26 Jun 2025 / Counterpoint

burgundy

During the summer of 1983, April I think, on the last day of my class X examination, I saw Day of the Jackal at New Delhi’s toniest cinema, The Chanakya. The film, drawn from the novel of the same name, released in 1973 starring Edward Fox (as the Jackal) and Michael Lonsdale (as Claude Lebel). The movie was taut and I loved it for more than one reason – one scene too many, one character too many. And yes, in days that were, films took long to premiere in India. The movie ran to packed houses. Fredrick Forsythe, the book’s author, died earlier this month. As I think of not quite pulp writers --- let’s call them popular authors and the movies I grew up with and the fiction drawn from zeitgeist I relished – Jack Higgins with his The Eagle Has Landed and a very rare Memoirs of a Dancehall Romeo…Ken Follet – The Eye of the Needle with Donald Sutherland, and a little known book of his which I read more than once – Night Over Water…Alistair Maclain, Paul Brickhill’s --- The Great Escape…the list grows. It takes me to the Commando comics and then circles back to other wonderful films across genre and plot: Escape from Alcatraz, Odessa File, Munich, North by Northwest, Murder on The Orient Express, Motorcycle Diaries, Bridge on the River Kawai, Tora, Tora, Tora, Our Man in Havana…an infinity of lists. And the great arc of actors during that time right down to Clint Eastwood and the last movie I loved Gran Torino….As I do, I am reminded to field trips of the mind, of the crook of my father’s arm and the stories he told me, of Casablanca narrated by my mother, of a school teacher, Mrs. Chandra in 1972, I think who told class about Anastasia, of my friends ahead of me by decades who told me of Hindu mythology, of my own readings…..of anecdotes I collected and then the humble scholar, the Late R V Smith who told me stories of the necropolis of Delhi….things change, they must. Some changes are not nice ---- the dead practice of stories and worlds with style and swagger, with mystery and intrigue…. Of men like Rock Hudson, Gregory Peck, Peter O’Toole, Anthony Quinn, Christopher Lee…There’s been a long fall. A degenerate shift – from style to template. I should think I must be in an unsurprisingly terribly microscopic minority but definitely not the only one to see the demise of signature style as the world becomes increasingly synthetic. Predictably uniform and arrayed in inter-connected cohorts which are as incestuous as they are heterogenous. Individualistic, imaginative and creative style is exceedingly rare. There are bogus spoofs though. You see, templates have replaced the bespoke. The ally of templates is a filtered world of algorithms where recommendation systems filter and decide everything. Peddle, push, prevail with the least ambiguous, least disruptive ---- least meaningful ---- least recallable everything. It’s everywhere, this drab, boring uniformity. And its over-the-top. I mourn the death of style. A longitudinal death which has been long in coming. We see it only now, with a degree of distance. Sight grants perspective I know, therefore the notice of extinction for the charisma, the charm, the unalloyed, differentiated, distinctive style ----- altogether convincing, overpowering, realism led style which defined the hero just as it defined the anti-hero, the villain in life, in cinema, in pop culture. Within and without linear separations, with originality and style in deep individualistic signature, without any ordained rubrics, style was set in persona and not mere mannerism. There was a believable, plausible gravitas which was impossible to pretend to.