The Times of India is too big for details

Indranil Basu’s front page Times of India story on the discontent in Indian cricket makes me cringe. Here’s is a bloated rumor masquerading as a major sports story. Just take a look at the headline, for christ’s sake. “Dhoni may be sacked as Test captain”. So the reporter isn’t sure. Or maybe he’s sure that the board isn’t sure.

Parts of it read as if a cricket administrator wrote the stuff. “While senior players, including VVS Laxman and Rahul Dravid, have clarified that they are not retiring from cricket as yet, it doesn’t mean that both, or either, will be selected for Tests again.” Who said that? The Times can be frugal with details, but here they’re stingy with anonymity too. So I don’t know if one board member is thinking this, or if lots of them are. A little later, Basu writes, “It is also being said that if Yuvraj Singh gets fit, he will be an ‘automatic choice’”. Nowhere does Basu indicate that he questioned those doing the saying about what they were smoking. He thinks it’s not important to tell us how he knows that Sehwag’s feeling left out under Dhoni. And he certainly doesn’t explain which particular cricket bosses think Sehwag should be given a chance. Okay, fine, don’t give us that. At least tell me how many people feel that way.

At one point in his story, Basu decides to toss away dispassion and distance entirely, and writes, “However, what is disturbing is the talk of ‘an ego clash’ between Dhoni and Sehwag”. I can’t make up my mind over whether Basu’s editorializing or being savaged by the Times’ light-touch copy-editors. Maybe he’s just being a mouthpiece, because this is what comes next: “It’s said that this affected Dhoni’s captaincy and he couldn’t assert his authority with Sehwag and a few others.”

Basu may have done the hard yards, and perhaps everything he wrote may still turn out to be true. But he forgets that to present all these voices without attribution, even if those voices are anonymous, is just beyond stupid.

This story, and others like it, just serve as a reminder that the only reason I let this collection of half-truths pretending to be a newspaper into my home is because I’m working on my sift-through-garbage-to-find-one-fact skills.

Ps. I just read the last part of the story online. It is an editorial.

A fan's note on Indian cricket

I don’t remember when exactly I began to have this fear, but the specter of an Indian team shorn of its extraordinary fortune (there’s no other way to describe how so many great batsmen turned up at the same time) numbed my pleasure as a fan for a long time. For many years this team achieved less than it was capable of, and so, if it won when it wasn’t supposed to, I believed that things had come together for one long moment. But a losing team that starts winning is a strange thing: many of its fans celebrate, but some, like me, are left deeply uneasy. Not much has changed, so how did we start winning?

When I look back now, I see the comfort we found in constant underachievement. We were anchored to our failures, of which we were very aware. They hung around, reminding us of what needed to be done before we could set sail. But we slipped away by choosing the lubrication of good fortune over the struggle of creation. Well, here we are, finally run aground on a reef of We-told-you-so’s.

Now that our luck has left us, I feel oddly reassured. What remains is not actions but words that expose the hollowness of this team’s spirit. It is built on revenge, on the mistaken belief that they will show us, and we will be converts once more. They talk in the abstraction of numbers, they remind us of the good times, they tell us we need to stand behind them. There has been hubris, not humility; they speak not of remedying themselves but of doctoring pitches. Here they are, cold, frightened, and utterly lost. Orphans.

And from afar, from the man in exile, come solutions the length of an SMS. This, that, that too, and don’t forget this. Obvious solutions, old solutions - all put forward half a decade ago, and then discarded by him. He did not see luck as an opportunity to buy more time and create his own. Instead, he set about taking control and creating wealth. But those values were on paper, and ultimately they hinge on how the sport is played. Which he largely ignored. The funny money paid for those crazy Indian broadcast deals? Those weren’t for Indian cricket, they were for Indian cricket’s superstars. Now some of India’s greatest batsmen will leave and what happens next should be fun.

Here’s what we have. We are left with a team, or the remains of a team, that has fewer spinners than England does. Putting it mildly, we now regard Harbhajan Singh with something like fondness. The board talks about avoiding whitewashes. Dravid says there is no hurry to decide on his retirement. Laxman says nothing. Sachin waits, and we wait with him. This is as it was. These are the failures we were anchored to a decade ago. And here they are again. Except that the greatest batting lineup ever is now behind us, as is the finest Indian spinner.

The promise of this team lies in men who haven’t announced themselves yet. So I know I will wait for them to come along, as they have always done, and remind us that Indian cricket is alive once more. But again, and I have to keep reminding myself of this, it will be our fortune that takes us forward.

This time, though, the specter of good fortune deserting us can be some other fan’s private nightmare. I’ve seen this once; it’s all I can take, frankly.

Beautiful words from a beautiful book

"When you write a book, you willingly step into the public arena, no longer reporter but being reported upon, no longer jotting down notes on the debate but joining in it. You should welcome to conflict with journalists, scholars, critics, and others who will read your work and challenge your version of reality with their own. That kind of disputation is healthy for a society and it will keep your talents sharp. Never be afraid to defend the vision of the world that you have committed to the page. But make sure you can defend it, because every charlatan in our midst undermines the credibility of us all."

Source: Letters to a Young Journalist.

The half-way point

Bear with me a moment. I'm trying to explore the nature of something.

I've found that when it comes to memories, there is an inevitable point when what you know and what you feel and what you feel about what you felt back then all come together to create the perfect storm of nostalgia. This is long after the actual event. This often happens naturally, but can also be forced out of myself by creating the conditions necessary for a deep longing. It's been a while since she died, but I recall my mother when I enter the room she died in. I recreate the last sounds that came out of her, pull out the look on the doctor's face when he stopped pumping her heart, and then my sister making a phone call I could never have made.

The idea is not to mourn, or grieve, but to remember. And not just remember a moment, but a moment filled with feeling.

But there comes a half-way point when the bubbling in the water starts to subside before it cools and, finally, becomes still. My instinct then is to remember what I can dispassionately, and fall back on photographs, videos, and the recollections of other people. Through these things I can reconstruct, in a Frankensteinian way, the life of people I knew. This happens after the half-way point.

At this stage, truly unreliable narratives are formed. The kind that can't always be verified because they could be true, or just might not.

Just thinking aloud.

The Dubai-returns

To me, a memory is a story whose cast and lines change imperceptibly with each recollection. Seen from other angles, memories become a kind of hazy witness report. Put together, they overlap to form some kind of truth. Three years ago, in a fit of nostalgia, I began to write a long, flawed memory of our life in Dubai. It is by no means accurate, but I had hoped to capture what I remember of this family before it became entirely fiction. This urge to record was always there, but it became more urgent when an uncle threw out a trove of old letters, photographs and documents because he needed the trunk for storage. I suddenly realized how much I wanted to read those letters, and see those photographs.

(A note. This was meant to be much longer, but I reasoned that a series of stories would allow me to delve into this history in greater detail, so I chopped it off abruptly.)

***

Not long after its independence, my elders landed on Dubai’s shores. They came by ship, one after another, heeding the trunk calls from other relatives in the desert. Come here, life is good here, get a job here. Here was the place to be. Between here and where they were, this was not a difficult choice to make. The Seventies were swinging elsewhere, and leaving India couldn’t have been easier. So they came, as others from India and its neighbors had, without a job, their confidence built on the rickety rumors of better prospects. They came with eight dollars in cargo class (because that is what India allowed them to carry outside) stopped at Karachi a while, and arrived here, unbathed and unshaved, five days later.

On arrival they walked to their new home under a burning sun. Word would spread. Another one had arrived. That evening the clan would converge, happy to have grown in number. I was not there then, but they would have danced, as they always did. Their arms jolting rhythmically and convulsing bodies following, their eyes closed, forefingers up, as if to say ‘bear with this for a minute’; the dance of men who could not groove. Wives and sisters, newly acquainted, sat on carpets with the air conditioning turned up, and talked about things the men had no time for.

Photographs show them before the wrinkles appeared, before the desert took its due. They look beautiful in their saris and pants, with the lady from Bombay in her short hair, and the new entrant from Indore in plaits, her eyes wide open. In hindsight, those years were lean but uncomplicated. Decades later, when they finally had the money they wanted, the simplicity would be gone.

For all it signifies, Dubai remains a small city. Along the way, its planners were galvanized by the idea of a greater destiny. The first attempts at greatness were classical: the world’s longest cake, the world’s biggest clock. Sharjah, the emirate next door, had the world’s third-largest fountain. These were diligently reported in the Khaleej Times, our local paper. Supportive letters were sent to the editor. Relatives gathered every week to discuss these achievements in earnestness. If anyone missed these drunken meetings, as an uncle who ran a photo store did, he would be heckled by the mob. “Note-chaap,” they would say to his face. Money-printer. And then rib his sons who had stayed behind.

Every now and then, a cousin would down a few drinks and claim to have seen the blueprint for Dubai’s growth. It involved breathtaking road layouts and supreme architecture. It was a great conversation stopper. For a moment the family would pause to consider how plausible this was. It was entirely plausible. Only fifteen years ago there had been nothing here but houses in the sand and a creek. Now there were malls and central air conditioning. Even then, it was implausible. The idiot had drunk too much. They would continue discussions over Amstel and Planters cheese balls. It was not a place or a time for introspection. One arbitrary ruling by the royal family, would have meant we’d be back in Indore. So the future, for many people, was of course filled with unknowns, but it held no promise, only the dread of tomorrow. They otherwise earned and lived well, better than they would have elsewhere, but many of them lived from day to day.



The cousin would not tell us how he knew. You only need to see a picture of modern Dubai to know he was right. There will be trains in the sky, it will be a city of skyscrapers and huge attractions and ten million visitors each year. You could see pictures of the same place, year by year from 1972, and understand that this advance was inevitable. But in 1990, which falls halfway between 1972 and 2007, we had simply no idea. Dubai was Dubai, it stood for nothing else. People made money there, but that was all. It would be a decade before it was compared with Monaco, giant islands were built off shore, and the Burj shone like a jewel in the Dubai skyline. But I missed this breathless growth. In 1996 I left to start my own life. 


Breathless activity has its downsides. Where I used to live is now unsympathetically called old Dubai. Twenty years old and it’s known as old Dubai. The beating heart of the city has shifted twenty kilometers outward, and so planned was the approach that for a while the city had a downtown filled with cranes and construction workers and not a finished building in sight. Before modern Dubai, a place like it existed only in Sim City 2000.

But downtown came later. This was a quiet town once, before the desert was swept back. At the time, a single low aerial snap could capture every building in town. A creek slunk through its center, splitting the population in two; Deira with its electronics stores on one side, and Bur Dubai’s south Asian textile shops on the other. The place couldn’t have been closer to heaven for immigrants from India, of whom there were multitudes. They lived a life radically different from anything their own countries could afford. Dubai offered wealth and familiar food and entertainment. Of course rules had to be followed, the first among them being unofficial - that the Arab always took preference over all else. It was a wisdom that held true, as people learnt from the unfortunate experiences of others. Deportations and jail terms were common. But such were the benefits of staying in line and keeping your head down that the city, at least as the papers reported it, experienced virtually no incident or crime.

Back home in India, people argued that they lived in a democracy. In Hindi movies the term ‘Dubai-return’ was coined to describe a peculiar comically stylish breed of sunglass-wearing Indian. The city came to be renowned as the den of smugglers and thieves whose motive was to destabilize India. Those were naïve times, although the truth is that the Indians who stayed behind lived an unforgiving life. There was violence and corruption and taxes and an uncooperative bureaucratic regime and a list of wrongs as lengthy as history.

The view in Dubai was of course different. To them, the freedoms of an authoritarian country were not as taxing as those of the democracy left behind. Naturally dissent was unacceptable, but they were here for work and the good life, not trouble. It did not matter whether internationally wanted men moved among them for the city was content and promised lasting peace. And peace was kept, despite the immigrant population consisting largely of Indians and Pakistanis afflicted by Partition’s festering wounds. Their recent history had brimmed with injustices that often boiled over into wars, but the immigrants here had long ago decided that nationalism did not buy a new car. Besides, Dubai offered only one chance.

They took that chance to build businesses that thrived for decades. Movie theaters and drive-ins, jewelry stores, supermarkets, photo studios, music stores, restaurants – the small businesses sprouted everywhere, making it like a sanitized version of home. This happened by strength in numbers. The photo studio I sat at was bracketed by an Indian fast food restaurant and a tailoring shop – one run by a sikh, the other by a South Indian. Down the street small and identical music stores did business, and flourished. Which was befuddling, because everyone sold the same video and audio cassettes. Indian textiles flooded the market. Hindi was adopted by Arabs, and they spoke a broken version of it: “Ek minute. Hum aati.” The Indian hand was everywhere. And so, given the evidence of their culture flourishing, each day convinced the immigrants further that the land was their own, even if they couldn’t buy it.

Perhaps they overestimated their supposed stake, because one morning the exodus began. The day’s papers mentioned a new ruling that forced workers below a certain income to leave Dubai immediately. As days went by the reports of departures nurtured an old insecurity. Our family meetings were more politically inclined. ‘Who knows what they’ll come up with next?’ some would ask in anger. It was true. Rulings came with no prior warning, and had a nasty way of forcing upheaval upon large swathes of the population. The children, my cousins, who had so far been unaware of the impact of new legislation, were now old enough to latch on to catchphrases. “Who knows what they’ll come up with next,” a cousin parroted and was immediately shushed up. My parents would wait until the last guest had left before holding me to never repeat conversations at home. The reigning Indian policy of no confrontation had worked for them, and they wished for us too to become invisible in some ways. The local populace, we understood, had to be respected and feared. An Arab was always - always - connected to someone who could alter the course of your life. Proof of this was not required. When enough people speak about a thing, it becomes true. Dubai was not the kind of place where you learnt from your own mistakes.

The theory of cooperation and respect was tested during the first Gulf War, when the city swarmed with marines. I’d spend time with my uncle at his photo studio in Bur Dubai where a cash register swallowed green bills with a frequency unimaginable to us. The volume of work had overwhelmed the small staff. He needed an extra hand. I’d help with feeding the negative into the processor, cutting it in to strips and slipping them into plastic sheaths. Then the photos would come out of the machine, one every half minute or so, with these alien white faces doing strange things. They were big and had blond hair and freckles. They dressed differently, and wore shirts untucked. Sometimes they were bare-chested. Sometimes the women wore almost nothing. My uncle would look at every picture, replacing bad prints with a reprint, not stopping to linger on any one a little longer. He betrayed no curiosity. Racy pictures were destined, like all others, for a drawer under the register filled with envelopes marked for customers. I think back now, remembering his glasses perched half-way up his broad nose under his thick Sindhi eyebrows, skipping through these prints quickly. The faster he did this, the more he earned.
Ever so often a local walked in to the crowded shop. Experience had taught them that Arabs will get attention, so nothing need be said or demanded. My uncle stopped what he was doing and would speak with him directly, bypassing the customers who arrived before. The others waited testily, but said nothing. Americans looked at things differently.

The pianist

The pianist, a quiet man from Washington, contemplated what he would do after he gave up what he was born to do. Greying, slowing, he no longer relegated tasks to the future, when he would be greyer, slower. He was born to old parents who gave him the opportunity to be still and read, and through these books he learned that men a thousand years ago were no different from those today. In time, after he was alone a long while, and after his professional ambitions began to fade, he saw the dreams his passions had obscured. The pianist took to travel, looking for answers to questions that were never clear. He traversed the quietest parts of this country, moving between places where people found enlightenment, hoping to be inspired. There had been no inspiration so far, only a faint realization that his life was enviable, even as it came to a close. Men who helped him get around told him so, and he began to see the walls that separated these men from the lives they could lead. The force of this desire made him reconsider what he was doing, and how he was doing it.

But there's still the future to think of, he said, lighting up a cigarette on a musty morning in Goa. There are things he wants to do, but these are tempered by things he has to do. Right now, he has to play the piano.

Then he shrugged, and smiled, and did what men a thousand years ago did: he filed the dilemma for later.

Why they left

Last Sunday, Niranjan Rajadhyaksha, Samanth Subramanian, and I caught up.

As an aside, one of the things I'm irrationally proud of - don't ask why - is that Samanth edited the first article of my professional writing life. He had been at Cricinfo a while, and I was three days old there. He went through it at the speed the web demands, adding a word here, removing one there, rejigging a couple of paragraphs, before reaching the last line. Here he paused, reading it again and again, before writing this over it in one thirty-second burst:

Farhat's dismissal brought Inzamam-ul-Haq to the crease, and he scored a quickfire 25 in his 300th one-day international to set the tone for the late-innings savagery. Youhana's 53-ball 64 and Razzaq's 34 off just 16 balls merely drove the nails more thunderously into the coffin of this depleted New Zealand outfit.

I don't remember what I had written, but the way he wrote these lines did. After he was done, he felt compelled to say something about good beginnings and satisfying endings. This was my first taste of the uncluttered thinking that added to Cricinfo's aura. In time I'd come to learn of Tim de Lisle's legendary stylebook - 'colour is good', I think he wrote - why adjectives were discouraged, and other things I can't remember, but which live on in the writing style of nearly everyone who moved on from Cricinfo (except for Rahul Bhattacharya, who came and went with his own style).

But ten days after I joined, Samanth left and, by dint of being present, I became a full employee. I was thankful for the job, but didn't really bother finding out why he left. In the years since then, while I worked there, I knew that Chandrahas left to explore a wider world, while Amit wanted to focus on blogging. It's difficult to explain how seismic this was. Sure, we talked about how there were more distractions for Indians today, and yes, a casual survey did tell us that football was more popular in city schools than cricket, and that is why people were stepping away from the game. These reasons explained dwindling audiences, they explained falling ratings. But now, when I think about it, these were probably things we felt by ourselves. That the more frequent games became, the lesser was the anticipation. The more they marketed each game, the less we listened to the personal rhythms that connect sport lovers spread over continents. Cricket thrived, and still does, but I'd argue that it is no longer the medium for its writers' passions that it once was. Siddhartha Vidyanathan continues to write about the sport beautifully, but he does this outside the fold. No Zimbabwe versus Bangladesh matches for him. Rahul has turned to exploring quieter worlds. Amit, who brings scary intensity to everything he does, now challenges himself in other ways.

All this is connected to Sunday. When the discussion veered to cricket writing, Samanth said he left because - and I'm phrasing this very loosely - he didn't want to hate the game. Now, writing this, I realize he felt it change before most of us did. Like the writers who came after him, he left it because he loved the idea of it too much. It would be funny if it wasn't true.

Why this post, why now? I guess I'm grappling with something new - the idea that writing seriously in India requires sacrifice and a degree of risk-taking. Looking at Cricinfo and its writers helps. They put themselves in a new place because they couldn't completely believe in the old one. I can't think of a better reason to leap.

The phantom leap

Eight days short of six years ago, when there was time for internal dialogue, I wrote this. Many things have changed since, but the conflicts present in the last paragraph have remained. There have been growing responsibilities, and a greater awareness of the consequences of each choice. And yet the conflicts don't go away. Even after six years of learning, of working toward something, of hopefully becoming a slightly better writer. That phantom leap still lingers, waiting for me to decide. Each choice is brave and yet cowardly; the secure path leads to a warm life, and the one I haven't taken could be miserable.

But I live and breathe my stories in a way I can't explain. Not to you, or my bosses, or my family, or even myself. The last story I explored and wrote with passion - even if it doesn't come across - was the longest I had ever written and, I asked myself after a month: "Still not one comment?" The story took three weeks to research, and a week to write. Then came another story, about the Oscar Library, which I wrote because I had to fill a weekly deadline. I wrote it in an hour. I spent the next two days in a terrible funk, because it was terrible. And I'm still surprised how many people liked it.

So at what point does one take that leap? I'm still grappling with it. When I wrote 25, 35, 45, I genuinely didn't know how life would turn out. At 31, the answer is no clearer, but the choices, and their consequences, certainly are.

I guess knowing how you're going to be screwed is a kind of progress.

The spirit of inquiry

Reading The Emperor of All Maladies today, I came by a passage whose sentiment I found familiar .

"Basic research," [Vannevar] Bush wrote, "is performed without thought of practical ends. It results in general knowledge and an understanding of nature and its laws. This general knowledge provides the means of answering a large number of important practical problems, though it may not give a complete specific answer to any one of them...."

Bush argued that the the spirit of inquiry was central to scientific progress, and that "programmatic" science, which favoured a regimented, goal-based approach, would stifle innovation.

But as I mentioned, Bush's words felt familiar because writing often felt like this. Especially at the start, and especially at times like now, when I want to stop doing whatever I'm doing and focus on defining my present limits. These boundaries keep changing, and with these boundaries the 'laws' change too. The "general knowledge" it results in is of the personal kind; I discover a little more about myself. These discoveries, in turn, take me someplace else. When the spirit of inquiry is alive, we chart new territory.

Airtel and me, the media.

It was a pretty calm and unexciting day when the phone rang, as it always did, quite suddenly.

Voice: Hello. I'm calling from IMRB on behalf of Airtel broadband to check customer satisfaction. Could you spare five minutes of your time to answer some questions?

Me: Yes!

(Background: My broadband had been behaving like MTNL's dialup for three months. I would call regularly to complain, and they would respond that an engineer had come by and everything was wonderful. It was like Middle Eastern propaganda. I nearly forgot what a 4mbps connection looked like. Just the other day a guy at the call center blew up at me for being unprofessional when I called the connection "shit". His awesome response: "The shit connection, sir, is because we have server trouble." Server trouble is like the Indian online version of dog ate my homework. Big-ass faceless entity that's safe to shake a fist at. Like a picture of god.)

Voice: Is any member of your family in the media?

Me: Yes.

Voice: Who?

Me: Me.

(Silence.)

Voice: Thank you for your time. We're not looking for feedback from the media today.

And then she hung up to go find some non-media person. Today it's us media folk. Next come the bloggers. Then the ones on Twitter.

You know where this is headed.

Voice: Sorry sir, Airtel broadband's not looking for customer feedback from anyone using the internet.

Another place, another plane, another time, another space

There are nine screws above me. Nine white dome-shaped heads pierced through the wings of the fan. Two hanging lights bracket this fan, and they all swing this way and that when a strong breeze rushes through. One glass shell contains tungsten, and the other is lit up by halogen. These are all stuck to a false white ceiling with tiny blotches, like dried rainwater in a school notebook. The fan’s tails are dusty and greasy, and someone would clean it if they noticed it the way I do. They would clean it if it bothered them the way it does me, because it feels like seeing through smudged spectacles. But for them to notice it would require them to look at the ceiling and nothing else. They would have to stare at it for thirty days and nights, the way I have, watching moths and their dramatic shadows flutter by and die, watching passing flies chase and flee, watching vampire insects float by malnourished and float away red and full and content. This is to go on for a week more, doctors say. Stay on your back. Don’t get up. And whatever you do, don’t die of boredom.

A slowdown is a heavy, heavy weight. It presses down hard, forcing you still. At first the body rebels, brimming with energies that need something, anything, to do. These turn to embers that die eventually. And then you lie there, waiting for something to happen. Until these thoughts die too. Then there is nothing. There is you, the fan, the stupid lights, a bunch of moths, flies in a hurry, and vampire mosquitoes. Like I said, nothing extraordinary.

But there’s something funny about all this. Night and day make no difference. You are neither active nor tired. There is nothing to be excited about. I stop reading the papers. For hours I lie here, staring straight ahead, listening to life go on outside. People are doing something. Insects and animals are doing something. It feels like holding life’s wrist and feeling its pulse. This always needed more than time. It needed me to clear the real estate in my head.

When a body goes on a general strike, it behaves like West Bengal. It begins on Monday and ends whenever. But there’s time to smell the flowers again, to dig into culture, to discover stories that slipped by. It is another place, another plane, another time, another space.

Next month I will have to come out and face the human race. They will stop by for a moment and perhaps see something faintly familiar when we meet. I will look at them and wonder about this. I might think about the house I’d like one day. The mountain home I see in daydreams sometimes. They might see this in my face, in my gait. But as I live among them once again, the slowdown will slowly end. The heaviness of that slowdown will be gone, replaced with something even heavier.

Amitabh Bachchan's *cough* work

Even by the breathtakingly atrocious standard of film reporting at Bombay Times, this story is incredible. An excerpt:

Amitabh Bachchan gave a funny dialogue of a South Indian film, "I will hit you so hard even Google will not be able to find you", out on a social networking site.

It became an instant hit amongst the net community, getting repeated, used as status messages and updates across the net. Of course, no one bothered to give credit to the person who set it all in motion. ... We speak about IPR rights in a country where even AB’s work is passed off by the general public as their own!

AB's work?

The wives who stayed behind

Rajni George has written a lovely story about women whose husbands live and work in the Middle East. Towards the end of her piece, George delves on the classic conflicts immigrants grapple with in a beautiful paragraph:

In [a book titled] Kerala’s Gulf Connection, ... loneliness is cited as the most serious problem Gulf wives face, followed by the burden of being the chief person responsible when a member of the household needs medical care or other help. How does one weigh this kind of loneliness against the other kind that both Amisha and Rasiya say they want to avoid, the loneliness of being in a foreign country without a social support system? Every immigrant life is shaped according to how they respond to this essential conflict. The question they are unwittingly responding to, of course, is what makes them happy and how?

I'm going to take a sentence out of context because it reminded me of something. The immigrant experience is inextricably linked to the region's story. When they left these shores to pursue a dream, they gambled that their fortunes would rise and fall with those of their host. Until three years ago they had good times, sailing through the greenest of green stretches life can provide. Until this happened, they could afford to not look at the strides being taken at home. Now the immigrant looks at home from a distance and sees it changed. The classic loneliness of being in a foreign country is slightly altered: It is also the loneliness of knowing that the home left behind has forgotten his absence.

I had the good fortune to meet Rajni, a writer and editor with The Caravan, during a recent trip to Dubai. I was surprised at how she felt about the city and its immigrants from a story-potential perspective. Surprised because I had naively assumed that my decades in Dubai had left me with a unique perspective, and that I could see stories that others couldn't. After meeting her, I wasn't so sure.

I do know one thing. If she decides to write a book on the place, it'll be far better than any literature on the subject so far.

Sabotaging bad movies

Reading a story today about the new old Bollywood meme of rumor and gossip being used to sink movies, I wondered why the firmament isn't called out more often on this lie. When a star becomes part of a movie unit, he goes public with his choices. I'm curious about what drives these decisions. What makes a movie like Kites seem like a good idea? Who sells it? What does he say to make a star buy it? What does the star see? Who does he consult? How does his existence inside this space lead him to believe that a failed movie was not undone simply by its badness? That it was sabotage?

What I'd give to be inside this bubble. Can you imagine the delusion?

The story

When I see a forgotten thing, of whose significance only I know, there’s a tightening in my chest and I think to myself that this forgetting and this discovery are a story. When the excitement fades, I remember that all this is a very old story, and that forgetting happens for a reason. Once the reasoning is over and the time to feel comes, I look at the forgotten thing from a distance, reconstructing the history that surrounded it and my place in it, and I remember that some things are most keenly felt by me only. Words only serve to lighten their meaning.

Guidance

This poor kid needs a little luck going his way. First the transfer problem, then his terrible tour, and now he suffers the indignity of a leaked mail:

"I regret that the board has sent me a notice for the incident in the West Indies, and please accept my apology," Jadeja wrote. "I had gone to the restaurant (pub) along with other Indian team members. Some other guests, which I presume were Indian origins of the USA, also came to the restaurant and on seeing us they started abusing us, this may be because they were unhappy with our poor performance. We requested them not to abuse us but they did not stop inspite of our repeated request. No way was I involved in any ugly brawl and I went to the pub only to have dinner with my team-mates."

Unless the board didn't leak it.

Whatever happened that day, there's no denying that Indian cricket fans - the only kind I'm familiar with - can be thoughtless and quite unkind. The chants at Wankhede and the thrown bottles and stones still resonate. I've seen this before in living rooms and locker rooms, two places where the filter between the mind and mouth disappears. Players shouldn't be dropped, they should be "kicked out". A captain isn't having a bad day, "he's just useless". I'm generalizing, but most of us have heard these words and uttered them too. I think we tend to forget that passion needs the constraints of civility. Without that, we can't be fans.

The vehicle

Watching Kites the other night, there were times I felt so embarrassed, exposed, and squeamish that I couldn’t bear to look at the screen. I had nothing at stake with this movie, not the investment of emotional interest, not even mild curiosity. This was because of my unshakable belief before the movie’s release that Kites was destined to fail. So my reactions confused me. Bad movies are usually enjoyable. What was so different about this one? Until I began writing this short piece, I had no idea.

My certainty about the movie’s fate grew with each round fired by the pre-release publicity. When Hrithik Roshan danced to an audience in one song, they were amazed by his moves. When he jumped up and lingered there, the background went white with blazing flashbulbs. His open shirt fluttered in the wind, revealing a body that has been exposed a hundred times before. I came away with nothing but the message its makers wanted to convey: Kites had a story, and that story was Roshan.

Most of us have our vehicles. A good gig. A profitable association. The things we ride on in life. But a movie as a vehicle doesn’t sit easy with me, especially a movie meant to be a vehicle into Hollywood. From Roshan’s first mumble to his final heartbroken leap, Kites’ purpose was to enshrine what was most beautiful about him. Whether men died around him, or true love struck, the camera remained on his face in a way parents making baby videos will recognize. In this way Kites was like a father’s message to the world: Here is my son. Take good care of him.

Well, that’s how I would have seen it if it rang true. This was a vehicle. I felt squeamish because there was nothing I could say or do. This wasn’t a movie. It was nothing. It was a modeling portfolio. It was lazy and assumed so much.

Roshan said that Indian audiences were “putting it down” instead of “nurturing this new passion that has conquered so many new markets”. He said that Kites was like pasta to biryani-fed Indians. What does this talk remind you of? To me he sounds eerily similar to men who explain markets through trends and buzzwords, men who have a reason for everything.

Does this talk come easily because actors sit at this intersection of art and commerce? I don’t know. I excused myself from a job interview once soon after my interviewer, an editor, spoke to me about the publication’s brand perception and its verticals. I know these things are important, but I’m conflicted. I walked out because I wanted to write.

Does Roshan want to act? I don’t know.

Looking through windows

A dusty new yellow skywalk winds from Bandra station, past IMG, and across the bumpy Western highway before turning abruptly and terminating in the lap of Matoshree. Before the wide path swings by the glass tower of the event management agency, and the swamp and endless asphalt that follow, it presents a rare opportunity to stop and look through windows.

At the bottom of a building constructed entirely of curling planks of plywood and nails, preparations are on for a shop's opening. Directly above it, on a wooden ledge on more than two feet wide, a perched carpenter accepts a hammer and nails from his adviser, currently balancing himself on a white paint-stained ladder. The carpenter places a rust colored corrugated iron sheet on the ledge, and discovers it isn't the right size. A measuring tape is brought out, the ledge is measured, and a discussion commences. The helper descends gingerly and disappears inside the shop. The carpenter is still now, apart from the odd sniffle. After a while he wipes his leaky nose on his right sleeve. With his left, he holds on to a wooden plank at the base of a window where two attentive young boys keep his hammer handy. A third child emerges from behind a yellow curtain and asks to hold the hammer in exchange for a screwdriver. The request is denied.

The next store is empty, but for a single telephone orphaned on a desk and the balding proprietor behind it. Above them, tattered floral prints sway gently to reveal and conceal tailors and their sewing machines sitting on the floor. One tailor's mouth is swollen with tobacco, and he communicates with expressive head shakes, never quite unsealing his lips.

Now the carpenter climbs through the window, and tiny heads bob up to evaluate his work. In seconds they are bored of this. One chokes the other, and the victim falls down dead. Immediately two hands clad in bangles close around the boys' ears and drag them in to deliver instant justice. The yellow curtain pauses a moment to take in their absence before settling down.

Beyond the building is an MNS flag nailed to the side of a ramshackle kitchen on the second floor of a firetrap. And even further is another flagpole holding up what looks like a giant rubber horn.

Watching Avatar

(Spoilers here, but you’ll thank me.)

There are many beautiful things about Avatar: plants in danger zip themselves shut, trees share knowledge, forests light up at night, the animals. But there is gift wrapping, and then there’s the gift within. Remember Pushpak?

The gift within, as it were, is the story and dialogue. The movie begins with interesting circumstances - a paraplegic finds his feet in another body. He is sent to the natives as a spy, and his loyalties slowly shift. This journey into his new life is narrated leisurely, and it feels suitably meditative. Almost Eastern, in a way.

But then it remembers Hollywood. Like an Indian copy editor pressed for time, it puts an end to the journey arbitrarily, and the result is brutal. A war follows, in which copters and flying beasts go at each other. I could not believe my ears when the protagonist screamed for war at the end. It stereotyped the stereotype. For a moment I saw Mel Gibson and Russell Crowe do their thing. Perhaps that is how battles are fought and how leaders inspire. Perhaps. But I think not. Imagine Marlon Brando going “YEAH!” and doing a fist pump during his monologue in Apocalypse Now. Weird there, weird here. There’s quiet leadership, and there’s Hollywood leadership.

There were references to Miyazaki’s work and the gargantuan machines so necessary in futuristic war video games. All this has been seen before in one form or another. Even the detailing, striking for a movie, is something I found underwhelming. I mean, once you’ve played MGS4, ‘graphics’ don’t stand a chance.

But the new thing that excited me about Avatar was the way the camera used 3D. It barely ever stood steady, with the result that you felt part of it. I can’t wait to see how that evolves in the years to come.

As for the rest, meh.

Ps. The wife put it well. "$280 million on the movie. How much on the script?"

A visit to the CA

Years of dealing with negligent and ignorant advertising professionals have helped my CA perfect a dialect that consists solely of euphemisms. When we last spoke he asked for a particular document that was necessary "to avoid things we are not interested in".