In August last year, my brief review of Ristorante Immortale by Familie Flöz had appeared in the Hindu. The detailed version is here.
This year, it’s my rather heavily-edited review of Shakespeare’s Midsummer’s Night Dream by the Yohangza Theatre Company from Korea. The detailed version will be up soon.
Posted in Madras, play, play review | Tags: theatre, theater, Chennai, Chennai theatre, Hindu Metroplus, theatre festival, Shakeapeare, Midsummer Night's Dream
I’m in love. With a foreign language. I am learning to live with its eccentricities everyday. It’s a beautifully strange experience. A brand new outlook to life opens up in front off like an abyss making my head spin.
Learning a new language is a bit like visiting a new country. You have to watch what you say, learn to navigate the ups and downs of the new terrain, and avoid the pitfalls along the way. En route, there is a lot of interference from other languages you have learned. I’m learning Spanish now and my nearly forgotten French still intervenes. I say, “pardon?” and “excuse moi!” even though I didn’t learn French for very long.
I fell in love with Spanish writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Pablo Neruda, Isabel Allende so many times based only on what they wrote. There must be something in the language that produces maddeningly creative writers like them one after the other. Is it the way they roll their “rr’s”? Is it the way they swallow their ”h’s”? Maybe they swallow their experiences and regurgitate it into magic as well. Maybe it is the very atmosphere of unrest, revolt, uncertainty that gives rise to such literature. When you know that death is imminent, there is an urgency to put down your thoughts/experiences. Or when you know thinking/writing is forbidden, thinking/writing becomes a way to protest, subvert, or reclaim what is lost.
However, when learning a new language, there are no such stratospheric ideas. I have far more mundane concerns - like what is the word for “chair”. Is “chair” masculine or feminine? While I am an adult in one language, I am a child in the other. I have to learn to walk all over again. It is a humbling and refreshing experience at the same time. On the one hand, I feel a weight lift off my shoulders, (since I don’t have to worry about making mistakes) on the other, I am impatient to run. To learn a new language when I’m an adult pushes the boundaries of my understanding. The language is new but my experiences aren’t. I will have to be patient till these two meet.
I have a CD-full of 80’s songs which a friend of mine had given me four or five years ago. But I hadn’t checked it out completely. Yesterday, I discovered it in my music collection and decided to listen to it. ABBA consisted a big part of the collection. One by one I listened to the ABBA songs but nothing nothing came close to Man after Midnight. I can listen to again and again. And in fact that is what I am doing. I don’t know what so appealing about it.
The uplifting disco beat is constantly throughout the song. The signature ABBA sound - multiple female vocals recorded one over the other - is unmissable: here Agnetha Fältskog’s oscillating vocals regales us. It’s ironic that a sentiment of a lonely woman gave birth to a peppy song. If you listen to the peppy ABBA long enough, at some point, you’d want to stand up and dance even if you know for sure that you can’t dance to save your life.
I see a such a similarity with Boney M; I’m thinking of Rasputin here. It could probably be a shared disco heritage. (ABBA started in the 60’s but carried on relentlessly through to the early 80’s.) I was just telling a friend of mine that we are so children of the 80’s. I love the 80’s sound: both Indian and Western. In India, I can think of the Nazia and Zoheb Hassan, the duo who gave us some of the best 80’s disco in our language. If you grew up in the tackiest decade of the 20th century, you’ll automatically edit out the tinsel and concentrate on the core of the music. Because even though images stay frozen in our heads, it’s the music that pulls our muscles.
After a pasta-laden brownie-stuffed lunch, M and I whiled away more than 3 hours sitting under the trees in an old bungalow-turned-yellow café in the heart of the city. We planned to have lunch at our usual haunt and follow it up with attending Amitav Ghosh’s reading at Landmark. (AquaM joined us only for lunch.) I was annoyed that the café was unreasonably crowded; inflation apparently had no effect on keeping people indoors. We talked about completely useless things, useless in the economic sense. Nobody would pay us to give our opinion on people, places, or writing. We basked in comfortable silence.
M’s observed that more than half of the population of the café was white. I kept noticing weird things, which could be almost discriminatory. Like the two German guys in the next table were given water in glasses while we were given paper cups. At one other time, I saw a white kid sipping from a glass with a fancy looped straw. I did try not to read too much into it. Maybe, they ran out of glasses and straws by the time they served us. Which brought the topic to Occam’s Razor. According to this principle, a given situation has many explanations, but usually the simplest one is right. But as M pointed out that need not be always be so. And so we aimlessly shifted from topic to topic.
The stack of virgin white paper napkins was so tempting. So I started doodling on them. I drew really bad versions of the sinewy trees that dipped and lifted. I could just about manage the petals of the white flowers that dropped from time to time from the trees. I tried to draw a guy with a red floral shirt but he got up and left as soon as I put pen to napkin! I gesticulated so wildly while talking that the waiter came running to our table. He thought I was calling him! So I put on a smile and acted as though I did indeed call the waiter to switch on the fan.
When we reached Landmark, Ghosh has already started reading. A small part of the store was cleared for a few chairs for the audience and a makeshift podium for Ghosh. The whole affair was very amateurishly handled. Almost all the seats were filled. I had no idea that he was so popular here in Chennai. After his reading, he didn’t know whom to ask whether there was a question-answer session. But people came up with questions anyway. Some were academic, some were inane but he answered all of them with equanimity and humor. The best question – I think - was about why The Calcutta Chromosome differed from his usual oeuvre. And his answer was rib-tickling, “The whole thing actually started with a bout of malaria.” A pause. Two seconds later the stunned audience burst into laughter. Followed by an intellectual explanation: “You know, malaria also induces the kind of hallucinations that opium does.” He played the audience like a professional.
After the questions, we looked around at the books – Ghosh’s books that is - arranged neatly in similar dust jackets. I was so torn between all of them. M chose The Sea of Poppies and finally I chose Dancing in Cambodia, his book of essays. Why? Because it was a really unknown book and I knew that while the other fiction books would be around, this would be the first of the lot that would disappear, not just off the shelves but into some obscure black hole either a University library or worse the store rooms of the bookstore.
We stood in line waiting to get a book autographed. I had never done this. I did get one other book autographed but that was in such a hurry that I caught Arundhati Roy climbing into her car and borrowed a pen from her agent, the famous David Godwin! In the middle of this waiting, a guy came up to us and gave us a piece of paper. He told us to write our names so that Ghosh can write our names down flawlessly.
M went first. And they chatted. When I presented his own book to the author, he looked at my name and went “Oh oh oh!” The reason was that I share his surname, which brought general smiles all around. Then I asked my question – Whom does he write for? Is it himself? And if not, who is his ideal reader? He answered, “I write for my friends…but mostly for myself.” I thought, is that all? Where was the famous Ghosh eloquence? But there were people standing in line. So I thanked him. In any case, I was very happy with the ohs!
Another near-perfect day had come to an end.
Posted in Books, Madras, life, reading | Tags: reading; writing; Amitav Ghosh
A review of the Lives of Others (2006)
Spoiler warning: If you have not seen the Lives of Others and know nothing about the plot and would like to experience the film, read no further.
Director: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
Cast: Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler - Ulrich Mühe
Georg Dreyman - Sebastian Koch
Christa-Maria Sieland - Martina Gedeck
Anton Grubitz - Ulrich Tukur
Paul Hauser-Hans-Uwe Bauer
The Minister Bruno Hempf - Thomas Thieme
Screenplay - Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
Director of photography - Hagen Bogdanski
Composer - Stéphane Moucha, Gabriel Yared
Duration: 2 hrs. 17 min.
The Winner of the 2007 Oscar for the Best Foreign Language Film, the Lives of Others stands out as a film in many significant ways. At heart, it’s a deeply human story of one man who was transformed by the power of art. However, to condense the essence of all that the film conveys to just this sentence will do injustice to the other concerns/themes that permeate this dynamite of a film.
Set in Orwellian East Germany 1984, the Lives of Others tells the story of two artists and their Stasi officer. Captain Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler (played to pitch perfection by Ulrich Mühe) teaches the science of interrogation at the Stasi University. His precise methods make him a favourite for carrying out sensitive missions. As in any totalitarian regime, the artists/writers group is considered the most dangerous. But playwright Greog Dreyman (handsome Sebastian Koch) is different. He is - in the words of Minister Bruno Hempf (Thomas Thieme) - “the only non-subversive writer we have.”
Wiesler is one day taken to see a Dreyman play by his ambitious superior Lieutenant Colonel Anton Grubitz, who wants to climb the Stasi ladder fast. Minister Hempf sets his eyes on the beautiful and insecure actress Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck), who is Dreyman’s girlfriend and leading lady. Hempf wants Dreyman monitored to remove him from Christa’s life. And this job falls on the man who personifies Socialism, Wiesler.
Wiesler and his men bug Dreyman’s home, and take position in the unused attic of the building right above Dreyman and Sieland’s apartment. Each activity of each day is reported in excruciating detail. Monitoring them day and night exposes Wiesler to the writer’s world and ideas. A world where independent thinking and freedom of expression is prized above all else. It is also the world where love thrives. In short, a complete anti-thesis of his sterile, gray, clockwork world where is no room for creative expression and the closest brush with love is the prostitute who has to leave in a hurry for her next appointment. Wiesler struggles in between these two worlds. His loyalty towards the party, a result of years of conditioning as a Stasi officer, versus his longing for this new imaginative universe that opens up through the works of Brecht and Beethoven. Imagination wins in the end.
He is healed and transformed by the power of art. Art also opens up in him emotions like empathy and sympathy. He tries to protect his “charges” from the arm of the state especially since his corrupt higher-ups do not value the spirit of socialism as much as the power they have. The film is an indictment on any system that produces power-hungry people at the helm. The subtle idea is that socialism by itself does not harm anyone but it’s the people who abuse it who do.
The Kafkaesque nightmare picks up momentum in the second half. Dreyman wants to protest the suicide (“self murder” in Stasi terminology) of his dear friend and director Albert Jerska. He pens an explosive article about suicide rates in East Germany and publishes it in a West German magazine. Wiesler protects him all the while.
To deflect suspicion on Dreyman’s article, Wiesler creates details for the play that Dreyman pretends to be writing with Paul Hauser. In doing so, Wiesler stretches over the last bridge that separates the watcher from the watched, Dreyman from himself. Once he begins creating, he becomes an artist and therefore a threat to the state himself. It is not surprising when later he is forced to leave his promising Stasi office. This is only a formal gesture. He had already left the Stasi symbolically when he started supporting Dreyman and the artists.
In the meanwhile, after several attempts – mostly forced - to win over Christa, the Minister Hempf gives up and attacks her in another way. He knows that she is addicted to some drugs, which she gets illegally. She is arrested on this charge and released on one condition that she agrees to be a state informer. The typewriter – damning evidence that Dreyman is the author of the article – is removed surreptiously by Wiesler before the Stasi get to Dreyman’s apartment. This remains unknown to Christa, who is driven by guilt to kill herself. Wiesler is suspected and suspended as a result.
Nearly five years later, the Berlin wall falls and East Germany emerges from behind the iron curtain. Dreyman meets Minister (now ex-Minister) Hempf at a performance of his play and comes to know that he was in fact under severe surveillance. He traces his surveillance records and pieces together that a certain Stasi agent code-named HGW XX/7 had saved him. This proves to be an inspiration for his next book.
The touching story, the tight screenplay, and the inspiring cinematography all come together to create this unforgettable film. Almost every word is evocative in the screenplay, which makes it closer to literature than film. I can’t think of a better screenplay written since the Ang Lee-directed Sense and Sensibility. To support this tight screenplay, the actors have done tremendous job. One actor stands miles above the rest: Ulrich Mühe, in a nuanced performance, creates Wiesler as a man shorn of emotion, feeling or an iota of humanity. From the Android-like Stasi agent, Mühe’s Wiesler literally melts into being human. The cinematography shows some shades of Kurosawa especially in the scenes where he points the camera at the sky. The film’s claustrophobic atmosphere is created as much by the musical score of Stéphane Moucha and Gabriel Yared, (best known for the English Patient) as by the other elements.
Exploring some of the universal and human concerns sets this film apart. It does not treat freedom as an abstract ideal to aspire to. The lack of freedom kills almost everything in its wake. Its absence is never been more heartfelt than in 1984 East Germany.
One common theme – that of crossing over - runs through the film: from suspect to informer, from East to West, from life to death, from sterility to creativity, from intolerance to empathy, from communism to capitalism. All these crossings are linked by one fact: that once you cross over, you cannot go back.
Though the film is situated in 1984, its themes are as relevant today as they were then: not just as a record of the past but also as a reminder of what happens when individual freedoms are curbed. Echoes can be felt as America grapples with privacy acts and other forms of state-sponsored surveillance. Though we might think we are a long way off from there, but we aren’t. What happened to M.F Hussain and Baroda art student are chilling reminders that we have our own “Stasi” and one never knows when they will knock on our door.
Posted in Films, life | Tags: acadmey awards, art, crossing, film review, freedom, movie, movie review, oscars, transformation
(1) I have no patience for people who see the world as either black or white. It’s either one things completely or the other. How is that possible? Isn’t the average moment, the average experience - and let’s face it, we live most of the time in this averagesphere - always between extremes? And the definition of extremes differs from person to person. My extreme is another person’s average experience.
To assume that if I don’t like Choice A, I would love Choice B is silly. It is entirely possible that I don’t like Choice A, B, or even C. I might decide to choose A.5 or something such. To deny me the space to make my own unique choice is a violation of my basic rights. I almost feel claustrophobic in such a situation. It exasperates me to have to explain such a basic thing. Maybe I like to live in media res. Thank you.
(2) I like to find answers to questions not create conflict. If on the way to finding these answers, I do create conflict, then I have to solve it. So my energies are diverted into conflict-resolution, damage-control etc and less on the answers that I seek. What a useless detour!
(3) What I intensely dislike is the way some people slot my ideas even before I have finished conveying them! I fail to see what makes them an authority on MY ideas. Most of the time I think while I am speaking. So to first interrupt me and then give me an inaccurate approximation of MY idea, is so exasperating. The only time this can be forgiven is when the thought that they finish is an accurate approximation.
On Sunday morning I found a flyer trapped in between the pages of the newspaper. A simple glossy black and white page which announced a sale of books in the city. It also had those three magic words which make my heart pound, “last few days”! And so I had to check out the sale.
I walked into the hall and into chaos. It seemed like everyone’s heart pounded at the same three magic words. My competitive “sale” spirit took over. My first loss - and I am still smarting from it - Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat. I saw a good-looking lady pick that up and not let go even after I glared at her.
It was a bit disorienting for the first half hour. The books were not arranged but rather strewn haphazardly all over the tables and some were thrown casually in the cartons below the tables. However, some other books were arranged in semi neat rows. The book sale looked more like a warzone. Since this was the case, I could not expect subject-wise classification, and therefore had to go through every pile of books there was. Finally, I was just relieved when the books worth buying started to come to me. They would float face up in the mess waiting almost to be saved by me. Or so I imagined. The prices were the fantastic though; I paid between Rs.50 to Rs.150 for each book. So these are the books I saved:
This should keep me busy for the next couple of months.
I have been reading Anjum Hasan’s Lunatic in my Head on and off for a month now. It’s a novel based in and about Shillong. It reminds me of all the hilly/mountainous things in my life. Like the fact that I have never lived in the mountains or that I have never traveled east of Calcutta. But I do have one connection to the North East - a friend from ninth grade.
Back then in the late 80’s and early 90’s, Chinese meant food, not ethnicity. And North Easterners were a rarity in the city. The few that were there were mostly ignored unless absolutely necessary. Like when you needed a haircut or “international” food. Chinese being the height of international cuisine back then. The beauty parlors and Chinese restaurants were their special haunt. Not just because they were good at it, but there were very few other avenues open to them. They were invisible much like South by North East, a direction that doesn’t exist. It speaks so much of our insularity as a society.
A few years later, this situation changed. The deadly combination of insurgency and lack of opportunity pushed many of them out of their homes. And some of them even left their beautiful lush mountains and came to the coconut plains.
As far as I know, my North Eastern friend was here because her mom had made a choice. To marry a South Indian. She was the most exotic looking girl of our class. Her name was Elizabeth Syiem. For some reason, we never shortened it to Liz, Eliza, or Lizzy. She was always Elizabeth. Following the matrilineal tradition, she took her mother’s surname Syiem. We were never sure how to pronounce that. One more reason to stick to calling her Elizabeth.
Her physical features were a study in contrast. From afar, she looked just like the women from the North East: petite with high-cheek bones, mongoloid eyes, straight hair, narrow hips, and an air of the mountains about her. (That air I am sure was inherited because she was very much brought up here in Madras.) Once you go closer, you’d realize that something was amiss. Something was not quite right. She was not the girl from the North East. Not completely at least. Her skin was the color of the woman in Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters. Very definitely not North East. Because of her exoticness, she often attracted the attention of the older boys not the boys of our class.
I can still remember her voice; quite unlike anything I’d heard. A voice with an incomplete twang. As if she had swallowed something by accident and that had stayed there, contributing to every sound she made. Maybe Shillong was stuck in her throat.
The air of the mountains couldn’t stay too close to the sea. We lost touch after High School. In a city this big, it was so easy to lose things - friends, memories, hopes, desires, ambitions, ourselves.
I remember the first time that she had told us that she was from Shillong. I had asked her, “Meghalaya?” as if to reassure myself that it was still a part of the recognizable world. She nodded a yes. The land of the clouds. A hazy-around-the-edges map of India sketched itself in my head. I zoomed into North North East of Calcutta. That little oval-ish state above graceful arch of Bangladesh. That was far. So far beyond my imagination that I had nothing to say. Maybe it was a land beyond both speech and clouds.
Posted in Nostalgia, life | Tags: childhood, friend, Meghalaya, memory, north east, north easterners, Shillong
I haven’t posted on food, that essential fuel of life, in a long time. I am not much of a cook, but when I do cook, I have always gotten compliments. No, it’s not just the family who don’t have a choice but to eat my cooking, but my friends agree as well. My latest experiment in the hot house a.k.a the kitchen is a big hit. How do I know? Thanks to my brother! He is like the world’s fussiest eater. The Anton Ego of my existence. And if my cooking passes his palate test, it’s not just good, it’s bloody good.
Take out your notepads, blackberrys, iPhones, cams and make a note of Paneer Bhurji a.k.a Scrambled Paneer.
Ingredients:
Crumbled paneer - 1 cup
Green pepper/Capsicum/Kashmiri mirch (diced into inch long pieces) - 1
Chopped tomatoes - 2
Chopped garlic - 4 tsp or 4 to 5 cloves
Chopped ginger - 1 tea spoon
Cumin seeds - 1 tea spoon
Chopped green chillies (optional) - 1 or 2
Chilli powder (optional) - 1/2 tea spoon
Chopped coriander - 1 table spoon
Cooking oil or ghee - 2 table spoon
Method: Heat oil in a heavy-bottomed pan. Add the cumin. When it starts spluttering, add ginger, garlic, and green chillies. Fry for a minute, then add the onions. Stir the onions till they turn soft and translucent. Then add turmeric, salt, and chilli powder. Add tomatoes and on medium heat cook till the mixture starts to separate from the oil. Keep stirring to prevent it from burning. Now, add the paneer, capsicum and cook for a couple of minutes while stirring it gently. Garnish with coriander before serving. Serve hot with naan or rice.
Last night, I helped murder a girl.
In my dreams.
I was at a party, talking and laughing away. I am with a group of friends, no one I can recognize from real life except one. We were sitting in somebody’s drawing room. Food and drinks on the table. The place was a mess, which meant that the party had been on for some time. I remember being shocked at the fact that two people who I couldn’t picture together in the same frame were having an affair, an extra-marital affair. Everybody was cool about it except me. Before I could feel bad about it, the dreamt goes into scene two.
A few friends had brought their teenage daughters with them to the party. One was called Sarika. I don’t remember what the other’s name was. Sarika’s sister started to feel unwell. She is sent to a room and a man with a yellow formal shirt, holds her to make her feel better. I told everyone, “Oh, she’ll be fine!” The next time I asked Yellow Shirt, “How is she?”, he looked at me and in a deadpan voice, and said, “She is dead.” I start panicking then. I am frantic. People around me start panicking as well. There is fear in the air. No one knows what to do. So I tell everyone that it’s okay, we didn’t kill her. Even as I say that, I know it’s untrue. I just helped kill a girl by denying her timely medical attention. My heart starts pounding to what feels like a million beats a second. And then I start planning the cover up. My brain works out the details. (We will tell the police no one knew she was unwell etc.) Finally, it arrives at a snag in the plan. A simple post mortem report will reveal the time of the death. We can’t lie about that.
I feel so guilty that I wake up.
