Intimacy

Written by Hanif Kureishi

Published in 1999.

This was a wonderful read. It was a short but extremely astute book. It is a first person narrative of a man's thoughts the night before he leaves his wife. We read so many books and watch so many movies about men leaving, but they are all from the perspectives of the wife or children; the man who leaves is always the villain. This book puts you in the leaving man's shoes: you experience his uncertainty, his guilt and desperation, as well as his hope and desire for something more than what his life has become. It is an extremely intelligent portrait of a generation of men who are turning old as society begins to allow freedoms and pleasures that were inconceivable in their youth. It is the modern heterosexual male's psyche and sexuality dissected and put under a microscope. Plus, it had a great many amazing quotes. I am writing down some of my favorites:

"One makes mistakes, gets led astray, digresses. If one could see one's crooked progress as a kind of experiment, without wishing for an impossible security – nothing interesting happens without daring – some kind of stillness might be attained."

"Fear is something I recognize. My childhood still tastes of fear; of hours, days, and months of fear. Fear of parents, aunts and uncles, of vicars, police and teachers, and of being kicked, abused and insulted by other children. The fear of getting into trouble, of being discovered, and the fear of being castigated, smacked, ignored, locked in, locked out, as well as the numerous other punishments that surrounded everything you attempted. There is, too, the fear of what you wanted, hated and desired; the fear of your own anger, the fear of retaliation and of annihilation. There is habit, convention and morality, as well as the fear of who you might become. It isn't surprising that you become accustomed to doing what you are told while making a safe place inside yourself, and living a secret life. Perhaps that is why stories of spies and double lives are so compelling. It is, surely, a miracle that anyone ever does anything original."

These are just two really profound passages. The book as a whole is a lot less sweeping and very much attuned to the individual character, even if it does remain for its 155 pages mostly contemplative in tone.

Sleepless in Seattle

Directed by Nora Ephron

Released in 1993.

Cute. But I really don't like Tom Hanks and in this movie I didn't like Meg Ryan either. You've Got Mail is just so much better. It is kinda hard to believe how similar the two movies are. Also, don't you think chick flicks have improved with time?

Benny's Video

Directed by Michael Haneke

Released in 1992.

This movie was fucked up! It came no where close to The Piano Teacher, but still! It opens with this grainy video of someone putting a gun to a pig's head and blowing its brains out. The pig squeals and squirms. The video stops, is rewound and then from right before the gunshot played in slowmo again. This video, we find out is being watched by Benny, a perhaps thirteen-year old German kid, who, it soon becomes apparent, is a total sociopath. He is obsessed with videos and his emotionally detached parents have bought him tons of video equipment. With this, he makes a snuff film by shooting this homeless girl three times with the same gun used to kill the pig.

The movie is not so much gruesome as it is shocking. Haneke himself has described it as a movie about the emotional glaciation of people in highly industrialized nations. Boy! I could not agree more with that definition. It was an extremely disturbing movie not just because of Benny's actions but also because of his parent's reactions when they see his snuff film. As I said: fucked up!

The Motorcycle Diaries

Directed by Walter Salles

Released in 2004

I have been meaning to watch this movie for a while now and I am really glad I finally got around to it. With every Latin American movie I watch, my respect for their cinema grows. The story was great, the direction extremely intelligent and the cinematography stunning. It is a slow-paced movie but by no means was it a boring one. Funny at first and then poignant, it kept me emotionally, intellectually and visually engaged throughout.

Saas bahu aur Sensex

Directed by Shona Urvashi

Released in 2008.

This movie was only so so. It was certainly not your stereotypical Bollywood movie though. Starring Kiron Kher, the movie was about a divorced mother and her twenty-something daughter who move from Delhi to Bombay to start over. The story is about the lives of the people in their new apartment complex. The Sensex (the Mumbai stock exchange), and through it Indian economic prosperity, remains a firm presence in the entire movie. It breaks appreciably from standard Urdu-ized Bollywood dialogues and represents language more realistically. The ethnic differences in speaking Hindi are not suppressed (the mother and daughter are quite firmly identified as Bengali). English is also much more prominent in the movie. I really appreciated the movie's effort to reinvent the image of the Indian middle class in Bollywood, but its undoing was a very uninteresting story-line and unusually dull characters.

White Mughals

Written by William Dalrymple

Published in 2002.

This book is a must read! It is about late 18th and early 19th century India. Dalrymple describes the earlier colonial encounter between the British and the Indians. The two people mingled – surprisingly enough – on equal footing and with mutual respect. Numerous Britons adopted Muslim and Hindu culture to a huge degree. They kept many Indian concubines and many even had loving and longlasting marriages with Indian women. We do not hear or read much about this early colonial encounter because our opinion of colonization is entirely coloured by post-1857 encounters when the British were firmly masters of India and when they had stopped viewing Indian civilization with wonder and respect rather than disgust and disdain. To me, this 18th century trend seems like the reverse of contemporary South Asian migration to the West, where the immigrants inevitably assimilate into Western culture.

And do not fear, it is not written like a history textbook. It is actually structured around the love story of James Achilles Kirkpatrick and a Hyderabadi noblewoman Khair un Nissa. Their love story happens when the older attitudes towards India are giving way to the modern colonial approach, which is partly responsible for the story's tragic end. It is, once again, a must read. Borrow it from Lamont! I am going to try and get my hands on Dalrymple's other book: The Last Mughal, I think it is called.

Letting Go

Written by Philip Roth

Published in 1962.

Interesting enough, I suppose. The most fascinating part about the book was the glimpse it afforded of American society in the 50s. There was none of today's political correctness then. People identified with their religious/ethnic groups much more strongly than today. The Catholics built their lives around their religion and their community and the Jews did likewise. Intermarriage was an earth-shattering action and religious institutions did not sanction them. Of course racism against blacks and jews was prevalent and there was none of today's consumerism.

The story, which moved at snail's pace, had its moments. I think Roth was at his best on his tangents when he explored the characters' histories.