Raghu and I are working through the Odyssey, in the Wilson and Fagles translations respectively, and we’re making something we are not really keen to call a podcast about it. We’re discussing four books at a time; you can listen to us discussing books 1-8 on the first two episodes of First We Read.

In a lunatic sideline I took the opportunity to also work through the filmography of Christopher Nolan, of which I’d seen very little. Here are my reactions, in order of viewing.

OPPENHEIMER, 2023. Interesting to encounter Nolan’s alter-ego straight out of the gate, which I only realised in retrospect. The figure of Oppenheimer himself is a familiar Nolan instrument, the hero who is troubled, but not impious enough to be an anti-hero. To his justifications of conscience, we are expected to yield the place of conscience itself. But the film’s moral centre and its most attractive performance is Robert Downey Jr. playing Lewis Strauss, the bureaucrat who wants to never be wrong and will hedge any bet he can in order to be right, or at least plausible. This man will never indict himself by picking a side in a moral quandary. His position is a consequence of his certainty, rather than his doubt. He is a liberal who understands why his opponents on both right and left see him as a glib functionary. He feels no need to respond or clarify. To him, the world is as good as it gets.

INTERSTELLAR, 2014. Made me miss a whole range of silly Hollywood space movies from the years just before this landed: Gravity, the two messy Tom Cruise vehicles, even Prometheus, the product of Ridley Scott’s destructive self-confidence. I am beginning to see Nolan’s sentimentality as a challenge to the naïveté of Scott and Steven Spielberg. Will he ever be able to doff his hat to David Lean, much less with the self-love that Scott exhibits in Prometheus? Mr Christopher Nolan! The trick is not minding that it hurts! As a native of internet fandoms the time-loop reveal didn’t blow my mind, a purely subjective reaction. I didn’t dislike Interstellar as much as I dislike Arrival, which I find an unsatisfactory flattening of the Ted Chiang story, in addition to being primitively Sinophobic. I was moved by the theme of familial love in Story of Your Life, bored by it in Arrival, and in Interstellar it made me want to sign up to a family abolition movement.

These two films have made it clear to me that Nolan is massively effective at gathering momentum in the third act, better than many other blockbuster-makers. His thematic interest in “time” is shallow, but there are real, positive consequences to his obsession with pace, which is the only thing that matters in cinema. This is his saving grace. Why then do his first acts do such little work in service of the third? People can make great movies in ninety minutes.

BATMAN BEGINS, 2005. Made me forgive Iron Man for its sins almost instantly. That was a costume party, already looking ahead to the sunlit phase of the War on Terror under Obama. In mood, colour and menace, this conveys the suffocation of that time very faithfully. A remarkable anticipation of the zeitgeist of the plutocrat-funded, billionaire-worshipping manosphere, driven by feeling contempt for inferiors, duty as victimhood, nihilism as a condition of masculinity, etc. etc. Some might foretell the future to forestall it, or at least in forewarning. Nolan has no more interest in such possibilities than, say, Tony Blair.

DUNKIRK, 2017. I was expecting a little more formal excitement. The aerial defence storyline resolved beautifully, in a way that even wartime audiences in the 1940s might thrill to. It seems very interesting that in 2017, when the battle against white nationalism in the US still seemed poised to go either way, Nolan was making the choice never to identify the opposing fighters as Nazis. I went with it as a choice to represent the worm’s-eye-view, abstracting the soldiers into every man in every war. But then the last sequence is literally a dramatisation of “We shall fight on the beaches.” So we derive the enormous satisfaction of Churchillian jingoism without the minimal inconvenience of acknowledging the context of its production?

Anyway, finally! Four movies in, a performance that manages not only to carry off Nolan’s witless and leaden dialogue but to invest it with a semblance of rhythm and deliberation. It only took Mark Rylance.

THE DARK KNIGHT, 2008. Taken aback by how enjoyable this was. It confirms every suspicion I had about how it shaped the language and self-image of the men in my life and evidently men the world over. For good reason: it’s real schlocky fun, sincerely maximalist, in love with its universe, while remaining quite distinct from the trim, A/B-tested harmony of the first run of Marvel Studios hits. I had a huge crush on Heath Ledger as a teenager, so I couldn’t stand to watch this when it came out. It’s now sweetly painful to see him on screen so self-assured, so full of fun, so physically commanding. A performance for the ages in the comic book movie genre and perhaps beyond.

MEMENTO, 2000. “Do I lie to myself to be happy?” The essence of the Nolan machista and the theme of all his movies. Ingenious, high-spirited, boyish. Guy Pearce has more rizz than any Nolan protagonist I’ve ever seen — including Al Pacino. Maybe because the film itself is closer to a rizzler era of Hollywood than the later work.

THE DARK KNIGHT RISES, 2012. I can see why this would mean a lot if you cared about this brand. A stacked, busy movie that’s better paced than it seems. I liked it when they broke Batman’s back.

THE ODYSSEY, 2026. What am I supposed to say? I had a nice evening at the movies and a good dinner afterwards. I admired the invention of the common soldier — a boy whose spirit might have haunted the beach at Dunkirk — who holds the threads of Ithaca’s fate in his hands; a prosaic little nod to Alice Oswald in an Emily Wilson PR blitz.

I re-examined some of my assumptions about the affinities between Nolan’s work and the text and found them very funny in hindsight. All the technical dazzlement of Homer, the flashbacks, misdirections, lies and fights that Nolan seems to like so much, are so much less complicated in the movie than they are in the text. I could question why an object as unique as the Odyssey had to become cannon fodder in a movie about the same thing Nolan’s films are all about, with the same emotional appeal that all Hollywood movies deliver. If I, like millions around the world, say: We admire you for setting the world on fire! We pity you for feeling bad about it! — will we get a movie about literally anything else?

But as with so much in Hollywood there is no need for questions. The answers are in plain sight. The innovation of Christopher Nolan is that they can be whatever answers you want. That is why he is telling you that the world is as good as it gets. You made it that way.

THE PRESTIGE, 2006. Slick, would feel slight in 2026 were it not recognisably an expression of the underlying logic of the men who currently rule our world: empiricist, but only in appearance. The long trick is to lull you into believing that the film is a rationalist exercise when it is really selling you on the fantastic and irreplicable. It is a trick deployed fully by Nolan’s fans in Silicon Valley today. Seems a bit ungrateful of them to throw loud tantrums about Nolan because his approach to colour-blind casting allows them to open up a new front in the US-led culture war. But on balance, it has turned out to be very profitable for Nolan.

One refreshing departure from the rest of his corpus: the men are freely unlikeable, with no need for tortured noble excuses.

TENET, 2020. Nice to encounter the only man in the entire filmography approaching anything like sexual confidence, Denzil Smith. This movie was fine when it was moving on pure vibes, unsatisfying when we got a heavy-handed Spielbergian payoff, the film’s reasoning for why people from the future might try to erase the past. There is a hard question somewhere in this material. Can we build a future with no reference to the past? No signposts or bulwarks but also no baggage? What if we could control path dependency at scale? Unfortunately the most interesting answers to these questions are material, moral and spiritual, not to be found in the low-stakes world of Nolan’s make-believe.

I watched Insomnia and Inception when they came out, so I didn’t revisit them, and I’m not going to watch Following. Tenet was a fitting way to end this tortured filmathon: the most straightforward expression of Nolan’s basic theme and method, the hedged bet. Other filmmakers retreat to allegory and fable when they find it unsafe or uninteresting to address the world directly. Nolan cuts the cord between the direct address and the allegory, not to defamiliarise it but to mystify it. It’s a great way to appeal to varied and competing groups of inegalitarians. But even though I live a life online, I am also a moviegoer, and I cannot forget what I have learned to think and know within the world of the theatre, within the logic of cinema.

First We Read is available on many podcast platforms. I also had the pleasure of reading S03 of the constitutional history podcast, Friend of the Court, with Raghu. I hope you’ll join us on this little cruise. See you on the opean sea.

Dear friend,

I wrote about Arundhati Roy for Himal Southasian. The review became about something else, so I didn’t end up writing about the first couple of things that occurred to me as soon as I closed the covers of Mother Mary Comes To Me on the evening of its publication. Its last pages are devastating, the more so to me because I had, just hours before, read Jeet Thayil’s miraculous auto-ish fiction-ish novel The Elsewhereans, whose own closing creates a haunting echo and mirror image with Mother Mary’s. I’m sure someone has written or is writing about the mingling affect of these two books, and the unlikely resonances between Roy and Thayil’s writing lives more broadly. I’m sure they are doing it in Malayalam. (When you’ve been too long in the rooms of English, to quote the Thayil poem.)

The other book I’d been thinking about before Mother Mary came out was Amrita Mahale’s second novel Real Life. Mid-novel, an LLM, responding to its hallucinating maker, parrots the words: “Not old. Not young. A viable, die-able age.” The character interacting with the machine doesn’t catch the reference. It’s not there for him. He knows not why the stochastic parrot sings. Amrita is writing from the last generation of writers who can separate reference from quotation, for a last generation of readers who will care to separate influence from theft. “A viable, die-able age,” from The God of Small Things, is there for us – readers of Arundhati Roy, who have grown up to become readers of Amrita Mahale. Roy’s work is at the back of the mind of every novelist I know who was a schoolgirl in or around 1997, the year of the publication of The God of Small Things. Others from the same time and place became journalists, for whom Roy’s essays were an early introduction to adversarial writing about social injustices. I have no doubt that still others became memoirists before Roy became one.

On the everything apps, people were asking each other if Mother Mary was “like Jeanette McCurdy’s memoir.” Someone posted a line from the book, about the jealousy Roy feels when she crosses a man on a lonely rural road, lying on his buffalo’s back and looking up at the stars, and someone else said Roy was nothing more than an Andrew Tate for privileged women. I said we should title the review She Came In Through The Bathroom Window because I wanted to make my editors laugh. In the years of media fragmentation every micro-population has its points of reference, illegible to others. It’s no one’s fault that people think they know Roy’s work because they’ve read tweets that quote it. There are many writers whose whole work can be contained in a carousel post. There are many writers whose success in publishing depends on this. If a girl’s girl on the algorithms had said she wished she had a man’s freedom to roam alone under the night sky she would have gone viral and become Meta’s head of gender in India, before being fired two to three weeks after the manosphere found out about her.

There are writers whose work is impervious to the vulnerabilities of influencerism. If you stopped reading Roy, you can forget that she is one of them. Publishing is a forgetting machine. In the years before the years of media fragmentation, the papers were full of accusatory commentary about how and whether Roy was a media creation. Some of that receded as the nature of publication changed and kept changing. In the excitement of Mother Mary’s release there was a lot of supposing and believing that Arundhati Roy has always been That Girl. But a strain of refusal has imbued her work with the complexity and thorniness of larger corpora. It cannot be contained in that-girlism (or not-that-girlism), except by booksellers and publicists. Its influence goes beyond influencerism. If Roy had written about collecting rain in the basin of her collarbones, as someone who moved to Goa wrote during the Covid lockdown at the beginning of the decade, she would have found a way to do it without being laughed off the internet. (In fact, she has. Re-reading everything she has published at a go, it was impossible not to notice how often collarbones - d’une certaine qualité, naturally - crop up in her writing, in reference to her own or those of the sylphs in her fiction.)

By the time I arrived this far it was many hours past my bedtime and my tears had dried. I realised that I wanted to read about Roy and the question of influence, but not write about it. So the review took another route, and my editors graciously let me keep my preferred title in the spirit of the article, if not in the letter. It’s here, and you can read it, for free, on registration. I feel privileged to have contributed to Himal, an independent internationalist publication based in the Indian subcontinent, made by minds I admire.

I’ve only written about Roy once before, in the inaugural number of Bodice Ripper, a fortnightly column about clothes and appearance in literature that I had the pleasure of writing for The Voice of Fashion.

In July this year I had the privilege of speaking with Nikhil Krishnan and Raph Cormack on their wonderful show, The Minor Books Podcast, about Daniyal Mueenuddin. You can listen to the episode here, and wherever you get your podcasts.

Last of all, a warm welcome to everyone who’s followed Supriya by Supriya Nair in the last few weeks. I assume it’s because of this tweet. Congratulations and best wishes to Mayor Mamdani and his constituents in New York City. In April 2019, I wrote about his rap song “Nani” for BPB.

Thanks and best wishes,

Supriya

A v. of this essay first appeared in a Roads & Kingdoms city guide in March 2018.

There is a cockroach in the big blocky building by the tracks outside Bandra station that houses seven movie theatres. I’ve seen it. I’m pretty sure I did, late last year. It brought me up short, but not because I was surprised to see it. Every good movie hall has its monsters; that’s what the shadows are for. I was surprised it had taken so long, almost three decades, for the creepy-crawly spirit that haunts the theatre to manifest before my eyes in this tiny, irreducible avatar.

The air of decrepitude that hangs over the building now called “the G-7 multiplex” is the first thing most people, including its long-time visitors, notice about it. The cinema is a mere 46 years old, but its upkeep has, for a long time, been outmatched by its use. Mumbai is a city full of ruined cinemas, as is only fitting for the home of one of the world’s largest and most unwieldy movie industries. For every glamorous Art Deco artefact that’s survived the twentieth century intact, there are dozens of theatres that have declined into rest stops for itinerants drifting in for the respite of the slow fans, falling asleep as the light from scratchy B-movies flickers over their faces.

G-7, which most people who grew up in the neighborhood call “Gaiety-Galaxy,” is very far from that kind of dump. It had few redeeming outward features to start with. Seen from the outside, it is a squat, square face with three eyes: its first three movie theatres, built row-house style, christened with the Space Age names of Gaiety, Galaxy, and Gemini. The “7” in its name is made up by four smaller theatres, Glamour, Gem, Gossip, and Grace. They were tacked on to its frame in the late 1990s, when the theatre expanded its screening schedule to include Hollywood films.

Inside is all Instagrammable #mood—murals of swirling gas-giant planets hamstrung by halogen-yellow lighting; wall accents that mimic stained glass windows offset by cheap sunmica veneers; concession stands teetering with towers of bright orange ice-cream cones. The atmosphere is gothic. When you watch a film at Gaiety-Galaxy, unseen presences are everywhere. Behind you, the hall is inevitably full of sensation: the cold trickle of irregular air-conditioning, feet scuffling, scraping noises. The seats in the old halls are hard coir and wood covered in blood-red Rexene (which is why there’s so much uncomfortable fidgeting). The hall goes blackout-dark when a movie begins: none of those new-fangled emergency light strips and neon signs. When a fire erupted outside Gaiety-Galaxy two years ago; the employees called the fire services and put it out without interrupting the screening of the blockbuster inside. No one was hurt.

This is my home, by the way, if home is a place where you’d rather hold your pee than risk the restroom. (A very Bombay phenomenon.) More than any place outside the flat in which I grew up, it made me and scared me and stopped time for me. It nourished me, quite literally; its samosas and salty popcorn are a city byword. My exhausted parents started bringing me here as a child, presumably to have a few hours to think about something other than me. Eventually, they stopped having to carry me out every time I woke up and started screaming. I allowed myself to be babysat by what was unfolding on screen. It’s where I still go, not to escape my life, but to inhabit its irrationality more fully.

Through the 1960s and 1970s, movie halls of this style sprang up around suburban Mumbai to accommodate the upwardly mobile people pouring in to occupy its formerly lush hills and quiet fishing villages. They were quite distinct from their predecessors in the city’s older districts. The grand picture halls of the early twentieth century had catered to wealthy Mumbaikars and colonial jet-setters. Later, scores of unpretentious cinema halls, often built in strikingly clean modernist styles, opened around the working-class areas of central Mumbai, in order to serve a universe of overworked, underpaid migrants. In one scholar’s trenchant phrase, the movies were to keep the workforce from escaping back home to the village.

The triplet-theatres that came up in residential neighborhoods also mirrored the lifestyles and aspirations of their target demographic. You were not ashamed to be seen at these places, built simply but at impressive scale, with alliterative names (Badal-Bijli-Barkha; Satyam-Shivam-Sundaram) just like families gave their children. They were victims of our success. Within decades of their establishment, these theatres were gone, wiped out and replaced by what their patrons came to prefer: wincingly bright malls with “multiplex” screens on the top floor. These plexes, perched atop perfume boutiques and sneaker stores, offer rolling screenings of movies in Hindi, English, and some of India’s regional languages, a nightless illusion of endless choice.

Gaiety-Galaxy is run by a man named Manoj Desai who is, to all accounts, a generous eccentric. His other movie theatre, a central Bombay institution called Maratha Mandir, ran the 1995 blockbuster Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge as a matinee show every day for 20 years. His ticket prices are the lowest you can now find in glamorous, expensive Bandra West. They would have been lower still had he not made the momentous decision to start selling tickets through an online booking service a couple of years ago, putting an end to a longstanding Bandra tradition: the snaking queue outside the ‘advance booking’ windows of Gaiety-Galaxy. (The other tradition, the “black marketeer” who procured seats in bulk and lurked outside the halls before screenings, had been regulated out of existence about fifteen years before.)

Unlike its more decorous mall counterparts, G-7 still has a reputation as a bastion of unbridled passion—a place where fans still dance in the aisles to hit songs and hoot at heroes throwing punches. They used to say that movie stars bought out seats at Gaiety-Galaxy in order to drive up their film’s box office. Rumour had it that they would come here in disguise, like kings eavesdropping on commoners, far from the sycophants at premieres and press shows. Desai even claimed that his clientele, passionate to a fault, were given to taking out their frustrations over a bad movie by ripping up his upholstery: property damage as film criticism. He had appointed a resident tailor, he told a newspaper, who would be on call to repair the constant damage.

I’ve always felt that this reputation for authenticity was overdetermined, a myth enlarged by a city and film industry undergoing rapid change, eager to retain any vestige of old certainties. I’ve been in those cheering, clapping throngs. They are never quite the delirious mobs of feature writers’ dreams. My definitive memory of collective response from these halls is much softer and sweeter. I was at a lukewarm movie about a decade ago whose only saving grace was a miraculous A.R. Rahman soundtrack. When one of its crooning, fizzy hit songs came on, people in each row of that half-full screening took it up, until the whole theatre was singing along. The hall was very warm, lit low and shallow by the screen. The shadows prickled my skin as I sang along, too.

Even if it’s not the circus than it’s imagined to be, G-7 is, the kind of spontaneous community that scholars and critics theorize as a product of movie-going. We will have to give them that. At the outset, Gaiety, Galaxy, and Gemini were stratified by old-school class division (dress circle to lower stall, in descending order). This used to matter more before the mid-2000s. After that, the declining and advancing halves of the Bandra bourgeoisie found themselves in the sweet spot where both could afford balcony tickets, thanks to the vagaries of the Indian economy and the unreasonable stubbornness of Desai.

The proliferation of upper-class multiplexes now contributes to the perpetual impression of Gaiety-Galaxy as a monument to a shabbier, grungier time when cinema was a great leveller. Well, cinema isn’t saving society. But come here on a Saturday night and scope the queue. These poufy-haired hipsters, these burqa-clad young moms, those prosperous Gujarati aunties, and the wage labourers looking for some downtime in the air-conditioning fit oddly together. They aren’t part of an idealized melting pot. It’s just that a mall cinema, occupied entirely by self-contained wealthy people, is like any other new, unhaunted part of Bombay. It offers absolutely no sense of the living city and—as we say in both English and Hindi—its “public,” a word by which we mean not our masses, but our commonwealth.

Late last year, in the final stages of a terminal illness, my mother wanted to watch a movie, and she wanted to watch it at Gaiety-Galaxy. (A mother who takes her screaming infant to the movies has a fine-grained sense of where she is welcome, I guess.) I swallowed my misgivings—including about that cockroach. We went to a late show. Only three other people had turned up. She drank it in, delighted to be out of the house, determined not to be discomfited by the hard seat and the cold air. But by the time the show ended at midnight, she had run out of strength. Getting out of the chair and leaving the hall was a struggle. She sank down on the bench by the empty concession stand as soon as we got out. We were alone but for the ushers and cleaners locking up.

I ran down the stairs to call the liftman out from the office and restart the theatre’s old-fashioned elevator, which he had locked up for the night because he thought all the patrons had left. The ninety seconds it took to ride up in that psychedelic box of mirrors were possibly the longest of my life. At last, my mother and I descended to the ground floor unharmed. We stepped out of the big wooden doors for the last time together. The lane outside was empty except for a small family. They were the other people who had been in the movie with us, waiting by an auto rickshaw. “Take it if you need it,” the man said. We took it.

It did not occur to me to think of it as a reversal of her harried years of bringing me to the movies as an unmanageable toddler who feared the dark. On that night, only the look on her face had made me bite my tongue before I said out loud that we never should have come. I am glad now that we went. I’m dazed at my good luck, after all these years, of still having a home to go to.

Dear friend,

A couple of years ago I had the pleasure of being involved in the retelling of a story that many of us are almost too fascinated by. In fact, in the early months of the pandemic, Ajay Krishnan and I had actually discussed the idea as a story for Fifty Two as the publication was taking shape. We’d spent many high-volume evenings in the company of fellow enjoyers of the idea of India in which most of us understood what the basic structure doctrine is (the categorisation of the features of the Constitution into parts that can be amended, and a core based on foundational values that cannot), and whether they supported it or not. But we figured it was beyond most of us to plunge a level deeper.

So when the Anil Divan Foundation were producing S2 of their podcast, Friend of the Court, I elbowed my way in with pleasure, and spent many happy hours reading and listening to the season’s historical and legal explanation for how the basic structure doctrine came to be, and how it’s shaped Indian democracy. You can listen to that season here, narrated by Raghu Karnad.

But how do so many of us know so much about the Constitution? Why do we care so much about its values? What are the ways in which we learned about it that were seeded in the soil that bears us and in the water we contain? There’s a lifetime of study in these questions, and as someone who wants this vision and these values to endure in a future I need not live to see, it feels deeply personal. For S3 of Friend of the Court, the ADF reached back into history to reconstruct the basis and development of these values through the stories of seven unusual people who helped bring them to life in the decades before and after Indian independence.

I feel shy and proud to have been asked to narrate some of the episodes in this new season. There’s only one woman featured in the line-up, so I recommend you listen to her episode first.

I’m grateful to my employers at Godrej for giving me the chance to ply my wagon on this track while running on another. In the year since I’ve expanded my career into corporate India I’ve enjoyed learning about the work of expansive and progressive institution-building from people who care deeply and sincerely about it. They have escaped the poisoned logic of meritocracy that so many educated Indians, including many from populations historically excluded from economic mobility, accept without question. If you can believe it, my job led to my acquiring enough knowledge to write for the Hindu Sunday Magazine, an honour I had not had previously. Here’s the story.

I’ve also really enjoyed working on a podcast for the DEI Lab called India Included, because it features some of the most vibrant and original voices I’ve heard emerging from the white-collar workplace in India. It’s hosted by Parmesh Shahani, who does what no one else could with his powers of conversational synthesis, warmth and immediacy.

We were lucky that our nimble and talented colleagues on this project were Maed In India, podcasters among podcasters, and some of my favourite people. They’re also the producers of The Lit Pickers, of which Deepanjana and I produced a full season over late 2023 and early 2024, and which I don’t think I ever promoted on this self-promotional newsletter.

I literally have said too much, as this email indicates. Until next time, I wish you good health and hearty courage.

Supriya

Hi, I’m Supriya. When we began Fifty Two we intended to publish deeply reported journalism from outside the news cycle and use our narrative format to reveal why these stories mattered to their readers. After we commissioned our first ten or so stories the world went into Covid lockdown, and our writers were at home instead of out in Bundelkhand or near the Assam border or in a national park in Sri Lanka, and that was how the publication acquired the second-draft-of-history character it became known for by some people. We asked our writers what stories they wanted to tell that they could report from their desks, and they reached back into history to re-examine the stories of our past, and to help explain how they had, in some way, shaped the world we lived in. It’s now on hiatus for personal reasons.

I loved what I did, but I’m not ideologically committed to narrative journalism. It is a byproduct of journalism as a service to keep people informed, and as such, is a second-order service to convince people that a given set of information matters. I also don’t like the word “longform” — it imbues a value-neutral description of a work’s format with aesthetic and ethical qualities that do not inhere to it. It takes a high degree of skill to make a readable work of journalism that’s over 5000 words long, and I suppose it takes a certain amount of habituation to be able to read and enjoy something of that length, too. That may be why there was a time in the 2010s that it really felt like “longform journalism” was acquiring an aura of moral virtue that I don’t personally like, and that I also think is irrelevant to its survival.

It’s not the most important point I want to make, but I would like to admit that many of us who think about journalism have a seriousness problem, because it is such a moral issue to us, and that morality means so much, that it feels like the only grounds on which we can justify why this work we love should continue to exist. I acknowledge that journalism as a service cannot be fully decoupled from journalism as entertainment. I think this is important to recognise so that we can move forward with finding effective ways to report on a time when the conflation of these two things has been masterfully executed in a secondary way by our political leaders, who now live and die by the rules of celebrity culture. They are reacting to the primary movers of this conflation, and of the de-productisation of existing forms of culture —  the owners of tech-oriented capital.

Journalists and independent media owners spend so much time on “product,” which in engineering teams means one thing, and for the rest of us means a package that serves the work up in a way that attracts audience and also serves the algorithm that controls that work’s discoverability, shareability, and profitability. Because of productisation, in the last fifteen years journalism has pivoted to video, broken things down into listicles, created micro-targeted subscription channels, disaggregated brands, gone cap in hand to venture capital to get a slice of the pie that’s poisoning us, and other dramatic things.

So, in fact, media owners have actually de-productised journalism and what gives it value. We’ve totally given up control over distribution. We have colluded in the wide-scale dismantling of intellectual property, and currently have no concept of how to get news out to a wide population that really wants and needs it but has no concept of why to trust what is delivered to their phones for free, or how to pay for what they like.

This sounds like a cultural problem, especially because we in India talk a lot about the difficulty of creating a subscription culture, and how we have a problem assigning importance to certain kinds of work. I don’t think that’s restricted to India alone. I also think that this cultural problem is, critically, a labour problem, and it speaks to my fundamental issue with journalism right now. No one has a model that foregrounds longevity. And that’s a people problem, a social problem, and a problem of labour because it is a jobs problem.

Independent journalism has had a jobs issue for a long time. I heard from someone at a journalism conference in Bangalore earlier this year about a panel of eminent editors — Prem was not among them — some of whom are leading the fight in keeping freedom of information and opinion alive in India. Their moderator asked them what they were doing to ensure that the bright young journalists in their employ could hang around for long enough to sustain their work. I didn’t hear that there was a satisfactory answer. I don’t have one myself. But I do know that journalists are on the backfoot when it comes to their survival. Independent media is not thriving in precarity; it is functioning in spite of it.

Journalists are among the most talented people I know, but I believe there is a crisis of talent in Indian journalism today because media owners cannot do more to keep younger people afloat in the profession for long enough to imagine high-level solutions to its problem. We are all without resources to construct a pushback to the total cannibalisation of journalistic work. This problem is exacerbated by what we call “legacy media,” because what legacy there is belongs to owners who have no idea how to stop client servicing Google and Meta and will have absolutely no idea of what to do in the face of LLMs dismantling copyright and intellectual property.

The best we’ve been able to do collectively is think of journalism as product. Apart from the few gigantic establishments that already think of themselves as platforms — Prem mentioned the FT and the WSJ, to which I’d add the New York Times, perhaps the BBC — there’s no real capacity to do something other than shape the work to game the delivery mechanism, which as I said earlier is no longer in our hands. 

Sure, you can say that that’s a version of what journalism always was — first a billboard for billboard owners to rent, then a stool pigeon for print advertising and so on. That history keeps many practitioners afloat: knowing that journalism has always existed at an intersection of competing interests, and the number of people fighting to deliver news of importance, stories that matter, have probably always been quite small, and so has the catchment of consumers who are interested in these things. If we survived the twentieth century, we can probably survive the twenty-first.

But the media businesses that survived the twentieth century are now fifty, seventy, a hundred, 150 years old, and they are the best in the world. The trust and respect that gives them power are not values that can give any investor hockey-stick growth. But they’re not dispensable, either: they are core to the social importance of any journalism. In the twenty-first century, media competes for resources in an economic environment where long-term survival is not considered relevant to success. In its race to the bottom of distribution mechanics, it is shedding its long-term thinkers very quickly. That shedding is not cheap. Especially in a craft-led industry, the work takes years to teach, to build on and to improve on. Without quality long-term thinking, we don’t make innovations that create value for society, and we simply don’t deliver enough work to help create trust and respect. 

So I really think the best thing is to de-productise journalism and start investing in journalists. It’s time to find metrics of long-term productivity and engagement other than the burn rate on cheap, value-less reach, and to teach investors to commit to them. If media owners and institutions start investing in people again, we can have many more ideas that will allow us to preserve the social goods that we believe in, the way we’re trying to preserve rainforests and fresh-water bodies — just a couple of other things that feel like luxuries but turn out to be essential. 

This weekend, Prarthna Singh and Snigdha Poonam invited me to speak at a walkthrough of their show 2024: Notes From A Generation. Here’s a version of my speaking notes. This is not a critique or a review. The show is on at Tarq gallery, Fort, until May 11.

Hello and thank you for being here. I don’t have much of a visual imagination, and my visual education is meagre, but if you want a credential for my belonging here, or at least to these parts, the first art exhibition I ever went to was the monumental Picasso show, which was held at the NGMA down the road from here when I was a teenager.  

I’ve grown up now, and I’m a writer and editor. I currently work at a company that made the ballot boxes for India’s first-ever elections, so the question of marking time by elections, and of using them as a guideline to locate your place in history, is on my mind. That is one form of understanding that this show offers you. 

The question I would like to offer, as you absorb the work, is: do these faces define an era? Or do they do something contrary, and escape time? 

As I grow older it becomes easier to describe my past in shorthand. One of my first memories of journalism is also my first and clearest memory of the radio: it’s of listening to the news of Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination. I have a vivid memory of seeing the Babri Masjid being demolished on my TV, as do many of you — a collective false memory, since that footage never aired. The more memories you collect, the more ‘pastness’ you incur, and the easier it is to describe yourself as part of a distinct era. When I say my grandparents come from the age of Jawaharlal Nehru and my parents from the age of Indira Gandhi, it’s shorthand. I can look back and say that I am a child of the market economy and the long Manmohan Singh era. That’s my own shorthand.

I don’t know what forms the texture of the Modi years for people much younger than me, and how easy it is for them to locate themselves like this. So it’s tempting to come to this show for answers. ‘Show me the effect of the Modi years on these young adults.’ But does the exhibit do something else? Does it try to create an irony, a tension between the big political picture — a picture that they did not choose to be in — and their intensely private ways of being in the world? There’s an audio loop in the booth behind us where you will hear them speak. You will constantly hear them describe themselves in relation to other people: family, friends, rivals, BTS, even Modi. But I don’t get a straight answer to whether they see themselves as part of history in the way I just described.

Perhaps that’s because it’s not supposed to be easy. You remember, ten years ago, that we were supposed to be in this ‘leher,’ this wave of campaign enthusiasm for Modi. That came and went. What about the ‘dhara,’ the current that bears us all through history? That sense is still becoming, and the show is a reminder that it is in the process of becoming for me as well as for you, and not just for those younger than we are. 

Indians — some Indians — like to say, or used to say, that a common feature of belonging to this country was the belief that no matter how hard things got, tomorrow was bound to be better than today. Now that I’m approaching middle age, I tell myself that if I were a young person today I would have a hard time believing that. I’d have liked a show that canvassed young people for their answers. ‘Is tomorrow going to be better than today? Tell me so that I can decide whether that feeling is a function of youth, or a function of the political reality we live in.’ That’s a convenient way of extracting messaging from art. We’re not dealing in those conveniences here.  

So what do I read in this show? First of all, and every time I’ve been here, it’s the overwhelming sense of how beautiful it is to be young, and how extraordinarily beautiful the people who come from our subcontinent are. Right? That’s the gift of the act of looking, of attention. Second, I think it offers resistance to a formal glibness that is also a neurological crisis. We’re up to our ears in captioneering, Instagrammified consumption of the portraits of strangers: pre-arranged midshots in candid surroundings, or the humansofxyz model. It’s a mode of aesthetic consumerism that’s totally compatible with the way tech platforms rewire our brains. It demands our empathy in a way that gratifies us. I have nothing against demands for empathy, or against oral history. I like both those things a lot. But we’ve become accustomed to pictures and stories of other people yielding to our gaze very easily.

This show comes to you without captions, without text or identity markers that help you slip into that mode of easy empathy. Does the lack of those particular markers proscribe your responses, or does it set them free? That’s another question I suggest you consider as you look at these portraits. 

I want to talk about the artists themselves, and a quality they both share, which is their ability to describe a moment in time without trapping you in it. Snigdha is, among other things, a lore-keeper of the modern Indian hustle. Her subjects are frequently on the make, or being made, and her writing captures something about the process of the con that can be transcendent. I often sense that her interviewee is teetering on some edge of double or triple awareness, trying to decide whether, in fooling a third party, he can get away with fooling himself, or even Snigdha herself. To the extent that it’s true that the photograph is a form of disclosure — sorry to Susan Sontag — it shares that mode of revelation with how the most inimitable reporters do their work. She’s one of them.

Prarthna works on film, and that is her medium of truth. It shapes this show more fundamentally than any other choice she and Snigdha have made. I was watching the Japanese movie Radiance before I came here, and heard a character say: ‘The photographer is a hunter. His prey is time.’ I was taken out of the movie because at that precise moment I was also thinking of coming here and looking at Prarthna’s portraits. ‘Does she see time as prey? Is that how she works?’ If it is, then why do I feel that these portraits, and this curation of them, set their subjects free? They’re not made to be devoured, and they’re not made for anthropological reasons, though they might come off like that in a different context and in front of different viewers.  There’s an ageless quality to them that I would argue escapes even the exhibit and the definitions it has drawn for itself.

I sense that Prarthna’s work is about finding truth without competing with the methods of the documentarians. Her major work preceding this was made in Shaheen Bagh, during the anti-CAA protests, and while it obviously has something in common with the making of a journalistic record, that’s not its whole purpose. The book is called ‘Har Shaam Shaheen Bagh.’ Every evening is Shaheen Bagh. You could see in that an attempt to liberate the moment, and maybe even to immortalise it.

Immortalisation is one of the side-effects of portraiture. That brings me back to the question I started with. How do you define an era? The first time I came here I thought of the Films Division documentary that SNS Sastry made in 1967, called I Am Twenty, an anthology of interviews with 20 year olds born in 1947. To me the people in that film aren’t just people from my grandparents’ time, or my parents’ time. They are part of a time that also lives in me. So are these portraits of people born twenty years after me. But I don’t derive this sense from how they look, or what they say. When you listen to the audio loop, you’ll hear the sounds of the streets on which Snigdha and Prarthna captured them. You hear the animals, and the chatter of other people, and the passing vehicles honking. That is their country, and also mine. That is the dhara to which we all belong. 

What we think of our place in history matters much less than what those who come after us will think about it. As you proceed through this gallery, it is not just you who are looking at these irrepressible young people. Their portraits are looking back at you. They are navigating the same barriers to understanding what they are seeing as you are. When I go back to that soundscape in the audio booth, and I feel like being annoyed at these kids for sounding shallow and self-involved and writing poetry, I know that what I think of them matters less than whatever they are thinking of me. Whatever I believe of them will never be better or more acutely observed than what they will believe of me. I’ll leave you with that thought. Thank you once again.

Dear friend,

This self-promotional newsletter is about three things.

First, Fifty Two: While our weekly publication is on hiatus, recognition for its second season of stories has been rolling in this week.

At this year’s ACJ India Awards, among a stellar list of honourees, “Hunger” by Andrew Fidel Fernando received a special mention in the ‘social impact’ category. Fidel travelled through Sri Lanka after a momentous year of popular uprising to report a story of deep and wide-ranging crisis.

“Uprooted” by Sarita Santoshini received a special mention in the ‘social impact’ category. This was one of the first stories we commissioned. Sarita had to wait a couple of years before the time was right to finish it. It’s about how the residential school system in Odisha is changing the lives of young Adivasis — an echo of how residential schools have affected children from indigenous communities in many parts of the world, over the last couple of centuries.

At the One World Media awards, Deepa Padmanaban received a special mention in the ‘environmental impact’ category for “Identity Crisis,” her work on how Indian forensic scientists are attempting to ease one of the most fundamental sorrows of natural disasters: finding and identifying the dead.

And Ankur Paliwal is on their print feature shortlist for “Off Balance,” the story of a rare disease that affects the members of just a few communities in India changes — and the story of how doctors and researchers are trying to ease their unusual burdens.

Stay with me a moment longer: we’re also on the SOPA shortlists. Karishma Mehrotra is nominated for excellence in tech reporting for “Human Touch,” her story about the young women in small-town India who make up the unseen manual force that teaches AI systems their work.

And Bhavya Dore is shortlisted for excellence in feature writing, for “The Match,” a haunting story about European children adopted out of Sri Lanka decades ago, who are returning to find their birth families.

Second, The Lit Pickers.

Despite the other things Deepanjana and I get up to, our short two-season podcast about books and reading is somehow the thing we are most frequently asked about in person. We also often get asked to recommend books or talk about what we’re reading. Since I’m always interested in what Deepanjana is reading, this is a bid to nudge her into updating her own newsletter. Here’s a list of books I’ve been reading or re-reading over the last couple of weeks:

Yeh Un Dinon Ki Baat Hai: Incredible trove of essays edited and translated from Urdu by Yasir Abbasi, drawn from film magazines published in the second half of the twentieth century. It includes writing from Kaifi Azmi and Shakeel Badayuni, Naushad writing on K. Asif, memoir-essays from Nadira and Dilip Kumar, and op-eds by Balraj Sahni and Dev Anand. Unbelievable! Bloomsbury India.

Sone Chandi Ke Buth: Edited and translated by Syeda Hameed and Sukhpreet Kahlon, a selection of film writing by the amazingly prolific (and really very charming) Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, who writes about everything from the Kapoors to workers’ struggles to film as the Indian public’s great teacher of the Hindustani language. Penguin India/Vintage.

Darlingji: Kishwar Desai’s champagne bucket of a double-biography, on the private lives of Nargis and Sunil Dutt, maybe among the most fun books about the Hindi movie business anyone has ever published. Aside: Desai has a more recent book, also drawn out of the neglected archive, called The Longest Kiss. It is about Devika Rani and Himansu Rai. I started reading it in advance of Vikramaditya Motwane’s show Jubilee, which I thought I’d jump into feet-first, but haven’t gotten around to just yet. (Aside to the aside: Neerja Deodhar wrote a wonderful Fifty Two story about Motwane’s own family and the making of their epic Hindi movie about the freedom struggle.) Harper Collins India.

Bombay Hustle: Making Movies In A Colonial City: The scholar Debashree Mukherjee writes a thrilling exploration of the world of pre-1947 cinema, which can feel unimaginably different from what came afterwards to present-day moviegoers, whose primary pastime is, after all, forgetting things. Columbia University Press / Penguin India.

Nobody’s Girl Friday: By J.E. Smyth, about what Bette Davis called the “twenty years in which women ran Hollywood,” a contradiction of the prevailing idea that women workers and executives disappeared when American cinema transformed from a maverick silent-picture business to an industry controlled by behemoth studios. This book was totally new to me. I bristled a bit at the title because I love His Girl Friday. But the real world is full of ambitious successful women, while there are no editors like Cary Grant, other than myself. Oxford University Press.

This is a pretty narrow list, targeted towards the third thing this newsletter is about —

— a short essay I wrote for Film Companion called “Everything About Nargis Was A Serve.”

It came out on the forty-second anniversary of the death of my favourite movie star. I don’t want to extend this newsletter much further but I would like to point out that almost all the films I refer to in the article are available for free on YouTube right now. Most are sadly un-subtitled, but there is an un-grody print of Awaara with English subs that I honestly recommend for a reminder of just what a good movie it is.

I will continue to apprise you of developments, mine or others’, in future editions of this newsletter.

Supriya

Dear friend,

I went to see an exhibit of Atul Dodiya’s paintings, “Dr. Banerjee in Dr. Kulkarni’s Nursing Home,” on the day that it closed. I know very little about visual art and I have a strong, practically anti-intellectual suspicion of nostalgia, so I felt conflicted and hesitant to enjoy the paintings. There’s been a generally celebratory revival of talk around Hindi cinema lately, with the extraordinary success of Pathaan, followed by the release of Yash Raj Films’s Netflix documentary, The Romantics. The conversation has been hyperactive because many people are tired of being worried about the ongoing focus on marginalising Muslims in Hindi cinema, and tired of being upset and uncertain about how the venture-funded platform economy is algorithmising entertainment. Dr. Banerjee / Dr. Kulkarni is a series of paintings depicting scenes from Hindi cinema from the 1960s and 1970s, full of the vanished glamour of a tiny salaried upper class. The air of buoyancy around it might be seen in continuity with the same sense of respite and enjoyment. However, I did not want to be the one doing this seeing.

When you have spent more time trying to be a creator (non-algorithmic) than a critic the impulse to let people do their work without hearing your opinions on it grows very strong. If Atul Dodiya were not a hundred times more prominent than anyone with a small self-promotional newsletter in India today I would have felt bad disclosing these doubts. If the exhibit were not loved and praised I would have thought a dozen times before airing these nitpicking doubts. In fact, I would have said nothing if the paintings hadn’t lingered in my mind long after I left the show. Riding a taxi home, I saw the faces and the storefronts, the windows and the vignettes that Atul Dodiya has been observing for all his life, re-ordering them into new, vivid and wonder-inducing works. I have always tried not to let objects and places displace the people I love in my memory. But the sight of the wired plastic chairs in the corner of one painting, exactly like the chairs in my grandparents’ home in Kerala, swept away my attempts to separate people from their surroundings. For a little while I dwelt in the thought of what it must be like to see the world the way Atul Dodiya does. It was a very great pleasure. If the show travels to your city I think you should see it.

For the last many months I have been trying to do my work, too, without delivering my opinions of it to you. But it must be said: Fifty Two has been doing very well, and I’ve had a lot of fun working on it with its excellent editorial team. I don’t want to make this unduly valedictory, so I am informing you well in advance that this is the last month of its second season. We will be going on hiatus once again after the last story. Please do follow us and cheer for us over the next few weeks.

I didn’t write much over the last few months, other than a brief comment for The India Cable on changes at Twitter soon after its change of ownership, in November 2022. The comment was republished in The Wire.

A few of you may remember that I thought of repurposing this newsletter as an advice column last year. The desire to mind other people’s business is extremely strong in me but as you can see, I have more or less avoided giving in to it after a couple of early attempts. I wrote a Twitter thread about something I often want to say to people. If you or someone you know finds it helpful, I’d be glad. I don’t want to famous-last-words myself but I would like to use the upcoming hiatus at Fifty Two to write more. If you have ideas for what I should write, please reply to this email and let me know.

I will leave you with news of a public appearance: tomorrow at 630 p.m., IST, in a Zoom window, talking about essays and long-format reportage with Nous of St Joseph’s, Bangalore.

Otherwise, for now, best.

Supriya

Dear friend,

It gives me great pleasure to put this newsletter to the original use to which it was intended: fanfare. In April we learned that Fifty Two is an honoree at the 2022 Webby awards: in other words, it’s been officially chosen as one of the most beautiful websites of the year at the equivalent of the internet’s Oscars. We owe it to our friends at 3 Sided Coin, who designed it; to Akshaya Zachariah, who designs our illustrations every week; and to Saul and team Tiger Digital, the immortal hand/eye that framed its fearful symmetry. I should additionally emphasise that my co-founder Gaurav is the one with taste.

If you missed all sporadic editions of this newsletter over the last year and a half, Fifty Two is a publication that puts out one long work of journalism from or about the Indian subcontinent every week. We’ve been going for a year and a quarter now, over which some of our stories have won other national and international awards.

Also in April, Monica Jha won third prize at the Fetisov Journalism Awards in the category “Contribution to Civil Rights,” for her story “The Testimony”. This came out in May 2021, and starts with a group of boys from Bihar who hoodwinked their traffickers and fled a bangle factory in Jaipur. Then it goes back to Bihar to recreate the story of how these boys and their mothers pulled off an even rarer victory: by taking their trafficker to court and winning. It’s an extraordinary story.

Also in April, Monika Mondal was longlisted for a One World Media award for environmental reporting. Her story, “Troops,” came out in July last year. It’s her version of the man-monkey story that used to be a rite of passage for Western foreign correspondents passing through Delhi in simpler times—and also something quite different, as you might expect.

Previously in our short life, Bhavya Dore’s “Collision,” our inaugural story, won a Red Ink press award in the “Science and Innovation” category, and an ASJA award in the “Technology” reporting category. And Aathira Perinchery’s “Succession,” a story about how and why the Western Ghats are practically exploding with newly discovered frog species, won gold at the AAAS-Kavli Science Journalism awards.

If you’ve been supporting us all this while: thanks for your support. If you haven’t, then it’s not too late. You can sign up for our (unobtrusive) newsletter or follow us on Twitter or Instagram where we try to keep you informed and entertained, braving algorithms that don’t at all like the fact that we don’t have 30 things to post in a day. Write me an email if you want to do business with us.

I have a number of amusing stories about myself to tell. But instead of diluting the message I will do some more self-promotion. I wrote a review, published this weekend in Scroll. It’s about Parvati Sharma’s new book, Akbar of Hindustan. It gave me great pleasure to write something for publication after a while, particularly since I loved Parvati’s previous book, Jahangir. (Some other writing on the period: a review of Ira Mukhoty’s Daughters Of The Sun, a history of Mughal women; and a column about Richard Eaton’s India In The Persianate Age, 1000-1765.)

Eid mubarak, and may your May be rife with darling buds.

Supriya

We went back and forth on it during editing. Was it too sudden? Too mournful? Too much of a swerve from the essay’s exuberance? Perhaps all those things, but I enjoyed it because it’s real. Academics go on about being right about tech and the internet all along. But out in the parts of Planet Earth outside sociology departments, getting to see and experience consumer tech still feels like learning to read a new language in a day. It’s always a sudden empowerment. It was not, and arguably still doesn’t feel irrational, to believe that the joy it provides is infinite. (That emotion is political, and I think it is as or more apt to influence progressive thinking than the latter’s less imaginative counterparts.) The shock of learning or recalling its costs is real, an emotional truth.

My first job out of college was in customer support at Google’s Hyderabad office, where I was surrounded by so many techno-optimists that I immediately started to think of myself as the skeptic, though I knew nothing about anything. In those years Googlers went about matter-of-factly dropping bombshells like: “oh, the perfect search is when the user finds a single right answer.” (Eric Schmidt explained this to us in a TGIF meeting.) I had only the language of the arts to criticise the sciences; I had only the barest minimum idea of how to form a counterargument.

It’s not even that I was a naysayer. In those days the question of whether Google would ever make money was actually not considered settled. I was the last, or maybe the slowest person in the world to brush against Big Tech when it saw itself as indistinguishable from Big Ideas. That brush was charged with the vestigial sense of this whole thing being an experiment. Long after my stint at Google I spent a full evening arguing with fellow editors at the Caravan that our style should be ‘the Internet’ and not ‘the internet’ because one of the few things I still understood and believed about “the Internet” was that it was a fragile, unique and temporary form. But so is the planet earth. 

(I lost the battle. We don’t use ‘the Internet’ at Fifty Two either.)

I started writing this a year ago, because in my last newsletter in January 2021, I offered “agony-aunt style advice” to younger readers. One person asked me, “How did you go from working at Google to [a word I don’t like to use, and substitute with the Bombay restaurateur euphemism ‘helping run’ wherever possible] a publication?” as a prompt for providing career advice. I took it seriously and even consulted with my colleague Sidin to extract usable information from our personal stories. But it would be pointless for me to offer that advice because the answer on my part is, honestly, luck. When I left Google it was already clear that the momentum of the tech industry was going to dictate change not just for my generation but also for those to come. It was also clear that journalism did not have that momentum. 

Still, I came of age in a very good decade. Fifteen years ago journalism was a fun job for someone of my age and station. You would not make as much money as your MBA peers but you could make more than your parents did in their early careers. It offered a public service that allowed you to do good, or at least help prevent active harm. It offered a fantasy of constant growth and improvement. I think anyone seeking those incentives today should probably work on their Instagram presence. 

I am not being flippant. The job is obviously more urgent than ever but the shrinking of the industry is very real. Having spent the last couple of years in an airlock at the edge of the universe of venture capital created by my colleagues at All Things Small for our journalistic experiment, I still think there is an entrepreneurial battle to be fought at multiple levels, in convincing people with money that the service you provide is important to them, and to the world they live in. It doesn’t seem to be easy and I think a part of that is the fallout of it having been easy going for a few years, for a few people, including me. 

But it is worth trying. Many people are still trying. I am even keen to see what emerges from constant, quick and sometimes deep changes in storytelling formats, even though these changes have been irritating and mostly for the worse for about thirty years running. Above all there remains the core job. Getting into journalism as an idealist is vital and will remain so even if things get much worse. I just hesitate to offer my experience as a useful indicator of any possible future, because getting into it as an optimist was not a risk when I started, and now it is.  

(I know some columnists who would say “calculated risk,” but I have personally never met a journalist good at calculating things.) 

So much for useful and timely advice! Sorry and I hope it at least made you laugh. I’ll do my best to improve.

I narrowly avoided making this newsletter a review-essay on some books I thought were relevant to the intersection of tech and writing, but I will offer a gloss, all the same. Kate Losse’s The Boy Kings and Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley are both B.A. English responses to the shock of seeing the world through the lens of Big Tech and, more crucially, I think, venture capital. I recommend Ellen Ullman’s A Life In Code, a memoir by a programmer who can both write and see the world politically. Robert Darnton’s essays for the NYRB on Google Books and libraries are very good examples of recent-ish thinking on public knowledge at the intersection of money and technological momentum.

Deepanjana and I dropped the second season of The Lit Pickers, our extremely personal books podcast, late last year. Thanks to our wonderful producers, Maed In India, for making it thinkable and possible. 

We took a break after publishing fifty two stories on Fifty Two, but will be back soon. Please follow us or sign up for our very disciplined and useful newsletter to get updates straightaway. My colleagues also produced a second season of our space podcast, Mission ISRO; 377, a mini-series about the legal battle to decriminalise homosexuality, and much more.

Happy new year!

[1] –– This is still true.

Dear friend,

I would not have revamped this newsletter if I still had the honour of writing a books column for the most interesting newspaper in India. But Mumbai Mirror no longer exists[1]. To be honest, neither does my need for self-promotion. This newsletter began as a way to let commissioning editors know that I was productive and looking for assignments. For the moment, my relations with the means of production have changed. 

À propos, if you are or know a person who enjoys reading Fifty Two and would like to work with us as we expand our audience––in other words, should you be someone who enjoys promoting things––send me an email with your resume. 

Over the next few editions this newsletter will offer literary opinions, recommendations, and, as I am a hair older than those of you in the youth bulge, agony aunt-style advice about reading, writing and a limited sphere of work. I have some of these stored up from previous ventures on Twitter and Instagram; if you’d like to contribute a question, I will protect your anonymity.

Other subjects may appear over time.

READING

I couldn’t review Arshia Sattar’s Mahabharata for Children because of a pre-existing condition (I love her). But I can be less zealous about separating personal interests from column space in a newsletter. Her single-volume illustrated adaptation really brings the thrum of deep personal and political sorrow—no, agony—to the forefront of the pomp and bombast of the epic. The book is meant for children over ten years old, and I think a lot of adults will find it appropriate to their own level of understanding. It’s simpler and obviously more brief than translations for grown-ups. But it tells itself with a gravity and emotional maturity I found terribly moving. Sonali Zohra’s illustrations are beautiful. 

Following this I started to read Carole Satyamurti’s verse translation, a 900-page effort that does restore the pomp and bombast to the agony. Scholarly readers may find a U of Chicago connection interesting: Arshia Sattar graduated from that institution; Satyamurti is British and not a scholar of Sanskrit, but the introduction to her work is written by the US Sanskritist Wendy Doniger.

No good translator ever humanises an epic[2], but Satyamurti allows it to stay, hm, socialised. Its scaffolding of dharma and caste obligations contains and explains its action without rendering it distant or foreign, or not in a way that it seems unrecognisable. This is a good way to tell an old story: not to bargain or reason with its logic, only to suffuse it with pity for its actors, and terror for all those whose voices never appear in it, but who breathe life into it from its margins anyway—all the lives which gave the authors of the Mahabharata the audacity to say that what is in it may be found elsewhere, but what is not can be found nowhere else. (They were right in that reality can’t compete with a book. Only other books can.)

Those who share the imperial schoolmaster’s view that epics say something profound about the human essence of their descendant societies might like both these works. But this demographic now heavily overlaps with that of the oversensitive nationalist, for whom any number of celebratory modern renderings exist.[3] For the uncertain, the skeptical, the curious, and for those who know about pity and terror, I think they will suit. 

WRITING & WORK

My last few columns for Mumbai Mirror were about books by Manjiri Indurkar and Rituparna Chatterjee; S Jaishankar; AK Mehrotra (editor) and Moni Mohsin, among others. I’ll be in conversation with Moni Mohsin over a Zoom call organised by the Jaipur Lit Fest around the 20th of this month, if that’s your jam. 

Fifty Two has published its first twelve stories, and I recommend all of them to you. Sign up on the website for a weekly email link to a new story. Briefly, for those who haven’t already, our contributors wrote and illustrated stories about India’s worst air crash; the accession of Sikkim; a history of Indian custard powder; the thin end of the wedge of the internet; a 1995 frenzy over idols drinking milk; the lives of dogs in Gurgaon; the strand of Indian activism that emerged after the Mathura case verdict; India’s longest-running insurgency in Nagaland; a man who inadvertently changed India’s environmental laws; why horse-racing still exists in India; the trailblazing scholar Kamla Chowdhury; and India’s capitulation to the aesthetics of embarrassed wealth. Next week: the history of a colonial mental institution. 

RECOMMENDATIONS

• I read the Ann Patchett essay like everyone else, enjoyed it, feel more alive &c., but even above the high degree of literary polish it was so interesting for its vistas of how the rich live. I really think other strivers should read it for this reason alone.

• The only magazine I read with any consistency over 2020 was the LRB, which turned a bit fey. Last month I tortured myself with delight over this 12,000-word takedown of Isaiah Berlin by the righteous socialist Christopher Hitchens. Ten percent of the pleasure of this essay comes from the lengths to which Hitchens goes to insult Berlin; eighty percent from hindsight; and an unlooked-for bonus from the letters responding to the essay which devolve into a fight between Berlin supporters and Hitchens supporters.

• I look forward to monthly numbers of the crisp and thoughtful Satyashodhak newsletter by Tejas Harad, which contains updates of the work released on their eponymous website, as well as recommendations for English-language writing and commentary.

• In 2020 I stopped being unnerved by the idea of a spirit world. I admit this is a reactionary opinion to hold in a country where people are murdered for demystifying superstitions and untangling history from mythology. But all stories start out as individual, or at least very small, consolations. I don’t think the dead are crowding my sleeping bedside, nor do I have any wish to communicate with them; but I’m now okay with the idea that other people believe in supernatural things, and that there are worse ways to be irrational. 

• One factor in this is the heightened awareness of the nightmare of waking life (lol). Others have written about this.

• Another is how comforted I am by visions of the uncanny in Korean dramas, where shamanic rituals, memories of the dead, parallel universes of spirits and ghosts, and prospects of reincarnation are all common, and help make life––secular life, almost never moored to organised religion––more vivid. I found Hotel del Luna especially nice in this respect. It’s a madcap gender-bent Beauty and the Beast about a bitter 1,000 year-old ghost who runs a way-station for the newly dead on their way from one world to the next, and the 28-year old human manager from Harvard who’s trapped into becoming her newest employee. It’s also a meditation on attachment and pride, on shame and longing, and, of course, love and faith; and it is modest and lowbrow[4] and hopeful about the human ability to come to grips with all these things, at last. 

I’m stopping here. In the next newsletter: food, agony advice and TBD. I don’t know if future editions of the newsletter will be this lengthy but please feel free to unsubscribe if it isn’t to your taste! Thank you for reading my intermittent messages over the last few years.

[1] For reasons it does not behoove me to dissect, both as a former colleague of the employees of the paper and as a participant in the ongoing clown show that is India’s metropolitan media industry.

[2] Humanising things is for moderns, and while the Satyamurti Mahabharata is called ‘A Modern Retelling’ the subtitle speaks more to its language and style than to its substance.

[3] Take Amit Majumdar’s recent rendering of the Bhagavad Gita in blank verse, called Godsong. In the introduction, Majumdar writes, of the survival of brahminism over centuries of invasion: “Hinduism also had an orthodox priestly class, insufferably convinced of its own superiority. This supremacism, however odious to outsiders, is a sine qua non when it comes to building an empire––or resisting one. The Jews have it in their rabbis; the Hindus have it in their Brahmins. Both are survivor religions, and both, accordingly, are at times reviled by non-believers.”

[4] My favourite kind of brow.

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Dear friend,

Perhaps the strongest false memory in my life is the utter conviction that I watched the mid-air collision of two passenger aircraft over a village in Haryana on TV. There was neither live footage nor photographs, but I can’t shake the distinct memory I have of having seen this unbelievable and terrifying thing. 

That was the second reason I jumped at the chance to work with Bhavya Dore on a story about the crash. The third reason was the sheer number of people I’ve spoken to, especially under 25,* who haven’t the faintest idea that this accident happened. 

The prime reason is that Bhavya is a great journalist. Hers is the first story in a publication I’ve been working on with my colleagues at All Things Small. It’s called Fifty Two and will send out a new story every week. Bhavya’s work kicks off a series of reported essays about history, culture and politics on the Indian subcontinent, and how they made a difference to the lives of some/many of us. (The Charkhi Dadri crash changed global aviation rules, for example, which makes it even stranger that there’s relatively little public memory of it.) 

Please read Collision by Bhavya Dore here, and let me know what you think. If you’ve feedback on the site, I am agog: it is a work in progress. And please write for us! We are eager to commission new work from writers around the subcontinent. 

In other news: in late August I participated in a pitching workshop run by the Network of Women in Media, India, for which I wrote up a set of pitching guidelines for writers starting out. Here’s a pdf of that document. Please feel free to share the link with anyone who might find it useful.

Early this year I sent Meher Varma a brief essay for a project she’s been working on. Our double-billed article on the styles of Delhi (Meher) and Bombay (myself) women came out in Himal in June. Please find it here.

In Mumbai Mirror this month, I wrote about books by Zadie Smith, Kate Manne, Aparna Vaidik and others. The columns are here. In writing about Vaidik’s book I wasn’t sure if I was elaborating or repeating the themes of two older essays I wrote for the Atlantic, about lynching after Mohammed Akhlaq, and sexual violence, after Kathua. I submit them here, for the record.

My other work this month has included beating my standard time on making a chicken pulao; refraining from getting into fights on the k-drama subreddit; and losing hours to solving (and starting to make!) crosswords. 

Please look after yourself and those around you. I’ll write again next month.

Supriya

* I know this sounded like a humblebrag but yes, it’s true, I do know persons under the age of thirty.

Dear friend,

My birthday was not the best I’ve ever had to be honest. It fell right in the middle of a bad mood that spread with the malice of an oil spill over my conception of past, present and future. For many weeks, I wished that the invincible summer that Camus talked of had had the good manners to stay within me. There was nothing to recommend it once it was without.

But then June came, and removing myself from all forms of social media began to revive my psyche. I got over the disappointment of not being able to draft my ambitious historical romance novel to my satisfaction and got to work on a second one, a short, quick novella-length work that helped me get over the slump. The third one was the best yet. I think I am getting the hang of things now. If I haven’t responded to your emails at any point in the last four months it’s because I was either working or preoccupied with this new hobby, I am sorry.

And now here we are, nearly in the last month of the monsoon. The electrician was finally able to come around again. I have discovered desk lighting, which for some reason I never had before. Seeing the engineers of Mac Fix Station, the most helpful tech service in Bombay (this is a recommendation), was even more heartening. I now have a new keyboard whose ‘e’ key does the work for which it was intended.

Our experiments at All Things Small are going well. My colleagues have been producing podcasts and working on film and video stuff remotely all through quarantine. Vikram and I will hopefully have something to show for all the pots we’ve been watching in a few weeks’ time. I will write with an update just before we’re ready with that.

I was honoured to contribute a list of recommendations for Indian films to the Nikkei Asian Review in early May. You may read it and be incensed about whatever I have left out here.

Harper’s Bazaar asked me to introduce Korean crime dramas* to their readers, also in May, or maybe in June. I did so in brief and saved the story in my Instagram highlights, which you should be able to find here (if you can’t, it’s in the ‘Writing’ highlight). A long and torrid essay on my year of watching drama remains to be written. I will get to it.

My books column at Mumbai Mirror continues hitchlessly. Recently I wrote about Karishma Upadhyay’s biography of Parveen Babi, Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, Barbara Demick’s Tibet book, some cookbooks I enjoyed and more. Please read them here.

Onam greetings to one and all. Please don’t reply with advice on personal electronics or asking to read my romance novel outlines. I wish you and everyone around you good health and revolutionary spirits.

Supriya

* Please do reply with your thoughts on Stranger if you are watching the new season.

First, the good news. The gentleman deputed to produce lunch in the flat across mine keeps the same laggardly timetable that I do. Long after the grinding, rolling, whistling and chopping noises have ceased from the more efficient flats around us, we enter our facing kitchens to perform our duties with the same air of breezy distraction. I have never met him, but I know the mood in which a person turns on the songs of Mohammed Rafi before applying themselves to a task. I welcome and celebrate it. 

Now I presume you will want the bad news. But as of this moment there are no personal tragedies to report.

On the subject of podcasts, The Lit Pickers reached the end of its run last week. If you listened to it, thank you. If you didn’t, each episode is about as long as it takes to make a tasty, nutritious and mercifully quick lunch. No link as it is available #WhereverYouGetYourPodcasts.

When COVID-19 lockdown was first announced in India, I wrote an op-ed for The Guardian. I submit it for the historical record here. 

In my Mumbai Mirror column this month I wrote about Dilip D’Souza and Joy Ma’s The Deoliwallahs; Thucydides and Boccaccio; and more. The columns are here. 

If there is a new year wherever you are reading this, happy Vishu.

I’ll write again next month. 

Supriya

Dear friend,

More than one journalist of late has written about the resonant image in Nirala’s memoir: of the poet seeing the Ganga, “swollen with bodies” as he passes the river on his way to his wife’s home, where she lies dying. Having immodestly read the memoir in its entirety, a different sentence sticks in my mind. He writes: “The custom was to abandon one’s house during the plague and encamp in orchards.” It is from the day he brings his wife home for the first time. Years later, the flu kills her, and so many others, that Nirala can only say, laconically: “My family was wiped out in the blink of an eye.” He doesn’t say much more than this. It is a memoir of comic abruptness; his English translator Satti Khanna has a good afterword in A Life Misspent about this feature of his writing. I find myself thinking a lot about the orchards these days.

I have nothing to self-promote, but so many friends and favourites have been updating their newsletters I thought some of you might want to read one of mine too. To psychoanalyse my reading habits, about ten days ago I impulse-bought Daniel Mendelsohn’s translations of Cavafy, the poet who, I think, really gave me my first grown-up sense of what it meant to fantasise about being away, or elsewhere. It’s been an enjoyable re-union. At the risk of being too on the nose in these times, here is one poem:

Nero’s Deadline
Nero wasn’t worried when he heard
the prophecy of the Delphic Oracle.
“Let him beware the age of seventy-three.”
He still had time to enjoy himself.
He is thirty years old. It’s quite sufficient,
this deadline that the god is giving him,
for him to think about dangers yet to come.

Now to Rome he’ll be returning a little wearied,
but exquisitely wearied by this trip
Which had been endless days of diversion––
in the theatres, in the gardens, the gymnasia…
Evenings of the cities of Achaea…
Ah, the pleasure of naked bodies above all…

So Nero. And in Spain, Galba
was secretly assembling his army and preparing it:
the old man, seventy-three years old.

It was published in 1918.

Inevitably, Netflix: my friends and I have used the past week of social distancing to finally power through Crash Landing On You, the fantastic new melodrama about two Koreans from either side of the border falling in love. If you, like me, grew up as the last generation of Indians to be fans of Hindi movies made by Partition refugees, I recommend it.

In my weekly books column for Mumbai Mirror I’ve been writing about Nirala and pandemics, but also about S Hareesh, Supriya Gandhi, Akhil Katyal and others. You can read the columns here.

The Lit Pickers is still airing; thanks to everyone who’s listened and said they’ve enjoyed it. We even made it to #1 on Apple Podcasts’ Indian charts one week. We hope to record a season finale along the lines of an AMA, so if you have any questions or requests related to books and reading, please write in. Or if you have an isolation recommendation, of course. And if you don’t already subscribe to my co-host Deepanjana’s newsletter Dear Reader, here it is.

I’ll write again next month.

Supriya

Dear friend,

I just didn’t feel like sending out a self-promotional email newsletter in the last few months, and I still don’t. Many’s the time I plotted a screed containing my feelings about the state of Kashmir, the degradation of parliament, the constitution of India, and about my home country, the Indian media, in an earnest and emotional way. But I am not the person to listen to on this matter; and at any rate for many of you reading this the time for listening is gone. So let us keep doing what we do, and meet in the streets.

However, my work updates have been piling up, and ironically for the end of the age of listening, I am part of a new podcast out today. This would never have happened if Deepanjana Pal and I hadn’t met for breakfast one day and decided to record a “pilot episode” of a conversation about books, just for fun. My friend, the musician Adriel George, was further responsible for letting us record this in his bedroom studio in Bandra, and editing and mixing a pilot that we put up for fun on Soundcloud. Next, my enemy Raghu said, I’m going to send this to the famous podcaster Mae Thomas. And then Mae, whose show Maed In India is a cornerstone of the indie music scene in India, said she really liked it and wanted to make a full show with us.

So we did. That was two years ago.

After a completely non-traumatic journey that mostly involved eating a lot of fries at the bar behind my house, the podcast is now out to listen to for free on a number of streaming platforms. Here it is.

It’s called The Lit Pickers and is entirely the baby of Maed in India. Thank you Mae, Shaun, Sharanya and Jaanam for wanting it to become a reality. I hope you, the reader, will enjoy it. Deepanjana and I will cherish any feedback you may have.

Another thing I started last year was work on a new media company called All Things Small. You can read a little about it here. We’re embarking on some journalism projects that will go live this year, so if you have a good idea for a story, send me a smoke signal, or HMU if you see me in public over the next couple of weeks.

Over the last few months, my books column at Mumbai Mirror has addressed the work of authors including Meena Kandasamy, Nikhila Henry, Fatima Bhutto, Niraja Gopal Jayal and more. They are available to read here.

A visit to Delhi has left my breathing apparatus clogged with the usual by-products of the cold, so I will not be providing an audio version of this newsletter.

I’ll write again next month.

Supriya

Dear friend,

Last month, I was belatedly converted to the joys of TV. I watched the first fifteen or sixteen hours of Reply 1988 with a deep and enchanted attention that I have never given to any show in my adult life. I have tried describing this as a kind of ‘Korean Wonder Years’ as an elevator pitch to friends. But in fact, that phrase describes exactly why pre-September 2019 Supriya would have been completely uninterested in it.

I trust I don’t need to explain what makes The Wonder Years so flat and unappetising in retrospect. I will explain about the Korean thing. Many years ago, inaugurating my life as a responsible grown-up by spending all my time on Tolkien fan forums, I had friends who were mid-wave Hallyu obsessives. They disappeared on discussions about the fate of the Entwives or the shibboleth of Fëanor because they had suddenly discovered Coffee Prince, or Super Rookie. Those were the days when downloading a giant piece of data in multiple low-res torrents over the day, then finding an additional torrent with a matching subtitle file to seed into the video, felt like child’s play. But I never got around to doing it, and at last, when streaming made it possible to go back and revisit these sources of second-hand excitement, it was too late for me to enjoy them.

Then in August, I idly clicked on the title of a new Netflix show called Rookie Historian Goo Hae-ryung - who wouldn’t? - and underwent a transformation. Within a fortnight, I knew what differentiated The Moon Embracing the Sun from Descendants of the Sun. I could recite the filmography of Park Ki-woong chapter and verse, although I can’t any more; too much has happened since then. I got a Dramabeans account and a Viki pass. I became a Redditor so that I would have people to talk to about K-drama.

For the last two weeks I have been in a state of total surrender to a show named Reply 1988, during which I went from a strict hour-a-day ration of TV to watching for 3 or 4 hours a day. I watched it in taxis, at restaurants, in my accountant’s office, and, regrettably, while walking on the street. I cannot have slept more than 5 hours a night over the last fortnight. Before you start worrying, it’s over. I watched the last half-hour after sending in my column this evening, then locked myself in my room and had a therapeutic little cry. Goodbye, Ssangmun-dong!

It would be pointless to say anything descriptive about a show that became a world blockbuster circa early 2016 in this, a self-promotional monthly email. Reply 1988’s English reviews, at least those emerging from outside Asia, can tell you the price of everything in it, in the Oscar Wilde sense. Modern TV is made to be all-consuming and attention-seeking, so it would be merely autobiographical to say that I woke up one morning mid-thought about who Deok Seon was going to marry; or that I must not have stopped smiling for a minute over the first four episodes — having started smiling because it opens with the face of Chow Yun-fat, an actor for whom I have downloaded videos at 30/kbps, and separate subtitle files.

That makes the appeal of the show sound nostalgic, and Reply 1988 is inescapably about nostalgia. The very premise of the Reply series is adults looking back at their younger selves. I duly went into hysterics at the sight of an AIWA walkman. But it’s not a celebration of nostalgia. It’s the opposite. It’s a lively, sweet comedy about a rare stroke of good luck: having a childhood that you can forget. The face Hyeri makes in this clip is iconically funny — you’ll know it when you see it — but to me it also exemplifies this forgettability, the ability to recover from the thousand small boredoms and betrayals of youth, and to embrace, forgive and move on from it.

I’ll leave the sociological aspects of this to be explored by someone else who grew up in a time and place when it seemed things would keep getting better for us (where better, I suppose, than middle-class Seoul in the 1980s?). Now, I will say no more. Please don’t send thoughts and prayers. I am only going to be busy and productive, and make up a sleep deficit with exceptional success.

The columns I wrote for Mumbai Mirror are here.

I’ll write again next month.

Supriya

Dear friend,

You can listen to me read a version of this newsletter in the link above.

This month’s newsletter is an experiment with a new service provider, so I am sorry if it ends up in an undesirable folder of your inbox. Please add it to your whitelist so the mistake is not repeated. Although many journalists use this particular service because it makes it easy for subscribers to pay them, please be assured that this monthly self-promotional email will always remain free.

I wrote my last sports column for the Mumbai Mirror at the end of July. Starting this month, I will be writing a weekly books column for them. My first article last week was about Krupa Ge’s Rivers Remember, a book I wanted many people in Bombay to read.

For Vogue India’s July issue, I wrote a short article about the status of India’s surrogacy laws. It isn’t available online, but it did look ahead to this week’s parliamentary ratification of the ban on commercial surrogacy.

As part of the first anniversary celebrations at The Voice of Fashion, I contributed a small opinion about the deadening character of millennial wedding finery.

Last month, on a trip to Delhi, I read Amita Kanekar’s A Spoke In The Wheel, a novel about a Buddhist monk who is commissioned by Ashoka to write the life story of the Buddha. Among the cascading effects of reading this novel was a fugue-state interest in Ashoka himself. I read most of Romila Thapar’s Ashoka and the Decline of the Mauryas and re-read parts of Upinder Singh’s brilliant Political Violence in Ancient India. I swam face-down through Nayanjot Lahiri’s Ashoka biography, which my friend Sonal and I ingurgitated hurriedly a few years ago, when we had the pleasure of publishing excerpts from the book at The Caravan.

I read half of Charles Allen’s Ashoka: The Search for a Lost Emperor on the flight back to Bombay, but its central argument did not appeal to me. If you found the book on the ledge of a women’s toilet in Terminal 2, I hope you enjoy it more than I did. I even watched Asoka, Santosh Sivan’s 2001 movie starring Shah Rukh Khan. He bore the weight of seeming both revolting and appealing, evil and innocent, in a performance that simultaneously required nothing but posturing and pouting. Like all timeless Hindi movies, it was buffoonish and sublime.

The funny thing is that none of this, not even Lahiri’s book, which closely reads the artefacts of Ashoka’s reign, helps transform the coppery and hollow sound of his own voice. The rock edicts still make him sound stilted and institutional, a man too invested in getting his office to speak. But then I guess it doesn’t take many words to set the wheel of time turning.

“And for the following purpose has this rescript on morality been written, (viz,) in order that the sons (and) great-grandsons (who) may be (born) to me, should not think that a fresh conquest ought to be made; (that), if a conquest does please them, they should take pleasure in mercy and light punishments; and (that) they should regard the conquest by morality as the only (true) conquest.

This (conquest bears fruit) in this world (and) in the other world. And let all (their) pleasure be the pleasure in exertion.”

I will keep writing.

Supriya

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