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