Once, a very long time ago, there was a movie called Dushman, which starred Rajesh Khanna as a boorish truck driver who runs over a pedestrian. Said pedestrian was the sole breadwinner of his incredibly poor family, which includes Meena Kumari in a vile temper (understandable because of the whole widowed by drunk driver thing). Khanna goes to court and pisses off the judge who then sentences him to a punishment most unusual: instead of jail time or possibly death, Khanna will have to stand in for the man he killed and take over his responsibilities. “Oh noes!” says Khanna. “I’d rather be with the convicts than take this bullshit.” But the judge isn’t just any old judge – he’s Rehman and he’s badass. So Khanna is packed off to the village. Much melodrama and overacting ensues. My mother liked it very much. You can read about it in spoileriffic detail here.
Many years later, there was another movie. This one was about a frazzled young man called Aamir Khan who abruptly inherits three bratty but inherently lovable children (including cute little Kunal Khemu) and makes a grand mess of it until a bubbly young lady called Juhi Chawla cons her way into his house and teaches him the power of love or something like that. It was called Hum Hain Rahi Pyaar Ke and my cousin and I liked it very much although, I suspect, for slightly different reasons.
And long before all of this, there was this movie called Mary Poppins that won Julie Andrews an Oscar for Best Actress and Dick van Dyke the wrath of Cockneys everywhere for his slanderous accent. It was about this good fairy type person who steamrollers her way into a frayed household and settles things to rights with a lot of delightful special effects (sitting on ceilings! jumping into sidewalk drawings! saving cartoon foxes!) and singing (on London rooftops and to stuffed robins). Everyone loves this movie. I think it’s the law. If you say different the police might come to your house.
Stir all of the above together, press firmly to make it all fit, take it out into the sunlight and then beat the holy motherfucking crap out of it until it weakly cries for mercy. Top with some giant Ameeeeesha (sorry, how many e’s was that supposed to be again?) melons and serve cold. Voila!
Not in a “Why sir, I quite appreciate your sense of humor! You have suddenly become rather attractive to me” kind of way, but in the same sense that Indians (or certain Bollywood-type people)) find the Chinese funny. You know, like in a laugh-and-point sort of way.
When a Chinese person needs a funny disguise, for example, does he darken his face, wrap a dhoti about his loins, drench his hair in oil, and walk down the street wobbling his head from side to side, doing namaste and periodically yelling out, “Batata vada! Samosa! Butten naan! Chicken tikka masala!”
That’d be something to see wouldn’t it? And I’m sure we’d all laugh gently at such silly shenanigans.
“Ah, those funny Chinese,” we’d say. “They crack me up everytime. I always think I can hold it in, but that first cry of ‘batata vada’…! Irresistible. Sheer comic genius!”
Right?
No? You don’t think so? Too complex a comedy for our simple tastes? What a pity. i was going to suggest it for that Bollywood theme park YashRaj is building in Dubai.
Hey, what if they combined it with an African-by-way-of-Mongolia accent infused with Japanese flavors? Total winner!
Anyhoo! No, I’m not offering you a giant Ben Affleck head (wow, that sounds dirty) – in fact, I’m not offering you anything (other than my love, of course!). The folks over at InkFruit are.
If you have design aspirations or are really into social networking or, heck, just want to wear tees that aren’t being worn by five million other people, then InkFruit might be for you. However, you can hold that conversation with yourself later – right now, just caption the above pic or make a funny and win a free tee.
That’s right! I’m a blogger with stuff to give away! Woo-hoo! Take it now, coz it ain’t ever happening again.
Caveat: They only deliver in India. But go ahead and make me laugh anyway. I could use it.
Oh, and this contest closes at midnight on Sunday, EST. That’s 9.30 a.m. Monday, IST. Results to be announced on Monday. Is that long enough? Or is that too long? I’m a little new at this. Oh well. Free t-shirt!
Brad Pitt and Ed Norton sing a song in honor of Terri’s post. (Eight inches wide? I’m gonna take a wild guess and say Taslima Nasreen is a little short on practice.) Extremely NSFW so put those headphones on!
So it’s true: there really is one born every minute. Reliance Big Entertainment, owned by Anil Ambani, splashed into the Hollywood pool by offering to bankroll Steven Spielberg, ending months of speculation about Spielberg’s long-in-the-coming divorce from Paramount. Aww, a brave new multicultural family full of drama queens! Now, here at IndieQuill, we’re full of warm and fuzzy thoughts (Shut up. I heard that.) and think this kind of international love-in is great. Remember that scene from the IPL finals where the Indians rushed out to plant big ones on a Pakistani and an Australian for outfoxing the captain of the current Indian team? Couldn’t have imagined it just a year ago, could you? Me likey. However, I don’t really understand where all this Bollywood-weds-Hollywood sentiment is coming from. What, you think Spielberg is gonna make Sholay 2? Kick harrison Ford to the curb for Amitabh Bachchan? Um, I don’t think so. I think Peter Bart pretty much hit it on the nose. And it may well be that the deal’s of greatest benefit to a Hollywood talent agency. Yeah, wtf?! Last word goes to my mother, the sternest critic of them all: “Bah! There goes all his money.” 😦 [Above delightful pic courtesy Nikki Finke, on whose blog the commentators are this close to declaring war between India and America.]
Mimi LaRue, 11, R.I.P. There goes my last reason to feel kindly towards Tori Spelling. Hopefully, there are no red carpets in heaven.
And finally, the tag that brought this post to life. Rada of Stepping Sideways took a holiday and brought me back a present: the Book tag. And thank God he did, coz I have something for him! But that’s for another day.
K, so the Book Tag. Everyone’s done this, right? If you haven’t then consider yourself tagged. Turn to page 123 of whichever book you’re currently reading and skip five lines down. Post the next three.
I have odd reading habits and usually am in the middle of three or four books simultaneously (don’t nag me: they’ve tried that before and it didn’t work.) so this is a little confusing. After some deliberation I chose Mary Stewart’s Wildfire at Midnight – an old favorite I’m in the process of re-reading.
Set in 1953 on the eve of Tenzing and Hillary’s historic conquest of Mt. Everest (not as random as it sounds), Wildfire at Midnight is the story of Gianetta Brooke, a celebrated model who needs a break from it all. Unfortunately for her, the much needed Scottish holiday brings with it certain problems – like a killer with an unhealthy fixation for mountains and ritualistic murder. And if that’s not enough of a headache, her ex-husband Nicholas Drury, a broodingly handsome douchebag of an award-winning writer (of course!), shows up as prime suspect. Oh, how I love thee, book of my teens!
The following passage is from the hardcover edition and takes place as Gianetta stumbles across Something She Wasn’t Meant To See:
In that moment I heard the little whimper of pain again, but this time back to my left. I looked back the way I had come, almost giddy now with bewilderment and excitement, my heart thudding, and my legs and wrists none too steady.
Old suit to magazine stand man: You know, they were going to transfer me to India but they had only one condition. Stand man: Oh, what was that? Old suit: I needed a cobra.
I don’t know if it’s the same stand but there’s this desi guy who owns a stand on Union Square West who really, really hates his customers. Like, I’ve seen him yell and chase bewildered (possibly stoned) NYU kids away when they try to buy cigarettes from him. And I always wondered what the hell was wrong with him. Not that he ever said anything to me – other than look suspicious when I asked for quarters and scornful at my choice of reading material – but you had to wonder what the hate was all about. Even when he had some of his homies over, he’d laugh angrily and shake his head at them, while muttering under his breath at some hastily departing customer.
Well, Overheard in New York might just have given me the answer. I’d be pretty violent too if the above was a sample of my daily conversation. Don’t try to bond with the desi stand guys, Men in Suits, even if “Steve” is Bangalore thinks you’re hilarious.
The internet: solving mysteries every day.
PS – Meet my new hero:
Met guard: Don’t touch that [Points to ancient Greek statue.] Little girl: Not even a little? Met guard: Not even a little. [Pause.] Little girl: Not even a little little? Met guard: Vera, stop. Little girl: Ok. No touching. Got it. [Sticks out her tongue and gives the marble a long, slow, slobbering lick.]
Meena, a regular over at Aspi’s Drift, just earned my undying gratitude by posting a link to the funniest rant I’ve read in years. If you were wondering how RGV feels about the ass kicking he received for his cherished Sholay remake/homage, wonder no more. With Sarkar Raj, the sequel to Sarkar (a more successful homage to The Godfather), out and in the critics’ bull’s eye, he’s sounding off loud and clear about the cretins who write about his movies. And what’s more, he’s got AB to post it on his blog. (RGV has his own blog but it obviously doesn’t get the kind of response AB’s does, so that was a clever bit of broadcasting.)
To paraphrase Kevin Smith (video below), every movie is somebody’s baby and it doesn’t matter who you are or what you’ve achieved – when someone goes after your baby, you get up in arms. And so we have RGV who spent months giving everyone a dead fish stare and a mea maxima culpa whenever the subject of Ram Gopal Varma ki Aag came up, only to go off like a Diwali rocket now that audiences have once more ventured (kind of) into a cinema hall to see a flick that he directed.
What’s especially hilarious (and simultaneously sad) is that he comes off kind of like an enraged elephant – indiscriminately stomping over everything in his path. Particularly heartrending is the plight of Subhas K. Jha, a man who adores Aishwarya Rai but didn’t really care for Sarkar Raj. Ultimately he chose to put RGV in the docket for the lapses in the movie – and earned himself a place in front of the firing squad. (Click here to read his extremely spoileriffic review. Like, seriously, that thing is practically a synopsis.) But the truly funny part is that RGV chose to quote his (rather purple) compliments as an example of his doucheness.
Digression: He did that to poor Meetu as well, but she’s pretty jazzed about making it on to AB’s radar in any shape or form, so that’s alright. In fact, I hope AB took note of both her review and her reaction to RGV’s rant coz superfans rule.
Anyway, the only thing that I was taken aback to read was RGV’s reaction to the cinematic aspirations of certain critics. I’m well aware of this attitude some people espouse viz. that if your job is to critique then you shouldn’t try your hand at that art form. Personally, I find that line of argument completely moronic and insulting.
Anybody who’s thought it through will tell you that the best way to understand any sort of art form is to immerse yourself in it. A moviemaker who doesn’t watch movies, a writer who doesn’t read, an artist who stays away from galleries and museums – well, first of all I don’t know how they can deny themselves that kind of pleasure but more to the point, they’re limiting their knowledge of what lies out there and thus capping their potential. The beauty of humanity is that we learn and build on what has come before; our history is important to us and our contemporaries help us grow as individuals.
So why on earth would you think that a critic who spends all his or her time studying cinema would be or should be immune to the desire to be a part of it? Of all the art forms, cinema is perhaps the one that holds the greatest allure – commercial cinema if not art cinema. Even laymen want to be a part of the process. Why not critics? They might not always be successful at it but that doesn’t mean they can’t try. Or that they should be looked down upon or their judgment doubted because they do. You can’t tell me in all honesty that the film industry is full of people who uncritically love each other’s work. Not when Karan Johar is snickering on prime time TV about Rani Mukherjee’s stint in the “B-movie” wilderness with Bobby Deol and Kareena Kapoor is mocking her own movies like Main Prem Ki Deewani Hoon (I bet the Barjatyas threw a fucking party when Tashan came out).
I find it especially sad that someone like RGV who according to legend ran a video store like that other director fellow called Quentin Tarantino, and presumably spent his days studying the work of other people, thinks getting paid to do what he was doing as a hobby would or should preclude you from doing anything in his field.
Perhaps it would surprise him to learn that Roger Ebert (the first Pulitzer prize winner for film criticism, Emmy Award nominee, Oprah Winfrey’s ex-boyfriend, recipient of a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and the most influential pundit in America according to Forbes) is also a screenplay writer.
His work? Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Up! and Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens. Stellar, ain’t it? But Vincent (ew!) Gallo remains the only person I’ve ever come across to take any serious exception to him unless you count Stephen King who thinks he’s too lenient. In fact, Rob Schneider, who’s been on the receiving end of a few zingers, actually sent him flowers when he was ill.
Of course, even blind Martians will recognize that Ebert and the horridly grating Khalid Mohammad (or “Khalida” as AB apparently calls him – with the utmost affection, he says) don’t inhabit the same plane when it comes to criticism. But that doesn’t mean he can’t try to make a movie if he wants to. Actually, the funny thing about all this “Khalid Mohammad trades positive reviews for a chance to make his movies” innuendo that’s been making the rounds in multiple places is that his first time out as a director, he made Fiza. A movie that starred Hrithik Roshan but was really a vehicle for Karisma Kapoor, then a Bachchan daughter-in-law to be, and marked Jaya Bachchan’s return to mainstream cinema. So am I to assume “Khalida” was doing the Bachchan clan certain favors?
See, that’s the problem with slinging mud. Try as you might, some of it eventually lands on you.
Anyway, the upshot of all this was that I did something I wasn’t planning to do and saw Sarkar Raj. And unlike a lot of other people, I actually liked it.
Yes, the background score and the camera angles tried a little too hard to convince me that this was a Serious Drama Exploring Dark Issues when the characters, not to mention the actors portraying them, were perfectly capable of telling me that much without any fanfare or manipulation – but I didn’t expect RGV to find his way back to the light overnight, so I guess I was prepared.
And once I settled down and saw the movie not as a sequel but as a kind of epilogue to the earlier movie, it made a lot of sense.
Sarkar (AB) is paying a lifetime’s worth of the butcher’s bill through Shankar. Shankar (Abhishek Bachchan) tries to atone for the choices he made in the earlier movie, specifically his brother’s murder, by embracing his social conscience because he can’t bear to embrace his moral conscience. His desperation to make his life count infuses his conversations with Anita (AIshwarya Rai).
Continuing this theme of every action giving birth to a consequence that must be faced are a host of supporting characters. Each works to an end of his or her own, and be it innocent or devious each of them has a bill to pay. And known or unbeknownst to them, they’re all of them connected – a long line of dominoes, who don’t always know that they’re being played.
That pretty much sets the tone of the movie.
Of the secondary characters, Anita is the one with the most potential – when RGV says that her character might as well have been a man, he means it literally. Unlike other women in the RGV universe, she is neither an angel nor a moll. Unfortunately, it’s unclear to the end what she is, exactly, other than a foil to the Nagre men. There are indications early on that she might be an equal, a yin to Shankar’s yang. She is just as much alone as he is, albeit for other reasons, and she seems to understand him in a way that the rest of us don’t – perhaps he showed her something more than we were allowed to see. Hers is such an indefinable presence, in fact, that there was a moment towards the end when I thought Sarkar was going to turn to her and ask her why she set the whole thing up.
Now that would have been a twist! Not that the one RGV gave us wasn’t a nicely chilling one, but it’d be interesting to see how he tackles a female protagonist in his universe.
If there’s one thing I found absolutely ridiculous, it was the hitman. That whole silent giant with the gloved hand bullshit – I had a feeling that if the camera panned up, we’d see the guy masked in a Hannibal Lecter-style helmet. I really don’t know why RGV, the man who’s single-handedly defined the character of the Mumbai hitman for my generation at least, would go for the kind of crock that belongs in a Vikram Bhatt movie.
Equally rubbish was that sequence on the terrace: I saw this movie unspoiled and it gave me a nasty jolt (I approve! So I won’t spill the beans) but you can’t tell me a man of his stamp would just stand there and take it instead of hitting the deck at first shot. Which makes me wonder if he was suicidal. Which is an interesting thought.
In fact this whole movie is like a very interesting idea, left half explored. The characters are all there and present but he keeps blocking our view of them. I kept getting the feeling that they were all holding much more interesting conversations when the camera wasn’t present. I don’t recommend it for everyone, especially those who like their movies made with more subtlety, but this is a movie that I’m glad I saw.
And finally Amitabh Bachchan – the things that man can do with just a sidelong look are amazing. Which is why he can blog like the most popular thirteen year old girl in school and still keep me as a fan.
I’ll give Tori Spelling this much credit: when she decided to jump on the pooch-in-a-handbag phenomenon that took Hollywood by storm a few years ago, she confined her evil ways to just one poor doggie rather than an entire procession of bitter chihuahuas and other tiny bowwows unable to register their protest without risking an international reputation as a biter.
Of course, she then named that poor pug Mimi LaRue, dressed it in atrocious costumes and dragged it everywhere that the paparazzi roam. On the plus side, Mimi is still alive instead of starving to death in her forgetful owner’s closet – a fate that reportedly befell the animals of an unnamed Hollywood monster. (Feel free to guess who that might be though.)
Below, more sad pictures of a disgruntled Mimi on various red carpets. (Hint: She’s the one with the “Kill me now” expression on her face.) I think there’s a special place in hell for anyone who makes their poor dog wear that Wizard of Oz monstrosity in pic#5. Any moment now, she’s gonna turn to some bystander and snap, “Whatchu looking at pal?” coz you know her breaking point is near.
Click here for more pics of other doggies whose owners think it’s cute to make them the laughingstock of the neighborhood park. Aww. If it’s so wrong, why am I snickering?
It was the middle of the night, the electricity had been knocked out by the ferocious monsoon storm now raging outside, and I was fast asleep. Tug tug tug. I must have been about ten and spending the night at my aunt’s house, the way I did most nights in the summer. Her husband owned factories in another town and spent every other week there – she usually stayed behind and would ask me to come give her company. Tonight was one of those nights. Tug tug tug. The hand on my shoulder was insistent – but I could sense that it wasn’t trying to wake me up. What the hell?
“What?” I asked, sitting up and blinking in the near darkness.
The room was lit by near-constant flashes of lightning as thunder rolled menacingly overhead. If a man with a bloodsmeared axe had appeared out of the shadows, I wouldn’t have been entirely surprised. It was one of those atmosphere filled nights.
My aunt was sitting crosslegged on her side of the bed (technically, it was her husband’s side of the bed but she took it when I slept over because my uncle had a bad back and had replaced his mattress with a plank of wood – no joke – and I wasn’t such a fan of sleeping on wooden planks). I could barely make her out but I could still see the sheepish expression on her face. “Come over to this side,” she said, after hesitating a little.
“What? Why?”
She didn’t say anything.
“Are you scared?” I asked. Her fright of thunder storms was legendary in the family. She was the person who wouldn’t answer phones when lightning flashed. She’d disconnect the TV. She’d find a room with the minimum possible windows (difficult because she lives in a quasi-modernist house dripping with windows) to sit in. She has a list of people who were felled by lightning, some of them quite closely related to us. And she’s never slept through a storm in her life.
She made this weird “phoosh” sound which meant she was too embarrassed or unwilling to talk about it. “Just do as I ask you.”
So I did what every caring niece does – I laughed. I mean, I sat there and laughed till I cried. I thought it was the funniest shit I’d ever heard: not only was she scared of sitting in a thunderstorm (something I incidentally love) but she was trying to tug me over to her side of the bed without waking me up in case the sneaky lightning came and caught me. Hilarious!
As you can see, I was not a very nice child.
It took me years to see that scene through her eyes. First off, she lives in the worst possible house a person deathly afraid of thunderstorms can live in and has been living there for about thirty years now. The master bedroom is perched on one corner of the house, at the very top. Since heat rises, the ceiling is rather low, and the room straddles an entire side, the architect decided to put massive amounts of windows on three walls, leaving just the wall that separates the bedroom from the rest of the house.
Worse still, the bed is positioned in such a way that it divides the room in two: the bedroom area and a dressing room area. The bed thus faces the front of the house, with its view of the road at the end of the cul de sac in which they live as well as the gloriously open sky above it. To maximize this effect of living on top of the world, the architect removed an entire wall and gave them a bank of French windows leading on to a balcony instead.
That’s right. Had I been living there, I would have loved it to bits and pieces. My aunt? Not so much. When it rains, she usually draws the (thick) curtains completely closed and lies there imagining the lightning strike to come.
However, this time around, I was in the room with her and the electricity was out. If she’d left the curtains as they were, the room would have become stiflingly hot. She was okay with this – anything to keep those ominous flashes out. But she wasn’t okay with it for me. This, after all, is a woman who used to feed me with her own two hands well into my teenage years. When the electricity would go out in the middle of the night due to non-rainy reasons, she’d sit up and wave a folded newspaper over me as I slept. Heck, my own mother would have told me to dream on if I’d asked her to do anything of the kind.
So she’d gotten up and drawn the curtains half open. She must have been terrified of even going near the French windows – she can barely move a muscle even when she’s with other people in the most secure area she can find, much less rattling around on top of a big empty house with a ten year old channeling Kumbhkaran for company – but she did it. And then she sat in bed, waiting it out, while I comfortably slept on. But the curtains being open on my side of the bed, I probably looked like her worst nightmare: someone felled by lightning as flashes lit my inert body.
People – like me, for instance – can be such assholes.
If you were to place a gecko in front of me, I’d probably scream, jump up on something, and cuss you out until you took the damned slimy thing out of my sight. And as you took it away from me, I’d jump up and down and screech “Kill it! Kill it! Kill it!” with a vim perhaps unseen since the French sent their aristocrats to the guillotine.
Nothing personal against geckos. They’re very cute in that ad. It’s just that I do not like little things with wings, bulging eyes, multiple legs, antennas, slime trails, sticky tongues, the ability to walk on walls, tentacles, etc. Especially the ones that lay eggs and can regenerate body parts. They might be fine and necessary for the food chain but I prefer it when they’re not participating in the food chain right in front of me.
So how ironic is it that the one writer I love above all others, the hero of my childhood and the inspiration of my adulthood, the man who never fails to amaze me or make me laugh, is Gerald Durrell?
All too often, when one grows up, the delights of one’s childhood turn out to be “less”, if you know what I mean. Your childhood house is a lot smaller, the fields are a lot less green, the people who towered over you shrink overnight, the trees don’t really kiss the sky, the flowers don’t smell as good, the fruit isn’t as sweet, the animals are annoying instead of cute, the folks who slipped you contraband candy are now nosy-parkers, airplanes are a source of aggravation… adulthood can be a disappointing experience.
So I was delighted to find that Durrell, like the Asterix comics, only improved on acquaintance.
Rosy is My Relative, the zany tale of a bumbling clerk with grandiose fantasies who inherits a dashing lady elephant with a taste for gin (or any booze, really), can still make me laugh until I run crying for the bathroom holding on to my aching abdomen. No, it doesn’t give me diarrhea (ew) – it makes me tear up with laughter and want to pee. I’m telling you, the thing is extreme.
And I sometimes think I could read the Corfu trilogy (My Family and Other Animals, Birds Beasts and Relatives, and Garden of the Gods) all my life and discover new things to appreciate in every reading.
According to those who knew him best, he didn’t really think of himself as a writer (the acknowledged writer in the family was elder brother Lawrence) and only picked up pen and paper when he either had nothing better to do or needed some cash to further his true love: the establishment of zoos that would see conservation as one of their primary goals. I’m just glad he had occasion to write at all.
Consider this excerpt from My Family and Other Animals where he discusses the musical if unfortunate looking pigeon Quasimodo, acquired from a vagrant (and occasional specimen supplier) he only ever identifies as the Rose Beetle Man:
One sad day we found, on waking Quasimodo, that he had duped us all, for there among the cushions lay a glossy white egg. He never quite recovered from this. He became embittered, sullen, and started to peck irritably if you attempted to pick him up. Then he laid another egg, and his nature changed completely. He, or rather she, became wilder and wilder, treating us as though we were her worst enemies, slinking up to the kitchen door for food as if she feared for her life. Not even the gramophone would tempt her back into the house. The last time I saw her she was sitting in an olive-tree, cooing in the most pretentious and coy manner, while further along the branch a large and very masculine-looking pigeon twisted and cooed in a perfect ecstasy of admiration.
Only to transition smoothly and beautifully to the following just one paragraph down:
The last time I saw the Rose-beetle Man was one evening when I was sitting on a hill-top overlooking the road. He had obviously been to some fiesta and had been plied with much wine, for he swayed to and fro across the road, piping a melancholy tune on his flute. I shouted a greeting, and he waved extravagantly without looking back. As he rounded the corner he was silhouetted for a moment against the pale lavender evening sky. I could see his battered hat with the fluttering feathers, the bulging pockets of his coat, the bamboo cages full of sleepy pigeons on his back, and above his head, circling drowsily round and round, I could see the dim specks that were the rose-beetles. Then he rounded the curve of the road and there was only the pale sky with a new moon floating in it like a silver feather, and the soft twittering of his flute dying away in the dusk.
It’s this mix of eloquent prose, his ability to paint landscapes with words (the hardest thing to do in my estimation) and populate them with personalities both human and animal that bring me back to his writing again and again.
Although it doesn’t hurt that his writing pretty much personifies my sense of humor. There’s this scene in Garden of the Gods, where young Gerry convinces his gun-mad elder brother Leslie to shoot him a few birds to feed to one of his many pets. Leslie decides to shoot enough critters to suffice the pet for a week at least. The brothers solemnly make their way to the terrace of their villa and proceed to pick off the smaller birds one by one until Gerry is satisfied. Except, when they make their way down to collect them, there’s their mother sitting frozen in the middle of the killing field – with the members of the local animal protection society.
Just imagining that scene makes me scream with laughter. (I know what you’re thinking, but it’s a lot funnier to read his version. I promise.)
And that’s another one of the things that makes me love Durrell even more. Unlike a lot of people who go about talking animal rights, not only did Durrell walk the talk, he did it without any kind of sentimentality or preaching. There is no holiness about his beliefs, nothing that suggests he’s a better person than you or I for caring about the animals who share this planet with us; he didn’t wave placards in your face or counsel you to turn vegetarian (quite the contrary in fact).
Books like The Stationary Ark make the case for conservation and better standards for zoos from a rational and compassionate standpoint without ever crossing over into fanatic zeal. He was, in the simplest of terms, cool about it. And yet he cared so much.
“The zoo has been enormously successful,” he told a visiting reporter in the mid-1980’s, “but not successful enough in the sense that it is such slow progress. You have to grope around for money and persuade governments and every year you read more horrible reports of what is being done to the world about us. The world is being destroyed at the speed of an Exocet and we are riding about on a bicycle. I feel despair twenty-four hours a day at the way we are treating the world and what we are piling up for ourselves. But you have to keep fighting, or what are we on earth for? I believe so much in what I am doing that I cannot let up.”
What is that thing on Akshaye Khanna’s head, peeking around his ears? Aaarrrggghhh, it has legs! Paresh is so traumatised, he’s now in a coma. Run, Akshaye, run!
Now it’s attacking the lower part of his face, poor baby. Look at him being so brave.
Oh cruel world, will no one knock that monster off his head and return him to happier, hotter times?
INDIEQUILL 