A Non-binary Democracy

Amma & Didi – India’s beneficiary politics

Amma & Didi – India’s beneficiary politics

Following Narendra Modi’s demonetisation initiative in particular and over several past years in general, few Indian politicians have made as much of a laughing-stock of themselves as Mamata …

Source: Amma & Didi – India’s beneficiary politics

The Definitive Guide to Creative Writing – I

Having written nothing more than occasional FYI emails in the office for the last six months, I’ve decided to advise people on writing. Before you smirk at that, please consider the number of times in the last two weeks that you’ve come across size-zero actresses talking against objectification of women or Rahul Gandhi talking about incompetent leadership.

So, having established that I’m no less qualified to to teach you creative writing than Mamata Banerjee is to teach painting and poetry to children, let’s get to it.

First off, what do you write? Now every other similar guide will tell you to write whatever you want, or even better, to write “what your heart wants to”. Yeah, right. Tell me, you remember that old blog you abandoned a year ago? The one where you wrote straight from the heart and managed 50 pageviews in 4 months? Yes, I’m afraid that shit doesn’t fly too well.

So, what do you write? Easy, you should write something that will get you the greatest possible publicity(never mind positive or negative) in the shortest possible time because let’s face it, that’s the point of everything nowadays. If that isn’t inspiring enough for you, let me give you some examples:

a. 13 reasons Marilyn Monroe was the greatest philosopher of all time.

b. Women are stupid.

c. Why you should teach your kids to hate Muslims.

And so on. You get the drift? You should pick a topic that adequately demonstrates your incredible intellect, and starts a discussion among people possessing an intelligence and capacity for rational thought that matches your own.

Believe me, it shouldn’t be too difficult.

You got all that? Good! Feel free to get started while I go do something useful and enlightening, like google Bruce Jenner. Or is it Caitlyn?

I’ll be back, I promise.

Ciao!

Book Review: Daughter of Smoke and Bone

Having read the book, I’ll say two things up front. One – I want to go to Prague and have a bowl of goulash at the Poison Cafe. And two – I so wish all this was true. “All this” being “Daughter of Smoke and Bone” – The opening book of Laini Taylor’s fantasy trilogy of the same name.

The story opens and runs with Karou, a young art student in Prague who is beautiful, naughty (not what you’re thinking) and funny. She also happens to be brought up by and living with four “Chimera” – who are, well, monsters with part-human and part-animal features, and keep some kick-ass magic up their sleeves.

On an average day, Karou has a fairly normal life. She goes to her art school, hangs out with her best friend in this really creepy cafe and tries her best to dodge a stupid ex-boyfriend. Many of those days, however, turn way out of average when she’s sent on errands to distant corners of the world by Brimstone – the nominal head of the Chimera quartet, and her guardian/father figure. These errands are always the same – to go and procure various kinds of teeth, which Brimstone weaves into mysterious magical necklaces for some unknown use. All this goes on about as normally as such things can, until Karou suddenly finds herself and her clan under deadly attack by the Seraphim. The Seraphim are another kind of magical creatures – they are beautiful and handsome, have a pair of absolutely gorgeous wings, and wield swords like you’ve never seen in Game of Thrones.  After a..um, complicated(no spoilers) encounter with Akiva, one of the Seraphim, Karou begins to realise how little she knows of the things that have been going on all around her, in this world or some other that she has no knowledge of. And there, begins the main story.

While this is a book almost entirely about all things magical, the parts I enjoyed most are those where the normal and magical worlds in the book got violently mixed up. Taylor does a fairly good job striking a balance between the dramatic and the casual banter. The plot and narrative do get strained on a few occasions, but like with any good book you’d find yourself skipping those parts quickly to find out what happens next. One thing that is sure to touch you is the loving, intimate portrayal of Prague, with vantage points varying from shady alleys to tall church spires. And finally, the best thing about Laini Taylor’s book is that it doesn’t just run away with imagination, it makes you run away with your own. The vivid detail of things in the book makes you think up magnificent things in your head – angels, mosters, mythical battlefields and  a lot more.

This book, is fun. 

The Empty Notebook

My girlfriend gave me this beautiful notebook and a nice Parker a few months back. I have occasionally used the Parker. Mostly to scribble my name on the various secondhand novels I bought from College Street. The notebook, this beauty with its faux-worn pages and artsy green cover, is lying empty except for a quote I scribbled on the first page with, yes, the Parker.

“There is a pleasure sure in being mad which none but madmen know.”

That’s by John Dryden, to save you some Googling.

Anyways, this isn’t about the quote, or mercifully, Dryden.

This is about the empty notebook, and the Parker.

To come straight to the point, it’s lying empty because I’m afraid to write in it. I’m not exactly a writer you see. No offense, but just like most of you I just kinda tap out whatever random shit comes into my head. And, well….ink and paper is so permanent you know. I can’t delete a sentence. I can’t do a CTRL+A & DELETE and start over. I can’t close the page clicking “Don’t Save”. I can’t hide it with a password. I can’t just remove it after a month if I realise it was just the Old Monk talking. And then there’s that eternal question : whether what I write in it is worth reading or not.

Yes, a computer and especially the internet makes cowards of us all. I don’t have a sales quota to fill. I don’t have fans to live up to. To tell you the truth, if anybody ever reads that notebook, it will be accidental more than anything else. And yet, I’d rather leave it blank. I’d keep it for such a time when I’d something magical, and brilliant and BIG to write in it. In other words, I’d basically leave it alone for a really long time. Because unlike this here blog for example, I can’t take back whatever I say there.

If you find that contemptible, take a pen and write it down on a piece of paper and stick it on your wall. Go ahead.

 

Book Review: The Lovely Bones

Once in a while you come across a book that feels like a reward for all those hours you have spent reading, reaffirms your faith in a lot of beautiful things, and probably also makes you a slightly better person than you used to be. All those might seem to be quite unlikely feats for a book that is little more than a narrative of a teenage girl’s life and observations, but Alice Sebold’s “The Lovely Bones” pulls it off with near perfection.

We hear the story from 14-year-old Susie. Susie Salmon – like the fish, she tells us at the very beginning. Susie tells us how she was raped and murdered by a neighbor while taking a shortcut from school all day. After her murder, her spirit arrives at her own heaven. It’s from there that she looks at her family and friends trying to cope with the loss and pain, and struggling to carry on with their own lives. In her own personal heaven.Susie tries to cope with the longing for everyday things that she can no longer have, and the sight of her friends and family slowly but painfully trying to build themselves a life in which she is no longer physically present.

From such a thin plot, Alice Sebold weaves a story through the eyes of Susie, and through the lives of the other characters. Its worth mentioning that none of the characters have anything strikingly remarkable at all. If anything, they do seem a little typecast. There’s the cocky sister, the grief-obsessed father, the struggling mother and even the obligatory immigrant classmate. What makes them, and consequently the story unique is the disarming innocence and intimacy that Susie colors her observations with, and the infinitely human qualities that we see in all of them.  They are all very ordinary people, and like ordinary people they struggle with things and make difficult compromises in their attempts at  dealing with this sudden tragedy. And when you read on, like any master storyteller Alice Sebold makes you feel their pain and loss, makes you smile at the small, occasional islands of happiness they find in a sea of grief.

Without giving away too much of the plot, a special mention has to be made of the small personal heaven Susie finds herself in. It’s a beautiful, personal, and completely secular heaven, which strangely makes you wonder what your own might look like. Perhaps my opinion might be a little biased by the fact that there are plenty of dogs in this heaven, something that has an intense personal appeal to me, but hey, judge for yourself. If you Google around a bit, you’ll find quite a lot of scepticism about the complete lack of any sort of divine presence. Perhaps I’m just being the atheist that I am, but in my opinion that is exactly where the book goes beyond the ordinary and the predictable into something surprisingly close to spiritual.

In the beginning I talked about reaffirmation and faith. The story of 14-year-old Susie Salmon is full of the same lessons we keep learning and forgetting: that it is okay to make mistakes, that forgiveness is better than revenge, that it is better to love than to hate, and it is infinitely better to accept, than to judge.

If only we remembered….

Book Review: Sweet Tooth

I have a confession to make before anything else. My purchase of this book was heavily influenced by its cover. It featured a stunning blonde in a stunning red dress, on the stairs of what looked like the interiors of a mysterious building. In fact, I spent quite a few minutes trying to decide whether the blond looked more like Scarlett Johansson or Rosie Huntington Whitley, and gave up that pursuit only when I realised I’d more or less be equally happy with either.

Now that that’s out-of-the-way, let’s get down to business. Whenever you’re reading a book that’s written by a very popular author, there is usually this faint voice in your head that keeps telling you that you’re most likely reading a good book; and you’re probably missing something if you don’t like it so far. I have tried Ian McEwan before, but I have always given up halfway. This time I doggedly read through till the end, out of curiosity and determination more than anything else.

The story is about a pretty girl named Serena (Yes, the blond featured on the cover) who ends up working for MI-5 during the 1960s through an odd turn of events, and is eventually assigned to an operation called, yes, “Sweet Tooth”. This operation involves sponsoring writers who are critical, but not excessively, of Communist ideals and claimed achievements. This, was to be a “Slow Burn” thing in MI5’s Cold War propaganda activities. Serena is assigned a writer, Tom Haley, who she takes absolutely no time in falling for, and the real story kicks off from there.

Despite the immensely slow pace of the novel, I have to admit I enjoyed the multiple layers and rather diverse cast of characters. Also, this is probably the first book I’ve read which describes the 60s and 70s in U.K from a different angle than the typical 70s perspective of mad abandon. Serena, who herself is an avid reader of fiction, provides some real insight into the literary world as well as those of music, pub culture, government functioning and social and political turmoil.

It is perhaps in those angles that the novel seems more vivid than in its actual storyline. That, ironically is what’s both good and bad about this book. It is an intimate and affectionate memoir of England in those decades, a good spy novel it’s not.

P.S ~ Ian McEwan has been open about a lot of autobiographical elements featured in the book, and those have generated quite a bit of speculation. Honestly, I couldn’t care less. An author’s writings are usually the only part of his life I am concerned about.

Thank You.

As Tony Stark said at the beginning of Iron Man 2, it’s good to be back! Considering the fact that it has been 3 months since I wrote here, I wouldn’t really mind if you took that with a bit of salt. Coming back to a blog after a long interval is a little weird. I mean, I have been planning to do this for a while now. You can ask my drinking buddies. Every time we have gathered round a bottle of Old Monk in the last couple of months, they have had to tolerate me lamenting my lack of creative output. It was funny. I could almost hear them  saying,”There he goes again. Jeez! Who does this guy think he is, Shakespeare?” And each time, I silently replied, “Hell no! But I ain’t no Chetan Bhagat or Durjay Das either.”

Anyways, as I was saying, getting back to your blog is difficult after a long interval. For starters, you have this nagging doubt that you’ll abandon it again after a couple of weeks. Like a Casanova who has suddenly found a conscience, you realise that you don’t want to be so heartless again. Also, there’s this thing about picking up the threads where you left them. And that, ladies and gentlemen, can be a bitch. In case you were writing a story (and I was), you suddenly realise that the characters have turned a little unfamiliar over this period. Its like they’re sulking, or they don’t trust you anymore with their lives or their secrets. The plot that you were so sure about suddenly seems flimsy. Also, there comes this sudden doubt about quality. You suddenly start getting a feeling that what you used to write wasn’t really good, and whatever you try writing next will turn out to be even worse.

So, what exactly am I doing here? Gee, I don’t know. I mean, I could explain how and why I am much more relaxed and at peace with myself now than I have recently been. But then I would also have to explain what has been keeping my on my toes for the last three months. And since I know damn well that you don’t really care, unless you are some sneaky, nosey SOB, I am not going to torture you with all that unnecessary information.

Crazy as this may sound, I do know this blog has, or maybe had some dedicated readers. And yes, I do realise I haven’t been very good to them. Being a voracious reader myself, I understand that few things in this world are as disturbing or annoying as a  story being suddenly discontinued after you have fallen in love with it. So, am I apologising? Hell No! Am I making promises? Of course not! What am I babbling on about then?

Why, I simply wanted to wish you all Merry Christmas, and offer you my sincere wishes for the coming year.

Thank you for reading.

Film Review : Safety Not Guaranteed

My girlfriend classifies my taste in movies as “juvenile”. I don’t argue with her. Not because I agree, but because history dictates that you don’t pick fights that you cannot possibly win. To tell you the truth, whenever I’m on IMDB, fishing for the next movie to download, I usually find myself browsing through the categories Action, Sci-Fi, War and a few other equally cheerful ones. That’s how I stumbled upon “Safety Not Guaranteed“. I then proceeded to obtain it, never mind how, expecting a lot of sleek tech, computer graphics, sexy females in futuristic costumes and what not. The movie turned out to have anything but those, and I’m glad it did.

The story starts off in Boston, when Jeff, a reporter, stumbles upon an ad in the classifieds that goes like this,

The reporter, desperate for a story, decides to go to Ocean View to investigate. He believes he will have enough material to write a funny article about some lunatic. He takes along two interns with him : Arnau, a predictably nerdy and intense Indian with a predictably atrocious accent. And Darius, a pretty but outcast girl with an unhappy past.

They arrive at Ocean View, and locate the man who had placed that ad, one Kenneth Calloway : a man who believes that he has built a time machine. Jeff tries to talk to him but is rebuffed. The job then falls to Darius to befriend Calloway with some feminine charm and to draw the story out of him. What follows is difficult to describe without giving away spoilers, so I’ll not go there. But I can tell you this, even when the movie ends and the end credits start rolling, you’ll have trouble making up your mind whether you have watched a sci-fi movie, or a subtle dark humour movie with lot of unanswered questions, or just a sweet low-budget comedy. And that, is what makes this film special.

The director, Colin Trevorrow, is a complete unknown, but he does a beautiful job of stitching his characters and story together. The cast, an exceptionally small one, perform their roles well, staying true to their characters. Jake Johnson plays the middle-aged reporter, Karan Soni the usual hapless Indian, and Mark Duplass plays Kenneth. But it’s the pretty Aubrey Plaza who effortlessly steals the show with her portrayal of the social misfit girl. Through her curt dialogues, convincing body language and beautiful expressive eyes, she plays her role to perfection.

To be honest, the movie does have the occasional hiccups and frankly silly scenes. For example, the sub-plot about Jeff’s old flame is a little to obvious as an obligatory but unnecessary distraction. So are those two rather lame government agents. And so is the bit about Jeff teaching Arnau all about being a man. Also, not that Mark Duplass does any injustice to his portrayal of Kenneth, but I could not avoid the feeling that someone could have done a better job of that character. But then, it should also be noted that the movie was made for less than a million dollars, and that does place considerable restraints on casting choices. Also, truth be told, you wouldn’t really be bothered by those rare moments when the movie falters. Because the odd but endearing chemistry between Kenneth and Darius would be more than enough to hold your attention. And if I’m not wrong, you would to busy trying to figure out where the story is going to start bickering about the occasional few minutes when the movie turns slow.

The movie ends in a way that is more of a leap of faith than anything else, but I think you’ll like it even more for it.

To sum up, “Safety Not Guaranteed” is a nice, sweet, off-the-track indie film, both endearing and thought-provoking. In my opinion, it’s a must watch between all those big-budget blockbusters that choke you on star-power and expensive visuals. Sure, it’s just my opinion, and you’re free to have a different one. In fact, you can choose to be a cynic and keep sniggering every other minute. But then, entertainment in general and science fiction in particular, were never really made for cynics, were they?

Live long and prosper, and may The Force be with you.

Related articles

• Safety Not Guaranteed (gfilmcritic.wordpress.com)
• Safety Not Guaranteed (smallscreenreviews.com)
• Safety Not Guaranteed (reelfilmopinions.wordpress.com)