Last night I went out and saw "The Namesake". And as it has been reported before, for once the movie trumps the book on which it is based. Few other things I liked about this Mira Nair's movie include the way time in the movie movies both backwards and forwards across two continents, the cinemaphotography which captures the slovenly loveliness of two cities Irrfan Khan & Tabu's restrained and brilliant performances as Ashoke and Ashima, and the delicious background score by one of my favorite musicians, Nitin Sawhney, which includes one of his most brilliant songs "Falling". Finally, as the end credits - a brilliant touch that; Bengali written out in calligraphy - overlaid with Susheela Rahman's "The Same Song" roll, I think one walks out of this movie - especially if one is an exile, voluntary or not - with this knowledge that it is love (Ashoke and Ashima's no-hand holding-in-public love, Gogol's love for himself etc), and the shade that it casts are somewhat sufficient refuges to face off this certain loneliness that comes with geographical displacements.

I am about to tell are shameless lies.

So proclaimed the creator of that zany religion "Bokononism", Kurt Vonnegut, in "Cat's Cradle". Consequently, when I when I read this post by a precocious reader of Vonnegut earlier during lunch today, my first reaction was that it may not be true at all, and that Vonnegut, like his most famous protagonist Billy Pilgrim, might just be tripping down into some parallel and weirdly macabre universe.

Vonnegut's work* was deeply appealing to the optimistic pessimist in me, who simultaneously believed that the world is going to hell in a hand basket in a minute as well as that life is beautiful, as I acclimatized and accultured to the weirdness of the New World subsequent to an arrival here some seven ago.

RIP Mr. Vonnegut. You have made a reader who is not interested in sci-fi read sci-fi that showed how real life is indeed worse (or weird) than any fiction a writer can dream about.

* This is a wonderful archive of his pieces, many of were part of his last book of non-fiction "A Man Without a Country"; re-reading some of which made me chuckle again, and say amen!