Ted, Ted, Ted

I spent Thursday evening, my last full evening in Chennai, seeing a movie. And I really mean full evening. The movie went a little over three hours, counting the 15-minute intermission. I can only say that I have never seen anything like it. I kept thinking of that scene late in Blazing Saddles when the whole cast busts into a studio where some Busby Berkeley extravaganza is being shot, and the two movies get all mixed up. Except it would have been Jet Li breaking in instead of Mel Brooks.

I know this stuff has been available around here for a long time, but I’d never really paid any attention. I’m going to start now. It is magical. But it didn’t finish until after 9:30, too late to get dinner. I was ready to take my work friends out to an expense-account joint, but it was late and raining, so we all just went home.

This particular movie was a police thriller about an innocent boy from the Bombay slums who is somehow blackmailed into impersonating a crime capo. Both of them are played by the dashing Shah Rukh Khan. (Warning: spoilers ahead. If you think you might see this movie, stop reading now.) Doubles and impersonations are among the most standard of the standard Bollywood devices, I’m told. So is the presence of not one, not two, but three leading ladies, one of them killed off in the first reel but not before starring in her own production number, for which the term “elaborate” is entirely inadequate.

The way it seems to work is, Indian movies are rated for lewdity (not for violence) by something like a much stricter MPAA board. They put up a certificate on the screen before every trailer with the signatures and credentials of two or more clergy, to attest that what follows is just as squeaky clean as it could be. Everyone’s clothes stay on at all times. At any point in the story where you might expect a sex scene in an American movie, you get a dance routine instead. Also, all party scenes and disco scenes are automatic candidates for a mass dance routine. The friends I was with said the standard is to have an outburst of song and dance every half hour, which means six on average. The plot twists came at a rhythm of about one every 15 minutes, I thought. I’m not that literate in the policier vocabulary, but all the usual twists I could think of were checked off: the police inspector who turns out to be a bad guy, the child hostage (twice), the escape from the doomed getaway car, all that stuff.

The acting was broad enough so that I could pretty much understand everything without subtitles, but it was professional. The bad guys were quite unmistakably evil, but a little ambiguity was allowed for a while as to the good guys. This was resolved by a sort of double-twist at the end in which the crime boss turns out to have been impersonating his impersonator all along, having switched hospital beds way back in the second reel. Some throwaway business, involving a CD that may or may not contain valuable information, is made to string together most of the central subplot. I kept thinking John Sayles could learn something about subplots from these guys.

In the office the next day, talking it over with the local elite, I sensed some discomfort with Bollywood. For anyone who went to school where I did after the 70s it’s a matter of course that The Wizard of Oz is as fine a map to the underlying social relations of its time as The Jungle, if you want to work with it. Does it portray something different from “real life?” OK, how different? In what ways? Why in those ways and not others? Anyway, what is “real life,” or, more interestingly, who gets to say what it is? But to my colleagues there, the distance between Bollywood and “real” India was an embarrassment, an indictment of a culture industry gone bad. When I raved about the dance routines, the costumes, the cast of thousands, all the stuff that I loved about it, they just squirmed and looked away. One more in my series of lessons on when to just shut up.

Laura and her backing band furnish a set of tunes in the early afternoon. More info here.

It’s Friday. We are leaving tonight at 10:30 p.m., which is 10:00 Thursday morning at home. Change planes in Singapore again, a rest stop in Hong Kong (no time for any joy rides outside the airport this time), and then about 13 hours to San Francisco. But I’ll get home at 1:30 Saturday afternoon, not Sunday, because we cross the international date line. I’m not going to try to understand that right now.

American foreign correspondents have traditionally employed a labor-saving device called “taxi journalism,” in which the reporter arriving at a colorful destination closely questions the driver on the way from the airport to the luxury hotel and then phones in the results as good solid hard-earned man-in-the-street wisdom. As a result, even though I’m not a reporter any more, I still make a practice of never asking a cab driver about anything except his health. On this trip, however, I have not scrupled to stick my camera out the window and let the video camera roll. You could call this my entry in the “taxi photography” genre.

I’m putting this link here just to remind myself to look at some of these webinars.

Near the elephant farm we met a tour group of women from the Sree Narayana College, which is in Kerala. They were singing and clapping to pass the time. We joined in as best we could.

I got six clips of this before my battery burned out, of which this one is the silliest. You can see the rest here.

Tonight I went with my colleague Kavitha and her two kids (boy 11, girl 5) to the giant Rasi’s sari shop. Kavitha really knew her way around the fabrics, which helped make my benighted choices a little less benighted, I hope. I dropped somewhat more than I should have but got away with some amazing stuff, some colors that I have only seen in dreams. Sometimes when we are wrapping a present for a kid’s birthday party Lilly will decide that she likes it and we must keep it, and only a lengthy negotiation gets the thing finally into the wrapping. I’m sure the same thing will happen with me when it’s time to give these things away for Christmas. They are spectacular.

Last Friday we flew to Bangalore, where a driver was waiting to take us to a resort in the high coffee country at the other end of a 200-mile dirt track. On Saturday we hiked around, saw elephants, sampled the local nightlife. On the way back to Bangalore the following day, we got lost in some of the most beautiful farmland I have ever seen and I found myself wondering how bad it would be if we missed our return flight, really.

The high point of the trip, for me, was a chance encounter with a tour group from a women’s college in Kerala. They were sitting under a tree singing and clapping and carrying on, and they graciously let us catch some of it on video, which I’ll post here as soon as I figure out how.

I’m in India for the second half of October, working with my team of intrepid tech writers. The Divali holiday is coming up, which in scale and importance is kind of like Christmas and Thanksgiving put together, and it seems that people start preparing for it pretty early, because the traffic this week hasn’t been nearly as mad as it was when I was here last March. But it’s still pretty scary. I went for a stroll the other night with my colleague Jeff and we ended up just walking around the block our hotel was on, because we were too prudent to cross a main road.

Here’s the view from the hotel we stayed at first. (We only lasted two nights there due to a kind of musty odor that pervaded the place. But it was pretty nice other than that.) Chennai is a graceful city full of palm trees and shaded verandas. Fruit trees are everywhere, although you don’t see any fruit growing on them because hungry people pick it all. Some days the smog reminds you of Mexico City, but when the air is clear it’s very beautiful here.

I’ve been suspecting for years that I’m less and less a separate physical being, more and more a node of the Internet. What’s cool about this is that now you can’t even talk about the possibility of netlessness outside of the network.

Trying to decide what to make of this. Offshoring has been on my mind as I’ve been getting ready to spend the second half of October in India working with my tiny team of tech writers. I’ve been pretty clear on where I belong in this whole picture: I don’t trust corporations to manage globalization, I don’t think the economic or social effects are nearly as pretty on either side as the Friedmanite hacks propose, and I don’t think cheap and docile labor power is a very good trade for quality and productivity. On the other hand: I don’t think I can make a living without participating in the software industry, and that means having some role in an offshoring relationship no matter what company I work for. I’ve tried to do it ethically, making sure everyone my own work touches comes off the better for it and practicing as much cultural relativism as I can figure out how. And let me not deny I’ve had a lot of fun with it — for all its hassles, an India trip twice a year is a eal privilege.