Notes on Taare Zameen Par

Aamir Khan and Amol Gupte know cinema. That much is evident from the spirited depiction of a child's (a dyslexic child's, at that) inner world filled with puddles, gutter fish, splendid colored golaas (sorbet/ice candy for the non Mumbaikars)- nods to the childhood celebrating 400 Blows and Kitaab. For a Bollywood star turned first time director, this is as unconventional and artistic as it can get. Taare Zameen Par is one of the finer films to emerge from Bollywood; after all, who cares to make a film about the Ishaans of India?

So, it almost makes me feel guilty to point out why it fell short of becoming a personal favorite. Khalid Mohammed covers many of the reasons, but there is one more: Aamir Khan. Clearly (I'll eat my words if this was Amol Gupte's idea), he cannot resist making a splashing entry as a clown; and from that entry onwards, there seems to be a jostling for screen space between him and the little child (for me, the art competition at the end took on new meaning in that light). The somewhat one-dimensional and unimaginative characterizations of everyone except the kid and the teacher betray how Khan doesn't quite have his finger on the middle class pulse (compare Mani Ratnam's Anjali or Kannathil Muthamittal, where tensions in the nuclear family are much more palpable). He even fails to conceive of a last shot without positing himself in it, and concludes with Ishaan running back to him so he can lift him up to the skies. What a marked contrast from the wonderfully understated first few minutes!

Hopefully, his promising directorial debut is a sign of better films to come.

Love in the Guise of Turpentine

(First published at Desicritics)

The wife and I were in the windy city on Thanksgiving Day. After croissants and a jasmine tea by the river, we agreed to complete a romantic morning by watching a romantic matinee. I hadn't seen/read any previews on Love In The Time of Cholera, knowing only that it was about longing in love or some such. That's romantic, we figured, and it's based on a book by the Great Garcia who brilliantly allegorized the futility and tragedy of our species in his 'One Hundred Years...', so we can't go wrong, re. Alas, go wrong we did.


Florentino Ariza, the boy, is smitten by Fermina, the village belle, and half a century of sex with over six hundred women doesn’t make a man of him so that he still ‘loves’ and pines for Fermina. I know, it’s supposed to be Profound - a man looking for True Love, the Holy Grail that’s spiritual and loftier than all the physical relationships he has (the number of which would make Genghis Khan look like a monk). I know that his diary of sexual conquests isn’t a high school kid’s scorebook of chicks he laid; it’s a chronicle of his journey towards True Love. And when he paints, in turpentine, the letters “This is mine” along with an arrow pointing downward (to you know where) on the belly of a woman, leading to her husband discovering it and slashing her throat, it’s supposed to convey how possessiveness in love destroys (and how turpentine is hard to get off human skin).

Oh, and by the way, all this happens in the time of cholera. Don’t ask me why.Women undress like it’s an episode of Senoritas Gone Wild, and Florentino (Garcia?) seems to have a brazenly narcissistic “the chicks dig me” air about him. Fermina is the only character you sympathize with; she refers to Florentino as “empty”, which is true of the plot as much as the protagonist; she reconciles with real life with a dignity and charm bordering on poignancy. Our hero, on the other hand, writes business letters in rhyme because “all I can write is love” and such juvenile, lofty gobbledygook. The only redeeming moments are the unpretentiously real ones, like Fermina’s wedding night.


This is my problem with magic realism run amok: metaphors tend to lose their purpose as means to illuminating truth and become ends in themselves. Characters become, to quote Amitava Kumar, “walking-talking metaphors”. The narrative space is crowded by metaphors - often contrived, tenuous, and downright absurd – and meaning struggles to find a place in it.


So, unless you're a horny heterosexual male, a connoisseur of stretched metaphors, or interested in the chemical bonding of turpentine and the epidermis, avoid this one.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

(First published at Desicritics)

When Changez, the narrator-protagonist of Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, returns to New York just after September 11, 2001 from a business assignment, he is stripped to his boxers by airport immigration authorities. There is a disarmingly clever little detail that Hamid works into this incident:

'...I had, rather embarrassingly, chosen to wear a pink pair patterned with teddy bears, but their revelation had no impact on the severe expressions of my inspectors'

Changez has bared himself to be the childlike, adorably dorky personality he is, but no one seems to recognize that. In post 9/11 America, he feels as though his external appearance defines him. The Reluctant Fundamentalist is largely a book about such prejudices. In a café in Lahore, Changez narrates his past to an American. There is constant tension between the two, obviously mirroring the uneasy love-hate relationship between the two nations. The book is a quasi-monologue; the American remains anonymous and peeks out of the pages only when Changez either repeats his casual questions (“Oh, you ask Why”? and suchlike), or reads his mind (“I see that you are alarmed”). This allows the story to come from Changez’s-and therefore Pakistan’s-perspective, it makes us-the readers-the intended anonymous audience, and heightens the sense of mystery surrounding the American.

The most powerful thing about the book is, not surprisingly, the love story. With some extraordinarily sensitive prose, Erica, Changez’s love, emerges as a brilliant personification of her country (whose name contains hers). Having lost Chris, her first and longtime love, Erica is only beginning to find life in Changez, when 9/11 happens. This pushes her into a depression-a heartbreaking vortex of longing for the dead Chris.
Hamid seems to warn us that this quest for a better future in an imagined past is not only Erica and Changez’s tragedy, but that of all fundamentalism. True to the novelist’s craft, he doesn’t directly condemn this backward looking ideology, but instead brings out the self-destructive tragedy of this outlook.
During their courtship, Erica responds to Changez sexually only when he pretends to be Chris. This is a poignant comment on the obliteration of identity that ‘fitting-in’ demands.

Religion, apart from a few oblique references, is conspicuously absent from the narrative. Hamid is more interested in the psychology of a fundamentalist. Changez’s inspirations are not in Islam; his angst is fuelled by his sense of wounded pride (he cannot bear the fact that even Manila has a swankier skyline than Lahore), his awareness of acute economic disparity, and his alienation-induced identity crisis-issues that all of us grapple with in this “World Is Flat” age.
The novel is the perfect medium to give these issues an identifiably human voice, and Hamid’s rich prose adds to the beauty of this endeavor. (A quibble: too many words are italicized for emphasis, often unnecessarily, sometimes jarringly.) The ending, too, is a slick comment on the perpetual mutual suspicion between the two cultures.