Home, via the world

Ma, nee Banerjee, says Chatterjees tend to be actors and suchlike, whereas the pursuits of those who share her surname before marriage are decidedly less trivial. Dida had the same birth name as me and Baba, there are several bearing either who buck the trend-that-isn't, and the world that exists extends beyond Bengal let alone two last names, so it is clearly a joke, albeit one that would resurface during any discussion about Bengali cinema because in the course of any such conversation two names would be invariably mentioned - the Mahanayak who died before Ma-Baba's marriage, and the great actor whose ancestral home is four hours north of the city in which he was born 85 years ago and breathed his last on Sunday.

Roughly midway between Calcutta and Krishnanagar is Halisahar, the place of origin of the Chatterjis, Baba's family that in time made its way two hours south. Dadu's remained in what ceased to be Bengal in 1912; work brought him to the capital of the newly created province and Thakurda to the capital of the newly independent country. That's how I came to be born in Ma's city, Patna, and brought up in Baba's city, Delhi. Like me, they were not born in the city they were brought up in, went back to their city of birth every summer when they were kids, they learnt Hindi and Sanskrit but not Bengali in school. Like me, they were probashi Bangalis. Unlike me, their city of birth was Calcutta; their formative decades, 50s through 80s.

For me, growing up in 90s Delhi with annual visits to Patna during the summers and casual film viewers for parents, Satyajit Ray was "just a name", never seen except in that hazy image in my head, receiving an Oscar on his deathbed. Cinema was what played on Doordarshan, all old, all colour, all Hindi (except, thrice a year, Gandhi), stemming from the need to compete with cable, and halls screening stuff potent enough to turn people off films entirely. And turn off it did, for a while. One hand is all I need to count all the films I had seen in a hall until I was almost old enough for A-rated films (no kidding - Lion King, Liar Liar, Khamoshi the Musical, Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge and Netraheen Sakshi make five).

Westward ho!

The arrival of cable at home in the final year of the old millennium meant we could ring in the new with Titanic. That and Home Alone on Christmas Eve ensured I went into the 21st century believing 'Bolly bad, Holly good', a belief buttressed by big screen FX when I resumed going to the movies and unfazed by India's new millennium resurgence, a belief that would have remained unchallenged had it not been for technology - post-Y2K, computers started entering Indian homes like ours, dial-up giving us a glimpse of the internet. The arrival of always-on connections in the mid-noughties coincided with my move to Mayanagari - cinephiles kept the recommendations (and films) coming; the more discerning ones told me what not to watch and turned me on to IMDb and PFC.

So I watched Babel and The Departed and started building my collection, 20 hours at a time. That's how long it took (ideally - in practice, it often stretched past the day mark) to download 700MB, the size ensuring that one CD held one film. Net aside, there were two constraints - awareness and availability. So despite the Holly-Bolly binary being broken, there were other binaries at play. Recent releases, watched in movie theatres, were either Indian (read: Hindi) or international (read: American). Other films, all American colour classics off IMDb top 250 watched on the computer at home, were either cult or critically acclaimed 90s titles, or all-time greats that at first only went as far back as the 70s.

Soon, I was watching films that were even older, not necessarily colour or American, which was recast as English with a new binary - old (black-and-white) and new (colour). The channel was a gulf much wider than the pond, but many movies (mostly MAMI) and new lists (Sight and Sound, They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?) later, it was bridged, and the binary broke, becoming a holy trinity - Hindi, English and World (read: European). Repeat references meant the latter expanded east of Europe (or west across the Pacific, perhaps?) to Japan, then Hong Kong. Approaching India from the east, I skipped the subcontinent altogether and landed in Iran, returning to drop anchor on the west coast before travelling overland to late noughties Delhi.

Homecoming

Back when IFFI was held in the capital, I wasn't old enough to attend the festival. Ma-Baba went to watch Unishe April, a film by Rituparno Ghosh, whose preference for Bolly stars I wasn't a fan of. Apart from that mental image of a dying Ray, this screening is probably my only childhood memory of Bengali cinema. Years later, I would be told that Ghosh and Ray are the only ones who could interpret Tagore for the celluloid, which didn't mean much to me because unlike Ma-Baba, I hadn't listened to any Rabindrasangeet in my growing-up years (barring Ekla Cholo, probably due to the Gandhi connect). But from a world cinema perspective, there was no avoiding Apu. Awareness and availability aligned. Ray was no longer just a name. But it wasn't love at first sight.

Don't get me wrong (and I'm retrieving memories that are a dozen years old). I really liked the first two of the trilogy, preferring them to anything Asian. I just didn't love them as much as some European, English, even Hindi films. Now I was never really a cinephile (and if I ever pretended otherwise, budding auteurs were quick to shut me down, reminding me that since I neither make nor understand cinema, my opinion is invalid, something everyone tends to do for myriad reasons), but if I loved an "important" film, I'd try to watch more of those actors, that director, that cinema, even specific titles that were panned. Conversely, if a film held no appeal beyond its reputation, well, fine (Italian not English).

Bangla being my language, a lot hinged on Apur Sansar and Soumitra. Suffice to say, this one trilogy by this one auteur was just the start. Given his reputation, Ray was, of course, easier to "source", so he was the only Bengali director whose works I had seen until a Ritwik Ghatak retrospective at a film festival. While I waited to chance upon the missing member of the trinity, I worked my way through Ray's filmography, including a dozen of his 14 collaborations with Soumitra. By that time, I was well acquainted with Scorsese-De Niro, Coens-McDormand, Godard-Karina, Antonioni-Vitti, Fellini-Mastroianni, Bergman-von Sydow and Kurosawa-Mifune. Ray-Soumitra were no less than any of them. Cinematically, Bengal was at par with anything France or Italy had to offer.

Anyone reading this might disregard such high praise as hyperbole on account of me being a Bengali. Well I am, and I believe that at least one aspect of cinema is lost in translation - subtitles can never do justice to dialogues in the original language, which is why I would hesitate to say that Bengali cinema is a cut above that of any language I do not understand. That said, my praise doesn't hinge on the dialogue - even if I know a language, I prefer watching films subtitles on whenever possible. In case of Bengali, being a probashi makes it almost a necessity. Also, I discovered Bengali films not because it's the language I speak at home, but thanks to world cinema. The journey - Delhi to Calcutta via Bombay, LA, Paris, Rome et al - is as important as the destination.

Perhaps it's a pity that it took nearly two dozen years when it became possible to complete such journeys within 80 days a century and a half ago thanks to a daily mail train connecting Calcutta and Bombay, inspiring that famous novel and maybe also a nickname for a duck that is actually a fish. Then again, better late than never. Also, this hasn't turned out to be much of a eulogy. So I guess what I'm trying to say is, so long and thanks for all the ghoti.

Early bookings and groovy Nehruvian pre-memories

Nov 14, 1992. In 22 days, the facade of secularism in India would be brought down, along with a 462- or 463-year-old mosque in Ayodhya. Of course, I didn't know it then. For me, it was simply Children's Day, Chacha Nehru's birthday. It was a Saturday, so we took the 621 from Malai Mandir to Shahjahan Road, alighted outside Dholpur House (which houses the UPSC), walked down the footpath and crossed the C-Hexagon to access a park next to India Gate. Children's Park, home to a toy train and host to the annual Bal Mela. I got a gift from "baba and ma", Classic Tales For Children Book 1, containing "fifteen well-loved tales of the world", illustrated, including Thumbelina, Three Little Pigs, Pied Piper of Hamelin, etc.

Every day, Subrata kaku used to take that same 621 a couple of kilometres beyond India Gate to ITO. His office was in Patriot House (JK Tyres), or next door, in Nehru House (JK Paper). The latter would be neater, since CBT was just two floors below him, next to Dolls Museum. Nine days after the demolition of Babri Masjid, I turned 6. Among the gifts I got at my birthday party were a couple of books, "To Kaushik, from Sukrit", a family friend my age who gifted me two more when I turned 8, and two more when I turned 10; all six, CBT titles. For Bangalees, unrelated Bong elders were assigned Bangla familial terms; non-Bengali elders were aunty and uncle (Chacha Nehru might have been an exception if he were still alive).

Two new phases began in 1993, but both Disney as well as adventure books can be seen as continuations of my fixation with picture books. My first of the former was the first prize for first class, but it might have remained a one-hit wonder had it not been for the Sunday morning Disney show on Doordarshan featuring Ducktales and Talespin and hosted by first Ashish Chaudhary and then Vishal Malhotra. The latter made an entry roughly a month after dadu passed away. Along with it, Galgotias probably got added to the list of CP musts. It was there that my next new phase, a major one at that, started on March 26, 1994. Although I had been gifted one of its comics over the winter vacations from Basant Lok, it was from Galgotias that my first real Famous Five book, a gift "for promotion to class III", was purchased.

CBT, Disney, picture and activity books collided on August 20, 1995, resulting in a then record stash of 4. It was my first Delhi Book Fair, but it wasn't my first book fair at Pragati Maidan. That honour belonged to the previous year's World Book Fair. An annual 9-day affair spanning two weekends (starts on a Saturday, ends next Sunday) since 2012, it was a fortnightly biennale back then (indeed, from 1972 until 2010). Then as now, it was organised by NBT, founded by Nehru in the same year his friend Shankar founded CBT in Nehru House, and now housed in Nehru Bhawan, Vasant Kunj. My only book from my first NBT World Book Fair is a CBT publication.

Memory, which begins somewhere around the next edition, needs to be saved for another post. But before ending this, one last pre-memory. On October 11, 1994, saptami of that year's pujo, I got a book of 90-odd pages containing 22 Panchatantra stories from one of the CR Park pandals. The writing inside tells me that I read 3 of them after coming home that night (CR Park pandal hopping was always a saptami evening affair back then), and the remaining 19 over the course of the next day, in between pandal hopping by bus on astami (our car was still half a decade away). Not bad, if I say so myself.

Key:
Chacha Nehru, Nehru: Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru
621: bus route number of Delhi Transport Corporation (DTC)
UPSC: Union Public Service Commission
Bal Mela: Nehru Bal Mela (Nehru Children's Fair; since 1963)
ITO: Income Tax Office, refers to 3 nearby traffic intersections (A-point, W-point, Ring Road Crossing)
CBT: Children's Book Trust (estd 1957)
Dolls Museum: Shankar's International Dolls Museum
Galgotias: ED Galgotia & Sons, B-17, Connaught Place (1933-2015)
NBT: National Book Trust (estd 1957)
Shankar: Kesava Shankara Pillai, cartoonist and founder of CBT and Dolls Museum
CR Park: Chittaranjan Park
Pujo: Durga Pujo, a 10-day-long festival; saptami and astami are Days 7 and 8, respectively

Square one

Developing an interest in anything happens later; first comes the introduction. But when? And how? If your answer to the former is middle school or later, chances are you also remember the how. But if you don't remember when, chances are you can't really say how either. Literature is no exception. I guess it is reasonably safe to assume that you don't develop an interest in it before you actually start enjoying the act of reading, which you can't do unless you learn to read. Remember when that happened? Google says 6 or 7, with some prodigies starting as early as 4 or 5; my memory fails me. I do, however, vaguely recall some early struggles with letters and numbers, especially when it came to writing them. Did I write a couple of them backwards or as mirror images? Does that mean I was mildly dyslexic? Uh oh, can of worms, can of worms, keep it shut, keep it shut (but note to self - dig out old notebooks).

In any case, the two - knowledge of writing and a love of reading - aren't necessarily related. Sure, you need to know to read before you learn to write (otherwise aren't you simply copying shapes without understanding what those shapes mean? Side note - this probably explains the occasional mixing up of b and d and p and q, as well as s and 5, although it doesn't account for Hidni instead of Hindi). Technically, though, you could go from learning to read to loving literature without ever learning to write. And while that's unlikely, it isn't uncommon to encounter people for whom reading's a passion but writing's a chore, or vice versa. In any case, there's no fixed sequence - after you learn to read, the rest can happen in any order (or not at all).

Long story short, if you don't recall when or how, it was probably a series of events between you learning to read and you being aware of your interest in literature. Me, I can recall not being interested in literature for the longest time. This despite the best efforts of baba (which in Bangla only means dad) as well as ma, although it was always acknowledged in our home that baba was the reader. Like most of my earliest crystal clear, chronologically correct memories, this one too is from February 1996. But instead of relying solely on my memory (which is possibly failing - early onset of some neurodegenerative disease, perhaps?), I'm also going to utilise the evidence I found scattered around the house (and which I alluded to in my previous post). Yes, I'm going to.

Multithreading

Then as now, I struggle to stick to one thing. This is true of a single activity such as writing - I'll have something specific in mind when I start, but digress sooner rather than later and end up writing something else entirely that has no connection whatsoever with the start (and, often, the title, which I would have thought up at the outset). But this is truer still when it comes to a combination of multiple activities. Like, while writing something, I'll want to check something. Often, it's online, so I'll open a new tab and look that thing up. Only, that one thing will lead me to another thing and another and then another and so on and so forth until I am thinking of a way to backtrack and get back to what I started out to do in the first place, but I am unable to do so because each of those tabs seem to contain something interesting, some for the future, but some for the now, more interesting than what got me started off on that path even.

At times like these, limitations help (and right now I am fighting off a strong urge to start talking about having far fewer choices up until the first few years after neoliberalisation). So, when my browser has too many tabs open, what comes to my rescue is the limited hardware configuration of my laptop or whatever system I'm currently working on. Mostly, it's the RAM that first groans before it finally gives up. If, in between the groaning and the giving up, I can quickly bookmark or otherwise save all the links, perhaps even close a few unnecessary tabs, well and good. Otherwise, the crash is unexpected - and the thing about anything unexpected is it invariably always happens while one is doing something of critical importance (of course, I only realise its critical importance after I am forced to abandon the task for a while). So the best option for me is to take the groaning as a hint.

Before the tabbed browsing era (yes, there was a time like that), the only option was to open a new window for each new thing that I wanted to check out, which put an even greater strain on the system resources. And if I recall correctly, unlike now, when I can reopen the browser and restore all tabs with a single click, there was no easy way of doing so (I could go to History and work my way backwards, but that was just too tedious). Besides, system back then had even more limited resources - the RAM norm back then, for instance, was not 4GB but 512MB. So I did the only reasonable thing - kept the number of windows down to a minimum, and kept closing whichever ones I was done with.

Procrastinatory diversions weren't always online. I could be looking for something saved somewhere, which now is like look for a needle in multiple haystacks - one of multiple 1TB portable drives, or one of the laptops, each with its own 1TB hard drive. Things were simpler when there was a single haystack - a single desktop with a 40GB drive. But procrastinatory diversions often can and do take me to a pre-digital India, and that's a rabbit hole that's hard to climb out of. So, just yesterday, I was writing (or at least trying to write) about how and when I started reading. Before I knew it, I had dug out every old book (and the odd notebook and diary) that was still lying around somewhere in some obscure corner of our home.

Now I had, until a certain point in time (10th boards, the reason for which could have simply been the fact that I stopped reading) a habit of religiously writing down my name inside every book ever acquired, along with the date of acquisition. So the next logical step, of course, was to make a list of all the books with these details written inside, to be used as ready reference, sorted in chronological order and perhaps typed and stored in an online spreadsheet (note to self - that's a good idea). Needless to say, I am yet to finish writing about when and how I started reading.

Also needless to say, the thing I originally started off writing about was something else entirely. That sort of focus is harder to achieve - no laptop with limited RAM or desktop with limited storage or lack of childhood and teenage artefacts scattered about the home are ever going to come to my rescue. What has helped in the past is being paid to write, because said payment comes with briefs attached. So whenever I actually sat down to write a news story, I'd similarly struggle, but ultimately I'd get to the point, so whatever I had written earlier would either be incorporated in the final draft, or saved for later, or discarded. And the title (the headline, rather) would be given right at the end, often on the page just before its release (I am assuming this is self-explanatory and not technical).

That sort of discipline is hard to impose while blogging. Sure, there might be an audience, but the audience feels secondary. Primarily, it seems to me that I'm writing for myself. Occasionally, if I feel like going public, anyone who is interested is free to read my posts, even leave comments. But the writing, that's entirely my prerogative. So, incoherent thoughts in no discernible sequence could be typed out and upload just like that. Except, that wasn't entirely the case during my original 2006-10 stint. I guess I was confused back then - do I write only for myself, or do I write in order to be read and establish myself as a writer?

Even then, it wasn't so simple - even if I decided to write keeping an audience in mind, writing was just the first (and perhaps easiest) step. I had to write at the correct frequency - often but not too often. And I had to seek out many other bloggers who wrote just as regularly and read and comment on each and every one of their posts. Then, if things clicked, the move upwards - up the blog roll of similarly obscure bloggers, up the hierarchy, first from obscurity to the notice of celebrity bloggers, then from the blogging fraternity to journalism and, finally, writing.

Needless to say, things don't click - there are scores of factors at play, most of which I'm still unaware of. In any case, my move was from obscure blogger to obscure magazine reporter-sub editor, by which time I had just about had enough of the blogosphere. Now, having been a nondescript reporter-sub editor at a far-from-obscure newspaper and a not-so-obscure website and given up on that jump from journalism to writing, I am back to the blogosphere. But even after a decade and a half, the song remains the same. Whom do I write for?

Ghar Waapsi

It was never this hard. It definitely wasn't hard a decade and a half ago when I first stumbled upon the concept of a web log, and it still wasn't all that hard when, exactly 10 years ago, I took the advice of someone (I forget who - perhaps more than one person told me this) and decided to write only if I get paid (with the odd exception reserved for the notes and, later when the strict character limit was relaxed, statuses of what was by then, as made amply clear by the film about it, the one and only social network). And now, a decade after having dismissed the blog as the platform for the failed writer, here I am, not knowing where or even how to start. Have I forgotten how to write or did I never know how to write at all? I started blogging when I started working, the work being writing for money. But like a colleague and I used to say back then, often self-deprecatingly whenever anyone would refer to either one of us as a writer, anyone who knows how to write is a writer. The implication being, not everyone who knows how to write is a writer. Food for thought, perhaps. Just that, well, that particular colleague has gone on to become a celebrity of sorts on account of what he writes (and often himself performs), so I highly doubt if there are any doubts in his head as to whether or not he is a writer.

This really shouldn't be this hard. As far back as I can remember, I have always wanted to be a writer (although that's not entirely true, but now is neither the time nor the place for that disclosure). Writing is the only thing I've ever been paid for. More often than not, other people's writing that I had to rewrite, rearrange, reduce, fact-check, spell-check and place on a page for printing, but every once in a while, I did get the chance to play the writer. The then editor in chief of the second largest English language daily in the country (largest in the national capital region by readership but not circulation) said about me after being informed (by me) that I make pages, maybe he can write. Maybe I can. And I did. But I seem to have forgotten how to. Or maybe I never knew. And now I'm just repeating myself. Or perhaps I'm just pretending to do so, buying time with my fingers for my head as it figures out the best way to go about this. Therein lies the rub. A decade, decade and a half ago, it was simpler simply because of my limitations. I could have, for instance, presented this as baring my soul to a shrink I wouldn't go to in real life without having any second thoughts because back then, far from having read Portnoy's Complaint, I did not even know any Philip Roth. I could have gone for an epistolary format, kind of like an online diary, something that I guess a blog was supposed to be in the first place, but without the opening "dear diary" salutation, which now seems tacky and done to death. As does the related "letters to a younger self", even though I cannot exactly recall the precedents right at this moment.

Back when I started blogging, I was obviously not ahead of the curve, but I wasn't too far behind it either. The year I got out of school and into college was the year the world got Orkut and India got broadband, a huge step up from the 56kbps dial-up connections. Unsurprisingly, it was also the year Indians started blogging - two of the three blogs that were well established by the time I joined the party were launched then (the third was only a couple of years older). Like me, there were many who started off in 2006; like me, most seem to have folded up or gone dormant by the end of 2010. What happened? Life, I guess. Most were my age, perhaps a year or two younger, so the active blogging years roughly corresponded with their (our) college years. Perhaps some (like me) decided to write only if they were paid. Can't say with any certainty, though. Haven't stayed in touch with any of them. And while I can't speak for any of them, I for one am back. Which brings me to the title. Those of you (so very presumptuous of me, I must say - for all I know, these words are meant for my eyes only and no one else's) expecting some sort of grand political post straight off the bat would be in for some disappointment. The ghar I'm making a waapsi to is the ghar of the expression "laut ke buddhu ghar ko aaye". Literally (as per Google, albeit after playing with the word order) "fools return home". Or, in this case, fool, singular. I guess one could say I am a kaagaz ka fool. A fool for kaagaz. Kora kaagaz. Blank paper. Paper is passe. Pen is passe. Type writer type. What a cliche. Techie turned writer. Wannabe Ibanov. Vonamor Romanov. Back to square one. Back home.