BOND VOYAGE

Sriram Raghavan, director of such smart films as Ek Haseena Thi and Johnny Gaddar, fell for the 007 magic when he was 14. Now, on his way to making a spy thriller Agent Vinod, he tells us why 40 years on, James Bond is still the spy we all want to be
A British nuclear submarine has mysteriously disappeared. Where is 007, asks M. In Austria, replies Ms Moneypenny. ‘Ask him to pull out immediately.’ And we cut to (you guessed right) Bond in a log cabin wrapped around a lovely girl.

A super-thrilling ski chase follows where Bond is attacked by Russian gunmen on the mountain slopes. Bond shoots as many as he can but you wonder how he’s going to escape. Well, he simply skis off a steep cliff. It’s a freefall to sure death. My heart is in my mouth and suddenly, his backpack springs open, a parachute unfurls, its design revealing the Union Jack. The famous theme music kicks in. Followed by the surreal title sequence and song. ‘Nobody does it better.’
And as I sat in the stalls of Pune’s Alaka Talkies, barely ten minutes into the movie, I had already decided I was going to see this again.

I was 14 when I saw Roger Moore in The Spy Who Loved Me. I was also 14 when I saw Daniel Craig in Casino Royale. And I’ll be 14 once again, when I watch Quantum of Solace. James Bond is more than four decades old, but every viewer watching a Bond movie at least for those two hours is a kid at heart. Or ought to be.

“It’s what you expect of an adolescent mind, which I happen to possess,” said Ian Fleming who started writing Casino Royale to take his mind off an impending marriage. He was in his early 40s then and had served during World War II as an intelligence officer. He dashed off the novel in a month and called it a ‘dreadful oafish opus’ written with ‘half a brain.’

He wanted a dull name for his fictional spy and chose the name of an ornithologist named James Bond, whose book Field Guide To The Birds of West Indies was lying in his library. Twelve years and 14 books later, by the time of his death in 1964, the Bond books had sold over 40 million copies worldwide.

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