Non-paying jests, a reluctant review

After weeks of being unable to go to a movie-hall to see a film that I might actually have wanted to see, I get asked to review Paying Guests. This is how life kicks you when you're down. Watching this rowdy comedy, I wondered if the producer-multiplex war had stretched on for so long that mediocre B-movies are now being hurriedly scripted and filmed within four or five weeks, just so they can fill the gaps before the (equally mediocre) big releases come roaring back.

Paying Guests opens with three bachelor friends – Bawesh (Shreyas Talpade), Sukhi (Javed Jaffrey) and Daljit (Aashish Chaudhary) – who live in Bangkok as tenants in the improbably large “Kiska” mansion (named purely for its punning utility) until one day they simultaneously lose their jobs and their accommodation (in both cases, their fault, though I think we're supposed to root for them). Along with a new addition to the group, a bumbler named Karan who’s just flown in from India, they contrive to become paying guests in the house of a Sikh restaurant owner Ballu Ji (Johnny Lever in a performance that makes every role he has done in the past 20 years seem like an acting-class in restraint) and his golden-hearted but rust-brained wife Sweety. Since this traditional-minded couple won’t have single boys staying in their house, Bawesh and Sukhi show up in drag as Karishma and Kareena, the wives of the other two. Loud, forced, headache-inducing slapstick comedy ensues.

It’s a pity in a way, for there are traces in this film of a certain economy of storytelling – such as in the compact opening-credits sequence and the neat little scene where the friends tell each other that at least there can’t be any more problems headed their way and there’s a quick overhead swish to the plane that’s bringing more trouble (in the form of Karan) for them. In these and other moments, one sees an unfussiness about the direction and editing which suggests that a better script (or any script for that matter) might have resulted in an entertaining movie. But sadly the technical competence is at the service of some of the silliest attempts at humour you’ll ever see.

This is a film that tries to extract belly laughs out of a scene where a deviant with a speech impediment (played by Chunky Pandey, no less) pronounces “rape” as “lape” (“Yeh totla hai,” we are repeatedly told, as if to assure us that this is meant to be cute). In another scene, a wife tells her husband that they’ve been invited out for “foreplay” when what she means is that they’ve been invited to a stage production comprising four back-to-back plays. Some of the attempts at setting up situation comedy would be embarrassing for a school-level skit (if someone straps you to a chair and forces you to watch this, keepyour eyes open during the tedious build-up to the scene where Sweety mistakenly thinks “Karishma” is pregnant). By the time Paying Guests reaches its messy, overlong climax – a nod to the famous Mahabharata scene in Jaane bhi do Yaaro, with a "Mughal-e-Azam" stage production overrun by all the principals dressed as Spider-Man, Ravana, Gabbar Singh, Umrao Jaan, Osama bin Laden and even Tulsi from the saas-bahu soaps – the viewer is the only one wailing “Yeh kya ho raha hai?”

Even worse than the bad humour is when the film tries to strum heartstrings, as in the scene where the three dolts talk about how they have hardly any money left because they have to send their earnings back to India to keep their families afloat (as the sad background music started to play, I reflected that said families would probably be happy to forgo the earnings as long as these guys signed an agreement never to return to India).

One thing I thought notable, given that this is screwball comedy with a line-up of pretty starlets – Celina Jaitley, Riya Sen, Neha Dhupia – whose main function is to be eye-candy, is that it refrains from running its heroines through a gamut of exploitative, demeaning situations (small mercies, I know). But that doesn’t mask the fact that there is a lot of tastelessness on view, mostly reserved for Talpade and Jaffrey when they are dressed as women. Here is the unfortunate sight of two decent actors (both of whom are noted for their mimicking skills – remember Jaffrey in Channel V’s Timex Timepass years ago?) hoping that the rest of the film will somehow catch up with them. Asrani and Paintal – veteran comedians who have seen better days – are also left to flounder in roles that no performer could possibly salvage. This is not a script that’s kind to actors – or to the audience.

From the “Overheard in the hall” series: sick but quite nice

Expectedly, there were some people in the hall laughing their guts out at jokes that I didn’t understand, for such is the human condition, but I was particularly impressed by a trio of girls in my row. Though they guffawed from start to finish, they were willing to be accommodating of views different from their own. Normally, when you hear people discussing a critics’ review that they disagree with, the standard rationalisation is that the guy must have been “paid off” (by the film’s producer if the review was favourable; by the “rival camp” if it was negative). However, these girls showed an astonishing spirit of tolerance:

“This is such a good film yaar, I didn’t understand why it got just one-and-a-half stars in that newspaper.”

“Arre, critics ke point of view se achi nahin hogi. Kaafi sick movie hai waise. (After a moment’s pause) But it’s quite nice too.”

“Ya ya, it’s quite nice,” they trilled in chorus, until they were sure consensus had been reached on this all-important matter and that the world was safely in its orbit. Then they returned to their popcorn.

Fantasies of an aging anarchist

One of my very favourite memoirs, and a book I often return to, is Luis Buñuel's My Last Breath. It isn't an "autobiography" - that word would imply a structure that this book never aims for. It's a delightfully free-flowing work, much like some of Buñuel's later films (The Phantom of Liberty, The Milky Way), more a mix of reflections on various subjects than anything else: death, cigarettes, village life in Spain, Catholicism, atheism, the evils of the free press. This means it's possible to pick it up in the middle of a day, open it at random and immerse yourself in a passage or two before returning to duller things.

With blogging being at a standstill these days, why not share passages from My Last Breath, just for the heck of it. So here are two that I read this morning, both pointers to the anarchist in Buñuel, a man who often fantasised about the destruction of what we call "culture" and who once said that the ultimate Surrealist act would be to go into a street and shoot indiscriminately into the crowd:

I have a horror of newspaper reporters, two of whom literally attacked me one day while I was walking down the road not far from El Paular. Despite my pleas to be left alone, they leapt around me, clicking as they went. I was already far too old to take both of them on at once, and only wished that I'd been foresighted enough to bring my revolver.

(Suggestions for a better world: make it legal to shoot journalists. It bears mentioning that the next paragraph begins with the line "Whereas my feelings about reporters couldn't be clearer, I confess to mixed emotions when it comes to spiders.")

And the second passage:

Where Picasso's concerned, his legendary facility is obvious, but sometimes I'm repelled by it. I can't stand Guernica (which I nonetheless helped to hang). Everything about it makes me uncomfortable - the grandiloquent tehnique as well as the way it politicizes art. Both Alberti and Jose Bergamin share my aversion; in fact, all three of us would be delighted to blow up the painting, but I suppose we're too old to start playing with explosives.

I love that throwaway "which I nonetheless helped to hang". Mental pictures appear of a young Buñuel wrinkling his nose in disgust as he puts up the legendary work while Picasso, hands still wet with paint, shouts "No no, it's the other way round!" What some of us would give to have kept the company Buñuel did in the 1920s and 1930s, around the dawn of some of the most exciting cultural movements. And it turns out that all he really wants to do is blow up one of the greatest works of art to have emerged from that period.

(More on Buñuel in this old post about my brief meeting with the writer Jean-Claude Carriere, a longtime associate of Buñuel)

Thoughts on Ishiguro's Nocturnes

As a long-time enthusiast of Kazuo Ishiguro’s work, I thought his new short-story collection Nocturnes showed a subtly different side to his writing. Ishiguro is one of the most elegant prose writers around, each of his six novels marked by a simple, immediately recognisable style – so unobtrusive that it doesn’t even appear to be a “style” at first glance - and this continues to be the case in the Nocturne stories. But I felt that the narratives here were, generally speaking, more informal in tone than the mannered, emotionally reticent voices of his earlier protagonists (such as the self-deceiving butler Stevens in Remains of the Day and the elderly Japanese painter trying to deal with changing social attitudes in post-WWII Japan in An Artist of the Floating World).

No doubt some of the casualness in the new collection comes from the fact that the narrators in this story cycle are relatively young people who are passionate about music, with interests ranging from old American Broadway songs by Irving Berlin to folk music to jazz. There’s the guitar player who performs in a Venice piazza, the hopeful songwriter taking a break from the city by helping out his sister who runs a café in the hills, the saxophonist who realises that his “loser ugly” face may be keeping him from stardom. There is a contemporariness, an accessibility, in all these voices, but Ishiguro’s old strengths as a writer are in place – notably the delicacy with which he makes the reader aware of things that even the narrator seems oblivious to, and his ability to show (rather than tell) us that life-altering moments don’t have to be dramatic (or accompanied by a musical crescendo) but can slip in and out of our hands before we realise it.

Like many great artists, Ishiguro obsessively reworks the themes he finds interesting, using new prisms and perspectives through which to examine them. Music is a binding force in Nocturnes and we see how it can create common ground between people (witness the transformation of the ill-tempered Sonja in the story “Malvern Hills”), but these short pieces aren’t really about music. They are about (professional and personal) successes and failures, fading relationships, attempts to maintain a hold on the past, and the different ways in which people deal with life’s disappointments.

In “Crooner”, a young guitarist encounters the aging singer Tony Gardner – an old favourite of his mother, who managed to procure American pop records despite living in a communist country – and is drafted into the crooner’s plan to serenade his wife Lindy. In “Come Rain or Come Shine”, the narrator Ray is invited to stay with an old friend and his wife in London, only to discover that the couple are barely on speaking terms with each other and that his own visit is an awkward ploy by the husband to rectify matters. “Cellists” gives us a moving relationship between two very different kinds of music-lovers. And when a middle-aged musician couple talk about their uncommunicative son in “Malvern Hills”, it feels like an extension of the strained filial relationships in Ishiguro’s most ambitious novel The Unconsoled (a book in which music frequently creates barriers between people).

One of the things I thought notable about this collection is that it contains some very amusing passages. Ishiguro’s sense of humour tends to be under-appreciated, perhaps because it’s usually very subtle or morbid or both – The Unconsoled, which is the most obviously funny of his books with its many surreal interludes, is also the most emotionally exhausting, and its funniness is never de-linked from the essentially weary state of its narrator, a celebrated pianist whose life has turned into a circular Kafka-esque nightmare. The humour isn’t the sort that allows you to laugh out loud, or even chuckle to yourself; it permits only sad smiles of recognition. But in at least two of the stories in Nocturnes, Ishiguro gives freer rein to his talent for the absurd, even allowing it to tip over into slapstick. In “Come Rain or Come Shine”, unfortunate circumstances lead the narrator to put an old boot to boil on the kitchen stove while waiting for his host to return home; his attempt to see the world through the eyes of a paper-masticating dog results in one of the drollest sentences in Ishiguro’s oeuvre: “I’d fallen into my earlier error again; I’d not merged sufficiently with Hendrix”. And in the story “Nocturne”, a midnight outing in the bowels of a five-star hospital where celebrities recuperate after plastic surgery ends with the concealment of a prize trophy in a turkey’s interiors.

In these passages, bordering on low farce, one gets the impression that Ishiguro is exploring ways to offset the poignancy of his themes – almost like a musician moving between registers to keep a piece from becoming repetitive or too intense. Unlike many other "thematic" short-story collections that give the impression of bringing together discrete pieces simply to make up the numbers, Nocturnes has the rigour of a carefully composed and balanced symphony.

[An earlier review of Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go here]

Future reloaded: the new Star Trek

If you were growing up in the monopolistic shadow of Doordarshan in the early and mid-1980s, Sunday mornings were dull things – or at least it seems in hindsight that they should have been. Actually, there was an hour or so of post-breakfast anticipation until the TV screen resolved itself into a black background representing the vastness of outer space, with tiny white dots speckled across it. The theme music we had been waiting for filled the room and our eyes strained to identify which of those little dots would turn into the comforting shape of the Starship Enterprise as it hurtled towards us from the depths of the blackness. “Space: the final frontier...” began the sonorous voiceover.

Those of us who watched Star Trek on black-and-white TV sets didn’t know that Captain Kirk’s shirt was yellow and Mr Spock’s was blue; these were things we found out later. (I had to wait until I saw a videocassette of “The City on the Edge of Forever”, one of the show’s very best episodes, at a US-returned aunt's house.) Nor did we know about the series' history: that it hadn’t been particularly successful in its initial, three-year run on American television in the 1960s but had developed a staggering fan-base in subsequent years – a following that led to Trekkie conferences, a number of feature films (which we had mixed feelings about because the characters looked older and wore more sophisticated uniforms) and later, more intelligently scripted TV shows featuring new characters, e.g., Star Trek: The Next Generation, which substituted the iconic line “...where no man has gone before” with the more politically correct “...where no one has gone before”. (Didn't work.) When popular demand or sentiment necessitated a reappearance of one of the older characters, the results could be sad – William Shatner, the original show’s lithe Kirk, was embarrassingly corpulent in his much-hyped guest role in Star Trek: Generations, made nearly 30 years after he first played the Enterprise’s captain.

Given the tortuous and expectation-laden history of the Star Trek franchise, it’s a minor miracle that a new movie has done a more than respectable job of returning us to Kirk and crew as we remember them from the original show, and to have them played by youngsters who closely resemble the prototypes. It doesn’t seem like a very good idea in theory, but J J Abrams' film (titled, simply, Star Trek, though the tagline “The future begins” has become something of an unofficial sub-title) pulls it off. Riding on a complicated plot involving the opening up of a time continuum by the embittered Romulan leader Nero, it begins with the birth of James T Kirk (on a day when many other tumultuous events – not always easy to decipher – take place) and follows him through the years, to his decision to join the space academy and his acquaintance with his future First Officer, the half-Vulcan Spock. (There's something very amusing about the solemnity of the place-titles that alternately read "Iowa" and "Vulcan" as the film tracks their parallel stories.)

For boys of a certain age and temperament watching the original TV series, the cucumber-cool Spock – briskly efficient in a crisis, invulnerable to cheap human emotion – was always more fascinating than the relentless skirt-chaser and macho-man Kirk, the same way Jughead was always cooler than Archie. At any rate, it was the contrast between their personalities – the friendship, the friction, the banter – that drove the show. And one of the areas where the new film scores is in its depiction of the grudging, even resentful (and competitive) dawn of the Kirk-Spock relationship.

This is where prequels play a special role in epic sagas. Done well, they can provide a tantalisingly off-kilter view of character development and personal destiny; of how a character got from Point A to Point B, and what was gained (or lost) along the way. Watching the trajectory of Jedi hero Anakin Skywalker’s slide into darkness in Star Wars Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith is doubly poignant because the viewer already knows – from having seen the original trilogy – that Anakin will become the evil lord Darth Vader, and that he will find redemption in the end. (The Anakin-Vader story wouldn’t have been so compelling if it had been told in chronological order.) Similarly, the new Star Trek adds depth and dimension to both its protagonists. Chris Pine’s outstanding performance as Kirk gives us a barroom brawler from the American Midwest whose cockiness conceals an intelligent young man born to be a leader (but who has to be given a nudge in the ribs every now and again), while Zachary Quinto’s Spock is a vulnerable misfit on his home planet who must learn to balance his human and Vulcan sides. These are two young men with chips on their shoulders, and the different ways in which they learn to shoulder their responsibilities, adjust to their circumstances – and, eventually, slip into the roles that we already know they are destined for – adds up to a very satisfying climax.

Notably, the script and the performances achieve this without seriously compromising on the pulp tone of the original show. Of course, there’s no denying that this film looks very different from the original series (which was, let’s face it, a sometimes-campy 1960s show that didn’t have sophisticated special effects; as a viewer, you knew the characters were in trouble of some sort if the sets began shaking and people started falling all over each other). But it captures something of the old spirit, which is no mean task in this day and age. There are nifty in-jokes, such as the one involving Dr McKoy’s “bones”. And you don’t need to be a hard-core Trekkie to feel a frisson of excitement when Kirk and McCoy catch their first ever glimpse of the Enterprise as the shuttle they are traveling on prepares to dock on the giant starship. Or when the “older Spock”, played by the wonderful Leonard Nimoy (who has spent a lifetime in this role), makes a short but crucial appearance to make sense of all the time-travel madness.

The one element this Sunday-DD nostalgist thought was missing from the film? The music score of the original show, sans any orchestral frills. The end credits just felt wrong without it.

[Did this nostalgia piece for the Sunday Business Standard]

Khamoshi, and the conundrum of the wildly uneven film

I was talking with someone recently about various aspects of movie-reviewing and book-reviewing, and one of the things that came up was the idea of unevenness: how it’s possible for a film to be transcendentally beautiful in some ways while at the same time containing scenes that are embarrassingly awkward or silly; or for a single aspect of a movie (a performance, a brilliantly written scene) to be so high-quality that it’s at complete variance with the elements that surround it. And how this sort of thing presents a special challenge to the reviewer - especially when you’re writing a lengthy, analytical piece about the work (as opposed to a 300-word overview made up of checklists and an accompanying “star rating” that will be more useful than what’s written in the review anyway).

A few days later I saw Asit Sen’s 1969 film Khamoshi (a remake of his own Bengali film Deep Jwele Jaai) and found that it was an extreme example of a movie that contains bizarre shifts in quality – to the extent that you’re almost watching two separate films, each unaware of the other’s existence.

I had heard a lot about Khamoshi from my mother years ago, but what really prompted me to search for the DVD was when I saw the beautifully filmed song sequence “Woh shaam kuch ajeeb thi” on the Space Black channel in Mumbai some time ago (see the video here). As it happens, this four-minute scene brings together the three finest things about the film: Hemant Kumar’s music (complemented by Gulzar’s lyrics), Kamal Bose’s stunning black-and-white photography, and Waheeda Rehman’s luminous, can’t-take-your-eyes-off-her performance as a nurse who begins to lose her own emotional equilibrium as she cares for mentally ill patients.

Well, that was the good stuff. The first alarm bells rang when I discovered that the film is set in the “National Psycho Analytical Clinic” (sic), run by a Colonel Sahab who works on the assumption that women are capable of any magnitude of sacrifice for mankind. Or men. And that, in fact, perhaps their principal role in the world IS sacrifice. (In a strange flashback sequence, he recounts a wartime experience that taught him this valuable lesson.) Accordingly, he develops a unique form of psychiatric treatment wherein beautiful nurses are encouraged to provide maternal or romantic care (or both, simultaneously) to handsome young male patients, especially the ones who feel betrayed by their girlfriends or mothers (or both).

It took cinema a fairly long time to learn how to portray psychiatric care with sensitivity and intelligence, and this movie will probably not be remembered as one of the milestones along that route. Anyway, the Colonel's approach to healing launches Khamoshi on its twofold path. On the one hand there’s Waheeda Rehman as Nurse Radha, her eyes more expressive than pages of dialogue, weighed down by the emotional demands of her job, haunted by the memory of what happened the last time she fell in love with a patient and by the realisation that she might be falling into the same trap again (with a new patient played by a very young Rajesh Khanna). On the other hand there’s Colonel Sahab and his two stooges (played by Iftekhar and Lalita Pawar, who somehow manages to seem irredeemably evil even when playing a hospital matron who isn’t actually written as an evil character) walking purposefully about the corridors, discussing which patient they ought to administer an “electric shock” to next. (Electric shocks are all the rage in this film. One suspects that whenever Colonel Sahab is feeling slightly bored he turns to a lackey and says “Still two hours to go before closing time? Let’s go and give patient number 18 an electric shock. 2,000 volts at most. By the way, where’s that new generator I ordered?”)

There are also (wouldn’t you know it?) attempts at comic relief, mainly built around the fact that the inmates have the run of the institute. No supervision, they go wherever they please – and so, when a patient’s relative visits the institute and runs into a doctor, each man briefly thinks the other must be a “paagal”, and situation comedy of some form develops. (When the misunderstanding is cleared up they chuckle with relief, secure in the knowledge that they are both sane after all. Deluded loons.) Meanwhile the real patients spend their time making facial gestures lifted straight from the Dummies’ Guide to Playing Mental Patients. (As one of the wards, a young Deven Varma manages to retain much of his dignity, but that’s about the best I can say about these scenes.)

It’s hard to explain how all this puerility can possibly coexist with the delicacy of the Rehman performance or with some of the restrained directorial and cinematographic choices made by the movie (such as the decision to show Dharmendra’s face only very fleetingly in his crucial guest role as Radha’s earlier ward; when he sings “Tum Pukar Lo”, we see only a back view of the character, in a dimly lit room). But they do coexist, and this makes Khamoshi a confounding film. In particular, there are moments in Rehman’s performance when she seems to be working almost in isolation, oblivious to the pompous, self-centred silliness of the man she calls boss; some of the scenes between her and Colonel Sahab are a textbook demonstration of how the sublime and the ridiculous can share the same frame.

P.S. Also see this post about Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers dance routines that transcended the films they were in.

Anand Mahadevan’s The Strike

(Did this short review for Tehelka)

Trains are a central motif of Anand Mahadevan’s debut novel, set mostly between Nagpur and Madras in the mid-1980s. The prologue, fittingly titled “Asai (Desire)”, introduces us to the young protagonist Hari – the son of a railway engineer – who wants nothing more than to ride in a train engine. Towards the end of the book, this wish will find morbid fulfilment, but in between is a nicely paced coming-of-age story about a boy dealing with the strangeness of family and friends.

Up to the halfway point, The Strike is a book of engaging vignettes: a grandmother dies in tragi-comic circumstances, necessitating a trip to Benares; an orthodox family must accept an American daughter-in-law; there is a confrontation with language militants who want Hindi-speakers out of their state. In all this, rail journeys play a recurring part and there are careful descriptions of the cold metal of railway tracks, the thick fabric of connecting gangways, and the electric poles, 25 to a kilometre, running parallel to the train – all seen through the fascinated eyes of a 12-year-old. But there is also a sense of a train as a comforting cocoon, a solidifier that brings different people together and into which the divisions of the outside world rarely impinge. It’s easy to see why this is reassuring for Hari, who (much like his friend Anamika, a Bengali girl who can barely speak her ancestral language) is more fluent in Hindi than in his mother tongue Tamil, his time in central India having left him unmoored.

Mahadevan is good at capturing the more fearful aspects of a precocious child’s world, including growing sexual awareness (as manifested in the threatening sexuality of older women who become uninhibited during Holi celebrations, the meagrely dressed Mandakini in the hit film Ram Teri Ganga Maili, the young playmate who seems to have matured overnight, and an attractive young actor on a train). There are depictions of patronising adult hegemony when a tradition is questioned (if the Ganga purifies everything it touches, why should a Brahmin be forbidden from eating the fish that live in it, Hari asks) and an understanding of how the smallest misstep can beget disproportionate guilt in a child, making it seem like he is somehow responsible for everything bad that is happening in his world.

Unfortunately, when the Tamil Express carrying Hari and his mother to Madras is brought to a halt by protestors mourning the death of the legendary actor-cum-chief minister MGR, the narrative enter a period of stasis as well. The hysterical deification of south Indian filmstars-turned-politicians is very amusing (“What is there to live for when MGR is dead?” howls a protestor; a young man who initially had a crush on the actress Jayalalitha starts thinking of her as his Amma when he learns that she is involved with MGR), but the plot as a whole begins to meander. We sense that something bad is about to happen, but the book never quite summons the sense of urgency that this portion of the story demands; instead it gradually cuts us off from Hari’s perspective, a decision that compromises the final quarter of the story.

Consequently, as The Strike judders to a halt, it’s difficult to escape the feeling that it lost a thread somewhere along the way. This isn’t an unworthy debut by any means, but it could have been a more focused one.

More notes from Hamburg

At the Kinderbuchhaus, contd: a short Q&A with the freelance illustrator Katrin Engelking, who has worked on more than 40 children’s books for publishers like Oetinger and Ravensburger. Engelking has illustrated the new editions of Astrid Lindgren’s famous Pippi Longstocking books.

What is your working routine like? Do you work on more than one picture-book at a time?

Normally I work on one big project at a time, but one has make adjustments. One thing that happens is that publishers typically want you to send a book cover in advance – for the catalogue and other promotional material – before you’ve even started working on the main body of the book. So there have been times when I’m doing the inside illustrations for a particular book but also simultaneously working on the cover illustration of my next project. And if the two books require different styles, it can be tricky to shift back and forth!

Once I made a cover and they used it for a promotional CD but later I ordered it back and added a few little elements, because by that time I had a clearer idea of what the rest of the book was going to be like.

How much time do you need to finish a picture-book?

Lots of time! I have two children so I can only work until 2, which is when they come home from school. Earlier, before I had started a family, it was possible to work all sorts of odd hours, but not now.

What are the main challenges for a freelance artist?

There are no contractual problems, except that obviously you can’t draw the same characters for different publishers. But you have to manage your time and your deadlines. In my case I’ve developed a good relationship with Oetinger and we fit together very well, so I mostly work for them now. Earlier I handled two or three publishers together, and it was sometimes dreadful! (Laughs) You have to be accountable to so many people.

You must have been very excited when you were asked to do the new editions of the Pippi Longstocking books?

I was very enthusiastic about it, sure, but it was scary too. I mean, I was reading these books when I was growing up, like nearly everyone else – Pippi is such a famous character in Germany, she’s been around for over six decades and generations of people have grown up with her. Everybody loves her and knows what she looks like, so it was daunting to do these new drawings. I had to do over 50 colour illustrations, but I enjoyed every bit of it.
When you illustrate stories written by other authors, what is the extent of collaboration?

It varies. Once I told an author – whom I knew very well – that I had looked at the moon one day and thought I saw a rabbit shape on it. So she developed that idea into a story and I illustrated it! But we worked separately: she wrote the story first and then I took over. You don’t want to start interfering with each other’s work.

When I’m doing both the text and the drawings for a book, I write the story first and then work out how much space there is for the illustrations.

Is it important for a children’s book illustrator to go through a professional course?

I don’t think so, although I did study at the College of Design in Hamburg. It depends on how good you are – if you come out of nowhere but your pictures are good enough to impress a publisher, that should be enough.

On the other hand, when you’re doing a professional course, there are many talented people working together and competing, which is a useful environment to be in. The option should certainly exist for budding artists.

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I also exchanged a few quick words with Isabel Kreitz, who is very shy when she’s amidst a large of people but eloquent in a one-to-one conversation; she told me that her real area of interest is writing/drawing comic books for older readers, but that she earns money by doing children’s picture-books. “Picture-books require a different artistic approach,” she said. “You have to put everything into one picture, which could perhaps be a really big double-spread – it’s like an extract. You can’t use sequential art in a very creative way, like you do with comic-book panels – so the mindset has to be different.”

“I wish I could collaborate with authors when I’m working on picture-books, but most of them are dead,” she deadpanned (because she often works on new editions of books written a long time ago), “or the book is already made and I’m just expected to add something to it.”

Otherwise, our session with the illustrators involved several people talking at once, and a certain amount of translation going on too. Peter Schössow told us that when he does illustrations he sometimes get fed up drawing the same character again and again, and wants to create variety to make things more interesting. “Sometimes I do three illustrations featuring a particular character, then I think to myself, my god, how on earth am I going to do another 71 pages!” For this reason he finds it useful to switch between drawing characters and writing a story. “If you’re stuck with one you can move to the other, refresh your mind a little and then come back.” It reminded me of something Isaac Asimov once said about never being afflicted with writer’s block: he wrote so many different types of books (sci-fi, history, mystery stories, popular science) that if he ever got tired of one genre he could switch to a different kind of writing for a while. Needless to say, this doesn’t work for everyone!

Here’s the cover of an all-drawing Pixi book done by Peter:


And, much to the delight of the Indian contingent, the opening page of a book by Ole Konnecke, about a kid trying to learn to do magic:


(Ole’s uncle was a professional magician and had a large collection of posters – including this one of P C Sorkar)

Notes from Germany 2: the Kinderbuchhaus, thoughts on illustrations

One of the most enjoyable sessions during the trip was our visit to the Kinderbuchhaus (Children’s Book House) in the Altona Museum in Hamburg. It’s a charming place that conducts activities geared towards getting children (and their parents) more involved with books. For instance, there are workshops where children are shown how to bind books – something that helps them appreciate the process that goes into the creation of the picture-books they would otherwise take for granted; to see a book as something that has to be carefully put together so that they can enjoy the end product. Enthusiasm levels run high at these workshops: project coordinator Heike Roegler told us that children are very proud – and very possessive – about the books they make themselves.

Also held here are exhibitions of framed, original versions of children’s book illustrations, so that visitors can see these drawing as works of art in their own right. On the day we were there, a Peter Schössow exhibition was on (Schössow himself was there too, as mentioned in the last post). Illustrations like this one – a child’s-eye perspective of a little cat in the foreground of a big city – look spectacular when you see them in their full-size versions:


Looking at high-quality illustrations for their artistic value, you realise there’s a lesson here for the many Indian parents who instinctively judge the worth of a children’s book by the amount of text it contains (all the better when it’s placed in the service of a pedantic moral lesson), failing to realise the role a series of beautiful drawings can play in developing a child’s imagination. (“Ismein padhne ka toh kuch hai hi nahin” is the typical response when a parent opens a book that’s full of beautiful drawings but very little text. But as Atiya Zaidi, publisher, Ratna Sagar, and one of the most entertaining members of our party, says, “You want value for your word-count? Buy a newspaper.”)

Earlier in the day, I had spoken with Zubaan’s Anita Roy about the often-haphazard way in which illustrations for children’s books are put together in India. “The Indian arts scene is actually lively and brilliant,” Anita said, “but there’s a lack of understanding of how children’s picture-books work. Illustrators are so central to the children’s publishing industry everywhere except India, where they get sidelined. They are not used to having publishers involving them in the creative aspect of putting a book together. It’s usually done very mechanically: an author will send in a story, the editor will say okay, this needs illustrations, and she’ll choose an illustrator and a format and send the text across and say we need 10 drawings of this size. And then someone else will put the text and illustrations together – a typesetter, or a designer if you’re very lucky. Everyone works in isolation, not much thought is given to layout, which is a crucial part of the process.”

“Most children’s publishing houses in India don’t even have a proper art director, so decisions about art design, layout etc are taken by editors like me, which is not the best way to do these things. Words persons end up having to learn how to think visually. Putting together a good picture-book requires an understanding of how text and visuals have to play off each other, but this is a neglected field in India.”

(I should mention here that Young Zubaan has just published one of the best-looking Indian picture-books I’ve seen, Mister Jeejeebhoy and the Birds by Anitha Balachandran. Lots of lovely drawings, notably a two-page spread of a sweet-shop that you just can’t tear your eyes away from. I first saw some of the illustrations at Bookaroo last winter and have been looking forward to the book ever since.)

The German Book Office in Delhi has now launched a programme called Jumpstart for children’s publishing in India, and among its initiatives is a series of intensive workshops for professionals involved in children’s books: writers and editors, illustrators, librarians and teachers, and marketing personnel. These will be held starting in July this year - mainly at the Max Mueller Bhawan, Delhi - and will hopefully address some of the issues facing children’s publishing in India. Anita tells me that as far as she knows none of the design colleges or art schools in India have courses that specialise in children’s book illustrations - certainly there's nothing that's comparable to the rigour with which these things are done in the West. The Jumpstart workshops should be a step in the desired direction.

(More about our meeting with the illustrators in another post)

Notes and photos from Germany: children's books and other goodly things

A few photos and commentary from the Germany trip. Apologies about this being a mishmash of children’s publishing and sightseeing - too lazy to do separate posts. Will put up more notes when I get around to doing the official pieces.

(Click pictures to enlarge)

Our first two days were in Frankfurt, which is full of these strange juxtapositions – walk about the town centre and you’ll find the scenery changing every 20 metres or so; parts of it are like something thought up by a hallucinogen-affected mind. Down the road from our hotel was this vista: a quaint, Legoland-style tower (the Eschenheimer Turm, it’s called) in the foreground, with an oversized modern glass building just behind it.


To my (no doubt untrained) eyes it was the Turm that seemed the newer, more artificial construction. The impression I got was that someone had decided to erect the little tower as an afterthought, as a contrast to the gleaming glass-and-concrete buildings. Later I was told that it really is the oldest construction in the area, dating back to the 15th century. I’m sure there’s been some refurbishing though; the thing definitely couldn’t have looked exactly like this 600 years ago. I mean, how old is Lego?

Our stay in Hamburg was brief but it was a much more picturesque place – lots of nice lakes and bridges. This is during a walk around the warehouse district, or the Speicherstadt.

Lots of, um, old warehouses, but all very good to look at. The weather was great too. And Hamburg is something of a pilgrimage spot for me because of the tennis Masters series of 2008. (If the Hamburg Masters hadn't been downgraded and replaced by the Madrid Masters this year, I would have been in the city just a couple of days after the final!)

The TV tower in Berlin...

...and a close-up of the graffiti on its sides (including “Berlin, Ich liebe dich!” or “Berlin, I love you”). East Berlin is full of colourful graffiti and building-length artwork.

The Alexanderplatz, where I took a long and most satisfying walk one fine evening.

The Brandenburger Tor, one of the city’s most famous sights and a popular congregating ground for hundreds of tourists. Also just a short walk away from an Indian restaurant called the Bolliwood.


Cafes on the waterfront. One of the buildings on the right is the theatre set up by Bertolt Brecht (who I'm told is better known in Calcutta than in Germany).


A German Shepherd with his human at one of the cafes.


I liked the fact that pets were allowed almost anywhere - into the local trains, in shops and restaurants - and that many of them weren't even wearing leashes while out on a walk. You see a collared dog coming out an alley and ambling about by himself for a bit, and just as you're wondering if they have strays in Germany you notice a human trailing behind as the dog looks back impatiently.

The German Cathedral and Concert Hall, near which much ginger ale was consumed.


At the “speed-dating” session we had with a few German publishers’ representatives in Berlin. On the right is the redoubtable Anita Roy (Young Zubaan). With her is Susanne Pfeiffer of Ravensburger AG.


Susanne holds up a Ravensburger picture book that uses flaps on every page.

Peel back the flap on the right page here and the exterior of the aircraft’s cockpit gives way to reveal the pilot and the first officer sitting inside, fiddling with knobs and levers and looking immensely cheerful, like they’re in Disneyland or something.

Renate Reichstein of Oetinger poses with the resourceful cat Findus who stars in Sven Nordquist’s Old Man and the Cat books.


An Oetinger book that comes with a DVD containing an animated version of the story.


Atlantis Verlag, an imprint of Orell Füssli, has a picture-book titled Mutig, Mutig (literal translation “Brave, Brave”, official English translation “The Test of Courage”) about various animals in the forest deciding to undergo suitable tests of courage to “prove” themselves.


When the sparrow’s turn comes he refuses to participate, saying he doesn’t need to prove anything, whereupon the other animals recognise that “saying no is a form of courage too”. Very nice little lesson, I thought – particularly apt for those of us whose lives are not governed by an urgent need to win MTV Roadies.

Love this picture of the frog, the sparrow and the rat patiently waiting as the slowcoach snail returns after performing his task.


Books for girls aged 12 plus.


The one on the right translates as “Love, Chaos and Summer Kisses”. These are relatively “clean”, I was told (“girls dream about boys but nothing really happens”), but there are a number of books for readers aged 12 and upwards that deal more explicitly with sexuality. Apparently it’s quite the norm for parents and teachers to get such books for their children because the kids are embarrassed to be seen buying them!

Before our ferry ride in Hamburg: Sayoni Basu, director-publishing, Scholastic India (and big sister to Samit the Duck) with our super-efficient tour guide Katrin Hoenemann.

At the Carlsen office, a company mascot holds a basket full of the little “Pixi” books that have acquired national-heritage status in Germany over the past few decades.


Quite a working environment, this: inside one of the Carlsen offices. These sightings caused much envy among the members of our group, most of whom spend their days in very drab offices. And yes, that's a Robbie Williams cutout in the far corner.


Inside the Tatzelwurm, a prize-winning children’s bookstore in Frankfurt. (Picture courtesy Arun Erik Wolf of the Frankfurt Book Fair office)

It’s a small space but very efficiently used. Lots of supplementary activities are conducted here to keep children interested in books, e.g. they occasionally have groups of youngsters coming in to loll about in sleeping bags and listen to audio books.

(Left to right) The children's-book illustrators Katrin Engelking, Peter Schössow, Isabel Kreitz and Ole Konnecke, whom we met at the Kinderbuchhaus (Children's Book House) in Hamburg.

We had an informal chat with these fine artists over tea. Peter also narrated the story of his marvelously detailed picture-book Baby Dronte, about a little dodo who gets himself adopted by a ship's frog-captain.


(For more on the illustrators and their work, see their websites: Peter, Isabel, Katrin)

Incidentally, one of the things we learnt is that there’s a cultural resistance in Germany (and other European countries) to the French style of illustration, which tends to be more distorted, surreal and not instantly pleasing to the eye (if you’ve seen the animated French film The Triplets of Belleville, you might get a sense of this). More about that later.

Watching Last Chance Harvey on the flight

I haven’t seen most of the non-Hindi film releases of the past few months, and haven’t been too clued in about them either, so I had only vaguely heard of the Dustin Hoffman-Emma Thompson starrer Last Chance Harvey. But on the flight to Munich I sank happily into this low-key romantic film about two misfits – an elderly American jingle writer named Harvey and a middle-aged British spinster named Kate – whose paths cross. It’s been a while since I’ve encountered a movie that’s driven mainly by characters and conversation, and this one was mostly a delight.

Its success owes almost entirely to Joel Hopkins’ sensitive screenplay and what the two leads do with it. Emma Thompson was one of my favourite actors back in the days when she was working prolifically in films (the Carrington/Remains of the Day/Dead Again/Much Ado about Nothing phase) and watching her endearing, self-conscious klutziness was like catching up with an old friend. But I was especially impressed by Hoffman, an actor whom I had slotted in the De Niro/Nicholson category of onetime greats who have become victims of their own stature so that it’s impossible now to watch them in a film without thinking primarily of the actor rather than the character. Working with naturalistic dialogue and a strong script that allows him to play a (relatively) normal guy, Hoffman is excellent as Harvey, whose growing despondency in the film’s first half hour is very believably done.

In London for the wedding of his daughter (who is closer now to her step-father than to him), Harvey checks in at the hotel he is supposed to go to, expecting the entire wedding party to be guests there, but then finds that everyone else is staying at a house rented by his ex-wife. At a pre-wedding dinner he is clearly out of his depth in the presence of sharply dressed youngsters who engage in social conversation and business talk; his daughter and son-in-law, though affectionate in a superficial sort of way, don’t make an extra effort to make him feel like part of the family. In these scenes, the writing and Hoffman’s performance creates a powerful dual effect: on the one hand we cringe for Harvey (anyone who's ever known social awkwardness will sympathise with him in these early scenes), but on the other hand it’s possible to see why this man estranges people and makes them uncomfortable, and to realise that he was probably a less-than-ideal husband and father. This brings a certain urgency to his relationship with Kate, whom he meets at an airport bar where he’s brooding about his misfortunes. (The “last chance” of the title refers to an assignment that might salvage Harvey’s teetering career, but his meeting with Kate gives the words a second meaning.)

I thought the film’s first half was outstanding, the second half slightly less so as it started reflexively drawing on the clichés of romantic films: a missed rendezvous (a la Love Affair and An Affair to Remember), second thoughts, a reconciliation. There was also a subplot about Kate’s paranoid mother and her next-door neighbour that was superfluous at best. But these things didn’t much matter given the Hoffman-Thompson chemistry. It’s wonderful to see two performers of this caliber in such good form, and playing off each other so well, especially given that one of them is in his seventies and the other doesn’t do much movie work these days.

(Also watched on the flight: The Reader, which I had heard mixed things about but which I liked a great deal. Maybe planes are the new multiplexes.)

A quote and more plugs

One of my favourite newspaper quotes from recent days is this one by Abhishek Bachchan, in a coochie-coo cover story done by HT City:

I still wake up in the morning and revel in the fact that I share the same room as Aishwarya Rai.

Why not simply "Aishwarya" or "Aish"? "Aishwarya Rai" makes it sound like little Abhishek is still the 17-year-old boy who gawped at the freshly crowned Miss India World back in 1993 and thought "How cool would it be to have HER as a roomie?" Now I imagine the first thing he does after getting up each morning is fist-pump and yell "Yes!" She even pays the rent on time, he probably thinks to himself.

(Going by this story, I think S Sreesranth would approve of AB's choice of roommate.)

Anyway, this is silly nitpicking. While on dream couples, here are two plugs for my wife (who has never once told a newspaper that she revels in sharing the same room as Jabberwock Singh). First, a wellness blog she recently started; it's still at an experimental stage but expect lots of spa reviews in the near future, and possibly a guest post by me about my Ananda stay three years ago (but definitely nothing about this experience). Second, a link to Abhilasha's page on Muziboo, where she's uploaded a couple of her songs. She hasn't seriously pursued what could have been a very promising singing career, but I'm hoping she does at some stage.

Back on the 24th. Blogging will or will not resume then.

Updates, plugs

Apologies again for the copious amounts of non-blogging I've been doing lately (ya, I know, who even notices or cares in this age of Twitter and Facebook). It'll probably continue like this for a while - as mentioned earlier there hasn't been much reading and movie-watching time recently, which in turn means that there isn't much to blog about (yes, my life is that interesting). Plus I took a minor break from writing and in the process discovered that non-blogging is nearly as addictive as blogging and requires less energy, so there.

The to-read list is being conscientiously dug into, or at least cautiously prodded. Two of my favourite bloggers, Amit and Falstaff, have books out: My Friend Sancho and études respectively. Amit and I became friends a few years ago, shortly after we both started blogging, but I had been a fan of his nuanced yet clear-sighted feature writing (as encountered mainly in Cricinfo and Gentleman magazine) long before that. And Falstaff's short prose - which you'll find scattered through his blog archives - is as delightful as his erudition is daunting. ("I can't help it, everything interests me" is one of the epigraphs on his book, and I can see why.)

To balance things out, one must occasionally read books by people whom one doesn't personally know. I discovered a lovely-looking Vintage Books edition of Patricia Highsmith's Strangers on a Train at The Book Shop in Jorbagh. (Here's an old post on Hitchcock's superb film of the book, and another one on Highsmith's writing.) Also, Alan Moore/Brian Bolland's Batman: The Killing Joke, which I picked up from Landmark in Mumbai, and a couple of Henning Mankells. And I'm eagerly awaiting my copy of Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro, one of my favourite contemporary writers.

Most of these are slim books, which makes them good traveling companions, and they should come in handy next week. I'm going to Germany for a few days from May 17 - the trip is part of an initiative by the German Book Office to facilitate interactions and tie-ups between publishers of children's books in India and Germany, and I'm playing the role of the bastard hack in the group. Will be visiting a few publishing houses, meeting illustrators, going to a small book fair in Berlin. Should be interesting.

Anything I write about that trip will of course find its way onto this orphan site at some point. And other blogging will happen as it happens.