God Makes Mistakes, Too

We've had movies where the audience didn't understand what movie they had just seen. For example the Lord of the Rings movies. Well, at least those who didn't read the books didn't understand most of the movies.

Then we've had movies where the music composer didn't understand what movie he was composing (or plagiarising) music for. Example, the historical mujra, Asoka.

Then there have been movies where the actors didn't understand what movie they were acting in, for example the Harry Potter movies.

But rare is the masterpiece where the director himself seems not to understand what movie he is making. And as we know, a director is the boss, and the creator of the movie. He is to the movie what god is to the universe (for those who believe in the god, that is). And sometimes, you know, you really need to say, Rab Ne Bana Di Khichdi.

This is the case of Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi, the latest from the Aditya Chopra (aka Rab) school of loving. No, you dirty mind, it doesn't involve anything that happens on the couch or the bed. So you have Shahrukh "Khan Is King" who for once is not very Kingly - for a princely amount of half an hour - as a Punjab Power employee named Surinder. He bumps into Tani, an attractive bride-to-be, who conveniently happens to be his teacher's daughter, and who equally conveniently loses her bridegroom-to-be just before her marriage.

Now in Aditya Chopra's (aka Rab's) world there is no point to a girl's life except getting married, so the star-struck lass is handed over to Mr Electric who, unfortunately, is anything but electrifying with his soda-bottle glasses, moustache and severely parted hair. On accomplishing this hand-over operation, Tani's old man decides to call it a life as well. However, as any girl in the Rab's world, Tani takes it up, though not with much enthu.

And so life goes on, for half an hour, with Mr Electric secretly doting on his young and pretty wife while the wife dotes on her past and does chores. Rab at this point correctly realised that this script was going nowhere fast, so he had to do something, and he did - enter the dance course plus competition for the best jodi. Tani joins the course, and so does a de-moustached and gelled Mr Electrifying aka Raj. If you've heard the name before, that's the work of Rab. Not that Mr Electrifying is really electrifying - he's a jerk, irritates the viewer and basically is just a little more enjoyable than Himesh Reshammiya singing at full blast with cats sliding down blackboards providing background music. But hey, the script needs to move, the girl needs to have something to do with her time and needs to like someone, so Mr Electrifying it is.

Of course, neither Tani nor any of her fellow dance students notice the curious coincidence that Electric and Electrifying seem to look and sound somewhat similar. Fret not - it's the Will of Rab. And with the exception of one solitary mechanic, no one in the whole town notices or comments upon Mrs Electric roaming more with Electrifying than with her hubby. Truly it must be the divine influence of Rab which makes the town so open-minded.

Rab was right - the entry of Mr Electrifying took the script somewhere. Unfortunately, Rab couldn't for the life of him figure out exactly where it took the script. And so, we are treated to the spectacle of a character who looks like he might, or might not, be suffering from Multiple-Personality Disorder dealing with problems of the heart in the most pointless ways imaginable. Fret not, Rab is still working on it.

One really feels sorry for Anushka Sharma. The girl is cute and fairly competent and you get the feeling she could actually do good acting under guidance from a Nagesh Kukunoor or a Ashotosh Gowariker. Unfortunately, she gets what must be the stupidest non-retarded female character in cinema, a woman who cannot recognise her husband once he shaves his moustache and gels his hair, and a woman who cannot see the loving hand of Punjab Power even when the city selectively blacks out so the that the shaved and gelled guy can give her the "I love you" message. Yet, for all the limitations of the character, Anushka does a fair job. Not her fault Rab screwed her world.

The King is far more bearable, sometimes even endearing, when he's a regular guy than when he's the King. He too makes the most of what he can with such a hopelessly confused character(s).

As for Rab, though, he should be looking for a new line of work. Himesh might be looking for someone to throw the cats on the blackboard, maybe Rab could try his hand at that.

Review: The 3 mistakes of my life

Chetan Bhagat, who the New York Times believes is India's best selling English novelist today, has released his third book, "The 3 Mistakes of My Life".

If Chetan Bhagat is India's best selling English novelist, I really wonder what other books Indians are reading, and for some reason it doesn't give me much to cheer about.

Now let's leave that aside and come to the book itself. First off, calling anything a spoiler in a CB book is an insult to the word spoiler because frankly, there is very little unpredictable in his books. But for the convenience of those who would not like me to "spoil the story", I'm putting the customary disclaimer.

** Mild spoilers begin **

The subtitle would have you believe that it is "A story about business, cricket and religion". Interesting combination, I thought as I picked up the book. Three hours and 258 pages later, I'm a bit wiser.

This story, to put it in a nutshell (and the space of a nutshell is all that is required to hold this story) is about three good friends and the girlfriend of the protagonist. Now, where have we heard that before? Did I just hear a voice saying "Five Point Someone"?

Now for the friends themselves. Loser-boy Alok from FPS turns into loser-boy Omi. The "hero" of the story, Govind is Hari Ver 2.0. And coincidence of coincidences, cool passionate nuts-and-bolts dude Ryan, the guy who doesn't get along with his parents, becomes cool passionate nuts-and-bolts dude Ish, the guy who doesn't get along with his parents. The last one had me flummoxed, because last time I heard, "Ish" was that annoying word Ash liked to use in that movie lemon, Devdas.

Just in case people started wondering if Bhagat had done a direct Ctrl-C Ctrl-V from FPS, the author pulls out the biggest innovative surprise of his career - namely, the girlfriend Neha, daughter of Cherian becomes the girlfriend Vidya, sister of Ish. Another innovation, loser-boy Alok, who had the slightly redeeming quality of being good with bookish knowledge, now loses that too in the transfomation to Omi, transferring it to Govind.

** Mild spoilers end **

Omi, Govind (the protagonist) and Ish are three 20-somethings in Ahmedabad, trying to start a business of their own. Govind, the guy who loves business and anything to do with numbers, is the mastermind behind the operation to start a cricket shop. Ish happens to be an ex-district level cricket player, which lends him an "expert advisor" status to the kids visiting the shop. Omi, an idiot (Govind's words) chips in with his only contribution - his family owns the temple in whose premises the shop opens. You can read the official synopsis here

So in case you were wondering where the tagline of "business, cricket and religion" came in, its because they run a cricket shop cum coaching business in temple premises.

When the tagline says "religion" and is set in Gujarat, you know its going to mention the riots. Indeed, the riots play in important part in the novel. But they are presented with such naivete that you begin to wonder whether CB has even done a cursory scanning of the newspapers.

Tackling a subject like the communal divide in India is not easy. All the more reason to take it seriously and not trivialise it like CB seems to have done. The characters involved in the religious turmoil are as unidimensional as it is possible to be.

The most ridiculous part is when he refers to a "secular party" and "communal party." OK, I know there can be legal issues when referring to actual parties in fiction, but calling them like this is so simplistic it makes me cringe. You can always give parties names or symbols. Of course, CB is nothing if not mind-numbingly simplistic. So we get a dose of the same old BJP-is-evil-Congress-is-angelic story that is repeated ad nauseam in the media.

Somewhere, CB does realise he is getting too one-sided and gives what he thinks is a more centrist view, but its obvious that he is out of his depth when discussing religion and politics, the same way he was out of his depth when dishing out his homemade (and undercooked) philosophy in his last outing, ON@TCC.

When FPS came out, people were quite impressed with the story and with a certain freshness that CB brought to the table. After his second novel, that gigantic lemon called One Night @ the Call Centre, perhaps CB thought that he better move to safer territory and try to redo the FPS formula.

The trouble is, the FPS formula worked because FPS was a college story. It would have worked for any college story or for a story of 20-somethings with rich dads. But not for middle-class 20-somethings who work two jobs to make ends meet. Just because a bikini-clad "size-zero" (I suppose it goes well with her IQ) Kareena Kapoor became the talk of the town, doesn't mean clothing Nirupa Roy in those clothes would have worked. Same problem here.

Maybe that's why the bindaas humor, which was the greatest strength of FPS, is missing here. It just doesn't go very well with the context. When he does indulge in it though, the jokes seem like they're getting tired of being told over and over again.

There is a serious problem of writers block when 4 years after his debut, an author publishes a book that seems entirely like a plagiarised version of his first novel. Indeed, if it didn't have CB's name on it, I would have thought it was a cheap imitation, much like Ram Gopal Varma Ki Aag was to Sholay.

Chetan Bhagat, with this novel has made the second biggest mistake of his life (ON@TCC being the first). Perhaps he should leave aside the serious stuff like philosophy and really go back to the basics of the FPS formula.

Back to the drawing board, boy.

Reviews: The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns

I had heard a lot of good things about two novels published by a new Afghan author, and decided to try them out. When I began with the first novel, I expected a kind of quasi-documentary on Afghan history. As it turns out, I was wrong.

First things first. Khaled Hosseini, the author of the two novels is, as mentioned, an Afghan, settled in the US and is also a member of the UN refugee agency. His two novels are set in Afghanistan, and they tell two quite different stories in a breathtakingly powerful manner. The first novel is not a new one; but I got around to reading it only recently.

The Kite Runner is Hosseini's first novel. Beginning in the 1970s, it tells the story of two young boys, the narrator Amir, and his friend Hassan. They are nigh inseparable, the thickest of friends as you would suspect – but not quite. Hassan is not just a friend of Amir – he is also the son of Amir's servant. And a Hazara, a race that is considered a lower caste. For these reasons, Amir never really admits that Hassan is indeed his friend. Nor does he ever stand up for Hassan whenever other Pashtun kids jeer at his race.

The book's name comes from the kite-flying competition (something the Taliban later banned). Amir struggles to gain acceptance in the eyes of his strict father, who he knows admires Hassan more. Amir is no sportsman, though he is a gifted teller of stories and a poet, but his father appreciates neither. The only avenue left to gain his father's favor is to win the annual kite-flying competition. The competition is a game of skill, requiring participants to cut opponents' kites and be the last man standing. The kite runner is a boy who chases fallen kites and tries to catch them before other kite runners do. Hassan is renowned as one of the best kite runners, and when Amir finally wins the kite competition, it is Hassan who retrieves his last opponent's kite.

But Amir's cowardice culminates in an incident that will haunt him for the rest of his life. It is the beginning of what, for him, is a nagging feeling of guilt that demands redemption.

One of Hosseini's many gifts is the ability to seamlessly weave in real events with the events of his story, giving you the perspective of how those events altered the lives of real people in Afghanistan.

When the Russians invade, Amir and his father, who are among Kabul's elite, escape Afghanistan to land up in the US, where, years later, Amir becomes a famous writer. Yet the ghosts of the past continue to haunt him until one day in 2001, he receives a call that will send him back into the cauldron that Afghanistan has become thanks to the efforts of the Soviets, the Mujahideen and the Taliban.

It is to the author's credit that he does not make the Afghanistan trip look like an adventure. Instead, he focuses on showing a nation that has crumbled, been pummeled by history. No one has been left unscathed and unscarred by the years of battles is what Hosseni tries to say, and he succeeds at it.

The novel is dedicated to the children of Afghanistan. And the sheer terror that the Taliban has inspired is again shown very well. But the best part, the most gripping, is the depiction of the friendship between Amir and Hassan in the first half of the book.

The Kite Runner was a novel that I had difficulty believing was a first attempt. Hosseini deftly manages to put in enough pathos, history and tragedy without making it look forced for the most part. The one minor gripe I had with the book is that at some places, the flow wasn't too smooth, especially Amir's life in America. But perhaps that could be justified to show the contrast with life in Afghanistan.

I thought The Kite Runner was powerful stuff. It was indeed a very engaging story, told with every ounce of sensitivity and quite touching. But as good as it is, The Kite Runner is greatly overshadowed by the shining brilliance Hosseini's second attempt, A Thousand Splendid Suns.

As the cover suggests, this is a novel about the women of Afghanistan. It begins with the story of 15 year old Mariam, who is a harami, a bastard daughter of a rich man and his servant. The word, for obvious reasons, is one she hates, but it is the word that all around her use to describe her. Staying near the town of Herat with her epileptic mother, she longs to join the family of her father.

Tragedy strikes and her mother dies. Mariam's father, who never wanted her, is forced to take her into his household. This arrangement doesn't last for long though, and Mariam is hurriedly married of to Rashed, a man thirty years her senior. And an abusive husband to boot.

After moving to Kabul with Rasheed, life quickly goes downhill for her, and at one point you think it just can't get worse. That is when Hosseini shows that the word "worse" has a different meaning for women in Afghanistan.

Because Laila, a neighbor of theirs, and a girl almost twenty years younger than Mariam is about to undergo a tragedy far worse than even Mariam. Laila is the direct opposite of Mariam. She is a literate girl, with a father whose ideas would be considered very progressive. He strongly believes in getting her an education and later a job – these were days when women could work in Afghanistan. With him, and her boyfriend Tariq, she visits the Bamiyan Buddhas, the same that the Taliban would later destroy.

It's too good to last though. As the war with the Soviets begins, Tariq and his family move to Pakistan, leaving Laila with her family. And her family do not stay long either. They are killed in a blast, of which she is the lone survivor. In these circumstances, Rasheed takes her in, and she is pressganged into marrying him as his second wife.

Predictably, this does not please Mariam, and a cold war begins. On this blog, it may sound the stuff of our dreary TV serials. But that impression couldn't be further from the truth, as you realize when you go further. The ordeal and hardships just get worse with the onset of the Communists, the Mujahideen, the warlords and finally, the Taliban. There was a real progression in barbarity in these successive regimes is used to full effect to show how it influences the lives of these two women.

The barbarity of the regimes is paralleled by the barbarity of Rasheed, which also increases in a similar progression. The women who began as adversaries soon find themselves befriending each other in a world where they have no other friends and no other options.

The novel begins on a slow note, but once the author has shown the contrasts between the two women's individual lives, and brought them together, the story simply becomes more heart wrenching with every chapter. Some points in the novel deserve special mention: the meeting that Laila has with Zaman, an orphanage director and one of the “few good men” left in Afghanistan; Mariam's interactions with Laila's children; Mariam's decision at the end of the book and Laila's reaction to it; and of course the ending itself, which I will not spoil.

While Laila's ordeal seems the harsher of the two, Mariam's role most closely mirrors of Hassan's in the previous novel, and her character simply wins all sympathies by the heartbreaking end.

The events may sometimes seem improbable – its often too barbaric that it may seem artificial. But many Afghan women have experiences that are arguably just as dramatic as as the one presented by Hosseini. Certainly, the barbarities that Laila and Mariam are subjected to, both at home and outside, are not something we've not heard, but stringing them together into one story that is more shattering and devastating than what we are normally used to. And while that may look unreal, we only need to read the Taliban's decrees to know that it was chillingly real.

The novel is not without its share of flaws – some parts in the beginning of Mariam's story are a bit melodramatic and Bollywood-ish, and the epilogue seems a bit too stretched, though a fervent message of hope redeems the final pages.

But in essence, Hosseni's second novel is gripping, extremely powerful and deeply touching. There have been very few novels I've come across that have been as moving as A Thousand Splendid Suns. It is indeed one of the most powerful and honest novels I've ever read.

Both the novels bring you face to face with a country which has been utterly destroyed, ruined and shattered, like the peace of mind of Amir and the lives of Mariam and Laila. But just as there is redemption for Amir in The Kite Runner and a new life for the women in A Thousand Splendid Suns, the novels raise a desperate hope that Afghanistan and its people will never have to again undergo what they have undergone these last thirty years.