Santosh Sivan’s calendar doesn’t have dates. Or months. Or years. It has movies. During our 45-minute conversation, there is no mention of a date. The past is simply, “during Asoka”, the recent past being “when shooting for Thuppakki” and the future is an empty plaque (“haven’t finalized the name yet.”) with a “scenic village backdrop and new faces.”[Link]

“Do you think I would think twice about urinating all over your frame and then returning it? Common.” [NYT]

The villain of the piece is Vitaly Borker (“thuggish Russia born Brooklynite“) who runs his online operation in a manner familar to anyone that has shopped for groceries in India. It is a hilarious read that leaves you feeling slightly queasy at the end.

“The customer is always right — not here, you understand?” he says, raising his voice. “I hate that phrase — the customer is always right. Why is the merchant always wrong? Can the customer ever be wrong? Is that not possible?”

The next day, a man named Tony Russo called to say that DecorMyEyes had run out of the Ciba Visions. Pick another brand, he advised a little brusquely.

“I told him that I didn’t want another brand,” recalls Ms. Rodriguez, who lives in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. “And I asked for a refund. He got rude, really obnoxious. ‘What’s the big deal? Choose another brand!’ “

With the contacts issue unresolved, her eyeglasses arrived two days later. But the frames appeared to be counterfeits and Ms. Rodriguez, a lifelong fan of Lafont, remembers that even the case seemed fake.

Soon after, she discovered that DecorMyEyes had charged her $487 — or an extra $125. When she and Mr. Russo spoke again, she asked about the overcharge and said she would return the frames.

“What the hell am I supposed to do with these glasses?” she recalls Mr. Russo shouting. “I ordered them from France specifically for you!”

“I’m going to contact my credit card company,” she told him, “and dispute the charge.”

Until that moment, Mr. Russo was merely ornery. Now he erupted.

“Listen, bitch,” he fumed, according to Ms. Rodriguez. “I know your address. I’m one bridge over” — a reference, it turned out, to the company’s office in Brooklyn. Then, she said, he threatened to find her and commit an act of sexual violence too graphic to describe in a newspaper. [NYT]

I ignored him with studied indifference and walked on toward the trains to the city, head buzzing from the bad coffee and last night’s bagel and the non-dairy creamer and the sitting in a metal tube convincing myself that the seatmate had allergies, not swine flu. That the odds of dropping down were low, Air France notwithstanding. Moving walkway is ending, and white guy was singing.

Except he was singing that song. My song.

Maaran Aranmanai,

Maadam Irandilum.

Deepam Erivadhenna.

Nothing a nap can’t fix, but right now I am inclined to conclude that my past is singing to me. Eww.

For family with two earners – government jobs, for fuck’s sake – ours lived like it had no money. The house was rented and the kitchen leaked whenever it rained. This was the same kitchen that had those ugly smoke-stains that formed when Gracy and her parents lived here and cooked fish. I could still smell the fish on some days, just as I could see Gracy and her long legs. Sigh. Pity she had married that loser and left town. The red-oxide floors had large missing chunks that Ayyamma had patched with a homemade cement concoction, and when I was bored I would test my strength against that of the cement. I always won. Later my parents would tell me they spent all that money educating me, and you can see where that led to. A notable feature of our penurious existence below the poverty line was a lack of access to any electronic gadget that could even remotely be called cool.

A few houses from us lived Mr. Mohanlal (clearly, my quiver of fake Mallu names runs very deep), father of Gopi, bowler of lethal tennis ball bouncers and Suresh, whiny bastard who could never be leg before. Their house had mosaic floors and they rented a part of it to the Cherians. Shared bathroom with priority for the landlord; cooking fish allowed. Suresh always wanted to pee when Jommy wanted to pee, letting everyone know just who the lord of the flies was. Ugh.

He never wore a shirt, this guy Cherian and he was a Malayalee like his landlord. Money-minded people, these Malayalees. Jommy was his kid, and his wife, man.  Some people have all the luck in the world, don’t they?  All I wanted to do when I grow up was be shirtless and do hot girls like her. Why was my chest hair not growing like Ganesh’s was? And what exactly is doing? Points to Ponder, like our copy of the Reader’s Digest said. Yeah, we subscribed to it, just like all the other poor people in India do.

The lucky dog Cherian had a brother in Dubai – that expanse of territory that included every country in the Middle East – a brother who brought him the fanciest electronic gadgets every two years so he could sell them to the neighbors. Kumar amma said it was a distant cousin, but who the fuck cared if it wasn’t a blood brother, right? Except me, of course, because I badly wanted that bootlegged tape recorder on sale that February.

I was tired, man. Tired of listening to snippets of music on All India Radio, Coimbatore Vanoli Nelayam. Ads for Sri Rajeshwari Hall and Shobha, Shobha Corner, Coimbatore and Woodwards Gripe water and Mangaldeep, bated breath, then the song.

Kalangalil Aval Vasantham

Fucking MSV. Even worse, AM Raja, singing like a girl. Girl like the spring, also like a painting, also like winter. Who made this shit up? And make up your mind, dude. Spring is not December. Coming to think of it, there is no Spring in the great state of Tamil Nadu because Mr. Jayaraman said through his spittle that we were too close to the equator for any meaningful change in seasons.

Oh, she made a poet out of me!

Go away already! I wanted Ilamai Idho Idho and I get fed this? Worse still, Ilamai Idho Idho starts up and my dad starts up the Lamby and it is time to go to school. Radio was just not going to cut it for me.

Rajesh and Murthy, Government school students, had a car stereo in their house, hooked up to Clarion speakers. It would bawl the Kanda Shasti Kavasam in the morning and I was, like, so devoted that I told the Lord God that I would play it every morning along  with Palli kattu Sabarimalaikku and other such drivel if he got me a tape recorder.

One such night, as I was turning my Geography textbook (“Mirror of the World”) upside down to see if how it would feel to magically turn  the 14 pages I had read so far into only 14 more pages left to read, I heard the song for the first time.

Idhaya Mazhayil, Nanaindha Kiligal

Udhayam Varayil Kulithu Kulithu

Ezha Veeendum…

Such haunting music. And deep lyrics, about parrots that got wet in the heart’s rain and wishing them many such happy showers till dawn. Some unknown guy with the most divine voice in the world singing the best song that could ever be composed. By the time it ended, I had tears in my eyes.

I got up, angrily looked at the Mirror of the World, walked to my dad and demanded that he buy the red Sharp tape recorder with APSS and two tape decks right away from Cherian, or else… Cowed by the implicit menace in my baritone, my dad agreed right away. (Okay, the truth was that he had already put a down payment on it, but the truth never gets bloggers anywhere, does it?). Naturally, Cherian retained the two empty “Dubai” cassettes that came with the gadget when we took possession of it a month later.  After that, we went out to Big Bazaar Street and bought some cassettes: Kanda Sashti Kavasam, Suprabhatham, some hideous song that always made me want to run for cover that began Bavayami Raghuram.

My promises to the Lord notwithstanding, I was bored after three days of listening to old siblings from various parts of India (Bombay Sisters, Trichy Sisters) loudly working out a quid pro quo arrangement with various deities. Clearly, they believed that volume trumped quality.

“Dad, we need some good audiotapes.”

“See, that’s why I said no tape recorder.”

Why that was a relevant answer, I don’t know to this day.

“Please, let’s buy at least a few.”

“Cinema songs spoil kids.”

Even more irrelevant response. Not like I asked him for a list of things that spoil kids. I should try this trick at school one day. “Q: Where is the equator? A: Planes fly on aviation fuel.” Focus, man, focus.

“Why not just a few?”

“Too expensive.”

Aha, some relevance.

“Let’s stop Reader’s Digest and use that money for this. I don’t understand the jokes anyway.”

Uh oh. He wasn’t amused at all. He invited my mom into the conversation.

“He wants us to give up the educational value of Reader’s Digest for cinema songs.”

“Did you see my handbag?”

Runs through the family, as you can see.

“Why can’t he be like his brother? He never asked me for such things”

“Why don’t you borrow something from Drawing Master’s house for now?”

It is a miracle I grew up sane.

The borrowing suggestion would have made sense except that the lender was totally messed up. This family next door to us, an art teacher, his wife and daughters – they were the nicest people you could find. The wife was a source of great food and he was a great source to turn to for help with anatomically correct renderings of the human heart for my biology classes. But audiotapes?

His collection consisted almost entirely of Sivaji Kadhai Vasanam tapes, audiotapes that consisted of all the dialogs from popular Tamil films starring “Sivaji” Ganesan, who could win any shouting match with any pair of siblings from anywhere. So this guy would turn the tape recorder on and actually spend his evenings listening to Sivaji secretly wooing Padmini at volumes rapidly approaching airplane engine levels.  The only time these things are useful is when you feel like watching Mirudanga Chakravarthy: they can reduce the trauma of watching them famous Sivaji jowls shake the spit out of themselves as he thwacks the poor mirudangam with murderous rage.

So yeah, this is the stuff I was to borrow.  I wish I at least had some blank tapes, but I had burnt my bridges totally with that Reader’s Digest suggestion, so I was doomed.

Or was I?

I was beginning to entertain a dangerous proposition in my mind…

Later that week, I walked to the neighbor’s house and asked to borrow some tapes. I picked out a few especially abominable ones and was told to “keep them safe for a reasonable period of time.” Out of this, I picked out the most abominable one for rescue. My plan was simple: I would tape over random portions of this audiotape with songs I liked from the radio every night. I would then proceed to listen to the songs until I was content, and then return the whole batch to them. 50% of 1 tape out of 10: my odds were great.

After some strategically applied adhesive tape to circumvent write protection, the audio cassette was ready for its redemption. Buh Bye Thooku Thooki.(What the fuck does that mean anyway?) Hello Ilayaraja.

The next few weeks were sheer bliss. The best songs from the whole wide world, right here on my fingertips. Thalaiyai kuniyum Thamaraiye and Putham Puthu Kaalai and Vaanile Thenila Aaduthe at my beck and call, waiting to entertain me. Could anyone be luckier?

Then it was the turn of choice portions of the hideous  Thanga Malai Ragasiyam (Secrets of the Gold Mountains, which are not at all what you think they are) to give way to the vastly superior Madai Thirandhu and Nila Kayuthu Neram Nalla Neram. And finally, I caught Idhaya Mazhayil again, making my life almost totally complete. The experiment ended at two rounds when my dad relented and allowed me to buy 3 cassettes a month.

A year or so later, we are invited to spend the evening lounging around with the drawing master’s family and their relatives who are visiting from a hamlet called Nanjundapuram. He plays out a few minutes from several of his tapes as a preview for the relatives, who finally choose to listen to the secrets of the Gold Mountains, perhaps because they were fooled by the title like I was the first time. A few minutes into the movie, during an obviously important moment judging by the number and extent of mouths held open, my song started again:

Idhaya Mazhayil, Nanaindha Kiligal

Udhayam Varayil Kulithu Kulithu

Ezha Veeendum…

Everyone seemed quite disappointed and a little puzzled. “How could this be?” the drawing master wondered aloud. “I must have accidentally taped over it,” he concluded, before adding that “it was such a great flim.”

He started looking for another tape when the song ended. Then it started again, except in my voice. In retrospect, I suppose practicing my singing on tape was not such a smart move, but man, did I rock that song or what.

PS:  If this post reads a little dated, it is because it is. I started it off almost a year ago, and never did gather the energy to finish it till today, perhaps fittingly on an airplane to Chicago. Also, my apologies for the rather long hiatus from the blog. I suppose I could blame being busy for not writing, but the truth is I don’t know why I didn’t write. I am pleased to say that the time off was rather productive – my wife and I had ourselves a baby girl in 2008, and she’s brought us more joy than most Illayaraja songs.

My first day at the bathroom here. Deed done, I zipped up pants. And then, a sudden gush of water, and my pants got drenched. Sopping, dripping, heart wrenching wet. Yes, I did get the order of events right, Ms. Know-It-All.

Puzzled, I did what every guy does. My carefully tucked shirt came out, and I walked gingerly back. I realize I am smoking hot, but can’t these girls stop looking at my pants for some time?

A few more attempts and some more pant wetting before I realized: Stop tucking your shirt in, because the stupid thing will flush whenever the tank is full, doesn’t matter if a guy wearing his only pair of Calvin Klein chinos is in there finishing up.

We’d sit around the table eating lunch, or dinner, or smoking cigars or playing poker or doing whatever else a group of people in an alien country can do sitting around a table. We’d start off well enough – how the food sucks, why the affirmative action policy in Malaysia was all twisted, why work blowed and so on … A few minutes was all it took though, for conversation to veer back to our favorite topic: Toilets.

Asian toilets are different from what most people in the West are used to: A hole in the floor, where people do the squatty, followed by washing where the left hand comes into play. And this was a source of endless fascination to everyone: there were most left hand jokes passed around than potato chips. Everyone had a funny story, it seemed.

A steakhouse across the street from where we lived had a restroom that had a bidet instead of a water closet. And to ensure that people knew this, they posted very explicit signs that left no room for any confusion.

It was all good, and I would laugh, of course, but if you listened closely, you could’ve heard a little bit of guilt.

For the first ten years of my life, a flush toilet wasn’t something I had access to that often. We stayed far away from the city so my mom could be close to her school, and while that meant really good food all the time, it also required sacrifices: An insanely long commute, and being stuck in a glorified village masquerading as a suburb, with no television reception, no malls, and no flush toilets. Well, ok, maybe I exaggerate a bit here: There was Murugesan Annachi Kadai which seemed to have all the items in a mega mall squeezed into a hundred square feet, and some of the houses did have flush toilets, but not ours.

Most of the homes were built on one corner of a large plot, while the other corner housed the toilet – a tiny room with an additional wall about a foot from one edge, creating a mini trench on the floor. You sit on the wall and … you know what I mean, right? And every morning, a couple of people would scoop the stuff up into buckets and empty the bucket into a cart, and push the cart several miles to a huge swath of land beside an important road to dump it. This was quaintly named the fertilizer dump – we do have a way with words, don’t we?

These people – a mother and her twenty something son called Selva – would always show up drunk, because the alcohol helped them forget the stench, but the alcohol also made them forget to show up for days on end. I also have a feeling their job satisfaction levels were kind of low. And when that happens, absenteeism increases, which results in a proportional increase in the levels of odor in the neighborhood. That would necessitate a visit to Selva’s house by a delegation of old people causing him to show up with a sulk for the next few days. But he’d show up nevertheless.

Somehow, we all managed.

And then one day, they closed the fertilizer dump, with no notice. It was inhumane they said – this process of humans removing human waste – and so the best way to combat this menace was to close the dumping ground. That way, news would filter down to the masses and they’ll turn humane overnight. If a few people lost their jobs in the process, big deal. So the land was sold to another government department, which then started to build apartments there – I guess they must’ve advertised it as fertile real estate although I hadn’t seen the ads: I was too busy worrying about where my next meal would go to.

We manged for a few weeks by making ad hoc payments to Selva, who had no job now. He would come and remove things clandestinely and then dump them somewhere. The trees in the neighborhood loved him, I am sure. And … I could go on with gory details, but suffice to say that things did turn out well finally.

My dad was able to convince our reluctant homeowner to shell out money for an actual toilet, complete with our own septic system. And Selva married his childhood sweetheart and gave up drinking and made a fortune and built his mom a castle (with a western toilet) and had many kids and lived happily ever after. Oh wait, that was a Tamil movie. In real life, Selva found a job at a brick kiln somewhere.

Then, I was off to college, swearing never to set foot in a dry toilet again. I wouldn’t, but what followed was worse.

Suresh wasn’t your normal young man: he was into religion, and he reminded us of it constantly. He’d avoid the raitha served in the hostel – onions make people horny, he told me once; and he’d use a wooden plank for a pillow. Clearly, all this made him a very religious person who was not to be messed with.

When he invited me over to his house for a few days, I was more than a little concerned: I asked him all the questions I could think of – if they had normal pillows in their house, if it was acceptable to not pray for several hours a day, and if it was okay that I preferred cooked food. And then we took a bus to his house, which turned out to be an enormous structure located in a picturesque village equidistant from Ooty and Coonoor.

The house was breathtakingly beautiful – it was surrounded by lush green tea plantations on three sides, and there was a stream flowing through the backyard where carrots and strawberries grew. The tea, I was told, is exported all over the world.

We then ate normal food – a lot of it, and then slept on normal beds with normal pillows. And I woke up like normal, and after a quick cup of coffee, expressed a wish to see the toilet. And was told that there was none. “We go to tea estates,” he said, this son of the richest family in the village. The admission had the effect of stunning me into holding back for a good ten minutes.

“Ok, take me there then.”

“Where?”

“Tea estate man, I got to go.”

“Err… sorry, but now is the time for women. You have to wait another half hour before the male window starts.”

And I held, and we went. Strangely, there was a stream right next to where I was, but I don’t really know if it was picturesque, because the plants were poking me in the butt, and I felt an incredible urge to moo loudly and pull a cart along. Ok, that line stunk. For all I know, that stream could have been an actual stream, or it could have been that the girls had decided to have a group piss before we got there. Somehow, I must’ve managed to finish… all I can remember is swearing to never set foot in a tea estate again – you can say what you want about them, but a dry toilet never poked me in the butt, causing me get up and yelp loudly.

I double boil my tea to this day.

PS:

While we are at this, might as well take the opportunity to laugh at someone elses expense. I have a friend who I will not name. He was once this idealistic young man who believed in social service, and so volunteered to go build a road at a village near Salem. The party stayed at some school I think.

And this village – kind of more sophisticated than Suresh’s village – had one bathroom that they reserved for the womenfolk, and the men were directed to the fields nearby. So my friend, who would soon be a man,went into the fields that morning, with another friend for company.

These two young men believed themselves to be superior to the riffraff that were perched on the outskirts of the field, and what better way to prove their superiority than by heading deeper? So they headed, carrying an open pail filled with water. They picked clean spots, squatted, and began.

A short way into the process, they realized that they had company. Pigs, that believe that human crap is quite unlike revenge and is to be partaken when steaming hot. And on seeing a couple of nice guys dishing it out to them, the pigs rushed toward their food; and the two servers had to relocate rapidly to another spot. And this went on for some time: Sit, shit, get up, run, sit, shit…

And by the time the process came to an end, two things had happened. The pigs were quite full, and the pails were quite empty. This necessitated a desperate cry for help to the riffraff who brought water, and hopefully got a good look. I don’t know what type of foodgrain was grown in those fields, but I would strongly recommend double boiling all food, especially if it comes from deep within.

And so I am back, and what’s the first thing I read? Plans for a Sepia Mutiny meetup in Los Angeles. A rare desi blog meet in this very country, and where is it held? As far away from Florida as humanly possible. Not a coincidence, I assure you: I know planned it that way.

In case you think I am overreacting, then how do you explain this: People wait for me to leave Chennai, and the very next week, they hold some sort of BlogCamp there. Clearly, it is part of a distrubing trend: Bloggers just don’t want to meet me. I know my intellect can be a little offputting to all you dumbasses, but still… You know what? Screw all you bloggers. (Poor Manoj excepted, of course. The jerk meets me everyday so that he can have something to laugh about with his new wife.) If you are a non blogger, the hot pictures are over on the other blog.

I’ve done it before, and I’ll do it again now: My own blog meet, right down the street from my own home. At my favorite coffee shop, run by dear old Mandy and her husband, who were nice enough to give us exclusive access to the place for the whole evening…

Here are snippets from the meet…

________

Bloggera: Smells coffee. Then tastes it. “Wow, this is great coffee. Ummm… just awesome. What would the world be without coffee?”

Falstaff: “A World Without Coffee. 1. It would be illuminating to consider what the word world means in this context. The world…

Bloggera: “Excuse me, but that was a purely rhetorical question. I don’t really want to know what the world would be without coffee.”

Falstaff: “Oh, I see. But can I finish off this speech though? I only have 37 more bullet items to go through. And then, about 18 footnotes.”

Bloggera: “Please, no. Let me drink my coffee.”

Megha: “This coffee is cho chweet. Gleat.”

Bloggercthruz: “What a thoughtful sentence.”

Suddenly, multiple rays of light emanate from her eyes.

Megha: “Don’t worry, that was my eyes twinkling. Thankoo Bloggercthruz. Thankoo cho cho much.”

Me: “I’ll be back guys. Gotta go pee.” Comes back in five minutes. “So did I miss anything?”

Bloggerb: “Umm.. not much. Megha got 18 more comments. Manish wrote four posts at UltraBrown, and made 3 releases of RocketPost. Amit made 11 posts on his blog, and wrote an article each for Cricinfo and the Wall Street Journal.”

Me: “Damn. In other words, ink flowed out of their pens, while piss flowed out of mine?”

“Eww. Groan. Puke. Good Lord.”

Unidentified Young Man: The speaker is trying to make a joke. He is using the fact that pens and penises are shaped similarly. I don’t like the joke much because Amit and Manish use keyboards, not pens.

Me: “Anyways, to be fair to myself, I did think of a post in the bathroom. In fact, I think of most posts when peeing, so I guess you could call me the number one blogger in India.”

Amit: “Damn, that joke was too bad for even India Uncut.”

Kiru: “Wait a minute, does that man I am not the number one anymore?”

Chenthil: “Of course not. Your blog sucks.”

Kiru: “If Himesh Reshammaiya can be the most popular music director in India, why can’t I be the number one blogger?”

Me: “Yeah, and let’s not forget the national award for Amitabh Bachchan.”

Kiru: “Thank you!”

_____

Just then, a knock. I open the door, and much to my horror, find an angry Jai flanked by Chandrahas and Ammani.

Me: “Why are you guys here? Who invited you? Jai, is your DVD player broke or something? Chandrahas, don’t you have a book to review or a mattress to buy? Ammani, what about quick tale 156? Who’ll write it if you are here? Please leave.”

Ammani: “You ingrate. I blogrolled you and all, and you won’t even let me in? Jerk.”

Jai: “Yeah, what’s up with that?”

Me: “Ok, ok. To explain, I got to make a speech.

Quick Tale 1000.

She got into the elevator on the top floor. The well dressed young man got in on the next floor. She smiled at him and he smiled back.

The eleveator stopped on the next floor down and another young man got in. He was dressed like a punkster, and didn’t return her smile.

After that, another floor. Another young man. She wasn’t sure about smiling, so she started fiddling with her cellphone instead. The third man smiles at the second man, and the second man returns his smile.

Ammani: “Go on.”

Me: “That’s it.”

Chandrahas: “I don’t mean to hurt your feelings, but that was pathetic.”

Ammani: “Horrid. So what’s your point anyway? Why didn’t you invite us?”

Me: “The point is, parody or no parody, I can’t really write like you guys. You write too well for me.”

All: “Aww.”

Me: “Anyways, now that you are here, I’ll give you all non speaking parts. Why don’t you go sit by that man JAP there and watch without speaking? Oh, and thank you for not bringing Amardeep and Anna along.”

Jai: “Why is JAP sitting there all by himself?”

Me: “He is taking notes on how bad everyone’s shoes are. Before you go to that table, I suggest you take off your watches and shoes, unless you want to be called a fashion challenged cretin on tomorrow’s post.”

_____

Meanwhile, Kiru strikes up a conversation with Mandy.

Kiru: “Hi.”

Mandy: “Hello.”

Kiru: “Hmm.. so you own this establishment?”

Mandy: “Yes sir, that’s correct.”

Kiru: “Would it be accurate to call you the attractive, self-made CEO of a growing startup company?”

Mandy: “Maybe.”

Kiru: “I am India’s leading blogger. Can I do a podcast with you?”

Mandy walks away, and returns with her husband.

Mark: “So who here wanted to do something dirty to my wife?”

Kiru: “Podcasting is not something dirty sir. I can do it with you too. I will then post it on the internet.”

Mark: “Do it and then post it on the internet? What the fuck? Do I look like Paris Hilton to you? Get out of here now!”

Unidentified Young Man: “This confusion arose because of the unfamiliarity of this gentleman with the word podcasting. Since he didn’t know the word, he assumed it meant something dirty.”

Me: “Dude, why do you keep stating the obvious all the time? Who are you?”

Unidentified Young Man: “My name is Patrix. I run Desipundit.”

Me: “Ah, that explains it.”

Nilu: “Puke.”

Me: “Is that all you can do? Puke?”

Nilu: “No, I can also talk about prime numbers.”

Me: “That is boring. What else?”

Thennavan: “Oh, I also know a lot about prime numbers.” Widens cheeks, and holds pose.

Me: “What’s that for?”

Thennavan: “That is a smiley. It’s always safe to throw in a few when you are talking. So, I know a lot about prime numbers. I love Chennai, I also love India. When will I find a girl to love?”

Nilu: “Please excuse me, but I need to do this first. Puke. I can also write erotica.”

Me: “Damn, that’s exciting. Give us an example.”

Nilu: “The auntie was chopping onions in the kitchen. The kids were out playing cricket. Uncle comes into the kitchen, and lifts up auntie’s saree. They then roll on the floor, back and forth, back and forth. Up and down, up and down. When he is done, uncle is crying, because of all the onions that got into his eye. Later, when auntie serves coffee to uncle, he flicks away an onion stuck to her ear. She blushes.”

Jai: “I feel a bit nauseous myself.”

Ammani: “Thanks for not inviting us.”

Me: “Wow. You should stick to puking.”

Patrix: Onions cause one to tear up, because they contain oxalic acid. Although people shed tears when they come into contact with onions, they are not actually crying.”

Nilu: “Double puke.”

Unidentified Young Man 2: I, find, all,,,,this,,,very,,,,,,funny;

Me: And who might you be, young man?

Bloggerj: “That’s Saket. Also known as Vulturo. Occasionally, he is known to punctuate his commas with some words.”

___

Me: “This is such a boring blog meet. Le’ts talk about something interesting.”

Amit: “Cows?”

Kaps: “Let’s talk about blogging. I read somewhere that to be a successful blogger, you have to write 365 posts a year. My question is, what does one do during leap years?”

Me: “I said talk about something interesting.”

Amit: It is a logical fallacy to assume that what is interesting to you will be interesting to other people.”

Me: “Well, hmm…”

Amit: “Do you disagree. God, I wish this was my blog. I would’ve linked to eighteen different Latin terms on Wikipedia to prove you wrong.

Actio personalis moritur cum persona.

Pacta sunt servanda.

Sine qua non.”

Falstaff: Ears perk up on hearing some Latin. “What a phrase! Actio personalis moritur cum persona. So lyrical, so poetic. I love poetry in other languages.

Amit: “Um well, that was a legal phrase. But whatever…”

Me: “Maybe we can talk about Hair? What do you guys think about the whole $500000 thing?

Neha: I love to talk about hair. Have I told you about how poetry altered my hairstyle?

Me: “Only a hundred times. But I was not talking about that hair.”

Annie Zaidi: “How mean! Men are pigs. All men are morons.”

Dilip: “What a thought provoking statement. That makes you a fine journalist.”

GreatBong: Clears throat.

Bloggerathruzandsomeothers: “Ha, Ha, Ha. Hilarious.”

GreatBong: “Shut up guys, this is serious stuff. So, Dilip, tell us how calling all men morons makes one a fine journalist?”

Dilip: “Oh a difficult question. How I wish this was my blog – I could’ve buried this one under a deluge of posts.”

GreatBong: “So ?”

Dilip: “Goodbye!”

___

And just as quickly as they came, everyone was gone.

PS: Please, please, don’t remove me from your blogrolls. That would break my heart. I love you all. Well, sorta.

Srinivasa is the tall guy that sits with her in the Data Structures class. He hails from Nellore and has only a vague idea of how big Amitabh Bachchan is up north, but he gets Data Structures really well. He used to look down upon Harpreet because she sucked at Computer Science, but every time he did , he ended up staring at the prettiest pair of boobs in the world. And so, he fell in love with her.

Harpreet, on the other hand, liked the guy – especially on days he did her homework for her – but she wasn’t in love with him or anything. It didn’t help that he kept mixing up Lata and M.S.Subbulakhmi all the time. “I always have trouble differentiating between old women singing in alien tongues,” he told her when confronted. She wasn’t impressed at all by that answer…

Harpreet didn’t know it then, but change was in the air.

A few days later, Harpreet came down with a nasty flu that brought the meanest headache along. She took a Tylenol, and asked her roommate Aparna Shah if she could bring her a bowl of Campbell soup, but Aparna refused because the Campbell soup in the refrigerator was purchased from her share of the grocery fund.

Unable to counter her roomate’s sound logic, Harpreet went hungry that afternoon, and was delirious by the time Srinivasa came to visit her. He had stopped by to find out if she had really bunked classes to “be with her boyfriend,” like his friend Ravikiran had speculated.

Moved by her plight (and by the sight a pretty girl coiled vulnerably on a used Sealy Mattress), he made her some soup, and then sat by her bed and said comforting things to her until she fell asleep. He then watched the Tonight Show and spent the night on the couch in her apartment. He could’ve walked to his place, but it was his turn to cook today.

The next day, he woke up, used Aparna’s Listerine, made some coffee and drank it together with Harpreet. He experienced bliss, or something like it.

This pattern continued for a few days, and Harpreet no longer had the flu, though she was still not attending classes because she felt weak. Sri wasn’t going to classes either, “to provide her some company.” He was now a regular in Harpreet’s apartment, regular enough that his toothbrush was in her bathroom, and regular enough for Aparna Shah to demand that he pay 14% of the rent that month. Things were going very well indeed…

“What do you like? ” he asked her that afternoon, acting on advice from Ravikiran “to find out her likes and dislikes.”

“My favorite thing in the world is Amitabh Bachchan”

“My favorite thing would be my iPod. But I do like Amitabh Bachchan. He is a great actor.”

“Really? Thats so sweet. What’s your favorite movie of his? ”

“Err…I thought Shahenshah was great. So was Giraftar ”

“Shahenshah? Even I couldn’t stand that one. Tell me the truth now – how many Bachchan movies have you watched?”

“Only those two on the video coach bus from Madras to Bangalore. Nellore theaters only play Telugu and Tamil movies. But there was a lot of potential in his angry eyes.. I could see it very clearly.”

“Oh you poor thing. That’s such a sad story… I need to show you how much you are missing.”

So she said, and put in a copy of Black into their Apex DVD player. A few minutes into the movie, and Sri hits the pause button.

“So you say Amitabh Bachchan is a big star in Bollywood, right? ”

“Of course, he is a superstar. ”

“If that is so, how come the title card doesn’t say SuperStar Amitabh Bachchan. If I call him a Megastar, would that be ok?”

“Yes, he is a megastar, a superstar, a huge star. The biggest there is.”

“He can only be one star. Tell me which one. ”

“I don’t think I understand where this is going. ”

Sri takes her hand, and holds it against his chest.

“Baby, before you explain Amitabh Bachchan to me, let me explain the Southern movie industry to you. ”

“I am all ears. ”

And thus the lesson begins.

“Down south, we tell people exactly what kind of star every actor is right in the title card. ”

“How so? ”

SuperStar!

“Like Rajinikanth is the Superstar. Every movie of his, right at the beginning, will have a powerpoint animation that shows the letters SUPER STAR flying into the screen, with an awful cover version of the James Bond Theme playing in the background. He owns the title, it belongs to him. If someone else uses it, his fans will enforce copyright laws by doing nasty things to him. ”

“I see. ”

“But the domicile of the copyright only extends to the state. ”

“Is domicile a Telugu word? ”

SuperStar, Mark Two

“No.. err, whatever. I meant to say that Rajinikanth is the SuperStar only in TamilNadu. In Andhra Pradesh, Krishna is the SuperStar.”

“How sweet. I love Krishna … my whole family worships him. ”

“I worship Krishna too. No one looks better in an orange jumpsuit.”

“Yes, yes. Go on though – let’s not talk about Gods now.”

“Gods? Oh I see now. For a second I thought SuperStar Krishna was famous in Punjab.”

“You know, I like Kamalhassan a lot. What type of star is he? ”

“You like Kamalhassan? Wait till you watch Hey Ram. And just for the record, he used to call himself the Universal Hero, but now he prefers PadmaShree. ”

“Oh! ”

“Yeah, one of the reasons he is not as popular as Rajinikanth is that he doesn’t have a fixed name for himself. How will people know if the Universal Hero is acting in this movie or if it is the Padmashree. ”

“Quite true. This is so interesting. Let’s munch on a paratha while you tell me more.”

Merely a revolutionary Actor.

“The Tamils are obsessed with revolutions. And stars. MGR started off calling himself the Revolutionary Leader, and then Vijaykanth became the Captain formerly known as the Revolutionary Artist and Sathyaraj became the Revolutionary Tamil.

Rajinikanth is the SuperStar, Ajit Kumar is the Ultimate Star and to top it all off, S.J. Surya is the Multiple Star. Oh, and one must not ignore Sarathkumar, who even signs his own letters Supreme Star and Murali, who is the Revolutionary Actor.?

“Great. I can’t say I’ve heard of all these people. I never knew that people named their kids Merely.”

“Merely? No, he is actually…”

“Before you move on, I have a question. Is Ultimate bigger than Super? Is Multiple greater than Revolution? Is Supreme better than Multiple?”

Multiple.

“The hierarchical rules are very complex. Lets just say there is Super, and then there is the rest. Let me also add that Multiple is less than everything else.”

“By the way, who gives them these names?”

“Give? What do you mean give?”

“Well.. someone has to name you, right?”

“Usually, they just wait for a movie or two. If someone doesn’t call them by an epithet, they just pick one they like.”

“This is so fascinating. Another paratha?”

“Sure. Now if Tamil fascinates, Telugu megafascinates.”

“You got a great vocabulary.”

“Thank you. You got a great… never mind.. so, the Telugu field is replete with star-sons. To account for this phenomenon, they pass epithets down from one generation to another with slight modifications.”

“Theory flies over my head. Give me examples.”

“I should’ve known that my honeybun. Chiranjeevi, the most popular star in Telugu, is the Mega Star. So when his brother made his acting debut, he chose to call himself the Power Star. Chiranjeevi’s father-in-law is the Ace Producer. He has another brother, and naturally enough, this brother is the Mega Brother.”

“Ok…”

“When Chiranjeevi’s nephew made his debut, he became the Mega Power Star. And when his son does make his debut, he will be the Yuva Mega Star”

Mega, Power, MegaPower. All Stars.

“Oh, what a simple algorithm. So if the another nephew debuts, he could be the Power Mega Star. Yet another could be the Mega Brother Power Star. And then Ace Power Brother Star Mega Yuva. This could go on for several generations.”

Real Star. Real Scary.

“Exactly! Ok, let me ask you something. There is a scary dude called Srihari – the Real Star. His wife is Disco Shanti, the ex-vamp. Now … ”

“Their son could be the Ex Star. Their daughter the Ex Vamp. Or VampEx. Finally an algorithm I get. ”

“Eh, maybe. I shouldn’t forget Tarun – who sounds like a girl and claims that his proudest achievement is his shoe collection – he calls himself the Lover Boy. Positive Reinforcement, sort of.”

One of these is the Lover Boy.

“Hmm… ”

“No such worries in the case of the Crazy Star: Ravi Teja. Prabhas is the Young Rebel Star, coz someone else took Rebel Star by the time he came on board.”

“Umm…”

“Anyways, moving on…”

“Can we stop here? I’ve been bored now for the last twenty lines. You don’t know where to stop”

“Ok, whatever you say, my Princess.”

“Princess? Aww. You are my Tera Star.”

“Our kid would be the PrinTer Star. Ha Ha Ha.”

“Eww. Pathetic. I am hungry now.”

“I am always hungry. For your love.”

“Stop it.”

And we will.

Sonia Faleiro’s The Girl, a book I’d briefly mentioned in this post at Sepia Mutiny, is a melancholy novel set in Goa about two men and The Girl they both loved. The book begins with the young woman’s suicide – yet another tragedy in cursed Azul – and the two men are “achingly curious” to find out why. And when one of them stumbles upon her journal, they use it to reconstruct her life leading up to the suicide – the death of an unhappy woman whose last big hope had vanished.

Just a few pages into the novel, and it is obvious that it is as much about showcasing the writing as it is about the actual plot. The Girl is a carefully crafted book: every sentence is meticulously assembled from deliberately chosen words, each page is filled with precise paragraphs construced from meticulously assembled sentences.

There is plenty of wordplay, and large doses of descriptive detail. Nothing is too insignificant to be let off without a metaphor or two, ranging from the inventive to the cliched.

Thus we have the earth “encrusting the casket like pastry bubbling into hardness,” a bar and its location as mismatched as “vegetarianism and a Goan” and as “profoundly antipodean” as the “Rua’s many little old ladies and the one young lady who lived opposite Breto’s in a stone mansion, and many years later flung herself into the well in the corner of her garden.”

It is also a book where shredded hills of coconut meat stand like “sentinels awaiting instruction” and the boring parish priest read for so long from the bible that “the cuckoo in the clock retired for the night” and so loudly that “a row of miniature Dutch houses slumbering on the edge of a small table trembled with the anticipation of their fall.” “Dewy golden hinged” windowpanes rock in the wind from their roots, “like butterflies pinned to the wall.”

While the care taken with the writing lends an erudite, suave feel to the book ( the classy production helps too), it also robs it of all spontaneity. Even the rare playfulness has a planned feel to it – one can almost sense the author pausing for applause before moving on to the next sentence. Perhaps that’s why The Girl comes off as verbose, a surprising thing for a book this slim. Some things are best left to the reader’s imagination…

At the very beginning of the book, for example, Sonia tries hard – way too hard – to convince her audience that there is something sinister about Azul, the Goan village where the tale is set in. Azul, we are told, enjoys a well deserved reputation as the Village of the Dead and the average Azulian resident has come across an excessive amount of tragedy. So much misfortune that the villagers are now inure to death and sadness and have grown to expect it.

And she doesn’t flinch at mentioning the fact over and over again – this supposed reputation of the village – devoting almost an entire chapter to it. And like the kid who keeps telling us over and over again that he didn’t really tear the five rupee bill (I really didn’t daddy), we start doubting the author, and an incidental detail that should’ve added a bit of intrigue to the narrative ends up creating a vague uneasiness in the minds of the reader about the whole story.

There is a village by the sea, a sea so blue they named the village Azul, the Portugese word for blue. But most people who have heard of or have passed through this forgotten clasp of Goa, know it not because of its unusual name but for its very real reputation as the Village of the Dead.The village is but a pinprick upon a map, so small and, as many believe, so potently cursed, that visitors who thronged to our part of the world after the incidents which I am now about to recount came to light, were unable, except perhaps by mistake, to stumble upon us.

***

In the house beside mine live Maria Coutinho and her three unwed daughters. Six months ago, Thomas Coutinho sunk to the bottom of the sea after his stomach cramped up during a particularly sharp movement of the breaststroke. Now Maria, Rosy, Daisy and Petunia feel like guests in their own home, unsure of the kitchen entrance or the exit door. They sit uneasily in their garden, sewing, drinking tea, weeping soundless tears to fill the empty space left behind by a beloved husband and father. I have another neighbour, a young man of indeterminate age. Perhaps a writer expecting to be discovered. a painter searching for a muse. Most likely he was once a cheery professional, eager for fame, desperate for a drink, who, having lost his way to someplace important, found himself in Azul and was immediately drained of all strength, perhaps even life, to turn back and go home. This is the effect we have on outsiders.

***

Yet I take meager solace in the fact that the entire village shares my fate. That is why we are of the Dead, perpetually in grief for losses real and imagined. There is not one in Azul who has not been denied a beloved too young, too soon. A wife whose husband drowned at sea, a brother who stumbled across an unlit path after too many glasses of arrack. A child born with an eye scooped out, another whose butter-soft skull lolls like a rubber ball on the dunes. A young girl, newly engaged, who lost her fianc� to a motorcycle accident that left the air thick with the smell of burning rubber and iron. A midnight stabbing at Happy Joe’s bar. And, of course, suicides. These are the sort of stories shared by the villagers at council meetings.

***

Soon enough, we realised that nobody understands death like the Village of the Dead, and no one expects to encounter it more. I suppose when you have nothing left to lose, you are finally freed of the terror of losing it.

Behind the veneer of beautiful writing and classy production, the story The Girl tells is nothing new. One girl, two men, unrequited love. The book is almost formulaic: A little bit of background about the girl – her family (dysfunctional), her life otherwise (lonely, boring). One of the men (sweet, lovable, timid). The other man (mysterious, traveler). Even though the Girl’s character is beautifully done – the quiet suffering, the hesitant hopefulness, and later, dignity when all hope fades – the rest of the people in the book veer dangerously close to being caricatures.

Perhaps a Marquez could’ve worked some over-the-top magic with this mix, but in the hands of this talented newbie with a gift for words, the book is just passable. One could be harsh and call this standard issue Bollywood, where you get great camerawork, flawless skin, beautiful costumes, plenty of cleavage, awesome locales and nothing else. One could, but that wouldn’t be fair. For all its flaws, The Girl is a pleasant read, and probably one of the better Indian books this year.

Comparisons can be odious, but I can’t help mentioning Siddhartha Chowdhury’s Patna Roughcut in this context. On a superficial level, the similarities are obvious. A short novel, a new author, a small town setting, released around the same time. The similarities end there though. Chowdhury’s unadorned prose is so much more believable, a quality that Sonia’s suave prose somehow lacks – her flowery prose is the book’s biggest strength, and its biggest weakness.

Someone meeting Manoj for the first time is usually struck by two things: How much he loves movies, and how much he loves music. Ok, maybe they’ll also be struck by how smart he is. Whatever. That’s not the point.

So anyways, Manoj and I spend the better part of our days IMing each other. In normal English, capitalized first words and all. (The only allowance for IMspeak is the ubiquitous brb, which I thought was a misspelt female undergarment when someone first used it on me. Now I know, and love to use it coz it sounds so, um, kinky.)

Illeana is hot, man.

BRB.

Damn, Bluffmaster is a copy of Criminal.

BRB.

Nayantara sucks, dude.

I am sleepy now.

BRB.

Please bear with me, this is going somewhere.

To cut a long story short, we thought it would be fun if we could start a movie blog focusing on Indian movies. As an added incentive for me, I get to hang out with great writers at both my blogs.

Although the ostensible purpose of the blog is to share bits of movie wisdom we find interesting, to review movies we like and to share the occasional photo we like (*slurp*), the real purpose is to bash Nayantara. She sucks.

We’re tired of writing long posts (at least I am) and we’ll try to keep the entries short, snarky and sweet. (What’s wrong with lofty goals?). In other words, it’ll be like an IM conversation with the whole world. Damn, thats almost patentable.

And before I forget, here’s the URL: http://www.silverscreen.in (aren’t you jealous we got such a cool name?).

To give credit where it is due, the idea originally came from Lavanya. Now she’s someone that loves movies. Enough to watch even the worst movie in the world with patient indulgence to the very end, and then stoically comment on how bad it was before changing DVDs. Enough to watch at least a movie a day – language no bar – for several years now. Enough to accumulate a database in her head of all the obscure movie trivia that’s fit to print.

I tried to recruit her to write, but it didn’t go too well.

Will you write for the movie blog you wanted us to start?

No, I’d rather watch a movie in that time.

Why don’t you try?

Can you not talk during the movie?

PS: Thanks to DoZ for looking over the template, to Kuzhali for looking over the template a million times (and asking me to remove shady banners), to Prash for help with (what else?) the template.

Picture Courtesy Wikipedia

Golden dragons sit atop the striking green fa?ade, flanked by golden arches on the left and (overpriced) gold topped taxis beneath. A unsightly blue roof stretches along the entire street, designed to keep out the elements and whatever little charm the facade has to offer. “Jalan Petaling,” the multilingual signboard suspended from the lowest tier says. Petaling Street.

Petaling Street, a narrow stretch of road in downtown Kuala Lumpur is the green dragon facaded, blue roofed home to a gigantic flea market selling bootleg merchandise. Fittingly, the market operates from dawn to midnight, drawing an enormous throng of bargain hunters looking for Rolexes and Patek Philippes; Guesses, Guccis, Givenchys and Louis Vittons; Star Wars and Flight Plan and Sims and Civilization and food.

A row of stores on each side of the street, and down the middle of the street a double row of stores with their backs to each other, splitting the narrow alley into two narrower alleys. Enter through the left, bargain your way up the street till the end, gawk at the vendors selling fried fish, and kabab rolls and ice kacang, and a Rolex or two; turn around and haggle back down the other way. Along the way, a sensual treat: the bright flouroscent lighting, the smell of sweaty bodies laden with faux Italian fashion goods mixed in with the the smell of barbecued fish, the sounds of hagglers haggling and touts touting.

To the shopper, the bustle is endearing, an alluring setting for an exotic shopping experience. To the non-shopper, the bustle sucks. It overwhelms, intimidates, drains.

And hence, I choose to stand guard at the dragons while the wife enters the market.

“Be back soon,” she says.

“Ok.” And I start waiting…

A young man wearing a shirt that requests people to consume him walks up real close to me, and smiles. I smileback. “DVD, boss?” he asks. “I got all good movies.”

What followed was chaos. Before I could answer, he walks up sneakily behind another person who is not wearing a shirt – his friend, I would learn later. Eat Me then loudly screams into the shirtless guy’s ear, scaring shirtless out of his wits. Shirtless turns around and angrily shoves Eat-Me, who staggers back into the waiting arms of an old Englishman who lets out a startled scream himself and then recovers enough to say “Wot?”

Eat-Me grins insolently, puts his arm around Englishman and asks him, “You want DVDs?”

“No, and don’t touch me. I don’t want to be touched.”

EatMe finds this hilarious, so he laughs very loudly and punches me on the stomach.

“Don’t touch me, ha-ha-ha, Don’t touch me. You want DVD boss?”

“I would love to, but that Rolex burnt a big hole in my pocket.” Proud grin accompanies bad joke. Eat-me looks bemused and then leaves.

Cue the next person in. Thin. Male. Dirty white shirt. Button-down, adding to the incongruity. Rings on his ear, a ring on his nose, and one around the lower lip. Several rings on his fingers, a box in his hand. Incredibly, Ring walks to me.

“Here boss, you wanted Rolex?”

“No.”

“He said you want to buy Rolex,” he says, pointing to Eat-Me.

“No, I was joking.”

“Don’t joke boss, this is our business.”

***

Ring moves away. Eat-me comes back. I duck into McDonalds and buy a tea and sit down at a table. I must’ve been halfway through the tea when a young man in a yellow shirt approaches me.

“Sir, when are you leaving?”

“Excuse me?”

“When are you leaving the table?”

“After I finish my tea. Why do you ask?”

“People are waiting.”

So I set this tea aside, and order another one. This one tides me over for a minute more. Yellow shirt approaches, and I beat a hasty retreat in anticipation of conversation.

Back outdoors. Ring spots me first.

“I got Tag also. See this watch, runs only on body heat. Also Bentley. Buy one boss.”

“I don’t want anything.”

Ring leaves, only to reappear in a minute.

“Watch?”

“No. One minute ago, I said said no watch. Does that RING a bell?” Prouder grin, poorer joke.

“Why you laugh boss, this is my business.”

“Sorry, but no thanks.”

Ring now walks up to EatMe. Without any obvious provocation, EatMe kicks Ring hard on the shins. Ring yelps. Shirtless enters the fray and shoves EatMe.

EatMe falls hard on the ground, and does a backwards somersault, landing right in front of me.

“This guy must be nuts”, I think to myself.

“You will think I am mad boss,” he says, with the now obligatory punch on my stomach.

“Why?” I respond, stunned. “I don’t think that.”

“No, you will think now boss if I say I will sell you DVD for only 5 Ringgits. You are my friend.”

This here was a mind reading moron.

“Sorry.” I rush back into the McDonalds, back into the hands of my yellow shirted friend who can’t stay away from me for more than a minute.

More tea later, the wife shows up. Looking cheery and refreshed. I whisk her away in a hurry, before my new friends spot her and insist on being introduced.

“You look grumpy?”

“Not grumpy, just sad. I wish I’d said goodbye to him.”

“Who?”

“Don’t worry about it…”

I was sixteen. She must’ve been a few years older.

I was the kid that snottily buried his head in a book through the hourlong bus ride to school, except to look at the occasional poster. After her, I was the kid that was starting to fantasize about burying the head elsewhere. Dirty thoughts, I know, but not as dirty as you think. I didn’t know all that then.

In truth, she wasn’t all that pretty. Thin and wiry and bespectacled and fair and squeaky and rude and unsmiling. But she wore exceptionally short skirts that fell just below the knee. Can you imagine? And traveled the same route as me every single day for two years, standing but a few feet away from me. And most important of all, she went to Nrimala[1] College. What could be hotter?

Ever since a we’d heard that story about a bunch of girls at Rinmala who forced the milkman that went to deliver milk to their hostel to have sex with them, the hotness quotient of everyone that spent any time at all in the general vicinity of the campus had increased by several orders of magnitude in our eyes. Especially because Rex – who assured us all that he knew – informed us that the story was very true. He also threw in a few details of the incident – oh my! – that made me think that being a milkman wouldn’t be a bad way to make a living. Wake up, clean bullshit, milk cow, visit college. Bliss.

Could the girl on the bus be one of those girls, I wondered. And then hastily assured myself that she couldn’t have been. Given the time of the incident, she was probably in this very bus when her classmates were doing the nasties to the poor milkman. Unless it was a predetermined crime, and she had stayed back that night. Quite possible, you know.

Now, in case you think we believed every story we heard about IrNmala, you are so wrong. That story about the girl and a broken test tube for example: In spite of the obvious truth that in those days – most young girls possessed rather loose morals and were capable of most acts of debauchery a male brain could think of, this one was a little too farfetched to be true. Also, it coincided a little too well with our entry into the world of pipettes and burettes and – you guessed it – test tubes. So we only partly believed the story.

And then one day, the girl didn’t show up. After she kept up the habit of not showing up for a few more days, I knew I had lost her – either she had graduated or she had fled the law. It must’ve been the latter – how could someone graduate in December anyway?

She had vanished without a word, my scheming shrew girlfriend. Thank God I hadn’t introduced her to my parents or bragged about her to Rex.

We’d been seeing each other for a good year and a half, and what did I get out it? A sorry glimpse of knee.

This won’t do.

“Man.”

“Yeah?”

“Umm..,”

“Yeah?”

“Err.. have you seen a, umm.. a.. you know what?”

“Do still pictures count?”

“No. I’ve seen those in the Illustrated Weekly too.”

“Then, damn. no dude. Don’t tell me you have.”

“Only a knee.”

“Ooh.. wow. Tell me all about it.”

“Well, it was a knee. Looked suspiciously like a male knee to me.”

“No way. Tell me more about it.”

“Well, it was rounded and protruding and bony.”

“You lucky dog. Was that it?”

“Yeah.”

“This just won’t do.”

“My thoughts exactly.”

“Hey, can you bring that Illustrated Weekly to school tomorrow?”

***

A plan was hatched: We would go to a morning show theater and see a live, writhing, nubile, hot female body. Without clothes. A simple enough plan, but the details needed some fleshing out.

“Where?”

“Murugan?”

“No way. My dad takes a bus through that place everyday.”

“Now that you mention it, it is on my dad’s route as well.”

“Padmalaya?”

“Too close to my house.”

“Swami?”

“Too close to my mom’s school.”

“Oh you chicken.”

“Screw you. Let’s do Padmalaya then.”

“Ok. sorry. Jayshanthi, then. It is far away from the city.”

The silent third guy chimed in now: “But, that’s a stones throw from my house.”

“Umm.. too bad dude. The two of us are going there anyway.”

A week spent in anticipation. Nubile. Live. Naked. Big screen. Getting caught. Naked. Nubile.

“What do we wear?”

“Eh?”

“What do we wear tomorrow?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I mean, to the movie.”

“Oh. Bring another set of clothes. Let’s change somewhere.”

“My mom’ll get suspicious.”

“Oh.”

“Let’s wear our school uniform. We’ll let the shirt out, so that it covers the belt with the school logo. Your shoes look cheap anyway, so we’ll end up looking like local school students.”

“Great idea. By the way, your shoes look like crap too.”

“Isn’t that the whole point?”

“And hey, don’t forget your underwear.”

Laughter.

We arrived early. After a little bit of haggling over who should buy the tickets, we walked up to the counter together. Two balcony seats (we were high-class, weren’t we?) to a movie called Aadhi Thaalam. Primal Rhythm. Tickets bought, we rushed to our seats.

“Hey man, I saw a guy walk past the theater when we were buying tickets. He stared at me for a long time. It looked a lot like someone we know.”

“Uh-oh. So that’s it for you. You are caught! I am glad I had my back to the outside when I bought the tickets.”

“Oh, no way. He knew you were there for sure. Don’t we always hang out together?”

“Oh! In that case, we should tell everyone that we were here for the afternoon show in case they ask.”

“Good call.”

Movie plays. A very frustrated young housewife who is neither nubile nor naked nor writhing nor hot (and perhaps not alive) occupies most of the screen. In both dimensions: space and time.

It was obvious from looking at her that the frustration had caused severe depression, which in turn had led her to take up on junk food in a big way.
Later, the frustration really gets to the housewife, and she decides to take up on a boyfriend instead. Sadly for us, the boyfriend turns out to be a stupid moron who insists on leaving her clothes on when making love. Jerk. (To be fair to him, the one time he tried, he got himself into a time warp, and the night was over in a second. It also caused a large section of the audience to scream in unison: “Votha censoru.”)

We were fast losing hope.

But towards the end of the movie, just as someone was stabbing someone else with a screwdriver, the young housewife’s clothes moved away and we saw it. The fleshiest knee in the world. We left at that point.

“Dude?”

“What?”

“This won’t do.”

“Yeah.”

Our quest started then. Oh, and to those who think young men are not patriotic anymore, take this: We must’ve ignored over a million recommendations to go Hollywood, because we were not interested in foreign flesh. Be Indian, See Indian.

Over the next year or so, we must’ve watched almost every adult Malayalam movie that was ever made. Some of them twice, to confirm suspicions that we could’ve missed a fleeting glimpse of something important when we were talking to each other.

And what did we end up with? Several sorry glimpses of knee.

We then left school and headed for college. At the exact moment we entered college a mysterious force had caused all college age women to turn into paragons of virtue. No rapists as far as the eye could see. And so we had to be content with cursing our bad luck and making same-sex friends.

“Man.”

“Yeah?”

“Listen, there is a theater here that shows scene movies. Should we go tonight?”

“You mean in the morning?”

“Nah, all four shows show the same thing here.”

“Wow.”

And thus the quest was restarted with much earnestness. But earnestness, I’ve come to realize, has nothing to do with eventual results. More knee. Maybe a bit (pats himself on back for clever pun) of grainy black and white action. But no nubile, no naked, no live, no nothing. Crapola.

Meanwhile, Hollywood was on a roll. Sirocco and Basic Instinct. In the Cold of The Night and Inheritance. Lots of nubility, lots of writhing, lots of what we wanted. Great, but wrong color, dudes. Sigh.

And then one day realization struck.

“Dude. The stupid censors have a different standard for English movies.”

“Of course, you dunce.”

And then one day realization struck someone else.

This guy then proceeded to name himself Sa J Jan (I swear that’s his real name) and shot a movie with the usual Malayalam actors and actresses. The same frustrated wife plot, boyfriend and psychiatrist and screw driver. Only difference was, when the crew showed up at the sound recording studio the next day, they were in for a surprise: their lines were all in English. Reading from transliterated Malayalam notes, they said things like:

“Please, oh please. Please let your finger linger on me.”

The movie was released as Secrets of Love and we watched it on the day of release. Our persistence had paid off! There was live flesh onscreen. It moved. It writhed. And it was not a knee. We had succeeded in our quest!.

Clever operator that he was, Sa J Jan rechristened himself all over again as Jai De Van, and made a sequel – Secrets of Marriage smashed box office records the world over, and set to rest any doubts we might have had about what we saw the last time. The Quest was done, dried and dusted.

But still we waited. Surely, this topic merited a trilogy atleast? Secrets of Divorce. Or maybe Secrets of ChildBirth. But I was quite sure there were more secrets… there had to be.

And sure enough, there were. Secret of Secrets was released a few months later – a fitting end to a grand trilogy. As we walked out contented, we secretly told ourselves that this would surely do.
Around that time, I graduated.

These days, when people talk about dubbing Basic Instinct into Tamil, all I can do is smile wanly. If I were you, folks, I would dub the Secret of Secrets. At the very least, it has a much better plot and the director’s name sounds more exotic.

[1] In a masterly stroke of self-protection, I’ve deliberately inserted one or more typos into the name of the institution. Hah. I hardly have enough time for blogging these days, leave alone libel lawsuits.

PS: Apologies are due for the break in blogging. I’ve always wondered if work could keep one too busy to spend an hour or two a week on blogging, and I know now. It can. Believe me, I didn’t really mean to take a break. And thanks to those who asked. It felt good.

We watched four horrid Tamil movies. While that in itself is not remarkable, what is remarkable is that we have refrained from reviewing any of them. Even this post is not a review per se. It is about celebrating the movies in question and rewarding them for the things they did.

And so, without further ado, Ladies, Pharmaceutical Industry Representatives and other Gentlemen, here we go.

The Freakist Bird Flu-ke Award:

Kamna Jethmalani, the lead girl in Idhaya Thirudan wants to send an anonymous email to her mom. She types up the email – whose contents are the proud recipients of another award – but she can’t figure out how to sign the email.

Unable to pick a random name, she picks up a pigeon hovering nearby and lays it gently on top of the keyboard. The pigeon walks back, then forth. Then forth again, and back once more. And then flies away, to leave the half dressed girl staring at the screen.

The pigeon had just keyed in T. Mahesh, which happens to be the name of.. you guessed it, the hero of the movie. What an incredibly clever way to move a story forward. Anyone out there who still thinks our moviemakers are unimaginative?

The Best Case Against Intelligent Design Award:

A no brainer here. Kamna Jethmalani, the lead girl in Idhaya Thirudan wants to piss her mom off. She thinks for an instant about her modul operandi, and then promptly takes her clothes off – at least all the clothes the censors would let her take off. She then takes lewd pictures of herself using a mobile phone, attaches the pictures to an email, uses a pigeon to sign the email and hits send.

Honorary mention: The two people who paid hard earned ringgits to go watch Kalvanin Kadhali.

The Inspired Acting Award:

Madhavan, long haired lead man in Thambi puts in an inspired performance as the (translated) Che Guevera quoting leftist rebel who beats people up to teach them the value of non violence.

Unfortunately, he chooses the wrong person to draw inspiration from – Jyothika in Chandramukhi. He rolls his eyes and shakes his head and thrusts his face and yells his dialogues and dances like a guy. Thankfully, there was no Telugu song playing in the background or we wouldn’t have known the difference.

The “Gratuitous Mention of Better Half in a Very Cool Context” Award:

To Renuka Menon, village belle in Kalaba Kadhalan, for going to an ice cream parlor and asking for Lavanya ice cream. Turns out she meant Vanilla, but couldn’t remember the right name because she happened to be a village belle. But still.

The Tom Cruise Award for Dumb Psychatrists:

To the Psychiatrist lady in Kalaba Kadhalan. The plot revolves around a girl falling for her sister’s husband. The husband tries his best to shoo her away, but she keeps singing steamy songs with him in her dreams. And finally, the exasperated husband goes seeks help from the psychiatrist. Her suggestion?

“Such girls like forceful men, so go talk to the moron who used to harass her in public in her native village. From what you say, I get the feeling he is madly in love with her. Ask him to come woo her. And ask him to be forceful. That will fix her up good.”

The moron arrives, and then goes on to rape the girl.

The Blank Noise Awards for Bringing Harrassment Out Into the Open:

S.J. Surya, for trying to look down an unsuspecting Nayanthara’s dress in Kalvanin Kadhali.

S.J.Surya, for going up to a guy who had just pinched his unsuspecting girlfriend in public(the hapless Nayanthara again) and advising him to use his “mouth” instead. A pregnant pause later, he clarifies that he meant for the guy to talk his way into a woman’s heart. Yeah right. To paraphrase Seinfeld (thanks Manoj), we are offended by how lame the joke was.

The motley crew of actors in Kalaba Kadhalan, who ask a raped girl to “stop being dumb” and “not act like a stuck up bitch” and marry the guy who raped her. Extra special mention of the girl’s mom, who strikes the girl really hard and then cries for a long time, probably because her hands hurt.

Honorary Award for the Sudden Use of Shudh Tamil to Startle Someone:

To hep, modern Pooja, long haired Madhavan’s girl in Thambi.

She wins an award of some sort in the movie (not from a blog) and a friend congratulates her:

“Congratulations!”

Pooja startles the poor girl with her response: A perfectly articulated “Nandri.” The friend’s expression was priceless.

One would do well to remember that the movie was directed by a dude called Seeman, who is a Tamil lover.

Another Honorary Award for the Consistent Use of Crude Tamil to Startle Everyone:

To Arya, Kalaba Kadhalan’s lead man, suave software engineer, for switching over to a dreadful variation of Madras Bashai whenever he gets excited.

To Arya, Kalaba Kadhalan’s lead man, for remaining excited throughout the movie.

The “I will give it to myself if you don’t” award:

To Jayam Ravi, pigeonpicked boyfriend of Kamna in Idhaya Thirudan. For stealing a trophy meant for the winners of a shooting contest, and then taking the trouble to attach the trophy – all two feet of it – to his motorcycle and not taking it off till the very end of the movie.

The Most Ostentatious Display of Bibliophilia Award:

To Manivannan in Thambi. For walking around with a collection of translated leftie literature in a dirty old bag. The books will later save his life.

The (Faithfully Following a Fad) or (Boldly Inventing a Trend) Award:

To Igore, director of Kalaba Kadhalan for giving himself a Russian name, and then adding an e to the end in a nod to numerology. We believe this was inspired by Myshkin, director of Chithiram Pesudhadi who named himself after a Russian literary character.

Unless Igore arrived at his name by removing an N from Ignore, in which case, he gets the Boldly Inventing a Trend award. When you watch the next movie directed by Mron or Idot, you will know who their inspiration was.

The Scene With the Most Educational Value Award:

Idhaya Thirudan (which would’ve swept the awards if not for a little category tweaking we did) takes this one by a mile.

So a guy and a girl find themselves locked in a themepark called Snow World. True to its name, the theme park starts blowing in a lot of cold air to keep the snow from melting. It gets colder and colder. The girl runs to the guy, hugs him real tight. Cut to song.

The next day, the girl tells the guy that her hugging him was purely to take advantage of the principles of Heat Transfer as stated in reference books on Thermodynamics. Yes, that is exactly what she said.

We can go on in this vein, but we are bored. Not as bored as we were when we watched three of these movies over a single weekend, but that’s a mark that will likely not be beat any time soon.

I watched silently, Krishna in tow, when a bunch of classmates decided to take a peek into the girls dressing room on a trip to Bangalore. And listened to their stories – much exaggerated, much embellished – afterwards, and wondered for a second if Krishna and I had missed out on something. Later, guilt.

I expressed a bit of disbelief and not much more when I heard that some of the guys that I studied with worked. Where working means getting off standing behind a girl in a crowded bus. Really getting off.

I’ve seen a lot. In buses and movie theaters, upscale malls and vegetable markets. From catcalls to breathing down the neck, from elbowing a fellow passenger to things a bit more than elbowing. Everytime, a silent “What the…” and I’ve moved on. Sometimes, not even that.

And for the last week, I’ve watched an incredible lineup of posts for the Blank Noise Blogathon, and stayed silent myself.

Until now, until this post. In the hope that something’ll come out of it all.

Tag: blog-a-thon 2006

After is when.

After the initial fascination that magnifies the slightest of contrasts into exotic singularities has worn off. After overcoming the shock of being surrounded by people speaking my language, of having to watch what I say; of not looking too out of place in a large gathering of people not discussing immigration issues. After the joy of seeing an Indian restaurant at every street corner has been washed away by the watery sambar, after realizing that tea with condensed milk is not such a great idea.

Now is when. But what?

Surely not the architectural dichotomy of George Town, fostered by arcane rent control laws. Through which the massive, utterly characterless Komtar sits right next to the modern Prangin Mall, and seedy, unpainted establishments occupy most of downtown. Nothing we haven’t seen before, right? Even though blind massages aren’t exactly the norm in most places.

Not the Odeon theater, that burly begrimed behemoth, the last man standing in an ocean of multiplexes. We went to school at Salem, remember? The city of Sangeeth and Gowri and Rathna and great memories. Can’t come close, the Odeon.

So Chowrasta it has to be.

A few blocks down the street from the ubiquitous Komtar is a nondescript market called the Chowrasta Bazaar. There is enough traffic on the street to make trying to get a picture of the facade hard, and the traffic is unruly enough to make trying to get a picture of the facade hazardous.

If one wades through the Ice Kacang vendors who glare nastily at camera sporting semi-tourists, up the flight of bright red painted stairs, through the Malayalee clothing stores; taking care to avoid going down the other flight of stairs – also red, but not as bright – one ends up at a dark corridor lit by naked fluorescent lights.

Cut through the corridor, and there they are: Books. Stuffed between shelves, strewn on the floor; in old Marie biscuit boxes and out of them; well kept and ill kept; Roth and Bellow, Tagore and Rowling; collections of tomes bound by rope; pieces of a single shattered tome spread around the store. And a couple of antique clocks keeping watch.

Chowrasta houses among the better stocked used book stores I’ve come across.

I went in there again last week, and – still not used to speaking in Tamil with strangers – kicked things off with a “Hello!” to Anwar and a friend of his who run the first store along the corridor. Like Anwar, most of the storeowners here are Tamil; and Anwar says that he entered the business for the love of books. Hmm.

He is polite enough as he escorts me into the store, trying not to show his bemusement at my unusual requests in English: “Only hardcovers, no textbooks, only fiction, only English.” And in anticipation of the fawning old man I encountered on the last visit, “I will pick the books out myself and ask you if I need help.”

Anwar’s little room is packed with books, packed enough that walking through it without stepping into a pile of books almost impossible unless you are Anwar.

Minutes pass on Anwar’s collection of antique clocks (or not. They might’ve been broken). And I navigate through the maze, looking for something non-Brown, non-Rowling(with all due respect to my co-author), not torn, non ketchuped.

And minutes pass on Anwar’s collection of antique clocks, as he waits for me outside the store. A bored Anwar finally decides to chat with his friend, in Tamil.

“Where is he?” the buddy asks Anwar.

“Who knows. The jerk has been in there for a while.”

“Maybe he is looking.”

“You think? You think he is looking for items?”

Anwar then brings me his fetching collection of items. Some with pictures, most with text. A few familiar ones – Charles Devereaux, and a few of the usual anonymous suspects, but the rest don’t ring any bells. I look, then avert, then refuse, and then present what I had collected so far to him. A first edition Bellow, a Proulx, Stephen Fry, a old Hobbit that’s still intact. A Bagley, and a Camus, and ask him to price them.

Anwar is still talking to his friend as he prices my books.

“Wonder why he said no. Should I try again?”

“No lah. He doesn’t look like he’ll spend the money.”

“Yeah, cheapie.”

And then Anwar gets back to me: 200 Ringgits is his price, a great price for the twenty odd books I had picked. I pay him the money, and take leave. “Thanks. You got a good store. I will come back sometime later.”

I said that in Tamil. And Anwar gives me a hundred Ringgits back.

Bhavna clutching an umbrella, Sunil clutching an underarm.

The boy: toughie, hired goon, bearded brute, all rough edges and bad acting, tall and dark and not so handsome.

The girl: heart that bleeds for all, assists helpless people cross roads, smooth and pretty and voluptuous and rich and pretty and smooth. Sigh. I mean, scratch the sigh.

How could they not fall in love? And how could he not turn over a new leaf, bringing a few oddball leaves along with him to keep him entertained at newdom? And how could their wedding plans not be rudely interrupted by her seeing him visit someplace not nice? And how could they not… well, no spoilers on this blog folks. By the way, for the record, this post is about a movie called Chithiram Pesudhadi.

“Ordinary plot,” you want to say, “hackneyed and trite, tried and tested (and failed).” True, we say, the movie is all that, but it has a little bit more going for it – it is disarmingly unpretentious and heartwarmingly earnest. The earnestness of a first time director striving hard – very hard – within his contraints to salvage something out of a mediocre script shines through every frame, drawing empathy from his viewers, and Chithiram manages to get off with sympathetic winces where another movie would’ve gotten a groan or two.

Kathir, Myshkin

The outlandishly named director of the movie – Myshkin – used to be called Raja before he decided to downgrade his name to something slightly less exalted and took on the name of the prince in Dostoevsky’s Idiot. Myshkin had possibly the worst start to his career one can imagine, when he had a chance meeting with director Kadhir at a bookstore. One thing led to another and Myshkin soon was assisting Kathir in some of his movies.

We are glad to report however, that Kadhir – the maker of such innovatively named masterpieces as Kadhal Virus (Love Bug) Kadhalar Dhinam (A Day for Love) and Kadhal Desam (The Country of, what else, Love) – seems to have influenced Myshkin very little. The only obvious influence we could discern was in the way they wear their hair, but even here Myshkin wins hairily handily.

Like most debutants, Myshkin has a lot of ideas. And like most debutants, he wants to use them all in his first movie. Chithiram Pesudhadi is crammed with a large array of fringe characters, each with a prequel, an odd quirk or two and plenty of screentime.

Most of that screentime is irrelevant to the central plot, but taken together the scenes add an element of whimsy to the proceedings, breaking up the monotony and lending an air of belivability. Like the friend of the former toughie, who angrily demands to know why the girl picked his friend over him and walks out of the restaurant in a huff, leaving his food untouched. And the other friend, who demands to know if he could eat the food thus left behind. Dry, mean, deadpan humor – just the way we like it. And while we are talking about good things, I loved the rather convincing backstory behind why the toughie was where he was when the marriage broke up. Old men have needs too.

When snotty people write book reviews, they usually enhance their review with a quote or two from the book. My ‘umble self, unable to diss the movie because it is all empathy for the earnestness of the director, will now “quote” scenes. And of course, it’ll put it all in blockquotes, so you can feel like you’re reading a book review.

Goons surround the toughie. Toughie’s expression changes from morose comtemplation to contemplative morosion. (He is quite versatile). He then walks to the farthest corner of the set, turns around and assumes the checking-if-my-shoelaces-are-off position.

Rowdy #1 is thoroughly confused by the sight of some same-sex ass. He runs forward to confront the offender and turn him around. He gets knocked out by a couple of lame ass blows that no self-respecting goon would fall for. In his defence though, this guy had just been blinded by a backside. I groan at my own alliteration, saving you the trouble.

Goon number 2 follows suit.

And so on till the scene ends.

If you are the sort of computer programmer who get a kick out of poor jokes, I would ask you to put the scene into a for loop that runs six times, but we don’t cater to that segment. So forget I said that and let’s move on to the next blockquoted scene(s).

There is this dude in the movie who sidekicks for the bad guy. He wears yellow all the time, and sings folk songs in return for cash. No pay, no song, never.

The yellow man is at a bar.

Two other people are at the bar as well. One of them heads to Mr. Yellow, and gives him money. “Sing!” he commands. Yellow demurs.

“But why Mr. Yellow? Aren’t you a sucker for some good old fashioned green?”

“I am normally. But today is a special day. My girlfriend died this day that age.”

“Oh!”

“And she died of jaundice, which is why I wear yellow all the time.”

Half the audience awws, the other half laughs. It was either an outstanding example of deadpan humor, or an incredibly corny flashback. The jury is still out on this one, as it is on the rest of the movie – while the press has been overwhelmingly positive, the box office hasn’t been very kind. Yet. And in that same vein, this reviewer’ll give it a lukewarm thumbs up, because:

1) He wath ambiguous about the movie.

2) He hath Ebertian delusions.

Chithiram Pesuthadi is written and directed by Myshkin and stars Sunil and Bhavna.

First up, this delectable little gem from Sidin. Certainly the funniest post of the week, and possibly one of the funniest ever. One post like this can make hosting a mela so much fun.

The esoterically named Gounder Brownie comes up with a splendid use for cabbages. An innovative twist on the idea that I came up with all by myself would be to use a lettuce in much the same manner – it has the added advantage of costing less money. Veena chimes in with some Valentine’s day advice of her own. Gawker manages to look through all this Dick Cheney brouhaha and draw conclusions that lay certain dodgy old demons to rest. Nice. And here’s a post from Megha I forgot to include the first time around – about what people seek and what people get.

Next up, the usual suspects. Jai Arjun Singh writes an awesome review; Chandrahas has a great post on literature – poet Jeet Thayil in this case; Amit has a series of offbeat posts about Pakistan; the folks at Sepia Mutiny churn out great posts. Humility prevents me from linking to this post on Thai Pusam, but not to Chenthil’s post on the same topic. DoZ on this blog, waxes eloquent about pleasure, pain, books, movies, life. Falstaff rhymes, then rants. And does it well. In other words, it was a week like any other.

The obligatory State of Fear post of the week. This time from Patrix. Unrelated, but here’s Sunil’s comprehensive review of Indu Sundaresan’s The Twentieth Wife. And Karthik just realized that one can use as many as three apostrophes in a single sentence.

Gayathri on the perils of choice. The title of her post reminds me of the funniest Subway story I’ve heard yet: My freshly arrived friend’s reply to the “For here or to go” question was: Both. And look ma: Three colons on this paragraph. Make that four: Sibyl, bless her soul, has a post on crossdressers and transgendereators. Now if that doesn’t bring me visitors, what will? By the way, great word, isn’t it? Transgenderators. Must be a smart guy that coined it. To keep the dressing thme going, here’s Tilo on non-violent silk; and the thread continues as she talks about the silk weavers of Madurai. Did I say one post per person? Bah.

Full2Faltu reminisces about the good old times when DoorDarshan was the only game in town. Oh, what’s the big deal if a guy makes a few (million) bucks on the way to killing a lot of bad people? Let him go, for he does what we cannot says Navin. From Cynical Nerd, a longish post about cheerleaders. Before you rush to click, be warned: there are no pictures, and many of them are old and male. Arrgh.

Spaceman Spiff wants states to be reorganized, Jeyavel has some predictions for India’s cities, Incredibly Me talks about oil changes, the Soliloquist muses on being an Indian. Or something like that, it was a long post, so pliss excuse me. Vivek talks about a village that built its own railway station.

Zero – who wants me to make no jokes – qualifies for the longest post of the week award with this. Speaking of which, Sandeep writes a Joyceian post about ballgirls and wins the longest sentence without any punctuation award hands down.

On Sports – cricket, of course – Prem Panicker’s outstanding blog still outstands, the atrocious interface notwithstanding. Anti isn’t too pleased about Moin Khan shooting his mouth off and Ruchir Joshi (who shares Rediff’s horrid interface with Prem) links to a video on who chucks and who doesn’t. By the way, if your vocabulary is not tuned to cricketese, let me clarify that rhyme notwithsanding, chuckin’ doesn’t mean what you think it means. Dirty chuckers.

The quote of the week, from PrufrockTwo. “Books may be easy to burn, but they aren’t that easy to get rid of.”

The next Mela is at Ashish’s Niti.

Update: We are collating posts, and will be posting the mela soon. Until then, read a book or something.
This blog will host the Bharateeya Blog Mela this week, and etcetera (Motto: “Oh no, not again!”) invites you to nominate posts subject to the following rules:

• Posts must be written by Indians, or have an Indian connection of some sort.
• Posts must be dated between the 9th and the 16th of February 2006.
• Only nominations received before midnight on the 16th will be considered for the mela
• Nomination does not guarantee publication, non-nomination does not preclude publication. In other words, we will get one of the underlings to scour the web for posts.
• One post per writer, please.

And while I am out traumatizing a wider audience, Doz, who runs a delightful little blog at Dreaming of Zihuatanejo will take over here. Please be nice to me when I come back.

Let me go back to gloating now.

“Well, tell me then , Toro, is there some reason you’re here?”

“There is,” the black cat said. “I thought you might be having a hard time dealing with that stone all alone.”

“You got that right. Definitely. I’m in kind of a fix here.”

“I thought I’d lend you a hand.”

“That would be great,” Hoshino said. “Take a paws in your schedule, eh?”

In other words, Kafka on the Shore is just another Haruki Murakami book. Murakami is a delightfully inventive writer, and Kafka On The Shore brings together all the qualities that’ve made him so popular with audiences the world over. After his “discovery” in the mid-nineties with The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, Murakami, with his distinctive brand of writing that blurs the boundary between what is real and what is not, has acquired almost cult status in the West. On one level, his books are dense, broody musings on loneliness and love; on another they are racily narrated fantasies laced with generous (tongue-in-cheek) references to pop culture. The dichotomy intrigues, drawing readers into the books. And the books never disappoint: they are dreamy fantasies set in the present, and the author’s overactive imagination ensures that there is never a dull moment, if you’ll pardon the cliche.

Kafka on the Shore is a book about a young boy who calls himself Kakfa (Duh!) (which means crow in Czech, apparently)(Clarification: Kafka means Crow, not Duh!). Kafka, whose mom and sister had abandoned him early on, runs away from home at fifteen to get away from his dad. Kafka is also running away from a prophecy of his dad. (The parallels with Murukami’s short story in the New Yorker are obvious:

“Among the women a man meets in his life, there are only three who have real meaning for him. No more, no less,” his father said–or, rather, declared. He spoke coolly but with utter certainty, as he might have in noting that the earth takes a year to revolve around the sun.

) (etcetera: We close parantheses.())

In another thread in the book, Nakata, a lovable old man who lost his mind in a bizarre World War II incident leaves Tokyo for “somewhere west.” Nakata, who can talk to cats, hitchhikes his way (rather eventfully) to where Kafka is now, propelled by mysterious forces within his mind. He is running towards something, but he is also running away from a gruesome murder that he committed. Or did he?

Kafka ends up at a quaint little family library in a quaint little town. On the way though, he meets a girl who he thinks could be his sister. And at the library, he runs into the following people.

1. Oshima, the uber-smart library assistant who says mysterious, metaphysical, profound, philosophical things with a straight face. Like so:

“Speaking of contradictions,” Oshima suddenly says, “when I first met you I felt a kind of contradiction in you. You’re seeking something, but at the same time you’re running away for all you’re worth.” [Please nod sagely. There you go, that’s it.]

Oshima is uber-smart, so quoting Yeats ( “In dreams begin responsibility”) and Aristophanes or drawing on Greek Philosophy ( “Cassandra’s curse”) to explain everyday predicaments comes easily to him. As does having a lot of fun at the expense of a couple of poor feminists:

“Yes, may I help you?” Oshima asks her amiably.

“Just to let you know, we are investigating public cultural facilities in the entire country from a woamn’s point of view, looking at ease of use, fair access and other issues,” she says. “Our group is doing a year-long investigation and plans to publish a report on our findings. A large number of women are involved in this project, and the two of us happen to be in charge of this region.”

[…]

“What we’ve concluded is that, unfortunately, this library has several issues which need to be addressed.”

“From the viewpoint of women, is what you’re saying,” Oshima commented.

“Correct, from the viewpoint of women,” the woman answers. She clears her throat.

[…]

“Well, first of all you have no toilet set aside for women. That’s correct, isn’t it?”

‘Yes, that’s right. There’s no women’s toilet in this library. We have one toilet for the use of both men and women.”

“Even if you are a private institution, since you’re open to the public don’t you think – in principle – that you should provide separate toilets for women and men?”

“In principle?” Oshima says.

“Correct. Shared facilities give rise to all sorts of harassment. According to our survey, the majority of women are reluctant to use shared toilets. This is a clear cae of neglect of your female patrons.”

“Neglect…” Oshima says, and makes a face as though he’s swallowed something bitter by mistake He doesn’t much like the sound of the word, it would seem.

“An intentional oversight.”

“Intentional oversight,” he repeats, and gives some thought to this clumsy phrase.

“So what is your reaction to all this?” the woman asks, barely containing her irritation.

“As you can see,” Oshima says, “we’re a very small library. And unfortunately we don’t have the sapce for separate toilets. Naturally it would be better to have separate toilets, but none of our patrons has ever complained. For better or for worse, our library doesn’t get very crowded. If you’d like to pursue this issue of separate toilets further, I suggest you got to the Boeing headquartes inSeattle and addreess the issue of toilets on 747s. A 747’s much bigger than our little library, and much more crowded. As far as I’m aware, all toilets on passenger aircraft are shared by men and women.”

“The tall woman frowns at him severely, her cheekbones jjutting forward and her glasses riding up her nose. “We are not investigating aeroplanes. 747s are beside the point.”

“Wouldn’t toilets in both jets and in our library – in principle – give rise to the same sorts of problems?”

“We are investigating, one by one, public facilities. We’re not here to argue over principles.

“Oshmias’s supple smile never fades during this exchange. “Is that so?” I could have sworn that principles were exactly what we were discussing.”

And so it goes. An exchange that later veers towards a discussion of red herrings, shifting analogies, Aristotle and phallocentric logicical fallacies before it ends with a revelation that would’ve been explosive in any other book. Here, coming after sardines raining and a dog interrupting Nakata’s conversation with a cat to lead him to a man dressed like Johnny Walker (whisky mogul, evil cat eater) who proceeds to eat live cat hearts, it is just another event. Murakami’s world is full of them.

Oshima is the reader’s muse in the book – erudite and unruffled, he “explains” (if you can call bits of tangential loud thinking that) what is going on to both Kafka and us.

2. (etcetera:we get our numbering right).

3. On the bus out of Tokyo, Oshima also meets Sakura, a hot young girl who he thinks could be his sister.Naturally. Kafka and Sakura form a bond on the bus, and later on, Kafka rapes her in his dream. But dreams blur into reality in this book, so one can’t really be sure. Sakura and Kafka carry on a conversation that might explain the preponderance of alarming coincidences in the book.

“Even chance meetings… Are the result of Karma.”

“Right, right,” she says. “But what does it mean?”

“That things in life are fated by our previous lives. That even the in the smallest events there’s no such thing as coincidence.”

4. And finally, Miss Saeki. She is the stately woman with a sad past she won’t discuss, who runs the library that Oshima works in. Kafka, naturally, thinks she could be his mom. There are tantalizing clues that seem to point to the theory – Miss Saeki was a lightning researcher and Kafka’s dad was once struck by lightning. But when Kafka asks her the question, all he gets is something to the effect of “You already know the answer to that.” And he accepts the answer and moves on. Occasionally, Miss Saeki becomes a fifteen year old girl and dons shiny white costumes and goes to Kafka’s room. This confuses Kafka no end, and his discussions with Oshima about Miss Saeki lead to the conclusion that this is probably a “living ghost.” The title of the book – Kafka on the Shore, is also the title of the hit single that Miss Saeki composed when she was young. The lyrics of the song are riddled with symbolism, and Kafka’s sees a lot of parallels between his life and the lyrics. And so on it goes…

Meahwhile, hitchhiking old man Nakata, after causing leeches to fall from the sky, ends up at the same town as Kafka, by sheer chance. Nakata has forgotten first person usage, so conversations with him remind you of conversations between Elaine and Jimmy.

Nakata is sleepy.

A truck driver who picks him up on the way is intrigued by Nakata and decides to accompany him on his quest for something that also happens to be – by chance – mentioned in Miss Saeki’s hit single.

The truck driver, Hoshino, later encounters a spirit dressed up as Colonel Sanders. Colonel Sanders has a slightly differerent job description here: he is a supernatural pimp, who gets Hoshino a girl that is very adept at quoting Henri Bergson and Hegel. Together, Hoshino and the prostitute find the perfect use for philosopy.

“See, you’re ready to go again,” the girl remarked, slowly seguing into her next set of motions. “Any special reqeusts? Something you’d like me to do? Mr. Sanders asked me to make sure you got everything you wanted.”

“I can’t think of anything special, but could you quote some more of that philosophy stuff? I don’t know why, but it might keep me from coming so quickly. Otherwise, I’ll lose it pretty fast.”

“Let’s see . . . This is fairly old, but how about some Hegel?”

“Whatever.”

[…]

“‘At the same time that “I” am the content of a relation, “I” am also that which does the relating.'”

The hilarious encounters between Sanders and Hoshino are the funniest parts of the book, with Murakami at his biting best.

“Listen – God only exists in people’s minds. Especially in Japan God’s always been a kind of flexible concept. Look at what happened after the war. Dougnal MacArthur ordered the divine emperor to quit being God, and he did, making a speech saying he was just an ordinary person. So after 1946 he wasn’t God anymore. That’s what Japanese gods are like – they can be tweaked and adjusted. Some American chomping on a cheap pipe gives the order and presto change-o – God’s no longer God. A very postmodern kind of thing. if you think God’s there, He is. If you don’t, He isn’t. And if that’s what God’s like I wouldn’t worry about it.”

Typical of Murakami, when the denoument comes (and goes), it leaves you with more questions than answers. Some philosophical, some practical. (“Was there a message in all this?” “What is he trying to say?” “Was Miss Saeki Kafka’s mom?”). What is the point, the overarching explanation that ties it all up? How could Hoshino start talking to cats? Was the stone the entrance to heaven? What is the significance of the paradise like land suspended between two worlds? Is this a fable? Or like a reviewer claims, is the whole book about giving shape to internal thoughts of the characters?

But then, a little bit of thought provides the answer: It doesn’t matter. There is so much fun to be had when reading the book, and some more fun thinking about all the questions, and that could very well be the whole point.

New York Times Featured Author Profile.

We strongly belive that the only thing that stands between greatness and us is our comments policy. So people, as soon as we find an email provider who gives us enough room to store all the emails we get (mostly pictures of admirers interested in romantic relationships with the handsome guy that writes all these posts) we will disable comments. And then there’s no stopping us.

Update: etcetera (New Motto: “Bad jokes are our forte, if you hate them, take us to courte”) would like to mention that through the flippant exterior it is all mushy and is actually humbled by the honor: The wife actually voted for it, and if you add Chenthil it got TWO votes. Beat that, Amit.

PS: etcetera ( Newest Motto: “We are running out of mottos”) promises that it will not update this post anymore.

“Yes sirs,” he said. Knighthood by coercion.

“What’s your favorite genre?” I asked, gazing at the immense forehead. “I was born with a large forehead, and no, that is not a receding hairline, you jerk” he would tell me later, when we had become friends.

But going back to now, his answer was “Science fiction. Asimov. Long pause. Sirs.”

We groaned.

Science fiction, in that little clique, was passe. It was boring and juvenile, a resort of failed fantasy writers (it was either that or . Worlds with scary green faced aliens and half baked scientific theories on time travel weren’t gonna cut it, not for hard nosed young men who could smoke a whole Benson & Hedges without coughing. By the way, we are a socially responsible blog and would like inform you that smoking in Bhutan can land you in jail, unless you are the king.

“Yes,” we said, “Foundation was good. Dick was good too.” Stifled laughter. “But that’s it. No new ideas anymore, and how many variations on time travel can you read ?”

“No, but …”

“Why do we get the sense you are trying to contradict us?”

“I mean yes… sirs. SF is not a happening field. I agree wholeheartedly.”

It has been a few years since the conversation happened, and I wish I could go back in time and take the side of the young man with a receding hairline and tell the others to go read Cyberpunk. That’ll only happen in bad science fiction, so I’ll have to make do with a tribute to Neal Stephenson.

The problem with sci-fi (we all thought) was that it took itself too seriously. ‘Twas a genre lost in its gadgets, a genre enamored with its clairvoyance, a genre filled with stuffy geek-writers who believed that mediocre plots could be transformed into classics when set in the future in imaginary planets. Margaret Atwood helped weaken the impression (you can’t really call her works science fiction, so scratch that) and William Gibson broke its resolve, but Neal Stephenson shattered it, burnt the remnants and shot the ashes up in the air with the weapons that he invented in Snow Crash. He did this by adding one ingredient to his books: irreverent satire. A self deprecating tone. Scathing social commentary. Intriguing new social orders, a healthy interest in the flow of money, an awareness of the impact of technology on people. Ok, I was off by a few ingredients. Big deal.

His books are elaborately plotted and incredibly detailed ( and very long), drawing on ideas from several sources: Snow Crash blends in virtual reality with notions of a libertarian future, The Diamond Age is about society’s response to nanotechnology. The complexity of the ideas is balanced by the irreverent, satirical tone of the narrative – Stephenson’s books never take themselves too seriously. And that endears them to you – a self deprecating geek discussing his ideas with passion is much more likable than someone earnestly trying to sell stories about plants that grow on Mars. This excerpt from Snow Crash is typical of how Stephenson treats conventional science fiction , turning hackneyed ideas into fun.

The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed subcategory. He’s got esprit up to here. Right now, he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachnofiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest. Where his body has bony extremities, the suit has sintered armorgel: feels like gritty jello, protects like a stack of telephone books.

When they gave him the job, they gave him a gun. The Deliverator never deals in cash, but someone might come after him anyway — might want his car, or his cargo. The gun is tiny, aero-styled, lightweight, the kind of a gun a fashion designer would carry; it fires teensy darts that fly at five times the velocity of an SR-71 spy plane, and when you get done using it, you have to plug it into the cigarette lighter, because it runs on electricity.

The Deliverator never pulled that gun in anger, or in fear. He pulled it once in Gila Highlands. Some punks in Gila Highlands, a fancy Burbclave, wanted themselves a delivery, and they didn’t want to pay for it. Thought they would impress the Deliverator with a baseball bat. The Deliverator took out his gun, centered its laser doo-hickey on that poised Louisville Slugger, fired it. The recoil was immense, as though the weapon had blown up in his hand. The middle third of the baseball bat turned into a column of burning sawdust accelerating in all directions like a bursting star. Punk ended up holding this bat handle with milky smoke pouring out the end. Stupid look on his face. Didn’t get nothing but trouble from the Deliverator.

The Deliverator’s car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator’s car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens. You want to talk contact patches? Your car’s tires have tiny contact patches, talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. The Deliverator’s car has big sticky tires with contact patches the size of a fat lady’s thighs. The Deliverator is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a peseta.

Why is the Deliverator so equipped? Because people rely on him. He is a roll model. This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them.

Just when you think “Bond wannabe”, you find out. That the Deliverator delivers pizzas in a world run by corporations. That the deliverator is a software engineer with attitude. And you grin, shake your head and move on to the next chapter about Governmentless worlds.

The Deliverator used to make software. Still does, sometimes. But if life were a mellow elementary school run by well-meaning education Ph.D.s, the Deliverator’s report card would say: “Hiro is so bright and creative but needs to work harder on his cooperation skills.”

After Snowcrash and The Diamond Age – Cyberpunk Classics – Stephenson changed tack. Cryptonomicon, his follow-up book, isn’t really Science Fiction, it is a “historical techno-thriller.” It is an outstanding book that has been has been compared in its breadth and scope to Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon’s dense World War II classic. But Stephenson won’t mind it being called Science Fiction:

“The science fiction approach doesn’t mean it’s always about the future; it’s an awareness that this is different.” [Link]

The book

follows two parallel sagas: that of cryptographers during World War II attempting to crack Axis codes and that of their descendants attempting to use modern cryptography to build a data haven in the fictitious state of Kinakuta, a small nation […]. It also details the political machinations that follow both efforts. [Link]

A much more confident Stephenson digresses heavily, including a pointless short story written by one of the characters and Perl source code for a cryptographic algorithm he describes in the book. The book is a delightful read, each digression a source of unexpected pleasure. Stephenson blends in his fictional protoganists with real life people: Dr. Waterhouse, his cryptographer hero spends time with Alan Turing, and Einstein and Churchill make cameo appearances as themselves. Cryptonomicon is smart, supremely funny and densely packed with ideas and an acute awareness of the several societies spanned by the plot.

[…]When he does get to the right floor, thought, it is a bit posher than the wrong one was. Of course, the underlying structure of everything in England is post. There is no in between with these people. You have to walk a mile to find a telephone booth, but when you find it, it is built as if the senseless dynamiting of pay phones had been a serious problem at sometime in the past. And a British mailbox can presumably stop a German tank. None of them have cars, but when they do, they are three-ton hand-built beasts. The concept of stamping out a whole lot of cars is unthinkable.

[…]Waterhouse has forgotten all of their names. He always immediately forgets the names. Even if he remembered them, he would not know their significance, as he does not actually have the organization chart of the Foreign Ministry (which runs Intelligence) and the Military laid out in front of him. They keep saying “woe to hice!” but just as he actually begins to feel sorry for this Hice fellow, whoever he is, he figures out that this is how they pronounce “Waterhouse.” Other than that, the one remark that actually penetrates his brain is when one of the Other Guys says something about the Prime Minister that implies considerable familiarity. And he’s not even the Main guy. The Main Guy is much older and more distinguished. So it seems to Waterhouse (though he has completely stopped listening to what all of these people are saying to him) that a good half of the people in the room have recently had conversations with Winston Churchill.

And perhaps in response to criticism that he couldn’t tie up his plots properly, Stephenson ends Cryptonomicon well, tying up most loose ends. An awesome, awesome read.

A review of Cryptonomicon at Slashdot.

Which brings us to the Baroque Cycle, his ambitious trilogy set in the early 18th century. Stephenson insists that the Baroque Cycle is still Science Fiction, because the book mostly focuses on science in the Baroque Era. Hmm. He continues using the technique of blending in fictitious people with real ones – the duel between Newton and Leibniz forms the backdrop for a large part of the cycle.

It is not Cryptonomicon, but it is a fine book nevertheless. Even though it feels a bit like reading a smart schoolboy’s scrapbook filled with newspaper clippings from the 17th century, the writing sparkles, and the characters intrigue. (And the second book in the trilogy is set in eighteenth century India, which is another reason to read it).

And the books are also… you know what, this post is way too long. So without much ado, I’ll conclude.

Therefore, I conclude, Neal Stephenson is a good writer who writes elaborately plotted science fiction full of irreverent humor. Hence, I infer, you will all go read his books and write your own reviews. Please wipe your glazed eyes and go back to your own blogs. If you are a came through google, sorry, no naked pictures exist on this blog, except on one post. Continue searching.