Sauce!

Standardised testing

2009-10-12T07:34:00.002+05:30

I like complicating things, mostly because it makes me feel smart. The trouble with this--apart from the obvious--is that I often arrive at popular (and therefore 'shallow') notions about certain phenomena after much mental merry-go-rounding. And having thus arrived, I feel that my extra mental legwork gives my shallow ideas more comparative depth than other people's shallow ideas (of course, I never entertain the idea that other people may also have arrived at their shallow 'pop' conclusions after considerable thought), and therefore, while my subscription to those ideas shows a resigned concession to messy reality, other people's subscription clearly demonstrate a general lack of grey cells.

Since the above analytical model puts me inarguably in a position of superior intellect to pretty much the rest of creation, I have great difficulty coming to terms with the idea that *I*, Rimi, can actually be subject to the same shallow and hegemonic normalising phenomena that I actually had to grace to briefly think about before scornfully dismissing. A great deal of practice (especially after I moved to the US) has done nothing to ease the process for me.

However, while usually I snort at this individualistic culture's total obsession with meeting homogenising norms in nearly every other aspect of life (in body images and concepts of beauty, for example), I have a genuine problem with the bell-curve approach to testing merit. And not merely because I am subject to it semester after semester, and frequently yield less than satisfactory results. I also mark students myself, and the idea that my grade distribution must conform to a certain "nice middle-heavy lay out" bothers me no end. The potol-shaped narrow-ended and plump-middled distribution simply does not fit actual grade clusters. Sometimes I have students performing rather well towards the beginning--straight As--and then petering off after they're sure they shall get at least a B in the course no matter what. Others take some time to realise that they *will* be marked down if they don't conform to assignment expectations in both form and content, and buck up towards the end to pull up their grades. The unevenness in this case might "look uncomfortable", but it is reflective of the actual performance of the students. The idea that one should 'adjust' this actual data set to fit an unreal norm--unreal because if every instructor is expected to 'adjust' to an ideal, no one actually ever achieves this distribution 'normally'--seems to me both unfair and silly, and quite preposterous besides. I quite understand, unfortunately, the need to have an abstracted idea of perfection against which actual merits can be measured, but somewhere along the line we seem to have forgotten that this abstracted ideal was chosen precisely because no person can meet it... unless of course he/she makes an effort to play the system (which a great deal of non-native speakers of English do with great felicity to the the GRE, for example).

And lest we forget, these 'actual performances' that I'm championing are already being judged on culturally predetermined parameters. And I'm not talking widely disparate systems, for to even think of comparing them is foolishness, but apparently similiar structures. For instance, the 'western' mode of education in various countries. At my old university, term papers were marked down (almost disqualified, in fact) if one used prescribed texts to write them. The idea was that midterms and finals were for textual testing; term papers were to demonstrate how well students could critique the theory learned in class, and apply it to texts outside the syllbus. In the US, or at my uni at any rate, term papers are nearly disqualified if they do not deal almost exclusively with prescribed texts, perhaps because graduate students do not have take textual exams here. Also, there is something called 'class participation', in which students get a small amount of credit for offering their opinions about the texts. But often the actual content of the contribution isn't taken into consideration, merely the fact of participation. This seems to me quite counter-productive, since students often speak for the sake of registering their presence, and not because they have something valuable to add to the conversation. But that is how America works, and appears to work just fine. Except of course for those who come from outside the system and have to undergo periods of adjustment. But even then, the system is more personalised. Normative parameters must be met, but there are professors and advisers and so on who smile and encourage and hand-hold them through it.

Standardised testing, however, is quite another level of absurdity. And yet again I understand it is a useful tool of separating the grain from the chaff without involving the terribly indelicate job of failing or turning down people personally. It would never do, after all, to have unpleasantness about. But I am forced to wonder how much of the grain gets thrown out with the chaff--and consequently how deeply the system becomes populated by mediocre talent--because standardised tests fail to take extenuating circumstances into consideration. It takes into no account illnesses, emotional upheavals, technical failure or alien attacks. When I took my GREs, for instance, I had a fever and a thumping heat-induced headache. Then, the computer I was at swallowed my essay and nearly all of my maths test, and had to be coaxed back while I waited for two hours in a sultry, drowsy, hot little room which nearly put me to sleep. The personnel tried to convince me that my current test was forfeit and that I should pay for a rescheduled test (which I woudn't do and honestly, couldn't afford to), and finally let an exhausted, anxious and very sleepy me take the test, but all over again.

I think I can say with a certain amount of certainty that my scraps from the second exam would not have yielded such mementos as "1129x2=1158" and similar had I been in better shape and been spared the assorted troubles. So if one goes by my GRE score's position on the bell-curve, I'm a right idiot. And I'm forced to say that this 'evidence' is patently false. I am by no means attempting to establish myself as a genius and am well aware that my intelligence is only of the moderate sort, but an idiot I am not. You can take my word for it. And therein lies the trouble, because of course no one *will* take my word for it--to do that would lead to the collapse of the entire concept of emperical evidence. But it's either my flawed initial scores while I was still trying to figure out the American system of grading plus my less than perfect GRE, or my own assurances that I am an intellectually competent human being. I think I can tell which would be treated as an objective evidence of my abilities, and which not. And frankly, now that I am back on the competitive market, it worries the hell out of me.

So much for you, then, Superior Scorn. Don't be a stranger.

See, spot, kill.

2009-10-06T03:41:00.001+05:30

Rimi's friend: and if that wasn't enough, he complains about my cooking *all* the time!
Rimi (incredulously): X complains about other people's cooking?
Rimi's friend: my point exactly.
Rimi: well, this gives me hope. I have been meaning to write a critique of nuclear physics for some time now.

Rimi's friend's annoying flatmate, who had been 'reading' the same page of the newspaper for the last fifteen minutes, decided to give up the pretence and join in.

Annoying flatmate: oh, so you're a physicist?
Rimi: god, no! I wish I were!
Ann. flatmate (shrewdly): so, you want to criticise nuclear physics without actually being a nuclear physics person.
Rimi (complacently): quite right.
Ann. F: and you don't think that is unethical?
Rimi's friend (with an exaggerated sigh): Ann, Rimi was only joking about...
Ann. F: but she isn't a physicist!
Rimi's friend: that's exactly the damn point!
Ann. F (in tones of superior astonishment): you mean to say it is 'the point' for non-scientists to criticise science??? You are going to encourage her to do this?
Rimi: (lets slip involuntary giggle)

My friend set down her enormous cup of latte carefully on top of Ann. F's shiny new copy of a bestselling lifestyle book, and looked at him directly.

Rimi's friend: Ann, I'm sorry. Obviously we haven't been clear enough for a mixed audience... we thought this was a private conversation. Rimi here was suprised that X criticised my cooking, given that he burns water. Her statement about critiquing--not criticising--nuclear physics was an... is allegory right, Rimi? [Rimi indicates she hasn't a clue] Anyway, it was a joke. All right?
Ann. F (getting up to go): anyway, I don't think anyone would have let a non-science person publish a criticism of physics.

A brief pause, while we hear the door open and close.

Rimi's friend (swallowing a hearty sip of coffee): he is moving to Chicago next month. Thank god!
Rimi: new job? Partner? Family?
Rimi's friend: do I care?
Rimi: good point.

Singing praises.

2009-09-27T21:46:00.005+05:30

(Familiarity with Bengali required for some parts)

What does one miss about the vibrant, vivacious, dazzling, crowd-clogged, loud, sumptuous autumn festivities? Well, *I* miss complaining about them. They say in Bengali that one doesn't appreciate one's teeth while one still has them, and this might well apply to the pujas... for some people. But for me, not so much. The first time I got away from them--and I left town a week or so before Mohaloya last year--I had the distinct feeling of a narrow escape. One does not appreciate being woken up by the dhaak at four thirty in the morning after being dragged around town and through an ocean of people on the pretext of 'thakur dekha' till 3AM. And one certainly does not appreciate Reshammiya or Kumar Shanu blaring from the mikes all day.

Actually, I'm being unfair. For the last four or so years, our parar pujo has chosen to play music one wants to hear: Hindi film classics from the sixties and seventies--lots of Asha, Mukhesh, Rafi, Kishore-- in the evenings, and plenty of Hemonto, Shyamol Mitro, Sholil De, Srikanto Acharjo, Orghyo Sen, Konika Bannerjee in the mornings, a nice blend of robindroshongeet and what is still called 'adhunik'. I never quit understand why people leave out Debobroto out of their playlists, incidentally. His renditions of Tagore's songs are often my favourites. In fact, if anyone has .mp3 versions of his robindroshongeets and are willing to share, I would be very grateful. But anyway, so we had these sterling mixed tapes being played for our aural gratification all day, and I would have been pleased... except that:

1. the same songs were repeated ad infinitum on a tedious loop, which, no matter how much one lives listening to Kishore singing Gulzar's lyrics to RD's music, is very, very painful.
2. the next locality had generously strung up two mikes facing our locality, so that Rafi was often superimposed on Alka Yagnik, and Shyamol Mitro on DJ Hot's "KaaNta Lagaa!".

All in all, I was quite happy to fly the nest before the Decibel Assault was launched. But in doing so, I was also withdrawing all claim on the pleasanter sounds of pujo--the call to onjoli on oshtomi mornings, the montropaath interspersed by ghonta bajano during shondhipujo, dhakir naach, dhunuchi naach [tiny video of just the first moves], the broken snatches of private conversations picked up by the microphone, people rushing around overseeing the serving at communal lunches on oshtomi and dinners on nobomi ("Bannerjee kaku ke luchi diyechho toh? Uni kintu chaichhilen.", "Ei ektu dekh toh Uma mashi khete boshlo kina, shokal theke mondope kaaj korchhen. Ei fol-mishtita diye aaye ontoto"). I even like the dhaak at more reasonable hours. In fact, provided I had managed the requisite eight hours, I quite cherished being woken up by the slightly intoxicating rhythm that gets under the skin and whispers to the blood. It gave the peaceful glow of an autumn daybreak a primal undertone of excitement--pujo eshe gaechhe!

There's also perhaps a sensual undertone to the association of the dhaak with the worship of the mother goddess. Feel free to treat this as a pop theory popped out by an amateur (I certainly do), but our goddesses are not pristine submissive vestal virgins in white, spending their days in seclusion. Or, for that matter, virgin goddesses reknowned for their intellect, but lined firmly with patriarchy. Our goddesses are far more sweat-and-blood, far more raw power that smites, far more protective love tempered by firm disciplinarianism. And although we in our psuedo-Victorian way shy away from it, far more powerfully, sensually, playfully sexual. Despite the ridiculously fake blindfold of 'Indian culture' that we wear voluntarily, perhaps this subterranean association seeps into the romantic overtones to pujo celebrations. And not just the sweetly romantic, neither. While the pujo pandals are a favourite first-meeting type place for potential sweethearts in Bengali films and novels, pujos are also the time when, slipping away from the performances like this, lovers go off to... do what lovers are always sneaking off to do. You couldn't ask for a better background score. And if someone raised an eyebrow you could always say you were embodying Shiv and Shakti, and enacting their reunion post-bijoya doshomi :-) (not that I've ever heard anyone use that excuse, but I would love to)

And perhaps that is why the only piece of commercial pujo "music" I'm missing is an ancient Thumbs Up! commercial. It's not on Youtube or Google videos. Does anyone remember it? "Shoptomi te prothom dekha, oshtomi te haashi... nobomi te bolte chaoa, tomaye bhalobashi. Doshomite hothat kaeno aakul holo praan... praan protima tumi ebar jaabe ki bhashan?"

Praan protima, tumi ebar jaabe ki bhashan? Shubho Bijoya.

"Disrespect".

2009-09-22T07:55:00.003+05:30

I hear the word a *lot* around here. It's a novel feeling, because while the society I come from is big on respect, it is a thing that remains largely inarticulated. No one bandies the actual word about. There is little talk about being respectful or feeling disrespected, or even about children being disrespectful--a favourite theme of most grown-ups. On the event that the latter is discussed, the behaviour is usually labelled as rudeness, or more circumspectly, as "a lack of good manners". And I've absolutely never heard anyone say, "I feel disrespected". Or any variations thereof. If one has to demand respect, I was always told, that person probably does not deserve it. That respect isn't Halloween sweets. You cannot demand someone give you a fistful of it just because it pleases you to coddle your system with it.

I overheard a conversation on the metro the other day, where an uncle-type was telling off a late teen for disrespecting him... because said late teen refused to buy the brand of tyres uncle recommended. To classify rejection of advice as disrespect seemed ridiculous to me, but to the uncle it seemed perfectly legit. "I have been driving on these roads for more winters than you have been born [sic.]", he emphasised. "I know more about them than you do. I'm trying to share this knowledge with you. But I will not be disrespected in public because your roommate likes a different brand!"
I watched the man closely, and he reminded me of nothing so much as a tiny little frog puffed up with an inflated sense of it's own importance, just at the verge of bursting with a messy wet "PLOP!" He inspired amusement and condescending pity, but never 'respect' (as I understand it).

Therefore I get the feeling this American 'respect' is a different beast from the one we find back at the tropics. It's not the thing we dutifully offer up to our, say, school teachers--the ones that taught us our alphabets and numbers and the ones that screamed us through differential calculus. In fact, I get the feeling school teachers don't command much respect in the US at all. Anyway. The point is that in India there are certain categories of people that command respect by sheer virtue of their categories, and this respect is a sort of public demonstration of "looking up to", even if there is no actual feeling of respect involved. In the US, on the other hand, I think 'respect' has got more to do with protecting one's rights to whatever (validating one's ethnic identity, emphasising one's individuality, etc.), and making sure no one points and laughs or gets nasty while said rights are being exercised. Again, such observances of 'respect' do not necessarily demand the observer actually support such rights ideologically, merely that he keeps his toes off other people's territory. Or so I think, anyway. I'm not sure about the 'respect' dynamics here yet. And yet I have already, according to my American acquaintances, experienced this 'respect'--or lack thereof--first hand. This morning, in fact. And at a university office, no less.

So I walk into a campus office for the third time in a row, because I need to put my name down on a list. The first time I went, I was asked for my passport. I went back with my passport, and was asked for my social security. This was the third time, and I was armed with my passport AND my social. Confident that the matter would be dealt with in a few minutes, I approached the undergraduate student employee behind the counter. She asked to see my I-20. I confessed I wasn't carrying mine, it being a valuable doc. and all, and promised to return (yet again). However, I asked her for a check-list of *all* the things I would need, since I did not wish to carry my passport, I-20 and social security card for a fifth trip. This was when the episode truly began. First, the girl merely repeated herself slowly and clearly, as one does to the deaf or the mentally deficient: "Look. You don't have your I-20. We need your I-20. Just come back with your I-20, and we'll do it."

I should probably have left it at that and left altogether, but one's patience wears thin after three failed trips, especially if they're no fault of one's own. So I asked if my university ID would suffice, since it was issued after my I-20 was scrutinised. At this the girl threw her hands up in exasperation.

Girl: Okay. Do you speak English? Or should I get someone to translate? Because clearly I'm not getting through to you. Before I give you any money [because my father is the University tsar, of course, and all it's money is hidden under my bed], I need to know that you are not here illegally and that you have the legal right to work in America.

At which point I decided I should perhaps seek out an employee actually in possession of her mind, so I gave the girl a friendly nod and started walking carefully away, not turning my back on her.

Girl: uh, excuse me! Yeah, I need to know: are you already working for the university? Are you getting any money from us?
Rimi (from a safe distance): yes. I draw a regular stipend.
Girl (in a blend of sanctimoniousness and "take that!" manner): you should know that you are doing it illegally. You have no right to do that. If I wanted I could report you.

Unfortunately, I suffer from a secret hero complex. I could have walked away from this without a further word, because the dumb child's crassness rather amused me, but suddenly I pictured another international student who actually doesn't speak English too well, and who doesn't know that stipends are perfectly legal and are paid by a completely different university office. I pictured this person in my place, thoroughly harassed and confused because a minor clog in a major machine was power-tripping by virtue of having access to a daily stamp and a cluster of cheap office supplies. Bullies are my secret button.

I gave the too-thin brunette a thoughtful once-over. She looked back at me with--and I could be a wrong--a superior glint in her eye.
"Has anyone ever told you," I said in a slow, largely indifferent voice, "that you are a singularly unpleasant young woman?"
The singularly unpleasant young woman did an exaggerated imitation of dropping her jaw in shock, while managing to gasp out a "What???"
"I know you don't need a translator for that," I continued in an indulgently reprimanding tone, "because I speak rather a classy version of your language. Now, I'm going to be back tomorrow, and you will manage to make yourself unavailable when I am here, because if I have to speak to you again, there might be unpleasant consequences."

And I left, this time turning my back on her, confident that I'd uprooted her venom-sack--if temporarily. I heard her say in a shocked voice to her colleague, "Did you hear what she said to me? Oh my god, she was like, so disrespectful! Okay, now I'm officially upset. Did you just hear the things she said?"

"In my country," I wanted to turn around and say, "respect has to be earned, not demanded. And you fail the qualifiers by a couple of thousand miles, cupcake."

But I didn't. This lily, I felt, didn't need that extra guilding.

Our Basterds

2009-08-26T11:45:00.003+05:30

Aaand, in a completely uncharacteristic move, Sauce! presents it's first actual film commentary, which basically is hardselling Vishal Bharadwaj's Kaminey in a respectable disguise. The man should be sharing his spoils with me.

The first question my mum asked when I came home from the film and praised it sky high was, "So what's the story?" And that's the stroke of genius--or at least the beginning of it. There is no story. Or none that one would notice. 'Mistaken identity flick with identical twins' is a category/subgenre description, not a plot summary. When Bharadwaj set out to make a chartbusting Bollywood film with all the trimmings, he set out to make a chartbusting Bollywood film with all the trimmings. Of Kaminey it may truly be said that iss film mein drama hai, comaydee hai, rrromance hai, akshun hai, traagedy hai... aur kahani bilkul nahin hai [this film has drama, has comedy, has rrromance, has action, has tragedy...and has no sustainable story whatsoever]. And to top it all, it has a Happy Ending. And only if you've been watching the the impishly clever little subaltern current of subversion throughout the film will you wonder whether it's a bona fide H.E.

I shall not dwell here on the excellent of the camerawork and the texture of the film--the brilliant use of light/shade/shadow/motifs... because I understand precisely zilch about those things. What I can tell you about is the sheer vitality, wicked humour, excellent performances, and a unfortunately, a couple of Very Serious iroksomenesses of the film. But most of all, the vitality.

Because, boss, Kaminey sparkles and almost sloshes at the sides of the screen with it's barely contained aliveness. This is a film where stuff happens, and unlike films full of mad car chases and crazy heists and getaways, it doesn't deafen you with it's one-track obsession with speed plus loud gunfire plus showy glossiness. Kaminey is all action, but it's also all quirky subversive humour, and so if you think you can safely visit the loo while the film is on and come back to pick up the plot right where you left off (and no one would blame you, because after all Bollywood has trained it's plotlines to play dead for two and a half of its three hour runtime), Kaminey is not your best bet. You'd come out confused, wondering where the mad capers came from and where they went, and what you, the poor paying audience, had done to deserve it.

Before we went to see the film someone mentioned the Bangali aspect of the film (there are three Bengali actors in the film, of which Rajatabha is completely wasted). What I didn't expect was to have it drag Feluda and my school Bengali teacher to mind even before half-time was stylishly announced. An association for which my teacher wouldn't thank me, and neither, if I know my fictional characters, will Mr. Mitter. But it's impossible not to compare Kaminey plot elements with the "hit formula" Feluda outlines for a Hindi potboiler to Lalmohonbabu in Bombaier Bombetey. And Kaminey is word perfect, if we substitute a Sholayesque group of dacoits with the most eclectic collection of underground 'businessmen' any Bollywood flick can boast of. Too bad the 'international' villian Tashi doesn't have pet sharks and crocodiles. But then again, Bharadwaj spares us the torture of "designer" clothes for the entire cast and ostentatious locations whose only point is being tastelessly ostentatious, so I suppose it balances out.

Second, our Bengali teacher. Mrs. D was convinced that not more than two girls in her class of eighty anglicised brown girls (or, as she would say, ei shob deshi memshaheb) actually knew a thing about their mother tongue, and that even fewer cared. And therefore it was surprising how much effort she put into teaching us the subject, and how brilliant she was at it. It's thanks to her, entirely, that I am aware of a rhetorical device called the jomok olonkaar (based on, yes, the concept of twin meanings of the same word or phrase), that very clever use of language where one apparently says something on the surface, but means precisely the opposite. Or, if not precisely the opposite, then mocks a certain idea while at the surface seeming to approve of it wholeheartedly. And Kaminey does exactly that to standard Bollywood tropes. Estranged goodtwin-badtwin with over-emphasised signature traits, homegrown and imported villians, family drama, villians' family drama, good cop-bad cop, young virginal maiden in luuurve, you name it.

So if you want to watch Kaminey, watch Kaminey. Some of the cleverness is so in-your-face you couldn't possibly miss it. For example, when Guddu walks out on a pregnant Sweety and locks himself in the graphiti-covered communal loo, and Sweety hammers on the door. The scrawl just above Sweety's pounding fists read "Apna haath Jagannath". Particularly effective, since it accompanies Sweety admitting that she is an ethnocentric sectarian politician's sister, which makes her and Guddu's continued intimacy almost impossible. And then there's Tashi's brilliant and completely inaccurate line, "Why do war for no reason? Am I America?" And yet there's Chandan Roy Sanyal's (credited, I notice, with his surnames clubbed together as Roysanyal) wonderful innuendo of an endearment, "Mukhta ektu kholo dekhini, shonamoni". Open your pretty mouth, sweetheart. When one takes into account that the addressee--Charlie, the bad-boy twin--is without doubt his partner in matters more than professional, the sentence acquires a whole new *nudge nudge, wink wink* meaning. Also, don't forget to note the conspicious absence of any mention of weepy mothers in the film (a dead father gives proxy for parent-as-conscience instead). Alas, Nirupa Roy, have we finally laid your ghost to rest?

But despite all the fabulous performances (where did Bharadwaj find the debutants? Tenzing Nima is very good, Roy Sanyal as the flamboyant mafia chhotokorta perennially high on cocaine is brill, and thank you for bringing back Amol Gupte!), there are two major and one minor thing I had serious problems with. One is when Guddu refers to an abortion within the first month of pregnancy as murder. Boss, does becoming a global citizen imply buying into the worst aspects of American mass culture? Since when is abortion in the first trimester murder, and isn't it a bit rich coming from a boy who absolutely totally doesn't want the baby, isn't prepared to marry the mother and therefore socially acknowledge the child, and doesn't even want a marginal role as an unwed father? And for those of you who think opposing abortion is "religious" or "traditional", I suggest you read up on your Hinduism (given Guddu and Sweety's roots) and not merely take Ekta Kapoor's word for it when she makes her characters screech, "Yeh mahapaap hai!" And what's with making Charlie marry a girl in the end? Enforced heteronormativity, eh?

All right, I'm prepared to consider the idea that Bharadwaj meant to show how most gay men are still required to act if they want to be 'accepted', and how Charlie twists even that to his advantage by marrying a beautiful girl clearly made of money. And I'm even prepared to agree that a 'modern' urban man mistakes popular ritualistic faith and media-propelled pop ethics for religious beliefs, and that is where Guddu's accusation of murder comes from. But those momoents still stick out like sore thumbs in what is an otherwise brilliant film, and I wish Bharadwaj hadn't taken the easy way out. Not that I don't understand why he had to, but nonetheless. And finally, why take on an actor as brilliant as Rajatabha and then not bloody use him, boss?

But. Pliss to be seeing Kaminey. It is the tewkewl film only.

The Colonial Bloody Hangover

2009-08-17T00:37:00.006+05:30

I wasn't going to write this post (primarily because it's a little whiny and a lot long), but then my Facebook acquaintance (and friend of my friend Swati) wrote this, and since when have I modestly held back my two bits?

It's amazing--or so I thought--the sheer number of people who asked me if I was British right from the second day I landed in the States (the first day I only spoke to a Canadian, who had lived in London and Yorkshire and could easily tell a pseudo-posh English accent from an Indian public school one). I briefly wondered whether it was an American pick-up line for unAmericans that pop culture hadn't seen fit to let the rest of world know, especially since the question served as a conversation-opener on more than one occasion, but since my opinion of my attraction quotient floats an inch above ground level, I abandoned this line of enquiry soon enough.

As days went by, I realised it was less the accent, which waxes and wanes depending on company and my temper (my enunciation sharpens to razorblade finesse when I've been shaken or stirred), and more the kind of English I speak. In subtle ways, it is vastly different from the English of my American peers. Sometimes it provides moments of comic panic. Like on a snowing December morning, when I ran out of my flat to the campus bus stop in jeans, a thin sweater and untied shoes only, because that was all I had on when the driver had called to say the bus would be at the stop "momentarily". You know, for a moment. So if I missed it I was looking at a thirty minute uphill trudge in and through the snow. Another time a friend's flight couldn't get clearance to take off, and looking to soothe the passengers, the stewardess decalred that plane "will take off momentarily". For about two seconds, my friend thought he was going to have a heart attack. Take off momentarily? You mean, take off and crash right back down? Then don't bloody take off, and let me out! It took a while to register that when Americans say 'momentarily', they mean in a moment, like one would say 'immediately'. Or, if 'one' were a stuffy one, 'presently'.

And when words aren't differently meant, they are completely absent. I'm yet to meet an American who exclaims "Rubbish!" when she disbelieves or disapproves of something. There are no bins, only trash cans. Which actually made me a wee bit queasy in the beginning, because ready-to-eat food is also found in cans, not tins. And of course, neither my endearments nor my swearing has quite the desired effect. "You're such a peach!" was once met with a doubtful, "Er, um, can I be an apple instead?"And to be asked to explain what a bugger or a sod "actually means" sort of takes the wind out of one's fulminating sails. And very few people get cricket terminology, of course. Hit for six, back to the pavilion (which I say often enough), batting to the same/other team, calling a tricky question a googly. Even academic parlance is different. People grade exams, not mark (or, may we be forgiven our smug teacheresque superiority, 'correct') answerscripts. The bastards who hawk over exams and make a communal sharing of data impossible are proctors, not invigilators. Heads of departments are usually department chairs. Soccer for football, aid for aide, the explicit 'bathroom' for the more prim 'loo' or 'restroom', the list just goes on.

There are stylistic differences, too. The most annoying instance of crossed wires, f'rsinstance, occured when a irksomely loud and cantankerous housemate of a friend started screaming at me--and I mean literally--because I had unwittingly sat on 'her' chair. "Such duclet tones, my dear", I observed dryly as I lifted myself off the unmarked chair. To which she spat, "I'm not your dear!", and then looked triumphantly at me, as if that was a devastatingly cutting comeback, instead of the pathetically lame knee-jerk response it was. This Brit exchange student once observed, quite acidly, that America is "the country irony overlooked". I know from personal experience this is a blatantly inaccurate generalisation, but either because they're too friendly or too politically correct, the average American does seem to shy away from [what we think of as] the caustic approach to language, in public anyway. Which makes me feel like a right bitch sometimes, I don't mind admitting. Sarcasm has been hardwired into my system (and before I left Cal I frankly didn't realise that 'friendly' and 'sarcastic' were mutually exclusive qualities).

And yet the way I speak hasn't changed a bit during my short stint abroad. If anything, the massive sea of linguistic difference has made me to cling harder to my speech patterns, further reinforcing beliefs about my Britishness. Usually I just brush it off, because after all we speak English on a mass scale because we were a British colony and learned their version of the language. And an American who hasn't lived in India extensively is unlikely to pick up the Indian flavour to the language. However, what bothers me is how the texture of the language spoken in India is changing so completely. I can no longer identify with the speech of people younger to me by less than a decade. Of some of my peers too, in fact, and most certainly of films and the telly. But I can certainly identify them with my recently acquired American acquaintances. Apart from a general tendency to emphasise 'r's (gurrrls, firrst) instead of nearly swallowing them, the two persistant Americanisms I notice are 'apartment' for flat and 'mom' for mum (including in the much-vaunted propah newspapers, which publish tips for "working moms with kids"). To a lesser extent, 'math' for maths. And I suppose if I was a true believer in human freedom to choose it wouldn't have bothered me, but I clearly am not and it does. Particularly 'mom' or 'mommy', when spoken with a non-American or non-Canadian accent, irritates me no end.

An argument I'm perenially offered against my distaste is that I have a colonial hangover, that I still live in an elitist past where the all cultural aspects of the raj was revered and imitated and therefore am intolerant of the natural metamorphosis of language. All of this is rubbish, but of course that is what I am expected to say, so I feel I must elaborate on my contemptuous dismissal. First, to be Indian and say things like "That only, no" and "what to tell, only" regularly and still insist the English we speak is the Received Standard is ridiculous and ridiculously un-self aware. And since we clearly do not speak the British normative speech, our English is our own. A consequence of a colonial past, and not a 'hangover'.

Secondly, all those that argue--and rightly so--that English isn't a foreign language in India, must also accept that if English is an Indian language then it has certain specific parameters that distinguish it from, for instance, Australian English. And while these parameters may have been British in origin, they have shed that association the moment the language in its entirety was accepted as Indian, and we began to modify and add to it in accordance with our respective mother tongues. This addition and modification is part of the process of natural evolution of a language at a certain place. Therefore I'm not bothered by verbs spelled with a 'z' instead of a 's' ('criticize', 'colonize'), although personally I prefer the latter. However, to suddenly start 'visiting with' instead of merely visiting or cooking flavourful healthful foods instead of well-flavoured healthy food--and to avidly accept such spellings as 'proffessional' and 'proffesor' before even the whole of the US have accepted them as the norm--show either a complete ignorance of India's own English and indirectly reinforce the argument that English is not an Indian language at all and we must slavishly follow whatever Caucasian form currently dominates the globe. Or, worse, it shows a wilful lack of respect for--indeed, dismissal of--one's Indian identity, coupled with a pathetic hankering to become a subject of American cultural neocolonialism.

And thirdly, it might well be argued that access to American English is more democratic, since anyone with an internet connection can have it, unlike the expensive and urban 'English-medium' public schools which insist on 'colour' and 'labour' being spelt thusly. But this is rather a simplistic explanation that doesn't hold much water. All one has to do to maintain one's linguistic identity as an English-speaking Indian is to choose Indian English (or, failing which, it's closest cousin, British English) as the system's and browser's default language. To the masses who rise up to wail, "But I don't know how to do that!"--mate, if you can create an Orkut profile, you can bloody well do this little thing. And if you can't, learn how. It takes a great deal less effort than taking to the streets and shouting to protect 'Indian culture'. Or have a thundering argument in favour of using the matribhasha or rashtrabhasha at the local tea shop. In case it slipped your attention, English is also a constitutional language of the Indian Union. Do some actual protecting of 'Indian' culture for a change. It takes six seconds.

And finally, if you must blindly and servilely ape the linguistic parameters of a country, please choose a country other than the US. A nation that has striven over the decades to create an English distinct from the rest of the world's--and reflective exclusively of itself--is the most ironic choice of object for such thoughtless, self-subsuming, servile worship. If I were an American and a thoughtful person, I would be... amused at such antics. And it wouldn't be benevolent amusement.

Previous US-related rants here and here.

Coming to the Party

2009-08-10T05:14:00.007+05:30

When Rahul Dravid was the First Bearer of the national colours, he thoroughly over-used a phrase during the two minute post-match performance analysis that captains were obliged to parrot at presentation ceremonies: "everybody came to the party". Never mind the West Indian and South African sun or the English rain, Dravid's Indian team apparently always had a rollicking time. Fairly soon, just seeing him mumble his way through the initial "Yeah, it was great" was cue for a sudden urge to smack the man on the mouth, keeping the inevit. phrase from escaping yet again. A Bengali hears enough about parties all day without the cricket captain adding his two bits.

There's a certain yearning and aversion attached to the word "party" in my state, referring of course to the political sort. I dare say the situation is similar in other states of the country as well, but lacking (so far, anyway) the diversion of religion- and caste-politics, West Bengal pours heart and soul into the purer sort of politics, whereby only the police records and corruption charges of politicians count. Given this, one's ability to get a job, promotions, one's children into schools, ration cards, passports, encashable 'respect', free lunches, unmarked banknotes, and the very right to exist depends on one's 'party' connections. Especially when one steps out of the urban elite circle. It's a fact of life so deeply entrenched, that every time I meet incompetent members of the public workforce, I automatically file the person away as lucky sod who "knows party people". And this is not knowledge that brings much sweetness and light, of course, particularly to those devoid of such connections. There are certainly people who stridently declare they do not want to live on the party's scraps, but I'm not entirely sure there isn't an element of sour grapes in there somewhere. I, for one, have always existed outside the privileged network, and consequently had to sweat and smile and grease fists and rage and almost punch my way through getting a passport. It took me eight months. And that's just one example.

Which is why yesterday was a first. For the first time in my life, the party smiled on me. I was on a government bus, raining muttered curses on the sour conductor who had rudely refused to give me change for a hundred. I was tempted to choose a new target when the bus slowed to almost a standstill, and then began the torturous crawl past a street meeting of the local branch of the CPI(M). The balding speaker in dhuti-panjabi shook his fist and raged at Mamata Bannerjee as traffic and people flowed around the small island of floodlit red and white, honking, puffing black smoke, weighed down by crackling plastic bags of puja shopping, swarming the local phuchkawala and eggroll stand, dipping in and out of the ATM right behind the temporary podium. Conductors screaming out their routes to potential passengers nearly drowned the speakers furiously self-righteous voice. Taxis cruised along the footpaths, looking for passengers. Rickshawpullers within the range of the hot floodlights fanned themselves with pieces of cloth. More than one person loudly voiced his or her scorn. A cyclist even threw a ball of paper at a framed picture of the late Subhash Chakraborty on the podium. But speaker doggedly went on with his speech. In fact, he appeared entirely oblivious of anything but his tiny audience of barely fifty, who occupied wooden chairs and seemed equally enraptured in him.

And it was so familiar, so very frustrating, so very nostalgic, so very not shopping malls and plastic cafés and Sector V glass-and-chrome, so very Calcutta. Whipping out my camera, I took a quick pic of the meeting, just as our dawdling light abruptly changed colour, and we lumbered past the island of 'party people'. Ever since I have developed a politicial consciousness and especially in the recent months, I have come to hold the state CPI(M) in deepest contempt, but as we crossed at the determined speaker--who, up close, was sweating profusely and had a slightly haunted look--I raised my fist slightly and quietly said, "Laal selam, comrade".

Suddenly, the conductor was beside me. "Din takata", he said gruffly. Give me the damned note. I handed it over, startled. The man soundlessly counted out ten ten rupee notes and thrust the bunch at me. "Ticket kaatben na?" I asked, even more taken aback. Won't you deduct my fare? "Ticket lagbe na" he muttered just as guffly before heading up the aisle between seats. You don't have to pay. That was when I noticed a small newspaper cut-out of Subhash Chakraborty pasted on his battered coin-bag. "Thank you, comrade," I mumbled at his sweaty brown uniformed back, recalling earlier curses. I suppose some of us are still in it for a penny's worth of ideology, after all.

Fun

2009-07-30T21:30:00.004+05:30

I'm tired of being asked if I'm having fun, and I want to address the question once and for all: no, I am not having "fun". I have never in my life had "fun", and have no wish to have it in the immediate future. I'm quite content to be content, happy, or occasionally joyful. But "fun", I want no truck with.

I'm either terribly old-fashioned or horribly repressed, or maybe just a plain old bore, but I can't get my mind around how activities usually labelled "fun" can actually be pleasureable. Every time I've been called a stick in the mud and been prodded to "come out with us and have some fun!", the plans for the evening involved going pubbing or clubbing, or peferably both, with a hasty meal thrown in somewhere--usually at 3 AM at a roadside dhaba. Depending on the crowd, it also tended to end in drunken hook-ups.

And I've always been at a loss to understand how braving equally determined crowds to get an overpriced drink, or shimmying to ear-splitting nerve-jangling music with loudly dressed (if one's in Calcutta, anyway) terrible dancers out for a grope--most of whom didn't bother to change or at least spray on fresh perfume after work--or making do with cold butter chicken and stiff naans can be considered time well spent. Or in any way relaxing. If you ask me--and I realise you don't--"having fun" seems like an aggressive advertisment of one's ability to pay for the privilege of sharing an illusion of a good time, possibly to bury one's head deeper into the sands of denial about the the messy, overstressed, routined misery that one's life likely is.

Aggression and a showy loudness. Those are the things that puts me off "fun". Actually, agression, a showy loudness, and a certain herd mentality are the things that put me off "fun". Well, aggression, a showy loudness, a certain herd mentality, and a boring predictability are the things that put me off "fun". And the same goes for "playing hard". I've often been advised to play hard, or indeed, play harder. The bloody thing is such an oxymoron that I entirely fail to grasp the idea. Working hard I get (or wish I did), but what on earth is playing hard? Making a checklist of all currently approved ways and places of having fun and sweeping through them in a determined fashion?

Now, I would hardly want nightclubs to close shop. To each his own, and besides, that would let loose an alarming number of shallow fools on the broader social scene. I merely wish people would stop trying to drag me off to rub shoulders with suchlike. Contrary to popular belief, I do have several ways in which I enjoy myself, and quite thoroughly too. I merely have simpler requirements. On hard day's nights, I usually order a sumptuous meal from a favourite restaurant, buy myself a favourite dessert, and have either a good friend or a good book to keep me company during dinner. Then I have a hot, soaking bath (no bubbles, they leave oily scum on my skin) and usually set up the laptop so I can watch a film while in the bath. Finally I make myself a cup of hot chocolate, have a quick chat with my parents, and crawl between the soft sheets.

I have quite a lot of fun on weekends too. Sometimes I do it by staying in to sleep, shower, eat, and read on a cushy sofa all day (a pot of hot sweet tea always works its way into this scenario). At other times I do it by hosting or going to a cooking-in or a potluck with family or friends (never family and friends). Sometimes, on my days off when everyone else is busy, I pack myself a couple of different kinds of sandwiches, a bottle of lebur shorbot or orange juice, a bottle of water, and a bag of grapes. Then I go to the Boston Public Library to read. If in Calcutta, I go on food-and-photo strolls, breakfasting on piping hot kochuri-torkari and jilipi, taking pictures of the morning flower markets, lunching at small roadshide eateries, capturing the first drop of rain falling in a glass tumbler of tea, snacking on bagfuls of jamrul or a guava, or phuchka. At evenings I make myself a basic sweet cocktail of gin or vodka (not for me the exotic liqueurs with silly names) and invite over a couple of friends who can talk up a blue streak and do not shy away from a caustic joke or two.

Happiness, and this is my piece of weekly wisdom, cannot be grasped at by hanging out at all the happening places (unless, of course, it can). In fact, I'm deeply suspicious of any mass-prescribed recipe for relaxation and joy, from alcohol to spas. However, if one must offer an easy path, I'd say, go for good food, good conversation, and good sex. Neon lights will soon cease to be necessary.

How NOT to write a "Victorian" Romance, Part I

2009-07-27T06:59:00.002+05:30

Or, Why Sunny is a Brat.

[UPDATE: please, please read aneelirh's comment on this post. It's the best piece of summarisation I've read on the subject.]

Dear readers, be not irked. This is a re-post from a Facebook note, because snooty little (or snooty tall) Sunayana Roy--Sue to you and Sunny to me--evidently considers writing on social networking sites beneath her, and what with one thing another (namely, that I shall see her soon and therefore wish to keep her in good humour) I have decided to give that note pride of place on my blog.

There are certain books people read for the sheer smug pleasure of deriding them, and most stereotypical romance novels fall firmly in this category. As a friend and I agreed, the narrative usually is about " a stupid bint who is pointlessly stubborn, idiotically aroused by a boorish hero, tries furiously to repress it, and spinelessly forgives everything he or anyone does to her". However, when this mess is compounded such basic lack of research as chronicled below, it's very hard not to want to hunt the authors down and make them write "I shall consult at least Wikipedia before I put pen to paper again" a hundred times. In their best handwriting.

And while we're at it, can we also please sign a petition to stop all romance novel heroes from being millionaires? Money is not particularly attractive, and such ostentations as private jets and private islands are quite repulsive. I had once read a rather nice Mills&Boon about salvaging the failing marriage of an architect and his photographer wife in a receeding economy, their three children and his extramarital affair included. Would writing stories about people who hover a leetle bit closer to our own reality kill these author-women?

***

1. The younger brother and elder son of Lord ABC cannot also be Lord ABC. A title is not a surname. Please get this imprinted on the inside of your doubtless thick skulls. I shall cheerfully volunteer my assistance to the endeavour.

2. A young debutante is unlikely to wear gowns "in flaming red silk with jewelled fronts". The preferred colour for demure young virgins on the market was white, and while they certainly were deviations, I rather suspect bright red jewelled silk would advertise quite a... different... sort of social function.

3. It is quite unecessary to describe how the legs of the table gleamed in the late spring sunlight and reflected the glow on the heroine's cheek, because only a lady very careless of her reputation would leave the legs of her furniture uncovered.

4. The entire point of the female emancipation movement was that it was absent in earlier times. A heroine described as shy and demure is VERY unlikely to "quietly creep out of her house" to meet the "darkly" and "dangerously" attractive stranger who had slipped her a note that evening at a ball. Besides, a young lady's apartment in a house full of servants is not very easy to creep out of. And finally, I am certain "Victorian" young ladies did not creep.

5. Only a woman born to a titled family is Lady [First name]. The peasant girl who marries a nobleman shall not, no matter how virtuous, ever be called "Lady Mary" by her domestic staff. Her son's nursemaid, however, would call him Master [first name], not Mr. [surname]. She isn't a schoolmistress from a later period. Do pay attention to your cultural history.

I wish to god people would stop writing period romances just because it tickles them to have their virtuous heroine address her romantic tormentor as "My lord". A little learning is a most annoying thing.

Only Words

2009-07-23T07:20:00.001+05:30

[Long post alert]

As nearly everyone knows by now, The Telegraph published an image on the 22nd of July that many found distasteful and contemptuous of women. I will admit I wasn't exactly delighted by the piece myself, but more than offended, I was surprised and a little bit pleased. I had thought The Telegraph smarter than setting themselves up in such obvious fashion--after all, no one with half a toe in contemporary reality could have failed to forsee the backlash. In fact, so obviously did the newspaper make a sitting duck of themselves that I wondered whether this could have been a publicity stunt (not that The Telegraph needs it). After all, no long-term or even short-term regular reader of the newspaper could seriously accuse them of being a misogynistic or sexist publication.

Of course, this contextual analysis does not in any way diminish the disappoinment, distaste or anger the image may have inspired in the article's female--and, one hopes, male--readers. Their concerns are perfectly valid. However, their reaction to the image hauls to the spotlight, I think, a linguistic and cultural tension that I have personally felt for some years now.

Language is inherently biased towards the location and culture of its origin. In other words, language--particularly idioms and folk sayings--is inherently ethnocentric. And in so being, it nourishes and sustains certain aspects of a cultural identity as a norm, even when in actual practice the ethnic group's lifestyle has become more flexible. For example, the Bengali baagdhara or idiom "Kaw-awkkhor gomangsho" indicates illiteracy by identifying the first letter of the [Bengali] alphabet with beef. That the origin of this idiom is Hindu is immediately obvious, because only in Hinduism is beef a forbidden meat. Thus for as long as this saying is in circulation, one--quite possibly unconsciously--affirms the socio-religious prohibition on beef, and in so doing also affirms a Bengali Hindu society as the source of this particular saying. An acquaintance suggested Buddhism as a possible source, which again goes to show how our own cultural beliefs influence the way we think. After all, to a Bengali, giving up 'non-veg' is a great gastronomic sacrifice--and what greater sacrifice than a gastronomic one? So naturally, a religion preaching non-violence and sacrifice of personal pleasures must advise vegetarianism, no?

And therein lies the trouble, I think. Being, on the one hand, a... 'non-western', shall we say?... participant in an economy, education system, and workplace that originated in western Europe and the US has made us accept and internalise certain western ethical parameters to a very large extent. Undoubtedly this is largely an excellent things (although that would be a 'westernised' urban Indian's opinion) . But this immersion in a western--or now, 'global'--way of life has also recently given us an extra push towards establishing our 'ethnic' identities firmly, lest we only exist as half-baked second-best westerners. There is a great deal of talk of cultural revival and going back to one's roots--the pipe-smoking pucca shaheb has gone entirely out of fashion.

To be fair, of course, one should add here that being thusly 'ethnic' has currency only amongst those who have already established their global credentials--there is no element of 'close to my roots' when our cook makes us payesh, but when a neighbour's AB[C]D son-in-law made the dessert for her, the lady nearly wept with the double exotic pleasure of a America-born man preparing such a "perfectly Bengali" dish for her. I know for a fact that Indrani Sen's voice held special appeal for a friend of mine from the day she discovered the lady is a professor of Economics at one of the better known--and British-sounding--city colleges. And I think it was Dipta who once said vernacular swear words achieved a certain ethnic coolth once the urbane urban female population started using them. He was rather floored by LMG women calling someone a gandu, if I recall right.

On the other hand, returning to one's roots implies returning to the decided datedness, the pre-PC quality to our mother tongues. It is especially complicated in cases like India, where the same language is spoken by a cross-section of religions and sometimes even ethnicties. I've been so well 'sensitised' by my more global persona that I bite my tongue when idioms such as "tate ki Mohabharot oshuddho hoye jaabe?" ("Will it render the Mahabharata impure?"; roughly, a caustic "doing this little thing will have earth-shattering bloody consequences, eh?") present themselves, opting instead for the safer, "tate ki peter bhaat hojom hobe na?" (will it stop you from digesting the rice in your tummy?). Because unlike pork and beef, rice has been left alone by the scriptures and is therefore unlikely to offend. Unless, of course, one belongs to the Cult of Tortured Thinness.

And so every time I feel indignant when a man booms, "come on then, I haven't worn bangles on my wrists have I!", indicating his undilulated masculinity, I cannot help but recall having used the same trope to vent my disgust at fellow commuters a few years back. An emptyish bus, mostly full of men, had an excellent view as a frisky drunk tried to paw me, then collapsed on me, and finally grabbed me by the shoulders and tried to shake me when I managed to push him off. After I'd commanded (I can be quite effectively imperious for brief periods) the conductor to stop the bus and throw the man off it, I turned my fury towards the men (the only women on the bus were three old ladies). "You lot should wrap your precious selves in a sari and stay locked up at home", I had snarled, and had never for a second felt disempowered for saying it.

For the bangles and the sari insults, at least to me, convey a certain rights-deprived, economically dependent and socially powerless idea of the female that was a historical fact (and often a contemporary one, behind closed doors), which contemporary language recorded and preserved as a collective cultural memory. Therefore when I advise a makeover to a group of ineffectual fellow citizens, I am not suggesting that their spinelessness makes them prime candidates for contemporary womanhood; I'm implying that they embody that state of existence that women experienced for centuries on end, and were socially conditioned to accept as 'natural' to them. After all, I could easily have called those men bleeding cunts or colossal pricks [which, as an insult, falls completely on its face], and I doubt I would have been accused of misogyny or misandry.

Again, this does not excuse The Telegraph's visual for those that found it offensive. But it does indicate the delicate jugglings we do every day in an effort just to keep off people's toes, and such effort deserves a mention.

Vunce more, mit feelink

2009-06-27T03:20:00.011+05:30

[Enormous post alert]

JUDE BA admissions, ladies and gentlemen. The Greatest Show on earth, if only because it managed to sneak to the top for a few seconds while the list-makers weren't looking.

And a complete washout this year, the monsoon no-show notwithstanding.

Three years ago, I remember saying, "at JU, come admission test season, we have sheer, uncontrollable entertainment of the nerve-wrecking kind". We moaned and groaned about it, and justifiably so. Apart from the rush of sorting three thousand nervous prospective examinees--each armed with at least a Mummy or a Daddy--into their right buildings and right rooms, there were the 'human-interest' cases that provided fodder for addas weeks afterwards. Like this examinee who had been caught lurking in the men's loo in the Bangla department just before the exam began, and had to be dragged out of there loudly protesting. Yet he couldn't--or wouldn't--tell us what possible benefit his exam could derive from this little loo-retreat. There was that examphobic girl, who, when asked her name, forgot it in panic and had a complete breakdown, screaming her head off at Supchau and ADG. We've also had our fair share of imposters, fine moustachioed specimens of masculinity trying to pass themselves off as the delicate young flowers smiling up at us from the 4x4 picture box of the exam form (and vice versa).

My ever-memorable was the girl who was convinced we were trying to trick her out of sitting for the English entrance by sending her off to the Economics department.
"We simply cannot seat all of you in the English department," I tried to explain, but she waved it away like so much concocted excuse. After several minutes of struggle, I suddenly remembered the girl was from the West Bengal Higher Secondary board, and had what I thought was a stroke of genius.
"When you took your HS, did you take it in your own school?" I asked triumphantly.
"Oh no," said she, "I had to go to this school, you know, far away. It took a half an hour bus ride and then a rickshaw ride that took ten rupees--although the first day the man asked for fifteen, can you imagine, he thought I didn't know..."
"This is the same exact concept", I cut in hastily. "You want to get into the English department, so you must take your exam in the Economics department. All right?"
Her face lit up in comprehension, and I started walking away, totally patting myself on the back for this piece of absolute brilliance. Which was when I heard a sudden shocked gasp behind me.
"Yes?" I asked tersely, wondering what she could possibly have left to ask.
"So, if this is like the HS, and I should sit in a different department... then shouldn't I also be sitting in a different university? What university should I be at? What university? Tell me!"
At which point I ran away.

And then there were the parents. Always, always, there were the parents. For reasons we never fathomed, they were convinced that within the privacy of the exam-rooms, we were either ceremonially sacrificing their children, or extracting their entrails to dance upon. Or cunningly convincing them to snort cocaine. Or forcing them to perform the Kamasutra ("Performance as Text", eh?). Or inciting them to join the Sicilian mafia. Or encouraging them to become vegetarians and forswear biriyani. They were forever trying to break into the buildings, demanding to be "shown" that their children were all right. Most tried to strongarm their way in first (heh. We had five-people strong bouncer teams at every entrance for exactly such circs). That failing, they skulked in the building's shadows, trying to peek through the dirt-encrusted windows. Since the uni buildings are 'maintained' by government employees, the dirt has had fifty years to accumulate, making this an entirley pointless enterprise; but that's yet to deter determined parents, who enthusiastically make incomprehensible sign-language gestures in front of opaque sheets of glass. A smarter few actually manage to enter the building on the pretext of using the loo, and hide beneath ground-floor staircases waiting for the opportune moment when they can dash out and scramble up the stairs to where the exam rooms are. At least one examinee broke down into huge racking sobs when we firmly escorted her father down the stairs.

There was a reason BA admish. was called the annual disaster-management and damage-control day.

Then came Exam '09. Scorched in every previous year, we brought out the big guns. Entry had been divided up between three different gates. Crowd management teams were swarming all entry points. A large poster had been put up, warning stentoriously, "Abandon All Guardians, Ye Who Enter Here" [link=pic]. What we completely did not expect was that people would actually listen. A mild reproof was all it took for most mummy-daddy grandpa-grandmum pairs to back off, pushing the offspring forward with muttered blessings. The only case of slight resistance was handled masterfully (mistressfully?) by Supriyadi, when she insisted that a gentleman standing in queue for his daughter had to take the exam in her stead. "No no no!" said the nervous gentleman, backing away and waving his hands like windmills.
"Line e jokhon dariyechhen tokhon porikkha ditei hobe", said a firm Supriyadi, advancing. If you were found standing in the examinee's queue, you have to take the exam.

It's little wonder, then, that thusly disappointed by the crowd no-show, volunteers would read over the examinees' shoulders avidly to enrich the JUDE oral tradition of exam howlers. That was the only exam-pleasure left for the day. The first started making it's way 'round the campus within a few minutes of the exam commencing. "In place of 'Mother tongue: ___', someone wrote 'pink'!" ran the scandalised whispers. Names came next. "There's a girl called Sonali Mayur on my list... but she didn't turn up", said someone dejectedly. "There's a Samudra Gupta in my class!" said someone else. "Jude Judhajit!" chirped yet another. I walked into a class to say hello to my friend Hrileena, and found the invigilator asking 'Akshay Kumar' to sign the attendance sheet, please.

But the real hell broke loose after the answerscripts were collected, signed, and turned in to be coded at the end of the exam. The corridors were replete with "What did you see? What did you hear?" From the noise, it was clear that we had all heard plenty. Some of the credit certainly goes to the paper, which was delightfully clever. For instance, there was a section where the examinee had to pick the phrase in closest association with a given word, from a list of three or four phrases/words. For the given word 'barrack', one of the options was 'run for President'. And it had several victims from every room. The other killer was 'swine', which had the options 'influenza' and 'contagious'. A clever lad who had got it right was a little disproportionately gleeful about it. "I got it right, I got it right!", he sang. When people looked at him quizzically, he said that that particular question gave him great pleasure to answer. Just a few days back, he had been called a swine by a classmate, and not knowing the word, he had looked it up in the dictionary. And now he couldn't wait to meet said classmate. Called him swine, did he? Did he? Hah! The surprise hitword, I think we all agree, was 'kindling'. As astonishing number of examinees seem to believe it means 'baby human'.
My personal favourite of the lot, however, was 'cogent', and its wickedly misleading option, 'male accomplice'. I wonder who contributed that.

Then came the short notes.
Calvin and Hobbes. "Calvin was a great photographer and philosophist [sic.] which were his Hobbes".
Omkara. "Omkara is a story stoled from great poet Shakespeare who read original is not getting enjoy from the film which has many bad word and desi gaalis always".
Eliot. "Eliot was great poet who wrote a church in a country yard" (after such achievement, what need of architects?)
Lewis Carroll. "Lewis Carroll was a wonderful writer who wrote Alice in Wonderland. She wrote it for her little daughter". (I think this boy has a Barbie hangover)

Correct the following sentences:
"Blind by 1648, Fortune did not favour Milton" -- "Blinded by the number '1648', Fortune did not favour Milton'.
"Our cricket team batted poorly in the first inning" -- "Our cricket team batted poorly in all the innings". Can't say I disagree, unfortunately.
"I knocked up on the door..." -- this gets a mention simply because it exists.

Make idiomatic sentences by completing the following sentences (filled-in words in italics):
"Take yourself in the hand, and the pleasure the better".
"Better the girl you know than the girl you don't."
And the absolute gem from this category: "Workers of the world dream! You have nothing to lose but your souls!"

If only Marx had thought of that one.

All in all, though, I'd like the unruly mob back. A few torn hairs and clutched collars makes the Entrance stew taste just right. In fact, if we run another deficit next year, I'm perfectly prepared to round up a few of my batchmates and start a loud fistfight in front of the main gate. Or we could intercept the lunch packets coming in from Milonda's and sell it to the starved parents milling about. Anything for a rousing chaos. Just say the word.

The "I" in Rimi

2009-05-28T23:35:00.004+05:30

From summary of a link sent by a (suitably mischievous) Boston buddy:

"Hayden Panettiere got a new tattoo in Italian, spies Perez Hilton. Unfortunately for her, a word is misspelled. The saying "vivere senza rimipianti," which scrolls down the side of her body, supposedly means "to live without regret" -- but the correct spelling should be rimpianti,with no additional "i." Sounds like she may live to regret that."

"Ah", he adds, still mischievously, "the regrets of living without Rimi! The world is in sympathy with us".

He's lucky I've always found mischief delightfully endearing.

Lesson #1, or What Civilised People Eat

2009-05-23T02:51:00.001+05:30

(It certainly isn't cheeseburgers, it isn't)

While still in Boston--which, despite all my pretend upturned noses, I have deep affection for--I made a list of things I would devour once I was back home, with preferred methods of cooking specified wherever applicable (I'm obsessive that way). Predictably, and aided by the subzero temps, my list began with biryani, and traversed kormas, koshas, rezalas, kalias, chNaaps, pulaos, and malaicurrys to reach the ultimate dessert: a rich, scrumptious, home-made pulir payesh--the pulis crisp with an outer layer of grated coconut and flour, but softened within by the gur (alas, no nolen gur this beastly time of the year) and a small amount of khoa kheer, garnished with slivered almonds and a few strands of saffron, so delicate they'd distintegrate around the neighbouring kishmish, plumped by the thin sweet milk under the thick kheer.

Plus I'd actually have proper Sunday breakfasts. Luchis, which I prefer soft and a golden-white as opposed to crispier and just turning golden-brown, and a basic but delcious alurdom, flavoured with tomatoes and garnished with dhone pata (which Americans call cilantro--quite a pleasing, if strange, name). Aluparathas without onions in the potato filling, and moglai parathas (my talent for killing a dish with words manifested itself once again when I called a moglai paratha "crisply fried thick paraths folded on itself in a triangle or a square to hold in a batter of eggs, salt, chopped onions and chopped chillies". My audience, who failed to realise frying the paratha cooks the batter too, went "Ewww! Gross!" in unison). And the deliciously deceptive koraishutir, hinger, or daaler kochuri--bloody time consuming to make and gobbled in a flash. I remember trying to describe the difference between hinger and daaler kochuri to someone on the local train once. "One is puri--the small puffs you get Indian restaurants?--with a filling of daal and asafoetida pasted together. The other is a puri filled with a different kind of daal paste cooked with slightly different spices". The lady kindly nodded her head, clearly not seeing the difference, and I feel like the sort of idiot whose head should be banged against a wall. Any wall. And then I did further damage by stating koraishutir kochuri's filling is made of a paste of "green peas and hot green chillies". I think I have put her off Bengali breakfasts forever.

Once I am done with that, I thought, I shall delve into the more mundane but no less heavenly alu-jhinga-posto, which I used to also inadequately translate as "potatoes and gourd in poppy-seed paste". And moog daal with aloo and begun bhaja. And I'd have prawns and diced pieces of chicken (marinated in garlic, a tiny bit of chopped ginger, salt, and lime juice) tossed and then simmered in chopped onions, chopped green chillies, and a few grated halves of tomatoes. Simple, but delicious. Then maybe a brief detour of Indian Chinese (chillie chicken, bless the US with thy presence!) before hitting the phuchkas, jhalmuris, egg-rolls, egg-chicken rolls, and mutton sami rolls (I really feel for this lady, the poor dear). And every time my sweet-tooth tickled, I could whip up a batch of malpoas in matter of minutes (give or take thirty).

However, what I've actually eaten in the last dizzyingly hot three days--bypassing the fragrant biryani and the payesh, awaiting my pleasure--is parboiled rice, mushur daal cooked the Bengali way (NO onions), pNuier dNata chochhori*, a light phulkopir daalna (no ghee, no tomatoes, and careful amounts of gorom moshla wonly), and the predictably Bengali machher jhol made with freshly-caught sweetwater (river) rui, and not aNshte bloody seafish, thank goodness! Breakfast, I've slept through, and have had chilled mangoes**, lichu and jamrul for dessert and general sustenance throughout the day.

And bigods, I've never felt this well-fed in a long, long time. Bless homecoming.

--
*pNui is possibly Malabar spinach, quite different from regular spinach. And chochhori is a slightly dry curry made of the spinach, the veins of the leaves, slices of potatoes, pumpkins, and sometimes a few pieces of brinjal. When cooked in summer, our cook+my mum+my aunts and greataunts convert the chochhori to a torkari, such that there is more gravy and less shallow frying of the vegetables.

** are lyangras is the market yet? Where I live we only get himshagor and other lesser variants, and himshagor is too sweet for me.

Conversations with Strange People

2009-05-13T05:27:00.001+05:30

Reasoably attractive stranger to Rimi at Davis Square café: Uh, hi. Can I share this table with you? They [jabbing a finger towards the staff] say those tables are unavailable because they have to clean up a spill...
Rimi: please. Feel free.
Stranger: thanks!

After a while of general chitchat:

Stranger: so, I never actually introduced myself. Hi, I'm X (extends hand).
Rimi: hello. Rimi (shakes extended hand).
S: so... uh, are you British or just Indian?
R: just Indian, I am afraid.
S: 'cause you have this British accent. It's kinda cute.
R: I haven't really, but thank you.
S: (persistently) and you speak like English people too. All big words and "c-aa-nt", "d-aa-nce"...
R: (laughing politely) well, at least we have the specifics now.
S: sorry?
R: "English" as opposed to the wide-ranging "British"?
S: you mean, like... the Irish accent?
R: I mean all the different countries and regions and local influences. There is quite a variety, I understand. And mine, of course, isn't one of them.

Just then three people enter with "Conserve Energy" leaflets and ask the proprietor/accountant/supervisor if they can leave a bunch next to the door. There is five minutes of putting up a couple of them on the wall, a cheerful "All the best with the rest!", and then the group leaves.

S: what is America coming to, huh?
R: (taken aback) good things, I hope.
S: do ya? With all this bullshit?
R: (looking around) which?
S: all this environment crap. You can't leave your lights on, you shouldn't take long showers, you should drive cheap little cars that supposedly use less gas... I mean, do I pay my taxes to be told what to do by a president I didn't event elect?
R: well. There is the little problem of diminishing resources, and growing population, and environmental damage...
S: oh, oh! Come on!
R:...and our leaders are expected to solve those for the 'greater common good'... I'm sorry, you were saying?
S: I agree with you! I agree that our "leaders", however they may have sneaked into office, have to solve these problems. But is that going to happen by going fascist on their own countrymen? It's like having a live-in mom!
R (mildly): I am all right with that, really. In my country we're quite used to the idea of living with our parents. We fight, we make up, we rebel, we concede... it's a viable enough model. The analogy certainly has precedence in political thought.
S: well yeah. I went to grad school at Harvard to study politics, I know all about the body politic and whatever. But this is a free country! It's the twenty first century! The government can't tell us what to do!
R: (dryly) I think you'll find it can, X.
S: in America it shouldn't, that's the whole point on which America was founded, Rimi. We are not a communist dictatorship.
R: I... do you really think so? Because this America is a contemporary composite whole, you know? It's sort of not... not like India, for example, which has had a traditional system of integration and segregation between communities. America is sort of... homogenising, I think. And to keep that effect in place it has to concede ground... evolve, you know? If everybody is to be American first, then America cannot really -- I mean, this is what *I* think obviously, and I have no knowledge of the US constitution's history -- but I think even if the original framers of your constitution wanted minimum government interference, with...
S: because they were thoughtful people who were right.
R: very likely, but also because their approach to government was based on their own experiences with it. I mean, if you met an Indian girl when you were young, walking home from school, and she hit your and stole your lunch money and your watch and your new sneakers and hit you some more and ran away, I assume it would influence how you react to Indian girls for some time onwards. At least it would for most people, and that is an important thing to remember, don't you think? That was a stupid example and I'm not explaining this very well, but...
S: so... basically you're saying they were sorta right but also wrong?
R: (takes a deepish breath) I am saying that perhaps we should not simplify political ideologies too much, and that we should always take the original and subsequent evolving contexts into consideration.
S: well, I am not simplifying, and I am "taking context into consideration".
R : I'll have to take your word for it.
S: Oh? Well, let me tell you something, and I hope you don't mind. I think you're being a little snotty. I think you're trying to tell me I don't understand the politics of my own country!
R (thoughtfully): do you know, I rather think I am.

Fear Itself

2009-05-11T23:36:00.002+05:30

Young Neelakantan, one of the current crop of JUDE ughhs (undergrads, for the uninitiated), has recently done one of those godawful Facebook survey/test things on fears. "Which of the 62 commonest fears do you have?", it asks intrusively, and then proceeds to list a set of fears that I am VERY hard pressed to believe are common at all (fear of silk; fear of "being myself" in company; fear of flowers). But this reminded me of a conversation I had with a an acquaintance--who, frankly, is a bit of an obnoxious prat--while walking back to our dorm from the local Mexican and Indian/Pakistani hub, Moody Street.

Rimi: oi, let's walk through this cemetary. It chops off a good twenty minutes.
Friend: What???
Rimi (raises voice slightly over evening traffic): Let us walk. Through. This cemetery.
Friend: are you mad! It is 11 at night! Cemetery!
R: But...what? Waitaminute, you'd rather walk uphill, downhill, then uphill again for twenty extra minutes because you're scared of walking through a cemetery?
F (emphatically): YES!
R: why?
F: I mean, I am not scared or anything. It's just not sensible.
R: common zombie precaution, you mean? On the same level as looking right, left, then right again before you cross the street?
F: (walks firmly past cemetery gate in steely silence)

After a few minutes of sulky silence, walking along the cemetery wall.

F: so you are not afraid of anything, eh?
R: plenty many things.
F: but they're all cool fears, I bet. Like being afraid of being kidnapped by aliens, because you're so special aliens would totally want to kidnap you.
R: (raises a silent eyebrow in the barely-lit darkness)
F: (not noticing eyebrow) or, or, maybe you're afraid of not getting an A in an exam. (flaps his hands) "Oh my god, I have got a B plus. Oh my god! What will I do!"
R (mildly): I'd probably go sit on a grave under the blood moon to feel better. Or jump from a fifty-feet cliff into a shark-infested lagoon. You never know with my kind.
F (moving away from a little): what do you mean, "my kind"? Are you... special... in any way?
R: (allows a moment's silence in fond remembrance of company that actually understands such basic irony)
R: I mean cool, fearless folks like me.
F: I bet you're afraid of cemeteries and darkness too.
R: I'm not.
F: so you would go into that house (points to empty ill-kept dark house overlooking the cemetery) all alone right now?
R: no.
F: aha!
R: because that would be trespassing.
F: would you at least do that jumping into shark-infested sea from a high cliff thing?
R: no.
F: hah!
R: because I am sensible, and I do not use that word as a euphemism for cowardice.
F: that's just...
R (calmly): but most importantly, because I have absolutely no need or desire to prove my assumed fearlessness to judgemental fools who measure bravery by idiocy. Goodnight.

I notice I am losing my temper oftener these days. Old age will out.

A Brief Critique of Food

2009-05-02T03:27:00.004+05:30

Or, "Crib Crib Crib!"

I live in the Greater Boston Area. It is usually bitterly cold, chillingly windy, and depressingly rainy. Since I come from a place that is murderously hot, horribly stuffy, and in equal parts refreshingly and distressingly rainy, it took some polar-oppositising to settle in. F'rinstance, no sooner had I sweated my luggage down a flight of steep stairs and gone to town to buy a table-fan, that the sun went down on the crisp autumn day and the place suddenly became Calcutta in wintertime. I dropped the new fan and scurried for blankets, of which I hadn't any. I slept the night in my school cardigan (which I still wear, six years after) and two thin cotton bedsheets folded double and wrapped tightly around. And woke up the next morning, sweating profusely and gasping for breath in the bleeding bright sunshine. New England is, in short, a very climatically confused place that can't tell it's own sunshine from it's rainclouds.

And matching it every step of the way is its wonderfully "diverse" food. Never before have I seen main courses being advertised as "entrées" on restaurant menucards. Or been expected to eat my salad before I am served the aforementioned "entrées". It's all very disorienting and fascinating, because frankly, I hadn't expected America to be quite this different. But more importantly, I hadn't expected 'foreign food' to put on such completely unrecognisable costumes and still dare to masquerade as authentic cooking. I did not expect to see the day when I tasted the first forkful of a Chinese noodle dish, and thought I'd been served dessert a course too soon. And when I bit into an actual dessert, I certainly did not imagine I would yearn for the quasi-bitter semi-sweetness of Kookie Jar. If there's one thing I can identify as culinarily American, it is the sweetness. The chilli chicken is sweet, the pork fried rice is sweet, the saag paneer tastes like a bowlful sugar has been upended in it, and the pastries can knock a tooth out, easy. Now, some people love it. Clearly the average American does, hence the pervasive sweetness. But so does my friend Deep, him of the savoury Indian street-food patronage. But then he tells me he used to sneak handfuls of sugar into his mouth as a child, so really, what can one expect?

But this sweetness of most things Oriental on the one hand, the deep-fried mayo-dipped burgers on the other, and the ridiculously overspiced curries on the third have driven me up the wall. I shall not even bother to comment on the local biryani. Tossing onions, tomatoes and meat with fully-cooked rice does not biriyani make, my lads. Go back to being an unemployed engineer and leave the sacred cooking to the suitably revential (and talented). People who slaughter biriyani with such careless contempt should be tied to a chair and tickled relentlessly.

But to go back to "driven me up the wall", it's a pity my tastebuds developed in Calcutta. Leaving the city was like having a vital part of my existence torn out. I miss my phuchka and my rolls. I miss the jhalmuri with boiled potato and coconut slices, extra-hot chanachur and chopped onions and green chillies, mixed with a thin tangy-sweet tamarind chutney and topped with a dash of salt and squeeze of the tenth of a bright green lemon, all of it flavoured with a judicious amount of mustard oil. I miss the alur chop and beguni and lonkar chop with their thin outer later of crisply fried byashon (besan). I miss the subtly sweet roshomalai and the hot-off-the-flames roshogolla. Everyone knows only a skilless sweetmaker will try to cover up for it by making the mishtis extra sweet. And by gods, I miss real tea, made by soaking real Darjeeling leaves in boiling water, somtimes with milk and sugar, sometimes with lemon juice, sometimes by itself. If I have to drink one more cup of mango-flavoured green tea enhanced by the flavour of juniper berries and enriched by added antioxidants...I swear there shall be Consequences. Just give me my regular tea , strong enough to beat back a headache with a stick, and thin biscuits to dip into it. On a winter's or monsoon's evening add piping hot phuluri with muri and lonka, and it's within throwing distance of heaven. Gods, with the rising temperatures I even miss titaar daal (a soothing, cooling moog daal cooked with mustard seeds and large pieces of papaya and kumro, which is called "squash" here instead of "pumpkin"), which my mum would have to force-feed me earlier. Give me this day my daily daal-bhaat, preferably cooked by someone else, is all I cry to the heavens these days.

And paradoxically, my own cooking--not to be mocked at in the days of yore--has become a curiously homogenised, undifferentiated mess of overboiled vegetables and overspiced gravy. I can no longer tell the difference between my phulkopir daalna and my alu-beguner jhol. And I've been so far influenced by a growing temporal distance from the subtly spiced, varied Bengali palette that I no longer even care. I merely throw the mess away--a thing I would never have done back home, throwing away food, haw!--and order pizza from the local Greek folks. I detest pizza, but the the shop-people like me and I them, so I suppose there is some inherent goodness to the extra-cheesy, extra-oily meat-filled plate of dough. It's often said in my family that a helping of green chilli paste takes care of below-par cooking. In the absence of green chillies, I suppose a cheerful smile and happy banter makes up for inedibility.

Well, not really. But when I am out of culinary options, I will take the one that comes with the smile. Without 'fries' and 'soda', thank you.

(Get me home! And turn on the monsoons!)

Facebook groups

2009-04-29T01:11:00.001+05:30

An occasional correspondent pointed me towards a Facebook group about a private liberal arts college in Pennsylvania. The group is set up by students of the college, and its primary aim seems to be to condemn the intelligence of those that haven't heard of it. Consider copy-pasted demo below:

Idiot: So, where do you go to school?
F&M student: F&M.
Idiot: Haha, never heard of it.
F&M student: Franklin & Marshall?! It's a liberal arts college in Lancaster...?
Idiot: Ohh, like Millersville?
F&M student: NO. Whatever, man. It's cool, you wouldn't have gotten into F&M anyway.

And that is the cinching argument: those that haven't heard of the college will not get in. It's true, too: they shall be tellingly left out... on account of not having applied. It is difficult to apply to colleges one has not heard of.

I spent the most intellectually rich five years of my relatively short life in one of the best liberal arts departments of Asia, and there are (educated) people in my state that haven't heard of it. So I feel for the students of F&M, which is doubtless an excellent institution. But the sweeping generalised arrogant condescension of a lot of Facebook groups bother me sometimes. "It's not MY fault what you said can be misconstrued as a sexual inneduendo" is quirky, but "You haven't heard of my small private American north-east coast college? You're an idiot!" pushes all my buttons. Normativity, much?

P.S: I'm considering asking our Caucasian American departmental chair if she has heard of JU. And if she hasn't...

2009-04-20T11:20:00.003+05:30

No other sun has brightened up my heaven,
No other star has ever shone for me;
All my life's bliss from thy dear life was given,
All my life's bliss is in the grave with thee.
But when my days of golden dreams had perished,
And even Despair was powerless to destroy,
Then did I learn how existence might be cherished,
Strengthened and fed without the aid of joy.
And even now, I dare not let it languish,
Dare not indulge in Memory's rapturous pain;
Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish,
How could I seek the empty world again?: Emily Brontë [and Daphne du Maurier]

And so on, and so forth.

Paranoid Androids

2009-04-15T03:17:00.004+05:30

D: do you think Amazon is the public face of [whispery sinister voice] the GCC dot dot dot?
R: the warriors?
D: oooof, the website!
R: (doubtfully) what is the GCC dot dot dot?
D: don't say the name out loud! Say [assumes aforedescribed voice] GCC dot dot dot.
R: (dropping voice) what is it?
D: it is... the Global Capitalist Conspiracy of Rid Us of Our Hard-Earned Money.
R: ooooh!
D: (urgently) so what do you think?
R: ohmygod, I think you're right! I just like completely against my will totally involuntarily spent 200-something dollars on it last week.
D: did you feel this strange seductive pull? Like you couldn't close the tab even if you wanted to? Like the "recommendations" were yanking at your soul?
R: yes! Oh god, oh god. I ordered From Hell in hardcover.
D: told you.
R: and a camera. And a 8 GB memory card with it. And a recorder. And the Pullman trilogy from Amazon UK, so the spellings would be right. And my own The Sandman Companion. It's rubbish, by the way.
D:I know. Bender is a twit. This Saturday I bought a turntable...
R: nice.
D: ... and suddenly, completely to my surprise, with no intention to, Buffy 6 and 7.
R: you idiot! You can watch pirated episodes online!
D: (coldly) just like you can read scanned Pullman online?
R: (mumblewumble)
D: hey! What if big brother's listening? Right now? To us talking about GCCdotdotdot?
R: ooh! I bet they're despatching "agents" to "silence" us even as we shake in our slippers.
D: we can seek shelter from the KGB.
R: (exasperatedly) they no longer exist, stupid.
D: that's all you know, moron! The truth is, they've gone undercover. They've got ops all over in India... as GKB.
R: (is astounded) oh!
D: they thought they'd cleverly disguise themselves by mixing up the letters in their name...
R: but you were too smart for them!
D: exactly. Opticals, panopticon. Doesn't take a genius.
R: but, but... what do we do till we get to the GKB?
D: hide under our beds?
R: good idea!

Otoeb ei bochhor khaater nicher dhulo aar makorshar jaaler modhye thekei amar noboborsher preeti o shubhechha grohon korun. Ki aar kora? Praan aage na okhadhyo American Desi puli-pitha aage?

(Rimi+Love) =

2009-04-11T07:21:00.004+05:30

Admirer as I think I am--of stars that may not give a damn--I cannot, now I see them, say, "I missed one terribly all day". Were all stars to disappear or die, I should learn to look at an empty sky. And feel its total dark sublime...

(...though this might take me a little time.)

[Stolen without permission from Mr. Auden, who doth not protest (on account of being dead)]

How Cultures Clashhh!!! (or, When my Greataunt saw Juno)

2009-04-09T22:22:00.004+05:30

Excerpt from text-based Gtalk conversation:

cousin: so I took it [noo-ly acquired laptop] to them to show it off, hehe, and since I had a copy of Juno on it, we watched it.
Rimi: of all films!
cousin: oh god, don't remind me. Had to pause it every five minutes and translate the accent.
Rimi: serves you right. Juno indeed. Little cowardly piece of cheap happymaking propogandist rubbish.
cousin: hahaha, you just ask her what she thought of the film. Hahahahahahahaha. Just you ask.

Next day, on Skype: [conensed and mostly translated]
Rimi: eije, shunlam toom Yammarikan fillim dekhta? (Been wotching American films, eh?)
Greataunt (slowly): I am still not quite sure...I didn't even believe it was in English at first. I just couldn't understand anything they were saying.
Rimi: (soothingly) right you are. It was American. They're quite distinct.
G: hoom, American.
R: you don't approve of Americans?
G: I am sure they are just fine... it's just that I cannot imagine these radical new ideas against abortion are actually popular.
R: wot??? :-o
G: I mean, young people can have these fluffy idealistic notions about, "oh, my child is so important". And all the rubbish about "don't kill it!", as if a one month foetus can be "killed". But that's not how the world works. Isn't it their parents duty to make them understand what the right choice is? All the adults in the film seems so... strange. They seem happy about this child's [meaning Juno's] completely irresponsible, and frankly immoral, decision.
R: actually, here...
G (talking over me): you know I am not as conservative as most of my generation. Okay, I was a little surprised at how easily everyone accepted the children being, er, intimate. But then this was in America. And also, when I was young people married very young, and most women became, er, active.... very soon after they started to, er, you know.
R: (hurriedly) yesyes. Of course, of course.
G: but I will still say this, Rimi: sometimes touting personal freedom just for the sake of it is hardly being progressive or liberal.
R: (desperately) but it's not...
G: wait. I know what you will probably say. But having a child for either the sheer novelty of it, or, or... or just because some silly immature schoolgirl-group tells you it is the "right thing to do" -- isn't it rather selfish and self-absorbed? Maane you can't bring a child into the world just because you were careless and because you think your, er, er, genes are too precious to be destroyed. And you cannot just give away a child! What is a baby, an extra bowl of food you cooked?
R: (inexplicably starts feeling like a chastised pro-lifer who has seen the silliness of her ways)
G: oh, no no no, my dear! I didn't mean to scold you. You have always been such a sensible girl. I try to keep up with your generation's ideas, but this villianisation of abortion is unacceptably selfish and self-indulgent. Conceive, feel righteous about having a child -- which makes no sense, then give it away shamelessly. What is the film saying to children like, you know, B? Never mind the destructive population growth, you do just what you feel like, and never mind parental responsibility. Never mind that there is an age for everything, never mind that when you have children you are bound to care for them the best you can and teach them the right things...you just hand over your child to an orphanage or some waiting person and run off to "live my life"!

Pause for breath. I twiddle my thumbs.

G (suddenly refocusing): have they ever seen an orphanage? How the children live, what they eat? Do they even know that hardly anyone is adopted at all? Or are American orphanages very different?
R: well I haven't of course...
G: because I have heard American jails are much better than ours.
R: er. Yes. Maybe. Anything is better than ours, I suppose.
G (hopelessly): but that isn't the point, is it. I was watching the film and thinking, how fast will this new fad spread all over thr world? Will people stop thinking about consequences completely? Will no one use their common sense at all? And then I thought, maybe I am being an old fogie, because these days I cannot decide if what we were taught was right or whether ideas you people come up with are more right.
R: awww, J!

And I hadn't the heart, anymore, to correct her. I like to think of my great aunt as a cheerful woman of solid, old-fashioned common sense, who has adapted from the British era to the Partition era to the ethnic-tension era to the naxal era to the industrial lock-down era to this modern, miraculous, globalised, ethically homogenised, financially wobbly, religiously fundamentalist Alice-in-Wonderland era, with a few wars thrown in for good measure. And if her traditional values are shocked by the silly self-righteous logic of "have conceived, will ruin a future life" poster-film, and she takes comfort in thinking this "villianisation" of abortion in a "dangerously over-populated" world is a crazy new idea of the self-obsessed, morally vague, and consequence-blind young (and that it shall die a natural death in a few years)... who am I to take her little piece of make-believe comfort away?

And your mum's fat!

2009-04-04T00:36:00.010+05:30

Long post alert.

Brief reflections and a second-hand anecdote brought on by my friend Sunny's desire to put on weight. Or, Rimi Ventures into Self-Righteous Social Commentary.

The story goes that an Italian-Ameican girl, a Sri-Lankan girl, and a Danish boy were great friends at university. The boy went away on an internship for a semester--a particularly gruelling one--and returned to find both women with dark shadows under the eyes, and visibly haggardish. Taking one look, the boy goes, "My god, you've become so thin!". And the Sri-Lankan girl goes, "God, I know. I've barely had time to eat. I'll make up for it", even as the Italian-American lass chirps a happy "Thank you!".

As I was telling Sunny, I was born in the right generation, grew up amongst requisite cultural influences, but can never quite bring myself to care very much about my weight which, unlike Sunny's, is considerable. Some say (esp. after they hear the story above) it's because I'm Indian, and Indians don't care about being slender. Bollocks. Urban Indians, at least, are just as obsessed with a no-frills frame as any other urban group. It's just that the our definitions of what is svelte, what's voluptuous, and what is fat is somewhat different from that of the cultural metropolitan centre generically referred to as The West: a wee bit plumper, somewhat better padded rears and fuller bosoms, and overall, a little bit closer to a healthier, survivable weight.

Actually, that bit about me never bothering about my weight is not quite true. When I was 13(ish), I went through a brief period -- maybe an year or so -- of a great deal of dissatisfaction with my plump frame, and at that time I hadn't the honeyed tongues of obliging young men and women to tell me I not was large, merely charmingly voluptuous. And the Reader's Digest then (much the worse for wear, as I recall. We soon stopped taking it) used to carry advertisments for a slimming wonder-drug called Sunova. Now, I was always terribly physically lazy, spending my youth and childhood curled up with a book in a corner, avoiding the shamelessly energetic and their tree-climbing, bicycle-riding, pool-splashing, football-playing, running-around-like-possessed nonsense. Consequently, I had studiously ignored my mother's pleas to actually attend the yoga classes she had signed me up for, or to at least crawl out of my corner and jump around a little bit more, like a healthy young brat. But I did harbour secwet wishes to shed my rather impressive tummy and slim down my thighs a bit, because the pillars of flesh chafed against each other during the summer and made my skin horribly, ultra-painfully raw. I merely refused to exert myself physically to the end.

And then I saw the advert for Sunova, and I thought, "Eureka!" Or not, it was a long time ago and my memory is but a sieve, but I was certainly very enthusiastic about the prospect of losing weight like zat! It was reasonably expensive, but I was sure my mum would buy it for me, because wasn't she always worried I was shoving my health along the plank by becoming progressively rounder? She, however, flatly refused. Slimming meds are the worst possible idea, she said, and what's wrong with going for runs in the morning, or joining a swimming club? She would pay for that, and surely it would be more fun? I was furious. I'd never felt so betrayed and uncared for in my handful of years. I couldn't understand why my mother would refuse to make the hellish pain of red-raw skin go away, to melt the wobbly ungainly tummy magically. Even make my bottom a little more proportional, so that the measurements of my school-skirt wouldn't have to be taken quite so carefully. There was a fair bit of shouting, as I recall, and a few frustrated tears on my part. Perhaps it was the reputation of the manufacturer, or the compelling power of my little demo, but my erstwhile tantrum-inexperienced mother finally agreed to let me do a six-month course of the medicine. As a consequece, I lost maybe a kilo, and my lunar cycle was muddled forever.

But I was thirteen. It was 1996-7, there was no internet, medical information was not easily available, and my mother let sympathy, hope, and the anger of a disappointed child override her vague suspicions. In our family we don't pass the buck much, neither do we look back in wistfulness. We accept things and move on, we're all blessed that way. For almost twelve years I have had a wonky internal clock that has to be coaxed and cooed at, but this rather a common problem I share with millions of women, and I haven't wasted time blaming myself or, more irrationally, my mother. I certainly have strong opinions about medication like Sunova, but I see this as a good thing, so it's all right. However, when thirty-five year olds proudly proclaim they are going on a three-month diet that seems to consist mainly of lowfat yougurt, celery, and half a cup of boiled dalia-like thing, I really don't know if I should hold their hands and make sympathetic cow-eyes at them, or whether I should let my true sentiments show, and scoff at their idiocy.

Because it is idiotic, attempting to sculpt a 23 inch waist on a frame that needs to get up in the morning, walk the dog, pump in espressos on the way to work, work work work, bring work home, walk the dog, make attempts at socialising, crash. It is very bloody stupid, trying to live on celery and yogurt and making one's entire sense of self contingent on a kilogramme threshold (how do people even manage to do that?). And it's absolutely fucking moronic to create a culture where "fat" is the ultimate insult, and where marking down a dress-size is called "complemetary sizing" (or something) and not "barefaced lying", which is what it is.

All of you who have been vigorously nodding along with me, however, are now invited to scout around for stones to throw at me, because in this age of broadly etched binary opinions on issues, anyone whose position isn't clearly aligned with either the white camp or the black is roundly condemned by both. For or against is the only way we prefer to understand people's positions, more fool us.

And I must admit, if I sneer at insecure women who scuttle about trying to emulate the sub-Saharan drought-ravaged emaciated look, I have nothing but exasperated contempt for Fat Activists (or whatever they call themselves). One of them wasted twenty of my precious minutes trying to convince me there is no such things as being too large. She was such a steamroller I could barely get a word in the edgeways, but there were a few things that I owuld have liked to point out to her. One, fatness exists. It isn't a dictatorial/normative capitalist fashion-empire invention, as she would have had me believe. The degree of fatness is what should be considered, not the ridiculous notion that there is no such thing as a fat person. A person is harmfully large when he cannot take the stairs without panting, when she has trouble breathing, and to be perfectly honest, when he look a fair few bites short of chocolate bar. Because people are allowed to have aesthetic tastes which lean towards the slender, or even the pleasantly plump, and not necessarily the bursting-out-of-their-clothes. No one is obliged to be in love with large frames simply because someone needs constant reassurance that his rather large frame is all right to have.

And above all, I wish I had made it clear to her that thinking one is plump does not imply one wishes to jump off a building and end this miserably ugly life. That mentality is the most twisted internalisation of the "Fat is UGLY!" attitude that seems to dominate America. To some people, "fat" is still just another adjective (although given the sweeping force of American pop culture globally, I don't know for how much longer), meaning only that the person can afford to be smaller, but isn't. And if a waddling little idiot wags a finger at my face and tries to impose a ban on my freedom to think of myself as a large woman because she thinks being fat is the worst fate that can befall a woman, then said idiot's fat fascist face is going to be slapped very hard.

Thankee furiously

2009-03-10T21:01:00.004+05:30

Of all the wonderful (adj: inciting wonder) things I am learning in the US, perhaps the most wonder inciting is the extended use of the phrase, "thank you". A section of the populace uses it like it is an unbalanced overcompensating parent, signifying bubbly cheerfulness at the end of accusatory or possibly even incendiary notes. Here to demonstrate my point are a few examples that I have collected over the last sevenish months:

1. From neighbour to a kindly girl who hosted the neighbour's freedom-seeking puppy till said neighbour got back from work, and then returned aforementioned p. to aforementioned n. :
"Hi X! Next time my puppy wonders [sic.] on [sic.] the hall plz dont [sic.] "rescue" it by kidnapping it in you're [sic.] room. Thanks! :)"

2. Landlord to defaulting tenant:
Dear Y, I am taking this opportunity to inform you that you have not paid up [sic.] your rents [sic.] for the last two months and this month's rent has also been not paid till today. If I do not get three month's [sic.] rent by this Friday I will be forced to evict you legally [as opposed to hiring goons to throw her out illegally?]. Thank you and have a great day!

3. Youtube comment:
I think u r a moron fukin asshole dont reply i will nt reply to u anymore ok thanks bye.

I would not vote against the general consensus that Americans are, on the whole, a bunch of rather friendly, easy-going, cheerful, and nice sort of people (especially now that they have deposed of their special-needs outbacks-President). Neither would I advocate an abandonment of good manners and a sunshiney approach to life. However, I think I speak for at least one/billionth of the world when I say that after a certain point, the friendliness and good cheer begins to sound a little creepily misguided, and is best abandoned in favour of honest rage or cold, clipped words personally delivered. Or perhaps even a good sulk.

J.U.D.E quotes, look how they continue.

2009-02-26T18:56:00.005+05:30

Rhea the Second: tu discipula sind unwise?
Rimi: wot?
Rimi: wait! "Are you students stupid?"
Rhea II: exactly.
Rimi: hah! I can still decipher Old English! You can tell PB that. Hah! [PB = professor of OE]

A day later.
Rhea II:
me: Rimi wants it known that she can still decipher Old English.
PB: I don't believe it.
me: but she can.
PB: I still don't believe it. She is, tell her this and you can quote, the ultimate imposter to ever take Old English [pause] Does she still have that sunkissed email id?
me: yes.
PB: then I don't believe her even more!

If only Tintinda could manage a supply of one each, I would let loose a nekriya baagh and shilposhu on a Certain Somebody, and no mistake. There's much to be said for these animals, especially that unlike dragons and vampyres, they actually exist.

(So there!)

An offer I shouldn't refuse?

2009-02-07T09:31:00.004+05:30

I have recently had an offer made to me; reading certain specific posts from my blog, a gentleman found my style "overdone" and stuffy, and offered to teach me how to write better (for a modest fee, or the pleasure of my company). A very kind offer, I think. I'm considering taking him up on it. What do you think?