CAUTION: VANARS AT WORK!

Here’s a sneak peek at the cover of the UK edition of Bridge of Rama: Book 5 of The Ramayana, to be published in December by Time Warner Books UK under their Orbit imprint.

Clicking on the image will take you to the Amazon UK page where you can pre-order a copy.

Those of you in India will get to see a different cover, as the book will be published by Penguin Books India here. I’ll post the Penguin India cover image when I get it from the publishers. Also, you’ll get the book a few weeks later than UK buyers as it’s scheduled to be published here in January 2006.

It’s not far to Lanka now!

Sep 27, 2005 | Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

“The Name is Ahlawat, Mohit Ahlawat”: Film review of James

RGV (that’s Ram Gopal Varma to you) revealed two things about this film before its release that had me, a longtime RGV fan, blinking madly:

James was the first project RGV developed purely as a vehicle for an actor–in this case, newcomer Mohit Ahlawat, whom he was convinced was star material.

And secondly, that he was putting out more prints of James (over 300 across India) than he had of Sarkar, the double-Bachchan starrer.

Was it worth it?

Hmm. Yes and no.

On the first count, RGV was definitely right. Mohit Ahlawat is a hell of a package.

A towering Jat of a guy with suiting-shirting model good looks, a smouldering brooding screen presence, and a fighting style that Akshay Kumar would give his right quadricep to possess.

He has the downside of most young action heroes–his dialogue delivery is a bit stiff, and his performance slightly robotic. But only slightly. Guys like Bobby Deol are ten times stiffer and they don’t have half of Ahlawat’s physical screen presence.

Considering this is his first feature film, Ahlawat is amazingly good. He is certainly star material. Although I don’t know how he’d work in a Karan Johar film, and his desi cowboy stature and looks might actually work against him, or lead to him being typecast in similar B-grade action movies.

But in James, he’s fantastic. Looks, charm, screen presence, muscles, and a fighting style that’s more convincing than any other Bollywood star today. Sort of like what Sunil Shetty would want to be but can’t.

I have no doubt that with RGV’s continued support, and the kind of ultra-violent action-crime films he loves to churn out, Ahlawat will find plenty of other good action star roles to showcase his unique talents.

About the film.

James is a straightforward RGV product.

A direct hit to the solar plexus of any action movie buff.

It’s what they call a good ‘B movie’ in the USA.

An action flick that’s basically about the action, with everything else, including technique and budget and script, subordinating itself to the single-minded goal of providing the audience with 90 minutes or less of pulse-pounding bone-crunching blood-spewing violence from start to finish.

This being a desi B movie, RGV as producer, and extremely competent first-time director Rohit Jugraj manage to fit in a love story track, a comedic sidekick, another comedic sidekick, and even a side-track about Mumbai politics, crime and police corruption.

If you’ve seen and liked movies like Roadhouse (starring Patrick Swayze) and The Transporter (starring Jason Statham), or even the sequel The Transporter 2, which is the current No. 1 on the US Top Ten, you’ll have a ball watching James.

The title character is a stranger who rides into town, is too honourable to back off when he sees someone doing something wrong, and quickly gets tangled with some really bad guys–so bad, that they’re almost larger-than-life caricatures, even by RGV’s we-live-in-a-violent-city theme–and then proceeds to punch, kick and dropkick his way through a small army of nasties, until Dirty Harry, sorry Clean James, has cleaned up the town as neatly as a mop swabbing a tiled toilet floor.

The action is very well choreographed, with some extremely well designed and executed sequences. If you’re looking for maar-dhaadh, you’re going to get your paisa vasool here.

Just don’t expect anything original or even unpredictable in terms of plot or storyline. It’s all as predictable as mud and dirt.

The obligatory pin-up girl in the film, Nisha Kothari, does her job about as well as you could expect. She’s playing a sexy kitten of a model-actress, the kind that dons the tiniest short skirts and prances around for music videos–giving the film a tidy excuse to segue into song sequences when required. She’s not bad at all, and manages to carry off her part with just enough kittenish sex appeal and credible acting to carry off the love-at-first-sight (of his muscles, presumably) plotline.

The humorous distractions are provided brilliantly by Snehal Dabhi and RGV regular Rajpal Yadav who inject welcome doses of silly but well-done comedy at the most unexpected moments. This helps the ultra-violent story from drowning in buckets of blood and actually helps in balancing out the non-stop violence.

This same excess of violence is the reason why I think RGV went too far in releasing so many prints. I very much doubt that families, or couples, or even the teenyboppers that turn out in such droves for the latest sugar-romance Bollywood movie will come to see a film that’s only maar-dhaad all the way.

But that’s RGV’s problem, not our’s.

As far as we’re concerned, RGV adds yet another notch to his record as India’s best maker of gritty non-Bollywood action flicks.

And in the process, he’s given Mohit Ahlawat the best damn debut in Hindi films since the last star-son made his ‘entry’ onto the big screen.

Happily, he’s well worth the ‘big break’. And so is James, if you can look past the cliches and just sit back and enjoy this actionpacked orgy of violence.

Sep 20, 2005 | Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

Up The Earthsea, Without A Paddle: Review of Earthsea miniseries on DVD

In the late Seventies and early Eighties in Bombay, India, (long before it became Mumbai, India), it was hard to get science fiction books.

The few bookstores we had barely more than newstands and they kept a strange amalgam of non-fiction and the perennial pulp bestsellers that were such a staple here: Carter Brown, Nick Carter, James Hadley Chase, Perry Mason, Agatha Christie, P.G. Wodehouse, Sidney Sheldon, Arthur Hailey, and, if you were lucky, an Asimov, a Clarke, maybe even a Dune novel or two, or a Heinlein juvenile.

But hardcore SF fans like I knew where to look.

We’d troll the backrooms of stores, where some bookstores kept the miscellanous stuff that wasn’t popular enough to put out on display on the five and a half shelves space out front.

Or the store rooms of book distributors and wholesalers. Or the second-hand bookstores like Smoker’s Corner on P.M. Road where they sold ‘stripped’ paperbacks with the covers ripped off and remaindered hardcovers for ludicruously low prices.

Some of this detritus was softcore, or even hardcore porn, predictably. Which meant that you often had middle-aged balding men shuffling about nervously, dabbing at their sweat with enormous handkerchiefs. But once in a while, you struck lucky, and came across a cache of real gold.

This was where I first discovered the work of authors like Samuel R. Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin (I quickly learned the K. stood for Kroeber), John Brunner, Clifford D. Simak, Philip K. Dick, and a ton of other SF authors whose books didn’t sell as well as Asimov, Clarke, Herbert or Heinlein.

I fell in love with Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossesed, as well as her essay Science Fiction and Mrs Brown which talked about writing the kind of social SF I loved so much.

So when I began discovering the Earthsea books, one by one, out of order of sequence, I picked them up without thinking twice. And when I had the first three books collected, I began reading them.

I remember reading them thrice in a row, over and over again, the way my teenage kids read Harry Potter now. I was blown away. It was the best thing I’d read since The Lord of The Rings, and believe me, I’d read a lot of SF already, even though I was barely twenty then.

Over the years, the book retailing scene in Bombay changed. Today, of course, we have 11 branches of the Crossword chain alone in Mumbai, and about ten other decent bookstores. Each one has its own SF section, and, by one of those peculiar quirks of happenstance, there’s usually one whole shelf reserved for my own books.

:~)

But it’s still as hard as ever to get the really good stuff, perhaps because India’s now fallen in line with international copyright regulations, and we don’t get those stripped-cover paperbacks or remaindered hardcovers anymore.

So we get tons of the latest big-selling fantasy series, endless copies of endless volumes in endless series (I should complain? My own series is at 4 books already, with two more to go!), and lots of big name authors but not too many of the lesser known but terrific talents.

But the newest instalment of the Earthsea books, as and when one appears, is always on display. And I’ve got them all. Although the later ones are nowhere near as good as the first trilogy. But you could say that about almost any fantasy series, right?

But even the weakest entry in the series is better than the travesty of an adaptation by the SciFi Channel. It’s funny, really.

Because, for instance, there have been other assembly line miniseries based on fantasy or classical material that have been turned into mid-budget well-cast and moderately well mounted miniseries epics.

You can even forgive them the way tweak history or the original books. Hallmark did it with Merlin, and it turned out pretty damn well, thanks partly to the terrific casting of Sam Neill and Isabella Rosellini, among many other great actors. Hallmark did a good job with Cleopatra based on the excellent Margaret George novel.

And I really liked their Arabian Nights, and Jason And The Argonauts too. As you can see, we get Hallmark here in India; though we still don’t get the SciFi channel…yet. But to be honest, I really like a lot of the SciFi channel’s work as well. Just not this one.

Past successes at making similar genres of miniseries epics is why it’s so disappointing to see the mess they made of Earthsea.

The problem starts with the casting. It’s not that it’s bad really. It’s that it’s all a bit off, with even the always dependable Danny Glover seeming ill-fitted, and the marvelous Rosellini completely wasted.

The script is awful; completely botching up the original dramatic development of Le Guin’s books, adding extraneous elements that do absolutely nothing to enhance the story or the screenplay, and generally butchering what was a brilliant, dark, and subversive fantasy epic to begin with, turning it into a typical good guy-bad guy young-wizard-in-training versus Guy-who-wants-to-conquer-world tale.

If I’m not naming names here, it’s because I’d like to think that the same actors in different roles could still work pretty well. It’s just that they don’t work as an ensemble, or even individually, here at all.

The production is cheap, but not that cheap. You could live with the stagey CGI and even the halfway decent sets and production design if there was a really good cast and a gripping storyline. But with the other faults wearing you down, every minor blemish becomes a major eyesore.

I could go on, but what’s the point? I don’t want to wax eloquent about something that’s a noble effort sadly mismanaged. I’ve read on the web that Ursula Le Guin herself withdrew support for the miniseries and was sorely disappointed by the results. And that loyal fans of the books were outraged.

I’m not such a purist that I’m going to say, Don’t watch this, because it would be disloyal to the author. Much as I love Le Guin’s work, I’d still go on to say, okay, I guess if you haven’t read the books, you might want to watch this miniseries just to pass a lazy Sunday afternoon.

But then again, you might not even want to do that. Because even without the context of the books, it’s still pretty lame.

In the end, the whole just doesn’t hold together. With or without the books. That’s something you can judge for yourself by renting or buying this DVD.

Or you can do yourself a big favour, buy the books instead (start with the original trilogy–they’re short books, like all fantasy books published before the Nineties) and see for yourself why beanies like I trolled the dubious backrooms of booksellers in Bombay searching for stuff this good.

Sep 19, 2005 | Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

Sozzled in Solzhenitsyn-land: Book review of Vodka by Boris Starling

Most crime novelists write like spinners on Atkins. Lean, mean tales of tough talking and even tougher thrills in a familiar setting.

That’s cool when you just want a quick fix. A crime thriller or mystery that delivers familiar thrills on familiar turf. But read enough of those and you find yourself craving for a change of scene.

Someplace you haven’t read about a thousand times before. Characters that really are different, and aren’t named Osama-something, or Sam-something.

Vodka is more than a quick fix.

Sure, it’s a crime novel, a mystery, a thriller. But it’s a hell of a lot more than just that.

It’s a novel about an entire country during a time of profound, sweeping change. It’s an ambitious doorstopper of a book, an epic of emotion and change, politics and economics, war and peace. It’s a novel about Russia that reads like a great Russian novel, and comes close to becoming one.

Close, but no cigar. I mean, it’s no classic, okay? But then again, it’s not trying to be Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, just a terrific crime epic. And by that yardstick, it delivers the goods.

It’s set in the early Nineties, right after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and during the tumultous period when the Russian government was trying to introduce American-style capitalism–or heck, at least some American-style capital, period!

Things are crazy, inflation is out of control, Moscow is run as much by the crime syndicates, and the long-simmering bitterness between various ethnic groups–the Chechens, the Georgians, etc–is bubbling to the point of outright street war, inflation is out of control, the bread lines are around the block but the supermarkets are filled with imported stuff that costs a fortune, the everyday stresses and tensions are so great that road rage leads to multiple homicide and the police is so corrupt that they actually moonlight for the crime lords at times.

Author Boris Starling paints all of this in brilliant, vivid descriptions that are rich, intense, emotionally involving. This is no Traveler-style travelogue for the rich and famous. It’s gritty, down-and-dirty, street-talking, getting down with the Moscow homies kind of stuff. Except that it’s Russia, not the ‘hood.

Starling writes like a slumming homeboy who’s really been there, seen that, done his time in the Red Square, and lived to tell the tale–and write the book. His Russia is the most palpable, tangible portrayal I’ve read in a long time. This is not just damn good research, I’d wager; it’s real knowing.

Into this madmaxian chaos he tosses a bunch of extraordinary characters, larger than life–or larger than American life, at least–because in the baroque Russia-in-upheaval of the novel, even these soap-operatic giants seem to fit in comfortably.

There’s an American woman, Alice, too beautiful for her own good and with a serious alcohol problem that she can’t bring herself to accept. She’s here to help the Russian government implement the first of its capitalisation plans, the sale and privatisation of a major Russian enterprise, a vodka manufacturing plant.

Counterpointing her is Lev, a giant of a man physically and psychologically, one of the most outstanding fictional creations in crime fiction. Like everyone else in Russia, he occupies multiple roles: Owner of the vodka plant, philanthropist and caregiver to a school of orphans–and incidentally, head of one of the biggest Moscow crime syndicates.

These two characters, Alice the American and Lev the Russian are the two endpoints of this enormous tug-of-war that is the battlefield on which Vodka plays out its liquor-drenched emotional epic saga. And trust me, if you don’t drink, you’re going to be hugely fascinated (as I was) by the amount of vodka drinking that goes on throughout this book.

I thought books like Lawrence Block’s early entries in his Matt Scudder series did just about whatever there was to be done with alcohol addiction that you could fit in to a crime novel. But Vodka makes even a lifetime of personal stories told at AA meetings seem like fairy tales in a kindergarten.

There’s excess here, in excess. Everybody drinks all day long, from the prime minister and president of the country, down to the cops and the criminals, and even the kids. Everybody except Alice Lidell’s surgeon husband, and he’s portrayed as a wuss anyway.

But vodka is more than just a plot device in this book. It’s a part of the story itself, because it’s a part of the country. Vodka is a metaphor for Russia itself: clear as ice, apparently without flavour or odour, but wholly unique, holding its secrets tightly within its molecules, giving them up only to those willing to imbibe it in huge, enormous, mind-numbing doses.

You can understand Russia, sure. But understanding will come close to killing you as well. And like some of the characters discover too late in the book, perfect understanding comes only with erasure of your own life. Russia accepts no other partner in her claim over your consciousness.

There’s a serial killer thread running through the book. There’s a gang war and vengeance drama played out from start to finish. There’s a rambunctious love story, which goes through every shade of man-woman drama imaginable, and then some.

There’s chases, and gunfights, and riots, and tank wars in the streets, and drive by shootings as common as butter at breakfast, there’s politics and political debate enough to keep a Senate House raging for weeks, there’s history unloaded by the bucketful, there’s individual stories woven through the larger fabric like colourful silk threads mingled into an already overdone pattern, and somehow Starling holds it all together, gathers up the slack, and keeps the whole afloat.

This is an epic of a novel, no doubt about it. It’s a terrific novel about Russia, and a terrific love story, and a terrific social saga.

It’s somewhat less effective as a crime novel, or as a serial killer thriller. But that’s only in comparison. It’s not that the crime story doesn’t work–oh, it works amazingly well, with Starling able to conjure up backstory and motivations so effectively, you wonder if he had a sideline as a homicide investigator in Moscow as well as a serial killer!

It’s more that the crime story is like another book written into the larger book about Alice and Lev and the privatisation plotline.

At the end, the vodka drinking gets a bit too much, almost as if the prose starts to stagger from its own excessive imbibing, and the Russian history becomes too much exposition too late.

But to give credit to Starling, this is not so much his failing as the reader’s overwhelming desire (at that point) to just find out how it turns out for the characters. His continuing exposition, unravelling late though it is, is unavoidable, you see in retrospect.

As is his maintaining the vodka metaphor–because by this point, it’s not just a metaphor, it’s just there.

Don’t make the mistake of picking up this book because you want a quick serial killer thriller. Or even a good mystery. Or just a sexy love story between an American woman and a Russian crime lord. Sure, Vodka delivers all these separate pleasures in a single package.

But most of all, it’s a novel about Russia now and how she’s gotten where she is today (or well, a decade ago).

In the end, the real protagonist of this book is Ms Russia, daughter of that old stalwart Mother Russia. She’s gorgeous, she’s slutty, she drinks too much and can kill over political differences.

But she makes for a compelling, sweeping, epic read. Read Vodka if you want to get to know her better. Just be willing to go all the way with her, to the last drop. And except a hell of a hangover the next morning–if you survive.

Sep 17, 2005 | Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

Getting ‘LOST’: Review of Season 1 on DVD

New TV shows tend to follow a year or two behind their US telecasts here in Asia. (I’m based in Mumbai, India, but the English-language channels are mostly telecast by satellite from Hong Kong.) They have a small but loyal following, and when I say ‘small’, I mean that in Indian or Asian terms. In India, for instance, an Indian show (in Hindi, Tamil, Telegu, or any of several dozen other Indian languages) would have to get several tens of million viewers in order to justify an extension from year to year, and the biggest successes have garnered audiences in the hundreds of millions!

On the other hand, an English-language series that gets even a few million viewers would be considered successful, provided it gets the ‘upwardly mobile’ segment of viewership that’s capable of buying the expensive consumer goods that have the big advertising and sponsorship bucks backing them. The most successful Indian show right now, for instance, is Kaun Banega Crorepati (a ‘crore’ is ten million), the official Indian avatar of the international Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.

The first season of the ABC TV Series LOST recently began telecast on the Star TV Network, the local arm of Rupert Murdoch’s Sky Television empire. Desperate Housewives is about halfway through its first season here. But those of us in the know prefer to watch our American TV shows on DVD. That way, we can get them sooner and have the pleasure of enjoying them uninterrupted. Best of all, with a plethora of independent DVD rental libraries to choose from, and rentals as low as $2 a day per DVD, it’s cheap too.

Because of this substantial market–and one of the fastest growing in the world–Asia often gets DVDs the very day they’re released, and sometimes, as in the case of LOST: Season 1, a couple of weeks before their US release. Don’t ask me how. All I can tell you is they’re 100% legally issued DVDs, and I guess that the trade here sees no reason to coordinate the release date with the US marketing machinery. Also, all DVD players here are multi-region, so we can play DVDs released anywhere in the world.

(We also have the happy choice of getting both US and UK editions of new books in stores, and we get them in mass market paperback at least six months ahead of their western publication – they’re called “special international editions”. And hey, you can buy brand-new DVDs here officially for around $10 each, often half or one-third of their US prices. Sort of like every store offering Wal-mart prices!)

But hey, you don’t want to know all that stuff, do you? You want to know what the TV show under review is really like. Or, if you’ve seen it on ABC or its affiliates Stateside, you want to know if the DVD is worth your money.

Oh, hell, yeah.

Getting LOST: Season 1 on DVD is probably one of the best Buttnumbathons you can indulge in this second-half of 2005. (And a ‘buttnumbathon’ by the way, is my word for the experience of watching an entire season of a TV series on DVD at one go, or, as in the case of LOST, over a single weekend.)

The first thing LOST does is prove Steven Soderberg right. Soderberg, speaking at the Venice Film Festival last week, trashed reality TV shows roundly, insisting that fictional TV or cinematic drama ‘does reality’ far far better than these so-called ‘reality’ shows. And since they’re scripted too, the ‘reality’ tag is a misnomer.

LOST is everything that Survivor isn’t, never was, and never will be.

It’s exciting, thrilling, involving, insightful, and a terrific roller coaster of a ride.

It’s realistic in the things that matter: its portrayal of real people with real problems, conflicts, and relationships.

And it’s fun in the ways that those phony reality shows just can’t be: Because LOST isn’t afraid to mix genres boldly and enticingly.

On one hand, it’s a classic Stephen King set-up. A bunch of interesting, problem-racked, easily identifiable, quintessential American characters are ripped out of their normal world and thrown into a bizarre situation out of some lost Twilight Zone episode, then put through a rollercoaster ride of wierdness where mere survival is the least of their problems.

On the other hand, it’s a soap opera, but about a bunch of airplane crash survivors, set on a desert island somewhere in the Pacific–or is it the South China Sea? With all the attendant story development that you might expect to follow that initial set-up.

And on the third hand–hey, I’m from India, we believe in people who have more than two hands!–it’s a parable about America today. A group of people with unique qualities, addicted to the very things that are the source of their greatest weakness and destruction–intoxicants, material possessions, free will, democracy…and automatic weapons. And they’re stuck out there in a hostile world, far from home (or, in a sense, at home, but with the world outside suddenly turned hostile), surrounded by enemies that they can’t for the life of them figure out how they pissed off! Sound familiar?

Or that’s how I saw it.

If you want the nitty gritty, here it is. A plane on its way from Australia to LA (via Singapore, I think) crashes mysteriously (the reason is never explained) and breaks into three parts in mid air. The central section of the fuselage lands on the beach of a desert island, with 48 survivors. The story of the first season is entirely occupied with how these survivors attempt to survive, about how some succeed and some fail (yes, major characters die, so deal with it, this isn’t Gilligan’s Island), and then about how they try to secure the basic necessities of life: fresh water, a regular food supply, a shelter from the monsoon storms. And finally, once they’ve got reasonably full bellies and a warm fire blazing, it’s about how they try to get off the island and get back to civilization.

The actors are all relatively unknown faces, with the best-known probably being Dominic Monaghan, who plays Merry, one of the Hobbits in the Lord of the Rings films. Although here in India, we sent up a cheer when we saw Naveen Andrews playing one of the major characters–billed first, because the billing is alphabetical. There are 14 regular characters, with the rest providing background mostly but sometimes swimming into focus before fading back into the jungle again. And they’re a regular mixed-bag of nuts: A former Republican Guard from the Iraqi army, a Korean couple who speak no English (or so it seems at first), an African-American with his 10-year old son and his pet dog (yup, the dog survives), a surgeon (whew, what would they have done without good old doc, a regular cowboy with an overbearing Texan accent and a powerful resemblance to Viggo Mortensen, an Australian woman who’s 8 months pregnant, a Hispanic youth who’s won about $150 million in the lottery, a tough balding military-looking dude who appears to have boarded the flight in a wheelchair and is now able to walk without the aid of said device…and one of the most endearing characters in the entire show, a gutsy, feisty, midwestern American woman who just happened to be travelling shackled and handcuffed in the company of an US Marshall.

The actors are fantastic, each one memorable from the very first five minutes. Whatever you do, don’t miss the first twenty minutes of the Pilot Episode, where the closest thing to a ‘hero’, Dr. Jack, does his amazing ‘let’s-save-everybody’ thing and we see the immediate aftermath of the crash in the only sustained sequence of the series.

For those of us who are fans of Alias, and less likely, Felicity, the name J.J. Abrams is hot news. The creator-writer-producer (and director of a few episodes) of Alias displays his virtuosity here on LOST yet again, coming up with flawless writing, fascinating characters, slickly executed storytelling and a plotline as intriguing as anything Stephen King ever wrote. He solves one of the biggest limitations of the series by brilliantly resurrecting that old chestnut of filmed storytelling, and reinventing it–flashback.

After all, think about it: how the dickens do you shoot an entire series on a desert island and still keep it looking interesting and fresh with every episode? Simple, you use a point-of-view based mode of storytelling, following each of the major protagonists for several minutes at a time (and later, through entire episodes of their own) and keep jumping between the here-and-now reality of life on the island to flashbacks that do much, much more than just give us backstory. Slowly, over the course of the season, these flashbacks actually give us hints to the reason why these people are all together, here on this island, why they crashed, why they survived (while the rest of the passengers and crew died), and why they fell on this particular island, with its mysterious roving monsters in the dark, its polar bears–yes, polar bears on a South Pacific island–and strong evidence of other inhabitants.

I won’t give away any of the real plot points, let alone tell you how the first season ends (do they get off the island? do they find out what the island’s secret is?), but I will bring up one major complaint. The season finale episode, double-length though it is, views more like a mid-season episode than an season-ending. For one thing, it leaves you on a cliffhanger too great and yet too simple to justify waiting a whole year to resolve. For another, it doesn’t answer enough of the questions raised earlier to provided any sense of closure, however limited.

That gripe apart, LOST is some of the best damn drama you’ll likely to see on DVD in the last few months of this year. And a must-watch.

Coming to the DVD extras. There is some stuff here. There’s commentary by executive producers J.J. Abrams, Damon Lindelof, and Bryan Burk on the pilot, and commentary by other EPs and featured actors on three other episodes.

Here’s a list of the other DVD extras:
The Genesis of Lost
Designing a Disaster
Before They Were Lost: personal stories and audition tapes
Welcome to Oahu: The Making of the Pilot
The Art of Matthew Fox
Lost@ComiCon
Lost: On Location
On Set with Jimmy Kimmel
Backstage with Driveshaft
The Lost Flashbacks: Claire at the Airport, Sayid at the Airport
13 deleted scenes
Bloopers from the set
Salute to Lost at the Museum of Television and Radio’s 22nd Annual Paley Festival

The best of the pick, of course, is “Before They Were Lost”. Because, believe you me, by the time you’re a couple of episodes in, you’ll fall in love with some, if not all, of the characters on LOST. And by the time you’re done with Season 1, you’ll be left with a hole in your heart which no other TV show is likely to fill. Because this is probably the best darn ensemble cast you’ve seen in a long while (a category in which I’m predicting right here and now LOST is going to win big at the Emmys). And some of the featured actors are truly star-material. So you want to take them home and live with them.

But you can’t. And so, the first season DVD ends, leaving you with that hole where you heart used to be, and a hankering to be on that desert island, far away from the problems of *this* world, with that wonderful group of people…

Feeling, in short, more than a little bit…Lost.

Sep 13, 2005 | Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

Sex & The Indian Author(ess): Why Some Desi Writers Handle Sex So Well In Their Books…And Some Don’t

Another old Footsie column from The Daily Pioneer.

Sex and The Literary Woman
Not all Indian English writers are bad at sex after all, in fact some are pretty damn good–and it’s no coincidence the best just happen to be women


On hearing that fellow journalist Sagarika Ghose was writing a novel, Tarun Tejpal threatened her with dire consequences if she wrote ‘bad sex’.

He needn’t have worried. Ghose didn’t write much sex at all in her novel, The Gin Drinkers. But what little she did write, she wrote well.

The few moments of physical intimacy in her flawed but highly readable first novel flow seamlessly with the narrative. Unlike most Indian English novelists, she doesn’t use sex scenes the way Hindi films use song sequences. She has understood instinctively that sex is a part of her characters lives, as much as conversation, drinking, eating, working, laughing, not an interruption of those lives.

In fact, I stand corrected.

A few weeks ago, I bitched mightily about the failure of Indian English writers to deal with the sexuality of their characters. That opinion still stands, mind you. I’m not interested in well-written sex scenes the way Tarun Tejpal seems to be: beautifully choreographed and picturized song sequences are just as intrusive as bad ones, which is why no Hindi film is truly a film, in my opinion.

Even Tejpal’s own Erotic Reader section of his tehelka.com web portal doesn’t successfully correct this lacuna. [Now defunct.] The moment you label a story as ‘erotic’ you admit that it isn’t literature. Good writing defies labels, good readers ignore them. There is no such thing as a ‘sex scene’ in a good novel, just as there aren’t ‘humorous scenes’ and ‘tragic scenes’ and ‘sporty scenes’ and so on.

The best sexual behaviour in fiction springs from the natural flow of the narrative itself. When a novelist relates a good story then sex, like laughter, digestion, flatulence, sorrow and death, is an instinctive part of the story. Not a gratuitous insertion.

This is the beauty of Ghose’s first novel.

And of several other novels published in recent times.

Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What The Body Remembers.

Chitra Bannerje Divakurni’s Sister of my Heart.

Shashi Deshpande’s The Binding Vine.

All of Sunetra Gupta’s novels, notably The Glassblower’s Breath and Memories of Rain.

Ruchira Mukherjee’s Toad in my Garden.

Sohaila Abdulali’s The Madwoman of Jogare.

Anjana Appachana’s Listening Now.

And a number of shorter stories published in various languages, some of which can be found in the excellent Katha series of anthologies.

All these novels have two things in common with good writing about sex: They all use sex as an integral part of their characters’ lives, not as ‘scenes’.

It’s often hard to tell when the eroticism begins because often, as in Chitra Banerjee’s marvellous Sister of my Heart, the most sensually arousing parts aren’t sex scenes at all.

For instance, the chapter in which Sudha’s mother-in-law takes her to the temple of the devi to pray for a child is powerfully erotic and charged with a sense of priapric anticipation even though there is no man around nor does anything overtly sexual take place.

In Gupta’s lyrical flights of prose, the tiniest details are suffused with sexual energy. Rarely has rain been such an instrument of arousal in fiction as in her debut novel Memories of Rain.

In Baldwin’s mesmerizing novel What The Body Remembers, the moments between the two wives, older and younger, are more erotic than any interaction between the Sardar and either of them, even though there is no trace of any erotic relationship between the two women: the envy felt by the older wife for the beauty of the younger is what lends these passages their sensual power.

As is probably obvious by now, the other thing all these authors have in common is the fact of their sex. They are all women.

Which led me to wonder: Could it be that Indian English women writers have instinctively learned something that the male writers haven’t? Again, to stick a convenient label of ‘male writer’ or ‘female writer’ is abhorrent. So screw the labels.

Let’s just say that for some reason, you tell me why, these writers are engaged successfully in a dialogue about Indian sexuality that’s far more effective than their male counterparts. They don’t labour to ‘write good sex’ or insert ‘sex scenes’.

They simply tell their tales and in the process, sex, like other human activities, incidentally unfolds.

On the other hand, so many other writers, mostly male for some unfathomable reason, continue to treat sex with golden gloves, either as something to be deified and made precious. Or trampled upon and muddied by cheap pseudo-literary tricks.

Tarun Tejpal is the latest to join a long and disreputable list of such authors who seek to comingle sex and literary writing in an uneasy amalgam in his own debut novel. Proving, for some unfathomable reason, that Indian women writers are far more accomplished than their male counterparts, not just in crafting beautiful, sensual prose about life itself, but particularly about that most secret and sacred of human interactions.

Why? I have no idea why. But at least a precious few are succeeding where all others have failed. And that’s exciting news.

Sep 10, 2005 | Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

Skeletons in the Writer’s Closet

This is another of my old Footsie columns from The Daily Pioneer.

FOOTSIE
Ashok Banker

About the Author–and his mistress too

While everybody’s out reading Tom Clancy novels and the prophecies of Nostradamus in an attempt to deal with the worldwide changes after last week’s attacks on the USA, here’s a book that may help entertain and inform you for a while.
About the Author is a nonfiction book by Alfred and Emily Glossbrenner recently published in the US.

This husband and wife co-writer team researched hundreds of famous authors, both dead as well as living ones, to compile this fascinating book.

If you love list books and books about writers, this one’s worth a look.

For instance, you know about Lord Jeffrey Archer’s recent expose and arrest.

You probably also know that he’s doing quite well in jail, keeping in touch with all his friends (those he has left, anyway) and generally seeming to enjoy his incarceration.

But did you know he has a fetish for dyed-Di?

What’s that, you ask?

Well, it’s a painting he bought in 1998, a portrait of Diana, Princess of Wales, by the iconoclastic painter Andy Warhol, who was a personal friend.

Diana herself sat for the portrait. But get this–the painting depicts her with green and black hair!

Not weird enough for you?

Then get this–Lord Archer is said to have paid a whopping $8.5 million for it.

No wonder he resorted to fraud schemes to make more money!

Then there’s Margaret Atwood, the Booker-prize winning author of Cat’s Eye and Alias Grace and several other critically acclaimed literary novels.

She has a love for gardening.

Fine, you say, but here’s the point: She’s not a very good gardener, by her own admission.

In fact, she’s so bad at it, that her gardens end up full of weeds which she euphemistically calls “native wildflowers”.

Then why does she do it?

In her own words: “I get seducted by catalogues, with their glossy photos and adjectives, and by pictures of rose-covered trellises and beds of mature perennials.”

Talk about loyalty.

Nobel Prize winning novelist Saul Bellow owed a great deal to Harriet Wasserman, his (literally) one-time lover and longtime literary agent.

Wasserman not only accepted that their relationship couldn’t go beyond that one-night stand, she represented Bellow for 30 years very successfully.

She even typed his novels for him and used to spend hours on the phone discussing editorial changes–one marathon session lasted seven hours, but five hours was common.

Yet Bellow left her to move on to another agent, the super-agent Andrew Wylie.
Wasserman’s only option was to write a book about Bellow, titled Handsome Is: Adventures by Saul Bellow.

Small consolation for a lifetime’s loyalty.

Speaking of Tom Clancy.
The world’s highest-paid novelist (on a per book basis–he gets over $20 million per novel), Clancy is known for his meticulous research and carefully plotted 1000-page tomes.

Yet you may be surprised to learn that Clancy does not plan his books out in advance and sits for a mere 4 hours or so, writing 10 unplanned pages every morning!

Now that’s a great way to earn Rs 100 crores a year, isn’t it?

Patricia Cornwell is growing into one of the world’s most popular crime novelists, and certainly one of the biggest selling.

But did you know that her research is often too close to comfort?

Whether it’s stepping on crack vials in the darkness of a New York alley, avoiding stepping on rats in sewers, placing her gloved hand in the chest cavity of a corpse–only to find the blood is cold–Cornwell thrives on writing from first-hand experience.

Sometimes, she does her research too well–Cornwell still needs to have bodyguards everywhere she goes, and carries not one but two loaded guns in her purse.

Because she personally knew one of the female serial murder victims in the real-life case that inspired her novel Postmorten, and fears she might become a target of the still unapprehended killer!

Richard Ford, the author of the acclaimed The Sportswriter and other novels, was in the news recently.

A reporter asked him about a rumour that he had shot a well-known American critic’s debut novel with a gun.

Ford replied that he had done nothing of the kind.

It was his wife, Kristina, who had used the book for target practise in their backyard!

Apparently, the author, a critic for the New York Times, had panned Ford’s novels mercilessly in the past.

Richard Wright was one of the first African-American authors to achieve literary success, fame and fortune.

Today he’s considered one of the most influential writers of the last century.

His books Native Son and Black Boy have both come back into print and sell steadily even now.

But back in the 1920′s he was only 15 and living in Memphis, a mid-West American city where the only public library had a strict “whites only” policy.

Wright forged a note from a white patron and showed it to the librarian.

The note read: “Dear Madam: Will you please let this nigger boy have some books by H. L. Mencken?”

The librarian let him take the books and that’s how he began reading and preparing to become a writer.

Talk about writing fiction!

Fact is crazier than the made-up stuff anyday, and this book is living proof of it!

Sep 09, 2005 | Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

Falling Down: Journalism in an age when everything is for sale

This is an old Book Chaat column that first appeared on Rediff.com.

BOOK CHAAT
by Ashok Banker

FALLEN HEROES
497 pages
Paperback
Buffalo Books/tehelka.com
Rs 350

They say there are only two kinds of news – bad and very bad.

To phrase that in today’s newspeak, you could say there are only two kinds of news articles — sensational pieces and sexational pieces.

The news that makes news in our info-overloaded world has to be shocking enough to make us sit up and take notice, or sexy enough to make us look twice.

This doesn’t mean that good news about good people can’t sell – it simply means that it’s easier and more lucrative to package and sell what most people want most of the time.

Advertising, the second-oldest profession, learned this formula a long, long time ago.

Sadly but profitably, journalism has learned from it in more recent times.

And most sadly of all, the Indian media has begun to depend almost exclusively on this easy and sleazy formula.

But once in a while, a few good women and men are able to take the formula and squeeze something good out of it.

To tell a news story that satisfies all the marketing requirements yet achieves something worthwhile in the process.

Like a corrupt politician who occasionally contributes fat cheques to deserving charities, the Indian media sometimes throws up a story that actually changes our lives.

I don’t know if the exposure of the cricketing scam qualifies for this praiseworthy position.

Frankly, I never thought that sports stars were heroes, and so I don’t see them as villains now.

But to those who did make that foolish error, it must be quite a heart-breaker to see their alleged heroes exposed as frail corrupt mortals.

The first Indian publication to take up the controversy boldly and bravely was Outlook, of course.

That now-legendary cover story about Manoj Prabhakar’s allegations is an important part of journalism history now.

It played a crucial role in establishing the fledgeling newsweekly, and exposed the reigning superstar India Today as a complacent dinosaur.

In a sense, the Outlook cricketing investigation, like its Kargil exposes, changed more than sports reporting or cricket history.

It changed the face of Indian journalism and non-fiction writing itself.

While the West has always had a free and flourishing industry in outspoken non-fiction, these kind of investigations are relatively new to us here.

The team at Outlook that was responsible for the sensational stories moved on to another venture.

A web portal called tehelka.com.

So far so good.

But when they moved, they also took their news stories with them! So both the cricketing controversy and the Kargil controversy got a new lease of life on the web portal.

What was most interesting about this whole exercise was that the stories didn’t really change much in its new avatar.

What changed was the packaging.

Editor Tarun Tejpal, Associate Editor Shoma Chatterjee, reporter Aniruddha Bahal, and the rest of the Outlook/tehelka.com team didn’t really rake up mountains of new facts.

Instead, they packaged the old facts in innovative new ways.

One was the now-notorious “Prabhakar tapes”.

Taking a page, several pages in fact, from American television reporting, the tehelka team managed to get several key players or observers in the whole cricket scam on a secret spycam and discuss the matter.

It wasn’t so much that the interviews revealed everything.

It was the very fact that these people had agreed to discuss the issue at all that gave it legitimacy.

Similarly, the book compiling the transcripts of those interviews and the rest of the whole coverage, adds another level of legitimacy to the scoop.

Today, with the CBI report tabled and most of its key facts revealed in the daily headlines, cricketers arrested or banned, icons falling by the wayside, it’s difficult not to be impressed by tehelka.com’s achievement.

If nothing else, they’ve certainly lived up to their name at least: “tehelka machcha diya”!

But what did they really achieve besides that?

Sure, so the book Fallen Heroes makes interesting, even gripping reading.

It’s the most fascinating collection of transcript since the Monica Lewinsky or O J Simpson trials – even though there’s neither sex nor murder involved here!

But has it done what some of the illustrious names quoted on the book claim it has done:

“…restored to Indian journalism its lost glory…” (Pritish Nandy).

Brought about “…a giant leap forward in investigative journalism” (Shyam Benegal).

Offered a “brilliant documentary” (Mid-day).

Or even showed the “true face of Indian cricket to the public” (KPS Gill).

Only time will tell.

Meanwhile, I’m willing to acknowledge tehelka’s achievement in one major area.

They’ve certainly proved that in today’s media-mad age, bad news sells beautifully.

And slick packaging justifies a fat premium on the price.

And most of all, that journalism is at its best when raking muck.

Is that because it’s the only thing journalism does really well (destroying being so much easier than creation)?

Or because we have so much muck that needs raking in our world?

Either way, I have a feeling that Fallen Heroes is a genre of book that we’ll see much more of in the months and years to come.

I’m still waiting for one good book that does for the Kargil cover-up what Fallen Heroes does to cricket match-fixing.

I wouldn’t be surprised if eventually, it’s tehelka who brings out that one as well.

But I wouldn’t bet on it.

Sep 08, 2005 | Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

The Spirit of Bombay Past: Book Review of Saleem Peeradina’s The Ocean In My Yard

This review first appeared in HT.

The Ocean in My Yard
Saleem Peeradina
Penguin India; 230 pgs; Rs 250

Books on Mumbai are rare; books on Bombay are even rarer.

The Ocean in My Yard is that rarest of rarities: a well written book on Bombay, the city that was and in some ways, is no more, subsumed by the garbage-strewn, slum-overrun, Share Bazaar and Bollywood-bullied megapolis by the sea that has sprung up in its place like a toxic weed that overwhelmed an untended garden.

This memoir by poet Peeradina, best known for his anthology of Indian poetry in English as well as for his own verse, is a welcome addition to the small but growing sub-genre of ‘growing up xyz in Bombay in the xxxties’.

(You substitute a descriptive term such as Parsi, Anglo-Indian, Female, Gay, Rich, Ugly, etc in the first blank and the decade in the second.)

Ardeshir Vakil’s Beach Boy is one of the better examples of this category, and comes repeatedly to mind while reading this slender, exquisitely detailed, poetically prosaic account of Salim Peeradina’s childhood and adolescent years in the western metroplis by the sea.

There are several others that also come to mind, notably Rushdie’s repeated mining of the same territory, in Midnight’s Children, and in the same locality in sections of The Ground Beneath Her Feet, but Rushdie stands, as always, in a class of his own.

In any case, the superficial similarities extend only to the neighbourhood in which other authors of similarly autobiographical novels spent their ‘coming-of-age’ years: e.g. Juhu-Vile Parle, in Vakil’s case, and Juhu-Versova-Andheri in Peeradina’s case.

Like Vakil’s charming Parsi-bawa-boy autobiographical romp, Peeradina’s graceful memoir is as much about himself as about the neighbourhood and the city within which he grew to adulthood.

And Peeradina being a wholly original person with a uniquely poetic point of view, Ocean turns out to be a delightfully quirky and invidualistic work which stands up in its own right.

The cover, beautifully designed and illustrated, perfectly illustrates the languid ‘old-Bombay’ feel of the text, split into numerous little chapters with quaint poetic titles.

Starting with an entire chapter on his feet and its various inefficiencies and deficiencies, he sets the tone for a highly introspective series of episodic reminiscences, coloured by an unabashedly self-aware perspective.

As with all memoirs of this kind, you have to like the person telling the story.

Peeradina’s style helps somewhat; sprinkled throughout with quotations from old Hindi film songs and verses or even entire poems from his own ouevre, it stays almost entirely in the author’s head.

This is a first-person book like a film shot entirely from a single point-of-view.

At no point does Peeradina ‘cut away’ to more panoramic ‘shots’ or more sweeping ‘scenes’ depicting the city, or aspects of life in the city. It’s entirely ‘I went there, then did this, and then I felt that.’

For this reason, it’s a book best dipped into, or read at leisure, Sunday-afternoon reading, with a cup of tea by your side–paani-kum chai, preferably, like the title of a chapter in the book.

Or even better, a perfect book to read in one of the city’s old Irani cafes, if you can still find one, where another late great Indian English poet, Nissim Ezekiel, was wont to do his reading.

I won’t try to summarize all the stories and escapades Peeradina describes.

His was not an atypical childhood: middle class, suburban, Muslim but quite cosmopolitan in social interaction, stricken by the usual boyish and adolescent pangs of lust, longing, and alienation.

Nothing truly extraordinary happens, and the only ‘adventures’ that young Salim experiences are the kind most of experienced: climbing on a stool to fetch the ilicit copy of 1001 Nights hidden on top of a cupboard by his father, reading through Carter Brown novels for the steamy bits, admiring girl-conquering young rakes like his uncle, and the already-notorious Alyque Padamsee, watching his uncle photograph nudes surreptiously.

This is an artist’s and poet’s memoir, so in place of the heated masturbations and lustful encounters you might expect, there’s a gentleness pervading the whole text, an inward-turned consciousness that is less preoccupied by salacious details than the feel of young female buttocks under cotton panties in an erotic encounter than by the emotional and psychological effect of those experiences.

Peeradina details his pain at his father’s growing alienation from him, and from the family, and later, the self-motivated decision to rise above his roots and inherited emotional liabilities to strike his own path.

In the end, he ‘comes of age’, quoting Alfred Adler and taking the almost-cliché flight to the promised land, USA, where, one notes in his brief author bio at the start of the book, he lives and teaches even now.

Perhaps it’s necessary to have flown away to be able to look back with such tender nostalgia, mercifully devoid of sentimentalism, and write about past decades spent lounging about lazily in a city that seems now like a distant relative, thrice removed, from the Mumbai we now inhabit.

Rushdie, Anita Desai, Vakil, Mistry, and most other Bombay novelists all had to leave physically before they could ‘return’ through their writing.

One wonders whether, if Peeradina had been still living in today’s flood-ravaged Page 3-maddened Mumbai, he would still be able to cast such an unblemished gaze at the past, eschewing the gritty, sodden reality of the present to dwell nostalgically, wistfully on those bygone days.

One doubts it.

But on the other hand, since that Bombay is truly dead and gone, at least we can revisit it, however briefly, in books like this one.

Sep 07, 2005 | Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

“All geniuses are plainly mad, Banker is madder than most”: M.V. Kamath’s Review of the first three Ramayana books

This review first appeared in The Free Press Journal, Mumbai on 7th August 2005.

An Epic tale to suit modern tastes
by M.V. Kamath

Prince of Ayodhya: Book One; Ashok K. Banker; Penguin Books, Pages 517; Rs 295.
Siege of Mithila: Book Two; Ashok K. Banker; Penguin Books; Pages 522; Rs 295.
Demons of Chitrakut: Book Three; Ashok K. Banker; Penguin Books; Pages 615; Rs 350.

Either Ashok K. Banker who has attempted to write – or re-write – the Ramayana in seven volumes is thoroughly mad or he is a ranking genius, a super-star in the literary heavens. There is story comparable to the Ramayana. Valmiki who first wrote it some three thousand years ago were he to come alive now would be probably shocked to know that since he wrote the adi-kavya, there are over seventy variations currently in existence. And all being read and re-read and re-re-read and enjoyed, thank you.

It is claimed that what goes for the aadi kavya itself had been in subsequent generations tampered with or subtly enlarged by others who preferred to stay anonymous. Never mind. As it stands, Valmiki’s Ramayana still remains unmatched, and one can be sure that both Kamban produced a Tamil version in the 11th century and Tulsidas who produced a Hindi version calling it Ramcharitramanas in the late 16th century would reverentially bow their heads before the aadi kavya. Ramayana is available in several languages, including Thai and Bhasha Indonesia.

The Thais actually think Rama is their man and one can’t blame them. To blurt out the truth, Rama is Everyone’s Man. And Ayodhya, as Banker reminds us, is “not just a place in north-central Uttar Pradesh, it is a place in our hearts”. And Raama is there, right in. While there have been so many language editions of the epic, for some strange reason there are very few in English.

Banker refers to William S. Buck’s 19th century version. In our own times, C. Rajagopalachari (Rajaji) attempted a fairly abridged one published by the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan and which has literally sold in lakhs; then we have had a version by R. K. Narayan which is not a patch on Rajaji’s classic. Now we have Banker’s version. Yes, version.

It is Banker’s argument – and who can blame him? – that if Vyaasa and Kambaan and Tulsidas can interpret Ramayana to suit their fancies (and, no doubt, the exigencies of their times) why shouldn’t he, to meet the needs of the English-speaking world in the 21st century? Good point. If, Banker insists, Ramayana changes shape and structre, form and even content, “it is because that is the nature of the story itself: it inspired the teller to bring fresh insights to each new version, bringing us closer to understanding Rama himself.”

And has Banker tried? There is no question: the man is a sheer genius! Ramayana in his hands comes through in flaming language. In English, of course. Not in Shake-spear’s English, nor in Hemingway’s, Somerset Maugham’s but in an English peculiarly Banker’s, that comes out alive, afire with words in Sanskrit, Hindi, Urdu and Gujarati.

Explaining how he came to write this English version (the fourth volume has just come out) Banker says: “My mind exploded with images, scenes, entire conversations between characters. I saw. I heard. I felt…(and) I wrote!”

Did he though! Was he exhorted by Brahma himself? For all one knows that may be true. If Brahma could inspire Valmiki three thousand years ago, why shouldn’t He inspire Banker in our own times? Brahma surely realises that English is spoken across the world by millions? Brahma told Valmiki: “Recite the tale of Rama…whatever you do not know will become known to you. Never will your words be inappropriate. Tell Rama’s story…that it may prevail on earth for as long as the mountains and the rivers exist.”

Brahma, it is clear, has repeated himself to Banker. There is clear evidence. He has beaten practically everybody else in this, his version of Ramayana. The three volumes earlier published teem with characters that make one shudder. Banker uses Sanskrit terms freely in order, on suspects, to give verisimilitude to his work. There are rakshasas, pisacas (pisachas?), and nagas, the last being “giant, cobra-like beings with a human head and toros, but with yard-long forked tongues and serpentine lower bodies and long tails” slithering “through the alleyways and up walls, finding the strays”.

And then there are the Uragas “enormous reptilian brethren of the Nagas, flowing slimily among their cousin species, their enormous python bodies swollen with telltale lumps – the Ayodhyans they had swallowed alive”, “their deceptively human faces cast in the appearance of beautiful girl-children, a detail that only added to the horror of their violations”. Are we getting a feel to the style that Banker freely uses to convey his interpretation of whatever happened? For the ordinary reader, Nagas and Uragas may just be tribals of that period: for Banker they become real ‘nagas’ serpents with yard-long forked tongues. Reading Banker is a hair-raising experience.

In his work, Banker lets his imagination run riot. Dasaratha gets a scolding from Kausalya, for ignoring her. (Incidentally, Valmiki’s Rama-yana depicts Dasaratha as having three hundred and fifty concubines in addition to his three titled wives and Dasaratha’s fondness for fleshly pleasures are stated factually).

Banker’s Ramayana is not just a divine story. At times it becomes a gory and it is frightening. One has to read his description of Parasurama, the axe-wielding brahmin and the scourge of Kshatriyas, emerging out of a mountain, glowing “with the blue-tinged effulgence of brahman shakti” wanting to know who destroyed the bow Siva himself had created and promising to destroy millions of kshatriyas. The conversation between Parasurama and Rama is something to savour. There never was a Ramayana such as Banker has written – his task still remains to be completed – and there probably never will be. It is action, action all the time and there is never a dull moment. Banker revels in his description of events that surely would win Valmiki’s approbation.

The description is vivid, sharp, illuminating and remains in the mind long after the reader has put the book (books) down. What Dasaratha told Brahmarishi Vishwamitra when the latter asks the king to give him Rama as guru-dakshina remains true for all times. Says Dasaratha: “My answer to your request for guru-dakshina is this,

Great One. You ask for Prince Rama. I say, Prince Rama is not mine to give. He belongs to Ayodhya. Rama does not belong to me alone, nor to his mother or family. He belongs to the people…”

Powerful words and they remain true for all times. What we are now presented is not anyone’s Ramayana: it is Banker’s Ramayana and for years to come it will surely be read for the power it projects, the vividity it presents and the sheer vastness of human thought it so humbly lays at the readers’ feet. Even reading the incomplete story of Rama in the first three volumes brings alive the ever-shining glory of Bharat as it was and will forever be. All geniuses are plainly mad! Banker is madder than most.

Sep 06, 2005 | Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

Yours, Unfaithfully: Talking about Infidelity with Neena Gupta (and others)

This is a column by me that appeared maybe five years ago.

The rest of the column speaks for itself…

BOMBAY BITCH
Ashok Banker

Looking for a Gautam
Even the most admired of independent women may not live the idyllic married lives we assume, writes Ashok Banker

Talking casually to Neena Gupta recently, the star-producer-director of Saans.

“All the marriages I know of are failures,” she said. “The women are all unhappy. The men…well, they must be getting what they want one way or another. But the women are miserable.”

So why don’t they get out, I wondered.

Well, for the same reason that Priya, the character Neena plays on her serial, accepts her husband Gautam back even after his long dalliance with another woman.

In fact, Priya doesn’t just accept him back, but even accepts the fact that the other woman has some legitimate association with him – even if it’s only that of financial support and the status of ex-wife.

What is it about Indian women that makes them so accepting of their men’s vagaries? Why do they prefer to stay married unhappily ever after? Why not just call it quits and start over again?

Is it because of the children?

Well, as the product of not one but two broken homes I can vouch for the fact that after a certain age, the children don’t really qualify as an excuse. Better one happy parent than two miserable, squabbling ones, I’d have said.

More likely it was because the women were too well settled in their marital ruts.

I remember meeting one such woman on a recent trip to Delhi.

She was an old friend of the male friend I was with. We bumped into her at Khan market.

They said the usual Hi-Hellojis. And then my friend made the mistake of asking her how things were at home.

She took off like a Diwali rocket, exploding into a golden fireball of glittering resentment and loathing.

Apparently, her husband was filthy rich, and spoiled her children rotten.

Teenagers both of them, she felt they were spiralling out of control.

If they wanted anything that took their fancy – a car, a fabulously expensive designer outfit, a night at a chic disco, a vacation abroad – he would let them have it without argument.

It had gotten so bad that if she withheld anything from them – “You can’t just give kids everything they want, after all,” – they would simply call up Papa who would say “Of course, bete,” and get back to his wheeling dealing.

The result: She felt completely sidelined, frustrated, and unnecessary.

After we escaped from her clutches, heads still reeling from her tirade, my Delhi friend told me that most ‘happily married’ women she knew were in the same boat.

Trapped into comfortable, wealthy alliances, they were neither needed for their feminine charms – that department was left to the ubiquitous mistresses and girlfriends that every such husband possessed – nor were they truly essential for home-management or child-raising.

No wonder these educated, professionally qualfied women felt so frustrated and wasted.

Coming back to Neena Gupta.

Her Saans may not be seeing its best days – in my opinion – with the story taking a definite downspin since the resolution of the Gautam-Priya-Manisha triangle.

(My sources suggest that the serial may be on its way to a final wrap-up in a few months).

But during its heyday, besides ruling the TRPs, the show also attracted a huge feminine following for Neena.

“Women open up to me instantly because of Saans,” she said. “They come and talk about all sorts of things, their marriage, their husbands, their kids. I can’t count the number of times women have come up to me at parties and said, ‘You’re showing my story in Saans’.”

Surely there are exceptions though?

“I don’t know anybody,” says Neena. Which begs the obvious question.

After all, she’s reputed to have had a pretty wild lifestyle herself.

Until her controversial marriage to West Indies cricketing legend Vivien Richards, from whom she has a daughter Masaba.

Surely she’s struck out on her own terms, found a match that meets her expectations? Surely she’s a woman of independent means, not the kind to take any BS from a man?

Sigh.

All of the above are true.

Except for one thing.

Sure, she isn’t Priya of Saans to accept her fate stoically.

But even she can’t create a man to her custom designs.

And the fact is, as Neena Gupta puts it so memorably in a candid, personal and wholly revealing comment: “I wish I could find a Gautam for myself. I’m still looking.”

What she means is with all his faults and straying, Gautam is still as close to the ideal Indian husband as any Bhartiya nari is likely to get.

Leaving the unasked question: Are there any such men out there? She doesn’t think so.

Sep 05, 2005 | Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

Gurus of Contemporary Crime Fiction (Part 1): Michael Connelly

I first met Hieronymous Bosch (Harry to those who know him) at Lotus House Books, Bandra.

At that time, Lotus was in its original location, in that kopcha behind the furniture store and the petrol pump. Before the flyover came and the slums and road diversion made it impossible to access the store.

I was on one of my ‘crime’ rampages, in the mood to read something good but exciting.

That’s when Virat Chandok, the manager of the store, recommended Harry Bosch to me.

The latest book was just out in paperback, Trunk Music.

I bought it on his recommendation, read it, and wished I hadn’t.

Because it was the fourth or fifth book in a series.

And I loved it to pieces.

I liked it so much, I wanted to go back and read everything about Harry Bosch.

I couldn’t believe I had lived through the years that the earlier books were being published, without even knowing about them, without even knowing that a writer this terrific, and a series this brilliant, existed.

I couldn’t do much about the time I’d lost already.

But I could make up for lost time.

So I did.

And by the time I had worked my way back to Trunk Music, I was totally sold on Michael Connelly.

I continued with the Harry Bosch series. I still read them, and believe it or not, the books are even better than before.

Unlike other series authors like, say, Jonathon Kellerman or Sue Grafton, who seem to grind down like a blunt knife-edge after a half-dozen books, or worse, the authors who start out brilliantly but then turn into pale parodies of themselves (Carl Hiassen, what the hell happened to Carl Hiassen? How do you go from brilliant to bullshit that fast?), unlike those bozos, Michael Connelly kept his game going, and got better at it.

Somewhere along the way, he brought out a stand-alone novel, The Poet.

This is something that authors of series detective novels usually have to do, often on the advice of their editors, in order to get new readers to sample their wares.

It worked brilliantly for Connelly.

The Poet was a runaway bestseller and won him a legion of fans.

Some of those even crossed over to become Harry Bosch readers.

(The same tactic has worked amazingly well for Robert Crais too, author of the Elvis Cole p.i. novels whose stand-alones are often better than his ongoing series.)

I was hugely grateful to Virat Chandok for his recommendation – one in a long series of similar recommendations, none of which I’ve ever found fault with. Today, I can’t imagine not having read Michael Connelly’s work, and the fact that I have read it, is thanks to Virat.

Today, of course, Lotus is no more and I’ve dropped out of touch with Virat.

(Hey, buddy, if you’re reading this, send me an email and I’ll be glad to meet up sometime!)

But Connelly’s still around, and so is Bosch.

The latest Harry Bosch is due out anyday now (in India, that is, abroad it’s already out). It’s called The Closers, and it promises to be every bit as amazing as its predecessors.

Here’s what’s amazing about the Bosch novels.

They’re police procedurals, a genre which is strictly speaking past its prime.

I mean, think of authors like William J. Caunitz (One Police Plaza, and its sequels), or Ed McBain (the 87th Precinct novels), or Ridley Pearson (the Lou Boldt novels), or Stephen J. Cannell (the Shane Scully series)…

…and a thousand other terrific books with tough-talking, hard-drinking, police detective protagonists who punch, and shoot, and sleep, and drink their way (not all with the same persons!) through a series of conflicts, with their own superiors or colleagues (Internal Affairs) giving them as much grief as their wives, girlfriends, the press, and the bad guys.

They’re great novels but after a while, you start growing tired of the tough, macho, brooding heroes with their drinking problems, issues with women, issues with society, issues with their own self-esteem, and almost always, those old memories of ‘Nam, or some incident buried in the past which keeps coming back to haunt them at 3 a.m. after a night spent drinking Wild Turkey on the rocks in a seedy motel somewhere off an expressway with the neon sign blipping fluoroscent sleaze into the room.

Harry Bosch, I must admit, has all these cliches, and then some.

It even has the skeletons in the closet. The mother who might have been a (whore) loose woman, who might have been murdered, and whose death left little Harry Bosch all alone in the world, friendless and defenseless against the monsters that roamed the big bad city–and his bigger badder mindcity.

But somehow, from this same material, used a thousand times before, Connelly makes gold.

He puts you bang into Bosch’s mind and heart (and the heart is where Connelly really gets you, unlike other tough-cop writers who blather and bluster a lot, stylishly, but rarely move you this profoundly) and takes you on a rollercoaster that is somehow about Bosch himself as much as it is about the case.

Connelly’s books don’t have flashy language. They’re beautifully written, but in an understated spare Hemingwayesque way, that isn’t afraid to say what must be said at times–as with Bosch’s relationships with women–and yet the language never draws attention to itself.

Often, the books read like straight descriptions of this-is-what-happened, and here’s-how-it-went-down…Almost like a crime reporter writing a long leisurely piece in a really good literary magazine, like, say, Vanity Fair, or Esquire.

(Connelly was in fact a crime reporter in LA before he turned to writing novels full-time.)

But I can promise you, by the end of the very first book, you will be hooked on Bosch. And Connelly.

And both author and protagonist will work their magic on you.

Connelly’s other, non-Bosch novels are even better than his series books.

And yet, interestingly, all roads lead to Rome.

If you’ve read, say, Jonathon Kellerman’s Alex Delaware novels as well as his stand-alone thriller The Butcher’s Theatre, then you won’t know what I’m talking about here.

Kellerman, like Robert Crais, and most other series detective authors when they write stand-alones, usually makes them as different from their series novels as possible. And the result is usually tailor-made for the Hollywood execs who are wary of series novels (where do you start? with the first book? the third? the last book?) but love stand-alone thrillers.

(Crais’s stand-alones are not just terrific reads–in my opinion, better fun than his Cole novels–but they also translate well into blockbuster movies. Like the most recent one, Hostage, starring Bruce Willis.)

Connelly, on the other hand, mines much the same territory in his stand-alones.

Take his Void Moon for instance.

Even though he has a completely different protagonist–a woman, a feng shui practitioner, and a classy burglar as well, to boot–yet she comes off as being almost a sister to Bosch.

Partly it’s that brooding internalized style he favours, which works so well capturing the inner mindset (and heart set) of the protagonist, building a connection more profound and powerful than any other crime series novelist I’ve ever read, but it’s also more than that.

It’s a worldview.

An intelligence at work behind the words that sees and thinks and has a finely developed sensibility.

A sense of naturalism.

A sense that while this is a detective thriller, a story to be read, enjoyed and then put aside, it’s also an opportunity to reflect on, study, and explore the darker side of human behaviour.

To explore the moral issues underlying these violent, often brutal, always wrenchingly honest tales of death, dying, and killing.

This sensibility is what elevates Connelly’s work far above that of his contemporaries.

In Void Moon for instance, he doesn’t just use feng shui as a gimmick, he makes us believe that the heroine herself believes in it.

So when things go wrong for her, we believe that the signs she saw earlier, the indications of bad feng shui, really meant something.

You don’t just suspend disbelief when reading a Michael Connelly novel.

You acquire belief in the fiction he’s creating.

I could go on and on, extolling his virtues, as a prose stylist, or tell you how he created another series character, Terry McCaleb (played by Clint Eastwood in the film Blood Work adapted from the book of the same name by Connelly) and how he then went on to brilliantly, shockingly, combine both his series characters–Bosch and McCaleb–in a single novel, A Darkness More Than Night. (He even wove in a strand and a character from his earlier stand-alone The Poet, in an impressive display of authorial control and skill.)

And this experiment, instead of turning into either a showoffy attempt at ‘look-ma-I’m-a-terrific-writer-too’ egotism, or an utter disaster as might happen in the hands of a lesser talent, actually produced one of the greatest crime novels ever written, in my humble opinion.

I could tell you how Connelly’s books function on your mind and memory the way good single-malt scotch does on your palette, even though I don’t touch alcohol, have never tasted single-malt scotch in my entire life, and would rather throw a bottle across a room than take a single sip!

But I won’t.

Instead, I’m going to just list all Connelly’s novels here. Tell you which ones are Bosch books, which are stand-alones, and otherwise.

And then leave you to pick them up, one at a time, or all at once, and discover one of the greatest crime novelists ever.

What I can tell you, though, before I get to the list, is that I’m not exaggerating.

Michael Connelly is one of the finest crime novelists ever.

And that’s something I won’t pretend to be humble about. It’s just a fact of life to me.

And I have Virat Chandok and Lotus House Books to thank for that. Thanks, man, for tuning my ear to Trunk Music.

Now, get off this web page, get off the net, off your comp, and go buy yourself a Michael Connelly novel, or ten of them.

You’ve wasted enough time reading this blogpost, when you could be reading the real thing instead!

The Harry Bosch series
in chronological order

THE BLACK ECHO
THE BLACK ICE
THE CONCRETE BLOND
THE LAST COYOTE
TRUNK MUSIC
ANGEL’S FLIGHT
A DARKNESS MORE THAN NIGHT
CITY OF BONES
LOST LIGHT
THE NARROWS
THE CLOSERS (forthcoming)

The Terry McCaleb novels
BLOOD WORK
A DARKNESS MORE THAN NIGHT (Tie-in)

Stand-alone thrillers
THE POET
A DARKNESS MORE THAN NIGHT (Tie-in)
VOID MOON
CHASING THE DIME
THE LINCOLN LAWYER (forthcoming)

Sep 03, 2005 | Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

Small Acts Of Betrayal: A short story

This is one of my SF short stories.

CAUTION: The following story contains some mild sexuality and themes of a mature nature–but no explicit descriptions or language.

Small acts of betrayal
by Ashok Banker

Mirin and Helpert were enjoying a rare post-copulation moment when the starship went to Defcon 2. The sirens blared in the narrow confines of Helpert’s quarters with jarring intensity.

“Jesus!” Mirin exclaimed, sitting bolt-upright.

Helpert felt the familiar sadness that came over him at such moments. This was the only intimacy he shared with another human and it always seemed to end too soon. He reached out to touch her one last time, but Mirin had already turned away from him, out of reach.

She reached over and jabbed her thumb at the nearest scanner. They were in one of the store rooms. He wasn’t sure why, except that Mirin always came to him rather than the other way around and seemed to be more interested in the act itself rather than where it was performed.

“Bridge, what the hell is going on?” she barked at the terminal over the whinging of the siren. “What? But how the hell–All right, I’m coming up!”

His hand touched her as she shifted to get off the floor, and she recoiled: “Get a hold of yourself!”

He blinked and looked around. She was already on her feet and at the Closet. A barked command and a clingwrap sheet flung itself out around her ample shape. It began to turn opaque as she slid her feet into the gravity boots.

“This never happened, okay? Like always.”

And then she was gone, leaving him feeling he’d been used and flung aside like a cheap prophylactic.

He sighed and rose to his knees. He gathered up the sheets of clingwrap he had spread on the floor of the storage level, bundled them up and he was about to shove them into the disposal chute when an idea occurred to him.

It was a few minutes work to obtain a couple of slides from the Medical Supplies shelf. He took several smears from the sheets, just to be sure that he was getting at least one of her’s, and put the slides into a pocket of his overalls. Then he disposed of the sheets. Later, while passing Medlab, he dropped them off and told Kingston what he wanted.

“Sure, mon,” Kingston said, bobbing his head to the drone-rap thudding on his contact stereo attached to his neck.

“Anything for you, mon. You the happy-maker.” That was what Helpert always loved about Medlab techs. They had their own insular world, oblivious to the crises and politics of the starship. He resolved to slip a box of bacco plugs off the next Earth shipment and slip it into Kingston’s quarters. Kingston lived for bacco plugs.

The siren was off by the time he returned to the Level Down-5, but the ship had gone to Defcon 3 by then, and a helpbot patrolling the corridor informed him that under the circumstances, he was not required to continue with routine duties.

“Yeah, well, I got nothing else to do,” he said to the helpbot. He went into the store room. And continued labelling and packing the shipment he had been working on when Mirin had come down for her “visit”. Shipping clerks on company starships didn’t get paid to lay off during alien attacks. Even if they were balling the Captain.

He was sipping decaff in the Level Down-5 cafeteria that p.m. when he heard the news. A group of Techs were chattering excitedly about the attack. He had seen the headlines on the evening editions of the tabloids on his portable Netcomp, but he really didn’t feel like reading about inter-species warfare and the politics of third-galaxy colonisation. So he was halfway through the latest instalment of his favourite Net-serial when the group burst into the cafeteria. In minutes every diner in the place had clustered around the newcomers’ table. All except for Helpert, who sat at his corner table spooning up his Veg Supreme and trying to concentrate on dialogue over the racket. Finally, he gave up on the soap opera as well as on his dinner–they were both too cheesy today–and resigned himself to hot decaff and gossip.

“It was like, mind-splintering,” said one of the younger techs, a geeky guy named Kumar with a thick Earth accent. “The xenomorphs had the drop on us. They must have been monitoring our frequencies for who knows how long, waiting for just this situation, and when we dropped the shields and went out to fix the structural fissure, bam, they moved in, guns blazing.”

Obviously the guy had seen too many episodes of The New Cowboys, that high-rated space-adventure Net series. “So there we were, hanging off the side of the centre structure, armed with just vacuum tools, and smack in the middle of a full-scale alien attack.”

There was a flurry of questions. The only half-intelligent one came from a maintenance clerk from Helpert’s level, a mousy girl he thought was called Jain.

“How many of you died?”

Helpert couldn’t see Kumar’s face from where he sat, but from the drop in the tech’s voice level, he figured that the question hadn’t been well-received.

“Oh, that’s the thing,” Kumar replied airily. “We, like, executed an avoidance action and escaped by the skin of our teeth. But it was really hairy out there for a while. I, like, thought I was going gone for sure.”

Helpert grinned. Translated, that read simply: We vamoosed like yellowbellies. And I pissed my pants.

“And the Company would have put up a floating memorial of you,” gushed a gay male tech whom Helpert didn’t recognise.

“That would have been so romantic! You would have been a space hero!”

“Yeah,” Kumar replied uncertainly. “But I must be destined for greater things. So here I am!”

“But how did we repel the attack? I mean, if the shields were down, and we couldn’t run interference or fire back because of you techs out there, then how did we defend ourselves?”

Helpert smiled: He liked that girl, Jain. She was smarter than she looked.

“Hey, come on,” Kumar replied, refusing to allow the wind to be blown out of his sails, even if it was just hot air. “This is a Class-A intergalactic starship. It’s got gizmos and stuff you non-tech people wouldn’t understand. The point is, our good Captain hauled ass and chased those xenos back to the hole they climbed out of. Now that’s a might fine lady holding the reins up there.”

Helpert raised one eyebrow at his mug of decaff. So Mirin had jumped into an attack cruiser and led an external counter-attack against the aliens. Probably zipping around and biting them on the rear, forcing them to turn away from the starship.
Then chased them back to their home base wherever that may be. Very sharp move. With its shields down and its defense systems compromised by the presence of personnel outside, the starship could have sustained major damage in minutes, or been forced to abandon the personnel in order to defend itself. Mirin had managed to avoid both contingencies by taking quick action. Well, it was nice to know that she was as efficient in what she did on Level 1 as on Down-Level 5!

He had tired of the chatter. He rose, carried his dinner debris to the nearest disposal chute, popped it in and started toward the exit. He was about to leave the cafeteria when he overheard another comment. He paused, turning back towards the cluster of personnel. They were spread out from Kumar like iron fillings on a sheet of paper in a magnetism experiment.

“What did that woman just say?” he asked the nearest person. A middle-aged sanitation clerk he knew by face, not name. “Did she say that Captain Mirin is still missing?”

The sanitation clerk–hell, he was just a toilet cleaner–looked up at him scornfully. “Where have you been? It’s the lead story on every Netcomp channel.”

Helpert stared at him, then glanced down at the Netcomp clipped to his belt. He left the cafeteria and rushed back to the Store Room as fast as the floor would take him.

It was on all the Netcomp tabloids and news channels: STARSHIP CAPTAIN SACRIFICES SELF TO SAVE SHIP, CREW. That was an exaggeration of course. Mirin hadn’t gone out like a lamb to slaughter. She had led a very intelligent counter-move to lead the aliens away from the ship. Her intention had probably been to chase them back to their home base, and then destroy the base itself, thereby ridding her sector of that problem. Directive One of The Commander’s Manual: ‘Destroy the enemy at its source.’ But apparently, something had gone wrong during the counter-attack. The other cruisers had been unable to keep pace with her and the alien craft, had in fact lose all trace of her within minutes. And hadn’t been able to find her since.

The Net tabloids were having a field day with the story. The Galactic Enquirer asked boldly: “DID SHE SEE ELVIS OUT THERE?” and suggested that Mirin might have seen a vision of a 20th century singer in space which led her to her doom. The New York Times was more sensible: “USS ENTROPY CAPTAIN LURED BY A TRAP?” Helpert liked that story best. It propounded the theory that the aliens had in fact attacked the starship in those circumstances for a reason. Not to destroy the ship while it was compromised, but to force the ship’s Captain to do precisely what she did. Leave the safety of her command post. And having done so, they kidnapped her. Which, the Times suggested, had been their original intention. It was a good theory, and the Company refused to comment on it, which meant they took it seriously. Helpert wasn’t a betting man but if he was, he would have put some money on the Times story over the others. Not much, but some.

Confirmation came beeping on the Netcomp while Helpert was showering next morning before his first shift. He reached out of the shower and turned the screen toward him. It flashed a banner headline, the pixelated NYT roman font dancing across the paperback-sized screen with visible glee: “ALIENS DEMAND RANSOM FOR RETURN OF STARSHIP CAPTAIN”.

So there it was. Mirin. His Mirin. Kidnapped and held to ransom.

He chuckled as he dipped Oreo cookies into a cup of orange juice and crunched them up noisily, his usual breakfast. He’d chosen to stay down here in the Store Room rather than venture out into the cafeteria again. Too crowded there.

So his theory had proved correct. Of course, technically speaking it was the NYT’s theory. But the germ of it had formed back there in the cafeteria when he’d heard that geek Kumar trying to sound like a war hero–”We, like, executed an avoidance action and escaped by the skin of our teeth.” If the aliens had come to destroy, then there would have been no escape for those techs floating outside. As it was, the casualties were almost nil–one tech dead, three injured. Which was ludicrous considering the kind of firepower those alien attack ships carried. No. They had been up to more than simple Hit and Run and Helpert had guessed it all along.

It was, after all, just the strategic move he had been expecting them to make. And had been prepared for.

Kingston wasn’t at his place, but his associate Jansson was there, peering at some kind of a holographic alien DNA simulation that looked like a Watson and Crick model gone insane. She was a slender, middle-aged Hispanic from Artemis One, and had the graceful slow movements of a Lunie. “Yes,” she said, smiling distractedly at him. “Kingston left this for you.” She handed him a plastic code key and explained how he could use it to access the Clone Capsule and activate the specimen. He tucked it away securely and rode up to Level 0.

A Media Ship had just docked and the place was swarming with human as well as AI journos. They were headed for the Media Briefing Hall, but were on the look-out for anybody who could give them a quick Net byte. A couple of them spotted Helpert and zoomed in. “So how do you feel about the situation?”

He looked around blankly, slack-jawed and glaze-eyed.

“Do you think the Company should pay the kidnappers?” a floating AI rig asked.

He stared blankly at the glass eye of the rig’s camera.

“Don’t you think Captain Mirin is worth the ransom?”

He scratched his balls.

As they whizzed away, he heard one of the human journos saying to the rig. “He’s just a janitor. He probably doesn’t even know what you’re talking about!”

He smiled and rode the floor to his destination, the Personnel Office.

“You have applied for 24 hours Casual Leave,” the console said in its crisp accentless tone. “If correct, please press 1. If incorrect, please press 2.”

Helpert pressed 1.

Less than ten minutes later, he was on his way back to Level Down-Five. He returned to the store room, packed a small kit of essentials, ordered a hot dinner from the Dumbwaiter panel and ate it while watching his Net Soap.

In today’s episode, the trillionaire who lived in seclusion on his lavish orbital ranch was attempting to seduce the beautiful syce brought up from Earth to train his cross-species mutant-equestrian race animals. The episode ended with the trillionaire about to accomplish the last peeling away of her defenses–and her garments–when his neck-com unit hummed and a holographic communication formed before them: It was his Earth-based ex-wife calling to say that she was on a shuttle about to dock with his orbital ranch: “We have to talk,” she said.

Helpert sighed and switched off the Netcomp as the familiar eight-bar theme of the soap began to play over the frozen reaction shot of the trillionaire. The soap was available in 3-D with virtual lenses as well as in a holographic version, but Helpert preferred it the old-fashioned way. After all, he was a 20th century child, even if he was living in the 21st.

He made a brief visit to Medlab on his way out, using the code key Kingston’s associate had given him. The Clone Capsule was frosted with the familiar smoky obscurity of cryogenesis. He rubbed the extruded curve of the capsule with the sleeve of his grey flannel uniform. Peering in with his face mashed against the cold silicon capsule, he could faintly make out the fleshy naked female form within, the sharp hooked nose, thin lips and copper-red hair. On his way back through Medlab he stopped to drop off not one but two large cases of Texan Vixen bacco plugs, the best brand available. Kingston was ecstatic enough to want to compose a special drone-rap anthem in his honour.

Boarding the shuttle to Luna, he felt the buzz around him. Everybody was talking about the kidnapping and the deadline for ransom payment. An elderly woman sitting beside him in C Class–the best his employee rating allowed–turned to him and asked, “Whadda think? They gonna pay or what?” He couldn’t place her accent, but the ID on her breast-pocket identified her as an F&B supervisor on Level Down-Five. He mumbled a noncommittal reply then wondered if he should suggest to her that they go easy on the cheese in the Veg Supreme. He thought better of it and they spent the rest of the 3-hour flight in silence.

She was reading a V-book, and he couldn’t help glancing over her shoulder from time to time. It was one of those historical mysteries that were so popular around the 2010′s. Time travelling detectives going back to various periods to clear up unsolved mysteries. He’d never been able to understand how people could enjoy stuff like that. Give him a good soap any day.

He was woken by a flight attendant, a bot. “Please proceed to disembark,” it informed him matter-of-factly. He looked around, rubbing his eyes. The shuttle was empty. He didn’t recall falling asleep. Emerging into the gaudy orange flares of Luna One’s dome lights, he raised his hands, shielding his maladjusted eyes. Too much time spent in that custom-lit Store Room. He needed to get out more often. As he walked across the ashy dust-field, he noticed a family with two children pointing and staring up at the sky. Glancing up, he saw Terra, a blue-green specimen suspended in ink-black solution. Floating, luminous. The peninsular triangle of North America was in view. He shook his head wistfully. Never again, he said silently. I’ve said my last goodbyes to you, old woman. He detoured around the laughing, excited children, and walked on without looking up in that direction again.

His business took him to Sea of Tranquillity. Not exactly a tourist attraction. But it was where his current contact operated from. He found the agent in a seedy subterranean condominium office. An ageing man with both Oriental and African antecedents. The man didn’t look pleased to see him.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he said sharply. His accent contrasted with his appearance. Very British, with a strong flavour of Liverpool.

“I want to come in,” Helpert said.

The agent stared at him.

“I want to come in,” Helpert repeated. By way of explanation, he added: “Had enough.”

The agent leaned back in his comfort-couch. The squishing sounds of the chair adjusting itself to his body, massaging, soothing, caressing, were mildly irritating to Helpert.

“That’s not good enough,” the agent said at last. “You’re on a posting. It’s not complete.”

“It’s complete. It’s been complete for a long time. I want out. I want my pension.”

“What are you offering?”

Helpert leaned forward, feigning anger. “Damn it. I’ve been on the job a long time. Supplied a dozen feeds, maybe more. I’ve earned my retirement. Now are you getting me out or do I have to speak to your superior. Because if I–”

“Cool your horses,” the agent said calmly. “Give me a second to check your account.” Almost literally a second later, he nodded. “Looks clean.” He saw something and reacted to it. “You fed us the Washington insight?” He looked impressed, the first sign of emotion since Helpert had walked in. “That was a big one. We brought the whole Government down with that.

The last democratically elected Government in the United States.” He stared at Helpert as if seeing him for the first time. “You did that?”

Helpert shrugged. “My job.”

The agent started to say something, hesitated, chewed his lip, then changed his mind. He spoke briefly into his terminal, then turned back to Helpert. “All right. I can have you on a flight to Robinson in less than an hour. New ID, passport, complete makeover. You’ll have a new life.” He smiled. “Great artificial beach resort on Robinson. You’ll live like a Nazi war criminal in Brazil! Babes, beach, and bumming.”

“Not Robinson,” Helpert said.

“Bova then? They’ve got the best Old West town outside of Terra. You can have your own ranch too, with real horses. Well, real AI horses. Never tell the difference. Lots of cowgirls too!” He winked.

“No, not Mars either.”

The agent looked at him curiously. “So where do you want to go? There’s nothing here on Luna, but if you want it, hell, you can have it. And the orbitals are no good, they’re under Terra jurisdiction, and if they catch you, they’ll haul your ass back to Terra and you’ll be tried for treason. Hell, you’re the biggest spy I’ve ever dealt with. You’re almost famous!” He laughed nervously. “There are people down there who would throw a rope over the nearest pole–if there were still poles on Terra–and hang you till your tongue turned blue!” Obviously another New Cowboys fan.

“I have other plans. I just want out, I don’t want to be relocated.”

The agent frowned, puzzled, his couch squeaking and humming. “No relocation? But once you’re outed, you know we can’t protect you from Law Enforcement. Terra laws are so damn hard on spies that–”

“I don’t need any kind of protection. All I need is for the Company to help prove I’m dead, and dispose of the body.”

The agent leaned forward, extricating from the couch with a sucking sound of release. Helpert tried not to grimace with distaste.

“Dead? You mean, fake a death? Body disappeared, organize a death certificate, so on?”

Helpert shook his head slowly. “No. I mean really dead. This body. Genuinely, mortally dead.”

The agent was speechless.

Helpert added: “And I’d like to be buried, not cremated. On Terra. Real grave, real coffin, real funeral service. Roman Catholic, all the bells and whistles.” He paused. “And there is one more thing.” He explained. And enjoyed the look of stunned horror on the agent’s face when he had finished. It would take more than a comfort-couch to make that man relax for a while!

He was tired when he returned to the Ship. Jet lag was bad enough when travelling to and fro between a planet’s different time zones. Jetting between simulated environments was worse. He felt dried out, withered. Even the bot attendant on the shuttle back said with robotic precision: “Your blood pressure is low, sir. Kindly take precautions.”

As he rode down to Level Down-Five, he felt a peculiar sense of nostalgia. It was like coming home. For almost six Terra years, this Ship had been his only world. The Store Room, his city. Store Room #B-64 and its adjoining extensions, his home.

He looked around the large area lined with stacks of stored product of all descriptions. He would miss this place. He would miss those quick, breathless encounters with Mirin. The surreptitious sexual liaisons that had to be cloaked as a visit to the toilet to avoid the rest of the crew learning about her affair with a store room clerk! He wondered how on earth he had ever been able to attract the captain of a starship into a sexual liaison. Perhaps that archaic phrase itself was the key: How on earth. They weren’t on earth. Terra firma. Anything went in space. This was why man had ventured out here, to breast the final frontier, taste the ultimate freedom. If not here, then where?

He performed the Download later that night. After the news broke of Mirin’s ransom money being paid and her release obtained. She was to be taken to Terra for a debriefing. There was about an hour or two of tense waiting, during which he was faced by the possibility that she would be found unfit to continue her duties and a new Captain sent in to replace her. If that happened, his entire plan went to pieces. But less than two hours later, the Net-bulletin reported that she was on a shuttle back to the ship, under heavy armed escort.

The crew of the ship was invited to assemble in Main Hall for a short celebratory party to welcome back their heroic captain. All routine duties were suspended for the duration of the party. Which gave Helpert the free time he needed to complete the last technical steps of his plan. When he was Uploading his file into the clone, he heard someone come into the section. It was Kingston and his associate, the attractive MedLab Supervisor. Helpert thought they were having some kind of a sexual tryst, but he relaxed when he saw them with one of the two boxes of bacco plugs he had given them. The penalty for being caught possessing or consuming tobacco in any form was life imprisonment. The penalty for trafficking in it was death. His secret was safe with the MedLab Supervisors. He made a mental note to leave them his backroom key code before he went upstairs.

The Upload completed, he used his Clone Capsule code key to start the De-Activation sequence on the Cryogenic monitor.

The countdown display showed ten minutes to De-Activation.

He went back to the Store Room and took a last look around. Goodbye, old buddy. Time to die. As he lay down and prepared to shoot the intravenous chemical into his neck, he realised he was committing the ultimate act of subversion. What was death if not the final rebellion. He thought back on how he had spent most of his life, spying on his own people, and wondered if it had been worth the risk, the life-threat, the stress, the stigma of being called a treasonous traitor. He thought it had.

He remembered the line he had come upon in an old biography of a 20th Century double agent. “If a spy performs small acts of betrayal against the Government of his own nation in order to achieve an enhancement in the quality of life or preservation of the common folk of that nation, his acts are more than justified. He is a trustee of his nation’s pride, not a traitor.”

He thought he had done more right than wrong. And he felt okay about it. Tired, worn, weary, but not guilty.

He pressed the trigger of the chemgun and died peacefully.

Later that night, Captain Mirin returned to a jubilant welcome from her crew and well-wishers. She was none the worse for her experience as a hostage. In fact, she looked just as she had when she had left. “The bastards just wanted the ransom of isotopes, not war,” she said to a huge burst of laughter from the packed Main Hall.

She visited the toilet soon. And was in there for about five minutes. But the Captain Mirin that emerged was not the one that went in. This woman was her in every physical aspect, down to the tiniest detail. But inside her head, she still dreamed of old betrayals and a distinct memory of how she/he had once stood in the White House and recorded the conversation that would bring down the last democratic Government of the United States.

The firm did its job immaculately. The real Captain Mirin’s body was disposed of without the shadow of a doubt. And the dead body of the Store Room clerk in #B-64 hardly attracted the interest of even the Ship-net’s hourly bulletin.

After all, there were over 4,000 crew members on a Federation starship. But only one Captain.

Or so it seemed.

Sep 02, 2005 | Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

Why We Hate Bhadralok Who Make It Big Abroad

This one’s a piece from a weekly column–one of several–I used to write.

But right now, let’s play mental footsie…

FOOTSIE
Ashok Banker

Night and Day

Talking to a well-known film director and the talk turned to Manoj Shyamalan. Or M. Night Shyamalan as he calls himself. The nub of the talk was about Night’s recent headline-making sale of his new script, Signs, for an alleged record fee. Apparently the highest fee ever paid for an original screenplay in Hollywood.

And since nobody pays more than Hollywood, the highest paid in the world. And if the newspaper reports are to believed, the fee is in the astronomical eight-figure region. Which means, over $10 million. Which in turn means over Rs 46 crores at today’s exchange rates.

That’s more than double the budget of the average big budget Hindi feature film. It’s about as much as a superhit Hindi film could expect to earn after all counts are in. It’s more than a mega film star–like Hrithik, Shah Rukh or Amitabh, the big Trimurti–get paid for a dozen movies. And as far as Hindi film scripts are concerned, hell, it’s probably more than the total sum paid for ALL scripts for ALL the Hindi films ever made in the history of Hindi cinema!

I pointed these facts out. I also pointed out the fact that I admired the hell out of Night, not only for his first two films, which I thought were excellent, but for his career success, which spelt great hope for all Indian talent worldwide.

Yet, the Hindi film director didn’t like it. In fact, he didn’t approve of Night Shyamalan’s success at all. Genuinely puzzled, I asked him why. He sniffed and made an elaborate argument revolving around superstition. He felt that films like The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable promoted superstition.

What? I asked him to explain that. He did. I still couldn’t figure him out. But to do him justice, he seemed to feel that films like this–in which category he included even horror films like Blair Witch and Stephen King novels–were regressive and anti-science.

I saw his point. But I also made a point of my own. All the movies and books he was pointing to were fiction, not fact. Nobody claimed they were about reality. Least of all Night Shyamalan himself. They were simply entertainment, and millions of intelligent people worldwide, including otherwise scientifically minded ones like myself, watched and enjoyed them hugely.

He stuck to his guns. Fine. That’s his privilege. But I soon found that he wasn’t the only one. The Hindi film industry at large has only one of two reactions to Night Shyamalan’s success: Either they say “Who? Who’s that? Never heard of him” or they discredit him.

It’s the same story with Shekhar Kapur. Or Om Puri, who has managed to carve a small but significant niche for himself with a succession of minor roles in major films, and major roles in minor hits. Or any other Indian who achieves any level of success internationally.

Is it just peer rivalry? To some extent, yes. The film industry is as jealous a place as any other. And as we all know, we Indians hate to watch one of our own actually make it big.

But there’s another aspect to it.

There’s also the deep-felt desire to be recognized by white people. By gora saabs. By Western critics, professionals, audiences. The most Hollywood-obsessed people in Bombay are the film industry folks themselves. They measure everything against their American counterparts. If you can even call them counterparts. This was always a major malaise. But of late it seems to have become an incurable disease.

And so, when one of our own, brown-skinned, desi chokras or chokris actually hits the big money button in Hollywood, they can’t stand it. Because it proves that they’re just cheap imitations living in the shadow of the big daddy. Copying shamelessly, imitating endlessly, emulating nauseatingly.

So when a Night Shyamalan or a Shekhar Kapur or any of our other brethren succeed over there. And succeed in a maha-major way. Our local bhidoos can’t stand it. They seethe. They froth. They ferment. And they bitch, bitch, bitch. You can bet your bottom dollar that after the news of Night Shyamalan hit the headlines, every Bollywood hotshot was burning with envy.

Because they know, deep down, that they can never ever succeed like Shyamalan did. Because to do that, they would have to actually do something meaningful and original. Not just copy, copy, copy.

And if they could do that, they’d be doing it. Not making endless remakes of Pretty Woman and Indecent Proposal and denying their links to the underworld while getting caught red-handed dealing with the same underworld.

Salaam, Night Shyamalan. Salaam, Shekhar Kapur. Salaam to every Indian who attempts to make it in the enormously challenging world of Hollywood entertainment. Salaam, Indian success. Those who will, do. Those who can’t, imitate.

Sep 01, 2005 | Uncategorized | Leave A Comment »

Chala Morari Horror Phillum Bananey: How to make a Hindi Horror Film Even If Your Name Isn’t Ramsey

This article first appeared in The Mahazine, a multimedia magazine on CD-Rom published in India some years ago. It was apparently the first of its kind.

Hey, Ashish, if you’re reading this…Fang U Very Much!

MAHA HORROR SHOW
PRESENTED BY THE
RUMSAY SISTERS HORROR FILM INSTITUTE
Jeena yahan, marna yahan!

MAHA HORROR SHOW
The overnight course in horror film making…
for people who only want to live one night!

MAHA GUARANTEE
Maha Horror Show is Guaranteed to turn you into an expert horror film maker in one night. By the end of this night, if you are not fully satisfied, we will return all your internal organs without deducting even one drop of blood.

CHALA MORARI HINDI HORROR FILM BANANEY…
So you want to make a horror film? Theek hai. It’s your funeral! If you have what it takes to scare the kaka out of people, we’ll show you how to take your brilliant idea from concept to execution…without executing yourself! Ready? Steady your nerves. Go!

MAHA SCRIPT DEPARTMENT
The first thing you need to make a successful horror film is a good script.
You’ll find everything you need in our Stupid Script Department. The scripts are stupid, you’re the one who’s stupid for going in there.

Khair…while you’re poking around in there–and getting poked–remember what we advise all our writers: “Just open a vein and write…what else is blood for?”

THE RUMSAY SISTERS MAHA SCRIPT METHOD
(Registered with all International and Indian script writers associations as well as the Transylvania Association of Vampires Masquerading As Scriptwriters)

After centuries of research and development–over 28,480 scriptwriters tortured at last count–we’ve found that there are only two proven ways to write a great horror film script:

1. Write What You Know
Sometimes we feel that our own lives are too boring to write about. But who are we to judge? Remember Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde? Dracula? Frankenstein? If they hadn’t sat down and written their life stories we would have been deprived of three of the greatest horror stories in history. Today, they’re three of the most wanted scriptwriters in the world–and they’re all dead!

Whether you’re a zombie or a vampire, a chudail or a chimpanzee, a nagin or a no-brain, you have a story inside you that’s waiting to come out. Cut open your chest, and let it free. Remember Hanuman? He opened his chest and showed Lord Rama his script for a rousing mythological epic. Put your heart and soul into your own script and like Bajranbali, you will also set entire nations on fire with your tail-ent!

And if you’re just an ordinary person, with no visible tail-lent (but make sure you look closely first!) then don’t think you don’t have anything to write about. Write about the horror of being a normal person in this mad, mad, mad, mad world.

If all else fails, then just add an ‘h’ for horror to your name, and become a Writher!

2. Write What Others Know
Who has the time to sit and make up original scripts? And why bother when there are so many great ideas waiting to be stolen! All you need is a TV set, a DVD player and a good secretary to take down all your flashes of inspiration.

These days, with Hollywood releasing horror films dubbed in Hindi (as they’ve done with House on Haunted Hill released as Kaun Banega Crorepati Bhoot Bangala Mein) you don’t have to feel ashamed of copying foreign horror films too. They’ve been taking our ticket money for years, now let’s take their story ideas!

CASTING DEPARTMENT
You don’t need a big starcast to make a good Hindi horror film, yaar. Just check if any five old-time heroes and heroines are sitting around bekaar and hire them. This is called the Nagin Casting Method. Better still, spend your money on one big name star to keep distributors and cast all unknowns in the other roles. This is called the Papi Gudiya Method.

PURAANE WAFADAAR
Here are some old faithfuls you must cast. No good Hindi horror film would be complete without them:

Jogindar
Katy Mirza
Sheeba
Achla Sachdev
Ashok Kumar
Goga Kapoor
Sudhir

Don’t worry if some of them are dead. It’s a horror film. Nobody will notice!

CLASSIC CHARACTERS
There are certain basic characters that will add colour and value to your film:

CANDLE KUDDI: The heroine of a horror film has to be beautiful, wear a white flowing saree and keep her long black hair open and flowing at all times. She must walk through the night singing a mournful song and carrying a candle–that does not get blown out even in the strongest wind–and she must lead the hero to a graveyard. You must never show onscreen the real reason why she goes to the graveyard alone very night and what she does with that candle. Leave it to the audience’s imagination. After all, what else could a sexily clad woman be doing to herself with a candle in a private place where nobody can see her!

KHATIYA KHADI: The raunchy chudal who does a cabaret for a roomful of desperately horny men while the khaufnaak storm rages outside. She’s likely to be heavily over-weight so remember to tell your setting department to make the floor strong enough to withstand her vigorous dancing–and the casting couch strong enough to withstand your auditions of various girls for the role!

PAHADI LATHIWALA: The old rake-thin chowkidar who always knows the past history of the haunted haveli or dak bungala. For this role, you only need to find one of the old-time heroes, dress them in the costume, ply them with lots of booze and put the camera on. They’ll keep talking for hours about their heydays in Bollywood. You can dub whatever dialogue you want later then.

KAMEENA PAISEWALA: The greedy businessman, zamindar or tycoon who has cheated and killed to acquire his fortune. We should hate him so much that by the time the bhoot or monster comes to kill him, we should cheer for the ghost! Ideally, get the financier to play this role himself and shoot it as the last scene of the schedule. Then make sure the bhoot really kills him. That way, you won’t have to worry about returning his money and you’ll get authenticity too!

PYAARI BEHENA: The very sexy, gauti sister of the hero. Always dressed in chaniya choli with elaborate jewellery and payals (barefoot of course), titillating everybody as she pretends to act all innocent and schoolgirlish. By the time she gets raped by the monster or the villains (or better still, both) you should be relieved as well as horrified. Horrified for the poor rapists who have to suffer listening to her screams, relieved for the monster who gets a female monster to match him!

SEXY BHOOTNI: This is a variation on the woman in white stereotype. The sexy bhootni is an evil creature come back from the dead to take revenge on the people who destroyed her family, her lover, or her favourite handbag. She disguises herself as a beautiful, sexy woman to seduce the men. But once their eyes are closed, she turns into her true form. Before and After. For the Before part, you can cast any sexy young starlet. For the After part, you can try using anyone’s mother in law.

ART DEPARTMENT
What’s the difference between a normal Hindi film and a Hindi horror film?
In a normal Hindi film, the emotions move you. In a Hindi horror film, the furniture moves.

Instruct your set designer to put all the furniture on wheels and the entire set on a tilt-axis. When the script runs out of steam, have a gorgeous woman chased by a bhayanak buffoon with a rubber mask. Ask five men on each side to tilt the set this way then that way so it looks like the whole house is shaking.

This technique can also be used with a four-poster bed during the hero and heroine’s suhaag raat.

CAMERA DEPARTMENT
All the weird angles and shots in horror films may make you think that the cameraman is drunk, but that’s not true. Horror film cameraman don’t need to get drunk. They get high on the excitement of doing extreme close ups of the heroine’s bosom.

There’s even a code word for this in horror film. The heroine shouts, “Mujhe bachao,” and that’s the code for the cameraman to start zooming in on her double assets.

If the heroine’s assets are not worth zooming in on, no problem. Cut to a flashback of the bhoot remembering how he once saw his beautiful bosomy sister in bed with a strange man–the start of his trauma. Better still, make the bhoot a peeping tom who keeps stopping en route to his intended victims and looks through keyholes, windows, curtains to see various couples or women in stages of undress.

After he ogles them sufficiently, he can kill them–so you can convince the censors that the scene is necessary to show how immoral behaviour always gets punished in the end.

To learn how to achieve true excellence with this technique, study the following classics of the genre:

Mehbooba
Ranga Khush
Jaani Dushman
All Ramsay Films

BLOOD DEPARTMENT
In case you’re wondering, this is one department found only in horror film units. How do you think you get the tons and tons of gore and blood that you see in horror films? Simple, you buy it from a blood supplier.

Blood suppliers can be found in any Yellow Pages directory. Look for one that is licensed by the Shri Dracula Foundation. This is a non-profit organization that believes that blood is our birthright and must be made available to every citizen of our great nation. Ask for the special bulk discount if you’re buying ten tons or more.

SOUND EFFECTS DEPARTMENT
Remember the sound of the wind blowing in Mahal? Or the sound effect of the door opening in Darwaza? How do you think those unforgettable sound effects were achieved? Not by using wind or doors, obviously! Every horror film sound effect is achieved by using a suitable sound from real life. This is a complete list of the _real_ sounds used to simulate the film sound effects. Remember: This is known only to the veterans of sound recording.

Wind Blowing — Producer farting very very slowly through a wooden flute
Curtains Rustling — Starlets taking off their clothes for the audition
Thunder — Producer farting very loudly and angrily, without the flute
Door Creaking — Director’s brain working as he tries to think after his fourteenth peg and fiftieth retake
Lightning Striking — Heroine’s dress being ripped off by villain in the make-up room
Eeiry whistling — Producer farting through a whistle, very musically
Jhoola swinging noisily — Old bed creaking as heroine humps producer to ensure role in next film

Note: Make sure the catering department has lots of channa handy for the producer to consume so that he can keep producing…gas, what else. Why the producer, you wonder? That’s because all producers are big assholes.

MAKE UP DEPARTMENT
Make up for a horror film is a great art. No ordinary film industry make up can achieve the spectacular effects of films such as Jaani Dushman or Ranga Kush for example. It requires a mastery of the art of illusion that was first perfected by the Hollywood silent horror film superstar Lon Chaney, known as the man of a thousand faces because of his talent to impersonate anybody.

But if you have to hire a make up man from the regular industrywallahs, no problem. Just make sure you keep him well and truly drunk and provide him with lots of bhang leaves to mash and mix into the make up palette. The motto should be: Rang mein bhang!

Once the actors get made up with all that bhangi rang, by the drunk make up man, they’ll make all the weird expressions possible. If that doesn’t work, tell everybody that they’re not getting paid for the movie and see the faces they make!

BLACKCAT COPYCAT DEPARTMENT
If at any time you have any doubt, just refer to any of the following films for inspiration, perspiration or constipation. If you don’t find what you’re looking for in any of these films, then beware, you have an original idea. This is strictly against the regulations of Howrah Horror Film Makers Ass-Ossiation. It is a crime punishable under the Penile Code.

DIRECTION DEPARTMENT
Direction is the most important aspect of making a good horror film. That’s why you need a compass. So that you always know what direction you’re heading: North South East or West. Ideally, good horror films are made in the North, facing South, with your eyes looking East, and your bum pointing West. For further directions consult your school atlas or Shri Dracula’s Book of Fang Shui.

EDITING DEPARTMENT
(This section has been edited out for reasons of length)

Kachh-kachh-kachh.

(So has the rest of the article)

Kachh-kachh-kachh.

THE END DEPARTMENT
So now you’ve made a horror film. Congratulations. And welcome to the club. Which club? That’s right, The Witch Club.

Now all you have to do is release the film, and let it run. And keep running, and running, and running, and running, and….

Sep 01, 2005 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »