Caffeine Relapse Migraine

Memory Part II: It Isn’t Better to Forget

2011-11-30T12:05:00.002+05:30

Forgetting is, for me, akin to a kind of hypocrisy.

Some months ago, a cousin of Mr. Ji’s that I’m quite friendly with called me up to air her anxieties over getting her daughter married. It seemed strange to me that since I was married she automatically assumed I’d fall into her camp on the subject, whereas at times she conveniently exploited the fact that by age I was more a confidante of her daughter’s. She described to me, in great detail, how decades ago she had been somewhat conned into marrying her husband by their respective families. She had been raised in Africa, was freshly out of medical school, and had opinions. He hadn’t left Kerala at all, but was from an impressive background and winningly handsome. She was in two minds on the issue when, to her dismay, she found his parents arriving at her home one day, comfortably discussing dates and venues in the living room while she listened with alarm from behind a door, trying to remember when it was she had given her consent. A familiar story. She then went on to confess that she had never really had a happy marriage and her husband and her were like chalk and cheese so she didn’t want to make the same mistakes and force her daughter into something inappropriate.

Only that evening, as I related this account to her daughter, I was stopped midsentence by a harrumph of pshawing. That was a ridiculous version of the truth, I was told, because the mother had confided to the daughter several times that she had fallen for her groom’s good looks and gotten carried away with the whole affair. I laughed and spent the rest of the evening mulling that over. Months later, the same mother is stubbornly trying to force her child into all sorts of awkward mismatches with a whole catalogue of asocial geeks the world over. I feel a little offended that I was made a part of this process at all.

It isn’t fair to forget. But remembering and forgetting are such convenient modes of social conditioning the world over, employed in happy contradictions whenever it suits our purpose. Take my mother, whose favourite put-down line on the phone is that I shouldn’t forget “where I came from”, or “the paths I had walked on” or whatever other cliché she can come up with to scold me for not calling her more often. But at other times, I must “let bygones be bygones”, “forgive and forget” or “put the past behind me” so we can get on with our moronic lives. I don’t mean to preach, but forgetting is not in my mental make-up. For lack of a better analogy, I must resign myself to a boring Lit Prof’s references and liken my version of things to Henri Bergson’s notion of memory and time. Things cannot and do not move chronologically in an unending march of linear events; time is a big ball of wool all messily rolled up in and around in tangled patterns. At any given moment, we are only living out a temporal spot, an active point that is a complex layering and entwined mess of all our pasts and all our futures tied up in a ball. So if you are talking to me and you see that vacant expression in my eyes, don’t worry; I’m listening, but I’m just lost in all the pastry-puff layers of remembering that creep up on me all the time.

Why should we put things behind us? The person I am, even if in love with my husband, is only the same person who so few years ago was for different spans of time in love with other people, and intensely so. The same person who is busily planning out 2012 in transport costs, car loans, relocations, academic projects and babymaking, is also the person who once planned out elaborate spinster parties, nets to catch boys in, PhDs in America and a menagerie of pets. But every time I crank out a sambar or meen vevichathu in the kitchen, I am reminded of how I spent an entire youth avoiding the stuff like poison. Every time a student in my class busily texts under the desk or falls asleep or passes notes or tries to sneak out of the class, I let things be, because I must not forget how only less than a decade ago I did all of these things and more to express my innate disrespect for people of the teaching profession.

Forgetting is being unfair to time.

Memory Part I: Rakshtar

2011-11-22T11:26:00.000+05:30

It was around Saturday that I began to ponder this long, rambling post about memory. While its theme remained constant, its moorings in my mind took many the meandering turn from family histories to personal grudges, to grander forms of history. Incidentally but not intentionally, the theme of memory also runs concurrent with the core of a new academic project I have reluctantly gotten involved with at work – an oral history project, the details of which I am not yet at liberty to discuss on a public forum – which is going to be all about personal memory and narrative. Perhaps unconsciously, I’ve been thinking a lot about the role of memory in our lives. To spare my ever-tolerant reader the bore, I’ve split this post into halves to make it a little more readable, something you can put aside and come back to later if you’d like.

I don’t remember what it was this past week that triggered off my probing into the function of memory. Was it the disaster that was Imtiaz Ali’s Rockstar or a little personal anecdote from an in-law’s home? Either way, it occurred to me all of a sudden, that memory was something you had a responsibility towards. It wasn’t just something you could possess and manipulate, elaborate when necessary and delete when inconvenient; it was something you had to take a responsibility towards remembering, owning up to, and being honest to. A person who was honest to their past subjectivities, their memories of their own marginal experiences, could quite possibly be a better person. I would go so far as to say that a good narrator of memories, an honest narrator would be a better storyteller, if all my grounding in critical theory and my own tendency to embellish and exaggerate did not contradict the same.

This might sound vague, but let me explain my point in the light of the two triggers I mentioned.

The first is public memory, in a sense.

The staff and students of Hindu College got unnecessarily thrown into a tizzy closer to the release date of Imtiaz Ali’s Rockstar. Not only is the director of the film an ever-returning alumnus of the institution, but the entire plot and characterization of the film, or so we heard, had been based on and around a Hindu-Stephen’s romance. The film’s opening sections were shot on campus a year or so ago amidst much hype, several of our students eagerly told their friends and well-wishers of which scene they could be spotted lounging about in the backdrop, how unattractive Nargis Fakhri actually is, and so on. Even I went practically dizzy every time I saw the promo reels on MTV. Hostel students booked out the first day’s first show at the nearby Amba theatre, and the rest of us made our elaborate plans to catch it with colleagues or students or friends, whenever convenient.

The film was a patent disaster. Worse, it was a massive disappointment to people affiliated with Hindu, who had great expectations about the much-desired epic conquest of the Stephanian heroine by the Hinduite chhokra-hero. To our horror, Ali’s version of the Hinduite boy was an awkward, blundering buffoon of a Punjabified small-town boy from a Pitampura back-alley in ill-fitting jeans, big white sneakers and hand-knitted sweaters. He was not the quintessential romantic hero: he was the creep, the stalker, the unhip (but strangely guitar-playing) roadside Romeo who totally fit the cliché of what Stephanian girls in the 90s must’ve thought Hinduite boys were like. It was as if the script had been written from the wrong side of the road. Worse, there were truckloads of inconsistencies in Ali’s description of the Delhi University campus. If you, dear reader, have seen the film but are not from DU, let me enlighten you: Random Hinduites do not hang about the dhabha tree in Stephen’s. Stephanians do not dance or have a choreo soc, let alone host dance competitions. To unfurl a banner in the Mess Lawns displaying a ChickList of the hottest girls would be sacrilege in Stephen’s, as would be to randomly wander into Hindu and sit under the Virgin Tree. And yes, surprise surprise, boys in Hindu do speak English, you know. Precisely how is it that our angrezi-music listening protagonist, he who tries to play the lead from Mr. Big’s “To Be With You” at his first audition, is so out of sync with the English idiom? No, those Pitampura-Punjabi boys do not worship Jim Morrison and turn into depressed and moody global rock-stars. That would be the stupidest flight of fancy in Indian history.

One is lead to wonder what kind of commercial impulse it must be that drives the perfectly intelligent director of Socha Na Tha and Jab We Met, the grounded English Hons. boy who founded a street-play society in Hindu, to make such a bizarrely unrealistic film with no plot, no movement, no basis in verity at all? And worse, what I’m most upset about, to so willingly forget despite shooting amidst the daily reminders of it, what must have been the reality of life in North Campus? To willingly disguise his classmates and college-friends, to so terribly miscast his hero’s avatar and so grossly mislead the audience into setting unfair stereotypes? I did not see in the film one frame that reminded me of the world I live in everyday – of the well-schooled politicians’ children I teach, their well-heeled debater/fashion soc girlfriends, or of street-smart and worldly West Delhi boys who fill a classroom with good humour, or even the quiet and unfashionable students from small-town UP and Bihar who are yet the fastest bulbs in their class. It seemed to me a crime that Ali forgot where he came from, exploited the college’s resources to then smear its image. But as my colleagues inform me, this is not new from our distinguished alumnus – he once approached a beloved late colleague of mine to show her his poetry, and though she knocked him down a notch with her critique, she also fondly agreed to share her poetry with him. Years later, he wrote in a centenary issue of the college magazine that it was an unmarried and lonely female teacher who had shared her (bad) poetry with him for completely different reasons.

What do you do, really, with a big personality on the run with bad intentions?

Melancholia and the Death of All Things

2011-10-07T10:35:00.001+05:30

Although I did silently promise my readers that I would never do another pseudo-intellectual write-up about an art film, I confess I have slipped. But it is a necessary slip, as I hope you will see. I also promised myself I wouldn’t watch depressive relationship films because they send me into a deep anxious marital void of my own making. I have slipped up there as well. Please don’t hate me for being a man-hater.

But I cannot ignore Lars Von Trier’s new film, Melancholia. For me, it is no mere fly-by.

I have thought a lot about Lars Von Trier and his works. In fact, my personal favourite of the many academic papers I wrote for my M.Phil was one that centred on Dancer in The Dark, that most breathlessly emotive piece of film with Bjork in the lead role. What I’ve always found so compelling about Von Trier is this grand constructed public persona he carries about with him like a traveling trunk to every film festival and interview he attends, offending everyone everywhere and painting himself to be this gigantic exploitative and self-obsessed arsehole who is obsessed with women and destroys them in his films. And yet when you watch those films, here is this maniac director who is inexplicably in touch with and supremely wary of the deep power that is in women, the unspoken strength that every man should fear. He is not one to trivialize it, equate it with Mother Earth or Goddess Shakti and make a mother out of it. Instead he casts it in unrecognizable shapes and sizes – sacrificial saints, victimized beauties, murderous antichrists and lunatic lovers – unwilling to reduce it to any known cliché. Only fair that a man who knows it so well must spend every film’s course taking it apart and ripping it to shreds, almost devoutly, as you would burn a saint on a pyre and cross yourself as you go at it. I can’t help but love him, like a bad husband.

Melancholia is as close to a Hollywood sci-fi commercial success as you’re ever going to get with Von Trier. Its outward frame subject is the end of the world, albeit due to the unexpected appearance of another planet in our solar system (which the film is named after) which is now hurtling towards the Earth in a dance of planetary ellipses. Although the crux of the action in the second part of the film hinges on whether Melancholia will only fly by, dangerously close on its course past the Earth, or whether it will actually collide, the viewer knows from the spellbinding slow motion Prologue sequence (Von Trier’s characteristic overture piece, this time set to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde) that it will inevitably crash into the Earth and be the end of all things.

But I’m not here to comment on the fabulous cinematography of the overture, or Von Trier’s relapse into German Romanticism, or his Bergmanesque touch and Bunuel-like storyline. The professionals will do all that for you. I’m only interested in the core of the film, another meditation on female intuition, power and the irreversible differences between men and women.

In two parts named after the leads, Justine and Claire, the film gives us insight into the testing relationships that two sisters share with their husbands. Justine, featuring Kirsten Dunst in the role of her lifetime, is inexplicably ailing and troubled on her wedding day. Her sister has organized a spectacular party for her at her home, a bizarrely beautiful, manicured Swedish castle overseen by a butler tellingly named Little Father. But Justine is unable to participate in the ritual events of a wedding party. We are alerted to the ridiculous nature of human customs – stretch limos that can’t get you anywhere, cake cutting, dances, asinine party games and pointless certificatory rituals. Justine dips in and out of these events like a mad woman, sometimes high and sometimes acutely low, sometimes sleeping through things, and sometimes more awake than anyone. Thanks to the opening sequence and Justine’s pointing out that something is amiss in the night sky, we suspect there are larger astronomical events dictating her character, reminding us of the origin of the very word ‘lunatic’. By the end of it all, her frustrated and disappointed new husband (Alexander Skarsgard, for all you True Blood fans) has left, her insulted boss (his father, Stellan Skarsgard) has fired her, and she has even had sex with a random chap in the wedding party.

In part two, Justine’s sister Claire, played by Von Trier’s favourite Charlotte Gainsbourg, gears up for possible apocalypse. She is married to the impossibly rich John (Kiefer Sutherland) and has a son. Their isolation in a massive castle is only indicative of the kind of isolation John imposes on Claire. Loving but dominating, he will not even allow her to check online what public opinion on the status of Melancholia’s collision is. They live in this strange world insulated from television and the web, far from the village and far from normalcy. Their only clue to the goings on of the world is in the reaction of the horses in the stable. They buck and whinny and tither, and we know they will be the first to go, from what we have seen in the overture. I was painfully reminded of how it was the simple drama of a natural calamity that took away the life of my dog.

Into this cocoon must the now weak and ailing Justine be included for care and the four must face the steady approach of the blue planet together. John must convince himself and his son via a host of scientific instruments and a library full of books and knowledge, that all reports indicate that there will only be a fly-by. Despite all his father’s gadgets and gizmos, it is the little boy’s handmade wire device that tells the most truth about Melancholia’s approach. As the planet looms closer, Justine’s health improves and she becomes curiously bewitched and calm, maliciously intoning that “The Earth is evil” and we must not grieve for its end. Claire on the other hand is a sack of nerves, completely thrown off kilter by her possible doom. But ultimately, when it is beyond doubt that Melancholia will hit Earth, it is John of all people who selfishly helps himself to the suicide pills Claire has been keeping safe for the end, and quits his responsibilities towards his brood. This leaves the sisters and the boy alone to face their end.

Nothing can prepare you for Melancholia’s thundering climax. The trembling emotional pitch is ratcheted up so terribly by Gainsbourg’s fine underplaying of the nervous Claire. As Justine gets calmer and more in touch with fate and doom, making her peace with life and nature, Claire gets more and more alarmed. They are like the Sun and the Moon, the blonde and the dark sister, one blinding in her beauty and power as the end nears, the other waxing and waning and pale as death. But for me, it is crucial that there are no men at the end of the world for these two. Only them in their maternal, protective capacities, holding hands with the child in their makeshift cave of sticks as the world goes up in flames. It is just the way I’d want it to be, Von Trier so clearly marking out the world of science, knowledge, human customs and society as useless, helpless and ultimately male.

Wake me up when September ends

2011-09-05T14:58:00.001+05:30

It has been a month since I blogged. Only a week ago, I had been driven by a sudden rage to write a very serious post: something about class consciousness and spousal differences. However, I got so completely obsessed with catching morning reruns of The Voice on TV that I never managed to put a word of the proposed post down. Thank God for that. There’s enough misery in the world already without me having to put my two pennies in.

I have been hanging in limbo this past one month, if you must know. It was August. The hardest working month for a college teacher with fresh portions, my husband’s birthday month, the month I should have moved house but didn’t, a month full of unnecessary public holidays and also the month before application processes begin in the EU. I am amazed at how the ugly prophecy of the astrologer who wrote my horoscope when I was born, is turning out to be true: he had clearly stated that the period of my life from 28 to 35 is going to be my hardest, although not as bad as others’ fates. As a cocky adolescent reading it, I had scoffed at the unlikeliness of the best years of my life (the years I might be newly married, newly employed and well on my way to prosperity) going wrong. Now I know that my best years are truly behind me. I am frozen in the despair of neither liking my life the way it is right now nor having the motivation to do anything serious about it. It seems like a constellation of forces are working to make things difficult for me: for example, the rotten Vice Chancellor of my university has gone and uttered a possible 3-year ban on appointments in order to fully facilitate (how?) the semester system he brought in which in itself is debilitating the very framework on which institutions stood.

My husband has grown a year older and only a touch wiser; he continues to be the bane of my daily existence by making it his business to object to everything I propose and quietly inhibit the progress of every project I undertake. It is with growing exasperation that I come to realize I should have stayed single or turned lesbian while I could. Too late now.

The house I live in is crumbling. My repeated pleas to consider moving house were met with only disinterested cooperation by my worse half, who allowed me to spend a day looking at other options in the area but refusing to seal a deal. Dragging feet over big decisions is his forte. Thinking a pacified husband was more important than a decrepit house, I resigned myself to drawing castles in the air over all the repairs and renovations I was going to make in our current apartment to make it more liveable. I have not budged an inch.

My dog is a woman now. And with it has attained every nightmarish hormonal swing known to Mother Nature.

My old laptop whom I fondly called Arumugam, called it quits some months ago and I had been leaning on the crutch of my husband’s even-older standby. This technically meant that I could no longer download movies or listen to much music because the control freak would not permit it on his techno-jalopy. I cannot count the number of times I hovered over new models in showrooms or on Flipkart, saying nothing, buying nothing, abetted in this monstrous indecision by the Great Procrastinator himself. I gave up at last and caved in on a handsome new Vaio yesterday. I had had enough of waiting.

As I tap out these words on the shiny black thing, I’m sincerely hoping it is as much good luck for me as my previous laptop was. God knows I need it.

My Own Medicine

2011-07-08T13:48:00.000+05:30

Several complaints and false starts later, I’m back, but only to complain and disappoint my readers again.

I  have thought a lot about it, and despite the several pretensions this  blog has undergone, I know now with great clarity that this will never  be a food blog. I’ll let the fruity template persist on the margins, and  I will do the occasional recipe post, but I will never go all-out  foodie. (Nor will this ever be a complete movie blog, and certainly no  longer a music blog.)

Let  me explain. A month or so ago I started writing this extensive post  about how a few acquaintances from my college days are now attempting to  be small-time commercial bakers. One of them has gone very  professional, one not so much and the other by just word of mouth. The  professional one has a jaw-droppingly gorgeous blog (that I will not  post a link to here for the sake of protecting my own voyeuristic  perversions) and seems to have a genuine knack for the oven, while the  other two, who are more personal friends, seem little more than amateurs  who are blown away by the discovery of how easy baking is and seem to  want to advertise that. See, even here you can detect my tone of  condescension and resentment. That unpublished post was FULL of it.  Every time I reopened the document to finish it off, I was disgusted by  how smug and uncharitable I sounded, so unwilling to allow my peers to  savour the joys of culinary self-discovery. After gloating over their  amateurish attempts, I proceeded to deliver a few knock-down tips of my  own, as if to say, THIS is how it’s REALLY done, and then topped it off  with a couple of recipes.

It  is of small comfort to me that I have this little grain of humanness in  me, this little drop of Christian spirit, that told me I should never  publish that post. That it would only tell the world what a  mean-spirited witch I was, and that I deserved every bit of injustice  the world has been meting out to me as of recent.

You  need humility, a willingness to learn and a willingness to share, and  above all a good heart to be a cookery queen. Perhaps that’s why I don’t  particularly like Nigella Lawson, because I don’t sense goodness of  heart there whereas Rachel Allen literally glows from within. I suppose I  haven’t reached that happy place yet. I have a lot to learn from life, a  lot to learn about tradition, snobbery, high-handedness and other  evils, before I can truly share what I have learnt about cooking with  the world.

In Malick's New World

2011-05-24T16:05:00.000+05:30

Every once in a while, there is nothing as rewarding, as refreshing for a mind that has gone into loop, as fishing out or stumbling upon a favourite film and watching it again. I came home from a lacklustre invigilation duty yesterday in the mood for something transcendent, and I found Terence Malick’s The New World about to start on the telly.

The odd thing about The New World is that unlike many of my other all-time favourite films, I first watched it on TV in a hostel common room and do not own a personal copy to date. Poignantly, I must have been watching it yesterday just as, miles away in Cannes, the jury was awarding Malick’s latest opus, Tree of Life, the Palm D’Or. So it is that time of the decade again, when film critics wax and wane over the ethereal quality, the rare gems that are Malick’s occasional films. Big names in big journals will stumble over each other to outsay, outphrase and outwit their peers on just how ‘ungettable’ Malick’s films are, how slow and processed his creations, how beautiful but just that bit beyond the grasp of the common man his idiom. (They are, of course, making polite disclaimers before these works of beauty make poor runs on dumbed-down North American screens.)

Personally, even though I am a true admirer of Malick’s work, I have never thought him to speak in a language unknown, like God’s to men. I have only thought that if any director had seen the burning bush and brought the word down to earth, it was him. Not lost in translation, Malick IS translation itself.

This is, by the way, the least I would expect from a former professor of philosophy. Like some reclusive departmental sage you may have idolized in your collegiate youth, Malick too has an interesting history of an academic maverick: Ivy League Rhodes Scholar with an unawarded PhD for a renegade thesis and a well-published translation of Heidegger, he is everything you dreamt he could be. In fact, Malick is everything you dreamed your favourite professor could have been, except that he didn’t. Malick’s films are the bibles, the symphonies and the magnum opuses your could-have-been heroes never got down to making.

The New World is not a philosophy thesis though, and not a difficult film to like. It has a familiar plot (everyone knows the Pocahontas story), romance, though partially fictionalized, and closure, historically accurate and fitting to boot. It is one of the most breathtakingly shot films I have ever seen, its multi-perspectival first-person voiceovers combined with natural images to make the loveliest kind of poetry. It is also the rare film where James Horner’s fabulous score tiptoes politely behind the images, unwilling to overpower them. The cast too, tread lightly on this script and around its female focus, not one to be boomed or hollered over lest they break its music... this was certainly the first time I saw Colin Farrell in his understated emotional avatar, a role he has come to inhabit much better with time, and Christian Bale as the second husband keeps to character and away from the spotlight.

It is also intrinsically a spiritual film, something I find a key to Malick’s work - I have often thought of this particular work as a long and complex prayer, whether in the animistic terms of the native princess, or the Christian overtones of first Captain Smith’s and then John Rolfe’s narratives and the final unison of both in a manner neither forced nor willing. The film might frustrate history buffs looking for theories and answers, factual closure of a sort, because it is not Malick’s brief to dwell on reportage. What he does is succinctly convey in a deep slow breath, the tragedy and triumph of colonialism, its crimes and excesses, but its odd opportunities and synthesis too. It is not a guilty white Disney film to take sides in animated technicolor and wail about dead rivers, unhoused spirits and iron horses like Chief Seathl. Its claims are simple, its suggestions unvoiced, its judgements wide open, much like reading scripture where we fear to tread on sacred ground with our heavy agnostic boots. Nothing transports like the final image sequence where Rolfe’s voiceover chronicles the demise of the princess, while switching images deliciously plop her native kinsmen into manicured English gardens, bizarrely framed against imposing Renaissance architecture and as at sea in lawns of grass and stone as the colonists in native Indian Virginia.

While reading up on the history behind the Matoaka/Pocahontas story and John Smith’s own account, I was struck by how impersonal Smith sounds discussing the woman he is so inextricably romantically linked with in fable. I was torn by the emotional ravage of the film’s romance and this historical possibility that she meant nothing to him. Or perhaps, quite simply, a Renaissance colonist and military professional's official travelogue was not the place for any memoir of a love affair. I came across a telling exchange that he recounts from his final meeting with her when she had arrived in England. Disregarding the (in)accuracy of Smith’s official-speak, I find the anecdote meaningful in relation to what I think is an unspoken subtext in the film: imperialist paternalism. But I will leave you to draw your own conclusions.

Being about this time preparing to set saile for New-England, I could nor stay to doe her that seruice I desired, and she well deserued; but hearing shee was at Branford with diuers of my friends, I went to see her: After a modest salutation, without any word, she turned about, obscured her face, as not seeming well contented; and in that humour her husband, with diuers others, we all left her two or three houres, repenting my selfe to haue writ she could speake English. But not long after, she began to talke, and remembred mee well what courtesies shee had done: saying, You did promise Powhatan [her father] what was yours should bee his, and he the like to you; you called him father being in his land a stranger, and by the same reason so must I doe you: which though I would haue excused, I durst not allow of that title, because she was a Kings daughter; with a well set countenance she said, Were you not afraid to come into my fathers Countrie, and caused feare in him and all his people (but mee) and feare you here I should call you father; I tell you then I will, and you shall call mee childe, and so I will bee for euer and euer your Countrieman.

(The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles... Captain John Smith, p.122-23.)

Prelude to a Post, homestyle

2011-05-02T16:38:00.000+05:30

The Times They Are a'Changin'

2011-04-25T16:10:00.000+05:30

‎"They say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself." - Andy Warhol

When I was a lot younger (read teenish) I emphatically believed in astrology and the cycles of fate. This was perfectly convenient because my life seemed to follow drastic spirals of divine inspiration, upheaval after upheaval, sea-change after sea-change, not all bad and not all awesome. I had dramatic highs and lows in high school and my collegiate life was a blur of happiness and discovery. In my late adolescence, having finished three degrees and downright complacent at my workplace, I managed to lose a good three years in wasteful self-indulgence and absolute aimlessness. I thought I was blissed out and approaching some kind of fated ecstatic-apocalypse.

Then things stopped happening.

I have given the myth of personal teleology a lot of thought. Apart from the fact that the whole hoopla is a cultural construct, a very bourgeois one at that, it’s also very persuasive (like all things bourgeois). Wasn’t it Marx who went on about how bourgeois life is so convincingly successful because it is ultimately so attractive? The same with the personal-progress graph: society and institutional thinking in all forms harping about the necessity, the absolute must-do of charting an upward graph of professional and social achievement, makes it all seem so exciting, so beautiful, so must-have. As of late though, I have begun to switch off a little. I temporarily step back from the ladder, the rat race, the innumerable quarter-life, mid-life and twilight goals, and everything seems so bloody iffy. I almost want to strangle that astrologer who convinced me that as a Rising Cancer sign, I would be the Mistress of Change. I believed her so completely that I propelled myself into radical shifts, altered everything about my self every few years, put piles and piles of baggage into my closet and closed the doors on the past... until about now.

I’m starting to evaluate my steep and jagged life curve against the simple, contented ones of people who have stayed in one school throughout their education, lived in the same city always, unquestioningly loved their homes and families and never felt the bite of wanderlust or o’er-vaulting ambition. I’m beginning to wonder whether I am not far worse off having drunk but never been fulfilled, having partially conquered but never reigned supreme. I’m also beginning to realise that there is no end to ambition, to the goals one sets for oneself or society sets for you. Once you achieve Plan A, they’ll start talking about Plan B, and once you’ve done Plan B....

A student of mine seemed very promising in his first year at college. Fresh from one of those hallowed Calcuttan schools, blessed with a fine diction, intelligence and a charming character, I thought he’d be The One. But in his second year, he has drifted completely out to sea. Still the most recognizable face in the class, the one with all the responsibilities and the respect, the Go-To-Guy, he is also the new face of disinterest, of nonconformism. When I discussed this with a senior colleague, she told me he had chosen to meander; that he was cutting back from a lifelong spiral of ambitions and achievements, and enjoying the nonlinear drift just for a bit. Unbeknownst to him, he’s become quite the inspiration for me as I begin to question the tiresome linearity and predictability of my own life.

What would happen if I stopped, mixed it up, put a little groove back into things?

I believe I’ve reached that apex of youth when every little font of happiness you have threatens to dry up unless you make some drastic choices.

I hate choices. Have I ever told you about the recurring dream I've had ever since I was a child and even to this day? I’m walking through a large department store and trying to select a particular item to buy. Depending on my age at the time of the dream, it’s been anything from chocolate to underwear that I’m trying to select. I spend hours moving through the rows and rows of shelves, analyzing but never settling on a choice, and never finally actualizing any kind of purchase. It’s my big Freudian grouse: choice. To put back into perspective what I was talking about when I started this post, life kind of carried me along with it in my youth, as I suspect it does for most Indian middle class kids who are just propelled into schools and colleges and jobs like well-oiled automatons. I’m deeply impressed by people who’ve stepped back to make their own choices, or actively tweaked their graphs of their own accord. I never did and now, when the time has come for me to make some big decisions, I find my mind rebellious, angry and questioning.

I suppose that’s what comes of waiting too long to take your life into your own hands.

Heavier Things

2011-04-04T11:14:00.000+05:30

I know it’s been a really long time since I blogged. I have my brief bursts of brilliance and then my relapse into mediocrity. This is more or less because post-adolescence, I find it very difficult to concentrate on a focal issue for very long. This could easily result in the death of my career, or the beginning of a new direction. But for my poor blog, this has meant very intense solar flares and then deep lunar seas of silence.

Like just now, I sat at my PC, feeling that particular inner peace that I have found conducive to blogging on Monday mornings. Spurred by a friend’s mention, I considered writing a long-deserved post about my dog. I typed out her name, “Melon”, on the Word processor, and then unfortunately queued up a complete John Mayer discography for play, and I was lost. I spent ten minutes air guitaring, Wiki-ing Mayer, and soulfully singing to a confused Labrador puppy, her head cocked at that WTF-angle. My desire to ‘run through the halls of my high school’ and ‘scream at the top of my lungs’ were lost on her. Oh whatever, she thought, and curled back to sleep.

And thus my post on Melon is gone. So is any thought of a post on John Mayer, youth, genius, polymathism and the trials of enduring relationships in celebrity life. Some half an hour ago, while making myself some tea and biting into a fresh packet of Milk Bikis, I had almost been provoked to write a very Vir Sanghvi-ish lament on the cream-less state of the great Indian cream biscuit and how millions of consumers here have been duped for decades into believing that little splatch of crumbly, artificially flavoured icing sugar between biscuits to actually be “cream”. And then I might have segued into the new release of the Oreo into the competitive Indian market, whether it was anything like its American ancestor, and how the politics of big-brand acquisition is affecting quality of produce the world over, take THAT Kraft!

See, a million things to say. Perhaps I should tweet instead, I often wonder? Is my change of mind an a priori mental collapse that led to the Twitterverse or am I succumbing to a generational sea-change post-Twits?

Ssssh, it’s “Daughters” playing now. Friday afternoon, navigating our way to Green Park, TK and I mused upon this song and how it was possible for a young adolescent male to have possibly understood this secret about womanhood? And if he had, why hadn’t the other men we knew? If the song was a monster hit, how hadn’t it contributed to more insight for men across the world, or were more women listening to Mayer than men? Some half hour later, Billy Joel’s “She’s Always a Woman” is playing in the restaurant. Much in the same vein as Mayer’s, I’m thinking about how such a lovely song has such terrible lyrics, pandering to every patriarchal masculinist cliche ever cooked up, as horrible as Springsteen’s “Secret Garden”. Mayer is way wiser, son of a more sensitive generation.

Ahh, issues of world import, far more seminal than a silly cricket championship to us.

And now, if you’ll permit dear reader, I must return to that discography.

Blue Valentine

2011-03-01T12:32:00.000+05:30

There is this terribly heartbreaking scene towards the end of Blue Valentine where the central couple have just had the unhavable fight, the one that ends in “I fucking want a divorce”. The husband, in the heat of the moment, has flung his wedding band out onto the curb and a few minutes later he makes the car stop to go back and flail about in the bushes wildly and hopelessly hunting for the discarded ring. I bled tears and I hated myself for, despite the better advice of my last post, having decided to watch this film this morning. That scene was the story of my everyday.

I had an argument with my alter-ego this morning about the tint my blogposts are taking. One side of me said that if I got all serious and art-movie about relationships here, I would lose my already invisible readership for lack of entertainment. The other side sternly argued that if I wanted to grow up, this blog, already 8 years old, would just have to grow up with me. Wouldn’t I be kidding myself by posting continually pretentious film reviews, recipes and music liner-notes as if nothing in my world had changed? Besides, kitchen-sink blogging is way better than letting my blog die, the way so many married women eventually let things go. I was still divided about things until I watched the film.

There’s something both cruel and cunning about letting innocent young women who have creamed in their jeans over Ryan Gosling in The Notebook set themselves up for romantic disaster in this film. Blue Valentine uses a spliced chronology to chart the romance, marriage and downfall of a contemporary New York City couple, played with brutal honesty by Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams, a pair of actors who probably know a thing or two about romantic tragedy. And anyone who knows anything about married couples with dogs or children or both, also knows that sometimes the dog/child can be the only thing holding a marriage together, the lynch-pin in an otherwise dizzying spiral. So when a film about marriage begins with the death of the pet dog, you just know you should stop watching.

But I didn’t. And so it went on, the painfully poignant rendition of heady first love, imbalanced equations and postmodern disorientation, a tune I knew all too well. The thing that threw me off was that the film rather subtly anchored itself in the emotional space of Dean (Gosling), the husband instead of the typically woman-centric angle. It was the collision of worlds, the jarring of revisionist role-play, what I talked about yesterday, that the depiction seemed to emphasise - Dean is an odd-jobs kinda guy with a winning personality, a musical talent and a beautiful singing voice, but little else. Cindy (Williams) is an ambitious student who wants to become a doctor but, as the film implies, only gets as far as a medical technician, her rise stunted by an unplanned pregnancy. Still, she is the workaholic breadwinner, the responsible parent, while Dean is the heart and soul of the household... he has a better knack for parenting, is intuitive, carefree and easygoing. We first meet him asleep in a chair, sporting a receding hairline, tinted spectacles and bespattered with paint, but completely at one with himself. This is, apparently, not enough. Midway through the narrative the couple have a huge argument where it becomes clear that the growing distance in their marriage is caused by Cindy’s desire for Dean to be “more of a man”, have a more conventional career, to exploit (for “successful gain”) his “potential”. “Potential for what”, Dean asks.

But we’re getting to the end of the film while we ought to have started at the beginning. Cindy and Dean are different from the rest of the inauthentic 21st-century world because they genuinely care for the people around them, but are thereby rendered far too fragile for the weight of the world. When they meet each other, it’s magic because it’s rare to find two caring people in one relationship. But as time passes and the demands of the world force them out of their adolescence, Cindy becomes as much a droid as everyone else while Dean remains unchanged, content. “Don’t let him brainwash you!” a colleague warns her as they argue at her workplace. “Don’t let him brainwash you?” Dean repeats in disbelief. His tendency for ironic repetition is one of the winning traits of this screenplay; dialogue that intelligently displaces, reveals the inauthentic cliches of so-called normalcy. “You take my words and twist them,” Cindy complains, but that is precisely what I love about it.

And surprisingly, nobody cries more in this film than the male character. It always takes me off guard to see men cry. I, who believe they should do it more often; I, who fell hook-line-and-sinker for my better half when he cried at the thought of leaving me after our first weekend together. As Dean wept his way right through from his wedding vows to the break-up scene at the end of the film, I was reminded of the colleague I mentioned yesterday, the subversive feminist husband. At a free poetry-reading session after hours, in front of a packed room, he read out a poem about the birth of his daughter, all the while addressing his wife seated in the front row, and as he neared its emotional climax, his voice broke a little and more than half the women in the room were brought to tears. I’ve known my male colleagues to jibe him about his attachment to her, even senior female colleagues have grumbled how he’s changed since he got married, but I thought that was the most beautiful moment I had ever seen outside of a film.

Driven to Distraction

2011-02-28T17:30:00.002+05:30

It’s been a while since I sat down to write an academic paper. Years, in fact, much to my horror when I did the math. And so when I now struggle to have a 20 minute presentation ready for an international conference on Friday, nothing seems to happen. I am colossally distracted. Don’t blame me that it’s been the run-up to Oscar Sunday (or Monday morning for us) so I’ve been busy catching up on the hot-list on my 3-day weekends. Or that watching films and thinking about blogging (sans execution) take my mind the furthest away from the subject of my proposed paper. Instead, I am all but ready to write a full-length thesis on unhappy marriages. Not really self-referential, but based on all those miserable films I’ve been seeing.

It wouldn’t be too far from the truth to say that my indie-film-loving habits are playing a huge dampener in my marriage. It’s nuts what these movies do to your head. I remember SN telling me a long time ago about a married friend of hers complaining that movies about infidelity or failed marriages are entertainment or food for thought for everyone except married women. She must have omitted to say “insecure married women”, or the niche category, married women who are driven to insecurity either by a vivid imagination or a tendency to philosophize. I suspect I fall into the second category. I can’t think of a single film I’ve seen in recent months that has made me feel good about marriage and relationships. And there have been quite the range: from Rabbit Hole to Dhobi Ghat, The Kids Are All Right to All Good Things... I suppose they awarded the Best Picture this morning to the only film that portrayed any kind of marital stability at all - The King’s Speech. But I was saying...

What is it about marriage that is so rotten at the core? My students point out to me that I have gone overnight from amused analysis of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s perspective to embittered sympathy. I found myself telling them that I discovered she was right after all, good ol’ Alisoun.

Marriage is the great middle-class patriarchal con. The very word marriage precludes any possibility of revision, modernisation or subversion. I have come to believe that the “Modern Marriage” is as invisible a myth as the Yeti, that there is simply no such thing as a modern husband, a modern wife, a feminist marriage or a non-patriarchal household. The very foundation of this wretched institution is built on the simultaneous functioning of two operators, gendered in binary and programmed to take on certain roles, no matter which sex ends up with what slate.

The poor soul who is currently the Head of my department at work appears to be the feminist head of a nonpatriarchal household. There was a time and I still do think his marriage has a lot to be learnt from for the average husband in terms of revised role-playing and nonconformity. However, as I barged in on him a few morning ago in his house, in his pyjamas and up to his elbows in moisturiser, chasing down his freshly-bathed 3-year-old with an unfinished dissertation lying jumbled on the table and one week’s leave of absence pending at work, I shook my head in pity. There was no revisioning here, it was simply reversal. He had turned into the wife, and she the husband. Nothing revolutionary about that if the house continued to operate in the age-old manner, roles switched about. I went home and wept.

It’s just not possible to be in a marriage and then whine about male-domination and skewed authority, so I have now learned to shut up. This gives a lot of people the idea that I am a consenting slave in an abusive power relation, but any married woman in a conservative household should know better. I find silence a far more productive space.

But what were we thinking?

Deep Structure

2011-02-22T09:07:00.001+05:30

Dear reader, this is the most deferred post in the history of my blog.
Every time I sought for words to put it down, thought evaded the grasp of language and my structures collapsed. I sought inspiration in films and music and daily life, but the unrepresentable quality of life as I know it seemed to thwart my knowing ways.

Because this post is about the only thing I ever believed would make a good writer: unhappiness. As a young girl, I shied away from writing anything concrete, anything remotely resembling a magnum opus, because I suspected happy people would never make good writers. Or contented people, or people with nothing much to complain about. My life seemed to be a blissful waking dream, writing itself with very little effort from me into a happy little adolescent novella, marked only by the mild vicissitudes of unrequited love. It reminded me very much of Bjork’s video for Bachelorette, with the harsh warning that all things are cyclical and we must return from Omega to Alpha. I was waiting for my Alpha to come again.

So here I am, at the beginning of all things, the pinch of first unhappiness. It tinges everything I do; I carry it like a coat about me to work and back, it sits on my furniture in a fine silt of puppy hair, and looms about my hair in a whirl of static. And yet there is nothing remarkably miserable about my life - nobody in my family is dying of disease or lack, there is no death or mortgage or financial collapse or material want. There is no deep sorrow or misery in my marriage. There is just this big, gaping hole that I am beginning to realize is the very quality of human life - emptiness and discontent.

Perhaps it’s time for that big novel, huh?

Aron(awful)sky or Nolan? .

2011-01-20T12:26:00.001+05:30

What do YOU think of Darren Aronofsky? Here's one filmmaker I admire and respect but am not sure if I like. I admire his patience, his relaxed pace, his resistance to prolificity. I admire his choice of subject and script and his ability to unsettle his viewers but I’m not the biggest fan of his films. He’s no Christopher Nolan to me. That said, I’ve seen all Aronofsky’s films excluding Pi (1998), his first feature length. If you look at his filmography, you’ll find he’s made only one film every two years, with a 6-year gap between his first cult hit, Requiem For A Dream (2000) and his only BAD film, The Fountain (2006). This average is about the same as Nolan’s, minus the 6-year hiatus. In mathematical terms therefore, without a single film I don’t like or haven’t seen, Christopher Nolan is the better director of several films to me. Nolan is also pure thinking genius. Lots of people I know have come away from Inception (2009) or Memento (2000) thinking they would have been better novels than already great films. That’s the thing about him - his films stay with you in a more mental way, challenging you to make calculations and revisions of them in your head, to rescript what’s already there and enjoy it the more. If you take that mathematical beauty away from it all, I don’t think they are necessarily fantastic films. They can boast of fine actors (DiCaprio, Bale, Ledger, Pacino) but their cinematography is only as good as the script demands, being visually demanding fiction. They do not leave my sensory landscape altered. The moment the puzzle is revised, the charm is gone. Perhaps this explains why Inception went home tragically empty-handed at the Globes? Still, I put them in my top tens because they totally had me, at least for a while.

This is something only Aronofsky can do. From the unbearably grotesque physical discomfiture of his junkie-drama Requiem to the psycho-thriller horror of his latest opus, Black Swan (2010), Aronofsky is one helluva creepy guy. Requiem and Black Swan managed to leave me with the same combination of itchy veins, numb fingernails and throbbing heart. The Wrestler (2008) made me suspect I had a heart condition for a whole year. I don’t know how Aronofsky achieves this, but this is his unique ability - to get so deep under your skin that like Lady Macbeth you can’t wash away the bodily displeasure of his films for whole weeks. I watched Black Swan two days ago but am still afraid to touch my nails or scratch my skin, afraid they’ll peel away or turn into ugly black feathers. I know horror films are supposed to have the same effect on me, but they don’t - these films aren’t horror films, but they do. Creepy.

The Dawn of the Masterchef

2011-01-19T11:50:00.001+05:30

As far as food is concerned, I think it boils down to the liberals versus the purists, just like everything else in art.

Like Masterchef Australia. Who knew there was haute cuisine in Australia? This barely-decolonized Indian foodie was still tucked away in some colonial picture of Down Under as inhabited by the descendants of ex-convicts and drovers... until Star World started airing the previous season of MC Oz here. A revelation to everyone, enough to spin off a (useless) Indian version, but mostly just a revelation: nice, genuinely friendly and well-intentioned people with no sense of dog-eat-dog competition just bending away in all their little Santa’s-elf-honesty over hours and hours of wonderful, no-fuss cooking. The best things about watching MC Oz was that it didn’t have any of the pretentious condescension, the presumption of knowledge and the cold, critical air of other (read American or British) food shows (I’m thinking Hell’s Kitchen or Top Chef). It had an honesty about recipes, ingredients and skills, and more importantly a willing acceptance of the conditions of good cooks that make so many unwilling to turn professional - a dependence on maternal food lore and cultural palate prejudice.

Speaking of purists, my mother doesn’t say much, but I know she isn’t too pleased about my tendency to cook up dishes that are standard fare in her kitchen without asking her for a recipe. She’ll call in the evening and ask what’s cooking; I’ll say Beef Olathiyathu and I’ll hear that split-second silence that means, “What recipe are you using if not mine?” (In that particular case, an in-law’s recipe that turned out quite well.) She needn’t be so insecure, seeing as how I learnt practically everything I know about cooking and baking from her. These are the foundations, the little tips and tricks that websites won’t teach you and you can only learn with experience. The little handy bits of knowledge that lead to a finished product that is that tiny bit more perfect, my kitchen surface that much less messy and my time that much more saved. And to gratify her ego, there have been a few times when Internet recipes, no matter how good they were, just didn’t match up to hers. Like this Sticky Date Pudding I found on the Masterchef Oz site.

It seemed easy as childsplay and came out really well (in fact it rose so high in my sanded ramekin that it hit the top of my oven and had a big hole of emptiness inside, see pic - I wonder if that was intentional?). However, it tasted nothing like the warm, spicy, gooey goodness I’ve been used to my mother dishing up and R didn’t like it one bit. I was left to apportion the whole thing out between the dog and I. Oh well.

My mother’s greatest distrust is this age of electronic media when any recipe I could ever want, indeed a dozen variations on it, are available at the click of a mouse. This is culinary democracy to some, but the death of a hegemony to others. I’m not too different from my Mom when it comes to purism. She might resent that I used Rachel Allen’s recipe for my first Christmas Cake instead of hers, but I equally resent that average women from non-baking cultures (and there’s a stern grandmother in me somewhere saying that) can now access overnight and achieve the kind of perfection it took our mothers years to reach. What can I say, I can’t have my cake and eat it too. Deep down I am as troubled as my mother is that the age of the precious 1950-issue, faded and rebound YWCA cookbook is coming to its redundant end. As I stare at the glossy shelves loaded with foreign cookbooks at home, my mother will secretly whisper to me to take as many away in batches as I can so that my sister-in-law can never lay hands on them. I smirk, because on one hand, those books are somewhat past their point of novelty, and on the other, my sister-in-law is least inclined to turn into Martha Stewart. Ah, the things that vex our mothers.

Why be a purist? I don’t know. Perhaps because I suspect, like an anxious postmodernist, that every little variation from the norm, by millimetres even, will result over a gradual lapse of time in an absolute destruction of traditional methods. Why believe in norms, you ask? I don’t know. They have their own strength, that incomprehensible watermark that you rejoice in achieving, the joys of little kitchen adages that stay with you long after their origins have been eclipsed. I have a few of these that I’ve passed on to many friends who’ve learnt something from my kitchen; most are my grandmother’s and their beauty lies in their bizarre metaphysical conceits. (John Donne would have been proud.) Like how brown and glassy onions should get before you add ginger and garlic to them: “the colour and lustre of an ant’s bum!”

That’s the kind of detail you don’t get on a cookery website. You also get information overload: 20 different recipes with wide variations on the same dish. I tend to read all 20, use my common sense and concoct a version of my own.

Here’s my yum version of the classic Thai Red Curry, with prawns. It’s easy!

Thai Red Curry with Prawns

Prawn marinade:

250g medium--sized prawns, cleaned and deveined

½ tsp salt

Juice of half a lemon

½ tsp red chilli powder

¼ tsp turmeric powder

Curry:

1tbsp oil

2 onions, sliced

¼ inch piece of fresh ginger, chopped

2 ½ tbsp red curry paste (I use Real Thai)

1 tsp palm or cane sugar

a pinch of lemongrass (fresh or dried)

1 cup chicken stock (I use Maggi cubes to cheat)

4-5 French beans, chopped into 1-inch pieces

4-5 mushrooms, similarly chopped

2 baby-corns, similarly chopped

1 cup thick coconut milk

½ cup chopped coriander leaves

a sprig of mint, to garnish

Method

In a bowl, mix the prawns with the salt, lemon juice, chilli & turmeric powders and leave to marinate for at least half an hour. Once marinated, fry lightly in a little oil until the prawns are semi-cooked and the juice reduced. Set aside. In a deep kadhai/wok, heat the oil and add the chopped onions and ginger to it. Once the onions are glassy and the ginger no longer raw, add the red curry paste, mix well and allow to cook for 2 mins. Add to this the chicken stock, palm sugar, lemongrass and chopped veggies, and allow to simmer a good 7-10 minutes or until you think your veggies are cooked. (If you’d like to save cooking time, blanch the veggies beforehand and then add to the curry.) Now add in your pre-cooked prawns and the coconut milk and allow to simmer again for 5 minutes. Turn off the heat and stir in the coriander, garnish with mint to serve. Goes best with plain steamed rice.

Janakpuri ki Kudi

2010-12-30T15:20:00.001+05:30

There’s nothing intrinsically Delhi about the nexus between class aspiration and residential address. Everybody wants to live in South Delhi, North Delhi will always be the other side of the world, East and West Delhi aren’t laudable addresses, no matter where posh malls and cineplexes come up, those locales will never be Saket, and blah blah blah. In all this ruckus, DU was probably the safest neutral zone I ever lived in: it was beautiful, it was cheap and it wasn’t entirely infradig. The clue of course was to say you lived in North Campus - never utter the unthinkable ‘Roop Nagar’, or ‘Outram Lines’ or (the horror!) ‘Mukherjee Nagar’. The phrase ‘campus’ would put you into some safe, magical zone in everyone’s youthful memories, idolized spaces and so on... every shopkeeper to fashion designer to big businessman would get that wistful look on their face and say ah, you’re lucky. Or something like it.

Then I got married and had to move. The mental struggle to find a new address was twice as hard as the physical one. Most middle to upper middle class young couples hunt down ‘rare finds’ in Malviya Nagar, Saket or Vasant Kunj in order to be able to say they have arrived, live somewhere decent and within delivery range for Mad Over Donuts. My own mother’s brother had lived only in Hauz Khas and Saket and the pressure was immense. Until I got engaged, I had never even flicked a casual glance at West Delhi. Like everybody else, I thought of East and West Delhi as Punjabi business-to-middle class housing areas, replete with the worst stamps of Punjuness possible - crowded gullies, big dhinchak markets and garishly dressed behenjis. No good schools, no decent crowd, I mean, why the hell would you want to live there? Then, post-engagement, I began to regularly visit a to-be-in-law who then lived in Janakpuri.

Janakpuri. It was unthinkable. I got off the metro at Janakpuri East station as gingerly as if I were stepping into cowdung. I don’t know what I expected. The brief glimpse of fancy malls at Rajouri and Tagore Garden hadn’t assuaged my fear that some big Amritsari tikka-monster would eat me alive or Mika Singh would arrive on a Harley with his turbaned entourage and sexually assault me. Ha. And to my surprise, nothing happened. The roads were clean, there were churches, temples, electronic stores, bakeries and pretty brick schools all around and Mr. Ji’s cousins lived on the ground floor of a nice house whose landlord was a dapper old gentleman who had retired from the UN. I was aghast. Heck, there's even a Hilton there.

These days, I live in Dwarka, which is even deeper southwest than Janakpuri. I wouldn’t have believed it, had you told me 2 years ago that I would. While I was scouting out apartments here, a status-conscious friend warned me in his most whiny Panchkula-posh drawl that it wasn’t just outside Delhi, it was a sub-city. He made ‘sub-city’ sound like ‘red-light-district’. I am still in some shock to find Costa Coffees, dignified young professional couples and a Labrador Retriever per square meter here. I’m equally shocked to be paying less rent for my comfortable Housing Society apartment here than I would have for something far inferior in Outram Lines. There are more than 5 large and impressive schools within a one kilometre radius from my house, not to mention a swanky market, fish shops and a soon-to-be-operational shopping mall. I hop onto the metro to go to work, and Mr. Ji has a relatively short drive down to Gurgaon. And slowly, but very slowly, I am becoming a big defender against the West Delhi-stereotype.

While there is no doubt that a trip to the malls in Rajouri makes me nauseous, and the Punju-kudis that get on my train from Janakpuri West district centre are speaking a language of boys, money, and shaadi ka shopping that I just don’t understand, all that is not the sum total of West Delhi. You have to live it to believe it.

Or simply, watch Band Baajaa Baaraat.

I don’t remember when a film last pulled so perfectly at all the strings I’m attached to. BBB begins with a warmingly realistic montage of college life in DU; our protagonists Bittoo and Shruti go to Kirori Mal and Hansraj, respectively. Bittoo, played by the controversial newcomer Ranveer Singh (YR Films had to combat a smear campaign against him alleging he had bought his way into the film - you have to see his performance to believe YRF was right) is just so quintessentially every tall, muscular and scruffily well-dressed hostel boy I encounter on my way up the ramp to college every morning - lounging around on the railings and talking ‘binness’. His lingo, pronunciation and general attitude are so smack-on that I was won over even before the film really began. But college life ends and you have to grow up at some point. True to reality, Shruti is an ambitious and very self-assured Punju-kudi from Janakpuri who wants to set up her own wedding planning business immediately after graduating. Typical opposites-attract storyline now fully set.

I can’t help but fall for a film that begins with a shot of my metro train passing by the surreally huge Hanuman-statue at Jhandewalan. And then the galis and endearing middle-class-ness of Shruti’s Janakpuri and the first wedding the pair organize there. (I have always wondered how you can have an entire pandal and dance party set up in a parking gali.) Oh and how can I forget, the central track of the film runs on a chorus that repeats my favouritest ever Dilli-Punjabi phrase “Ainvayi” (pronounced ‘ayvay’ in a nasal tone). And then on to the faux-faltooness of the elite weddings of Sainik Farms and Chanakyapuri... this film uses a syntax and a speaks a parole that I fully understand.

Did I forget to mention this is a love story? Bread pakorae ki kasam, the romantic chemistry between Anushka Sharma and Ranveer Singh is one that stays with you, reminiscent of the lingering Imtiaz Ali slowburn-style that is so in vogue now and thankfully most unlike the typical bombastic yet conservative Yash Raj formula. What seemed to me more impressive, was the performance of the two leads. I am amazed at Ranveer Singh's ability to erase his American-educated Mumbaikar self from his portrayal of Bittoo from Sahranpur, and Anushka Sharma's delivery in the argument scenes is a far, far cry from the laughably rigid performances one has come to bear with from the Katrinas and Deepikas of the world. Why isn't this girl going farther, I wonder? There is a subtlety, a fine nuance to the love-hate chemistry they build up onscreen that I only remember in every Meg Ryan film. Thank God Ranveer Singh isn't too handsome.

You must watch this. If for nothing else, then a good laugh with some garam-garam adrak ki chai and pakorae. Please!

The Aam Aadmi & his Daily Bread

2010-12-06T12:48:00.001+05:30

Up until I moved down to this remote, southwest corner of the city, the Delhi Metro was largely a recereative and somewhat enjoyable space for me; a via media on my self-entertaining trips down to central Delhi. More often than not, I traveled with friends or with the thought of imminent good company uppermost, keeping me somewhat serenely detached from the gross realities of using public transport. Up until now, that is.

When you start using the Metro as a daily commuter, spending a good 3 of your precious 24 hours in that big steel whalebelly, things change. I often proudly remark to friends that becoming a Metro commuter has turned me into some kind of vicious, scheming middle-class crone who sneaks into the door at a brisk step always watching for empty seats and manipulable co-passengers with a beady eye. No arrangement works better with my little schemes than the newly converted Ladies’ Compartment... women are so pliable! I can now look back with a laugh at the days when I would miserably fail to persuade a construction worker happily slouching over a Ladies Only seat to get up for me. Despite the entire compartment of men righteously pleading on my behalf, he would pretend we were all animals in a zoo, and I would then turn defensive-offensive, requesting him politely to remain seated because of course, he must think of himself as very delicate and womanly and therefore had every right to the seat. He would continue to pretend I was a hungry monkey. Ten minutes later, the adjacent seat would be vacated and the potbellied, paanchewing small businessman who had valiantly defended my case only minutes before would blissfully slide into it unperturbed by my needs. Oh, the hypocrisy.

I have formulated, over these few months, a grand constitution of personal Metro ethics, open always to amendment however, when indignant friends upbraid me over my lack of civic sense on a point or two. I am starting to suspect though, that every Metro rush hour commuter has their own ethic system for Metro usage and it’s the mind-boggling network of common sympathies and cultural differences in these systems that both bind and separate the mad mass of people in your compartment. Becoming a part of this extrasensory social network and navigating its serpentine modus operandi on a daily basis can really take the shit out of your day.

My ethics are simple.

Anyone over 25 and a little portly or bespectacled or weighed down with an office bag is ELDERLY and has the RIGHT TO A SEAT (ergo, I qualify). However, a passenger within the age group 25-60 cannot demand a seat of another younger passenger within the same age bracket. So stop staring me down, aunty. I will not get up.
Young, lithe girls in jeans and carrying backpacks DO NOT DESERVE A SEAT or can be bullied into yielding a little bumspace. For a month or so, I didn’t care two hoots for old ladies and the infirm but after an acquaintance lectured me about the hypocrisy of young girls demanding reservation but not letting old people have their seats, I changed my stance.
CHILDREN SHOULD STAND in the Metro. What rubbish, their mothers trying to wrangle seats for them as is they’re pet rabbits or something!
BULKY BAGS BELONG ON THE FLOOR. Who cares if you have prasad or holy books of learning in them? This ain’t Benaras and I ain’t Saraswati so put it down, aunty-ji! I am so often annoyed at random strangers who upbraid me for putting my pretty little Hidesign case on the floor between my feet. It has books in it, they shout in horror. Fuck off, you medieval grannies, I want to say, Derrida would have you burnt at the stake.
MEN WHO ENTER THE LADIES’ SHOULD BE HANGED. Here the stupid DMRC only wallops them on the head and makes them do sit-ups as punishments. How silly. In Delhi only, girlfriends will defend their men for accompanying them into the Ladies’, fathers will plead little children and innocent wives, 60-year-old men will say they’re old and need consideration and the other 10 men in the compartment will tell you to plain sod off.
Women really should SWEAR MORE OFTEN.
If it says DON’T EAT OR DRINK in the Metro, please DON’T EAT OR DRINK! There’s only a fine line between eating carefully and putting crumbs and spills on the floor; anyone might cross it.
Why doesn’t anyone in India understand the KEEP LEFT rule on staircases?

I’m ranting, I just realised.

On that note, let me segue into the last half of my post. Which is about bread.
Despite those 3 hours on the train, I still find time at home to cook and bake to my heart’s delight. As I am confessing to a friend in the parallel Gtalk window right now, my only worry is that my love for food and cooking will gradually erode my other pursuits in life. I don’t know if that’s necessarily a bad thing. I take comfort from reading foodblogs where young mothers write about having been, until recently, fiercely independent researchers or scientists or what have you and now having happily converted to being stay-at-home moms and bakers extraordinaire. I really work hard at trying to rationalise a life where that just might happen and I will gracefully accept it. Or, like I tell R, set up a cafe and make some money out of my domestic pursuits. Nonsense.

My biggest guilty moments are when I take R’s casual whims and make realities out of them. Like ‘bakery bread’. Shortly after I started my baking marathon, R nonchalantly mentioned how he longed for the taste of that sweet and chewy bakery bread of our childhoods in Kerala, the kind you had to slice at home and always smelt so fresh and yeasty. Pat came my reply, that could easily be done at home. And ever since, I have been baking a couple of loaves of bread at least once a week. I don’t know why I do it, seeing as how it’s such a tedious process, the dough barely rises now in the Delhi winter, and everything’s so darn sticky. But aaaah, the end result, the way the smell of sweet, yeasty bread permeates your home and hearth, the way you can just eat it plain and it goes with absolutely everything, unlike your usual market-bough Britannia loaf. Sigh, heaven.
So, here it is, my recipe for Half-wheat White Bread.

Semi-Sweet White Bread

Ingredients
¼ ounce (7.5g) active dry yeast
1 cup lukewarm water
¼ cup sugar
½ tbsp salt
1 egg, beaten
½ cup vegetable oil
4 - 4 ¼ cups plain flour/maida (or 3 cups maida & 1 ¼ wholeweat/atta)

Method
Put the water into a bowl, add 1 tsp of sugar and sprinkle the yeast on top. Leave to stand for 5 minutes, then after giving it a quick stir, transfer it into a larger bowl. To this, add the sugar, salt, egg and oil. Add the flour now, one cup at a time, stirring firmly with a strong wooden spoon, adding only enough flour to make a soft dough. (The consistency is the trouble here: you want it really soft and fluffy, and yet kneadable to an extent. It gets easier with experience but the trick is not to over-flour the dough.) Turning out the soft dough onto a lightly-floured surface (use atta to flour the tabletop if you’re health-conscious), knead it either with your hands or with metal scrapers in a fold-in, push-out motion for 8-10 minutes. (Here again, the difficulty is in keeping the flour kneadable and not sticky. The tendency is to add more flour to the surface to ease the process and lessen the stickiness, but don’t overdo this or your bread will turn out flatter and harder than you desire. I use my open palms in a kneading motion that’s like closing a book and then pushing it away, closing, and pushing alternately. This keeps the dough together and yet folds in enough air to keep it light.) Place the kneaded dough into a greased bowl, cover with plastic film or a wet cloth and leave to rise in a warm spot for an hour or until double in size. Then punch down the dough and shape into a greased and floured 9x5x3” loaf tin or two smaller ones. Cover and allow to rise again for an hour or until doubled. Finally, bake in a preheated oven at 375ºF/180ºC for 25 minutes until golden brown on top. Turn out onto a wire rack to cool.

Quiche-mish!

2010-11-22T10:11:00.000+05:30

Back in my days of endless spare time between Delhi and Pune, I would never miss the 1.30pm repeat of a certain British baking-diva’s cookery show. (Let’s call her Mrs. A; I don’t want to be sued.) I adored her simple appearance, her no-airs, no-frills approach to baking and her very useful tips. Also, I’d furiously scribble down her measurements and methods as she casually steamed through the toughest of recipes in 15 minutes. Ah, television.

The thing about TV cookery shows, especially where baking and Mrs. A are concerned, is that, for one, they make the toughest processes look laughably easy, and worse, give you only an 80% glimpse of the actual recipe (if you’re listening closely). The measurements that Mrs. A mumbles off the corner of her mouth and some important details she omits imagining you already know them, are I suppose the stuff of marketing gimmickry. You’ll realize, shortly, that you can’t possibly reconstruct her recipe without buying her book, and there’s the rub! However (and I’m shamelessly indulging in self-congratulatory horn-blowing here), the seasoned baker can more or less decipher the dots and dashes in Mrs. A’s routine. What’s more, I think watching her show regularly can really rub in over a period of time some of the finer aspects of European baking technique. Like shortcrust pastry: I’ve seen her do a basic shortcrust pastry two or three times for a variety of dishes, from quiches to dessert tarts. Although she never explicitly says so, the pastry remains the samein mase and technique. I figured that out only after leafing through my frantic lecture-notes in retrospect. For sweeter dishes, she just adds a sprinkle of sugar to the dough, simple!

But for all the past years of my lonely Delhihood, I have only leched and drooled at her recipes and never tried them out simply because I didn’t have an oven of my own. Finally, on Saturday, R and I went out and bought me my first OTG, a cute little black & steel thing that works like a dream. That was it, I’ve been in baking overdrive ever since! So for a first day first show attempt, I decided to go all out and try Mrs. A’s version of the French classic, the Quiche Lorraine.

The quiche, though now considered a generically French dish, originates from the Germanic cultures of the Lorraine region. The traditional Quiche Lorraine is a non-crimped bread/pastry crust containing an egg and cream custard with bacon. (It was only much later that cheese got added to the recipe.) The Quiche Alsacienne (from Alsace) is somewhat similar but contains onions, and modern variations of the quiche contain a variety of season vegetables since they taste great in that cheesy, eggy filling! Mrs. A went native and only put onions and bacon in her quiche, but my health concerns prompted the addition of a handful of winter veggies. She also used simple double cream for the filling, but I went a little more French and put in some homemade crème fraiche (mildly soured heavy cream).

Quiche Lorraine

Shortcrust pastry:

200 gms plain flour (maida)

100 gms butter

Pinch of salt

1 egg, whisked

Filling:

2 whole eggs

2 egg yolks

250ml thick double cream or crème fraiche

175 g bacon, chopped and sautéed

1 large onion, chopped and sautéed

A handful of cauliflower florets, chopped and sautéed

A handful of French beans, chopped and sautéed

Grated cheddar

Parsley

Mixed herb seasoning of your choice

Salt and pepper to taste

Method

Rub the flour and butter for the pastry together and add in the whisked egg by lightly rubbing in. Wrap the kneaded dough in cling film, somewhat flattened, and leave to chill in the fridge for 15mins. Then, roll it out flat between two sheets of cling film and use it to line a 20cm quiche-dish (round springform pie-dish).Blind bake (par-bake with double layer of cling film on top and filled in with dried beans/small stones) at 180˚C for 15mins and then for 5mins without the stones/beans.

Whisk all the filling ingredients together and taste for seasoning. Tip filling into the par-baked shortcrust pastry dish and cook at 180˚C for 30-40mins till golden brown and set in the centre.

Pancake Make-Up

2010-09-30T21:11:00.001+05:30

The ultimate nightmare for some ‘cosmopolitan’ Malayali women is the prospect of a nice homely husband who wants upma, idiyappam, puttu, pal-appam, idli, or blah, not necessarily in that order, every morning for breakfast. Because while he spent his years away at IIT/MIT pining for Amma’s idiyappam & motta-curry, the nice Malayali boy’s female peer left home to find comfort in muesli, fruit, French toast, pancakes, porridge and lavishly stuffed omelettes. These are the things that in their modest forms can be squeezed into her 10-minute morning rush for work, or transformed into a breakfast of champions on a lazy Sunday morning. While I do sometimes mourn the cultural loss of the forgotten orotti, I’m not sorry that thus far my ideal comfort breakfast is still pancakes.

Ah, pancakes. Ten minutes of quick knocking in and whipping are all it takes to produce one of the simplest joys of life. I sometimes wonder why people trundle all the way to the American Diner (or worse, McDonalds) to get their weekly pancake fix when it’s the darndest joke to do it yourself. Huh, go figure. So here, in all its joyful simplicity, is my recipe for kickass banana pancakes.

Serves you and your roommate. :)

Susan-ji’s Banana Pancakes

Ingredients

3/4^th cup plain flour (maida)

a generous pinch of grated nutmeg

¼ tsp salt

1 tbsp sugar

¼ tsp baking powder

3/4^th cup milk

1 egg

1 tbsp melted butter

1 freshly mashed banana

Method

Put all the dry ingredients (the first five, duh) in a bowl and mix roughly. Beat the egg well, add ½ cup of milk to it, and add this liquid mix to the dry mix in the bowl. Combine well with a spoon (no need to whip) till it isn’t lumpy anymore, adding the remaining milk as you go to achieve the desired moistness and consistency. Last of all, add the mashed banana and melted butter to the batter. Pour one ladle per pancake into a lightly greased frying pan and flip once bubbles start to pop on the top. * The lighter the grease on the pan, the better the pancake. (I generally melt my butter on the same pan to grease it but the first pancake is always too hard as a result. Just a warning.)

These pancakes go best with a dollop of butter and maple syrup/jam on top and chopped walnuts if you’re feeling extravagant!

Jack Johnson - Banana Pancakes

The Wrath of God

2010-09-22T11:50:00.000+05:30

These days I am incredibly angry. And when the fuming is done, I am simply sad. Sometimes I go to sleep crying.

Failure makes me religious. My mother would have me believe it’s the best way to deal with adversity. It’s a pattern I’ve evolved since school, when I’d pray desperately before exams, marking out my favourite psalms and at the worst moments, underlining in red the most self-righteous comfort I could find. Nowadays, as I approach a mountain, I start praying a week ahead. I pray at home, weeping into my Bible, or silently seated with hands clasped on a cycle rickshaw. Sometimes even on the metro, for a minute while nobody’s watching.

But I am no saint. Thanks to an unnecessarily liberal education in the arts and social sciences, I lean heavily on blind faith and barely on logic. Because my understanding of the world makes it very difficult to justify my faith; my faith is the one thing I wouldn’t like shaken. I do know, however, that my little system is a safety net I’ve knit out over time to catch me when I fall. I know it’s only a psychological framework, a behavioural pattern that comforts. While this doesn’t mean I no longer believe, it means I’m skeptic about the woodwork, I’m wary of what I’ll find underneath.

I sometimes wonder how I would explain my faith in a job interview. (Not that anyone would ever ask, but when you’re in my field, nothing’s personal anymore.) So I have my well-phrased theoretical reply, ready for regurgitation without prior notice: my faith is in the community, in structures and rituals and cyclical systems that periodically incriminate and resolve my guilt. My faith is in practices and processes, the outward bulwark of structure that keeps the institution alive. What is God, does God exist, who is God: absolutely irrelevant.

When life’s grand 5-year-plan debacle hit me last week, my mother gave me a one-liner to throw in people’s faces: “I am a child of God, and this is the will of God.” When she said it, I was filled with a mix of outrage at the egotism of the statement, and a curious sense of religious nostalgia, wishing I still belonged in the category of people who could unblinkingly say something like that to the cynically bitter sutta-toting Marxists of the Association. Hah, never. How out of touch she was with my world, that she should think up something like that. Of course I’m a child of God, of course every shitty thing that happens to me is His will… I know all that, but I’m not about to announce it on my Facebook status.

(Denial and troubled faith go hand in hand; ya hear me St, Peter?)

But more difficult to encompass is this image of the long-suffering, all-bearing, passive cheek-turning Christian that I am supposed to be. This is the great conflict of our times: do we

A. slime up and insinuate ourselves into the dirty games of the real world, or

B. coat ourselves in the political warpaint of the radical do-gooder and seek justice at all cost or

C. accept God’s will, stay calm and kill our detractors with mindnumbing kindness?

The City of Sleep

2010-05-18T10:01:00.002+05:30

Today is eighteen days since I got off from work, skipped the light fantastic and landed in Pune for what I foreboded would be the dullest vacation of my life. I’m always a pessimist so I can be surprised but no refreshments for my distaste this time of year.

It’s a law of civilization that a city can only entertain you either if you go to work in it and have a comfortable social circle to be around, or if the city is itself so vibrant and throbbing with variety that it can hold its weight sans friends and family. Many are the snide remarks passed at self-satisfied and proud Delhiites but you have to admit, Delhi is the liveliest cultural city in India. As concerns different expressions of art and taste, Mumbai doesn’t even come close. Oh but of course, Delhi critics will hear that same smugness in my tone again as I laud my habitation of 7 years, so let me not rub it in.

Here in Pune I have no magic wand to make this city come alive: no work, no friends, no nothing. I can at best say I am comfortable here - a city so tame that a woman need never fear for her safety or keep an eye on her neighbours. I recall a sharp article full of truism that I read in a recent issue of ‘Time Out’ Delhi where author Rana Dasgupta convincingly explained that the real reason people so love Delhi is because they are proud to survive it - yes it’s nasty, brash and cruel, everyday is a pain to get through but we do it and we’re smarter than any other citizen of the country because we DO, so eat that. He was right somehow, Dasgupta, because I come here and I sneer at the lack of danger, the lack of challenge to daily life in Pune. Why is everything so convenient? Why are people so gracious? Why do men not pinch or eve-tease? Lame!

What is it about this sleepy city of outsiders? I feel the north-south divide sharp as a knife when even my breakfast waiter at the South Indian Veg. restaurant sees fit to comment on how he is so glad I’m South Indian and what use are North Indian wives anyway, blah blah blah? And the obviously Punju/Delhi-type young people (students/techies/BPO employees) that stroll the streets seem loud and out of place. (I’m unsure where I belong.) More even than Delhi, everyone in Pune seems to be living in a state of temporaryism - exemplified not only by my husband’s sparse glorified bachelor pad filled with suitcases, but also the daily appearance of moving vans at apartment gates and the quick changes of nameplates outside doors. Despite what I’ve heard, I’m ready to believe that Pune is a very easy city to leave.

And then there are other things for the Delhiite to condescend upon. Clothes, for example. Pune is like some twopenny twin suburb of Mumbai and Delhi when it comes to the way Punaikars dress. I can’t explain their fashion atrocities clearly enough - it’s like they aspire to the high style quotient of Delhi but are weighed down but the practicality of the Mumbaikar and thus fall in some ugly inbetween - hideously cheap harem pants teamed with mismatched asymmetrical t-shirts or loud salwar-kameezes over track shoes. Even when you find a half-decently dressed individual, she’ll have an ugly pair of block heels on her feet to destroy everything. Oh, and the Jihadist head-knots and floral sun-coats I’ll never understand… as if no other city in India has sun and pollution! I can see that if you take public transport a lot and are on your feet most of the time, practicality must win; but every Delhiite knows that you must suffer for fashion - so, choose.

Let me not sound so grim. There are a few things about this city that I thoroughly appreciate. Topmost on the list would be the multiplicity of well-fed, clean and affectionate stray dogs that Punaikars obviously care for enough to leave alone. I can’t walk down the street without petting a dozen before each turn, and they’re cute enough to follow you home if you’ll let them. Then there are the cinema halls - you don’t have to travel 10 miles to watch an English film in a multiplex, and they release everything here. Even the roadside DVD vendors are packing South Park and Sex & the City seasons, to my surprise. ‘Koregaon Park!’ bleats a Delhiite colleague of my husband’s, ‘it’s amazing!’ Yeah, but you can’t spend two months just walking down Koregaon Park. The Army Camp area is rather pretty too; in fact the city itself is gorgeous and one could just spend all day driving through.

And yes, the Dominos delivery guy speaks English.

Different States of Ire

2010-04-07T22:28:00.000+05:30

Every morning I have this ritual of picking my pillow off the divan and putting it back on the bed to pretend I haven't been sleeping nights in the living room. Why?

I was enraged this morning by a certain examination candidate in the room where I was on invigilation duty. She provoked the strangest of responses in me, this tall, delicate and smooth creature who obviously hadn't prepared a word for her chemistry subsidiary paper and was hoping to make the best of the physical proximity between candidates. It was not just that she was trying to copy or beg friends for help - it was her appearance: huge solitaires blinking furiously in her ears, one dangling off her neck and two enormous ones on her fingers... and needless to add, a flashy managalsutra and a faint dash of sindoor on the tip of her widow's peak. I stared at her no end, found myself thinking up the strangest possible abuse to chastise her with should I catch her glance straying again... "What's the matter, love? Up all night rolling out rotis, so you couldn't study for your test?"

What was wrong with me, I wondered. Why should her pedestrian efforts to cheat (only similar to about a gazillion I have encountered in my profession) invoke the most patriarchal and base of imagined comments from me, a married woman like her?

Well, not 'like' her, and that's the point I suppose. I'm angry that she's barely legal and married. I'm angry that there might be other demands on her time instead of what every 18 year old should be free to do. I'm angry that all those lakhs of diamonds on her body show up like abusive welts, the brands of possessive husbands and in-laws, of ownership and quantification, like a beautiful cow with a clipped ear. I'm angry that any one of us could have been her, with a little less choice in our fates.

And maybe I'm confused that I'm not automatically applauding/supporting her for going to college at all.

Two Love Songs from My Long Ago

2010-03-28T20:16:00.000+05:30

WORDLISTS

If love is to think of you

ad nauseum

sans seven year itch;

I’ll admit I loved you once.

Miles apart everything,

in person not enough.

I apologize for my imagination.

When we’re forty

we will meet

in a supermarket aisle

down a common street,

and hedged in by Tide and Comfort

we’ll have that embrace we never had

-that symptom of delay and fear-

and swap nursery rhymes

just like old times.

And hopefully,

I’ll tell myself again

I’m better off

without you.

Tattoo Parlour

Curtained glass barricades both

silhouette

and conceal

its advertised enticements.

I lunge towards its doors,

the call of a craving grown past its adolescence;

the strongest it has ever been.

I have never been so sure of a desire

to etch significance onto my skin,

where no erasure but laser-sharp volition

can chase the permanence of meaning away.

By this surety I am maddened.

And I have all but pushed open the door

when

your non du frere echoes against the glass.

‘Are you nuts?’

Eat, Drink and be Merry for...

2010-03-15T18:54:00.001+05:30

One aspect of my life I have not shared much with you, reader, is my foodie-ness. I distinctly remember trying to start a bit of food-blogging here but it never quite got on. The other day, however, it occurred to me that instead of reviewing restaurants & c., I could offer up some of my own cooking-gyaan for the interested reader.

Now, I'm not exactly Jamie Oliver. Consider me a low-fat Nigella for the lazy homemaker. :) Or a realist, like Rachel Allen.
But here goes nothing!

Susan-ji’s No-Brainer Mocha Fruit Tart
(Serves 4)

Ingredients

6-7 chocolate/digestive biscuits
1.5 tbsp butter
1 tbsp honey
1 banana OR 7 strawberries, thinly sliced
2 tbsp strawberry jam (if using strawberry fruit)
300 ml creamy milk
2 tbsp vanilla flavored custard powder/corn flour
4tbsp sugar
2 heaped tsp cocoa powder
¼ tsp grated nutmeg
1 tsp kahlua or irish cream liqeur
1 tsp strong coffee powder
1 tbsp butter
10 almonds/cashew nuts, crushed or finely chopped
Half a regular-size bar of milk chocolate
½ tbsp salted butter

Method

Crush the biscuits with a rolling pin in a plastic bag, for ease. Combine them with the melted butter and honey and put into a greased 4” diameter shallow tart-dish/pie-dish. Press the mixture flat with fingers along the base and a little up the sides of the dish, till compact but not over-tight. Refrigerate dish to set the crust.
Once the crust is set (15 mins), layer the base with sliced fruit (and top with jam if using strawberries). Take 2 tbsp of milk aside and mix with custard powder/corn flour to form a paste. Then, slowly boil the remaining milk with sugar, cocoa, nutmeg and coffee powder. Once boiled, remove from heat and add the custard powder/corn flour paste while briskly stirring, then return to low heat and cook for 3 minutes until well thickened. Remove from flame, stir in 1 tbsp of butter, and pour immediately onto the prepared base and spread evenly.
Meanwhile, melt the milk chocolate and salted butter over boiling water until a smooth paste, then immediately spread while hot onto the chocolate custard. Sprinkle evenly with crushed nuts (and fruit slice for aesthetics) and refrigerate for 2 hours. Serve chilled.

Hot Shorts

2010-03-13T09:40:00.002+05:30

Ceiling fans need cleaning before they are re-operated post winter hibernation. I no longer need my shawls and coats. Not even a muffler. The pavement “Funky Fashion” man’s stall announces that last summer’s vogue is here to stay for another year (or as long as global warming lasts) - “Hot Shorts” he calls them, these tiny bifurcated flaps of clothing, a poor apology for bodily coverage that a good 40% of campus-girls have turned to after their winter woollies, much to the disconcertion of my 30-something male colleagues. I wonder how they wear them in all the grit and glare of an oncoming Delhi summer. Dusty winds lash the now unrecognizable campus roads (thanks to frantic last-minute Commonwealth Games beautification drives) and it is practically impossible to walk home anymore in all that heat and dust… and the very real danger of falling into a gutted, gaping pavement.

Like clockwork, I blog most over summer. There’s a good mix of reasons for this and even as I think of the approaching restful period, my blood tingles with relief. Classes for the academic year finish on the 23rd of this month but I have already completed most of my lectures. I now have three-day weekends and lavish one-hour workdays before the final stop in two weeks. And usually by the 1st of May, pat, I am home in Kerala with absolutely nothing to do for a whole two and a half months - the incomparable luxury of a temporary assistant professorship. With the monsoons keeping Kerala temperate and nothing but household chores to involve myself in, it is usually in this period that my mind becomes most fertile. And more than all of this, inexplicably, it is the past habit of mental activity during the examination period of March-April that my mind sets its clock to: so even now, something like 3 or 4 years since I have given an exam or submitted a paper, my mind kicks into thinking mode come mid-March.

If Delhi doesn’t get too hot too soon, I have some of the best times of my life these two months. The occasional trip to college for paperwork or workload meetings is punctuated by umpteen cups of tea or bottles of soda, long walks to restaurants and plenty of gossip. Students are few and far between in the commercial hub of the university, so we can let our hair down in cafés without having to keep eyes in the back of our heads. During April, there is only the rare invigilation duty per week, which I thoroughly enjoy in the most sadistic manner. And afterward, a trip to Khan Market or CP, or a movie outing. I also get back to my reading habits and look up old friends.

This year I will be sidestepping the Kerala trip in honour of my newly-acquired other half. The prospect is exciting - a whole summer of unshackled adventure and all the time in the world to kill, all the places in the country to go. It will be like no holiday I’ve ever had - for the first time in my life not bound by the adolescent decrees of a possessive family, yippee. And perhaps, just perhaps, I may no longer even be a temporary worker by May; and so free to join in that deliciously mad world of college admissions that I haven’t been involved in for a couple of years. Chalo, dekhte hain. The world awaits!

Honest Awkward Notes after a Farewell Party

2010-03-12T22:47:00.001+05:30

Today was all about college, College, college. We welcomed a new principal and bid farewell to a batch of final year students. On an emotional high but physical low, I came home to a horrific migraine, took two paracetamols and slew time online while they went to work. Doing so, I stumbled across a blog of interest, maintained by a European student who is attending final year classes in another department of the college, on exchange from a prestigious American liberal arts college. (I’m being deliberately nominally vague to avoid rambling students chancing upon this post.)

And suddenly, seeing my world through the eyes of a somewhat alien, I became acutely conscious of how deeply embedded, irretrievably involved I am in this tiny corner of the country that we call DU academia. And more severely, how I was not once so. This twenty-something writes aghast of a world of somnabulent Indian kids who speak only in practiced tones of Anglicized pretentiousness to scoff at teachers, express extreme disinterest in their areas of study; are chauffeured around in government cars, play guitar in bands, party three nights a week nonplussed by the cost of alcohol, and snap their fingers at servants. Sleep, sleep is their only recognizable human frailty.

It’s such a cliché to say that students today are just not the way they used to be. Instead of detaching myself from this horde of the undead, or taking voluntary retirement in protest as one of my colleagues plans to do, I try and insinuate myself into their world, find out what’s going on in their heads, what they do after hours. (But never actually fraternizing with them.) A few of my colleagues find this intrusive method disconcerting - initially, getting to know me, they would laugh about how I could faithfully report who was seeing whom, living where and doing what amongst the student body - but now they genuinely worry that I know too much, or worse, am one of them. Anyhow, the only thing I have learned, from day one of this knowledge project, is that I am dealing with a bizarre niche of society.

These almost-adults have access to a world of privilege, money and cultural exposure that the best of us in my student days could only dream of. Being Delhi, the crème of student groups are often the power-children, with parents who live in Lutyens Delhi or are the business elite of South Delhi. Otherwise, they are the acad-children, whose parents are already part of a thick intellectual fraternity and therefore hereditarily impart the stock-in-trade secrets of survival early on. And the rest are simply comfortable, in every possible way. Where I only managed to wheedle a cell phone out of my parents in my third year of college (a most basic model which when lost caused my parents to almost disown me), freshers have flashy Blackberrys these days. There is the rare exclusion of the Bengali student who is selling her fiction collection to get by the penniless last week of the month and the Malayali student who just stays put in his hostel room because he cannot afford the constant eating out and partying his classmates do. In these rare exclusions I recognize the endangered species of my era.

When I moved to Delhi, I like most was initially wowed by the incessant who’s-who’ing. After a while, it became pleasant or amusing, and then later, simply annoying. I would always be the sarcastic one to put someone down for talking of connections and ‘did you know’s. Three to four years into my Delhi life, I deeply resented the gene pools of knowledge or influence my acquaintances could so easily dip into in a moment of crisis whereas I simply could not afford to have a crisis at all. All that “uncle” and “auntie”-calling, that studied nonchalance.

And then gradually, imperceptibly, I assimilated. I caught myself dropping names the other day to a friend who was trying to get a book published… “I know so and so, I can ask so and so.” Her simple non-Delhiite silence stated that she would not ask for my help. This morning the new principal blatantly offered that we should exploit his “social capital”. “I know people,” he said, and we were thrilled to bits. Sometimes my husband warns me that I am so much a part of the horde now that I can barely speak the language of true simplicity, of simple emotion anymore. He can hear the false note even in a ‘hello’. And reader, I do not feel chastised when he complains: I feel he is at a lower stage of evolution.

The Knot

2010-02-04T20:02:00.004+05:30

I’ll be honest with you, reader. I find it extremely difficult to blog these days. I think about it every afternoon, when I have nothing to do except dither on gtalk or watch mindless telly. These days I’m thinking all the time, much more contemplative than I ever was. I simply have more to think about, clichéd as it may seem. So when I finally gather the skirts of my frayed creative resources and sit down at my Word document, the very pull of a hundred fragments of thought from the farthest reaches of my mind destroys my attempt. (So forgive me if you find I’ve lost my touch here.)

I’m depressed about falling into the cliché. Believe me, in my position it is the greatest struggle to constantly resist the norm. It wouldn’t be so difficult for an individual who didn’t trumpet Marxist socialist feminist anti-globalist anti-imperialist anti-establishment anti-everything perspectives all morning long to earn her daily bread. And this is not to sound like I don’t believe in the things I say in front of a blackboard - I do, wholeheartedly - and there my friend lies the rub. A year ago I despised a temporary job I worked in because my all-female department threw meetings like kitty parties and turned them into cook-outs. I grumbled inwardly about their pretty homes and ballet-school-going children, bespectacled Bengali husbands and Fab India clothes. So now with imminent domesticity, a 5 liter pressure cooker, gift vouchers for the said store as wedding gifts, and whatnot, I feel a traitor to my self. I abhor the subtly automatic social processes of marital status categorizing. I hate that married women in my workplace now smile at me, invite me home and ask after my husband. I resent that even my closest married friends seem to be constantly trying to empathize with me over some housewifely issue or the other, that we have gone from simply saying “oh, men!” to “oh, husbands!”

How does one rightly combat this? Will my elevated sense of “Oh, I’ll be different somehow” hold out long enough? I hate justificatory talk of circumstance, social or familial obligation. It is not very difficult to say no, to decide against, and to go it alone. Anyone could have done it. Instead, it is walking the tightrope that causes the most sores. When friends relate to me other cases, Oprah testimonies or bookstore gyaan that confirms the general need for family, home and children, I feel angered and uncomfortable. But I do not understand me - do I want to reaffirm to myself everyday that I have violated the contract of non-normativity I signed when I got a liberal education? Do I want to self-flagellate for the ethical crisis I have junked myself into? Who knows.

I think it’s prime that in my worst crisis, caught up in the daily argument of why, Hollywood has gone and established the grand renaissance of American neoconservatism.

“You’re young; right now you see settling as some sort of failure…”

“It is, by definition.”

“Yeah but by the time someone is ‘right’ for you it won’t feel like settling and the only person left to judge you will be the 23 year-old girl with the target on your back.”

This is Vera Farmiga, in her Oscar-nominated role in Up In The Air, challenging a naïve young Anna Kendrick about her beliefs.

Every film coming out of Hollywood these days reverts from its most twisted context to being a family drama at the end of the day. Consider the latest from the Jason Reitman stable: George Clooney plays a middle-aged management expert who works for a company that outsources relationship officers to handle firing processes for other companies. Determinedly single, close to totting 10 million frequent flyer miles, a connoisseur of quick hotels and rent-a-cars, and a national motivational guru for detached, impersonal living, he claims to be able to pack everything that truly matters in his life into one strolley. He keeps his distance from family and other relationships and prides himself on the extreme casual nature of his current fling (the equally ‘flighty’ Farmiga). So when young Kendrick joins his company with her Ivy League textbook knowledge, perfect boyfriend and unshakeable new-gen conservatism, Clooney has a conversion task on hand. At the heart of her, though, he finds an insecure business school topper who once embraced the radical ideal, lived for her ambition but clumsily gave it up to chase a boy and has spent the rest of her time sugarcoating her failure with conservative justification.

The conversion happens, but it is dual. Kendrick’s marital beliefs are shaken and Clooney’s avowed singledom takes a beating. And that, apparently, is the triumph of the film. He was wrong, the 70s were wrong, single moms are so yesterday. We want family dinners, turkey for Thanksgiving, Baby Gap vouchers and silly destination weddings. THAT, is the real deal, THAT is true happiness.

Oh where oh where is my Erin Brockovich?

Asia Major

2009-12-15T17:45:00.006+05:30

(A loose rambling post, for once.)

I have been binging on Korean, Chinese and Japanese films this past week. It started with me giving SK a copy of Bakjwi, and he repaid it in kind with a DVD full of stuff, plus my later downloads came through.

I started off with a couple of Takeshi Kaneshiro starrers: John Woo’s martial epic Red Cliff (2009) and Peter Chan’s musical romance, Perhaps Love (2005). From the Korean set I watched the only installment of Chan-Wook Park’s Vengeance trilogy I hadn’t already seen: the finale Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (2005), then the poet-turned-director Yu Ha’s Marriage is a Crazy Thing (2002), and last a Buddhist allegorical gem, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring (2003). This smorgasbord I topped off with the highly-rated Japanese Tokyo Sonata (2008). (2009), and Peter Chan’s musical romance,

In retrospect, I wished I hadn’t watched any of these films.

Why are Far Eastern filmmakers so disillusioned with love? I am left wondering if it isn’t because the Hollywood concept of romance simply jars with Asian cultures in transformation from tradition to modernity, or because there is no space and time for slow romance in ambitiously developing countries. Or is it that every good, realistic film from any world industry must needs be romantically cynical because either A) romance doesn’t really exist or B) they have to ideationally counter mainstream films?

My picks of the above would be Marriage Is a Crazy Thing and Tokyo Sonata, easily the most complex and nuanced films of the lot. The first film takes the issues of relationship role-play, Gen X jadedness and cyclical romance to new heights. Its beauty is that despite its cynicism it retains that peculiar quality of improbability and playfulness that has always puzzled me about Korean films. Since unlikely plot twists and unrealistic behaviour is so common in the industry, I have reluctantly begun to accept that they must be a hallmark of Korean culture… Come to think of it, I do remember this inherent tendency for storytelling and fantasy surprised me even in the Korean family I once tutored in Chennai so many years ago: despite her age, the mother lived in a virtual world of Tohm Kuhloosuh (Tom Cruise) and Robhut Redbhurduh (Robert Redford), watched Out of Africa once a week on DVD and liked it best when her husband was away. The little daughter wanted time-out every half an hour to play “Indian Bride” with me or tell me far-fetched quasi-sexual-mythological stories about Korea that I only half believed. On Sundays I’d catch a glimpse of the father, an emotionless hunk of white meat, back from golf all flat-stomached and beady-eyed, completely uninterested in the family tutor or the children. In those days, the modest luxury of their centrally-located apartment with its pristine white walls and gleaming Samick piano would impress me. These days, post my introduction to Korean film, I wonder that for a senior manager at the Hyundai factory, he let his family live so simply. I digress, but something of the buried resignation that was so much a quality of that household I find resonance with in these films. When the demands of marriage and worldly comfort are so mundane, so predictable, what are the alternate avenues urban adults must take to instill a semblance of meaning in their lives and how little does morality have to do with it all?

Don’t look for a ray of light in the second film. Tokyo Sonata is probably the most depressing thing I’ve seen in a while: a sobering take on the consequences of the recession and US dependency on a non-white, Asian country. I am always upset by films that use the family microcosm as a metaphor for nation or economy or some such thing, but Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s take is bleaker than most. Dysfunctional children, unhappy mothers, fathers turned from managers to mall janitors, food lines, employment exchanges, Iraq, undisciplined schoolrooms, prison cells, rape, theft, hit-and-run accidents and family suicides… Kurosawa saves the film’s single touch of beauty for last - Kenji’s heartbreaking piano performance.

Watch this one only if you are an otherwise happy person.

Confessio Amantis

2009-12-01T19:52:00.004+05:30

I think the Catholic Church should apply for a patent on Guilt.

It isn’t that non-Catholics don’t experience guilt, but no other institution in the world knows how to evoke this weightiest of human emotions at the flick of a wrist. Growing up on the short tether of a mother who believed in instant retribution and an angry Judaic God, I have not been a stranger to guilt, but adulthood has weakened my reflexivity to vice. Recent months of prayerlessness and material comfort were cut to the quick last weekend, however, when the avowedly anti-Catholic Susan-ji reluctantly entered the halls of a Catholic retreat centre in Okhla for a 48 hour “marriage preparation course”. (You don’t want to know why.)

Why must all Catholic institutions embrace the cult of the cloister? Why must free adults be locked up in gender-segregated hospital rooms just for a counseling course, be forced to rise at the crack of dawn to partake of the body and blood of Christ (wait, the Eucharist for Catholics only) and stay hungry through the day till the lights go off at 10pm again? Dim electric lights, the chill of Ujala-white walls and I.V. stands decorating the head and foot of our beds as an eerie remainder of God-knows-what. Fist-thumping conservatives pound doctrine into our numbed minds, demand a chorus of “Praise you Jesus” and “Thank you Jesus” every ten minutes and bleed one hundred and twenty ‘Hail Mary’s from our chapped lips. Amidst all this a bizarre trumpeting of the “marital act” (sex, lay-people), simultaneous climax and procreation. Something about a 25 year old uptight, unmarried Malayalee nurse teaching me about reproductive anatomy, vaginal discharge and ovulation is simultaneously comic and morbid. I sit up at night haunted by the hooks on the ends of the I.V. stand above my head. In a fit of sleepwalking, I might well hang myself.

On the second morning, I awake bathed in sweat and have an unusual November morning bath in the dark. I tell my roommate I am not attending Mass and lie in bed thinking for a while. Though I spent most of the previous day smirking at what was being taught, my hand now reaches for the Bible I brought along and I turn to a comforting Psalm. In the three times I had been asked this weekend to think of my worst offences and silently ask pardon for them, my conscience did a Peter on me and betrayed me to the morals rapped out on the wooden podium. I questioned many of my simple happinesses, the recent improvements of my life and some buried past memories… and my heart was heavy with sin. An hour later, my roommate does not return in time for breakfast and my suspicions are confirmed a little later - she has asked the Priest to take her confession. She returns blushing and panting to the classroom, late.

I surprised myself in a T.S. Eliot lecture a week ago when I suggested Christianity was a religion selling itself successfully on the Eucharistic ideal of consumption: you cannot eat the fruit of the forbidden tree but you can partake of the body and blood of Christ and be new again! FREE! (T& C apply: One mouthful only. Catholics only.) Two things about this grand transcendental signifier of salvation/consumption amaze me:

One, that it is juxtaposed with the ideal of control and abstinence. Two, that it reeks of vampirism.

How bizarre! A significant world religion with a central sacrament that would not be out of place in a vampiric cult. Of course, vampirism is the grand cultural symbol of taboo consumption. What is communion? One bite only, per week?

Korean auteur Chan-wook Park’s latest film, the masterpiece Thirst (Bakjwi) does the unthinkable: it brings together the Catholic cult of guilt and vampirism. Skeptics might jump to think Park is cashing in on the latest vampire fad, but if there were ever a completely non-normative and utterly original vampire film, it is Thirst. To say this film is terrifying or gory or scary or intense or romantic or sexy would be using pathetic pedestrian clichés only worthy of the Twilight saga. Instead, Thirst redefines ethical vampirism, forbidden love, the vampire’s kiss and the real grisliness of flesh-feasting.

Thirst opens with a corpulent patient in a hospital bed describing his only act of virtue to a priest, presumably before he is administered his last rites. In his dreamlike narrative, the fat man is about to eat a huge, divine sponge cake the likes of which he will never eat again, when two schoolgirls stop to stare at him. At the threshold of ultimate oral pleasure, he gives the cake away to them and watches them wolf it down. Story over, the patient immediately slips into a coma. The priest who works at this charitable hospital, Father Sung-Hyun, is sick of the suffering and offers himself up as a volunteer at an experimental lab where treatment for a rare African HIV-like virus, EV, is being developed. Things go awry and Sung-Hyun dies of the disease but is miraculously revived by blood transfusion. Upon recovery he finds that he has been infected with vampire blood, which is keeping him alive but needs a steady supply of blood consumption to keep the EV virus at bay. Gentle and sensitive as a lamb, our unlikely vampire provides for himself in the most ethical and secretive manner possible, drinking at night from the drip-stands of the patient in a coma (since he would have willingly given it away) and from a sympathetic blind mentor in the monastery. Back to his world, he becomes revered as the Wounded Saint, the lone survivor among hundreds of volunteers, suffering his disease to heal the dying. Oddly, his intervention does miraculously heal a few of the ailing, bringing him into a coincidental meeting with a childhood friend and family. Taken in by them, he meets Tae-Ju, the unhappy wife of the family matriarch’s immature son, a slip of a girl treated like the family dog. Gradually, Sung-Hyun becomes aware that it is not only thirst for blood that his condition dictates, but other desires unfitting for a man of the cloth. He is sucked into an intensely physical relationship with Tae-Ju, the lovers bound together by their burdens of guilt and a tendency for self-flagellation and self-mutilation. However, desire uncontrolled is a boundless pit of immorality and Sung-Hyun’s life falls into a downward spiral of lust, murder and irreparable wrong. Before long the viewer can barely differentiate between the image and sound of bloodsucking and an intense kiss. When he is forced to make a vampire out of Tae-Ju to save her from death (what Edward will not do for Bella, yawn), Sung-Hyun creates a vampire with no morals and no curbs, the ultimate beast.

Park’s wonky morality play is clear in its Biblical moorings: the danger of forbidden fruit, the Christ-like ideal of self-abnegation, the fine-line between suicide and self-martyrdom. The breathtaking ending of the film (I won’t give anything away) completely catharsizes the viewer’s and Sung-Hyun’s immense burden of guilt. In a film about a man of God, oddly, God is nowhere to be seen in this black comic world of talking ghosts, corpse-filled cupboards and blinking stroke-victims. Ultimately it is the protagonist who must administer his own judgement and punishment. We are suitably chastened, Mr. Park. We get your message.

As the priest says in an early confession scene: “Say ten ‘Hail Mary’s, take a cold shower and forget the bastard who dumped you.”

Want, Want, Want

2009-11-04T16:33:00.004+05:30

I fell to shocked silence when the glorious past master of austerity, the bred and born national party spokesperson, the grassroots Comrade classmate who had always made my branded clothes itch and my 50-Rupee coffee taste sour, offered me a ride home in his brand new Chevrolet model. He punctured the accelerator with his scruffy new FILA chappals, casually mentioned the arrival tomorrow of a new home PC flown in from the States, and lamented the loss of his carefree bachelor life. A mutual acquaintance had warned me that Comrade’s rented apartment not far from mine sports a quality home theatre system, washing machine, and sundry other unaffordables for the beginners-level government servant. We, neither of us, yet have a permanent job, so we discussed imminent scope for improvement. As Comrade squeezed my arm and begged me not to speak of how we had aged, how life’s tenor had changed to one of responsibility and prudence, I struggled to superimpose this freshly-shaven face in a tight black tee onto the khadi-clad, bearded oddball I had shared classes with since 2003. A faux-colonial crispness replaced the once-Bihari cadence of his accent and when he stopped to buy takeaway for dinner I winced at the memory of how he had once to be dragged into commercial establishments for coffees and dinners, averring at every step how he had been raised with two pairs of pants and shirts all through.

We had come full circle.

Over time, I’ve inculcated a lot of false desires in the friends I love. I have made skinny girls plump with regular eatouts, switched second-hand lovers to bookshop vultures, pavement chai drinkers to Costa Coffee fans, and Old Monk survivors to Black Russian connoisseurs. I haven’t yet figured out the what and why of these compulsions, but in the most modest sense possible, I must suppose I make the culture of consumption look good. I’m a sucker for advertisements… I haunt department stores for new products and read gizmo reviews on websites. (I may never buy any, but know enough about them.) I went to the mall complex I most detest on Monday, ostensibly to watch a regional movie but ended up feeling very much at home (guiltily), blowing up a government schoolteacher’s salary on the excuse of trousseau shopping and a choosing an American café for lunch. Most of the people who read this blog will entirely miss the irony of my predicament because they (you) work in private sector establishments and earn tidy sums that justify the high life. Moreover, their (your) work cultures are not a daily critique of consumerism and big spending, a life of dharnas and marches, Credit & Thrift Societies, rajma-chawal lunches and constant comments about extravagant sartorial choices. ‘Pay arrears are spending money’, a consolatory colleague offers to assuage my guilt. Still, I wonder how much of living in an oil-rich Emirate has really rubbed off on my otherwise educated mind.

Please tell me I’m not alone.

(Some capitalist music for your listening pleasure.)
Ingrid Michaelson - You & I
Everclear - I Will Buy You A New Life
Muse - Please Let Me Get What I Want (Smiths cover)
Vampire Weekend - Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa

Away We Go

2009-09-23T15:39:00.007+05:30

A married friend and I often discuss parenting. She is a strict mother of one, never reluctant to bestow an earful on her primary school tot, and once in a blue moon land him the occasional slap much to her husband’s chagrin. Her son has strict bedtimes, fixed meals and evening schedules, much like I did as a child. He doesn’t wait for his mother to get home or expect her back in time for tea because he has a nanny who takes care. So she has it easy, a working mom who can kill time out till 6 on the town with her single friends. Needless to say, she doesn’t abuse the freedom - she does the lunch-date only every ten days and is a dutiful and caring mother the other nine. Do you like kids a lot, she once asked me. I admitted I didn’t. You’ll make a good mother then, she assured me; no room for indulgence. The only difference between her son’s and my childhood is that my mother never did lunch-dates. Bound by the sense that she was somewhat neglecting traditional motherhood by working regular hours at all, it was unthinkable that she should spend ‘me-time’ elsewhere.

My 70-plus landlady doesn’t rue the change. What’s wrong with having time to yourself, she asks? These days parents have disposable incomes and easy lives so you can’t blame them for wanting to spend a little of it on themselves. I wish I hadn’t had to live such a sacrificial existence in my time, and I’m glad for my grandchildren that they don’t now, she avers. There isn’t the briefest hint of sarcasm in her tone when she lists the many fun things “modern couples” do away from home these days. I’m impressed with her attitude but partially critical. I’ve had traditional guilt instilled in me from the day I was born, my parents always placing the sacrificial parent on a pedestal. Only the good parent makes time for cooking and baking and churchgoing and tidying-up and tucking-in, I’ve been warned. And all that alongside a fulltime job… you could go straight to heaven, a wagging finger instructs.

Traditional parenting is back with a bang. In India, urban ‘open-minded’ parents who grew up in the 70s and 80s let their kids run wild in the 90s, producing a rather strange generation of disenchanted, uninteresting and unmotivated zombies. Twenty-first century parents are not going the same way. I have always wondered where the simultaneous post-modernization and neotraditionalist perspectives of our new urban tribe will lead us. Outstanding American director Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Revolutionary Road) provides us with a parable for an answer in his new film Away We Go. I’ve begun calling this film the “Pilgrim’s Progress of Parenting” - an unpretentious and funny look at where modish lifestyle choices and ethics have led American parents over the past two decades. Away We Go is an almost indie low-budget morality play about an average American thirty-something interracial couple, Burt and Verona (played by The Office’s John Krasinski and SNL alum Maya Rudolph), who are expecting their first child. Unmarried by principle and used to a life of irresponsibility and “leaning” on Burt’s parents, the two are forced to make some independent choices when the said bourgeois-boho parents abruptly decide to move to Belgium before Verona’s delivery.

So away go the expectant couple in search of the perfect cultural space to bring up their baby. For a couple of slackers, I must say they have a miraculous amount of motivation and money to fly/drive/move from hotel to hotel across the map. But then this is an allegory, I remind myself. They traverse literally the length and breadth of America in the pursuit of their child’s happiness, bound by a conventional set of values that they both agree on - Burt wants to be the all-American hands-on daddy, the one who’ll take his kids fishing and teach them to whittle wood; having lost her mother at 23, Verona only wants to be as loving and perfect a mother as hers was. With love the binding force, the two examine options ranging from Phoenix, where Verona’s best friend Lily’s loudmouthed part-Dr. Seuss and part-Hoochie mama brand of Southern parenting doesn’t exactly advertise itself in her discontented husband and fat, repressed kids. The next parenting model is in Madison, where Burt’s childhood family-friend LN (a typically wild Maggie Gyllenhaal) is a professor at the university. A typical breast-feeding, earth-mother hippie, LN supports a so-called “Continuum Home” - a bohemian touch-feel-share kind of family where blind radicalism and free thinking touch nauseating new heights, sending Burt and Verona running for their lives (but only after exacting revenge upon the Contimuum wackos). Next stop is a country away: Montreal, where Burt and Verona’s college friends have set up home with a full brood of adopted kids. Mendes brilliantly frames this section with the kids enacting a scene from Rogers and Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music, possibly the most unforgettable cinematic ideal of family togetherness in the twentieth century. In love with this home, with the fun Canadian couple that spends their nights out on the town, taking in Montreal’s vivid jazz culture, Burt and Verona decide they will move here.

In a cruel tweak, they are whisked out of their idyllic cocoon by a distress call from Burt’s brother, a world away in Miami. His wife has left him, and he has to negotiate the miserable world of single parenting all on his own. Faced with the ugly reality of broken marriages and half-baked promises so unlike their secure bond, the couple is finally forced to confront their only point of disagreement - Burt wants to get married but Verona doesn’t believe marriage makes a home. In a touching scene they finally utter a set of new-age vows to cement their relationship and define their ideal of a family.

Finally, the couple finds a home: it is the old ancestral house where Verona and her sister grew up in the care and security of their perfect traditional African-American parents. It is a house that breathes the religion of Burkian conservatism: rooting the family in landed property, in the comfort that only one’s own lil’ cabbage-patch can give. Mendes’ solution to the New Age dilemma is a return to the All-American Southern home, as earthy and voluptuous as a Toni Morrisson dreamscape. However, what I like about it all is that Mendes does not put down college-educated radicalism or the forced unconventionality of postmodern life. Burt and Verona are, after all, an unmarried interracial college-educated couple with modern ideals and a love of the good life. Their adorable quirks and oddities assure us that they are far from boringly middle class. The only critique Mendes allows is a disavowal of extremes. Love and the nuclear family, we are assured, are the only ideals that can outlast cultural change. A hazy cocoon of warmth and Southern comfort ensconces the viewer as the camera pans out from the veranda of their home in the closing shot, and we are trapped in their dream. Are you buying it?

Readwright review: District 9

2009-09-14T22:55:00.005+05:30

It takes some amount of grace to accept that some of the things you loved when you were young are no longer ‘appropriate’ and need to be left behind. It could be for any number of reasons: because you’ve grown beyond it, or because you realize it was politically/ethically incorrect in some way and you have to accept that it was okay to like it once but now you know better. For me, the Lord of the Rings franchise (and the genre of fantasy at large) represents one of those things. So while even now Peter Jackson’s gorgeous LOTR films set my pulse racing and make me weepy with nostalgia, at the end of it all I clench my jaws and remind myself that the politics of the franchise are horrendously inappropriate and there is something irksome about the little hobbit-like New Zealander who even as a grown man believed in Tolkien’s feudal racist world so much that he practically moved mountains to make his filmic magnum opus of it.

So when Jackson took South African first-time feature director Neill Blomkamp under his production house (Wingnut Films - ‘under the wings of a nut?’) to produce the possibly intelligent sci-fi film District 9, we should have known we were in for some trouble. Jackson was impressed enough to mentor Blomkamp after seeing his 2005 short “Alive in Joburg” from which premise District 9 develops. Shot in documentary style with handheld cameras and faux news footage, District describes a fictional ongoing crisis wherein an alien mothership has come to a permanent halt above Johannesburg since 1982 and has been forcibly entered to reveal an entire population of somewhat defenseless, weakened and malnourished aliens onboard. The aliens, whom humans derogatorily call “Prawns” due to their crustacean appearance, become a humanitarian crisis for the South African government, which copes with them by resettling them in a ghetto district within city limits. When xenophobic tensions escalate between human and Prawn populations, the government is forced to enlist the help of MNU (Multi National United), a confusingly UN-like organization that maintains a peacekeeping force and is simultaneously the world’s largest manufacturer of arms. The South African government palms off to MNU the mammoth task of manually relocating the Prawns from District 9 to a concentration camp-like secure area 200kms from the city.

Enter the film’s unlikely hero (even a half hour in, I’m not believing Sharlto Copley is actually the lead in this film!) - weak, gullible and naive Wikus Van der Merwe, a hitherto insignificant employee of MNU who also happens to be married to the boss’ daughter. Put in charge of the resettlement operation, Wikus innocently leads us and a camera team through a firsthand account of the operation, a military-backed exercise in discriminatory politics and hegemonic law enforcement, eye-washed in the legality of signing consent forms and eliminating protest. It is only when our hero is accidentally exposed to a precious alien genetic fluid/fuel that begins to transform him, by the hour, into a Prawn, that we finally get to meet the tragic character hidden under the amiable and chatty exterior. The nail-biting action of the film revolves around Wikus’ horrifying transformation, his cruel father-in-law’s attempt to pawn him off to MNU as a piece of multi-billion-dollar prize genetic engineering and the hero’s subsequent fleeing of the MNU lab. Befriending an unusually intelligent Prawn named Christopher Johnson, Wikus discovers that the fluid he has been exposed to is the crux of a plot two decades in the making to get the mothership back in motion. In exchange for medical help to reverse his transformation, Wikus agrees to help Christopher and his little son retrieve the fluid from the MNU lab and set the ball rolling. Only, now that Wikus’ DNA is so crucial to both the MNU and a group of Nigerian gangsters, both of whom need it to activate their hitherto unresponsive alien weapon stashes, the man is a most wanted fugitive living on the brink of social acceptance. Forced into an uncharacteristically selfish state of ethical compromise, Wikus almost crash-lands Christopher’s getaway plan, jeopardizing both his own future and that of the entire Prawn population. He must finally put their interests before his own and defend their escape on the loose promise of their return with help 3 years from now.

That said, even the uninformed reader of this blog will have his/her interest piqued. And here is the good news: District 9 is indeed unlike any sci-fi film I’ve seen for a long time now. Its docudrama realism and the absence of big stars ensure nothing distracts from its content. While it did not yield the devastating catharsis of Danny Boyle’s Sunshine (arguably my favourite sci-fi flick of all time), the fresh though shaky premise, emotional depth and gripping action were enough to make me simultaneously weep with despair and perspire with tension. Blomkamp’s humane portrayal of the relationship between Christopher and his son, Wikus and his wife and later Wikus and Christopher was piteously compelling in a typically Fellowship of the Ring kinda way, for lack of a better phrase.

At the end of the day it was exactly that that took the film off its pedestal for me: Blomkamp’s Chicken Soup emphasis on basic humanist ideals of camaraderie, loyalty and agape instead of probing the depths of the elaborate social metaphor he constructs. The director-producer team is just not up to the mature task of developing a metaphor. Because District 9 is a blatant reference to the notorious District 6 of apartheid Jo’burg - a coloured peoples’ ghetto that was forcibly evacuated after the government declared it a Whites Only area in the wake of racial violence. As alien films have always been, in my opinion, a comment on human relationships and not interterrestrial ones, District 9 does nothing to hide its thesis statement about racist intolerance, prejudice, international political machinery and social alienation. The Prawns with their animated body language and googly eyes look even more human than 1970s Hollywood Martians, despite the shells and feelers. At the level of extraterrestrial realism, Blomkamp’s clicking, Anglicized, humanoid, oxygen-breathing and catfood-eating aliens score very poorly. Their degenerating intellect, wasted physical prowess and penchant for hoarding scrap and stealing branded electronics are traits disconcertingly similar to settler stereotypes about the black populace. Shot in a former Soweto camp and banking on visuals that immediately evoke the racially-charged streets of Joburg’s recent past, the film is a bit like Tsotsi for Comic-Con geeks. However, what does Blomkamp have to say about apartheid? Does he posit a solution, or at least a soothing balm? No: he doles out equal parts of insensitive stereotyping and Abu Ghraib-like torture under the veneer of realism until he finally puts a couple of aliens in a spaceship and beams them up to Andromeda awaiting a sequel. The human-Prawn hybrid remains an exiled alien even from his reconciled wife, and nothing is said of what becomes of the traumatic resettlement operation.

If its rapid rise and then decline from the #44 position on the IMDB Top 250 in its first week to a still-phenomenal but lower #54 is any indication, it is a film that wows at first and disappoints in retrospect.

Three Meditations on Kaminey

2009-08-28T18:54:00.003+05:30

I’m sure you, like me, have had it up to here with the endless cycles of love and hate being churned out on Facebook status messages about Vishal Bhardwaj’s Kaminey. My more critical friends did not make the smoothest of reviews and it was only after two weeks of equal parts bouquets and brickbats and then the calm after the storm that I went to watch the film myself. But this post is not a review of Kaminey - I am not going to join the love/hate bandwagon or presume to speak of gangster noir and Tarantino. This is only a tentative three-part meditation on some thoughts the film set off. (Spoiler alert!)

Karan Johar’s Guitar

While I am no Hindi film buff I am not insensitive to the most obvious of archetypes, in this case a guitar that is barely ever strummed except in parody (touché, Shahrukh) but becomes the central trope of the film. In a lecture on Wednesday I found myself at pains to describe to a class of Masters students what exactly Jürgen Habermas means about the postmodern bifurcation between culture and social reality. Cultural modernity seeks to define itself as an irresponsible anti-historical and anti-traditional motion, Habermas argues, which in producing a work of art that sets itself apart from the past and yet prove itself a ‘classic’, risks detaching itself forever from social practice. He talks of the avant-garde and the kind of modish, kitschy pedestal it has set art upon, creating a cult of the ‘new’ and of the transitory - here today, gone tomorrow. Habermas joins American neoconservative theorists in suggesting that the only way this divide between art and practical reality can be destroyed is for social practice to reabsorb artistic production in some way, consecrate it to religion again, perhaps. Otherwise it will always remain somehow detached, artificial, prescribed an abnormal value and rendered incapable of social participation.

And here we have Tashi’s/Charlie’s/Guddu’s guitar. I was confounded at first by what the guitar stood for - Charlie and Guddu’s corrupted innocence? The antirealist aestheticism of a Karan Johar - Shahrukh Khan film? The Bollywood aestheticization of the underworld, perhaps? Or nothing at all. I’m going with options A & B in combination. To hell with ‘Raj’ and his faux-guitar, Bhardwaj seems to say; there is no place for Guddu’s NGO-working, Fataak-singing goodness in this world… and in a Habermasian tone, perhaps we ascribe all this singing and dancing and painting far too much cultural value. (Incidentally, Bhardwaj himself was an active member of the street-play society in Hindu College where perhaps he honed his originary Guddu-like qualities.) Recontextualize the guitar (no one can play it anyway), stuff its casing with dope and THEN you’ll have something valuable, eh? When Guddu first walks away with the guitar after his one-on-one showdown with his twin in the abandoned railway house, I thought the symbolism of it all would kill me… the untainted Romeo surrounded by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Also, thanks to the heavy promotion of that sequence in trailers, I thought that would be the last I’d see of that damned guitar. But no, it surfaces again in the final shootout only to be flung into a fire and destroyed. (Come to think of it, I didn’t actually see the guitar fall.)

Lady Macbeth, Emilia and Sweety

Where previously one could argue that it was Shakespeare, not Bhardwaj to blame for the misogynism of Maqbool and Omkara, in Kaminey there is no Bardic cloak to hide behind. I’m not sure what I think of the director’s street-smart, manipulative and melodramatic Sweety, a convenient cross between the ambitious machinations of Lady MacB and the rural pragmatism of Othello’s Emilia. In a directorial stroke of genius, the audience is betrayed of the much-hyped Sweety-Guddu romance. I waited the whole film yearning for a flashback of their courtship but was denied one until the closing titles. It was as though Bhardwaj didn’t want me to place my sympathies with the lovers, especially with Sweety. So we join Guddu in feeling wronged when we discover her self-righteous scheming: the pregnancy, the secret identity, the wedding arrangements and finally the getaway to Nepal. Like Guddu, we wonder how much more depth this character can churn up? While I commend Bhardwaj for writing such a gutsy and active female role, atypical in conventional Hindi films, I wish it weren’t so unsettlingly negative. When finally we are confronted with a brazen, machine-gun wielding Sweety who will even pull the trigger on her own brother, I am unsure how to judge her… have her genes won out in the end? Is she the ideal anti-hero? Or is she a Kannaki-like protector of her husband’s innocence and justice, bringing holy nemesis upon her entire clan? I feel most assured with the final option, and remind myself how unlikable a character Kannaki must have been, too.

Bhai-Bhau, Lowe-Showe

People in love are so self-absorbed and self-righteous, always filled with a divine sense of blessing and purpose and privilege that leads them to judge others so easily. People in love point fingers, scorn misfortune, condemn underprivilege and presume an advantage. What gives Guddu the right to take the guitar away from Charlie? What gives him the right to judge his brother? Charlie is no saint, of course, but he has been a likable character throughout, the dream sequence of his bookie-winnings justifying his every crime. Guddu’s impassivity irks me - and his self-righteous assurance even more so. At the end of the film, I wonder which value has been more effectively destroyed - innocence or fraternity. Sisters are wrenched from brothers, twins torn apart but reassembled, fraternal deaths avenged, partners killed, and mobster kinships decimated. Like St. Paul’s ideal spouses, Guddu, Sweety and Charlie are displaced from their symbolic families and replaced within the nucleus of a heterosexual couple. Amor vincit omnia?

Ma Vie est un Enfer

2009-08-27T10:20:00.000+05:30

It’s a little odd how in all my 6 years in Delhi as a single woman I never felt half as alone as I do now, when I am no longer ‘on the market’. I used to have this weekly plan: promise myself that I would wake up early, take the metro to the nearest multiplex and catch a quick lunch and the latest cult movie all on my own (because my girlie friends wouldn’t be interested). That plan ran in my head like an unwatched movie-reel for more than half a decade but curiously, I never actually executed it. Not because I couldn’t - I had time, loneliness, money and opportunity enough - but because I never felt compelled.

In the past one month since I got attached though, I have done the single-girl-movie outing THRICE. I did not plan these outings with much deliberation or foresight, nor with any philosophical or hedonistic intent… I just fell to them like clockwork all of a sudden. I’m not even sure there is a direct relation between the loss of my singledom and the inverse increase in my single activity. My significant other doesn’t live in Delhi so logistically my lifestyle has barely changed, I still have the same amount of time for the same number of things, apart from the impossibility of getting through to me on the phone at night.

The difference is, I realize, that you feel more alone when you know how it is not to be so. And I’m under more pressure to do something useful with my time. I never felt accountable for my free time until I met someone who works a 9 to 9 corporate job and lives on sandwiches and biscuits. I cringe with embarrassment at my leisurely existence of 17 hour work-weeks, TV Mondays, lavish lunches, drinks with friends and late-night movie marathons. Every time I have an unexpected day off (like today, it’s the DUTA election) I feel pressed to go out and use the moment, instead of whiling it away in front of the PC or the telly as I would have done two months ago. So, on the last DUTA strike I had breakfast, shopped for clothes at Janpath and watched Love Aaj Kal at Plaza. Last week, I took off early after work and took the metro to Patel Nagar to watch Public Enemies in a hall with three other people! And this afternoon, I will treat myself to lunch in CP while I read my new copy of Arzee the Dwarf and then catch a 3 ‘o’ clock show of Kaminey.

A couple of my friends rationalize this as the last single hurrah - the effort to live it up before my time is no longer my own. “That’s what I would do,” they all say. I on the contrary feel no such impulse to live it up before I’m tied down… despite having done everything there is to do in the book, I get the feeling my life is only going to begin a short while from now and I feel very sorry for people who think otherwise. They shouldn’t be getting married in the first place.

Not Another Love Song

2009-07-09T11:06:00.003+05:30

If you haven’t noticed, there isn’t a word of sentiment on this blog. Not because I’m an unromantic wet blanket, but because I’m simply not very expressive. My closest friends remember me as the silly one who’s always pining after some object or the other so maybe its ironic there isn’t any talk of love songs here? Not that I’m suddenly in the mood for them - very strange chain of thoughts here. I heard a new Jason Mraz single on FTV of all places, and one thing led to another.

So, love songs. Yeah, I listen to them. I have a playlist full of the mooniest ones. I have a special place in my head for some that at different points in my life have eerily echoed situational sentiments. It was only a little while ago I realized love songs aren’t all about rhyming ‘love’ with ‘dove’, that some positively ache with realism. And needless to say, my favourites are the ones about intensely psychological relationships, affairs of the mind and not the heart. On that count, my ideal love songs are ones about lovers who are friends and companions, not wildly opposite poles fatally brought together by attraction or that Romeo-Juliet sort of thing. I like songs about constant relationships, growing old and being buried together. How mundane! In fact tragic romances absolutely fail to excite my pragmatic heart.

The Weakerthans - Night Windows (for the undying old flame)

Colbie Caillat - Realize

Ra Ra Riot - Can You Tell (if close to missing the bus)

Dave Matthews Band - Baby Blue

Death Cab For Cutie - I Will Follow You Into The Dark

The Frames - Lay Me Down (‘grow old with me’ songs)

Jack Johnson - Better Together (for the easygoing friends)

Regina Spektor - Fidelity (for the newly in love)

Lily Allen - Who’d’ve Known

Norah Jones - What Am I To You? (for the happily in love)

The Verve - Sonnet (for the cynic in love)

Coldplay - Fix You

Incubus - Love Hurts (for the dogged optimist)

Sting - Mad About You

Tori Amos - A Sorta Fairytale (for the dreamer)

Muse - Unintended (for the egotistic dreamer)

Athlete - Half Light (for the next chance meeting)

Bjork - Hyperballad (for the sacrificial wife)

Bush - Glycerine (for the drama queen)

Vampire Weekend - Campus (for the your favourite teacher, before you graduate)

Slipknot - Vermilion, Pt.2 (for the obsessive psycho)

Rufus Wainwright - Hallelujah (but of course, Leonard Cohen needs no explanation)

Adele - Chasing Pavements (for the embittered single woman)

Take That - Patience (for the rebound)

The Stills - Retour A Vega

Malajube - Étienne d’Août (when the end is nigh, if lost in translation)

Punjabi MC feat. Surinder Shinda - Mirza (what? a list without a Punjabi song?)

Call - Sab Bhula Kai (and no Paki rock?)

But the undisputed King of the love song for me, has to be Jason Mraz.

You & I Both

I’m Yours

Lucky (feat. Colbie Caillat)

If It Kills Me

All I Want For Christmas Is Us (feat. Tristan Prettyman)

And of course, no love lasts forever. So for when it’s over:

Glen Hansard - All The Way Down (Damn you, heartbreaker!)

The Streets - Dry Your Eyes (Forget it mate, it’s over)

Kanye West ft. John Legend - Used To Love You (and screw her, anyway;)

Sara Bareilles - Love Song (I’m stronger than all this blah.)

When Discipline Is Bliss

2009-07-08T10:09:00.003+05:30

Boarding school, with its ‘study time’/ ‘prayer time’/ ‘free time’ demarcations, its mess hall bells and sky-blue bedspreads, was heaven. Little me even spent two years as the designated bell-ringer - up at the dot of 05:29 to ring the heavy brass clanger at the end of the middle dorm hallway. I revel in schedule, in routines ticked to a rigid clock. In my happiest hours, I am rule-bound and pre-planned. I am the demon author of every time-planning self-help book every written.

In the past two years though, past the prime of academic rigor and working the laziest job on earth, I have forgotten what a disciplined schedule was like. I wake up at a different time most days, thanks to an irregular timetable at work, and get back from work at a different time each day, sending my maid into a tizzy. Dependent on my own kitchen, mealtimes begin to radically shift (dinner at 11pm? Horror!) and global standards of ‘morning’, ‘afternoon’ and ‘evening’ started to lose their meaning as well. On an occasional gloomy day, I can even be found napping in the afternoon, a habit I studiously avoided all my life to make more time for my hobbies.

Hobbies? What are they? I haven’t written anything meaningful, sketched or sewn or sung or whatever in ages. I have entirely lost my reading habit - to such an extent that I hadn’t even finished reading one of the novels I taught until the end of the term… unbeknownst to my poor students. (Pssst… don’t tell.) I look back at my glorious high school and college years - all the activities I busied myself with - and I am appalled at my lack of motivation now. To think that I once sang in a choir, went to every cultural event that required talking skills, designed stage costumes and fashion things, cartooned and crafted and drew my fingers numb - even played guitar so hard my fingers bled. My brother gave me 3000 bucks when he first started working (which was ages ago) so that I could buy myself a guitar and seriously learn to play (I carry on with some self-taught hack-work). He has gotten a raise, gotten married and settled, and I still don’t have a guitar.

I miss being a student. Talking to a friend who has extended her degree by a couple of years to accommodate a procrastinatory and itinerant lifestyle, I realized how much I missed the deathly toll of a deadline. I miss lectures, class hours and assignments. I miss late nights and word limits and seminar discussion rounds. It’s ironic that I now conduct seminars and lectures, demand assignments and class responses - and derive no satisfaction from it. I want to be ordered around, goddamit!

What or who is to blame? If you’ve been reading my blogs for years, you’ll notice that my writing skills have taken a beating too. It’s the films that are to blame - this visual culture landslide that I’ve gotten buried in. I want to do nothing but see and hear. My learning, creating process has hit a total block, subsumed by the dominant hegemony of a filmy lifestyle.

Memories of War - II

2009-07-08T10:02:00.001+05:30

It is with some embarrassment that I announce my absolute inability to write any kind of a war memoir that would do justice to the actual experience. Not that anyone cares for chronology and teleology on my blog, but because I promised such a post I feel obliged to apologize for its absence.

Perhaps in explanation I can depreciate my failure to some degree.

My memory has been colonized, Americanized. When I started writing the post it was all weepy and personal like a Diary of Anne Frank or something, but the moment I crossed into Dubai and the actual physical experience of threat in the city, my mind-screen started to buzz and crackle and spurt detached reportage. Christiane Amanpour, Larry King, Norman Schwarzkopf and George Bush Sr. floated through my head. I realized my personal interest in the war revolved around CNN programming (all local English channels were discontinued and only CNN aired in Dubai during the Gulf War), the arrival of American troops in town, and the oft-promised school educational tour of the Kitty Hawk (a US warship).

Unable to channel my thoughts away from this imperialist hum and static, I crave your forgiveness, honest reader.

Memories of War - I

2009-06-26T11:13:00.003+05:30

I put off watching my copy of Waltz with Bashir for almost two months. I tried watching it the night I ripped it, as I usually do, but something about this deadpan Israeli animated documentary-style film put me off and I shelved it for later. I finally got down to it last night and it set off a wild chain of thought in my head because this film falls into a tradition of enquiry into holocaust narratives. I unwittingly learned a lot about holocaust memoirs and narratives while studying for a paper on the Indian partition. My professor at the time saw fit to channel our understanding of how memory functions in the aftermath of conflict via a pile of literary criticism on ‘Shoah’ narratives. At the end of it I ended up far more interested in the Shoah than the partition of India. I grew detached and cynical in class and wrote piles of unnecessary response notes on the holocaust material until finally my professor wanted to know what had gotten my goat. It was simply that I couldn’t identify, I confessed. The other thirteen people in the class all had some personal connect with Partition, either as Punjabis or Delhiites or Bengalis… I had nothing. It was a historical event that barely touched my life except for the annoying patriotic fervor it generated during cricket matches. Growing up around Pakistanis, I had never felt the keen sense of divide people at home do. And thanks to my childhood insulation from Indian film and television, I had barely any cultural link to Partition either. In fact my entire point of reference for the Partition till then had revolved solely around Attenborough’s Gandhi and a couple of televised miniseries of The Jewel in the Crown and Mountbatten.

But I digress; I was talking about Waltz with Bashir. I’m not too far from my point. Bashir is a film about a former Israeli soldier trying to fill a blank in his memory about a massacre he witnessed during the Israeli offensive against Lebanon in 1982. The director/narrator draws a lot of parallels between the entrenched Jewish memory of the Holocaust and his own experience in Lebanon. Only here, the guilt is reversed onto himself. You’ve unwittingly taken on the Nazi perspective, his friend psychologizes, and you’ve distanced yourself from the memory of the massacre because you find yourself implicated in the guilt. (That line reminded me a bit of The Reader.) In trying to recapture his lost memory, the narrator digs up a lot of old acquaintances and individuals involved in the conflict and quizzes them for details. That’s what happens with so many lost narratives of conflict, I remember, thinking of how Urvashi Butalia dredges lost memories out of interviewees in her Partition volume The Other Side of Silence. But the lasting impression you get out of all this research and solicitation of information, is that the human memory is at best subjective and gullible.

I realize this best when I think of my own memories of the only war I’ve ever experienced (albeit from a distance). I was 8 when the Gulf War broke out and we lived in Dubai at the time. It’s another exercise in detachment and surmise to recapture the memory of an excitable 8 year old. At its most tense moments, the Gulf War seemed like a live picture show to me - like living in a state of-the-art animated war museum where you can experience wartime life, tension and conflict at a safe distance. Our state (which of course like all GCC countries alienated Iraq and offered unconditional support to US allies) was on high alert and bore the period as if in anticipation of nuclear war tomorrow. Collectively, adrenaline was pumped as if all set for the battle of a lifetime that never came (hallelujah!). Thanks to this odd frozen tableau of hormones, my memories of the Gulf War are more happy and excited than anyone’s ought to be.
Some of those memories then, in the next post.

Meanwhile, here's one song from the Bashir OST, and a Rachid Taha track from the Black Hawk Down OST/Made in Medina album.

Zeeve Tene - Beirut
Rachid Taha - Barra Barra

The Britpop Bible

2009-06-23T12:57:00.002+05:30

I discovered this song randomly ages ago but still love it. Perhaps the best spoken word track of the decade?
How many counts do you plead guilty to? :)

Dan Le Sac v/s Scroobius Pip - Thou Shalt Always Kill

Thou shalt not steal if there is a direct victim

Thou shalt not worship pop idols

Or follow lost prophets

Thou shalt not take the names of Johnny Cash, Joe Strummer, John Hartmond, Desmond Dekker, Jim Morrisson, Jimmy Hendrix or Sid Barrett in vain.

Thou shalt not think any male over the age of 30 that plays with a child that is not their own is a peadophile, some people are just nice.

Thou shalt not read NME

Thou shalt not stop liking a band just because they became popular

Thou shalt not question Stephen Fry

Thou shalt not judge a book by its cover

Thou shalt not judge lethal weapon by Danny Glover

Thou shalt not buy Coca Cola products

Thou shalt not Nestle products

Thou shalt not go into the woods with your boyfriends best friend, take drugs, and then cheat on him

Thou shalt not fall in love so easily

Thou shalt not use poetry, art or music to get into girls pants...

...use it to get into their heads.

Thou shalt not watch Hollyoaks

Thou shalt not attend an open mic and leave as soon as you've done your shitty little poem or song, you self-righteous prick.

Thou shalt not return to the same club or bar, week in, week out Because you once saw a girl there that you fancied; that you're never gonna fucking talk to.

Thou shalt not put musicians and recording artists on ridiculous pedestals.

No matter how great they are, or were.

The Beatles were just a band.

Led Zeppelin , just a band.

The Beach Boys , just a band..

The Sex Pistols , just a band.

The Clash , just a band.

Crass , just a band.

Minor Threat , just a band.

The Cure , just a band.

The Smiths , just a band.

Nirvana , just a band.

The Pixies, just a band.

Oasis , just a band.

Radiohead , just a band.

Bloc Party , just a band.

The Arctic Monkeys, just a band.

"The next big thing", just a band.

Thou shalt not give bad word to tragedies that occur in non-English speaking countries as to those in English speaking countries.

Thou shalt remember that guns, bitches and bling were never part of the 4 elements and never will be.

Thou shalt not make repetitive, generic music x4

Thou shalt not Pimp My Ride.

Thou shalt not scream if you wanna go faster.

Thou shalt not move to the sound of the wickedness.

Thou shalt not make some noise for Detroit.

When i say "Hey", thou shalt not say "Ho"

When i say "Hip", thou shalt not say "Hop"

When i say, he say, she say, we say; "Make some noise.", kill me.

"Ah, I've forgot were I was, hang on..."

Thou shalt not quote me happy.

Thou shalt not shake it like a polaroid picture.

Thou shalt not wish your girlfriend was a freak, like me.

Thou shalt spell the word "Pheonix"

P-H-E-O-N-I-X.

Not, P-H-O-E-N-I-X, regardless of what the Oxford English Dictionary tells you.

Thou shalt not express your shock at the fact that Sharon got off with Brad at a club last night by saying; "Izziiit"

Thou shalt think for yourselves.

And thou shalt always, thou shalt always, kill.

Get it for yourself it here.
View the awesome video here.

Passenger (dir. Ranjith Shankar, Malayalam, 2009)

2009-06-19T10:45:00.009+05:30

In my childhood I watched a lot of vernacular cinema, simply because it was freely available and my parents survived on video rentals. But since I turned 18 and went on to college and other things, I can’t say I’ve kept in touch. I can’t say I’m missing much, though. If the golden age of Malayalam cinema was in the 80s and early 90s, these days you don’t see more than two or three tolerable films released in a year. There’s a mixture of reasons for this downfall and everyone has their own theories. I’ve personally just come to believe that popular tastes have changed - Malayalis seem to prefer Kollywood formulae with quick romances, action cuts and dhinchak dances. Newspaper critics like to think the tide is changing. I’m always reading hopeful articles about rising stars of parallel cinema, or ‘thinking’ directors in the young generation. I haven’t seen much to corroborate this except the occasional Shyamaprasad film. But yesterday, riding on the wave of media appreciation and testimonies from friends, I was persuaded to go watch the latest film from Mollywood stable, Passenger.

Passenger is like 'The International' rewritten on a smaller scale by Paul Haggis. (Forgive my use of the Hollywood metaphor but I can’t think of a Malayalam film similar in format.) The ensemble formula, a la 'Crash', is what makes this film different. Unlike other Indian productions the script does not pander to the screen presence of its top-billed actors. There are no song breaks, no long speeches and no sweeping orchestral melodrama. In the establishing shot, the camera pans over the Ernakulam Junction railway station, tracking the steady rush of Eliotian office workers on their way home. In theory, if every film’s establishing shot makes a statement about the film’s purpose, you could say that Passenger achieves this because its focus is upon the average everyman. Its thesis is very simple: that the ideal hero is not the handsome superstar with big guns and an English vocab, but the average Joe, a humble anonymous wageworker with a family and kids who goes out of his way to take responsibility and help make a difference in a crisis. The Southern Railway is what knits this film together - from the initial scenes establishing camaraderie between daily commuters on to the more gripping events in the later half of the film. Bollywood films have paid homage aplenty to the local train as the lifeline of the city, but it hasn’t happened in Malayalam.

A middle aged wageworker played by Srinivasan (I forget his character’s name but that’s intentional I’m sure) commutes daily to work with a gang of trusty friends and even has a routine for falling asleep and waking up at particular points of the journey. Meanwhile, a smart young professional couple is having a sentimental parting at the station - the hep young wife, Anuradha, is a television journalist on her way to interview a prominent minister embroiled in a sexual harassment scandal. Anuradha’s husband Nandan (played by a very understated Dileep) is a top criminal lawyer handling the same case. We are privy to the televised interview, where a subtly aggressive Anuradha puts the consternated minister (a superlative Jagathy Sreekumar) on the spot. As events progress, Anuradha tracks the minister’s story and suspects his involvement in a bigger land scam. In her efforts to uncover evidence, she digs too deep by planting a webcam in his hotel room. She gets the shocking evidence she wanted, but is caught red-handed. From this point events tumble into a thrilling pace - a colleague is kidnapped and murdered and the hunt is on for the troublemaking journo and her husband.

Meanwhile our average Joe is late from work and has to take a night train home, the Guruvayoor Passenger. His routine out of sorts, he falls asleep and misses his stop. Anxious, he befriends the only other passenger in the train, lawyer Nandan. The two strike up a friendly rapport over some comic banter and teasing. Upon disembarking the train at a dark and deserted Guruvayoor station, they have just parted ways when our hero witnesses Nandan being kidnapped by a bunch of goons in a van. This is where the real action of the film begins, with Srinivasan having to make a choice to help Nandan or pretend it never happened. This is also the moral crux of the film - the station master plays the average social conscience voicing the prevalent attitude of the Indian majority:

- If you take one step towards involving yourself in anything, you’re likely to get entangled beyond escape. Nobody wants to meddle in the affairs of politicians and goons.

- Red tape will prevent you from achieving anything substantial. By the time you’ve rung up all the concerned police stations and authorities, the culprits will be done with their work.

- If you have no personal connection to the person in need, why bother at all?

The director’s objective is to show you what happens if the average Joe ignores common sense and takes a morally upright decision. Thenceforward there is no end, as the station master warned, to his entanglement. He must put aside his mundane domestic responsibilities towards his temple committee and family, physically take upon himself the onus of tracking down Anuradha, helping her evade the minister’s goons, and simultaneously save Nandan’s life and those of hundreds of people implicated in the land scam.

What I like about the film is that it ensures the unlikely hero’s marginal position vis-à-vis the larger events taking place around him. He is in a sense the anti-hero to the general norm and the director amusingly captures the quirks of daily monotony we are all used to. At crucial moments his wife rings up and demands to know where he is and if he remembered to buy a packet of tea. His mother interrupts his daily TV watching in time for her serial of choice, ‘Devi Mahathmyam’. Money is always an issue. So are transport hazards (an aging Ambassador) and phone batteries, just like they are for any of us. Unlike the Suresh Gopi-Mohanlal-Mammooty heroes we are used to, our chap can barely muster a few words of English or Hindi when required. And best of all, when the film ends he is not celebrated and decorated or feted by the government/media, but sinks back into his daily life of obscurity and anonymity.

How to Reverse a Moshpit

2009-06-08T13:22:00.009+05:30

So the most popular Malayali rock band ever, Avial, recipients of much critical love and nationwide adoration, were to perform at this brand new, state-of-the-art theatre, oh wait, ‘performing arts centre’ on the outskirts of Kochi. I kind of knew it was fated to be an awkward performance. Avial’s music is raucous, fun and fashionably left-aligned - hardly fit for a polite seated audience in neat gradations of VIP-type corporate MDs, more affluent fans and finally, pocket-money dependant teenagers. But no, this was not to be some sort of rowdy college circuit affair - the kind where you emerge from a moshpit bruised and sore, cigarette burns all over with a mixed sense of euphoria and annoyance. This show had everything from curtain voice-overs to a svelte American-accented emcee to the prefatory ‘memento’ awards and speeches. Yawn.

Finally, the band. The original vocalist, the ethereal-voiced Anand, has left the band and celebrity bassist Naresh Kamath (of Bombay Black, Kailash Kher and Bollywood fame) hasn’t been performing with them for a while either. They are left with the skeletal presence of three founding members and a stand-in bassist. Their DJ and backing-vocalist, Tony, takes over lead vocal duties. After a longish eccentric instrumental intro, Tony walks on to loud cheers and hoots. I can see why. He’s not much of a singer, but his stage presence compensates for everything - tall and statuesque in a white cotton shirt and green mundu, his bald pate makes for a fine silhouette against the stagelights and his body language is oddly calm and serpentine. It is unnerving.

The first half of the concert is mildly disappointing. Tony’s presence at the mic necessitates his absence at the turntables so the band relies heavily on prerecorded samples as backing. Amongst the clicks and whirrs and scratches of the artistically permissible, I detect the hum of backing guitars, vocals and other recordings. I’m critical of bands that aren’t as live as they pretend to be; it’s as bad as lip-syncing in my book. Avial has only one album out so far, with eight songs on it, and they stick to the softer tracks in the first half, obviously trying to build up a tempo. I’m not critiquing their musical leanings - their songs are awesome, the Malayalam folk/protest-crunching guitar formula works like a dream and production values are fantastic. I’m only mildly critical of how much songs like ‘Njaan Aara’ and ‘Arikuruka’ barefacedly rip off Incubus intros from the Morning View/A Crow Left of the Murder phase. At other points too, they sound strangely familiar, but I’ll try and think of it as a virtue.

Meanwhile, theatre authorities enforce a version of discipline on the crowd. The show hasn’t gotten too loud yet; the kids at the back have been singing along to popular songs like ‘Chekele’ and ‘Karukara’ but there hasn’t been any moshing. Thus far I have felt humoured by the band’s ease with the audience. I’ve never been addressed in my native tongue at a rockshow, it’s surreal. After the break, though, things take a wild turn at the back of the hall. The band breaks into its heavier material: the riff crunching ‘Aaranda’ begins with a voiceover of our much-maligned chief minister talking (which is a sample on the record too), and is followed up with songs the crowd has been begging for right from the start: ‘Aadu Paambe’ and ‘Nada Nada’. The music gets under your skin, makes you want to jump and hoot. All hell breaks loose.

The beefy ushers are forced to the front of the room, waving their torches helplessly as a human river of sweaty and maddened adolescents rush up from their sequestering in the back of the hall. Repressed young wannabes with streaming hair and beards neatly braided Kerry King-style let loose, clambering out of their seats and engaging in some hardcore ‘mudiyattam’ (headbanging :)). Even the so-called ‘uncool’ 30-plus get up and wave their fists and moustaches wildly about. It’s like a Shiv-taandam. The front seats have never seen anything like it. Uncles, aunties and MDs turn right round in their seats eyeing the revelers with some alarm. I wonder if they’ve ever seen headbangers before? Should they be afraid? In a couple of minutes, the ushers force the crowd back up a few paces and stand firm like riot police before them, permitting them no further. The cops are in before we know it and are waving their arms and lathis before the kids, forcing them back to their seats. My brother looks at me quizzically - ‘Is it because they’re political?’ I don’t know whether to laugh or be outraged - what are they thinking will happen? Are they protecting the expensive environs of the new theatre or the uncles and aunties in the front? It’s hardly Rojskilde!

The band is loving it, and heads into an encore. Finally, finally some energy!… the man beside me shouts gleefully - Idhu rockshow aado, rockshow! (It’s a rockshow man, a rockshow!!)

The Thinking Man's Yobs

2009-06-07T11:00:00.002+05:30

We likes The Clash. It’s nice to learn of an older band not through their own recordings, but through covers by bands you love. That’s how I grew into an appreciation of this political punk act from the classic days of anarchy in the UK. I guess the range of bands/artists that have covered The Clash pay attribute to the variety of styles and influences they managed to cram into their music - from hardcore punk to reggae, ska and wilder stuff like Arabic folk. (So you know where punk ska bands like 311, No Doubt and The Mighty Mighty Bosstones got their chops.) The Clash’s legacy is a mini-history of musical globalization, from the band’s own produce, to zany covers by non-mainstream political/community music outfits, the proliferation of Clash samples on dance tracks as familiar as ‘Paper Planes’, to finally band members’ own new musical directions. Here’s what I mean:

Far from just vomiting blood and smashing guitars, The Clash wanted real political action. They had a decided opinion, pointed fingers, took names and somehow got away with it. Take ‘Rock The Casbah’ for example, a reaction to the Ayatollah Khomeini’s ban on rock music in Iran. My acquaintance with the song is actually through Algerian rai-rocker Rachid Taha’s funky Arabic take on it: Rock el Casbah. Or take the anti-establishmentarian rant ‘Police On My Back’: I adore this adrenaline-pumping bhangra/ska cover by my all-time favourite Brit-Asian collective, Asian Dub Foundation, another radically politically active group. It leaves you echoing ‘…what have I done?!’ all afternoon.

Ok, so it’s not only radical bands that do The Clash. But it’s more than coincidental when so many of my favorite bands have: The Arcade Fire have done ‘Guns of Brixton’, Third Eye Blind put a pop spin on ‘Train In Vain’ and Ben Folds cutesified ‘Lost in The Supermarket’ for the 'Over The Hedge' sounbdtrack.

In his last years Clash founder Joe Strummer got very multicultural. He toured as Joe Strummer & The Mescaleros and I discovered a couple of their songs on the fantastic soundtrack to indie flick Bigga Than Ben. My pick are these two songs that leave you feeling very hungry: ‘Johnny Appleseed’ and ‘Bhindi Bhagee’. The latter goes on and on about balti, bhindi, lassi, dal, halal, tikka and god knows what else. Gee, all that politics left him with quite the appetite.

Internazionale!

2009-06-03T13:41:00.004+05:30

“This is the difference between truth and fiction: fiction has to make sense.”

- General Wexler, The International.

So what is Tom Twyker trying to make in his latest offering, pre-recession thriller The International - sensible fiction or nonsensical truth? In trying to write a sensible analysis of this film, my confused meanderings have led me into my third draft from scratch. No amount of conjunction and rationale seems to help me link together the threads of this strange film with grand intentions and confused execution. I’m beginning to worry that Twyker is becoming one of those overrated auteurs who has steadily lost his touch, or can’t hold things together.

Still, watch The International. It reminds me in pace and setting of The Interpreter and Syriana, but in texture like The Bourne Ultimatum or Twyker's own Heaven. Revolving around a scam that is now a sort of pedestrian truth to a world in recession - that banking giants stimulate world conflict (by supplying cheap small arms) in order to control the production of global debt - the film spins a well-paced tale of the righteous crusade of one man against the global financial conglomerate and its underhand dealings. But that is exactly the problem with this story, a failure that Twyker’s plot acknowledges, studies and resolves on its own - can a true-hearted individual with a system of ethics single-handedly change the world?

Apparently, no. This is what confuses me most about The International, that Twyker should use such a complex, grand platform - a global debt scandal, an arms deal, Interpol agents, assassinations, multiple locations - to philosophize about the postmodern existential crisis of the single male hero. As the film gets on you realize that the precipitating financial crisis is not the real focus here but the individual commitment and efforts of Agent Salinger, played by thriller-standard Clive Owen. He must gradually detach himself from the Interpol and his closest associate (Naomi Watts) to carry out his ideal of justice on his own. But that ideal, you are told, is an outdated illusion from the past - a socialist relic of revolutionary change that could only work in a Tolstoy novel. In constantly trying to inject the cultural angst of modern guilt, pain and responsibility into what could have otherwise been a slick action thriller, the director gets all lopsided and sentimental. Assassins meditate upon Damien Hirst paintings (sorry Twyker, been there In Bruges), there’s a grand shootout in the Guggenheim (as if!), and a former communist general waxes poetic about truth, destiny and international law during an interrogation. And all the while our righteous hero is framed against these grand European architectural edifices of commerce - looping ramps, glittering glass facades and chiseled stone facets - as if to say you, dear hero, amount to nothing. In the film’s awkward finale atop the roofs of an old quarter in Istanbul, Salinger achieves his ends. But we are told it is to no avail except to quench his own blood-thirst because there will always be a hundred banks waiting to take over the space left by the one he destroys - and the financial crisis will spin on cyclically forever.

Hmm. In theory a very solid premise, a very real scenario, let down by some confusing maneuvers to keep the film as true to its name as possible. I didn’t buy the whole ‘international’ effort by the Interpol (with operations centered in New York?) to expose the ugly truth about global debt. (There is something persistently annoying about this recurrent Hollywood idea that only the upright Western agency/hero can save the world from the recession.) The avenging hero imported from Scotland Yard, the corrupt Luxembourg bank and its retired German communist advisor, the Berlusconi-like Italian arms dealer/president-in-waiting, the African rebel leader, the Turkish arms manufacturer… too much! And all this layered over with Twyker’s acute leftist conscience-keeping leaves you with a lot of lecture notes but no thesis.

On Catherine Breillat

2009-05-28T23:42:00.002+05:30

I had until yesterday seen only one film by French radical filmmaker Catherine Breillat, but there is a certain kind of director of whose work you need to see only one opus to be a lifelong fan. Of that mould is Breillat, and that first film was the searing, coming of age classic with a twist, A Ma Soeur! (Fat Girl, 2001). I used to have a thing for coming of age films; there was a phase only a year ago at the ripe old age of 25 where I would thematically download plenty of them: from the wilder Y Tu Mama Tambien or Almost Famous to the more staid Brit comedies like Starter for Ten or Driving Lessons. Then I watched A Ma Soeur! and it cured me forever of that peculiar obsession.

There are a million reasons to like this film and unfortunately there are bound to be more if you’re a woman. Still, there is one simple idea that the film portrays that struck a chord with me because it’s something I’ve believed all my life: that there is no such thing as childish/childlike innocence and that the said trait is highly overrated in society. To most people who nurture some happy memories of innocence and childhood bliss it might seem stupid bordering on offensive to suggest that innocence is nothing to crow about. Breillat chooses to couch her reworking of the idea via a portrayal of heightened prepubescent sexuality and repression in the life of a young, overweight and unattractive little girl whose elder sister is not only attractive but becomes sexually active while they are on holiday with the family. To the viewer’s horror, the elder girl drags her sister along as ‘cover’ while she gallivants with her new Italian boyfriend and even loses her virginity to him in the same bedroom where her sister is pretending to sleep and ignore the hubbub. I don’t want to give the game away, but the emphasis is on the psychological torture this experience inflicts on the younger girl - not because her sexual innocence is being shattered, but because stuck within her unripe, ugly body is a young woman bursting to emerge, to have everything and more that her sister and mother and other women seem to enjoy.

It always sounds worse than it is when you talk about a film you like, but failure to synopsize apart, I love how the film ends, in a violent, shocking, gruesome and completely unexpected triumph for the younger sister. What shocked me more than the finale though was the way I reacted or failed to react to it. I suppose that is Breillat’s masterstroke in the film - to envelop the viewer so wholly I the psyche of the young girl that when she gets her victory, no matter how horrific it is, you guiltily celebrate it with her. And at that moment you turn around and wonder what your response says about you as an individual - what exactly am I celebrating here?

My second Breillat film (which I watched only today) is a more recent one: Une Vieille Maitresse (The Last Mistress, 2007). It’s hasn’t got a patch on the brilliance of A Ma Soeur! but it’s not a bad film. As usual, Breillat being one of France’s most prominent contemporary feminists, the film is definitely female-centric even though the narrator of the inset story is the male protagonist. It’s also very different from the other in that it’s a period film, an adaptation of a novel set in the nineteenth century among the Parisian aristocracy. It tells the tale of the tortured and complex relationship between a renowned Casanova and his ten year mistress, and the ensuing complications when he falls in love with a proper young heiress and marries her. The crux of this film is the elusive nature of men in romantic relationships. I and a dozen of my female friends would fall to the floor giggling and nodding furiously at this mention while all the men frown, but, watch the film. Breillat frames the narrative with a bit of wise matronly philosophizing running throughout - how difficult it is to catch and fix the interest of men! Beauty, virtue and feminine accomplishment are definitely not all they’re cranked up to be since its cunning and ‘other’ kinds of abilities that win out in the end. How temporary is love and it bonds, how fickle yet inexplicable its loyalties!

In the film’s love triangle the hero repeatedly assures us that ‘love’ is not the bond that ties him to Vellini, his longtime mistress. They have been to hell and back together, vacillated between intense love and intense hatred, and yet that emotion is not the sealant in this tie. On the other hand he assures us he sincerely loves and adores his fiancé/wife Hermangarde, but in the end the wizened philosophés are right: he does leave her and return to Vellini. The plot seems fairly predictable and in truth so are the characters, the sets &c. This is no remarkable film, except that it bleakly confirms and consoles the fears of most young women looking for love. It affords no sympathy for either Hermangarde or Vellini, though you might expect it. Unfairly, it sides with its fickle hero. Like in A Ma Soeur!, you are forced to sympathize with the one character you would in reality (or in an Austen novel) more naturally dislike: the selfish rake. And like in A Ma Soeur! you are forced to swallow a truth about romance and courtship that you do not like.

Austentation and its Consequences

2009-04-18T12:49:00.002+05:30

This morning, I and a whole community of women all over this country must have watched a rerun of The Jane Austen Book Club on HBO. Not only does the film (like all Austen novels) draw you into this cozy sense of sisterhood, but in a little while I discovered that so many of my women friends in different parts of the city were sitting at home sipping their Saturday tea and watching the film as well. And we all, each one of us, pasted the image of ourselves onto each of the characters and sighed the morning away.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that if only as many men as women read Austen’s novels, the world would be a lovelier place. And this is exactly the idea behind this little delight of a film. It never ceases to amaze me how generations of women have seen their lives and the characters of their respective objects of affection written into the people that roam the pages of every Austen novel. I taught Pride and Prejudice to college freshers the past two years and it is positively astounding how almost every single girl in class could see herself and her life through the eyes of an Elizabeth Bennet or, if sterner, a Charlotte Lucas. While in more progressive societies the ‘arrangement’ of marriages in Austen might seem the only distanced contrivance, to the average Indian woman reader, even that can sting with reality like no Bollywood film ever could.

Nor as with other women’s novels is it the case here that Austen only appeals to a certain age/phase of women readers - there is a universality to Austen that can only be described as a phenomenon. But in the midst of all of this, I reiterate the point that the film had to make… if only our men were reading Austen too! I guess it’s too late for me now to know firsthand whether men who have read Austen in college or school make better boyfriends - shall just have to ask students about that! As we watched the film, my friends and I frantically texted each other over ad breaks: ‘Who’s your favourite Austen heroine?’, ‘Don’t you just hate Fanny Price?’ &c. And it goes without saying that we all see the men in our lives as particular versions of Darcys, Bingleys, Tilneys, Willoughbys and Wentworths. I suppose for the majority of women Darcy seems the most compelling parallel and I’m sure I could write up a whole thesis about how that just goes to show that men are still so superior and detached in patriarchal courtship. (It could be depressing.) But the question to be asked is whether our Darcys would stop being so high and mighty if they actually read the book?

‘But Austen never tells you about what happens after the wedding,’ a character in the film complains. ‘Maybe Elizabeth and Darcy hated each.’ Fair enough. Austen will only see you to the church door if you’re taking her principles for gospel truth.

For the aftermath, you’ll have to watch Revolutionary Road or read Sylvia Plath.