Latest news with #Gogol
Indian Express
26-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
From The Namesake to Vanity Fair: 6 books that inspired Mira Nair's films and series
Filmmaker Mira Nair has long brought stories of identity and migration to the screen, some adapted from renowned literary works. As her son, Zohran Mamdani, makes headlines after defeating Andrew Cuomo in New York City's mayoral primary, it is worth revisiting the books that shaped Nair's cinematic legacy. From postcolonial satire to diaspora, these six books explore themes of belongingness. They continue to resonate with readers across generations—a must-read for anyone interested in the intersection of identity and culture. From Calcutta to Cambridge, The Namesake follows the life of the Ganguli family. Ashoke Ganguli, an engineer, adapts to his new life. While, his wife Ashima remains emotionally attached to home. Their son is named Gogol, after a Russian writer. Gogol's name, much like himself, is an identity in limbo, never fully American, never truly Indian. Adapted into a film by Mira Nair of the same title, this novel shows the discomfort of belonging nowhere and the slow, aching journey toward becoming your own person. A biting portrait of ambition and hypocrisy of British society. Vanity Fair (Wordsworth Editions Ltd, 720 pages, Rs 435) shows two women on opposite ends of the moral scale. Becky Sharp, an orphan, with wit and ambition. And, Amelia Sedley, her sheltered, sentimental schoolmate. This book lays bare a society obsessed with status, exposing its vanity through the rise and fall of its unforgettable characters. Vanity Fair is a perfect portrayal of a world so obsessed with status that ambition is the only way up. No wonder Mira Nair chose to bring this book to screen. The true-story Disney film The Queen of Katwe (Scribner, 245 pages, Rs 1,324), directed by Mira Nair, is based on a book by Tim Cothers. In the slums of Katwe, Uganda, where finding food is a daily struggle, Phiona Mutesi discovers an unexpected lifeline- chess. She is taught by a war refugee turned coach. Our protagonist learns the game barefoot on a dirt floor. And she rises to become a national champion by age fifteen. The Queen of Katwe is the powerful true story of a girl who defies every odd stacked against her, proving that greatness can come from the unlikeliest places. Told as a monologue in a Lahore cafe. This novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Penguin India, 168 pages, Rs 250) shows the life of Changez, a Pakistani man who once chased the American dream. Then he begins to question everything after the 9/11 attacks. Changez begins to feel the slow erosion of identity and belongingness in a post-9/11 world. Adapted into a thriller by Mira Nair, it is a sharp and deliberately unsettling book. It poses a serious question- What happens when the world no longer sees you as one of its own? Set in the newly independent India of the 1950s, A Suitable Boy (Aleph Book Company, 1,552 pages, Rs 1999) is part love story, part political story. Lata Mehra, a young woman navigating family pressure and personal desire as her mother, Rupa Mehra, searches for a suitable husband for her. Sprawling across four interconnected families, the novel weaves together love, caste, religion and politics. It's a story of ordinary lives caught between tradition and change. Mira Nair adapted this into her BBC series of the same title. A mysterious royal claim, a crumbling palace and a reporter drawn into the story. The New York Times article The Jungle Prince of Delhi by Ellen Barry, follows the strange story of Begum Wilayat Mahal, who declared herself the queen of Oudh in the 1970s. She demanded lands from a kingdom that no longer existed. Barry's bond with Wilayat's son, Cyrus, leads her deep into the family's world. Through interviews and investigation, Barry reveals a tale shaped by Partition and a desperate need to belong. A haunting true story, which is now being adapted into Mira Nair's new series. (The writer is an intern with
Scroll.in
23-06-2025
- General
- Scroll.in
Climate fiction for children: Gogol's friends have to leave as forests are cleared to build houses
Gogol was no ordinary kid. He was born on the day that the instruments of an atmospheric observatory on a Hawaaiian mountaintop, which measures how much carbon we are pumping into the atmosphere – crossed a dangerous limit. But that was not why Gogol was marked different right from the time he was a young boy, lugging along his bags to the boarding school at the edge of an old forest, a few miles from the sprawling city of Anantanagar. There were other reasons that made him different. But we have to begin at the beginning. Because if we do not, then all that happened later will sound like a fairy tale told by a storyteller with a fevered mind. One whose thoughts change colours like the chameleons that flitted across the neem tree branches in the village graveyard just behind Gogol's hostel rooms. Now it so happened that some years ago, a gang of thieves had emerged from the forest and knocked off some bricks from the boundary wall, which had created a hole through which the graveyard could be reached. And every night, when the moonlight would be painting the devil trees silver and the barn owls would be screeching away on the tombstones, Gogol would be standing by the wall, right next to the hole. Through this hole, thin, bony hands with outstretched palms, ten and twenty feet long, would be sticking out into the darkness. 'Here, Chingu, these two are yours,' he would whisper softly and drop two stolen mangoes into Chingu's chalky-white palm. Chingu was the tallest of those who lived in the graveyard. People from the nearby village who came across him in the middle of the night said he was as tall as a bamboo grove and as thin as a beanstalk, but the moonlight shone through him and he cast no shadow. 'Now, where is Suleiman?' Gogol wanted to know. The mango trees on this side of the wall and the neem trees on the other side swayed and murmured, passing on the message. But Suleiman, who was just a wisp of smoke, and whose appearance would always be announced by a powerful gust of wind that rattled the stones of the old graveyard, wasn't going to appear right then. He was always late. 'Lazy idiot, that Suleiman,' Gogol would say, the leaves whistling in agreement. 'Where are the others?' Gogol asked Chingu that night, dropping more mangoes from his schoolbag into his outstretched hands. But his bag was still heavy. Neither Chacha (who could sing like a bird and had a penchant for fish) nor Maryam (who brought with her the fragrance of a thousand roses) had arrived. 'I think they don't live here anymore,' a voice whispered in his ears in the darkness. 'Who said that?' Gogol asked, but there was no answer from the other side. And so, Gogol went back to his room, his bag still half full of stolen mangoes, and fell asleep on his small bed. Next night, when the owls had begun to hoot and the fireflies were dancing among the ixora shrubs, Chingu's hand poked through the hole and Gogol gave him two fresh mangoes. But neither Suleiman nor any of the others were there. Gogol fished out a green mango from his bag and absentmindedly took a bite, 'What is the matter, Chingu? Where have they all gone?' he asked. 'We are leaving, Gogol, we can't live here anymore,' Chingu whispered in his ears. The trees seemed to hear him and they whispered along with Chingu. We are leaving, we are leaving, they said. The owls stopped their hooting and looked from one side to the other, rolling their fiery red eyes. 'But why so?' Gogol asked, his voice a little shaky with sadness. 'Because they will be building bungalows here for people from the city,' Chingu said from the other side of the wall. People from the city, people from the city, the trees joined in a chorus. Hooooot, hoooot, the owls warned. 'The city is growing, the city is getting bigger and bigger,' Chingu whispered from behind the wall. So his friends would be gone soon. Gogol looked up at the tall trees of the forest beyond the graveyard, silvery waterfalls of moonlight washing over their canopies. He put his arm around the trunk of a mango tree. A lump was forming in his throat. A leaf floated down from a high branch and landed on his head. He took it in his hand and smelled it deeply. Tears were gathering at the corners of his eyes. He felt choked up with emotion. Gogol put the leaf carefully in his pocket, zipped up his bag, and without wishing them goodnight, turned around and plodded his way back to his hostel room. The boarding school had a science teacher who everyone feared. He was thickset and short, his nose was hooked like an eagle's beak and his eyes were shifty like those of a jackal. He had a habit of roaming around the campus at night with an enormous flashlight, the kind you see in the hands of police constables and railway guards. The teacher was ill-tempered and was notorious for meting out harsh punishments for the flimsiest of offences. Once, when Gogol's classmate Paul had forgotten to tie his shoelaces, he made the poor boy memorise Tagore's long poem 'Juta Abiskar' (The Invention of Shoes) and recite it every day at the dining hall till he got it right without any mistakes. Another time, when a senior student was found disrupting class, his meals were randomly rationed; on certain days, the standard piece of fish would be missing from his plate at lunch, or there would be no meat and only a lonesome potato sitting in his weekend meat bowl. Because this teacher taught biology, the students called him Microscope. So at the end of that week, when everyone had gone to sleep and the hostel warden was snoring away in his air-conditioned quarters, Gogol sneaked out of his room and crept up to the hole in the wall. It was a warm night punctuated by the rhythmic call of cicadas in the bushes. Somewhere, a frog began to croak. Chingu was already there, waiting for his mangoes. Just as Gogol unzipped his bag, a powerful beam of light lit up the darkness, blinding him for a moment. Gogol froze. It was Microscope, and Gogol was caught in the fiery beam of his flashlight! 'What are you doing here, you young whippersnapper?' the biology teacher barked in his raspy voice. 'Uh, Sir, I was, I was…' Gogol began to fumble. Microscope came menacingly close to Gogol and swung his hand to direct the beam of light onto the wall but froze suddenly, his raised hand stuck in midair. Right at that moment, the flashlight flew out of his grip and sailed slowly through the air, landing on top of the wall, from where its blazing beam hit Microscope's eyes like a searchlight, blinding him completely.
Times
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
The Government Inspector review — a Gogol revival with slapstick
It's almost as if panto season has arrived early at Chichester Festival Theatre. Gregory Doran's revival of Gogol's comedy of mistaken identity and everyday graft in Tsarist Russia is brash, hectic and awash with old school slapstick. Phil Porter's fruity adaptation isn't afraid to toss in slivers of Carry On humour as well, nor can you help noticing that Sylvestra Le Touzel's lubricious mayor's wife speaks in the same suggestive tones as Mollie Sugden's department store harridan in the vintage sitcom Are You Being Served? The comedians Rik Mayall and Julian Barratt have been drafted in to spice up the central role in past productions. This time the honour falls to the stand-up comedian Tom Rosenthal, star of the TV shows Plebs and Friday Night
Telegraph
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The Government Inspector: Gorgeous to look at, but where's the rottenness?
Long before Stalin, there existed in Tsarist Russia a trickle-down terror. In considering his 1836 comic masterpiece of mistaken identity – in which Khlestakov, a hard-up visitor to a provincial backwater is taken to be an undercover government inspector and treated like a king – Nikolai Gogol remarked: 'I tried to gather in one heap all that was bad in Russia. I wished to turn it all into ridicule. The real impression produced was that of fear…' It's hardly the worst time to be placing a vision of Russian folly and grasping venality on a regional main stage, and if a director gets the balance right between domino-effect mayhem and a hierarchy of domination, then in theory you get the best of both worlds: an evening fit to have you clutching your sides, while delivering a punch to the guts about stupidity, self-interest and the herd instinct. Attending the premiere, the Tsar himself – Nicholas I – waved it through, which shows not its inoffensiveness but its guile in slipping an indictment of power abuse past the noses of officialdom. Stepping back into the directorial fray after his esteemed tenure running the RSC, and capably opening Chichester's summer season, Gregory Doran almost hits the mark, but doesn't quite. There's a thin line between catching the way a shared misapprehension becomes a grinding mechanism ensnaring everyone, and parading a gallery of grotesques going through the motions of helpless frenzy. Despite the evident, even strenuous, effort applied across the board, the rottenness Gogol was striving to anatomise feels decorous. Keeping the play in period is fine (albeit you could 'Putinise' the piece, and Doran has written an interesting programme note about the battle over Gogol's Ukrainian identity). The fidelity does mean, though, that we're in a world of amiable between-scenes folk-music, frock-coats and large boots, and an opulent, absurdist set (by Francis O'Connor) that makes overflowing filing cabinets part of a picturesque townscape. The company deliver energetic, larger-than-life performances that serve well to fill Chichester's capacious auditorium; what's less apparent is a sense of inner-life – of panic and hysteria rising from deep within. Only in the second half, when a townswoman petitions the newly influential Khlestakov for redress against mayoral abuse, and bears the scars of a whipping, does a brutal reality manifest. Taking on a role played in the past by Tony Hancock and Michael Sheen (and 20 years ago, in Chichester, by Alistair McGowan), Friday Night Dinner's Tom Rosenthal sports a nicely disbelieving demeanour as the suddenly fêted and hastily freeloading ne'er-do-well, taking relish in Phil Porter's springy adaptation ('He'd sell his own granny for two roubles and a half-sucked sweetie'). There's robust work on all sides – whether it be Lloyd Hutchinson as the pompous mayor, or Miltos Yerolemou and Paul Rider as a delightful double-act (Bobchinsky and Dobchinsky), redolent of a Tsar-era Tweedledum and Tweedledee. I laughed a fair bit and acknowledged the audience merriment around me. Did I feel I was in the presence of a gold-plated, cleverer-than-it-seems classic, though? Not really.
The Guardian
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Government Inspector review – Tom Rosenthal stirs up Gogol's political satire
A satire by a Ukrainian-born writer in which Russians trust a chancer who cruelly tricks them has obvious topicalities. The programme for Gregory Doran's revival of Nikolai Gogol's The Government Inspector (1836) includes a letter from a Ukrainian academic bemoaning Putin's attempts to claim Gogol as Russian, although the Kremlin dictator could not sit with any comfort through a play about the stupidity of rulers. Nor, though, could Donald Trump or most leaders. In a show premiered, deliberately or not, on local election day in England (May Day in Russia), Doran strongly brings out how power can be a confidence trick in which both sides consent. The citizens of a provincial Russian town submit to the authority of a penniless nincompoop because guilt at their corruption has led them to think they deserve him. But Khlestakov, who they falsely believe to be their governmental nemesis, finds, as unsuitable overlords often do, that he enjoys control. In our context, the play can also be seen quietly to question whether the reflex sending of inspectors – into schools, hospitals, prisons – is distraction rather than action. However, even Doran's signature swiftness, each speech pursuing the last, can't overcome the original's blunt structure. It has a setup of exemplary economy – the opening line announcing 'a government inspector is on the way' – but the subsequent misunderstandings are linear with no twists. And, of the corrupt town officials, only the Postmaster (brightly played by Reuben Johnson) behaves badly in a way that impacts the narrative. If only more were made of the Head of Schools, the Chief of Police or the Charity Commissioner, given their modern significance. Unfortunately, Phil Porter's adaptation always favours lighter jokes, such as anyone speaking a long Russian patronymic being blessed for sneezing. Khlestakov is an unusual central role in that the character is only on stage for the middle three of the five acts. That means the actor must satisfy anticipation with his entrance and leave a tangible gap after exiting. Achieving both, Tom Rosenthal brings the easy stage command of a practised standup to a performance of energetic inflections and physicality that suggests a route to Shakespearean and Restoration comedy clowns. Miltos Yerolemou and Paul Rider double-act nicely as Bobchinsky and Dobchinsky, landowners as interchangeable as Rosencrantz and Tweedledee. But, for all the efforts of the director and cast, it made me want to see two later, darker plays that knowingly used Gogol: JB Priestley's An Inspector Calls and Dario Fo's Accidental Death of an Anarchist. We now demand tougher inspection of government. At Chichester Festival theatre until 24 May
