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Magazine
IN PASSING
On a roll
BY SUCHITRA BEHAL
Actor John Abraham is on a roll. His latest venture, despite an element of risqué, has got him and his co-stars rave reviews. A grinning and satisfied Abraham said that the break he’d taken seems to have done him good. “My weakest po
int is never knowing what scripts to choose. I realised that I was not making the right choices so I decided to sit back for a while and it seems to have worked.”
Abraham is all praise for his co-stars as well as director Karan Johar. “I nearly revolted when he suggested that I wear yellow briefs. But he told me that that would be the defining moment of the film and it seems to be true. So I really do trust the guy,” said he.
Talking about the relationship between him and Bipasha Basu, Abraham grins wickedly and says, “Marriage is not on the cards right now; we know each other too well for all this to bother our relationship. I suppose we are at a mature stage now and would like to keep it at that. We are going to concentrate on our careers and leave the display of affection in public to others. I think we have gone beyond that stage,” said he.
Meanwhile he is more than confident that his latest film will be a hit.
Gordimer impact
Nadine Gordimer needs no introduction. During a short visit to Mumbai, Gordimer chose to introduce herself to her audience via a short story about a little girl who details the immense suffering and struggle of her life. Gordimer, small and elegant,
suddenly transformed into her character, lending it an immediate visual impact that few authors can.
Responding to questions from the audience, Gordimer said that she regarded writers like, “Chekov, Tolstoy and Dostoeyvsky as her professors”. Of Indian authors, she said she was struck by the works of Nayantara Sahgal and “of course, Salman Rushdie. Amitav Ghosh for his wonderful book on the opium wars and Shashi Tharoor. I liked Arvind Adiga too, but he is too determined to shock… sometimes too much of a nudge of the elbow.”
She is proud of the fact that many of her works were banned during the Afrikaans rule. “Looking back it would be an insult if they hadn’t been banned,” said she. Critical of the ever increasing dependency on the image rather than the written word, Gordimer said, “Writers are becoming irrelevant because of the image. People are always looking at a gadget and the written word becomes less and less relied upon to inform.”
Indian twist
He doesn’t deny that it was a meeting with Charles Sobhraj that gave him fodder for his most recent book. Author Farrukh Dhondy, who recently released his book The Bikini Murders, said, “I didn’t have substantial
material for a thriller earlier. But Charles Sobhraj approached me, after his Tihar Jail stint, to find him an agent for his memoirs, I couldn’t get someone for that, but the manuscript gave me ideas. After that it was my imagination that I let run loose.”
Replying to a question on how he decided on a crime thriller, his answer is hardly flattering. “Indian authors are too caught up in gazing at their navel. They hardly look beyond their family and immediate surroundings for stories.”
But Dhondy feels that the audience is ready for a book of this genre written with an Indian twist to it. On whether he is working on a new book and what it’s about, Dhondy quipped, "”Can’t say yet. I don’t know where I’ll start it or how it will end.”
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