Friday, December 09, 2011

Book Review: Open by Andre Agassi



I look up. I'm lying on the floor beside the bed. I remember now. I moved from the bed to the floor in the middle of the night. I do that most nights. Better for my back. Too many hours on a soft mattress causes agony. I count to three, then start the long, difficult process of standing. With a cough, a groan, I roll onto my side, then curl into the fetal position, then flip over onto my stomach. Now I wait, and wait, for the blood to start pumping.”

These opening lines from “Open” – grip you and send you into the world of a champion sportsman and a tortured human being. The sweat-ridden years of ball bashing and a childhood measured in sets of six games. You realize the price a human being pays for being gifted – the agonizing pressure of being squeezed tightly into a shape and destiny molded by your talent. And you feel the serrated fear of giving up even this one gift.

(“But if tennis is life, then what follows tennis must be the unknowable void. The thought makes me cold.”)

Open is at its least, a deeply moving story, and at its best, a transformational one, especially for anyone who’s tasted sport and its angst-filled romance. You get a ringside view of professional sport and uber-human beings, who have given up entire lifetimes to play a game at its highest level for a few short years, without any assurance of payback – you see dreams becoming mortal and entire sagas written in a few thousand square feet of real pain and victories all too fleeting. It deconstructs and demolishes the paradigm of effortlessness of champions; you see the painful imbalance of their natures in their compulsion to win, and the price they pay for this imbalance.

The content is deep but the language of this story is surprisingly and happily literary with a modern, staccato style that’s a sign of our times and our attention spans. Some phrases blow you away with their simplicity and some have you nodding in agreement, using words that could have been yours.

While Open does dive deep into the soul of the tale, its also a tale well-told covering lots of ground about Agassi’s life events, his childhood and professional life, his relationships and loves, his much talked about experiences with drugs – it comes across as a mostly honest tale, but maybe that’s a just a happy contrast to the little we had known and the lot that we had assumed.

Open is not a sad story or a happy one, its just real. Just like life, it leaves you at the end a little happy, a little sad but mostly with the fullness of an experience, a little wiser and little more human, with a degree of insight into life’s realities.

I hope you will read this book. For Andre Agassi and his story  -he is a remarkable man with a perspective that’s even more remarkable for its objectivity,  for Tennis  - you will never watch a match the same way ever again, but most of all, I hope you will read it for the same reasons you ever read a great tale – for the way it moves you, teaches you and carries you along for a journey you may not have completely signed up for.

Monday, December 05, 2011

Movie Review: The Dirty Picture




Watched the dirty picture over the weekend. (Insert Dilli joke here “Maa, main gandi picchar dekhne jar aha hoon.” “Theek hain beta. Ghar jaldi aana”)

Yeah, so it was THE Dirty Picture.

Well, here is the gist of it, the Vidya Balan essayed- Reshma ,  a sassy village girl runs away to Chennai to make it big, quickly discovering among its streets the repressed sexuality that’s a signature of the Indian male – the thigh-groping old man sitting next to her in theatre or the elderly neighbor. who plugs away at his wife manfully every night and propositions her in the morning.  Her genius lies in her curiosity and her eventual embracing of it, paving her way into the hearts and fantasies of larger than life movie-stars and full of life movie fans as the voluptuous “Silk”. Her curves are her grammar and her dance the syntax of a new voluptuous, sexual lingua franca. She drops all pretence of middle classed orthodoxy as she plays the part in real life 

“Kya aapko patha hain maine 500 ladkiyon ke saath “tuning” ki hain?  “Haan sir, lekin ek ladki saath kabhi 500 baar tuning nahin ki hogi”

The acting is of a high standard and very quickly, you identify with the character stronger than the actor. The high point of the movie is the dialogue – classically spicy South Indian – with crisp double entendres ringing of sassiness and the humor rather than any twisty vulgarity. “Jab Sharaafat ke kapde utharthe hain, tab sharifon ko hi sabse zyaada mazaa aata hain". The imagery in the movie - a Jeetendra era evoking song sequence or the deeply-bloused, bra-peeking south indian female uniform  - is artfully created and adds so much tone to this 80's based story. 

I wish the script had spent some time on the making of Silk’s psyche  - the core of her sassiness and curiosity  -  but the later half does do justice to her mind -  the making and eventual unraveling of it.

Strangely enough, I thought the movie could work better for women than for men, the titles and the promo shots are provocative enough -  but it could tap into the Silk in every woman. In the movie, her impact on men and women is her biggest source of herself and she uses that as a weapon of offense and defense powerfully. All in all, an intelligent experience punctuated with crackling humour – It ages a bit in parts from being out there too long- it isn’t one you can’t do without, but definitely better off with it.