The Buddha and the Musashi: Two Ways In The World
The passage that follows was written by me as an Author’s Note to the Japanese edition of Prince of Ayodhya. It’s unedited as yet, and of course, when published it will appear in Japanese, translated by the esteemable Yutaka Ohshima, who is almost single-handedly responsible for the Japanese editions of my Ramayana series. Thank you, Yutaka-san, for undertaking the labour of love, translating the Ramayana, as well as for constantly compelling me to work to a higher standard. This short note, barely a sketch of a few random thoughts, is also the result of your encouragement.
Author’s Note To The Japanese Edition
Two books are upon my desk as I write these words: One is a collection of the teachings of the Buddha. The other is The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi.
One was an Indian prince who lived two thousand five hundred years ago, and grew to loathe his life of wealth and prosperity and sensual pleasure, giving it all up to go upon a journey of self-realization that gave us the single most important moral creed of all humankind: the way of Absolute Peace. The other was a young samurai who lived in the 16th century, and was gifted with a great and terrible skill for mortal combat, as well as a deep understanding of the philosophy of violence that he distilled into his masterful book on Kendo, Go Rin No Sho (The Book of Five Rings). One, a master of peace and non-violence. The other, a master of the art of killing.
I feel that both these men, separated by a great divide of time, culture and philosophy, had a great and powerful link. Perhaps some day I hope to attempt a story that shows this bond, and shows how violence and non-violence are eternally interlinked, two sides of the hastily minted coin of humanity. This bond, this eternal dilemma between the way of the warrior and the way of the void, is the question at the heart of the Ramayana, the oldest and one of the two greatest epics of India.
It is no coincidence that the Buddha was born not far from the place where Rama Chandra, the hero of the Ramayana, was born. Or that Rama’s tale is one filled with great exploits of combat and violence, and was followed historically by the other great epic of India, the Mahabharata, which told the story of a war so terrible, it is believed to be the greatest war that was ever waged upon Earth.
For the Buddha was the product of an age that followed the time of Ramayana and Mahabharata, and his quest for Peace began because of this terrible history of violence that had preceded his time. Remember that the holy sages who composed both these great epics were men sworn to uphold the values of peace in much the same fashion as Buddhist monks would do a few years later, and continue to do even today, Buddha be praised.
But it begs the question: Why would holy men compose tales of violence and adventure? For the same reason that a deeply spiritual man ranks as perhaps the greatest killing machine that lived. Despite his brutal, violence-spattered life, Miyamoto Musashi’s philosophy of Kendo is no less beautiful than the teachings of the Buddha, or the tenets of dharma that Rama adhered to so diligently. In the end, it is the same mystery that both the Musashis of this world as well as the Buddhas seek to explore, the Ramas as well as the holy brahmins: The way of the warrior, and the way of the void. Which is the best way? How should one choose? Must one choose at all?
All great stories ask great questions. The Ramayana asks the greatest question of all: How should we live? It is the story of a man who possessed the beauty of the Buddha in mind, as well as the mastery of combat of a Musashi. Yet his choices were not his alone to make: he played a part in a tale of which his own life was only a sub-plot. In time, his deeds were acknowledged as so great, that to Indians everywhere he is considered the greatest human that ever lived. His life, the perfect life. He, the perfect son, brother, husband, warrior, clansman, king. He used his gifts for violence in service of others, and in doing so, embodied dharma, and is now regarded as a god. As a mortal avatar of the great Hindu god Vishnu, remaining unaware of his own divinity till the very end of his days. His story is considered the apocryphal story of good versus evil.
Yet, I often wonder. Was not Rama seeking the very same thing that the Buddha sought when he left his wife and son, his palace, his silks and gold, and walked out into the dark night of the forest? Was it not the same question that haunted Musashi in his cave during those last years of his life, when he composed Go Rin No Sho? Is not that same question echoing in our minds even today, linking us all together in one vast family of humankind? How should we live? How?
The Ramayana shows us one possible answer to that question. It was uniquely Rama’s answer. But I like to think that in some afterlife, the Buddha, Musashi, and all the other great men and women of history, look down at the epic tale of Rama’s struggle as it unfolds, and nod approvingly. For this is a good answer. Yes, a very good one. Read it yourself and see.
M. Night Shyamalan’s “Sick” Sense and The Book That (Might Have) Inspired It: Book Review of Orson Scott Card’s Lost Boys
If M. Night Shyamalan ever makes a sequel to The Sixth Sense, he should seriously consider adapting Lost Boys. Or has he already? The very fact that Lost Boys was first published way back in 1992, years before Shyamalan made his dazzling debut that shot to the top of the biggest all-time grossers in Hollywood history, makes me wonder for a moment. Could it be that apna talented young Manoj-bhadralok actually read Lost Boys in its first publication? Because, if he didn’t, then the ‘twist in the tale’ of both The Sixth Sense and Lost Boys is more than amazing; it’s close to supernatural!
Well, Shyamalan is certainly talented enough to have come up with his zinger of a ‘twist’ entirely on his own, and his stately, sedate pacing, masterful direction, and superbly nuanced screenplay certainly made The Sixth Sense way more than a clever-idea film. But it’s hard to believe that Lost Boys essayed an eeirily similar plot device, and did so years before Shyamalan’s movie, and had no influence at all upon that standout film.
As my old friend, Bollywood producer, Grabber Singh would put it: “Kitney idea the? Sirf ek? Aur woh bhi iss book mein? Bahut na-insaafi hain!”
But, unlike Grabber Singh, since I certainly don’t know what did or didn’t influence Shyamalan–for all I know, he’s never even read an Orson Scott Card book in his life, I can only muse on that a moment, and then move on. Because it’s enough to know that Lost Boys existed before The Sixth Sense and that it exists even now, in a reissued paperback edition along with a number of Orson Scott Card’s other highly readable backlist novels.
The reason for the reissue, presumably, is a change of publishers or a lapsing of rights. But there’s also Card’s new novel, Magic Street. Card is best known as the author of the Ender series of thoughtful science fiction novels, the linked Shadow series, and probably less-well known but equally loved for his Tales of Alvin Maker series of marvelous, magical alternate history novels. But what most SF readers don’t know is that he’s also the author of some wonderfully written, genuinely moving, and eeirily effective supernatural suspense novels.
Lost Boys is part of this lesser known genre that Card has worked in over the years, but found little success in, compared to his SF novels at least. (Each instalment of the Shadow series has hit the New York Times Bestseller lists like clockwork and won him a whole new generation of young readers who weren’t even in boxers when the Ender novels first came out. That situation might change now, with the publication of Magic Street, which, though I’ve read only a couple of chapters of so far, seems to be a wonderful urban fantasy, and happily, seems to be doing much better on the sales charts as well.
Lost Boys isn’t your typical supernatural novel. It’s definitely not a horror novel, by any stretch of the genre imagination. There’s no violence in it, no explicit horror, and almost all the tension and suspense comes from the conflicts and crises faced by the characters in their everyday lives. In this sense it reminds of the excellent suspense thrillers of Douglas Kennedy, especially The Job and The Big Picture both of which rely more on the daily work-and-relationship problems of their protagonists rather than John Grisham-type mega-million dollar stakes or mafia assassins or any of the usual suspense thriller fight-or-flight devices. (Although, Kennedy’s novels have plenty of violence, as well as fight and flight both!)
On the surface, it’s a deceptively simple book. Card even starts each chapter with nursery rhyme-like opening sentences…
“This is the car they drove…”
“This is the house they moved into…”
“This is the company where Step worked…”
…and so on right to the last chapter (which starts thus:
“This is how the Fletchers found their way to the end of 1983…”
This is a novel about a family. Step Fletcher, his pregnant wife DeAnne, and their three children move to Steuben, North Carolina, because that’s the only place where he’s been able to get a job after his royalty income from the bestselling computer game he designed slows to a trickle. The job is with a small computer software firm whose sole claim to fame and success is a word processing program. Step is heavily under-employed here, a brilliant game programmer forced to take this humiliating middling-pay job in order to support his family through this financial crisis. (It’s 1983. There’s a recession on.)
The job turns out to be an awful one; his boss is an ass, his department head is literally a Dick, and the only friend he gets along with there, a young, brilliant programmer who’s really the talent powering the engine of the firm, is possibly a child molestor who all but begs Step to let him babysit his children. As if.
DeAnne isn’t have it much easier. Managing three small kids, an advanced pregnancy, and the inevitable difficulties to settling into a new town and house are compounded when she and Step realize that their oldest child, 8-year old Stevie, is having a really hard time at his new school. If they believe Stevie’s version, then his class teacher is a real monster, his classmates are mean country brats, and even his straight-A record isn’t likely to save him from flunking the year.
No wonder then that Stevie starts imagining fictitious playmates to spend his free time with, shunning his little kid brother and sister, and, after a while, even his mother and father. Of course, it takes them a long while to realize that he’s telling the truth about how awful his teacher really is, and about those invisible ‘friends’. It takes them even longer to understand that those ‘friends’ are really boys more or less his own age who went missing and are suspected to be the victims of a serial child-killer. By then of course, it’s much too late.
Now, the important thing to know about Lost Boys is that despite its quite routine story premise, it isn’t written like a Christopher Golden or like most similar novels. On the contrary. Not once do we see the killer’s point of view, or even Stevie’s. Well, except for the very first chapter, more of a prologue really–but at that point, we don’t know whose point of view it is, and I’m sure as hell not telling you.
Almost the entire novel is divided between Step Fletcher’s point of view and DeAnne Fletcher’s point of view. The daily problems of Step’s struggle to retain his dignity at his humiliating job while trying to find an escape route that will enable him to come out of his financial bind without losing the company medical insurance he needs so badly for DeAnne’s pregnancy, DeAnne’s artful and stressfull managing of the household, three kids, Stevie’s problems at school, Step’s late hours and work tension, her pregnancy, and the well-meaning but often intrusive, or downright aggressive fellow Mormons in the community, she’s got a lot to juggle.
Card’s strength lies in plunging us so deeply into the lives and minds and problems of his protagonists, you have to actually remind yourself that this is a supernatural suspense novel, because it reads for the most part like any good mainstream fiction. But the supernatural element is an integral part of the story, and when it finally rears its scary head, trust me, you’ll find all that emotional investment in the characters’ lives and job hassles to be well worth the investment, for the payoff is fantastic. I won’t give away much more about the plot of Lost Boys because that twist at the end is really something to savour. Even though its terribly sad, heartbreaking, and the poignancy of the last pages lingers with you for days after you put the book down.
You should also know up front that Card is a Mormon whose books and stories are always deeply invested with his own personal, unique sense of morality. Don’t worry, there’s no preaching here. But yes, there is a lot of moralizing, and all of it is completely relevant and related to the characters and their situation. All the Fletcher family, kids included, are Card-carrying Mormons, you could say. (Sorry, couldn’t resist that one!) And the book is all the better for it. Because its such a relief to read a good supernatural novel which isn’t filled to gagging point with drunks, addicts, self-obsessed paranoics, and all those dysfunctional misfits that seem to be must-haves for most novels of this genre.
Card’s Mormonism manifests itself throughout this finely crafted, heartfelt novel as a warm, humane, beautifully rendered fable about a family of five wonderful human beings struggling to maintain dignity and balance in a time of great stress and conflict. It lifts the story to a plane of moral beauty that I’ve not found in many novels. It reminds me of the very first Orson Scott Card novel I read, decades ago, called Hot Sleep, a thinly veiled science fiction adventure with a biblical allegory. Or even his chilling, brilliant short stories in the early collection Unaccompanied Sonata in which the original short story ‘Ender’s Game’ first appeared, and which he later expanded to novel form to find great success.
I won’t deny also that the book appealed to me, as a non-smoking, non-drinking father of two, with an amazingly similar moral outlook and that at times, I felt I was almost reading about myself and my family. And I’m a desi living in apna Mumbai, yaar! What I’m trying to say is that it’s rare to find a good story about a good man. And Lost Boys is one such rare book.
Since discovering it recently for the first time, I quickly pounced on copies of Card’s other supernatural suspense novels. Unfortunately, Homebody didn’t work for me, not even halfway worth reading, and even Treasure Chest isn’t looking that great, frankly. But I’m hoping Magic Street will be mucho better. Let’s see.
Meanwhile, Lost Boys is really a terrific novel about a family’s struggle for survival and dignity. And a creepy ghost story with a dynamite twist at the end. (Manoj, naughty boy, you! Give it back!)
This is a warm, beautiful, sad, humane, and ultimately, profoundly moving novel that deserves a place on the reading list of anyone who’s fond of supernatural suspense.
And, if you give it a chance, a place in your heart as well.
5 Billion Belindas: A short story by Ashok Banker
This one’s a blast from the past. An old short story I wrote like, twenty years ago.
I had forgotten all about it, until I found it tucked away in a long-forgotten website run by an old friend. I didn’t even remember giving it to him back when he started the site.
There are a few dozen more like this around somewhere, but don’t ask me where. I tend to forget about old stories because… well, because I’m usually too busy writing new ones! But also because sometimes, I cringe and wince at those oldies–definitely not goldies, some of them.
For its length, though, this one’s pretty okay. See for yourself. It’s a one-shot idea. In, boom, out.
And the reason it works, I think, is that it doesn’t try to do more–no padding, no unnecessary description, no ‘fleshing out’ of characters, nothing more than just that one idea, and a swift, graceful exit.
And for the trivia record, there was an actual Belinda once. Except that I wasn’t the one obsessed with her. Someone else was. A long time ago, in another place, another age.
But there was no photograph involved. And no curse.
5 Billion Belindas
“Want to see her picture?”
Ravi looked up at his friend. In all the years he had known Virat, he’d never seen him so depressed. The guy was really heartbroken.
“Forget it,” he said. “Forget her, forget the whole thing, Virat. Let’s go out, catch a movie, unwind, just like old times. What do you say?”
But Virat just shook his head and looked gloomily into his drink. He was just having a cola, but he looked like an alcoholic on his 10th peg. “Nahi, yaar,” he said morosely.
Ravi looked at Virat. The guy hadn’t shaved in days, and from the crumpled, stained shirt he was wearing, he probably hadn’t bathed either. Disgusting. “Come on, man. It can’t be that bad. Okay, so she ditched you. You can get a dozen other girls like that.” He snapped his fingers. “Stop moping around and get over it. Get on with your life, man. You can’t go on this way.”
Virat just shook his head sadly and kept his eyes on the cola. “You don’t understand. She’s no ordinary woman, Ravi. You should see her picture, then you’ll understand.”
Ravi was getting irritated now. “So she’s beautiful? Sexy? Fine, I’ll take your word for it. But she’s not the only one out there, pal.”
Virat shook his head again, still not looking at Ravi. “You don’t understand.” He paused and swallowed some more cola. “I see her face everywhere. The liftman, the doorman, my neighbours, people on the street, the people at work…everybody has her face. Even you.”
Ravi almost laughed. “I know what you mean. Everything reminds you of her. But–”
Virat interrupted him. “No. Everybody is her. Everybody has her face. Literally.”
Ravi stared at him. Maybe Virat needed a psychiatrist, not a friend. “What do you mean?”
Virat gestured morosely at the window. “I mean that every person out there, the entire population of the planet, every single human being, looks exactly like Belinda. It’s like the world suddenly became a planet full of 5 billion Belindas.”
Ravi sighed. This was worse than he thought. “Look, Virat,” he said gently. You’re tired, man. You haven’t slept since God-knows-when. You’ve been cooped up in here for days. You need to get out a bit, get some fresh air.”
“Don’t you get it, Ravi? I can’t go anywhere. Do you know what’s it like? Do you have any idea? It’s pure torture! Even you…” he looked up briefly at Ravi, shuddered, and averted his eyes. “I can’t take it any more. I wish I’d never looked at the goddamn thing.”
“What thing?”
“The damn picture. That’s what started this whole thing.”
Ravi was beginning to wonder if he should call a hospital and have Virat admitted for treatment. “Yaar, Virat, what are you talking about?”
Virat sighed. “Ravi, there’s no Belinda. At least not in real life. This whole obsession started with my looking at a photograph of a woman named Belinda. Apparently the photo was cursed. Anybody who looks at it even once gets the curse. After that, he sees only Belinda’s face on every person he meets. The only way to break the curse is to show the picture to another man–by passing it on to him.”
Ravi stared. “You really believe this crap?”
Virat picked up an envelope lying on the table beside him. “This is the photograph.”
Ravi reached for it, but Virat held on to it for a moment. “Ravi, remember. I didn’t force you to see this, it has to be your choice. Or the curse won’t get passed on.”
Ravi laughed. “Yaar, you’ve been reading too many horror novels!”
He took the envelope and yanked out a postcard sized picture. He looked at it for a moment, then shrugged. “She’s cute,” and put the picture back in the envelope.
Virat stared at him. Then he grinned happily. “It’s working!” He touched Ravi’s face. “I can see you now! Ravi, I can see your face again! She’s gone! The curse is lifted!”
Ravi stood up. “Virat, I have to go. Chall, yaar, I’ll be in touch, take care.”
He left the flat as fast as he could. Going down alone in the lift, he snickered to himself: The things people could delude themselves into believing! A cursed photograph. Five billion Belindas! Ridiculous.
He laughed as he stepped out into the street–then stopped abruptly. And looked around. The street was filled with hundreds of people rushing home from work, going to catch trains, buses, driving by, hawking stuff… Ravi looked at each one in turn, his eyes growing wider in disbelief.
“No!” he said, loud enough to make people turn and frown at him. “It’s not possible! Not everybody! No!”
Upstairs in his flat, Virat heard Ravi’s long, strangled scream and smiled. He whistled as he shaved, preparing to go out and enjoy Saturday night.
Banville Bags The Booker…And Banker The Blogger Predicted It!
A reporter from Times of India, New Delhi, Sunaina Kumar, called me thrice in the past month, asking for the usual ‘quotable quotes’ about the books and authors nominated for the Man Booker Prize 2005.
Since I’d read several of the books in the running, I commented on various titles. You can read my review of one shortlisted title, Ali Smiths’ The Accidental elsewhere on this blog–use the search bar at the top of the page to find it. Typing in Ali Smith should do it.
But each time the TOI Delhi reporter called me, she always asked, “Who’s your favourite?”
And each time, I replied “John Banville for The Sea.” And I gave her several reasons why.
She laughed, wrote it down, published my comments, and I promptly forgot about it, as one should with quotable quotes given out to reporters.
But it turned out yesterday that Banville actually won. He was the dark horse in the Booker race, with odds of 7 to 1 against him, and the only one in the six-book shortlist that no major (or minor) critic in the UK or USA had picked as the winner, or even as a possible winner.
That’s not to say that anyone’s complaining. It’s not a case of some pulp novelist walking away with the prize when everyone else is a heavy hitter. It’s quite the opposite: Banville is so highly regarded and so much a ‘writer’s writer’ with his exquisite prose and mesmeric structure, that everyone assumed the Booker panel would pick someone more, well, popular.
Zadie Smith was a hot favourite, especially since her nominated book, On Beauty, was set in America, which means it has twice the sales and critical-acclaim a typically Brit book would have got.
They picked all the others. Except Banville. But now that he’s won, they’re all delighted, of course, even amazed and pleased in a way.
But nobody thought he’d win.
Except for one lone Blogger here in Mumbai, India.
I have proof too. As I said, there were three articles in which I was quoted. I couldn’t find links to two of them, but I found one, dated August 31st, and you can get to it by clicking on the title of this blog post (above).
As you can see, I even said “Expect the unexpected” when predicting that Banville would win. (I said a great deal more but as usually happens with quotable quotes, most of it gets left on the editing table for lack of space. Still it’s better than having one’s quote attributed to someone else entirely–that happened on one previous occasion and it can be quite irritating!)
I’m thrilled that Banville won. The only thing that might make me happier is if it had been an Indian novelist–and I mean, really Indian, as in apna bhadralok, writing about Indian characters, and Indian settings. It’s happened before of course.
I’m sure it’ll happen soon again.
“He’s Still Out There”: Why John Carpenter’s Halloween movies are still so damn good
Not many movies stand the test of time. Even fewer horror movies do. Horror movies are notoriously cheap on production and quality, and viewed ten or twenty years later, they’re often more campy than chilling. You could actually get a bunch of friends your age together at Halloween, sit down with a lot of beverages (I’m a teetollar but you go ahead and have yourself a cold one) and crisp snacks, and spend a whole night howling and slapping your thighs while watching some of those old howlers.
At some point, you’ll call it a night (or morning of All Saints Day) and stand around the messed-up living room, going, ‘How the hell did we ever find these things scary?’ Call it the 20-year curse of low-budget horror movies, or call it just a nightmare on horror film production street, it’s an unremmiting law of the genre that these flicks offer diminishing returns as time goes by.
But a few horror movies manage to beat the rap. They still manage to work the same cruel magic on you, still manage to make you jump in your seat (watch out, oh crap, you got brewskie all over Marie’s new couch covers, damnit, Tim!), wince a time or two, drop your jaw and mouth-breathe in anticipation, and even, at their finest moments, scare the bejeesus out of you.
One of those rarities happens to be John Carpenter’s Halloween movies. Not the whole 8-movie series, or hmm, is it 9?, but just three choice ones that I think still stand the test of time, and can give you a jump or two on that beer-stained couch.
We all know the basic drill: On Halloween night in 1963, six year old Michael Myers brutally murdered his sister in the small town of Haddonfield Illinois. Now, 15 years later, on Halloween night 1978, he’s escaped from a mental institution and decides to swing by the old home town to visit the old house, maybe stick a few trick or treaters while he’s around, just for old time’s sake.
His old doc, Dr. Sam Loomis (played by Donald Pleasance back when he still had some turf on his roof, comes to warn Haddonfield Police that Michael might like to offer a more violent variation of the old trick-or-treat game, but of course, in the finest tradition of classic horror films, nobody takes him too seriously him until it’s too late–way too late, halfway through the sequel in fact!
A very young, blond, and extremely likable Jaime Lee Curtis stars in her first role as Laurie Strode and gets to play tag with the visiting Mr. Myers, for reasons that don’t become clear until the end of Halloween II and which I won’t give away here–not until you’ve seen the DVDs at least, heh heh heh. She’s the babysitter who meets the brat out of hell for most of the movie, and she plays more or less the classic slasher flick victim heroine.
Now, she’s not a fighter, not really, but when it comes to the pinch, she doesn’t just scream and say ‘Stab me, stab me now’ either. I’m just trying to warn you (or remind you, depending) that this is not about her versus The Shape (as Michael came to be called by fans of the series in later years). Because nothing can really fight The Shape or kill The Shape. But, ah, it’s way too early for that still; we’re still talking about the first film–or actually the first two films here.
In case it’s been a while since you’ve last visited this gem of 80′s horror film-making, or, incredibly, haven’t seen it at all as yet, then you should know that Halloween II continues exactly where the first film ended, literally moments after Laurie and Dr. Sam Loomis have had their climactic run-in with Michael, and after Michael has had a dramatic disagreement with a front lawn.
I’d strongly recommend renting or buying both movies together. And if you want more, get Halloween H2O. It’s by far the best of the sequels. But if you’re like me, an inveterate horror film fan, you might still want to plough your way through the other five (or is it six) sequels as well. Well, why not make a night of it, right? Go ahead, have a blast.
What makes Halloween (or Harrowing, as we call it in my house) was the quiet chill. This isn’t a Nightmare on Elm Street entry, with explicit gore, or a Friday the Thirteenth movie with explicit teenage nudity. (Friday the Thirteenth, by the way, just took the Halloween formula, sexed it up, dumbed it down, and ran with it–and is still running, to the best of my knowledge. Keep going, fellas! I’m right behind you…not.)
Sure, there is a lot of violence here, and a little shower-curtain nudity, but those are not the reasons why you watch a Halloween film. Halloween is one of the most tastefully made horror film franchises ever made. It’s extremely well shot, with the camerawork capturing late Seventies smalltown USA so perfectly that it works just as well as a slice of life of that whole period. It doesn’t even matter that the Special Features featurette tells you that the film/s were shot in suburban LA, not smalltown Illinois as the film claims. It’s that whole ‘feel’ that it just gets so right.
Throughout the film, the camera set-ups are just amazingly well done. Creeply, freaky, with beautifully designed lighting (the moments were Michael Myers steps out of the shadows into the gritty light is pure cinematic beauty), and masterfully designed movements and tracks. From the very first frame, Halloween looks and feels like a legit film, not just a low-budget horror flick, and that credibility and quality adds immeasurably to its viewing experience. It maintains that sedate stately camerawork throughout, even in the most horrific moments, and while I don’t claim that it’s Hitchcock, it’s certainly a good enough homage.
The second thing that makes Halloween great 80′s horror is John Carpenter’s score. It’s still as chilling as it was when the film was first released, and doesn’t seem dated by even a day. You can take all the big digital scores produced today on mega-budgets by Oscar-winning music composers, and Carpenter’s simple theme on a synthesizer still outperforms them for sheer background atmospheric value. At times, just that camerawork and that score, with not a word being spoken (or just maybe a few lines of a conversation picked up in passing, or on a phone call) and Halloween conveys more menace and mood than a dozen wannabe horror movies.
Debra Hill’s script, co-written with director Carpenter, is pitch-perfect too. There aren’t any corny lines or at least not any unknowingly corny ones–a lot of the characters are kids or bubblegummers after all–and structurally the script is a perfect two-and-a-half act, with the last half carried over to the next film, and the next, and the next, in the long-honoured tradition of ‘it ain’t over yet, folks’ which horror film espouses.
The casting is perfect too, with even the most trivial bystander or onlooker, or screaming neighbour just right for that moment. And of course, Jamie Lee Curtis, very young, very blonde, and so endearing in her first major starring role, is a star from frame one.
The violence is carefully crafted. There’s no attempt to outdo each murder, to splash the gore and shock you out of your popcorn. At the same time, there’s careful thought given to the killings, with more is less being the maxim. So while you don’t actually see a lot of blood splashing or knives hacking and hacking endlessly, the killings are brutal and sudden and effective as hell.
They get more effective by the second film, where some of the murders are worth waiting for, just to see ‘how this creep dies’ or ‘that slut gets her commuppance’. Yup, also in the tradition of teenage horror flicks, Halloween follows the morality line, with each victim doing something unlikable to justify, however remotely, Myers gutting them.
Even the Undying Beast, so familiar from countless horror franchises now, seems original and fresh in the first sequel. The fact that they don’t try to explain why with corny pseudo-scientific rationale just makes you respect the makers all the more. Like a force of nature, he just goes on, and it’s only in the later sequels that that repeated ‘fall and rise’ of Michael Myers starts to get wearisome.
Which is why, unless you want to spend the whole night experiencing the diminishing returns principle, I’d advise you to go straight from Halloween I and II to Halloween H2O. It’s set 20 years later, in the year Y2K. Jamie Lee Curtis returns, and so does Michael and the doc. And if you haven’t watched the movies in between, it works almost as well as the first pair. In some ways, it’s a pretty damn good third entry. If only so many other ripoffs hadn’t played all the cards that are there to be played in this particular game of slash poker.
In the end, if you really want a night of quiet terror this Halloween season, then I can’t recommend anything better than the film that took its name from the season. And lives up to it.
Conversation in a Dead Language: Interview with American author Lee Siegel
This interview first appeared as part of my Book Chaat series on Rediff.com
An American by birth and nationality, Lee Siegel is no foreigner to India in the literary sense. He’s a trained magician and professor of Indian religions at the University of Chicago. Formerly, he was with the University of Hawaii, where he penned Net of Magic: Wonder and Deceptions in India and City of Dreadful Night: A Tale of Horror and the Macabre in India.
With Love in a Dead Language, Siegel returned once more to his favourite culture, with a marvellously entertaining romp through Indian sexuality, heritage and academia.
A charming and darkly humorous “character” himself, Professor Siegel is blessed with that great literary trait–to be able to absorb and retain more from a single visit than most people acquire in a lifetime of living. I had the pleasure of conducting this interview with him during a visit to India to launch the Indian edition of Love in a Dead Language.
Q1. You seem to have made a career out of writing books about India. You’re also a Professor of Indian religions. How and when did this fascination with India originate?
When I was in the third grade–each kid in the class had to do a notebook on a country and I was assigned India (even though I wanted Israel for no other reason than I had heard of it). I cut pictures out of magazines and books (really amazing, evocative pictures of just what you’d expect: snake charmers, the Taj Mahal, maharajas, Gandhi, nautch girls, lepers, sadhus, and the usual gang) and, of course, I plagiarized snippets of information like “More people die of snake bite in India than anywhere else in the world,” and “people in India worship the cow.” I love stuff like that. While doing “research” for that school project, I remember reading in the World Book Encyclopedia about child marriage in India and thinking: “Gee, if I was an Indian I wouldn’t have any homework or even have to school–I’d be married.” All my books have been attempts to rewrite that third-grade project, that lost notebook.
Q2. And the inspiration for Love in a Dead Language?
I teach at the University of Hawaii where one day I was sitting, having a beer, with a very serious male graduate student, discussing his dissertation topic (nothing to do with snake charmers, nautch girls, or child marriage) when a very beautiful girl, obviously Indian, passed and said hello to him. When I asked him about her, he shrugged: “oh, she’s just some hippie chick. Her parents moved here from India when she was a kid. She doesn’t know anything about India. She’s not interested either.” That planted the seed for the plot. I’ve never spoken to the girl.
Q3. The novel is a grab-bag of virtually every kind of literary technique under the sun: Letters, diaries, quotations from real books and nonexistent ones, translations, footnotes, illustrations, caricatures, scrolls…. Why did you choose this approach over a straight linear narrative?
Well, the book is, I hope, about many different ways of trying to describe love, about the way words fail, (although often attaining something in that failure). So the form provided a context for a wide range of voices engaged in that endeavor.
Q4. You’re careful to mention at one point that despite the title, Sanskrit is not really a dead language. But to us in India, sadly, it’s just that. It often seems as if only Western scholars and academicians have any interest in studying this rich motherlode of our culture. For instance, most of the major translations of ancient Indian epics, including The Mahabharat are being conducted in US universities or countries like Germany and Sweden. Why do Westerners have such an enduring interest in our culture?
I can only speak for myself. When I decided that I needed to go to graduate school (to avoid being drafted and being sent to Vietnam) I knew I wanted to study an ancient culture, a great civilization, one that had survived: you couldn’t go to China; there was no longer the Greece, Egypt, or Rome of antiquity. But my impression was that you could still see ancient India today, that wonderful traditions persisted. And I was right–I ended up studying with a pandit in Puri whose methods were thousands of years old. This is, of course, very charming for a foreigner, but I can very well understand why a young person in India would not be interested, or might even feel such persistent institutions were preventing economic development. I’m sure that, on my way to India, I must have sat in airport transit lounges next to Indians on their way to study engineering or physics in America.
Q5. Do you see a great increase in popular interest in things Indian in the USA recently? Perhaps in the wake of the popularity of authors like Arundhati Roy, Vikram Seth and others–including yourself of course!
Like everything else, cultures come in and go out of fashion. India was very groovy in the Beatles period. Now, I’m not sure. I don’t want to have to look at people in bell-bottom pants again, but I’d love to believe that Americans are interested, culturally and politically, and in other ways as well, in India. There are so many truly great Indians writing in English and it’s very exciting to me that U.S. publishers have not been afraid to make their work available. The enthusiastic response of readers to that availability has been spectacular enough to encourage more Indian writers, a new generation of gifted authors. This has nothing to do with me as a writer, but a great deal to do with me as a reader. I’m a big fan of Roy, Seth, Rushdie, Mistry, Ghosh, Tharoor, and the list goes on. G.V. Desani, R.K. Narayan, and Valmiki would be on my list of favorite authors of all time.
Q6. The biography for the dust jacket of her book that “Tajma Hall” provides to Professor Roth in the novel reads remarkably like the BSP (Blatant Self Promotion) that’s motivating so many socialites and celebrities here to turn authors. Have you had a chance to swim in the shark-infested waters of urban Indian high society?
No. My friends in India are street performers who live in the Shadipur Depot, an amazing Delhi slum. That’s a snooty answer. I love shark-infested waters. I’ve just never been invited to jump in for the swim.
Q7. Your novels suggest that you’ve met a fair number of interesting characters in India–you seem to know some of the familiar ‘types’ here. Could you share with us some of your encounters with Indian characters–famous or otherwise?
The only famous person whom I know in India is Khushwant Singh–he’s one of my great heroes, a man that I am so utterly charmed by that I always telephone him as soon as I arrive in Delhi in hopes of drinking some of his scotch right away. I’d like to meet Phoolan Devi and Miss Universe (especially at the same party and I hope Khushwant’s invited too). I’ve written about most of the other characters who have enchanted me.
Q8. What’s the worst thing that ever happened to you in India? And the best?
The great thing about writing about India is that when something really
terrible happens I can say to myself “this is going to make a great story.” And so the worst things that have happened have also been the best.
Q9. How similar is Professor Lee Siegel to Professor Leopold Roth? Are there any Lalita Guptas in your life? Or any Anang Saighals?
Professor Roth was a jerk. That’s why I killed him. No, no Lalita Guptas or Anang Saighals, thank god.
Q10. I believe you’re also a professional magician? Tell us something about how that came about.
No, I’m not a professional magician, that being someone who gets paid to entertain in Las Vegas or at children’s birthday parties. But I wanted to do a book on Indian magicians and so, in hopes of being able to meet them, I learned magic. I didn’t want to introduce myself at a Professor but as an American magician. The result was my book, Net of Magic. Traveling and performing with the jadugars of Shadipur was truly one of the most wonderful experiences in my life and I remain friends with them. I recently went to India with Penn and Teller to make a television film on Indian magic. It will air this fall.
Q11. Has magic influenced your work as a writer? There’s clearly a lot of sleight-of-hand in your books! And in Love in a Dead Language, there’s almost a sense of a Houdini-like attempt to create a spectacular, epic theatre of ideas.
Oh, yes, for me writing is fundamentally prestidigitorial. My involvement in magic taught me that everybody needs, craves, loves to be deceived. I know I do. Good magicians and good writers give us the pleasure of seeing the reality of illusions (or is it the other way around?)
Q12. Let’s talk about films. The novel mentions a great many old Hollywood films, some real some perhaps imaginary. Even in your previous novel City of Dreadful Night, the influence of cinema seems pervasive. Does cinema influence you a lot? In what way?
I loved movies as a kid. I remember the scene in Around the World in Eighty Days when Cantinflas and David Niven saved the Indian girl from being burned on her husband’s funeral pyre. It was utterly thrilling and the sowing of yet another seed of Indological fascination. My parents were in the movie business and so I was explosed to it throughout my childhood. I don’t go to movies anymore because I can’t smoke, drink, or talk in the theater. But I rent videos. Usually old ones. Yes, usually the pleasure is a regressive one.
Q13. In a related sense, you’re able to use tropisms of various fiction genres–mystery, suspense, horror, even porn–while not succumbing to the cliches. That suggests you read a lot of popular fiction. Do you? If so, what are your favourites and why?
No, I don’t read that much popular fiction, although sometimes I think I ought to. When I was writing City of Dreadful Night, I tried to read popular horror books but without much gratification. It’s a genre for teenage boys. My interest in romance and (to a slight degree) porn as genres, when I was working on Love in a Dead Language was, again, an interest in the sundry conventions of writing about love. Bad writing can be very interesting, more revealing about certain things than great writing. Great writing defies us.
Q14. Do you think there’s truly a dichotomy between popular genre fiction and ‘literature’ in modern fiction? Or are some critics right in asserting that some popular authors like Stephen King and Anne Rice (just two examples) paint valuable portraits of the consumer and media culture of our times?
Sure. I have great respect for anyone who writes a book that ten or more people actually buy and read. Stephen King is a great storyteller. So is Anne Rice. And yes, their popularity reveals a lot about us. But I don’t read authors like that these days. Right now, I don’t want to know too much about us. I’m reading the Mahabharata.
Q15. Coming back to films. Have you seen many Indian films? Hindi films? Any favourites? Could you share with us your favourite scenes, stars, movies, etc?
I loved Bandit Queen and the old black and white Nagin–truly a sexy movie. When I’m in India I love watching the music channel playing the song and dance clips from Hindi movies. But, as I mentioned, I don’t like going to movie theaters. The Bollywood women are amazingly beautiful and thrilling in the way Hollywood movie stars used to be. I like the hype around them, the mystique, the glamour that’s exuded like honey–so sticky, sweet and irresistible.
Q16. Several new Indian books deal with Indian sexuality–Sex, Lies and AIDS by Siddharth Dube, Bitter Chocolate by Pinki Virani, An Obedient Father by Akhil Sharma, and your own. It’s interesting to note that most of these books-not your’s–deal with deviant forms of sexuality such as incest, rape, sexual abuse. Do you feel that the India of the Kamasutra has lost its way somehow? That the healthy robust sexual openness of those times have given way to a guilt-afflicted, shame-bowed social outlook on the subject?
The issue is not the sex, but the “openness”–and I’m not sure if openness is such a great virtue. Maybe it is. I truly don’t know. For some years sexual pleasure in India has been private, not flaunted as it is, say, in America. Just as defecating has perhaps been more public in India and less proudly flaunted in America. But people everywhere are doing these things, and enjoying these activities, in exactly the same way. The differences are merely in how much we talk about what we do. I see big changes in India–young people going to clubs, bars, holding hands, going public. The signs of sexual openness can be seen in the Indian press, on TV, in movies. Are congratulations or condolences in order? I don’t know.
Q17. Why do foreign films, books, reports tend to either glamorize India–elephants and maharajahs, Kamasutra and yogis–or relegate it to the cliches of ‘turd-world’ backwater? How do you think those authors, film makers, reporters escape these extreme points of view and zoom in on the real India as, for instance, you’ve managed to do so successfully? Or do you think it’s impossible to deal with the teeming morass of contradictions that’s contemporary India?
Indian films, books and reports tend to either glamorize the west or relegate it to the cliches of materialistic inhumanity. Is there a “real India?” If so, I’d love to see it. I’m flattered that you feel I’ve been successful, but perhaps that’s the impression only because I’ve used all the cliches as cliches, without attempting to claim that they have any reality to them.
Q18. A related question: There’s a great deal of sensitivity about religion and culture in India right now. Especially among the so-called ‘rightwing fundamentalist Hindu’ factions. Do you think Indians are in danger of being mocked, satirized or even insulted by comic references to their Gods, icons or culture? Wouldn’t books such as your’s, for instance, capture the spirit of self-deprecating humour that’s so much a part of the Indian storytelling tradition from ancient times.
I hear this and indeed, the Indian edition of Love in a Dead Language, has been modified: the chapter called “Fucking” for example was changed to “Sexual Union” in fear of the actual power of that puritanical “right wing fundamentalist Hindu faction.” The good news for Indian writers is that right-wing fundamentalists cause real satire to flourish. Nothing is funnier than people without a sense of humor.
Q19. What’s next on the anvil for you? Another novel about India? A non-fiction book? How’s it going?
I’m just finishing another novel and about a third of it takes place in India (in Calcutta in the 1920′s). I’m having fun with it. Speaking of which, I’d better get back to work on it now.
Q20. Anything else you’d like to add–about almost anything? Please, here we are now, entertain us!
Yes, it’s very important for me to say that there has been enormous gratification for me, these many years after writing my third-grade notebook, in the positive response that I’ve had among Indian readers of Love in a Dead Language. I was fearful that it might be offensive. But, on the contrary, the response has been grandly good humored and generously generous. I’m grateful for that.
If Sage Narada Was A Blogger: Srimad Bhagvatam Retold by Bangalorean Saravan Kumar
Discovered this very nice blog. No, it’s not by Sage Narada, but if the great voluble seer was around today, perhaps this is what his blog might have been like!
It’s a blog dedicated to retelling the stories of Srimad Bhagvatam, which, as you probably know already, was a minor collection of mythological tales from the ancient puranas, collected, edited, and compiled by the author of the Mahabharata, Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, better known as Ved Vyasa.
It’s been retold several times over the ages, in several languages. In English, though, it still cries out for a good retelling, one that captures the multitude of its tales with all their exciting, adventurous aspects, as well as its spiritual and metaphysical teachings.
Until a really good English-language printed edition comes along, I’d say this blog does pretty well.
I’ve bookmarked it and intend to return to it regularly to read along as blogger Saravan Kumar continues his epic labour of love.
According to the blog, he’s a 25-year from Bangalore. An IT Professional? It doesn’t say, but probably!
In any case, he’s doing a great job with this simple, clean, unpretentious retelling of a great collection of ancient Vedic tales. Keep it up, Shri Saravanji! Well done.
You can click on the link above to check out the Bhagvatam Blog.
And don’t forget to say “Nar-a-yan-a, Nar-a-yan-a!”
Sleepless in Seattle: Book Review of Urban Shaman by C.E. Murphy
When I first read about the American romance publisher Harlequin starting a fantasy line, I wasn’t sure whether to be thrilled or wary. After all, category romances are no longer the most exciting reads. Even the sales figures reflect that fact, with ‘big’ multi-character novels like The Ya-Ya Sisterhood and crossover genre novels like the romance thrillers of Kay Hooper doing much better business than straight romances in the past decade or so.
But there was something about Luna Books that made me hopeful. If it was anything like Harlequin’s Mira line, with much stronger characterization, more realistic plots, and multi-cultural backgrounds, it would be worth checking out. But I still wasn’t going to buy a Luna Book just to try out the series–it had to be a title that was interesting enough in itself, regardless of the imprint. After all, like most book lovers, I buy books, or maybe authors, not publishing imprints or lines.
So it was something of a surprise when I happened upon Urban Shaman by C.E. Murphy. Because I didn’t come across it while browsing for a romantic fantasy novel. I happened upon it while checking out the latest titles in a sub-genre of fantasy I’ve started to grow really, really fond of lately: urban fantasy thrillers. If you know anything about Harry Potter, you know the genre. Urban fantasy covers stories placed in contemporary settings with realistic characters living relatively ordinary, everyday lives. They live among us, and to all intents and purposes, they are us. Except for that one key thing that separates them from the rest of us.
That key difference could be that she’s a private investigator specializing in esoteric supernatural investigations, as in Laurell K. Hamilton’s hugely successful Anita Blake series of novels. (Although, to be accurate, the Anita Blake novels are set in a world significantly different from our’s, in that vampires, werewolves, and assorted ghoulish creatures co-exist side by side with us, but they still fit the general bill of urban fantasy.)
Or a wizard for hire in mid-town Chicago, like Harry Dresden in The Dresden Files series by Jim Butcher, my absolute favourite ongoing series in the urban fantasy sub-genre. Or the near-future police procedurals by Stephen Woodworth that began with Through Violet Eyes about psychic consultants who can communicate with the dead and aid detectives in solving their murders (the psychics all have violet eyes, hence the title of the first book). Or the Stookie Stackhouse novels by Charlaine Harris. And so many others.
Urban Shaman is an urban fantasy set squarely in this sub-genre. The protagonist is a part-Irish part-Indian garage mechanic who works nominally with the Seattle Police Department (she fixes their cars). She goes by the name of Joanne Walker, but her full birth-name is Siobhan Walkingstick. When the novels opens, she’s flying back from a long visit to Ireland, where she was visiting with her mother who has just died of an incurable disease.
Jet-lagged, exhausted, eyes weary from wearing her contact lenses for too many hours, Joanne wants nothing more than to get home and crash for a week, after which she intends to roll her tired carcasse to the PD office downtown and allow her supervisor, a curmudgeonly fellow named Morrison who is waiting eagerly for the slightest excuse to fire her minority ass and replace her with a real cop, so he can finally sack her from her job for the unspeakable crime of over-extending her leave by several months.
That’s when she happens to glance out of the plane, circling in anticipation of a landing slot, and when passing over a suburban street, she sees a woman being chased near an old church by a menacing man and a pack of dogs. Or at least they look like dogs. That’s all she has time to see, and then the plane flies past the street and she’s left with a cold, sick feeling in her belly.
Being who she is, Joanne can’t just leave well enough alone. She has to argue with the pilot and crew and get them to give her enough details about their flying speed, height, etc, so she can figure out the location of the street and church where she saw the woman being chased. Upon landing, she has to jump into a cab without even checking out her luggage (brave woman!), and drive around till she locates the spot of the alleged crime.
What follows thereafter is a few days of intense, fastpaced thrills, chills, and shocks. Joanne doesn’t get much sleep, and her exhaustion becomes an integral part of the story that follows, with her weariness battling the need to solve the mystery of what she saw briefly from the plane window, and then, as things escalate, to stay alive, and finally, to save other lives that are dependent on her by then.
It’s a knuckle-clenching ride of a story, involving the fabled Celtic Wild Hunt, the 12th night of Christmas, Irish demi-gods and their sons, a girl from an ancient painting who might or might not be living in our world posing as a real person, and Native American shamanic folklore and legends. And don’t forget the character named Coyote who is also a man who keeps visiting her everytime she loses consciousness–which is more often than you’d expect–and is apparently working for that mysterious Pie in the Sky (my term, not the author’s) that some of us might call God.
Urban Shaman is a debut novel and at times, it reads like one. C. E. Murphy takes the sleep-deprived motif and all but beats it to death at times. There are moments–several of them–when you want Joanne to just go crash out on her bed in her lonely apartment and sleep it off. Shades of Al Pacino in the film Insomnia. And there are almost too many descriptions of Joanne’s feelings visavis her colleagues in the PD, her boss, the cab driver who unwittingly becomes her closest companion in her unlikely quest, often captured in a style that borders on adolescent angst-ridden confusion.
Joanne also fumbles and stumbles and has one too many pratfalls through this book–the scene where she slips on the frozen police station steps and knocks herself out is more Charlie Chaplin than urban fantasy!–generally managing to do everything that’s possible to prove she’s about ten years younger than the mid-twenties age she’s supposed to be. And the florid internal monologues are often painfully close to romance-novel cliches. Although, to give the author credit, they never actually take those predictable turns into romance-novel territory.
Murphy overcomes these minor stylistic quirks to produce one heck of a fantasy thriller. The amazing thing is that she makes Joanne Walker’s character work brilliantly despite her failings–or perhaps because of them. This is an endearing, eccentric, ethnically confused heroine that you really enjoy spending time with, even when she’s exasperating as hell.
Murphy’s greatest gift is the ability to keep the action coming fast and furious, with something happening on almost every single page. Her sincerity in describing esoteric events and encounters with mythic beings and demi-gods in mundane everyday settings like an airport cafe or an expressway at night makes every unlikely scene totally believable.
She has a real gift for describing action sequences, something that I always look for in a novelist and aspire to myself (which, by the way, is a totally shameless plug for those of you who haven’t read any of my books!) and makes even these unlikely face offs between Joanne and her supernatural foes nail-bitingly intense and viscerally suspenseful.
Urban Shaman is a wholly original debut by a very talented new author who’s going to go places very soon. Fresh, unique, and different from every other urban fantasy I’ve ever read, this exciting supernatural action thriller manages to roll enough wit, emotion, mythology, action set-pieces, suspense, serial murders, mystery, and even a hint of romance (between Joanne and Morrison, which I think is going to develop further in time) into a relatively small, tight bundle of entertainment (well, less than 400 pages at least), making this one of the best goddamn fantasy novels I’ve read this year. And I’ve read more than a few, trust me.
What’s most refreshing is the fact that despite being a Luna Book, Urban Shaman doesn’t lay on the romance track thick and heavy. In effect, there is no romance sub-plot here (I’m only speculating about the Joanne-Morrison relationship) while there’s plenty of exciting fantasy thrills and chills to be had.
The interweaving of the Native American shamanic details with Celtic myth is inspired and brilliantly done. The action sequences are wonderfully written (did I praise her action writing already? Well, it deserves to be praised over and over). And Joanne Walker, or Siobhan Walkingstick, or whatever you care to call her, is a heroine who’s going to give Anita Blake, Harry Dresden, and the rest of the urban fantasy clutch a hell of a run for their money.
I’m already looking forward to the sequel, Thunderbird Falls, scheduled to be published next summer, and am fervently hoping that this will burgeon into a whole series featuring Joanne Walker and Coyote (and Gary as well, don’t forget Gary, whom we shall not call Cooper even though that’s the Gary he reminds us of so strongly). There’s also a novella featuring Joanne in the collection Winter Moon coming this November. And after this terrifically entertaining debut, I’m willing to check out even C.E. Murphy’s other series of action thrillers, written under the pseudonym Cate Dermody and published under the Harlequin Bombshell imprint. She’s just too good a writer to miss out on.
“Kuchh toh log kahenge…”: Readerswrite reviews of the Ramayana series
Hi there. It’s only a few days to the VORTAL launch, and I’m trying to vary the contents of this blog from my recent run of reviews, reviews, and more reviews.
So I decided to post a couple of reviews for a change–but not by me, this time. They’re reader reviews culled from the many emails that come to me either through this blog or through my website Epic India.
These two or three in particular struck as saying so much more about the writers than about the books being reviewed. Which, to me, is what makes a very good review.
Because, if all reviewers only talked about the books (or films, or music, or whatever) being reviewed, then they might as well be written by publisher’s bots, or Amazon.com editors.
It’s the personal insights that make a review really special, and give you a connection with the work (or with the themes underlying the work, or anything else connected however remotely) that makes the viewpoint memorable.
So, without further personal insights of my own (!), here’s the first of my favourite new Reader’s Reviews of my Ramayana books. This one’s by Meenakshi Srinivasan, currently residing in the sunny state of California, USA, but a desi through and through.
“Eleven days ago, I finally got my hands on the first four books of The Ramayana by Ashok Banker. I started to read the Prince of Ayodhya and had to stay uptil 2am finishing it, earning the ire of all members of the family. Then I had to sleep and wait for the weekend to begin The Seige of Mithila owing to my commitment to my marriage and family! My eyes couldnt take in the words fast enough to get to The Demons of Chitrakoot. Then it was time for me to stop all the reading and go on an amazing “vacation” to get back to my self. I willed myself to write this post before I finish reading The Armies of Hanuman as I want to save some bit to relish while awaiting the last few volumes. Ashok, if you are reading this, let me tell you that I LOVE your style and speed. It was so fast-paced. And guess what, after reading about Rama doing his Sandhyavandan, my son has become more regular with it!! He feels so connected with a character like Rama who wears Indian clothes, does Indian stuff and eats Indian food. No pizza and coke, no jeans and Tees but with all the “cool” stuff like in the Lord of the Rings or even Harry Potter, couldnt have it better! And what a story, as old as time and yet as relevant today as it was thousands of years ago.
“The Ramayana has always symbolized Love in all its shades to me. It was intriguing to read a narrative where there is absolutely no overt expression of “love” but is simply experienced as a life fully expressed and lived at every turn of the page. The fantasia of an epic that has created more connections in my brain than anything else made me look within to see the enthusiasm and joy welling up.
“To top this I was in an amazing experience of a “training”(?) and just let the love flow through and out of me. I can just summarise that experience with language that cannot truly convey everything but here I go: Once there was a heart (am giving you a graphic representation as words are sort of hard to come by to explain!) and around the age of 5, I put it in a box. As the years rolled by, I made this box bigger by letting in all the situations and people in along with the lessons and knowledge they brought in. This included books, music and all my various interests and hobbies. Then, a decade ago I did the Art of Living course and during one of the processes, this box vanished on me. It was beautiful, I looked beautiful too after that course and soon, the box came right back with the course inside. Meeting with the Guru, being in the presence of truth (satsangh), meditating, giving of myself to a friend or my child or even doing dishes (rarely though!), the box would vanish and the heart would flow. This Friday, that box vanished after an intense expereince of letting go that went on for more than 5 hours.
“Ra (light) m (within me) had vanquished Ravana (the ego- the box). It is now Deepavali. Love.”
–Meenakshi Srinivasan, currently based in California
And this one’s from a reader in Bangalore who recently discovered my work. For those of you who don’t know this already, I’m available to correspond with any reader of my books. (My email address is right there on the top right hand section of this page, at the end of my profile.)
I’ve corresponded with several thousand readers of my books, from all corners of the world, and it’s a wonderfully enlightening and illuminating experience. Always a pleasure to hear from a new reader and to hear what he or she has found worthwhile in my books (or not found worthwhile, because I’m always open to criticism as well.)
Except for the occasional crackpot or racist or bigot (there are a few, sadly, but these make up barely 2% of my overall correspondents, so I guess I must be doing something right), these emails are always hugely encouraging to me in my work. More than that, they give me interesting insights into the lives of so many people–mostly Indians, since my readership is about 90% Indian worldwide–and their individual problems and issues and loves and hates.
This reader below, Ananth Padmanabhan (hi Paddy!), is employed with a well-known IT firm in Bangalore, and these quotes below are his own selected excerpts from his lengthy opinions of my Ramayana books:
“I read your interview about your early life to a foreign journalist. Perhaps, those difficult days have moulded you into what you’re now. I was also awed to read the comment by none less than MV Kamath that if Valmiki was blessed by Brahma 2500 years back, why not the modern-day Ashok Banker. Very true! I felt so too. You must be gifted like an MS Subbalakshmi, like a Bismillah Khan, like APJ Abdul Kalam, like Sachin Tendulkar, like Unnikrishnan, like Sania Mirza, like CV Raman, like AR Rahman…. It is indeed the Bramhan power that’s flowing inside all of us that gets tapped (with the right attempts, prompts, training etc.) which flows out and feeds the world in so many ways.
“I felt that Ravana’s Tower of Kama in Armies of Hanuman was gory to say the least. I guess the objective of your effort is to communicate to readers that Ravana was worse than the worst imaginable person (dead or now living). I loved reading about Sita getting a fleeting feeling of similarity in one of the faces of Ravana with one of the visitors to her father’s court. She feels this at a moment when she’s to be kidnapped by him. Also, she wonders how her life would be if she had 10 heads. And the heads talking to each other in many different languages, tenors, modes. Awesome imagination!â€?
“I read an excerpt of Mahabaratha from your EpicIndia website. It is, to say the least, breathtaking. It’s an explosive and unimaginably different beginning.
“When Rama was standing on the banks of River Godavari and was addressing Supanaka’s he unhesitatingly apologized to her brothers for the mistake that Lakshman made. In the same vein he pardoned Supanaka for making advances towards him, a married man. I used that on the day after I read it to sort out an issue in office of unhesitatingly apologizing while pardoning the other party. It was a successful method.�
–Ananth Padmanabhan, Bangalore
This one’s from a lady in South Africa, apparently a place where I have many readers, because I’ve had readers come up to me at my book launches and I invariably ask them where they’re from and one place I keep hearing mentioned frequently is ‘South Africa’. (Other places where I seem to have a lot of readers are Singapore, Malaysia, and Canada.)
“Dear Ashok, I have read the first three books of the Ramayana and have just purchased the 4th book. I am a 35 year old businesswoman and mother of 2 and for a long time been starved of “good reading” – quality novels with a good story are very hard to find.
“I found the Prince of Ayodhya at the science fiction section of our book store – an area where I really never look for a good read!
“I was pregnant at the time with my second daughter. Needless to say, highly disappointed when our book store did not have the second novel in stock.
“Your version has made the Ramayana all come alive and I feel as though I am reading it for the first time. The Ramayana as I have read it (and as was read to me by my grandmother)while growing up has been a little far fetched and I really read it only for the spiritual lessons one must search for…I mean, flying monkeys was a little hard to believe.
“The Ramayana is a tale of good over evil – but more so, it is an indication of being in control of our destinies by the choices we make – evil influences are the endless desires we have in a world where having it all is not enough. Sita’s desire for the golden deer is indicative of this “want”…..
“Having had a rudimentary understanding of the lessons one should learn from the Ramayana, I now read your book with glee and a new found understanding. You have made the characters in this novel, real; for as I understand them, they were in human form and while they were supreme beings; they must have been faced with the same challenges that other human beings face. This is what is so exciting for me. I still look for the lessons but enjoy getting caught up in the world as you describe it in Sath Yug.
“I thank you for writing these novels and for re-inspiring me. Never before have I waited in such anticipation for the next novel. I hope that you have started the next novel already and that once this is completed the Mahabarata is next on your list of books to write – this epic; I have no doubt will keep you thoroughly busy for a long time. I will certainly be one of your fans and eternally grateful for this. God Bless!!”
–Urvashi Maganlal, Johannesberg, South Africa
That’s it for now. There are tons more. But I have to go change a tyre–the one around my waist, actually–at the gym!
:~) Just kidding. But seriously, I’m back to work now. If you want to read more reviews of my Ramayana series, by readers, or by critics, just click on the title of this blogpost and it will take you to the Readerswrite page of my website.
See you soon.
And don’t forget, even if you’re busy before that, be here next Wednesday, 12th October, for the first episode of my brand new fantasy novel, VORTAL.
The Key To Southern Gothic: Movie Review of Skeleton Key
Caroline: Kate Hudson
Violet: Gena Rowlands
Ben: John Hurt
Luke: Peter Sarsgaard
Jill: Joy Bryant
Papa Justify: Ronald McCall
Mama Cynthia: Maxine Barnett
Hallie: Fahnlohnee Harris
Bayou Woman: Marion Zinser
Universal presents a film directed by Iain Softley.
Written by Ehren Kruger.
Running time: 104 minutes.
Rated PG (for violence, disturing images, some partial nudity and thematic material).
You don’t have to be Southern to enjoy Southern Gothic. You don’t even have to be American. Sitting in the swankiest multiplex in downtown Mumbai, a coffee in your right place-holder and a box of caramel popcorn on your left, you can visit the deep South for an hour and a half. Heck, you can even stay awhile.
Skeleton Key doesn’t try to do too much, and what it does, it does damn well. That’s its greatest strength. It’s a little movie with a simple, one-shot idea that it explores from point A to point Z, and then wraps up neatly and effectively, with a shocker in the tail that would do a scorpion in Death Valley proud. There won’t be any sequels to this little atmospheric shocker, nor will there be any franchises, and that’s almost a relief in this age of over-produced, over-marketed, over-franchised movie-making. Just an hour and a half’s entertainment in the dark, and then you get to go home and maybe talk about that ending on the drive home.
Dripping wisterias, weeping willows, murky swamps with a layer of mist undulating, an old house on the Louisiana backwaters, with a creaking porch, rocking chair and, of course, an attic with a secret room that even the master skeleton key can’t open. Add to it all an old couple, Southern to the bone, eking out the last years of their lives.
Enter a young beautiful nurse to care for the old man, a tragic history that nobody wants to talk about, a little hoodoo magic, and you have the makings of a perfect 104-minute supernatural suspense thriller. Not a horror movie, unless you categorized What Lies Beneath as horror, with its quiet, building suspense and thumping shocks. No zombies lurching, no body organs spilling out, no buckets of gore splashing about…just quiet, scary-as-hell Southern Gothic.
The story’s simple enough: A young attractive nurse Carolyn who works at a hospice caring for the elderly dying during their last days wants something more than just an impersonal job where, after an old person dies, his bed is turned over in twenty minutes to make place for the next warm body and his personal effects are put in a box and dumped in the bin out back. She wants to work with someone who actually cares about the patient.
So she takes on a job in the bayou, caring for an old man who’s had a stroke recently that has left him completely paralysed. Or so says the old battle horse of a wife who runs her house and her husband in the old ‘Southern style’, and looks down on an ‘outsider’ whom she feels ‘won’t understand our ways, and won’t understand the house’.
The young New Orleans lawyer, straight out of a John Grisham novel, is persuasive enough to keep the young nurse on the job despite the grumbling old battle axe, and the old lady from getting too pesky, while flirting a bit with the young nurse himself.
Her friend in the city worries that she’s spending her best years with old dying people and that it’s changing her, but young nurse needs to work out her own emotional issues and guilt over not being around when her father died prematurely. ‘Nobody should have to die alone’ is her reason for sticking it out in the Louisiana swamps, and you admire her for it.
Just don’t admire her too much, or fall in love with her, because this is Southern Gothic. Where, in the best tradition of Carson McCullers, Greg Iles, and a whole bunch of Mississippi masters, old and new, everything does not always turn out well in the end, someone usually dies–or worse, and the good guys don’t win.
I won’t give away the barb in the tail of this film, in the event you haven’t caught it a local multiplex in your town yet. But I will tell you that it involves a terrible secret the house holds close to her wooden breast.
A secret involving two African-American servants with the typically turn-of-20-century Southern Gothic names of Papa Justify and Mama Cecile, who were lynched and burned in front of this very house for initiating the two young children of the house into the macabre rituals of hoodoo. (Not to be confused with hoodoo–and if you watch the film, it’ll tell you briefly what hoodoo is and how it differs from voodoo.)
And it also involves sacrifices–but, as the Gena Rowlands character says in the end, people always take it for granted that sacrifice involves killing someone. And that isn’t necessarily true.
I guess I could pick holes in Skeleton Key. It’s full of cliches–creaking staircases, sagging porches, shadows flitting about an old house, locked doors that clatter incessantly as if something behind them wants out, mist-laden swamps, the gothic staples of storm and thundershowers, a young defenseless (unarmed and naive) female protagonist…basically the whole waterworks.
But the said items are neatly arranged, and an genuine attempt is made to infuse originality into each one. Kate Hudson’s heroine has spunk and isn’t a dumb thriller victim rushing in blindly. She has a head on her shoulders, and her wits about her, and actually has a shot at getting away with her audacious plan in the second half of the movie. The only problem is, as she herself harps throughout, she ‘doesn’t believe in hoodoo’ and she’s trying to save the wrong victim. To say anything more, would be to give away the ending, and that’s the best part.
While all the acting is first-rate, the script is clever and well balanced, the direction expertly handled and with just the right mix of atmospherics and shocks, in my eyes, John Hurt stands out as the most brilliant turn out of all.
You’ll especially appreciate his performance _after_ you walk out of the theatre, once you know what the secret really is and who he really is, and I can guarantee that as you’re turning in for bed that night, you’ll be thinking of his haunted eyes, the way he thrashes when he’s shown a mirror, and what really haunts him. Hint: It’s not the house or even the ghosts within it. Poor guy.
For a film that doesn’t have a happy ending–just the opposite–and where you could argue that the good guys actually lose in the end, Skeleton Key nevertheless builds a solid suspenseful hour and a half of popcorn entertainment and delivers a whallop of a Southern sting in its last ten minutes that will haunt you more than most fx-riddled horror movies these days. Watch it and have yourself a Happy Halloween ahead of time!
SLAYER OF KAMSA: Book 1 of The Krishna Coriolis will be out next month (October). Written in a pacier style than my Ramayana Series, this short impactful book details the rise to power of the monstrous Kamsa and his brutal campaign to thwart the birth of the prophesied 8th Child. 