I once read a book called The Shadow Lines. I was at home and it was lying near the bed. I don’t know who brought it there or when, but I was on vacation, so I read it. It’s the story of a kid who experiences a riot which affects his family and probably even his entire life. Later when he grows up, he realizes that the riot was largely overlooked by history even though he has always thought of it as a pretty significant event.
Later, earlier this year, I read another book called Above Average. I’d heard about it earlier, but I’d thought it was another one of those “campus” novels . I got to read it when my room-mate brought it back from his trip to India. This book also turned out to be very deep and moving. What is the connection between these two books other than the fact that I’d recommend it to you (and both are written by people named Amitabh but neither is spelled that way) ?
Amitabha Bagchi, who wrote Above Average also read The Shadow Lines and admits that the book influenced his writing In fact he pays a cheeky little homage to Amitav Ghosh, author of The Shadow Lines. Click on the picture below for more on that.
If the last few lines in the picture excites you, you would be delighted to know that the book was typeset using LaTeX.
Somebody said, in a totally different context, “I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it”. I don’t know how to describe a good book (or a good movie) but I know it when I read it (or watch it). I loved both of the above books and loved them. But I could hardly describe what I liked about them. I have a problem with that. I can never really describe what I felt when I was watching a movie or reading a book, but I certainly feel something. Most people express themselves after watching a movie by talking about it. People discuss it over dinner, on the way home, write about it on their blogs, or message boards on imdb etc. I, on the other hand, read. I read reviews, I read blogs, I read news articles, – I do all this till I find the articles I agree with, with views that strongly resonate with mine – even though, I don’t know till then that I held those views. Which is probably why I subscribe to more than 112 blogs and websites in my Google Reader account.
I watched the latest Batman movie on Friday evening with a friend. The movie was like any other movie of its genre and would probably have felt the same if it ended about an hour before it did. Around that point it became something else.
Maybe that is because I’d been reading about Heath Ledger and the fact that his death might have been related to the movie (he had been living alone in a hotel room to prepare for the role and he kept a diary to record the Joker’s thought . That is just difficult to imagine for me – I can’t keep a diary of my own thoughts).
The situations became more real to me. There is a scene where the Joker arrives at Harvey Dent’s fund raiser (We are tonight’s entertainment, he announces). Rachel comes out to confront him while Bruce Wayne takes Harvey to safety. You would normally expect characters in a movie to behave that way, but it was just so scary to imagine something like that if it were real. And later on, Batman has to make tough decisions – decisions which are for the better but they would make him less of a hero in the public eye (This kind of thing is not new, we’ve seen countless Hindi movies situations where the hero sacrifices his love so that the heroine remains happy!). But in this movie, these situations affected me differently. At the end, I described the movie as dark, depressing and complicated, but I would have to watch it again to understand the movie and my reaction to it. Of course, I was a little behind the plot also towards the end, but it isn’t just the plot that makes it better than other movies that I’ve seen. Or just the action scenes – the shots of batman soaring through Gotham skyline are great and the batbike (whatever it’s called) scenes were really cool. Or those little moments – the Joker’s magic trick, the You complete me dialogue, the coin scene, etc. There was something else in that movie that made me react to it the way I did.
There, I said nothing in 500 words or less.
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