limited social time and I would rather spend it with people with whom my wavelengths have at least half-a-chance to match.

In India, the instant judgements go much further because I know the society so much better. Accents aren’t the only giveaway to people’s histories there. In India, I can guess a person’s caste, community and culture by his or her very name. Add an address and occupation to that, and a person’s whole life is reasonably mapped out before me without any effort on my part.

Of course, every now and then I am proved wrong. But it is not pleasing to start an acquaintance under the burden of prejudice.

As a student of media, I know that stereotyping people is wrong. We should not slot people on the basis of their colour, ethnicity, culture, community, caste, accent or education. Because over and above all they are individuals, and their shared cultural experiences will always be modified by their own unique personalities. But how do I train my brain to filter out people’s colour, names, accents and addresses and begin every acquaintance with a clean slate. It just refuses to listen to me.

So instead, I live with guilt: the guilt of a good, Labour-supporting liberal.

And occasionally, I escape to Paris where I can always assume the best of everyone.

***
The Scottish comedia Danny Bhoy on French accents

London's Most Expensive: Or why I love and hate online journalism

2010-11-17T10:25:00.002Z

What I love and hate about the internet and online journalism is the power it places in the hands of the readers.

I love it because sometimes the commentary by readers opens your eyes to the most curious ideas – ideas that that would have never occured to you. For example, when I wrote a blog about how Frieda Pinto is a fairly average-looking girl in India, I practically got assaulted by an American fan of hers in the commentary section. Her argument was that Pinto wasn’t Indian at all, but Latina, and that Indians in general were ugly and racist and hated Pinto.

Ok, so her language offensive. But I had never thought of Pinto as Latina-looking. But damn it, she is. I can see her playing Latina roles – if her acting chops are up to it – and make a successful Hollywood career out of it. But for the trenchant reader, I would have never thought of it.

But I hate it when readers point out factual errors in your story. For example, I recently wrote an article for the website Londonist on some of London’s most expensive experiences. One of them was London’s most expensive whiskey, and my research led me to a £740 double measure of whiskey at Albannach Bar at Trafalgar Square. My conclusion was based on other media reports, personal memory and internet research. And I thought how could one possibly trump £740 for a shot of whiskey?

Only, as one reader pointed out, Dorchester can. It offers a “Macallan 57 years in Lalique Crystal” for £870.

Thankfully, we were clever enough to put a rider at the end of the story asking readers to trump our finds. So we had already put the humble idea out there that our finds may not be the full and final truth.

Still, I hate being trumped. But as most literature on the future of journalism suggests, I should just get used to it.

***
Here's a little clip from Drop the Dead Donkey - a satirical series on journalism from its good ol' days in the '80s. Can you imagine any journalist getting away with it today!

Baby gorilla at London Zoo: Or is it EastEnders in a new avatar?

2010-10-29T11:06:00.001+01:00

Hmm... so I have started contributing to Londonist. It is all a big experiment and all shall be revealed in due time.

In the meantime, enjoy my latest contribution on gorillas, zoos and EastEnders.

i Spy: or what possessed The Independent to launch another newspaper?

2010-10-28T22:19:00.002+01:00

Why oh why, did The Independent launch i?

It is a question that has me befuddled ever since I read the first copy of this tabloid-sized newspaper that launched two days ago – the first national newspaper to be launched in Britain in 25 years. I actually read the paper for three days running to try and figure that out.

It is not that I don’t think there is a need for a newspaper, a proper paper publication at that, in the UK. The endlessness of news over the web – the twitter feeds, facebook updates, rss feeds, google news updates and reams and reams of endless commentary – does make me wish for a one-stop shop every morning for all the important events of the day past.

But I wanted it be real news – facts and information that would clue me into the important issues surrounding my life. I didn’t want to be entertained. I didn’t want gossip. I didn’t want lifestyle features. And I certainly didn’t want views and commentary telling me what to think about the issues at hand. I have enough media at my fingertips to do just that for FREE. I only wanted facts – the bare bones to build my own opinion on, if I cared enough about the issue.

That is exactly what i claimed it would do. It was supposed to be “a new kind of a paper” giving you your “essential daily briefing” that “cuts through this information overload to give you all you need”. Only it came filled with features like “Are you getting your oats?”, “best toys in town”, “10 best leggings” reviews on films, theatre and books, tv listings, and still more commentaries and views on television, arts, business, sports and politics to add to the existing media cacophony.

But it is only 20p, The Independent says. The point is I would still have to take a detour to a newsstand or at the very least, stop by a streetside vendor, search through my handbag, and extract 20p for the pleasure. For that much effort, wouldn’t I want to treat myself to a real newspaper?

Watch this space: Or has Google come to our rescue... finally?

2010-10-17T22:37:00.011+01:00

Zuckerberg: Poor little rich boy

Watching The Social Network yesterday got me curious about how Facebook makes money. After all, the site hasn’t made a public-offer yet, it hasn’t been bought out, so how has it made Zuckerberg the youngest billionaire in the world?

The answer left me reeling. It made $500 million dollars last year primarily through advertising. Ever noticed those four small boxes that pop-up on the side of your profile page? I hadn’t. I would have, if I had known that they were making nearly $450 million dollars for Zuckerberg & Co annually. And what made me nearly burst into tears was that the rest of the $50 million dollars were being made through sale of virtual goods – those silly $1 ducks, mugs, hugs and batches we keep sending to each other.

How is it that Facebook can get people to collectively spend $50 million dollars on silly goods that are not even real but newspaper and magazine websites can’t get a penny out of people for bringing critical information to their desktops every day? What is it that media companies providing information content don't seem to understand about their audience? Or is it that they are just lazy, uncreative and incapable of thinking of innovative ways to squeeze money out their audience? The best great minds such as Rupert Murdoch’s have been able to come up with is a militant, view-on-subscription-only paywall approach. But if I haven’t felt motivated enough to get an online subscription to his Sunday Times then fat chance Mr Murdoch has with ADD-infected teenagers?

But help may be on its way if Google’s Watch This Space campaign is even half as effective as it sounds.

Now we might as well accept that information content is all going to go digital. It is also mostly going to be free. So the only saviour content creators can possibly find is advertisors. And yet, online advertising has always been particularly dull. Those tacky banner ads have a tendency to pop-up at the wrong time and wrong place. Besides, conventional wisdom suggests that the medium is too fragmented and fractured for any campaign to make any measurable impact. However, Google has put its geek-might behind making online advertisements easy, smarter, attractive, measurable, customised and better-targeted than ever before.

Algorithm-by-algorithm, Google is trying to streamline the online digital space to make it easier for advertisers to find the right audience, place smart and attractive advertising campaign swiftly and smartly, and be able to measure its success more accurately.

For example, Google representatives Barry Salzman and Neil Mohan at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Mixx conference last month (see video above) predicted that almost half of all online display ads will move from static text banners to real media ads, that is, videos which are interactive and expandable. Google claims to have the necessary technology called the double click studio to help the conversion. The ads will be customised in real time depending on the audience and their location. They are also working on more metrics to examine the success of the campaign, which hitherto has been dependent on the actual number of clicks on display ads. But clicks didn’t take into account people who made related searches or visited the product’s website instead of clicking on the display ad. Google claims it can make that possible in the future, apart from coming up with other solutions to measure a campaign’s success.

If Google can, and if online media becomes genuinely profitable for the first time, perhaps there will be some hope for me.

And yes, The Social Network was a fabulous film! Zuckerberg was a sneaky little bastard but what a rich sneaky little bastard he was.

Bookered Out: Or I bet Jacobson was not mantelpiece-deprived like me

2010-10-13T12:36:00.010+01:00

As Howard Jacobson was accepting his first Man Booker Prize award yesterday for the book The Finkler Question, I was accepting my first polite rejection from the Story Quarterly to whom I had sent a short story for publication.

I don’t blame them. I was destined to fail as a writer. Because I grew-up funny in small town India reading words I couldn’t visualise and seeing things I had no words for.

Howard Jacobson: Bet his was rich with mantelpieces

We spoke Hindi at home, English at school, and a hopeless mix of the two everywhere else, and my book diet was rationed by our school librarian to 12 books a year -- to be chosen out of an exclusively selected pile of Enid Blytons and Nancy Drews. Other than that, there was a Railway Club library entirely built out of the comic books and American paperback thrillers left behind by Railway Officers passing through Dhanbad.

The problem was that everything I read related to some imaginary world out there with landscapes, terrains, houses, neighbourhoods, foods and clothes that were divorced from most things that surrounded me. I remember spending an entire winter afternoon in our large, bare drawing room staring hard at its every feature trying to figure out if anything fit the description of a mantelpiece. Mantelpieces frequently appeared in the lives of the Famous Five whom I was rather obsessed with. Yet, I had great trouble visualising it. I knew my drawing room had shelves and a cupboard, four walls and a CEMA fluorescent tube light – but nothing that could be a mantelpiece. It sounded grand, M-A-N-T-E-L-P-I-E-C-E, but what was it? What did it really look like? The fat Oxford English Dictionary gave me a hazy idea of shape and form, and the fact that it probably had something to do with fireplaces, but nothing concrete that I could grasp. And there were no google images to rush up to. There was only my imagination, and a hazy, frustrating feeling that I was not trying hard enough.

But how could an eight-year-old visualise something that she had never seen. How could I visualise bacon, mackintoshes, loafers, brogues, macaroons, jodhpurs, loafers, brambles, blueberries, awnings, turrets, gables, attics, and daffodils when I was surrounded by saris, pyjamas, polyester, aubergines, karelas, English broilers, spices, scooters, pigs in gutters and water buffaloes. Slowly, I simply started shutting descriptions out, involving myself more and more with the characters and their internal lives. After all, I could still identify with their anger, surprise, jealousies, envies and joys, if not with their mackintoshes and brogues. I thought that a better solution than the one my best friend Shilpi (or was it Shilpa?) came up with – not read at all.

To make matters worse, there were no texts around me that helped me put into specific words the things that actually formed my visual landscape. Even our school textbooks were filled with stories by English and American writers. There was nothing that described the lives we led in our Indian towns and cities. Was there a specific word to describe the standalone single-storey brick-built apartment block that I lived in? I knew it was different from the row of stone-built single-storey apartments with shared walls that my friend lived in. If there were separate words to distinguish them, I never came across them in either books or real life – they were only ever called buildings. There were bungalows and then there were buildings, nothing in between.

Confused and frustrated by words and descriptions, I simply stopped looking for words to describe the in-betweens. Rooms were rooms, houses were houses, trees were trees, colonies were colonies and chicken curry was chicken curry – if there were in-between features, they existed in the world of my vision, not in words, not on paper, not in stories, and not in novels.

Today, Indian children are more lucky. Google has made the world so much smaller, and Indian authors writing about life in India are increasingly common. But it is too late for me. Mantelpiece deprivation sealed my fate forever. Bet Jacobson never had that problem.

****
Update: Naresh sent me a link related to a BBC4 documentary talking about Blyton's overpowering effect on so many Indian children. I am glad I wasn't the only one.

Zuckerberg & The Social Network: Or why when in doubt I turn to The New Yorker

2010-10-08T13:05:00.009+01:00

On my third day at Time Out Mumbai, I dragged Naresh into our merry, cherry-red office meeting room and demanded to know what he expected of me as a journalist. I was an aggressive, green 24-year-old, and was determined that my Columbia-educated, WSJ-alumnus editor, Naresh Fernandes, was going to teach me all that there was to learn about journalism. Naresh, in his usual part-alarmed, part-taciturn way, asked me if I had heard of The New Yorker. I hadn’t – you see, I was also a stupid 24-year-old. He went ack to his desk, got a few copies, handed them to me, and said: “This was my favourite magazine in New York. This is what I want Time Out to be.”

I remember feeling a bit deflated at that time. But six years later, I wonder if he could have taught me more about journalism then to introduce me to the absolute best in the trade. I am a complete, unabashed, unapologetic fan of the publication and now website. I love it because whenever there are too many voices, too much emotion, too much hyperbole in the air about something, I know I can turn to The New Yorker for a detailed, thoroughly well-researched and reasoned analysis of the situation.

And if there is one subject that has tongues wagging at the moment, it is David Fincher & Alan Sorkin’s film The Social Network, which is the story of how Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook, screwed all and sundry in the process of becoming the hippest geek in the world. It is hardly surprising that the film is so anticipated. After all, no internet tool since Google had impacted our lives as much online as offline. For better or worse, it tapped somewhere deep into our psychology and affected our notions of friendship, popularity, self-awareness, privacy and connectivity. And of its reach, I can only say that my 61-year-old Dad who still types with one finger has a Facebook account, as do many of his friends.

The film will release in the UK on Oct 15 but if reviews of the film from the US are anything to go by, Zuckerberg is depicted as a socially-retarded, sexually-charged, and morally-vacant person. The film is not kind to Zuckerberg’s personality, his intentions or the way he went about making the Facebook tool. In short, we will probably come out the theatre heartily disliking the fellow and suspicious of how his intentions for us, the unquestioning users of Facebook.

But trust the New Yorker to come out with a more questioning and nuanced profile of Zuckerberg just before the film’s release in the States to balance the Sorkin’s hyperbolic character. The author Jose Antonio Vargas still describes him as supremely ambitious, iconoclastic and socially-retarded, but tempers his portrayal with enough humanity to make him believable. There are four things from the article that I would like to keep in mind when I watch the film.

a)    He was 19 when he created the tool. He is 28 years old now. Surely, some self-reflection must have accompanied his ascent into adulthood.

b)    If money and acceptance was all-important to him, why didn’t he sell his tool to Yahoo!, Microsoft or MTV Networks, all of whom offered him between 75 million dollars and a billion dollars for the tool.

c)    His girlfriend of last seven years, Priscillia Chan, is a Chinese-American studying medicine at the University of California. Somehow that does not sound like the actions of a horny, misogynistic jerk – that the film supposedly shows he to be – who suddenly came into a lot of money and fame.

d)    And finally, the fact that the 49-year-old Sorkin admitted in the article that he knew very little about social networking and professed an “extreme dislike of the blogosphere and social media”. Are the most ignorant, often the most prejudiced?

The New Yorker article was important because how we view Zuckerberg, and perhaps Facebook, will be affected by the film for a long time to come. Hence, I am glad that there is another compelling and alternative account of him out there too to counter the film’s character. After all, as any good journalist knows, you will never know the truth but it is important to put all versions of it out there. And The New Yorker is all about good journalism.

Wright or Wrong: Or how not to get "Robie-ed" in life

2010-10-07T12:48:00.017+01:00

Robie House: modernism or a Vaastu disaster?

I couldn’t have left Chicago without visiting at least one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s buildings -- now could I? So I zeroed in on Robie House: a residential house he built in 1910 in Hyde Park (the neighbourhood that would later house the Obamas). Not only was it considered to be Wright's first house that truly embodied modernism, it is now a museum with guided tours of the property.

It turned out to be beautiful, peaceful, three-storey brick house with an innovative spatial lay-out, gorgeous design details and lots of delightful little aids to the modern life, such as an ice-box, planters with automated water pipes and vacuum cleaners, with reflected the forward-looking sensibilities of the young, fashionable Robie family.

I kept thinking how lovely it must have been to live in the house until our guide started disclosing the sordid fates of all its eventual residents. The house was custom-built for 28-year-old Fredrick C Robie, his socialite wife and two kids, keeping in mind their modern lifestyle, ideals and aesthetic sensibilities. But poor Fredrick Robie, who spent nearly $60,000 on the house (20 times what he had budgeted for it), went bankrupt within a year of moving into the house. He sold the house to repay his debts, but never recovered his fortunes. Soon after, his wife walked out on him with their two kids. The new owners of the house, The Taylors, didn’t have a happy run in the house either. David Taylor died less than a year after moving into it, and the house had to be sold again. The third and last family to live in the house were the Wilburs, who lived there for 13 years. History doesn’t record their fate, but they sold the house to the Chicago Theological Seminary, who bought it with the general idea of demolishing it and rebuilding larger premises on the plot. They attempted to do so thrice, and only gifts of all the adjoining plots to the Seminary by Wright fans to the premises instead finally stopped them. The house was then bought by a real estate firm which handed it over to the University of Chicago in 1963. It ran a rather dull administrative office there till 1997, after which it was converted into a museum. So it was a family home than never quite managed to become one.

How could this amazingly harmonious-looking house bring so much disharmony in the lives of all those who lived in it?

Sid and I could think of only one cheeky explanation: messed-up Vaastu (or the Feng Shui of India). I searched the Internet to find if any of the enthusiastic proponents of Vaastu Shastra might have done a post mortem of this famously controversial house pointing out all the design-disasters led to such headaches in the lives of its residents. Surprisingly, I didn’t find any.

So here’s an idea for a reality show for silly Indian television: Vaastu vs Wright, or should we say, how not be “Robied” of love and luck in life?

Me & the Bean Talk

2010-10-06T19:27:00.008+01:00

There are few things that immediately turn me into a child. Sculptures by Anish Kapoor – especially the large, tactile, abstract ones – invariably do.

Which is why I landed up visiting the Millenium Park thrice during my two-week stay in Chicago. Just so that I could stare, touch and fool around with The Bean (or Cloud Gate, as is its official name that nobody uses) – the giant, bean-shaped, silvery sculpture by Anish Kapoor that sits in the park reflecting the amazing towered skyline of downtown Chicago.

After attending a retrospective of his works at the Royal Academy of Arts, I had written in a blogpost: “The material and colours somehow invited you to touch them, stare into their curving holes, pose in front of its shiny surfaces, hop over them, slide under them – and just fool around with them. The museum staff was having a tough time stopping people from doing just that, even though, I wonder if Kapoor would really mind. The works looked too solid to be easily harmed by anyone.”

Well, there was no museum staff to police people here, and boy, were they fooling around with the sculpture? You could see people being attracted to its shiny, curved reflective surface almost against their will. They would stare at it, crawl under it, run their palms on its smooth surface, and then slowly the camera would come out and they would go nuts shooting their own distorted reflections, or in my case, taking post-modern pictures of me taking pictures of Sid, which he has expressly forbidden me from publishing on this blog.

The work did exactly what good public art should do – get people curious, interested, fascinated and, at the end, exhilarated.

According to Wikipedia, the people of Chicago started referring to the sculpture as The Bean even before it was fully unveiled, thanks to its inverted bean shape. Kapoor thought the name "completely stupid", and went on to name it Cloud Gate. Of course, I didn't come across one person in the city who called it that. But then again, looking at his amazingly tactile works, one would imagine that Kapoor made them specifically for people to physically interact with. Yet, as Girish said in a comment to my previous blogpost, he absolutely hates the public touching his works. The fact that the people anyway call his work The Bean and continue to touch it in fascination goes to show how the city has appropriated his sculpture. It is a measure of how this public work of art has truly gone public. Would Kapoor have wanted it any other way?

Kallat in Chicago: Or you just can't escape India anywhere

2010-10-04T15:33:00.008+01:00

Step-by-step Kallat conquers the world

I went all the way to Chicago, and guess what – the first article to catch my eye, when I opened the Time Out Chicago website, was one recommending a view of a public installation work by Jitish Kallat entitled Public Notice 3 at the Art Institute of Chicago or ARTIC. (ARTIC, by the way, houses such greats as Nighthawks by Edward Hopper and American Gothic by Grant Wood.) Never one to let a story go to waste, I quickly charged my dictaphone and set out to view the work and interview the curator. The article appeared in this week’s TOI Crest, and you can read an online version of it here.

What is interesting, and which I didn’t get a chance to discuss in the article – word counts are such a bummer! – is how the work actually got made.

So for those not keen on reading the Crest piece, this much should suffice to understand the work: “The installation links two important events in American history. The first is the landmark speech delivered by Swami Vivekananda calling for an end to “bigotry and fanatism” at the opening of the first World’s Parliament of Religions, on September 11, 1893, held at the site of the Chicago museum. The second is, of course, the terrorist attacks on the same day, 108 years later. Kallat has recreated the entire text of Swami Vivekananda’s speech on the risers of the main staircase of the museum using LED lights in the five colors of the US Department of Homeland Security alert system—red, orange, yellow, blue and green.”

However, I imagined Kallat playing a critical role in the creation of the installation. When we hear that the installation is by So-&-So, we still conjure-up visions of the artist painstakingly hammering away at his sculpture / installation. Actually, Kallat’s main role regarding this work pertained to conceptualisation. The museum curator, Madhuvanti Ghose, then found a company that specialises in making art installations, gave them the specifications, and worked with them to bring the installation to life. Kallat was consulted over phones and emails. Throughout the course of the installation’s creation – which was roughly a year – Kallat only made an appearance in Chicago once. That was in August this year, a month before the show’s opening, when the installation was ready for a mock-up.

I wonder if any credit needs to be given to the company that actually produced the installation as per the specifications received. None of the literature accompanying the work mentions them. Ms Ghose in the interview said that it is well-known within the artistic community of Chicago, so I am guessing, they don’t as such need the marketing mention. But do we as the viewers need to know who actually made this work, apart from who conceptualised it?

I am not asserting that the installation not being hand-made by Kallat in any way diminishes it. It does not: the work fully and completely remains his. But does the museum or the artist owe it to their viewers to make the process of the making of the artwork transparent to the viewer?

What was also interesting was that the installation – that is so custom-made for this particular site – can in fact be loaned to other museums. Only, it would have to be built from scratch for the borrowing museum. Ms Ghose said that the site of its display will have be relevant, since much of the artwork’s meaning is derived from the site of its installation: the staircase opposite the Fullerton Hall at ARTIC, the exact spot where Swami Vivekananda made his speech on September 11, 1893. However, I wonder, if the artwork is so site-specific, how can it ever be recreated elsewhere without either losing its meaning or donning a new meaning. Would it not then be a whole new work?

After all, if it weren’t for its site-specificity, wouldn’t the art-work simply be Detergent: a very similar text-and-light installation – with the same speech and colours – on the staircase of the Guangdong Museum of Art in China, that Kallat made last year?

***
I have created a soundslide – my first – of Kallat’s installation. All images except the first one are courtesy the Art Institute of Chicago. (PS: The triumphant Star & Stripes music is meant to be tongue-in-cheek, and yes, I know there are typos in the video text. I didn't realise that I wouldn't be allowed to edit once the video was made. Sorry about that.)

Kallat goes to America on PhotoPeach

Games people play: Or why the success of CWG will spell our doom

2010-10-03T21:16:00.011+01:00

A cracker of an Opening Night...

As I watched the opening ceremony of the Commonwealth Games in Delhi – perhaps, the most controversial in the history of the Games – I kept thinking of the wise words by a wise Indian economist – “The 21st century is India’s to lose”. If the past few months building-up to the Games are anything to go by then lose it we will.

The opening ceremony was a success. No bombs went off, no ceilings came down, no bridges collapsed and we put together a lovely, warm, humorous opening ceremony – I damn near burst into tears twice while watching it. Unfortunately, in its very success lie the seeds of our eventual failure to make it big. Because this final face-saving effort will erase the need for any post-mortem or soul-searching that is necessary if we are ever to remove the “ing” from our “developing” tag.

What we really and truly needed was for the Games to be cancelled. We needed to be told by the world that “Jugaad” – the boastful Hindi word that we use to show the ingenuity of our last-minute “beg, borrow, steal” survival skills – is not good enough. We needed complete humiliation to realise that if we want to be taken seriously around the world then we need to start taking ourselves seriously first. We need to demand higher standards of our politicians, government officials – and before them, of all ourselves.

I remember meeting this Delhiite in Vienna who kept complaining about how Tata Nano – the one lakh car – would spell the ruin of the city. A little while later, when I asked him how many cars he owned for his family of five, he proudly declared, “Oh, seven”. He saw no irony in his position. Similarly, I am sure right this moment one of the private contractors, who bribed his way into the Games and then provided shoddy, inefficient construction work, is sitting somewhere loudly complaining about how corruption is the bane of our country. And he’ll see no irony in his complaints. If we look into our own lives, we are constantly taking advantage of our corrupt, inefficient systems to gain little advantages: whether it is dodging a traffic fine, getting a fake license, bribing examiners, exploiting our servants or getting contracts to CWG Games for a steal. Because we are corrupt and inefficient as people, we have a corrupt and inefficient government. After all, we are a proud democracy, aren’t we? And democracy is as much a government OF the people and BY the people, as it is FOR the people.

To make matters worse, there will be insidious comments about the complains being a racist conspiracy. Only, I don’t understand what is racist about pointing out that if a footbridge to the biggest stadium collapses two weeks before the opening ceremony, then the facilities are potentially dangerous? What is racist about saying that that missing deadlines after deadlines in building the stadiums and residential village is not a mark of a mature country vying to be seen as a world power? What is racist about asking for clean toilets and rooms for athletes? What is racist about holding us to the same standards as they would hold other developed countries to? On the contrary, wouldn’t it be patronising and racist to expect lower standards of us?

The fact that the ceremony opened to great fanfare will make us forget the ridiculousness of our efforts – the missed deadlines, the broken bridges, the falling ceilings, the inflated budgets, the slimy double-dealings, most of all, the deaths and injuries of construction workers that marked the event. We will just comically nod our heads side-to-side and say, we are like this only – and expect the world to congratulate us for our “jugaad”.

... but better not forget the fallen footbridges

Just remember, the only other Games to be riddled with the same last-minute, hurried problems – though on a somewhat smaller scale – was the Olympic Games of 2004 held in Athens, Greece. And Greece was the first country to go humiliatingly bankrupt when world recession rolled-in. Internally weakened by years of corruption, inefficiencies and nepotism, it simply collapsed. Is that the fate we are looking for ourselves too? The twenty-first century – ours to lose?

Commonwealth Games: Or why Madhu Sapre should be the final relay runner of the Queen's Baton

2010-09-12T13:06:00.006+01:00

And she learnt never to be honest again!

Sid’s Dad called, and we all started talking about the Commonwealth Games. Specifically about what are we going to do with all the stadiums after the Games are over? After all, it is a well-known fact that Indians don’t do sports; at least not the kind that require any physical exertion – like, horror, horror, running! My bet ison the stadiums turning into venues for those overblown Delhi weddings.

The discussion made me think of the last Indian who showed any passion for athletics and paid a heavy price for it: Madhu Sapre, the first Indian model of any consequence. The year was 1992, the venue was the Ms Universe Contest and Ms Sapre – then a lissome 21-year-old Mumbaikar full of rough edges (complete with a Dadar accent) – was the first Indian contestant to make it to the final round. Unfortunately, she managed to goof it up by actually being honest. When asked what she would change if she was the prime minister of the country for a year, she replied that she would improve the sports facilities available in the country. It was a practical, doable, and an honest opinion coming from her heart – after all, she was the daughter of an athlete and an athlete herself. Unfortunately, as her answer didn’t include any obscure references to world poverty and world peace, she lost.

I think Ms Sapre – who now lives in Italy with her ice-cream making husband – should be given the honour of being the final relay runner with the Queen’s baton. Think about it, she is glamorous, good looking and she once paid a big price for siding herself with the athletes of India. Now that her dream is close to reality, this is the least we could do.

***
Here’s a grainy video of the final round of that momentous contest with the winsome Ms Sapre so innocently talking about her life and dreams. She actually sounded real and non-plastic. Those were the days.

The rise and rise of Mayank Shekhar: Or has Sarah Palin found her literary match?

2010-09-09T16:59:00.021+01:00

To
Mayank Shekhar
National Cultural Editor and Chief Film Reviewer
Hindustan Times
India

Dear Mayank,

In the Wikipedia entry for Peepli Live – one of the most talked of Hindi films of late – I came across an extract from a review of the film by you: “The satire is irresistible; the subtext, compelling. And yet neither shows itself up in any form of self-seriousness. The comic writing is immaculately inspired”.

Mayank spreading knowledge - hopefully not on English

And I found myself wondering, what exactly is “self-serious”?

Perhaps, what you mean is serious.

Only, as I understand a good satire is something superficially funny but with a serious subtext. If it doesn’t have a serious subtext, then it is just a comedy not a satire. So what exactly do you mean when you say that the satire and subtext are both good, but thankfully not serious?

And what exactly is “immaculately inspired”? Now, I’ve heard of immaculate conception, but immaculate inspiration? I am still trying to figure that one out.

Now, I bear you no malice – after all, you are my Facebook friend, a friend of a friend, and best friend of a best friend, and we did have a hazy, boozy conversation at a literature festival in Mumbai several years ago. But this is what I don’t get about your rise and rise: How can you be one of the most popular film reviewers of India, the national cultural editor of one of the country’s largest selling dailies, and a winner of the Ramnath Goenka Award for Excellence in Journalism – when you have no concept of the English language, your primary tool of trade?

For example, here is what I don’t get about your review of another recent film, We Are Family:

The review begins with: “It’s this thing about soppy chick flicks, or afternoon soppy soap operas, if you will. The male character is destined to severe step-mom treatment. If he’s present at all, he usually has no say in his own destiny.” Err.. perhaps what you meant was “severe stepson treatment”. Step moms are usually disturbingly in control of the destinies of others.

“The setting is the sanitised First World. Spaghetti's ready for supper. Aesthetics of modern, good housekeeping is established.” What exactly is “spaghetti’s ready for supper” hanging around for unless it is a quote from the film, in which case shouldn’t it be placed within quotes?

“It’s just the idea that binds all these together, which is entirely outsourced from the West.” No, no Mayank, what you mean is “entirely borrowed from the West” because you cannot outsource from, you can only outsource to.

“A warm, doting single mother, losing before her eyes, her life and her sweet children to fatal cancer, you can tell, is something that’ll weep any woman off her feet.” Only Mayank, in the film the mother is not losing her kids to cancer, the kids are losing their mother to cancer.

And you don’t “weep women off their feet”, you “sweep them off their feet”. Or were you punning? It is so difficult to tell.

“This cultivated suaveness is but suddenly forgone as everybody begins to simultaneously weep from the screen.”

Now Mayank, I am trying very hard – very hard indeed – to imagine them “weeping from the screen”, but it is very difficult, let me tell you.

And then there are the mysteries of your review of another film Kites:

Your review begins with: “Two people (Hrithik Roshan, Barbara Mori), respectively romance another from the same family (Kangana Ranaut, Nicholas Brown), purely for the love of the money. The girl’s an illegal immigrant into the US from Mexico. The boy is the American half of various green card marriages on sale: “$1,000; honeymoon charges extra.””

Now, I’ll forget the messiness of a phrase like, “American half of various green card marriages on sale”. Let’s start with the basics - which girl and which boy? I mean, is Moli the illegal immigrant or Kangana Ranaut? Is Roshan the one half of the various green card marriages or Brown? I am confused.

“The premise from hereon could take the shape of a slight comedy of deceit (Woody Allen’s Matchpoint), or follow an aggressive drama (Anthony Minghella's The Talented Mr Ripley).”

A “premise” does not have continuity, Mayank, so it cannot not take shape or follow. I think, the word you were looking for was simply “story” because a story can take shape.

“The said Mafiosi home belongs to one, Bob Grover (Kabir Bedi), the “owner of one of the biggest casinos in Vegas,” no less. Senators, governors etc swim under Bob’s pant pockets”.

I won’t quibble over the fact that there should be no comma following “one” because I am too busy trying to imagine people swimming under pockets. Only, I can’t. What do you mean?

“No Hindi film actor ever, I suspect, has worked himself up this much to make the super-star grade.” No, no Mayank, what you mean is “worked on himself”. “Worked himself up” means gotten himself excited.

“Hrithik remains the perfect foil for an action piece across the barrenness of Nevada.” No, no – “foil” means “to frustrate” or “defeat”. What you want to say is “perfect … “perfect… I don’t know. I don’t know what you want to say.

And Mayank, these are only two reviews. And I have not yet mentioned all your mixed tenses, misplaced commas and crazy syntax. You would be such an inspiration to Sarah Palin.

But come every Friday, I'll carry on with my helpful advice on your language bloopers.

Or else, I will be happy to pass on the numbers of some good English language tutors. After all, you are my Facebook friend, friend of a friend, and a best friend of a best friend. And what else are friends for?

Yours
Always ready to help
Chetna Prakash (nee Mahadik)

Snake Stories: Or which airline does the world's most wanted animal smuggler use?

2010-09-07T12:10:00.012+01:00

Boa constrictor in news

I came across this news piece today about a man being sentenced in Malaysia for trying to smuggle 95 boa constrictors from the country to Indonesia.

In itself, the news doesn’t surprise me. If there is a market of exotic, endangered animals, unscrupulous groups will come in with a supply. But I always imagined that it would require some ingenious planning to smuggle those animals – I imagined dark, foggy nights, boats on choppy waters, mysterious lights flashing on, off, on, off, followed by perilous journeys through mountains and jungles with the police on their tail.

This man, who apparently is the one of the world’s most wanted animal smugglers, was taking his 95 boa constrictors from Malaysia to Indonesia in a suitcase on an airplane. But that is not the best part. The best part is that the snakes were not found via X-rays or whatever other sophisticated radiology system the airline presumably used. No, the bag – bursting with 95 snakes and some turtles – simply broke open on the conveyor belt, spilling the loot for all to see. I guess, they had no choice but to arrest him.

If the world’s most wanted animal smuggler was exporting animals by checking them into airplanes, then it must be fairly standard practice. I mean he didn’t even worry with a sturdy suitcase – that is how nonchalant he was.

How is it that airports can catch that one shampoo bottle or one nose-hair scissors that you mistakenly left into your hand luggage, or the coins or the underwire in your bra on yourself, but not boa constrictors, turtles and baby tigers? How is it that any petty traffic law you might have broken turns up in your record, when you go about asking for visas, but others travel around the world with boa constrictors in their bags despite being world's most wanted animal smugglers?

I trolled through many, many news reports - from Malaysia Star to AFP, Time and the Sun - but as usual all of them forgot to find out the most useful bits of information for the readers.

a)    With his criminal record, how did the world's most wanted animal smuggler manage his visa and passport situation?
b)    Which airline was he flying that would allow him to check in boa constrictors?
c)    Which suitcase brand was he using?
d)    And finally, if snakes are not allowed in planes, how does Dick Cheney travel?

***
Did you hear about the other Thai lady who tried to take a baby tiger in her land luggage? At least she had the decency to hide the drugged baby tiger among other stuffed toys.

Did you know there was a music video about snakes in a plane? The things you tube teaches me every day.

The girl with the dragon tattoo: genius or a cartoon?

2010-09-03T11:02:00.005+01:00

Lisbeth Salander, the heroine of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – who in case you were wondering, is the girl with the dragon tattoo – was described in the book blurb behind as “a genius computer hacker”. Which to me meant that she was in grave danger of being a cartoon. Naturally, I had to read to find out.

You see, the thing is there is a thin line separating geniuses with cartoons in popular culture. After all, do we ever question the "what, why or how" of Tom and Jerry’s antics? No we don’t, because they are cartoons. They are not encumbered by any physical limitations the way we humans are. So often becomes true of geniuses in popular fiction. Once you have set your character up as a genius – established that his brain functions differently than us lesser mortals – you are released of any need to limit his actions and abilities by any normal human standards. They are like superheroes.

A genius computer hacker is the worst of the lot. He or she is the scientific equivalent of Harry Potter with his invisible cloak. They can simply enter anyone’s server, network, email accounts, phone lines and happily gather all the incriminating information required – and all in the time that would take you to fill in your username and password. And they don’t have to explain anything. Since their brain functions differently, they just know how to break codes and encryptions in a way that they themselves can’t explain – so who are you to ask.

Further, their status as a genius will demand that they have extreme and inexplicable personality quirks, further taking them closer to their animation-counterparts.

So does Stieg Larrson's Lisbeth Salander fulfill her cartoon potential? Spoiler alert: Yes, she does. But the novel is a page-turner anyway.

I mean she is as much of a cartoon as can get. She can not only hack through any computer system, she also has a photographic memory, can master complex financial money movements in a jiffy, is good with weapons, knows all about international travel on false passports, is fabulous with disguises, and is asocial, moody and emotionally stunted. In short, she is James Bond on steroids.

But on one point, Salander is truly original and not a cartoon at all. She extracts revenge in the most unforgiving way. In fact, one of the most staggering moments for me in the novel was when she takes revenge on her newly appointed legal guardian. I didn’t see it coming.

Funnily enough, Larrson’s novel only in part requires Salander’s genius abilities. Most of the plot is a rather more staid mystery of a missing child which is solved using standard sleuthing techniques: going though old, old newspapers and photographs, questioning people, piecing together the scene of crime, and lots and lots of plain old thinking and connecting the dots, which is done without any computer hacking required. The end is somewhat grisly, let me warn you.

Besides, Larrson plays off Salander against her mature and serious-to-the-extreme sleuthing partner Mikhael Blomkvist, which takes the edge of her extremities.

Most of the computer hacking is limited to a sub-plot within the plot – a sort of mystery that depends on solving the main mystery. Which means that – whether you enjoy old style whodunits or new-agey digital thrillers – the novel has something to offer.

However, one thing glaringly missing from the novel is sparkling humour. In fact, Larrson’s sense of humour is strictly juvenile. Here are some gems:

“For a moment he stared at Blomkvist with an expression that was presumably meant to instil respect, but which made him look like an inflated moose” (pg 312).

Inflated Moose – doesn’t that have a secondary school corridor ring to it? In fact, I think even secondary school boys might have moved on.

“He, on the other hand, told a funny story about how Nilsson had come home one night to discover the village idiot from across the bridge trying to break a window at the guest house. Nilsson went over to ask the half-witted delinquent why he didn’t go in through unlocked front door”. (pg 127)

Was there ever a more boring rendition of a funny story?

Other than that, the only points of humour are Ms Salander’s T-shirts which declare stuff like “Armageddon was yesterday. Today we have a real problem”.

T-shirt humour? As I said, juvenile.

So would I read the other two Salander novels to complete Larsson’s trilogy?

Yes, what to do? I love Tom & Jerry.

***
Here's the trailer of the Swedish film by the same name:

Freida Pinto on T-Mag: Or luck from one brown woman to another

2010-09-01T10:50:00.008+01:00

Not much surprises me about India or Indians. But the enduring popularity of Freida Pinto has definitely surprised me.

This fall, she made it to the cover of the T Magazine - The New York Times Style Magazine that comes out every quarter, and the video above of her interview is available on the magazine website. It is no mean feat considering that she has only appeared in one bonafide film Slumdog Millionaire - an Oscar winner, sure, but still just one film. And even there, her total screen time didn't exceed more than 20 minutes, the Jai Ho song at the end included.

Sure enough, I liked her in the film two years ago. She was cute, small and most importantly really, really brown. Not tanned, not bronze, but brown. And being a brown person from a fairness-obsessed India, I was thrilled.

But there were reasons for me to believe that the fame was shortlived.

a) She didn't have Bollywood star looks. She is indeed too brown. So that career was not happening.
b) Slumdog Millionaire hardly tested her acting chops. She was mostly expected to look either sullen or terrified. So there was no reason for me believe that roles would drop into her lap.
c) There are only so many Asian roles going in Hollywood, anyway.

The fact that she was immediately offered a James Bond film seemed to further my belief that her career was short-lived. Because, honestly, how many Bond girls can we think of who went to have serious long-lived careers as actresses?

But Ms Pinto has shown a remarkable ability to remain in news - and mostly for the right reasons. She has even wormed her way into the ensemble cast of the soon-to-be released Woody Allen film - You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger. (Wouldn't it be thrilling if the title refers to Ms Pinto?).

Perhaps, the answer to her popularity lies in her charm. As her interview video evidences, she is talkative, intelligent, good humoured and doesn't seem to take herself too seriously. Fresh, fresh is the word that popped in my mind when I saw her interview.

I still don't believe that her career will be long-lived. Simply because we cannot ignore the fact that she is brown and very South Asian looking. To seem believable, she will have to embody characters that are South Asian. And for South Asian characters to emerge, we will need more South Asian writers in Hollywood. And as we all know, Indians don't write for a living, they become doctors and engineers.

Still, as one really, really brown person to another, I wish her all the luck. She has defied me once, I hope she defies me again.

***
The official trailor of You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger:

Commonwealth Games Theme Song

2010-08-31T12:23:00.006+01:00

At least one person connected with the Delhi Commonwealth Games 2010 has finished his task on schedule - the ever dependable AR Rahman, who was entrusted with the task of coming up with the CWG theme song. (So even if the athletes have no track to run on, at least they are now assured a good song and dance show.)

Of course, the humble Mr Rahman did not only finish the song "Swagatham" but has also made it available on Soundcloud for people to listen to:

CWG Theme Song by arrahman

Now, MumbaiBoss - a website I follow - has given it a thumbs up. But you can also have your say here:

Result

Cricket Scandals: Or why I continue believing in sports

2010-08-31T10:24:00.005+01:00

Hall of Shame

Sid & I returned from Italy yesterday to all the hullaboloo over the Pakistani Cricket scandal. My first thought, as I glanced at the Daily Mail front page in the airplane, was "Thank God, it was Pakistan and not India." For considering that corruption is a way of life in both countries, it could have just as well been. We too, after all, had a cricket captain Mohammed Azharduddin banned for life from playing the sport for admitting to having fixed three ODI matches. Today, he is an honourable member of the parliament in India.

I stopped watching cricket after it emerged that the South African captain Hansie Cronje and a few others had thrown matches against India in 2000. I had been one of those idiots who had emotionally invested herself heavily in one of those thrown matches, breathlessly hanging on to every ball as it was played. So when it emerged that the match had been coldly fixed in advance, my relationship with the sport was forever broken. After that, no matter how hard I tried, I could never feel any emotional involvement with the game.

And yet, just as my cynicism towards sports in general was cementing with this lastest scandal, a fellow blogger posted a video on his latest entry that reminded me how - when played right - sports is the closest thing to transendence we will ever feel. With its mix of sweat, blood, talent, dreams, courage and imperceptable chance, it touches something so unbearably human inside us. And the video is not even about a win, it is about a tragic loss: that of the athlete Derek Redmond's in the 1992 Olympics.

Derek Redmond - May your tribe increase.

A discourse on first impressions: Or how my grubby one-bedroom apartment redeeemed India

2010-08-25T08:19:00.004+01:00

A friendly fruit market in Wroclaw

I wrote to Girish that I had been to Wroclaw (pronounced Rotslav for some reason) in Poland over the weekend and had found the Poles the friendliest and most unassuming people I had ever met. He replied that after his Vietnamese friend got beaten up by some racist thugs in Warsaw, he developed an aversion to the place and people and had never felt like visiting it.

That made me think of the danger of parachute travel, where we swoop down on a place, hang around for a day or two, and leave with very decided opinions about it. Often, we only get a first impression of the place, and good or bad, it forever colours our view of the culture and people in question.

Because I had my only racist experience in Greece, the country will be stamped as racist in my mind. And because the Poles in Wroclaw were friendly, I'll always recommend it to others. However, isn't it possible that the friendliness of the people in Wroclaw had more to do with it being a non-touristy, small town than anything necessarily Polish, and our experience in Rhodes was an isolated, freak incident?

Unfortunately, we never really think about all these possibilities, do we? We visit the country once, and our experiences determines what we will think of it for a long time until perhaps other experiences colour them over.

But that makes me think, that by corollary, isn't it also true that as I visit different countries, I am leaving behind a trail of first impressions of Indians in the minds of the people I interact with, especially in countries that Indians do not frequent?

Maybe that is why the Phillipino landlord of the guesthouse in Amsterdam that we stayed at had insisted on telling me about a horrible Indian woman who had stayed with him once. Apparently, she was American-Indian and had refused to enter the establishment on the grounds that it did not have a reception. Having checked into a "proper" hotel next door, she had then insisted on coming over for breakfast every morning at the guest house and brag about her doctor-daughter who apparently owned a six-door car and lived in a mansion in the US. I wasn't exactly sure why he told us the whole story, but I couldn't help but feel that I was somehow responsible for her behaviour.

I tried explaining that perhaps her rudeness had nothing to do with she being Indian. Maybe, she was just a rude, silly woman, and rude, silly women live everywhere. When that didn't help, I added that Sid & I didn't have a car at all - let along a six door one - and lived in a rather grubby one-bedroom place in London. The last seemed to have redeemed Indians in his eyes, but only just.

The things I do for my country.

***
On competitive Indian mothers:

The Orientalism Paradox: Or do everything I write, I write to prove the British as bastards?

2010-08-23T11:45:00.007+01:00

How about we settle for mutual critcism

Andrew is writing a book about British travel accounts of Egypt in the nineteenth century. I am reading Edward Said’s Orientalism, which is all about how prejudiced, supercilious and ill-advised such seemingly-innocuous nineteenth century British accounts of the East were. Together, that should have made for a rather volatile session over coffee last week.

But we are civilized people so we didn’t explode. We just grimaced.

Now, here’s why I love and hate Syed at the same time.

Said's argument is not simply that the West criticises the East based on prejudice, poor information, and with the intention to dominate. His argument is that all criticism of the East by the West will always be based on prejudice, poor information and the intention to dominate because it already arises from the position of the dominant. If you are already the stronger one, you will want to maintain that position – and hence, everything you say will be to that end, and hence suspect.

Conclusion: Until the West is a dominant force around the world, it has no business criticising the East. Thus, the Middle East, India and China are free to behave the way they want. Voila!

For a wonderful account of how this frees us Indians of any responsibility, read Girish Shahane’s latest column on Yahoo.

Unfortunately, as much as I love Syed, he has created a peculiar problem for me.

If I believe Syed’s argument that everything lies in positioning, then don’t I come to Britain from a position of victimhood, that of poor little Ms once-colonised-Indian-me. And can a victim ever be objective about the oppressor? And if not, wouldn’t all my criticisms of Britain always be based on prejudice, poor information, and the intention to prove the British as absolute bastards? And thus, automatically invalid?

Only, I’d like to keep my right to criticise Britain – its horrible food, labyrinthine bureaucracy, piss-all weather and an obsession with peculiar creatures like Katie Price – and be taken seriously.

So Syed will have to retire to the back end of my book shelf. I'll reserve my right to criticise anything and everything about Britain. And Andrew can write all the travelogues he wants about Egypt.

***
From the horse's mouth himself:

Work of art: Or why I love reading Bollywood film reviews

2010-08-21T14:58:00.003+01:00

Birds of prey

No matter what Indian filmmakers may say about Bollywood films coming of age – we all know they haven’t. They are still as silly as they come.

But here’s why it is important to keep Bollywood a going concern. Because they lead to such pricelessly funny reviews. Like this one of the latest Bollywood release in India, Lafangey Parindey (translated as “Loafer Birds”, told you silly as hell).

The thing is that if you are an intelligent person and have to review a completely absurd product, the only way you can survive the process is by developing a sense of humour. If most things about the film suck – the story, the characters, the acting, the plot development, the editing – the only way to get any joy out of the work is to make fun of it. So actually, the worse the film, the better the review.

Of course, that can happen with films elsewhere as well. Every now and then, silly British films come up that lead to incredibly funny reviews. But Bollywood film reviewers have an edge over others for three reasons.

First, they get so much more practice. After all, as is famously known, Bollywood produces more films a year than any other film industry around the world, most of them silly.

Second, everyone in the know – the reviewer, the filmmaker, and the audience – takes it for granted that sense has no place in the film. So you are relieved of any responsibility of looking for it in the film. Your sole responsibility is to make sure that the audience enjoys your review.

Third, you know that your review will have no effect whatsoever on the fate of the film.

So you are free to have as much fun with your review as you want without any kind of responsibility or ethical dilemmas. Slowly, as your skills get more honed, the reviews become works of art in themselves.

So, if I was a book publisher looking to come out with a book on Bollywood that intelligent people would enjoy – I would forget the films and focus on the reviews.

***
At the risk of self promotion, here are a couple of Bollywood film review that I had fun writing: Namastey London & Shaadi Se Pehle.

On Style: Or does homelessness lie in the eyes of the beholder

2010-08-20T10:52:00.002+01:00

Taken from the Style Scout blog

Trolling through the English-Life Mattters website, I came across The Style Scout, a sort of Sartorialist-for-adolescents blog. I was completely perplexed by the picture that greeted me: see, the man in sad green cardigan on the side.

Now, if I met this guy on the streets, my first thoughts would be: “Oh, poor soul, do I have some pennies to spare!” I mean, to me he just looked homeless and starved. He even has a dog to complete the look.

But, obviously, the look was constructed and considered stylish enough to be featured on the blog. Apparently, he is “very grandma-chic meets sporty” according to one of the comment.

Obviously, I was missing something.

Then I realised I was being “so first-gen” (as Sid calls all the first generation Indian immigrants).

You see, the thing is that in India everyone looks generally poor and badly dressed. Life is too hot, rushed, crowded and painful for most of us to worry about how we look. So if somebody wants to stand out – he/she dresses well. Because if you turned up in holed cardigans and cotton Bermudas, you won’t be seen as a stylish wannabe-arty-person-only-masquerading-as-a-homeless-man, you will actually be taken for one and shooed away. On the other hand, if you regularly turned up in uncreased clothes, neatly blow-dried hair and make-up in place, people will be enthralled. For it is indeed a difficult look to manage with a four-hour commute in a breathlessly-packed train everyday.

On the other hand, as I am slowly learning, in the civilised world it works in reverse: the more holes in your cardigan, the better. Because if everyone is dressed in their Sunday best all the time, what better way to grab eyeballs then to turn-up in your Monday night pyjamas.

The Foto8 Summershow 2010: Or why I'd give Poulomi's exhibition a go

2010-08-19T17:01:00.010+01:00

Best Ear Cleaners by Nick Cunard

Poulomi messaged excitedly on Tuesday. Her photo was being displayed at the foto8 summershow exhibition at the Host Gallery, and she wanted me to come for the opening. “There’ll be wine, canapés and lots of industry people,” she said by way of enticement. I didn’t go. Because Sid came back home looking rather miserable, and I didn’t want to leave him alone to noodle soup and bbc iplayer. (What to do? I like Sid, he’s nice to me.)

But l am also a loyal friend so I diligently registered my footprints at the exhibition the next day.

What took me by surprise was that 15 of the 153 works of photojournalism on display were shot in India – meandering between Kashmir, Rishikesh, Varanasi, Bhopal, Rajasthan, Ahemdabad, Jharkhand, Mumbai and Goa. No, no, they were not shot by Indians, silly heads, only shot in India. There was only one photograph actually taken by an Indian, and the honour went to my friend, Ms Basu (pronounced Boshoo, thank you.)

Now, I dislike whining postcolonialists enough to agree that yes anyone – Indian or otherwise – has the right to come to India, take our pictures, and display them in London galleries. And they should be allowed to shoot what they think is interesting, and celebrate it as such. What I was interested in was what I, as an Indian in a London viewing these images, should get from them? Do they observe and single-out things that I as an Indian – born and bred in India – do not or cannot notice myself?

The first image of India that caught my eye was of the ear cleaners of Rishikesh? Oh no, I thought. Aesthetics aside, haven't I seen ear cleaners being shot and documented (as a lovely, quirky anachronism) by other Indian photographers already?

Next came the train ride. Ok, nice enough shot but as social documents go the great Indian railway journey is a bit overdone, I think.

The three shots of Bhopal Gas Victims. Well, at least it keeps a controversial, unresolved issue in the limelight.

I began to get intrigued when I found myself face-to-face with a black-and-white close-up of a school girl from Varanasi – her face tightly framed by her ungainly woollen scarf. Shot by Kathryn Obermaier, the portrait reminded me of how I used to dress with no sense of fashion whatsoever when going to school – hair tied in tight plaits, red ribbons, long skirts, long socks, oily hair, tight woollen scarf and a deadly scowl. If I looked anything like her than I was absolutely lovely in my unassuming ugliness. I’m glad such innocence lives on.

Courtesy: Poulomi Basu

Poulomi’s photograph of the women of the Indian Border Armed Forces as they trained before being deployed to the line of control between India and Pakistan stood out too. Who would know, if it wasn’t for Poulomi, that such a battalion exists. Yes, a battalion of women soldiers in a country where women are still being burnt alive for dowry! Nice contradiction, isn’t it? I couldn’t help but wonder what went through those bodies and minds, and Poulomi’s image gave a glimpse.

I also loved Helen Rimmel’s portrait of Azim Tuman, the chairman of the houseboat association in Kashmir. Houseboat Association? Houseboats? I can’t remember the last time, I thought of beautiful things when someone mentioned Kashmir. And yet, the remnants of those old, beautiful, half-happy things perhaps lay scattered all over the valley and pop-up in photographs like this one.

The others included images of illegal mine workers in Jharkhand (that cesspit of India), ganges (a bit ho-hum), and a couple of intriguing shots by Shiho Kito.

So shot by Indians or not, I'd say the exhibition does give an intriguing glimpse into India.

***
The exhibition will be on till September 4 at Host Gallery, 1-5 Honduras Street, London EC1Y OTH.

In memory of Satyavrat Redey

2010-08-18T21:23:00.012+01:00

My uncle died.

Normally, I wouldn't be so put out for I have a great many number of uncles – Indian family, what to do? But Baba Mama, as we all called him, was one of the precious four I actually cared about. Now I am left with three.

Come to think of it, he wasn’t even my uncle. Technically, he was my father’s uncle, but I appropriated him once I discovered how cool he was.

He was the first in our family to step outside India (he lived in Germany in the 1950s to be exact), first to become an engineer, first to travel around Europe, first to see the Mona Lisa, first to marry a career woman, first to live in an Indian metropolis, first to own a car and take my Dad out for a spin, and the first to get on to the computer and the Internet. Nothing was too new, too radical for him.

But the absolute crowning glory of his achievements was that he offered me my very first glass of wine, red wine.

I was 17 or 18, and guess what did I do? I promptly added ice cubes to it and gulped it down.

I hope he didn’t die thinking that I still drink my wine with ice.

***
To Mami, Vipul and Vaibhavi:

The Dinner Party: Or have I turned into Mrs Dalloway?

2010-08-17T09:41:00.005+01:00

Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf? I am.

I got up yesterday in a frenzy. It was the day of the dinner, and I hadn’t even got the chicken. And the blender was broken, so I needed to pick one up from Argos.

I knew that the cashews were there, but I wasn’t sure there were enough mushrooms. We had the right number of serving bowls, but I was one frying pan short so I had to make the mushrooms first, and only then get on with the chicken. Sid had scrubbed the bathtub, and had bought the wine and the spinach so that was done. But should I get flowers for the house as well?

It was at the flowers that the frightening realisation struck me – I had turned into Mrs Dalloway!

Now, Virginia Woolf’s unfortunate Mrs Dalloway is no one’s my literary heroine exactly. The weak, silly, snivelling woman had given up the chance of a life with real love, adventure and the struggles that accompany them for a cushy life organising parties and wondering about flowers in London.

Ok, so my party was small and informal with only Esther-the-Lawyer and Leo-with-an-Afro (and recently turned free market supporter) coming over. But I was married, jobless in London, and worrying about flowers, mushrooms and the colour of the table mats. Did that mean that I, too, was a weak, silly, snivelling woman? Had I given up on real love, adventure and the accompanying struggles?

The thing is, I grew-up with rather fuzzy ideas about feminism. There was never much discussion about it at home or school, but I picked up enough from popular culture to know that housework – the unholy trinity of cooking, cleaning and washing – was deeply uncool and needed to be avoided at all cost. Of course, there were other elements too – being financially independent, intellectual pursuits, being an equal decision-maker in the relationship. But I determinedly decided that those could only be achieved at the cost of housework. Any man who expected me to cook, clean or wash was not worth my time.

To give credit to my parents – lovely people – they did argue that it was a conveniently lazy form of feminism that I had adopted, but at the end they just shrugged in resignation and let me go ahead with my funny experiments with life.

Sid did not expect me to cook, clean and wash. But once it wasn't expected it of me, I discovered was that I actually enjoyed cooking and cleaning (maybe, not so much washing). I love good food and a clean house, and the easiest way to get them is to cook and clean yourself. It doesn’t have much to do with either feminism or working, because even during the months that I was working – May, June and July – I would return home looking forward to the next hour in the kitchen. I find chopping therapeutic, I love the whoosh vegetables make when I slide them into the hot oil, and the changing aromas of food as it moves through the different stages of cooking mesmerise me. Most of all, I love eating what I cook. And if I can eat it on a well-laid out table, with nice wine to accompany it, and some flowers in the house – so much the better.

Yes, I must get a job and be financially independent. (I know I am shortchanging myself there.) But that is mutually independent of cooking and cleaning. I can be a feminist and still love cooking, cleaning, throwing parties and arranging flowers.

And I always leave the dishes for Sid to do at the end. I wonder if Mr Dalloway was as obliging.

Baffled by brands: Or is Louis Vuitton pulling a fast one of us?

2010-08-14T10:43:00.014+01:00

Grand signature design: Mud brown with LV squiggles?

When the lady at her little shop in Portobello Market pointed at the Elspeth Gibson London label on the nice tweed skirt, she expected my eyes to light-up. Never having heard of Ms Gibson from London, I only stared back in incomprehension. Unfortunately, I don’t think the fact endeared me to her and I suspect she bumped the price up of by another £5 just to punish me.

But here's the thing: why should I have heard of Ms Elspeth Gibson from London? She only makes skirts – nice skirts, I agree, but skirts nonetheless. She doesn’t set the tax rates, and she doesn’t decide how my taxes will be spent. And yet, it is socially unacceptable for me to admit that, no, I had never heard of her before today.

Perhaps, it is my legacy of growing up in a socialist India that I don’t know, understand or care for brands.

I like to buy things, nice things. But I want to buy them because they are well-made, and look good on me or my house. Not because cleverly-made advertisements - with not just a little help from feminist icon Carrie Bradshaw - tell me that they are fabulous, my life is worthless without them, and that just to own them will prove to others that I have fabulous taste, or at the very least, lots of money.

Unfortunately, most people are buying into brands precisely for those reasons. And I can't help but feel sad for such people.

Even if I bought into the whole advertising spiel, I still don’t get the obsession with Louis Vuitton, the luxury leather goods brand. Its grand signature design comprises mud brown backgrounds with LV squiggled all over it. From my perspective, that is ugly and somewhat loud. Sid says the idea behind having such an obvious signature design is instant recognition. No one should miss that you are carrying a Louis Vuitton accessory.

But what I can’t miss is that everyone is bloody carrying a Louis Vuitton. In cars, buses, shops, streets, I see men and women flashing their mud brown LVs: young women, old women, fat women, thin women, gay men, straight men, and white, brown and black men and women. So either the market is glutted with clever fakes or this exclusive club is bursting on its seams.

Agreed it is ugly, but at least there are no squiggles

If it is the former, it’s the brand’s fault fair and square. Instead of trying to sell itself on genuinely clever, hard to copy, detailing, Louis Vuitton tried to sell itself on the basis of its one loud, easily recognisable – and thus equally easy to reproduce – patent design.

And if it is the latter, than it has hard-sold itself so much that I am no longer setting myself apart by spending my money on Louis Vuitton.

Either way, from my perspective, this brand is pulling a fast one on us.

But then again, what do I know. I am just a hick little child of socialist India.

***
Who says it better than Jennifer Saunders in Absolutely Fabulous - "Lacroix? Fabulous. Thank You!"

Policing the poll: Or an update on the great Indian passport debate

2010-08-13T09:36:00.003+01:00

Courtsey: The American Culture

Two day ago, I wrote a blog about how Sid says that Indian passports should be divided into two categories: Passport A & B – with one having more rights than others.

I put up his very undemocratic sounding idea up for a democratic vote, and much to my surprise – four people actually voted. The result like most things Indian is complicated. We have a tie with two votes in favour and two against.

Now, one vote I know is from Sid – trying to rig the poll in his favour. But I have no idea who the other three are.

Please stand up and identify yourself. The comment floor is yours to say why you think it is a bad or a good idea. I swear you won't have Sid running after you with a stick!

Bring on the Biryani: Or how I saw journalism get its mojo back

2010-08-12T11:12:00.005+01:00

Inside the toilets of Dishoom

I have never really believed in the power of journalism. Of course, I had heard of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein and had even dutifully watched All the President’s Men during university years, but five years of working as a journalist cured me of the notion that anything I wrote changed the world by even one-tenth of a percentage point.

My cynicism was cemented by the fact that Nandini – the film critic of Time Out Mumbai – would keep sending me to review Hindi films. They would invariably be terrible, I would invariably say so in my reviews, and they would invariably go on to become major hits. Alright, so film reviews weren’t exactly in league with investigating the president, but if I couldn’t even get people to change their taste in films, how was to convince them to change their leaders.

So I entered my thirtieth year of life convinced of my own powerlessness. And then, Guy Dimond and Dishoom happened.

Now Guy is the food critic of Time Out London, and Dishoom is a new restaurant on Long Acre Road which claimed to be on the lines of a Bombay Irani Café. Last month, while I was doing an internship there, Guy asked me to accompany him for the restaurant review hoping that my Bombay days would come in handy in affirming his views on the place. We sat, ate and concluded that the Berry Chicken Biryani – the signature dish of most Irani cafes in Mumbai – was too dry, and really that ought not to be so. Then he wrote the same in his review, and we all forgot about it.

So imagine my surprise last week, when I was there with a few friends, and we found the whole recipe to be changed. When I quizzed the manager about it, here’s what he said: “some reviews said that the biryani was too dry, so we decided to change the recipe!”

Change the recipe? Change it because of a review? A review that I was – in whatever small measure – a part?

If I could get a restaurant to change its recipe, perhaps, I could change people’s tastes in films. Perhaps, I can change people’s minds about their leaders. Perhaps, I could change the world.

I am ready. Now, if only someone would hire me to start upon the project.

***
With its Biryani fixed, I would consider Dishoom a very welcome and much needed-addition to Central London. It has a contemporary décor, a cool vibe, an eclectic menu (with no Chicken Tikka Masala in sight), and reasonable prices (if you consider about £30-35-for-dinner & drinks-for-two reasonable). No longer will I have to go all the way to Southall or Wembley and suffer the terrible restaurant décors in order to enjoy a good Indian meal with friends.

Malaysian Malaise: Or should we have a passport A and passport B for Indians?

2010-08-11T10:26:00.006+01:00

I was in throes of misery last week when I found out that Malaysia had scrapped the Visa-on-Arrival facility that it extended to Indian citizens. Not that I blame them. After all, 40,000 Indians had abused the system and disappeared into the netherland of Malaysia. Naturally, the Malay aren’t feeling terribly welcoming towards us.

But what I want to know is this. How many Indians visited Malaysia in the same period and did not flout the visa regulations? I am sure that the figure was much higher than the much-maligned “40,000” figure. But now, all those people who kept to the right side of the law, including myself, will be penalised.

Is that fair? Will I always have to answer for the actions of my lawless compatriots? Does my good behaviour account for nothing?

Sid says he has the perfect solution to the problem.

The Indian government should have a two-tiered system of passports. Everyone is granted Passport B to begin with, which is like our passports as the moment – with no visa-on-arrival facilities. But if in the next five-to-ten years, they rake up an extensive travel history without flouting any visa regulations, they should be upgraded to a Passport A, which will be allowed visa-on-arrival facility.

After all, if someone’s objective is to go AWOL in America, they are not going to wait five years, visit the country several times, get their Passport A and then do it. They will probably do it the moment they are granted their very first visa on their Passport B.

Now Leo-with-an-Afro (see followers) says this will amount to grading of citizenship into Class A & Class B, and as much as he would like it, he cannot support the idea. But Sid says it amounts to rewarding good behaviour because everyone has to start at the same level – and then, whether they move up or not will depend on their own actions. According to him, the problem in India is not just that bad behaviour goes unpunished, it is also that good behaviour goes unrecognised.

As for me, I am undecided. But I so do want that visa-on-arrival…

***
Have your say:

The blue bits are the travel option available to a non-visa holding Indian. For a closer look, go here. (Remember to remove Malaysia out of the blue bits now.)

Ms Rich visits India: Or why we Indians are not achieving spiritual nirvana

2010-08-10T00:29:00.006+01:00

There are principally three things that people in the West associate with India. First, of course, is its poverty. There is no running away from that. Second is Indian cuisine, or curry food as it is popularly called here. For all its accomplishments, it is lamb curry and paneer tikka that our great civilisation will be forever remembered for. The third, peculiarly, is spirituality.

I was reminded of the third today when I came across the book Dreaming in Hindi by Katherine Russell Rich, an American journalist. According to its reviews, the book is about how – overwhelmed by her fight with cancer, loss of job, and having her Manolo Blahniks chewed by her cat – Ms Rich decides to move to India in order to master Hindi. What follows is, quite naturally, her spiritual self-discovery in Udaipur (with some divergences into the science behind learning a whole new language). The book has just arrived in England, even though it was launched in America last year, where it quickly (and dare I say, predictably) made it to Oprah’s list of summer reads. And if Eat, Pray, Love is anything to go by, there will be a film to follow in a couple of years.

Ms Rich is not alone. I’ve met several people over the last couple of years for whom India represents some kind of mysterious spiritual awakening waiting to happen. The notion is further aided and abetted by a whole Eastern spiritual industry comprising massage parlours, yoga classes, meditation centres, healing foods, and of course, books about spiritual journeys to India.

I once asked one such spiritually-minded Canadian, what exactly he meant by wanting to visit India to experience its spirituality, in what way did he think that Indians were more spiritual than the rest of the world. What I gathered from his incoherent mumble was Indians are “non-materialistic unlike the west”.

Now, let me get one thing clear. It is rather difficult to be materialistic when there isn’t much “material” to go around. Just because a lot of poor people make do with whatever they can, doesn’t mean that given the opportunity – that is money and access to shiny goods – they won’t give in to material pleasures. They will, and they are in increasingly larger numbers, if my last trip to Inorbit Shopping Mall in Mumbai was anything to go by. I don’t think my Canadian friend would have found much spirituality-in-action there.

Sometimes I wonder if celebrating India’s supposed spirituality is West’s way of dealing with its poverty. Because they can’t understand how people can continue to live, work and thrive in such deprived conditions, they make themselves believe that Indians must have some kind of super-human spiritual armour to keep them going. Indians don’t have money because they simply don’t care for it – they are too busy enjoying spiritual nirvana.

Now I lived for twenty-three years in India, but let me assure you, I wasn’t enjoying any spiritual nirvana. Nor could a single person out of my extensive network of friends and family be strictly described as spiritual. Yes, they pray to God quite diligently, but mostly it is a tit-for-tat arrangement: I’ll pray, and you nust get me that seat in an engineering college/job/pay packet/car and whatever else is the latest at Inorbit Shopping Mall. That is not spiritual, non-materialistic, meditative or other-worldly in my dictionary of self-attainment.

But still women like Ms Rich arrive in India and promptly achieve enough self-fulfilment to write books on it. Perhaps, we Indians are just not trying hard enough!

***
Here is a trailor to my favourite spiritual journey through India, Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited.

Gay Pride Parade: Or going pink on Princengracht

2010-08-07T08:48:00.004+01:00

Amterdam has greeted us with the gay pride parade, which will start today at 2pm on Princengracht (the Prince's canal).

No, we didn't plan this. In fact, thanks to the parade we couldn't find any reasonable accomodation and had to rent a small apartment and pay double the price. Oh well, it is lovely and next to the canal and I shouldn't complain.

Think I will leave you guys with the American-Indian comedian Russell Peter's take on Gay Indians and Gay Pride Parades (I am sure that most of you must have seen it already):

Amsterdam: Or the story of a dominatrix, bakery and a dress shop

2010-08-06T08:47:00.004+01:00

Red, red, red in Amsterdam

Sid & I are off to Amsterdam for the weekend.

Amsterdam, oh Amsterdam! I lived there for six months, and I know that I will never live in a city more full of quirks than it. What with its canals, bicycles, tilting houses, motor boat travels, coffeeshops, weed smell everywhere, and a university and red light district standing side-by-side in perfect harmony.

Last year, I had written a blog on an artwork on the red-light district in Amsterdam. Now I am tempted to quote out of it - to explain why to live in Amsterdam means rewiring your brain to a new way of life.

"All tourists to Amsterdam religiously take a tour of its notorious red light district. And are dutifully awed by it. No matter how much you have read about it, how world weary you are, how primed you are for the experience: the reality of Amsterdam's canal-lined sex lanes will leave you overwhelmed. It is the shopping arcade of prostitution. Women of all ages, colours, sizes and catering to all kinds of festishes are casually displayed in windows like candies for your pick. Nothing is left to the imagination including the price of the experience: 50 euros for a mere hump, another 5 for moaning, another 10 for a caress, another 15 for her to kiss back, more for some oral... you get the picture. It is in-your-face, unashamed, unsentimental and utterly commercial. And it will leave you awed.

I was awed.

But what is more amazing - and something you learn only if you live in Amsterdam - is how quickly, how unbelievably fast, you stop noticing the sex romp around you. It hit me two months into the city, as I was pedaling my way to the university early one morning. As I glanced around, I noticed a bored sex worker in dominatrix attire sitting in front of her window, perhaps waiting for a customer to walk in for a early morning quickie. Her window was in the basement of what looked like a respectable residential block, and was sandwiched between a bakery and a dress shop. The bakery had just opened and the smell of warm freshly baked bread was in the air. The dress shop had an hour to go before it opened. There was little excitement or sense of the forbidden anywhere - it was just another banal morning in Amsterdam with a sex worker, a baker and a university student (me) going about their lives in an everyday city street. And to me, it was priceless."

You can read the whole blog here.

Toilet Troubles - Or how do I defend the poverty in India

2010-08-05T14:04:00.003+01:00

Not quite jewel-crusted, but my toilet did have a flush

Yesterday again, the topic at dinner turned to the horrendous poverty in India – to be more specific, the way millions live without toilets, being forced to shit out in the open.

There were two Australians (including Sid), two Americans, a Newzealander and poor little Ms-Indian-Me at the table, and we had just finished the most amazing Indian meal at a restaurant near Leicester Square.

The comment came about rather innocently, as such comments usually do. I asked the Texan if he had ever visited India and his wife started a story about how he used to keep saying that he didn’t need to visit India because it couldn’t possibly be that different from Mexico City – loud, colourful, lots of poor people and great food – until he saw a documentary about how so many Indians live without sanitation. Then, he changed his mind.

I didn’t bother asking whether he was keener to visit India now.

I am never quite sure how to react to such comments – and they come up in conversation often enough. I don’t think they arise out of nastiness at all. People are just genuinely bewildered that such poverty can exist at all. And it is precisely because such statements are true that I feel at loss about how to respond.

The easiest thing would be to turn around and say, “Yes, 665 million defecate openly in India. But we always had a toilet at home. It even had a flush!”

A lot of Indians do that, they make it point to mention how back in India they had so many servants, and a chauffeur, and a huge garden with one gardener to water, another to weed, and still another to sing and dance to the plants. I guess, they want to define themselves as far apart from the miserable minions that the West see in documentaries and films, as possible. I can see where they come from.

Only, then we immediately come across as evil, feudal and insensitive. After all, the general assumption is that if you are living in such luxury surrounded by such inhuman poverty – then you must be exploiting the poor. How could you otherwise, so casually, talk about having servants. The whole servant-structure is seen as rather exploitative here.

So what I really want to say is this: Yes, there is immense poverty in India. Horrifying poverty. But I am not ashamed of the poor of my country. I am ashamed of the caste system, the criminalised politics and religous riots, but not the poor. With or without toilets, they are no less human than those Swiss with their toilets that even clean the seats automatically.So whatever else you want to be overwhelmed by, don't be overwhelmed by the poor.

And yes, I was privileged, but I was not evil. I was just at loss about how to address a problem that is so immense and so overpowering. I was just one tiny Indian, earning a middle-class salary, trying to enjoy life while still hoping to do my bit to help the poor: pay my taxes, vote diligently, sign petitions, and occasionally join a protest when I thought something egregious had occurred. It was no more, no less than what an average European would do.

But it is too much, too complicated for a casual dinner table conversation. So I usually choose to just remain quiet.

France, Switzerland & Italy in a day - Or how I learnt to stop worrying and love the pasta

2010-08-04T08:28:00.007+01:00

Trapped in translation?

Whatever else I had imagined myself doing in my life, it wasn’t this: having breakfast in one country, lunch in another, and dinner in third. But that is precisely what Sid and I did this Saturday, thanks to the excellent road connectivity of Europe and the marvellous ease of travel afforded by Schengen.

So we started our day with croissants in a village cafe on the French side of the Franco-Swiss border, then drove along the gorgeous winery-lined Geneva Lake in Switzerland and then through (and often under) the snow-capped Alps into Italy to finish the day with dinner in the lively town square of Turin.

I had already been to France and Switzerland (for my views on Indians in Switzerland read here) – but it was my first time in Italy. And less-than-24 hours in the country was enough for me to realise that every stereotype I had ever heard of Italians – was totally and completely true. Yes, they are indeed loud, friendly and colourful. Yes, they drive like maniacs. Yes, they are easy with their honks. Yes, they have the most divine food. And yes, they are not shy about roadside displays of affection – I mean those Italian men were really going for it with their girlfriends in public.

Considering that all other stereotypes had been confirmed, I was completely ready to encounter the ultimate Italian experience: the tourist trap. And when we sat down for dinner at a little taverna in the Latin Quarter of Turin – and the Italian lady started serving us all sorts of yummy things without us having actually ordered any – I thought this is it. I mean, when she asked in her very limited English “Apertifs?” and we nodded, I thought we would get menu cards. Instead, we got a wine for me, a beer for Sid, a plate of cold-cuts and cheese, and a basket of bread.

It didn’t help when Sid recounted a story he had read of a Japanese couple landing up consuming fish worth €2000 in a restaurant in Rome without quite realising it until the bill arrived – the Italian waiter had been just a little too helpful, you see.

The only saving grace was that the two girls sitting next to us had been offered exactly the same food. Taking courage from that, Sid & I decided to just relax and play along. So we took our time with the wine and cheese, and tarried over the pasta and the icecream-in-chocolate sauce that followed. (No, we hadn’t ordered that either.)

Finally, when the meal was over – and the girls next to us had left – we decided to go up to the till, and check out the damage. I was fully expecting to fall back by a good 40-50 euros.

So we could hardly believe our ears when the lady pointed at the till showing €16. “No, no – we had some wine and beer too” – Sid actually protested. The lady just looked quizzical and said “ci! ci!”

Part elated and part guilt-ridden at having so awfully presumed on her behalf, we paid our paltry bill and left.
You know those stereotypes about Italians – never believe them…

***
- If you do land-up in Turin and are looking for smashing meal for €16, try Rhumeria Vodkeria on Franco Bonelli Street.
- The comedian Eddie Izzard on Italians

CSI Reloaded - Or how England recovered a Rapahel

2010-08-03T10:21:00.002+01:00

Madonna of the Pinks at the National Gallery

This week's edition of The Times of India Crest carries an article by me on how the National Gallery in London uses highly speciliased scientific techniques to verify artworks - very CSI!!!

For example, this lovely work on the side is entitled Madonna of the Pinks. A renaissance-period work it was considered a copy of a Raphael and was sentenced to a century of obscurity in a castle far away in Northumberland. Then, while getting its 100-year cleaning someone noted its masterful execution and sent it to The National Gallery for a check-out. The gallery took out its electron microscope, infrared radiogram and mass spectometer to uncover the line drawings underneath.

Voila! Turns out that both the material of the line drawing and their style was doubtlessly characteristic of the great master Rapahel himself.

The painting now owned by the National Gallery and is currently on display at an exhibition Close Examination: Fakes, Mistakes and Recoveries. The exhibition displays more than 40 such paintings whose authorship was in dispute until super-sciences were used by the Gallery's laboratory to verify the claims and counterclaims.

***
Have you seen the Audrey Hepburn-starrer How To Steal A Million? It was the funnest film on fake art I've seen. Here's a trailer:

Brenton's Boleyn - Or how I met St Anne the Martryr

2010-08-02T13:07:00.002+01:00

Anne Boleyn at Shakespeare's Globe (photo by Manuel Harlan)

Last Monday, Sid &I finally made it to Shakespeare’s Globe – a theatre built in the original Elizabethan style and dedicated to Shakespeare’s works. Unfortunately, it wasn’t staging any of the works by the bard himself, but a modern play by Howard Brenton called Anne Boleyn. Anne Boleyn-Henry-Elizabeth-Tudors -Shakespeare: get the connection?

I must say I was also curious to see Brenton's take on Anne, especially to contrast it against Hillary Mantel’s monstrous version, about which I had blogged before.

Now, I was expecting a reasonably sympathetic portrayal of the mistress-in-question. After all, you seldom write and name a play around the villain of the show. But what I was not expecting was to be confronted with St Anne the Martyr.

Brenton's Anne is pious with just that dash of sassy impishness to make her sexy and modern to the audience. Whoever comes in touch with her – her ladies-in-waiting, the courtiers, and above all, Henry himself – simply falls in love with her. Her decision to not have sex with Henry, whilst he was still married to Catherine of Aragon, is really borne out of piousness and honesty rather than cold calculation. And most importantly, she is driven equally by her evangelical zeal to save her soon-to-be English subjects (if only bloody blockheads would agree) from the Roman Catholic Church as she is by her great love for Henry.

But what really took my breath away, was Brenton's suggestion that it was Anne’s intention to expose Cromwell’s siphoning-off for public funds – “funds meant for schools and universities” – that got her so cruelly marked and crucified. What a charming touch – and so resonant with an audience just coming out of a horrendous expenses scandal in the British parliament.

But Brenton's portrayal was essentially a dishonest one because he refused to deal with what Anne’s actions meant to another older woman and her child. Catherine of Aragon and her daughter Mary suffered – and suffered grievously and publicly – because of Anne’s determination to have Henry and the crown. Even if her actions were all borne out her desire to serve the English people, surely, these darker consequences ought to have been addressed by any play seriously asking us to change our perception of England’s most famous mistress. But Brenton coloured Anne hatred of Catherine which just that touch of childishness – she churishly keeps calling Catherine a cow – to the audience laugh affectionately with exasperation rather than seriously question her actions.

Now Shakespeare would have dealt with Anne’s character in all its darkness and still would have us still somehow see the humanity in her. Brenton in his place airbrushes the darkness away.

Brenton’s play might be staged at Shakespeare’s Globe -- unfortunately, Shakespeare he is not.

***
- For more on the play and how to see it.It is on till August 21.

- For top ten Tudor sights in London

- I may not be pleased with this version of Tudor history, but apparently Hitler wasn't too pleased with Michael Hirst's pop television version, The Tudors, either. Enjoy!

In Colchester - Or my hunt for Blyton's England

2010-07-30T10:17:00.004+01:00

Retina fatigue waiting for you in Colchester

Sid & I discovered the ugliest garden of England in Colchester a couple of weekends ago. I mean, sure, purple, yellow, blood red, pink, and white are lovely colours individually. But together in close vicinity – under the sharp summer sun – and in strange geometrical combinations...uhhmm.. not such a great idea.

Of course, that leads us to the question, what were Sid and I doing in Colchester – a little townlet (as I call it) in Essex – anyway?

We were in Colchester to in pursuit of Enid Blyton’s England that had me so obsessed as a child. I read my first Blyton in fourth grade – it was one of the Secret Seven series – and was hooked. I polished off secret sevens, famous fives, five find-outers and whatever else that came with Blyton’s name on top and little English boys, girls and dogs inside: cycling, swimming, camping, caravanning, having adventures and eating exotic things like lemon tarts & macaroons.

Now, you have to be a shy 8-year-old in a godforsaken coal town called Dhanbad in India to understand why their macaroon-fed, adventure-filled, nature-soaked lives would have me so overwhelmed. The only adventure my sisters and I ever got in Dhanbad was taking the school bus (which considering the frightening state of the bus, the road, the traffic and the coal dust-filled air should have been enough).

And thus I arrived in England with visions of cream teas, jam tarts, seacoasts, town-squares, butcher shops, constables on their bicycles and lots and lots of little sun-browned English kids running about busily solving mysteries. Imagine my horror to find it filled with Starbucks, kebab shops, Tescos, Arabs at Harrods, Katie Price, and fat English girls stuffing themselves at McDonalds instead.

But I wasn't to be vanquished that easily. In search of Blyton's England, Sid and I started touring around UK in buses, trains and cars - stopping at quaint-sounding towns and villages.

No, I haven’t found my Julian, Dick, Anne, George, Timmy & Kirrin Island yet, but I am glad for my trips. And yes, Tesco and Katie Price-inspired fashion still rules. But hidden in the din, I also did find myself sipping cream tea on a rainy afternoon in Carlisle; or sharing thoughts with a farmer's wife in her B&B in Haltwhistle in Cumbria; or watching ponies peacefull graze by the side of the roads in gorgeous New Forest; or walking along the wind-swept, bleak coastline of the fishing village of Blakeney chomping on the best crayfish sandwich, I ever had; a or lazing about in a hidden sunny seabeach just outside of Swansea; and of course, the coming face-to-face with the ugliest garden of England in Colchester.

Blyton's England or not, the visits were totally worth it.

***
Nostalgia trip

Minimalism - or why we just can't get it right

2010-07-29T13:16:00.005+01:00

Two magazines found their way on my doorstep yesterday at the same time: the weekly woman’s lifestyle mag-rag Stylist & the season catalogue of the high-end contemporary furniture store, BoConcept.

The simultaneity of their arrival made me think of the big lifestyle dilemma of our modern world: minimalism vs perennial consumerism.

Now, if you look at the BoConcept catalogue, it is all surfaces – clean, uncluttered, never-ending surfaces (and insect pictures on the wall, for some odd reason). The uber-expensive furniture and fixtures are defined by their sparseness and their determination to not take attention away from the pure beauty of empty space. Think: the frighteningly modernist house in Polanski’s latest, The Ghost Writer.

Ice-cold minimalism is the lifestyle to aspire to.

On the other hand, fashion magazines such as Stylist that we consume on a regular basis are filled with “stuff” being peddled to us. I don’t know what else to call all of this but stuff: citrus-orange watches; limited-edition velvet flowercap perfume bottles; wall-mounted wine racks; handcrafted cards; cellulite brushes; Lady Gaga designed heartbeat earphones designed “just for Dr Dre Beats”; Phillips Fidelio’s snazzy DS9000 iPod; peppermint and lemon insect-repellent candles; a book of 100 shots of Kate Moss; “little fella” late-night reading lamps; and, I kid you not, babushka-doll inspired USB sticks -- all of which Stylist believes would really enhance your life.

Would it make any material difference to anyone’s life, whether they did or did not own the babushka-doll USB stick or the Lady Gaga designed heartbeat earphones? None what so ever. Yet, we will all buy it because of the fuzzy, warm momentary joy that the act of buying gives us.

And then, we will try to fit all this colourful junk into our supposedly cool minimalist lives – and wonder, what went wrong.

Cameron in India - or my post-colonial perplexity

2010-07-29T10:51:00.003+01:00

Reading the British & Indian newspapers in unison has been a perplexing affair for me for the last few days.

The British media has been full of discussions about Cameron's visit to India - why is India so high on Cameron's agenda; why a 68-strong delegation is accompanying him; the reason behind his plain-spokenness over Pakistan; its consequences; his stand on the immigration cap; our historical colonial ties; Labour's shitty take on Kashmir; and of course, what a blow for India it is that SamCam is giving it a miss....

Then I turn to the Indian media: SILENCE.

Everyday, I keep waiting for Dear Dave to pop-up in the news feeds from Indian newspapers only to find nothing. Realising that depending on newsfeeds might lead to a loonnggg wait, I turned to the newspaper websites myself today only to find no mention of him at all in the top news sections of either The Times of India or the Hindustan Times. (I would go to the Express India site too, if only I wouldn't get rabid virus warnings each time I did that.) I finally found an editorial in the Hindustan Times on the subject, only to discover that it has been written by a British BBC presenter.

The article itself is interesting. Nic Gowing suggests that the government's enthusiasm towards India is very much an elite affair, and that the Brit-on-the-road simply doesn't have an opinion on India, positive or negative. This Indian-summer love is strictly limited to the elite.

Going by the Indian media's coverage of Cameron's ongoing visit, I don't think that Indians - elite or otherwise - care that much either.

But according to the post-colonial theory - beloved of so many academics - it should be the exact opposite. The British media should have a few disdainful mentions of Cameron's visit, and Indian media should be going summersaulting in excitement. Is any more proof required that post-colonial theory is way past its sell-by date - at least, where India was concerned?

Indians in Switzerland

2010-07-07T10:48:00.004+01:00

Sid and I just returned from a trip to Switzerland. We biked and hiked for two days in Interlaken, roamed about in the old town of Bern, and then literally walked into a summer party in Zurich. The city was holding a summer festival - which takes place once in every three years - so Sid and I got a firework show, an airshow and lots and lots of good food in the bargain!

What took me by surprise was how many Indians we bumped into in Interlaken, and almost half of them were honeymooning couples (the gigantic choudas are such a giveaway). Amongst them, I also came across one of the most disturbing sights ever: a newly-married Delhi couple on their honeymoon with the bride's mum-in-law and bro-in-law in tow.

Most of them looked slightly bewildered and bored - like now that they finally were in the much-hyped Switzerland, they really didn't know what to do with it.

I think it is because we Indians don't grow-up vacationing. And thanks to Bollywood, vacations to beautiful places are more of an exotic idea to us rather than a reality. So when we finally go on one, we don't exactly know what to do. (It happened to me as well on my first few trips - thankfully Sid was more practiced at it than me.)

For example, the main beauty of Interlaken is in the mountains and lakes around - and the possibility of adventure. It offers parasailing, gliding, and lots of mountaineering, hiking and biking options ranging from very easy to quite tough ones. But we were the only Indians cycling or hiking, albeit on the easy ones. The rest just seemed to congregate in the tiny Interlaken town square (which by standards of European town sqaures is rather boring) and spend their time browsing through its seriously touristy shops.

Another strange thing was how no Indian ever acknowledged another. Instead, they pretended they hadn't seen you. This was something that a friend - see Leo Mirani among the followers of this blog - had pointed out over beer one evening. When a Spanish meets another, he'll go hola. An American is always happy to meet another. But Indians act as if the other Indians in their direct line of vision are not there.

So I tried smiling at a few Indians. Just as Leo had predicted, I got some deadly glowers back.

My theory is that when Indians land in Switzerland, they are expecting the exotic. But seeing so many other Indians around somehow reduces the specialness of the experience. And in response, they school themselves to not see other Indians.

Being in Interlaken also made me notice how ungainly most Indian women look, and the kurti on jeans with huge Nike shoes - their regulation vacation attire - doesn't help their case. I still am not sure whether it is their figures or the clothes they don - either way, they don't make a pretty sight. Which is bothersome, because it makes me wonder what I look like.

I do know one thing though, I certainly don't wear kurtis on jeans with big Nike shoes anymore ;-)

Hilary Mantel's Anne

2010-06-14T17:03:00.001+01:00

I wonder if I would have been as gripped by Mantel’s Wolf Hall, which I just finished reading, if I wasn’t woman, more importantly, a married woman. After all, if I am truly honest, it wasn’t Mantel’s rags-to-riches account of Thomas Cromwell’s life that kept me going through the 650 pages without a stop. No, it was Mantel’s deliciously monstrous image of the husband-stealing Anne Boleyn that had me obsessively turning over the pages.

For those who spent 2009 on Planet Pluto, Wolf Hall was last year’s Man Booker prize winner. It is a semi-fictionalised account of the life of Thomas Cromwell, an English commoner who rose to become Henry VIII’s closed confidante as he conspired to replace his ageing, dumpy wife, Catherine of Aragon, with the bootylicious Anne Boleyn. As a fall-out of this tricky wife-swapping, England broke ties with Catholic Rome, reformed the Anglican Church and accredited Protestantism in England.

Mantel remained faithful to the chronology of the actions and events. However, she let loose her imagination when giving personalities to the different characters. And boy! Is her Anne Boleyn evil? She is cold and calculating about sex, deadly in exacting revenge, grasping about wealth (read: palaces, jewellery, and titles, especially if they belonged to Catherine of Aragon) and a master at scheming. In short, she is your Grade A Mistress-From-Hell. Even King Henry VIII is a tinsy-bit scared of her. It is almost as if Mantel wants you to be standing there cheering when Boleyn meets the guillotine (for which, by the way, we will have to wait for the sequel. This novel ends with Anne’s second miscarriage and the general souring-up of Henry and Anne’s sex life.)

Strangely, Mantel even takes away credit from Boleyn where it is due. Most accounts of Boleyn – especially, if they arise from the feminist cauldron – tend to present her as a refined woman, genuinely concerned about the corrupt Catholic clergy, knowledgeable in international diplomacy, and generous towards her sister Mary. (Apparently, Anne granted her sister a life-long pension despite the fact that she was a former mistress of Henry VIII.) However, Mantel reduces Anne’s erudition to her merely passing some of William Tyndale’s writings to Henry VIII, and her experience in international diplomacy to a dinner and dance with the French King. Mantel’s Anne was a belittling bitch to her sister and she gives credit of Mary's pension to Thomas Cromwell's interjection.

To insult to injury, Mantel introduces Jane Seymour – for whom Henry VIII so spectacularly dumped Anne – as a rather simple, sweet soul with a generous heart. So good eventually won over evil, and all was well in the world again.

Why would Mantel do that? I believe she did it in order to provide maximum pleasure to her married, female readership. Can there be a purer, sweeter pleasure than in encountering the perfectly hateful “other woman” and then see her receive her comeuppance in form of beheading? After all, if Sid ever dumped me for another woman, I wouldn't be able to imagine her as anything but purely evil, and nothing short of her severed head would satisfy me. In fact, make that two ;-)

***

You can buy Wolf Hall on Amazon here.

Kabuki: Strange but Delightful

2010-06-10T17:44:00.002+01:00

On Tuesday, Sid and I felt like experiencing something strange and somewhat outlandish. Naturally, that meant we had to go for a “Japanese”. After all, no matter what aspect of culture you examine – food (fish sperms?), books (Murakami?), films (Tampopo?), clothes (oh, all those hobbling women in Kiminos?), and of course, sex (where do I begin?) – Japan wins all contests in strangeness.

However, Sid and I stuck to the safe end of Japanese cultural strangeness and went to Sadler’s Well for a Kabuki performance – a traditional Japanese opera of sorts, with men-in-drag, outrageous make-up, elaborate costumes, lots of heavily stylised singing and dancing. The show, entitled Yoshitsune and The Cherry Trees, was outrageous, exaggerated, colourful, exhilarating and a lot of fun.

The play, set in the 12th century, had little to do with Yoshitsune and none at all with Cherry Trees. General Yoshitsune leaves his favourite drum with his mistress Shizuka, and leaves her in the care of his favourite retainer Tadanobu, before huffing-off to fight his brother Yoritmoto. The plan is for Shizuka and Tadanobu to meet him across the Mt Yoshino. Only, Tadanobu is really a fox and is accompanying Shizuka because the drum she is carrying is made from the hide of his parents, who speak to him through its beats. Bizarre? You bet! But oh so, beautifully rendered.

I guess, Kabuki’s delights can be enjoyed only if you place yourself before the 19th century: a time before television or films when people took themselves to theatre to experience the larger-than-life. And they got it in the form of the elaborate costumes, stylised dance and fighting sequences, and melodrama.

So if a yen for something strange and larger-than-life overcomes you between now and June 15, I would recommend a trip out to Sadler’s Well.

Yoshitsune and the Thousand Cherry Trees is playing at Sadler’s Well till June 15. If it helps, it stars Ebizo Ichikawa XI, who apparently is the Brad Pitt of Kabuki theatre.

***
More on strange Japanese films.

The Way We Were

2010-05-19T18:01:00.002+01:00

I found this piece of hulking machinery - rather endearingly called a paddle tug - at the National Maritime Museum.

I am not exactly sure why I clicked the picture, except that the machine looked so lovely, outdated and redundant.

Will journalists too become a redundant relic in some museum someday?

Fashion, flies and summer skies

2010-05-18T15:14:00.004+01:00

This intriguing shop window – notice the huge house flies behind the mannequins – is that of the Zara store opposite the Oxford Circus tube stop.

But the connection between flies & fashion isn’t the only thing that befuddles me about the UK fashion industry. No, that honour must be shared by the absolute disconnect between the weather and the fashion trends.

One February morning this year, I entered the Reiss store on Essex Road in order to escape the drizzle that had just suddenly come down to cherry-top the ice-cold morning. I decided to put the time to good use by looking around for a good cardigan or sweater. Only, when I asked the assistant for a good 100 per cent wool sweater, she looked nonplussed.

“We have only two of those left,” she explained. “You see, we have moved to our spring collection.” Ironically, as we looked outside in search of spring, we saw snow flakes drift by. To give the shop assistant her due, she had the grace to look sheepish.

And now, the shops say that it is summer and we must buy cut sleeves, tube tops, cotton frocks, summer skirts and sun glasses. Only, there is no sign of the ballyhooed summer or the sun.

But who will tell that to Vogue!

Don't worry Quinn, it is not a freak show

2010-05-16T21:46:00.003+01:00

Can someone sculpt a life-size bronze statue of a woman-with-a-penis fucking a man-with-a-vagina, doggie-style, and then claim that he doesn’t want his exhibition to be viewed as a freak show? Yes he can, if he is artist Marc Quinn. The claim was made in an interview to The Guardian on May 1, just before his latest show - displaying the said statue - opened at the White Cube gallery.

The statue has been cast from two real-life pornographic actors: Allanah Starr (a man who surgically became a woman but decided to keep his penis) and Buck Angel (a woman who changed into a man but decided to keep her vagina because she didn’t want to lose her orgasms, as she explained to The Guardian).

Other works include a marble statue of Chelsea Charms, a woman with enormous, surgically-enhanced breasts who is an adult “breast entertainer” for the pornographic industry; a towering marble of Thomas Beatie, a pregnant man; two large, pop-ish busts of Michael Jackson playing on the “Black or White” theme; Pamela Anderson sculpted to perfection, in real life and in bronze; and more.

I had only heard of Quinn’s works in passing before – Self, a bust of himself shockingly made using his own frozen blood, and Alison Lapper Pregnant, a naked marble sculpture of a pregnant woman born without hands and feet. I hadn’t seen either, but the first sounded interesting and the second – simply noble. I had to see his works in real, which I finally did this week.

Unfortunately, there isn’t much nobility on display in this show – except, perhaps, in the sculpture of Thomas Beatie, the pregnant man. Beatie’s sculpture stands out because of the astoundingly gentle expression that radiates off his face – as he softly runs his palm over his swollen belly. The expression said more to me about the beauty of mother’s love than the countless medieval Madonnas that I have viewed in museums across Europe. By capturing that expression on Beatie’s incongruously bearded face, he instantly transformed Beatie from a freak into something close to godliness – and to me it was a revelation.

But I can’t understand how sculptures of Starr fucking Angel or of Chelsea Charms looking up in ecstacy as she strokes her monumental breasts help us understand them and their choices more, let alone identify with them? If anything, it further alienates them, since they are already pornographic actors and presumably used to putting up such displays for people’s pleasure – often freakish pleasure. It is not particularly courageous of path-breaking to allow themselves to be sculpted so. On Quinn's part, by presenting them in such poses, he has only confirmed the stereotypes of transgenders.

Were it not for Beatie, I would have found Quinn’s show boring. And since boredom is not a sentiment any good freak show aims for, perhaps, Quinn has achieved what he set out to do.

Charting Chadha

2010-05-12T09:22:00.001+01:00

Last Saturday, The Times of India published a profile I wrote of Gurinder Chadha - of Bend It Like Beckham fame - whose latest film is just out. Thanks to the utterly idiotic and complex website of the newspaper, I can't put a direct link to the article. Hence, am reproducing the text of my article here:

Title: Charting Chadha
Intro: Mum’s the word in Gurinder Chadha’s life and Afterlife these days.

At the age of 50, the British Asian filmmaker Gurinder Chadha is a woman focussed on motherhood. It is a warm Saturday morning, and we are sitting in the sunny terrace garden of her posh Primrose Hill house in London. But her mind seems to fixed somewhere between the terrace and the floor below where her tiny three-year-old twins – Ronak and Kumiko – are squealing. “The children aren’t well, and they know I am here,” she explains. “There’ll be like ‘where’s mama..’, then you can experience this motherhood thing when I’ll abandon you half-way through your interview in an abrupt end,” she adds with a raucous laughter.

She doesn’t, naturally. But I hurry with the questions nevertheless.

We are meeting to talk about her latest film, It’s a Wonderful Afterlife, a comedy set in the Indian community of Southall, London, about a serial-killing Punjabi mother (played by Shabana Azmi), whose victims come back to haunt her as ghosts. Again, she blames her unexpected motherhood at the age of 47 for the outrageous premise of the film. “When my children were first born, every time I looked at them, I would think about my own death,” she recalls. “I would just look at these things and go – ‘Oh my God, if I die tomorrow, how will they manage? Oh my God, if I die tomorrow, they will never know me?” Her overblown anxiety got her started on the theme of motherhood, death and reincarnation. Further, as she explains, “even though Shabana is doing these killings for her daughter, it is really a metaphor for how much a mother will do to see her child happy”.

It’s a Wonderful Afterlife is Chadha’s third full-length feature film since the light-hearted comedy Bend It Like Beckham put her on the international charts eight years ago. Made on a shoe-string budget, it unexpectedly became the highest-grossing British films of that year picking up several international awards along the way. Since then, she has made Bride & Prejudice (2005), a lavish Bollywood-style western musical, and Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging (2008), a small-budget teenage drama set in Eastbourne, England, which was not released in India. Neither of the films were set in the British Asian community of Britain, which had been the focus of Bend It Like Beckham and most of Chadha’s films before it. Notably, neither achieved the tremendous success of Bend It Like Beckham.

“Whatever I would have done after Beckham would have had a rough ride, I think,” says Chadha, reflecting on the reception of Bride & Prejudice, which ranged from lukewarm to frankly hostile. As she explains, after Bend It Like Beckham, audience world over wanted her to continue regaling them with films about the foibles of the Indian Diaspora in a light, frothy way. “But obviously as a director I can’t keep repeating the same film over and over again,” she explains. Hence, she consciously decided to move away from the world of the British Asian community in her films.

Even with her latest film, Chadha was aware of the looming comparisons with Bend It Like Beckham. In fact, it was particularly likely with It’s a Wonderful Afterlife, set as it is in the streets, shops and gurudwaras of Southall and its loud, lively British-Punjabi community. Thus, though she set her film in Southall, she decided to turn it into a goofy, horror-spoof film in the style of Shaun of the Dead or An American Werewolf in London. “You can’t ever accuse this film of trying to copy Bend It Like Beckham”.

Besides, Chadha mulls, the success of Bend It Like Beckham fulfilled the quest that set her on the path of filmmaking initially. “The reason I went into films was that people like me were very absent from the screen in the UK,” she says. “Fifteen-twenty years ago, whenever there was an Indian on TV, everyone would go ‘quick, quick.. Mum mum.. there’s an Indian on tv,’” she recalls. Most of her initial films, from her documentaries such as I am British But... (1989) and Acting Our Age (1992) to her features such as Bhaji on the beach (1993) and Bend It Like Beckham, were more about chronicling the Asian lives in Britain than about filmmaking itself. The success of her films went a long way in making Asian faces and stories common on the British television. In fact, on last Christmas Day, the long-running British soap opera EastEnders ran an Asian storyline on its peak viewing time to no raised eyebrows.

“I feel I have achieved what I set out to do, in terms of making the British Asian family a mainstream of the British culture” she explains. All her work since Bend It Like Beckham has attempted to take her beyond message-centric, community-specific films to more broad-based genres.

For the British Asian community of Southall, Chadha remains a much-loved progeny. In fact, her films have a corner to themselves in an exhibition called Southall Story, which is currently on at the Southbank Centre in London. It traces the history, culture and life of Southall, one of the most mixed, vibrant immigrant neighbourhoods of London. As Shakila Mann, one of the minds behind the exhibitions and a Southall child herself, explains, Bend It Like Beckham gave the people of Southall a lot of confidence. “Suddenly you were going to see not just a Bollywood movie, but you were going to the multiplex to see Bend It Like Beckham, which was about you.”

It’s a Wonderful Afterlife has opened to mixed reviews in Britain and the US. However, Chadha herself remains remarkably unfazed by the fate of her films. She again credits motherhood to her new-found calmness. “Earlier I’d watch other films coming out or I’d see the award season and think, ‘ahh.. I should make a film like that’,” she admits. “But now I don’t care about anything like that. I just want to make sure that my children have a good lunch, a good dinner, are happy.”

***

I want volcanoes

2010-05-08T12:04:00.001+01:00

I think I want another volcano to erupt in Iceland.

After all, all along that the supposed volcanic ash was hovering above us, we had the most beautiful blue summer skies and long, warm days. There was barbeque smell in the air, streets had come alive with outdoor cafes, and even the British managed to look happy.

Of course, some people had their travel plans foiled. But as Sid and my passports were toasting in some drawer at Britain's Home Office during that time, we really couldn't have cared less.

And then, the volcano subsided, and we are back in the thick of winter again. Cloudy skies, cloudy faces, and the Home Office has still not relinquished control over our passports.

Give me back my volcano.

One Lion

2010-05-04T08:36:00.003+01:00

Chris Morris couldn’t have asked for a better opening week for his latest film, Four Lions.

Considered so controversial that both BBC and Channel 4 refused to fund it, Four Lion is a dark comedy about four inept, bungling Jihadi terrorists of British-Pakistani origin and their attempts to blow-up London Marathon.

And along comes Faizal Shahzad, the terrorist of American-Pakistani origin, who tried to blow up Times Square last Sunday in an effort that will go down in history as the most incompetent, clumsy terrorist undertaking ever.

Think about it. Shahzad left his car awkwardly parked in the busy Time Square with gunpowder smoke billowing out of it. The car was filled with among other things, two five-gallon gasoline containers, three propane tanks, firecrackers, fertilizer packed in clear plastic bags bearing a store’s logo, a cooking pot, a 78-pound metal gun box, a GC-14P 14-gun steel security cabinet manufactured by Stack-On, two neon-colour alarm clocks and some batteries. And just in case, no one noticed it, he also left the ignition running and the hazard lights on.

Apparently, the bomb he was going for was a Rube Goldberg contraption, or as the bomb expert on the case, James Cavanaugh, explained a “‘swing-the-arm-with-the-shoe-that-hits-the-ball-and-knocks-over-a-stick-that-knocks-something-off-a-shelf” kind of bomb. No wonder, the bloody thing never went off, and left behind a treasure trove of evidence for the investigators. As another officer on the case commented, “This guy left everything here but his wallet.”

If I ever wanted to write a book on how not to conduct a terrorist bombing, this would be my star case study.
***

Here's my favourite scene from the film on "how to blow up the internet".

View the review

2010-05-03T20:03:00.004+01:00

Ever since I stepped out of India, I have been terrified of all that I don’t know. Should I express an opinion on anything – be it film, theatre, music, dance, television or even street culture – when I haven’t had a lifelong engagement with them? On so many occasions, I have abandoned blogs half-way, conscious that I don’t have enough background on the subject.

But now I find that the esteemed London reviewers don’t share the same diffidence when it comes to opining confidently on Indian culture.

Last week, I attended the dance performance by Akram Khan and raved about my experience on this blog. Most London reviewers did the same too, in their respective columns, with one crucial difference: most got the storyline hopelessly and hilariously mixed-up.

As the leaflet given to us during the show made clear, the performance was about the relationship between Gandhari and Duryodhana, the mother-son duo from the Hindu epic Mahabharata. In the third, fourth and fifth act, Akram Khan plays Duryodhana and Yoshie Sunahata, the Japanese dancer/drummer/singer, plays his blindfolded mother Queen Gandhari. The relationship is made still more evident from the fact that at one point, Khan is dancing around Sunahata, who stands at the centre of the stage blindfolded with a stick, with the vocals “Maa Sun (mother listen)” echoing through the hall.

And yet, Times online married the two-off, by claiming that Khan played the king, presumably Dhritrashtra, and Sunahata the Queen. Guardian did the same, making the further claim, that the dance was a “portrait of a marriage”. Telegraph claimed that Khan plays the last surviving Kaurava son Duryodhana, and Sunahata the blind king, thereby doing away with Gandhari in a single swoop. The theatre newspaper Stage was a bit cleverer, and refused to commit itself to who was who in the play, focussing instead on the dance moves.

The confident tone assumed by most reviewers, especially Judith Mackrell of Guardian, had me simultaneously despairing and doubling up with laughter. And what about the dishonesty? After all, if they didn’t get the plot, it says something of the performance as well. If the show couldn’t get through to the reviewers, what are the chances of the rest of the audience following the story?

Only Times Online was honest enough to admit that he found the performance a tad confusing.That would have been enough for me to become a follower of Times Online reviews if I hadn't discovered yesterday, that the website has been claiming all over the internet that the Bollywood movie Teen Patti (or three cards in Hindi) refers to three husbands.

Rescued by Bollywood: Or How I Learnt to Stop Worrying and Love Kathak

2010-04-30T13:23:00.003+01:00

The thing about being out of India is that the moment I hear of anything even remotely connected to India, I feel I must experience it. Yesterday, I actually found myself considering attending some loud, over-the-top Baisakhi festival at Trafalgar Square -- the kind of affair I would have certainly turned up my nose up at, when living in India. Academics would call it my search for identity in an alien land or some such.

What else but my "search of identity" could have led me to Sadler's Well theatre last Tuesday for a Kathak performance by Akram Khan? After all, hadn't I decided early on in life that Indian classical dance and music was not for me? So, naturally, as I sat down on my seat, I nervously wondered whether I had signed myself up for more Indian culture than I could take in one evening.

I tried to take courage from Akram Khan's impeccable reputation - a dancer of Brit-Bang origin (my short form for second-generation British-Bangladeshis), who has not only mastered classical Kathak, but also modern dance, and by combining the two has apparently breathed new life into Indian classical dance in the West. I hoped to find solace in his modern-take on classical, if not classical dance itself.

I needn't have feared. Just because I never actually attended Kathak performances myself, doesn't mean that all along Kathak hadn't been visiting me. It had - through all the Bollywood films I had grown-up watching. As I saw Khan sway and twirl elegantly, I found myself revisiting the dance sequences (particularly, the infamous mujras, come to think of it) of so many films through the '50s and '60s, and found myself absorbed by the performance. Heck! At some point, I even felt tears well up in my eyes. Nostalgia - we are all such suckers for it.

In fact, at the end, I actually enjoyed the first half more, which was entirely in Kathak than the second-half, in which he performed Kabuki-style modern dance.

I don't know whether it was Khan's best performance or not. Maybe, he missed a beat or two here or there. Maybe, he didn't. Who cares? I was just happy to realise that I had known and loved Kathak all my life, thanks to Bollywood.

***

Watch Akram Khan talk of Kathak:

And here's a Bollywood version:

Such twits!

2010-04-22T22:30:00.001+01:00

So today, I finally got around to finding details of Tharoor's resignation and reading reports about what a blow it was to new-age politics in India. And the evidence of Tharoor's new-ageyness was of course his ease with new media, mainly twitter.

Naturally, as a critic of the general workings of the Ministry of External Affairs, I couldn't help but be amused that it was finally a tweet by Lalit Modi that precipitated Tharoor's journey downhill.

My problem with Tharoor's new-age twittering self was that his tweets never amounted to anything more than self-promotion. For days I followed his twitter account hoping to find some genuine debate or discussion on it. Majority of his tweets were links to flattering media reports on himself and his activities, a commentary of his daily activities, and rather high-minded opinions on any and every subject that caught his attention during the day. Genuine debate requires dissenting opinion, which was curiously absent from his twitter profile. I refuse to believe that people were only sending him flattering messages. I, for one, sent him my critical views of how the High Commissions outside of India performed, or didn't perform. But it disappeared into a twittering black-hole. In contrast, Tharoor would promptly retweet the flattering messages. It is more likely that he simply chose to ignore the critical comments and keep-up his popularity myth rather that engage in debate . The tactics were those of a wily, old-world politician, only the medium was new.

Besides, in his short-lived tenure as deputy minister of external affairs, for all his erudition, Tharoor didn't actually make any radical policy or make us think of our international relations in any new, visionary way. Instead, he spent most his time building his persona. And the same middle class that laments that the poor fall for the superficial promises and saddle the country with bad politicians proved themselves to be twits by falling for Tharoor's surface smoothness.

Bollywood musicals?

2010-04-20T09:18:00.002+01:00

Years ago, I read an article by Rachel Dwyer – a western academic and champion of Bollywood – asking the scoffing audience in India or elsewhere to compare Bollywood films to modern day musicals. After all, they are both replete with music, dancing, action, high emotions, spectacle and melodrama. Only when we saw Hindi films through the lens of musicals, she argued, would we really appreciate the true value of Bollywood’s offerings. Unfortunately, never having seen a musical, I was rather hampered from taking her advice then.

So once in London, I decided to fill this lacuna in my cultural education, and Sid and I started logging in the musicals: Phantom of the Opera (high emotions and great, great music); We Will Rock You (terrible, terrible, terrible); Thirty-nine Steps (Comical with great light and shadow effects); Billy (fabulous dancing and social commentary); and finally Enron (intelligent, incisive, and contemporary), which we caught last week.

I still have a hard time appreciating most Bollywood films.

To begin with, most musicals tend to maximise the audience experience by putting the stage to new and clever use; whether it is through silhouettes, clever lighting, puppets, or clever platforms that seem to appear and disappear at will. It works because we know the limitations of a single stage, and hence can appreciate it when someone puts it to particularly innovative use.

Bollywood films on the other hand rarely experiment with the tools of their trade – the camera, the editing machinery, the studio space – to give us new experiences.

Even when it comes to storytelling, watching Enron made me think why should incorporating music, dance and high emotions require sacrificing complexity at all. The musical is based on the rise and fall of the energy company Enron: one of the biggest corporate scams ever perpetrated. It is hardly a subject that renders itself to music and dancing. And yet, the musical manages to tell the story with ease, style and heavy doses of black comedy. After all, the idea of a musical or a film is to put a story forward – draw certain characters, delve into their psyche, recreate the mood and atmosphere of the environment in which they existed, and explain what they did. And in case of Enron, the music and dancing heightens our experience of the characters and their motivations, the headiness of the rollick’ 90s, and that curious mixing of testosterone and greed that fuelled the whole episode. And it does so without sacrificing the complexity of the financial shenanigans that lead to Enron’s downfall.

You see, my quibble with Bollywood has nothing to do with singing, dancing and high emotions. It is that that most films do not use them cleverly enough to accentuate the story-telling. And that they almost never use the tools of their medium to create a new visual experience – unless you consider a 100 dancers behind Shah Rukh Khan a spectacle.

Name Game: Or is it goodbye Ms Mahadik?

2010-04-15T12:37:00.004+01:00

It is a truth universally acknowledged that teenage-hood brings trauma in its wake. For girls, it is usually connected to breasts, bras and boys. I must be the only girl in the world for whom the trauma related to a dick – a big dick at that.

I was in eighth grade when the attention of my hormone-charged class of 36 boys and girls suddenly fell on my surname: Mahadik. With “Maha” meaning big in Hindi, I was a sitting dic.. sorry duck! I faced the vicious teasing with a stoicism and non-violence that would have put Gandhi in shadow. As I kept telling myself – it could have been worse, my surname could have been “Harddik”. But secretly, I vowed to get married and change my surname as soon as possible.

The vow took 17 long years to materialise. But the strangest thing is that when finally the moment arrived to rid myself of that blighted "Mahadik", I felt an immense spurting of affection for it. For better or worse – mostly for the worse – it was my name. All my certificates, my degrees, my email addresses, my facebook name, my skype ID, and all the hundreds of articles I had written over the last seven years carried that name. Even my bills came under that name. All my friends knew me by that name. All my long, lost friends probably remembered me by that name. What if they googled my name and couldn’t locate me?

But Sid was adamant. As Mr and Mrs Prakash, we were a unit. What if someone wanted to send us a wedding invitation? Would I really want the invitation to come in the name of Mr Prakash and Ms Mahadik? Wouldn’t that be absolutely outrageous?

Faced by such impeccable logic, I quelled. Kicking and screaming, I decided to change my name.

And this month, I finally had the honour of getting my first few articles published in the name of Chetna Prakash.

One for the website Mumbai Boss, which funnily enough is about another famous name change and ensuing identity crises: that of the city of Mumbai.

Open Magazine, which is my revenge against Shashi Tharoor, ha ha ha!!!

And finally in Crest, the Saturday paper of The Times of India on art and culture.

I eagerly sent the article to a friend in Mumbai. And guess what? She replied, yah but who the hell is this Prakash woman?

Sob!

Mumbai vs Melbourne

2010-04-12T06:27:00.002+01:00

Do the cities we grow up in continue to live inside us, long after we have left them?

Sid and I just returned from a trip to our respective homelands: Mumbai and Melbourne. And if the answer to the above question is yes, our unborn children are in trouble.

Were there ever two cities more differently conceived? It was schizophrenic travelling from Mumbai’s crowds, claustrophobia, chaos, and perpetual panic to Melbourne’s order, antiseptic emptiness and overwhelming leisure. Perhaps, that is why I am so impatient and rushed all the time, and Sid so calm and zen.

I remember the first time I had visited Melbourne, I had kept complaining to Sid that the silence was buzzing in my ears. Wisely, he hadn't revealed to me then that Richmond, where his house is, is one of the busiest neighourhoods of Melbourne. Coming so soon, it would have certainly marked the end of our fledgling relationship.

Perhaps, London marks a happy medium for both of us. It is nice to be home.

***

It is also nice to return to a new job– my first in London – with a documentary filmmaker.Let the adventures begin....

Man doesn't eat dog...

2010-02-27T11:50:00.001Z

But he eats his 10,000-euros winning ticket. That too, on a Ryanair flight.

It is for news like this that I live on.

Night at the Gandhi Opera

2010-02-26T21:36:00.005Z

There were three very good reasons for Sid and I to attend Philip Glass’s opera Satyagraha, which opened at the English National Opera last night. It was based on Gandhi’s years in South Africa, where he developed, honed and polished his philosophy of non-violent protest.

First, as Indians, Sid and I are well-versed with the life and times of Gandhi. So for once, we would already be one up on the rest of the English audience as far as cultural references went. (Besides, it meant we would not have to buy the booklet explaining the Acts. A few pounds saved there!)

Second, the opera was sung in Sanskrit. And even though 15 years of complete non-usage has rendered my Sanskrit extremely rusty, I felt my chances with Sanskrit were far better than Italian or French.

Also, Sid has a great pair of opera glasses which he, very disrespectfully, has been using to watch cricket. I felt we needed to restore its dignity.

Besides, I must admit that somehow felt that if I watched an opera about a subject close to my heart – Gandhi and his philosophy of non-violent protest – then all that high-pitched singing would transform into sweet music and I would find myself moved to tears. Thus, I would prove that I am truly cultured ala Julia Roberts of Pretty Woman.

(Sorry, I could only find an Italian version of the youtube clip. But I am sure you got the point.)

It didn’t work.

Despite my best efforts to connect with the music, it just seemed like a lot of dignified and pious howling. Besides, it might as well as have been Italian or French for all I got of it. The music seemed to be based on mainly on repetitions. But apparently, that was a part of its magic, it was minimalist. Besides, there were "slowly metamorphosisng textures" to it according to The Independent, but Sid and I were too untutored to get them. And though the music seemed very heavy to Sid and I, it was only because of our inability to appreciate its “nobility, seriousness and purity”, as the NYT put it.

If I still enjoyed my night at the opera, it was mainly because of the totally trippy stage activity that accompanied the singers. The act was full of acrobats, aerialists, gigantic puppets, and lots and lots of innovative use of newspapers. At one point, as Gandhi sang away contemplatively in front behind him a huge six-armed puppet made out of newspaper stabbed an equally mammoth puppet made out of wicker baskets with wooden swords (see the rather sad image above).

Watching the mayhem through Sid’s excellent opera glasses thoroughly restored the pair’s respectability.

***
Note to Girish: The opera was a part of a trilogy on millennium men by Glass. The other two are Einstein and the Egyptian Pharoah Akhnaten. I am guessing Glass hasn't read your blog entry on the great pharoah .

War Horse: a theatrical Avatar?

2010-02-23T12:25:00.003Z

A simple question that Sid and I ask each other after watching a film, play or art show is: “Was there anything you didn’t get?” Our attempts to figure out what we didn’t get invariably lead us to new insights, ideas and notions about life around us. And to us that is the value of the artistic experience: of course, it is about the visual, but it is also about discovering something new about the way we view the world.

It is in the latter that War Horse – the most successful theatrical production in the history of the National Theatre, which has since moved to the West End – sorely disappointed us. Yes, it was visually spectacular: the life-size horse puppets, the recreation of war, the scene when a tank thunders on to the stage were imaginatively conceived and stunningly produced. But what about the story to the benefit of which this spectacle was created: it was a simple, predictable children’s tale about the enduring love between a boy and his horse that survives the miseries of the First World War. It neither presented any new ideas about the human-animal equation nor about the war.

I would understand if the audience were mainly children. But the average age in the packed, admiring theatre last night was between 40 and 60. The play has been a huge commercial success and even enticed the Queen – well-known for her love for horses – into dropping by. It is set to hit the New York Broadway later during the year, and it is rumoured that Steven Spielberg has bought its film rights.

In a way, War Horse reminded me of Avatar, where the story played second fiddle to the visual experience, but no one minded. As we watched Avatar, I could practically predict each scene before it happened. Is that ok? Does focussing their time, energy and money into producing a cutting edge visual experience absolve the makers from giving us a complex, multidimensional storyline?

If yes, then I have been needlessly lambasting Bollywood for all these years. Bollywood films too create an extravaganza of songs, dances and drama for the benefit of binary, moralistic tales. I put down their success to us Indians not being particularly demanding viewers.

But apparently, that is what works commercially world over. Just the tableau in the West is more sophisticated.

***
Hidden among the rave reviews of the play is a piece by Michael Billington of the Guardian, which asks the same question as I do.