In the first sentence of Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis”, one of the founding stories of modern literature, we see the travelling salesman Gregor Samsa wake up one morning to find himself transformed into a huge insect. “Companion”, one of the stories in Mridula Koshy’s debut collection If It Is Sweet, offers us a similarly strange prospect, although it is not announced as swiftly and dramatically as in Kafka’s story. Instead, we are made to wait. For a while we are led to believe that the efficient and attentive companion to the old widow in the story is like any other domestic servant. But we find out after a while that he is actually an extremely talented talking monkey.
The initial surprise and disbelief of this is quickly overwhelmed by the radiance of Koshy’s imagining. The monkey, we are told, was bought off the street by the widow (“Maji”) and rescued from a life of captivity, cheap stunts, and hunger. In return, he brings all his skills to bear on improving Maji’s stuttering life. The natural alliance of human and simian lives and needs imagined by Koshy (“His tendency to groom found great satisfaction in her tangled morning hair”) is very endearing. By the time the monkey takes Maji, at the close of the story, back to the old house in Bhutan where he used to live, and we see his tail curl “to lovingly lift the latch of the house gate”, we are totally won over. The companion echoes the tender love and fidelity of that most devoted of companions in our literature, Hanuman.
Indeed, Koshy’s stories are full of large and small acts of caring – of a sense of duty that does not go away even when the object of that duty is no longer present. In one of the best of these stories, “The Good Mother”, we see a woman returning to Delhi from Manchester after the death of her two young sons in a car accident. She carries with her their ashes, to be dispersed in holy waters, but finds herself unable to release them when the occasion arrives. Finally, in a little apartment in Delhi, the claustrophobia of which Koshy evokes with a set of precise details, she brings herself to let the remains go. “Little bits swirl back and stick to her lids and lips,” writes Koshy, leaving us to imagine the horror of swallowing a particle of a life birthed by the very body that now ingests it.
It's not every day that I have the time to take a walk along the sea in the mornings. Today was one of those rare days when the weather was perfect and I had the time so I thought, "Carpe diem et coffee. Let's go for a walk." As I got into the lift, I saw myself sauntering on Carter Road Bandstand. Naturally, I saw myself like a Henri Cartier-Bresson photograph: a blurry, perfect moment; wind-swept hair arranged artfully yet carelessly to show only my kohl-lined eyes, preserving the camera and other things with sight from having to survive seeing my face.
So I go to Gloria Jean's to get my daily dose of chocolate soup (officially known as the Mocha Caramelatte). It is raining by now. No matter. I'm carrying my navy blue umbrella, which is perfectly colour-coordinated with the grey sky and murky sea.
My Sita Sings the Blues tee just arrived, and it’s gorgeous. The gold is a bit blingy. No doubt some desi auntie swapped out the original color at the factory. Subtlety is like kryptonite for that old biddie. There’s a light sprinkle of tiny gold rub-off, which is common with metallics. But otherwise it looks good.
One reader mentioned the gold’s flaking off hers, which is hopefully only a problem with her individual shirt. But if you’re concerned, maybe stick with the non-metallic colors. Me, I’ll be rockin’ the shadow puppet at the next premiere.
Ever since shiny little Apple products started including voice commands, I’ve wondered how they’d handle song names in unsupported languages. Would it be as bad as Moviefone’s text to speech bot?
Yes it is. Here’s how the current iPhone reads out the title track to ‘Kaho Na Pyaar Hai (Please Say You’re in Love)’: ‘Now playing kah-ho en-ay-ay pyre hay.’
Kailash Kher is ‘kay-lahsh cur, terry dee-wuh-nee.’ Sukhwinder gets ‘thay-eye-uh thay-eye-uh by suck-wine-dur sing.’ Nusrat largely escapes the phonemic massacre.
But the machine out-pronounces some 2nd gen actors I’ve had the pleasure of listening to.
A set of curly-toed juttis signify a couple’s overweening liberalism in Away We Go, a film by writer couple Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida and director Sam Mendes. Eggers and Mendes are doyens of dysfunction, but Away is more comic than dark. It’s less a movie than a series of comic setpieces which set up grotesque characters and then puncture them.
Away is about a couple esconced in a battered Volvo, searching for a city in which to settle down with their first baby on the way. John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph’s first choice is thwarted when Krasinski’s parents move to Belgium, renting out their home through ‘an elegant gentleman named Fareed.’ Jeff Daniels plays the callous dad, reprising his character from The Squid and the Whale.
The couple drive to Madison, where their friend U Wisconsin prof Maggie Gyllenhaal insists they take their shoes off. That’s how Krasinski ends up with a set of crazy-toes. They don’t last the evening; Gyllenhaal and her Burning Man-attending partner drive them away with bourgeois condescension and moonchild political correctness.
Krasinski is unbelievably good in this flick, whether taking revenge by driving Gyllenhaal’s son around in a forbidden stroller (’it’s the most fun you’ll have until you discover oral pleasure!’) or breaking into Tourette’s curses to drive up his unborn child’s heartbeat. He yells a non sequitur at his girlfriend, dives beneath the dashboard and reappears with a stethoscope, grinning like a be-spectacled, be-arded comic gargoyle.
About a month ago, my girly, Kenia, showed me some illustrations by one Junko Mizuno and I was hooooooked. Her work is a mix of macabre and sexy, with and a fat dose of "cho chweet!" Luckily, she was in Tr0nto a few weeks later for her first Canadian solo show at the Narwhal Art Projects. We were there to squeal over her mind-boggling awesomeness:
If only my pockets ran deep, I would've jumped on this one:
Remember when we giggled over Sumit Basu singing in a Microsoft Research video? Turns out we overlooked the real star. MS product manager Latika Kirtane earned her CS degree in ‘05 and croons in this cheesy Songsmith vid. Bet this gets played at her wedding:
Kirtane and a desi friend put out a series of acoustic videos filmed in a stairwell. Utterly, butterly adorable:
Few experiences in my life have given me a greater thrill than that of reading with Naseeruddin Shah at the launch of Arzee the Dwarf last week. My own reading skills - reading-aloud skills, I should say – are modest, and therefore I was more than happy to let Naseer take up the gauntlet of bringing Arzee to life sonically. Here is some footage (1, 2) of Naseer reading from a sections of the book. Besides Naseer, the two other live things in the video frame are the book itself and my knobbly knee at bottom-left.
I will be back on Wednesday, when I get home from my travels, with new essays on books. I am also going to be in Delhi (on July 10) and Kolkata (July 17) next month to read from Arzee.
Smoke that tron son. This is one of those rare duets between Lata Mangeshkar & Asha Bhonsle. It’s an entertaining video that has some hotties, a lot of tron and some fuckin’ hippies (where did they come from?)
Film: Jalte Badan
Year: 1973
Composers: Laxmikant Pyarelal
Check out the trailer for Mira Nair’s Amelia, a proto-feminist biopic about the pioneering aviator. The movie looks like an Oscar bid and has the blandest, beigest visual palette of any Nair film:
Earhart was the first woman to receive the Distinguished Flying Cross, awarded for becoming the first aviatrix to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. She set many other records, wrote best-selling books about her flying experiences, and was instrumental in the formation of The Ninety-Nines, an organization for female pilots. During an attempt to make a circumnavigational flight of the globe in 1937, Earhart disappeared over the central Pacific Ocean near Howland Island. [Wiki]
Nair will no doubt follow up with Boseand Air India 182. Fortunately, Salman Rushdie’s movie Gibreel and Saladin would not, in fact, be about flights lost at sea. The Satanic Verses characters were probably inspired by rare survival stories like this one:
On January 26, 1972, a 22-year-old flight attendant named Vesna Vulovic… [set] the Guinness World Record for the highest fall survived without a parachute, at 33,330 feet. [DamnInterestingI]
Before salsa, before bhangra, my Filipino college roomie taught me to dance, and the core of his moves was his M.J. impersonation. This one’s for you, Ariel.
And for you, Michael, you moonwalking, child diddling, skin lightening, cleft-chin-purchasing, extreme body moddingpatent hound. Patron saint of bedroom dancers. You’ll be missed among the sequin shirt tribes of Lokhandwala and Jabalpur.
Poor Mike. The president was black by the time he got done turning white.
After weeks of being unable to go to a movie-hall to see a film that I might actually have wanted to see, I get asked to review Paying Guests. This is how life kicks you when you’re down. Watching this rowdy comedy, I wondered if the producer-multiplex war had stretched on for so long that mediocre B-movies are now being hurriedly scripted and filmed within four or five weeks, just so they can fill the gaps before the (equally mediocre) big releases come roaring back.
Paying Guests opens with three bachelor friends – Bawesh (Shreyas Talpade), Sukhi (Javed Jaffrey) and Daljit (Aashish Chaudhary) – who live in Bangkok as tenants in the improbably large “Kiska” mansion (named purely for its punning utility) until one day they simultaneously lose their jobs and their accommodation (in both cases, their fault, though I think we’re supposed to root for them). Along with a new addition to the group, a bumbler named Karan who’s just flown in from India, they contrive to become paying guests in the house of a Sikh restaurant owner Ballu Ji (Johnny Lever in a performance that makes every role he has done in the past 20 years seem like an acting-class in restraint) and his golden-hearted but rust-brained wife Sweety. Since this traditional-minded couple won’t have single boys staying in their house, Bawesh and Sukhi show up in drag as Karishma and Kareena, the wives of the other two. Loud, forced, headache-inducing slapstick comedy ensues.
It’s a pity in a way, for there are traces in this film of a certain economy of storytelling – such as in the compact opening-credits sequence and the neat little scene where the friends tell each other that at least there can’t be any more problems headed their way and there’s a quick overhead swish to the plane that’s bringing more trouble (in the form of Karan) for them. In these and other moments, one sees an unfussiness about the direction and editing which suggests that a better script (or any script for that matter) might have resulted in an entertaining movie. But sadly the technical competence is at the service of some of the silliest attempts at humour you’ll ever see.
Actress Pia Glenn, who’s dating Salman Rushdie, does a comic burlesque in Will Ferrell’s Broadway show You’re Welcome, America. Playing Condi Rice in Dubya’s fantasies, she dry-humps his desk while Ferrell mimes doing to her what Bush did to the country (at 2:20). Rice, of course, once famously referred to Dubya as her husband before correcting herself.
In the first sentence of Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis”, one of the founding stories of modern literature, we see the travelling salesman Gregor Samsa wake up one morning to find himself transformed into a huge insect. “Companion”, one of the stories in Mridula Koshy’s debut collection If It Is Sweet, offers us a similarly strange prospect, although it is not announced as swiftly and dramatically as in Kafka’s story. Instead, we are made to wait. For a while we are led to believe that the efficient and attentive companion to the old widow in the story is like any other domestic servant. But we find out after a while that he is actually an extremely talented talking monkey.
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