Lights, Camera...umm..wait a min..

The War Within is a movie that should not have been made!

I saw 2 movies last week based on suicide bombers - The War Within is about a terrorist from Pakistan blowing up Grand Central and Paradise Now (my visit to the NY Film Festival this year) is about a terrorist from Palestine blowing himself up in Tel Aviv, Israel. While The War Within presented the hard facts without any sugar coating (or subtlety), I was impressed with how Paradise Now (mainstream Warner Bros released this movie in the US btw!) managed to incorporate a fair dose of humor into such a dark topic and delved more into the terrorist's psyche. Was lucky to sit through for a Q&A session with the director and lead cast of Paradise Now and to hear about the director's extensive research, including reading the Bible (which he claimed cited the 1st suicide attempt in religious texts, that of Samson...I wouldn't know..).

I don't think we are ready for movies like this. With fear being instilled very strongly in most of this country (and NY specifically), with taglines like, "When you see something, say something" doing the rounds, when an abandoned dark bottle or suitcase causes subway evacuations, when a "suspicisous" man with a long trenchcoat makes people call the cops without legitimate reasons for fear, we do not need movies like this presenting us with hard facts on how and why people turn to terrorism and how they could go about blowing places up. But then, freedom of speech says an artist must be able to express whatever he wants to. This, to me, is the 1st signs of suicide bombers and terrorism featuring in movies, post 9/11. Just like the Cold War provoked decades of spy thrillers and such in movies and writing, we may be coming up for a few years of terrorism-themed books and movies (exciting pursuits in Tora-Bora, Arab royalty, you can imagine the kind of stories this theme presents to artists), but are we ready for it? It makes me cringe and feel uncomfortable, I am not!

While on the topic, these terror alerts (thank God they did away with those color codes - that was an insult to human intelligence!) every now & then and warnings of potential subway attacks on a Sunday (!!!) - are these just politicians screaming "wolf!" to use fear as a tool as and when they need, is it anything more than a disclaimer to cover their behinds, can we do anything about it, should they be informing (scaring) the public about these things or handling it efficiently on their own?!

Writing..

Re-discovered the joys of reading over the last month or so. Just put down the latest book by Shashi Tharoor called Bookless in Baghdad - it's a collection of essays about writing and (Indian) writers. Am a big Shashi Tharoor fan, having read 2 of his earlier works. I read India - From Midnight to the Millenium first, was mighty impressed, and then The Great Indian Novel was even better. The Great Indian Novel superimposes characters from the Mahabharatha on the Indian freedom struggle and beyond (Gandhi is Bhishma, Karna is Jinnah..you get the point..) - it's a great way to retell a myth, fusing it with history. His writing really speaks to people like me - he was born in London, brought up completely in urban India and now lives in NY and works for the UN. All his books and writing so far is about India and emphasises how one can be Indian, at heart, living outside of India. He has this line in Bookless.. which goes, "one has to get out of the frame to see the whole picture" (which is debatable, but very comforting and redeeming nevertheless for someone like me).

In his review of different writers in Bookless.., I completely agree with his take on R.K. Narayan (too simplified, made me wonder if I was missing something that everyone was loving about his books, much like what I feel about New Yorker now - come on, isn't most of the stuff there plain pretentious cra*?), V.S. Naipaul (I like a conclusion in a novel, that's just me - once I finished his book, it left me thinking that maybe he didn't really incorporate that thing called "conclusion" in the structure of his book; I'd like to read Father & Son though), & Salman Rusdhie (sheer admiration - excited about reading, Shalimar the Clown, his latest, next).

Indian writers in English have a flair and a fascination for the language, its like a kid being all excited about a newly acquired skill. It was the best Colonial influence that the Britishers left us back with. We have a fascination for long sentences, packing a lot in a single sentence, going on and on, comma after comma, making the reader crave that full-stop (like this :) - someone I spoke to about this believed it was because we fear that we may lose the thought if we didn't get it down asap in one BIG sentence - not sure if I subscribe to that theory, but anyway..). We fill our writing with convoluted, arcane words and imagination - most Indian writers would prefer to take the prettier, scenic, curvy, convoluted path to get an idea across rather than a crisp short-cut.

In that respect my writing (this thing that I do here :)) is all Indian (my pathetic attempt to put myself in the same bracket as Salman Rushdie :)) - brevity is not really my strength (if you've made it this far into this posting, you definitely have realized that by now), humor is subtle (at best!). I like having a main train of thought with a parallel, related line within ( ) (I think I sometimes put more within ( ) than out of it (and the programmer in me wants to have mulitple levels of nesting of ( ))).

I should bring my indulgence to a close now - last, but definitely not the least (trite, trite!!), thanks for spending your time here - I mean there is so much else you could be doing, even if you decide to read/browse, there is so much out there for you to choose from, the fact that you chose to come here and read through a posting like this means a lot to me.