Arvind Adiga grabs the Booker

Arvind Adiga has done it. He has won this year's Man Booker Prize for his novel, The White Tiger.

Adiga has got this honour with his first book--that's amazing. I had no doubt about his talent ever since I had read some of his book reviews in the Time magazine. Perhaps at that time not many had noticed him but I had been impressed.

Here is the Guardian on his win:

After an "emotionally draining" and closely fought final judging session, Aravind Adiga, one of the two debut novelists on the Man Booker shortlist, was last night awarded the £50,000 prize for The White Tiger, a bracingly modern novel about the dark side of the new India.

Adiga, 33, is a surprise winner: at long odds he batted aside the claims of veteran writers on the shortlist such as Sebastian Barry and Amitav Ghosh.

He is only the fourth first-time novelist to win the Man Booker - after Keri Hulme in 1985, Arundhati Roy in 1997 and DBC Pierre in 2003 - and he is the second youngest after Ben Okri, who won in 1991 aged 32.

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From the valley to the ghats

Young Indian filmmaker Rajesh S. Jala’s new documentary Children of the Pyre (2008) has recently won the best documentary film award at this year’s Montreal Film Festival. This documentary features about 7 children working at Manikarnika, Banaras, India’s busiest, most sacred and ancient cremation ground.

Though this director-producer-cinematographer relishes the honour, it behoves his hard work. Rajesh has been making films, primarily documentaries, for the last 11 years. He has directed more than 10 documentary films and a number of television series for leading international and Indian television channels. One of his earlier documentary films Foating lamp of the shadow valley (2006) was nominated at the International Amsterdam Film Festival and was officially selected at the Palm Spring Film Festival, US and the Raindance Film Festival, London.

Here’s an exclusive interview with the young filmmaker:

How did "Children of the Pyre" come about? What attracted you to this serious theme?

For many years I was keen to make a film on Banaras. Two years back I went to Banaras for a recci and I spent a month there. And during this period I got an opportunity to meet these extraordinary 7 children. Immediately I decided to do this film. This unusual subject, children working at the busiest cremation ground in India, attracted me to do this film.

Was it a difficult subject to research and write on? Or did you shoot the film first and then edited it down to whip out a meaningful narrative?

There wasn't much of research involved. We followed the children for 18 months (off and on), and shot more than 100 hours of footage. The film is a self-narrative of these kids who narrate their lives very candidly. And it took us 7 months to edit the film.

As has been mentioned elsewhere, you took several months to shoot and edit the documentary. When you were making the documentary, what was going through your mind?

This film has left a deep impact on me. Filming at a cremation ground, where almost 150 dead bodies are cremated each day was one of the most difficult experiences I have gone through. Especially in the beginning it was an emotional torture to shoot at this cremation ground. Dead bodies coming after every 10 minutes with the chants of Ram naam satya hai (Lord Rama’s name is the truth) echoing in the air almost created a haunting environment. During the peak summer schedule last year, the temperature at the ground was above 50 degrees and we shot for many days. The whole crew got sick. Our energy was drained out. I was limping and I could hardly talk.

What sort of relationship developed between you and the principal characters of your film? Did you face any hurdles in shooting as Varansi is a religious place?

Initially the kids treated me like any other visitor but when they saw me spending most of the time with them, following them through days and nights, their perception changed and so did their approach towards me. Gradually we became friends.

Shooting at Manikarnika cremation ground was the biggest shooting challenge in my 11 years of filmmaking career. Besides physical and emotional challenges, there were lots of hurdles we had to go through. At times we had to face the wrath of the relatives accompanying the dead body. And some times the local cremators or touts would intimidate us. But gradually, we built up a good rapport with the locals and eventually, almost everybody supported us.

Did you expect to win accolades (such as the best documentary film award at Montreal film festival) when you were working on the film? How do you feel getting appreciated for your work?

When I was making the film I didn't think of winning awards. But I was hopeful that this film would generate awareness about this extreme form of childhood. Thankfully, I am getting a lot of appreciation and it really encourages me.

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French Writer Wins Nobel Prize

The French writer Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, whose work reflects a seemingly insatiable restlessness and sense of wonder about other places and other cultures, won the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday.

This is from today's NY Times:

Asked at the news conference if he had any message to convey, Mr. Le Clézio said: “My message will be very clear; it is that I think we have to continue to read novels. Because I think that the novel is a very good means to question the current world without having an answer that is too schematic, too automatic. The novelist, he’s not a philosopher, not a technician of spoken language. He’s someone who writes, above all, and through the novel asks questions.”

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Inside India’s publishing business

In the last few years, following the Booker Prize win of Arundhati Roy, there has been a phenomenal change in the publishing scene in India. According to reports, the industry is growing at the rate of twenty five per cent every year. Many multinational publishers have set shop in India. Literary festivals at places like Jaipur, Mumbai and Kolkata have created the buzz about writers and writing (and in the process, stoking some controversies too)—and I am not even mentioning the five-star book launches, peppered with Bollywood celebrities and talkative sound-bite savvy politicians. Agents and talent scouts have been making trips to India in search of the next Arundhati Roy. New names have arrived in India’s overcrowded literary marquee with a regularity and speed only to be rivaled by the cell phone penetration rate in the country. If you find that last comparison a bit off the curve, take it with a pinch of salt but I hope you get the signal (I mean, the drift of things).

There is a reason for all this rush to the Indian market. According to publishing guru David Davidar (who established Penguin India some two decades ago and now heads Penguin Canada), the Indian (English language) publishing scene in 20 years will be the second or third largest in the world overtaking Canada and Australia. “From about 7 to 8 million India will go to 30 to 40 million in the space of 15 to 20 years which means it's just going to explode,” he has said in an interview.

In a scenario like this, one would be forgiven to assume that young Indian writers—boys or girls or their adult versions—today have the world at their feet: talent hunters stalking the wannabe literary superstars, literary agents wooing the parents or grandparents of their literary children or grandchildren, hoping to help them snatch the next literary deal of the century, publishers laughing their way to the bank as they sit atop an inexhaustible literary gold mine of unsolicited manuscripts.

The truth is as far from the reality as it could be. The publishing scenario in India, especially the fiction side of it, is still a nightmare for young Indian writers, far removed from the fairy tale scene painted above. When it comes to publishing, an aspiring Indian writer (sans any literary pedigree or fancy degrees in creative writing from UK or US) is—yes, you guessed it correctly—much on his own: no agents, no literary scouts, and no willing publishers.

Well, actually there are some but the scene has perhaps not changed much ever since the days of an upstart R K Narayan (The Malgudi Days, The Guide) when he had to ask his friend to tie a stone to his unpublished, much rejected manuscript and throw it into the Thames. Now that the big brand global publishers are in India, new Indian writers don’t have to go to the Thames; they have their Ganges or the Jamuna waiting for their precious offering at a stone’s throw.

The only difference, between now and then, is that perhaps there is a lot of awareness about publishing, especially about the million dollar advances that some writers get in the west. There are some websites and email groups too that help writers share information and advice with each other—a soothing atmosphere for the wannabe novelist to cool his heels and let his hair down and cavile and complain until he sets off for another wild goose chase for a publisher.

Writers’ Side

In the given situation, is anybody doing anything to help the poor writers come out of the shadows? I was surprised to find out that an agency-- Writer's Side—is actively seeking to help new writers reach publishers in India and abroad.

“Writer's Side has been set up to counterbalance the increasing inaccessibility of Indian publishers, especially the global conglomerates that are setting up divisions here,” says the founder editor of Writer's Side, Kanishka Gupta.

Kanishka was attached to an agency based in Jaipur before he took the plunge into an inkpot to start a new literary chapter. “It took me just seven months to grow out of the concept of literary agencies in India and evolve a model that was more holistic and profitable,” says the literary entrepreneur.

His company now provides editorial and market assistance to writers. In addition, it introduces very promising talent to our contacts overseas.

He, however, clarifies that he is not a typical agent. In fact, for India’s unhealthy publishing scene, he pins some blame to the agencies. “I think the origin of agencies in India was largely an offshoot of the growing interest of foreign markets in Indian fiction,” he says. “Sadly, that interest is very volatile and fluctuates from time to time. Also, agencies in India as a business model are not viable. Apart from Osians, I've not encountered a single agent who works with proper infrastructure and support. Thus, the business model of agenting that was started to become lucrative ultimately ends up seeing the agents drag themselves into a metaphorical space of literary martyrdom. That's not something we can afford.”

“I would also question some of the choices the agents are making. It not only fails them in their cause but also makes Indian writing look increasingly suspect to foreign markets,” he adds. “One has to be very patient and has to stop hanging on the coat tails of The God of Small Things era. The market has become insanely competitive and somewhat unreliable.”

To prove his point, Kanishka gives the example of a major publishing house (he does not want to disclose the name) which has been in operation in India for over two years. “Other than established names in fiction and commissioned titles in non-fiction they haven't been able to do anything substantial,” he notes. “Most of their time is spent in formulating innovative marketing campaigns- again a very shortsighted approach for a publisher especially one who purportedly claimed to be here to find unique voices in the country.”

Kanishka thinks that for the benefit for the writers and the industry, publishers should start taking serious initiatives to nurture talent rather than simply work as money-making corporates. “It’s one thing to justify your salary at the end of the month, quite another to do it at the cost of thousands of writers who are waiting to get some sort of direction in their careers,” he points out. “I hold publishers responsible for writers abandoning their careers prematurely. In the West, consultancies like the TLC, several freelance editors and book doctors are there to help writers but there's no such system in India, maybe not even in Asia.”

I guess writers will welcome that kind of approach in India. And Indian writers won’t have much to complaint if more agencies like Writer’s Side stood by them.

So, what’s his advice to the aspiring writers? Kanishka ferrets out a long list: “Don’t follow trends. Inoculate yourself against rejections. Don’t get paranoid. Always be on the lookout for a novel idea or a novel way to tell a story. Find a mentor or a reader to nurture your talents. It may take 5 years to see your work in print but it’s worth all the effort.”

Well, it’s not that a long list but makes immense sense. If you are not in a hurry to become famous, make those five years into ten. Writers can always do with some patience and hard work.
Published in the MPH Malaysia magazine, Quill.

Writers, beware!

A word of caution from Anita Desai ('One Rip Van Winkle Sleep And...' in Outlook):

Now that worldly success has been made acceptable and popular, something to be courted, it can too easily follow that the publisher will demand books that earn back those advances and justify the expenditure on publicity and distribution, and slowly, but surely, turn the writer into a good financial bet just as one actor may prove to be such a treasure and another may not. The pressures exerted on both the publisher and the writer today simply did not exist 40 or 50 years ago. But there is no free lunch and the writer soon learns that if he wishes to earn, he must learn to please. An insidious pressure, this, not one that encourages freedom or fearlessness.

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The wonder that was India

I am witnessing the birth of a new resurgent India, which has rejected Nehruvian visions of a modern mindset and polity, and which believes in a masculine and aggressive version of religiosity and cultural hegemony, a belief in contrast to the Gandhian values of Sarv dharm sambhav.

In the light of the recent encounter killings in Jamia, Delhi and the anti-Christian activities in the south of India, I am sad to note what Shabnam Hashmi says here in her piece in Tehelka (Communalism, Centrestage):

The ascent of these forces has been systematic and well planned. Twenty years ago, most of the secular forces believed that the communal fascist forces were on the fringe of society and laughed at the possibility of their ever moving centerstage. Today the situation has reversed — the communal forces are so centrestage, it is difficult to differentiate between what is right and what is centre. They have invaded all spaces and areas including the minds of our secular politicians.

Among the plenty of weapons that they have used in this journey — from the peripheral to the Centre — fake encounters occupy a fairly important position. They have cleverly used different weapons at different stages. Beginning from ordinary bhajan mandalis, they moved to more organised kathas, to new age gurus. Working at different levels over 15 years — shishu mandirs, shakhas, ekal vidyalayas, sant samagams, television serials, the rath yatras, leaflets, videos, CDs — they have slowly entered the consciousness of an entire society with targeted messages against minorities. Only those sections of society who strongly and consciously contested this ideology could retain their sanity. After the seeds of hatred were sowed successfully and the harvest was being reaped, started the more decisive phase — the physical attacks and largescale genocide. Most of the experiments were done in Gujarat and the remote areas of other states. For example, the experiment within the tribal belts started in the late 1960s and early 1970s.Almost simultaneously, the VHP swamis then moved into these areas.

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The most dangerous places on earth

Pankaj Mishra in The Guardian:

Apparently, no inconvenient truths are allowed to mar what Foreign Affairs, the foreign policy journal of America's elite, has declared a "roaring capitalist success story". Add Bollywood's singing and dancing stars, beauty queens and Booker prize-winning writers to the Tatas, the Mittals and the IT tycoons, and the picture of Indian confidence, vigour and felicity is complete.

The passive consumer of this image, already puzzled by recurring reports of explosions in Indian cities, may be startled to learn from the National Counterterrorism Centre (NCTC) in Washington that the death toll from terrorist attacks in India between January 2004 and March 2007 was 3,674, second only to that in Iraq. (In the same period, 1,000 died as a result of such attacks in Pakistan, the "most dangerous place on earth" according to the Economist, Newsweek and other vendors of geopolitical insight.)

To put it in plain language - which the NCTC is unlikely to use - India is host to some of the fiercest conflicts in the world. Since 1989 more than 80,000 have died in insurgencies in Kashmir and the northeastern states.

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Naomi Klein: "The Shock Doctrine" & "No Logo"

The Indian Renaissance

Book Review

The Indian Renaissance—India’s Rise after a Thousand Years of Decline by Sanjeev Sanyal, World Scientific, 2008, US$ 29.95.

Did you read the title of the book under review? Read it carefully. Because when I received the email to review this book and saw the book’s title, I felt a little daunted. The Indian Renaissance—India’s Rise after a Thousand Years of Decline! Whew! In my mind’s eye, I imagined the book to be heftier than Amartya Sen’s The Argumentative Indians. But when I finally got a copy of the book in my mail, I was relieved to see its manageable heft. In this timely treatise, Sanjeev Sanyal has made his point in less than 250 pages. That itself says a lot about the author’s prudence given the challenge he had in his hands.

Writing a thousand pages would not have been impossible for Sanjeev (the topic would have justified it) who is an Indian economist based in Singapore. He is currently Deutsche Bank’s regional Chief Economist and Adjunct Fellow of the Institute of Policy Studies, Singapore.

The book’s central thesis, which is largely about India’s economic resurgence, is very straightforward at its core: During the “golden age”, prior to the 11th century, India was a country that encouraged innovation and change. By virtue of that, India exercised huge influence, both economically and culturally (the author calls the India of those days as the United States of today), in the entire known world, especially in South East Asia (through the Silk route and the Southern Spice trade route). According to Angus Maddison’s estimates, India accounted for 33% of the world economy in 1AD. Between 1000 and 1820, India’s share of the world gross domestic product (GDP) fell from 29% to 16%. The author concludes that “India’s position was long in decline well before the colonial period. The industrial revolution and colonial occupation only sped up the process.”

The question Sanjeev asks is this: why did this decline in the thriving Indian civilization set in?

Even though Sanjeev seems to agree with V S Naipaul’s “India—A Wounded Civilization” thesis, he argues that per se it was not the Muslim invasions or the British colonialism that that set India back on the path of backwardness. “A change in cultural attitudes by the 11th century created a fossilized society obsessed with regulating all aspects of life according to fixed rules,” he posits. “Not surprisingly, this discouraged the spirit of innovation and led to a long and painful decline. India fell behind not just as an economy but as a civilization.”

Even after India’s Independence in 1947, India’s potential was not unleashed due to the Nehruvian policies, says Sanyal. According to him, the turning point came in India’s destiny in 1991 when India was forced to open itself out to the world. By opening up, Sanjeev means not just the opening up of the economy but all aspects of life—and how it coincided with the communications revolution: cable TV, mobile phones and the Internet. This change was heralded, if you will, by Bengal reformers like Ram Mohun Roy and others in early 19th century when the country witnessed important social reforms and the introduction of the English language.

In the backdrop of a glorious past, Sanjeev provides an analysis of what happened after Independence and how the 1991’s liberalization unleashed India’s entrepreneurial potential. Especially interesting is a chapter on the great Indian middle class in which Sanjeev debunks the myth of the Indian middle class’ size. He claims that the “300 million” size of the Indian middle class is exaggerated, which is quite convincing. What he does not examine is whether this BPO and KPO spawned middle class is solid in its base or will it be washed away by the wave of global economic depression.

To buttress his claims and arguments, Sanjeev quotes a lot of research throughout the book, from ancient text to modern-day research papers, from Kautilya to Surjit Bhalla. Luckily, he has kept the use of footnotes to the minimum and despite the parading of statistics (which is necessary for a book of this nature), the reading is not hampered and there are hardly any digressions.

Towards the end of the book, Sanjeev paints a bright picture for India’s future. He points out that India needs institutional reforms to cope with the changes brought about by economic prosperity but perhaps he relies too heavily on the moral courage of the middle class to make it happen. He also does not invest much thought into the social divisions that beset today’s India.

Even though Indians can rightfully take pride in its current ascendance, there is no point quarrelling with the past except perhaps in drawing lessons for charting the future course. Perhaps that’s what Sanjeev is trying to do in this book.

However, this is not a new idea. All civilizations, as Edward Gibbon had noted, go through cycles of rise and falls. Centuries ago, India went through it and before it many others such as the Greek, Persian and the Islamic civilizations. Even today, as India and China are rising, one could see many already heralding the end of the Pax Americana.

Even though this is an intelligently written book, it skips many historical facts especially from the last thousand years. The consolidation of India under the Mughals and the administrative set up that followed, honed by the British with their laws and technology (Railways, Telegraph) was significant for India’s journey into modernism. Except for the early Mongol and Afghan marauders, the Mughals did not take away the wealth of India. The British did, and hence the drain of wealth of theory, to finance their industrial revolution. Before they built Calcutta and Bombay, it were the British who caused the de-urbanization and de-industrialization of India—otherwise Indian manufactured calicoes were famous the world over. Therefore, to ignore the achievements of the last thousand years flies in the face of history. If the last thousand years were a black hole in India’s history, many of India’s current cultural achievements would not have come about: How else can you trace the origins of the Taj Mahal, Hyderabadi Biryani, and the songs of Taare Zameen Pe? And could the Vikram Seths and Rushdies and Arundhati Roys be possible without the influences of the last few centuries?

Also, while the author flogs Nehru and his advisor Mahalanobis for their “inward-looking cultural attitude” and socialist policies, some credit should be given to them for having the vision to found the IITs and IIMs—the educational institutions that irrigated the field of India’s resurgence.

Besides the book’s core arguments, what impresses me most are the author’s astute observations about the modern developments in India—the way he has described the decline of Calcutta and the emergence of unplanned ‘planned’ townships such as Gurgaon is honest and courageous (Dazzled by the glitz and glamour of the high-rises and malls, quite often the upper middle class Indians tend to overlook underlying problems that mainly affect the hoi polloi—it takes a Sanjeev to write about the lack of municipal waste disposal systems and lack of pavements in Gurgaon, for example).

Whether one agrees or disagrees with Sanjeev’s propositions, the book is worth one’s attention for its sheer intelligence and historical sweep. Subjects like history and economics might not turn everyone on, but believe me, this is one book that can make every Indian heart race—with excitement and pride, and hope in India’s future.

An edited version of this book review appeared in India Se, September 2008.

Woody has still got it

I have been disappointed to see Woody Allen's recent outings, especially Scoop, and I really don't understand why does he need to have Scarlett in every film that he directs (maybe that's why all his recent films are such duds). After watching films like Scoop, I thought the guy had lost his mojo.

Woody's last film that I had enjoyed watching was Bullets Over Broadway. And then recently when I was in Sydney I could get hold of a Manhattan DVD. I watched it in my hotel room. And man, you have to respect this guy.

Then I read this piece "Excerpts from Spanish Diary" in the NYT a few days ago and enjoyed it so much that I thought I should share it with you here on my blog. This guy is 72 and he says his pants caught fire when he interviewed Penelope Cruz for his new film, 'Vicky Cristina Barcelona', which also has Javier Bardem in it (David Denby of The New Yorker calls him criminally attractive, read Denby's review of this movie here):

Once again I had to help Javier with the lovemaking scenes. The sequence requires him to grab Penélope Cruz, tear off her clothes and ravish her in the bedroom. Oscar winner that he is, the man still needs me to show him how to play passion. I grabbed Penélope and with one motion tore her clothes off. As fate would have it she had not yet changed into costume, so it was her own expensive dress I mutilated. Undaunted I flung her down before the fireplace and dove on top of her. Minx that she is, she rolled away a split second before I landed causing me to fracture certain key teeth on the tile floor. Fine day’s work, and I should be able to eat solids by August.

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Sex and the Olympic city

'Talk about shooting your load'...that's Clive Oven mouthing it in Shoot 'Em Up while he is still inside Monica Belucci and at the same time firing his gun at a posse of invaders--talk about sex and athleticism, I say. That movie, Shoot 'Em Up, which I just saw, is a fireworks of a different kind, a mood more than a movie, a trigger happy full frontal assualt, as the movie's DVD jacket proudly showcases.

Sorry, I am supposed to write about sex and the Olympics in this post--a weird topic indeed but one that I was forced to talk about after reading this frank and brilliant piece of writing from Olympic athlete and now commentator Matthew Syed. This article appeared in the Times, UK:

I am often asked if the Olympic village - the vast restaurant and housing conglomeration that hosts the world's top athletes for the duration of the Games - is the sex-fest it is cracked up to be. My answer is always the same: too right it is. I played my first Games in Barcelona in 1992 and got laid more often in those two and a half weeks than in the rest of my life up to that point. That is to say twice, which may not sound a lot, but for a 21-year-old undergraduate with crooked teeth, it was a minor miracle.

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'Write what you know'

Arvind Adiga in FT:

A piece of advice that every aspiring novelist is sure to get, sooner or later, is to "write what you know". By restricting yourself to direct experience and autobiography, the theory goes, you give your narrative authenticity. Now comes a first book by a young Vietnamese-Australian author that challenges this maxim: The Boat , a collection of short stories by Nam Le, insists that literature must also be created out of worlds the writer does not know.

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Anita Desai in Singapore

Indian novelist and short story writer Anita Desai will be giving a talk in Singapore as part of the India Se-India Club Literary Saloon.

The talk is slated for 23 August 2008 (6.30 pm). The venue is the Pod, Level 16, National Library Building (NLB), Victoria Street.

Anita Desai is the Emeritus John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has been shortlisted for the Booker prize three times. Her daughter, the author Kiran Desai, won the 2006 Booker prize.

Her recent works of fiction include The Zigzag Way (2004), Diamond Dust and Other Stories (2000) and Fasting, Feasting (1999).

Like dancing after walking

Arundhati Roy has finally moved her pen into the realm of fiction...for the second time. Outlook reports that The Briefing, her first work of fiction since The God of Small Things in 1997, is an allegory, a powerful fable about Climate Change, the War on Terror and Corporate Raj.

According to the magazine, The Briefing was written for Manifesta7, one of the most important European Biennials of Contemporary Art, which opens on July 19 in northern Italy.

How does it feel to come back to fiction? And she answers:

Well this is only a little shard of fiction...I don't think we should make too much of it. It cannot in any way be compared to writing a novel...but writing fiction-shard or otherwise-is a delight. Like dancing after walking.

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The idea of artistic value is meaningless these days

So says novelist and critic Amit Chaudhuri. The context of his saying this is Bollywood and the kind of films it produces. I quote from a review of his latest release (a book of essays, Clearing a Space: reflections on India, literature and culture) in The Economist:

Pausing briefly, Mr Chaudhuri, the earnest poet, dismisses any possibility of Bollywood containing “artistic value”. And then the critic recollects himself, and Mr Chaudhuri reflects that, “of course”, the idea of artistic value is meaningless these days.

Here's on his take on Indian literature and postmodernism:

Post-modernism, writes Mr Chaudhuri, is “polyphony; the conflation and confusion of fantasy with history”, a “rhetoric of excess, plenty and a relentless engulfing inclusiveness”, which has been the context for Indian writers since the 1981 publication of Salman Rushdie’s babbling narrative, “Midnight’s Children”.

An exhausting theorist, Mr Chaudhuri likens this and the Indian literature that has followed it—with all its variety and interconnectedness—to globalisation. Literary merit, he says, has become synonymous with commercial value; “today’s writers are stocks and shares”. Here, the poet in Mr Chaudhuri asserts himself: “The triumphal narrative of Indian writing”—perhaps even including Mr Rushdie’s feted trickery—“bores me, personally speaking, as a reader and writer.”

Thought-provoking, isn't it?

Couple of writers

What happens when both husband and wife become novelists? You might say this is nothing new. You might even give some examples to prove your point. But I find it interesting.

I am talking about two relatively new writers here.

Melanie Abrams, wife of Indian author Vikram Chandra, has debuted with a novel on love and sadomasochism.It is called Playing.

Maria Giovanna writes about Abrams in Mint:

I ask Abrams—whose spouse is the acclaimed Indian writer Vikram Chandra—if she felt the whole subcontinent looking over her shoulder as she wrote an admittedly “gritty” story. She laughs and recalls urging her agent to pursue selling the novel in India as well as the usual markets (the US and UK). Then, reality hit. Says Abrams: “I thought, ‘I must be out of my mind. What was I thinking? My in-laws, my sisters-in-law, everyone is going to read the book now!’” But, she calmly asserts: “I am proud of it. I am not ashamed or worried.”

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Also, Anuradha Roy, herself an editor/publisher, and married to famous publisher Rukun Advani (Permanent Black, author of the novel, Beethoven among the cows) has come out with her first novel, An Atlas of Impossible Longing:

Deftly and sensitively narrated, this first novel is the story of three generations of a Bengali family and Mukunda, the illegitimate child of a tribal woman, who became from the age of six a part of their lives. The events span the first 50 years of the 20th century; and in the three sections of the book, the last spoken by Mukunda, the narrative is punctuated with key dates which link loosely the family's history with that of modern India.

Urdu ke naam

Prof Gopichand Narang on Urdu's legacy:

I write in three languages, Urdu, Hindi and English, but I identify most with Urdu. It is in my blood and marrow. Language provides freedom but it is bondage as well. You do not choose a language, a language chooses you. I consider Urdu as one of the finest by-product of the composite culture of the last millennium. Its base is Hindustani, the lingua franca of India. It is like rainbow where so many colors merge to create an effect. It is a misnomer to consider it alien, it is Indo-Aryan, Indic, and 70 per cent of its vocabulary is Hindi with selected Arabic-Persian phonology and phraseology, which has been fully assimilated and indigenised. This cultural blending gives Urdu a sophisticated élan which has a charm of its own. Its elegance and eloquence is like the Taj Mahal, which represents the synthesis of Islamic spirit with Indian sensibility. Urdu all along has been anti-sectarian and its tone and temper has been humanitarian.

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Short + Sweet Singapore

In the third week of the Short+Sweet Singapore play festival, ten plays of varying quality were staged at NAFA’s Studio Theatre. In less than two hours, audiences were treated with ten ten-minute long performances that tackled themes ranging from sex to consumerism to cultural identity and suicide.

Playwright Jerome Parisse’s Smell the Roses, directed by Candice de Rozario, tried to dissect the (non-existent) sexual life of a Singaporean couple. A few years into their marriage, Andrew and Maree had seen a near total decline in their sexual attractiveness for each other—not only a disappointment for themselves but also for Maree’s mother who wanted to be a grandmother. One day when Andrew is alone at home and helping himself with some porn on TV, his wife and mother-in-law catch him “smelling the roses”. The touch of comedy in this light-weight relationship play set the mood for the evening.

Mark Friend’s Ledge Fetish, directed by Michael Wang, took everyone by surprise because of its weird theme but it turned out to be hugely satisfying and was clearly one of the most well-written and well-performed plays of the lot. An accountant, played by Musa Fazal, has a fetish for ledges and windows of old buildings. One day he is indulging in his fetish when he is spotted in the act by a shoeshine girl, played by Julie Wee. The exchange between them takes fascinating turns, stoking the imagination of the members of the audience. Julie’s Juno-like performance and easy charm enthralled the audience.

Changing the gears was another Singapore themed-play, Sharon’s Scrumptious Pineapple Cake (Playwright: Leon Foo, Director: Sharon Lin). Two daughters reach their mother’s place with two contrasting news—one wants to divorce her husband and another wants to get married to an elderly man. The mother is at first distraught and heartbroken to hear the secrets that were brought to her and she berates her daughters at their stupid decisions. But then as they quarrel and argue, the mother gives in and acquiesces to their decisions, respecting their right to be happy in their own ways. In the acting department in this play, the mother easily takes the cake.

Ken Mizusawa’s Free Fall (directed by Geraldine Paul) deals with a dark theme: suicide. A man, driven to commit suicide by the ever-changing demands of his workplace, climbs the top of a building to “take control of his death”. But even there, he cannot commit the act in peace as he is interrupted by a student who is there to do research on suicide. The play’s premise was good but including too many characters somehow diluted its effectiveness.

Carolyn Seet’s The Bank (directed by Jamie Cant) is not a normal bank. It can also be a place of seduction. Sounds weird? But bank employee Stephanie (Jeane Raveendran) makes it deliciously believable. The Bank was like a one-character play and Jeane did well to hold the audience’s attention through her soap opera performance.

The next two plays, Are you wanting greater coverage? (playwright Raksha Mahtani and director Nur Sahirrah Safit) and Native Speaker (playwright: Dean Lundquist; Director: Muhammad Faizad Salim) tackle serious themes of identity and racism. While the first one is an exchange between a bored Chindian girl and an Indian call centre guy (who calls in from UK, short for Uttra Khand), the second one is set as an interview piece where a white man is hiring for the position of a “native speaker”. The interviewee insists that she is a native speaker. The position is closed, says the interviewer, because, it emerges, the interviewee does not look like a native speaker. A long argument follows between the two characters that explores the racist biases but it all ends with a twist in the tail—which I could guess coming.

Raksha Mahtani’s play has some clever lines but it fails to fully explore the issues of identity and culture. To be honest, there is only so much one can do in ten minutes. In that perspective, it was a commendable effort.

Verena Tay’s Imperfect Family Recipes (director: Claude Girardi) is about generation gap and old age. It had an old and infirmed character as its main protagonist who vented her feeling out through her pre-recorded monologues. I found it clever and the video’s production quality was quite good. For its sheer innovativeness of presentation, this play deserves appreciation.

Also different in presentation was Alex Broun’s Somewhere Between the Sky and the Sea (director: Rayann Condy) but the theme was trite: a lyricist torn between two beautiful women. Truth be told, I quite enjoyed it.

The last production, Permission to Use Fire (writer/director: Richard Lord) was the darkest of all the plays in this lot. A failed illusionist gets a rare gift just about when he is about the kick the game for good. Intriguing, isn’t it? You have to watch it to believe it.

In all, most of the plays were above average and if you get a chance, catch some of the good ones this Friday at the Esplanade.

More play reviews by other writers are here.

A case of exploding tongues

Apologies again, I have been away, travelling. You might have already guessed that seeing my two earlier posts: photos and a video. If you did not, no worries. Here I am.

Recently, while surfing the net, I was delighted to note that Pakistan (or UK) has given birth to another novelist (in English). This is Mohammad Hanif. His novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, has been reviewed here by William Dalrymple.

I was delighted because I happen to know Mohd Hanif--but in a twisted way (I am sure he would have forgotten it all--no one's fault). He is with BBC Urdu and if you watch BBC World, sometimes he appears with his comments on Pakistani issues. This was several years ago when I was still in India. I appeared for a test for BBC Urdu Radio and cleared a few rounds of the process. My final interview was with Mr Hanif and another gentleman who was English.

As luck would have it, I never made the final cut, primarily perhaps because at that time I did not have any newspaper or radio experience. Since then, as you might have noted, my career has taken a different turn. Perhaps I was never meant to be a Urdu journalist despite my love for the language (I love both the languages--Urdu poetry and English fiction).

But I never forgot my interviewer, Mr Hanif (I never forget anyone I've met).

So, when I read about his novel's release, I was quite pleased. The review sounds good and I look forward to reading his novel. Do let me know if you happen to read his book. Here are excerpts from Dalryple's review:

Highly praised by, among others, John Le Carre, A Case of Exploding Mangoes is quite unlike anything recently published this side of the border, and throws the gauntlet down to a new generation of Indian writers. For the first time in this part of Asia, there is now serious competition out there.

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Sarawak on video