It’s almost as elusive as the Holy Grail – but we search nevertheless. Scanning numerous newspaper ads and waiting by the phone – all for those few square yards of reclaimed land to call our very own. We begin our quest on Juhu Tara road, where tiny designer boutiques occupy the ground floor of old apartment buildings . Clothes stores must flourish here – a new one opens every few weeks. I see these ‘openings’ on my way back from town to our rented apartment of many years. Traveling down the unevenly tarred roads, they appear as tiny traffic jams where cameras and crowds cluster outside , and the beautiful people sip their wine and cheese inside. They’re flats for sale here on this palm tree lined, pocket- handkerchief- glimpse- of -sea promenade. ‘Sea touch’ as the broker lingo describes them, these buildings are often over 20 years old. Many have spectacular views – glass windows that look onto a shimmering blue grey sea. But there’s damp on the walls and the plaster is crumbling . The sea air will ruin all your TV’s and CD players a musically inclined friend warns us. Need massive maintenance and structural repairs, another friend counsels.
So we move onto the cozy streets of the Juhu Scheme. There’s lots of new construction here, ‘TDR buildings’ as the local broker calls them. ‘Transfer of Development rights’ buildings are easy to spot. Newly erected giant columns prop up old apartment buildings. Fresh floors are then added on with generous abandon. Inside the flats look swankingly modern – granite floors and brass tapped bathrooms. Outside the parking spaces are defined in tightly squeezed slots. Not much green, but they’re gulmohar trees on the street and some parks in the neighborhood. “Madam, flat le lo , badiya location hai , Film star ka neighborhood hai”, our earnest faced part time broker ( he’s a fitness instructor in the other time) urges me. But the views from the windows depress me. They’re multi storied buildings coming up in at least two lots close by . Many more will come up soon, as property prices zoom and proliferating families trade their ancestral houses for neat little blocks of flats. Soon all the charming bungalows that line these streets will disappear.
So we carry on northwards to the Juhu Versova Link Road, where apartment buildings line the road with large spaces in between. These are the mangrove areas and the residents have fought bitter battles to keep them so. We maneuver our car through a tight band of metal spikes. Spikes that have been erected by residents to keep away trucks that made stealthy trips in the middle of the night to dump soil on reclaimed mangrove land. Many spacious buildings line the mangrove sea front – but this again is not to be. The land is Collectors Land , we’re told and comes with a whole barrage of pre conditions, most of which we, as ten year residents in the city do not fulfill. So it’s back to the streets again !
This appeared in the Mumbai Mirror November 25th 2005
Monday, November 28, 2005
Life at the Juhu Versova Naka
The Juhu Versova naka is (like all others of its ilk) a noisy and eventful confluence. Identity wise though, it has always been a bit quirky. Some years ago, a tiered and landscaped garden with green grass and fountains sat regally in the centre. Maintained by the Lokhandwala Builders , the circle, perhaps logically, was named in their honor. All very well, though as it turned out , Lokhandwala Circle was a few miles away from Lokhandwala Complex, with Four Bungalows in between. And unlike the dual name American cities like Cambridge and Rochester ( oceans away from their English namesakes), this circle was sufficiently close to its Complex counterpart to confuse most first time visitors to the area.
Then, in a traffic streamlining initiative, the circular garden was razed to the ground. In its place was installed that red, orange and green presiding deity of all urban movement- the traffic light. Free right turns and free left turns were now rigorously administered. Traffic policemen in the area suddenly turned prosperous.
Today the naka is somewhat uncertainly referred to as Juhu Circle. It sprawls over as many as six roads. One corner encloses the empty concrete spaces of a BEST bus depot, the other makes its way down to Mithibai College. Yet another goes down gulmohar tree lined double carriage roads, past star’s bungalows and spacious apartment buildings.
The naka is a little world in itself- the modern day equivalent of the village banyan tree- the home airport in the areas hub and spoke system. Always noisy and always lively. Two newsvendors hawk their wares from one corner- wooden newsstands filled with newsprint and glossy Elle’s and Outlooks. Peripatetic policemen in perpetual attendance on the traffic lights. Little balloon children who skip around on the pavement . Sometimes they sell colorful talismans – pale yellow lemons strung with a series of slim green chillies and sometimes they sell toys and sometimes they sell republic flags. A wizened old woman who taps hopefully on every car window. You know she lives here on this naka, you see her every day. The other families too - their pots and pans on the sidewalk, their clothes put out to dry on the road dividers . The news vendors, the policemen and the seller of spurious books – they all go home every evening , but these poor people , the new age urban nomads , many miles away from the villages of their birth , are perhaps the only constants in this traffic filled transit space.
This appeared in Mumbai Mirror September
Then, in a traffic streamlining initiative, the circular garden was razed to the ground. In its place was installed that red, orange and green presiding deity of all urban movement- the traffic light. Free right turns and free left turns were now rigorously administered. Traffic policemen in the area suddenly turned prosperous.
Today the naka is somewhat uncertainly referred to as Juhu Circle. It sprawls over as many as six roads. One corner encloses the empty concrete spaces of a BEST bus depot, the other makes its way down to Mithibai College. Yet another goes down gulmohar tree lined double carriage roads, past star’s bungalows and spacious apartment buildings.
The naka is a little world in itself- the modern day equivalent of the village banyan tree- the home airport in the areas hub and spoke system. Always noisy and always lively. Two newsvendors hawk their wares from one corner- wooden newsstands filled with newsprint and glossy Elle’s and Outlooks. Peripatetic policemen in perpetual attendance on the traffic lights. Little balloon children who skip around on the pavement . Sometimes they sell colorful talismans – pale yellow lemons strung with a series of slim green chillies and sometimes they sell toys and sometimes they sell republic flags. A wizened old woman who taps hopefully on every car window. You know she lives here on this naka, you see her every day. The other families too - their pots and pans on the sidewalk, their clothes put out to dry on the road dividers . The news vendors, the policemen and the seller of spurious books – they all go home every evening , but these poor people , the new age urban nomads , many miles away from the villages of their birth , are perhaps the only constants in this traffic filled transit space.
This appeared in Mumbai Mirror September
Thursday, November 17, 2005
The Sunday Philosophy Club - Book review
A fat lady detective in Botswana, who drinks red bush tea and drives a little white van around the Kalahari desert, Mma Precious Ramotswe has quickly notched up legions of fans, since her debut six years ago in the best selling No 1 Ladies Detective Agency.
Now her creator, 56-year-old bassoonist and Scottish medical law professor, Alexander McCall Smith, brings us another equally lovable and quirkily eccentric heroine.
Forty-one-year old Isabel Dalhousie lives in Edinburgh. She edits a philosophical journal called ‘The Review of Applied Ethics’, attends symphonic concerts and art galleries, whilst ruminating on Auden and Kant, solutions to the Times crossword and repressed Albanian film makers, in her spare time.
All very arty, but Dalhousie is no dilettante. She may live an industrial age away from the stout, sturdy Precious Ramotswe but both woman are uncannily similar in their honesty and their matter-of-fact zeal for fighting the evil in their worlds.
A young man falls to his death after a performance by the Reykjavik Orchestra and Isabel thinks that it wasn’t an accident. Her doughty Scotswoman housekeeper Grace, quick to pronounce devastating moral judgments on the world at large seems to agree. Twenty-four-year-old Cat, who runs a delicatessen and is Isabel’s niece, protests at Isabel’s involvement,” You simply cannot get drawn into other people’s business like this”.
For Isabel though, there’s a moral bond between them (“I was the last person that young man saw… Don’t you think the last person you see on this earth owes you something?”) She embarks upon an investigation of sorts– meeting a whole congregation of characters from the predatory paparazzi McManus to the art collecting fund Manager Paul Hogg and his ‘man-eating ‘, art-swindling fiancé, Minty.
Intrigues emerge as she finds out the deceased young man was called Mark and was also a fund Manager, working coincidentally in the same firm as Paul Hogg, and that his flat mates Neil and Hen are hiding something.
It’s an interesting story, beautifully told. McCall Smith’s cameo characters from Grace and Cat, to Cat’s rejected suitor Jamie, are well developed and distinct. There are a profusion of profound little plots and sub-plots.
Grace’s friends husband’s mid life crisis– “He’s bought teenage clothes. Tight jeans. Sweaters with large letters on them. And he’s walking around listening to rock music” grumbles Grace; Cat’s suitable and unsuitable suitors; Jamie the musically minded “bit of a wimp”; Tony with the “touch of cruelty in [his]; Face and Isabel’s speculation, “Why should anybody actually want a hunk, when non-hunks were so much more interesting”.
These delightful digressions also echo and enrich the main narrative in their subtle meditations on the foibles of human behaviour and McCall treads gently and entertainingly (“was he married or… “, Isabel asks and then pauses ,”People often did not bother to marry…and yet it amounted to the same thing in many cases”).
All of which makes The Sunday Philosophy Club that rarity– an interesting detective story that’s not necessarily a hurried page turner, the development being every bit as satisfying as the denouement.
Deccan Herald September
Now her creator, 56-year-old bassoonist and Scottish medical law professor, Alexander McCall Smith, brings us another equally lovable and quirkily eccentric heroine.
Forty-one-year old Isabel Dalhousie lives in Edinburgh. She edits a philosophical journal called ‘The Review of Applied Ethics’, attends symphonic concerts and art galleries, whilst ruminating on Auden and Kant, solutions to the Times crossword and repressed Albanian film makers, in her spare time.
All very arty, but Dalhousie is no dilettante. She may live an industrial age away from the stout, sturdy Precious Ramotswe but both woman are uncannily similar in their honesty and their matter-of-fact zeal for fighting the evil in their worlds.
A young man falls to his death after a performance by the Reykjavik Orchestra and Isabel thinks that it wasn’t an accident. Her doughty Scotswoman housekeeper Grace, quick to pronounce devastating moral judgments on the world at large seems to agree. Twenty-four-year-old Cat, who runs a delicatessen and is Isabel’s niece, protests at Isabel’s involvement,” You simply cannot get drawn into other people’s business like this”.
For Isabel though, there’s a moral bond between them (“I was the last person that young man saw… Don’t you think the last person you see on this earth owes you something?”) She embarks upon an investigation of sorts– meeting a whole congregation of characters from the predatory paparazzi McManus to the art collecting fund Manager Paul Hogg and his ‘man-eating ‘, art-swindling fiancé, Minty.
Intrigues emerge as she finds out the deceased young man was called Mark and was also a fund Manager, working coincidentally in the same firm as Paul Hogg, and that his flat mates Neil and Hen are hiding something.
It’s an interesting story, beautifully told. McCall Smith’s cameo characters from Grace and Cat, to Cat’s rejected suitor Jamie, are well developed and distinct. There are a profusion of profound little plots and sub-plots.
Grace’s friends husband’s mid life crisis– “He’s bought teenage clothes. Tight jeans. Sweaters with large letters on them. And he’s walking around listening to rock music” grumbles Grace; Cat’s suitable and unsuitable suitors; Jamie the musically minded “bit of a wimp”; Tony with the “touch of cruelty in [his]; Face and Isabel’s speculation, “Why should anybody actually want a hunk, when non-hunks were so much more interesting”.
These delightful digressions also echo and enrich the main narrative in their subtle meditations on the foibles of human behaviour and McCall treads gently and entertainingly (“was he married or… “, Isabel asks and then pauses ,”People often did not bother to marry…and yet it amounted to the same thing in many cases”).
All of which makes The Sunday Philosophy Club that rarity– an interesting detective story that’s not necessarily a hurried page turner, the development being every bit as satisfying as the denouement.
Deccan Herald September
Friends, Lovers, Chocolate - Book Review
This review appeared in the Deccan Herald November 6th 2005
A case of too much of a good thing
The latest book in the detective series is fairly radical in its own right, but not much new happens here, just more of the same.
Friends, Lovers and Chocolate is book two in the prolific Professor Alexander McCall Smith’s new detective series. His phenomenally successful first series, The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency was set in Botswana.
This new series moves, fairly radically too— from dusty underdeveloped third world Africa to the rarefied cultural capital of Edinburgh. Its Scottish single woman-of-independent-means protagonist, Isabel Dalhousie finds herself (a bit like Miss Marple) drawn into strange situations, called upon by her conscience to investigate anything remotely grey in her vicinity.
Last time around in ‘The Sunday Philosophy Club’, the forty-one-year-old editor of ‘The Journal of Applied Ethics’ found herself on the case of the strange suicide-that-wasn’t. This time Dalhousie is in the midst of an even more bizarre mystery. In a typical McCall setting of old world meets new (seen here as medical technology meets the supernatural), Isabel encounters a heart transplant patient.
Over mackerel and wine at the Arts Club, Ian of the transplanted heart, discusses his cellular memory theory (that it maybe “perfectly possible that the heart may be the repository of memory”) and of one such recurring memory of which he is “worried that it’s going to kill” him.
The mystery of a sinister memory he’s received via a heart transplant? It’s a theme that could with Stephen King be pregnant with possibility, but McCall Smith’s mysteries are mostly mundane (no racy chases of missing manuscripts please). His detective’s concerns are earthy and ‘slice-of-life’ and his protagonists, like the kindly car mechanic Maketoni, are prone to many delightful digressions on life, the universe and everything else.
So the story of the memory of “high browed face, with hooded eyes and a scar running just below the hairline” doesn’t go anywhere. The desultory detection that follows is dilute even by McCall Smith standards. And the ending when it eventually arrives is a complete anti climax.
So much so, that much of what had delighted in ‘The Sunday Philosophy Club’, the elegant twists and turns and the rich ruminations now prove irksome. For nothing happens except more of the same.
Isabel’s love life is still in limbo. Niece Cat’s rejected suitor Jamie, who Isabel likes, continues to play platonic. Salvatore, the intriguing Italian of ambiguous origin (another aspiring Cat Suitor) vanishes as abruptly as he arrives. Also, interspersed with these everyday events are constant and even cloying references to Auden, Burns and Haydn.
There’s reams of reflection too (“Did the Turks go over their history with a moral fine tooth com?”) and some contemporary commentary (“exactly the same emotions and energy that had gone into witch-hunting now went into the pursuit of our preferred modern victims”). Good, but also decidedly a case of too much of a good thing.
Still, read it if you’ve never read McCall Smith.
A case of too much of a good thing
The latest book in the detective series is fairly radical in its own right, but not much new happens here, just more of the same.
Friends, Lovers and Chocolate is book two in the prolific Professor Alexander McCall Smith’s new detective series. His phenomenally successful first series, The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency was set in Botswana.
This new series moves, fairly radically too— from dusty underdeveloped third world Africa to the rarefied cultural capital of Edinburgh. Its Scottish single woman-of-independent-means protagonist, Isabel Dalhousie finds herself (a bit like Miss Marple) drawn into strange situations, called upon by her conscience to investigate anything remotely grey in her vicinity.
Last time around in ‘The Sunday Philosophy Club’, the forty-one-year-old editor of ‘The Journal of Applied Ethics’ found herself on the case of the strange suicide-that-wasn’t. This time Dalhousie is in the midst of an even more bizarre mystery. In a typical McCall setting of old world meets new (seen here as medical technology meets the supernatural), Isabel encounters a heart transplant patient.
Over mackerel and wine at the Arts Club, Ian of the transplanted heart, discusses his cellular memory theory (that it maybe “perfectly possible that the heart may be the repository of memory”) and of one such recurring memory of which he is “worried that it’s going to kill” him.
The mystery of a sinister memory he’s received via a heart transplant? It’s a theme that could with Stephen King be pregnant with possibility, but McCall Smith’s mysteries are mostly mundane (no racy chases of missing manuscripts please). His detective’s concerns are earthy and ‘slice-of-life’ and his protagonists, like the kindly car mechanic Maketoni, are prone to many delightful digressions on life, the universe and everything else.
So the story of the memory of “high browed face, with hooded eyes and a scar running just below the hairline” doesn’t go anywhere. The desultory detection that follows is dilute even by McCall Smith standards. And the ending when it eventually arrives is a complete anti climax.
So much so, that much of what had delighted in ‘The Sunday Philosophy Club’, the elegant twists and turns and the rich ruminations now prove irksome. For nothing happens except more of the same.
Isabel’s love life is still in limbo. Niece Cat’s rejected suitor Jamie, who Isabel likes, continues to play platonic. Salvatore, the intriguing Italian of ambiguous origin (another aspiring Cat Suitor) vanishes as abruptly as he arrives. Also, interspersed with these everyday events are constant and even cloying references to Auden, Burns and Haydn.
There’s reams of reflection too (“Did the Turks go over their history with a moral fine tooth com?”) and some contemporary commentary (“exactly the same emotions and energy that had gone into witch-hunting now went into the pursuit of our preferred modern victims”). Good, but also decidedly a case of too much of a good thing.
Still, read it if you’ve never read McCall Smith.
Cross over Directors ..
This is a feature I wrote many years ago ..just found it online so decided to post it here
In director Tarsem’s Singh’s visually arresting debut film, The Cell, Jennifer Lopez, an expert child psychologist enters the mind of a serial killer in order to obtain information on the whereabouts of his victim.
With this as the basic storyline, we are transported by Tarsem Singh, an award winning music videos and commercials director, to a world of sights and sounds that embrace the full visual power of what cinema can do.
Wild flourishes and varied canvases bring the 'mindscape' of the subconscious to life and the imagery employed mixes the surreal textures of Salvador Dali, the gothic motifs of Tim Burton, Japanese-inspired costume design and some truly bizarre set pieces.
Stretching traditional cinematic boundaries we have a genre of directors, many first time, who bring with them the strengths and elasticities of their earlier disciplines, whether it is cinematography, ad filmmaking, painting or even film criticism.
For directors like Santosh Sivan, Rajiv Menon, M F Husain and Khalid Mohamed, direction has been a richly interactive experience, a process of being defined by cinematic traditions as well as defying them, and of positioning themselves at varying degrees on the art cinema-commercial cinema continuum.
For Santosh Sivan, this has meant moving from the award winning, low budget somewhat niche The Terrorist, where Sivan worked wonders with his camerawork and Ayesha’s Dharkers expressive eyes to magnum opus Asoka.
Inspired by the late Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese, Sivan’s Asoka, based on the life the 3rd Emperor of the Mauryan Dynasty, is a three-hour epic love story, which deals with the transformation of the emperor Asoka from a bloody warrior to a peaceful monk.
Beset with controversy from the start as to historical accuracy, the film is however nothing short of sheer visual magic. Sivan’s cinematographer’s eye captures the essence of the changing seasons, the colors and the landscape as well the femme fatale of the piece, the Kalinga Princess Kaurwaki played by the oomph-laden Kareena Kapoor, with poetic accuracy and stunning virtuosity.
The film is a riot of colors, of contrasts, of light and shadow and striking sets sans the usual glitz and glitter. You can’t miss the cinematographer Sivan in his films, he is truly in every shot.
As fellow cinematographer, former ad filmmaker and director Rajiv Menon points out , "Cinematography helps you to keep the shooting problems in mind. It also helps you to think visually. Direction and Cinematography are related. The only difference between here and the west is that, there, the Cinematographer decides the shots while here the Director does the same job. I understand the cameraman better - my single greatest plus”.
For artist M F Husain, films have always been a passion. "It is", he declares, "a way for art to reach the people. Painting often becomes the preserve of a few art critics, who guard their knowledge jealously and do not want to share it with anyone. Besides painting, as even Dali put it is 'intellectually inadequate'. My intention in making a film like Gajagamini and casting superstars like Madhuri and Shah Rukh Khan was to bring art to the people.”
Gajagamini sketches the different forms of woman -- mysterious, multi-faceted and majestic. Filmed in surreal set pieces, with a format of a dance ballet, linear time and space progression are deliberately bent to artistic effect. Husain attempts to dispense with the concept of time by showing Leonardo Da Vinci and Shah Rukh Khan (playing himself) sharing screen space with Monica, a modern-day Madhuri, and Kalidas riding a bicycle!
Visually each frame is like a prize painting. In one of the many surreal scenes, Shabana Azmi is unable to hear Madhuri, Shilpa and Farida Jalal's voices, emphasizing that women down the centuries, want to be heard, but aren't. The role of women in keeping the cycle of creation going is established through the scene where Shilpa Shirodkar ceaseless pushes a laden-with-children giant wheel.
Yet there’s a surfeit of surrealism and symbolism here, and the Director whose celluloid brush endeavors to create a film that’s not too 'artsy artsy' and 'audience friendly', seems to have fallen short despite the star power.
Then you have film-critic Khalid Mohamed’s Fiza, that is fully accepting of the pop tradition, yet unusual in the very character of Fiza, the heroine of the film. One of the few really strong woman characters in Hindi cinema, Fiza as Director Khalid Mohamed points out is the rare film that shows a woman with a book. Amaan the hero is by contrast, shown as a well-intentioned but rather weak man.
The film delineates characters in detailed hues, though much criticism was leveled at the director for selling out to mainstream Bollywood song and dance traditions, thus situating his strong, intellectually inclined heroine in a bar and having her dance for dramatic effect. "It was however a natural progression", the director maintains, "a deliberate upset of the stereotype that Muslim woman have to exist in their mohalla and cannot dance."
Commercial successes in varying degrees, these films are nevertheless interesting ones to look out for, in the power of their imagery and in their cinematic explorations, transcending stereotype and tradition and yet also somewhat intrinsically and eventually contained by it.
In director Tarsem’s Singh’s visually arresting debut film, The Cell, Jennifer Lopez, an expert child psychologist enters the mind of a serial killer in order to obtain information on the whereabouts of his victim.
With this as the basic storyline, we are transported by Tarsem Singh, an award winning music videos and commercials director, to a world of sights and sounds that embrace the full visual power of what cinema can do.
Wild flourishes and varied canvases bring the 'mindscape' of the subconscious to life and the imagery employed mixes the surreal textures of Salvador Dali, the gothic motifs of Tim Burton, Japanese-inspired costume design and some truly bizarre set pieces.
Stretching traditional cinematic boundaries we have a genre of directors, many first time, who bring with them the strengths and elasticities of their earlier disciplines, whether it is cinematography, ad filmmaking, painting or even film criticism.
For directors like Santosh Sivan, Rajiv Menon, M F Husain and Khalid Mohamed, direction has been a richly interactive experience, a process of being defined by cinematic traditions as well as defying them, and of positioning themselves at varying degrees on the art cinema-commercial cinema continuum.
For Santosh Sivan, this has meant moving from the award winning, low budget somewhat niche The Terrorist, where Sivan worked wonders with his camerawork and Ayesha’s Dharkers expressive eyes to magnum opus Asoka.
Inspired by the late Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese, Sivan’s Asoka, based on the life the 3rd Emperor of the Mauryan Dynasty, is a three-hour epic love story, which deals with the transformation of the emperor Asoka from a bloody warrior to a peaceful monk.
Beset with controversy from the start as to historical accuracy, the film is however nothing short of sheer visual magic. Sivan’s cinematographer’s eye captures the essence of the changing seasons, the colors and the landscape as well the femme fatale of the piece, the Kalinga Princess Kaurwaki played by the oomph-laden Kareena Kapoor, with poetic accuracy and stunning virtuosity.
The film is a riot of colors, of contrasts, of light and shadow and striking sets sans the usual glitz and glitter. You can’t miss the cinematographer Sivan in his films, he is truly in every shot.
As fellow cinematographer, former ad filmmaker and director Rajiv Menon points out , "Cinematography helps you to keep the shooting problems in mind. It also helps you to think visually. Direction and Cinematography are related. The only difference between here and the west is that, there, the Cinematographer decides the shots while here the Director does the same job. I understand the cameraman better - my single greatest plus”.
For artist M F Husain, films have always been a passion. "It is", he declares, "a way for art to reach the people. Painting often becomes the preserve of a few art critics, who guard their knowledge jealously and do not want to share it with anyone. Besides painting, as even Dali put it is 'intellectually inadequate'. My intention in making a film like Gajagamini and casting superstars like Madhuri and Shah Rukh Khan was to bring art to the people.”
Gajagamini sketches the different forms of woman -- mysterious, multi-faceted and majestic. Filmed in surreal set pieces, with a format of a dance ballet, linear time and space progression are deliberately bent to artistic effect. Husain attempts to dispense with the concept of time by showing Leonardo Da Vinci and Shah Rukh Khan (playing himself) sharing screen space with Monica, a modern-day Madhuri, and Kalidas riding a bicycle!
Visually each frame is like a prize painting. In one of the many surreal scenes, Shabana Azmi is unable to hear Madhuri, Shilpa and Farida Jalal's voices, emphasizing that women down the centuries, want to be heard, but aren't. The role of women in keeping the cycle of creation going is established through the scene where Shilpa Shirodkar ceaseless pushes a laden-with-children giant wheel.
Yet there’s a surfeit of surrealism and symbolism here, and the Director whose celluloid brush endeavors to create a film that’s not too 'artsy artsy' and 'audience friendly', seems to have fallen short despite the star power.
Then you have film-critic Khalid Mohamed’s Fiza, that is fully accepting of the pop tradition, yet unusual in the very character of Fiza, the heroine of the film. One of the few really strong woman characters in Hindi cinema, Fiza as Director Khalid Mohamed points out is the rare film that shows a woman with a book. Amaan the hero is by contrast, shown as a well-intentioned but rather weak man.
The film delineates characters in detailed hues, though much criticism was leveled at the director for selling out to mainstream Bollywood song and dance traditions, thus situating his strong, intellectually inclined heroine in a bar and having her dance for dramatic effect. "It was however a natural progression", the director maintains, "a deliberate upset of the stereotype that Muslim woman have to exist in their mohalla and cannot dance."
Commercial successes in varying degrees, these films are nevertheless interesting ones to look out for, in the power of their imagery and in their cinematic explorations, transcending stereotype and tradition and yet also somewhat intrinsically and eventually contained by it.
Author Profile - Bapsi Sidhwa
This appeared in the Hindu Sunday Magazine November 6th 2005
Novelist Bapsi Sidhwa talks about her writing, her best-known book about Partition and her latest one on Lahore.
BAPSI SIDHWA is in Bombay to promote a book of writings on the city of "sin and splendour" that she grew up in — pre- Partition Lahore.
I meet her at her cousin's elegant, old time Parsi apartment in South Mumbai. The heritage-like flat with its dark teak furniture and copper urns looks out onto an expanse of the Oval Maidan, onto the Rajabai Clock Tower and the gothic spires of the Bombay High Court.
It's a sumptuous setting. Also one that's immaculately appropriate for the petite Punjabi-Parsi- Pakistani writer sitting across me. Indeed this could be a still from a Merchant Ivory film. The fair 67-year-old writer, clad in a pink salwar kameez, with her carefully modulated tones, certainly looks the part. (The closest she's come to this, she confesses, is a cameo in the Deepa Mehta directed "1947 Earth", a film based on Sidhwa's classic story on Partition The Ice Candy Man.)
Early days
The last few days have been hectic as journalists and their photographers line up back to back. A TV shoot the day before, of the Houston-based writer hunting for bargains on Colaba's colourfully chaotic Causeway bazaar, has left her with a bad back. She also has a bad stomach ("All that Bombay duck," she exclaims, "I can't have enough of it.")
We talk of her days in Bombay, the five years of her first marriage. Sidhwa, like her eight-year-old heroine in the Ice Candy Man, had childhood polio and wasn't allowed to go to school. "I came to Bombay like a country bumpkin," she declares. "My first husband said, `you can't walk; you can't talk. What you can do?'"
Still, it was a city the young woman found enormously liberating. "Unlike Lahore where everybody knew you, in Bombay there was a wonderful anonymity, you could wear what you liked and just get on a bus".
Like Madhu Jaffrey, who tells an interesting ugly duckling story of how unattractive she felt as a young woman until she moved to the U.S. and threw her spectacles into the Atlantic, Sidhwa too, discovered the confidence of being a late bloomer.
Years later, on her second marriage honeymoon to the mountains, her first novel came to her ("I'd never written before", she says, "just some stupid little piece on pregnancy and how if you walked too far front you were carrying a boy"). It's a story I've read of before, but Sidhwa tells it beautifully, in the manner of a storyteller born. She describes the remote mountain fastnesses between Afghanistan and Pakistan ("you could lose a herd of elephants in there, let alone Osama bin Laden") and tells the tragic tale of a runaway young bride bought as a wife for a tribal man. The short story she set out to write (in secret, she was afraid she'd be laughed at), turned eventually into her first novel The Pakistani Bride.
Trauma of Partition
Interestingly, the story she'd carried inside her almost all her life — that of the terrors and traumas of Partition — was to emerge much later in 1988 — as The Ice Candy Man (published in the U.S. as Cracking India as "ice candy man" had colloquial connotations of a drug supplier).
It's an immensely powerful book, written from a child's point of view and based on Bapsi Sidhwa's own terrified memories. As she writes in an essay for The New York Times of those times, "Yet the ominous roar of distant mobs was a constant of my awareness, alerting me, even at age seven, to a palpable sense of the evil that was taking place in various parts of Lahore...(And when) the dread roar of mobs has at last ceased, terrible sounds of grief and pain erupt at night. They come from the abandoned servants' quarters behind the Singhs' house... why do these women cry like that? Because they're delivering unwanted babies, I'm told, or reliving hideous memories."
Later that evening, at the book's formal launch at a city bookstore, strangers come forward emotionally with their Partition stories — one lady wants the book of writings on Lahore autographed for her mother who used to live in Lahore, two young students from Xavier's introduce themselves, "We did a presentation on you." Question hour is animated.
Journalist Anil Dharker asks her, "You look so gentle and genteel. How then do you manage to write such ribald stuff?"
Sidhwa splutters, "But my writing is very decent — I don't write like writers like ... er ... Philip Roth" (the infamous Portnoy's Complaint being a prime example!).
"If a writer writes about a boy's sexual urges it is perfectly natural; but girls also experience the same feelings, the daze and the dazzlement, so how does that become ribald and indecent?" she queries, still smarting under the recent U.S. high school controversy on a couple of burgeoning sexuality scenes in The Ice Candy Man.
Novelist Bapsi Sidhwa talks about her writing, her best-known book about Partition and her latest one on Lahore.
BAPSI SIDHWA is in Bombay to promote a book of writings on the city of "sin and splendour" that she grew up in — pre- Partition Lahore.
I meet her at her cousin's elegant, old time Parsi apartment in South Mumbai. The heritage-like flat with its dark teak furniture and copper urns looks out onto an expanse of the Oval Maidan, onto the Rajabai Clock Tower and the gothic spires of the Bombay High Court.
It's a sumptuous setting. Also one that's immaculately appropriate for the petite Punjabi-Parsi- Pakistani writer sitting across me. Indeed this could be a still from a Merchant Ivory film. The fair 67-year-old writer, clad in a pink salwar kameez, with her carefully modulated tones, certainly looks the part. (The closest she's come to this, she confesses, is a cameo in the Deepa Mehta directed "1947 Earth", a film based on Sidhwa's classic story on Partition The Ice Candy Man.)
Early days
The last few days have been hectic as journalists and their photographers line up back to back. A TV shoot the day before, of the Houston-based writer hunting for bargains on Colaba's colourfully chaotic Causeway bazaar, has left her with a bad back. She also has a bad stomach ("All that Bombay duck," she exclaims, "I can't have enough of it.")
We talk of her days in Bombay, the five years of her first marriage. Sidhwa, like her eight-year-old heroine in the Ice Candy Man, had childhood polio and wasn't allowed to go to school. "I came to Bombay like a country bumpkin," she declares. "My first husband said, `you can't walk; you can't talk. What you can do?'"
Still, it was a city the young woman found enormously liberating. "Unlike Lahore where everybody knew you, in Bombay there was a wonderful anonymity, you could wear what you liked and just get on a bus".
Like Madhu Jaffrey, who tells an interesting ugly duckling story of how unattractive she felt as a young woman until she moved to the U.S. and threw her spectacles into the Atlantic, Sidhwa too, discovered the confidence of being a late bloomer.
Years later, on her second marriage honeymoon to the mountains, her first novel came to her ("I'd never written before", she says, "just some stupid little piece on pregnancy and how if you walked too far front you were carrying a boy"). It's a story I've read of before, but Sidhwa tells it beautifully, in the manner of a storyteller born. She describes the remote mountain fastnesses between Afghanistan and Pakistan ("you could lose a herd of elephants in there, let alone Osama bin Laden") and tells the tragic tale of a runaway young bride bought as a wife for a tribal man. The short story she set out to write (in secret, she was afraid she'd be laughed at), turned eventually into her first novel The Pakistani Bride.
Trauma of Partition
Interestingly, the story she'd carried inside her almost all her life — that of the terrors and traumas of Partition — was to emerge much later in 1988 — as The Ice Candy Man (published in the U.S. as Cracking India as "ice candy man" had colloquial connotations of a drug supplier).
It's an immensely powerful book, written from a child's point of view and based on Bapsi Sidhwa's own terrified memories. As she writes in an essay for The New York Times of those times, "Yet the ominous roar of distant mobs was a constant of my awareness, alerting me, even at age seven, to a palpable sense of the evil that was taking place in various parts of Lahore...(And when) the dread roar of mobs has at last ceased, terrible sounds of grief and pain erupt at night. They come from the abandoned servants' quarters behind the Singhs' house... why do these women cry like that? Because they're delivering unwanted babies, I'm told, or reliving hideous memories."
Later that evening, at the book's formal launch at a city bookstore, strangers come forward emotionally with their Partition stories — one lady wants the book of writings on Lahore autographed for her mother who used to live in Lahore, two young students from Xavier's introduce themselves, "We did a presentation on you." Question hour is animated.
Journalist Anil Dharker asks her, "You look so gentle and genteel. How then do you manage to write such ribald stuff?"
Sidhwa splutters, "But my writing is very decent — I don't write like writers like ... er ... Philip Roth" (the infamous Portnoy's Complaint being a prime example!).
"If a writer writes about a boy's sexual urges it is perfectly natural; but girls also experience the same feelings, the daze and the dazzlement, so how does that become ribald and indecent?" she queries, still smarting under the recent U.S. high school controversy on a couple of burgeoning sexuality scenes in The Ice Candy Man.
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