| Martin Amis has contributed a slight, mocking screenplay of Northanger Abbey; there is a lyrical, previously unpublished story by V S Pritchett; a profile by Tim Adams of Benjamin Pell, the man who got rich rooting through celebrities' garbage for stories to sell to the tabloids; and even two pieces by Pankaj Mishra and Amit Chaudhuri. |
| Mishra, in a longish piece called "Aspirers", writes detachedly about Bollywood. His object in writing this story is nebulous from the start and doesn't get much clearer as he goes on. |
| He floats around, talking with various directors and film critics, includes snatches of conversation with the vacuous and unenlightening Mallika Sherawat, and in between adds his own impressions of Hindi cinema when he was growing up in Allahabad in the seventies (this is perhaps the only part of the piece where Mishra sounds like the writer we know). |
| He even tries, somewhat weakly, to look at the "harder reality" (a phrase Mahesh Bhatt uses, quoted half-derisively by Mishra) of the industry, offering a desultory conversation with a poor young man from Bengal, Pritam, who shows up every day at Bhatt's office looking for a "break". |
| Mishra makes this conversation sound neither sympathetic nor particularly interesting""Pritam's story (the early death of his father, the mistreatment of himself and his mother by his uncle that followed, and the subsequent murder by him of said uncle) sounds garbled and mostly fictitious, even to Mishra, who is straining to be on his side""and the moment Pritam disappears off the page, he disappears from our minds, notwithstanding Mishra's attempt, with the closing shot, to turn him into a martyr. |
| Mishra is usually a thoughtful, engaging commentator but "Aspirers" is an essay meant for foreigners and reads like one; Indian readers have heard it all before. |
| Amit Chaudhuri's piece about "The Tailor of Gujarat", Qutubuddin Ansari, talks of the meeting with Ansari in Calcutta and his recounting of the horrors of the Gujarat riots, but loses the immediacy of the story in his laboured, filtered-down narrative. |
| The bits he gets right are when he tells of what he sees through his own eyes, for example his passages about Calcutta and the life Qutubuddin is trying to piece together as a migrant after the famous photograph made him such a reluctant celebrity. |
| This is the same quality of observance and detailing that makes his novels so appealing, but here Chaudhuri's prose is flat, sterile, full of turgid, faux-resonant passages like this one: "There are hundreds of millions of people like Ansari in India; paradoxically, they don't exist. Then their presence becomes tangible during the elections; like spirits given leave to visit the earth for a limited duration, they queue up to drop their ballot paper in the ballot box (this time, in a slow symphonic swell, voting took place electronically throughout the nation)." |
| Both Mishra and Chaudhuri could take a couple of pointers from Patricia Hempl, who has contributed a story about a "friendship mission" to Jerusalem. A short piece, it is restricted to her personal experience of Israel, and does not even attempt to capture anything wider. |
| She reasons that a tourist cannot begin to really experience a country, tied up as it is with not just its vast shadow of history and tradition, but also the micro-culture of day-to-day living that ordinary people acquire unconsciously. |
| She talks of the futility, the gluttony and even the grubby voyeurism of travel and tourism, the grabbing for experience. The piece is full of discomforts, of nagging self-doubt, and yet she allows herself, and us, to be lulled into a colourful local bazaar, where it is suddenly and forcibly brought home to her with the violence of a physical assault that to regard means to be outside of""as a tourist, she is an intruder. |
| Paul Auster's "The Brooklyn Follies" is also a brilliant piece, a story about a man just coming into his retirement, and at first being engulfed and overcome by free time. He decides finally to write a book called "The Book of Human Folly", recording "every blunder, every pratfall, every embarrassment, every idiocy, every foible and every inane act" in his life. |
| These aren't the large mistakes, the cruelty, the selfishness that mar all our lives, but absurdities, meaningless and trivial: "the countless stubbed toes and knocks on the head ... the frequency with which my glasses have slipped out of my shirt pocket when I've bent down to tie my shoes ... opening my mouth at a Labor Day picnic in 1952 and allowing a bee to fly in." |
| Auster's chatty, wry style perfectly suits a man who, single in retirement, has nothing to do but reminisce; perfectly suits his growing dismay at the fact that he can only recall the stupidity and the mistakes, and his wonder at the tricks the universe can play, to sometimes give the smallest, most ludicrous accident a vast significance, and a full human life no meaning at all. |
| This minute examination of what it means to be human, the dissection of a single human life in all its complexity, beauty, ugliness, smallness and largeness, is what makes Granta so enduringly interesting""and this Jubilee edition is, of course, no exception. |
| GRANTA |
| Ian Jack (ed) Published by Granta Price: Rs 399; Pages: 320 |
Explore Business Standard