Short Stories

MADRAS TALKIES - article

I fell in love with the movies in the darkened cinema halls of Madras. They were called halls then, not movie houses, cineplexes or multiplexes. They were places of reverence, some grand palaces of velvet red curtains, rococo ceilings and seats as comfortable as sofas. And visiting them was an event in our young lives. Going to the cinema involved negotiations with my father or grandmother. She was much more of a cinema fan than my father so it was always easier persuading her for us to go to the cinema. My father was more serious in his choices, historical cinema like ‘Anarkali’ was more acceptable than American or British films.

The nearest cinema hall to us, a fifteen minute walk along almost deserted streets with scarcely any traffic, was the Roxy in Pursawalkam. It was a wondrous, huge hall, one of the finest examples of a cinema theatre, built in 1918 by the film pioneer Raghupathy Venkaiah. He first called it The Globe but then changed it to the sexier, Roxy. Its architectural style was baroque and it had a large entrance hall, so cool after the hot sun, where we bought our tickets. On either side of this hall were stairs leading up to the balcony but as we (sisters, brothers, cousin) were only allowed matinees, we never sat in the balcony. We entered the main hall through finely polished teak doors, and stepped on teak floors as we made our way to our seats. We chose them as central as possible and sat with expectation and impatience for the great curtain in front of us to reveal the silver screen. Overhead, fans whirled slowly, stirring the warm air and for some reason, maybe because of its size and height, the hall always seemed cool.

Then, at 3.30 pm, the curtain rose and the programme began. For the first half hour or so there were the cartoons – Bugs Bunny, Tom & Jerry, Popeye and others, I no longer remember. But the main attraction for us, every Saturday, was the serial. The serial was the forerunner to our television serials. Not soaps but real serials. They were all shot in black and white and were all action stories. The most famous one was ‘The Perils of Pauline’. Pauline was a young, and I thought as a child very stupid, beautiful woman who was constantly chased by bad guys and ending up with her life in peril. Apart from her constant, and irritating screams, and the grunts of the villains, there wasn’t much dialogue. So we never quite knew why the pursuit. The serial would run for about 20 minutes and end with Pauline either hanging by her finger tips from a skyscraper or else being tied to the train track as a steam train came roaring down towards her. There it would end with a ‘continued next week’ caption, accompanied by our groans of frustration. This of course ensured we’d back next week to see whether she fell off the building or was run over by the train.

But the matinee wasn’t over yet. There was the interval where we discussed Pauline’s predicaments in detail. We didn’t have cokes or pop corn then and, in fact, I believe the theatre forbade us bringing in food. Nor did they sell it. When the lights went down again, we’d be treated to another serial. This one had to do with spies and gangsters and the hero, thankfully a male, also ended up hanging either from a plane or strapped to a submarine about to dive. And it ended too with ‘continued next week’. Those weren’t the only films we saw, whether at a matinee or the 6.30 show. We also loved Bud Abbot & Lou Costello, Laurel & Hardy, the Three Stooges and, of course, the Marx Brothers. The fun was innocent as well as the violence. When someone was shot they just fell down, and blood didn’t splatter the screen. The Roxy hall still stands on Pursuwalkam High Road, now densely crowded with shops and chaotic traffic, decrepit, neglected and hidden behind ugly hoardings. I’ve thought of wandering in but it would be too disillusioning and ruin my happy memories.

Sometimes, if an adult, grandmother or an aunt, accompanied us, we could venture further afield for more serious cinema and even attend the 6.30 show. The Elphinstone was another hall, though not as splendid as the Roxy, on Mount Road, opposite the roundtana. Today, Annadorai’s statue stands somewhat near to where that old roundtana stood. This, for a start, was a large one with parking within it and, at most, there’d be a dozen cars in the space. The Elphinstone, named after a Governor of Madras Presidency, showed more adult fare – westerns, film noirs, romances, comedies (Francis, the Talking Mule) and musicals (‘Anchors Away’, ‘Singing’ in the Rain’) . We’d always go a half hour early as slap next door was, Jaffa’s, the best ice cream parlour in the world. There were tables and chairs, of course, but it also had a long zinc-topped counter with stools that spun around. Jaffa’s ice creams, milkshakes and sundays were even more seductive than the movies. They were served in tall, heavy cone glasses and we scooped them out with long silver spoons.

The Elphinstone also kept its doors open right through the film. They were half doors, like those in a horse’s stables, so the sea breeze, along with the fans, could keep us pleasantly cooled. Madras then being what was there wasn’t even the sound of a passing car, once the film started, to disturb our concentration. We, adults and children, were in the Elphinstone watching a Rita Hayworth/Glenn Ford film (I forget the title) on January 30, 1948 when the film stopped midway through. We waited as this happened not infrequently. Then we saw a familiar figure, our driver, searching for us. ‘You must come at once,” he said. We didn’t move until a hurriedly scrawled message appeared on the screen – Gandhi killed.

But the strangest of all the halls was the Minerva. It was in Georgetown, a most peculiar location for a cinema hall and even more peculiar was that it was on the second floor of a commercial building. I’ve forgotten on which street it once stood, but like all Georgetown’s streets was narrow. Yet, in retrospect, it wasn’t that unusual a location for a cinema hall. In those days, Georgetown was the cradle of Karnatic music and singing. The great singers and musicians lived along those narrow streets in far humbler surroundings than their wealthy land-owning patrons who occupied grander houses in the same area. The Minerva then nestled alongside our culture, although it showed mostly English language films. The Minerva was the first cinema hall to be air-conditioned. This in fact was a miracle for us and the hall was more of a cineplex style, small with maybe a hundred seats at most but it was a sheer pleasure to walk into that cold air. But the Minerva had to be showing a ‘must-see’ film for us to persuade an adult to have us driven right across the city.

There were other cinema halls we’d patronise. Around the corner from the Elphinstone was the Casino, still standing, with what was then a spacious parking lot in front, a curved drive. The Midland on General Patters road, the Globe on Mount Road, the Laskhmi along the Coome, to name just a few others. They showed Tamil, Telugu and Hindi films, each sticking to its linguistic speciality. It’s in one of them that I fell in love with Nargis. I don’t remember the name of the film but she played a village belle who fell in love with a philandering musician, Dev Anand, and came in search of him in the city.

Madras was a city with one of the earliest histories of Cinema in India. The first (date unknown) short films, in black and white of course, were shown by a European in the Victoria Public hall. They were non-fiction and all about daily life. Victoria Public hall, a great example of Raj architecture, still stands next to Rippon Building, but like the Roxy is in a state of total disrepair. Samikannu Vincent, an employee of the South Indian Railways in Trichy, purchased a film projector and silent films from the Frenchman Du Pont and set up a business as film exhibitor. He erected tents for screening films. His tent cinema became popular and he travelled all over the state, then Madras Presidency, with his mobile unit. In later years, he produced talkies and also built a cinema in Coimbatore. To celebrate the event of King George V's visit in 1909, a grand exhibition was organised in Madras. Its major attraction was the screening of short films accompanied by sound. A British company imported a Crone megaphone, made up of a film projector to which a gramophone with a disc containing prerecorded sound was linked, and both were run in unison, producing picture and sound simultaneously. However, there was no synched dialogue.

R.Venkiah, a wealthy landowner, in 1912 built a permanent cinema in the Mount Road area named Gaiety. It was the first in Madras to screen films on a full-time basis. This theatre is still functioning, although under different ownership.The Electric Theatre, on Pophams Broadway, off Mount Road, later screened silent short films back in 1915. It was built by Warwick Major and his partner Reginald Eyre but it wasn’t a great hall. Just a brick building with a corrugated roof and, quite rightly, it didn’t last too long as a cinema hall, though it still stands, housing the Philatelic society

Of course, being in love with this new medium, Madras just didn’t exhibit films, the city, or town I should say, made them as well. In the very centre of Madras, in its heart, was the Gemini studios, a large garden with studios set well back. We passed under an archway with the Gemini Twins blowing their trumpets. Gemini Studios is now only a memory called the Gemini flyover and nothing remains of that beautiful garden. But much nearer home, in fact opposite our house, was another film studio. In those days, we could wander in to watch the film in the making. My grandfather, who sometimes unwisely invested in films, also encouraged producers and directors to use part of our garden for shooting. MGR, Gemini Ganesan and others would sit around with my grandfather in-between takes and discuss the film’s story or the political scene. The films shot here were mostly religious epics because part of the garden was quite wild and looked like a forest through which Rama and Lakshman or anyone else could wander. Quite often I’d find chariots parked in the garden in the mornings, awaiting their charioteers to be made up and costumed, and ponies grazing on the lawn. Those old studios have long gone and film making is now concentrated in Kodambakkam which is now known as Kollywood. The AVM studios are always a bustle with films in its sound stages and, not far off, is Prasad labs waiting to develop and print the film stock. And Gemini studios is also in the suburb though in much humbler surroundings, not making films but developing them. The stars are now bigger, and much richer, than those olden day ones.

The love affair with the cinema, over a century long, still continues in Tamilnadu. In the last century, Tamilnadu churned out 50,000 films. Some great, but for the most part, bad. But that has never stopped the optimism and the love for making movies, and going to them. It’s no surprise that through this love affair with celluloid, Tamilnad continues to have movie stars and script writers as Chief Ministers and opposition leaders.

Rupert Murdoch - article

I wrote features for The Guardian when I had the inspiration to profile an upstart Australian called Rupert Murdoch. To the shock, and outrage, of the British media and the public he had just bought the most sacred of all the British newspapers, the News of the World. He beat out the well established British newspaper tycoon, Robert Maxwell, for the paper. The Carr family had owned it for the last 80 years and Murdoch promised to run the newspaper jointly with them. The title of this paper was a misnomer as the ‘world’, as we knew it, never appeared anywhere in those pages. It was a Sunday paper that concentrated almost entirely on revealing sexual scandals among the rich and famous and the general public. All of whom happily obliged for a column or two of fame to reveal their peccadilloes – for a price, naturally. No one ever admitted to reading this newspaper but it did have the phenomenal circulation of around 4-5 million. This in a time when the serious newspapers The Guardian, The Times, The Daily Telegraph boasted of a few hundred thousands and were proud of their popularity.

Murdoch had popped up in staid (but raffish) Fleet Street, almost like the rabbit from a magician’s hat, and no one quite knew who he was. He owned a few newspapers down under that no one had ever heard of, and the British media expected him to disappear back down the hole. And, hopefully, never to be heard from again. I was interested in writing the profile on him because of the air of mystery surrounding him, and didn’t think this story on a competitor would clash with the upmarket Guardian . It took a few days of persistence and waffling past his secretaries before I was informed that Rupert Murdoch would meet me at eleven o’clock in the morning in the offices of the News of the World. A short interview wasn’t exactly what I wanted. I wanted to spend a few days with him, as I had with racing drivers, rock stars, tycoons and movie stars. I hung out, basically, as they went about their business. A female French movie star, after a dinner, liked the idea so much that she invited me skiing for a weekend in Klosters and I went along, though I never skied. But Murdoch’s minions dug in their heels – an interview, that’s it.

The newspaper’s library didn’t have much background on my subject. There were a few clippings – born 1931 in Victoria, and was reading Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Worcester College, Oxford, when his father, Keith, died in 1952. I thought at least he wasn’t quite the stranger to England. Rupert returned to join the News, the company holding shares in various small town Australian newspapers. His father had left many debts and the family had to sell off the shares to clear them and to pay death duties. So Rupert wasn’t left much to play with but took up journalism with great enthusiasm. He began his acquisition spree when he bought a rundown Sunday newspaper in Perth and raunched it up. From there in 1956, he started TV Week, (still the most popular TV magazine) and New Idea, the oldest women’s magazine. He was on a roll, which has never stopped.

However, in 1958, Murdoch had a bitter taste of political power and betrayal. His newspaper, the News campaigned to save a young Aboriginal fair ground worker, accused of killing a small girl, from the death penalty. Murdoch’s campaign succeeded and the worker’s sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. This enraged the then Premier Thomas Playford who ordered a royal commission of enquiry (headed by the very judge who had passed the death sentence). It found the worker guilty and Murdoch, the newspaper and the editor were charged with sedition. Murdoch, pleading youthful ignorance, grovelled to Playford who agreed to drop the charges if Murdoch fired his editor (an old friend and mentor) and paid the costs of the commission. Murdoch, unable to face his friend, fired him in a terse letter. (In 2002, Murdoch financed a film, ‘Black and White’ in a re-telling of the story)

In 1963, Murdoch found The Australian Australia’s first quality national newspaper. By this time he had cemented his foothold in Britain by buying the Sun newspaper and turning it into a tabloid with topless women on Page Three as a staple selling point. During the Magaret Thatcher regime, Murdoch, with her support, broke the back of the print unions and revolutionised the newspapers by shifting out of Fleet Street to Canary Wharf. When we met, he had been married to Patricia Booker, an airline hostess, whom he divorced and then married Anna Torv (whom he divorced in 1999 and paid her a settlement of $200 millions). He had two children at that time by her, Elisabeth and Lachlan. (A third, James, was born a few years later).

The News of the World then was on Bouviere Street, a crooked lane trickling off Fleet Street. It was in a 19th century building which smelt of printing ink. I slid past the uniformed doorman and a cautious secretary met me at reception to check my credentials before leading me up wide stone stairs and down a musty corridor. She opened a door and waved me into an office. A slight man, with somewhat wary eyes, dressed in a white shirt and a tie, sat behind a bare desk. It felt more like a barrier which he would defend against any assault. He looked in his mid-30s, quite fit, his hairline receding. The room too was bare of any wall decorations. I had hoped to see his office, some place of a grander scale for a man who had just bought a newspaper, but this was all he was willing to offer, the bare room, so one couldn’t get a feel for his tastes. Even his jacket was hanging elsewhere in the building. Murdoch rose and shook hands firmly, and throughout our talk he was very courteous, polite and non-committal as a brick wall.

‘What decided you to buy the News of the World?’ It was for sale and has a healthy circulation, he explained in a soft voice, almost accent-less, neither Australian nor British. ‘Will you be changing its style?’ I have assured the Carr family that they will work with me to keep the tradition of the paper. We went around in a few circles, no, he had no plans to buy any other British newspapers; yes, he’d studied at Oxford and admired the British way of life. We went into his personal life, just the edges, about divorce and marriage, about kids, about the media.

Here was a man very distrustful of the media, especially the British one which had been sniping at him since he bought the newspaper. I suggested that, as my style of writing profiles, was to spend time with him while he went around the newspaper, chatted with editors, watched a print run, could we… Murdoch smiled. I’m off to Melbourne tomorrow for a few weeks, you’re welcome to join me. Melbourne! I’d be lucky to get the cab fare back to my newspaper. We found some common ground discussing cricket, Ashes tours. He wasn’t a cricketer, had played in his school but not since and certainly not at Oxford. He’d never visited India, one day he might, he said. He checked his watch, a call came through as a reminder. He rose and, courteous as ever, walked me down the corridor to the stairs. It hadn’t been an easy interview, as some people are happy to talk of themselves. Murdoch wasn’t one of them.

I returned to my newspaper, and told Peter Preston, the features editor, about it. He frowned and said, ‘Why on earth did you waste your time? Even if you write it up, I doubt I’d run something on him. Just forget him, he won’t be around long.’ I made no mention of accompanying Murdoch to Melbourne as I foresaw a discussion on the cab fare.

Murdoch reneged on his promise to the Carr family, moved that newspaper even more down market, and then bought the prestigious London Times. He fired the editor, Harold Evans, in his first year of ownership. Evans had been the twelfth editor in that paper’s 200 years of existence. In Murdoch’s first 11 years of ownership he hired and fired five editors. Evans, in his book ‘Good Times, Bad Times’, commented : ‘The most charitable explanation of Murdoch’s attitude to a promise was that he meant it when he made it; only circumstances changed.’ An ex-Times reporter, Bruce Pages, wrote that ‘Rupert is a very kind man personally….There’s a lot to be said for Rupert Murdoch the man. There’s nothing to be said for Rupert Murdoch the journalist.’ The writer Phillip Knightley said: ‘He has said he never interferes with his editors’ editorial decisions. Absolutely true, because he is careful to choose editors whose views agree with his.’

Murdoch is the last of the great Media barons like Lord Northcliff, Lord Beaverbrook, Henry Luce and William Randolph Hearst (on who Orson Welles based his classic film ‘Citizen Kane’). All of them kept a tight rein on their editors. They were limited in their vision, confined to one country, while Murdoch spans the globe from Hong Kong, India, Australia and Britain to the United States. Apart from newspapers, magazines and publishing houses, he also owns a Hollywood film studio, television networks (the right wing Fox Channel in the US, BskyB in Britain and Star in Asia) and the popular internet site Myface. At 74, his latest and most controversial acquisition, after a long battle, has been the Wall Street Journal, the most prestigious financial newspaper in the world. He paid $60 a share when it was quoted at $36 on the Dow.

He’s a clever gambler. Back then, he’d bet his whole Australian holdings when he bought the News of the World, and won. No one doubts his canny gift to foresee the future. He’s quoted as telling his executives, ‘You think I’m too old. I think you’re too old.’ He has promised the Bancroft family that he will not interfere with its editorial content but we know from his dealing with the Carr family, and his other newspapers, circumstances will change.

He may not be as flamboyant as those old barons but the power he wields must be a few magnitudes greater than theirs ever was.

ORWELLIAN BRITAIN - article.

The cheaper way to travel around London is to use an Oyster card. I decided to buy one, and save a few pounds on using the ordinary Travel card. However, when I asked for the Oyster card I was handed an application form which required the usual details on all these forms – name, address, telephone number and my signature. Quite simple, except when you use an Oyster card you can be tracked on your journeys across London. A central computer knows I entered Bond Street station at 8.45 am and left the underground at Hammersmith at 9.30 am, and then caught bus number 209 at 9.40 am, into Barnes. I didn’t buy an Oyster, not because I had devious journeys, but I felt uneasy that someone knows my exact movements in the city’s transport system.

But it’s not that easy to escape surveillance in modern day UK. Even as I make a journey across the city, someone calculated, that I will be caught on the CCTVs - on every street, tube station, bus stop, railway station and building - a minimum of 300 times. The 7/7 tube train bombers were caught of CCTV’s as they made their way to the trains. That didn’t prevent the tragedy. Should I drive along a motorway or even a country lane, one of the 4.2 million CCTV cameras scattered around Britain, more than even the whole of Europe, will catch my twists and turns through the countryside. Speed cameras will log my speed on the motorways. I’m not sure who is watching all those thousands of monitors. But someone is, that’s for sure. The CCTV computers also have the software now to circle a wanted face, and send an alarm to the watchers. Wanted faces are supposedly known criminal types, or terrorist types, but who’s to say whose face is in the computer.

London now has a ‘Congestion’ charge for cars entering central London. If you don’t pay the charge, now eight pounds, the cameras have your license plate and you’ll get the bill, with a huge fine, for evading the congestion charge. By next year, London will also abolish parking meters on all streets. Instead of feeding in a pound for 20 minutes you will have to SMS your license number, time and the parking slot number. And SMS when you leave the slot.

‘Big Brother’, coined by George Orwell in his novel ‘1984’, on a dictatorship has softly and subtly invaded British life. In ‘1984’, Britain was constantly at war, and people lived in fear of an invasion, which allowed the State to create a ‘Big Brother’ to watch for traitors. Fear is once more the reason for today’s state to watch its citizens. Increasingly, and there’s more to come, the state will be watching your every move. There will be no privacy, no real freedom of movement. Since 9/11, and under the prime ministership of Tony Blair, this has been done in the name of protecting the populace from terrorism. Al Qaeda has achieved the ‘conquest’ of Britain where Hitler failed. The British people stoically weathered the Blitz of their country during WWII but in modern Britain they have succumbed to State power without even a whimper. Their conqueror was already within its borders.

Under the Terrorist Act 2000, the police have been given the unprecedented right, according to civil libertarians, the right to stop and search anyone. In 2005, 35,000 people were stopped and searched, not one of them a terrorist. Between May 1997 and August 2006, the Labour government created 3,023 new criminal offences. Now, the age-old of freedom of demonstrating in front of the Houses of Parliament is an offence; heckling a minister at a conference is also an offence.

The State hasn’t stopped tightening its grip on its citizens either. By 2009, Britain will introduce the National Identity Register, linking all data bases. The computer has made this surveillance even easier. In the pre-computer days, organisations like the Stasi, the East German secret police, maintained millions of files on its citizens but no doubt the paperwork allowed a dissident or two to slip through the web. In the NIR, you will be tracked through your DNA, bank account, credit card, student card (which books have you taken from the library?). It was also have your medical and dental records and no doubt your sexual preferences, apart from your biometric date – your iris scan and fingerprints. Your child will also be on the computer: how well did it do in school? Does it play truant? Does it play games? And of course, it will know where you are at any given moment of the day. Even escaping by car won’t be possible as the State is legislating that every new car must contain a GPS chip. Naturally, this supposedly is to track your car if it’s stolen, but the State will know exactly where you are in your car.

The other day, walking through Trafalgar Square, I looked up. There were three helicopters permanently hovering over the area. They didn’t move, I guess, all day as after lunch they were still in the same positions. I imagined the watchers scanning the streets through high-powered binoculars (or even more sophisticated equipment) to make sure everyone docilely behaved themselves. Well, the potential terrorist isn’t exactly going to wave his bomb up to the helicopter.

From July 1st, it’s against the law to smoke in any enclosed area – office, restaurant, pub, bank – and you’re liable to a thousand pound fine. Every enclosed area, by law, must display a no smoking sign. Smokers might consider this an erosion on their liberty while non-smokers will be relieved they don’t have to breathe in secondary smoke. A friend with his own company was sitting in his office, smoking, when a delivery man entered. The man pointed to the cigarette and growled ‘after July 1st you’ll be breaking the law’. But then, a week ago, one of Mr. Blair’s ministers’s, mentioned in a speech that the Brits were drinking too much in the privacy of their home and this was worrying the State. It won’t be long, as in the old days of prohibition in Tamilnadu, Brits will need permits to buy their booze. Except, it won’t be a tattered piece of paper but the quota will go on their NIR. When they go to buy a bottle of wine they’ll be told that sorry, they’ve exceeded their quota.

Sadly, the British are meekly accepting their new way of life in what can only be called an open prison. Of course, it’s for their own protection that they will be watched day and night as re prisoners in enclosed prisons. As any security expert will tell you finding criminals and terrorists can only be done through informants and no number of CCTVS will do that job.

Right now, the British are ruled by a benign State, if you can call such increasing paranoia benign. But the future can never, ever be predicted. Should a more malign government come into power, it will have all the tools of repression, and a dictatorship, already in place. All it will have to do is press ‘enter’.

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