Film Review: Pyaasa

Pyaasa is justly lauded as a masterpiece of 1950s India cinema. It’s a fantastic film whose melancholy twists and turns make for a refreshingly individual film.

Written, produced, directed and staring Guru Dutt, the 1957 film was his follow-up to the commercial success that was Mr & Mrs ‘55 and he used the rewards from that film to make a darker counterpart.

Pyaasa sees Dutt play an unemployed poet and, following his unemployed newspaper cartoonist in Mr & Mrs ‘55, you’d be forgiven for thinking Pyaasa was set to follow its predecessor’s pleasingly familiar story arc.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs @ Brixton Academy (1/12/09)

I’ve followed the band for some time but had never seen the Yeah Yeah Yeahs live, until last week.

They didn’t disappoint, putting on a great show, playing my favourite song (Y Control) and generally being as cool on stage as they are on record.

So we had giant inflatable eyeballs, costume changes for Karen O, Nick Zinner’s crowd photography at the end of the show and unflappable drummer Brian Chase, holding his sticks with a jazz-like grip but attacking the skins with rock abandon.

Bengali vocabulary – school words

Now in year two at primary school, A has been given homework for some time now. So revising school words in Bengali has been on my to-do list for a while.

We went in to the school yesterday for parents evening while A was at Beavers, so now seems as good a time as any to get around to it.

There’s a useful chapter for this area of vocabulary in William Radice’s excellent Teach Yourself Bengali book where, through a conversation about a school, he looks at a number of different parts of grammar, including the present tense, the reflexive pronoun and participial postpositions.

Learning Bengali page updated

I’ve been tidying up my blog a little this week. Nothing too strenuous mind, that would require a surfeit of spare time, something I don’t yet have.

Nonetheless I’ve added a little to the About page concerning my aim to blog at least once a week, with posts related to Bengali on Fridays and/or posts on any other subject that appeals to me on Tuesdays.

More importantly though I’ve also cleaned up the Learning Bengali page, adding in information from recent posts about Bengali fonts, Google’s language tools, Bengali grammar, YouTube and the Bengali phrase book you can find on Google Books.

Count the rings around my eyes

Sleep deprivation comes with the territory of bringing up a baby. But it’s still a shock when it hits and when you feel your body drained of the necessary resources to get through the day.

This time around it has been a bit easier. We’re more relaxed with K, our second child, than we were the first time around. With his elder brother A to think about,  the attention K gets is of a different type to that A received, and includes having an older brother who delights in trying to make him smile by singing to him and dancing around for him.

Nevertheless, over the last three months I’ve once again found myself intimately acquainted with the earliest hours of the day. Those when the house, the road and perhaps the town itself are quiet.

Learning Bengali on YouTube

One of the challenges of learning a new language is pronunciation. There will usually be some words that you just can’t get quite right because of the way your mother tongue has conditioned you to speak.

For me,  Bengali words requiring a nasalised sound, that is, those using the চন্দ্র বিন্দু (condro-bindu) grammatical mark, are difficult. I’ve also long preferred to say আসতে-আসতে (aste-aste) rather than ধীরে-ধীরে (dhire-dhire) when needing a word for ’slowly’. Partly that’s because of the aspiration required by the letter ধ (dh) and partly because I so mispronounced the word once to my father-in-law that my confidence never quite recovered.

One way to get an idea of how words should sound is of course to listen to a native Bengali speaker. If you don’t know anyone from a Bengali family, then podcasts are one way to hear the language, another is to see what’s on YouTube.

Bengali grammar – obligation (need, must, should, ought etc)

I need to revise this area of Bengali grammar, which covers things that I must do, those I should and those I ought to do.

It also an area that will come in really handy talking to my sons: You must wash your hands, you need to do your homework, you should watch less television and you ought to stay in your own bed at night. The variations are limitless.

However, it’s not true to say that I structure all my Bengali study around ways to tell off my children. (Some, perhaps, but by no means all.)

Film Review: Mr & Mrs ‘55 and Mahal

An unusual twist on ‘boy meets girl’, Mr & Mrs ‘55 is more ‘boy meets girl, boy paid to marry girl, boy loses girl, girl loses boy, boy and girl reconciled’.

The film is directed by Guru Dutt, who cast himself to star as the unemployed cartoonist Preetam Kumar alongside Madhubala’s young heiress Anita.

The plot sees Preetam contracted by Anita’s feminist aunt Sita Devi to marry Anita, thus saving her inheritance, but only on the understanding he will divorce Anita when asked to.

A fantastic return to the cinema

There’s a great moment in Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou when Zissou – his aquatic search thrown off-course by hijackers – mounts a counter-attack to rescue his hostaged crew.

The film slows down and Iggy & The Stooges’ Search and Destroy kicks in as Zissou, played by Bill Murrey, charges forward. Anderson’s been criticised for over-using music in his films, but his song choice and approach, and generally actually, really connect for me.

This continues with Anderson’s latest film, a stop motion animation of the Roald Dahl book Fantastic Mr Fox, and a scene of which reminded me of Zissou’s heroic run.

Google and language

Is there anything Google can’t do these days? My admiration for the company’s products is tinged by just a hint of conspiracy paranoia that it’s all a prelude to a world takeover.

But seriously, is there anything Google can’t do? It’s already, amongst other things, improved immeasurably the way the world searches the internet, changed the way we use maps, begun digitising the world’s creative resources, forced every website to go 2.0 with the release of sidewiki and is now, apparently, about to kill email with Google Wave.

Looking at language there are plenty of very clever things the company is doing. Although my interest is what these allow you to do in Bengali, for which most require the right fonts, they apply to many other languages as well.