Skip to main content

The Namesake

Watched The Namesake yesterday. Having read the book earlier, I was curious to see how it would translate in cinema. Meera Nair's succinct adaptation of the story flows better than what Lahiri had originally written. Irfan Khan and Tabu provide the film most of its heft though the story really revolves around Kal Penn who plays their son Gogol. The scenes from life in Calcutta are entirely believable even if somewhat cliched. Being that first generation immigrant angst is an universal condition, the use of certain stereotypes is perhaps inevitable while depicting it.

When Tabu talks about how watching her teenaged kids makes her think she gave birth to strangers, she echoes the feelings of many parents like Ashok and Ashima Ganguli. Alienation between parent and child can and does happen even if they are raised in their home country. The only difference is that in a foreign country such children flounder along and find their harbor in a foreign culture that their parents do not fully comprehend. While the effects of alienation are percieved more viscerally by immigrant parents, the condition itself is not unique to them.

Ashok abortive attempts to explain the significance of the name Gogol in his life to his son highlights what is contributing to the distance between parents and the kids. He allows the riptide of foreign culture sweep his children away seeming to presume he will not be able to influence or stop it. That seems like a defeatist approach but is hardly uncommon. You wonder how the kids might have fared if the parents had put up a resistance and made an effort to reach out to them.

Comments

bharath said…
nice review of the rift in parent child relationship aspect of the movie. cool. just watched it yesterday. I felt the same about the script: very tight and narratives stuck together very well till the end.

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...