How much would you pay to buy $2.4 million? Would you pay your life?

Hunting for antelope near the Mexican border, an ex-Vietnam War veteran called Llwelyn Moss comes across the aftermath of a drug war – shot up vehicles and several dead men. In one of the bullet riddled trucks he finds a dying Mexican who asks him for “agua” (water), and also a fortune in heroin. He decides to track down the winner of the battle, because clearly someone must have walked away victorious. Some distance away he finds the corpse of the mortally wounded winner – and also a briefcase containing $2.4 million. (The story is set in 1980, when that money was worth even more than it is now.)

Although he realises that whoever the money belonged to would be coming after him for it, Moss chooses to take it and run. He makes it back to his trailer and his young wife, who doesn’t believe him when he tells her what he’s brought. However, obsessed by the thought of the Mexican he has abandoned to die in the desert, he goes out with water that night back to the trucks. But the Mexican is dead, and the ‘others” are here, and waiting.

Chased through the night, abandoning his truck, Moss somehow makes it back to his trailer. He packs off his wife to her grandmother’s (mother’s in the film of the book) and takes off himself, with the money.

Meanwhile, a sheriff’s deputy arrests a man called Anton Chigurh who carries around a captive bolt pistol (normally used to exterminate cows) and a compressed air tank to activate it. Chigurh calmly strangles the deputy with his handcuffs, takes his official car, uses it to flag down an innocent driver, murders him, takes HIS car, and meets up with two men representing one of the parties in the drug war. Chigurh, it’s obvious by now, is a professional hitman, and after he studies the battle scene and Moss’ abandoned truck he shoots the men dead and take a tracker they have been using, unsuccessfully, to look for the money. Using the registration of Moss’ truck, Chigurh finds where he lives and breaks into the trailer, but the couple are long gone. From the phone records they left behind, Chigurh finds out where the wife has gone.

Meanwhile, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell is trying to solve the murders but getting nowhere fast. A World War 2 vet still grappling with memories of an incident where he abandoned his dying squad members and ran (subsequently, as he confesses, being awarded a medal for the action) he too visits Moss’ wife but gets no information from her. Moss runs but cannot run far enough or fast enough, because there are many on his trail: Chigurh, who considers himself honour-bound to kill him, the Mexican drug gang, and also Carson Wells, a former partner of Chigurh who has been hired to bypass him and get the money; and because, as he finds out a bit too late, there is a hidden transponder in the pile of money.

I won’t give away any further details of the plot except to say this: Anton Chigurh has just replaced Hannibal Lecter as my absolute favourite literary villain, an ice cold killer who on two occasions forces potential victims to call on tossed coins to decide their own fate. And that the plot is refreshing because it turns the conventional ending of this sort of device on its overused head.

Or maybe I'm just ecstatic because this is the first book I read after that horrible bore, Paulo Coelho, whom I literally can't bring myself to review.

The writing is mostly fast paced and taut; the punctuation, except for commas and full stops, nonexistent. The only dispensable part is the rambling reminiscences of Sheriff Bell, who goes on and on and on for far too long and who could, in my opinion, have been written out of the book altogether without hurting the plot too much. If the author had reduced his part I'd have given this book a 5 star review.

Now to rent the movie…

What can one say about a massacre that ended a kingdom?
I still remember the morning of Saturday, June 2, 2001 – a patient of mine, since deceased, told me in a state of high excitement – “Do you know – the Nepal prince shot everyone dead because his mother wouldn’t let him marry his girlfriend?”
It was only next morning that the news was plastered all over the papers…and since it was Sunday, a couple of friends and I went picnicking after my morning’s work and I read the news sitting on grass with the newspaper open on my lap and a thunderstorm (I remember it perfectly well) brewing.
Those early accounts were sort of …confused…and I remember responding caustically to one highly coloured account in Outlook magazine somewhat along these lines – “Anyone who has ever fired an automatic weapon will wonder how Prince Dipendra managed to aim and fire, let alone handle the recoil of two of the heavy weapons, one in each hand, and that too while drunk and stoned. Add to that the fact that he managed to shoot only members of his own family, sparing Gyanendra’s, and you have a ready-made episode of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not.”
This year, when I was in Kathmandu, I came across a couple of books on the subject of the royal massacre at Narayanhiti palace – and, since I had been interested in the subject of regicide in general and this particular bout of bloodletting in particular, I chose one of them – that was the book I’m reviewing here.
Part travelogue, part narrative history, written throughout in a racy style with constant references to the historical past and to the present, this is quite a piece of work. I’m sure my personal response to it was conditioned by the fact that I know, having visited them, at first hand most of the places the authors mention. I know the Nepali people (there are many in this city as well) – maybe someone else would respond differently to it. I may be too close to the events in question.
Briefly, anyway, here’s what happened. Intrigued by the newspaper reports of the massacre, the present authors – a husband-and-wife pair from Australia – chucked their jobs (am I envious or what?), went off to Kathmandu, stayed there (well, technically it was in the “separate” city of Patan across the Baghmati river that they stayed) for five months, interviewed a variety of people, and finally produced this work. I suppose you could call it a labour of love.
So what is it about?
Ignoring the filler background, much of it irrelevant to the point at hand but entertaining to read, this is what happened:
On the evening of Friday, June 1, 2001, the Crown Prince of Nepal, Dipendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev, was hosting a family get-together at his own residence inside the Narayanhiti palace complex in Kathmandu. Dipendra had long wanted to marry the love of his life, one Devyani Rana, but for reasons difficult for any normal human brain to comprehend (the young woman’s bloodline wasn’t pure enough to suit her) the queen, Aishwarya, had forbidden the wedding. At some point during the evening, Dipendra spoke to Devyani Rana on the phone. Nobody knows what they talked of, but he then began smoking marijuana on top of Scotch whisky, collapsed (it was suspected by most who saw him that he was faking), and was literally carried to his room.
Once there he made some kind of miraculous recovery, and was back within 20 minutes, dressed in military fatigues and carrying four firearms. He then proceeded to shoot dead his father and sister, not to mention at least five other royals, injured plenty more, and then finally cornered his brother and mother in the garden and shot them to pieces too. He was then found with a pistol bullet through his head, allegedly self-inflicted (odd though that the bullet entered on the left side of his head while he was right handed!).
All this while the royal aides-de-camp were conspicuous by their absence. In any case, even if they had been at hand, protocol forbade them from taking out the prince – even if he were a homicidal maniac, he was a prince. (I wonder what the guards of the British monarchy would have done in case Charles Windsor had reacted similarly when forced to choose Diana Spencer over Camilla Parker Bowles! Entertaining to speculate, huh?)
Although in a terminal coma, Dipendra was proclaimed king the next day, and in the three days he took to die he held the status of a living god. When he finally did die, he was succeeded by his father’s conniving younger brother, Gyanendra, a character so despised by the Nepali people that his accession to the throne made inevitable the end of Nepal’s 238-year-old monarchy. And good riddance too.
Well, that’s what the book is about, though it does talk a lot about Nepali history and a lot of stuff to put the authors in the scene. As I said, much of that is extraneous – it does make the book more suited to shorter attention spans and light reading, which I guess makes it more saleable. Towards the end the book also falls back on the overused American technique of breathless two-paragraph chapter parts, shifting back and forth between characters, so that it reads as if written for a movie script.
Pity, really.
A massacre that ended an empire and put in place an elected Maoist government that might yet prove South Asia’s answer to Hugo Chavez deserves better. I might have given it five stars.

I should have read this one first.

Some time back I had reviewed Khaled Hosseini’s “A Thousand Splendid Suns”. I’d actually bought his earlier work, “The Kite Runner” earlier but not got around to reading it till later. Wish I’d read it first.

Why, I’ll tell you in a minute.

First, the story, sans spoilers.

Amir is the son of a rich man in Kabul in the days of the monarchy. His father is a cold, unfeeling man; his mother died giving birth to him. In a corner of his compound is a mud hut where lives his servant, a Hazara (the ethnic Mongoloid and religious Shia double minority of Afghanistan, despised by the majority Pashtuns) man named Ali and his son, Hassan. Ali’s wife ran away soon after Hassan’s birth, which followed soon after Amir’s – they were nursed by the same wet-nurse. Hassan is Amir’s confidant, his playmate, the boy who helps him in championship kite flying and runs down the kites Amir cuts down with his glass-coated string. Amir is also a storyteller – he tells his own versions of popular stories and writes them too, even if the only one he can show them to is his father’s friend, Rahim Khan.

One day in 1975, Amir wins a major kite tourney and Hassan goes to bring the last kite of the day, which Amir had defeated in single combat. He is cornered and raped by a half-German Nazi-worshipping sociopath, Assef, and his cronies. (Amir has had a run-in with Assef earlier, and Hassan had rescued him by threatening to shoot out Assef’s eye with a slingshot, with which he is an expert.) Amir watches the rape but makes no attempt to intervene or even to show himself. From that moment on his guilt turns on himself and he hates Hassan for making him feel guilty. Finally he plants money under Hassan’s mattress, accuses him of theft, and Ali, bitter and angry, knowing this was a plant, takes Hassan away to a village.

By then the monarchy has collapsed, Afghanistan is a republic, and the 1979 Communist takeover in Afghanistan is followed by jihadi rebellion and near anarchy. Like most of the rich, Amir and his father get themselves smuggled out of Afghanistan and end up in San Jose, California, selling goods at a weekend flea market while Amir continues to write his stories. There he meets and falls in love with Soraya, the daughter of an exiled Afghan general. Amir’s father, before dying of cancer, arranges the marriage of the two. The marriage is happy – Amir becomes a successful author as well – but childless. All this while, Amir still has not been able to shed the guilt of what he had done to Hassan many years ago.

Meanwhile the Afghan Communist regime has fallen, the “freedom fighters” of the Mujahideen have fought among themselves and demolished Kabul, then the Taliban took over, to initial raptures from the war-weary citizenry. It is at this time that Rahim Khan, now in Pakistan, contacts Amir and tells him that he must come and meet him because “there is a way to be good again.”

Amir goes over to Pakistan, where he finds his father’s old friend dying of an unspecified disease. Rahim Khan reveals to him that Hassan was actually his half-brother, his father’s son by Ali’s promiscuous and runaway wife, and that in recent years Hassan (who has never forgotten Amir), his wife, and their son, Sohrab, have been staying with Rahim Khan in Amir’s father’s old house in Kabul. But after Rahim Khan left for Pakistan for treatment, the Taliban shot dead Hassan and his wife and put Sohrab in an orphanage. Rahim Khan charges Amir to go and find Sohrab and bring him back.

Driven by an initially suspicious and later supportive Afghan called Farid, an in a false beard, Amir returns to a ruined Kabul and in the orphanage finds that the director has sold Sohrab to a Talib – for money in order to buy food for the rest of the inmates. This Talib is an executioner for the Taliban and Farid and Amir see him in action in Kabul’s football stadium, stoning an adulterous couple to death during the halftime break of a football match. Amir gains an audience with the Talib, who is holding Sohrab as a sex slave. The Talib turns out to be Amir’s old antagonist, Assef, who recognises Amir easily and challenges him to a duel to the death – the winner to take Sohrab. Amir is no fighter, and Assef is about to beat him to death when Sohrab shoots a brass ball into one of his eyes with a slingshot – as Hassan had threatened to do years ago. The desperately injured Amir and Sohrab escape, with Farid’s help, to Pakistan. There begins another struggle on Amir’s part, this time to find a way to get Sohrab back to America.

Right, apart from the ending, that’s the story.

Now: why should I have read this book first?

Because it’s such a totally inferior product to the later “A Thousand Splendid Suns”, that’s why. I don’t mean to say “The Kite Runner” is a bad book – it isn’t, in its own way. But compared to “A Thousand Splendid Suns” it fails – completely. The scenarios are caricatures, many of the characters (like Amir’s father and Assef) are cartoonish, the coincidences worse than incredible.

As for the ending, well, it’s less bad than that of “A Thousand Splendid Suns”, I’ll grant it that – but then it could hardly have been worse than that one. I’m beginning to fear that Khaled Hosseini’s writing style invariably includes weak endings.

My favourite moment of the book is actually a story written by Amir early on, in fact – his first real story, about a man who found a cup where tears would be turned to pearls. The man, turned greedy by the riches he could have, found ways of making himself cry so as to drop his tears into the cup and get pearls. The story ended with him sitting on a mountain of pearls, weeping into the cup, with the body of his beloved wife, whom he had murdered, in his arms. Excellent story. Better by far than the book itself.

My surprise at the resemblances of Farsi with Hindi has been overtaken at its similarities with Bengali, a language right at the other end of the Indian subcontinent. Words like “Baba” for father, and “Kaka” for uncle, are identical in the two. I don’t know how that came about. Maybe some linguist can enlighten me?

Conclusion: if you can only read one of the two books, read “A Thousand Splendid Suns”. It’s better. If you’re going to read both, read “The Kite Runner” first, or you’ll spoil your enjoyment of it afterwards. Though there is little enough in it to enjoy.

Maybe as a dog lover I should not be reviewing this book. I can hardly be objective or impartial, after all.

Snitter and Rowf are dogs incarcerated for experimental purposes in the aptly titled ARSE (Animal Research Scientific and Experimental) in the Lake District, England. Rowf, a big black mongrel who seems to be more a Newfoundland retriever than anything, is being repeatedly drowned in a tank of water to see how much of a resistance he can build up. He has never known a family home and consoles himself with the thought that dogs were meant to suffer for the betterment of the “whitecoats”. Snitter, a fox terrier separated from his master, whom he believes dead, has undergone brain surgery designed to drive him insane so that he can no longer distinguish between fact and fiction, reality and imagination. There are other dogs and other animals who have also undergone mutilation and horror – NONE of which is fictional – in the interests of “abstract scientific knowledge”. A classic example cited is that of guinea pigs who had legs amputated (without anaesthetics, of course) just to find out whether they compensated for the absence of the limb (Answer: they didn’t. They behaved as if the leg was still there.)

One night when the caretaker leaves Rowf’s cage accidentally open, he and Snitter manage to escape through the incinerator chimney and make their way to the moor. There they join forces with a wild fox (“tod”, in the fox’s dialect) and kill sheep to live. This draws down the wrath of farmers on them and ARSE finally admits that the dogs did escape. In order to sensationalise the story, the gutter press (in the person of Digby Driver of the “London Orator”) deliberately and cynically spreads the rumour that the dogs have been exposed to, and presumably are suffering from, bubonic plague.

As the story explodes in the media, the government orders the army to hunt the dogs down, and they, in their turn, try and survive by any means possible, eating sheep when they can and raiding the isolated farms for what they can find. Despite their unexpected resourcefulness and many narrow escapes, hunger, cold and mounting injuries combine to force them off the moor or face death.

Finally, they are cornered on a sea-bird sanctuary on the coast and are forced to try and swim out to sea. What happens next is something I won’t reveal here, except to say that it is one of the most moving and satisfying endings one could imagine for a very sad and beautiful book (dog lovers note – you won’t have cause for sorrow).

There is much of beauty in the book – the description of the moor, the mountains, the people, and not least the dogs themselves and most of all of Snitter himself, his hallucinations, his mounting problems with his sanity, his dependence on Rowf and yet his leadership of the duo. And the handling of the last scene of all, with the dogs swimming to certain death in the sea (or are they?) is among the best I have read in a long time.

This is not a children’s book, though the characters are dogs who can talk to each other. It’s completely adult in theme, concept and execution. As a dedication to the animal victims of random science it can’t be improved on.

Anyone, incidentally, who wants to know how the book ended but can’t get to read it should either search online for a plot synopsis or ask me by personal message. (I’d recommend you read the book, though. Even if you don’t like dogs.)

I’d also recommend Richard Adam’s two other animal-themed novels, the rabbit saga “Watership Down” and the Bronze Age tale “Shardik”, about a gigantic bear. They all deserve five stars.

There is, or should be, some sort of limit to what human beings should be asked to tolerate.

Mariam is a bastard, a harami – her mother’s favourite epithet for the little girl living in a hovel near the Afghan city of Herat. Her mother, the cast away mistress of one of the city’s richest men, is the troubled and bitter Nana, who warns her constantly against her father’s wiles during his weekly visit to see her.

Then comes the day when Mariam breaks out in rebellion against her mother’s control over her, dresses in her best clothes, and walks down to Herat to find her father Jalil’s house – to be rejected and forced to spend the night sleeping on the pavement before his gates. Returning to her mother the next day, the little girl, just turned fifteen, finds she has hanged herself. Jalil, unwilling and unhappy, takes her into his house, and marries her off at the earliest to a man three times her age. This is Rasheed, a widower and shoemaker from Kabul, far to the east, where Mariam has never been.

Life in Kabul, difficult for the almost illiterate, lonely, disillusioned girl, is made tougher by her domineering bully of a husband, who rails against Western values, forces Mariam into a burqa, and yet has a shelf full of pornographic magazines full of pictures of naked white women with their legs apart. She endures his nightly marital rapes, becomes pregnant, is full of joy at the prospect of motherhood…and then suffers a miscarriage.

“The grief kept surprising Mariam. All it took to unleash it was her thinking of the unfinished crib in the toolshed or the suede coat in Rashid’s closet. The baby came to life then and she could hear it, could hear its hungry grunts, its gurgles and jabbering. She felt it sniffing at her breasts. The grief washed over her, swept her up, tossed her upside down. Mariam was dumbfounded that she could miss in such a crippling manner a being she had never even seen.”

Miscarriage follows miscarriage over the succeeding years, and Rasheed becomes ever more violent and abusive. Mariam bears up, like a rock in the stream. She endures.

In the meantime, King Zahir Shah is overthrown by his cousin Daoud Khan, Afghanistan becomes a republic, and Daoud Khan is himself unseated by a Communist rebellion. The Soviet Union sends in troops to bolster up the new regime (of Babrak Karmal) and the Americans and other western powers begin the familiar and sordid tale of pouring weapons, advisers and money to train, arm and finance the people who form the nucleus of Islamic terrorism today.

Meanwhile…

Laila is the living antithesis of Mariam. The daughter of an ex-schoolteacher, she is loved and cherished and educated by her father who, despite the fact that his two elder sons are both off fighting the anti-communist jehad, tells her that the communist regime is the best possible thing that could have happened to Afghanistan’s women and that Laila can be whatever she wants. The two sons are both killed and Laila’s mother retreats into semi-insanity, leaving her in de facto charge of the house. During these days she falls in love with Tariq, the son of a neighbour who has lost a leg to a mine and uses a prosthesis.

The Soviets withdraw, the government of President Najibullah falls, and the jehadis take over Kabul – only to immediately begin fighting each other…not to mention killing, robbing and raping the hapless civilian population of the country on the side. As more and more people die, Tariq’s family decides to leave for a Pakistani refugee camp. On a goodbye visit to Laila, Tariq makes love to her, unknowingly leaving the fifteen-year-old girl pregnant.

Soon the situation is so bad even Laila’s mother agrees that they have to leave the country. As they gather up their possessions, a rocket hits the house, leaving Laila the sole survivor. Partially deafened, severely wounded, she is taken in by Rasheed and Mariam and nursed back to health.

Knowing Rasheed, what happens next is predictable. He sweet-talks the girl, woos her, makes up his mind to either take her as wife or – when Mariam objects – to throw her out of the house, to go among the rapists and murderers that fill the “liberated” city. In the middle of this a stranger arrives with an account of having witnessed Tariq’s death in a Pakistani hospital from injuries sustained in an attack on the truck in which he was fleeing. Devastated, pregnant, Laila accepts Rasheed’s proposal.

Then it is that life becomes truly hell for Laila. After she gives birth to Tariq’s daughter, whom she has to pretend is Rasheed’s, she has to contend with Rasheed’s disappointment (he has wanted a son) as well as Mariam’s jealousy. After she begins to gather her own share of beatings, Mariam slowly grows closer to her and begins to share in taking care of the baby.

In the meantime, Laila has begun stealing money from Rasheed, and she and Mariam, along with the baby (Aziza) try to escape to Pakistan but are arrested at the bus station and returned to Rasheed, who brutally beats them and starves them for days in punishment.

Things move on. There is a new force that rises in the south, an army of religious students called the Taliban, who capture most of the country with astonishing speed and impose such brutal restrictions on women that Laila, pregnant again, has to undergo Caesarean section without anaesthetic while the woman surgeon positions a lookout at the operation theatre door because she is supposed to operate wearing a burqa.

Drought comes, crops fail, Rasheed’s shoe shop burns down. Things go from bad to worse and Aziza has to be dumped, albeit temporarily, in an orphanage while Laila has to brave Taliban whips to go and meet her once in a while. And then, the supposedly “dead” Tariq turns up again…earning Laila and Mariam a murderous attack from Rasheed.

The novel has four parts. I won’t give away the end of this story, except that the true end is at the conclusion of Part Three, where Mariam – the real soul of the story – makes her exit. The last part is mawkish, sentimental, and also inaccurate in its hopefulness about Afghanistan’s future. It is also the reason why I’m giving this book four, and not five, stars.

I read this book in two sessions, and could have finished it in one if I'd not needed to sleep.

Incidentally, I'm amazed at how many words Farsi has in common with Hindi - no Hindi-speaking person will need translation of such words as "harami", "moochi", "jan", and so on. But then we're all South Asians, so I guess it shouldn't be all that surprising after all.

Normally, I don’t watch Hindi films. I once told people I wouldn’t be caught dead watching a Bollywood film. And I kept my word. I wasn’t caught dead watching it. I was very much alive.
The reason I watched the film, in the first place, was all the gushing reviews – both word of mouth and on the web and in print – that I came across. Besides, it has been a sleeper hit; there was none of the usual pre-release hype of the type I absolutely detest; so I decided I had to have a look.
I decided; and then what? I found I couldn’t have a look. I couldn’t have a look because the damn film got to places like Kuwait before it got here – and it finally got here on Friday, just three weeks after it was released everywhere else.
Absolutely typical.
So I finally got around to seeing it only today.
OK, now the prelims are over, and I’ve finished explaining why I’ve watched it, let’s get to the review itself:

There is a genre of films about the sports underdog. The list of those films is long, and mostly originate in Hollywood, but I guess it’s time someone took a whack at it here. And they do.

The story: The final of the men’s hockey (that’s HOCKEY, as in “hockey”, damn it, not ICE hockey) world cup between India and Pakistan. Pakistan is leading by one goal with just seconds left to play, when India gets a penalty stroke. Kabir Khan (Shah Rukh Khan, in his first on-screen portrayal of a Muslim character), the Indian captain, decides to take the stroke himself. And fluffs it, losing the match in the process. As a Pakistani player, in a moment of camaraderie, hugs him in consolation, and the photo of him doing this is splashed all across the Indian papers (a clever touch, using front pages of real yellow rags like the Times of India) calling him a traitor and worse. He is finally forced even to move out of his own house while a man scribbles “Gaddar” (“Traitor”) on the wall in charcoal.
Cut to seven years later, when a women’s hockey team is being put together. There is just one applicant for the job that no one wants, that of the coach of a team that is bound to lose….Kabir Khan. By default, he gets the job.
What he gets is a team of scrapings from the bottom of the barrel, from all corners of the country, from Andhra Pradesh and Jharkhand, Punjab and Haryana, Maharashtra and the Railways, and even Manipur and Mizoram (nice to see people from this part of the country getting a chance to act in a mainstream movie). What he gets is a team of no-hopers, misfits, egotists and drama queens, who can’t even decide who gets which bunk without fighting among themselves, let alone act as a team.
Now of course you know what’s going to happen, without me needing to tell you. Except for “Rocky” (the first part, and I detest boxing) the underdog films always end with the victory of the underdog against all odds. So there was no surprise regarding the ending when I went to see the movie. I knew what was coming; what I wanted to see was how they went about presenting it.
The beginning is a disaster. The girls, on the field, are more intent on hitting out at each other than playing, and Khan is forced to bench several of them till they apologise to each other. In the end the anger against his training methods is so great that they sign a petition against him. It looks as if all’s over for the team, till the player’s suddenly and spectacularly bond at a MacDonald’s when a group of louts tries to harass them. They beat the living hell out of those men. Maybe not realistic, but entertaining all the same.
Meanwhile, the national selectors are fast losing interest in the team and are about to decide against sending it to the World Cup. Khan makes a desperate plea: he will have the girls play the national men’s team. If they at least draw, they will go to the World Cup. The selectors, many of whom are sleazeballs, want the team to lose. The men’s team walks all over them in the first half, leading three goals to none, but in the second they begin to TRY and they manage to put two back. Despite losing narrowly, the team is so impressive the entire men’s team and the spectators salute the girls and the selectors are forced to let them go to the World Cup in Australia after all.
As is usual in this type of film, they lose heavily in the first match (against Australia) before Kabir Khan, with his coaching and his pep talks, motivates them to claw their way back, till they finally reach the final, gathering sponsors and new kit on the way. And, of course, in the final, meeting Australia again, they win - as they would. You knew that all along.
And with the world cup in hand, they return to flowers and Kabir Khan, with his mother in tow, returns to the old house they had abandoned, with the same people who had reviled him earlier giving him an ovation…and a little kid scratches out the “traitor” written on the wall all those years ago. This scene was so maudlin it left a bad taste in the mouth.
All right, so that’s the story. There is much more to it, of course. There is the time when the girls are being registered at the hockey camp, when they’re all coming together, and the man at the desk is someone who has never heard of places like Mizoram and thinks Tamil and Telugu people are the same. There is the moment when Kabir Khan tells super-egotist Bindya Naik (the eminently kissable Shilpa Shukla) “There is room for just one bully in this team, and that’s me”. There are the repeated and very enjoyable digs at that national obsession and fifth-rated pseudo-sport, cricket (Kabir Khan calls a cricket bat wielding goon a eunuch, for instance). There are the girls goggling at the training facilities the Australians enjoy. There are the (really, this even moved me, and I’m a hardened cynic) bonding between the players at the end of the film, where even Komal Chaurasia (Chitrashi Rawat, who is a hockey player in real life) learns to pass the ball. There is Kabir Khan fingering his old silver medal and seeking personal vindication from a win. There is the delicious touch of irony when the team returns – the players are seen bargaining for the autorickshaw fare, as before. Just as it really happens in India.
The score is one jarring point – the music is loud and intrusive and more often than not unnecessary. At least there is no song and dance, one must be thankful for that. Also, while the on-field hockey action is beautifully shot and excellently portrayed, there is a loud yammering radio commentary in Hindi that is all but unendurable.
If this film had been made before the nineties, the players from the other teams (the Australians, British, and so on) would have been made to speak in Hindi and would have been portrayed as ignorant, conniving, evil racists. There’s none of that here; one even feels sorry for the Australian players after they break down and cry after their defeat in the final. Another plus!
I’m giving this film four stars, but really it deserves 4.25. I’m deducting half a star for the awful radio commentary and for the musical score. Another quarter of a star goes for that ridiculous last scene, where people still – after all these years – remember the old rancour, albeit this time to wash it away; Kabir Khan arrives pushing the same old scooter, and his mother returns too, looking not a day older. And the charcoal “traitor” is still there to be crossed out – after seven years. Bleh.
Kabir Khan’s story, incidentally, is based on the real life story of Mir Ranjan Negi, Indian goalkeeper in the hockey final of the 1982 Asian Games against Pakistan in which India lost 7-1. Negi was accused of taking bribes, his career ended, he was hounded for years – and he ultimately returned as women’s team coach. He was also technical adviser for this film.
Chak De! also deserves for not shying away from a brutal truth in India – the fact that an Indian Muslim is always forced to keep proving himself an Indian, the fact that he is not even allowed to make an honest mistake on the sports field without suspicion. This should ideally be studied in depth in another movie. Chak De! is a sports film; one can’t ask too much from it.
A superb effort, still. Infinitely better than “Lagaan,” the overblown Amir Khan film which was short-listed for the Oscar for best foreign movie a few years ago. Chak De! isn’t good enough to win; far from it. But it will still have me rooting.


Cast (names in the movie on the right…some cast members appeared under their own names, but not all):
Shah Rukh Khan...... Kabir Khan
Vidya Malvade...... Vidya Sharma
Anjan Srivastava
Javed Khan
Vibha Chibbar
Nakul Vaid...... Rakesh
Sagarika Ghatge...... Preeti Sabarwal
Chitrashi Rawat...... Komal Chautala
Shilpa Shukla...... Bindya Naik
Tanya Abrol...... Balbir Kaur
Anaitha Nair...... Aliya Bose
Shubhi Mehta...... Gunjan Lakhani
Nisha Nair...... Soimoi Kerketa
Sandia Furtado...... Nethra Reddy
Arya Menon...... Gul Iqbal
Chonchon V. Zimik...... Molly Zimik
Kimi Lalhming...... Mary Ralte
Kimberly Miranda
Nicola Sequeira
Raynia D'Souza
Mohit Chauhan
Joyoshree Arora
Vivaan Bhathena

The complete curriculum vitae of the girls are here, for those who are interested :
http://www.indianexpress.com/sunday/story/211123-2.html

If old soldiers don’t die, but just fade away, what happens to old authors?

To be more precise, should authors who have lost the spark keep writing?

I used to be a fan of Jeffrey Archer, pre-imprisonment. Not of his novels, which I always found either trite (“Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less”) or stultifying (“Kane and Abel”) – but of his short story collections, which were almost all of very high standards. So I bought this one, pages unturned.

Verdict: I shall never buy Archer again.

Tip to an aspiring author – if you want to write about places you haven’t visited, at least get someone to tell you something about them. Two of Archer’s stories are set in places I know intimately: St Petersburg, Russia, and Mumbai, India. Just these two are so riddled with errors and gasp-inducing idiocies that one doesn’t really need to delve further.

Time was when I used to read the stories for boys set in India with Indian maharajas abounding or with characters called Mr Bombay, Mr Calcutta and the like. I thought those days were extinct – till I opened up Archer’s Indian story and found someone called Anil Khan. Anil Khan!!! I can, you know, just see Archer taking the first name of one Indian acquaintance and the last of another and pasting them together, thinking he’s made a good equivalent of making a Thomas Stafford out of John Stafford and Thomas Jones. Oh yes.

As for the St Petersburg story, which involves a medical miracle – a water-borne disease which is simultaneously highly contagious – he has his characters going through the Hermitage in one morning and going over by taxi for a tour of Petrodvorets in the afternoon. Advice to readers going to St Petersburg – don’t try that feat.

The rest of the stories are all set in the standard places, England and America, except one that’s placed in Greece. Going by the Indian and Russian stories, the Greek one’s likely to be the same mash-up.

Now I might have forgiven all these blunders if the writing had been good. It isn’t. It’s bland and totally tasteless, meanders aimlessly, and with the single exception of a delightful little tale of a greedy gold-digging wife and a hapless surgeon husband in divorce court, there is not one story that matches up to Archer’s previous standard. The idea of at least one’s a direct lift from O Henry – the story of a crook who tries to spend each winter in jail by deliberately committing a small crime and being caught for it.

Sorry, Jeff. Time to try growing mushrooms, or something. You’re past it.

New York City, 1998
My high school friends have begun to suspect I haven’t told them the full story of my life.
“Why did you leave Sierra Leone?”
“Because there is a war.”
“Did you witness some of the fighting?”
“Everyone in the country did.”
“You mean you saw people running around with guns and shooting each other?”
“Yes, all the time.”
“Cool.”
I smile a little.
“You should tell us about it sometime.”
“Yes, sometime.”



A few weeks ago, I wrote a poem called “Child Soldier” and posted it online on Multiply and Orkut. My Orkut friend Subodh Khanolkar read that poem and replied with news of a book, which he highly recommended – the memoirs of a former child soldier named Ishmael Beah.

The tragic story of the great continent of Africa is so well known that repeating it endlessly will just be telling a well-known tale again – it would not benefit anybody. But even among Africa’s blood-soaked recent history, the Sierra Leonean civil war stands out for its savagery.

It was a war where the rebels of the Revolutionary United Front of Foday Sankoh chopped off people’s limbs for fun, where wholesale murder was the order of the day, where the violence – though on a lesser scale than the Rwandan genocide – was even more gruesome and revolting. It was a war where boys who had the misfortune to be captured were immediately recruited and pressed into service – on one side or the other.

Ishmael Beah was an aspiring rapper, all of twelve years old, who, along with his brother and friends, took a walk to another town because they wanted to take part in a talent contest – just in time to escape a rebel attack on their own hometown. Fleeing before repeated and murderous rebel attacks, they were to escape many brushes with death, finding help from various unlikely characters in their attempt to trek through the jungle out of the danger zone, their rap skills saving their lives more than once. Captured by the rebels, they managed to avoid both recruitment and execution; but finally, Beah, separated from his elder brother Junior, wandered alone through the forest until he joined another group of young stragglers. Arriving only just too late to be caught up in a rebel attack that finally killed his parents and brother, Beah ended up being recruited as a child soldier – by the Sierra Leonean Army, which was supposedly protecting the people from the rebels. Hopped up constantly on drugs, his violent instincts honed to a knife’s edge, Beah spent the next couple of years in the jungle, killing anyone he was ordered to kill, and taking a great deal of pleasure in killing – when he bothered to think about it at all.

“Rescued” by the United Nations, Beah, along with many other child soldiers from both sides, underwent long “reconditioning” at a camp in Sierra Leone’s capital, Freetown, where he and his companions stole, fought, ran amok, and finally knuckled down to some kind of civilisation. Finally, he was returned to what remained of his family – an estranged brother of his father’s, who took him in as his own son. Beah, articulate, intelligent, and – despite his violent history - personable, beat out stiff competition from city boys (who, in one of the many moving scenes from the book, laughed at him because he didn’t know what an elevator was) to go to the Untied Nations in New York and speak at a conference on children around the world affected by war and disaster. He returned from there having made friends from around the world – just in time for Sierra Leone to fall apart in military coup, total anarchy, and brutality of a level that he had not encountered before. Terrified of being found and killed by his own former comrades-in-arms for “deserting” them, Beah somehow bribed his way to Guinea in the west. It is there we leave him at the end of the book, musing on the future and unanswerable questions.

The book is quite pitiless in its ruthless description of violence and mayhem – Beah neither asks for pity nor hands it out. His descriptions are clinical, cool, and sometimes leavened with dry humour, as when he describes his uncle’s refusing to believe he actually had got a visa to visit New York. He doesn’t flinch from describing how his “training’ included hacking at banana trees to teach him and his colleagues how to get their anger to a pitch so they could learn how to kill human beings, or how, when his squad ambushed and killed all of a RUF squad comprising other children, they sat on the corpses and ate their (the dead rebels') food while the blood “leaked from the bullet holes onto the ground”. Beah speaks, too, about how his force would – just like the rebels they were fighting – attack and kill civilians and destroy their villages so that they could steal their food and supplies, so that this became a major part of their war, and how they were always provided with drugs to keep them addicted and to keep them going.

One wonders at the mental resilience that allowed this violence-crazed, drugged multiple killer to return to the real world and the humanity that allowed him to write this book. There are basically two Beahs – the first, that automaton of the middle of the book; and the second, the sensitive child and the sensitive teenager of the beginning and the end of the book. How the one changed to the other and back again is the real story of the book.

And – yes – the credit for that isn’t Beah’s alone. Mostly, it goes to the wonderful volunteers at the rehab centre, who never, ever, gave up on their wards and led them – kicking and screaming – back towards the light. Without even any religious sermons!

A wonderful, deeply moving book. I only wish it had been a little longer.

Sometimes it's better not to know too much...
I've always been fascinated by the Third Reich, most so of the story of the last month of its existence, with the Red Army threatening Berlin, the Western Allies smashing their way through the Ruhr, Germany almost cut in two, and Hitler hiding in his Fuehrerbunker under the Reich Chancellery. So when this film was made and opened to good reviews I waited for it eagerly, and I finally found a copy of the DVD in Delhi and bought it. Watched it last night.
Man, what a turkey.
First things first. If you want to make a historical movie, for dog's sake, keep it true to history. Or it will appeal only to those who prefer drama and invented "facts" to reality - and going by all appearances there are far too many of that.
What should I say about this film? It purports to depict the last twelve days in the Bunker, from Hitler's birthday on April 20th to the final exodus from the Bunker on May 2, two days after his suicide. I say "purports", because it does nothing of the sort.
Anyone who's read Shirer or Trevor Roper on Hitler will never be able to reconcile knowledge with depictions here. I won't really bother to give too much away - go see it for yourself if you must. But I'll say this much:
They play merry hell with timelines and logic, with the surrender of the city PRECEDING the final exodus and heavy fighting (how on earth?)
The film invents things, like Goebbels and his wife shooting each other (they were shot - at their request - by SS guards).
Total nonentities like Traudl Junge, Hitler's secretary, and Eva Braun are turned into super-important characters while the single most important man in the Bunker in the last days (after Hitler himself), Martin Bormann, is about as important as an item of furniture. Braun, in reality a brainless Hitler devotee, becomes a discerning, sensitive woman who tries to save her brother in law from Hitler's wrath (in reality she bluntly refused to help). Magda Goebbels' alleged personal poisoning of her children (since they all died, there's no way of knowing just who poisoned the kids) occupies at least ten minutes of screen time - all to no value. Etc.
The film dramatises incidents out of all proportion, like the capture of the brother in law (SS Gruppenfuehrer Hermann Fegelein) who was discovered in his own house in civilian clothes and on Hitler's orders quietly shot in the Chancellery garden. In the film he's discovered naked in bed with a woman, boozed out of his mind. Even Hitler's funeral is fictionalised beyond recognition.
And so on. If I were to write an account of every fictionalisation, dramatisation, and plain fabrication in the film, I would end up writing pages, and this film isn't worth it. Not at all.
I'm awarding it two stars, and the film is worth zero. I'm awarding the two stars ONLY because of Bruno Ganz' performance as Hitler. He's worth more than the rest of the film's cast put together, dragging leg, trembling hand, and all.
Many years ago, I watched a TV film called THE LAST DAYS OF HITLER. That was so much better I'd have loved to see it again.
As for this one, they should have burned it along with Hitler's body.

Uniformed UN soldiers load foreign (read white) civilians into trucks and fire into the air to fend off desperate locals who know they face certain death if they cannot get away. As the trucks drive off, gangs of machete-wielding killers, who have been waiting, step out of the jungle and walk towards the terrified people. One of the militiamen casually bends and scrapes his machete on the surface of the pavement – scrape, scrape, the noising drilling through all other sounds – to sharpen it.

In its casual, brutal murderousness, that scene is the essence of “Sometimes in April”, which I finally managed to get a look at yesterday. Set in Rwanda in 1994, at the time of the genocidal massacre of Tutsi and Hutu civilians by the Rwandan army and their allies the Interahamwe militia, and ten years later during the war crimes trials that followed, it is a searing look at the violence that permeates and runs through what we pretend to be our civilisation.

“Sometimes in April” is the story of two brothers, and the different paths of their lives, and how war touches the people around them.

Enough is known of the Rwandan civil war of the early nineties that I wouldn’t want to repeat what many people already know. But, before I begin a review proper, here’s a bit of potted history that might help.

Rwanda is a tiny nation in the depths of Central Africa which – like its neighbour Burundi – is inhabited by two tribes, the Hutu and the Tutsi. These tribal distinctions are more than a little arbitrary, being accentuated by colonial administrators who chose the “taller, fairer, more advanced” Tutsis as their collaborators to rule the Hutu majorities. Part of the process of identifying who was a Hutu and who a Tutsi – after generations of intermingling of these tribes, the genes were thoroughly mixed – was the measuring of noses and other physical features to find out who had the more “European” physiognomy, and hence was a Tutsi. As always, this policy led to the creation of a Westernised collaborationist class ruling over a suppressed mass of their own people and developing a vested interest in perpetuating their own rule. Equally inevitable was the mass resentment that finally – post independence – flared out into rebellion and retribution.

By the early nineties, Rwanda was in a ferment, with the army (now almost entirely Hutu) fighting a vicious insurgency by Tutsi refugees largely based in neighbouring Uganda. Meanwhile, as the world looked on unconcerned, fascist Hutu militia armed and prepared to wipe the Tutsi people from the face of the earth.

Over the span of a hundred days, starting in April 1994, between three quarters of a million and a million people – mostly Tutsi, but also any Hutu who opposed fascist and racist policies – died in a genocide unleashed by the militias with the active backing of the Rwandan Army. One has to remember that we are talking of a tiny country, virtually a dot on the map of Africa, to understand what such numbers mean. It has been said that there was not a single Tutsi family in Rwanda at the time who had not lost members in the genocide.

The world did nothing. While parsing phrases to see if what was going on was “genocide”, or “acts of genocide”, or something else altogether, the western nations did nothing except withdraw all their own (white) civilians trapped in the country, leaving behind everyone else. UN peacekeepers from Belgium were withdrawn after some of them – forbidden to defend themselves – were kicked, beaten, hamstrung, castrated and ultimately suffocated by having their own genitals stuffed in their mouths (no, I am NOT inventing this tale). The then (female) Prime Minister of Rwanda, whose bodyguards they were, was shot dead during this episode.

The violence ended when the Rwandan Patriotic Front finally overwhelmed the Rwandan Army and forced its remnants and the militias to flee the country and take refuge in neighbouring Congo (then Zaire). While I’ve pointed out elsewhere that the RPF swiftly got involved in the expanding Zairian civil war (which continues to this day), it did finally capture some of the perpetrators of the massacres and bring them to trial. Many others, however, were – and are – sheltered and protected by France, Belgium, Kenya and other nations. I doubt if many of them will ever be punished for their crimes.

In 1994, Augustin Muganza is a Hutu army officer married to a Tutsi whose brother is a rabid hate spewing commentator on RTLM (Hutu Power Radio). As he watches his trainees taken over by the violent fascists of the Interahamwe, who openly advocate killing the “cockroaches”, and as he sees the army openly acquiring and stockpiling weapons for an attack on all Tutsis, he is stricken to his conscience. His closest friend, Xavier, a Tutsi officer, shares his misgivings. In the meantime, the insurgents of the Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front shoot down the aeroplane of the country’s president, Juvenal Habayarimana – who was ironically on the way back from peace talks. (In another of the ironies of history, Habayarimana’s plane’s wreckage fell in his own backyard.)

This was the excuse the militias were looking for to begin an all out assault on the Tutsis. Augustin, who is under suspension from his army rank, shelters his Tutsi fellow officer and his family in his own house, later getting his brother – the RTLM man – to try and drive them, along with his own wife and sons, to safety. The brother vanishes, and so does the family (wife Jeanne and two sons), so far as Augustin knows. As we see, the brother does try to get them to safety, running the gauntlet of several roadblocks before being finally stopped and his ploy rumbled. (What finally happened to the family is revealed only at the very end of the film, in a reunion of the two brothers).

Ten years later, in 2004, Augustin is a teacher who gets a letter from the brother, Honore, who is a prisoner facing trial for war crimes (this is where the film begins, after a preface showing the colonial administrators at their racist worst). With his girlfriend Martine – a teacher in the school where his other child, a daughter, studied – Augustin sets out to find out what happened to his family and bring some kind of peace to himself.

Shifting back and forth between 1994 and 2004, “Sometimes in April” takes the viewer to the heart of darkness and the implicit irony of those who sat and watched the genocide unfold without lifting a finger to stop it sitting in judgement a decade later, and the need of the survivors to balance their new lives with the requirements of justice, retribution, and closure.

“Sometimes in April” needs to be seen in comparison and contrast to that other movie based on the events of that genocide, “Hotel Rwanda” starring Don Cheadle. While “Sometimes” is infinitely the better movie, it is not so much a separate experience from “Hotel Rwanda” as a complement to it. One should watch “Hotel Rwanda” first for background, and then “Sometimes” is the richer experience.

In what ways does “Sometimes” score over “Hotel Rwanda”? In virtually every one that matters. “Hotel Rwanda,” which I reviewed earlier, is – relatively speaking – a mainstream Hollywood movie, with clear cut “good“ and “bad” and no shades of grey. It has a clear cut hero, evil villains, and the movie ends as soon as the hero’s task is over, with a rather fancifully happy conclusion. Even the violence is seen at one remove – on the TV screen. Except for one surreal scene of a truck driving over corpses in the dawn, the rest is almost entirely just loud threats and waving of machetes.

“Sometimes” does not shy away from its violence. It shows everything – rotting corpses in swamps, the role of churches in assisting the genocide and where women prisoners were used as sex slaves, the casual way in which people were butchered and thrown into rivers, everything. Loads of corpses are hauled along in a convoy of trucks, and nobody really turns a hair. The film shows one of the most gruesome incidents of the genocide – the killing of 120 girl students of the Sainte Marie school because the Hutus among them refused to separate themselves from the Tutsis so the latter could be killed, and – at the same time – doesn’t ignore the casual brutality of the RPF when it summarily executed anyone it felt like after its own victory. “Hotel Rwanda” would never do something like that.

And “Sometimes” does not pretend things are all “happy ever after” once the shooting stops. It explores the tribunals – the big one run by the UN in Arusha, and the little ones in the countryside, where pink clad murderers are paraded before villagers to be identified for the crimes they committed.

It’s a harrowing experience, but worth the watch, and more. Not for weak stomachs.

I've no hesitation in awarding it five stars.

Directed by Raoul Peck
Produced by Daniel Delume
Written by Raoul Peck
Starring Idris Elba
Oris Erhuero
Carole Karemera
Debra Winger
Music by Bruno Coulais
Cinematography Eric Guichard
Editing by Jacques Comets
Distributed by HBO Films

It’s difficult to know how to go about reviewing one’s favourite movie of all, of all genres, all eras, everything. Where does one begin?

I first saw this movie as a teenager, back in the late eighties, on television. The impact it made on me was immediate and unforgettable. I bought the DVD in Russia, and watched it several times since then, the most recent occasion being this evening.

The problem with reviewing a film one loves more than any other is that one lays oneself open to incomprehension. Another person watching the same movie will be left cold. Someone else might have actively hated it. It depends on one’s tastes, one’s mindset, one’s outlook on life.

So, what is it about?

On the face of it the story is simple to the point of being simplistic. Soldier destroys two enemy tanks in combat, at his own request gets home leave as reward instead of a citation, and goes on a long train journey meeting a wide variety of people as he goes.

Simplistic.

Only, it is not so.

Alexei “Alyosha” Skvortsev, the protagonist, is a Soviet signalman who at the outset of the film destroys two German Tiger tanks with an anti-tank rifle. His general wants to give him a medal. Instead, he begs for leave, just for a day, in order to go home and repair his mother’s roof. He has left for the front before even being able to say goodbye to her. The general gives him leave – not one day, but six: two days to get home, two days to fix the roof, and two days back.

(Let me mention here that the director doesn’t play around with one’s hopes here – right at the outset he announces that Alyosha never returned from the war, that he lies buried in a foreign land, so that the movie is a continuing tragedy, and everyone knows it as such.)

Skvortsev, on his way to the train, meets other soldiers going up to the front, and one of them entrusts him with a message to his father and wife, who live in a city Alyosha must pass through, and gives him two large cakes of soap to give them. He had never seen this soldier, Pavlov, before. He never is going to see him again, but he takes the soap and the commission just the same. On the train, he meets a crippled soldier on his way back from the front who does not want to go back, minus a leg, to his young and pretty wife. Alyosha must, delaying his own journey, persuade and escort him till he reaches his destination. His wife meets him, tearfully overjoyed, at the station.

Alyosha – in the meantime – has bribed a guard on a goods train to let him travel in a wagon full of bales of hay. Into the wagon comes a stowaway, a young girl named Aleksandra (“Shura”) who tries to jump off the train when she sees Alyosha. He pulls her back in, and they form a sort of temporary truce until she can get off when the train stops. Only, she can’t. The train is under heavy guard whenever it stops and she can’t get off.

Stop by stop, little by little, Alyosha and Shura grow closer. The theme could have easily become hackneyed, but the director makes sure it does not. She tells him she is on her way to the bedside of her fiancé, an Air Force pilot who had been shot down and wounded. They are discovered by the commandant of the train, the dreaded Lieutenant, who turns out to be an extremely nice man who merely asks them to be careful not to set the hay on fire and puts the guard under arrest for accepting bribes.

Once, Alyosha gets left behind once the train sets off while he is fetching water for Shura. He has to hitch a lift on a farm truck and reaches the next station only to find the train has already left – yet Shura is there, having abandoned her journey to wait for him. This is the town where they are supposed to meet the wife and father of the soldier who had given Alyosha the soap. What follows is the most touching part of the whole film, where the wife of the soldier turns out to be living with another man while the father is in a shelter for bombed out civilians. Alyosha tells the father a lot of lies to make him happy, but he cannot wait long, and he and Shura are off again. They finally part on a railway platform where she finally admits that she is just on her way to meet her aunt. The wounded fiancé story was just a fabrication.

On again, with Alyosha already delayed far too much, and dreaming of Shura, and the train is bombed almost within sight of his destination. Somehow, Alyosha does make it home with a ride hitched on another truck – just in time to see his mother, hug her, and rush off to the war again.

As we have already been told, he will never return.

This is a film of heroism, but is not a film of heroes, just as it is a film set in wartime, but not a war film. It is a film of love, and friendship, and much else that cannot be easily categorised. It is ultimately a film about coming of age, but a coming of age that was cut short.

It could have been so easy, so very easy, to ruin this movie, especially by creating a happy ending. it is to the director's eternal credit that he didn't.

As I said, on the surface it is simplistic, but I liked it. I don’t know if you will.

Go see it yourself.

(Oh yes…the title in Russian, “Ballada o Soldate”, translates into “Ballad About a Soldier”; but the official title in English is “Ballad of a Soldier”, which doesn’t quite mean the same thing, but I have had to stick to it.

And a blooper or two: Alyosha never finds time to shave in the movie, but he remains immaculately shaved all throughout, and clean even after helping to push the farm truck out of mud. And the movie is set in 1941, just after the Battle of Voronezh – loudspeakers make announcements about that battle. But the tanks shown, German Tigers and Russian T34/85s, did not come into service till 1943. Sorry.)

The island of Anapopei lies somewhere in the Pacific Ocean.

Occupied by the Japanese, it is invaded by American soldiers on a pointless campaign of no discernible strategic value, who land on its almost undefended beach and then get mired in jungle warfare.

Run by officers who are more interested in their personal politics and jostling for advantage, the soldiers are left to win the battle on their own. They will win the battle because the Japanese garrison is isolated and cut off from all reinforcements, supplies, and ammunition, and the officers know this.

It makes little difference to the troops on the ground, though. They suffer on this victorious campaign just as much as they would if they were defeated, and they die just as dead.

The soldiers Mailer talks about are not nice men. He mostly follows the fortunes of a single fourteen man reconnaissance platoon, as well as a motley group of officers from Headquarters. Each soldier gets given a flashback (called "The Time Machine") to give a window to his past. Among them are Sergeant Croft, the psychopathic platoon leader; Gallagher, anti-Semitic Irishman; Goldstein, the Jew who is a misfit; and others. Then there is the divisional commander, General Cummings, his officers Dalleeson and Hearn, the latter one of the few relatively likable characters in the novel.

Mailer was himself a rifleman in a platoon in the war and he wrote realistically; it's difficult to believe that he was still only in his mid-twenties when this book was written. It's even more difficult to remember that when he published it, in 1948, the Second World War was still seen as a great big heroic victory and its soldiers as untarnished heroes.

So, such characters as Croft, who gets Hearn killed by deliberately feeding him false information, and casually murders prisoners of war, and Dalleeson, who schemes for war with Russia while still fighting this one, would have been catastrophically different from the usual depiction of men at war.

Mailer did have to make some compromises; the most famous one is the invented word "fug" instead of "fuck", since the publishers of the time wouldn't use it. There is a story that Mailer was later introduced to a woman (who it was varies in the retelling, but the most plausible version says it was Dorothy Parker) who said, "Oh yes, you're the young man who doesn't know how to spell fuck."

Ultimately, it's good book. It's a good book in spite of not having the courage to, unlike Joseph Heller's "Catch 22", take on the establishment no-holds-barred and show up the war for the sham that it is. This is why Mailer's novel gets four stars from me, not five.

A very good novel, "fug" and all, about a little more than war.

Let's face it - Shakespeare was possibly the greatest playwright ever to have lived.
If you bypass his plainly unforgivable "The Merchant of Venice", he is just about the only person whose play, made for an audience of the late sixteenth century, could be put in a modern setting and still remain watchable.

I watched this movie several times - it's cheesy, but it's still about the best way of introducing Shakespeare to those who never would have touched him with a barge pole. OK, I admit it, I liked it - right from the first time I saw it. (I can already picture Kande sharpening her claws.)

The story? You know the story. They didn't change the story. When you come to Shakespeare, you can't fiddle with him - he's not H Rider Haggard.

So, what's so special about it?

Well - it's got everything from the original - dialogues, everything - set In Fair Verona, with the Capulets and Montagues as rival crime lords who have the city carved up between them. It's got Leonardo di Caprio, whom I don't like (I only liked him once on screen, as a retarded kid in "What's Eating Gilbert Grape") as Romeo, it's got Clair Danes (no, I'm not interested) as Juliet, it's got a lot of makeweights who really don't matter as long as they are competent, and they are...and it's got John Leguizamo as Tybalt. The film is worth the price of admission for his act alone.

"What, art thou drawn among these hartless hinds?"

He would have made my favourite villains list if it had been a modern story. Consider him there, anyway.

If there is one film that encapsulates the idiocy of the military experience, it is this. Beginning in the late eighties in the brutality of a Marine recruit's training, most of it takes place during the build-up to Operation Desert Storm and during the actual course of that "four day, four hour, one minute" operation.
It starts off like, and could have become, a standard Hollywood genre war film of the type parodied in MAD Magazine - the tough sergeant, the gentle boy, the bullying recruit, the clean cut protagonist who is muddled by what is going on, they are all there; the only figure missing is the chaplain mouthing platitudes, but there are enough crucifixes on view to make up for that. However, the director (Sam Mendes) takes pains to make sure it does not go that way.
The film is based on Anthony Swofford's 2003 book about his own experience as a Marine in Kuwait. I have no idea (not having read the book) if the book's account has been played around with, but it's still a compelling watch.
Brief story: the soldiers (pumped up for action by cheering as American helicopters on "Apocalypse Now" bomb and rocket a Vietnamese village) arrive in Saudi Arabia unsure of where they are, unsure of the difference between Saudis, Kuwaitis, and Iraqis, and are met by a Lt Colonel who tries to pump them full of zeal for combat. Then they wait, and rehydrate, and masturbate, and wait some more, spending their time on scorpion fights and discussing the infidelities of their girlfriends. Bizarre things happen - they are made to play American "football" in chemical warfare suits in the blazing desert sun for the benefit of a TV crew, they burn drums full of faeces as a punishment (a similar scene to one in "Platoon", but much more explicit). Finally they do go to war...where their first combat experience is being strafed by USAF A10 Warthog ground attack aircraft. The rest of their war consists, as one man says, of "walking over a lot of sand". There are gruesome depictions of charred Iraqi corpses in the Highway of Death, which make Swofford throw up, and blazing oil wells whose smoke make the day turn to night. Then - more walking over sand, anmd at last a chance for Swofford ( a trained sniper) to shoot an Iraqi officer, the culmination of his training and waiting for action, his chance at revenge against the system. But he is denied permission to take the shot because it would give warning of an imminent air strike. And then there is more walking. And, before he can fire a shot, the war is over.
There are so many ways this film scores over vainglorious Hollywood garbage like "The Three Kings" and "Courage Under Fire". There is really no heroism at all, and all there is, at the end, is a return to civilian life where no one fits in. Of course there is the delicious irony of contrasting this movie to the prolonged defeat the Americans are going through right now in Iraq.
And as for why they all went through this, it was Swofford's remark to a TV interviewer which pretty much summed it all up:
"I am 20 years old and was stupid enough to sign a contract."
No wonder the Bush worshippers did not like this film.
You reap what you sow, baby.

Mushroom clouds...
I've just spent the evening watching, online, the unedited version of a remarkable film - the British TV movie, "Threads", made way back in 1984, a year after the similarly themed American film "The Day After". That film I’d watched back in school, in that same year, and come away unimpressed. It was so obviously sanitised.
Now, I’ll admit Threads is sanitised, too, but it’s at least a far more honest and upfront account of what might happen in the aftermath of a nuclear exchange. It’s set in the British industrial town of Sheffield, near a major NATO base, and in the background of a major standoff between the US and the USSR (remember this was made in 1984) over…Iran. The movie opens with the lives of average working class people and their average lives, with the usual problems of a young man, Jimmy Kemp, whose girlfriend Ruth is pregnant and whom he wants to marry, while his nosy younger siblings and parents complete the family picture.
The film switches from a narrative style to a documentary with voice overs and onscreen titles, which is why I can’t really classify it as anything than “other”. As the Kemp family plays out its dreary life amid the airless drudgery of an industrial town, there are reports of nuclear exchanges over Iran, shrill threats from both Moscow and Washington, and Britain loyally following in its lord and master’s footsteps to certain ruin. Peace activists who argue for sanity are heckled and arrested, people are warned not to attempt to flee to safety because their homes would be appropriated to shelter homeless people and local authorities in places other than their own areas would refuse to feed or shelter them.
Finally a full scale nuclear exchange takes place, with some 3000 megatons of nuclear warheads used, Sheffield is hit by a single warhead. Most of the city is blasted flat, with fires raging afterwards and the authorities in charge of emergency services themselves being destroyed in their protected bunker. As the survivors emerge into their new, ruined world, it is to find that they have neither food, shelter, nor assistance. What is left of the government does not even manage to distribute what food there is, preferring to open fire on desperate, starving people. The pregnant Ruth manages to flee, along with refugees who drop dead from radiation sickness all around her, finally being reduced to eating raw meat from a sheep that may have died from radiation itself, convincing herself it probably was protected by its coat from the worst radiation.
As smoke clouds fill the sky, agriculture collapses, fuel stocks disappear, millions of corpses lie undisposed of because it is impossible to find the fuel to cremate them or even run bulldozers to bury them, while digging so many graves by hand is impossible. As the population of Britain plunges towards medieval levels, the smoke clouds clear to reveal a sun whose rays are much richer in ultraviolet radiation now that the ozone layer has been so badly damaged by the nuclear blasts. So the survivors are now exposed to increased cataracts and skin cancers, not to speak of birth mutations, along with the other hazards of living in a post holocaust environment. Ruth dies of exhaustion and overwork years after the nuclear war, leaving behind a daughter who grows up in a world where civilisation has broken down utterly, and who, raped, gives birth to her own child at the very end of the film.
The film itself is well crafted. It was made by the BBC, which was forced to keep it off the air for years after showing it just once, because it was deemed “alarmist” (I guess people might feel the price of being America’s stooge wasn’t worth the peril). Once the nuclear blasts take place, the scene shrinks to Sheffield itself. There is no more discussion of what happened to the US or USSR or to Iran, the bone of contention. Intelligent, that.
The scenes depicting the nuclear blasts themselves are, I must say, not as well made as those depicted in the otherwise infinitely inferior The Day After (except for the scene where urine runs down a woman’s leg as she sees the nuclear flash, which I admit I enjoyed). But the aftermath, with its scenes of shattered wreckage, rats feeding on charred corpses, and the like, are far better than in the American film. Also, the heavy smoke clouds, the hopelessness of the survivors, the utter lack of Hollywood heroism as they die quietly one by one, all this is affecting in a way no “mainstream” movie would dare to emulate. (I just wish they’d depicted cannibalism, though. I’d think it would be inevitable under such conditions.)
It has its drawbacks. It’s typically 1980s in milieu, with nary a non-white face anywhere on screen, yobs with long hair, roll-necked pullovers and glottal incomprehensible accents, but there’s nowt abaht that we kin do anythin’ abaht now, innit?
And there are a few glitches. Nuclear blasts would have destroyed the city so thoroughly that the scenes of refugees fleeing for the countryside are unlikely to ever actually take place. In 2002 I had written an article for Eastern Panorama magazine on nuclear warfare where I’d pointed out that all the scenarios for a post exchange world assume that people live to suffer the consequences. But in cities most people would not; and those who were in this film watching the nuclear flash would be cremated by the flash itself, or burnt in the fires that will follow. Also, the depiction of the government’s (represented by impossibly clean shaven soldiers and policemen) incompetence after the attack presupposes that there is a government left to be incompetent. Something that would, I submit, be unlikely, at the very least.
There are a few glitches that are at least forgivable. Ruth’s daughter, born after the holocaust, has clearly visible silver amalgam fillings in her upper molars, for example.
Now that nuclear weapons are again being thought of as usable, in fact we may see them being used within a matter of weeks, over that same nation of Iran, it’s time that we revisit films like these. Propaganda claiming that nuclear weapons are somehow sanitised and harmless except to the actual, immediate, targets is unlikely to stand up to the visual shock these images provide. I know, of course, that this movie will never be shown in a world where Picasso’s Guernica was covered up so Colin Powell could spout his lies to the UN in peace. Or if it was shown, it might be used as counter-propaganda (“Do it to them before they do it to us”).
The thing is, once you let the genie out of the bottle it doesn’t necessarily go quietly back. And like Frankenstein’s monster, it can turn on its creator.
The movie can be seen here
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2023790698427111488&q=Threads
Not recommended if you're squeamish, though.

Cast:Karen Meagher ... Ruth Beckett
Reece Dinsdale ... Jimmy Kemp
David Brierly ... Mr. Kemp
Rita May ... Mrs. Kemp
Nicholas Lane ... Michael Kemp
Jane Hazlegrove ... Alison Kemp
Henry Moxon ... Mr. Beckett
June Broughton ... Mrs. Beckett
Sylvia Stoker ... Granny Beckett
Harry Beety ... Clive Sutton
Ruth Holden ... Marjorie Sutton
Ashley Barker ... Bob
Michael O'Hagan ... Chief Supt. Hirst
Phil Rose ... Medical Officer
Steve Halliwell ... Information Officer

"When a country descended into madness and the world turned its back, one man had to make a choice"

That is the tagline of what is billed to be the true-life story of Paul Rusesabagina, a Hutu hotel manager in Kigali married to a Tutsi named Tatiana (played by Sophie Okonedo), trained in Belgium and running the four-star Hotel Des Milles Collines in the capital city of Kigali, Rwanda in 1994, during the period when Hutu Interahamwe militia, aided and abetted by the Hutu Rwandan Army, murdered up to a million people, Tutsi and Hutu, men, women, and children.
The film begins with Clinton expressing his "concern" over Bosnia, and segues to a brief voice over from Hutu radio talking about the untrustworthiness of the Tutsis who have signed a ceasefire in their rebellion against the Hutu President Juvenal Habariyama,. All this is in pitch black, before the cameras come on.
When the story begins, Paul, played by Don Cheadle, is on his way with a Tutsi driver to pick up cigars from Cuba with which to bribe a Hutu Interahamwe militia chief to give him food and liquor for his guests. The leader asks him to join the militia and gives him a tribal multicoloured cloth. On the way back, this cloth saves his driver from being murdered by a Hutu gang, when Paul brandishes it to proclaim "Hutu power".
Later, they watch while a Hutu army unit arrest a Tutsi neighbour at the dead of night and listen to the screams of the man's wife, but are powerless to do anything to intervene. Paul's Tutsi brother in law talks about how his Hutu friend has warned him to flee while there is still time; but it is too late already, the President is killed in a plane crash, and the Hutu radio proclaims that the time to "cut the tall trees" has arrived. The country explodes in violence, Paul bribes an army officer to let him take his Tutsi wife and their children, as well as all their surviving neighbours, to the hotel, which is under nominal UN control. The UN is represented by a force of just 300 men in the entire country, under the control of a Canadian Colonel Oliver (Nick Nolte) who is forbidden to open fire even in self defence. As he says, he's there as a peacekeeper, not as a peace maker, and there is no peace to keep.
As the country explodes into genocide, there is an interesting interview with a US State Department spokesman who is asked whether or not it is a fact that he has been ordered to preface the word "genocide" every time with "acts of". He hems and haws and ultimately says that he will just say that he implements his orders as best he can.
As more and more moderate Hutus and desperate Tutsis gather at the hotel, and "cockroach" hunting Hutu militias wander outside, a European military force arrives...only to remove only the foreign (read white) guests, and leave the rest of the people to die. France and Britain demand the removal of the minuscule UN force as well.
Joaquin Phoenix, who plays a journalist and photographer, asks Paul if he did right by airing footage of a massacre.
“If people see this they’ll say ‘Oh, my God. That’s horrible,’” he explains to Paul, “Then they go on eating their dinners.”
Colonel Oliver points out just how little Paul and his people mean to the rest of the world. “You’re not even a nigger,” he tells him, “You’re an African.”
An African explains to Phoenix' character early on the difference between Tutsi and Hutu. The Belgians decided to create a collaborator class during their colonial days (like the Kurds and some Shias in Iraq today). So they picked out tall, fairer Rwandans with aquiline noses (they actually measured the noses) and put them in positions of authority, calling them "Tutsis".
This leads to one of the moments of black humour in the movie.

Journalist (Joaquin Phoenix): (To pretty girl) "Are you Hutu or Tutsi?"
Girl: "I'm Tutsi."
Journalist (referring to other pretty girl): "And your friend is a Tutsi as well?"
Second girl: "No, Hutu".
Journalist (to African interlocutor): "But they could be twins."
(African shrugs)
Journalist (to first pretty girl): "I'd like to carry on this conversation later in my room."

That girl is later abandoned by Phoenix when the evacuation of foreigners happens.
When Paul and his assistant attempt to make a run to buy more supplies, he finds himself running over piles of bodies in the road in the fog. This is supposed to be the high point of the movie, but I felt it was a poor copy of the similar but more gruesome scene in "The Killing Fields" about the Cambodian genocide.
An attempt to evacuate some of the people trapped there is betrayed and the convoy, which includes Paul's wife and children (Paul elected to stay behind at the last moment), somehow makes it back to the hotel.
How Paul and his charges survive later is a mix of Paul's skills at bribery, flattery, and, later, the threat that only he can save a Hutu general (Bizimunga) from a war crimes trial. The hotel's Belgian owners would have liked to close it down. Only Paul, interacting with the director (Jean Reno), and lying through his teeth when necessary, keeps it going and even enlists some help through the French who armed and aided the Hutu army.
There is a scene where a Red Cross worker describes the murder of a Tutsi girl. "She cried saying 'Don't kill me, I promise I won't be a Tutsi any more'," she says with tears in her eyes.
I won't give the ending away, except that it's happy...sort of.
There are a few points of criticism of the film. It is not explicit in its depiction of blood and mayhem, preferring machete swinging lunatic militia to make noises rather than actually use their machetes. Also it glosses over the action of the Catholic Church, which often aided and abetted the massacres (a Catholic priest was recently jailed for helping murder 4000 Tutsis trapped in a church) - all Catholics in the film are either window dressing or moderately heroic priests and nuns. But then it's an American film and the director needed to maintain his ratings and his audience.
The massacres ended with the victory of the Tutsi rebel army and the Interahamwe and Hutu Army fleeing - leaving behind them a million Tutsis and Hutu moderates dead. For a tiny country like Rwanda, that's even worse than it sounds.
So is it a film about the good Tutsis versus the evil Hutus? Sorry, it isn't.
Especially if you look at the recent history of Rwanda and Burundi. In Burundi the Tutsi always lorded it over the Hutus and there is a Tutsi military dictatorship in power now. In Rwanda, while the massacres targeted Tutsis, Hutus who were either pro-Tutsi or neutral suffered too at the hands of the Interahamwe. Even the film shows how the army was really not in full control over the Interahamwe militia and called them "crazy men".
After the takeover, the Tutsis set up a de facto Tutsi dictatorship with a figurehead Hutu president. It was no representative government of both sides.
After the retreat from Rwanda, the Interahamwe set up bases inside what was then Zaire and conducted raids into Rwanda in order to massacre Tutsis and Hutus who wanted to just get on with life. Then, Rwanda's Tutsi army joined with the Zairean rebels of Laurent Kabila and invaded Zaire, expelled the American-supported criminal dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko, and imposed Kabila (who was later murdered by his own palace guard and succeeded by his son) as President. Things soured almost at once when Kabila showed himself as not being a Rwandan puppet. The alliances suddenly shifted, Rwanda again invaded Zaire (now Congo) to dethrone Kabila. The Interahamwe then switched to Kabila's side. Angola sent troops to support Kabila, while Uganda sent troops to the Rwandan side. The horrible Congolese civil war, where some 90% of the atrocities can be laid at the door of the Rwandans and Ugandans, continues to this day.
So, it's NOT a clear cut fight of good versus evil. I think it's clear enough from the film, where Paul is a Hutu and it's mentioned that there were Hutus among the more than 1200 people he sheltered at the hotel.
All in all: excellent, but could have been improved if the director had been a little braver.
I just wonder if it might have been different if Rwanda had had oil.

Rio de Janeiro, Brasil. What do you think of when you hear that name? Copacabana Beach? The Carnaval with its lovely mostly-nude dancers? The scenes we saw on Hollywood films? Or something else...
This film is about the something else.
The denizens of one of the favelas of Rio, notorious for drugs and gang violence, were partly resettled in the sixties in a new housing project in Rio, called City of God. By the early eighties it was one of the most dangerous places on earth, riven by violence and crime - some of that crime being committed by the police who were supposed to prevent it.
The film is seen through the eyes of the narrator, Rocket (Alexandre Rodrigues), a poor and none too brave young man who has the (mis)fortune to be blessed with a keen photographic sense. Both directly, as seen through his own eyes, and indirectly, narrating offscreen, he brings to life the savage violence of a very savage City.
There are many characters, and the events of the film span several years, but because of the unrelenting pace and the shifting of the perspective to the "stories" of the various characters, there is none of the slowness and (dare one say it) the monotony of the typical film of this sort.
It opens with what would seem a comic scene, a group of armed gangsters chasing a chicken through the streets...until they come face to face with a rival gang, Rocket caught in the middle. From there it abruptly cuts to the origins of the City, with people being brought in to their ramshackle little township with its red earth roads. Crime begins almost immediately, and the protagonists make their first appearance as juveniles, a nascent gang called the Tender Trio (one of whom is Rocket's elder brother) robbing a brothel, the people who were robbed all ending up mysteriously dead.
The movie is divided into three chapters, each bleaker and more appalling than the one before; they parallel the intertwining destinies of Rocket and one of his childhood playmates, Li'l Dice (Douglas Silva). In the first part, the Tender Trio rob the brothel and their gang disintegrates; only one of the three survives to escape. It becomes known only later that it is Li'l Dice who (not allowed to join in the robbery and kept as lookout) shot the robbed hookers and their clients.
After growing up and changing his nickname to Li'l Zé (Leandro Firmino da Hora takes over the role), he ascends into a trigger-happy drug dealer and local kingpin, who enjoys killing and takes over rivals by eliminating them. Li'l Ze is incidentally MY candidate for top acting honours here. The only thing keeping his crazier impulses in check is his lieutenant Benny (Phellipe Haagensen), a smart, good-hearted gangster with a hippie sensibility who eventually decides to abandon the criminal life. He is shot dead accidentally in the course of his own farewell party.
The final third, set in the early 1980's, finds Li'l Zé's empire threatened by an even younger crew of pre-teenage gangsters called the Runts (some of them only 9 and 10), who disregard his authority. It all builds to a showdown between Li'l Zé and a rival band led by Knockout Ned (Seu Jorge), a peaceful bus conductor who turns to gang war for revenge after Li'l Zé rapes his girlfriend and shoots his brother.
If this was a Hollywood flick, it would end with the heroic Knockout Ned destroying the evil Ze. Instead, Knockout Ned's effort merely makes the bad far worse, with open gang war and children joining the two sides just for the hell of it, wielding guns they hardly know how to use. And it is at this time that one is forced to confront the question of who is worse, Ze or his enemies. I never could decide, myself.
Rocket, meanwhile, makes a godawful and comic mess of his own foray into crime (he lets one potential victim get away because the man was "too cool", for example) and when his photos of Ze's gang get published (accidentally, he fears he might get murdered for them) he ends up as a sort of court photographer for the publicity-famished Ze. The last, blood-soaked scenes of the film are mostly seen with Rocket as eyewitness and reporter.
"City of God" was shot in the streets of Rio with hand held cameras and a mostly nonprofessional cast. This adds immensely to its value as a film, giving a grainy touch of reality to its scenes.
It's riven with violence, such as the scene where a little boy is given the choice of being shot in the head or foot by Ze. As the foot-shot kid hobbles away, Ze orders him not to limp. And so on.
Extremely highly recommended, but not if you're squeamish.

I'm playing safe by categorising this book as a memoir, because I have no proof that it is fiction - even though I'm convinced it is.
Briefly, it purports to be the memoirs of a French boy with a German mother, Guy Monminoux, who joined the Wehrmacht (the conquerors of his native country, let's not forget) in July 1942 under his mother's maiden name, Sajer (incidentally I only found out the man's real name on the net. Nowhere in the book does he state that he joined under his mother's maiden name, or for what reason). Or did he join the Luftwaffe? He seems not to be sure of this, any more than he is of the reason he joined up, which is never explained. He claims to have tried for aircrew training (on Junkers 87 Stuka dive bombers, but unexplained as to whether he wanted to be a gunner or pilot) but to have been rejected (again for reasons unexplained). After this he was assigned to the Wehrmacht (oh really? Not to Luftwaffe ground crew?) as a driver in the Rollbahn (transport division). Here he gives some highly coloured accounts of his experiences delivering supplies to the front in Russia. After the death of a comrade in Russian strafing he volunteers for the Gross Deutschland infantry division, gets leave, and falls in love with a German girl in Berlin while apparently spending most of his free time digging out bodies from bombed buildings.After the leave he rejoins the Gross Deutschland, undergoes "brutal" training with a Hauptmann Fink and serves with the division for the rest of the war on the Eastern front, coming out alive through incredible scrapes. He fights through Kursk, Kharkov, Kiev, Romania, East Prussia, and Memel, finally surrendering to the British at some unspecified time which was apparently early April 1945 or thereabouts. He was almost immediately released because of his French father (ha! fat chance!) and sent home, doing a brief stint