The Wedding Guest (2018)

Radhika Apte in The Wedding Guest

The British-American thriller The Wedding Guest (2018, directed by Michael Winterbottom) became available on Sky a few weeks ago and turned out to be one of the best films they added in a while in my humble opinion.

Playing in Pakistan and India, it tells the story of the abduction of a bride (Samira, played by Indian actress Radhika Apte) shortly before her imminent wedding and various stages of flight through Amritsar, New Delhi and Goa. Jay, the kidnapper, a British national of South Asian origin, is competently played by Dev Patel.

While not an action movie, the film keeps up the suspense, revealing details of the characters as the story moves on along the roads of Pakistan and India.

A dream

For P.

A bad dream arisen
from distortion,
not quite the truth,
having been left
with incorrect
impressions not
corrected on
purpose. It took
on surprising
proportions as a
ferocious
animal assaulting
me, like Tipu
Sultan’s tiger
the English soldier.
Such fierceness
my feelings must
have. Perhaps
not for you.
About you –
about you and me,
about being goaded
and lied to.

– Iself (© 2011)

Written for NaPoWriMo, day 17. Actually, today's task would have been to reduce a passage from Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life, but I could not get into it, try as I might. (I tried 4 versions, calling them Curtain calls / Exercises in elimination and conversion.) But I still had the remnants of a dream to chew on, and they went into the poem above. Last night I found out, more or less by chance, that someone I care about has been dishonest with me, telling me things about herself that are not true, the greatest puzzle being the reason for this dishonesty.

Tippoos's Tiger – a life-size 18th century automaton on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

From across the river

Dark-eyed,
from across the Hooghly she beckons to me

Mysterious night
across the river beckons to me

The old chamber softly lit
beckons to me

A sweetly solemn thought, sun and wind and beat of sea
beckon to me

“I am your woman,” she says
and beckons to me

– Iself (© 2010)

Written for napowrimo #26, get scrappy.

Note
As I was quite sure that I did not have any scribbled or unfinished poem in my wallet or in a notebook, I went to a random poetry generator for inspiration, picking a poem from the “poetry in motion” category. The above romantic/folkloric poem, which is more or less in the form of a ghazal, is the result.

I’m not posting the original generated poem because it has ingredients I did not care for and did not use.

The Hooghly river is a distributary of the Ganges in West Bengal, India, and flows by Kolkata.

I wanna hold your hand / the Beatles Indian style

Nandigram conflict continues

The western media do not seem to cover it at all, but the Nandigram SEZ conflict I posted on from Kolkata in January is still very much going on, or has even escalated dramatically.

Sanhati | Fighting Neoliberalism in Bengal | keeps reporting.

What continues to strike me as paradoxical is that it is a communist party – which should by definition defend the interests of the common people – that is behind this forcible acquisition of agricultural land for industrialization.

But then again it could be said that communist parties have a long history of not representing the people's interests, be it in Russia, China, North Korea or elsewhere.

Even more generally speaking, it could be questioned whether any party whatsoever and anywhere actually represents the people's interests.

Reminds me of a President Bush joke.

Another Indian News Item

In what is one of the most horrible serial crimes ever, a man and his servant have abducted and killed more than 30 children in Noida, a suburb of New Delhi.

Blog from Kolkata

Not very far from here in the state of West Bengal there's warfare going on - villagers are tearing up roads to prevent the police from coming in. There was an exchange of fire two nights in a row. Supporters of the CPM (the Marxist Communist Party) and inhabitants of Nandigram and other villages were going at each other with rifles and home-made bombs.

What it's about - the government's intent to create an SEZ (special economic zone) on village land.