Reading in 2020 : The year-end 'best of' list

2020 was/is a year unlike any year we have lived so far for the most of us. In terms of reading,  it was just another year for me though. The only thing I tried to do differently this year was to stay clear of any books or movies related to pandemics or epidemics. As if we don't have enough already.

Since I am not a fan of movies in the pandemic category it was easy not to break down and watch World War Z or Contagion. These would have helped me get an idea about how the U.S. government and CDC mutants in space suits will tackle a global pandemic. Hint:  It is nothing like in the movies. The U.S. government does not watch Hollywood movies as Hollywood is infested by you-know-who, so they had absolutely zero clue as to how to deal with a planet-wide pandemic.

I also gave up on a book half-way through, Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic and How it Changed Science, Cities and the Modern World by Steven Johnson. It was not solely because of the subject - the cholera epidemic of 1854. While it was interesting to read how this epidemic changed the urban geography of the city of London to what it is today, the narrative became repetitive and started straying in different directions. My attention, as usual, was faltering. I will attempt it again next year, once I get vaccinated for my ADHD.

Here are the books-worth-my-time I read in 2020 in no particular order. Only 3 out of the 8 listed below were published this year.

1. Paying tribute for keeping the U.S.A number one in 2020, I will start off with Mary L. Trump's portrait of her uncle, Donald Trump - Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man (2020.) While the book feels rushed and could have been put together better, it is an intelligent insider's personal view of her family and her uncle - the man / the President who instigated/is instigating many (failed) soft coups at the American democracy. Read it, if you want to smell out the next Donald Trump in the making before it happens.

2. Of the Civil Rights Movement leaders, I empathize more with Malcolm X than with Martin Luther King. MLK, I have always felt, was promoted because he was a 'cleaner' African-American leader more acceptable to the white majority of the country. This year started with Netflix's documentary series, Who Killed Malcom X where historian Abdur Rahman Muhammad traces and condenses his thirty year of investigation about Malcolm X's assassination into a six part series.  This was followed by Autobiography of Malcolm X:  As Told to Alex Haley (1965), which focuses on Malcolm X's evolution as a street hustler to the charismatic speaker and leader of the Civil Rights era. 

3. I am closing out the year with Pulitzer prize winning author Les Payne's 25+ year labor love exploring and researching the life of Malcolm X, the biography The Dead are Arising : The Life of Malcolm X (2020.) The work was completed by the author's daughter and fellow researcher, Tamara Payne, although the final manuscript was ready before Les Payne's passing. I may attempt a separate review sometime later combining all the Malcolm X books, as they and their eminent and intriguing subject rightfully deserve.

4. Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at Time (2012) by Jeff Speck is far removed from the current mental state of the world. It was written at a time when when American downtowns were a bustle of activity, restaurants had not shuttered due to Covid-19 and some people did walk on the streets. But if we were to learn from history and the book that I gave up half-way, Ghost Map, pandemics have the power to upset the status quo which includes the urban way of life among many other things. The effects of it will percolate down to urban planning and how people use spaces. At that time it will be good to have a primer of things we did right and the things we had designed wrong in the past. Speck's works will be worth referring to improve on things when we rebuild our cities and economies after this year's setback.

5. I choose "Asian" when I have to choose my race while filling out forms and applications. Yet I do not identify myself as Asian. Like the rest of the United States, when I think Asian it is the people of east-Asian descent who are Asian. But like Cathy Park Hong points out in her book of essays - Minor Feelings (2020), United States immigration has for centuries barred entry of Asians from the entire continent of Asia, starting from the Naturalization Act of 1790 which made sure that only 'free white persons of good character' where allowed to immigrate to the U.S. While not all of Park Hong's essays from the collection resonated with me, it helped me understand another PoV from a representative of the same racial minority that I am also part of.

6. The Giver (1993) was one of my kids' middle school reading projects that was recommended to me by my kid. YA fiction is not usually my cup of tea, but for sharing the experience of a book with someone I love, I gave it a try. For young readers 10-13 who are the book's primary audience, Lois Lowry's The Giver is thought-provoking, intense, disturbing and engaging at the same time. I am glad I read it, it is a perfect book to discuss with your tween or teen. I appreciate Lowry writing such a powerful book for young audience. It is an oft-banned book, so I am glad for our schools choosing it as reading material for kids at that right age when they need to understand the importance of compassion and altruism, to understand there are many shades and colors between black and white.

7. Voices from Chernobyl : The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster by Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich (2006) - I read this in Jan '20 while watching HBO's Chernobyl as a companion piece. The HBO show was 'inspired' by the book and had some excellent performances. The book is composed of verbatim interview material, the voices of common people who were at Chernobyl or thereabouts when the disaster struck. Chernobyl did make a big impression on my mind as a kid, when it had happened in 1986. Then it faded out till the aughts when I chanced upon a website by a girl who documented Chernobyl on a motor bike - Elena Filatova - an Ukranian photographer and biker. Then it went dormant again till HBO came out with the TV show in 2019. Like the title says, the book is an oral history, a much-needed documentation of one of the most suppressed disasters in human history. Don't go looking for a complex literary masterpiece. What it is a simple and stark portrait of a section of humanity, during a dark and senseless hour, in their own words. Kudos to Svetlana Alexievich!

8. How do kids living in affluent western societies get taken by radical Islamic ideologies? Asne Seierstad's documentation of two Somali-American teenage girls from Norway who go to wage jihad in the Middle East is one window to the mysterious realm of teenage and what goes on there, making the kids act like they do. While Two Sisters : A Father, His Daughter and Their Journey into the Syrian Jihad (2018) offers no easy answers, it is a book just like the Trump one, that can be used to pick up the warning signals.

My Best Books Lists from the past

• 2019 Best Books List
• 2018 Best Books
• 2010 Best
• 2009

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Nine Hours To Rama : Movie Review

Nine Hours to Rama (1963) was the first foreign film banned in India. It was based on historian and Indophile Stanley Wolpert's novel of the same name and is a fictionalized account about the life of Nathuram Godse - the assassin of Mahatma Gandhi. It features a narrative capturing the final hours in the run-up to Gandhi's assassination on Jan 30, 1948, with a few biographical notes about Godse thrown in. This Anglo-American film was directed by Mark Robson who also directed films like Van Ryan's Express and Valley of the Dolls.

The book was banned by the Nehru administration upon its release in 1962 and subsequently the film was banned when it was released an year later. The reason for banning cited by the first Prime Minister of independent India - the liberal socialist Jawaharlal Nehru, was it supposedly portrayed Nathuram Godse in the wrong (better than he deserved) light and that it would have hurt the sentiments of certain sections of the population. That is a credible argument, although banning both the book, which clearly belonged to the fiction category and the movie based on it, was an overkill, especially for a progressive like Nehru. 

The real reason could have been that throughout the 2+ hours the camera was focused intensely on Godse and the Father of India, M.K.Gandhi was just a side character. Adding insult to the injury, for a movie based on an event that was a turning point in India's history, almost every consequential Indian character other than Gandhi was played by white actors.

Valerie Gearon and Horst Buchholz

Godse was played by German actor Horst Buchholz. Buccholz looks very Caucasian with his chiseled face, but can't say he didn't try his best to act his part. The women characters in the movie were also essayed by British/American actors. I appreciate the effort they had put into make them look Indian. The make-up (brown-face?) is excellent, the only thing that gives them away other than the language they speak - English, is their bone structure. The way these ladies carry off their acts in well draped saris and kurtas are some of the best sari-draping I have ever seen on western women. 

The character of Godse is shown as a beer-chugging, hot headed romantic chasing after women, which might have been the farthest from the real life Godse. So it is understandable the conservative Hindu RSS faction, to which Godse belonged, would definitely be incensed by this fictional Godse. Nathuram Godse, the real assassin, was a celibate, religious right wing activist and teetotaler. Here's Godse's letter on - "Why I Killed Gandhi"

J.S. Casshyap as Gandhi, with Robert Morley in white cap

Gandhi in this movie is the best Gandhi I have ever seen on silver screen. The most famous Gandhi on screen, Ben Kingsley's Oscar winning portrayal of the man in 1982 Attenborough film - Gandhi , looked a little too able-bodied, younger and muscular compared to how the real sixty, seventy year old person would have looked. Jamuna Swaroop Kashyap who portrayed Gandhi in Nine Hours To Rama, credited as J. S. Casshyap in the movie, was an excellent choice. He looked and delivered like the real life Mahatma Gandhi. Although one of the reasons Indian PM Jawaharlal Nehru cited on banning the film was that the person who played Mahatma in the film lacked dignity. For about 5 minutes of screen time in the entire movie and a handful of dialogues, I would say,  J.S.Casshyap did an amazing job, delivering the first believable Gandhi I have ever come across on screen. His claim to fame in Bollywood though was as a lyricist, from mid 1930s to 1950s. An English professor turned Hindi lyricist, he wrote the songs for Achhut Kanya (1936), one of the early super hit movies of Bollywood that had established the career of actor Ashok Kumar.

This is the first movie I have ever watched, based in India, much of it shot in location in India but the entire main cast of Indians were played by westerners. Delhi police chief Gopal Das was brought to life by an amazing Jose Ferrer (Cyrano de Bergerac, The Caine Mutiny, Moulin Rouge) Other actors like Valerie Gearon, Robert Morley, Harry Andrews (the Sikh general in the pic, alongside Jose Ferrer) and Diane Baker essayed other Indian characters. It was fascinating to see 50s-early 60s towns and villages of India in color, as there were a lot of outdoor locations in the movie. The only other non-Indian movie which I have watched that showed India of that time period in color is Jean Renoir's The River. A juicy bit of trivia about this movie is among all the inconsequential characters played by Indians or people of Indian descent there was a man named Basdeo Pandey who played a bit part of a laundry man, he went on to become the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago (1995-2001.)

Nine Hours to Rama intriguing movie for a student of history or someone interested in India, Gandhi or Indian independence. The movie opens with the disclaimer that it is historical fiction, but its fidelity in the depiction of India (despite non-Indian actors in all major roles) and the socio-political climate of the times is remarkable.

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Cathy Park Hong's Minor Feelings : A book review

I picked up poet Cathy Park Hong's collection of essays, Minor Feelings to see if I can find any overlap between her life and experience as an Asian American immigrant and mine. We did have the same hyphenated American racial identity, although I personally had never considered myself Asian. Asian for me means the people from East Asia - China, Koreas, Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand and the like. But however I see it, I also understand the common the thread that binds us all - we all have roots in the continent of Asia, whether East Asia or West Asia and we are all outsiders, immigrants hot off the U.S immigration grill in most cases.

Park Hong, a Korean American born and brought up in California, touches this aspect of immigration history in one of her first essays. She reminds us that the immigration policies of the U.S government ever since the first immigration law was enacted in 1790 - The Naturalization Act, was intent on preventing non-white immigration. The 1790 law allows any free white person of “good character,” who has been living in the United States for two years or longer to apply for citizenship. Without citizenship, nonwhite residents are denied basic constitutional protections, including the right to vote, own property, or testify in court. This exclusion is especially concerning because 1 in 5 persons counted by the 1790 census was of African descent.

In 1882 the Chinese Exclusion Act passes, which bars Chinese immigrants from entering the U.S. This is the first time a specific group of immigrants are targeted by a U.S immigration law. In 1917 U.S. government decides to be impartial and expands the ban to all of Asia - restricting the entry of Filipinos even, a former colony. Then there is the much-maligned and rightly so, Japanese Americans internment camps during the Second World War. In 1965 under the threat of heightening Cold War, as a part of the PR exercise to revamp its image US opens doors to the degraded Asian people - but only the best and select professionals who already have advanced degrees and were highly trained- engineers and doctors were admitted in. Hong's book made me look this all up as her essays filled the gaps.

She also reflects on the sorry space taken up Asians in daily life. She ruminates thus about her own poetry reading, " I confront the infinite chasm between audience conception of the Poet and the underwhelming evidence of me as that poet. I just don't look that part. Asians lack presence. Asians take up apologetic space. We don't even have enough presence to be considered real minorities."

She says when she hears the phrase, 'Asians are next in line to be white', she replaces 'be white' with 'disappear', and that Asians reputed to be accomplished and law-abiding will disappear into this country's amnesiac fog.

While most of her essays resonated with me there were a couple that flew over my head. There was one where she expounds on the merits of Richard Pryor's standup and her appreciation of it. I never really understood Richard Pryor, even with closed captions on. Appreciating Pryor, might be like learning to appreciate dark beer. I need to drink a lot of light, craft and fruity beers to get there. Although many African American comedians I like, like Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock and Wayans Brothers consider Pryor the father of African American comedy. Maybe it was because Pryor created that niche for African Americans in the standup scene, where none had existed before. He was the pioneer, the reason why others could walk the trail he cleared. While Richard Pryor made Cathy Park Hong question the kind of audience she should be/is writing for, no stand-up comedian (except perhaps George Carlin) has ever led me down the tunnels of retrospection or life-reviews.

The other essay I breezed and skipped through was the one about her college days, female friendship and art. There was nothing wrong with the essay, it was just not a subject I cared much about. It delved too much on relationships, emotions and people and too less on hard cold facts, logic and info snippets that I tend to enjoy. My bad.

Minor Feelings is a hybrid of memoir and criticism. There were places where I could appreciate the poet in her, writing the essay, but there were also places where her prose dangerously veered into the stiff, incomprehensible parlance favored by academia. I could find similarities in her experiences and her diagnosis of situations that you are exposed solely by the merit of belonging to a racial minority.

In one of her essays, Park Hong mentions an anecdote about an award-winning poet of color say during a Q&A, "If you want to write about race, you have to do it politely, because then, people will listen." Minor Feelings is Cathy Park Hong trying to come clean of her politeness cover, talking about race in prose, it was good to hear an Asian voice on the subject - loud and clear.

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Notes on Jeff Speck's - Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time

Jeff Speck's paean to walkable, bike-able cities makes me want to plan a city. The only place they allow someone like me to plan cities is Minecraft and I don't even have the patience of my tween who is the resident Minecraft architect-planner. Therefore the easiest way to pay respect to the author and try out his ideas is to walk downtown, which I try to do a few times a week. 

Walkable City is full of interesting facts and statistics. Did you know that car crashes have killed 327 million Americans (up to this point in time), that is more than all our wars combined and is the leading cause of death for Americans between the ages of 1 and 34? 

Speck also says pollution is not what it used to be, American smog now comes principally from tailpipes not factories. Asthma related hospitalization reduced by a full 30% during the '96 Olympic games in Atlanta as more residents started walking and took public transit to downtown because of the impossibility of motoring around downtown during the Games.

As any walking enthusiast would have found out from his/her first few walking outing in American downtowns, block sizes affect walkability. Quoting verbatim from the book, "generally speaking the cities with the smallest blocks are the ones best known for walkability, ones with the largest blocks are places without street life. The pre-industrial neighborhoods of downtown Boston and Lower Manhattan like their European counterparts have blocks that averaged less than 200 feet long. Philadelphia's and San Francisco's blocks averaged less than 400 feet in length. And then there a pedestrian free cities like Irvine, California where many blocks are 1000 feet long."

I remember walking infinite blocks that seemed to extend forever flanking wide 3-4 lane roads in Anaheim, California with four kids in tow because I had a booked a hotel a "couple of blocks" away from the Disneyland entrance. Since it was only 2-3 blocks I was also trying to save money by not renting a car or using a rideshare app. Before this I had only driven in southern California, had never walked. That trip made me realize that southern California's cities and suburbs are one of the unfriendliest urban areas for walking.

The book provides an insight to how the human form and our physical limits affects urban planning, if urban planners would take heed. For example, we walk just under 3 mph hour in warm weather and around 2 mph in cold weather. We bow our heads 10 degrees while walking and we can see a person's movement at 100 yards and recognized and hear them at about 50. If we want to make our cities walkable, they should reflect our physical capabilities and limitations. We should design our public streets and squares smaller. Some of America's most famous public  squares like New York's Rockefeller Center, San Francisco's Ghirardelli Square and  San Antonio's Riverwalk are small - only very few are much broader than  60 yards across.

Instead what many of the 'unwalkable' US downtowns have is what is called the missing teeth phenomenon  - where every block of construction is surrounded by three blocks of empty lots or parking  thus rendering otherwise promising pedestrian environments uninviting. 

Speck also warns that smaller cities need to be aware that some big city practices are not made for them,  like the Barnes Dance intersection in big cities where all the pedestrians wait for a full cycle for all  the cars to stop and then are briefly given free reign over the entire intersection including diagonally. In smaller cities this would mean that the pedestrians will have to wait an inordinate amount of time before they get a chance to cross or there are no pedestrians to cross and traffic just idles unnecessarily, during hours of low volume foot traffic.

Speck points out that the planning of streets is as important block-sizes when it comes to walkability. No one prefers walking on the side of 4 lane road where vehicles are hurtling past at 60 mph. Increase in lane sizes result in approximately nine hundred additional traffic fatalities yearly (I forgot the get the reference for this from the book.) He says that increasing lane sizes in the name of safety (for motorists) is like distributing handguns to deter crime.

This is because humans always adjust their behavior to accommodate changes in risk patterns. The behavior is called risk homeostasis or risk compensation - becoming more careful where we sense greater risk and less careful if we feel more protected (wikipedia) It explains why poisoning deaths went up after child proof caps were introduced and people stopped hiding their medicines.

The best risk homeostasis report comes from Sweden a nation obsessed with traffic safety. In a single year in 1967 traffic fatalities dropped 17%. It turns out that March 9th 1967 Sweden switch driving on the left hand side of the road to drive right hand side of the road. Therefore Speck argues that the safest roads for both pedestrian and the motorists are those that feel the least safe demanding more attention from their drivers.

I was reading that while Walkable City pointed out the problems in U.S downtowns it didn't offer any real world solutions. So Jeff Speck came out with a follow up - a resource book of steps or rules to follow to make better urban places for people called Walkable City Rules : 101 Steps to Making Better Places. Maybe I will check that out next.

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Bron | Broen Review

Almost a decade after Scandi noir or Nordic noir  had migrated from books to TV screen, I happened to watch of one the flagship TV shows of the genre - Bron | Broen or The Bridge.  The bridge stands for the Øresund Bridge across Øresund strait that connects the southern Swedish town of Malmo to the Danish capital - Copenhagen. The crime that starts off season 1 of Bron | Broen leaves it dead body straddling the Swedish-Danish border passing through middle of Øresund bridge.

The long and looming, sometimes foreboding Bridge is an omnipresent character in the series. It is a team of two detectives, a Swedish and a Danish one who are given the responsibility to investigate this cross-border dead body / crime. Sofia Helin headlines as the Asperger-y Swedish cop - Saga Noren and the Danish side is represented by the warm and affable, Martin Rohde played by Kim Bodnia. They make an unlikely pair who hit off despite the odds.

Considering the geographical proximity and the cultural overlap of Sweden and Denmark across the strait, the series must have surely explored and presented nuances and references pertaining to the people of the region. Not being very much familiar to the place or the culture except the civil engineering marvel of Øresund bridge, all that was lost on me.

But the one thing that was not unfathomable is the brooding overcast geography and how it influences the people and their behavior in nordic climate. A third of my life was spent north of the 45th parallel in the snowy gray northern lands. My affinity towards Nordic crime dramas is natural. The landscape and the weather are familiar, the IKEA-ish interiors not so much - but that's okay, mega IKEA box stores are working hard at converting the interior-scape on this side of the Atlantic too. As soon as IKEA introduces two-day shipping to Alaska we will be brewing our own home-grown noir in our northern country.

The other attraction for me is the prominent presence of strong, unconventional women protagonists in Nordic noir, starting with Stieg Larsen's Lisbeth Salander aka The Girl with Dragon Tattoo in the 2000s to Bron | Broen's Saga Noren. While Bron | Boren is an engaging crime drama, that evolves into a better version of itself each passing season, I am not really convinced about the way the creators have coached Sofia Helin to play a detective on the spectrum. Then again most characters on the autistic spectrum on TV are stereo-typical, with certain traits exaggerated - the way the majority neurotypical society perceives how a person with Asperger's syndrome should be. As they say once you meet an autistic person, you know one autistic person. Helin's Saga Noren is probably one of the better depictions out there, because I know, I tried watching the U.S version of Bron | Broen.

Bron | Broen inspired a series of remakes the world over in various languages including a U.S one on FX called The Bridge and a French version called The Tunnel. There are also three other remakes take place at the borders of Estonia / Russia, Malaysia / Singapore and Germany / Austria. I almost started watching the U.S one by accident, then I was warned by a concerned loved one to stay clear of it. I am glad such people exist in my life.

But after finishing Season 1 of Bron | Broen, my curiosity got better of me and I sneaked in a fast forwarded S1E1 of the US series. OMG - it was like I had averted a major catastrophe. It was a let down on all fronts. The Hollywoodization of the show made sure that the direction, screenplay, casting and acting went out of the window. 120 lb, 5' 7" waif like Diane Kruger guarding the El Paso-Jaurez Bridge of the Americas against drug lords, coyotes and ICE, sauntering into mob bosses' dens in the middle of the night without backup? Gimme a break. On top of it - a police officer with Asperger's syndrome wearing make-up? I am so done. I like Damian Bichir, but the dialogs and the hamming of other actors were so over the top that Bichir's natural style looked out of place.

I am half way past Season 3. Kim Bodnia said goodbye to the series after season 2 (the rumor was the presence of anti-Semitic elements at the main shooting location of Malmo) and in comes as Saga Noren's Danish counterpart a much younger Thure Lindhart playing detective Henrik Sabroe. He is another broken character like Saga Noren. I have one more season to go after this, we will see how that goes.

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Donald Trump : A Review

 Tl;dr  -  VERDICT : "Tremendously Unfit"

To get rid of the last iota of indecision (ROFL) before dropping my ballot in the ballot box, I brushed up on the biography of one of the candidates - the incumbent Donald J. Trump. Netflix has been kind enough to continue streaming their 2018 four part documentary miniseries - "Trump : An American Dream." It is an outsiders' take on the current President. These were the people who had been close to him from the seventies to his Presidential run in mid 2010s. Originally created for UK's Channel4 the documentary series is not an expose, but a biography up till his candidacy in 2016. 

While watching this series, I was also reading in tandem, Dr. Mary Trump's (Donald Trump's psychologist niece, his older brother Fred Trump Jr.'s daughter) explosive expose on Donald Trump and the Trump family - Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. My review of this book is done in Trump-speak and it goes like this - "great, spectacular, brilliant, fabulous, incredible, amazing, fantastic, tremendous, sophisticated, honest, outstanding, phenomenal, powerful, " well, you get the drift.

I will let Dr. Mary Trump speak, the best speaker Trump family has yet produced. Take it away, Dr.Trump. Everything in blue text, is an excerpt from her book, "Too Much and Never Enough"

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Guru Dutt and his movies

 It is a leaden gray Saturday evening, raining dense into the night. I am stuck on Guru Dutt. Pyaasa (Thirst/Yearning) rests heavy on my mind, Kaagaz ke Phool (Paper Flowers) is not light as the title means, although this must be the second or third time I am watching these films, but years and life had happened in between.

I scour the internet and read or watch every single piece on Guru Dutt, one of India's legendary directors/actors. I read about his friendship with Dev Anand, I leaf through the chapters of his life with his wife and the singer who lend her voice to the songs in several of his movies - Geeta Dutt nee Roy Chaudhary, his team of creative minds who got together in every film of his - cinematographer V.K.Murthy, director/writer Abrar Alvi, his muse, actress Waheeda Rehman, actors Johnny Walker, Rehman. I find that he lost a ton of money on Kaagaz ke Phool - India's first cinemascope which was a movie he directed to showcase the talents of his cinematographer friend Murthy. How he recouped his losses with Chaudvin ka Chaand. 

The more I read or watch interviews I realize how much Guru Dutt is the poster boy for the temperamental, mercurial artist. For a mind in such constant state of disquiet, who brought his emotions and life translated raw into cinematic medium (referring to Kaagaz ke Phool & Pyaasa), it seems almost unlikely that he would exit through a natural death. Of course he didn't. I read about his last evening with his brother, Abrar Alvi and Shakti Samantha before he committed suicide or had an accidental overdose of sleeping pills and alcohol. He was 39.

Film schools all over the world teach Pyaasa and Kaagaz ke Phool to the students of world cinema. Kaagaz ke phool is a movie about the world of movies. Its camera is turned inward on a director down on his luck played by Guru Dutt himself. Although now regarded as a classic of Indian cinema, Guru Dutt stopped directing movies and confined himself to production and acting after the failure of Kaagaz ke Phool at the box office. 

Much has been analyzed and written about Guru Dutt's body of work. He would make three or four movies that would appeal to the public and keep the counters ringing before plunging deep into his pet project, like Pyaasa or Kaagaz ke Phool. Guru Dutt the artist, the director, seem to have a real serious case of melancholia, so much so that Dev Anand once remarked after Guru Dutt's passing that Guru Dutt was a young man, he should have made happy films instead of stories about depressed people.

This is the only footage of Guru Dutt in color, the famous song from the movie of the same name, Chaudvin ka Chaand

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Glitch : A series co-produced by Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Netflix

Why did Glitch not show up in any of the best of Netflix lists? Glitch, an ABC show, picked and co-produced by Netflix from its second season onwards is one of the highly bingeable shows on Netflix (US.) I accidentally stumbled on it after watching a zombie series (Dead Set, UK) on fast forward and was looking into more 'shows like this.' In a way it is a zombie show without blood, guts and the inevitable zombie apocalypse. No spoilers, check it out for yourself.

If you have been looking for glitch-in-the-matrix, afterlife or paranormal TV shows, Glitch is it. There are three seasons and six episodes per season. With each episode an hour length, you can probably finish watching the entire three seasons over a weekend if you put your mind to it LOL like I did. There is no fourth season or AFAIK nothing is in the works yet.

Glitch takes place in a fictional town of Yoorana, in Victoria, Australia. A set of people come back from the dead, rising out of their graves in perfect physical shape. They are helped by a police officer and a doctor who first discover them. All characters have a back story and their story lines mature as the series progresses. As viewer I felt invested in the characters though all the actors were totally new to me. Brilliant casting, great acting and a solid story / screenplay bring to us the vision of creators Tony Ayres and Louise Fox and director Emma Freeman.

One of the things that made me like Glitch, especially the first two seasons, (the final one was a washout though,) is it is very un-American. There is no hint of Hollywood anywhere, it is feels like an Australian original. Although in reality, it is not. It supposedly got its inspiration from Les Revenants, a French TV show and a cancelled (after season 1) American TV show, The Returned. I am pretty sure the American show would have been too much plastic for me, call it my confirmation bias. Also I prefer the sunnier Australian outback to the dark French mountain towns. 

While the seasons 1 and 2 were gripping and had good production value for a series produced on a tight budget as Glitch was, the season 3 was below par. It was as if the creators of the show couldn't figure out how to bring the series to a culmination. New characters were introduced, then had their stories abruptly cut short. There were a lot of loose threads with explanations lacking and a very anti-climatic ending. I thought the characters deserved more. It was as if there was only enough money to somehow finish the third season and no more. Therefore they had to set a fire, annihilate everything and bring the series to a close once and for all.

Still, it is worth a watch. Because it is not very often that we come across paranormal or tales about glitches without eerie sound effects, cheesy story and production design and ghosts who are not dressed in white.

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Godless : A Netflix Original (Review)

 I am a fan of movies and TV shows based in the American West. Not all of them have to be Westerns. In fact I have not seen any movies of John Wayne, the classic Western icon. Maybe I will, one day. The message of the glorified cowboy who wins the West and its pioneer trailblazer construct does not appeal to me much.

It was Sergio Leone's Dollars trilogy that introduced me to the westerns. These spaghetti Westerns were not classic Hollywood fare at the time. They didn't have just one good cowboy, what they had was a mixture of good, bad and ugly in the same people, fighting each other against a fantastic background score. And these Leone westerns were not even shot in the U.S! 

Places and things interest me more than people. The starkly beautiful, hostile wide-screen landscape is appealing to my eyeballs. The history of the westward expansion was another aspect, how it affected the conqueror and conquered and it all happened so close to the present. I have documented my love for the stories of the West a few times in this blog - here, here, here.

 

Godless is a Netflix mini-series that dropped in 2017. Yes, I am late to the party. But better late than never, right? It is written and directed by Scott Frank (director of Minority Report, Get Shorty) and the executive producer is Steven Soderbergh. The heroes in Godless are ordinary folks fighting their own personal battles and more than half of them are women. Although not exactly the feminist Western the series was marketed as, a frontier town without able-bodied men is a new take. 

The powerful performances by the women actors do justice to the story. Sam Waterson, Jeff Daniels, Jack O'Connell, Michelle Dockery, Merrit Weaver, Scott McNairy play some of the important characters in the series. It seems funny to me that for an American western TV show more than half of the lead cast is from U.K.

The Hollywood cliche trap that even Godless couldn't escape is when there is a powerful female character in a leadership role, she inevitably has to be a lesbian. Have they not seen hetero-sexual leaders like Angela Merkels, Golda Meirs or Maggie Thatchers of the world or our home-grown Kamala Harris ? Or is it done as a symbol of political correctness and inclusivity to make sure they don't leave any minority groups out? I am looking at you Mindhunter (Wendy Carr), Xena and Batwoman. It is almost as if a hetero-sexual woman won't have the balls to take on the leadership role intended for the said character. 

Godless captures the epic scale, wall to wall geography of the West faithfully making even trigger-happy TV remote user like me soak it in and keep my fingers off the fast forward button. As expected from the title, there are no Gods in Godless. It is set in a territory of lawlessness and struggle. Yeah, the struggle is real in 19th century New Mexico. 

 

Edifices dedicated to a higher power are conspicuously absent. The story is mostly centered around the silver mining town of La Belle, NM where a church building is seen to be in perpetual construction state and is never seen finished. All the men of the town perished in a mining disaster, except the grocer, the saloon owner and the sheriff and a few other old men.

 

The series is written as a journey through the lives of the people in La Belle as they advance towards the ultimate showdown (which will happen in La Belle) between two outlaws - Roy Goode and his adapted 'Pappy', Frank Griffin, both gun-slingers and outlaws of the finest kind. Roy being a Goode, the makers of the series are trying to tell us that there is some good in him. Guns play an important part in the show, but the lead character Roy Goode, while he is an ace shooter, sometimes belts out dialogs like he is a spokesperson of a gun control advocacy group, which is okay be me. Goes to show that even among gun-toting outlaws the voice of reason and reality was not always a lost cause.

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Ken Burns' Central Park Five and Ava DuVernay's When They See Us

Five boys happened to be in some corner of an 843 acre park when a white woman got raped in the same park. The five teens who had nothing to do with the crime are charged with it. Black kids. White women. We know it is an explosive combo, or else Emmett Till would have lived, right? Thankfully the white lady lived.

A blonde millionaire business man takes out ads in major newspapers calling for the return of death penalty to punish the kids. He must have been thinking that it should be obvious to (white) people that black teens get off by raping white women. It was the universal truth first discovered by KKK in the South. But this was not the South, this was the North, the promised land to which the slaves took the underground railway to escape persecution and lynching. This was New York City. The year was 1989. This happened after Michael Jackson had turned the world on its head with Thriller. Thurgood Marshall, the first black American Supreme court judge was already in the office for almost quarter century and there had already been four African American astronauts in space.

But more things change, more they stay the same. Your biases and prejudices just grow old with you. Maybe they fade out from public view, maybe they are less pronounced, but make no mistake they are still there. What happened to group of five kids christened Central Park Five was a catastrophic failure of the American justice system. No other case in the recent history highlights how the biases and prejudices of the U.S legal system works against the young people of color.

I watched Sarah (daughter of Ken Burns) and Ken Burns' documentary on Amazon Prime called The Central Park Five after I tried watching Ava DuVernay's Netflix biopic series based on the same event, When They See Us. Ken Burns' documentary is faster and it delivers justice to the boys in about 100 minutes. It has media footage and the film makers made the film after the ultimate exoneration of the five in 2002, wanting to make the miscarriage of justice public and to help the wrongful conviction case the Five filed against New York City.

When They See Us on the other hand is incredibly more

traumatic to see, especially the first few episodes. I cannot imagine what those innocent kids went through - first prosecuted for a crime they didn't commit and then charged and incarcerated for a major part of their young lives. The biopic delves in the lives of the kids before the event that turned their lives upside down, their time in the prison or juvie and their lives as adults after they come out of prison. No one but Ava Duvarney could direct such a powerful series.

In this era of Black Lives Matter, it is all the more important to watch these accounts of black people (or people of color, one of the five was a Latino kid), to understand how they are treated differently by the law and order machinery. While being at the wrong place at the wrong time does not work in favor of anyone, but if you are the wrong color too - that seals your fate, for the worse. 

These are the Exonerated Five - Antron McCray, Raymond Santana Jr, Kevin Washington, Yusef Salaam and Korey Wise. All the men have contributed and assist the Innocence Project whose mission is to help exonerate individuals wrongfully convicted through DNA testing. Here below are the Exonerated Five, at the screening of When They See Us, in 2019.

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Two Sisters by Asne Seierstad

 I picked up Two Sisters from a suggestion list in the Overdrive library catalog when I was searching for another book. I had always wondered how kids who grew up in Western societies get radicalized, threw away their privileges to the wind and went to wage jihad in an unknown country. This documented true story by Norwegian journalist-author Asne Seierstad is a window to the world of radicalization.

Somali-Norwegian teens Ayan and Leila are sisters, brought up in a Muslim refugee family in Oslo. They are Norwegian citizens and regular teenagers at the start of the book. As the story progresses, we see them getting interested, immersed and finally fully transforming into radical Islamists who leave the security and future of their home in Norway to the unpredictable war zone of Syria as potential brides for the jihadists. 

There is an entire section at the end of the book where the author lists her sources. The book is based on extensive interviews with the parents of the girls – Sadiq and Sara and their friends and with other detailed research into organizations, people, and related media material. Asne Sieerstad does state that she is relating her findings, but it up to each reader to draw their own conclusions. Unlike some of the books written by journalists I did not find the narration dry or technical, it was well written, paced well and was well-researched. 

A large part of the material came from the girls’ father, Sadiq, who made several excursions to the Syrian warzone to rescue the girls, but never succeeded. In stunning contrast to the decision made Ayan and Leila, Ismael, the girls’ brother (younger to Ayan, older than Leila) who had the same kind of upbringing chooses the exact opposite path. He distances himself from religion when he is old enough to stand his ground and at every opportunity tries to question his sisters and ask them to explain their deeds on the basis of Quran and tries to explain to them folly of their actions.  

The book didn’t give me the answers I was looking for – how on earth do these kids get radicalized? How could two kids in the same family with the same parents and upbringing choose radically different paths? But one thing it is helpful for, which was what the girl’s father and the author intended was for other parents to recognize the signs of radicalization in youngsters and nip it in the bud.

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JL 50 - A TV series starring Abhay Deol

 JL 50 is a commendable first attempt. This is the first time an Indian TV series have tried hands at the material that is usually found on The Twilight Zone. I am a fan of the Rod Serling's original series from the 50s and the 60s, not so much its new avatars. There are several The Twilight Zone episodes which could have served as inspiration to JL 50 like The Odyssey of Flight 33, The Arrival and The Last Flight.

Time travel, worm holes, parallel universes are not something Indian movies have handled well. One of the reasons could be the money required for creating believable VFX. Another could be, even when Indian movies tackle science fiction it ends up being a masala musical, like the time travel Tamil movie starring Suriya Sivakumar - 24. JL 50 used the excuse of being a TV series for not including any songs which would have been mandatory had it been a movie. At slightly longer that two hours total, this TV series is only as long as a typical Indian movie.

The best things about JL 50 are, the cast and the location. Calcutta/Kolkata, the first capital city of British India is a location tailor-made for time travel stories. With its yellow Ambassador taxi cabs, rickety trams and narrow inner city streets, it is a city still caught in its past. Paused at the edge of disintegration back to an older age, it is easy to recreate Calcutta from thirty-forty years ago in the current Kolkata. The makers of JL 50 make use of this chameleonic aspect of Calcutta to their advantage.

The cast led by Abhay Deol as CBI officer Shantanu and Pankaj Kapur as physics professor Das are outstanding. Ritika Anand, one of the producers of the series has a pivotal role as Capt. Bihu Ghosh, the pilot of the ill-fated JL 50. I see it as a nod to the female commercial pilots in India, especially Durba Banerjee (first woman commercial pilot to fly Indian Airlines in 1956) who is also from the state of West Bengal. (Calcutta is the capital of West Bengal.) India had female commercial pilots (Prem Mathur in 1947 was the first commercial woman pilot in India) and Women Pilots Association long before United States had its first female commercial pilot - Bonnie Tiburzi in 1973 for American Airlines.

Returning back from the aviation history tangent to JL 50, the story and direction of the TV series is by Shailender Vyas. While there are some plot holes and goofs in the story line, as a viewer who had always wanted to see a desi take (or more) on The Twilight Zone, I appreciate Mr.Vyas taking up the challenge of making an Indian sci-fi series. With an open-ended ending, I hope he will be back with more and please make sure to include Abhay Deol - he is more than half the reason I enjoyed this series as much as I did.

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Kilometers and Kilometers

The title of this 2020 movie comes from Mohanlal's famous dialog in the 1980s film Mazha Peyyunnu Madhalam Kottunnu. It is his answer to the general knowledge test question posed by the U.S returnee character played by Sreenivasan, "how many kilometers from Washington DC to Miami beach?" Ans: "Kilometers and Kilometers"

The concept of Kilometers and Kilometers, I suspect, comes from an idea originally propagated by the former chief minister (of Kerala) E.K.Nayanar that rape is as common in the U.S of A as drinking a cup of tea. ROFL. Indians' general perception of the West is, it is a society with loose morals, non-existent familial relationships and wayward lifestyle. Indians consider themselves the polar opposite, the ultimate moral righteous and the defenders of family relationships. 

In the U.S we see a different flavor of this cultural superiority complex in God Bless USA and other populist takes on American exceptionalism. Either way if you have not traveled and been to other countries or exposed to their cultures, you end up thinking your culture is the gold standard.  Kms & Kms was created faithfully adhering to that standard.

The overwhelming theme of this road movie, where the lead pair (Josemon played by Tovino Thomas and the U.S tourist Cathy played by India Jarvis) travel on a motor-bike from Kerala in the south to Rajasthan in the north western part of India, is cultural chauvinism. 

The development of characters was easy-peasy for the story/script writers - Deepu Pradeep and Jeo Baby(who is also the director.) They just dipped into the brimming vat of stereotypes and pulled out a few - there's the unemployed do-gooder and the older son who carries the burden of his entire family Josemon (aka new-age Vatsalayam Mammootty), the clueless American tourist Cathy, the Malayali with a heart of gold who has been banished to a harsh northern territory, Veer bhai (aka Sunny Joseph) ready to help any Malayali with some Malayalam and a shoulder to lean on. And then there is Basil Joseph as Kuttan. Basil is a relief (to me, love his self-deprecating, comedic presence) although he is barely there after the first quarter of the movie.

Tovino and India are believable. While this is not a film that calls for hard hitting performances, it is easy to believe Tovino as Josemon, as someone with broken English trying to turn a quick dime chauffeuring the gullible tourist. It is a light watch, long as you have the remote in your hands, I would say, go for it - you can always fast forward the bits you don't like.

 

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The Frozen Ground : Anchorage's own Hollywood movie

Years ago when I was working in downtown Anchorage, most days after my lunch I used to take a walk from downtown to the water's edge (Cook Inlet.) The year was 2011 and I remember it was not summer. Every other season in Anchorage kind of felt the same - cold and grey, it had to be one of those indeterminable seasons. 

3rd Ave leading to Hilton was closed to traffic on that particular day. There were a lot of old and vintage cars parked curbside. We knew there was a Hollywood movie being shot in our city. This was the first time I was this up close and personal to a Hollywood movie location. Along with my friend who was with me on that afternoon we skirted around block and tried to get a better view from another side. Unfortunately we didn't catch any glimpse of Nicholas Cage or any other actors who were purported to be in the movie. Yet we were excited, a Hollywood movie in our city, that was a first. The movie is The Frozen Ground. I happened upon it on Netflix yesterday and watched it in one go.

 In the background of the title is the hazy urban sprawl of Anchorage

Ever since reality TV series took off, Alaska has been a reality TV hot-spot. The only true last frontier state remaining in the United States has provided ample fodder for the escapist lifestyle fantasies promoted by reality TV. From series like Alaska State Troopers and Ice Road Truckers to Palin clan's reality series (Sarah Palin's Alaska, Bristol Palin: Life's A Tripp) to homesteading families in Alaskan Bush People and many more, there has been no dearth of reality TV material from Alaska. 

But it is a different reality when it comes to feature films. Most of the Hollywood films with stories based in Alaska are shot in Canada, mainly in British Columbia. Thanks to Film Incentive BC Tax Credit. Why can't Alaska institute something like this, you know you can't always rely on oil.(Oh just found that there is one , and The Frozen Ground utilized it) These so-called Alaskan feature films will have few aerial shots of the real Alaska and maybe a few scenes filmed at landmark locations, other than that they are all Canada. I am  looking at you, Insomnia. The Hollywood remake of the famous Norwegian movie of the same name supposedly takes place in small town Alaska and starred Hilary Swank, Robin Williams and Al Pacino. It was entirely shot in BC except for a few frames shot at Bridal Veil Falls in Valdez,AK.

The other Hollywood movie, based in Alaska and shot in Alaska that I can think of is Into The Wild. Adapted from Jon Krakeur's book of the same name documenting the real life story of Alexander McCandless who hiked across N.America and finally found a home in an abandoned school bus in the wilderness outside Fairbanks,AK, Into The Wild's Alaskan parts were shot in Cantwell, about 50 miles south of Fairbanks. Oh yes, there was also Big Miracle - the Drew Barrymore movie about a whale rescue in Point Barrow. For this movie Anchorage and Seward stood in for small towns on the North Slope. It was imminently forgettable.

Back to The Frozen Ground. It tells the story of the real life serial killer, Bob Hansen (played by John Cusack), who terrorized the ladies of the night, walking the streets of Anchorage from the 1970s to the early eighties. I had a colleague who worked in my team who used to frequent Hansen's bakery for donuts (in 1970s.) She said the man gave off no signs of being a serial killer and was just another ordinary looking guy. 

A faraway shot of the Anchorage skyline, a bit more close and you would see it is 2010s Anchorage and not the 1980s.

Despite its 300K+ population, Anchorage is still very much a small town. Anchorage operates at a maximum of about 2 degrees of separation, six degrees is too much when half of the State's population lives in the city and its suburbs. Even serial killers can be just an acquaintance of an acquaintance like you can see in the example above. Some people even claim to be able to see foreign shores like Russia from their backyard.

Alaska Public Lands Building on 4th Ave serves as the APD HQ in the movie, which is less than half a block East of the current APD headquarters in the LIO building.

 

 A considerable amount of shooting took place on the 4th and 5th Ave, west of the Sheraton building. The shot below is at the intersection of Barrow St and 4th Ave looking east, where Bob Hansen is seen picking up one of his victims in the movie.

The film crew converted the store fronts on 5th Ave into strip clubs and other night-life enterprises. A lot of action in the movie happens on a couple of blocks on 5th Ave. In most of these scenes, the sidewalk outside seemed more crowded with people than you would expect on a night-out in Anchorage. But I am not complaining.

The Frozen Ground : Shooting Location on 5th Ave

I am immensely grateful that the makers of The Frozen Ground decided to shoot the movie on location, remaining truthful to the places and people, especially all the victims like Eklutna Annie whose remains are shown to recover from the sandy banks of Eklutna river, near the Knik Arm. This was the same place her remains were recovered in 1980.

          Aerial shot of Hansen (John Cusack) on Knik River bridge , Old Glenn Highway

Nic Cage plays Jack Halcombe the Alaska State trooper in charge of the investigation. His character is modeled on the real life investigator,Glenn Flothe. The movie also has Vanessa Hudgens, 50 Cent (he is one of the producers) and Dean Morris (aka Hank Schrader from Breaking Bad)

Hansen is an avid outdoors man and a pilot, which is not uncommon for Alaskans. Alaska probably has the most pilots per capita for any U.S state. He is often seen in the movie taking off from Merrill Field in his little bush plane, sometimes taking his victims along, probably before letting them escape in the wilderness and hunting them down with his gun like game.

All the actors have given solid performances. It is not your typical Hollywood movie, maybe reflecting the director Scott Walker's New Zealand roots. The script (also by Walker) and the movie are taut. There are no frills or cheap thrills which is probably why it failed at the box office recovering only $5.6 million of the $20 million production cost. It reminds me a lot of the Icelandic and Norwegian police procedural series like Trapped or The Valhalla Murders, set in a similar snowy grey landscape.

The film is dedicated to all the victims of Robert Hansen - he had attacked and raped 30+ women in Anchorage and killed at least 17 of them. At under two hours, it is a quick watch. Give it a try, just the amazing performances by all the actors will be worth your time. If you are from Alaska or have ever lived in Anchorage, you should watch it, no excuses.

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Irakal (The Victims)

 Another K.G.George gem from the early eighties, Irakal is the debut film of Ganesh Kumar. I didn't have much of an impression of Ganesh Kumar as an actor till I saw this movie. He makes a pretty decent debut as Baby Matthews the youngest son of a wealthy Christian business family and a closet psychopath - as in he has not come out to the family yet about his psychotic tendencies.

L to R Gopi as the Bishop and Ganesh Kumar as Baby Matthews

I remember a K.G.George interview where he mentions he had modeled Baby's character on Sanjay Gandhi, the younger son and heir apparent (before he died in an untimely air crash) of India's former Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi. Irakal came out, eight years after Emergency - which was a period of almost two years starting from 1975 when the Prime Minister Indira Gandhi placed the entire country under a state of emergency. It was alleged that Sanjay Gandhi who had no political position ran a police state terrorizing the administration and the people using his mother's position and influence.

L to R  Ganesh Kumar and Ashokan in Irakal

All the characters in the movie are perfectly fleshed out and the script is taut. Actor Sukumaran who produced the movie also plays the role of the alcoholic middle son - Sunny Matthews. Thilakan plays the big daddy rubber baron and family stalwart, Matthews or Mathukkutty. Srividya is the oldest sister and the only girl in the family, and Radha plays Baby's love interest. Venu Nagavalli as usual loses the girl and meets a gory end. Ashokan also gets to play a small part as Baby's local acquaintance.

Irakal was awarded the best ever original Malayalam screenplay thirty years after its release. But the movie was not a commercial success when it hit the theaters in 1985.  It is said that Sukumaran had to make a couple of commercially successful films to recoup the losses he suffered in producing Irakal. It is a very mature film for a discerning audience, probably not the regular movie-goer's cup of tea. 

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Lekhayude Maranam Oru Flashback

 Movies about movie industry are fascinating to a curious audience. If that intersects with true crime or unsolved mysteries genre, it is even more captivating. Lekhayude Maranam Oru Flashback ( eng: Lekha's Death - A Flashback) directed by K.G.George, takes place in the Malayalam movie industry of the late seventies. It is loosely based on the suicide of a famous Malayalam actress of the time - Shobha. There were also rumors at the time it was not a suicide, but an accidental murder framed as a suicide. 

Many S.Indian actresses at the time came from poor families. With a few years of dance or music training in their kitties, these girls along with the rest of their family boarded trains to Madras to try their luck in movies. Of the hundreds who came to Madras with movie star dreams only a handful made it to the top and their path to stardom often was no picnic. In LMOF, the director K.G.George tells the story of Shantamma, one such girl from some village in Kerala. 

The first step to becoming a S.Indian movie actress is to change their real name into a fashionable pseudonym. This trend was more common 40-60 years ago, than now. Thus Shantamma becomes Lekha. Lekha (Nalini) is egged on by her over-zealous mother, played by Subha, who is bent on making her daughter a star at any cost. 

The costs she had to incur en route to stardom are enormous - from having to sleep with various powerful men to having to support the entire extended family through out her working life. Again this is a story typical of many girls' journeys in the south Indian film industry at the time. The character Lekha is one of the lucky few, many others find that their pinnacle of growth reaches a plateau as a  background or cabaret dancer.

The greatest similarity between LMOF and the life of the real life actress Shobha, is the affair Lekha has with a film director, Suresh Babu (Gopi). Shobha had an affair with director Balu Mahendra while he was married to his first wife which ultimately culminated in her marriage with Mahendra. Even during his short-lived marriage with Shobha, Balu Mahendra often spent nights at his first wife's place saying the he had to take care of his nine year old son. These are depicted as such in the movie, except that Lekha and Suresh Babu are not married, it is an ongoing affair in the film. Suresh Babu's attire is an exact copy of Mahendra's unifrom at the time

Nalini as Lekha and Gopi as Suresh Babu

Shobha didn't go through the struggle Lekha did trying to achieve stardom. Shobha's mother Prema Menon was already a supporting actor in Malayalam and Shobha had also been a child-artist in several films. The struggle part of Lekha's story is the stereotypical uphill battle faced by female artists in the industry at the time. 

A scene from Lekhayude Maranam Oru Flashback. Subha, Nalini, Nedumudi Venu (R to L)

The story, screenplay and direction of LMOF is by K.G.George. Shobha's suicide and the mystery surrounding it might have been irresistible to the director who was always beguiled by the unpredictability of human mind and the fragility of relationships.

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