Smileysson's sense of mole - A review of Tomas Alfredson's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy movie

Jim Prideaux has been shot by a waiter in Brno for trying to leave without paying for his coffee

Circus, the spy headquarters of a Scandinavian nation. Jorge Smileysson is a fit and spry greyhound of a man, a former spy and fond of taking dips in cold pools in the altogether. Overhead the Northern Lights weave their manifolded magic, while below, moles burrow into the Circus. Riki Tarr, scalphunter and spy on the run, has called and blurted out this poorly kept secret. Lisbet Salandar having retired and Smilla having suffered an overdose of snow, Herr Lakon of the ministry has approached Jorge to ask him to uncover the mole.

Jorge being deaf and autistic does not hear and does not react to the offer. Only after Lakon bawls in an ear trumpet does Jorge stir. I need Mendel he says. Mendel or Mendeleev asks Lakon who loves to nail an ambiguity. Mendel says Smileysson. Immediately a burly man materializes and gets into a car. The car moves. No one speaks.

A Circus meeting is in progress. Six figures sit around a table. Control-C is in charge since he is the one who is drinking the most. "We must go at the right time" he says jovially after a final quaff. "What about Jorge?" asks a figure. "Jorge is leaving with me" says Control-c. They leave. They pass through many corridors, descend many staircases. Sweating mountain trolls toil away on either side of dim passages.

Jorge heads for the pool and has a bath.

Percy Alleline or Control-V, is now in charge. Somewhere between the book and 2011, he has lost height and his foul smelling pipes but not his rich Norwegian brogue. Bill Haydon, whom everyone knows is the mole, smirks at Guillam, Belinda the blonde, Smileysson, Jim Prideaux and Ann. He is still smirking in the last frame when he is shot dead.

Jorge comes home to find Ricki Tarr. Tarr has fallen in love with a Moscow centre agent in Istanbul. Turkish delight Irena has a secret. But first Irena has to have a bath. There is a mole in the Circus. Tarr rushes to tell the Circus. Irena comes home to find most of Boris in the bath. He is clean but dead. Soon she is on a ship.

Lakon and the Minister play squash. Lakon then whips the Minister with birch twigs (this has been edited out of the movie). Then they have a sauna bath while talking to Control-V.

Connie tells Jorge that she is underfucked. Then they both drink and look over old photographs.

Guillam goes to the Circus library. Befuddled moments later he manages to get the wrong file. He is taken to meet Control-V who shouts at him. Guillam is very sad and also very angry. He goes to Jorge's house and hits Tarr. To take his mind off sex and violence, Jorge tells Guillam the story of how he lost a Ronson lighter. Soon Jorge is also sad.

Toby Esterhazy is taken on a drive to see a plane land. He cries with joy and blurts out the name of the safe house.

Jorge meets the minister and Herr Lakon. They decide to have a joint bath soon.

Tarr goes to Paris to send a telegram to the Circus. Bill Haydon who cannot read, takes the gram to Polyakov but gets caught and is sent Sarratt the school to learn how to read.

Smiley is now head of the Circus and will be known as Ctrl-Alt-Delete

Infidel - Ayaan Hirsi Ali - A review

Ayaan Hirsi Ali's life and deeds have made her simultaneously a heroine and a villain depending upon your point of view. Her's is the incredible story of a Somali Muslim woman who till her early twenties lived the life of many other women in deeply conservative Muslim societies, who enroute to an arranged marriage manages to escape to the Netherlands, finds refuge there, is ostracized by her family and community, educates herself, becomes a Member of the Dutch parliament, courageously speaks, writes and makes films against the bias and the violence against women in Islam and becomes both an icon and a role model to Muslim women as well as an object of vilification of Muslims worldwide. Theo Van Gogh her partner in making the controversial film Submission, was subsequently murdered by a Muslim as retribution for the documentary. Such is the hatred she has garnered for her views that for the past several years Hirsi Ali has lived her life under a heavy security cover.

Infidel is her story.

It is a work that spoke to me on two levels.

The first was at that of Ayaan's perception of all that what she went through as a Muslim woman in a deeply conservative Islamic society & culture. A brutal feminine circumcision at age 7, the incessant indoctrination of woman's lesser state and how this was how God meant it to be, seeing the diminished lives of mother, grandmother and other feminine relations and friends, having her skull broken by an Islamic teacher who thought physical abuse would teach her the right way, living in a broken home, the innumerable restrictions on every dimension of existence from clothing, appearance and movement, emotion, expression, life choices, the lack of educational opportunities, the gulf in freedoms given to her brother and to herself or her sister. The constant claustrophobic admonitions of lay preachers, acolytes, evangelists, relatives who had seen the light.

There were times as I read the book, that I had to stop reading and do something else for a few minutes just to calm down. It is impossible not to be swept up by the book and the world and experiences it describes.

You suffer with Ayaan as she goes through a sequence of traumatic episodes, you delight at her escape to Europe, you are in awe at the way this barely educated woman breaks out of various mental cocoons & barriers, chases impossible dreams of education and at her courage in speaking about Islam's treatment of women and fighting to ensure more freedom to Muslim women in the developed world.

It is a hero's story, well told. Ayaan has the gift of controlled narration. Her matter of fact style of reporting, unleavened by dramatic flourishes, directly speaks to the reader. And speak it already has to millions, some of whom are influential law makers. Ayaan's story and her talks on Islam and woman has led to steps to prevent violence and crime against Muslim women in Europe, the move to ban the Hijab and the increased negative focus on Islam itself as a religion. At least the first of this is good.

This is where the second level I spoke about butts in with inconvenient questions.

The second level has to do with two prominent global narratives at work today. One is the narration in the West and increasingly even in India, of the evil that is radical Islam, the conflation of this with 9/11, Al Qaeda, 26/11 and many other terrorism based horrors. The other narrative belongs to the Muslims, of the sense of Islam itself being under threat from the West, of Islamic countries being attacked, of Muslims being targeted for their religion and the need for a robust response. The blasphemous cartoons of the prophet Mohammed, Salman Rashdie, global war on terror all merge in this narration to create a sense of victimhood, of being the target of an imperialistic hegemonic Christian West which wants to finish off Islam. Two decades after Samuel Huntingdon, we are back in cliche land, of clashes between civilizations.

There is no middle ground between these two opposing narratives. And it is here that Ayaan's book is troubling because it feeds in so well, almost conveniently, with the Western narrative. Every word in Ayaan's book may well be true and it is as well to state that there is no reason to doubt her story (though there are some hiccups as a search on the net will show). But this dovetailing with the Western narrative on Islam does give a sense of unease that this will provide further fodder to those who are moving from targeting Islamic terrorism as in the specific to Islam as a religion in the general.

It reminds me of a controversial (now known to be flawed) study of the 60s (forget the name) which measured IQ levels of African Americans, found that it was lower than of other Americans and concluded that this was proof that blacks were sub-human. The study of course fed into white supremacist biases and was welcomed by Southern states while liberals naturally questioned the findings.

There is a similar divide at work right now about Islam and it does raise the issue of whether there might have been some literary creativity used by Ayaan to exaggerate experiences in order to feed a constituency which she knew would be the primary consumers of her work.

But even if we assume some artistic license, it remains a sobering and inspirational story of the systematic indoctrination and organized abuse that women go through in Islamic societies and that it is possible to break free and find freedom elsewhere.

A note to the Hindutva Indian reader: there may be a measure of Schadenfreude in reading Ayaan but a closer look at home will show that outside of urban India, the lot of Hindu women is scarcely better. We can begin with female infanticide that has led to India having one of the worst gender ratios in the world, the fact that female literacy, life expectancy lags woefully behind the male, the reality that girls are still viewed as a burden to the household and discriminated against in the matter of nourishment, education, health care and nurturing parental attention. Even today most Indian girls have little control over choice of partner, indeed are often just informed of their own nuptials, without a veto vote. The fate of Hindu widows is of course well documented. Dowry is still an ongoing practice in most communities. So is purdah. Even in many educated households, the "honour of the house" argument is used to stop the well educated wife from working. In others, the wife is magnanimously allowed to work but is expected to still cook, take care of the children and do all the housework prior to and subsequent to her work hours. So life is not exactly swarg to the average Indian woman.

Postscript: There are several videos featuring Ayaan (such as the seven part debate against Zeba Khan), the face to face with Fareed Zakaria, the 2 part discussion on HardTalk etc. Worth a watch.

Inspector Morse serial - Wolvercote tongue - Why did they stray from The Jewel that was ours

The John Thaw as Inspector Morse episode The Wolvercote tongue has perhaps the most iconic TV policeman ever (Thaw as Morse), great actors (for example, Simon Callow) and a great book on which it is based.

It is terrible.

The heart of The Jewel that was Ours, Colin Dexter's book on which TWT is based, had deep in its convuluted centre, a crime committed long ago which devastated two families. In one it left a paraplegic, in the other a dead girls. All that happens in the present including the theft of the tongue and the murders that follow can all be traced back to that dark heart, the primal cause. How that truth reveals itself, whorl by whorl, to show the interconnectedness of all things was the most fascinating thing about the book.

The TV serial has the same setting, more or less the same characters and then proceeds to tell another, far more boring tale. One can only wonder why. Perhaps the scriptwriter wanted to do a deliberately anti-Morse story, the kind where the various threads don't really tie in together. Whatever the motivation, we end up with a disconnected story with many threads which do not really relate to each other. A crowd of tourists land up, a theft happens, a woman lies dead, an affair ends, a don makes his excuses for not attending a party, the body of the unfortunate don is found, the prime suspect of the original theft remains at large, the tour guide's mind is elsewhere, the don's wife commits suicide, the tour guide's wife also ends up dead, the prime suspect returns with a daughter in tow, the murderer is found without too much fuss and then the tongue is also found. Morse is left contemplating life through the bottom of a beer glass. Good night.

What was that?

I find it unforgiveable when a scriptwriter mucks up a perfectly good story just to seem clever or original or for any other 'creative' reason. One can forgive them some flourishes, a little artistic liberty, the removal of inessential elements but to tamper with the heart should carry the death penalty with no appeal IMO.

The only excuse for doing this would be if one landed up with a better story than the original. If you are not confident of doing that, desist.

I am reminded of an anecdote in Thomas Kennealy's 2009 book, The Making of Schindler's List which is Tom Kennealy's personal journey that led to the book and the movie. Spielberg first hires Kennealy himself to write the script but Kennealy is unable to. The job is then passed to a succession of other writers who also labour manfully but fail. Finally Spielberg calls Tom and tells him, "Tom, I am going to do what you told me years ago. You told me 'Just shoot the bloody book Steven'. I am going to do just that" And he does.

Listen to the master. Stick close to the book and the original story.

Dev Anand - The first anti-hero

Farewell to the first anti-hero in Indian films

It is difficult to think of another major actor who almost from his first film was comfortable with the colour grey. While he was an out and out villain in Baazi and Jaal, his role in several other films was in territory that no other major mainstream actor would inhabit for the next two decades (Amitabh being the next given his roles in Deewar, Trishul, Sholay, Agneepath, Muqaddar ka Sikandar, Shakti and Sharabi). 

Consider Dev's Bombai ka babu where he plays the role of a minor figure in the Bombay underworld who during a drunken scuffle in a gambling den accidentally kills one of his acquaintances. On the run he meet someone who recognizes him and blackmails him into masquerading as the long missing son of a rich man. Dev agrees and is accepted without question by the father, the mother and a sister. Complications set in when Dev falls in love with the 'sister' and further increase when he realizes that the man he murdered is the son he is masquerading. It is a fascinating tale (apparently taken from an O Henry short story but which reminds me more of the novels of Du Maurier, Cronin and Shute), well told and Dev Anand plays the role with empathy, oscillating between being torn with guilt over having deprived the family of their legitimate son, shame and anger because he has fallen in love with his 'sister' and knows there is no way forward, terror of getting caught to begining to feel and act as the real son. In Kala Bazar, Dev is a black marketeer and hoodlum who falls in love and turns over a new leaf. In Kala Pani, the son of a man who is serving his life sentence for a brutal murder. In Guide he seduces a married woman and gets her to run off with him abandoning her husband. In Taxidriver he plays the sleazy figure of a Bombay taxi driver.

These roles avoid two of the common traits of heroes in India, viz., hero as superman and where the hero finally makes it to the big time - be it in business, politics, the underworld, literature, science or any other career track. In Dev's movies, his roles are unheroic and in all he remains an ordinary flawed human being even at the end. He does not become a multi-millionaire, the don of a city or a novelist with a fan following. He is in a sense the anti-Amitabh since the latter's roles once he achieved superstardom always had him playing a larger than life character.

Raj Kapoor might have also championed the ordinary man but Raj's ordinary man was an idealistic one, ever honest, simple minded and acting according to his principles. Dev Anand's ordinary man was much more real with fluid morals, a person who was not above lying, cheating, seducing, drinking, gambling and even murder under the influence.

This persona of Dev Anand was probably a joint creation of Dev with his brother Vijay aka Goldie Anand, often the director of his early movies (and what most would consider his best movies). What Goldie and Dev managed which the art film world could not was to create mainstream films which had novel, interesting, topical, real stories with characters who were not stereotypes. Vijay and Dev seem to have parted ways in the 80s and most of Dev's latter day movies were directed by himself. They were mostly terrible. Take Lootmaar where he plays an airline pilot. The villains kidnap him. Why? Because they have a malfunctioning aircraft and expect him to repair it (conflating the roles of pilot and engineer). Anyway, Dev, game to the bitter end, enters the aircraft and emerges after a few hours with oil on noble brow, trademark bob of the head and uttering the immortal words "Carburettor karaab hai". The movie was so bad that it was actually fun to watch. The same was probably the case with his other movies of the period. Perhaps the best interpretation of this is that the muse might have left him but movie making and acting was all he knew and he continued doing what he loved.

The other aspect of his career which others too have commented upon was the urbaneness and the style of his character. There was a always a slickness to the Dev character, a quick wit and gift of the gab. Not for Anand the moroseness of a Dilip Kumar or the measured pomposity of a Raj Kumar or the irritating, "Mrs D'Sa Mrs D'Sa" gaucheness of Raj Kapoor. Dev's characters were always city slick, one move ahead of the competition. But it was always the glibness of a small time operator and not of a big fish.

And Dev's films of course also gave had some of the best music in Hindi cinema. The roster of classics is long. Jaaye to Jaaye Kahan, Gaata rahe mera dil, Dum maro dum, Abhi na jaao chodu kar, Tere ghar ke saamne, Shokiyon me gola jaae, one can go on and on. And the music spanned genres. From the classicality of Jaaye to jaaye kahan or Din dal jaaye haye to the hipness of Dum maro dum.

The best of Dev was behind him and that will remain with us and in us

A cell for senior citizens - iBall Aasaan - Problems in the last mile

Recently iBall, the people with the ergonomically designed consumer electronics, came out with a cell phone aimed at senior citizens, the iBall Aasaan. This cell phone is supposed to have it all, large sized letters on the keypad, big sized font on screen display, simple one touch operation of many functions, loud volume, SOS feature etc. After reading a few reviews I bought one for my parents, whose old cell was showing distinct signs of age.

This is not meant to be a review of Aasaan but to point out that even with the best intentions, products aimed at a certain category fail to carry out the thought process through to completion.

Now, let us assume I am a senior citizen and after looking at the product and reading a few reviews I buy the cell phone. I open the attractive box in which the cell phone comes and dig down to unearth the user manual so that I can learn how to use the Aasaan.

I open the user manual and stop dismayed. See the image below to know why.

Fig 1: iBall Aasaan on top of User Manual

Did you notice why? Of course you did. The user manual would require a magnifying glass to read even for someone with normal eyesight. How on earth is the senior citizen expected to plough through this microscopic lettering? What iBall should have done was to have the user manual in 2 parts. One part, a fold out, consisting of the sections seniors would need the most to get going or frequently. This part should be with large sized lettering. It need be just a few pages and can be an FAQ like document that can be stuck on a wall. Charging the cell phone, putting in or taking out the battery, the SIM card, turning the cell on / off, etc. The other sections can be small font sized. That way the user manual would be actually usable by its target consumers AND at the same time not bulky.

The sides of the Aasaan have four buttons / switches to enable the senior citizen to have easy access to four functions: turning on / off the torch, locking the cell phone, the FM radio and volume control. The first two are on the right and the last two on the left. See images below.

 Fig 2: Left panel view - FM and Volume control

Fig 3: Right panel view - Lock and Torch

It is great that iBall have thought of having one touch buttons and switches conveniently located on the sides. But here's the thing, why not have the buttons or switches in a colour that contrasts with black, such as white or yellow?. Better still, have them glow in the dark. Right now all the four buttons are exactly the same colour as the side panel which furthermore is coloured black, not the best of colours for a product aimed at seniors. I found my father peering hard at the side panels to know what was what and what was where. He was then reduced to using touch to identify the locations since the visual cues were absent.

These lacunae in a product that is otherwise well conceived shows how important it is that all aspects of the product from the packaging, the documentation, the product need to be tested thoroughly by the target community for usability under various conditions. Re the Aasaan it is obvious that the user documentation must not have been tested with seniors. Nor was proper testing done with the side panels. Aesthetics should never be allowed to trump over function, as it seems to have done in this case. 

Get well soon Aakar Patel

I have for long admired Aakar Patel’s writing. Apart from his articles in various Indian magazines and newspapers such as The Mint, Aakar is also a columnist on Pakistani news sites and magazines such as The News and recently the weekly, The Friday Times. Ironically, it was from his articles in the Pakistani e-news and e-zines that I came to know my own first city Bombay / Mumbai better, got an anthropological education on the mercantile Gujarati community and learnt the close affinity in ethnic terms of two historical figures, MA Jinnah and MK Gandhi. During the 2009 elections, we had his superb article on the gulf in concrete achievement between Manmohan Singh and ‘Iron man’ LK Advani to the latter’s disadvantage. Recently his articles on the Urdu media in South Asia showed the difference in narrative not only between the English and Urdu newspapers but between Urdu dailies.

It was therefore disappointing to read his wildly off the mark hagiographic piece on Sonia Gandhi in a recent Friday Times (Get well soon Sonia Gandhi ).

The article starts well enough. After a few paras discussing Sonia's absence from India for medical treatment in the US, a tongue in cheek section on the educational background of Sonia (to be blunt, non-existent) and of the Gandhis (meagre), Aakar gets into the meat of the article and that is where your jaw begins to drop in disbelief.

He begins by saying, “She has revived Congress, and it is again the great political party of developing nations.”

Whuh?

"... again the great political party of developing nations"

This almost suggests we are back in the glory days of Nehru and Shastri. Even if things were hunky dory, this statement would give us pause. But to say this after all we have seen over the past year,CWG, 2G, cash-for-votes, Radia tapes, Air India aircraft purchases, Reliance, Adarsh society, … is beyond belief. It is no exaggeration to say that in common perception the Congress today seem more a bunch of graft artists in oligarchic cahoots with big biz, caught red handed in the middle of a loot of public resources. It is no comfort to the Indian citizen that the opposition BJP seem to be no better (as for example the Yeddy and Reddy show). 

Aakar goes on to say, “The best thing she has done for India is to hand Manmohan charge of policy.” No, no, no Aakar. There was a time when lulled by the romance of Sonia relinquishing power and believing in the mythology of 'Mr. Market-reform' Manmohan Singh, I also subscribed to this but if there is just one thing the last six months have revealed with its scams and Anna Hazare moments, it is that this division just does not work and indeed, never did work.

If we remove the gauze it is not difficult to understand why.

In Sonia and Manmohan we have two very reticent individuals, neither of whom seems comfortable in wielding power, who have both in varying degrees abdicated governance to the more forceful, whether driven by ideology (the Left in UPA-I), the frankly venal (Maran and Raja in UPA-I and II) or those working their own regional electoral agendas (Lalu in UPA-I and Mamata in UPA-II). All that Sonia's handing over the 'reins' to Dr. Singh achieved was to give a respected and scholarly face to a government where pretty much all the ministers could do as they pleased with little danger of accountability or reprimand.

Given the opacity that shrouds this government's functioning, it is particularly difficult to know exactly how and what Dr. Singh contributes, how he brings his erudition, his experience, his gravitas and whatever else to the table, how he drives the agenda and the government. This government increasingly seems directionless and leaderless. The most common perception is that especially when the chips are down, no one is in charge.We saw this during 26/11, when the 2G scam broke and most recently during the Anna Hazare imbroglio.

Let us consider the recent mismanagement of the Anna Hazare movement as it highlights this 'we-are-all-out-to-lunch' rudderlessness. No one seemed to know who should be fielding this Black Swan from Ralegaon Siddhi. Kapil Sibal and PC batted it around for a while then screwed it up by sending Hazare to Tihar to keep company with Raja. Rahul then picked it up, held it indeterminedly for a while then passed on the hot potato to that old troubleshooter Pranab who finally managed to work a solution in the Nth hour. Dr. Singh gave two soporific speeches but apart from that one did not get any sense of his being in charge. It almost seemed as if he felt that this had nothing to do with the government. This was odd as the handling of the burgeoning Hazare movement was an executive issue and the tackling of their Lokpal demands a legislative issue. In either case, the ball was with various ministries, parliament, the cabinet and the PM.

So no Aakar, one would strongly disagree that the best thing she (Sonia) did was to hand over reins to Dr Manmohan Singh. A recent exhaustive profile of Dr. Manmohan Singh that came in Caravan Magazine further highlights why this was not a good move and in retrospect may not have been in India's best interests.

Aakar then goes on to discuss the children, Priyanka and Rahul and gives his vote of confidence to the latter as PM designate when he says, “Rahul appears to be able to think independently and if this is so, will make a great prime minister, like Manmohan”. How do we know Aakar? Can you point to any thing he has done that highlights his capabilities to be even a minister of state leave alone the Prime Minister of India? Rahul has now been roaming the countryside for a few years now. Around the same time that he launched his yatra he also came out with his first foot-in-the-mouth statement that it was Gandhi family that caused Pakistan to break up in 1971. If his recent actions and statements are anything to go by he does not seem to have matured through his journey without maps in the Indian hinterland. His success in managing Congress electoral fortunes in various states (such as in Bihar in 2009 and 2010) have been indifferent. He continues to make wild statements such as accusing Mayawati of a non-existent carnage in Bhatta Parsaul. And there was his sudden 'George Fernandes during Emergency' like appearance in zero hour in Parliament during the Lokpal debate to give a sanctimonious discourse to parliamentarians about institutional reform.

It deeply worries me (and no doubt many others) that this gauche young man, with zero experience in administration or governance might be at the helm of our affairs in 2014. The only positive I can find in Rahul is that at least no charge of mass murder can be brought on his head. He is not Narendra Modi, who along with the BJP continues to be in blissful denial about the Gujarat carnage in 2002 and his sins of omission and commission during that period.

The choice in front of the Indian voter in 2014 thus may be Hobsonian. Between an unproven, inexperienced person whose only qualification is name recognition and a super-administrator who at the very least, winked at the murder of thousands. Between a party that still behaves as if it can rule India by owning a name and one that seems unable to understand that clubs are no longer trumps and the world has moved on.

In other words Aakar, perhaps it is time we asked harder questions of Sonia, of Dr. Singh and Rahul baba. 

Perhaps like why the Congress party does not have elections for President and other office bearers every year which will throw up leaders who don’t necessarily have the Gandhi surname? Before 1947 the Congress had regular elections and many a Congress leader was groomed through this process. Dadabhai Naoroji, Badruddin Tyabji, Pherozeshah Mehta, Surendranath Banerjea, Lala Lajpat Rai, Chittaranjan Das, Maulana Abdul Karim Azad, Sarojini Naidu, Vallabhbhai Patel, Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, Subhash Chandra Bose, Acharya Kripalani, Pattabhi Sitaramayya and many others. Every year would throw up a new name thus creating a healthy pool of capable people who could lead the party. Moreoever, this democratic churn, year after year, also gave the INC an all Indian texture.

Today the oldest Indian party has had the same president from 1999. Elections are now deemed unnecessary. It is likely that when Sonia hangs up her boots, we will have either Rahul or Priyanka becoming the next President.

 India deserves better Aakar. The time for hagiographies is over