Know Your Enemy

Dear Manu,

How are you? You'll be out soon. And perhaps you'll get a chance to spend some quality time with your friend from Tihar, Vikas (he's at AIIMS four times a month, so chances are you'll catch him there!). So it's wedding season in the family -- my congratulations and best wishes! Here's hoping that the Sharma family gets to celebrate in peace.

Unlike Nitish Katara, who was abducted and murdered from a similar wedding.Your friend Vikas was involved in some way, but by the number of times he's been let out of Tihar recently, it is unclear precisely what his involvement was in that young man's untimely death. So, my friendly advice is don't let anyone with a gun anywhere near your brother's wedding. You have to respect your family, after all it is your family! How would it look otherwise? They've been behind you through thick and thin (literally too -- that food in Tihar must be pretty good!).

I heard the great news that you've got an NGO that apparently helps children of prisoners. How noble. Truly. I hear you've also been a model inmate at Tihar -- helping co-criminals file appeals, prepare legal papers, find all those beautiful cracks in our glorious legal system. Yeoman service. When you get out (oh wait, that doesn't really matter), you'll be able to hit the ground running with all the people you may have helped get out as well. You should feel proud.

Sabrina Lal was on TV yesterday (from what I hear, you watched the news last night on a flatscreen TV, but that is probably just irresponsible gossip) to ask why Manu Sharma was getting the chance to attend a wedding, when her sister Jessica, the girl you murdered (what can I do, that's what everyone says!) over a glass of whiskey a dozen years ago, won't be attending anything. Neelam Katara, the mother of the man who your brave friend Vikas murdered (again, that's what everyone says!) with a hammer, says the whole point of a prison sentence is that luxuries -- weddings, parties, socialising -- are stripped from a person's life. But what does she know? Losing a son and having your life crumble around you can make one think all sorts of peculiar things. What has she achieved fighting against people like you for so long? Nothing! Who is she to cast aspersions on the extra-special favours being extended to you? Let her get some powerful friends in some powerful political parties. Then we can call it an even discussion, hai na? Then there's Mr Chaman Lal Mattoo! Old man doesn't know what he's talking about. :)

Is it true that you were involved in a brawl in a Delhi hotel? And then escaped through the toilet window of the famous LAP lounge bar in South Delhi? You know how people love talking in Delhi. You were out to tend to your ailing mother, everyone knows that. After all, presiding over a women's cricket function in Chandigarh can be pretty hard on the system. I hope you were able to make her feel better. And do pass on my regards. And let us take a moment to remember your dear departed grandmother. I'm sure she would have approved tricking the Police into thinking that she had only just reached her heavenly abode. Who else would be able to tend to her "last" rites? Real genius, bhai.

Now, you have your NGO, which is supposed to be doing all that great work for the underprivileged, instead throwing itself into clearing your great name, on Twitter no less! A valiant effort.

I wish you a happy family wedding week, but I have one small piece of advice: Please be safe -- there are plenty of psychos out there who think nothing of shooting people over liquor.

Best wishes and happy hunting!

A Friend

(This post was originally published on the Headlines Today website)

Considering just how central Tintin was to growing up, and the contemptuous view I have always taken of people who either did not or could not appreciate Tintin the same way I (and a whole subculture) did, I thought I’d watch Spielberg’s Tintin film before anyone else. Before anyone’s irritating opinion was allowed space on the forbidding foyer of the Tintin lobe of my brain. Alas, that wasn’t to be. I watched it only today, over a week after it came to cinemas in the country. In the week since its release, I’d heard different things: about how it was downright awful (the Guardian piece on it was hugely entertaining in itself) to being just about ok. Someone else said it was a warm tribute to Tintin, and that any true fan would receive it with amused sensitivity and not brash disregard. It must be said that most Tintin fans, including me, have felt at some point or other, that Spielberg tinkering with the legend of Tintin smacked of an oaf fingering something of eternal beauty that could only be soiled with touch. That Tintin belonged on the page, unmoving, ageless, eerily sexless and pristine in his idealism. Anyone who wanted to transform him into a moving, talking figure risked destroying the collective imaginations of millions of his fans — who imagined his voice a certain way, the sound effects another. What Spielberg was doing was walking a thin line. As someone who didn’t grow up reading Tintin, Spielberg says he was conscious of the great task he had signed up for. It had to be treated with utter sensitivity, and almost surgical regard for what was sacred: most of it subliminal and inexplicable, yet something that any Tintin fan would understand. I decided that I had to watch the film with a clean slate. On the one hand, I was an avowed Tintin fan — one who had pilgrimaged to Brussels to pay homage. So here’s the list of ten things I loved, and ten things I hated about Spielberg’s Tintin film:

LOVED:

1. Background score: Full of pregnant intrigue and darkness, it fit just right. Choosing the music, in my mind, was one of the most important things — the books only have the characters’ voices. Music in a film would a distraction no matter what you did with it. The score they created worked nicely.

2. Tintin’s apartment: It was just the way I imagined it. It made the small snatches of apartment one sees in Unicorn come completely alive. The chest of drawers, the side table, the red armchair.

3. Title sequence: Everyone says this, and there’s a reason. You’ll have to watch it to know why. Spectacular.

4. Ship battle: The ship battle was stunning. It made one of the most dramatic flash-backs in the Tintin series truly rivetting.

5. Zachary as a villain worked well. Transforming a minor character from the books into the central antagonist with an ancestry going back to Francis Haddock’s arch rival was clever and executed well. It could have been trite and forced, but it worked. I was skeptical when I realised where Spielberg/Jackson were going with Zachary, but I think they pulled it off.

1. Haddock’s accent: I’d like the find the idiot who decided to give the Captain a Scottish accent. Unforgivable.

2. Exclamations: The Great Snakes! and Blistering Barnacles! were out of place and sounded foolish. Such stuff, while a core part of the Tintin experience, clearly belongs only on the printed page. Haddock’s Troglodytes! from the capsized boat in that boozy Scottish accent was like a rusted knife in the gut.

3. Choice of story: I wish Spielberg had chosen a different album to begin his films with. The Secret of the Unicorn/Red Rackham’s Treasure are brilliant, but I’d probably have chosen Seven Crystal Balls/Prisoners of the Sun to start. The stuff borrowed from The Crab With The Golden Claws were, to my mind, a criminal waste — I think Crab is a separate film altogether, and hopefully a better one. Throwing Castafiore into the mix was a mistake.

4. Alan wasted!: Villain Alan was completely wasted! Devious ship first mate to Captain Haddock, Alan is a personal favourite character (he is outstanding in Flight 714).

5. Red Rackham's Treasure? The end of this film was the end of Red Rackham's Treasure, with a nudge-nudge comment about more treasure in the seas, which IS Red Rackham's Treasure. WTF. I'm having minor nightmares about which storylines Spielberg will mash into Rackham. Please. Not Red Sea Sharks. That's sacred territory. Don't go there, Mr S.

1. Am I Evil by Diamond Head

2. War Pigs by Black Sabbath (and covered by Faith No More)

3. Holy Wars... The Punishment Due by Megadeth

4. Angel of Death by Slayer

5. Kill the King by Rainbow

6. Electric Eye by Judas Priest

7. Crystal Mountain by Death

8. BC AD by Nocturnus

9. Among the Living by Anthrax

10. The Great Southern Trendkill by Pantera

11. The End Complete by Obituary

12. Slave New World by Sepultura

13. Vampiria by Moonspell

14. Hammer Smashed Face by Cannibal Corpse

15. Slash Dementia by Carcass

1. HIGH VOLTAGE DRAMA / HIGH DRAMA ("There was high-drama in the Bigg Boss house today as Dolly Bindra slapped two men in their sleep")

2. GOT A CLEAN CHIT ("Mr Chidambaram was shocked when he got a clean chit he wasn't expecting in the 2G note episode")

3. IN THE WEE HOURS ("The couple returned in the wee hours to find their house ransacked")

4. SHOW OF SUPPORT ("Mulayam's unexpected presence is being seen as a show of support")

5. LIFE CAME TO A STANDSTILL / SCREECHING HALT ("Rains have brought life to a standstill / screeching halt in Mumbai")

6. "PELTING" STONES ("Heavy stone-pelting in the Pahalgam area has forced Omar Abdullah to stop tweeting and start governing")

7. SEETHES IN ANGER ("The judge seethed in anger as the 2G Scam accused sat his wife on his lap during closing arguments")

8. FATE IS SEALED ("While Kiran Bedi's fate is sealed, Afzal Guru's is not")

9. THE REAL QUESTION IS... ("The real question is, what the hell does Mr Agnivesh think he is talking about?")

10. THE QUESTION NOW REMAINS...

11. KEEPING FINGERS CROSSED

12. WAITING WITH BAITED BREATH

13. FALLEN ON DEAF EARS

14. TURN A BLIND EYE

15. REMAINS TO BE SEEN

16. TIME WILL TELL

17. RAP ON KNUCKLES

18. PROVE TO BE A DAMPENER

19. PLAYED SPOILSPORT

20. SILVER LINING

21. IT WAS BUSINESS AS USUAL

22. RED LETTER DAY

23. CLEARLY

24. NOTWITHSTANDING

25. CAME AS NO SURPRISE

26. HOUSEHOLD NAME

27. MUTE SPECTATOR

28. BREAK THE IMPASSE

29. BOLT FROM THE BLUE

30. FEVER PITCH

31. EVERYONE WHO'S ANYONE

32. IMBROGLIO

33. HIGHLY-PLACED SOURCES

34. CAST A SHADOW ON TALKS

35. GROUND REALITIES

36. PALL OF GLOOM

37. TOKEN EXERCISE

38. "TERROR RETURNED TO HAUNT..."

39. QUESTION MARK OVER TALKS

40. POPULAR HAUNT

--------------

EXTENDED LIST BY CONTRIBUTORS

41. RETURNED TO NORMALCY

42. SLAMMED

There is something about this city's centres of power that smells overpoweringly of death. I cannot imagine what it is, or why, but it does. Rajpath, the perfect highway that dashes out under India Gate and zooms inexorably towards the President's Palace is an unlikely grave, but it was, and a supremely agonising one for a lone Pariah Kite a few days before January 26.

As I tempered my engine into a free 80 kilometres per hour, I noticed with a degree of alarm that a swathe of kites had begun to spiral dive towards a point on the road about forty yards ahead -- a distance I would cover in less than two seconds at my velocity. But before I could slam onto the brakes and swerve righteously onto the orange mud paths that flank the grand tarmac, a police squad car tore past me, my little vehicle almost banking in its wake. About a second to go before the meeting point. As I gunned closer to 90, I stepped past the police car and noticed just as I passed that the spiralling kites had almost hit, and then, a nauseous thwack.

The police car gunned right back past me, while I floored jammed my brakes, fish-tailing my car, pulling on the handbrake and getting the vehicle to momentarily threaten to turn turtle, before coming to a burnt-rubber rest in the middle of the line, turning all the way around. And there in the middle of the road, forty yards ahead of me, I saw the great bird.

I got out of the car and walked the forty yards as slowly as I could. The wind was icy cold. When I reached I found the kite, on its back, it's great yellow tearing talons grabbing at nothing, a gash torn into the bird from its throat, right through its great while breast right down to its legs. As I stood and watched, the bird, which had at least a four-foot wingspan and was therefore not a mere dying beast, felt compelled to emanate the most high-pitched screeches of a death rattle. A momentary pause of stillness allowed me to move closer, but I was immediately beaten back by a great flapping of its wings that made my hair fly and my trousers flap. The great bird's skull was smashed and one of its eyes was a singly bloody blob now. Out of its open, screeching beak came the semi-digested remnants of recently devoured prey. My guess is that it was a mouse, or at the very most, a small rat. There were bits of mammal tail in the bird's vomit.

I bent down and the bird flapped me away again, using its talons to tear out its bad eye and attempt to lift off again. But its gut had begun to give. A small pool of bird blood had collected around the creature as it made a final attempt to fly, took off for what was a supremely impressive second, and landed back, this time on its face, right in its own pool of blood, its nostrils buried under the puddle's surface, it's final eye shut. I must have stood there for another hour, because when I looked up, there was a newspaper photographer taking pictures of the bird and me. As he left, he said he would send me copies, but I'm not sure how, because I did not tell him who I was or where I lived.

Then I picked up the bird, by the tip of its wing and held it up so it was stretched to the limits of its great girth. It almost spanned the length of my body, and when I held it up, it made a final shudder of death-rattle before going limp, its talons buckling into its breast, the neck assymetrically and impossibly contorted backwards, the bloody eye still open and staring. I dropped the bird on a patch of cold grass by the side of the grand highway and watched. It was still alive, but I didn't think it would be for long.

I left, and went away to meet boring people in the centres of power for boring things and I told them about the bird. I think they listened because it was fun, but I don't know anything else. I thought maybe a final death-rattle would shake the great bird out of its impossibility and it might spiral back away upward. And with that comfort, I rushed back to my car and drove rapidly back to where I had left the great bird. It had been nearly four hours. If it was not there, the death rattle would have worked. Why the hell didn't I wait to see it, I thought.

But the death rattle hadn't worked. The bird lay there, just as I had left it, except that it had drawn its wings inward, probably to pack in a last joule of warmth before it died. I poked at it with a thistle, but it was indisputably over.