Awaiting Kerala Cafe

Malayalam cinema has been dead for a long time - notwithstanding the fact that Adoor G is still alive. After all Dada Falke award is nothing more than an invitation to one's own funeral!

Kerala Cafe - is the new Malayalam incarnation of Dekalog by a Krzysztof Piesiewicz ingénue - Renjith. Instead of a project house/apartment complex, the general setting is a cafe in a railway station. A sneak peek here.

I haven't seen the movie yet. But it has managed to spark a bit of anticipation. I have always thought of malayalam directors as capable but weighed down by the pulls of market and bizarre perceptions of neurotic distributors and prejudiced producers. Bringing ten of them with individual plots together relieved them of the pressure of carrying a two hour enterprise to the far end of box office. From what I've seen from the promos, it promises quite a bit. The compositions appeared tight and rhythm taut with an unmistakable thread of a theme. After a long time, the actors looked really the part!

Looking forward to watch it.

Globalisation and IWE...

The effects of globalisation on IWE (Indian Writing in English)?

"As the Indian novel in English, assisted by India's rising profile in global affairs, finds an audience wherever English is spoken, it often seems to sacrifice the particularities of Indian experience for a watered-down idiom that can speak to readers across the globe.." - Chandrahas Chaudhury writes about the Indian writer in English no longer being seen as someone who panders to the tastes of the West. But at what cost?

Click here to access the full article.

apropos Dalrymple

Take off from a review of malayalam colonial era movie, Pazhassi Raja - a royal nemesis of East India Company from the erstwhile kingdom of Kottayam.

...18th century Kottayam, a royal house otherwise renowned for producing Sanskritists and Kathakali playwrights. On the map, it’s approximately where William Dalrymple was doing his research at approximately the same time. Why, if he had wandered on to the sets of this multi-culti Company-era epic, there surely would have been a walk-on part for a cherubic Scotsman. And by offering to impale himself on a quivering Kurichiya (tribal) spear, he could have atoned for the sins of his ancestors at one stroke and spared himself the rigours of ethnography!