Glossing over it

My Mirror column:

The real-life story of Anand Kumar and his free coaching is incredible, but Super 30 feels like a missed opportunity.

A still from Super 30, directed by Vikas Bahl. 

“Kya baat hai bhai, ki film hamaari aa rahi hai toh sab log lag jaate hain? [What's going on, bhai: is everyone piling on to me because a film is coming out?]” asked the renowned engineering coach Anand Kumar during a video interview to BBC's Hindi correspondent Saroj Singh in January this year. The biopic he was referring to released last week, but it answers few questions -- not even Kumar's own.

Directed by Vikas Bahl (known for Queen and for the serious #MeToo charges against him that led to the dissolution of Phantom Pictures in 2018), Super 30 stars Hrithik Roshan as the Patna-based Kumar, who shot to national fame a decade ago, when all thirty students in his Super 30 class 'cracked' what might be the world's most competitive entrance examination: the Joint Entrance Examination to the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT JEE).

Every year since 2002, Anand Kumar has selected thirty students from underprivileged families for his free coaching, also providing them free lodging in Patna and home-cooked meals. How Kumar arrived at this vocation is a fascinating tale. In the early 1990s, Kumar's handwritten submission to a UK journal of mathematics was followed by an offer of admission from the University of Cambridge. The backward caste son of a poor postal clerk, Kumar couldn't arrange the money. Then his father died, and he spent some years in penury before finally hitting his stride as a teacher. The idea of using his abilities to improve the lives of talented poor students like himself came later, and their continued success has been his, too.

It isn't unusual for Bollywood (or for that matter, any commercial film industry) to pick a big star to play a real-life hero. Many recent biopics have done it: Farhan Akhtar as Milkha Singh, Priyanka Chopra as the boxer Mary Kom. Others have cast a known face who's also a good actor: Nawazuddin Siddiqui has appeared as Urdu writer Manto, Shiv Sena politician Bal Thackeray and everyman road-building hero Dashrath Manjhi, while Irrfan Khan was superb as the runner-turned-dacoit Paan Singh Tomar.

But there seems to me something about Super 30 that outdoes these previous instances. I do not refer only to the blackface that Bollywood unabashedly carries out in the name of make-up, literally covering the taller, more muscular Roshan's fair skin and light eyes with an artistic tan. I mean also the way that Bahl's film covers over the facts of Anand Kumar's life.

What's strange is that the facts of Kumar's life are already full of drama. Interviewing Anand Kumar for his 2013 book A Matter of Rats: A short biography of Patna, the US-based writer Amitava Kumar wrote, “When Anand describes the events... you watch his tale of woe unfold as if in a black-and-white Hindi film possibly made by Raj Kapoor.” The fact that his father's sudden death took place by choking, that the streets around their house were flooded by rain, that he had to put his unconscious father on an abandoned vegetable cart to wheel him to a clinic – all this is in Amitava Kumar's book. But in the film, there is no choking, no flooding, and Anand has a bicycle. The film depicts the papad-selling business that his mother and he supported themselves on, but there is no mention of the fact that the postal department sent Anand 50,000 rupees after his father's death, or the fact that he needed to stay on in Patna to support a family that included a grandmother and a disabled uncle. It almost feels like the facts are too extreme for the film.

Instead, Bahl's version wishes to distract us with not one but all of the following: a youthful love interest who marries another man (Mrunal Thakur, from Love Sonia); a hard-drinking journalist who makes confusing interventions; an overly villainous coaching competitor (Aditya Shrivastava); a buffoonish politician (Pankaj Tripathi). Worse, it gives us a whole first batch of Super 30 students, some with 30-second backstories that could be potentially devastating – the manual scavenger, the construction labourer, the girl with the alcoholic father -- but not one gets a real personality. The camera is so focused on Roshan's as-ever exaggerated performance that the kids don't have a chance.

Attempts have, in fact, been made on Anand Kumar's life. But the film makes these about overly chatty hitmen, and the last episode – where his coaching competitor plans to blow up an entire hospital in order to wipe out the Super 30 – has the students turning Kumar's science formulae into a bizarre combination of religion and magic. A Vedic chant about vidya is the aural backdrop to an elaborate game of smoke and mirrors to outwit armed goons. Meanwhile the villain warns: “It should look like a Naxal attack, no-one should suspect that it is meant to kill Anand Kumar, otherwise he'll become a martyr.”

The BBC interview is filled with allegations it thinks are controversial. How many students does Kumar take on in his (paid) Ramanujan classes? What fees do those students pay? Why does he not reveal the names of each year's Super 30 students until the IIT JEE list is out? Kumar answers them all, though he sounds victimised.

The film, meanwhile, refuses to even engage with the last decade of Kumar's life, involving the complexities that come after the Happy Ever After. We dearly want our heroes to be saints, and we are happy to erase their real selves to achieve that.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 21 July 2019.

Post Facto: Keys to another world

My column for the Sunday Guardian this fortnight. A large part of my adult life has been spent inside books. There are books I read too fast because I want to know what happens, and so must read a second time to savour all I missed. There are books I hate from page one, but read all the way through, sometimes because it's work (one cannot review half a book) and sometimes just out of masochism. There are books abandoned midway, which look at me accusingly as they sink to the bottom of a pile. There are books I refer to for facts magisterially marshalled, and books I turn to for analytical clarity. The best books are ways to enter the world afresh. But there are times when what you want is not to find a different route into the world, but to leave it behind entirely. Fantasy and science fiction are increasingly popular genres in writing for adults. But the books of my childhood provide a dual escape: a temporary reprieve from the adult world, and in the case of three of my most favourite children's books — an entry into a parallel universe. In the first of these, that parallel universe is an entirely domestic one, imagined to exist under the floorboards. Mary Norton's fertile imagination created a world of little people — six-inch-high creatures who looked and behaved like minature versions of ourselves, but lived by 'borrowing' from us all the little things that disappear so mysteriously from every home: "Safety pins, for instance... And all the other things we keep on buying. Again and again and again. Like pencils and matchboxes and sealing wax and hairpins and drawing pins and thimbles..." The Borrowers, as Norton named them, first appeared in print in 1952, and were such a success that she continued to create new adventures for her chosen fictional family — Homily, Pod and their daughter Arietty — for the next 30 years. { The books of my childhood provide a dual escape: a temporary reprieve from the adult world, and in the case of three of my most favourite children’s books – an entry into a parallel universe Much of the delight of the Borrowers' universe is in seeing familiar household things in a new light: a cogwheel becomes a fireplace, a wristwatch is a clock, a matchbox a chest of drawers, a single chess-piece provides both a pedestal for a dining table and a knight's 'bust', which "lent that air to the room which only statuary can give." The other pleasure of this world is to experience, vicariously through the Borrowers, a life which involves precision and danger in equal measure, a world in which innovation is not a luxury but a need, and in which the everyday act of survival has the thrill of constant adventure. The thrill is also enhanced by juxtaposition: the Borrowers, by their very nature, live in houses where no new things happen, where the humans live to a routine. "Routine is their safeguard," says old Mrs. May, who first tells Kate about them. "They must know which rooms are to be used and when. They do not stay in houses where there are careless people, or unruly children, or certain household pets." The key to another kind of parallel universe is magic. Of all the many stories about magical creatures and magical worlds that I have ever read, I think E. Nesbit's The Enchanted Castle is the most wondrous. The children in it move constantly in and out of a magic universe — but not in the predictable manner of, say, Enid Blyton's The Magic Faraway Tree, in which a trip to the Enchanted Forest guarantees access to a magical world, but the everyday, regulated life of the nursery remains unaffected. In Nesbit's 1907 book, magic turns the everyday world topsy-turvy in a way that can be both frightening and marvelous: a girl disappears, statues talk, a whole secret world comes to life at night where there is nothing but lifeless stone in the day. Nesbit credits the power of the imagination in some far deeper way than most books — magic itself, she suggests, is a matter of belief. If you believe a ring will make you invisible, it will. If you believe it'll make things come to life, it will. But if you say it won't, it won't. The last book — Tom's Midnight Garden — uses a third route to enter an alternative world: time. Philippa Pearce's 1958 tale -- of a boy stuck alone at an aunt and uncle's place for the summer — uses an old grandfather clock as the bridge between the regular world and a past one. When the clock strikes thirteen, late every night, Tom finds he can open an old rusty door and go into a garden that seems not to be there during the day. And there, in that world of the midnight garden, he forges a bond with a girl named Hattie — a bond that feels stronger than almost anything in the world of the day. But Pearce is not really interested in old-style magic. At the end of the book, she gives us an explanation that hovers on the edges of the psychological. But her vision of the garden — a place so intensely remembered that it manages to communicate to someone else — remains a haunting ode to the power of memory and dreams.

Published in the Sunday Guardian.

Old Magic In New Bottle Deptt.

Delhi now has a magic theatre. In a mall. I went. 

Until recently, the magic show in India had a well-defined aesthetic that drew on an imagined idea of royalty. The legendary PC Sorcar Senior and his son PC Sorcar Junior always dressed like over-the-top maharajas – bejewelled turbans, shiny kurta-churidars and glittering jootis – and most magicians followed suit. Tejas’s new magic performance, however, emerges out of a more contemporary fantasy world: Bollywood. 
 

The magician’s assistants are two young men in silver body suits and two young women who alternate between spangly black-fringed outfits, white satin gowns and silver miniskirts. The magician ( full name Tejas Malode), is a startlingly young man in a dark Chinese collar shirt, his hair gelled back to achieve the effect of something like sophistication. As the assistants twirl to an unidentifiable pop music track and a backdrop of coloured smoke, it feels like you’ve walked into one of Vikram Bhatt’s haunted romance flicks. 
  
The show has all the staples of a classic stage magic performance: he produces cards out of thin air, pulls coins out of a boy’s ear, nose and mouth, frees himself from a thick rope knotted round his wrists and knees, suspends his assistants and then an audience member in the air. Of course, no magic show is complete without the famous “sawing a woman in half” effect. Tejas’ version has a female assistant climb into a box, which he proceeds to divide into several horizontal sections that are pulled apart entirely then put together again.

Mumbai-based Tejas won the title of India’s Magic Star on Star One in 2010. Since then, he has been performing on cruise ships and in cocktail party acts – though only, he tells us, for Hollywood stars. The one cocktail act he does for us starts as a transformation: a bottle of Kahlua and a glass tumbler change places, change back, and then back again. Then it becomes what stage magicians call a production: making something appear out of nothing. Watching Tejas lift the yellow cylin­ders, first with curiosity, and then – as Kahlua bottles start to proliferate – with surprise, one realises how much of the effect of a magic show depends on the magician’s skills in acting and mime.

The other component of stage magic is to draw the audience in, and this Tejas does very well. In his version of the classic “pick a card”, he got a girl to pick a card from an “invisible” deck – essentially, to choose a card in her mind. Even better was his prediction act, where he opened a sealed box to reveal written predictions of the choices just made by three audience members. 

Tejas’s magic is perfectly competent, but the show’s cheesiness robs it of aura. But perhaps aura, like stage magic itself, lies in the eyes of the beholder. 

Magic Theatre is ongoing at Moments Mall, Kirti Nagar, New Delhi. 

(Published in Time Out Delhi)

Is IT a bird? Witchcraft and the Computer Course

An essay I wrote in January 2002, some months after finishing a Social Anthropology degree at Cambridge, and in the immediate wake of a visit to Ganesh Devy's then-nascent Tejgarh Tribal Academy in Gujarat. 

The Azande of Sudan, immortalised by EE Evans-Pritchard in that wonderfully unselfconscious, "The-Tagawawa-are-my-best-friends" way that anthropologists still had in 1937, lived in a world in which witchcraft was all pervasive. Witches could be men or women, and had the hereditarily-acquired power to do harm to a person or his family, psychically. Those who suffered misfortune could try and find out who was responsible by consulting one of several oracles. The most common oracle was a chicken, who was fed a reasonable quantity of poison called benge and given the name of a possible witch. The truth or falsehood of the accusation was then established by whether the fowl lived or died.

The tribal world, if at all such a gross generalization is possible, is populated with a host of spirits and forces that are capable of having a powerful influence upon human beings. Some are usually associated with seriously deleterious effects on mind and body, while others might be rather more beneficial in their impact. In no way do I mean to suggest that only tribal people believe in ghosts and spirits, but it so happens that I recently spent a few days discussing these things with some adivasi students in Gujarat, and time and again in those conversations I found myself making, with a passion that I never realised I could invoke in the service of modern science, a case for rationality, (as opposed to belief in the ojha's powers or jhaadh-phoonk techniques).

I had gone to explore the possibilities of working with a Baroda-based organisation that has set up a first-of-its-kind Diploma in Tribal Studies. It's a two-year course, with a theoretical and a practical side to it. The idea is for adivasi students to be trained in development survey work in villages and introduced to some development jargon - so that the classroom is the constant site of discussions in which terms like Needs-Based Approach, BPL Families (Below Poverty Line families), Microcredit Mandli and so on, are bounced back and forth with as much faith and vigour as in any self-respecting TISS project report. The other parallel motivation is to provide exposure to viewpoints and theoretical perspectives that the students may not have had a chance to engage with before.

Already, at the academy, ideas for the preservation of traditional Rathwa medicine jostle with government schemes which rest upon doling out large quantities of additional vitamins and minerals in tablet form each month. There is a tradition of Pithora wall painting in the region, which the Artists' Cooperative is trying to preserve. The three-day ritual performance which culminates in the creation of Baba Pithoro might, they have realised, be a difficult thing to market. So they sell large expanses of cellophane-protected muslin, stretched taut on wooden frames. Caught behind the cellophane, whole forests teem with life. Peacocks and mynahs and raucous green parrots fly above the horses of Indralok, scarlet and green, their hooves kicking up the dust. To me, though, they seem constrained. In a way that they didn't on their mud wall in Malaaja village. But these seem like unsolvable dilemmas, and I decide to leave them alone for the moment.

Then the next day, fifteen young men -- graduates in Gujarati and sociology and economics, who have lessons in basic linguistics and computers, and have set up committees to deal with sickle-cell anaemia patients -- started talking to me about bhoots and prets who carry off children and daayans who bewitch families. One speaks of the ojha who cured him of an undiagnosed "weakness", another of a local Rathwa tribal ritual specialist, the badhwo - in the same breath as the 'modern' medical system: injections, haemoglobin counts, hospitalisation. And suddenly, I find myself shifting -- slowly, but surely, from the supposedly value-neutral anthropological position -- to that of the scientific, anti-superstition rationalist. The process alarms me slightly.

So when I come home, I find myself turning the pages of notes I wrote as part of a long-ago course on the anthropology of knowledge. Anthropology, right from its early Fraserian avatar, has been interested in what it saw as 'irrational' beliefs and practices: the world of gods and demons, magic and witchcraft.

{Often, the domain that the anthropologist describes as magic or witchcraft does not exist as a category in the minds of those who practice them. Evans-Pritchard makes clear, for example, that Zande magic, though it may be systematic, is not theorised or systematised by the Azande themselves. If the category is of the anthropologist's making, then there must be anthropological criteria that make certain practices or beliefs magical. Behaviour which seems not to be effective in the realisation of its apparent goal, or a belief in powers or beings whose existence is not substantial, can be classified as magical. Already, we have stepped beyond mere observation of behaviour into defining what its goals might or might not be.}

Three kinds of explanations have tended to emerge for such beliefs and practices. There have been those who categorise magic as ineffectual behaviour, based on mistaken or illogical belief systems: the so-called intellectualists (Fraser, Tylor, etc). The problem with a strong form of this position is that those who practice witchcraft also perform tasks that involve fairly complex abstract reasoning: the same 'primitive' who believes in voodoo also builds real houses, using techniques that are fairly complicated.

Then there are the symbolists - who provide an 'expressive' explanation of magical practices. As Peter Winch argued with regard to the Azande, the oracular revelation is not a matter of intellectual interest, but a tool which is used to decide how to act. Therefore, the question of refutation or confirmation does not arise. Winch's question is: does someone who presses the notion of witchcraft to its logical conclusion (and finds inconsistencies) necessarily act more rationally than the Azande (who do not)?

He argues that something can only appear 'rational' or 'irrational' to someone in terms of his understanding of what is and is not rational. Winch, in effect, suggests that Zande magical rites and practices express an attitude to human life, and a recognition that life is subject to contingencies, rather than an attempt to control these. This position has been taken also by others who draw a contrast between scientific explanation and magical analogy: the former can be judged true or false, the latter only legitimate or 'felicitous' - or not.

But does a strong form of relativism, a la Winch, tell us anything about rationality? If magic is an expressive ritual -- like kicking a chair when one is angry -- then belief, at least in the propositional sense needing rational approval, is not germane to the explanation of ritual/magic action. Yet, rationality is measured with respect to beliefs, coherence, consistency of thought and so on. Magic may have expressive and performative elements, but if it has any claims to an impact in the material world, then can it be considered a different type of thought from say, science?

Critics of the strong relativist position, like Robin Horton, point out that such an assumption of 'difference' would prevent anthropologists from making a studied culture intelligible to their own at all. Horton argues that western anthropologists, afraid to be seen as 'inegalitarian' or racist, have insisted therefore that much of what seems like theoretical thought in non-western cultures is actually thought of quite a different genre, with goals quite different from those of explanation, prediction and control.

Horton's argument is that science and magic are not so far apart. The opposition between them is not that between common sense and mystical thought. In fact, both explain the world in terms of underlying uniform laws. Both are forms of theory used to explain what common sense cannot: action at a distance. Magic is not used as a substitute for a theory of natural causation, but works as an explanation for particularity -- 'why did my son fall ill? In Evans-Pritchard's terms, beliefs about witchcraft and magic form a closed system - 'a web of belief' which insulates those who lived in it from anomaly. Thus, apparent falsifications - a mistaken prediction or an ineffective cure -- can be explained by bad materials, fraudulent practitioners, broken taboos or occult interference. Such 'secondary elaborations' help to preserve the truth of magic.

Horton argues that scientists, too, practice secondary elaboration in their explanations, citing bad apparatus or otherwise imperfect conditions as reasons for anomalies, or tagging caveats onto their theories to make them fit the evidence better.

Horton's conclusion: that it is wrong to think of magical thought as anything less than scientific. What is not scientific, or strictly rational, in magical thought is the fear of abandoning theory - the'closed predicament' in Popperian terms. Whereas magical thought and practice is hedged round with taboo, and believers react with fear when it is questioned, Horton argues that scientific thought is constantly actively challenged: a continuous critical monitoring of theory takes place.

But I do not know if 'science', when it appears as a solar lantern in an adivasi village in Gujarat, or even in the computer centre in Tejgarh Tribal Academy, is indicative of, or subjected to, a greater degree of critical questioning, than say, the spirits of the badhwo's dream-world or the bhagat priest's cure for jaundice. There is really not much difference in the faith that the badhwo asks the adivasi to place in his ritual incantations, and the faith we would rather he places in say, the power of two yellow tablets a day to keep him from fainting in the fields at noon.

Regardless of the particular effects of each, the point I am trying to make is this: seen from the point of view of the woman in Malaaja village, the workings of both processes -- traditional medicine and modern science - are equally hidden from view. And offered to her in quite the same way, from above, to be accepted unquestioningly.

All over India, and all over the world, perhaps, there is this sudden great desire to learn computers. In these days of IT, the computer course, from Bareilly to Belgaum, has come to represent a hotline to information that is knowledge that is power -- and of course, money. 'Computer course' : most potent symbol of the modern age, of science, of technological advancement - the word is almost magic.

There will be computers, too, in Malaaja. But having access to the tools of modern science does not change how people think. The astronomer who believes in Vishnu's creation of the world, the state trading associations which perform yagnas to ensure that stock prices will rise, all of us who read the Sunday newspaper horoscopes and feel that slight sense of apprehension -- or happy anticipation -- perhaps none of us subscribe to a single, coherent belief system. People often have views that are inconsistent with other views that they themselves hold -- and they may argue for different views at different times.

What then makes my belief in Bejan Daruwalla's predictions for heartbreak this week, or whatever, different from Veereshbhai's belief in the ghost who is the cause of his household's misfortune? Is it just that I have more choices, greater access to a greater variety of preventions and cures? Perhaps what is crucial is that we do not merely dole out the bounties of science, but attempt to spread that elusive thing -- its spirit. The spirit of critical enquiry, to which both the badhwo and the sarkari dawakhana must be subjected, so that one is not merely substituted by the other.

Published on the website 'digitaltalkies.com', January-February 2002.