Movies I watched of late

I’ve recently had a bit of respite from a month’s hell, and my sister, from a year’s… and we’ve been catching up on movies we’ve missed.Here are the highlights:

8X10 Tasveer
You wonder if Nagesh Kukunoor had a lobotomy or his brain tissue was replaced with that of Abbas-Mastan… is this the same guy who directed Rockford and Hyderabad Blues? And if you haven’t watched it yet, I’ll spoil it for you: The villain is Akshay Kumar’s evil twin. And Ayesha Takia is his girlfriend, while pretending to be the girlfriend of the Hero Akshay Kumar. What hits rock bottom however, is when the evil Akki says to the good Akki after it is revealed that Ayesha Takia is the evil one’s girl too, “We have the same taste… isn’t that kinky?’.  *Gag*.

My colleague wondered why no one in the movie thought of showing Akshay Kumar a picture of the night sky or some other bit of the universe, given he can go back in time and space to identify the events before and after the image was clicked.

Gula..
I couldn’t finish watching Gulaal. But whatever I saw of it… awesome. Kay Kay Menon is enchantingly fiery and calculative. Mahi Gill suits her role perfectly. They couldn’t have picked a better guy for the role of a nerdy fresher than Raj Singh Chaudhary. I’ll finish watching it one of these days.

Vantage Point
Fast-paced. Nice storytelling style. I’d like that applied to other sorts of stories… just to see how it’d work.

In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones
The one I liked best. It’s a really nice slice-of-life movie about students at the School of Planning and Architecture. You see so many movies depicting hostel life, youth, students and stuff like that…. but none have come so close to reality as this one has. In most such movies, you’ll have the hero riding a bike and having a hot girlfriend, but here he’s stocky, unattractive, takes a rick, doesn’t even get the maximum screen space, and has a cabaret dancer for a fiancee. The villain is supposed to be the head of the department…. in any other movie, he’d've been an intimidating guy suited and booted all through, and who doesn’t do an ounce of good work…. but here, he’s played by the diminutive Roshan Seth, dresses just as unimpressively as the profs at NITK, lives under his mother’s thumb, and can be seen at the drawing board even at late hours… but is mighty condescending and sarcastic and his tongue-lashings that begin with a “My dear donkey” rather remind you of some of the more condi profs you’ve met. Just when you wonder how such a guy can be evil, you get to know he’s holding a grudge against a student and has flunked him for four years just because on a dare he peed next to him in the bogs and looked over the side… and you see him whispering to the other thesis jury members that this student is a hardcore drug addict….. evil, evil Prof.

Quite a star-cast… Himani Shivpuri is the cabaret-dancing fiancee. Shah Rukh Khan (yes, the very same) is a random student with a few lines of dialogue who is credited as one of the ‘Other Others’. Arundhati Roy (yes, the very same) is one of the main characters, apart from doing the story and screenplay.

It amazes me how little she has changed over the course of twenty years (more so since the same twenty years have changed me beyond recognition). She sounds the same. Speaks the same commie crap. Gets credited for absolute nonsense – in the movie, her character gets away with complete crap presented for the Art Thesis and even manages to secure the highest marks in the class…. not much has changed.

But what shocks me is her looks. She has the same ungainly way of walking still. Wears a saree the same way, with a short pallu. Wears her hair the same unkempt way. And her build hasn’t changed at all! She’s still the same anorexic-looking stick-thin woman. If it weren’t for her wrinkles, I’d suggest she’s some sort of a non-learning robot in which the things to speak, walk, dress, write have been hardcoded long ago….. maybe we can call her Paranoid Android.

How to write an Indian Novel

Ah.. no, I don’t pretend to be about to write something that has even an iota of the brilliance of the RK Narayan essay of the same name, which got accepted by Punch for six guineas.

So I am appalled by the quality of fiction, more importantly Indian fiction that one gets to see in bookstores these days.

Actually, let’s go into a bit of a zoom-out…. I hate the newer bookstores of Bangalore. The ones that give you a basket to shop for books. (Blossoms, however, is excluded from the list…. but then it isn’t a ‘newer’ bookstore, is it) These places are stacked wall-to-wall with multiple copies of the same pulp-fic pop-lit trashy writing that I would maybe read but never in a million years buy.

Add to this mix nouveau riche folks who don’t have a discerning taste in reading, but buy books all the same from these bookstores, which don’t even have friendly proprietors to guide people around and give discerning recommendations on what to read… and what do you get?

Chetan Bhagat. Tushar Raheja. Arundathi Roy. And maybe Arvind Adiga, but I’ll refrain from passing judgements till I’ve read the book.

These are people who’ve probably read ONLY bad Indian writing, and said to themselves, “Heck, I can do better!”, and proceeded to write bestsellers which line the bookstores which young Indians read…. vicious circle there.

So when I read these book blurbs, I say to myself, “Heck, I can do better than that!”. Then realization dawns that I probably do not have the patience to write anything other than 1000-word blogposts about absolutely nothing. And fiction.. haha. I can’t spin yarns for nuts.

But hey, I can probably use some factory methods to write a novel? There are some time-tested rules on that. It all depends on what I want.

Two very obvious paths come to mind. The first one is the Chetan Bhagat way, which has been illustrated quite succinctly here. But then, I don’t want all that that comes with a Chetan Bhagat reputation, especially not fanmail like this, this and this. After reading these comments on Logik’s post on Mr. Bhagat, I began to sincerely, fervently hope those comments were from someone pulling a fast one on Logik, and not actual fan comments by fans who thought a scathing review of Mr. Bhagat was actually Mr. Bhagat’s blog!

So the other path would be to go the Arundathi Roy way.

I’ll first have to get a frickin’ crazy amount as an advance from Penguin or Rupa, or Bloomsbury if the Gods smile down on me. The publicity wave that follows that will be enough to keep me away from writing for months. In due course of the wave, there will be atleast one mediaperson who compares me with the other Tam-Brahm writergirl Kaavya Viswanathan. Of course, it’ll be hard to fit together her origins from Chennai, Glasgow, Timbuktu, and godaloneknowswhereelse with my Bangalore, Bangalore, Bangalore and Bangalore origins, but I’m sure ToI-Let paper will find some way to prove Kaavya’s Bangalore connection, or connect me to Glasgow and Harvard. After all, these people are the ones who researched Sabrina Setlur’s Bangalore origins!

And when I finally do get to writing the book, life is going to begin to be hell. Coz, most of these celebrated writers have had lives that are profoundly Left-leaning, at the crossroads of tradition, hated their origins, questioned everything around them…. unlike my right-of-center upbringing and conformist behaviour.

And my life has been a series of uninteresting events. I thank the stars above for my having all my loved ones intact, and for trauma being just another word in the dictionary, unlike many best-selling authors. But I’ve never witnessed history unfold, atleast I haven’t witnessed anything that has been proven yet to be an event that will be in history textooks. I went to a normal school that didn’t believe in building the character of its students by subjecting them to traumatic experiences, and pre-university was even more normal. NITK was a life-changing experience, but hardly anything happened there that is Booker-material… I didn’t lead a band of protestors to the Chief Warden’s door demanding for better food in the messes or anything. And I stayed put when riots broke out on the highway. I didn’t research ways to beat the Hayflick limit, I didn’t break into the Pakistani Arms database. Neither did I wrestle terrorists on the beach, nor did I meet the extremely poverty-stricken who made me hate myself for being born into the bourgeoise.

I might of course write a seemingly-humorous novel about very little, but sprinkled generously with Kannadiga and Tam-Brahm in-jokes, endless Bangalore reminisces, what it means to be a South Bangalorean… or put that all in a schoolgirl story, like my friend Poojitha Prasad did. But alas, I’ve been too hardened by life, and I’m pretty sure any such attempt on my part will reek of sermonizing on everything from following rules (or not) and feminism. Either ways, it won’t go further than my cousins in their early teens who are probably the only folks in their age group (my target audience) I know who’d choose to read a book in their spare time.

So, well, I’ll probably have to write a book that angers the Who’s Who of Bangalore. Bangalore, for the local flavor. And to ensure there’s a readymade audience of Bangaloreans and expat Bangaloreans who’d be roused by curiosity enough to read the book.

Ramachandra Guha, surely. And since all the Bongs think he’s one of them, I’m sure I’ll catch their eye too. There’s no point berating UR Ananthamurthy; everyone does, these days. It’ll be a heart-wrencher to bash Anil Kumble as he was a crush of mine once upon a time, but the deed will have to be done to raise some cricket-lover eyebrows. I might say a few things about Vishnuvardhan, but I’ll keep away from even mentioning Dr. Rajkumar lest the LeT and HuJI sleeper cells in Bangalore use that as an excuse to arrange some rioting.

Girish Karnad and Arjun Sajnani would probably get a dose, and maybe I should go on to assert that the plays at Ranga Shankara is the antithesis of all that that Shankar Nag stood for. Maybe I shouldn’t spare Mr. Garudachar of Garuda Mall fame… the amit_123 and isha_123 population of Bangalore might probably want to know more about their weekend hangout spots.

And to pay some tribute to my being in the software field, I’ll need to target Infy and Wipro and say they are really bleeding the city… now if that doesn’t raise hackles, I don’t know what else will. My community will possibly disown me, given the large number of folks who started their careers there…. brilliant, I’d be the enfant terrible of the Indian writing scene.

And I don’t think my publishers can ask for anything better.

The media would probably make me out to be some sort of a Killer Queen (yes, I still am a fan of Brian May, Roger Taylor, John Deacon and Farokh Bulsara)…. my publishers would have to pay royalty (and I make bad puns, yes).

Guess it would start off as a pathbreaking novel that “breaks” the “myth” of the whole world being Bangalored. A relatively insignificant work. And then comes to the notice of the Booker committee… who possiby haven’t gotten over their Raj hangover and expect any work from India to be Macaulayan in its view of the country to be certified as good, in their opinion.

And maybe I should wear a black hat along with my red tussar saree (a la Ms. Roy in In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones) when I go to accept the award and tell the committee they have blood on their hands. And maybe I should also say my saree is red – red with the blood of the millions of nameless toilers who pick out silkworm cocoons from scalding hot water to spin silk… possibly get out all my frustrations about Silk Board, and the traffic jams around it.

And back on home turf, I should probably spend the rest of my life protesting anything even remotely connected to Bangalore – the dancing ban, the 11:30 deadline, launch of new radio stations, construction of a new flyover, a new software park getting constructed, Def Leppard calling off its concert, Aerosmith coming, U2 coming (which I’ll probably use as an excuse to catch the concert live for free), Metallica coming, Maiden thinking of coming again, Russel Peters, S. Ve Shekhar conducting his plays, Y.Gee Mahendran doing the same, and PSBB opening another chain of schools in the city…

And what’ll I do for a living? Well… my first book will possibly be a cash cow.

But then, I’d probably face the prospect of piracy eating into my earnings.

So, well, I’ll upload the book on a googlepage, for free download. And maybe I’ll gather enough to publicize a Download Day for my book…. calling it a celebration of freedom from copyrights and the like… and ask folks to download the book, pass the link on…. and maybe also get Al Gore to back me on making the world a greener place by promoting ebooks… just think of all the trees that would have had to be cut to fulfill the demand for my book!

And I’ll live the rest of my life off Ad-Sense earnings.

And maybe the satisfaction of controlling and shaping atleast a part of public opinion via free stuff, a la New Life’s free proselytization material…. I can’t do that with hard copies; I don’t have moneybags from Latin America funding me.