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Thursday, November 27, 2008

Mumbai - November, 26




When I started this blog, I thought I would move away from just creating a space detailing out the stories of my travels and daily drudgery and keep it restricted to just art, literature and celluloid depiction of dreams. However, having a space to write – where you get heard by at least some people – also comes with the inexplicable desire to give vent to your deep seated anguish. This might be a step towards breaking my self-inflicted rule – but there are times when you are so helpless, chained and restless that you can’t help but try to do your own bit even in the smallest way…

Yes… I am talking about the cowardly act of terrorism that was inflicted on the city of Mumbai yesterday night. And as I write these lines – there are still people trapped in a hotel in Mumbai waiting for either death or rescue to rid them of their miseries…

I wish I could be more coherent – as the Pakistani Prime Minister was when he spoke about how we are fighting the same war. I wish I was as coherent as the British Prime Minister was when he said that UK was all for the war against terrorism. I wish I could replicate Barack Obama’s measured speech when he said that US was looking forward to support India in this long-drawn battle. But… this is my land and these are my people…and I can only be as coherent as a common man who witnesses his own family burning before him.

Yesterday could have been just another peaceful November night with a nip in the air and the promise of another thoughtful quarter in the financial capital. But yesterday was meant to be different… and some cowardly, brutal creatures (yes… you read it right… these characters who are dying in the name of religion can hardly be called human anymore. Religious? Could be… though my untrained mind can hardly ever fathom what kind of religion they follow) had decided the fate of the financial capital long before we could even imagine it. Yesterday… November 26, 2008… they meant to strike at the heart of everything human. Just like they had struck at the heart of US during 9/11.

In case, you are still appreciating the daily soap, the story here is a dirty one. Some creatures (if you watched the news at some point of time, you may have seen the still shots of their ugly, snarling faces) decided to open fire at 11 locations across Mumbai. Not content with injuring innocent civilians, they took several hostages – mostly foreign nationals – in two of Mumbai’s biggest hotels. According to the bulletin that is rolling now – the hostages at Oberoi are still trapped inside the building waiting for their fate to come upon them. The official death toll is 125, the official list of injured stretches on to 327, the chief of the Anti Terrorist Squad has laid down his life in the war… and I wish… we could offer something more than just condolences.

If you have been to Mumbai ever in your life, you will probably appreciate my feelings about the city. It is a city of dreams – a city that never sleeps, a city where if you ask a direction someone will abandon his work and guide you, a city where you can always find a decent rickshaw driver to take you to your destination in the middle of the night, a city where people create destinies every minute. Mumbaikar, the term that typically identifies someone who has been born and brought up in the city, is a curious fellow. He is money-smart, speaks in a filmi language, acts like a superhero every day on his way to work beating the mad-rush at the station and jostling his way through the super-crowd in the train, and is a die-hard romantic at heart when he skips from office early and spends time with his family at the Choupatty (beach). A Mumbaikar is a superman and more… he is superhuman. He lives. And we live with him… watching him grow, watching him prosper, watching him live our dreams. Mumbai has been on terror alert earlier, Mumbai has witnessed bomb blasts that had ripped people’s bodies… and Mumbai had stood there, steadfast and unbeatable. A spirit so large and so full of vigour that it only fits a leviathan.

But the creatures… the unmanly, cowardly scum of the dirtiest soil wanted the city to look up and panic. And along with the city they wanted the entire world to panic – so the natural process was to target the innocent foreign tourists who had been staying as guests in the five stars. “Do you have a UK or a US passport? Then come with us to the roof… when the NSGs and the commando troops look up at the sky they shall see our bullets rip through your bodies…” And my God how they have succeeded! How they have succeeded in getting attention from all international news channels – how theyhave lived up to their names as serpents of the netherworld by making the financial capital come to a standstill, by spraying bullets to an odd four hundred innocent people and still continuing to do so…how they have succeeded in making every foreign guest a scaredy cat who would think twice before alighting from his or her flight…how theyhave succeeded in making us suspect our neighbours and their intentions.


In India, we have always been tolerant. And at times tolerance has even reached a point of ignorance. We are a confused country. We have confused leaders. We fight with poverty and opulence, we fight with bursting population and growing infertility, we fight with demons of our past and a future of economic freedom... we fight for every rupee against a strengthening or weakening dollar. We try and educate ourselves to take on the world and yet we worry about how the rest of our population will grow - will they find good schools? Can they prosper? We fight with darkess and light.


Amidst our daily wars, we fight with violence and non-violence. Our heritage and our culture teaches us to be tolerant. We have been tolerant of every invader who have come our way, we have preached non-violence and unshackled ourselves from the colonial rule, and we have been tolerant enough to run a bus to Pakistan and say, 'we believe in friendship.' We have done all that and by God we have succeeded, but for you… the one who counts the bodies and rejoices in it… we made a mistake. We tried to look beyond your façade of a terrorist and tried to find a heart, a family, a mother, a brother… we forgot that you have been ripped away from every human relation the day you were born. We forgot that you had never been as born as human, and therefore there was no reason to treat you or believe you to be human either. Look at our literature, our cinema, our art… we have always tried to see beyond the gun-toting militant. With forensic precision, we have tried to untangle you from your gun, with a painter’s mind we have tried to place you in the midst of normal colours, with a common man’s mind we have tried to believe that you… the scum of the earth… will change. You will perhaps look back at your families, at your parents and realise that it is a sin in every religion to kill innocent people. We were wrong. We gave you more attention than you deserved. There was no point in trying to locate your terrorist psyche… you belong to death and that is where you will be placed. The scum will always remain scum and need to be discarded… there’s no point in looking beyond it.

We have seen your face… in the rugged still shot carrying an AK 47 and snarling at the world. We wish you’re covered in blood now, and may you not find a religion where you can hide the blood that you have shed. And so do we wish for anyone who tries to hide their madness in the name of an all forgiving God. And by God… we will remember your face… every Indian will remember your face and so will every British and so will every Israeli family who you have taken hostage tonight. We will track you, we will look in every nook and cranny, in every bunker, in every house... and we will find you. Lashkar e Toiba or Deccan Mujahideen, it won't take time before we find you because from today you will all look the same. And by God we will see the end of you.


To check out the news on Mumbai, access the following sites:







Sunday, November 16, 2008

Tiger Tiger, Burning Bright


“Friends, Indians, countrymen – lend me your reading habits
I’ve come to bury Adiga, not to praise him”


Recently Aravind Adiga made us proud by winning the prestigious Booker Prize 2008. With predecessors like Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, V.S Naipaul – Adiga is definitely in the big league now. He even managed to get a call from hot shot literary agent David Godwin (whose claim to fame was flying down to India and landing up at Arundhati Roy’s door for “The God of Small Things” when both were nobodys) and is presently looking into the nitty gritties of getting the right deal for his book in other foreign markets.

Now somebody said ‘nothing succeeds like success”. As a natural consequence, three days after Adiga flashed his winning smile in the newspapers, I went to Oxford bookstore and picked up my copy of “The White Tiger” for not less than the price of a medium sized pizza and some garlic bread with extra cheese. What was even surprising was that I finished it within two days – a true miracle by my standards.

Usually the prize winning books that I buy remain unread for years. I buy them because they have won prizes. They remain unread because I get used to them being better appreciated only in bookcases. On the rare occasions, when I find myself reading one of them I am usually late and some other contemporary writer ends up winning the same prize the next year and I need to buy one more volume to satisfy my literary hunger.

I guess one of the reasons I started out and even finished “The White Tiger” was because it was a true page turner. I worship page turner writers – because it is difficult and a tricky task to keep people hooked to your book. Give me a Sidney Sheldon novel any day and watch how I recede to the corner of my room deeply engrossed in it. When I bought Kiran Desai’s “The Inheritance of Loss” and tried to spend a lazy afternoon in the company of Sai – it turned to be the right medication for my insomniac tendencies. Similarly, when I tried reading ‘ A House for Mr. Biswas’ during a three day train journey, the bookmark never moved from page 116 till the end of my journey. Rushdie makes me dizzy at times, but I guess that has always been his desired impact. Trap your reader in a maze of words so that he can never get out it. Not even when the book’s finished.

Usually when people like me end up paying a price equivalent to that of a decent Dominoes lunch for a novel by an Indian English author - they expect a certain sense of complexity in it. It matches our mental construct if the novel turns out to be richly embroidered with vocabulary, makes the chief protagonist travel half the world in search of something elusive and has the term ‘diaspora’ printed all over it. Yes, that’s a novel that people like me would spend some money for and probably leave unread and immaculate as ever in their bookcases. For page turners there are always haunts like the railway station or the second hand bookshop or the flight terminal. Needless to say Coetzee’s ‘Slow Man’, Peter Carey’s ‘True History of the Kelly Gang’ and Amitav Ghosh’s ‘Sea of Poppies’ suffered the same fate in my hands.

The first thing that struck me as I was reading ‘The White Tiger’ was how could Adiga have won the Booker Prize? The novel is not a picaresque by nature, but the protagonist Balram Halwai does travel from Laxmangarh to Delhi and then to Bangalore and has his series of adventures in the process. Eventually, I realised that I was not the only one to get surprised. The Guardian correspondent Sam Jordison too had been quite baffled when Adiga walked away with £ 50,000 instead of Linda Grant.

However, there are a few things which pointed towards Adiga being a possible winner. Even though Indian by birth and looks, he had travelled, studied and worked in Australia from a pretty young age. I guess staying out of the country is a necessity if you want to win international prizes (even though Arundhati Roy largely proved me wrong), because it gives you the first world perspective that international prize judges may just appreciate and understand. You need to travel, go through the experience of being a non-entity in a foreign land and then hanker for the roots that you had happily snipped off at one point of time. And once you have hankered well, you may just end up writing a book from a largely autobiographical perspective about a non-entity in India travelling as a non-entity to the US and crying his/her heart out for remaining a non-entity for ever. Add with it a few Indian terms – ‘mesho’, ‘mashi’, ‘pishima’, ‘dadu’, ‘macher jhol’ and you have the winning formula of the occident taking notice of you and appreciating your literary inclinations. Rushdie differed from the formula, Arundhati Roy differed and strangely so did Adiga.

When I started reading “The White Tiger” it sounded as hypocritical and populist as I expected it to be. The novel begins with a letter to the Chinese Consul by a driver-turned- murderer-turned-entrepreneur and the continues till the end of it. Epistolary? Not really, it was just one letter continuing throughout 60 0r 100 thousand words he had written. So, yes, it was not meant to be different. Driver-turned- murderer was not something new. Rushdie had already explored that territory in ‘Shalimar the Clown’. Driver turned storyteller was not new neither – such instances are steeped in Indian mythology. Think of Lord Krishna for instance, who heard and saw it all and yet was content with driving the chariot of his buddy Arjun. But a India steeped in darkness… yes, that was a territory that remained uncharted, at least to the prize judges. I guess that is where Adiga scored over others – he presented an India without a ‘choice’, a country that lived up to all the darkness that are reflected in the human development reports and tarnished the images created by software giants and BPOs. India was not just Bangalore with call center executives and software engineers trying to chart out a better life catering to the US populace – India was a lot more.

For readers who have still not had the opportunity to forego their lunch at Pizza Hut and invest in Adiga – the story is about a young boy in a village called Laxmangarh (in a state that so aptly connotes Bihar and is called the ‘darkness) called Balram Halwai. Born in a family of plenty and ruled by a matriarch, Balram witnesses his father dying of Tuberculosis at a village hospital where patients keep on waiting for the doctor to arrive. Just like Vladimir and Estragon in Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’. But in the darkness, doctors do not come to Government hospitals – if you are not satisfied with Adiga’s chronicle, you could refer to the Human Development Report 2007 and that too would vouchsafe for the truth. Watching his father die in silence – Balram promises not to be taken by the darkness and move into light. Somewhat like the way Scarlett ‘O’ Hara said “I shall never go hungry again” in “Gone with the Wind”. But the journey from darkness to light is not a spiritual one – in India it takes skill, money and connections to go into the light. Someone like Balram, who idolises the local bus conductor for his khaki uniform and his command over the passengers, may just need to sacrifice a lot more than his present dwelling for the journey into light. That is when the story picks up – Balram Halwai, sweet maker by birth, coaxes his family for some money to learn driving and then joins the family of Laxmangarh’s rich and famous to drive their car. As his driving job takes him from Laxmangarh to Delhi, Balram shrewdly takes in everything that life has to offer. The prostitute with her hair dyed blonde, the diseased driver who tells him about all the secret nooks in the city of Delhi, the malls where the drivers are not allowed to enter, the room with roaches where he stays behind the shield of the mosquito net to maintain his identity and the drunk chote sarkar, his employer, who in spite of the goodness of heart remains the spineless pawn in the hands of his powerful family. To my mind as a reader, the entire story acts like a camera. Imagine the act of focusing on something, and as you slowly adjust your lens the particular object in your frame comes into focus – and then you snap. The novel works like that – as Balram grows up the novel slowly comes into focus and clearly divides India into two halves. For the rich man the easy way out is to bribe the Great Socialist and legitimise his business – but when the rich man’s wife runs over a street child in a drunken spree, it is the poor driver who is asked to take the blame. So, when Balram (who essentially is the anti-hero) decides to go into light – the road to enlightenment is through the murder of rather-decent and kind employer. Running as a fugitive, changing locations everyday with a bounty of seven lakhs in stolen money, Balram also realises that the common man is difficult to catch. Because every common man looks so much like the other – that they become indistinguishable in their commonness.

The novel, as the beginning suggests, is not just about moving from darkness to light. It is also about a common man without college education moving onto entrepreneurship. However, this is the only point that gets diluted towards the end. Adiga, even though quite an entrepreneur to have come up with an winning formula for his book, did not have entreneurship quotient to bring his book to a credible ending. The story fizzles once Balram reaches out and becomes an entrepreneur almost without putting in any effort. He puts the onus of such an easy way out to the city of Bangalore, a city that gives you the choice. However, as we all know, by all means the last part couldn’t have been that easy – not in Bangalore or for that matter anywhere in the world.

“The White Tiger” is an interesting book – more interesting because it has won the Booker. A novel so linear, simplistic, without frills and dealing with such commonplace things that you could almost feel cheated if you bought it for… well… the price of a lunch. After all, we are so used to books being complex and reflecting something other than what the regional news channels show us that we almost refuse to believe in the mundane. As I said earlier, driver-turned-murderer was a subject that Rushdie had dealt with earlier in “Shalimar the Clown”. But the story was different and so was the history of the driver who hailed from Kashmir and came with a deep-sated revenge harboured in his breast. We do not expect the driver to just ‘steal’ for money and that’s where Adiga catches us on the wrong foot. Leave aside revenge motives – the biggest reason a person can kill is to desperately want a better life.

“The White Tiger” is an interesting read - and we do hope some more such stuff from Arvind Adiga. After all somebody was seeing beyond diaspora and call centers when it came to Indian English writing.

Picture source: http://podularity.com/wp-content/images/adiga.jpg

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Fleming didn't have an internet connection


I have been criticised for painting an emotional character like Craig in murky colours. It is also true that I have been praised for putting in an honest thought about why I think Craig and Mark Forster screwed up big time by creating this 'working class Bond character'. So I guess it is time to put down a few more logical thoughts around this.

To start with the argument - in the entire Bond franchisee, why do you think James Bond has always been so devoted to Her Majesty's Secret Service? Is it because he is a true patriot? Or does the job also give him chances of being in good company, ask for the finest drinks every time he visits a five star (seven, eight... you can just count the stars here), drive the best of cars and receive the best of medical aids (along with pretty looking doctors) for all the bullet and knife wounds that he suffers. In truth - James Bond as an employee has perks that are enviable by the CEOs of any mid sized Information Technology company out there. Even though the risks are high and require skills of every kind (from flying a plane to the best ‘kisser’ award) nobody really asks him for a justification for breaking down a brand-new Bentley in the middle of Africa or pumping in a bullet or two without rhyme or reason. The bottomline is – Bond is given a responsible role with the perks associated, the government spends on him because he has the ability to deliver.

Now put yourself in the role of an employer and think of Bond (now read ‘Craig’) as the VP of your company. How would you feel if your VP - someone who enjoys the finest of wines and charges it to the company credit card, gets the best suite in the biggest hotel with a bill that ends up at your finance department and romances the hottest looking woman in the Consulate by flashing out a card that gives the name of your company – decides to travel half the world to find the ex-boyfriend of his dead girlfriend and ends up shooting down half of your sales volumes. Not a very rosy picture, right! I mean, you would think twice before keeping this guy on the job whatever portfolio he may have to prove that he had been good once. I mean think of the Lehmann CEO, the papers are speaking of the mistakes that he made and which eventually wrapped up his company. Wasn’t he somewhat like the working class Bond in someway? Or think of Enron makers – who decided to put environmental concerns aside and went ahead with the profit motive only to meet with disastrous results. Weren’t they ignoring the obvious? The basic point being that your actions need to be justifiable in terms of costs and results. Otherwise, it’s nothing but a mistake.

Now think of Bond and his actions. When Ian Fleming came up with his hot-shot super spy, he had his feet firmly in the ground. Thus Bond suffered hurt, was vulnerable to female affection and at times traveled by train. Fleming knew what he was writing about. In ‘From Russia with Love’ (the novel) Bond loses his girlfriend and even gets killed in the end by S.M.E.R.S.H agents. Every Bond novel follows a set pattern:

Bond gets a mission
Bond befriends a girl who he falls in love with
Bond is caught between his affection and his mission
Bond ends up winning the mission and losing the girl

Set around this pattern was the story of a man who was caught between his duty and his love. Thus the characteristic Bond dichotomy was the tussle between the head and the heart.

When the Bond movie franchisee came into being and the Broccolis took up the task of presenting the coolest spy, the characteristics of Bond, as Fleming had created him, had to go through a sea change. Bond became a cold killing machine who got his revenge at the end and ended up benefiting his employer. Thus the emotional Bond became replaced by a chauvinistic Bond who believed in perfection and getting his job done. His continued pretensions before Moneypenny, his refusal to get involved in emotions and his tendency to stick to just the bed and not the wedding party – gave Bond movies a distinctive flavour of its own. The difference between the novels and their cinematic renditions pronounce the difference - for example the short story ‘Octopussy’ begins and ends with a conversation, but the movie has Bond traveling half the world and getting involved with the mysterious ‘Octopussy’ who stays in Delhi with her devout female followers. Similarly, ‘Moon Raker’ the novel is just about a missile that Bond has to find. Compare it to the movie and you have Bond traveling to a space station and then making love in a space capsule followed by more fights in space. Throughout Bond films you have villains with interesting idiosyncracies and female leads with funny names (Pussy Galore, Octopussy). The novels do not have the same flavour – and Ian Fleming as one of the prime screenwriters of the Bond franchisee had endorsed that. The difference was intentional. Bond had to be larger than life on screen – and all the actors starting from Sean Connery to Pierce Brosnan fit that role. The only ‘humane’ Bond that had come into being prior to Craig was George Lazenby in ‘On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’ – a film where Bond gets married and his wife is promptly bumped off by the villains. Needless to say, the movie didn’t work.

When ‘Casino Royale’ was released with Craig, it seemed that the movie was a conscious attempt to stick as close to the novel as possible. Bond no longer had interesting gadgets to back him up and is so desperately in love with Vesper that he decides to resign from his job. Considering the minimal violence that was used in the film (in spite of the breath-taking chase) and the realistic way of presentation – Craig passed off as the character that Fleming had originally conceived of. But ‘Quantum of Solace’ as ‘Casino Royale Part-II’ is not viable. Because Bonds ends up with mistakes, kills endlessly and yet survives the pink slip. Why? ‘Quantum of Solace’ is a conscious attempt to be somewhere in between the Bond as Fleming created him and Bond as the movies had portrayed him for years. But the attempt isn’t convincing enough. Because considering the damages that Bond finally brings to the fore – you don’t feel that it’s viable to keep him in this particular post and arm him with licenses to kill and fall in love. Bond retains his 007 responsibilities but remains the inductee that he started out as in his last movie. You can’t match the two figures.

Also, look at the year in which we are getting a working class Bond! When Fleming wrote Casino Royale he didn’t have access to the internet, Bond couldn’t use a cellphone or drive a car which had all the gadgets built into it. The movies were futuristic – they made promises of what were to come and since Bond proved himself to be an able patriot he had access to the latest research materials through Q a little earlier. Getting a Bond that is ages old is regressive – ‘Bond with the Best’ (as the Reid and Taylor advertisement goes) is no longer true. Instead we are stuck with a guy who tries age old tricks to break into a house when easier methods are available. Are we watching The History channel? Also, this guy doesn’t believe in using second grade facilities. In ‘Quantum of Solace’ Agent Fields takes him to a shady hotel as it can be good hideout, but what does Bond do? He immediately drives out and lands up in the closest five star suite – ‘cause shady hotels do not fit the brand positioning. On the other hand, Bond is going after the most topical environmental cause ever – the fight over water resources. The basic point is – the Bond creators need to make up their mind as to where does this curious character fit in. Because, very soon it will no longer be recognisable.

I won’t be surprised if in the next Bond movie, we find M searching a Monster database for the next best C.V with some interesting recommendations.

Picture source: http://www.indiana.edu/~liblilly/fleming/manuscripts.html

Sunday, November 9, 2008

Quantum of Bondness




INT: A PARTY

A lively evening in a party. A lady in a red noodle strap sipping wine at the bar. A man approaches in a black tuxedo, looks at her with piercing (soul searching?) blue eyes.

MAN: Bond. James Bond.

The lady turns, puts on a bored look.

LADY: Lost. Get Lost.


Cut


Nobody could have said that to a Pierce Brosnan. Not after those, "hmm, are you free tonight, then how about a ride in my Aston Martin" looks. But to the blonde, rustic, crash-boom-bam parkour-gang Daniel Craig? Well, the unthinkable might just happen. Someone in a red noodle strap might just turn her back and ask him to get lost. The reason... yes...you guessed... you can't distinguish between Danial Craig in "Quantum of Solace", Matt Damon in " The Bourne Ultimatum" and Van Damme in "Universal Soldier". After all the years and all the research that has gone into how James Bond was concieved and positioned, Daniel Craig is a 'never ending fighting machine' and stops at that. The quantum of bondness that has characterised the franchisee over the years is no longer there. At least for the first two movies "Casino Royale" and "Quantum of Solace".


Those of us, who tried saving some dough during schooldays from the weekly pocket money for a first row ticket to "Goldeneye" and then proudly fished out some more from the first month's salary for the gold class tickets of "Die Another Day" - "Quantum of Solace" is a tad different. There are craftily orchestrated action sequences, "Another Way to Die" sung by Jack White and Alicia Keys for the titles, breath-taking chases (in all kinds of vehicles), lively parkour, listening to information exchange in theatre auditoriums and hardly any witty exchanges. Yes, that's Bond. Blonde and unrecognisable to the core. 'Quantum of Solace' takes off from the premise where 'Casino Royale' ended. Bond, driven to madness and characteristic violence from the death of Vesper, is desperate to find out the face behind the betrayal. He travels from London to Paris to Haiti and finally to Bolivia to find the truth about the power-hungry General Madrano and Dominic Greene - the man who runs the mysterious organisation called Quantum. He has the beautiful Agent Fields (who ends up dead and swathed in oil after a ten minute screen presence) and the revenge-hungry Camille (Olga Kurylenko) for company.


Of course, there’s a rock-solid reason for this new Daniel Craig starring working-class Bond character. Bond isn’t Bond yet. He has just been promoted, he has tried to leave his job once, he has been suspended once and he’s about to enter the world of cold-hearted killers, business giants, megalomaniacs and environmentalist turned villains. He’s still the idealist who ignores his key result areas and tries to correct the big picture. He avoids red tape; he eliminates people who come between him and the cause and even gives MI6 a tough time in controlling him. Bond in his induction years is what gives “Casino Royale” and “Quantum of Solace” the only reason to justify their selection of Craig as the timeless spy. Bond is more human, more emotional, prone to mistakes and a total ram-into-everything character who goes a roundabout way to find the truth and leaves behind a trail of blood. We weren’t used to such a Bond, were we?
What happened to the chauvinistic, smooth-talking, well-attired double agent who won hearts simply because of his politically incorrect actions?

We are used to a Bond who loves his Martinis, his gadgets and his women. Even if we imagine that Craig is going through is ‘growing up’ years, then what makes him decide to have Agent Fields in bed, someone who’s already on his side? Of course, Craig is a ‘confused’ Bond, yet to grow up and yet to convince the audience that he is good enough to handle the gadgets and the women. As a consequence, what you are stuck up with is a man who jumps roofs, breaks into every building possible, kills without provocation and tries to imagine ‘M’ as the mother figure in his life. There’s no Q, no gadgets, no ‘shaken, not stirred’. Is it “Bond with an Oedipal Complex?” “Bond who has grown up watching Rambo movies?” We are not so sure.


“Quantum of Solace” has its moments, and scores over a lot of movies because of its breath-taking action sequences.

But…

All set and done…

Pierce! We’re missing you man… at least till Craig grows up!