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.

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.

A Bowlful of Minestrone

You never realize what you have until…. sounds too cliched, doesn’t it?

Do unto others as…. nah, this too.

Absence is to love what wind is to fire…. mush-ick-y.

Give ‘im an enema and ‘e’ll fit into a matchbox... there.. that’s a better status message.

For close to eight years now, I have been mistaken for a metalhead, so much that people once dropped by to check if I’m fine when they heard strains of Roxette’s It must have been love from my room. [I am not exaggerating... my friend felt my forehead, peered into my eyes, and gave me the mental third-degree about whether I had fallen in or out of love or what. And no, it was neither.]. I suppose that phase is ending… retro Hindi is taking over my playlist.

Talking of which, I read somewhere that Kishore Kumar once had a “Beware of Kishore” board put up on his gate. And once when a colleague came home and offered to shake hands as he was leaving, the maestro bit his hand, and laughingly asked the visitor whether he had seen the board on the gate.

And another bit of trivia… apparently Nana Patekar is a police artist – the sort to which you describe what your assailant looks like and based on that get a sketch of what (s)he probably looks like.

Watching Kamal Haasan’s Kurudhipunal, which is a remake of Govind Nihalani’s Drohkaal, I wonder what the difference between a “good” person and a “bad” one is… is an good armyman still good when he makes tiny, seemingly careless transgressions that anyone could make by mistake, at the behest of a terrorist organization that’s holding his family hostage? And that, along with a few events I came across at college makes me wonder… is a niceguy still a niceguy overall if he doesn’t remain a niceguy when faced with a nattily-dressed Natalie?

It’s amazing how little things can be such a turn-off. Like the way Sagarika Ghose says “Mmhmm”, and the finality of her tone when she says “Okay” to cut off someone she is speaking to. Or when someone swipes the kitchen counter with a dishcloth in a way which doesn’t ensure gleaming surfaces. Or uses ‘besides’ where they should actually use ‘beside’… as in “She lives besides my house”. Or simply bad grammar, zero punctuation and improper capitalization on blogs.

Talking of Ms. Ghose cutting people off, I’ve begun to watch Lok Sabha TV, and it makes such a refreshing change where you have panel discussions with not more than four panelists, where none of them cut the others off, and best of all, the moderator really moderates, and it does sound like a chat than a charged-up game of one-upmanship with the stress and time constraints showing on the reporter’s face as you so often see on 24-hour news channels. The interviews aren’t designed to provoke, but to gather insight about issues rather than people. And unlike other TRP-oriented channels, the interviewer openly says “I disagree with you on this” rather than let that show in the way he biases the discussion, and very less attempt, if at all, is made at being politically correct.

I wonder what has happened to the concept of gathering around for the purpose of idle chatter. You don’t anymore see people gathered around a park bench talking politics or cricket or national policy, or even plain gossiping… no, not even the ajjas and ajjis in panche or cotton sarees and imported sports shoes… they are too busy looking inward, closing their eyes and meditating, when they are not walking at marathon-ish speeds.

So much hoo-haa is being made about the shortage of teachers… why don’t they simply hype teaching as a career on par with one in the IT field or medicine, like it has been done in Southeast Asia and Finland, with really painful entrance exams and coursework (though I’d say the coursework in a decently good college in India is no joke either), apart from absurdly high pay?

I’m not able to understand the correlation between a good education and being a good leader. It’s the sort of thing that is taught in schools, but it seems absurd to me that Shashi Tharoor writes a column asking why when the US has its presidents from Harvard and Yale that we don’t. More than education it has to be a willingness to learn, and knowledgeability. And education, while it opens up new insights and possibly newer ways to solve problems, is no band-aid remedy for corruption; if anything, it enables you to loot the nation in a more suave way. India doesn’t have any dearth of educated politicians… Narendra Modi is a postgraduate in Political Science, Praveen Togadia is an oncologist, Manohar Parrikar and Jairam Ramesh are from IITB…. and, on the other hand, Madam Sonia didn’t even quite finish a spoken-English course at Cambridge, and after Nehru, the only graduate in the Family has been Varun Gandhi and he is not with the Congress…. well, there you go.. that resolves the doubt I put forward in the first line. But heck, what has a stint at School of Architecture given Arundathi Roy other than one of her husbands, and material for In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones?

I’ve started to see ads for this proposed successor to IPL… it’s called ICL. If you, the cricket fan haven’t yet heard of it, despair not and you can stop looking for more feeds and sites to keep you updated on the latest in the Gentleman’s Game… it’s the Indian Comedy League. It’s on Star Vijay and the humour doesn’t seem much different from the other standup comedy shows… the same imitations of Vinu Chakravarthy, Chinni Jayanth, Janagaraj and Bhagyaraj.. but the team names sound cool this time – Chennai Kings, Trichy Terrors, Kovai Killadies, Pondy DeFulls, Katpadi Cutbodies, Nellai Notties, Salem Siddhars, Madurai Mannars. And for some weird reason, I have the lines in the ad going round and round my head – “Tiruchi da, kokka!”, “Ellam rendu-renda theriyudhu”, “Haiyyo.. vekka-vekkama varudhu”, “Maga, soukyama?”…  Going by these, it should be called the TNCL… we didn’t see as much as a Bangalore Bandha-parties or a Kolkata Koothaadies.

After hearing about Love Story 2050, I’m wondering why coloured hair is seen as a sign of rebellion… I’ve always wanted to have my hair colored bubblegum pink or a garish violet, or electric blue streaks like Kylie of Extreme Ghostbusters, and I’m the worst sort of conformist and conservative you can find. Oh, and the reason I haven’t yet done it is the risk of follicular damage, wispiness and split-ends, all of which I can’t take for granted considering the long time it takes to recover from the effects of hard water. Oh and if you want to advise me to try burgundy or hazelnut, please don’t waste time… IMO, if you’re coloring your hair, it should look like you’ve coloured it, not like you’re trying to cover up a few greys.

And… the other debutante flick… Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na… from what I’ve heard of the storyline, it’s a remake of the Prashant-Shalini starrer, Piriyaadha Varam Vendum, Shalini’s last flick before she succumbed to the pressures of matrimony, which itself was a remake of a Malayalam flick called Niram. While it is refreshing to *not* hear the line “But… we’re friends!”, or variations thereof, it gets onto your nerves to hear yet again that Ladka-Ladki kabhi dost nahin ho sakte. I can’t help but give an ironic laugh at that.

Look at the ease with which I declared a movie I hadn’t even seen to be a remake of a Tam flick… for some reason I seem to worship Tamil cinema, atleast more than Bollywood or even Hollywood, as I discovered on a long, long discussion with yet another fanatic.

There’s this old, old friend of mine who I’ve long lost touch with, who I had almost forgotten about. Recently, I was reminded of a story idea suggested by this friend – a murder mystery set in the Indus-Sarasvati Civilization. Of course, he called it the Indus Valley Civilization, and staunch Congressman, secularist and Anglophile that he was, he called the river as Indus, or if we got into specifics, the Ghaggar-Hakra, instead of the Sarasvati. Gives me an indication of how much I seem to have changed in idealogy since then, but still, that’s one heck of a story idea… anyone any more ideas, anyone?

And in case you’re wondering what Minestrone is… here.