THERE IS A WAY TO BE GOOD AGAIN


In the truest sense of the word, you can say that I am the ideal audience.
Be it a movie or a book or even just a cartoon strip in the daily newspaper, I get totally involved. I laugh, snigger, cry, sing along… you name it… I do it. As a result I am more forgiving towards even amateur works (as long as they entertain) as compared to pretentiously highbrow pseudo intellectual crap (read: Arundhati Roy)

I can read Kafka with equal delight as I can a Sidney Sheldon or enjoy The Godfather as much as a Sarkar.

Recently I read The Kite Runner by Khalid Hoseini.

It is the winner of the Penguin Readers Choice Award but surprisingly nothing else.

No Pulitzer’s or Bookers etc. The book is widely loved and the movie of the same directed by Marc Foster (Monster’s Ball, Finding Neverland) is coming out in December (it was supposed to release in Nov but the 2 kids playing the principal characters had to be relocated to UAE for their safety as the rape scenes could have gotten them ostracized and even harmed in Afghanistan).

One reason for its omission from major western awards maybe is its tendency, as one of the reviews put it, to not be afraid to use every method to tug at your heartstrings. In other words it isn’t constipated enough for the pseudo intellectual shrinks to find layers of imaginary meaning. Aaah Yes, and it is also melodramatic, they said.

The truth is that the book is as Asian as you can possibly get.

As much as we try to ape the west externally, in our hearts and souls we are inherently native.

We enjoy skimming over news about Britney and Brangelina but it takes a SRK or AbhiAsh to get us really reading.
We may hum and sing along to the Madonnas and Mariahs but it takes Alisha and Kajra Re to get us dancing in the aisles.
And the only reason we don’t have a Justin here is simply because in Asia, Sexy never went away.

Like Bollywood everything in Asia is heightened. Emotions, Actions, Characters are all larger than life.

We dress in more colours than the rainbow, our food can blow the taste buds off almost all non natives, and most of our festivals can seem like a higgledy-piggledy mess to the uninitiated.

Take the 3 most important events of a person’s life and compare how they differ: Birth, Marriage & Death.

In the west celebration as well as mourning is characterized by restraint, while in Asia it is accompanied by lots of either dancing or shouting or crying or music or beating of chests or in some cases all of them together.

So why do we base our appreciation of local cinema & literature on western notions of what it should conform to?

Cinema & Literature while universal in its appeal is actually very local and cultural in its foundations and it has to be so, or else all movies and books would be the same homogenized version.
If Asians are so demonstrative of their emotions then it is only natural that their Cinema, Literature etc will also be reflective of the same. Why should that be looked down upon?

If The Kite Runner has a moral redemption and makes you reach for your kerchief like all folk tales then why should we apologise for it.

I recently read 2 novels on Bombay, Sacred Games by Virkam Chandra and Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts.

The former was appreciated but never really got its due because it was unabashedly colloquial. Shantaram meanwhile was lapped up by the media (the Indian contingent following the western lead stopped just short of comparing it to the Mahabharat) and is even being made into a major Hollywood movie. To be fair, it was an engrossing read but which reader can honestly say that they didn’t find the principal character, Karla, to be a pretentious bitch. She spends most parts of the novel spouting inane (here comes the dreaded phrase again) pseudo-intellectual crap. Infact her character would fit right into any of the numerous daily soap-operas. Yet because it is about a ‘foreigner’ who is ‘experiencing’ India, it becomes the must read book of the season.

I have to confess that I never bothered to read a book I didn’t enjoy (except if you count textbooks in school).

And I can honestly say that I could not stand to complete reading any of Salman Rushdie’s books and it had nothing to do with his religious or political leanings. It’s just that I didn’t want to plod through it just so that I could make conversation at parties. It was quite another matter that I managed to distract the conversation at the same parties, quite simply by admitting that I hadn’t read the book. Irony anyone?

The Kite Runner is simple in both its style and format. My English teacher in school always impressed upon us that good writing is one which can say something in short, simple words. Advice, which I have to admit, I myself do not often follow but it does not stop me from appreciating it in others. Hoseini's language is simple & wholesome and yet it evokes images that some authors struggle to do with long tirades. It begins with the tag line of the novel which is short, succinct and doesn’t have a single word a 5 year old can’t understand:

“There Is A Way To Be Good Again”.

After the young characters, Amir & Hassan, grow up on a diet of dubbed western movies, one fine day the realization dawns on them that “John Wayne didn’t speak Farsi and he wasn’t Iranian. He was American, …” and later a wise old man tells a character that “Children aren’t coloring books. You don’t get to fill them with your favorite colors.”

When asked to go retrieve the falling Kite by Amir, Hassan the hare lipped and loyal servant says, “Amir agha, For You A Thousand Times Over”.

"For You A Thousand Times Over"

Many chapters, incidents and a lifetime later in another continent on another cloudy day a grown up Amir tells another little boy “For You A Thousand Times Over” and brings the novel a full circle.

Now if you are not moved a little by this gem of a novel then you don’t need to check out another book, you need to check your humanity.

In this fast paced world even avid readers sometimes don’t have time to sit down and really read. If you haven’t read this (or any book in a long time), try and pick it up soon. Believe me, there is a way to be good again.

As winter approaches with its cold misty tentacles, grab a cup of Darjeeling, snuggle under a warm blanket and lose yourself in this heart warming tale of paradise found, lost and regained. Move over Milton.