A Bookish Saturday - The Bourne Identity

A Bookish Saturday

I'll begin with my thoughts on what I think is one of the best books of fiction written in the 20th century. Now people may or may not agree, but books and their perceptions are to a very large extent personal. In any case, a book I hold very dear is 'The Bourne Identity' by Robert Ludlum. And here's why.

At the outset, the book is divided into 3 parts. Post the blockbuster movie, most of us know who Jason Bourne is. But one thing many who haven't read the book don't know, is that the movie is absolutely not like anything in the book. So, the opening lines begin with a shooting aboard a trawler, where we know that someone is mercilessly shot at. This someone topples overboard and then we have a body that is spotted by fishermen and brought over to the Ile de Port Noir in France. They think he's dead, but he isn't. A drunk doctor tries to save his life and succeeds, only to realize that our man remembers precious nothing of his life. And then starts the journey of trying to find out who he is and the reader is taken along in this journey. At each stage he stumbles upon a clue which leads him closer to the truth, while at the same time, someone else is out to get him killed.

The plot is a maze of very well etched characters, with Jason showing his personal traits in situations, which give you a hint that he is perhaps conscientiously a good guy. But then, the reader also comes across some pieces of news that point towards him being an assassin for hire. While the reader would be confused over what his true identity is, Jason's turmoil of perennially staring into an abyss is very well brought out in the book. The character of Marie St Jaques, a Canadian economist is also well sketched - portraying an independence and a steadfastness albeit without explicitly using those words! The circumstances that put Bourne and Marie together, and how they try to find out who Jason truly is, is edge-of-the-seat interesting to say the least.

As the plot goes on, one travels through the mystical world of Parisian haute couture, the corridors of power and diplomacy, the arcane world of the CIA, the crooked mind of an assassin, and the dark environs of a man without a memory. All in all, a real treat for those who like intrigue and unpredictability. The best part is that this book does not have a hero and a villain or a goal to achieve by the end of the book - like say find the bad guy and eliminate him or solve a whodunnit. The magic lies in figuring out the nuances of the characters and delving deeper into each character's psyche. How would one feel if suddenly one were to wake up in an unknown land, with no idea of who he is and the very next instant find out that someone out there wants him dead? What is the relationship between a certain event that happens early on and a certain person somewhere later in the book? Who is Jason Bourne and what happened on that trawler that night? These are the questions one would find himself asking throughout the book and the book never lets a reader down. The high point also is in the believability of the characters and the circumstances. Nothing is left to chance, everything is perfectly... believable. Like it is possible for someone in stress to trust the wrong guys. It is possible for someone to feign an identity and get through to someone else. It is possible for the bad guys to have connections all the way to the top. But then again, who is the bad guy? Such is the tone of the entire book.

And the book may have been written in 1980, but the story and the way it is written will continue to thrill millions for years to come.

So,

Plot - excellent

Characterization - brilliant

Pace - Typical Ludlum

Veracity and believability - Up to the mark.

If you haven't read it yet, it's time you did.

The answer is out there...

When something begins to consume you, the best option is to let it all out. If you are consumed by anger, bury your head in a pillow and scream your head out. If you are consumed by the hurt of a betrayal, you have two options, confront the person who betrayed you and let it go, or bury your head in a pillow and cry your heart out. If you are consumed by self-doubt, as I am right now, tell someone, and if there is no one around to listen, just put it out there, the cosmic energy will take it somewhere.

I saw the movie Julie and Julia last night, and I loved it. A simple story of a lady in the early 1940s, the wife of a diplomat, moving countries and continents, searching for something to do that would define her. She falls in love with Paris and French food. She wants to write a cook book, taking French cooking to the American world. Her part of the story traces her travails trying to get published. A young woman in the early 2000s, with a lackluster career and a half-written novel without a publisher, wants to find a definition of her own life, something that she can wake up to happily in the morning and decides to embark on a Julie/ Julia project. She starts a blog, that runs for a year, as she cooks every recipe in Julia Child's 'Mastering the Art of French Cooking'. Her blog is an instant success and she is covered by the NY Times, gets multiple calls from agents who want to work with her on a book. And everything ends happily ever after.

So it's got writing a book, blogging and following your dreams. And I wonder, what is the point of writing here, unless I know someone is reading it. Like Julia Child says in the movie, when her first publisher chooses not to publish her book, " 8 years of my life wasted. Of what use is writing, if no one wants to publish it". I dream of writing one day, soon enough. For me, my blog is a means of testing the waters, if I may, to see whether I do indeed have it in me to make what others may want to read. And many-a-time, the absence of any sign tells me that I don't have it in me. I try to avoid the bellowing sound that resounds in my head telling me that I am perhaps wasting my time, and I would be better off doing something else, because I do not want to hear that response.

And then I wonder, what if one's virtual writings are liked primarily by people who know and like what one is in real life, the content of what you write, notwithstanding. Is it worth changing who you are, just so that people encourage what you like doing? The fiercely independent person in me, may perhaps want to vociferously declare - NO! But the fiercely passionate about writing person inside me may squeak - maybe yes. And that, whoever is listening out there, is the gist of 'drowning in self doubt'. Do I have the right answer? No. But when consumed with the question of 'whether all of this makes sense', I just float the question out there, hoping somehow, somewhere I will find an answer, an answer either one I want to hear, or an answer for which I develop the courage to hear.....

Quick and dirty? I guess not...

So yesterday's post was all on how I'd like the GMAT life - quick, no waiting, life in perpetual motion. The more I think about how life is these days, I guess we are indeed inching towards that end goal.

Till a few decades ago, books and fiction had Great Expectations from the Mayor of Casterbridge or Tess of the D'urbervilles, where descriptions of the context covered more than half the book. Stories were replete with maps, descriptions of the perfect evenings, or detailed descriptions of a lady's beauty, ending with a strong line like 'Estella was between pretty and beautiful'! Short stories were so short that a 500 page tome typically housed 6 stories! I can understand the motivations behind the voluminous mode of writing back then! They were the dark ages, and unlike the days of today, people truly had precious little to do!

And then the Chase era began. The race against time and a villain to reach the truth. James Hadley Chase, Erle Stanley Gardner (maybe it was the fact that they all had 3 words in their names, that made them write crisper!). But that era pushed the erstwhile granddaddies of fiction into the hall of fame called 'literature'. A dusty corner of huge school libraries (where only the bold literature graduates dared to venture into) was dedicated to those who created the genre called fiction.

But even that got too slow, and Arthur Hailey and Robert Ludlum made their grand entry. Hailey and Ludlum, had a following, and they became 'thinking writers' - it took one some cogitative effort to fathom the plot, but the die-hard loyalists never left their side. For a while they caught the peoples' fancy, till a certain Mr. Sheldon made his foray into fiction. After that, speedy, crisp, page-turning writing became the flavor of the season.

Take cricket for instance. I know of cricket fans who to date spend their winter holidays watching the Boxing Day test match! But the proportion of such fans has since come down tremendously. At a point of time a decade ago, people spent hours watching a one-day series. Great duels were set as day-and-night matches to draw bigger crowds. Then came twenty20. If one can see 2 matches (4 teams) on one day, why spend time watching 50 overs per team? There is only so much a team can do, and what they can't achieve in 20 overs, they can't achieve in 50 overs, became the belief. Short and crisp was the mantra here as well!

Now I wonder how far this can go. Can it go the way we used to play cricket as kids? One over per team - since all of us used to want to bat (and only one kid used to bring the bat to the game)? That sure can be fun to watch, although unless the teams dressed in sharp contrasts like say red teams and blue teams, the viewer would be stumped! English country decorum of white cricket uniforms would have to go out the window! As for books - Shakespeare once wrote - Brevity is the soul of wit. Little did he know while writing Hamlet that this would indeed be personified in the art of writing several years thence! So brace yourselves for the one paragraph short story in the future. I sure don't think I can write those!! (My blog is a testimony to that :) )

Sunday Stuff : Leisure, story books and all things beautiful

A mellow wind outside. Cloudy skies. Piping hot tea in hand (might have been happier with coffee though). Un-understandable lyrics of Deep Forest singing 'Will you be ready' somewhere in the corner. Images of meadows, a lovely sunset, tall grass billowing in the wind. The scent of fresh, wet mud. A brilliant book in hand - Picture perfect...

At long last, we got a real good free weekend, and needless to say all of us utilized it to the max. I had my fun, but the one part I loved the most was reminiscing about all my favorite books with a fellow bibliophile! Ah well, bibliophiles are few and very rare to come by. And the variety that matches your tastes are even fewer. More often than not, one can find the kind of people who love the self-improvement category of books. They read books that give them gyaan on cultures, languages, time management, economics, behavioral finance and all such good stuff. But just like warming up to Coldplay takes a certain level of maturity (measured in years), warming up to only non fiction books is a taste that can come only with age. At such a time, one yearns for the true fiction lover.

Back in Mumbai, I had a friend who shared my reading tastes. I remember a long talk one night with her, where we spoke about a certain Mary Higgins Clark book, and I followed it up with my dissertation of the Bourne Identity (I had just then completed my third revision of the book). We then went on to talk about our common favorite book - Kane and Abel and went on analyzing each character, picking up nuances and interpretations, which I am sure even Archer might not have thought about! I had an almost similar experience today, discussing all and sundry from the unabridged version of the Count of Monte Cristo, where the Count sails off into the sunset with Heidi (not walks away with Mercedes, as happens in the movie), to O Henry, and of course Jason Bourne. And the experience left me wanting to sing with joy in the middle of the grassy meadows, with the billowing wind, much like the woman in the Deep Forest song!

People to whom I have described this fundoo feeling I get while discussing books, wonder what the fuss is all about. But all I can say is, reading is one level of joy. Discussing the book, the characters, the story with others, takes you deeper into that world, a world that does not have to be left off on the last page. A world where the Gemeinschaft bank exists on Bahnhofstrasse. Where Treadstone 71 is a real building. A world where characters can actually be morbidly malevolent like the wife in Roald Dahl's William and Mary. A world where two seemingly simple people, born on the same day, reach the pinnacles of success, while always being at each others' throats. A world where a person's spirit is brought into a book without even a mention of anything remotely related to an apparition - just the methods of Mrs. Danvers makes you keep looking over your shoulder to see if Rebecca is watching from somewhere. A world of the bibliophiles - One of the best places to be in.....

My first tryst with Hari Puttar....

Harry Potter. Ok. Long long ago when the hoopla started, I took the stance of a die hard Enid Blyton fan. I said that I would not, under any circumstance, allow my idea of a kiddie book be changed from an Enid Blyton perspective to something else. I refused to allow Jo, Bessie and Fannie of the Enchanted Wood be dethroned by Harry Potter and his exotic name wallah friends. And thus I lived for a very long time. I read no book in the Potter series. Malvika told me scores of times that I must mussssssssssst read Harry Potter. I snobbishly repeated my stance, and she very sweetly, very patiently tried to reason with me, that the two genres were different. I refused to listen, since I was very very contented with my view. My cousins swore by Harry. My nephews never touched a Blyton, but read Harry Potter in 2 nights! My cousin, who is all of 20 years elder to me was a fan. My watchman told me about Hari Puttar, whose books his son used to read - Apparently, his son decided school books were worthless, and he needed to find his own Hogwarts! And yet, I stood my ground

Then many many years later, while I was vacationing in Mumbai, my friend in Hyd, assumed that I would be a Potter fan, and when Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince released, she booked tickets for me as well, when they were going out together as a gang. I got to know from an SMS at 3 am, that I was meeting Harry Potter on such and such date, time blah blah blah. I kept quiet. Upon reaching Hyd, I told her meekly, that I did not know the funda of Harry Potter, and I tried preaching my 'value system' - Kiddie book = Enid Blyton and none else! Sounded more like 'Moochein ho toh Natthulal jaise ho, warna na ho - from Amitabh Bachhan's Sharabi'. She responded with a look that combined one of aghast + disdain + 'Kya pagal ladki hai' etc etc. So I decided not to belabor my point and just go with the flow.

This, turned out to be the turning point in my value system life! So, I was seeing the sixth installment of the Potter franchise. I did not know the names of Harry's friends. I had a vague idea of the premise and I had 2 Potter fans on each side at the theater. The conversion was complete. I fell in love with Potter and Hogwarts, and everything Potteresque. I loved the picturisation, I loved the old old cupboards in the upper stories of Hogwarts - it kinda triggered a new wave of imagination in me. I loved the magic, the characters, the nuances, the premise. I now want to read all of the books!

And that's when I realized that there was a key positioning folly here. Potter is not in direct competition with Jo, Bessie, Fannie, Saucepan, Silky and Moonface. Potter is for another generation, another age group. So my assumptions underlying my 'value system' were flawed on account of the prevalent data then (thanks to flawed advertising... huh), and hence some minor tweaking was desired! So I was justified in holding my view and even more justified now, in changing it. So now, I have my work cut out for my next term break. Harry Potter and the Goblet of fire, Harry Potter and the chamber of secrets, Harry Potter and the order of the phoenix, Harry Potter and the prisoner of Azkaban, Harry Potter and the deathly hallows, Harry Potter and the half blood prince - HERE I COME!!!!!

Victim of circumstance

Thomas Hardy was a great man. Yeah like he needs the greatness certificate from me. Cut to Return of the Native. Barring exotic names, another high point was the conversion of seemingly benign episodes into having super disastrous consequences. One of the most memorable ones - Mrs Yeobright visiting Clym. After a rather acrimonious start to her relationship with Eustacia Wye post the latter's wedding to Clym, she decides to try to patch things up and goes over to Clym's house. Wildeve - Eustacia's 'ex' is in the house, since he has come a-visiting. Eustacia sees her mother-in-law through the window and hurries to usher Wildeve out the back door. and while at the porch, she hears Clym saying 'mother'. So, she assumes that he has opened the door and let his mother inside and so, she lingers longer in the garden. Clym, however has muttered 'mother' in his sleep. Mrs Yeobright, meanwhile, receives no response at the door, and she knows full well that both her son and her daughter-in-law are in the house, since she saw Eustacia looking at her through the window and she also saw Clym's gear by the door. So downcast, she starts going back and exclaims that she is a 'broken-hearted woman who was cast off by her son'. Sad and depressed, she trudges back homeward and is bitten by a snake. Venom combined with exhaustion from heat, kills her. And in true Hardy fashion they all lived sadly ever after.

The juxtaposition of circumstance and a certain behavior in a certain situation - somehow provides a number of stray episodes in life. More often than not, our hugely volatile moods are an offshoot of these episodes. So in a way these episodes, provide the spice of life. So failure to meet a bunch of friends on two disparate occasions once on account of health issues and once on account of work issues, gets misconstrued as an exhibition of snobbery. The Hardy admirer in me screams to say that I am 'an overworked/ill individual who was cast off by her friends'. But no one reads Hardy today and so no one would even bother to hear my sentence, let alone listen to it. So when I get angry with a friend, - who was supposedly in 'the inner circle' - for not having called when he happened to land in town, (my logic was that international flight tickets and trips halfway across the globe do not happen at 1 hour's notice), and scream at him for his gross lack of motivation to keep a friendship, I guess somewhere I should hear him say "The resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible."

Moody Monday : An endless boxing match

Late night yapping sessions with friends are similar to drunken night outs. Honest. They make you deliriously high as long as you keep chitchatting about things as crazy as old school nonsense to modern day work politics. You don't realize how sleepy you are till the time you finally hit the sack. And we actually hit the sack at 5:30 am, since somewhere in some obscure school book we learnt that humans sleep at night. The result? The next morning and the day after, are spent in a quasi 'drunken stupor'. People liken you to the Lotus Eaters or the sloths. Or even the slug that feasts happily on the leaves of your potted plant.

One such 'friendly hangover' later, dawned a hideous Monday morning in the boxing match of my life. Round 1. And I could hear the gong go 'BONGGGGG'. Or was that just my alarm clock? Note to self - Nickelback's Fight for all Wrong Reasons must be removed from being my alarm sound. I refused to believe the fact that the Monday had dawned. I drearily pulled myself out of bed, and proceeded toward the mundane tasks that comprise the 'waking up' process. Ever wondered how you always feel under the weather on a Monday morning? I am sure I was running a temperature today morning, as I woke up. But who'll listen? At least in school I needed a leave note. At work, if I give in to the 'I am sick on Monday Morning' syndrome, I lose the opportunity of taking the day off when the blues get absolutely unbearable. So, sigh! I then headed out to the world in my living room, only to find my coffee on the table, and company missing. My folks wanted to subtly tell me that they had a very hectic schedule and helping me beat my Monday blues was by and far the last thing on their mind. So all alone for a coffee with no one to crib to. Round 2. Yet again ... BONGGGGGGG. Then, bidding a near - poignant goodbye to the cosy confines of my house, I headed out into the hostile mean Monday world.

I have already been preoccupied with a certain gnawing anxiety over the past few days and the fight with my thoughts and 'What If' analyses has been another duel in itself. "But the human mind has a tendency to turn towards the gnawing thoughts, and so, always train yourself to live in the present moment", so said a realized soul. I shook away the dovetailing thoughts and came back to reality. Not because I was reminded of the preacher's words, but because of a terrible honk that blared into my ear drums almost rupturing them. It was a clear sky, but a not so clear road. It was a bright sunny morning, but a dark gray smoky surrounding. And the cabbie I got was the kind you can only encounter in nightmares. He drove as if he was more keen to hit a traffic light, than to get me to office on time. Even a bicycle overtook us. He chose not to take a crucial flyover at Sion, because he 'forgot'. When I reprimanded him for the same, he took it upon himself to take all available flyovers. The result, he 'forgot' the section where he was supposed to go under a flyover and ended up going over it instead. Round 3. BONGGGGGGGGGGGGG. Frustrated with the chap and not wanting to go till the end of city limits hunting for a place to make a U-turn, I got off and decided to walk back a short - cut to office. So, with three kilos on my shoulder, and a hundred kilos of irritation, I trudged along. Round 4. BONGGGGGGGG.

I got to work, and all hell broke loose. I had drafted a meticulous plan of action for my team this week, and suddenly, I was told that almost my whole team had been whisked off out of Mumbai on an urgent project. But my project, my deadlines? 'You figure it out'. Round 5, 6 and 7. An extra loud BONGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG. Eight people had eight hundred questions to ask me. I had eight thousand questions to ask, with the first question being, "who do I ask the Seven Thousand Nine Hundred and Ninety Nine questions to?" A client wanted a report. I needed 3 reports from my team. Two guys in Bangalore called to say that they wouldn't be able to send some crucial data since they had been called off to a very important meeting. My colleague in Chennai who was to send me 2 very important reports called to say that he was on leave since he had a stomach upset. My tea was cold. I was asked to go to another corner of the city in 3 hours. Wait. Someone would confirm whether I'd need to go. A member of my team (only one of the remaining two who were spared the critically urgent out of Mumbai project), came over to say that she was supposed to go on a one-day meeting somewhere. Gongs were going off. Round 8, 9, 100, 1000. And amidst this cacophony, someone said, "Sindhu lunch?" I headed out, and greedily took a spoonful of the vegetable I'd brought. Youchhhhhh. I ended up like a leaky faucet. Lunch was ruined as well. Round 10,003. BONGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG.

Lost in the labyrinthine ways of the day, I finally looked at my watch. 7:45 pm. The office was almost empty. The working day was finally over. The manic Monday was finally done. A colleague was leaving and he asked me how long it'd take me to get home. In a buoyant mood on account of finally having conquered the Monday, I nonchalantly replied - 20 minutes. "Wow! that's truly lucky. It takes me nothing less than an hour to get home!", he mused. I smiled, shrugged, packed up and left. God damn the roads of Mumbai. They build flyovers everywhere. 'A small sacrifice for a better tomorrow', they say. Tomorrow? Well, the vehicles line up on top and below the flyover. For Mumbaikars, the song we sing is,

'The Road is not enough.
But it is such a perfect place to waste my time.
The Road is not enough.
Flyovers're such a perfect way to spend my evening.
The Road is not enough.... The Road is not enough....'
(To be sung along the tune of The world is not enough).

So a small move by the cab was a prelude to a large wait in the traffic jam. So inch by inch, I managed to reach home. In not 20 minutes, but in 120 minutes. Whoopa. Gongs kept clanging like temple bells. Round 2,00,003, I guess. I lost count. I lost the power to count. I finished dinner and I so wanted to get myself out of my sad, dejected, melancholy mood. I so wanted to spend half an hour by the seaside, listening to the soothing waves with the cool, gentle, salty sea breeze brush against my face. So I asked my father whether I could just drive down to Worli Sea Face and be back within the hour. Unflinchingly, he gave me an emphatic No. 'You must be insane to expect me to say yes to you driving at this hour,' he jeered. This was the loudest BONGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG in ages. Sad, dejected and rejected, I walked off to my room. Mom said, " Read your Bible, and go to sleep. Tomorrow will be a better day". So I took her advice and soon after finishing this post, I am off to my 'Biblical jaunt'..... Jason Bourne beckons...... For the sixth time.

A crooked look at the new cloning miracle.....

Japanese have just managed to clone cryogenically preserved species of dead rats! This could be a giant step in genetics, since so far we have only managed to clone living species, right from Dolly the sheep. This whole field of genetics and DNA studies is again a key field of our times.Not just in science but in countless books and movies over the years. Jurassic Park, Chromosome 6, The Sixth Day, imagination has been fraught with grotesque projections of the flipside of meddling with nature.

So, how can we imagine a world of the future? Evolution crossed with species of the past? Neo - humans along with dinosaurs? A cross between 'Planet of the Apes' and 'Jurassic Park'? Well, for a city like Mumbai, or for that matter any megalopolis, it is a picture fraught with despair. We are unable to drive on roads on account of the potholes, and huge construction activities happening on Indian roads. With an imminent 'poor man's car - the Nano', the bleak just got bleaker. As if the small car phenomenon instituted in India by the Japs was not enough, now we are going to have mammoths, dinosaurs and dodos on Indian roads - thanks to the Japs again. Dodos are already present in the form of Indian drivers, but we'd probably get to see the maestro of stupidity - the real dodo. So, a giant leap forward for mankind in genetics that has been taken by creating species that could have been seen had we taken a giant leap backward in evolution, could leave us with space not even enough to take an inch step in any direction on Indian roads......

All this humor apart - Let's take a moment to pay respects to the man who immortalized dinosaurs for our generation - Michael Crichton - one of my favorite and I guess one of the best authors of science fiction - who passed away yesterday. My respects to a man who gladdened a world......

My 2 virtual trysts with Islamic terrorism

What do the book ‘The Afghan’ and the movie ‘Aamir’ have in common? Islamic terrorism as a backdrop. What do they not have in common? Sorry for being blunt, but the sheer substance of both plots. Since I had the chance of encountering both over the past week, I just thought I’d share my two-pence-worth thoughts.

Let us start with the Afghan. The plot, as is always the case, revolves around an AQ threat to the US. All the allied intelligence forces of the US and the UK have as evidence are, a laptop belonging to a financial wizard belonging to the higher echelons of the AQ and a rather ambiguous phrase ‘Al-Isra’, that literally translates to the mythical journey from earth to Allah undertaken by Prophet Muhammed. It is up to the ‘smart’ guys of the CIA and MI5 to try to figure out what major catastrophe awaits the US or the UK or some other part of the world.

The solution, they soon realize, is to send a Para brought up in Iraq into the proverbial ‘inner circle’. What happens thereafter is the story. Or at least that is what the build-up of the story betrayed.

Unfortunately, as happens with all major projects, the distance between the goal and the end result is too much. Although the terror plot as professed to have been hatched by the AQ looks truly formidable, the whole story which is supposed to trace how the Intelligence forces of the world uncover this deadly plot, just seems to pull on, describing inch by inch the mountainous terrain of the Tora Bora! Secondly, no achievements of the deadly/feared Afghan, as he is many-a-time referred to, which in turn give him the epithet are described. Other than being a true son of the soil, and displaying true Pashtun characteristics of being a daredevil, brave-heart fighter, typical characteristics which unfortunately do not warrant a real reverence from the side of the AQ, no other great behavioral or leadership milestones are described. Alright, so he is accepted as one of the clan for some reason not known to us. But then he is directly sent by Osama himself to be a part of their most shocking event to date. Why? Because of an old rendezvous in a cave wherein the then 14 year old Afghan had clumsily mumbled that he wanted to fight for Allah! Oh well, Go figure!!! Alright!!!! So he is sent to the most ambitious AQ attack to date. And what does he do there? Acts like a silent observer. As if he has been put into the book, just because they need a firangi protagonist! All in all, everything happens like clockwork. All pieces fall into place as if the whole plot – both sides – have been orchestrated by the intelligence forces. And, surprisingly no former friends of the Afghan, including his inmates at Gitmo, who ironically had ratified the Afghan’s story try to make contact with the Afghan, even by chance. Plus, you seem to discern the actual plot pretty early in the story.

So the high points – Highly picturesque descriptions of Afghanistan and Waziristan which have more than amplified my desire to go look at these beautiful geographical blessings of nature and a truly formidable, deadly idea of the AQ.

This puts in mind another book on terrorism that I read a few months ago – The Bourne Betrayal. The plot – very well conceived, embedding a personal vendetta into the greater milieu of terrorism. The modus operandi – a tad fantastic – a la Face/Off. The suspense – brilliant. The protagonist’s operation – very believable. He does not have situations and opportune events presented to him on a platter. So, the resulting book is quite interesting, fast-paced and a real page turner all the way.

Now we go to the second topic – the movie called Aamir. The plot – simple yet believable. A Muslim doctor lands from the UK and is shocked to realize that there is no one there to pick him up outside the airport. He is given a cell phone, where an faceless voice tells him what to do. He is told that his family has been kidnapped and he needs to follow the instructions in order to see them alive. The viewer then travels with Aamir through his day tying to figure out the labyrinthine plot that the villain has in mind. As said before, the plot is plain simple.

The magic lies in the way the movie has been taken. Indian media has been rather vocal about the way in which the movie was taken, using hidden cameras to provide the ‘realism’, so to say. And I am afraid the ploy has delivered. Over and above imparting a real feel to the goings on, you view the movie as if you are a by-stander watching Aamir as he follows the guidelines provided by the caller. A second high point is the characterization of the protagonist. He is an average middle class youth, who is keen on carving a niche for himself in his life and supporting his younger siblings. This is a true projection of the urban youth of today, who play no part in the fundamentalist manifestations of the terrorists of today, but that of the hapless victim. So you can actually experience his vexation at being the chosen one, his frustration at not being able to understand why things happen the way they happen and also his vacillation as the plot draws to a close, wherein he is torn between his personal loss and a humanitarian loss. Finally, one must applaud the acting capabilities of the lead actor – Rajeev Khandelwal. He has definitely entered the skin of the character and portrayed the complex emotions, with aplomb. Not a mean achievement for a first movie.

So although a simple premise, the juxtaposition of the plot, the characterization and the acting capabilities of the protagonist make this movie a must-see.