Warrior
Posted on | January 3, 2012 | No Comments
Easily one of the best movies I’ve seen in 2011. I don’t know jack shit about UFC but I’m a huge Nick Nolte fan so I decided to give it a try.
The movie is powered with strong emotional content. The fight scenes were bloody fantastic, the acting was powerful, and the entire theme of the movie had ‘heart’. I support Nick Nolte for his oscar winning performance. The rest of the cast was just as good. All in all a brilliant experience. 10/10.
Dedicated to Salman Taseer
Posted on | January 3, 2012 | No Comments
Hey you’re a genius, enough to be a fool
A fool to gamble everything and never know the rules
Some of us can only live in songs of love and trouble
Some of us can only live in bubbles…
RIP
… From the song My Only Friend by The Magnetic Fields.
Rather awkward silence
Posted on | December 29, 2011 | No Comments
Once in a while I wake up and blog … However, I’m still sleeping at the moment.
Addicted to Vinyl
Posted on | November 25, 2011 | No Comments
I’ve been a music enthusiast for much of my life. I started off with classic rock bands and grew up listening to Pink Floyd and Deep Purple. For over a decade I’ve tasked myself collecting music on CDs and Records. I don’t believe in MP3s as the main source for music but do appreciate their creative convenience. I mean, who doesn’t love their iPods? However, recently, I just can’t stop myself from spending money on records, rare records, all kinds of god damn records that are costing me a fortune. I was having a hard time finding Deep Purple’s Purpendicular on vinyl and I finally found it for $75, yea $75 freaking $$$ for a single music album. Many might ask if I’ve gone insane but when it comes to such addictions, all bets are off. Not to discreetly mention that my rare Pink Floyd Division Bell blue vinyl cost me a whopping $135 along with Pink Floyd’s P.U.L.S.E for $450.
Do I listen to such exquisite records every now and then? Absolutely yes. My Thorens TD 160 is my partner in crime and plays every single record with immaculate beauty.
Yes, I am addicted to collecting vinyl.
Silent Post
Posted on | October 28, 2011 | No Comments
Nothing has been going on due to a death in the family. Sometimes silence is the best way to communicate feelings.
Raymond Carver
Posted on | October 20, 2011 | No Comments
For the past few days I’ve been trying to figure out what to read next. I think I’ll start with Raymond Carver’s collection of short stories. I had read them in college but I feel they have to be reread. I’m sure I will feel different about them now.
But before getting into heavy reading, I will spin Bruce Springsteen’s Tunnel of Love album on 33rpm. God I love my old school Thorens TD 160.
The Cloud Messenger
Posted on | October 15, 2011 | No Comments
Aamer Hussein’s Cloud Messenger is one of the saddest books I’ve read in the past few years. It made my stomach turn in many directions. It is dedicated to all the great urdu/persian poets, literature gurus, and thinkers. It is also a story of pain and longing for places and people lost.
This book is my introduction to Aamer Hussein and it came recommended by an old bookseller in Karachi who is an avid reader of Urdu literature. I wasn’t expecting much from the book but the first few pages introduced clear and direct prose that piqued my interest. Not to mention the story is something I could closely associate which spoke to my inner feelings of regret.
The opening page of the book talks about Rumi; “One day, when we loved each other, you said a falcon flew out of a book and perched on your shoulder. You couldn’t keep her. You let her fly away. The perfect falcon from a poem by Rumi.”
The protagonist of the book Mehran, talks about his disappointment with Pakistan and how politics led him down. “Pakistan had let me down by letting Bhutto be hanged and ogre-faced Zia take over with his henchmen.”
I feel Pakistan is faced with the same dilemma as nearly 30 years ago. I feel abandoned in this country of mine and would prefer moving back to foreign lands in the West. Its just sad what is happening to this nation of ours. It is slowly decaying into oblivion.
There were certain passages in the book that pointed out Mehran listening to a bunch of french music on LPs, and one of my favourite french artist Jacques Brel (ne me quitte pas). It was interesting how almost every reference in the book is something I’ve enjoyed myself. Yes I enjoy Urdu poetry and french music along with ghazals. I can’t lay claim to completely understanding Persian poetry but I have appreciated Rumi and Hafiz in my college days.
Aamer Hussein did a fantastic job with this book and I strongly believe it to be close to an autobiography than fiction. The Cloud Messenger travels between cities and places painting vivid pictures of personal and private experiences. Aamer does a brilliant job establishing all his characters with great care. Mehran was equally compelling as was Marco, along with Riccarda and Marvi.
“I spend my life longing for the place I’m not in, but when I go back I never fit,’ she laments. ‘I married a place, not a man, because I thought the man was home.”
I’ve always found Hemingway to be one of the best writers of clear prose. And Aamer has done a perfect job in achieving that status.
In another instance he writes in a letter to Ricarda,
“My mother told us: never try to make pets of wild creatures, like peacocks or deer; they yearn for their wild places, and their longing brings bad luck to their captors. But who holds me captive, and in what hunter’s net? I remember the images of the poem my mother used to recite so long ago, Kalidasa’s poem about the cloud messenger, carrying love messages back from a man in exile to the city where he’d left behind his beloved, letters of infinite longing. And I, too, want to send such messages home on the back of a rain cloud, those messages about the net that I’m trapped in, trapped like a peacock who had only wanted to escape captivity when he heard the rain fall, smelled the earth’s longing, listened to his playmates’ cries. But I have nowhere to send my messages to: only the rainless place in which I am a stranger now. I too have built myself a net of words and images in lieu of a home. Other people’s words. And sometimes I imagine myself escaping that net: rising as vapour then dissolving and dripping away, drop by drop, to become not the exile who sends the messages, but the cloud that carries them, to rain down my longings on the dry, dry earth of my past, the land I left behind.”
I can still feel the words echo in my mind. It has left a mark in my life and one of the books I will always remember reading. I recommend this book to anyone and kudos to Aamer Hussein for writing such a masterpiece.
I have written this review while listening to Dire Straits “Making Movies” album. Other recommended books are Michael Chabon’s Adventures of Cavalier and Clay and Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy, well, amongst many others. I can’t seem to figure out what to read next. Perhaps I will revisit Hemingway with a twist.
Before I sign off, one of my favourite lines in the book; “Marvi grinned, and it seemed that the five years we were apart had just fallen, one by one, like pages off the calendar.”
And I leave you off with translated lyrics to Ne Met Quitte Pas by Jacques Brel:
Do not leave me now
We must just forget
Yes, we can forget
All that’s flown beyond
Let’s forget the time
The misunderstands
And the wasted time
To find out how
To forget these hours
Which sometimes kill
The blows of why,
A heart full of joy.
Do not leave me now
Do not leave me now
Do not leave me now
Do not leave me now
I offer you
Pearls of rain
Coming from the lands
Where it never rains
I will cross the world
Till after my death
To cover your bosom
With gold and light
I will make a kingdom
where love will be king
Where love will be the law
Where you will be queen
Do not leave me now
Do not leave me now
Do not leave me now
Do not leave me now
Do not leave me now,
Will invent for you
The insane words
That you’ll understand
And I will tell you
Of these lovers who
Were seen twice
With their hearts in blaze
I will say in detail
The story of this king
Dead, from having not
Encountered you.
Do not leave me now
Do not leave me now
Do not leave me now
Do not leave me now
One often recalls
Flames light anew
From an old volcano
Thought to be too old.
It appears that
The scorched fields
Can give more corn
Than the best of springs.
And when evening comes
In this blazing sky
The red and the night
Marry nevermore.
Do not leave me now
Do not leave me now
Do not leave me now
Do not leave me now
Do not leave me now
I will cry no more
I will talk no more
Will hide somehow
Just to look at you
Dance and smile
And to hear you
Sing and then laugh
Let me be for you
The shadow of your shadow
The shadow of your hand
The shadow of your dog
Do not leave me now
Do not leave me now
Do not leave me now
Do not leave me now
Midnight in Paris
Posted on | October 14, 2011 | No Comments
Midnight in Paris is yet another fantastic movie written and directed by Woody Allen. I dived into the movie without reading up on the plot. I was not disappointed at all.
Owen Wilson plays the troubled writer who is engaged to a materialistic bitch and soon to be married. Perhaps Rachel McAdams was the weakest link in the movie along with her parents.
Owen is a writer obsessed with classic authors like Hemingway, Twain, Fitzgerald, etc. The dialogue in the movie was fantastic and the Hemingway’s character was just brilliant.
The movie is set in striking Paris and it clearly is obsessive in nature. The photography was beautiful and the portrayal of Paris was dreamlike. Well, Paris is a dreamy city anyways.
Famous actors play their part beautifully and Adrian Brody did a fantastic job portraying Dali. Even Carla Bruni felt settled in her brief role and seemed confident. The sightseeing and the shifting between eras was done well. During the movie I was totally tripped out and out of excitement drank six cups of freshly brewed coffee.
All in all, the movie was fantastic and I’d recommend it to anyone. It was a tribute to classic literature and painters of the time. I personally enjoyed the many references to classic literature.
What better way to spend a Friday morning. Midnight in Paris was remarkable.
Our Lady of Alice Bhatti Reviewed
Posted on | October 7, 2011 | No Comments
Book Cover
I’m a fan of his debut novel A Case of Exploding Mangoes and I had high hopes for his second offering.
The novel started off strong and Hanif seemed sure of plotting his characters with vigour and ultimate sense of humour. First half of the novel completely engulfed me in a stream of beautiful prose, but the second half pushed me away in different directions. Our Lady of Alice Bhatti failed to impress in the character development area. I did not get close to Alice, I had no interest in Noor and his mother, the senior sister Hina Alvi felt like a pedestrian, and Teddy Butt was completely forgettable. Inspector Malinga was the only character that caught some of my attention. The entire novel felt like an abrupt ending.
Certain passages were extremely well written and I made sure to mark them down. There was a short paragraph on Alice Bhatti painting a vivid picture of her existence.
“Her twenty-seven-year-old body is a compact little war zone where competing warriors have trampled and left their marks. She has fought back often enough, with less calibrated viciousness maybe, definitely never with a firearm, definitely never with a firearm, but she has never accepted a wound without trying to give one back. And like all battle-hardened warriors she has managed to preserve her gift for the fight but forgotten why she became a fighter in the first place.”
The fact of the matter is that I’m a sucker for well written prose and although Our Lady of Alice Bhatti is a weak story, it still is a well written book. It failed to divide my attention and kept me fully immersed and appreciative.
Here is another instance, “Senior Sister Hina Alvi sits on the interview panel with a paan tucked in the right side of her mouth, her tongue occasionally licking the crimson juice before it can become a dribble. This well-timed anticipatory lick will remain her main contribution to the proceedings.”
I went into the novel expecting another A Case of Exploding Mangoes but instead got a trimmed down subdued experience.
Hanif did a decent a fantastic job introducing the choohras of Karachi. Karachi is such a vibrant and multi-culture infested city that even a life long local citizen will not know the many corners of it. He chooses one of the poorest parts of the city and builds character out of it.
In certain parts of the novel it is clear that Mohammed Hanif might’ve been influenced by Manto. There is this small passage referring to Toba Tek Singh, “Have you read Toba Tek Singh? Nobody read around here any more. Manto wrote about the mutters in a charya ward and then ended up in one himself. His own family put him there.”
Another instance describes the madness that is Karachi, and points out its indifferent citizens, “Look, we live in a city where you can get someone cut up for a thousand rupees. What is wrong with charging them half that money for not cutting them up? Do they want a post-mortem? No. Are they interested in the cause of death? Does it really matter to them if their lungs gave up first or their heart went pachuk? For them the cause of death is death; they died because death arrived in Garden East and they happen to be buying vegetables there. So buyings vegetables is a valid cause of death as any.”
In another instance Hanif writes a wonderful passage on frequent violence scenarios in Karachi. How a simple fault trigger mayhem.
“The city stops moving for three days.
The bullet pierces the right shoulder of a truck driver who has just entered the city after a forty-eight-hour-long journey. His shoulder is almost leaning out of his driver’s window, his right hand drumming the door, his fingers holding a finely rolled joint, licked on the side with his tongue for extra smoothness, a ritual treat that he has prepared for the end of the journey. He is annoyed with his own shoulder; he looks at it with suspicion. His shoulder feels as if it has been stung by a bee that has travelled with him all the way from his village. His left hand grips the shoulder where it hurts and finds his shirt soaked in red gooey stuff. He jams the brake pedal to the floor. A rickshaw trying to dodge the swerving truck gets entangled in its double-mounted Goodyear tyres and is dragged along for a few yards. Five children, all between seven and nine, in their pristine blue and white St Xavier’s uniforms, become a writhing mess of fractured skulls, blood, crayons and Buffy the Vampire Slayer lunchboxes. The truck comes to a half after gently nudging a cart and overturning a pyramid of the season’s last guavas. A size-four shoe is stuck between two Goodyears.
School notebooks are looked at, pockets are searched for the clues to the victims’ identity, the mob slowly gathers around the truck, petrol is extracted from the tank and sprinkled over its cargo of three tonnes of raw peanuts. Teddy with his broken heart and the truck driver with his bleeding shoulder both realise what is coming even before the mob has made up its mind; they first mingle in the crowd and then start walking in opposite directions.
A lonely fire engine will turn up an hour later but will be pelted with stones and sent away. The truck and its cargo will smoulder for two days.
In a house twenty miles away a phone rings. A grandmother rushes on to the street beating her chest and wailing. Two motorcycles kick-start simultaneously. Half a dozen jerry cans full of kerosene are hauled into a rickety Suzuki pick-up. A nineteen-year-old rummages under his pillow, cocks his TT pistol and runs on to the street screaming, promising to rape every Pathan mother in the land. A second-hand-tyre-shop owner tries to padlock his store, but the boys are already there with their iron bars and bicycle chains. A police mobile switches its emergency horn on and rushes towards the police commissioner’s house. A helicopter hovers over the beach as if defending the Arabian Sea against the burning rubber smell that is spreading through the city. An old colonel walking his dog in the Colonel’s Colony asks his dog to hurry up and do its business. A bank teller is shot dead fro smiling. Finding the streets deserted, groups of kites and crows descend from their perches and chase wild dogs, who lift their faces to the sky and bark joyously. Five size-four coffins wait for three days as ambulance drivers are shot at and sent back to where they came from. Carcasses of burnt buses, rickshaws, paan shops and at least one KFC joint seem to have a calming effect on the city. Newspapers start predicting ‘Normalcy limping back to the city’, as if normalcy had gone for a picnic and sprained an ankle.”
Karachi is a melting pot of ethnic cultures that is ready to overflow any moment. The city is rife with violence and there is no end in site. Anyone who lives here is a brave soul and should be award a medal.
The novel deals with religion as well. It points out the many fundamental issues facing Islam and one of them being fundamentalism. Casually he writes, “You Muslas (referring to muslims) have a prayer for everything. It’s like they are groping in the dark, hoping to get hold of something for you. It’s like you are in a race that you must finish. It doesn’t matter if you win or lose.”
By the time I finished the book, I felt sad. It was a turbulent journey that ended abruptly. I’d recommend this book to Mohammed Hanif fans but definitely not to a first time reader. I suggest starting off with A Case of Exploding Mangoes and with an open mind, giving Our Lady of Alice Bhatti a chance. I consider myself a loyalist and stand by Hanif’s second effort regardless of its shortcomings.
Before signing off, I would like to point out that the book was set in Sabon typeface and was a joy to read. Printing was excellent. Gavin Morris did a fine job with the cover and the book definitely stands out when sitting on a shelf. I had to mention all this since I’m a designer at heart, but naturally, the old saying goes, don’t judge a book by its cover.
“Love can only survive if it comes with a ration card.”
The book is available at many bookstores across Pakistan for RS.500.
Our Lady of Alice Bhatti
Posted on | October 3, 2011 | No Comments
I’m utterly bored, but I am going to write a review of Mohammed Hanif’s new book once I’m done. I loved his debut novel, a Catch 22isq offering. Brilliant.