Karan Mahajan’s debut Family Planningis a comic novel about a Delhi minister with 13 children. Arjun, the eldest, is a Bryan Adams fan who pulls together a band to impress Aarti, a cutie on his bus route. His dad Rakesh keeps having kids because he’s only attracted to his wife while she’s pregnant. He’s a good manager in charge of flyovers but a poor politician, turning in his resignation histrionically every time he wants a day off. But he runs into trouble when female protesters besiege Parliament after a popular serial hunk is killed off on screen.
This novel covers upper middle class Delhi and is a fine parody of Indian politics. It starts with promise, but the writing is inconsistent. You get the sense that the 24-year-old Mahajan hasn’t quite found his voice. At its finest, Family reads like the ineffectual, bumbling Mr. Biswas and is written with flair. At its weakest, it’s 90210, delving into the de facto horniness and low-level fears of a callow Delhi teen without making us care.
Several commentators in the Indian press and on this blog have asserted that attacking terrorists in Pakistan would strengthen public support for the army and so should be avoided. This line of thinking strikes me as a three-rail bank shot, something with far too many tricky psychological variables to be a reliable foundation for policy. And it’s fatally naïve because of the invariants in the Pakistani military-terrorist nexus.
The most basic reason why India should strike terrorist training camps in Kashmir and mainland Pakistan, the former with airstrikes, the latter covertly, is to alter the incentives. The masterminds are irrational only insofar as martyrdom ideology. They’re quite rational in terms of designing an attack and picking soft targets. India needs to raise the cost of committing a terrorist attack and do so directly, freighting the masterminds with the blowback.
The next is business confidence. A country which cannot protect its Dalal Street will not long have one.
Another is sheer government survival. A government which cannot defend its people has no business existing. The party in power is well aware of this.
The idea that we must not unite Pakistan around its military is naïve. The Pakistani military is the enemy, of both India and the United States. The 11/26 attackers were allegedly trained by men in army uniform. Part of the LeT’s funding comes from the state security apparatus. The military encourages the training camps in Kashmir and Muridke. This is the same military which wired $100K to Mohammed Atta and runs supply helicopters to Taliban attacking American soldiers. The same military which commands Taliban raids against Americans. The same military which helped Osama bin Laden escape. This is an invariant. Whether the attack is 11/26, the other half dozen attacks last year or any of the attacks to come this year, the problem will not go away until the Pakistani military is crippled or its current top officers removed.
Freida Pinto stroked Leno’s quiff on The Tonight Show (Dec. 22) while Robin Williams wished the audience Merry Krishna. Leno was puzzled to hear about the existence of Indian Catholics.
Rab Ne Bana Di Jodihad one bright spot: an Om Shanti Om-style homage to old Bollywood, called ‘Phir Milenge Chalte Chalte’ (We’ll Meet Again Someday). Only a handful of songs were recreated visually, my favorite being the ’60s outfits in ‘Jai Jai Shiv Shankar’ (3:30).
But the lyrics tipped their hat to many others. Now some Bollyfan has lovingly compiled them all. Here’s the modern homage vid:
Now that we’re well and truly in 2009, and I’m no longer living from hangover to hangover (what is it about the last week of the year that makes Kolkata’s posh set want to emulate Paris Hilton?), I think it’s time to indulge in a little nostalgia about 2008. I wasn’t going to do a “Best of…” post but then Manish drew my attention to what popped up when he posted about one of the Guardian’s writers finding a post of mine “tasteless” – an ad for a “Bondage Gimp Smorkin Labbit”.
That was when I knew that I had to have my very own award show. One day, perhaps, I’ll order a vast number of gimps from Kozik Posters & Toys to give out at the Anonandon Awards. For now, we’ll stick to the jpeg version.
There are problems with awards. First of all, you have to remember what happened this year, which after spending New Year’s among drunk octogenarians in Kolkata is no mean feat because right now, after having consumed the equivalent of my weight in alcohol over about 72 hours, my entire life seems like a blur. Then there’s the other problem of access. So, despite my best efforts I didn’t get to see “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” while in Barcelona, “Slumdog Millionaire” hasn’t yet made it to India, Julian Schnabel cancelled his exhibition in Mumbai, most of the Booker longlist titles are unavailable in bookstores and I’m still waiting for “2666“. Instead I read “Playing“, survived a Jonathan Meese ‘performance’ and watched films like “Jaane Tu…“, which was essentially “Beverly Hills 90210” by way of Bandra and St. Xavier’s College. Actually, I’d like to award a broccoli to Jonathan Meese and “Jaane Tu…” for being overhyped, overpriced (it’s Rs. 70 for a broccoli in Pali Market at the moment; that’s the price of an entire meal at certain places) and boring. But I digress. And the Gimp goes to…
A shout-out for this year’s edition of the Jaipur Literature Festival, which is taking place from January 21-25 at the usual venue, the scenic Diggi Palace. Details are on the official website, including the (not fully updated) schedule of events. Many big names in attendance, including Michael Ondaatje (still to be confirmed, I think), Vikram Seth, Pico Iyer, Colin Thubron, Tina Brown and Nandan Nilekani, but as always many of the lower-profile sessions will be worth attending – and easier to find seating space for. Some potential highlights:
- “Writers’ Chain: Found in Translation” – a session that comes as a follow-up to a week in Neemrana, where four poets from the UK spent time with four Indian authors, exploring each other’s work through translation.
- “Celebrating Vijay Dandetha”, a tribute to the Rajasthani writer, with the screening of a short film about his work
Alfred Hitchcock once referred to the swamp scene in Psycho – where Norman Bates attempts to sink the car containing Marion’s body – as an example of the viewer being made (at least temporarily) complicit in the carrying out of a morally undesirable act. In the long, intense, wordless sequence before this one we’ve watched Norman, a likeable young man, meticulously cleaning up traces of a murder committed by his vicious mother; if we’re really involved with the film at this point, chances are that we acquire something of an emotional stake in his efforts. So we want the swamp to swallow up the whole car. Besides, wouldn’t that be a good way to get the plot moving forward?
There are even better instances of such audience manipulation in other Hitchcock movies (Rope and Strangers on a Train among them) but for an example of a whole film that creates this effect, you probably need to watch one where nearly all the characters are crooks or wannabe crooks. Like Stanley Kubrick’s solid 1956 thriller The Killing, about a group of men carefully planning a racecourse heist, a plan that then begins to unravel on different levels.
Something about tackiness of Vegas, even the new casinos like the Wynn, infects even the writing of it. If I told you a girl named Raja dealt blackjack at a local joint, and after escaping with my money, I jogged home past a street named Heaven which dead-ends into a dirt lot, and I did so listening to Mandeep Sethi, ‘Maula Mere’ and Roxy Music, you’d rightly call it trite. But it happened not an hour ago.
On a happier note, a beauty named Mariam has now displaced Adnan Khashoggi in my mind as the go-to image for ‘Middle Eastern dealer.’
If the next terrorist attack on the U.S. is based inside Pakistan and conducted by terrorists allied with the army, will Obama take out the Pakistani military?
Gerry Bednob(The Forty Year Old Virgin) is currently headlining a show here in Vegas, where I’m at a family reunion. I didn’t know doing bad Indian accents could get you that far without being named Peter Sellers I’ve seen movies about Vegas more times than I’ve visited. There’s a sudden profusion of cheap Indian restaurants, and the chain called Cricket does not, in fact, sell cricket supplies but rather mobile phones. All of Cherry Hill seems to have taken up camp in the lounges of the Venetian, and it’s not unheard of to run into half-desi strippers.
Vegas is the purest expression of gated suburbia. Mountains like those in Afghanistan overlook artificial oases of golf, as subsidized as Phoenix or Dubai. If the water wars ever happen, Las Vegas (Fertile Valleys) will be a casualty. The city sprawls low-rise and unimpeded into empty desert, flush with strip malls. A couple of blocks south of the Strip sits Omar Siddiqui’s personal Fry’s, an excuse for his Vegas jetting. The air is so arid, my brother woke up with a nosebleed. Yet McMansions are awash in swimming pools while coded gates keep out the plebes. But for the humidity, it could be Gurgaon, if quieter.
In recent weeks things have been happening to revive happy memories of my Doordarshan-cocooned childhood. First I discovered Shemaroo DVDs of the beloved TV serial Yeh Jo Hai Zindagi, which used to be a Friday-evening fixture in the mid-1980s. Shortly after this, I found that several episodes of Bharat ek Khoj, Shyam Benegal’s visualisation of Jawaharlal Nehru’s Discovery of India, are now up on YouTube.
I shamefacedly admit to not following the show regularly when it first aired 20 years ago – it was too subdued for my taste. (What I did love, and made sure never to miss, was Vanraj Bhatia’s beautiful soundtrack for the opening credits, accompanied by words from the famous creation verses in Book 10 of the Rig Veda, which are a rare instance of agnosticism/sceptical inquiry in ancient scripture.) But I’m enjoying it now. Haven’t seen all the YouTube clips yet, but I’ve got through the Mahabharata ones along with a few others. Almost needless to say, Benegal’s presentation of some of the epic’s key scenes, spread over two episodes, is much earthier than the B R Chopra opus (which, incidentally, is also available on YouTube now). It draws on various artistic interpretations of the Mahabharata over the centuries, including a Kathakali performance that depicts, with gory relish, Bheema tearing out Duhshasana’s entrails and using them to bind Draupadi’s hair. Notable too are thesetwo clips that show the dying moments of a repentant Duryodhana (played by Om Puri), in the company of Balarama and Ashwatthama as well as his grieving family – his blind parents, his wives and his son Durjaya. This scene is directly taken from Bhasa’s play “Urubhangam” (”The Shattered Thigh”), which I mentioned in this post.
Say you come across a tandem bicycle with no chain, no pedals and both ends pointed in opposite directions. ‘Who built this?’ you might wonder. ‘This is asinine.’ But that way madness lies. A tandem bicycle with no chains, no pedals and ends in opposite directions cannot be understood as the work of an intelligent designer. It only makes sense when you figure out the backstory of how it got so nonsensical.
And that’s the story of Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi (God Made This Marriage). In 1996 the Japanese box office hit Shall We Dansu?introduced a salaryman with the hots for a sexy ballroom dance teacher. Hollywood remade it in ‘04 with Richard Gere and J.Lo. Now your aspiring Lokhandwala screenripper was faced with a problem: one can’t very well rake in Yash Raj-level cash without making this a family film. And the lusting-after-another-woman bit won’t bring out Pinky and the kids. What to do?
So here’s how we get to the tandem bicycle. Instead of lusting after the dance instructor, the repressed Punjabi salaryman lusts after his own wife, who’s actually the one taking dance lessons. When he joins lessons in disguise and she flirts back, it’s all socially acceptable. But why such lust? Well, this must be an unconsummated marriage; let’s have the wife’s first choice of mate bumped off on the way to their wedding. But how can she possibly not recognize her own husband? Ah, let’s make the best friend a flaming hairdresser (Vinay Pathak): Surinder salaryman becomes Raj rake every day after work. Never mind that he develops instant biceps, and his blond permanent highlights turn dark every night.
“… if we have Osama bin Laden in our sights, and the Pakistani government is unable or unwilling to take them out, then… we will take them out.” [Obama]
We conceded to Israel the same right of self-defense after it attacked Hamas training camps and arms caches today, killing over 200 (unclear how many were terrorists):
A spokesman for President Bush… did not call for a halt to the attacks on Hamas. [NYT]
Backing Israel, the administration of President George W. Bush, in its final weeks in office, put the onus on Hamas to prevent a further escalation. “The United States … holds Hamas responsible for breaking the ceasefire and for the renewal of violence in Gaza,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in a statement. [Reuters]
But we’ve got quite another standard for India after 11/26:
“We hope that both sides will avoid taking steps that will unnecessarily raise tensions during these already tense times,” White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe said Friday. [AP]
Our seven-year-old retaliatiation in Afghanistan must remain convenient and inexpensive.
(WaPo) India, the Bush family cat, passed away Sunday. The 18-year-old black American shorthair was named after former Texas Rangers player Ruben ‘El Indio’ Sierra.
(AFP) Men in a van without license plates torched Maharaja TV in Sri Lanka after the gov’t called it unpatriotic for devoting too much coverage to an LTTE suicide bombing.
(NYT) From the lowliest traffic policeman to the family of Karzai, the Afghanistan gov’t seems to exist for little more than the enrichment of those who run it. Even Karzai’s brother is involved in the opium trade.
(FP) ‘The Hindu’s’ Chinese correspondent says best: high-caste Indian man with political freedom. 2nd best: wealthy Chinese woman. If poor: an Indian latrine cleaner may get to vote, but a Chinese one is less likely to be viewed as subhuman.
(NYT) India turned over a 100 page 11/26 dossier to Pakistan, saying retired military trained the attackers and it was unlikely that a commando-style assault ‘could occur without anybody anywhere in the establishment knowing it was happening.’
(Sympatico) The rich just outsource disease, famine and poison under the name of progress, environmentalism and clean living. This Senegalese village was poisoned by lead from car batteries to satisfy demand in india.
(News) Rajini Narayan, who murdered her husband by torching his genitals, told neighbours ‘his penis should belong to me’ after learning he was cheating.
(BBC) Sri Lankan choppers flew journies low and fast at treetop height to prevent being shot down. Wild peacocks staggered from prop wash. The LTTE took many Tamils as human shields.
(WSJ) To pre-empt Obama’s Afghanistan buildup, the Taliban has said it will, for the first time, fight offensively through winter to demoralize NATO forces.
(DNA) The 11/26 controllers arranged their plan to minimize risk to the Nariman House attack. Fixated on Jews, they treated it as higher priority than the hotels.
(WaPo) Afraid the workers on a national Indian contraception hotline would be eve-teased, the boss inserted them in a large call center operation as camouflage.
(WaPo) All non-Africans on Earth can trace their origins to India, Wood says, calling the country’s history a 10,000-year epic. He calls the Mahabharata the longest poem ever written.
(NYT) PBS’ ‘The Story of India’ starts with ancient history and ends with Partition. The historian, known as the ‘thinking woman’s crumpet,’ uses excerpts from ‘Asoka’ and ‘Lagaan’ as recreations.
(CNN ‘07) SI columnist Aditi Kinkhabwala found the real-life Dr. Christmas Jones. Summer Williams is an aerospace engineer at a NASA contractor and an NFL cheerleader.
(Frontline) After 26/11, India chose to follow its traditional role of disciplinarian, in such a way as to feed Pakistan’s significant inferiority complex. Once on the backfoot, Zardari was forced to react to, rather than engage with, New Delhi.
(New Yorker) The new ‘Joy of Sex’ claims anal is taboo, but it was fair game in the 3rd century ‘Kama Sutra.’ Deodorant is no longer banned absolutely, armpit shaving is no longer ignorant vandalism, rear-entry is no longer called sex a la Negresse.
(Guardian) His mother poisoned for marrying below caste, his father ill, Raja fell into the clutches of a beggar pimp who beat him with a red-hot iron rod if he didn’t make Rs. 100/day. Now he’s a state football star. (ht: Sapna)
(Tehelka) Room is kamra in Hindi, camera in Italian. People were janta or gente. And an appropriate and ever-handy conversation filler was accha or gia. There’s even a mustachioed analogue to Anil Kapoor. (ht: Khoof)
(WaPo) Tarsem Singh’s ‘The Fall’ featured a former slave named Otta Benga as one of its larger-than-life heroes. The real-life Ota Benga was an African pygmy displayed in a monkey cage at an American zoo.
(WaPo) Crippled by a thin satellite pipe and expensive minutes, Cuban cell phone owners only text and never use voicemail. [Like the Indian habit of giving a missed call.]
(AP) The LTTE build 11-mile-long defenses: a 4’ x 6’ deep moat filled with water and unexploded grenades; an earthern berm 6’ high x 15’ deep. Rubber flip-flops lay scattered about Kilinochchi.
Karan Mahajan’s debut Family Planning is a comic novel about a Delhi minister with 13 children. Arjun, the eldest, is a Bryan Adams fan who pulls together a band to impress Aarti, a cutie on his bus route. His dad Rakesh keeps having kids because he’s only attracted to his wife while she’s pregnant. He’s a good manager in charge of flyovers but a poor politician, turning in his resignation histrionically every time he wants a day off. But he runs into trouble when female protesters besiege Parliament after a popular serial hunk is killed off on screen.
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That was when I knew that I had to have my very own award show. One day, perhaps, I’ll order a vast number of gimps from Kozik Posters & Toys to give out at the Anonandon Awards. For now, we’ll stick to the jpeg version.
I’ve seen movies about Vegas more times than I’ve visited. There’s a sudden profusion of cheap Indian restaurants, and the chain called Cricket does not, in fact, sell cricket supplies but rather mobile phones. All of 
