Kuda Bux: The Real Magician From 'Henry Sugar'

Fair Play: A Promising Pitch That Falls Short Of Closing The Deal

By pitting two lovers against each other in the ruthless world of high finance, Fair Play weighs up the high personal price women are likely to pay for their professional success, writes Prahlad Srihari.

THE most revealing scene in Chloe Domont’s bad romance Fair Play arrives right after financial analyst Emily (Phoebe Dynevor) gets a promotion that her fiancé and co-worker Luke (Alden Ehrenreich) expected would go to him. Rather than rejoice in the good news, Emily postscripts it with an apology. She is sorry she got the promotion. She is sorry he didn’t. Above all, she is sorry for being better at her job than he is. Luke congratulates her. “I’m so happy for you,” he says with a smile, but it can’t hide the discernible sadness leaking down his face.

The next day, Emily reassures him, bandaging his wound with the insistence her promotion will be mutually beneficial, so his disappointment doesn’t curdle into resentment and sour their relationship. Not unexpectedly, as the false equilibrium of traditional gender roles gets disrupted, aggressions inflame from veiled to vicious to violent. The disruption exposes the fragile threads that weave a male ego. Which, when deflated, needs constant massaging and patching up. Which, at its toxic worst, can hold captive a woman’s sense of self-determination.

By pitting two lovers against each other in the ruthless world of high finance, Domont weighs up the high personal price women are more likely to pay for their career success. Fair Play starts off nippy and nerve-wracking with a nice sense of economy. Until its inability to figure out which screws to tighten dull the edge of its cutthroat setting and dampen its dramatic intrigue. In corporate-speak, it serves a good opening pitch but fails to close the deal. Continue reading...

Watch Here

STRANGER THAN FICTION

Kuda Bux: The Real Mystic Behind The Wonderful Story Of Henry Sugar

By Manik Sharma

IN 1938, Robert Ripley took his radio show of oddities from around the world to Manhattan’s Rockefeller Centre. Two pits of fire held centrestage, as people converged in awe to witness a turbaned man hurriedly hop through the flames twice. The event would later become the TV show we know as Ripley’s Believe it or Not. The man who walked through the fire was Khudah Baksh*, an Indian mystic from Kashmir who had by then become a bit of celebrity for doing the unthinkable … or at least the inexplicable. “Attending physicians examined the fire-walker's feet, found only one small burn where a coal had stuck to his sole, (and) marvelled,” a report published in TIME magazine said about Baksh’s exploits. Baksh is now the subject of Wes Anderson’s The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (Netflix; starring Benedict Cumberbatch as the titular protagonist, and Sir Ben Kingsley as Imdad Khan, the character modelled on the mystic), an adaptation of a Roald Dahl story.

Baksh rose to prominence, or popularity you could argue, in an era where colonialism was the default lens. Western reporters, litterateurs and travellers sent dispatches back to their homelands, about the folksy ways of the Indian subcontinent. You’ll easily find newsreels from pre-independence India that view the subcontinent as a land of exotic mystics and snake charmers. ‘The Great Indian Rope Trick’, for example, is a totem of western fantasy meeting subcontinental patronage. But Baksh was perhaps different. Born in 1905 in Akhnoor, Kashmir, Baksh travelled across the subcontinent, before finding succour with a yogi in Haridwar. Yogic techniques he learned during this time, Baksh claimed, were behind the virility that allowed him to perform herculean magic tricks. His audience, Baksh knew, lay abroad. And so Khudah Baksh became “Kuda Bux”.

Western rationalists and myth-busters swooned at the sight of a blindfolded Bux effortlessly reading letters, lighting cigarettes and avoiding bumping into slight objects as part of tasks. Tests would be conducted, challenges extended and competitions arranged as Bux carefully dallied with doubt and illusion. For he became popular not just in the awestruck eyes of the western observer — he mesmerised them in their own backyards. The walking on fire trick was executed repeatedly across the Atlantic, with Bux so convinced of his fame and prominence that he bicycled through the streets of London blindfolded, to advertise his shows. Ever since the fire-walk at the Rockefeller that had left the audience bemused and dumbfounded, Bux had ridden the wave of intrigue and doubt, candidly batting denial and suspicion with tactical sociability. People argued about exotic techniques, gaps in the bandages or hypnotism of sorts, but walking on fire was as blunt an undressed trick as magic tricks come.

By the 1950s, Bux was a firmly established showman across the Atlantic despite the occasional report or expose of him peeking down his nose, failing under scrutinising circumstances inside laboratories, and so on. Bux was as much a creation of the media, as he was a darling of the mind that wanted to believe. Naturally, he knew how to play both. Changing his name to an Anglophone spelling was only part of the trick. In 1950, CBS gave Bux his own TV show, titled Kuda Bux Indian Mystic. He performed various acts of illusion and yogic prowess but his most contested and hotly debated ritual remained the one that gave him the title ‘The man with the x-ray eyes’. In 1953, Bux met writer Roald Dahl for a profile that would 70 years later become the subject of a Wes Anderson film. Continue reading...

Stream The Wonderful Story Of Henry Sugar

Always get the latest reviews. Sign up for our newsletters.

Like what you read? Get more of what you like. Visit the OTTplay website, or download the app to stay up-to-date with news, recommendations and special offers on streaming content.

OUR OTHER NEWSLETTERS

This weekly newsletter compiles a list of the latest (and most important) reviews from OTTplay so you can figure what to watch or ditch over the weekend ahead.

Each week, our editors pick one long-form, writerly piece that they think it worthy of your attention, and dice it into easily digestible bits for you to mull over.

In which we invite a scholar of cinema, devotee of the moving image, to write a prose poem dedicated to their poison of choice. Expect to spend an
hour on this.