Unlike many others, I run alone. There is nothing monkish about it. It might be the contrary actually. It is just that I start later than monks who wake up at 5 am to run. Apart from having someone who sets pace, not sure what running with a partner does. Anyway we are not exactly chatting away while running. Running with someone also entails that your times match with the partner which again is not an easy job. So for all those who have running buddies, congratulations, but I will pass. 

  An Ode to Elegance As we know it is easiest to learn languages as a child. I learnt tennis (as a viewer) much ahead of cricket. We got our first TV in May 1980, a Dyanora B/W. A few weeks later, I happened to see the greatest tennis match before 2008, between a certain Bjorg and McEnroe on the trusted Doordarshan. I still have vague memories of my dad oohing-aahing at critical moments. Cricket followed much later — not until the 1983 cricket world cup. Those initial years of tennis watching took shape of proper fandom when a 17 year lad emerged on the scene in 1985. You can carbon-date a person if they say their favourite sportsperson growing up was Becker. The burst of energy, the vibrancy, the power literally shocked and excited the establishment and the young ones simultaneously, which is a tough thing to do. Sticking posters on walls, staying up late, tracking records etc became a full time extra-curricular activity. Becker slowly faded away at the age of 24–25...

Dear Mr. Pahlaj Nihalani and other Censor Board Members, I went to see La La Land today, as the Adult rating really got me excited. I would give up my voting right to see Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone in an “A” movie. However I was shocked to find that there was nothing to sate my appetite. Nothing, nada, shunya. I am going to file a RTI application to see what made you give this an A rating. I sat through 130 minutes of a elegant, old fashioned, beautifully shot, romantic movie. Romance, wtf, where is the gratuitous sex that the rating promised. None, not even with sheets cautiously covering offending parts. Okay, probably my expectations were misplaced, atleast some nudity would have sufficed, my hopes were belied there too. There is more nudity on Big Boss or the streets of Bangalore where men freely grope and molest women. Now what do we have left, let’s go with abuses. I could have lived with a liberal use of the F word, something approaching 5% of Wolf of Wall ...

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 a...

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...

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...

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 th...

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 int...

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 unti...

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 exe...

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 w...

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 lesb...

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 re...

Review of Babel I have seen two of Alexando Gonzalez Inarritu’s earlier movies – Amores Perros and 21 Grams (both with the writer Guillermo Arriaga). I liked both of them immensely, especially 21 Grams for its structural complexity, for its top rate acting, for its moral clarity. Inarritu has reached a kind of auteur status after his two movies – for his structural innovativeness, his micro-cosmic moral world view and the great work he extracts from his photographer and editor who have as much a role to play in his success. Babel covers similar issues though not the same terrain as some of his earlier movies. It has 4 interconnected stories – some connections stronger than the other. · One story has a Moroccan villager who buys a rifle to guard his flock of sheep and gives it to his kids who playfully shoot at a tourist bus while practising with the rifle. · The second story involves an American couple (Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett) who ar...