A Little Tone Shift Goes A Long Way

Some prankster posted this silly, yet ingenious, video on Youtube; it's a trailer for slapstick Robin Williams cross-dressing comedy Mrs Doubtfire, sinisterly recut as a psychological thriller. Mrs Doubtfire could never be accused of being serious or dark in any way, but with careful editing and some dramatic/ scary music and heavy breathing on the soundtrack, the film appears 100% different to the finished product. It adds yet another string to Mrs Doubtfire's bow as the greatest film of the 90s.

It's amazing how little you have to do to completely shift an audience's perception of something, and shows how important it is to strike the right tone to get your message across. There are tons of little things that might affect somebody's reading of literature, from what they've read in the past to their own life experiences, and you can never truly know how anybody is going to take an idea or plot. I've written stories and people have completely missed the point I was trying to make, or reached an entirely separate conclusion. Mostly this has been my fault because I thought things were obvious when they weren't, since the story in my head is so much bigger than the words that make it onto the page. It's hard to put yourself in a reader's shoes, coming at the story fresh rather than having read it fifty times and edited it to death, to put the right number of clues in to make your meaning clear, but not overdo it and spoonfeed your message. Writing is difficult!

Inside Dehli's Magician's Ghetto

In Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie refers to Delhi's magician's quarter, a fabulous place in which fire-eaters, snake charmers, fakirs, contortionists, jugglers, and fortune tellers live in a presumably Harry Potter like reality, with spells crashing through the air, an endless stream of juggled objects being hurled around and kept off the ground by thousands of people, and inhabitants whizzing around on magic carpets. I just assumed it was a wonderfully unrealistic creation of the author, until I looked it up and found that it was the real deal: there genuinely is a slum section of Dehli in which the city's various conjurors congregate to live in crudely raised shacks. From there, they can draw in passing tourists with their displays and scrape a living, or venture out to entertainer jobs in wealthier areas.

It's probably pretty far from the fantastical version of my mind, a 24-hour circus where the fun never stops, where a succession of wild and crazy performers jostle for the attention of any passing tourist, diving in front of the camera to perform their wondrous feats before being jostled aside and having their place taken by another magician, but just the idea of an area in which all the city's entertainers live together is enough to make the world sound a jolly place. Perhaps it's a good juxtaposition between the fantasy of a perfect world and the true world we live in when the actual place is nothing like the dream, but is instead like any other slum, in which people are crammed together under leaky tarpaulins, half-starved, but just happen to be professional conjurers. The most up-to-date article I could find on the Magician's Ghetto suggests that in 2010 India were looking to bulldoze it to the ground to tidy the area in time for the upcoming Commonwealth Games. After this article the trail runs cold, so hopefully it never came to pass and the Magician's Ghetto lives on.