Young spunk, more open, more books

The shortlist is out for the ‘lesser Boo­ker’, known as the Man Asian Literary Prize and three of the names, Omair Ahmad, Siddharth Chowdhury and Nitasha Kaul are Indian. That is one better than last year. So far, no Indian has won the award, though it’s early days yet as the Man Asian was initiated only in 2007.

It does show, however, that it’s not just Kiran Desai and Arvind Adiga who have made the world sit up and notice Indian writing; there have been other seismic events that shifted the tectonic plates. Earlier, the shelf life of the modern Indian writer was somewhere between the milk and the yogurt, and why not considering the fact that most writing came either from journalists or ex-journalists. But that is no longer the case.

The proof can be found in the longlist for the Man Asian. Half the people who made it are Indian. More interestingly, for some of them writing is not a full-time job.

Omair Ahmad, whose Jimmy The Terrorist is on the shortlist, says, however, that writing is still a top shot job. “You need money and time to do research and visit the places. To write my book on Bhutan I had to pitch story ideas to Penguin India and I was lucky enough considering they commissioned six books, including the one on Bhutan.” But he says the publishing scene has improved. The era of ‘vanity publishing’ is over.

“Three to four years ago, if a book sold 3000 copies in India, that was deemed a bestseller. Nowadays, 10,000 is the magic number. A lot can be done to popularise books, though. In London, even the underground railway stations have the posters of upcoming small books, something which is unthinkable here.”

K Srilata, who was on the longlist for her debut novel Table for Four, is an example of the change that is taking place. Her resume boasts quite a few published works apart from a first prize at the All India Poetry competition in 1998. But writing is not her bread and butter. She teaches creative writing and literature at IIT Madras.

Asked if writing is just an extension of her job she answers: “No, writing is very much a departure from my work as a teacher, though both have to do with words and with the life of the mind. But the energies required for teaching are altogether different from those you need for writing. As a teacher, I am dealing with flesh and blood “real people”. There is a constant reality check happening. Teaching is a very public thing, unlike writing. In the latter you deal with characters who can be pushed around a bit!” Before you think that Srilata‘s lifestyle seems to be straight out of Jekyll and Hyde, Ram Govardhan will make you think again.

Govardhan too was on the longlist for his first novel Rough With The Smooth and, he, surprise, surprise, is an auditor with a market research company in Chennai. Last year, two writers got book deals on the basis of their blogs’ popularity — Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan (You Are Here) and Amit Varma

(My Friend Sancho), the latter even made it to last year’s longlist.

What this suggests is that now there are many avenues to get published in India. Every major publishing house has a branch in India. On an average, Penguin India publishes one book every ten days. This is statistics and bikinis, both revealing as well as concealing.

Srilata too was emphatic about the publishing scene over an e-mail: “I think there are many more options now for Indians writing in English today than there were in the 90s. Lots of young publishing houses with spunk and a lot more openness, I would think, are open to new writers. It was certainly more difficult to get published in the 90s compared to now.”

Tom Dark of Heacock Literary Agency and the agent of Sriram Karri, another who was on the longlist, almost nails it: “In general, the Indian writers we hear from write beautifully. Indian English as it has developed over 250+ years maintains a grace in prose that Americans have begun to forget. Maybe they‘ll teach the world something.” Sriram Karri too straddles two careers. While he writes books, he makes a living as a corporate consultant and has worked with some of the biggest blue chip companies. He writes columns for The Guardian and The New Indian Express. Sriram expe­cts to be a full-time writer by 2011.

Considering these stories, it‘s unclear what‘s more remarkable — that they finally got their ship up the mountain or that they managed to come down, the other side more or less intact.

Anatomy of the page 3 crowd

Best selling author Dan Brown’s writing exploits have been described by Edinburgh professor of linguistics Geoffrey Pullum as, “Brown’s writing is not just bad; it is staggeringly, clumsily, thoughtlessly, almost ingeniously bad.” One would echo Pullum’s sentiments after ploughing through Ira Trivedi’s sophomore work The Great Indian Love Story. The audacious title notwithstanding, this book is to be read only if one wants to expand his understanding of the word trite to infinity.
An alternative title for the book could have been Love Aaj Kal. Here’s why. Set among the page 3 crowd of Delhi, the Love Aaj part is about two women, who are friends — Serena and Riya. The book starts with Riya’s life in the US and how the recession has had a debilitating effect on her life, both personally and professionally. Only a few pages later do you realise that Riya’s character is the book’s moral buffer and that she will introduce Serena into the narrative.
Serena, “who lives her life one debauched night at a time”, takes to wrong men like fish to water. One such man is Amar Khanna — a coke addict, serial adulterer and, more importantly, a husband. To understand why things have come to such a pass, Ira weaves a hackneyed past set in Serena’s student days in the US where the latter is knocked up by her long-time boyfriend Salman and, consequently, cracks develop in the relationship when Serena wants to keep her baby and Salman doesn’t. After a crude abortion and a broken heart, Serena returns home where bigger shocks await her.
Here starts the Love Kal part. Her mother Parmeet and IAS father SP (just SP) get divorced. Parmeet finds love out of the marriage in Randeep, whom she eventually marries; not before a cuckolded SP gets vicious towards Randeep
and drives him to a point where he appears for civils and becomes a bureaucrat. Upset over his wife’s conduct SP dies of heartbreak. Consequen­tly, Serena starts staying with her mother and step-father, something not to Serena’s liking. The accounts of the trio that make up Love Kal part are like overlapped dialogues, something only Robert Altman can pull off, and here it seems no more than warbled monologues.
It’s pointless to even discuss the book’s predictable denouement. That would be as sensible as asking what would come after electricity. More than the soporific storyline it is the jaundiced eye of Ira that gets on the nerves. She paints the entire page 3 crowd with the same thick brush, what with Serena having one-night stands as frequently as Martin Scorsese’s characters mouth expletives. What’s more, she even has a boy toy.
Ira studied at elite institutes like Columbia Business School and Wellesley College. However, some serious gaps in her education come to
the fore in this book. How else can one explain phrases like “master the art of bullshitting” and words like rocking, babe, perv in the book? To talk of grammatical howlers in this alleged drama would be nitpicking.
Ira’s debut novel What Would You Do To Save The World was a far better work than the current one because of its honesty. In The Great Indian Love Story Ira’s prose sparkles, albeit sporadically. Despite drawing caricatures of the high and mighty, she has been able to describe their ethos with panache. However, that doesn’t mean the material is compelling.

A David Lynch character in Kathmandu

The second law of thermodynamics tells us that without an injection of energy, all order decays. Now imagine this being beaten to death in the most turgid prose possible and you have Karna Sakya’s Paradise In Our Backyard. Right in the introduction, Sakya asks the reader not to expect ornate writing but when a book falls short in every aspect, including the book’s subtitle that claims “A Blueprint for Nepal”, the reader could do with some good language.

Sakya is a hotelier whose Kathmandu Guest House (KGH) in Thamel has achieved iconic status in the country. Prior to being an entrepreneur, Sakya was with the forest department of the Nepal government and this is where the book’s strength lies. The reader can feel the adrenaline rush when Sakya describes how a woman saved herself from rhino or how Sakya waded through the vast wetlands of Shuklapanta. Expunge the book of these parts and Sakya comes across as a David Lynch countryside character — one who has never said a single profound sentence in his life.

Here’s why. In a country where governments change as frequently as Judd Apatow makes movies, Sakya mentions politics in the most apolitical manner. One would have liked to know how he ran the business during the 1990 revolution and how he withstood the test of time when the tumultuous political scenario meant not many foreign tourists — Sakya’s bread and butter. Instead of expending precious ink on showing his self-effacing side (“hefty income and a good profit have never been my sole ambition”), Sakya could have thrown some light on what Nepal felt on being the first democracy in the entire world to have a communist prime minister.

In the latter part of his life, Sakya was involved with a news magazine and there’s no mention of the iron curtain that ensured that Nepal was the most repressive state against the media what with more than 100 journalists jailed during the state of emergency (according to Reporters Sans Frontiers). The book takes a brief Sophoclean turn when Sakya compares the urban-rural chasm in developed and underdeveloped countries and concludes that the chasm is a universal phenomenon. However, the turn is just that — brief. After an eventful stint at the forest department, Sakya set up the KGH for the non-hippie foreign tourist.

For the uninitiated, this part would be illuminating as Sakya talks about his business techniques and no wonder then that KGH was one among the top thirty travel highlights of the world in the thirtieth anniversary special of Lonely Planet. In a country where the bar of progress seems to be set so low that a baby could backflip over it, this is no mean achievement. Sakya comes across as a man who can theorise without oxygen at any height. Case in point: the 101 suggestions to improve Kathmandu city and this comes closest to the purported “A Blueprint For Nepal”. One chapter titled “Hope and Despair”, however, tugs at the reader’s heart, Sakya’s affected prose notwithstanding. Sakya lost his first wife and daughter to cancer and how he followed up his personal losses with a cancer hospital in Bharatpur is commendable.

Sakya is that amphibious creature, a high-society intellectual, and this comes across tellingly when he mentions how the hospital was built with one paisa tax on every cigarette consumed, or when he expatiates how the Visit Nepal Year 1998 came about. After passing on the family business, Sakya is back to square one — nature. This time, through, niche tourism and his nepalnature.com is an unqualified success.

At the end of Paradise In Our Backyard, the reader’s state of mind would be exactly like that of Alice after hearing “Jabberwocky” — “Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas — only I don’t exactly know what they are.”

Clawing way back to top

When General Motors filed for bankruptcy American humorist P J O’Rourke cried his heart out in the Wall Street Journal. “The phrase ‘bankrupt General Motors’, leaves Americans my age in economic shock. The words are as melodramatic as ‘Mom’s nude photos’.” For the hardened souls (read sceptics), incontrovertible proof of the battered state of the auto industry was available on that week’s cover of The Economist, which had a stripped-down dinosaur with all auto parts attached and a headline screaming “Detroitosaurus”. In the wake of such tumultous times comes Jim Collins’ small book titled How the Mighty Fall. Before the title puts you off with its the-great-depression-is-upon-us undertones, the sub-title should be encouraging — “And Why Some Companies Never Give In”.

Collins tries to create a cocktail of optimism and pessimism through five steps, which are self-explanatory, that encapsulates any company’s decline. In the exact order it is: Hubris born of success, undisciplined pursuit of more, denial of risk and peril, grasping for salvation, and capitulation to irrelevance or death. Whether the cocktail is potent or toxic is something that depends on the reader’s taste.

Collins’ research is impeccable and that’s apparent in the fact that one-eighth of the book is dedicated to notes and sources. His case studies are hard to better, be it the one on Motorola or Zenith or Circuit City. Collins provides perspective that is not run-of-the-mill. According to his hypothesis, a company can go through the four stages and still rebound to the top, like Xerox did. But if it reaches stage five, its further route would only be southwards. Case in point: Zenith.

Collins, who has authored bestsellers like Good to Great and Built to Last starts from where he left in Built to Last. That is irritating, to say the least. Every now and then, he invokes the two books, only to confound the reader. His entire methodology of choosing the companies has been borrowed from his earlier works. Collins, of course, paid interest with generous references to the books.

He falters, however, maybe due to the millstone of previous works around his neck. He gives simplistic differences between a company that made it big after reaching stage 4 and one that didn’t. Everything is binary, either one or zero, nothing in between. And that’s the major flaw. Collins’ examples are the companies that were already chronicled in his previous books. Instead, he could have taken a look at the demise of Long Term Capital Management in 1998 and spoken about the lessons to learn. It’s apparent that the current recession is a vast reprise of LTCM, although this time the banks played the lead roles instead of a hedge fund.

Perhaps Collins should have steered clear of the recession, as he mentions at the beginning. But he was just too busy making the book as relevant as possible to the current times by putting the fall of Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae and Lehman Brothers into context. An energy that he could easily have expended on writing about CEOs who make for fascinating case studies in the book. At a time when CEOs are asked to follow the Japanese example and “either resign or go commit suicide”, reading about Anne Mulcahy who achieved an amazing turnaround by reviving a an on-the-brink Xerox to a profit-making company, is awe-inspiring. One wonders why these days so few think that “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste”.

Maybe the answers lie in Collins’ previous works.

A literary power-point presentation

At a time when the global economy has pancaked, did Umesh Ramakrishnan get it wrong by releasing his book, There’s No Elevator to the Top, where CEOs talk about survival techniques at the top? Umesh bristled at this question: “You can’t talk about corporate governance through a narrow prism of an 18-month recession. This is just a cycle.” One has to take his word, considering that in his capacity as vice-chairman of global executive search firm CTPartners, Umesh recruits CEOs, CFOs, COOs for Global 2000 companies. Asked what spurred him to write the book, he says the book is 20 years of experience of these successful people and will help people who want to gain entry into, in Umesh’s words, ‘C-Suite’, save time.

Umesh traversed North America, Latin America, Asia and Europe to talk to CEOs from various sectors. His globe­trotting seems to have served its purpose since their quotes are worth a read even though they sound like borderline evangelists at some time or the other. “Make sure you concentrate on doing the job at hand, building upon the skills and opportunities you have now. You’ll be noticed and promoted.” Chetan Bhagat has been known to provide better insight. This common wisdom notwithstanding, some of the analogies made by the author’s sources do pack a wallop. Be it the one on rock-climbing or the usage proportion of ears and mouth or making use of all six guns on the battlefield.

In the last 18 months, bank CEOs were arguably the most-reviled species across the globe for their apparently irrational decisions to offer NINJA loans and then pack them as obscure objects called credit-default swaps (CDS). A beast whose nature was never known until the economy started to get bruised. Umesh is vindicated in that he didn’t approach any banker. An innocuous why was enough for him to embark on a diatribe.

“I think that there is more to learn from the CEOs outside the banking industry than from the inside. I have always felt that, and the publishing date on the book is good enough proof that I did not include the (banking) industry due to the downturn.”

Such fastidiousness, sad to say, does not get translated into the book. The net result is the silliness that the reader has to grapple with. The sub-chapter headlines are a good enough indication of the potential landmines that dot the book’s landscape — “Never Stop Learning”, “Health and Your Personal Life Matter”, “Be Good at What You Do — and the Rewards Will Come”, to name a few. What’s more, you have the author telling that he was “comfortably seated” on the sofa of Nilekani’s office and each of the ten chapters culminates with pyrotechnics titled “executive summary.” It must be the literary equivalent of the Powerpoint presentation, which is part and parcel of Umesh’s job.

His honesty is, however, unflinching. His favourite CEOs are not media-driven. “The people I admire are the ones who go below and unscrew the bolts.” Thus, his choice of CEOs, apart from Nandan Nilekani and Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, are the ones who never dominate public consciousness but are institutions in themselves. Umesh’s favourite writer happens to be the best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell because he is the kind of reader who is happy if he gets two nuggets from a book, and Gladwell does that consistently.

One may paint the book with the same broad stroke. For a book where the author professes, to quote the jacket, “a leading headhunter shares the advancement strategies of the world‘s most successful strategies,” only Jim Donald’s Big Fish theory, Bob Reynolds’ make mistake and fix theory, the A, B, C players analogy stand out among what is otherwise as old as hills content. That means the book is recommended for two kinds of readers — the ones like the author himself and those who may be interviewed by a panel consisting of the author. For serious readers, Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments is suggested.

My Dorothy Parker moment:
Well, as part of our city supplement my editor asked me to imagine a character "who would read Shakespeare for a screw". I took it up reluctantly, and grudgingly, and the first piece got printed today. I cannot upload that content because though the instances are made up, they are clearly inspired from mine and lives of others close to me. Wish me luck on that. By the way, my character is called "The Byronic Hero". Don Juan ! Rings a bell?

A modern day fable for adults

Writer Omair Ahmed takes pride in claiming to be ‘old-fashioned’ owing to his non-presence in Facebook and Twitter. What’s more he even uses that most enduring image of the days of the yore ink pen. Whatever Omair’s personal life be, his sophomore work The Storyteller’s Tale is definitely a modern-day fable for today’s adults.

The early 18th-century story is set in Delhi (which Omair tells was the suggestion of Ravi Singh, the Penguin India publisher) when Ahmad Shah Abdali was pillaging his way across the north. The protagonist, modelled on the Delhi poet Mir Taqi Mir, is a storyteller deprived of his ‘beggarly poet’s’ income owing to Abdali’s exploits.

In the desert of Rohilkhand, the storyteller comes across the haveli of a begum whose husband is busy looting Delhi. What follows are four stories narrated in turn by each protagonist. To write them Omair took just four days. When told that this would be an amazing hook for the story, he brushes it off and insists that it be mentioned as six weeks (the time he took for conceptualising). Still, six weeks is an amazingly short time.

Omair says that he was a reader and never a raconteur or listener during his childhood. He was anyway too busy “looking for a shark’s tooth in the desert” of Rasta Nura, a small seaside city in Saudi Arabia, where he spent the first 12 years of his life.

Ever since Gorakhpur has been his mitti. This book is a homecoming for Omair who branded himself a jaahil (ignoramous) in the acknowledgements. In a family where Urdu poetry “is in the blood”, Omair is an outcast considering his not-so-particular interest in it till late.

“I am not being self-deprecating by calling myself a jaahil. It’s a clear assessment of what I know and what I don’t know,” he says in a tone unmistakably self-effacing. During the course of his diverse career, Omair saw to it that Bill Clinton gave his speech safely in Rampur and was political adviser to the British High Commission.

But what continues to give him a helium high is the fact that he made it to the international relations programme at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi in, “mind you”, open quota. Omair‘s short stories and first book Encounters have Islam as the leitmotif and for him “it’s extremely important”. “There are certain
organisations that say Islam is not part of the country. Yeh meri mitti hai, tumhe problem hai to tum jao yahan se is Omair’s retort to those “certain organisations”.

Mention Bhutan, and Omair’s eyes light up. He is working on a part-travelogue and part-documentation of the political history of the world’s youngest constitutional democracy. “In India 60,000 riots happen in a year. Apart from a couple of stirs, a riot never took place in the country. It is a perfect example of the top-down democracy and it has learnt from all its neighbours,” says the man who is clearly fascinated by his subject.

Apart from this, he is compiling a short-story collection called Unbelonging, another novella Jimmy the Terrorist, a book on Gorakhpur and a biography of his great grand-uncle, who was the former Pakistani High Commissioner to India, all for Penguin India. “I have sold my soul to Penguin,” says Omair. When he has to be, Omair Ahmed is all business.


Recommendation:
Dreamers: This Bernardo Bertolucci film ends when the 1968 student revolution in France, which was the 'comeuppance' of the De Gaulle regime, is reaching its crescendo. Mathew, an American student, who is on a student exchange program in Paris meets up with the brother-sister duo Theo and Isabelle (a comely Eva Green) and shares their love (read madness) for cinema. In the initial reels when Matthew justifies the reason for sitting right at the front of the screen, will alter the way a viewer watches a movie from then on. The way iconic scenes from 'Band of Outsiders', 'Blonde Venus', 'Queen Christina' and 'Breathless' are inserted and 'reenacted' in the film almost justify the 1968 setting. Plot wise, Matthew gets attracted to Isabelle who shares 'not so' sisterly relationship with her brother. What follows are generous doses of nudity, not that you will be complaining. Eva Green flashes her pendulous pair of breasts that will find cinematic comparison only with the ones shown in Bergman's 'Cries and Whispers'. Watch out for that scene when Eva Green cries after having lost her virginity. Its vintage Bertolucci.

Purpose of solitude

This interview has been published in the New Indian Express


"One-and-half teaspoons of sugar please,” said Siddharth Dhan­vant Shanghvi for the tea that was served. This was a surprise considering that anyone who read his latest book The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay would say he never resorts to half measures. After all, the book pans the page 3 crowd, politicians who subvert the judiciary with impunity, Bollywood culture, and the Shiv Sena. One interesting anomaly is that you will find Mumbai being spelt as Bombay throughout since Shanghvi says: “Bombay, not Mumbai, is at the heart of my book.” Excerpts from the interview.

Samar, the immensely gifted pianist in the book, reaches dizzying heights at a very young age and then stops pursuing his passion. Something similar happens with Rhea too who doesn’t find the urge to continue with pottery. Now you said that Flamingoes is your last book. Should one draw parallel between these fictio­nal lives and yours?

You cannot actually draw a parallel. There was always this conflict between the dicho­tomy of purpose and meaning in my life. All my life I have been confined to solitude, which is non-negotiable, to write books. This was the purpose. However, now I am yearning for a meaning. I find meaning in a walk on Juhu beach, listening to a piece of music, conversations with friends. I want to be true to those things rather than to the public symbols of success. Maybe I will watch the green mould on the wall or make jam at home. That sounds far more cheerful than writing a book for over six years (Flamingoes was started in late 2002 and was completed in late last year).

What do you intend to do now?

I don’t know (laughs). A very close friend of mine who has written screenplays for some really successful films has asked me to help her out. That is one option I am mulling over. As of now, there are many noises in my mind, which I want to get mellowed until I get to hear my own voice.

A politician in the book says that Zaira got killed since she was wearing a backless gown. One sees the Mangalore attacks and can’t help but say that maybe the politician is indeed echoing sentiments of a large populace.

Absolutely. What happened in Mangalore is not anti-women, it is anti-human. You are not only insulting women, you are insulting men also. Such moral regression is unforgivable. During the recent Valentine’s Day, a man got married to a donkey, in Ranchi. His crime: he was seen with a woman. That was absolutely ridiculous.


Karan, the protagonist of the book, leaves Bombay in a fit of revulsion after looking at an impotent judiciary and a burnt Iqbal. Did you feel the same away about Bombay, which formed backdrop for both your books?

I have a love-hate relationship with Bombay. Bombay is all about Bollywood ecology- neon lights and superstar images. However, nowhere else will you find such unexpected kindness from people. During the 2005 floods, people helped each other caring least about identities. It’s completely ironic and absolutely sentimental, and this gives Bombay the edge of jazz when it was still all about the blues. Bombay tells you that humanity might be flawed but resplendent. That’s the reason why I mentioned it as Bombay in the title. You cannot take away what is rightfully mine. As an artist I am claiming ownership on Bombay.

‘A lushly, wildly, imaginative fairy tale.’ This was how LSD (Last Song of Dusk) was described. Flamingoes is anything but that. There are obvious references to Shiv Sena, Jessica Lal, Salman Khan, Fire, the beau monde, M F Hussain and even Lalu Prasad Yadav. Was Flamingoes a conscious departure from LSD?

It’s rather an unconscious departure. Flamingoes is a stronger book compared to LSD. The book is a witness to the times we are living in.

But wasn’t the obvious reference to Jessica Lal and devoting an entire part of the book to the trial a bit of an overdrive?

It might seem like overdrive for you since you are an Indian. However, my friends in other countries who have read the book found the tale very gritty and real.

You have been very actively involved with AIDS. You have written extensively on it for The Chronicle and recently one story, ‘Hello Darling’, was published in AIDS Sutra. How has been your experience?

I am glad you have read Hello Darling. It is more important to me than the two books. I am involved with an international foundation, which has to remain nameless, and I am involved with children with pediatric AIDS. I do creative brainstorming and have recen­tly done an ad campaign that will get broadcast nationally and internationally.


Don’t you think that the page-3 crowd was shown in bad light?

Well, if they think that I have caricatured them then they are flattering themselves. They are exactly the way I have written. The woman who shows the left cheek of the butt is a friend of mine and she also said, “I’ll show it (the reference in the book) to my mom”.

In the book, why are all the characters apart from Adi so pessimistic?

I find optimism very boring. I think bad luck is much more reliable than good luck.

A recommendation:

Fucking Amal: It comes down to individuals if Swedish director Lukas Moodysson is perceived as the most important or notorious director among his peers. Lilya4ever and Together might qualify as his more important movies and F**king Amal is unlike any other Moodysson flick- meditative, something which Wong Kar Wai would have smacked his lips at. Young Elin is the coquettish girl of her school who is secretly admired by Agnes who does not have any friends as such in the quiet town of Amal. Things go on the upswing when Elin chooses to attend to Agnes' birthday party and then Elin asks almost rhetorically 'What is your worst nightmare'? Elin replies herself 'Of spending my entire life here'. That sets the platform for this teenage lesbian drama where, thankfully, for once, sex is not emphasised upon at all. Every scene makes sense in this uplifting story of two girls who do not want to have blinkers on. This is one of those rare teen films which you can watch for the second time.

Mirrors of memories in Chor Bazaar

Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi is obsessed with Michael Ondaatje. So much so that he told this reviewer that he read The English Patient 42 times and has pasted a quote of his in the room that might have inspired his

sophomore work The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay — “A novel is a mirror walking down the road”. The novel is witness to the times we are living in, what with the obvious references to the Jessica Lall case, the Page-3 crowd, Shiv Sena, Lalu Prasad Yadav, Salman Khan, depraved politicians and their debauched lives, the 1992 Bombay riots and even the 2005 floods. Sadly, Shanghvi’s work does not have the quality of his earlier The Last Song of Dusk. On the brighter side, it still manages to bear witness to truth.

Karan Seth is a cub photographer for India Chronicle and as part of an assignment he gets to take pictures of Samar, a genius piano pla­yer who stopped playing for reasons best known to himself. The pictures compel Samar to meet Karan. The pianist’s close friend Zaira, a Bollywood actress who is “single-handedly responsible for raising India’s National Mastur­bation Index”, comes in contact with the photographer with whom she instantly clicks (the pun is inadvertent but hard to erase). Karan, however, is ambivalent towards Leo, Samar’s boyfriend, an American writer who is ‘exploring’ India.

In his search for Bombay Fornicator (no, it’s not what you are thinking), Karan lands up in Chor Bazaar and bumps into Rhea, a middle-aged woman who can be anyone’s trophy wife. In this case, of Adi a hedge-fund manager who shuttles between Singapore and Bombay. Karan’s achingly beautiful work brings them together, considering Rhea herself was a precocious talent in pottery who left it voluntarily, and finds traces of herself in Karan. She becomes his eye to explore Bombay and those are the best moments of the book. This episode bears uncanny resemblance to Mohsin Hamid’s sublime Moth Smoke.

Meanwhile, as retribution for spurning the advances of Malik Prasad, son of Chander Prasad, “a top-ticket politician with the Hindu People’s Party”, Zaira (read Jessica Lall) gets shot. What follows is total arm-twisting of the law, thanks to Chander Prasad’s clout, while Samar and Karan continue to fight despite all the witnesses chickening out. How all these lives take irrevocable turns after the incident forms the emotional crux of the book.

Shanghvi is a master storyteller, and that’s evident through the empty spaces left when the characters have nothing to say and the way he modulates the sex part of the book. Where it was organic in Shanghvi’s debut novel, here Rhea wants to be “torn apart”. The way Karan justifies Bombay as his work place and how Karan-Samar’s relationship blooms post Zaira’s death are just a few shining testimonies for Shanghvi’s way with words.

However, there are a few stultifying passages too. “Karan stood with his mouth open wide enough to trap a few flies”. Yeah, right. Thankfully, such pedestrian writing is hardly witnessed. The cynicism that pervades the book reminded this reviewer what Shanghvi told him — “Optimism is boring”. It certainly should be considering this book is so unputdowanable.

A recommendation:
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown: Compared to 'All About my Mother' or 'Volver' this 1988-release does not embellish Pedro Almodovar's resume in any which way. However, this is the kind of comedy which was rarely seen in Almodovar's later films. Pepa, a dubbing artiste, is yet to come to grips as to why her lover, also a dubbing artiste, left her. Her lover's wife and son (Antonio Banderas in his early days) are also clueless about his whereabouts. Meanwhile, Pepa's girlfriend is palpitating if she would be implicated in a terror-attack case. Courtesy, her one-night stand with the terrorist whose love-making continues to give her 'goose-pimples'. As the prospective buyer of Pepa's penthouse Banderas and his wife land up. Chaos reigns all over the film and the discerning audience would be treated to loads of chuckles despite it not being suffused with madcap gags.

World is going to the (slum)dogs

Apart from the four movies that Slumdog Millionaire was able to pip for the ‘Best Picture’ award at the Oscars, a few other films also bit dust owing to this Danny Boyle-directed film for another award that this writer wishes was instituted. The award is worst book-to-film adapation award for the year 2008. The other contenders would have been ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’, ‘Blindness’.

Slumdog is as different from its source material, Indian diplomat Vikas Swarup’s ‘Q&A’, as the difference between listening to a song and hearing to it live. While the book is logic-defying it never demands your brain to be placed in pause mode and Slumdog, on the other hand, to quote Salman Rushdie, “piles impossibility upon impossibility”.

The movie kicks off with a boy trying to catch a cricket ball and an aeroplane that whizzes past distracts him. This is a trope that is visible throughout the film that those in slums cannot reach dizzying heights and are condemned to fall. To explode this myth, whenever Danny Boyle’s fascination with absurd wide angles and wipes allows, the protagonist Jamal Malik, a slum-dweller, enters a game show that is a variant of ‘Who wants to be a Millionaire’ and thanks to his sheer dumb luck, Jamal ends up pocketing the prize amount.

How the questions are inextricably linked, somehow, to his pulp fiction kind of a life forms the crux of the film. As quiz master Anil Kapoor is menacing and lights up the proceedings in what, otherwise, is a stodgy fare. Some scenes of the movie are repulsive unlike Danny’s sublime ‘Trainspotting’ where Ewan Mc Gregor had to dip himself in the commode. Slumdog is a film made by a foreigner on India for foreigners. Case in point is a young Jamal falling into loads of feces to get Amitabh Bachchan’s autograph. This is supposed to be a shining testimony for the Indians’ deference towards their matinee idols. Danny does pander to some other firangi notions about India too like Taj Mahal, children begging on roads, nubiles turning into nautch girls, third degree police torture and, of course, the song-and-dance routine.

As a matter of fact, the movie does give some amazing chills too. That scene where a young Jamal escapes before his eyes are gouged in order to make him fit for a begging job is something that only Danny could have pulled off. Performances wise Dev Patel is unconvincing as Jamal Malik and is far cry from Swarup’s Ram Mohammad Thomas. He sleepwalks through his role. Freida Pinto as Latika, the childhood sweetheart of Jamal, is definitely over-rated. Her chemistry with Dev Patel is such that heating up a cup of coffee will be a huge task.

The moment you come out of the theatre a couple of Rahman’s numbers (‘Ringa, Ringa’ and ‘Jai Ho’) will stay with you and that’s it. The much-talked-about musical at the end is something Ram Gopal Varma pulled off in Rangeela in similar settings. That was 12 years ago.

If you are really game for some gut-wrenching drama about kids in slums, watch a Romanian film called ‘Underground Children’. Slumdog is a picnic if these two movies are to be compared.

Some recommendations:

Into the Wild: Whoever has heard the original soundtrack prior to watching this Sean Penn-directed movie will know that Eddie Vedder is almost giving a nutshell plot of what to expect while watching the film.
"Society you are a crazy breed; hope you are not lonely without me"
After passing out from college Chris McCandless (a fabulous Emile Hirsch) realises that job is a "20th century invention" and starts craving for "absolute freedom" which he will find when he goes, yes, "into the wild". The poster shows Emile sitting on top of a bus christened as "magic box".
Adapted from Jon Krakauer's book of the same name this is a real-life story. Sean Penn manages to be faithful to the book and, consequently, the viewer is privy to Emile's sojourn to Alaska. His brief encounters with a hippie couple, 16-year-old singer, a farmer and a geriatric who wants to adapt him suffuse the narrative with poignant moments. Some scenes are, however, in critic parlance, a strain on credulity. However, the denouement is sure to leave a giant-size lump in every viewer's mouth.