Lonely all your life

My nights are so exciting I get a shiver up my spine just writing these words. At 11 pm precisely, I switch on "Homeland" and there he is. Damian Lewis. I first saw him in "Life" and was totally into the show because he made it interesting. In "Homeland", he makes his character so ambiguous that you don't know whether to love him or hate him but this much I do know: He gets more and more attractive episode after episode - when he isn't attractive at all. One expression of awareness in his eyes or a flirtatious smile on his lips when he looks at Carrie and you forget 2 things: 1. How you feel like slapping Carrie with a dead fish every time she raises her eyebrows or gives that annoying, bird-like tilt of her head, and 2. The hysterical SNL take on Damian's mouth.
There are some things that really do degrade the sublime, like the little kid who made Nicki Minaj's Super Bass more famous by performing it (along with the deadest sidekick I've ever seen) on YouTube, but Damian somehow makes us forget every joke about his looks because he manages to transcend them. Not a bad act for someone making waves on TV.
Last night, Carrie said something that was more absurd than usual. Watching Brody walk back to his wife, she realizes that she will be "alone all my life". Uh, Yeah. Who isn't? You are born alone, have children alone, are married alone (because you never know what your spouse is really like, he could be a serial killer and you could end up telling the Police, "but he's always been the perfect husband...his children love him...he was on the Neighbourhood Watch!"), and you sure as hell die alone. What's with the epiphany, Carrie? Did you forget to take your meds??
Another guy who rocks my boat (how well does he mix humour and drama) is Denis Leary, whose Cindy Crawford and Eskimo Pie sketch made him famous way before "Rescue Me" of course. But the latter shocks you out of your seat. You begin watching, thinking this is fun, then Leary manhandles his wife and threatens her with extreme loss of life and limb if she takes their kids away from him. This is your first insight into how "Rescue Me" will keep you shaking your head and laughing one minute and then suppressing a scream the next. The show has been over for a year in the States but even 8 years later in the Third World is alright when you can enjoy Tatum O'Neal, frat boy firefighters, an idea of what risking your life every single day does to a body, freakazoid relationships....I could go on, but there's someone called James Arthur playing on VH1 and I cannot believe my ears.

Beauty & the Beast

Went to listen to Salman Rushdie as he did a Press thing for the movie Midnight's Children. So adore the courage with which he has conducted his life that all I could do was sit there lavishing him with maternal gazes. And am  always amazed at how young he is, in his manner, his interests, his sense of humour. He should sell his joie de vivre in Tom Ford fragrance bottles. 

He is also as articulate in person as he is in his work. He understands the force of a good anecdote, naturally, which simultaneously adds to the movie he is publicising, telling us how he wanted to play the soothsayer in the film but didn't want to shift focus from the scene with theatre-goers pausing to point and say, “Isn't that Salman Rushdie?” Which is exactly what they would have done.

I noticed even the way he signed books was in the deliberate manner all good writers bring to anything that has to do with the written word. 

People are amazing.

In more ways than one. Towards the end, a woman, dressed in what looked like too much curtain material, leaped from her chair and accused director Deepa Mehta of casting only actors she knows. Here I am, the woman said. I act. Please consider me in future. 

Aside: The movie world is a ruthless one. You have to look like Shriya Saran to get a foot in the door; for every hundred Sarans there will be one Edward G Robinson. Beauty or talent must win. Stands to reason. But reason is something a lot of people who live in small towns and think they are Somebody seem to lack. They are not just like people treading water and trying to keep their heads above it. They are like people who have already drowned in the sea of their fruitless ambition and overwhelming lack of redeeming qualities like humility, self-knowledge or perspective. Sometimes, you just can't fight the tide.

She later rushed the stage and thrust her card at the director, who said, and who can blame her, "But how will I know who this card belongs to?"

Liberty wins

Why would any self-respecting wife stay with a husband who has an affair? The clue must lie in the word 'respect'. Women so rarely own that, thinking of financial and emotional security instead. Men so rarely feel that in regard to women. If you look at the photos of Rupert Sanders and Kristen Stewart, it's painfully obvious that he lusted after this young and beautiful new experience, while she was in it for kicks and had no feeling for him whatsoever. A gorgeous model like Liberty Ross, whose only failing is she's getting older, should have reacted much sooner. She's filed for divorce now and one hopes she sticks to it, but I, living vicariously as is my wont, am punching the air. It's a kick in the shins for those men who are simply less evolved than their brothers. The only response you can make towards them is to cut them off like a gangrened limb. 

These Holy Men

There are so few individuals you recognize instantly as being a cut above, but when you do, it makes you hopeful when you are otherwise surrounded by a Confederacy of Dunces. Watching the Critics' Choice Awards, I was utterly baffled by Daniel Craig getting an acting award. (Were the critics imbibing a bit too easily at their free luncheons and maybe thought they were voting Day-Lewis? There's no other explanation. Or perhaps they think 'action' movies aren't real movies. Who the hell knows.) So when Ben Affleck won his wins for 'Argo', I sighed in relief. And if you heard the reaction he got, you would have known it was a special moment because not only is Affleck-Damon-Clooney-Pitt wildly popular they are popular for the right reasons. They are intelligent, strong and committed, not only to their talent but to the world in which they live. Everywhere they go, they are greeted with reverence; there are so few of them, you see. Everything from architecture to politics to human suffering gets addressed with this lot, the beauty of it being they don't need to address any of it. They aren't running for President. They do it because they have something no one knows about; something that is whispered in dark alleys and rumoured to exist in strange lands, or seen hurriedly through the driving rain and gone before it's realized. That something is Integrity. Go on, look it up. You know you want to.

The human condition

Indian media. I'm just sad when I think about it. If you've been following the papers in the last 10 days, (which I try not to do but sometimes I'm pretty jobless), you would think all my countrymen have been doing recently is going on a raping spree across the length and breadth of this land. Minors, teenagers, older women who still have working parts (and really, isn't that all that matters), have been attacked, screams practically every Page 1. I beg to differ. My countrymen have certainly not been going mad in the last 10 days. My countrymen have been doing this FOREVER. Now, though, newsprint is spent on them. That's the only difference.
And why? Because Indian media likes to latch on to the easy catch; no struggling to land Moby Dick for them. If real stories mattered, every attack against a woman would have made it to Page 1. Every attack against a man or a child, for that matter. That's news, surely. What makes us, moves us, changes us, betters us, worsens us. What can be more exciting than the human condition? All news is humanity, anyway. It's the delinking of news from this, in favour of sales, that has spelt the downfall of newspapers in this forlorn country.
Right, enough angst. I'm off to see what's on Twitter.