The Hungry Tide

Last night Putu finished reading Amitav Ghosh's 'The Hungry Tide' last night. Here's a review by Alok Rai in Outlook and a another one by Mithu Banerji in the Guardian. What's striking about Ghosh's work is the way he seamlessly manages to narrate so many stories at once. The book is as much about the Sunderbans, as it is about colonial policy under an eccentric Lord Hamilton, life in the rich fertile soil of the tide country, the merciless resettlement policies of the Indian government post 1947 leading to the central events in the book, dolphins and their habitat patterns, as well as about the complex relationship between the three central characters- Kanai, a middle class businessman from Delhi with a ear for languages; Piya- an Indian-American grad student who studies dolphins, and Fokir- a poor fisherman who lives in the tide country. Ghosh manages to convey the breathtaking beauty of the Sunderbans without even once romanticizing the perilous existence that those who live there face. The introduction of these two 'foreigners' (even though Kanai speaks the language of the locals, he is in reality, as much a foreigner as Piya), upsets the fine balance of life in Lusibari, a fictitious island. Ghosh has written with incredible lucidity, erudition and empathy for his subjects- The Hungry Tide is not different, and it might just be his best book to date. A final review by Sagarika Ghose in the Indian Express.

Putu watched Fahrenheit 9/11 and was not one bit impressed. Michael Moore can be an engaging, if occasionally quirky filmmaker. Bowling for Columbine, despite the controversy it generated, managed to outrage, move and provoke all at once. Fahrenheit 9/11 has a different agenda altogether. In fact, the agenda is rather simple- oust Bush come November 2004. To that end he uses a number of arguments-the disenfranchisement of voters in Florida that led to Gore's loss,  links between the Bush family and the Bin Ladens, Bush's incompetence in dealing with 9/11, the false case for war, the recruitment of soldiers from poor and lower middle class backgrounds by unscrupulous army recruiters and so on. But Moore takes on way more than he can tackle and the finished product is a garbled, long winded account of all that went wrong with the Bush administration with no real coherent argument.

If you read what Robert Jensen has written here and here about the movie, that quite effectively sums up what Putu has to say too. Jensen makes a number of valid points: that the Moore is covertly racist, that his movie is really made for white middle class Americans, that it whitewashes the Clinton era, that by arguing that Bush is the sole culprit for all that has gone wrong he misses the larger point about the empire building project that America has embarked on since the end of WWII, and so on.

Much of Bowling for Columbine's magic lay in Michael Moore himself- his ability to get a vast range of people- from the loony brother of Timothy McVeigh to two kids who were injured at Columbine, to talk candidly. But F9/11 has far less original footage and the bit that does, either tends to be overly dramatic and pointless (what IS the point of reading out the Patriot Act in an ice cream truck? Sure it makes for good documentary footage, but it does it serve any real purpose? Why harass senators to send their kids to war? Would he? Would the war be okay if senators' kids were fighting it rather than poor Hispanic kids?) or highly moving, as in the interviews with Lila Lipscomb. And footage like that of Bush sitting in a kindergarten classroom, just after he's been told that the second tower at the WTC has been hit, is actually rather poignant. I'm not sure what Moore thought Bush ought to be doing- and for the only time in the movie, Bush comes across as a mature, sensible leader, facing a grave crisis, before a classroom of five year olds.

There are also several inconsistencies in the movie. First, the entire focus on the 'Saudis' (Moore pronounces 'Sau' as in the Hindi word for hundred for some strange reason) is disconcerting. It's almost as if any association with any Saudi is suspicious. You are left wondering if he'd been happy if the Saudis had been bombed instead of Afghanistan. Then, there's the entire bit about army recruitment. Moore suggests that this is an unjust war, and it's being fought by predominantly non white soldiers who've been duped into fighting for a cause that many may not believe in. It's a strange case to make: does Moore think that a) a just war fought predominantly by non whites is okay? or that b) an unjust war fought by white kids is a fair deal? These are two related and in some senses, unrelated issues and Moore entangles them, all the while ignoring the 'American Project for the New Century' that had been well underway under Clinton. Finally, his big omission is not Blair and the UK, as this Guardian review would suggest, but Israel. In a film that centres around American foreign policy in the Middle East, the omission of even a mention of the I-word is baffling.

Having said all this, Moore doesn't always waffle. He has fascinating footage from Iraq showing detainees being hooded and photographed (remember he shot this before Abu Ghraib became public), he has some compelling footage from Iraq and Bush, as usual, can be trusted to make an ass of himself in public, from time to time, which is always entertaining. All in all, if you're apolitical and you haven't read 'Dude, where's my country' (which contains much of the material this movie centres around), this is a must see movie. If you have read the book, and you are a political person, it is probably still worth seeing a movie, that might well change the course of an American election.

 

Being a Culture Vulture in Calcutta

I went to watch this play yesterday put up by Jayant Kripalani, based on the script by Manjula Padmanabhan. The play is called Lights Out and deals with how in an ordinary middle class neighbourhood a bunch of men over days repeatedly rape and brutalize a woman while the rest of the neighbourhood which can hear her screams for help stand by in mute impotence. The play clearly suffered from less than inspired acting, but parts of the play are so meandering and implausible that the irony is lost.

The acting was, on the whole, quite poor. Putu must admit some bias here. One of Putu's fat cat cousins was in the play, and Putu clearly felt that he was the best actor on stage. But it's true- till Bikram entered the play was uniformly dull. Even Bornila Chatterjee, who did a wonderful job in the last Kripalani production was too subdued and too one dimensional (i.e. hysterical housewife) to make an impact.

The audience for the play wasn't great either- they kept laughing at the wrong moments. It was only when they were told at the end of the play that the whole situation was real, that they were shocked into silence. But that shock should really have come much earlier. It ought to have been obvious that the play was making fun of the hands off attitude of the middle class in India that doesn't want to get involved because what is happening next door involves 'poor' people, or maybe a 'whore'.  In fact, Putu felt that the prostitution angle ought to have been pursued more vigorously- the entire debate about rape and prostitution is a lively one, and not just in legal circles. However, the brief dialogue between the protagonists on this fell completely flat. The whole religious/exorcism thing was overdone and by the end of it, was so implausible that the characters too were beginning to lose their credibility. The unfortunate bit is that the play had the possibility of opening up a number of different avenues for exploration and tried to do too much, in too little time, with a cast that was clearly not up to the mark, that it ended up being more farcical than it should have.