The Best From The World Of Entertainment And Books: Debt Heads, The Second Book of Prophets and more

FILMS

Homebound, Coming soon

A decade ago, Neeraj Ghaywan confirmed his place as one of India’s finest young directors with his debut film Masaan. His first full-length feature since then, Homebound is about two young men from a small north Indian village whose friendship is tested by their search for social dignity. Shoaib (Ishaan Khatter), born to a Muslim family, doesn’t want to go to Dubai, where, as his folks keep telling him, he won’t be viewed with suspicion because of his faith.

Chandan (Vishal Jethwa) is a Dalit boy and Shoaib’s friend who has known only social exclusion but tends to wear it lightly. The two friends decide that a job with the police represents their shortest, surest path to social acceptance. But as they soon realize, there is always a price of admission. The film’s release in India is yet to be announced, but going by the nine-minute standing ovation it received during its premier at the Cannes Film festival this year, Homebound is certainly an unmissable watch.

Thug Life, In theatres on 5 June

In 2022, the Tamil superstar Kamal Haasan delivered one of the industry’s biggest commercial triumphs of the decade in Vikram. Haasan is set to return this month with a gangster drama directed by Mani Ratnam. The duo’s last collaboration was the 1987 gangster film Nayakan, which drew rave reviews from Indian and international film critics.

As though underlining the connection with the earlier film, Haasan plays “Rangaraya Sakthivel Naicker” (Nayakan’s protagonist being “Sakthivel Naicker”), a gangster who turns against his own family following an assassination attempt. Silambarasan plays Sakthivel Naicker’s adoptive son Amaran, engaged in a power struggle with his formidable father. Mani Ratnam is one of the rare Indian directors who remains super-versatile at the visual level, finding new and inventive ways to balance spectacle with intimacy.

SERIES

Squid Game S3, On Netflix on 27 JuneArguably Netflix’s biggest global success in recent years, the South Korean survival thriller series Squid Game returns with its concluding third season. As fans of the show are aware, the narrative follows a disparate group of strangers (including protagonist Seong Gi-hun), all buried under near-insurmountable debt, playing lethal versions of children’s games on a mysterious island. Losers are terminated in increasingly gruesome ways while winners get one step closer to claiming millions of dollars in prize money.

In the third season, the deadly Front Man, one of the show’s main antagonists, prepares to welcome the island’s “VIP guests” for another round of blood-soaked ‘games’. But Gi-hun has finally hit upon a crucial lead that may signal the beginning of the end for the island’s shadowy inner circle.

BOOKS

The Second Book of Prophets by Benyamin, translated by Ministhy S., (Simon and Schuster India)

In the JCB Prize-winning Malayalam writer Benyamin’s earlier novel Yellow Lights of Death he had fictionalized certain aspects of Christianity’s arrival on Indian shores. His latest, The Second Book of Prophets, is a grander enterprise still, a radical re-imagination of episodes from the Bible itself. Biblical figures like Lazarus and Pontius Pilate are depicted in terms that are familiar yet sufficiently different from their canonical counterparts. And Jesus himself is a straight-up revolutionary, burning with outrage at society’s inequities.

Benyamin’s greatest achievement here is showing us how social subversions are, ultimately, ‘encoded’ in palatable mythological terms. The ‘miracle’ of Jesus turning water into wine at a wedding feast, for example, has been depicted as Jesus convincing the hosts to serve wine to “the low-born” (who were customarily only served water).

Learning to Make Tea for One by Andaleeb Wajid, (Speaking Tiger)

The summer of 2021 was one of the cruelest in recent memory for so many Indians, with the second wave of Covid-19. And while writer Andaleeb Wajid was hospitalized after testing positive for Covid, she lost her husband and mother-in-law within the space of five days. This book is Wajid’s account of her grief — as she worked through the loss that she felt but also the life that she shared with her husband, its infinite small miracles, inside jokes and domestic symbiosis (ditto for her relationship with her mother-in-law).

Learning to Make Tea for One is about making sense of death, but it is also a text about honoring life. For obvious reasons, grief is extremely difficult to talk about in a reasoned yet compassionate way but this book does exactly that.

The Last Bench by Adhir Biswas, translated by V. Ramaswamy (Ekada/Westland Books)

Adhir Biswas is a respected and prolific Bengali writer and publisher, with over twenty books to his credit since the 1970s. The Last Bench is a memoir about Biswas’s childhood, beginning with his father (a Dalit man running a barbershop) migrating along with the family from East Pakistan to Calcutta in 1967. The father knows that for 12-year-old Adhir to have a shot at escaping the poverty and squalor around him, education was a must.

Father and son then set about overcoming the many manifestations of discrimination around them—the harrowing scene that gives the book its name describes how Adhir was first asked to sit by himself at the back of the classroom. Through all of this, Adhir has a constant, shadow-like companion in Bhombol the dog. The Last Bench is a poignant childhood memoir about living with constant oppression and yet, striving hard to make the best of circumstances.

MUSIC

Oh What a Beautiful World by Willie Nelson

Willie Nelson, one of the undisputed legends of country music, returns with his 77th solo album, consisting of twelve songs written by the singer-songwriter Rodney Crowell. Country music aficionados will remember the soulful ‘Making Memories of Us’, which in Keith Urban’s rendition was a chart-topper in the late 2000s. Nelson’s version is even smoother and genteel, a feel-good song that goes beyond ‘happiness’ and towards contentment.

‘Banks of the Old Bandera’ and ‘Forty Miles From Nowhere’ are songs you’ll hear around the fire on a camping trip — amiable, hummable, courteous. But the pick of the album is ‘The Fly Boy and the Kid’, with its infectious melody and quick-witted lyrics. “May the wind be at your back and the world sit at your feet / May you waltz across Wyoming with a rose clutched in your teeth

Behad by Anurag Mishra

Alongside the likes of Prateek Kuhad and Ankur Tewari, Anurag Mishra is one of those Indian indie artists who have created a genteel, acoustic-guitar-led, lo-fi sound. In his latest album Behad, Mishra delivers 10 new tracks across 33 minutes and shows off his technical prowess and increasing maturity as a singer. The album’s first song, ‘Ek Aur Nadiya’, is also one of its best, featuring Hansika Pareek on vocals alongside Mishra.

‘Aashna’ and ‘Kayee Dafaa’ are Mishra on familiar territory, songs about romantic love that proceed in an orderly, mid-tempo fashion towards a broader nostalgia for one’s youth. My personal favorite was ‘Zaaya Zaaya’, a bit of a departure in style for Mishra, its grunge-y electric guitar bits lending the song a defiant edge not often seen in his music.

PODCAST

Debt Heads by Jamie Feldman and Rachel Webster

Several recent studies have indicated that across the last 4-5 years, more young Indians have applied for a personal loan than in any other era. This is an especially relevant time, then, to discover Debt Heads, a smart and engaging new podcast about loans and what they’re all about. Jamie Feldman and Rachel Webster educate the audience (but always in a fun, irreverent manner) about the origins and the architecture of personal finance, busting the “myths of financial responsibility”.

Along the way the duo also takes a good long look at their own finances, demonstrating common mistakes that young people often end up making, especially towards the beginning of their careers. Debt Heads is frequently funny, but it never loses sight of the fact that it tackles a deadly serious topic.