Manil Suri's "My Life as a Cabaret Dancer"

The monthly magazine The Caravan is an excellent forum for long-form feature writing and journalism, and the January issue is special for me on two counts: first, it carries a piece I've written about Jaane bhi do Yaaro - the film and the book. Here's the link.

Second, the issue excerpts this wonderful essay by author Manil Suri about the "Helen dance" he performed in drag after a public reading at the Brooklyn Book Festival. The piece is one of 13 original essays in The Popcorn Essayists: What Movies do to Writers, an anthology of film-related writing that I've edited for Tranquebar. The book should be out in February, and needlesss to say I'll keep feeding you information and updates about it. But for now, do read Manil's piece, and watch his Bollywood dance here.

P.S. It's purely coincidental that the Helen number Manil picked for his dance was from a film titled... Caravan.

Kitty lit: Pallavi Aiyar’s Chinese Whiskers

It’s no secret that cats and writers are temperamentally suited to each other. Dogs are more dependent on human attention, needing to be regularly played with, spoken to and taken down for walks, but felines are moody and unsocial and independent - and hence perfect companions for someone who spends much of his time in fierce concentration, or sulking about being unable to write. (Ironically, though I was an unqualified cat person when I was young, I’ve become seriously involved with a very demanding dog at a time when I’m writing professionally and working from home. Not easy.)

Besides, as Aldous Huxley said, “If you want to be a psychological novelist and write about human beings, the best thing you can do is to keep a pair of cats.” Which brings me to Pallavi Aiyar’s lovely novel Chinese Whiskers, told in the alternating voices of two young cats living in Beijing.


Soyabean is born in reasonable comfort – being part of a courtyard litter that’s cared for by a kindly old lady – while Tofu is from a family of dustbin scavengers, but as kittens they are both adopted by a waiguo (foreign) couple named Mr and Mrs A. It’s a cosy and happy life until threatening winds begin to blow in from the World outside: animals are being held responsible for a nasty bing du (virus) and groups of mean-minded vigilantes prowl the streets, kidnapping unmonitored pets, stuffing them in vans and driving them off to a terrible fate. Meanwhile, the rotund Soyabean is roped in to model for a TV ad for a delicious new brand of Chinese cat-food. He is soon seduced by his newfound celebrity, but Tofu – timid, introspective – is dubious from the start:

And what was all that nonsense about “Chinese food is better”? I wasn’t a very smart cat and there were many things I didn’t know, but I did know there was something wrong with making a statement like that. Maybe some Ren liked Chinese food more and some preferred waiguo food, but how could you say that Chinese food was always better? Even though I wasn’t so interested in food at all, I still thought it was more interesting to have many different kinds of foods than just one type all the time.

The subtext is clear enough; it isn’t just food that is being talked about here. Chinese Whiskers examines many aspects of Chinese society – insularity, the city-dwellers’ prejudices against migrant workers from the countryside, the friction between tradition and modernity, the hard-edged materialism of the younger generation – but it does this with a lightness of touch that is sustained from beginning to end. Many people will see it as a book for “young readers” (with the patronising tone that sometimes accompanies that phrase), and indeed it can be enjoyed by eight-to-ten-year-old readers in the undemanding way that they might enjoy Enid Blyton’s Bimbo and Topsy stories. But I think it also makes for a good companion piece to Aiyar’s prize-winning Smoke and Mirrors: An Experience of China, which was a more overtly serious work of narrative journalism about the Middle Kingdom (and which also had an outsider-narrator – Aiyar herself – looking with fascination at a multilayered World).

Needless to say, the perspective in Chinese Whiskers is a very different one, but it’s insightful in its own special way. What more succinct comment on the human condition than these words of wisdom delivered by a mama cat to her daughter as they discuss the fickle ways of people: “Ren are as the wind. Who can say why they blow this way or that?” It’s a line plucked out of a children’s book featuring anthropomorphized animals, but the context for the conversation is an old professor who got into trouble with the authorities because of the dissenting views he expressed in a book. Even so, despite the hints of danger, the melancholy asides and the sense of a society in flux, the overall tone is optimistic and comforting: the story's leering villains are more than offset by Good Samaritans such as the animal-rights activist Madam Wang and the construction worker Four Fingers Fu who cares for Tofu when she is lost.

The use of Soyabean and Tofu as narrators provides a fresh perspective on such real-life events as the frenetic build-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics (some of the details of which mirror the preparation for the Commonwealth Games in Delhi), but it’s also a useful plot-mover: the cats understand what humans say, eavesdrop on crucial conversations and eventually help expose a cynical money-making scheme. The one very minor reservation I had about the voices is that both Tofu and Soyabean are fairly docile, domesticated sorts, rarely displaying the tartness that characterises the best of their kind. I wouldn’t have expected the caustic tone of Saki’s “Tobermory” from a story like this, but an ill-tempered hiss every chapter or two would have been nice! That little detail aside, Chinese Whiskers was one of my favourite reads of the last few months.

P.S. The book includes some beautiful black-and-white drawings by Gerolf Van de Perre, some of whose other work you can see here.

[Did a shorter version of this for The Sunday Guardian]

Q&A on South Asia Daily blog

It's nice to get intelligent questions that encourage you to articulate your feelings about the writing process, so I was very happy to do a Q&A with author/senior journalist Mayank Chhaya. Here it is, on his blog South Asia Daily: Part 1 and Part 2. Mayank has also done a feature story about the book for IANS, which has been picked up by a few media outlets.

(Meanwhile, since I don't want to inundate this blog with posts every time there's a new JBDY-related link, I'm putting all media coverage on the right sidebar as it happens. Do check if you're interested.)

The Good Times video

Here's the video of the NDTV Good Times interview from last week. Given that "Cut!" is an entertainment show focused on movies and movie stars, and not a books show, I think they managed to get quite a bit in.

Yeh kya ho gaya? How The Book came to be written, part 1

The daunting thing about having written a book on Jaane bhi do Yaaro is the number of encounters I’ve had with people whose relationship with the film is more intense than my own. Whenever I mention the book to one of these ardent fans – someone who claims to have seen the movie fifty or more times – they respond by pirouetting around the room and reciting entire sections of the script. They toss one-liners at me like Satish Shah throwing pieces of cake out of the window in the “Thoda khao, thoda phenko” scene. “Heck, you’re better qualified to write about this film than I am,” I’ve heard myself say on some of these occasions, only half-jokingly.

I’d love to be able to proclaim that this book was the culmination of a lifelong ambition to write about Jaane bhi do Yaaro – that Kundan Shah’s cult classic is closer to my heart than any other movie, that I’ve watched it dozens of times over the years and been spellbound each time. But that wouldn’t be true. What happened was more mundane.

More than two years ago, during a chat at a book event, the Harper Collins India editor V K Karthika told me about a series they were planning on Indian films and asked if I’d like to contribute to it. After my neck had recovered from the whiplash caused by excessively vigorous nodding, I began thinking about cherished movies I might be able to write about: an early frontrunner was the inventive, dialogue-less Kamal Hassan starrer Pushpak (which I blogged about here), and I also considered a few underrated mainstream films, but I wasn't sure about being able to sustain a whole book on any of them. (Sidenote: when I first heard about the movie series, I misunderstood that it was going to be a single book with a collection of 3,000-word essays by different writers. This complicated the brainstorming process more than somewhat. Writing an essay about a single film is very different from investing time and energy in a 55,000-word book about a single film.)

Then Jaane bhi do Yaaro came up during a discussion with the series editor Saugata, and something clicked immediately. I recognised that this would be a very interesting film to write about – with many potential talking points – and that gathering material on it would be fun. There was also the pleasing coincidence that I had watched JBDY just two weeks earlier – for the first time as an adult, and after a gap of at least 18 years.

If you believe in predestination or “stars aligning” or “the universe conspiring to make something happen” (I don’t – bah!), here’s a bit of information you might enjoy: three weeks before my meeting with Saugata, during a chance visit to the Landmark store in Gurgaon (a place I very rarely go to), I happened to see the Moser Baer DVD of Jaane bhi do Yaaro and picked it up on a whim. If it weren’t for that unlikely visit, I wouldn’t have re-watched the film recently enough to be really enthusiastic about it. Astonishingly, in the two years since that day, I haven’t seen another DVD of it in the dozens of times I’ve been to music stores in Delhi. You’d think this film would be easily available, but the only other DVD I’ve seen in all that time was Kundan Shah’s personal copy, in his office.

Of course, like most other movie-lovers of my generation, my relationship with Jaane bhi do Yaaro goes back a long way. As a child I saw it many times on Doordarshan, and of the many fragmented memories it were the last few seconds of the movie - the coda that follows the framing of the innocent heroes - that stayed etched in my mind: Vinod and Sudhir walking about in prison clothes, Lata Mangeshkar’s soothing voice (very incongruous to this scene) singing “Hum Honge Kaamyaab”, the sudden, strident sound of drumbeats, the protagonists looking directly into the camera and making a throat-slitting gesture, the brief shot of the Gateway of India and the sickening “thud” with which the film ends.

How those drumbeats and that gesture haunted me all these years! When my wife and I first talked about Jaane bhi do Yaaro, it turned out that this was her most vivid memory of the film too.

Watching it through adult eyes in 2008, I liked some scenes and performances a great deal, I loved the wackiness of the screenplay and the bizarre, unexplained moments such as the scene where Tarneja (Pankaj Kapur) sprays perfume under the armpits of a foreman (who beams gratefully as he raises his arms). But to return to my original admission: if I had to make a personal list of my 10 favourite Hindi films (and no, I'd never actually do this), I’m not sure if Jaane bhi do Yaaro would figure on it.

This is not to undermine the film, just to say that I admire it more for its concept than for the execution. I think it’s an important movie for many reasons, including its blurring of the line between Serious Cinema and Entertainment (which are facile and misleading distinctions in any case). However, watch it with pen and notepad in hand and you'll find that parts of it are shoddy. You can tell that it was made on a very small budget, in less-than-ideal conditions, by struggling artists who weren’t sure if anything would come of the endeavour. You can see the haphazard way in which it must have been put together, the last-minute alterations and deletions, the lack of options available in the editing room, the compromises necessitated by budget or scheduling.

And yet, this very aspect of the film was what ultimately made researching and writing about it such a pleasure. I’m going to abruptly end this post here because I’ve just finished an essay about the researching and writing process for The Caravan magazine. Will put the whole thing up when the January issue of the magazine is on the stands. So watch this space, and - as ever - look out for the book.

Memo

As you know, I've been busy with the promotional work for my book (and will be more busy with this sort of thing soon, because February sees the release of the film-essay anthology I've edited for Westland). This means I haven't had much time for other writing apart from my regular columns, but I will soon put up reviews of some books I've enjoyed in the past month or so. Among them: the James Ellroy-edited anthology The Best American Noir of the Century, Pallavi Aiyar's Chinese Whiskers, and Zac O'Yeah's Once Upon a Time in Scandinavistan. (The number of books on the To Be Read list is, as always, several hundred times larger.) Watch this space.

Muscular fish, invisible gorillas, and an anti-establishment Bengali writer

[More knick-knacks from my Sunday Guardian books column]

At first, Your Inner Fish sounds like the title of a “motivational” book – perhaps one that encourages readers to reach a zen-like state by emulating the placidity of our piscine betters. (“The Monk Who Sold His Sole and Discovered His Inner Monkfish”?) But Neil Shubin’s book, subtitled “The Amazing Discovery of our 375-Million-Year-Old Ancestor” is more stimulating and informative than that; it’s the story of one of the most exciting finds in paleontology over the last decade, and what it revealed about an important transitional period in the history of life on earth.

Shubin, an expert in evolutionary history, was part of a team that discovered a crucial fossil fish (subsequently given the name “Tiktaalik”) in the vastness of the Arctic, during an expedition that could be compared to searching for a needle in a haystack as big as a village. To the delight of the scientists, Tiktaalik proved to be a truly rare species, one of the first creatures of its kind to attempt the move from water to land – and this was reflected in its body structure, which included a nascent shoulder, an elbow and a wrist that could jointly be used to perform the equivalent of “push-ups”. Here, then, was a water-dweller whose fins were in the process of being transformed into limbs that would help it live in a different environment.


Later studies of the fossil would aid in the understanding of how arms, legs and wings come to be formed in modern creatures, including humans. Anyone remotely interested in the wonders of evolution – and in particular, the distant cousinship between human beings and other creatures (not just simians) – should make a dash for this lucidly written book.

(Among my other favourite books about evolution: Richard Dawkins' Climbing Mount Improbable, The Blind Watchmaker and The Ancestor's Tale)

****

The Golden Gandhi Statue from America, an English translation of short stories by the anti-establishment Bengali writer Subimal Misra, comes accompanied by daunting publicity. Blurbs by Amit Chaudhuri and Ruchir Joshi tell us that Misra is “one of the unsung heroes of contemporary Indian fiction” and a “path-breaking modernist pushing the boundaries of form and language”. Then there’s the book’s lengthy “P.S.” section – a literary equivalent of DVD Extras – where Misra discusses himself, explaining that his writing “has the capability to challenge world literature”, that he “feels humiliated to be in the line of litterateurs like Rabindranath Tagore”, and that he tries to bring Eisenstein’s montage technique of cinema to his writing. His ideal writer, he says, "is only Subimal Misra", though he does also like to read Joyce, Kafka, Proust and de Sade. And oh yes, his favourite book is Finnegans Wake. Who would have guessed it?

If you can bring yourself to read the actual stories after encountering all this bombast, there is much here of interest. The translator, V Ramaswamy, has done a good job of capturing Misra’s fragmented, abstract prose, which couldn’t have been an easy task. Despite Misra’s anti-narrative claims, there is a narrative arc of sorts in many of these tales, such as “Times, Bad Times”, about an anti-social drifter contemplating going to the wedding of a former girlfriend. Other, viscerally chilling pieces include “Fairy Girl” (in which four men dismember the corpse of a woman whose “fairy-like body had given them pleasure so many times” when she was alive) and “The Money Tree” (a dead donkey becomes fodder for people at a south Calcutta traffic crossing).

Frankly, I’m in two minds about Misra. Any artist with his level of idealism deserves to be taken very seriously (he lives in penury, writes only for little magazines that don’t publish popular authors and refuses to sell his stories for use in theatre), and there is a lot of truth in his laments about books being sold as “commodities”, and about how even the anti-establishment eventually becomes marketable. However, excessive “integrity” of this sort can make a writer inflexible and make his work inaccessible as well as critic-resistant. Also, there’s something a little disingenuous about Misra’s claim that the “establishment” would never “dare touch” his stories. In that sense, there’s something both ironical and pleasing about the fact that this collection is under the banner of a mainstream publisher. Now for that market...

****

A few years ago the experimental psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris broke new ground in demonstrating how limited our perceptions can be - and the phenomenon of inattentional blindness - with their “Gorillas in our Midst” experiment. The experiment showed that a surprisingly large number of people watching a video of students playing basketball had failed to notice a man dressed in a gorilla suit, who even faced the camera and thumped his chest for a few seconds. The attention of the viewers was elsewhere – they had been asked to count the number of ball passes made in the video – but the results were still surprising, as were the reactions when they realised what they had missed.

Now Chabris and Simons have a book, The Invisible Gorilla, which discuses the repercussions of the experiment, placing it in the context of real-life incidents such as the case of the policeman who failed to see his colleagues beating up an innocent man right in front of his eyes (he was chasing a criminal at the time). The central thesis is that most people don’t understand everyday illusions such as “the illusion of attention” – which leads us to believe, for example, that we can drive efficiently while talking on a cell-phone. Or that an experienced radiologist examining an X-Ray is unlikely to miss something obvious (such as a wire accidentally left inside a patient’s body) when he might be looking for something else.

The Invisible Gorilla is an entertaining work, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it stirs controversy for the authors’ casual dismissal of a Pulitzer Prize-winning piece of journalism: Gene Weingarten’s 2008 feature about the famous violinist Joshua Bell playing music in a Washington subway and being scarcely noticed by the people nearby. The conclusion of Weingarten’s piece centred on the lack of appreciation for beauty and art in the modern world, but The Invisible Gorilla offers a simpler explanation: the conditions of the experiment – rush hour on a weekday morning, commuters focused on getting to work – ensured that no one would have mental space for Bell’s performance. “This stunt provides no evidence for a lack of aesthetic appreciation,” say Simons and Chabris, who even go on to suggest that the Pulitzer Prize committee were duped. I sense an intellectual brawl in the works.

[Some earlier snippets here and here]