YES

THE SOUND OF TYPEWRITERS

2011-12-12T14:35:00.004-05:00

If you've never heard the sound of genuine, honest-to-goodness manual typewriters (mechanical, electric, whateverical) and have always yearned to know what they sounded like, well ... here's your chance. Performed by someone who may well be the world's best-known -- if not also the first-known -- beatboxer, MICHAEL WINSLOW of 1984's POLICE ACADEMY. Brought to my attention via the superlative VERY SHORT LIST.

History of the typewriter recited by Michael Winslow from SansGil—Gil Cocker on Vimeo.

Decoration

2011-10-29T22:45:00.000-04:00

Couldn't resist. This is the decoration on my front door, received as a gift in the mail from my sister Su, today. I have named the charming arachnid Lady Long Legs on account of the gorgeous, shapely limbs that can be made to wiggle about. I plan to keep re-arranging them in the week ahead.

DOUBLE EGG

2011-10-29T12:18:00.001-04:00

There's no way to prove this, but the eggs pictured here were actually ONE egg, with two yolks. I know, I know -- it's common enough -- but not for moi. So after the first couple of eggs I thought, "Hey wait! Why am I being cool about this? It's new for ME. Even if the whole rest of the world gets double yolk eggs for breakfast EVERYDAY, I haven't so far." So I took a photograph, with my usual ineptitude (just so that it's clear I'm not employing a professional) and have -- as you can see -- posted it here. I got about five double yolk eggs in a carton of 12 extra-larges. They tasted completely normal. I was SO disappointed!

Puzzle Time #3

2011-10-16T12:40:00.000-04:00

Five more pictures. Things seen around my house. Two are slightly unusual. To post guesses, scroll down and click on "comments"-- then scroll down again to see the input window. I monitor comments, so your response won't be instantly visible.

SUBWAY PORTRAITS, lithograph

2011-10-14T13:40:00.000-04:00

SUBWAY PORTRAITS, Poster
SUBWAY PORTAITS, Tee Shirt

This is a lithograph I made at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, under the expert guidance of master printer Devraj Dakoji, in 2009, in NYC.

The link will take you to the Zazzle.com site where you can buy a poster of the print. Also a tee-shirt -- though I'm not totally sure whether or not it's appeared in the "market place" yet.

A Joke For Our Times

2011-10-13T11:51:00.001-04:00

Got this joke from my most reliable source of Web Gold, AA (click to see the punch-line):

As it's no longer politically correct to direct a joke at any racial or ethnic minority, try this one:
An Englishman, a Scotsman, an Irishman, a Welshman, a Gurkha, a Latvian, a Turk, an Australian, a German, an American, an Egyptian, a Japanese, a Mexican, a Spaniard, a Russian, a Pole, a Lithuanian, a Jordanian, a New Zealander, a Swede, a Finn, an Israeli, an Egytian, a Romanian, a Bulgarian, a Serb, a Swiss, a Greek, a Singaporean, an Italian, a Norwegian, an Argentinian, a Libyan, a Nigerian, a Ghanaian and an Liberian went to a night club.

The man at the door looked at them and said, "Sorry, I can't let you in without a Thai.”

THINGIVATOR

2011-10-11T22:12:00.002-04:00

This is so amazing I had to post it here right away, even though I will of course ALSO e-mail it to long-suffering friends and fambly who (I know) find my enthusiasm for Every New Thing just a teensy bit tiresome.

Well, TOUGH! Some things are irresistibly enthusiasmagoric.

The video (click the post and the vid-interface will come up) features BRE PETTIS, CEO of MakerBot, a company that makes machines which permit people anywhere to print things out in three dimensions. For $1300. This isn't the first example of such wizardry I've seen, because this 3D printing revolution has been evolving quietly in the background for several years. But it's starting to spill out of the design stage and into our homes.

Puzzle Time #2

2011-10-09T12:33:00.002-04:00

Picture Puzzle #2

Several friends responded to Picture Puzzle #1 but only two managed to post comments (and one posted via me). I think there were a couple of problems: (a) it wasn't easy to find the puzzle because of my post about the World Tour Mystery (b) the "comments" button is not merely tucked out of sight, but you've got to click on it and then scroll down to see it. Which is a bore. This new template is still being tweaked, so maybe that'll improve.

Okay! I thought the previous pix were too obvious by half -- but I didn't know whether to make em more or less so. Based on that experience I ... STILL DON'T KNOW! Heh. So this new lot is easy too but I used the same background for four, which may help with scale issues. They're also common objects. But how common is "common"? In the previous set, I realized belatedly that #4 was coloured in a way that wouldn't be common in India. Anyway, here now are the answers to Picture Puzzle #1:

1) Popcorn -- i.e., one popped kernel
2) Postage stamp -- the wiggly edge between one stamp and its neighbour. They're self-adhesive stamps so the familiar perforations are missing. This, like #4, was location-specific. Also the stamp is not typical and the fragment of printing that you see is misleading. So ... my bad.
3) Cotton bud
4) Toothpick tip -- an ordinary wooden one, but blue
5) Burnt match-head (everyone got this, no surprise)

Below are five new pix. Complaints are welcome, BTW -- too easy/too hard/too blurred -- I'd like to know. I plan to do this once a week! So feedback is useful. As before, scroll down past the pictures to find the comment button. Click on it and THEN SCROLL AGAIN. I watch-dog them, so they won't post immediately.

Okay! PUZZLE TIME

2011-10-01T16:12:00.000-04:00

TWO puzzles: one is in my most recently published book, THE WORLD TOUR MYSTERY (Tulika Books, Madras, 2011); the other one's right below the book-info, a very simple amusement I put together just for you, Unknown BlogVisitor.

THE WORLD TOUR MYSTERY
This is the cover and there's a description of the book at the link. But if you're feeling too lazy to explore the link, here's what I wrote, for Tulika's blog, about working on the book:

This book took shape in my mind mainly because of a party game we used to play when I was little. It was called Around-the-World: no game-board, player tokens or pictures of places and countries. Instead the names of cities were scattered through the house and the players were told to figure out the correct sequence of places on an (imaginary) world tour. Playing the game involved a great deal of running up and down and all around the rooms of the house, with much excited screaming and calling out of cities. The first person to get the whole sequence correct was the winner.

I enjoyed this game so much that I thought it might be possible to make it into a book. BUT … dearie me! It really wasn't easy. In my typical way, I started with the thing I wanted to do most: which is, to make drawings of some of my favorite monuments from around the world. Having done that, I thought, it would be quite simple to force the drawings to become a game! And also a book!

Of course, I was wrong.

Fortunately, Tulika's editors are very kind and also very patient. I actually completed one version of the book with big colored drawings of my favourite monuments. In the end, however, we all agreed that it just wasn't working as a book. So it didn't get published. We all felt there was something nice about the idea if only it could be worked out in some other way.

Well, five years passed. During that time, I worked on SAME & DIFFERENT, a sequel to I AM DIFFERENT!. Both books explore the ways in which sameness and differences are interesting subjects to think about. As the idea of the Monuments book continued to twitch and grow inside my mind, I and Tulika began to see that difference/sameness are a really important part of traveling too. After all, people in other countries look different and have unique local costumes, yet -- as we see in the book -- tourists look the same wherever they go! When we line up to board an aircraft, we see hundreds of people, some young, some old, some funny, some strange: yet for all the differences, we can also see so much that's the same: we all drink water, for instance; little babies of all nationalities scream in the same language; and everyone looks grumpy if there's a long queue for the toilet.

The first big improvement was to create a puzzle based on the game but not really like it at all. You've still got to figure out the correct sequence of places on the tour, but by finding clues embedded in the pictures rather than by running around a house. The next improvement was to imagine a family going on a trip – and then to think up names and faces and personalities for the members of that family. Finally, the family became the focus of the book and the monuments got fitted into the background. That's how the world looks to us when we go on a real sight-seeing trip: a lot of people in holiday clothes, with strange or interesting-looking structures in the distance.

So what we have now is a puzzle-book called The World Tour Mystery with lots to look at and amusing facts to read, as Mum, Dad, Aunt Mimi, Kooks, Bunny and Bobo travel around the world.

I hope you enjoy it as much I enjoyed putting it together! And maybe some day you'll go on a world tour just like it.

PICTURE PUZZLE -- #1 October 1st, 2011

Guess what the objects in the pictures are. All very common. There won't be any prizes this time around, because it's too easy. But the next time around, who knows?

Watch this space ...

2011-09-28T17:03:00.002-04:00

Well. Yes. It's been a while ...

So I thought I'd come back to life (not that I've been dead! Just bizzy*) with a surprise -- I mean, it's a surprise to me too -- change of lay-out. I just happened to discover Google's Blogger re-vamp earlier today. I don't know if it's just confusing or rather cool. But anyway. As a way of making a fresh start ... I thought, WHY NOT?

So here we are. For today.

MOON SOAP. For late-night showers.

(*I've been living in downtown Newport, Rhode Island, in a tiny apartment, since 1st May this year. There's a Dunkin Donuts on my doorstep. So far it's been a good year: another picture book for Tulika -- it's just been published but isn't on the market yet, so I haven't gotten around to posting about it; an odd new art form that is probably only amusing for me; an enthusiasm connected to an internet site which I'll post about here eventually; the project-in-hand, which I don't want to name directly except to say it may be a sequel to my last novel; a new niecelet -- in Boston, this time; and an encounter with nature in the form of Hurricane Irene. And LOTS of movies becoz I signed up for Netflix. Yes, of course, just as the company goes down the tubes. This is typical of me so I didn't even bother being surprised/depressed).

HAPPINESS

2011-06-22T09:22:00.029-04:00

I'm compiling a list of "variations on the theme of happiness". Please join in and compose one of your own! Post it as a comment or send me e-mail and I'll include it on this list. Initials are what I'm using for the moment, but if anyone wants their full name revealed they can ask for it.

VARIATIONS ON THE THEME OF HAPPINESS

I'm as happy as a …

… fruit bat in a mango orchard! (MP)

... a kite on a long string! (MP)
… a starving bear who has fallen into a pot of honey! (EG)
... a grasshopper on a Pogo stick! (GD)
... a hummingbird in a honeysuckle bush! (SN)

... a clam in a spy agency! (DM)

... a dot in a decimal factory! (KR)

... a transparency that didn't get stuck inside the photocopier! (Dr SS)

... a manic depressive with a bottle of pentobarbital! (AA)

... a newborn baby at her mother's breast! (DMM)(= new niecelet! Posted on her behalf by An Admirer)

... a closet-laundress with a new spin-dryer! (SN) (deep ref. to context here ...)

... a Scrabbler who has picked both the blanks! (SA)

... a Lawyer in a litigation-prone land! (VM)

... a Masochist in hell! (SM)

... a cat in a bowl of mice! (NR)
... a kitten in a pile of feathers! (NR)

(the following are all from AA. I tried to remove the numbers but they wouldn't go away in "compose" view and Html is only good when I don't have to fix it)

2. ... a masochist in bed with a sadist

3. ... a virgin on her wedding night

4. ... a paedophile in a kindergarten class

5. ... an agoraphobic in a stranded elevator

6. ... a urolagnic in a pathology lab

7. ... a nymphomaniac in a gang-bang

8. ... a teddy bear with its little boy

9. ... the thumb in a baby’s mouth

10.... George Bush in a B-2 over Baghdad, with his finger on the button

... a sore bum in a sitz-bath! (SN)

... a bat in a belfry! (MB)

... the ink in Will's quill! (SBI)

... the hare beating the tortoise! (SBI)

(all of the following are by AA -- who is definitely winning this blog's Most Varied Definitions of Happiness Prize)(so far)

... honey-bee in a field of thyme!

... baby who’s just had its first taste of chocolate!

... aomeone whose biopsy result says ‘Negative’!

... shopaholic with a stolen credit card!

... an anorexic in Ramadhan!

... a monk in a massage parlour!

... a suicide bomber with his foot on the accelerator!

... an author who’s writing the last paragraph of his novel!

... Charlie Brown after a kiss from the little red-haired girl!

... a fly in a puddle of shit!

(okay, these are from MP)

… a battery in a charger!

… a chick under a wing!

… a firefly in a hall of mirrors! (uhh … CRAZY happy)

… a free electron!

… a nudist on the first day of spring!

… a gas balloon on a hot day!

… a magnet at the North Pole!

… a bull in a Swarovski show room!

… a kitten with a ball of wool!

… as an arsonist in Hell! (heheh)

... a puppy in a splash pool! (RK)

(yet more from AA!)

… an olive in a martini!

… a pig with a truffle!

…. A rabbi with a pork-chop! (Uh-oh ...)

… a kid who’s just learned to cycle (30 seconds ago)!

… a pilot whose parachute has finally opened at 200 feet!

… a constipated lady who’s just had her first shit after 10 days!

… a tranvestite with a new pair of Pradas!

… Christina Hendricks’s bra!

… a guy who quit smoking and just lit up his first cigarette after 6 months!

… someone coming out of Bukhara (burp!)

... a philantrophist reincarnated as santa clause! (Shomu)

... a smile! (Ishan)

... a baby gurgling in bath-water! (Golly)

... Rip Van Winkle after 200 years of sleep! (Anjali)

(more from MP - gotta keep up with AA!)

… a shorn sheep!

… a released kidnappee!

… a new graduate!

… a flag in a high wind!

… a released dove!

… a popped pimple! (yuck!)

… a gushing geyser!

… a fresh-hatched tadpole!

… a cured AIDS patient!

… a successful litigant!

and … an escaped convict!

(OH AAAARGH! More from AA!)

… the worm in a tequila bottle

… a psychopath with a steam-roller

… an epileptic with a drum-set

… a foot fetishist in a shoe shop

…. a sniper in Sarajevo

… someone who’s discovered a wrong credit of Rs 10,00,000 in their bank account

… someone who’s just cracked the Times crossword

… someone who’s just peed in the swimming pool

… Ogden Nash, after finally finding a rhyme for ‘silver’

… the man who broke the bank at Monte Ca-a-a-rlo!

(*gasp, pant, wheeze* these are from MP)

… Galileo Galilei seeing the rings of Saturn for the first time!

… Isaac Newton being hit by his apple!

… Edmond Hillary at the summit of Everest!

… Hellen Keller saying her first word!

… Marie Curie discovering X-rays!

… Andrew Wiles solving Fermat's Last Theorem!

… Robinson Crusoe seeing a human footprint!

… Frodo when he wore the Ring!

… Max returning to his room in Where the Wild Things Are!

… Alice eating mushrooms!

(Oh NOOOOO! More from AA!)

… a kid with a new box of crayons!

… a monkey on a mango tree!

… an accountant who’s finally got his trial balance to balance!

… the bouncer in a whore-house!

… Ronald Reagan with a giant bottle of jelly-beans!

… Morarji Desai in a pathology lab!

… someone who’s just signed his first 8-figure cheque!

… someone who’s just farted in a bathtub!

… a 4-year old at a birthday party!

… the cherry on top of an ice-cream sundae!

(and these are MP's last and final set!)

… a water molecule returning to the ocean!

… salmon returning to their spawning grounds!

… ruby-throated humming birds making it across the Bay of Mexico!

… a queen bee at the peak of her inaugural flight!

… all of Bombay at the start of the monsoon!

… whooping cranes displaying!

… polar bears at the start of the next Ice Age!

… an emperor penguin at his mate's return!

… a porcupine nailing another tiger in the mouth!

… a novelist recovering from a hard-disk crash!

... a nose in a book! (EG)

... a Clintern! (JD -- who explains: "Clinton getting into an intern")

Night Blooming Cereus

2011-06-19T21:59:00.004-04:00

These photographs were taken by me, all on the same day (June 10th), from around two in the afternoon till maybe nine at night. The flower's common name is NIGHT BLOOMING CEREUS. The link takes you to the Wikipedia entry on the plant's family, which includes this flowering species as well as the one that produces DRAGONFRUIT. The botanical name of this particular plant is most likely Epiphyllum oxypetalum, or Gooseneck cactus. The related variety, cultivated for the fruit, is called Hylocerus undatus.

I wrote a blog entry about this some years ago, because I was totally blown away to discover that there was any kind of link between this beautiful and very short-lived flower and the fruit -- perhaps because I associate the fruit with Southeast Asia, having eaten it for the first (and only) time in Singapore. Most people who have seen or know of the flower do not associate it with the fruit AT ALL. But if you compare the strangely zoological appearance of the flower's bud, it is easy to recognize the shadow of the fruit's shape in it.

The flower doesn't last the night and by morning, it looks like a pale pink bat-carcase. My sister got her plant from a friend who said they had never seen the flower blooming but had heard it was spectacular. In my sister's house, it has bloomed so often it's like a regular cabaret! Sometimes a dozen blossoms will all go critical in the same night. She says they don't bloom very often, but more than once a year.

INDIAN NEWSPAPERS

2011-06-11T09:00:00.003-04:00

Got this list from the Incomparable Anvar Alikhan. Good reading. I freely confess that my household in New Delhi gets only one daily newspaper and that one is ... the last one on this list. 'Course, I'm not exactly living at that address these days, so maybe that lets me off the hook? On the other hand, where I'm living now, I don't get ANY newspapers. *sigh*

INDIA'S NEWSPAPERS

The Times of India is read by people who think they run the country.
The Economic Times is read by people who think they own the country.
The Bombay Samachar is read by people who do, in fact, own the country.
The Hindu is read by people who think the country should be run by the government of another country.

The Statesman is read by people who remember the time the country was run by the British.

The Telegraph is read by people who think the country should be run by Mamata Banerjee.

The Mid-Day is read by people who think the country should be run by the people on Page 3
The Hindustan Times is read by people who think that Delhi is their country.
The Malayala Manorama is read by people who think that their country is Kerala (or Dubai, they're not sure which).

The Tribune is read by people who believe that India lives in its villages.

The Dainik Jagran is read by people who actually do live in those villages.

The Pioneer is read by 223 people, but nobody's quite sure who they are.
The Deccan Herald is read by 219 people, but at least we do know who they are.
Saamna is read by people who don't give a shit about the country, all they're interested in is who runs Shivaji Park.
The Asian Age is not read by anybody, but it's useful to wrap your shoes in when you 're taking a trip outside the country.

THINGDOM!

2011-06-05T08:41:00.003-04:00

I've just had a shot at playing a super charming online game called THINGDOM at the Science Museum website (UK based). I learned of it via this week's edition of the BBC's ClickOnline feature WEBSCAPE, anchored by the ever-resourceful, tireless and always user-friendly Kate Russell (I'm convinced that she is at least PARTLY electronic -- and I mean that in the best possible way).

THINGDOM is aimed at children, and is a very cute, easy-to-play game to teach the principles of genetics. Go on! Play it. Make things. And help them make even more things.

CATZ

2011-05-27T23:19:00.004-04:00

A couple of recent posts from Animal Planet have got me wondering whether we're on the brink of a species breakthrough. Of sorts. First there's LOUIS v/s RICK -- The Story of The Man Who Taught His Cat To Use Instant Messaging. It's hilarious, of course. But then there's also Cooper, Ansel Adams of the Cat World. After I'd watched the Australian TV spot, and visited Cooper's web-site and watched Cooper's video (taken by himself) as he walks around, I began to feel a sense of déjà mew: the feeling that they've been acting superior all along, but we've just not had evidence before of quite how cool they really are. I mean, here's this little furry character wandering all over his neighbourhood, putting together a show of photographs and publishing a book and becoming an internet celeb -- and HE'S A CAT.

Time to re-read Saki's classic short story, TOBERMORY.

PUNZ

2011-05-14T09:17:00.004-04:00

Okay, time for a silliness break. I got these from a punny guy called Ranvir S!

Did you hear about the glass blower who accidentally inhaled? Now he’s got a pane in his stomach.

To write with a broken pencil is pointless.

When fish are in schools they sometimes take debate.

A thief who stole a calendar got twelve months.

When the smog lifts in Los Angeles , U.C.L.A.

The professor discovered that her theory of earthquakes was on shaky ground.

The batteries were given out free of charge.

A dentist and a manicurist married. They fought tooth and nail.

A will is a dead giveaway.

If you don't pay your exorcist you can get repossessed.

With her marriage, she got a new name and a dress.

Show me a piano falling down a mineshaft and I'll show you A-flat miner.

You are stuck with your debt if you can't budge it.

Local Area Network in Australia : The LAN down under.

A boiled egg is hard to beat.

When you've seen one shopping center you've seen a mall.

Police were called to a day care where a three-year-old was resisting a rest.

Did you hear about the fellow whose whole left side was cut off? He's all right now.

If you take a laptop computer for a run you could jog your memory.

A bicycle can't stand alone; it is two tired.

In a democracy it's your vote that counts; in feudalism, it's your Count that votes.

When a clock is hungry it goes back four seconds.

The guy who fell onto an upholstery machine was fully recovered.

He had a photographic memory which was never developed.

Those who get too big for their britches will be exposed in the end.

When she saw her first strands of gray hair, she thought she'd dye.

Acupuncture: a jab well done.

Review of ESCAPE

2011-05-12T08:38:00.001-04:00

This review, by RIMI B CHATTERJEE appeared in the American Book Review earlier this year. I wasn't able to link to it there but RBC has very kindly scanned the printed review, blogged it and then sent it to me. Here's a link. It's definitely the best review that ESCAPE has received so far but more than that, it's the kind of review that makes an author feel that some readers really DO make the effort to read all the way through a book. That is SO RARE ...

Brief review of the POPCORN ESSAYISTS

2011-04-17T07:50:00.002-04:00

By Bhaichand Patel in OUTLOOK MAGAZINE: TWIST KARAOED.

VERY COOL SITE

2011-04-16T09:48:00.002-04:00

All kinds of amazing distractions at the CHROME EXPERIMENT site.

POPCORN & MOVIES

2011-03-18T22:09:00.004-04:00

"THE POPCORN ESSAYISTS: what movies do to authors", edited by Jai Arjun Singh, will be launched at the India Habitat Centre, New Delhi on Tuesday 22nd March. All those within reach of Asia should attempt to be there. (Of course, this leaves me out, heheh).

It's a collection of essays by published authors who are NOT otherwise connected with films -- though, umm, some of us have had our plays made into films. Well. Whatever. My essay, JELLYFISH, is featured in the book. If you want to read the essay or -- better yet -- want to know why it's called JELLYFISH, you'll have to buy the book. Which you can do, easily enough, through FlipKart, by clicking this LINK.

Of course, there are a number of other reasons for buying the book, such as the other authors:

Musharraf Ali Farooqi, Rajorshi Chakraborti, Amitava Kumar, Kamila Shamsie, Sumana Roy, Manil Suri, Madhulika Liddle, Anjum Hasan, Sidin Vadukut, Namita Gokhale, Jaishree Mishra.

You can read A SNEAK PREVIEW at Jai Arjun's Blog.

And you can also read this excerpt from my essay:

[Mumbai, circa 1981. Interior]

In a room the size of a sweaty handkerchief, I and some seventy other members of the Alliance Française film club are watching François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows. The film is about to end. On screen, we see the right side of a young boy’s head and shoulders.

I wonder whether to risk a yawn.

The boy is walking towards the sea with no clear purpose in mind.

I know I am not worthy of my membership. Even though the film is one of the central pillars of modern French cinema I cannot focus on it because the auditorium is too uncomfortable. The folding metal seats have been designed by an evil orthopaedist looking for customers. The floor is uniformly flat and viewers are forced to strain their Kurosawas and Renoirs through a sieve of other viewers’ hair. In summer, the lack of air-conditioning guarantees death by B.O. And of course the majority of the movies are wrist-slittingly sad.

This one, for instance, is centred on a troubled fourteen- year-old boy living in Paris. The story moves at the pace of an arthritic sloth while packing the punch of a land- mine in the gut.

I want to inform my companion of the evening that I simply do not have the mental energy for films like this. Yes, yes, they’re beautiful, haunting, memorable, and all the rest of it, but what about the emotional wreckage they leave in their wake? I am, after all, a Hollywood junkie. I admit it without shame, like an addict who wears her needle-tracks with pride. I thrill to my Technicolor sunsets, my MetroGoldwynMayer lions and my air- brushed, peroxided heroines. Assisted Reality is what I call these films, and I love them all the more for knowing they will never kick me in the Jiminy Cricket or leave me bleeding in the Mekong.

Meanwhile my companion, whom I shall call B–, is even then, thirty years ago, so steeped in his knowledge of films and his passion for them that he seems to my eyes practically incontinent with world-weariness. We are both in our twenties, me late, he early. I enjoy his intensity and his seriousness even though I know he does not consider me girlfriend material. I often wonder what he sees in me. Nothing, probably. When a young man has watched enough art cinema, he knows that romantic love will never make it past the editing table.

Onscreen, our boy is still walking. The scenery continues to move away to the left, behind him, which is how we know he’s in motion. It’s a pleasant summer’s day and the French countryside looks suitably tranquil and inviting, even in black and white.

I begin to wonder why we’ve been watching the same damn scene for so long.

I turn towards B–.

He is sitting at the very edge of his seat, like a gundog on point.

He’s muttering to himself, ‘Come on, come on.’ That’s all he says. He’s fidgeting, he’s leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, he’s sweeping back the comma of hair that falls over his forehead and giving his fingernails a quick chew. In a word, he’s doing the adult equivalent of a child jumping up and down, screaming encouragement to Luke Skywalker taking on the Empire single-handed.

Yet before us on the screen is nothing more than a boy, walking.

[END OF EXCERPT]

GREAT GAME FOR CINEMA BUFFS

2011-03-16T11:48:00.005-04:00

This is such a neat little game! It's called FAMOUS OBJECTS FROM CLASSIC MOVIES and I got it from another outstanding source-object called VSL, short for VERY SHORT LIST. If you haven't already subscribed (free, like all good things) to VSL, I suggest clicking and signing up right away. You won't regret it (though of course you might lose your day job. But then again, you won't care. You'll be too busy following up VSL's smart, interesting links).

OKAY! And here's a bonus link to BABY ELEPHANTS PLAYING IN A KIDDIE'S WADING POOL! If I were a mad scientist, I'd find a way to shrink elephants down to the size of Great Danes, so that we could all have ELEPHANTS as house companions instead of -- whatever -- dogs, cats, people. Notice, I said "house companions" rather than pets? I think we've got to stop with the "pet" concept. Or anyway, not when we're talking about animals other than humans.

Review of ANAND GIRIDHARADAS's INDIA CALLING in OUTLOOK

2011-03-05T09:59:00.004-05:00

But first, an amusement of the Rock-Paper-Scissors kind: play against a computer at the New York Times: MATCH WITZ WITH A ROBOT HAND!

And here's the review. It appeared on Saturday 5th March, in OUTLOOK Magazine (I didn't choose the title!):

KNOW INDIA--Learn the Alphabet By Heart

Barely have we strapped ourselves in to read Anand Giridharadas’s rollercoaster ride of thoughts, experiences and interviews about being an Indo-American who returns to India, when whoosh! It’s over.

But in its brisk way, the book covers a broad area while sparing us the mandatory visits to slums, brothels and palaces. It should appeal to the thousands of so-called ABCDs—American Born Confused Desis—who struggle with feelings shading from guilt and confusion to joyous surrender to their ethnic homeland. Amongst the most corrosive results of emigration is the loss of a past without the benefit of gaining a present. For the Indian diaspora, the typical cultural dislocation of all immigrants is multiplied many times over by the fact that, as a culture, we’re not homogeneous and the shared citizenship is an illusion. We might find ourselves being thrown together with others of our nationality only to realise that we have neither food, language, religion nor social experience in common. We would be better off with complete aliens, who would at least have no expectations, than with one of our “own”, who might be inclined to penalise us for being non-standard.

Giridharadas’s story is just one amongst the countless multi-dimensional histories that this diaspora has begun to write. His parents left during the peak “brain-drain” years. They fell in love in India and married across the Punjab-Tamil Nadu cultural divide. Once in the US, they assimilated quickly, raising their two children as Americans, rather than as Indians-in-Exile. In this way, Giridharadas had less confusion to contend with than many others. His face and genes are Indian, but the organisation of his thoughts is American. When he talks to Ravindra the Roller Skating King or the hapless divorcing couples at the Bandra Family Court or the god-emperor-industrialist Mukesh Ambani, it is as an outsider looking in, but with the advantage of looking like an insider.


	When Giridharadas talks to divorcing couples, or Mukesh Ambani, it’s as an outsider looking in, but who looks like an insider.

The thing that wasn’t clear to me by book’s end was whether the author set out to tell us more, then decided to hold back. He weaves the personal narrative of his parents’ departure from India, his own upbringing and the stages by which he revisits India as an adult in between the stories he gathers from a handful of others. The result is patchy, as if he has selected from a rather slender stock of options. Of his own story, the most intimate glimpse he offers is of the account left by his paternal grandmother, a 32-page document entitled ‘Our Marriage’. Though the author tells us that “it conjured a world that was unrecognisable in twenty-first-century India,” I would say the exact opposite. Not only has very little changed in the way marriages are arranged but in his descriptions of personal life, Giridharadas is just as reserved a writer as his grandmother was. He refers to his parents’ love-match and to his own shadowy girlfriends in the manner of a chef who mentions chillies but doesn’t use them.

Trained as a management consultant, the author moved to Bombay in 2003, working for McKinsey & Company for two years. Having previously interned with the New York Times at the age of 17, he returned to journalism in 2005, reporting from Bombay for the NYT andHerald Tribune for four years. The stories he tells best are those which work as set pieces in a column, such as the scenes at the Family Court and the tragicomic account of his stay in a Ludhiana home belonging to two brothers, where climbing the stairs from the ground to the first floor is like time-travel from the fly-blown hospitality of the past to the cell-phone-enabled future. I wondered how his subjects would respond to their depiction in this book, whether they felt violated rather than showcased. But perhaps that’s always the case with documentary footage?

I also found myself being reminded, oddly enough, of both Geeta Mehta’s Karma Cola (1979) and Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City (2004). Both were huge best-sellers, but one was written as infotainment and the other as dispatches from an urban war-zone. Giridharadas is cooler, younger and more detached than either of these writers. He writes with the confidence of the marathon runner, who knows he has many miles to cover before he truly finds his way home.

AMAZEMENTS of the VISUAL KIND

2011-03-04T19:42:00.004-05:00

Serious brain candy! Click this link: BEST PHOTOMANIPULATION ARTISTS

I came across it at the BEST BOOKMARKS site. Here's what they say about themselves:

Best Bookmarks is a daily-updated, lifestyle blog for everyone who loves Arts in general, Paintings, Illustrations, Sculpture, Photography and more.

We keep track of everything interesting so you don’t have to.
Each post brings you to a place worth visiting.

Best Bookmarks is the right place for you! We are sure you will find something that piques your interest.
Enjoy Best Bookmarks.

All works (images, portfolios) are property of their authors. Any usage is forbidden. All files available at this website (BestBookmarks.net) are provided for educational purpose only. Users are responsible for further use of the files they have downloaded.

PLAYTHING!!

2011-02-28T11:29:00.006-05:00

There are some things that leave you with no option but to drop whatever else you're doing and PLAY. Here is one of those things: Mitoza. It's not quite a game or a puzzle and it's certainly more than a slide-show. Designed by an Israeli artist who goes by that handle "Baboon" it's one of those things that gives the Internet a good name.

UPDATE: Sadly, this site posted an ACCOUNT SUSPENDED sign some time later today. I'm hoping it's just because of heavy traffic or some such thing and that it'll be back up SOON.

Further UPDATE: And while you wait, here's a site I found interesting: THE WEEK BEHIND -- you'll see that they've featured MITOZA too -- and a little further down there was this rather beautiful and hallucinatory KALEIDOSCOPE.

And ... just to show all of you that I am reallyreallyreally concerned about the quality of your visit, I discovered a site where Mitoza is featured and it DOES work: KONGREGATE.

Short Pieces

2011-02-20T08:02:00.003-05:00

These two pieces appeared recently -- the first one on the edit page of the Times of India (in what's called the Third Edit slot) and the second one in OUTLOOK magazine, as part of its Cricket Special issue. The Third Edit pieces are going to be semi-regular, appearing once-in-three-weeks, on Mondays. The titles are links to the online editions of the pieces.

RAINBOWS AND PLANETS

The Times of India, February 13th 2011

Familiar mnemonic sequences sometimes need updates. For instance, I can remember learning Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge when I was twelve. The initial letters of the words, E,G,B,D,F represent the names of notes on the five lines of the treble clef staff in western musical notation. Alas, however, I got it into my head that Every Good Boy Deserves APPLES, rather than Fudge. Worse yet, since I wasn't a boy, I tried to provide Every Girl (with) Big Delicious Apples. The resulting confusion effectively brought my musical career to a quick and screechy end.

But mnemonic devices have never ceased to fascinate me. Even as I grow more absent-minded with each birthday, my yearning to know the names of the nine Muses or the progression of taxonomic categories in biology becomes ever more intense. Particularly in the middle of the night. There is nothing so dismal as to lie awake at three a.m., with the planets from Mercury to Jupiter spinning around the sun in an orderly fashion, but Pluto, Uranus, Neptune and Saturn milling about in disarray at the outer fringes of the solar system. It doesn't help that their initial letters form the handy, but incorrect, acronym PUNS or that Pluto was de-classified as a planet in 2006. The familiar mnemonic, My Very Energetic Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas has had to be altered and the new suggestions are all a bit disturbing. They range from My Very Eccentric Mother Just Served Us Nothing to My Very Evil Mailman Just Showed Up Nude. At three a.m., the last thing you want is to be fretting about pizza-free mothers and evil, naked mailmen.

I used to think VIBGYOR was the accepted mnemonic for the colours of the rainbow. Despite the fact that the colours are reversed and the word is an ungainly earful, I honestly believed this was how the English-speaking world remembered the sequence Violet, Indigo, Blue, Green, Yellow, Orange and Red. So it's a rude shock to discover, via Wikipedia, that it's been Roy G. Biv all along! Not only that but in the UK, the preferred formula is Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain. This is hardly useful to those of us who might turn into dangerous colour-blind insomniacs, as we churn about in bed, reciting Richard Of Gere Battling Various Irksome Yokels instead.

Sometimes, the only solution is to find one's own mnemonic. For instance, I have secured the Muses in memory by placing their names in alphabetic sequence. This yields Calliope, Clio, Erato, Euterpe, Melpomene, Polymnia, Terpsichore, Thalia and Urania – a very easy-to-recall sequence of CC-EE-MP-TT-U. Needless to say, it works particularly well for me because my initials are MP. Taxonomic categories? Not a problem: Dear Kilroy, Please Come Over For Gay Sex stands for Domain, Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus and Species. So I was doing okay with the late-night frets until I came across this one: Camels Often Sit Down Carefully. Perhaps Their Joints Creak? Possibly Early Oiling Might Prevent Permanent Rheumatism. It's for the Earth's geological periods: Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous and so forth. But its imagery is much too complicated. I get to the Permian, Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous without mishap. Then the Paleocene begins and I'm lost in a hopeless tangle of Oily Masseurs and Rheumatoid Perverts.

So when I found a small book called THE ORDER OF THINGS by Barbara Ann Kipfer, I thought I was saved. I kept it by my bedside and slept peacefully for several weeks. Until the night when I happened to glance elsewhere in the book and noticed something terrible: the graphic for silverware shows a cheese knife in place of the fish! My confidence in the book is shattered. Herds of arthritic camels hobble enthusiastically across my pillows once more and the Duke of York eats pizzas every hour. And no, that's not a mnemonic for anything.

THERE'S A GOOGLY IN MY HEART

OUTLOOK Magazine, February 21st, 2011

When OUTLOOK invited me to write an essay for their Cricket Special, I said, 'Sorry! Don't know a thing about the game. It's like I'm colour-blind, you know? But for cricket.'

'Whoa,' said the man from OUTLOOK. 'You must be a total social pariah, right? So tell us what that's like! Amazing. Seven-fifty words by next week?'

'Wait, but—' I spluttered. Too late. He'd put the phone down.

It's not just cricket: it's sports in general. I get no thrills watching teams of Neanderthals kicking an inflated bladder of polyurethane between goal-posts or muscle-bound viragos in short skirts slamming fluorescent green missiles across a red clay court. In the case of cricket it's one team whacking a shiny red sphere so that the other members of the team can … ummm … well! There we go. I can't even understand the objective of the game. Fellows in white run about. The crowd roars. The score changes. And then one of the fellows in white is once again rubbing the hard red sphere against the sides of his pants in that ominous way, like a bull pawing the ground just before charging.

My explanation for the excitement that surrounds these activities is the R-word: Religion. Yes, it's one of my themes of late. Public art installations, sports, romance – all, in my view, are expressions of religious fervour. Belief in a Higher Power provides an anchor in the Ocean of Doubt. However many children die in your arms, spouses divorce you, lovers betray you, dictators rise and fall, stock markets crash or recover, there is some corner of a playing field that is forever glorious. With victory. With defeat. With valour. With sweat. With passion.

Anything that mimics religion gains by association. You know how the concept of One True Love has been promoted relentlessly as the international gold standard of Romance? Well, I believe it's a cunning extension of monotheism's ever popular One True God concept. Celebrities who stray from monogamous ideals are burnt at the stake of public disapproval while those who remain faithful to one partner all their lives are showered with tributes and giant fan-followings.

Extend this idea to sports and you get a million fans chanting "Sa-CHIN! Sa-CHIN! Sa-CHIN!" and painting their faces with the tri-colour in a close approximation of devotees chanting the Divine Name in a temple and ascetics at the Kumbhamela painting their faces with saffron and white ash. At one time, an interest in sports was considered a distinctly masculine preoccupation, connected to physical prowess and the warrior's ethic. But that's changing, isn't it? Sports has become a subset of religion and religion merged with patriotism long ago. So women, traditionally responsible for maintaining the spiritual core of the home, are bound to make space for these new gods on the altars of their private prayers rooms.

Where does that leave unbelievers like me? Just as you might expect, in a grey and silent space. There are neither the dizzy heights of victory to soar up towards nor the bottomless depths of loss to be shattered by. It's not that I haven't felt the occasional tug of faith. I can remember a night-spend at a friend's house once, years ago, to watch a match on her superior television set. As a teenager I was dragged to a couple of games at Bombay's Brabourne Stadium. And as a child when my father was Ambassador to Thailand the Nawab of Pataudi stayed in our house. The other kids at the Embassy were incandescent with envy, but I'd grown up away from the Motherland. I'd never heard of the famous cricketer and therefore had no idea how lucky I was.

Initiation to any religious faith needs to occur early in a person's life and it's obvious to me now, at 57, that I missed out. I cannot possibly memorize all the crazy terms for instance. What's a mid-off and who says it's silly? Why are there legs before wickets, not whole bodies? Where are the maidens and what are they standing over? As for the ducks, don't they get hit by all those sizzling balls? And who removes the poor things when they die? Is it the night-watchman?

There's just too much to learn and never enough time! In the dibbly-bobbly corridors of uncertainty, with no friendly white-clad gardeners to worship and no bails to lose, unbelievers like me were clean-bowled by destiny a long time ago.

My Dad's Birth Centenary

2011-02-13T01:05:00.004-05:00

February 13, 1911 -- February 13, 2011: as this is a special birth date for my father, K. V. Padmanabhan, I thought I'd post a few photographs. We're all sensitive these days about what part of the shared record is made available on-line, so I've confined myself to just these four. The first is of my Dad and me as a baby, most likely taken in Bangalore just before we left for Sweden in 1953-4 (not sure of dates! Will amend when I've checked); the next is of both my parents and me, in Thailand, circa 1965, when I was 12; the next is of Dad with the man he called with great affection and warm reverence, "Panditji" -- I'm guessing it was taken while we were in Karachi, circa 1959-60; the last is of Dad with (not sure what kinds of titles are appropriate so I'm not attempting the name) the King of Thailand, most likely in the first year we were there, 1964.

There's a great deal I could say about Dad's illustrious career, his journey from tiny, French-speaking Mahé in Kerala to representing India as Ambassador to Thailand and Iran. But all that matters is that he was a wonderful Dad. He was good, kind and scrupulously honest, with a strong sense of humour. He collected comic strips and stamps in his youth and always enjoyed doing puzzles. I can remember, for instance, him glueing together a crystal vase that had shattered in transit -- it would never look all right, but he did it for the pleasure of the challenge.

MANIPUR SONG

2011-02-04T06:32:00.009-05:00

MANIPUR SONG

A film by Pankaj Butalia

(2008, English, with subtitles)

Distributed by Magic Lantern Foundation.

------------------------------------------------------

If a scream could be recorded, then filmed, then edited so that only the shadow of the pain revealed by that terrible sound might be heard, the result might look a bit like Pankaj Butalia's MANIPUR SONG.

At the time that I began watching the film (at home, on DVD), the amount of practical information I had about the "small northeastern state" of Manipur wouldn't fill one of the dimples on the outer surface of a thimble. I use those quotation marks because it's the kind of description that is routinely used of a "small northeastern state" and it is, whether we want to think of it that way or not, just one of many ways that we discriminate against places that are physically small. And "marginal". After all, however small Manipur may be, if it were located somewhere close to Connaught Place in New Delhi, we would never refer to it in that way.

The movie is not intended to be an educational supplement for people like myself who have not managed, for whatever reasons, to be better informed about their own country. What it does is remind viewers like me that we live in a vacuum of awareness. A reminder that "news" is only the items that get past all the filters that exist between news-consumers and the continuous bleeding of reality from all the pores, gaping wounds and sores and orifices that make up the world we live in.

Through five or six shifts in perspective, scenes from another world appear. Initially, it is a fairly familiar world – it could be anywhere in those "marginal" places, far from the cities – there are ill-made roads, slender young men in uniforms, their faces smoother and more hairless than their counterparts on the plains, their eyes shaped differently into those elongated shapes that we, of the plains, find various derogatory ways of describing: slit eyes, chinky eyes, slanty eyes – and yet, as the film gradually unfolds, I realize it's not familiar at all. Not to me, anyway.

The scenes that stand out for me include:

*The interviews with the young woman dissident called Sharmila – Wikipedia tells me that her full name is Irom Chanu Sharmila – who is even now living in the limbo of detention, a feeding tube threaded through her nose to prevent her from dying of her hunger. She has been on hunger strike since 2000. She was 28 at the time she began and has not let up since then.

*The "naked protest" of Manipuri women, at the gates of the Assam Rifles headquarters.

*The groups of young men, apparently being urged by soldiers to cane one another – all of them looking so similar to one another (I mean, racially similar) except that the soldiers were taller and better-fed, and the actions carried out with so little apparent passion, that it would have been farcical if it were not so pitiful. Toy soldiers, toy dissidents, but the blood, the pain, and the deaths only too real.

*The women drug addicts injecting themselves with the clear liquid that rules their lives so thoroughly, yet so invisibly too. This footage was, I thought, extraordinary exactly because it was presented with no squalor, no drama, no special lighting, no salacious, invasive, prurient commentary. It was the extreme domesticity of these scenes that gave them depth. We might have been watching a wild-life film in which a syringe is readied for use on a wild animal, to subdue it. And as that thought appears in my head, I realize that it IS what's happening and that these young women, from their quiet lives in distant villages, ARE being anesthetized, subdued and put to sleep, by forces out of their control.

*The school girls at the end, the sweet simplicity of their nursery rhymes and their soft, defenseless faces contrasted against the implacably jagged background of the whole rest of the film.

I realize, seeing this film, that all unknowingly, I've been aware of Irom Chanu Sharmila – because over the course of several years, I've noticed the face of a woman, stenciled in blue, that has appeared here and there on walls around the city. It is a small stencil, but draws attention to itself easily – perhaps because the face, with its pouting mouth and its narrowed eyes, the brows slanted in a permanent frown appears not angry so much as fierce – perhaps because it is positioned on white walls and looks freshly painted. All the time.

There is so much more that might be said, but – just as in the film, with its curious restraint, its silences despite the song referred to in its name – to use violent language, to scream, to lash out, or in any way to lose composure would be besides the point. What we see has little to do with having reactions or registering emotions. The film is that smallest and saddest of things: a tiny but dignified, well-made and carefully crafted gravestone for a culture, a people, a protest, and a movement. A gravestone made even while the culture, the people, the protest and the movement are still alive and still breathing.

[Manipur Song is distributed by Magic Lantern Foundation]

LIFE IN A DAY

2011-01-28T07:29:00.001-05:00

I read about this on-line and was intrigued. Sounds wonderful.

Opinion Piece in OUTLOOK

2011-01-26T01:35:00.004-05:00

ART WITHOUT HEART appeared in this week's OUTLOOK Magazine. It's my response to the Anish Kapoor show that's on in Delhi at the moment. I know lots of people who adore his work and I did too -- well, not "adore", but I liked it, sort of. It caused an interesting tickle in the brain. Now I only want to run the other way. There's a photograph of the model for the piece called "ORBIT", being readied for the London Olympics next year, accompanying the article.

A Beautiful Story

2011-01-24T12:40:00.003-05:00

This appeared in the New York Times (possibly today, in the section called "Region"): Against All Odds, A Beautiful Life. Keep a handful of tears on stand-by. It was the horse that tipped the balance for me ...

DISTRICT 9

2011-01-17T02:12:00.005-05:00

It should've been called "District Nein! Nein!", in my opinion. My critique of it appeared in the TOI this morning under the title: A CAUTIONARY TALE.

EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE

2011-01-16T05:56:00.005-05:00

For some people THIS LINK might be the most important thing they read this year. From The New Yorker. About findings from the forward reaches of modern-day social science.

VIRTUAL LOVE = VEROS INFECTION?

2011-01-09T10:24:00.004-05:00

I've been visiting Salon.com's advice-chat column "SINCE YOU ASKED", written/managed by Cary Tennis, for a couple of weeks now. Today's offering has something of special interest to subcontinentals: I'm From India, Crazy In Love.

Worth a visit, mainly to witness the extraordinary levels of cultural missed catches.

LUFTHANSA's VIRTUAL PILOT GAME

2011-01-02T11:01:00.004-05:00

This was sent to me by my Itallian Connection, PL!!! A game that leaves me feeling at the mental level of a cicada -- obviously something I adore, coz I play it at least a half-a-dozen times in a row, getting worse and worse scores each time. Time to pass it on to all you Geography buffs: LUFTHANSA TO EUROPE. This is perhaps the only way left to enjoy air travel these days!

2011 -- Graphiti and more!

2011-01-01T02:34:00.006-05:00

So! My previous post didn't make it into the New Year it seems. Hmmm. Well, here are fresh offerings, in that case! To begin with, a set of funny graphs sent to me RS followed by (not sure if the link will work coz it's from the Evil Empire of FaceBlecccch) a video-montage from BBC One of critturs in chat. Posted by blogger Kapan Senget. Sent to me by ANOTHER RS. Oh wait -- turns out the FB link DOES work, but it isn't willing to appear at the END of the images. So here it is now: BBC ONE, Animal Chat

Later today: here's a link to a wonderful article in the New Yorker called SWEET REVOLUTION, by Adam Gopnik, about the science and theory and also the sheer delight of ... DESSERT. An absolute MUST READ.

My Blackberry Is Not Working! - The One Ronnie, Preview - BBC One

2010-12-31T14:48:00.002-05:00

Got this from TA and after a short struggle decided it would be my New Year offering to friends and visitors to this blog. It's funny AND it's got resonance for Pythonizers from the last century -- for everyone who finds the references to Blackberries and Apples funny, there will be a small tribe of those who chuckle at the echoes of John Cleese's Dead Parrot sketch.

HELLO 2011!!!

The year just ended was a fairly wild one. My niece got married three times in quick succession (oh all right! It was three different ceremonies, in three different locations, but only one marriage) and I visited Belgium for the first time, and also Framingham, MA and also Lebanon, NH and also a number for friends and family besides.

I spent most of the year either on my way to the airport, returning from the airport, AT the airport or in the air. Or at a bus terminal. Or at a train station. Or planning to be at an airport/bus terminal/train station. I even managed to lose my passport and waist-pouch in August, but got it back three hours later, because Boston's South Station is the kind of hub where many buses run a loop that goes to Logan Airport and comes back before the buses return to their base-stations in other cities. I was just major, major LUCKY that I got it back. I think travelers should be allowed to have their passports micro-chipped and embedded in their skulls. That way, we either have our travel papers or we're dead.

But that wasn't the only hairy trip I made. This last week, returning from Madras to Delhi, I left for the airport at 2 pm and arrived at Friends Colony in Delhi at 1.30 a.m.! It was a Jet Airways flight (9W 830, Sunday 26th Dec), scheduled for 5 pm. It was even announced on time but then, at 4.30 with passengers queueing up into front of the gate, it was cancelled with no further information.

Actually, I was so sure that the flight WOULD be delayed -- because it's the Season of the Fog, and flights in and out of North India are ALWAYS disrupted -- that I was amazed when I heard it being announced. After that point I had only sympathy and admiration for the Jet Airways staff. The passengers milled around, buzzing like a swarm of angry bees, behaving like children who've been told that they can't have a second helping of ice cream. Some were just shaking their heads from side to side, saying "nonononononono" as if sheer denial was going to ensure them a seat on the flight of their choice. The ground staff were scrupulously polite, maintaining admirable sang froid while explaining very softly and patiently that the matter was simply out of their hands.

I decided to stick it out at the airport. The drive from Chetpet (where my mother lives) to the airport is arduous even without a fog and my ticket was nonrefundable. I felt I'd rather take my chances with the flight. Even though I knew the chances were very low: according to news reports 70 flights had been cancelled in the course of that day. The flight was called again, at 7.30 pm and when we boarded, there were enough empty seats that I had a spare one between me and the fellow passenger with the window. In spite of all the chaos, Jet landed safely (and with a HUGE thump!) at IGI but we had an hour's wait before a parking berth was available.

Outside, the fog was like a thick woolen blanket. The luggage carousel didn't begin spewing its contents till we'd all been waiting 45 minutes. And then there was the FOG, THE FOG, THE 'ORRIBLE FOG outside. It was one a.m. and I am always unwilling to take my chances with the prepaid cabs if it's very late at night. But the alternative was waiting till sun up.

So I stood in queue and got my receipts for a prepaid cab -- but was still feeling anxious -- and so just before going out into the wind and fog, turned to a fellow passenger -- someone I'd noticed on the flight, sitting across the aisle from me and fiddling with an interesting hand-held device which he explained to the flight staff was "not really a cellphone at all, but I'll turn it off, since I know you'll want me to" -- I turned to this fellow passenger also standing in the prepaid queue and asked if he'd like to share a cab.

Whoever he is/was and in case he happens to see this blog post -- THANK YOU. Because, even though the prepaid taxi-wallah refused to accept passengers to two separate destinations -- and anyway, he was going to Vasant Vihar while I was going to Friends Col -- just the act of accompanying me out to the cab rank was somehow steadying and life-affirming. I hadn't ever used Terminal 3 for prepaids before and it was all rather peculiar and confusing so it was just NICE to be escorted out by a friendly person, stranger though he was.

The drive back was so tense that I entirely forgot to feel any fear whatsoever. The driver & his buddy were both hunched forward and staring through the windscreen at a thick white swirl of pure white lassi -- there's no other word for it -- it was just totally impenetrable. So long as we were on the highway, there were the tail lights of other cars to follow into the creamy haze, but then we eventually had to veer off and go through an intersection ... and there was nothing WHATSOEVER to hold onto, as a visual guide. The driver was navigating by the seat of his amygdala, or whatever's the name for the most primitive/mysterious part of his brain, that permitted him to find his way across the milky nothingness and on and on and on until ... at last we were at the Outer Ring Road and the sheer volume of traffic thundering through had managed to shift the curtains vapour aside enough to show us the way.

Whew. I spent the whole trip saying "GOOD DRIVER! NICE DRIVER! THERE'S A FINE FELLOW THEN!" and other soothing remarks of this nature, to which he would give out little bashful snorts and say, "We live only to please our customers!" or some other PR-type nonsense that maybe they'd been taught to parrot to tourists during the C'wealth Games.

And so it goes, so it goes.

My final offering for this first post of 2011 is something mildly controversial that I wrote a couple of weeks ago. It was intended for publcation so if it sounds a bit a dated and also rather more formal than my typical posts here, it's because it was not intended for the Blogiverse. But it got turned down in favour of my other offering, the item on Klingons (see below). So here now is:

WIKI-FICTIONS

The WikiLeaks story reads more like a movie than a news item: Julian Assange, a cold-eyed ash-blond geek, is catapulted to fame as a cyber-Robin Hood only to be derailed by his sordid sex-life. While Liberals and Leftists the world over struggle to decide whether he's a hero or a villain it's the feminist networks that have boiled over with dissent. Is he a victim of cynical governments or a sexual deviant stupid enough to parade himself on the international political scene with female skeletons rolling out of his closets? Should he be denounced as a rapist or championed as a man whose sexuality is being used against him?

What makes this case so fascinating is that for once, it involves a man's sexual integrity rather than a woman's. Gender-parity has not yet reached the point where we can speak of outraged masculine modesty. But in this case it seems possible that a man's sexual misconduct is being used to punish him for having pulled down the panties of various Governments. That's something new. The easiest way to destroy the credibility of a woman who challenges authority is to accuse her of "loose" behavior. Men, however, are rarely charged with sexual misdemeanours when their real crimes relate to politics and international trade. Imagine, for instance, a suspected terrorist or arms dealer being arrested because he also happens to be a rapist! Not only would it mean potentially millions of men being thrown behind bars but it would also suggest that all those women who are typically silent victims of violent, sadistic men had suddenly been enabled to speak out in the way of Assange's ex-girlfriends.

What makes this case especially interesting (or atrocious) is that the accusations are not about easily-identified crimes. The accusers are not, for instance, under-age virgins savaged at gunpoint by a man riddled with AIDS. If the accounts in media reports are to be believed, both of Assange's ex-girlfriends are adults who consented to have sex with him but later withdrew that consent. Modern societies try to distinguish between types of sexual behavior in order to ensure that manipulative and oppressive practises can be treated as crimes. But the arena in the Assange case is murky. One woman claims that he pinned her beneath him using "his body weight" and proceeded to have sex with her even though she strenuously objected. The other woman says she was unconscious. Condom malfunction was also an issue. Whatever the specifics, it's obvious that Assange behaved in a seriously uncouth manner. But within the spectrum of incidents deserving the title of rape, these accusations fall within the eye-roll category. The boundaries between full consent and playful resistance, pleasure and pain are, after all, extremely porous. It is easy to wonder whether these accusers would have felt differently if Assange had varied his behavior just a bit: used romantic language, for instance. Or chosen a more expensive aftershave. Or promised a stable relationship.

Merely to ask such questions is -- I KNOW -- terribly unfair. The insinuation is that the charges are trivial. Assange may yet turn out to be a sexual predator who deserves to be locked up. But supposing the problem is that one or both women is motivated by hurt pride and unrequited love? Worse yet, supposing one or other of the governments whose secrets have been exposed by WikiLeaks is motivated by its own hurt pride and wants to get Assange behind bars by any means whatsoever?

The nature of truth and justice in any accusation of rape is muddied by the gender-biased prejudices of societies. In the Assange case, it's as if an awkward sexual encounter has suddenly blown up into an international fracas complete with red-faced ministers and black-browed generals. But whose version of truth will prevail when the end-credits roll? Only time will tell.

KLINGON SEASON

2010-12-27T07:31:00.004-05:00

Here's a link to an opinion piece by me that appeared in the Times of India today KLINGON SEASON. I found the image of Star Trek's Worf on CARBON BASED CURIOSITIES.WORF, Star Trek

The Night Before Christmas, by John Cleese

2010-12-25T04:54:00.000-05:00

SALON's GREAT MOMENTS FROM CINEMA

2010-12-19T23:36:00.002-05:00

Found this while burning time online: SCENES EVERY FILM FAN SHOULD SEE, as chosen by Matt Zoller Seitz of Salon.

ADS TO MAKE A SAILOR BLUSH ...

2010-12-11T00:07:00.006-05:00

Seriously cool CONDOM ADS

Well, they're not all EQUALLY cool but many are the kind that bring a warm fuzzy glow to the inner lining of the brain. My brain, that is. And for those of you who crave sweeter rewards for visiting this space, here's a photograph of the FRESH TANGERINE CAKE I made following my friend Elizabeth Wong's recipe, for Thanksgiving at my sister's home in Sayre:

It was as yummy as it looks! I don't feel immodest saying this because I just followed the recipe. The decision to add the slices of of tangerine was taken at the last minute -- I had taken far too long over the cake and was feeling kind of bedraggled at the end of it all, but there was a clamor for DECORATION! DECORATION by the time I had finally slathered on the icing, so I went that extra mile -- and they made a very pleasant difference -- the icing was VERY sweet and the slices were a welcome contrast.

The thing about not being an instinctive cook is that I can't tell whether or not something is working properly just by looking at/tasting it. In the case of this cake, it had to be made in two layers and for some reason I took an inordinate length of time just setting everything up and measuring quantities and then, after all of that, having put the two pans filled with batter into the oven, I happened to glance at the recipe again and realized with an awful OOOOOPS! feeling that I'd left out one entire ingredient! The sour cream. And the fact is, the batter had seemed a little odd, too runny and too sweet, but this is what I mean when I say I don't have the right instincts: I knew something was wrong but I wouldn't have fixed it if I hadn't looked at the recipe. But my sister said, "Don't worry! Just pull the pans out of the oven -- it's not too late -- and add whatever it is! It'll be fine." And it was.

I've not been keeping up with the blog at all, right? Well there's just been TOO MUCH going on. Thanksgiving was great fun but also a lot of work -- my sister cooked up a storm, as I'm sure many millions of other equally capable and gifted home-owners did too, all across North Am -- and I was her sous-chef. There were six of us in the house over the final four days and I think we all had a very pleasant time. For me, however, the absolute KNOCK DOWN MAJOR HIGHLIGHT OF THIS YEAR was that my nephew-in-law, Deke taught us all to play Poker (the game called "Texas Hold 'Em"). Wow! I had NO IDEA it was so much FUN! I am not a natural gambler at all, and I don't like losing money (we used real money, but not much -- $20 max per player), but playing the game was like a fascinating tool for understanding motivations and strategy in other people. Thrilling.

SYMBOLS

2010-11-17T10:34:00.004-05:00

What a major thrill -- I have finally discovered how to generate symbols without going into the Special Characters menu -- and I wasn't even looking! Obviously, many of those I "discovered" won't translate equally well on all the potential monitors that might display this blogpost, so I'm not going to make a big effort to show off this discovery, but -- for instance -- I can finally write 'cliché' correctly, online (I could always do it in Word dox, but could not reproduce that effect online). Nice, huh. And 'Æsop's fables'. It's a simple trick and different keyboards no doubt have different combinations that help achieve it but on the MacBook Pro it involves the OPTIONS key, various combinations of. I didn't get it right away because on earlier machines, to get an accent into place, I had to highlight the letter then type the required accent. With the Options key, it's a bit in reverse -- for the é for instance, it's Option+e, then e again. ƒåßçîñæ†ìñ©… (translation: fascinating ...)

The 'and I wasn't even looking' is my lead-in to another recent MAJOR THRILL -- watching the Beatles movie 'HELP' the other day, on DVD. I always loved this film -- I saw it on the big screen, in Bombay (at EROS Cinema, Churchgate), maybe a year after it came out, and if I could have, would have seen it many times over to memorize key scenes -- but of course that wasn't really an option in those days, as I was still in (boarding) school and wasn't at liberty to just dash off to see any movie I liked.

It's been digitally remastered and is absolutely sumptuous. I didn't realize at the time I ordered the DVD that iTunes was going to be show-casing the Fab Four starting today (or was it Yesterday?), not that it would make a difference -- but I may have felt I was band-wagoning if I'd known. Which I wasn't.

Watching it again reminded me that it was still very funny in a way that anticipates Monty Python's Flying Circus by about five years (I had to check to see the dates -- 1965 for HELP, '69 to '70 for MPFC) -- it's something I didn't recognize at the time I saw MPFC, though I knew they were channeling the Goon Show -- but also just their own I-Am-The-Walrus wackiness. They anticipate political correctness to an astonishing degree, considering that it was NOT the order of the day: they use a multi-armed deity they name 'Kaili', importune a goddess they call 'Perverti' and though characters are obviously dressed to simulate SubContinentals, they're just enough off the mark (I suppose ...) to get away with their spoof. They're quite vicious towards the British characters in the film -- the manic scientist who complains bitterly about the lack of Govt recognition and the daft elderly-lady neighbours, f'rinstance. The mumbling conversations of the 'Head Priest' in which he complains about young people not being attracted to human sacrifice any more, 'such a shame!' and wonders what can be done to make it more palatable. LOVE it.

Like I LOVE the tiger, the idiotic winking lady, the Beatle-fan who was the original sacrificial victim, the crazy 60s clothes ... and of course, of course, the boyz themselves, singing.

For me the best bit is the way Ringo finally gets the ring off his finger --SPOILER ALERT-- not all thru the main part of the film, when he desperately wants to, but only at that moment when he's distracted from the need to get it off his finger and is no longer obsessing over either keeping it or removing it and because at that moment he genuinely wants to help the petitioner. I always thought (but yes, of course I romanticize the Beatles out of all proportion) this was totally THE HEIGHT of transcendental philosophy revealed in the banal-pop medium of a Beatles film. Way out.

To top this, I have also ordered the DVD of Magical Mystery Tour, which I've never seen. Yes, yes, I know it was such a low-tide moment in cinema that even die-hard Beatle fans are embarrassed by the film. That's why I want to see it. I want to Love The Hate. Haven't got it yet! Will report when I do.

President Obama Takes a Tough Question

2010-11-06T11:32:00.001-04:00

A little boy asks President Obama why everyone hates him ...

NATURAL REMEDY FOR DENGUE?

2010-10-27T07:12:00.007-04:00

UPDATE: A friend posted a link suggesting that this so-called cure is most likely a hoax. Please follow this LINK. It's the same as the one in the second comment to this post. I'm removing most of the original post regarding the "cure" but if you'd like to know what it was anyway, then follow the link in the paragraph below this one.

A friend sent this to me. I do not have first-hand information but since the method appears to be otherwise harmless AND easy to resort to, I think it's well worth the try. Here it is: (disclaimer: I don't know, in both accounts given below, who the "I" is. The message is as it came to me, with no changes made to it by me. I Googled Won Low Kat and found several sites listing the same advise about the papaya leaf cure. I have NO idea what "Won Low Kat" is! The story and information appear to be sourced from the Philippines or Indonesia. There are very many links to blogs featuring the same or very similar text, but this one includes a photograph of the papaya's leaf: A SAILOR'S MUSINGS.

OUTLOOK MAGAZINE's 15th Anniversary Issue

2010-10-23T09:46:00.006-04:00

Here's a LINK to my essay in the issue -- it features a couple of old SUKI cartoons! Here's one of them -- a fragment from the "Historionics" episode published in THIS IS SUKI.

THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PYJAMAS and other movies

2010-10-16T16:05:00.004-04:00

Last night I watched an excellent movie I had vaguely heard of but not seen: THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PYJAMAS. A simple story (referred to as a "fable" at one website) by Irish author John Boyne, it worked entirely because of the believable performances, especially by Asa Butterfield as Bruno the eight-year old son of an SS Officer whose father is stationed just outside Auschwitz. Bruno befriends a boy of his age on the other side of the electrified wire fence and … well, it's a story and not an especially credible one. Extremely moving all the same.

Was I just in the right mood to see it? The Wikipedia article about the book on the which the film was based suggested that both the novel and the film came in for sharp criticism -- the unlikelihood of such a situation developing was the main charge I think, but there were stronger views -- but I wasn't greatly bothered by the knowledge that it was "just fiction" after all. I think a story like that -- and the film in particular -- maybe works better as fiction. It opens up a pathway that cannot be refuted by mere facts about what might have been -- and then takes the viewer down a corridor that is strangely sweet even while horribly sad.

If you'd rather not know what happens, please don't read this paragraph. For me, the ending suggests that even while one part of Germany saved itself by using elaborate arguments to justify atrocities against the Jews, the other part, the soul perhaps, disappeared as surely and irretrievably as Bruno into the ovens. This movie presents that soul and its disappearance in heart-rending form, in the person of the little boy. Every time I tell myself that I cannot bear to watch yet another film about WWII, I see a fresh reminder that there's a good reason to remember and be re-inoculated against that particular form of brutishness -- because the story never really stops, it only translates itself into dozens of different new versions.

It's been a good fortnight for movies: perhaps two weeks ago I saw PEEPLI LIVE (Hindi, 2010 dir by Anusha Rizvi, Mahmood Farooqi), followed by WELL DONE ABBA (Hindi, 2009, dir Shyam Benegal) and VAANAPRASTHAM (Malayalam, 1999, dir Shaji N. Karun), all on DVD. I liked the first best, the second one least and the last one … well, I enjoyed it in a purely visual sense, because it concerned the life and times of a Kathakali dancer.

PEEPLI was clever, well-acted, excellently well-cut and had a great script but I would have preferred a different ending. It was so obvious that (a) someone would die and (b) that it would not* be Natha, the poor farmer whose would-be-suicide the film revolves around, the only element of surprise that remained was to discover how the situation will be resolved. So when it is resolved in the canonical way -- see the film and find out -- I was disappointed. It seemed to me that an opportunity to discover a less oh-well-yes-it's-got-to-end-SOMEHOW ending was missed. But this is a minor quibble, considering the smart and keenly-observed quality of the film. It's got the quick wits of a television commercial but the heart of a documentary. *(his death would be too, too obvious for such a cool film)

ABBA was (for me) unbearably, unforgivably paste-board cute. I am the wrong audience for films of this sort, where everything has to be make-believe, from the Mr Nice-Guy driver with the saintly-but-irritable-executive-boss, to the cheeky-beauty-smartypants daughter, to the long-suffering-police-officer … you get the picture: one endless album of stereotypes. I detest this kind of cinema because I feel it talks down to everybody and the sarcasm -- oh! A well that was paid for by a Govt scheme never materializes and eventually is reported to the police as having been "stolen" -- is meaningless in a country where it is no longer even ho-hum news to hear of taxes being paid for houses that have never been built and defaulting tax-payers receiving threatening notices for years after their deaths. But it worked for my co-watchers at home, all of whom are fond of sophisticated cinema but who found it charmingly rustic and were willing to award it the Social-Relevance-Against-Impossible-Odds Prize.

VANAPRASTHAM came highly recommended and so for me was a much greater disappointment than if I'd realized that it was an annoying and weepy story dressed up as a stirring art film built around the spectacular costumes of a Kathakali performance. I don't get any thrills from hearing Malayalam since I can't understand anything said onscreen and though I LOVED the costumes, the story was moronic. Or it WOULD have been moronic if it hadn't been performed in Art Motion (that's slow motion for the sake of Art, not Sports) and been Heavy With Cultural Significance. Even with the subtitles, which were ungrammatical, too literal and yet also obscure in meaning, the story was hard to follow. The characters seemed to age at differing speeds -- a little girl of perhaps five grows into a lissom young miss of at least 16 during the same time frame as a baby who grows into a maybe five year old boy (going only by their appearances -- I couldn't read dates or follow the time references). Meanwhile the parents, estranged by social class and personal quirks barely show the passage of time at all.

It's like watching a gift parcel being tossed in one's direction from a distance, watching it arc through the sky, imagining/hoping that it might be aimed in one's direction and then watching it fall quite far afield: it was never intended for this viewer after all, is what one realizes. And those for whom it is made, apparently live in a dimension of extreme, brooding emotions that can never be released through logic or calm reflection, passions that can never to be talked through or smoothed out: all of existence viewed as one continuous storm of untamable Feeling. Ooh! AAAhh! SobSobSob. Exhausting and unsatisfying, however beautiful the costumes.

But it won international awards and brought its star actor, Mohanlal much fame.

Nevertheless there were a couple of moments I DID appreciate. One was when the dancer (Mohanlal) visits his lady love -- a very refined and intellectual woman -- in full costume. We never see them entwined in any way, but when he leaves her, their intimacy is revealed by the rich colours that have rubbed off on her face! Delicious.

Chicken Soup serving

2010-10-11T03:29:00.007-04:00

When VEENA SESHADRI, editor of CHICKEN SOUP FOR THE INDIAN SPIRITUAL SOUL (Westland, 2009), asked me to contribute to her book, I DID say that I was a rather unusual choice for inclusion. I am not exactly famed for spirituality, I said. But she was warmly insistent and ... anyway, the result is this tiny graphic story. I don't know why it's taken me so long to post it here. Sloth, most likely.

From the Suki Archive

2010-10-08T13:17:00.005-04:00

TheSCREAM

FrogLove

I just finished writing a piece for OUTLOOK in which I talk about the reasons why I stopped drawing SUKI. While researching images I looked for a couple to post here. Enjoy ...

SLUMCAKE MILLIONAIRES

2010-09-25T05:26:00.004-04:00

This is a comment piece that appeared in OUTLOOK Magazine about a bizarre birthday gift: a cake in the shape of a SLUM. There's more about it HERE, including a photograph of the cake, tweets generated by the birthday party and then tweets in defense of the cake from the host of the party. London's the GUARDIAN also weighed in with a comment piece by Pervez Sharma.

Here's my piece:

This week I heard that a well-known Mumbai actress received a birthday present from her husband, of a cake in the shape of a slum. That’s right, a slum. It is reported to have been created with shanties, pipes and a road sign with the celebrity’s age displayed as its “gali number”. The first reaction that went through my head when I heard this description was, “Imagine even pretending to eat clogged drains and sewage!”

But the more I thought about it, the more difficult it was to say exactly why I found the idea nauseating. For instance, would it have been okay if something bitter and hard to chew had been created rather than a sweet and creamy luxury item? Or is it mean-spirited to assume that a slum would NOT be delicious to bite into? And by the way, is it inherently distasteful to think of eating up whole neighbourhoods? Or is it only distasteful when the neighbourhoods are not well-maintained? I can remember, for instance, that for my sixth birthday the party theme was clowns, with a cake to match. At my 10th, I helped decorate a cake in the shape of a medieval castle, with ice-cream cone towers. Does this mean that my family was grotesquely insensitive about medieval royalty and circus entertainers? Or is it okay to eat delicacies fashioned into symbols associated with wealth and pleasure while confectionery in the shape of destitute neighbourhoods must be condemned? And is that because we believe the destitution is unacceptable or our willingness to admit it exists that must be avoided at celebrations?

The more I thought about the thing, the more questions my mind generated. For instance, would someone, child or adult, who asked for leper-shaped desserts be considered depraved? Or would we think they were socially mature and responsible? Then what about pornographic puddings—would they be considered inappropriate at a child’s party? And does the shape of a birthday cake raise awareness? Or breed insensitivity? Would it be acceptable if, when a cake were made for someone who didn’t live in a slum, the dwellers had been invited in to eat it? Or is it so obviously offensive to make a dessert out of the visible symbol of the nation’s social inequalities that there’s no level at which inclusion becomes possible?

Is there anything that the revellers could have done that would have made it less objectionable, such as providing clean drinking water to a slum for a month? Or would only a full year’s supply make it okay? And would that be considered a responsible approach to lavish celebration or would it be tokenism to assuage guilt? Would it show a greater sense of humour and/or irony if there had been candles in the shape of slum-dwellers? And if it turns out that the slum-dwellers had benefited in the manufacture of the cake would that have made it all right? Or would the shape of the cake be okay if it had been made in order to be raffled and the ticket money given to the homeless?

The husband of the 60-year-old birthday baby is reported to have accused cake-critics of being humourless. The couple is known for their support to worthy causes and in particular to pavement-dwellers. So perhaps they should have responded to the criticism by gifting the residents of the slum closest to their residence a cake of matching size, but made in the shape of their own apartment building. Or—here’s a radical idea—how about cakes in the shapes of politicians, made to be eaten by their opponents? Religious icons too! And would that result in cake-eating becoming a politically charged activity with opposing parties ostentatiously gobbling up the religious icons of their enemies? Might we be entering an era of cake-wars? And would anyone who pointed fingers at those who objected to such activities be told that they lacked a sense of humour?

In the end, there’s no way of policing or legislating such things. People of conscience must know in their hearts whether or not they’re using a symbol appropriately. If not, it really doesn’t matter whether they are leftists eating slum-shaped cakes or anti-abortionists eating foetus-shaped eclairs. The moral of the story is, you can’t have your ideology and eat it too.

Review of HOWARD JACOBSON'S The Finkler Question

2010-09-25T05:02:00.005-04:00

This review THE FINKLER QUESTION by Howard Johnson appeared in Times of India's CREST. It's a subscription site, so you'd have to log in to read it there. Anyway, here's the review (this is my version of the review. The print edition may differ in small ways -- the title for instance):

SORRY, PLEASE! I'M NOT JEWISH

There are some books that make me want to lie flat on the floor and howl. Not with fear or laughter, but the sheer tedium of having to plough through them. If this one hadn't been expressed in such elegant and well-turned language, it would have been easier to ignore. So alas, part of my complaint against the book is that its author Howard Jacobson writes so well that we can see the emptiness at the heart of his novel all the more precisely.

The story revolves around Julian Treslove. He is presented as the type of human being who should have been drowned at birth, like an unwanted kitten ¬– except of course that would only have lead to a novel being written in the voice of an exceptionally annoying phantom. We are told that Treslove has no qualities to recommend him: unreliable as a friend, disloyal as a lover, uncaring as a father as well as monumentally sentimental and romantic. The cherry – or do I mean the eye-ball dipped in red dye? – on top of this dismal list, however, is his obsessive fascination with Jewishness. He is the one who considers it an affliction, in part because he isn't a Jew, in part because he considers his entire existence to be an affliction. The question that gives the book its title is based on Treslove's use of the name "Finkler" as his personal code-word to mean "Jew". The novel's ultimate theme is about what it means to be Jewish in a post-Holocaustian world, where yesterday's victims are today's terrorists and tomorrow's front-page corpses might be yours, mine or the Palestinian family's next-door.

Treslove's two dearest friends are Jews. Samuel Finkler and Treslove were in school together while the nonagenarian Libor Sevcik was at one time a teacher to both boys. At the beginning of the book, Finkler and Libor have both lost their wives. Libor's marriage was long, loving and intensely loyal, Finkler's was shorter and riven with infidelities – marital, ideological, intellectual. It is through Libor that Treslove meets Hephzibah, the woman who most fulfils his notion of Ideal Life-Mate. But his relationship with her is so compromised by his self-image as a cultural chimaera, a gentile Jew, that he ceases to maintain his integrity as a convincing character. It's enough that the world has Israel, Palestine and Woody Allen's New York-style neuroses to contend with. The spectacle of a non-Jewish Englishman moaning about the angst of not having Jewishness to moan about is too absurd to be funny and not pathetic enough to be interesting.

Perhaps one of the reasons I found the novel merely self-indulgent rather than insightful or poignant is that I already know, as an Asian belonging to a post-colonial nation, a fair amount about the inclusion-exclusion game as it is played out in urban situations around the world. Through Treslove's character, Jacobson seems to want his readers to re-explore the notion that the Jewish version of this game is still the most riveting one around. But it no longer is for me or, at least, not in the hands of this writer. According to the back-cover blurb this is a "scorching story of exclusion and belonging, ageing, wisdom and humanity … funny, furious, unflinching …' And it's on this year's Man-Booker Prize shortlist. Brrrrr! The longlist must have been grim indeed.

HONEY DREAM

2010-09-12T09:28:00.004-04:00

It's very unusual for me to express any thoughts in the form of a poem. But here's something that might be called a poem. It's an image-file, not a document (because I wanted a coloured background) so if the image looks like a miniature with ants crawling across it, click on it. That should cause it to pop up in a separate window and at full size.

DELHIRIUM graphic!

2010-09-02T17:50:00.004-04:00

This illustration was commissioned by OUTLOOK TRAVELLER to accompany an article by LUCY PECK about Delhi's monuments. I am usually disappointed when I see my work in print but I think this one looks rather sweet in the current issue -- I don't think the issue's been uploaded to the net yet but it's on the stands. The illustration looks a little different in print because I created it in two versions, stacked (as it appears here) and also as a border across two pages (as it appears in the magazine).

Ah -- and here's a link to the article itself, THE OLDER DELHIS.

PAUL THEROUX's SIR VIDIA'S SHADOW

2010-09-02T10:48:00.001-04:00

I've just finished reading Paul Theroux's SIR VIDIA'S SHADOW

and am still tingling with pleasure. I have always liked Theroux as a writer and look forward to his books but for some reason never got around to reading this one when it came out in 1998/99. Perhaps because I was not interested enough in VS Naipaul to care that they'd apparently had a falling out; perhaps because the reviews suggested that Theroux exposed himself as spiteful and small-minded while criticizing a famous lit-giant.

Whatever.

I am glad now that I waited to read it because in the intervening years I have read several new books by Theroux but only the odd word or two by Naipaul. The fact that the latter was finally awarded a Nobel changes nothing: I don't choose my reading based on prizes. I read 'SHADOW as if it were a murder mystery -- but with a friendship rather than a corpse at the heart of the mystery.

I would say that it's a must-read for anyone who is interested in books and literature, in writers and their lives. Theroux does expose himself -- and that is what makes this such an unusual book -- it's like reading the diary of an intelligent, well-read and sophisticated lover who has been jilted in the most atrocious way and then, in the way of ALL lovers, intelligent or not, cannot stop himself from screaming his heart out. The entire book is a very well-articulated, superbly crafted scream of deep, unquenchable heart-hurt. The pain of a lost friendship IS often more unbearable than the loss of romantic/sexual/conjugal love because it very often involves betrayals at levels that the loser does not even know existed until they are revealed.

It is a wonderful book, better than any fiction. Go on, then: run out and buy it/borrow it/read it AT ONCE.

CUTTING CIRCLES

2010-08-29T15:44:00.004-04:00

If you've never felt the need to cut circles out of a sheet of paper, you should stop reading this blog-post right now. If, however, you have spent the greater part of your life wondering if -- uh, no: feeling CERTAIN that -- somewhere in the Universe there's a gadget that cuts circles out of an ordinary sheet paper easily and without mess, then what I'm about to describe may be of use to you.

Perhaps it's something that graphic designers and artists are taught on their first day at art school -- but I didn't go to art school and also I didn't hang out with the kinds of people who ever showed the slightest interest in cutting circles out of paper, so I missed out on this little trick and had to wait 57 years to wake up one day and work it out for myself.

You'll need a couple of pieces of equipment: one, a compass with a bow-attachment and two, a box-cutter or Exacto knife. And of course a sheet of paper, a drawing board and a cup of water.

A bow attachment is something that is bundled along with most good compass sets and is used for drawing circles in ink rather than with a pencil-point. It resembles the beak of a slightly peevish hornbill -- and is definitely an instrument that looks as if it was designed in the nineteenth century (and probably was). But the point is, it works rather well, so long as one is reasonably un-clumsy with open bottles of ink.

Anyway. For the purpose of cutting circles out of paper, you don't use ink with your bow attachment. Instead, you fit the attachment to the arm of the compass that usually holds a pencil point and you dip the beak of the bow in the cup of water. This causes a very small amount of water to be taken up at the tip of the bow. Then you use the compass in the usual way, depositing a circle in plain water onto your sheet of paper. Put the compass down, wipe the tip of the bow (so that it doesn't rust) and then, using the box-cutter and/or Exacto knife, gently separate the circle from the rest of the sheet -- the water will weaken the paper just enough to allow you to do this without ripping the paper sideways. Ta-daaaaa! A neat and graceful circle-shaped aperture appears where before there was none.

It works best with thin paper of course -- but I cut a large number of circles out 150 gsm card the other day, slicing along the water track left by the bow attachment, with very little difficulty. The results were definitely neater and more circular than if I'd just used the cutter on its own.

All through my life, I have tried cutting circles out using scissors (hopeless!) and tiny knife-blades with circle-templates but the results have not been good because (a) tiny knife-blades seem to get blunt very easily so they require a great deal of pressure and (b) when the blades are NOT blunt, they slice through the plastic of the template. I have also tried attaching blades of various kinds to my compasses but it is too much of a struggle, and anyway, the blades bend and wiggle in a most uncooperative manner. Google searches reveal that Rotring and Staedtler make blade attachments for compasses -- but then these are NOT standard add-ons with compass sets and I have never got around to buying one.

No doubt there are laser-cutters out there, made exclusively for the professional and non-garden-variety of circle-cutter. But for me, this late-life discovery of the uses of a bow-attachment is very pleasant and I am very grateful to the Muse of Circles, whoever she is, for whispering this secret in my ear.

POPCORN MAGNOLIANA

2010-08-23T02:31:00.002-04:00

This is an idea I had this morning for what will undoubtedly become a major snack item. My suggested name is:

POPCORN MAGNOLIA

The main (only!) ingredient is POPCORN.

Using freshly popped corn, squeeze the popped kernels into small molds about the size of fish fingers, plus something to keep the forms from breaking apart, like some kind of light batter (but not enough to seriously flavour the corn). Then these can be arranged on a plate around different kinds of dips -- such as hot caramel sauce, or chocolate for a sweet and sticky snack -- and Mughlai gravy, or BBQ sauce for savoury treats!

------------------------------

Many people make popcorn "balls" using honey or golden syrup to bind em up -- but there's no reason that something else can't be used -- I mean something savoury -- and at the same time, it's okay in my book to dip something with a sweet under-carriage into a savoury sauce.

A MONKEY-PUZZLE STORY

2010-08-20T08:54:00.008-04:00

REVIEW: MONKEY MAN by Usha K.R.

[This has appeared in the current issue of BIBLIO]

Like an experienced angler landing a difficult catch, Usha KR keeps her line taut all the way through this elegantly plotted novel. Not till the end do we get to see the whole thing as it lies panting and struggling, revealed at last in all its oddity, neither a mystery nor a romance but a story of people caught in the embrace of a complex and hairy otherness.

The tale begins in Bangalore, as a fictional account of the real-life events that took place in New Delhi, circa May 2001. Reports began circulating of a mysterious, humanoid creature that attacked innocent citizens during the hours of darkness, causing a fear-psychosis to grip the city. The panic lasted for perhaps six months, resulting in injuries ranging from deep scratches to severe trauma and even death: at least two people were reported to have died as a result of falling down a flight of stairs while trying to escape from the monster. But the creature, such as it was, was never caught either in person or on film. The police released sketches based on eye-wtiness accounts, but ultimately, according to Wikipedia, "the entire incident has been described as an example of mass hysteria".

Usha's retelling of this half-forgotten news story is set in January 2000. A teacher called Shrinivas Moorty forms the heart of the book. Despite a sterile marriage and dead-end career, he has entered his middle-years with a few shreds of his youthful dreams still clinging to him. Next is Neela Mary Gopalrao, the woman bureaucrat at the Centre for Socio-Economic Studies who rules over her private fiefdom of clerks and peons with a rod of petty cruelties: cheques that will be needlessly delayed, inter-departmental letters that will never be delivered, cutting remarks that can never be countered for fear of dismissal. Finally there is Pushpa Rani, the young woman who has powered her way out of the slums and into a call-centre with the tenacity of a peepul-tree seedling growing out of a brick wall.

We are told at the outset that these three lives will be braided together and held in place by that monkey-shaped filament whose name adorns the cover of the book. And we look for the creature, as we enter the opening chapters, wondering from which corner of Ammanaguddi Street, dug up and traffic-clogged as it is, the shadowy being will spring. But the lives of the three characters soon dominate the stage and we are diverted by the unspooling of their histories until suddenly, with a twitch and a stifled scream, yes – there's the creature! Or … wait: what exactly are we looking for, again? Is this a novel about three fictional characters or a documentary about the changing soul of Bangalore? About a city or a country? About you or I? By the time we end the book, we know a little more about what we might have believed when we began it, but we also look reflexively over our own shoulders, wondering about the monkey-shaped spectres that haunt the hidden corridors of all our lives.

Usha K.R.'s gift as a writer is her ability to convince us that even the slighteset of stories is worth caring about. Her characters are so unremarkable that if not for the precision with which she describes them, we would not pay them a second's attention. Moorty, for instance: he has a slight paunch, his hair is thinning, he rides a scooter. Even the elements that make up his tiny inner spark, the love of western rock music, the fondness for good cinema and the Nehruvian socialism that still animates his deepest memories, are hardly very original. The songs and the bands are only too familiar, the socialism has grown so stale and the movies are all a bit passé now. But it is this very ordinariness that makes the portrait so convincing. Like a frog that has been expertly dissected for us by our biology teacher, the fact that it is commonplace is precisely why we value it – because it reveals what is commonplace about all frogs.

Pushpa Rani by contrast, is a character whose real-life counterparts are so recently evolved from the primordial slime of India's social inequalities that her feet as still a little webbed, a little unknowable. None of us has enough data about what lies in the future of all the Pushpa Ranis rising up from the slums and shanty towns of Indian cities and in that sense a literary character created from her clay can be molded to fit almost any role. Neela is more familiar, the petty bureaucrat in the starched cotton sari, but she has some unexpected flourishes too. She is of mixed Hindu-Christian parentage and for that reason is neither wholly respectable nor wholly pariah. She is that stock figure-of-fun, a card-carrying member of the Spinster Party who will nevertheless permit one single pulse-beat of indiscretion to rattle around her veins for the rest of her natural life.

The secondary characters are as well-realized as the principals. They include Neela's underlings such as the brash, good-hearted peon Sukhiya Ram and her single overlord in the official pantheon, the lofty Dr Subramanyam; 'Bali Brums', short for Balaji Brahmendra, the "charismatic and hugely popular radio jockey of the city's brand new and only FM channel, Voices from Heaven"; and Moorty's fragile wife Lily, with her beauty and her childlessness, and Moorty's colleague at work Jairam, with his America-returned born-again capitalism. Pushpa Rani's co-workers and family have a faintly filmi quality to them, as if we have either seen them in BBC documentaries about Call Centres or in commercials about the near-magical properties of skin-fairness creams.

Holding all the characters together is the personality of the street along which so much of the action takes place. "The Ammanagudi Street of [Moorty's] boyhood was a nice mix of cows and men, and of course, the goddess after whom the street was named. Of the old shops, only two remained – a cycle-repair shop and a flour mill, going about their business for more than thirty years – before they were shown up by a fast food "palace" selling hot tomato soup at five rupees per cup and a cyber café with twenty-four-hour Internet access … now that he had to go past the temple every day for the past two years, past the potholes filled with the over-runs from the manholes and the plastic bags that floated on the scum and got caught in the foot rests of his scooter every now and then, he had seen for himself how the Mother lived and even become familiar with Her routine. Every morning he did what every other passerby did – turn right to have a glimpse of her face – black stone, freshly annointed with oil, her nose, eyes and mouth outlined in silver, calmy accepting of all that her devotees did to her. A trishula was planted in front of her, lemons impaled fresh every morning on each of the three prongs – marking the bounds of direct access. No one could venture beyond except her priest – an unsmiling young man with a crew cut, the razor-trimmed arc of hair clean and precise against the skin of his neck. Late one morning Shrinivas Moorty had been witness to the priest lighting up a beedi and having a quiet smoke after closing the temple, and then making his way to the self-service joint up Ammanagudi street, presumbaly for an idli-vada … [The Mother] reminded him of his wife – the same mysterious rituals with the unguents and the stoic acceptance of worship. He remembered his mother and sister, who were easier than Lily and the Mother, and whose ablutions too were not as complicated, rubbing on their faces something called Afghan Snow, that came in an icy white glass jar and had a picture melting snow-covered peaks on the outside." (pgs 13 & 17)

Just as the street succumbs to the indignities of being dug up and built over, slowly strangulated with underground cables and wholly choked with a combination of garbage and over-sized cars, so too the human inhabitants succumb to the changes that have stampeded over them. In this twilight of the senses, where all that was once so familiar has been replaced by cement and plastic, the emergence of a "half-man half-beast" that briefly held several Indian cities in the grip of a fear psychosis is perhaps not surprising. As an interesting speculation about a phenomenon that was never properly explained the novel is refreshing and provocative. I look forward to whatever next Usha KR has in store for her readers.

ADDITIONALLY ...

Here's a link to a feature article that appeared in last week's issue of OUTLOOK (i.e., the Aug 15th issue for this year) about FOUR FAMILIES -- North, South, East, West -- each one having travelled a great distance from its origins. Inspirational.

Catching Up

2010-08-07T15:40:00.003-04:00

Waffle

ShowerBath

BeerWagon

Divya,Deke,Boston

The past few weeks have passed in a blur of activity. I'm not even going to try to present a clear record of all that happened. But these pictures may provide a few clues -- starting with the ENORMOUS Belgian waffle at the very top and ending with the wedding photograph of my niece Divya and nephew-in-law Deke at the event in Boston, 17th July.

The three days in Belgium were pure pleasure, spent in the company of Paul and Bea, exceptional hosts. The two pictures following the waffle are both from Belgium. One is of the shower-cum-sunken bath of the Ah-MAAAAZING hotel at which P&B accommodated me as their guest -- it was a small manor which had been renovated maintaining its authentic turn-of-the-century opulence, complete with constantly playing classical music in the foyer and courtesy wine in the little garden at the back. The second is of a beer-fuelled wagon -- the seated beer-drinkers cycle in unison, which is what powers the small wagon they're sitting in!

We did a lightning tour of Ghent and Bruges with a brief follow-through in Brussels including a visit to the newly opened RENE MAGRITTEmuseum, on the day before my departure, on Sunday 11th.

I arrived in NYC on the 12th, discovered to my great delight that there's a shuttle bus service direct from the airport to Port Authority Bus Station -- it's called NYAS, stands forNew York Airport Service and is REALLY convenient. At Port Authority I got onto the bus to Binghamton, arrived on schedule at 6 pm and there was my sister Su waiting to collect me and drive us both back to Sayre.

I was two nights in Sayre, then Su and I left for Boston, by car, on Wednesday. We checked into the Marriott in the evening, and on Thursday guests began to arrive for the wedding. Paul and Bea flew in from Belgium and I went to the airport to meet them, while Su and Divya came by in their car to collect all three of us and return us to the hotel. In between, I also had a most enjoyable lunch and business meeting with the publishers of the American edtion of I AM DIFFERENT, in Boston, that same afternoon.

Friday was spent with P&B, doing a "DUCK TOUR" of Boston and generally having a good time. The first formal wedding event took place at the hotel in the afternoon -- a mehendi ceremony plus cocktail and dinner -- it turned into an extremely lively affair as Deke's large family had begun to arrive and everyone was in Party Mode!

On Saturday, the wedding was scheduled at 4 pm, began on time and continued with dinner and dancing late into the night -- but not the wee hours. By the time we wrapped it, it was only 11.30 at night and we had cleared all our stuff out of the venue, which was Deke's Golf Club ball room. The next day, Sunday, was a general wrap up for all the guests at the hotel, since many of them left that day. Everyone was very relaxed, there was an enormous breakfast buffet, also attended by Deke and Divya. On Monday, Su and I drove back to Sayre.

I spent another three nights with her, then took the bus to New York on Friday. Spent a night with Visa & Chandru, then on Saturday left for Vermont, by train. It was a very pleasant ride -- I LOVE trains -- arriving exactly on time at 8.03 pm. Suzanna was there to collect me and in another hour we were in East Hardwick.

So THAT was great -- a huge change of pace -- there were three hives of bees, new goat babies (yes, I KNOW I can call them kids ...), turkey chicks in one enclosure, ordinary chicks in another enclosure, a steer whose head was soon to be on the chopping block, the haying was in full swing ... and much, much more. Including of course the mandatory fantastic meal at RAINBOW SWEETS of Marshfield, VT.

My final five days were especially hectic: by bus to White River Junction where I was met by Daisy, my friend in Lebanon (NH), and was whisked off to a lunch date with her new friend David, owner of the amazing MAIN STREET MUSEUM -- a museum of droll and unusual objects, chosen for "the stories" that are attached to them. The next day, Friday, I left for Newport via Boston's South Station, on the Dartmouth Coach.

I mention this because I managed to drop my little waist-pouch on the bus while getting off. Yes, OF COURSE my passport was in it! By the time I realized it was gone, so was the bus. But I was VERY lucky: the bus does an airport loop and returns to South Station. Meanwhile I had the help and reassurance of a very kind South Station control-booth officer called Keith, who called the driver of the Dartmouth Coach and confirmed that he had indeed discovered the pouch. An hour later, it was back in my hands, contents intact. PHEW. Only another Indian citizen will know what kind of nightmare it would be to lose travel documents just prior to an international flight.

ANYWAY. So I went on to Newport, spent two very happy nights with Steve, Marion and the girls, then returned to Lebanon for two very pleasant nights. On Tuesday morning at 6.15 a.m. Aaron, Daisy's husband, very kindly dropped me off at the bus terminal, where I boarded a nonstop coach all the way to New York. It stops very close to Grand Central Station, but I was able to catch the same convenient NYAS shuttle service back to JFK. My flight left on schedule at 6 pm. arrived an hour early in Brussels at 7 a.m., left again for Delhi and 10 a.m. and we landed once more at exactly 9.40 pm.

And that's my story for the past few weeks!

IN TRANSIT

2010-07-12T02:34:00.003-04:00

... in Brussels airport. I've been off the net for three days and very BIZZY, staying with wonderfully hospitable friends in Ghent, Paul & Bea. Am now at the airport and getting ready to leave for NYC. I hope to post pictures and more news after I arrive. For now, I need to log off and concentrate on the flight ahead. I belong to a little-known sect of international travelers which believes that no flight we take can land or take off safely unless we guide it with the energy of our superior worrying ...

JOEL STEIN in TIME Magazine, about those Immigration Blues

2010-07-04T02:44:00.006-04:00

When I started reading MY OWN PRIVATE INDIA I assumed it was meant to be ironic. Then I began to think, well, you know? It's a view I vaguely sympathize with, because it IS unpleasant to wake up one day to find that one's familiar neighbourhood has become UNfamiliar. Everyone knows that. It's like falling asleep in a pale blue room and waking up in a green neon pizza parlour (or the reverse!).

Then I began to think, Uh-oh! Joel Stein's e-mail box is going to be filled with hot, wet hate VERY SOON!

MEANWHILE, in other news, here's my review of VISHWAJYOTI GHOSH's DELHI CALM. I can never find India Today's online review links, so this is my own text-version (with my title for it -- the print title is most likely different):

IN SEPIA VERITAS

The thing about a graphic novel is that it is so very personal. The author's hands have touched the work, not merely via the keyboard, but physically: the paper, the colours, the visual shape of the narrative. In this sense, it seems to me, Vishwajyoti Ghosh's graphic novel, his first solo work as an illustrator/artist, is so intensely internal that reading it is to trespass within the author's inner studio of thoughts, moods and memories. Even though he's invited us in by publishing the book, his style is that of an artist who would much rather not exhibit at all.

So yes: this is not a novel in the normal sense. Nor is it an autobiography. It's more like the disinterred remains of a national trauma, reconstructed by someone who must have been a small child at the time (three years old: I checked). The trauma was and is forever, the Emergency. Yet in this version, it is less a historical event than a state of mind. The political figures of that era are not named, nor are their parties vilified. The entire situation is presented as a crisis that began for an obscure reason and was then maintained forever, a bogeyman in the collective national psyche. The book suggests that as a nation and as a people, we have become so inured to being in condition of stressful anxiety that we have forgotten what it means to be any other way.

The narrative is presented in a series of discontinuous episodes focusing on the persona of a journalist, Vibhuti Prasad. Interspersed between his interactions with friends and fellow-thinkers, are sections presented in the form of newspaper clippings in which we see a character known as Moon who is clearly meant to represent a certain woman prime minister. The atmosphere of unease within the book is infectious to the extent that I find myself unwilling to name this historical character in my review. Indeed, it strikes me as both very odd and very sad that while India prides itself on being a nation with a free press, Ghosh could not afford to name anyone in his book.

The entire story is told as if it were a fever-dream, and though some events are all too familiar – the rise of the younger son, called Prince in this version, the forced sterilizations of that era, the midnight disappearances alongside the flowering of a rare and sweet idealism, as if only the extremes of political excess can squeeze the purest type of radicalism out of an otherwise inert populace – other effects are presented as fantasy. The wearing of ever-smiling masks, for instance, and the chopping back and forth across narrative lines.

The drawings are presented in a yellowy sepia brown, watercolour washes combined with sharp, scratchy ink-effects. I found the work most effective in some of the long perspectives, where the city is represented as a jumble of rickety aparments held together by telephone wires, illegal power cables and the once-ubiquitous cable TV lines. The title is a slap of bitter irony: there is nothing in the least bit calm about the book. It rakes over the coals of the past with anger and in mourning, for all that was lost and all that will never be.

Review: SEASONS OF FLIGHT

2010-07-01T04:38:00.002-04:00

This is the link to my review of Manjushree Thapa's Seasons of Flight. Here's the review:

In the opening pages, Prema, a young Nepali living in the US, is asked where she’s from. She tries explaining: “‘It is near India’, or ‘Where Mt Everest is’, or ‘You’ve heard of the Sherpas?’, so that they might say, ‘Geez, that’s real far’, or ‘I could have sworn you were Mexican/ Italian/Spanish’, or ‘You speak good English.’” In this efficient, endearingly familiar way, second-time novelist Manjushree Thapa introduces us to a story about displacement, self-definition and one South Asian woman’s search for fulfilment.

Prema’s story starts in a small village near Kathmandu, ascending quickly through the loss of her mother in childhood and the commonplace hardships of poverty, to a college degree in forestry, resulting in a job with an NGO. Secondary plot-lines include a younger sister who runs off with Maoist rebels when they come calling, an anaemic romance with a fellow NGO worker and a stoic, undemanding father who only wants to see her daughter go forward in her life.

One day, in a spirit of indifference, Prema signs up for the US Green Card Lottery. When she wins, her response is characteristically laconic, as if resigned to her fate. Her inner world, however, is taut with emotion and she turns her face westward with a faint quickening of hope. When she finds a lover in the US, an attractive Guatemalan, she responds with an ardour native to her own passionate nature and her mountain culture. Another kind of heroine might have capitalised on the romance to build the familiar multi-storeyed, bathos-laden Asian drama. Prema’s different. She knows her path is an “ever-directionless zigzag trail”. In the spirit of a true seeker, she exceeds the stereotype. Her strength lies in the miniature scale of her aspirations. Like a tiny field-mouse setting out to find a niche in the limitless sprawl of the North American cornfield, she succeeds by being undeterred by her smallness.

Thapa has a light touch and maintains an admirable balance between telling a story and making socio-cultural observations. I enjoyed noticing the altered perspective of someone who might be mistaken for an Indian, but isn’t. Prema’s personal life is enviably free of the guilt and family-honour-type tensions of the subcontinent. Thapa writes as if she knows what there is to enjoy about sex. In a literary ethos where authors all but compete to earn the Bad Sex award, it was a rare pleasure to read a description worthy of the opposite.

Sonic Plaything

2010-06-28T11:27:00.003-04:00

Like someone said at the site from which I got this, "Time for a break". Go play on this charming little TONE MATRIX.

Good Punz

2010-06-23T23:55:00.002-04:00

Some of these are golden oldies, but some are gnu ...
They were sent to me by the Incomparable AA.

01. I thought I saw an eye doctor on an Alaskan island, but it turned out to be an optical Aleutian.

02. They’ve designed a new kind of high-tech airport which can retrieve passengers from the aircraft even before it’s landed -- a case of out of the flying plane into the foyer.

03. A vulture boards an airplane, carrying two dead bandicoots. The stewardess looks at him and says, 'I'm sorry, sir, only one carrion allowed per passenger.'

04. The roundest knight at King Arthur's round table was Sir Cumference. He acquired his size from too much pi.

05. Did you hear about the Buddhist who refused Novocain during a root canal? He wanted to transcend dental medication.

06. Two hydrogen atoms meet. One says, 'I've lost my electron.' The other says 'Are you sure?' The first replies, 'Yes, I'm positive.'

07. Two Eskimos sitting in a kayak were feeling really cold, so they lit a fire in the craft. Not surprisingly, it sank … proving once again that you can't have your kayak and heat it too.

08. Two fish swim into a concrete wall. One turns to the other and says 'Dam!'

09. Atheism is a non-prophet organization.

10. No matter how much you push the envelope, it'll still be stationery.

Review: AFTERTASTE

2010-06-15T09:24:00.003-04:00

This appeared in India Today this week. I cannot link to it, which is sad, coz it has a bright, chirpy graphic that rather nicely offsets the whips and chains of the text. But anyway, here's the review(the title in print is "MUMMY & MONEY"):

HEARTBURN
Dear Namita,
Two years ago, when your first novel "The Music Room" won the Vodafone Crossword Popular Book Award, I enjoyed meeting you at the ceremony in Bombay and applauded warmly when you won. How sad then, that I cannot be enthusiastic about Aftertaste.

What compelled you to write this mithai-house saga? How does anyone set out on a journey of 292 pages, knowing that it's going to focus wholly on dreary, unattractive people and the grubby monotony of their lives? Writing a novel is such a very conscious effort, after all. You must have had some very specific reason for wanting to do it. Yet even the hospital doorman in the prologue can see that this family of four adult siblings doesn't want their parent to walk out alive! It's like you're daring us to continue reading after having revealed the essential features of the story right there on page four.

But okay, let's suppose we dismiss the opinions of a minor character and forge ahead. We meet the family patriarch, his friends, his money-lender. We meet the two sons Rajan Papa and Sunny, and the two daughters Suman and Saroj, in their youth. We watch their mother grow into the matriarch known universally as Mummyji. The siblings grow up, get married and have children, all in an atmosphere of unsmiling tension. By book's end we still have no idea why you've introduced us to characters so annoying that they can't even masturbate in peace without an audience of readers looking on.

I can only assume that your real purpose was to write a stirring (haha, yes, pun intended) drama centred around mitthai. And yes, there are a couple scenes in which someone or other succumbs to the charms of a milky sweet: "The minute the khoya barfi entered his mouth, Kartar shrank from master to slave. He was seized by a strange sensation that he couldn't quite understand. His tastebuds unlocked an ancient room where he was an infant sucking on his mother's breast." But two pages later, you follow up with: "Rajan Papa slipped into a satiated sleep … He woke up to the squishy sticky feeling of rasgolla syrup streaming down his legs." I'm sorry, but that has not only ruined rasgollas for me, but inspired unnatural questions about advanced diabetics and whether or not their secretions might indeed be sugary. Bleah.
The other possibility is that you had planned to write a laugh-riot about sweating in the sweet-shop, but then your journalist's instincts got in the way. Before you knew it, your characters had curdled into soap-opera stereotypes and your research into the sweetmeat industry produced the kind of ho-hum material best suited to a Sunday Magazine article rather than a feature-length novel. Your prose turned from glib to glum and your plot sank into that armpit of tedium known as Hindu Undivided Family Failure. There's really only one solution to plots that go down this path: disk-erase and start afresh.

I know, I know, all this sounds like I'm going at your book with a blow-torch, right? Well think again. Whenever I've written what I believed was a devastating review in the past, the subject of my attack has gone on to win prizes and break bestseller records for that year. So take heart! This is really only my effort to boost your sales and enrich the lives of all those readers who will swarm to read your book, now that they know it's about their favourite fixations: money, mithai and Mummyji. See you at next year's book awards! Sincerely and with no hard feelings, MP

MOKSHA

2010-05-31T09:04:00.005-04:00

An article I read about the widows of Vrindavan many years ago made such a deep impression on me that forever afterward, I could not hear the word "widow" without thinking of that article. There was a single photograph, showing tiny bowed figures dressed in greyish white, sitting by the steps of a temple.

Then on NDTV, recently, I happened to catch a glimpse of a documentary feature called MOKSHA, by filmmaker and friend Pankaj Butalia. The five minutes I watched were enough to make me want to see the whole thing, so with a few shakes of the e-mail tree and a month's delay because of my travel sched, the DVD was in my hands. Magic Lantern Foundation, the distributors of the film, were exactly as prompt and courteous as their name suggests they might be.

The film is quiet, powerful and very beautiful. I could say "sad" but the nakedness of what it shows us cannot possibly be covered by any mere words like "sad" or "tragic". At one end of the spectacle of Indian life there's the gaudy frenzy of weddings but at the other end ... these bowed figures, with their shaven heads, little cloth bags, scrawny hands and their bare bodies, blouseless, swaddled in thin cotton the colour of ash and bones.

The fragment I saw on NDTV quoted a nineteenth century account of a nine-year-old girl's death: she is a child-widow still living in her father's house. She falls ills and is burning with fever, but because it is a day of fasting she is forbidden water by a senior widow in the clan. She dies of thirst, having "licked the whole floor of the room (she was locked into) in search of a little moisture".*

What does one do with such stories, such images? One click away, on TV, there are girls striding about like gender empowerment shock troops, grinding their hips and sticking their glistening lips out at the world in quest of a better shampoo or a more meaningful potato crisp. Meanwhile, in Vrindavan, today, right now, even as you read this, there are thousands of these other women, unrecognizable as the same species so bent and shrunken are they, as they wait for death while eking out a living by singing bhajans to Krishna.

One of the achievements of this film, it seems to me, is that it manages to slide in between that moment when you want to turn your face away and that other moment, when you want to stare, to reveal the femininity of even these women who have been stripped of that very thing. There are the faint echoes of beauty that still cling to the shape of the nose, the calm straight lines of the brow, the ritual of applying white ash on the forehead, the bridge of the nose, some with dots on either side, some without. And there is that heart-breakingly steady gaze, without self-pity, as the life is described: yes, I am alone, yes, I have nothing, yes, my husband died in my arms, and then yes, my children threw me out.

(*not word-for-word)

AMAZEMENTS of the OPTICAL KIND

2010-05-27T01:08:00.004-04:00

Now you see him, now you don't: the work of LIU BOLIN. From the New Yorker. DOES EVERYONE SEE THAT THERE'S A MAN STANDING IN THE MIDDLE OF THIS IMAGE??? My guess is that most people who've stopped here have not realized that there's a reason why that otherwise ridiculous bird's nest soup stadium is featured at my blog ...

Possibly the World's Best Op-Ed

2010-05-26T00:07:00.004-04:00

This appeared in today's edition of the Asian Age, reprinted from the New York Times. It's an op-ed written by the DALAI LAMA, by-lined as "Tenzin Gyatso".

Many Faiths, One Truth
By TENZIN GYATSO

WHEN I was a boy in Tibet, I felt that my own Buddhist religion must be the best — and that other faiths were somehow inferior. Now I see how naïve I was, and how dangerous the extremes of religious intolerance can be today.

Though intolerance may be as old as religion itself, we still see vigorous signs of its virulence. In Europe, there are intense debates about newcomers wearing veils or wanting to erect minarets and episodes of violence against Muslim immigrants. Radical atheists issue blanket condemnations of those who hold to religious beliefs. In the Middle East, the flames of war are fanned by hatred of those who adhere to a different faith.

Such tensions are likely to increase as the world becomes more interconnected and cultures, peoples and religions become ever more entwined. The pressure this creates tests more than our tolerance — it demands that we promote peaceful coexistence and understanding across boundaries.

Granted, every religion has a sense of exclusivity as part of its core identity. Even so, I believe there is genuine potential for mutual understanding. While preserving faith toward one’s own tradition, one can respect, admire and appreciate other traditions.

An early eye-opener for me was my meeting with the Trappist monk Thomas Merton in India shortly before his untimely death in 1968. Merton told me he could be perfectly faithful to Christianity, yet learn in depth from other religions like Buddhism. The same is true for me as an ardent Buddhist learning from the world’s other great religions.

A main point in my discussion with Merton was how central compassion was to the message of both Christianity and Buddhism. In my readings of the New Testament, I find myself inspired by Jesus’ acts of compassion. His miracle of the loaves and fishes, his healing and his teaching are all motivated by the desire to relieve suffering.

I’m a firm believer in the power of personal contact to bridge differences, so I’ve long been drawn to dialogues with people of other religious outlooks. The focus on compassion that Merton and I observed in our two religions strikes me as a strong unifying thread among all the major faiths. And these days we need to highlight what unifies us.

Take Judaism, for instance. I first visited a synagogue in Cochin, India, in 1965, and have met with many rabbis over the years. I remember vividly the rabbi in the Netherlands who told me about the Holocaust with such intensity that we were both in tears. And I’ve learned how the Talmud and the Bible repeat the theme of compassion, as in the passage in Leviticus that admonishes, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

In my many encounters with Hindu scholars in India, I’ve come to see the centrality of selfless compassion in Hinduism too — as expressed, for instance, in the Bhagavad Gita, which praises those who “delight in the welfare of all beings.” I’m moved by the ways this value has been expressed in the life of great beings like Mahatma Gandhi, or the lesser-known Baba Amte, who founded a leper colony not far from a Tibetan settlement in Maharashtra State in India. There he fed and sheltered lepers who were otherwise shunned. When I received my Nobel Peace Prize, I made a donation to his colony.

Compassion is equally important in Islam — and recognizing that has become crucial in the years since Sept. 11, especially in answering those who paint Islam as a militant faith. On the first anniversary of 9/11, I spoke at the National Cathedral in Washington, pleading that we not blindly follow the lead of some in the news media and let the violent acts of a few individuals define an entire religion.

Let me tell you about the Islam I know. Tibet has had an Islamic community for around 400 years, although my richest contacts with Islam have been in India, which has the world’s second-largest Muslim population. An imam in Ladakh once told me that a true Muslim should love and respect all of Allah’s creatures. And in my understanding, Islam enshrines compassion as a core spiritual principle, reflected in the very name of God, the “Compassionate and Merciful,” that appears at the beginning of virtually each chapter of the Koran.

Finding common ground among faiths can help us bridge needless divides at a time when unified action is more crucial than ever. As a species, we must embrace the oneness of humanity as we face global issues like pandemics, economic crises and ecological disaster. At that scale, our response must be as one.

Harmony among the major faiths has become an essential ingredient of peaceful coexistence in our world. From this perspective, mutual understanding among these traditions is not merely the business of religious believers — it matters for the welfare of humanity as a whole.

Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, is the author, most recently, of “Toward a True Kinship of Faiths: How the World’s Religions Can Come Together.”

Penguin India's INDIAN ESSENTIALS

2010-05-24T05:04:00.004-04:00

PENGUIN INDIA recently published a collection of essays under the title INDIAN ESSENTIALS

I was one of twenty authors invited to write an essay for the book and the subject suggested to me was "commuting in India". I wrote my piece several years ago and was quite pleased with it, so I thought I'd post a couple of excerpts here as a teaser trailer. If you want to read the complete piece, you'll have to buy the book!

THE TRAVELLER

Right until the moment that I sat down to write my piece for this collection of essays, I had expected to make a patchwork quilt of some fifty years of train journeys, from early childhood to now. Then I opened a new file on my laptop and in that instant the gently bubbling spring of memories changed into a trickle of stale anecdotes about lost tickets, colourful fellow passengers and the time I threw up all the way from Madras to Bombay courtesy my mother's mutton sandwiches. I’ve told these stories dozens of times and though they’re reasonably entertaining when accompanied by cheese sandwiches and tepid coffee, they're not exactly marble-plaque material.

....

So I decided to fashion an amusement from scratch, using myself as fall-gal and the Indian Railways as my stage. I decided to go on an actual trip from Delhi to Madras, on the Rajdhani, but to treat it as if it were an amalgam of all my previous trips.

...

Naturally, then, my first priority was to create a disguise for myself. Stage magicians will tell you that the main part of a successful trick is misdirection - drawing attention away from the mechanics of the trick by doing something just outside the plane of intention. With this in mind, I did two things. The first was that I bought myself a set of clothes of the kind that I never normally wear: a salwar-kurta ‘suit’ made out of cheap shiny cloth, mud-brown in colour, with an all-over print of dull red flowers. On my feet I wore a pair of vomit-pink slippers, one size too small and I took care to paint my toe nails metallic sea green two weeks in advance of the journey, so that by the time I boarded the train my feet looked moth-eaten and diseased.

My second move was to shave my hair off.

My reason for taking this drastic step was simple: I didn't have the time or inclination to grow my hair out, yet a woman with short-cropped hair not only suggests that she makes regular trips to a hairdresser but also that she has the money and leisure to pay for such indulgences. By contrast, a shaven head, in India, instantly communicates a message of traditional values, self-sacrifice and most importantly, loss. A woman will not normally remove her hair except for sober reasons - the loss of a spouse, catastrophic illness, mental derangement, louse-infestation or in quest of a favour from the gods. Whatever the cause, nobody doubts the credentials of a tonsuree. The very nakedness suggests an exposure to the elements and an absolute lack of secrets that is pitiable and for that reason, disarming.

...

‘Excuse me?’ I said.

Both men looked up. They were mismatched in the way of famous comedy pairs, Laurel and Hardy or Tom and Jerry —something intrinsically funny about the differences between them. The tall, broad one said, ‘Yes?’ while the smaller, more delicate one just nodded, with his head cocked to one side.

My immediate impression was that they were both young, perhaps in their twenties. Travelling salesmen was my first guess regarding their careers, but they might just as well have been cousins going home for a clan gathering or graduate students taking a Puja break. They were dressed decently, but without any flair. In the dim light all I could see was that they were clean-shaven, wearing long-sleeved shirts, with their luggage stowed neatly under their seats. The big one’s hair rose up in a poll of black curls on top of his head while the smaller man’s hair was straight and slicked back, parted on one side: a large hearty rabbit and a small nervous mongoose.

‘I’m doing a survey,’ I said. ‘Is it all right if I ask a few questions?’

‘Sure, sure,’ said Rabbit, as he shifted his bulk aside very slightly, as if to make
space for me, except that there was plenty of space and therefore no real need for him to shift.

‘- usually, we are the ones asking the questions,’ said Mongoose, unexpectedly. ‘Never mind! We will give the answers this time.’ He said this with a straight face, neither smiling nor frowning. There was something melancholy in his sobriety.

We were all speaking in English, though theirs was more accented than mine.

I said, ‘Oh! Does that mean you’re … ?’

‘- media consultants,’ said Rabbit, turning the palm of his right hand up, as if this were a self-evident fact. Something in the way he performed this gesture made me want to giggle.

‘We do market surveys,’ said Mongoose, nodding morosely.

‘Really!’ I said, smiling too brightly. There are certain circumstances which cause me to laugh uncontrollably. I produce a loud, chuckling rattle - sub-machine-gun with a touch of hyena - that is difficult to turn off once it gets started. I grow breathless, my sides ache and my eyes stream with tears. The fits usually occur when there is an obvious trigger, such as a comedy film or the company of friends, but sometimes, as on this occasion, the hysteria rises inside me like a volcano of soap bubbles, for no clear reason at all. An image flashed before my eyes, of me with my shaven head and green-painted toe-nails falling off my seat howling with laughter, as the two media consultants looking on, puzzled and a little pained. I clamped my hand across my mouth, hoping they wouldn’t notice.

‘How about you?’ asked Mongoose. ‘You are in survey business also?’
Further images were flashing in my head: scenes from Peter Sellers’ movies, of Herbert Lom’s face starting to twitch as crazed cackles leak out of him. I feared something similar was about to happen to me. I began massaging my cheeks as if I was in pain.

‘Uhh,’ I stammered, ‘not really, no. I’m - I'm a journalist -’

‘You should let her ask the questions,’ said Rabbit to Mongoose, in a reproachful tone.

The smaller man turned towards me, his eyes trusting and morose. ‘Please, Ma’am, you go ahead and ask. We will tell you anything.’

I was very grateful for the relative darkness of their cubicle. Sucking in a deep breath, so that the giggles were pushed back down into my stomach, I said, ‘I’m doing a series of articles about reincarnation. Maybe the two of you have some interesting stories to tell me?’

There was a brief silence. Rabbit cleared his throat and shifted slightly in his seat. Looking straight ahead as if reciting a passage he had memorized, he said,

‘Well … speaking for myself alone, I can say I take six eggs once a day.’

‘Eggs?’ I asked, unsure of what I’d heard.

‘Hard boiled,’ he said, thinking that I’d wanted clarification.

Mongoose was shaking his head from side to side. ‘He refuses to listen. I have told him so many times, but still he eats them. He says it is a question of faith.’

‘Just a moment,’ I said. ‘Why are we talking about food?’

‘You asked about it, so I am telling,’ said Rabbit, turning his palm over once more.

‘It is true,’ said Mongoose. ‘We have been travelling together on field trips for three years. He takes six eggs every night before dinner -’

‘I’m sorry but … what do eggs have to do with reincarnation?’ I had gone to a stage beyond laughter now. There was a floating sensation in my head, as if my giggles had transferred themselves to my sinuses without pausing to be released along the way.

‘You can read it in the papers every day,’ sighed Rabbit, raising his eyes to the ceiling with a long-suffering expression. ‘Some people are dying, some people are getting attacks. Excess of eggs leads to catharsis of the hearteries - leading to incarnation. But I am still eating my six eggs a day because … because … it is my belief!’ He closed his eyes.

‘No one can help him,’ whispered Mongoose, ‘no one’. He seemed on the verge of tears.

I got to my feet, knowing that I would explode if I remained in their company a second longer.
‘Thank you!’ I managed, before I fled. ‘You’ve been very informative!’

Excellent Article

2010-05-22T21:05:00.003-04:00

This morning I woke up unnaturally early, thinking: I need to use my blog in a more pro-active way. A blog is an extraordinary vehicle, if you stop and think about it, for putting private ideas and interior moments right out there where everyone/anyone can see them. But most of us use our blogs for hanging out our wet hankies and maybe passing around links that have done the tour of the universe half a dozen times already.

So anyway, when I got up and looked at e-mail the first thing I read was this article by Dr DAVID MICHAEL GREEN, Associate Professor of Political Science, Hofstra University and broad-spectrum commentator. He posts regularly to his web-site, THE REGRESSIVE ANTIDOTE and I'm subscribed to his automatic mail-out list.

It seemed like the ideal thing to post here on a day which began on a sober, I'm-not-doing-enough-with-my-life-note. Go click! It'll kick-start your day. Or what remains of your day. Or light up your evening. Or ... whatever.

On Self Censorship

2010-05-18T02:25:00.003-04:00

Some of you may have visited this blog in the past couple of days and seen a link, which I have now removed, to a website called ... ummm ... well, obviously if I say what it is that'll be pretty much the same as posting a link to it. No-one asked me to remove it, but on reflection I decided it was kinder and safer to avoid displaying it here, even though the article (in the New Yorker) was/is fascinating and even though I will still visit the site now and then.

It's NOT a porn site, but then again, it's quite a bit like one, so I thought: nah. I think it's funny and very bizarre but then again, lots of people I know might find it (a) disgusting (b) child-unfriendly. I don't think I normally receive visits from Persons of the Youthful Persuasion, but then again, it's always possible that someone young strays here from TULIKA's website. So I decided to err on the side of being super cautious.

Hmmm. I feel the weight of every single gray hair on my head ...

May 14th

2010-05-13T22:07:00.006-04:00

That was the view from the upstairs window in my friends' home in Vermont -- barely two weeks ago. It snowed two feet in one day. Two days later, emerald green meadows speckled with brilliant yellow dandelions were all that could be seen in every direction.

But that was 2 weeks ago, and since then I have been trotting about -- I had another night in Lebanon and a wonderful dinner, in terms of company, conversation and food -- returned to Boston the next day and spent two nights at my niece's new home in Randolph and then two nights at the Fairmont, the hotel my sister was staying in while attending a medical conference. I hadn't planned to be there for two days, but that's how it worked out, because the volcano began sputtering again and my flight was delayed by two hours. That meant I'd miss my connecting flight through Frankfurt, so I opted to take an earlier flight the next day.

Got back to Delhirium on Thursday morning.

Lebanon, NEW HAMPSHIRE

2010-04-29T08:53:00.003-04:00

... is where I am as I write this quickie post. I've spent two days with a friend in her "pink palace" -- a rambling house with wonderful light, one husband, two cats and a one-year-old-today baby.

There's so much I could write about but time constraints force me to keep this to the teeniest minimum. I arrived in the US on Friday night, spent that night in Boston with D&D, my niece and new nephew-in-law, traveled the next day to Newport and spent one happy night and day there, before returning to Boston on Sunday. Monday morning I had a very good session at Tufts University, talking to drama students of Prof Sean Edgecombe about my play HARVEST. Monday night I was once more with D&D, and we had an extremely jovial dinner at JOE'S, a high-quality burger restaurant. Tuesday morning I left for Lebanon, NH, intending to spend one night but then got SNOWED IN -- Vermont got two feet of snow -- so I delayed departure and am very grateful for the big friendly home I'm in.

And now I'm going to end this bulletin with a typically bizarre story, encountered on Yahoo News. Enjoy!
YOGI SURVIVES WITHOUT FOOD & WATER

Feel Good Moment of a Lifetime?

2010-04-18T06:20:00.003-04:00

Wow. That's all I can say to this astounding SURVIVAL STORY. The take-home message is: NEVER give up ... but also, if you must drown, do it in a very cold climate.

The Eerie Beauty of Iceland's Volcanic Eruption

2010-04-17T06:49:00.000-04:00

The Eerie Beauty of Iceland's Volcanic Eruption

The title of this piece is what it was given by TIME Mag. I would've said "dramatic" rather than "eerie". Dramatic, eerie, whatever -- I remember thinking it would've been fantastic to have had cameras trained on the vent say an hour or so before the actual eruption. It would have been the ultimate in fire and ice -- glacier and lava! Yum. Now, if we could only organize a mountain-sized chunk of sugar alongside, we might have cooked up a natural Baked Alaska fit for a giant.

Sunitha Krishnan fights sex slavery | Video on TED.com

2010-04-14T04:30:00.000-04:00

Sunitha Krishnan fights sex slavery | Video on TED.com

Down The Dark Alley

2010-04-13T13:31:00.003-04:00

This is perhaps a cruel contrast to my last post -- so if it's been a difficult day so far, you may want to click past this one right away -- but it's also got an astonishing and profoundly touching clarity. We all know terrible things happen: sometimes they happen to us, and of course to the millions of people we read about in the press. Here's the Pulitzer Prize winning feature article (2010) that appeared in the Washington Post. About how some of those to whom the worst of the worst has happened deal with the rest of their lives. FATAL DISTRACTION: Forgetting a Child in the Backseat of a Car Is a Horrifying Mistake. Is It a Crime? by Gene Weingarten

A HAPPY Story

2010-04-08T11:26:00.004-04:00

Last night a friend dropped by for an after-dinner visit saying he just HAD to do something for a little dog he'd seen lying by the side of the road near his parents' home in Panchsheel. "I heard this low moaning from the side of the road and when I stopped and got down there she was. Poor thing!" A car must have run her over, because at least one her back legs was badly damaged. "It may have happened a day or two ago, because (the leg) was full of maggots and stinking ..."

He lives in Bombay so he couldn't take the poor creature in himself. His neighbour suggested calling the animal ambulance in the morning. But when he got to our house he was still wincing at the thought of leaving the animal alone and suffering all through the night.

"What about FRIENDICOES-SECA?" one of us said.

"Wow! Great idea -- why didn't I think of them right away?" When our friend lived in Delhi, he'd had two wonderful and much loved strays living with him. He had gone to the famous animal shelter under the Defence Colony Flyover whenever he needed help with his dogs.

"Uh-oh, don't have their number though," we said.

"NO problem," said our friend. "I'll just call Just Dial and find out --"

Literally one minute later, there was the number -- well, a list of them, actually -- for Friendicoes, sent by SMS, to our friend's phone. Another couple of minutes later, and after a couple of dud numbers, he got through to Friendicoes and explained the situation. "Do you want me to be there to identify the dog?" he asked, already holding his car keys in hand.

Keep in mind this was maybe 10.15 at night. The friendly voice at the other end said, "No, that's all right. Our night ambulance driver'll go over and collect the dog. All you have to do is tell him where to go. I'll give you his number ..."

Our friend called the number and described exactly where the animal was. Maybe fifteen minutes later he got a call from the driver, saying that he'd found the dog, had taken her in and all was well. We could hear the dog's pathetic whining even without holding the phone to our own ears.

Our friend and one of us decided this was really great. So they drove over to the shelter right away. By that time, the little dog had been registered, her wound dressed and she'd been given a sedative to ease her pain. Our friend had said on the phone that he thought it may be best to put her to sleep, but at the shelter they just smiled and nodded (I wasn't there, so I'm just reporting what I was told).

Today, when I went online to check their site, I realized that they've probably had loads of "hopeless cases" whom they resurrect and find happy homes for! Maybe this little one will be another such story. We made a donation right away, of course. But more than anything else, we came away from the experience feeling an unfamiliar sense of total gladness.

Everything was good: the fact that our friend gave in to his compassionate nature, the fact that Just Dial worked at once, the Friendicoes response and at the end of it all, one little creature saved from a lonely, painful death. Friendicoes was totally uncommercial: making the donation was absolutely voluntary. They go and collect the animal when they get a call; the rest is up to the conscience of the caller.

Yes -- yes -- I KNOW: it was just one dog, just one story.

Right.

But in this sad old world even one story is a miracle.

SAME & DIFFERENT

2010-04-03T01:36:00.004-04:00

Here we go! A link to SAME & DIFFERENT, at Tulika's web-site, now on sale. I am waiting impatiently for my author copies for immediate give away -- the one big thrill of publishing boox is being able to give 'em away!

Oh -- and here's a link to a page at Tulika's Blog where I describe how I did the drawings.

April Fool's Day TRICK

2010-04-01T06:28:00.002-04:00

It's the first of April and time for some magic. I have NO idea how this was done, but I'm guessing major manipulation of space-time and perhaps a pact with the Devil thrown in on the side. This AMAZING TRICK by Chinese Magician LIU QIAN was sent to me by none other than ... AA. Of course.

Error Messages

2010-03-31T09:46:00.006-04:00

Further to the theme of Failure that I've been pursuing, here is a series of ERROR MESSAGES*. Do I need to mention that they were sent to me by the Incomparable Anvar Alikhan? I don't know who designed them and executed the graphics but I would send them a bouquet of roses, if I could.
(*Okay, if you've never seen one before, it means you are not human. Thank you for visiting this blog. I am sincerely honoured)

The Uses of Failure!

2010-03-22T04:22:00.006-04:00

[This is a re-run of a piece I wrote years ago for my column in the Pioneer. It was later reproduced in Rediff-on-the-Net and entirely forgotten by me until, through a series of coincidences, I REDIFFcovered it on the net. So if you missed it the first time around 10 years ago, no worries! Here it is again]

If you were given "a piece of wire that is bent to a rectangular, triangular, or otherwise shaped hoop, the end parts of which wire piece form members or tongues lying side by side in contrary directions" -- what would you do with it?

Use it to bind sheets of paper together, I hope, because that is a description of one of the early versions of paper clip, the invention of a Norwegian called Johan Vaaler. This fragment of information is just one of countless revelations made in a fascinating book called The Evolution of Useful Things by Henry Petroski (author of a book about another supremely useful thing, The Pencil).

It is humbling to realise how much thought, effort and, yes, even passion lies behind all manner of objects which we take for granted in the blurred momentum of our urban lives. By describing the conception of such items as zip fasteners, cutlery and "Scotch" tape, Petroski pays homage to the astounding inventiveness and optimism of our species.

Take, for example, sticky tape. I am one of those people who cannot survive for long without at least four different types of tape close at hand: Narrow and clear for basic bonding; broad and opaque for packing parcels; Scotch magic tape for sneaky repairs like torn currency notes: and the absolutely indispensable double-sided tape for any job which requires one sheet of paper to be attached as neatly as possible to another without the mess of wet glue.

According to this book, gummed tape evolved out of the 1925 fashion, in the US, for cars painted in two colours. A young salesman called Richard Drew, who worked for the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing company -- which, at that time, specialised in waterproof sandpaper, heard auto shop workers complaining about the difficulty they had painting these two-tone cars.

Producing clean edges between two shades of paint required some part of the car's surface to be protected while the second colour was being sprayed on. But the adhesive used to fix the protective mask onto the car was often so strong that it took one coat of paint off with it when the mask was removed.

Drew set himself the challenge of producing a type of paper which would adhere to a surface temporarily. It took him two years to chance upon crinkly paper as the ideal medium. The brand name Scotch, belonging to the company we all know now as 3M, is supposed to have arisen because the tape was initially adhesive only along its edges. Users reportedly complained that due to the "Scotch" stinginess of its manufacturers, the tape wasn't sticking properly! This resulted in the tape being gummed across its whole surface.

Similarly, in 1978, Art Fry, a chemical engineer also working for 3M, felt the need to mark the pages in his hymnal with bookmarks which wouldn't fall out. What he needed was an adhesive strong enough to keep a small scrap of paper from falling out of a book, yet weak enough not to damage the page it was on. A fellow employee and researcher called Stephen Silver had accidentally discovered just such an adhesive. Because the company they worked for took a benevolent view of extracurricular inventiveness, Fry was able, in a year-and-a-half of experimenting, to come up with the now ubiquitous little bits of paper called Post-its.

"Form follows function" has been a designer's mantra for many decades now. But, in his book, Petroski contends, "The form of one thing followed from the failure of another thing to function as we would like. Whether it is the bookmarks which fail to stay in place or taped-on notes that fail to leave a once-nice surface clean and intact, their failure... is what leads to the true evolution of artifacts."

What an attractive and hopeful thought this is! I read it to mean that failure is one of the building blocks of success: that failure can be, and often is, the foundation on which strong and vibrant ideas are built. Those of us who fail are generally given little encouragement except to be whipped to perform better the next time around. The celebration of success hides a fear and an abhorrence of failure; and yet, in a sense, failure in the form of death is the ultimate fate of every mortal being. How much gentler and more powerfully inclusive it is, therefore, to recognise that every failure is an invitation to improvise, improve and innovate.

In one example after the other, Petroski demonstrates his point: The safety-pin which evolved out of the failure of straight pins to protect their users from getting pricked; the incredible variety of hardware items, each invented and patentable only because they filled a need which some other item failed to satisfy; the endless variety of cans and their corresponding openers. There is such a thing as creative discomfort, Petroski's book suggests, which is the ultimate fount of all creation.

Statistics

2010-03-19T04:29:00.002-04:00

This appeared on the edit page of the Asian Age on Tuesday, 16th March (i.e., one day after International Women's Day), in an article written by the former governor of J&K and former Union Minister, Jagmohan:

"Domestic violence is also quite common. About 45 per cent of women are slapped. One case of cruelty by husband and relatives is reported every nine minutes. General crime against women, too, is widespread. There is one molestation case every 15 minutes, one rape every 29 minutes, one dowry death every 77 minutes, and one incident of sexual harassment every 53 minutes."

No wonder the sex ratio (quoted in this article) currently stands at 927 females for every 1000 males!

Someone's got it RIGHT ... maybe?

2010-03-17T02:12:00.005-04:00

Just looking at the pictures, I feel the book must be great to own -- a beautifully stylized version of the RAMAYANA, by US-based cartoonist/artist Sanjay Patel. I just happened to notice a reference to the book (its full title: RAMAYANA: The Divine Loophole) at CNN GO Asia via TwitterBuddy Elu and instantly fell in love with the visuals. They remind me of the wonderful angular style and colour palette of American wildlife artist, (the late) CHARLEY HARPER -- but exciting and lively in their own unique way. I've never heard of the book, but am assuming that's just becoz I live with my head tucked under my arm.

Rethinking HAPPINESS

2010-03-16T01:29:00.004-04:00

Here's a link to an article in the NEW YORKER -- it's worth reading, regardless of how happy/unhappy you are at the moment. A couple of years ago I read a book called HAPPINESS: Lessons from a New Science by Richard Layard which was interesting for several reasons but especially because (a) it suggested that the law of diminishing returns applies to happiness as it does with many other things and (b) this particular books ends with a discussion about chemical solutions to depression. I thought this second point was very odd but then again ... it's about happiness, right? And for many people a little chemical help is entirely crucial to maintaining the brightness of their smile -- please be sure to include white sugar in your definition of "chemical help"!

Anyway. The New Yorker article is an elaboration of the points raised in the book (i.e., if you read the article, you don't really need to read the book). On the one hand, I remember an Arab businessman friend whom we met more than 40 years ago, part of the oil-rich tide that spilled over into India, looking for new markets and business. He said that being rich certainly did not guarantee happiness but if you're going to be sad either way, then "... it's better to be rich and sad than poor and sad."

MEANWHILE! More videos. These two are from my recent trips to FATEHPUR SIKHRI and the TAJ MAHAL.

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

2010-03-13T00:45:00.006-05:00

Well and here I am, back in Delhuxe.

Since posting the zebrae I have heard from Tulika books that they will NOT spank me for uploading bits of images from SAME & DIFFERENT, their next title by me. So ... here's another one. I may be unable to resist posting fragments from each of the pages in the days/weeks ahead! I normally lose interest in my work the moment it's delivered and out of my hands, but with picture books, I remain enthusiastic at least until I've seen the printed result.

Meanwhile, I must report I had a funny dream the other night -- all about ring-tailed lemurs!! Nothing much happened in my dream, except that there were a number of the cute little critturs leaping about, making their musical cries and blinking their enormous orange eyes. At the Goa Seminar (see the post just before this one ...) dreams and dream analysis were amongst the topics of discussion and we had a bonafide dream expert, MADHU TANDON, author of DREAMS & BEYOND (Penguin Books) to reveal a little bit about the unconscious mind and the tales it sometimes tells us.

Alas, I missed the dream analysis session at breakfast on the day I left Goa -- even though I no longer pay much attention to my own dreams. I used to, but over a period of time came to the conclusion that I am too prosaic and insensitive a person to have mystical experiences. I dream a great deal but nearly always in the ring-tailed lemur mode -- i.e., there's a great deal of detail and amusement, quite often with sound and light (and sometimes smell) effects, but rarely anything else. Whenever I've tried to write down dreams after waking up, the result is that I have more and more astonishing "adventures" and spend less and less time actually awake. Still. It would have been fun to have been at the session. I like talking about and hearing about the dream world, even though I find it difficult to believe that they (dreams) are anything more than a type of mental hobby for the brain, while it's recovering from its daytime activities.

AND ...

On a completely different note: while reading about gay rights and a recent ruling in the USA which makes it legal for gay couples to marry in yet another state (Maryland?) I got to wondering why people belonging to alternative-gender lifestyles don't frame a different contract altogether. I wrote to someone who is an activist in the gay rights movement, and asked if there were any moves in that direction and was told that there were, but not enough consensus to make the initiative stick.

It would be so cool, I think, if alt-sex groups cobbled together a type of contract that would actually appeal across the board to anyone who is sick of the inanities of the conventional marriage contract while at the same time recognizing the need for formal ties.

AND! A new feature, from a great site called ANIMOTO -- instant little animations! Using your own stuff. In this case, it's a collection of my drawings and 'toons.

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

GOIN' GOAN

2010-03-09T23:12:00.007-05:00

I'm currently in Bombay, enjoying the pleasant aftermath of three days in Goa at the very enjoyable seminar organized jointly by the Sahitya Akademi and Goa University on Fantasy, Science Fiction, and other Forms of the Marvellous in Indian Literature. These two photographs are all that I succeeded in capturing on account of having my camera with me but refusing to take out anywhere, with the result that I could only use my cellphone (All Hail Nokia E71!).

The seminar was only my second experience of an ac-lit seminar but based on these two experiences (the previous one being in Ch'garh ten days ago) I could easily become addicted! It was fun, it was interesting and I think we all came away feeling better and broader for it -- no puns intended. A partial* list participants is:
(* it's not exhaustive becoz this list is cut-and-pasted from the list of those staying at the Hotel NOVA GOA. I'm too lazy to look up the printed list to check to see who else was present at the seminar, if they weren't on this list)

1. Dr. A Krishna Murthy, Secretary Sahitya Akademi
2. Alok Bhalla, Jamia. Delhi, Advisor, Sahitya Akademi,
3. Gitanjali Chatterjee, Dy. Secretary, Sahitya Akademi
4. Arshia Sattar, Bangalore, Seminar Co-Ordinator,
5. Malashri Lal, Seminar Co-Ordinator, Delhi U,
6. Sahitya Akademi accounts/office staff
7. Ahana Lakshmi, translator, Chennai
8. Deepa Agarwal , writer, translator, Delhi
9. Kavita Sharma , writer, academic, Director, India International Centre
10. Madhu Tandan, writer, dream analyst, Delhi
11. Mahesh Sharma, historian, writer, Chandigarh
12. Manjula Padmanabhan, writer, artist Delhi
13. Namita Gokhale, writer, publisher, Delhi
14. Neerja Mattoo, writer, translator, Kashmir
15. Raju Natesh, writer, artist.
16. Reba Som, author, singer and translator, Director, ICCR Tagore Centre, Kolkata.
17. Sanjukta Dasgupta, writer, translator, academic, Calcutta Univ
18. Shilo Shiv Suleiman, Illustrator
19. Sukrita Paul Kumar, poet, academic, ILLL, Delhi Univ.
20. Sumanyu Satpathy, translator, academic, Head, Dept of English, Delhi Univ.
-- ah -- one person who I know was at the seminar, but wasn't on this list is
21. China Meiville, writer, UK, whom we borrowed from the British Council's Lit Sutra.

March Madness

2010-03-03T22:31:00.004-05:00

Need a laugh? Go visit THIS SITE featuring howlers of the political rally kind.

But in other news ... I am still chasing my tail, trying desperately to get one lot of work completed in order to make space for the OTHER lot, which, coincidentally happens to be my primary work (i.e., writing, painting). Ahem. Well ... yep. I'm the sort of degenerate being who cannot even manage to play hooky in a competent fashion, because one way or another it's ALL WORK. *snarl*

I did manage to complete my picture-book-for-the-year, however and am feeling very pleased about it. It's called SAME & DIFFERENT and is another* book of picture puzzles. I am posting a TINY sample below -- and haven't asked my publisher TULIKA's permission yet, so if you return later today and discover that there's NO PICTURE it means I've been smacked on the head and sent to bed without supper. I delivered the artwork last week and the finished result should be out in print, I'm told, in maybe a week from now!! The speed at which books leap off the desk and into the world these days just takes my breath away. (*the first one was called I AM DIFFERENT, also from TULIKA)

Chandigarh Revisited!

2010-02-28T23:25:00.007-05:00

On Friday I went off to Chandigarh for a quickie visit. I was a guest of the Ch'garh Sahitya Akademi with the lightest of light duties to perform: all I had to do was introduce three other writers at the afternoon STORY-TELLING SESSION. The writers were Prof Tej Nath Dhar, Prof Carolyn Kraus and Dr Jaideep Chadha and they each read from their work -- Prof Dhar read an extract from his book UNDER THE SHADOW OF MILITANCY, Prof Kraus read her short story GARGOYLE and Dr Chadha read his short story THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE DOOMED.

The one day Lit-Fest was organized by Dr Manju Jaidka, Chair of the Akademi and a person with unlimited resources of energy. The LitFest marked the culmination of a three day "International Conference on Literature and Culture Post-1980" and there was a party atmosphere over at the Panjab* University campus, where the events were taking place. There's more information here. (*this is how it's spelt on their sign boards. I was surprised, the first time I saw it, but was assured that it wasn't a proofing error).

I had a very happy visit with my good friends JACQUIE and RANJIT SINGH and got back to Delhi after a bare two nights, on Sunday morning. As usual, I have no time to breathe or think, so I'll stop for the moment after uploading these two pix, taken at the Ch'garh Railway Station.

2010-02-16T13:31:00.002-05:00

Madras,14-02-2010 My sister and niece pose for a picture just before the Event -- nope, NOT a wedding, though it looks like one! It was a family blessing, to celebrate the marriage which took place on the first of January this year. I'll post more pix to a SnapFish album later this week. It was a very pleasant occasion and much amusement was had by all.

Monuments-R-Us

2010-02-04T21:57:00.003-05:00

FatehpurSikri

This is where I was yesterday, with my sister S, niece D and new nephew-in-law D -- in fact he's in the frame, in white, near the left. The photograph is a first for moi, something I took with my New!Improved! phone, a very superior creature given to me as a gift by my OTHER niece, M. I'm a little afraid of the phone and try not to use it in a rude or inappropriate manner and have so far not made the effort to scrape pictures out of its memory and into my computer's memory. And it doesn't like sending things by MMS (have I set up a profile? Noooo). But yesterday, on a whim, I tried sending myself an image via Gmail. Voila! This is the result.

When I say it's a first for me, I mean that this is the first image from my phone that I've managed to get out of it and into the wider world. Of course, it took a whole minute to upload to Gmail, so I am not likely to send more out anytime soon. *sigh* The worst thing about superior gadgets is the feeling that they're smirking quietly in their shiny little black skins, knowing that they're getting the better of their clunky human owners.

KNOW-IT-ALL

2010-01-31T18:40:00.007-05:00

... which is a book by a youngish man who took approx one year to read all the way through the Encyclopaedia Britannica. It's called The Know-It-All: One Man's HUMBLE QUEST to become the SMARTEST PERSON in the World by A.J. Jacob. 33,000 pages, 65,000 articles, 9,500 contributors, 24,000 images, a total of some 44 million words.

I hadn't heard about it before seeing it on the "Humour" (haha -- of course I actually mean HUMOR, right? coz I was in the US. But I am not yet ready to give up my birth-orthography) shelf in a Barnes & Noble near my sister's home in Pennsylvania. Maybe in Vestal, NY -- I forget. I was trying NOT to buy anything because books are the heaviest item in my luggage and I am determined to morph into a light-luggage traveller in my twilight years (I believe in announcing the twilight as early as possible so that I've got used to the idea well before I really need to). So one of my methods of NOT buying a book, is to find at least one small something to buy -- which may turn out to be a book -- so that I don't leave the store empty-handed and ALSO so that I don't fall for some gigantic Leviathan of a coffee-table tome just because the Book-Buying-Slot in my psyche has been left empty. If you know what I mean? I fill the pre-existing empty book-buying-space in my head quickly and with a small, light book, in order to lower the chances of finding something much heavier and more expensive to squeeze in there.

Okay. So having seen it, I also saw a CD-ROM offering to improve my memory. Hmmm! TOUGH CHOICE!! So I went with the memory CD (more of this later). But all the way home from B&N and for the rest of the week, I kept feeling I NEEDED to read that Know-It-All book. You see, like many millions of other bipedal mammals around the world, I too have hungered after that very quest, to read all the way through the Enc.Brit. My sisters and I, three of us, each have our personal set of the books. I got mine in the late '90s because a very dear friend had left me Rs 25,000 as a bequest when she died of cancer -- it was a completely unexpected windfall and rather than use it up on groceries and rent I wanted to staple the money down in some way that I would always cherish. I knew that she would have wholly approved because she had one of the brightest, liveliest minds amongst the friends I've had over the years, and believed passionately in the notion of knowledge as an end in itself.

On my way back through New York, I had a few hours to spare before meeting up with my friend Kristen at her apartment in Manhattan. I knew exactly where I would find a B&N. So I took in a movie, visited another store at which I bought gifts for my niece and her new husband, then went into the B&N on 18th St and 5th (World's Largest Book Store -- and apparently the original B&N), sailed up to the information counter and explained that I wanted a book whose name and author I didn't know (I hadn't begun my Memory Expansion course yet!) -- but I DID know what it was about. To his credit, he didn't blink or even look mildly surprised, but listened courteously as I said "... by someone who read all the way through the Britannica ..." and bing! -- "Yes," he said, "I know that book -- upstairs, in the Humour section -- " Then he looked it up on his computer and I had the name and title.

The front cover sports a recommendation from Jon Stewart: "... is a hilarious book and quite an impressive achievement. I've always said, why doesn't someone put out a less complete version of the encylopedia? Well done, A.J." And you know what? For once I can say I agree with that recommendation. It's a pleasant, friendly and cruising-speed sort of read and at the end of it, you know a thing or two that you maybe didn't at the beginning. Naturally, it helps that I love having my own edition of the Enc.Brit., that I enjoy using it and that I have believed for a long time that it is a brilliant way keep knowledge captive in the house in a form that will continue to work even when the power fails and the internet is down and the laptop's batteries are dead. But the EB eulogy-dimension aside, it's also just a warm and human story.

Alongside the gentle reeling out of facts, the author throws out a couple of hooks to keep us reading. One is his and his wife's quest to conceive a child and the other is his desire to show that there are SOME practical applications to being an EB reader: i.e., appearing on game shows. Well, not just any game show but Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? And also Jeopardy -- but he disqualifies himself from Jep because he had interviewed the show's host prior to applying to appear on the show, not realizing that would be enough to invalidate his eligibility.

As it happens, I'm a WWTBAM fan. I've never watched it on TV, but it's one of the things I do on long-haul flights -- I play obsessively on the in-flight entertainment system. So far, after eight or nine such flights I have only ONCE made it to the top prize (it's the British edition of the quiz so many of the questions are UK based). I never know any of the wretched sports and local trivia questions and anyway, who am I kidding? My general knowledge is so abysmal that the other day, I sent a package to a friend in Coimbatore, and was shocked that it took 10 days to reach him. The reason? I believed C'tore was in KERALA, not TAMIL NADU!!! Aaaargh. So ... yes, it took its time getting there. And yes, I have a great deal of Swiss Cheese in my mental larder.

But I like to play nevertheless. So for me, this book had that bated-breath quality that I know so well from my in-flight activities -- and no, of COURSE I'm not going to tell you what happens! They do succeed in having a child, BTW. That's on the back cover so I'm not giving away any suspense here and besides, in my world, well ... reproduction is just not a red-button issue, right?

Along the way the author enrolls with MENSA and tells us that he gets in because of his SAT scores, but when he sits for the regular test anyway, he flunks (doesn't lose his membership however). This too resonates with me: in the very distant past -- like when I was twelve -- my school discovered that I had a high IQ and made a minor fuss over me (it was forbidden to reveal scores in those days so I have no idea). But that was 44 years ago and now my IQ is below tree-shrew-level. So I could enjoy this about the book too: recognizing in someone else that weirdly embarrassing desire for validation. The endearing thing about this account is that it could so easily have been radioactive with ego but instead is only mildly self-congratulatory. I don't know whether he was trying especially hard or not, but I found his account modest in a believable, non-phony way.

I enjoyed the tid-bits of data he shared -- Neat's Foot Oil is made from the hooves of cattle; Descartes had an obsession with cross-eyed women, and yes, the Fibonacci series continues to be a very cool thing to think about. I also noted tiny anomalies -- the god Kama is an "angel"?? No way. I should look it up in my edition of the EB to see whether it's in the book or in Jacob's interpretation of what the book says. Most of all, I enjoyed the slow coasting through that sea of information, felt glad to known now that it was worth doing and also relieved to feel no special urge to do it, now that I had sampled its pleasures through this book.

And now to turn to the Memory Expansion CD ... you know what? It was (a) a gyp because it's much too breezy and truncated to be of any real worth and (b) I've taken way too long over this book-report and (c) I'm still working my way through the exercises. I'll get back with a complete report once I can tell you whether or not I can remember my telephone number and the locations of Indian cities.

Paul Theroux's A DEAD HAND

2010-01-25T13:15:00.002-05:00

An aside: I am back in Delhirium. Arrived Sunday night, after a pleasant 10-day trip. Jet Airways gets a major thumbs up from me -- the service is friendly, courteous and efficient. I must confess -- and it pains me much to say this -- slender, young and attractive cabin crew really do appear to make a difference to the overall ease-of-experience. It pains me coz I would like to think that a person's appearance makes no difference to how they perform; but based on several years' worth of flying experience, it is hard not to conclude that men and women who look neat, tight and fresh-minted actually work more efficiently. I don't know which comes first -- the efficiency or the appearance? -- but the combination really does seem to make a difference to the quality of a passenger's experience. Maybe this is just years of advertising finally taking its toll on my objectivity? But since many airlines have consigned the pencil-thin virginal seductress standard to the dustbin of history, it is now a rare pleasure to look up and think "How ... sweet!"

OKAY. And so to A DEAD HAND. I am at a slight disadvantage because I no longer have my copy with me. So if I make mistakes, sorry. (WARNING: I'm not especially trying to make this spoiler-free, so if you haven't read the book, you may want to do that first. Or not. I don't mind having the suspense removed from a book before I read it -- sort of like handling a venomous snake without its fangs makes it possible to enjoy the snake)(but then again, some would say, why bother?)(you'll have to decide for yourself what you'd prefer)

My basic take on the book is that it's clever, highly manipulative and cynical AND ALSO disarmingly humble and reflective -- I sense for the first time (with Theroux), the author telling us, "Look, I'm aging, I'm starting to see the end of my road, I've seen practically every place in the world that's worth seeing, I've done my time in many variations on the Third, the Fifth, the Tenth World and now I'm tired of playing games with truth: I returned to India recently and this is what I saw, this is what I felt, this is what I think and if you don't like me for it, if you believe I'm a shallow, scheming white supremacist in Friendly Tourist clothing -- well, I don't give a f**k."

The story kept my interest even though I found the female lead, the American woman called Merrill Unger, unconvincing from page one. But this is one of the astonishing features of Theroux's fiction -- he can use utterly plastic, make-believe elements alongside observations that are so tight-focused, so precisely, even cruelly, observed, that it doesn't matter in the end. Or -- well: that's what I felt having read only two pieces of fiction, ELEPHANTA SUITE and now this novel. Both books have been set in India, so perhaps in both cases it is easier for me to separate the plastic from the pukka. I didn't care that the woman was such a throwback to a Rider Haggard Femme Fatale or that the protagonist was such an extreme sap. It didn't bother me that the two secondary characters, Parvati and Raj (? one of those generic Indian male names starting with "R") are such cardboard cut-outs. I can't even explain why none of this matters -- I know it should -- but maybe it's because I see his story-telling as only a clothes-horse he uses as a support for the observations he has collected along the way.

So none of the plot elements really matter: the cheesy American woman with her magic hands and her blood-stained sari-hem, the unconvincing son, the post-colonial Doctor at the Police Station and the murder itself, the pathetic little victim and the limp-wristed ploy used to bring the author into the picture. Really, looked at from the distance of two weeks, the story is pure hokum. Indian Jones' Temple of Doom was more credible.

But we all know that there really ARE manual labourers all over the country, seething, sweating vast hordes of them, whose lives are considered to be of very little vlaue. There really are animal sacrifices at Kali temples. There really are hundreds of child prostitutes, child labourers, child destitutes. If I've never heard before that extreme manual labour can result in the fingerprints being worn away, or that the sacrifices are quite as nauseatingly bloody as in this book or that little girls are sold in an open field lit only by the light from smoking braziers well, that's just my ignorance. My unawareness of something doesn't mean that it can't be true.

I could go on like this, but actually I'm less interested in revealing the plot or evaluating the book -- as far as I'm concerned, it was a rewarding read and I would recommend it strongly -- than in something that gnawed at me all the way through, something that had nothing to do with Theroux or the book. It is this: why is it so unlikely that an Indian author would write such a book?

This isn't meant to be a real question because I don't think anyone is detached enough to answer it honestly; it's something to chew over and to find several half-answers to. For instance, it's very likely that an Indian author inclined in this direction would simply not find a publisher. After all, the story is mundane and many of its characters are tissue-thin. Theroux gets away with it because he has the luxury of being a highly successful author whose publishers will indulge him and whose readers will buy his books even if they don't think they're going to like each particular one. He has proven many times over that his ability to observe people and cultures is ironic and eccentric but also bitterly true. Some part of his attraction is that he bites, he stings, he cuts to the bone. But he seems to be equally unsparing with himself.

Then again, I have to ask myself whether my lurking and hard-to-suppress fellow-citizen-bias would make it hard -- impossible? -- for me to accept some of the weaker bits of this novel if they appeared in a book by an Indian? There's an echo here of a complaint voiced in the context of the Jaipur lit-fest, of the term "bhasha language poetry"; is this truly something to feel irritated by or is it just a label that we wouldn't even notice the inappropriateness of, if it took place in the context of someone else's culture? I can't decide.

Which leads me to wonder out loud whether we (i.e. Indians) EVER really allow one another to make scathing observations about the Motherland/our families/our religions without either (a) balancing the criticism with such a thick coating of sugar that the critique becomes irrelevant or (b) ostracizing/belittling/ignoring the offending writer until he/she is forced to give up writing altogether?

These are all questions that I don't have answers for, but I thought were worth raising.

Resolutions UPDATE; Travel; AVATAR (the movie)

2010-01-19T00:17:00.008-05:00

RESOLUTIONS

Well, here we are sailing past the first fortnight of the year and it seemed a good time to review how my resolutions are doing: not bad, but not great. The main thing is that I HAVE stopped playing Mahjongg Solitaire*. I am almost up-to-date with my diary and I've certainly been plugging away at my book projects. But I'm still traveling in short gasps, and several of them and I've been avoiding the careful-bill-stashing altogether. (*About the Solitaire, I must admit it wasn't a smooth transition: I spent the whole of the year's first week playing games at the LUMOSITY site instead! My justification was, of course, that my brain's power was being significantly boosted, as evidenced by the sharp angle at which all the scores were rising. But at the end of the week my free membership came to an end. I had to choose whether or not to crawl my way out of the swamp of moronism all the way up to Einsteinhood for the mere pittance of $5 a month. And I decided to take my chances with moronism. Since then, NO GAMES)
TRAVEL

Thursday night, I pulled up stakes and flew to NYC on Jet Airways. It was a close call, getting to the airport on time because the Season Finale of Boston Legal was being aired and I was determined not to miss it. So instead of leaving the house at ll.30, we left at 12.00, which was the time I should have already been at the airport, checking in. I kept calling the Jet Airways Fog Delay number, hoping against hope that the flight WOULD be delayed -- in which case I could watch the season finale in peace -- but oh no, of course THAT never happens, right? Just like the watched pot that never boils, a flight is never delayed if you WANT it to be delayed. Anyway, I watched finale and arrived half an hour late at the airport and it didn't matter much at all. We boarded at the correct time only to wait an hour on the runway. Still, we DID take off (rather than be delayed for nine hours which is what routinely happens during Fog Season) and that was a relief. I had a great seat -- an aisle seat in the front of my section, excellent leg room. I give Jet Airways service high marks -- next only to Virgin Atlantic, in my experience. On Continental the hostesses behave like wardens in an asylum for retarded war criminals ("... please remain seated until we allow you to move around and oh by the way there will only be two meals served on board for the full duration of your 16-hour nonstop to Newark and if you can't shut up and watch your movies quietly, we'll sedate you and flush you down the toilet.")and on Air India, the flight crew all behave like contented tabby-cats, waddling about in their saris and dispensing greasy meals with a homespun cheeriness inappropriate to hurtling through the upper atmosphere at 500 KPH.

However in Brussels, where there was a halt and change of aircraft, our flight arrived one hour late and that, combined with the one and a half hour hold up on account of enhanced security for all flights to the US meant that I caught my onward flight with seconds to spare. AAAAARGH. I absolutely detest having to run for anything, but the prospect of missing the flight (to be stuck in Europe without a Schengen visa would certainly have qualified as junior membership in Hell) had me sprinting the last five hundred yards. It didn't help that the man behind me in the queue insisted on repeating over and over, in Hindi, "These people are all COWARDS -- cowards, cowards, cowards --" ("yeh sab darpoke hain, darpoke, darpoke") meaning, Americans in particular and all westerners in general, were foolish to be afraid of a few innocent travelers arriving from the Third World. I can't be sure that I was the last passenger to board my flight, but it seemed to me they sealed the hatch minutes after I got to my seat. PHEW. Major panic stations there.

Other than that, it's been a great trip so far. Was collected at JFK by friends, had a very pleasant evening with them and the next morning was really grateful that they dropped me all the way to the Port Authority Bus Station from Long Island -- it's a 20 minute journey by car, but about an hour and a half by commuter train and subway. Caught the 10 a.m. bus to Binghamton and my sister collected me from there, at one o'clock. And then we sailed off to see AVATAR in glowing 3D ... but before I move on to my next topic, i.e., the movie, I must mention the outstanding dinner we had at home, Sunday night : lobster-stuffed steaks with baked potato. Unbelievably tender and delicious meat, outstanding dressing on the potatoes, everything cooked to perfection. My sister is a genius cook aside from all her other accomplishments, and that's final.

AVATAR
What can I say? I enjoyed the movie, in spite of myself. I was convinced I would find it unbearably soft-centred and sentimental -- and even though I wouldn't howl to the moon about it or anything, I have to admit it had moments of stunning beauty; and the mushy bits were not so deadly saccharine as to drown out the good bits (I didn't like the TITANIC, for instance, because of the utterly improbable-for-that-era romance). I knew I would not be especially wowed by the scenic sights coz I've already been wowed by MYST and I was certain this would be a MYST-like environment. And it was -- but the N'avi were beautifully realized, perhaps the smoothest transition from live-action to CGI that the world has seen so far (well, in mass-distribution media, anyway). So that was fun to watch. The romance was irritating, of course, but inevitable and thank goodness, not over-emphasized. And there was always Sigourney Weaver to link back to, every time we returned to the human dimension. The story was never going to be of much consequence, so heavily larded with guilt as it was bound to be, but within its constraints (i.e., the constraints of History and Reality) it did manage a generous portion of dignity.

However, there's another piece of fiction that has been tweaking my brain -- more engaging by far than AVATAR -- and that is Paul Theroux's A DEAD HAND. It was what I read on the flight out of Delhi, with the result that my arrival in NYC was distinctly Theroux-flavoured. I really enjoyed it and plan to devote my next bulletin here to it -- aside from being too sleepy to continue this blog-item right now, I want to dedicate a whole post to the book, rather than a mere section.

FIVE BOOKS

2010-01-11T06:36:00.004-05:00

It was kind of fun responding to MAIL TODAY's "WHAT BOOK" question: Which five books have most influenced me? I was given 50 words of explanation per book. My response is HERE. Of course, five is just an arbitrary number! I would have preferred something like ten. Like I said, though, it was fun: this is not the same question as "Favourite Book" -- it's about which one's left a long footprint. I was surprised to remember Have Spacesuit Will Travel ...

IN CASE the whole article doesn't load at the site, here's the full text of what I sent them:

THE TITLES:
Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass – Lewis Carroll
Have Spacesuit Will Travel – Robert A. Heinlein
The Gormenghast Trilogy – Mervyn Peake
Gödel, Escher, Bach – Douglas R. Hofstadter
MYST – Robyn & Rand Miller

Each book marked a turning point in my understanding of reality; each one showed me different rules for managing the most weightless and outlandish of situations.

In Alice, which I read when I was six, the flowers talk and a caterpillar smokes a hookah. But Alice remains both rational and scrupulously polite. In Spacesuit, the ordinary becomes surreal: liquid spilled in zero-gravity turns into floating globules and the simple act of drinking coffee from a cup becomes an unlikely miracle. I read it when I was 12 and it undoubtedly shaped my life-long fascination with science as well as science-fiction.

I read Gormenghast in my early twenties. Physical reality in the book is conventional but the social dimension is utterly warped: we enter a castle as it celebrates the birth of its 700th Earl. The author was a brilliant illustrator, playwright and poet with an impish sense of humour. His trilogy is a wonderful reflection of all his talents.

In GEB, Hofstadter paints a picture of human intelligence using music, mathematics and art. His book is highly sophisticated, while never losing sight of his essential thesis: that at the heart of intelligence is a rogue thread of paradox and wit. As for MYST: yes, it's "just a game". But it became a type of electronic hallucination that I entered in late 1996 and never quite exited. I am forever clicking on white rabbits, looking through glass and finding cookies labelled "Eat Me": forever hopeful, curious and ready for a snack.

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Ms Malcontent Sez ... 2010 #02

2010-01-10T07:24:00.005-05:00

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