Word: chandni
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...veggie-slicing galoot from Delhi goes to China to realize his destiny as a martial-arts master - and just from the synopsis, I'm on board with Chandni Chowk to China. For, as any video nerd-historian will tell you, the two most exciting foreign movie industries of the past few decades have been Hong Kong and India. While European filmmakers went inwardly minimalist, those teeming Asian cinemas generated robust entertainment of pinwheeling action and violence (Hong Kong) and unabashed sentiment and music (Bollywood). Different in temperament, but alike in their vigor and brio, they were both exotic and oddly...
...stars in the East, made a dent in the U.S. market; and in 2005 the movie Bride and Prejudice, starring Bollywood princess Aishwarya Rai, tried unsuccessfully to anglicize the Indian musical. Yet there's been little foreign exchange between the two national cinemas. So far as I know, Chandni Chowk, which Warner Bros. is giving a fairly wide release in the States this week, represents the first A-budget crossbreeding of Bollywood and Hong Kong...
...perhaps not surprising that Sujit Saraf chose Chandni Chowk as the main setting for his ambitious 750-page novel of politics, commerce and manners in modern India. The Peacock Throne does for Delhi and democracy what Vikram Chandra's recent 900-page Sacred Games does for Mumbai (formerly Bombay) and organized crime. Or what 19th century European novelists did when economic and intellectual winds howled: produce teeming, sprawling, barn-burning novels that try to describe everything in sight. The surprise is that Saraf is not, strictly speaking, a novelist. He works full-time as a space scientist...
...Hindustan. Saraf casts a scientist's eye on the country of his birth and finds it still preoccupied with holding sway. He starts with Indira Gandhi's 1984 assassination by Sikh bodyguards and the spasm of anti-Sikh violence that ensued. Kartar Singh, a Sikh who runs a Chandni Chowk appliance store, narrowly escapes death in the rioting - and leverages that experience to gain influence in a Hindu nationalist party. "He has a limp and a charred signboard - wounds that even a Member of Parliament would covet," a rival notes wryly. "It is wonderful what a riot...
...India's technology-fueled future, studying and later teaching science at Delhi's prestigious Indian Institute of Technology. He also spent time at Berkeley, where he met the American who is now his wife and the mother of their infant daughter. "I have an uncle who owns shops in Chandni Chowk," says Saraf, 37, from his home in San Jose, California. "When I was in high school, I lived above one of them. I actually saw some of the incidents in the book...