Slumdog Millionaire - Review

It has been a long time since I have written a review, atleast on the group list. I thought with the considerable hype around Slumdog Millionaire, I should write a first day first show review.

The Story

The story is quite simple and must be familiar to people following the endless news coverage. It is about a kid from the slums, Jamal Malik, who is on the verge of winning Rs2 crores in Kaun Banega Crorepati. As he is just one question away from the final prize, he is whisked off to the police station overnight to be questioned if he has been cheating. He is subject to some heavy torture by the police, played by Saurabh Shukla and Irrfan Khan. Then he reveals how he has been able to answer each question as it corresponds to an event in his life. His brother, Salim and childhood love Latika, are with him on and off through his life and Jamal’s quest for Latika through brothels and gangsters dens becomes his obsession. He is finally released by the police and he goes on to win the prize and Latika too.


My Views

I am in two minds about SM, I really wanted to like the movie as it was a quasi-Indian movie which has been seeing considerable success and above all the themes, if not the sensibilities, are essentially Indian. The theme being essentially about the role of destiny (or fatalism in a negative sense) in our lives. However the movie for me was underwhelming, and that too by a huge margin.

One big note of caution before reading my views is that the context in which I have seen the movie was different than most audiences. I am one of the very few who have actually read the book on which the movie was based – Q&A by Vikas Swarup. The book, though not exceptional on literary merit, was excellent entertainment. I am cognizant of the pitfalls of comparing a book with the movie, however the pitfalls are likely to be fewer here as the book is largely a good story which should have been easy to film or adapt. However the filmmakers have changed the story around to make it more palatable to international audiences and reduce a few complexities.

However, one big grouse which I have is the sequencing of the questions to match the chronology of events in Jamal life. To elaborate, the first question might refer to something that happened to Jamal when he was 4 years, the second to something that happened when he was 5 and so on. This was really really stretching destiny. The book was interestingly structured where each question refers to a different phase of the protagonist’s life and we keep going back and forth till we have a neat mosaic of his life.

With the kind of structural experiments in narrative that we keep seeing nowadays (Following, Memento, 21 Grams, Irreversible etc) I thought that the story could have really merited a different flow to it.

Another factor which hinders an objective assessment is the feeling of déjà vu that I got when we see many of the scenes from the movie, whether the search for love or the grittier parts of the movie. I feel that, it might be new for international audiences, but people being handicapped for begging or young girls forced into prostitution is not something we are unaware of.

Unlike the comments of some faux nationalists or ignoramuses, my crib is not that we are presenting the seamy side of India for the foreign markets but that it is not seamy enough to make a more hard hitting statement atleast for Indian audiences (including me) who have been long been inured to these scenes. I felt that there was a flippancy in the way these gritty events were handled, never lingering for the audience to think, but used just to propel the story to the next question. There is a visceral movement to the movie, a very music-video psychedelic pace which makes it very difficult to dwell for a moment on the love just lost or the horrors recently seen. In editing terminology, the movie I am sure would be having a very low average length of shot (ALoS) (I really wanted to use that, never got a chance to do that until now)

Technically, the movie is top class. The photography was really award worthy. On the music, thought Rahman has done better work earlier. The actors are uniformly good, though I would take my hat off to the kids who played the younger Jamal, Salim and Latika.

However, nothing above should deter you from seeing the movie. In fact, you should see it and give me an opinion so that I can test my hypotheses of whether my reading of the book affected me against the movie and whether the movie is liked more by international audiences (a couple of Indian friends have seen it in the US and corroborate my views).

On the awards bit, I really would have loved to see the Dark Knight get more recognition. It is still the best movie I have seen in 2008. More on that later probably.

White Tiger - Book Review

There was a time I used to read all the Booker prize winners, from 1997 to 2003 – I read 6 out of the 7 winners; only missing out on the 2001 winner – True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey. Of late though, the awards have become pretty mediocre, at least by the reviews I have read of them, and more importantly, their impact. I have seen a steady deterioration since 2004, when they awarded the Booker to Alan Hollinghurst’s “The line of Beauty” over David Mitchell’s “Cloud Atlas”. The selection was universally panned at that time. I did not read the former but read the latter and was bowled over by the sheer literary inventiveness of Mitchell. Post 2003, most of the books were apparently very dull and eminently forgettable and probably have been. Even Kiran Desai’s “Inheritance of Loss” was supposedly a very weak winner.

On the whole, most of the Booker winners I have read have really impressed me and I would gladly re-read many of them and have actually re-read like “God of Small Things”.

To be honest, I decided to read the White Tiger not because it won the Booker but just because it was available at the British Library. It being Indian was the least of my concerns.

The story is about Balram Halwai, born into a very poor family in Laxmangarh, a village near Dhanbad. His father is a rickshaw puller and his childhood is similar to millions of other children we read about everyday. The area is steeped in feudalism and there are faint stirrings of change, ostensibly through the Mandalisation of politics and the lower classes appear to be finding their place in governance. All this is only a minor backdrop to Balram’s story. He is pulled out of school to help his family out. He works in tea shops and other assorted places before learning car driving as a way out of the Darkness (as he calls the region). He is recruited by the local landlord’s family to be a driver, first in Dhanbad and then in Delhi. Balram, though achieving more than anyone in his family ever has, is still not comfortable with his current state and his outlook and he aspires to breaking free. He realises that the only way of getting out of the rut would be to steal money from his employer, but ends up killing him. He runs away to Bangalore to start a new career for himself as a taxi operator for call centre workers.

To say that I was disappointed by the book is an understatement. It was totally underwhelming. The book has nothing which caught my attention – either story or narrative or sheer self-indulgent literary craftiness (like a God of Small Things or Cloud Atlas). The story is very straightforward, which one would often read in newspapers or magazines. To make a story about it would require more than reporting. Unfortunately, Adiga has been a reporter for Time and this is the angle he takes. There is little additional depth he brings to his any of his characters, has superficial knowledge of the region or people he speaks about and has barely any understanding or insights into modern India which the book attempts to show a mirror to. It come across as a shallow effort, like one of those 2 page articles in Time or Economist which one encounters every other month, talking about the “real India” and how development is passing them by etc etc. If you are writing a 300 page book, your should aspire to more than that. The shining example which Adiga should have followed is “Bombay – Maximum City” which shows the real Bombay, things we know about but with a grittiness, a realism and sheer reporting brilliance and guts.

I could have forgiven all this if the language or narrative was brilliant or had a distinctive voice. There was scarcely a passage or phrase which held me in thrall. White Tiger looks like something which a schoolboy would write for his school magazine, high intentions coupled with a mediocrity and inability to rise above his position. In fact, I could not understand why Balram was writing his biography as letters to the Chinese premier. Why? It seems to be a lame attempt by the author to infuse some narrative style which seems downright juveline.

Finally, the only thing going for the book is that it is a very easy read, so is your Sidney Sheldon or Jeffrey Archer but that does not mean they get feted by awards.

Short notes on Books i read in 2008 (25 in total)

FICTION

Haroun and the Sea of Stories
Salman Rushdie
Entertaining read. But somehow I kept losing interest in the book, did not find it gripping enough. I am not much of a fairy tales guy.

Full Moon
PGW
Very good Blandings story.

Road
Cormac McCarthy
Pulitzer price winning book set up in a dsytopian landscape where the world has been destroyed due to some reason and people have resorted to cannibalism to survive. The story is of a father and his son's trek along the country to reach a safe place. I did not find it compelling enough, it would have been good as a short story of say 50-100 pages but nothing to keep the interest sustained for 250 pages.

Vengeance
George Jonas
Did not realise that Munich by Spielberg was based on a book. Just came across this in BCL. Started off well but gets a bit repetitive and the writer seemed to have lost interest in the later stages of the book just as Avner lost interest in killing.

Train to Pakistan
Khushwant Singh
A great book set during Partition. A must-read

Different Seasons
Stephen King
A collection of 4 of his famous novellas - The Body (made into a critically and commercially acclaimed movie - Stand by Me), Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption (made into Shawshank Redemption), the Breathing Method and Apt Pupil (made into Apt Pupil). Though Apt Pupil was the weakest movie of the lot, the book was the best of the above 4, they messed up the movie towards the end.

Green Mile
Stephen King
A long but compelling book. Different from the usual Stephen Kings, mysterious and magical.

Q&A
Vikas Swarup
A very entertaining read. Thought it great for a movie as it has indeed turned out (Slumdog Millionaire)

Wuthering Heights
Emily Bronte
Loved the book. Very dark and brooding, thought the writing to be quite modern and seems to have dated well.

Unnatural Causes
PD James
Adam Dalgliesh investigates a murder in his aunt's country village. Though these PD James' seems more recent, somehow I found the investigation and unfolding of the suspense too sudden and not logical.

An Unsuitable Job for a Woman
PD James
My first PD James. Good characterisation, a refreshing break from Agatha Christie

The Big Sleep
Raymond Chandler
A famous noir book and movie. Liked the dialogue and the style. However the actual uncovering of the suspense at the end seemed forced.

Moon and Sixpence
Somerset Maugham
Ideally one should read this wonderful book when one is in his early twenties, it is more relevant. The summary of the book is in this line from the book "a man is not what we wants to be, but what has to be"

A Case of Exploding Mangoes
Mohd. Hanif
A good satire of Pakistan politics. I don't think a similar book on Indian politics would have been possible.

Very good Jeeves
PGW
One of the earlier PGWs which are usually a notch better than the post-50s books

Never let me go
Kazuo Ishiguro
A charming but haunting, sci-fi/dystopian book on cloned babies, organ donation etc.

Motherhood, the second oldest profession
Erma Bombeck
Was running out of books to read in Hyderabad on holiday. Picked it up at my favourite used book store there. Meant more women actually. Some parts are good but gets trite after a point

Tell No One
Harlan Coben
Heard about the French movie which was a big critical and commerical success last year. It was actually based on this American thriller. Completed in a day, an absolute page-turner.

Blandings Castle
PGW
Short stories of important background events at Blandings Castle - how Freddie gets married, how Empress wins the Silver at Shropshire etc.

The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole 13 3/4
Sue Townsend
I don't like to give up books. I had dropped this once in IIM. I picked it up to finish it again. Again, to be read, when a teenager or just out it. But still a fun read.

NON-FICTION

The Art of Captaincy
Mike Brearley
Considered to be a classic. I thought it was an over-rated bore.

Conversations with Javed Akhtar
Nasreen Munni Kabir
Very interesting book structured like an interview.

Life and times of the Thunderbolt Kid
Bill Bryson
Easily one of my best books of the year, a really funny book after quite some time from Bryson.

The Mughal World
Abraham Eraly A guide to the lives of the kings and subjects during the Mughal times.

India after Gandhi
Ramachandra Guha
Detailed review on this blog below.

Book Review - "India After Gandhi" by Ramachandra Guha

I have been an admirer of Ramachandra Guha since some time. I have been a regular reader of his columns in the Hindu and also read his Cricket Anthology and his Wickets in the East/ Spin and other Turns. His "Corner of a Foreign Field" has also been critically received, though i never got round to read it.

India After Gandhi is Ram Guha's first history book, though he has written some other books in the niche of environmental history (available as a compendium in Oxford paperback).

The book covers Indian history from around the time of Independence till date. Most history we are taught in schools ends at around Independence which is a bit of travesty but we can't expect it to change soon as the post-independence history is too controversial to have a uniformly accepted version of the truth. The syllabus will have to keep changing whenever the Congress and BJP come to power after the other.

India After Gandhi is an impressive achievement offering the un-initiated a snapshot of Indian history over the past 60 years. It is nearly 800 pages long and 900 including the bibliography. So it is not a lie-down-in-bed read, unless you want to sprain your wrist (as Vikram Seth once famously put it). However, it is a surprisingly fast read, an easy read (did not have to reach for the dictionary even once) and quite compelling.

I use the word un-initiated above with discretion. At the risk of sounding immodest, I already knew most of what was written. That is where my problem with the book lies (actually the problem might be with me rather than the book). Any decently well read Indian might also feel the same. There are few instances in the book where I wanted to know what would happen in the following page. Apart from a few instances like the Naga conflict, resettlement of refugees post-independence, influence of PN Haksar on Indira Gandhi etc. i find it difficult to come up with things i am not aware of. To be fair, even Guha acknowledges it in his prologue that recent history will have people already aware and judgemental. But still, in an 800 pages book there are significant areas which could have been covered that had evaded the lay reader.

Another issue of mine is the treatment of the Nehru legacy. Ram Guha comes across as a Nehruvian. I have no issues with that, he is entitled to his view. I can forgive Nehru's economic policies (that was the mood of the times as Guha makes it a point to prove), his indecisive foreign policies (non-alignment, Chinese debacle), sticking with friends for too long (Krishna Menon) to the point of sidelining legends like Rajaji, Kripalani etc. What i can't forgive is his bringing Indira Gandhi into the party and actively promoting her. She was already General Secretary at the time of his death, so it is not like his Congress sycophants foisted her on to us after Nehru’s death. When so many able candidates were available like Morarji Desai, Jagjivan Ram, Kamaraj - Ram Guha never even discusses why Nehru had to promote Indira over others. What was Nehru's state of mind, what compelled him to do this could have been actively explored. This is the legacy that Nehru leaves - a dynastic cult which has never left us. To give credit where due, Nehru can be considered to the torchbearer for India's secularism which makes me proud every moment. I also admire his persistence in changing the Hindu civic code by amendments to the Marriage and Divorce Act and the Inheritance Act. But the family legacy that he started rankles.

Guha is also a bit flippant over one of the most important reasons for the Indian democratic decline - corruption. He doesn't even mention the Nagarwala scam under Indira Gandhi, the death of LN Mishra (who was supposed to have been the extortion agent cum revenue collector of Indira Gandhi) receives a brief comment. However what is surprising is how he almost swept the Bofors story under the carpet. It WAS the biggest story in the press in the 80s and for me personally, it was the almost like my first awakening of political consciousness. The anti-Sikh riots after Indira Gandhi's death do not get the opprobrium they deserve. I can't imagine the response of rights activists if the same actions were carried out by the saffron brigade. But here it was a liberal, secular party which did these things. This leaves writers perplexed.

In a nutshell this book is a celebration of democracy - just like we have many books and columns today that are a celebration of our economic strength. But just like these business books which ignore the dark side, India after Gandhi too does not delve much into the democratic rut. Some of the questions which are relevant here and needed some discussion:

· Why has debate frequently come around to a trade off between growth and democracy? To the un-initiated again, even Pakistan is growing at 7-8% per annum.

· Is democracy a rich man's need (who does not vote) but a luxury for the deprived (who actually vote)?

· Continuing with the earlier question, especially in the light of the success of other non democratic regimes like Singapore, China, is democracy as defined by Western political scientists and political philosophers a universal necessity or only an option?

· Freedom of speech is a crucial pillar of democracy - however countries like China (and even Iran) and Russia have created very successful pieces of architecture, movies, literature than countries like India? Don't get me started on Russian oligarchs, India beats them hands down.

· Was Nehru's marrying socialist economic thought with democratic politics a losing combination? Socialism economies, it is suggested, work better (if they do) where the lack of incentive for citizens (due to absence of property rights) is compensated by the whip hand of an autocratic leader. Did India choose the worst of both worlds?

· Why did liberal parties like the Swatantra party never reach the masses? Was it lack of charismatic leadership or is it because liberal polemic is always weaker than the left or the right, especially in a deprived nation?

I would have loved to read about these issues in the book and not just a chest-beating exercise on Indian democracy and secularism.

History is not only about facts, it is also about insights which is a bit lacking in the book. This is compounded in the book by the frequency with which Guha uses quotes from earlier books or manuscripts, though amply cited in the bibliography. Guha has a distinctive voice which is somehow lost within this profusion of quotes.

I might have been a bit harsh, probably some of the above points are better discussed in a political science book and not a history book. India after Gandhi, with its limitations, will continue to be a pioneering work in the field of post-Independence Indian history.

Lives of Others - Movie Review

The Lives of Others got the Best Foreign Film award at the 2006 Oscars and I have rarely seen an award which was as richly deserved. The Lives of Others is set in the final years of East Germany amidst the paranoia and corruption which the communist regime had sunk into. Wiesler (Ulrich Muhe) is an ace investigator and interrogator in the Stasi, who has been assigned the role of surveillance of a top dramatist Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) to ascertain his political leanings. Dreyman is suspected of having anti-left beliefs and Muhe’s boss wants to lock him up at the slightest hint of being anti-left. Muhe’s boss is also sleeping with Dreyman’s girlfriend Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck), a decent if struggling actress, using his coercion and influence in getting her roles in government funded plays and letting her have her daily dose of amphetamines/ drugs.

Wiesler, in the first scene, is shown as a canny, relentless and ruthless interrogator who has completely bought into the communist regime’s thought control. However as he proceeds on his surveillance, he gradually realizes the power of art, the limits of his own belief in communism and the subversion of his ideals (where he has to veritably act as pimp delivering D’s wife into the hands of his boss).

The movie is an intense subliminal thriller and keeps you guessing what Dreyer’s true political beliefs are until late in the movie. It is like a horror movie where one jumps up at the sound of something in the kitchen and happy that it is a cat. Similar the audience is drawn into being a voyeur, watching with bated breath whether Dreyer is going to say something in the next line or next scene and get arrested by the Stasi. Finally when the scene passes, you rest back in your chair and glow in the director’s subtle manipulative genius. The screenplay is fantastic in its plotting of the gradual but subtle changes in characters. The denouement when it comes is melancholic but uplifting.

The movie main’s focus is on the totalitarian regime’s breakdown; Wiesler is a left leaning, unquestioning citizen in East Germany who flips finally onto the other side over the moral corruption he has to endure just like the vast majority of the population leading to 1989. But the movie is as much about the redemptive power of great art. A key turning point in the movie is where Dreyer and friends are listening to a piano piece entitled “Sonata for a good man” and Wiesler in his surveillance center is listening on with his headphones. The conversation goes “Lenin said ‘Anyone who creates such music can’t be evil’. Similarly for Wiesler, a great wordsmith like Dreyer can’t be evil.

Ulrich Muhe has given one of the most brilliant and controlled performances I have seen in recent years. He has an impassive face throughout and hardly has any dialogues, but manages to convey his feelings with a minor pause in words and movements, a gleam or sorrow in his eyes and a fine and compact body language. In a tragic coincidence, in real life, Muhe was an East German actor apparently being spied on by his wife under the East German government. He finally found this out when the state records were opened after the German unification. Muhe died from cancer, shortly after the release of the movie.

Lives of Others is by far, one of the most fulfilling movies I have seen in ages.

Black Friday - Movie Review

Black Friday

Last February, Black Friday was finally released after a delay of over 2 years. I felt that at least in this one instance, the delay was justified in a way and not due to some censor board member’s whims or minister’s fancies. The objection to the movie was that it pronounced the accused as guilty even before the court has passed their judgement in the 1993 Bombay blasts case. Finally the movie was released in February 2007 after the court had passed their final judgement.

I happened to miss it in the theatre due to some pressures at work and it did not have a long run. Finally I saw it on DVD. Black Friday got some good reviews and justifiably so. But there was something in the movie which did not work for me, something which made the movie fall short of being a truly good work.

The story, as is well known by now, is about the investigation and arrest of the culprits behind the Bombay bomb blasts in 1993. The movie starts off like a police procedural until the first batch of suspects are arrested, after which it becomes more a narrative on arresting the people who have been named by these first batch of arrests. Anyway in India, police procedural is more like torturing the hell out of the suspects and not like your typical Henning Mankel book.

The movie runs for the most part like a docu-drama and shows the planning for the bombing in impressive detail. The real strength of the movie lies in its realistic depiction of the lives of the bombers – most of whom come from poor families who have seen someone close lose their lives or livelihoods in the Bombay riots. The induction, indoctrination and training scenes are all very well shot. The detailing of the bombers’ personal lives is strong. The places they hang around, the friends they keep, the clothes they wear, are all depressingly normal. The fall of the bombers comes not when they are arrested but when they sink into a harrowing hole after their bosses forsake them.

Anurag Kashyap earlier wrote excellent screenplays like Satya. Even here the script is very tight. For instance, the only scene where you get to know that Rakesh Maria (Kay Kay Menon) is even married is when he gets a phone call at office which his constable hands over to him saying “Madam ka phone hai”. You do not him see him having the conversation too. Here is a movie you can’t fault with not giving too much importance to minor characters as the story is not about these characters. The story is about the bombers and the character of Badshah Khan is used as the lens through which we see everyone else’s.

Where the movie falls short is in editing and screenplay. The Imtiaz Ghavate chase sequence, the scenes of Badshah Khan (nicely underplayed performance by Aditya Shrivastava) on the run are stretched out for too long. The screenplay falters in requiring the audience to digest too many names of suspects too early into the movie. I did not have a clue who each character was and what was their role in the bombing. In fact I do not need to. I can do this in a book where I can flip through the earlier pages, but I do not have this option in a movie. The movie is close to 3 hours long – Anurag could have made it 5 hours or 10 hours adding on a few more suspects. Where does this stop? Focussing on a few key personalities and building stories around them would have made the movie a better watch. I can envisage the movie just being about Badshah Khan/ Tiger Memon and Rakesh Maria and expanding their universes slightly more. Anurag has tried to do justice to the book and has tried to cram too much into the movie. To use an analogy – you can make a documentary on the “Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” but for a movie you would go with a “Schindler’s List”, “The Pianist” or a “Life is beautiful”.

The movie gave me the feel of watching a Discovery Channel re-enactment, except shot in a more cinematic manner. Not that I do not like these, it is just that I may not want to watch them on a DVD or theatre. This is not to take away any credit from Anurag Kashyap who was made one of the better Hindi movies in some years, but just some regret at what might have been.

Life in a Metro - Movie Review

Prologue:

Bowing to the moral police gaining ground our country, I have decided to give a guidance rating to the movies. Love in a Metro gets a 15 (in a green circle) for a long and longing display of Shilpa Shetty’s belly, liberal images of promiscuous activity in urban middle and upper middle classes and especially call centres (much to the chagrin and wistfulness of my friends in BPOs) and above all gratuitous scenes of women drinking and smoking purely for pleasure and without remorse. Now that I have given you three reasons for seeing the movie, let’s go to the rest.

The Story

Well actually there are 4-5 stories.

Aakash (Shiney Ahuja) is a theatre actor playing to empty halls and struggling to make ends meet while Shikha (Shilpa Shetty) is a lady struggling with her husband’s silences, absences and distances. They have a brief encounter at a bus-stop and the inevitable happens and then does not happen. Shikha’s husband Ranjeet (Kay Kay Menon) is a top executive at a BPO who happens to be sleeping around with his junior Neha (Kangana Ranaut) who inspired by movies in which an actress called Kangana acted, feels that sleeping and weeping are good ways for career advancement.

Ranjeet uses the apartment of his subordinate Rahul (Sharman Joshi) for his night shifts. Rahul lets out his apartment for Ranjeet and other seniors at his BPO to gain some brownie points. Rahul has a crush on Neha and is crushed again when he realizes that Neha is sleeping with his boss in his own apartment. Neha’s roommate is Shruthi (Konkona Sen), Shikha’s sister who is pushing 30 and desperate to get married and runs into Monty (Irrfan Khan), pushing 40, a complete opposite in character and a male chauvinist who feels that gazing at a lady’s chest is okay. Again the inevitable happens.

Shikha (Shilpa) spends some of her time at an old age home where Shivani (Nafisa Ali) talks about her long lost love. Shivani regains it when her lover Amol (Dharmendra) comes back after 40 years and they elope from their old age home to set up a cosy nest for themselves.

My Views

“Pehle tho bistar pe galti se bhi pair takraate to sab kadwahat pighal jaati thi. Ab tho hamari khamoshiyan bi aapas me jagadthe hain” – Shikha on her marriage

“Did you leave her or she left you” - Shikha, “Love left us” – Aakash

“Hamne Zindagi girvi laga dhi, makaan tho kharid sake lekin ghar nahin bana sake” – Shikha (on house mortgage)

How I wish movie synopses could be condensed into a few quotes from the movie. Love in a Metro is that kind of movie. It has 4-5 stories, but one theme. A theme of love lost and gained and (sometimes) lost again. It has all these parallel stories running together to weave a colourful tapestry of emotions - hopes, disappointments, love, ambition, greed, confusion etc. The director Anurag Basu, who has earlier done some decent work in Gangster and some indecent work in Murder pulls off a petite piece of art here. He has inspirations – the entire letting-out-the-apartment episode is from Billy Wilder’s classic - “The Apartment”. But I am glad when people take their inspiration from Billy Wilder rather than say movies like Spiderman or Stepmom.

The stories might be predictable. But Anurag has a deft hand with characters and an even better one at casting. You grow to know and love/ hate their characters and at the end of the movie still want to continue to be with them and know more. Some areas could have been scripted better – Shiney Ahuja’s role has an incompleteness to it and so does Shilpa Shetty’s. Nafisa-Dharmendra’s track too could have had a bit more meat. No complaints with the others. Rahul-Neha’s episode is very sensitively portrayed. The Konkona- Irrfan episode is easily the highlight of the movie, a wonderful romantic comedy involving meeting of opposites. Probably one of the most delightfully written pieces in Hindi cinema of late, reminding you of Basu Chatterjee’s or Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s gems of the 70s. Both actors steal scenes from each other. Anurag should just make a movie on these characters. The movie is worth a watch for this storyline alone.

Anurag also has some nice directorial touches like the three singers (including Pritam, the music director himself) who crop at moments through the movie like the wandering minstrels we read about or Sutradhars, carrying the story along with some songs.

Anurag Basu’s main talent has been in getting together one of the finest collections of actors of our generation – Irrfan Khan, Konkona Sen, Kay Kay, Kangana Ranaut, Shiney Ahuja and still give each of them a significant role to chew on. Irrfan Khan, as they say is this part of the world, is a “total stud”. He brings immense depth to his character and you wish his episodes with Konkona were longer. Konkona Sen is good as usual. My favourite Kay Kay Menon acts with as much intensity as always. Kangana Ranaut may be being typecast in a self-destructive woman’s role, but she manages to pull it off each time. Even Shilpa Shetty is brilliant, her quivering belly conveys more emotions than most actresses’ faces. And thank Anurag for reminding us of Dharmendra.

Anurag has a nice sense of visuals, he makes even Mumbai in rain look good, even those dull, morose, blackened buildings somewhere around Mahim creek. As he has shown in his earlier movies, Anurag is able to get fantastic music from his composers and Pritam’s music, though a bit music-video like, is composed and sung very well.

Summary

Life in a Metro is the kind of movie which Woody Allen would have made if he was in India or Gulzar could have made if he was born 20-30 years later and Mani Rathnam should have been making, if his aspirations did not run ahead of his abilities. I am not comparing Anurag Basu with them, he is just aiming that high which should be applauded with both hands. Life in a Metro is the best Hindi movie I have seen this year.

Guru - Movie Review

It has been over three months since the movie was released and I just got to see it on a flight from Frankfurt to India. Agreed that it was not the best location to see a movie but what the heck. One inescapable conclusion - Mani has added business naivete to his already well recognized political naivete (Dil Se, Yuva, Bombay ..). What was he thinking?

The story in brief – Gurukanth Desai is a failure in academics, goes to Turkey and earns a decent work reputation there but comes back to India to start his own business here. He marries Sujata (Aishwarya), who has a failed elopement plan on her resume, for dowry to start his business. He comes to Mumbai, makes it big in the textile trade and over time becomes one of the largest industrialists in the country. But this is not at the cost of creating enemies – personally and professionally and is finally hauled up before the court for violating some license era regulations.

A lot about the direction

The movie could as well have been produced by Indiatimes as part of their India Poised campaign. The hollowness of that campaign seems eerily similar to the gung-ho optimism of the direction in this movie. Even the background score (especially towards the end court scenes) has a rousing, Rajnikanth-going-for-the-climactic-fight, over the top feel to it. I had a similar feeling when I saw Independence Day – “Today, America will save the world” or some such nonsense. Every scene and every dialogue serves just to drive home the optimism of capitalism and moneymaking – when Ash examines Guru’s paunch, she says that she can sense 25,000 shareholders in there, when Sujata delivers twins the doctor says just like Guru’s companies which double profits, he has got double the benefit with one ejaculation (okay those last words are mine). It gets tiresome after a point.

For me the main culprit is the screenplay which is extremely weak and thin – in building characters or situations. Business is hard work, here it is reduced to serendipity, puffed out chests and standing outside buildings. The last of the above takes the cake, it was as bad as using banana peels to evoke humour. It was that inane. Never do you see Guru struggling - leave aside living in chawls or going on Mumbai locals, where are the parts he refers to (in his final speech) – walking on feet all over Mumbai, lifting huge bundles of polyester. Struggle is only alluded to, not depicted. Where are the sorrows, disappointments, ebbs and flows of business. It seems to be one big joy ride for Guru. Never a wrong step, nary any hesitation. Does Guru regret having to make compromises, not seeing his kids growing up, or having kids late, or not devoting time to family etc. Mani just ignores the huge impact on personal life of entrepreneurship. In fact Guru’s family just serves as a picture frame, even his kids just disappear after inspiring one of the most illogical songs in Mani’s repertoire.

When Guru is pulled up in the press by Mithun Chakraborty’s newspapers for his misdeeds, we are not shown what those actions were save one minor scene with a politician. You can’t use the argument that Don Corleone (or Velu Nayakan) wasn’t shown killing people - in those cases, that is assumed, that is the underworld’s profession. But in a business biography, you need to depict the misdeeds. You can’t shy away from it. Well, unless Mani feels that all businessmen transgress laws anyway. If your argument then is that in a 2:30 hr movie you can’t be so detailed about business aspects (about rise is business or the misdemeanours) then you need to focus on the personal side (like a Godfather, Sarkar ..), you can’t do a total copout saying we do not have time, being a biography of a whole life. He could have cut all the unnecessary crap like Vidya Balan’s role (who is over-rated and overweight and whose only asset is a cosmetic enhanced smile).

Mani’s lack of business acuity is obvious where Guru is offered a blank cheque by a Parsee businessman to sell his businesses. A blank cheque, where did that come from - I thought this went out with Kader Khan or Pran. Does Mani think that is the way business is done.

Now to the climax – it has already been ridiculed and it deserves every bit of that. The comparison with Gandhi was downright puerile, he could have compared Guru to Robin Hood or some such comic book hero, spreading wealth among the masses. What irks me is that Mani appears confused here, throughout the movie the mood is almost that greed is good and we are not required to “like” or empathise with the character of Guru, however in the climax he does an about turn to indicate that all the while he was working in the best interest of the masses. Who is playing with the audiences here – Guru or Mani. And what is that Hindi-English bull in the court. It is like Govinda, the village bumpkin ribbing the big town, rich girl Karishma or Raveena.

Another biographical movie Gandhi (based on Guru’s spiritual guide, more on that later) was made in 3 hours, so the attempt to be breezy to fit the commercial biographical screenplay format lets the movie down badly.

A bit about the acting

Abhishek Bachchan has got a damn good role to play, but I think a better actor could have done a better job. But I guess Mani was hamstrung for choices. A movie like this required a star and a better actor like, say, Kay Kay Menon would not have fit the star billing. Abhishek is not bad, it is just that I am indifferent to him. He doesn’t surprise me, either in positively or negatively.

Repeat above comments on Abhishek for Aishwarya. Only change being that Mani could have got a better actress – say like Kajol or Konkona who would also have probably looked more Gujarati and more earthy too than Aishwarya.

The only actor with a large role who has done remarkably is Mithun who manages to steal each scene he is in.

It is all the two bit role players who have done a good job – Rajendra Gupta, Dhritiman Chatterjee, Madhavan (actually a four bit role) and make the movie rise a bit above the ordinary.

Nothing about the others

Return to insipidness by Rehman after the stunning score for RDB which seems to be a one-off. He wasn’t helped by Mani who has inserted songs at every wrong moment you can imagine. I would not like to comment about the technical aspects – we have reached a stage in our film-making where all the leading directors manage to get good work from their technical team.

Concluding remarks

Lastly, but primarily can we not have another intro rain song for the heroine. Can’t Mani recognize that he can’t repeat the same act for 2 decades. There are newer directors who are making more challenging movies (Vishal Bharadwaj, Anurag Basu, Rakesh Mehra) or old ones who are continuously dealing with fresh ideas (Ramgopal Varma). Mani, unfortunately, is not changing. And I am not qualifying my review here saying that I have higher expectations from Mani than from others and hence I am being harsher than usual. Even if this movie was made by Karan Johar or David Dhawan, my opinion would have been the same.

Corrections - Book Review

Short review of Corrections

Corrections is this highly acclaimed book which came out 3-4 years back. I have been wanting to pick it up and finally got a used hardbound book in great condition for around Rs100. Now after reading I am thinking of selling it back, probably in weight!!

Corrections is about a dysfunctional family in Suburban U.S. That one line describes the book quite neatly. You practically know who the characters are going to be – elderly parents in St.James (Kansas) with the old man suffering from Parkinson’s, and the old lady living out delusions of her own; elderly son who is financially well off and living in New York and is bordering on depression encouraged by a wife who doesn’t like his hobbies or his parents; second son who teaches literature at college and has lost tenure after seducing a young student and then escapes to Lithuania to help in defrauding Western investors; daughter, an upmarket chef marries an older guy followed by a break up, has a lesbian lover and finally to top it up ends up having an affair with both a husband and wife.

All these are interesting characters if it were a short 250 page book, not a 550 page tome. There are parts which are absolute tedium - you are also forced to endure a 10 page experience and conversation with a turd by the old man; come on, I know he has Parkinson’s and dementia, can we get on with the story. Why can’t editors nowadays cut short books keeping in mind reading tastes and time. We are not talking War and Peace here. The best part of the book is the section where the daughter seduces both the wife and the husband. Any prurient and it would have ended up in Letters to Penthouse. If any of you has the time and the inclination, just quickly read through this section and dump the book.

I don’t know why I picked up this book – what do I know or need to or want to know about dysfunctional families, that too in the U.S. I also feel that the whole dysfunctional family thing is a piece of nonsense. Every other family I see in India is dysfunctional. Only a vastly hypochondriac society like U.S can give it a name like that and have entire literary sub-genres devoted to it. The writing too is not gripping. If the story is not interesting, atleast the writing better be. If you want to read a really good book in this genre, with a great voice, please do read Vernon God Little and look no further.

At least one good has come out it, I thought I will pick up some books by Philip Roth, John Updike (Rabbit series) but have decided to give up the whole idea. I don’t need any more of this shit (pun intended), literally (pun intended again).

Fever Pitch - Book Review

Review of Fever Pitch - Nick Hornby, 1992, 242 p.

Fever Pitch was voted the best sports book of all time by Guardian-Observer in a survey a couple of years back (beating out books like Beyond a Boundary). It surprised me that I had not heard about the book till I came upon this list. I picked up the book with some trepidation as I am not a great football fan, though I do catch the occasional EPL or Champions League matches. However one thing which enthused me was that the book was about an Arsenal fan and whatever little I have followed of the EPL, I have always been an Arsenal follower.

Fever Pitch is an autobiography – a growing up story of the author set against the backdrop of the the author’s love and later obsessive interest in the Arsenal football club and how the key moments of his life, professional and personally, intertwine with the (mis)fortunes of the club. The book is structured innovatively with memories broken down into specific match days which is in fact representative of the author’s own mental condition where all his memories have an Arsenal backdrop. This is a great instance of the structure being used not for style alone but because the author’s life has flown that way.

For all Arsenal haters, (even though some of whom would have been won over by the exciting football which the team has been playing under Arsene Wenger), this book is not about Arsenal alone. It could have been any other club. Even for Hornby, Arsenal was just serendipity. It just happened to be the first match he saw at a ground, it just could have been Chelsea or Man U if he went to Stamford Bridge of Old Trafford that fateful day. Hornby’s dad had recently split up with his mother and in the first instance of the lifelong linkages between football and his personal life, parental weekend visits for his father end up at Highbury. Football gradually starts filling the gap left by his father and starts being a metaphor for his life.

Hornby likes the whole scene – going in the football special trains, the noise, the ability to hide oneself in crowds and consequently the power of groups, the braggadocio. Arsenal during this time was not a particularly successful team and hated by quite a few because of their dismal record and their dour style. Hornby parallels his own life here as just an average student at school. His obsession has already acquired manic proportions. For a brief while when he is about to leave for college, he leaves the ground misty-eyed as he feels that Cambridge and being 18 offered the prospect of Sartre, Van Morrison and being in bed with “young, rapacious, art students” and hence Arsenal had to go. He is back though in a few weeks excited at the prospect of a new manager and new sign-ons.

Hornby falls in love and out of it, gets out of Cambridge with average grades, takes up some odd jobs without any consistency and generally hangs around with the aimlessness of art students. His obsession for all things Arsenal becomes like an addiction to him. When he describes his state of life here, you can replace football with say “cocaine” and you are talking the same thing. He does not feel happy at these matches and instead he feels terribly depressed, his nerves are shreds and fingers are stubs, his lungs are full of nicotine, when he is not able to go to Highbury his heart is torn, even though he is at a friend's wedding or a job interview. All symptoms of a full blown drug addiction.

Frustrated by his lack of success in love and career, he even goes to a shrink but, in true addictive fashion, he slicks away one day to attend an Arsenal match which actually ends up reviving him. This is a turning point in the book when he starts thinking of his life and Arsenal as separate, each important in its own way.

Hornby examines a whole lot of issues, important and trivial, with an easy style. The most important for me, just when I have been upto 2 a.m to see India lose to Bangladesh in the World Cup, is what drives people to emotionally invest a big part of their lives in a particular team and especially a losing one. As Hornby views it simply, they have no option. Its not like they had a choice. They were given a team and they stuck with it, through joys and sorrows and disappointments and euphoria. He says being a fan is not that different from a job, with its attendant stresses, joys, losses etc. and it is not about entertainment which the fans do not seek anyway. This is an important point – when viewed against the backdrop of so many cricket experts asking us to enjoy the game irrespective of who wins. How many of us can appreciate Miandad’s last ball six in Sharjah? Okay that was a lusty heave, but still. Hornby feels that would be just expecting too much from a fan and that watching sports for entertainment alone is devaluing the importance of fandom and that lambasting football as boring is like criticizing King Lear for its tragic ending. ”For the committed fan, entertaining football exists in the same way as those trees that fall in the middle of the jungle, you presume it happens, but you are not in a position to appreciate it”.

There is not an issue that a fan misses out and Hornby doesn’t too – racism, television broadcasts, stadium facilities, hooliganism all get his treatment in a thoroughly sensitive and entertaining manner.

Hornby also touches upon the 80s tragedies at Heysel and Hillsborough and how he feels that football would take a different turn for the English clubs after these disasters, especially the latter with some of the smaller clubs losing out with expensive regulatory compliances, bigger clubs getting bigger and better facilities and stadiums. Fever Pitch was written in 1992. Hornby was remarkably prescient in foreseeing this change. As we now know, Premier League was formed in 1992, television broadcasting rights were sold to Sky in 1992, bigger clubs earned higher revenues ensuring better facilities and the best players. Pity that close to 100 had to die at Hillsborough to achieve that.

Another important, light hearted take is on the difference between men and women on their obsessions, particularly with sports. He feels that for men, their passions and obsessions define their personality more than they do for women. He is spot on when he says that women are only obsessive about people (which may also keep changing) while for men, they get stuck onto passions and continue with it. Just as Hornby says that he is yet to come across a female football fan who musters the time to go to Plymouth on a working day (Wednesday), I am yet to come across too many women who can see an India vs Bangladesh test match which is petering to a tame draw. In a nutshell, there are more “anally retentive” men than women.

The funniest part of the book (even though it only 4 pages) and one of the most perceptive instances of obsessive behaviour is reserved for his discussion on the ultimate male fantasy of a female partner who is a sports addict and how Hornby tries to reclaim territorial domination using his 18 years obsession to browbeat a partner who is only a 4 month fan through a subtle mix of over-reaction, sulking, juvenile behaviour and general misanthropy. Witness this excerpt: (on his partner saying that dreaded “it’s only a game” thing) – “ ‘You don’t understand,’ I shouted as I had wanted to shout for months and it was true – she didn’t, not really. And I think that once I had been given this opportunity, once I had uttered the words that most football fans carry around like a kidney donor card, it was all over. What was she left with? …….i can safely say that I am top Arsenal dog in this house, and that when and if we have children, it will be my bottom exclusively that fills our season ticket seat. I’m ashamed, of course I’m ashamed, that I have to play dirty like this, but for a while back there I was beginning to worry.”

This is a slim book, only 240 pages long but every page incisive in its social commentary and acerbic in its wit and observations. Such a cynically humourous, mostly depressing and largely pessimistic book could have only been written by a Brit. This one is a masterpiece. Hats off, Hornby.