Indian Writing

Have been offline, preoccupied with some stuff. More on that later. Meanwhile I just wanted to say how much I liked Anurag Kashyap’s new film. No Smoking has a cool plot, dark humour, great music, some nice Bombay moments, and an elegant performance by John Abraham… And it’s visually so good. Yes, there are a few moments that are over-clever, but so what. And mmm, I liked the Jesse Randhawa-Adnan Sami tribute to Bob Fosse.

I had problems with Black Friday despite liking a lot about the film. But No Smoking is very very confident, and very nice. As far as I’m concerned, the critics who have panned the film can go take a hike.*

*****

(Added later, now that I’ve found some time)

What I liked:

the open blue skies;
the hallucinatory imagery;
the distant, unhappy wife; the busty, all-over-him secretary;
the dusty dhurries, the dirt, the biometric screening;
the descent into deeper and deeper levels of the underground, like the deepest circles of hell;
the weird efficiency of the call-centre at the prayogshala;
the sameness of those faces - the taxi driver, the security guard, the man in the lift…

eating out at night - and outside the restaurant, meeting old friend Abbas Tyrewala, cross-eyed, wearing a hearing aid, and with two of his fingers missing. oh, and that weird drunk, too.

the memory of K’s first cigarette with Abbas.

Ae ajnabee…

the stylish music.

the murky haze of the sea-view from Worli. Avarsekar Heights?

the dreamlike strangeness of night-time Bombay… the rows and rows of car headlights, their reflections shimmering in the dark water.

—-

*As for the quarrel between Anurag Kashyap and Khalid Mohammed, part of it has been quite entertaining, I have to say, and it’sbeen good - or at least cleansing - to see someone speaking their mind in an industry that’s mostly built on dishonesty and vacuous smiles. But now the ad hominem attacks are getting rather tiresome and embarrassing, and it’s time for both of them to get a move on.

The 80-year old elephant at Rajaji National Park, Uttarakhand, has been in pain after a multiple fracture and is due to be euthanised very soon. A sad end, but it’s the right thing to do, to put her out of pain. More here, here and here.

Update: Arundhati succumbed to her injuries yesterday.

Outlook has this Q & A with Ashish Nandy:

Will the loss of Test cricket be lamented in India?

We have lost the language of lament in modern India. That is why Indian creativity in social knowledge has been so cramped. Modernity can become creative only when you have thinkers like Nietzsche or Dostoevsky, who recognise what we have lost in being modern. That sense of loss humanises society. We Indians are only supposed to celebrate the gains of progress, not the losses. I doubt if many will miss Test cricket.

…

Why do Bollywood and cricket unite India?

They do so because only three areas of our life—cricket, cinema (Bollywood) and crime—recognise capability wholeheartedly and unconditionally. Unlike other channels of social mobility, these have no caste or religious prejudices and are least bothered about social background and polish. That’s why all three areas have become so important for so many Indians and have acquired a pan-Indian presence. They are the three most popular professions today.

Today, October 2, is the International Day of Non-Violence.

A poem by Wislawa Szymborska:

The End and the Beginning

After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won’t
straighten themselves up, after all.
Someone has to push the rubble
to the sides of the road,
so the corpse-laden wagons can pass.

Someone has to get mired
in scum and ashes,
sofa-springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.

Someone must drag in a girder
to prop up a wall.
Someone must glaze a window,
rehang a door.

Photogenic it’s not,
and takes years.
All the cameras have left
for another war.

Again we’ll need bridges
and new railway stations.

Sleeves will go ragged
from rolling them up.
Someone, broom in hand,
still recalls how it was.
Someone listens
and nods with unsevered head.
Yet others milling about
already find it dull.

From behind the bush
sometimes someone still unearths
rust-eaten arguments
and carries them to the garbage pile.

Those who knew
what was going on here
must give way to
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.

In the grass which has overgrown
causes and effects,
someone must be stretched out,
blade of grass in his mouth,
gazing at the clouds.

(Image source)

This three-line poem by the late Burmese poet Tin Moe. Reportedly, he later found these lines etched on a prison wall by an unknown inmate.

Cigar’s burnt down
The sun is brown
Will somebody take me home?

“Beware of any film in which an entire race and culture is turned into therapeutic scenery.”

“In any Indian film, many of the pleasures are tactile. There are the glorious colors of saris and room decorations, the dazzle of dance costumes and the dusty landscape that somehow becomes a watercolor by Edward Lear, with its hills and vistas, its oxen and elephants, its houses that seem part of the land.”

My review of Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People appears in Frontline here.

Earlier Bhopal post here.