The Limey

The Limey (1999)
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Writer: Lem Dobbs
Stars: Terence Stamp, Peter Fonda and Lesley Ann Warren

Terrence Stamp was a handsome man. No wonder Passolini hired him to play the allegorical God/Satan who seduces a family in Theorema, he was asked to play the lead in Alfie, which made Michale Caine a star.

Even in his old age, he makes a handsome picture, with a taut face and piercing blue eyes. He is the star of The Limey, and he is the one reason why the film works. There are shots of Stamp walking in the vast, empty spaces in Los Angeles, and Steven Soderbergh’s camera gawks at Stamp’s lithe figure. You get the drift.

Plot-wise, The Limey is not much, but as cinema, it’s engrossing, to say the least, and that’s because of Stamp, and of course, Peter Fonda. It’s surpising how, in youth-obsessed Hollywood, Soderbergh gets two once-a-hero-now-a-character-actor actors and pit them against each other to get a smouldering picture. This is why his is Soderbergh, the blue-eyed boy of the independent cinema scene in the US, who single-handedly made independent cinema look cool. One thing that goes in favour of Soderbergh is that he is not scared to experiment. Here there are experimentation at many levels, and at most levels, it pay off, and even if it doesn’t, it’s an altogether new experience — Like the ending of the film; I was not convinced, yet it did not stop me from enjoying the film.

The first risk Soderbergh takes is picking up two actors as nemesis, actors who come with their baggage, and Soderbergh is not scared to play their baggage as their strength. You mention Peter Fonda and what you remember is Easy Rider; he cannot be anything else. Here, he plays Wyatt growing old. He is a music mogul, who needs money to maintain his lifestyle, but money is hard to come by unless you deal with the drug dealers, and Terry Valentine will do anything to maintain his image, and to sleep with girls younger to be his daughter. One of these girls happen to be Jenny, daughter of a British criminal. Now, Jenny is dead and Wilson, who has just been released from the jail, travels to LA to find out what happened his baby girl. Stamp’s Willson is The Limey of the title, an American slang that refers to the British. Talking about slangs, Wilson has an entire dictionary of it, and uses it generously, as one character asks in bafflement to another, whether she understand what Wilson says. They may not understand what Wilson says, but they can fathom what Wilson wants — revenge. He gets his revenge, but that’s not the point, the point is how the film plays to reach to that final act.

The film is told in flashback, which we don’t realise till the very end. Soderbergh and his editor employ dramatic editing methods where the early scenes are jumbled, and at times repetitive. At times, voiceover from one scene intrudes the introspection of another. All these till we warm up to Wilson. Later, it’s a straight-forward story, as he issues a threat — “Tell him, I am coming.”
You don’t see The Limey for the plot, but for its inventiveness. And, one of the major invention of the film is the flashback sequences, telling the youth of the Terence Stamp character. Instead of hiring a young actor to play the role, Soderbergh does a fantastic things, he takes an original Stamp film, and collects a few scenes and pass it off as Wilson’s past — ingenious. The film in question Ken Loach’s 1967 directorial debut Poor Cow.

In the heart of The Limey is a private joke, between the father and daughter. It’s sad, twisted and ironic when the girl runs away from her father to fall in love with an older man (father fixation!), and plays the same joke, and gets herself killed because of it. The film does not show us Jenny, except for a brief image of a young girl, timid and apprehensive, looking for love. Here Jenny comes alive from Wilson’s memories, and that’s the reason why he fails in his mission to kill his daughter’s killer, for, at the end, Wilson realises it was he who was responsible for the death of his daughter, not Terry Valentine. Terry Valentine did not understand the joke, he did not know what Jenny wanted, but Wilson did, but could not help her.

The Line of Beauty

Abstract

When Alan Hollinghurst’s ‘The Line of Beauty’ was awarded the Booker Prize in 2004, there were discussions in the media how for the first time a ‘gay novel’ has been nominated for the prestigious mainstream award. There are evidences to support the claim. Hollinghurst, the author, is open about his sexual orientation, so is his narrator. There are explicit, almost graphic descriptions of sex between men. The novel also deals with the arrival of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and how it killed a whole generation of gay men in England.

Yet, a close analysis would reveal that ‘The Line of Beauty’ is not a ‘queer text’, or a minority text for that matter. Though narrated by a man who is marginal on several accounts — social, cultural, sexual — the novel in the long run is not about the narrator Nick Guest, but about the Fedden family, and the culture and politics of Thatcher’s London in 1980s.

A gay text demands certain amount of perversion — a sense of subversion. Minority writing can exist only in the context of its binary other, the mainstream, and it must disassociate itself from the mainstream. Else, minority literature is in the danger of losing its sting, as the mainstream itself is opportunistic enough to co-opt dissident views.

If we try to read ‘The Line of Beauty’ in the context of the literary tradition it inherits, it comes closer to F Scott Fitzgerald’s 'The Great Gatsby' (1925) than say James Baldwin’s 'Giovanni’s Room' (1956), which should have been its inspiration as queer text. Both 20th Century American novels deal with outsider experiences. While Baldwin’s focus is narrow and confined, Fitzgerald’s critique on the American Dream is sprawling, to say the least. Fitzgerald is indeed Hollinghurst’s model. Therefore, it’s not surprising that his narrator shares the name with Fitzgerald’s narrator Nick Carraway.

Minority literature needs to create an aesthetics of its own. It cannot express itself comfortably with the aesthetic confines of the mainstream. Unlike for example, Jean Genet, or the Beat writers, Hollinghurst’s aesthetics is classical, mainstream. The title refers to William Hogath’s theory of aesthetics. Nick writes his Ph.D on Henry James. The novel abounds in allusions of writers, artists from Pope to Pound. But there’s no mention of Genet, or any sense of subversion.

Thus, homosexuality that appears in the pages of the novel, does not constitute itself as minority text but becomes a mainstream shock object. (For example, two men having sex in a private estate garden.) Thus, like Fitzgerald’s Nick, Hollinghurst’s Nick too fails to becomes a protagonist. If we really need a protagonist in ‘The Line of Beauty’ it would be Catherine Fedden. For Nick she is the bridge between his worlds, and she is the only person who not only knows but also understand the complexities of both the worlds — Nick’s world of sexual perversion and conservatism of Fedden’s world.

Thus, despite its depiction of homosexuality, ‘The Line of Beauty’ is neither an example of minority literature, nor is it a gay novel.

The Reading List

A colleague wanted a list of books (in different categories for her students in the creative writing class. The list/s turns out of be pretty massive, thanks to the internet sources from where I culled the data. Thanks to those who compile the list/s. Individual mention would have been impossible.)

Reading List: Indian Writing In English

Vikram Chandra: Love and Longing in Bombay
Vikram Chandra: Red Earth and Pouring Rain
Aubrey Menen: The Fig Tree
Rohinton Mistry: Tales from Firozhsha Baug
Jhumpa Lahiri: The Interpreter of Maladies
Hari Kunzru: The Impressionist
G V Desani: All About H Hatterr
Vikram Seth: The Golden Gate
Salman Rushdie: Midnight’s Children
Salman Rushdie: Haroun and the Sea of Stories
R K Narayan: Swami and Friends
R K Narayan: The Guide
Mulk Raj Anand: Coolie
Kamala Markandaya: Nectar in a Sieve
Anita Desai: Baumgartner’s Bombay
Amitav Ghosh: The Shadow Lines
Amitav Ghosh: The Calcutta Chromosome
I Allan Sealy: The Trotternama
Shashi Tharoor: The Great Indian Novel
Githa Hariharan: When Dreams Travel
Kiran Nagarkar: Raavan & Eddie
Shashi Deshpande: That Long Silence
Arundhathi Roy: The God of Small Things
Raja Rao: Kanthapura
Khushwant Singh: Delhi
Nisha Da Cunha: Old Cypress
Ruskin Bond: The Room on the Roof
Gita Mehta: The River Sutra
Pankaj Mishra: The Romantics
Manil Suri: The Death of Vishnu
Amit Chaudhuri : Afternoon Raag
Rohinton Mistry: A Fine Balance
V S Naipaul: In A Free State
V S Naipaul: Bend In The River
Upamanyu Chatterjee: English, August: An Indian Story
Nirad C Chaudhuri: The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian
Ardashir Vakil: Beach Boy
Hanif Kureishi: The Buddha of Suburbia
Michael Ondaatje: Anil's Ghost
Shyam Selvadurai: Funny Boy

Reading List: Classics

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
American Pastoral by Philip Roth
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Atonement by Ian McEwan
The BFG by Roald Dahl
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Call of the Wild by Jack London
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
Charlotte's Web by E. B. White
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Emma by Jane Austen
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
Herzog by Saul Bellow
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Moby-Dick; or, The Whale by Herman Melville
Money by Martin Amis
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
Nostromo : a tale of the seabord by Joseph Conrad
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey
A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
The Periodic Table by Primo Levi
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan
The Plague by Albert Camus
Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford
The Quiet American by Graham Greene
The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence
The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
Sybil by Benjamin Disraeli
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
Three men in a boat by Jerome K. Jerome
The Tin Drum by Günter Grass
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
The Trial by Franz Kafka
Wise Children by Angela Carter
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Animal Farm by George Orwell
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Harry Potter Series by J.K. Rowling
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
The Stranger by Albert Camus
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Watership Down by Richard Adams
The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
Siddharta by Hermann Hesse
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

Reading List: Detective Fiction

G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories
Carolyn Keene’s Nancy Drew stories
Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin stories
Franklin W. Dixon’s The Hardy Boys
Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple stories
Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot stories
Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay’s Byomkesh Bakshi stories
Satyajit Ray’s Feluda
Douglas Adams’s Dirk Gently stories
P.D.James’s Cordelia Gray stories
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories
Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe stories (‘The Big Sleep’)
Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade stories
Novels:
Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone
Uberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose
Ian Fleming’s James Bond
Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne Series
Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter Series
Stieg Larsson’s The Millennium Trilogy
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles

Reading List: Ghost Stories

The Best Ghost Stories by Sheridan Le Fanu
Complete Ghost Stories (Collector's Library) by David Stuart Davies
The Wine-Dark Sea by Robert Aickman
The Collected Macabre Stories of L.P. Hartley by L.P. Hartley
The Sense of the Past: The Ghostly Stories of Henry James by Henry James
The Collected Ghost Stories of E.F. Benson by E.F. Benson
The Complete Wandering Ghosts by F. Marion Crawford
Tales of Horror and the Supernatural by Arthur Machen
Best Ghost Stories by Algernon Blackwood
Ancestral Shadows: An Anthology of Ghostly Tales by Russell Kirk
Widdershins (Alan Rodgers Books) by Oliver Onions
Alone with the Horrors: The Great Short Fiction of Ramsey Campbell 1961-1991 by Ramsey Campbell
Supernatural Buchan: Stories of Ancient Spirits Uncanny Places and Strange Creatures by John Buchan
The King in Yellow and Other Horror by Robert W Chambers
Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe
Strangers and Pilgrims by Walter de la Mare
Mark of the Beast by Rudyard Kipling
Ghost Stories by Charles Dickens
The works of Stephen King
Seleted ghost stories:
The Apparition of Mrs. Veal by Daniel De Foe
Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook by Montague Rhodes James
The Haunted and the Haunters by Edward Bulwer-Lytton
The Silent Woman by Leopold Kompert
The Man Who Went Too Far by E. F. Benson
The Woman’s Ghost Story by Algernon Blackwood
The Phantom 'Rickshaw by Rudyard Kipling
The Rival Ghosts by Brander Matthews
The Damned Thing by Ambrose Bierce
The Interval by Vincent O’Sullivan
Dey Ain’t No Ghosts by Ellis Parker Butler

The Story Of A Shipwrecked Sailor

A Story of Survival
After the publication of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966, which depicts the account of an apparently motiveless murder of four family members in Kansas) daubed as a ‘non-fiction novel,’ it has been a standard to retell a real life story in garb of a fictional narrative. Indeed, fact is stranger than fiction.

This slight book by Gabriel García Márquez, The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor is a non-fiction novel, if we can call the book a novel at all. García Márquez writes: “This book is a journalistic reconstruction of what he (the sailor) told me, as it was published (…) in the Bogotá daily, El Espectador.”

In February 28, 1955, eight crewmembers of the destroyer Caldas, of the Colombian navy fell overboard in the middle of the sea, and disappeared in storm. A week later, one of them however turned up, half dead on a deserted beach, having survived 10 days without food and water on a drifting life raft. The book retells the story of his survival where he says, “My heroism consisted of not letting myself to die.”

But the book is more than a story of survival. It is a tribute to a greathearted man who dared to face and tell the truth even at the expense of losing his own heroism.

His name was Luis Alejandro Velasco. Once rescued, he was immediately proclaimed a national hero, in the regime of military and social dictatorship of General Gustavo Rajas Pinilla, in a state where each news item was censored, he told his story in newspapers favoured by the government, appeared in several ads and accrued a small fortune.

It was then he came to meet García Márquez, then a staff reporter with El Espectador to tell his real story.

His tale was full of explosives, not only his odyssey of survival at sea, but the very fact that there was no storm at sea when he fell overboard, the real reason being that the destroyer was overloaded with illegal cargo. As Velasco’s story appeared for 14 consecutive weeks in the newspaper breaking all records of popularity, the dictatorship countered the blow by shutting down the newspaper and by stripping Velasco of all his heroic honours, including his job in the navy, making the hero disappear into oblivion for telling his real story.

The book is a reprint of the original newspaper story divided into 14 segments. The story is told in first person. As the story unfolds the thin line between Velasco the narrator and García Márquez the scribe disappears and we see the wonderful rendering of 10 days of loneliness and strife at sea, where nothing much happens, except for heat of the day and chill of the night, and sharks to give company.

Of the narrator, García Márquez writers: “My surprise was that this solidly built 20-year old, who looked more like a trumpet player than a national hero had an surprising instinct for the art of narrative, an astonishing memory and ability to synthesize and enough uncultivated dignity to be able to laugh at his own heroism.”

Luis Alejandro Velasco’s story begins at Mobile, Alabama in the USA from where the destroyer starts its journey. Once aboard, he tells us about his shipmates whom he was to see drowning at sea very soon. He tells us how the experience of watching the film The Cain Mutiny (1954) gave him a sense of premonition. He informs his readers in minutest details his last minutes at the ship, his shipmates, how the overloaded vessel struggled with the wave a few hours before reaching its destination, and how he suddenly fell overboard.

When Velasco could realise what had happened, the destroyer was already miles away. He was fortunate to find a solitary raft. As he settled himself on the raft, he witnessed his mates devoured by the sea. Soon everything was calm; he was alone drifting on a raft in the vast blue sea and the voice of his shipmate Luis Rengifo’s cry of help ringing on his ears.

He calculated that as soon as the ship reached its destination, a rescue mission would be sent for him. This hope helped him to endure the first few hours of solitude at sea. Soon, though it felt like ages for him, afternoon turned into night. No help arrived. He spent the night watching the stars, still hoping for a rescue. Next day a few airplanes did appear in the sky, but they missed the raft. No more rescue followed.

Thus begins Velasco’s 10 days of sojourn at sea without food and water, flaunting the very depth of human instinct for survival. Nothing dramatic happened, but the way Velasco retells his story of loneliness at sea is no less dramatic. He tells us how he kept seeing his watch every five seconds, how he tried his best to save his lungs from being exposed to sun, the heat of the day, the chill of the night, the fishes under water which he was unable to catch, the sharks which always visited him at five in the evening, the flying seagulls who brought him the hope of land. He turns into Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner when to appease his hunger he kills a small seagull and fails to eat it. He also demonstrates the very core of human instinct. Every time he loses hope, the fear of death will grip him and he will again struggle to stay alive with renewed fervour.

For more than a week he did not eat anything except for a piece of fish he obtained by fluke and which he finally lost to the sharks and a few drops of sea water. By the end of 9th day he was worn out. He began to see visions, his childhood, his girlfriend, and his days at the ship; he could no longer distinguish his current state with his hallucinations.

He was on the verge of losing all his senses when on the morning of the 10th day he spotted land. He thought it was another of his visions. When he finally realised that the land just 2 miles ahead of him was real, he took his final decision. Ignoring his emaciated body full of blisters due to sun and salt of the sea, he leap into water, first swam and then crawled ashore.

He tells us: “Ten minutes later, all the suffering and hunger and thirst of ten days took their toll on my body. I lay exhausted on the warm, hard beach, not thinking about anything, not thinking anyone, not even rejoicing that, by force of will, hope and an indefatigable desire to live I had found this stretch of silent, unknown beach.”

He was finally rescued and was proclaimed as a national hero, kissed by beauty queens, and made rich through publicity, before he blew everything up only to reveal the real cause of his shipwreck.

Velasco is an ordinary man and his story is an ordinary story. He says, “It never occurred to me that a man could become a hero for being on a raft for ten days enduring hunger and thirst (…) I did nothing. All my efforts went towards saving myself.” Isn’t this humility itself heroic? The heroic about Velasco is his instinct for survival and his composure to face adversity as it is and fight it. His heroism lies in his exhibition of extreme human endurance.

Introducing the book, Marquez writes about Velasco’s story after 15 years: “It seemed worthy of publication, but I have never quite understood the usefulness of publishing it.” The usefulness of the story lies in the fact that it tells us about the epic possibilities of men, that, when all hope is lost, there is still hope.

From the Blurb:
[A] truly inspiring storyteller… García Márquez stands closest to Conrad, who also elaborated a world, or found a corner of the world, where regularities are perpetually under pressure… written with utmost simplicity, utmost clarity.
— Justin Wintle, New Statesmen & Society

The story of Velasco on his raft, his battle with sharks over a succulent fish, his hallucinations, his capture of a sea gull which he was unable to eat, his subsequent droll rescue, has all the grip of archetypal myth… reads like an epic, lit from within by Velasco’s greatheartedness… an example of survival instinct in full flame…
— Jill Neville, The Independence

This bottled piece of journalism has developed a significance of its own while adrift on the waves… as Márquez shows in manipulating the narrative for his own ends, truth can emerge only through the honest lies of fiction… (a) gripping tale of survival.
— Nicholas Shakespeare, The Times

A clean, salty journey of a perilous moment in a man’s life… powerful bony book…
— Roger Clarke, The Literary Review

The Author:
García Márquez is the Colombian short story writer and novelist, initially trained in journalism. Marquez was a liberal thinker whose left-wing politics angered Colombian conservative dictators Laureano Gomez and his successor General Gustavo Rajas Pinilla. To escape persecution, he spent the 1060s and 70s in voluntary exile in Mexico and Spain.

His best known novels are Cien anos de soledad (1967; One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1970), the epic story of a Colombian family, which shows the stylistic influence of the American novelist William Faulkner, and El Otono de patrirca (1975; The Autumn of the Patriarch, 1976) about political power and corruption. Cronica de una muerte anunciada (1981; Chronicle of a Death Foretold, 1983) is a story of a murder in a Latin American town. El amor en los tiempos del cólera (1985; Love in the Time of Cholera, 1988), a story of romantic love. El general en su laberinto (1989; The General in His Labyrinth, 1990) is a fictional account of the last days of South American revolutionary and statesman Simón Bolívar. His latest novel was Of Love and Other Demons (1995). García Márquez is admired for his weaving of realism with fantasy in narratives that take place in a fictional Colombian village.

García Márquez was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. He now resides in Madrid.

The Book:
The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor
Gabriel García Márquez
Originally published in Spanish under the title of Relato de un naufiago by Tusquets Editores, Barcelona, 1970
Translated by Randolph Hogan
First published in the USA by Alfred A. Knoff Inc., 1986
First published in India by Penguin Books, 1996

Antaheen

My friend wouldn’t like it, but I’ll have to tell the truth; I did not like Antaheen (literally, endless). I found the film puerile, and romantic like a 16-year-old boy meditating on issues of life and love. It was slow and pretentious. But, one thing I must say, I am in love with the soundtrack (by Shantanu Moitra), it’s great, especially the last track — ‘Bhindeshi Tara.’ I am listening to it right now. And, I did not like the film.

Why I am stressing on the ‘I didn’t like’ part? The film came with high recommendation, and great lineage. The Bengali film directed by Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury, starring Radhika Apte, Rahul Bose, Mita Vashisth, Aparna Sen and Sharmila Tagore won the best film award in the National Film Award, 2009; that’s the highest honour in Indian cinema, mind you. Second, a friend of mine gave me the film (she first gave me the soundtrack, which I absolutely adore), and insisted that I see the film. I did, after some struggle. First time I couldn’t concentrate at all, as the scenes started jumping from one thing to another without any apparent connection, and then, the show of blatant product placement — advertisement on the movie (the girl Brinda says she has flowing hair, because you see, she uses hair oil, and the camera dutifully zooms to her dressing table and lo, there’s a bottle of Nihar oil. The heroine tries to make a call, camera on the mobile phone, and yes, she has a Reliance connection, for everyone to see. (One review tells me there are more such instances, but I stopped counting).).

The second time, I took the film head on. It’s an award-winning film, how bad it can be, and there are some solid actors. The actors disappoint. But the visuals are top class, kudos to cinematographer Abhik Mukhopadhyay; you sit glued looking at those fantastic moving images, the city in the night, seen by someone who, like any true-blue Kolkatan, loves his city, and the interior shots, poetic, and the songs, Shreya Ghoshal’s magical voice crooning ‘Pherari Mon...’ ethereal.

Then you remember, you are seeing a film, not a music video. But where is the film? We are introduced to certain characters, all of them are lonely, despite being successful, and the film is ostensibly a meditation on love and relationship in the times of jet-setting lifestyle and of course, internet. But there is no concrete action to build on this mediation, and when the film ends, it does not say anything.
The story involves a hot-shot police officer, Abhik (Bose), and his interactions with his brother Ranju, sister-in-law Paro (Sen) and her colleague, a Barkha Dutt-in-making TV journalist, Brinda (Apte). And there’s a lonely unmarried pisi with whom Abhik lives (Tagore). Meanwhile, the policeman starts a blind date on the internet and finds a ‘soulmate’ in an username ‘raat jaga tata’. Cool. They spend half of the movie chatting, and we hear their conversations in voiceover. How interesting, How romantic! In between we meet the brother, sister-in-law, the pisi, all talking about how difficult it is to maintain relationships, in axioms, in flowery, romanticised dialogues, like Facebook posts, without ever stating what the real problem is. If that was not enough, we meet a big time builder and his mentally-unstable wife (Mita Vashisth in a wasted role; she is a fantastic actress) to ruminate more on the intricacies of relationship. In between, the lead pair chat some more, about birds and bees, losing and finding, all the romantic nonsense that a 18-year-old boy may write to his 16-year-old girlfriend. And the film ends, I must not say how, that’s the film’s only plot development. But we will surely guess it, if you can sit through it for an hour or so.

When you have actors like Bose, Sen, Tagore, you expect firecrackers. Unfortunately however, all of them appear lacklustre, the interactions between them drab, mundane — the word is humming. The drab script does not help either. Only the newcomer, Radhika Apte, shines with her effortless presence. The stage actress’s (I saw her perform in Lillete Dubey’s Kanyadaan) screen transformation is effortless. The dusky beauty plays a young, and probably a bit inexperience but committed to her job girl to perfection. She fits in the bit who may be hopelessly romantic and one who can still believe in blind dates on internet, unlike the Bose character, a serious police officer whiling away his time in front of his laptop, instead of chasing the arms dealers, a story thread with which the film opens.

Another major issue I had with the film are the dialogues, not the content, which are drab and mundane anyways, but how it is spoken. I may not speak Bengali very well, but I think I have an ear for languages, and its nuances. The language the characters speak, with heavy usage of English and Hindi, not a word or two in between, but sentences after sentences, sound broken and incongruous — spoken like a prabasi (expatriate) Bengali, not someone who lives in Kolkata. I understand this in case of Brinda’s character; she is after all from Jamshedpur and her father is probably a Malayalam, but what about the others?

Midway through the film, an almost love-lorn Bose asks his pisi Tagore if she had ever fallen in love, if she ever missed anyone. The pisi tells a story: One she had received a missed called. Instead of saying wrong number she started chatting up with the stranger because he had a lovely voice. Since then the stranger continued to call the pisi every day, and both talked about a lot of things, but never asked each other’s name and never wanted to meet. And one day, the calls stopped abruptly. That’s it. Before the internet, there was telephone. And the wait for love is endless, antaheen. And in the romantic vision of director Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury, it is also doomed. This is precisely what the film is. I agree in real life, life can be banal and ruthless, but in a narrative film, we seek a resolution, an answer, a stop, which Antaheen fails to provide.

The lyric of the song 'Bhindeshi Tara'

amar bhindeshi tara akaa rateri akashe
tumi bajale aktara amar chilekotahr pashe
thik shondhe namar mukhe
tomar naam dhore keu daake
mukh lukiye kaar buke tomar golpo bolo kaake
amar raat jaga tara tomar onno parae bari
amar bhoy pawa chehara ami adote anari ||

amar akaash dekha ghuri kichu mitthe bahaduri
amar chokh bedhe dao alo dao shanto shitol pati
tumi mayer moto bhalo ami aklati poth haati

amar bichiri ak tara tumi nao na kotah kaan e
tomar kisher ato tara
rasta paar hobe shabdhane

tomar gaye lagena dhulo
amar dumutho chal chulo
rakho shorir haat e jodi aar jol makho dui haat e
pls ghum hoye jao chokhe amar mon kharaper rat e

amar rat jaga tara amar akash choya bari
ami paina chute tomay amar akla laage bhari ||

Films For Students

[Films for students: Now, that's not a very good marker for selecting films. Students should be allowed to see all films and then decide for themselves. Since that's not always possible, here's a list of random films that students can see and ponder over. I have lifted several descriptions from the net.]

Au Revoir les Enfants (France, Louis Malle, 1987):

During World War II, two French schoolboys in a Catholic boarding school become friends. The conflict arises when it becomes apparent that one of the boys is Jewish student. In French.

Boyz N the Hood (US, John Singleton, 1991): This critically acclaimed film by first-time director John Singleton tells the story of three friends growing up in South Central Los Angeles: Doughboy, a drug dealer; his brother Ricky, bound for college on a football scholarship; and Tre, the focal character, longing to make something of his life but not immune to his surroundings. In English.

Cinema Paradiso (Italy, Giuseppe Tornatore, 1989): Salvatore, growing up in Sicily in the years following World War II, is drawn to the local theater, Cinema Paradiso. The projectionist, Alfredo, befriends Salvatore, watches over him as he grows toward manhood, and encourages him to leave Sicily to become a filmmaker. In Italian.

Empire of the Sun (US, Steven Spielberg, 1987, PG, 153 min.): Jim Graham, an English boy, is separated from his parents in Shanghai, China, at the beginning of World War II. Jim spends four years in an internment camp, where his time is divided between helping other British prisoners cope with deprivation, and learning survival tips from fellow prisoner and American con-artist, Basie. In English.

To Kill A Mockingbird: Herper Lee’s enduring novel about a young girl in American south finding about what life means, and the pressures of racism; Boo Riddley finally comes out of the house, and Atticus Finch will forever remain the symbol of perfect father. In English.

Wings of Desire: An angel roams the streets of Berlin, a mute spectator to the human predicament which he grows to love and aspire to be a mortal. In German

The Bicycle Thief: Vittorio De Sica’s masterpiece of Italian neo-realism; a lesson in empathy. A down-and-out man must own a bicycle to get a job. He gets one, but it’s stolen. In Italian.

Zorba the Greek: Can friendship change you? An Englishman, a bookworm, visits to poverty-ridden Crete in Greece to reclaim an abandoned mine. En route, he meets Zorba, who forces him to hire his skills. Anthony Quinn’s greatest starring role, with Alan Bates, and hauntingly beautiful Irene Papas. In English

Baraka: A feature film without a sound; a look at our Lonely Planet in all its glory. Spellbinding.

Che: May be flawed in parts, the epic telling of Che Guevera’s life tries to understand the mythology of the symbol of the modern revolution. In Spanish

Waltz with Bashir: An anti-war film, rendered in animation. Incomparable. You have never seen something like this before and probably never will.

Seven: Two cops investigate a series of murders where the pattern fits the Biblical seven deadly sins. Gloomy, nihilistic, and absorbing. Wait for the end. In English

Ankur: Shyam Benegal directorial debut. A story of the oppression and choice. In Hindi.

Hour of the Wolf: Probably the most accessible and most haunting film by Swedish filmmaker Ingmer Bergman. A horror tale, where in an deserted mind a failed painter started to lose his mind while his wife tries to cling to him. “When you really love someone, is it possible to see his dreams as well?” In Swedish.

2046: Sequel to Wonk Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love, the film is a meditation on unrequited love, in images. It’s so sad that it’s wonderful. In Cantonese.

The Mission: A few brave missionaries open a mission in a remote Amazon villages, and sacrifices themselves to protect the villages. In English.

The Lives of Others: In 1984 East Berlin, an agent of the secret police, conducting surveillance on a writer and his lover, finds himself becoming increasingly absorbed by their lives. In German.

Solaris: A science fiction that meditates on the issues of memory. A scientist goes to a newly-discovered planet called Solaris, and finds that the planet has a life of its own, and it is manipulating the minds of the scientists there. A visually enthralling film from Andrei Tarkovsky. In Russian.

Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter and Spring: Buddhism for the pop generation? In a remote lake in South Korea, in a floating house lives an old monk and his young protégé. A masterpiece from Kim ki-Duk. In Korean.

Mysterious Skin: An event in their childhood makes two friends react in very different ways until they meet and come face to face with the trauma. Perhaps the best film made on the issues of child abuse. In English.

Battle Royal: A teacher captures a group of young students and puts them on a battle of death. Only one of them will survive. Nauseatingly violent, and thought-provoking. In Japanese.

Walkabout: In the remote Australian outback, two siblings lose their way after their father is killed while trying to kill them. They meet a young aboriginal and travel to civilisation. Nicolas Roeg’s minimalist epic of tremendous beauty.

Stalker: A meditation of faith, without ever mentioning the word God. Absorbing, without revealing its mysteries. An Andrei Tarkovsky masterpiece. In Russian.

The Holy Mountain: A mad epic. Utterly bewildering, and dreamlike, and asks too many questions. In Spanish.

Ten Canoes: In most part, most actors in the film do not wear clothes. But you never notice it as the film transports you convincingly to the world an aboriginal tribe before the while men set foot there. In English, and the aboriginal language.

The New World: The story of Pocahontas, and a meditation on men’s relation with nature.

Tingya: A young’s boys relationship with the bull and the extent he will go to save him. Perceptive. In Marathi

Whale Rider: A young girl’s struggle to maintain the tradition and at the same time rise above it, in a veiled feminist tale told with compassion and passion.

Atanarjuat: An Intuit film from start to film, and you sit their looking at their lives, from start to finish.

Once Upon a Time in the West: A western unlike any other, a waltz between four people, a woman and three men and how their destinies intertwine. Slow and captivating. In English.

25th Hour: Can you change your life in the span of a single day. Edward Norton’s convict says you can in the sparking Spike Lee film. In English.
Persopolis: An expatriate Iranian woman returns to her country from France and relive her memories during the time of cultural revolution.

Bold, moving and funny, and heartbreaking, all at the same time. In French.
The City of God: The life of crime in a Brazilian ghetto call city of god, and how one man will do anything to get out of it, with the help of his love for photography. In Portuguese.

400 Blows, The (France, François Truffaut, 1959): Twelve-year-old Antoine Doinel is having a troubled adolescence: conflict with and between his parents, boring and irrelevant teachers, and brushes with the law for petty crimes. An enduring classic of the French New Wave. In French.

Schindler's List (US, Steven Spielberg, 1993): This story tells the heroic effort made by a businessman in Nazi Germany to save thousands of Jews from death. In English.

Gandhi (UK, Richard Attenborough, 1988): This biography tells the story of the famed leader of India, from his beginnings as a lawyer to his eventual embracing of non-violent protest to his assassination. In English.

The Grapes of Wrath (US, John Ford, 1940): John Steinbeck's classic novel about life during the Great Depression. In English.

Philadelphia (US, Jonathan Demme, 1993): A lawyer fired from his firm because he has AIDS fights for his rights in this film. In English.

The Color Purple (US, Steven Spielberg, 1985): Based on Alice Walker's book, this film details the life and struggles of an African-American woman in early 1900s America. In English.

Hotel Rwanda (US, Terry George, 2004): This film tells the story of real hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina, who saved thousands of refugees fleeing the dangerous militia that had taken over Rwanda. In English.

Into the Wild (US, Sean Penn, 2007): A free-spirited young man heads off into the Alaska wilderness to try his hand at survival with devastating results. In English.

Touching the Void (UK, Kevin MacDonald, 2003): This true story follows two climbers as they scale Siula Grande in Peru, the disaster that occurs, and how the two survive. In English.

Cast Away (US, Robert Zemeckis, 2000): A white-collar executive must learn to survive when he finds himself alone on a deserted island after a plane crash. In English.

Erin Brockovich (US, Steven Soderbergh, 2000): Based on a true story, this film is about an ordinary woman who takes up a cause when she learns about dangerous pollution in the water. In English.

WALL-E (US, Andrew Stanton, 2008): This touching animated film envisions a future that could be where modern culture takes itself without restraint. In English.

Gorillas in the Mist (US, Michael Apted, 1988): A film based on a true story, focuses on the work of Dian Fossey as she lived with and studied the mountain gorillas in Rwanda. After fighting against the illegal poaching of the gorillas, she was mysteriously murdered. In English.

Wuthering Heights: Emily Bronte's novel comes to life in this film version. There are two major version, earlier one starring Lawrence Olivier and the modern one starring Ralph Fiennes in the character of Heathcliff. In English.

Macbeth: There are several film versions of the Shakespearean classic, but the best perhaps in the one made by Orson Welles. In English.

A Streetcar Named Desire (US, 1957, Elia Kazan): Adaptation of Tennessee Williams' play with Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh. In English.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail (US, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones, 1975) : This movie is not only filled with classic British humor, but also provides examples of the idea of the literary quest, allusions to the legend of King Arthur, and more. In English.

Dead Poets Society (US, Peter Weir, 1989): This film provides a great chance to study the poetry within. In English.

Freedom Writers: A high school teacher inspires her students to reach beyond their tough lives through writing. In English.

The Sound of Music: This famous and much-loved film about the Von Trapp family is a must-see. In English.

Woodstock: As much about history as it is music, this film chronicles the famous 1969 festival. This is how the hippies were. In English.

Almost Famous: Following a rising rock band, a young man in high school writes a story for Rolling Stone magazine on the band, and discovers life. In English.

West Side Story The Jets and the Sharks are gangs at odds, but when a member of the Jets falls for the sister of the leader of the Sharks, the story really takes off. The Romeo and Juliet story never looked so musical. In English.

Jurassic Park: Dinosaurs are brought back to life with dangerous consequences. In English.

Pan’s Labyrinth (Spain, Guillermo del Toro, 2006): Myth meets horrors of life in Franco Spain when young Ophelia must find a way to her underworld kingdom and yet save the lives of her mother and her infant brother. In Spanish.

The Godfather: The greatest film ever made about the mafia, and perhaps about family. In English.

Casablanca: This is a classic romance, in fact probably the classic romance, starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman.

Billy Elliot: If you have the perseverance you can be what you want to be, like the young hero of a mining village in England who wants to be a ballet dancer. In English.

Star Wars: A New Beginning: A film that defined a generation. In English.

The Shawshank Redemption (US, Frank Darabont, 1994): The story of the triumph of the will, from a story by Stephen King. Inspiring. In English.

The Spirit of the Beehives: Life in a small Spanish village during the time of the rise of Franco, a young girl grapple with the mysteries of life around her, especially after seeing the film Frankenstine, and believing that the monster might be lurking around somewhere. In Spanish.

My Neighbour Totoro: The best Japanese animation film, and for that matter the greatest animation film ever made, a joy to behold, a watch on a rainy day for that sunshine. In Japanese.

Durga Puja Of My Childhood

When you are away from home for a long time, a festival like Durga Puja (and Bihu too) in your homeland becomes something of a myth; an experience you can relive only in memories. For me, being from lower Assam, it’s the puja, more than the Bihu, that’s nostalgic. Now, even if I come home during the puja, to Guwahati, I cannot find the days of celebration as meaningful as I found it when I was a child, and a teenager. Things have changed, for better or for worse, and unfortunately, I am not the part of it.

I haven’t seen Durga puja in Assam for several years now. Last time I was in Assam during the puja, my grandfather, Sarbeshwar Sarma, was there in the Durga puja pandal in Lankeshwar. Though he hold a government job, my grandfather was always a priest. When he was posted in Meghalaya, in a town called Tikrikilla, he was an integral part of the puja preparations there. He was the head priest, and we, his grandchildren, would proudly hang around the puja pandal for all five days. When he retired and settled down in Lankeshwar, he could not really retire from being a priest. So, he would go the puja mandap in Lankeshwar, and we would wait for him to bring home the prasad in the evening.

Out here, when you say you are from Assam, they think, you are a Bengali too. There is a Bengali community in Pune who celebrate the Durga puja with traditional pomp and grandeur. My local friends ask me why I am not part of it. I tell them, the puja is Assam is nothing like Bengali puja. The Bengalis may be much more obsessed with it and claim that Durga Puja is their festival, but Durja Puja is our festival as well, and our celebrations are not the same as Bengalis celebrate puja. For one thing, the style, the way the Durja idol is created is very different in Bengal and Assam, so are the traditions.

I miss the puja as celebrated in Assam, especially during my childhood.

We grew up in a place called Dakhin Hoiborgaon in the Nagaon town. The place had an eclectic mix of various communities. There were the Assamese, Bangalis, Marwaris, Biharis and so on. And, the puja organised there was typically Assamese, you can say to a certain extent, typically ‘Nagaya’ (of Nagaon).
Nagaon being the birth place of Sankardeva, we could not ignore the influence of Bordowa and the Sankari tradition. So, every night, during the puja days, there would be a bhawna performance in the traditional style. I think, those days I was in school. There was a puja pandal not very far from my school and not very far from our house either. Every night after dinner, my mother would take me and my brother for the bhawna, sister and father would be asleep at home. We would lock them from outside. Women and children from the neighbouring houses would join us and we would proceed to the venue in a group. The bhawna was the main attraction of the evening, so it would start late. Before that the local artistes will entertain you, songs, and jokes (anybody remembers bhaya mama?). By the time, the show begins I will be fast asleep and my mother would carry me home. What fun!

Those were different days, before globalisation and commercialisation took over. In those days, there was no Vishal megamart. We did not have any idea that we needed new clothes as long as our school uniforms were clean and wearable. But, come the puja, we knew we would have new clothes. There was the tradition to wear new clothes on the Ashtami day. How eagerly we would wait for the day. We would go to the market in Faujdari patti and buy the clothes, well in advance and keep them ready for the D-day, when we would visit the pandal around 12 o’clock and offer our gratitude to the Goddess.

On other days, in the evening, we would go visit other puja pandals in places like amola patti. While returning, we would buy hot and sweet ‘jilapi’, the staple puja delicacy. If he were in a good mood father would give us some money; my brother would buy a pistol, and what did I buy? I don't remember now.

But, I clearly remember the vijaya dashami day. We would all converge on the banks of the river kolong, to bid the Godess goodbye. The place would be full of people. We would hold father’s hands, lest we are lost in the crowd. We would buy a packet of sindoor for mother. That’s a tradition. You have to buy a packet of sindoor on the vijaya day. And we would get more jilapi.

But the morning of the last day was a different story. We would all write letters to the Goddess. We won’t show the letters to anyone. We would seal the letters and place it on the feet of the Goddess before she leaves the pandal. While returning, we would bring home the piece of the red cloth that adorned the image of the goddess. Mother would tear the cloth into pieces and we would wear them as thread on our wrists. The Goddess would protect us.

During the puja, my Maharashtrian friends ask me if I miss the festivities at home. Yes, I do. But then again, I would never be able to relive those days even if I come home during the puja. We left Nagaon a long time ago. And, Guwahati, including Lankeshwar, has changed, and is changing. My grandfather died a long time ago. Times are differnt now.

‘A Film By Neil Marshall’

Neil Marshall movies are like best-sellers, like Dan Brown, for example. You know what to expect, yet it’s a fun ride till it lasts. He is the best of B-movies. Now, I have used the moniker B-movies not in a derogatory sense, but in a sense that it underlines a particular taste. I know people who revel on movies like this (from the ‘Saw’ movies to ‘Resident Evil’ films, and everything in between.). That’s what they call a cult following, don’t they? In this context, Marshall is sharp, on the edge.

One of the features of B-grade, action, exploitation, adult horror films, which proliferated in the 1970s is super heroine, a tough as nail femme fatale, in movies like ‘Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!,’ ‘I Spit On Your Grave,’ and numerous others. In the 1990s Milla Jovovich updates the images for the today’s audience, most famously in 'Resident Evil'. Other followed: Rose McGowan in ‘Planet Terror’ and Kate Beckinsale in ‘Underworld’.

Now, you look at a Neil Marshall picture, you see the same template: The girl power. (I haven’t seen his first feature ‘Dog Soldiers’, so no comments on that one.) ‘The Descent’, his second feature which earned him name and fame and a few awards, has a all woman cast. Recently, a sequel has been released, directed by someone else. ‘Doomsday’ stars Rohna Mitra as a cross between Kate Beckinsale of ‘Underworld’ and Milla Jovovich of ‘Resident Evil’, and she kicks ass. The latest ‘Centurion’ stars Olga Kurylenko as Etain, a warrior-animal out to have Roman blood, and how.

The stage is set. It’s an epic journey for survival. In 'The Descent,' it’s the unidentified inhabitants of the underground cave, in 'Doomsday', it’s the survivors/victims of the reaper virus, in 'Centurion', the Picts vs the Romans. It starts with a group, an eclectic group — and as the film progresses, you watch them die, one by one. The body count in 'Doomsday' is better, three survives. However, this is not ‘Final Destination,’ a film about various ingenious ways of killing its characters. In 'Final Destination', you know everyone is going to die. You sit back and watch (and enjoy!) them dying.

In a Neil Marshall film however, you care about the characters who die. Marshall does a smart thing. He hires actors with commanding personality, like Liam Cunningham in ‘Centurion’, and give them a few establishing footage so that the audience can root for them, something that most B horror action movies forget to do.

At the end, a Neil Marshall film is bloody violent, gratuitously visceral, relentlessly fast-paced adventure film. At the end, it does not count much. But as you watch the film, it’s a ride worth the while. You can credit this for picture perfect photography, and top-notch production design, and it does not hurt that Marshall was an professional editor.

And the locations?

While 'The Descent' is mostly shot inside a cave, and what photography, both 'Doomsday' and 'Centurion' is located in Scotland. The Hadrian’s wall, which features prominently in 'Doomsday', becomes the background of the Roman action-epic 'Centurion'.

'The Descent' is the story of group of hard-assed women who are into adventure sport. After one such adventure Sarah’s husband and daughter is killed in an accident, and she is wounded. One year later, her friends meet and invites her to another adventure in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina. It was supposed to be a simple hike, until they discover a cave, not marked in the map. The girls dare each other and decided to explored the cave. They do, and all hell breaks loose. The entrance caves in and they are struck, and they discover that the cave is inhabited by some kind of creature, who are humanoid, but not quite human (Remember the second half of 'The 13th Warrior'?)

In the first look, 'Doomsday' looks like an update on Danny Boyle’s '28 Days Later'. Mercifully, however, the reaper virus does not turn you into a zombie. But there is no cure. So, when the virus struck Scotland, the British government decided to quarantine the entire country, around the Hadrian’s Wall. A small girl with only one eye managed to get away. Now, 30 years later, in 2032, the girl has grown up into Eden Sinclair, Alice of Resident Evil on Steriods, as the cliché goes. The virus attacks again. Now, Sinclair and her team much go to inside the wall and find a cure. There is blood, chase, and other action sequences, in the tradition of 'Mad Max (Beyond Thunderdom)', and 'The Warrior', the punk horror style, spiced with mediaeval horror, but the greatest thing about the movie is that it’s able to fight the temptation to turn into a zombie/vampire flick. Kudos.

You cannot make a 'Gladitor' every other day. Even Ridley Scott himself and his leading man could not do it in 'Robin Hood'. Marshall does not even try. In 'Centurion', the Roman part of the story/background is just an excuse to play around with the action. You are tired of seeing those guns, bombs and other high-tech stuff. It’s time of something ancient, sword and sandal. Michael Fassbender (Of ‘Hunger’, his breakthrough role), is Centurion Quitas Dias, who is caught by the Picts, a tribe in ancient Scotland, whom the Romans are trying to dominate but cannot. He is caught and taken to the Pict village from where he flees, to meet the fable ninth legion (history says they marched to fight the Picts something around 117 AD and never returned.). The legion is led by Dominic West (McNaulty of TV Series 'The Wire'), and Dias is inducted. On the way to the Pict stronghold, they are attached. Everyone dies, except for a handful, who are now chased like rabits in a open ground. The chase begins, and bodies roll.

This has been a new trend in British movies, trying to tell an alternate, so-called authentic history behind the popular stories. I think, the trend was started more or less by the latest ‘King Arthur’, starring Clive Owen and Keira Knightly. It claimed to be the authentic history of the King Arthur myth, very different from the Arthur legend, where Arthur becomes a Roman, Guinevere is a Pict princess, and no, she did not have an affair with Sir Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart. The trend from in Ridley Scott’s recent Robin Hood. Russel Crowe’s Robin Longstride is before the legend began. In the same fashion, Centurion tells the story of what happened to the fabled ninth legion. And, since this is a Neil Marshall film, we all know the ending, they all died, except for one, thanks for the small mercies.

Tile Tale

A conversation overheard during the Ganapati immersion procession on Laxmi Road on Wednesday (To say that the street was crowded is an understatement. If you had a place to stand comfortably near the roadside, consider yourself lucky, and lucky this writer was, standing behind two men gossiping away.):
Man 1: Nice seeing you after a long time. You look happy.
Man 2: Yeah. My house is finally done, without me having to spend too much money.
Man 1: How?
Man 2: You know I have been doing my house for the last two years.
Man 1: Yes. Instead of buying a flat, you decided to buy a plot and build you own bungalow.
Man 1: And I was broke soon after. I had spend all my money in the plot itself. After that, I was doing it fits and starts, a wall there, a floor here.
Man 1: And it’s finally done.
Man 2: Yes, thanks to the PMC.
Man 1: Where does PMC come into the picture?
Man 2: Thanks to the PMC that they decided to fit tiles on the footpath on FC Road.
Man 1: I don't understand.
Man 2: As you know, the floor work in my house was still pending. A few days ago, I was walking on the footpath on FC Road. I stumbled and nearly fell. Then I saw the tiles beneath my feet, loosely fitted, and slippery after the rain. I bent down and picked up one tile. It was a nice quality product. I thought what if I take this one home. Nobody would notice for sure. And I’ll put this to a good use. But you know, one tile was not sufficient. So, I made a few more trips, this time on my two-wheeler.
Man 1: And your floor is done?
(This eavesdropper couldn’t hear what the second man said as a mandal had just landed in front of us, filling the atmosphere with their music. [P.S. This eavesdropper has taken the liberty to translate the conversation from original Marathi.].)

— Dibyajyoti Sarma