Verbal Sot

Stand Up Comedy - "History VIRitten"

2010-12-10T07:50:00.000-08:00

Last weekend I went for Vir Das' new show (after the very successful Walking on Broken Das). The considerable seating of the Tata Theatre was packed to the brim and the queue outside hoping for last minute tickets stretched for miles. Vir Das has come a long way.

Vir has picked a fertile theme - the history of India - from ancient times to where we are today - and come up with a delightful show that tickles the funny bone without really offending too many people. School day memories of history lessons will come back, only to crumble in laughter. Who ever thought mohenjo-daro, the mughals, or the British viceroys could be such fun? Why, even Gandhi had his funny side and Vir has unearthed it.

What if Vasco Da Gama had reached Calcutta instead of Calicut? Why is the God of Small Things not a shorter book? What is the reason for the Bulund Darwaza? How do you gate crash a Delhi farmhouse party? What drew your mother to your father in the 70's?

Vir will answer all these and more!

One of my favourite moments was when he got to the Minto-Morley reforms (remember your history text-books, and the pictures of viceroys you decorated with warts and whiskers?) - he said "Lord Minto - the viceroy with a hole!"

Book Review: Norwegian Wood

2010-09-23T09:49:00.000-07:00

Norwegian Wood is not a new book, by any chance, nor a little-known one. However, I wanted to review Haruki Murakami’s cult 1987 novel for two reasons – because I don’t see the average Mumbaikar reading or even knowing about Murakami and I want to change this; and because the Norwegian Wood movie releases in 2010, and the book should come before the movie.

Norwegian Wood is, at one level, a coming-of-age novel – the story of Toru Watanabe, growing up in the Tokyo of the sixties against the background of all the changes that happened in that decade – amidst the Beatles, the student revolutions, and the sexual liberty. It is also the story of Kizuki, Toru’s best friend, who killed himself at 17, and Naoko, Kizuki’s girlfriend. It is Naoko’s favourite song, Norwegian Wood, that lends the book its title; and its bitter-sweet atmosphere reflects the sad, sweet melody. Kizuki’s death has a profound effect on both Toru and Naoko – for Toru, it brings him closer to death, making him more aware of it, while on the emotionally fragile Naoko, it has a far more disturbing effect. Love blossoms between Toru and Naoko, but her own problems take her far away. While Toru continues to love her, he is also drawn to a vivacious, confident classmate Midori – a girl who is full of life and deals with problems head-on, the opposite, perhaps, of Naoko.

This is not a standard coming of age novel, however; Murakami’s characteristic frank, blunt first-person voice alone sets it apart from the ordinary. That apart, it explores themes far deeper and more complex than romance and friendship. Death is a constant through the novel, as the adolescent protagonist is forced to see it around him and dwell on it and wonder about it. The novel also explores sexuality as Toru explores his own, the nature of sanity, and first love in all its depth and wonder.

While it definitely has the Murakami touch, Norwegian Wood stays away from the author’s characteristic use of magic realism, and instead explores the boundaries of the real world, and the vagaries of the human mind when pushed to the edge. For a first-time Murakami reader, I would recommend this one to begin with.

Play: Dial 1-888-India

2010-07-24T22:02:00.001-07:00

Dial 1-888-India is a sharply insightful comedy that draws humour out of modern day Indians, their dreams of making it big, and the hilarious things they do in order to chase them. It's a world where Western ideas are often adopted in the most peculiar ways, and the play exploits this to the fullest.

Kunal Roy Kapur makes his acting debut in this play, as a rather unscrupulous Indian businessman Arun Gupta who gets funding from a foreign investor to set up a call center for a American Suicide helpline. Kunal is howlarious as a larger-than-life, flashy, wannabe, outrageous businessman with a frank appreciation of life's pleasures and a shrewd cunning in getting funding from his investors. Conservative Rashmi("Megan"), with a mother who won't let her do anything, is the unlikely employee who wins his approval by saving all the Americans who call, while geeky loser Ramesh ("Greg"), who needs to support his middle-class family, is unable to rescue most of his callers.

From the two Americans who act as accent coaches (a gay man and a nun), to Ramesh's conservative father and his excessively socially networked sister, to Rashmi's outwardly old-fashioned mother, the characters in this play are eccentric to say the least and constantly throw up surprises.

The hilarity lies in the unpredictability of the jokes and the crazy depths revealed by all the characters. While Rashmi is not quite what she seems like on the surface, Ramesh reveals hidden depths, and Arun dishes out surprise after surprise to the audience as well as his unsuspecting employees.

Sophie Chaudhary, Faezeh Jalali and Ashwin Mushraan are great in this play - appearing in a number of wonderfully executed cameos, creating a huge cast of characters that make this play a refreshing contrast to the dialogue-type scripts that have been flooding the theater scene today.

Would definitely recommend this one - light, fun, and very very funny. Go for it.

Rajneeti: Review

2010-06-20T07:53:00.000-07:00

I don't usually review movies in this space, and I generally watch them about two weeks after the excitement has died down, but I felt like writing about this one, so I am.

Rajneeti is basically the Mahabharat (I love the Mahabharat!) mixed with the Godfather (definitely on my list of great books), staged in the arena of dynasty politics in Madhya Pradesh.

I loved the first half of the movie completely - it was fast paced, gripping and a great watch.

When a powerful party leader suffers from a stroke and slips into coma, there is a battle for the throne. On one hand, his brother Chandra and his nephew - the fiery, aggressive, Prithvi (Arjun Rampal); on the other, his son Viru(Manoj Bajpai) along with a Dalit firebrand Sooraj(Ajay Devgan). The canny king maker Brij Gopal (Nana Patekar) manipulates things from behind the scene.

Chaos ensues, tragedy strikes, and Prithvi's younger brother Samar, a PhD student from the US gets drawn into the battle, emerging as the crafty tactician who marries ruthlessness with a flair for strategising.

It is the second half where the movie flounders and slips into cliches, moving away from the terrain of politics to become full-on ganglord warfare, mafia style. While we would have loved to see clever political manouvres and chessboard style moves, we are instead treated to a blood bath that goes on for far too long and is too implausible. An election is a battle all right, but it's not supposed to be a war with each side butchering the other's candidates.

Rajneeti is definitely worth a watch and is a refreshing change from what Bollywood usually doles out - however an extremely promising first half let me down as I had expected much, much better fare to follow.

Broken Images - Play Review

2010-06-01T09:53:00.000-07:00

Broken Images is a chilling dialogue between a woman, Shabana Azmi, and her image.

Starting out with a mildly comical portrayal of a Hindi author whose first English book becomes an international bestseller, it begins to delve deeper into the truth behind the book and behind her life, moving from social drama territory into that of a psychological thriller.

To say more than that would be to spoil the effect of this gripping play that raises the hackles and succeeds in creating pure terror.

Shabana as usual is excellent - beautiful, subtle, wonderful voice and diction...changing effortlessly with the mood of the play. And a special mention for the lighting - superbly executed at the Tata Theater.

Watch the play - it will leave you feeling unsettled and disturbed - a testimony to the power of the stage.

Why We Like What We Like About Books

2010-05-21T22:05:00.000-07:00

This post is partly inspired by a vociferous argument over lunch in the office canteen as to what constitutes a good book - or more specifically, a good novel.I began to think about it, and as I thought, I realised that there are so many levels at which we (or atleast I) relate to books. It is a multilayered experience, each adding and mingling to the other.

The first, of course, is the series of actions and broad themes that make up the book, the plot, the absolute basics.

The second is the quality of the writing technically - the wit, the dialogues, the vocabulary, the imagery, the technical polish of the writer.

The third is the insight into human character, the "exploring the human condition" part of it, the art of peering into the minds and motivations of those who people the pages.

The fourth is the structure of the narrative - the forms and techniques uses - whether they add or subtract to the novel, or whether they don't.

The fifth of course is the power to provoke reactions, to disturb, to challenge thought processes, to leave behind something in the reader's mind, to evoke some change. This power to change a reader's way of thinking, to plant ideas into his head - this is what makes a good book great, this is what makes it art.

There are so many aspects - blurring boundaries, merging - making a book entertaining, literary, poignant, funny, absorbing, disturbing - creating all the grand emotions of life, or ignoring them for the gentler ones. When I read a book, I may enjoy it but consider it lacking in literary value, or not enjoy it, but appreciate the mastery behind it, or, as in the case of my favourite books - both enjoy and appreciate it, with a depth to the enjoyment that would be missing in the case of a work less literary.

So Pride and Prejudice, or Emma, with their humour and romance combined with the quality of the writing and the sharp, sly insights into human character for me would be books which are both hugely entertaining, yet very literary - because within their admittedly narrow world they look deeply into life. P.G. Wodehouse, who evokes no emotion except for chortles, has a souffle quality that appeals to the literary gourmet - his polish, finesse and his wonderfully creative similes alone would catapult him into the league of extraordinary wordsmiths. The Russians, on the other hand, I appreciate as writers - but I cannot enjoy their gloomy outlook on life - I cannot identify with the needless suffering of their characters, who exasperate me. I do not like the bleakness - I believe that just like life, tragedy should be tempered with comedy.

Literature, after all, is life.

Inspiration

2010-05-12T22:03:00.000-07:00

Every writer has a different answer when you ask them where they look for inspiration. They generally add that writing boils down to a lot of hard labour. This post, however deals with that brief flash of inspiration and how it comes.

I remember an old Reader's Digest article that talked about the three b's of creativity - bed, bath and bus. I completely agree with these, especially "bus" - long bus rides are now a thing of the past and a rare occurrence with me, but just the other day I took a long bus ride to Bandra and back, and returned overflowing with ideas. I guess the lack of conversation, the noisy engine, and the slow pace of motion all lead to a gradual freeing up of thought, a kind of creative liberation, with ideas floating through and up for the grabs. It is a kind of meditation.

Long baths have a similar effect, with you concentrating on the soothing warm water and the pleasant fragrance of the soap, freeing up mind space for bigger ideas to come in.

For me, illness too has been a creative time, with the initial struggle and frustration against inactivity followed by a certain calmness, a clarity of thought, a surrender and a time of introspection.

The opposite sort of creative time is a time of high stress, when the over-functioning brain churns out all sorts of solutions, and you jot them down to examine in calmer times.

Of course inspiration has all kinds of sources - stray bits of conversations, books by other writers, some chance phrase that chills you and creates magic within. But in my experience, it is the state of mind that decides whether you are receptive to it or not.

Love On The Brink

2010-05-02T09:05:00.000-07:00

When I flipped through the April issue of NCPA's On Stage, I was thrilled to find the debut of a new Lilette Dubey play. I was quick to book tickets for the April 18 premiere.

I have in the past enjoyed Dubey's brilliant performance in Dance Like a Man (an excellent play and a highly recommended watch - it returns to the NCPA on the 29th of this month), and I was eager to see her new offering. It was to star her daughter Neha Dubey, whose unconventional good looks I have always rather admired.

The first disappointment came a few days before the play - when I realised that Neha was not acting in it after all, and the lead actress was now Shivani Tanksale. Shivani is good looking and has a good comic timing, however I have always found her to be rather a loud actress.

The play opened to a packed house and a gorgeous set design - a moonlit promenade by the sea, with light creating the effects of shifting water and moon. I am a sucker for great props, and was delighted as elaborate sets are increasingly rare these days.

The play deals with three people - two college friends, Bandy (Joy Sengupta) and Chops (Kumud Mishra), and Chops' beautiful wife, Amu. It starts off with the two friends meeting at the promenade, thus narrowly averting an attempted suicide; it then turns into into an absurd love triangle between the two friends and Amu. Joy Sengupta is superb as Bandy, the depressed philosopher, with Kumud Mishra (competent) as the worldly-wise Chops, and Tanksale (good-looking, competent)as his too-intelligent, too-educated wife, Amu.

The two male characters, Chops and Bandy, are a study in contrast - with Chops being materialistic, successful, and just a little bit shallow - and Bandy being over-sensitive, intellectual, and unable to make it through reality. Neither of them is really a match for the beautiful, capable Amu. One of the things I most enjoyed about the play was how frustrated Amu's education has made her - all she wants is a happy marriage and children, but she over-analyses, over-complicates and intimidates - unintentionally. I think all intelligent women would empathise at some level with her frustrated attempts to make her marriage work.

There are clever lines and funny moments, with Amu oscillating wildly between the two men, and Sengupta at his zaniest. There are dialogues that make you smile, even laugh, and there is plenty to make you think as the characters debate on the meaninglessness of life and attempt to give it some meaning.

Love on the Brink does not fall into the category of plays that are emotionally absorbing, pull you in, and make you feel for the characters. Lilette aptly describes it as a "tongue-in-cheek look at existentialism." The theme by its very nature makes you feel detached - mulling over the emptiness of life is unlikely to warm the cockles of the heart. It reminded me, in a sense, of the famous Waiting for Godot (which I found to be far too dry and depressing) - however this is a far more light-hearted and entertaining exploration of the theme, and a pretty good watch if you like a play that is lively and yet makes you think.

Of course, there were sections of the crowd who had come expecting a pop-corn Hindi film romance acted out on stage and were seriously disappointed and bored with the black humour.

Existentialism can be a lonely - and alienating - thing.

Ex Libris - Confessions Of A Common Reader

2010-04-24T12:13:00.000-07:00

I have wanting to get my hands on this book since a long, long time - ever since Jerry Pinto mentioned it in this delicious column.

Now, books about books are an especial weakness for any bibiophile, and when I came across an excerpt from this one I was even more tantalized.

Ex Libris (meaning from the books/library of) is a collection of essays by Anne Fadiman, describing various facets of her and her family's relationship with their books, and sundry quirky habits of people who love books and are intimately involved with them. It is a slender little volume, filled with humour (I love the vintage-look Penguin publishing). It's one of those books which brings out your gluttony - you want to read it quickly, stuffing your mouth with each delicious bite, but you force yourself to go slow, in order to prolong the pleasure and savour the taste of each morsel.

My favourite is the first essay, where Fadiman writes about how, five years into their marriage, she and her husband have not combined their libraries. Combining libraries is an arduous, heartbreaking task - getting rid of duplicate copies, decinding whose copies to keep, and compromising on the structure and method of organization. When the two libraries are seamlessly combined, Anne feels that she is well, truly and irrevocably married.

I love Fadiman's wry, dry and mildly self-deprecating humour. I also love all the Fadiman eccentricities, right from compulsive proof reading (I am a closet one myself, though I conceal it at work in the interest of diplomacy), to collecting strange and long words, to enjoying quiz shows.

She talks about the nature of poetry and the phrases which catch at the soul; about the joys of the perfect fountain pen and the heart break of losing or spoiling one. The book is redolent with bookish scents - the smell of ink, of paper, of glue.

One essay describes the difference between courtly lovers of books (who keep books in a pristine, untouched condition) and carnal lovers of books (who lay them face down, write in the margins, and general give them a "used" look). I began to analyse my own behaviour in this regard. To all appearances I am certainly a courtly lover - I do not dog ear, mark, or tear. However, I do not live up to my sister's standards of courtliness. I love creased spines, where she wants spines to remain virgin and sleek. When i open a book slightly wide, she cringes. And when she thinks I may lay it face down, she rushes to me with a book mark.

Which makes me think I have some buried non-courtly tendencies. Certainly, I have never been courtly towards text books. My old study tomes are underlined, bracketed, annotated, well marked and well thumbed. They gave me a comfortable feeling of being moulded to my thought processes, by the time exams rolled around. And I absolutely love used books with wrinkled spines but in otherwise good condition, and I enjoy little notes from previous owners.

Books, I feel, should look well-preserved but old, falling open comfortably at favourite bits, looking familiar and individual. I do not particularly care for a glossy feeling of whiteness and newness - after a bit, a book should look mellow. So yes, in between the two ways of loving I fall in the middle - I cherish, but I also ruffle the hair.

Anne writes also of the nature of inscriptions and the etiquette to be followed, and how special they can be. I have always understood - painstakingly composing the best ones for those who matter, or else not inscribing their books at all - carelessly dashing them off for those who don't. There are books that I treasure for their inscriptions alone - a line or two written across the fly leaf or title page.

The last essay is overwhelming familiar for me and my sister. It has to do with secondhand bookstores - the delightful unpredictability, rummaging through piles of higgedy-piggledy books and the sudden unearthing of hidden treasure. It brings to mind the smell of dust and old books, the occasional sneezes induced, Fort's pavement shops, the New And Secondhand Bookstore at Princess Street, and the raddiwalas you find everywhere in Bombay, the most unexpected ones yielding absolute gems at times.

As Fadiman says, these places bring out the worst shopaholic tendencies - you find a book, and don't know where or if you will find it again, and if you do find it again, it may not be the same edition. (Also you feel you might as well give it a try as the Fort guys take books back after cutting reading charges - alas it's hard to return books you fall in love with)

My sister Ami has picked up an even worse vice due to frequent trawling of these places - picking up second and third copies of books from these places. The second copies (sometimes of out-of-print books, sometimes of other favourites) are against the day when we no longer live in the same house and have to split our library (I cannot imagine anything more heart-rendingly tragic. Even if we buy duplicate copies of all the books we have, I want the old copies that I grew up reading. The problem is, so does she.)

Unfortunately, if she finds a better (esp. hard bound) copy, she is not above picking up a third one. Which has now zoomed to alarming proportions.

My "hope chest" as she calls it, or my "dowry" as my mother terms it, lies carefully preserved in the loft. Perhaps some day, I shall write a Fadiman-like essay on how it came about.

Nostalgia

2010-04-17T01:06:00.000-07:00

I am not a very nostalgic person in general. Nostalgia, I feel, is the experience of a moment - the sudden awareness of impermanence and change - a bitter-sweet heightened sense of living. Post that, you deal with the uncertainty that change brings, you cope with it, you get into a new way of things and then you move on.

It soaks the pages of fred uhlmann's Reunion - a brief, war torn friendship based in Nazi Germany that unabashedly makes you weep. It is the theme song of Goodbye, Mr. Chips - a short (and extremely sentimental) book that will take you back to your school days, make you remember your school teachers, and (particularly if you are the susceptible sort) cast those years in a golden glow. In the classic movie Casablanca it was tasteful, underplayed, touched upon just enough to move you.

Daphne du Maurier evokes it superbly in the famous opening line of Rebecca "Last Night I dreamed I was at Manderley again."

And that famous, popular Erich Segal romance did it too in just nine words - "What can you say about a girl who died?" Blunt, out there, and instantly arresting.

My feelings about nostalgia in literature are mixed - in general, I am the sort of person who is unlikely to look at the past bathed in shades of rose and gold, and do not approve of wallowing. I dislike books that are self indulgent and maudlin, of course. However, underplayed and used with taste and humour nostalgia can be a powerful literary force.

What do you think - are there any books or movies that you love, based on this theme?

Mid-Week Holiday with Regency Romance

2010-04-14T00:46:00.000-07:00

There is something so charming about a mid week holiday, a restful sunny morning at home doing minor chores and sitting around, dipping into a book and just generally enjoying the peace.

Today was one of those mornings; I woke up brimming with optimism and with a smile on my face, and so far nothing has happened to wipe it off.

It is the perfect day to write about Julia Quinn, one of my current favourite "light" reads - Regency romance, written somehow with a modern feel and laced with wit and humour. The ingenuous device of a scandalous anonymous gossip column brightens up her books about the eight desirable Bridgerton siblings and their various romances, and neat plot twists keep them lively and interesting.

I avoided Julia Quinn for a while, put off by the word Regency that suggested Georgette Heyer (definitely not an author I can stomach) and by the bright, pastel, covers which suggested, well, chick-lit.

Not that I am anti-chicklit - far from it, there is a definite need for light, entertaining books that help you relax and keep you upbeat. But most of these turn out to be fearfully hackneyed, achingly shallow, or dull as dishwater, or all three. Julia Quinn, however, is none of the above. She has a light touch, plenty of humour, likeable characters, and engaging plot lines.

I have a habit of reading light and serious books alternately, and for me Julia Quinn has been a great find. If you live in Bombay, you can pick her books up off Fort's street bookstalls and read-and-return for the princely sum of Rs. 20.

The Ones That You Remember Long After They Are Over

2010-04-11T08:06:00.001-07:00

I should probably apologise for not blogging all this while, but I felt the quality of my posts had been going down...also was frustrated by various attempts with templates :)

shifted to pen and paper for a while, and in a way it was good - pen and ink has an immediate reality, a way of collecting all your thoughts and transforming them - and anyway, I am a sucker for great stationery.

While I have probably lost many of you guys on this long hiatus, I hope some of you will come back and read about my "assorted entertainment" on humid Mumbai weekends (yes, the mercury has been climbing, and how).

I have seen many crappy movies in the last six months or so, mostly because I haven't been going with the right people.

I loved Ishqiya and Paa, especially Paa, and Vidya Balan looked glowingly beautiful in both. Right now, I am dying to see The Japanese Wife, but my family weren't willing to miss their siesta for an afternoon show, and most multiplexes prefer to bombard movie goers with the Riteish Deshmukh potboiler in all the favoured slots. So that is what I went for, and it was a complete waste of time and money.

My movie highlight of this week was Dev D which I saw (well most of it - i have yet to get hold of the TV for enough time to finish seeing it) and I completely loved it. I love the rich visuals, the layered and haunting sound track and songs that stay in your mind for long after, the realities of small town India, and the casual, almost blase treatment of the characters' sexuality.

Standing out in all the plays, concerts and outings of the past six to eight months was Zakir Husain's free style nature themed tabla recital at the NCPA, accompanied by the lilting sounds of the sarangi. I have heard him live several times, yet this time stands out in my memory as the one in which he moved into a different zone altogether. His singing tablas encompassed all of sound, moving from nature to divinity, from men, to deer, to horses, till I wanted to laugh and cry at the same time, to dance through the aisles, to whirl until I was part of the music.

It was one of those unforgettable concerts, the experience of which lingers in your memory all your life. I remember a Kishori Amonkar Malhar concert in 2007 - it went on for 4 hours and we didn't want it ever to stop - it was magic, and I was part of it, and it is impossible to forget.

I have been reading a lot of books too, and I must recommend Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running - his memoirs braided with his experiences of running marathons, his journals about his thoughts while running, his definition of what it means to be a writer. It's a slim paperback I picked up at Magrudy's in Dubai, and it was one of those books that pack a punch, that make you think, that affect your way of thinking in some way or the other. But then Murakami always affects me, his fragment-like works leave me searching for more, he asks questions and leaves me hunting for answers, at times he leaves me weeping and destitute.

I guess that's what separates good art from the mediocre, whether it pulls at you and makes you think, or whether it entertains you for a while and then slips out of your memory.

Going for a play next weekend (NCPA, Sunday evening - Love on the Brink). Hope it will be good, and hope to catch The Japanese Wife some time in the week.

Meanwhile, au revoir - Inshallah the writing streak is back again, and I hope to keep blogging. Missed you all - xoxo

Swine Flu scare and books of the month

2009-08-30T00:14:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-03T09:23:00.000-07:00

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?

2009-07-24T21:53:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-23T20:07:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-14T10:38:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-27T09:54:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-26T10:01:00.000-07:00

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.

The King Who Was A Mother

2009-05-06T20:42:00.000-07:00

The Mahabharat is an astounding epic, packed with wonderful stories quite apart from the main narrative. Devdutt Patnaik has brought yet another one to life with his mythological novel, The Pregnant King (Penguin India).

The book's underlying theme is to do with a tolerance for people of different or ambiguous gender or sexuality. That said, it is also a rich and colourful account of the life of the king, Yuvanashva, of his mother and of his wives, of their lives, defined by duty and morality and the code of Dharma, and of their times, the days of the legendary Pandavas. It also speaks of human frailties, the pain of women sharing a husband, the nature of gender, and of the deep-seated human need of acceptance.

At the core of the book is Yuvanashva's problem; he is unable to have children despite marrying three wives in an effort to become a father. Thus he is unable to fulfil his duties to his ancestors, who must hang upside down in the land of Pitr until they can be reborn as their descendants.

Through the book, boundaries blur and roles and identities are questioned. There is Shilavati, the mother of Yuvanashva, a woman with an extraordinary understanding of Dharma, whose gender prevents her from being a king. There is Somvat, who gives up his manhood to be a wife to his best friend. There is Shikhandi, a daughter brought up as a son, who borrows manhood to be a husband, and there are the homosexual priests of Bahugami.

There is Yuvanashva himself, who accidentally drinks a potion meant for his queens and gives birth to a son. Thus he creates life in two ways; he creates life outside his body like a father, and he also creates life inside his body like a mother. This brings him to the question; is it sweeter to be called father, or to be called mother?

For years Yuvanashva struggles with his identity; for a man who was adamant that gender is absolute, motherhood proves a hard truth to accept. And in search for the answer to his question he is led to Arjuna, who lived as a woman for a year, and to Krishna, who as Mohini was a wife for a night. But he finds no man who has been a mother, and years of anguish pass before he finds his answer and finally, peace.

For Yuvanashva's son, Mandhata, a king who was borne by a man, realisation comes much later, and he finally weeps for his father/mother, the pregnant king, "for the imperfection of the human condition and for our stubborn refusal to make room for all those in between."

Aamras and mango curry

2009-04-27T10:23:00.000-07:00

Reams have been written about the sensuousness of eating mangoes, and ads have tried to connect this simple pleasure with sex, of all things. Thus one mango drink TVC had a bronzed Sheetal Mallar licking and sucking unabashedly, and more recently Katrina Kaif appears in an ad campaign titled Aamsutra.

I wouldn’t go that far myself, but the mango is certainly a sensuous fruit and few eating experiences could better that of sinking your teeth into cold, golden, freshly cut alphonso, with it’s perfect balance of sweetness and tartness, colour and flavour.

And there is something elusive about the taste of mango – if you cut a mango and leave it uneaten for a while, it’s flavour alters subtly, until what is left is not special at all. It’s the same with mango juice – leave it in the fridge for a day and there’s no magic in it any more.

Rich, pulpy mango juice must come from the paayri mango and no other. The rest of India calls it Aamrasa, mango juice, but for Gujjus it is just Rasa – a word that requires no prefix, signifying mango juice, and also pleasure, joy and emotion.

It must be squeezed in the morning and eaten with lunch – it’s far too heavy for the evening. And Rasa frozen and stored for the year is an abomination – within hours, all it's tanginess and charm evaporates.

So every summer, rasa is a staple part of weekend lunch at my house. It is accompanied by stuffed gunda, a round, green summer veggie, which brings out the flavour of rasa beautifully. Waal ki daal (not my favourite) is also considered a perfect complement. My grandparents eat rasa with bapdi roti, a soft, layered roti which is painstakingly rolled out again and again, each layer soaked in ghee.

My favourite part of these meals apart from rasa itself is the mango kadhi, or fajeta that is always made along with rasa. It is subtly sweet, with a light mango flavour and just enough spice – faintly gingery and said to help digest rasa. The secret of a good fajeta lies in the balace – too heavily sweet and it will taste like a sticky reminder of rasa. Not sweet enough and it will no longer be redolent of mango. Too insipid and it will be bland and unremarkable .

That apart, it’s quite easy to make, and here’s how.

After you finish squeezing out aamrasa, soak the mango peel and seeds in water for a while. Then throw away the peels and seeds and keep the water. Add a little gram flour, curds and ginger powder to this water and whisk till it has a smooth, pouring consistency.

Keep it to heat on a low flame. Spice it with slit green chillies, a few curry leaves, a little bit of jaggery and salt. Dried red chillies also impart a good flavour. Stir the kadhi until it boils.
Now, for the tadka, heat a little ghee and add cumin seeds to it. When they sputter, add a pinch of asofetida and temper the kadhi with the tadka.

That’s it – the fajeta is ready. Like a dal, it can be sipped hot through a meal and eaten with rice and pickle or papad.

I hope at least one of you tries making this golden kadhi and tells me how it turned out. It's one of my favourite Gujju dishes and something I look forward to all year.

Mumbai's Christie

2009-04-21T09:32:00.000-07:00

I am a big Christie fan, and I don't think anything is more relaxing than plunging into a one of her closed situation mysteries.

Unfortunately I finished most of her books years ago. Even more unfortunately, I remember most of them.

So of course I was delighted to discover that here in my own city, Kalpana Swaminathan has written two really good Christie-esque mystery novels, complete with a tang of Bombay instead of the genteel British flavour. So Swaminathan's detective is Lalli, an iron lady formerly of the Mumbai police force and still it's L.R. - or Last Resort. The narrator, in keeping with the Arthur Hastings tradition, is Lalli's niece, a writer.

I read the first, Page 3 Murders, a couple of years ago. The second, Gardener's Song, I read a couple of days ago.

Page 3 Murders is a closed-situation mystery. The Mumbai monsoons trap the residents of at an isolated Malad bungalow, where a weekend Page 3 party has made for a strange assortment of people - a food columnist, a doctor and his socialite wife, a dancer, a model, an advertising man/writer, a businessman, a feminist - the usual Page 3 suspects. The author has created a delightfully Bombay-ish set of characters with the most comical quirks. Add to this delicious gastronomic descriptions of a series of feasts created by the cook-chef who knows too much, comic interludes, poignant moments a la Christie, a tight and quick narrative, and surprises that unfold right till the end, and you have a winner of a book.

The second book, The Gardener's Song, is a murder mystery that unfolds in a pattern based on Lewis Carrol's poem of the same name (another Christie tradition - she used nursery rhymes). It is based on another Mumbai institution - the cooperative society, or Building - in this case Utkrusha, in Vile Parle, where Lalli and her niece live. This book has even more laugh-out-loud moments as you recognize people you have known - and even more moving and sad sketches of this city and it's people.

In short, two highly entertaining murder mysteries and that too with good re-read value.

I believe Kalpana Swaminathan is an excellent author yet an under-rated one. Do grab one of these and tell me what you think of it.

Exams!

2009-04-07T08:59:00.000-07:00

Hi readers,
This week I will excuse myself from writing a post as I am in the midst of exams!

Probably the last exams of my life - which doesn't really make me feel sad - in fact, it almost cancels out the poignant feeling that these could be my last few days as a student.

However, summer exams suck and I have endured them through four years of engineering and I have reached a point where exams have become hard to bear.

So I shall voyage through this last lot as best as I can and be back next week with a fresh new post!

What are your thoughts about exams? Do you prefer them to the working life or is it the other way round?

Matunga Market

2009-03-28T23:44:00.000-07:00

I went to Matunga market this Friday, and it is a gastronomic delight.

Piles and piles of beautiful, fresh produce, and so many unusual vegetables.

Matunga market caters to the South Indian stronghold, and one can often spot an Amma, dressed in a crisp saree, flowers in her hair. My mother says the place is the same since she was a child, and indeed there is an air of timelessness about it, this little bit of Chennai in Mumbai.

The vendors stock a variety of unusual tropical vegetables - bamboo shoots, colocasia (arbi), breadfruit (delicious and flaky when fried in my Nani's special masala), tapioca, jackfruit, and even lotus stems and some unidentifiable long, white stems slit vertically.

Nani has come for tender green mangoes to make into Karwari pickle, and we find piles of them. We buy a succulent 1.5 kg, and my mouth waters at the thought of the tart, spicy, earthy, tangy green mango pickle that will mature in the galzed brown earthenware jars.

We buy sambar masala at a musty, dark old-school shop manned by two old men, and with half the shelves bare. They also persuade us to buy dry, buttermilk-soaked chillies, that are fried and eaten with curd rice. A short distance away we stop at a stall aptly named Annapurneshwari, that sells typical Tamil savouries. So there is rice-flour muruk and there is chakli and there is the long thin papdi. There are wafers - banana, jackfruit, tapioca. There are also round flat sabudana (tapioca) puris which I can't quite catch the name of, and curvy crisp kodbolas.

I rip open the packet and bite into the crisp muruk - it's awesome!

As we begin to wander back, our nostrils are assailed by the heavenly aroma of roasting coffee. The source is a very modern looking stall-shop that grinds and sells coffee mixtures - unfortunately, they do not sell cups of coffee to thirsty shoppers. A Barista would kill for the aroma that surrounds it.

We pass Ramashraya, crowded with people snacking on idli-dosa and coffee at affordable prices, and walking back to Matunga, almost at Welingkar, another South Indian place that can hardly be noticed from the street - Sharda Bhavan, which makes indifferent sambar - but their white chutney is to-die-for and so are the crisp dosas, uttapams and gingery mendu vadas. Service is quick and the coffee is excellent.

Read, Eat, Play...

2009-03-18T08:42:00.000-07:00

Read - Unaccustomed Earth

I finally read Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth and enjoyed it. Though the stories have her usual theme and setting of Bengali immigrants in the United States, they are unfailingly strong in their plot and never fail to surprise in the end.

Her writing is elegant and certain, unusual turns of phrase fall fluidly and naturally from her pen, and the stories are so easy to read that you forget how long you've been reading. However, all her writing is brushed with tragedy - not usually the great sweeping tragedies of the world, but the small tragedies of everyday life, tragedies we're all responsible for. She writes of human foibles - it is often hard to point a finger of blame at any one of her characters because they are most of them helpless in the ways they act.

I believe this is the strength of her writing - her deep insight into different people, to be able to peep at them through her magnifying lens and help us to accept them all with compassion and sympathy.

And yet, she is the master of the short story - often leaving just enough unsaid, leaving the reader hungering for more with a quick, unexpected and delicately ironic ending.

Eat - Tapenade at Moshe's

Moshe Shek sells a variety of spreads and preserves at his cafes and restaurants, and I recently tried the tapenade, a sort of paste of crushed black and green olives, sundried tomatoes, and with or without roasted garlic, seasoned with herbs. I tried the garlic free version, which was delicious - you can make a great-tasting sandwich with a filling merely of cheese and Moshe's tapenade. However, it was too expensive - a little plastic container was priced at Rs. 110.

I plan to try the readymade hummus next time.

Play - Little Zizou

This weekend, I saw Little Zizou, a lovely, light hearted film. However, a word of warning - if you are not familiar with Parsis, the film will seem merely average. The humour lies in the depiction of the Parsi community, in the Parsi Gujarati sentences that lose their flavour in the subtitles, in the authenticity of the acting and the settings.

The humour is in a camera shot, in an action, in an inflection, in an expression.

I loved it all, and especially enjoyed watching the scene shot in my alma mater Queen Mary School, and the cameo shot of my old teacher, Mrs. Wadia.

It left me feeling happy and warm , unlike the other film I watched last week - Revolutionary Road - which was powerful, thought-provoking and well-made and yet profoundly disturbing, leaving me uneasy more than twenty-four hours after it ended.

This weekend I plan to watch Walking on Broken Das (stand-up comedy, NCPA, Saturday, 21st March) and Murder on the Menu (English play, NCPA, 22nd March). The play especially has been well-reviewed, so anyone reading this do go and watch it if you are free on Sunday.

Of the Strand Era, and of Booker books

2009-03-07T10:37:00.000-08:00

I must begin this post with a remembrance for Mr T N Shanbhag of Strand Book Stall, who passed away on February 28. I haven't met him for a while, but when I read of his death in the news, I openly wept. And yet his is a life to be celebrated - he is a man who has lived a wonderful life doing what he loved most - he has done a lot of good for others and yet remained profitable doing it - and he has been recognised for it too.

Here is a wonderful requiem for Mr. Shanbhag, written by one of my favourite journalists, Jerry Pinto. The link is http://www.mid-day.com/news/2009/feb/280209-T-N-Shanbhag-Strand-Book-Stall-Jerry-Pinto-Nani-Palkhivala-Kannada.htm

I hope that Mr. Shanbhag's children continue to run Strand the way it always has. I always want to wander into an Aladdin's cave of a shop that's not really organised by sub categories, and stumble across books I had never intended to buy, and then buy them anyway. I hope they continue with the flat 20% discounts and with their promise to order you any book in the world that's in print (they don't charge shipping, either). I hope they don't hire college kids who can't even spell as assistants. Above all, I hope they don't begin to select their books by marketability and best seller lists, we already have Crosswords when we want a bookstore without a soul.

I hope they remain a bookstore where you can expect to find Strunk and White in stock, where you find two different editions of Walden, and actually buy and read it, where you find short books of Haiku or French folktales, hard bound, and priced under Rs. 50. A place that stocks books of intellectual importance, not 500 copies of Chetan Bhagat.

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Lately, I got into a discussion about The White Tiger by Arvind Aradiga, a book that (somewhat controversially) won the 2008 Man Booker. Reviews of this book have been fairly discouraging - both the reviews I have read, and the informal ones I have received from friends.

I have a somewhat unreasonable prejudice against Booker Prize winning books - very unreasonable, rather, because I have hardly read any. It has reached a point where a Booker Prize is a reason for me to avoid a book or an author.

I think it began when I read The God of Small Things and absolutely detested it. I thought it was god-awful and also contained some of the worst descriptions of sex I have ever had the misfortune to come across. I picked up The Inheritance of Loss, flipped through it, and thought it did not appeal, ditto, the 2005 winner, The Sea, and this year's - White Tiger.

The one glorious exception to the rule for me has been Salman Rushdie. Though plenty of people have told me they couldn't get past the first fifty pages of Midnight's Children, I found it in the publishing cliche "un-put-downable."

I loved the book, it gripped me, it drew me in, it disgusted me at times, it disturbed me, it made me uncomfortable and it shook me up. I loved Rushdie's extravagant style, his original descriptions, his sheer creativity and his lack of boundaries in his writing. Midnight's Children is the book where it all came together - a balance of creativity and control, of spontaneity and polish.

The man is a complete original, unique, made in his own mold and no other. Sometimes it goes wrong - as with the Enchantress of Florence - a book that could have been wonderful, but floundered into the outrageously sexual, degenerated into over-fantastic self-indulgence. But it does not lack patches and flashes of brilliance - gorgeous word pictures and inventive similes ("a flock of parrots exploded from a tree like green fireworks"), rich ideas, innumerable influences.

And I still found it a worthwhile read.

So maybe it's time to go explore all the Booker authors. With an open mind.

What say? Anyone has an opinion on The White Tiger, or any other Booker winners?

A Year in Provence

2009-02-24T09:11:00.000-08:00

At the Strand Book Stall sale in January, I picked up a series of three books merely because I liked the publishing and they seemed interesting.

So when I picked up the first to read, I suffered a moment's trepidation - if I didn't like it, it would be a triple loss.

As I began to read, I smiled and relaxed - I had discovered Peter Mayle. And the book in question was A Year in Provence...and it's two sequels, Toujours Provence and Encore Provence.

I read Provence and it's two sequels one after the other, reading them in taxi cabs, between weekend lectures, and in the evening after office. Once I had begun the first one, I couldn't stop.

I love them because they are such gentle books, so kind and so happy, full of the sunshine of Provence, looking at people with warmth, and bursting with the small innocent pleasures of life.

The Provence books are in a sense travel books, though they describe the experiences of a man who actually bought a house in Provence and settled there. But as he says about his life in Provence, "We are permanent visitors in someone else's country, but we have been made very welcome." Which is why I can call them travel books - they are written from the perspective of someone exploring a place, often with wonder and delight.

They are a perfect read for people who appreciate food and wine (plenty of mouth watering details there) ...and also for people who appreciate human character. The pages of Provence abound with a number of unique personalities from the peasant Faustin to the plumber Menicucci (Oh la la!), the champion gourmet eater Regis and the funeral connoisseur, Marius.

Mayle details the quirks of the French, particularly the Provencal, with affection - the accents, the love for onomatopoeia, the reams of expert advice he gets on anything and everything, and the total dedication to the stomach.

He also soothingly outlines a slower, calmer way of life - where time is measured not by minutes and seconds, but by seasons - where stress is not known - where the hardy outdoor life helps people to live to a ripe old age. Sentence by sentence, you, the reader, slip into this sense of calm, this sense of enjoyment of life. Mayle writes about his enjoyment of excellent meals, of beautiful views, of delicious wine, of small routines, of the game of boules and there is a delicious golden feeling of truly appreciating life, of swirling it round in your mouth like a sip of wine, and chewing it to savour it's bouquet.

The prose is brisk and lucid, laced with a subtle, at-time-British humour, and the content is always interesting. Along with Mayle, one stumbles on a corkcrew museum, truffle hunts and a truffle market, the bylanes of Marseilles, gourmet restaurants for truckers, a school for noses exclusively for the blind, pastis bars and other wonders one could encounter only in the South of France. And he unravels all these at a gentle pace, much like Provencal life itself.

Do read this books, they will bring in a sense of calm that can only be good for you. After all, as Mayle says, stress and hurry possibly kills many more people than does foie gras.

Bon appetit!

Music on the weekend, and tea...

2009-02-10T09:26:00.000-08:00

I had a really great weekend despite attending various lectures - managed to squeeze in quite some fun. It helped that a couple of lectures were cancelled.

Friday night I went for the Shiv Kumar Sharma and Zakir Husain concert at the NCPA. It was so great. It was classical and not fusion (after quite some time). Pt. Shiv Kumar began with Raga Patdeep - alaap, jod and jhaala, with Zakir joining in later as he moved to compositions in Rupak and Teen Taal. The second half was devoted to folk music with liltingly lovely melodies from five different states.

What I really enjoyed about the concert was that Pt. Shiv Kumar painstakingly explained what he was playing, and this went on throughout the concert. I also loved the way both musicians played with so much joy in their music, and also in each playing with each other - the bonhomie was palpable.

They are both so amazingly creative with their sounds, that everytime I hear them, I am surprised yet again. Their fingers fly over their instruments, visible only as a blur and yet they evoke sounds of such precision and creativity. Zakir's tablas produces melody as well as rhythm, they almost sing as he uses the left hand drum (baaya) to it's full potential, they make you want to dance as he improvises a filligree of rhythm. Shiv Kumar's santoor sounds at times like myriad bells ringing, like a human voice even.

Another great weekend experience was meeting Lulu (www.lululovesbombay.blogspot.com) for tea at the Tea Center (yes, I went there again!) We had excellent kulhad masala chai in little clay pots, crisp and flavourful - and (eggless!) scones with strawberry jam and whipped cream.

Lulu came up with the idea of having a bloggers-and-readers get together in Bombay...and I was really excited at the idea of interacting with people I know pretty well in the virtual world. She'd organised something similar in New York and she says it was great fun.

So everybody reading this post, if you are in Bombay and like the idea, please write back and tell me that you are interested in coming. If there are enough people who want to come, then it should happen soon.

High Tea

2009-01-29T09:06:00.000-08:00

Lulu's post on Sunday brunch at Banyan Tree reminded me of another place I love for lazing around on Sundays - the (newly renovated) Tea Center at Churchgate. The place is open from 8:30 a.m. to 10:30 p.m - but I believe their breakfast menu is restricted to mornings.

I generally end up going in the afternoon or evening to chill with friends. The last time I went there I had an absolutely delicious honey walnut pie, smooth and rich...the memory of it still makes my mouth water. My friends also had muffins (which I could not taste as i don't eat eggs) and claimed they were very good. We badly wanted scones in memory of Enid Blyton...however, they were over by the time we reached and we could not try them.

The snacks range from typically British (fish fingers) to Indian (samosas, pakodas), to chilly cheese fingers.

If you are a tea person, then Tea Center has a range of different grades of teas (starting with TGFOP, which is Top Grade Flowery Orange Pekoe), and also typical Indian mint tea, adrak tea etc. They have herb infusions like chamomile tea, and a kick-ass peach iced tea, pulpy and well brewed. It used to be run by the Tea Board, but now I believe it's belongs to the Indian Summer (neighbouring restaurant) owners.

I love the atmosphere, which is that of a British Raj tea room, with pillars for privacy, and curtains at the windows, and little bells on each table, and liveried waiters moving around. The renovation has gotten rid of the rather outdated dark green colour scheme, and it's now done up in softer tones of beige and white, while still retaining the old-world atmosphere.

It has a relaxed atmosphere and usually has a more mature clientele, which means it is not very noisy. It does not force loud music on you, or cigarette smoke for that matter.

A very nice place if you want to have some real conversation.

Inconsequential Thoughts

2009-01-22T10:41:00.000-08:00

For days I have tried to write posts on two wonderful concerts that I attended - but somehow the prose eludes me. So I will give in to my impulse to write of inconsequential things, and for now leave the things of - well, consequence.

Like honey. Can't stand the stuff. Bought these huge-sized Britannia five grain biscuits - took a bite - and then almost spat it out. Seems they are sweetened with honey, a substance I find terrible and somehow it's scent seems redolent with crawling insects. Yuck.

Like this book I am reading, Digging To America, where one of the families is Iranian American. And I read this following White Teeth, with Jamaican and Bangladeshi British. Reading any immigrant book makes me feel that I can never emigrate, never bring up my children in a land where my genes will ultimately disappear, dissolve in a gene-pool of Saira Mohan-like beige, where I have to carry a piece of my country with me to cling to, to fight for and to hold on to, like clutching at sand in a fist. I want to live with my children in my country, in the sweet sound of the languages I know, spoken the way I speak them, surrounded by the irritating warmth of extended family and friends. And I want my city to remain safe so that I can do this.

Like my tiny little personal planner for Rs. 25 that's made my life simpler. It's so relieving to jot things into it and then forget about them for the time being. Yes, I know cell phones have a reminder function but that's not the same as a little paper book in your bag where you scrawl things down quickly.

Like, even though I need to type for most of my serious writing, I need paper for any planning, or study, or analysis, or even to commit things to memory. Through my MBA I have painstakingly printed out the slides given by teachers when I need to learn them, marking things, underlining, jotting down extra information. The connection to paper is strong.

Like, having a good cache of books in the house after a particularly rewarding trip to Fort can feel so rich, so comfortable. You can have entertainment in every hand bag (and thus in trains, buses and doctor's clinics), under pillows and beds and everywhere. Very very comforting.

Like, I am finally visiting my Nani's home town - her childhood of white beaches and blue ocean and coconut trees and garden-opening-on-the-sands - Karwar. The next post will have to be on that.

Do comment back. Tc.

Shankar Mahadevan for 26/11

2009-01-17T00:56:00.000-08:00

To me, the Shankar Mahadevan concert at the NCPA yesterday had a single theme; dualism (yes, I know, oxymoron).

It was a concert in hope of peace and in tribute to the martyrs of 26/11, and this dualism seems to symbolize the way we all feel about 26/11. It’s sort of like the way you feel when a person dies – actually, in this case, when a person is murdered. You don’t want to forget the pain and the anger and the hatred, and you want to hold it close to you and fight, or protest, or shout or cry and you don’t want the world to think you are okay, because you are not okay, and you don’t want to be okay. You don’t want to be told that it will be okay.

And yet, on the other hand, after a bit, you want to be happy again. You don’t want to remain fearful and in pain, because that, after all, was what they wanted. They wanted you to be terrified and not to be able to live with a light heart.

So there you are, wanting to defy them and celebrate life again, and yet not insult the memory of the pain by being completely okay.

Which is what Shankar said when he began the concert. He said, “I was confused when I planned this concert. I was confused about what I should sing because we want to remember, and yet we don’t want to remember, if you know what I mean.”

We understood perfectly.

We had all felt the sorrow as we paid floral tribute to the martyrs at the entrance, yet we had all felt the joy as we enjoyed the famed NCPA cold coffee and the well-bred, pre-concert buzz of anticipation.

The stage set-up when we entered the auditorium represented yet another dualism, that of Indian music today. The front of the stage was arranged in a baithak format for a traditional classical performance, complete with harmonium, dholak, cymbals, and low mikes. The back of the stage was set up for a rock band – from drum sets to synthesizers and electric pedals.

“Pre-interval, post-interval,” I whispered to Mom, knowingly.

And so it was. Bolllywood music, said Shankar, is too deep a part of Indian culture to not be acknowledged as Indian music. So the first half will be a collage of folk music, and the second half Bollywood.

Before the interval, Shankar started with a beautiful piece of Carnatic singing, followed by a Ghulam Ali ghazal. He then sang a Marathi natya sangeet, a part of the traditional musical plays that used to be performed in Maharashtra, amazingly complex and beautiful. His last was a Bhimsen Joshi abhang – a devotional song that grows in passion and intensity, pushing emotions to rise in a crescendo.

I alternated between ecstasy, tearfulness at the beauty of the music, and the semi-trance that classical music puts me into. As usual, for a few minutes, that tearing feeling came. The feeling that says, perhaps, after all, I should have given up everything else and pursued classical singing with single-minded zeal. Perhaps the risk of being one of dozens of mediocre struggling singers IS balanced by the reward -the possibility of weaving a web of sorcery around people – of reaching right into their souls. And then, as usual, I told myself what I always do – “Art is not for those who can. Art is only for those who must.”

We awakened from our reverie for the interval, and when we re-entered after the interval, it was to the sound of loud percussion from the drummers – the baithak had been cleared away, the dholak and keyboardist and first and second guitar in place – and Shankar, all in black entered to sing the passionate title track of Lakshya, Haan Ye Rasta Hai Tera – a song that can stir my blood and bring tears to my eyes any time (I have always felt that Lakshya is an underrated film – I love both the movie and the music). Shankar dedicated this song to those who fought through the 26/11 attacks in a tribute to their courage and passion.

This was followed by effortless renditions of his biggest hits, including my favourite pensive Breathless with its seamless, flowing lyrics, and the deeply emotional Maa. Shankar played completely to the gallery, getting the audience involved, and while the polite, well-behaved NCPA audience is not quite a Mood Indigo/Malhar one, he did get them to sing along quite a bit. I shouted along joyously – I hope I am never too classy or too blasé to enjoy singing aloud at a concert!

Shankar also managed to get an entire row of women on stage dancing to his tunes in Pretty Woman. And an old boy who was at least in his sixties got on to the stage for Jhoom Barabar, jhoom-ing his way surprisingly well through the whole thing, in a dandiya-dhamaal kind of way. Perhaps in his youth, he was a Navraatri King, dandiyas flashing as he moved from one Gujarati belle to another.

My favourite was a man in the audience who stood up for all the sing-along parts, singing loudly and with plenty of dramatic, classical-singer airs and gestures – belly-laugh inducing.

Shankar, like the seasoned performer he is, alternated throughout between celebratory songs and introspective ones, keeping the emotions nice and varied. And ended by saluting the Indian spirit with the super-fast, super-energetic, super enthusiastic “Sabse Aage Hoge Hindustaani” anthem. The entire audience got on it’s feet, clapping and cheering.

Most of us walked out, feeling warm, happy, sad, patriotic, celebratory, courageous…and very satisfied.

After all, we Indians are an emotional people.

Le Retour

2009-01-15T09:25:00.001-08:00

I have put off writing this post for days, because I wanted my come back post to be something special. So I chewed my pen, listed possible ideas and thought about which post should be The One. The Return. Le Retour itself.

Well, that perfect post hasn't come yet. In fact, the more perfect I try to make it, the more imperfect it gets. So this one's going to be a general, general post, and I will try to get sharper, more focused, the next time.

Currently, I am recovering from a vacation. A vacation that has included a wedding, friends and cousins descending from all corners of the earth, endless outings both in town and Bandra, more-or-less daily "plans", driving lessons, yoga lessons, walks, shopping in Bandra for essential (fashion) commodities, and other similar time-filling activities.

Except for the three days that I was ill, and finished David Eddings' saga the Elenium, this was the general tone of December-Jan.

Now, my time is being consumed by the feverish spring cleaning that happens every vacation. And as I sort through piles of clothes, accessories, books and make-up, trying to decide which I can do without, a kind of frenzy takes over and I just can't stop.

The reward is that wonderful feeling when you see a pile of useless things moving over to people who want them and find them useful. Like those too-tight trousers that you are never going to get thin enough for. And that lipstick that will always look tarty on you.

I have begun to think that perhaps something is wrong with me, because every time I think I am done with all these errands, a new one pops up. The itinery for tomorrow includes polishing silver jewellery (!) that I had forgotten about.

Oh well, hope the weekend turns out to be great, with Shankar Mahadevan tomorrow evening, Zakir Husain on Saturday and fusion tap on Sunday. Hope it translates into a sublime post or two.

Also, hopefully, will get time to read White Teeth. A book I've begun sinking my teeth into, but interruptions happen.

Like work, and phone calls, and of course, Gilmore Girls.

I will be back shortly.

Cheers, and keep the comments flowing!

Archive Post 2 - MBA Days (2007-08)

2009-01-14T09:26:00.000-08:00

These are the xanga posts I wrote during my time at Welingkar (almost over now), which brings us up to now. These are the last things I wrote on xanga and now I am back on blogspot. I can now, in the next post, begin where I left off.

2008-05-01(6:15 PM) - Of Internships and Memories

A year ago the thought of being at work for even eight hours a day made me feel all miserable and caged and wanting to break free. After all, engineering college meant I got home before six, generally. It meant plenty of bank holidays, and lots of time wasted.

Nine months of B-school later, I now face my summer internship with a feeling of being set free. I mean, I'm all excited about having weekends off. When was the last time that happened at college? I don't remember being home on Sunday, ever. Maybe I'll also get to stay home on a few bank holidays. Like, today. I'm chilling at home for a holiday like Labour day.

I'm also thrilled that when I come home (unlikely that it will be later than the 8/9 pm that I average in college days) I will probably chill out rather than working through the night. And in the worst case scenario, if I am made to work 12 hour days, take work home, and work on weekends, I am still fairly cheerful about the prospect. Because hey, that's what I'm used to!
_______________________________________________________________________________________
I've just been meditating on the nature of memories. And the fact that all of us are just the sum of our memories. A jumble of images and sounds and scents and sensations crammed into the brain.

They are temperamental, unpredictable creatures, are memories. They lurk around corners and in certain places like ghosts. School, especially, is full of these ghosts. In one corner of the school gym, a bunch of giggly little girls dines forever when I visit.

But there are other places, too, that bring back so clearly a place, a time, a date. The Dadar station stairway, for example. A dimuntive figure, plastic bag in hand, that moves towards me each time and shakes me.

When people move away from a place they have lived in, they move away from their memories. No longer can a turn of road bring them to a different time, or an outing carry them to the past. They can snatch at their memories only on rare visits, and even then, they do not always visit memories, because memories can be met only alone, or with the person who shares them.

Memories are tied up in all kinds of funny ways with the little activities of everyday life. A workout routine is a memory trigger for me, and the way I knot my shoelaces another.
We preserve so many useless objects because they are the receptacles of our memories. Like that seventh standard maths paper with a 100/100, and the school 'composition' notebook that was the beginning of a life long passion. Four copies of my college magazine (I remember the date, May 4) and I the printer delivering it late, and the sweetness of leafing through it for the first time.

We try to hold on to our memories, to document them in diaries, and photographs, to hold them in objects, and to visit them in places.

Yet they lurk most potently and unforgettably in the elusiveness of scents. A whiff of a college chemistry lab, and it's junior college again, I'm outside the large old Jai Hind laboratory, test-tube holder in hand. Old Spice sandalwood - and Papa is with me. Gucci Rush, and it's a certain evening, a certain restaurant. Chrome by Azzaro, and it's quite another.

Pears soap, of course, smells like coming home.

2008-03-18(1:48 PM) - IIM's rock sensation

Gaurav Dagaonkar, "IIM's Rock Sensation" is all over the music channels these days.
And long before he became the IIM sensation, he used to be an apna TSEC ka banda, an IT engineer, who gave one of his earliest interviews for the TSEC magazine, over an oniony sandwich from Jay Sandwich Stall. I scribbled down the interview in the college atrium. He spoke about the CAT, his IIM days, and his musical ambitions.

What I found strange is, his song talks about his engineering days, but is shot almost completely on the IIM campus, except for a few shots of circuit diagrams on a blackboard.

I enjoyed the song...how could I not, with the familiar references and the familiar lingo. We engineers are quite sentimental and nostalgic about our college days. KT's and exams acquire a sentimental and romantic glow in the past tense, the boring lectures turn rose-tinted in retrospect, and even the copying of assignments, that exercise in futility, becomes cute and funny. Proxies and pseudo-proxies are suddenly a scream.

And when we find that the world at large does not adore rock, and every alternate guy doesn't strum a guitar, we mope for Jal and Metallica and Indian Ocean, and for the irritating boys who sang guitar chords, and for the Korn and Rammstein and Maiden and System of A Down that you found on every iPod.

The song is suitably vegetarian in contrast to anthems like Sutta, but maybe it will work. Though I wonder why Gaurav didn't throw in a few shots of TSEC. Workshop or lab is suitably angsty. Or perhaps the TSEC smoker's lane, for that authentic engineering days flavour.

2008-03-13(1:50 AM) - Consulting??

"While no one has the real number, it has been estimated that management consulting has a global market of more than $ 50 bn. Consultants are drawn to money like bees to honey. Big rich companies are surrounded by all types of consulting firms, trying to collect as much as they can to feed their expensive teams. ( It costs about $ 250,000 a month to have one of McKinsey's consulting teams on site.)

Many of the big brands in trouble were surrounded by consultants who took their money but apparently offered no real help with the problems threatening to overwhelm them. From their performance with these big brands, one could accurately portray these folks as modern day Robin Hoods: They rob from the rich and keep it."
-Jack Trout (Big Brands, Big Trouble)
Also read:
Dangerous Company: Management Consultants and the Businesses They Save and Ruin
-James O' Shea and Charles Madigan

2008-03-06(11:45 PM) - 24/7

I had college for all of three hours today...and an off on Tuesday!! Two events qualifying as rarest of rare happening in just one week...unbelievable. Also three out-of-town friends contacted me in a single day...another rare event.

After 7 days a week, every week, having a day or half a day off makes me almost feverishly weigh options about how best to use this day -- whether I should finish off long-standing errands, or call up people I should have called long ago, or meet people I should have met long ago, or finish off some work so that I am hassle-free for the rest of the week; but finally I come to a single conclusion --I sleep.

So I slept and lazed away most of my free time and woke up with an bright, perky irritating smile that shone through the fogginess of Skype video at Papa, who said, "Hey, you're looking reeaally happy today!!!"

I am -- eating lunch at home made me feel I was in heaven, an afternoon siesta after goodness-knows-how-long made me want to turn cartwheels, and I almost forgave the authorities who made me write exams till the 31st of Dec, only to have me back in college on the 2nd of Jan, and be there from Monday to Sunday every day ever since.

P.S. On Republic Day, I went to the college office and found it was shut and only then remembered it was a holiday.

2008-03-05(11:10 PM) - Capital Markets

"We run what is undoubtedly the best course in Equity Markets in this country. Forget the IIMs, forget everything else. And we are not being immodest. We do. Not that we have superlative academic qualifications. But every single rupee of our money is invested in the equity markets. Every single rupee."

The Mankekars, father and son, were introducing us to their course on Capital Markets. And discouraging us from taking it. They handpick fifteen students from the college...fifteen who want to make their career in Capital Markets and are extremely clear about this.

"It is not that easy to get a job in equity research. You may be jobless after placement week. You may get a job months after your classmates. If that will upset you, don't take up this course.
"It's high-risk, high-return. You can strike gold, but you can fail miserably. And you will see the results of your decisions in minutes.

"There is an easier path. It's damn easy to get a job in, say, Corporate Finance. It's easy to stay there, too. The results of your decisions will come through only after years, and by then you can switch your job. You will be safe, and in five years, you can make 50-60 lakhs a year. Easily.

"We don't believe in ratio analysis, or any of the theories, because theories are based on assumptions. We believe in practicalities. We analyse the business model of the company. It's the direction the company is going in that we analyse...that, and the grace of God...by which we are in the top 0.001 percentile of successful investors..."

Both men were soft-spoken and precise. Yet they had that aura of power and supreme confidence that surrounds men who have been extremely successful in what they do. There was passion underlying the modulated voices.

They are fortunate enough to have found the career that is exactly right for them, that they love and enjoy, and that has probably made them wealthy beyond imagination.

2008-03-04(5:13 PM) - Intellect

Market research lectures often transgress into lectures about life and love and relationships.
And sometimes we weary, but sometimes a truth strikes home.

"Human beings have intelligence," exclaims the professor, "and that is what makes us inferior to all other animals!"

The class bursts out laughing, but he glares at us and continues, "Our instincts are closed to all signals from nature. We cannot detect disaster or calamity, nor can we read the signs of the weather. And our intelligence prevents us from doing what we really want to do."

We interrupt. "Sir, our intelligence helps us to do what we want to do..."

"No, you, Sir," he stabs a finger at one guy, "You want to get a good job, so you can marry a nice girl, have kids, educate your kids, see them married, play with your grandkids and then die. That's what you want! Correct me if you don't want these things..."

"And your intelligence comes in the way of this. If you were a dumb, illiterate guy, you would go up to the woman in your life and say, 'I love you.' But now, you intelligent MBA are not sure what you feel or think. And if you do go up to a woman, you will say 'I have some feelings which I have begun to comprehend as...but I am not sure what these feelings mean..." His voice trails off into ambiguity. "And it gets worse with your level of education. Ph. D's!" He stops and shakes his head sadly.

"And so gentlemen, we have lost our abillity to obtain what is most important to us, and therefore intelligence makes us inferior."

He beams around proudly.

"Knowledge, after all, was the original sin..."
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Rahman has done it again in Jodha Akbar with the ethereal Khwaja mere Khwaja. The song has an almost magical appeal...picture it performed live, in the open air, under starry desert skies...and one can understand why the young Akbar goes into a trance himself.

2007-11-04(12:38 PM) - Cinema Paradiso

I was very small...less than ten, certainly...when I saw Cinema Paradiso.

I had no idea then that this was a famous movie. It was just an Italian film with subtitles to me...a film that interested me and that I enjoyed.

And yet, hauntingly, the film never left me. I still remember the little boy...Salvatore, or Toto as he is called...asking where his father is. His father is in Russia, his mother tells him. Russia is very far. It takes years to go there...and years to come back. I can still hear the Italian voice in my memory.

The scenes are still vivid in my mind. The magic of cinema as it flashes on the screen, larger than life. Alfredo at the cinema.The fascination the movies have for Toto.

The kissing scenes have to be censored out of the movies, and the boys often beg Alfredo to be shown them.

The theater burning, and Toto rushing to drag at the blinded Alfredo.

Young, handsome Toto falling in love for the first time...surreptiously capturing her on film with a hesitant charm. Waiting outside her house all night.

I remember particularly the last few scenes, when Toto comes home from America for Alfredo's funeral. Alfredo has left him a box of film.

And Toto flies back to his big movie theatre in the states, and sits alone in the audience, as all the censored on-screen kisses of his childhood, that he had longed to see, flash on the screen and create magic for him.

I can understand more from memory now than I did then. But imagine the power of a movie that could endure in a child's memory with clarity for so many years.

I want to see it again. And then again, I don't. I don't know whether it will have the same charm again, whether it will match up to my memory.

"Fine" flash the words across the screen at the Cinema Paradiso, after every movie.
But it never ended in my mind.

2007-09-11(11:52 PM) - Restraint

I started out in life using too many words. I used them extravagantly, spilling them out in abundance, often cloyingly. Not just words of my era, but of all eras, picked merely for their beauty and made part of a peculiar everyday vocab for a twelve year old.

I talked too much, I wrote too much. I verbalized what I thought, and sometimes even what I didn't. I created strange worlds of fantasy that echoed the world around me, and yet intensified it, painting it in gold and crimson.

Life taught me many lessons before I began to discover the power of restraint.

Slowly, I began to write using simpler words. Taught myself to do so. Shorter sentences. Simpler images. Mundane characters. My poetry was now no longer a pale echo of Keats and Byron.
But what of speech? Silence is a force. I understand it's strength, try to imbibe it.
For I have become afraid of words spoken. Afraid of their power to destroy as much as I still delight in their power to create. Their effect is perilious, intangible. Like arrows, they fly from the bow and a careless marksman can only watch in dismay.

Yes, I have watched, and suffered consequences. And though I can still speak thoughtlessly, I hope I shall learn not to.

2007-08-06(11:27 PM) - Exodus

The first post I am writing on my laptop.

And as I write, an exodus is taking place. It began in the last week or so, when software jobs began and friends left Bombay. But today the largest bunch departs for foreign shores. And in another week, the city will feel rather...empty.

Right now they must be gathered at the terminal...sad, perhaps...nostalgic, maybe...excited, for sure. Or perhaps at the very moment of leaving it will feel unreal and all those feelings will disappear.

There has been time to get used to it...for all of us. And yet it still seems like a faraway event. The GRE scores, the applications, the attestations, all of them running around for the red tape, the acceptances and rejections, the shopping and the planning, all of these seem real. Not the fact that in a couple of hours the plane will take off.

And then, of course, all conversation will be Skype and voice chat, long distance calls and digital photographs. We won't disappear from each others lives. But it's still too hard to delete the phone numbers from my cell phone, too hard to realize that we will rarely all be reunited as a complete gang at the same time and place, that we will necessarily grow apart from some and grow closer to others. That the equations are going to change.

Hardest of all to accept that in a way, this is the end of childhood. Not the eighteenth birthday, not the driving license, nor coming of age, nor liquor permits. This is the end. This end of "regular" college life...for some of us, jobs, for some of us, education in other countries, for some of us, management schools.

Oh well, it's been a great four years. Vive la companie!

2007-07-10(2:21 PM) - The Pursuit of Happiness

Everyone I know -- everyone -- is busy with only one of two pursuits.

Pursuit one: Getting an MS abroad, or giving the GRE, the qualifying exam. Future goal: A software job abroad.

Pursuit two: Getting an MBA, or working while simultaneously giving the CAT, the qualifying exam. Future: A high paying job, high tension in an investment bank or a management consultancy firm.

If everyone wants one of these futures, I should, too, right? They mean money, status and prestige...all of which I want just as much as the next person. And yet those tried-and-tested routes seem like hollow dreams to me. Exams used to matter dreadfully to me, till I was eighteen. And then I took a step back, and realized there was more. It's never been the same since. I realized that I had nothing to prove to myself. And stopped caring.

Life is at least partially about achieving things in the eyes of the world; there's no pretending otherwise. But can you turn a verbal sot into a number cruncher? An artist into an investment banker? I think not. It would be fruitless. A life wasted.

Of course I need to "make it" in the world. But surely there must be a path that will also allow me to also justify my existence to myself....

Archive Post 1 (2006-2007)

2009-01-14T08:36:00.000-08:00

Engineering and freelance writing days (Posts from my Xanga blog)

I've returned to blogspot after quite a long hiatus, and I did not succeed in importing my xanga posts (xanga, along with it's many other flaws, does not allow you to export your blog to an xml file). I decided it would be an incomplete blog without all the interim blogging years, so here are my xanga posts. They will be coming in installments. These belong to my engineering days, and also the heady times when I was a freelancer for Afternoon.

2007-06-06(12:42 AM) - Quotable Quotes, etc
I love quotable quotes. And not the homilies that they pass off as "quote of the day" in schools and colleges. Not the ones they work little morals into, and teach to children as precepts of life.
They are miniature masterpieces to be enjoyed, bits of artistry in words

Some are memorable for the pithy snapshots of life that they give us. Voltaire: "The secret of being a bore is to say everything." And some because they reflect something that I've always thought, yet could never put into words.

There are those that make me smile. That whimsical one from Dryden, for instance. "There's a pleasure sure in being mad, which none but madmen know." Crazy, exuberant and funny, too. And dry, witty Jane Austen to be savoured again and again. "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a large fortune must be in want of a wife."
And then there are those that touch me. W.B. Yeats...

"But I, being poor, have only my dreams;I have spread my dreams under your feet;Tread softly for you tread on my dreams..."

There's a magic in those words. And a picture too, somehow.

Many words I treasure come from L.M. Montgomery, the author I grew up with. Such as: "A woman who has a sense of humour possesses no refuge from the merciless truth about herself. She cannot think herself misunderstood. She cannot revel in self-pity. She cannot comfortably damn any one who differs from her. No, the woman with a sense of humour isn't to be envied."
Shakespeare, with his remarkable insight into the human heart. "Fear is more pain than is the pain it fears."
And the indefinable passion of Thoreau...

"I went to the woods because I wanted to live
I wanted to live deep and suck the marrow out of life
To put to rout all that was not life
And not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Soon, it will be midnight. And my last day of being 21 will begin.

It's been a long, hard year. And yet I'm loath to say good-bye to it. I wonder why...
The Victorian charm of one-and-twenty? The musical ring of it? The horror of growing older than Elizabeth Bennet?

Or perhaps it's the very long-ness and hard-ness that I have grown attached to? There's no denying it; this has been a year that has wrought changes both within and without. And as it slips away, there's a growing sense of lightness. Exhilaration. Freedom. And regret? That too..
I wouldn't give up the pain...

Goodbye, 21, coming-of-age. And hello, 22...welcome!

2007-05-18(9:32 PM) - Today I sang

Today, I sang...

Not with absolute joy, not with complete freedom, but I sang. Sang on an impulse. Sang to indulge a whim. Sang because I wanted to.

It's a long, long time since that happened. Strange thing to say...for someone who lists "classical singing" among hobbies, but it's true.

Burdens of the mind weigh on the vocal chords as well. There is a heaviness of the soul, a dullness within. Any singing is forced, dragging. The voice does not flow lightly over the notes but is chained, like a stream flowing over boulders.

There is no richness in the melody, nor delight in the rhythm.

Those come when the heart is light and free.

Mine is not free from wistfulness and regrets yet.

But still, today I sang...
Soon, I will be free.

2007-05-15(11:53 PM) - Golden fruit

The mango is a fruit for a sensualist.

Try walking into a room filled with baskets of mangoes on a hot May night, and savour the air. The warm air is heavy with perfume…almost tangible. Drink it in through your nostrils, feel it silken against your skin, taste it on your tongue.

Biting into a frosty slice of it’s smooth, firm, golden flesh is an almost heady experience. There is nothing restrained about the fruit. Not for it the cool delicacy of a lichi’s flavour, or the subtle tanginess of a strawberry. It tastes lush and full-bodied and flamboyant…and utterly unforgettable.

The flavour tangos over the taste buds—sweet , but with hints of tanginess that prevent it from being cloying. It’s juices spill over and trickle down the throat.

It’s scent is warm and golden…like old sweetnesses...like memories of sunlight...

2007-05-12(1:06 PM) - Obstinate Virtues

"I prefer an accomodating vice to an obstinate virtue"
-Moiliere

How very, very true. Stubbornness can be so infuriating. It can imply resistance to change, good or bad , inflexibility of opinion, closed-mindedness towards the ideas and opinions of others, a refusal to negotiate or compromise, and at times, plain self-injurious pigheadedness.
But then there are those who can afford it. Or can they?

2007-05-03(11:59 AM) - i carry your heart with me

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in my heart)i am never without it(anywhere i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done by only me is your doing,my darling) i fear no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true) and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you here is the deepest secret nobody knows (here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide) and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)
ee cummings

2007-04-12(6:32 PM) - Of kingfishers, and so on

There are kingfishers outside my window. Two, in fact. One of them has been an annual visitor for sometime. The other is a newcomer.

It's a strange place for them to choose. A hot, dusty, busy, noisy road...an arterial road choked with traffic. Yet they continue to visit their wayside motel...a magnificent old baadaam tree that intertwines with an equally magnificent old peepal tree behind my house. When they primly turn towards me, they are small, chocolate brown birds with white bibs and long beaks. But when they turn, or swiftly fly away, their colours flash a jewelled blue.

I hear their strange cry in the morning, and rush to catch a glimpse of their beautiful plumage. I sip my morning cuppa by the window seat, looking for a brilliant turquoise gleam amidst the green leaves.

My small miracles.

I wonder where they catch fish, though? I used to think kingfishers eat freshwater fish. But here there is nothing but the Arabian sea, a stone's throw away.
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Anniversaries are peculiar things. It's strange, the way we mark days by their periodic (or maybe not periodic, given the irregular lengths of months and years) reoccurence. And actually get affected by events that happened on the past such-and-such.

For example, most of us stepped out on 26th July, 2006 with some thoughts about flooding. Though it wasnt really a rainy day. I doubt I will feel like boarding a train on 11th July, 2007...with completely irrational apprehensions.

Anniversaries of weddings and birthdays are okay, I guess...just another reason to celebrate.
But it's sadder events that leave their shadows behind. There are medically recorded cases of people who fall ill on the death anniversary of a loved one.

We associate a particular date or even a particular day of the week with a person and allow it to trigger off memories. We lose both senses, that of humour and that of perspective, and wallow in the past.

We count the days and months and years, and even after all that time, a simple date on the calendar can move us to tears.

2007-03-20(8:57 PM) - Tonight I can write the saddest lines

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.

And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.

The night is shattered and she is not with me.This is all.

In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.

My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight searches for her as though to go to her.

My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.

We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.

My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another's. She will be another's. Like my kisses before.

Her voice. Her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.

Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms

my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer

and these the last verses that I write for her.

2007-01-02(4:32 PM) - New Year

And finally, it's 2007.

Here's my new year post...a day or two late, which just about sums up how I'm feeling. Lazy. Contented. And at peace with the world. And this despite the fact that 2007 is going to be a year of changes. Six more months, and engineering days are going to be a (mostly) pleasant memory.
In a fortnight, I will go back to college, for the last time. The last first day of the last even semester...actually, of the last any semester. And although I know that I don't want any more semesters, I'm still going to feel a little nostalgic.

So I'm going to relish those lazy first weeks, with the free lectures and the hang-out time and the movies. After that, as usual, the pace will accelerate, periodics will happen, journals will be completed, submission time will arrive and it will be time for the last engineering vivas.
The beginning of the end has come, and the end itself will follow real soon.

With all it's flaws, engineering life at TSEC has been perfect in so many ways. The relaxed, non-competitive atmosphere. The wonderful, like-minded friends. The great food from the dabbas of so many different people. The varied music, heard on different people's iPods. The bonding that occurred as we went through vivas, submissions and exams together.

Among the clearest memories are those of the two July's. The 2005 July...Tuesday, 26/7....the deluge...and it's heroes. The 2006 July...11/7...another Tuesday...and the truths it brought home.

2006 itself I'll remember in two halves. Semester 6...fun, relaxed inspite of 6 vivas. An easy semester, devoid of any Communications, that bane of all Computers students lives.
And Semester 7...the gloomy, rainy atmosphere of odd sem, with the wet commutes, and half the class missing because of the GRE. Everyone tense and busy with entrance exams, the burdensome subjects, and finally the long-drawn,painful exams. Oh well, it had it's moments. Engineering teaches you to grab all the fun you can, all the glorious moments...and there have been those too.

2006-12-21(4:49 PM) - Rules, and then some more
Rules for the Efficient Writing of Journals

#1 As soon as any of your friends (or classmates) finishes a write-up, snatch it from him/her.

#2 If you know someone is going to be writing a journal soon, quickly “book” it before anyone else does.

#3 Copy out these snatched write-ups whenever tired and listening to music/watching your favourite TV show/talking on the phone.

#4 For all Comps and IT engineers; do your own programming, during practicals. Do not copy codes. This is your only chance to use your brains while in engineering college.

#5 If your program uses weird logic, you will have to write lengthy documentation in certain subjects. So, take a printout from the person who does the standard program. You will then be able to copy out his/her documentation.

#6 Ignore rule #4 if you really do not like programming. You can manage quite well by swiping other people's codes

#7 Graphs for electronics subjects should be drawn/copied in the lunch break. A solid crowd will form around you, clamouring for them. The pressure will force you to finish the graphs in record speed.

#8 When it comes to assignments, copy the lengthiest one. It is worth it, as these are most impressive. (Do not do this if the assignment is due on the same day). Develop assignment writing into a fine art and an accompaniment for your leisure.

#9 Always get your experiments signed when there is a long queue for the same. This way, the harassed teacher won’t scrutinize them too carefully.

#10 Lastly; with the help of these rules, control your journals. Do not let them control you.
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A poem by the Augustan poet John Donne....one that I first read in school days and still enjoy. Note the references to Elizabethan beliefs that you will recall from studying Will Shakespeare. Check out.........

SWEETEST love, I do not go,For weariness of thee,Nor in hope the world can showA fitter love for me ;But since that IAt the last must part, 'tis best,Thus to use myself in jestBy feigned deaths to die.Yesternight the sun went hence,And yet is here to-day ;He hath no desire nor sense,Nor half so short a way ;Then fear not me,But believe that I shall makeSpeedier journeys, since I takeMore wings and spurs than he.O how feeble is man's power,That if good fortune fall,Cannot add another hour,Nor a lost hour recall ;But come bad chance,And we join to it our strength,And we teach it art and length,Itself o'er us to advance.When thou sigh'st, thou sigh'st not wind,But sigh'st my soul away ;When thou weep'st, unkindly kind,My life's blood doth decay.It cannot beThat thou lovest me as thou say'st,If in thine my life thou waste,That art the best of me.Let not thy divining heartForethink me any ill ;Destiny may take thy part,And may thy fears fulfil.But think that weAre but turn'd aside to sleep.They who one another keepAlive, ne'er parted be.
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Currently listening:
Afterglow, by INXS.
Sway.

2006-10-25(2:13 PM) - Unplanned

No time to write the intended post. No time, either, to write out the substitute one I came up with. So, an unplanned post... some thoughts from someone else.
This excerpt is from The Mourners by Satyajit Sarna, from a recent Penguin compilation....quoted by Khushwant Singh in a column.

Comforting the bereaved is like juggling with daggers,
For what joy of the sullen world could complete hearts
And what words would not seen ungentle
Falling like salt on wounds
Watering fresh?

Sorry about the double line space..xanga's not behaving. Skipping down a couple of verses,

I felt the discomfort of the alien
prick me,
Excluded from loss and grief
But present at it's exorcism.

Good stuff.

2006-10-12(4:00 PM) - Daily News
I can't remember when it was that newspapers first started making me cry.
The news, of course, has always been depressing. The media thinks tragedy sells better than good news. Some newspapers are more cheerful than others...the Hindustan Times, for example, is never as down-in-the-dumps as TOI.

But I seem to remember a time when I stoically read the papers, at the most blinding myself to the bad news, and reading on.

Now, increasingly, there is something in the papers...some photograph, some story, some detail...that makes the page blur before my eyes. Have they simply upped the frequency of "poigant/moving" stories? Do they make more of an effort to publish gut-wrenching photographs?

Or is it just that, instead of getting hardened to things, they have begun to affect me more and more? I wonder...
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Read this article in the HT a couple of weeks ago and have been wanting to comment on it.
What it said, in a nutshell, was this:
Girls going to single-sex schools are more confident, ambitious, successful and likely to be career minded that their counterparts in co-ed schools. Emotionally, they are more or less as well-balanced as the latter.

Boys coming from single-sex backgrounds, however, are emotionally not as well-balanced as those from co-educational backgrounds...they are more likely to go through divorces and break-ups. They gain no benefits as regards their careers, to balance this.

Plainly, single-sex education benefits girls, while co-education benefits boys.

The question is, which girls will be ready to throw up the advantages of single-sex education for the betterment of the opposite sex?

2006-09-20(3:02 PM) - "You sold your soul when you put on your first pair of Jimmy Choos"
Finally saw "The Devil Wears Prada". And loved it. Merryl Streep is absolutely wonderful as the boss from hell...what a persona she has created. Her diatribe about a cerulean blue sweater has to be heard. I loved the dialogue, loved the fact that men are merely incident to the plot, and totally, absolutely loved the clothes.

Here are a few one-liners from her Miranda Priestly...

Miranda Priestly

"The details of your incompetence do not interest me."
"Yes, move at a glacial pace. You know how that thrills me. "
"Find me that piece of paper I had in my hand yesterday morning. "
And my favourite....
Miranda: "...You have no sense of fashion... "Andy: "I think that depends on... "
Miranda: " No, no, that wasn't a question. "
A few other good ones...
Emily "I'm one stomach flu away from reaching my goal weight."
Nigel: "Corn chowder? An interesting choice. Cellulite is one of the ingredients..."
Andy "Doesn't anybody eat around here?" Nigel "Not since two is the new four and zero is the new two." Andy "Well, I'm a six..." Nigel "Aha, the new fourteen".
Nigel: (when Andy spills food on her sweater) "Not to worry, there's more polyblend where that came from."
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Currently listening: Toxicity.

2006-09-14(11:51 PM) - Symmetry, Harmony

One enduring memory I have of 5th semester exams is the night before the Microprocessors paper. Not because I was particularly worked up or tense or anything. On the contrary, I felt all the stress, all the pressure to finish the portion just melting away before the sheer, beautiful symmetry of the subject.

It was as if for once, the details didn't cloud my perspective, but fitted together into a whole. Design problems filled me with wonder, and peripheral chips with delight.
It was almost like reading a perfectly constructed line of poetry.

Or like listening to an incredibly harmonious piece of music...harmonious with that rare hamony, which could occur equally in a classical khayal, in rock music, in a folk song, or even in a Bollywood number. A harmony independent of genre.

And I wondered why I hadn't seen it before...why I had been as blind as those who can be shown a perfect verse of poetry and say that it didn't do anything for them.

After that, it was a great paper.

Currently listening: Scarborough Fair
More on that next time

2006-09-03(11:40 PM) - Just some words...

One of my all-time favourite songs...a romantic song that does not sound mushy...listen to it if you can...
Artist: Peter Gabriel
Song: Book Of Love
The book of love is long and boringNo one can lift the damn thingIt's full of charts and facts and figures and instructions for dancingBut II love it when you read to meAnd youYou can read me anythingThe book of love has music in itIn fact that's where music comes fromSome of it is just transcendentalSome of it is just really dumbBut II love it when you sing to meAnd youYou can sing me anythingThe book of love is long and boringAnd written very long agoIt's full of flowers and heart-shaped boxesAnd things we're all too young to knowBut II love it when you give me thingsAnd youYou ought to give me wedding ringsAnd II love it when you give me thingsAnd youYou ought to give me wedding ringsAnd II love it when you give me thingsAnd youYou ought to give me wedding ringsYou ought to give me wedding rings

2006-08-01(9:39 AM) - Peace comes dropping slow

Savour the words for a moment of peace...

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

I WILL arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,I hear it in the deep heart's core.

-W.B. Yeats

2006-06-29(9:48 PM) - Much Ado
"Sigh no more ladies, sigh no more
Men were deceivers ever
One foot on sea and one on shore
To one thing constant never
Then sigh not so, but let them go
And be you blithe and bonny
Converting all your sounds of woe
Into Hey nonny, nonny"

Strange, huh? But it grows on you. And sounds great when set to music.

It's like, the theme song of Much Ado About Nothing. Which I was watching, with subtitles, all the better to get the dialogues completely and not miss the puns. Shakepeare rocks. Everytime.

Anyone remember the song about fancy? Merchant of Venice, Act 3, scene 2 (I think) played by Portia, perhaps to give Bassanio a clue. If you gave your ICSE in or around 2001 you oughta remember. I remember it, complete with the tune from the audio cassettes.

2006-06-22(12:35 PM) - Southern Spice

Spent four days down South, and found much to amuse me.
A single day in Chennai was fodder for plenty of amusement.
It started right from the airport, where the black and yellow ambassador taxi bore the Mercedes logo on it's bonnet.

Unseen authorities had seen fit to plant little homilies along the road. Like "Increase speed decrease life", and, I kid you not, "Hurry burry spoils the curry."
Hugely funny.

I could go on, though at the risk of irking Chennai lovers.
Therefore, here I stop.

2006-06-16(11:53 PM) - Question of language

It's the situation that dictates the words you use.
For instance, though it's generally better to use short and simple words, there are times when a more complex phrase is in order.

As when teaching thirteen-year old boys the use of the Vernier callipers. "So, when you want to measure, for example, the diameter of a ball..." my mother began, only to see lips twitch and immense self-control exercised so as not to burst out into giggles. Furtive glances were exchanged, and merriment smothered.

My mother was quick to react to the situation. "Yes, as I was saying, you can take the measurements of a spherical object ....."

Yup, in this case, the longer words worked better.

2006-03-30(10:58 PM) - tagged
I didn't really want to post this. It's days since I've been tagged, and I've been most reluctant to post.

I mean, how can you put up a list of things you expect from the opposite sex? You make your list of requirements all ready, and along comes the next person who doesn't fit into it, and yet somehow fits in a way you can't explain.

In fact, for me, there have only been very few factors in common, and those may change too any moment. So let me give you three

1. Intelligent.
2. Intellectual. Yes, different from the above.
3. Possessed of a sense of humour...which is far more than just the ability to tell jokes...really, it is a sense of the fitness of things.

And that's all I'm going to say. They are very far from exhaustive. And very far from complete. They're not even the bare essentials, but if I say more, it will tell the world what makes me tick.
So the other things remain secret. Or sacred. Funny how similar those two words sound...

2006-02-27(7:38 PM) - Taxi, Taxi (Public)
(A post from my old blog which also got printed in JLT)

I wonder what it is about a taxi that makes it seem so much more comfortable than a bus? Even if you have to walk almost as far as the bus-stop in the pouring rain, your umbrella flapping, and no windcheater because you were just going to get into a cab. Even if you spend the same time trying to wave down a cab as you would’ve spent waiting for a bus; even if you strain your eyes completely trying to spot a raised meter.

Even once you do get one, and sink down gratefully into the damp, slightly smelly seats. Why is it that you do not cringe as you would’ve done on the bus? On the bus, there is the comfort of knowing exactly where you are going. The exact route, to the exact road, the exact stop. In the cab, there is the false security of THINKING you know where you’re going. Though in fact, the cabbie may take you to CST instead of Fountain, via Churchgate instead of Metro. To the opposite side of the road, or a kilometer ahead. While you, yakking on the cell, nodding off, listening to music or just blinded by the rains sit tight in the lull of false security. Oblivious, obviously, to the fact that you will have to pay for the longer route. Or worse, trudge unknown roads backwards in search of your destination.

It’s even worse when you sink into the cab, and the cabbie, after starting up, says “Madam, aap raasta dikhao. Then, besides spending money, you will also spend your energy, vocal chords and adrenaline, to constantly guide him along every twist and turn. Or, in case you are in the dark as to the route, shout in alarm, “Rok do, Rok do!” Only to descend and try in vain to flag down another cab.

There are all the cabs that refuse to take you despite the law that no passenger can be refused (“Door ka bhaada chaahiye”). Or the home-ground-loving ones. (“Aadhe ghante main doosre driver ko gaadi deni hai.”). Or the ones that just don’t want to go where you’re going. There are the ones who take you along the right route, right away. And then when you happily say “Left maar do,” at the end, growl “Hamko seedha jaana hai.” Only to drop you at the corner to trudge on. And the even more dreadful ones, who turn right as you wail out loud. So that you, spewing profanities, actually have to cross roads to reach the right place.

And then there are the ideal cabbies; nice, smiling, willing. You spot them as you are getting late for an exam, and drop in for a ride to the suburbs. Only to find the cab itself is far from ideal. Rattle, bump, jolt, feel the road with every bone, strain your eyes to study, feel the heat pouring in from the glass rear windows, and burn into your back.

Wouldn’t a bus have been better? Yes, says common sense. But next time I’m tired, or the next time it pours, I know I’ll still say to myself. “What the hell, I’ll just take a cab!”

2006-02-27(7:36 PM) - A few good books

A quick zip through some recommended books apart from the well-known ones
The Sunday Philosophy Club by Alexander McCall Smith
The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith
The Simoqin Prophecies by Samit Basu
Mistress by Anita Nair
The Crow Eaters by Bapsi Sidhwa (hilarious)
Letter from Peking & Pavilion of Women by Pearl S. Buck (much nicer and gentler than her more famous ones)
More some other time,
TC

2006-02-18(6:55 PM) - The nine faces of the heart

An awesome book I read some months ago, this is the sort that leaves you with that warm, satifying, complete feeling that only a good book can induce.

Mistress
Anita Nair
Penguin India
Rs 350

Two stories unfold. The first is the story of Radha, and Shyam, and of travel writer Chris, who comes to their riverside resort in Kerala with a cello and a tape recorder, to meet Radha’s uncle, Koman, a famous kathakali dancer. While Koman and Radha both find themselves strangely drawn to Chris, Shyam becomes a helpless observer as Radha embraces Chris with a passion and recklessness he cannot comprehend. Koman is both an observer and participant in this story, making no judgments, except those he reveals to the readers.

The second story is that which Koman tells Radha and Chris, the story of his own convoluted past and his parents, a fascinating account by all standards. The tale takes us all over Kerala and Tamil Nadu, to the unique town of Arabipatnam, and to various other places. And it brings us to kathakali, with fascinating insights into the training and performance of this traditional dance form, which is drama as well as dance.

The book is in the first person, but does not have a single narrator; as in a dance-drama, each of the players is allowed to speak for himself. Shyam voices his thoughts, and Radha voices hers, and we see them hurting each other, the misunderstandings deepening through the trickery of words. As Nair goes further into their past, we begin to understand the complexities of their relationship, to comprehend the injustice of it all. While it is Shyam who draws the most sympathy, Radha is not really a vamp; rather, she is vulnerable and insecure, too.

But it is Koman’s point of view that is the most interesting. With his knowledge of kathakali, a dance form which is entirely based on the epics, he looks upon mankind with a wisdom drawn from the heroes, princes and villains of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. He recognizes every nuance of emotion as one he has experienced, as part of a vesham, or a role in kathakali. In minor gestures and fleeting expressions, the minds of all the characters are revealed to him, an artist who is trained to interpret emotions with a finesse and perfection.

The author uses kathakali as her metaphor for life; the book is sectioned into nine parts, each named after one of the navrasas, the nine emotions or the nine faces of the heart…love, contempt, sorrow, fury, valour, fear, disgust, wonder and attachment…their traditional names, of course, are used. Each section begins with a wonderful piece on that particular rasa, in the voice of the teacher, giving examples from nature to teach his students how to bring the expressions onto their faces. The book moves from Shringaram to Shantam, and each time we get an inkling of what is to follow.

The language is superb and the structure unique. The plot is full of twists, and the book is powered by the colourful complexities of many characters. Through all the incidents, Nair searches for deeper meanings in art and life. Thought-provoking and absorbing, this a brilliant book from a writer who does not hesitate to challenge herself, a book original in both structure and content.

2006-02-17(1:27 PM) - Kunal Kapoor

Been down with an eye-infection for the past week...still red-eyed, so it's difficult to write much. But have to wonder why people haven't been noticing Kunal Kapoor in Rang de Basanti. Always thought he was gorgeous right from the time of his stint in Meenakshi...., and in RDB he was sooo cute. Dunno why no one has noticed his dimpled smile, intense eyes and utterly charming face. Methinks he is much better-looking than most of the men around in Bollywood

2006-02-13(9:24 PM) - Paritrana

"May you be tough as a Rock." - Rig Veda (LXXV-XII)
PARITRANAthe Political party for the Bharat of the 21st century.

says the site of this political party, started y six IITians and pronounced ParitrAAn. I am fascinated with the idea of a political party by intelligent and idealistic professionals...
The meaning of PARITRANA, as given by their site is:(Trana) means the act of relieving a conscious entity from the state of distress or pain. However, this relief may not be of permanent nature.(Paritrana) is the complete relief implying the end of the very cause of distress.
The site is pretty exhaustive, describing their ideologies in great (and abstruse) detail.
"The objective of the party is to resuscitate and restore the great traditions of Bharatvarsha's glorious Golden Age based on the eternal values, and to transform Bharatvarsha into a prosperous and powerful nation, and reestablish Bharatvarsha to its rightful place in the world as 'JagadGuru', " they finally end.

Lofty ideals...hope they succeed, to however small an extent. There are those who say they should've joined forces with an existing party, but that would've been the wrong route, methinks...with all the disadvantages of starting form scratch, that is the only hope there is of any politician being different from the current lot.

2006-02-06(1:54 PM) - Return of Cha bar

Piece of good news...the Cha Bar at the Oxford Bookstore is back. I can't wait to rush back for their excellent tea and genuine Udipi style filter coffee. Am so glad it is back!

2006-02-06(1:51 PM) - Laughter, the best medicine

The Puffin Book of Funny Stories
Puffin Books
Rs. 225

Puffin promises the oddest cast of characters ever in this collection of funny stories for young children…and delivers it too, 100%. These funny stories by Indian writers are breezy, imaginative and refreshing, with protagonists to match. No morals or lessons here, it’s just quality humour for children. No reason why adults should be left out of the party either; sixteen riotous tales of good, clean fun are hard to come by.

Jerry Pinto’s imagination runs wild in as he provides general knowledge about witches, and Samit Basu pens a school story in his characteristic unconventional style. The stories by Sukumar Ray (in a translation by Gopa Majumdar), Satyajit Ray, Ruskin Bond and R.K. Narayan (with the immortal Swaminathan) are excellent as always, but the great news is that almost every story in it’s own way is as good.

Expect the unexpected, with time-travel and a crazy ancestor in the village of Pappudom, a multi-talented man who can do just about everything at the same time while picking his nose, and an African witch doctor’s eccentric bird. There is King Batata in Ultapur, a version of the ‘Andheri nagri, Chaupat Raja’ stories in Hindi lore. There is a dosa conspiracy involving a South Indian priest with a weakness for the rice pancakes. Children come to terms with irritating younger siblings, sometimes with a little outside help, and even teach eccentric elder folks a lesson in a close knit joint family set up.

The stories range in their settings from traditional to modern, but in their sensibilities they are essentially modern, and also very Indian. They are highly imaginative and very laughter-inducing, and do not at any point talk down because they are aimed at the young reader. The humour is intelligent and can be enjoyed by all age groups.

If books like these continue to appear, the young Indian reader will have no need to depend on British and American books, as this is quality reading with local sensibilities. In language, publishing and illustrations as well as in the creative talent of it’s authors it lacks nothing. A very commendable effort by Puffin, and a definite must-read for children and young adults.

2006-02-02(4:54 PM) - Flamingoes

I don't know how many of you have made the effort to go and see the flamigoes at sewri creek. I took a harbour train last sunday, landed there and went.

The sea, unlike our western coast, different, dimpled. Mangroves. Empty peace and seagulls. And the flamingoes.

They were a pink cloud, unmistakable, gorgeous, clannish. Wading about the shallows, always together, their hues of pink something out of this world. I felt richer just seeing them. It made my day, my week, my year....for the cost of a Rs. 8 return ticket on the harbour line.

2006-01-29(6:52 PM) - A little thought

"The illiterate of the twenty-first century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and re-learn" - Alvin Toffler

So true, isn't it?

2006-01-28(6:41 PM) - How many shoes does the average girl own?

In Her Shoes…

A male friend asked me, “How many pairs of shoes does the average girl own?” “No such thing as an average girl,” I tossed. But then I got to thinking, and decided there was answer, and then came up with this article.

The girl next door:

She owns a pair of sneakers, probably floaters as well, and a strappy, black pair. She also owns beige, brown or white sandals, and the usual metallic pair worn to weddings and the like.

The Osho enthusiast:

She owns Osho chappals in every colour of the rainbow. She buys them from Pune, Colaba Causeway and Linking Road, and every time a friend or a friend of a friend goes to Pune she beg them to buy her a pair. She wears them in rain, though they smatter her jeans with mud as they go flip-flop. She wears them to parties. She even wears them to treks (I kid you not). Her mother stopped her from wearing them to weddings.

The sneak freak:

She collects sneakers. Pink sneakers, red sneakers, and sneakers with purple dots. Sneakers by Nike, Reebok, and even Tommy Hilfiger. Lace-up sneakers, velcro sneakers, cloth, synthetic and leather sneakers. Gold sneakers by Aki Narula. And of course, the ones she exercises in. Those fancy Nike/Adidas ones with the complicated air-pressure system to protect her metatarsals. You thought the others were for exercising? All those shoes that coordinate with her T-shirt collection? Silly you.

I-love-shoes-but-have-a-shoestring-budget:

She loves to wear fashionable shoes. Wedges are in? She’ll get them. Gold-edged sandals with transparent straps? She drools. Problem is, she’s on a budget. So she trawls Linking Road and Colaba Causeway, enduring poor quality and shoe bite to wear the very latest. She rushes to Kemps Corner every time the Warden Road shoe line-up has sales, rummaging wildly in the heaped-up stuff.

The ethnic chick:

No one else but her could wear the mojdis, jootis and kolhapuri chappals in her wardrobe. Her shoes are either picked up on travels or (where else?) Linking Road and Colaba Causeway.

Imelda Marcos:

She owns all of the above, handcrafted, expensive and in all imaginable colours. She has a shoe cupboard in her house, and picks up Manolo Blahniks when on her travels abroad.

2006-01-25(6:21 PM) - Words...(no, not the Song, puhlease)

A poem I wrote long ago...

WORDS

They overwhelm me.
Two by two, three by three,
Marching in rhythmic order,
Flowing torrentially…
Engulfing me like an angry crowd, all
Jostling for attention.
Shattering each other, or harmonizing,
More alive than life itself.
Dropping on the white expanse of the page
Like black jewels, like stark survivors
Like tears of ink from an old, old pen…
Clasped by the hands of generations

Like drops of blood, like vehicles
Of pain, of joy, of passion
Pulsating with the supreme force
Of creation, or of
Destruction.

A tidal wave of symbols.
Markings on paper
That sketch their nuanced tales, they are
The essence of all
Humanity.

The story of our race,
Our superiority over beasts.
Our bonds, and also
Our barriers. We live
A verbal duel. Every day,
Words slicing words
Fencing with each other, clanging
In the air like metal foils.

Now concealing, now revealing
Breaking hearts, touching souls
Caressing, oppressing,
Breaking hearts, making days…
Redefining lives.

They obsess me, words
Creating
Worlds within me
Worlds…
The extraordinary, delusionary,
Fantastic worlds, which are
The habitation of
A verbal sot.

2006-01-23(9:01 PM) - Interview with Samit Basu
Samit Basu, the twenty-six year old author of The Manticore’s Secret, the second part of a fantasy-humour trilogy was in Bombay to launch the book. I interviewed him for the AFternoon Despatch and Courier. Here's the unedited version.

The Gameworld Trilogy began very interestingly, with you quitting IIM-A to write it?

Oh, I am very much over quitting IIM-A, it was bound to happen. I don’t think it was either brave or stupid. I would have made a terrible banker. Anyway, it was back in 2001, and I will never regret it. At that point, I just knew I wanted to write, and sure, I had the beginning, but I didn’t know anything more. Before IIM, I studied economics in Calcutta, which was fun and interesting.

Tell us a bit about the Manticore’s Secret. Is it very different from the Simoqin Prophecies?

It is a bit different from the first, it had to be. The first book stands on the shoulders of giants in the field. That sort of a thing would get too much over one more book. In this book, I let the characters play around themselves, a bit.

Why is it the “Gameworld Trilogy”?

Well, you’ll have to read this book to find out! I hadn’t actually named it when I wrote the first book, as I didn’t know there was going to be a trilogy for sure! The fact is that in this second book, the action splits into two levels. On one hand, there are all the characters running around. On the other hand, there are the gods; in this case, very fickle and malevolent, playing games with them.

What next, after you complete the trilogy?

Graphic novels. Of course, I can’t draw to save my life, so I’ll be getting someone else to do the artwork. Will they be about fantasy? Well, yes, if you put superheroes and sci-fi under fantasy. Will I ever write anything apart from fantasy? Yes, of course, why not?

Where do you get your inspiration?

I steal. I steal from everywhere.

What are your influences?

Oh, that’s a bit difficult, there are so many. Myths, ancient and modern. Sumerian myths, James Bond, Harry Potter…of course, everyone in this genre owes a great deal to Tolkien. Hindu mythology, too, of course.

How would you feel if other authors stole from you?

Happy – to have contributed. Unless, of course, they made more money than I do (begins to laugh). Also, an author has only arrived when pirated copies of your book are available on the streets. I was the happiest person, when I saw that my books were being pirated and my money was being stolen from me!

Do you think writing is easy?

It’s fairly hard work, but it’s great fun. It’s kind of bewildering, you know, when work is fun? I mean, you aren’t just waiting for it to get over and that’s so unexpected.

Did you read a lot of fantasy as a child?

On and off. I read more or less anything I could get my hands on. Fortunately I did not read a restricted variety of books, I read everything. I love fiction. Non-fiction is boring, though.

For a time, you wrote for the Great Indian Comedy Show. (He pulls a face.) Was it very traumatic?

Well, we don’t have a template for Indian comedy, so it’s actually quite brave to have the Great Indian Comedy Show. For instance, Bengali humour is very strange and weird, and Punjabi humour is quite different, so I don’t know about Indian humour. The thing about humour is, it doesn’t translate well. A lot of what we find funny is defined culturally, and by what we read. This was a translation, and it didn’t turn out well. Besides, TV humour is not my cup of tea.

Do you think you would be happier being a banker as well as a writer? Like Chetan Bhagat, for instance.

I would be happier earning more (laughs hard).But I am happy the way things are. I fairly seriously hated IIM-A, though it is a wonderful place, and I met many wonderful people there who survived it and remained fundamentally sound.

You could make a fortune telling people how to get into an IIM.

Yeah, I find myself frequently giving CAT tips. And the CAT helped me in many ways. All that fast calculation means that I can calculate auto-fares, split bills very quickly. It made my friends trust me!

Are you serious? The CAT helped you in calculating auto fares, that’s it?

I am a very serious person, believe me. (Pulls a serious face and then begins to smile.)

Ok, let’s change the subject. What are you reading currently?

Graphic novels…most lately, Fables, By the last man. Also this book, called Wicked, by Gregory McGuire. It’s about the wicked witch from the west, of Oz fame. Everyone should read it.

2006-01-22(8:34 PM) - Piece of Cake

Swati Kaushal's Piece of Cake is intelligent chicklit, fun without being irritating or dumb. This book is a fun, lighthearted journey through the ‘corridors of corporate India’, with a touch of romance thrown in. It has a smooth flow that makes it a real easy read. In fact, a piece of cake!

Minal Sharma is twenty-nine, an MBA, and a successful corporate professional in a food company, briefed to sell the company’s cakes…hence, the title. She’s not really your conventional heroine, at five-foot-ten, with no earlobes, and huge feet, though (as Minal herself says) with killer legs.

The book opens with Minal’s mother advertising in the newspaper for suitable grooms. Suitors do turn up and disaster knocks on the door. Plenty of comic situations ensue. Meanwhile, she fights corporate battles with confidence and flair, and comes up with several creative ideas. She hits a snag in a new colleague on the make-or-break cakes assignment, who turns out to be her nasty and despised childhood enemy…out, she is sure, to sabotage her career.

Meanwhile, on the personal front, sparks fly between Minal and gorgeous Ali, her hunky radio jockey neighbour. Enter Sunil, successful cancer surgeon, family friend and catch of the year. Minal tries to brush off Ali, as she decides it really is time to get married. But more twists and turns ensue as Minal gets a temporary transfer and Sunil thinks she should change her job.

Kaushal’s in depth knowledge of the corporate world shows in the racy, interesting plot. With intrigue, one-upmanship and royal battles, the office world is not a mere backdrop for romance. Instead, the vice-versa would seem true. Minal’s professional victories mean far more to her than success on the personal front. Her job is a part of her, the single most important thing in her life. She enjoys it despite the ups and downs, the adrenaline rush is vital to her existence.

The characters are sketched out well—spineless Jaggu and firm, decisive Vik, stubborn and often petty Rana Bhatia, khadi-and-Fab India advocating Mrs. Sharma, and the lively, rather cute Yogi from the ad agency. Even perfect-catch Sunil is all too real in the nuances of his character, as is the softly feminine charm of Sunil’s mother.

It’s not all perfect…the book could have gone deeper, could have swung away from a few stereotypes. But Kaushal shows a genuine gift for humour. She writes with a good pace and tone, and does not meander aimlessly. The conversations are lively, the characters have attitude, and wit sparkles. There are nifty little details like Minal’s great-grandfather, fondly called the GGF, a freedom fighter, whose memory pops up at inopportune moments.

The bottomline: this book is good although it is not great literature. There are great one-liners guaranteed to make you chuckle, the romance is understated and fun, and the plot is strong with a neat twist at the end. Do not subject it to too deep a scrutiny. Just enjoy!

2006-01-19(5:26 PM) - The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency

By Alexander McCall Smith

The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series is not a thriller, nor the standard type of mystery story. Rather, it is a book about the ordinary problems of ordinary people set in the peaceful African country of Botswana, told with charm, warmth and subtle humour. It is one of those books that just reads itself.

McCall Smith’s heroine is the thoroughly delightful Precious Ramotswe. With the money left to her by her beloved Daddy, Precious opens Botswana’s very first and only detective agency in a small shop. Precious and her secretary, almost immediately get busy with all sorts of cases including uncovering conmen, tracking down husbands, and investigating a girl’s boyfriend. The most sinister case, however, comes when Precious is asked down to track down a little boy who may have been kidnapped by witch doctors. She has to face one of Africa’s most ugly traditions, the use of human bones in the making of charms and medicines.

Precious is not qualified in any way to be a detective. However, she is observant, possesses common sense and has a keen sense of right and wrong. Indeed, one is often treated to her shrewd assessment of people’s characters and her humorous accounts of their failings. With her insight into human nature and a determination to get at the truth, Precious shows wit and resourcefulness in getting to the bottom of all her cases. Often, Precious stands up for women’s rights. As she tells her skeptical lawyer, “Women are very observant. Haven’t you heard of Agatha Christie?”

McCall Smith doesn’t write with the detachment of an outsider, but as if he too were an African, with an African sensibility woven into his writing. He writes about Africa with affection and empathy as well as with humour, with a very real understanding of the place and it’s people. Precious is very patriotic and loves her country, with it’s wide open spaces and peaceful people. She refers to a legend her Daddy used to tell, where a boy and girl go to heaven and find it is full of beautiful white cattle...just one of the uniquely African touches.

The characters are sketched out with a direct simplicity that brings an earthiness to the telling. There is Precious’ good friend, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni of Speedy Motors, whom she often looks to for advice and assistance. There’s her secretary, Mma Makutsi, an admirably accurate typist with a long face. And of course, there are her various clients, who range from the ordinary to the extremely rich and important.

The charm of the book is difficult to pin down or easily define. Perhaps it is the simplicity of the writing, the ordinariness of the characters or the sly, subtle humour. Or perhaps it is the optimism and quiet happiness and content pervading the book, from the beginning to the happy ending. Even danger, when encountered, has a human aspect, and can be conquered with common sense and wisdom. McCall Smith has penned a modern day classic, a gem of a book.

2006-01-15(2:21 PM) - Samit Basu and the Gameworld trilogy

Met Samit Basu on Friday on behalf of the Afternoon, and interviewing him was one of the most enjoyable experiences in my short journalistic life. Plump, smart-alecky and over-confident, this (famously) IIM-Ahmedabad dropout and economics graduate is oh-so-quoteworthy. Between The Simoqin Prophecies and his latest, The Manticore's Secret, he has decided to name his books The GameWorld Trilogy.

He would answer a question, then burst into infectious laughter, so I actually laughed my way through the interview, as if it were just a lively conversation.

Through the book-launch, he had the audience in splits, requesting everyone to buy atleast three copies, handing over pseudo-intellectual questions to his co-host Sonia Faleiro, reading out funny passages from his book in a droll tone.

When asked whether his sarcasm had got him into trouble, he repied "Several times."
When asked to elaborate, he leaned into the mike and recited with droll blandness, "My sarcasm has never got me into trouble." Touche.

Will post the interview next week, after it appears in the Afternoon along with it's review. Anyone here reading Samit, do post your views on his unique blend of fantasy and humour.

When God Came Calling (Review)

2006-01-09T21:57:00.000-08:00

One Night @ Call Center
Rupa
Rs. 95

Chetan Bhagat’s second book has created waves ever since it’s launch. After all, it’s a second offering from the author of the very popular Five Point Someone, a book that made it’s author’s reputation. Sadly enough, it disappoints.

Sure, Bhagat picks a relevant setting for his book…a call center. Yes, he is attempting to understand the large chunk of young people who wake up at night and dress for office, and learn to fake American accents. Yes, he has done considerable research on the subject. Where does it all go wrong?

One could name the opening scene, to start with. The book begins with the author finding himself alone, with a pretty girl, in a train compartment. In true filmi style, she promises to tell him her story if he makes it into a book. Hardly original or true-to life, as the author himself admits.

The over-simplified writing style does begin to pall after a while, but that’s not the worst part of this book. On the plus side, the conversations are natural and real…Bhagat’s forte lies in the natural and lively dialogue. Shyam, the bumbling protagonist is a likeable enough fellow, with his typically male observations that are mirth-provoking and thoroughly believable. Shyam’s little thoughts and insights, trivial or otherwise, are real and funny, as he thinks and comment about his fellow-employees at the call center.

There’s Priyanka, Shyam’s ex-girlfriend, whom he still has feelings for. Esha, who wants to be a model, supports herself by working at the call center. Radhika, of the tyrannical in-laws, is supplementing her husband’s income. Vroom, aka Varun stays on because he’s addicted to branded clothes and pizza. Finally, there’s the elderly Military Uncle who’s there because of a fallout with his son’s family. And then, there’s the evil boss.

And the plot? Yes, that’s where the book truly falters. A bit of America-bashing, a few relationships, Shyam’s dates with Priyanka, a few work-related events and anecdotes. Darker revelations about all the characters emerge, though again Bhagat doesn’t explore very deep. Yet, it is all readable enough, and one waits for a twist, some action, some striking denouement.

Crisis strikes at the call center, and when things are at their worst, the much-hyped call from God happens. The call from God is absolutely corny…it appears as though Bhagat, stuck for ideas, had to resort to this anticlimax, this device. After which the various employees rise up against the evil boss, and sort out their messed–up personal lives. And I didn’t quite go for the “defeat the Americans by fear” concept.

A stereotyped intro…not much of a plot…far too simple language. What does this book have going for it? I would say…the innate humour, the witty observations and the spontaneous dialogue. For some, it’s fast pace and simple style would make it worth reading. For others, it may be curiosity to read Bhagat’s second book. Though it’s biggest selling point remains it’s utterly affordable price!

One Art

2006-01-09T21:35:00.000-08:00

Loved this poem that they used in In Her Shoes where Cameron Diaz's dyslexic character learns to read it out. It's beautiful, wry, poignant. Elizabeth Bishop makes her losses all the more touching as she pretends to trivialize them. Read on.

One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

---Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

-- Elizabeth Bishop

Growing up

2006-01-09T03:27:00.000-08:00

Turning eighteen never made me feel a whit older. I felt just as childish, just as commitment-phobic, and not at all responsible for anything. But now, approaching coming-of-age, I suspect I am growing up at last.

Strangely, I am atlast "willin' " to cook. And I do not find it as incredibly hard or as odious as I used to. I do not run away screaming at the thought of putting the tadka in the dal. Boiling oil does not scare me as it used to. I enjoy the freedom of not having to eat things I don't like or having to order out when there is a problem with the food situation. I've come to accept cooking as a survival skill.

I find I can clean out a drain or a sink with my bare hands...something that always made my stomach lurch in horror.

I find myself reaching for Business World and not for Bombay Times...most of the time, anyway! I find myself actually reading the political story in Indian Today, something I used to flip through and only read sometimes. I find myself picking up Non-Fiction instead of the latest novel.

I even find myself making my own shopping decisions!

If nothing else, at least this last convinces me that I am, finally, growing up.

Memory Lane

2006-01-09T03:24:00.000-08:00

Nope, I didn’t do a New Year post. No top-ten or top-50 list, no resolutions…at least, no public ones, no year-end thoughts.

Though this first week of the new year has been one of the most enjoyable ever. I’ve met most of the people who are close to me. The current gang, as well as friends from school and colleges past. Long days spent talking, a visit to Jai Hind, revisiting old haunts, dredging up memories. Laughter, nostalgia, some good movies, some golden hours.

Some friendships can survive on a few hours together…once a year, twice a year, once in two years. While others fade away into casual acquaintanceship. Some friendships made over a month last a lifetime. Others, built over years, crumble into dust. It was great to celebrate the lasting ones.

Yes, this sounds like a sappy friendship day post. But with 2006 beginning in this way, with all the richness of old friendships renewed, what else can I do, but dissolve into sentimentality. And I will wish you all for navo varas after Diwali, when the bijness community wishes everyone a hearty ‘Sal Mubarak!’

Pune: Not bad at all!

2005-12-27T04:03:00.000-08:00

Back from Christmas at Pune, which has overnight gone trendy.

Camp and Pune Central are filled with malls and outlets that have literally mushroomed all over the place. Coffee bars and myriad restaurants dot the city. Even the people have changed. While in older areas like Deccan one still sees the more conservative Pune crowd, at Camp one sees people almost indistinguishable from Mumbaikars.

The clothes have changed, the hair has changed, the attitude has changed. More casual daters, more eyebrow rings, more brands.

As for the nightlife, I can't be too sure, but looks like that has changed, too.

A suburb of Bombay? Dunno. It's still a rickshaw-ridden city, horrible buses, no taxis. It still faces load-shedding everyday. It's much better than Delhi in terms of safety for women and overall culture. Much better than Mumbai in terms of commuting and distances, also it has green belts like Aundh.

Not bad at all.

Back again

2005-12-15T08:05:00.000-08:00

Yes, I am back. My faithful few, always silent readers, whoever you be, I am back.

Once again, a short hiatus from real life.

This week's recommended books:
The WOrld is Flat ...Thomas Friedman
Freakonomics...Steven Levitt

I read One Night@Call Center and didn't think much of it. I want to read Argumentative Indian by Amartya Sen. Have some expectations from that one.

Have been cooking these days. It is not as difficult as I thought it would be. However, it is time-consuming, the day just flies away.

Humph...not in the mood to write. Will be back later.

G'bye.

Champagne...and Chocolate!

2005-11-10T13:00:00.000-08:00

Everyone must have seen the hoardings advertising champagne diamonds. A lovely word…champagne. And beautiful advertisements. Light, golden-y diamonds spurting out of a champagne glass. A golden-haired nymph, with stones like sunlight sparkling on her pale, smooth skin.

And then there are chocolate diamonds…chocolate and diamonds—what a name, everything a girl wants. Designer watches studded with chocolate diamonds. Necklaces spangled with them. Makes one think of chocolate truffle, light, tasty. We see photographs of them gleaming darkly against deliciously tanned bodies.

It’s the miracle of marketing, isn’t it? Cause I remember quite well the old fundas of buying diamonds. The best colour is no colour, except if it’s blue. The whitest, brightest diamonds have the highest prices.

The not-so-white diamonds were scorned. The off-white diamonds. The yellowish diamonds. The yellow diamonds. The brown and brownish diamonds. Now they’re chocolate…and champagne. Shakespeare sure as hell didn’t know what he was talking about when he asked “What’s in a name?” How many women would buy them if they were called brown diamonds?
What’s the resale value of those diamonds, I just wonder? And how will they look on average-looking women? Think brown skin, ordinary figure, and champagne diam

Lakhi re kankotri

2005-10-30T21:30:00.000-08:00

We Gujjus sure make a big deal about weddings, with every little detail being done according to mahurat, and a ceremony/function to accompany it.

Today, I attended my cousin's invitation card (kankotri) filling function. Heard of these often, but never actually been to one....and found there is actually a number of specific rituals attached!

At an auspicious hour of the morning, we all dropped in, arrayed in heavy Indian clothes. First, every male forehead was adorned with a kum-kum tilak. Ceremonial bowls of jaggery were passed around to sweeten the mouth(direct translation!) Then all the grooms unmarried sisters(includes cousins) gathered round, while the first eleven invitation cards were filled in red ink by a brother and then handed to them.

We made five kum-kum thumbmarks on each enveope and then splattered kum-kum over the envelope for good-luck. We then scattered rice grains over the envelopes. All this was accompanied by (hold your breath) invitation card filling songs! The songs had lyrics about spattering kum-kum etc.

After which, we had lunch.

Enjoyed the function, it was small and intimate and strangely fun, though I thought it was weird how people managed to know so much about so many rituals. Especially the songs!

Mistress (Review)

2005-10-12T09:35:00.000-07:00

Mistress
Anita Nair
Penguin India
Rs 350

Hdl: The nine faces of the heart
Strap: Art and adultery in picturesque Kerala

Two stories unfold in this book. The first is the story of Radha, and Shyam, and of travel writer Chris, who comes to their riverside resort in Kerala with a cello and a tape recorder, to meet Radha’s uncle, Koman, a famous kathakali dancer. While Koman and Radha both find themselves strangely drawn to Chris, Shyam becomes a helpless observer as Radha embraces Chris with a passion and recklessness he cannot comprehend. Koman is both an observer and participant in this story, making no judgments, except those he reveals to the readers.

The second story is that which Koman tells Radha and Chris, the story of his own convoluted past and his parents, a fascinating account by all standards. The tale takes us all over Kerala and Tamil Nadu, to the unique town of Arabipatnam, and to various other places. And it brings us to kathakali, with fascinating insights into the training and performance of this traditional dance form, which is drama as well as dance.

The book is in the first person, but does not have a single narrator; as in a dance-drama, each of the players is allowed to speak for himself. Shyam voices his thoughts, and Radha voices hers, and we see them hurting each other, the misunderstandings deepening through the trickery of words. As Nair goes further into their past, we begin to understand the complexities of their relationship, to comprehend the injustice of it all. While it is Shyam who draws the most sympathy, Radha is not really a vamp; rather, she is vulnerable and insecure, too.

But it is Koman’s point of view that is the most interesting. With his knowledge of kathakali, a dance form which is entirely based on the epics, he looks upon mankind with a wisdom drawn from the heroes, princes and villains of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. He recognizes every nuance of emotion as one he has experienced, as part of a vesham, or a role in kathakali. In minor gestures and fleeting expressions, the minds of all are revealed to an artist who is trained to interpret emotions with a finesse and perfection.

The author uses kathakali as her metaphor for life; the book is sectioned into nine parts, each named after one of the navrasas, the nine emotions or the nine faces of the heart…love, contempt, sorrow, fury, valour, fear, disgust, wonder and attachment…their traditional names, of course, are used. Each section begins with a wonderful piece on that particular rasa, in the voice of the teacher, giving examples from nature to teach his students how to bring the expressions onto their faces. The book moves from Shringaram to Shantam, and each time we get an inkling of what is to follow.

The language is superb and the structure unique. The plot is full of twists, and the book is powered by the colourful complexities of many characters. Through all the incidents, Nair searches for deeper meanings in art and life. Thought-provoking and absorbing, this a brilliant book from a writer who does not hesitate to challenge herself, a book original in both structure and content. A must-read for any lover of literature.

Tin Fish (Review)

2005-09-30T10:06:00.000-07:00

Hdl: The Wonder Years?

Strap: A touching story about boarding school in the seventies

Tin Fish
Sudeep Chakravarti
Penguin India
Rs. 250

Set in the elite Mayo College boarding school in Rajasthan, Sudeep Chakravarti’s Tin Fish has been publicized as a school story. Which it is…but only on the surface.

Funny, wry and sad by turns, it takes you through the pre-teen and teenage years of Fish, Porridge, PT Shoe and Brandy, aka Barun Ray, the narrator. Fast paced and readable, it does succeed in making you believe that the narrator is a young boy from the 70’s, his language peppered with slang and bad words, making sense of the world around him, and trying to underplay his grief, don’t be a stupid sentimental bastard-ya.

We encounter teachers with names like Mutt, Yogi and Chalu-Charlie, and celebrities like the bully Maindak, the very likeable Moses, and characters like Squash and Century. The cupboard doors are decorated with posters of Zeenie Baby and Parveen Baby and the voluptuous Katy Mirza. Brandy’s tuck boxes come replete with canned fish, or ‘tin fish’, which brings with it comfort and familiarity, as he remembers Ma’s wonderful cooking back at home, with ‘tin fish’ as a special treat.

Days are crammed with studies and games, peeling off socks dirtied with toe-jam and poring over Pat and Vicky’s ‘pondies’, the porn magazines. They’re also crammed with sexual fantasies about various ‘chicks’, both gora and otherwise. Letters are received and written, to parents, siblings, and in Fish’s case, to his Muslim girlfriend. The boys crib about Mayo, but feel proud of it when the ‘Doscos’ from the Doon School come visiting.

Yet all this is on the surface. On another level, Tin Fish is a very clear commentary about the seventies. The outside world does intrude into the closeted kingdom of Mayo, and into the lives and thoughts of it’s students. We see it all…the Emergency, the blind worship of the Gandhis and the absolute faith in the Congress. The first signs of fanatical Hinduism in Fish’s Muslim-hating father. The Naxalite movement in Calcutta, where Brandy witnesses the massacre of college students. It is wry, sad, ironical and even funny, as when the boys try to make sense of a urine-imbibing Prime Minister.

Tin Fish also has it’s incredibly sad moments, as the boys try to cope with their growing alienation from the families at home, as loved ones die far away, or grow apart. When intolerant parents unwittingly cause a terrible tragedy for the boys…shades of Dead Poets Society here. When circumstances make friends to separate and calf love has it’s unhappy ending. The boyish bravado and sometimes, the absolute honesty with which tragedy is met adds to the pathos, making some parts of the book absolute tear-jerkers. Boarding school can be incredibly lonely.

In a way, Tin Fish is essentially a book about loyalty and friendship, friendship until death. As Brandy says, Mayo becomes family, and then it throws you out. Laugh and cry with Brandy, Fish, Porridge and PT Shoe through this unsentimental, real and unsettling book. You won’t regret it-ya. Because it’s a really cat book.

Visiting VESIT

2005-09-26T20:37:00.000-07:00

It requires a visit to another college....Vivekananda, on this occasion, for me to appreciate TSEC properly. Vibrant Bandra, the well-ventilated new building, the 'regular college' rather than 'Institute of Technology' feel to it, the crowd, everything.

The college was extremely clean, but cleaned with a ghastly-smelling disinfectant. Though it was clean, it somehow reminded me of VJTI. And out of the windows, I could see the smoke curling out of chemical factories...

I contrasted busy Linking Road with travelling over the highway to a god-forsaken corner of Chembur, and the clean and pleasant nearby Bandra Talkies bus-stop with rickshawing it to Swastik Chambers and it's garbage dump. And felt lucky.

VESIT students...no offence meant. I guess VESIT is as good or as bad as any other 'institute of technology' or 'college of engineering'. Only, breezy TSEC is neither.

Indiraji: Through My Eyes (Review)

2005-09-26T20:28:00.000-07:00

Indiraji: Through My Eyes
Usha Bhagat
Penguin Books India
Pages: 292
Price: Rs 595

Indiraji: Through my Eyes is not a complete biography, nor does it presume to be one. It is a memoir by a person who had a special and intimate relationship with ‘Mrs. Gandhi’, as she refers to her, right from the time she was merely helping her father out. In 1953, Usha Bhagat was a young kindergarten teacher. She left her job to become secretary to Indira Gandhi. It was an association that would continue, with some breaks, for thirty-one years, until Mrs Gandhi’s death in 1984.

Bhagat was intimately involved in the lives of the Nehru-Gandhi family. Though she was never actually a friend of Mrs. Gandhi’s, her relationship with the latter went far beyond the merely professional. She was Mrs. Gandhi’s companion on several journeys and trips over India and abroad. She often selected Indira’s saris and bought gifts, organized parties and banquets ranging from intimate celebrations to formal events, and kept Indira informed of the arts and crafts scene of the country.

The book is not aimed at educating the reader about the political scenario, nor does it provide much historical backdrop. Instead, it takes you into the home of the Gandhis. It brings out interesting little details about the complex character of Indira, through various observations. Various notes and letters written by Indira to the author are included, many in her own handwriting. Several doodles and caricatures done by Indira are also added. These give a unique flavour to the book.

Bhagat also talks about various larger than life people who had important roles in Mrs. Gandhi’s life. Pandit Nehru and his little ways, the eccentric Elisabeth Gauba, to whose kindergarten school she sent Sanjay and Rajiv, before their fallout, her friends Marie Seton and Dorothy Norman. Bhagat gives an insight into the natures of both Sanjay and Rajiv, the former impetuous and headstrong right from childhood, the latter more quiet, fond of drawing planes from kindergarten days. She draws an unprejudiced portrait of both Sonia and Maneka and their natures, and of Mrs. Gandhi’s relationship with her grandchildren.

Various people who entered the Gandhi household in a quest for power are also described, like Mathai, and, later, Dhawan. Mrs. Gandhi’s weaknesses, too, are detailed, like her tendency to outgrow relationships and hurt people thereby, also her moodiness, her peculiarities, and her susceptibility to Sanjay.

What is most interesting is the personal side of Indira Gandhi that emerges in this book. A well-groomed, elegant lady with an interest in literature, art, interior decoration. A woman who could organize the funerals of her dearest ones with iron will power in the day, and then cry alone at night. A mother who constantly thought and worried about her children, even when she had to be far away. A doting grandmother who often had all her grandchildren sleep in her room, and selected gifts for them with great care.

The photographs, some taken by Bhagat herself are enjoyable and reveal many facets of Indira’s life. There are also charming anecdotes that like the one about Bhutto’s visit with a young Benazir, when Indira, finding the condition of the Himachal state guesthouse less than acceptable, personally rushed about with the help of Usha to make things better before the arrival of the Bhuttos.

The book is readable, not dry and boring and is full of interesting tidbits about the Gandhis and the political personages of their times. Yet it is not a stand-alone biography, or a complete analysis, and at Rs. 595, it is a tad expensive for what it offers. A casual reader may not want to shell out that much for it.

Hair gel, rain and reports

2005-09-21T19:02:00.000-07:00

Lots has been happening since the last post, including several drafts of that annoying technical report. Also a survey, memorandum report, etc, etc. Every morning begins with the tired sound of late September rain, and late at night I drift off to the sound of yet more rain.

I got my result, was at first disappointed, and then made happy as a mistake was uncovered a few days later…there is nothing quite as sweet as an increase in marks.

Except if it is two friends almost falling out and then making up, the joy and relief is incredible, for those who are friends of both.

Have been hearing a lot about hair gel these days-a narcissist in 44 Scotland Street uses quantities of a clove-scented variety-also plenty of conversations about it and ads for UV glowing gel. Yuck, I hate gel, it makes hair look sticky and go hard…though the women in ads are shown drooling over gelled hair. Soft, newly washed hair looks the best on both men and women, methinks.

Term end is looming up…time flies...and it’s already the nastiest bit of the semester. And a whole Java project to be done.

Any suggestions? Do tell me.

Some good news

2005-09-13T18:20:00.000-07:00

There's so much bad news around...but i read a piece od good news that day.

2000 students once dug a big, deep hole in Mahim nature park...somewhere near Bandra Kurla complex, using completely ecological methods. 26th July, the rain filled this hole up to give Mumbai a brand new fresh-water lake...one that now houses a complex ecological system, including more than 110 species of birds. Even moorhens have adapted beautifully to it.

That's something that's kept me going for days, a little piece of information that I savour and relish.

Hope somehitng happens to the Mithi river; I pass it's mouth everyday, used to think it was a nullah. It's so, so dirty...and I never can bear to look at the heartbrokenly few mangroves at Mahim bay...they wrench at the gut.

So it's good to hear about this unexpected gift that 26th July gave to Bombay and to poor, flooded, trafficky Mahim.

Had planned to write about something different, that will have to wait for later. Not in a mood for long post.

Thanks!

2005-09-08T20:26:00.000-07:00

Wasn't going to post today, but was so uplifted by pseudo sphinx's comments that I felt like it anyway. Pseudo sphinx is the only person who bothers to comment on this blog...so here's a big thanx going out to you!

Comments are the only reason bloggers go on...that, and a compulsion to keep churning out words, of course. Yup, that's a hint to all the rest of you.

Today is the last day of Pajushan. Tonight, I shall dream of pizza from Karma, pav bhaji from Swati, Nani's delectable Konkani cooking and also of bushels and bushels of bright green coriander. All ye ignorant, I will explain some day what exactly goes on in Pajushan and also some common Jain fasts, which most people find unbelievable in their rigour.

But not today, my head is pounding with hunger-induced acidity because I have eaten last at 3, with precious little appetite, and now must while the night away in hunger. Hats off to those who have taken only water since the past 8 days/30 days or have fasted through months with innovative combinations of fasts.

People all over my house today, for the marathon last-day pratikaman under my granddad, who makes it a lot less boring and finishes as fast as possible. Far better than a crowded temple pratikaman packed with sweaty yet overdressed people.

Must say I hate those people who know perfectly well that I either don't fast or do piddly little ones like ekashnaa/beshnaa, and before even walking into the door of my house, ask, "Su karyu chhe?" (What (fast) have you done today?). Just to make me say, smiling brilliantly, "Nothing!" and then look at me smugly, as their grandchildren are far more virtuous. My sister said to one such lady, "60 Physics problems, 30 maths, a maths test and a three hour maths tuition." Needless to say, she was speechless for a second or two.

The weather, the Gods...and more

2005-09-07T21:24:00.000-07:00

There is something wrong with the weather this monsoon. It is stretching on, and on. It is hot and humid and oppressive, something sickly about it. An old Victorian phrase describing a place “…the unhealthiness of the situation…” (Austen or Bronte) seems to sum up Mumbai perfectly. It sets everyone coughing, headachy or just plain irritable, with peculiar strains of influenza, body ache and viral infection, including mine that has been around from more than two weeks.

But then the whole world is going through bad karma…floods in Mumbai, China, Europe, Katrina in the US, burning buildings in France, plane crashes innumerable and all sorts of natural hazards. It’s as if the earth has begun on it’s journey of revenge.

Meanwhile, we live our frivolous lives, and try to forget.

On the religious side, Pajushan is almost over, Ganpati has begun. That’s 10+ days of 24-hour noise for us poor dwellers of the area around Chowpatty. Though I love the elephant headed God, I don’t like the festival, it is not at all holy and often does not show respect for Ganesha. It should be much more civilized to truly show devotion.

Meanwhile, I continue to pray to Ganesha for good results.

Did a spot of shopping today, which brightened my day up completely, of course. Finally got to the Tommy Hilfiger sale…most of the smaller sizes had been snapped up, but I managed to get my hands on cropped denims with a fit that made me ignore the price tag.

As I said, we live our frivolous lives...and almost forget.

Pajushan, Patrikas and TSEC samachar

2005-09-06T20:45:00.000-07:00

Yes, I’m back from relapses of viral infection, periodics and the slackest Pajushan of my life (getting over on Thursday), been unwell and had the tests also, so no pratikaman, no small fasts, nothing.

Have been reading the Hindustan Times…loved it. Easier to read and more optimistic than the Times, better content than the Express, better supplements that are less mindless than BT and yet good timepass. Planning to subscribe, cause I just can’t get myself to read TOI or Express these days.

Used to think Mumbai Mirror was absolutely useless, but they got out ONE decent article at last…100 factoids about Mumbai’s past. Yeah, yeah I know it’s not a very original idea, but some of the factoids themselves were interesting and I am always a sucker for Bombay’s history.

They also carried an article today saying that nerds make better partners...funny thing is that they consider the entire species of nerds to be male. Why are Mirror journalists so supremely dumb? Of course nerds make better partners, but I say that because I'm a nerd, too!

TSEC Computers results are not yet out. We will get this time’s periodics marks before our last semester results. Also our intra-collegiate fest Avalanche is no more…the end of another era…besides the Jay Sandwich one. Keep missing you, Jay. No more chilled mangolas on your little verandah...or Jain toast, or quick Bisleris...while MB quickly filters out the noodles from his Chinese, making a little pile of discarded veggies at the bottom. And PK recommends the cheaper High Point noodles.

The path to GRE heaven is littered with little yellow squares. Yup, follow the yellow brick...sorry, yellow card... road. College is full of flash cards, among the third and final years. The word ‘analgesic’ on capsule packets suddenly makes sense to many. From a bookish talker, I have suddenly become an irritating show off, if we ever do flash cards. So I have now started faking ignorance. Anyway, the CAT is a long way off.

Also, I don’t think I will ever have the blind desire to get into any particular college now. After I slogged and wept for two years to get into VJTI, then was tense for a whole month trying to get out of there, and winded up in TSEC, where I am contented. And where I would have got in with a good 8 marks less!

So the best colleges, the top colleges…take everything with a pinch of salt.

Friend of mine is doing Maas Khaman, a Jain fast of no food, only boiled water between sunrise and sunset, for a period of ONE MONTH, ending with the end of pajushan. While I am sure he has great will-power and strength of mind, very secretly, I was horrified. I just can’t bring myself to believe in so much self-mortification. There are many things in religion that are unconvincing, but then, how can one believe in a part of something and not in a whole? Wish I could go back to a time when I just believed, implicitly. Sometimes, I blame, too, the devilishness of mixed blood. I stand at the fringe of all three communities, secretly amused by all. When I am with Konkanis, I look and feel Gujju, and vice-versa. I do not feel Kutchi at all. And I never really, really feel I belong anywhere.

Look out for reviews of Tin Fish and Indiraji over the next few weeks. Conditions permitting, of course.

The Sunday Philosophy Club (Review)

2005-09-06T20:10:00.000-07:00

Headline: Mystery and morals…

Strapline: Not just a detective story!

The Sunday Philosophy Club
Alexander McCall Smith
Abacus books

This book, the first in Alexander McCall Smith’s new series, is better than just good. It has a depth of thought combined with an ease of reading that could be compared with Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. And though it is a detective story, it is much more than just that. It is literature.

The protagonist, Isabel, is a wealthy, single woman in her early forties, a philosopher, who edits the esteemed Review of Applied Ethics and presides over the Sunday Philosophy Club. The book begins when Isabel witnesses a tragedy, a boy falling to his death, right past her. At first unsuspicious, she slowly begins to get curious about the circumstances of his death. Then murder mingles with morality, as the plot unwinds in a fashion both gentle and genteel.

Matters of conscience form a large part of Isabel’s thoughts, and her actions are often dictated by her highly developed sense of morality. Every reader will relate to the questions that Isabel asks herself. She engages in constant debates with herself and with others, over questions of right and wrong. These questions form as much a part of the narrative as the mystery itself.

The book is peopled with other interesting, quirky characters as well. Isabel’s niece, Cat, is a young woman who is intelligent and good-natured, but a poor judge of men. She and the blunt housekeeper, Grace, form Isabel’s inner circle, along with Jamie, who is in love with Cat. The minor characters, too, are alive, interesting and vividly drawn, including Cat’s colourful boyfriend who wears crushed-strawberry trousers.

As the mystery thickens, Isabel is drawn into the unscrupulous secrets hidden by Edinburgh’s outwardly respectable investment banking community. Though her investigations are informal, she is driven on by her sense of curiosity and also by a sense of moral obligation to the young man, as she was the last person she saw before he died.

There are no sickening descriptions of dead bodies or gruesome details. Instead, the mystery unfolds in gracious drawing rooms, in an atmosphere of Scottish art and poetry, of classical music, of gourmet food and wine and coffee in Cat’s delicatessen and in Isabel’s lovely home. Delightful intellectual tidbits are strewn throughout, in the form of crossword clues that make one rack one’s brains, and the odd obscure quotation. Edinburgh, the setting of the novel has a strong presence, it’s nuances, it’s values and it’s customs interwoven in the narrative. The Sunday Philosophy Club of the title is a vague presence throughout the book, a club that is often mentioned, but never seems to meet.

Throughout the book, Isabel often laments the loss of manners, feeling that it signifies the slow decay of civilization. But in his book, McCall Smith has created the very world whose passing he laments. A world of kindness, culture and manners, of intellect and morality, of cosy dining rooms and well-brewed coffee.

The Sunday Philosophy Club is like a soufflé, rich, smooth, and melt-in-the-mouth, with subtle flavouring. McCall Smith writes a book that is to be savoured and enjoyed, that raises questions; but it is a book that is comforting, sometimes wistful but never jarring or disturbing. He revives a lost art in the 21st century.

Engineering news

2005-08-27T18:01:00.000-07:00

Results are in the air at TSEC; except for semester four computer results, most have come out. There have been people who rushed to college at 11 pm, only to find the wrong branch results being put up. There have been people who hung around college till 7, to be informed by the omniscient Deenanathji (man Friday of the principal) that results would not be announced that evening.

THe other flavours of the moment are periodics, PCT deadlines for the third-years, and membership drives for the societies. Also influenza and viral fever, also mysterious minor ailments which show a strange combination of symptoms. Even the smallest thing conjures up one word in all minds "lepto!"

I remember earlier it was only my mom who always feared the disease and forced me into sneakers throught the monsoon. "Leptospirosis," I would tell my friends half-heartedly and most of them would laugh. Now it has an abbreviation and lingers at the aback of our collective consiousness.

Our Jai Sandwich is shut; the once busy little verandah is a hang-out for those MMK students who favour the road to the campus, and bears a deserted look. There are whispers of BMC problems. Will Jai come back? If he doesn't, it will be the end of an era.

As from my side, hopefully my review will be up this MOnday. Didn't appear in the paper Monday last, and I don't like to put it up before it appears there.

Also about the lack of posts;influenza-like symptoms, PCT, stress, and the lack of comments kept me from blogging. There are regular hits, but no comments...rather like writng for ghosts...but anyways felt like writing today, despite all of the above.

Moods

2005-08-19T20:28:00.000-07:00

Two books whirling round in my heads, books for reviewing, but also two books that caught at my heart in different ways. But books are like that, they hold on to you, in your memory for days, not like movies, when you step out of the darkened hall and you’re back to real life again. They remain in your consciousness, in sleep, dreams and bus rides, floating up out of nowhere and filling your imagination.

And there is nothing quite so lingering as a touch of sorrow, a quirky phrase that suddenly moves you to tears, drawing every memory of sorrow out of you to connect with the characters.

There is too much sorrow all around, barely hidden from our consciousness and then the slightest movement of our blinkers and it is upon us again. It is like the rain in the late monsoon, especially rain at night; dreary, dull and gloomy, sad and purposeless.

But too much about sorrow. It just consumed me at this moment, but I’ll put on the blinkers, feel joy gush through, move on.

So I’ll be frivolous.

Saw this impossible article in a mindless glossy, about the supposed contents of a girl’s handbag. Dunno how they come up with such things. The list was endless, with crazy stuff ranging from exotic skincare products to things I didn’t even know existed. Like pencils with teddy bears glued on or something.

I don’t even carry handbags, I move with a backpack that’s as long as my back. But I compiled a list of stuff I would carry, if I was a handbag person. And discovered why I am not glamorous. It goes wallet, cell phone, bottle of water (but of course), handkerchief (if reminded), hand sanitizer, and comb (concession to vanity, or possibly civilization). Sad, no?

Well, I’m feeling better already. Little things in life make one happy. Like whizzing through the labs on the wheeled computer chairs when the lab asst is not looking. And the cool benches princi installed on the ground floor, whose back-rests can be pulled down and converted into tables to chhaap assignments on. Like programs that finally run, and sisters coming home with blow-dryer-straightened curls(hilarious).

Like not meeting a friend for ages, and then bumping into them when least expected.

That's a sudden rush of joy, like a rush of blood to the head.

Keyboards: An ode

2005-08-13T21:54:00.000-07:00

Have you ever appreciated quite how wonderful it is to write stories on a computer?

Try writing one in longhand and you will find out. After the first little burst of inspiration, when the pace begins to go slack, you will ache as you scrape out the words. Then the polishing stage, when your paper will be covered with cancellations, asterix, and little omission marks.

And later on, when you want to restructure the paragraphs and sentences? It doesn't bear thinking about.

Typewriters were an improvement, atleast there was the added speed, diminished painfulness, and the satisfaction of tapping away at the keys.

But nothing to beat good old wordprocessing software. You can view your work as a glorious maze of words, senteces, paragraphs, to play around with, rearrange, restructure, to arrange until it resonates with perfection. Hold the threads in your hands, and weave them together, observing with satisfaction as the tapestry of words emerges. Vary the patterns, until you are satisfied. Tweak them, until they are just right.

Launchpad for Literature

2005-08-13T21:39:00.000-07:00

The second book reading I covered for my newspaper was very different from the first. The first one was for Ashok Banker’s Ramayana. It was at Crosswords, very commercial, noisy and crowded. The shouts coming from the coffee shop upstairs combined with the buzz among the media. Wires, cameras, camera men and reporters, news networks and print media, all mingled with Crosswords staff and PR agencies.

Banker himself, first blogging to say he would come early to meet his fans before the despised “media”, then turning up a whole hour late. Dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, among all the formally dressed people. Playing up very much to the same scorned media, smug as a cat with the cream in the consciousness of his 10 crore contract, speaking freely about a rather brutally frank film about his own mother. Rather pointedly reminding everyone how much his fans loved him.

That being said, Banker is a brilliant writer, and a shrewd one. He has discovered the greatest fantasy novels of all time, and done a very good job of writing them in a popular format. But I didn’t enjoy the book launch at all. Perhaps it was not really his fault, maybe publishing created the blitzkrieg. And perhaps his book had a "big" presence in all the news. But it was not a day for book lovers. It was a day for light bulbs and one-to-ones.

The second one was this Wednesday, the 10th I think. Alexander Frater, the elderly British author of Chasing the Monsoon. At Hilton Towers’ Tiffin restaurant, in an ambience created to soothe. The author had arrived before everyone else. He and his wife were dressed with elegant, understated formality. There were just a few journalists, and some readers. Wine, canapés and afternoon tea. The speech was to the point and un-self-conscious. There was a complete respect of everyone’s time.

Maybe the story I wrote was less spicy. No model mother with a risqué past, no flamboyant speeches and ten-crore contracts. No scoop. Just an author, in love with the monsoon, eloquent when he spoke about it, and about his writing, understated otherwise.

The book reading at Tiffin was not a huge event, like the one at Crossword. But it was a book reading. To savour and enjoy.

Competitive Spirit

2005-08-08T20:22:00.000-07:00

Took part in a quiz after a long, long time today. Just a casual college thing, but somehow I felt more aggressive than I have in a long time. Perhaps because it has been such a long, long time, since those days of inter-house and interschool rivalry. Perhaps because I got carried away and went back to being an immature 14/15 year-old on the school quiz team. Perhaps because I had just spent an hour, hearing about something that made me very sad. Anyway, I was completely unbalanced and feel ashamed.

I did all the things I usually scorn. I complained about things, though I have swallowed much more injustice in quizzes past (though there have been some that were remarkably fair and just). I was literally at the edge of my seat.

I came second by a hair’s breadth. A jot of confidence would’ve got me the first... answering a question blindly instead of asking for the options.

Shit, I should’ve won!

Sharing books

2005-08-08T20:17:00.000-07:00

To lend a book you treasure to someone is like leaving your child with someone. Maybe worse, because people may not give a book the same importance as they do a child. I wonder if my friends realize how much I trust them and care about them, to lend them my books, and to actually suggest lending out my books. Of my own accord.

Mistake me not…I do not want to not lend my books. It’s just that I lend my books only to those I hold in great regard. And after all, there is a real and deep pleasure, a strong sense of sharing in lending books. As also in gifting books. It's so much fun to wander the shelves, searching for that elusive book that will be just right...just the perfect sort of book for that person. No other sort of gift is as satisfying.

All the books I have ever been given kind of ensure that their givers will never be forgotten. I pick them up and glance at the date and message inscribed inside, and go back for a minute to yesterday.