Imagine a scenario where in Hollywood they decide to make a biopic on Oprah and to enact her on screen, they chose Scarlett Johansson instead of Viola Davis!  What could be more ludicrous than this?  Something similar has actually transpired here in Bollywood.  To make a movie on the life and career of the female boxing world champion and Olympic medal winner Mary Kom is a legitimate creative aspiration for any film maker.  More so when she has made all the Indians proud considering she faced so many hardships in life, being a woman and coming from North East, such a neglected and isolated part of the country.  She has literally punched above her weight to get where she has.

I know that aesthetics, authenticity and attention to detail has never been Bollywood’s forte.  But in this instance, I would like to point at their utter disregard for even the basic norm when it comes to making a so called ‘’biopic’’, and it’s that the person playing the character should have a close resemblance to the subject matter.  Anybody familiar with India would know that people hailing from the North Eastern region of the country share the same mongoloid features as their brethren in other South-East Asian countries, and for the faithful portrayal of Mary Kom, the least the film maker could have done was to have picked some talented girl from there who closely approximated the boxer in terms of looks and features.  But what do they do?  They draft a simpering Priyanka Chopra, one of the many Punjabi actors the Hindi film industry is infested with.  Now Priyanka Chopra (PC for her adoring fans) is one of the biggest movie stars in India and a huge box office draw (though I don’t like her, but then that’s just me poor sod!).

Even if I stretch the bounds of credulity to its breaking point, I cannot imagine Ms. Chopra in the persona of Mary Kom.  And with all due respect to the gritty champion that Mary Kom is, even she would agree that she’s nobody’s idea of a beauty queen.  I have not seen the movie nor do I intend to, by all accounts it has been an indifferent and a lazy effort but that’s hardly my point.  PC must be over the moon, thinking that she has done one better than Hilary Swank in ‘Million Dollar Baby’.  The sooner she disabuses herself of this notion the better.  Say what you will about Hollywood, they don’t display insincerity when it comes to depicting real life people.  Whether it’s Ben Kingsley essaying the role of Gandhi, Denzel Washington playing Malcom X, Sean Penn as Harvey Milk or Nicole Kidman enacting the role of Virginia Woolf.  And what can one say about Daniel-Day-Lewis, he not only played Lincoln to perfection, but he became one.  Do the Indian film makers believe that our notion of womanhood should confirm to the stereotypical standard set by the lowest common denominator?  In this mad rush for commercial bounty, must they throw even the most basic requirements of movie making to the wind?  By selecting PC as their Mary Kom, they have shown, in my view, a shocking lack of sensitivity not only for this petit champion from Manipur, but to the entire womenfolk of the North Eastern region.

It is not very often that something stirs a deep emotion in me.  That creates a churning within, so much so, that your eyes well up.  When I read ‘’ I Married a Communist’’, I underwent the same emotions and some more.  Besides examining one of the most paranoid period in American history, when almost every member of any society was being scrutinized for his or her suspected involvement with the communist party, through our narrator and Rothian alter ego Nathan Zuckerman’s reminiscences, we also chart the topography of human desire and the sheer folly of it.

When, after many years, Mr. Murray Ringold, who was Nathan’s high school teacher of English literature, tells him about the tragic unmaking of his kid brother Ira Ringold, with whom Nathan shared a very special relationship when he was one of Mr. Murray Ringold’s pupil in school.  At some point our narrator lost touch with Ira and moved on in life and is now himself over sixty years old writer, living a reclusive life in rural New England.  What Ira meant to Nathan, but more importantly, what Nathan meant to Ira, has been dealt with most poignantly.  Both Ira and our narrator could not be more dissimilar beside their significant age difference.  Ira was this giant of a man who, with the help of his older brother Murray, literally raised himself from the gutter to become this famous radio star.  To say that Ira had a harsh upbringing, would be a gross understatement.  As Mr. Ringold relates to Nathan that he himself found the civilising path in life and became a teacher, it was never clear to him what Ira, this giant sized brother of his was running away from or running after.  He would try to find solace in Communist ideology, and then he married one of the biggest movie stars, if for nothing else, than just to inhabit a world as far removed from his own as could possibly be.  And then the annihilation began.  An annihilation that was so spectacular and grand in its scope that the mind reels.

But let me not digress.  The purpose here is not to delve deeply into the plot of the book, but to examine why I felt the way I did.  When I see in my mind’s eye the two old men sitting there on the patio in the deck chair, one in his sixties and the other in his nineties, who in another life were pupil and teacher respectively.  As old Mr. Ringold sits there night after night, six nights in a row and only because he knows that he will find a patient listener in his favourite pupil, who shared something subliminal with Ira.  As I see in my mind’s eye, the old age has done its job on Mr. Ringold good and proper.  It has pruned away at his vitality.  The thing about the old age is that you can bludgeoned by life into submission.  You have been exorcising the ghost for so long that you don’t know what it is like not to be surrounded by the shadows all the time.  This conversation between two lonely people makes you realise a few fundamental truths about human beings.

You will betray and be betrayed.  Betrayal is not static, but is in constant motion.  Just when you thought that you have controlled it in one place, it leaks out of another place.  We are a betrayal factory.  You can deal with the cynic and con artist, but a hypocrite is a dangerous liar for he doesn’t even know when he is lying and betraying.  You have got rid of every illusion, God, ideology, politics, but the one thing that will finally get you is your own idealism and unhinge you.  As Nathan Zuckerman reflects on these in the middle of night long after Mr. Ringold is dead and gone, long after everybody is dead and gone.  I tend to think there is no such thing as happily ever after and you will be punished no matter what.

As a human being, you are allowed to be anything.  You can be beautiful, you can be ugly, you can be rich, you can be poor, you can be conservative, you can be liberal, you can be straight, and you can be gay.  No problem as far as I am concerned.  But what you are not allowed to be in my book is to be a crashing bore.  And by God we have more than a couple in our extended family who shall remain nameless for obvious reason.  Whenever I am about to be paid a visit by these worthies, my heart starts sinking, because it is so utterly soul destroying to be in the company of a crashing bore. 

Now who is a crashing bore you might ask.  Well, anyone would does not see the funny side of life, anyone who does not see the tragic side of life, in fact, anyone who doesn’t see human existence in all its shades and dimensions.  One major characteristic of a bore is that they are so much in love with their own voice that it is impossible to get a word in edgeways.  The more wrong they are, the more righteous they get, but for that you first have to be able to make your point which is not easy.  Another thing is their remarkable capacity for passivity and shutting down.  While you have shown the courtesy to listen to them while they were droning endlessly about their son or their son-in-law or their extraordinarily talented daughter, it could be also about the tribulation of their job, about some incident in the distant past, something you are hearing for the nth time, but the moment you try to bring something else to the conversation, to introduce a new element by saying something, that’s when their talent for shutting down is revealed.  They will not only become invisible, even though they are right in front of you, but they will become impervious to what you have to say about anything.  You would be perfectly justified in thinking that it might be more profitable if you banged your head against a brick wall!  They will have you believe that just because they have piled year upon year of simple but monotonous living, they are the repository of all the wisdom, and you will only gain by listening to their spiel.

I can only say that they are a wet blanket, they are rain on my parade and they are on the march of humanity.