Policeman, framed - an Ardh Satya poster

Around the time The Popcorn Essayists was at the editing stage, the great Manjula Padmanabhan gifted me a couple of posters she had designed for Govind Nihalani's Ardh Satya in 1982, including a close-up of Om Puri's weary, haunted face, done in yellow and dark blue. Took the longest time to get around to having the poster framed (apart from anything else I was petty enough to wonder if I really wanted a 4 ft by 3 ft picture of Om Puri on a wall - so much for being a Critic and appreciating good art, focussing on form as much as content etc), but have done it at last and it looks super.

There's a bubble-wrap around the poster here (will put up a clearer photo later), but you get the gist of the drawing. It suggests the inner turmoil of Puri's character Sub-Inspector Velankar so effectively, with the dark strokes seeming to cast shadows across his face and exaggerating the lines on his forehead. Velankar looks scruffy and unshaven - something you never see in the actual film, where he is neatly turned out from beginning to end. There is a poetic rather than literal realism on view here, and it's perfect for the character.
 
(And while on the art of Manjula P, here is my proud appearance in her comic-strip Suki.)

A comfort cushion

Had a decent time at Tehelka's THiNK fest in Goa last week, but the unexpected personal highlight was the acquisition of... this cushion cover.

The illustration on it was done by Sudeep Chaudhuri for the cover of the year-end Tehelka special I co-edited with Nisha Susan in 2008 (later published in book form by Hachette), and I remember how delighted I was when I first saw the picture all those years ago: Foxie was just a few months old at the time, and it was a lovely coincidence that the dog in the illustration resembled her so much - the posture, the long limbs, even the red collar she wore as a pup. (The resemblance became more pronounced subsequently, with her illness and emaciation.) It is still a source of strange, irrational comfort that a book with my name on it has this picture on the cover.

[More on the anthology here, for anyone interested. And here is one of the stories, Manjula Padmanabhan's piece about a vampire in Delhi]

A sneak preview: The Popcorn Essayists

What happens when you gather a line-up of established authors who don't write professionally about cinema and ask them for personal essays about a cherished film or film-related experience?

This happens:



[Click to enlarge]

The anthology will be out in a month or so, but here's a quick summary of what the pieces are about:

- How do you "read" a film, how do actors recapture the immediacy of their feelings when they dub for a scene months after the original shoot ...and other questions that movie buffs ask themselves ("Jellyfish" - Manjula Padmanabhan)

- A tongue-in-cheek analysis of a cult Punjabi film as a Bible for foot-fetishists ("The Foot-Worshipper's Guide to Watching Maula Jatt" - Musharraf Ali Farooqi)

- On dreamlike vistas, from Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill Jr to a surreal chase scene featuring Kader Khan and Vinod Mehra ("Perchance to Dream" - Rajorshi Chakraborti)

- How the Bihari actor Manoj Bajpai passed himself off as a native in an archetypal Mumbai movie ("Writing my own Satya" - Amitava Kumar)

- From watching Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire to reading Michael Cunningham’s ‘White Angel’ - how does the language of film differ from the language of prose? ("Two Languages in Conversation" - Kamila Shamsie)

- On the tumultuous romance between a man and his car in Ritwik Ghatak's Ajantrik ("Gaadi Bula Rahi Hai" - Sumana Roy)

- Why a middle-aged male author performed a Helen dance in drag after a public reading in Brooklyn (Manil Suri's "My Life as a Cabaret Dancer", which you can read here)

- Secret agents, suave detectives, fake ghosts ... on Hindi film noir and thrillers from the 1950s and 60s ("Villains and Vamps and All Things Camp" - Madhulika Liddle)

- What the silences in the Kaurismaki brothers' movies reveal about Finland and its people, and why an Indian writer should be so interested ("Going Kaurismaki" - Anjum Hasan)

- When you're starved for moviegoing experience, a Charlie Sheen thriller can be "the greatest movie ever made by man" ("Terminal Case" - Sidin Vadukut)

- On why being scared is a good thing ("Monsters I Have Known", by yours truly)

- A novelist recalls her time publishing a gossip-driven film magazine in the 1970s, steeped in "a Film Lok parallel to Indra Lok" ("Super Days" - Namita Gokhale)

- A writer who worked for the British Board of Film Classification on the occasional need for - and her ambivalence about - censorship ("The Final Cut" - Jaishree Misra)

And here's the video of the Popcorn Essays session at the Jaipur lit-fest, where four of these writers read from their pieces.

Updates to follow as the release date draws near.