Why Bob Dylan rules

...here's why. A passage (just one of many such) from Chronicles Vol 1:



"New York City, the city that would come to shape my destiny. Modern Gomorrah. I was at the initiation point of square one but in no sense a neophyte.

When I arrived, it was dead-on winter. The cold was brutal and every artery of the city was snowpacked, but I’d started out from the frostbitten North Country, a little corner of the earth where the dark frozen woods and icy roads didn’t faze me...I had a heightened sense of awareness, was set in my ways, impractical and a visionary to boot. My mind was strong like a trap and I didn’t need any guarantee of validity."



More on this later...

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Amu, and the 1984 riots

Watched a preview of Amu at the Habitat; this is Shonali Bose’s soon-to-be-released film about a young, US-based Indian girl coming to Delhi for the first time in 18 years and realising that the death/disappearance of her real parents was tied up with the 1984 anti-Sikh riots following Indira Gandhi’s assassination.



For the first 15-20 minutes I was convinced it was going to be a disappointment. The flaws were there for all to see: a few cliches about the "real India", a couple of stiff performances, a slightly theatrical set-up, some prettification of riot violence. But the film got better and more engrossing as it went along.



Something else I thought was iffy - though other friends at the screening disagreed - was Konkana Sensharma’s brave but misguided attempt at an American accent. Now Sensharma is a fine actress but I almost wish she and the director had decided to compromise on authenticity by avoiding the accent altogether. Not that it’s bad, it’s just very uneven - sometimes there, sometimes not -- and the bigger problem is that when her character speaks Hindi or Bengali she promptly lapses into a completely Indian voice, which is jarring if you’ve just about managed to convince yourself that it’s an NRI girl up there on the screen.



But even this was a minor fault. An unconvincing accent will at most times ruin a performance, but the young actress rose above it as the movie went on, so that after a point, it was possible to ignore the way she was speaking and focus instead on the character’s other nuances. She has to be one of the most interesting performers around and I think her career will bear watching.



Bose has an assured yet unpretentious style, and that’s sorely needed today, when so many directors in non-mainstream Indian cinema are preoccupied with being clever and tricksy. I liked the subtle use of trains as a motif, for chook-chooks have had an interesting role to play in the context of the "many Indias". At most times, they are the threads that bind the country, enabling people of one region/community to travel to another. But at times of communal violence they have carried some horrific associations - one thinks of the corpse-laden ghost bogies of the post-Partition riots and the moving deathtraps of Godhra.



Even when Bose over-simplifies, it doesn’t seem too preachy or forced. In the last scene, for instance, the Konkana character has achieved closure; she’s mourned for her parents, come to term with their deaths, and she’s walking away near the train tracks with her boyfriend when we hear an NDTV report in the background about the torching of kar sevaks in a train in Gujarat -- the prelude to the Godhra riots. But the simplistic (though not irrelevant) message about the cycle of communal violence isn’t thrown into our faces. Instead, the director gives us a long shot of children playing near the tracks as adults mill around the TV set and tension builds in the air - thus making a quiet point about the legacy we’re bequeathing our children. (Incidentally, some of the most striking visuals in the film are shots of the faces of terrified children seeing things they should never have had to.)



P. S. I was only seven in 1984, not old enough to fully grasp what was happening or to be traumatised by the fact that the "Singh" nameplate on the gate of our Panchshila house had to be removed for a few days (in fact, I don’t think I knew about that till later); or to understand the implications of the stories that men riding two-wheelers were stopped in the Delhi streets and had their helmets removed to check if they wore turbans. My strongest memory is that of our class 2 teacher Mrs Gidwani walking into the classroom all shaken up, waving her arms about like a bird in a cartoon, repeating "she’s been shot". I didn’t even know she was talking about Indira Gandhi until later, on the way home in the school van, and then some silly conductor was trying to reassure the children by saying "she’s only got a stomach ache, she’ll be okay" or something such.



P.P.S. One of the points the director makes is that the Sikh-stalking during those few days in 1984 hasn’t been adequately represented in literature or film - partly because many people in high places were complicit. Some lines of dialogue have been censored from the film in India - mainly where characters bemoan the apathy of powerful ministers. The print telecast at the IHC was the original international print without any cuts but with the "offending" dialogues blanked out, which meant that in the middle of an intense onscreen discussion, the characters would suddenly turn into Marcel Marceaus for a few seconds. It was very funny and very frightening.

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The Humourless

Was demoralised yesterday when I discovered a friend of mine does not understand Humour. I don’t mean the Laurel-and-Hardy variety, wherein the Fat One accidentally sits on the Thin One, and most people recognise that now would be a good time to laugh out loud, and in unison. No, I’m talking about that - alas! - rarity: Delicate, Understated Humour (which we’ll henceforth call DUH), the sort that doesn’t need to broadcast itself from a far distance.



Like the first sentence of a comment I posted on this friend’s blog yesterday. (Not revealing details here, though doubtless she’ll hang her head in shame on reading this). It was a black joke that derived its funniness (or so I like to think) from being stated matter-of-factly, unaccompanied by a signboard saying "Laugh here!" Why then should anyone be able to recognise it as a joke, you ask? Well, because of its content, which was plain absurd; it was like nonsense verse, a non-sequitur, a Jabberwocky. If the sentence in question had been meant seriously, it could never have fit in with the frivolous overall tone of the comment.



But this friend mails me saying, "Are you serious? What happened...etc etc." What unnerves me is that she’s very with-it in most other respects, and has a work efficiency that I’m in awe of (incidentally, I came within a couple of months of working directly under her, which we agree would probably have ended the friendship for good).



In fairness though, she’s not the only one to respond thus. Thinking back, some of the most intelligent people I know just blank out when administered a small dose of DUH. Now I’m worried because I often write mails in this vein to friends, and could this be the reason some of them have stopped calling me?



For solace, I turn to Martin Amis. Here is what he has to say about the Humourless:



"Watch the humourless closely: the cocked and furtive way they monitor all conversation, their flashes of panic as irony or exaggeration eludes them, the relief with which they submit to the meaningless babble of unanimous laughter. The humourless can programme themselves to relish situations of human farce or slapstick -- and that’s about it. They are handicapped in the head, or mentally ‘challenged’, as Americans say (euphemism itself being a denial of humour). The trouble is that the challenge wins, every time, hands down. The humourless have no idea what is going on and can’t make sense of anything at all."



(Having said which, I don’t find Amis - or his dad - as funny as many others seem to. But that’s Irony.)

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Big Deal, says Roosevelt

Philip Roth isn’t the only one who can rewrite history. Have a look at this front page from the archives of the venerable Onion newspaper.

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Robert Bloch, Lon Chaney and an elegy for silent films

Just read Robert Bloch’s short story "The Legacy" part of a horror anthology I recently bought. It fits the bill well enough; it’s about a film buff who leases a house once putatively owned by a famous silent-screen horror star and discovers, in said house, a make-up kit with a mirror that has retained the spirits of malignant personalities from old horror movies. It’s a creepy tale, it gets under your skin, and it’s by one of my favourite suspense/horror writers. So why can’t I shake off the feeling that the author intended it to be not so much a horror story but a tribute to a fascinating, enigmatic actor and – on a broader level – an elegy for the lost treasures from cinema’s early days?



The actor in question is the legendary Lon Chaney, known even during his own lifetime as the "Man of a Thousand Faces", an epithet that is only mildly exaggerated. Chaney, whose talents as a make-up artist still inspire awe today, is best remembered for his iconic death-head face in the 1925 Phantom of the Opera; but in hundreds of other silent movies (many of which have been lost forever) he played a mind-boggling range of characters, mainly exotic villains, not one of whom quite resembled another. (What adds mystery to the Chaney legend is that very little is known about his off-screen life. "Between pictures," he famously told prying reporters once, "there is no Lon Chaney.")



Robert Bloch watched The Phantom of the Opera as a child and was "terrified and fascinated by the face that glowered at me from the screen". It isn’t too much to speculate that this terror and fascination played no small part in Bloch’s prolific writing career, during which he produced a number of chilling stories that played off on real-life figures (Bloch wrote the novel Psycho, inspired by the true story of the grave-robbing Ed Gein, and his "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper" is one of my favourite short stories).



The frightening passages in The Legacy are the ones where the protagonist looks into the make-up mirror to find, reflected back at him, the faces of the characters Lon Chaney played in his movies. But anyone who cares about the rapidly-vanishing legacy of the silent cinema will also instantly recognise in these passages the voice of a true movie-lover:



"Faces formed in the glass – contoured countenances which seemed frighteningly familiar…some Dale had seen before only in photographs – the evil Chinaman from the lost film Bits of Life, the benevolent laundryman in Shadows. Then, in rapid shifts, the vengeful mandarin of Mr Wu, the bespectacled elderly image of Wu’s father, and a final, frightening glimpse of the chinless, sunken cheeked, shrivelled face of the aged grandfather. They formed and faded, sharing their secret smiles.

Now others appeared – the two pirates, Pew and Merry, from Treasure Island, a bearded Fagin out of Oliver Twist, followed by figures looming full-length in the mirror’s depths. Here were the fake cripples of The Miracle Man, The Blackbird, Flesh and Blood. Then the real cripple of The Shock and the legless Blizzard of The Penalty. Now came a derby-hatted gangster, a French-Canadian trapper, a tough sergeant of Marines, a scarred animal trapper, and Echo, the ventriloquist of The Unholy Three…a crazed wax-museum attendant, a bearded victim of senile delusions, a deranged Russian peasant, the insane scientists of The Blind Bargain and The Monster."



Though I was once obsessed with the silent cinema and read up on it gluttonously, I hadn’t even heard of some of these films. Reading Bloch’s story made me want to revisit Chaney’s filmography on IMDB and then try to get my hands on all these movies. But I know that’ll probably never happen; some of them don’t even have any existing prints.



The great silent films in the horror/fantasy genre have an unmatched visceral effect, precisely because they are so creaky and fragile; they seem to come from another world altogether (which in a sense they have), which suits the demands of the genre perfectly. It gives them a power that no computer-generated effects can replicate. Chaney’s films fall in this category, as do the films of F W Murnau, Fritz Lang’s great Siegfried series (I remember watching with awe the hero slaying an obviously cardboard dragon) and numerous other films of the time.



But silent films are also tragically fragile. Granta editor Ian Jack wrote recently of how thousands of reels of film are slowly decomposing in forgotten archives, and of "the unequal struggle to preserve and remember". Like the unfortunate vampire exposed to sunlight in the final scenes of Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu, the great silent movies are fading.



P.S. Love this coincidence. The latest essay in the fortnightly "Ebert’s Great Movies" series is on The Phantom of the Opera. Here’s the link.

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The one where they all turn 30

There’s the cliche about how, once you’ve reached a certain age, you find a member of your group missing each time you go for an annual class reunion or similar get-together; the circle keeps getting smaller and smaller. I’ve experienced something like that over the past year, and though it doesn’t entail a permanent passing into oblivion, it’s still disquieting. What’s happening is this: friends have been turning 30 with frightening rapidity.



This trend began in September last year when Amrita’s clock struck three times ten. But somehow it didn’t seem like cause for alarm at the time - I’d always thought of her as several years older, and besides we know better than to wish each other on birthdays, so the day passed without one having to think about it. But early this year Sudipta and then Raghu followed suit and I began to think, "whoa, hold on!"



Now, what once was an ignorable trickle threatens to turn into a flood. This week, Rumman travels to the Land of the Three-Oh whence one may never return, and I’m almost as upset about losing him to that dreaded number as I am about his more corporeal shift to another city next month. Worse is to follow; come February/March 2005, Ganatra, Ajitha and Soumik fall in quick succession.



It’s a comeuppance of sorts for me. I used to play this cruel joke on friends wherein I would call/message them the day after their 29th birthday to announce "Welcome to the first day of your 30th year." Some were thick enough, or in denial enough, not to get the maths: "No, no, I’m only 29!" they’d say cheerfully. Then the horrible truth would hit and I could practically feel the moroseness seeping in through the phone lines.



Now I’m faced with the likelihood that I too will turn 30 eventually. I feel much the same way as the evil rakshas Hiranyakashipu must have when he realised, seconds before Vishnu’s man-lion avatar ate his heart, that he was mortal after all. Or Macbeth, when he was asked the silly, completely rhetorical question "Knowest you not, Macduff was from his mother’s womb untimely ripped?" Mythology and literature are full of cruel tricks like these, but this is real life! Of course, I tell myself, I still have more than two-and-a-half years to go, but Time works in unknowable ways and before one can take stock of things the three-oh will have sneaked up on one. My aging friends all assure me that that’s what happened with them.



My one consolation is that I can now tell them "Congrats, you’re on the right side of 40." But how long will even that pleasure last?



(P.S. I've, uh, plagiarised the blog headline from a Friends episode)

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Rushdie-Dalrymple reading

Wasn’t planning to blog about the Rushdie-Dalrymple book reading at the Oxford Bookstore on Tuesday evening, but after reading Hurree Babu and Putu the Cat I thought I’d fling in my three rupees’ worth. Not that I have much of substance to say. Salman Rushdie, who I’m unashamedly in awe of, read out a whole short story ("The Firebird’s Nest") and I missed most of it, because I was more interested in roaming the store. Does that make me a Bad Bookster? Dunno, maybe book readings are an acquired taste, like scotch, but I just couldn’t get into this one.



Shougat, who’s as dedicated a reader as anyone I know, once sniffed that most of the book readings/discussions he’s been to had the feel of public masturbation. ("Look at us, we’re the Few Who Read.") I wouldn’t go that far, but yes, there’s something so personal about reading and something so impersonal about events like this one. And I’m not talking about the pretenders -- the high-society hacks and gadflies, the types who go up to Rushdie and coo "I loved The God of Small Things. Those are the soft targets; we poke fun at them all the time and I have no intention of stopping. But I’m talking here about the genuine book-lovers. Oh, sure, I know those who write reviews/do author profiles on a professional basis have to go for such events, and so it makes sense to find a way to have a good time at them. But still, but still still still... (Had a terrible headache at the time, so think I’ll use that as a temporary excuse while I’m searching for the larger answers.)



Oh well, the good bits now. Met Putu, who’s back in Delhi. We’re all such dour creatures behind our Internet identities. Think Putu the Cat encountering Jabberwock and you’d at the very least expect some hissing, snarling, gurgling, calloo-callaying, perhaps even bookshelves being hurled from one end of the store to another. But no, we just walked about, murmuring in undertone, exchanging reading recommendations, making half-hearted attempts at wisecracking.



Finally met Hurree Babu, whose presence always reminds me of how much reading I have yet to do before I can call myself a "books person". Strange to come face to face for the first time with someone you’ve had long, thoughtful mail exchanges with. (I was never a part of the online chat fraternity when the Internet first took off, so this was a completely new experience for me.) And when it’s someone you admire, well... Was unnerved, tried not to show it though.



Briefly met Rana Dasgupta, whose book Tokyo Cancelled is out in January, and who is being hailed as the next big thing. Putu assures me that he won’t be The Next Big Thing in the same way that Siddharth Dhanvant Shangvi (of "the air was bursting with tension like the belly of a pregnant male sea-horse" fame) was last year’s Next Big Thing, so that’s encouraging.



And of course, had the always-delightful company of Shrabonti, who, refreshingly, is just a real person, with no blogging alter ego attached (though she was mistaken for Putu’s Forebrain by some at the do). The cakes and quiches were good too. So I probably will give the next book reading a go after all.



P.S. As Putu pointed out, no Padma Lakshmi cleavage. She did look hot though, and surprisingly elegant. Rushdie (all shaven) was surprisingly White.

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