Khamosh Sach/ Silent Truth

While the long elaborate post is still to come, sorry to constantly do this, but really wanted to share this urdu couplet by a lesser know poet called Momin, a trained Unani physician.

Kuchh log hain khaamosh
Magar soch rahe hain
Sach bolenge tab
Sach ke jab daam badhenge
- Hakim Momim Khan Momin

There are some who remain silent
But are sunk in deep surmise
Yes, they wll speak the truth
But when the price of truth is on the rise-
-transalated by Khushwant Singh

No Goats No Glory

If George Clooney were to sit three feet away from me and stare at me for a good 5 minutes....I would kneel over and die. So would most women I know. What chance does a goat have against the mesmeric blue eyes of Clooney?

I just had to write a review for director Grant Heslov's movie called The Men Who Stare at Goats because this is the funniest screwball comedy I have seen in the year 2009. If you like Coen Brothers, I say you go watch this one.

The movie starts with a note saying "This movie is more true than you would believe it to be" ....or words to that effect. Now the beauty of this little sentence in the context of this movie is truly stupendous. I spent the whole movie trying to figure out which bits of it are true and which are made up. But everything about in this movie is so farcical that it is hard to

Ok, so we have a loser journalist Bob Wilton (played by cuteii Ewan McGregor) whose wife leaves him for another man. He decides to go to Iraq, play the sympathy card and get his wife back. Only, he lands up in Kuwait and bumps into one Lynn Cassidy (Clooooooooney). Bob remembers that he had heard about this Lynn Cassidy when he had interviewed another man about psychic powers. Lynn, he (other guy not Bob) he claimed, was the ultimate in psychic powers.

Lynn takes a liking to Bob and reveals to him that he is a part of the (and get this) The New Earth army - an exclusive wing of the US intelligence and army who believe in non-lethal weapons and methods. They want to make peace and not war. They are, in other words, hippie Jedi Warriors. Lynn then invites Bob to go along with him on a "mission".

What this mission is ...no body knows, but the journey of Lynn and Bob is hilarious. They get kidnapped, shot at, land up at a house of an Iraqi, get lost in the desert. All thanks to Lynn and his Jedi powers. The interaction between Bob and Lynn and the banter between them provides some sparkling moments. Lynn totally believes in this psychic BS and its absolutley amazing how Lynn says these completely idiotic things with a deadpan face. howlarious! really.

The main narrative goes into flashback every now and then into the story of how the Jedi warrriors and the New Earth Army actually originated. Apparently, it all started with Lynn's commander, Bill Django (Jeff Bridges....the Lebowski returns) had a vision in Vietnam which set him off on this path. The formation and the activities of the Jedi warriors is extremely comical to say the least. Imagine Full Metal Jacket mixed with Bohemian Raphsody! Sir yes Sir!

Anyway, the happy days of the New Earth Army come to an end due to the antics of Larry Something (played by what i call fat Kevin Spacey - what happened to the lean chap in American Beauty?). The unit gets disbanded and Django disappears.

The end of the movie brings the threads together - again I am tempted to tell you the ending but I will try and be good. And not tell who what happens to Men Who Stare at Goats.

So go watch the movie for the crackling dialogue, outrageous situations, great acting by Clooney and Bridges and a mystery - at the end of the movie, I bet you will come out thinking how much of it is true. Happy figuring that out!

O Me O Life !?!

The Answer

That you are here - that life exists, and identity;

That the powerful play will continue to go on and you shall contribute a verse.

An advance warning

Coming soon.....a piece that will blow your collective intellectual pretensions to smitherns.

Reading sense!

I was 13 years old when Arundhati Roy's "The God of Small Things" was first published and won the Booker Prize, something that was still a relatively foreign concept to me, given I'd never yet been old enough to read anything that had won the Booker! My mother bought us a copy and me being me, I set out to read it. I read through the first few pages and got to the point where Estha has his, well, unpleasant run-in with the OrangeLemon Drink Man and remember feeling nauseous and disturbed. I gave up on the book then and never went back to it, until now that is.

For the last few years, the book followed me from bookshelf to bookshelf, wherever I went (I have a hardback with its paper cover missing. So its just a bottle green cardboard cover with the name inscribed on the spine in Gold and somehow, I prefer this to the lotus picture cover that seems to be common) but I could never bring myself to read it. My memory of the book was dark and confusing, dirty, smelly and just unpleasant. Similar to my memory of "The Ice Candy Man", another one that I read too soon in life. I had no interest in picking up TGOST again. Angstein told me several times that she had loved it and that I should read it but I stubbornly stuck to my guns.

Recently, on a holiday to Thailand, I ended up reading "Twighlight" on the beach. So hooked was I (blame it on the sun and the copious amounts of coconut water!) that I spent the last of my Thai Bahts on buying book two, three and four of the series from Bangkok airport, to carry back with me! Having pooh-pooh-ed at people who read Harry Potters for the last so many years, I was more than a little ashamed of myself for getting hooked to tripe (with all due respect) like Twighlight! (And all ye HP lovers, it is not my contention that Twighlight and HP are of the same standard! Even I believe that HP has more class!) After listlessly dragging my feet for a whole month through book two of the "bestselling Twighlight series" I finally threw in the towel and decided that enough was enough and I needed to read something about real people who didn't turn into vampires and werewolves at the slightest provocation and about girls who were not confused quivering shivering accident-prone 17 year old yeedeeyots (this is my Malayali accent from TGOST talking) who threw themselves off cliffs for the love of a vampire!
It was thus that I finally truly began to read TGOST. My first reaction to the first few pages was simply of relief at reading something that was a plausible story about plausible people. Roy is a great storyteller. In her writing, you can actually hear a seven year old's mind chattering. Words and phrases that appear in Estha and Rahel's heads such as "fallingoff noises", "greentrees", "thang God!" "the time was ten to two".. to name just a few, actually make me chuckle out loud. It reminds me of the time when I thought ilzaam was intezaam and frequently said "mujhpe galat intezaam lagaya jaa raha hai!".. and when i thought that "outside the off-stump" was actually "outside the austum!" (don't ask me where that came from!) I'm at that point in the book where Ammu, roughly the same age as me, trapped in the role of a single young mother to very intelligent twins, with one divorce behind her and a life full of whispered nudges ahead, confined to her parents' home, with a whack-job of an aunt and a has-been-genius of a brother, is finally beginning to make an appearance as an independent character and not just as the twins' mother. One can finally feel her restlessness and imagine her feeling of incredulity (sort of) at her circumstances and what her life has come to. I can sense the upcoming scandal and its not going to be pretty!

Sure, its dark and dinghy, depressing, complex, cruel, unreal even.. but its a constant prattle to lose yourself in. Fiction for the sake of fiction. Thang God!

Note to RR: I did get to "fil mactor" but haven't reached the poem yet!

Note to Angstein: don't you dare plotspoil!

Prizes and Glory

Now I don't know how you choose your books when browsing at a book store but I have two simple criteria for selecting what to spend my precious 8-10 quid on. One, go for something which is highly recommended by a fellow reader. No I don't trust the Times bestseller list because I recall the puke worthy Devil Wears Prada being on it at some point of time. English literature reached it's nadir when that book became a best seller. Seriously! The second and more often employed criterion is awards or prizes bestowed on a book. You cant usually go wrong with a Booker winner (The Sea by John Banville being a serious aberration) or a Grand Prix. With a Nobel you are sure to be in for a heavy haul with a thesaurus by your side. But do we readers know where these literary prizes came from or what they represent? To confess I had no clue....till I decided to explore a little further. Here is a lowdown of what I found.

The Booker (short for Man Booker) : awarded each year to the best full length English novel by an author residing in Commonwealth countries, Ireland or Zimbabwe.

The Whitbread (now known as the Costa Book Award) : given to english novels of authors based in the UK and Ireland. Winning novels are usually of high literary merit but also enjoyable reading for the people generally. More populist than the Booker

The James Tait Black Memorial Prize : oldest and one of the most prestigious British awards. Because these have no commercial sponsors and are selected by a professor of english with the help of PhD student, the prize winning books are generally considered to be very high brow. Famous for selecting people who later went on to pick up the Nobel.

The Orange prize: given to the best English novel written by a woman of any nationality. This prize was established in response to the all male 1991 Booker shortlist.

Le Grand Prix du roman: highest French recognition for French literature

The Pulitzer Prize: awarded for distinguished fiction by an American author for novels preferably dealing with American life.

Neustadt International Prize: I have never come across this one but according to Wikipedia this prize is second only to the Nobel in prestige. Like the Nobel, it is awarded for an entire body of work rather than a novel. I could only recognise Gabriel Garcia Marquez amongst the list of winners.

Sahitya Akademi Award: given by India's National Academy of Letters, it recognises Indian vernacular writers of outstanding repute.

The Jnanpith Award: India's highest literary award. Prior to 1982, it was given for a single piece of work but now given for lifetime contribution to Indian literature.

And finally the bid daddy of it all....the Nobel Prize in Literature: according to the will of Alfred Nobel, this prize is bestowed on any author who has produced "in the field of literature the most outstanding work in the ideal direction". Nobel's choice of emphasis on "idealistic" or "ideal" (in English translation of the will) has let to recurrent controversy. The Swedish word "idealisk" can be translated as either idealistic or ideal. A strict interpretation of this meant that authors such as James Joyce, Tolstoy, Henry James never received this award. Apparently, the judges have now adopted a more liberal attitude.

I was looking at the list of authors who never got the Nobel and it reads like the list of whos who of great literature. Proust, John Updike, Chekov, Nobokov, Emile Zola, Henry Ibsen, Jorge Borges, Graham Greene, W.H. Auden. Apparently Salman Rushdie will never get it because he is "too predictable and too popular".

All this said, prizes are never foolproof and there are a lot of interesting controversies and politics surrounding the choice of the winners. Statistically speaking, Atonement by Ian McEwan book is the 5th best book published in the world ever. It is number 5 on the list of novels with most awards. We all have read it. It is crap. You know it and I know it. Need I say more?

Buena Vista Social Club

So I had a long and elaborate first post planned, but didn't get around to drafting that, in what turned out to be a "sunday bloody sunday". don't even ask.
But i did manage to see buena vista social club. The music is lovely and has been on my i pod frequently played list for a while. Am sure you guys have heard it- you must if you haven't. Ditto with the movie. But the high point for me was the sub-titling, cause the lyrics were translated. lovely.
Here's a link to the english translation to one of songs, with a very cute (unconnected) picture-
http://http://www.pbase.com/image/38128187

Here's another: http://www.lyricsdownload.com/buena-vista-social-club-veinte-aos-lyrics.html

Reproducing the the english.

On the trunk of a tree, a young girlfilled with joy, carved out her name
The tree, touched to the core Let a flower drop down to the girl
I am the tree, sad and moved
You are the girl who wounded my bark
I will always treasure your beloved name
And you, what have you done with my poor flower?

Mush overload, I know. But. Very few do it like the latinos do. :)

For the love of food

I am Angstein. I read. I watch movies. I listen to music. I criticize everything. I am talentless and passionless myself. But that never stopped me from mocking others who try their hand at creative/artistic pursuit. Therefore, ladies and gentlemen, I am the critic... self appointed and non exclusive of course.
I watched a not-so-new movie called Julie & Julia last week. The in-flight entertainment guide described it as a depiction of two true stories of women obsessed with food. So the movie is primarily partly based on Julie Powell- a dissatisfied government city worker by day and food freak by night. Cooking good rich food is therapy for Julie. She is a fan... no worshipper of Julia Child who is till date the most popular French cook book writer to emerge from America. Julia Child's quest for a French cook book for "servant less American housewives" is the crux of the part of the movie.
Coming back to Julie (played by Amy Adams) . To beat the ennui of her life, Julie takes up a challenge of cooking through Julia Child's magnum opus cook book over the course of one year and she shares this with the world through a blog dedicated to her travails. Sounds like fun if you are a food lover? Sadly, it was anything but that.
What follows is a scene after scene of Julie cribbing about her life, her recipes, her mother, her husband, her job but mostly its about Julie and her issues with life. There is no story here, no plot and the most dramatic scene involves a burnt beef bourguignon. All that Julie talks about is how she is inspired by the life of Julia Child and how she feels Julia's presence in her kitchen. Seriously....like seriously?! The audience is expected to sympathise with a 30 year old who is clearly suffering from mid-life crisis and is trying to cook her way out of it. I wish Julie had instead gone to law school and got a job at a law firm and spared us this movie.
The story of Julia Child set in the 1950s on the other hand, as she discovers the art of French cooking and her attempts at writing a book, is sweet and has its touching moments. Meryl Streep who plays Julia Child creates a character of a woman who is charming yet determined and most importantly doesn’t complain about her circumstances, very unlike our poor lil Julie. The scene where a novice Julia Child is practicing chopping onions to beat the professional chefs in her cooking class quickly establishes the fact that she is a bull headed fighter. The love story between Julia and her husband Paul is also very sweet without much mush. I would have loved it if director Nora Epson had dropped the Julie and made a movie out of Julia Child's life story.
I will not discuss the ending here so as to not spoil the surprise for those of you who still want to catch the movie. My suggestion - stay away from the movie and Julie Powell's book...treat yourself at the nearest Chez Gerard with the money you save.

Here's to an attempt at getting back into the writing spirit...

 Zeitgeist (from German Zeit-time and Geist- spirit) is "the spirit of the times" and/or "the spirit of the age." Zeitgeist is the general cultural, intellectual, ethical, spiritual, and/or political climate within a nation or even specific groups, along with the general ambience, morals, and sociocultural direction or mood of an era (similar to the English word mainstream or trend).
  
WHY?

So, RR and I were catching up on gtalk and discussed the desirability but unviability of J/L's "women who read" initiative. We figured that a book club over e-mail will probably never really work because how do you get say.. 8.. people to read the same book(s) at the same time! So, we figured that blogging just might work! No pressure to read what the group is reading. The only pressure is to write about what you are reading. And let's not pigeonhole ourselves.. write about a movie you saw or an article you read or someone else's blog or even idle gossip.. anything!! Just write. Dammit!