Briused and humourless

I can be intemperate on my blog. I need to tell myself this before I can and even then I may not succeed.

What does this tell me about the culture of silence and niceness we - in this case I mean women, but it could be any description of person speaking out in a majority that doesn't include them - put ourselves into? Why do I play nice even when I don't have to?

Yesterday a friend sent out a mail making what was, in effect, a rape joke. I was not amused and I said so. I was told that my sensibilities were wafer thin. I said a number of things, most of them unbelievably un-ragey and moderate.

What I wanted to do was rave and rant. I wanted to use a hammer and instead used what might be called a needle. Or an unwound paper clip.

Today I feel bruised and humourless. I want my sensitivites to be wafer-thin and I wish my friend was similarly sensitive. Instead, he side-stepped. He suggested something else and said, 'is that plausible?'

No, it fucking is not. I said so. I await developments.

Elsewhere in the country, men are coming out of the woodwork to say why the Justice Verma report can't be implemented. They don't want to rethink the AFSPA. They don't want to disqualify politicians and bureaucrats who have rape charges against them. They don't want senior officers made responsible for the sexual assaults committed by the people in their charge (they like being decorative and drawing large salaries for not doing their jobs).

And in the meantime, ordinary men, people you call friends, still think rape jokes are, if not hilarious (we musn't be too sensitive) at least mildly funny.

Never quite getting there

A Disappearing Number. Directed by Simon McBurney. Complicite. Global Peace Auditorium, Hyderabad. 22 August 2010.

Remember Amadeus? There is one line from the film adaptation of the play that I will never forget. Mozart says to the king, "Forgive me, Majesty. I am a vulgar man, but I assure you my music is not." He may never have said such a thing; we will never know, but we do know that it doesn't matter. But with these few words, we approach something like an understanding of a man whose genius we know only through his music.

No such understanding is given to us of another genius, Srinivasa Ramanujan by watching Complicite's play, A Disappearing Number. In this very slick, techincally and choreographically admirable production, nothing of the man behind the numbers is revealed. Like his formulae, we only approach but never arrive at anything approximating the person Ramanujan was. When you consider that Ramanujan died only 80 years ago, that it shouldn't be hard to find out more about him, it's truly puzzling to see such an opaque representation of the man, even in his brief relationship with G.H.Hardy.

This is not a review. It is an expression of my dissatisfaction of the structure of the play that gives more importance to the modern love story of Ruth Minnen and Al Cooper (the character an Indian American), and an annoying sub-plot involving an Indian call centre employee who calls herself Barbara Jones.

There are curious, unexplored asides involving another character of Indian origin - a Ugandan who insists that she is a British national - in one scene, she comes to make Al Cooper's bed in a hotel and side-steps the question of 'where she's originally from'. Something is being said about identities - Cooper identifies himself as American, the son of Indian parents who left for the States even before he was born, and who has never, ever visited India - but it isn't clear what or what it has to do with Ramanujan. In another scene, Ruth, who is visiting India,  is in a train with a Ugandan of Indian origin - it isn't clear that it's the same character, though it could well be, since it would seems to bolster the play's central and only premise that the pattern is the thing - and asks her what the meaning of the sacred thread is. The Ugandan, in an astonishing display of mystical knowledge, says it represents the mind, body and the soul, all intertwined.

This is an example of the mystical bullshit that the play - perhaps unconsciously; let's be generous - is full of. At various times, characters, some of them supposedly mathematicians who should know better, are appallingly sentimental about numbers. Ruth's telephone number is significant because it contains a  number that Ramanujan once explicated (this telephone number is responsible for a large chunk of the play); in another scene, when Ruth finds out that she is pregnant, she calls Al and tells him that one plus one is not two but three. Oh please.

Then there is the character Ramanujan. You see him in his home, writing on a slate, erasing what he has written with his elbow. His wife remains nameless and is more often than not seen in supposedly respectful half-crouch. In England, to establish his awkwardness in wearing shoes, Ramanujan is shown waddling along Cambridge. Everything about him in England is overdone - his gestures, his facial expressions, even his accent. Is this supposed to be funny? Poignant? What, if we accept that one's demeanour says something about who we are, does this say about Ramanujan? That's he's infantile and incompetent? Comic and inscrutable in every way including in his mathematics that doesn't follow western methods? What do we make of the way he speaks?

Let's talk about accents. We're Indians speaking in English. To ourselves, we don't have an accent. To other ears, our speech might sound strange but no stranger than other accents sound to us. How is this to be represented on stage or on screen? I remember the first film appreciation class I'd ever been to in school. We were 15 then. Someone asked a teacher, who had just shown is Dr. Zhivago, why the people didn't have a Russian accent. "The film's in English. Why should they have Russian accents unless they're Russians speaking to each other in English?" we were asked in return. It was something to think about, and we did. But apparently Complicite didn't think to ask themselves this question, or how they wanted to deal with it.

What this demonstrates is that orientalism is alive and well. India is, to all intents and purposes, still a mystical place where even mathematicians, geniuses though they be, worry about crossing the kalapani, wear their sacred threads and cast their horoscopes and live out the outcomes exactly as predicted, and none of this is problematic in any way at all because this is a story about the early 20th century and such things happened then, this was so, Ramanujan did worry about all these things and probably spoke English with exactly that South Indian wobble we all know and love so well.

Except, this is emphatically not a story about the early 20th century. It's a story about the present, and a supposed discovery of the man and his math by a mathematician and her reluctant but besotted husband. The narrator, a Bengali-Telugu by his name, is also in the present, guiding us through the past to the present time (which we're told in another nugget of mysticism, is All Connected). And he can't seem to bring himself to interrogate anything. If anything, he also gives us his version of the three words that make the sacred thread a symbol of higher-minded abstraction instead of the socially oppressive one is also and really is. At the very least, he ought to have been shamed into silence but of course he won't because the director and the writer have no clue whatsoever of anything other than the prism of the mystic orient through they've decided to view the subject.

It's also an odd and not always unpleasing contrast between the abstract and stripped down mathematics that is at the heart of the play and the highly-overlaid and layered production. At worst, it seems to make math palatable for a viewing audience with spectacle; at best, it is another, spatial expression of concepts that are only half-comprehended but inuited to be beautiful.

*

There's more to say, but this should suffice. Other not laudatory reviews include this and this one. It should tell us something that most reviews that have appeared in the Indian press are all gushy bedazzlement. There are dissenting views but I haven't seen them written about anywhere. If anyone has, do point them out.

*

Update: Just for fun, here's Veena's take on the play form three years ago.

What's love got to do with it?

Last night's performance of Love| Death| The Devil at the Goethe Zentrum had the audience either leaving fifteen minutes into the performance, or stunned into silence by the end. It consisted of six dancers, a few animal masks and the most puzzling presence of a table and a few chairs.

Now I have a high threshold for performances that require patience, but this one was just weird: every once in a while some person would grab a megaphone and ask us if we were afraid to die and announce that s/he was not afraid to die.

Every once in a while they'd put on animal masks and writhe on the floor, gurgle and make animal sounds, change costumes and do a bit of Kraftwerk-y prancing, and John Woo-ish gunslinging, and then holler at us through the aforementioned megaphone. It was all headache inducing, not least because of all the dry ice they seemed to need. The final straw was one dancer who gagged himself on one microphone and left long strings of bodily fluid on it which dangled like a broken spider web until he flicked it off some fifteen minutes later. I tell you, the entire audience watched that string of spit with horrified fascination for the entire fifteen minutes while other no doubt more interesting things were happening elsewhere on the stage.

I mean, I think of death for a large part of my waking day, okay, and having a few people asking me in between dance moves if I am afraid of death does not convince me that this was supposed to be some deep, meaningful take on eros and thanatos. Love was conspicuous by its absence, and what the devil the devil had to do with any of it is something I'm still trying to figure out.

The one good thing about the performance was, of course, that at least a few people in the audience would have welcomed death in preference to watching more of the dance.

end credits

*SPOILER ALERT*

Did anybody watching Iron Man in India catch the 'surprise' dialogue between Samuel Jackson and Robert Downey Jr. buried in the end credits?

Because I didn't. Not because I didn't sit through the end credits - I always do - but because as usual, the theatre didn't run the credits through to the end.

Also as usual, this made me seethe and compose scathing letters to theatre executives and righteous ones to the producers/distributors, in my head.

Of course, this should teach filmmakers not to bury treasure in places where it'll never be found. I can see script meetings where everyone tears their scanty hair out figuring out the exact place after the film where there will be maximum impact: 30 seconds in! Two frames after the end credit montage! Lead in to teaser with subliminal flash frames right in the last scene so that viewers will stay rooted to their seats!

And isn't Robert Downey Jr. hot?

Also saw first (uninspiring) promos for Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na, Abbas Tyrewala's first feature as director. Many reasons why I'm waiting to see this film but July is still some way off.

Whining and Whingeing

I have a massive headache. To be fair, I already had one before I went had to emcee the evening's book launch, about which not another word - except to say I can't deal with 'sufi' poetry unless it's by Rumi or Hafiz. Okay? Okay.

And how dare projectionists just skip an entire song in Across The Universe? Went to watch the first day first (heck, only) show on Friday, and had the misfortune to have a projectionist who could not wait until the reel was over before inserting the slide that announced the interval. So there were these nine folks lying in a field, singing Because and half a minute before the end of the reel, way before the markers flash, the dude turns the projector off. When the interval is over, he resumes from where he left off but now changes reels before the song is over.

He also skipped Something. What's the law on this?

And the end titles. Nothing annoys me more that theatres that cut short the end titles. At the end of LotR 1, I've fought with projectionists to show the last reel again, but I was really not in the mood to do a crusading act on Friday. But I've been spending nights composing bitter letters of complaint to Ramesh Prasad. I also dream that he will be so worried that this will come to the ears of Columbia Pictures, whose contract with the theatre owners states that every inch of the film has to be shown (except those portions that have not been allowed by the censors of the land) and who will sue Prasadz till they have no choice but to give up their theatre to the govt. to convert into a science museum, so that he will personally call me up and offer me a couple of tickets free for whichever film I might want to watch, which I shall nobly refuse, saying I didn't do any of it for free tickets; I'm capable of buying my own tickets thank you very much, it's the principle of the thing.

Finally, why do people say 'at the end of the day' in a profound undertone as if they're uttering one of life's mysteries when all they're doing is saying stupid things like 'at the end of the day, we have to stand by each other'? Life as roll call. I knew it.

A Glutton for Punishment

If you are one, head over to km's post where there's a carnival with curd and other questionable substances (not excluding the stuff that dreams are made on) and contribute your bit.

Or just go groan.

**

A propos of nothing, will someone please explain to me this business of ROTFL? Who does that? Not even Buster Keaton films make me actually roll all over the floor losing control over my bowels.

If it's supposed to indicate that on a scale of 1 to 10, something you just said comes close an excruciating 9, it still seems a bit excessive to me. I mean, imagine that you've just made a mildly funny remark and as reward are greeted by the sight of an adult getting off their chair and proceeding to roll around the floor in a paroxysm of mirth. How astonished would you be (on a scale of 1 to 10, of course)?

Succumbed

A few days ago, Equivocal sent me an invite to join the Fulcrum list on Facebook. I politely mailed him back saying I don't do Facebook, or Orkut or any of these evil time-swallowing things. I mean, I do enough with blogs and Ryze and other stuff.

Pity, he said. There are some really interesting discussions about poetry there.

I hate people who know what strings to pull. I've been getting these Facebook invites for months now and I've successfully ignored every one of them. But this one I thought I'd check out.

Before you knew it, I was staring at a page that asked me to fill out some stuff and there I was a fully paid-up member of the Facebook community. In the next five seconds, my mailbox was choked with friends' requests and network invitations and god knows what else.

So I complained to Equivocal, who said, rather gleefully for the zombie he claims to be, "I lied if I said this was harmless. I am a facebook zombie and you've just been bitten by me. Welcome to the world of the undead."

Bah. I continue to ignore any additions on my wall (wall?! What are these guys - Kilroys?) Anybody who wants to communicate with me can do so via email.

Do you know the things people spend their time doing? Sending people fortune cookies, chest bumps, and joining networks that campaign for the removal of the 'is' on the status message on one's profile page. Who wants to know who is massaging whose liver and who is trying to grow another brain? I mean I know I have better things to do - like refreshing my page a million times to see if there's are new posts on Bloglines, for instance. That requires much concentration and a large expenditure of one's mental resources.

Wait. There's more. I get a mail telling me someone's done some scrappy stuff on Orkut. BUT I don't do Orkut! I've never been there, never done that. So how could anyone do anything on a Orkut page that doesn't exist?

This is sinister. I check out the link to see what happens, and it turns out that I have an Orkut page. I have no idea how. I also seem to be born in a wildly improbably year but hey - why stop at one weird thing? (Can you tell how much this is upsetting me? I've never used so many italics except in posts that have film or book titles).

Just so everyone knows, I Don't Do Orkut.

Facebook I shall look at but I shall be as silent as the mountains.

Where's Ignatius J. Reilly when you need him?

And Equivocal, those discussions had better be outstanding!