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The Duo Hits the Road
Two friends, bitten by the itinerant bug and armed with little more than a Norton 500 motorcycle and the carefree craze of youth, embark on a journey across a continent. Nothing exceedingly extraordinary about that. The human spirit of adventure has seen a lot of heroic trips being undertaken by daredevil travellers. Yet, what is it about the journey of these two Latin American friends that pulls curious onlookers like me to follow their trail to this day?
What is it about The Motorcycle Diaries that makes such a lasting impression on me and so many others? The fact that it isn’t just a travelogue, nor is it just another memoir of youthful impulsiveness; but that it’s a man’s inner journey happening hand in hand with the outer sojourn. It’s also your own journey—as a reader and as a person. A bit surreal to describe in words.
This is not a story of incredible heroism, or merely the narrative of a cynic; at least I do not mean it be. It is a glimpse of two lives that ran parallel for a time, with similar hopes and convergent dreams.
[From The Motorcycle Diaries, by Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara]
Indeed, Ernesto Guevara hits the nail on the head there, at the beginning of the book. When I first read The Motorcycle Diaries some three years ago, I knew little about Guevara. He was this t-shirt and poster figure, the epitome of “revolution.” I only knew him as a left-inclined man who stood and fought for the rights of the oppressed. In hindsight, it’s a good thing that The Motorcycle Diaries, and not one of his political pieces, was the first Guevara writing I came across. The book surprised me. For, here I saw a 23-year-old young man, going on 24, just like any other of his age—bursting with restless energy and the spirit of quest. I saw this young man poking fun at himself, his older pal, and their often unfriendly motorcycle. I found little or none of the political rhetoric that Ernesto Guevara came to be associated with, just a few years since making this defining road trip. And layer by layer, chapter by chapter, I saw the young man changing, until the end of the nine-month journey, when he seemed to have come of age and matured way beyond he could have imagined at the outset.
On Celluloid
And then last month, just like he had done three years ago with the book, my brother gave me the DVD of The Motorcycle Diaries. I had pestered him a lot to bring home the movie. Yet, when it finally arrived, I didn’t show any urgency to watch it. I let it lie until my brother rang an alarm bell saying the DVD was a friend’s and had to be returned. That’s when I finally watched it.
Why this lack of interest? Did I think the film would be boring? No. I just felt sceptical about the movie because I wasn’t so sure the book could be adapted for celluloid without a measure of documentary-like info-dumping. And even though the book is written chronologically, it still has this scattered and fragmented persona, which I thought would make a film made from it less cohesive.
And this is why they say, don’t think about it based on what you read. Go, watch the film.
The silver screen version of The Motorcycle Diaries moved me just as much as Guevara’s own words had. In fact, there couldn’t be a better rendition of the book in film format than the one we now have from Director Walter Salles. It stands out for all the elements that define fine filmmaking. Besides being technically slick, it impacts the viewer at a very human level. That is where it’s real victory lies. It entertains you wholeheartedly yet leaves you uneasy by posing difficult but nagging questions through young Ernesto’s observations.
http://www.motorcyclediariesmovie.com/home.html
http://www.motorcyclediariesmovie.com/home.html
That the filmmakers chose to shoot the film at the exact locations where the journey took place doesn’t just enhance its credibility, but also makes for exhilarating visual treat. Cinematographer Eric Gautier superbly captures the scenic charm of the places on his camera, often giving the viewer the feeling of being there with Ernesto and Alberto. And the landscapes covered are magnificently diverse—from the green of Argentina, to the Atacama Desert in Chile, to Peru’s mountain tracks. I seriously want to see Latin America based on what the film portrays.
The Light Side
The Motorcycle Diaries is a testimony of Guevara’s brilliant sense of humour, something he is said to have possessed until the very end, even when he turned into a hard-boiled guerrilla fighter and a mass leader.
Alberto, unmovable, was resisting the morning sun’s attempt to disturb his deep sleep, while I dress slowly, a task we didn’t find particularly difficult because the difference between our night wear and day wear was made up, generally, of shoes.
[From The Motorcycle Diaries by Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara]
Toward the end of the book, Ernesto lays out a neatly chalked-out “anniversary” routine he and his friend had devised to manage some food off unsuspecting people. The five-step program started with the two friends talking loudly with some local twang thrown in to pique the curiosity of those around them. A conversation would ensue and our peripatetic friends would subtly enumerate their hardships on the road and one of them would ask what date it was. As soon as someone told them the date, the other friend would let out a massive sigh, saying softly it had been a year since they started their journey, and they couldn’t even celebrate, they were so broke. Their “victim” would then offer some money, which the duo would refuse before finally accepting it after much insistence. Their host then treats them to drinks. After the first drink, Ernesto refuses another one. The host persists, asking why he wouldn’t have another one, and after much requesting, Ernesto confesses that according to a custom in Argentina, he can’t drink without eating alongside.
In the film, actors Gael García Bernal (Ernesto) and Rodrigo de la Serna (Alberto) portray the “anniversary” act hilariously before a couple of Chilean girls, about their age. I was in splits watching the duo performing their antic, mischievous innocence and the desperation to fulfil their stomach’s cries leading them to stand-up comedy brilliance.
The Humanist Emerges
However, what set both the book and the film completely apart are the pertinent and often not-so-easy questions about the human condition. As Guevara and Granado travel farther and deeper, they have a close brush with the lives of the poor and exploited. This becomes possible because of the tramp-like nature of their journey for the greater part of the trip, since their bike breathes its last at a location in Chile. As they hitchhike their way through the Latin American landscape, a lot of times aboard trucks laden with indigenous people, Ernesto realises the tremendous humiliation meted out to poor people across the continent—whether it be a mining couple they meet in Chile who are persecuted for the man’s “communist” leanings, or the abject conditions to which Peru’s native mountain tribes are relegated, or the hapless state of leprosy patients they visit at the San Pablo leper colony in Peru. Every instance of coming across such injustice pains young Guevara and his anger and frustration is reflected throughout the book. Director Salles brings out this sense of pain very well in the film.
It isn’t unnatural for a human to feel moved or sad at the plight of a fellow human. Most of us would feel the same emotions that Ernesto does. However, there are a few human beings, for whom the pain becomes so intense they can’t remain silent about it. Even though the book is primarily a record of Guevara’s and Granado’s journey, you can see Ernesto belongs to that rare breed of empathising human beings.
The book carries tell-tale signs of the man he was to become later. The man who would galvanise poor peasants across Latin America to take up armed struggle for the life of dignity to which they had a birth right yet which was denied to them for lifetime after lifetime. And underlying the most violent of approaches he undertook as a guerrilla commandant was his deep love for human lives that had been rendered powerless through centuries of unjust subjugation. The Motorcycle Diaries—the book and the film–reveal this loving, soft-hearted man time and again. We see Ernesto’s vision of a United Latin America, when at a party thrown by the staff and patients of the San Pablo leper colony to celebrate his twenty-fourth birthday, he delivers a speech saying “the division of Latin America into unstable and illusory nations is completely fictional.”
Yet, the maturity doesn’t happen overnight. The self discovery happens layer by layer, and here, the filmmakers pull it off with great sensitivity, without the slightest trace of sensational exaggeration.
The symbolic nine-month journey is also a tale of immense physical grit. The two friends brave harsh blows of nature—from walking through a completely uninhabited stretch at pitch dark, to trekking their way through forests and the Atacama Desert, even as Ernesto falls prey to a series of asthma attacks (he was chronic asthmatic).
The Motorcycle Diaries includes a few letters Guevara wrote to his parents. These lend a fresh dimension to the book, reflecting his close bonding with family members with whom he freely shares his disenchantment with the appalling conditions of the poor across Latin America.
Chillingly Prophetic…
Although it’s difficult and unfair to pick sections of the book as favourite, the parts I found the most chilling were those in which Guevara envisions a future for himself exactly as it unfolds years later. Early in the book he says his destiny is to travel. Indeed, in the succeeding years, right up to his death, he travels and travels—across the world—from Russia to Asia and Africa. Only now he is shorn of youthful indulgence and is a champion for the voice of the proletariat.
And again at the end of the book, in the very last chapter, “A Note in the Margin,” Guevara gave me goose bumps, when he predicted his death.
“…I knew when the great guiding spirit cleaves humanity into two antagonistic halves, I would be with the people…I see myself, immolated in the genuine revolution, the great equalizer of individual will, proclaiming the ultimate mea culpa.”
[From The Motorcycle Diaries by Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara]
Ernesto Guevara would be 78 today (June 14). In my opinion, people like him don’t die. Only their bodies perish. Happy birthday, Che.
And a useless bit of trivia: Ernesto Guevara shares his birthday with yours truly. How old am I? Let’s hope like Che, forever young.
Che Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries, Books, Films
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Surreal isn’t limited to being just a print magazine, though. It has two websites, one that gives you information about the magazine, authors guidelines, and advertising information; and another one called Surreal Interactive that gives you a peek into future issues, what with flash-powered trailers and minisites. Surreal has grown a dedicated community for itself, too, as can be inferred from the vibrant discussions on its forums, which even give you the chance to interact with the magazine’s editors directly. I find that rather cool.
This year, Surreal goes a step further with the launch of Shadow Regions, an anthology of stories that reflect the supernatural. These 20 stories promise to be rivetting reads, as they throw a perfectly normal scheme of things out of order with the invasion of something weirdly extraordinary. The anthology even features a story by the horror maestro, Gary A. Braunbeck. Find more on this potentially gripping anthology here. Beware, it’s due out very soon.
So what’s stopping you from getting Surreal?
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My submission to Letters to My Mother, an anthology of true letters dedicated to mothers, has been accepted. I received the contract today. How did I react? Well, the heartbeat and pulse rate are still normal, my vocal cords haven’t been injured yet, and no, I didn’t send a large batch of emails to friends. I did post the news on the message board of a writing forum I visit, though.
And
I am here, sharing the moment with you all 🙂
Post Script: It would be inaccurate to say I didn’t celebrate this news with any measure of oddness. I did clean my computer table with a liquid cleaner, extracting sedimented heaps of dust. The spotless marvel looks barely recognisable to my eyes.
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Have you ever pondered how similar the acts of writing and cooking are? It struck me one day as I dropped chopped onions and other ingredients into hot oil for frying. First you get all the ingredients together—the vegetables, the spices, the seasoning. The characters, the plot, the setting/s. Then you proceed to chopping and churning. Character style sheets, plot outlines (for those who do), setting details. And finally you begin cooking. The writing ensues. All this while, as the stew simmers and as the words flow off the keyboard, you are anticipating with anxiousness something good would emerge out of your efforts. Yet, you remain unaware of the final outcome. It is creative uncertainty at its nervous best, and for me, it’s a childlike joy to go through the process. Finally, when your dish is ready and the story’s last word is typed, there’s a sense of relief. A breath of contentment at having created something from scattered, raw ingredients.
I guess the process is same for all creative pursuits. Food attracts me because of personal inclination, that’s all. And while we are at it, I will skip onto another note, while staying on the same octave. Food, being as vital a part of any culture as music or arts, has often found delicious expression in the words of writers. I would even go on to say that is one of the hallmarks of great writers—to successfully transfer the experience of the taste buds onto the writing page. I find that challenging myself, yet very inclined to attempt, too. For now, let’s savour some masterly literary relishes:
“As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.”
—Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
“Bread, milk and butter are of venerable antiquity. They taste of the morning of the world.”
—Leigh Hunt (1784-1859), The Seer
“…and every Saturday we’d get a case of beer and fry up some fish. We’d fry it in meal and egg batter, you know, and when it was all brown and crisp — not hard, though — we’d break open that cold beer…” Marie’s eyes went soft as the memory of just such a meal sometime, somewhere transfixed her.
—Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
“Well loved he garleek, oynons, and eek lekes. And for to drinken strong wyn, reed as blood.”
—Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales
“Huge lemons, cut in slices, would sink like setting suns into the dusky sea, softly illuminating it with their radiating membranes, and its clear, smooth surface aquiver from the rising bitter essence.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke
food writing, food in literature
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From what little she could see by glancing above, a streak of sky revealed itself—just as narrow and as skewed as herself.
She asked the filtered slice of sky, “Tell me sister, of which city are you the blue alleyway?”
In the afternoon, she would spot the sun for just a little while and think, “I couldn’t understand any of that.”
Overwhelmed, the alleyway utters, “There wasn’t any problem when it was parched dry. Why this sudden pouring trouble?”
At the end of spring, the southern wind looks delinquent, raising swirls of dust and sweeping torn pieces of paper. The alleyway says, bewildered, “Which god’s drunken dance is this?”
She knows that all the garbage that gathers around her every day—fish scales, stove ash, vegetable peels, dead rats—are reality. She never thinks, “Why all this?”
Yet when the autumn sun slants itself on the balcony of a house, when the notes of Bhairavi float from the puja nahabat*, she feels for a second, “Perhaps something big really lies beyond this concrete track.”
The day yawns; the sunlight drops from the shoulders of the houses to rest in a corner of the alleyway, just like the slipping away of the corner of a housewife’s sari. The clock strikes nine; the maidservant walks by, tucking a basket of vegetables she bought from the market to her waist; the smell and smoke of cooking envelopes the alleyway; office goers get busy.
At this time the alleyway thinks again, “All the reality is only contained within this concrete road. What I had thought of as something big must be just a dream.”
* Music room or a tower from which live music is played/performed during festive occasions.
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I suppose Ms Bauer forgot to take basic arithmetic into account. “There is power in numbers” and bloggers across the blogsphere are proving just that to her. If not for this step, she wouldn’t probably have received such high amounts of bad publicity in such record time, amounts enough to bring her greater disrepute than what she has possibly earned in all her years in the business.
It’s a sad day when serious, sincere, yet unsuspecting writers fall prey to scamming predators in the publishing industry. The power of blogging is changing the equations, though. And if agents don’t get their act together in this business, they will be outsmarted. No; no one will actually shove bad agents out of business, physically. That will happen all by itself, because writers will stop approaching them altogether.
BarbaraBauer
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The books I selected are important to me for different reasons, some purely for the reading pleasure they gave me, others for the emotional value they hold, and yet others for their timeless companionship.
1.
Shonai Shono Rupokotha (Listen to the Fairytale I Tell You) by Amiya Sen:
My grandmother wrote this book. She was a powerful writer, way beyond her times and one with a magician’s ability to play with words. This book of hers has the backdrop of India’s freedom struggle and tells the story of how a bunch of young people of the time did their bit for the country’s independence. A book worth more than all money could buy, for me.
2. Cry, The Beloved Country by Alan Paton
3. Sanchaita by Rabindranath Tagore (Tagore’s collected poems)
4. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
5. Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle
6. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
7. Lipika by Rabindranath Tagore (Brief Writings)
8. A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
9. Carry Me Home by Sandra Kring
10. Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt
Now, that list is in no particular order, for, I feel it’s unfair to compare any two books of fiction. They all gave me tremendous satisfaction as a reader, and like I said, some of them have become lifelong friends.
Which ten books will you save?
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Do you like it? I have already expressed my opinion in the previous post, so I don’t have much more to add to that.
A word about the artist. He happens to be, ahem, my brother. He studied commercial art at the undergraduate level and filmmaking for his master’s degree. After slogging it out in a premier international advertising agency for some years, he started “Inverted Commas,” his own graphic design firm. His clients’ list is long: it includes Amnesty International and Penguin Books, among others.
Three years ago, the French government selected him as one of six Indians for a prestigious Artist-in-Residence programme. He was in Paris for six months, working on his project and collaborating with other French artists.
Did I come across as a braggart there? Sorry if I did; that wasn’t the intent, honestly. I am just a proud sister who is jubilant to have him on board for the book project.
Thank you, Dada.
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Spontaneous reactions like that are often a good measure of how eye-catching or interesting something is. I hate to admit it, but my initial efforts at writing this book didn’t generate a similar response in my editor. I have mentioned before how I came to this project without any experience in book writing. The idea appealed to me, and I set about doing it anyway. The catch lay in how I was to write this book. The approach I took in the beginning didn’t just reflect my inexperience but perhaps also my lazy disposition to some extent. Some writers do need a whip-lashing editor or a similar equivalent. I am not exaggerating; I am proof of that.
It all started when my editor, who held a senior editorial position with a TN newspaper and is a personal friend, asked to see a sample chapter. I had already decided the book would have chapters based on different themes. So I picked up a random theme for my sample chapter and selected a bunch of relevant words (slang and colloquialisms) I wanted to weave into the narrative. I drafted a short (less than a thousand words) write-up using those words. Keep in mind, my target happened to be an intimidating 70,000 words (approximately). And here I was–with a sample chapter shy of touching even a thousand words. With twelve chapters in total, how could I ever reach the proposed word count? So what did I do? I smartly listed all the words and phrases I had collected for the sample chapter at the end of that priceless thousand-word write-up.
I sent the chapter to my editor and proposed to him that that’s how I wanted to tackle the book–start every chapter with a short narrative and follow it with a list of more words/phrases pertaining to the same theme. I soon heard back from the edtior. The matter-of-fact man that he is, he just said he had a few “observations” about the chapter. He didn’t elaborate. Instead, he said he would tell me more when we “met” in chat.
The said chat happened. My editor, who had up to that time been quite appreciative of my writing efforts, stopped short of punching me online this time. Without mincing words, he told me the approach I was taking with the book was “as boring as watching paint dry.” No one would like to read a list of words, he warned me, adding there were tons of slang reference books and websites fulfilling that purpose. “What will make your book unique is your experience and how these ‘strange’ words put you into a stupor several times.”
One session of editorial smacking did the trick. The book took a whole new direction–a direct, confessional account of how certain elements of everyday American everyday speech befuddled an Indian. And what do you know, the chapter word counts swelled too, appreciably at that. Humour entered the narrative and the manuscript started getting encouraging responses from crit partners. Even my editor nodded in the affirmative and gave me some virtual pats on the back.
Thank god for hawk-eyed, no-nonsense editors as taskmasters. They can be such a boon for greenhorns like me.
Note: This is the second of a series of posts in which I share the process of writing my debut book, Making Out in America.
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After spending about a year with this accommodating community, I joined another writing group–this time a British one. Here, I was reminded of my ESL identity once again. This time though, the compliments were more backhanded than those of the American writing board. As a member of a critique group in the new community, I was required to submit a new short story every month and review the ones submitted by other members. On more than one occasion, my stories would get such notes as “I found the sentence structure a bit awkward. I know it’s difficult to tackle that, and given your ESL background, it was a good effort.” I swallowed the remarks since my primary focus was to improve my writing. But now that I can share it with you, let me vent a bit on that perception. No, those views didn’t hurt me. They angered me.
Such a perception made me angry not because I think too highly of my English proficiency. Far from that. As far as I am concerned, learning–especially that related to writing–is a lifelong endeavour. The idea of me being an ESL, and therefore, only the second best ruffled my nerves because of the sympathetic undertone to it. Yes, English is not my first language. So what? Should that make editors take a lenient approach while reading my work? NO! When I am writing in a given language, I should be rated alongside all others who write in that language, regardless of whether they speak that in their daily lives or not.
For the record, I studied British English in school. The legacy of our colonial rulers is still in place as far as India’s education system is concerned. English happens to be the language of instruction in a lot of schools (including mine) here. So I am not a latecomer to the learn-English club. I started scribbling A, B, C as a toddler, just like any American or British would. Therefore, if I am to be credited for a reasonably okay grasp of the language, I should also be the one to take the onus for any slips and slides I make.
At the same time, readers need to be conscious of what to expect from writers of different geographical backgrounds. As an Indian, whose first language isn’t English, I am not likely to use it like an American, British, or Australian (or those whose native tongue is English) would. Just like the language itself, the slang that cultures using English as their first language have made up, are foreign to me. If my Indian characters start speaking like that, my story will end up being a ridiculously phony disaster. You won’t even buy into the characters, would you? Another point that comes to mind is when I write about rural Indians, I am mostly translating their words into English. For, they would never speak in English; most don’t know the language apart from some basic words. All these factor into my writing of this immensely universal language.
Are those points excuses for making weak prose acceptable to the Western audience? Never. More than one non-native, or should I say ESL, writer has proved how much English belongs to the whole world and not just to pockets where people speak it.
Want proof?
1. Amitav Ghosh
2. Joseph Conrad
3. Salman Rushdie
4. Ayn Rand
5. Rohinton Mistry
6. Arundhati Roy
7. Vikram Seth
I am sure there are more. And the world of words is only richer because of them.