Life-en-treats

Many months ago, I had the good chance of watching a play in the yakshagaana style, Venuvisarjana . Performed solo by Mantapa Prabhakara Upadhyaya; organized by the Ramateertha Foundation. Mantapa Prabhakara donned the role of Radha and charmed us by walking and talking like a woman. But this play was not just about a man wearing a woman's clothes and playing her role perfectly. There was more in store for us. If it was a story about Radha and Krishna, it's a story about love, is it not? What else can it possibly be? Mind you, I didn't say love story... Venuvisarjana is a story about love, it reflected upon what love is, what Radha's love for Krishna was like and why it stands as exemplary for all times. The play captured Radha's love for Krishna, her contempt for his pranks, their playful togetherness, the torment she faces in the small everyday separations from Krishna, knowing fully that he must just then be on his way to meet her and numerous such other ...

K.N. Ganeshaiah interweaves many disciplines into his stories Padmapani by K.N. Ganeshaiah, Ankita Pustaka, Rs. 120 Padmapani is a collection of eight extraordinarily brilliant stories. You read them and will sure be left with a good hangover; questions, alternate possibilities, twists and turns will haunt you in good measure. For, here is a book that recreates the genre of the thriller and is highly engrossing: what do ants swarming up in groups have to do with US planes flying across a small town in India? Why exactly do the paintings of Ajanta seem feminised? Has the curse on the Mysore Maharajahs been realised? What’s the mystery of the village Goddess and her miracles? Facts and fiction are so woven into each other that readers will feel an irresistible urge to shoot an e-mail to the author and confirm: ‘This is fiction, right?’ As if to test us, Ganeshaiah faithfully reproduces photographs and other historical details his stories are set in. Combining the styles of travel-writing...

First WB and then World Movies showed Before Sunset and Before Sunrise some months ago; two movies that can be seen independent of each other but are also good when watched sequentially. This movie manufactures tears in my body, but does not help with expelling it. Such is its sense of humour. Not sad at all, not happy surely--and not classifiable in those terms at all. The colour this movie splashes about is the colour of truth. An exploration into the myriad forms of love, disappointing relationships and my favourite part: a prophecy lived out. I seriously recommend this movie to those amateurs among us who have seen few movies, little life and even less of relationships. I cannot help saying that, and sounding imperious! Art makes us better and these movies are ART. But, of course, it takes a long long time to even understand art and then benefit from it. Like everything else, it also possesses the ability to violate us. Art makes better human beings because it provides for us...

To sharpen my writing skills I was going to go to bookshops and hunt for some books on clauses and idioms. But I chanced upon a book at my mother’s office library. Yes, that very library that fed my fires while I was younger. All my reading of the classics of several literatures took off from here. Significant memories are Dostoyevsky and Jane Austen. Like always, I freaked out a little bit when I went into the library, the minimum number I have wanted to pick up at any library are 20 plus books and definitely exceed the number of library cards I am allowed. Curse this love of books! This time, I spent a good time convincing and cajoling myself about the PhD work that awaits me and managed to get out of the library with a mere four books. One was on the history of Karnataka, another, a translation of Premchand’s stories, The Wisdom of Lao Tse and the last one, a book that summarized the workings of a newspaper, called Behind the Scenes on a Newspaper. Behind the scenes… is a small boo...

Offering hope An interesting read in Kannada… Ondu Photoda Negative by Sridhara Balagara Ankita Pustaka, Rs.120. If you had begun to feel disillusioned that fiction today was hopelessly caught between historical or ideologically-driven agendas and its very opposite extreme — character sketches that believe in the universality of the human spirit — Balagara’s “Ondu Photoda Negative” is the perfect cure that would render you back into that ever-elusive zone called hope. Balagara’s 13 short stories are each so unique, so brave, true-to-life and filled with themes captured to perfection, that they ask for a redefinition of not just what it is to write, but also of that higher aim of literature — what it is to live. Every story weaves such a magical spell through brevity of language and the introduction of multiple plot-prototypes that we would want to expand the notion of believability as a criterion in art. Balagara is the very epitome of the thumb-rule of literary writing: ‘show, not tel...

Moyers, Bill 1994  A World of Ideas: Conquering America . The Moyers Collection series. Princeton, New Jersey:  Films for the Humanities and Sciences . Notes: VHS color; 30 minutes Reviewed 12 Jun 2009 by: Sushumna Kannan sushumnaa@gmail.com > Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS), Bangalore, India Medium: Film/Video Subject:  Immigrants - United States Mukherjee, Bharati - Interviews Keywords:  Culture, Asia, America, Literature, Immigrant experience, Race, Multiculturalism.   ABSTRACT:    Bill Moyers interviews the Indian-born writer Bharati Mukherjee about the immigrant experience in America in the 1960s and '70s. Mukherjee relates she would rather "conquer" America by contributing to the shaping of its culture and correcting its problems, rather than "adjust" to it. We learn how the 'American dream' survives for Asian immigrants despite the country's failed economic promise.      Bharati Mukherjee was born into an upper middle cla...