Sunday Long Reads: Lionel Messi’s last World Cup, why India doesn’t play FIFA, Vasan Bala’s Monica, O My Darling, and more

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Vasan Bala on Monica, O My Darling’s fight scene: ‘Rajkummar Rao, Huma Qureshi treaded that line well’

Vasan Bala talks about his latest release Monica, O My Darling

The pulpy crime noir Monica, O My Darling, directed by Vasan Bala, has emerged as something that a doctor would recommend to those craving old-world Hindi cinema potboilers. An adaptation of Keigo Higashino’s Japanese novel Burutasu No Shinzou (1989), this Netflix release is about a robotics expert, who is from a small town with a big dream, getting entangled in a botched-up murder plan. Some may even call it a diabolical game of snakes and ladders where the players are deceitful and desperate to grab a bigger slice of the pie.

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Why India doesn’t play the FIFA world cup

A masked dancer in Mali (Peeyush Sekhsaria)

In western Africa, there is the land-locked country of Mali, about one-seventh the size of India, a large portion of which is made up of the largest desert in the world, the Sahara. A river, the Niger, cuts across the country, passing the port town of Mopti to undertake a journey into the heart of the Sahara. Just south-east of Mopti, the river’s flood plains rise gently into a large plateau that ends dramatically in the cliffs of Bandiagara.

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What one can achieve with a binoculars in Goa

The white-bellied sea eagle breeds and hunts near water (Credit: Ranjit Lal)

It really must be among the most relaxing ways to bird: swinging gently back and forth in a rocking chair, binoculars (and beer) by your side, overlooking a turquoise swimming pool and wondering if the white-throated kingfisher you saw, taking a dip here in Goa five years ago, still does so, or has passed on the custom to any of its children. To your huge delight, it does turn up, perching first on the water tank on the terrace and then skimming down and sluicing itself in the water. So, it’s either the same bird or has passed on the tradition.

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In ‘In Search of the Divine: Living Histories of Sufism in India’, Rana Safvi maps a millennium of shared spirituality

In Search of the Divine: Living Histories of Sufism in India; By Rana Safvi; Hachette India; 432 pages; Rs 599 (Photo: Amazon.in)

Ye masaail-e tasawwuf,
ye tera bayaan, Ghalib
Tujhe hum wali samajhte,
jo na baada-khwaar hota

(These scholarly Sufi discussions, and your speech, Ghalib, you thinker
We would have thought you a saint, had you not been a wine drinker!)

The above lines by Ghalib, characteristically mischievous, also point to the fact that the bard of 19th-century India thought of himself as being close to the Sufi tradition. Indeed, Indian Sufism, which traces its origin to the 12th century CE, was quite mature in the nation’s ethos by Ghalib’s time.

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1971. 1999. War Stories offers readers glimpses into the challenges of the Bangladesh Liberation War and the Kargil War

1971. 1999. War Stories by Air Cmde Nitin Sathe; Vitasta; 232 pages; Rs 525 (Photo: Amazon.in)

During my childhood, an elderly relative in the neighbourhood would tell us stories about his days in the Indian Air Force (IAF). Partly annoyed at being disrupted in the middle of our games, we would retort, “Appooppa (grandpa), you have told this before” and return to playing.

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With The Education of Yuri, Jerry Pinto has proved, yet again, that he is one of the finest chroniclers of a Bombay gone by

A deserted Churchgate Railway Station. (Credit: Express Archives)

The Education of Yuri is the first book I sit down to read as I move into a new house in New Delhi. I seem to have brought the Bombay monsoons with me, and the constant clatter of raindrops falling on a tin terrace next door provides the perfect setting to embark upon Jerry Pinto’s sometimes awkward, often funny — but always moving — coming-of-age novel set in Bombay in the 1980s.

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Bureaucratic Archaeology is a scholarly investigation of the history and hierarchical structure of the ASI

Bureaucratic Archaeology: State, Science, and Past in Postcolonial India; Ashish Avikunthak; Cambridge University Press; 358 pages; Rs 9,936 (Source: Amazon.in)

In Bureaucratic Archaeology, an ethnographic study of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), author Ashish Avikunthak shows how the work of archaeologists, which was originally supposed to be scholarly, has degenerated into a performance of official duty. Instead of promoting any professional and creative act of intellectual inquiry, this routine “normalises” the work into mere occupation. Archaeologists are moulded into typical government officers, within a rigid hierarchical structure. Being a bureaucracy, the workforce becomes prone to disenchantment and subject to corruption. Furthermore, such an “obedient” national-level agency, eventually, becomes a useful apparatus to serve the political agenda of the government of the day.

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