The boy who fixed Earth - on Tik-Tik, The Master of Time

[Did this for the Hindu Literary Review]

The narrator-hero of Musharraf Ali Farooqi’s new book for young readers is preoccupied with Time and wastes none of it in letting us know what the central peeve of his existence is. “There was one gigantic, colossal fault with our species which trumped all the advantages,” says Tik-Tik – a boy from the planet Nopter – on the opening page, “Our species was slow to grow up. Very slow.” In case you’re wondering, “growing up” isn’t code for a people collectively becoming wiser, or something else abstract or allegorical; it is literally about moving from childhood to adulthood. Hankering after the many freedoms available to adults, and impatient to become one of their rank, the single-minded Tik-Tik decides that “this state of affairs should not be allowed to continue unchallenged and uncured”.

In fact he continues to make such self-important proclamations throughout the book, for he is an endearingly deluded fellow. He gives himself heaps of credit along with many grand-sounding designations, but he constantly misreads situations and overestimates the worth of his own initiatives – which means much rescue work has to be done by other people, notably his unruffled friend Nib-Nib, with whom he shares a love-hate relationship (and whose cat Dum-Dum is a personal nemesis). This brings a bumbling charm to Tik-Tik’s narrative, which serves the book well, especially when he makes a proud announcement only to have the wind taken out of his sails a few sentences later. Or when he indulges in quasi-philosophical asides (“I realised that all planets have their Dum-Dums. One cannot escape them”) or over-dramatizes his problems: “With Dum-Dum prowling on the land mass, and the penguins underwater, this planet had now become for me the single most dangerous place in the whole cosmos [...] I hoped to find their military training camp, fitted out with rope ladders, horizontal beams and swings.” Even when he casts himself as an Evil Scientist driven to nefarious means for his survival, the effect is funny, not least because we know that little will come of his schemes.

This winsome book begins slowly, with a series of developments that culminate in Tik-Tik setting off on an inter-galactic journey in a space egg with his grandpa, but the pace lifts once they land on Earth and start figuring out “high science” methods to remedy the planet’s construction flaws. Hanging a giant comet from the “bottom” of Earth, for instance, would stabilise it and do away with the menace of changing seasons. A huge propeller fixed to the North Pole would be a nice way to speed up rotation and make time pass more quickly. And a polarity device is a neat method for keeping unwanted things and creatures as far away from you as possible (though this can, like anything else, backfire).

Sprinkled through the story are illustrations by Michelle Farooqi – the author’s wife – the best of which do a valuable job of enhancing the text and clarifying the things described. For example, it wasn’t until I saw the lovely drawing on page 61, a depiction of what Earth looks like after the propeller and the comet have been attached, that I felt I had a real sense of what Tik-Tik had been up to. The drawing is non-realist in that it shows Tik-Tik, his grandpa and five waddling penguins as abnormally large figures occupying a sizable part of the planet’s surface, both on the “top” and the “bottom” (the effect is similar to the famous images of Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince on his tiny asteroid) but it is an instant mood-establisher, affectionate and quaint while also making the familiar seem unfamiliar.

Tik-Tik, The Master of Time is a breezy, humorous adventure story – with some very rudimentary science for young readers – but it has a self-evidently serious side too. Tik-Tik’s impatience is a version of a paranoia many of us have experienced as children: suspecting that Adulthood is an exclusive, privileged club floating unreachably in the misty distance; wondering when (or if!) we will be admitted to this fellowship and what deep secrets we might learn when that happens. The irony is that for a grown-up reader, a book such as this one can both create and fulfil the opposite sort of yearning. And this may be why the climax, though a bit laboured in its spelling out of ideas, is so affecting – Tik-Tik’s sense of loss and disorientation when he finally gets his wish and then realises that there is no going back is easy to relate to. For those of us with limited access to space eggs and giant propellers, revisiting our favourite children’s books – and discovering new ones – is a good practical way of bridging time’s great divide.

(Some earlier posts on the work of the versatile Farooqi: on his excellent translation of the Hamzanama here and here; on another children’s book, The Amazing Moustaches of Moochhander the Iron Man, here)

Of snails and superhumans - Uday Prakash's tales of deprivation

[Did a version of this review for Mint Lounge]

With the surge in Indian English publishing and a concurrent increase in literature festivals with an Anglophone slant, it is no secret that writers who work in the other Indian languages have felt increasingly neglected and undervalued. A particularly sharp expression of this occurs in the story “Mangosil”, by the celebrated Hindi writer Uday Prakash. “When I tried explaining my troubles to Delhi’s influential writers and thinkers,” says the narrator, a possible stand-in for Prakash himself, “I felt as if I were a snail that had surfaced to the world above, telling the divine bipeds patting their fat bellies about his wild, weird, othercaste experiences from his home at the bottom of the sea. My language was incomprehensible. They viewed my utterances born of sorrow, vulnerability, and nerves with indifference, curiosity, wonder.”

The chilling sense one gets from this passage is of someone trapped in a hermetically sealed room, failing to be heard (much less understood), the echoes of his own cries bouncing off the walls. It is unsurprising then that Prakash’s collection The Walls of Delhi - three stories translated by Jason Grunebaum - contain powerful representations of other forms of marginalisation too. The world of this book is one of spectral tunnels in which the untold chronicles of the dispossessed lie hidden (“walk outside your home and take a good look at the little crowd that hangs out at the shop or stall or cart – and who knows? You might find where the tunnel comes out”) as well as hollow walls containing the dark secrets of privileged people.

Thus, in the title story, a poor man named Ramnivas finds seemingly limitless treasure in an improbable but oddly appropriate place: inside a wall of a south Delhi gym to which the children of the rich come to work off the weight they have accumulated from eating too much (even as Ramnivas mulls that one of his own children died after eating fish caught from the sewer). The stacks of currency notes change Ramnivas’s life – and a man who had looked like an emaciated version of the actor Jeetendra transforms into a “gregarious, colourful, radiant Govinda, always ready to flash a smile” – but soon his dream begins to unravel. In “Mohandas”, a lower-caste man discovers that his name and job have been stolen by an upper-caste loafer, and then comes upon what seems to be a village of doppelgangers, each usurping another’s rightful place in the world. (“Were all the people who had good jobs and held high positions and ran around in automobiles and caroused who they really claimed to be?” he wonders.) And in “Mangosil” a child’s head grows at an abnormal pace because it knows things other heads don’t know, or don’t want to know; the virus that causes this mysterious disease, we learn, is poverty.

These are angry, sarcastic stories, infused with the rage of someone who has seen far too much meaningless injustice to want to withhold judgements or trade in nuances. It is the rage that comes with seeing the cities of a half-developed country from the sky, as “incongruous tokens of priceless, shining marble stuck in the mire and mud”. Prakash’s writing is full of poetic imagery. “One more stomach had delivered itself to the house that morning,” it is said of a child’s birth in a poor family. Insects seem to recognise the cough of a dying man and arrive in droves as his phlegm hits the ground. When Mohandas wades into a river to pray, “tiny kothari fish swam to the surface and fought to nip at the salt from his teardrops”. And the narrator occasionally breaks the fourth wall by giving us parenthetical asides about politics or the economy, showing a sense of curiosity about the wider world and about the lives of distant figures like Bill Clinton, almost as if trying to convince himself that his derelict protagonists really do inhabit the same planet as the one on which these other, “important” things involving supra-humans are taking place. (One thinks again of the snail and the well-cushioned bipeds.)

Not having read these stories in the original Hindi, Grunebaum’s translation seemed serviceable to me, though there is the odd jarring note: an old man says “hey blindy” – an awkward, slangy rendering of “andhi” – to his wife, and some phrases – “Isn’t this peachy?” – feel culturally discordant. But Grunebaum clarifies that he wanted to make these stories accessible to a non-Indian readership, which is as well, for their content is unsettling to begin with; there are some obviously fabulist elements in them, especially in the story of the large-headed Suri. At the same time it is useful to remember how strange reality can be. In his Afterword, Grunebaum mentions a trip with Uday Prakash to Chhatisgarh, where they just happened to run into the “real Mohandas”, walking on the road, “looking just as haggard and resilient as described in the story”. They spoke for a bit, took some photos and then went their separate ways – “Mohandas” presumably to continue fighting his small battles against shadowy imposters, Grunebaum returning to translate stories about deprivation for a readership that can sympathise but perhaps not fully understand.

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[Also see: Jason Grunebaum speaks with Trisha Gupta about translation here]

Crorepatis, kal aur aaj

[From my Business Standard Weekend column – did this little theme-fitting piece to go with their “Billionaire’s Club” edition]

Old Hindi cinema had an impressive line-up of billionaires (but let’s adjust for inflation and allow them to be mere crorepatis). For the purposes of a short column, it is useful to divide them into two broad categories: the bad guys and the good guys. The former were the ones who eventually became the Bond-style villains of 1970s movies, living in dens with spiky walls, quicksand pits, dancing sylphs and floors that would part to reveal a shark tank into which an inefficient minion or the hero’s beleaguered father could be dipped. The other types of crorepatis were decent – or relatively decent – people. They wore their wealth lightly, called their grown-up daughters “baby” and were good to the less privileged in the indulgent way that people who have never known true hardship can afford to be. In Yash Chopra’s Waqt, Shashi Kapoor as the poor driver walks into a high-society party to ask his employer if he can use the car to take his mother to the hospital. The boss, played by Rehman, looks solicitous, says “haan, le jaao, le jaao” and gets back to his socialising. (And this despite the fact that he isn’t a good guy in the overall scheme of things. He has bigger fish to fry, but he can be nice at a micro-level.)

Some things were common to both sets of wealthy people: the mansions of the Good could be just as vulgarly opulent as the villains’ lairs (minus the shark tanks). In Manmohan Desai’s Parvarish, an underappreciated classic of commercial Hindi cinema, Kishan (Vinod Khanna) takes up smuggling in his off-hours. This was the get-rich-quick profession of the time, but what is perplexing is that he already lives (with his honest police-inspector dad) in an eye-poppingly fancy house. In a confrontation where the father pulls out his gun and shoots about randomly while the wayward son ducks behind a sofa, one worries more for the well-being of the velvety furniture than for any of the human characters.

In fact, there are hundreds of films where the decor interfered with the playing out of real emotion (not always to the movie’s detriment). Take the scene in the Kapoor family’s ego project about generational conflict, Kal, Aaj aur Kal, where Prithviraj Kapoor as the “yesterday” and Randhir Kapoor as the “tomorrow” have their big spat while Raj Kapoor watches despairingly. It’s a tragic moment in its conception, and various hyper-dramatic things are happening at the level of the music, the camerawork and the facial expressions, but who notices? You gape instead at the interior design – the enormous bifurcated staircase, the endless halls – and feel that it would be worth not getting along with anyone in your family if you could only live in a house like this.

It was surprising then that some of these films featured youngsters trying to break out of their stifling ancestral wealth. In Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s enjoyable but ideologically muddled Asli-Naqli, Dev Anand is a spoilt rich boy who sulks when his grandfather ticks him off, and then sets out to discover How the Other Half Lives. His adventures – which unfold in an idealised basti populated by poor people who are basically good-natured even when they are beating their wives – are shown as fun and games; there is no real sense of danger or sacrifice, no accrual of responsibility. The story amounts to an idealising of both rich and poor, with the suggestion that they are each more or less content in their respective places, and that they can role-play once in a while, when things get dull. (Role-playing would become an important theme in Mukherjee’s cinema, but this is a shallow manifestation of it.)

Amitabh Bachchan’s angry young Vijay would not have approved of such idealising. In the 1970s, Vijay became a symbol for the wronged man working his way up in the world by operating outside the law if necessary: his progression from footpath boy to millionaire is strikingly summed up in the shot where he looks up at a skyscraper his mother once toiled on, and which he has now bought for her. But such were the moral imperatives of this cinema that even while you sympathised with the character at an individual level, the film couldn’t let him go unpunished. The great conceit was that if you have to become a billionaire, do it the “honest” way or else.

Today things are more cynical and perhaps more pragmatic, with many recent films depicting a social landscape where everything is up for grabs – Special 26, for instance, ends with the conmen played by Akshay Kumar and Anupam Kher settling down in the Middle East, having got away with their heists, and the film encourages us to cheer for them. The message is clear: it is okay to be crooked if you do it with panache; the ends justify the means. “Be a billionaire. Accha hai.” The genteel villains of the 1970s might have found it a little distasteful.

Mere paas maa waali kitaab hai

Delhi-wallahs, sorry for this deluge of invites, but please mark your calendars or your shiny Blackberrys for the launch of the Zubaan anthology about motherhood. Lovely book, and I don't say that because I have a piece about Hindi-film mothers in it. There are many good, varied essays and stories by a shining cast of writers including Urvashi Butalia, Shashi Deshpande, Manju Kapur and Mridula Koshy. And it's for a good cause, with part of the proceeds going to Save the Children. So come. Invite below. (6 pm, March 5, India International Centre - New Building.)

P.S. any rumours you may have heard about my re-enacting the Disco Dancer electrocution scene at the launch are not to be believed, but the event should still be very enjoyable.

On ways of watching films (and connecting dots from The Apartment to the Bates Motel)

Yesterday I had the very happy-making experience of watching Billy Wilder’s The Apartment in a darkened mini-theatre, on a screen that, at a rough estimate, had a surface area around 12 times larger than that of my plasma TV at home (a TV with which I have sometimes tried to simulate the theatre experience). For selfish reasons I won’t say where this screening took place, but there were only two other people in the room, one of whom was my viewing companion, a huge Apartment fan. We had both seen the film recently enough for it to be fresh in our memories, so we murmured through parts of the screening, exchanging nerd-trivia and observations, imagining how much more subversive it would have been if James Stewart had played the manipulative corporate heel Sheldrake - and even remarking on the film’s tangential similarities with Hitchcock’s Psycho (naturally I was the prime culprit in this), which released in the same week in 1960.

(Have trouble linking the two movies? Well, think about illicit sexual liaisons conducted hurriedly in rented rooms; think social outsiders living lonely lives in stripped-down settings, photographed in sombre shades of grey. Think of one melancholy working-class girl, played by a film’s ostensible star, who dies unexpectedly in a shower before the halfway point, and another who almost dies in another bathroom after swallowing half a bottle of sleeping pills halfway through her film. Think of earnest, likable young men performing clean-up operations after crimes have been committed. And both films – it just occurred to me as I was writing this – have discomfiting scenes where a bullying man in a position of power casually, callously hands over money to an unhappy young woman, an act that precipitates a life-changing decision for her. The scene in The Apartment where Sheldrake, having strung the vulnerable Fran along for weeks, gives her a hundred-dollar bill as a Christmas present, is one of the cruelest moments I can think of in a fiction film, and the look on Shirley MacLaine’s face is devastating.)

Anyway, the Apartment screening was a reminder that for all my mad love of old Hollywood, I have only rarely watched movies of that vintage on a big screen (what sort of screen can be considered “big” is of course a relative matter these days) and that one is at a vast remove from what the original viewers of these films saw and felt. It also reminded me of observations in two essays about cinema. First, one of my favourite film writers David Thomson***, in an entry in The Biographical Dictionary of Film:

Intensive film study and film scholarship now work by way of the TV screen. It is seldom possible to review the great movies “at the movies”. Suppose I wanted to see Sunrise, Duel in the Sun, and Ugetsu Monogatari on big screens – where would I go? […] Yet I might be able to summon them up on video, where I could see them as often as I liked, with “pause” to access the full beauty of the frame. Everyone is doing it, no matter that the colour is forlorn (the United States has the worst TV colour in the world), the image format is different, the sound is tinny…and the passion is not there. That passion is made by the dark, the brightness, the very large screen, the company of strangers, and the knowledge that you cannot stop the process, or even get out. That is being at the movies, and it is becoming a museum experience. How can one tell one’s students or one’s children what it was like seeing Vertigo (in empty theatres – for no one liked it once) or The Red Shoes from the dark. We watch television with the lights on! Out of some bizarre superstition that it protects our eyes. How so tender for one part of us, and so indifferent to the rest?

And here is Pauline Kael, from a 1967 essay titled “Movies on Television”:

Not all old movies look bad now, of course; the good ones are still good—surprisingly good, often, if you consider how much of the detail is lost on television. Not only the size but the shape of the image is changed, and, indeed, almost all the specifically visual elements are so distorted as to be all but completely destroyed. On television, a cattle drive or a cavalry charge or a chase – the climax of so many a big movie – loses the dimensions of space and distance that made it exciting, that sometimes made it great. The structural elements – the rhythm, the buildup, the suspense – are also partly destroyed by deletions and commercial breaks and the interruptions incidental to home viewing […] Reduced to the dead grays of a cheap television print, Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons – an uneven work that is nevertheless a triumphant conquest of the movie medium – is as lifelessly dull as a newspaper Wirephoto of a great painting.

Reading these quotes, it might seem that both essays are prim condemnations of how things are “now” compared to how they were “then”, but that isn't the case - they are both pragmatic acknowledgements that things change, and that our assumptions, attitudes and ways of looking shift with them. Thomson in particular, being from a generation after Kael and having seen many further variations (including the phenomenon of people watching films on YouTube, or even on smart-phones!), has often written insightfully – in such books as Have You Seen...? and The Whole Equation – about the complex ways in which we engage with our art and entertainment in the contemporary world.

Meanwhile, in another astute piece, “Movies too personal to share with an audience”, Jim Emerson provides an important counterpoint to the idea that film-watching is best as a communal experience. I myself have had a terrible time watching films such as Vertigo with large, mostly indifferent audiences, and I know that I wouldn’t have enjoyed The Apartment so much the other night – notwithstanding the screen size and the print quality – if the room had contained people who had just happened to stumble in and didn’t care about the film. Perhaps what we thin-skinned and over-sensitive movie buffs really need is permanent access to a private screening room along with programming software that tells us exactly who we should be watching a particular film with.

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*** More on Thomson, and especially his book The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder, in another post soon. And here are some other connect-the-dots posts: Mean Streets and Contempt, Ozu's Good Morning, Altman's 3 Women, and Peeping Tom and Psycho

Mini-review: Zero Dark Thirty

Saw this film yesterday. It is apparently a true story about the killing of a terrorist leader who knocked down some buildings in America a decade ago. This makes it sound modern and topical, but I thought it most intriguing for its use of tropes from the old epics. The protagonist, a young CIA agent, gets so personal and obsessive about her mission that when presented with Osama bin Laden’s mutilated corpse, she does a Draupadi and washes her lustrous amber tresses in his blood (and yes, the film is generally very fond of her hair). Then she does an Achilles and drags him around the military camp behind her Lamborghini until his dad shows up and says please can I have his body back. Then she quietly weeps as classical heroes do when, having vanquished their arch-enemies and fulfilled their life’s great purpose, they realise it's all downhill from here and that even the in-flight sandwiches on the trip home will be stale. I can’t guarantee that these are all accurate representations of what occurred in the film, but they were the interpretations my good friend Shougat and I preferred as we sat giggling through the final 15 minutes. Which can only mean one thing: expect Oscars to be bestowed.

(Okay, seriously? Didn’t think the film was too bad – some good moments in the midsection along with some almost-too-conscientious non-Hollywoodising – but it got a little trite in the end. Plus, watching a film with Shougat is a good way of ensuring that you spend much of your time laughing at it regardless of its overall quality. This is the same boy who savaged my Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King experience a decade ago by repeatedly imploring Frodo and Samwise to get down to actual making out instead of just looking chastely into each other’s eyes.)

Conversations with Baradwaj Rangan

Movie buffs (and Baradwaj Rangan fans) in Delhi, please mark your calendars: I'll be speaking with Baradwaj about his Mani Ratnam book - which was one of the publishing highlights of the last year in my view - and about films and film criticism more generally, at the India International Centre on the 21st. Do come. Here's the invite.