[PMH] launched Sanjay’s new website for Ghee Happy last week. Check it out!

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I have a habit oƒ clapping when I hear something ƒunny (excuse the curious "ƒ"s; there's something rotten in the state oƒ my keyboard's f-related circuitry. And wouldn't you know it would type the letter ƒine when I want to write f-related...). It isn't the most discreet of habits but it certainly gets the point across that I like something. In Rangoon, however, people don't clap in delight. They clap when hundreds oƒ monks take to the streets in an effort to resist the military junta; they clap when they're surrounded by soldiers and about to be shot at; they clap to protest. In "Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country", Joshua doesn't find it odd that his people use applause to revolt rather than celebrate. Our idea of applause, my stupid habit of clapping at a joke, all this would probably seem oddly bizarre to him. Perhaps he'd be bemused by how I'm wasting the only means oƒ expressing protest his people have on stupid jokes.

"Burma VJ" is a superb documentary. It's mostly made out oƒ footage smuggled out oƒ Burma by Democratic Voice of Burma reporters. It's a perƒectly-constructed jigsaw puzzle oƒ despair, valour and futility. Superbly-edited, the pace doesn't flag ƒor a moment and the documentary successƒully tells Joshua's story without ever showing us what he really looks like. It begins with Joshua remembering the 1988 protests in Burma when the students took to the streets to protest against the military regime. The crowd that gathered at Rangoon's Shwedagon Pagoda on September 18 would have been more than 3,000 people. We can guess this because the army killed 3,000 protesters that day and presumably, at least a handƒul must have escaped. Joshua was a very young boy in 1988 and he has no memory oƒ either a pre-junta Burma or the 1988 protest. All he knows at the beginning oƒ "Burma VJ" is that Burma "doesn't have any more people to die". Three-quarters into the documentary, he tells someone on the phone that he hates to sound cruel but perhaps  the only way to efƒect change is through people being arrested. "People will have to die, monks too," he says and the person on the other side is almost speechless with horror at the future that Joshua is suggesting, one in which the military will not hesitate to inƒlict pain upon the monks who are the one bit oƒ civilization and decency from which the Burmese people have drawn strength and comfort.

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It isn't often that I want to jot down notes about a book after reading only the first chapter, but well, the first 12 pages of Upamanyu Chatterjee's Way to Go seemed to demand it. The chapter is called "Missing Person" (never was a title more apt) and it takes the form of a conversation between a middle-aged man named Jamun (whom you might remember from The Last Burden) and an obtuse police constable. Jamun has come to the local police station to report that his 85-year-old father has vanished from his bed overnight; the constable is asking him questions pertaining to the disappearance.

Chatterjee's recent work hasn't been to many tastes - his humour is often scatological, vulgar, gratuitously mean-minded to a point where you wonder if he's testing the reader's endurance, and remarkably preoccupied with human excreta (run his last few novels through Wordle and I'm fairly sure "turd" will show up in a healthy font size). I expressed my own ambivalence about his last book Weight Loss here, and the present post isn't intended as an endorsement of Way to Go (which I've only started reading). But I thought "Missing Person" was funny, not so much in a laugh-out-loud way but in a chuckle-hopelessly-to-yourself-until-you-choke-on-your-own-phlegm way. It's what you might call morose humour.

Like so much of Chatterjee's writing going back to English, August, this chapter is about how both time and common sense are suspended when bureaucratic procedure takes centre-stage. Many things contribute to its effect. For example, there's the deliberate overwriting and over-attention to detail, as in the passage where the constable opens a register with "Bittoo" printed on its cover ("above the painting of a long-haired baby sucking its thumb with an adult expression in its eyes") and then begins "massaging" the stitching of the book's inner spine and doing sundry other things with his fingers until he finally locates a printed form containing the questions he needs to ask Jamun. (All this while an octogenarian might possibly be in need of speedy aid.)

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I love learning about weird new critters. Bullet shrimp? Anglerfish? Bring it on. Among flora, the carnivorous cobra lily is highly unusual. Endemic to Northern California, it entices insects into a nectar-filled cavity. There it dazzles them with numerous translucent spots, each of which looks ike an independent exit. Bugs batter themselves against the fake egresses until, exhausted, they fall into a trap of digestive juices.

That’s how I felt after enduring 3 Idiots’ ~five false endings. If one ending is good, reasoned the filmmakers, several are even better. Unnecessary birth scene! But wait. Unnecessary stillborn! Only the last one lets you escape the sticky, carnivorous sentimentality of a Rajkumar Hirani joint.

Hirani’s formula, though calculated, is highly effective. Like Slumdog Millionaire, 3 Idiots is one of a handful of movies elevated by the screenwriter’s skill and disregard for the source text into being better than the book. The dialogues are side-splitting, and from That One Scene I learned some Hindi words I earlier had no interest in knowing.

3 Idiots is certainly formulaic, relying on obvious verbal catchphrases. Like Aamir Khan’s Fanaa, it suffers from the second half curse. Like Hollywood, it doesn’t get engineers right. Khan is far too old, good-looking and buff to be a top-flight Indian engineering undergrad. (Though if you think about available young actors like Imran Khan, you run screaming.)

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I checked out this lecture last Friday at the Jewish cultural center. It was about The Jewish Leading Ladies of Indian Cinema. The lecture was held in a small room, which was filled with old Jewish couples. It was amazing to learn about this history I had no clue about, pretty mind blowing. Eric Molinsky, who was one of the speakers there, did this great piece for Tablet Magazine. Take a listen here, pretty dope.....

Here's Nadira AKA Florence Ezekiel in the film Shree 420.

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Clowning around at the Olympics, Stephen Colbert needles British Columbia MP Ujjal Dosanjh about the caste system. Colbert even gets in a lick about the Indian ice skating team, by which I can only assume he means U Mich students Davis and White.

Uncle vs. comedian ain’t a fair bout — you need someone quick and untrammeled by public rectitude to go toe-to-toe with the ‘bear. Though I have a feeling this might’ve turned out differently had the sparring been done in Surrey Punjabi.

Colbert calls him ‘Oo-zhal,’ and I get ‘Veezh.’ Amrikan pronunciation is odd that way. Foreign means French, except at the movies, where all baddies are Brits.

Gordon Ramsay's "Gordon's Great Escape" recently aired on Channel 4 in the UK and through the miracle of the interwebs, we had a chance to watch the three-part series. Over the course of a few weeks, everyone's favorite foul-mouthed Scotsman travels all over India to learn about India and its cuisine. Not one to shy away from getting his hands dirty (or in this case yellow from turmeric), Ramsay tries his hand in cooking on a passenger train, running a street stall and entering a cooking competition for housewives.

In the last episode he even makes it to Kerala to eat beef (errichee) curry in a roadside toddy shop and take a few swigs of the homemade hooch. After learning how to cook fish (karimeen) Ramsay also joins in at kumbala – a sport that involves surfing behind bullocks across flooded paddy fields.

The series ends with Ramsay cooking for some royalty, (the maharajah of Udaipur), Mumbai's well-to-do and some Bollywood stars (our interns think they spotted Kabir Bedi at the table) at the Taj Mahal Hotel.

Recipes, pictures and more here.

I was saddened to hear of the demise, on the 17th of February, of Chaturvedi Badrinath, a writer and philosopher I admired greatly. Badrinath was the author of several notable books, including The Mahabharata: An Inquiry Into The Human Condition (2006), Swami Vivekananda: The Living Vedanta (2006), Introduction to the Kamasutra (1999), and The Women of the Mahabharata (2008).

Badrinath's literary career began, by today's standards, fairly late in life, when he was in his forties. (He was a member of the Indian Administrative Service from 1957 to 1989, and this consumed his energies in his youth). Unusually, the last decade of his life, with the world of action exchanged for one of reflection, was the most prolific of his literary career. Indeed, it was through his last published book, The Women of the Mahabharata, that I first became acquainted with his work. Merely to read the introduction of this book was to realise that one was in the company of a first-rate reader.

Great literary works, by their very nature, condense thought, pressure language, revel in ambiguities, hum with implication, make meaning through symbols, patterns, leitmotifs and repetition. They replicate life's mystery and complexity through their own patterns of speech, suggestion, and silence.

It follows then that one of the primary tasks of literary criticism is exegesis: the explication, often at a length several times that of the text being scrutinised, of a text's net of meanings and complexity of structure. Sometimes criticism itself becomes pithily epigrammatic, vivid in imagery, rich in the play of ideas. This is the signal quality of Badrinath's work in his two great books on the Mahabharata, books which qualify both as literary criticism and as philosophy. They never make the mistake, as some works of interpretation do, of isolating the work's ostensible message at the expense of the form or context. A short excerpt from one of them is here.

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My latest adventure. I walk into the Musicland at Saket, see a very nice-looking DVD of the classic Bela Lugosi Dracula. On sale, Rs 149. With a long list of Extras mentioned on the back-cover, including the documentary The Road to Dracula, and feature commentary by film historian David Skal. So I buy it, come back home and immediately slip it into the player - something I wouldn't normally have done, but I'm eager to see if the "restored" print is any sharper than the print I remember from seeing the film on VHS years ago.

And on the screen is the 1979 version of Dracula with Frank Langella in the title role and Laurence Olivier hamming it up as Van Helsing.

This would have thrilled me back in 1987, when I was in my He-Man phase and had just seen Frank Langella as Skeletor in the live-action Masters of the Universe film. Today, not so much.

I'll return the DVD tomorrow but I can't figure this one out. How exactly are the Indian DVD releases of foreign films put together? (This one seems to have been jointly produced by BIG Home Video and Universal.) Do they procure the disc first and then separately search for a cover jacket to go with it (in which case a mistake like this was just waiting to happen)? Does anyone know?

P.S. Here's an old post about bats in Sheila Dikshit's garden.

As you may remember, Mira Nair and Suketu Mehta collaborated on a short segment of the movie New York, I Love You. The Paris, Je T’Aime spinoff is an anthology about love in New York by filmmakers including Fatih Akin and Shekhar Kapur. Nair roped in Irrfan Khan and Natalie Portman for the short.

The segment brings together a Jain diamond seller with a Hasidic broker in Manhattan’s diamond district. It compares the dietary restrictions of Jains with those of orthodox Jews. Nair films a lovely visual rhyme involving asceticism and temple hair, and the discussion of Jains echoes Mehta’s Maximum City.

But how does one cram a piece this ambitious into seven minutes? Nair and Mehta punted on the problem. The segment is a fun conceit, sunk by a silly level of exposition. Its script is less movie dialogue than a paired set of Wikipedia entries, turning it into a cultural explanation piece for the mainstream. It’s so tell-not-show, the stance it takes is almost apologetic.

This might not be as apparent if the entire movie were by Nair. But the stylish piece immediately preceding, by director Jiang Wen, deigns to explain nothing. It’s so full of reversals, you only piece together what’s happening towards the end. Moviegoing is less fun when you’re spoon-fed.

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Roger Ebert, subject of this beautiful Esquire profile about his life after he lost his lower jaw to cancer, says the Indian roles in rom-com Valentine’s Day were stereotypical:

There are a lot of Indians in the movie, for instance at the next table in an Indian restaurant, revealing that when Indians are out to dinner, they act just like Indians in a movie comedy… “Valentine’s Day” is being marketed as a Date Movie. I think it’s more of a First-Date Movie. If your date likes it, do not date that person again. [Ebert]

I haven’t seen the movie, but a friend reports back:

Embarrassing. They were bit parts. A… kid called Rani, pronounced Ran-ee, not Raan-ee. Hair oiled back. She had to work at her mum’s restaurant… the Golden Kadhai, pronounced Kudhai not Karhai (the best Indian restaurant in LA — don’t you know). Then there was a wedding party at the restaurant. The bride and groom were not sardars but the guests were… all in fake, badly tied turbans and one or two in Nehru hats…

I’m more surprised that someone saw fit to rip off the schmaltzy Love Actually, turning it into an n^th-generation copy of Notting Hill. Which was itself not particularly well-written. Fractal badness! I’m just a director, standing in front of a punter, asking him to give me his money.

The cast list seems like the party scene from Om Shanti Om, where they got cameos from every actor in the industry with a pulse. If you believe the reviews, its crimes against film are worse than its stereotyping.

British ice dancing team Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean performed this Nataraja and Khajuraho-inspired routine in ‘84. They’re famous for picket-fencing the Sarajevo Olympics that year, winning perfect scores from every judge in the finals:

The costumes consisted of both Jayne and Chris wearing billowing orange/red trousers with brief top pieces adorned with India jewels… a balletic piece which they describe at evoking Indian sculptures… [it received] straight 10s at the 1984 World Professional Championships…

The piece contains a unique move… Dean lifts Torvill feet-first, allowing her to take hold of his lower calf. He then lifts his one leg back with Torvill held horizontal across his body as he completes the lift gliding forward on one leg… quite a show stopper… [Wiki]

Related post: The ‘Slumdog’ factor

The novella is sometimes viewed as an outlander – it’s thought by many to lack the respectability of a full-length book while also lacking the compactness and balance of a good short story. But there are certain types of stories that adapt extremely well to this in-between format. George Orwell’s social allegory Animal Farm was a famous example. Closer home, and less well known, is another caustic allegorical work, Syed Muhammad Ashraf’s 1997 Urdu novella Numberdar ka Neela, about a village administrator who uses a fearsome blue bull to keep people under his thumb. Happily, Ashraf’s book is now accessible to an English readership via a fine translation by the Pakistani writer Musharraf Ali Farooqi.

Ashraf’s story isn’t told in a strictly linear fashion, but the gist of it becomes clear within the first few pages. Shortly after a theft occurs in his village house, the despotic Thakur Udal Singh (who owns property in a village, a town and a city) begins to bestow special attention on a calf named Neela. Fed on a diet unusual for a creature of the wild, Neela grows into an exceptional animal that strikes terror into the hearts of anyone who might wish to oppose the Thakur. A cycle of oppression thus begins, culminating in the rape of a village girl by the Thakur’s son Onkar, and the subsequent deaths of three people associated with the crime.

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I took this shot a while ago when I was chillin in Bangalore for 3 months. I really  wanted to pay this chap for his shirt off his back, it’s too good. ‘I Am Very Lucky Because My Parents Is Good’