New bonding

The burn mark on Camille (a fetching Olga Kurylenko) underlines the change. The world's longest running spy-film franchise, now, comes with a grim real-worldness. Suckers for the old, happy swagger can make do with Sean Connery re-runs. Casino Royale had famously effected the bleak drift for double-o-seven. Quantum of Solace -- the 22nd film instalment featuring Ian Fleming's debonair agent -- takes the mode forward.

James Bond (Daniel Craig) is nursing wounds of betrayal by a woman. That's a sort of first for the super-stolid agent who has his girls and work all sorted out, as smooth as his Martini stir-ons. The heady chases and action set-pieces -- erected on a pan-global sprawl, from Haiti to Siena to Kazan -- work well within the franchise's trademarked template. But it's hard not to pit Craig's bare-knuckle rage against the cocksure poise of Connery. The spy who could kiss his women with all the heart and move on with baffling detachment is, now, someone who forgets the hard way. A killer, bloodied and not done.

The shift in Bond's bearings also, in parts, reflects his new beat. He's on the trail of Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric, flashing moments of edgy evil) who eyes potential in the business of water, in the drylands of Bolivia. Bond has had a rather interesting assortment of antagonists: from metal-mouthed hitmen to egomaniacal media czars. It was, perhaps, also a given that the MI6 agent would have a sham environment crusader like Greene to battle in these days of meltdowns; of the glaciers and otherwise.

Quantum of Solace is, often, a patently snappy Bond vehicle. But what really powers it is the clever, yet intriguing positioning of its protagonist. It's a choice of the maker (Marc Forster from Monster's Ball and Finding Neverland) and his writers (Paul Haggis, Neal Purvis and Robert Wade) who sift through the darker half of their lead player, that may put the formula-seeking purist off. But it's a supremely engaging detour that deserves a look-in not blinded by endorsement of the cult, as against the film. The name's still Bond. Only, he's getting real.

Goosebumps

A day off work. Vodka-high. Fist of Fury on the television. This is the real deal. Damn the pretenders.

Singapore and all that

Legislation, combined with persuasion. Take that for a potent, inclusive development model. The city-state of Singapore -- all of 700+ sq km -- offers a distinct look at political savoir-faire for those who care. The development is top-down: The state advertises, legislates and implements. The people fall in line and endorse. Things work.

The state jacks up car prices to get more people on public transport. The state beats its water concerns by recycling water from the sewers and branding it NEWater for potable use. The state lines up massive public housing blocks (where more than 70% of the population lives) in the central district. The state, also, sexes up integrated water management projects by promoting them with a leisure-and-high life feel-good. The state is, also, opening a casino and is calling it an Integrated Resort. There was initial resentment over the casino. That's where the persuasion helps. Things work.

The city sits easy and quiet on its spotless roads. On the flanks, the Young Rich hit the teeming, noisy malls and splurge. You are warned ahead of traffic snarls. You are told how long would it take for you to get where you are getting. The MRT is a cruise. You get change after the cab ride. Life moves like clock-work. Sometimes, things are better when not working. Really.

The brilliant Tan Dun was in concert at The Esplanade, playing his Academy Award-winning score from The Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. There was some divine beef, Indonesian style (Garuda Padang, Orchard Road), Guinness and exotic wine (assorted parties), a staggeringly beautiful skyline (view from the Pan Pacific hotel room) and some hurried shopping (Marina Square, Farrer Road and Little India). The best deal? Saravana Bhavan, near Mustafa Centre. A spicy, full meal. Burp. That was contentment.

Ten is a crowd

Christian Fletcher: Remember Hiroshima?
Shingen Narahashi: Remember Pearl Harbour?

As two of the 10 avtars – Kamal Haasan, mightily affected as an American mercenary and Kamal Haasan, with rehearsed gravitas as a Japanese martial art ace – exchange this during the climactic fight in Dasavatharam, it’s hard to miss the point. Haasan is playing to the gallery. He wants you to take note. Fair trade.

But what, truly, tanks Dasavatharam is not the corniness of it all. It’s not the supremely shoddy graphic-work. It’s not Michael Westmore’s laboured, prosthetic faces. No, not even The Bullet That Cures The Cancer. This super-hyped return of the chameleon actor-star is done in by its ambition.

Dasavatharam has an engaging premise that makes for a rollicking road movie. White hitman follows Indian scientist who flees with a deadly virus, in a cross-continent trail. The thread, though, gets thinned out as the actor-writer pursues the blurred and the superfluous, with an apparent nod to the Chaos Theory. In the process, Dasavatharam gets populated with the rest of the avtars, spun in for the all-lead-to-one effect.

RAW sleuth Balram Naidu – perhaps Haasan’s best turn here – has terrific possibilities as a stand-alone protagonist. There are also moments that carry the stamp of a writer who hasn't quite lost it yet. These are still parts of an underwhelming whole. Some of the avtars look straight out of a badly done school pantomime, ill-propped and cramped for movement. The CGI boys go berserk with their toys, belting out practically anything – from butterfly wing-flaps to the Tsunami – with a certain B-movie tardiness that you don't attach to the costliest (check) film made in the country. And Himesh Reshammiya has, probably, scored his last for a film down south.

But as always with a Kamal Haasan film, the fun is on the ringside. While many fans have been left shocked at this assault, the more trusted ones are out there, diligently decoding the method behind this madness. Last heard, the jury is still out on if Vincent Poovarahan – an interestingly etched Dalit leader – is a throwback to the well, varaha avtar. And if the kurma avtar has a parallel in the vaishnavite priest Rangaraja Nambi, who's left bound to his deity in the depths of the ocean. Loaded questions, really. But after an outrageously indulgent lead-man trip, do you care enough to dig deep?

Jodhaa Akbar

Understatement is not what you look for in an epic romance that’s set in a period identified with pomp. Ashutosh Gowariker’s Jodhaa Akbar – despite its spectacular premise and ethereal-looking actors – has its neat share of hearty, everyday blips.

Emperor Akbar (Roshan) is stopped before his feast, to be told by Princess Jodhaa (Rai) that the food is low on salt. After his first look at the demure princess, the Emperor strolls down the palace corridor like a lost teenager, as curtains swirl to A R Rahman’s rapturous score. Jodhaa and Akbar cross swords in a duel that would decide if the Princess of Amer would return to her shauhar’s palace that she had left after a fight.

Gowariker’s detailing works fine in these little touches. What really fails Jodhaa Akbar is its compliance to convention. And it’s not just the classical three-and-a-half-hours run. It’s the clunky writing, underwhelming battle sequences (watch out for those cannon balls and deadpan soldiers) and an inefficacy in tapping into the minds of its protagonists, who are already out there on the pages of history.

The story of the feisty Rajput Princess and her politically arranged marriage to the Mughal Emperor, as conceived in the screenplay (Gowariker and Haider Ali) is not quite a story that had to be told again. Not with this grandstand splendour, at least. The set-piece battles and songs are shot like fancy pageants – the rousing Azeem-o-Shahenshah has giant drums and a crowd of minions genuflecting to the all-conquering Emperor – but Gowariker gets it wonderfully right with Rahman’s terrific Khwaja mere khwaja.

Roshan, the stray affected bits notwithstanding, is in top form. Rai puts in a fairly restrained turn as well. But it’s the fringe players who get a better deal from the writing. Particularly engaging is Maham Anga, the Emperor’s overbearing badi ammi (played with spunk by Ila Arun) and Sujamal (Sood), the failed, tragic prince.

Jodhaa Akbar is mounted on the epic romance staples. While the love story, by itself, is engaging, it doesn’t come with the perspective that could have made this a worthier effort. Despite the all-out sincerity of the lead actors, their presence primarily works as a smart product placement tool for the eyeballs. Precisely why the camera closely freezes on a sweaty, topless Roshan, almost calling out for the gasps.

The old, familiar rush

When I picked an old, sodden copy of The Mosquito Coast from the pavement, it was just about the name. I had heard of Paul Theroux. I knew that Theroux is pronounced without the x, making the purchase all the more gratifying. It was a phase when travel writers came with definitive cool for me. He meant everything from Bohemian abandon to sagely poise. He was at once, the hippie and the Buddha.

At 17, when all my miles couldn't have gotten me past my hometown, I wanted to travel and write. I needed the style. I needed the words. Theroux could help, I presumed. Until someone broke in and said my prized, passed-down possession was a work of fiction and probably one of the more departed from the writer's core essentials. I remember flitting through the book with a strange feeling of betrayal. For me, that was the last of Theroux.

On Wednesday, in the bustling Landmark at The Forum, the man had a blunt, dazzling turn. He revived the solitary traveller in all his brooding, glorious disconnect. Theroux traced the interior world of the traveller's imagination, as pitched against the exterior, physical process of being at an exotic destination. "Imagination, too, is an exotic place," went the line. And the anecdotes. On Jorge Luis Borges, the Russian gulags, African Literature, Gujarati settlers in Kenya, the Civil Rights Movement. More.

"When you are at home, it's like a motherly embrace. You tend to become less critical about your surroundings... Good writing comes out of being isolated."

I'm all set for a revisit. This time, suitably initiated.

Culturally correct

Kyom darte ho? Bolo Hindi.

That's the rather quaintly malayalified teaser for a spoken Hindi column in one of those assembly-line career magazines. The pitch, here, is for job aspirants from Kerala looking out of the State. And who can't say their hain from hoon. In these times, when cultural multiplicity doesn't quite mean what it suggests, a bit of functional Hindi shouldn't hurt. Anything goes, as long as it helps social existence.

Migrant population. There's something galling about its sound. I think inter-state work permits. I think tests to prove affiliation to the Local Culture. I think separate queues for the settlers and floaters. Last time I checked, there was no Constitutional provision that validated physical violence on grounds of ethnicity. The local is a migrant, elsewhere. But obviously, Raj Thackeray disagrees.

The mobilisation of Maratha hostility against the corrupting influences on the city of Mumbai is also pegged to a familiar divisive agenda that may even work in favour of political rebels who have drifted off the Sena's first family. But more importantly, the grain of hate has just spun another charged debate on the question of progress at the cost of cultural identity.

In Bangalore -- one of the country's more culturally inclusive metropolises -- posters have come up saying "Learn Kannada or leave Bangalore." These are minor elements of defiance that don't cloud the overall sense of amity and tolerance that this city is rooted in. But it's hard to miss this tone of expectant glee when some of them discuss the Mumbai situation.

This was random talk at a house party. Soon, it drifted to Mumbai and what it meant for the rest of Us. "No offence (you being an outsider, you see), but just wait... this will spread to other cities." Point noted.

Red Sunday

The weathered building sported fluttering blood-red on this muggy Sunday morning. The flags signalled a CPI(M)-hosted seminar on parliamentary democracy. The turnout, however, didn’t suggest anything remotely linked to the loaded deliberations that would spool out in the seminar hall. Well-groomed boys and girls sauntered in, nimbly flitting between small talk and SMS. Parliamentary Democracy? Is this the stereotype debunked, finally? A dapper teenager put doubts to rest, in an acquired accent: “There’s Also a seminar on IT entrepreneurship.” Ah.

The Other seminar. Nilotpal Basu, acerbic as ever, was on the drill: Engels, counter-reactionary forces, India’s Sham Socialist Constitution, conceptualisation of The Change. Nandigram. The bourgeois mainstream media double up as champions of Socialism, while charging the Left forces with a diluted ideological premise, went Basu. A good part of the Sunday down, Bourgeois Journalist walked out, even as the crowd — a neat mix of hope and prudence — was just warming up. The debate is pegged to the old point: How to take Socialism to the people. How to work within the “limitations” of parliamentary democracy and strive for that Tomorrow.

Two boys from the Also seminar, heard outside of the hall.
“What’s with all the flags?”
“Some party meeting.”

Adam's Values

Here's to the one definitive swashbuckler of the modern day game. Superstar stumper and marauding bat, Adam Gilchrist came with the customary Australian pluck. But after the genial Mark Taylor, Gilly has also been the sober other-face in a side that redefines in-the-face aggro. At 36, when the willow still hits them sweet and long, he has pulled out. With the easy grace and no-hassle composure that's, perhaps, second nature to The Australian. Thanks for the entertainment.

Just like yesterday

The flavour is 80s. Ilayaraja on the mind. The Bangles on the computer. The weekend has been a willing bow-down to the decade of pop culture excesses.


And John Rambo is around. Bloody, yeah. Do we mind?

Stutter

Take One. I'm stuck.

(a cigarette later). This is embarrassing. I'm like the child on stage, with the lines all muddled up. Send in the cheer, people. I'll need all that and more for Take Next.