After watching the first 5 minutes of "The Flying Wallas: Opera Noir" at the Prithvi Theatre Festival a few days ago, I decided thin people can get away with anything. I was listening to a (bald) man reciting poetry in his gravelliest voice and a (bald) woman who spoke her lines in high-pitched song, as though she was an Indian version of Bianca Castafiore (only scrawny instead of buxom). When she wasn't singing, she looked like a homeless junkie who had found a Swan Lake dancer's costume in the trash.  My seat was in the centre of a row so I couldn't even get out. Unable to understand what she was warbling and able to predict most of his rhymes, I decided to focus my energies towards causing the forces of the universe to do painful things to the friend who had said this would be "interesting."

Which goes to show that I'd do well to curb my enthusiasm for being unenthusiastic. Because "The Flying Wallas: Opera Noir" by Sridhar/Thayil ended up to be good fun and rather intriguing. In fact, many of us in the audience wished it had been longer. "The Flying Wallas" is about a pair of acrobats or trapeze artists. He in his white suit haunts her. She, glittery and wearing something between a tutu and a corset, was his partner. They were The Flying Wallas, a pair of trapeze artists known for performing death-defying routines without a safety net. One day she changes their routine slightly, he isn't able to reach her or perhaps she doesn't catch him, and he falls to his death.

Most often, Thayil walked around casually and flapped his hands a few times. Suman Sridhar sang beautifully but her movements was either as mannered as a wind-up doll or slack. Thayil has great stage presence and a bad head for remembering his own writing. For the better part of the play, he was reading from a script he carried on stage. He'd finish reading a page and then it would be ripped out and left to flutter to the ground. Sort of poetic and very obvious that Thayil needed his lines before him. Sridhar's songs alternated with Thayil's elocution. The background music was occasionally too loud and frequently discordant, possibly as an homage to John Cage. There are some delightful musical moments in "The Flying Wallas", not the least of which is when Sridhar, in perfect tune and using her wonderful, unwavering classically-trained voice, sings, "What the fuck?"

"The Flying Wallas: Opera Noir" was not particularly good theatre. It had a lot of cool music, some interesting poetry and it didn't spare a thought for the conventions that generally govern the structure of a play. The stagecraft was unimaginative and smacked of sloth. The play began with a drum, a platform, a chair and the chalk outline of a fallen figure; all of which were in a bluish circle of light. This looked lovely and left the stage to be used by the actors but randomly strolling around counteth not as "using the stage". The one element that was used was the square, black  platform in centrestage. A few times, Sridhar stood on it, as though poised to leap. Now and then, Thayil sat on the chair, turning the platform into a table or perhaps a judge's desk.

But I don't think Sridhar/Thayil were looking to give Complicite a run for their money. Sridhar/Thayil is a band. She's a singer with a Macbook, he's a poet with a guitar and if Prithvi Theatre Festival deems this to be theatre, then it's not for Sridhar/Thayil to argue. The city's many English theatre companies, like Rage and QTP, may feel miffed but there's one thing that Sridhar/Thayil did with "The Flying Wallas" that most plays aspire to do: tell a story engagingly. The idea of a vengeful ghost haunting someone isn't particularly novel and neither is the story of being racked by guilt when your loved one dies. However, considering the fact that one of the city's better-known theatre groups decided to put up a theatrical adaptation of — brace yourself — Pedro Almodovar's "All About My Mother" recently, let's not start beating our chests about being unique.  "The Flying Wallas" never lost sight of the fact that they needed to make the audience interested in their story. So there we were, wondering, did she actually kill him? Is he just taking out his anger at not being alive upon her? Is he blaming her because he can't accept that he, the founder of The Flying Wallas, made a mistake? Has she gone mad or is that just what he'd like to believe? Is she imagining the whole thing? Does she realise he's playing with her? Is she really there or has he conjured her to keep him company in his limbo? Just for the possibilities in the plot, "The Flying Wallas: Opera Noir" is more engaging than 90% of the theatre writing I've seen in Bombay this year.

And let's not forget the gossipy angle. If I had a cap, I'd doff it to Jeet Thayil for having the courage to go on stage with "The Flying Wallas" because every single person in that audience who has heard of Shakti Bhatt must have wondered how much of this "play" is autobiographical. When Bhatt suddenly died and her family chose to be very tight-lipped about the cause of death, rumours flew about what killed her and there were malicious whispers about her relationship with Thayil, her husband. The fact that he hooked up with Sridhar (romantically and professionally) very soon after Bhatt's death didn't help his reputation much. Watching "The Flying Wallas", it was impossible not to wonder whether the memory of Bhatt's death had inspired Thayil to write the helpless rage of Sridhar's character as she tries to explain her innocence to a ghost that refuses to listen. I'll admit it: It didn't strike me while I was watching but once it ended and I was outside the theatre, I couldn't help wondering whether the ghost, who is bitterly furious at having lost life simply because of a tiny slip, was Bhatt. Or was this all that was left of Bhatt after the rumourmongers had taken over the memory of her life and death?

Wyclef Jean, Cyndi Lauper, DJ Rekha and Neel Murgai performed ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ on Letterman last night (thanks, Joolz). The track’s sweet, poppish melody sounds like Maya lyrics crossed with Cornershop sitar.

And to answer your burning question: Cyndi’s 56, but she still rocks it.

Kumail Nanjiani unfurled his eyebrows for comedy on Letterman Friday night. It’s interesting how every standup comic who’s not black or white starts with a joke about his ethnicity. Nanjiani didn’t riff off it too much, slowed down his set and kept it clean for primetime.

Letterman’s intro was a touch awkward. He seems like he’s walking on eggshells with desi guests, afraid of being insensitive.

Related post: Kumail on the telly

[I’ve written earlier on this blog about Prem Panicker’s Bhimsen series; here’s the text of a story I did for Business Standard Weekend]

The literal English translation of the Malayalam word Randaamoozham is “next in line”. Slightly extended, it might be used to describe someone who is perpetually second best, forever the bridesmaid, and this made it a particularly apt title for M T Vasudevan Nair’s acclaimed retelling of the Mahabharata in the voice of Bhima, the second of the five Pandava heroes. Next in the line of succession to his elder brother Yudhisthira (and usually in the shadow of his younger brother Arjuna when it comes to charisma and skill in warfare), Bhima comes across as a gluttonous, slightly oafish he-man figure – or a comic foil – in many mainstream renderings of the great epic. But Nair (popularly known as “MT”) turned him into a three-dimensional figure, more sensitive and thoughtful than he is usually given credit for. “He took familiar building blocks and created an entirely new, incredibly compelling construct from them,” says Prem Panicker, senior journalist, Rediff.com co-founder and a long-time admirer of MT’s work.

When Panicker first read Randaamoozham as a youngster, it helped him realise that “the stories that made up the warp and weft of my ‘heritage’ are open to interpretation”. Returning to the book years later, he was struck by the nuances a familiar tale could yield if you changed the perspective even fractionally – “like a kaleidoscope, where every time you gently flick your wrist, strange and wonderful patterns emerge from the same broken bits of glass”.

A little over a year ago, he embarked on a whimsical, experimental project that quietly grew into a robust literary work: an English transcreation of Randaamoozham, serialised under the title Bhimsen on his very popular blog Smoke Signals. The series is now complete – it runs to 72 episodes and 135,000 words – and available in PDF format on the website. It’s an outstanding work that deserves to be read by anyone interested in an intimate, earthy version of the Mahabharata – one that places us right amidst the characters.

“Perspective tellings” of this complex, multi-layered epic are not, of course, new things. Many notable books and plays in this vein have been written in all the major Indian languages – Shivaji Sawant’s Mrityunjay (Marathi), Pratibha Ray’s Yajnaseni (Oriya) and P K Balakrishnan’s Ini Nhan Urangatte (Malayalam) being just three among them – but unfortunately for the English-language reader, hardly any of these are available in high-quality translation. This makes Panicker’s Bhimsen an especially important work, one that remains deeply respectful of the original Randaamoozham while at the same time confidently building on it. It isn’t a straight translation. Using the blog-post format meant that Panicker had to carefully work out how to begin and end each chapter, which is a different process from flowing a story over the uninterrupted length of a book; each episode had to be relatively self-contained. He also drew on his own understanding of the Keralite martial arts tradition to embellish the descriptions of Bhima’s many hand-to-hand combats. And he expanded on the frequent tensions between the Pandava brothers, for Randaamoozham, as he points out, is at its heart the story of a family struggling to survive.

As a reader, if you come to Bhimsen having previously encountered only mainstream translations of the Mahabharata, there are two important things you have to deal with. First, this is not an omniscient-narrator telling: everything we read is filtered through the prism of Bhima’s personal experiences, his very particular biases and prejudices. This seems like an easy idea to process, but a reader who knows the Mahabharata well must keep reminding himself of it. It’s revealing to read the comments on Panicker’s original Bhimsen posts and note how frequently he got asked to add an extra sentence or two elaborating incidents that Bhima wouldn’t have had direct access to (“More details on the Abhimanyu killing please”) or justifying the behaviour of another character. A recurrent subject of such requests was Karna, who is presented here almost throughout as a negative figure, rather than the tragic anti-hero so many of us Mahabharata aficionados admire. But as Panicker shows us, when we are looking exclusively through Bhima’s eyes, it’s perfectly natural to view Karna as nothing more than an arrogant, mean-spirited low-caste man constantly trying to rise above his station in life by ingratiating himself with Duryodhana; an outsider meddling in family affairs and adding to the trouble. Other perspective tellings will, of course, present completely different pictures, which add up to create a fascinating tapestry, for these subjective renderings go a long way towards helping us grasp character motivations and appreciating the many moral complexities of the story.

The other thing to understand about Bhimsen is that there is no room in it for the supernatural or the divine; everything is explained in strictly realist terms. Thus, when the young Bhima is poisoned by Duryodhana, he doesn’t enter a magical snake kingdom at the bottom of the river and receive nectar that will grant him the strength of 8,000 elephants – instead he meets a tribe of Nagas, who heal and fortify him before sending him back home. Most of the “rakshasas”, such as Bhima’s wife Hidimbi and son Ghatotkacha, are similarly tribal-folk, people who exist on the fringes of the kingdoms that make up the narrative (and who are not particularly well-treated by the epic’s conventional heroes). Karna’s “Shakti”, the irresistible, one-use-only weapon supposedly gifted to him by Indra, is described with careful realism as an arrow that contains freshly extracted snake venom, therefore guaranteed to kill (and not replaceable because the warrior would have to carry a basket of live snakes around with him on his chariot!).

There are references to the Pandavas being the sons of Gods, but in his brusquely pragmatic way Bhima de-mythologises himself and everyone else, dismissing the bards’ songs as fanciful public relations exercises. (I could never listen to balladeers sing of my battle against Bakan without feeling the urge to laugh out loud. They called him an asura and invested him with all kinds of magical powers... but the battle itself was merely a matter of killing someone who needed it – a quick, clean kill with nothing to recommend it in terms of strategy and tactics.) Towards the end of the story, his mother Kunti even tells him about the human men who fathered her sons.

What this approach does is to flesh out the quotidian aspects of the great epic, making it more relevant to readers who don’t think of mythology as literal truth (and who aren’t very interested in its religious significance) but read it for what it tells us about human beings and their conflicts, about the everyday bustle of life. But it would be a mistake to think of Bhimsen as a radical, new-fangled attempt to “modernise” or “deconstruct” the Mahabharata. In fact, it draws on the earliest forms of the epic poem – notably the much shorter text called the “Jaya”, which we know about largely through references in other ancient literature, such as Bhasa’s plays, written around the 3rd century AD. In the afterword to Randaamoozham, Nair wrote that he stayed philosophically anchored to this “original version” throughout.

This is not to say that a minimalist Mahabharata is intrinsically more worthy or valid than the grander, more fantastical one that most readers are familiar with. Both have their uses and both have something to tell us about the long, fascinating process by which myths are generated and regenerated over time. But at a time when religious fundamentalism has become almost fashionable, when some people take chauvinistic pride in the idea that a sacred text has existed in exactly the same form for thousands of years, it’s important not to forget how old stories grow and change over time. After all, Randaamoozham is also a reminder that the particulars of myths vary as you travel from one part of this vast country to another. “MT brought to his narrative a Kerala-centric appreciation of interpersonal relationships within a rigidly hierarchical family structure, such as that of the Nair tharavad where the pre-eminence of the eldest male is the guiding rule,” says Panicker. This informs the relationship between Yudhisthira and the other Pandava brothers.

In her excellent book The Hindus: An Alternative History, the Sanskrit scholar Wendy Doniger explores the vitality of Hinduism and the fact that its major texts have been subject to reinterpretation over the centuries, not set in stone. There is no better example of this than the Mahabharata, and Bhimsen is a worthy addition to the ever-growing canon of this dynamic epic – as well as a fine tribute to a modern classic of regional literature.

The complete text of Bhimsen is available here.

[Will soon put up the text of an email conversation I had with Prem about Bhimsen. Meanwhile, on a related but much lighter note, some old posts about Ekta Kapoor’s delightfully muddle-headed Kahaani Hamaari Mahabharat Ki, which was telecast for a few months last year before it died with the channel it was on: The tattoo menace, The squabbling sutradhaars, More on Vyasa and Ganesha, Little princes with big pecs, Low comedy from the Dwapara Yuga]

Just finished Paul Theroux’s new novel A Dead Hand, which features a Theroux-like narrator-protagonist – Jerry Delfont, an itinerant travel writer currently living in Calcutta, looking for a story, and suffering from a bad case of writer’s block or inertia. He has an impressive opening paragraph (or what he thinks is an impressive opening paragraph) that compares the city’s atmosphere to a bulging vacuum-cleaner dirt-bag, but that’s about it. In other words, he has a “dead hand” – “it seemed a true description of what I was facing, a limpness akin to an amputation” – and being middle-aged, he worries that this might herald a permanent decline.

But there’s more than one kind of dead hand in this novel. The other, more literal manifestation emerges soon after Jerry is approached by an American philanthropist, Mrs Unger, who asks him to investigate an incident involving a little boy’s corpse in a dingy little hotel room. Initially unwilling to get involved, Jerry finds himself besotted – in ways that he can’t fully articulate – by the enigmatic, maternal yet sensuous Mrs Unger. He also discovers that there’s nothing in the least dead about her hand: an almost magically skilled masseuse, she soon has him under her thumb, in more than one sense.

Paul Theroux himself isn’t the sort of author who you’d think struggles much when it comes to filling a page with words: he’s remarkably prolific, having averaged around a book a year for the better part of four decades – this includes the travel writing for which he is best known, as well as fiction that frequently draws on his experiences of traveling and living in different lands. He’s a polished, fluent writer – the quality of his prose is better than one usually expects from genre fiction (and A Dead Hand is very much a genre thriller). As in previous books, notably The Elephanta Suite, he has a way of capturing little things about India that might make Indians bristle – and even lead to accusations of an outsider being patronising or promoting stereotypes – but which have the ring of uncomfortable truth about them. “As I was leaving,” says Jerry at one point, “I heard him shout – a bawling in Bengali, the sort of rage I’d heard before in India, uninhibited indignation, pure fury, always a man screaming at a woman.” And this, when referring to certain middle-class Indians whose English combines grammatical incorrectness with a florid over-formality that suggests the colonial legacy: “They had the language for every occasion. It was still possible to be subtle, even sinuous, in a conversation, probably as a result of the weirdly Victorian verbosity, using politeness and amplification and elaborate excuses and courtesies.” On yet another occasion, Jerry says that “India’s human features” frighten him, but then speculates that “I saw doomed people where [Mrs Unger] saw life and hope, because I was doing nothing and she was bringing help.”

Also present here is some of the exoticising that so raises the hackles of many of us Indian readers - references to Tantric sex and Kali worship, for instance (see on left the international cover I found on Amazon.com, a Kali with a stylishly skewed third eye!). Of course, one mustn't confuse narrator with author: Jerry is given to painting with much broader brush-strokes than Theroux himself would. But he can certainly be seen as a version of Theroux, perhaps a more callow version. Or perhaps a lazier, less ambitious version, the sort of man who would hide behind the façade of “writer’s block”. This parallel is underlined for us midway through the book – in a passage that doesn’t take the main narrative forward but is very intriguing on its own terms – when Jerry has a brief meeting with the travel writer “Paul Theroux”, who happens to be visiting Calcutta. During the course of their exchange, we get a vivid, cynical image of an inquisitive writer as someone who pokes a wary animal: “It was not only cruel, but the torment evoked an uncharacteristic and untrue reaction.”

Despite thoughtful passages like this, A Dead Hand has a peculiarly rushed and unfinished feel about it. The book’s target reader would seem to be someone who simply wants a cosy little Oriental mystery (the subtitle “A Crime in Calcutta” suggests as much), and in this sense it never quite satisfies. Early on, when we learn that Mrs Unger’s largesse extends to rescuing and caring for some of the city’s huge population of orphaned children, it isn’t too difficult to guess the general direction where the story is headed, and I kept waiting for a twist that would add a new, unanticipated dimension. However, this never quite happens; the book doesn’t seem to want to be a conventional whodunit (or whadhappened). But in that case, what is it? Is it more about slowly unwrapping the many veils that conceal the real Mrs Unger (something one can’t be sure Jerry has succeeded in doing by the end of the book)? Or is this inscrutable woman an elaborate symbol for Calcutta – and, by extension, for India? A Dead Hand raises these questions but leaves them dangling in the musty air of the dirt-bag.

Stephen Colbert riffed last night on the leaked memo telling Indian cricketers to have sex before a match because it increases testosterone. It’s such a pleasure to finally have the phrase ’sticky wicket’ handled correctly.

Film: Laawaris
Song: Apni tu jaise taise
Year: 1981
Composer: Kalyanji Anandji

American ice dancing pair Meryl Davis and Charlie White won the NHK Trophy on Sunday, rising into the lead with a medley of ‘Kajra Re,’ ‘Dola Re Dola’ and ‘Silsila Yeh Chahat Ka’ (thanks, blackmamba):

Davis and White were first after the original dance [the Bollywood medley] and were awarded 100.79 points following a strong free program… With their second title of the season, reigning U.S. champions White and Davis locked up a spot in the Grand Prix finals in Tokyo on Dec. 3-6. [CNN]

It’s perhaps the first American homage which hasn’t entirely sluttified the outfits. The kurta isn’t as fitted as most skating costumes, and the woman’s outfit, though minimal, is less skimpy than recent item numbers. What’s more interesting is how a small British movie about Indian poverty scored by A.R. Rahman has kicked up mainstream Bollywood homage in America.

This cross between Hemingway and Connery is the cover of Aziz Ansari’s new standup DVD, due out in January. Says Aziz:

“there are 53 standing ovations… some people might say, ‘Wait a second, it looks like it was edited to look like there were 53 standing ovations,’ but that’s not the case… that’s the way those people felt they had to respond–by standing up in the exact same fashion for the exact amount of time, 53 times.’” [EW via Brownstar]

Two moments involving the clothes of departed people might serve to give a sense of the distinctive mood and method of Aseem Kaul’s book of very short stories, Etudes. In “The Shirt”, we see a woman who has recently been widowed. Every day she continues to wash one of her late husband’s shirts and then hangs it out to dry, watching – the image is both macabre and touching – “the empty shape of him billow in the back yard.”

And in “The Smell of Smoke”, a woman is abruptly left by her partner, and decides instantly to give away all his clothes. The narrator proffers this observation: “There was something very attractive in the idea that if he did come back (not that she allowed herself to think about this, not even for a moment) he would find his wardrobe empty.” Although the parentheses insist that the woman is not considering the possibility of the man’s return, we know, of course, from the very vehemence of her insistence that she is. The sentence is simultaneously a description of both determination and desolation.

Almost uniquely among Indian short-story writers in English, Kaul is determinedly a writer of short shorts (for similarly compressed and elliptical work by contemporary Indian writers in English, I can think only of Kuzhali Manickavel's Insects Are Just Like You and Me Except Some of Them Have Wings). Kaul’s characters are rarely named, their backgrounds barely sketched in, and the places they live in almost never described—all the pillars and plinths on which realist storytelling is based are rigorously cleared away. But for all the austerity of the writer’s method, his creations seem no less real than those of realist writers. What we see his characters do, primarily, is think. In his best stories, we feel as if mind has insidiously established contact with mind, in the same way as we might in a conversation with someone we have just met.

Indeed, many of Kaul’s stories are built upon a model of conversation, either real or imagined. One of them, “Where Shall We Go For Dinner?”, is written entirely in dialogue, without a single word of narratorial explanation. It shows us a couple quarreling over where to eat dinner, and then making up. It is hard to work from such a simplified palette, so the success of this story is no small achievement.

In another story, “Conversation”, a man begins to track the voice of the woman who lives next door, because he can hear her on the telephone through the wall they share. Although they never actually speak, he becomes more and more involved with her life, . When he realises she is sad, he takes “to playing soft music at night – works for solo piano” to soothe her (as the title of his book indicates, this is clearly the kind of music Kaul loves best). But, churlishly, the woman complains about the disturbance, and makes the narrator gloomy. One day he finally takes the plunge, and calls her. She picks up the phone. “He doesn’t say anything, just sits there, hearing her voice coming through the receiver on the one hand, through the wall on the other. Like a conversation.” Kaul’s arresting ending beautifully fulfils the spirit and strangeness of the story.

Like the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, who is clearly one of the moving spirits behind Etudes, Kaul loves to write a certain type of mind-bending fiction. In one story, “Googled”, the protagonist Bihag Sharma (one of the few characters in the book who are named) googles his own name, and is astonished to find, among the search results, a few links dated 2014, describing things that are going to happen in his future. Google's reach and power are now so immense, the story suggests, that is knows not just every bit about our past but also the future. A story called “Juliet” puts a wicked modern spin on the love story of Romeo and Juliet, suggesting that Juliet was really a malevolent schemer who cozened Romeo into sacrificing himself so that she could marry someone else. Kaul’s mischief extends all the way to the back cover, with its list of quotes by fictional reviewers, including one Orhan Gutan.

Here, in full, is the story with which the book opens, called "Note Autobiographical":

Note Autobiographical

Every time he speaks to himself you sense something missing, something not quite true. It's not that you doubt his sincerity—on the contrary, you know he's making every effort to be honest. It's just that by putting himself in the spotlight he has blinded himself to his own shadow, to the audience of alternate selves who watch him from the wings. He tells you what he sees, but all the while the real self remains invisible, like light seen from the inside of a bulb.

It's like the difference between the way you picture yourself and your face in a photograph. The way you hold your breath at immigration, waiting to see if the man examining your passport will accept you for who you are.

In six sentences, many truths and intimations about the self are captured, and the three metaphors—the two light-related ones of the spotlight and the inside of a bulb, and the one about the difference between the face's conception of itself and its look in a photograph—are all rich with suggestion, with lights and shadows. Even such a short piece attests to the writer's control over prose rhythm, and indeed, while the 75 stories in Etudes might prove wearying if read at one go, there is not a page here that does not reveal in some way the writer's ferocious intelligence and alertness to metaphysical complexity.

These winning pieces might be seen not only an assertion of a new kind of method, but also be seen as a tacit criticism of the lazy gestures and banalities of much realist storytelling, particularly from the subcontinent. Such a fresh and strange sensibility is very welcome in the house of Indian fiction.

And an older post on another writer of very short stories: "The zany fictions of Etgar Keret", which features Keret's strange and beautiful story "Pipes".

When you’re trying to chase down a particularly juicy quote, and the only sources you find are right-wing blogs and Fox News (redundant?), it’s usually a tipoff that the issue you’re tracing is entirely synthetic. But this quote by a grad student colleague of alleged Ft. Hood shooter Nidal Malik is too ridiculous to ignore:

“The issue here is that there’s a political correctness climate in the military. They don’t want to say anything because it would be considered questioning somebody’s religious belief, or they’re afraid of an equal opportunity lawsuit… They should’ve confronted him — our professors, officers — but they were too concerned about being politically correct.” [Fox]

Think about this for a sec. How many politically correct military men do you know? Is the military as an institution known for soldiers’ overweening sensitivity? Or is it an institution which, partly out of the necessity of conditioning men to kill, reduces enemies to dehumanized cutouts nicknamed ‘hajji’ and ‘raghead’? Hasan wasn’t kept in the army because of left-wing political correctness in an army stacked with southern conservatives. He was kept in the army because of a pointless, neocon-spurred war strained military recruiting, prompting stop-loss orders, lowered personnel standards and made the military willing to recruit petty criminals and gang members into the ranks of the enlisted.

Now Nidal Hasan was clearly operating a few cards short of a deck. A rational person who’s anti-American doesn’t join the U.S. military in the first place. A rational person who doesn’t want to fight overseas doesn’t join the army in the midst of two active wars. A rational person who can’t get a discharge, files as a conscientious objector or moves to Canada. Hasan used the army to pay for his education, tried to wiggle out of his commitment and was rebuffed. He was reportedly receiving poor work evaluations and was about to deploy to Afghanistan.

Hasan’s alleged crime looks more like American workplace violence than pure, fundie-inspired murder. It’s more accurate to say that Hasan went postal than that he went jihadi. The second-gen, Palestinian-American military shrink who can barely speak Arabic committed a crime which in its broad outlines is specifically and tragically American. His susceptibility to jihadi ideology is reminiscent of the nth-gen fundies of Bradford.

That’s not to say fundie ideology wasn’t a major factor — it clearly was. Hasan reportedly delivered a presentation to fellow grad students about jihad and rejected suitors for being insufficiently devout. But disaffected freelancers glom onto self-justifying ideologies of victimhood all the time. Red-flagging soldiers by religion rather than seditious views or history of violence would sweep up large numbers of innocents while missing militia and gang members, neo-Nazis, embittered subordinates and the mentally unstable — all of whom have been involved in terrorism or mil-on-mil fragging in recent years.

Hasan’s history of making openly anti-American statements should’ve caught him out, not his religious affiliation. As always, attack the problem directly: red-flag the violence, not the religion; scan for the bomb, not the skin color. The only reason this common sense rule is even controversial is that whites are so normative in the U.S., and Muslims other than black Americans considered so exotic, many white Americans baldly stereotype.

Were brown Muslims as commonplace here as elsewhere, this sort of rhetoric in favor of profiling would seem as ridiculous as demanding all white men with crew cuts be closely investigated. Grandstanding politicians are perenially willing to jump on weak proxies like religion or race rather than tackling problems directly. It comes across like feeble-minded credulity crossed with a provincial xenophobia.

[A special-case counterargument does exist: Indira Gandhi's Sikh guards in the immediate aftermath of Operation Blue Star...]

Related posts: That’s not my bag, baby, A country of snitches, No halal soup for you, Sniff ‘n scratch, The profiling myth, part 2, Muriel’s shredding, Banerjee wants bag search ban, A profile of cognitive dissonance, The profiling myth

Apparently, if you're a guy from South Mumbai — sorry, SoBo; for South Bombay, naturally — then there's a new way to hit on a girl. You go up to her and pretend to be a dude from Andheri. This involves saying things like, "Hey, wanna dance?" (with dance pronounced with a Texan twang) or "You wanna form a friend with me?" Girl dissolves into laughter, friendship is formed, happily ever after is beginning already. If you think this sounds idiotic, cast your eye at how some recent Bollywood heroes behave when striving to be attractive to the opposite sex. Salman Khan wore cut-offs that were so tight and skimpy that ladyboys on Bangkok's Walking Street would have second thoughts about them. Aamir Khan had to say, with a straight face, the naïvete of a slow 6-year-old and fluttering eyelashes, "You cum cum, madam".

For a mind-bogglingly patriarchal society, it's weird how stupid and juvenile a hero has to look in our movies. Cases in point, this week's new releases: Jail and Ajab Prem ki Ghazab Kahani. In Jail, which I have not seen, Neil Nitin Mukesh has to strike this pose.

Now explain to me, what the hell is he doing there? It looks like a) someone took a video into a primitive locker and b) he's trying to do a dance that mixes up Govinda's thrusts with the funky chicken routine. Forget the ignominies of being strip-searched in prison or having to pee in your cell, that's just way more humiliating. Inexplicably director Madhur Bhandarkar believes this is going to make us more sympathetically inclined towards the hero of his film. In Ajab Prem..., Ranbir Kapoor is supposed to have studied till Class IX, which means till the age of 15 he had some sort of formal schooling. God bless our education system if by that time we haven't taught our students how to string one sentence in even vaguely-correct English. Setting that aside, he spends the first half of the film (that's all I could watch before leaving in order to prevent my brain from self-destructing) behaving like an idiot adolescent. How is this attractive and to whom is this attractive? Another character claiming to be an adult was the guy called Tony Braganza, who is briefly rivals Ranbir Kapoor for Katrina Kaif's affections. While attempting to flirt with Katrina Kaif, "Little Tony" gesticulates the way deranged people did in eighties' Bollywood flicks (the particularly bad ones, I mean). This, according to Little Tony, is masculinity.

It almost makes me wish for the return to the time of polka-dotted bow ties and white shoes when men were men (albeit in polyester shirts) and boys were played by mullet-headed little girls in shorts.

The CIA’s assassination of Baitullah Mehsud now appears to be a Pyrrhic victory. According to the New Yorker, 200-300 bystanders also died while the CIA took 16 shots to finally off the alleged Benazir assassin:

… the recent campaign to kill Baitullah Mehsud offers a sobering case study of the hazards of robotic warfare. It appears to have taken sixteen missile strikes, and fourteen months, before the C.I.A. succeeded in killing him. During this hunt, between two hundred and seven and three hundred and twenty-one additional people were killed… [NewYorker]

That is an unbelievable statistic: less than half a percent accuracy. It’s the equivalent of dropping a daisy cutter on a crowded market to get one target. Many of those killed were no doubt Mehsud henchmen, but it’s not clear how many. The bystander killings will likely inspire acts of revenge. Mehsud was exactly the kind of high-value target which begged for a more targeted ground operation.

Then there’s the inevitable mission creep. Like Afghan warlords, the Pakistani military feeds the U.S. bad tips to eliminate political enemies:

… the U.S. government keeps broadening the definition of acceptable high-value targets. Last March, the Obama Administration made an unannounced decision to win support for the drone program inside Pakistan by giving President Asif Ali Zardari more control over whom to target. “A lot of the targets are nominated by the Pakistanis–it’s part of the bargain of getting Pakistani coöperation.”

… only six of the forty-one C.I.A. drone strikes conducted by the Obama Administration in Pakistan have targeted Al Qaeda members… the Pentagon’s roster of approved terrorist targets, containing three hundred and sixty-seven names–was recently expanded to include some fifty Afghan drug lords who are suspected of giving money to help finance the Taliban. [NewYorker]

Extremely troubling.

Related post: Speak softly

Kumail Nanjiani, who plays Gitmo Guy on The Colbert Report, gives you advice on the latest new drug cocktail (at 4:40). He’s on Comedy Central tonight at 11pm ET / 8pm PT as the warmup act for ‘Live at Gotham.’

He began performing at open-mike nights eight years ago at the Cubby Bear in Chicago, where he had moved after college, took a writing class at Second City and wrote what became his breakthrough work, an autobiographical one-man show called “Unpronounceable”… in which Mr. Nanjiani described how coming to America both strengthened his relationship with his family and deepened his ambivalence about his Muslim upbringing… “It was very controversial with Muslims…”

From there he did a stint as the opening act on Mr. Galifianakis’s national tour last year… That led to his selling NBC on an idea for a sitcom that he would write and star in. “It’s basically about my marriage and my family — a Pakistani living in Brooklyn with his Southern wife…” (NBC has paired Mr. Nanjiani with John Pollack, a writer of “Community,” to develop the script.) Though he finally has a significant paycheck — a deal like what he has with NBC probably pays in the neighborhood of $100,000 to write a pilot episode — he still does not have a future he can count on; a fully booked week of stand-up might bring in $700 or $800. [NYT]

It’s a hell of a sea change when a guy with an accent can hit it big in the comedy biz, not making his ethnicity the focus of his act, except on Colbert. A guy named Barack is president, and Nanjiani isn’t doing Yakov Smirnoff.

[Did a version of this profile for Tehelka]

“Most of us experience our parents as authority figures, we don’t think of them as human beings,” says Ved Mehta. We’re discussing his books Daddyji and Mamaji, now republished in graceful new editions by Roli, with Krishen Khanna paintings on the covers mirroring the quiet refinement of the prose within. “It’s hard to imagine one’s parents having hungers, fears, problems of their own. For me, this was a way of humanising them, and I hope readers will get something out of that.”

“Secretly,” adds the 75-year-old author, “I hope they’ll also get pleasure from their literary value.”

It would be very surprising if they didn’t. Daddyji and Mamaji, both written in the 1970s, are intimate personal histories of Mehta’s parents and their forebears, but they are also explorations of changing worlds and ways of living, from the provinciality of village life in mid-19th century Punjab (where a journey to Haridwar, lasting several days, could become the achievement of a lifetime – part of a family’s corpus of oral myths passed down over the generations) to “Daddyji” travelling to England to study in the early 20th century. These were the first two books in a large, initially unplanned cycle of autobiographical works that eventually became known as the “Continents of Exile” series. Most of them were published to acclaim in the US, where Mehta has spent much of his life, yet they continue to have a low profile in India; even immediately after the publication of The Red Letters in 2004, it was difficult to find copies of the earlier books in most stores.

This is a pity, for Mehta is among the most distinguished Indian writers of his generation. Over a career that stretches back to the 1950s, he worked as a staff writer for the New Yorker for three decades and wrote features and books on contemporary India, Mahatma Gandhi, philosophy and theology. He has also written with pragmatic clear-sightedness about being blind (the result of a bout with meningitis at age four): about how, “being a donkey in a world of horses, one would have to justify one’s existence and worth to the horses”; his journey to America at age 14 for the well-rounded education that wasn’t available to an unsighted adolescent in India; how loneliness gradually made way for self-reliance; and his use of “facial vision” (the ability to sense objects by the feel of the air and differences in sound) to navigate the world around him.

But his defining work remains “Continents of Exile”, which began with the simple, unassuming desire to record the story of his father’s life. “My father was a great storyteller – maybe that’s how I ended up becoming a writer – but with seven brothers and sisters clamoring for his attention, I rarely got him to myself,” he tells me. “Once that finally happened, in New York, I asked him to repeat the old stories he used to tell us. Initially it was mainly for my own edification. Then I started taking notes, and the book developed.”

“I had no real long-term agenda, but creative projects gather their own momentum,” he continues, “After Daddyji was published my sisters said I had to write a book about my mother next. She was very reticent at first but she finally agreed to be interviewed when my father wasn’t present!” The books grew to tell a vast cross-cultural tale involving India, England and America, revealing a great deal about a time when Indians first started moving to other countries in large numbers, breaking cultural strictures against crossing the oceans, tearing themselves away – or being torn away by circumstance – from family, friends and culture. One of the dominant themes of the last century, as Mehta points out, was the huge displacement of people around the world. Naturally, this shaped a literary landscape too. “The word ‘exile’ usually has negative connotations, but it has produced such great literature,” he observes, recounting the works of Nabokov and Conrad among others – and quickly adding “I’m not comparing myself to any of these names!”

Writing several books about one’s family history and one’s own personal development can sometimes be dismissed as navel-gazing – possibly one reason why Mehta’s place in the pantheon of leading Indian Anglophone writers doesn’t seem as secure as those of his contemporaries like V S Naipaul and Anita Desai – but he had the conviction that “if you write a very specific story and write it well, it will have a wide resonance”. He was so adept at using small stories to cast light on a big picture that his mentor, the legendary New Yorker editor William Shawn, developed a new rubric – “Personal History” – especially for his profiles. Mehta smiles as he recalls “how absurd it was, right in the middle of the Vietnam War, for a leading American magazine to publish a three-part profile of my mother, who no one in the world had ever heard of”.

The lucidity and precision of Mehta’s prose – Shawn once described it as “airy, elegant, marvellously clear” – may have been honed at the New Yorker, but Mehta himself believes “it originally came out of the impulse to tell people who I was, where I came from – I had a lot of explaining to do, and there was nothing more important to me than clarity. When I wrote Face to Face in my early twenties, I had very little English – I wrote it as a letter, I scarcely knew I was writing a book, it was more like recalling my background for myself”.

More intriguingly, his writing is very visual and descriptive. Determinedly avoiding any reference to his blindness except when it’s integral to the narrative, he writes as if he can see, and in a memoir this can be disorienting: what to make of a passage where Mehta “watches” as his father opens a large trunk and takes out “an empty Harrod's plastic shopping bag and a packet of letters in envelopes of many sizes and colours, loosely tied with a string”?

“Perhaps we shouldn’t compartmentalise fiction and non-fiction so strictly,” Mehta counters when I raise the subject, “Even in old histories there are passages – descriptions of soldiers in war, for instance – that are slightly heightened to make them more immediate.” He recalls that once, after interviewing a well-known historian who smoked throughout the duration of their talk, he wrote, “He smoked from the side of his mouth; there were times the cigarette seemed stuck to his lower lip.” The startled interviewee wrote asking how he had known this. “But I had simply interpreted what I heard – the patterns of his speech – and put it in visual terms,” says Mehta, “I could have written ‘His voice sounded muffled, which led me to conclude that the cigarette was dangling...’, but that would have been cumbersome and distracting. I don’t write for blind people, I write for the general public, and I don’t want to repeatedly draw attention to my blindness by explaining my impressions of thing.”

Making his own way around the world of reading and writing on a daily basis isn't an easy task, however. Since many of the books Mehta wants to read aren’t available in Braille or in talking-book format, he usually has to rely on readers, and this can be an expensive business (in his college days he would pay fellow students 75 cents an hour for their assistance; rates have risen considerably since then). He’s managed well enough – he finished Vikram Seth’s immense A Suitable Boy in just three to four days, less time than most sighted people would take – but it’s difficult for him to closely follow new literary developments as they happen. When he speaks of Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance (which he holds in very high regard) and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (“I liked it but it wasn’t an easy read at all, it was very convoluted”) almost as if they were recent publications, I realise that he has to be very selective in his reading, relying mainly on recommendations of “important books”. “I can’t always read books as soon as they are published,” he says in a resigned tone.

When I ask him to sign my copy of Daddyji, he scrawls a rough “V.M.” under the book’s title and lets his wife Linn write the short dedication. “As you can see, I’m functionally illiterate,” says the man who has filled thousands of pages with explorations of the interior lives of individuals as well as the shifting histories of continents.

[An old post on The Red Letters here. Also see Ved Mehta's website, which contains many of his essays and shorter pieces, as well as information on his books.

And some earlier author profiles/interviews here: Mohsin Hamid; Vikram Chandra; Amitav Ghosh; Anita Desai; Rajorshi Chakraborti; Kiran Desai; Manjula Padmanabhan; Manil Suri; Edward Luce; Amitava Kumar; Sudhir Kakar; Raj Kamal Jha; Kiran Nagarkar]

Guess what was reportedly the first buy at the business centre of the Mumbai Film Festival (which is known as MAMI but is actually the MFF)? Lars von Trier's Antichrist. Meanwhile, on IMDb, Antichrist's popularity fell by 71%. Sharmila Tagore, who heads up the Indian Censor Board, must feel like she's just eaten crow. Just months ago, she had said that she didn't think Indian audiences were mature enough for Antichrist. Recently, she reiterated that there was no way in hell (I paraphrase) that she would let Antichrist have a commercial release. Enlighten Film Society buying the home video rights isn't a commercial release but hey, the point is that an Indian company decided that there was money to be made with distributing this film.  It isn't entirely surprising. Everyone knows that 99% of the people at film festivals watch foreign films for their uncut sex scenes. But from the sound of things, Antichrist isn't quite what you turn to when you can't access Savita Bhabhi. On the other hand, there was uproar and minor violence across Maharashtra because actors in Wake Up Sid said "Bombay" instead of "Mumbai". So von Trier's twisted brand of attention-seeking chauvinism that brands the woman as Antichrist and prescribes as a cure some slicing in the nether regions (with a rusty razor) is ok. Colloquialisms, however, are not allowed. Who needs The Onion when you have true facts like this floating around?

When The X-Files started airing on tv, I remember a grand aunt of mine told us very solemnly that watching paranormal activity on television attracts ghosts, ghouls and other supernatural creatures. Since you like watching this stuff on tv, they figure that you want them in your home too. Having spotted a suitable habitat through a family's taste in tv programmes, they would slither their way in through the smallest crack and the thick glass of the tv screen was no protection against them (I was having good fun imagining ghosts careening towards the screen and going splat like paintball bullets). Fear and horror were an insidious thing, she said.

Not that I'm telling you to stop watching The Twilight Zone and instead start sinking into Gossip Girl, but my batty grand aunt may have been on to something. Because the way Antichrist snuck its tentacles into my world right after its screenings at MFF/ MAMI is just plain weird. Antichrist radiates sex, violence and weirdness. When you survive watching it, you carry a little bit of its discomfort and eeriness with you. Only one person from work had seen it and that was obviously not me, given the fact that merely reading the reviews had made curl into a foetal position and rock myself to sleep. My colleague was considerate towards our delicate, innocent minds and refrained from detailed descriptions. But despite this, within hours of the screening, I noticed that things were a bit alarming at work. The same thing happened with the only other person I know who saw the film and so I offer examples from conversations with these two separate arena.

An innocuous question about a random vegetable ended up as a prolonged exploration of how the Sindhi delicacy sai bhaji "looks like shit. Like that runny stuff when you've got a really bad case of loosies, you know the kind that makes you puke and crap constantly." I'm not going to go on (because I'm the sophisticated sort) but they did. For what seemed like hours. A corny joke about geometry and Halloween (pumpkin pi/e) resulted in a gruesome description of how to slaughter, sorry, carve a pumpkin. And the tour de force: an extended conversation about unicorns, which included the following statements/ comments/ observations:

"A fondle of unicorns? That's just way too horny."

"It's like there should have been unicorns in Monsoon Wedding."

"I never thought of unicorns as fondlers or fondlees, frankly." "What despite that horn?"

"There's a single horn, there's a mane. Use your imaginations." "Don't forget the virgins that people believed could lure the unicorns while you're using your imagination."

"There's a lot of mounting by virgins in the unicorn world."

"But the horn's pointy!"

"Did you just turn the unicorn into a sex toy?" "No, no! Look, Wikipedia says that they're symbols of virility and the horn is obviously phallic. That's not a toy."

"You're ruining My Little Pony for me!"

"The unicorn was actually a rhinoceros." "It's still a horn and it's definitely not prettier for the virgins."

For the rest of the day, decency was bludgeoned in every conversation, much like Willem Defoe's genitals are in Antichrist, and I'm blaming Lars von Trier for this. Obviously. I'm happy to report that the effects last about as long as a hangover. Hallelujah.

The good people that brought *PMH over to Germany earlier this year  gave me a chance to design a poster for an Independent Filmfestival they put together out in Frankfurt!  Bringin' that *PMH flavor into Deutschland y'all.

I wish I could make it down. If any of you are in Frankfurt this weekend make sure to check out the 3-day festival. You can check out the schedule here.

Decked out in pimp suit and dreads, Aziz ‘T-Pain’ Ansari gets a Halloween party started. 1 minute clip.

Happy Heteroween.

From the Rupa and the April Fishes show last night in SF, their hometown album release party:

Jessica Simpson was in India filming for her new reality show "The Price of Beauty." We were going to write something snarky about her going native but others did a better job.

She's also sporting a bindi which is the final nail in the coffin for her country music career because there are two things you don't do in that genre: Be a minority or look like a terrorist. Now, I know what you're thinking: India had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11, and you're absolutely right. However, you're employing things like book smarts and facts which, according to southern law, means Alan Jackson has the right to throw copies of the King James at your face until you drink a two-liter of Mountain Dew. Them's the rules.

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