The Death of Imagination

Omkara, a.k.a. "Bollywood Does Othello", turned out to be a more than solid recommendation. Lots of interesting choices, chief among them giving Iago a wife and a motivation. You've got your songs, of course, but only a couple big choreographed dance numbers, one of which completely confirms the Hitchcockian principle that the most desultory conversation becomes engrossing when you realise there's a ticking bomb underneath the table. (Though given that the dancers in that scene consisted almost entirely of jiggling potbellied policemen, I did not strictly need the additional inducement.) The flaws were chiefly technical, such as a scene in the bed of a pickup that had rudimentary lighting errors or a couple with seriously muddy sound. (Could be the print, of course, since the DVD did lock up in a number of places.) And it's not even ridiculously long, at two-and-a-half hours only 25% lengthier than one of our other immediate options, The quiet man.

If the Bollywood Macbeth is even half as good, it'll be well worth our time. Now if we could just convince Bhardwaj to take on Merry wives of Windsor...

Somehow, last weekend managed to be both productive and relaxing. No, I'm not quite sure how that works either. Well, one cause was the thunderstorms on Sunday which kept our realtor holed up at some distant airport so the afternoon photo session got rescheduled for today. Thus, after humping to get monshu's apartment dejunked and gleaming, there was nothing to do in the end but slip in a classic Hindi movie and sip blueberry-ginger mojitos.

It took quite a bit of coaxing to get monshu's buggy French DVD player (yeurr days, zey arre noombared, m'sieur!) to play Junoon, but I think it was worth it even if the GWO found himself unable to empathise at all with Shashi Kapoor's stern broody Pathan. My problem was a little different: What is wrong with you that obsess over callow, calf-girl Nafisa Ali when you're married to knockout firecracker Shabana Azmi? But the tension between Kapoor and his real-life wife Jennifer Kendall as the calf's iron-willed English mother was engrossing, as was the bloody backdrop of the Indian Mutiny of 1857 (even if the battle scenes were somewhat sub-All Hitler Channel in their staging). Plus you have some stand-out minor roles like a raving fakir, a meddlesome aunt, and the stunning moustache on an impossibly thin, young Kulbhushan Kharbanda. Which is good, because there wasn't a single production number in the entire proceedings. At one point, I pointed out to my better half that we'd gone an entire hour between songs; it was almost like watching something from the parallel cinema! I wonder, was that common thirty years ago, or was this particular labour of love somewhat exception even at the time?

Unfortunately, those same thunderstorms that gave us our unexpected break also woke me up at 4 a.m. and kept me up. (On the positive side, I lay there a full twenty minutes before I remembered I was supposed to be obsessing about my love-gone-wrong. Progress!) As I'd been making the bed the night before, I reflected on the fact that I've basically given up on setting my alarm and yet haven't overslept except for the times I "meant to" (e.g. when I felt ill and decided if I slept in, than so be it). Of course, that was the cue for me to oversleep this morning and dash to work without my cell phone or my raincoat. On top of that, I just learned that I need to hire new summer help the very week that my second in command (who handles interviews while I'm away so I can take a break without worrying about missing some candidate) has jury duty. It's enough to make one want to go back home and file away his correspondence!