Zul vellani biography books
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'I'm Not Here To Defend Naipaul's Politics'
'I'm Not Here To Defend Naipaul's Politics'
This is an extended version of a January 2003 article.
Nandini Lal: You’ve never been one to shrink from revisionist takes (Liberty or Death on Gandhi or Jinnah, for example). Will we hear the familiar crackle of controversy again in your Tibet book? And are there any myths you’re planning to debunk in your Naipaul biography?
Patrick French: It’s not so much that I deliberately set out to debunk! It’s more that if I see a reality of how something is, then I will say that, rather than going along with the orthodoxy. One of the things that drives me as a writer is never to assume that orthodoxy is always right. There’s a load of political and social orthodoxies that people subscribe to without really examining them.
People think something’s an orthodoxy, when in fact it’s an orthodoxy of a previous generation. And the orthodoxy of the present generation is different. So people will think they’re challenging something, when in fact all they’re doing is saying the same as everybody else at that particular historical moment.
Is it true that Naipaul told you, "Don’t let the New Yorker worry you. The New Yorker kno
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GOOD NIGHT, SWEET PRINCE, AND FLIGHT OF ANGELS TAKE THEE TO THY REST!
Those lines from Hamlet immediately sprang to mind when I read Anmol Vellani’s sms telling me that “Zul Vellani – the Voice had been silenced” on the last day of 2010.
For more than a decade the first poster that caught one’s attention in my flat was the sepia head of Zul Vellani as Hamlet directed by Alyque Padamsee in 1964.
Pearl Padamsee did the Costumes for that Production. She despaired and turned to the Director to say “I can’t put Zul in tights. His legs are too splindly”. Alyque in his usual dismissive dictatorial voice said: “I don’t care. That is your problem. You are the Costume Designer.” Pearl then made him wear four pairs of tights one on top of the other. He looked so good. But nearly died of heat!!!
And that head portrait contained all the sensitivity, handsomeness, poetry that was Zul Vellani…one just has to mention Hamlet, and Gerson daCunha as the King and Usha Katrak as Gertrude go into memory zone immediately.
Many of you may not even have hard of Zul Vellani – but he was a judge at Thespo IV.
More: http://qtpthescript.blogspot.com/.
http://findarticles.com/p/news-articles/dna-sunday-mumbai
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0892606/