Love me anyway

Read a story, FAA to allow tablets and e-readers during all phases of flight, (at bottom, story has: First published October 31st 2013, 10:06 am). Near the bottom is this paragraph: Not to mention that passengers will sometimes sneak in a few Words with Friends turns when they think they can get away with it. “You can’t be looking at everybody all the time,” said Tiffany Hawk, a former flight attendant and the author of “Love Me Anyway,” a novel about airline culture. “People are always pretending to turn things off even when they’re not.”

I looked at Kirkus review of that book, which has this: ""Readers will find the book's two heroines well worth knowing."

And they are. I read 185 pages in 2 days. Story is solid, well paced, and has substance.

Publisher's Weekly: Though Hawk provides a fascinating snapshot of an industry seldom explored in fiction, the cycling between first person (Emily) and third person (KC) is distracting, and Hawk's prose turns didactic as the pace slackens.

I did not find the alternative narrators distracting, but I do agree that as the book reaches its last quarter the narrative style weakens.

Fun, worthwhile, nicely done.

The best exotic Marigold Hotel (2011)

an ensemble cast consisting of Judi Dench, Celia Imrie, Bill Nighy, Ronald Pickup, Maggie Smith, Tom Wilkinson and Penelope Wilton, as a group of British pensioners moving to a retirement hotel in India, run by the young and eager Sonny, played by Dev Patel.

Gets 78% & 79% in Rotten Tomatoes. About right. Wilkinson charcater is very well portrayed. Patel's seems a stereotype that nearly drowns in syrup. Ebert liked it. As did Stephen Holden in the Times: The screenplay does a reasonably skillful job of interweaving its subplots and of creating some mild surprises. This is a programmatically feel-good movie whose tempered optimism and insistence that it’s never too late to leave your comfort zone and explore new horizons stays mostly (but not always) on the safe side of sentimentality. Besides its sterling cast, its ace in the hole is its pungent depiction of Jaipur’s teeming streets, which give an otherwise well-mannered movie a blinding splash of color.

Slumdog millionaire

Finally saw this 2008 film. A Mumbai teen who grew up in the slums, becomes a contestant on the Indian version of "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?" He is arrested under suspicion of cheating, and while being interrogated, events from his life history are shown which explain why he knows the answers. In doing so, the film shows a slice of Indian society. Finely done.

3 films

The Darjeeling Limited - mediocre, at best. Waste of time. Three brothers are on a train in India in some sort of quest, that, inexplicably, involves consuming cough syrup and pills, as well as smoking an endless stream of cigarettes. This nonsense exemplifies Hollywood in one of its ceaseless impulses, and it is not a pretty sight. Owen Wilson plays the eldest of the three brothers, wearing head bandages and a domineering streak that is baffling. Adrien Brody is stuck in a time warp, it seems, and wearing oversized glasses he keeps flipping onto his forehead. Jason Schwartzman plays the third brother, who lusts after the waitress/stewardess that serves them lime drinks. The film meanders, and then flops.

Manchurian Candidate - very good. Denzel turns in a stellar performance as a Desert Storm veteran, rather than a Korean War vet, played by Frank Sinatra in the original film version (1960). Meryl Streep plays the bitchy mother to perfection. The film veers on the melodramatic or absurd, but the action and the acting, especially the acting, pull it back, and make it work.

Adaptation - too much Cage. Way too much. Even Streep and Chris Cooper, in the end,, can not overcome that hurdle, good as they are.

Shantaram

A young, and very pretty, patron wanted this book for her summer English class. Looks interesting.

City of Joy

Swayze film. Enjoyable.

Outsourced

At times, a randomly chosen film works out to be a good choice. This is one of such: Friday afternoon I went over to the DVD area and looked at the NEW arrivals, and took this one home. It was a good choice. Reviews are positive.

A Seattle call center, Todd, manager is sent to India to train his own replacement, and get the outsourced call center to reach the 6-minute minute per incident (the much-vaunted MPI). When he gets there, a building in the process of being built, the MPI is over 12. Funny, effective, scenes develop: on arrival he misses the sign held by the driver sent to pick him up (a small, hand-lettered one reading Mr. Toad), and thus has to ride a crowded train, then take a taxi to the town where he'll be working; Todd learns about eating with his right hand; sees how the poorer half live; calls his ex-girlfriend, forgetting the 12-hour time difference, and is surpirsed to hear someone with her; longs for a burger; and lives through the celebration of the day of Holy.



I enjoyed it a lot. It is a smart, amusing, fun movie, well acted, with good cinematography, and a crisp script.

Best Books About India

Best Books About India
Sudhir Kakar picks his favorite books about India

1. Ka FIC Calasso
By Roberto Calasso
Knopf, 1998

"Suddenly an eagle darkened the sky," begins "Ka," Roberto Calasso's vivid retelling of Indian myths. Calasso brings ancient stories as alive for a non-Indian reader as they continue to be for most Indians. For in India, tales about the origins of the world, of man and sex and death, are not cadavers on the dissecting table of mythologists. The stories are worked and reworked into modern forms -- never more captivatingly than by Calasso in "Ka" -- and they continue to be the preferred medium for the expression of metaphysical and social thought.

2. Slowly Down the Ganges
By Eric Newby
Scribner, 1966

In 1963, Eric Newby and his wife, Wanda, undertook a 1,200-mile journey by boat from the Himalayan origins of India's most sacred river, through the country's densely populous plains, to the river's terminus in the Bay of Bengal. The Newbys and their crew ran aground 63 times in the first six days, and plenty of miseries followed, but in "Slowly Down the Ganges," the laconic Newby reports every mishap, every miscommunication, with an appealing sense of humor. He is full of warmth toward India and its people, but he has a keen eye and is always conscious of his outsider status among the Hindus: "However well-intentioned he might be, and however anxious to participate, for a European to bathe in the Ganges . . . was simply for him to have a bath."

3. Autobiography of an Unknown Indian
By Nirad Chaudhuri [BIOGRPHY] B Chaudhuri
Macmillan, 1951

In his "Autobiography of an Unknown Indian," Nirad Chaudhuri (1897-1999) gives us a tragi-comic portrait of an Indian middle class eternally caught between the traditional and the modern. His memoir begins early in the 20th century, when he was growing up in rural Bengal; it then describes his youth in Calcutta and his life as a struggling writer in Delhi just after Indian independence in 1947. When the book was published, many Indians were outraged by Chaudhuri's paeans to the country's recently departed British rulers and by his detestation of all things Indian. With the passage of time, though, Chaudhuri's intemperate outbursts and his attacks on his countrymen's failings came to be regarded as part of his lovable eccentricity. The book remains one of the best chronicles of the Indian middle class's enduring love affair with the West, even if England has since been replaced by the U.S. as the object of desire.

4. India: A Wounded Civilization 954 N
By V.S. Naipaul
Knopf, 1977

The year is 1975, during the period known as the Emergency, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi suspended the country's constitution and assumed dictatorial powers. Naipaul, who was born in an Indian immigrant enclave in Trinidad, recounts his travels through a "wounded" country. India "isn't my home," he notes, "and yet I cannot reject it or be indifferent to it." Instead, he is often hostile toward it, especially toward modern Indian art, architecture and literature. He does not restrict his complaints to modernity; he also rails against the dead weight of India's past. The country might have won its independence from Britain, but it is "a land of far older defeat." With the declaration of the Emergency, he writes, "it is necessary to fight against the chilling sense of a new Indian dissolution." Luckily, India survived its flirtation with dictatorship, a time that Naipaul memorably captures in this portrait of a country in distress.

5. The Collected Essays of A.K. Ramanujan
By A.K. Ramanujan
Oxford, 1999

A.K. Ramanujan (1929-93) was one of India's finest English-language poets, a devoted folklorist and a scholar of Indian literature. His essays crystallize a theme that runs through much of his work: the interplay between the India of the past -- both personal and collective -- and the Western-centric modern nation. The collection includes his classic "Is There an Indian Way of Thinking?," wherein Ramanujan argues that Indian thinking is overwhelmingly "context sensitive," in contrast to the "context free," or abstract, thinking of the West. Ramanujan was that rare writer who combined the mind of a scholar with the heart of a poet.

Mr. Kakar's books include "The Indians: Portrait of a People." His "Mad and Divine: Spirit and Psyche in the Modern World" will be published in May by the University of Chicago Press.

A suitable boy

Vikram Seth.
New York: HarperCollins, 1993.
1,394 pages

Set in newly independent India, Nehru's early 1950's, this adipose saga counterbalances a book of social manners--the marrying off of a well-to-do educated young woman, Lata Mehra--with a historical account (even at the level of transcribed parliamentary debate) of the subcontinent trying to find its societal bearings vis- -vis language, religion, and the redistribution of estate-lands taken off the hands of the elite. Set mainly in Brahmpur, the story encompasses four well-off families, with a focus mostly on the younger members--poets, academics, playboys, newlyweds--who stitch a pattern of peccadillo through their elders' expectations. Meanwhile, Seth, whose California novel in verse, The Golden Gate (1986), was clever and energetic in concept but dull and soapy in final effect, falls into the same trap here: lots of stuff obviously--at a marathon 1300-plus pages--but characters made out of clich , with background-India the very stuffed pillow of local color that keeps them standing. The book, too, fairly squeaks with its own pleasure in itself, larded with poetry and a general recommendation of art over politics and money: the characters it spends the most time over are narcissists. Anyone wanting to read how a marriageable daughter can X-ray a whole society ought to let this cream-puff-wrapped-in-a-cinder-block pass and return to Tanizaki's classic Japanese masterpiece, The Makioka Sisters. Fat (the publishing world's delayed reparation for Rushdie's Satanic Verses?) but fatuous. (First printing of 100,000; Book-of- the-Month Dual Selection for May) Copyright 1999 Kirkus Reviews

The white tige. Aravind Adiga. New York : Free Press, 2008.

26 holds on 39 copies on 7 January 2009. 8 holds on first copy returned of 69 copies on 21 March 2010. In between it was very popular, with high numbers of holds.