Reading Agatha Christie & Thinking of Slow LIFE

Solan - Feb 20 23

My mindspace has been blocked by MUBI and the daily dose of movies where I am trying to sample a few movies from directors and across genres. While I did my best to pick and choose based on reviews and suggestions. Many of them were stark / had strong emotional overtones or covered topics like transgender growing up n identity (GIRL), war and its effect (beanpole) which leaves with a very melancholy mood.

To beat the same & lack of a good book for which I have a strong desire I picked up Agatha Christie’s ‘A pocketful of Rye. I had never read a Miss Marple mystery - I am not an out and out fan of hers but I enjoy reading them when it comes to our house. In recent years I am more in the space of experiencing different genre’s / authors and have not read any of the latest books of 3 of my all time favorites - Amitava Ghosh, Jhuma Lahiri or Murakami.

What I like about her books are the way she describes the English life, the description of characters and the overall setting is of a laid back life, something which I always looked forward  to and am enjoying (read trying to) in the last 6 months. It’s like the movies by Hrishikesh Mukherjee & Basu Chatterjee - everytime i feel bummed I go back to Chupke Chupke or Gol Maal. They have to put a smile back on your face. Yes they are comedies but they are also so 70’s an era I wish I was born - there was a romanticism about life which has been taken over by our aggressive competitiveness / career focused objective life. Everything has to have a purpose and an outcome.

As I was reading the book I realized that so much of the investigation is about the understanding of the character and how his / her mind works. Deriving how a criminal and all other character’s minds work based on their past actions or what they speak about. Her deductions are mostly based on an astute understanding of the psychology of the person & the mechanics of the society and less of the deductive science which Holmes uses.

And as I was reading it, rather after finishing it I couldn’t help but reminiscence about my recent conversations with many of my relatives when I met them in Assam, Lucknow, Kanpur - especially the older lot on how much they talked and most of the talks were around pretty inane stuff which just did not make any sense to me. Why are we talking about someone’s issue in their house and how that will affect someone else & what’s happening in the village etc. I just could not make any sense about it and after a point of time I used to feel restless and find everything so pointless. 

But that is probably the biggest unlearning, there is no point of being so purpose driven, you have to learn to flow with the time. 

Kabir says” Aaaye hain to Jayenge Raja - Rank - Fakir…. 

Postscript: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaasWuOieqw (Listen to Prahlad Tipania - his renditions are priceless...)