My First Sketch – Analyzing Harry Potter with JK Rowling

So as I mentioned in my previous post, I’ve joined a sketch-writing class. Our first homework was to find a pet peeve of ours, develop a character who embodies that irksome quality, and then to write a sketch revolving around that character.

I find a lot of things irksome, but the one I picked was people who read too much between the lines of books and movies – classic thing where when the author says ‘The curtains are blue’, they try interpreting that in various ways, when all the author meant was that the curtains the room were coloured blue.

Then I had to come up with some sort of a character sketch for a person with this character, so I created Abby, who is a sixteen-year-old girl, sort of like the older sister in Ten things I Hate About You, top of her class, considers herself more mature than others, reads a lot, cut her baby teeth on Ayn Rand, wanted nothing more than Kafka and Nietzsche for her fourteenth birthday, dates an older college student who moonlights as a hipster barista, considers herself real deep, aims to study Literature at Harvard, draws inspiration from second-wave feminists like Gloria Steinem, always enters any argument with ‘If I may chime in as a woman…’, resorts to grammar nazism when all else fails… the works.

Now for a funny situation to put Abby in… I thought it’d be fun to have her come face to face with the artist whose works she overanalyzes. I first wanted her to read too much into Disney/Pixar movies, but then, the interpretations would have to be suitably ludicrous, and I somehow didn’t feel up for that. It was finally a tie between Tarantino and JK Rowling. The problem with Tarantino was, he himself weaves in layers of meanings into his movies, what with tributes and parodies and whatnot. I somehow couldn’t come up with theories ludicrous enough to have him go ‘Say, what?!’, though this one interpretation of Pulp Fiction was really awesome – Marcellus Wallace has sold his soul to the devil, and the suitcase is what he has to give the Devil to get his soul back. For more on that, ask me later; I’m too tired to type that out right now.

So JK Rowling it was. I scoured cracked.com for crazy Harry Potter interpretations, and got some nice suggestions off Tuna and Surabhi, the biggest HP fan I know. And I had a ton of things worrying me during this whole week that I could finally manage to get things written only in the hour before I had to run to class.

And so… here it is. It got a few laughs when I read it out in class. There were a few edits suggested too, which I might take up on and rewrite this sketch. Apologies for having it as a PDF, but writing it in the screenwriting format using rawscripts.com (I initially started off writing in LaTeX, but time crunch meant I ended up using something more WYSIWYG), I can only export it as a PDF so far.

Hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it

JK Rowling and the overanalytical fan

Book Tag

A book that made you laugh: Ogden Nash’s Candy is Dandy. And some passages of English, August.

A book that made you cry: Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead. For the sheer hopelessness of the writing and unreadability that ensued.

A book that scared you: 1984

A book that disgusted you: The Mammaries of the Welfare State by Upamanyu Chatterjee. Sequel to English, August, but lacks any subtlety. Very in-your-face, so much that you hate the practiced cynicism the book radiates.

A book you loved in elementary school: The Adventurous Four series of Enid Blyton – the one with Andy, Tom, Jill and Mary and their boat.

A book you loved in middle school or junior high school: Malory Towers and St. Clares by Enid Blyton.

A book you loved in high school: The English Teacher, Grandmother’s Tale and Harry Potter.

A book you loved in college: I read too much in college, and most of it was pulp-fiction or pop-literature that it refuses to stick. I’d say Catcher in the Rye.

A book that challenged your identity: How to Win Friends And Influence People. It’s the only self-help book I have any respect for. Oh, and English, August, too.

A series that you love: Lots – all of Enid Blyton’s schoolgirl series, all the Blandings books by Wodehouse. I like Blandings much, much better than Jeeves.

Your favorite horror book: World’s Greatest Ghosts. The book became a major rage in school, with everyone asking to borrow it, including snooty seniors who probably didn’t know of my existance till then. The popularity of it can be gauged by the fact that it came back to me in four pieces.

Your favorite science fiction book: The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. I liked the first three, but the other two became too much for me. Sure, there are brilliant ideas introduced, and alternative explanations offered for so many everyday occurrences, but when these become the essence of the book and not the story, for five long books, it gets trying. Asimov’s I, Robot is aeons better and comes close to being put on a pedestal by me, though his Foundation and Elijah Baley series weren’t all that great. I liked his Nightfall: Brilliant concept, but after a while it gets unreadable.

Your favorite fantasy: Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer. I like the no-nonsense attitude of it all. I like Foaly the centaur and his innoventions (word I coined – innovative inventions. Propagate it, do.). But above all, I liked it that the lead character was not a loser-who-gets-lucky, but an astute plotter and planner whose plans worked, and not just due to luck. I hate most other fantasy series.

Your favorite mystery: Feluda. I also like short stories featuring Miss Marple. Perry Mason rocks, but more for astute grandstands and manipulations than for any detective work.

Your favorite biography: The last book I bought. And also, Satyajit Ray – The Inner Eye – Biography of a Master Filmmaker.

Your favorite “coming of age” book: English, August. And to a lesser extent, Swami and Friends.

Your favorite classic: Gone With The Wind. And though I haven’t read it fully, Ponniyin Selvan.

Ebooks vs hardcopies: For availability and easy of obtaining, ebooks. Yes, I’m aware they are illegal. But Rupa and Penguin can bring down prices, can’t they? And bookstores can be better stocked? I can’t justify paying big bucks to read stuff I’d like to read only once. And… ease of stocking is certainly more with ebooks; I don’t have mum and dad yelling that my eBooks folder needs maintenance. But the thing with ebooks is, out of sight and out of mind. I see Back On The Road Again peeping out of my crowded bookshelf, and am reminded I should read it sometime. But The Hunchback of Notre Dame has been languishing on my laptop for four years now.

And who do I tag?
Anyone who wants to do this tag. Just anyone.

My tryst with Wizardry

It seems very, very long ago that I came across a book review in Deccan Herald’s weekly supplement for children, Open Sesame. This one was about a “story about magic, with a difference”. It talked about a boy having an oppressed existence with his aunt and uncle, and then being told he’s a wizard, following which he goes off to magic school, battles the villain who was responsible for killing his parents… and leaving the ending open for a sequel.

I, who normally gave short shrift to books reviewed in Open Sesame as being for an unimaginative bunch of little kids whose knowledge of literature rarely stretched beyond Fairy Stories written by authors of little or no reputation, apart from the occasional Enid Blyton, was sort of impressed. I don’t quite remember why; the storyline seemed awfully cliched and the review wasn’t such a great piece of writing anyway.

But I ended up with Prisoner of Azkaban on my thirteenth birthday [we at home have this thing about gifting books to each other, more so since all of my generation are bibliophiles. So right from my first birthday, I've always got books, coloring books, pens, paints, or some such thing from those at home apart from the usual thisNthat], and got hooked, and couldn’t stop gushing about the wonder that was JK Rowling.

Funnily by now, hardly anyone had heard of the wonderful world of wizardry at school, and they all dismissed it as some “fairy story”. Little did they know that fairies are one of the most half-witted magical creatures!

But the Sunday Times of India put it on the front page of their Sunday supplement once, and there you go! The phenomenon began. At first, a few bibliophiles like me started reading the books, made it conversation-filler material amongst ourselves… and all of a sudden, the corridors were echoing with talk of Basilisks, Animagi, loathing Snape, comparisons of McGonagall to our martinet-ish Principal….

Things only hotted up even more when the first movie was released, after which the buzz behind Goblet of Fire led to whispered conversations at the back of the school assembly about whether the new Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher would be a vampire as Dean Thomas predicted.

Winter break 1998. Yay! I finally got GoF. It’ll keep me company as we walk along the esplanade in Pondicherry… Oh, Darn! The city’s just too beautiful to see! Result: It took me four days to finish the book, and that too, I couldn’t spare more than just cursory glances at some chapters. But retribution took the form of spending New Year’s at an uncle’s place, sans TV. So I ended up reading the book again and again until I could quote it offhand, and my uncle ended up another Pottermaniac.

Well, it really had caught on. The mania still haunts the old gang from school. We just have to get started on Potter and we go on for hours on end. Just like HP-fans everywhere.

OoTP in class XII. Exams the week after. And I just had a couple of days to finish Dee’s copy. I had never been so maniacal about finishing a book before. Finished it off in a day. Hated it. I rather thought the Department of Mysteries bit towards the end was grossly overdone, at best. It had gone beyond all fantasy tales, IMHO. I was going to write off JK as just another woman whose fame had gone to her head and affected her work. Most people agreed. But when I said so to my friend who was the Grandfather of all Pottermaniacs, it was met with nothing but uncomprehension, surprise and an admonishment to “Go read it again, see what you’ve missed” and also a detailed analysis of why the Fifth book doesn’t deserve all the insults I heaped on it. I did, and discovered that my friend was right. The book shows a transition to a darker, more serious tone, setting the stage for the sixth and seventh books.

And… sixth book… that was when I was just a year at NITK, and when I’d found the place to be replete with dozens of Harry-lovers, some Snape-lovers, many Snape-haters, and the like. I was really maniacal about Harry Potter, as can be seen by my posts in the run-up to the release. The book cost a bomb, which IMHO was simply cashing in on the publicity, and I staunchly resolved “not to succumb to consumerism” and all of that idealism that was doing the rounds in my head back then. The ebook links my friends were giving me didn’t seem to be working, and I took it upon myself one fine morning to Find An Ebook In Less Than Three Hours Or Let My Internet Connection Perish In The Attempt. Sheer hell, it turned out to be, dodging the various links to buying it on Amazon, various links that talked of some eBook site bringing it out in eBook form, so many links that had the Chinese fake version that had caused some famous controversy that merited a million webpages dedicated to it alone, and most of all, the dead links. So it was on the eighteenth or nineteenth page of Ask.com [It was the first time Google had failed me] where I found this excellent site where the full text could be downloaded. Quickly converted it to PDF for ease of reading [I hate reading Word docs], and sat through it and finished it in six hours straight [Oh, my poor aching eyes ]

And now The Deathly Hallows. I don’t have any real expectations regarding it, it surely will be good, JK would want it to be worth the obnoxious amount her fans will be paying for the book, she would want to give everyone’s favourite hero a good sendoff. And she definitely won’t quit writing; she’s far too good for that. Her visual style is what keeps sending chills down our spines, makes us skim through the pages again and again hoping for a clue to what comes next. I also am not thinking of ANY ideas regarding what is to come. Harry lives/dies, Ron lives/dies, Ginny lives/dies, Hermione lives/dies…. I don’t much care. I’m waiting to be surprised, to be telling myself I should have seen it coming, and finally coming to terms with it and saying

“It’s perfect this way… the whole world is happy, kids haven’t quit reading [they've come back to it, actually,], Rowling’s rich, and I’ve been entertained for the past seven years, and I don’t have to worry about how to start conversations for the next few months”.

Oh, and any offers of the eBook [no, not the "leaked" one, it's utter garbage] or of the book are absolutely welcome.

Addendum: I got the ebook of HP7 two days in advance. A really “leaked” copy. Haven’t read it yet, but mean to do so soon. I can’t upload it here as it is 70 MB zipped. Those on NITK LAN can find it there, but others with hopefully better Net speeds can get it on http://avaxhome.org. Just search for deathly hallows. And the file is an encrypted .rar file, you’ll need the password given in the download page to decrypt it.

Addendum 2: Some kindly soul typed out the entire book. Managed to read it one day before it released. Many thanks to The Monk for the book from us Numbskulls. So far, I’ll say it’s a good one, though the soppy last chapter is quite a damper. Review coming later.