Syndrome X
Studies show that Indians are genetically predisposed to physiological symptoms collectively called Syndrome X. This makes them highly susceptible to heart disease. Fortunately, technology can help detect coronary artery disease at an early stage.

Peace By Piece
Having failed to make headway with the cease-fire, the Centre is now trying to talk peace on Kashmir, internally through its negotiator K.C. Pant and externally with Pakistan's Chief Executive General Pervez Musharraf. But will anything come out of this?

Good Monsoon
So What?
The traditional link between the monsoon and the economy weakens.

Slippery Deal
The ONGC subsidiary's whopping Rs 8,136 crore investment was signed in indecent haste.

BOOKS

Blah Blah Bollywood

Scholarspeak takes the fun out of these essays on popular cinema

By Bhaskar Ghose

They were the heady days when jargon was all, and the more incomprehensible a sentence was the greater the acclaim one got for it, or so one flattered oneself. Those days have, however, gone; younger scholars like Simon Schama make it a point to write as simply as possible. That places the quality of one's scholarship and ideas in plain view. This book contains essays that are lucid and enriching, as well as some which belong to the older genre.

The title of the book implies that it covers a very wide field, but it doesn't. It's a collection of essays almost all of which are on popular Indian cinema, and one of the editors, Christopher Pinney, has tried to stitch them together in an introduction that is written in that irritating scholarspeak-I must thank one of the essayists Stuart Blackburn for the term. One example of this will suffice. Pinney talks of "a cognitivised chronotope within which a certain type of cerebral rationality is privileged" and cites the example of a "coffeehouse, where one would read and discuss The Tatler".

There are exceptions. Kathryn Hansen's essay on the Indar Sabha gives a fascinating account of this 19th century spectacle and, interestingly, of the rise of Parsi theatre. But Blackburn's "Storytelling and Print in 19th Century Tamil" is the best in the book. It's leavened with gentle humour that makes it a delight to read. "Invitation to An Antique Death" by Ashish Nandy is a well-observed account of filmmaker Pramathesh Barua. Nandy highlights Barua's achievements and his failures with compassion, making the point that while Ritwik Ghatak saw Barua as a pioneer in the development of filmmaking, Satyajit Ray had little time for him.

The essay on Mani Ratnam's Bombay (above) misses the context

There are two essays on two films by Mani Ratnam: one on Roja by Nicholas Dirks and one on Bombay by Ravi Vasudevan. Both are unsatisfactory on many counts. Dirks's essay on Roja contains some absurd statements that show the writer's unfamiliarity with the context. At one point he says, "The fact of partition has meant that the state has had to become, first and foremost, a security state". I don't know which state he's talking about. I think co-editor Rachel Dwyer read only a limited issues of Stardust-there's more to the magazine than her rather basic comments on it, which tell you nothing you didn't already know. Asha Kasbekar, writing on the female ideal in Hindi cinema, doesn't even bother to check her facts-contending that kisses were allowed by the censors in foreign films because so few of them could actually be imported. The import of foreign films has actually been on the OGL for several years now.

Patricia Uberoi's analysis of Hum Apke Hain Kaun is one of the most perceptive studies of this film. Her tracing of one aspect of the film to folk traditions rather than to Sanskritic ritual is most convincingly done. Sara Dickey's painstaking documentation of fan clubs in Madurai is an interesting insight into the perception of filmstars in the eyes of their fans and the relationship stars consciously build with them.

MetroScape

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