Swine Flu scare and books of the month

After months of battling minor ailments (and miserably slowing down on blog output as well) I have now decided to just ignore them. The moment of truth came when I had to test myself for influenza this week; if positive, I would have to test for swine flu. After the swab test (basically, a long, sterile cotton bud pushed up your nose) I went home to wait for the result. Although the physician had said this was unlikely, I was positive I had swine flu. Half asleep, and sweating in the heat of the afternoon, I tossed and turned, images of positive test results, being at Kasturba hospital for further testing, and getting behind at work swirling through my head.

I woke up parched and tired, to find the test result; negative. I felt slightly ashamed of myself; I thought I had swine flu just because “it seems like my fate to catch things.” Another victim of media hype.

Anyway, besides newspapers I have been reading quite a lot lately; a fairly diverse selection of books at that. The book gods have been kind with a heavily discounted sale by Ashish Book Center where I bought more than ten books (a friend bought twenty-one) and fruitful visits to the streets of Fountain.

Agatha Christie wrote six novels under the pen name Mary Westmacott, and I picked up one of these at Fort the other day, hungry for a Christie I hadn’t read. Absent in the Spring tells a story triggered by a single incident; a wealthy, middle-aged woman is stranded at a railway station in the Middle East with nothing to do. She begins to think about her life, and goes on an internal journey of discovery that shakes her world. The book is excellent, more a novella than a novel, with a single story as it’s focus. It is full of a deep understanding of character which shines through in Agatha's detective novels as well, but truly comes into it's own here.

Finally read Frank Herbert's classic fantasy novel Dune. Set on the harsh desert planet Arrakis, it draws from Islam and Judaism to create the nomadic society of the Fremen people, for whom the mere act of survival takes effort and ingenuity in a parched world of sand dunes and monstrous sand worms, where wealth is measured in water. Arrakis is set in a universe with a complex society all its own, post-modern technology combining with medieval culture to create a reality of Emperors and Dukes, with a planet as a fief. Dune makes compelling, fascinating reading and should be on the list of every serious Fantasy-and-SF fan. However it is harsh, gritty even, and definitely not a light, pleasant series.

I thoroughly enjoyed Eric Weiner’s book The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search For the World’s Happiest Places. He serves up a seasoned slice each of ten different countries - chew and taste for happiness. He seriously tempted me to leave India for freezing cold Iceland, the world’s happiest country, place of noon darkness and the midnight sun, where grants allowances are granted to artists and poets, where you recognize people in the street, and where colourful woollens brighten up the cold. Or perhaps for Switzerland, where everything works and is clean – no matter if it’s rather dull, growing up in Bombay has already given me all the excitement I need in one lifetime. The journey into Moldova, the unhappiest country in the world was interesting if gloomy, and that into Qatar, suffocating. The most disappointingly written one was India – Bangalore and Sri Sri Ravi Shankar’s ashram are hardly representative of the country. (I was horrified at the crassly commercial answers “Guruji” gave to life’s most profound questions, in the session documented by Weiner)

Vogue India, by the way, served up a scrumptious bachelor of literary pedigree this month - Zafar Rushdie, only twenty-nine and with all the elfin charm of his father. Oh, for a date with a Rushdie!

And while on the subject of books and authors, how many of you have read or are planning to read Jaswant Singh’s latest?

A Few Stray Thoughts

And for this week, a few stray thoughts.

Like, there is no feeling so amazingly delicious, so wonderfully relaxed, so free and easy, as the few minutes of consciousness before I open my eyes on a Saturday morning. There is no pleasure to beat the pleasure of anticipated pleasure.

And next to that glorious aimlessness, the best feeling is that of going to office on a Monday morning, exhaling enthusiasm, looking forward to attacking work which provokes you to tussle with it.

Like, my favourite movies are those that are carried along by witty dialogue. Love Aaj Kal is one of them... I loved it. Loved that it lasted only two hours, loved that it was slick and crisp, loved that it began not with the dawn of romance, but with a break-up between two people who don't believe in long distance relationships. Loved that it focused not on the hormonally charged first phase of love, but on a great comradeship that goes beyond that. I haven't cried in a movie for a long, long time, but in this light, non-serious, popcorn flick my eyes filled just for a moment as the couple amicably breaks up, because it touched me and probably my whole generation on the raw.

Like two of my favourite plays have been Starring You and Me, and Anything But Love, also both based on verbal repartee between two people.

Like, my favourite companions in the world are people who enjoy and engage in the art of debate. It's stimulating, it's informative, and if minds are open, it is enlightening.

Like, why is the novella a dying art? It is a lovely length for a book - long enough to explore the characters, short enough for the plot to remain crisp, and concise enough for the modern reader.

Like, I read a jewel of a novella this weekend - The Uncommon Reader, by Alan Bennet. He took a single thought - what would happen if the Queen became a passionate reader? And what if she enjoyed it more than the monarch's royal duties? and turned it into a thoughtful little book, with a light touch, layered with subtle insights.

Like, the day I finally feel like jogging on the roads again is the day finally I feel like writing again. There's a joy in flexing the writing muscle.

Going with the flow?

I've been ill on and off for quite a while now, and finally feeling better, I'm now back to write a post about those most inspiring of individuals; the spontaneous types.

In Mumbai, they are quite easy to spot. They mill in the waiting areas of restaurants and even outside them, on weekends, waiting while the ones who made reservations have leisurely meals inside. They are the ones who get lunch at 3 and dinner at 11.

At no-reservation restaurants like Relish and Cream Center, they are the ones who are just late enough to arrive at peak rush hours. You will see families of them, parents, grandparents, caterwauling children in tow - entire clans waiting for tables of ten.

Outside NCPA or Prithvi they are the eager beavers who chase play-goers, asking if they have an extra ticket to sell (I am grateful to them at times when I have over-planned and have too many). And when going for movies in the good old single-screen days, they were the bread-and-butter of black marketeers, eager to catch the latest hit film on Sunday, yet ticketless when the time came.

To my legions of "going-with-the-flow" buddies, I am beyond boring, making reservations for dinner, getting passes and picking up movie tickets, booking my fortnight's plays and concerts in one go.

Yet when I meet up with members of this carefree race, experiences are not always pleasant. Like on-the-spur-of-the-moment dinner last Friday, at Karma, on one of its horrible (but unreserved) high tables near the window, deafened by loud Bollywood music and surrounded by pre-pubescent girls, with achingly slow service and uninspiring food.

I don't want to be the enemy of all free spirits, but in a crowded city where there are always too many people, I prefer being one of the stodgy ones who plan out weekends. The ones who hit weekend sales early in the morning before crowds arrive. The ones who are welcomed into the best tables/booths/seats while the noisy crowds mill helplessly outside.

Just watched - Me, Kash and Cruise

It's finally raining, and I took a walk in the first true monsoon rain yesterday morning. Oh yeah, and spotted two rainbows over the sea today. The rain brings out the culture vulture in me, so here's the review of a play I saw this weekend.

Me, Kash And Cruise

Director : Rahul da Cunha
Cast : Yamini Namjoshi, Amit Mistry, Neil Bhoopalam and Rajit Kapur

Me, Kash and Cruise is based on a fairly interesting premise - three friends and their relationship with Bombay as it changes over the years.

It starts out (where else?) in St. Xavier's college, 1984. For me, this was the first snag - Mr. da Cunha, get past Xavier's, please! You may be surprised to find that there are literate (and even sometimes literary!) people to be found who never passed through it's hallowed gates, and (astonishing!) some of them even do theatre!

The other snag in the play also revealed itself in the first scene - the lead actress, Yamini Namjoshi. Whether it was her acting or her styling (think hairbands, think Fashion Street ganjees with cleavage spilling out), she got on my nerves from the word go.

Setting her aside, I did enjoy the play for the most part. The play is the story of three friends - Kash or Kashyap (Neil Bhoopalam) intense theatre type, dyed-in-the-wool South Bombay guy, and rich boy; Pooja Thomas(Yamini Namjoshi), in love with the city, and also with Cruise (Amit Mistry, screamingly funny) - a Delhi guy who looks like his namesake Hollywood star.

The play alternates between serious and funny, with Mistry (of 99 fame) providing plenty of laughs with his wisecracks and flamboyant personality. Bombay constantly intervenes in the lives of the characters, in the form of the 92-93 communal riots, the Moral Police, the media explosion, dug-up roads, and Ganpati festival.


This brings us to the actor who easily steals the show - Rajit Kapur in a host of small parts, each superbly executed, each realistic as well as funny, and each nuanced and eccentric enough to escape being a stereotype. Rajit as the sauve and zany PR guy; as the self-righteous and star-struck havaldar bent on moral policing; as the menacing fundamentalist; as the devout Ganesh-bhakt; they all delight, these many Rajits.

Thanks to Mistry and Kapur, the play entertains throughout; it is eminently watchable, though not in the league of the best plays I have ever seen. However, since it's a Rahul da Cunha play expect it to be praised to the skies and packed to the rafters; deserved or undeserved.

In all fairness, though, a decent play; if the lead actress were to be altered, perhaps even a good one.

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Birthday Wishes

Two of my most beloved authors celebrated their birthdays this past week - happy birthday Vikram Seth (20th June) and Salman Rushdie (19th June) - they are now 57 and 62 respectively. May they live long and keep writing wonderful books. In celebration, I have been re-reading A Suitable Boy (with special attention to the serious political bits) and am appreciating it anew like I have never appreciated it before. But more on that (and two other books) in the next post.

Desperately awaiting the Monsoon

Bombay is waiting, desperately for the rain.

On Malabar Hill and elsewhere, the gulmohar trees have decked themselves in their bridal finery of flame red, as they wait for the monsoon winds to embrace them.

Children have begun school without being drenched in a single shower, and the weather gets
more and more unbearable. Meanwhile, we wait for the rain.

For me the rain has always meant Raag Malhar, specifically my favourite, Miyan Ki Malhar. The music of the teenage years, I guess, is the music that remains magical forever, and this raga was the theme song of mine. I'm craving the dark clouds and cool winds and damp earth smells. And there's not even a pre-monsoon squall in sight.

My monsoon birthday was bone-dry and though I often complain about the rain, I felt the loss.

The monsoon is mystery, change, poetry. The monsoon is new beginnings - new school years, new colleges, new degrees, new ideas. It is a season of concerts and music that celebrate the rains, of grey skies and stormy seas with waves that rear over promenades to spill into the windows of vehicles, of comforting mornings with a book and a cup of ginger chai.

Hindi literature, whatever I studied of it in school, was crammed with references to the season of the rains, poetry always deferred to it, and in films of course it is ubiquitous. In Urdu poetry, "the moonlight of the face, the dark monsoon clouds of hair"









Alexander Frater's book Chasing the Monsoon has been on my to-read list for the longest time - it details his travels as he accompanies the monsoon winds through 1970's India, from their majestic arrival in Kerala onwards. I dream about making the trip myself, taking indefinite time off as I trail the piling clouds.

Another book that springs to mind is Sunetra Gupta's beautiful, vivid sensuous book Memories of Rain, about a Bengali woman who marries an Englishman, and about the disintegration of their marriage. And there is a Penguin anthology, edited by Anita Nair, about Kerala, that describes God's Own Country as the land Where the Rain is Born.

No more English language books that draw heavily on the monsoon come to mind, though of course there are bits and pieces of about the season in several. Yet I believe most of us wrote our first poetry about the monsoon.

I am craving the monsoon, craving it - waiting for it's cool winds to blow through the house, waiting for it's scent to fill my soul with romance. Because the June rain is soul-food, a gift from the gods, whimsical and awaited; the July rain is torrential, cumbersome, but necessary; the August rain is tired and dispirited, and the September rain an annoyance.

Here's to hoping that the rain visits soon, this June in Bombay.

Market Research - what I do in the daytime

When you're a research analyst, you play around with numbers all the time, you often examine rows and columns of figures, and your screen is generally emblazoned with some sort of bar chart. And you may also find yourself on Monday morning, tasting hard candy in flavours like mint (delicious) orange (average) raw mango (sick making) and cherry (suck and spit).

In my short tenure I have tasted disgusting-tasting energy drinks and prepared coffee subtly redolent of metal, smoothed my skin with herbal moisturiser, the bottle proferred by a worried looking analyst to all the women in the office, and crunched through some rather dismal biscuits. If you're wondering why we're always testing duds, well, 90% of new products fail and we are the ones who see them before they do!

Then there is the boy who soaked his hair with a blonde (test) colorant and remained black - he didn't know you had to bleach it first....

But jokes apart, I do love research - I love the sifting through data until it makes sense, the creativity involved in finding the story in the numbers, and then telling the story through charts and graphs. There's a thrill in having a hunch and then digging through the data and then the yes! moment when you're proven right, and then the puzzling moments when things don't make sense and you're scratching your head trying to figure out that strange creature, the consumer.

And what a beast he is - the X in the algebra, the ambiguity in the equation, the obstacle in the race - and he's the creature we claim to figure out, atleast partially. We hunt him, we classify him, we break him down into measures and key measures, open ends and closed ends, we tie him up in terminology, we normalize him for countries and regions, globally and locally and yet he throws up a surprise or two.

There's definitely a lot of judgment involved, no model can ever sum up the consumer perfectly, and that's why we're labelled experts. There's thought and creativity and the flair to make a balanced decision, and yet the job demands a meticulous sort, who'll check and cross check and back check his data and notice a niggling figure, who'll generate new tables at the slightest possibility, and triumphantly figure out that the depiction of purple pajamas in the communication made consumers subconsciously feel that the product rocks.

I have loved market research ever since I knew what it was, I love it because it approached marketing with the eye of a scientist and then does the rest with the vision of an artist. I love it because it doesn't like assumptions and it doesn't generalize unless statistically valid and it is by it's definition, accountable. I love it because it looks at the bewildering population of consumers, and condenses it and makes sense of it and then tells you how you can do business with it.

Comfort Reading

A comfort book is just like comfort food, both of them soothe the soul.

And just like piping hot khichdi or crisp buttered toast, they can never get boring.

L.M. Montgomery tops my personal list of comfort writers - although I first read her books as a child they have stayed with me through the growing up years and we're still best friends. So whether it's the red-headed Anne (of Green Gables fame), the enigmatic Emily, the Story Girl, or whether it's her charming short stories and stand alone novels (Blue Castle and Tangled Web are my favourites) it's her books that make me smile through the toughest times in my life. Most of her books are about young women growing up, and they're full of often funny and sometimes touching incidents. An irritating factor at times is passages of purple prose, that I skip. But more importantly, all the protagonists are likeable - so likeable that readers often want to stay with them through several books.

A sympathetic main character is often the mainstay for a comfort book, which makes Pride and Prejudice, having two of them, another favourite. To lose yourself again in Jane Austen's sly wit and dry observations, add to this a heroine with a a charm and piquancy that hasn't faded through the centuries, and a hero who is just imperfect enough for every woman to fall in love with.

Alexander McCall Smith, with the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, wrote a series of books which are serene and yet compelling. The setting - Botswana, still a country with a simpler and a slower way of life. The heroine - the earthy, practical and "traditionally built" Mma Ramotswe. The style of writing itself - quietly absorbing, warmly humorous and somehow with a strong flavour of Africa coming through - comfort food indeed. The author's other books, too - like the Scotland Street and Sunday Philosophy Club series (both set in Edinburgh) can be thus classified, but No.1 Ladies'... is the pick of the lot.

Hindu mythology is very comforting - there is a solidity about it, rules, and the rich fulfilment of a colourful past. Historical fiction, too - there's a lot to be said for old fashioned plots. With Rosemary Sutcliffe you can lose yourself in the days of Celtic tribes or Roman occupied Britain and dream about honour and glory and chivalry. Look for her Eagle of the Ninth or the Mark of the Horse Lord, they're not usually available in India, however.

David Eddings' ten book long epic - the Belgariad followed by the Mallorean - provides a great escape. Fantasy by it's very nature is escapist, and Eddings creates a world with the right balance of reality tempered with lots and lots of humour - and to season things, a dash of romance. Strong female characters, the idiosyncrasies of gods and the very human frailties of superhuman beings allow for plenty of witty dialogue and fun.

I find Asimov absorbing and comforting - but when Ihave plenty of time, because you can't put down an Asimov book. They're too full of ideas to completely remember, so it's often almost like reading it again.

Vikram Seth can sometimes be comforting - Suitable Boy has its comforting bits. However, Rushdie never comforts - he eats at you and disturbs you and tears your sensibilities apart.
For comfort, I sometimes go back to childhood and read Oz and Puffin Classics like The Secret Garden.

Nevil Shute is so comforting if you ever find him in print - A Town Like Alice, The Far Country, Old Captivity, The Checquerboard are some of his books about wartime and post-war England and also Australia. They are down to earth books with sensible characters and plots that move along at a decent pace. In his time, he was a paperback best seller - he can beat the John Grishams and Sidney Sheldons hollow any day.

And finally - perhaps strangely - the old fashioned murder mystery. Those closed room murders can be very relaxing. No effort involved - lose yourself, let the pages turn as Christie performs a mental sleight of hand. Yes, the old girl is a winner still.

An incomplete list, and of course a feminine one.

What are your comfort books? I'd love to know...do comment.