Non-Objective Reviews – Bossypants, ChungKing Express, Saat Khoon Maaf, Blue Oranges

I’ve been exceedingly tied up with this and that and god alone knows what else, though I feel like I’ve not gotten any darn thing done. But over the past couple of months, I’ve managed to watch and read stuff.
Most of it has been random shite I wouldn’t rewatch or reread. But some stuff has penetrated my numb skull and made an impression on me. I’m a sucker for small details which I don’t explicitly notice, but which give me a glimpse of a feeling of something, somewhere I want to be. A flick of the wrist, a hint of jealousy in a voice, some microexpression, pastel colour schemes… they don’t even register, but go on to hit me like a ton of bricks, drawing the seemingly arbitrary line between “good” and “godawesome”.
So… here goes.

Blue Oranges
I hunted this one up just for the title. It sounded genuinely hatke. It’s a whodunit, with Rajit Kapoor as the detective, only it’s more Roger Akroyd and Poirot’s Last Case than his well-known Byomkesh Bakshi. It is shot very well, the white balance makes the images very sharp. And the characters apart from Rajit Kapoor and Rati Agnihotri aren’t known faces. Due to this, it genuinely feels like a whodunit… you can’t assume anything about any of the characters, you’ll be willing to go wherever the story takes you.

Saat Khoon Maaf
This movie sort of lived up to expectations, though watching a bad print sort of dilutes the experience. But what I liked the best was not Priyanka Chopra’s performance, though she does do well here. It was the characters of the servants – the butler, Usha Uthup and the dwarf jockey which gave it a real feel for me. When the butler is poisoned, it sort of hit home for me, the evilness of Naseeruddin Shah’s character. Usually the support staff in any movie are either just in the background and nothing happens to them; they are in the same state in the end as in the beginning, or their deaths are inconsequential, some sort of a sideshow. But here, it’s a turning point in the movie. Whoa.
And Vivaan Shah. The character of the narrator was so incredibly well-etched. The dark way in which he talks about each death in a casual way mirrors the sort of feel in the original Susanna’s Seven Husbands story, where the narrator is just a bystander, but the muffled irritation he has to every husband of Susanna’s (and is conveying the same to his wife) earns my empathy, makes the story personal in a way going deeper in to Susanna’s mind couldn’t have.

Bossypants:
Tina Fey’s memoir. It’s not a bodice-ripping tell-all tale or anything. It’s exactly what you expect from a comedy writer. She writes about her early life, her path to SNL, life at SNL, 30Rock, playing Sarah Palin.. and then reflecting on her life, child(ren)…. the stories aren’t spicy or edge-of-seat. But it’s the way she writes them that keeps you glued to the book. Her writing style when she is trying to be funny is reminiscent of Woody Allen. When she’s not being all WoodyAlleny, she has a very conversational, stream-of-consciousness way of writing. You can as well imagine her saying these things on some talk show or the other. Her pragmatic approach to feminism appealed to me, mainly because I haven’t heard these sorts of points of view elsewhere, and it gives my (very similar) points of view some validation.
I’ve always found Tina Fey pretty, and wondered where all those ugly-jokes came from – on 30Rock, everyone makes derisive references to her looks including herself, and she herself talks about her looks in a self-deprecating way. That, mind you, was a little unsettling… it felt like she was just playing the Geek Girl card while being Hollywood-ugly (the sort who only needs to take off her glasses to look like a leading lady), not real-ugly. But only until I saw what she looked like before she began doing Weekend Update on Saturday Night Live… overweight, badly-dressed, with a haircut that didn’t quite suit her… and realized, well, she does know what she’s going on about; it’s not just exploitation.
This gives her a self-deprecating yet mean and nasty sort of a sense of humour, that is enchantingly delightful. She disses Paris Hilton, she disses random people on the Internet who’ve left nasty comments about her… you don’t always want to agree with her, but her insults are fun to hear and file away in memory to use sometime later.

Chungking Express
This is a famous movie, apparently. It’s one of those very few Chinese movies famous outside of China which aren’t about martial arts… here, you must keep in mind that the only Chinese movies I’ve watched are Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and those ones dubbed in Tamil that show on Vijay TV on Sundays.
This one’s made in and set in Hong Kong. It’s got two stories, told one after the other, and they pretty much don’t intersect except for one brief moment.
The stories are normal, usual, whatever you call it…. they didn’t much make an impact on me. What did was the dialogues… my favourite is where one of the protagonists is arguing with the cashier in a departmental store about the feelings of a can of pineapple. The cinematography is good too. It gives me a feeling of deja vu; I seem to have seen this movie before I came to UCI – When I was at Hong Kong airport for my transit, this was one of the first shots I took, and the movie seems to look like that, only much more ’90s-looking and with better white balance and contrast.
Yeah, the dialogues are good, but I think the poignancy in the movie comes from the heckuva lot of stuff that is left unsaid. It’s been ages since I’ve watched a movie with latent emotion portrayed in a believable way. You know that scene in Sarkar where AB senior and AB junior realize that Kay Kay Menon is the one who betrayed them or something? That whole scene passes without a single word, just ominous background score and ‘powerful’ glances exchanged between them. That’s ‘latent emotion’ alright, but I didn’t find it one bit believable…. it came off as too forced.
In the climax of Chungking Express, he asks her if they would accept a boarding pass that looks like the one she gave him a year back, and then she says a very casual ‘maybe’ after which she writes him a new boarding pass on a tissue… that scene to me was pure magic.
And, of course, the strains of California Dreaming playing throughout the second half… I liked very much.

I liked the first story much better than the second one. Maybe because like the protagonist there, my twenty-fifth birthday isn’t all that far away. Maybe because of the pineapple dialogue. Maybe because of the pithy philosophy he spouts while nursing a broken heart, same as I do even when not nursing a broken heart – “Running is good. The body loses so much fluid when you run so that there’s none left for tears”. Maybe because Takeshi Kaneishiro is way better looking than Tony Leung. Maybe because on some days, I feel like Brigette Lin, with the whole world against me and so tired that I want to just sleep, though I might not remember to wish people on their birthdays when I wake up. Maybe because I found Faye Wong’s character in the second half way too creepy and stalkerly… maybe a few years back, I’d've found her character as alluring and enigmatic as the director wants you to think she is, but all I feel now is she is crazy, creepy and needs a restraining order.

After watching this flick, I’ve pretty much made up my mind that I’m going to fly to India the next time transiting at Hong Kong, with a really really really long layover and a transit visa. And take pictures of the streets and neon lights downtown at night. And edit them to make them seem as psychedelic as possible without making it look like Tokyo….thinking of which city gives me the shudders; the ghost of the Ryu Murakami books I’ve read so far still refuse to stop haunting me.

I’ll leave you with a clip of Quentin Tarantino talking about Chungking Express.

Midnight Minestrone Soup

I’m writing this in darkest hour. No, not metaphorically like that.. just that dawn is an hour or so away. My body clock is rather messed up, and I’m stuck about whether to embrace it or to go on the warpath and try to set it ‘right’, right here meaning the sort that’ll wake a few hours before noon and sleep somewhere on the good side of midnight. I’m afraid to upset the delicate balance I’ve created, but I also crave the productivity of the morning hours. It’s not like I’ve not tried setting it ‘right’… I’ve tried over so many weekends, to sleep it off or keep awake, but something or the other always, always messes it up.

Talking of which, I have a vague, vague wish I were in Egypt two weeks back. Some detox from the Internet is what I need, yeah, but I can’t voluntarily detox now when I’m actually awaiting a lot of stuff in my inbox. I can’t pull a danah boyd (Lack of capitalization intentional. That’s how she spells her name) and ask everyone to email me a week hence. Not just yet.

However, I don’t even remotely wish I was Egyptian over the past week. Uprising and all is great, but volatility kills me, it just kills me. I cannot take the excitement of a pregnant pause, the cusp of something totally different, the uncertainty in what’s coming next. And yes, I’m going through a bit of that for a few other reasons. I think if I were in Egypt, I’d've broken a window, set something on fire, thrown a Molotov cocktail at an armyman…. something to spark off all the latent tension.

I just can’t take uncertainty.

And all the stuff about how the Internet helps organize mobs… y’know what, uncoordinated publicity, hashtags and all that can only incite mob frenzy. Nothing more. If anything gets done, it’s in the frenzy of a mob. And it can also be easily defused. Expecting 10k likes to translate into 1k people on the streets is too much, let alone expecting 10k people on the streets based on some Facebook community. The reason all these things looking like they work are because they place great weights on things that don’t take much for people to do. Sounds pretty disjoint coming from me at this time in the night/morning, but it was very lucidly said by Malcolm Gladwell in an opinion piece I can’t seem to find now.

I’ve pretty much lost faith in humanity, so I don’t expect the outcomes of the ‘revolutions’ dotting the Arab world to lead to any larger good for the countries or for the rest of us. As long as there are people to be exploited, there will be tinpot dictators, slavedriver bosses, bossy spouses, martinet teachers.

And heck, if anyone’s nice to me, or anything good happens, I just don’t take it well. I am constantly looking for the price-tag, the downside, the catch… it’s good, in a way, I’ve to admit.

Y’know how it is when you hate things for absolutely no reason? Yeah. It pays to try finding out why exactly you hate these things, and for writing it down somewhere for posterity. Otherwise you’re wont to hear one mindblowing talk and say “Heck, why didn’t I consider this career option? What was I smoking?”, and kick yourself for weeks together till the reason is staring at you in the face and you say “Oh, yeah, that’s why”. Save yourselves the trouble, children.

Also, the reason you pick a career is not because you love the awesome stuff… anyone can love that, but you pick one because you like the boring stuff about the job as well. Like the endless waiting for code to finish compiling, or the thrill of reading a dozen papers on a topic and categorizing them, or dodging the paparazzi or singing the same note for three hours to get it right.

Short book review: I read Ryu Murakami’s Almost Transparent Blue. Fellas, don’t mistake Ryu Murakami for Haruki Murakami. Also, this book is absolutely not for everyone. Puke-worthy. And worse, pointless. Though, I must say, writing’s okay.

Oh, and the DA’s office decided to press charges against 11 students belonging to the Muslim Students Association for planning a disruption of the Israeli ambassador’s speech here last year. Looking at this, I wonder if my earlier stance on the need for student activism was misplaced. It suddenly seems like the right thing to do is to go to class like a good kid and keep away from any sort of trouble. I don’t know if it would have been just like this if it was a more protesty campus like Berkeley instead of goody-two-shoes Irvine… what do you say? As for facts, while I didn’t attend the talk, you can read this article here.

And, well, I’ve been at the receiving end of some racism as well over the past week. I don’t want to talk about it, and the perpetrator was someone well-known to be racist and well-known as the Department Jerk, so it’s not a reflection on attitudes here in general (though I’ve also heard tales of a racist European here), more so since the jerk was told off quite quickly by folks around me. I was very very pissed, and still am, and while it irks me that I’m not displaying any backbone here by making the Jerk’s life miserable, the more I think about it, the more it seems to not be worthwhile. More so since it seems more of a display of jerk-ism than racism.

Then… I’ve sort of been attending these Women In Computer Science events on campus. I’d love to go to those conferences, but haven’t got an opportunity yet, so just the campus stuff for now. While it’s great that these spunky undergrads are taking initiatives to get highschool girls interested in computer science, I have mixed feelings about another aspect of this. I find I am not too comfortable with the whole “Computer science doesn’t mean being a nerd, y’know” line. Especially when that is peddled about to get girls interested in stuff like Informatics and technical writing and software testing. For one thing, it makes Informatics, technical writing and software testing look like the poor cousins of ‘real Computer Science’. For another, it says folks in computer science are nerds and for some reason, being a nerd is a bad thing, and more so if you are a girl.

If your girls are not choosing parallel processing and database systems as a career because it requires being a ‘nerd’, there’s something wrong with the whole system, not with the girls. If your society says working hard is a bad thing, or choosing not to do something just because it’s hard is okay, something’s wrong with that attitude. If your society doesn’t reward persistence with anything but social ostracism, there’s something wrong with it, and that’s what you have to work to correct. Not these band-aid measures. Like getting women to do the ‘easier’ jobs in the field and saying ‘Oh, look, we have a fair representation of genders in our workplace’. This is just passing the buck, and it doesn’t solve any damn thing.

That said, I sometimes wonder if I’d've been better off in some artsy job that involved writing features and blurbs and reviews, meeting Marxy members of the literati, talking in abstractions, finding phallic symbols in the opening scene of Lion King, making Free Binayak Sen posters and Tshirts, and sending pink innerwear to some remote address in North Karnataka. That, when I’m not viewing people from other countries as objects in a museum, acting in plays which use just one prop and have plenty of monologues, and lamenting the cloistering morality of the middle classes of India. I possibly wouldn’t have been as analytical as I am now, but maybe that’d be a good thing; it’s blissful to not know the extent of your ignorance about the world.

And then I look at one of those Indian-hippies-discovering-themselves-in-the-US, with their Jayanagar-4th-Block-Pavement junk jewelry, their ill-fitting kurtas and their totally clashing salwars, their desperately-in-need-of-a-comb hairdo, their lack of pride in themselves, and back at my Zen-ish accessorizing, recent trendy haircut, clothes designed to blend in rather than stand out, and strict no-caffeine-as-wake-me-up rule and decide the change is totally not worth it.

On the Indian Literary Scene

This blogpost is prompted by this set of articles on The Open Magazine: 1, 2, 3.

Hartosh Singh Bal wrote a piece about how easy it is for any British ‘writer’ to be taken seriously in India. William Dalrymple, one of the main people named in the article, wrote back saying that the article was blatantly racist. Mr. Bal replied even more scathingly.

Wondering if all the accusations in the original article are true makes me think about the Indian literary scene.

Now I’m probably unqualified to comment on this, given that I’ve quit my fascination with Indian writing in English since probably my third year at NITK., and am not up-to-date on the scene. I think that probably happened because Indian writing in English rarely if ever is pirated in ebook form.

The stuff I’ve been reading since then is more or less nationality-agnostic, and given that I was going through enough trouble with see-sawing emotional states over the past few years, I have cut out anything that’s even mildly depressing. No tales of rape victims, no suicidal females, no people selling organs or themselves out of poverty. And I’m sick and tired of wordy prose, so all the emo stuff is also out. And, ever since the Mumbai train blasts, since when I have turned internetHindu and internetIndian, I detest, detest, detest any books that espouse the warped leftie-commie-westie perceptions of the Motherland and pronounce it to be the only true point of view [That's not because of the point of view. It's just that I feel their case is extremely overstated and I don't want to hear those arguments again and again and again].

And guess what. The number of Indian books I’m reading has gone pitifully low. Off the top of my head, I can remember only three Indian English books that I’ve read with delight in the recent past. The most recent one is The Immortals of Meluha. It’s okay. It’s not a great book. The plot is rather weak, though the premise is brilliant. Then there’s The House of Blue Mangoes I’ve reviewed before here. And the most, most delightful one has been Gopa Majumdar’s translation of Satyajit Ray’s Feluda and Professor Shonkhu.

Isn’t it a rather depressing thought that most Indian writing in English is tragic, depressing, emo stuff? Or that it’s by foreigners/NRIs who’ve visited Delhi and Mumbai and maybe one location in the South and decided they want to set a novel here, and borrow the mainstream media’s perspective on the country to do so?

This means one of two things. Either India can’t produce people good enough to express themselves well in English, or these forin/NRI folks are actively preferred over India-born-and-bred writers. Ok, third possibility – depressing stuff is preferred anyday over stuff with more joie de vivre. And forin/NRI folk are more likely to write about the depressing squalor of India than the average English-writing Indian (it’s just darn impossible for someone who lives here to constantly be depressed about poverty and rape and abuse and organ harvesting enough to churn out book after book on those topics).

The first possibility seems likely. Yes, not everyone from an English-medium school speaks well in English, let alone write novels in it. But heck, is the situation so bad that we have very few who write cheerfully and well in English? I don’t want to believe that’s possible.

I’m ambivalent about the third possibility. Given that most Indian hit films are escapist fare, I find it hard to believe that depressing stuff is preferred over fun stuff. But then, it’s also possible that the folks who watch the fun movies are not the ones who read, and that the ones who read are folk who prefer emo sad stuff, because it feels more ‘real’. I was one of these people in my less-jaded days where I equated ‘real’ with ‘stark’, ‘explicit’ and ‘depressing’. And back then, I read a lot of Indian writing in English

The second possibility…. ah, here’s where we lock horns with the likes of Dalrymple. It’s no secret that Western (and even Eastern) recognition and approval is highly prized in India. It’s as if we have no good standards of our own that we look to someone else’s to know what to like and what not to. It’s like Yahoo coming to NITK’s campus for placements and instead of conducting their own set of Aptis and interviews, giving offers to the folks placed in Microsoft (No, that did not happen. And if you want, you can replace Yahoo with Infy and Microsoft with ITTIAM. Or any two random companies. It is immaterial). The reasons for that are many… colonial hangover, our persistent resistance to growing a backbone, our sense of identity and self being derided every single day by own own media… the bottomline is, you can go places here with a forin tag – skin colour, accents, degrees, passports. Even if you are decidedly a worse stringer-of-words-together than the average Indian; your use of the language will be feted as ‘interesting’ and ‘intriguing’ and ‘creative’.

Where’s our own Steig Larsson, JK Rowling (no, don’t point to the scriptwriter for the flick Hari Puttar), Rick Riordan (Amish Tripathi seems to be trying), Eoin Colfer, Agatha Christie? Why don’t we have our own Miss Marple, shouldn’t it be easy to have a nosy lady solving murders here? (Oh hey, we do… I found this series about a detective aunty called Lalli. Except it’s not thaaat well-written). Why don’t we yet have our own LotR, given that our folk myths are so rich and ripe for drawing from?

Where are our school stories, the ones that involve making fresh-out-of-college teachers with weird pronunciations run out of the class crying, and hatching plots over ice-lollies and salt-n-chillied-amlas after school? And what about our own murder mysteries, surely there’s sufficient fodder for that? And given that we have so many threats, where the heck are our spy thrillers? The only one I’ve come across that had a hint of a spy in it is Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey. Are we so unimaginative a people that we can’t produce our own kahani-mein-twist writer, like an Archer or an O Henry?

I’m not saying no examples of any of these exist. I’m saying there isn’t enough. I’m saying it’s not reached a critical mass enough to be its own genre, the way books about (and by) IITians have. The dominant chunk of Indian writing in English is hardly positive, fun-to-read stuff.

So, I repeat, where the heck are all these writers? Too busy slaving away in an IT company? Or gone abroad for higher studies/job and will now only write sickening Indo-nostalgic stuff? Or writing up a storm in some other of our fourteen languages? If so, why aren’t they being translated into English?

Or worse, are there actually none? Surely, judging by the number of user-contributed stories in children’s magazines from, say, eight years back and earlier, there must be a significant portion of good writers in their twenties now?

Coz it’s going to be a depressing next thirty if there actually are none. I see these children’s magazines go lower and lower in quality, and dumb down their content more and more. It’s a symptom of lower and lower standards in English writing in India…. when there is nothing to whet the imagination of children, it is a sad state of affairs, indeed.

Some people might say ‘This is why children should learn their mother tongue… writing in regional languages is far better’. I agree. But we’re looking at a generation of children whose parents themselves aren’t conversant with their mother tongues; and who talk, fight and play in English. Given that we use and abuse English so much in India (and wear it on our sleeves), shouldn’t we be giving back something to the language; is it so unreasonable to expect quality reads of our own stories, in our own language?

On Bookstores

I have this ability to get completely lost in a bookstore. By lost, I don’t mean the way I get lost in the Kumbh Mela or the bylanes of Basavanagudi. Lost here means I lose track of time, of others around me, and all I can see is more and more titles beckoning tantalizingly to be read, one by one.

This ability is by no means unique, I suppose. Plenty of people get lost this way in a bookstore.

And it’s not restricted to bookstores, in my case. I get lost in libraries as well. And a few other things and people, but all of that is out of the scope of this post.

So bookstores. I love them. So much that when we go shopping together, my mother assigns my sister to watch over me to ensure I don’t enter one and turn untraceable for hours on end (“No Priya, not the bookstore. We have to be at their house in two hours!’).

Guess she’s the one who started me off on that. For several birthdays, I remember being gifted books. Yeah, my parents did get me new clothes too, but those were the ritual things. The main attraction, the centerpiece, the Gift would be a book. With a note inside. At first, I just watched as they picked my gift off the shelves of the bookstore, and made the right noises (‘Gurgle!’ was about the only thing I said all day anyway back then) when shown books with colourful covers and even more colourful pages.

I think I’ve been visiting Nagasri Bookstore in Jayanagar since before I learnt my first letter. It soon became a well-established ritual to head there right after the term exams. It was my parents’ way of bringing in the holiday mood, I can say. But the first time I was thoroughly transfixed in a bookstore was at Manipal Center. I think I was nine. The books were hardcover, unlike the ones I was used to at Nagasri and Prism. There was a mildly ostentatious feel to the place. The Nancy Drew titles were different from the ones I’d seen before. And they were ridiculously overpriced. Then there were these history books with full colour photographs. And these remarkably child-friendly-looking encyclopaedias. They had to drag me away. I sulked.

Since then, it feels like a spirit enters me each time I step into a room full of books. I just have to read through every page I see. I’ve been told enough times about being in a bookstore and not a library (most notably by the proprietor of Prism in Jayanagar. That jerkofellow tried saying the same thing to me when I was reading away at Nagasri’s, but that proprietor, genial man that he is, said ‘It’s ok, ma’. Since then, I have never bought anything at Prism, and I make it a point to buy something at Nagasri if I spend more than a few minutes there).

Blossoms on Church Street is a different ballgame. They give you coffee while you browse! But somehow, the backroom look discourages me from browsing for too long. And the crowd as well. But that place, I must admit, is a treasure trove. They have everything, right from a travelogue by Michael Palin to random American romance novels. But then, a place like that simply has to be good, given its clientele, given that it takes second-hand books, and given that it spans over three floors.

I was rather content with my choices in bookstores, when my friend introduced me to Crossword on Residency Road. I must admit, the place with its multiple floors and large floor space scared me. I should have been pleased at the sofas and bean bags for people to sit and browse through the titles, and the coffee counter too, but I strangely was not.

The place was bigger than forty Nagasris. And held probably as many books. They were all organized by topic. There was plenty of Young Adult Fiction. Plenty of Indian English writing. Stuff that should have floored me. I felt sick and refused the coffee my friend offered, and in quiet defiance didn’t relax on the bean bags. Instead, I prowled the aisles, looking to get transfixed. The way that went, it was the first time I was asking if we could leave the bookstore and go have some chocolate cake.

I have never quite understood my revulsion for those sort of bookstores. Somehow I can never seem to find anything I like in those places, even though they are positively spilling over with books of all sorts. And when I do pick up a book and buy it, there’s always the nagging feeling that I’ve been had.

Someone suggested it’s possibly the user experience. And personalization. I’ve been seeing the frail, sharp-grinning proprietor with the faint coastal Karnataka accent from way too early and it’s etched in my mind that a good bookstore has atleast a hundred books per square foot, and it irks me when the proprietor or his assistant don’t magically reach for the book I ask and materialize it out of thin air.

But no, I adore the UCI Library where none of those things happen.

Maybe it’s the exclusivity? Probably. Along with the user experience, which makes me feel like I’ll simply love every book that belongs in that space. Maybe it’s the discounts he gives me. Maybe it’s the small talk.

But even if all those are true, I should feel some semblance of lostness when I enter Crossword near Miniforest, or Landmark. I have slowly stopped feeling those things. I wonder why.

Maybe it’s that you don’t have to be a lover of books to love these new-fangled bookstores. The coffee and bean bags seem too populist. As is the selling of non-book merchandise like junk jewelry and fancy-shmancy notebooks (I must admit here between my sister and me, we own a good many of those).

But it’s not just that… the same is true of Barnes and Noble here, but I actually love the place, and spent many wonderful hours chewing on a pizza roll while reading out fantasy fiction to my nephew, or chugging cherry coke and quietly reading Jane Austen.

Maybe because the choice of titles is too wide. Maybe they try to please everyone. Maybe it’s that the assistants aren’t the sorts who read, so they are unable to give you recommendations or locate the book you ask for without looking it up in a database.

Maybe it’s also because I don’t recognize the authors and titles anymore, being rather cut off from pop culture, and having distanced myself from mainstream media. Whose book reviewing skills are also on the decline. Combined with really bad writing, pretentious authors and all-too-attractive book covers and blurbs. Give me the orange-and-white Penguin ones anyday! And well, my own prejudices stand in the way too… gone are the days when I can read some pretentious NRI-writing-about-India tripe and like it, or be accepting of an Indiabashing point of view.

Maybe it’s a combination of all these things which contribute to my feeling like I just don’t belong there. Due to which I walk out, and back to my safe confines, where I can ask ‘Do you have Shame?’ to which people won’t do a doubletake, but smilingly retrieve Salman Rushdie’s book.

I wouldn’t agonize over this for so long if it weren’t for the fact that having loved books and bookstores for so long now, I have a sort of pipe dream to have my own bookstore. Appa has, on occasion half-jokingly discussed having a bookstore post-retirement with the proprietor of Nagasri. Such a nice, peaceful existence, he says. To which the proprietor gives his ‘Not on your life! Don’t you desire a tension-free retirement?!’ look. It’s apparently a lot tougher than it seems.

It’s not like I’ve not tried finding out… each and every time I ask him how he manages to stock exactly the sort of things I like, he just thinks I’m complimenting him (which I seem to do every single time I visit, anyway) and laughs and shrugs it off as usual.

So, well, let’s get to the bottom of this mystery. Which is your favourite bookstore? Why do you like the place? Tell me, in the comments section. I need to know, so that forty years later, the bookstore I own, or the online bookstore I design, has the best possible user experience. And by best possible, I mean one that I’d like.

A Book, A Movie, An Article, A Blogpost and Social Networks.

After heavy recos from Tuna Fish, I watched half of The Social Network. I was reasonably impressed. It was a decent start to glamourizing coding and algorithms. It feels like a good start… maybe twenty years hence, there will be montages that show the completion of someone’s computer science thesis.

Until then, every bit here in Arjun’s rant about Zadie Smith’s review of the movie holds true. I can’t see why coders are still seen as a niche bunch of nerdy-geeky asocial idiots. The number of people in IT and ITES the world over has reached a number sufficient enough to have a reasonable level of diversity… ranging from aiyo paavam Thayir-Saadam guys and girls, to loose, forward, pub-going women, to snooty corporate types to first-gen immigrants to Old Money to…. you get the picture.

I guess it’s just that the people who tell stories in the mainstream media – filmmakers, writers, photographers, journalists – aren’t yet savvy enough that they identify with the large number of IT folks. For them, computers are still a mystery. Most of these folks belong to the generation of my older sister, for whom computers and internet are something that happened after their teenage, when they were well into their postgraduation or first jobs. This is important, because teenage is when you have enough time and enthusiasm to do random things for timepass. This timepass exploration of new things is what gets you comfortable with those things, develop habits and lifestyles around them. Later on, it gets harder to pick up new stuff near-intuitively. So if you didn’t get comfy with the Net by your late teens, it would take that much more effort for you to do so later in life. And where do these artsy types need to use a computer or the Internet…. they don’t appreciate the magic of web search, the awesomeness of the blogosphere or the freedom of the twitterverse. Atleast not enough to think of the level of design and coding that would have gone into them.

For them, we will always be the ‘others’. Our work will always be inscrutable even if it’s just a few lines of PHP. The word ‘hacking’ will always be accompanied by wary stares.

Talking of hacking, I’ve just finished two-thirds of Steig Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy. I think websnoops should build a temple to Lisbeth Salander, the mother of us all. I mentioned to Swaroop a while back that it’d be interesting to have a detective in a novel rely on the Net for investigations, and his response was Millennium. Great, but not really what I wanted. Lisbeth uses more than just simple available-for-everyone tools.

What I would like better was if her methods were looked into in more detail. And not just that deus ex machina called ‘Hostile Takeover’ where she’s able to access any harddisk she wants. There’s no challenge there, is there? What I would really like is people using Google, Bing, Yahoo, Pipl, Facebook, Buzz and Twitter to varying extents, using the output of one to augment the input of others. Like you find out from Facebook that Alec Smart went to the high school in College Station, Texas and infer that his parents would have been profs at TAMU coz he doesn’t seem to be ‘from’ Texas given that you found his name on a Left-Liberal website, and then look for ‘Professor Smart TAMU’ to get the dirt on his childhood and family.

Coming to Facebook. Remember how I rued about the artificial walls on Facebook? Watching The Social Network enables me to understand the rationale behind that. Facebook is designed to be like your undergrad experience. It’s all about strong cliques held together by weak links. It’s hard for cliques to change dynamically in such an environment. Unless a major social upheaval happens offline, you can’t expect many, or even any changes to the average network structure online.

In other words, Facebook depends more heavily on the real world to keep its social networks going.

That’s quite unlike Twitter. Following and Unfollowing are easier than Friending and Unfriending. The privacy settings are all-or-nothing, which means either anyone gets to hear what you’re saying or just a handpicked few. For various reasons, most people prefer everyone hears their shout-out, not just the handpicked few. And the structure of sharing and retweeting makes sure that good tweets and good links bubble up the hierarchy, getting their originators more followers, and hence more social capital. And sharing and retweeting also makes it easier to discover new people. There’s little involved in following someone…. there’s no tense sending-friend-request-waiting period. That makes the network more dynamic, and also makes it easier to get to know friends of friends. If you think that fella your classmate keeps retweeting is fun, you follow him. And then you reply to his tweets. And he finds you interesting enough, he follows you back. If he doesn’t, he doesn’t. Things stay 1.0 simple on Twitter, unlike the complications on Facebook that are set up to mirror the real world.

Also, given the minute-by-minute, or more realistically, hour-by-hour updates on Twitter, people tend to be more honest. Rather, it’s harder to lie consistently for so long, so it’s harder to be dishonest on Twitter unless you’re really determined…. in which case you’ll use better media to lie than damn Twitter.  If you whine about that meeting you’re in, you’re establishing that you go to work, that you are in a position to attend meetings, and that it is daytime in the timezone you’re in….

Uh, so what?

So… you use the networks in different ways. You find new interesting people on Twitter, establish a sufficient base, and then look them up on Facebook. You’ll try to discover someone’s Twitter account than their Facebook if you are looking to do a cursory check on the person you’ll be hiring… if you want to see if they tend to whine about past employers, or if they have racist tendencies or any other such that might affect your organization’s reputation. And you’ll also want to see the volume of their tweeting during working hours.

And then people will clean their Twitter profiles up, with generous help from Twitter offering differing levels of privacy settings and privacy lists, and then the world will explode.

Or, there’ll be sufficient tripe about everyone out in the open, and we’ll all accept that at our core, we’re all a bunch of twisted, demented bunch of jerks and all of us have tendencies to gripe about our employers and it doesn’t mean we hate our jobs, or all of us have weird tastes in music, and it doesn’t finally reflect on what sort of people we are. And maybe employers will come to accept that their employees tweeting while working isn’t necessarily counterproductive as long as news and youtube links are blocked.

Either way, it’s going to be atleast ten more years before people write decent articles about social media and social networks. I’m not really complaining. There’s atleast some remaining space of exclusivity for those of us who understand these things, and some niche we can all use when we want to get away from those who don’t much understand these things.

Open Letter To Aroon Purie

Dear Mr. Purie,

You quite obviously don’t know me. And while I know you (well, you head India Today), I didn’t much care. Your rag always lost out to The Week in my house, God alone knew why my father subscribed to you…. to me, you were inherently unreadable. I didn’t pay much attention to your antics. Until this morning.

I happened to come across this post not twenty minutes after I woke up. Normally, it takes the better part of an hour for me to ungrog. But Mr. Purie, your scandalous behaviour and the brush-it-off-gently apology got me all fired up in not more than three minutes. While my teammate was happy I showed up early to his meeting for once, I don’t much share his joy. I’m livid, pissed, wild, mad, cross, fuming, steaming at the ears.

Why, you ask? I’ll tell you why.

Firstly, plagiarism sucks. Secondly, plagiarism by a huge media house, especially one of the ‘India Today Conclave’ fame, totally totally sucks. Thirdly, a top editor like you not knowing about Thalaivar is BLASPHEMY. And fourthly, WTF excuse was that? Jet-lag?

I was jetlagged three weeks back. Not just your ordinary jetlag. I was coming from eight-regular-hours-of-sleep-IST to Pacific time. Twelve hours away. Twelve whole hours. Total reversal of night and day. Add to this, I had deadlines from my three classes, AND from two bosses, one of who was on Pacific time, and the other on Indian Standard Time. And that apart, Mr. Purie, I flew Economy. Nearly twenty-four hours. Not much legspace. Folks eating smelly food around me. Middle seat. Two stops. Baggage that weighed twice of what I weigh. Which I had to lug over three floors when I got home, no elevator. Not your first-class flight where you’d be served champagne and have ample leg-room, and have Ram Singh carry the luggage when you landed, for the short distance from the terminal to your airconditioned car.

I blogged when I was jetlagged. And blogged when I was both jetlagged and sleep-deprived. Did I plagiarise? NO. A big NO. Why didn’t I? Because I love my blog too much to post unoriginal content here, and pass it off as mine. This place is hallowed, and such injustice will be met with Hara-Kiri.

Also, I have been plagiarized. By Bangalore Mirror. Old story. I vilified them quite some on this blog. But you know what, Mr. Purie, you make them look like Sathya Harishchandra. Because, they posted my stuff without permission, but they did put my blog URL there. And when I complained, they responded. And apologized (though frankly, I’d say that was an apology for an apology). Quite unlike what you’ve done to my fellow blogger Niranjana.

My colleagues were to submit something for review and publication. And by publication, I mean in the proceeds of a conference, not a piddling rag like yours. New results and changes at the last moment made it such that they didn’t have all their references in place. Did they submit it and say ‘Hah, let’s see who finds out’? No, they did not. You might say yours is a mag that touches millions of life, and just HAS to be out by the deadline, but you know what, they had more at stake. They get this opportunity ONCE a year, mind you. And yet did not compromise on principles.

What were you thinking when you blatantly plagiarized? Doesn’t your conscience prick you? When I put my friend’s joke as a status message on gTalk, I add a “(Credit: Abhi/Tuna/Ego/Whoever)” bit towards the end, because it doesn’t feel fair when people ping me and say “Heh, you crack good jokes!”. We all do that. Even on Twitter, where no one would worry where a joke came from, people say “@jokerman says” or “(credit: @jokerman)”. Even the most mundane stuff, like a new word coined – like Kosubat (the electrified racquet used to kill mosquitos) or Homour (jokes about homosexuality).

Why do we do this? It’s our culture. Our honour code. ‘Stupid gits’, you might think. But no, Mr. Purie. It’s not just our morality that has resulted in this culture.We know what it’s like to have our friends copy from us and get higher marks. We know the resentment it breeds. We know what it’s like to pull an all-nighter and then have the folks who were lolling about get higher marks and skew the whole grading curve because they cheated. There’s no end to how much you can cheat. There are plenty of us who can keep coming up with better and better techniques to steal credit, not that the world needs it. We don’t want every sphere of our life descending into that sort of an abyss. Hence this culture and honour code. And you know what? We like this sort of an environment darned very much. We don’t have to worry about our jokes being stolen, so we let ‘er rip. We know our ideas will be attributed, so we put them out there for others to play with. We like this setup very much on the Net.

It might seem very old-fashioned to you, this moral posturing of mine. But you know what, Mr. Purie, you’re the fossil here. Did you really think you could get away with ripping off such a widely circulated article from the Net? Especially at the peak of Thalaivar-craziness?  Especially in this age of Facebook and Twitter and gTalk status messages? Heck, it was the title of this Churumuri article, for godsake. For context, more people have read that article than your titchy Letter From The Editor. For context, Mr. Purie, that’s like ripping off Jai Ho and mega-releasing it as your own in the weeks following the Oscar nomination.

And when you say “Not being an acknowledged expert on the delightful southern superstar, I asked Delhi for some inputs.”, I can only say WTF. Any piddling two-bit journo knows enough to write about Rajnikanth, heck even Manu Joseph does. Or they pretend to, which is fine because we Thalaivar-fans don’t expect any insights into the method acting in Netrikan from anyone in the mainstream media. That you, yes YOU of the India Today Conclave fame, and YOU who edits ‘India’s Biggest Newsmagazine’ had no frickin’ clue on what to write about Thalaivar really gets my goat. If you had said this about Amitabh or SRK, there would have been blood on the streets. Blood. Yours. And the rest of your staff’s.

And I don’t get why you asked Delhi for input, especially given that a reasonably well-travelled Amit_123 like you itself had no clue about Thalaivar (No, he’s not just a ‘Southern Superstar’… he’s a South-East Asian Sensation as you would have realized if you had travelled through Japan, Singapore and Malaysia even once), what do you expect from the rest of the Amit_123s and Isha_123s there? I’d've thought the first logical reaction would have been to call Chennai.  As we say on the Internet, #FAIL.

And how DARE you change it from SUPERSTAR to Superstar? All the Caps are merited. And we forgave the original author for not putting it in Bold, Underline and Fontsize 42 only because he was not Indian. You on the other hand…. bah!

You know why I’m pissed, Mr. Purie? It’s not just because you ripped something off. It’s your impunity in shrugging it off that gets my blood pressure rising. AND that no one is being fired over this. Or even getting a rap on the knuckle. Not just the Slate thing…. I’m more pissed about Niranjana’s situation. What sort of low-quality mediocre staff you have who can’t even have a few original ideas? And why are you still keeping them? And no rap? What sort of a message are you sending out? That it is okay to lie and cheat?

No remorse? No nothing? Atleast pretend you’re sorry about the whole deal, suspend someone for eyewashing…. do something! Even the smallest political scandal makes sure that atleast one person gets the axe! The fact that you’re not even pretending to be outraged outrages me.

I know Mr. Purie, that this letter might not even reach you, and even if it does, you wouldn’t read it (And if you do, you might plagiarize it… no worries, I now know I can issue a cease-and-desist notice if something like that happens). But I just have to write this because I feel quite outraged on knowing about your heinous act…. If Ponzi mated with Kaavya Viswanathan, and their Indian-Italian spawn then hooked up with Bangalore Mirror AND the folks from here and here, the offspring would be you.

Paanch

No, not the most-watched yet-unreleased movie by Anurag Kashyap starring Tejaswini Kolhapure and Kay Kay Menon.

It’s time for the annual self-congratulatory pat on the back, for not giving up on this venture for 365 additional days. Yes, The NITK Numbskulls Page completes another year of its existence, and yes, as the title suggests, this page has been going strong for half a decade now. For perspective, I have a cousin younger than that. And if I had begun work on my doctoral dissertation when I started this blog, I might have possibly been graduating or been cursing myself for not. Five years can change a stripling out of school to a full-fledged medical doctor. In five years, you can build a site to be as popular as Youtube. If I had been convicted of certain crimes when I started this blog, I might have been free today.

So while not being so dramatic, five years have certainly made me a different person; I can’t be eighteen forever. I used to be aimless, clueless, and without a plan back then. Now too, I’m aimless, clueless, and without a concrete plan, only more informedly educatedly so. My grammar is better, I’m less lenient with people who are wrong on the Internet, I’m less tolerant of a lot of things. Surprisingly, I’m also more idealistic now as compared to before, less cynical, and don’t fight all the battles that come my way.

I don’t know what more to say which I have not said on this day over the past four years. I wish I could write a flippant ‘I’m turning five!” post where I crack my choicest jokes and make it look effortless, but I guess I take this page more seriously than I should. As the years go by, I feel this place grow closer and closer to my heart. It has been the focal point of my entire online existence for this period. It has been where I have corrected my tending towards smsLingo. It has been where I have expressed myself fully, completely. I have met many delightful people just through this blog.

This page has aided me in my journey of self-discovery. (But heck, what has not?)

So what has our fifth year wrought? Sea-changes in life and living, for sure.  Being plagiarized by Bangalore Mirror. Twice. And being flagged by some new WordPress spamfiltering algo as Spam. And when I blogged about it, Matt of WordPress fame commented on it. My posts have been more personal, less about movies and music and books, or so I feel. I haven’t given this blog as much time this year as I did last year, and am glad I’m using my time more productively. Sort of, atleast. For example, I just hastily scribbled this post to get back to coding, while in previous years I did spend an hour writing it and feeling all the nostalgia.

Weirdly, it was being plagiarized that made me wonder what writing here meant to me. Even two years back, I’d've been game to my content being published elsewhere. Now it’s not just privacy concerns and control-over-content concerns that make me more possessive about my content. I am disillusioned when it comes to the media now than then. And I know the extent of energy and thought I put into each word here that I can simply not see someone else reap the benefits of my hard work. And there’s more of that self-important drivel where that came from, but I’ll let it pass.

My other attempts at blogging haven’t gone so well, neither in terms of reach or content. Which leads me to believe that blogging success comes only from lavishing time on a blog.

Where am I going with this? Well, there’s this novel I’ve always wanted to write. Except that I am horrible with fiction. Maybe I’ll be bold enough to present my babystep short stories here, get feedback, and then maybe gain enough confidence to put in effort at something longer?

Till then, I’m content keeping this place what it is – thought receptacle, insanity preventer, good listener and shining example to convince myself I am not that distracted, I mean, I can’t be, I can keep things going for five years and more, right?

And readers. Thanks for reading, thanks for commenting, thanks for sharing, thanks for noticing when my blog disappeared off the Internet, thanks for all the support when I blogged about being plagiarized.

And as always, I thank Goddess Saraswati for all that bestowed on me and pray for more of the same thing, or maybe something different… oh, I needn’t bother… She knows what’s best for me.

The Book, The Movie, The Awesomeness – A just-out-of-the-cinema-hall review of Shutter Island

I watched Shutter Island this morning. And read the book it is based on this afternoon. I liked both. That’s a first.

Ordinarily, it turns out that the one you come across first reeks of awesomeness, and the other always pales in comparison. I liked Sixth Sense – A Novelization better than the movie because I read the book first. And I liked the Bond movies better than the books. But in this case, no complaints about either. None, whatsoever.

The year 1954, an island connected to civilization only by a ferry, the island full of loons, no cellphones or other links, a storm and hurricane, and an escaped insane baby-drowning woman loose on the island. And a US Marshal with his own inner demons. Add to that disappearing inmates, the other inmates not telling the whole truth, suspicions of Nazi-esque experimentation on the human mind, a la The Men Who Stare At Goats. No sideshows, no distractions.What more do you need to create a taut, tense plotline that keeps you on the edge of your seat for each of the two hours and eighteen minutes of its running time?

I particularly liked the cinematography. Since this wasn’t an all-out extravaganza, there are no desktop wallpaper shots, but it is pure whiteBalance magic. The bright, warm shots of Teddy Daniels’s happier times also take on a surreal tone, consistent with the rest of the movie. There are no gory images out to shock… none of that sort of B-movie madness.

The book is short – only 131 pages. Perfect movie material. Martin Scorsese has stayed faithful to the book, with only a few omissions here and there, and just a couple of additions. No radical plot changes, which someone making Harry Potter movies would really have to rely on to get the movie within bladder-tolerant duration.
The best part is the dialogues just out of the book. So if you liked the book, it would be simply great to see all those lines you read and read over again come to life on screen.
Which also means, the book is taut, no loose ends. Not a single word wasted. No elaborate unnecessary descriptions. Nothing at all that distracts you from the plot.

Which means at no point during the movie you feel like you’re watching a movie. You don’t move, you are so riveted that you even forget to sip your lemonade or nibble at your popcorn.

And the performances. Ben Kingsley is awesome. DiCaprio… I saw him play a similar role in The Aviator last night, so yeah, well, nothing new there. Mark Ruffalo gives a measured supporting performance which makes you want to watch him in other movies as well.

The plotline…. there’s no point of going into that here… as is expected, the climax turns the whole thing on its head and I’m not inclined to give out spoilers. The concept might have been done before, but Scorsese brings a realistic feel to it.

So… should you read the book? Oh yes, you certainly should. Should you watch the movie? Please do, and join me in raving about it.

PS: I ranted about Google Buzz, and now I don’t much mind it. For all you know, I might be cursing the movie tomorrow. Don’t really go by my just-out-of-the-hall reviews. I once said *shudder* Rang De Basanti was awesome.

Plagiarism 2.0 – From Email Fwd to Full-length film

I guess this end of the blogosphere now knows all about the Lavanya Mohan – Charukesh Sekar story. Poor Lavanya, down with Charukesh and Vichar Hari yada yada. I’m surprised only one person has yet accused Lavanya of having her story ‘inspired’ from this Goodness Gracious Me sketch. J’Accuse! Make that count two. And KrishAshok saar, she need not have gone back and forth in time to view a video and write her story as you said, she could have just logged on to Youtube. I’m not saying she did or she didn’t. I’m just presenting the possibility. Of course, the possibility exists that she, like Kaavya Viswanathan, can cite Cryptomnesia.

But this case does bring up the issues of credit on the Net, non-attribution, and how easy it is to plagiarize. How easy it is to pass some story off as yours. And the prospect of seeing someone else reap the fruits of your hard work if you aren’t as popular or well-connected as Lavanya is.

A week back, I was wiki’ing for the storyline of Mumbai Salsa. There’s an American actress in that movie, Linda Arsenio. Click. Turns out she’s made quite a name for herself in Bollywood. She recently starred in the movie Aloo Chaat, alongside Aftab Shivdasani, Aamna Sharif, Kulbhushan Kharbanda. Click.

And the story read oh-so-so-so-familiar!

No, it wasn’t a rich-girl-poor-boy story.

But it was the same story as I’d received in an email fwd in December 2008. And this movie released only in June 2009. And it seems pretty popular on the Net, right from 2006. Here you go, link to the story, link to the story of Aloo Chaat. Decide for yourself.

The identity of the author seems lost to the recesses of time. But whoever you are, this is to inform you that you have been plagiarized. Sue ‘em for all it’s worth. Or atleast milk the publicity.

Of course, the chance is nonzero that the scriptwriter himself comes forward to say the story was originally his, and that he put it on the Internet circa 2004….

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.

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.

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.

Mark of a T-School.

(When there can be B-Schools, why not T-Schools? There’s more of a demand for them in India anyway. And it sounds way cooler than ‘Engineering College’. My lame attempt at introducing a new word into everyone’s vocabulary. Like bitchcakes.)

There’s this urban legend about Lewis Carroll. Apparently once the Queen liked Alice in Wonderland so much that she asked for a copy of his next book. Carroll duly obliged, sending her a copy of his loyally inscribed An Elementary Treatise on Determinants.

But then that’s urban legend.

Now for some cold, hard fact.

First floor of NITK Library. Most books in order, a few thrown about here and there and stuffed into the wrong locations. A man hard at work putting books back in their correct place.

Category 500 in the Dewey Decimal System. Books on Mathematics. A bunch on Number Theory. Then some on Linear Algebra. Quite a lot, actually, on Linear Algebra. You sift through the books looking for one particular author.

Then a volume slimmer than those around it catches your eye. It looks very unlike the others. You look at the author’s name and wonder what that book is doing in Category 500. Then you look at the title and understand.

Author: Arundhati Roy. The book: The Algebra of Infinite Justice.

Blush.

There are times when I splurge, and there are times when I’m rather…. economical. I’m not ashamed of exhibiting the latter behaviour, and successfully ignore stares from rude waiters when I do not tip, or bookstore owners when they say “Thisees naat ye library”.

But occasionally, I do end up blushing. Like today.

Usual bookstore whose owner doesn’t quite mind me finishing the pulp-fic pop-lit in the store. Not when I actually do buy more durable tomes from him with amazing regularity.

I came across one of those tiny books which give you daily predictions for a whole year, based on your Sun sign. Found the right one. Found it was cellotaped shut.

Now I had no intention of buying that book, given one-third of the year is done. But I wanted to test the accuracy of the damn thing. Just like I read the day’s forecast after I am done for the day.

So since the cellotape was only around the middle of the book, I tried peering through the ends of the book, for one specific date to check if the book was on track there. Feb 10, Feb 14, Feb 15…. and I see the proprietor giving me a look.

I tried giving my best ‘Well, you caught me with my hand in the cookie jar for the gazillionth time since I was four years old, now what?’ look, but he just smiled and said

That’s not for Taurus, that’s for Aries

Whoops.

This is what happens when you’ve been going to the same bookstore since before you learned to read.

PS: I find in most stores that such books are present for all the sun signs with the exeption of Taurus… why? Is there more demand for these books among Taureans?

Late Afternoon – Books, Luchis and Conversation

So the Strand Book Festival is on, and I wanted to give it the once-over. A free weekend, the prospect of doing absolutely nothing the whole of Saturday loomed large. I didn’t seem to know anyone with as much enthu for Strand as me… or did I?

Chapter 1: The Strand DarkHorse-and-WhiteElephant Market

So my EvereadyToChillOut cousin and I found ourselves at Chinnaswamy Stadium wondering which of the three halls to check out first.

Big difference…. all of them were the darned same. For once, I didn’t feel like buying the entire bookstore. And no, that is not a compliment. The quality of books has dipped like crazy in my opinion. It’s full of crazy pseudosecular nonsense, the very titles of which have my blood pressure rising. Kancha Ilaiah has quite a few of his titles for sale. All Brahmin-bashing nonsense that wouldn’t stand scrutiny for a minute. C’mon, his logic is like “Hindus like cows. Hindus don’t like buffaloes. Cows are white. Buffaloes are black. Hence, Hindus are racist. QED”.

Apart from that, I didn’t think much of the quality of the fiction available. Most of it was racy pulp-fic-pop-lit that I really couldn’t justify paying for. There wasn’t much of Indian fiction, and most of the ones that were there were the NRI-rediscovering-roots types.

As for the title here, the prices were, like we say in Tamil, elephant-price-horse-price. The ‘Dark’ for the number of books there that had shot to fame after languishing unread for ages, like Holy Blood Holy Grail and the ‘White’ coz the eye-catching books were all these foot-long books full of awesome hi-res pics of people and places which cost a neat packet to buy, but served little purpose.

“Why do you go one week late? You should go on opening day! No wonder you’re disappointed”, chided my father when I called to ask if he or mum wanted anything. In the end, the only decent thing I found was a Japanese-English-Japanese dictionary my mum wanted. And an ‘Oils for Beginners’ book I found for sis, but in the time she took to make her mind up as to whether she wanted that one or the one on watercolors or the one on sketching, someone else filched it. Funnily, the exact same thing had happened last year. But then I’d returned later and found another copy of the book she wanted. I don’t think that’ll be happening anytime soon with this edition of Strand Book Festival.

I felt really insignificant standing in line to buy ONE slim volume when others were having basketloads of books. It has never happened before that I walk away nearly emptyhanded from a book exhibition… So on an impulse I bought Vikram Seth’s From Heaven Lake, a travelogue about his trips to Sinkiang and Tibet. Let’s see how it reads.

Chapter 2: A lot can happen over… Luchi!!

Cousin and I were rather starved, and had enough time for a small snack. So we hit KC Das. Cousin was rather sick of sweets for some reason, and we decided we’d order savouries. It’s quite a crowded place, where you don’t get a table to yourself. You end up sitting wherever you find a couple of free chairs, and no one minds. We ordered Luchi after deciding Sev would be an overdose of good stuff. At our table were a couple in the last stages of their meal, and they soon left.

While we were wondering if we should order a sweet to go along with this, this lady walked in. I assumed her to be Bong, because of her large, large eyes. Her eyes were rather shifty, and her body tense. Her manner was confused as she asked us if the seat opposite us was taken. We said it was not. She was in the last stages of a phone conversation as she put her bag, couple of magazines and a file folder on the table and proceeded to beckon the waiter.

Just then, a man came to her and said “Magazine”. And I thought her confusion couldn’t get worse. He pointed to the magazines in a cover next to her and said “Pay”. She said “But I paid!” and proceeded to hunt for the bill. This man then reached under her file folder and withdrew a blue glossy magazine. “Oh, I’m so sorry, I got a call and I walked away with it”, she said, more to us than to him.”I was calling a friend, had to meet her, and my cellphone battery was low… my cellphone battery is low…”. I told her it was nothing to worry about and that I walked away with the pen in the NITK library so many times (but mind you, I alwasy returned it when I realized I had it) that the librarian tied a string around it; such things are normal.

“Are you guys from Bangalore itself? God, after a point this city gets so boring!”. She seemed to be talking to herself. “Yeah, it’s rather boring for folks who don’t have a family here”, I said, after ascertaining she was indeed talking to me.”Where do you normally hang around? I live in Lavelle Road and so I hang around here… it’s so boring, nothing new here!”. “Oh, CMH and Indiranagar, South Bangalore…” “Oh yeah, CMH Road… I used to have… I have a friend who lives there, and we used to hang around at the CMH Road Coffee Day…. but that was two years ago. I haven’t met him since TWO YEARS! Oh God, what is happening??”.

“Egad, what’s happening” is what we were wondering too. “You seem rather tense… are you going to write an exam or something?” I offered. “Oh, no, she said, in a confused, distracted voice, “I’m just feeling rather lost. I seem to have lost it in life *nervous giggle*”.

Our orders arrived and we dug in. (On an aside, I now know after that meal why Bongs all eat meat. If you butcher vegetarian preparations like that with only a modicum of seasoning and spice, it is but natural that even Hitler would have taken to eating meat). She enquired whether we were students or professionals. We told her. I have no clue as to what she does, coz that bit was a hazy blur of college names, course names and place names, interspersed with enquiries of other totally unrelated programs. There was something about Mounts, something else about Christ and Josephs, and then something about Coimbatore. And then something about Geneva.

“What are you guys doing here?” she asked. We told her. “Oh, books… somehow I’ve never been able to understand how people can read such big books. You’ve to follow some goddamn long story also along with all those words.. I prefer magazines”. To each his own, but keep away from me with a ten-foot broomstick, girl, was what I wanted to say, but instead I said, “You can read travelogues also.. there’s not much of stories in those.. and short story collections are not so demanding on the attention span”.

“So what did you buy?”. We told her. Considering the amount of comforting she seemed to need, I think I would have told her the secret of the Holy Grail had she cared to ask. “Ohhh we share such common interests. I’ll be going to Geneva soon, so I’m interested in languages too”. Er.. Japanese… European… how common are we really? “So.. which do you recommend? Spanish? Italian? German?”. Instead of shrugging, I went on to elucidate why German was a better option. And I even happened to have a Max Mueller Bhavan handout in my jacket pocket, and handed it to her when she asked about the courses.

“Where are you from?” we asked her when she lapsed into a tense silence. “Coimbatore”, she said. “Ohh Tamizhaa?” we asked, with broad grins. “Yes” she replied and continued in English.

We were done with our meal. We asked for the bill. Oh WTH… they combined our bills!! We told her we needed to split it. She wasn’t done eating yet. She asked me to reach over to her bag, pick out her purse, and take out a Rs. 100 note. We paid our share but were still wondering WHAT was with this girl! Yeah, cousin and I are renowned for our innocent looks, but this really was careless.

After paying our share, we got up to leave. She said, “Stay till I finish, please?”. We obliged. She asked about trekking spots around Bangalore. We mentioned Muthathi. She was done. We got a call asking us where we were. It was time to leave.

We said it was nice meeting someone who was not a software engineer. We wished her luck with Geneva.

Out in the street, we wondered WHAT happened in the past half an hour. We’d never experienced anything like this before. (Oh, there was one incident where an old man suddenly called the same cousin and I when we were on our way home and ordered us to hail him an auto to Kamakhya, and was very very dissed when we hesitantly told him we had an appointment and gave us a dirty look as if we’d betrayed him or something). We didn’t know women naive enough to admit to complete strangers that they’re confused and are distracted or that their cellphone battery is low and they can’t make calls. We’ve never met anyone caught so off-guard. No, not even those middle-aged maamis on the Lalbagh Express who’ll tell you their life story at the drop of a hat and bitch about their mothers-in-law before you can say “maanga uruga” give an impression of this much naivete or helplessness.

It’s rather amazing to meet different sorts of people, and it’s comforting to know that you’re not the naivest person this world has seen… And it sure does feel good to speed up the return of people from extra-tense to normal, especially of people who don’t know you.

Oh, and it sure is nice to talk to strangers every once in a while.

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.

How to write an Indian Novel

Ah.. no, I don’t pretend to be about to write something that has even an iota of the brilliance of the RK Narayan essay of the same name, which got accepted by Punch for six guineas.

So I am appalled by the quality of fiction, more importantly Indian fiction that one gets to see in bookstores these days.

Actually, let’s go into a bit of a zoom-out…. I hate the newer bookstores of Bangalore. The ones that give you a basket to shop for books. (Blossoms, however, is excluded from the list…. but then it isn’t a ‘newer’ bookstore, is it) These places are stacked wall-to-wall with multiple copies of the same pulp-fic pop-lit trashy writing that I would maybe read but never in a million years buy.

Add to this mix nouveau riche folks who don’t have a discerning taste in reading, but buy books all the same from these bookstores, which don’t even have friendly proprietors to guide people around and give discerning recommendations on what to read… and what do you get?

Chetan Bhagat. Tushar Raheja. Arundathi Roy. And maybe Arvind Adiga, but I’ll refrain from passing judgements till I’ve read the book.

These are people who’ve probably read ONLY bad Indian writing, and said to themselves, “Heck, I can do better!”, and proceeded to write bestsellers which line the bookstores which young Indians read…. vicious circle there.

So when I read these book blurbs, I say to myself, “Heck, I can do better than that!”. Then realization dawns that I probably do not have the patience to write anything other than 1000-word blogposts about absolutely nothing. And fiction.. haha. I can’t spin yarns for nuts.

But hey, I can probably use some factory methods to write a novel? There are some time-tested rules on that. It all depends on what I want.

Two very obvious paths come to mind. The first one is the Chetan Bhagat way, which has been illustrated quite succinctly here. But then, I don’t want all that that comes with a Chetan Bhagat reputation, especially not fanmail like this, this and this. After reading these comments on Logik’s post on Mr. Bhagat, I began to sincerely, fervently hope those comments were from someone pulling a fast one on Logik, and not actual fan comments by fans who thought a scathing review of Mr. Bhagat was actually Mr. Bhagat’s blog!

So the other path would be to go the Arundathi Roy way.

I’ll first have to get a frickin’ crazy amount as an advance from Penguin or Rupa, or Bloomsbury if the Gods smile down on me. The publicity wave that follows that will be enough to keep me away from writing for months. In due course of the wave, there will be atleast one mediaperson who compares me with the other Tam-Brahm writergirl Kaavya Viswanathan. Of course, it’ll be hard to fit together her origins from Chennai, Glasgow, Timbuktu, and godaloneknowswhereelse with my Bangalore, Bangalore, Bangalore and Bangalore origins, but I’m sure ToI-Let paper will find some way to prove Kaavya’s Bangalore connection, or connect me to Glasgow and Harvard. After all, these people are the ones who researched Sabrina Setlur’s Bangalore origins!

And when I finally do get to writing the book, life is going to begin to be hell. Coz, most of these celebrated writers have had lives that are profoundly Left-leaning, at the crossroads of tradition, hated their origins, questioned everything around them…. unlike my right-of-center upbringing and conformist behaviour.

And my life has been a series of uninteresting events. I thank the stars above for my having all my loved ones intact, and for trauma being just another word in the dictionary, unlike many best-selling authors. But I’ve never witnessed history unfold, atleast I haven’t witnessed anything that has been proven yet to be an event that will be in history textooks. I went to a normal school that didn’t believe in building the character of its students by subjecting them to traumatic experiences, and pre-university was even more normal. NITK was a life-changing experience, but hardly anything happened there that is Booker-material… I didn’t lead a band of protestors to the Chief Warden’s door demanding for better food in the messes or anything. And I stayed put when riots broke out on the highway. I didn’t research ways to beat the Hayflick limit, I didn’t break into the Pakistani Arms database. Neither did I wrestle terrorists on the beach, nor did I meet the extremely poverty-stricken who made me hate myself for being born into the bourgeoise.

I might of course write a seemingly-humorous novel about very little, but sprinkled generously with Kannadiga and Tam-Brahm in-jokes, endless Bangalore reminisces, what it means to be a South Bangalorean… or put that all in a schoolgirl story, like my friend Poojitha Prasad did. But alas, I’ve been too hardened by life, and I’m pretty sure any such attempt on my part will reek of sermonizing on everything from following rules (or not) and feminism. Either ways, it won’t go further than my cousins in their early teens who are probably the only folks in their age group (my target audience) I know who’d choose to read a book in their spare time.

So, well, I’ll probably have to write a book that angers the Who’s Who of Bangalore. Bangalore, for the local flavor. And to ensure there’s a readymade audience of Bangaloreans and expat Bangaloreans who’d be roused by curiosity enough to read the book.

Ramachandra Guha, surely. And since all the Bongs think he’s one of them, I’m sure I’ll catch their eye too. There’s no point berating UR Ananthamurthy; everyone does, these days. It’ll be a heart-wrencher to bash Anil Kumble as he was a crush of mine once upon a time, but the deed will have to be done to raise some cricket-lover eyebrows. I might say a few things about Vishnuvardhan, but I’ll keep away from even mentioning Dr. Rajkumar lest the LeT and HuJI sleeper cells in Bangalore use that as an excuse to arrange some rioting.

Girish Karnad and Arjun Sajnani would probably get a dose, and maybe I should go on to assert that the plays at Ranga Shankara is the antithesis of all that that Shankar Nag stood for. Maybe I shouldn’t spare Mr. Garudachar of Garuda Mall fame… the amit_123 and isha_123 population of Bangalore might probably want to know more about their weekend hangout spots.

And to pay some tribute to my being in the software field, I’ll need to target Infy and Wipro and say they are really bleeding the city… now if that doesn’t raise hackles, I don’t know what else will. My community will possibly disown me, given the large number of folks who started their careers there…. brilliant, I’d be the enfant terrible of the Indian writing scene.

And I don’t think my publishers can ask for anything better.

The media would probably make me out to be some sort of a Killer Queen (yes, I still am a fan of Brian May, Roger Taylor, John Deacon and Farokh Bulsara)…. my publishers would have to pay royalty (and I make bad puns, yes).

Guess it would start off as a pathbreaking novel that “breaks” the “myth” of the whole world being Bangalored. A relatively insignificant work. And then comes to the notice of the Booker committee… who possiby haven’t gotten over their Raj hangover and expect any work from India to be Macaulayan in its view of the country to be certified as good, in their opinion.

And maybe I should wear a black hat along with my red tussar saree (a la Ms. Roy in In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones) when I go to accept the award and tell the committee they have blood on their hands. And maybe I should also say my saree is red – red with the blood of the millions of nameless toilers who pick out silkworm cocoons from scalding hot water to spin silk… possibly get out all my frustrations about Silk Board, and the traffic jams around it.

And back on home turf, I should probably spend the rest of my life protesting anything even remotely connected to Bangalore – the dancing ban, the 11:30 deadline, launch of new radio stations, construction of a new flyover, a new software park getting constructed, Def Leppard calling off its concert, Aerosmith coming, U2 coming (which I’ll probably use as an excuse to catch the concert live for free), Metallica coming, Maiden thinking of coming again, Russel Peters, S. Ve Shekhar conducting his plays, Y.Gee Mahendran doing the same, and PSBB opening another chain of schools in the city…

And what’ll I do for a living? Well… my first book will possibly be a cash cow.

But then, I’d probably face the prospect of piracy eating into my earnings.

So, well, I’ll upload the book on a googlepage, for free download. And maybe I’ll gather enough to publicize a Download Day for my book…. calling it a celebration of freedom from copyrights and the like… and ask folks to download the book, pass the link on…. and maybe also get Al Gore to back me on making the world a greener place by promoting ebooks… just think of all the trees that would have had to be cut to fulfill the demand for my book!

And I’ll live the rest of my life off Ad-Sense earnings.

And maybe the satisfaction of controlling and shaping atleast a part of public opinion via free stuff, a la New Life’s free proselytization material…. I can’t do that with hard copies; I don’t have moneybags from Latin America funding me.

Yet another blog of jokes

I come across a lot of jokes here and there. It really irks me when I’m reminded of a really good one and can’t for the hell of me recollect the punchline, or when I remember the punchline and forget about the story behind it.

So here it is… Chuckle and Guffaw – A collection of all the jokes I come across, and think is good.

Do give it a read, subscribe to its feeds, blogroll it, tell your friends.

And.. if you have some nice ones, do pass them on this way.

Review-of-sorts: The Hippopotamus – Stephen Fry

Watching Blackadder and Jeeves and Wooster, you do get a feeling Stephen Fry (Melchett in Blackadder, and Jeeves in J&W) has a flair for humour. And that’s what convinced me to buy this book.

I wouldn’t go to the extent some people go to, and elevate Mr. Fry to the level of Wodehouse, but I should certainly say he’s got a style of his own.

Getting to the book… I had no idea on what to expect. I hadn’t read much contemporary British fiction, save Harry Potter, Artemis Fowl and Bridget Jones, and those would definitely not be anything to go by.

The blurb reads, Ted Wallace is an old, sour, womanizing, cantankerous, whisky-sodden beast of a failed poet and drama critic, but he has his faults too… That got me right into the novel.

It opens with the aforementioned Mr. Wallace getting the sack, and not very long afterward, running into his long-lost god-daughter Jane.

It soon turns out that she’s dying of leukemia. The conversation turns to Jane’s uncle Michael, in whose mansion, miracles are whispered to be happening. And Jane engages her godfather to investigate the mysterious goings-on…

Most of the novel is told from Ted’s perspective. His cynical viewpoints, monologues full of dry sarcasm and passionate digressions are a pleasure to read. At times, you do happen to feel it’s Fry speaking, especially the cynical tirades, and the language at these points might seem showy, but it’s so engaging and entertaining, you are tempted to tolerate it. On his digressions, Ted says,

No, I fart this noxious guff in your faces not because it’s important or new, nor because I want to engage in a sterile debate about it, but because you have to understand something of my mood and disposition the day Jane found me and dragged me off to Kensington.

On looking at the interior decorator Jane’s house, he says,

“This is one of the most revolting rooms I’ve ever stood in all my life. It is exactly as hideous as I expected, and exactly as hideous as ten thousand rooms within pissing distance of here. It’s an insult to the eye and as fully degrading a cocktail of overpriced cliche as can be found outside Beverly Hills. I would no more park my arse on that sofa with its artfully clashing and vibrantly assorted cushions than I would eat a dog-turd. Congratulations on wasting an expensive education, a bankload of money and your whole sad life. Goodbye.”
That’s what I would have said with just two more fingers of whisky inside me. Instead, I managed a broken “My God.. Jane…”.

The narrative fits the story like a glove – most of the novel is told in the form of letters from Ted to Jane. There are short replies that suit to direct the reader’s attention to different aspects of the mysterious happenings. There are also letters and faxes from Jane’s other correspondent in the mansion, her friend Patricia who’s also heard of the mysterious healing powers of the place and is there to recuperate from a break-up. And a diary entry too, from the diary of a homosexual ex-padre friend of Michael’s and Ted’s who’s got “a cute lover and acute angina”, who’s also at the mansion for “some much needed R&R”, where R&R “is Eighties-speak and means Rest and Recreation, or possibly Rest and Recuperation, at a pinch, Rest and Relaxation. Not Rock and Roll, nor Rhyme and Reason, nor Rough and Ready, nor Radicals and Revolutionaries, nor Rum ‘n’ Raisin”.

There are also glimpses from the life of Michael’s son David, who seems to be at the epicenter of all the mysterious healing that has been going on. These serve to increase the suspense and shock value.

A backstory is also inserted in the form of an extract from the biography of Michael that Ted is supposed to be writing – an excuse for Ted to probe deeply about the nature of the miraculous happenings.

The story and the writing ensures there’s not a single dull moment, and the book does have its unputdownable moments, but there’s also this bit in the middle when it all but becomes apparent the nature of David’s healing powers, when you feel like having been invited to the wine cellar for ginger ale. But only for a page or two… Ted’s cynicism and sarcasm soon puts things into perspective.

All in all, a nice read, timepass, but certainly not a one-time read. It’s nothing deep, but the rich, fruity language and choice of words make for brilliant reading and re-reading. Story is straightforward, nothing complicated, but sort of can get you thinking on what social conditioning can do to an individual, if you are jobless enough. Full marks to the style of narration – the way the plot twists are unveiled to the unsuspecting reader, the way the facts are presented in the letters… all these we’ve (read I’ve) seen before only in books that took themselves too seriously, or where authors took the books too seriously for their own good, but the amazing lightness of this book along with the language and narrative are a brilliant combination.

I’d recommend it to be read. Preferably in a cynical state of mind – the empathy you’ll find in the first few pages will simply be mindblowing…. Ted says

If you’re a halfway decent human being you’ve probably been sacked from something in your time… school, seat on the board, sports team, club, satanic abuse group… something. You’ll know that feeling of elation that surges up inside you as you flounce from the headmaster’s study, clear your locker or sweep the pen-tidies from your desk. No use denying the fact, we all feel undervalued: to be told officially that we are off the case confirms our sense of not being fully appreciated by an insensitive world. This, in a curious fashion, increases what psychotherapists and assorted tripe-hounds of the media calls our self-esteem, because it proves we were right all along. It’s a rare experience in this world to be proved right on anything and it does wonders for the amour propre, even when, paradoxically, what we are proved right about is our suspicion that everyone considers us a waste of skin in the first place.

Addendum 1: Oh, and I also read Such A Long Journey by Rohinton Mistry… good read, loved the bits about R&AW, but they turn out to be damp squibs at the end… except for the threats and allusions to possible means of eliminating Sanjay Gandhi and Indira Gandhi… but you have to remember this book was written much after both their deaths. Mr. Mistry calls his work Indo-nostalgic. Thank God it’s more Indo than Nostalgic unlike most diaspora writers we’ve found in the past couple of decades. Got a kick finding this book… I’d seen trailers of the movie version around ten years back… with a young man telling his parents, “I’ve had it with your constant IIT, IIT, IIT!”. More than anything else, that line stuck with me… and I’ve had opportunity to use it a couple of times in the past ten years, and whenever I felt irritated, I’ve taken solace in that one line…. there you go, Indo and Nostalgic.

Addendum 2: Don’t watch an Indian-made whodunit (in my case, Ramesh Arvind’s Accident, which actually is pretty well-made, though the script could have been aeons better… still beats any Bollywood “thriller” or “whodunit” hollow… except maybe gems like Manorama Six Feet Under.) after two days of continuously devouring Feluda stories. You’ll end up laughing your head off at the cinema hall and inviting stares and nasty threats.

Addendum 3: It’s amazing to find so many people riding on someone else’s popularity wave… next to this book, I find a stack of books by “Stephen Frey”… no dry British humor, just cheap American pulp-fic. You also can find books by “Dale Brown”. Barry Trotter, The Da Vinci Cod… *sigh* the very sight of these makes me want to cry.

Last Inci – First Day. And farewell to S. Rangarajan aka Sujatha

Now Listening to: Some darn good fusion version of Raghuvamsha Sudha by an unknown artiste.

The day started off not very good, and YouKnowWhoYouAre (I suppose you prefer you_know_who_you_are), if it’s any consolation, I feel really horrible about how I started off my day, and possibly, your day.

Anyway…. getting to Inci Day 0….

I slept through Slam Dunk!‘s inaugural basketball match, and woke up just in time to have dinner and head to Bandish. Earlier on, when I’d not yet bothered to check the Inci schedule, Maloo told me about Bandish. We’d assumed it was a performance by The Bandish Projekt, (they’d released a song/album called Bhor a long, long time ago, which should have been called Bore according to me) who IMO sound like absolut losers. But heck, it turned out to the Eastern Musicals

Shiny, Kosu and I took turns getting photographed under the bulbs hung by the way which were covered with really ni-i-ice lampshades, trying to look like we had some bright ideas. People nightouted last night making the lampshades… and the result it turns out is FANTABULOUS.

[pic to be put up soon]

Eastern Musicals @ Inci this time surpassed everything I’d seen before. The average quality of the performances was very, very high this time. Not a single performance could be called boring, or sub-standard. Every band was able to keep our attention, and most managed to impress

NITK’s performance was, as usual, brilliant, with talented performances by all, and a great choice of songs, which were both crowd-pullers as well as which showcased our best. We came third.

The second prize was bagged by BMS. Quite a departure from their previous years’ performances, this one was. The singers all seemed to be trained in Classical Vocals, and it showed in both their excellent performances and choice of songs. Guys, your brilliant performance would have been better appreciated by the crowd if only you’d chosen better songs, songs which people knew.

And…. one of the bands did a bloody massacre of Pal by Strings and Sagarika (They did it WITHOUT THE VIOLINS!! How could they!), and another one butchered Dum Mast Qalander, after which I messaged a friend saying “Yeah… the next band will also come, they’ll play my favorite Indipop number in such a way as to completely ruin the evening for me..”. And as it often happen, I was proven wrong. No, make that WRONG.

This band takes stage, starts off playing Paisa by Agosh. That’s enough for me and Tuna, we’re already impressed. They didn’t have to do that svelte transition from Dhoom Pichuk to Sayonee, or sing Luka Chuppi. But that original number which was a fusion of Hindustani, Carnatic, and Western… phew! I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a large standing ovation EVER in Eastern Musicals (or Western, for that matter) before!

Message for the team from BIT: Never before have everyone unanimously felt that someone deserved the first prize. Here are some of the nice things people were heard saying about you guys:

“What a lead singer da! He holds the whole show together!”

“Man! That lead singer guy is totally in control!”

“Whoa! What a goodlooking backup vocalist” – they meant the guy in the green kurta.

“If I’d not known Dhoom Pichuk was different from Sayonee, I would have thought they were the same song”.

“Perfection, da”.

“Paisa! Don’t think any other band has had such guts in the past”.

“They made my day”

And a request from The NITK Numbskulls, and our friends: Could you please, please, give us an audiofile of your original composition?

And I’ll say it again… You guys were godawesome.

**************

I came back and among my feeds [from LazyGeek, who is THE biggest fan of Sujatha I know, and has the privilege of Sujatha himself commenting on his blog. LazyGeek has closed down both his blogs for the next one week as a mark of mourning], found one that informed me of the sad demise of S. Rangarajan, the guy who supervised the design and production of Electronic Voting Machines in India, and who is more popularly known as Sujatha, the author of over 100 novels, 250 short stories, ten books on science, ten stage plays, and a slim volume of poems. He is better-known for his scripting of movies like Iruvar, Boys, Kannathil Muthamittaal, Sivaji, Aayutha Ezhutthu.

All I knew of him were his movies, my inability to read Tamil coming in the way of my appreciating his writing otherwise. His dialogues were so realistic, so full of life, the sort that struck a chord in you and stayed with you for days, or maybe even years. One dialogue that comes to mind from Aayutha Ezhuththu: Esha Deol tells Surya, “Enna ni, enna oththrum-illaada theatre-ko, Pondicherry-ko kootindu poegaama edho oru graamathuku aleichindu porai….”

Tamil cinema has suffered a great loss. And like Vishwas put it, Director Shankar has a dog’s chance of ever having another hit to his name.

Personally, I feel a loss, for he was not just a talented and prolific writer, but an engineer as well, and hence, to me, a role model, an idol, an ideal to live upto. If I ever end up learning to read Tamil, Mr. Sujatha, it will mainly be to appreciate your stories and other works of fiction.

From what little I know of him, he seemed to have led a full life, and accomplished a good bit in both his chosen careers. May your soul rest in peace, and may your legacy and huge body of work continue to inspire people like me.

And on that note, Mr. Rangarajan, I bid you adieu.