நிழல் நிஜமாகிறது

I’ve never been a big fan of the Tamil language. I hated learning it school. I still remember the howls of laughter – and a குட்டு on my head from appa – when I wrote “என்று குறளகம் சொல்கிறது” when talking about something in the Thirukkural. Sometimes I think Telugu is a sweeter language.

Maybe it’s a part of being from Madras. Madras Tamil is not really the most mellifluous of languages. But once in a while, I listen to something and I get what the poets talk about.

A couple of weeks back, I was travelling from Bangalore to Madras. We crossed Kanchipuram at around 10 pm and got hold of an FM station playing old hit songs. One of them was this.

Ignore the subtitles. The sound is crappy, but fuck, the song still works. The song - and the movie is completely set-bound, it manages to invoke 1970s West Mambalam tambram vibe pretty damn well. I know. I used to spend my weekends with my cousins in Umapathy street. They were all in their twenties, and the street was full of guys like them, with names like Murali, Gopal, Muthu, Nagu, Nachchu, Pacha... so many of them. They would come back from work and change into lungis, checked or tie-dyed green and blue against black, and hang out,  playing shuttle and carrom and chess and flying kites in the evenings, gathering to watch TV calling out the names of playback singers and music directors, talking about girls  or  sleeping on well worn mats on mottai maadis on those warm summer nights.
And the furniture. Those cane "easy-chairs". The "show-cases". Those lamps. Those glass/peengan flower vases with bright and ugly plastic flowers.The wash basins in the "hall". The calendar from Kodambakkam timber mart. The houses rented out room by room to multiple tenants.  நாடா ஜெட்டிs vs  elastic. The Shaw Wallace calendar.

கம்பன் ஏமாந்தான் was one of the first songs I recorded - on one of those C-60 TDK tapes that were so prized three decades ago. Must have been around 10 at the time. My chitappa mocked me gently, for my choice. The movie was, after all, about a master who bangs his servant and gets her pregnant, while his ice queen sister defrosts to the charms of an jerk-with-a-heart-of-gold Kamalahasan. I didn't really understand the lyrics - or maybe I didn't examine them too deeply. I didn't know much about women or love (not that I'm any better now)- nor was I very interested, but I liked the sounds of the words.

Balachander isn't Welles or Hitchcock. He isn't Resnais or Antonioni. He seems to be more about "social" than "style". In நிழல், he overdoes the Sumitra "imprisoned" motif with low angle shots through balcony railings, window grills and banisters. Thilakam's queen cuts are funny, but they don't need the queen costume, Shobha could have carried the conceit off even with her hand-me-down sarees. When I saw Arangetram -I cringed at the whole "Trap" play name. But Balachander was never about style. He was "social" and he was courageous. There is something that he did really well, in all those movies - he ripped up the tambram lifestyle and showed the hypocrisy and narrow-mindedness that often lay beneath. Even now, I have cousins who detest him because he is so "anti-brahmin".
Its easy to take that away. Tilakam is the most sympathetic character in the film. Kasi is the nicest.  but their happy ending doesn't change anything. And it's debatable whether losing Thilakam is any kind of punishment for Chalam's choothishness. Indu saying she hates men after one failed பொண்ணு பார்த்தல் makes her way too sensitive (Maybe that was intentional, but it seems off).  All it would have taken is just a few throwaway lines of dialogue to change one rejection to two or three. Or maybe Chalam is an unreliable narrator, and Indhu is really a stroing  minded woman determined to get ahead in the world without a husband. But for that, it really doesnt seem that bharatha natyam tuitions would be enough to handle such a big house without being supplemented by her brother's salary.
And Kamal is meant to be likeable because he doesn't fit the hypocritical brahm stereotype. 
And fuck, he was good - and he made smoking look so cool - especially in கம்பன் - which is filmed so much better than his sections in this - equally awesome - song.

 

I watched நிழல் a few days back. It holds up, and has a certain quiet charm. Maybe that's because I remember the time it came out. There used to be a huge poster of a shirtless Kamal in bell-bottomed pants (why do I remember them as being pink?) striking a Bharatha Natyam pose on Mount Road.This pose:

And its also because Sarath Babu's Chalam and Kamal's Sanjeevi are recognizable - but I'm not sure they exist any longer in the internet era,  they're probably at retirement age now, with children and grandchildren
I do find it odd that a woman brother's name is Venkatachalam would plaster her forehead with விபூதி, though.  

In some ways, the movie is unsettling, in terms of how much gender roles have changed in the 36 years since its release.  But that would be the subject of another movie, wouldn't it?

Lookin' out my backdoor

Here's CCR having a really good time. Obviously, some of the happiness is substance related - just look at Clifford's face at 0:59 - but still, you can kind of tell that this isn't staged.
And then came the fights, the breakup, the blame and all that

 

 I'd want to make some point about growing old, but all I'll say is "This just makes me so...sad"

Writing about something you like, for someone else

It’s not easy writing about a book you love, especially when you are writing on commission. If you want to write for yourself, it’s a different kind of challenge. What you end up being is a cross between squeeing like a teenage fangirl – or disembowelling it with inexpert tools, like a sixth standard schoolboy doing a book review. But the other kind, the kind where you write about it for money, with fixed rules and predefined comparison points, is even more fucked.

Case in point. I was asked to do a George RR Martin story to coincide with the broadcast premiere of season four of Game of Thrones in India. I jumped at it, because it had been a complete shit week for me, workwise – to put it mildly – and I was wallowing in self-disgust. But there was a catch – since the audience is Indian, there had to be an Indian hook to it. OK, I thought. That’s not too difficult – I was able to get an idea of the number of Facebook ‘likes’ that came from India, the number of Indian IPs that had torrented the first couple of episodes of season four, the number of seeders from India and stuff like that. Plus, there were also the merchandise sellers who were stocking increasing amounts of expensive GoT merchandise, and I could get quotes from them. So far, so good.

But then, the story was also supposed to show that Indians loved GoT episodes/ASOIAF novels because of their similarity to Indian myth and history. That was harder. Not because you can’t show parallels between two long dramas with powerfully-drawn characters competing for a throne. But because it seems so artificial. Who really reads A Game of Thrones or A Storm of Swords and thinks that Ned Stark is like Bhishma or Robb Stark like Abhimanyu? It’s stuff that belongs to a Comparative Literature class, if there. It’s like a stoner version of the fucking glass bead game, with ass-pulls taking the place of analysis.

I submitted something which I thought wasn’t too bad. /* insert obligatory Dunning-Kroger reference here */ A few hours later, I get a mail asking me to make some changes – removing an introductory paragraph that I rather liked -  and add more comparisons. OK. It hurt to remove those opening paragraphs, but “kill your darlings” and all that, so I did. And I did it again. And again. Until there was so little of what I wanted to say left.

I know “it isn’t what I wanted to say” smacks of self-indulgence. But that’s the point. If I was writing about something I cared less about, then it wouldn’t matter. I’m happy to pull out comparisons and criticisms, drawn from authoritative sources like Wikipedia and Tumblr. But when it is about GRRM, whose books I've loved for more than a decade (and no, that's not a hipster statement. I started around the time A Storm of Swords was published, which makes me very late as far as the fandom is concerned), it just feels ... terrible

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Original copy (and now, in retrospect, it seems pretty bad, but I think the rant helped)

In 1981, an American tourist visited Hadrian’s Wall in Scotland. It was his first time outside the United States. It was sunset by the time he got there, and the tour buses were leaving. The man stood on top of the wall and looked northwards as the dusk set in, trying to imagine the thoughts and feelings of a Roman soldier on patrol, guarding the edge of the world. The image would stay with him for a long time.

The tourist was a minor science fiction writer named George RR Martin, and a decade later, inspired in part by the historical fiction of people like Bernard Cromwell and by the real-life War of the Roses between the houses of York and Lancaster (sounds familiar?), he decided to write a three-book series of fantasy novels, the first of which was titled A Game of Thrones. It was to be followed by A Dance with Dragons and The Winds of Winter. It was a “story about the people guarding the end of the world”.

Two weeks ago, the fourth season of Game of Thrones, HBO’s adaptation of Martin’s novels aired. The demand was so great that HBO Go, the channel’s online streaming service crashed. The demand for the first episode broke piracy records as well, when over a million users downloaded copies within six hours of the show being aired, and over 3,00,000 users were actively sharing their copies. A study by the torrent tracking site torrentfreak.com showed that Indians accounted for 4.2% of these downloads, seventh in the world. On Facebook, Indians were the seventh biggest fans of Game of Thrones, making up 2.9 lakhs of the 1.03 crore people who ‘liked’ the series. ”I would say Game of Thrones, being a period drama, and the love Indians have for mythology, makes it a fit and there is a connect,” says Monica Tata, MD, HBO South Asia in an interview with Indiatimes. ”Indians generally love drama and we see that on a much larger scale in the Hindi GEC space,”

The walls of The Entertainment Store in Bangalore are covered with posters. Posters from Game of Thrones dominate. Tyrion Lannister, his face half-shadowed, looks at you from behind the words “A mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone if it is to keep its edge.” Daenerys Targaryen sits in profile, a newly-hatched dragon on her shoulder, swearing that she will take what is hers, with fire and blood. “There’s a lot of demand for Game of Thrones merchandise, even though its more expensive than other properties” says Sunil Tekchandani, who runs the store with his brother Satish. “We ordered a dozen replicas of the Iron Throne – at Rs 6,000 apiece, and they sold out in a matter of weeks” he says. Even the Amul ad, one of the most reliable indicators of popular conversation, has paid homage to the series and its most detestable character, the privileged prince Joffrey Baratheon.

Multiple point-of-view, non-linear narratives and sudden detours into history and backstory make the saga closer to our epics than western narratives like Harry Potter or Star Wars. ”Western fantasy narrative is usually linear, based on the hero’s journey as described by Joseph Campbell,” says Eika Chaturvedi Banerjee, one of the organizers of Aakhyaan, a festival where participants discuss and interpret mythology. “Indian myth is much more pluralistic. If you take the Mahabaratha, you will find characters like Bhishma, whose adherence to the idea of honour has devastating consequences. Or take the tale of Shakuni, imprisoned with his 100 brothers. The prisoners were given one grain of rice a day to feed themselves. Shakuni’s brothers starved to death, so that at least one of them could survive, and Shakuni, the sole survivor, swore that he would have his revenge on the Kuru dynasty. If you look at the Kurukshetra, it was Krishna, the avatar of Lord Vishnu himself, who broke several of the rules of war. The characters are not purely good or evil. The Kauravas, even though they are ostensibly the villains of the story, end up in heaven ahead of the Pandavas. It is a similar kind of non-linearity that gives GoT its appeal” she says.

Martin’s storylines are notoriously complex. His characters are multi-layered, with shifting motivations and loyalties. The person who seems like a villain in the first book or season becomes a fan favourite by the third, and could easily flip back again. Arranged marriages have a better chance of working out, and love is dangerous. It’s also about clan, family and honour, subjects that are familiar to everyone who watches any of the numerous soaps that grace our airwaves.

Martin is sparing in his use of fantasy elements. There is magic in the world, but it’s not the Dungeons and Dragons kind of magic where wizards cast fireballs and lightning bolts. Here, there are dragons, but at this point, they are just dangerous pets that have the potential to be weapons of mass destruction – if they survive. And no one in Martin’s world is safe. There are giants and wights and shadows and the promise of an apocalyptic battle, but it’s all just background for a group of incredibly human people jockeying for power – or just fighting for survival in a cold world.

Nilanjana Roy, the critic and writer, counts herself a fan of Martin’s work. “It's tempting to look for resonances between India's tradition of fantasy and epic and the Ice and Fire books, but I’d suggest that sometimes, it's really the great storytelling that counts, whether you're looking at Narnia or Middle Earth or Westeros, or whether it's the equally culturally distant but compelling worlds of Garcia Marquez's Macondo, Alice Munro's Vancouver, Annie Proulx's Wyoming. Good storytelling has a way of travelling across national boundaries, and it's been such a pleasure to be a reader in the time of Rowling, Martin, Proulx, Munro, Morrison, Marquez, to have the privilege of seeing those books come out as you move through your own lifespan,” she says.