Triumph of Will

A troubled childhood leaves the prince a stutterer, but nothing worse. He grows up to be a normal adult, a loving husband and father, and what is more, an intelligent royal with adequate understanding of the role of royalty in politics.

As a child the prince was being pinched by the nanny when presented before his parents, the King and the Queen of England, to show him in bad light. He also experienced his younger brother's long illness and subsequent death, and was made to undergo excruciating pain on account of the steel braces he had to wear to set right his knock knees. A very dominating father and a bully of an elder brother completed the picture of the young prince's growing up woes and erosion of self confidence.

It takes someone with a deep understanding of human nature to bring to the surface these early life episodes and to show them as the contributing factors for the Prince's speech impairment. The plot of the movie revolves around the lively tussle between the so called speech therapist, Dr Logue (Geoffrey Rush), without a formal medical education and the blue blood (Colin Firth), who finds it very difficult to shed his royal pomposity to accept the therapist as an equal. These moments of vacillation by the prince on the face of contrived provocation by the therapist, gives the movie its high points. Logue shows remarkable sangfroid in his moments of dejection and humiliation. The scene at Westminster Abbey on the eve of the coronation of the Prince as King George VI brings out the best in both Firth and Rush, who play out a protracted duel as vexation, anger and snobbery get a free flow. In the end the duel turns out to be the personal triumph for both the contestants, as both of them overcome great challenges.

I had started watching the movie with great hesitation, as I thought stammer is too insignificant a subject to knit a story around. But my fear was short lived because soon I discovered that stammer was just a peg on which hangs a great tale of trust, friendship, and of psychological triumph.

As to whether these factors are good enough to bring the movie all the Oscars it won, in the face of stiff competition from other good movies of the year, I have my own doubts. But then Oscar always loves the high and mighty. 

A Bend in the River: A Review

No writer understands the psychology of the uprooted better than V.S. Naipaul, who was directly affected by the tides of history that took his ancestors from some nondescript Indian village to the plantations of Trinidad. Struggle for assimilation and cultural conflicts are thus recurring themes in Naipaul's novels. When the master craftsman posits his rootless characters in a milieu shaped by the forces of neocolonialism, the plot gets really complicated and multifaceted.

Salim inhabits such a world of complexity, which is unpredictable, violent, confused and given to whims and caprices of the mighty. The locale is an unnamed country in Africa--which many presume to be Congo--writhing under the weight of its violent liberation from colonial rule. Salim, comes from a family of Indian descent, settled in the East Coast of Africa. He is out in search of his destiny in the war ravaged society. 



Salim's self-imposed exile takes him on a westward journey into the heart of Africa that is reminiscent of the slaves' march from central Africa to the eastern coasts in the 18th century. Like the slaves Salim is moving towards the great unknown, an area of bloody rampage, but unlike theirs, his journey is voluntary.

We see the city where Salim comes to take up his business, with his alert and observant eyes. The narrator Salim is an intelligent and practical man, trying to settle down with his own entrepreneurship. He is hard working, sympathetic and judicious. But the ebb and flow of events in the fast changing post-revolution society rattles his confidence and leaves him at the mercy of the political developments. He reads the signs of things early on and takes a sensible decision to leave. When he leaves the place in a steamer, we see a land of utter chaos and hopelessness receding from his view.

Naipaul presents his views on African people and politics, their culture and mysticism through his sensitive narrator very deftly. The writer is not very optimistic about the people, who are perennially trapped in their ambivalence towards non-African or western society and culture. While on the one hand they destroy all the external trappings of the exploiters' culture, on the other hand the dictator shamelessly imitates the French ruler's symbols of power. While the western powers are labeled as exploiters, corruption in its most vicious form squeezes the society dry.

Naipaul shines as he paints the heart of darkness. 

Plastic English

  I was bewildered when a young junior colleague handed me an application for leave ‘for attending son-in-law’s marriage.’

“Correct this”, I said handing the application back to him.

“Sorry sir, the date has been finalised, it can not be corrected now,” he protested.

‘Er…I meant this, not the date,” I said, pointing at where “son-in-law” was written on the paper.

Looking confused, he said, “What is there to correct, sir? He is my saala, the son of my in-laws”. What I presumed to be a casual slip, turned out to be a matter of conviction for him, backed by what seemed to him an unassailable logic.

            English language always lends itself to innovative uses by people for whom it is not their first language. But no one employs such ingenuity as do the denizens of Indian officialdom. Consider the predicament of the gentleman, single-handedly manning a remote outpost, when the condition of his ailing wife deteriorated. This was the text of the telegram he sent to his head office, `Wife serious, send substitute.’ Or imagine the shock the husband must have received when he called up the office of his wife, who worked as the head cashier in a bank. After a long wait he was politely informed, “Madame is giving delivery in the strong room, Please call after sometime.”

            These are not instances of Orwell’s `Doublespeak’, nor are they examples of double entendre employed by creative writers.  Forced to use a foreign tongue in a demanding work situation, the effervescent babus unwittingly produce these gems by the dozen.

             But the language does not always get the better of the babus. As the following example will depict, with some amount of ingenuity, the language can be manipulated to the best advantage of the user.

            This was a time when license raj was still a way of life, and not a term of derision. The babus ruled the roost, then. A man came to an office to apply for, what else, a license. The babu demanded his pound of flesh. As the price seemed a bit steep, the man set out to explore other possibilities. The MLA of his area came to his rescue and took him to the minister, who turned out to be still more cooperative. The minister asked for the application and wrote ‘Approved’ on it. When the man came to the babu next morning to collect his license, the babu had already added ‘not’ before the word ‘approved’. Exasperated, the man realized his mistake and asked in a conciliatory tone if anything could be done at that stage. The babu reassured him that
nothing was impossible there, but only the price would be much more than what had been asked for initially. After money changed hands the babu asked the man to come the next morning to collect his license.  The man came the next day, and the babu showed him his application. The ‘Not approved’ now read `Note Approved’. The license was issued without any further delay.