A date with myself

I have a date with myself, as in I am on it right now looking out through glass walls at scyscrapers on Barakhamba road bathed in benevolent Spring sunshine. Ever since I stopped being a carefree college student , which is way back in 2007, I have accumulated a toxic collection of fantasies of things I want to do on weekends. Invariably, these fantasies only involve myself - as self obsessed as I am. One of these was to spend a whole day in a book store with no agenda at all. It would be a quaint book store with a cafe attached with me alternating between reading parts of random books and sitting on my laptop and drinking coffee. The funny thing is, in all these years I haven't done it even once so here I am at the Oxford Book Store at CP. (I am the sort of crazy person who will make such a long journey to do this.) Unfortunately, and predictable my photon isn't working so I don't anymore see the point my indulging my luxurious attempt with having two internet connections- one wifi and one photon given that I do such things once in four years.

There are more things like this such as going for picnics, having wine nights at home etc etc.

So yes, I am in the crowded midst of a book store that has an ongoing 80% off sale. The people behind me are covering that nowadays dreaded topic of who is getting married. I am sort of still in denial of the fact that people my age are old enough to get married It can't be, really.

Yesterday CQ tried calling me a feminist so I told him I am not. I found myself performing laproscopy on a light bulb recently. So, to put it more simply, I fixed a light bulb and felt proud about it. And then, I felt so ashamed that a twenty something woman should feel proud about achieving a normal thing such as fixing a light bulb. To be fair to me, the socket was reaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaally high up so, yes, I was sort of performing laproscopy- I couldn't see what I was doing, only guess. The point is I wrote a long introspective mail that started with the light bulb and went to all sorts of topics. So there, that, according to CQ is what defines a feminist. Feeling proud of fixing a light bulb, then feeling ashamed and then writing an introspective piece about it.

 

 

Samit Basu Interview

Every one on Flight BA 142 got off with a superpower that they subconsciously dreamt of having. Uzma wanted to be loved and to make it in Bollywood. Aman wanted to be well networked and so he can now control the Internet. Vir can fly. Television journalist Namrata apparently can sense news before it happens. Throughout the dizzying, scene shifting (London,above Pakistan’s nukes, Delhi, Carter Road Coffee Day) plot, these characters come together harnessing their good intentions to (well, try) save/change the world.

They all live in your India of IPL and Manmohan Singh bleating-condemning terror attacks. It is postmodern but there are singing aunties and blue babies and snide allusions to the going-out-alone-at-night dreams of Delhi women. So, everything urban India, except add super powers, chaos and the license to laugh.

Samit Basu has been given many labels and has dabbled in what is for the Indian writer exotic genres. He had decided, he says, as he settles with his cappuccino in a coffee shop in GK, that he didn’t want to do a “fancy novel” anymore. Samit has written The Simoquin Prophecies, The Manticore’s Secret and The Unwaba Revelations, part of the GameWorld Trilogy and has been thus far celebrated as ‘India’s first fantasy writer.' “You are supposed to write an India book right if you are an India writer and examine contemporary Indian reality, all this while I was writing books I wasn’t supposed to write,” he says

“When I started thinking of the checkboxes on contemporary India and what it means atleast through perception, I ended up with a really insane landscape. I wanted to write about urban 20 and 30 somethings which is also something you are supposed to write about.” Supposed, I ask? Samit grins and continues, “Ya ya, so I wanted to write a very good boy kind of book. Real people tend to be very self-involved but I wanted the story to have some societal relevance. I kept turning up the volume on these characters and they ended up with strange powers. See it’s not that I started off wanting to write a story that disobeyed the laws of physics at any point of time.” It’s like you begin reading and then you feel like your on edge in a gaming station, being chased by giants, or otherwise feeling love for comic book superheroes in shiny costumes.


He always knew though that he wanted to be a writer, “in the same way that (he) knew he wanted to be a rock star or an astronaut. “I have picked the least glamorous of these professions ya, also, the lowest paid.” Samit says that to work across media means that element of each comes into the other. He has co-written comics with X-men writer Mike Carey, written children’s books and screenplays.” You look at the different structures. The comic is the tightest structure- you have to be controlled. In a screenplay, there is a lot of room. I think that’s why my last two books have been shorter; you get across more in a shorter space. Also, in comics and screenplays, you learn escape routes through tight corners so that helps with the novel. But having said that there is nothing like writing a novel because the annoying things about other media is not present at all: (he lists in an almost wicked exasperation) budget, nature of artist, temperament of collaborators, evil businessmen associated with large scale entertainment companies you know.”



We are interrupted by a light eyed, dashing, whitewashed Hrithik Roshan sort of boy from the next table who says he relates to everything we are talking about. He plays video games, he wants to act and was writing a script for his audition to be a news anchor later that day. “See what I mean”, says Samit. “So much of all that is in the book is the lives of urban India. Your standard day, it will be fairly easy to sit back and laugh at most things in it.” He gets drawn into a conversation with the Bollywood aspirant telling him to skip the anchor audition and take the next flight to Bombay. “Look, I don’t want to suddenly come and crush your life plans and all but am telling you!”

Suddenly getting back on track, he continues, “And so ya, I wanted to look at some kind of encapsulation of the present generation and make it a book at the here and now. I mean you are in your twenties, and I have escaped mine and at the sage old age of 30, I am looking back on that distant period,” he says somewhat theatrically.

“The twenties are about figuring out what you can do with what you have. It is about making the compromises that you will come to terms with when you are in your thirties and forties. If you had powers, you might do things better right?” And so he gave his characters superpowers. “I figured that super heroes are completely mainstream I mean Dark Knight’s got an Oscar nomination and when you are writing, you kind of have to explain the context especially in India. In Turbulence, it’s not a standard costume -adventure thing. Which puts you on the same ground as someone writing a campus novel or a romance novel you know.” That things go beyond the normal, he says, is the “setting’s fault.” So, these well-intentioned heroes transfer money from drug lords to relief agencies and are ecstatic at this sudden sense of control they have to choose how to change the world. But then they are very much like the staff at the DNNTV where Namrata works, most people have the job because their dads knew the owners.A very important job done with very little skill. The chaos that ensues fuels the plot.

These characters hint at satire but they are etched out in bold uniform strokes, true to reality but more crayon drawing than impressionist painting. Although, its fun because everything is a snide target: security comparable to Hollywood stars scouting slums, a political party promising to ban women’s jeans, that this whole mess was predicted by some insane people on internet videos a long time ago etc.

Samit explains that it is a book with neat sections, very conducive to a film interpretation, apparently. The buzz is that the rights for Turbulence are being sold to Bollywood. “Selling the rights and having the film come out are very different things in Bollywood…there are three potential producers now but I need to find a director who can do something with it.” Samit “shuddered more”, so to speak, earlier, to think of what Bollywood will do to his book. Now, it is just a matter of shuddering a little less.

He interrupts me again to ask what sort of a book I’d want to write if ever. I am forced, of course, to aspire to some decent level of articulation till I manage.. “a really silly book about really serious things.”

“That’s my exact ambition too,” says he, the writer of the good boy book.

The Appointment

You can sleep all you want but the day is still there waiting and the bed is not another country.
A young, unnamed Romanian seamstress living in Nicolae Ceauescu’s regime is constantly summoned. Her crime is having sewed ‘’marry me’’ notes into the Italy bound trouser pockets in the factory where she works . The hope is to escape the country. Women could apply to get married. It was all about Italy. It was nothing about him(the potential husband). It was about going from being bare assed poor to having a marble vase on your table.

There is of course always a battle between content and form.Here the content is unnerving. You are invited as voyeur into this woman’s mind, as she takes a tram ride from her home to meet General Albu for an interrogation.The prose is like thought process , especially as it would be in a totalitarian system- disjointed, scattered, wretched, random, hopeful. You end up reading in rhythm,this happened , that happened, her best friend died, her body splattered red like a bed of poppies , the nut, it always helps to eat a nut to face the summons.

And so, the form is not friendly, not conducive and you feel like an outsider visiting neurosis. You understand how terror’s largest presence is not in the
fire of bombs or the drums of gunfire but in the rhythm of the mind trying to retain sanity, the mind that occasionally tips over, scrambles back to an uncertain balance.



The first and the best: don’t get summoned and don’t go mad, like most people. The second possibility: don’t get summoned, but do lose your mind.. The third: do get summoned and do go mad. Or else the fourth: get summoned but don’t go mad like Paul (her lover) and myself….or to be young, and unbelievably beautiful and not insane, but dead.

Her tram journey was supposed to take her to the interrogation but
she misses her stop and where she goes is worse, by far.

The trick is not to go mad.

Rating: ***1/2

Nadeem Aslam Interview

The best piece that Nadeem has ever written, says editor John Freeman of Leila and the Wilderness, which is also one of the longest pieces ever commissioned by Granta.
“I was on a panel in Edinburgh with him almost two years ago. It was all about the short story. I asked him, do you ever write stories? And he said no, but I have a story I think I want to write. I’ll send it to you. He did, only 9 months later, which is much longer than most people wait when they say something like that. It has such thematic depth and story-telling muscle – so much of what this issue ended up being about: love, family, the pull of extremism, tradition and honour, the feeling that Pakistan is becoming someone else’s place…all that’s in this story. So it was really a no-brainer putting it first.”


Past its minarets from where Allah was pleaded with to send the monsoon rains…..its snow blind mountains and sunburned deserts… past the boy sending a text message to the girl he loved…past the crossroads decorated with fibreglass replicas of the mountain under which Pakistan’s nuclear bombs are tested...past the six year olds selling Made in China prayer mats at traffic lights… in this immense homeland of heartbreaking beauty…


Nadeem Aslam, who was born in Gujranwala and lives in England, had Leila in the Wilderness in his mind for 15 years. In the two months that he took to write it, writing for 12 or 13 hours a day, not leaving his house, not seeing any one, not celebrating Christmas till the novella was done and sent to Granta, which accepted it immediately without any editorial cuts. What it does is that it distils the purest form of truth in prose, sprinkled with a surreal magic and an inhuman brutality, the politics of this moment - Guantanamo Bay and Jihad and love, all at once, in a sweeping fable. Leila is a young woman separated from her lover Qes and married into a family that kills all her just-born daughters and despises her for an inability to produce a son.

“I was introduced to a man – an educated man – who asked me whether I was married and had children. When I told him that I had no children and that I thought of my books as my children, he said, in utter seriousness, ‘Yes. Your successful novels will be your sons, and your unsuccessful ones your daughters.’ That was when I began to think seriously about writing the novella.”


“But I do love thinking about religion and how it attempts to put something other than money and sex at the centre of human discourse – it puts love there. As Borges said: I give thanks…for love, which lets us see others as God sees them.”

“It has always been the case. I remember being a student and buying Bruno Schulz’s Street of Crocodiles for 50 pence in a second-hand bookshop after reading the first paragraph. No one told me it was a great book, that he was a great writer. I knew it instinctively. When the real thing comes along you don’t need anyone to tell you: something inside you tells you. That is how I wish the readers to come to my work.” (Nadeem has never had a reader in mind while writing.)



“That sentence (the one-and-a-half page one) is the only occasion in the story when I let my subconscious speak. It was like a word-association game – I asked myself: What do you think of when you think of Pakistan? Give me the answer as fast as you can. I took less than ten minutes to write, one thought led to another – and it all feels like a train journey, sometimes the rhythm is uniform, sometimes broken, sometimes a wide and deep vista is seen out of the window, sometimes the back of a building looms up just two yards away. And all the while the wheels on the track keep up a steady beat – ‘past the…past the…past the…past the…’”



“Reality (referring to the many worlds in this book) is like that – it is made up of many layers, and our mind is quite capable of perceiving them simultaneously. We try to keep this aspect of existence out of art, out of stories, because we wish to see order in art, not chaos; we wish to sense rhythm and pattern, as opposed to confusion.”

“Pakistan is a country with immense problems and huge moral dilemmas - so it calls for minds that have to be sharp. It's not up to writers to do PR for Pakistan or Islam, or America, or India.”

PS:

The italics in the first paragraph are deeply unintentional but the calm, serene ,slow moving nature of my internet makes sure I make no ammends.

Celebrating Delhi

Edited by Maya Dalal

Penguin, Rs.350

 

With time, landscapes get sedimented over with new meanings and new maps of movement; but the submerged Histories resonate at the sound of a place, says Narayani Gupta on the History that gets lost when names of streets are changed to adhere to the politics of the time. We learn stories about the curious mix of names in Lutyens Delhi for instance. Kasturba Gandhi had to step into Lord Curzon's seven league boots, and Copernicus was randomly chosen to replace Lytton in the naming of that road that we now associate with Mandi House. In Celebrating Delhi, a compilation of  eleven lectures  that were delivered at The India International Centre in 2006, we are treated to an intelligent digging into Delhi's past and present, it's streets, its music and even it's first foundation stone.

In My father, the builder, Khuswant Singh writes in a warm, humourous style about how his father Sir Sobha Singh transported secretly, the foundation stones of Delhi in the middle of the night and how he watched the birth of New Delhi, brick by brick . Going back to the First War of Independence, William Darymple critically examines the religious rhetoric around it and why what mattered most then was the threat that the Company posed to religion. Dunu Roy brings us back into independent India's Delhi, questioning who makes a city, who breaks it and in the course of History, who is completely excluded. The city of Delhi, he says, was claimed for the elites, with the acquisition of the Southern basin and then the approval of the slum clearance project in 1924.Roy outlines what he calls selective inclusion and systematic exclusion - a history from Independence to the Commonwealth games.

 

The book then shifts from politics to food with Priti Narain talking about the asli khana of Delhi. She traces the eating habits of the Mughals (Apparently many were vegetarian and Akbar started his meal with curd and rice).We learn how colonisers influenced our food. It is the Europeans who first brought chilies, tomatoes and potatoes ,now such an integral part of Indian cuisine. In the last piece, Ravi Dayal concludes that there is thus no such thing as a Dilliwallah anymore and this absence seems to be part of the present, amorphous identity.

 

If the question is whether the collection is comphrehensive, the question itself is not valid because comprehensiveness can only be attempted for a subject as varied as Delhi with its many histories. As a cohesive whole, you can sense that these are words written(spoken?) with love and from a point of belonging and knowledge. Celebration , in its true sense and for the average reader, the best moments are the "Oh really? I never knew that.." ones.  When you pick up the book, attractive cover design apart, you get the sense that you are in for some drab Historical non - fiction but in fact the prose leads you in and makes for a breezy informative read. We would have liked some photos!  A good introduction to understanding the capital and its many facets- some glorious, others just dubious.

 

 

 

The Swan Thieves

The Swan Thieves
Hachette India
Rs.595

‘The Swan Thieves’ promises to be a saga about love, obsession, art and history, similar to Kostova’s bestselling debut, The Historian. The characters in the present are irresistibly drawn to the past and history manifests in their own lives in tangible, life altering forms. Robert Oliver is the genius artist we romanticise, love and hate. When he attacks a painting at the National Gallery of Art, he is taken into psychiatric care and becomes the patient of Dr. Marlow, also a hobbyist painter. Marlow is drawn into the mysteries behind Robert’s obsessions with French impressionism and in particular the artist Beatrice De Clerval, whose letters to her artist uncle Olivier Vignot, Robert possesses and is obsessed by.
Kostova treats us to the cinema of a painter’s mind, lush watercolours, nuanced
brushstrokes ,every detail in place .There is a gradual, layered and intelligent build up. You feel like you are in New York of the eighties when Robert and his lover (later wife) navigate the art world. You empathise with artist Beatrice living in 19th century France who lives ahead of her time, when her intense genius is suppressed by the need to conform. With Kate keeping her dignity intact even though Robert has wrecked it without explanations of the coherent kind. There is Marlow who crosses all professional boundaries to understand Robert even if out of a personal fascination for an extreme pursuing of art that he himself hasn’t done in his comparatively sane psychiatric practice. Robert himself never speaks much during the period of his treatment and that’s probably why you never get an authentic insight into his tormented mind throughout the book.
Kostova takes us into the mind of love, into the staid atmosphere of its remnants, of Robert’s girlfriend Mary, the then scandalous relationship between a young Beatrice and her aging uncle who she knows will die leaving her to hold their secret for life. Marlow lets love cross the forbidden line of professionalism. Lush prose and a handholding into the geography of these characters, painting by the French Channel, teaching in a suburban art school in Virginia. You are there, almost, but you would want this to be offset by mastery of plot. The narrative pace is mostly competent; the beginning of the book turns out to be a page-turner. However, Kostova falters in the end when you sense a sudden constructed-ness. Letters as narrative devices? Sure. But Marlow imagines a letter that Olivier Vignot might have written to his niece. Suspension of disbelief suspended. The plot comes together as a quick tying together of the mysteries which after 500 hundred odd pages of lush prose and crazed expectation disappoints.

Historical mystery, love stories, and the obsessive ness that accompanies the transcending of the ordinary, anchored by bright, engaging prose.


Rating: ***

Kostova interview

Elizabeth Kostova, bestselling author of The Historian and now, The Swan Thieves in an email interview talks to FCBOOKS about the "parallels (in)the way past and present can echo each other in real life, or the way history holds information we can use somehow in the present" , her involvement with the making of the movie The Historian and why no one really resolves the conflict between art and responsibility in …

 

 

THE SWAN THIEVES

 

 

The crossing of boundaries, of youth and old age, of professional and personal, of real life as we know it and of being drawn to impossible geniuses. The ones who we know will never settle into the sober atmosphere of domesticity and then the obsession of those who want to create art; this is the core of Elizabeth Kostova's second novel The Swan Thieves.

Kostova who has a degree in creative writing from the University of Michigan says "

As a child and teenager I loved to paint and draw, but that was a very long time ago; for The Swan Thieves I was careful to interview and observe several painters at their work.  Their knowledge and perspectives were incredibly helpful to me."

 

Robert Oliver is the brilliant artist who attacks a painting Leda by French artist Gilbert Thomas at the National Gallery.  Dr. Marlow, also an amateur painter is on his case. Robert himself has stopped talking except to tell Marlow that (he) did it for her..the woman (he) loved.  Dr. Marlow's need to understand his patient leads him bang into the intimate space of Robert's life-his women, his contemporaries in the art world and the men who hold the secrets of History and also across continents , picking up fragments from the past to piece together coherently. The most fascinating of Roberts's works is a series of paintings featuring an intense dark haired woman. Mystery surrounds the exchange of letters between French Impressionists Beatrice De Clerval and her uncle, artist Olivier Vignot both fictional characters created by Kostova. Robert possesses these letters which are given to us as snippets of their life in nineteenth century France and the stories they tell emerge, stark and disturbing, in Robert's paintings.

 Kostova's debut novel, The Historian was a spooky Historical thriller where a young girl gets drawn into the story of Vlad the Impaler, Wallachia's dreaded ruler who later became associated with the legend of Dracula. Kostova's characters in this novel dig out evidence of the real life inspiration of the Dracula myth traveling across Europe. In Swan Thieves, you have these nineteenth century artists and the substance of their life finds resonance in the life of Robert and those associated with him in America of the eighties. "Yes, those situations are all deliberately constructed parallels for the structure of the novel, but I also wanted to show in those parallels the way past and present can echo each other in real life, or the way history holds information we can use somehow in the present."

 

Does she view her books as Historical fiction then? "I think my novels are literary fiction that deals with history, but I'm much more interested in writing about the way we modern people interact with the past than in producing classic standard historical fiction.  For me, the voice, style, and structure of a book are as important as its historical subjects, although I also work very hard to make my presentation of history as factually accurate as possible." The novel takes us through America, to Normandy in France and to Paris and shifts seamlessly between the nineteenth and twentieth century as though everything really belonged together and the core of the past cannot be separated from that of the present as one can't separate the sound from the echo. "I've always loved the study of history, myself—I see it as simply the greatest human story we tell and retell—and so I find it natural to write about characters who have the same obsession!  For The Swan Thieves, I had the various pleasures of reading about French art history, looking at great Impressionist paintings in person in every museum I could reach, and of visiting some of the French locations in which my characters De Clerval and Vignot find themselves.  It was a wonderful experience."

In this novel, we learn the story of Robert through first person narratives from Kate-his ex wife, lover Mary and Dr. Marlow. Many voices make a story but at times one wishes, one could really get into the mind of Robert's tormented genius which somehow can be only through him but Kostova has her reasons. "I love all those nineteenth-century novels in which voices from various perspectives of a story reach the reader through letters, journals, oral histories, even police reports.  To me, history is a collection of voices—we don't have much more to go on for the truth than those voices, in the end—that often tell different versions of one event.  I also love the art of storytelling, and for storytelling in the classic sense you need a storyteller (or two, or five)."

 

 

We have Kate,Robert's ex wife, holding together the pieces of her life that was somehow never whole despite her forgiving, stoic love for Robert. She herself was a practicing artist but becoming a single mother with children to support doesn't leave much time for art. The people in Robert's life make space for him and often excuse him in exchange for little empathy or understanding. I could see the skin of his face and neck beginning to age, the lines under his eyes the deep brown green  of his gaze, …the angelic curls threaded with silver, his largeness, his distance, his self sufficiency, his loneliness. I wanted to jump up and throw myself at him, but that was what he should have been doing for me. Instead I sat where I was, feeling smaller than ever, framed in a frame -a little straight haired, too clean person he had forgotten to look after in his big quest for art- an essential nobody. You wonder if the novel romanticises genius or is it a true exploration of it.  "I don't think the novel makes a moral case for supporting geniuses no matter what kind of mess they make of their lives; it's really an exploration of why other people sometimes love them and consent to do that, and what the results are for those people.  Some of the characters justify Robert's mode de vie, loving his work and him as they do, and some revile it—I tried to have a balance of voices on that subject."

 

All the female characters, as far as the practice of art is concerned are somehow overshadowed by their need to conform to social norms or simply to domestic responsibility. Robert on the other hand is let loose; he retreats into his own sphere of obsession and art. Nineteenth century Beatrice De Clerval for instance is told by her husband the he wouldn't want her to know too much about life-nature is a fine subject but life is grimmer than she can understand. Is the conflict ever really resolved? "I'm not sure anyone with any sense of responsibility ever resolves that conflict!  It's an especially difficult one for many female artists, and I wrestle with it daily myself.  I do think each of those spheres of life can enrich the others and that no artist really lives and works in a personal or societal void.  What would be the point?"

 

 

To write a dense paced Historical thriller needs discipline and much more than mulling over yellowed pages in old libraries. "I simply try to write as much as I can in whatever part of each day I can carve out for that.  I'm wary of developing habits and rituals, since life always interrupts them!  Writing takes discipline but it also takes a kind of habit of going at it again and again.  A dose of joy in the work helps, too.  I wrote The Historian over 10 very busy years, working much more than full time at other jobs and domestic; I often wrote in 20 minute bursts because I had so little time.  It was an escape from daily life, among other things."

 

Talking about her influences, Kostova says she is really influenced by nineteenth century and early twentieth century Literature. "I've been deeply influenced by some of the important writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, especially Henry James, Charles Dickens, Emily Bronte, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, and E. M. Forster.  For The Historian, I learned a great deal from early mystery writer Wilkie Collins and from the ghost stories of Henry James—and of course from Bram Stoker's Dracula."The books and authors she admires are "too numerous to put down here in any adequate way!" She continues to write that she likes the work of her American contemporaries. "I admire such British writers as A. S. Byatt and John Banville, I read widely in the "classics," and I try to become acquainted with the rest of the world by reading plenty of translations.  At the moment, I'm reading all the translated work of poet Czeslaw Milosz, as well as a fantastic novel, Solo, by Rana Dasgupta."

 

 

 Extracts in Italics , published in First City Magazine 

Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People who Cook.

Anthony Bourdain

Bloomsbury, Rs. 599

Rating: **1/2

 

 

If you are a vegetarian animal lover, your introduction to taste Bourdain's Medium Raw is painful, but that's why you want to sort of devour masochistically. Why? It starts like a suspense novel, where the greatest chefs of America gather, shrouded, to eat an illegal meal of orlaton : sublime dribbles of varied and wondrous ancient flavours- figs, Armagnac, dark flesh slightly infused with the salty taste of ( the author's )own blood.(The hunting of the orlaton bird is banned.)                                                                               

 

The thrill of all this exquisiteness wears off when you find Bourdain in the Caribbean

with his vulgarly rich drug addict girlfriend. A lot of personal mean rants-more appropriate as facebook statuses of exhibitionists. A pinch or two of gyan on spaghetti and we're done.

 

Thankfully, Bourdain the man of culinary excess, gastronomic bizarreness returns. In this sequel to much loved Kitchen Confidential, he's over heroin, has wandered the Caribbean and remarried. The world has changed personally and in culinary terms.  Food to Bourdain alternates between unconditional love and raw sex, enlightenment and nirvana.  Describing pho (Vietnamese noodles) as more like love than sex will be more appropriate…Sometimes I think I should feel guilty about writing stuff like the above. It's porn. Albeit food and travel porn.  Apparently his parents taught him not to show off.

We assure you he slips and mostly we are glad he does. One day he is eating from the Taco lady in Puebla and on another he is gorging on roast goose in Hong Kong and then living it up in Paris with pearls of tapioca with oysters and caviar, you know.

 

 

Food of every imaginable kind remains his passion, not the show around it, just what's on the plate. In an interview to First City in December 2008, he said "Context is so important to the perfect meal.  I think a Bombay Burger (Vada Pao) is just as likely to be a perfect meal as a meal at the best restaurant in Paris."

 

You learn that the recession made foodies of the world more equal. CEOs didn't want to be seen dining openly at fancy restaurants. Tables were suddenly freed for those who deemed it unthinkable to dine at a Masa or something equally intimidating. So, he is being analytical about the world that has changed since Kitchen Confidential, about how food is the new music for the young, on a quest for exceptional box sized eating joints in downtowns across the world. He is being weird in a fun way. He meanders too, sometimes too much. But it's Bourdain. We sort of forgive him.

 

 

 First City Magazine, July 2010. 

Choice

The Art Of Choosing
Sheena Iyengar
Hachette India
Rs.499
Rating: ***1/2

An increasing number of people now assemble their life stories from narratives so disparate that the mind reels from trying to contain all that contradiction. Everything is overlapping with everything else.
It is in a world like this, we make choices every day. Husband, career, Pepsi , Nike etc. Part anecdotal, part research based, Columbia University Professor Sheena Iyengar writes in an engaging non-academic style.
If you are expecting self-help style bullet points on choosing well, stay away .You might, after reading, be stranded -abandoned by conditioned belief systems and forced to rethink why and how you choose. Iyengar questions choice using every possible framework through which we question- scientific, political, personal, economic, medical, religious, institutional, individual, and even astrological.
Iyengar demonstrates how the presence or lack of choice can have a profound impact on our health and sense of well being. How you choose to respond to looking at a diagram of an aquarium for five seconds may be determined by whether you are from a collectivist culture or an individualist one for instance.
She examines popular myths and stories from different cultures analysing them to determine how they demonstrate choice patterns, careful not to generalise but instead give nuanced detailed explanations. We get snapshots into brilliant psychology research such as the experiment where two groups of men, one on a hanging bridge, and the other on a regular one were introduced to attractive women who gave them their phone numbers. The study ultimately reveals that falling off a bridge is biologically similar to falling in love.
Most interestingly, she analyses fashion and why you didn’t actually choose what you are wearing but that a bunch of people sipping cappuccino in New York made that choice for you.
Why did coke buy over Christmas? Is there variety or did the market create that illusion? Is too much choice a bad thing?
We cannot opt out of choice but the best way is to continue studying our complex relationship with it. Science can assist us in becoming more skilful choosers but at its core, choice remains an art.
If you have the choice, read this.

Published in First City Magazine , July 2010 .

Not this , Not this

It’s always been difficult for me to find the geography of my own life in literature. Urban, upper middle class , mostly Bangalorean . Anjum Hasan’s Neti Neti captures the city that is in a maddening flux in some parts ,stagnant and seething in some parts and in some parts traditional as it would have been fifty years ago with sensitivity and a nuance I haven’t read in writing about Bangalore before.

Sophie Das is 25, has moved from the quiet hill town of Shillong to transcribe Hollywood movie subtitles by day and have moral tussles with her land lord about hanging underwear, spend time in pubs with her boyfriend Swami and navigate the weed bed of wealth in the malls, streets and homes of the city’s privileged.
Then there are her friends. The dubious Ringo Saar whose job is to bash up people defaulting on loans, Anu who gets through life doing nothing and keeping a boyfriend and convincing him to move to Australia where the roads are clean.
Shiva, who could be those few people we know who keeps tipping the parallel narative that connects the lives of urban youth into conversations. The South Bangalore gang that hacked a 21 year old man of a rival gang to death, a man who forced his wife to drink acid, how the shit of the rich determinedly travel to the open sewers of the poor.

Her colleague Shanti Gouda lives on the metaphoric other side of the city – lower middle class and working her way up , subtitling English shows for money but refusing to enjoy their vulgarity.
We meet the police men who tell the city’s migrants only half jokingly that in Karnataka they must speak kannada. And the rich Punjabi father and son duo who get out of their air-conditioned car to bet up a local auto driver in their perceived right to exert their masculinity.
Sophie is a witness to other people’s tragedies, forced to make a comment or two. A child dies in a mall, but when a brutal and unexpected murder ends it all for Sophie she imagines finding peace in her mountain home away from what she calls India . It is at this stage in the novel where it feels like Hasan clumsily put together news reports from Bangalore’s recent past and used these events as a backdrop for Sophie’s angst.

And yet, her dull and cold family home which she believed could never change has its own share of , if placid, fissures. Her sister is on a teenage trip towards boys and gold earring gifts while her parents’ relationship is not what she imagined it to be.

The elections are on , their politics suddenly revolving around a visit by Bob Dylan with every party wanting to capitalize on it in a rock loving town. Sophie chases her ideas of a man she has been fascinated by, if not in love with for a while . Nothing however is yielding enough for her to stay.

I can feel Bangalore in Hassan’s prose..it’s fissured class dynamics, , its confused youth , its gourmet shops , its butter and ghee shops , its migrants and its malls.
It’s not Amitav Ghosh’s Sunderbans or Arundhati Roys river polluted with world bank loans or Rushdie’s magic realism. Its most of our lives..


Those of us who went to college here know pretty well how to irritate sales girls by making them help us test lots of expensive perfumes that would cost 1/5th of our first salaries, walk into expensive branded stores and try on purple dresses just because our Tibetan market skinny jeans and what could be easily from Mango t shirt, coupled with our ‘’neutral’’ accents made us pass off for those who could afford such shit..
''She squinted at cubbon park (on a map) and tried to picture them separated by it- Sophie and her friends on the right half of this centre drinking coffee in Styrofoam cups, and Shanti’s mother and great grandmother on the left half , selling breakfast to lewd lorry drivers.’

White Tiger

At first thought, it is Chetan Bhagat that starts of in a rural setting with generous helpings of intellect and garnished with perspective. But Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger is more than that.
The tone is almost flippant but a tone like that is necessary for a story like this, Balram Halwai is a driver from a small village lakshmangarh, who follows his master in delhi , becomes a criminal and ends up an entrepreneur in Bangalore.

Bangalore of the new India.
In a narrative of the New India we haven’t read before told through the eyes of a man from the darkness writing to Chinese Premier Wen Jibao after becoming a successful entrepreneur in Bangalore.

We Indians have stopped seeing contrasts of what it means to work in the house of a lady whose handbag costs ten times the monthly salary she pays you. Adiga tells the story and its dark and touching at the same time.You don’t know whose side you are on, the man who was murdered or the man who murdered - the rich,the poor, the light , the dark.

‘’Who would have thought that the only person in the household to have a conscience will be the woman who wears short skirts’, Halwai asks, when a child gets hit by a family member who was driving drunk and halwai is made to take the blame for it..

Adiga rips apart the lives of India’s rich who live quite comfortably beyond the law for most part and he startles us into thinking about Balram as he passes from darkness into light and the world of Bangalore’s call centres, South Indian coffee and the mothers of murdered sons. ''See, sometimes i think that i will never get caught . ......I have switched sides. I am one of those who cannot be caught in India. ''

His masters laugh at him for being unable to say ‘’Pizza’’ and for saying ‘’pig’or ‘’maal ‘’ for ‘’mall’’.

The real success of this book lies in the fact that it tells you the contrasts without sounding journalisty or patronizing or unnecessarily intense. The tone then is not flippant, really but just matter of fact.
And being urban middle class Indians, it must have occurred to us, the mind of the darkness but we never dared to think it so articulately.


I have never appreciated firangs writings on India ..except William Darymple types.
But sometimes I think , that we are much more blinded to India’s contrasts being Indians and seeing hundreds people settle down to sleep on the pavements as we head back home from office.And there is this argument that Adiga himself has lived much of his life outside India.
But Halwai is as convincing as a potrait of a driver to a rich family can get.

I can imagine the grateful but dumb look on his face when he is told that he is free to not go to jail for a murder he hasn't commited.I can't feel the humiliation he feels when he can't pronounce worlds alien to his tongue and when his masters laugh , his anger , his opportunism and you know, his 'paaapaness''

The other day I saw a perfect shot .

We could start shooting you know, with marine drive, the way every other slick Hindi movie nowadays starts.

Accompanied with a romanticized voice over about Mumbai. The city of dreams.
We then come to NCPA apartments- the world’s second most ( or one of the ten most ok), residential complexes, tilt down and pan left.The road is quite and smooth and mercs pass by, there are women with expensive dresses and smooth legs passing by .

Passing by two three year old bare chested children sleeping on a piece of sack next to ncpa on the road at 9:30 PM one October evening.

‘What a’fucking joke!’’