Luck By Chance

Zoya Akhtar, in Luck By Chance, has understood something fundamental about satirising Bollywood that's been overlooked by makers of dozens of previous spoofs, from Bombay Boys to Om Shanti Om. She's understood that exaggeration, the traditional weapon of parody, is useless in this case. The Hindi film industry's culture and its products are so over the top that further hyperbolising is redundant or counter-productive.
This insight, and the privileged experience that comes with being daughter of the industry's most celebrated script writer and lyricist, have enabled her to create almost a dozen characters who are at once believably realistic and hilariously stereotypical. Hrithik Roshan, Alyy Khan, Anurag Kashyap, Juhi Chawla, Manish Acharya, Isha Sharvani, Saurabh Shukla and Sanjay Kapoor all make an impression in their respective roles, but the show is stolen by one of Bollywood's iconic pairs: Dimple Kapadia and Rishi Kapoor. Kapadia plays a faded actress turned star-mother from hell, and Kapoor has his best role in decades as Romy Rolly, an old-style producer ditched by his lead actor at the thirteenth hour. The cameos and character roles bolster, and occasionally overshadow, the central story about two migrant wannabe actors, Vikram Jaisingh (Farhan Akhtar) and Sona Mishra (Konkana Sen Sharma), trying to make it big in a field dominated by insiders.
Luck By Chance is almost an excellent movie. The film's many virtues have been discussed by reviewers who've been generous with their praise. I'll list the drawbacks that prevent it from being the film it could have been:
1) The action tilts too heavily in Farhan Akhtar's direction. At the end, we realise the film was meant to be about two lives, but for most of its length it seems primarily about one.
2) Akhtar is adequate as Vikram Jaisingh, but not quite the rakishly charming leading man he needs to be. Both he and Sen Sharma are too old for their roles.
3) The fine detailing in camera movement and production design visible in early sequences fades in the later stages. The movie feels like it was shot more or less in sequence and the crew's energy eventually flagged; or the production fell seriously behind schedule, forcing crew members to cut corners.
4) The pace of the narrative is too even.
5) The final encounter between Akhtar and Sen Sharma is a massive let down. The writing, lighting, framing, and setting are all unimaginative, and Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy's score, never inspired, plunges to its lowest point.
6) Luck By Chance needed more edge to be truly effective. Farhan Akhtar seduces his way to stardom, but his escapades are all joke and no sizzle. Sen Sharma's relationship with Alyy Khan is treated with a 1950s sort of coyness. And when Dimple Kapadia reveals the dark truth about her childhood, there isn't enough bitterness in her voice.
The film, ultimately, is scared of profundity.

Gandhi, Peres, Erdogan, Ignatius and my friend McKinty

Mahatma Gandhi, who was shot dead on this day 61 years ago, never received the Nobel Prize for Peace, an omission that tainted the award forever. The Nobel committee made things worse in succeeding decades by nominating warmongers as soon as they signed any peace agreement. That's how the likes of Henry Kissinger and Yasser Arafat won the award.
In Davos yesterday, Shimon Peres -- President of Israel, father of that nation's atomic weapons programme, and co-winner of the 1994 Peace Prize alongside Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin -- got into a slanging match with the Turkish premier Recip Erdogan . Erdogan walked out, complaining he wasn't given adequate time to rebut Peres' defence of the Israeli assault on Gaza, which killed over 1300 Palestinians.
The moderator accused of favouring Peres, David Ignatius, is a Jewish-American columnist at the Washington Post who has published several novels. Trying to decide if he was biased, I looked up his Wikipedia entry and then one about his spy novel Body of Lies (adapted by Ridley Scott into a well-made, if slightly cookie-cutter, movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe).
I was pleasantly surprised to find a footnote citing a review of Body of Lies written by an old acquaintance of mine, Adrian McKinty. Adrian and I were college-mates in England in the 1990s, but lost touch later. I learned recently through a common friend that he has settled in the United States and written several thriller novels.
In his review in the Washington Post, Adrian writes: "Ignatius seems to have swallowed whole the Edward Said pill and made a conscious decision that he will not resort to cliche or condescension in his descriptions of the Middle East. As a result, he bends over backward to portray his Arab characters as wise, honorable and decent. We find few instances of anti-Semitism in any of the Arab countries Ferris visits, and even in the misery of a Palestinian refugee camp, we see only fading Yasser Arafat posters rather than venomous anti-Jewish slogans or Hamas hate graffiti. At times, Ignatius seems almost embarrassed that his villain is an actual Arab terrorist (albeit one with a high IQ and a warped sense of morality)..."
This makes David Ignatius an unlikely target for accusations of bias. Perhaps he felt Peres deserved extra time as the lone voice for Israel on the panel, fighting the pro-Palestinian tag team of Erdogan and Arab League head Amr Moussa.
The widely differing opinions on the Gaza crisis remind me of how divisive the IRA issue was in Britain not so long ago. It was a subject Adrian McKinty, a Protestant from Belfast, researched for his Master's in Politics, and it led to an amusing and frustrating episode that involved me. I was the graduate library rep of Lady Margaret Hall College in my first year at Oxford, and passed on Adrian's request for two books published by Sinn Fein, the political party which many considered a front for the terrorist IRA. The librarian, to my astonishment, refused to buy the volumes on moral grounds, and didn't budge despite many protestations that the university was a site of free enquiry.
While this presented an obstacle to Adrian's research, we both figured it only meant he'd have to walk across to the main library, the Bodleian, to access the books. The Bodleian is one of six 'legal deposit' libraries in the British Isles. At that time, publishers of every book copyrighted in the country were required to send a copy to each of these libraries. The law's been modified a bit since then.
So off Adrian went to scan the Bod's old catalogues and rudimentary computerised search system. He discovered that, since Sinn Fein disputed Northern Ireland's place in the UK, it did not recognise legal deposit laws and had not sent any material to the Bodleian.
Adrian saw his thesis prospects being ground to dust between the LMH librarian's distaste for Sinn Fein and Sinn Fein's rejection of UK statutes. One of the most amusing guys I've known, he played up the absurdity of his situation, but it must have caused him some genuine worry.
The librarian who allowed her political prejudice to influence her work was incompetent in other ways too. Though ultimately sacked, she was allowed to stay for too long, probably because she was handicapped and the LMH authorities feared an anti-discrimination lawsuit. I happened to be present when the college treasurer explained to a colleague why the librarian had been fired. "We found she did not flourish in the job", the treasurer said. I resolved right there that, should I ever be in the position of sacking somebody, those would be the words I'd use: "I regret that you haven't flourished in this job".

The Times of India: Confused as Usual

Yesterday's Times carried a prominent headline stating, "Indonesia Bans Yoga for Muslims". The body text indicated something a bit different: a religious body in Indonesia has issued an edict prohibiting its followers from chanting mantras while practising asanas. For the Times, one Muslim council directing its followers to stop saying 'Om' equals a multi-religious, multi-ethnic nation proscribing yoga entirely.
In today's international section, a headline reads "Queen escaped Oz govt's plot to assassinate her". Apparently, back in 1970, while Queen Elizabeth II was journeying in the Blue Mountains, a large log was placed in her train's path. Had the train been travelling faster when it hit the log, it would have gone off the rails, threatening the lives of the queen and Prince Philip.
The main suspects in the plot, which has only now been revealed, were members of the Irish Republican Army, but Australian republicans were also considered possible perpetrators. The Times article omits the IRA, and capitalises 'republicans'. The copy editor obviously concluded the word referred to leaders of Australia's ruling political party, rather than to anti-monarchist activists. This confusion resulted in a headline blaming the Australian government for the plot.
Those readers who merely scan headlines will come away with some twisted ideas about the Indonesian and Australian political systems.

Preity Zinta barks at Slumdogs

Preity Zinta is obviously in the mood to shoot her mouth off these days. Her latest salvo, published in today's Hindustan Times includes some choice bits about the condition of Bombay:
"We should forget about national identity cards... we should have Mumbai identity cards with finger prints and eyes scanned so that no extra people come into the city."
I can see it now. Our police, who have failed to create a manageable fingerprint database of hardened criminals, go around with biometric scanners, arresting Indian citizens for moving around in their own country. Should they arrest Zinta herself, who was brought up in Simla? Or Shahrukh Khan, who grew up in Delhi; or Amitabh Bachchan, born in Allahabad? Or should there be a cut-off point to regularise migrants like there is for slums?
It is those slums that have got Zinta so worked up. She isn't against migrants like herself and Shahrukh; it's the proles in the shanties she despises:
"At this point, I also would like to mention that it breaks my heart when I see what small-minded politicians have made out of Mumbai. Obviously, slums exist because they are looked upon as vote banks. Really, people of Mumbai should wake up and slap those who’re creating vote banks."
And here I was, believing slums had something to do with millions of people in the countryside who are so desperately poor they're willing to move to cities and brave sub-human conditions in order to scrape together a living. But let me not interrupt:
"There’s congestion.. and we have to wake up every morning to see garbage being dumped outside our windows... But look.. I’m getting carried away. Let’s talk about diamonds.. cream.. chocolates.. wines and sweet sweet things."
Nasty slumdogs, taking Preity's mind off diamonds, chocolates and wine.

User-Generated Urban Regeneration

Rahul Srivastava, a friend of mine who majored in anthropology and was the first director of PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge, Action and Research), has helped set up a new consultancy called Urbz, which works on the principle of 'user generated cities'. He has written a number of articles on this theme, frequently in collaboration with fellow-Urbz member Matias Echanove.
PUKAR is doing some important work in urban regeneration, and I'm sure Urbz will also make a substantial contribution to the field. Nothing I write in this piece should be taken as belittling their achievements or intentions. I do, however, have fundamental differences with Rahul's view of city development. Take the issue of slums in general and Dharavi in particular. The subject is on many minds because of the stark visuals seen in Slumdog Millionaire. Rahul and his partners at Urbz have an unusual take on it: "Often dubbed “Asia’s largest slum,” Dharavi is in fact a heart-shaped agglomeration of primarily informal settlements that bustle with economic activities. It is located literally in the heart of Mumbai, India’s commercial capital." Let me first voice a pet peeve about the use of the word 'literally'. Why do people always use it when they can't mean it literally? As in, 'I literally died', or 'literally in the heart of Mumbai".
That trivial matter behind us, let's analyse the purport of the sentence. Dharavi is called Asia's largest slum, while IN FACT it is not a slum at all but something else. An agglomeration of primarily informal settlements. In another essay, published in Art India magazine, Rahul and Echanove go further, speaking of "millions around the world who actually live in villages that are misrepresented as slums."
The enemy of informal settlements is, of course, the planned township. In good postmodern fashion (see my previous post for more on that), Rahul and Echanove (R & E) favour bottom-up, incremental development in consultation with communities, rather than any master planning by state agencies. They take as a model the development of Tokyo after WWII, where local activists and residents designed precincts because the government had other priorities. The gulf between Tokyo and Dharavi, though, is immense. Tokyo was devastated by bombing during the war, and so citizens had a clean slate of sorts to work with. They stayed within the law, maintained high construction and hygiene standards, and were provided requisite utilities. Dharavi, on the other hand, is an overcrowded mess of shanties built illegally on state land by residents who, for the most part, have to contend with pathetic sanitation facilities. In fairness, I should clarify that all my knowledge of Tokyo is second-hand, I've never visited Japan. If anybody has been there and feels the comparison with Dharavi is apt, please let me know. I doubt, however, that any Tokyo neighbourhood looked like this after it was rebuilt:



This photograph was taken by Matias Echanove, who knows both Tokyo and Dharavi well.
In their Art India piece, R & E hold up the bazaar as the ideal metaphor for the city, writing, "No wonder the bazaar is making a comeback in post-industrial cities: farmers' markets, music festivals and the like appealing to an increasingly cosmopolitan and bohemian generation...". They then provide the example of the Bombay Bazaar in Tokyo, a restaurant that "is part of a new group of venues that have adopted slummy-looking vernacular architecture as a fashion statement." Slumminess tends to become a fashion statement when there aren't any actual slums around.
I love comeback bazaars like London's Borough market myself. But the fact is they cater not to the clientele that farmers' markets originally did, but to prosperous citizens who can afford handmade oatcakes, organic heather-fed lamb and seaweed-eating hogget. The rustic feel of Borough market is cherished by those who have grown up shopping at Sainsbury's. It seems an odd model for places which have till very recently not experienced the convenience of modern retailing. R & E decry the clinical design of planned neighbourhoods, but they fall into the trap of glorifying its opposite. A bit like India's communist parties which support dubious regimes like Iran's theocracy just because they are anti-American.
In critiquing the antiseptic, R & E end up glorifying the septic.

Ahmedabad recollections

Since so many people are speaking of Narendra Modi as the best Prime Minister India could have, the latest being Preity Zinta, here's my account of what I experienced of the man's development policies. I travelled to Ahmedabad in March 2007, my first and thus far only visit to the city. The town has over a dozen world class historical monuments, some great modern architecture and a fine museum, but has never made it to India's tourist map because it is noisy, dirty and lacks atmosphere. Gujarat's ban on liquor doesn't help.
Most auto rickshaw men are clueless about major architectural landmarks. Luckily, I ran into a driver named Mohammad who specialises in ferrying around the few heritage-seekers who come to Ahmedabad. He saved me a lot of time, aside from taking me to one or two interesting places that guidebooks don't mention and, at the end of the day, only charged what his meter showed.
Most of Ahmedabad's oldest surviving monuments are delicately-embellished mosques. Many have been in continuous use for half a millennium; they predate the Mughal emperor Akbar's takeover of Gujarat. I expected the people in these mosques to treat me with suspicion. I have encountered such suspicion in places like Bhopal and Banaras, and assumed the onslaught that Muslims in Gujarat faced in 2002 must have made them wary of strangers. To my surprise, I was received warmly everywhere I went, with caretakers going out of their way to point out decorative details I might have missed. One young Maulana, on learning I was a journalist, took me round the mosque under his charge, showing me places where it leaked, other areas where the structure had weakened and needed to be propped up by bamboo sticks. He'd been asking for assistance from the state government since the earthquake of 2001 without any response. He pleaded with me to send letters to the Archaeological Survey (ASI) or any other conservation authority I knew to bring the neglect of the monument to their notice. I promised him I would, but am ashamed to confess I did nothing after returning to Bombay.
On my final evening in Ahmedabad, I rode through an area of the old city called Astodia, to find many of the structures bordering the street were being bulldozed. One old man stood in what had been his living room on the third floor of a building whose entire front had been gouged out. He had probably stayed in that home his whole life. Many of the structures being demolished were clearly over a hundred years old. It was unfathomable why anybody would want to destroy one of the few places in the city with real character. My immediate reaction was that, since most of the residents of Astodia were Muslim, the administration probably didn't care what happened to them. It was one more strike on behalf of Modi's revolution.
Back home, I tried to make sense of what I'd seen by googling the Ahmedabad news. I learned that the city's municipal authorities had decided to widen the main Astodia road in the 1950s. The case went to court and, in 1964, residents got a stay on demolitions. When I visited, the locals had just lost their final appeal, the stay had being vacated, and the municipality had gone to work immediately.
Along that road lie two of the 500 year-old mosques I have spoken of, including the Rani Sipri mosque, a small but exquisite construction in excellent condition. The Ahmedabad municipality planned to take down the compound walls of these places as part of their road-widening plan. Since both were ASI-protected structures, conservationists prevented the vandalism by getting a court order in the nick of time. But they could do nothing about more recent buildings of architectural merit, because the list of Ahmedabad's heritage structures had not been published.
In the months since I witnessed those bulldozers at work, I have spoken to some Modi supporters from Ahmedabad about the destruction. Their defence has been that, a) the widening of the congested arterial road is necessary for Modi's 'Megacity Ahmedabad' plans; b) The residents have been given good alternate accommodation and are happy with the deal; and c) Many Hindu roadside shrines were removed as part of the civic improvement drive, so there is no special targetting of Muslims involved. I have not verified these claims.
The road widening, though is yet to be completed, and just today there's a news item about a Brazilian student of kathak performing in public as a protest against the destruction of Astodia's heritage. So, what is it the Brazilian could see that Modi's acolytes in the municipal corporation could not? The answer lies partly in the time-warp involved in the demolition. It was mooted an astonishing fifty years before it was executed. I've written about the revolution in museum architecture that took place in the twenty years between the design of the new NGMA wing and its construction. It's hardly surprising that ideas of urban planning have also substantially changed between the 1950s and 2009.
The urban planning revolution began even as the Astodia road was first being scrutinised. If one were to mention a single event that kick-started the movement, it would be the publication in 1961 of Jane Jacobs' book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which took on the policies of Robert Moses, the man who transformed New York City. Town planners like Moses believed in making cities more liveable by executing big-ticket public works projects: expressways and bridges, parks and promenades, dams and waterworks, and massive public housing schemes. Whatever came in the way of these efforts was bulldozed without much consideration of value. The new way pioneered by Jacobs rejected this rationlist, top-down approach in favour of decentralisation, preserving and empowering communities, consulting locals rather than depending solely on appointed experts, and working on a small rather than gargantuan scale.
This movement is now seen as a shift from modernist to post-modernist thinking. A modernist would view Astodia as a traffic bottleneck ghetto of mostly impoverished citizens, living in uncomfortably tiny habitations without good public utilities. A post-modernist would see it as a close-knit community dwelling in old structures, some of them finely crafted, practising a lifestyle that had developed organically down generations.
In India now, we are faced with an interesting conflict. NGOs have overwhelmingly adopted the post-modern approach, but administrators preserve the modernist mindset, with one important variation, namely that they rarely accomplish what they set out to do in the proper time frame, thus negating the essential advantage of modernist planning, which is its emphasis on rationality and efficiency. The fact that the Astodia road widening is yet to be completed nearly two years after the demolition drive is a good example of Indian modernist planning.
The modernist and post-modernist viewpoints are so distinct that one side cannot comprehend the other's perspective. As I took that ride through Astodia, for instance, I found it mind-boggling anybody would even consider demolishing that row of antique buildings. I am sure that, conversely, some officers of the municipal corporation were amazed to discover activists fighting to preserve that enclave intact.
Although I thought the razing of buildings in Astodia foolish, I have not bought entirely into the post-modern line of thought. My friend Rahul Srivastava has recently co-written an article about Dharavi which exemplifies what I believe to be the shortcomings of the postmodern-NGO approach to urban planning. More on that in a day or two.

Slumdog, Q & A and the Art of Adaptation

I watched Slumdog Millionaire last evening. If it wins the Oscar for best film, it will be one of the weaker movies to have done so. However, I'd rate it higher than past winners like Driving Miss Daisy and Braveheart, and at about the same level as Million Dollar Baby. (The paragraphs that follow reveal some plot details. If you don't want to know about those, stop reading now)
Slumdog departs substantially from the novel on which it is based, Vikas Swarup's Q & A, about which I wrote in a previous post. The basic premise has been retained: a poor youth wins a quiz show because the questions asked happen to connect with episodes in his life. But everything from the name of the main character to the questions themselves has been altered. For the most part, the changes work. The film is less sleazy than the novel, has much more heart. Simon Beaufoy, who wrote the screenplay, understands Bombay better than does Vikas Swarup. Recognising that an episodic format is easier to pull off in fiction than in cinema, Beaufoy has added a framing romance and a love-hate fraternal relationship which provide the film interesting personalities and a compact narrative arc.
The three main characters, Jamal, his brother, Salim, and the girl he loves, Latika, are each played by three actors, one for childhood scenes, one for adolescence and one for adulthood. Eight of these nine actors perform satisfactorily, but the adult Salim is a washout, robbing the film of intensity at crucial moments.
Another drawback is the film's failure to come up with a coherent explanation for the actions of the quizmaster, played by Anil Kapoor. In the book, the superstar host has a financial stake in the show. The prize money is a billion rupees rather than the 20 million of the film. The producers don't actually have the billion, forcing the host to place obstacles in the contestant's path. Anil Kapoor is far less villainous than his literary counterpart, but he does mislead Jamal at one point, for no clear reason.
Slumdog Millionaire, being a Hollywood production, faced copyright issues that the novel did not. To ward off potential lawsuits, they chose to collaborate with Celador, the makers of Who Wants to Be A Millionaire, precisely replicating the name, sets and format of the worldwide hit. Naturally, they dropped the scam angle, but couldn't come up with an adequate alternate motivation for Anil Kapoor's deceit.
Indians will, of course, frequently find the use of English jarring, and receive as outlandish or banal a few scenes that people with no knowledge of India are likely to consider deeply interesting and insightful. But that's unavoidable in a project of this sort. Slumdog offers plenty of visual excitement, though of a rather horrific sort, even for locals, and certainly for Indians who have never been to the city, because the terrain of Bombay is so underexplored despite the Hindi film industry being based here.

High-rise cycle

Today's Times of India carries a story about plans to build a 101 storey high-rise in Wadala. The piece begins by hinting the time isn't right to conceive such a grandiose project. However, considering the usual length of business cycles and the years taken for large buildings to be completed, the middle of a downturn might be the perfect time for these sorts of proposals.
High-rise buildings are the ultimate architectural sign of business confidence, even hubris. They tend to be conceived at the peak of business cycles, and completed at the trough. The Empire State building, the first habitable modern structure to be the tallest edifice in the world (setting aside the few months that the Chrysler Building held that honour) was completed in 1931, as the Great Depression really began to bite. It remained largely unoccupied for years.
The Sears Tower was first envisioned during a retail boom in the 1960s. By 1974, when the tower was ready to be occupied, the owners discovered their revenue projections had been very optimistic. Sears Roebuck eventually had to mortgage the property.
Margaret Thatcher took over in hard times, but by her second term in office the British economy was growing at a healthy rate. That's when bankers dreamt up an ambitious regeneration scheme for the docklands, with a showpiece tower that would be Europe's highest building. Canary Wharf hung out the To Let signs in 1991, running smack into a massive recession, meaning that, like the Empire State and the Sears Tower had done, it lay half-empty, causing bankruptcies and changes in ownership.
After the World Trade Centres were attacked, many people suggested the era of tall buildings was over. The exact opposite happened, as a housing bubble led to a slew of dizzyingly high structures being proposed and passed. So now we wait for Burj Dubai to open the doors of its 5 billion dollar, 800 meter plus tower in mid-2009. Something tells me the promoters of the project aren't thrilled about their timing.
On the plus side, as economies eventually turn around and demand for office rentals creeps up, the tallest buildings begin to seem like icons of a city rather than white elephants. Who can imagine Manhattan without the Empire State Building?

Rahul Gandhi and the Politics of Hope

Just switched on the telly and heard Rahul Gandhi speaking at a conference of top police officers in Jaipur, and it made me very afraid. The man is completely out of his depth in any forum. He said something like, "A hero is only necessary when systems fail". What is that supposed to mean? Can terrorists be countered by a 'system' independent of human agency? Can computers and robots do the job? If not, don't some people, at some stage, have to put themselves in harm's way to counter terrorists? It could be the person who infiltrates an organisation to gather intelligence rather than a policeman or commando in sight of cameras, but surely his anonymity doesn't make him any less a hero. Will the provision of top class equipment ensure that firefighters always quell flames with no threat to their person? What about the firemen who perished at the World Trade Centre towers despite their efficient systems and excellent equipment?
Humans are sometimes said to get smarter with each generation, but political dynasties describe a different trend. In the case of the Gandhi family, we go from Jawaharlal Nehru's broad vision and intellectual grasp, to Indira who barely scraped through college, Rajiv who flunked out, and now this chump of uncertain educational attainment.
I remember the euphoria that greeted Rajiv Gandhi's election victory in 1984. Over 400 seats in parliament, the power to move the country in whichever direction he chose. Early progress in Assam, Punjab and Sri Lanka, and then everything going pear shaped. A leader and his coterie taking the country down a disastrous path of international military intervention, profligate spending, and manipulation of sectarian emotions (Shah Bano, Ram Shilanyas) strengthening hardliners on both sides of the religious divide.
There are strong moves to resurrect Rajiv Gandhi as a prophet, a man who brought the computer and telecom revolution to India and began dismantling the license raj. Some of this praise is justified, but the damage he did was far greater than any benefit that's accrued to the nation through policies he set in motion.
I thought of Rajiv Gandhi a lot during the American election season, because Barack Obama represented hope, and Rajiv hope betrayed. Their paths to power were very different, though. Obama is obviously a man of immense intellectual capacity coupled with a calm temperament and a vision worthy of Nehru. I believe he will do better by his country and the world than Rajiv did by India. As for Rajiv's son, he could be our Prime Minister in six months. The only worse fate I can imagine is the other option: another BJP-led government.

Update, January 23: with Manmohan Singh in hospital for a bypass, it seems even more likely that Rahul Gandhi will be the Congress candidate for PM, alas.

Live Blogging the Inauguration

Maize is a dreadful colour. Don't drop that bible.
The Announcer sounds like the ring guy Michael Buffer. In the red corner, Geoooorge Buuuuush... let's get ready to rumble.
Obama looks spaced out, probably going over the speech in his head.
Diane Feinstein speaks exclusively in cliches.
Rick Warren. More cliches. The gay pastor's bound to do better.
"As we forgive those who trespass against us". Hmmm
Aretha's seen many better days, though she isn't as out of tune as Lata Mangeshkar now gets.
Biden's taking the oath. I don't agree with Karl Rove about many things, but I think he was spot on in calling Biden a 'blowhard doofus'. Biden's wife, who appeared perpetually on the verge of tears during the campaign, has joined the gaffe brigade.
Ma, Perlman, and the others in a multiethnic band play sweetly. The tune is sleepy to start with, picks up for a bit, goes pleasantly drowsy again. Wonder how it's playing to the million plus on the mall.
Roberts, whose elevation to the court Obama voted against, administers the oath. A brief stumble, nothing serious. He's still rehearsing that speech.
It is done. Bye bye Bush. We will not miss you.
The artillery booms, flags wave. The 'president elect' phrase is retired for at least four years, not a minute too soon.
I had a feeling he'd be humbled at the start.
He's got the rhythm going. Good tone. Difficult to get right.
Now it's sounding like a campaign speech.
"On this day..." heard it before.
"Greatness must be earned." As, apparently, must Bournville chocolate. If anybody understands that ad, let me know.
People died at Khe Sanh so Americans could live a better life? Gettysburg and Normandy I understand.
George Bush Sr. is wearing Davy Crockett headgear.
Bogged down. This is not inspiring.
Reaching for the usual historical linkages, but it feels like a stretch.
"Warming planet" followed by shots of freezing crowd members swathed in woollens. There's a renegade editor in the crew.
"Non-believers"!!! Yippee.
He says Pahkistahn, but Muslim like muslin.
Desultory clapping.
The troops again.
"The levees break." Bush jr's probably wincing.
Finally, the personal touch brings real applause. Father might have been refused service in restaurants.
Flapping wings hard, hoping to get enough elevation to soar at the end, almost makes it.
Elizabeth Alexander. Can she top the highlight of the Clinton inauguration, Maya Angelou's performance?
She keeps it very simple. Crowd begins to disperse.
The simplicity doesn't build to anything.
Is she done?
Another religious guy. Not the gay pastor, far as I can tell. Civil rights type. Slurs his words, but he's better than the poet, less mannered, something genuine coming through the biblical rhetoric.
Gosh, he's going yellow-mellow, red man-ahead man, white-right. Never rhyme adjectives.
Biden is taking photographs. Doofus.
National anthem. Can't help thinking of the Borat version.
Time to leave. Very underwhelming. It's clear we're in a deep hole and words will not raise us out of it.