The Dark Knight Rises: An Early Review

You know how in competitions you don't want to go after the best act because you fear you'll get judged harshly? That's exactly what The Dark Knight Rises must feel like, as audiences around the world queue up for it with one question lingering somewhere in the back of their minds, "Will it be as good as The Dark Knight?" If I had to answer in one word, I'd say, "No." Two words, "Nowhere close." Three words, "Oh, fuck off!" But then, coming second to The Dark Knight isn't really that sad, and TDKR does a lot of things right.

It gives the Batman a lot of time to introspect (He's been sitting in the east wing of his mansion for eight years, and still doesn't have answers when the movie begins!), it asks difficult questions of him, it pushes him even further down the rabbit-hole he jumped down in Batman Begins. He ponders, at various times, the purpose and price of his life. His parents are central to all this, as ever, but that explanation for his anger grows old -- perhaps even within him. Alfred wants him to run away; he thinks that's the only way to move on. Wayne's wounded, he's rusty, and Alfred isn't sure how battle-ready he is; but he is, on the surface, raring to go. What drives him? Is this impulse true? He isn't sure. He learns, first, that conquering all fear might not always be the best thing to do, and later, that he hadn't really conquered it in the first place. He learns that only fear can make you free, only the fear of falling can push you to make the jump. There is, of course, a lot of back and forth on relationships crucial to him -- with Alfred, with Gordon, with crime, with justice, with Gotham. In other words, it gives the Batman a lot of time to be Bruce Wayne, the eccentric millionaire.

With him on this journey, are a quirky set of characters.

There is a smooth, sizzling, scheming cat-burglar with an eye for his mother's pearls, who, strangely, steals his fingerprints. She is as planned and as deliberate as the Batman's other nemesis, the Joker, was impulsive and reckless. Even without the Batman having a vague mix of a crush and suspicion on her, she has dilemmas of her own -- an identity she's trying to get rid of, and an almost unnatural desire for self-preservation.

Then there's the bizarre man in the mask -- Bane. No surname, no first-name. Just Bane. (Clearly he's no boon) A disciple of Bruce's guru, Ra's Al Ghul, and an outcast from the League of Shadows, just like Bruce, he has the brain, the training and the brawn to pose the most serious threat in eight years to Gotham -- a threat grave enough to force Bruce out of his mansion and into his long abandoned costume. His plans are clear for us to see, but his motivations remain unclear.


There is another orphan, a too-curious-for-his-own-good, smart, tough, honest, rookie cop who has discovered Bruce's mask and is intrigued by it. He wants to understand the Batman's motivations, he almost seems like he wants to wear a mask himself. He perceives more than most others, he acts swiftly, decisively and level-headedly.


There are the people of Gotham, basking in the sunshine of the Dent Act, named in honour of the white knight, Harvey Dent -- it gave teeth to the police, the Commissioner says in a speech --  that cleansed the streets of Gotham of organised crime. The very people who believe the Batman betrayed them and murdered their saviour.


Commissioner Gordon lives that lie, repeating it each day, and hoping he will be able to get the truth off his chest soon. He thinks they should know the truth, but he doubts the people's ability to take the truth with equanimity. The lie is eating him from the inside, slowly.

There is a nuclear fusion reactor in the middle of it all -- belonging to Wayne Enterprises, controlled by the redoubtable Lucius Fox and Miranda Tate, a clean energy activist -- that Bane converts into a tick-tocking nuclear time-bomb. The scale of the plot, as you can see, is fairly large.

The gadgets are all there -- the new and improved Batpod with a sweet new wheel move, a flying machine simply called The Bat, and multiple Tumblers rumbling along the streets of Gotham. The action sequences are intense and inventive, the CGI simply breathtaking, and the cinematography broodingly beautiful.

But something doesn't fit. Somehow, the movie doesn't come together as an overwhelming meal that The Dark Knight was. The narration in the earlier movie was more sprawling, more messy. There were many sidetracks, many staircases that led nowhere. But that seemed to work in its favour. The tauter, more focussed approach in TDKR seems almost limiting. You're not plunged into a vast drama that no one seems to have total control over, and that, funnily, takes away from the movie.

For a movie where characters think so much, they seem to think too loudly, they seem to speak their thoughts too often. The movie doesn't ponder enough. In the previous two movies, Christopher Nolan found a way to not let the pace drag while still feeding us enough to think about. Here, he does neither.

Most disappointingly, TDKR's philosophy is re-hashed and superficial. Ra's Al Ghul and the Joker, even the Scarecrow (who makes a guest appearance here) and Dent, had their own set of ideologies -- political, social and economic -- and ethics. And this made them incredibly colourful. One of them was flawed, one greedy, one plainly unhinged and one wronged. They were coloured by what they saw, they reacted to what they experienced. Even the Joker, who unleashed mayhem for the fun of it, did it because he believed it was necessary for there to be someone to do it. "This city needs a better class of criminals," he said. They were all uniformly fascinating exactly because they took strong stands on the world around them.

Sadly, none of the villains on display in TDKR had any of this spunk. Seline Kyle was never really a villain, Bane's motivations were unconvincing. The third villain (shan't let the cat out of the bag!) was pushed by a need for... wait for it... revenge! No, I'm not suggesting that revenge sagas are necessarily simplistic. I'm saying that a revenge saga needs the avenger to lose something dear, and for the audience to feel that pain and that loss. Here, the whole thing is reduced to a plot twist -- now that's flimsy, that's insubstantial, that's fruitless.

And that's why TDKR is underwhelming -- because it builds a structure that is gigantically grand, achingly beautiful and painstakingly constructed, but builds it around a hollow, shallow core.

On Campus Novels, Sanskritisation and Causality: A Conversation with Satyajit Sarna

The last time I met Satyajit Sarna (unimaginatively nicknamed 'Surd'), in a few hours, and for a few hours, I forgot who, where or what I was. When I met him before that, after being in the legendary Queens Bar in T.Nagar and the highly underrated Ranjith rooftop in Nungambakkam, for some reason, I woke up in a room at the Taj Coromandel. The next day, at the Madras High Court, various people wanted their photo taken with what they thought was an alien apparition -- a six-plus-feet tall Sardar in an advocate's gown!

Here, I talk to him about his first novel, published this June by Harper Collins, The Angel's Share.
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The author poses with mint vodka that tasted like mouthwash.

When I heard that you were writing a novel, I wasn't surprised. Somehow you seemed like the sort of guy who would want to tell a story. But I must admit that given the range of literature you read, and the sort of things you tend to talk about (in our bizarre interactions over the years), I was a little surprised when I heard you were writing a campus novel. This genre, in the context of Indian writing in English in the last decade, brings its own limitations, expectations and biases, doesn't it? What pushed you to write about Law School?

Well, to the extent I was thinking about it, I was following advice. They say you should sort-of bleed the autobiographical urge out of yourself, write it, get your own voice out of your head and onto paper and then either publish it, or print it out on a nice big sheaf of paper and lock it up in a drawer. The danger, if you don’t do that, is that the stories you need to tell start showing up in the stories you want to tell. So you get science fiction with a little campus novel in it, and your detectives have coming-of-age issues. The way I see it, if as a writer you feel a need to write a coming-of-age book, you might as well write it so your space cadets and detectives don’t end up with student angst.

So when I sat down and started typing, I decided to go with the flow and tell the stories that I did know, and they came together and grew with time to become The Angel’s Share.

What's wrong with detectives who have coming-of-age issues or a sci-fi set on a campus of some sort? Wouldn't that sort of thing set the novel apart amongst that genre? Are literary genres like ragas that have strict goalposts within which an artist’s creativity is channelled?

Ha ha, of course! That would be wonderful, and there is great work along those lines which exists. Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card is one of my favorite books that way – a sort of schoolboy story told against a background of interstellar war. What I meant was an unintentional urge to write exactly what you saw into a narrative where it would sit uneasily…

The IITs had Five Point Someone, and the IIMs got the "MBA" series (Mediocre, but Arrogant; Married, but Available and so on). (Have you read these novels?) Law schools don't have a definitive campus novel yet, although there have been attempts to write one. You think The Angel's Share fills that market void?

I read Five Point Someone in third year, and I honestly enjoyed it. It was a light read which appealed to me because I was in college and it was a college book – there was an immediate empathy. It also perversely appealed to me because I liked reading Big Books, and it was the exact opposite of a Big Book and so it felt like cheating. I read it in the back row of class, returned it to the owner and thought that it may be the last I heard of it. Boy, was I wrong!

Campus novels have fallen a long way in the perception of the reading public, which may be a fair assessment of the quality of work we’re seeing, given how many of them are mass-market clones of Five Point Someone.

Coming-of-age, the Bildungsroman, is a very evocative genre– a lot of great writing has come out of it. And as my friend Aditya Sudarshan says, This Side of Paradise is a campus novel. But the tag does make me uncomfortable still.

The Angel’s Share has a couple of settings; I’m not sure I’d have written it or tried to have it published if I had written only a campus novel. In my head it’s a story about youth and growing up. But I’d like to think that if you wanted to tell a story about law schools or law firms in India, you’d have to think about The Angel’s Share and ask yourself if someone got there first.

It's funny you should mention This Side of Paradise, because when I read it, I actually thought, "Hey, Satyajit could write a novel like this!" And in continuing with the Fitzgerald theme, there was also Zorawar who is, in some ways, Nick Carraway to Sasha's Gatsby.

I think that what you may be doing is upgrading me vastly by association. I thank you kindly, but fear that you are far too generous. The Great Gatsby remains my favourite book of all time, and I reread it every year or so. Every time, I see more than I saw the last time, which is incredible given that it’s an even shorter book than The Angel’s Share.

 I see where you’re going when you contrast Nick-Gatsby with Zorawar-Sasha, but there is a little difference in the dynamic, even while Zoju plays the straight man to the inspirational personality of Sasha. If Zoju wasn’t so callow and insecure, Sasha wouldn’t shine so bright, and if Nick wasn’t a non-judgmental Midwesterner, than the East Coast opulence of Gatsby wouldn’t seem so mythical, and Nick’s judgment in the end wouldn’t be so damning.

But, in Gatsby, Jay Gatsby is squarely at the centre of the book. The big question is how big Nick is  - does he tell the truth fairly? How much does he grow and change independently of Gatsby? Zorawar is a lot more active than Nick and his growth and story is more central by comparison.

If I may refer to another one of my favourite books, I could venture that maybe, in Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, the relationship between Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty is a better example. Dean appears and disappears and changes Sal’s life, but the story is about Sal. Dean is more the idea of Dean, and less the person of Dean. And so Sasha.

However if you had to point to a hero in these three books, I feel that you could without hesitation point to Jay Gatsby, Dean Moriarty and Sasha Kapur.

Your novel is intensely personal. It is about people you've known intimately, and spaces you've inhabited for a considerable period of time. Did the familiarity make writing it easier or tougher?

Some of the characters are based on traits I saw in real people, and on events that I saw or heard about. But when you sit down to write fiction, it’s impossible to tell it like it happened. The rules of fiction are different from the rules of life. Events happen in a very diluted non-causal fashion. People are a lot more alike than they are different. You blur lines, mix and match, exaggerate – do the verbal photoshopping you have to make an interesting picture.  What familiarity does help with is description. When I need to describe a setting, I can just tell it like I saw it.

There are things you take for granted when writing about National Law School. For instance, you mention the "Five Buck Shop" and "Amma" without really explaining who or what they are.  Would that put off outsiders? Or are these things not really central to the plot anyway?

Hopefully, neither ‘Five Buck Shop’ nor ‘Amma’ would put off readers. I tested some of these terms on ‘outsiders’ before publishing it, and it appears that anybody who went to college had a Five Buck Shop AND an Amma. There’s an institutional logic to these elements, and its bound to be common to most colleges. If, however, you have ever been to Nagarbhavi and stared into the deep and knowing gaze of Amma, then the reading experience may be so much more the deeper for you.

I’m now trying valiantly to recall whether I still owe any money at Five Buck Shop or to Amma. I think I cleared my tabs at Convocation, but the details are hazy…

There was a moment in the novel when I thought I must launch into a diatribe about Sanskritisation and Westernisation. When you mentioned that for our generation of Indians, cricket was no longer the number one sport, I wanted to jump into the pages of the novel and talk about how Westernising city kids have shifted to football, but for the Sanskritising small-towners (like myself), cricket (which used to be the upper class, elite, city-game) was still number one. This is not a question. I feel like faffing, and I faffed. You may comment, however.

I see your point. Of course I meant this in the context of urban India, where the rise of football is self evident and is definitely influenced by televised international sport and focused marketing by the English Premier League and companies like Nike and Adidas. You are right in that this rise of football is not even across India and that for the vast majority of children in India, cricket is their one true love.

That said, the way I hear it from my granddad, the sports he used to play as a child, and even past independence, the sports that really held the Indian imagination were football and hockey. If you look at the past of Indian football, the Durand Cup predates all but two tournaments and clubs like Mohun Bagan and Mohammedan Sporting have very old and storied pedigrees. Maybe the history of subcontinental sport would have been different if FIFA had allowed India to play the 1950 World Cup barefoot…

I’m no expert but the rise of Indian cricket in the sixties probably has a lot to do with decolonization and the scars it left on the Indian psyche – a need to ape our colonial masters, perhaps. It’s not an obvious fit for our conditions – the equipment is expensive, a proper pitch and grounds are very hard to maintain – but cricket-like games happen everywhere.

I could go on, but so could you. That’s how faffing works.

That’s one skill Law School really taught us, didn’t it? I wouldn’t be half the man I am without it.

Some would say that’s an improvement.

In a report somewhere, it was written that your novel exposes "hard-hitting truths" about National Law School. It made me smile slimily. Your reaction to that (not to my slimy smile, but to the phrase)?

I smiled slimily. I did not intend to write a comforting and sweet paean to NLS. I love the institution and had a fantastic time of it myself, and telling the truth should take nothing away from it. NLS is an amazing college with great alumni, a unique culture and the remarkable achievement of having changed the face of legal practice in India by example. But every institution requires honest assessment, and nothing is perfect.

While The Angel’s Share isn’t a report on the functioning of NLS, it does shine a light on the life of the college that outsiders probably don’t see. The biggest problem with NLS in the years we were there is probably that nobody wanted to tell the truth about anything – infrastructure, safety and security, quality of teaching, lack of effort from students, parochialism, discipline, drug abuse – and nobody wanted to hear it. If the institution and its stakeholders (including us) had been more honest and forthcoming, and more willing to listen to each other, I think we’d have learnt more, done better and a lot of people wouldn’t have graduated with such a bitter taste in their mouths. The courage to talk about things is something that I wish we had possessed as an academic community in those years.

I hear that these things have gotten a lot better, and that’s great to hear. I hear exam papers don’t have roll numbers on them, and that there is an actual functioning ‘open-door policy’. I hear that extracurricular activities get more support from administration. Fewer people lose years now and thankfully, the suicide rate is dropping.

You talk of lack of effort from students, drug abuse, discipline – and these were issues that our professors often cribbed about… Remember the time when a professor said he wouldn’t send his daughter to NLS because he saw a guy and a girl make out on the tennis court? Isn’t this (and the consequential lack of student-teacher dialogue) a symptom of a problem that is fairly central to the incident that led to Sasha’s death in The Angel’s Share – of a cultural disconnect between Law School students and the people around them?

Law School was a bubble. Maybe it still is. The world within was culturally, politically, linguistically different from the ‘Portugal’ outside. I would hesitate to draw that link so explicitly because the saddest part about Sasha Kapur’s death is that it dealt to him by unknowns as random act of unthinking violence. When you attribute causality, you reduce the world to a simpler thing than it is.

If you had to dedicate this novel to three storytellers (novelists, film directors, playwrights -- storytellers), who would they be? And why?

The first would be Jack Kerouac, the patron saint of youth in search of itself. The second would be Bob Dylan, who signals to me that at no point in your life need you run out of stories to tell or avatars to slip into. I think they should hurry up and give him the Nobel Prize for Literature already; it’s embarrassing that they haven’t. The third would be Nick Hornby, because more than anything else I have read, High Fidelity and Fever Pitch spoke to me and my passions and whispered that fiction is a mask we wear so we can speak the language of empathy.

What about sympathy and genuiness?

:)

Your father is a novelist, and a fairly well-known one at that (I must admit that when I first saw We Weren't Lovers Like That on the shelf of a bookstore, I thought it would be vaguely erotic).

That’s because you have a filthy mind.

Guilty as charged. Please tell him that I loved The Exile?

Will do.

Did having him around help you write this novel? Say, in understanding what it takes to write one -- schedules, deadlines, self-discipline and things like that? Did you pick up these things osmotically? Or how to approach publishers with a manuscript? How to deal with editors? Anything?

I only wish I had the discipline of my father, who wakes up early and works at a steady pace, and makes a certain amount of progress on his projects every day. The writing process is something that differs vastly for different people and you just have to find the key that works for you.

It was helpful to have a published author tell you to keep at it, keep your expectations in check and not to give up when the rejections come in, or worse, with the interminable waiting for the rejections to come in.

More than any tangible assistance, I would say that it’s a tremendous boost psychologically. Writers are booklovers first, and I grew up in a house of books. My paternal grandparents are both famous writers in Punjabi. To have books and writing in the family means that writing is not alien or terrifying. After this many years of reading, of hearing one side of a conversation, you just want to open your mouth and say something yourself. Writing makes the world of books a dialogue and not just a monologue.

***

The Angel's Share can be bought online -- this link will tell you the options you have in India. And Amazon has it here. But keep those brick-and-mortar bookstores alive; look there first?

An unreliable socio-political history of wedding reception food in Madras

Somewhere in the mid-1990s, brides, grooms, their families, wedding planners, caterers, philosophers and sundry wedding attendees, buoyed by liberalisation-privatisation-globalisation, exposed to alien cultures and rituals, realised that since the wedding reception -- yes, that very reception that looks like a school annual day prize-giving ceremony, with the groom in a suit that will cease to fit him in two months, and the bride in an ultra-bling ghaghra-choli that she will be embarrassed to wear in any other environment -- was not a religious ceremony anyway, it was alright to serve food that wasn't, um, auspicious and upholding traditional Indian values.

So, out went the avials and the morekozhambus, and in came the soups, chats, cheese dosas and syrup-y gulab jamuns. The sit-down leaf-served meal made way for the posh buffet served from behind canopied counters. Why the canopy in indoor venues, you ask? Aesthetics, my friend -- a wedding must either be pleasing to the eye or overwhelming to the senses. A canopy can do either, depending on the mental state of the attendee. The servers, originally in crisp off-white veshtis (they used to be white when they were first worn) changed to random black-and-white plain or checked shirt-trouser-and-aprons and wore tall chef hats. Yes, chef hats. Aesthetics, again.

The banana leaf disappeared, and was replaced by mega-sized melmac or plastic plates that were large enough to hold one chapati or two puris or both, with an overpowering-masala gravy concealing microscopic paneer particles, one bowl of instant-diabetes-inducing sweet rasamalai, one collapsed dosa with accompanying sambar bowl and two chutneys, ladlefuls of "variety rice", pulao, bisi bele bath and curd rice, chips, a pappadum, and a minuscule quantity of red pickle.

Vegetable and fruit carving became the latest rage amongst the mamis as miscellaneous barn animals, cartoon characters, gods and goddesses were all sculpted out of carrots, watermelons, pumpkins and pineapples and placed on a central table in the middle of the hall with spurious sliced vegetables - god knows when they were sliced - posing as salads.

But this model had its disadvantages. Firstly, as the number of guests increased, the cleanliness of recycled plates became questionable. Many guests took to rubbing their plates dry with the provided tissue. Secondly, while the youth with their limitless energy went back for refills and repeated helpings, the middle-aged and the geriatric often under-ate. Thirdly, many guests left the hall without eating -- a serpentine queue (Serpent is too tame a word. Some of the queues are positively anacondaic, threatening to eat up the wedded couple by the time the photographer allows it to slither along) to wish the couple was bad enough, another one for the buffet was too much to handle and guests preferred rushing to the nearest Saravana Bhavan for some tame plate meals.

Then, at a wedding, a few years ago, I noticed a new trend. I trekked up to the dining hall to find, curiously, a sit-down meal. My inner mama was highly pleased and I rubbed my hands in glee, waiting for some hot kozhambu. First, they placed a paper cup next to the leaf and poured some thick red liquid in it -- no payasam, friends, instead we got tomato soup! Soon, a guy followed with two little bowls in his hand -- one had bread crumbs, and the other, I kid you not, corn mixture! To my horror, a rubbery rumali roti was tossed on to my leaf next. This was accompanied by a lot of gravy with four suspended grains of channa. I ate this gingerly, hoping we would be back to regular programming in the next round.

Then came some sticky ajinomoto-overloaded hakka noodles and tomato ketchup (which didn't taste much different from the soup, mind you). I witnessed the cosmic sight of two hundred Tamilian brahmins eating hot noodles off a banana leaf with their fingers. The culinary world-tour didn't end there. Immediately after the noodles came some cheesy baked vegetable, and I swear I tasted some aamchur masala in it. A friend sitting next to me actually ate the au gratin with mango pickle.

Then, we were served sambar rice with chips and curd rice. I breathed calmly for a couple of minutes, before the waiter shocked me again with the dessert menu -- again, on the leaf, to be eaten with bare hands -- of chocolate mousse cake and mango souffle!

That night, I didn't sleep. I really hoped this concept dinner, whatever that concept was, was an aberration. A one-off. A product of an overactive imagination of an under-utilised mind. But I was proved wrong.

In the three years since that meal, I have consumed off the hallowed banana leaf, naans and kulchas with side dishes as outlandish as malai kofta, manchurian, penne arabbiata (the flavour was more Ambattur than Arabia), and localised versions of kachoris, malpuas, vegetable momos, pav bhaji, cutlets, dhoklas, french fries, and even a bar of chocolate.

This encapsulates the spirit of 21st century India -- an India that's global yet local, an India that borrows but makes it's own, an India that's as outward-looking as inward-looking, a democratic masala of a nation that is, in every way, a true original. (Or so I console myself.)

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This piece should appear sometime now in an in-house publication of some sort. If you are in that house, you can read it again. If you aren't, you can come back here to read it.