Theatre by Somerset Maugham

Good actors are difficult to understand because they can fake their emotions so easily. And after recently finishing reading Theatre by Somerset Maugham, I have very few doubts about it. Julia Lambart is the best stage actress of England and has a somewhat happy family life with a husband and a son. But the family tranquil starts coming apart as she falls for a clerk, who works in her husband’s theatre company, and is two decades younger than her. The affair continues for some time, her lover finds access to the world of celebrities through Julia and Julia, now in her 50s, rediscovers her youth and starts visiting places (night clubs) where she had never been seen and, as is common with such affairs, tongues start wagging. (What is Julia Lambart doing with this young nothing?) Reputation matters for show business people and the rumour mills shake Julia a little and Julia tries to move away from her lover only to return to him again.


However, meanwhile, her young lover has met a beautiful upcoming actress and has fallen for her. He has also promised the newbie a role in Julia’s husband’s home production. Julia can easily deny her the opportunity but lest her lover thinks she is jealous of the upcoming actress having lost her lover to her Julia arranges for her to get a role.

It’s a dream come true for a struggling actress to find a role in a play which casts Julia Lambart; but, alas, for Julia’s romantic competitor, the play turns out to be a disaster as Julia, using her stage prowess, undermines her performance slaying her career without even anybody noticing Julia’s sinister thespian moves. Expect her husband, who being oblivious to Julia’s cuckolding, fails to understand why Julia would try to destroy the newbie’s performance, having helped her get the role in the first place. When he confronts Julia with his discovery, Julia, again by her sleight of hands, deceives her husband into believing that she destroyed the young actress’s performance to avenge the fact she had tried to seduce her husband. And the husband takes it as a compliment for his looks and believes it remaining oblivious to the real reason - that Julia had exacted revenge because the actress had seduced her young lover.

This was my first Somerset Maugham book and having read many writers write about Maugham reverentially, I partly knew what to expect and wasn’t disappointed. Maugham is a breezy story teller and holds you tight till the end and although he produced a commendable body of work, he never found enough literary acclaim. Maugham is read to this day but not bracketed with the likes of DH Lawrence and EM Foster who roughly came from the same period. Commenting on the puritanical attitude of literary snobs, Maugham had one said you can’t write just for the pleasure of telling a story. However, Maugham has inspired two three, generations of writers and it’s from some of their books that I first came to know about Maugham.

Characterization

The characters are all human with their limitations and virtues, all trying to do the best they can within them, none is one-dimensional. Various situations bring out various sides of their personalities.

Julia Lambart is brilliant but she is self centered, an artist who attributes all her human shortcomings in some way or the other to her artistic abilities. She manipulates people around her and situations to her favour and generally has her way. Her husband is a good husband but is too believing of Julia. He is stingy but his theatre employees overlook that as he is also very courteous. He is unimaginative but that helps him to be disciplined and makes him a good manager. He is good looking and vain and can be easily won over if praised about looks. Julia’s son is growing up and developing his views on things around him and with a father busy trying to be the most attractive man in England and mother wrapped up in her acting career, he feels lonely and ignored. And so on…

The story is set in the pre Second World War period when cinema had still not overshadowed theatre and the celebrity of stage actors could be just as big as the screen ones. The novel’s central character Julia, for example, was the most famous of stage actresses of her time in England but she had limited success on screen.

Chinese Cottage and Chinese in India

“The specialty of Chinese food lies in its blandness. If you put too much spice it kills the authenticity. Any Chinese restaurant you visit in Bangalore the food is spicier than Chinese food is supposed to be.”


I was sitting at a Chinese restaurant which promises to serve Chinese food Tangra style, a Chinese food hub in Calcutta which is host to many small to medium size Chinese restaurants owned by Chinese people most of whom originally owned tanneries until a few years ago (foot wear and other leather products made by Chinese people are very popular in Calcutta) which had to be closed down following a state government edict forcing the Chinese owners into different occupations, food being one of them.

However, there are other Chinese food hubs in Calcutta and, according to Anthony, the one on Poddar Court Lane is the best and the oldest. Poddar Court lane is where Anthony grew up in and in later years, after doing a hotel management and failing to find any satisfactory job in Calcutta, he moved to Bangalore. His initial years in Bangalore were tough. He worked in various small to medium size Chinese hotels with Indian owners. Being a Chinese food puritan, Anthony was unhappy with the general approach towards making Chinese food in Bangalore.

Opening his own hotel was nowhere in sight in early years as Anthony was mostly busy with his day to day existence. His marriage changed that. Anthony got married to his childhood sweetheart from Calcutta and a few months after marriage his wife joined him in Bangalore and started to work. After a few years, they felt together if they saved money from their income they would be able to open a restaurant of their own. About seven to eight years of hard work, saving and a bit of loan from friends and bank led to Chinese Cottage.

Antony said the focus of Chinese Cottage is authenticity. (He told this when I was chewing my way through Chinese Chopsuey. Chinese Chopsuey was not the correct dish to check the verity of Anthony’s claim as all Chinese restaurants make it bland and have its spicier versions separately on menu card. I am a conservative food enthusiast who tries out different joints but sticks to familiar dishes. ) Blaming the Bangalore Chinese taste orientation, Anthony said, “You have to eat chilly chicken to understand what I am saying. Chilly chicken is supposed to be so bland as to be perfect for a 16 year old kid. Here it’s opposite.”

Chinese Cottage (located opposite Koramangla Club) is quite sparse with very few people on its staff and Anthony is involved in everything in a hands-on way, expect cooking. He makes sure to explain an unfamiliar dish to you, so you make an informed choice.

What brought Anthony to Bangalore? “Calcutta has become inhospitable to its Chinese population. They are approached by local bullies for huge donations for Durga and other pujas. Not having access to any power base, Chinese people don’t have anybody to turn to. Despite being into its third or fourth generation, they are treated like foreigners. Some of them don’t have any legal documents to establish their citizenship. When they try for passport, papers establishing their ancestry are asked for which are very difficult to furnish now, almost a 100 years after their ancestors came to India.

Their ancestors had been taken captive by British forces during the First World War and sent to Rajasthan whence they came to Calcutta. But why Calcutta of all places which is anyway quite far from Rajasthan? Anthony said maybe their group leader went to Calcutta first and the rest followed. In later years, the descendants of the Chinese group which came to Calcutta went on to make Calcutta the city with the highest Chinese population in India. However, this population is gradually shrinking because over the years many have moved to the US, Singapore and some to China.

While Anthony was talking to me, a bespectacled kid was running up and down the restaurant, the restaurant being quite empty at this hour, early evening. Anthony said he was his son. He was born in Bangalore and has never been to Calcutta.

Bangalore and Booze

Caravan a literary magazine I read has carried an interesting cover story on how Bangalore became an alcohol city, The Liquid City: How Alcohol made Bangalore by Raghu Karnad. Long before Bangalore came to be known as the IT capital of India, it was known as a city of pubs.

Bangalore was chosen as a summer capital by Brits, Scots and Irish soldiers because its weather was similar to England’s . The soldiers set up their houses in north Bangalore and there rose a sharp social divide between the northern part of Bangalore (known as Cant, short form of cantonment) and the part of the city inhabited by natives. The divide was not just social but also one of drinking preference. The Cant residents drank whiskey and the poison of the natives was arrack. After some years, beer replaced whiskey as a more handy beverage for the white soldiers.

With the independence of the country the social divide between the whiskey drinking and arrack drinking population of Bangalore decreased and the two types of drinks found their own torch bearers and political patrons in political parties and governments. Karnata lost three chief ministers to the liquor lobby. In 1948, Vittal Mallya bought United Beverage and with time it grew while arrack grew under the ownership/leadership of KN Guruswami, who, to steer Bangalore clear of prohibition under Murarji Desai, launched two newspapers (Deccan Herald is one of them) to influence government policy against prohibition of liquor. KN Guruswami was also the first person to set up a pub to serve draught beer and a few years later, following the example of KN Guruswamy, Vijay Mallya set up a pub which became a huge success leading Mallya to open more. It was the 80s.

But, in later years, where Guruswami and his likes restricted themselves to manipulating the system to ensure their survival and advancement, Vijay Mallya understood the importance of branding and chose sports, among other platforms, to promote Kingfisher.

When I first saw the cover story on alcohol in Caravan, I thought whether a cover story on alcohol is a serious enough topic especially given that Caravan’s cover stories tend to be quite long and they deal with serious topics. After reading it, I know that my hunch was wrong. It was worth making and reading the story.

In Custody by Anita Desai

Anita Desai, the author

A language provides a window to the history of a place. Take any language and trace its development across time and you will see in it the history of its people and its country of origin and adoption. The biography of Urdu is not an exception. Urdu was born out of a practical need. Soldiers serving the Mughal army came from varied religious and linguistic backgrounds and when they stayed together in army camps awaiting the start of military campaign they didn’t have a common language to speak. The Muslims among them couldn’t speak Hindustani and the Hindus weren’t familiar with Farsi and so on; in such circumstances Urdu was born, a mix of all languages spoken by various communities serving the Mughal army.

Somewhat similarly was also born Biriyani, out of a need to have a food which contained meat and rice together so that cooked rice and meat wouldn't have to be separately carried to army camps as soldiers’ food. Alas, unlike Biriyani, Urdu didn’t survive the test of time. It became popular in its day but after the fall of the Mughal empire and the coming of the British, Urdu’s decline started. It further hurtled down the road of decline and eventual obscurity with the independence of India, and the growing prominence of English and Hindi and that followed.

However, Urdu is a language of poetry and there are fans of Urdu even today. Written by Anita Desai, In Custody’s Deven is one of them. Deven is a Hindi lecturer in a college in a small town and loves Urdu poetry. His friend, an editor of an Urdu literary magazine, commissions Deven to interview Nur, a famous Urdu poet, who is now old and decrepit, for his magazine. Nur is Deven’s childhood literary hero and Deven happily takes up the project and goes to Chadni Chowk, in Delhi, to interview the poet.

Far from finding the poet in an environment fit for poetry and reflection, Deven finds Nur in an unwholesome condition, staying in a dilapidated house in Chandni Chowk, heavily drinking and gorging on greasy Biriyani from the bazaar and surrounded by spongers and hanger-ons. In the raucous created by Nur’s visitors in the terrace where Deven meets Nur, Deven’s repeated attempts to interview the poet fail.

Finally, Deven persuades his college to pay for a tape recorder to interview the poet and arranges to smuggle Nur out of his house away from his envious relations into a somewhat quieter place , a brothel, where he can record Nur’s autobiographical account in Nur’s own voice and leave it for the posterity. Alas, many goof ups later, the endeavour fails again.

In Custody opens with a great promise but that promise somewhat fizzles out as the story settles into what I would say a limited plot. I had expected a detailed account of the birth, rise and fall of the Urdu language  through Nur but no such thing takes place (except some lamenting by the poet about Urdu's declining prominence) and the poet’s plot time has been mostly spent on his indulgences and senilities. The poet seemed like a physical representation of the condition the Urdu language is in today.

Anita Desai’s writing is completely natural and her sentences read like she writes them just as they form in her mind without any attempt to embellish them, and they read surprisingly simple, completely unpretentious, light, crisp and fresh. No matter what’s the plot of her story just her writing style has the ability to carry the reader through.

She is a story teller in the mould of RK Narayan with simple plots that can sometimes read a little slow but surprises the reader with twists and turns. Her characters, like Narayan’s , are ordinary people with foibles coming from small towns and caught in the tangle of their problems. Her simple language also reminds the reader of Narayan.

At the end of the story, when there is no practical way left to salvage anything from the recordings Deven made, in a moment of reflection, Deven realizes that even after Nur dies his poems and soul will not quit with him; they will live on with Deven who through his regard for Nur’s work and an earnest effort to preserve it has become the rightful custodian of Nur’s legacy. That’s Deven’s success.

Hip Hop Nature Boy and Other Poems - by Ruskin Bond

Ruskin Bond recently visited Bangalore to launch his new book of poems, Hip Hop Nature Boy and Other Poems. I had decided to visit the venue but couldn’t. However, later I visited the bookstore Bond had launched the book at and bought the book. Some of the poems the book carries were written by Bond in the past and some are new and have been written particularly for the book. The poems are for children but I liked them anyway. Some of them tell short autobiographical stories and some just are stray thoughts on various things related to nature.


Not many people read poetry because they think poetry is about esoteric profundity. That’s partly true – poetry is about profundity dealt with brevity and wit. And I like such poems, but what I particularly look for in poems is simple truth and observations told with easy language and occasional peppering of wit; it should read natural and not forced. It leaves you feeling light and easy just how peppermint leaves you feeling after you have finished sucking it.

What the poems have in common with Bond’s other writings is that the poems are about the ordinary and the hum drum. Bond has made a career out of writing about ordinary things, people, places. Even a history book I had read by Bond was not about kings and leaders but ordinary people who lived their lives in times that were historically significant.

A few lines of a poem:

The simplest things in life are best

A patch of green,

A small bird’s nest,

A drink of water, fresh and cold,

The taste of bread,

A song of old,

These are the things that matter most.

Notes on Media

The other day a friend retwitted an article on how the English television media have a fetish for English-speaking and suave-looking Indians and seek their views on issues affecting a much larger section of India than suave and English-speaking represent.

This blogger, who was herself a TV reporter with NDTV, detailed how, when she was out to get reactions of people on a petrol price rise and collected reactions and visuals of truck drivers on the issue (since they are most likely to be affected by it) and sent them to her editorial team, they rejected them and asked her to get reactions of English speaking people instead since they would make better TV, although they, generally coming from richer sections of society, are less likely to be affected by petrol price rise.

However, based on this it would be wrong to conclude that English TV media don’t give representation to, let’s say, un-TV-friendly people at all, but neither can it be completely denied that the English media have an up-market inclination. And they can’t be fully blamed for this as up-market types, without doubt, make better TV and therefore help the image of an English channel and its viewership by extension.

Some would say Hindi TV media are much more representative but I think they are equally lop-sided: if the English TV media ignore the non-English speaking types, Hindi channels generally overlook the English-speaking ones.

The problem lies in the fact that TV media have become more about showmanship and less about news, which is why preferring convenience to fairness as long as it’s in interest of viewership is the accepted mode of operation.  Many of the social movements of recent times would have hardly met with the kind of success thhey did had it not been for TV media – which gave them unbridled coverage not so much for their news value but because they had become spectacles.  If you follow questions asked during TV discussions, you will see the larger intent is not to do justice to the topic in discussion but to be sensational.

Vernacular channels, I think, are more representative because they don’t need to have English speakers but they are also sensational and more than their English counterparts. Honestly speaking, even after the profusion of so many channels, newspapers continue to be the best mode of journalism. They are generally less sensational (expect the naughty photos in page-three supplementaries) and are far more analysis-driven.  But this analytical approach towards news is a post-TV phenomenon for news papers.

There are many things you can blame on media, but there is no end to how self-righteous you can get on this. It’s difficult to survive in any show business given that the competition is immense and you constantly need to do new things to ensure viewership.  We may talk about media ethics but how many of us will watch channels or read newspapers that passionately uphold them, like the BBC and Hindu for example? You can’t demand infotainment and expect high standards of journalism – it will be just like watching general Bollywood movies and getting sanctimonious about their low standard of cinematic aesthetics. 

The Great Unknown by Shankar

Last week I was on vacation in Calcutta and I finished The Great Unknown by Shankar while on the vacation, an autobiographical account of the author’s days in the High Court of Calcutta where he worked as a clerk for the last British barrister in India.  The book is a novel with a series of short stories in it about the people the author met during his years in Calcutta High Court.

 The people who come to court for solution of their problems are as varied as the problems they seek solution for, so naturally the book is an interesting read always keeping the reader guessing what story will come next just as a book of short stories does.

 Shankar, whose real name is Mani Shankar Mukherjee,  is among the popular Bengali writers and his novels started coming in English translations a few years back. Shankar’s writing and observations are simple and they make him immensely readable, but they can sometimes read too Bengali middle class.

The book is breezy and once you start reading it you are left with the yearning to return to it. I found myself lost in the lives of its characters soon after I started reading it. Helen Grubert (an Anglo-Indian typist ), Nicholas Droulas (a Greek sailor) – characters just flit in and out of Calcutta High Court, some with tragic consequences and some happy. The book carries a plaintive character and the stories convey the flavour of 50s' and 60s' Calcutta.

Written in the early 50s and serialised in a Bengali magazine fisrt, it was the first book by the author. In a way, the book was a precursor to the nature of writing to come from the author: novels set in the heart of an industry, in this case High Court being that setting and men of law the main characters. Few years later Shankar wrote Chowringhee, which predated Arthur Hailey’s Hotel, which was later made into a popular Bengali movie.