The Great Indian LSD Trip

At long last Om Dar-B-Dar, an India film made in 1988, has finally had its theatrical release this month. The reason? It fell foul of India's notorious censor board, who refused to issue it a viewing certificate not because it was too violent or explicit --but because it was weird.

Well, how weird would that be exactly? It has been described as a surreal, postmodern satire, and The Great Indian LSD trip, but I prefer how TheSeventhArt.info describes the film:

‘Horoscope. Dead frog. Cloudy sky. Radio show. Terrorist tadpole. Caste-based reservation. Bicycle. Mount Everest. Women’s lib. Communism. Sleeveless blouse. Yuri Gagarin. Miniature book. Nitrogen fixation. Computer. Man on moon. Biology class. Hema Malini. Turtle. Typewriter. Text inside nose. Googly. James Bond. Severed tongue. Shoes outside temple. Gandhi. Hopping currency. Goggles. Helium breath. Diamonds inside frogs. God. Promise toothpaste. Nehru. Aviation centres. Potassium cyanide…."



That is the view in 2014. Way back in 1988 the censor board couldn’t make head or tail of the movie and feared that subliminal, subversive messages were being transmitted through he film that could adversely affect an unsuspecting public. So it got the axe.

Read the full story in Open Magazine:

Saying it with song (and dance)

For reasons that are not entirely clear, we are having a musical January. It all kicked off with White Christmas over the holidays, followed by Grease, The Sound of Music, Singing in the Rain and Hairspray.

And it doesn't look like it will be letting up any time soon. An American in Paris and West Side Story are in my sights now, and then there is the Bollywood backlist to consider. So why musicals and why now?

Perhaps it is a way of extending the xmas sparkle into the New Year with films that truly kick ass in the way they tell a story. I have always loved musicals, particularly musicals with great dancing, for their ability to transcend a straightforward narrative in the most powerful and emotive way. Music and dance in a film are like a different language, they convey an idea, emotion or sensibility in a way that dialogue cannot. And they are fun.....



What's not to like? Why then are there not more of them? The few recent musicals I can think of --with they exception of Baz Lurman's Moulin Rouge-- are all celluloid versions of musical stage plays. Where are the new, original musical films? Why is this form acceptable in the theatre, but so rare in western cinema?

At the very least, it would make a terrific break from the tedium of the war-without-end blockbusters....

What's in a cover?

Tender Hooks, by Moni Mohsin, is a wonderful, fiendishly clever satire on contemporary Pakistan, but you wouldn't know it from its cover. This is one of those books that committed the terrible crime of not slotting neatly into any genre that could be easily marketed. So it got sent to the chick-lit ghetto and given a cover that the likes of me would normally never pick up in a squillion years.

I did pick it up though, but only because I had heard Mohsin speak at a Bath Literature Festival event on "Politics and Satire" and was so impressed I rushed out to the bookshop to buy it. I love books that take me different worlds I know nothing about and tell me what is really going on there. I hoped Tenderhooks would do that --and it did.

The book is best described as a kind of Diary of Adrian Mole, narrated by a snobbish, poorly educated middle aged Pakistani woman recording her efforts to find her cousin a wife. It is smart and funny and touches on everything from the education system to marriage to terrorism to "fundoos". Best of all it satirises the venality of the elites, their self absorption, snobbery, greed, lack of self awareness and distraction by minutiae while around them chaos and absurdity reign. It may be about Pakistani, but like all good books, it's about everywhere.

The title isn't great either, particularly when you put it into Google looking for pix of the book cover for your blog....Yeeewwwww.

Thank you NaNoWriMo

I've resurfaced after a month at the coal face of NaNoWriMo. That is short for National Novel Writing Month and it does what it says on the tin --a writing challenge to produce £50,000 words of a manuscript from the 1 Nov to the 30 Nov.

It might sound like madness, but having done it for the first time this year, I think it is a little bit of genius. First of all, what better way to spend November, that dark and dank waste of a month, than with fingers glued to the keyboard? But mostly, it was a brilliant way to kickstart my second novel, which I had been avoiding (more like dreading). I had spent a torturous seven years writing the first one (or mostly re-writing the first one...) and could not face starting to climb that mountain again. NaNoWriMo gave me a way to dive straight in and just start swimming, without worrying about the quality of my strokes or whether I looked fat in my bathing suit, etc. Without it, without the impetus to produce close to 2,000 words each day, I would have stalled early on, getting bogged down in detail, backtracking. Instead I was able to write roughshod over my own pedantry and get on with the story.

I managed to write a reasonable draft too. Or maybe it is better described an elaborate outline. Either way I have completed the whole story in 50077 words, with my characters established, plot laid out, themes, symbols and pretty much everything coming together in the way it should. There is even some good writing in there, amidst the dross. I can now use that to write the book properly. And it definitely won't take me seven years.

Thank you NaNoWriMo. You are ace!

The genius of Doris Lessing

Taking a break from NaNoWriMo to pay tribute to the great Doris Lessing, who died yesterday. Truly one of the greats, a fantastically honest and political writer who was not afraid to shine a light on uncomfortable corners.

She is most famous for The Golden Notebook (which established her in many eyes as first and foremost a feminist writer) and for her science fiction works, which broke with serious literary convention.

But for me, it is Lessing's Children of Violence series that is her most brilliant legacy. Five books covering a pivotal time in the 20th century, socially and politically, encompassing both world wars, colonialism, dysfunctional families, sex, parenting, communism, politics, art and liberation. It is not the happiest read in the world, but it is an essential read. If you want to know what really happened in the 20th century, these five books will take you there.

Lessing would have hated all the fuss being made about her. She continually resisted being labelled a "wise woman"  or a "feminist". She resisted labels in general. Which is what made her writing great.

10,000 words and counting

I am taking some time out to do NaNoWriMo this month so the posts are going to be thin on the ground, and sparse.

For the uninitiated (meaning all those who live beyond the boundaries of writingland) NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month, where in a moment of madness,  crazed writers from around the world commit to writing a novel in a month. Or 50,000 words in November. That's 1600 words per day folks. Madness.

Six days in I am right on target. And loving it. Because the point of NaNoWriMo is to loosen the fuck up and just do some writing already. And forget about everything else.

More eloquent analysis to come later....

http://nanowrimo.org/

Behind the Beautiful Forevers

It took me awhile to get round to reading this book as when it first came out I was suffering from Slum Fiction Fatigue…I called it the Slumdog Millionaire Effect whereby suddenly every book, every documentary, every travel show seemed to zone in on the slums of Mumbai as though this were the only story worth telling about India.

More to the point, they are all told the same 

way. Privileged western wades into slum, hanky to nose, to witness the sorry state of the lives of the poor, emerging tearful and humble having discovered how jolly nice they all are. This is where Katherine Boo’s book is truly unique. Based on years of living (sort of) in Mumbai's Annawadi slum, what makes it such compelling reading is the way she has chosen to tell the story, through the eyes of half a dozen slum dwellers, alternating their points of view. The effect is one of strange balance that could not, to be honest, be achieved with straight reportage. 

By writing about events from the point of view of each character, Boo has managed to tell the story from within. In doing so she humanises and normalise the residents of Annawadi, showing their struggles, fears and problems are not a million miles away from anyone else's. 

There are no violins grinding away in the background as we gaze benevolently on the noble poor. Instead we are offered the individual stories of real people, warts and all. We are offered understanding. By  the end you feel you know the people in the book, can identify with them. You do not think of them as slum dwellers. They could be anyone. They are anyone.

What I also liked about this book is how well it illuminates the inequities of an economic system that sees fantastic wealth existing alongside absolute poverty, how it is seen as completely acceptable --and how systems are built to maintain it. It shows how the powerful exploit the weak, the impossibility of escape and how shameful the whole thing is. It is not just about Annawadi --it is about the whole world.

At the end of the book, Boo explains her methodology and claims to have only represented thoughts and feelings that were reported to her.  An extraordinary achievement.

Final point on the bookcover design: Dynamic, colourful shot of boy shooting through alleyways. Now where have I seen that before...