flaccid writing at its best !!

Lunar lunacy

2011-12-29T10:16:00.000-08:00

Japanese writer Haruki Murakami’s brand of fantasy-realism is polarising and there can’t be any acquired taste about it. You either believe in talking cats and orthogonal cheese or you don’t. However, his latest opus 1Q84 is a far less demanding work of fiction but is as rewarding like Kafka On the Shore, Sputnik Sweetheart, and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

Set in the last nine months of 1984 in Tokyo, the three-part novel (divided into Book 1, 2 and 3) pivots around two characters: Aomame and Tengo. They have not met for two decades, but each is very much an essence in the other’s memory. Aomame is a sweet, po-faced sports club instructor with a sexual leaning towards balding men who look like Sean Connery and occasionally operates as a Manga-version of Lisbeth Salander who kills men by touching the “sweet spot” on the back of their neck. Tengo is a math instructor at a primary school and writes fiction that is yet to deserve any publishing house’s affections. The title alludes to a parallel world that the characters unwittingly walk into (number 9 is pronounced as kyu in Japanese).

Tengo is involved in the rewriting of a young girl’s novel about a cult, at the behest of his smarmy editor, Komatsu. Not so far away, Aomame is entrusted with the impossibly dangerous task of killing this cult’s leader. Murakami does well to inject a few more characters who propel the novel into the realms of brilliant storytelling. Ushikawa, a lawyer turned private detective, has a major presence in the book 3, and his Sherlock Holmes-kind deductions are an absolute delight. Tamaru, Aomame’s Man Friday, waxes eloquent on topics ranging from Carl Jung’s home in Switzerland to Chekhov’s “gun maxim”.

1Q84 was issued in three volumes to huge acclaim in Japan in 2009-10 and is destined for similar response in rest of the world as well. Right from the opening page, where Aomame is transfixed by Czech composer Janacek’s Sinfonietta, Murakami wears his Western cultural influences on his sleeve. He eschews kimono for jeans, sushi for pizza and hardly mentions sake in this hefty (932 pages to be precise) novel. Here are a few references that should give you an ample idea of what Murakami wants his reader to think about: Faye Dunaway, Duke Ellington, Janacek, Sonny and Cher, Anton Chekhov, Proust, Churchill and George Orwell.

What makes 1Q84 a fierce work of imagination is the scope that Murakami gives to his love story: Lewis Carroll meets Charles Dickens meets Philip Pullman at the same table in a jazz club in Tokyo. The way Aomame makes her way to the parallel world through an innocuous expressway is pure Carroll, Tengo’s deprived childhood could give any Dickens character a run for his money and the way parallel worlds coexist cheek-by-jowl in the novel is straight out of a Pullman book. On top of that, 1Q84 is deeply rooted in the Japanese kaidan eiga tradition and its kabuki theatre ancestry.

The part where Aomame kills the leader has more chills per sentence than the entire shower scene in Psycho and eyeball ripping in Un Chien Andalou together. Despite its size, Murakami makes sure that he weaves his yarn intricately enough to not let the reader’s attention waver. By jettisoning his usual fantasy-realism, Murakami could etch out his characters more finely and have arresting backstories that would make 1Q84 a novel easily suitable to any reader’s palate. Explicit, yet subtle and dreamlike, and more sex than is usual for Murakami, 1Q84 will transcend Murakami’s fan base.

That said, this being a Murakami novel, ordinary events do turn into extraordinary events in no time. Tengo and Aomame can see two moons in the sky, Aomame ties herself up in knots over the colour of the uniform of Tokyo Police, there’s a bizarre impregnating scene, dwarfs called Little People walk out of dead people’s mouth and any Inception fan would revel at how you can never be completely sure which world the story is taking place in. Memory plays an important part in the novel’s structured and exploding proceedings. Both the leads are forever clinging to their past despite the bad taste that it leaves in their mouths. After all, the past is something they can be at least sure of.

If any blemishes are to be picked up from this otherwise flawlessly brilliant novel, it’s the climax that is a tad contrived. The publisher appointed two translators and had them race against the time in order to release the book as soon as possible, which is why the language gets a bit jarring at times. In fact, 1Q84 was nominated for Literary Review’s bad sex in fiction award for this clunky line: “A freshly made ear and a freshly made vagina look very much alike, Tengo thought.” Despite this I would say that if you have to read only one work of fiction this year, make sure it’s 1Q84.

1Q84: BOOK 1, 2 AND 3
Haruki Murakami
Harvill Secker
932 pages; Rs 649

Thomas Hardy in India

2011-12-29T10:15:00.001-08:00

Nine years ago, British director Michael Winterbottom visited the deserts near Osian in Rajasthan for a documentary project. Though Osian did not make it to the final cut of the documentary, Winterbottom decided to make a feature film set in Osian. This is Trishna, a not-so-faithful adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, which will release in India in March 2012.

The story revolves around Trishna, played by Freida Pinto, who wishes to rise in life despite her humble roots. She meets Jay Singh (Riz Ahmad), the London-bred son of a hotelier, who falls in love with her. What follows is a rollercoaster of emotions that Marcel Zyskind’s (a Winterbottom regular) camera captures unflinching, never once shying away from reality.

Asked why he chose to set Tess in India, Winterbottom says, “I think Hardy was able to capture ordinary people’s lives really well. He wrote about rapidly changing rural landscapes as a result of increased education, mechanised farming, steam engines, and so on. Right now, India is undergoing a similar change, so I thought it would be interesting to set the story in India.” Clearly, Winterbottom, who has made three films on Hardy’s novels, knows the author very well.

Shot in Osian, Jaipur, Jaisalmer, Jodhpur, Nagore and Mumbai in a short shooting schedule of six weeks, Trishna is a departure from Winterbottom’s two previous films which released last year — The Killer Inside Me which was a thriller, and The Trip, a comedy. Trishna, on the other hand, is a cross between a gritty documentary on rural India and a love story.

Unlike Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, however, Winterbottom depicts both the incredible and insipid India in the same light. On his choice of Pinto for the lead role, he says, “When I met Freida, she came across as extremely beautiful but also as someone who could convey Tess’s pain.” Pinto is not the only Indian on the film’s credits. The film has been co-produced by Sunil Bohra and Anurag Kashyap while Amit Trivedi has composed the music, coming up with an evocative soundtrack which combines Rajasthani folk music with sounds of English bands like Kasabian and Portishead.

Kashyap, Trivedi and Bollywood actress Kalki Koechlin play themselves in the movie, while Trishna’s family members are inhabitants of Osian who hosted the film’s cast and crew. In fact, some of the best wisecracks in Hindi uttered by the minor characters were spontaneous improvisations.

Recounting her experience of working on the film in Goa, where Trishna premiered at the recently concluded 42nd International Film Festival of India, Pinto says, “This is an author-backed role of a silent sufferer and Michael took me ten steps ahead as an actor.” Used to working with large crews in The Immortals and Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Pinto says she found working with a small crew on Trishna an “intimate and interesting” experience.

Trishna is the third film this year to adapt a classic novel — earlier there were Cary Fukunaga’s bleak Jane Eyre and Andrea Arnold’s dreamy Wuthering Heights. While both these films stuck to the novel’s plot, purists may scoff at the liberties Winterbottom takes with the original, especially in the character of Jay Singh, who is a combination of the two main male characters in the novel. But Winterbottom is undeterred. “Every human has a spiritual and sensual side which comes out at appropriate time,” he says.

But why make a movie that is so bleak, and offers little hope? “When the socio-economic conditions of people are rapidly changing, some are gainers while some are invariably left behind,” says Winterbottom. “In this period of flux, Trishna might have lost out but I show that there’s still hope for her family.”

Between the covers

2011-12-29T10:13:00.000-08:00

A couple more weeks and the books industry will have survived another year, predictions of its imminent death notwithstanding. Yes, people are spending more time on social networking sites, giving pigeons competition in terms of attention span, and independent bookstores in the West (not just chains like Borders) are shutting down en masse, but books as such have survived.

Apart from the gloom and doom, 2011 saw the worst literary spat since Paul Theroux and V S Naipaul’s fell out. Niall Ferguson accused Pankaj Mishra of racism after Mishra’s scathing review of Civilisation: The West and the Rest appeared in the London Review of Books.

Here are a few of Mishra’s jabs. Ferguson, he wrote, is a “retailer of emollient tales about the glorious past” whose books “are known less for their original scholarly contribution than for containing some provocative counterfactuals”. He summarised Ferguson’s new book in one word: gallimaufry. Thin-skinned Ferguson threatened to take Mishra and the LRB to court for making “racist” comments and called the review “a personal attack that amounts to libel”. Mishra refused to be cowed, and is nowhere near making an apology. It remains to be seen whether in the new year Ferguson makes his threat real.

Mishra rubbed Patrick French the wrong way, too. He trashed French’s India: A Portrait so harshly in Outlook magazine that the latter retorted, “It was less a review than an ideological cry of pain,” and returned the compliment by comparing Mishra, with his “migratory bio”, with Lord Curzon.

Catfights apart, one of the bigger events was Salman Rushdie’s entry into Twitter. Other than Bret Easton Ellis, Rushdie is probably the only popular novelist who understands perfectly well how to engage his followers. When Facebook banned his profile for not including his first name (Ahmed), Rushdie took to Twitter and compiled a list of Middle Name Users: James “Paul” McCartney, Francis “Scott” Fitzgerald and Edward “Morgan” Forster, among others. If you haven’t yet read Rushdie’s limerick on TV personality Kim Kardashian’s recent divorce, you’ve missed a minor gem.

Another major controversy blew up when a judge quit the Man Booker International prize panel after Philip Roth was given the award. The judge, author and publisher Carmen Callil, said of Roth that “He goes on and on and on about the same subject in almost every single book. It’s as though he’s sitting on your face and you can’t breathe.”

Closer to home, the mushrooming of literary festivals was a cause of minor consternation as the same clique of writers was seen displaying its wares at every location. But then, anything that celebrates a series of dark pigments in rectilinear format has to be a good thing.

The Jaipur Literature Festival at the beginning of the year was the absolute standout among the bookfests. With the impressive lineup of international writers its organisers manage to assemble year after year, JLF is turning into the Hay Festival of South Asia. Martin Amis, Orhan Pamuk, Kiran Desai, Junot Diaz, Siddhartha Mukherjee, Richard Ford, Jay McInerney, J M Coetzee and Vikram Seth are a few of the many writers who held the audience in thrall during the five days of the event. Next year’s list of speakers looks equally promising.

The sore thumb of the year in bookfests was Harud, the Srinagar literary festival that was indefinitely postponed because of an “open letter” that several writers of Kashmiri origin composed and circulated. The letter said that so long as human rights were being denied in the strife-ridden region, an “apolitical” festival was an absurdity.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. If only it didn’t have to be that way.

Margin Call

2011-12-29T10:11:00.000-08:00

There has been massive literature on the financial recession that shook the world three years ago. However, not many movies have been made depicting the exact turn of events. Wall Street 2 was at most middling with the usual Oliver Stone empty bluster. First-time director PC Chandor’s Margin Call makes more than a decent attempt at plugging this ever-widening gap. In his fictional account of how Lehman Brothers bit the dust, Chandor shows how harrowing those 72 hours leading to the bankruptcy were.

In brokerage parlance, “margin call is a demand by a broker that an investor should deposit further cash to cover possible losses”. The large investment bank in the movie realises that it has too many junk bonds well past their sell-by date, which it can’t sell to the investors anymore unless it doesn’t mind cheating. Thus, this dictum: “There are three ways to make a living in this business: be first, be smarter, or cheat.”

Chandor’s camera is a fly on the wall and is uncomfortably close to the faces of the dramatis personae. The viewer is bound to feel the tension. There are no two ways about it. The bank’s chairman Jeremy Irons, who is modeled on, YES, Dick Fuld, delivers a masterly performance as the man who knows end is nigh but would still delude himself that a miracle is on the anvil.

Not just Irons, each actor, the bits-and-pieces ones included, perform their part with a gusto that these themes need. Chandor manages to give everyone sparkling dialogues. In the heat of the moment, Paul Bettany stands atop the skyscraper and gets philosophical with his subordinate Zachary Quinto, “When you’re this high, you’re not afraid that you might fall, you’re afraid that you’ll fall.”

In another delicate moment, Quinto’s colleague has an epiphany that he is just “pushing buttons” and making loads of money. “I might as well play roulette,” he says.

The movie’s denouement is equally heartrending when Kevin Spacey asks the brokers to go for the broke (pun not intended) and deceive their clients. When the game’s up and only one team of players knows that, it’s an absolute rampage. This is why the Occupy Wall Street protests fall flat on one level. This quote from Reuters journalist Felix Salmon should illustrate why, “Wall Street isn’t picking the pockets of the 99% and giving the proceeds to the 1%. It’s picking the pockets of the 1% and giving the proceeds to itself.”

Humble brag

2011-12-29T10:08:00.000-08:00

UrbanDictionary. com defines the term humble brag as, “A form of self promotion where the promoter thinks he is bragging about himself in the context of a humble statement.” This definition more or less sums up what Douglas Edwards achieves through his book I’m Feeling Lucky on his former employer Google (more on this later).

Edwards was Google’s 59th employee, was involved with the company in 1999 when it was virtually based out of a garage in Silicon Valley and he left it in 2005. Backed by seven years of solid marketing experience for the San Jose Mercury News, 34-year-old Edwards felt he deserved a tiny bit of the technology pie in Silicon Valley. He acquired the vague designation of director of consumer marketing at Google, and quickly realised it wouldn’t be a cakewalk. Here was an organisation that is as flat as it can get. He had carte blanche over various decisions and in the same way anyone could overrule his decisions as long as the alternative made sense.

With headlines inspired from the satirical website Onion (“I Go Logo Loco and Learn Good Enough Is Good Enough”, “Rugged Individualists with a Taste for Porn”, “Managers in Hot Tubs and in Hot Water”), Edwards charts the all-too-familiar history of Google, albeit with in-house jokes and anecdotes hitherto unknown to outside world. Whether this Google-y humour will make those unfamiliar with Google’s zeitgeist smile is a contentious issue but the writer deserves to be commended for the perennial undercurrent of light humour in the book. One of the chapters, “Is New York Alive?”, has the sweep of a disaster epic novel. Edwards displays all his literary chops when he describes how Google went about covering 9/11. The spot ethical decisions that Google made at that juncture demonstrate that it at least strives to live up to its credo of “Don’t Be Evil”.

Edwards’ reverence for Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page shines through the pages. All sorts of fawning adjectives are used to describe their intelligence and ingenuity. They may be valid but it would have been better if Edwards had exercised some restraint. The book’s subtitle is “The Confessions of Google Employee 59” but this is hardly a tell-all memoir. If anything, it’s a safe one. Where is the bite that was seen in, say, Stephen Levy’s In the Plex? Google’s disdain for non-engineers is legendary and an open secret, but Edwards gives this issue cursory treatment. And that’s quite discombobulating considering he was told this when he was sacked in 2005: “I’m having a hard time slotting you. I don’t really see where you fit. There doesn’t seem to be a place for ‘brand management’ in the organisation as a functional role.”

If Edwards didn’t want to burn bridges, he could have at least loosened a few screws and provided an insight like Eli Pariser did with his book The Filter Bubble: What The Internet Is Hiding From You. If Google really purports to not be evil, why is it that search results change depending on the geographical location of a user? The only mild criticism that Edwards had was the company’s attitude towards Orkut, a social networking site. Edwards thought that the site had great potential but it was nipped in the bud because Google’s “tech snobbery” came in the way. “Because Orkut had been written using Microsoft tools, Google’s engineers deemed it not scalable. They turned their noses up at it and … they just let it die,” reminisces Edwards.

Edwards himself doesn’t have any earth-shattering contributions to speak of. Apart from coining AdWords and writing the documentation in corporatespeak (he has studied English literature at college), Edwards wasn’t a great employee. Even though he was a bit player, he invariably found himself in the enviable position of fly-on-the-wall during Google’s most momentous occasions. That is why the way Google pipped its then competitor Overture for a contract with AOL is written with a panache that will keep the reader hooked.

Coming back to the humble brag part, I’m Feeling Lucky is a litany of complaints and Pyrrhic victories that Edwards writes about in meticulous detail. Be it his tiny ego battles over inconsequential things with his superiors or an argument that he wins after intense wrangling, Edwards doesn’t let anything slip away in the ether of time. It’s not even his delusions of grandeur that let down the book; what really prevents it from being a page-turner are the useless details with which he peppers the book. Instead of providing the true insider’s lowdown on Google, Edwards dedicates pages to the canteen food and the facilities in the recreation room.

Pardon the feeble attempt at humour, but as a reader I didn’t feel lucky having to review this 400-page puff piece.

I’M FEELING LUCKY: THE CONFESSIONS OF GOOGLE EMPLOYEE NUMBER 59
Douglas Edwards
Allen Lane
401 pages; £20

Smudged ink

2011-12-29T10:06:00.001-08:00

T S Eliot once wrote, “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with a whimper.” Looking at the way newspapers across the world are either going belly up or downsizing to the barest bone, Eliot is a vindicated man. My idea of an apocalyptic world is one where newspapers aren’t sold on the streets but can be read only on digital contraptions of various sizes. Thankfully, closure of News of the World brought dailies into an ephemeral limelight. That limelight is sputtering but will be alive for a while because of a few movies that released this year, which make for a pretty compelling case for the future of smudgy old newsprint in the face of new media.

One movie that makes maximum noise is the documentary Page One: Inside The New York Times. Film maker Andrew Rossi is a fly on the wall of the media desk of the Gray Lady and tries to portray how the world is a much more uncomfortable place to live in without newspapers (especially NYT). Page One is a documentary for news junkies that charts the apogee and perigee of arguably the best newspaper in the world: Pentagon Papers expose and the utterly discredited reporting of Judith Miller in Iraq respectively.

David Carr, the crusty media columnist of NYT and a former crack addict, is at the heart of the documentary whose spit-and-vinegar nature is an absolute delight. Right at the documentary’s fag end the viewer gets to see how Carr is ripping a Tribune Company’s executive to shreds for having the gall to accuse Carr of doing a “top to bottom hatchet job”. The ‘job’ here refers to the story that Carr eventually wrote about the company's bankruptcy and the rampant sexual transgressions that reduced the esteemed publication to a “fraternity house”. Carr takes a jibe at the ever-expanding Internet news machine and rightly so.

The earliest beacon of investigative journalism was Hunter S Thompson whose truculence produced some of the best pieces the world has ever seen. However, Thompson’s brand of journalism is something else, a kind of new journalism. While he was commissioned to cover a certain happening, his shoe-gazing self would unearth something else that would be oblivious to every other pair of journalistic eyes.

The Johnny Depp-starrer The Rum Diary is an adaptation of his book with the same title that he wrote in Puerto Rico while he was working with a newspaper called San Juan Star during the sixties. A young Paul Kemp (Depp) is assigned to write astrology columns and rambling pieces about American tourists that land up on the island to go bowling.

The movie’s shining moments are to be seen when Depp and his two amigos, the leathery photographer Sala (Michael Rispoli) and a batty religious affairs correspondent Moburg (Giovanni Ribisi), get their banter going.

When Sanderson, a local mercenary played with an understated menace by Aaron Eckhart, asks Kemp to write a few flattering pieces about a real estate ripoff that he has in mind, the old school journalistic ethics start kicking in. Realising that he is turning into a bedfellow of the deep-pocketed evil men, Kemp tries to expose them but his troubles are such that he utters this line when at the printing press, “Do you smell it? It’s the smell of b**tards. It’s also the smell of truth. I smell ink!”

If Rum Diary is about journalistic ethics, Errol Morris’ purely entertaining documentary Tabloid lays bare how the Tabloids slug it out for that all-elusive ‘exclusive’. In the 1970s, Joyce McKinney, a Miss Wyoming and absolutely gorgeous woman, was accused of kidnapping and raping her erstwhile boyfriend who turned into a Mormon. While a fair bit of Tabloid is dedicated to how Joyce went about with her ‘act’, what Morris shows is the dog-eats-dog ethos of the Tabloid culture. Here were two premium UK Tabloids — Mirror and Daily Express— that were desperate for any scrap pieces of the story as long as it’s ‘exclusive’.

Closer to home, Tamil flick Ko is about an audacious newspaper photographer (played by Jeeva) who gets involved in journalistic capers that would make even Clark Kent blush. But then, at a time when Indian movies are all about wall-to-wall television coverage (cue Peepli Live), Ko redeems the declining habit of appreciating what’s on the front page.

Economics 2.0

2011-12-29T10:03:00.001-08:00

I have a modest alternative in mind for the Occupy Wall Street and its variants that are spreading their tentacles across the developed world. Let the 99 per cent lay a siege against all the banks and ask for its money to be returned, something that James Stewart underwent as the head of a bank in the 1946 classic It’s A Wonderful Life. That way, we can no longer blame ourselves for lining the “one per cent’s” pockets. If you think I’ve lost my marbles, you are not the reader Charles Eisenstein wants to attract through his book Sacred Economics: Money, Gift & Society In The Age Of Transition.

This book is Eisenstein’s clarion call to the world to jettison all its prized possessions and get together again to build a new world. This world would invert all the cherished tenets of conventional economics and instead use new concepts like de-growth, underproduction, non-ownership and negative-interest currency. Negative interest on reserves and a physical currency that loses value with time ensure that we don’t hoard money and instead lend it out to people without, here’s the kicker, expecting it to be returned. That’s the motto of the citizens of Planet Eisenstein: to eliminate currency and bring back the system of a selfless economy.

Economic de-growth puts the brakes on our unfettered quest to conquer every Maslow hierarchy and scale new peaks without giving any thought if it’s worth our time. Thus, de-growth will allow us to work less for money and enjoy the beauty of life. Eisenstein upends every theory of economics and tries to topple every master who is perched atop, be it Malthus or Keynes or Marx. In an interview with the Dazed And Confused magazine, Eisenstein said: “People think we’re too materialistic, but I think the problem is that we’re not materialistic enough. We settle for cheap mass-produced stuff made by people in a degraded state of paid starvation at the expense of the ecosystem. Materialism to me means treating matter as sacred and making as beautiful a thing out of it as we can.”

In a world dominated by cold hard cash, it’s a stretch of the imagination to envision a sacred economy in action. But then, what’s the harm in it? If John Lennon’s Imagine can be a classic, why not at least venture out to create an economy that embodies new values like human dignity and sustainability? Eisenstein’s child-like enthusiasm to overhaul the financial system is extremely gratifying. He tries to find withering life under every unconventional stone of economics. He hits and misses but he never gives up. Even he admits the fact that he’s being “hopelessly naïve, vague and idealistic” but one can’t contend the fact that he gets a few things right. In this age of smartphones and uninhibited access to others’ personal lives, we have somehow forgotten that sharing a song or link to an article is not as altruistic as donating blood or kidney. Eisenstein wants to put the H back in humanity.

Some of the things that the author proposes in his book are straight out of Communist Manifesto. In modern-day China, that last true-blue bastion of communism of yore, no one is allowed to inherit a house after the death of their parents. That’s why we read newspaper reports that the one per cent Chinese are investing elsewhere in the world. In such circumstances, a book like Sacred Economics makes for essential reading.

This distilled elixir of Ayn Rand’s utopia in Atlas Shrugged is the backbone of this hefty book. And that happens to be its Achilles heel as well. While imagining this hybrid of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged kind of world, Eisenstein starts to sound as if the world is divided into two people: brainiacs and idiots. He thinks that people shouldn’t be working for wages. They should strive (read: work) to create something beautiful all the time. “We’re not born to just survive — we were born to contribute to the world in a way that makes use of our talents,” he says.

And his point of reference is the garbage collectors. So deluded is Eisenstein that he believes recycling waste will eliminate these “menial” jobs and people can channel their creative energy towards something more sustainable. Clearly, Eisenstein hasn’t heard of something called shadow economy. At a time when an entire layer of ancillary jobs is disappearing, be it the gas station attendant or the ticket agent at airport or employees at retail stores who would help customers find difficult-to-locate products, Eisenstein thinks we don’t need to have these jobs at all.

As long as Eisenstein’s magpie eye is focused on current economics, the book is devastatingly good. Once he starts mining the depressing but brilliant lecture that David Foster Wallace gave at the Kenyon College, Ohio, in 2005, the book turns into a rah rah manifesto for Ayn Rand fans who will lap up anything that barely resembles her utopia. That’s why this book will never eclipse the dinner table talks. After all, we all have to get suited up for the next day at work.

SACRED ECONOMICS
Charles Eisenstein
Evolver Editions
469 pages; Rs 843

In the dark

2011-12-29T09:52:00.001-08:00

Everything that’s wrong with post-Internet movies can be seen in The Pirates of The Caribbean and the Transformers movies. These money-spinning ventures show how fluffy Hollywood flicks are turning out to be: aimed at teenagers, special effects glossing over hackneyed plots, Photoshopped people passing off as actors, being cool is the norm. If this Facebook-status size rant gets you either interested or worked up, film critic Mark Kermode’s The Good, The Bad And The Multiplex (TGTBATM) might make it to your bedside table.

Right from the standard of service at multiplexes to the decreasing influence of movie critics and the flakiness of 3-D cinema to the American disdain for foreign movies, Kermode makes sure every sacred cinematic cow is slayed between the covers of this slim paperback. He describes Michael Bay, the brain behind the Transformers franchise (personally, I’m not sure if making this garbage needs a brain), as “the reigning deity of all that is loathsome, putrid and soul destroying about modern-day blockbuster entertainment”. Nowadays Hollywood only makes two kinds of films: the larger-than-life fare that inevitably turns out to be jaw-droppingly awful or the below-the-radar stuff that can only be seen at independent film festivals like Sundance.

How have things come to such a deplorable pass? If you are someone who likes unapologetically bad movies with superb production values then you are part of the problem. In one of the six chapters, “Why Blockbusters Should Be Better”, Kermode argues that a “big” film is possible without eschewing the essential cinematic aesthetics, and his prime exhibit is Inception. Here was a smart thriller that was never “dumbed down” to pander to the sensibilities of a certain demographics, unlike expensive obscenities such as Titanic, Pearl Harbor and Avatar.

Kermode is equally dismissive about the latest practice of Hollywood studios of producing all big-budget flicks in 3-D format. In the chapter “The Inevitable Decline of 3-D”, Kermode turns into an entertaining boffin to give the reader a guided tour of the past of a medium that was never impressive and only ended up leaving a perpetual itch on the bridge of the viewer’s nose.

Equally revealing is his take on the profession of film criticism. He speaks at length about the shady practices of the studios in misquoting a critic. It's baffling to know that a review can be mangled in such a way that a review that trashed the movie is actually shown to be glowing on the DVD cover. Beware budding reviewers, next time you describe a movie as “so incredibly bad that it's good”, there are high chances it might make it to the DVD cover.

His cri de coeur that film criticism is no longer that important an art is arresting. He is very clear that, “I don’t think that critics should do the job of watching movies for you. I don’t even think they should do the job telling you which movies to watch… I think critics should do the job of watching all the movies and then telling you what they think about them in a way which is honest, engaging, erudite and entertaining.” What really gets Kermode's goat is that “for most cinema-goers in the UK, it’s blockbusters or nothing”, a phenomenon that we Indians perpetuate as well.

TGTBATM is an entertaining read because of Kermode’s LOL-provoking writing, which makes the book literally laugh-a-minute. He's so funny that if you hasten to read this book in public places, brace yourself for some baffled stares. But the humour is also the book’s biggest undoing. In a chapter in which he rants against the multiplexes he gets so carried away that he calls a multiplex staff member a “uniformed monkey”. While Kermode is an able wordsmith he tends to go overboard, which makes one wonder why his editor didn’t even make a feeble attempt to lasso his excesses.

It’s true that you need to take a small loan to afford the complete multiplex experience, but one can’t deny the fact that they have helped spawn an alternative movie-going culture. There have been a few occasions when I was allowed to watch a movie even though I was the only one in the auditorium. The burgeoning “mumblecore” movement, which is reminiscent of the Dogme 95 style of filmmaking in the US, is a sign that independent cinema might just thrive. The fact that a movie like Drive is finding a release in India shows that a multiplex is not really, to borrow a Matt Taibbi quote, “a vampire squid relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money”.

Another irritant in the book is that Kermode keeps reciting his impressive resume of the last 25 years. There were moments when I shouted aloud, “all right, all right, I get it that you’ve traveled half of the world and schmoozed with every movie celebrity, now can we please move on”. What’s more, he inundates the reader with random numbers about how much a movie spent and earned in return. I really wish Kermode’s gimlet eye for accuracy was toned down to turn this enjoyable book into what could have been a genre-defining book.

THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE MULTIPLEX
Mark Kermode
328 pages; Rs 732

Identity crisis

2011-10-06T03:43:00.000-07:00

Imagine this: A Pakistani-American woman is in the trenches of emotional downturn because her eight-year-old relationship has come to an end, at precisely the same moment she loses her job as a lower-rung-but-destined-for-bigger-things White House official, returns to her parents and is yet to get over her boyfriend. This sure sounds like run-of-the-mill chick lit for Pakistani diaspora and is, in fact, the crux of Welcome To Americastan. But Jabeen Akhtar’s debut is not a paint-by-numbers novel, nor is her central character Samira, whose dual nationality alludes to the portmanteau in the title: Pakistan and America.

Owing to an unfortunate sequence of events, Samira finds herself at her parents’ place in Cary, North Carolina. Her father, a Pakistani immigrant who made it from rags to riches, expects his children – Samira, her elder brother Khalid and younger sister Meena – to follow his path of rectitude. This being the age of Xboxes and indefatigable texting, the kids are obviously getting debauched. The book’s most silently imposing character is the mother, who has this Mrs Dalloway-ish obsession of getting her kids married.

Akhtar’s initial masterstroke has to be her choice of Cary. Most novels about Pakistani diaspora are set in big cities like New York or London and, truth be told, barring Mohsin Hamid’s fabulous Reluctant Fundamentalist, most of these books harp on the same issue: the all-pervasive xenophobia. No wonder that is a lightning rod, but Jabeen’s novel shows that the Pakistani-Americans actually live in harmony, if you go into the bowels of US. In Welcome To Americastan the Pakistanis do not get hostile looks from the white and blend seamlessly into the society. When I met Akhtar a few days ago, she mentioned Garrison Keillor among her literary influences. Cary is more or less similar to Keillor’s fictional town of Lake Wobegon: everyone is above average. So, don’t start playing Arcade Fire’s helplessly elegiac “The Suburbs” just because the novel is set in the suburbia.
This novel is not candyfloss either. None of the characters is shallow and all are well fleshed-out. Samira’s relationship with her siblings is heartfelt and their banter is lively. There’s an undercurrent of l’esprit d’escalier (“staircase wit”) throughout the novel that helps it veer away from the obvious, on most occasions. When Samira tells an American that she’s a Pakistani, she sums up an inadvertent momentary silence that follows as, “With trained patience, I waited for him to pass through the three stages typically experiences by someone coming face-to-face with a Pakistani: first, disbelief that someone from the world’s most notorious brown country located way on the other side of the planet somehow ended up in the same room as you; next, fear and a little excitement that this Pakistani could have illicit ties to recent national and international news events; and lastly, the formulation and subsequent airing of a bone-headed comment.”

The novel is worth your time for more such penetrating insights into the lives of Pakistanis (or those from the subcontinent for that matter) living abroad. There are a few sub-plots that involve the apprehension of getting married to a beloved, catfighting, infidelity, the entire rigmarole of hooking up with someone rank unknown and even global terrorism. The author deserves to be appreciated for her storytelling sleight-of-hand for enmeshing these many themes into a coherent narrative. Even the trickiest situation is rescued by the strangely ironic humour that Jabeen manages to infuse. “For Pakistanis, everyone in the population falls into two categories — kids and parents… If you’re nineteen years old and have a husband and kid, you belong with the grown-ups. If you’re twenty-seven like me and not married-with-children, you’re in the ‘kids’ category.”

A minor bump in this otherwise rollicking ride of a novel is the reams of pages dedicated to a hideously titled association, Pakistani American Council for Political Action Committee, headed by Samira’s father and other venerable males of the community. The novel gets stagnant whenever this committee starts discussing how to make the Pakistanis an active part of American society. Another tiny bit jarring aspect of the novel is the lack of social networking and smartphone culture. No one talks about a tweet or a Facebook update, hard to digest considering how the attention span of Americans is shrinking owing to the fire hose of mindless information that is peddled as gold on these sites. But then, the reader needs to recall what Warren Buffett once said, “Internet will not change the way we chew the gum.”

Welcome To Americastan is definitely not the zeitgeist-defining novel for the American diaspora and it never intends to be so. At most, it’s chick lit for those who hate chick lit, which, make no mistake, is an achievement. And neither is the author a Jonthan Franzen-lite (the most obscure cultural reference in the novel is to Roger Waters’ personal life). Having said that, Jabeen Akhtar is one of those rare and gifted people who seem biologically incapable of doing anything that isn’t incredibly funny.

WELCOME TO AMERICASTAN
Jabeen Akhtar
Penguin
268 pages; Rs 499

'In the US, Pakistan is hot'

2011-10-06T03:41:00.001-07:00

For almost two years Jabeen Akhtar, a Pakistani-American novelist, led a Jekyll And Hyde existence to flesh out her canter of a debut novel, Welcome to Americastan. “After my day job writing and publishing federal regulations for the US Environmental Protection Agency, I would come home and write during the evening and night. I didn’t tell anyone that I was writing this novel. I just did it,” she tells me one splendid sunny morning at the café of Mumbai’s Hotel Astoria. Eventually, she left her cushy job and gave herself a year to write a novel about a young woman in the sleepy town of Cary, North Carolina.

Why Cary? Why not Washington, DC, where she did her undergraduate and master’s degrees (at George Mason University) and worked for seven years? “There have been a lot of books talking about the immigrants living in big cities like New York and the constant ethnic tension that they live through. I wanted to write about the thousands and thousands of middle-class Pakistanis living comfortably in the suburban US,” says the 37-year-old.
Her book revolves around one such family. DC-based 27-year-old Samira returns to her parents’ home in Cary due to a series of dramatic events. What transpires over the next four months is what keeps the reader on tenterhooks. With the range of themes involved in the novel — including infidelity, defiance of parents, casual sex, homosexuality, a tinge of Muslim terrorism, catfights, hopeless romance, xenophobia, racism — it’s a mindbending task to shoehorn Welcome To Americastan into any definite genre. “How about The Reluctant Fundamentalist for Candace Bushnell fans?” I hasten to ask her. She laughs and says, “It is just a comedy. I’ll be glad if I have accurately portrayed the Pakistani lifestyle in the suburbs. I was very clear at the outset that my novel is not going to change the world.”

This novel may not be “revolutionary”, but some of its aspects may be a revelation for readers unfamiliar with its milieu. At a time when many fathers in Pakistan resort to abominations like honour killings, Samira’s parents are extremely liberal with her and her two siblings Khalid and Meena. Samira is never pushed to get married and her father, a self-made man, always asks her to concentrate on a career instead of settling for the banalities of conjugal life.

This prompted me to ask Jabeen if Samira’s trajectory is somehow inspired from her own: a job in DC, super supportive parents. “The novel is certainly inspired by people I know from close quarters, and every author’s first novel is largely autobiographical,” is her safe answer.

There’s a scene in the novel in which Samira is subjected to racism in a retail store. For a minor mistake of hers an American customer tells her, “Welcome to Americastan,” obviously ignorant of the fact that Samira is as American as she is. What is the typical American perception of a Pakistani? “Pakistan is a hot topic in the US for all the wrong reasons,” she says. “But Americans don’t know who Pakistanis are. The moment you say you are a Pakistani, you are looked at as a celebrity,” she says.

Looking at the way Pakistani youngsters have been portrayed in the novel, as more American than the Americans, I ask Akhtar whether the ABCD (American-Born Confused Desi) syndrome is on the wane. “Definitely,” she says. “The Pak Gen X is no longer confused. Owing to the Internet, the second-generation children have a firmer footing in the country now. Technology allows you to talk to anyone in any part of the world and that has gone a long way in bridging the gap between American and Pakistani youth.”

More than anything, Akhtar is chuffed to bits over the fact that she stuck to her stand instead of pandering to the American publishing industry’s stereotypes about the country. “Since [the book] was about Pakistan I was asked to make my tale ‘tragic and exotic’ and bring out the ‘ugly truths’.” As a reader, I am happy too that she didn’t let anyone mangle with a guilty pleasure that never made me feel guilty.

Boys in the hood

2011-10-06T03:38:00.000-07:00

In its searing editorial the New Statesman magazine described the recent riots in Britain thus: “The looting was, on one level, pure nihilism; on another, it was a crude attempt by rioters to mimic the conspicuous consumption exercised by the affluent and credit-rich.”

To understand the unholy chaos that rages within the hearts of urban poor youth and how they have been disenfranchised by globalisation you can do far worse than picking up Gavin Knight’s Hood Rat.

Knight, a journalist, brings to life (and how!) his two-year experience of being embedded with police units in inner-city London, Manchester and Glasgow. He handpicked a phalanx of characters whom he encountered and documented their lives, albeit with fictional names. In Manchester, Anders Svensson, a silver-tongued detective, has taken it upon himself to rid the city of drug baron Merlin and his lieutenant Flow. The reader is witness to the harrowing and pointless life of a detective. Svensson gets his high from arrests but it dissipates soon enough when the peddler is back on the streets after successfully evading the rightful course of law.
In London, Knight’s focus shifts towards Pilgrim, a Jamaican, who immigrated to London and is well on his way to becoming the poster child of gang violence. After Pilgrim is shoved into a jail for six years, 14-year-old Troll, a Somali, takes over and his gang of miscreants continues Pilgrim’s macabre job. Then Pilgrim finishes his sentence and finds himself back in the mix. That’s when he has an epiphany — that a gangster’s sell-by date is very short. In this story, the inner-city drug abuse and the vagaries of wasted childhoods are seen at their brutal best. The Punjabi junkies in Southall represent the book’s most miserable lot. This is something Bollywood should bring to light rather than churning out trash like I- Proud To Be An Indian and Patiala House.

The third part of Knight’s sprawling triptych takes place in Glasgow, where detective chief superintendent Karyn McCluskey has lot of sweeping changes in her mind to rid the city of its embarrassing statistic: the highest murder rate in Europe. Square-eyed readers might find parallels for Merlin and flow in the characters of Avon Barksdale and Stringer Bell in the brilliant HBO series The Wire — there are too many coincidences to ignore. Merlin is brash like Avon while Flow has just the kind of brains that Stringer does. What McCluskey sets out to do is uncannily similar to what Major Colvin does to the kids in Baltimore. The British ghetto lingo is more or less similar to what is shown in Baltimore (the setting of The Wire). But then, be it Bradford or Baltimore, the cokeheads and druglords tend to be the same in the Western world.

Not the cops, though. It was a huge rebuke to the Metropolitan Police when British Prime Minister David Cameron asked the American supercop Bill Bratton to help overhaul a demoralised police force and to cut crime. The adage that “the police are the public and the public are the police” is seemingly forgotten these days and Hood Rat is a timely reminder. The way McCluskey tries to instill sense into the kids and stop them from taking the road to cocaine is a harbinger of hope in these desperate times. Svensson’s indefatigable attempts at handholding gangsters to a better future show that all is not lost, yet.

Hood Rat has nothing particularly new to offer to readers who are acquainted with Sudhir Venkatesh’s masterly Gang Leader for a Day and movies like This Is England and, of course, The Wire. What, however, sets Hood Rat apart is Knight’s direct and stop-you-in-your-tracks kind of writing. “These girls have bought into the image of gang life that rappers like 50 Cent or Akon present, where women are treated like princesses, driven in Aston Martinis and Playboy cigarette speedboats and bought expensive presents. But the reality isn’t like that. The reality is being chased by the police, ten men from the Tactical Support Group in visors and helmets charging in the front door of your council house at 5 a m. Being beaten, being left alone for days,” Svensson says about the vagaries of ghetto life.

Another high point of Hood Rat is its humour, which is as dry as striking two sticks to light a fire. “A twelve-year-old cannot wait to step up, shoot a general and get a reputation for himself. It’s like X Factor,” muses Svensson about the really young demographics of the criminals. This unflinching book gets so cinematic at times that you might wonder where your popcorn has gone. A few chases are so vividly described that the reader will inadvertently feel a part of the proceedings. On the flip side, the book doesn’t throw any new light on the problem of inner city crime, apart from a few terms that are limited to respective police organisations. It tends to drag at times as well. But then, it lives up to the Kafka golden rule: “If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it?” Do remember to play “Way Down In The Hole” by Tom Waits when you are peering through this eye-opening window into a world of absolutely no hope.

HOOD RAT
Gavin Knight
Picador
298 pages

Reading between the lines

2011-10-06T03:36:00.000-07:00

Halfway through Noon, the sophomore novel by Aatish Taseer, I was almost tempted to call it a post-modern joke. Many questions were unanswered: is this the fiction equivalent of a mockumentary where the writer’s memoir masquerades as fiction? Is this novel a parlour game for the Indian and Pakistani gentry, who are supposed to read between the lines and guess who’s who in reality? Will Aatish Taseer continue to mine his own past to write fiction?

A golden rule about enjoying a work of fiction as laid down by D H Lawrence is to “trust the novel, not the novelist”. Fair enough. It’s common knowledge that at some level every writer generously pilfers from his or her personal experiences. But Noon is cut with a different cloth: Taseer talks about his parents through Rehan Tabassum, a love child of Udaya Singh and Sahil Tabassum. Taseer had a not-so-idyllic childhood because his father Salman Taseer, a Pakistani politician who was assassinated earlier this year, never displayed any fatherly affection towards him. Rehan, too, has to deal with his father’s absence after Sahil deserts Udaya in London in the mid-80s.

I could have ignored these obvious similarities with Taseer’s personal life if Noon had been fiendishly compelling, which it mostly isn’t. Instead of exploring themes in some depth, the novel provides fleeting glimpses into various stages of young Rehan’s life. Right from his childhood in Delhi where an adoring grandmother takes care of him to a stint at his stepfather’s farmhouse to a visit to Sahil’s place in Pakistan, Taseer’s sharp gaze never overstays its welcome. Noon could be called a daring piece of fiction in as much as the writer chooses to leave many loose ends.
The slim novel also packs in myriad side-characters with brief, walk-on parts of little consequence: a typical single mother who is overprotective about her son, a gay uncle and his toy boy, a step-brother who ascribes his transgressions to his father’s overbearing presence, a Rajamata steeped in colonial delusions of grandeur, a step-father who is desperate to gain entrance into the noble class, a servant desperate to prove his loyalty under trying circumstances. Taseer needs to be commended for his portrayal of human foibles. Every character is inherently self-righteous but it’s their mean side, which also happens to be more human, that shines through.

For instance, Rehan imagines what might happen if his servant Kalyan is convicted of theft, a thought that coincides with the arrival of Kalyan’s family at the farmhouse: “I had to stop myself from thinking of their (the family) disappointment and fear on that same Uttarakhand Roadways bus, heavy with the smell of diesel, coiling its way back through unlit mountain roads to the place from where it came… I thought, if India was the sort of country where college essays were written about such things, Kalyan’s son might grow up to write one about this visit to the capital… And where would I be in such an essay? A small player in the background, a figure of fun perhaps, denied even the dignity of a villain.”

I got my Jonathan Franzen rush when Rehan muses about his ambivalent relationship with Sahil: “We had blood and almost nothing else in common.” Taseer’s charming disdain for the schmooze fests is apparent, “And like this, the diplomatic circle closed around Mahapatra, bringing an atmosphere of great cheer and congeniality to the recently moribund gathering.” Rehan reflects Taseer’s sensitive side: “Servants didn’t have birthdays or zodiac signs; their age and the places they had lived and grown up in didn’t matter.”

Sadly, Taseer’s canvas is way too big and he crumbles under the weight of it. The journalist in him (he worked for Time and Prospect magazines) probably tempts him to weave many events into the narrative – the Kashmir earthquake, London bombings, Musharraf’s presidency – without really adding any value to it. His understanding of the new India is more or less generic. Here’s a description of his stepfather’s obsession with technology, “wireless Internet, a modern gym, flat screens and DVD players, Tata Sky and dark-brown plug points capable of taking the plugs of the world.” Taseer describes a loyal employee as “the most bendable unbending man I ever knew!”. There are more such vapid descriptions that help Noon’s abstract plot progress roughly at the same pace as a glacier.

V S Naipaul hailed Taseer as “a young writer to watch”. That endorsement should have come from anyone but Sir Vidia. After all, early in his career he rejected Trinidad as a viable creative place and decided to “withdraw completely from nationality and loyalties except to persons”. His corpulent work has a girth that extends from Gabon to India. It might not merit a comparison here but both Taseer’s novels (The Temple-Goers was set in Delhi) are set more or less in his comfort zone — England, India and Pakistan. While that’s no crime, Taseer should withdraw from his narcissistic navel-gazing self and attempt something different.

It’s said that everyone has one book in him or her, and if that’s true Taseer has done that. Let’s hope that from now on he puts wonderful writing talent to better use.

NOON
Aatish Taseer
Fourth Estate
238 pages

Lethal moves

2011-10-06T03:34:00.001-07:00

It’s a fool’s task to try to make sense of Bobby Fischer, the man who juxtaposed weird and wondrous like no one else. He was and remains the youngest ever US chess champion, and in 1972 he did what was thought impossible: he ended the Soviet Union’s 24-year stranglehold on the World Chess Championship. After that, he descended into what appears to have been a bottomless pit of anti-Semitism and mindless fulmination against the world. A biography by Frank Brady, Endgame: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall, and an HBO documentary, Bobby Fischer Against the World, flesh out this enigmatic figure.

With his credentials — he was founding editor of Chess Life magazine and deeply involved with the Marshall Chess Club in Manhattan, where Fischer hung out as a youngster — Brady is au fait with every cobble along Fischer’s path as he went, to quote the second half of the book’s subtitle, “From America’s Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness”.

Fischer was born in Chicago in 1943 to Regina (Jewish) and Hans-Gerhardt Fischer (non-Jewish). His penchant for chess became apparent at age six: he would analyse chess games and try to replicate them in his own game. With constant self-training, Fischer scaled peak after new peak and grew increasingly unbeatable. An early triumph of Brady’s biography is a beautifully written description of the 13-year-old Fischer’s game against Donald Byrne, a former US champion, at an invitational tournament.

In describing this game, dubbed “the game of the century”, Brady's prose so effectively rises to the occasion that one begins to imagine a cross between Raymond Chandler and Ernest Hemingway. These four pages will gain a death grip on the reader.

But this nearly flawless book has one dark spot: the Cold War-era Boris Spassky-versus-Bobby Fischer duel in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1972. Brady gives it plenty of colour but does not offer a fly-on-the-wall account of the game. That void is filled by the HBO documentary, which gives a blow-by-blow account of the game, with insight into all the machinations and diplomatic wrangling, and Fischer’s clever brinkmanship. Just before the match was to begin, Fischer made many complaints, about everything from the location to the prize money.

* * * * *

For a better understanding of Fischer, one needs to know that when it came to money, Fischer could make Ebenezer Scrooge look open-handed. At one point it looked as if the Spassky-Fischer duel would never see the light of the day, thanks to Fischer’s incredibly petty financial objections. What put it back on track was an intervention from Henry Kissinger, no less.

Bobby Fischer Against the World, the documentary film, uses talking heads throughout rather than a running voiceover. Its portrayal of the Spassky-Fischer match is a cinematic tour-de-force. Director Liz Garbus’s use of archival footage will put cinéma vérité techniques to shame.

In his biography, Brady revels in describing the aftermath of that iconic duel. What has up to this point read like a hagiography suddenly shows signs of turning into a hatchet job. Here, as the book tells it, was a shy, unassuming, reclusive, well-mannered young man who suddenly morphed into a colossal egotist — eccentric, inconsiderate and intransigent.

After the Reykjavik match, Fischer spent two decades — widely known as the Wilderness Years — immured in a room not much larger than a chessboard, in Pasadena, California. He devoured anti-Semitic literature and made venomous statements about Jews. The floodgates really opened when Fischer defied a US embargo on Yugoslavia in 1992, imposed because of the ethnic war there, to participate in a rematch of the 1972 classic. What’s more, he spat on the official US letter that informed him about the conditions of the embargo. Ultimately he had to give up his American citizenship. What followed was a quixotic, peripatetic lifestyle.

Ever more convinced of (non-existent) Israeli and Russian conspiracies, Fischer turned into a paranoiac. He developed outlandish, even deranged fears: he suspected the Soviets could affect his mind by sending radio signals through the metal in his teeth; he feared a KGB assassination plot. He grew more unhinged with time. Just after 9/11, while America reeled from the most lethal terrorist attack in modern history, Fischer’s schadenfreude towards his former nation excited only repulsion: “Cry, you crybabies!” he said. “Whine, you bastards! Now your time is coming.”

The best thing about Brady’s book is that he realises that Fischer’s genius and his mental illness were closely connected. That is why Brady never expresses his opinion of Fischer, even though he is well acquainted with his subject. Brady also depicts Fischer’s final three years in Reykjavik well. From Fischer’s daily routine to his reading predilections, Brady gets the details and presentation right. If ever a course is taught on how to write warts-and-all biography, Brady’s unflinching book should be at the heart of the curriculum.

Why is Islamophobia okay?

2011-10-06T03:31:00.000-07:00

Recently, fashion designer John Galliano and film-maker Lars von Trier faced a lot of opprobrium for their anti-Semitic rants. Galliano’s drunken remarks at a Parisian pub got him sacked from Christian Dior and Lars von Trier was banned from the Cannes Film Festival. In this age of social networking and reduced attention spans, is anti-Semitism really that important a stand? In his book The Freedom To Be Racist?, writer Erik Bleich says: “There are people who hold anti-Semitic views, but they generally don’t hold them intensely. They don’t fear that Jews are going to threaten their livelihood or culture or any of the things that people truly worry about.”

Still, anti-Semitism is somehow deemed equal to anti-humanity. That begs a question that why is Islamophobia allowed to thrive? Dutch politician Geert Wilders is furthering his political ambitions not by any brilliant reforms but through his unbridled hatred for Islam. So much so that he called Koran a “fascist book”, which should be banned in the Netherlands, like Hitler’s Mein Kampf. And Wilders got away with his rant because it didn’t deal with Jews.

Muslims are being oppressed in various ways. In her novel Welcome To Americastan, Jabeen Akhtar mentions how the FBI Terror Watch list contains “names of two-year-old kids. Names of dead people. People complaining about finding their names on the list and not knowing how they got on there”. That constant fear among Muslims is getting more and more visceral. We hear stories about Muslims shaving off their long beards and having cropped hair to assimilate with others and not raise any ‘suspicion’. The Western world is turning into a liberal Taliban if its constant raiding of madrasas and banning of burkhas is any indication. So ruthless is the stereotyping that the first image that strikes of any venerable looking man in long beard and skull cap is that maybe he spends half of his time in the Tora Bora caves. The recent tenth-anniversary of 9/11 was a huge slap on the extremists’ face, thanks to gunning down of Osama. However, the slap could have been tighter if only The Cordoba House project was okayed.

Last year, when a 13-floor Islamic center was proposed to be built three blocks away from Ground Zero, the 9/11 venue, there was an unprecedented hue and cry. In his piece for Financial Times, Basharat Peer wrote, “The Cordoba House project will be a venue for reconciliation between Islam and the west, delivering a powerful rebuttal to the al-Qaeda terrorists who attacked the trade towers; opponents call it an offence to the memory of those who died in 2001.” Finally, the project was scrapped.

Don’t think I’m being insensitive towards the Jews. It pains me to no end when someone compares a crowded Mumbai local train ride to a concentration camp. The sheer facetiousness makes me cringe. But then if you go to the same Parisian pub where Galliano was indicted and add any number of expletives preceding the word Muslim, you’ll still be fine. After all, those one per cent of Muslims who are mindless enough to blow themselves up subsume the other 99 per cent.

Why NOTW will be missed

2011-08-25T11:13:00.001-07:00

Once the paroxysm of anger against News Of The World subsides, the tabloid will be sorely missed. Here’s why. In the age of Internet, when there’s ginormous amount of information to be accessed instantly, it’s a foolhardy thing to assume that people will wait for the next day’s paper to know what’s happening at that moment. Unless newspapers reinvent themselves and start doing original reporting, there’s no real reason why a newspaper should exist at all.

NOTW was doing exactly the same thing. It might be using guerrilla journalistic techniques but it’s giving something new to the reader every morning. Rupert Murdoch, owner of NOTW, is probably the last news baron the world will see. His love for newspapers is amazing. He bought Wall Street Journal when it was bleeding money and couldn’t cope with competition from Internet. And this is exactly the reason why the world needs Murdoch now more than anytime else.

Newspapers make sense of the madness. On Internet anything goes as news as long as it’s taken at the earliest. You can pass canards and get away with it but it’s the newspapers that give the reader an accurate sense of the event. So we need more newspapers now more than anytime else. As it is, newspapers across the world are shutting their presses or resorting to ridiculous cost-cutting measures. This is why we should not take point our knives towards Murdoch, yet.

His championing of the newspapers is legendary. He still believes they have a role to play in the way world shapes up. He started a New York Metro section in WSJ as competition for New York Times. He started a book reviews supplement in WSJ when everywhere else the reviewing space is constantly shrinking. This doesn’t mean that Murdoch may sup with the devil (read phone hacking).

But clearly demarcated lines can do a world of difference. I’m sure journalists must be wondering if committing that act of daily journalism is worth it if this is how things are going to pan out. Right now, we should mourn the shutting of NOTW. I have a feeling this might be the beginning of the end of newspapers.

Charm offensive

2011-08-25T11:09:00.000-07:00

What is one to make of the modern-day Russia? If the global media is to be believed here’s a country that has unabashedly shed its communist leanings (hell, it didn’t even celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the coup); you either have to be rich or beautiful or well-connected to live in Moscow or else be condemned for a life of vermin; the media is muzzled (we all know what happened to Anna Politkovskaya).

Snowdrops, the debut novel of A D Miller, former Moscow correspondent for The Economist from 2004 to 2007, doesn’t veer much from these stereotypes through his narrator Nicholas Platt or Nick, a 30-something Englishman, who is a corporate lawyer. Written in the form of a confessional billet doux to his would-be wife, Nick tells her about his ugly past in Moscow that involves a cousin-duo, Masha and Katya. After having come into contact with the girls under trying circumstances, Nick develops romantic feelings for Masha. As his luck would have it, she reciprocates and the carnal rituals follow on an almost daily basis.

On the professional front, he is the face of a group of banks loaning $500 million to the subsidiary of an oil major Narodneft (since the story is set in Putin-era Russia, comparisons with Gazprom are thinly disguised). The front man for this subsidiary is a shady but infinitely charming person called “the Cossack”. Meanwhile, Nick is introduced to the sisters’ aunt, Tatiana Vladimirovna, who is a staunch communist and still worships Stalin. One insanely cold night, she muses, “What a shame. Such a winter, and no war.” She starts adoring Nick and the hopeless romantic starts imagining a “happily married ever after” life with Masha.

Not surprisingly, a mixture of deliberate emotional and financial obfuscations gets Nick tangled in an intricate web of self-realisation. It doesn’t help the matters much when the Cossack also vanishes with all the money. With such a straightforward plot, Miller’s confidently brilliant writing comes to the book’s rescue on several occasions. Speaking about the stinking, moneyed ethos of Moscow, Nick says, “The cars congregated around the must-be-seen-in restaurants and nightclubs like basking predators at watering holes, while money went inside to gorge itself on caviar and Cristal champagne.” The hatchet job extends to the few Russian girls who never ended up in relationships with Nick because they wanted “a car, a driver to go with the car, one of those silly little dogs they drag around the designer shops in the cobbled alleys near the Kremlin”.

The novel acquires the gravitas of a Higher Lonely Planet here: “The old part of the Moscow Metro, in the city centre, is the sort of subway system you get if you give a tyrannical maniac all the marble, onyx and disposable human beings he can dream of.”

But then, exquisite writing (the writer studied literature at Cambridge and Princeton) can only buttress a gossamer-thin plot in short bursts. Moreover, Miller’s characters are way too flaky to be taken seriously. Nick needs a nice spanking for believing a comely Russian woman would fall for him with no strings attached. Thumb rule for expat men: never fall for local ladies unless you are George Clooney. Masha and Katya never entirely transcend the caricatures. As far as the Cossack is concerned, I would paraphrase what Voltaire said about God: “If there was no Cossack, it would have been necessary to invent him.” Tatiana is a direct lift from any Alexander Solzhenitsyn book. The only person who shines through this mess is Steve Walsh, a well-connected foreign journalist, an alcoholic and an inveterate womaniser, who knows the inner quarters of Kremlin creepily well. “In Russia, there are no business stories. And there are no politics stories. There are no love stories. There are only crime stories,” he says.

Too bad that Miller chooses such an underwhelming story. Too many loose ends are allowed to hang around and this is where the function of the editor comes into question. Snowdrops reminded me of what Zadie Smith said about Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland: “Isn’t it hard to see the dark when it’s so lyrically presented?” For such run-of-the-mill characters, belletrism of the highest order is unjustifiable. I just don’t see any of these people mouthing these lines in real life. It’s as if they have spent all their lives in various creative writing workshops. Only Nick’s bitterness is this flailing novel’s defibrillator. Here’s he talking about his acquaintances in London: “People I know in London who had already got married began to get divorced, and people who hadn’t, adopted cats. People started running marathons or becoming Buddhists to help them get through it.”

Miller earns his journalistic stripes by making vague references to Putin’s inefficiency (“weasel President”) and to Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the Yukos fiasco (“uppity oil tycoon, his unfortunate lawyer and his livid minority shareholders”). Still, that doesn’t lift the spirits of an already torpor-induced reader. I would still suggest you pick up Snowdrops — to hurl at the Man Booker judges for long-listing this self-centred, high-class literary pretentious slush.

SNOWDROPS
A D Miller
Atlantic Books
273 pages; Rs 399

London calling

2011-08-25T11:06:00.000-07:00

There are parts of our society that are not just broken but frankly sick. When we see children of 12 or 13 looting, it’s clear there are things that are badly wrong in our society.” It wouldn’t be far- fetched if you thought this was a statement from the head of a war-ravaged or drought-prone country. But these observations were made by David Cameron, prime minister of the United Kingdom, one of the world’s most developed countries. He was expressing his anger after surveying the damage during the recent urban riots in the UK.

Against the backdrop of this pillage, Stephen Kelman’s debut novel Pigeon English makes for a timely read. Even otherwise it would have been an almost brilliant book. By illegal means, 11-year-old Harrison Opoku arrives in London from Ghana along with his mother and older sister Lydia. As movies on immigrant angst like This Is England and Harry Brown and books like Londonstani and Brick Lane show, the inner-city housing estates of London are a self-contained universe where debauchery and depravity are deemed virtues. Yet to grapple with the realities of a white-dominated locality, Opoku is in a culture shock of sorts.

During one of those addled days, he is a witness to the knifing of a senior at school. Along with his friend Dean he tries to find the killer, “CSI-style”: collecting spit samples, fingerprints et al. Kelman’s plot includes a handful of characters for whom Opoku is the centripetal force. There is Lydia, who falls into those Justin Bieber demographics, cooing over girlie things and forever at odds with Opoku, a mother who is spooked by London ghetto life but determined to give her children a better life, Opoku’s cousin Jordan, who is on the fast lane to self-destruction, and the eponymous pigeon that visits Opoku every day and is his subconscious shining light in the darkest of times. There are also blink-and-miss characters like Connor Green, whose supposed wisecracks always fall flat but will still entertain the reader, and Dean, who is, in turn, condescending and appreciative of Opoku’s detective brain.

With a plot set within a time span of just four months, Kelman deals with a multitude of issues plaguing inner city society in an engaging rather than sanctimonious manner: mindless killings, urban dystopia, dysfunctional families, adolescent violence, xenophobia, illegal immigration, racism and homophobia. All these issues are witnessed through the fresh and non-judgemental eyes of Opoku. “Mamma says the CCTV camera is just another way for God to watch you. If God’s busy in another part of the world, like if he’s making an earthquake or a tide, his cameras can still see you. That way he can never miss anything.” In a country, where there’s a CCTV camera for every 13 people, this is a convenient explanation for the Big Brother side of the state.

The greatest strength of Pigeon English is the author’s vice-like grip on the proceedings. There were moments when the story grabbed me by the scruff of my neck. A major reason is Kelman’s rooted language, which evokes the HBO TV series Wire and Emma Donoghue’s Room (fittingly, she wrote a blurb for the book). The pidgin is authentic and so are the kids’ ruminations that never grate even if they oscillate between the sublime and the ridiculous. Throughout the book there is a certain Ghanaian lingo peddled, which should make it to urbandictionary.com in no time. “Asweh” is short for I swear, “bo-style” is the coolest fad in the town, “dey touch” means “are you crazy?”, “hutious” means frightening, “Gowayou” is the short for, yes, go away, you.

Opoku’s relationship with his sisters forms the book’s emotional core. Although he is not overly protective about Lydia, he does make his presence felt and, on the other hand, his thoughts are forever dominated by the well-being of Agnes, a younger sister whom he left behind in Ghana. The best part about Pigeon English is that what purports to be a find-the-killer sort of book, actually ends up with Opoku finding his moral moorings.

Opoku tries hard to be accepted in the local gang, Dell Farm Crew, as that would lend his meek disposition a veneer of audacity but, as luck would have it, he fails to live up to the “missions”. If there’s a misstep in an otherwise flawless book, it is that the pace lags a bit in between. The entire episode of Opoku finding a love interest in Poppy, a classmate, sounds a bit far-fetched. Also, the killer is found way too easily and in an abrupt fashion. Having said that, Pigeon English is most definitely the Catcher In the Rye for the Internet generation. This heady cocktail of dystopian innocence and strange sadness could only have been whipped up by Cormac McCarthy among living authors. This book wraps its crooked fingers around your heart and keeps tugging at its strings.

PIGEON ENGLISH
Stephen Kelman
Bloomsbury
263 pages; Rs 499

The longest 90 minutes of my life

2011-08-25T11:04:00.000-07:00

There used to be beatniks, peaceniks and these days there are coolniks. Everything that anyone does has to and is supposed to be cool. Be it the words they utter or the phone they brandish or their Facebook timeline, the underlining theme is, yes, ‘cool’. Being cool is passé as well, now it’s all about being uber-cool. This is just the sort of affliction Abhinay Deo has. He’s the man who made Delhi Belly with some able production support from the supposedly sole arbiter of sensible cinema in this part of the world, Aamir Khan.

Right off the bat let me make it clear that this isn’t a review where I’ll throw around intensifiers followed by the synonyms of either brilliant or horrible. And neither do I intend to piss on anyone’s parade. What really gets my goat about this egregiously execrable movie is its hollowness that’s being showed off as ‘boldness’. I didn’t know that mouthing the F-word (that too in the most effete manner possible) would make a movie ‘shocking’. For the last six weeks, I was addicted to this brilliant American series called Wire and, trust me; the variants of F- and S-words in it will leave you gobsmacked a.k.a ‘shocked’. Since we are so cool, female infanticide or farmers’ deaths or massive corruption is just sad, if ever they fall in our social radar. An erection on screen or blown up display of human feces or sonic variants of farts is what is, well, shocking.

I don’t mean to sound like an idealistic savant here. When a movie claims to have “broken new ground” in terms of “shock value”, I obviously would draw comparisons with the clitoral circumcision in Anti-Christ or the abandoned fetus scene in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days or the butter scene in Last Tango in Paris and so on.

New York Times was on its money in its review of the film,” Your average American sitcom, let alone summer comedy, outdoes “Delhi Belly” in rudeness and crudeness, though its graphic language and sexual candor are unusual for an Indian movie.” The point to be underlined is the “unusual for an Indian movie” part. Post-Internet, we shouldn’t be at the mercy of Indian film-makers to teach us what is profane or sacred. If a cerebral film-maker in Senegal has something to say, we should be all ears as well. A car boot load of non-funny gags passing off as ‘bold cinema’ cannot be construed as the zeitgeist of any generation. As long as we the audience demand such shoddy supply, movies like Delhi Belly will continue to be dumped on us.

In a nutshell, I wanted to chew my arm off than watch something as putrid as Delhi Belly.

Reading, RIP

2011-08-25T10:54:00.000-07:00

If the seventies’ hit single Video Killed the Radio Star is to be given a digital twist it most certainly will be on the lines of “Internet Killed the Books”. With Twitter, Facebook, e-mail , smartphones, Tumblr, Xbox competing for your attention, words assembled in a rectilinear form in black and white will hardly hold you in thrall for more than ten straight minutes. This might sound like an antediluvian rant but David L Ulin’s The Lost Art of Reading is anything but that.

Buoyed by the acclaim (and vitriol) that his 2009 essay by the same name in Los Angeles Times brought him, Ulin has stretched the essay into a book. Ulin begins the book with a laser beam on his 15-year-old son who finds it tough to plough through The Great Gatsby. Ulin knows what’s wrong: “Like many of his [Ulin’s son] friends, his inner life is entwined within the circuits of his laptop, its electronic speed and hum.” Can a book really deliver that elevated sense of solitude if this relentless digital cacophony persists?

Ulin, a Los Angeles Times literary critic until 2010, delves into his past to answer this all-important question. Recalling his backpacking trip in Europe in his mid-twenties, Ulin speaks about his serendipitous encounter with Trocchi Rare Books, owned by Scottish novelist Alexander Trocchi. As the bookstall’s name goes, Ulin made some amazing purchases that still give him a good shiver down his spine. Moreover, he is fascinated with the persona of Trocchi, who had all the potential to be the best Scottish literary expert across the Atlantic (“bastard son of Jack Kerouac and Albert Camus”), but instead burns out owing to his heroin abuse. The lines in his novel Thongs take existentialism to another level: “You call life meaningless and you think you assert your freedom in rejecting it. But your act of suicide is just as meaningless as any other.” That’s the thing about going to a stall and looking for a certain title and suddenly stumbling across another masterpiece. In these days of Amazon and Flipkart, a computer algorithm will tell the reader what is to be bought.

Another indelible mark on Ulin’s literary psyche was made by Frank Conroy’s 1967 memoir Stop-Time in which he talks about his compulsive reading habit as a high school kid, “Night after night I’d lie in bed, with a glass of milk and a package of oatmeal cookies beside me, and read one paperback after another until two or three in the morning.” It’s tough to think a 16-year-old would do the same nowadays. If anything, he’ll be flanked by a MacBook and iPhone on his bed.

Strangely, now is the time when people should be reading more than anytime else. Right from our tweets to status updates to blogs to mobile texts to YouTube comments, we are dealing with words more than ever before. In his recent column, Simon Kuper, a Financial Times columnist, described the language of nouveau English speakers as Globish — “a simple, dull, idiom-free version of English with a small vocabulary.” Kuper is not yet done with his excoriation: “In a Globish world, the native English-speaker triumphs. When you need to drop into Globish, you can. But when subtlety or speed is required, you beat them. Native English-speakers often steer conversation, using phrases like, ‘Can I just jump in here...’ and, ‘So what we’re saying is...’ Foreigners sit mutely, trying to follow what’s being said.” In short, move beyond LOL and bollocks like that.

There’s never a moment when we are not thinking and the way you phrase your thinking will define your articulation level. In the middle of his slim book, Ulin takes a beautiful detour and tells the reader about a near-fatal accident of his son while scuba diving in Hawaii and how his son finally managed to reach safely and compares it to his son’s complaining about The Great Gatsby, “I had a mental image of him floundering in the linguistic ocean of the novel, much as he had floundered in the Pacific on that diving day.”

While Ulin is busy slamming the current age of Instant Gratification, his book seems to be an output of an unfettered access to Google and Red Bull. Most of the book’s eureka moments happen to be quotes from a myriad of sources; right from Scott Fitzgerald to Nicholas Carr and Borges to Nicholson Baker. Ulin seems so impressed with Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains that he quotes the book’s most cogent arguments verbatim and ends up cleaning the digital Augean stables with the help of the shape-shifting book: “Fiction readers mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative. Details about actions and sensations are captured from the text and integrated with personal knowledge from vast experiences. Deep reading is by no means a passive exercise. The reader becomes the book.”

Ulin’s criticism of Kindle too is borrowed from Nicholson Baker’s 2009 New Yorker article, “sharp black letters laid out like lacquered chopsticks on a clean tablecloth”. Though it’s true that the brains of the current generation are the digital equivalent of a web browser with 12 tabs open at once, it’s not yet certain if the Internet is indeed a bane to literature. The phenomenon needs to be given at least another decade to quantify its intelligence or vacuity-quotient. For now, let’s install the Freedom software and get off the digital treadmill.

THE LOST ART OF READING
David L Ulin
Sasquatch Books
152 pages; Rs 466

Junk Bond

2011-07-07T11:05:00.000-07:00

Here’s a pop quiz. What’s common to these writers: Kingsley Amis, John Pearson, Sebastian Faulks, John Gardner and Raymond Benson? After the death of Ian Fleming, the creator of the James Bond series, all of them have written at least one Bond book. It’s a glowing testimony to Fleming’s Zen-like focus on the world’s deadliest fictional spy that none of these writers saw their books made into movies. The Fleming estate continues to gamble and this time it is American thriller veteran Jeffery Deaver who writes the latest Bond book.

In keeping with current world politics and cultural mores, Bond’s enemies are no longer the Soviets (if anything, the new ones are to be found in the Tora Bora caves), he totes an iPhone and has this new-mannish sensitivity of avoiding sex. What’s more, no fist fights and cliff-hanging either. I wouldn't mind if you asked whether we are talking about Jason Bourne or James Bond. As you see, this is less of a renaissance and more of a recrudescence of Bond.

Carte Blanche opens in Belgrade with a train full of methyl isocyanate (of the Bhopal gas tragedy notoriety) almost being derailed. Bond averts the sabotage but is intrigued by the motives of a dead-eyed villain, Niall Dunne. Back in London, then gearing up for the Olympics, Bond traces Dunne’s antecedents to Severan Hydt, the owner of Green Way, a garbage disposal company.

Meanwhile, an Operation Gehenna in the making is reported by Government Communications Headquarters, a UK agency that collects and analyses foreign signals intelligence. The attack scheduled for three days later might leave thousands of casualties, including, yes, the British.

Bond, the nifty dot connector, tracks Dunne and Hydt to Dubai then Cape Town, where a not-so-cracking denouement awaits the reader. In between, Bond assumes a different identity to gain entrance into Hydt’s lair, which is certainly going beyond Green Way’s motto: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. The ruse that Bond adopts to gain Hydt’s confidence is a stroke of genius. Calling himself Gene Theron – spoiler alert! – he masquerades as a mercenary who supplies troops and arms to the despots of war-ravaged countries.

Deaver involves a handful of other characters to lend Bond’s mission vim and vigour. Ophelia Maidenstone is his pointswoman in London, Bheka Jordaan is his partner-in-crime (pun intended, unfortunately) in Cape Town; and there’s Bond’s love interest Felicity Willing, who intends to put a stop to the horrible practice of “foreign-owned megafarms forcing their way into third-world nations and squeezing out the local farmers”.

Being a Bond devotee, Deaver is able to maintain the tight pace of the story with staccato writing and he does manage to capture Bond’s typical derring-do style. But a Bond book is not so much about the destination as the journey. Right off the bat I can list the trademark Bond tics that are missing in the Deaver avatar — obsessive-compulsive tendencies, depression and a tinge of S&M.

The problem is that Deaver tries to touch all the familiar Bond bases but doesn’t really succeed. For instance, Hydt comes across as convincingly feral in the beginning but he doesn’t do much after that and ends up being as generic a villain as they come. Also, many of the hallmarks of the series are missing — especially the quirky inventions (the use of the ejector seat to upturn the Aston Martin in Die Another Day) and neatly judged humour (Bond straightens his tie while submerged in the Thames during the boat chase in The World Is Not Enough).

Of course, Deaver has managed to invest his Bond with a sense of humour as dry as the martini (“shaken not stirred”) that he famously favours. During a fight in a basement that is on the verge of demolition, putting Bond at risk of being buried under the detritus, he has him musing, “Not a great place to be buried alive...” When his mission is going nowhere and pressure is mounting, Deaver has him thinking: “I'm beginning to feel a bit like Lehman Brothers; my debts vastly outweigh my assets.”

The prose, however, becomes clunky in places. Examples: “you can keep secrets from those you’re close to for only so long” or “seduction in tradecraft is like seduction in love, it works best if you make the object of your desire come to you”.

Though the dialogue is trite and characters weak, Carte Blanche is not a complete downer. The author does manage to successfully recreate the Bond persona: tuxedos, fast cars and pretty women. Deaver also deserves to be appreciated for his sleight of hand in deftly handling the alphabet soup of agencies’ names.

That doesn’t mean Daniel Craig should be the leading man if Carte Blanche is made into a movie. This is a sort of the role Jason Statham should be sinking his Kevlar-like teeth into. Deal with it, Bond fans.

CARTE BLANCHE
Jeffery Deaver
Hachette India
436 pages; Rs 499

Pitch Reports

2011-07-07T10:30:00.000-07:00

It was a John Updike moment when VVS Laxman was about to catch the ball that deflected from Wasim Akram’s bat, which would complete Anil Kumble’s achievement of 10 wickets in an innings: “It was in the books while it was still in the air.” The latest book to chronicle that world record is journalist Amol Rajan’s Twirlymen: The Unlikely History of Cricket’s Greatest Spin Bowlers. But there’s a twist of schadenfreude to the tale here: Englishman Tony Lock was giving his team-mate Jim Laker no easy route to the 10 wickets that he would eventually take against Australia at Old Trafford in 1959. Cut to Delhi. “By the time Kumble was on his ninth, Javagal Srinath was bowling wide long hops at the other end”.

It’s anecdotes like these that give Twirlymen a brio of Eurostar. Rajan’s borderline Darwinian approach to spin bowling is the missing link between Wisden Almanacs and websites like Cricinfo. The writer charts out the history of spin bowling and how it keeps evolving with an armory of deliveries that keep befuddling the most experienced batsmen. Rajan is easily at home while discussing Clarrie Grimmett’s flipper as well as Graeme Swann’s shenanigans in the days prior to his current level-headed disposition. Be it Shane Warne’s ball of the century or Muralitharan’s helicopter twist or Saqlain Mushtaq’s doosra or Ajantha Mendis’ carrom ball, Rajan combines his journalistic chops and easy-going prose with élan. He gets down to some serious myth-busting as well: googly wasn’t invented by Englishman Bernard Bosanquet and nor was Saqlain the progenitor of doosra (England’s Jack Potter is the answer you are looking at if asked at a pub quiz). At the end of each chapter there are illustrations of how famous spin deliveries are to be delivered. Here’s a 21-gun salute to spin bowling. Lately, there has been a minor explosion of sorts in the representation of cricket in the field of arts: fiction, non-fiction and documentary.

Fire In Babylon is a delightful amble into the annals of West Indies cricket from 1975 to 1994. Circa 1975, West Indies still had the yoke of colonialism attached to its neck, and when its cricket team toured Australia, it was treated with utter disdain by the hosts. With lilting reggae soundtrack in the background, Steven Riley goes about telling the tale of the most dominating reign of a team in the history of team sports. Initially, Clive Lloyd drew first blood and then Viv Richards took over. At their peak, the pace quartet of Andy Roberts, Michael Holding, Colin Croft and Joel Garner (Malcolm Marshall is to come later) have sent so many chills down batsmen spine. What used to make batsmen balk even more was the lack of protective equipment and no one-bouncer-per-over rule. With no respite coming from any end, this small clutch of islands was ruling roost over cricketing world’s imagination. Add to this the punishing blade of Richards and Gordon Greenidge. Roberts, christened as “Hit Man” in his heydays barely managed a chuckle on the field but speaks his heart out before Riley’s camera: “The sympathy is there (for the batsman) but I can’t show to the batsman.” There are more such confessions one from Greenidge, who took a long time to understand the spectre of racism during his childhood in England. It’s a fatal error to push Fire In Babylon into the facile sinkhole of sports documentary when it deals with multiple issues: racism, country politics and exorcising past ghosts.

* * *

Just like the West Indian team, Pradeep Mathew could have been the toast of Sri Lanka in the fictional tale of Chinaman by Shehan Karunatilaka. Here’s someone who defied conventional spin bowling techniques and went on to build up his own armory that till date remains unmatched: chinaman, googly, top spinner and an amazing arm ball. It remains uncertain whether its diffidence or arrogance but Mathew never plays his cards the way they ought to be. His open defiance of his seniors’ diktats, a chronic womaniser who doesn’t mind bit of hanky-panky in between match days, a blithe ignorance of his talent makes him an enigma. With his life never well fleshed out for public perusal, an aging sports journalist W G Karunasena, takes up the mantle of resurrecting the image of the greatest cricketer Sri Lanka never had.

Karunatilaka’s sparing prose is an unsparing take on the obstacles that have been besaddling Sri Lanka: LTTE, Tamil discrimination and xenophobia. While his liver threatens to die any moment (massive alcohol abuse does that, you know), a recalcitrant Karunasena wants to give that patina of respect to Mathew. While Rajan never gives much credence to the spinners who never made it big, Karunatilaka’s novel is a tribute to bowlers like Laxman Sivaramakrishnan and Narendra Hirwani. The former had three six-wicket hauls in his first three innings and the latter hogged 16 wickets on his debut but their careers never ascended any further peaks.

Duncan Hamilton’s A Last English Summer is an unapologetic critique of the 20-20 version of cricket, which makes Kerry Packer’s World Series look like a conservative affair. Hamilton is one of those sticklers who prefer to slug it out for five days to get their cricketing kicks rather than fall for the ‘razzmatazz’. Speaking about the version’s “incalculable harm to the wider game”, Hamilton laments the “technical ability needed to bowl a long spell or vary their bowling, for example, or bat for hours, or adapt successfully to different types of pitches and conditions”. This is Hamilton’s way of doffing his hat for a game that is increasingly being perceived to be going to dogs. He travels the length and breadth of England to capture the beauty of the game: MCC v Durham fixture at Lord’s, Ashes series, Lancashire League and other local matches.

The grand-daddy of recent cricketing literature has to be Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland which was longlisted for Man Booker 2008. Hans ven den Broek, a Dutch banker, living in London and in harmony with his erstwhile briefly estranged wife and son, reminisces his past in New York when he was re-introduced to cricket through Chuck Ramkissoon, his erstwhile friend and “business associate”. O’Neill wades through some really choppy waters: the New York of 9/11, the powercut and the neo-conservativism in the air. To O’Neill’s credit, he comes up trumps and part of the credit should go to the novel’s leitmotif: cricket. In a passage he compares cricket to baseball: “…the art of batting is directed at hitting the ball along the ground with that elegant variety of strokes a skilful batsman will have spent years trying to master and preserve: the glance, the hook, the cut, the sweep, the cover drive, the pull and all those offspring of technique conceived to send the cricket ball rolling and rolling, as if by magic, to the far-off edge of the playing field.” Clearly, O’Neill did for cricket in US whhich ICC couldn’t do: make it look like art.

Breaking Bad

2011-07-07T10:17:00.000-07:00

What would you make of a brilliant chemistry teacher, who uses his chemical expertise to churn out the purest form of methamphetamine the US state of New Mexico has ever seen? Before you jump to a conclusion, allow me to work a Nazi metaphor here: not everyone who worked at the concentration camps is evil. Walter White is diagnosed with an acute form of lung cancer and obviously his piffling teacher salary will never be a cushion for his wife, a disabled son and a soon-to-be-born daughter.

Thus, to provide for his family after his truncated life, he gets down to ‘cooking meth’ with his erstwhile not-so-bright student and currently a drug peddler-cum-junkie, Jesse Pinkman. This duo is probably television’s equivalent of Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid and a more menacing one at that. While White is the matter, Jesse is the anti-matter and their banter is easily the show’s greatest strength. This must be one of those few television dramas whose mise-en-scene is not contributed by the garage sale of a rich man’s mansion. Barring the household squabbles of White, rest of the action happens in the open and this is the sort of action that can give you anxiety attacks.

Apart from the lead duo, there are a bunch of other characters who could easily straddle both the worlds of David Lodge and Werner Herzog. There’s White’s tough-as-Kevlar cop brother-in-law Hank, whose psyche goes for a toss after a ghastly experience. White’s sister-in-law Marie is a kleptomaniac and is forever in a state of self-denial. Of course, there’s White’s wife Skyler, a perfect embodiment of a household dominatrix. As show progresses there are other minor but hugely memorable characters that keep giving the show its Eurostar brio. Of the three seasons, the last one has some high-octane drama that would put even Robert Rodriguez to shame.

More than anything else, this show only reignites Gore Vidal’s assessment of USA: United States of Amnesia. Here’s a show set in the sleepy town of Albuquerque where all the settings are natural and the show’s creator Vince Gilligan has a Zen-like focus on the failings of the much ballyhooed Great American Dream. This is one show that will richly recompense for whatever time you expend on it. David Foster Wallace merits to be quoted here: “Entertainment provides relief. Art provokes engagement.”

Breaking Bad is art with capital A.

PS: Fourth season begins on July 17.

Ethical downloading

2011-07-07T10:15:00.000-07:00

“I download stuff and I ain’t ashamed of it.” I plan to inscribe this on a plain tee sometime pretty soon. I have utter disregard for those who perceive downloading movies and music as the worst form of theft. Because they take this sanctimonious stand that Intellectual Property is a holy grail, even a sensible argument will be met with a wall. I’ll however hasten a risk and list out a manifesto, which someone like me, who downloads 70 GB of unique content every month (that’s a shameless plug, I know), tends to follow.

· Never download movies that will find a release near your theatre. If you are the kind of person who downloads Kung Fu Panda-2 and critiques it on Facebook, you should be given a brief custodial sentence. Admit it, if someone confesses to be a movie buff and is busy downloading Scream 4, he or she is anything but a ‘movie buff’. I didn’t have any compunction about downloading “Hobo With a Shotgun” because I was very well aware that delicious gore wouldn’t find a theatrical release in this part of the world.

· If you really respect movies, start from Buster Keaton’s silent cinema. Then graduate to Orson Welles, Luis Bunuel, early Woody Allen, and latter Spielberg and so on. All these movies are available for downloading and you are very much justified to download these flicks. I don’t really give two monkeys about the sanitised world cinema that UTV and NDTV proffer to show in their channels. Imagine watching ‘Irreversible’ without that underground rape scene and that’s how badly they mangle movies with aesthetic sex scenes (or gratuitous for that matter) and justified swearing.

· By the way, never ever download the camera prints. Always go for the dvdrips that are available 90 days after the movie’s release.

· If downloading music is really a crime, Steve Jobs should have been Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s fellow inmate at Rikers Island. The iTunes service has already hijacked the concept of album and peddles singles to anyone willing to pay anything as low as a half-quid. Anyway, it’s an old saw that bands don’t earn money anymore from CD sales but it’s the live concerts that brings bread to their table. That means I’m exonerated, right?

· I’ll also propose institution of a system of fines to anyone found downloading downright garbag-ish sitcoms like Friends, How I Met Your Mother, et al. Star World anyway plays these shows round-the-clock, if you have such free time to expend. Instead download The Killing or Wire or Breaking Bad (PS: I refuse to believe the daft argument that one man’s Grisham is another man’s Shakespeare). What more, none of these shows are broadcast in India.

· Now the above ‘rules’ might not apply to students who depend on their parents for their daily expenses, right? That’s wrong with a capital W. If they can find enough money to buy Blackberry to frantically fiddle with the trackball and BBM sweet nothings or if they can throw flashy birthday parties at one of those over-priced fast food joints, I’m sure they can spend Rs 200 on something as rewarding as watching a movie in a dark starkly dark room where the only light is a beam from the projector. Anyway, if they are really interested in cinema, there are at least half-a dozen movie clubs that show amazing movies pro bono.

Do remember to abide by these rules and I’ll be more than happy to welcome you into this digital Ku Klux Klan. Feel free to add more ‘rules’.

Their perestroikas

2011-07-07T10:11:00.000-07:00

When Cat Power sang “If I can make it there; I’ll make it anywhere; New York”, it’s hard to dispute the magnetic charm of this megalopolis. After reading Jennifer Egan’s marvellous fourth novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, I somehow imagined a New Yorker singing these Perfume Genius lines instead: “No one will answer your prayers until you take off that dress; No one will hear all your crying until you take your last breath.”

Remaining loyal to her Zen-like focus on urban dystopia, Ms Egan starts her latest novel in a similar vein with the lead character Sasha, who doesn’t have much to look forward to in her life. This assistant to a record executive is battling a lot of demons too: kleptomania, zero love life and the inability to break the shackles of a super-bourgeoisie life. Her boss, Bennie Salazar, a former punk rocker (of a band with the cringe-worthy title Flaming Dildos), is no better: a promising rock future is cut short, as a record executive he displays a tin ear for bands of the future, he is sexually frustrated and has an adorable son whose custodial rights he doesn’t own thanks to his infidelity.

At first glance, these characters might strike the reader as bilious New York clichés but Ms Egan lends them respect with her way with words. Mulling over his current job, Salazar realises that the world couldn’t care less about meaningful music: “The problem was digitisation, which sucked the light out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh. Film, photography, music: dead. An aesthetic holocaust!”

In brutally staccato prose, Ms Egan slowly lets us piece together the fragments of back stories encompassing unhinged lust, dysfunctional families, a love triangle, teenage angst and ridiculous levels of hipsterism well past its sell-by date. Ms Egan even writes the book’s longest chapter in the form of a Power Point presentation. This is Jonathan Franzen meets early Woody Allen meets Italo Calvino without sounding like any of them.

The back stories involve Bennie, the band’s lead guitarist Scotty, and three girls, Jocelyn, Rhea and Alice. Scotty’s heart pines for Jocelyn, she is on the verge of a romantic relationship with Lou, a biggie in the music industry. Another parallel back story happens to be that of Lou and his children. Another circle in this back story Venn diagram is that of Bennie’s first wife Stephanie and her neurotic brother Jules Jones, an erstwhile celebrity journalist.

As a connoisseur of celebrity profiles I was blown away by Jones’ profile of Kitty Jackson, yet another Hollywood ingénue. Jones, who is already disenchanted with his job, writes a brutal takedown of Jackson, which might send a chill down the spine of even seasoned celebrities. “I feel slopping within me a volatile stew of anger, fear, and lust: anger because this naïf has, for reasons that are patently unjustifiable, far more power in the world than I will ever have, and once my forty minutes are up, nothing short of criminal stalking could force the intersection of my subterranean path with her lofty one,” laments Jones. Unable to bear his self-loathing and to spice up an otherwise bland interview, Jones forces himself upon Jackson, only to find himself in Rikers Island.

Ms Egan’s love for popular music is the book’s greatest asset and, no kidding, music actually wafts from every page. She captures the zeitgeist of every generation (precisely three generations) with their kind of music. A younger Bennie swoons to Iggy Pop, his older self graduates to Dead Kennedys — a clever allusion to the fact that fire-in-the-belly is inversely proportional to age. Sasha’s daughter, who is a breath away from reaching the Justin Bieber demographic, is obsessed with pauses within the songs. Did you know that Police’s “Roxanne” has a pause from 1:57 to 1:59? The infant picks up at least ten such songs. A possible PhD subject on Planet Egan! The novel ends on a really high note (pun not intended): Scotty, who slid into a cave of obscurity, finds a second lease of life when Bennie prods him to perform on a slide guitar, a performance that turns out to be bewitchingly brilliant.

Of course, Ms Egan stumbles occasionally. The chapter in which Kitty Jackson is employed to put up a human face to a “genocidal dictator” does echo the Naomi Campbell-Charles Taylor story but is hardly compelling. So is the chapter where Sasha is living her hipster life in Naples. While Ms Egan’s description of Naples was tactile I couldn’t really empathise with Sasha’s salt-of-the-earth lifestyle. That said, credit needs to be given to Ms Egan’s literary sleight of hand that ensured all these disparate stories cohered into a simple narrative.

Goon Squad can be used as a textbook at the creative writing workshops. Within one book Ms Egan uses all kinds of literary styles (sly satire, moving tragedy, even Power Point) and tenses: be it present tense or the various forms of past tense like the perfect, the imperfect, the pluperfect. In short, this book is the perfect anti-matter to the “feminine tosh” remarks made by that literary panjandrum V S Naipaul. Perhaps it’s this refusal to conform to stereotypes that earned Ms Egan the Pulitzer in fiction for Goon Squad.

A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD
Jennifer Egan
Anchor Books
342 pages; Rs 529

Google, a benign evil?

2011-07-07T10:00:00.000-07:00

In one of G K Chesterton stories the hero observes that nothing is as frightening as a labyrinth without a centre. Google might be one such labyrinth: a cloud computing major, owner of an insanely successful operating system called Android, owner of YouTube, even producer of a car that drives itself. All of this, apart from its lucrative search engine exoskeleton. How can a decade-old company be branching out like a banyan tree on crack? A possible answer is the Montessori schooling of Google’s founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, according to Steve Levy in his new book In The Plex: “To ask their own questions, do their own things. Do something because it makes sense, not because some authority told you.”

This has been the guiding light of this unobtrusive duo right from its typical-Silicon-Valley garage-start-up days to its current “800-pound gorilla” status. This journey has been charted pretty well in Mr Levy’s conventional but fairly elegant book. Mr Levy, a technology reporter, almost unlocks the Google “labyrinth”. He meets almost every employee who is someone at Google and accumulates a massive corpus of interviews. The first two chapters on how Google came up with the AdWords and AdSense concepts and the course-changing decision to induct Eric Schmidt as CEO amply show how Mr Levy knows every cobble of Google’s journey.

As it gained traction with web users, Google started to look beyond the search business. It locked horns with Microsoft and Apple. So enraged was Apple CEO Steve Jobs with Google’s smartphone operating system (Android) that he once quipped “we did not enter the search business, why is Google entering the smartphone business”. It’s apparent that Mr Jobs did not have a Montessori background. Mr Brin and Mr Page, who think as one, are like two unhinged horses together in harness. They are always on the lookout for new paths and don’t baulk at exploring them.

The first five (out of eight) chapters are a build-up to the following chapters that take the reader on a TGV ride. Google’s kerfuffle with China over privacy issues has been the search engine’s major lightning rod in 2010. As it is, Google was neck-deep in problems in the world’s largest Internet market over censorship issues, cultural issues and massive competition from local search engine major Baidu. However, Google was still trying to sail through these choppy waters when the Chinese government allegedly hacked the Gmail accounts of Chinese activists.

Google, whose motive is “Don’t Be Evil”, couldn’t take this arm-twisting anymore and started locking horns with the government only to make an unceremonious exit. Google has had other embarrassments too, like the public spat with publishers and authors over the digitisation of every book that has been ever produced. Unlike China, Google cannot claim to be a victim here. As Mr Levy tells his readers, “Google was making a copy of every book – without permission – to build a library of its own, without paying publishers and authors for the privilege.” However altruistic Google may sound in its aim of making books available to one and all with there being no geographical boundaries, it was actually being a literary shark that is into some serious literary land grabbing. Here’s an instant where that Chesteron hero should get “frightened”.

While Mr Levy’s journalism in the book is stellar, he does miss (overlook really) a couple of issues. He doesn’t even hint at the Big Brother aspect of Google Earth, which drew some serious ire in Europe. Another issue is Google’s inherent bias towards engineers and blithe ignorance for non-engineers. Mr Levy does touch on that but never cares to burrow enough. A classic example is Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook and former vice president of Global Online Sales and Operations at Google. In a recent BusinessWeek article, Roger McNamee, a friend of Ms Sandberg’s, was quoted as following: “Google has done so many things right, but the thing they screwed up more than anything was missing the import of people from nonengineering backgrounds and failing to appreciate the value such people can bring. As a consequence, a lot of people like Sheryl (Sandberg) were not given an opportunity to shine to their true level. For all intents and purposes, Google chased Sheryl away.” There might not be a grain of truth in these allegations but Mr Levy, with his unhindered access to Google, could have investigated further.

The book’s greatest strength is in its closing chapter (“Chasing Taillights”). The chapter enumerates so many sour grapes that it could pass for a massive vineyard. With Facebook’s meteoric ascent, Google has every reason to worry. Google Buzz, the company’s feeble attempt at social networking, turned into a huge PR disaster when users’ email contacts were made public. Foursquare’s co-founder Dennis Crowley had a similar prototype that Google bought but never cared enough to build into something shape shifting, which Foursquare eventually turned out to be. Google has a social networking site called Orkut, which is Facebook before Facebook, but lack of enough patronisation saw it limiting itself to Brazil and India.

Google has a couple of search engine worries as well: Microsoft’s Bing is trying to close in on Google and Yandex, a Russian search engine, just raised $1.5 billion through an IPO. This “labyrinth” better find its centre, soon.

IN THE PLEX
Steven Levy
Simon & Schuster
424 pages; Rs 961

Craven retrieval

2011-05-15T09:47:00.000-07:00

It wasn’t just sad when 46-year-old David Foster Wallace hanged himself on the porch of his house in Claremont, California, in fall 2008. It was a blow. Here was a man who rebuilt the skyline of American literary fiction in 1996 with his 1,079-page doorstopper Infinite Jest. His journalism for various publications is equally breathtaking. The Pale King is his posthumous work that has been assiduously brought together by Michael Pietsch, publisher of Little, Brown and Company and Mr Wallace’s longtime editor.

The book is essentially about agents at an IRS Regional Examination Centre in the leafy town of Peoria (Illinois) during the Reagan era. Like every slow-moving bureaucracy, here too paperwork comes to die and, over a period of time, so do the souls of humans working here. Abiding by the dictum of “if you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish”, the agents pore over the tax code’s minutiae day in and day out.

While the book talks about people in fragments, the plot tends to be unclear, though Mr Wallace’s widow Karen Green said his notebook mentioned that “an evil group within the IRS is trying to steal the secrets of an agent who is particularly gifted at maintaining a heightened state of concentration”. Lane Dean Jr, Claude Sylvanshine, David Cusk, Chris Fogle and Leonard Stecyk form the book’s dramatis personae apart from David Foster Wallace (not to be confused with the writer, as he reminds us over and over), a newly arrived trainee at IRS. Although each character sketch would qualify as a gripping novella, all of them cohere to make The Pale King a page-turner. Apparently, Mr Wallace spent a year taking accounting classes to prepare himself for the book, hence the onslaught of Illinois tax code’s snippets. During the course of reading the book, I had to take two hot showers to come to terms with Mr Wallace’s fascination with trivia. Here’s what a reader has to grasp quickly: “Revenue Procedure 74-17 announces certain operating rules of the Service relating to the issuance of advance ruling letters concerning the classification of organisations formed as limited partnerships.”

Mr Wallace started writing the book around the same time he gave that perceptive commencement speech at Kenyon College in 2005 where he said, “Life is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head.” It’s this depression, ennui, ambivalence, whatever, that seems to have driven Mr Wallace to suicide. These are the same themes that recur in The Pale King too. You have a pretty woman providing the details of her brief stay at a mental asylum to a relatively unknown colleague, a couple of agents talking about their mirthless weekend as if the Super Bowl happened in their backyard, another agent reminiscing about his dead father in the drab tone of a sports commentator and yet another who subconsciously counts the number of words that he is speaking. There’s also an elaborate description of the architecture of the run-of-the-mill IRS buildings.

Unlike Infinite Jest and his journalism, Mr Wallace’s trademark footnotes don’t run a riot in The Pale King. But that’s hardly a quibble considering his prose, which is not for the faint-hearted, is intact. Here’s a sample of the rather graphic story of a kid who wants to “be able to press his lips to every square inch of his body”, which you might either find beguiling or enough to provoke a four-aspirin headache: “The insides of the small boy’s thighs up to the medial fork of his groin took months even to prepare for, daily hours spent cross-legged and bowed, slowly and incrementally stretching the long vertical fasciae of his back and neck, the spinalis thoracis and levator scapulae, the iliocostalis lumborum all the way to the sacrum, and the interior thigh’s dense and intransigent gracilis, pectineus, and adductor longus, which fuse below Scarpa’s triangle and transmit sickening pain through the pubis whenever their range of flexibility is exceeded.”

While reading The Pale King there were quite a few moments when I imagined how Mr Wallace could have expanded his literary tentacles if he were alive today. My reference point is Infinite Jest where he was too busy trying to be avant-garde, post-structural and, as he told to Jonathan Franzen, “linguistically calisthenic”. While all these elements are alive and kicking in The Pale King, Mr Wallace appears more at peace with himself. In Infinite Jest, Mr Wallace was obsessed with savaging the corporate culture of America (so much so that he christened every year belonging to a certain product) but in The Pale King his X-ray focus is on baby boomers, who are fit for recruitment into the IRS after the Vietnam War.

According to Aristotle, we are what we do. According to Mr Wallace, we are what we endure. At time, however, Mr Wallace’s ontological despair tends to get wearisome. For example, chapter 25 is all about various agents turning pages in their respective files. But this is hardly a Faustian pact compared to the enchanting storytelling of which Wallace is capable.

THE PALE KING
David Foster Wallace
Little, Brown and Company
944 pages; Rs 1,120

El Classicos galore

2011-05-15T09:46:00.001-07:00

I’ve always been a late bloomer. Heard Beatles at an age when people usually graduate to jazz, started watching French cinema even after those living under the rock and read ‘Corrections’ at least four years late. While I’ve taken these things in my stride, I couldn’t reconcile with the fact that I came to know about El Classico this late in my life.

From April 17-May 3, four Real Madrid-Barcelona games were to be watched. Comparing it to India-Pakistan cricket matches will be a huge disservice and facetious to the Spanish teams.
The history attached to these teams is way too much and intricate to encapsulate into a blog post. It would be suffice to say that barring El Salvador-Honduras football game (Ryszard Kapuscinski’s ‘Soccer War’ is a brilliant piece of reportage on this), El Classico is the greatest sporting tie, ever. With Jose Mourinho at the helm of Madrid affairs, I knew that these four games will be high on testosterone. The way things panned out, they exceeded my wildest expectations.

Last November, Madrid received a 5-0 drubbing at the hands of Barcelona and a fusillade of, rather premature, obituaries were written out how a team full of superstars (Ronaldo, Kaka for the starters) is not a patch on the proponents of ‘beautiful game’. April 17 was the second leg of La Liga and the game sailed by to a satisfactory 1-1 draw. Next game was the Copa Del Rey final and a beautiful Cristiano Ronaldo brace in the extra-time ended Barca’s chances of a treble this season. These two games were just a prelude to the opera called UEFA Champions League semi-final.

A barrage of soccer invectives were exchanged between Mourinho and Pep Guardiola (Barcelona’s manager) prior to the game and they only intensified after the game. Barcelona have been accused of playacting, a neologism for the way Barcelona’s players feigned fouls and fell to the ground. The game touched its nadir when Pepe was sent off for what looked like a typical football tackle on Dani Alves. Reduced to ten men and that too without Pepe, who was pretty successful in marking Lionel Messi, Madrid were barely hanging to the game when the final straw came in the form of two successive goals. If that wasn’t enough, further salt was sprinkled onto Madrid’s wounds by UEFA for banning Mourinho from the stadium for the second leg for his comments on Barcelona’s style of playing.

With an insane advantage of two away goals, Barcelona had to just defend itself during the second leg of the semi-final. Defend they did but if not for a disallowed goal at the 47th minute, Barcelona would still be smarting from a bitter defeat. While Gonzalez Higauin was at the cusp of converting a Ronaldo pass, Javier Mascherano fell to the ground in controversial circumstances (he allegedly faked an injury) and from there on the game ended in a tame 1-1 draw.

At the end of four El Classicos, I was reminded of what Kingsley Amis thought of someone who just got initiated into P G Wodehouse: “What a lucky beggar! Just think of the fun he’s going to have reading all those other books for the first time.” This late-bloomer thing really tastes bittersweet.

Geeks shall inherit the earth

2011-05-15T09:45:00.000-07:00

One look at the well-illustrated jacket of Angela Saini’s Geek Nation: How Indian science is taking over the world and all those “Emerging India” clichés popped up in my mind: a booming software industry, fresh-out-of-college graduates earning more than their dads, a technological brain drain that has been manna from heaven for US, UK and other developed countries. After reading the book, I stand corrected, more or less.

“It shall be the duty of every citizen of India to develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform” is a statement that is included in the Indian Constitution on the insistence of the country’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Saini, a UK-based award-winning science journalist, spends six months on the Indian soil to see for herself if Nehru’s unflagging patronisation of the sciences bore any fruit six decades later. Her first stop happens to be the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi, one of the 16 institutes that Nehru envisioned would, in Saini’s words, “train up an army of innovative young engineers, who would be the country’s first generation of technocrats, researchers and inventors”.

She expected the college to be a sort of an academic Woodstock where intellectual curiosity and innovation will be in the air. It turns out to be borderline academic dystopia. Students’ sole intent seems to be getting marks and landing a cushy job. Anything that “won’t help them pass their engineering exams, they don’t want to know”. “All I can see are drones” is how she expresses her despair. Another sacred cow that Saini slays is this new-fangled thing called the “IT boom”. Indian computer science engineers are increasingly becoming the backbone of every tech company that mushrooms in developed countries, with salaries that are hardly rivalled elsewhere in any other sector in the country. This lemonade stand is turned into a chain by companies like Infosys, Wipro, Tata Consultancy Services and so on. On her visit to a couple of IT companies in Bangalore, which is unnecessarily dubbed the “Silicon Valley of India”, Saini could see through the nebula: “Lucrative though it is, most of the work done in Bengaluru tends to be day-to-day maintenance and routine software development.”

While Saini’s technological insight might be questionable, she compensates for it with her excellent journalistic skills. She’s not starry-eyed, doesn’t mind burning a few formidable bridges for the sake of truth and always takes facts with a fistful of salt. She doesn’t balk at painting an almost unflattering, and accurate, portrait of Infosys chairman N R Narayana Murthy. At his penchant for calling his employees “Infoscians”, she says the term sounds “as if they were scions of some great, dynastic family”.

With one-third of the book resembling a Swiss Army Knife, Saini only builds on it by checking on India’s geek quotient during pre-historic times. She pores over Vaimanika Shashtra, a scientific paper written in the early 20th century, which contained, among other things, descriptions of real aircraft that existed thousands of years ago. It’s these nuggets of information that give Geek Nation an intelligent heft. Like a true journalist, Saini places both sides of the story in a dispassionate manner. While she respects the common populace’s belief that Ganesh idols really drank milk, she takes on board the opinion of the general secretary of the Indian Rationalist Association: “One that is modern, with science and another India that is living in the Middle Ages.” Saini achieves a fair amount of success when she talks about this modern India through a genetically modified banana, a lie detector that would put truth serum to shame and a possible panacea for tuberculosis. But her use of pat phrases and blanket assumptions does jar at times. While it’s true that “the Indian government spends under $200 million on all of the IITs, equivalent to just eight per cent of the annual budget of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US”, Saini discounts the fact that India is still an emerging economy and has a lot of catching up to do. In a chapter titled “Geeks Rule”, she talks about how embracing technology has helped untangle bureaucratic red tape. While it might be true that e-filing will help reduce paperwork, it’s foolhardy to expect that the process cannot be stretched in the infamous Indian courts. Saini happily buys this notion that the e-mitra kiosk that she sees in Jaipur, where people can pay all their bills online, if replicated all over the country will be a boon to the populace. She somehow fails to factor in the fact that corruption is all-pervasive in government offices and the employees will always find ingenious ways to extract a bribe.

In all fairness, Geek Nation still manages to make for a very good read and that’s only because Saini treats her subject matter with care. In a chapter titled “Brainpower” she pays a visit to the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre and gives hitherto unknown insight into India’s nuclear capabilities. A thorium reactor that is being designed will put an end to India’s energy problems, for once and all. At a time when science writing is beset by arid literature, Saini’s writing gives her already interesting premise a masterful and penetrating feel.

GEEK NATION
How Indian Science Is Taking Over The World
Angela Saini
Hachette
288 pages; Rs 499

Cinema Paradiso

2011-04-14T00:16:00.000-07:00

You’d always find me sitting closest to the screen. Why do we sit so close? Maybe it was because we wanted to receive the images first, when they were still new, still fresh, before they cleared the hurdles of the rows behind us.” This is the first dialogue of “The Dreamers” where Michael Pitt lays bare his cinephilia. The Popcorn Essayists, an anthology of essays on films written by 13 well-known Indian writers, is a book-length equivalent of that Pitt dialogue. Edited by Jai Arjun Singh (a columnist for Business Standard), the book pays tribute to a raft of eminence grises of world cinema like the Kaurismaki Brothers, Wim Wenders, Francois Truffaut and Luis Bunuel. This being an essentially Indian book, there are quite a few pieces dedicated to the Hindi cinema of yore too.

For every brooding of Manjula Padmanabhan over Luis Bunuel’s technique of using multiple actresses for the same character in “That Object of Desire” there is an Amitava Kumar gushing over Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya. If Manil Suri gave the ultimate ode to Helen by performing a raunchy number of hers at the Brooklyn Book Festival, on her trip to Finland Anjum Hasan hops on to a cinematic time machine that takes her on a whirlwind trip of all the movies of Kaurismaki Brothers. There’s this one really long passage in which she encapsulates all the tics of every stereotypical Kaurismaki character (for the uninitiated, imagine them as poor man’s Jonathan Franzen characters): “In Kaurismaki land, you lead an honest life, working with your hands. You take short breaks, standing under a harsh light and smoking silently with a colleague. You go to a bar where there’s a band playing and you sit and listen for a while.” And so it goes. This dry-as-dust scholarship married with superb literature is the book’s biggest achievement.

Jai Arjun Singh’s recollection of all the slasher flicks that he has seen from his childhood is just what the flicks are all about: a guilty pleasure. He flits from the grand-daddy of the genre (Psycho) to the chained-up-in-the-cellar movies within the space of a couple of paragraphs. As an Ed Wood, Wes Craven and David Cronenberg fan, I was a bit disappointed at not finding them mentioned but Singh makes up for that by discussing lesser-known but brilliant movies like Onibaba and Hour of the Wolf. Despite the space constraint, he manages to delve into the philosophy of the genre through his childhood.

In 1996, Susan Sontag remarked on the decline of the film culture: “Perhaps it is not cinema that has ended but only cinephilia.” To a certain extent Dame Sontag was spot on. Cinema is thriving even more but it’s the fragmented reality of modern human lives that have other media of entertainment like the Xboxes, YouTubes, incessant text messaging and so on. A ridiculous sense of urgency has been creeping into the movies lately. A languid shot and empty space are all taboos now. An interesting counterpoint to this theory is to be found in Jonathan Rosenbaum’s latest book (the title and this review’s headline are the same). He says the golden age of cinema is long past us because “it’s a central aspect of our alienated relation to language that when someone says, ‘I just saw a film,’ we don’t know whether this person saw something on a large screen with hundreds of other people or alone on a laptop — or whether what he or she saw was on film, video, or DVD, regardless of where and how it was seen”.

This was the kind of argument I relished while reading Rajorshi Chakraborti’s penetrating analysis of his favourite movies. A beautiful condensation of the initial manic ten minutes of a Hindi film (Naukar Biwi Ka) is a roller-coaster ride fuelled by amphetamines and regular eighties’ Hindi cinema tropes. Right from the fifties to the late eighties, this flashback episode has always been a Hindi movie staple, which Chakraborti coins as “Pre-Credit Backstory-Compression Special”.

The book has its shares of misfires also. Amitava Kumar’s essay on his love for Satya and adoration for Manoj Bajpai was belaboured and the subject matter is hardly compelling. What could have made for a better narrative in the form of a book was too rushed and out of place here. His pretzel-like twists at trying to win Bajpai’s trust made for some bad reading. “I would press him for details. It didn’t always work. I was unsure whether Bajpai understood the difference between a journalist and a writer. But I was pleased when he granted me little snippets.” I burrowed through this dreck but the essay fails to break any new ground. Madhulika Liddle’s piece on Hindi cinema tropes is more of filler than a definitive tip of the hat to an era gone by. The same is the case with Sidin Vadukut’s homage to Charlie Sheen starrer Terminal Velocity. This hyperbolised essay left me gasping for breath at times: “Terminal Velocity was the greatest movie ever made by man.” To think of it, Vadukut’s tweets make for a better read than this tripe.

At a time when the cinematic discourse space in India is increasingly being colonised by kitsch purveyors like Karan Johar and Rajkumar Hirani, this book is the most fun a movie buff can have with his clothes on.

THE POPCORN ESSAYISTS
(Edited by Jai Arjun Singh)
Tranquebar
227 pages; Rs 395

Drip from the top

2011-04-14T00:14:00.000-07:00

For everyone who thought Julian Assange was fighting the good fight, his former associate Daniel Domscheit-Berg has evidence that suggests the contrary. The evidence is this book, Inside WikiLeaks, and because it is about WikiLeaks the subtitle is appositely dramatic: “My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website”. In Manichaean terms, this book is the yin to Assange’s yang — the autobiography he was asked to write, for a sum reportedly totalling more than £1 million.

The WikiLeaks.org domain name was registered in late 2006, but not until November 2007 did the whistleblowing website make its first revelation, when it published the Guantánamo Bay handbooks (a military manual for the notorious “detention facility”). A month later, Domscheit-Berg met Assange at the 24th Chaos Communication Congress, an annual hackers’ meet, in Berlin. Until that time the site had looked like a poor man’s Craigslist. With Domscheit-Berg WikiLeaks got a new lease of life. In his book he claims to have redesigned the site’s architecture and made it almost immune to hacker attack.

In its initial chapters, the book bears an uncanny resemblance to Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series. The setting is Sweden, the hackers in Assange’s team chat online just like Lisbeth Salander and her coterie, foreign forces oppose the release of some startling information. It would, however, be disingenuous to compare WikiLeaks with the Millennium series because the former is headed by a man who, as Domscheit-Berg describes him, is more anarchist than revolutionary. Assange does not want the world to be a better place; he wants the world to go belly-up.

Assange is megalomaniacal, narcissistic, never owns up to his mistakes, throws his weight around, has mood swings that oscillate between the sublime and the ridiculous (more often the latter). These Aguirre-like characteristics (like those of the lead in Werner Herzog’s film Aguirre, the Wrath of God) are brought to the fore in Inside WikiLeaks. In a chapter devoted to Assange’s polyamory, Domscheit-Berg says his former boss would “never be able to accept a woman who was truly his equal” and that he would “boast about how many children he had fathered”. Revelations like this may add fuel to the fire of the rape charges against Assange in Sweden. On the other hand, they might be dismissed as the author’s inability to disguise his burning resentment towards his subject.

In a perverse way, Domscheit-Berg might be forgiven for deliberately obfuscating — if he is, that is — truth with facts. After all, according to him, he never got due credit from Assange for raising funds by expending a lot of shoe leather, right from Berlin to Iceland. In fact, he says, Assange “had become very concerned that he get at least 52 per cent of the attention and me only 48 per cent”. Before Assange turned into this Frankenstein’s monster, Domscheit-Berg had a few good words for him. “For Julian,” he writes, “principles were more important than anything else.”

These “principles” are highly dubious. Here’s why. According to WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy, a book by Guardian journalist David Leigh, Assange dismissed Leigh’s suggestion that WikiLeaks disguise the identities of Western forces’ informants in Afghanistan, to protect them from retribution. “Well, they’re informants,” Assange is said to have replied, “so, if they get killed, they’ve got it coming to them. They deserve it.”

In his book Domscheit-Berg focuses on certain lesser-known facts. Regarding the quarter-million diplomatic cables that WikiLeaks released last year to worldwide uproar, Domscheit-Berg says: “Of 250,000, 15,652 of the dispatches were classified as ‘secret’. Only a fraction of them, however — a few hundred in total — appeared on the Cablegate page.” Most of that set of cables was of a scabrous nature. The cables talked of Muammar Gaddafi’s allegedly voluptuous Ukrainian nurse and Silvio Berlusconi’s propensity for erotic play, or “bunga-bunga”. In short, none of the dispatches was particularly shocking.

If the US authorities hadn’t girded their loins in advance, Assange could never have claimed to have been victimised by the American government. Domscheit-Berg explains why Assange wanted to unsettle the US: “Why should he expend his fighting energy in Africa or Mongolia and get into quarrels with the Thai royal family?

It would have been a far less attractive prospect to end up in some jail in Africa… than to inform the world that he was being pursued by the CIA.” Domscheit-Berg’s further insinuation that “someone could purchase exclusive access to documents with the express intent of ensuring that they never see the light of day” sounds ominous.

Inside WikiLeaks may be treated as the author’s book-length manifesto for OpenLeaks.org, a site he helped found and that he intends as a more democratic version of WikiLeaks. In retail terms, OpenLeaks is a mom-and-pop shop while WikiLeaks is a “giant supermarket” for secret documents. At OpenLeaks, the whistleblowers will be king. In that case, Domscheit-Berg should have come clean.

He never delves into his informants’ details, instead lumping them together as “disgruntled elements”. His painful attempts to portray himself as saintly and Assange as a monster will not cut much ice with the reader. Never once does he attempt to counter the claims of journalists like David Finkel, who said the infamous “Collateral Murder” video is doctored to a certain extent (the video, released by WikiLeaks in 2010, shows American soldiers killing civilians indiscriminately in New Baghdad; the victims include a couple of Reuters reporters). It’s hard to believe that he has no clue whatsoever about the identities of the women who alleged that Assange raped them.

For these reasons the reader is unlikely to empathise with the author, and may, in fact, decide that Domscheit-Berg is to Assange what Simone de Beauvoir was to Jean-Paul Sartre: “part accomplice, part victim”.

INSIDE WIKILEAKS
My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website
Author: Daniel Domscheit-Berg
Publisher: Random House
Pages: 282
Price: Rs 499

Gentleman of Letters

2011-04-14T00:13:00.001-07:00

For the last three years, most of my mornings’ caffeine shot has been Arts And Letters Daily, but on 28th December 2010, I saw a black masthead on the site. The site’s founder Denis Dutton breathed his last. This was my “where were you when Michael Jackson died” moment.

This was the very site that opened my eyes to a plethora of world-class writers and amazing pieces of writing. After spending a couple of months at the desk of a newspaper, this particular Oscar Wilde quote was ringing in my ears: “Journalism is unreadable and no one reads literature.” Time was ripe for the most sophisticated deus ex machina: www.aldaily.com.

Modeled on an 18th century newspaper format, Dutton, professor of philosophy at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, started aldaily in 1998. For the uninitiated, I’ll try to describe the site: The site is divided into three sections, ‘Articles of Note’, ‘New Books’ and ‘Essays and Opinion’ and, six days a week, one link is uploaded to each section. On the left-hand side there’s another section called Nota Bene (Latin for “note well”). This might be seen as the site’s equivalent of tabloidish news, which could easily walk into New Yorker’s pages.

Forget the paywalls, there’s a lot of material out there to be read on the Internet. How do you rummage through this midden to spend a couple of hours of your day reading something intellectually stimulating? Aldaily condenses its three links into a tweet-size introduction and lets you make the decision if you want to read it or not. In a way, aldaily is a precursor to Twitter’s 140-characters. Right from 1998, Dutton and his small but able team have been giving links preceded by just the right kind of tantalising text. Sample this: “When her daughter died, Edith Piaf slept with a man to pay for the burial. The melancholy grit of Piaf’s voice was hard-earned.” That was good enough to let me decide that I’m going to spend the next twenty minutes on reading the piece.

It’ll be unfair to lump aldaily along with other news aggregators like Browser or Utne or Longform. If an earthquake takes place in Japan, aldaily will give a reflective piece after a week rather than flashing the news on the site on the day of incident. Dutton’s refined tastes used to reflect in the kind of pieces he used to handpick. He is a connoisseur of classical music, world cinema, classic literature and also dismissive of technology and geopolitical conflicts. Through aldaily I came across magazines that I would otherwise always be oblivious to. Dutton never gave much thought to the publications. A New York Times article will have a piece from Dublin Review of Books giving it company. In fact, I tell my friends that “you read only aldaily and there’s absolutely nothing that you wouldn’t know about this world”.

Dutton will be sorely missed.

The Disillusionist

2011-04-14T00:10:00.000-07:00

“We knew we weren’t going to win. So, getting the nomination was the exciting part,” said Bob Last grinning from ear-to-ear. The producer of Oscar nominated animation film The Illusionist (not to be confused with the Edward Norton starrer in which all characters are animated) was talking about the chances of his movie at Oscars, which eventually lost to Toy Story 3. Sitting in the plush-but-somewhat stuffy lobby of Taj Lands End hotel in Mumbai, the shaggy-haired man, dressed like a PGA Tour player sans the cap, recalled the adrenaline rush when the movie got an Oscar nomination: “On the day of the nomination I was in Lost Angeles, and they tell you at five in the morning. I was fast asleep and I didn’t think we weren’t going to win. It was the best wake up call.”

To think of it, The Illusionist needed as laidback a producer as Last. Based on an unproduced screenplay by Jacques Tati, director Sylvain Chomet is a delightfully lo-fi yin to Toy Story-3’s yang of over-the-top 3-D mish mash of thin characters and bland dialogue. The story is simple but potent: in the late ‘50s, a down-on-his-luck magician migrates from Paris to London to a hamlet on a Scottish island, where he befriends a young servant girl, Alice. With her encouragement, they go on a tour of the mainland, she believing he is capable of real magic, he taking menial jobs to maintain the illusion. The flick is full of rich characters, finely attuned details and the love of pop culture from a bygone age. The scene where The Britoons (a brilliant parody on The Beatles) are to be seen performing is killer amazing. Chomet’s semi-silent soundtrack interspersed with sparse Gallic dialogues is so rooted and lilting that it elevates the movie to a couple of notches higher than other indie animation flicks like My Dog Tulip and The Secret of Kells.

Barring a computer-generated vertiginous swoop around Edinburgh, the movie’s master-stroke is rendering of the wistful tale in soft lines, gentle water-colours and detailed backgrounds. But at a time when the multiplexes are swamped with 3-D flicks (blame James Cameron!) it made immense sense to ask Last if he never wanted to follow suit: “I always said film is not a war between pencils and computers. The animation industry has reached a new maturity where 3-D is technically easy to do. So, it comes back to your creative decision making. Not so long ago making a 3-D movie was good enough but not anymore and that means getting back to making movie first and choosing the right tools to do it.”

Last should know judging by his years of experience as MD at Dundee-based Ink.digital, whose range of work includes working on The Illusionist to award winning animated commercials. He was in Mumbai as one of the delegates at FICCI Frames 2011 and the Scotsman had quite an impressive pitch for the increasingly growing Indian animation sector: “After The Illusionist I’m looking at making a major family CGI feature. In Hollywood, it would cost me $100 million. My model is to keep production in Europe, use Hollywood story-telling and looking at a possibility of 30-40 per cent production in India.” That’s a win-win-win situation fuelled by amphetamines.

When the talk veered towards Scotland’s expertise in animation industry, one gets a feeling that there’s a lot under the Scottish kilt, “Our greatest strength is the creative decision making. From the Indian point of view, we can help the Indian company make those early creative decisions that will allow the company to access the global markets and work as a bridge.” Clearly, this small nation of five million people is punching way above its weight. Mark Dolan, country manager, India, Scottish Development Institute, who accompanied Last said that Scotland is number one contributor to UK in terms of animation.

Producing films is just one of the many hats that Last donned. He was music supervisor for twenty feature fims, was series producer for BBC and even did a few art installations. But his major claim to fame came in 1978 when he founded the independent record label “Fast Product” and launched the to-be major cults like Human League, Gang of Four, Mekons, Fire Engines et al, which suggests he pioneered indie music before the indie music. Throughout the 1980’s he managed The Human League, ABC, Scritti Politti, Heaven 17 and literally took them from obscurity to national consciousness. In other words, think of him as an indie Malcolm McLaren.
When asked about the changes that he noticed from the vinyl days to the current iTunes zeitgeist, he drew an analogy between the music and animation industries (I believe the plug is unintended): “In the 80s the production of music went from analog to digital and that was interesting and I see some parallels with what’s going on in the animation industry now. For a while, everything digital was fashionable and everything in music had to be done digital and then it reached a new maturity and people again went back to their guitars, drums and so on. Which is the same happening with animation where for a while everything was digital and people are again now using the old tools.”

The most interesting aspect of music industry that has caught Last by surprise is the importance of live performances to the bands. “In the eighties live performance used to cost us money but now live performance is where a band makes its money. So the whole business model is now upside down.” He is unfazed by the digital downloads and with a Zen-like expression on his sleek visage he said “it all comes back to good music”. “For example in 1981, when we were making a big Human League record we got computers, imported a drum machine from California and we thought that was what counted. But the reason why the record was a hit is good song-writing.” I didn’t want to debate that times are different now and that the popular perception is that it’s borderline foolish to buy music. Even Radiohead allowed its last two albums to be downloaded virtually free but then as I said, The Illusionist needed a producer like Last, who is slightly divorced from the present but is pragmatic at the same time.

When I said we are done he stands up, shakes hands and tells me “you know more about me than anyone else” and rushed out. In cinematic terms, all of that happened in one shot. May be he really had a golf game to attend to.

Truths about Web revolutions

2011-03-23T07:23:00.000-07:00

So, Zuckerberg’s puppy can have its own Facebook page but Chinese dissidents using pseudonyms are out of luck?” A few days ago, this was the Twitter status of writer Evgeny Morozov, who was referring to Facebook’s decision to ban a Chinese activist from opening an account using a pseudonym that has otherwise been used to publish articles in major publications. Belarus-born Morozov, currently a visiting scholar at Stanford University, is the best man to cast aspersions at social networking sites’ claims of being a catalyst for modern-day uprisings. His book, The Net Delusion: How Not To Liberate The World, is a massive takedown of the recent Twitter and Facebook revolutions. Here’s the opening salvo: “Today’s authoritarianism is of the hedonism and consumerism-friendly variety, with Steve Jobs and Ashton Kutcher commanding far more respect than Mao or Che.” Just when you start dismissing it as polemic on crack, Morozov has some chilling facts to back him. Only 0.027 per cent of Iranians were registered on Twitter on the eve of the controversial 2009 elections and Al-Jazeera said at one point there were only 60 active Twitter accounts in Tehran. Even the usually subdued The Economist chose a jingoistic headline when Iran was a simmering cauldron: “Twitter-1 CNN-0”.

To Morozov’s credit, he never goes over the top with his denunciations of “slacktivism”, the tendency to tweet and Facebook about social causes without ever going to the place where it’s happening. Some of the chapter titles take the most delicious stabs at the digital equivalent of burning bras and talking politics in cafes: “Why the KGB wants you to join Facebook”, “Why Kierkegaard hates slacktivism”, “Hugo Chavez would like to welcome you to the spinternet”, and “Orwell’s favourite lolcat”.

Morozov says Twitter and Facebook might give impetus to a fledgling movement but then it soon fizzles out because there is no one to take up the mantle to get people together in the real world. It would be foolhardy to proclaim the recent revolution in Egypt as victory for Twitter. Growing unemployment numbers and a stagnant economy is all it took for the Egyptians to congregate at Tahrir Square in Cairo. Thusly, cometh the hour, cometh the revolution.

The fact that Morozov is so bearish about the Internet is because he can see through its pretensions: “While many praised Twitter’s role in publicising and promoting political demonstrations in Iran, the death of Michael Jackson on June 25, 2009, quickly overtook the protests as the site’s most popular topic.” So, as you can see, this butterfly is yet to emerge from the chrysalis.

If Twitter is supposed to be digital samizdat for the dissidents, it can be used as propaganda by authoritarian regimes too. After opening his Twitter account, Venzuela’s president Hugo Chavez declared the site his “secret weapon” and that Internet can be used for “ideological battle as well”. All tweets by the official ID of North Korean regime are in Korean. And not so long ago, 50 Facebook groups sprang up online to support the presidency bid of Gamal Mubarak, son of Hosni Mubarak (until recently the President of Egypt). Hell, even China and Ajerbaijan quell revolutions in their own ingenuous ways.

Russia adopts a different tack: The Tits Show, the weekly show hosted by Russia.ru, the country’s foray into Internet television supported by Kremlin’s ideologues, shows a “horny and slightly overweight young man travel around Moscow nightclubs in search of perfect breasts…”, the idea being that any generation that is seduced by technology and sleaze will never have time to take part in a protest.

In a chapter titled “Why the KGB wants you to join Facebook”, Morozov lends gold standard to this aphorism: “Never wrestle with a pig. You just get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.” Earlier the Big Brother had to literally oversee what everyone is up to but post-Internet, all it takes is to induce software called keylogger into anyone’s computer and the unwitting person is inching towards his proverbial grave with every following keystroke. Morozov makes a grave prognostication in this regard: “As long as most virtual activities are tied to physical infrastructure — keyboards, microphones, screens — no advances in encryption technology could eliminate all the risks and vulnerabilities.”

Morozov is mostly on the money in The Net Delusion but on a few occasions he tends to jump the shark. He proposes a rap on the knuckles of whoever believes that climate change is a hoax; he’s hardly scathing about WikiLeaks for all the irrevocable damage it’s inflicting on diplomacy; resorts to platitudes like “a knife can be used to kill somebody, but it can also be used to carve wood”; an entire chapter is devoted to drawing parallels between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the 2009 revolution in Iran, which is a no-brainer judging by the fact that the former has had an indelible impact on history.

The book loses its steam at the end when he blathers on cyber-utopia and “technological fixes”— “make the world’s knowledge available to everyone; take photos of all streets in the world”— without making any headway. Then again, there’s so much to take home from Morozov’s brave and, more important, successful attempt to clean the Augean stables. Despite the Sisyphean task at hand, Morozov ensures that reading the book is a pleasure and never a chore thanks to his writing that throbs like a Led Zeppelin song.

THE NET DELUSION: HOW NOT TO LIBERATE THE WORLD
Evgeny Morozov,
Allen Lane,
408 pages; Rs 550

The crash and after

2011-03-23T07:21:00.000-07:00

Forgive me, I must start by pointing out that three years after our horrific financial crisis caused by financial fraud, not a single financial executive has gone to jail, and that’s wrong.” So said Charles Ferguson accepting the 2010 Oscar for ‘Best Documentary’ for his film Inside Job.

The biggest global financial crisis after 1929 has spawned a number of books, but strangely, it has not inspired too many films. America’s film-makers, it seems, have not taken to it the way they have other momentous events such as Vietnam, 9/11, Iraq and, lately, Afghanistan. Perhaps, it is also because they feel that any analysis of the subject would end up partly blaming the homeowners — in this case, the movie-going audience — for the crisis, and naturally Hollywood studios don’t want to alienate their consumers.

Inside Job is one of the few films on the subject. But this is no gloom and doom story: instead of grainy images of the stock market crash, Ferguson begins with the sylvan locales of Iceland, once hailed as a safe financial bet, and proceeds to strip bare the layers of mystery surrounding the economic recession.

Matt Damon’s stern but sensitive voiceover strings together Ferguson’s interviews with Eliot Spitzer, Nouriel Roubini, financial lobbyists, university professors, journalists, bankers and writers. Most film-makers would have baulked at using too much financial jargon, but not Ferguson. Here credit must go to the graphics that make exotic derivatives such as credit-default swaps and collateralised debt obligations comprehensible to the layman. Ferguson’s research is evident in every frame.

What brought things to such a pass is better explained in Michael Moore’s Capitalism A Love Story (2009). But while Inside Job is a sprawling study of corporate greed, this one is a stab at the very pillar of US corporate culture, epitomised by the famous Gordon Gekko line from Wall Street: “Greed is good”. Moore is, of course, his rabble-rousing self when depicting Wall Street and Washington as cohorts (“Government Goldman”) but he introspects by harking back to Franklin D Roosevelt’s idea of a near financial utopia in 1936. For Moore, Ronald Reagan is the man responsible for Wall Street’s decadence. The documentary’s high point is its conjuring up of a hole in a dam that finally opened the floodgates, as happened in the fall of 2008.

While war movies have a set template, there is no formula for films on the economy. Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times is perhaps the most definitive Great Depression film and the “run on the bank” was last seen in 1946 in Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life. Ever since, Hollywood has been celebrating the Great American Dream.

Thus, the two recent Hollywood flicks on recession need to seen with greater consideration. Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps (2010) is a sequel to the 1989 hit Wall Street and centres around Gordon Gekko, out after 20 years in jail. His handphone is now sleeker compared to the brick he brandished earlier, but that remarkable snarl is intact.

While the first half breezes through with Shia LaBeouf and Douglas talking financial argot on New York streets and Josh Brolin’s spirited performance, the second half gets all gooey with Douglas trying to patch up with his daughter, Carey Mulligan.

The other release, The Company Men (2011), is Hollywood’s somewhat ironic take on Luke’s Gospel: “Blessed are the poor; woe to the rich”. The plot centres around three high profile executives — Ben Affleck, Chris Cooper and Tommy Lee Jones — going through a career low. It’s tough to empathise with someone like Affleck who has led a hitherto charmed life with a $110,000 salary and now must take up a $10-an-hour job to bring food to the table. Who in his right frame of mind will give a toss about Cooper not having the money to send his daughter backpacking to Italy?

This may seem decadent to most viewers, but the fact remains that Cooper and Affleck represent an aggrieved lot. At the nadir of the recession, only the CEOs could keep their heads above water. Those in the middle level were left in the lurch. Somewhere in the three lives shown in The Company Men lies a parable for those spewing venom at white-collar employees: These people might not be good, but they are not all bad.

Talking heads in print

2011-03-23T07:19:00.000-07:00

In this age of the sound bite, the 24x7 news cycle, multitasking and the new media, books are a threatened entity and, therefore, need to be patronised more than ever before. That’s a good enough reason to fete journalist and columnist (including for this paper) Sunil Sethi, who has been hosting the weekly literary show Just Books on NDTV Profit since early 2005. The Big Bookshelf is a compilation of his interviews with 30 famous writers on the show.

The book’s masterstroke is that apart from interviews with writers from the rarefied world of literary fiction (Orhan Pamuk, Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh, Gunter Grass, etc.), there are conversations with unabashed shtick peddlers (Chetan Bhagat, Shobhaa De, Khushwant Singh, Ken Follett, Jeffrey Archer, etc.). So, you have 230-odd pages of rare insight into the minds of authors, who continue to hold the world in thrall with their words and imaginary worlds.

You have Nadeem Aslam speaking about his writing regimen in his struggling days. “For about three months every year I would do two jobs at the same time. Then for the next three months I would not work and live on that money.” Umberto Eco draws parallels between the social tensions of medieval and modern world: “Our whole story was once a struggle between cities and states but, now, we don’t need external enemies because we have so many internal enemies.” Patrick French laments at the seduction of technology as a sign of doom for future biographers: “Once we start the use of cellphones, all the intimate exchange of letters… disappears. When we are texting, again there is a whole area of communication that disappears. It is almost as if communication, though getting technically better, does not let the result survive.”

Paul Theroux can be seen washing V S Naipaul’s dirty linen: “Naipaul is a very odd man. If you have interviewed him, I don’t have to tell you how he will rebuff you, or jump down your throat, or bite your nose off, if you ask him the wrong question”. The Alexander McCall Smith interview is a real cracker where the man talks about Precious Ramotswe, the protagonist of the immensely popular The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency.

Whoever has read the books that are talked about will be pleased as punch. That said, the interviews shine not because of Sethi but despite him thanks to the impressive roster of writers to whom he spoke. I never expected his interviews to rock me from my prefrontal cortex to my toes, something I experience when I read the interviews in Paris Review. Maybe, it’s the tyranny of television that allows Sethi a quarter of an hour at the most (the show’s duration is half-an-hour) to conduct the interview, which is never enough to etch out a writer’s beliefs.

I have been following his show for a few years now and Sethi has always come across as genial and gregarious. I am definitely not holding that against him but Sethi would have been more on the money if the charming facade had a literary dash to it.

One look at the Chetan Bhagat interview and you will know what I mean, “When you see Hrithik Roshan or Shahrukh Khan on screen, you feel, ‘Oh, they’re so great but in no way I can be them.’ But when they see me they think, ‘Oh, well, he kind of looks like me. Maybe one day I could get there if I work as hard’.” A more careful interviewer would have cut short this narcissistic rambling but Sethi allows Bhagat to indulge in his delusions. Bhagat could do with some humility; in comparison to his work, even Khushwant Singh looks like Camus.

Speaking at the recently concluded Jaipur Literature Festival, writer Kiran Desai said the world assumes that writers are some sort of diplomats, who are supposed to take a grand stand on every major burning issue across the globe. This is exactly the sort of booby trap Sethi walks into more than once during the interviews. Every foreign writer offers token appreciation to the ever surging Indian economy but in the same breath reminds the reader that the rich-poor disparity is vast and is of the on-your-face kind.

The Big Bookshelf might never be more than the sum of its parts but, hey, the “parts” are often terrific. “Reading, my dear, is the only training for a writer from a young age. You only become a writer by being a compulsive reader,” says Nadine Gordimer on the rite of passage to be a man of letters. Here’s a Paul Theroux tip to aspiring travel writers: “Go away. Yes. Leave home, leave your parents and leave all the comforting things that hold you back… because if you stay… people will always ask you what you are doing, what you are writing, what you are publishing? They ask you questions that you can’t answer.” Sample this William Dalrymple quote: “Books are like children, they lead their own lives after you publish them.” Something like that alone is worth the admission price.

It’s easy to dismiss this book as a boondoggle that hardly adds colour to a writer’s persona. But then, it might be a harbinger for similar anthologies, hopefully more readable ones at that.

THE BIG BOOKSHELF
Sunil Sethi
Penguin Books
240 pages; Rs 350

Weak end to the crisis sagas

2011-03-23T07:14:00.000-07:00

The economic recession that the world stumbled into seems to have caused larger damage to the forests than banks. Add Maria Bartiromo’s The Weekend That Changed Wall Street to the “recession literature” shelf that is already packed to the rafters. Aided by Catherine Whitney, the CNBC anchor recalls the tumultuous weekend of September 12-14, 2008 when Lehman Brothers went under, Merrill Lynch sold itself to Bank of America, the stock market was in the toilet and AIG became a ward of the federal government.

Bartiromo has been reporting from the New York Stock Exchange for 17 years and this book is a testament to the contacts she made over the years. Her face is after all that launched, literally, a thousand shows (Closing Bell with Maria Bartiromo) and according To Gordon Gekko of Wall Street 2, she’s a huge hit even among Gekko’s prison inmates.

The Weekend is mostly a blow-by-blow account of “the major-league powwow” between the Wall Street elite (except Lehman) and the then Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, Federal Reserve Chairman Tim Geithner and their associates, who had their nuts against a cheese grater over Lehman Brothers future. In March 2008, the government provided an emergency loan to Bear Stearns to orchestrate a fire sale to JP Morgan. But bailing out Lehman Brothers would surely have raised the bogey of “moral hazard” and thus a repeat of Bear Stearns was ruled out. This book is an unwitting ode to the master brinkmanship of Bank of America and Barclays, who pulled out of a near-emerging deal at the nth hour. It was a rare moment of selflessness among the other investment banks that were willing to stump up a substantial amount to keep Lehman’s head above water at least for a while. It’s another thing that it never fructified.

The other part of this slim book is dedicated to the ripple effects that were seen in other countries and how the financial world might pan out post-recession. Bartiromo’s reporting is to be seen all over the book and it adds the necessary colour to an event that has been chronicled ad nauseam. Sample her description of Paulson: “Hank Paulson, I had learned from experience, was very good at talking lots and saying little.” Sometimes the same colour turns garish. Maria quotes a Lehman source as telling her, “Look, I’ve got to run. Talk to you later.” I would like to meet any reader who gives a toss about that.

The Weekend is one of those books that are written so that the writer isn’t accused of a dereliction of duty. What is supposed to be a massive takedown of the financial experts instead turns into an exercise of self-aggrandisement. The implicit message throughout this rudderless book is that no one can afford to snub Bartiromo. It must be true that former Lehman CEO Dick Fuld apologised to her for the “chilly reception” he gave to her at a party in 2009 but that fact didn’t contribute to the book’s narrative in any way.

And frankly, I didn’t give a monkey about the glorious mayhem Wall Street kingmaker Steve Scharzman wrought on Bartiromo’s former apartment after buying it. “Gayfryd Steinberg (Bartiromo’s mother-in-law), a woman of impeccable taste, had remodeled the apartment… and her work had been, in my opinion, sheer perfection. Christine (Steve’s wife) gutted the place and spent a year on multimillion-year overhaul.” I empathised with Bartiromo as much as with the bankers who were crying themselves hoarse over lower compensation during the recession: zilch.

A book of this magnitude needs a gripping narrative and to be better than the best Dashiel Hammet or Chandler, “unputdownable”, like Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big To Fail and Michael Lewis’s The Big Short. Bartiromo falls flat on that account. Seventeen years of television experience is to be seen in staccato sentences, superfluous exclamations and a semi-cliché in every sentence.

There are some flashes of brilliance in this overwrought book. Like the lesser-known fact that Wachovia’s Achilles heel was a California-based mortgage company called Golden West Financial, which was acquired by the former for $24 billion. The company’s “Pick-a-Pay” programme “allowed borrowers to pay low monthly amounts, delaying what they owed by adding to the loan principal. People ended up owing far more than their properties were actually worth.”

Vikram Pandit, the Citibank chief, displayed rare candour when he was speaking with Bartiromo about the Basel liquidity requirements for banks that called for $3-5 trillion in liquidity. “Where do you think that money will come from?” he asked rhetorically, “The lending pool.”

This good work was undone by what looked like a wishy-washy approach to the book. With the benefit of hindsight, Bartiromo could have delved deeper as to why Lehman was denied a bailout after which troubled banks were given $767 billion in the name of Troubled Asset Relief Programme. Insinuating personal rancour between Fuld and Paulson is a classic case of barking up the wrong tree. She should have built up on this particular Paulson quote: “There is a difference between a capital problem and a liquidity problem.” To think of it, if she wasn’t painting by numbers she might have turned out a more rigorous book.

THE WEEKEND THAT CHANGED WALL STREET
Maria Bartiromo with Catherine Whitney
Portfolio/Penguin
Pages 232; Rs 958

And the Oscar goes to ....

2011-02-19T22:06:00.000-08:00

BEST PICTURE
For Hollywood, 2009 was all about the nine-foot blue humanoids in Avatar and the misplaced bravado of a US soldier in Hurt Locker. Barring Inception, where Leonardo DiCaprio tries the ultimate heist by hijacking human dreams to extract information, 2010 is more human: a man is caught between a rock and hard place (127 Hours); a ballet dancer bites off more than she can chew (Black Swan); a junkie who wastes his boxing talent on drugs achieves glory through his brother's antics in the ring (The Fighter); two homosexual mothers go through emotional upheaval with the re-entry of the sperm donor into their unconventional family (The Kids Are All Right); King George VI overcomes his bad stutter (and how) with the help of a ridiculously indefatigable speech therapist (The King's Speech); Mark Zuckerberg is the equivalent of a moustache-twirling villain in an unflattering take on his Facebook journey (The Social Network); a bunch of toys face an uncertain future as their owner is about to go to college (Toy Story 3); a 14-year-old exacts revenge on her father’s killer with the help of a bounty hunter in a Western drama (True Grit);and a 17-year-old has shoes too big for her to fill after her father goes incognito and mother becomes increasingly withdrawn, leaving her with two siblings to take care of and a mountain of debts to clear (Winter’s Bone).

Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours is a major improvement on his Slumdog Millionaire and James Franco’s gut-wrenching portrayal takes the film to a different level but the uneven last 45 minutes might not find many takers in the Academy. Black Swan is a fabulous showcase for Natalie Portman's histrionics but, barring that, the movie gets unnecessarily dark, with ballet peeling off Portman's skin and a faux lesbian relationship that doesn't pack the required punch. And just when you thought the boxing movie genre couldn’t go beyond its grand-daddies, Raging Bull and Rocky, David O Russell comes up with The Fighter, an otherwise oh-so-predictable boxing movie saved by its multiple layers, including a crumbling sibling relationship, a blow-hot-blow-cold love affair and a boxing match that has a lot at stake (don’t they all?). If anything, the Academy might overlook this gritty drama for its intimate American setting.

The Guardian was scathing in its appraisal of Inception, terming it “an intelligent movie for stupid people.” However, barring any David Lynch flick, only Nolan managed the near-impossible: have people talking about it long after the movie was over. However, Inception will find it hard to get an Academy nod, considering it’s not suffused with emotions, compromised for the delectable action sequences. The Kids Are All Right will likely remain a nomination and, more important, a little gem of 2010. Christopher Hitchens sneered at it as “a gross falsification of history” and the pedant in Martin Filler was aghast that it ignored the fact that its subject was considered a “nitwit” and a “moron.” But whatever the experts say, Geoffrey Rush and Colin Firth give The King's Speech an air of jocularity even in the grimmest parts.

The Social Network is a rich, understated character drama about one of the internet era’s most bitter court cases. Though the main characters come from the rarefied worlds of Harvard and Palo Alto, director David Finch renders them human. Toy Story 3 was last year’s top grosser at the box office but the Academy might give it a thumbs down for its denouement, which would have been better off as a delicious tangle than a neat bow. Coen Brothers’ take of a successful Western film, True Grit is not a No Country For Old Men but it affirms that no material is elusive in their able hands. The remaining nomination, Winter’s Bone, will win the viewer's heart, if not an Oscar. Think of the hillbilly flick as 2010’s Precious, sans the incest and racial overtones.

My bet: It has to be The King's Speech but the preferential balloting introduced in 2009 — in theory, “the movie with the largest number of votes in first place can lose to a film with a strong second-place showing” — can be its biggest undoing

BEST DIRECTOR

Black Swan may not be Darren Aronofsky’s ticket to Oscar glory but it cements his position in the pantheon of Hollywood mavericks like Todd Solondz, David Cronenberg and Lars Von Trier, while with True Grit, Ethan and Joel Coen come up with a cinematic picaresque adventure that can put Don Quixote to shame. David Fincher, the man behind Fight Club and Zodiac, would be the last person expected to piss on Mark Zuckerberg’s parade but piss he did with The Social Network. Aaron Sorkin’s rat-a-tat dialogue is aptly complemented by Fincher’s direction — restrained, except for an exhilarating rowing sequence at the Henley Regatta. Tom Hooper displays a hitherto unknown panache to turn a seemingly melodramatic and mannered tale of a would-be king’s speech problem into the story of a man next door in The King’s Speech. Regardless of the verdict on February 27, David O Russell should be a happy man with The Fighter, making an uncomfortable movie that affirmed Christian Bale can act out of his limited gamut and Mark Wahlberg is capable of nuanced emotions.

My bet: Put your money on Tom Hooper.

BEST ACTOR (MALE)

As the father of two battling a debilitating disease and too much blood on his hands, Javier Bardem sinks his teeth into his role in Alejandro Inarritu Gonzalez’s bleak drama Biutiful. He won the best actor award at Cannes and Oscar glory doesn’t seem too elusive. Jeff Bridges is hitting a purple patch of late. Who knew Bridges had it in him to deliver such a magnificent patch-eyed rugged performance in True Grit, especially after his soul sapping Crazy Heart? As Rooster Cogburn, in the role earlier played by John Wayne, he becomes a man, not a myth, so much so that even his mutton chops assume a character of their own. Jesse Eisenberg is a class apart as the conflicted genius with a mean streak in The Social Network. Like Bridges, Colin Firth’s career too is scaling new heights, of late. As the tortured and tormented gay English professor in A Single Man, Firth was a revelation but that was just an appetiser compared with the range of emotions he displayed in The King’s Speech. For the most part, James Franco is in a monologue in 127 Hours but not once do you see him performing— he lets you get so close, you stop noticing the camera.

My bet: Firth will be second-time lucky

BEST ACTOR (FEMALE)

As the ‘man’ of the house in The Kids Are All Right, Annette Bening is an inspired bit of casting and her innate wholesomeness gives the movie’s plot, which is as light as a whisper, a fillip. Nicole Kidman conveys the pain of losing a child and its excruciating aftermath beautifully in Rabbit Hole. Her performance anchors the movie even in the choppier parts. Jennifer Lawrence displays astonishing sensitivity in her role of a girl dealing with multiple problems in Winter’s Bone. Natalie Portman has already won a raft of awards for her breakout performance as a devil personified as a ballet dancer in Black Swan. In Blue Valentine, Michelle Williams barely puts a foot wrong, though the story itself is replete with awkwardness of every kind, the ones that are a given in a marriage where love has fizzled out.

My bet: Portman may be just a hop, skip and jump away from Oscar glory

Wrong is the new right, always

2011-02-19T22:00:00.000-08:00

Writer Vladimir Nabokov was a self-taught expert on butterflies. He would have gained rock-star status if only professional lepidopterists had taken his idea seriously: Polyommatus blues, a group of butterflies, had originated in Asia, moved over the Bering Strait and headed south all the way to Chile in a series of waves. After reading David H Freedman’s Wrong, I thought of possible reasons why this telling research on the evolution of a group of butterflies was nipped in its bud. Nabokov didn’t do any academic gigs; his ideas weren’t published in any top-of-the-heap scientific magazines and peer-review journals; he didn’t have the Internet to “blog” his ideas.

While my arguments might seem shaky, they stem from an equally uneven book. The book’s subtitle “Why Experts Keep Failing Us – And How to Know When Not to Trust Them” is a dead giveaway of the Gladwell-isms that are buried between the covers. Here the word “experts” is a veritable kitchen-sink that includes “scientists, finance wizards, doctors, relationship gurus, celebrity CEOs, high-powered consultants, health officials, and more”.

It’s painfully obvious that Freedman would skewer those at Wall Street for pushing unwitting investors to the edge of a financial precipice with questionable investments while masquerading as experts of finance. It would have put things in better perspective if Freedman had cared to talk about the financial deregulation that Ronald Reagan perpetrated in the early eighties.

Where Wrong breaks new ground is in its take on the scientific community. And as long as Freedman sticks to the scientists, the book is a rip-snorter. By limiting their research to a handful of people, the scientists extrapolate the numbers. The implicit assumption is that all humans are equal and that if 20 out of 30 displayed similar characteristics, the next group would be similar. Another fallacy to which scientists are prone is animal tests. “A drug that fails animal tests but that would have worked fine in humans is a drug lost to the world. Sample this: It is frequently claimed that penicillin might easily have become one of those mistakenly discarded drugs because it sickens rabbits and guinea pigs in large or in oral doses. It’s this arbitrariness that suggests a layman should approach these studies with a fistful of salt. Freedman does a piercing diagnosis behind these trials: “The way science works is, when you end up backing a theory, you can’t afford to be wrong or your grant will suffer.”

The strengths of the book are Freedman’s Mobius-strip like arguments. The writer believes that the public is a sucker for stripped-down advice for which the template is “The [number between six and thirteen] tips [or secrets, rules, etc.] for [aspect of the world the reader would like to master].” Example: “The 6 Myths of Creativity” or “Seven Paths to Regulating Privacy”. He laments the frenetic pace of living that makes us mistake junk food for nourishment and consider Dale Carnegie our saviour with his How to Win Friends and Influence People, 73rd on the all-time global list of best-selling books in any language.

This perspicacity is most visible in the book’s most important chapter “The Internet And The Technology of Expertise”. Of all the sacred cows that he slays in the book, Freedman reserves the maximum relish for Google. Freedman takes off from Eric Schmidt’s damning quote of Internet turning into a “cesspool” of false and misleading information and cites Google’s famed ranking algorithm as a possible root of all online evils. The frequent failure of Google’s results to provide links to trustworthy advice can be frustrating. “The ranking scheme is highly susceptible to being gamed by people who master the art of manipulating webpage language, code and links so as to boost a page’s ranking far above what its usefulness, relevance or popularity might reasonably merit.” Thus, it’s hard to find clear, consistent medical advice online.

Moreover, all that talk about the Internet being a level-playing field where ideas can be discussed in a free-flowing manner is pure balderdash. Freedman cites the initiative of Richard Gallagher, the editor-in-chief of The Scientist, in 2008 to introduce a forum in the magazine’s website where the readers are given a free hand to debate story ideas. A year later, Gallagher confesses to Freedman that the forum has been “a real disappointment in terms of members of the community posting on new topics”.

Freedman, however, loses the plot in the latter half of the chapter when he cries hoarse over the “online wisdom” of recommendation engines like Amazon, Netflix and other retail sites that serve to suggest products one might be interested in. Freedman’s gripes are symptomatic of how much we are expecting a nascent technology that has just entered its twenty-first year to deliver.

The book has four appendices in which Freedman harks back to ancient times (as early as 2500 BC) when Egypt had seen the development of something beginning to resemble mass expertise and went to reckon that Earth was a spinning globe that orbited the sun, and that the position of the stars could be charted to enable predictions of when the Nile would flood. Somehow, this charting of expertise, diverting anecdotes and ironic asides aided by epigraph-like quotes at the beginning of each chapter coheres into a compelling narrative. But, the reader needs to discount some enormous castles built on the shakiest of sands.

Ending recession, musically

2011-02-19T21:58:00.001-08:00

It was with much trepidation that I took the really late night bus to Pune for the Bacardi NH7 Weekender. Why trepidation? Using plastic loos for a prolonged period is not my kind of thing and Woodstock is nothing more than a relic of a glorious past. With these niggling doubts I attended the concert this weekend and I wished that the following three people were present among the 10,000 people: Manmohan Singh, Montek Singh Ahluwalia and D Subbarao.

Apart from promoting Indian independent music, concerts like these are a quick-fix solution to the economic slump that we are going through. All those 10,000 people had bought tickets (mine was Rs 1,500 and I was dragged along by a friend) and what more, the people who man the multiple stages (eight in all), the ones in charge of car parks, the bar tenders, the security personnel, all owe some of their living to the 60 bands that belted out their best music.

And I haven’t even started talking about the engineer in charge, who makes sure that Vishal Dadlani’s growl is absolutely audible, and the multiple lorries that are used to ferry the kit. What more can the trio expect, when people are loosening their purse strings generously at an event where the vibes are post-apocalypse Woodstock?

Here are a few performances that made me mark the event in my calendar as a must-visit every year. Susheela Raman’s meditative Tamil chants from her latest album were just the kind of start a Saturday evening wanted. When she was singing ‘Vel Muruga’, it was as if everyone present were having a pie of her séance. The ensemble performance that included Rajasthani folk artists was the closest anyone could come to a commune with the Divine Being. Susheela’s wicked version of ‘Voodoo Child’ was just the sort of denouement the act needed. Now I got a clear picture of why Sigur Ros’ Icelandic lyrics broke all language barriers. It’s not about the words, stupid!

Following was the headlining act of the day Indian Ocean that at last seemed to have made peace with the death of one of its band members last year. Starting with ‘Bandey’, they went through their predictable-yet-delectable playlist that includes ‘Maarewa’ and ‘Kandisa’. I look at this band and I am really chuffed that they chose to stick to their passion at a time when rock music in this part of the world was unheard of. To think of it, it is still unheard of here considering most of us are yet to go beyond Bryan Adams and— may the force be with them— MLTR.

In gourmet terms, if Saturday was a starter, Sunday was the most expansive platter. I had so much to choose from: right from Shaa’ir + Func to Raghu Dixit Project and Midival Punditz to Asian Dub Foundation. Not to forget, the British indie act The Magic Numbers. This band made up of brothers and sisters seems like a love child of Belle &Sebastian and Drums. Every hook of theirs only reinforced my belief. Be it the riff-laden ballad ‘Love Me Like You’ or the soothing ‘Forever Lost’, here was a band that in the right time period would have been lumped along with the British New Wave movement.

My musical evening, however, began with Monica Dogra’s crunchy voice. While she was singing stuff from both the band’s old and latest albums, I was wondering if this is the closest India can come to Black Eyed Peas and one look at Monica she would remind you of Fergie, a campy one at that. For a brief while I listened to Junkyard Groove and was reminded of a line from poet Jack Black. “No, you’re not hard-core/ Unless you live hard-core.” These guys do.

Up ahead were the electronic duo Midival Punditz, whose 70 minute electronic genius stuff started with a tribute to Edvard Greig (recall the rowing scene in Social Network?). Following that, they beat the bejesus out of the electronic equipment what with a glorious mish-mash of Hindu chanting and schizoid verses. With a little bit of chemical assistance, the music was a guaranteed brain-melter.

The son-et-lumiere, both literally and figuratively, of the evening was Asian Dub Foundation. With an expansive set arrangement that includes dhol jamming with guitar interspersed with rap lyrics, it was pretty obvious that this London group packs a wallop.

Thus, as I was saying, we should be having more of such concerts where people can lounge around and quaff alcohol to get out of the meltdown rut. This might seem like a simplistic solution. But the times are such that I know what ‘quantitative easing’ means but not ‘money’!

Literary ark

2011-01-28T23:25:00.000-08:00

We’re gonna need a bigger boat.” William Dalrymple might well have quoted this famous dialogue from Jaws to his able team of organisers at the end of Jaipur Literature Festival 2011. Diggi Palace, the venue, was clearly bursting at the seams. At several sessions the allotted space could not accommodate the scores of people lining up to attend.

That was no surprise. JLF does get the world’s most famous writers. This year the list got longer: Orhan Pamuk, J M Coetzee, Kiran Desai, Richard Ford, Martin Amis, Junot Diaz, Vikram Seth…

Those who attend get everything (and the kitchen sink) thrown at them. Amazingly, everything sticks. Junot Diaz’s self-deprecating humour quickly earned him new lifelong fans — even those who hadn’t seen a page of his Pulitzer-winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Martin Amis was his usual self — complete with etymological quibbles and that famous Mick Jagger lip. He treated us to a six-minute monologue on how to write about sex and went on to frown at John Updike (“He sends a little Japanese camera crew into the bedroom”) and scoffed at writing autobiographical sex as “absolutely disgusting”. He dismissed magic realism as “levitating purple donkeys” and also recited half-a-dozen sonnets.

J M Coetzee, on the other hand, was separated from the hubbub around him. But when he had to speak he held the audience in a trance for a 45-minute reading from his books. In a session titled “Imperial English” he made a prediction about how linguistics will pan out in the future. “Any language that you are fluent in is your mother tongue,” he said, “and the future will be of the Big Language. Foreign languages can be translated into English and be read.”

Orhan Pamuk was irascible, especially when he hadn’t finished making his point and the interlocutor would interrupt to go on a tangent. “Let me complete first,” was how Rana Dasgupta was dressed down when the latter was trying to barge in at the session “Out of West”.

There were intimate sessions too. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie spoke about her award-winning novels and how she mined her family’s past to marry it with her country’s politics during the 1960s. Rachel Polonsky recalled how a chance encounter with the abandoned library of a former Russian foreign minister spurred her to reconstruct Russia in the time of Stalin.

That said, there were a few no-brainer sessions. It was a toxic combination of irony and paradox that “Why Books Matter” was discussed at an event where the audience should be presumed to worship books. Another topic, “The Crisis of American Fiction” was summarily dismissed by writer Richard Ford, who said “the crisis exists only on page”.

Off stage, there was a lot going on. Journalist Hartosh Singh Bal and JLF co-organiser William Dalrymple were seen on civil terms, quite surprising considering the rancour that had built up owing to the former’s spirited criticism of the festival in Open magazine earlier this month. Although JLF can claim to be a “free” event for ordinary attendees, questions were raised about some corporate sponsors and whether JLF’s allying itself with money machines, some of which have doubtful human rights records, would dim the brilliance of the event.

Meanwhile, a Hindi daily splashed a story on its front page titled “Saahitya Ka Balatkaar”. There were three photographs from JLF alongside, showing different writers holding a drink, holding a cigarette and giving someone a peck on the cheek. This was preceded by protests against Dalrymple in Bihar because he told the Wall Street Journal that “few would’ve turned up had the festival taken place in Patna”. More than anything else, it is this sort of parochial pettiness that may prove to be this excellent event’s worst enemy.

Internet: a brainmelter?

2011-01-25T11:54:00.000-08:00

It’s a familiar pattern: A provocative piece with fragile logic and thin evidence but crisp writing and pungent examples goes viral followed by a storm of discussion. After all, it’s an assault on sacred cows. What follows is on expected lines: A lucrative deal for a book length extension of the essay. Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains” reinforces this syndrome. The book is an improvement on Carr’s bridge burning essay called “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, which appeared in Atlantic magazine a couple of years ago.

Backed by evidence in neuroscience by pioneers like Michael Merzenich and Eric Kandel, Carr crystallises the most important debates of our time: while enjoying the Internet’s bounties, we are sacrificing our ability to read and think deeply. Carr posits that the nature of the beast called Internet is that it is supposed to distract humans through its “ecosystem of interruption technologies”: a few chunks of text, video or audio stream, a set of navigational tools, various advertisements and widgets. He says that the 21st century man will be busy flitting among bits of online information while losing “capacity to concentrate on a complex task from beginning to end”. So piercing are his observations that I almost felt guilty for checking my Twitter timeline while reading the book and started wondering if the Net was indeed a digital Chernobyl: the air is fine, the water is fine but it is just not worth inhabiting.

While denouncing the mind-numbing nature of Net, Carr also doesn’t discount its multiple and attractive benefits: interactivity, hyperlinking, searchability, multimedia. The best part about the World Wide Web is that information is now literally available on fingertips. This blessing is inherently a curse in disguise too, according to Carr. “Whenever we, as readers, come upon a link, we have to pause, for at least a split second, to allow our prefrontal cortex to evaluate whether or not we should click on it. The redirection of our mental resources, from reading words to making judgments, may be imperceptible to us— our brains are quick— but it’s been shown to impede comprehension and retention, particularly when it’s repeated frequently.”

But the case that Carr makes for books tends to be simplistic. “By allowing us to filter out distractions, to quiet the problem-solving functions of the frontal lobes, deep reading becomes a form of deep thinking.” Carr fails to notice that a book too is a form of technology and not some organic object that was plucked from a tree. Let’s face it, a book also can no longer provide what our relentlessly connected age has made difficult, if not impossible: splendid isolation. But Carr tends to get mystical when the talk veers towards the brick and mortar: “There was something calming in the reticence of all those books (in the library of his alma mater Dartmouth College), their willingness to wait years, decades even, for the right reader to come along and pull them from the appointed slots.” Sadly, ‘The Shallows’ is beset by similar bouts of mawkishness that Carr never manages to shrug off.

While the book’s subtitle purports to talk about the impact of Net on human brains, Carr barely touches on the subject the half-way mark. In the first six chapters, I got the feeling that Carr was on literary auto-pilot with meandering accounts of Friedrich Nietzsche wrestling with a typewriter and Sigmund Freud dissecting the brains of sea creatures.

The Shallows breathes hard in the initial parts when Carr dons a historian’s hat and takes the reader on a guided tour on the genesis of paper to Google’s ascendance to Internet superpowerdom. A more careful editor could have curbed his indulgence. It’s not until the seventh chapter (The Juggler’s Brain), which is the book’s linchpin, that Carr gets down to business. Carr introduces us to John Sweller, an Australian educational psychologist, who explains that human brains incorporate two kinds of memory: short-term and long-term. While the former holds immediate impressions and thoughts, the latter stores all our conscious and sub-conscious impressions of the world.

Carr says that the depth of our intelligence hinges on our ability to transfer information from the former to the latter. “When we read a book…. Through our single-minded concentration on the text, we can transfer all or most of the information, thimbleful by thimbleful, into long-term memory. With the Net, we face many information faucets (remember “ecosystem of interruption technologies”?) all going full blast…. And what we do transfer is a jumble of drops from different faucets, not a continuous, coherent stream from one source.”

To say something so substantial about a technology that’s only two decades old, this thimble, faucet metaphor seems a bit farfetched. That said, there is much to admire in ‘The Shallows’, primarily for the brisk, vividly written chapters that flow with the swiftness of a river. If only Carr could match his magpie’s eye for detail with an insight that’s truly unique. ‘The Shallows’ is so packed with thrills that the reader doesn’t have a moment to breathe— or to enjoy the deep reading that he so strongly recommends.

The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains by Nicholas Carr
W W Norton & Company
276 pages
Rs 1,277

Yes, we can't

2011-01-25T11:51:00.000-08:00

Sartre said that hell is other people. Since the last 65 years, hell for North Koreans was only two people: Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-il. At least this is what one would glean after reading Barbara Demick’s superb piece of reportage Nothing To Envy: Real Lives in North Korea. Aided by the tales of six refugees, Demick paints a never-before-seen picture of probably the most secretive nation in the world. Never mind the country’s totalitarian vibes, the largest per capita military, iron-fisted leaders, they’re old hat.

Demick, former Seoul bureau chief of Los Angeles Times, goes much beyond the obvious that North Korea is the darnedest casualty of World War II, which fell in the lap of the Soviets as part of American appeasement. Brace yourself for a peek into lives that are quite Dickensian in the colour and scale and improbability of its unfairness and squalor. While people are starving, they are made to sing paeans to the Dear Leader (as Kim Il-Sung is referred to ). This hubris only went from strength-to-strength: be it the numerous statues of Il-Sung across the country or banning of the Bible or meting out the harshest punishment for a remote jibe at the Dear Leader. This takes the cake: It was mandatory for every household to have glass-framed portraits of Kim Il-Sung and his son Kim Jong-il. People were provided with a white cloth and they are supposed to clean the portraits every day, which would be checked on a monthly basis.

While its neighbours South Korea, Japan and China have been scaling new peaks, North Korea never shrugged off its communist leanings or maybe the leaders never wanted to. Lies were peddled as gospel truth, thanks to state-controlled media. While denouncing the neighbouring countries as anti-communists and lackeys of America, propaganda was being fed left, right and centre. It’s almost like a real-life king-size enactment of the 2003 film Good Bye Lenin!.

The six lives that Demick chose to document put the very “harrow” in “harrowing”. A kindergarten teacher recollects that the hardest part of her job was watching her pupils die of starvation. A paediatrician says something similar about her patients. Eating the pickings from human vomit isn’t exactly outlandish here. When the paediatrician fled to China, she saw a dog being fed white rice and healthy slices of meat, and couldn’t deny what was staring her plainly in the face: “Dogs in China ate better than doctors in North Korea.”

Barring the lowbrow title, Demick’s prose provides a marvellous insight into a nation that is obsessed with isolating and oppressing its citizens. The euphoria that gripped the nation in July 1994 when Kim Il-Sung died is brilliantly described. It’s as if people lost the reason to live. “Whether it was due to shock or suffering, many older North Koreans suffered heart attacks and strokes during this period of mourning — so much so that there was a marked increase in the death rate in the immediate aftermath. Many others showed their distress by killing themselves. They jumped from the tops of buildings, a favourite method of suicide in North Korea since nobody had sleeping pills and only soldiers had guns with bullets. Others just starved themselves.”

This is the closest anyone can come to understanding the psyche of North Korea. Here’s a nation where people are starving and are earning one dollar a month but its leaders are busy rubbing their “enemies” the wrong way. The presumed North Korean attack in March on the Cheonan, a South Korean warship — and the firing of artillery at a South Korean island in November — is one of the heaviest attacks on its neighbour since the Korean War ended in 1953. Both have been widely condemned. Kim Jong-il is unfazed, though, and recently anointed his son Kim Jong-Un as the new leader.

Barring China, North Korea is not left with any trading partners and is turning into a veritable Zimbabwe or maybe even worse. To think of it, till the late 60s, North Korea was way more prosperous than its southern counterpart. But while South Korea started currying favours from western nations, Kim Il-Sung ensured North Korea remained a relic of the communist past. But the relentless brainwashing continued.

Government newspapers described miracles that were conjured out of thin air. A turbulent sea instantly became calm when sailors sang hymns to Kim Il-Sung. When in the demilitarised zone, a mysterious fog descended that saved him from potential assassination by South Korean snipers. At the birth of Kim Jong-il, a bright star was to be seen in the sky (North Korea is probably the only country on Twitter that spouts propaganda the way lava oozes out of an active volcano).

And the unwitting people never questioned these lies on steroids. To think of it, questioning is ruled out judging by the fact that everyone is a potential traitor and everyone is a potential informer. The lives that Demick chose to narrate are equally heartbreaking but there is an undercurrent of melancholic optimism throughout the book that really makes Demick’s writing sing.

At times the ends appeared too well-tied what with ex-lovers meeting once again and very few teething problems in getting assimilated into South Korea. But that is to quibble. Nothing to Envy is an intelligent Wikileaks: less of a cable and more of a gate.

NOTHING TO ENVY
REAL LIVES IN NORTH KOREA
Barbara Demick
Granta
316 pages; Rs 399

Sonic intervention

2011-01-25T11:43:00.000-08:00

The annual Jaipur Literature Festival is rewarding on different levels right from talks on various forms of literature to poetry to… music. William Dalrymple and his team understand that nothing’s better than music to help one unwind after attending multiple sessions throughout the day. Right from Salman Ahmad’s beautiful, reckless music to Suheir Hammad’s soul edifying poetry, the Festival will take a lovely “James Joyce meets Monsoon Wedding” detour every evening of January 21-25.

Susheela Raman’s authentically soulful timber aided by Aref Durvesh, Nathoo Solanki, Kutle Khan, Chugee Khan and Sam Mills should be a barbecue jam of sorts. If her recent performance at NH7 Weekender in Pune is any indication then Susheela is testing new waters and how. She seems confident that the raw emotions in her Tamil music would definitely soar stratospherically. She didn’t bother to sing her most popular song ‘yeh mera deewanapan hai’ (from the movie Namesake) and even dismissed requests by saying that “it’s old”. However, fans of her day job seem content to lay hands on any pie of her séance with the Supreme Being. Maybe this is how music can be an utterly transforming experience.

Unlike last year, this time there are quite a few international acts lined up. One being an Algerian DJ called Cheb I Sabbah whose clever mixes of earthy Indian music interspersed with schizoid religious chants will be a huge draw.

London-based band Transglobal Underground’s mish-mash of western, oriental and African music styles is so addictive that it might even blow your argyle socks off. We wouldn’t know their playlist but if they choose to play ‘Temple Head’, ‘Tal Zamaan’ and ‘Delta Disco’, your trip to Jaipur would be worth for the music alone. Belgian singer Natacha Atlas’ (a former Transglobal Underground member) fusion of Arabic and Western hip-hop is certain to drive the crowd utterly mental. With a little bit of chemical assistance, some of her songs like ‘Leysh nat’arak’, ‘Yalla Chant’ and ‘Le Printemps’ are guaranteed mindmelters.

Another artist worth watching is Tunisian singer Ghalia Benali, whose fluid voice can be described as the Arabian reincarnate of Billie Holiday. Sample a song called ‘Rome & Juliet’ where the juxtaposition of pain and sensuality is pure Billie Holiday. We expect the meeting of poets Jeet Thayil, Omar Musa and Suheir Hammad to be a standout performance. Thayil, popular for being one half of the music duo Sridhar/Thayil, has four collections of poetry to his name; Suheir Hammad a Palestinian-American poet writes poems stabbing at the post-modern society’s propensity for sexism; And Omar Musa is an Australian poet and rapper, who won the Australian Poetry Slam in 2008.

What more, there are some brilliant Indian acts performing too like Shyopat Julia, Rajasthani musicians, Gafaruddin Mewati, Jaipur Kawa Brass Band. We can already see the Diggi Palace (the Festival venue) exploding the way Mt Eyjaffjallajokull did last year: difference would be that in Jaipur people will fly.

Under-the-radar writers at Jaipur Lit Fest

2011-01-25T11:37:00.000-08:00

Visual writer
Atiq Rahimi fled Afghanistan for France in 1984, where he has become a filmmaker and novelist. Judging by the themes of his three books so far, his heart has remained in Afghanistan. The first two, Earth and Ashes and A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear, were set in the late 1970s while the Soviet cloud was hovering over Kabul. Think of Rahimi as Khaled Hosseini minus the contrived plots. Rahimi’s books never cross the 160-page size mark and his prose is as spare as a bone. He embodies that famous Leonard Cohen line: “shy one at an orgy”. He will be joined by Ahmed Rashid, Jayanta Prasad, Jon Lee Anderson and Rory Stewart to discuss Af-Pak on January 23.

The professional
To think of it, history may well remember Washington Post reporter David Finkel as the Julian Assange the world never had. The Collateral Murder video that transported WikiLeaks to the centre of the universe was in Finkel’s possession, too, but he choose not to disclose it, in order to protect his source. This journalistic integrity has held him in good stead, earning him a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting in 2006 for a series of stories about the US’s democracy promotion efforts in Yemen. His book The Good Soldiers is a harrowing fly-on-the-wall account of the time he spent as a reporter “embedded” with the Second Battalion, 16th Infantry Regiment of the US Army in Iraq. So you see, for every Michael Hastings there is a David Finkel. With Jon Lee Anderson and Rory Stewart, Finkel will discuss “Reporting the Occupation” on January 22.

The unsettler
Here are a few unofficial boxes that writers and poets need to tick to ensure themselves a hassle-free life in China: no lengthy descriptions of sex, no explicit writings on homosexuality, not even a slight disregard for history and absolutely nothing about what transpired in June 1989, the month of the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing. The fact that Hong Ying doesn’t keep to any of these rules makes her a Chinese literary rarity. Her prose sparkles. Her most popular novel, K, could be described as China’s answer to D H Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Catch her in conversation with Isabel Hilton, a Scottish journalist and TV personality, and Stephen McCarty, a literary editor, in “China Dialogues” on January 25.

Sudan’s soul
Sudan is now on the brink of its own partition. Leila Aboulela’s books are an excellent way to begin to understand her country’s war-ravaged past. Their unsettling themes call to mind Virginia Woolf’s dictum: if they can live it, you can write it. Lyrics Alley is about a family during Sudan’s struggle for independence in the 1950s. Minaret is about one woman’s culture shock when she flees to the UK after the 1985 coup. In The Translator, the central character is torn between love and her identity. In Colored Lights, short stories, Aboulela deals with the emotional intricacies of young women wedged between competing worlds. It is as if the author is saying: “If I can write it, you can read it”. Listen to her on “Mapping the Novel in the Arab World” on January 23.

Greek death crisis

2010-11-15T20:04:00.000-08:00

In his latest book The Emissary, Aniruddha Bahal tries to do with Seleucus what Hilary Mantel did with Thomas Cromwell in Wolf Hall — fictional biography of a historical character. To put it more succinctly, Hilary “did it” while Bahal “barely does it”. The imagined story of Alexander’s original Macedonian officer takes off when his father Nicanor, an ace Macedonian charioteer of Olympia, is trampled to death under his own horses owing to the machinations of a rival charioteer at a practice session.

Since this is a book that claims to be a “tale of love, vendetta and war”, Seleucus defeats his father’s murderer at the race in a dramatic fashion and that triggers a chain of events, which force him to turn into an outlaw. Meanwhile, Seleucus’ mother and close friends draw the ire of his adversaries and that results in their death. With an all-consuming desire to smell his enemies’ blood, Seleucus becomes a skilful manipulator and how he avenges his near and dear ones’ death is the McGuffin chase for the reader. And here I was thinking that we meet tough guys only in Raymond Chandler novels!

Bahal, an acclaimed investigative journalist, won the Bad Sex Award for his previous book Bunker 13. The Emissary comes across as his attempt to uproot himself from the slums of pulp fiction to establish himself in the literary suburbs. In that case, this Greek bildungsroman is hardly the kind of book that will redeem his somewhat diminished reputation as a writer. The sparse language and deliberate (or was it inadvertent?) lack of colour create a series of static backdrops. The castles and palaces can hardly be differentiated.

In an article that he wrote for Open magazine, Bahal said that while reading Arrian’s The Campaigns of Alexander and Indica the idea of revisiting Greek battles, events and other historical landmarks of Alexandrian times through a character came to his mind. “It is through him that I imagine behind-the-scene events and forces that could have shaped the lives of King Philip, Alexander, the Persian King Darius, the Athenian orator Demosthenes, and others living in this era. From chariot racing in Olympia to naval escapades and battles, I had to research the whole gamut of Greek life,” he said.

Yes, the book ticks off every conventional Greek trope — treachery, enchantment, lies, brutality, adultery and constant violence — but emotional paucity is writ large on every page. One reason might be the number of characters (200, to be precise) that are crammed into this book so that it’s easy to take one’s eye off the ball (in fact, one character is even spelt wrongly twice on the same page). Another reason is that the greater part of this book looks at the fates of cardboard figures, like individual knights and their adventures, which tend towards a baffling monotony. Only Seleucus’ adventures are hero-like judging by the way he finds his way through every sticky situation. Here’s a genuine poster-child of the phrase “gift of the gab”.

This 444-page long book has its share of moments but they are too few in between. I was clinging more tightly to the book than the railing in an overcrowded Mumbai local train when reading the portions where Seleucus helps the Persian king and his soon-to-be ex-wife escape the clutches of Macedonians in a Shawshank Redemption manner that involves sewers and tunnels, and like the movie here too there is light at the end of the tunnel. The way Seleucus plots the death of Philip, Alexander’s father, is a shining testimony to Bahal’s storytelling exploits that are to be seen only in fits and starts in the book. The sequence where he takes hold of “monsters”, the ancient Greek equivalent of nuclear bombs, is truly electrifying.

The book’s breathtaking opening sequence of the chariot race gives The Emissary a headstart, which Bahal squanders to set up more characters and absolutely unnecessary back stories. Not until the reader is through three-fourths of the book that it gains steam again. However, by then the reader would fail to empathise with Seleucus’ desire for revenge considering he is happy with a wife and a son and too much money (drachmas as the Greeks would say) to play with. The cat-and-mouse chase between Alexander and Seleucus is hardly edge-of-the-seat stuff. A silver-tongued Seleucus does a Houdini even in the most adverse situation and suspending disbelief is difficult because this is the heart of the book. While the entire world is ganging up against him for “treachery”, it beats a simple mind like me to understand how Seleucus and his coterie of followers who stick together like nickels on a dime, get away with everything. Sadly, barring one, none of these escapes is remarkable or resonant.

Bahal’s editor should get a rap on the knuckles for not smoothing out quite a few avoidable infelicities. Pick your favourite gigantic cliché and it would find exalted position in the book. As there is little of either characterisation or strong narrative thrust that marks nearly every paragraph of Hamlet, Homer or Virgil, it is hard to maintain interest and, thanks to Bahal’s clunky prose, this book instead comes across as a really long Wikipedia entry.

The Emissary is a meandering mélange and a pointless pastiche. You can only use this book to stand on while changing the light bulb.

THE EMISSARY
Aniruddha Bahal
Fourth Estate
444 pages; Rs 699

The much hated B-word

2010-11-15T19:59:00.000-08:00

After watching The Social Network, a middling biopic (sort of) of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, I thought the eight most hated words in English are: “I am a businessman and I am human”. Right from the first shot, Jesse Eisenberg (Zuckerberg) is portrayed as a typical nerdy Harvard kid, who has an all-consuming passion for excellence at the expense of human relations.

Let’s admit it, we love facile sinkholes. As soon as someone tells his profession (gynecologist or surfer or concert pianist), our mind conjures some images ‘associated’ with it. When someone says he is a businessman, we immediately think of him as an arch manipulator, mean, cold, maximising profit is the only driving force of his life, showy to the extent of irritating (Exhibit A: Mukesh Ambani’s Antilia). Hollywood being the most-obliging industry, Eisenberg’s character ticks off all these boxes. He is dismissive of his girlfriend in the first scene and those tics are to be seen throughout.

“If you could have, you would have created Facebook,” says Zuckerberg derisively to The Winklevoss Twins and Divya Narendra, the trio who accuse Zuckerberg of stealing their idea. This Aguirre-kind of smugness is really misplaced and it becomes apparent when you read about the real Zuckerberg. In reality, Zuckerberg is a Mammon devotee (who isn’t?) but his personal traits are certainly not so abhorrent to portray him as a moustache-twirling villain. While David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin have created a masterful drama, they also end up doing a great disservice to the business fraternity.

Bill Gates donated $28 billion for charity and Google’s founders (Larry Page and Sergei Brin) are going beyond the realms of search engine. Google just invested $5 billion in wind energy and had also recently brought out a self-driven car prototype. All of this is crammed onto inside pages and page one material is this: When Apple ‘harassed’ a tech blogger of posting the pictures of iPhone 4 prior to it hitting the market, there was a virtual outrage. If law of averages is taken into account, at least three-fourth of those posting comments will have an iPod. While we discount our propensity for hypocrisy, we expect businessmen to stick to a strong moral ethic.

If there is a poster boy for this depraved image of a businessman, it has to be Gordon Gekko (played with seductive relish by Michael Douglas) in Wall Street. His ‘greed is good” speech in the 1987 cult classic has apparently inspired lot of kids to end up being one of those ‘fat cats’ on Wall Street. While Oliver Stone raked in the moolah with a half-decent movie that was lapped up by the lowest common denominator as 80s’ answer to Citizen Kane, the damage was irreparable. When the sequel (Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps) released a couple of months ago, the image of Gekko was still resonant. The brick-size phone might have been replaced by a sleeker one but the sneer on Gekko’s face didn’t budge.

While the sequel was a snore-fest I had bigger problems with the film. Oliver Stone nails a Goldman Sachs-like investment bank to the wall but lets off the homeowners, whose bottomless appetite for that second and third home led to the recession, too easily. Oliver Stone had to keep that myth of slimy businessmen alive, after all.

PS: Eisenberg’s lawyer tells him in the movie’s final scene that only a ‘demon’ could have created something like Facebook. Now, really!

Of liars and outliers

2010-10-21T07:35:00.000-07:00

While preaching that “honesty is the best policy”, my parents lied to me through their back teeth throughout my childhood. Here are a few of their lies: sleep early otherwise ghost will come, Father Christmas exists and God makes all children. It’s as if my entire childhood was one big lie. Are my parents compulsive liars?

I looked for answers in psychologist Dorothy Rowe’s new book Why We Lie and my parents have been exonerated with the following argument: “On a crowded bus, try explaining to your seven-year-old what a dildo is.” That’s like saying that in this age of cloning and parthenogenesis, women don’t need men at all. These kinds of half-baked arguments are potential landmines that dot the book’s landscape, a book that claims to make its way to the last shingle on the vast beach of lies.

One look at the index page and the book would come across as if it was conceived at a table where Malcolm Gladwell and Sigmund Freud were exchanging ideas: How Important Is The Truth to You, Why Lying Is Necessary, How We Learn to Lie, Varieties of Lies, Some Hard Truths. One answer that Rowe offers to why we lie is that “what determines our behaviour is not what happens to us but how we interpret what happens to us”. Rowe also posits: “We might lie in order to protect our sense of being a person, but the consequences of our lying can be such that it would have been better to tell the truth in the first place. But how can we be sure what we take to be the truth is so?” More than a psychologist, Rowe comes across as an impressionable teenage philosophy student who just stumbled across Descartes.

Rowe mines several contemporary themes — Bush’s war on terror, Blair’s complicity with Bush’s lie, recent recession, extermination of Jews, climate change, dynamics of writing literature, existence of God — to drive home the Gladwellian point: there is more to a lie than what meets the eye. Rowe treats a lie in a very Manichean manner: for every yin there is a yang and, ipso facto, for every truth there is a lie. She, however, fails to grapple that a lie can transcend black and white and land in the grey area too. After all, one man’s truth is another man’s lie.

Rowe says people resort to a lie either under the prevailing circumstances or believe something that masquerades as a truth and has been ingrained in their psyche. How else could one explain the unflinching support offered by civilians to Hitler or why there has never been an uprising in North Korea despite the rich-poor disparity reaching a dizzying height? Rowe gets it right when she says humans turn rigid when faced with incontrovertible proof that their long-held truth is, in fact, a lie. When a few dismissed the climate change talk, they were branded anti-human or ignored like car wrecks (A paper authored by endocrinologist Klaus-Martin Schulte has been rejected by the journal Energy & Environment as “hot air” even without giving it a look).

Some live a life based on a lie. The Nazis were convinced of Germany’s superiority and the extermination of Jews never caused them the slightest of remorse because they were convinced that this was the means to their end: Germany’s right to take over the territory to its east. Years later, they would realise their ghastly mistakes but would still stick to their stand in case they were seen as culprits.

There is a bravura chapter in the book, “How Important Is the Truth to You?”, where Rowe really displays her psychology chops. She implores everyone to be a sceptic and question everything even though it may appear true, at the face of it. Being British, Rowe turns vituperative at Tony Blair’s prime ministerial days. “Blair’s government ran on spin, which is a message that has a tiny kernel of truth inside a thick husk of lies. Often the kernel of truth is missing,” she bristles. Another chapter titled “The Delights of Shared Fantasies” is compelling. Global terrorism is a dangerous delusion. Why would Abdulmutallab carry a bomb in a place that would automatically render him useless to enjoy the services of 72 virgins? It’s this shared fantasy (of 72 virgins waiting for jihadis in heaven) that has wreaked havoc across the world.

Even after quite a few flaps, Why We Lie never metamorphoses into a bird of much grander plumage. An accomplished psychologist and best-selling author like Rowe cannot get away with sweeping statements like “married men who know that, if they are unfaithful, their wife will throw them out are likely to think carefully before they put their marriage at risk”. This is Jackson Pollock in the garb of Seurat.

My biggest grouse against my parents has been the denial of a Walkman citing “potential ear problems” as a reason. The other day when my mother asked for a music player, I couldn’t pay her back in the same coin and ended up buying it. How I wish Rowe touched upon lies that are tantalisingly close to coming a full circle!

Spaced out

2010-10-21T07:34:00.000-07:00

To readers who are too busy or distracted or interested enough to not read beyond a paragraph, let me cut to the chase: Room is a masterpiece and Emma Donoghue is a genius. Now that I’ve got that off my chest, here’s more about it.

In a flourish reminiscent of a nineteenth century novel, Room rings up its curtain on its 11X11 eponymous setting. Its inhabitants, Jose and her son Jack, have been holed up there since time immemorial. Living within the soundproofed cell, the mother-son duo’s only connection with the outside world is a psychopath, Old Nick, who held Jose in captivity seven years ago. Jack is made to believe that the world is an oyster called television where the cartoon characters are his “real” friends and a saccharine lollipop (courtesy Old Nick) is the best thing he ever tasted.

When he turns five, Jack’s mother tells him so many things he never thought possible. Being the narrator, Jack coins a term for these revelations in his typical fashion: unlying. In a manner inspired by the Count of Monte Cristo, Jack makes it to the open world and, subsequently, so does his mother. Of course, with a fair bit of action involved.

While this part of the novel sounds like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (think of it as chick lit for non-chick lit readers), the following portions take David Foster Wallace tones — post-modern irony on crack. When Jack is confronted with the harsh realities of the open world, he turns into a victim of Stockholm Syndrome and his mother is no better.

In a shade over 300 pages, Donoghue captures physical deprivation and human degradation, not to mention the most poignant mother-son relationship committed to paper. The plot of the seventh novel of this Ireland-born, Canada-based author seems like an obvious nod to the Fritzl case in Austria — when, in 2008, Elisabeth Fritzl accused her father Josef of holding her captive for 24 years and subjecting her to sexual abuse. Donoghue categorically dismissed the notion. Speaking to the Guardian, she said: “It’s too strong, I’d say it was triggered by it.” Some similarities, however, are hard to miss. Jack, who is released from the garden shed, is the same age Felix Fritzl was when his mother emerged from her dungeon.

That being said, there is so much to celebrate about Room. It’s never easy to narrate the story through the eyes of a five-year-old, whose vocabulary would not extend beyond a handful of words and understanding of the world would be stunted at best. In fact, Donoghue’s writing style, its present tense notwithstanding, can be sandbagged into a kind of hard-boiled poetry, what with the machine-gun cadence interspersed with abbreviated sense impressions (Jim Thompson would be a proud man). Sample this: When a news reporter insinuates to Jose that she might have wanted to kill the kid, Jose bristles, “What, put a pillow over his head?” Jack thinks to himself, “Is that me Ma means? But pillows go under heads.” Considering the kid at the heart of the novel is a bastard child, this is, all rights reserved, inglorious bastardry at its best.

The novel’s second half lends gold standard credence to the old saw that “every man is an island”. Most of us only do things in our day-to-day life and, consequently, we don’t live a life. Here are two people who shared five years in an almost Amish lifestyle never craving for technological felicities beyond the bare minimum. Jack curbs his desire to take his own picture with the following reasoning: “I was going to take one (a picture) of me in the mirror (phone camera) but then I’d be a paparazzi.” (Italics are mine).This novel is a stab at modern man’s compulsion to buy the new car, the faster laptop, the inflated stock. For fear of becoming dinosaurs, are we turning into sheep? This question turns moot in the novel.

Unable to cope with urban demands, Jose tries to kill herself to which Jack remarks, “I saved her, only then she didn’t want to be alive anywhere.” The writing sometimes seems ill-suited to those faint of heart. There’s this gut-wrenching talk between the mother and son when the former describes how she gave birth to a stillborn baby before Jack.

Though the book is suffused with immensities, there are a few immaturities too. I understand that the narrator is a five-year-old and to retain the cutesy factor, Donoghue makes him commit grammatical howlers, which he fails to rectify despite his mother’s persistent corrections. This, when he undertook a complex task (for a five-year-old) to trick the captor. At times, Jack’s weariness seems beyond his age: “In Room we knowed what everything was called but in the world there’s so much, persons don’t even know the names.” Really?

I wouldn’t give a hang if Room doesn’t get the Booker (it’s on the shortlist) but my disappointment would know no bounds if it doesn’t find mention along with the works of literary masters that delight in misery: William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Susan Hill’s I’m the King of the Castle, J G Ballard’s High Rise, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and J M Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians. Enter this Room to expand your world.

Back away from the tipping point

2010-09-14T19:27:00.000-07:00

It wouldn’t have been out of place if Anatole Kaletsky’s Capitalism 4.0 was called “The Moral Obligation To Be Financially Intelligent” and I say so knowing I risk lining Kaletsky’s pockets. At a time when US President Barack Obama is urging his countrymen to improve their financial knowledge, this improvement on a famous Lionel Trilling essay is fitting enough. If you aren’t piqued yet, the book’s subtitle might get you interested, “The Birth Of A New Economy”.

Kaletsky, a senior journalist, says that the world has already been through three financial epochs. The first one started in 1776 when the US Declaration of Independence happened right up till 1932 when capitalism came closer to genuine collapse. Capitalism 2.0 saw its genesis in Roosevelt’s New Deal experimentation of 1933 and ended in 1979 owing to breakdown of the postwar gold-backed currency system. Capitalism 3.0, a 30-year epoch, started with Thatcherism in 1979 and ended with the crisis of 2007-09.

Relying on the writings of great economists as well as on a drawerful of articles from various magazines and policy documents, Kaletsky’s diagnosis of the past three “Capitalisms” is as enlightening as his 4.0 is. He concludes that boom-bubble-bust cycle grows ever swifter and more calamitous. Without placing the blame of recent financial collapse entirely on the bankers’ shoulders, Kaletsky rightly indicts the political establishment too. “The Bush administration’s failure to recognise the essential role of government in stabilising and underpinning the modern financial system brought every bank in the world to the brink of failure and threatened the global economy with an unprecedented depression.” Mr Kaletsky, how do you say touché in Russian?

The book takes a Sophoclean turn in its 10th chapter titled “The Economic Consequences of Mr Paulson”, a swipe at former US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who took tough decisions when the world was on the brink of the financial equivalent of bungee jumping. With the possible exception of Andre Mellon, Paulson’s predecessor at the Treasury from 1921 to 1932, Kaletsky says that “this disaster was not the stupidity of regulators, the greed of bankers or the improvidence of speculators in low-income real estate but a series of misjudgments by one man: Paulson”. This particular chapter makes one wonder if the $767 billion Troubled Asset Relief Programme was the right thing to do at that time. Kaletsky says no private business would like to depend on the milk from government’s tits. Little wonder if the same businesses are trying to wean themselves off the milk. General Motors is raring to shed the “Government Motors” tag.

4.0 promises to be a different beast though, a benign one at that. Kaletsky predicts an overriding trend of “a view that politicians could be held accountable for wars but not for financial crises was a typically market fundamentalist confusion of the kind that is likely to be swept away by Capitalism 4.0”. Kaletsky is one of those rare economists who can tell his Bukharin from Bakunin and that apparently stood him in good stead while writing this book. He says that conservative parties tend to do better when societies are under stress because “as voters see their incomes and wealth eroding… the generalised demands for change escalate but the willingness to embrace any specific changes tends to disappear”. With the Tories winning in England and Republicans’ bright prospects at the coming US Senate elections only confirm Kaletsky’s theories.

Kaletsky says health-care reform will be an important issue in 4.0. Referring to Obama’s recent health-care reform Bill, Kaletsky says, “Had President Obama focused more attention in the health care debate on costs and less on coverage of the uninsured, he might have managed to convince Americans that their present health-care system was unsustainable and threatened bankruptcy not only for the government and individual businesses but for the entire nation.” He makes a few dire observations too: “Facing up to the inevitable choice between significantly higher taxes and major reductions in health and pension entitlements will be the greatest political challenge of the post-crisis years.”

However, Kaletsky paints the finance and banking structure in 4.0 in broad strokes. “Managements and investors will need to discover new ways to reconcile financial and political investors” and many such are the kind of statements that make the reader wonder if Kaletsky read his own book. While he exhorts the Americans to increase their savings, he thinks that those savings will be “lent to businesses for investment and expansion” and that they would also cut the Americans’ demand for consumer goods. However, he fails to factor in the fact that the rich don’t necessarily invest their earnings and savings in the American economy; they send them around the globe where they’ll get the highest returns. Kaletsky laments that the rich are better off with a smaller percentage of a fast-growing economy than a larger share of an economy that’s barely moving.

Kaletsky’s lucid prose is his strength but still he wouldn’t be everyone’s cup of tea. For a casual reader, reading the whole book feels like a marathon unfairly imposed on a jogger. Having said that, invest your time in this tour de force of information and speculation, and you’ll be richly rewarded. That’s capitalism of a sort too, which I am sure Kaletsky would approve of.

Roubini's prophet motive

2010-09-14T19:26:00.000-07:00

CNBC often plays disco music when New York University’s party-boy economist Nouriel Roubini appears on air. And why not? The man earned the moniker of Dr Doom for his pessimism about the world economy when other economists were busy heralding a new financial age. Not surprisingly, when the recession happened, Roubini was belatedly hailed as a prophet. As the Portfolio magazine said of him, “Ridicule turned into respect, not to mention countless television appearances, speaking engagements, invitations to testify before Congress, new clients for the consulting firm he runs, and parties packed with young, beautiful admirers.”

The reason for a lengthy introduction of Roubini, an Iranian-Jewish, is his new book is as much about his analysis of the financial future that beckons the world as about himself (more on that later). Written along with Stephen Mihm, a University of Georgia historian, the writers spill a lot of ink to either hark back to the halcyon days of the post-War era or give an overview of the key factors that led to the 2008 financial crisis. Roubini and Mihm spend the second half of the book discussing financial sector reform and key aspects of global trade imbalances. Drawing on the parallels from many countries and centuries, right from the 17th century tulip craze to Japan’s Lost Decade, the writers show that financial cataclysms are as old and as ubiquitous as capitalism itself.

The writers found a possible solution to grapple with the inherent instability of the global financial system in the thinking of economists as varied as John Maynard Keynes and Joseph Schumpeter. “Indeed, the successful resolution of the recent crisis depends on a pragmatic approach that takes the best of both camps, recognising that while stimulus spending, bailouts, lender-of-last-resort support, and monetary policy may help in the short term, a necessary reckoning must take place over the longer term in order to achieve a return to prosperity.”

If books on recession are a genre in themselves, then Crisis Economics would wear out its welcome even with the most tolerant genre buff because the writers take just too long (three-fifths of the book precisely) to deal with the book’s subtitle. And even those predictions (“outlooks” as the book says) are not transcendental. Sample these: “exploding fiscal deficits may prompt some countries to default on their debt, or to resort to the printing press to mitigate it, triggering the sort of high inflation last seen in the 1970s”, “Japan might return to deflation and near-depression, triggering a major sovereign debt crisis”, “China faces growing risks: its investment-led recovery could lose steam, possibly triggering a rise in non-performing loans and, ultimately, a banking crisis”, “no double-dip recession”. Did Roubini write this book with his left hand?

Also, the thesis that asset bubbles and ensuing crises are part and parcel of capitalism isn’t new and is explained in a more articulate fashion in Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart’s 2009 book This Time Is Different: Eight centuries of Financial Folly (the book is referenced in Crisis Economics too). The much talked about thoughtful reforms that the book purports to suggest are middling at best: breaking up the banks and more reforms of the International Monetary Fund.

One look at the book cover and you would know that Mihm’s name in smaller font size gives him a direct entry into the pantheon of greatest sidekicks who include Sancho Panza. Roubini jumped onto the Dr Doom gravy train that even if the economy were to rebound, there is more to him than the one-time doomsday scenario that he predicted. Thus comes this book where Roubini seems to have conjured it up by swallowing an entire dictionary of economic terms. Swathes of text are dedicated to explain as to how “credit default swaps” and “mortgage-backed securities”, once obscure expressions, have now become household terms, even if their exact nature remains mysterious. Roubini’s glibness (explaining what assets and liabilities are is being borderline lazy) in the first half of the book sets in such weariness that he comes across as a one-trick pony who acts in every page as if he’s discovering the trick for the very first time. Having said that, this book is highly recommended to those who have been living under a rock since circa September 2008. Those few can suck out the maximum juice.

If anything, the prose, which seems like a love progeny of Economist and John Le Carre, redeems the book. Roubini is a brilliant quote hanger and that can be seen from the disparate quotes that he peppers his arguments with, to a good effect. But then, that’s it. I’m sure, some would argue that the ability to raise money is just as important as the ability to write well or frame a shot. While that may seem to be nonsense, Roubini’s book got me terrified that it might be true.

Earlier this year, when the Eyjafjallajokull volcano started blurting cinders as if it was the world’s biggest broken toaster, people couldn’t fly in Europe at all and had to go back to boats. Roubini doesn’t have an equivalent situation to see through this financial disaster. An argument that the United States must use the recent crisis as an opportunity to make deep and meaningful reforms to its financial system only affirms that at heart Roubini remains a permabear.

Facebook fatigue

2010-09-14T19:21:00.000-07:00

Exactly a day after I wrote an anti-Facebook rant in this blog space, my account in the social networking site got disabled. A few questions instantly crossed my mind while I was mourning the death of my digital alter ego: Is Mark Zuckerburg the new-age bearded mullah who issued a digital fatwa against me? Should I have sought refuge in Salman Rushdie’s sock drawer? Facetiousness apart, in my case Zuckerburg will not have the last laugh.

Here’s how. I feel liberated by the fact that I don’t need to update my status with a Bertrand Russell quote that I might comfortably pin over my desk or an Updike poem that would befit my epitaph. I’ve realised that I am this passive aggressive status update guy, who wants to show his estranged high school flames what a brilliant quote hanger he has turned into.

The ‘Like’ button was my crack cocaine. Whenever my 160-odd friends don’t ‘like’ the latest foreign article or the elusive indie song that I post on my Wall, the withdrawal symptoms set in. What else, I place one more link filched from the news aggregator sites. I can now concentrate on my work for time immemorial at a stretch without having to refresh my page every five minutes to see if anyone ‘liked’ my latest post or not.

With benefit of hindsight, the reality has dawned on me that a tweet-size review of latest Bollywood drivel or recommending the just-released Sigur Ros album is not exactly altruism the way, let’s say, donating blood is. It needed a bolt out of the blue to make me understand that for every page or group that I ‘like’, I am actually walking into a corporate’s trap, who will place ads accordingly. It’s almost as if it’s not ‘my’ Facebook profile. It is Facebook’s profile about me. Whoever said benign corporate is an oxymoron!

I really had to stop wanting to look at other people’s photos and updates. I was almost stalking them, spending hours a day looking at their pages without actually saying hello. I felt detached from my Facebook buddies because I rarely directly contacted them. This kid is tired of his new toy. Many others are not, as yet. According to comScore, Facebook attracted 87.7 million unique visitors in the United States in June. Traffic to two of the most popular blog-hosting sites, Blogger and WordPress, is stagnating, according to Nielsen, a media-research firm. By contrast, Facebook’s traffic grew by 66 per cent last year.

If blogs’ ability to absorb the dime-a-dozen knee jerk reactions isn’t pathetic enough, the Facebook is spawning a totally different beast — slacktivism. Urban dictionary defines it as: “One of those feel-good internet campaigns that doesn’t actually help anybody or has political impact.” Mir Hossein Mousavi, one of the main opposition leaders in Iran, has 128,000 Facebook followers. Too bad that joining such groups is being deemed as the hippie equivalent of burning money in a trash can. Regina Spektor nailed it with the beautiful lines in ‘Hero’: “And we’re going to these meetings. We’re not doing any meeting”.

I wonder why there’s no campaign against Facebook’s corporate interests that saw its erstwhile beloved Scrabble application, Scrabulous, pulled amid copyright issues. The Facebook fatigue seems to have caught up with its users though. According to the website www.insidefacebook.com: “Facebook’s growth slowed down in the United States in June, following a burst of activity through April and May. The country picked up only 320,800 new monthly active users in June, compared to the outstanding 7.8 million it gathered in May.”

You, the Facebook user, will feel the fatigue when you realise that a News Feed full of constantly updating ‘friends’, like a room full of chattering people, is no substitute for a conversation. Meanwhile, ‘friends’, e-mail me.

Not so fine print

2010-08-21T06:17:00.000-07:00

By the time the dog could get the day’s newspaper to its master, the latter was already reading its digital version. “Should I get the paper from tomorrow or not,” asks the dog to its master. Unless Yann Martel decides to make something out of this New Yorker cartoon, Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists is most probably going to be the last mainstream work of fiction on the totem of past generations— newspaper.

Rachman’s entertaining debut is a warts-and-all account of a “stolidly black and white” Rome-based English newspaper’s heyday and decline in 1954 and 2007, respectively. Brace yourself for a peek into a self-contained universe where the editor-in-chief is pondering sleeping with an old flame while the paper is staring at the abyss and the publisher’s basset hound is called, wait for this, Schopenhauer. Rachman tells his tale in eleven chapters through eleven characters associated with the daily, whose circulation is down to its last 10,000 and it doesn’t have a website.

Rachman displays a David Lodge-kind of ability in etching out a farrago of zany characters, who could have easily walked into any Luis Bunuel production: be it the Business Reporter Hardy Benjamin (“practically forty and I still resemble Pippi Longstocking”); or News Editor Craig Menzies (“has nothing in his life but news”); or Copy Editor Ruby Zaga, who spends every New Year eve in a different hotel to ward off the ennui of her perpetual singledom; or Paris Correspondent Lloyd Burko’s struggle against what he sees as “encroaching entropy”; or Cairo Correspondent Rich Snyder, who vocalises with the matchless authority of a man who has never been known to hit a note on pitch; or Ornella, the obsessive reader, who is intent on finishing every old edition, leaving herself trapped in the past and blithely unaware of the present; or Corrections Editor Herman Cohen, whose true calling in life has always been as a proofreader (“finally, arcane knowledge and pedantry came in handy”).

Rachman’s impressive journalistic credentials (AP correspondent, International Herald Tribune’s Paris editor) shine throughout the book. Be it the way he names the chapters with headlines straight out of Onion (“Kooks With Nukes”, “World’s Oldest Liar Dies at 126”, “Global Warming Good For Ice Creams”) or the Houellebecquian way of describing the characters’ tics.

While the book’s tone may inspire comparisons with Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, its soul is more attuned to Michael Frayn’s Towards The End Of The Morning. Rachman has been able to demystify the print industry for the lay audience. I would prefer the Financial Times review of the book, “These journalists could just as easily be in banking or in advertising (the influence of Joshua Ferris’ downturn drama ‘Then We Came To The End’ is certainly present), or in any field that people fight to get into, but then, years later, fight to escape.” Thus, the uninitiated are to understand that there are hardly any Mikael Blomkvists in journalism. Most are as much a journalist as Tintin was. My former editor wasn’t far off the mark when he remarked that “journalism is the last resort for rejects of the world”, where sub-editors moan about lack of recognition and reporters fit that new full form of MBA doing the rounds: Mediocre But Arrogant.

To Rachman’s credit, the action most worth reading in the book is not at the centre of things but where edges meet — at the end of each chapter, Rachman chronicles the newspaper’s inception till its demise. What started as a product of fashion and a multimillionaire’s (Cyrus Ott) fancy ended up as follows: “The greatest influence over content was necessity — they had holes to fill on every page and jammed in any newsworthy string of words, provided it didn’t include expletives, which they were apparently saving for their own use around the office.”

The Imperfectionists is to be seen as more than just a piece of fiction. Last year, 15,000 newspaper jobs ended up in ether across the world and, you needn’t be a cynic to predict that the bleeding has just begun. The advent of 24-hour TV news and online information sites are increasingly making a newspaper’s information stale before it appears. One train of thought doing round has been aptly put by Kurt Andersen in Vanity Fair: “Life is manically parceled into financial quarters, three-minute YouTube videos, 140-character tweets. In my pocket is a phone/computer/camera/ video recorder/TV/stereo system half the size of a pack of Marlboros. And what about pursuing knowledge purely for its own sake, without any real thought of, um, monetising it? Cute.” Onion even did a story titled “Nation Shudders At Large Block Of Uninterrupted Text”. Thus, Rachman’s book is a grim reminder to the newspapers that a reinvented business model to sustain professional news-gathering is of absolute necessity. Slamming across a newswire copy that could easily be read online will no longer do. Make your opinions count. We are living in a world where Beaverbrooks and Hearsts will be seen as benign in the wake of the Internet’s dominance.

It’s a shining testimony to Rachman’s writing abilities that while the book raises questions more pertinent than ever before, the humour quotient never lags.Inan industry where bastardisation is the name of the game, this is, all rights reserved, inglourious basterdy at its very best.

Pressing the reset button

2010-08-07T20:49:00.000-07:00

Will he or won’t he? Answers are he won’t and he will. United States President Barack Obama will find it a tough going at the elections to the Senate scheduled in November for 36 of the 100 seats. Obama, however, will try every trick in the book to get the economy back on track (unemployment rate in the US was 9.7 per cent in May 2010). Best-selling author Richard Florida’s latest book The Great Reset: How New Ways Of Living And Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity might help Obama in more than one way. Books on the meltdown are being written at a pace rivalled only by Martin Scorcese characters’ penchant for mouthing expletives. Sadly, owing to the glut, most of the writers tend to choke on their own bile. Florida’s fascinating slim book is cut with different cloth: it tries to find answers for the future in the two biggest economic crises the country ever saw in 1873 and 1929.

Florida’s book is a long-form extension of a cover story titled “How The Crash Will Reshape America” that he wrote for The Atlantic magazine in March 2009. (Minor digression: What’s it with Atlantic’s cover stories turning into books, this being the second book to have released in as many months after Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains?)

The prose of The Great Reset might lack the snap, crackle and fizz of Florida’s best-selling books like The Rise of the Creative Class and Who’s Your City?, but he makes it up with a plethora of coruscating observations. Florida says that “The First Reset” took place during the Long Depression when the US saw the transition from small cities and an agricultural society to dense industrial cities. “The Second Reset”, a consequence of the Great Depression, gave us the sprawling suburbs and great metropolitan areas that defined recent times. “The Great Reset”, whose midwife is the latest meltdown, that Florida talks about, is the shifting of the tectonic plates in the US “from an economy based on making things to one that revolves around knowledge and creativity”.

Florida terms this shifting as “spatial fix”. He argues that “positioning the economy to grow strongly in the coming decades will require not just fiscal stimulus or industrial reform, it will require a new kind of geography as well”. The argument holds water considering America’s tendency to over-consume and under-save, the main cause of the current meltdown, a consequence of the post-War spatial fix — housing and suburbanisation.

Here are a few forces that Florida expects, if worked on, will trigger the Great Reset: considerable dependence on public transport (preferably through high-speed rail); transformation of millions of service jobs into middle-class careers that value workers as a genuine source of innovation; creation of “megaregions” that will drive the development of new industries; and, of course, change in attitude towards home ownership (yes, rent it out).

The “megaregions” that Florida refers to are the concentrations of population that encompass several cities and their surrounding suburban rings. The largest in the US is “Bos-Wash”, which comprises Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington DC. According to Florida, it’s the megaregions, not nations, that really power the global economy considering the fact that the world’s 40 largest megaregions account for two-thirds of all global economic activity.

A memory of a virgin hard drive is almost a prerequisite to assimilate the book’s arguments (wonder if Obama is left with such a memory). This is apparent when the writer connects disparate dots dexterously. Sample this: According to Florida, New York will continue to be the financial hub of the world despite a double-dip recession lurking around the corner. He reasons that once a top financial centre, always a financial centre. Case in point: Amsterdam, which has been the centre of the world’s financial system in the 17th century and ever since, is one of the top-25 financial centres. The book’s otherwise turgid prose turns sparkling when the writer narrates anecdotes of his parents and grandparents, who experienced the last two crises. I could have done with more such anecdotes.

All’s not well with the book though. It is high on compelling statements but abysmally low on convincing arguments. Florida says, with the benefit of hindsight, the US could have followed the Canadian banking system and the current crisis would have never occurred. That’s almost like saying Norway is an ideal form of economy for European Union countries. What works well for a small country doesn’t necessarily mean its bigger counterparts should follow suit. Florida tries his hand at doing a Malcolm Gladwell and doesn’t achieve much success with that. By collating the employment numbers from 1970s to 2009 in a chapter titled “Good Job Machine”, all Florida could remark was that the lower-paying routine jobs in the service economy (food service workers, janitors, home health care workers and the like) will never leave the country!

Florida is prone to toot his own horn and while that is not a crime, evoking his best-selling works proves to be a speed-breaker when the reader is on the intellectual autobahn. Expanding from his original essay, the personal and economical meanings of the subject seem not to enlarge, but rather to dissipate. He has somehow contrived to say less in a book than he did in an article. Having said that, this book is highly recommended for the very fact that the writer tries to make hope possible rather than making despair convincing.

Literary, shmiterary

2010-08-07T20:47:00.001-07:00

Fresh’ is a catch-all term used in Bollywood. It will describe a production with two unknown faces or even a storyline that is borderline predictable. However, one look at the trailer of Aisha and the word ‘fresh’ doesn’t seem out of place to describe this Sonam Kapoor and Abhay Deol starrer, set for an August release.

What really sets Aisha apart from the usual crop of Hindi cinema is that it is an adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma. A faithful adaptation, one hastens to say, given Victorian elements such as Abhay Deol playing polo and the leading woman being a personification of chastity. Sadly, history is not on the side of Aisha.

Bollywood’s tryst with classic English literature hasn’t exactly set the box office on fire. Apart from Vishal Bhardwaj, who has successfully adapted Shakespeare’s plays to build an enviable oeuvre, Hindi film directors have never taken more than a passing interest in the world of Charles Dickens or Somerset Maugham. Take a look at the handful of movies inspired by books written in the 19th century and it is a classic embodiment of the expression, “many a slip between cup and the lip”.

Saawariya, Bhansali’s dark love story, was adapted from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s short story White Nights. Apart from introducing talents like Ranbir Kapoor and Sonam Kapoor, the 2007 Diwali release fizzled out like a wet cracker.

Something similar happened to Gurinder Chadha, who, fresh from the success of Bend It Like Beckham, tried to adapt Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. The end product, Bride and Prejudice, turned out to be a turkey (imagine Sooraj Barjatya directing a P G Wodehouse book). Minor digression: The best adaptation of a Jane Austen book in Indian cinema was done by Rajiv Menon in his directorial debut, the Tamil film Kandukondain Kandukondain, which remained quite faithful to the gravitas of Sense and Sensibility.

For reasons beyond my understanding, Hindi cinema has been content with making films from contemporary books that are middling at best. Erich Segal’s Love Story comes across as the apogee of the protagonist’s reading habits (Ranbir Kapoor holding a Haruki Murakami in Wake Up Sid was an aberration). Hrithik Roshan and Rani Mukherjee bond over mawkish prose in Mujhse Dosti Karoge and somehow the sentiment continues to endure till date with Sonam Kapoor expressing her romantic predilections while hugging Love Story in this week’s release I Hate Luv Storys (sic).

Technically speaking, Love Story has been adapted twice in Bollywood cinema — Akhiyon Ke Jharoke Se starring Sachin and Ranjita, and Khwahish, which gave a carte blanche to Mallika Sherawat and Himanshu to pass-the-polo-mint at least 17 times on screen. Judging by their failure, love means never having to say sorry, especially to the audience.

Erich Segal’s Man, Woman And Child saw itself unfold on Hindi screen in the form of Shekhar Kapur’s Masoom and enjoyed quite a bit of success too. No writer, however, held or holds as much sway over the country’s consciousness like Chetan Bhagat. His One Night @ The Call Centre, which was made into Hello, which didn’t help the limpid careers of the lead actors like Sharman Joshi, Gul Panag and Sohail Khan in any way. But Rajkumar Hirani’s Aamir Khan-starrer 3 Idiots, which was ‘inspired’ from Five Point Someone, has achieved cult status. But then all these books are contemporary.

Since Sonam Kapoor has already tasted failure with Saawariya, one would expect her to exercise caution with Aisha, which happens to be her home production. For all you know, Aisha: the movie might be all strip and no tease. However, if the movie bucks the unfortunate trend, who knows the Bollywood audience might be introduced to Dickens or get first-hand knowledge of Kafka.

Source of despair

2010-08-07T20:38:00.001-07:00

Hours after the Stanley McChrystal story got published in Rolling Stone, Politico, a US-based news web-site remarked that the writer Michael Hastings was a freelancer and, ipso facto, could write such a no-holds barred piece. As usual, Politico got it wrong. Any editor would hack his or her right arm for such a damning piece. So what if the ‘sources’ might never be helpful again. My exhibits: Woodward and Bernstein were cub reporters, nowhere near the White House beat, when they cracked Watergate. Seymour Hersh was a freelancer when he broke My Lai. And as New York Times puts it, “It was uncelebrated reporters in Knight Ridder’s Washington bureau who mined low-level agency hands to challenge the slam-dunk WMD intelligence in the run-up to Iraq.”

What Michael Hastings did was old-school journalism. A senior journalist once defined it to me: “It’s calling and calling and tracking leads and this is what journalists used to do before they got used to being fed scraps and doing sting nakhras when their sources were caught in a weak moment (read drunken haze).” In the current times of fixing up appointments in a watering hole, Hastings instead hung around McChrystal and his coterie for a month, which was facilitated by Mt Eyjaffjallajokull’s explosion. You can’t expect McChrystal to say “Bite Me” instead of Biden at the spur of the moment.

Hastings’ interview was an unqualified anti-thesis of Mark Twain’s impression of an interview: “You (the interviewee) close your shell; you put yourself on your guard; you try to be colorless; you try to be crafty, and talk all around a matter without saying anything.”

And anyway, what sources is Politico referring to? Preserving your sources during journalism’s heyday was done by dropping in at their office and chatting them up instead of sniffing around for a story idea. Nowadays, journalists’ sources are restricted to either their gTalk list or, even worse, Facebook friends list.

Post-Twitter, major news stories are broken through the users’ unbridled exuberance to showcase their tweet-sized thoughts. One Mumbai-based tabloid even has a section called ‘cho-tweet’ to chronicle Bollywood celebrities’ garbage heap. The day is not far off when officially every mainstream daily and news channel has desk dedicated to tracking celebrities’ tweets.

Facebook faux pas

2010-08-07T20:31:00.000-07:00

“I left Facebook because I want to be taken seriously,” said a woman to New York Times. This must be the closest digital equivalent to “throwing the baby along with the bathwater”. Here’s why. While there is a lot of pap floating around, Facebook also allowed me to know people with whom I share similar interests.
Now, this woman, who has an account since her college days, suddenly had the epiphany after joining a job that her ‘embarrassing’ pictures taken at college parties might send out wrong signals to her bosses. Here are a few thumb rules where you can have your Facebook cake and eat it too.

* First things first, stop those stupid status updates like “my kitten just purred” or “I am applying red nail polish” followed by at least seven exclamation marks. You are not Paris Hilton, live with that.

* I know it’s tough but stop playing FarmVille, Mafia Wars and their various clones. These games are like junk food but your brain is so conditioned to them that you can’t wait to milk those jersey cows. However, I would implore you to refrain from playing these games for a more important reason. Understand that your Facebook account is an extension of your CV. No company, unless it’s Zynga, will appreciate an employee with the highest Mafia Wars score. Here are a few numbers: one per cent of the population of the world is an active FarmVille user, eight per cent of white-collar workers are playing FarmVille, it has more users than Twitt-ah. Got the drift?

* Don’t try to be overtly funny. The ironical relationship that you are in with a friend (of usually same sex) might not go well with your prospective boss. For laughs, imagine this: An aunt who joins Facebook, looks up her nephew and, even without sending a formal “friend request” discovers, that little Rahul was listed as ‘married’ to someone of the same sex. And his mother hadn’t even told her he was gay— let alone invite her to the wedding!

* Facebook group is the best thing that happened to me in the recent past. It’s an amazing lift to know that there are people in the world, who read this arty gay magazine called Butt. However, it’s the existence of groups like “Thank you Pakistan for taking Sania Mirza, now take Rakhi Sawant also” or “Orkut murdered Facebook” that vitiates the social networking atmosphere. If you think that joining these groups makes you funny, I am the tooth fairy.

* Like the New York Times source, you too might have uploaded pictures of yours taken in the spur of the moment. You can’t expect Lamebook.com to point it out. There are many things that one might comfortably pin over a desk or hang on a wall, but that would best not be made visible to just anyone online. And please, job or no job, delete your display picture that impersonates Andy Warhol’s over-rated painting of Marilyn Monroe. Warhol doesn’t deserve this kind of adulation, his patronistation of Velvet underground notwithstanding.

* Stop accumulating those ‘friends’. A survey says that you can at most have 150 friends in a lifetime. I see teenagers totally at home with at least 800+ friends. As William Deresiewicz, recently argued in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

“We have turned [our friends] into an indiscriminate mass, a kind of audience or faceless public. We address ourselves not to a circle, but to a cloud…. Friendship is devolving, in other words, from a relationship to a feeling.”
Hope this detox helps you to lead a healthy social networking life.

PS: How could anyone’s parents be their ‘friends’ on Facebook? It’s like being chaperoned by your dad to the disco.

Foot(ball) in the mouth

2010-06-11T09:51:00.001-07:00

It was one of those dates that wasn’t going anywhere. After all, she never went beyond Paulo Coelho drivel and I talking about Italo Calvino on that occasion would have been as unappetising as a beefless burger. With a feigned interest I asked her if she watches football and her eyes light up to say ‘yeahhhh’. “Okay, this might not be a date that Lou Reed talks about in ‘Perfect Day’ but at least it’s not an unmitigated disaster,” I was telling myself. Who’s your favourite player I asked with a renewed vigor and pat came her reply “Zidane”. “Zidane who”. “Zinedine Zidane”. I guess the constipated look on my face was a give-away to her that I am not impressed at her reply.

I perfectly understand if someone has no interest in football. I’ve never listened to Justin Bieber or touched Twilight series with a bargepole either. However, my problem is much more existential. It makes me wonder why in India football is viewed through that narrow prism called “FIFA World Cup”. Case in point is this woman, who last saw a football game when Zidane headbutted Materazzi in 2006. In a week’s time, another World Cup is set to begin and my childhood friend, who cannot name a single Brazilian player apart from Ronaldo, not the Cristiano one, is betting his money on Brazil. Lula Silva might be overwhelmed looking at the kind of support his country’s team is getting in India considering the fact that a Brazil victory would be the football equivalent of “out of the blue”.

Words like EPL, UEFA Champions League, La Liga might sound gibberish to people but the same people would easily hack their right arm to be in South Africa to watch a game between Greece and Nigeria. Football is no Olympics that is essential watch in every four years. Every year, Manchester United and Chelsea, Real Madrid and Barcelona, Inter Milan and AC Milan slug it out to justify the ridiculous amount of money spent on them. But we are not bothered with that.

Don’t get me wrong here. I am in no way belittling the World Cup. I am rooting for Spain and can’t see myself getting out of a slough of despond if anyone else wins it. However, my devotion to Spain has logic to it. Fernando Torres, Cesc Fabregas, Carlos Puyol, Xavi Hernandez, Xabi Alonso are the names I follow on the club circuit the way these days kids follow Lady Gaga. It’s sad that Lionel Messi will be known in this part of the world only after showcasing his exploits donning Argentina colours.

If you are stinking rich enough to go to South Africa but cannot tell who Jose Mourinho is, remember that to avoid any more embarrassment, always say “football game”, not “football match”. See you around in… 2014.

It’s a mag, mag world

2010-05-18T20:10:00.000-07:00

It is a typical Bombay minute away from Churchgate station and is almost like the Harry Potter 9-3/4 platform— visible but elusive even before you could fathom its existence. I am talking about a magazine store that has been the biggest find of my six months’ humble existence in Bombay. I get the latest issues of foreign magazines like, New Yorker, Wired, Empire, The New Republic, Spin, Rolling Stone, Downbeat, Prospect, FourFourTWo, New York, Q, Atlantic, Spectator, Monocle and, at the risk of being branded a jubiliant name dropper, many more. That too, wait for it, within the price range of Rs 20-150.

For the uninitiated, I am making a killing here. Why? Well, foreign magazines are prohibitively priced in India because of overhead costs like shipping, courier and what not.

Thus, the latest Wired will be available at Rs 500 at any Crossword store, Esquire at Rs 600, Monocle at Rs 850. You get the drift. Considering the chump change I get in the form of salary, I can’t afford all these magazines even at my death bed. However, I would love to hoard them. I read any of these magazines and their writing would rival the compelling narrative of any novel worth its salt.

You may read all these magazines cover-to-cover on the net without any undue pressure on your conscience. However, the designing of these magazines is done in such a way that your heart would pine for a print edition rather than their digital cousins. You pick up an Empire magazine, which is the best film magazine after Cahiers Du cinema, and just see how much happens on every page. They don’t slap the content and a picture in the middle, which New Yorker does and is justified in doing so for the last 85 years. The sense of humour in Empire and Q is all pervasive to the extent that even the picture captions are a hoot and, mind you, the intellectual value is never diluted. I don’t understand a single music term but I consider reading the interviews in Rolling Stone and Spin almost an on-the-job training.

Spectator introduced me to probably the most insouciant movie critic called Deborah Ross. Her personalised reviews opened a whole new world of movie criticism that doesn’t necessarily tip a hat at Pauline Kael, Roger Ebert. It’s fascinating to know how magazine culture is embedded in the westerners’ DNA. I don’t know if we all came from Gogol’s overcoat, but as a cinephile I can certainly attest to the fact that the best cinema came from Cahiers Du Cinema with the likes of Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, nouvelle vague, starting from there. The kind of stories the western magazines come up with while giving a big middle-fingered salute to hard news can be some delicious food of thought for the news-obsessed magazines that are available in India.

Our magazines insert all kind of forks in that eight-inch pie called news magazines. The features are downright risible and expecting insight on any issue would be optimism on steroids. Except Caravan, which shows a semblance of audacity to cock a snook at hard news, our magazines have a lot of soul searching to do. I am not saying I’ve become a better writer after poring through these magazines’ delicious prose. I still remain, and would continue to remain, someone who, as my former professor once said, “can’t write to save his life”. However, I find it almost epiphanic that I can add an extra dimension to an American president’s quote, “I am not educated but I read magazines”.

Too big to fail fail

2010-05-14T11:59:00.001-07:00

After 40 years, the Vatican has forgiven The Beatles for claiming to be more “popular than Jesus Christ”. But will there ever be redemption for Llyod Blankfein who claimed he was doing “God’s work” when his investment bank Goldman Sachs came to exemplify Wall Street’s rapacious brilliance? New York Times journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin’s book Too Big To Fail: Inside The Battle To Save Wall Street doesn’t offer any easy answers but it surely makes a case for Wall Street biggies, who have been branded anything from “fat cats” to “vampire squid”.

With their laser-like focus on making money, hook, line and sinker, the investment bankers could easily be mistaken as modern-day Meursault, who wouldn’t be out of place while mouthing, “Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday. I don’t know.” Sorkin’s hefty book is about the backroom dealings among the dramatis personae, which involves the Who’s Who of Wall Street, to avoid an, to quote the then US treasury secretary Henry Paulson, “economic 9/11”. After reading the book, most looked to me a bit like Lennie in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men with their lumbering frame and slowness in grappling with reality.

Three-fourths of the book’s narrative runs on parallel tracks with Dick Fuld, CEO of Lehman Brothers, trying to save the company from an eventual bankruptcy and Paulson and his coterie battening down the hatches to stanch the bleeding during the financial tsunami. Sorkin’s minute-by-minute construction of the fateful week in 2008 when Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae and Lehman Brothers went belly up, and the US government was branded socialist, is done in a typical NYT fashion — racy, unobtrusive, confident, well-informed.

Sorkin’s first story for NYT was a 400-word piece on the tinnitus-inducing sound emanating from dial-up modems. This eye (and ear) for detail is to be seen all over the book where he elevates a simple fact with the help of anecdotes, which shouldn’t be hard for him considering his notorious proximity to his “sources” as a mergers and acquisitions specialist. Here’s one: JPMorgan bought a beleaguered Bear Stearns’ shares at $2/share and “when Fuld first heard the $2 number from his staff in New York, he thought the airplane’s phone had cut out, clipping off part of the sum”. That’s when you understand the gravity of the situation that this is not a cycle but, to quote Paulson, “once-in-a-hundred-year flood”.

Too Big To Fail doesn’t tell you in detail about the financial alchemy that brought the biggest spending binge to a screeching halt. What’s more, the reader will start swimming in the alphabetical soup of CDO, CDS, the junk bonds, responsible for the meltdown, only from the 89th page. Reading Niall Ferguson’s Ascent Of Money should do a world of good on that subject. The book’s first half plays out like the Lost TV series with every chapter focusing on key players and how they made their way through pecking order. Half way through the book takes Dr Strangelove overtones — you know a bomb (bankruptcy and forced mergers) is going to explode but how is the moot question.

Sorkin remains faithful to the subtitle and how. Every tic of the smallest player involved has been captured in this compelling book. Jim Wilkinson, Paulson’s chief of staff, marvelled at the crisis, “This would be extremely interesting from an analytical perspective if it wasn’t happening to us.” Such a quote would breathe its last at the desk of a newspaper or magazine but it’s these quotes that become the book’s flesh and blood. I am a shining testimony. I lived with the book for nine days and got some puzzling looks from co-passengers in Mumbai’s local trains, considering a 90th minute winner’s kind of manic glee was forever pasted on my face.

The editor, however, was caught napping on more than one occasion. At certain chunks of the book Sorkin rambles without making any headway. Three chapters start on a similar note and the epochal Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy ends on a mawkishly predictable note. Dick Fuld could be seen throughout the book pleading with Paulson to ban short-sellers but Sorkin never shows anything more than a passing interest. Michael Lewis’ The Big Short should be enlightening on this subject. The much-talked-about bailout, the Troubled Asset Relief Programme (TARP) to be specific, comes unheralded. To state these kinds of facts, the analogy of how to boil a frog is apt: Change the temperature quickly, and the frog jumps out of the pot. But slowly increase the temperature, and the frog doesn’t realise that things are getting warmer, until it’s been boiled. Sorkin clearly doesn’t know the boiling techniques.

Sorkin’s obsession with the Long Term Capital Management disaster, a US hedge fund that lost $4.6 billion in the wake of the Russian financial crisis in 1998, is evident in the book when he harks back to the event at the drop of the hat. The book’s timelines would be a constant bugbear with some TARP beneficiaries already paying back the government money and the ongoing probe into allegations against Goldman Sachs that it deliberately pushed its shareholders into the financial abyss. But then that would be akin to not seeing the wood for the trees. Neither should an odd spelling mistake nor journalistic cliches (“none other than”) nor grammatical howler put you off. That’s the least you can do for this awesome fly-in-the-wall account of the financial crisis as observed through the eyes of the clashing Wall Street CEOs and the government regulators who watched powerless from the sidelines.

IPL, EPL: Leagues Apart

2010-04-01T06:36:00.000-07:00

"To put things in perspective the amount of money spent on Kochi and Pune's IPL teams is same as that spent on Manchester City last year,” said Indian Express (don't judge me, it's my job). Until then my when-it-comes-to-math-I-turn-dyslexic mind didn’t fathom the gravity of the million billion rupees splurged by the latest owners of two new franchisees of Indian Premier League (if you are one among the 29 people who don't know what it is, I am not explaining and, trust me, I envy you). Does this mean that IPL is IPL and EPL (English Premier League) is EPL and the twain does meet? Are you (certain Mr Modi) effin' kiddin’ me?

I don't mind the money part but I do have problem with this run making orgy fest, where bowlers are reduced to leather-chasing masochists, being touted as India's answer to EPL (the name itself is a derivative). I never saw Roman Abramovic talking about finer details of football on the cathode tube while in IPL the owners masquerade as coaches at the dugouts. Those marble dolls with alabaster cheeks can be seen talking about "team strategies" as if they are giving a power point presentation on selecting curtains for kitchen. The moment a wicket falls or the ball soars over the boundary, camera shifts to the pretty owners or, in the case of reclusive ones, to the anodyne pelvic thrusts of cheerleaders. You have to give it to Lalit Modi, the IPL chairman, though that he sold everything that is worth selling. If the 1985 World Series was dubbed as the Packer's Circus, the IPL is truly Modi's harem.

Modi is, however, justified for devising every which way to make money but the moral high stand that he takes gets onto my nerves. He says that IPL is a platform for young cricketers to rub shoulders with the players they admire. That’s bollocks. The condescension on the part of the senior players can never be more apparent. Here's a rookie bowler, who'll get a ball signed by the "man himself" (Sachin Tendulkar), for bowling his heart out. I don't remember a younger Rooney genuflecting before Giggs so that he would get an inflated football as souvenir. Thus, seamless integration is still a genuine problem.

Has playing well in IPL changed the fortune of any local player apart from Ravindra Jadeja, who ironically is 'banned'? Will we throng the stadiums to watch Ranji matches where the IPL performers will be playing? The answers for both queries is no with a capital N. In fact, Brendon Mc Cullum even said recently that one-day international is well on the dinosaur way looking at the amount of 20-20 being played these days. If you know your cricket, Mc Cullum is not puritanical by any standards.

A couple of days ago Times of India (like I said, it's my job) carried an anchor story on front page that on basis of weekly wages IPL players are next only to their NBA counterparts. Good for the players but then that's it. The IPL is sending a wrong signal out there when it bears the name of a country where, according to Wall Street Journal newspaper, only 1 per cent of the 1.2 billion population earns above Rs 85,000 per month (Arjun Sengupta report is so 2007). With this NBA comparison are we to forget for a fleeting while (six weeks precisely) that we continue to be a third world country and that we are far ahead of England (EPL) and Spain (La Liga)? In a recent Spectator article, these were Lee Langley’s words, “The privileged (in India) inhabit an environment of fitness gyms, personal trainers, mobile phones, chauffeur-driven limos, lipo-suction and designer labels, blind to the filth and decay outside their radar, where millions live as they have always lived, clinging to survival by their fingernails.” Superbowl of India – my arse!!

IPL will face its major litmus test next year when two new teams will come and the pool of players remains stagnant. Therefore, here comes Brian Lara, Lance Klusener and all those geriatrics, who couldn't even find a commentary job. If IPL was a movie, it would have been put by a critic as a bastard child of 'Wild Hogs' and 'League of Extraordinary Gentlemen'. With these teething problems, IPL is nowhere up there as yet. So, for now, leave those inane comparisons to a future date and revel in the mindless display of tits and ass.

P.S: Don't stop supporting Deccan Chargers, like my room-mate, just because it 'represents' Hyderabad (Telangana) and you belong to coastal Andhra.

War against emoticons

2010-03-10T04:52:00.001-08:00

Truth be told, “Frowning At Smileys” was the headline in my mind until a Daily Telegraph article ended with this bleak portentous line, “In the future Shakespearean tragedies would be rewritten in a series of downcast emoticons”. Thus, the headline, which, to the uninitiated, is derived from Martin Amis’ sublime book “War Against Cliches”. Be it on gTalk, the Google equivalent of Yahoo! Messenger or on sms, my florid sentences aimed at the cerebral cortex of the recipient fail to register until they are followed by a miniature version of a Halloween pumpkin with gamut of emotions pasted on it.

If you are reading this then I don’t think I really need to delve into how a colon followed by bracket or a semi-colon for that matter or a colon followed by ‘p’ are supposed to represent your current state of mind. Thanks to the smileys I am always skeptical if the irony or sarcasm in my words is being noticed at all by the person, usually those of fairer sex, on the other side. Thus, I follow it with a smiling emoticon to convey the hilarity intended. In short, during this virtual communication people are in a verbal Jacuzzi – a pool of warm, swirling water, relaxing yet constantly moving and challenging – but only if smileys are there in the water.

For every intelligent remark that I make online or on sms I make it a point to tag a smiley along or, even worse, an exclamation mark. In my earlier job my editor’s thumb-rule while editing is to avoid exclamation marks. Why? It’s like laughing at your joke, he said. What about people who use at least three exclamation marks to convey the gravity of situation? Author Terry Pratchett said that everyone of those has a diseased mind(!).

I am no Luddite, by the way. I dig YouTube, I tweet my movie watching schedules, I update my Facebook status every nine hours (mostly I am a quote hanger there), until recently my religious views on Facebook was ‘pro-piracy’. I almost qualify as a poster child to that new saw making rounds, “I am only popular on the Internet”. My problem with the smileys is that they are making me feel inferior. While I am trying to woo (or whatever you kids call wooing these days) that ‘new’ Facebook friend with my Kevlar-like grip, suspend your disbelief for a while, over English, I am almost sure that the words would ring hollow until there’s a smiley lurking around.

For the record, I have no problem against swimming in the alphabetical soup of tsk tsk or lol or hehe or rotfl. I know that’s like quitting drinking, but making an exception for beer and hard liquor (I am so tempted to use a smiley, preferably the wink one, here). But then, dealing with bigger evil is of more important. For now, I hope there is an Alcoholics Anonymous or sex-rehab (a certain Mr Woods would attest to it) equivalent for shedding the addictive habit of mine to use smileys. Smiley patches may be?

Needed: quality criticism

2010-03-10T04:50:00.000-08:00

In his early 20s, film-maker Quentin Tarantino used to wait for movies to release. Not necessarily to watch them but to read the trenchant reviews of Pauline Kael, the then New Yorker movie critic. The way she used to tear into movies was a masochist’s delight. In India, we too wait every Friday to watch the Bollywood fare and as far as film criticism is concerned we go by the ‘stars’.

Despite the existing shoddy standards in the country I still consider film criticism as journalism and this star system would qualify for that ultimate term of humiliation, lazy journalism. I don’t know if Google is making us stupid but this star system is definitely dumbing us down. As Richard Schickel , a Los Angeles Times book reviewer puts it, “Opinion — thumbs up, thumbs down — is the least important aspect of reviewing.”

French film-maker Jean Luc Godard once remarked that a movie should have a start, middle and finish but not exactly in that order. Maybe he was referring to his days as a film critic as well. Writing a movie review is as creative as any other art form is. The proof is in the pudding called Western journalism. Pick up any daily or magazine in US and UK and their reviewing standards are so high that it would seem they were always destined to be film critics.

Cut to India, except Bhardwaj Rangan, who reviews for The New Indian Express, no other Indian movie reviewer (film criticism is not their forte) comes closer to global standards. (Full disclosure: I worked at the desk of The New Indian Express in Bangalore for 19 months.) Rangan is the only person, who seems to have taken Godard’s remark to heart, and that can be seen in his reviews. He doesn’t start like everyone else in his Indian brethren with mundane details like plot outline, how good or bad the lead actors were, if the second half was better than first half or vice-versa.

Rangan starts his review with a minor gem of a scene in the movie (a la Roger Ebert and Nigel Andrews) and from there on he takes off. He tries to find global parallels for even the biggest cinematic duds. I am not even talking about his breathtaking writing, which would leave all the other reviewers’ writing akin to hanging their underwears in the open. Case in point: I almost barfed when the review of Kurbaan in a ‘reputed’ daily started off with “first things first”. I wonder if all fourth ratehacks end up as film critics here. It’s so easy to imagine Rangan as a Woody Allen character in an empty train coach and on the parallel track is revelry populated by the other reviewers.

Some less-informed people tell me that conventional reviews will die soon what with the blogs allowing everyone to voice their opinion. I don’t think this argument merits a counter argument simply because our blogging culture is still in its infancy. We have people who watch the movie first day morning show and put up a wishy washy ‘review’ on their blog. With a vocabulary that doesn’t go beyond ‘awesome’ and ‘superb’, I don’t want to waste my time reading such spontaneous drivel. Rangan too started off as a blogger but then he took his craft seriously unlike the latest crop of smug bloggers, who think of themselves as the final authority on any movie and can’t say who A O Scott is or what Criterion Collection means. Had J D Salinger ever ventured out of his Cornish castle, these bloggers would have been the first ones to be branded ‘phoneys’.

For Christ’s sake, Sistine Chapel is awesome not the jejune balatkar joke in Three Idiots. I know am digressing. The need for conventional criticism has never been more felt than now when life is manically divided into 140 characters, three minute you tube videos and “my kitty is sick” status messages. Any form of art that is not on the top will have to vie for space with millions others because of the fragmentation of media. This is where the critic can make all the difference by separating the wheat from the chaff (read sensible from juvenile).

For now, the situation seems so dire that I am forced to give an extra dimension to a Richard Feynman’s statement: “movie reviews are as important to Indian moviegoers as much as ornithology is to birds”.

A-Z of Jaipur Literature Festival

2010-01-29T01:41:00.000-08:00

For any self-respecting reader, the Jaipur Literature Festival is the best that could have happened after the invention of the Guternberg press. The fifth edition of the “greatest literary show on the earth” as a vinyl board at the venue says, just got bigger and better. Here’s an A-Z of the who’s who and what’s what of the event.

A— Applebaum, Anne: The Pulitzer-winning author and Slate columnist was in her elements when speaking about the gulags in Russia and dissecting John Kampfner’s book on where people should draw a line when it comes to public freedom in totalitarian countries.

B— Bollywood: You can run but not hide from the world’s second biggest movie market. Everyone perceived to be cerebral in the tinsel world was present at the event. Namely, Shabana Azmi, Javed Akhtar, Rahul Bose, Om Puri, Ketan Desai.

B— Bhagat, Chetan: Love him or hate him or even if you don’t have the foggiest idea of who he is, it’s hard to ignore the “best-selling author”. He actually got a rockstar reception when he swaggered onto the stage to interview Ira Trivedi, Anjum Hasan and Meenakshi Madhavan.

C— Capitalism: Right from Vikram Chandra to Lord Meghnad Desai, Marx’s class conflicts and statements like consumerism is the opium of masses were evoked in various for a during the festival.

D— Democracy: Amit Chaudhuri and family was waiting behind me in the queue to serve themselves the scrumptious feast. Pulitzer-winning journalist Lawrence Wright was asking if he can sit beside me. William Dalrymple had to make do with a space on bare floor owing to lack of sitting space. Much as the discussions at the festival were more-or-less elite, the festival’s marrow was connected to democracy.

E— Entertainment: Everything from beat-boxing to the earthy Rajasthani folk music was to be heard every night during dinner. My favourite was Susheela Raman singing the famous Namesake song. How can the entire world be elsewhere when something to sulbime is happening?

F— Ferguson, Niall: This man is the Judd Apatow of the intelligentsia. He writes at least two articles every week for Financial Times, pulls out one book every year, teaches at various Ivy League institutes and even finds time to fight with Paul Krugman. Does he ever sleep? When asked, he said five hours and I am still taking it with a pinch of salt considering his pessimistic Scottish humour seeped into evey corpuscle of my body.

G— Gulzar: The Durbar Hall was teeming with swarms of people to get a glimpse of the famous poet reading his poems.

H— Hour-class figures: Every connoisseur of beauty with brains would feel like a kid lost in toy shop. It defies human imagination that so many pulchritude-personified women can be under one roof.

I— India: Though there were people from all over the world and the discussions ranged from denouncing Scotland and Obama administration’s attitude toward Bin Laden, India was, however, never forgotten. For every Wole Soyinka reading there was a Mimlu Sen talking about the Baul music. For every Ghost Wars, there was a Sacred Games too being celebrated on the sidelines.

J— Jaipur: The influence of Jaipur in the festival is not to be missed. The venue, Diggi Palace, a construct on the lines of the erstwhile Maharajahs’ guest houses, brings the city within the hotel alive. What’s more, step out and Hawa Mahal is a Rs 40 auto-ride away. Behind is the imposing Secretariat. Dalrymple pulled off a masterstroke to conduct the event away from the humdrum of Delhi.

K— Karnad, Girish: The eminent playwright inaugurated the festival and, thus, added that touch of Indian class to the festival where subsequent events were essentially going to be about foreign land.

L— Line of no control: No one bit their tongue at the event. Tenzing Tsundue went on a tirade against Tibet and a youngster termed the discussion between a battery of intellectuals like Max Rodenbeck, Steve Coll, Lawrence Wright, Tunku Varadarajan, Kai Bird as “bitter rhetoric” and “something straight out of FOX news”.

M— Memories: Brigid Keenan, Geoff Dyer, Tony Wheeler recalled their memories of travelling across the world. Wheeler, the founder of Lonely Planet series, spoke about his hippie travelling and for the uninitiated it was a good throwback to an era where bohemian was the catchphrase.

N— Nine-to-five: Even though the schedule was from ten-to-five, any star struck reader would reach venue at nine itself to have a more free-wheeling conversation with the writers having their breakfast.

O— Oeuvre: The lifetime of works of people like Wole Soyinka, Roddy Doyle, Hanif Kureishi, Niall Ferguson was discussed at lengths during the festival. For the uninitiated, this was the best way to get sucked into the magic world of their words.

P— Piquant: Without mentioning the delicious food served over the five days, the literature festival will not be getting its just due. Various dishes from Dal Bhati Churma to lamb dipped in red wine were waiting to melt in the mouths of gourmet galore at the festival.

Q— Quip: Some really blood curdling questions were asked at the fest and the one that takes the cake was a remark made by Javed Akhtar. He took Steve Coll head on for being pro-American and negated him on Coll’s theory that Bin Laden is alive. Akhtar believes that Laden is dead and pray why, because no tape of his came out in the last one year. How I wished he stayed for one more day when Laden claimed responsibility for the botched Decmber 25 explosion.

R— Rendition: If there’s anything more magical about Amit Chaudhuri than his words, then it’s his music.

S—Spoilt for choice: For once, I wished I was in Soviet Union where choice wasn’t a problem. How can you swear allegiance to one writer and not to the other one whom you equally worship?

T—Tension: I can imagine the tension in Diggi Palace when Ayan Hirsi Ali made a secret visit. She has a fatwa issued against her for getting involved in a movie called Submission, which chronicled Islam’s evil influence on Muslims.

U— Under the Kilt: In the tranquil surroundings of Diggi Palace, an event on Scottish ethos was the destination of rambunctious laughter. Niall Ferguson, Alexander McCall Smith, Andrew ’O Hagan and William Dalrymple spoke about the Scottish pessimism and the Scots’ superiority complex, most visible in the current famous Scots, Gordon Brow, Alistair Darling and David Cameron. Had the festival been on television, this one would have got the maximum TRPs.

V— Varadarajan, Tunku: The greatest testament to this cerebral man’s intelligence is how easily in a single breath he jumps from conspiracy theories abounding in West Asia to effect of Kindle on books.

W- William, Dalrymple: The festival director wore more than just one cap. He moderated plethora of discussions, did readings of his books, was listening to many talks and even managed to intone a few lines from his latest book while the Bauls were singing.

X— Xanadu: The festival is nothing less than the Chinese province where Kubla Khan establishes his pleasure garden in his famous poem.

Y— Yankeeland: There were more foreigners to be seen at the festival than Indians or may be I was looking through a jaundiced eye.

Z— Zeal: This was an emotion that was all-pervasive all the five days. Everyone wanted to know everything that was to be known at the festival.

Tyranny of trade

2010-01-29T01:40:00.001-08:00

The audience was so enraptured in the first discussion of day three that a perfectly innocuous even like taking down notes drew quite a few disapporving pairs of eyes. Who said everything that needs to be invented has been invented? A pen that wouldn't make any noise when put to paper will have its niche market; especially when Tarun Tejpal is moderating a discussion on John Kampfner's new book with the writer himself, Niall Ferguson, Anne Applebaum, Meghnad Desai, Steve Coll in the panel. Kampfner's book is a case study of eight countries where people are involved in a 'trade-off' with the respective countries for material comforts in return for public freedom like staging public protests against government policies, free media.

Kampfner cited Singapore, China, Russia, UAE, India, Italy, US, UK as his examples. Applebaum agreed with Kampfner's analysis and advocated for redefining of private and public freedom. She said that in any country, 10 per cent are filthy collaborators" with govt for personal benefit, 10 per cent are "brave opponents", 80 per cent are bothered all about how to send their children to best colleges.

Next event was "Writing About Music". This discussion moderated by Sunil Sethi was a damp squib of sorts because the people in the panel, with an honourable exception of Louis De Bernieres, got self-indulgent and kept rambling on their respective books. I thought I would get to hear what exactly will a layman make of a chord, riff, cadence, falsetto, the terminology used to describe music, in music writing. How I pined for Amit Chaudhuri, as per the original plan, was the moderator.

Whatever bad taste was left in my mouth, faded into oblivion in the next event about the craft of travel writing. Geoff Dyer spoke about the queue culture in India, William Dalrymple about hitting a blank wall in the form of a Pakistani policeman in Lahore a good two decades ago, Isabel Hilton about her trip to the exotic land of Greenland and Brigid Keenan about her stay in Tajikistan as an EU diplomat's wife.

Next up was Dalrymple holding a tete-a-tete with Tony Wheeler, the founder of the iconic Lonely Planet publication. During the conversation Wheeler recounted his travels through South East Asia during his hippie days ('70s) with his wife. During his globetrotting Wheeler hit upon the idea to start Lonely Planet, a name derived from a song called Space Captain in a British movie.

The mother of all discussions was of course Niall Ferguson talking with writer Omair Ahmad about the former's monster hit "Ascent of Money". By terming financial history 'sexy', Ferguson ensured that those in Durbar Hall are not going to tread tested waters, but choppy ones. Who said best-selling authors will be best-selling authors and serious writers willbe serious writers and the twain shall never meet? Ferguson shatterd all such myths, at least for those in the Durbar Hall.

Ferguson teaches, writes books, columns and even fights with Paul Krugman but if one description fits him like a glove, then it's historian. He said that how the recession is not getting its historic due because this is financial history happening to us, which might never happen again. He said that the investment bankers are not to be blamed for the financial mess that the world found itself in. Ferguson put the moral baggage on everyone who has a bank account of being complicit in the financial bloodshed. He had words of praise for India and expressed paranoia over British companies being bought over by Tatas and other Indian behemoths.

He, however, stuck to the Chimerica phrase and said that US needs China to survive. US imports and China exports, US spends and China saves. At this juncture I wonder what if China decides to sell its the foreign capital of $800 billion. Doesn't matter, for now let's revel in Ferguson's writing.

Susheela Raman's singing during the dinner was the choicest of cherry to top off what has been an eventful day.

Conspiracy theory theory

2010-01-29T01:38:00.000-08:00

Why are there no Karma Police at the Jaipur Literature Festival? Shouldn't they be arresting Kai Bird for talking in math and buzzing like a fridge? The reason Radiohead's famous lyrics were playing on the back of my head is that the eminent biographer was at the helm of affairs on day two's first two events.

In the first one, Bird was in conversation with Claire Tomalin about the art of biography. At the end of if, what did I take home? Biography is not art, it's sweat. Your subject seduces you if he is alive. Minor characters are the prism throught which you view your subjects and, this is my favourite, best biographies have been written by journalists.

Then Bird moved to the Mughal Tent, where he was joined by Forbes columnist Tunku Varadarajan and New Yorker journalist Lawrence Wright on why conspiracy theories abound in all the crannies of the world. Moderated by famous West Asia correspondent Max Rodenbeck, the panel discussed topics as diverse as the single assassin of Robert Kennedy and checking out the possibility of there being explosives in the World Trade Centre towers prior to the aircraft hitting the twin towers.

While the intellectual masturbation that is all-pervasive in such discussions, the panel actually came out with panacea, it's fleeting nature notwithstanding, to suppress the proliferation of the Chinese whispers. Tunku said democracy is the perfect antidote to conspiracy theories that are wilfully devoid of evidence (case in point: the very fact that Lebanon is fragmented according to the theory that you subscribe to).

It makes perfect sense that after a talk on why human mind loves conspiracies, it is followed by Steve Col talking about his Pulitzer-winning work Ghost Wars. Willian Dalrymple moderated the talk and managed to get all the gut wrenching details as to how the New Yorker journalist debriefed a Pakistani ISI agent in Dusseldorf. The most fruitful part of the discussion was when they described the nature of the beast called al-Qaeda. The way Coll describes how he gained access to the bin Laden family made him a new-age Jack Nicholson from Antonioni's "Passenger". What was, however, disconcerting was the fact that there were not many present in the audience.

After a scrumptious feast of Rajasthani cuisine and lamb dipped in red wine, I went to the Mughal Lawns to listen to Isabel Hilton and Tenzing Tsundue talking about Tibet. Isabel, author of much-acclaimed "In Search of Panchen Lama" and Tenzing, a Tibetan fighting for the Tibet cause, kept talking in a show-China-in-a-bad-light tone. Yes, China might be suppressing the muffled cries for Tibetan democracy but then that's a tacit Faustian pact that people in countries like China, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, Myanmar have made with the respective governments in order for social security and material comforts.

The event I was eagerly looking forward to happened in the front lawn over a white elephant that the publishing industry would avoid looking at, as if it's a car wreck- Internet. "Can The Internet Save books?". Well, yes and no is what the group of panelists said. Novelist Vikram Chandra found it highly ironic that people are crying hoarse about the sooner-or-later death of printed work. Chandra said that just like Gutenberg made the quill obsolete, Internet is doing something similar. some serious food for thought, that is.

Tunku Varadarajan hit the nail straight into the head by lamenting over the "declining intellectual standards of Indians". He said the discussion is virtually useless because in the end, good writing is all that people need, be it on the cathode tube or papyrus roll. Tina Brown, former Vanity Fair editor and editor of Daily Beast, quoted a disconcerting statistic for the worshippers of printed word; that she got as many readers for Daily Beast in a year as she got in Vanity Fair in the last eight years. However, she hastened to add that long form narrative is not to be seen online, something magazines like New Yorker, vanity Fair specialise in.

Thus, her future plan to put 40,000 word pieces online from various writers and then bring them out later as a short paperback. That was music to the years of those present.

Literary shmiterary

2010-01-29T01:37:00.000-08:00

What is the colour of the sky seen from the rest of the earth? Yours truly is in Diggi Palace attending the 5th Jaipur Literature Festival and from here it's a life-altering experience to see the writers you revere in flesh and blood. I wish I had the keen autograph hunter streak in me.

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"The greatest literary show on earth" is what anyone a few feet from Diggi Palace would get to see. Is that an exaggeration? Well, wait until you enter the hallowed portals of the venue where it's a lovely sight to see writers being treated in an over-the-top fashion. Thanks to few accommodation hassles I missed out on the inauguration address by Girish Karnad. Next up was a discussion on the art of criticism moderated by Business Standard literary critic Nilanjana S Roy and speakers being Amitava Kumar, Geoff Dyer and Amit Chaudhury.

Minor gripe: Andrew O'Hagan the former Daily Telegraph movie critic couldn't take part in the discussion. Had the place where the discussion was taking place was a person, it would have slashed its wrists, such was the despair among the speakers about the lack of seriousness among Indian newspapers for literary criticism. "Absence of compelling literary journals like London Review of Books or New York Review of Books," as Amit Chaudhry puts it. Dyer, whose new book is about his travels to Venice and Varanasi, lamented that book reviewing is becoming much less important, This, from a man who himself started out as a critic.

Amit Chaudhry said that Indian criticism scene lacks the panache to pull off a good review of a badly written book. "Demolition has to be done with wit and interestingly," he said. Writer Arvind Krishna Mehrotra went a step ahead even while sitting among the audience by saying that when talking about literary criticism leave India out of discussion. He went on to quote Bengali writer Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, who cried his heart out in the 1870's for there being no healthy criticism scene.

After this gut wrenching session, Claire Tomalin's talk about Jane Austen was a fresh breath of air, literally also, because it happened in an open air session. Tomalin's love for Austen was visible in her breathtaking biography (Jane Austen: A Life) of the woman who did to feminism what Christopher Hitchens did to atheism- championing their respective causes.

Tomaline regaled her audience, which included festival director and famous writer William Dalrymple, with some delectable trivia about Austen. If anyone else were to say did you know Austen bought her stockings from a street peddler, you would brush it off as prurient interest but with Tomalin these details get radioactive and will glow in your mind hours after hearing her speak. Tomalin couldn't hide her glee that Austen rejected Harris Bigg-Wither's marriage proposal. And nothing seems to have given Tomalin more kicks than the fact that by the time she was 25, Austen had three, to-be-major later, books yet to be published. Thank god for small mercies like Austen not wanting to be a part of the marriage market.

The next event was a conversation between Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum and Forbes journalist Tunku Vardarajan about former's Pulitzer-winning book "On The Gulag".

This was arguably the day's piece de resistance and I didn't feel a tinge of guilt for skipping Gulzar's poetry reading session for this. Gulags can be called as the old-fashioned Guantanamo Bays being run by the Soviet Union from 1929-53 to apparently oppress political opposition. An estimated 18 million people have been affected due to the gulags. The Soviet Union's unremitting appetitie for maintaining records has proven to be Applebaum's manna from the haven; for she read all the documents and, thus, each starts life as a kind of archipelago of depressing details. Applebaum deftly built bridges between the islands.

Tomorrow promises another fascinating day what with Claire Tomalin talking about the art of biography and Wole Soyinka doing readings of his famous books. Personally, I am looking forward to New Yorker journalit Steve Coll's conversation with Atiq Rahimi.

Everyone should love a good recession

2010-01-29T01:36:00.001-08:00

“I don’t understand business and I don’t even want to because my math is atrocious. I am into features. End of discussion,” said a female friend of mine, who is a writer at a leading fashion magazine. I found this, the way you perceive, statement or confession, scandalous. Here’s why.

I am sure there must be many more like my friend, who are blithely unaware of the recession that befell on everyone in the recent past. However, let me limit my rant to my friend as she is in the field of journalism and, more importantly, she’s a features writer.

In journalistic parlance features are the articles that are not essentially newsy, are discursive and more contemplative than the spot news. In the last 20 months the best features have been on the meltdown. Vanity Fair, arguably one of the best fashion magazines, had incisive reportage on AIG, Alan Stanford and Bernie Madoff’s fall to disgrace. Onion, the parody newspaper, known for its headlines replete with banana peel humour and cerebral content, had a story on how the pins industry is thriving in the wake of recession.

According to the story, due to the pink slips and various kind of foreclosure notices that have to be stuck up for viewing, pins were used left, right and centre. Isn’t this a feature story? At least the people who visited the newspaper’s site thought so and it was the top story for weeks. Consider this Financial Times story- every major financial institution that went belly up in the US had a Starbucks outlet, the US equivalent of India’s Cafe Coffee Day, around the corner. How is something as innocuous as a cafe be in cahoots with the men, whose glutton-like appetite for money was unprecedented? All the paper work for those insidious junk bonds called credit debt obligations was done sitting in the cafe’s plush settings. A simplistic story yes but a thought-provoking one too.

How can my friend be immune to the fact that this downturn made words like ‘toxic wife’, ’stimulus’, ‘deficit’ part of the urban patois? How can she repudiate the reality when the fashion designers had recession wear as the flavour of the season? Financial Times and Wall Street Journal are financial newspapers but they have the best fashion coverage among all the global newspapers.

Business journalism invariably involves a lot of math, which for the uninitiated might look discombobulated. That doesn’t preclude you from knowing the bare minimum. How else would you appreciate Matt Taibbi’s damning article on Goldman Sachs in a recent Rolling Stone issue, which is, well, a music magazine. Taibbi’s no-holds-barred article deconstructs the entire facade of the Wall Street giant in his inimitable fashion. He used swear words in the article in such a way that Martin Scorsese’s expletive-laced dialogues sound like sermon on the mount.

I am not asking my friend to wade through the alphabetical pool of CDO, TARP, AIG, NINJA and what not and come up trumps on the other side by understanding the nature of the beast that shaved at least $3 trillion money from banks and myriad financial organisations. All I am telling her is that when you are wedged between the Wall Street and Main Street, just make sure you don’t slip through the cracks.

Unsung heroes called sub-editors

2010-01-29T01:35:00.000-08:00

The modicum of awe that I inspire from strangers by saying I am a journalist dissipates into ether when I mention I am sub-editor. With their interest fast waning, people still manage to ask what exactly I do. “Oh not much, reporters file stories, I edit them, give headlines and make the pages” is my stock reply. I brush it off as a mundane job because it’s hard to describe it to the uninitiated.

How do you explain to people that a desk job is as enriching as the muck-raking done by the reporters? After all, looking at people’s reactions, a sub-editor is as much a journalist as Tintin was. Ironically, a sub-editor is the lowest common denominator. The reasons for such low awareness levels of my job is varied.

In popular culture, there have been books written ad nauseaum on the craft of reporting but next to nothing on copy editing. Only Tarun Tejpal’s “Alchemy of Desire” comes somewhere close to describing the agony of a sub-editor. Now, there’s not much hope too with obituaries of newspapers being a stock-in trade of many doomsayers and Facebook groups like ‘Save Sub-editors’ proliferating. I don’t even expect there to be any John Travolta straight out of Pulp Fiction to revive copy editing with a shot of adrenaline administered straight to the heart.

Most newspapers in this country, or world for that matter, are desk-driven. At the moment, I can recall only one Indian newspaper that is reporter driven. As a Times of India senior editor once told me, intellectual churning happens at the desk. Little wonder then that at all the foreign newspapers most of the news stories have the byline of a sub-editor and at the end they would mention the reporter’s name. A practice unheard of in this part of the world.

And why not? After all, we people work graveyard shifts to pull out the paper, make packages, give a catchy headline by putting our intellectual toolkit under immense duress, social life goes for a toss and, as Garrison Keillor once put it, turn into alcoholics by the time we turn 50. This, apart from discounting the taunts, some valid ones notwithstanding, of reporters that we don’t have to run around for quotes. After so much toil, a copy editor’s job is deemed akin to working on Large Hadron Collider- something special but not of much interest for common man.

Small digression: Economist has realised this and made it an egalitarian newspaper, who are you to call it magazine if it thinks otherwise, where there are no bylines given. A touch injustice though with such brilliant writing getting published with no name attached.

If you come across any journalist who is faking fluency in every subject, then on most occasions that would be a sub-editor. We make Karl Marx’s following remark our professional dictum, “Anything human is not alien to me.” A reporter would be caught tongue-tied if asked anything beyond his or her ‘beat’. All this doesn’t mean that we are saintly. Yes, we bitch about the reporters’ writing that they can’t write to save their lives. Yes, we lament at the lack of legitimacy attached to our craft. Evelyn Waugh nailed it by mentioning in his seminal book, ‘Scoop’, that people don’t understand what toil goes behind the paper that they buy ‘for a penny’.

Next time when you read the newspaper, always remember what D H Lawrence said, “trust the novel, not the novelist”.

Do raise eyebrows over low brow

2010-01-29T01:31:00.000-08:00

Clad in a khadi kurti made in one of those sweatshops, with not a single strand of her straightened hair out of place and those chiselled facial features that transcend sexual tendencies; this local train co-passenger resembled a Cajun goddess. What’s more, she was reading a book. Blame the male mindset, if you have to, I even imagined ourselves as literary soulpartners walking into the sunset with our hands held. Anticipating a Netherland or at least a Sue Townsend I peeped into what she was reading and, here lies the dampener, it was (drum roll) Chetan Bhagat’s “Two States”. Whoooosshh! That’s how the crumbling of my imaginary castle sounded.

Why would anyone endure writing that is clunky and is the LOL equivalent of literature? Isn’t Chetan Bhagat essential reading only for those below 12 years? Why does India celebrate writers who can’t string two sentences together? These were the initial questions that popped up in my mind. I tried to find a pattern but all I have been able to glean is that we swear by bestsellers. Look at the books that made waves in the recent past, Da Vinci Code, Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series and, of course, Chetan Bhagat sack of chicken feed.

Most often you would find these names mentioned in the profiles of social networking sites’ users. I don’t mean that everyone ought to have mandarin tastes and should be reading W G Sebald and Patricia Highsmith. But do give Steig Larsson’s Millennium trilogy or closer to home, Samit Basu’s GameWorld trilogy a read.

It’s not the economic imbalance that is the difference between the third world countries and developed nations but the fact that printed word is celebrated in the latter and, well, not in the former. A US friend was telling me that everyone in the New York’s locals are to be seen reading books, a rare sight over here. My heart swells with pride at the sight of so many people reading the newspapers cover-to-cover in the Mumbai local trains. I hated Bangalore for not patronising newspapers (I, however, wonder why every newspaper is available in that bottomless pit of techiebabble). But then newspapers do not enrich one’s life the way books do. To think of it, they are not supposed to.

Some might say that the lack of reading culture may be attributed to the rise of Web but that is an argument that doesn’t deserve credence. A Pew Survey says that every American read at least ten books in 2009. This, when an average American spends ten hours on daily basis to swim across the ocean of hypertext links.

The cartoon in Atlantic Monthly captured the bestsellers’ phenomena very well by a bunch of kids holding Harry Potter books berating another child at a distance as ‘problem child’ for reading Charles Dickens. When I made a Mumbai friend privy to my rant, she said that the city is essentially ‘working class’. In that case, won’t Grapes of Wrath have greater resonance in Mumbaikars’ lives than Chetan Bhagat’s love story that is as interesting as watching wet paint getting dry.

I am not listening if you are going to mouth that gigantic cliche to justify proliferation of low brow art: “To each his own”.

Singles commingle, for once

2009-12-09T22:49:00.000-08:00

What exactly were the indie-rock band American Princes alluding to when they belted the following lyrics of their hit song “Real Love”?
I don't care about real love; I just want a world that can bear its own weight
I really don’t know but in the recent past I saw three movies that were thematically different but had the above lyrics at the heart of them. They are: Richard Linklater’s acclaimed Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004) and Alex Holdridge’s “In Search of a Midnight Kiss” (2007).

These movies are made of stuff that make up the wet dreams of the urbane youngsters – free-wheeling conversations, references that are elusive, no maudlin climax, Hollywood fare but no trappings. For the cinephiles these movies are the best things that could have happened to them after sliced bread and Nanook of the North – shoe-string budget, Dogme-invoking camera sequences, mumblecore before mumblecore. In fact, Holdridge’s feature is shot in black-and-white.

The movies are about the heady intersection in the lives of two lonely people who may never again see each other but, at that moment, being with each other is almost inevitable. Their roadmap is as follows: Man (Ethan Hawke) meets woman (Julie Delpy) on a train in Vienna (Before Sunrise) and asks her to spend a day with him. When a flustered Julie manages to mumble a why Hawke blurts out the most telling rationale ever witnessed on Hollywood screen: “Jump ahead 10, 20 years, okay? And you're married. Only your marriage doesn't have that same energy it used to have. You start to blame your husband. You think about all those guys you've met in your life... and what might've happened if you'd picked up with one of them. I'm one of those guys. That's me. So think of this as time travel.”

Thankfully Julie takes the bait and for the next 75 minutes the viewer gets a fly-on-the-wall account of the weighty and compelling conversation between the lead couple that even includes Hawke’s Proustian dream of his dead grandmother (I am excluding Annie Hall as it doesn’t qualify with Woody Allen hogging all the limelight, rightfully of course). As fate would have it they part their ways in the early morning with a firm resolution to meet after six months.

Linklater, of School of Rock fame, has other plans and the young couple comes across each other in Paris after nine years in Before Sunset (2004). Obviously, the enriching conversation resumes where it was left albeit on a more sedate tone, keeping their ages in view. Forget the threadbare storyline these two movies work solely on the basis of their dialogues and the way actors mesh.

An unwitting derivative of these two successful films is Alex Holdridge’s 2007 release, which is nowhere closer to Linklater’s cerebral tone. I mean you won’t see a Hawke-like man mimicking Dylan Thomas tone while reading out Auden. Banana peels are strewn all over but the lead couple’s charm would win you over. It’s New Year’s Eve and post break-up Wilson (Scott McNairy) is still recuperating in seclusion in Los Angeles. Goaded by his friend he signs up on craigslist to find a date with a hook of “Misanthrope seeks misanthrope” so as to spend the evening in a more eventful way. Lo and behold he gets a prospective date in the form of Vivian (Sara Simmonds).

A very engaging scene is the first encounter of the lead couple when Wilson finds himself at his wit’s end that Vivian is searching “for the love of her life” on a dating site. Vivian rambles and Wilson loves her self-indulgence and, consequently, the viewer gets sucked in. And why not after coming to know that Vivian takes pictures of every solitary picture that she comes across. Why? Who would lose only one shoe, she says. The viewer would be as dumfounded as Wilson and that’s no mean achievement. Holdridge and Linklater are thorough romantics because cynics cannot make these movies.

Only grouse: I wouldn’t mind spending another hour with these couples or maybe I am asking for too much just like the male leads do in these movies.

Is our country really going to dogs?

2009-12-09T22:37:00.000-08:00

While I was marveling at the fact that Iam McEwan's "Saturday" is available at a 'pirated' book stall, one man asked the seller in a surreptitious tone if 'Lost Symbol' is available only to be disappointed as the answer was a resounding no. With that my trance was broken and got me thinking why would anyone subject themselves to reading something, which is like getting lobotomy done on someone while that person is awake. Dan Brown has achieved a cult status among Indians for being a master storyteller when in fact his writing is clunky at best. The genesis of this undue reverence lies in our perception of art. Let's be brutally frank — the escapist form of art is what we like the best. We want to be entertained and in this pact of Faustian proportions we are willing to put our brains at home when it comes to the Bollywood movies that are made for an audience who has never seen a Hollywood movie or suspend disbelief if Langdon's escapades are described on paper.

In a recent Rolling Stone interview U2 vocalist Bono makes a telling statement that the saddest people he knows are the ones working for their own well-being. That is exactly the reason why our media gets a collective orgasm even if a dog catcher in the US happens to be an Indian American or if Danny Boyle makes an apology of a movie on a slum dweller's life. Except Tehelka to a large extent and Outlook to a minor extent, none of the other newspapers or magazines or the dime-a-dozen news channels are reporting on Naxalism and if at all they do, their reporting is done through a jaundiced eye. Little wonder that a leading news channel had a prime time debate on "If Naxals are the Taliban of India". Where is a country heading to if the media is pandering to the sensibilities of upper middle class?

The panacea to redeem such a hopeless situation is to ban television, which has become the retina of the mind's eye. You burn all the books in the library at the town hall and no one would care two hoots about it. You remove the same youngistan's televisions and they will be there in a jiffy armed with pump shots and pitchforks. Does all this inner decadence suggest that we are at a point of no return? Not really. I am in no way coercing everyone to be idealistic and foment a revolution similar to the ones seen in Iran and France. I am not asking you to shun your Twitter and Facebook accounts. All I am saying is that while you update your status message as "my kitty just sneezed", also read something stimulating. You might say to each his own but that doesn't mean you watch a trashy flick and mention it on your orkut profile.

The primary reason why our country is culturally bankrupt is the fact that we don't respect humanities as a subject. Sociology, anthropology are looked down upon and that is exactly the reason why the country is literally going to dogs. Every university wants to produce those factory made zombies called engineers but humanities is that pink elephant that is safely avoided. The other day I was reading W G Sebald's 'Austerlitz' where one character traverses Europe to trace the architectural history of the 19th century spas. If someone is to propose a similar idea in an Indian university with an Indian connection forget research funds, he or she would be branded as a lunatic.

Apart from Hindu no other newspaper gave the death of Claude Levi Strauss , 'the anthropology god', the kind of prominence it deserves. His structuralism has almost changed the way the intellectuals perceived the world. his structuralism theory said that every culture has some common traits and that went a long way to lend legitimacy to the eccentricities of Amerindians.

Unless there is an intellectual wave sweeping the country, Chetan Bhagat will be writing dimwit editorials about the youngistan.

Young spunk, more open, more books

2009-11-13T12:42:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-13T12:36:00.000-08:00

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

2009-09-24T05:11:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-12T05:26:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-21T05:13:00.001-07:00

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?