Norway Mama

The first time I met Norway (outside of my third-grade geography class) was when I heard that one of my more adventerous mamas (footnote: mother's brother) had migrated to Norway. He must have been the world's first Bengali gent to do so.

I remember how everybody laughed at him; real men, it was said, did not immigrate to Norway.

But this mama of mine, not only migrated to Norway, but he also married a Swedish- Norwegian, whose Finnish-Norwegian daughter from her first marriage, he gamely adopted.

I met that very same Mama in the mid-nineties. He had finally emerged out of Oslo and had come to claim his property in Kolkata (his father had passed away leaving behind a sumptuous legacy).

In sharp contrast to the scrawny and potbellied--in short unhealthy looking--native-Kolkatan relatives and friends, the mama appeared like a poster child for good health. He was radiant and almost white (not to mention he exuded a body language that had gayness writ large); not a pale, but a lustrous kind of whiteness hung on him and made the rest of the Bengalis look, well er, typically lacklustre.

(We could have written a sonnett in praise of the glowing mama).

No, my mama had not morphed into a deity in Norway; it must have been the effects of living in a relatively pollution-free environment and eating excellent quality food.

Also, Mama was happy because he didn't have to worry about money. His living was well nigh paid for by the state.

So, when I read that the UNDP lists Norway as the best country (the U.S. was 4th on the list) to live in for the second time in a row, I nodded to myself in silent affirmation. I was reminded of my lustrous mama as living, breathing evidence of Norway's superior quality of life.

However, Norway's delight notwithstanding, few from India have since followed in the footsteps of my mama.

Sons and Fathers

I am now wondering which one of these two films I should see first: Extremely Loud & Incredibly Clear, based on a novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, or The Kid With a Bike, a French film directed by the Dardenne brothers.

Both seem to be about a similar quest--a boy's search for his father. In Extremely Loud, the boy's pursuit is that of a figment of a paternal figure who has been blown away by the 9/11 explosion. The son takes time for the truth of the father's sudden demise to sink in, and the movie, I hear, is about his frantic movements through Manhattan, aboard his skateboard. 

The Kid is about a boy whose father is living but refuses to take care of him and so he puts him in the hands of kind strangers. The boy does not believe this; he thinks his father is momentarily away on business and one day will come to collect him and father and son would live happily ever after. He rides frantically on his bike, as though he is trying to run away from something into something else--better. During one of his helter skelter movements through the town he collides with a young woman in a hospital. As he collides, he clings to her, perhaps to steady himself. Hospital wardens try to peel off the boy from the woman, but, surprisingly the woman says to the boy, "You can hold me [...] but not so tight." Thus begins a saga of an interweaving of the boy's and the woman's lives.

The interweaving is complex and according to some reviews I've read, unsentimentally rendered. I am almost certain that the American film is loaded with juicy sentimentality. I think, I'd like to see the French film first.