When silent films speak of a lost past

My Mumbai Mirror column:

The discovery of a treasure trove of forgotten nitrate films from the early 1900s is the inspiration for a magical documentary

Sometimes a film feels like an epiphany. Watching Bill Morrison's Dawson City: Frozen Time, currently streaming on an international film platform, had that sort of effect on me. It tells the strange and wondrous tale of how nearly 400 silent films from the early 1900s, managed to survive in the permafrost of what had once been a small-town swimming pool -- emerging from the ground in the 1970s, to finally find their place in the history of humanity.

Technically a documentary, Morrison's film is an exquisite assemblage of facts and footage so artfully and lovingly crafted that it feels like an epic. That epic quality comes from two historic elements – the Canadian gold rush, which originally brought Dawson City into being, and the invention of cinema, which created these thousands of feet worth of early film images, only to abandon them. What Morrison captures, without ever spelling it out explicitly, is the way the treasure trove -- known as the Dawson City Film Find -- offers up a conjoined history of these two lost worlds: A forgotten town and a forgotten technology.

And yet both the town and the technology were, a century and a quarter ago, part of the crucible of modernity. Morrison begins with the fact that film originated in an explosive, nitrate cellulose. The Kodak company turned it into nitrate film by adding camphor to it and then coating it with plastic emulsion. But nitrate film, on which all early cinema was stored, remained highly inflammable, and the documentary shows, over and over again, that the history of early cinema is also a history of fire. From Thomas Alva Edison's film manufacturing plant exploding, to the Solax Film Company Fire in 1919, from the repeated burning down of Dawson City's film theatres, down to the 1967 warehouse fire in which the National Film Board of Canada lost its entire nitrate film collection, the sense of tragic loss comes to be replaced by a sense of inevitability.

The film is also a deep dive into Dawson: Now a small town with a tiny population of 1300-odd people (as of 2011), but once the site of a remarkable moment in world history. Gold was discovered near here on August 17, 1896, at the confluence of the Klondike and Yukon rivers near the boundary with the US state of Alaska. Over the next three years, thousands of prospectors made the extremely difficult journey to this freezing-cold terrain, often crossing snow-covered passes on foot, hoping, literally, to strike gold. During the height of the Klondike Gold Rush in 1898, Dawson City’s population exceeded 30,000.

Naturally, entrepreneurs of all sorts arrived, hoping to ‘mine the miners’, as Morrison puts it. Fred Trump opened a brothel called the Arctic Hotel and Restaurant in the nearby town of Whitehorse -- the origin, says Morrison, of the Trump family fortune. Casinos were the other gig in town, as you might expect from a place full of men on the make. An athletics association building came up, with boxing matches organised for a largely male audience. Soon, there were not one but three theatres screening films.

But as the more accessible mines began to be exhausted, and gold was discovered some distance away in Nome, Alaska, the city of Dawson emptied out, becoming a quarter of its size in a year. Films continued to come to Dawson, but they often took two or three years after their first release, to arrive. The town was at the end of a film distribution line, and the distributors didn't want to pay for their passage back. The films were already old news. So they ended up being stored in Dawson. As the years passed, and the town's buildings started running out of space, thousands of old silent film reels were burnt, or simply disposed of in the Yukon river. A small section remained -- and the rest is history: A history whose incredible details you should watch the film for.

Yet Morrison's film is no mere history book on screen. What he does is a marvel in terms of film form. He uses still images -- including photographs taken during the Gold Rush by a photographer called Eric Hegg, which have their own magical history of survival and recovery -- as well as newspaper articles, printed posters and archival letters. He uses newsreels from Pathe and Fox. And he combs all of this archival visual material for Dawson history, from an early instance of baseball match fixing to a real-life Hollywood murder with a Dawson connection. And of course, Dawson's connections with early cinema. But he goes far beyond using the footage as factual archive; he uses the reels from the Dawson Film Find, their edges marked by decades of water damage, to craft a magical visual history of their time. A sentence like “The years and decades passed Dawson by” is illustrated with shots of silent film heroines sleeping, as if waiting to be awakened by the kiss of some fairytale prince. We watch entranced as a series of unidentified film characters gamble, or wrestle with their lovers, or wait outside doors, eavesdropping. It feels like we're eavesdropping too, on history.

 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 14 Mar 2021

What sells in the media hasn’t changed in 40 years

My Mumbai Mirror column:

In Mrinal Sen’s 1982 film Chaalchitra, the filmmaker turns his astute gaze upon the smokescreen that is the business of news in a capitalist world.

In 1982, Jyoti Basu, who was then the chief minister of West Bengal, watched Mrinal Sen's newly-completed film Kharij (‘The Case is Closed’), about a middle class family's attempts to pass the buck when their under-aged servant boy dies of carbon monoxide poisoning. 

 

“The film is excellent, but it is too grim to be popular,” Basu had apparently said.

Sen didn't make only grim films, but he knew perfectly well what Jyoti babu meant. In 1981, a year before this incident, the great actor Utpal Dutt had played a newspaper editor in Sen's film Chaalchitra (‘The Kaleidoscope’). In a crucial establishing sequence, the pipe-smoking Dutt tells an idealistic young job seeker Dipu (Anjan Dutta) to come back in two days with an “intimate study” of his “middle class milieu”. His only instruction is to keep the tone light, because the piece must sell.

 

The big boss testing the potential employee is also the man-of-the-world lecturing the ingenue. Already, 40 years ago, in Sen's sharp-eyed vision, we see the media being clearly understood (by those who run it) in terms of the political limits placed on it by those who buy it – ie, the middle class.

 

When Dipu walks into the editor's grand office, he is hoping to escape a dull job elsewhere and clearly has a positive, perhaps even idealistic, image of the media. Asked to name an article he enjoyed reading in the paper in the recent past, Dipu enthusiastically mentions a feature about rickshaw wallahs. The editor is unmoved. “Yes, that piece gained some popularity,” he replies. “People are eating it up.”

 

“See, we've got to feed the public,” he says matter-of-factly to the young man who is his son's classmate. “Some sell potatoes, some bananas, some sell words. And we, we sell news. The whole goddamn world is one big shopping centre. And we're all pedlars.”

 

Chaalchitra didn't sell well, either in the commercial Bengali cinema market or in the film festival universe where Sen's films often found their niche. But it is an interesting film, not least for the historical reason that it is the only one of Sen's 25-odd films as a director, to be written by him. Dipankar Mukhopadhyay, in his biography of Sen, describes how the idea of it took shape. The incident Mukhopadhyaya describes as a creative trigger is oddly tangential to the film at hand. An old man arrived at Sen's doorstep one day, claiming to be his school friend from the village. Sen, who had come to Calcutta in 1940, couldn't remember the man's face or their acquaintance. But seeing that he had brought children with him, Sen finally feigned recognition. Still, when the family departed after having spent some time with Sen, he felt irritation that they had wasted his evening.

 

What the incident seems to have evoked for Sen is the distance he had travelled away from his roots. Two years before Chaalchitra, the filmmaker had acquired a car and moved to a posher locality. Chaalchitra was perhaps his last engagement with the lower middle class milieu he had left behind – and it is discomfiting in its honesty about the protagonist's decision to cut that cord.

 

Dipu spends the film searching for a 'story' amid the mundane details of his everyday life, a story that will get him the job. But although tensions erupt often, people seem keener to resolve them than to make them flare up further. The occupants of his chawl-like building in Shyambazar squabble over their dirty, mossy courtyard, but also get together to scrub it clean in a fit of anger. When one of the poorer old women in the building steals coal from Dipu's mother's bin, Dipu's mother takes care to safeguard it – but without a hue and cry about the theft. Even a fake astrologer that Dipu first thinks might make for an expose seems, upon reflection, a poor man in need of an income. Everything he observes has a flip side, a legitimate reason.

When he comes up with a story about the inescapable smoke from coal ovens in the city, the editor is excited – but wants to remove the flip side. Rather than question why the country's lower middle class still cooks with such fuel (the fact that gas ovens were -- and are-- too expensive), the editor believes what will sell with the middle class 'public' is a story about polluted air; the poison that they are forced to breathe. Does Dipu want to be a communist, or does he want the salary?

 

Earlier, in a remarkably edited sequence, Sen reveals how the same city that seemed so harsh when you're a poor man trying to hail a taxi in an emergency, turns into a tableaux of pleasures, seen from the back seat of a car.

 

The film ends with the arrival of the gas cylinder. It is only for Dipu's family, though -- leaving the rest of the building, the city, the country to continue in its haze of smoke. It's much thicker now.

 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 7 Feb 2021.

Book Review: Out of the ordinary - Tanuj Solanki's The Machine Is Learning

A book review for India Today magazine:

Tanuj Solanki’s quietly savage third novel digs for high-stakes drama under the surface of dull office life.

Indian literary fiction has rarely engaged with the office. Unless it’s glamorous or powerful milieus like big business, entertainment, crime or law enforcement, fictional workplaces often remain unidimensional backdrops, the wings from which characters emerge on stage to fight their real psychological or ethical battles. Drawn from his own experience in insurance companies, Tanuj Solanki’s The Machine is Learning makes a conscious departure from that norm, and does so with aplomb.

Solanki plonks us into a sea of office-speak that a less ambitious writer might not have risked, while crafting a plot thick enough to keep us afloat. As we find ourselves suddenly au fait both with standard corporate self-inflation (“business process excellence”, “strategic projects group”) and more specialised insurance terminology (underwriting, reinsuring, local operations executive), it becomes clear that the zone-out dullness of this linguistic universe can mask very real drama. One begins to suspect, in fact, that the masking may be intentional. In Solanki’s splendid pacy telling, office politics emerges as an undeniable microcosm of politics in the deepest sense.

The book’s appeal is aided by its narrator, a 29-year-old who combines corporate ‘dudeness’ with an aspiration to good spelling and non-conformism, his cockiness tempered with just enough insecurity to make him interesting. In his corporate bubble, Saransh Malik is a rising star and he knows it. But he is also smart enough to know what he doesn’t know; willing to let his “ex-journalist, do-gooder” girlfriend Jyoti stoke his uncertainties. Saransh is the perfect hero for a novel of ethical questioning: someone with something at stake, but not yet frozen irredeemably into the guarding of turf.

Since his Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar-winning Diwali in Muzaffarnagar (2018), Solanki’s prose has become cleaner, and his insights sharper. There is a pared-down quality to this book, though it never avoids the self-reflexive detail, Saransh implicitly contrasting his boss Mitesh’s arranged marriage wife and “this year’s bonus” life with his own Tinder-dependent one, or marking the class difference that separates him from Jyoti, even as she pushes him to confront his role in the capitalist juggernaut. Thoughtful but never ponderous, scrupulously deadpan in its descriptions of sex as much as office spaces, this is a great book about aspects of Indian life only just finding their way into fiction.

Published in India Today, 29 Aug 2020

Shelf Life: Run of the Mill

The July edition of my 'Shelf Life' column on clothes viewed through the prism of literature, for the website 'The Voice of Fashion':

A reading of literary works set in and around the Industrial Revolution which remain relevant today, showing that no technological innovation is by itself any guarantee of social betterment

 Power loom weaving in a cotton mill in Lancashire England, ca. 1835. Engraving with modern watercolour. (Shutterstock)

As any school textbook will tell you, the Industrial Revolution began in Britain in the mid-1700s. Production became increasingly mechanised, accelerating a process of economic change that altered the very character of society. What the textbooks don't stress enough is how much of the technological innovation that drove the Industrial Revolution was in textiles. John Kay's flying shuttle, patented 1733, allowed wider cloth to be woven faster. The greater demand for yarn was met by James Hargreaves's 1764 spinning jenny, where one person could work many spindles, and Richard Arkwright’s 1769 water frame, with spindles operated by water rather than manually. Both were supplanted by Samuel Crompton's 1779 spinning mule, which spun thread strong enough for Britain to finally start producing cheap calico cloth. Then came Edmund Cartwright's vertical power loom in 1785.

Combined with Britain's colonial status, these innovations meant that by the 1830s, 85 per cent of the world's raw cotton was being processed in the mills of Lancashire. Manchester and the surrounding mill towns began to draw researchers and writers concerned about the new working class. Benjamin Disraeli, later Britain's Prime Minister, wrote a novel called Sybil, or the Two Nations (1845), in which an upper class character travels to the industrial north to see working class conditions. The popular Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell set her first book Mary Barton (1848) in Manchester: a romance between her working class heroine and a mill-owner's son. In Gaskell's North and South (1854), we see workers’ troubles and early strikes through the eyes of a heroine who clashes with a cotton mill owner, only to eventually marry him.

Real-life romance in the mill town could sometimes expand on the novelist's imagination.

Friedrich Engels, born into a German textile dynasty that had made its fortune from linen yard bleaching, mechanised lace-making and silk ribbon manufacture, came to Manchester because his father had a thread factory there. Expected to learn the textile business, Engels instead produced The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), establishing in horrific detail how early industrialisation had actually worsened workers' lives. Low wages and terrible living conditions led to much higher mortality from disease in Manchester than in the surrounding countryside. Karl Marx's reading of the book helped forge the intellectual partnership of a lifetime – and Marx and Engels' critique of capitalism.

But Manchester is also where Engels forged a long-term partnership with Mary Burns, then a worker in his father's factory. Rachel Holmes' delightful 2014 biography of Marx's daughter, the feminist and trade unionist Eleanor Marx, describes Mary Burns' role in Engels' life as “directive and Socratic”: “Engels took Mary to bed; Mary took Engels to the tenements and to the heart of the Irish immigrant community of Manchester... [explaining] the conditions of factory and domestic workers.”

Among the sharpest fictional takes on the textile industry came almost a century later, in 1951, when Roger MacDougall's superb play, The Man in the White Suit, was turned into a Ealing Studio comedy by his cousin Alexander McKendrick. Starring the great British actor Alec Guinness, The Man in the White Suit is a cynical comedy, with its cynicism extending all the way across capitalist society.

The film opens with a younger textile mill owner called Michael Corland romancing Daphne, the daughter of an older and richer mill owner called Birnley, with purely monetary desires. Guinness plays Sidney Stratton, a misunderstood scientific genius who takes yard jobs in one textile mill after another so that he can stealthily use the labs. When Sidney devises an artificial fabric that will last forever and repels dirt, Daphne convinces her father to test it. But when word gets out, the mill-owners gang up to prevent what they see as a calamity for business. “The spinning jenny and the mechanical loom increased output,” says one captain of industry. “This'll finish it!”

Sidney somehow escapes their clutches and is trying to reach the newspapers, but is stopped by his old worker friends: the unions, too, are dead against a fabric whose production has an inbuilt time limit. Even these socialist workers, aware enough to describe themselves as “flotsam floating on the high tide of profit”, cannot actually imagine a world beyond the short-term goals of capitalist production. If obsolescence is not built into the things workers produce, then things will last forever; demand will dry up – and so will jobs.

A still from The Man in the White Suit, an Ealing Studio adaptation of Roger MacDougall's play

The Man in the White Suit is even more relevant today, when late capitalism's need to artificially inflate demand ensures greater inbuilt obsolescence. It is more so because technological innovation is constantly being thrown at us as a panacea, without enough attention paid to the politics that surrounds that technology: think, in post-2014 India, of the discourse around the digital, in relation to demonetisation, lockdown relief or Covid-tracking apps.

Just as with the textile industry at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, technological innovation is not by itself any guarantee of social betterment. Who has access to that technology, who controls it, and to whose benefit – that is what determines whether it is good for the human race: whether, in fact, technology will mean progress.

Published on The Voice of Fashion, 16 July 2020.

Under the influence

My Mirror column:

The under-watched classic Bigger Than Life turns family drama into almost-horror, with prescient warnings against modern medicine and delusional masculinity

 
The first 20 minutes of Bigger Than Life seem to paint a picture of the perfect family man, who’s also a hard-working, pleasant colleague. A schoolteacher in suburban 1950s America, Ed Avery (James Mason in a career-defining performance) is the nice guy you ask to help push your stalled car, the guy who lets the kid in detention go if he can name one Great Lake out of the five, the guy who sprints on to the last bus after school to work a second job at a garage.

But those first 20 minutes also show us that Ed is also the sort of guy who thinks he can handle everything, and do so alone: he hasn’t told his wife about the garage job because she’ll think it’s beneath him, nor mentioned the pains he’s had for six months because he thinks they’re nothing. So it doesn’t seem surprising that when he’s forced to go to hospital after a blackout, his first instinct is to instruct his little son Richie to be “the man around here” and “take care of your mother”.

On the surface, Nicholas Ray’s film is about the dangerous mental side effects of a miracle drug for the body. Ed is diagnosed with a rare inflammation of the arteries, and treated successfully with cortisone – until he starts to take it in excess. The mood swings, paranoia and manic depression that result only reinforce his impaired judgement, making him take still more pills. Screenwriters Cyril Hume and Richard Maibaum based the script on an article called ‘Ten Feet Tall’ by Berton Roueché, medical staff writer for The New Yorker, about a real schoolteacher’s experience with high-dosage cortisone. And though this is 1950s America, and patient and doctor are well-acquainted, even friendly, the film clearly indicates how alienating hospitalisation is: the non-stop tests, the solitary confinement, the ghostliness of barium meal, the unrecognisable medical jargon in which you hear your own body described.

But Ray, a director more famous for films such as Rebel Without a Cause and In a Lonely Place, was a man both ahead of his time and able to see into the depths of it. Released in 1956, when much of America was watching the era-defining sitcom Father Knows Best, Bigger Than Life revealed the frightening cracks in that idyllic ’50s family picture. At one level, Ed Avery’s symptoms are those of a mentally ill man, but he can certainly also be viewed as a barely-exaggerated version of the ordinary neighbourhood patriarch, the father who thinks he knows best even when he clearly doesn’t. This is the man insecure about being a “male schoolmarm”, who also has delusions of grandeur about schooling the nation. He insults his wife (“What a shame I couldn’t have married... my intellectual equal!”) and pushes his child beyond breaking point in the name of prepping him for the real world (“If you let it at ‘good enough’ right now, that’s the way you’ll be later on.”).

The film is also a powerful indictment of the pressures of life in a consumerist era, for a man trying to give himself and his family a good life on a single schoolteacher’s salary. The Averys’ house is filled with posters of faraway European holiday destinations, and there are wry, hopeful conversations about vacations and “getting away from it all” – while the camera often focuses on James Mason’s watch, and time and lateness is a frequent topic. The tight budgeting that makes Ed work a secret second job has as its flip side the grandiose display he indulges in when under the influence of the cortisone: hustling his wife into a fancy designer store, being rude to the saleswomen, and insisting on buying her two expensive dresses with a cheque that eventually bounces.

The more unbalanced Ed gets, the more he is convinced that he is the only smart person around. The milkman’s jangling of a bell seems to him deliberately designed to annoy him “because I work with my mind”, the other drivers on the street irritate him, his son and wife disappoint him, and the children he teaches for a living seem to him idiots. “We’re breeding a race of moral midgets,” he declares at a PTA meeting, eliciting mostly gasps of disbelief – but also a couple of votes for future school principal.

Watching Bigger Than Life in 2020, the self-aggrandising family man who thinks the country needs to do away with “all this hogwash about self-expression, permissiveness and emotional security” and focus on inculcating “a sense of duty” feels terrifyingly familiar. He might be your neighbour, your uncle, your father or your boss. And his condition is getting worse, under the influence of a collective drug called nationalism, being doled out for free at a counter near you.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 2 February 2020.

The dream machine - II

My Mirror column:

What might we learn about our relationship with machines from Ritwik Ghatak’s classic Ajantrik and Buddhadev Dasgupta’s recent Urojahaj – with a detour through Naya Daur? The second of a two-part column

In last week’s column, I suggested that there might be something to be learnt from comparing two Indian films made 60 years apart, each about a man besotted with a machine – Buddhadeb Dasgupta’s most recent feature, Urojahaj (The Flight), and Ritwik Ghatak’s 1957 arthouse classic Ajantrik. 

In Urojahaj, the protagonist is a happily married man with a child, and his attachment to the broken-down Second World War plane he finds in the forest comes across as selfish. The mechanic’s quest for something so impractical can only be individualistic. The plane is an obsession that takes Bachhu Mondol away from those he loves. And as he hears more tales from ghosts of betrayed humans, he begins to be suspicious of those that love him: in one sadly revealing moment, when his wife tells him the police are looking for him, he actually asks her if it is she who has reported his discovery of the plane.


In Ajantrik, in contrast, the taxi driver hero Bimal has no-one else to love. The battered taxi seems to fill up the space in Bimal's heart where a person might have been. When Bimal speaks of Jagaddal, it is as a trusty companion – and when the car collapses, he sees it as betrayal.(“Even if I give you my all, I can't win your favour?”) His hunger for human company may be inarticulate, but when he encounters a young woman who has been cheated by her lover, something buried deep within the usually misanthropic Bimal bubbles up to the surface. When Jagaddal appears not to cooperate in his mission to help her, Bimal delivers a well-aimed kick to its engine. That unprecedented moment of anger kickstarts the process that will eventually bring the machine to its knees – and it might be said to stem from Bimal's frustrated effort to assist another human being.

Despite their differences, the close relationship between man and machine in both films seems to turn on excluding the rest of humanity. The same year as Ghatak made Ajantrik, the Hindi film industry also produced a hugely popular narrative about man and machine. Released on August 15, 1957, BR Chopra’s Naya Daur ('The New Age') starred Dilip Kumar as Shankar, a tangawalla who becomes the focal point of a battle between the horse-cart drivers of his village and the evil capitalist son of the village’s feudal landlord. The legendary climactic race between Shankar, straining at the reins of his horse-drawn cart, and the villainous Kundan at the wheel of his bus was staged such that the underdog would win. 

But even within Naya Daur’s wishful dream universe, laced with the labour-capitalist bhai-bhai rhetoric that was often as far as Hindi cinema socialism went, Shankar’s victory could only be presented as a one-time thing, a reprieve. The film was intended only to give us pause as we hurtled into the machine age, to consider the fate of the masses who would be left behind if we were not careful.

Ajantrik seems to occupy a mindspace so different that is scarcely recognisable as belonging to the same cultural landscape. Instead of a race between a tanga and a bus, Ghatak has his taxi compete with a train. The creaky, decrepit Jagaddal cannot win. But that does not lead us to anything so simple as a win or a loss for technology. Driving too fast on a curving hilly road to catch up with the train, Bimal must draw back from the edge in the nick of time – and the moment when he does is also the moment when he finally sees the world in which both taxi and train have arrived: disruptions, but here to stay.

What Ghatak shows us through Bimal’s eyes is a festive gathering of the Oraons: women singing with flowers in their hair, bare-chested men with drums, dancing in unison. There is something about Bimal’s gaze that seems to see but not see, the marvellous sight of the human body moving to a rhythm that has existed long before the rhythm of the machine. And yet, as the Oraon man who pushes the broken-down jalopy to Ranchi Station says to his sweetheart, it is the train from this station that takes “our people to Assam and Bhutan, to work in the tea gardens”. A single machine may die, Ghatak seems to suggest, but the machine is here to stay. 

Ajantrik extended the concept of pathetic fallacy from nature to the machine. But the human hero of 1957 still saw his favourite machine in human terms, giving his car a name and human attributes; a sense of life and death; even a kind of burial, at the scrap dealer’s. Sixty years later, at the end of Urojahaj, it is the human hero whose life and death are in balance. Bachhu Mondol, running from the irrationality of a tyrannical state, speeds through the forest and out onto what looks like a runway, and the camera pans over the ground, rising higher as if looking on from high. What Bachhu sees is what a plane would see, if it could. The man in search of freedom now models himself on the machine.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 15 Sep 2019

The Journey of Modern Indian Art

A piece for India Today about the state of modern Indian art, (occasioned by a new book on the subject, Modern Indian Painting, edited by Giles Tillotson and Rob Dean). 

'Assassin', by the late Ganesh Pyne. (Tempera).

Last week, an “art market intelligence” firm called Artery India announced on its website that India’s ‘Top 3 Artists’ over the last five years are V.S. Gaitonde, M.F. Husain and S.H. Raza. Husain and Raza, once colleagues in the Progressive Artists’ Group, are running neck and neck, with 494 and 454 works sold for Rs 331 crore and Rs 321 crore respectively. Gaitonde is the dark horse, having totted up Rs 392 crore with just 81 works.

The racecourse metaphor may seem undignified, but it’s also sadly accurate in a country where art is only discussed for its price tag. When Christie’s sells a Tyeb Mehta work for Rs 22.9 crore, or an “unseen” Souza is a Sotheby’s auction highlight (as will happen on March 18 in New York), modern Indian art can provide temporary grist to the national pride mill. Five artists—Raza, Husain, Gaitonde, F.N. Souza and Mehta—account for two-thirds of the top 500 lots sold at auctions. The market’s unrelenting appetite for big names can lead down murkier paths. In February, several works listed for auction by the Neville Tuli-run Osian’s-Connoisseurs of Art Pvt. Ltd—an untitled 1957 Souza, Shadow of Death by Bhupen Khakhar, a 1964 Jehangir Sabavala and a 1952 Akbar Padamsee—were charged with being potential fakes.

Kito de Boer and his partner Jane Gowers began collecting modern Indian art 25 years ago during a seven-year sojourn in India. Their collection, now 1000-odd images strong, offers an example of how informed private collectors might depart from such a highly skewed art market. The de Boer collection is now the basis of a new book, Modern Indian Painting, edited by Giles Tillotson and Rob Dean.

The de Boers' personal tastes sometimes align with the market, for instance on the Bombay Progressives. Yashodhara Dalmia’s essay on them usefully contextualises each artist: e.g. Raza’s move from early cityscapes and representational works, like the arresting Three Artists, to the abstract, ever more luminous oils that he began to make in the 1960s; or Souza’s iconoclasm, including ghoulish depictions of Christian themes and unprecedented sexual imagery. Dalmia includes a great anecdote from artist Krishen Khanna: a woman he once heard muttering “Disgusting, absolutely disgusting”, as she stepped away from a nude self-portrait by Souza.

The late S.H. Raza's 'Three Artists'

The de Boers also display a strong interest in art from Bengal, and because the region has been so crucial to modern Indian art, the book works superbly as an introductory historical survey. Partha Mitter’s essay on the Bengal School explains succinctly how Indian art first became wound up with nationalism. The rise of western art training in colonial India first gave rise to an artist like Raja Ravi Varma, who “used the syntax of Victorian academic art for his ‘authentic’ recreations of the Hindu past”. Varma’s style of portraiture, spread by his printing press, became the new norm in the popular imagination. But, Mitter writes, by the early twentieth century, there was a reaction to western academic art. The Bengal School, under E.B. Havell and Abanindranath Tagore, led a formal movement against western-style three-dimensional illusionism. This included using watercolours rather than oils, and looking East (e.g. to Japan’s colour wash techniques), or to India’s own past (e.g. Ajanta frescoes or Mughal miniatures) for ‘Swadeshi’ form and subjects.

The book illustrates this period with Tagore’s own Bharat Mata and The Passing of Shah Jahan, A.R. Chughtai’s Shah Jahan Looking at the Taj, Kshitindranath Majumdar’s Chaitanya images and, most interesting of all, Prosanto Roy’s works in variegated styles, from Untitled (Arabian Nights) to the Tibetan thangka influences in Mara’s Attack on the Buddha. Tillotson’s essay further amplifies our sense of this early period, illustrating how the Tagore-led Bengal School was challenged, not just by the Bombay School’s portrait painters, like M.V. Dhurandhar and M.F. Pithawalla, but from within Bengal itself. Practitioners in oils like Motilal Pai created ‘realistic’ perspectival architectural settings for epic themes, while the Calcutta Naturalists like Hemendranath Mazumdar, B.C. Law and Satish Sinha focused on naturalistic female figures and landscapes.

Bezwada, by Chittaprosad.

Sona Datta’s essay frames the mid-century change in Bengal’s art as a rural idyll (Jamini Roy, Nandalal Bose, Benod Behari Mukherjee and others at Shantiniketan) disrupted by famine, war and Partition. The standout figure here is Chittaprosad Bhattacharya, whose woodblock prints and ink-on-paper drawings are a scathing commentary on stark times. But Datta also helps explain the darkness of major mid-century Bengali artists, like Nikhil Biswas, Rabin Mondal, Somnath Hore and Prokash Karmakar.

The book ends with three fascinating interviews with living artists: Ganesh Pyne and his unsettling, ghostly temperas, A. Ramachandran’s vegetally embellished re-workings of Indian myths and Rameshwar Broota’s eclectic career that was “never influenced by the watercolours of the Bengal School”. As he says, “I am influenced by universal art.” May all future Indian art be as confident.

Published in India Today, 15 Mar 2019. A brief accompanying interview with Tillotson is here.

Singing from the soul?

My Mirror column:

Gully Boy movingly fictionalises the lives of two real-life Mumbai rappers, but its insistence on authenticity masks as many contradictions as its characters 

In the opening scene of Gully Boy, the film’s protagonist Muraad (Ranveer Singh) is roped into stealing a car by his friend Moeen. It’s clear that Muraad isn’t too comfortable doing this, and yet he goes along for the ride, literally. The scene manages to do several things with superb economy. It marks, first and foremost, the thin line between the legal and illegal that these young men must straddle, a lakshman rekha where the temptations of stepping over are much greater than any benefits that might accrue from staying within. It also returns us to the risky lives of poor young Muslim men in Mumbai, exactly thirty years after Saeed Mirza’s Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro (1989), evoking an updated version of that youthful urban swag but avoiding the sense of real danger. Specifically, though, Zoya Akhtar’s achievement in the scene is to show us what really matters to Muraad: when the stolen car’s stereo starts playing some generic rap, he mocks the lyrics showing off girls and gaadis. Whoever listens to such “nakli rap” must be a “nakli aadmi”, the boys giggle, and in their heads the stealing of the car is now more than ok.

Given that Akhtar’s consummately crafted film is, after all, an appropriation of the lives and work of real-life Mumbai rappers Naezy and Divine, there is something audacious about Gully Boy’s frontal claim to authenticity. The unspoken message, in this scene and throughout the film, is that Muraad is asli, the real thing. Some of the most affecting lines in the film are built to bolster this truth-claim: “Teri kahani tere ko nahi bolni toh main kae ko boloon? (If you don’t want to tell your story, why should I tell it?)” MC Sher asks Muraad when he says he’s afraid to actually perform the poem he has written. Or later, before a crucial rap battle, when Muraad seems dejected by his poverty and what he sees as his lack of exposure, Sher tells him, “Tere paas kya hai tu woh dekh (What you have, you look at that)”.

Of course, this is tied to the idea of hip-hop as an autobiographical form, whose discomfiting of its audience draws on the authentic experience and unexpurgated language of African Americans from inner city backgrounds. As Sher tells Muraad in response to his “Comfortable nahi hoon main (I’m not comfortable)”, “Bhai duniya mein sab comfortable hote toh rap kaun banata? (If everyone in the world was comfortable, who would make rap?)”.

And yet Gully Boy itself shows us otherwise. Rap, like any other art form trying to succeed under conditions of late capitalism, must become comfortable receiving the patronage of the comfortably-off. So while the film shows how rap is enabled by the democratising possibilities of the internet, it also acknowledges that the music industry continues to have gatekeepers. Money matters, as does the influence of what Moeen once cuttingly refers to as “the English-talking gang”. A crucial character here is Sky (Kalki Koechlin), who is Indian but studies music in the US, with enough university funding to enable a posher studio set-up than anything Muraad and Sher can imagine. 

There is some symbolic power that Indian rappers can draw from hiphop’s international linkages. But while the film invites us to smirk along with Muraad when he shocks an American tourist by coolly reciting lyrics by the famous rapper on the tourist’s T-shirt, the fact is that Muraad actually lives in a Dharavi jhuggi that’s on the American’s Mumbai slum tour.

But what the film also offers is a clear-eyed vision of how no-one can be a single “asli” self, simply because social and economic and cultural pressures force most of us into inhabiting multiple universes. Muraad must cover over his distaste for his chauffeur father’s decision to marry a much younger second wife, literally playing his own soundtrack on his headphones to block out the traditional shehnai music whose maudlinness feels like a comment on his mother’s (Amruta Subhash) misery. Muraad’s long-time girlfriend Safina (Alia Bhatt) might want to be her authentic self with her loving but conservative father and mother, but she knows that telling them the truth about her desires will only result in them being scotched. So she keeps Muraad’s number on her phone labelled as “Mrs Ahmad” and uses the excuse of imaginary medical deliveries to sneak out and meet him.

Safina and Muraad’s perfectly choreographed romantic assignations, clandestinely conducted in the city’s most public places – trains, buses, bridges – are among the film’s unerring joys. As is the emotional landscape of their relationship, especially in the tear-inducing moment where Muraad explains her shaping influence on him to Sky: “Safina ke bina meri jindagi aisi jaise bachpan ke bina hi bada ho gaya (My life without Safina would be as if I’d just grown up without a childhood).”

Safina is both the aspiring doctor for whom career comes first and the girlfriend reckless enough to risk a police case to keep her man; the headscarf-wearing Muslim daughter and the girl rubbing rouge onto her cheeks on a railway platform. Muraad moves from being the white-shirted employee who must keep his mouth shut to the fit guy with two top buttons open, pouring his angst into a microphone. Like many films about artistic aspiration, Gully Boy seems certain that only one of these selves is the real one, the one worth celebrating. But perhaps it is the very fact of acknowledging multiple selves that keeps us asli. 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 24 Feb 2018.

At what price beauty?

My Mirror column:

Women struggle to feel beautiful in an intriguing television series called Dietland, and a new comedy called I Feel Pretty.

“Apart from Steven and a few other people, I’d learnt to live deep inside myself... My body was just a thing I used to move my head around,” says Alicia ‘Plum’ Kettle early in the first season of Dietland, the ongoing television series of which she is the heroine and sometimes narrator. The thought isn’t a complicated one. But Plum’s description of her inner life as a fat person also encapsulates what seems to me to be a most universally resonant thought: a split between the body and the mind, the feeling that one’s visible outer self does not really represent one’s inner being. Based on Sarai Walker’s novel of the same name, Dietland’s aim is simple: it places a woman’s struggles with obesity at the centre of our consciousness, forcing us to engage with our prejudices and pity-parties, even — perhaps, especially — when they come couched as concerns about the fat person’s health and happiness.



As she moves hopelessly between her friend Steven’s cafe and her lonely Brooklyn apartment, her thankless weightwatchers meetings (where she is lectured by annoying thin women) and her freelance gig as ghostwriter for teen zine editor Kitty Montgomery (where, too, she is lectured by annoying thin women), Plum gets sadder and angrier. Still, she continues to suspend all her present-day desires in aid of a future Day of Fulfilment, pegging her meagre savings and oversized hopes to a gastric band surgery that promises to unveil her “thin person within”.

So in Plum’s case, the split sense of identity is based on being fat. But Dietland makes it clear that what it’s really targeting is much larger: a world of impossibly precarious standards for what counts as female beauty, held in place by what it refers to as the “dissatisfaction industrial complex”. “They get us to tell them how broken we are and then get us to buy things to fix it,” says the wonderfully savvy Julia, manager of the so-called ‘Beauty Closet’ that’s part of Kitty Montgomery’s media empire — who also enrols Plum into a secret project to subvert it. Meanwhile, an anonymous female vigilante group by the fantastically normal name of Jennifer starts to claim responsibility for the grisly murders of rapists who have escaped the law. Their violence is effective and media-grabbing — it shuts down Fashion Week and kills off a female porn star associated with rape porn — and even as Plum is adopted by a peaceful ‘anti-diet’ philanthropist, the connections she’s making seem to lead her closer and closer to Jennifer.


A few weeks after I watched Dietland, I came upon a 2018 film that seems to engage with very similar concerns. Called I Feel Pretty, it stars the influential stand-up comic Amy Schumer. Schumer’s Renee Bennett is by no means obese, but like Plum Kettle, she struggles with insecurities about her looks. 

If Plum slaves away secretly over her laptop in her apartment, Renee leads her work life in a dank Chinatown basement. Both are wage slaves employed by insanely posh women in the youth and beauty business, who gradually start to see the value of our anonymous, non-posh heroines. Where Plum had Kitty, Renee has Avery LeClaire (Michelle Williams in a memorably excessive performance), heir and CEO of a cosmetics corporation called Lily LeClaire that’s looking to branch out from high-end to mass products. Most strikingly, Renee yearns to know what it’s like to be “undeniably pretty” — which, in both Plum’s and her minds, is what will make them worthy of being desired, and thus — at least potentially — loved.


I began by being struck by how similarly Dietland and I Feel Pretty set up their scenarios. But I ended up amazed by the different routes they take to resolve them. I Feel Pretty uses the old knock-on-the-head device to create a version of amnesia: Renee wakes up from a gym accident convinced that she has been transformed into a woman of stunning attractiveness; a babe by mainstream standards. That illusion kickstarts her lifeless dating life and career, as romantic partners and snobbish bosses alike are first bemused and then charmed by her self-confidence. As feel-good comedy, this premise walks a bit of a political tightrope — because, of course, the reason everyone (including us, the audience) is so amused is because Renee’s new confidence is misplaced, incongruous, delusional. And there are moments of annoying obviousness when Renee befriends the beautiful people — her gym friend or her boss — only so that we can be told that hot people have problems, too.


What I Feel Pretty’s makers want us to concentrate on, however, is that feeling “undeniably pretty” is enough to make the life we want. If we feel it on the inside, it’ll start to show up on the outside.



Meanwhile, in Dietland, we watch Plum being treated badly, by strangers and by potential dates, because fatness has been declared not just unattractive but inferior, worthy of fetishising but not respect and love. But then we also see women with the most flawless of bodies being objectified. “They’re perfect,” says an acid attack victim with a disfigured face. “How’s that working out for them?” In fact, Dietland wants us to arrive at the same place as I Feel Pretty —just via a darker route. The most beautiful body is no guarantee of anything, if we aren’t feeling pretty on the inside.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 19 Aug 2018.

Book Review: Yashwant Chittal's Shikari

Bombay High

My review of Yashwant Chittal's classic novel Shikari, translated from the Kannada by Pratibha Umashankar-Nadiger:

Pratibha Umashankar-Nadiger's long overdue English translation makes it clear why Shikari, originally published in 1979, is perhaps acclaimed Kannada writer Yashwant Chittal's best-known novel. Offbeat and absorbing, it provides a stirring portrait of urban Bombay, and a rare insight into Indian corporate life under the Licence Permit Raj.

Chittal's narrator Nagappa (often modernised to Nagnath, and further to Nag) was born, like the author, in a village called Hanehalli in Karnataka's Uttara Kannada, and his memories often take him back there. But it is in the Bombay bylanes of Khetwadi, Prarthana Samaj, Charni Road, Grant Road, Chowpatty and Dhobi Talao that the novel unfolds -- largely on foot, with Nagappa's distracted meanderings often guiding his thoughts. Passing the Communist Party press reminds him of health hazards at his company's Hyderabad factory; buying the Times of India sets him dreaming of an alternative life as a news-stall-owner. He responds to urban stimuli like an automaton: buying a bus ticket to Worli makes him realize he is going to see his friend Sitaram.

Together with Shantinath Desai and Jayant Kaikini, Chittal formed a triad of post-independence Kannada writers for whom Bombay defined urbanity. A superb new translation of Kaikini's Bombay stories, under the title No Presents Please, came out in November 2017. Shikari is Chittal's big Bombay novel, and his fine-grained observations feel like an ode to its streets, even when its narrator is at his most anxious. But the familiarity of the chawl and the neighbourhood, Chittal suggests, can turn into oppressive social surveillance. And economic rise does not guarantee belonging: neither Nag nor his bete noire Shrinivasa are confident of retaining their social status.

If Shikari is presciently pessimistic about urban alienation, it is downright depressing on the inner life of the corporation. Despite a century and a half of industrial modernity, the white-collar workplace isn't a frequent Indian literary setting: off the top of my head, I think of Krishna Sobti's Yaaron Ke Yaar (1968) and Amitabha Bagchi's The Householder (2012), both vivid portraits of corruption in government offices. Shikari is about corporate intrigue in a Bombay world that feels contemporary in some ways – say, its liberal use of jargon like MD, DMD, R&D – but not in others: the only women in Nagappa's working world are secretaries, receptionists or airhostesses, who are either Parsi, Anglo-Indian or Goan Christian.

Shikari references Kafka's The Trial on page one, and yes, both books contain an unspecified crime and erotically charged encounters with most of the female characters. But Nagappa's paranoia also brings to mind Bob Slocum, the manager narrator of Joseph Heller's 1974 novel Something Happened, for whom, too, the office is a space of dread. The relentless mutual suspicion that forms the matrix of Shikari, though, is informed by sexual hypocrisy and naked appeals to caste and community. The transparency of those factors in this supposedly modern white-collar milieu makes this a tragically Indian classic.

An edited version of this review was published in India Today, 9 Feb 2018.

Machines director Rahul Jain on his acclaimed film: 'In India, inequality stares back at you'

Rahul Jain's debut Machines is a compelling, deceptively simple cinematic essay on the dehumanising effects of labour, set in a cloth factory in Gujarat. Having won awards and acclaim at film festivals from Zurich and Thessaloniki to Sundance and Mumbai, the documentary was screened at the Dharamshala International Film Festival last weekend. 

We caught up with the 26-year-old debut filmmaker at his family home in Delhi just after Diwali, to talk about privilege and inequality, shielding ourselves from our environment, capitalism and the creative process.

You grew up in Delhi. 

Yes, till the age of 15. In Pitampura. By the time I left India, we were in GK II. And then while I was gone, my family moved to Geetanjali Enclave. And then a few years ago, we moved here [to the South Extension house].

Do you have plans of moving back here?

I have actually moved back. Though I'm travelling a lot, and it has been difficult to be here and meditate for my next film. I went out today for a few hours, and it was very depressing. But I guess that's what I'm looking for. [laughs]

Yes, I read that your new project is about environmental pollution. Is this also a fieldwork trip – given that Diwali now inaugurates the pollution season in Delhi?

It is, kind of. But very privileged and protected. I think the suffusion of politics and art is a relatively recent thing, maybe 100-150 years. Since the Renaissance artists have had this problem of how to represent anything an invisible force: the greatest of those would be God. To look at a poison does not suggest what that poison can do.

So why does the visual representation matter then?

This is something I struggle with. But this is where the human comes in. It is life that interprets matter around it. Otherwise matter is just matter. If I can somehow manage to excavate and provoke certain kinds of reactions from a wide intersection of the population of the city... I don't experience the city the way an average person here would, by needing to walk around. When I went to school in a non-AC school bus, maybe I did. But now, with air conditioning, for example, the more you  avoid the genie outside, the more the genie outside keeps growing. It's a Catch-22, something that I'm really confused and scared about — as much as one can be with a level of comfort that allows you to ignore your surroundings.

It's more and more possible to shield yourself from the environment. Once you begin, there seems no end.

Yes, the thickness of the barriers between you and the world keep growing, the more you avoid the world outside. I don't really know how to communicate that fear to people for whom that fear is not up to their necks at the moment. I don't know if this blindness is a socio-economic problem. This is going to affect all of us. Maybe the richest will dig into mountains and hide themselves inside, but that won't really be life, would it?

But even people not in that position seem not to see what it is doing to them, and worse — what they're doing to it. In my very middle-middle class Delhi neighbourhood, families hoarded fireworks and lit them after midnight. That — not relief — was the response to the Supreme Court ban on firework sales. It seems like everyone wants to assume the role of victim.

Every single book that I've read about climate change or global warming, the first chapter talks about denial. Of course there's pollution outside, but the real pollution is inside our heads, which is causing us to not perceive the magnitude of the behemoth we are facing, we are causing. Carbon is a solid but we have managed to transmute it into a gas.

The other thing is slow violence. As a five-year-old, there was something fascinating about explicit, extreme contrasts — if the punch doesn't have the dishoom-dishoom sound, we might experience it less. It's easy to kill creatures in a video game. Like that virtual violence, the pollutants we are generating remain virtual or fictional — till they hit us. Maybe an animal feels more when they see a chrysanthemum growing in January instead of April. How do you generate that foreboding, the terror of what that means? To depict that is a big representational challenge.

What you just said about denial and our comforts making us deny our role reminded me of one of the strongest scenes in Machines: where the factory owner says he keeps the labourers' salaries low because they would spend the extra money on bidis or alcohol. That is class blindness and denial. The other thing I remember is that in an interview you gave, you mentioned that you wanted to capture the stench of ammonia in the factory — which takes us back to depicting the invisible.

I'm just a very olfactory person. I am very moved by smell. I even choose my partners by it. I am wary of it, but I use it in my art as well. But films are nonetheless a two-dimensional medium. You get sound and image, you have to make do with that, but I try to generate a kind of synaesthesia.

I believe that you first visited the factory in Machines when you were a small child. What stayed with you from then?

Sense perceptions. A child doesn't have the language to articulate the world, they can only feel. I was three feet tall and there were all these sweaty people, very big. And the machines were very big. It was one of my foundational experiences to have seen that, even though I was only a tertiary participant. As a child, I was a ghost there. My whole life it was brewing, I think. Then three things happened. First I was given a warning that I would get kicked out [of film school] if I didn't make something. But I didn't identify or relate with anything in my immediate environment.

Where was that?

In Valencia, which is 40 miles from Los Angeles. Very white and very dull. Then I was googling for inspiration and googled '25 Greatest Photographers Ever' and came across Sebastian Salgado's book called Workers. I was hypnotised. It literally took me back to my exaggerated perspective, that of a child. Also around the same time in 2013, the Rana Plaza incident in Bangladesh happened, where a garment factory collapsed and over a thousand people passed away. This was also one of the catalysts that brought this into the zeitgeist.

I could have made this film in a bread factory or a Pepsi factory. I mean, the whole world is built on slavery of some kind or another. But the earliest rhetorics of working class conditions and anthropology of workers was articulated for some reason in textile mills.

Yes, true. So did you work out why the cloth matters? I mean, there is an obvious visual contrast between these reams of fabric and the often meagrely-clothed men working to create them...

Yes. Which some of the girls in my school in California found really hot. Though I wasn't at all eroticising them in that way.

How old were you when you started shooting?

Twenty-two. It took me three years to finish the film. I'm 26 now. That time I had, when I was studying other things, was helpful. I didn't have a producer for the longest time. It wasn't very expensive at first: I had my own equipment, my best friend from film school, Rodrigo Trejo Villanueva, agreed to be my cinematographer, and we have a synergy. I'm somebody who worries a lot, but he didn't give a f**k about important deadlines. I learnt patience from him. It's the most basic fact of meditation: to calm down and not be tremored (sic) by twenty different ideas. When we lose our anally-retentive postmodern sense of control, that's when we can let go. I do believe that creativity needs a kind of looseness — your mind needs to free itself of the tautness of deadlines, and be relaxed enough to make wild juxtapositions in your head.

You don't ever appear in the film.

In films, just like in life, what you don't see is as important as what you see. Of course the film is brought to the audience from my perspective. But my presence would be a barrier, or filter. It would take away the urgency of the words spoken. I wanted viewers to feel they were being directly addressed.

There is one scene towards the end, where the crowd of labourers outside ask you what you've come to do, whether you actually want to help, or will you also just go away like politicians do. What did you say?

I didn't really have any answers. But I told the workers what I was doing.

And what was the response?

They thanked me. Some of them said, that's really kind of you, that you're trying to understand what we're going through. Some of the others were just happy that someone had pointed a camera at them for the first time in their lives. These people come from a place of thinking nobody cares about them. So for anybody to be curious about their situation, about their being, is almost a phenomenon. But we're humans and we respond to empathy. Also I communicated with them the kind of privilege I come from, and the fact that I've never earned a single penny in my life, and that I'm studying.

That's a difficult thing to do.

Absolutely. You really have to be vulnerable. Sometimes a worker would ask me, yeh camera kitne ka hai, and I could not bring myself name a figure that would equal 20 years of his salary in that factory. So I would just say, it's very expensive.

That is also the basic question that drove me to make this film: not knowing why there is this inequality. In many places the illusion of equality is much more present. Here in India it stares back at you.

So are you back in India for good?

Well, at least as long as I'm working on my next project, the documentary on pollution. It's depressingly inside my head still. I need to put pen to paper.

Did you write a script for Machines?

[Shakes his head to indicate no].

But you want to write a script for this film?

No, I just want to see my thought process tangibilised [sic]. Writing things down helps. I mean my father still takes notes, and he's one of the most successful men I know. And he went to school till Class Eight.

You started out going to engineering school in the US. How long did you last?

Six months.

But the science that you studied, seems to survive in your concerns, and in your metaphors.

I came to art very late. Until the age of 20, I had never met an artist. But I had met scientists. And businessmen and lawyers and doctors.

You're just back from the Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival. Any thoughts on current cinema in India? Do you watch Indian films?

I'm going to watch a Bollywood film with my family tonight, and I know that every part of my brain will be screaming 'I want to get out of here'. We are a film-watching country, but it can't be about the numbers. It's about what sorts of film we're watching; what films it is assumed we want to see. The formula [of producing commercial cinema] works on the same principle as Amazon or Netflix, which is to say that the machine is supposed to be able to predict what you would like. But it is a machine making that decision, and a machine can only create based on what has been made before. How then will anything new ever get created?

Published in Firstpost, 5 Nov 2017.