eyefry

For those who came in late...

2010-07-05T18:25:00.011+05:30

Jungle drumroll, please. This ghost walks again. (A design update.)For your amusement, some new book covers, some posters, an obituary, a wee bit of good news, and some unscheduled Grouchoness, will follow. First, the cute: and it's corresponding paternal: This one was rejected for being too ethnic: And then we have the not-so-cute (coming soon!): Some posters (the fest is over, but

How to write a perfectly shite review

2010-03-27T01:08:00.001+05:30

When Kulbhushan met Stockli: A comics collaboration between India & Switzerland Edited by Anindya Roy HarperCollins, 2009, pp 272, Rs 699 I hate to complain about writing this review even before I’ve started it (and now that I’ve said “I hate to complain”, there’s no going back), but reviewing a collection of stories is no cakewalk. Keep still, because I’m going to tell you why. With an

Dear Sir, this is to inform you with regret that a small error has been made in our earlier calculations...

2010-01-30T19:11:00.014+05:30

Today her man swung by her office. A new experience. Her man + her office. Equals? But he had never before needed to enter -- swing by, yeah, swing on by -- that hallow domain, not in all of their months together, and so it was that that notion had never been considered, dissected, forbidden, despaired. But why dissect? Why despair? Because her office categorically was not a place that

Maria's Room

2010-01-16T14:40:00.015+05:30

Photography, illustration and design by your humble servants, I an' I. Cover artwork © copyright Vinayak Varma 2010 Cover model: Divya Viswanathan

Hackneyed States

2009-12-13T03:02:00.007+05:30

Book Review: Stephen Fry in America (The Sunday Herald, Deccan Herald, Dec. 13) In the English-speaking world, the strongest poles of influence – the two countries that have most moulded the speech and ideas of its colonies and allies – have long been Britain and the United States of America. Each is hard-wired by its soft power; each intoxicates its cultural progeny with a potent cocktail of

Boys Town

2009-11-16T15:56:00.017+05:30

The following article is featured in the current edition of 'Offbeat' (download a pdf of it here), the quarterly magazine of Sattva, the social development consultancy. Titled “Empty benches, whither children?”, the issue marks Children's Day by addressing the inadequacies of India's education system. In this article, I interview three teenagers who were once street kids, abandoned to vagrancy

Lingo Bingo

2009-11-15T12:36:00.003+05:30

I was recently in Delhi, where I bumped into a group of my old collegemates one evening. They had studied with me in Bangalore, which, for many of them back then, was their first prolonged exposure to southern India. I was amused to notice, as the night wore on and spirits ascended, that much of the talk at our table was punctuated by warm and free exchanges of typically 'Madrasi' appellations

See Change @ The Alternative

2009-10-26T16:31:00.008+05:30

A couple of months ago I was invited, by a couple of intrepid ex-engineer, present-social development types , to write a regular blog on design and sustainability for their forthcoming e-mag called The Alternative. I said yes, yes, of course, smartypants that I am. The actual site, as you can see from the tantalizing splash page, is still being tested and tweaked and recoded, but I thought I'd

Joy in the morning

2009-10-25T11:18:00.011+05:30

After nearly thirty years of literary incarceration, Woody Allen staged a prison break last year with a new collection of short stories titled, appropriately, Mere Anarchy. The book hit our local shelves only recently, and it offers a textbook example of 20th century humour writing. 20th, and not 21st, because the references, sense of humour and world view, given the author's vintage, are

The Boy Who Knew Too Little

2009-10-11T00:45:00.008+05:30

Book Review: Sam's Story by Elmo Jayawardena The problem, as well as the advantage, with a first-person narrator who isn't conventionally intelligent is that his vocabulary is essentially limited. He is unable to express complex ideas succinctly -- instead, he is forced to lead you, anecdote by painful anecdote, shorn of chronology or method, toward a decidedly unclinical conclusion. In the

No Soap Radio

2009-10-03T15:51:00.010+05:30

Pretend you're filling out an online registration form and answer these: What do you feel about Shashi Tharoor's over-hyped bovine tweet? How did you respond to last year's financial meltdown? Did you panic and buy a bunch of masks when the pigs first took flight? How did you react to the big fuss over those old Danish cartoons? During an election, do you cast your vote based on the analysis of a

Horsing Around

2009-09-06T02:09:00.008+05:30

Q.G. Murugun is God-fearing, vegetarian and anti-smoking, imbibes alcohol only when severely depressed, has a flair for gymnastics, fights for justice and believes in true love. The perfect Shaadi.com profile, you say? Hold onto your Stetsons, because there's far more to this man (that meets the startled eye the way a .44 Magnum cartridge says hullo-goodbye to a brittle skull). Quick Gun Murugun,

The Art-House Party

2009-08-07T12:21:00.005+05:30

In Kurosawa: The Last Emperor, Alex Cox's documentary on Akira Kurosawa, the great American auteur Francis Ford Coppola pays tribute to his Japanese counterpart: “One thing that distinguishes Akira Kurosawa is that he didn't make a masterpiece or two masterpieces. He made, you know, eight masterpieces.” Three of those masterpieces were screened to Bangalore audiences last week at the Akira

Mortal Combat

2009-08-06T12:24:00.007+05:30

On a cold September evening in 1941, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, two of the fathers of modern particle physics, set out from Bohr's home on a fateful walk together into the streets of Copenhagen. Heisenberg, the mathematician most famously responsible for the Uncertainty principle, was by this time firmly rooted in Germany, working against his will on weapons development for Adolf Hitler's

Nu Releases

2009-08-05T22:39:00.015+05:30

Click on images to view in large size:Friends Forever, an anthology (set of two, illustrated and designed by yours truly)Pub. by Hachette :The Magic Store of Nu-Cham-Vu by Shreekumar Varma, recommended by Ruskin Bond (illustrations, me. design, not me)Pub. by Puffin :(I'm summat miffed that they didn't use my charming blue cat, but oh what the hey.)And a couple of pieces of interior artwork from

Alice

2009-07-24T13:08:00.002+05:30

My excitement knows no bounds:

Star light, star bright

2009-07-16T12:31:00.017+05:30

Two days before Labour Day, Cat lost his connection to the universe and started smoking again. He sat out on his terrace, chugging his fifth cigarette, staring at the smoggy night sky and desperately attempting to will the stars to move like he could've done only days ago. He'd been up there for an hour and a half, uneasy and restless, but the stars refused to budge. And he kept smoking, hoping,

Small World: an Interview with Chandrahas Chaudhury

2009-07-11T14:45:00.016+05:30

Arzee the Dwarf is a short novel about a short man with tall plans. It is the first novel by Chandrahas Choudhury, a book critic for The Mint and writer of The Middle Stage, an online literary blog. It follows the eponymous dwarf Arzee over a period of fourteen days as he traverses the length and breadth of Mumbai and interacts with a broad representation of its residents. Much of the book forms

Jay Leno: Gone Today, Here Tomorrow

2009-06-07T12:03:00.016+05:30

“That chin! That chin! That fabulous chin! It starts in Burbank and reaches Berlin! You oughta put some wheels on it and take it for a spin! That chin! That chin! That chin!” – Billy Crystal, singing about the salient virtues of his host Jay Leno, during the final week of The Tonight Show With Jay Leno Five years ago, NBC initiated a succession plan for The Tonight Show that required its host

'Oh Waiter': a modern country blues classic

2009-05-10T22:16:00.006+05:30

(E/A/B7/A7 in any combination you like)Oh waiter, there's some urine in my soupOh waiter, I taste some wee wee in my soupOh waiter, you doodat bebop Betty BoopAnd it seems quite clear you've got it in for me.Oh waiter, when I said please improve this goopOh waiter, when I said please dilute my goopy soupOh waiter, when I said floop de doop de doopI didn't mean for you to do it with pee.Oh ho ho

Cover Story

2009-04-19T19:14:00.010+05:30

My first real-world design job involved illustrating, writing and laying out my own children's book, as a college intern. Lots of rewrites, lots of script changes and arguments with the editors, many terrible sleepless nights, chewed-up brushes, shattered paint bottles and creative swearing cumulated in a published book that's currently on its third reprint (I think), selling quite well around

Cover Versions

2009-03-18T20:46:00.019+05:30

First (rejected) and second (approved) iterations, with and without dummy text:(click on images to view in large size)The cat from the first version might still be used on the back cover. Dunno for sure yet.More soon. Stay with me.Update: I'm told the book's releasing in August. Apparently the recession's playing havoc with Penguin's printing schedule. (I'm also given to suspecting that 'the

Up

2009-03-10T02:55:00.005+05:30

This looks brilliant, worthy of Roald Dahl himself. How does Pixar churn this stuff out so damn consistently??I find it only mildly strange that they've chosen to pit animated versions of Spencer Tracy and Ted Turner against one another. And the fat kid and Dug the dog are hilarious. I can't wait!

Two random old articles, found and posted summat late in the day

2009-03-09T04:53:00.008+05:30

The following pair of chestnuts (chest nuts. what a strange idea.), which I'd earlier neglected to put up here, are from my Expresso days. In no way are they intended to showcase my sound editorial judgement or sanity. From the Unhinged archives: Steven, with porpoise Hollywood Unhinged, 8th October 2008 SOURCES close to actor Steven Seagal tell us that the fading action hero's home has been

A Few Good Men

2009-02-28T14:41:00.017+05:30

Film: ValkyrieDirector: Brian SingerCast: Tom Cruise, Kenneth Branagh, Tom Wilkinson and Bill NighyI remember reading this old Mad spoof on World War II movies some years back, which lampooned the changing face of the Nazi/Japanese prison commandant over the decades. According to its timeline, the films made during wartime and soon after always depict these commandants as lean, blood-guzzling