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Paul Kalanithi was just months away from qualifying as a neurosurgeon and completing his postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University when he was diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer at the age of 36. Suddenly, the doctor becomes the patient. And his plans to start a family with his wife, Lucy, now seems like a distant dream, one that would perhaps never come true.

Kalanithi chooses to pen a book because, as he writes in an email to his best friend, he has outlived two Brontës, Keats and Stephen Crane, but, unlike them, he doesn’t have anything to show for it. Writing When Breath Becomes Air is a) his way of coming to terms with his death and, more importantly, b), as his wife said in an interview after the book’s publication, his way of communicating with his daughter Cady after his death.

However, when Kalanithi died on March 2015, the book wasn’t complete. His wife Lucy wrote an epilogue for it and the book was published 10 months later. In the book Kalanithi ponders on what makes life worth living when one is facing death. Apart from meditations on life and death, Kalanithi also gives us a glimpse into the life of someone who strives to always maintain a positive outlook.

For Kalanithi, life was never about avoiding suffering. So when his wife asks him, “Don’t you think saying goodbye to your child will make your death more painful?” when they decide to have a child, his reply is, “Wouldn’t it be great if it did?’”

‘When Breath Becomes Air’ is perhaps the most soul stirring book I’ve read. Lucy writes in the epilogue that his memoir can teach us to face life and death with integrity. And indeed When Breath Becomes Air serves as a reminder to value life and not think of death as a tragedy. Kalanithi’s message is simple: We are all confronting mortality on a daily basis, whether we know it or not, and the beauty of life lies in the fact that it’s so uncertain.

“Before my cancer was diagnosed, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. After the diagnosis, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when.” The important thing, he says, is not how long we live but how we live.

But be warned, this isn’t a book you can read in a single sitting or even over the course of a few weeks for that matter. There were times when I couldn’t read another page. But I also wanted to be comforted by Kalanithi’s words and to find out how Lucy and his daughter were doing. It’s compulsive but you have to put it aside and take time to process what you have read after every few pages.

Fiction
When Breath Becomes Air
Paul Kalanithi
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2016
Language: English
Pages: 228, Hardcover

With actor/producer/director from the blockbuster “Loot” fame Nischal Basnet starring in the dark comedy “Ghamad Shere,” the expectations of the audience and film critics were high. Ghamad Shere—almost a ‘film noir’—starts promisingly. But by the time it reaches the interval, it kind of loses the plot and is then unable to climb back into the entertaining spectrum.

That’s what happened with the film’s reception too, we’re told. It started well in the cinema halls with a decent number of audiences in the weekend. But the turnout fell sharply in a couple days, adding to the low spots the film actually hits. The power of word-of-mouth can’t be ignored.

Written and directed by Hem Raj BC, Basnet plays the protagonist Sher Bahadur aka Shere, a Nepali migrant worker who has returned to his hometown in Chinchu, Surkhet. Shere, a naïve yet stubborn simpleton, buys a piece of land on the bank of the local Khahare River and settles there with his wife and son. He’s just begun cultivating the land when the river floods it, and he’s left with nothing. In an attempt to get compensation for his lost property, Shere ends up filing a case against the river.

The story has an interesting albeit not entirely new premise. We’ve seen protagonists challenging the ‘act of God’ or ‘force majeure’ before: “The Man Who Sued God” (2001), “Oh My God” (2012), to recall just two of the previous international movies. Yet, unlike those movies, its extended storytelling and lack of focus on the main conflict nearly sinks Ghamad Shere. Instead, there are way too many conflicts, without any of them satisfactory resolved. This gives the film a weak body even as it has multiple arms and legs, encumbering it and making it crawl rather than sprint.

Basnet puts in an average performance as the socially crude Shere. He sounds rude most of the times, does not understand the complexities of life, and easily resorts to physical violence. But he has no malice towards anyone and is in fact a harmless creature when not provoked. Basnet as Shere is convincing, and yet the lengthy screenplay more than once exposes his mediocre acting.

His real-life spouse Swastima Khadka on the other hand performs exceptionally well as Gauri, in the film his sister-in-law and an English teacher at a local school. Khadka is brilliant as the strict, assertive, yet loving and nurturing Gauri. She has a friendly and somewhat flirty relation with Shere but it doesn’t look wrong or sexual at all. Khadka with her acting skills maintains the dignity of her character and makes the audience love her in all the situations. After her insignificant roles in multi-starrers and loud comedies, Khadka as an actor has clearly come of age in Ghamad Shere. She doesn’t divulge from her character a bit and is pleasant to look at throughout.

One commendable fact about the storytelling is that it takes the film to western Nepal. Nepali cinema is travelling in terms of locations and we are no more forced to see only Kathmandu and Pokhara, or Manang/Mustang. If you are a wee politically inclined, the film also gives you a mini-course on the functioning of the new local governments, especially the judiciary, in the country.  

Only if director BC had cut redundant sequences and focused on Shere’s fight for justice the film would have been so much better. But unfortunately the film spends too much time garnering sympathy for Shere. So much so that it becomes a borderline ‘yawn fest’ at one point. And no, irrespective of what rumors would have it, Ghamad Shere has absolutely nothing to do with Nepali Congress Chairman Sher Bahadur Deuba.

Who should watch it?

Basnet and Khadka don’t lack fans. And watching the two together on screen could be a treat for them. For others, the film is marginally below average and you may want to rethink how much spare time you have for it.

Rating: 2 stars
Length: 2 hrs 15 mins
Director: Hem Raj BC
Actors: Nischal Basnet, Swastima Khadka

When her novel ‘The Palace of Illusions’, based on the Mahabharat told by Panchaali, was published 10 years ago, many readers asked Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni what she would write about next. Usually that was a question she had no answer to but this time she instinctively knew she had to write about Sita. Just like Panchaali, she wanted Sita to be able to tell her own tale.

In Hindu mythologies, women are more often than not relegated to the margins and we rarely get to know them unless it is in context of their husbands who are always mighty warriors. Which is why retellings of these ancient texts are so important. They bring women to the forefront and give them a chance to tell us how things transpired in their lives and how they felt about it.

And ‘The Forest of Enchantments’ is just that. It’s Sita filling in the gaps in the story and recollecting her version of events. What I specially liked about Divakaruni’s retelling of the Ramayana is that it’s not just Sita’s story either. The other women—Kaikeyi, Mandodari, Surpanakha—also get a chance to set their narratives straight. They are more than just mothers, wives and sisters. Kaikeyi is an excellent charioteer and swordswoman, and Mandodari is shown to be a perceptive leader with infinite compassion for her people.

We know how the Ramayana plays out but even if you don’t reading Divakaruni’s version of the mythology is enough for you to understand the story. There’s everything there, from Sita’s birth and her marriage to Ram, the eventual exile, to Ravana kidnapping Sita, and the ultimate rescue and the birth of Luv and Kush. Divakaruni has also chosen to be faithful to the original text and kept the ending the same. But it’s much more nuanced than in the original text.

Sita’s Ramayana, which is what this book essentially is, is far more than a story of morality and filial duty, as Ramayana is generally made out to be. The Forest of Enchantments reads like an important commentary on love, duty, the importance of balancing the two and, sometimes, when situations demand, being able to prioritize one above the other.

I read The Forest of Enchantments on a weekend. Divakaruni’s writing is a joy and the story too is captivatingly told. If you, like many women I know, have always been slightly angry by the unfairness of things in Ramayana, then this book will appease you  a little.

Fiction
The Forest of Enchantments
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Publisher: Harper Collins
Published: 2019
Language: English
Pages: 359, Hardcover

Every time a new edition of the Housefull series that started in 2010 goes into production, the filmmakers seem to leave a part of their brain at home when going to work. And that is exactly what they expect the audience to do too when they come to the cinema halls. What more, with Housefull 4 grossing almost NRs 3.2 billion worldwide in under two weeks of its release, the audience seems to be fully complying.

So the latest edition of the Housefull franchise with its old mascots Akshay Kumar and Riteish Deshmukh has once again minted much moola. But, for a critical viewer, this has to be the most senseless movie not only in the franchise but in the whole industry in recent times. Housefull 4 is a disaster in terms of intelligence, creativity and sensibility, but looks like the Bollywood as well as Nepali audiences don’t mind much. The movie theaters of Katmandu are still packed, booting out this past weekend’s Nepali release ‘Badhsha Jutt’ in under a week. 

Along with repeat offenders Kumar as Rajkumar Bala Dev Singh/Harry, and Deshmukh as Bangdu Maharaj/Roy, the filmmakers have roped in Bobby Deol as Dharamputra/Max as the essential third wheel which is signature to the Housefull franchise. As “eye-candies”, Housefull has Kriti Sanon as Rajkumari Madhu/Kriti, Pooja Hegde as Rajkumari Mala/Pooja and Kriti Kharbanda as Rajkumari Meena/Neha. (Housefull has always been about the pleasure of perversity and there’s nothing significant in any of its women characters.) These women show a little more skin than necessary, act painfully dumb, and are made to romance men double their age.

The story of Housefull 4 is based on reincarnation and we’re shown two different timelines (1419 and 2019) with all the major and even supporting characters getting reincarnated. The film moves back and forth between the timelines for a while and sticks to the present for a senseless climax that is so clichéd, it could have been straight from an 80’s Bollywood disaster.

But the climax is not the only cliché. The movie also spoofs past Bollywood films and recreates stereotypical Bollywood scenes to gimmick them. The dialogues, as coarse as they are, use lyrics from popular Bollywood songs to muster humor but nonetheless fails miserably in this over-used formula.

Even if Housefull 4 is meant to be a parody of Bollywood, it surpasses all logic in storytelling and the comedy is crass and disrespects the women as well as the LGBTQI+ community. The Housefull franchise always puts skimpily-clad women in machoistic men’s laps. This edition takes the insult to a whole new level by poking tasteless fun at the LGBTQI+ people. How long will we laugh at cross-dressing men and their stereotypical antics?

The pervasive lack of logic, repetitions and prejudice makes the movie difficult to watch. So much so that you lose all respect you gained for Kumar from his previous films like ‘Padman’, ‘Toilet’, ‘Gold’ and ‘Mission Mangal’. Kumar looks too old for this terrible slapstick. But it must be the power of mainstream Bollywood that Kumar is belting out one after another forgettable performance in back to back Housefull films. Even accomplished actresses like Sanon and Kharbanda who have stuck to their guns in independent and low-budget cinema have agreed to be reduced to naval and cleavage displays in this one.

Houseful 4 is sexist, racist, unintelligent and problematic in terms of what it chooses to make jokes of. The excellent cinematography, editing and set design make the film a little bearable. But again, 2h 26m for such a loud comedy is no fun.

Who should watch it?

Housefull 4 is an offensive vaudeville which challenges the audience’s intelligence. But perhaps all of us at times want to watch something so senseless that we cannot but marvel at our own intelligence, right?

Rating: 1 Star
Actors: Akshay Kumar, Riteish Deshmukh, Bobby Deol
Director: Farhad Samji
Run time: 2h 26m
Genre: Comedy