+: etcetera :+

Tamils have certain rituals. What appears perplexing or perfectly disgusting to others is heavenly to us, and we swear life isn’t worth living without it. For instance, we take some rice, mash it all up, add some yoghurt to it, mash it up some more, and then we stuff our faces with it. We like our heroines with some fat on their thighs and our heroes with some hair, well, everywhere really. And we like directors called Mani Ratnam. Because that’s what we do.

If you were a kid during the 80s and 90s, you’ll remember your first Mani Ratnam movie. It’s probably different for different generations – Agni Natchatram, Nayakan, Thalapathy, Roja, whatever. It was the only movie you’d ever seen which had dialogues like “odi poyidalama?” It had jokes your parents didn’t want you to get, and the odd song they wished you wouldn’t hum. But even they couldn’t hide their enthusiasm when a new Mani movie was released. Ratnam’s movies were among the few I could be certain about watching in the theaters, instead of waiting for a decade or so for Doordarshan to stoop down and broadcast it.

I feel duty bound to hate all holy cows. They are very annoying and demand adulation, even when they’re doing very little to deserve it. The reason my enthusiasm for Mani Ratnam has remained strong over the years is because I didn’t really see him as a holy cow. His movies were just another artifact from childhood. Also, I was just a little proud of the one Tam movie personality I didn’t have to defend to my northie friends. Not to forget the feeling of infinite superiority I derived from knowing that these northie friends didn’t have a clue about Mouna Ragam or Agni Natchatram – a feeling very similar to that one has for people who discovered Tolkien via Peter Jackson. You are glad they finally got on board, but Jesus, the effort it takes to convince them!

The experience of waiting for and finally watching Guru brought back a lot of memories. When we lived in Cuddalore (where I watched my first Ratnam movie – Agni Natchatram), we didn’t have 24 hour television, and it was possible to actually look forward to something. For some reason, I didn’t watch this movie with my parents. I watched it with a couple of friends, and a random adult who’d come along to baby-sit. I remember desperately wishing during the movie that it wouldn’t end, and I remember emerging from the theater in a daze.

One of the friends who watched the movie with me managed to get her parents permission to buy the audio cassette, and we listened to the songs for hours. We even tried to write down the words – I was in charge of the cassette player and T wrote down the words, as she was the one who knew to write in Tamil.

Perhaps thanks to being away from India, the weeks running up to Guru were, for me, quite like the weeks running up to, oh, Nayakan or Anjali. I knew it was coming, had a very vague idea of what it was going be about and who was in it, but nothing more. What’s more, I didn’t have to wait for my opening-weekend-averse parents to take me to the movie. I’m not going to review the movie here, other than to say it is an OK movie and no where in the vicinity of Nayakan, which it tries to invoke.

When I turned on Namaste America the next day (a Saturday morning ritual, if I manage to get up early enough), I found out that Mani Ratnam and other stars from the movie had been in Manhattan to promote the movie. They were all asked extremely silly questions by the desi press, to which they managed to give boring and occasionally charming answers.

That press conference, with its multitude of gushing desis was the first inkling. Since then, at almost every desi DVD store I’ve been to (and I went to several while on a mission to buy DVDs for a friend who’s recently moved out of NY), I’ve had people incessantly gush about Guru. Much of it has to do with the movie’s pedigree. I’ve finally reached the deeply saddening conclusion that Mani Ratnam is now very much a holy cow, if not one of the holiest.

It’s a good thing I didn’t come to this conclusion before watching the movie. While I was watching Guru, my only wish was for it to be not a lousy movie (and I mostly got my wish, until the very last bit, of course.) But since then, every time I read one more hyperbole about how fantastic Abhishek’s acting is or how brilliant a director Mani Ratnam is, I just want to grab the person and shake them for a minute or two. Have people become so inured to exceedingly lousy movies that a mediocre one appears superlative by default? Or is all this gushing the dues we owe a holy cow? If it’s the latter, it’s a pity, for it confirms his bovine status. And it makes it almost certain that he, too, will turn into a monstrosity, like the Big B has.

The last month has seen several truly remarkable things happen to this blog: We turned into a group blog with two real contributors, and several imaginary ones. Our fan following among pharmaceutical companies seems to have increased, and like all delirious new fans, they can’t seem to stop writing to us. (We might trash your letters, ladies, but your affection means a lot to us.)

We watched four horrid Tamil movies. While that in itself is not remarkable, what is remarkable is that we have refrained from reviewing any of them. Even this post is not a review per se. It is about celebrating the movies in question and rewarding them for the things they did.

And so, without further ado, Ladies, Pharmaceutical Industry Representatives and other Gentlemen, here we go.

The Freakist Bird Flu-ke Award:

Kamna Jethmalani, the lead girl in Idhaya Thirudan wants to send an anonymous email to her mom. She types up the email - whose contents are the proud recipients of another award - but she can’t figure out how to sign the email.

Unable to pick a random name, she picks up a pigeon hovering nearby and lays it gently on top of the keyboard. The pigeon walks back, then forth. Then forth again, and back once more. And then flies away, to leave the half dressed girl staring at the screen.

The pigeon had just keyed in T. Mahesh, which happens to be the name of.. you guessed it, the hero of the movie. What an incredibly clever way to move a story forward. Anyone out there who still thinks our moviemakers are unimaginative?

⇥ Continue reading

Bhavna clutching an umbrella, Sunil clutching an underarm.

The boy: toughie, hired goon, bearded brute, all rough edges and bad acting, tall and dark and not so handsome.

The girl: heart that bleeds for all, assists helpless people cross roads, smooth and pretty and voluptuous and rich and pretty and smooth. Sigh. I mean, scratch the sigh.

How could they not fall in love? And how could he not turn over a new leaf, bringing a few oddball leaves along with him to keep him entertained at newdom? And how could their wedding plans not be rudely interrupted by her seeing him visit someplace not nice? And how could they not… well, no spoilers on this blog folks. By the way, for the record, this post is about a movie called Chithiram Pesudhadi.

“Ordinary plot,” you want to say, “hackneyed and trite, tried and tested (and failed).” True, we say, the movie is all that, but it has a little bit more going for it - it is disarmingly unpretentious and heartwarmingly earnest. The earnestness of a first time director striving hard - very hard - within his contraints to salvage something out of a mediocre script shines through every frame, drawing empathy from his viewers, and Chithiram manages to get off with sympathetic winces where another movie would’ve gotten a groan or two.

⇥ Continue reading

My favorite pastime is talking to myself. Not many people know this, but I am actually two persons in one: There lurks inside me this crass dude called Smith who thinks this blog is truckloads of bull and periodically tries to convince me to loosen up and go check out Kirsten Dunst pictures instead of writing stuff that no one cares about.

Last night, Smith wanted me to go to The Myth. It is a Jackie Chan movie starring Mallika Sherawat and Smith had read somewhere that Ms. Sherawat contrives to lose a strategic piece of her clothing in the movie for a split second. I wanted to go to Thavamai Thavamirunthu instead, because it is my strong opinion that movies like The Myth are best left to DVD players with pause buttons.

So I won, and we ended up going to Thavamai Thavamirunthu, directed by Cheran - the guy that made Autograph - and starring himself and a new girl called Padmapriya. After the movie, I had a pretty long conversation with Smith about what I was going to write in my review of the movie, and as we were wrapping up, he begged me to publish the conversation on this blog to provide people a window into his soul. He also wanted me to tell people that Xaviera Hollander is so much better than Raymond Carver.

Me: In fiction - both written and on film - details can mean the difference between good and great; between corny sentimentalism and touching poignancy. Descriptive details - she was beautiful, wide forhead, strong chin, pretty clothes, unsightly mole - are much easier on film than paper, a good director can reduce ten pages of Tolkien to a single shot. Narrative detail, on the other hand…

Mr. Smith: There you go again. Descriptive detail, Narrative detail. You bore me to death.

Me: Please, I hate being interrupted. Let me continue here. Narrative detail, on the other hand, is different. The reading audience has more patience than moviegoers, and will tolerate even digressive, detailed narratives better. The moviegoer has a limited attention span, and too much detail - man waking up, stretching, brushing, showering - usually does not go down well.

Mr. Smith: That’s coz people that read are fools. And yes, too much detail stinks unless it is a girl bathing. There is this movie in Malayalam where they show a girl taking a shower, and man it was very detailed and I liked it. Therefore, it is not like all details are bad. So,there you go.

Me: What’s your point?

Mr. Smith: My point is, the movie sucked. It was long, and the dude that acted in it kept crying. The girl was fully clothed throughout, and she was crying whenever he didn’t. So why don’t you just tell people that instead of going on and on about details?

Me: Aw, come on. A twenty word review on this blog? Scandalous.

Mr. Smith: Whatever. Go on and wake me up when you are done talking.

Me: Cheran’s Thavamai Thavamirunthu is a son’s tribute to his father. Rajkiran does an outstanding job as his dad that puts the welfare of his kids above his needs, and Cheran is the kid that never forgets how much his dad did for him. Once Cheran decided that this was going to be his premise, he look no further than Autograph: he took the movie and retooled it, using the same technique of a guy reminiscing about the past intercut with sequences from the present. The problem with the movie here is that it lacked the freshness of Autograph…

Mr. Smith: Wait, you mean you liked Autograph? Freshness? You are a mushy piece of…

Me:: Will you let me finish my sentences? I was going to say Autograph was corny, but it was the first attempt in Tamil cinema to move away from the traditional premise based format to something more informal.

Mr. Smith: Funny how you always use thirty words when all you needed was two. It was a Bad Movie.

Me: The problem with the movie was the length. It is obvious that Cheran wanted to make something that was deliberately paced, but deliberate pacing does not mean showing every single event in a sequence. When his wife delivers a baby in a hospital, the viewers know that the hero is broke. Yet Cheran has scenes of him not being able to pay the hospital, not having money to buy medicines, a scene of him riding a bicycle to try and borrow money and a scene of him coming back on the same bicycle without money.

Mr. Smith: That was terrible! How can someone watch a guy riding a bike for five minutes? Although I am pleased he didn’t wear Spandex. In fact, the movie was so boring, I’d rather have read your blog for three hours. Ha Ha!

Me: What else, smartass?

Mr. Smith: Why don’t you tell them how the dude managed to make his classmate pregnant? Or how she cries and cries for half the movie because of this? About how he tells his dad he could not face him after “defiling” a girl? Now, what the heck is that supposed to mean?

Me: Yeah, true. That was bad. Now please, get off the girl, and say something else.

Mr. Smith: Oh, I see. Let’s talk music.

Me: Sure. The music was pretty average…

Mr. Smith: Shut up, let me take over. The music was hideous, horrid and unpalatable. Some people cannot do slow songs ever. It was like reading Joyce while watching Will and Grace. Torture.

Me: Yeah, I think I’ll agree with you there.

Mr. Smith: Cool. So there you have it folks, Sucky movie. Too long. Too much crying. Bad music.

Me: In the interest of balance, I should say that the good things about the movie were, Rajkiran’s performance and well… At least I tried.

Mr. Smith: And when the critics try to tell you the movie was well-made and touching, please laugh.

I’d like to go on record that this review is not totally mine, and please don’t accuse me of snobbery. I love you all.

Cross-posted at teakada.

Inspirations for books can come from the most unexpected of sources - from the obvious in your face incident to tangential, barely related happenings that spark trains of thought that lead to novels. Nabokov’s Lolita apparently “was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage.”

Muses lurk everywhere. In the right hands, apes with charcoal in their hands can become seductresses.

In the case of “Sujatha” Rangarajan, one does not need to look too hard to find out where the muse lurked: His typical middle class Brahmin upbringing - a unique mix of conservative and liberal extremes, a steady diet of Dahl, O.Henry and Carver, an engineering education, and an interest in science fiction.

Drawing themes from the milieu he was most comfortable and using a lot of techniques borrrowed from the masters - mostly Dahl methinks - Sujatha developed a successful formula early in his career. A matter-of-fact prose style with a lot of irony thrown in helped make him immensely popular, and that popularity persists to date.

At seventy, he is prolific as ever - supplementing regular columns in several magazines with the occasional work of fiction. If you allude about his popularity to Sujatha, he will bristle. He is convinced that the whole popular tag is a conspiracy to belittle his literary achievements, and says as much in his introduction to “Sujatha’s Selected Short Stories”, a two-volume collection of a hundred and something of his best short stories.

But the truth is, after the initial creative burst that helped him break into the league of very popular writers, Sujatha stagnated; he was reduced to churning out story after story using the same formula. And I don’t blame him for it - an environment where your name guarantees instant commercial success is not really conducive to self improvement. He also alludes in the introduction to the pressures of working with deadlines affecting the quality of his stories.

The best evidence of this stagnation is this anthology - after the refreshing effect of the first few stories ennui sets in. It is not that the quality of the later works is bad - no matter where you start in the book, the repetitive nature of the stories in the anthology becomes evident after the first few stories. It’s all the same after some time: The wry first person narratives (always male, almost the author), the bold (for those days) descriptions of women, the twists at the end, the slightly macabre plots and the upper middle class setting.

This is not to say I didn’t like the book: taken one at a time, most of the stories in the anthology are competent, and a handful of them are outstanding. Sujatha’s use of irony is especially good - in one my favorite stories, a family discovers a bag filled with money at their doorstep. Scared, they want to go hand the bag over to the cops, but the husband realizes he has no money to hire an autorickshaw to go to the police station. He sends his wife off to borrow some money from the neighbors.

If the books had been whittled down to about twenty of his best stories, this would have been a collection to treasure. As it stands though, the books are a little too long, and a little too repetitive. Do buy them both, but don’t read them in one shot - take your time, and read a lot of other authors in between.

PS: I have to mention this - the production quality of the books is awesome. Uyirmai Padhippagam has done a great job - typo-free hardcovers at this price are very cool.

Cross-posted on teakada.

I have been called a DUMD ASS(sic) on this very blog by an irate commentor that thought I was being snotty when talking about Indian movies. Now to be honest with you, one part of my brain would like me to think the commentor was a nubile young lady who had very, very strong feelings for me. But y’all know this quite well: I am a realist and such balderdash cannot delude me that easily. I will readily concede that her feelings for me weren’t very, very strong.

So anyways, in deference to my secret (but not very strong) admirer, I will restrict myself to a strictly objective, factual reportage about this movie called Sivakasi. It is in Tamil, and it stars an actor called Vijay. What? Ok, sure. I will defer to the spirit of this report (objective, factual) and revise the last sentence. It is in Tamil, and it stars a person called Vijay.

Close Shaves:

A group of people headed by a guy called Palanquin Pandi surround another group of people. After a series of scuffles, Palanquin Pandi’s group reveals their motive - they want to know who heads the other group of people. “Fairly easy question,” I thought to myself. Regular movie watchers know what would happen next: The hero will come up to Palanquin and punch him a few times, and then look at the cameraman and inform him that he heads the group, and owns their hearts. Cue a song.

Now imagine my horror when the scene unfolded differently - someone that did not look like Vijay at all duly stepped forward, applied generous amounts of ash on his head and moved his hands up and down. “This guy, hero?”, “Oh no!”, “What the ..” were the thoughts that ran through my mind. The guy then used several long sentences and clever placement of a title card to inform the cameraman that the hero was wise and strong and that he was the director of the movie. I am not sure Palanquin got the point, but I heaved a sigh of relief. Phew.

What happens to the losers on Jeopardy?

Dad A complains to Dad B that Dad B’s son tried to rape his daughter. Dad B is very angry, and tries to beat up his son with a stout object. After a couple of blows that didn’t land that well, Dad B asks his son if he is indeed his son. The bemused son asks the dad to check with his mom. Unable to stand this question, dad promptly dies. Hard questions can kill.

What a total waist?

Music Director Srikanth Deva in a cameo appearance shakes his enormous waist to the beats of Maama Un Ponnai Kodu, an old Illayaraja number.

Actress Nayanthara in a cameo appearance shakes her enormous waist to the beats of a song I can’t remember. Coming to think of it, I am not even sure it was a song, but the waist was enormous. She is now a cabalite.

Best Song in the Movie:

Music Director Srikanth Deva in a cameo appearance shakes his enormous waist to the beats of Maama Un Ponnai Kodu, an old Illayaraja number.

The rap-like song (wanna, shake it, s to the i to the blah) that plays in the background. Music can be mirthful too.

Movies can educate too:

A male human being is defined as someone that:

a. Falls in Love with a girl.
b. Marries the girl.
c. Sleeps with the girl.

Any change in the order of events is not acceptable. What will happen to such people though? I want to ask someone, but I am afraid it might be a hard question.

Chicks will dig this:

Several (male) actors show off their thighs during fight sequences. I even detected a glimpse (or three) of undergarments. Sorry, no thongs though.

Biggest expense item:

The amount of ash purchased for the movie. The good guys show their goodness by applying generous amounts of it on their foreheads.

Second biggest expense item:

The amount of kum-kum purchased for the movie. The good guys show their goodness by applying generous amounts of it on their foreheads.

Dialogues heard the most:

“Start the car!”

“Beat that guy!”

Decrease most noticeable:

Quantity of clothes worn by Asin over the last few movies.

Increase most noticeable:

The number of times Vijay speaks to the cameraman. They must be close friends.

Optimism:

Majaa will be better. Surely.

Impossible:

The opinion of my dad - reliable critic, born, brought up and living in India still. Both movies are bad, Majaa is a tad worse. Such depths exist?

Cross-posted on teakada.

Making a movie is hard work. There is much thinking involved - plots and premises; characters and camerawork and a whole slew of such things, but if you ask me who has the hardest job in filmdom, I’ll unhesitatingly raise a metaphorical arm and say: The Dialogue Writer. What is the easiest job then? Why, Lyric Writing, of course. Now if you are one of those fancy-schmancy Hollywood types that knows not what a Dialogue Writer or Lyric writer is, go away.

On second thoughts, do stay: Losing sixty percent of my two person strong regular readership is bad, so I will explain. Now here is how it works. After a plot is decided upon, a screenwriter sits down and writes the entire screenplay but wherever the screenplay has characters talking, he leaves the page blank. Like so:

Shriya enters the room from the left.

Sanjay is sitting on the bed.

Shriya:

Sanjay:

Shriya:

Sanjay:

Now Sanjay hugs Shriya. Takes off her red saree to reveal a black saree inside. Sanjay now brings his lips closer to Shriya’s lips. Giant rose covers lips. Shriya wipes off her lips sensuouly; camera focuses on her waist. Music begins. Cut to song.

Shriya:

Sanjay:

Shriya:

Sanjay:

Now Ms. Fancy-Schmancy, if you are still there, the person that fills the first set of blanks is the Dialogue Writer. And, yes, the person that fills the second set of blanks is the Lyricist.

In the real world, a conversation between Sanjay and Shriya would probably go,

Shriya: Hi, you are late.

Sanjay: Hello, you are hot.

Shriya: Thats so sweet, thank you.

Sanjay: Let me take off your clothes now.

Shriya: Ok.

Ok, I will stop here. My mind wandereth.

Once upon a time, the person that filled the first set of blanks had a clear-cut job description: he was to write exchanges that were completely different from any real world exchange ever. So he would write something like

Shriya: Sweetheart, why art thou cometh late. I waited long, took a shower, and have withered like yonder flower.

Sanjay: Huh? I had to go to the loo. But now that I’m here, let me stick to you like glue.

The more unrealistic it was, the more people would clap and whistle. Easy enough. Today though, things are murkier. The Dialogue Writer is expected to be a little bit more realistic, but if he writes something like “Um, you smell good, let’s have a go at it,” the censor board will immediately intervene and do a couple of things:

1. Misspell the dialogue as “Um, you small goon, let’s have a go at it.”
2. Mark the dialogue as offensive, and ask that it be removed.

So now the dialogue writer has to go back and write something that fits the lip movement but is not offensive anymore. Like, “Um, your mail came. Let’s take a look at it.” Imagine doing this constantly for every line. Very hard work. There is some hope though: A new technique that consists of Sanjay making violent speaking motions with his mouth, with sound muted is doing the rounds. But that will be for a later post.

Fancy-Schmancy? Please don’t go away now. I will grovel. Will buy you coffee when we next run into each other. Maybe a Mocha Latte from Starbucks.

Now a lyricist has no such worries. All that is required to be a successful lyricist is is a certain set of easily available tools - the metaphor, the simile and the names of ancient works of Tamil literature. There is minimal interference from the censors, and whatever interference there is can be circumvented with ease. Say you are asked to write a steamy song to describe the courtship betwen the lead couple, you just reach into your toolkit and pick the tool of choice. For example, in this song, the lyricist uses a metaphor (from the movie Mazhai, starring someone called Ravi and the real Shriya, who is not in any way related to the Shriya in our screenplay).

Let your kisses be the hammer
that drives a nail into my brain

It should be obvious by now that metaphors in songs don’t really need to make sense. You just say Y is like X, where X and Y can be quite random. And there is plenty of latitude. Imagine Ravi saying “Let me put my sword into your scabbard” to Shriya. That would drive the censors into apoplexy (and create a new record for bad spelling). But on the other hand, a lyricist can effortlessly slip in stuff like that in a song and no one will blink.

Let out bodies unite
like a sword and a scabbard

Or you could say,

Let me be the Thriukkural
to your Kurunthokai

where Thirukkural and Kurunthokai are the names of literary works. Naturally, the names chosen here are random. You could put Silappadhikaram instead of Thirukkural and no one would care. In this case, people will call this gibberish literature and even try to slip a few awards to you. Yes, that’s how easy it is.

Occasionally though, some lyricists go overboard and the censors notice.

In your hand a pile of books
And you, a pile of sex.

And when they gently chide you for using the word seks, you just pick a random word from the dictionary that rhymes. In this case the song became,

In your hand a pile of books
And you, a pile of Vicks.

Yes, that’s how easy it is. We got our favorite lyricist to comment on this, and he said:

This is easy, I sound the horn
as easy as eating a cob of corn
you can even slip in some p*rn
and the dialog writers will go darn.

Fancy-Schmancy, please wake up and smell the corn. If you are wondering about the releavance of the title to the post, I’ll put you out of your misery by confessing that I am not too sure either. But it seemed very cool, and the words simile and camera appear in the post.

Also posted at teakada

Update: Manoj manages to find a few (non-blogging) people who translate verses much better. Go here. I hope Venky listened to Shriya and let her stay in his cute smile during one of his watery orgies.

Let’s call this guy Krishna, because I don’t know what his real name is. He is an assistant director in Tamil movies, and like everyone else employed thus, his life is

a) currently very miserable.
b) centered around dreams of making it big some day.

One day, Krishna says, he got to meet the head of a large production house. After complimenting the head of the large production house on his magnificent pecs (you can be a hero saar!), Krishna went on to narrate the screenplay of his dream movie to the guy. The narration went well, Krishna says, and the head thanked him and told him he would keep him in mind for his next movie.

A few months on, the large production house announces a big budget movie. And wonder of wonders, Krishna says, it is based on his screenplay. So he approaches an arbitration body. The hearing went like this:

“Mr. Krishna, you claim that this movie is based on your screenplay.”

“Sir, yes, sir.”

“Can you prove it?”

“Of course sir. I will narrate the screenplay line by line right here.”

Proceeds to narrate it.

“That’s pretty good. But you could’ve just sneaked a peek at it when it was lying around somewhere. Got more proof?”

“Sir, yes sir. I will now tell you exactly when and where I narrated the screenplay to the head of the large production house.”

Proceeds to tell them exactly when and where he narrated the screenplay to the head of the large production house.

“And that’s proof? Give us something more concrete man.”

“I will go to the temple of your choice, light some camphor and swear in front of the deity of your choice that it is my story. I dare you to ask the head of the large production house to do the same thing sir.”

“Holy cow, that is irrefutable proof. Let me call the head of the large production house and set up the showdown.”

Other members of the arbitration committee nod sagely.

No not 55-word story that ran over, though I wish it was. This came straight out of this story from an online newsmagazine. Link (in Tamil). The only part I made up was the line about the arbitration committee members nodding sagely.

I believe this legal strategy has a lot of potential. For starters, I sent an email to Mr. Banville today claiming that The Sea was my work. I’ll even go to a church if he wants me to.

It had rained all week in Salem - an incessant drizzle that looked like it would let-up in a few minutes, but had gone on for days. It was still raining when we took a bus that weekend to town to catch the new Illayaraja movie.

As we started walking towards the theater, we noticed a crowd of very wet people walking towards us. The relationship between the wetness of their clothes and the magnitude of the rain was puzzling (I thought it was exponential, Manoj thought it was strange), more so when you consider that the wetness was unevenly distributed across the length of their bodies. We walked over to someone, and politely enquired, “Umm.. how come you wet your pants?”

The guy didn’t get the joke - he told us earnestly that a storm sewer had broken, and that there was knee-deep water on the roads leading to where we were going.

Without hesitation, we took our shoes off, folded up our jeans and started walking. (towards, of course). In a couple of minutes, we were wading through murky water (”It doesn’t look like a storm water sewer, man”), that got higher and higher. People kept squealing, as unknown objects whose specific gravity was just right floated below the surface of the water and kept striking them at inconvenient places.

By the time we reached the theater, shoes in one hand, wallet in the other, our shirts were wet, and it was not from the rain. Around the same time, realization dawned on us: the guy that didn’t get the joke meant ass when he said knee.

I headed straight to the bathroom, which was filled with a few hundred people in various states of undress, pouring water over themselves from a communal bucket. It was quite entertaining, and I would have stayed there for some more time if not for the clanging of the bell that announced the start of the movie.

The movie was horrible; and the audience filled with squirming wet bodies (heh!) hated it. It was the same old overweight-hero-rescues-a-callgirl-who-is-still-a-virgin plot with a twist: the girl was overweight too. I thanked the storm sewer guys for the distraction of wondering if the water would do bad things to me as I squirmed - it saved me from losing my mind completely. In case you want to know, the movie was called Kolangal. All said and done, Kolangal was the worst movie I’ve watched in my life.

Last week, I had been to a movie called Oru Naal Oru Kanavu (A Dream A Day). In hindsight, the parallels were obvious - rainy day, directed by an acclaimed movie maker from Kerala, music by Illayaraja. After the movie, I couldn’t help telling myself, ” You know what, Kolangal wasn’t all that bad.”

Ponniyin Selvan is filmmaker Radhamohan’s second movie, coming on the heels of his successful debut venture Azhagiye Theeye. The movie stars Ravi Krishna - the no can emote son of the biggest producer in Tamil, with Gopika, PrakashRaj and Revathy playing supporting roles.

Radhamohan has an affinity for feel-good tales about young men from middle class backgrounds - Azhagiya Theeye was an oddball romance between an aspiring actor and a girl who wants to shake off her arranged marriage. It was simple and honest, funny and touching - the kind of substance over style movie that Bollywood will never make. The movie wasn’t flawless: it emphasised words over visuals, an unfortunate throwback to the Balachander days and the old fashioned direction did nothing to dispel the stage drama feel that parts of the movie had. But, a neat script and some good performances glossed over the shortcomings, and the movie was eminently watchable.

Ponniyin Selvan though, has no such luck. Whatever chances the movie had of success, are ruined by insipid performances.

It’s the story of a disfigured young man living with his widowed mom. He has learnt to live with his disfigurement and the accompanying disadvantages, and seems fairly content with life until someone suggests to him that maybe he should try fixing his face surgically. Turns out that the surgery costs a fortune. End happiness, begin obsession. He works hard to make money, forgetting the simple joys of life in the process. It’s not a bad premise at all, and with better performances and less mush, the movie could have worked.

Ravi Krishna sports the same blank expression throughout the movie, and his monotonal, droning dialogue delivery makes him unbearable. Prakash Raj tries his darndest to act enough for everyone else in the movie, while Revathy, surprisingly, delivers a controlled, effective performance as Ravi Krishna’s mom. Gopika is competent as the goodie -goodie girl that doesn’t care much for looks, and there is another girl that doesn’t care much for the way the hero looks.

The other big drawback is an overdose of pithy one liners in the dialogues. The occasional smart repartee livens up things, but to have every exchange between every character end in some type of witticism is disconcerting. (Also the fact that some of the lines are quite inane.. “It’s ok to live in a complex, but don’t let a complex live in you”). Radhamohan doesn’t seem to get the “cinema is a visual medium” thing still - there are a few people in the movie that seem to exist to just sit on benches and exchange “There was a Sardar once.. ” type of jokes.

Throughout the movie, the struggle between the director that prefers realism and the director that is obliged to make a star out of his producer’s son is evident. There are pointless dances (Ravikrishna can add leaden footed just below wooden faced on his resume), and given the lack of suitable situations for the hero to beat up a few people, there is a ridiculous dream stunt sequence. Surely, that’s a first.

And so, one more filmmaker with potential promises to deceive.

The crowd hath spake on Shankar’s Anniyan : big hit in Tamil, big hit in Telugu. Hindi Movies with Long Names, Chandramukhi, Anniyan … makes one thinketh that movies might be your Achilles heel, Mr. Surowiecki. In case you are wondering, I cannot figure out for the life of me why I have this incurable urge to write in fake old English.

Setting that aside for a moment, let me talk about a certain scene in the movie. But first, to set things up, here is the premise: Multiple personalities come out of the docile hero, and do multiple things. Since I hate spoilers, I will just say that the multiple things he does may or may not include creating artificial stampedes with buffaloes, frying people alive, eating live monkeys, talking in a hoarse whisper and copulating with snakes. And yes, I must add that it was all done in a grandiose manner, so if there were buffaloes they were pretty big.

One of the personalities that emerges out of the weak kneed lead character is a wannabe cool dude, decked up with all the accoutrements that go into making someone a wannabe cool dude. These include, but are not restricted to the following:

1. Colored Hair.
2. Transparent clothing.
3. Gaudy Sun Glasses.
4. Terrible Fake Accent.
5. This Name: Ramp Walk Remo

The girl that refused to fall for the docile hero, falls for the wannabe. Naturally. For how can you not fall when wooed with roses? Rampwalk sends roses to the girl. (Sorry if the sentence construction sounds funny, but that’s his name. Also notice how I took the liberty of assuming Rampwalk is his first name, unless RampWalk is actually two words, in which case he should be called Ramp W Remo…). So where was I?

Yeah, Rampwalk sending roses to the girl. Rose bushes, if you care for detail. An obscene number of them in pots. Along with an audio tape. (a Compact Disc maybe? The director disdains cheap stuff) As the girl stares at the roses, looking suitably surprised, fake accent plays out of the tape and asks girl to smile. She obliges, and behold: amateurish special effects make all the roses bend down in unison. Fake accent explains to a bewildered audience: The roses were ashamed. Duh. Something a good editor would have chopped, and flushed down a toilet. (If you ever do that, make sure you have some Drano handy).

Why is this scene special, you ask? Because I happened to see an interview of Shankar, and he talks about this scene in particular: Apparently, the first time they brought the roses in for the shoot, the roses sucked for whatever reason. And so, Shankar chose to wait four months for the roses to bloom. Four months the producer spent making inflated interest payments. Perfectionism, a la James Cameron.. Or callous disregard for the realities of a reeling industry.

You think Shankar knows what the title of my post means?

We watched Jithan (a Tamil movie, for the uninitiated) over the weekend. It’s a remake of Gayab (a Hindi movie, God you are really uninitiated aren’t you?), and if you trace the inspiration tree you’ll end up at H.G. Wells. Kinda like Revenge of the Invisible Nerd.

So anyways, the movie had music by Srikanth Deva, son of the legendary music composer Deva (snicker); and I was inspired to write a detailed, analytical review of the soundtrack. So, here goes.

Excrement.

More reviews of the soundtrack from around the web.

Prelude: Young man enters movies fresh out of film school, makes a few movies that span the entire emotional spectrum between mushy and corny. Most of them turn out to be big hits, women cry, all the big stars vie to act under his baton, he gets called a top director, etc. Suddenly, his luck runs out. Or mush went out of fashion. A few movies flop, he has a fall out with the music director who helped his movies immensely, and he disappears from movies, making only occasional appearances as a passable lyricist.

Now the young man is no longer so young, and he wants to make a comeback.

“How do you make a comeback?”, he asks his muse. Perhaps ’twas a friend he asked, but that’s besides the point. Not that there’s a point to all of this, but thats even more besides the point.

“Easy. Make a youth movie na!”

“Youth movie?”

“Haven’t you seen those? Easy to make… Get a young hero. Get a young heroine. No, wait, get two, just to make sure. Give them very little by way of clothes. Let them all prance around a little bit. Get a dark looking dude, and make him shout out his dialogues loudly. Call him the comedian, it seems to work well.”

“Thats it?… what about a villain? Where do I set the movie? What’s the premise?”

“Dude, you are so not in sync. Premise? Ha-Ha-Ha. ”

“No premise? I don’t get it.”

“Ok, have one if you must. Set it wherever you want to. Village, city, whatever. Get a villian if you must. But remember this: Not much clothes on the girls! You hear that? ”

“…”

“I can’t stress this enough, like for instance, even if the girls have to cry, make sure the camera pans to their cleavage. Or maybe their waists. Ok?”

“How would people know she is crying if the camera is on her cleavage?”

“Duuuude, don’t keep interrupting me. Show her eyes for a second, and pan down, ok. Maybe let her heave her bosom a little bit when she cries, people seem to like that. You have to improvise.”

“I think I get the idea. Let me work on it.”

Once young filmmaker works on it alright. He gets the half brother of a popular hero to star in the movie. (Improvisation, you see!) And fills the movie with innuendos about how this guy looks like that one. Even fits in a scene (or seven) with the comedian getting him and his half-brother mixed up, and shouting out his confusion.

He gets the recommended two heroines. Even goes for “foreign song shooting.” Like going to Malaysia and setting a song inside a car dealership, who could’ve thought of it. He fills the movie with innovations, like having an ant go inside the heroine’s blouse and the guy taking it out, having the guy do CPR on the girl after saving her from drowning inside a shallow river. Overall, he feels pretty good about himself.

Just to make sure though, he goes to an astrologer and asks him to make sure his stars are in the right order.

“Hmm…”

“Is there a problem?”

“Yeah, your name has issues. R. V. Udhayakumar? It’s like an open invitation to all the bad vibes that are out there”

“Oh!”

“Don’t worry, … an extra A at the start of your name will fix it.”

“Audhayakumar? That sounds a little funny.”

“Hmm.. ok, A.R.V Udhayakumar then. And hey, make sure you use a smaller font for the extra A.”

Leaves him feeling even better. And he names the movie “Karka Kasadara,” - chaste Tamil - sure to please the anti-English lobby in Tamil Nadu.

Movie gets released, and movie sucks. So movie bombs. Shaken, stirred and angry, he looks for his muse, wanting to do bad things to it. But then, the muse had deserted him a long time ago.

A few weeks later, a couple of doofuses walk past a rundown movie theater that’s screening the movie. “Loong time since we saw a Tamil movie in a theater,” one of them opines. The other agrees and suggests that they go in. A few days later, one of the doofuses writes a clever review of the movie for his blog. It was not a total waste of time, you see.

Enigmatic. Idiosyncratic. Brilliant. Genius. Words used to describe the life of Srinivasa Ramanujan. Robert Kanigel’s outstanding biography of the Indian mathematician makes you realize that all these adjectives fall flat on their (type)faces when faced with having to describe his life.

Born into poverty in an obscure corner of British India and stifled by an educational system that stressed conformity over creativity, he managed to break free and went on to become one of the preeminent mathematicians of his time. Over time, the same circumstances that helped him get fame and recognition – his domineering and persistent mom, intense creativity and a tendency to work, work and work, all the rest be damned – contrived to kill him early.

But the outlines hardly capture the essence of Ramanujan - a man full of outrageously contrasting streaks: Genial and gregarious, boorish and cranky. Humble and brash; supremely confident yet in constant need of approval and validation. He could also be called hypersensitive, but that would be understating it. When a couple of his guests at Cambridge refused a third helping of his rasam, Ramanujan left home abruptly and didn’t return for four days. He was also maddeningly stubborn and fatalistic. When on his deathbed, when a doctor suggested he go to Thanjavur for further treatment, he refused, punning instead that – “He wants me to go to Than (My) – Savoor (City of Death). A potpourri of odd ingredients that somehow ended up brewing a genius. Or a magician, in the words of Mark Kac,

An ordinary genius is a fellow that you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what he has done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians. They are, to use mathematical jargon, in the orthogonal complement of what we are and the working of their minds is for all intents and purposes incomprehensible. Even after we understand what they have done, the process by which they have done it is completely dark.

A magician with a brain wired to invent, and invent feverishly. When he came across an obscure book of formulas designed to serve as a cheat sheet for British students taking mathematical exams, he set out trying to prove some of the theorems, and ended up conjuring hundreds of new identities. When he wanted to send some of his results to other mathematicians, he started copying the results to another notebook – a fair copy – but as he was writing, he would invent a few more new results. He relied on intuition and disdained rigor - frequently, his proofs were amateurish and wrong, but remarkably enough, the theorems were right. How? (Kanigel puts forth theories that include divine inspiration, and intuitive leaps of faith, though Hardy stubbornly refused to accept that Ramanujan was wired any different from the rest)

His was a lucky genius too – it found British mathematician G.H. Hardy – possibly the best British mathematician of his time - a charming young h atheist, a “non-practicing” homosexual and a liberal in the best sense of the word. A man who was open to the possibility that brown can sometimes do good things. Ramanujan wrote Hardy, begging to introduce himself and coyly stating a few intriguing results with no proofs. Unlike his contemporaries who had seen the results and dismissed them as worthless, Hardy recognized the letters as the work of a mathematician of considerable ability, and nurtured Ramanujan for the next few years – bringing him to England, and gently teaching him the virtue of rigor without dampening his creativity or hurting his ego.

Meanwhile, Ramanujan was starting to feel homesick - and the war wasn’t helping. Getting vegetarian food (potatoes, butter) was proving to be hard, and Ramanujan had to subsist on canned food -
sometimes cooking the food in the cans themselves. His possessive, overbearing mom would not let him bring his wife to England with him – denying Ramanujan the one thing he missed in the most in England - companionship - something to distract him from work, someone to talk to, care for and be cared by. Lonely, he buried himself in his work and neglected his health. Like all things in Ramanujan’s life, Hardy’s friendship was a double edged sword: it helped him gain worldwide recognition, but Hardy might have pushed him too hard, and not cared enough for his personal life which was unraveling rapidly. Kanigel dances around a little bit here (Hardy was too English to pry into his personal life), but it is fairly obvious that Hardy comes across as uncaring in his (personal) relationship with Ramanujan. Even after Ramanujan attempted suicide by jumping in front of a train in London, Hardy stayed aloof – professionally he was invaluable to Ramanujan, but as his only friend in an alien land he probably let him down a little bit.

Ramanujan returned to India a sick man, and died in the next couple of years. He was only 32. The cause of death is unknown, though Tuberculosis seems to be the widely accepted explanation. His creativity hit a peak in the years before his death, and his best work probably was done as he was dying.

The soap opera didn’t end after his death, though. His wife left to live by herself, and his brothers tried to get jobs using his fame, writing letters to everyone who would read them, claiming they had wasted the last few years of their life caring for their brother, and accusing his wife of “stealing” all his papers.

A country hungry for heroes lapped up his success, and the media was only too glad to overblow the case. Barely tangential applications of Ramanujan’s findings were touted as his “inventions”. The truth though was that Ramanujan didn’t care much for applications of his theories – he just did Mathematics. Hardy disdained applied Mathematics, and considered anything that could be applied to the real world inferior. India today takes immense pride in Ramanujan, though it is debatable how much it contributed to his success.

“His life,” Kanigel says, “is like a parable.” You can infer whatever you want from it. True. Could a better system of schooling have helped? Maybe he would have learnt a lot of what existed without having to reinvent the wheel. Or maybe it would have killed the genius in him.

At first glance, it appears that India did nothing for him. He pretty much made himself, and it took an English mathematican to tell the world how good he was. But then, could it have been his fatalistic spirituality that led him to trust his intuition? Did his brain’s wiring have anything to do with his upbringing?

Meanwhile, I think of Mr. Romald , who back in sixth grade used a wooden ruler to stunningly good effect when I added a couple of decimal numbers wrong. “Point under Point,” he screamed, letting loose a spray of spittle onto my double ruled notebook. I am pretty sure he killed my creativity.

“Sujatha” Rangarajan, the most recognizable Tamil writer around today, turns seventy next Wednesday. In an evocative, nostalgic piece in Anandha Vikatan, he talks about his multifacted career and his legacy, signing off wiith the “The love of my fans is my Nobel prize” line, stung perhaps by the lack of recognition as a serious writer.

Employing a racy narrative laced with dry humor and writing in conversational, easy to understand Tamil - a mixture that quickly became his trademark - Sujatha is a prolific writer. His works span different genres: science fiction to middle class angst; classical poetry to courtroom dramas. In a culture full of home brewn creators that pride themselves on their indigeneousness, Sujatha stood out for his use of Western style rhetorical devices and literary technique. A small town boy that grew up to be an engineer, well traveled, hard working and no communist leanings: Sujatha does not fit the profile of the average Tamil writer. Continuing on the differences, he is well read - he can quote ancient Tamil poetry and Saul Bellow in the same breath - and his books are always bestsellers. He dabbled in script writing too, writing screenplays and dialogues for a few Tamil movies.

A sound knowledge of writing techniques and the ability to employ them well; a voracious literary appetite; an immense love for his craft: Notwithstanding all this, Sujatha’s works never rose above passably good. Constrained perhaps by writing in a language whose public prefers magazines and newspapers to serious fiction, Sujatha sacrificed quality for quantity: his books were interesting reads, but never great. Flitting from genre to genre, he mastered none, succeding only partly in his attempts at straddling popular fiction and serious writing.

He did not win literary awards, but he sold books. A lot of them. And that is nothing to sneer at, for not all Bellow fans can be Bellow.

Link to the Bellow tribute page at the New York Times through The Middle Stage.

Sun TV, the channel that holds much of Tamil Nadu captive in the evenings with melodramatic soaps starring fat former movie actresses celebrated its thirteenth birthday this month. Most of the programming is hideously bad - the closest analogy I can think of is Craig Kilborn reruns all day for a whole week. The lack of talent is pervasive throughout the organization, and compiling a list of the worst anchors is exceedingly difficult:

Sureshkumar, the snooty looking dude who anchors a program called Top Ten movies, wearing costumes in colors that are best left to Hawaiian shirts. He rates movies every week along with a what he thinks is a snappy comment. Suresh cares not for spoilers, and nonchalantly gives out endings and important twists with nary a blink of the eye. “The movie has a great climax, when you come to know that Susheela is the killer, you are surprised!”.

Gowri , the girl that interviews people in the mornings. She has a prepared list of questions with her, and will go through her list no matter what the answers are.

“Are you married?”

“No”

“Where did you meet your wife”

“I am not married”

“Interesting. How many kids do you have?”

You get the picture. And she mangles her consonants so much that her Tamil pronunciation is clearly the worst of all Sun TV anchors. Believe me, that is a difficult honor to get. KaLLoori and KaLLvi.

Fatima Honedew: Utter a word. Proffer toothy smile. Move upper body and head vigorously from left to right. Another word. Right to left movement. Another word, Up and Down. Yet another word, diagonal shakes. Poor Tamil diction, more smiles. Always stress the wrong syllable. Makes you yearn for Gowri.

Yet, we pay Dishnetwork actual money every month and religiously subject ourselves to torture for at least a few minutes a day. Because, for good or for bad, it reminds us of home. Of evenings spent on easy chairs, drinking coffee and watching movies.

Jayakantan, winner of the Jnanpith award this year is one of the writers I’m proud to have read. And read again. And again now, thanks to the internets. And (cliché alert!) yes, the Jnanpith just went up a few notches in esteem.

His writing is minimalist: businesslike, brisk, and shorn of adornments. The content always takes precedence over presentation. Not for him the verbal flourishes of a Marquez or even Le Carre. Writing was but a medium to showcase his ideas – his brilliant, radical and often controversial ideas. He courted controversy, and reveled in shocking conventional sensitivities. He went on to write for a few films, and even directed a couple. Another medium.

A staunch Marxist, he was a fixture on Theekadhir, a red “newspaper” that my uncle used to buy – my first introduction to the man. Later, I read Sila Nerangalil Sila Manidhargal and walked around for a few days swelling with pride – that works like this existed in Tamil and that I had read it.

This article in the Indian Express is an evocative, incisive tribute by Jayathirth Rao. No one could’ve said it better. Link through India Uncut.

Jayakantan, however, is much more than the mere aggregation of his inherited traditions. He is, above all, an individual with a sense of the future, one who makes his or her own future, a future which is usually coloured with hints of an optimistic dawn about to happen. His masterstroke is to revisit the past and examine the possibility of different futures…

On another note, why is it that all the artists in my life bleed so red? Le Carre, Jayakanthan. And Illayaraaja who started off his career singing Communist propaganda songs. Sheer chance maybe. Or perhaps, God willed it thus.

Bala’s singularly original Pithamagan was one of the better Tamil movies last year. It is about a young man brought up by an undertaker. He lives all his life in a cemetery, becoming an undertaker himself when his foster dad dies. He lives his life in isolation, with almost no contact with civilized society, ‘cept when burning their corpses. He is unfeeling and callous, his demeanour the same whether he is burying a child or watering a plant. His vocabulary is limited: all that he does is bray a weird song loudly when burning corpses. What happens when this “child of God” tries to enter civilized society in the company of an assortment of fringe characters?

Pithamagan is also an illustration of how one great artist can inspire another. Bala is a confessed Jayakanthan fan, and it is no surprise that the lead character in Pithamagan draws some inspiration from a Jayakanthan short story: ‘Nandavanathi Oru Aandi’ - which is about an undertaker living in isolation, considered “mad” by society because of his quirks, who is unfeeling and callous and happens to sing a song every time he buries a body. The similarities end there, but the source of the character is unmistakable.

Bala is quite possibly the best young director in India today. On second thoughts, I think I’ll get rid of the qualification and state simply: Bala is the best young film maker in India today. I say young, because he is only three movies old. All three of his movies are morose and inward-looking. Almost all the scenes fill you with a strange foreboding, even the funny ones. When I watched Mystic River, I was reminded of Nanda - not because the two movies were similar, but because they both made you feel the same way.

Bala is commercially successful without making what lesser directors refer to euphemistically as “compromises.” He dares to pick unconventional subjects and works hard on them. He chooses his actors after he has written the move - an unbelievably hard thing to do in Indian films. His films don’t preach - Bala understands that the role of art is to reflect life, not to change it. I hope he goes far.

PS : Bala wrote a wonderful series of autobiographical articles in Vikatan (paid registration required) that go some way in explaining what makes him tick: he writes candidly about being an academic failure and doing drugs; how his life changed after coming across works by people like Jayakanthan and Balu Mahendra among others. Here was a wastrel who used his love of art to rescue himself from obscurity. A filmmaker who reads. Another reason to hope he goes very far.

This is more up Manoj’s alley, but the plagiarism is so glaringly obvious here that the moment I listened to the song all I could say was, Ada paavi! (or Holy Crap!)

Prema Prema, by Chakri from the Telugu movie Kabaddi Kabaddi, ~ circa 2004.

Poovarasampoo, by Ilaiyaraaja from Kizhakke Pogum Rail, Tamil, ~circa 1980.

Ada Paavi!

Wikipedia, on Madras bashai, the curious tamil variant spoken in Chennai. The tongue-in-cheek usage examples at the end are amusing.

(Through an email forward from Kuzhali)