Yercaud - in the lap of nothingness

Tall trees. Signature sign of the hills. Like standing alone together, dignified, aloof but not forgetting that there is beauty in togetherness. And that typical rustling hushed unhurried sound of breeze flowing through leaves. And those winding trails, stone-crusted, roughly-hewn, made of the trampling of a myriad human and animal feet. 

And the sudden turn of a corner and the sound of water. It's such a sound. Gurgling. Joyous. Fulfilled. Needing but unheedful. It's what stops you in your tracks to search for that glimpse. Is it a waterfall, a stream or just water from a village finding its way? Whatever it turns out to be - its a discovery. The sight never stays, the sound does. 

And the locals, up early, carrying wood up steep paths, turning into an early bazaar for a cup of tea from a roadside cart with steam gushing out in little clouds. Women with wizened faces and toothy smiles, with tiny children holding onto their hands for dear life. Do children grow slower and gentler in these parts? 

And I, a stranger, lingering, for resuscitation from a hurried harried life, seeking to find something lost in my life, amongst trees and flowers and meandering paths and tiny streams. So much to ask from so little. 

A strange insistent bird calls out with a rich fruity whistle. It's sound fills up the forest and the paths around. One bird. One sound. Enough for a universe to pay attention to. And I know, in all the noise I surround myself with, all I require to live is to have a gentle sonorous voice. I require that to live. The world may find it too. 

I walk back refreshed. 

Caravan to Vaccares

This supple, muscular, hilarious and heart-stopping thriller is my favorite Alistair Maclean.  Considering  that Maclean's oeuvre consists of the likes of Where Eagles Dare,  Guns of Navarone,  HMS Ulysses et al,  it's saying a lot. And what a riot I had re-reading it after, I think, twenty years. And I was again in thrall of the writer's  consummate mastery over language and plot.

I grew up with Alistair Maclean's books and those of Desmond Bagley, Arthur Hailey, Irving Wallace, Harold Robbins - till I discovered the Hardy's, Fitzgerald's, Cronin's, Proust's,  Mausappant's and the like. But Alistair Maclean was always a bridge for me - the guilty pleasure, which still enabled pencil markings under consummate writing.

And Caravan to Vacarres is ultra-special - the way Kill Bill will be, however great a film Tarantino might have or might  make or Mad Max: Fury Road would be, however incredible all road thrillers might be. 

First and foremost the atmospherics of the book. Set in the starkly beautiful and menacing Provence area of France, it evokes the romance and fascination and foreboding related to gypsies. The plot follows them as they travel deep into the region - and all kinds of utterly fascinating encounters take place. Violence is embedded in the story but it is the characterisation of the protagonists and the conversations, which take it to another level.  The mordant humor of Neil Bowman, the hero, who calls himself an idle layabout, as he goes about poking his nose into the affairs of the gypsies with some pretty dire consequences, or the ducal snobbery of the regal and rotund Le Grand Duc,  whose wealth is only matched by his appetite, will have you chuckling away the night as you simply have to finish this utterly enthralling book in one hungry bite!

The set pieces - the chase into the craggy heights of the Alpilles; the fight inside a caravan as it ends being clinically wrecked into smithereens; the absolutely heart-thudding encounter in the callajon, the bull ring, with an Andalusian monster from Spain, whose horns have been sharpened to make it a killing machine, where our hero has to become a razateur to survive. Oh the riches abound.

The heroes are tough, the girls are pretty and pretty tough themselves, you learn about gypsies and things you shouldn't do with them, and an intimate guide into the  must-visit and never-visit areas in Provencal France. What else can a simple pleasure-seeking,  lotus-eating reader ever want?

Alistair Maclean 's books always resonate with one dialogue in this book, when Duc is about to walk into a situation he has nothing to do with, in front of his perplexed girl-friend -

"But you can't just barge in -"
"Nonsense. I am the Duc de Croytor.  Besides, I never barge. I always make an entrance."

You could say that for all the books of the redoubtable Alistair Maclean.

The Winter of Our Discontent ~

I remember the first time I read John Steinbeck's The Winter of Our Discontent. I was in my early twenties and had finished reading his Grapes of Wrath, The Pearl and Tortilla Flats in a row. I was moved to bits with his intimacy of sight and his compassion for people who the world viewed as failures, but for the writer were real survivors and heroes. The backgrounds of all the novels was earthy, and his power of writing made me see the dirt deep inside the nails of his hardy protagonists. These were moving dioramas of people who refused to give up. 

And then I picked up this book. And the way it's background unravelled - urbane, full of sunshine, following the fortunes of a family, set in a small town in the eastern coastline of USA - it could have been written by a different writer. Until it reached into it's dark core and it's shattering dilemmas. It's darkness was greater than the black destinies of all the characters of all the books which came before this. 

The universality of the ethical dilemmas of it's protagonists made me revisit this book again and again. It was almost as if I grew up reading this book - or maybe the book grew into me. And every time I struggled with it's issues, and each time I reacted to it's themes differently. It was almost as if my evolution as a person was charted out in my different readings of the same book. I just finished my fifth reading of the book. And I sit back, as moved and disturbed as ever, with it's problems and struggles and heartbreaking resolutions. 

The year is 1960. Ethan is a clerk in a store, which at one time his ancestors owned. He has a wife, a son, a daughter. And society is at the cusp of a materialistic explosion, and it's effect is making inroads into every home. Ethan represents a lineage which is one of the richest in the town, but today he doesn't even have money to have a television or take his family for a holiday. And every time he enters his home, he enters a vortex of his family's desires and ambitions. And finally he is forced to make choices which burst into smithereens every value, every ethic he thought were his own. 

The theme is so contemporary and universal, that it seems it's written for today. At a time when our society has sharper economic divisions but similar explosions of expectations for a good life, what does a person do to fulfill desires? And particularly when he sees the corrupt becoming rich beyond any limit, with no holds barred - and becoming respectable to boot. 

Ethan at one point says -

"Now a slow, deliberate encirclement was moving on New Baytown, and it was set in motion by honorable men. If it succeeded, they would be thought not crooked but clever. And if a factor they had overlooked moved in, would that be immoral or dishonorable? I think that would depend on whether or not it was successful. To most of the world success is never bad. I remember how, when Hitler moved unchecked and triumphant, many honorable men sought and found virtues in him. And Mussolini made the trains run on time, and Vichy collaborated for the good of France, and whatever else Stalin was, he was strong. Strength and success— they are above morality, above criticism. It seems, then, that it is not what you do, but how you do it and what you call it. Is there a check in men, deep in them, that stops or punishes? There doesn’t seem to be. The only punishment is for failure. In effect no crime is committed unless a criminal is caught."

But what do small people do with the small defeats of their daily life? What do WE do with the choices we are given ever so often between keeping a moral high ground & despair and compromised morality & instant gratification? The book is littered with the angst of ethical choices and the trauma of living below the expectation-levels of those who mean the most to you. 

The happy irony of this book is that even as it unravels it's onerous ethical knots, it's writing is bright, funny and sparkling. And like the best of writing, it works incredibly on numerous levels. It delineates married life and love within it's paradoxes: how often, how little we know the people we love the most, as also how our love doesn't lessen in spite of it. How both the villainy of circumstances and the heroism of choices both reside within us. And, more shatteringly, how our fragilities, foibles and fables find their way into our children - until they openly mirror our true selves, and we are helpless to do anything.

Packed with memorable characters and a storyline throbbing with inner tension, this is ultimately a book about defeat and redemption - and how destiny is just a handmaiden of the determinism of our choices. And why, in the darkest nights of our life we cannot let the light of our lives to go out. 

Trivia:

This book was specifically mentioned in the citation of Nobel Prize awarded to Steinbeck. The irony was that this book was savaged critically and hurt Steinbeck so much that this became his last novel. All books after this were non-fiction. Today, of course, this book stands as a literary monument documenting man's ethical dilemmas. 

The Silkworm ~

The pleasure of reading an author at the top of her game is an incomparable pleasure. And when it is Rowling, in her ghost writer avatar Robert Galbraith, writing about her detective Cormoran Strike and his comely assistant Robin, the pleasure just doubles. 

The smoothness of writing, the relaxed tone, and the never-boring detailing of a city I have grown to love ever so much, reminds me of those terrific speakers, who take you on the wings of their words and transport you to a place which is the nearest kind of bliss one can experience. That's this book. 

Oh there is a deliciously gory murder, and a slew of abominable characters, any of whom the reader would have loved to be the murderer. But the fun lies elsewhere. Rowling gives an almost insider view of the self-serving navel-watching narcissistic world of publishing. And all the characters who move in that circle - the established authors, the fledgling ones, the agents, the editors, the owners, the rivals - and all of them fighting for authors, attention, promotion, women, men, et al, And the delightful ugliness of it all. 

And it's quite cleverly done, like a film within a film, with the murdered author being the author of a book full of poisoned portraits of a host of industry characters.

One can literally see Rowling chuckling as she penned this inside story. 

Rowling treats each chapter as a set-piece, as she unravels the intricate threads of the murder. There is a classical English family dinner, where the hostess considers it her entitlement to know the inside story of an affair; the absolutely hilarious scene of a couple with two painful kids, who to the absolute horror of Cormoran, want a third; a lovingly described lunch at a quintessential English pub; a road trip which almost proves to be fatal; a drunken, gossipy party celebrating a publishing house's coup of getting an author; and so on and so forth. Each piece moves the story forward, whilst allowing Rowling to lovingly create atmospherics. And London, ah. It is in the throes of it's coldest winter, and there is treacherous snow and treachery out in the streets: one gets chilled to the bones, indeed.

And then there are two parallel and subtexual tracks, which add considerably to the heft and charm of the book. One is of reminiscence and endings, of Cormoran's abortive love affair with a heartbreakingly beautiful girl. In a short passage, she is shown to be getting married, and there is a sms and there's a photograph. Suffice to say, there is an incredible amount of despair and fortitude written in with consummate skill. 

And the second track is the ever on-the- edge relationship between Cormoran and his assistant Robin, who is, regrettably,       bethroed to be married. The exasperation and the exhilaration of the relationship has a delectable balance. A treat indeed. 

I have not read Rowling's Harry Potter books. But have read everything after that. Her A Casual Vacancy was probably one of the most heartbreaking books written these last two years. And then her detective series starting with Cuckoo's Calling and now this. She is a brave writer, unflinching in her dissection of sorrow and purpose, and the frailties of strong men, and the self-centeredness of despairing women. 

She's promised at least seven more Cormoran Strike books. What a mouthwatering prospect indeed. 

Delhi Art Fair 2015 ~

I will forever remember F N D'Souza's blue. All the fabulous contemporary outre art all around, and here I'm remembering only the blue of a 70s painting. It was unlike any I had seen. I remember every little detail of the still life, but that blue, well it's burnt into my memory. It was a rich, deep color, full of the most radiant and dark and deep character. I had stepped in front of the canvas, and I'd  thought I could spend all of my time of the whole of the day, just gazing at that color. That's how magical it was. 

Strange things one carries back.

Genres, styles, periods, countries: the riches on display were staggering. For me, each piece was like a story aching to jump out and be told. Sewing machines as still heads, the gulf between two mirror images of the same person, the playfulness on a canvas of an artist unable to keep his exuberance to himself, the intimacy of the handwritten letter and it's demise in the hands of the digital, the jumble of nonsense-shapes reflecting an airplane in flight when light fell on the installation, portraits of pain, faces which gazed as if into the soul of the onlooker, mythic figures revelling in modern times, women celebrating their sexuality and men discovering theirs. 

The beauty of art is the freedom it affords the viewer to see herself in each canvas. The story being told by the painter is seldom the story the viewer sees. Sometimes a deviant stroke, sometimes a killer color, sometimes an expression which burns through the canvas - and the tale one finds one's soul catching is the cumulative sum of the viewer's own life-story. Art is literature seen as cinema captured in a single frame. 

Sometimes I feel the craft of an artist is tougher, more exhausting than that of an auteur in any other art form. She has to compress all the exhaustion and exhilaration of life into one canvas with the literality of a paintbrush and the shade of a color. The most intimate stories require the most upfront representations. There's no place to hide.

As I stood in front of an incredible canvas of a moment caught in motion, but made hazy by memory, as if of an image seen through the mist of time,  I saw a young school kid in his uniform, with his backpack intact, staring at it with his mouth open. And I found,  I was also standing and staring at the painting with my mouth open. I recognized the innocence and wonder in the child. And I thought - well, there was still some hope left for me, in these cynical times. Art is such a journey of discovery - and rediscovery

A poem called The Book Thief ~

Life is often just vignettes,

of colour, silence

and broken shadows.

Death comes 

as black emaciated spots 

on white snow:

blood strained dark, often

bodies bereft of blood.

Hearts save stories

from the freezing hell of nothing

for a kiss of redemption,

not knowing that 

dreams die first. 

Refugees from life

find their sun with tangled tails      

on musty damp walls -

they survive in the eyes of innocents 

being charred alive. 

And off-kilter music fills caverns,

as broken notes join hearts,

& humans find beasts in themselves -

and kindness finds

victims. 

And people like us, 

blessed with breath,

orphans to ourselves, 

see losses in our riches &

death in every spurt of blood. 

And the magicians of survival,

obstinate to give,

faithful to the air,

sisters of flowers,

the reason itself for life's creation. 

Everything is Inside: Subodh Gupta ~

I first met Subodh Gupta some six years back in Bombay when his wife did an installation for a show my company was doing. He was helping her around, and was happy to just be around, as his wife was the center of attraction. Years later I heard Subodh in this year's Lit Fest. He was a very successful artist now, selling his pieces for croresu. And he came as someone with a charming  rusticity and a cocky charm. And he grew a little indignant when some difficult questions were asked. But there was a raw honesty about him which I liked. 

His solo show is on in NGMA ( with Amrita Sher-Gill in the hall across; such riches!), and I had a sliver in a day, and I knew I couldn't miss it. 

And I am glad I went. 

Installations are ever-so-often so symbolic that they become esoteric (for example Nalini Malani's show called 'You can't carry Acid in a Paper Bag' in Kiran Nadal Art Gallery, which showcases the artist's intelligence in such a way that the viewer starts wondering if he is a fool, and slinks away quietly). Subodh is on the other end of the spectrum. He is having fun. And he is in an intensely nostalgic mood. And he digs deep inside himself for memories of childhood, and of things which he loved and which have passed. Gimmicky? Oh yes. But in a good way. It involves you, but at the level of your curiosity and sense of humour. It doesn't superciliously challenge your IQ. It tickles your EQ. And for me the show was a winner for it. 

Installations are a clarion call for discipline. An artist can go anywhere with these. The temptation to self-indulge and intellectualize is immense, what with the arsenal available - videos, sculpture, painting, any material in the world. But when an artist brings intelligence and sensitivity and humor into his work, ah, such tales can be told.

So you have him doing a wall installation of what a lovely messy kitchen looks like. Another one is a massive  house made solely of cow dung (how did he eliminate the smell?!!), which he remembers from his childhood in Bihar when he used to help his mother make dung-cakes and use them when lighting a fire. Then there are the doodhwalas who get their motorcyle- charm registered. And do you remember the hold-all we used to carry in olden times' train journeys? The rolled up thing which our Dads opened up in the night and which had a pillow and a quilt, and in which we tucked ourselves in, as the train rolled on through the night? Yes, that makes an appearance. And the dabbawalas. And then there is a full series of memories of cinema as it used to be, shown in so many ways!! And then there is the lovely clever depth he gets inside a tall earthen jar, as you peep In through an orifice - and then there is a surprise inside.

And then the two massive massive structures he has created with pans and buckets and all kinds of things - one in the gardens of NGMA and the other outside the KNAC. The one in NGMA is called The Ray. And you know exactly what he wants you to have in your life, as a bucket pours all of it right on front of you, with the winter sun reflecting gorgeously right on your face, into your glad eyes. 

Catch it.