The year that rocked

Book it!

It has almost become a cliché in Indian literary circles to extol the rise in high-quality “narrative non-fiction”, but Aman Sethi’s A Free Man is a reminder that the enthusiasm is justified. It begins with an apparently small canvas — the labourers of Delhi’s Sadar Bazaar — but gradually draws back to reveal a pulsating world. This social commentary on marginalised lives is upfront, insightful and occasionally absurdist (beggars look “just like anyone else” after they are bathed, says an officer at a Beggars Court, regretfully). The protagonist, Mohammed Ashraf, is a “small man” who has survived in far-flung places, but equally important to this book’s impact is Sethi himself as narrator-observer — the privileged boy who, when his wallet is stolen in a city where he knows no one, simply has to make a phone call to set things right, even as an amused Ashraf looks on.

One of the best literary novels I read in 2011 was Teju Cole’s Open City, a demanding book driven not by plot but by the measured ruminations of its narrator Julius, a young Nigerian psychiatrist living in New York. As he walks the streets of Manhattan, this cultured man reflects on his own personal history as well as the long and complex history of the city he lives in; he has encounters and conversations that touch on historical atrocities and divisions. The tone is sombre, and there are references to paintings, literature and music that can get a little daunting. But this is a tremendously rich and layered work that will stay with you long after you’ve finished — and I’d recommend more than one reading.

Among the year’s most engaging genre novels — though it isn’t exactly a quick-read — was Stephen King’s bulky time-travel tale 11.22.63. King has written some very affecting stories about the terrors of childhood, but in this book he takes the reader back to the world of his own adolescence — late 1950s America. Jake Epping, an English teacher, arrives here via a mysterious portal and must live nearly five years in this fascinating but potentially dangerous “past world” as he attempts to prevent the John F. Kennedy assassination. The result: a thriller laced with fine period detail and sharp social observation.

Anyone interested in the intellectual and cultural discourse of an earlier time should be thrilled by The Best of Quest, a collection of essays and fiction from the quarterly magazine dedicated to “inquiry, criticism and ideas”. Among the many gems here are several 1960s and 1970s columns by the witty Dilip Chitre, including a commentary on senseless censorship (a topic that is still very relevant) and a profile of author Nirad C. Chaudhuri. Literature buffs should also enjoy the argument between Jyotirmoy Datta (whose essay On Caged Chaffinches and Polyglot Parrots critiques Indian writers who worked in English) and the legendary academic and publisher P. Lal.

Finally, a supreme guilty pleasure: the excellent new English translations of four Jasoosi Duniya thrillers by the famous Urdu novelist Ibn-e Safi. The central figures in this series are the unflappable crime-fighter Colonel Faridi and his assistant Captain Hameed, who live in a large mansion in an unnamed cosmopolitan city full of posh night clubs, harbours and skating rinks. The books have titles like Poisoned Arrow and The Laughing Corpse, and the stories are as fast-paced and exciting as you’d expect.

I hope to see more Ibn-e Safi translations in the coming months, but I’m also looking forward to Jeet Thayil’s novel Narcopolis — a portrayal of the residents of an opium den and brothel in the Bombay underworld — and Blue: The Tranquebar Book of Erotic Stories from Sri Lanka.

A screen presence

One of the most skilfully constructed Hindi films of the year was the under-watched Shor in the City, set in Mumbai over the 10 days of Ganesh Chaturthi. Caught in the festive bustle are three people struggling to keep their heads above water: a book-pirate with a conscience, a foreign-returned entrepreneur terrorised by extortionists, and a young cricketer trying to bribe a selector. Their parallel stories add up to a fine microcosm of a metropolis: in this city of unlimited possibilities, visarjan can mean the elephant-god’s final immersion in the water, but it can also indicate a man hurling a murder weapon into the same sea.

I’ve been a fan of the famously reclusive American director Terrence Malick for years, but when I first saw his new film The Tree of Life, I thought it was unbearably pretentious. Then a strange thing happened: for weeks afterwards, I couldn’t get the movie and its hypnotic, abstract images out of my head. So even though I’m still ambivalent about the overall experience, it gets an honourable mention here. Malick’s canvas includes (quite literally) Everything: in just two-and-a-half hours, he examines key questions about existence and consciousness, interspersing brilliantly imagined sequences from evolutionary history with vignettes from the lives of an American family. Full marks for ambition, though needless to say this film isn’t for all (or most) tastes.

I know people who thought Delhi Belly was flippant, not much more than good “time-pass”. I know others who thought it was scatological, obsessed with faecal matter and bad language. They have a point, but this film — about the misadventures of three roommates who get mixed up in a diamond-smuggling ring — featured some of the most naturalistic use of language I’ve seen in a Hindi movie. We are used to films where young urbanites speak incongruously in a Hindi that sounds like a direct translation of the English they would use in real life, but the dialogue here is pitch-perfect — where a sentence might contain the phrase “benevolent God” while ending with a Hindi cuss word. And yes, I thought it was extremely funny too.

Martin Scorsese is one of the major directors of the past 40 years, but he is also one of the greatest movie aficionados of all time — a man whose encyclopaedic knowledge of, and open-hearted enthusiasm for cinema should serve as an inspiration to any film-lover. His first 3-D film Hugo is hugely interesting for the many affectionate references Scorsese makes to cinema of the past — going right back to the Lumiére Brothers’ 1896 short of a train pulling into a station. But Hugo also works on its own terms, as an adventure tale about a boy obsessed with the work of the early filmmaking genius Georges Melies. The boy could well be Scorsese himself!

Too often (and unfortunately), eyes glaze over when the word “documentary” is mentioned. But I doubt that any movie buff can fail to be captivated by Jagannathan Krishnan’s Videokaaran. Shot largely with a hand-held camera, this dynamic film is about the world of underground video parlours, where viewers gather to see movies on the cheap, and cinema is a business as well as personal catharsis for people who live their lives on the messages of hope sung to them by idols like Rajinikanth and Amitabh Bachchan. And it has one of the most compelling “leading men” I’ve seen in any film this year — a philosophising, giggling raconteur named Sagai Raj, who used to run a video theatre near a Mumbai slum. Videokaaran should be an eye-opener for any urban, multiplex-going movie buff.

Music to your ears

The Grammys were invented in 1959, and we heard about them in the 1980s (the Michael Jackson breakthrough). Ever since, they’ve become the thermometer that measures what’s popular or ‘hot’. This is true, with one caveat. The Grammys may have grown beyond the States because of television, but they were, and in many ways remain, representative of ‘American Music’.

There are places closer that warrant our attention over the latest year in our multi-lingual, multi-cultural, multiply connected world. I speak of the music coming out of Africa. But first, let us deal with the challenges that this wonderful year posed for the music lover.

This is a particularly difficult year for a top 5/10 music release list. If you were to take the ratings to the supreme court — by which I mean YouTube — then the number of people disliking what’s been produced in 2011, weighs down heavily against what was liked. That tells us this was the year in which people let us know what they didn’t want to listen to. Add up the ‘dislikes’ on Justin Bieber (all songs), and the now legendary Friday by Rebecca Black and you have approximately a quarter of the population of the world wishing natural selection had omitted the cochlea.

Crushed under the weight of all the trash — like carbon in its most sparkling form — are many records that deserve the attention of the music-miner. I dug mainly in Africa this year, so I’ll start there.

Some of the older readers of The Telegraph will remember the Osibisa performance from the ’80s: the one that was rumoured to have shattered the tinted panes of the Tata Centre and stunned the weather wane adorning the Victoria Memorial into decades of inertia. These were fairy tales, of course — tributes to some pretty basic, crappy, music in a town that didn’t know better.

Some 30 years later, I am under obligation to bring up Fela Kuti. 2011 saw the release of a six record set (Fela) of his music. Fela (died 1997) was Nigerian — a political musician born to an activist mother in a troubled country, whose sweat drips on to you as you listen to him. I am not a great one for bathing in protest, but I find the music irresistible — a bath with a beat.

From the desert close by comes a different brand of music — less current, more traditional and more bluesy. Mali’s Ali Farka Touré was the undisputed king of the Saharan Blues. His son Vieaux Farka Touré has kept that haunting tradition alive. Rolling Stone said Vieux “slays” in his 2011 release The Secret. Another album (technically a December 2010 release), Ishilan N-Tenere: Guitar Music from the Western Sahel, is worth every minute. Especially the band Amanar.

Before we get too ahead of ourselves with all this ‘non-mainstream’ stuff, let me list the albums you must buy if you haven’t already. Radiohead’s King of Limbs for experimental/electronic rock. Elbow’s Let’s Build a Rocket Boys for more straight up stuff (I love bands that sing about the ‘first cigarette of the day’). For electronic music: a six LP compilation of Plastikman (Arkives). Plastikman is DJ Ritchie Hawtin’s alter ego — Hawtin is one of the pioneers of the audio-visual experience that is the future.

And what about 2012? With full disclosure, let me announce that Amarrass Records, of which I’m a founder, will release an album where the Thar meets the Sahara. Vieux Farka Touré, Mamadou Diabate, the 71st generation kora player (the Malian kora is an unbelievable instrument: it makes a single musician sound like an orchestra) and a number of virtuoso Rajasthani artistes jammed at Siri Fort in November to a crowd that crammed the aisles. Live recordings are due out soon. It’s the Buena Vista Social Club on speed. Happy listening!