That video footage of a small time operator Eric Garner being not only handcuffed and overpowered, but also choked to death by the cops on a sidewalk in New York City, will continue to haunt me for a long time.  The man was screaming ‘’ I can’t breathe…I can’t breathe’’ for God’s sake!  I could never imagine that the police force of one of the most industrialized and advanced country in the world could act in such a barbaric manner.  The fact that the deceased was a black man is not just an incidental inconvenience.  Clearly the massive unrest that one saw on the streets of Ferguson in the state of Missouri in the wake of shooting down of another small time but unarmed offender Mike Brown, you could have been forgiven if you thought that you are back in the dark days of the sixties when the black folks would regularly fight pitched battles across various cities and towns of the United States against the predominately white law enforcement authorities for the implementation of their civil rights.  Of course it’s hard to judge sitting thousands of miles away here in India, but the U.S. as a society has to travel a lot more distance before it could completely deal with its deeply troubling and complicated legacy of racial tension.

Since Indian television sucks most of the time because of the low brow soaps with regressive plotline and shocking aesthetics, not to mention the news channels that are behaving like lynch mob in order to garner maximum eyeballs.  I now devote a considerable part of my nightly prime time to music.  To me listening to quality music is not just a pastime but a rather spiritual experience.  When I shut off my eyes and let the melody and rhythm wash over me, the effect is therapeutic to say the least.  Hindustani music is in my blood and bones but I have also acquired a taste for English music and Jazz.

What can one say about Sachin Tendulkar that hasn’t already been said over the last couple of decades?  So, instead of gilding the lily, I want to talk about his autobiography that came out couple of weeks ago.  Now I have followed the career of the master batsman right from his first day in international cricket in November 1989 to his last in November 2013, in fact, I have lived and died through his batting, over the years, he exercised a strange hold on my mood depending on how he batted and I don’t think any other sportsperson has received as much mass adoration in India as he has.  If ever there was a case of somebody being both Moses and Beatles rolled into one, he would come pretty close.

In light of the above mentioned, you would think that when the man himself has come out with the story of his life, I would be dying to lay my hands on it.  But that is far from the case.  Even though I yield to no one in my admiration for Sachin, I don’t believe that he can do or even he’s done justice to the art of writing an autobiography.  As a fan and a follower his exploits with the bat have been a matter of records and he’s had such a long and phenomenal career that for the statistically minded, he is a goldmine.  But I think when you are telling the story of your life; you need to come up with a lot more than giving us a lowdown of your deeds with the bat for us to be really hooked.  I don’t care about the generalities like you were disappointed when this or that happened or you felt emotional when something else happened.

Let’s face it.  Sachin, when he was in his playing days, never showed any inclination to speak up or speak out on any controversial issues surrounding the game.  He would always go about his business quietly and without any fuss.  By nature he is politically correct, even boringly so.  In my view, people like him don’t come up with a tell all, a kind of no-holds-barred memoir.   Do we get to know his unfiltered view on betting and match fixing that so much bedeviled Indian cricket? No.  Do we get to know what he thinks of the way sports in general and cricket in particular has been run in this country?  No.  His rise as a cricketing God has coincided with India’s emergence from an insular, plodding and mediocre economy to one of the fastest growing economy around the world.  But does Tendulkar dovetails the larger narrative of his country to his phenomenal career as a cricketer?  The answer unfortunately is a resounding NO. 

George Orwell once said that an autobiography is not to be trusted unless it reveals something disgraceful about the man.  Surely, it would be unfair to hold Sachin to that exacting standard.  But he could have done a lot better than sticking to tired clichés and politically correct posturing.  Maybe, it will need somebody other than the man himself to tell the definitive story of a phenomenon called SACHIN RAMESH TENDULKAR, because this one is too tepid for my liking.  

Reading this wonderful memoir by Naseeruddin Shah, one can’t help but being pleasantly surprised by the candor of the man.  Usually the Indian luminaries in general and people from the movie world in particular are quite cagey about revealing themselves to the public.  Most of the time they would be either be evasive or resort to embellishing the important moments in their lives.  But not Naseer.  He has a produced a first rate memoir which gives a vivid account of the life of this very unremarkable man from a nondescript town who went on to become one of the finest actors this country has thrown up.

From his utter failure in academics and because of this, his uneasy relationship with his father with whom he could never reconcile, his roving eye for women, to his experiments with LSD not to mention discovering sex for the first time in the tent of a Gypsy woman!  It’s been one hell of a ride for him.  Until I read the book, I didn’t know that in the first flush of infatuation and a budding romance, he’d married a Pakistani woman with whom he also produced a baby girl. Of course when the novelty wore off and the grim reality of compatibility hit home and not least because the lady in question Purveen was fourteen years his senior.  He gets estranged from not only his wife but also his daughter who he would not see for another fourteen years.  What is remarkable is that he has not tried to  gloss over the complete indifference that he felt for the child.  There are some pithy but accurate observations on the Hindi film industry and its unique star system.  When you go through some illuminating passages about the craft of acting, you can sense that Naseer is not only a good actor but a highly intelligent man.  I liked it a lot when he describes how later in life he found his anchor and soul mate in Ratna Pathak, a decent actor in her own right and they have stayed in a happy and loving marriage for well  over thirty years.  He credits Ratna for re-establishing connection with his estranged daughter Heeba.

The one thing that really underpins the whole enterprise is his lifelong commitment and passion for acting and to that end, this memoir is a no holds barred attempt, sometimes moving, sometime darkly comic, totally self-deprecatory, to tell the story of the life of a seriously gifted actor of this generation.  

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.