Indian Writing

Devyani Onial on some of the things she heard while visiting Imrana’s home in Muzaffarnagar last year:

One neighbour, a woman: “Don’t ask me, I am a Tyagi and that woman is a Qureishi — kasai (butcher)… Imrana’s family is Ansari — julaha (weavers), so how should we know anything about them.”

Another neighbour, Dr Mohd Hanif Tyagi: “It’s basically a property dispute. She and her husband Noor Ilahi wanted to sell this house but her in-laws didn’t want that. She has framed them. Let the case be tried. If Ali is proved guilty, then punish him.”

The SHO at the police station: “I have been posted in many areas with a high crime graph but in all my postings I have never got fame like this. Now when I walk in the market, people point towards me and say there goes the daroga.”

I wonder when Farhan Akhtar will realise that there’s more to life than cool haircuts, Aki Narula clothes and neckties worn under the shirt (oh yeah, what was that about?). And SRK has become one big quivering mass of tics and mannerisms. At one point, when Priyanka Chopra is dabbing at SRK’s wounds with bits of cotton (aargh, I hate those dab-dab moments), she looks up at Arjun Rampal and seems to have a nirvana-moment: Wow, this guy’s sooo much nicer-looking…

Why the Munch painting (yeah, that one) in the saferoom, why the bullock-cart to depict India before Don’s Sonata whizzes by, why the sacrilege of refilming a song that can only ever be Amitabh’s, and why oh why this silly little shadow of a movie at all?

Farhan’s Don is one of the big disappointments of the year. The only good thing is that the people on FM will stop blathering on about Don ko pakadna mushkil nahin, etc. Oh, and we can hope that people (Ramu, J.P.Dutta, koff,koff!) will stop meddling with old hits.

Margaret Atwood on Orhan Pamuk:

Pamuk gives us what all novelists give us at their best: the truth. Not the truth of statistics, but the truth of human experience at a particular place, in a particular time. And as with all great literature, you feel at moments not that you are examining him, but that he is examining you.

Last year - not long after Orhan Pamuk was tried for insulting Turkishness - an Istanbul newspaper ran an article entitled ‘Who is Maureen Freely?’ Their answer was that I was more than just Orhan’s friend and translator - I was a shadowy master agent whose sole purpose in life was to win my client a Nobel Prize…

Novelists are the “babas”, the fathers of their readers. They are loved and hated, looked up to and looked down upon. This is a society which is writer-oriented, not writing-oriented.

Orhan Pamuk has been working against this background for years. He writes with great passion and determination, all the while endorsing, publicising and internationalising the Turkish novel. As conspicuous as his books have been, he himself has always remained almost unreachable. If he has been any kind of “baba” to his readers he has only been a detached father more inspired by his own imagination than by his nation. Perhaps it is this that triggers some sons, some segments of Turkish society, to attack him…

In my film, the cop was honest and so there was the fight between the good and the bad. But here, there are two Ravans, so how can there be a conflict?

Animals fear Diwali, because they are much more sensitive to noise than humans, and the loud fireworks terrify them. Stray animals on the streets have a particularly bad time because of the noise, the smoke/dust, and the junk left on the pavements.

Which is why I can’t agree with Jaitirth Rao when he talks about the ananda of bursting noisy crackers.

Noisy crackers are objected to by crackpot environmentalists who see pollution everywhere and deny that life on this planet is about joy and its pursuit. Varuna tells Bhrigu in the Taittriya Upanishad that the core of being human is not about the fact that we eat or that we breathe or that we think, but that we have the capacity for ananda. And what can give more ananda than a series of burning flower-pots followed by a series of red crackers going off and assaulting the ears…

Ananda must be noisy, rejecting at least at this time the hushed tones of patronising kill-joys. Let us learn to celebrate with wholehearted vim and gusto our wonderful traditions of gambling, baksheesh, lights and deafening noise!