All Izz Well

This line is very popular these days. My daughter says it to me before going to school, her friends say this to each other, youngsters tap on their chests as they walk jauntily, and yesterday, I even saw a T-shirt emblazoned on it.

The "3 Idiots" fever is upon us. I enjoyed the movie too, immensely. A tale entertainingly told, about the most primitive deep rooted desire of ours - to make meaning with our lives. And this is in India, where making meaning is something that several of our country folks can only just dream of, most managing to just about survive. The setting is the young India, the youngistan, as they call it in the bubble gum kitshcy vocab that goes around these days.

Young people will dream. As they have always done. Always should. Always would. And every generation dishes out these feel-good movies, where the young are told that what they do, can and will, matter. Feeding them optimism and idealism. Thank God I am not young anymore. All this "All Izz Well" chant does not generate a fervor in me.

Most of our lives, All is not well. For most of us, what we do, does not really matter to anyone, except our immediate family, whom we feed and clothe. Most of us do not find what we love to do, leave alone being competent to do it. Most of us just survive.

The odds of finding the one thing that one was meant to do in the world are stacked against one. There are so many things in the world to do, how does anybody know what they are best at? Who defines best? How does one know that one is good at building bridges when one has never built one? Or even seen it?

I am not sure why this is so. There are people who DO find what they love, indeed, I am one of the fortunate ones, as I love what I do - not all the time, but most of the time. But only I know how long it took, the knocks I braved, the search that it took, the work after it, and even when I am here- my moments of doubt. So many of them. When I run into stone walls, barren fields, abusive team mates, irate customers, I despair still, and wonder if it was worth it all. This fleeting feeling of love for what I do -will it matter to me, really really matter, in say 5 years from now? In ten? Would it matter to anyone else?

How many of us really find what we love to do? And how many of us are sure that this is it, the thing that we really were sent to this world to do? How many of us really know what we want? How many of us even know how to go about finding out what we want? And when we do find out, how many of us make a mistake? How many of us make a mistake, and then get stuck there, like a helpless fly in a spiders net? There are divorces in marital lives - but none in the professional life. Once an adult takes up a profession, he can never really shrug it off. Why isn't there a notion of divorcing your earlier-acquired-profession? If people make mistakes in finding mates, and give a name to it (divorce) for correcting their mistake, why is there still no word for changing ones profession?

Oh, don't give me that hogwash of the universe conspiring to give me that I really really want! Just tell me how I can figure out what I really really want, and what I am good at. And that too early in life, in youngistan days... the rest will fall in place.....

Let the Midnights Children Sleep!

I read the news about Deepa Mehta doing a movie on Salman Rushdie's "Midnight Children" with trepidation and horror.

Midnight Children is a book I read the first time when I was in my raw teens, during which time I did not understand much of it and flung it after the first few pages when I could not figure out how a nose could be so important. I read it with determination the second time - this was when I was at college, and it was a mark of dishonor to the group that I belonged to who prided themselves on all things literati - and was awed by the intricate ornate imagery the author wove, and its hugely metaphorical content to the birth of our nation. I have since then read it at least thrice, though not in recent years, and have fallen in love with is quirky characters - Salim Sinai, the hapless exchanged-at-birth child, the rumbuctious Brass Monkey, the rotund but sexy Begum Sinai, Mary Pereira, the ridden by guilt midwife, the Aunt Alia who feeds guilt and resentment in her pickles, the sinister Widow with her half grey head of hair - and the quirkier setting - the tetrapod laced Mumbai, the fortune-changing Mahalaxmi Race course, the breathtakingly beautiful Kashmir, and the dark murky hate spewing streets of Mumbai - and not to forget the stuffy Chothes Chest in the Sinai bathroom where Salim lay hidden, as he is hit by his first adult moment.

The book is rich in feeling and metaphor, and creates a world which dazzles, smells and shakes and has characters which cower, lust, love, fear, and take shape in ones mind, and stay with one, hours after the book is put down. Salman Rushdie is a masterful story teller. His story needs some telling, but for people who have the patience and the imagination to stay with him awhile, he amply rewards them with a world that is rich and suggestive, like real life. Like the famous Arabian Night stories, the Midnight's Children can be spun into a tapestry of another set of stories - in which each of the characters takes off from one point in this story, travels to another one, and then comes back to this one to take his rightful place.

And now, a story of this kind, the kinds that holds a world and many other yet-to-be-born stories inside is, is going to be played out on celluloid, and its fluid rich imaginative world will be concretized on reels. I hate it. Just completely abhor the idea.

It is not that I don't like Deepa Mehta - I also understand that perhaps this movie would give Salman Rushdie another spot of bright illumination in public life which the beleaguered man may or may not relish, and may give him some much needed money - nor do I mind the re-interpretation of the story in thousand different ways, which is what most good stories are for, anyway.

What I truly mind is the change of medium of the story. .

For, just how would the cinema capture the musty smells of the clothes chest in the Sinai bedroom as he views his mothers bottom? How would the camera capture the Sr. Sinai's falling-in-love-in-parts-by-part, and its completely apt metaphor to India being a country made up of parts? How would the camera manage to get inside the guilty purse of Mrs. Sinai as she goes horse racing, guilt ridden and shadowy? How could it capture the conversations-in-mind with all those many midnights children that Salim Sinai has, his falling in love with Parvati when she is just a nebulous presence in his mind.

The list is large - and I shudder to think what butchery would take place of my beloved story and my beloved weird characters as Ms. Mehta will apply her celluloid knife.

It would not be her fault, the fault would be the medium's. The tyranny of it being two dimensional - visual and audio, and that's it. No imagination, no smells, no in-between emotions, and the worst of it all, the tyranny of 2 hours! Stories of this kind are told over and savoured over days of indolent reading and telling, and the "Phir?" question marks that one goes to sleep with - and wakes up luxuriously to return to it again…

Ms. Mehta, please don't do this. Please do not put faces to my Salim Sinai, and the Brass Monkey and the virile Shiva Please do not tell me the color of the Clothes chest. Please do not tell how Bombay looked then - and how the Widow looked. I know them all in my minds eye, and I do not want to know them through your eyes. My eyes and mind are in great shape, thank you.

And Mr. Salman Rushdie, just how could you do this? Just how could you consent to the butchery that is bound to be unleashed on this magical story of yours? How can you kill all the other stories than can come out of Midnights children still? You are the father of this story, aren't you? Or have you too, tired of your creation, and are out to milk it for whatever its worth in gross coins you can touch, rather than thoughts and minds you can reach?