Ten days ago, I stood in the line for tickets at Bandra station and noticed that the guy in front of me had these lines printed calligraphy-style on his T-shirt:

Stone Dead Forever
Auttgart Sineers
Galaxy Rainers
Bengrance — Witteilingen.
Being Outstanding in a Complex Society Revolution

I know, I know. You feel envious that you weren’t there to read these words for yourself. Believe me, I felt privileged.

But on Sunday (Feb 10) at the Kala Ghoda Festival, I noticed this on a T-shirt that passed by:

Being Outstanding in a Complex Society

Now that has to rank as a seriously improbable coincidence. In years of being a T-shirt slogan watcher, I’ve never seen the same wacky slogan twice. Here it’s happened within ten days. Naturally, I wonder if this is some popular quote, sort of like “Don’t tase me, bro”.

Is it?

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On Tuesday evening (Feb 5), the tables got turned. Up on stage at the David Sassoon Library, discussing travel writing, were four people: Naresh Fernandes (editor of Time Out Mumbai) moderating, Sarayu Ahuja, Hartosh Bal and me.

Naresh got the wagon rolling with excerpts from various ancient travellers/writers, mainly focussing their keen eyes on the chiquitas. Then he asked the three of us to read bits of our writing, to give our audience a flavour.

About now, a scrawny kitten climbed the stairs leading to the stage, but stopped at the last step.

Sarayu read first, a bit from a book she wrote with Dom Moraes, about the travels of a British writer. Hartosh had earlier confessed to me that he was a product of my college, BITS Pilani, where he studied Mechanical Engineering. He was at Pilani a few years after I graduated. His reading was from a book in progress, about a journey around the Narmada river. Mine was a short piece about a tiny place that touched my heart, Cayce in Kentucky. (Click here to read the whole post)

Bae Chang-Ho’s My Heart shall be screened today at the Max Mueller Bhavan at 1830 hours i. e. 6:30 in the evening. The director is considered the foremost exponent of the Korean New Wave cinema. In a stark departure from his usual style of film-making, My Heart is set in the Korea of 1920’s.

The movie is shot amidst the beautiful scenery of Korea. It tells the story of Sun-Yi (played by Kim Yoo-Mi, the director’s wife), who is married off to a ten-year old spoiled brat. When her husband grows past adolescence, he brings home a mistress much to the petrifaction of Sun-Yi. The movie tells the story of how Sun-Yi leaves home and searches for an identity of her own. In a way, the movie mirrors the struggle of Korea to find its identity in a shrinking world. (Click here to read the whole post)

Two of the gems of experimental cinema - Manhatta and The Man With The Movie-Camera - were screened at the Gallery Beyond yesterday. Since I missed the first one (I watched it on the internet anyway), I shall review only The Man With The Movie-Camera.

Made in 1929 by Dziga Vertov with cinematography by his brother Mikhail Khaufman, The Man With The Movie-Camera captures the Russian life in all its avatars. The movie has no story as such, yet one could call it the story of a people and a time.

The movie shows the Russian way of life in minute detail, and not often in the sad way that directors of art movies are wont to perceive. The camera captures in a most natural way the beautifully uncertain smiles, the lips that make unheard whispers, basking ladies, the victories and the excitement, the routine and the indifference - all captured with the devouring eye of a greedy voyeur and the detailed panache of a keen observer. The result is a movie which speaks of life without judgment and the consequent pitfalls that a jaundiced eye brings to the task of film-making. (Click here to read the whole post)

After Kiran Nagarkar, Saeed Mirza. Mirza’s new book, Ammi: Letter to a Democratic Mother, is out from Tranquebar Press. On Monday night, an hour after her conversation with Nagarkar, Nilanjana Roy sat on stage with Mirza to talk about Ammi. And Rahul Bose read several passages from the book.

Nilanjana said that when the manuscript came to her (as Tranquebar’s editor), she figured it would take her a week to read it. Instead, she sat up one night and finished it, and knew right away that she had to make it Tranquebar’s first book.

That was introduction enough.

Mirza began by telling us that his mother came from a “tradition of inclusion”, and had a “largeness of spirit.” These were values, he said, that are disappearing today, leaving only a chauvinism and a lack of the generosity he knew in his mother. Rahul Bose echoed that theme. He said of the book that it speaks of a world we all know; it is a lament for this country, a mixture of longing, love, unslaked thirst and a sense of loss. Books like these, people like Mirza, he said, are the “bits of chewing gum” that keep us together.

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The third session of Experimental Cinema screenings (and my second), Gallery Beyond showcased the last four of Avant-Garde movies they had chosen to screen. I say chosen to screen because the Avant-Garde Collection (from which the movies are being shown) is a much wider collection comprising many more movies than time would have allowed them to show.

The four movies screened were:

• Regen (Rain) (Netherlands, 1929) directed by Joris Ivens, 14 minutes: This is a movie every Bombayite would love to watch, especially if you’ve grown up watching the rain and what gentle poetry it can create on the streets and in the minds of men. If you can catch this short film anytime, please do so. It is a lovely evocation of rain in Amsterdam and how people react to it. Perhaps the most lyrical of all Avant-Garde movies, it is for the best that it is a silent movie. The gentle strumming of the guitar throughout the movie is the only sound the movie has. It is the director’s best documentary before he moved on to doing political documentaries. It is now my favorite documentary; when you have watched it, it will be yours too.
• H2O (US, 1929) directed by Ralph Steiner, 12 minutes: This movie demonstrates what light can do with surfaces, especially with water. An intensive exploration of the play between light and water, it soon delves into abstractions leaving the consciousness of the existence of water behind. Recommended only if you love the sort of cinema that academics can argue and debate over.

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(Apologies for the technological incompetence that resulted in this being empty when I first put it up).

I’ve never read Kiran Nagarkar, but after Monday evening when he spent an hour in conversation with Nilanjana Roy, I resolved to fix that lacuna in my life. Not so much because of the samples of his writing we heard or heard described, but because of the man. If that makes sense.

For one thing, his sense of humour. It was there in the first bit of reading he did. This wasn’t a passage from any of his books, but three short fictional biographical blurbs about himself that he wrote for what he said was a short-lived website he had once. “Take your pick”, he said of the three, and it was hard. In one, he claimed to be the most prolific writer in history, having written works now claimed by such luminaries as Don DeLillo, Ian McEwan, Shobhaa De and the various apostles who put together that book known as the Bible. In another, he claimed to be the inspiration behind the crimes of Idi Amin, Osama, Mugabe and others. It wasn’t just that these outlandish claims were funny by themselves; it was the way he made them, and the way he read them out to us, that had the audience chuckling.

And it was apparent in the rest of his conversation too. Something about the way this man spoke with and to his audience hinted at an alert, vibrant mind, always a good substrate for humour, and so always on the lookout for humour. Not the laugh-out-loud slap-you-on-the-back humour of a Bollywood-style Johnny Lever, yes, but a subtle, self-deprecating kind that grows and builds with that twinkle in his eye. It brought to mind Davy Barry, or Groucho Marx, or perhaps someone even subtler, like Art Buchwald or PL Deshpande.

But there were other things about Nagarkar. (Click here to read the whole post)

Thanks to the innovative organizers of this play, I don’t have to think of a title for this post. ;-)

Organized by Nitin Das and the Sheikh brothers, Chana Chai Nukkad Natak featured two plays enacted wholly by kids from the Akanksha NGO (with some prodding from Nitin who sat at the back of the stage directing the kids and correcting their cute faux pases).

The first play was about a man saddled with an ailing mother, and two brothers - one mad, and the other given to drinking a lot. He wishes to get his mother to a good hospital, to get his mad brother married, and to gift his drinking brother a career. To that end, he forges fake banknotes. The man gives a fake 500 rupees note to his mother, who buys groceries (or ration as it is called out of habit in India, thanks to the Raj’s and then the government’s policy of rationing food). The shopkeeper later recognizes the fake and adulterates food in order to compensate for the loss. The adulterated ration is bought by a lady whose jobless husband eats it, and goes to an interview with a sick stomach. Rejected in the interview, he becomes a nakli doctor. Finally the drinking brother of the man who had forged the note falls ill and is killed by the fake medicine administered by the fake doctor. The play was aptly titled Nakli Duniya.
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The Avant-Garde movie screenings at Gallery Beyond ended twenty minutes early in spite of the organizers thankfully repeating the first two movies by Man Ray which I’d missed on account of being late. I rushed to Eros to catch Bow Barracks Forever; expectedly I was told that the Preview Theatre was filled to capacity. I took a ride back to Kala Ghoda thinking I might have missed the Kathak performance, but might as well drink in on the later performances.

I arrived halfway through the Odissi performance by Ms. Sujata Mohapatra. It was the first classical performance I saw being held in an open-air theatre, so I had my reservations. But Mohapatra’s excellent performance soon dispelled all of them.

Wearing the white raiment and adornments of an Odissi dancer, she might as well have personified the quality of purity. Her dance was one energetic, controlled expression of sublime artistry; her countenance and hands in perfect tandem with the moods of the song being sung.

The music too was splendid, especially the mellifluous vocals (I think it was Bengali/Oriya folk though I’m not quite sure) and the mesmerizing violin and flute whose flourishes were as brilliant as the lithe movements of the dancer’s hands.
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On an apparently slow Sunday afternoon at the Festival, we — meaning the wife, our nearly-four-year-old and me — were the attraction for a reasonable crowd at the amphitheatre. It went like this: they were playing rocking Bollywood tunes, but they had nobody on stage to dance to them. I don’t know if this was a planned gap in the performance schedule, or if the performers for that slot decided to stay home. Either way, the two young emcees on stage wandered about, pleading into their mikes for people from the audience to climb up and dance. “The best dancer will win a prize!” they said.

Eventually, a slender young man in a maroon T-shirt and glasses leaped up. Handed over his glasses and began srutting about, pointing periodically up at the trees and sky, once falling onto his back and pointing from there. Yet it was all in time to the music, strangely graceful, and refreshingly different from typical Bollywood dancing.

Five or six more young men — only men — flooded on, some of them clearly trained and accomplished gyrators. But the most endearing was a thirty-something man with a thick moustache and a definite belly, moving about the stage, shaking an arm, shaking a leg, with abandon. When the song was done, everyone jumped off the stage, except him. He commandeered a mike and told us all: “I’m just an ordinary engineer! I just got up here to express myself! You all should come up and express yourself too!”
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I was lazing around in the afternoon and almost on a whim, I decided to attend the Avant-Garde movie screenings held at the Gallery Beyond. And it was so good that at the end of it, I cursed myself for being lazy and not attending on previous days.

The map for the festival does not pinpoint the location of the Gallery. And nobody except the a man standing outside Max Mueller could tell me where Gallery was. As a result, I arrived at the Gallery a full one hour late. To add to my woes, the watchman there told me that games were being played at the Gallery (Yahaan toh khel khila rahein hain).

Just as I was about to leave thinking that the event had been shifted to some other venue at the last minute for which notifications could not be put up on the website, a man told me that movies were indeed being screened at the Gallery and directed me to a door. I entered a darkened hall where the movies were being screened. It was only when my eyes adjusted to the light and I spotted paintings hanging on the walls around me that I realized I’d been ushered into the gallery itself.
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Admittedly, this is not about KGAF itself. Maybe it does raise some issues though. With no further ado…

After spending most of Sunday afternoon and evening at KGAF with the kiddos, they were starting to tire, asking to go home. Wife wanted to listen to two sessions at David Sassoon Library that would run later than the kids’ bedtimes, so she stayed on while a friend and I walked with the little ones to Churchgate and caught a train home.

About 10pm, wife called. I answered, but asked her to wait a minute because I had to tuck in the kids’ mosquito nets. When I returned, she said, as near verbatim as we can remember: “Dilip, I’m at a public phone and my time is running out!” She told me she was at Churchgate station, about to catch a train for home.

When she got home an hour later, she had a story to tell.
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The PenTathalon sounded like fun. And unnerving given its ‘Five Exercises for Fiction Writers’ description. What does a fiction writer look like, one wondered. I found out on the morning of Saturday, 3rd February.

Kavita Bhanot, the workshop leader, turned out to be a charming, soft-spoken young lady with a clipped British accent and an eye (and ear) for detail. There were fifteen participants from various backgrounds - a journalist, a business consultant, an animation script-writer, an accountant, a former magazine editor and an advertising professional to name a few.

The five exercises were actually discussions on five aspects of fiction writing: Openings, Description , Characterization, Dialogue and Point of View. Kavita started with,

You all probably read a lot of books and enjoy them. There are actually several techniques employed by fiction writers that you would not have noticed so far because you aren’t familiar with them. In this workshop we will look at some of them and how you can use them in writing.

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In the one hour I had between the two writing workshops An Introduction To Freelance Writing and The Art Of Translation yesterday, I wandered the corridors of Elphinstone College and its narrow dark staircases that looked as if they belonged to a cold time-forgotten castle more than a college.

I even happened to venture unnoticed into their staff room which has six larger-than-life portraits hung across its walls. And guess what I found!!! One of the portraits was of William Wordsworth (eponymous grandson of the great poet William Wordsworth), who was a principal of the college at one time. Another portrait was that of Peter Peterson, who had been a Professor of Oriental Languages in the college. It might be history to those who know Elphinstone, but it is certainly news to me.

As for The Art Of Translation workshop that followed, it soon regressed into The Craft Of Translation workshop. It is very necessary to have an agenda or at least a purpose which implicitly sets some sort of tacit agenda, especially if the workshop session is going to be as long as three hours. The discussion was often punctuated with silences that hovered in the air of Elphinstone’s Seminar Hall which hosted the poorly attended workshop.

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First visit to an event like the KGAF, I prefer not to go attend an event. Instead, I like to simply wander through, getting a feel of place and time and people. (Well, in that third case, not literally a feel, you understand).

And so here’s a feel of what I got a feel of, Saturday opening day evening.

Somebody sold us a lemon tart. (Food wasn’t quite the first priority on my mind as I strolled through, but close enough). Usually, I like lemon tarts: the taste, the texture, the colour. This specimen wasn’t bad, but failed on all three of those counts.

• Instead of a healthy bilious yellow, this one was a pale yellowish-grey.
• Instead of smooth and velvety, this one was grainy, almost crunchy. And that’s before I got to the crust.
• Instead of a pleasant blend of sour and sweet, this one was lip-puckeringly limey, with an intriguing aftertaste of ghee. Lots of ghee.

I immediately ordered another.

Wife yanked me away.

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