What is it about this movie ‘Birdman’ that has created such a buzz, propelling it all the way to the best picture and best director Oscar winner?  I’ll have to find out by watching it.  I’m so happy for Eddie Redmayne; the guy did a stupendous job enacting such a severely disabled character of Stephen Hawking.  Whatever people might think a best actor Oscar trophy really validates your identity as an actor and a performer.  You leave a legacy behind you.  You don’t have to look any further than Tom Cruise; he’s been one of the most bankable stars in Hollywood for many years and yet the biggest hole in his career has been the conspicuous absence of this golden statue.

   By the same token, Julianne Moore, after doing years of good work gets her due reward by getting the best actress award for playing an academic professor, who struggles to cope with the onset of Alzheimer in the movie ‘Still Alice’.  Even though I would have loved to see ‘Boyhood’ win some of the awards, because this movie is close to my heart.  But never mind there were so many good selections to choose from that somebody had to miss out.

   On a different note, how wonderfully they present the show.  Everything works with clockwork precision and the warmth and camaraderie seems genuine.  This is one occasion when the actors aren’t actually acting.  I was desperately hoping that Kiera Knightly or Jennifer Lopez would come on the stage so that I could have had a better look at them in all their glory!  But I did get to see Jennifer Aniston and boy didn’t she look stunning!  And Meryl Streep’s tribute to those who passed on during the course of the year was truly moving.  And last but by no means least, Lady Gaga can sing!

‘THE UNQUIET ONES A History of Pakistan Cricket’ has to be of the finest books on cricket to have come out in recent times.  And let me also say that the author Osman Samiuddin is without doubt the best cricket writer in south Asia especially when it comes to Pakistan cricket.  As the subtitle suggests, the book is primarily a chronological history of the evolution Pakistan cricket, but in broad terms you could also take it as a pithy and humorous observation on the state of Pakistani society and its rulers.  Although the author is a proud Pakistani, he doesn’t wear his patriotism on his sleeve and hence not blind to its faults.  What is quite remarkable is that how cricket and state of the nation have generally mirrored and reflected each other’s chaos and disorder.  But because of what the author describes as the innate ‘’jazba’’ or passion of its players and some brilliant administrators that Pakistan has enjoyed quite a lot of success and yet because the overall structure is inherently fragile and dependent on the whims and fancies of individuals, the descent into hell has been also spectacular.  This book is a true labor of love.  It is witty in style and ambitious in scale.

The couple of chapters devoted to unarguably the most influential cricketers that Pakistan has produced namely Imran Khan and Javed Miandad make for a riveting reading.  Their respective characters have been deconstructed like an accomplished psychoanalyst.  For someone like me who’s always had this curious fascination with Pakistan, our neighbor with whom we have shared a love-hate relationship for nearly 70 years, this was a kind of book I’d been looking for quite a while now.

I asked my Oscar trivia question to five people.  Shipra got it right while Kat, D and Mike came up with the wrong answer.  Sylvie had no idea and when I told her it was Daniel Day Lewis, she said the man creeps her out.  I was taken aback somewhat.  I mean why would such a seriously fine actor like him would creep you out?  But anyway, to each his own.  Kat said Jack Nicholson which is par for the course.  What was most interesting was Mike and D’s answer.  They said Marlon Brando.  A perfectly reasonable answer given that he has been one of the legends of Hollywood in fact film scholars and historians talk about the craft of acting in two parts namely before Brando and after Brando because he was the watershed as far as the method of acting is concerned.  Because until he arrived on the scene, acting was done mainly in a theatrical fashion which was far from natural.  But his approach to acting really changed the way subsequent generations of actors faced the camera.  Marlon Brando introduced what is now known as method acting where there is plenty of realism in the way you enact the character.  They call it “getting under the skin of the character”.  So it is but natural to assume that if anybody would have got three Academy award for best acting in a leading role, it would be him.  And yet that’s not the case.  Brando got two Oscars in his glittering career.  First time he won the trophy in 1955 in Elea Kazan’s ON THE WATERFRONT and the second time he was given the award was in 1973 for playing the role of Don Vito Corleone in THE GODFATHER. 

When he was called upon the stage in 1973 to receive  the award, something almost surreal happened when I think about it.  Not only he refused to accept the award which  so many actors crave all there lives but he also launched into a full blown tirade against the American corporate and military-industrial complex in general and the brutal and exploitative treatment of the native red Indians by the state in particular.  Things got so heated that he had to be ordered off the stage by that poster boy of right wing America John Wayne who was obviously outraged.  By that time Brando had clearly aligned himself with the liberal agenda big time.  He was a sort of pioneer in Hollywood activism the likes of which men like George Clooney and Sean Penn have carried forward.  

                                                                                  

Let’s not be mealy mouthed for once.  We must have the guts to call a spade a spade.  And by that I mean the toxic spread of Wahhabi Islam that is wreaking havoc in the civilized world.  Ironically these medieval psychopaths are adopting the same methods of modernity that they are raging against to propagate their diabolical worldview.  Even the very word Islam means total and complete submission in Arabic.  Now it has come to signify an unquestionable submission to the forces of unreason and bigotry.  Don’t get me wrong, I am not an Islamophobe.  My love and respect for the Muslim community is no different from my love and respect for any other community and since I am not a religious minded anyway, it doesn’t matter to me in the least.

I don’t want to get into a Freudian analysis of the alienation some sections of the Muslim community be experiencing and I also don’t wish to dig out that old chestnut ‘’root cause’’.  My contention is that every other organized religion has undergone some sort of reform over the centuries but only the mainstream of Islam that is caught in a time warp.  We’ve all been witness to the kind of barbarism being perpetrated by a lot of crazed people in the name of Islam and the prophet.  By raining death and destruction on the innocent people, from Nigeria to France and from Australia to Kenya, they want to establish a utopia of their delusion.  And what could be more abominable than the fact that they derive sustenance from Islam for their murderous ideology. 

The so called ‘’silent majority’’ have done a great disservice to their religion by remaining quite on the growing fundamentalism among the community in general and the young in particular.  Every time something horrible occurs, they will indemnify their condemnation with all kinds of qualifications and rationalizations to guard against any future backlash.  A little more courage and outspokenness on the part of the moderate sections of the Muslim community against all kinds of vile practices and atrocities committed in the name of their religion would be a good beginning.

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.