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A disclaimer first: I have never liked Paulo Coelho. I didn’t even like ‘The Alchemist’ that was so widely acclaimed. I think the Brazilian novelist’s writing really doesn’t deserve the hype it has received. The stories he has chosen to tell might feel relatable or even inspire some people but the messages in his brand of ‘self-help-lit’ aren’t anything new. Like a wise friend once said, you are supposed to leave Coelho behind in high school at best. I picked up ‘The Spy’ because I had forgotten to carry a book and needed to read something while waiting for an appointment.

Here, Coelho retells the story of Margaretha Geertruida, better known by the stage name Mata Hari, who went to trail for allegedly being a double agent for France and Germany during the 20^th century. An exotic dancer and courtesan, she was ultimately executed by a firing squad in France. The story, which doesn’t follow a chronological order, is told in the form of letters between Mata Hari and her lawyer. At the beginning of the book, Mata Hari is positive that she will be pardoned but, as she awaits the verdict of her trail, she writes to her lawyer instructing him on all the things that need to be carried out if her request is denied. 

If you aren’t familiar with Mata Hari’s story then The Spy can, in bits and pieces, read like a thriller and historical drama. But it isn’t Coelho’s narrative that grips you. It’s Mata Hari and her story. From being sexually exploited by the school principal and receiving jewelry and favors in exchange for sex to meeting Pablo Picasso and Amedeo Modigliani, Mata Hari makes for a fascinating subject. But, as an author, Coelho has failed to develop his character. He has sketched pre-war Paris better than Mata Hari. And he also drops bit and pieces of his pop philosophy that don’t really go with the story. What The Spy will do is leave you wanting to know more about Mata Hari and the internet can be a great resource for that.

As you delve deeper into Mata Hari’s story, you will realize that Coelho has barely scratched the surface. Historical fiction is a challenging genre requiring first a lot of research and then an ability to fictionalize events without distorting the facts. While Coelho gets the facts right, The Spy, which is a novella, doesn’t feel like a story he has spent considerable time thinking about and writing. It feels like a spur of the moment book at best and that’s unfortunate given how Mata Hari is a character with so much potential.

Genre: Historical Fiction

The Spy

Paulo Coelho

Translated into English by Zoë Perry

Published: 2016

Publisher: Penguin Books

Pages: 186, Paperback

Don’t watch it alone! Or you’ll be holding hands with a total stranger sitting next to you in sheer fright. Arpan Thapa’s “Ghar” is that scary. Not exaggerating at all when we say that this has to be the scariest Nepali movie ever made, giving tough competition even to its Bollywood contemporaries.

Written and directed by Thapa, Shiva in the film, who is married to Saru (Surakshya Panta), Ghar is a story of the couple who move into a new house they get for cheap. Also moving in with them is Maya (Benisha Hamal), Saru’s cousin and Shiva’s extra-marital affair. Despite some foreboding, the family does not suspect the house they happily move into is haunted, not by one but two sinister ghosts!

What happens next is expected, yet the execution surpasses all expectations from a Nepali horror flick and upholds the reputation of Thapa, an actor and filmmaker who studied acting in Mumbai in early 2000s, brings along. For someone who watched Thapa lead on his debut Nepali movie, Murray Kerr’s “Sick City” (2011), and saw a promising talent emerge, his stint behind the camera this time does not come as a big surprise. His ability to hold together a script of a movie that has been shot almost 95 percent indoors, with a cast of under a dozen, is simply remarkable.

Under a dozen is all that Thapa needs to create this scare flick with the lead actress Panta marvelously excelling in her role as Saru, a lovable wife who adores her husband and is on her third trimester of pregnancy. If you’ve ever encountered a woman on her final stages of pregnancy, when hormonal changes and motherly instincts cause many mood swings, you will easily relate to Saru and will absolutely love Panta for her acting skills. When she is possessed and has to let out morbid screams, the intense changes in her demeanor are further testament to Panta’s talent as an actor. She definitely brings home the gold on this one.

Hamal, playing Maya, Saru’s jealous younger cousin, is almost unrecognizable at first in her role of a pot-smoking seductress. The actress who has previously played lead in Nepali movies looks comfortable enough in a supporting role this time. Thapa as Shiva doesn’t do nearly as much on-screen as he does behind the camera. Again, the film belongs to Panta.

But she still can’t take all the credit. Like a comedy, horror also calls for impeccable timing. Scare the audience too much and they stop being scared; scare them too little and they’ll find the film boring. Thapa, with his team of skillful cinematographers, editors, makeup artists and rest of the crew work out the perfect calibration. Besides them, Iman Bikram Shah, with his eerily haunting background score, needs a special mention as well.  

The filmmakers have resorted to using ‘orthodox’ ghosts on this one to give the audience the chills. Ghosts from grandma’s stories that appear only at night, creep into your bed and smother you, move furniture to scare to you and possess you are unmistakably more frightening than watching a Catholic nun being possessed by the devil in the 1950s’ Romania. Add top-notch acting and continuous long takes to the childhood horror stories and they make for a perfect recipe for fright!

The only drawback, if it can be called one, is that both the film’s lead actors are not much into publicity. And neither is the production team. The result, the film lacks sufficient promotion and for a movie of this caliber, audience turnout is comparably low. Only if word-of-mouth works on this one.

Who should watch it?

If you like horror movies minus the stereotypical skin-show, item numbers and song and dance sequences, you will definitely enjoy Ghar. If you are not scared enough at the end of it, the end credits announce a sequel too.

Rating: 4 stars

GHAR (A)

Genre: Horror

Run time: 1h30m

Director: Arpan Thapa

Cast: Arpan Thapa, Surakshya Panta, Benisha Hamal

How do you make an inspirational movie about a not so well known mathematician/teacher for the mainstream audience and also manage to get them to the theaters? The team behind Hrithik Roshan starrer “Super 30” show you how.

With Bollywood heartthrob Roshan making a comeback in cinemas after a gap of two and a half years, his fans and followers see him asserting a character he has never, in his career spanning almost 20 years, impersonated. Roshan plays Anand Kumar (an educationist and a mathematician from Patna, Bihar) in this biopic based on Kumar’s life as a student turned instructor and the first ever batch of economically underprivileged students he began teaching for free at a school which would later be popularly known as “Super 30.”

The plot, which begins in narration, first takes us back to 1996 when Kumar is a student from an economically deprived family. Kumar manages to get an admission at the prestigious University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom but try as they might, his family is unable to raise enough funds for him to travel there. This is followed by a family tragedy and a sequence of events that force him to give up mathematics and sell papads for a living. Fate changes for him one day on a chance meeting with Lallan Singh (Aditya Shrivastava), CEO of Excellence Coaching. His journey then continuous from a desperate papad salesman, to a star tutor at a commercial coaching center and finally to a patron of a group of 30 bright students from the most impoverished families in the state.

“Super 30” is all about the sacrifice and perseverance of Anand Kumar and his family who give up what could have been a wealth and lavish life to teach and raise underprivileged children. The filmmakers have taken a gamble by making an inspirational film on people usually sidelined in mainstream Bollywood and a story that is usually the subject of low-budget independent films or art cinema. Having said that, they sure have taken the liberty of adding far-fetched sequences just to keep the multiplex audience entertained and despite all its subtlety, “Super 30” does have its larger-than-life moments.

Talking about sacrifices, the one that Roshan has made to give life to Anand Kumar’s character, cannot go unnoticed. Roshan, known for his chiseled Greek God-like physique, plays a Bollywood ‘anti-hero’ in the form of Kumar. He has evidently bulked up for the role, shunning his 8-pack abs and diamond-cut face, to look his part of a regular mathematics teacher. And believe it or not, he does not dance at all in the movie. Something surprising for all Roshan fans.

But where Roshan is found wanting is in dialogue delivery. For as much effort as he puts into his physical appearance, Roshan somewhat falls flat when it comes to emulating the iconic “Bihari” tone of speaking. Especially in scenes paired against the talented Pankaj Tripathi (Devraj Jagan Safdurjang, a local minister), Roshan’s Bihari accent sounds painfully assumed and not amusing at all. At a time when Bollywood has seen its fair share of Bihari characters portrayed by the likes of Irrfan Khan, Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Manoj Bajpayee, Roshan’s Anand Kumar, despite all the intensity he brings to the required scenes, is not as assertive.

Who should watch it?

“Super 30” is certainly an inspirational film that makes the audience feel thankful for the privileged lives they have been living. So students, teachers, parents and movie enthusiasts, everyone can enjoy it. Fans of a flexing and grooving Hrithik Roshan might want to give it a miss though, for Roshan does nothing of that sort in “Super 30.”

Genre: Biography/Drama

Director: Vikas Bahl

Run time: 155 minutes

Cast: Hrithik Roshan, Pankaj Tripathi, Aditya Shrivastava

Rating: 2.5 stars

 Poet-turned-novelist Devi S Las­kar’s debut book about racism in Trump’s America is heartbreaking. But it’s also a devastating story that sheds light on important issues that just can’t be ignored—like bul­lying and terrorism. The book is inspired by a true event in Laskar’s life—the Georgia Bureau of Inves­tigation raided her home and held her at gunpoint, on a legal matter that was later dismissed. This event gave Laskar the idea to write about a woman who goes from being polite and submissive to one who holds her ground.

The story opens with a South Asian woman as she lies bleeding on her driveway. She has been shot. Her life flashes before her in fragments and she struggles to understand the question she has been asked all her life: Where are you really from? The protagonist of Laskar’s novel—Mother or Real Thing as she’s referred to—has what might seem like the perfect life. There’s a lov­ing husband and three beautiful daughters in the picture and she has a solid career as a journalist and aspires to be a novelist. But the color of her skin—the Mother is born in America to Bengali immigrants—doesn’t let her enjoy all these good things in life in peace. Her daughters too have inherited her skin tone and that results in a lot of bullying at school.

The narrative jumps between the past and the present as an Ameri­can ‘nightmare’ unfolds right before your eyes. But the fragments are tied together by several themes and timelines which make it easy to get a sense of who Mother is even when the story moves backwards and forwards in time. Though surviv­ing racism in America is the main theme of the book, you also get a glimpse of the lengths many wom­en often go to, to maintain peaceat home.

Mother and daughter’s refusal to tell “the man of the hour”—as Mother refers to her husband in the book—about the racism they are facing so as not to upset him is an example of that. Laskar has also tried to show how women, more so women of color, have to juggle motherhood, marriage, and ambition, and fight for respect and sometimes even just mere acknowledgement.

Although the topic the book deals with is ugly, the writing is beautiful, almost lyrical. It temporarily relieves you of all the horror that’s going on. Laskar, by her own account, is a poet first and so the book’s structure was inspired by one of her favor­ite forms of poetry—a pantoum, a Malay verse form consisting of three stanzas. ‘The Atlas of the Reds and Blues’ is unlike anything you have ever read and Laskar’s “experiment” (writing prose in poetic form) works to keep a complex narrative crisp and engaging.