stills from wong kar wei's in the mood for love, 2000

i was turned on to this book- film: the critics choice over at FSFF. it's a beautifully designed coffee table book that also happens to be pretty high on substance. heavy hitters like david bordwell and peter wollen among other contribute with bernardo bertolucci writing a short intro that's really quite passionate and polemical. buy it used for mere pennies. 

because i too am a sucker for a sunset photo.

our lady of alice bhatti is pretty unusual for a pakistani novel. there is  fair bit of violence in it, and sex too, which may not appeal to the exact stratum of society that especially needs to read it.  while much south asian literature tends to vacillate between depicting pakistan as a nostalgic space of diaspora or a geopolitical hotbed of fundamentalism, this novel does neither. it offers a portrait of contemporary urban pakistan that is complex, layered and entirely unsentimental. at times it is brutal, but the dark brutality rests on a kind of insight that should not be dismissed.  a lot of pundits continue to ask why pakistan remains a country at crossroads sixty five years on. this is not a book specifically setting out to answer that question, but it does get at a certain kind of truth about it.

like mohsin hamid’s moth smoke, our lady unfolds as a modern crime noir. it’s a tragedy about a woman who is punished not for what she has done but for who she is. she is a reluctant femme fatale- her sexuality a weapon not because she chooses to wield it but merely because she possesses it.  and her story is an indictment against a society that remains handicapped not by it’s polarization against the west as the nightly news would have us believe, but rather because of an internal class based system of misogyny that is condoned by a corrupt church-state system. this is a country out of order, and the external pressures of the new great game have spun it out of control.

despite all this it would still be dismissive to categorize this novel as a timely political thriller, because i think it gets at something even deeper than the current state of affairs in pakistan. at it’s heart it’s a feminist novel. it’s about how the bodies of women are being trampled, displaced and discarded in lieu of rational discourse. this war is not being waged by outlaw forces in turbans but by fathers, husbands and brothers who have acquiesced to a society of inequity. and it’s happening because a country has turned in on itself. the daily human suffering that has come out of this cannibalization is what our lady is really about. combined with hanif’s previous a case of exploding mangoes, it’s a must read.

there were also loads of cheeky weka birds walking around. they are so fast and clever. one pretended to saunter by me in a disinterested manner then out of nowhere dived into my bag and grabbed a piece of foil that was somewhere in the middle of the bag and dashed off before i even knew what was happening. moral of the story: don't trust a weka.

on some of the shorter walks in tongariro i took along a medium format film camera i have been learning how to use. it certainly involves a lot more effort to get results but it's pretty interesting comparing the same image to one taken with my canon digital slr [see below]. the fidelity of color and depth of detail in the darks kinda blows my digital version away. i also think the developed positives have a charming quality on their own. here i used a film stock called velvia which is known for its ultra rich color. velvia the word [and the results] remind me of a kind of processed american cheese known as velveeta. if you grew up in america in the 80s i don't need to remind you how rich, creamy [i daresay delicious] that synthetic cheese was. think there's a reason the two words sound similar!

i didn't do the crossing while out in tongariro last week, but i did manage to get in a few hours of rigorous tramping. even the baby hikes offered stunning views.