Who will write your obituary, Mr. Salinger??

Jerome David Salinger is no more...

Contemporary and competitor, Joh Updike predeceased him...

Now, the thing that immediately popped in my head mind when I heard of Salinger's death was not what the world will miss (because he hasn't written a book in the last half of his life and at 91, one wasn't really expecting anything from him at all), but who will write him a fitting obituary now that the rockstar of a literary/culture critic of all times is no more.

I am confused...I don't know who I like more...Updike or Salinger....I don't know what saddens me more...Salinger's death or the fact that every obituary (and there will be many) will repeat every boring cliche that every existed on the man (reclusive, cool, crazy, inspirer of assasination plots and the whole Mark Davuid Chapman-John Lennon reference etc etc etc) in the absence of Updike, who, if alive, would have produced a legend of an obituary..yet another thing to remember Salinger by, after Holden and the Glasses!!

That, however, is not to be for reasons as mundane as mortality....

But I remember reading a review of 'Franny and Zooey' a few years ago by Updike, which confirms the big loss I just talked about.

'Franny and Zooey' is a big favourite with me despite my contempt for precocious children which is exactly what this book is all about. But I guess the written word can change all of that, which is what Salinger is loved for...for turning phonies into heroes, idiots into icons!! :-)

Anyway, F & Z was panned by critics as a rich person's guide to raising children all wrong. Updike shared this view:

Salinger loves the Glasses more than God loves them. He loves them too exclusively. Their invention has become a hermitage for him. He loves them to the detriment of artistic moderation.

but ended the review on a note of respect and appreciation:

When all reservations have been entered, in the correctly unctuous and apprehensive tone, about the direction [Salinger] has taken, it remains to acknowledge that it is a direction, and that the refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.

and the words which perfectly explain why I, like many others, love Salinger:

We live in a world, however, where the decisive deed may invite the holocaust, and Salinger's conviction that our inner lives greatly matter peculiarly qualifies him to sing of an America where, for most of us, there seems little to do but to feel. Introversion, perhaps, has been forced upon history; an age of nuance, of ambiguous gestures and psychological jockeying on a national and private scale, is upon us, and Salinger's intense attention to gesture and intonation help make him, among his contemporaries, a uniquely relevant literary artist.

Salinger had the rare ability to convert extraordinary feelings into ordinary words (incidentally, that's what all writers intend to do) and who could know it better than Updike!!

That Updike feeling is what I am going to miss when I read those factory-made obituaries about Salinger that I shall read starting later today.

Chalk and Cheese

Dr. Vijay Mallya and Anil Kumble just do not belong together...so didn't Mallya and Rahul Dravid...

As far as I am concerned, this is an absolute travesty!!

Strange Idols....

At the very beginning of this post, I should mention that it concerns a representative from a group of people I dislike with single-minded devotion. I have faced maximum rejections, not at the hands of employers or men but ….auto-rickshaw drivers.

The upside of this is that any auto rickshaw driver, who does not reject me, agrees to turn on the metre or is even reasonable in his demands and is not a lech appears GODLY to me.

I encountered such GODLINESS on my way to work this morning. Not only did the first auto driver agree to take me to my destination, he agreed to do so on my terms. If I remember correctly, his exact words were, “De dena madam, jo aap ko theek lagey”. To a hassled public commuter, this is pure, unadulterated sweetness!!

On the way, I took a look around the small vehicle and was slightly surprised not to find laminated Rs. 10 posters of skimply clad Bollywood actresses on both sides of the seat.
( I have noted that auto drivers prefer Kareena and Priyanka to the rest of them!!) Although these pictures officially offend me, I totally get it!! While searching for Kareena inside the auto, I spotted something rather odd but oddly reassuring.

On the mirror, there was not one, but two unevenly cut out (heart-shaped, if I might add) postcards of two unlikely heroes…..Ritesh Deshmukh and Rajpal Yadav.

Now, not only did I wonder why those pictures were up there and how, in God’s name do you get postcards of these fellows for a price?? (I am pretty sure they weren’t newspaper or magazine cut outs but an actual, 50 paise/ Re. 1 postcard), I decided to wonder aloud.

The answer I received was obvious in many ways yet it appeared to me as charming. He said, ‘Woh hasatey hain madam…unka chehra dekh ke din achha jaata hain’. My response to that was a dim, not so charming “Oh” (Not that I intended to discuss my sociological findings with him and appear even more stupid).

Today, I learnt to keep it simple, go back to the basics and I already feel good. What I did not learn, however, is where you can buy postcards of strange idols as I have some of my own!! :-)

Food for Thought: Globalisation and Androgyny

Heterosexual, Homosexual, Metrosexual, SNAGs (Sensitive New Age Guys), Retrosexual, Neosexual.....

Cross-dresser, Transvestite, Hermophrodite, Androgynous....

When girls go baggy and boys go skinny....

For every Audrey Hepburn and Aishwarya Rai, there is a Tilda Swinton and Charlotte Rampling (Strong yet sensual)

For every Hugh Jackman, there is a Justin Timberlake (with that falsetto voice and boys too can cry kinda' appeal).

An actress, Diane Keaton, whom I love just for her spontaneity on and off screen, starred in a movie titled Annie Hall in the early 1980s, where she iconised androgynous fashion as it is known today, wearing baggy pants, waistcoats, oversized shirts, neckties and fedora hats. She was consistently voted as the Worst Dressed Female for years for her conservative and rather 'eccentric' fashion sense. She never changed though. Today, international fashion swears by that look.

The importance of trends and buzzwords in our daily lives is overwhelming...Ah...the things I have to keep up with in this lifetime!! Having said that, the revival of androgyny continues to fascinate me in its impact on gender relations (not only in fashion but in the real world..inside our homes, at the workplace, in other informal social spaces etc) and someday, equipped with better knowledge on the subject and a live muse, I will seek to undertake detailed research on GLOBALISATION AND ANDROGYNY...SERIOUSLY!!

A.Kashyap is angry and it works!!

No Smoking could have been a masterpiece if told simply and of course, if John Abraham himself understood his character a little better. Dev D and Gulaal, however, have turned the tables in favour of a trend that was increasingly losing its stronghold in Hindi cinema. 'Anger' that made Amitabh Bachchan the legend that he is and 'Revenge' that cemented SRK's career is now being re-invented by Anurag Kashyap to tell it as it is.

Dev D, a take-off on Devdas, the legendary lover a.k.a loser who 'sacrificed' his life in the name of unfulfilled love re-looks at the character of Devdas as he was probably originally written. Having read Devdas in the original, I can vouch for the fact that the one thing that the author did not want to do was glorify Dev's submission to alcoholism which is exactly what every movie interpretation- from greats like Bimal Roy and not-so-greats like Bhansali have done because creating sympathy for the protagonist is Bollywood formula. Even if you create a flawed character, you have to justify the flaws to the audience because according to trade pundits, the intelligence of the Indian movie-going audience does not allow them to accept 'simply flawed' characters without any emotional baggage. 'Pure evil' remains unacceptable, even in the movies.

Dev-D and Gulaal challenges that in a way. Kay Kay's character in Gulaal is supposedly a leader of a separatist movement that has no clear objectives. What becomes increasingly clear towards the end of Gulaal is that he is amoral and arrogant and will go to any lengths to achieve his ends (Rajasthan for Rajputs), whatever the means. Ransa, living in a ramshackled palace turned Democracy bar with strobe lights and Bob Marley life size posters is a bundle of contradictions. He wants no part of his father's aristrocratic legacy yet is dependant on that very legacy to sustain himself. He does not work, drinks and philanders yet is idealistic and moral in a way. Although he does not know what he wants, he seems to know what he does not want. Dilip Singh, on the other hand, just wanted to get a law degree but gets entangled in this dirty mesh of campus, family and gender politics. Naive as he is, when asked, what he knows of Rajniti, he says 'Politics'!!. In love as he is, he believes that his lover's abandonment was not an independent decision and was guided and manipulated for political gains. True as that may be, the audience is left to wonder as to who was really exploited by whom and for what purpose? Brother exploiting sister, Rajput exploiting co-Rajput, half Rajput leading Rajputana movement...what for?? Did any of the characters in the film know what they stood for despite their strong political ambitions and definitive plans of action? Casting Jesse Randhawa and that new girl in their respective roles was probably not a good idea but may be, Kashyap could not convince our 'holier than thou' Bollywood actresses to play murky female characters. While the female characters are not unimportant in the scheme of things, they are not fleshed out as well. This is a male film with female catalysts. Powerful performances were delivered by the 'male' cast and the music was phenomenal and very. very, well placed in the context of the film.

Coming to Dev-D...Dev is no more than a spoilt brat who cries because he did not get his favourite toy. Nothing exposes the subtlety of gender equations in Indian society as this film. Dev does not want Paro when he learns of her sexual history. This he does when he himself is 'sleeping around' to use crass Indian English. Paro abandons him....oh wait..Paro VOLUNTARILY abandons him...no family pressures here!! Now, that, of course, virtually kills Dev..it's not love, it's the male ego that is crushed to pieces in the process. Dev's ultimate rejection, of course, comes, when the very married Paro comes to meet him in the shady Paharganj hotel room, shows him she cares by offering to wash his dirty clothes and then leaves when they are about to make love...That, my friends is 'emosanal atyachar'...the brutal fact of rejection by a woman and not some cooked-up, well-packaged romantic idea of unfulfilled love that we've been fed for generations that we almost believe to be true. There would be no Devdas if the decision to split came from Devdas himself-Go figure!!

Unlike Devdas in the novel, Kashyap's Dev gets to mend his ways and interestingly enough, he does not flush it down the toilet (not in the movie climax anyway). Chanda, the escort girl by night and college student by day encounters Dev surrounded by a haze of drugs and alcohol. As is characteristic of Dev, she is spared no part of his ego-centrism but she stands her own-loving and supporting him yet not submitting to him. When Dev hits his lowest lows and finds himself alone and abandoned serving momos at a streetside food joint in Dilli, life gives him a second chance and he embraces it. But knowing Dev, a relapse is not totally out of character but for now, he seems to have found his feet.

Kudos to Kashyap and looking forward to his next..Meanwhile, KJo's masterpiece on the aftermath of 9/11-an untold story is also sincerely awaited!!

You read my mind.....

The Terrible People
-Ogden Nash

People who have what they want are very fond of telling people who haven't what they want that they really don't want it,
And I wish I could afford to gather all such people into a gloomy castle on the Danube and hire half a dozen capable Draculas to haunt it.
I dont' mind their having a lot of money, and I don't care how they employ it,
But I do think that they damn well ought to admit they enjoy it.
But no, they insist on being stealthy
About the pleasures of being wealthy,
And the possession of a handsome annuity
Makes them think that to say how hard it is to make both ends meet is their bounden duity.
You cannot conceive of an occasion
Which will find them without some suitable evasion.
Yes indeed, with argumetsn they are very fecund;
Their first point is that money isn't everything, and that they have no money anyhow is their second.
Some people's money is merited,
And other people's is inherited,
But wherever it comes from,
They talk about it as if it were something you got pink gums from.
Perhaps indeed the possession of wealth is constantly distressing,
But I should be quite willing to assume every curse of wealth if I could at the same time assume every blessing.
The only incurable troubles of the rich are the troubles that money can't cure,
Which is a kind of trouble that is even more troublesome if you are poor.
Certainly there are lots of things in life that money won't buy, but it's very funny --
Have you ever tried to buy them without money?

Of Obscene Wealth and Superstar India....

A super rich person like Doctor (apparently, he gets super-duper pissed if you don’t refer to him as Dr. which although not earned but gifted does indeed display his intellectual ability….so there you go, Doctor….no less no more) Vijay Mallya with an empire that feeds off people’s vices, two airlines (one, the epitome of cheap air travel and what often comes with it…. inefficiency and the other, the symbol of glamour and good travel), a failed cricket team, two rival and fairly successful football teams, the Kingfisher calendar (for the uninformed, the Indian equivalent of the Pirelli calendar and any man’s fantasy desk adornment), etc etc etc…..is not exactly my idea of a role model for superstar India, to use the dame's words. Nor is Donald Trump for that matter with his loud-mouthedness, Trump this and Trump that, Apprentice, pink ties and not to mention, the inimitable hairstyle or a really bad wig..whatever that is!! Watching Mallya or Trump speak fills me with a sense of immense hopelessness…as we get richer, what kind of people are we becoming or aspiring to become and what kind of entrepreneurship/business leadership are we promoting?

With one business launch after another, Dr. Mallya has not learnt that there is humility in accepting defeat. Whatever Dr. Mallya does, he does it big. Not only does he sack the team’s CEO in violation of the ‘sportsman spirit’ that we so often talk about and lambast and very publicly at that, everyone who he thought was responsible for the team’s dismal performance, including captain Dravid and coach, Venkatesh Prasad; he goes ahead and claims his part ownership of the best performing team in the IPL, not because they are great but because they are sponsored by him. So, in effect, the performance of the Chennai, Delhi and Chandigarh teams are of little relevance beecause they are not screaming “HAIL MALLYA’ on their jerseys. Even praise, therefore, is associated to ownership and profit. If it is mine and doing well, it is good..otherwise, no comment! One wonders why Kat Kaif was not sacked as team ambassador because even her pretty presence failed to revive a nosediving Royal Challengers (Oh..I forget, she is a young woman, a pretty one at that..one of Mallya’s many weaknesses, after his shameless pursuit of wealth, of course). And all this is referred to as the ‘killer instinct’, ‘perform or perish’ or the attitude of a true winner in some circles!!

There is always the nouveau riche attitude of not knowing what to do with suddenly acquired wealth. Tasteless spending or over-spending on things of limited importance screaming “I have what you don’t” is on the rise. Look at the wedding industry in India. It's booming (for crying out loud) In fact, a person who earns well but lives modestly (by modest, I do not mean lives in a hut and survives on fresh air) is termed a miser in our modern, progressive scheme of things. Parsimony and prudence is looked down upon. Wastage and obnoxious ostentation are encouraged. Seriously, since when did saving money become a crime??

Perhaps, I don’t earn enough to know what it feels to be rich and powerful but I know a whole lot of people from the earlier generation who have earned and spent in moderation and you know what…they are neither unhappy nor dissatisfied. As someone once said, money is the petrol that runs the car that is life. The importance of money cannot be undermined but to make it all-important is probably a mistake. But what do I know? With television channels like NDTV Good Times (sponsored by the King of Good Times himself) airing programmes like “Limited Edition” (on luxury brands in India) and “Best Spas”/Best Hotels”; Shobha De’s path breaking treatise on modern India making it to the best sellers list and popular opinion caring a rat’s ass for anything beyond their bubble, India’s rich-poor divide will further deepen and Mallya will be King….who knows??