Poornima Manco

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creativity

Parasite

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Last night I sat and watched ‘Parasite’ again. Yes, the same Korean film that won the Oscar this year and what a fitting winner it was too. The first time I’d seen this movie on a plane headed to India, and been shaken to the core by it. This multi-genre marvel with themes that intersected and overlapped, left me awed by its sheer complexity, by how black humour segued seamlessly into social commentary and the inevitable tragedy at the end. How, at the very heart of it and despite all indications to the contrary, Bong Joon-ho’s film was about hope. Hope itself being a double-edged sword with its capacity to wound and destroy.

Before you proceed any further, please be warned that this blog post contains many spoilers. So, if you haven’t seen the film yet and don’t want any details revealed in advance, go ahead and surf away.

As a writer, I am an avid consumer of content from various media. It enriches and informs my own work in many many ways. However, a particular quirk of mine is the inability to shut off the analytical side of my brain which sifts through everything to understand themes and patterns, their usage towards building a story and achieving the desired climax. Bong’s extraordinary talent lies in the layering of multiple ideas with a single motif as the objective.

Layers of society are portrayed in the three families depicted in the film. The Parks are representative of the wealthy upper classes, living in airy open-space mansions with chauffeurs and housekeepers at their disposal, the ability to hire tutors or buy foreign goods and toys for their children and organise picnics and parties on a whim. They are the aspirational top tier of society. Nice and naive – both because of the advantages that wealth affords them.

The Kim family, on the other hand, live in a small semi-basement apartment typical of the poorer sections of the Korean suburbs. They drift from job to job, subsisting on minimum wage, eager to grasp at any opportunity that comes their way. It is no wonder then that they have no compunctions about worming their way into the employment of the Parks, using underhand means, replacing the previous employees through a combination of lies, fraud and deceit.

Bong’s treatment of the two families is even-handed. Each is a victim of their circumstances, each believes themselves to be functioning in exactly the way they should be given their station in life.

It’s when a third family is added to the mix that things begin to get muddier. If it is at all possible, there is a tier that lies even below that of the poverty inhabited by the Kims. It is that of the previous housekeeper Moon-gwang’s husband, Geun-sae, who has lived in an underground bunker beneath the Parks’ house, not having seen sunlight in four years.

When the bottom two tiers clash, there is no honour amongst thieves. Each is capable and more than willing to destroy the other in a race for survival, while the top tier remains oblivious to the internecine wars beneath them. This fundamental disconnect is once again underlined in the conversation that Mrs Park has with a friend inviting her over for an impromptu party on their lawns, commenting on how lush and green it is after a night of unprecedented rainfall that (unknown to her) has flooded the Kims’ semi-basement with sewage, making it completely uninhabitable.

The differences are little and large, setting each group apart from the other. From housing to food to body odour, each signifies a societal placement several rungs afar. Can these distances be traversed? Can the scholar’s rock presented to the Kim family bring them the wealth it promises?

Hope drives the film to its conclusion, even as tragedy unfolds on the lawns of the beautiful Parks’ home. In an unexpected twist, Mr Kim drives a knife into Mr Park, a knee-jerk reaction to the lack of respect that has underscored every perfectly civil interaction of theirs. A fundamental disrespect for those that lie below, even while they serve, accommodate and aim to please. Mr Kim’s escape into the bunker previously inhabited by Geun-sae is his falling even deeper into the squalor and ignominy that he has tried so hard to climb out of. His son, Ki-woo’s dreams of being wealthy enough to someday buy the same house and rescue his father from its depths, are a painful reminder that while hope can fuel a fantasy, the daily grind of poverty will irrevocably douse those flames.

The ultimate question is: who is the parasite? Geun-sae who survives on the food secreted to him by his housekeeper wife, the Kim family who aspire to a larger share of the proverbial pie, or the Parks who cannot live without the labours of those who wait upon them?

In the end, we are all parasites in one way or another. But hope is the largest parasite of all, for it feeds upon so much, offering so little in return.

Watch this wonderful film, if you haven’t already! If you have, let me know what you thought in the comments below.

Hurry up, slow down

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Where has 2019 gone? I mean, seriously! I know we tend to say this every year when we look back, but this year in particular, has just sped past. Scarily so! Is this a side-effect of ageing? Remember when we were children and time seemed to pass soooo slowwwwly?

So why the ‘hurry up’ in the title of this blog post? Well, it’s quite a personal thing. You see, I am now more than ever, acutely aware that my time on this planet is limited. Gone are the days of youthful insouciance, knowing in one’s bones that there are decades to follow, many many years to accomplish, live, love, party and work. Now, it’s a slow winding down to a more sedate living; less partying, possible retirement and fewer accomplishments. Not yet, I know, but not that far off in the future either.

Hence, there is a need within me to try and hurry up in accomplishing all the goals I have set myself. Writing more books, travelling to far-flung places, reading all the classics I missed the first time around, watching highly-regarded Television shows, discovering little-known gems of movies, doing more and being more. All these desires and the realisation of the paucity of time.

One could argue that no-one knows exactly how long we have to live, so really, the mantra should be to live every day as if it were your last. In reality, though, that is an exhausting thought. Who wants to spend each day chasing goals? I don’t know about you, but I have good days and bad days. Days that I want to do sod-all and days that I am at my productive best. It is in fits and starts and bursts of energy and inspiration that I move forward.

My slow down is an appeal not just to time (when has that ever happened?) but also to myself. In hurtling towards doing more and being more, it’s easy to miss the beauty of just being. There is so much joy and satisfaction to be found in sitting around a dinner table with your family, discussing the mundane details of life. Such pleasure to be had over a cup of coffee with a friend, catching up or reminiscing. So much contentment in sipping a glass of wine in front of the fireplace, sitting quietly with your partner, letting the hypnotic dance of the flames lull you into a serene state of equanimity.

Perhaps it is finding a balance between the hurrying up and slowing down that allows one to live one’s best life. So, here’s to 2020. May it be the best of both.

🍾🥂🎊

Turn back time

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Oddly, synergistically even, I have started to watch two TV shows about time travel. One is the series based on the books by Diana Gabaldon, called ‘Outlander’, and the other is a new French series that Netflix suggested I might enjoy, called ‘Il etait une seconde fois’ (Twice upon a time). I’m only two episodes in on the first and partially through the first episode on the second. Although hugely different in cast, location and treatment, the premise is one of returning to the past, through some strange, magical happenstance.

As humans, we are continually fascinated with the idea of time travel, and explore this in many mediums, whether that is in books like ‘The Time Traveller’s Wife’, movies like ‘Back to the Future’ or television series like ‘Doctor Who’. The ability to challenge space and time is like an itch that needs scratching to be soothed. But why are we so taken with the idea of returning to the past? After all, unlike the future, where events are yet to unfold and therefore, there is a natural curiosity to find out more, we are already familiar with what has occurred historically, and indeed, intimately familiar with our own, personal histories.

Could it be, that in our desire to return to particular places and times in our past, we seek to amend or rectify our mistakes? Could it be, that having suffered bereavement or loss, we seek to spend time in the company of loved ones, knowing in hindsight that it will not last forever? Could it also be, that we seek to reimagine ourselves in our yet-to-be-determined futures once again?

Regardless of what we imagine or seek, turning back the clock is an impossibility. As they say, time and tide wait for no man. However, there are no boundaries to our imagination. So we continue to explore, examine and extrapolate the endless possibilities of breaking through such barriers.

Let us consider though, if ever, in the distant future, time travel did become possible, what life would be like. We could be stuck in loops of indecision, wanting to continuously examine the various permutations of a given choice and perhaps, returning over and over again to change seemingly minor moments that led to momentous shifts. How exhausting that would be! Would we be pushing the rewind button on our lives all the time? Would we ever be able to live with the choices and decisions we made at any given point? Would we grow, evolve, change or learn? What a great TV show that would make!

Hindsight is 20/20 and there may be several occasions in the past that we would love to be able to return to and steer our lives differently, but learning to live with the consequences of what we decided in that given moment, with the information and wisdom we possessed back then, is what maturity and growth are all about.

The fact is that life does progress linearly, from birth to death. Yes, it’s wonderful to imagine alternatives, but really, what is even more wonderful is to take nothing we have or do for granted. The inability to change the past, and the futility of trying to predict the future, is what makes life the thrilling ride that it is.

But when reality gets tedious and boring, there is always vicarious time travel to be indulged in. Go on, enjoy yourself! It’s Christmas, after all.

The extroverted introvert

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Does this sound like you?

I’ve just come back from the largest Indie book conference in the world, where I learned so much and made many new friends, but you know what my most surprising takeaway was? The fact that, at heart, most writers are introverts. As am I.

I’ve always pretended to be an extrovert, be happy in company and at parties, even enjoyed the spotlight to a large extent, but somewhere within me I’ve always known, that given half a chance, I would rather be curled up on my sofa reading a book.

A lot of it could be down to my background and upbringing. I am an only child, and in my childhood with both parents working, I had no choice but to embrace reading and escape into other worlds or do the same with my imagination. Which, I suppose, in turn, led me to become a writer.

The other aspect of my nature is the desire to melt into the background, to become an observer of people and life, to take mental notes and file them away for future reference. What are writers but people who carefully curate experiences to create experiences for their readers?

So, looking around a room of 1000 strangers, I had a mild panic attack. How would I possibly get by for the next three days? I knew no one, and although we were all there to learn something, to grow, to expand our minds and our readership, we were still unknown quantities to each other.

I really needn’t have worried. Just as a country has its own language, we had ours. ‘Reader magnets’, CPCs, Beta readers, Bookbub deals – words and terms that would be incomprehensible to a layperson, became the vocabulary we introduced ourselves with. ‘Reverse harem’, ‘LitRPG’, ‘Space Opera’ were genres I started to grasp. Most importantly though, I came to understand, that here was a humongous tribe of (mostly) introverts who had pushed themselves out of their comfort zones to mingle with and learn from other equally terrified introverts.

There was absolutely no pressure to socialise if you didn’t want to. If you did, however, you were welcomed into groups with a rare and genuine kinship. In an extremely intense and enjoyable few days, I found myself relaxing into being just me. This me could be an extrovert or an introvert, depending on my mood. And that was okay because these were people who understood because this was them too.

On any given day, we are a multitude of things. I know that I am, for the most part, an extroverted introvert. Which means that after I have spent a lot of time in the company of people, I need to retreat and recharge my batteries for quite a while before I venture into company again. Some people will read this and say, “You? Never!” Because the facade is a good one. But I am also the person who can get extremely shy, awkward and tongue-tied amongst people. Often I’ve had to give myself a very stern talking-to before meeting someone new, for fear of making a complete fool of myself. I am incredibly diffident about approaching people, and the tiniest rebuff can dent my confidence for days.

Why am I telling you all this? Because I want you to be aware that sometimes people aren’t who they appear to be.

For the world I may seem to be a confident go-getter, travelling around the world, ready to plunge into any new experience, up for a laugh or a party at the drop of a hat. In reality, I am shy, very critical of myself, lazy to a large extent and an over-thinker to a painful degree. I am no different from any other human being. We are all bundles of contradictions.

Maybe its time to discard all such labels and to embrace our faults and our foibles, to delight in the many positive qualities we have been endowed with, work hard to overcome our shortcomings, but also to never ever lose sight of the fact that regardless of who or what kind of people we are, there is a reason for and a value to our existence.

 

The sweetest revenge

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I’ll start by saying that I was fully prepared to hate it. I’d read enough bad reviews about ‘Once upon a time in Hollywood’ to have preconditioned my mind to not like the movie. However, I was on a long haul flight and the film offerings were nothing worth getting excited over. This one piqued my curiosity and I started to watch it.

I am not new to Quentin Tarantino’s films. Just out of teens, I’d watched ‘Natural Born Killers’ with my friend and been riveted as well as disturbed by the violence in the movie. ‘Pulp Fiction’ though, just blew my mind, it was that good! ‘Kill Bill’ I watched on television when there was nothing else to watch, and despite myself, got sucked into the story. The point is, I am not unfamiliar with his oeuvre. Accusations of misogyny and gratuitous violence aside, there is no doubt that Tarantino has earned his stripes as a maverick filmmaker.

So, what about the people who’d said to me that this movie was one long yawn-fest? Without discounting their opinions, I tried watching it with a completely open mind and I was not disappointed.

A bit of background for those who do not know what this movie is about: In 1969, the horrific, brutal and senseless murders of Sharon Tate and her friends rocked the Hollywood community. Committed by Charles Manson’s ‘family’ members, a cult that believed so implicitly in their leader’s vision that they were ready to kill for him, it shook Hollywood to its core. Particularly as Sharon Tate, Roman Polanski’s wife had been eight and a half months pregnant, and despite begging for the life of her unborn baby, been stabbed fatally with her blood being used to write ‘pig’ on the front door.

In Tarantino’s retelling, he’s kept to most of the truth, combining the fictional lives of his protagonists played by Leonardo di Caprio and Brad Pitt, with the very real lives of Tate and co. In splicing real film footage from Tate’s career, he once again bucks the trend of recreating everything from scratch. This does not divert from the storytelling. 

A washed-up actor and his stunt double are best buddies, having been through thick and thin together. Rick Dalton’s career is on the wane, and despite having bought property in Hollywood Hills, and being a neighbour to the hot new director Roman Polanski and his beautiful actress wife, Sharon Tate, Di Caprio’s Dalton is well aware that his glory days are behind him. In his downward slide is his pal and Man Friday, Cliff Booth, played by Pitt. Their career trajectory is also an examination of the rise and fall of the genre of the Westerns, and the lure of the terrible Spaghetti Westerns that flooded Hollywood in the ’60s.

Tarantino’s homage to Hollywood is heavy-handed and ham-fisted in many places, but his love for the industry shines through regardless. In this long (and sometimes rambling) tale, he examines the disparate states of human behaviour. There is Dalton’s self-awareness that his time is nearly up, there is Tate’s excitement in her rising star, there is the grime and the grunge of Manson’s cult and the shadowy side to their encampment, there is the muted loyalty of Pitt’s Booth and there are also many many digs at film stars past.

Can this retelling be taken as gospel? Of course not! Fiction is fiction after all, even if its basis may be fact.

Yes, Tarantino’s women are imperfect (cue: they snore!), nearly everyone uses profanity, Tate is portrayed as a vacuous, sweet blonde, his men are unlikely heroes and the violence when it arrives, is vicious, merciless and savage. These are all classic Tarantino tropes, and for a first-timer, they can be pretty shocking.

But look beyond that and you will see that what he is really trying to do, is change the course of history. In circumventing what really happened, by placing his protagonists as the obstacles to the murders, he is reimagining a more innocent world where evil was taken down before it could destroy beauty, innocence and life. 

Sure, that’s not what happened. But it could have.

In the distance between reality and Tarantino’s fiction lies his imaginary revenge, a sweet and futile attempt to alter the past.

Distil and percolate

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I was asked an interesting question recently. As most of you know, all my books have Indian settings and characters. It is a milieu I am intimately familiar with, having been born and raised in New Delhi. Those formative years are what I plumb for my locales, my characters and their stories. I am an Indian by birth, and even though I am a naturalised British citizen now, nothing can take that Indian identity out of me.

The question was, why didn’t I write stories based in the United Kingdom? After all, I have lived here for over two decades and surely that counts for something?

That got me thinking. Why am I unable to translate what I see around me, or my own experiences into stories worth telling? The answer, I think, is distance and perspective.

When I look back on my time in India, it seems like another life. A life that I lived well and enjoyed too, but I was a different person back then. It is so much easier for me to distil those experiences and percolate them to you in the form of my stories or novella. Far far more difficult to do that about my life in the here and now.

That’s not to say that I will not do this someday. Maybe even someday soon. But chances are, that it will take a few more years for these stories to fructify. In the meantime, I will continue to write what comes naturally to me, and if that just happens to be another tale, set in the fertile land of my birthplace, well, so be it!

Parvathy’s Well & other stories

Damage

The Intimacy of Loss: A Novella