Are we rich?

....so asked my daughter one day as soon as she came back from school. Tricky question that. She is old enough to not be fed a cock bull fairy tale but enough to not really understand economics slash money.

Fortunately she was distracted by a phone call from a friend and not even my offering of taking her out for a pizza would have separated her from the phone (she has her priorities so right! Friends before parents or anything else for that matter)
So there I was, desperately looking for an answer that would satisfy my daughter and me as well. Are we rich?

My mind harks back to an interview of Shekhar Kapoor’s many years ago in a film magazine. I am the last person to read anything related to Shekhar Kapoor. I just don’t like him, don’t like his mumblings and don’t like his preening and posing as an intellectual film maker (what’s wrong with just being a film maker?) I haven’t seen Elisabeth (or was it Victoria or Mary?) and don’t follow his Cannes outings (does anyone? We are fans of Aishwarya Rai here and her many experiments with the mercurial subject called fashion).
BUT this interview I will never forget for he actually echoed my sentiments and I remember having blurted out a heartfelt and spontaneous ‘Wah wah”. He was asked if he was rich and the answer he gave made me weep. At last here was a thought we both had in common and this was enough. He answered “I have enough money to buy books and music without a second thought” Maashallah! What a beautiful answer! It was like a Haiku, delicious in its brevity and so precise in its expression.

That evening I steered the topic around my daughter’s question and delivered my answer neatly like a batsman waiting for that perfect loose delivery and hit it resoundingly for a massive six, way outside the stadium. “I think we have enough to buy us books and CDs”. Of course that answer cost me because my daughter took it literally and trapped us quickly into taking her to a bookshop. But I did see a fleeting expression of wonder in her eyes. Probably because she expected a different answer, or expected us to talk about money or how it is a precious commodity and how we should spend it wisely. Instead I had expertly negotiated this minefield of an answer. Glad to not have to explain wealth or lack of it to my teenage daughter.

Thanks Shekhar Kapoor, see this much we have in common.
By the way, when I was in Mumbai some time back, I bought a yellowed copy of a book called Masterclass. It had the name ‘Jayant Kriplani’ inscribed on the first page. This is a terrific book in the sense it’s not like any other I have read before in style and story. It is leisurely even in the con-job that is central to the plot. More about the book later though. Got to grab a coffee….sorry no more using the word grab as far as food is concerned! So got to have a quick coffee and run over to the Metro Water Office.

See ya folks and have a great Friday!

What makes TV enjoyable?

Mindless entertainment? If that were the case then I would be hooked on to the sundry serials where women my age have quivering lips and men my husband’s age have flaring nostrils. Kaun banega Crorepati? Now that is different.
I was never a fan of Kaun Banega Crorepati. All these years from 2001 on, I was quite content to let my husband describe the show and also rhapsodise endlessly about that tall man with French beard, velvet suits and kindly eyes that reached out to contestants. I also briefly saw the this show during the last season where I thought Amitabh Bachchan appeared tired and really just wanted to get on with the show. He was unwell and the show was aborted midway.
But let me tell you, from a non-believer to fervent convert I am the naya Mullah whose each sentence is interspersed with Allah as my husband watches me with amusement. Amitabh is an actor par excellence but that alone could not guarantee the complete thrall that he holds over the contestant, spectators and the TV audience. There have been other good actors who tried their hands at this format on other channels from Anupam Kher to Govinda and of course the man who dared to put his hand in the viper’s nest and…………Shahrukh Khan. Nobody remembers his stint. It was inconsequential, pedestrian and the show actually fell from its lofty heights that Amitabh commanded to the boring plains where Sharukh held court. It was not the same. SRK was no AB. Ok I can only speak so much or gush only so forth about the man who Baron Baritone. Channel bosses at Sony are smart. Amitabh cannot ride the show endlessly into that glorious sunset. There has to be entertainment portion too that gets it hooks into the audience.
And this is the reason I watch Kaun Banega Crorepati and that I the reason I dig Amitabh Bachchan more so as an anchor than as an actor. Every contestant brings with her or him a story to the episode. It is strange that the stories come out touching us and have us rooting for the contestant despite Amitabh’s high- wattage presence. His sunshine never ever overshadows the conditions that the contestant come from. The questions are relatively easy compared to previous seasons’ but the plot is there, oh yes! It is very much there and drives each episode of KBC into another shining example of TV entertainment.

Through KBC I have learnt so much about our country and its people, how they live, what they do, how different they are than me in the sense of dress, dialect, economic status, social and cultural histories and their prevalent situation. It couldn’t have been highlighted more glaringly when I saw the episode where the contestant was from Kashmir and had killed militants when confronted by them. The contestants are all from the lower middle class to abjectly poor households. They have all faced economic breakdown and have come back stronger from it. They know the despair of hearing a jangle of coins in the pocket instead of feeling the crispness of bank notes. I hang on to their every word and worry. I can count the creases of tension on their faces and feel every drop of sweat running down their faces when the prize money appears to be slipping away and out of their desperate grasp. I come to know names of smallest town or villages or even cities in India that I haven’t hitherto heard of and scurry over to the Atlas to find it. I love the different accents that the contestants speak in and then try to identify them by their regions.
Quiz takes a backseat. It’s the byplay that is India that I enjoy the most.