Time Out magazine - Jaane bhi do Yaaro on the page

From the blog of Time Out Delhi's Uday Bhatia:

The more one reads Singh’s book, the more one is struck by the fact that Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro may not only be one of India’s best-loved comedies, but also the encapsulation of the possibilities of a moment when a supremely talented bunch of individuals decided to collaborate on a project that seemed jinxed from day one...

Full post here. You'll also find a version of it in the new Time Out, part of a larger piece about the Harper Collins film books.

P.S. Yes, yes, I know, this blog has been all about the Jaane bhi do Yaaro book for some time now, but bear with me. I was in Mumbai for a few days - only just back in Delhi - with limited Net access, and have also been battling a viral infection for the last two weeks. (The Delhi chill and Diwali pollution have not been good for my system this year.) Not much work getting done in these circumstances; hopefully that will change soon.

The Harper Collins film series in Lounge

Supriya Nair (who blogs here as Roswitha) has done a nice piece about the Harper Collins film series, including my Jaane bhi do Yaaro book, in today's Mint Lounge. Here goes.

JBDY at Flipkart

The Jaane bhi do Yaaro book can now be pre-ordered from Flipkart. (They don't have the right cover on the site, but hopefully it's the right book.) Do send me any feedback you have about the process: was the copy that arrived in the mail eaten up by silverfish? Did the site charge your credit card twice? Did you find pages 12-24 missing, only to discover that they were located after page 54? These things happen. Do order, nonetheless.

Update: the right cover is on the site now.

A shout-out for Beautiful Thing

When you look at my life,” [Leela] taught me, “don’t look at it beside yours. Look at it beside the life of my mother and her mother and my sisters-in-law who have to take permission to walk down the road ... Every life has its benefits. I make money and money gives me something my mother never had. Azaadi. Freedom. And if I have to dance for men so I can have it, okay then, I will dance for men.”

When you have your own book of narrative non-fiction coming out soon, it can be demoralising to encounter something as good as Sonia Faleiro’s Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay’s Dance Bars – and so, as I read the first few pages of this illuminating book about the life and struggles of a spirited young bar dancer, my admiration was tempered by a sinking feeling of envy. But a couple of chapters in, the admiration had won out. This book is everything one might have expected after reading Sonia’s outstanding journalistic features on bar dancers and domestic workers (links to some of those old profiles here).

I’m referring to the author by her first name in this post because this isn’t a formal review and because I know Sonia quite well – but also because “Sonia” or “Sonia-ji” is an integral character in this book. She’s a friend and confidante to Leela, and what I admired most was how Sonia maintains the reporter’s distance and records incidents with a seemingly cool eye while also allowing us to see how close she is to this girl and her story. Beautiful Thing has all the vitality that you’d expect from a really good novel, in the way it brings alive Leela’s world – the Mira Road building she lives in, populated by bar dancers; the Night Lovers bar where she works; the overcrowded red-light district of Kamatipura; even a hill shrine where Sonia accompanies her – and the people who move in and out of it. It has a dramatic arc too: the 2005 ban on dance bars brings a swift end to Leela’s hard-won (if ambiguous) “azaadi”, putting her and many other uneducated girls in a position of dependence and potential exploitation, and raising some very pointed questions about the nature of moral policing and “social cleansing” in a country like India.

I also liked that Sonia has the discernment to completely hand the podium to her characters when required: there are many passages in this book where a lengthy paragraph or two is entirely in quote-marks – Leela, or her beautiful friend Priya or her self-absorbed mother Apsara or someone else, speaking continuously, and the author not interrupting with her own observations (the way a feature writer is usually expected to, to inject “colour” or “detail” into a story). There’s a recognition in these passages - the sign of a secure, confident writer - that what the characters are saying is gripping enough, that it doesn’t need unnecessary embellishing.

At the Delhi launch of Beautiful Thing, Sonia mentioned that one thing she always wanted to do as a writer was to explore every possible side of a character’s personality – to present the complete person, as far as possible. “I didn’t want to depict a bar-girl as being only a victim, or a customer as being only exploitative.” This book’s world is a multi-dimensional one and Leela is a bundle of contradictions: we see her as feisty and independent at times, emotionally vulnerable at other times; sweet-natured on the one hand, caustic on the other; telling herself that she’s the “luckiest girl in the world” because her (married) lover is taking her to Lonavla for a weekend, while secretly terrified that he’ll leave without her because she hasn’t finished packing.

Compelling as she is, though, one is never allowed to forget that hers is only one of thousands of similar stories, and the book doesn’t provide any false comfort. As a character offhandedly says near the end, “Leela may want something else. But who will permit Leela what she wants?” The question is unanswerable, even though the final image is that of a brave, smiling girl, looking her destiny firmly in the eye.

PoV 15: Sympathy for the Devil...

...or, why you don't always have to use a long spoon while supping with Satan. My latest Yahoo! column is about some of the cooler movie Devils.

Update: here's the full piece

A depressive, hung-over actor named Toby Dammit is being asked a string of banal questions at a press conference. He answers them crabbily; he looks like he hasn’t slept in weeks.

“Do you believe in God?” asks a reporter with shiny white teeth. “No,” sighs the actor, terribly bored and distracted.

“And in the Devil?”

Now, for the first time, Dammit looks animated. He leans forward, says “Yes. In the Devil, yes.”

“How exciting!” exclaims the questioner, delighted to have hit home, “Have you seen Him? What does He look like? A black cat, a goat, a bat?”

“Oh no,” says Dammit, a faraway look coming into his eyes, “To me the Devil is cheerful, agile…”

Cut to an shot of a girl, her pale face occupying the left half of the screen, leering at the camera

“He looks like a little girl.”

I’ll leave you to discover the rest of Federico Fellini’s atmospheric short film “Toby Dammit” (or “Never Bet the Devil Your Head”) for yourself. But the scene is a reminder that Satan, or Beelzebub, or the Prince of Darkness, is the most adventurous of screen characters. He comes in many forms, and He’s a lot more willing to show Himself than his opposite number – you know, that guy in the Other Place – is.

God, as a snarling Al Pacino reminds us in The Devil’s Advocate, “is an absentee landlord” – aloof, unwilling to have much to do with mortal affairs. But Devils are always around, always willing to listen, and the most genteel and hospitable of them all has to be the one in Ernst Lubitsch’s Heaven Can Wait. This witty 1943 film begins with the deceased protagonist Henry presenting himself to Hell of his own accord, for as a title card tells us:

“As Henry van Cleve’s soul passed over the Great Divide, he realised it was extremely unlikely that his next stop could be Heaven. And so, philosophically, he presented himself where innumerable people had so often told him to go.”

The appointment chamber of Hell is a spacious room lined with bookshelves, which suggests that the Devil (referred to here as His Excellency) is a well-read gentleman. Dressed in a tuxedo and sporting a somewhat pointy beard as a small nod to tradition, he greets Henry courteously and enquires if he had a peaceful demise. His Excellency is patient and solicitous. (He does lapse into a sly smile once in a while, but then nearly all of Lubitsch’s characters have a bit of devilry in them!) After listening to Henry’s story – the story of a life marked not by any major crime but rather a “continuous series of misdemeanours” – he weighs things and shakes his head. “Sorry Mr Van Cleve, but we don’t cater to your class of people here,” he says, instructing the elevator boy to take Henry “upstairs”.

Like every other Lubitsch movie, Heaven Can Wait is elegant and packed with clever dialogue. But it also has perceptive things to say about the human tendency to deal in polarities – in this case, the idea of a Heaven for do-gooders vs an eternal hellfire for sinners. As the Devil gently reminds us at the end, things usually aren’t so cut-and-dried. Even if Henry’s peccadilloes and philandering ways earned him some red marks, it’s just possible that Heaven has “a small, not-so-comfortable room vacant in the annex”, where he might be permitted to stay for a few hundred years before they let him into the main building. Why not give it a try? Why be so hard on yourself?

****

Other screen Satans are less urbane and less understanding, but they have a sense of humour and know how to have a good time. A great rascally portrayal of the Devil is in Benjamin Christensen’s silent movie Häxan. This is, believe it or not, a rationalist film (remarkably so for the time it was made in) about witch-hunts, but Christensen uses the Devil sequences to illustrate the delusions that superstitious or credulous people suffer from. In one scene, an old woman recalls her acts of witchery, including riding on broomsticks through the night and participating in a devil’s feast. But then the poor thing is being tortured by the priests of the Inquisition; under those circumstances, I suspect I would have similar “recollections”.

Satan’s superb first appearance in this film has him leaping out at a plump monk who’s studying the Bible. (If you watched MTV in the mid-1990s, you’ve probably seen this delightful shot already, without knowing it.) He’s repulsive to look at, bare-chested, pot-bellied and lumpy, waggling his forked tongue, knocking on boudoir doors and enticing young women into his hairy arms even as their husbands doze nearby. He’s also played by the director, and I suspect Christensen had fun in the role.

[If you see Haxan, try to catch the 1968 “remix” titled Witchcraft Through the Ages, set to a jazz score (!) and with narration by William Burroughs, who tells us in his brilliantly deadpan, gravelly voice, that “belief in the Devil was so steadfast that many people gave incredible descriptions of this horrid individual”, and that witches had to show their respect for Satan “by kissing his ass”.]

However, if I had to pick a single favourite screen Devil, it would be Walter Huston as the grizzled Mr Scratch in The Devil and Daniel Webster. This adaptation of the Faust legend shifts the tale to rural America in the mid-19th century, where Mr Scratch, with his little black book and self-combusting visiting card, makes a misfortune-plagued farmer an offer he can’t refuse: a hoard of gold coins in exchange for his soul, contract to be renewed in seven years. “And why should that worry you?” Scratch says persuasively. “What is a soul? A soul is nothing. Can you see it, smell it, touch it? No.”

Huston’s Devil is diabolical and charming at the same time, but in a folksy, Midwestern sort of way. He isn’t a supernatural figure arbitrarily thrust into the story – it’s possible to see him in realist terms as a roguish tramp sitting about on the sidelines, stirring people up – but the viewer can never have the slightest doubt about who He really is; this is exactly what old Lucifer would look and behave like in the 1800s if he tucked his pointy tail away, whisked off his horns and visited a farmstead. Best of all, this isn’t a Devil who turns sullen when his plans are foiled at the end: Scratch’s maniacal grin only becomes wider and he departs with a polite nod, as if he knows this is a temporary setback and many more triumphs lie ahead of him. After all, he has eternity.

The film’s unforgettable last shot has Scratch flipping through his black book, then looking up, staring straight into the camera, grinning and pointing at us, as if to say “You’re next!” The message is clear. In cinema’s early days, puritans would denounce the bioscope and the movie camera as being “the devil's instruments”, and in a sense that’s still true. Few other movie characters are this hypnotic.

John Doe, Mark Zuckerberg and The Social Network as a David Fincher movie

[Did this for Business Standard Weekend]

An early scene in David Fincher’s 1995 thriller Se7en has an elderly police detective named Somerset (Morgan Freeman) alone in his room at night, sitting up in bed, probably suffering from insomnia. A clock ticks ominously in the background. Later in the film, when Somerset and his young partner break into the den of a psychotic serial killer (known only as “John Doe”), they discover hundreds of notebooks full of incoherent rants – outpourings against the world and the people in it – scribbled in the killer’s writing. Still later, we learn that John Doe isn’t just committing grisly murders built around the seven deadly sins; he’s playing God, at least in his own mind; he’s exposing human foibles, and the world for the wretched place that it is.

On the face of it, nothing in this dark story seems like it could in any way be related to the sophomoric birth and subsequent growth (and growth, and growth) of a social-networking website. And Fincher – a director with a distinct, bleached visual style, who is drawn to gloomy, often unpleasant narratives – hardly seemed like the right person to helm a movie about Facebook. As a fan of his earlier work, I was bemused about what The Social Network would turn out to be.

And yet, within the first 10 minutes of this film, I felt the thrill that can come from seeing a gifted director take unpromising material and bend it to his own purposes. Without making a facile comparison between Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (this film's protagonist) and a serial killer, it’s worth noting that The Social Network is about a young misfit – a geek who has already spent a lot of time cocooned by himself in front of his computer, writing thousands of lines of code – who demonstrates his inability to relate to other people (including his girlfriend) in the very opening scene. Soon, for his towering achievement, he will create a concept that will captivate a generation (while also revealing some not-very-flattering things about Internet denizens). In the cyber-age, what better way to play God?

“What I’ve done,” John Doe modestly says near the end of Se7en, “is going to be puzzled over and studied and followed, forever.” He says this with the same emotional inexpressiveness - the same detached, "I don't care what's happening in this room, I can see the Larger Picture" look - that we often see on Zuckerberg's face in The Social Network. I have no idea how long the Facebook phenomenon will be studied or followed, but consider the warped interior life of Doe (who no doubt spends a lot of time talking to himself) and then consider the virtual-world seductiveness of a website where you can poke and share personal photographs with people whom you wouldn’t necessarily say hi to if you saw them across a room in the “real” world.

Social alienation and the attempt to deal with it – by trying to connect with people or by taking recourse in escapism – has been an important theme in Fincher’s work. In The Game (a movie that was in some ways prescient about game-playing in the online world), an unhappy, middle-aged banker is led through a series of situations that he believes are real, only to discover that his family and friends had played a carefully orchestrated prank on him. In Fight Club, adapted from Chuck Palahniuk’s brilliant novel, the nameless protagonist joins a support group for testicular-cancer patients (despite not being one himself) and later creates an alternate life for himself by willing a new personality into being. In the relatively conventional thriller Panic Room, the theme of isolation was given a more literal treatment: a woman and her little daughter are trapped in the “panic room” of their new house while a gang of thieves try to get in. Fincher even managed to take a quaint 1920s short story by F Scott Fitzgerald (as different a writer from Chuck Palahniuk as you're ever likely to see!) and turn it into a modern-seeming parable about a life literally lived backwards.

It doesn’t take much effort to see the lines joining these films, and The Social Network is a culmination of sorts for this director. A question that he and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin would have faced is: how do you make a serious, involving movie about the creation of Facebook anyway? Apart from being a seemingly flippant subject, this is history so recent that the protagonists are real-life celebrities who are around the same age as the actors hired to portray them. ** What they did was to turn Zuckerberg into an enigmatic cipher, a genius whose motives are never entirely clear. By underlining the irony that the young man who launches a billion “friendship requests” is oddly friendless himself in the real world – and that he betrays the only real friend he has (at least in the movie’s view of things) – they gave the story a powerful dramatic arc.

“Mark Zuckerberg is the youngest billionaire in the world” the film’s closing title tells us, but it’s imposed on a shot of Zuckerberg alone in a room, endlessly refreshing his FB page to see if his ex-girlfriend has accepted his “friend request”. The image is a pitiable one, but it’s also a comment on the very particular form that alienation has taken in the Internet age. With hindsight, David Fincher was the right director to deal with the phenomenon of millions of insomniac sociopaths staring unblinkingly into their computers, convinced that they are connected.

-----

** This business of celebs playing other contemporary celebs is very confusing. I was so muddled by the sight of Justin Timberlake as Napster founder Sean Parker that in a scene where Zuckerberg thinks Parker's girlfriend looks "familiar", I momentarily thought "Britney Spears?" (with whom Timberlake had a high-profile relationship)

(Side note: The Social Network is executive-produced by Kevin Spacey, who played John Doe 15 years ago. Not that I'm saying that necessarily means anything!)

Collecting trivia: actors and real-life characters

Just realised that Jesse Eisenberg, who plays Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, is a few months older than Zuckerberg in real life. Can anyone think of other instances of actors playing real-life characters who were younger than them? I have a niggling feeling that there have been a few such cases (and possibly a couple that are very obvious), but I can't put my finger on many.

The ones I have so far:

- Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford were both several years older than their real-life characters, reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, in the film about the Watergate expose, All the President's Men.

- Gary Cooper as baseball star Lou Gehrig in The Pride of the Yankees.

- In The Great Dictator, Charles Chaplin played Adenoid Hynkel, a barely disguised version of Adolf Hitler (who was a mere four days younger than Chaplin in real life).

- In The Boys From Brazil (an adaptation of Ira Levin's excellent novel), Laurence Olivier played a Nazi-hunter modelled on Simon Wiesenthal - who was a year younger than Olivier - but the character had a different name.

As you'd expect, there are a few close contenders from biographical movies about sportspeople and musicians who achieved a lot at a young age: in Fear Strikes Out, Anthony Perkins played Jimmy Piersall, who was just two years older than him. Then there's James Stewart in The Glenn Miller Story (four years) and Paul Newman as the boxer Rocky Graziano in Somebody Up There Likes Me (six years).

Any additions to this list? Movie buffs?

Update: just to clarify what I mean, I'm talking about actors who were born before the real-life people they portrayed.