Wrestling multi-armed bandits: How do I… filter stuff from Google Reader?

For those of you who don’t know, I trip on Google Reader.

Multiple reasons. To start with, there were a lot of things I missed out on by virtue of ignorance, while at NITK. So I subscribe left right and center to anything that aggregates together information about opportunities.  And then there was this time when I wanted to improve my domain knowledge on things like Knowledge Discovery and Text Mining and Machine Learning and Data Mining and Image Processing and Software Engineering and… you get the picture, so I subscribed indiscriminately to a lot of blogs that write extensively on these topics. There was also a time during the holidays when I stumbled on a gazillion blogs, found them all wonderful, and subscribed to them all. And I feel I don’t follow movies and music fervently enough, so there are some entertainment blogs that keep me informed of things in that arena. There was a time during my professional life when I would reach office absurdly early, and there began my subscribing to quizzing blogs, so that I could get my daily dose of trivia before I began work, or during my lunch break. And political blogs. What would life be without them. There are also photoblogs and photography blogs which I subscribed to in an initial enthu, and starmark various posts to implement them whenever I can. Then there are those zillion-feeds-a-day blogs like Freakonomics or MentalFloss.

And initially, the Recommended Feeds section was a huuuuge hit with me. It gave me access to so many good feeds I might have otherwise skipped.

And shared items. Some or the other person who I follow is always jobless. And finds time to discover a million new blogs and share all the (mostly good) things they find there.

I never felt the need to prune my reading list over the past year. I had atleast an hour-long commute to work every day and found that catching up on my feeds from my mobile was the best way to spend that hour. I routinely found myself craving for more, during those times in traffic jams.

But now, I don’t obsessively compulsively refresh my Reader every few minutes… there is hardly any time for that. Right now. I find it quite a burden to bring my Unread count to zero. And the number of feeds that pile up if I don’t log in for a day or two is really, really scary. It’s only in three figures, though.

I don’t particularly like marking things as Read. Especially because the things I subscribe to are interesting, worthy of respect, even.

“Unsubscribe. Easy!”, you might say. No, it is not that easy. Now I mightn’t have time to read all that I ask for, but there will definitely come a time, say winter break, or some point in time, I KNOW, when I’ll look woefully at my empty account and wonder what used to take so much of my time. It has happened in the past.

And I did try unsubscribing from some feeds. But most of those were feeds from blogs whose owners had long quit updating, feeds from blogs of events which happened rather long back, and feeds which I generally do not find very useful.

But there’s this seemingly irrational reasoning in my head that I should read feed X because it’s good for me, it’ll help me grow as a person. And that makes me avoid unsubscribing based on like/don’t like  or goodWriting/badWriting.

So what do I want? An application that magically transfers all the information data I subscribe to and transmits it to my head. While I’m sleeping.

More (or less) realisitically, I just want some sort of a recommender system that tells me which of the two-hundred unread feeds right now do I absolutely have to read, and which ones I can safely mark as hell.Or atleast some sort of a ranking system.

And I came across this article which voiced all the concerns I had! (Through Reader, of course ). Great, people are already on the job.

Till Google listens to that and comes up with some system like that, or until someone attempts to come up with such a system, I’m stuck with 135 feeds most of which post regularly. So what do I do?

Logik suggested crowdsourcing once. I’ll-share-good-stuff-from-TechCrunch-you-share-from-mentalFloss-and-greatBong. But is it really reliable? And how do we evolve some similar system? Any thoughts?

And I really don’t want to trim down this part of my life. Fact remains that these nice reads do definitely keep me on my toes, keep me informed, give me good fodder for conversation, are useful in many ways…. and heck, it’s convenient. It’s also nice to have something good to fall back on when you don’t have anything else to do.  All I ask is for more convenience.

PS: There might be some to whom my concerns might seem alien. “You’re a computer addict”, they might say. Heck, do I call you an ‘air addict’ or ‘water addict’, or… ‘rice addict’…. or ‘Sunday Mass addict’? If I’m on my laptop the whole day, it doesn’t mean I’m a computer ‘addict’. While I’m logged on, I’m also networking, keeping in touch with friends, reading novels, going through tutorials, looking up recipes, watching movies, making jokes, reading the news. I don’t ask you “Why are you alwaaaaaayyys standing up or sitting down?”, do I?

And no, I don’t wear glasses.

Bleg: MTV India version of A Little Less Conversation, pretty please?

I was watching some Youtube clip of Ocean’s Eleven, and the next one on the playlist was A Little Less Conversation with clips from the movie. And the next related one was the Elvis vs JXL version of A Little Less Conversation.

And sadly, the next one wasn’t the MTV India version of the same thing.

Yes, there was one.

I think this came out in 2001 or 2002. MTV used to make their own videos of popular international hits. I don’t distinctly remember any others apart from this one, though. It had a shadow of Jailhouse Rock in it… the setting was a prison with the cells arranged like it was in the original video. Cyrus Broacha was the jailor, and there were several inmates. All with their own dance styles.

One I remember was Kareena (lookalike, obviously) in her red You are my Sonia costume [Oh What The Hell, all I can find is a low-quality Youtube video of the song, and NO shots whatsoever on Google Image Search for Kareena in that costume. Was it really from some other era or what?]. Another was a pair of Chandramukhis doing a mujra just like Madhuri in Devdas, only, twice as fast. I think there was a Hrithik too, doing his famous step from Ek Pal Ka Jeena.

I think this video was more vivid and colourful than the original. Maybe it was the rather in-your-face popcul references that did it… the original showed dance styles, not personalities or caricatures.

Thing is, I’m not able to find a video of that. I haven’t tried really hard, though. If you’re able to locate it somewhere, please, pretty please share it with me. And it’s really worth the hunt… it’s a damn fine video, one of the best to come out of MTV. It’s pretty cool and slick for a parody.

So what are you waiting for? Go memory-lane tripping! And get back to me.

 

Off with ‘em Misconceptions!

I entered the United States mentally prepared for things that would surprise me. But oh well, I still end up shocked, surprised, all that jazz.

First, about Americans. All I knew of them was that Indians worked rather hard in American companies. If something had to be done, it HAD to be done, even if it was 2 am on a Saturday morning. I don’t yet know if that’s a misconception, but here’s what I know: Everyone, EVERYONE without fail just clears off the California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology building at 5 pm sharp. And the place wears a deserted look on weekends. DESERTED. Yeah, there might be exceptions, but the place is tombish as the evening wears on.

And then about geekdom. I thought they were the bottom rung of society, etc. But then, I see Tshirts that say “Talk nerdy to me”, and “I Love My Geek”. And a few other things besides… geeks are the cool guys here, or so it seems to me in gradschool. But not that much geeky joking around. Not here, atleast. I thought I cracked the least geekiest jokes, while I was at NITK, atleast when you compare me to a SaiO or folks from Tronix ‘08, but a post-doc with a double PhD from two continents and several other geek qualifications besides told me of late that I crack the nerdiest jokes he’s ever heard. ‘Plenty more where I come from’, I said.

And mad scientists. I attend classes taught by one of them. Contrary to popular perception, they are the most sociable people, some of the funniest I’ve met. And they have the best sort of communication skills I’ve ever come across. Even the most complicated equations take on a pleasing face when they are teaching you about those. They’ll talk to you for ages about their research and it won’t be boring in the least. Even if it has nothing to do with what you’re interested in.And if you don’t understand something, you can ask a million times. Oh, their awesome patience.

And the utter lack of hierarchical barriers. Getting back to the aforementioned Institute which is deserted at 5 PM… I found that out the hard way. On my second day in the place, I had been staring at my monitor for two hours and stepped out for a breather at 4:55 PM. I came back at 5:02, to find everyone gone, and the lab locked up. My things were inside, inclusive of wallet, mobile, laptop, keys…. and the whole place seemed to be deserted. I was told by someone to go up to the top floors, where the folks with keys were. And they were the only ones with keys, apparently….. this place was out of reach of Campus Security too. And hurry, because everyone leaves at five. I did so. I barged into the first open door and disturbed a man having a no doubt well-deserved peaceful cupcake. I blabbed something about my situation and he cross-checked whether I really did belong there. And then came down three floors to open the door for me. And waited till I had cleaned out my stuff. “Thanks!”, I said, “What do you do ’round here?”

“Oh, just Assistant Director”.

But then, the overwhelming social equality or whatever gets to me. We’ve come a long, long way since John and Yoko sang “A very Merry Christmas / For Black and for White / For Yellow and Red Ones / Let’s stop all the fight”. No allusions to perceived skin colours. No shortforms of people’s countries of origin – those have already been used during WWII and hence been given rather negative connotations. And lighter shades are more common than darker ones. And all you Dalit Leaders who talk about affirmative action and social justice…. just live here for ten days and then talk.

And for some strange reason, all the evangelists are South Korean. All the churches I’ve seen are, too.

And there’s this one-toothed old black lady at the same spot on campus every day getting people to sign petitions to make weed legal and taxable.

Did someone say the Nano would increase pollution? Hell, they haven’t done a comparative study of the USA and India. It naturally comes to me to hoard every single scrap of paper I find, and at the end of six months, parcel them off to the raddiwalla. Here, you shred and throw. And what’s with the leaf-blowers? This post sums it all up for me. Oh, and how many eucalyptus trees! In the middle of the desert! Isn’t it common knowledge that eucalyptus depletes the water table?

And the houses don’t optimize on sunlight.. it’s the way they are constructed. If I want to use my walk-in closet or the bathroom, I need to turn on the light. Even if it is blindingly bright outside. And all the doors/windows face only one way. No cross-ventilation whatsoever. Oh man….

Every single building, device and vehicle here seems to be built for an emergency. The first thing that hit me were the doors (literally). You pull the door to go into a building. So that when there’s a disaster, you can push the door (which is more natural) to get out. Every single time I approached a door initially, my head would fill with images of a hundred screaming people pushing Bren Hall’s main door and spilling out.

I mentioned my blog in passing to one of my non-Indian friends, and he asked for the URL. I gave it to him… but couldn’t help thinking WHAT he would understand from this page. All the lingo I use, all the references I give on this blog…. they seem so localized. That’s just a realization… I’m not complaining.

A Happy Kannada Rajyotsava to everyone.

And something I’ve been wanting to embed on a blogpost from a long time.. here you go:

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Playlist: part 1

I suppose I am about to embark on another music exploring extravaganza. All thanks to DC++. And Its about time I compiled a list of songs which are, or atleast find compelling.

1. Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now: Found her after my cousin remarked that Big Yellow Taxi is her original and not Counting Crows. Beautiful lyrics. Deep emotions.

2. Sugar Hill Gangs’ Rapper’s Delight: Best one i’ve heard.

3. Elvis Presley’s Rubberneckin’: Just love the initial music and his complacence and the way he sings. Loved it so much that I never used to allow soaringhieghts to pick her phone when it was her ringtone.

4. Shaggy’s Chica Bonita: Well, flirtatious lyrics. Spanish Guitar. Everything said.

5. Safri Duo’s Samba Adagio: and Played Alive: Heavenly beats

6.  The Temptations, My girl

7. Simon and Garfunkel’s 50 ways to leave your lover: Crazy bitch

8. Rolling Stone’s Sympathy for the Devil: Pleased to meet you, hope you guessed my name; Whats puzzling you is the nature of my game.

9. Edith Piaf’s La Vie En Rose

10. Bob Dylan’s version: Mr. Tambourine Man ad It aint me babe.

11. I suppose I simply can’t pick any of the Beatles song. The super heroes who sum up life. (ok that was a bit over board ) More on them later.

This is, i suppose is a very small list compared to the the number of songs I listen to. But well …

My Stupid Computer

I have computer. ( I mean who doesnt?) .

Ive had it for too long. Id like to think of it as my alter ego. A very silent one at that. Who knows my expressions when im reading something on it. Watching a movie, listening to music. It also exactly knows what my expressions are when im chatting with somebody, or even when im talking because im always in front of it. It also knows when im crying, when im sad when im happy or even angry. It is sort of my extended self.

The idiotic thing also knows how disorganised I am, yet how I can mine things through it. It also knows what I use a lot and what I dont use at all. I have carried it through a lot of things and and it has still managed to survive the occasional rough handling.

It is idiotically slow, and very prehistoric piece of equipment.

Now I think its dying. A very slow death.

I would like it to know that it is something that I have cherished having. I also want to thank it for being with me through thick and thin remaining faithfully by my side and silently watching me over. It is one of those really precious friends.

I will keep it till its last breath and maybe never give it away.

The Incomplete List of Things That Put Me Off.

Wrote this ages ago. I’m clearing up old drafts now. Deleting the ones that lead nowhere, and trying to publish the rest. Bear with me.

Like most normal people, there are a lot of things that put me off. Some things more than the others. I guess most of these are common. Just that, in me, these things cause chronic changes in facial expressions, tone of voice, and at the extreme, have me walking out of the place silently, and at another extreme, have me screaming the place down.

• Gender wars. I’ve had enough of these over the past one year. Quite thoroughly, too. While it might be a big use in breaking the ice with the opposite sex, the arguments are all stupid, easily refuted (unless you’re a stubborn, thickheaded doofus), and the next person who says “I can’t understand women”, or “All men are like that only” gets a socking from me. For God’s sake, it’s just your damn social ineptness, not any fundamental characteristic of either gender that prevents you from understanding a person of the opposite sex. And I really felt like smashing the TV a zillion times when Hum Tum was on. I watched just to see how much I could tolerate.
• Pseudo-Bangalorean-ness. I’ve lived in this city all my life. I like a lot of things about it. I hate a lot of things about it. But then, it’s home. It’s where my permanent address is, will be. It’s something I take for granted. So it sort of pisses me off when I read of “idlis as soft and white as a Mysore Mallige” or “Masala dosas so crisp, they would give the news in Indian Express a complex”. In nostalgic stream-of-consciousness-reminisces, fine. Not in food reviews. Gah. And the eternal question. “”Where have Bangalore’s sparrows gone?”. Probably the same place as the sparrows in other metros. It’s not a city-specific problem. And they would probably be more numerous in Bangalore  if you and your ilk didn’t zip around in your Alto having the aforementioned idlis at Veena Idli Stores Malleshwaram for breakfast, the melt-in-mouth Bisi Bele Bath at MTR for lunch, the aforementioned Masala Dosa for a snack at Ganesh Darshan, Jayanagar, before topping it off with dinner and a tipple at Pecos. Just one more time I hear Swalpa Adjusht Maadi, I’ll probably try increasing your Kannada vocab by teaching you other phrases commonly heard outside spirit stores in the Kalasipalya area.
• Too many LOLs over IM. Honestly, if you laughed that much in real life, you’d beat Mr. YMN Murthy of Jayanagar Laughter Club fame. And he laughs for the therapeutic properties, like increasing circulation, clearing airways, increasing endorphin levels. Which typing LOL, ROFL, ROFLOL, ROFLMAO, LMAO won’t do.
• Star bloggers. Nothing personal. But doesn’t it feel weird getting a few dozen comments all saying “First!”? I generally find that the level of discussion at these blogs tends to be ke-rap. But then, you pander to the lowest common denominator, that’s what you get.
• Pseudosecularists. Needs no further elaboration if you read my blog.
• Dirty kitchens. I’m too used to my mother’s and her mother’s kitchens. Anything below that golden standard, and I feel like picking up some Vim, a scrub, some rags, a broom and a mop. This, coming from me who tries to run when Amma calls me to help in the kitchen.
• Negative people. There are some people I know who can NEVER say anything good about anyone. That girl who studies well almost always does well because she cheats. That goodlooking boy out there is always a Don Juan-ish swine. That artsy kid there comes from a depressing family, that’s why he draws… to get away from the pain. The girl holding her boyfriend close is always a protective witch who’s really insecure about her relationship. That divorcee is so successful because she charmed her way up. There’s absolutely nothing in the world that can’t be repeated in a mocking tone. There’s absolutely nothing that can’t be parodied to make it look like something the dog threw up. Everyone is against them because the world is insecure about such a smart/beautiful/brilliant person, and everyone is frickin’ jealous. Either that, or they are so radical, so full of novel thoughts, so rebellious that the world can’t stand them, the descendants of Galileo, the suffragettes, Ramanujacharya and who else.
  There’s no point trying to change their world-view… they are ostriches with their heads stuck in the sand. Depressing. Keep away.
• “Modern” people. I knew of this girl who was considered by many to be fairly ‘modern’. She wore ‘modern’ clothes, her folks didn’t quite mind when she brought home rather ‘modern’ young men… the works. And she wasn’t allowed to play her musical instrument of choice at a place outside her religious spot of choice, under threat of it being separated from her forever. I’d rather be medieval. Or stone-age.
  It amuses me to listen to people say “these conservative ideas about sex and things are taking us back to the stone age”. Uhh… you didn’t have to wear conservative clothes in stone age, nor did you have to worry about social mores when sleeping around… is it such a bad thing, according to your er… ‘modern’ self?
• Swine Flu hype. I’ve already woken up crying from two nightmares about dying of some fatal fever. Just quit the damn thing, will you? I knew people in my ex-workplace who caught the ‘flu, and were back at work within the week.
• Evolutionary psychology. We haven’t stayed unevolved for 50k years. I think I’m rather removed from being a cavewoman. Don’t blame your brutish behaviour on the fact that you evolved from cavemen. Bulk of the arguments for gender wars come from here. That’s why I hate it all the more now.
• Self-Help. I think they aren’t exactly in the real world. There’s an entire post in this. I’ll write it sometime soon.
• People who don’t disagree. “I’ll have what you’re having” is fine when you don’t know to read the menu and are too embarrassed to admit it. But not because I’ll be offended otherwise. There’s nothing that directly implies that you and I can’t be friends if our stands on, let’s say, the best sort of music in the world, gay rights, football-vs-cricket, or hell, even political parties, are different, even at loggerheads. Be a real person, for godsake.

That’s just some of my pet peeves. There are more, as you might already know, or will find out.

Art and Life and Imitation.

I wrote this rather long back. I’m just clearing old drafts now. Deleting the ones that led nowhere, publishing the rest. Bear with me.

I watched Nadodigal a few weeks back. I don’t recommend it. Painful to watch. Even worse music.

But everyone seemed to be lauding it for its ‘realism’. Yeah, I was one of them, too, while watching the movie.

The language they use seems authentic. The smallTown-ness seems so too. The character sketches seem so too somewhat, at some level.

But what bothered me a bit was the clothes.

One of the two leading ladies wears quite uh… realistic salwar-kameezes in the scenes when she’s at college. And in the scenes at home, she wears loose striped tshirts with skirts.

Which made me wonder… how much should art imitate life and how much should be vice versa?

It’s fine when Sadhna cut became a trend, when Yuva skirts were the latest, even SRK’s ‘Cool’ chain is fine… but when art imitates life, which life promptly imitates back, doesn’t it make things bleaker than it already is?

Like what would life be if the loose striped older-and-much-bigger bro’s tshirts and mismatched skirts became a trend? Sure, it might have a chic avatar which would quickly be adopted everywhere, like Boyfriend Jeans, but heck, at the end of the day, it’s just bad taste.

There’d be no sparkle, no break from the mundaneness of reality. Now NITK Lingo, if shown in a film, would probably appeal to folks from other corners of the country where they talk proper. But to us, it’s just “Eww man, he can’t even put DASA lingo properly”. And god save the country if everyone started adding -ax and -esh to phrases. It’s okay in college. Tolerable. But if magnified on a large-enough scale, it can easily be painmax.

This sort of life-imitates-art-imitates-life thing can work well if the stuff imitated in the first place is different enough, diverse enough, cool enough. Like Denim… it was just workers’ clothes to begin with. But as we become more and more homogenized, and can know enough about any culture we want at the click of a button, like just look at any damn college blog for NIT and IIT lingo, there’s not much novelty value. Everything’s just another stereotype. We’re so inundated with information these days that we cannot get back the wonder we had at anything new… like how speaking Mumbaiyya suddenly became cool after RGV’s Satya came out. Plus, our lives and thoughts are so influenced by the Media these days that there’s nothing to imitate that isn’t already there in some form in public memory.

Like once upon a time, MTV with their superstar lookalikes was so cool. These guys who looked like Dev Anand, Hrithik, SRK, Ganguly, and parodied every damn thing. But now they are part of our er.. ‘culture’, and now we can as easily have a parody of people who parody superstars. And subsequent levels of indirection. While there can be innovation in these subsequent levels, like you see in re-re-remixes, it can’t be as good as coming up with original stuff.

Move over Madhur Bhandarkar. We want Manmohan Desai.

PS: I just wanted an alliteration. I don’t think Mr. Bhandarkar is all about realism… it strikes me more as a weird voyeurism.

In which my friend is likened to a Bakasurish Amoeba.

S and I have known each other ever since we can remember. We were in school together, from kindergarten to tenth. We grew up together, more or less… went through ego battles together, began sighting guys together, joked together in the middle benches (not the backbench… teachers wise up to it pretty much) whenever I could manage it (my height made sure the teachers always put me in the front bench)…. and then we lost touch in the middle, during our engineering. And got back in touch just as I was leaving for Irvine…. for which I’ll be forever thankful. It turns out we turned out  more similar than we ever thought we’d be, having quite a few aspects of our lives turn out very similar, including our job profiles, and heck, we even started on our first jobs on the same day! And… we also complete each others’ sentences now, can totally understand what the other person says…

The best bit was not meeting up for the first time in four years and feeling not a day had passed since we met last. The best bit was that we ran into two of our school teachers when we met. One of them was the much-chronicled-on-this-blog Naughty Nallu, who treated us just like we were two errant schoolgirls giggling in the middle benches, and not at all like two adults…. somehow, the more things change, the more they remain the same

So now that the background has been established that we are in regular touch, let’s get to business.

More background.

We also had another classmate, who also studied with us from first to tenth. I’ll call her Pink for reasons I’ll explain later. She was the class darling, as well as the class hottie. S and I killed many trees just by making lists of the many boys who had approached us about how to win this girl’s heart. Every damn teacher hated our class, and every damn teacher thought the only redeeming feature of our class was Pink.

Being together for so many years, your differences start becoming insignificant. You get used to Pink’s total lack of interests in books outside of schoolwork. You get used to her primness and properness. You all have fun together, that’s all you end up keeping in mind.

And then school was out; we kept in touch on and off after that. We more or less lost touch with Pink, though she was just a click away. We rather joked about her in her absence…. I have no idea why we began doing that.

One of those is why I call her Pink here. We had a get-together after AIEEE. She was wearing a pink top, and brown jeans. And then a while later, we watched Main Hoon Na. She was wearing a pink top, and brown jeans. A year or so later, we had a class reunion.She was wearing…. you get the drift.  And then one of us met her at an intercollegiate fest. No prizes for guessing what she wore there. Basically, this was during all the very few times we met after school. Hence the inside joke, and the silent chuckle whenever she was mentioned.

A month or so back, another friend told me Pink was engaged. My first reaction was “Was she wea..”, when I was promptly cut off by that friend who dismissed my doubts and said, no, she was wearing a dark-coloured saree for the occasion.

S told me a common friend of hers and Pink’s told her that Pink got married yesterday. I just was beginning to think about her wardrobe, when S brought my attention to the fact that both of us hadn’t been invited. When the common friend (who had been invited, hopefully?) asked, she was apparently told by Pink, “Jana jaassti aagtaare“. There would be wayyyy too many people at her wedding if she had called S.

Oh, dear dear S… what are you, an amoeba that splits to form too many people when given enough food? And keeps consuming more and more and make more and more people?

And Pink, do you not remember all the occasions we fended off valiant young men intent on winning your hand? The times when we played throwball? The times you sucked up to teachers and we didn’t laugh? The times when we agreed that you had been sinned against even when it was so clear you had sinned? All the maths we did together? All the games we used to invent together to rid the monotony of a meaningless class? All the outings you used to plan so painstakingly?

I don’t care if you’ve forgotten us. School was a long time ago, and we all move on. You need not invite us if you don’t think we aren’t important enough to be there. We knew each other long ago, and priorities have changed since then, and we acknowledge that. And it’s not like we are all that free to take a break and come off to whichever faroff place your wedding is being held at. This is not about us. But er… jana jaasti? Isn’t that a bit cheap? At your wedding, of all days? Especially when we _know_ you don’t have a restricted guest list or any such.

S and I were wavering between choosing to invite her or not for our respective weddings when they happen, when I remembered one tiny memory that put things in perspective for us.

“Not much has changed”, I said. “Remember the time she used to write with your pen in class because she didn’t want her ink to get over?”

And Pink, we both heartily wish you a very happy married life.

Nothing about a lot of things …

Right now, I want to write a long long post, just so I put a bunch of thoughts that have been running continuously in my mind for quite some time. One thing to clear my mind, to see things more clearly.  Another just because I feel like writing something.

There are just too many things going on, none that would, say, bring a smile on your face or something to that end. But some do bring one on mine . I don’t even want to write cryptically, being the fiercely private person that I am.

Kindly Excuse.

Maybe I should go and sleep now. My brain will form the necessary connections and give me the result when I wake up

Anyway! Here is to the fun, interesting, and rejuvenating week that was!

Silent TamBrahms and other amit_123 myths

Being in a relatively quiet place where the police diary reads like “Resident reported suspicious person. Officer found suspicion unfounded” or “Caller reported loud music. Officer advised residents to keep it down”…. no, hang on, that has nothing to do with what I was going to say.

Being in a place where there is considerable excitement on Dan Brown’s latest, Chetan Bhagat’s latest goes rather unnoticed. Thankfully, I read Kosu’s post on it, and apparently it’s about TamBrahm girl marrying Punju guy and the culture clashes that ensue.

Yeah, whatever, it’s Chetan Bhagat.

But I couldn’t really ignore it. Because one of the culture clashes is that the guy is used to a boisterous lunch table, while it is deathly quiet in the girl’s house at mealtimes.

Mr. Bhagat hopes to impress upon the reader about the clash between the boisterous culture of the Northwest of India and the mild, quiet, disciplined nature of folks from the Southeast.

Uh? Silent TamBrahms? Mr. Bhagat, you haven’t met me, or had lunch with my largelySouthIndian gang whose bantering resounds through the cafeteria. Heck, you haven’t even met my Appa’s Perima who manages to singlehandedly talk to us about absolutely nothing for fortyfive minutes on STD, and still give us something to laugh about. Or my Peripa who feels like his audio is on fastforward. Or my numerous cousins coming over for a Sunday evening. Or my Iyengar neighbor’s sister dropping by. Or attended my Akka’s wedding. Or.. hell, walked around my neighborhood in Irvine where the loudest voices come from the resident Tams. Oh hell, have you ever gone into a restaurant in Thanjavur? Or the streets of Kumbakonam? Or any damn meal at any Tambrahm household where folks will routinely dissect the ‘kirket’ scene, the impending nuclear war, relevance of Gandhi in today’s world, the latest movies, all at 4x volume and 8x speed.

You haven’t gone to some random tourist spot in Britain where all of a sudden the quiet atmosphere was broken by excited shrieks from the children, loud words of caution from the mother, grandmother, father, and lots of laughing at blade jokes by the rest. You haven’t ever been around in that intermediate period between breakfast and lunch at Arvind Anna’s wedding where all the oldies get together to put blade – offer commentary while reading The Hindu, Indian Express, Deccan Herald, Asian Age, Vijay Times and god alone knows which other magazine.

You haven’t even done basic research… talk to any Pankaja aunty on the streets of Bangalore and she will tell you about how she has no peace ever since some rather loud Kongas moved next door. She’ll delight you with details of how the mother shouts for the son, shouts at the son, and how everyone expresses their joys and sorrows at max volume.

I don’t know about the loudness, or the relative loudness of Pnjaabi folk, but all the Pnjaabis I’ve come across have been soft-spoken, and I have never in real life witnessed spontaneous Balle Balles or Shava Shavas, or any of the loudness Bollywood so loves portraying. I do know, however, that the most talkative people I’ve known are all TamBrahms.

This is just another of those playing-to-the-gallery acts that Mr. Bhagat is so known for…  taking some popular perception and playing it up to a high level… hell, IITians and NITians have a richer extra-curricular life than most of the rest, and still Bhagat dares to say in his first novel that IITians have no life. Similarly this one about silent TamBrahms.

Or maybe, maybe Mr. Bhagat should talk to both my northIndian roommates, one from NITK and another from gradschool, both of who are quiet as mice, and both of who took time adjusting to ze TamBrahm volume, speed of speech, and sense of humour. Or maybe to Prof. Welling, who is Dutch and who finds it easier to understand what one Mr. Amanpreet Singh says better than what I say… and routinely asks me to repeat myself and speak more slowly.

And… tailpiece: Ambujam maami’s excited voice resounded in the neighborhood for forty-five minutes. When she stepped out of her house looking pleasantly happy, Pankaja aunty accosted her. “I was talking to my niece. She’s in New York!”, Ambujam maami said, excited. “Oh, long distance call”, Pankaja aunty observed. “Next time, Ambujam,”, she said, “Use a telephone”.

PS: I seem to have totally forgotten the tenet of ‘Show, don’t tell’ in this post. It reads really amateurish thanks to that. But no time. Code needs to be written. Do comment, though.

Vaaranam Aayiram – I’m still around

Tuesday evenings are my most unproductive. And ruin the entire week so that I’m always playing catch-up.

I have a half-a-dozen drafts languishing in my WordPress account. And I really shouldn’t be away from proper blogging/writing for so long… it begins to feel unreal. But oh, well, such is life. And will continue to be.

I want to write about how the power of choice is making us all incredibly narrow minded, and about how un-green this country is, and another ‘impressions of Irvine’ sort of post. But I’m becoming incredibly inarticulate these days. And rather dreamy, moony, moody and silent for the most part, bordering on misanthropic. There are a lot of reasons for that, but let’s not get started.

That apart, I seem to have a newfound fascination for Thillanas.

I find I’m rather tired from late nights, lugging my laptop around, lugging groceries… hence the title: Give me strength enough to conquer a thousand elephants. Or a thousand lines of code. No, I don’t fancy myself Sameera Reddy or Ramya or least of all, Surya.

And those who are here for reasons other than Raul Ghandy’s gurlfiend, please do drop a line in the comments section, just saying hi or whatever. You are also welcome to invite me over for snacks, and please make it chaat; been ages since I’ve had chaat, and you don’t really find the ingredients here. It feels nice to read comments on the blog.

Postscript in Pink

Or An Afterthought in Amber.

Or Revelations in Red.

I’ve been seeing so many such titles at the Jack Langson Library [At the university, all places have names associated with them - John Croul Hall, Aldrich Park, Donald Bren Hall, Paul Merage School of Business... and most of these people are wealthy donors ] – all American ones. So much that I want to write one like that. It shall have tales of intrigue, death, violent romance and some very lurid images on the cover. Which shall all be in the title colour – pink or amber… but for red, it’ll have to be bloodied letters on a black background.

I’ve begun reading one such book now. It’s Indian English writing, though. It’s called The Pangolin’s Tale. It’s about misfits in society or some such. It promises to be an exercise in practiced, controlled, subdued cynicism and intense self-revelation. Wish me luck in getting through it without shouting ‘WHAT’ every few pages.

The writing seems bad… too much overload of information in the first few pages. It seems even worse than “Renowned author Dan Brown staggered through his formulaic opening sentence”, as Prof Pullum put it.

Last week, I read A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Md. Hanif. It’s a rather endearing read, I strongly recommend it. The language, the narration are all so good that you even begin to identify and/or sympathize with the rather sadistic under-officer Ali Shigri, but the plotline… oh man, give me a break! The author tries to do a Rushdie… y’know, the whole “I was witness to the whole history unfolding… I even took part in it. Though of course, by a quirk of fate, or planning, or both, history doesn’t record me in the story”. It was great in Midnight’s Children, it was okayish in The Moor’s Last Sigh. Ground Beneath Her Feet was seriously unreadable. I think that sort of plotline has been done to death, and if I read another book like that, I’ll write a blogpost from the future about how the author died in an aircrash/fire/car accident/suicide attempt and I was somehow responsible for it in my own small way.

I’m wondering what book to borrow next. The library is rich in All-American reads. Not so much chicklit. Any suggestions?

Oh, and the postscript in pink…. here it comes. All reflective, long-winded and meaningless.

When all the songs in your playlist start making sense to you in some weird, long-winded way, it’s time to begin worrying. People are fickle. Natural, considering that our minds are all work in progress. No one really says what they really mean. And you can’t fault them for it – they themselves don’t quite know what they mean. And you wonder whether it is okay to be curt right at the outset, and cause some unpleasantness which will resolve itself with time, or hope that things change as often as people’s minds, and try putting up with it, or sending subtle signals, or, trying to communicate your feelings through ESP and hoping that the person will be receptive enough atleast through that channel… in other words, not really trying to resolve matters, and getting so used to being in unpleasantness that anything else seems out of your comfort zone.

And the Afterthought in Amber:

Everything happens for a reason. When you go through adversity, you curse your circumstances, your environment, and most of all, yourself. What you realize when it’s all over is, it gives you strength to soldier on in pursuit of greener pastures. It makes your happy times even more happier, now that you know how lucky you are in having good times. There’s a constant amount of discontent anyone has at any given time, and it’s better wasted on real difficulties than on something you make up just to feed that part of you which feels discontent.

The Revelation in Red:

You can get used to anything. Even killing.

Wow, three random titles and I come up with stuff on the fly. Heck, I should write a novel sometime, Indian Diaspora Writer ishtyle. It seems so darned easy.

RIP Allen J Mendonca

It was when I was twelve or thirteen, I think. I wanted nothing more than to be a journalist. An investigative journalist, if I was lucky.

And there were a few inspiring people behind that ambition. No, Barkha Dutt wasn’t really one of them. Maya Sharma and Jennifer Arul could have been, but seemed rather regionally restricted. Sreenivasan Jain was a major one.

But I didn’t really like journalism on a national level for some reason. And this was when Times of India was entering the Bangalore market, and was marketing itself as the newspaper that could read the pulse of Bangalore just as well as the nadi astrologers of Vaideeswaran Kovil were reputed to. And having a piece or two published in Offspring [the school section of ToI, which we were introduced to through Newspaper In Education] made sure I was a ToI loyalist back then. I read every word of every article back then.

And the city-specific reporting captured my heart. It really felt like this is what I wanted to do… I’d religiously go through each column. Some names stood out more than the others. HS Balram was too serious for my taste.

And so it was Allen J Mendonca, in his avatar as Chief Reporter of the Times of India, who proved to be a major inspiration for me.

His writing style was a tad quirky, quite informal, his bylines hard-hitting. His movie reviews were a treat. His sprinkling of Kannada words in what would otherwise be an elitist newspaper article made it all the more endearing to me.

At first, I was content just reading newspaper and watching news channels, but when we got our dial-up connection, I acquired a bit more nerve.

I first mailed Sreenivasan Jain, a long garrulous mail describing how awesome I find him on TV, how I admire his ability to ask the right questions, how insightful I thought him to be. [Back then, his email ID was available in the newspaper, or when he wrote a column for The Week... not like now, when we had to really HUNT for his email ID when we wanted to contact him for something related to Engineer, NITK's Techfest]. And all I got was a one-line reply, in SMS lingo. End of an infatuation. I’d had it with television reporters.

I don’t know exactly why I mailed Allen Mendonca… other than maybe I imagined he was a nicer person not prone to SMS lingo and incredibly more loquacious, and… the name sounded like he’d be quite a looker. But it remains that I did, and got a nice reply to all that I’d asked him. I don’t remember the exact contents of that mail, but I’d asked him about how you go about being a journo, what do you need to study in college, and…. that ONE question. Did he think I had it in me to be a journo.Of course, the answer to that one was that I was too little and I had it in me to become anything I wanted. But oh, the inspiration that one provided back then!

The exchanges continued. I’d been on a holiday to Coorg, and going through the guestbook, I discovered he had holidayed at the same estate bungalow I was staying in, just two months before! Boy, did that put a smile on my face! And his detailed description of the estate and all that it offered, and how well he’d enjoyed the whole deal – the walking trails, the books in the library about the history of Coorg, the ponds, the coffee plantations…. I’d previously been rather sulky throughout the holiday, but just reading that made me realize I was missing out on stuff. And I instantly cheered up!

I wrote to him mentioning this, nicely omitting my sulkiness from the whole story, and right after, he began feeling like some friendly uncle. I stretched my boldness far enough to send him samples of my childish verse… and he actually went through fifty lines of my random thoughts, and said it was rather good. Was I on top of the world or was I on top of the world. And he said I should write more often, and needed to ‘develop a style of my own’, which would come by regular writing.

Not very long after that, he stopped responding. I consoled myself saying he was probably undercover on some story, or was incredibly busy, or some such thing. Besides, his stories stopped appearing in ToI.

And then he replied from a different mail ID, after almost months together, saying he’d quit ToI, over some disagreement with his bosses, about political favors and exposes or some such thing… I don’t remember the details. He said he was writing a book, and that he’d send over an invite for me and my family for the opening.

We stopped corresponding after that, given that I was grappling with increasingly challenging academics, swimming practice, emotional upheaval on shifting my house to seemingly the middle of nowhere, ego tussles, multiple crushes, and similar stuff.

When I was in the tenth, or eleventh, I saw a news article about his book coming out. “He didn’t invite me as promised”, I sulked. There was an interview of his on RadioCity, where he was just as upbeat, funny and full of life as I’d thought he would be..  and I wondered if I should mail him…. but stopped short of hitting send, wondering if he would still remember me, or reply, or anything at all.

I got over wanting to be a journo, thanks to the JEE dream, and quit mailing people I hadn’t met in person thanks to all those newspaper articles about some weirdo trapping kids…. basically, just switched tracks. And I saw less and less of news about Allen [Oh yes, he'd said I needn't address him as Mr. Mendonca, and Allen would do, and I used to feel a thrill whenever I typed "Dear Allen"]… given that the Times wouldn’t mention him for all the world, and my not reading the Asian Age or Vijay Times.

My opinions of other journalists might have changed, my opinion of ToI has certainly changed, but of Allen, nope…. whenever I came across any reference to him, I still get the image of a lively man who peps up his radio interview with stories about his ‘three weddings’, who had a very vivid, visual way of writing, and who was one of those down-to-earth people who still bothered enough to humour an awestruck little girl, correspond regularly with her, and actually give her feedback on her writing.

So this morning, when I came across this Churumuri post about his sudden, untimely demise, I was really shocked. I was also overcome with a whole lot of memories… surprisingly clear for ten-year-old memories that aren’t regularly thought about. Thinking back, I realize the ideal I was using to model my writing style was his – show don’t tell, local flavour, seeming stream of consciousness.  I’m amazed at how such small gestures had such a big impact on my thoughts, dreams and aspirations for such a long to come. Even when I wasn’t thinking of the correspondence with Allen, I used to think of how to ‘develop my own style’. Still do. That phrase has stayed with me for a long time. And will do for a long time to come.

Great Soul. May he rest in peace.

Viva South Bangalore

Conversation on meeting a random person yesterday:

Me: Hi I’m Priya
Person: I’m X
Me: Where from in India?
X: Bangalore.
Me: Me too! South Bangalore?
X: Jayanagar
Me: 4th Block
X: Ohh… 8th Block.
Me: We shifted to Bannerghatta Road, though
X: Vijaya Bank Colony.
*Mutual grinning*
Me: Studied at Oxford School
X: Aurobindo
Me: Oh, did you know Y, Z and A?
X: Course I did! You must have had Mrs. SD teach you at some point?
Me: Yeah, heard you guys drove her out? Good job!
….
….

I keep finding folks from South Bangalore wherever I go. And we normally have a dozen common friends. Remember, this was in Irvine, on the other side of the world from Bangalore.

And this is not the only So.Ba. meeting so far…. There’s this other So.Ba. guy, and it turns out I’ve throughout studied with one or the other of his cousins, through school, through PU, through NITK. And the cousins were all from different branches of the family, and never knew each other.

Over the years, I discover that me and any other South Bangalorean have less than three, or even four degrees of separation between us. It’s amazing, shocking, brilliant and scary all at the same time.

Like this time when I quoted something random at office from a friend’s status message, and two-three others around me were like “I’ve seen this recently…. on my friend’s status message….”, and we found that we all knew the guy in question.

Or the time when this guy in some Phoren Univ was too scared to hit on a So.Ba. girl because it transpired that she knew his ex (also So.Ba.) rather well.

Or the many times when I find that some commenter on this blog and I have a dozen common friends from our school days, and/or have met at one point or the other much earlier on, and live in the neighborhood of each other, and frequent the same hangouts. And also have a dozen people in common to gossip about.

Or the time when I was speaking to a college friend and she had to cut the call short because her schoolfriend R was frantically calling on her mobile. And the next day when I met up with my schoolfriends, they were telling me a story about a girl called R who broke up with her boyfriend just the previous day.

Or the time when my friend A had a crush on someone in her college, and the news travelled all the way to Mumbai, Surat, Rourkela, Chennai and back to her college, where the crush in question was the last to know.

Or when someone I know travelling to the UK for higher studies happened to come in contact with a long-lost schoolmate of mine who happened to be his senior there… and tried putting us back in touch.

Or when I went to write the Manipal entrance exam and met every friend of mine and her secret crush, and at one point sat down gossiping silly about everyone I’d ever known.

Or my father’s colleague’s daughter and I putting two and two together to make five – piecing together different sides of the story of my (rather er.. reputed) neighbour who happened to be her classmate.

In my office, there were four of us, three of us from South Bangalore and the fourth one who’d lived in Indiranagar for the most part. The three of us had never met before, but had enough common friends to gossip about, while the fourth person would stare blankly during these conversations.

I really wonder if this is normal; if this is a common feature of most places. But then, I don’t find others picking common threads with new people as easily as I do. I don’t see such a connect within the network of others as I see with mine… all my friends seem to know each other one way or the other. And it’s not because I call them and say “X, Y, Meet each other”.

I remember reading on some other blog that the North and South of Bangalore were two totally different cities, with even a toll gate between them, and so the cultures are very different. I have no clue about the rest of the city, but folks from my part of town tend to be very similar. Somehow, the upbringing, the values, the language, the backgrounds were similar enough to hold us together, and varied enough to keep us from getting bored. And most of us seem to have grown up the same way, and the same middle-class motivations behind our ambitions.

We’ve all gone to the same schools, the same tuition classes, and the ubiquitous BASE and ACE, apart from Gopu Tuition, Venky Tuition, and a million others… and most of us tend to have similar career paths. We know each other, and each others’ friends from one or more of these places. And it’s not just friends… uncles, cousins, siblings… our network extends that way, too.

Like, I have my schoolfriends, my playhome friends, my tuition friends, my Gopu tuition friends, my PU friends, my ACE friends, my NITK friends, my office friends… and from a dozen other things I’ve done, and it turns out atleast one friend from each stage of my life knows atleast one person from one of the other stages.

It all seems to fit in so well, I really wonder if other cities/regions have similar phenomena… I mean, of course there must be. I would generally expect this from some smalltown where everyone knows everyone else. But then, does South Bangalore fit into the notion of a ‘Small Town’? I should think not!

Or is this restricted to me, and a few of my friends who are as talkative as me? Or have I been too restricted in my horizons?

I don’t know what explanation fits this best. It would be an interesting experiment in social networking and all that, or maybe not. But I sure do know that we spread our tentacles all over the globe. Be it some semiconductor lab in Seoul, or a software development center in Seattle, or a university in Singapore, we are there. And so wherever I’m going, I’m pretty confident my Class III classmate’s TuitionFriend’s Cousin, who is also my sister’s maths teacher’s son/daughter will be there, to give me company when I want to reminisce about the perfect Ganesh Darshan Masale, or Subbamma’s Sandige.

IrWhine – The First Week

So it’s nearly been a week since I got here. It’s rather hard to get close to a computer so far, considering summer break’s still on, and Fall Quarter starts only 23rd. So labs are all closed, and the libraries open only some hours of the day. And, there’s been lots to do.

Car Car Car Car Ell-nodi car.

Remember that Kannada song that went like “Sontakk-beltu kattikondu / Freeway-nalli haarikondu / Exit-alli jaarikoLtaaro” ? Well, all the lyrics are true. You are dead here without a car. The distances are just a few minutes away by car, but unless you happen to be PT Usha, you can’t even begin to hope to cover the distances in less than an hour. Public transport is decent, but the frequency SUCKS. I feel more so because I’m more used to Bangalore’s awesome BMTC, with it’s awesome frequency and service.

And since everything is optimized for folks with a car, and everyone (other than me) has a phone with GPS, people generally don’t know to give public transport directions or walking directions. So this Chinese lady was accosted by four rather scruffy-looking Indian girls (us), and asked, “Is this the way to Tustin District?”, and I think she got freaked enough to just say yes and shake us off. But it turned out, that was NOT the way to Tustin District. We ended up walking thrice the amount we were supposed to. So that lady earned the ire of all four of us, who wished she soon crashed her car on the San Diego Freeway, lost her license and was condemned to use public transportation for the rest of her life.

There was one other time when we had to get to this place called Quail Hill, and took the bus going in the wrong direction. We stopped two ladies crossing the road to ask for directions. One of them said “Hmm… where is your car?”. We obv said “We don’t have one”. She was LITERALLY taken aback before saying “I don’t know how you’ll do it, but cross the Freeway and get to Sand Canyon”. Driving directions for people on foot. Phew!

A side effect of walking around so much in the bright California sun is that I’m very tanned. Very very. My mother would really curse this place and lament about who would marry her dark daughter who’s been burnt coal-black in a place which has no fairness creams.

Hiee! How’re you doo-innnngg!

The first thing you’ll notice is people are VERY polite to you. We went to a hardware store and asked the guy if we could get a key duplicated. He said “Sure! I’d LOVE to!”. The bus drivers wish you a good morning. The guy who  bags your groceries wishes you a good day. Random people on the street stop to enquire about you. Old ladies crossing the road with you tell you about their children and grandchildren. Everyone makes eye contact, everyone smiles.

I likes the Eendian Curry.

One look at me, and everyone asks me if I’m Indian. Other Indians quickly strike up a conversation here. And folks of other nationalities too. There was one Turkish lady who taught dancing at the school here, and a Tunisian woman who was learning English to take up TOEFL. There are many people of Chinese origin… it’s after all the University of Chinese Immigrants.

One Chinese-American old lady caught hold of me while I was waiting for the bus on Sunday, and said she likes the Eendian Curry, lamented that these forks and knives here are not enough to take big mouthfuls when you’re hungry. She likes eating from banana leaves, and described in detail how she rips apart the chicken served to her on a banana leaf with nothing but her fingers and teeth. She hated American Indian Curry, it’s not spicy enough.

And then she proceeded to educate me about the ‘Cast’ system:

In Eendia, you have the Cast. C-A-S-T. There is Tamil, there is Punjabi. Tamil-Punjabi no marry. Punjabi-Tamil, no marry. Only Tamil-Tamil marry.

I asked her if she’d like to marry a Tunisian, or a Japanese… and said the country is pretty diverse and people prefer marrying someone they have more in common with in terms of lifestyle. And that it’s been ages since we folks said balls to the Cast system, it’s about time everyone else does too.

And she had so much ire about the system, it scared me. And the loneliness was so palpable in her voice… talking absolute random stuff about yourself to the first stranger you meet…. I was scared she’d come home with me and ask me to make her curry.

Irvine chaala baagundhi

The omnipresent Gult community. Most of them working here. God, how many of them! Clad in sarees and salwars, and even nighties, they make me feel at home, and tell me how to make ghee from butter, what fruits to buy in what seasons, and a load of other timepass stuff.

Down in the dumpsters

People here discard a lot of good stuff. They don’t have the middleClass Indian mentality here. And also, when they are moving house, it sometimes turns out cheaper to discard furniture than to haul it along.
So a senior said the best way to find these pieces is to talk an after-dinner walk around the block. We did.

Within three hours, our bare house had a couch, a center table, a writing table, a bookshelf and a vacuum cleaner [which we discarded because the plug was broken and beyond repair].

…And other stuff

I’m managing cooking fine. My roommates cook well. There’s hardly a moment to myself, so I don’t yet feel lonely or homesick. I don’t yet have a laptop… I’m waiting for a Dellivery. I’m also waiting to pile up clothes so that I can finally go to the laundry and feel that my $3 was well-spent. I don’t have that much of antipathy towards Pakis anymore, considering a few of them helped me out when I was lost on campus.

The place is quite costly, and we keep mentally converting everything into Indian currency. I find I like Mexican food, and am rather glad for the proximity to Mexico, coz the green chillies are hot enough. Unlike other places where the ‘HOT’ salsa sauce will be extremely mild.

The pizzas are a blessing, and ‘No Meat, No Seafood’ has become my catchphrase in restaurants.

The South-East Asians shock me with their flawless skin, and I wonder what they do to keep it so untanned. I find there are a lot of people just like me walking around on campus on a Sunday morning taking random pictures. There are a lot of beautiful rose gardens on campus. The birds aren’t as scared of my camera as they used to be in India.

I see so many maple leaves here, it feels like I’m walking on the sets of Mohabbatein all the time.

I also seem very impressionable… when someone talks to me in an accent, I tend to talk back in that same accent… it’s unconscious. I’m sure I’m going to get killed one day or the other. Though not as brutally as that Indian on the Cathay flight who said “Ching-chong chinky monkey”.

That’s it for now. I’m rather hungry, and need to go get some lunch. Sorry, make that PREPARE some lunch.

IrWhine

I’m on foreign soil. Land of opportunities, wide roads, friendly profs and low-voiced people….. so this really isn’t a whine.
I’m yet to get myself a laptop, or an Internet connection, or even a cellphone… so it’s going to be atleast a week before I get back to using the Net like I used to while I was working. Right now, I’m using a system that has ONLY Internet Explorer 5.0, and hence this post mightn’t come out looking good.
Anywaaaay…
At Bengaluru Intl. Airport, they said my hand baggage looks ’suspicious’ and dug through it, dismantling my mother’s perfect packing. And the officer was nice enough to atleast try putting it back in my bag the same way it was.
The airhostesses on Cathay looked literally like DOLLS. You could easily mistake one to be a mannequin… all the porcelain-perfect skin and plastic smiles.
Six hour stopover at HongKong. Window shopping. And then decided to have Vegetable Ramen SomethingOrTheOther instead of something at Burger King. I must say it is incredibly easy to make. Take rice noodles, carrots chopped long and thin, corn and s of two different types and boil them all in water. The End. It reminded me of the time when a classmate offered me something called Rubber Dosa, which is made purely from rice and water, with absolutely no spice or seasoning and I gagged and retched at every mouthful. This one wasn’t so bad, mainly owing to the sweetcorn, but it was quite a feat to finish the huge bowl of Vegetable Ramen SomethingOrTheOther.
It turns out my working with South Koreans over the past year has given me a rather intuitive feel to talking to people with limited knowledge of Engrish [not a typo... I had a colleague who liked eating flutes and an MD who thanked us for the pressure of adlessing us. Serious.]. So at HK, when others were saying “Vegetarian! Only vegetables!” and the staff at the eat-outs said “Sowie?”, I asked for “No meat, no seafood”, and got fast service. And… it turns out I get a rather irritating (to other Indians) faux-Korean accent when I have too many South-East Asians around me. I’d better get rid of it ASAP, else I’ll get killed in Irvine, where even the Mayor is a Korean.
Twelve-hour flight to LA. Slept through it a good deal. Watched All About Eve and listened to tracks of Ella Fitzgerald and Nina Simone for the rest of the time.
I understand now why most of the rest of the world prefers meat over vegetables…. they don’t know any other way to cook vegetables other than by burning them. The maincourses, while not inedible, were far from satisfying. And the desserts could have saved my day if it wasn’t that they were made out of bean curd. I lived on juice for those twelve hours.
And then LA. Some other student also wanted to join us on the shuttle to Irvine, and none of us could figure out how to use the phones. When we finally did, the call didn’t get through and we ended up losing a dollar.
Funnily, none of my pickles were confiscated, and they didn’t ask me anything, and Customs and Immigration was over before I knew it. I was expecting something really crazy, from what I heard from a lot of others.
The folks who run the shuttles said with bravado that they could accomodate all six of us with three huge bags and two smaller bags each, but that was only until they saw our luggage. We were strongly advised to get two vans, until a Chinese-origin guy somehow convinced the driver to stuff all the luggage in.
My house is airy, bright and spacious. It gets rather hot in the middle of the day, but quite cold in the nights, not unmanageably so, though…. we are between the desert and the deep blue sea.
The university is HUGE. IITB, the largest campus I’d seen so far, seems to be dwarfed by this campus. I have to walk a good twenty minutes to get to my department from the University Center (yes, my spellings are turning more American). It however takes me only four minutes to get to the University Center from where I live by bus, a distance of two miles.
This morning on the bus, there was this huge Caucasian who seemed to be talking to the lady bus driver and thanking her and wishing her a good day, but it turned out, he was talking to my three roommates and me. He gave us the usual “Welcome to California, Everything’s king size” lecture, before telling us to use Vocabulary Builders, improve our language, before telling us the names of a few books that are “great for people who have English as a second language”. Two of us weren’t listening, one got really offended and thought he was being racist, while I just grinned and thanked him… and tried stopping myself from using six- and eight-syllabled words to see if he could follow
And…. it turns out I’m fine with people in clothes that don’t cover their bodies at all, or people kissing or…. men kissing other men in public, but if you touch the serving spoon with the same hand you’re using to eat, I get outraged.

It turns out I don’t have a camera charger that’ll fit in the plug points here. And it’s of a different sort, so I can’t get an Indian-to-American converter or something. So… no pics uploaded or clicked till I get something.
More later. I’m sure I’ll have lots to post about.

So Much To Say, So Much To Do…

… So little time to do it in!

I’m leaving India in less than a week. I have a lot of pics to share, a lot of feelings to blog about, a lot of nostalgia to express.

So many people to meet! If by chance I’m not able to bid you goodbye in person or over the phone, I’m so sorry, but it’s not because I hate you.. I’m on a forgiveness spree where people I hate are concerned. I mightn’t be able to say ‘bye because there’s simply too much I need to do that I remember/am reminded of only in the very last minute.Do call me this week, if you want. My home number hasn’t changed in ages, and my mobile has remained the same for two years now.

I don’t quite know when we’ll meet again, if at all. I’m going to begin living from deadline to deadline again. And if we’re on different timezones, our correspondence is done for, especially if you love your sleep.

I’m not thaaaat social a person, so chances are high I keep to myself in a new place, reminisce like crazy… which means I’m thinking of every person I ever knew. And for once, I’m going to a place where I actually know no one I knew before. Not like PU College where everyone knew (or atleast knew of) everyone else, or NITK where there were quite a few people I knew from school or PU, or office, where the NITK gang was quite populous. And it was easy keeping in touch with people from the past back then. Now however, it’s not going to be easy to keep in touch on a daily, or even weekly basis with all but a few people I regularly interact with. There is no easy conversation-starter like common friends or something. Things are going to be different.

The easy comfort I drew from the past is going to be even farther away, so I’m going to be going deeper in my head than before to draw comfort. So call me this week, keep your memory fresh in my mind. God knows I’m going to need it. Thanks.

I’m excited about new prospects, new everything. I sure hope once I’m at Irvine, I have enough time to write about all that on this blog.

And sure hope I manage to record the happenings and feelings of the past few days here before next week comes along with stuff that’s really exciting and hence this week is forgotten… I just want to record it somewhere.

As I’ve discovered, I’m lousy at saying ‘bye, and other sorts of endings. So.. uh… see you ’round. We’ll meet again.

Bad-bad words: “Bleddy Bhaskar! Thisis your Last Morning! I’ll hit you meeeans you’ll go fall in foreign”

So there was this tag on Twitter called ThirdStandardClassics. It reminded me of some of the misconceptions I had in those glorious days.

First, I wondered where exactly this place called “Forin” was. Uma Chithi went to America, and she was supposed to be from Forin. Raju Thatha was from London, and he was also from Forin. Vadi Mama was said to be in this place full of kangaroos called Australia, and he too was…. From Forin. And Sidhart’s father got chocolates from “the Gulf”, also known as Forin. So confusing.

All I knew was Forin was really far away (I wondered if it was Far-in, and that my granny was actually pronouncing it right when the rest of them were merely ignorant), because Hemant in my class threatened me with “If you actoff meaaans I’ll kick you and you’ll go and fall in Forin”.

Right from Class 1, we got various threats of “This is the last morning* I’m giving you”, “This is your last morning”. Given that corporal punishment wasn’t exactly banned then, and Mrs. Meera Sarkar was one crazy female who slapped you if you lost your water bottle, I assumed it meant she’d hit you so badly, you wouldn’t live to see another morning. *Shudder*. [Aside: I had a phobia for the name Meera and always imagined witches to be dark-dark-skinned people with black curly hair and black lips so thin they'll give a Motorazr a complex, because Meera Sarkar looked like that. Thankfully I didn't have much of her, though my sister suffered like crazy with her].

And then, the bad-bad words. The usual ones – kaththe, kothi, naayi, handi were staple, and we routinely looked up words in other languages. I remember my friend Thrilok being in demand for bad-bad words in Tulu.

But once, there was a fight in class 1 where one boy called another a “Bleddy Bhaskar” [Someone else on Twitter said "Bledy Basket"]. They both had to kneel down for an hour or something.

At around the same time, there was this family friend called Bhaskar. I didn’t like him very much… he didn’t seem to like children. He gave the five-year-old me a formal smile instead of the usual ragging reserved for little children. It didn’t go down well with me, though I really detested the leg-pulling some of my parents’ friends indulged in.

So I assumed when someone yells “Bledy Bhaskar”, they are referring to this frown-faced guy. That he was such an evil person (when you’re a kid, you only have extremes) that his very name was a badword. I wondered for long why parents still continued to give their kids such names, inspite of this glowing example of a man who visited us every Friday. [I also used to assume that everyone had the same set of relatives you did, only they looked different. In my world-view, it was okay if your parents and grandparents had different names, but I assumed everyone had a Krithika-akka, a Vinu-anna, Seenu-mama... until I finished kindergarten. Hence, I assumed everyone would have a frown-faced Bhaskar-uncle who visited them every Friday. When I was in primary school, this notion stopped persisting, but at the back of my mind, I had a notion that adults knew everything]

For a very long time, I kept away from people named Bhaskar.

*It turned out to be ‘warning’. Such a relief that was.

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Review: The House of Blue Mangoes by David Davidar

Why isn’t this a major motion-picture yet, with Ilayaraja/Rehman soundtrack and Surya in a double role?

This book made quite a few waves when it first came out. It was supposed to be a really brilliant book, nicely written etc etc, and Mr. Davidar was the other reason for the hype. The man who brought Penguin India from being a publisher of a handful of books every year to one of the largest publishing houses in English in India had written a novel. It seemed quite full of Raj reminisces, caste violence, and all that staple Indian English fare. There were murmurs that it was semi-autobiographical.

Me, I was in no mood to read another The God of Small Things. The reviews were goddamn all over the place. All the more easier to gloss them over. [Aside: I read on a blog somewhere about how online advertising co.s like Google should penalize bad ads, because they make users more resistant to ads, making the jobs of even the good ads more difficult]. Just like it had been for Arundati Roy’s magnum opus. And the plot seemed to be set in Kerala. God, just some smartass publisher who hoped to capitalize on the success of The God….

So I don’t know what I was thinking when I picked it off the rack at Blossoms a couple of weeks back.

But I’m glad I did.

(It later turned out to be set in Tamil Nadu, in some places bordering Kerala, but it’s not about a bunch of Malayalees who have descendants who come up with those irritating Mallu jokes. But the reason I’m glad for it being set in Tamil Nadu, I will come to very soon. Oh, and those of you wondering how to pronounce Davidar, after reading the book, I guess it doesn’t have an outlandish pronunciation, but probably something like David-err… just like Kalaign-err, Chozhiy-err, etc.).

The plot line is quite simple… tracing the travails of three generations of the Dorai family, who find true happiness and purpose only at their ancestral Neelam Illam, the titular House of Blue Mangoes.

The story starts in 1899, the first generation of Dorais we are introduced to are lords of a village… Solomon Dorai is the village headman, a just, kind and stable one. Caste violence tears the family asunder, taking with it Solomon and his cousin, and separating his wife and older son from the younger son.

The next generation consists of his sons – the studious Daniel, and the volatile Aaron. Aaron is lost in the freedom movement, while Daniel becomes a successful doctor, combining the best of traditional and Western systems of medicine, going on to become very wealthy after coming up with a skin-lightening formula.

The story follows Daniel’s son Kannan in its last third. It is now close to independence and WWII, and Kannan finds himself a brown man in a white man’s world. This part of the book deals exceedingly with his identity crises, and his journey of self-discovery.

Themes of family togetherness, father-son conflicts, and stubborn pursuits of idea run throughout the story.

While the book deals mainly with the men of the Dorai family, Mr. Davidar does do the women justice. Be it the strong Charity, or the Anglo-Indian Helen, or even the calm Lily, they have a depth of character, elaborate character sketches, strong likes and dislikes – enough to feel very real. Though they are mainly relegated to the background in their lives, their importance to the plot is not undermined by Mr. Davidar, who goes on to give them engaging, powerful and empathy-evoking personalities.

Mr. Davidar does the same for even the minor characters. Be it the sneaky Vakeel Perumal or the sturdy Joshua, or Cooke, the good Brit, or Hall, the Brit with his own axe to grind, Mr. Davidar does enough to ensure they aren’t stereotypes who exist to perform fixed roles in the story, but characters good enough to have their own birth certificates and passports.

I was glad this novel was set in TN and not Kerala, not because of any innate hatred towards the redflag-toting football-loving neighbors to our south, but because I’ve been so long cut off from Tamil literature, I know very little of the place beyond what I see in movies… which I don’t watch much on a regular basis. I cannot read my aunt’s columns and short stories in various magazines, because I can’t read Tamil. The cap on all this came last month, when I was visiting an uncle of mine. For half an hour or more, he kept slipping in references to various Tamil authors, what they said, and all that, none of which I could comprehend. And after forty-five minutes, he finally understood that I can’t read/write Tamil, and with a flourish, brought out a book of children’s stories by Sujatha. I hadn’t finished reading even one line, when he’d interrupt me with some other quote by some 16th Century saint, to ask about Lennon’s lovelife, trying to get me to spar with him on a K’taka-vs-TN argument which would put Ka.Ra.Ve and the cable operators of Bangalore to shame… I haven’t read even a single story in Tamil yet.

But anyway, any Tamil writer on the same topic wouldn’t be as passive as Mr. Davidar, but take on a more activist role. Most Tamil writers who would generally deal with caste violence in their books would take a stand, mostly on the side of the lower castes, and yell Death to Brahmins, mostly in verse, obtuse verse a noob like me wouldn’t be able to understand.

And that’s where Mr. Davidar’s brilliance lies. He doesn’t preach, or take sides. He presents the caste wars as just another agent of change, nothing more, nothing less. He doesn’t decry the Englishman’s apathy towards the native… it’s left to the audience to do so. There is absolutely no overstatement, no underestimation of the reader’s intelligence.

What makes the book all the more refreshing is that Mr. Davidar doesn’t write from the point of view of the urban Indian or an NRI rediscovering his roots, but as someone writing about something close to his heart. There aren’t outlandish references, or an overuse of vernacular words [though one minor irritant is his spelling Avvaiyyaar as Auvaiyar.. but that's towards the end of the book, by when Mr. Davidar has established his credentials as a non-pseud-Indian]. There isn’t any of the mandatory description of traditional rites and rituals from an outsider’s perspective. That makes you feel one with the characters, not like some fly on the wall. You care about the characters. You worry when Charity Dorai begins to lose her mind. You rejoice when Rachel’s wedding with Ramadoss comes off successfully. You feel the desperation when Kannan sets off to bag the tiger. You feel the same sense of homecoming when Kannan comes back to The House of Blue Mangoes in the end. You don’t turn the pages of this book and keep at it for four-five hours because there are strange twists and turns in the plot, but because you care about the characters.

What, for me, added a touch of honesty to the whole thing is the Author’s Note near the end, where he announces that the story is fiction, and the castes mentioned in it are, too, and it shouldn’t be construed as autobiographical, or as family history masquerading as fiction, though inspiration for bits of the story came from places he lived in during his childhood, and a grandfather who had a family settlement. That bit makes me like the book a lot more, as that makes it less like other works of Indian fiction, more notably The God Of Small Things which everyone thought was Ms. Roy’s autobiography with fiction thrown in here and there. It’s also great to come across a plot which has been conjured from thin air, with only the implementation details inspired from real life.

And you’d even know which bits are from where… the Acknowledgments page is more than just a boring collection of sources… Mr. Davidar acknowledges in detail seemingly everyone who had to do with the book, including “Vivek Menon who pointed out that ‘nightjars drift and do not whir’”.

All in all, a nice, well-written book with characters you can sympathize, if not empathize with. A good read.

***

It surprises me that no one has yet made a movie out of this plot. The narrative has been so gripping, I can see prospective trailers in front of my eyes… a collection of clips where the village gathered on the beach for Chitra-Pournami, Aaron jumping the well, Rachel blushing when she first meets Ramadoss, Solomon jumping into a well and playing with the local boys, Aaron and the Andavars practising silambattam under the guidance of Joshua, Kannan bagging the tiger, Solomon and Muthu Vedhar locked in a fight, Aaron assassinating a police officer, and a flash of an Indian flag, Daniel’s visions of his mother after she dies, Aaron calling Daniel anna before dying,  Kannan getting ragged at the Madras Christian College, Kannan and Helen having long walks around the tea estate, Charity, Daniel, Rachel and Miriam on the way to Nagercoil, with wistful music in the background and visuals of evergreen forests… and finally members from different branches of the family coming together to celebrate Christmas together, and graphics of a house and a mango tree, and the title “Neelam Illam” falling into place next to it.