Reluctant Fundamentalist - a Movie Worth Watching

I had long wanted to read Moshin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist but couldn’t get round to doing that before Mira Nair’s movie adaptation arrived. I watched the movie at the theatre last week. It’s both a thriller and a thoughtful film. It has all the trappings of a ‘sexy’ movie with drama, sex, romance and a fast-paced narrative and also an underlying tension, a constant anger and protestation.


The story starts with the kidnap of an American professor in Lahore. Following the kidnap Changez (the protagonist) is being interviewed by a CIA agent, masquerading as a journalist, involved in the search operation to find the professor and Changez is narrating his story starting a decade back in 2001, a year before 9/11 happened. The narrative moves back and forth taking the viewer through Changez years in the US and the modern day Lahore. Chanez’s past, in the US, explains the choices he made in life in the later years following 9/11.

Changez comes from a liberal Muslim family which is on a financial decline. Changez a bright chap goes to the US for studies and laps up a job in an investment banking company, a dream start to a career in the US. Similarly, Changez has a fulfilling emotional life: he is in a passionate affair and live-in with an artist (Kate Hudson). As Changez starts climbing the career ladder, 9/11 happens and his world starts changing and so does the world of Muslims in America. As Americans’ patriotism and schizophrenia rise making the land suddenly inhospitable to ‘outsiders,’ Changez goes through a series of experiences (humiliating frisking at US airport, being arrested for nothing by police etc) which leave him humiliated challenging all his preconceived notions about the US and his position in it as a Muslim.

And this inner churning gradually brings into sharp relief the questions of identities which had until now lain dormant in Changez. The more his Muslim identity (made aggressive by post-9/11 experience) asserts itself, the more mortifying Muslim-belittlements (made through conversations in office in surcharged post 9/11 atmosphere and general attitude towards them in the US) feel and the wider the cracks in Changez’s American dream get.

Finally an office visit to Istanbul pushes him off the cliff: he returns to New York, resigns his job and goes back to Pakistan.

The performances are very understated. There were enough opportunities for Changez (Riz Khan) to break out into an angry anti-West rant but he didn’t; yet the simmering anger comes through effectively.

But the most important aspect of the movie (or perhaps the book) is its emphasis on the fact that those outside the circle of fundoos who identify with the ‘Islam under attack’ phenomenon think it’s their identity (or people who share it globally or the lands they inhibit) which is under attack and not so much the religion. And it’s precisely how the occasionally drinking Changez who doesn’t give up his dalliance with alcohol even after embracing the cause of his faith/land/people - feels after 9/11. However, how Changez’s espousal of the cause is different from his other comrades across the world is that unlike them Changez doesn’t believe in violence.

The Skinning Tree by Srikumar Sen

Those of us who have not been to boarding schools don’t understand how difficult life for a kid can be there. Apart from a few difficult situations, however, Sabby Sarkar doesn’t face too many challenges coming from his peers. But that doesn’t make Sabby’s experience at his boarding school at Gaddi pleasant. The Skinning Tree is the first book by Srikumar Sen (now 81). The novel starts in the Calcutta of the 40s and 50s where Sabby is growing up in an aristocratic Anglophone Bengali family.


Sen brings alive the Calcutta of the period effectively and successfully creates the political and social atmosphere of the time. Through the Sarkar household, Sen has brought about the duality of the world aristocratic-Anglophone Indians inhabited those days, one that included their British social equals cohabiting with their loyalty to India and sympathy for the Independence movement.

However, Sabby’s Calcutta world abruptly comes to an end when he is sent to a boarding school and finds himself in a completely different world. Of the most remarkable things at the school is the fearsome atmosphere created by discipline-enforcing sisters and brothers at the boarding. Every boy who strays from the straight line of discipline faces punishment, spanking of various degrees of severity depending on how far away you strayed.

Another hallmark of Sabby’s experience at the boarding is the numerous acts of cruelty the students carry out towards animals. This is where the book draws its title from – there is a tree outside the boarding premises on which the students throw out skinned bodies of birds and animals after sadistically killing them. Initially a little reluctant, Sabby eventually joins his boarding friends in their acts of cruelty. I felt cruelty towards animals was a manifestation of the pent up feelings caused by oppression at the boarding – cruelty inflicted on one person finds its way to another, maybe in a different form.

However, this cruelty-towards-animal part of the book can read a little unsavory. The details of torture of insects, birds are too graphic and sensitive souls will find it difficult wading through them. The book also becomes a little monotonous while the author takes you through the butchery of one animal after another by Sabby and friends. The book takes a sudden turn towards the end when a tragedy occurs.

One day Sabby finds a sister, a very authoritarian figure in the boarding, calling out to him for help standing on a ledge a fall from where would surely lead to death. At the same time, it is time for Sabby and the other boys to attend a prayer. The prayer bell has rung and heeding the sister’s call for rescue would mean reaching the prayer late and attracting punishment from one of the brothers. Sabby stops upon hearing the sister’s call for help, but as he sees his friends rush for the prayer, he follows them. Next day they find the sister’s dead body lying on the ground below the ledge.

And even after many years a contrite lingers in him. Sabby wonders should he have tried to help the sister, but wouldn’t he get late for the prayer then attracting punishment? Even if he tried to save the sister, would he, just a child, be able to really save her? He could have called others' attention to the incident, but who would listen making a dash as they were for the prayer? Or was it that when he saw the sister in a helpless situation calling out to a mere boy for help, Sabby found it hard to believe that a person of such command and authority as the sister could be so helpless – the prayer bell seemed more believable and he ran for it?

The very atmosphere of oppression and fear-psychosis which the sister had helped build finally took her life. To me The Skinning Tree is a strong indictment of the boarding life where punishment (and fear of punishment) is used as a means to enforce discipline.

After this incident Sabby visited home and never went back to the boarding.

The book has won the Tebor Jones South Asian Prize.

The Srilankan crisis, one without easy answers

I have been reading about the Srilankan issue and each article seems to peel off a new layer from the issue making it more and more difficult to identify the issue with any one problem. One aspect of the issue is whether the Rajapaksha government was right in going after the LTTE.

Yes and no depending on which side you are viewing the issue from. Yes - if you believe that if a terrorist group causes bloodshed and massacre and runs a parallel administration which is beyond the writ of the state, a government has the right to do whatever it takes to cleanse the group. No – if you believe that before going after any outfit which has political demands (which the LTTE had) a government should be sure that it has exhausted all political means.

Whether the Rajapaksha government was disposed to solving the LTTE issue politically is debatable. Being a right wing party, it probably wasn’t. But past regimes had tried out political options and they had not yielded any results. My belief is Prabhakaran, like any underground revolutionary, had lost interest in the cause of the movement and wanted to continue its pretence to hold on to power. Many had understood that and LTTE had lost popular sympathy.

From what I have read so far, no one is shedding tears for Prabhakaran except some political outfits. Of course, killing Prabhakaran’s son was inhuman but even those castigating the government for it aren’t questioning the logic of the murder: that the son would have been the representative face of the LTTE and could have followed his father’s footsteps in future. So, for all the brauhaha, neither Prbhakaran's nor his son's death forms the core of the issue.

What people are baying for Rajapaksha’s blood is that in the last days of the war the government had caused Tamil civilian casualties while trying to wipe out the LTTE. This is the issue. There are a few things about this issue one has to consider. Once the government went after the LTTE there were bound to be some casualties. The civilians killed were taken hostages by the very outfit – the LTTE – which claimed to represent their interest. Should the government have withdrawn when it became clear it could not cleanse the LTTE without killing noncombatant civilians in the process? If it had withdrawn, the LTTE problem would have been left half-solved. There are no easy answers to these questions.

The social aspect of the Lankan Tamil issue is equally muddled. Some months back a friend of mine was in Srilanka and he said while he was in a bus and some passengers were talking in Tamil, the bus conductor forbade them to. This means there is an unaccommodating attitude towards Tamils in at least some parts of Srilanka. And it is much more dangerous than a government’s indifference, or even hostility, towards a community.

In India, successive governments have been variously disposed to minority communities, but what has secured their position in the society is that there is no sustained social hostility towards them. Not that there has never been but it did not continue. And it’s partly because India is a land of contrary voices, one where all opinions are contested. The media have played a great role in making it so. I don’t know how independent Srilankan media are but they surely have a role to play to make sure people don’t lose sight of the Tamil plight.

But it’s not going to be easy. My friend also noticed that Srilanka has a thriving market economy. Anything is available but at a high price, so the lower income groups have it really difficult. Why this is relevant here is that, typically, in a market economy a government finds it easy to make people indifferent to the plight of the marginalized by anesthetizing them with prosperity. The effect of this anesthesia can be in fact so strong on people that they readily believe what the government tells them to; the government’s rhetoric becomes the belief of the common man; the government becomes the nation and a threat to the government is perceived as a threat to the nation and its wellbeing. It is not to say that development is bad but it should not be devoid of social concerns.

But how will they address social concerns? Tamils, as is apparent, are linguistically and culturally different from Sinhalese. And this is going to obstruct social integration. So probably assigning the Tamil community a separate place and devolution of power are going to be considered. But if you go by India's Kashmir example, devolution doesn't necessary help. Problems continue to stalk Kashmir spilling onto the rest of India.

So the path of reconstruction and rehabilitation is going to be difficult and one without any easy solutions; but probably constant international gaze will ensure Srilanka will at least try to look like it's doing something. But will a constant international scrutiny push Srilanka closer to safer sanctuaries - China - who can help thwart international pressure leading to a new power imbalance in Asia?

Merry Go Round - W Somerset Maugham

The best part about reading novels set in the Edwardian period, in England, is that that society resembles the Indian society in many ways. A rigid moral code defying which meant attracting collective social frown; the existence of a strict class division, violating which led to social derision and people going about their lives under these social norms , sometimes digressing but most times conforming. Merry Go Round was my third Maugham novel and it shares many traits in common with the other Maugham novels I read before, like character examination, a slow build up, adultery etc.

But the book is also different from the other two I had read in various ways. Merry Go Round is a commentary on the Edwardian society: how social rules shaped the lives of people, how a rigid class division was maintained, the shallowness of all this etc.

The narrative has several strands. Merry Go Round starts with a house party and then pans out into a novel tracking the lives of the guests at the party. The host of the party, Miss Ley, is a spinster who has inherited a fortune from another spinster and is the moral axis around which the other characters in the novel revolve.

There is Basil Kant an aspiring writer who marries a barmaid because of an unexpected development, overlooking his feelings for Mrs Murray - and the marriage suffers. There is Herbert Field, a clerk and poet, who is suffering from tuberculosis and Bella Langton at 40 double the age of Herbert marries him to tend to him in his last days and sees the poet die. And there is Frank Hurrell, a cynic, who abhors the conventional life. And there are many more to bring about a complete social interplay of characters, some conformists and some rebellious.

Maugham has skillfully pitted the rebellious characters against the conformist ones to throw into sharp relief his voice and views against those of the Edwardian society. The book mainly cocks a snook at the rich the employing class which held people economically dependent on them to the very moral codes that their socials peers and companions violated.

In another review of a Maugham book, I had said that his observations on human character and other things form an important part of Maugham’s narrative. In MGR they are plenty and they leave you feeling edified.

MGR was published in 1902 and is not among Maugham’s famous works. In fact, the novel has been completely forgotten. But you will find Maugham at his best in character development, interplay of plots and a commentary running in the background climaxing in a strong condemnatory message about the society in which the plot is set.

Novel plot challenges modern day technologies bring

When you try to write a novel or short story set in the ‘pre-Internet and mobile phone’ era, you realize how these technologies have changed our lives. I’m trying to write a novella (my third attempt to write one having failed twice before to take my attempts to conclusion) which starts from the early 80s and ends somewhere towards the end of the last decade, 2010s (roughly), spanning 30 years. Such being the timeframe of it, half of it is set in the period before the Internet and mobile phones arrived. While writing situations, I realized how the two technologies govern our lives today making them very different from the lives before the  arrival of mobile phones and the Internet.

The plot traces Anoop Nandi through his stay in Bangalore in the 80s and what happens to him after he leaves the city - all the way to current times with other characters coming in as the plot progresses. The novel is not about Anoop alone but three friends who had lived in Bangalore in the 80s and how their lives unfolded later, each representing a separate perspective on life.

The first half of the novel is set in the 80s. Anoop and I stay in Bangalore as friends and colleagues but we can talk and exchange details about each other only when we meet in office or each other’s residences, physical places. These physical places are important for us to stay connected, to exchange details about each other and so on. (Being migrant workers in Bangalore we didn’t have landline phones and landline connections were very difficult to get those days anyway.) In modern times, mobile phones and of course social networking sites would play the role of a connecting platform. You wouldn’t necessarily need an office or someone’s residence to be in touch with your friend. This makes our lives today very different from the pre-cell-phone-Internet times.

And being used to our modern lives as we are, you have to constantly remind yourself while writing a plot based before the advent of modern communication technologies that a lot of what we take for granted today were not available then. So a person had to either have a landline at home or go to a public booth to phone someone up. A person had to send a telegram to give an urgent news to someone else. Etc.

You can best feel these time-gap differences when you are building a tight situation-based plot: how a character is informed by another character about an accident that suddenly killed someone close to the character being informed; if two characters have to be separated for a period such that they completely lose track of each other, in ‘pre cell phone Internet’ times it would be very easy to do them part, but today due to social networking sites it’s almost impossible for two persons to be untraceably lost to each other.

I’m struggling with these details particularly because my plot is based in both pre and post communication revolution times, but these are just auxiliary details for my plot – they may convey dynamics of the times in which an action is set, but they don’t contribute to the essential plot. Albeit, for, say, detective stories where small details actually form the main plot, the technology angle can make lot of difference and present a challenge to the author. First he/she has to decide whether his characters use these technologies; if yes, at what level, how frequently; if no, why. And so on.

Once Upon the Tracks of Mumbai - a Good Debut Novel

Mumbai is a city which refuses to date despite the number of books written and films made on it. Upon the Tracks of Mumbai, by Rishi Vohra, mayn’t be among the best works on the city but Vohra effectively brings a part of the city alive to his readers through the eyes of Babloo, an autist who negotiates the difficult world of Mumbai in his day-to-day life. What makes the book touchy is that Vohra has used the first person narrative to detail Babloo’s travails, a supercilious brother, indifferent parents and condescending people Babloo meets on local trains, streets of Mumbai etc.

However, in the middle of this indifference, Babloo finds solace in his love interest, Vandana, a resident of Railway Colony, like Babloo. Once Upon The Tracks of Mumbai is from the genre of books that just sets out to tell a good story. However, some of them succeed and some don’t. Rishi Vohra’s book certainly stands out as a tale well told. Another thing I noticed while going through the world of Babloo is that the book is immensely filmable – the situations are well described and characters skillfully chiseled out.

Rishi is a debutant author and his first book suggests that there is a lot in store.

Midnight's Children - the movie fails to stand tall

Some books lend themselves beautifully to movies and some don’t. Midnight’s Children appears to be one of those books that are hard to adapt to movies. I say ‘appears’ because I have not read the book but watched the movie last Saturday. I’m reluctant to criticize Deepa Mehta for the shortcomings of the movie because the defects a naïve movie watcher like me found in the movie would have been spotted by a movie maker of her calibre with three eyes closed. But  I have a few bones to pick with her for choosing Midnight’s Children for a movie-adaptation.

The story starts in Kashmir about 30 years before India’s independence and meanders its way through various incidents to Bombay where two boys are born exactly at the time India got independence, on 15th August, 1947; one rich, coming from the clan that migrated from Kashmiri, and the other poor, the love child of a poor minstrel musician's wife and a Britisher who is leaving India.

The two newborns are swapped by a matron as a tribute to her Marxist lover, condemning the rich boy to poverty and the poor to wealth - as a metaphor of social justice - forever altering their fates. The rich child is named Salim and the poor Shiva whose paths cross several times during their lives, Salim representing the accommodative, kind India and the tough India of Indira Gandhi, Sanjay Gandhi, the state and system embodied by Shiva. Their birth coincides with the birth of India and their lives move in tandem with India’s history (till Emergency) shaping their lives – which, I felt, was a larger metaphor of how the lives of people are shaped by lives of nations.

This is a rough sketch of the story. Amidst this there are many plot devices used to bring various angles into the story, like Salim’s ability to summon, in his imagination, a bunch of children (born at mid night during India’s birth/independence) representing varied social strata of Indian society, his ability to sniff danger etc. The problem with this kind of plot (and it has come to this after lot of snipping by the screenplay writer who was also Salman Rushdie) is that it's very difficult to effectively flesh out its naunces in visual form. (Many reviews have complained about how the film has turned out to be a very emaciated version of the book, which rids the film of the richness of its literary sibling.)

And the result is often that one incident leads to another without any logical dots linking them, reducing the film to a collage of multiple frames forming, maybe, a very broad thematic narrative but without any immediate connection with each other. Characters come and go and after the movie is over you feel many characters just disappeared from the story without any conclusive end given to them.

However, Rushdie’s background narration is where the movie scores. Some of the lines are just too haunting and told in curt, British accent.

Probably Deepa Mehta got swayed by the grand pull to become the first person to recreate the book on screen. The book was staged in 2002 and, according to many critics, it didn’t work. Mehta could have learnt from the precedence. Or maybe the movie was made for people who have read the book thinking that the audience, having read the book earlier, would overlook the oversights in the movie narrative and would see the movie for the sheer joy of watching what they have read.