Poets and Pancakes

The chapter is an extract from Asokamitran's memoir My Years with Boss, about his time at Gemini Studios in Madras. It is a series of sketches rather than a single narrative, held together by tone: affectionate, ironic, and quietly deflating.

The title's 'pancake' is not food. Pancake was the brand of make-up the studio bought in bulk — Asokamitran notes it was the make-up used by every actress from the great stars down.

The make-up room was in the upstairs of a building said to have been Robert Clive's stables. It was lit by a set of powerful incandescent lights at all angles, and the author remarks that the make-up department's job seemed to be to make the players look ugly — anyone in that chair emerged looking hideous, and only the lights of the shooting could redeem the effect.

He calls the department a fine example of national integration, since its members came from so many places: a Bengali headed it, succeeded by a Maharashtrian, and there were a Dharwar Kannadiga, an Andhra, a Madras Indian Christian, an Anglo-Burmese and the local Tamils.

There was a strict hierarchy. The chief make-up man made the chief actors and actresses; his senior assistant did the second hero and heroine; the junior assistant the main comedian; and the office boy was left to apply make-up to the players who formed the crowd, slapping a thick layer of paint on their faces with an indifferent hand.

The 'boy' was over forty. He had joined the studio years earlier hoping to become a star actor, or a top screenwriter, director or lyricist. He was a bit of a poet himself.

He would come to the author's cubicle and pour out his anguish, blaming his failure on Kothamangalam Subbu. The author, who spent his days cutting newspaper clippings and filing them, appeared to everyone to be doing nothing — which is precisely why the office boy chose him as an audience.

Kothamangalam Subbu was the number two at Gemini Studios. Asokamitran describes him with a mixture of admiration and irony.

Subbu was a Brahmin, which the author says gave him a certain advantage of exposure and connection. He was always cheerful, always at the Boss's side, and possessed of an enormous creativity — he could produce four alternative ways of shooting a scene on the spot when the Boss was stuck. He was a poet who wrote for the masses rather than for critics, and a novelist whose Thillana Mohanambal the author praises for its recreation of a period. He was also generous, with a house full of dependants.

Yet the office boy hated him, because Subbu's loyalty and closeness to the Boss made everyone else's contribution invisible.

Officially a member of the Story Department, he was known to everyone as the legal adviser — and the author says he was more accurately the opposite, since he once brought an actress's career to an end.

The actress, in a fit of temper, launched into a tirade on the set. The legal adviser quietly recorded it, and then played the recording back to her. She was so shaken that she never appeared at the studio again. He wore trousers, a coat and a tie among a crowd dressed in khadi, which added to his separateness.

Everyone at Gemini wore khadi and worshipped Gandhi, and the prevailing sentiment was firmly anti-communist without anyone being clear what communism was.

In 1952 the Moral Re-Armament army arrived — about two hundred people of twenty nationalities. They staged two plays, Jotham Valley and The Forgotten Factor, in a professional manner. For years afterwards Tamil drama copied their sunrise and sunset scenes, with a bare stage and a white background curtain.

An Englishman visited and delivered a speech. The audience of film-makers and Tamil poets understood nothing — neither his accent nor what an English poet was doing at a film studio. He left, and the incident was forgotten.

Years later, out of work and reading in the British Council library, the author came across a book called The God That Failed, in which six eminent writers described their journey into communism and their disillusioned return. One of the contributors was Stephen Spender.

Only then did the visit make sense. Spender edited the magazine Encounter, to which the author had once sent a short story for a competition. And the anti-communist Boss had, without anyone in the room knowing it, been hosting a poet whose politics matched his own.

He is the chapter's most quietly sad figure, and Asokamitran never says so directly. A man of over forty still called a boy, applying paint to crowd players, having arrived years earlier expecting to be a star.

His resentment settles on Subbu because Subbu has exactly what he wanted. The author records his complaints without endorsing them, and notes elsewhere that the office boy's grievance was really with a system in which talent without connection went nowhere.

The portrait is double-edged, and this is what exam questions usually probe. Asokamitran genuinely admires him: the inexhaustible inventiveness, the cheerfulness, the generosity to a houseful of dependants, the novel he rates highly.

But the admiration is qualified. Subbu's advantage of being born a Brahmin is stated plainly. His talents were subordinated to the Boss — he could have achieved more independently, but chose loyalty. And the author suggests that Subbu's success was as much about proximity to power as about ability.

He is described with amused hostility. He is the one man not in khadi, wearing trousers, a coat and a tie, and he is 'the opposite' of a legal adviser because his single memorable act destroyed rather than protected someone.

The recording incident is told flatly, which makes it colder. There is no malice attributed to him — he simply did it, and an actress's career ended.

Asokamitran presents himself as the man who appeared to do nothing. His job of cutting and filing newspaper clippings looked like idleness, so people felt free to come and unburden themselves in his cubicle.

That self-deprecation is a device. Precisely because he is beneath notice, he sees everything — which is what makes him able to write the chapter.

The chapter's undertow is the number of people at Gemini who wanted to be something else. The office boy wanted to be a star; he paints crowds. The author wanted to write; he cuts clippings. Even Subbu, the one man who succeeded, succeeded as somebody's second.

Asokamitran never states this as a theme. It accumulates.

Almost every sketch turns on a gap between what something is called and what it is:

• The make-up department exists to beautify and in fact makes people look hideous.
• The office boy is over forty.
• The legal adviser ends a career instead of protecting one.
• The author looks idle and is the one writing it all down.

The studio's politics are the sharpest instance. Everyone was firmly anti-communist without any clear idea what communism was — a prejudice absorbed rather than reasoned. The Spender episode completes the joke: a poet arrives whose politics would have delighted them, speaks, and is understood by nobody, because nobody knew who he was.

The 'national integration' line and the MRA visit both point the same way. Gemini was a place where regions, languages and even nationalities met without much friction — and where influence flowed in unexpected directions, as when Tamil drama spent years copying an MRA sunrise.

The chapter's governing attitude is worth naming in an answer. Asokamitran is fond of these people and refuses to flatter them. The irony is never cruel, and the admiration is never uncritical.

There is no plot. The chapter moves by association — make-up leads to the office boy, who leads to Subbu, who leads to the legal adviser, who leads to the studio's politics, which lead to the MRA and then to Spender. Each sketch is complete in itself.

The looseness is the point: it reproduces how a workplace is actually remembered.

The chapter's humour comes almost entirely from flat statement of absurd facts. The make-up room 'in Robert Clive's stables'; a department whose function is to make people ugly; a boy of forty. Asokamitran never signals the joke.

The same flatness makes the darker moments land. The actress who never came back is reported in a sentence, with no comment.

The Spender episode is the chapter's structural achievement. The visit is narrated as a pointless anticlimax — a man spoke, nobody understood, he left. The explanation arrives years later and in another place entirely, in a library, from a book picked up by chance.

Withholding the meaning for that long is what turns an anecdote into the chapter's conclusion.

Praise arrives with a qualification attached, and criticism arrives disguised as praise. Subbu is the clearest case: everything admiring said about him is true, and the chapter still leaves you with the sense of a talent spent in service.

• Why the make-up department is called national integration.
• Subbu's character — almost always the longest question on this chapter.
• The office boy's frustration and who he blamed.
• The legal adviser and why he is called the opposite of one.
• The Stephen Spender episode and how the mystery is resolved.
• The title — what 'poets' and 'pancakes' refer to.

A full answer needs both sides. Praise: inexhaustible inventiveness (four alternatives for a scene on demand), cheerfulness, loyalty, generosity, and a novel the author genuinely rates. Qualification: his Brahmin birth gave him exposure, his gifts were spent in the Boss's service, and his position rested partly on proximity to power.

Answers giving only the praise, or only the criticism, lose marks.

Pancake is the brand of make-up used at the studio. Poets refers to the many literary men working there — the office boy who wrote verse, Subbu the poet-novelist, the Tamil poets in the audience, and Stephen Spender. The title yokes the two worlds the chapter is about.

Robert Clive's stables; the make-up hierarchy in order; 'a fine example of national integration'; Thillana Mohanambal; the 1952 MRA visit with 200 people of 20 nationalities; Jotham Valley and The Forgotten Factor; The God That Failed; Encounter.

• Thinking pancake is food.
• Treating Subbu as a straightforward villain because the office boy disliked him.
• Saying the studio understood Spender — the whole point is that nobody did.
• Confusing the MRA visit with Spender's visit — they are separate episodes.
• Presenting it as fiction — it is memoir.