Dreaming of Zihuatanejo

Moving to Wordpress

2006-10-16T14:46:00.000-07:00

This blog is moving to Wordpress. Categorizing's easier there, even if the categories matter only to me. I've been mirroring posts at both sites, but this seems to confuse people, besides being a complete waste of time (yes, logging in and pressing Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V is time consuming). I feel bad about ditching Blogspot and its infinitely easier interface, but, tant pis, one of the blogs has to go. And this is the one...

Artistic license? Or too much Will & Grace?

2006-10-16T14:32:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, Anatha, Samanth and I watched “A First Class Man”. This was my first time meeting another blogger and it was fun. The play was bad, but it was awesome to meet up with two other ex-Chennai-ites who also like Tin Tin and Asterix and Seinfeld and well, just take it from me that we had number of things in common.

But I digress – let’s return to the play. It’s about Srinivas Ramanujan, the math genius. The play focused (mostly) on the mathematician’s years at Cambridge – the spiritual, cultural, professional and alimentary challenges he had to over come during his stay in England. The big picture was fine – it was the little things that just didn’t work. Ramanujan sounded like how Hollywood-types think Indians sound like (thank goodness he didn’t sound like how northies think “madrasis” sound like, so there were some things to be grateful for, I suppose); his widowed mother appeared in a colorful saree, with a full head of flowers; the only veggie options in early 1900s Cambridge consisted of carrots and lime pickle, and as the icing on the cake – a strong suggestion of a love triangle with Ramanujan being the object of affection of his lady friend Esme, as well as his mentor Hardy. Fortunately, Samanth had read The Man Who Knew Infinity, and was able to warn me about the bits where the playwright had indulged in, shall we say his “creative license”.

History’s a tricky thing. When you’re dealing with a non-fiction account, you’re less likely to make errors of interpretation, I think. An account of battles won or lost, wells dug and trees planted is just that – a list*. But add a couple of dialogues to keep people from nodding off, and boom, you risk changing everything. When Hardy calls his time with Ramanujan, "the one romantic incident in my life", I don’t know if he meant what we today automatically assume he means. (Hey, the playwright could be right in his interpretation – it’s just difficult for me to believe that a man who didn’t know how to “operate a bed” was remotely close to understanding the mechanics of a romantic entanglement, let alone one with Hardy.) Two hundred years from now, will people be as amused at us, and our eagerness to interpret same-sex friendships as being more than what they actually are?

There’s a temptation to overdo it these days, I think. There’s an ad for Chivas Regal that I see only on Channel 73 – it has a group of men out in the jungle somewhere – fishing and rafting and camping – hajjar male bonding and what not. The whole effect is spoiled by the background score – a particularly sappy song that goes, “we could be together, every day together”. Every time I see that add, I have to laugh. That they don’t seem to use this ad in non-desi programming makes me wonder about a couple of things – are desis less likely to see the ad as being anything other than four guys doing guy things, inured as they are by years of watching Salman dance without his shirt? If that’s the case, then the problem clearly is with me. Am I watching too much Will & Grace?

But with yesterday’s play, it wasn’t just me. I don’t know about the rest of the audience but each of the three of us felt “Kadavulae, enna ithu!” or its equivalent before repeating the same thing together.

I sound ancient when I say this (not to say 23 kinds of a prude), but I really do miss the old days when math was maths and gay simply meant happy. And watching an ad or a play was not so fraught.

10 days and counting

2006-08-15T14:43:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend, I watched Scoop. At the moment, my life feels a lot like watching Scoop - a job and a city that're vaguely familiar, and therefore comfortable to be in. But they did promise more than they have delivered so far, and I can't quite shake off the feeling that my previous experience with them was richer, more fun, better. And I've resigned myself to enjoying just the memory of grand old times, or at least till Allen and I are back on our feet again. Saving grace: I'm only 28 and closer to the beginning of my career than the end, and therefore hopefully have a few more chances than Allen to recreate the good old times.

As a dyed in the wool pessimist, I am blue most of the time. I am especially miserable during the time leading to and following a big change. Right now, I'm in a state of inter-city limbo that I detest - I have already moved on from my last home, but am yet to find a new home (or even a place that will eventually become home). Routines perfected in Dallas are in shambles. The only reason I fall asleep in my strange new bed is because I'm exhausted from all the walking I do here. A true New Yorker would laugh (or spit in my face or both) at the amount of walking I do. A true Texan, however, would run me over with his Hummer for moving to a city where a "decent commute" is a 25 minute walk, as opposed to a 45 minute drive.

Somewhere in my 3 years in Gurgaon and 2 in Dallas, I apparently turned into a creature of the suburbia without quite realizing it. The sad truth is that my happiest moments in the last 10 days have come from shopping for groceries. I dream dreams of going veggie shopping, of cooking in my own kitchen. On Friday, I wandered into a Food Emporium and didn't wander out for another hour. On Saturday, the sight of the Manhattan Mall almost had me in tears - a mall! I was so overjoyed that I rushed in and bought some totally unnecessary things. Finally, something I'm used to!

While I completely fail to understand the folks who set the credit-history rules, I do understand why some women marry for money. I spent most of yesterday wishing I had a sugar daddy. Not just any sugar daddy, but one who makes 80 times my rent-to-be, has a pristine credit history, and wants nothing more from life other than to be my guarantor. Let other women have the sparkly trinkets – I’d pledge eternal gratitude for a rented studio. Heck, I’m even happy to pay the darn rent myself, so long as the process is in no way confused with “buying” a studio. Yes, I’m smack in the middle of the give-3-month-advance or put-up-sugar-daddy negotiation.

Despite the preceding cribs, it’s not all bad. I get a thrill every time I remind myself that I don't have to take a taxi to La Guardia in the next day or two to get back to "real life", where ever that may be. I am here and that feels wonderful. And the routinizer in me has been hard at work. I’m learning to switch from Dish to Time Warner Cable and getting your head around a whole new set of channel numbers feels like discovering cable all over again. And the entire subway system awaits mastery. Heck, I’ve even found a tea mate in a city of coffee-drinkers! Now if I can only find myself a sugar daddy…

Moving. Again.

2006-08-03T12:03:00.000-07:00

I used to hate my dad's job growing up. Mostly because it was the reason we had to move every few years. I'd accuse my dad of never giving me a chance to "put down my roots". I vowed that when I got a job of my own, I'd say put!

Since getting a job, I've moved twice. First time across the country. The second time to a different continent. And in a little over 5 years, I'm moving for the third time. This time to New York, to become a minuscule cog in a rather major wheel. This is will come as a big change from being a minuscule cog in a tiny wheel. Yeah, the change that really matters is that I get to exchange Dallas for NYC :)

Any city am about to leave turns beautiful over night. Dallas is the same. It actually looked like it might rain some time yesterday. The temperature went all the way down to 97, while New York swelters at 99. Every corner of the town home I'm leaving stares at me with pity, and says, "I'm one less corner you'll have in your match-box studio."

Friends in Dallas have spent the last few weeks carefully going over many aspects of life in New York - the size of the studio I'll be renting, the rent I'll pay for this space, the weather, the crowd, how my Mr. Perfect is sure to live in some city that is not New York, how I shouldn't let that stand in the way of eternal bliss (to illustrate how I shouldn't let this change in cities stand in the way of other more important changes), and how I'll continue to work during the week and laze over the week ends (to illustrate how little my life will really change). My friend in New York has also been helping me to keep my expectations real. And my real estate agent chips in where ever she can ("remember they are ads not listings").

Sometimes I take the trouble to protest, to try to convince them that I really am going to have a grand time. But these protestations are half-hearted attempts. It's not that I fear I'll be miserable in New York. Far from it. I agree with many of the things my friends say. I am not going to start jogging simply because Central Park exists. And despite my day-dreams, I am probably not going to buy season tickets at the Lincoln Center. Even I realize that apart from paying my rent I will also have to eat, occasionally at least. Truth be told, I am a little nervous about the weather. After spending the last 28 years claiming to love winters, I will finally experience a real one (oh, shush you Ice-Landers - am talking to people who mostly grew up in Madras or Trichy). Will I continue to love them as before?

The real reason I don't bother to protest too much - I don't care. The true worth of a city lies in the possibilities it offers. I doubt that I'll ever walk into some store on 5th avenue and blow $7000 on some hideous handbag - but it's nice to walk by and imagine you can. I am not going to become a concert pianist, ever. But it's easy to imagine that I might, especially when I'm gazing down at an ant-sized Barenboim, as I hang upside down from the ceiling with one hand on some fixture which will likely be the only spot I can afford at Carnegie Hall. As for the winter, I have memories enough of summers from Dallas and Delhi that will last me a long long time to come. And who knows, maybe I'll even start jogging. Not having Central Park - surely that's the reason why I've never indulged in the habit till date.

Terrace

2006-07-25T15:12:00.000-07:00

A seemingly never-ending column of cars, arranged four abreast, moved at a measured, forced pace like some marching army. The mindlessness of it was comforting. A mechanical activity, which didn't require her to come up with bullet point responses to why she should be driving that car, at this hour, in that direction.

"Why do they call this a freeway?" she wondered to herself, as traffic queued up in the toll-tag only lanes. She fidgeted in her seat, fussing with the seat belt, the rear-view mirror. If this were Delhi, she'd be changing gears, and feeling a little proud if the car didn't stall. But this was Dallas, where one had dispensed with the old rush-hour routines. This time of the year, MG Road would be filled with drunken baarathis, leading another spooked bride-groom on another nonchalant nag to some farm house. She did not miss the traffic, though she did remember the horses with fondness. Inured to the drunken dancing and the cacophony of horns and Bhangra music, they were so unlike the grooms who twitched (too afraid to give a real jerk) at every honk.

A Hummer honked her back to Dallas. She did what the man wanted her to do, getting them both ten inches closer to their respective homes. She smiled to herself, relieved that Ravi wasn't with her. He would have felt embarrassed to be honked at. She was still a Delhi-ite, and retained her faith that a little honking was good for everyone's soul.

She switched on the radio. A voice sang of love, of twilight. At 6:15 in the evening, it would be twilight back home. Here, the sun blazed on. Like the insolent teenager who live in the apartment upstairs, it insulted first by not going to bed when it is supposed to, and made things worse by refusing to so much as acknowledge the end of a long day. She cooled herself by turning up the AC and returned to thoughts of twilight in Delhi.

Twilight was best enjoyed from the terrace. A few years ago, the view had stretched all the way to the DU Campus. Between the trees, you could see the tops of other houses. Her favorite was the one with the coconut trees - looking slightly out of place in South Delhi. It always reminded her of her grand-parents' home in Madras. Another terrace with another great view. Mentally, she ranked her top five favorite terraces: 1. Her parents' terrace in Delhi 2. The terrace at her friend's home in Bangalore (with a view of Lal Bagh and the dishy neighbor out on his own terrace) 3. The terrace at her grandparents' house in Madras, from where you could hear the ocean, even though you couldn't see it 4. The terrace at that house in Pondicherry, with its view of the backyard of a church, and the Pastor's very interesting underwear drying on his clotheslines. 5. The terrace in their old Rajouri Garden house, which overlooked a potters' colony.

It was funny that she remembered every single terrace she'd ever been on. She realized that she had made practically every major decision when pacing some mottai-madi, from ranking the Asterix books she had to have (mom limited purchases to two per year) to picking a college major (Microbiology over Zoology - microorganisms were less icky than rats). She'd also decided that she loved Ravi after he'd told her he loved her (one of them had to say it first, he'd said) and later that she was going to ask him if he'd like to marry her (one of them had to ask first, she'd said).

As she passed the Belt Line exit, the traffic finally speeded up. She moved to right most lane, letting the Hummer overtake her. She drove on, thinking to herself that life had been so much simpler on those terraces. Had it been easier to make those decisions because she'd been younger? Or was there something about a terrace, the extra forty odd feet of elevation mysteriously bringing perspective to life on the ground?

She wanted nothing more than to be on a terrace at that moment. Even before she could complete that thought, she suddenly felt her car flying through the air. By the time she registered the thought that she'd been hit from behind, she and her car had already broken through the barrier on the elevated freeway. She stepped on the brakes, then stopped, because the car was still flying.

People stared at her car somersaulting through the air, flying straight across the service lane, towards the terrace of a Walgreens pharmacy. As the gravel on the terrace approached, she thought to herself, "Life doesn't flash by in nanoseconds. You get a whole traffic jam. And you get your last wish."

Also on Wordpress

2006-07-23T01:11:00.000-07:00

Dreaming of Zihuatanejo is now also available on Wordpress. [Link] This has nothing to do with blogspot problems in India. No one was reading this blog over there even when there was full access. Then why bother? Categories. I tried to figure out the d.e.li.ci.ous (or wherever it is those folks put full stops in the middle of a perfectly nice word) thingummy, and gave up. Wordpress, being just a tad more tolerant of technophobes like me, seemed like a good alternative. Will continue to cross post on blogspot though. Far be it from me to anger the Google God. (It actually sounds like a real pagan god, doesn't it?)

Strangers in strange lands

2006-07-12T21:52:00.000-07:00

The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai

(Some spoilers)

Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss is my first foray into works by the Desai clan. The experience has been good enough to warrant many more. The Inheritance of Loss reminds you that there are confused desis in India, UK and the US. The novel straddles three generations, and three different sorts of lost and dissatisfied Indians.

First, the anglophile ICS generation, loyal to a way of life that they perpetually aspire to, but never achieve. They live in Indian cities and villages, and long after the departure of the Brits, continue to fill their worlds with symbols from their ideal society: eating scones and cucumber sandwiches for tea, reading Agatha Christie, meeting one another at crumbling Gymkhana clubs, conversing among themselves in English, and with the servants in pidgin Hindi, and for all intents and purposes remain completely oblivious to the people, the language, the food and the problems that actually surround them. Many of the characters in this book belong to this generation – a retired Gujarati judge, a couple of Bengali sisters, an Uncle Potty of unknown origin…

Then there is the Amreeka-is-great generation. They believe they'll be richer in the US, fatter, and surely happier. Biju, the cook's son, is an illegal immigrant, working for less than minimum wages in one New York restaurant after another. His experience is understandably worse than that of the average H1B software type, but how different are they? Aren't they all trapped in a common nightmare, even as they dream their common green-card dreams?

The green card, green card, the machoot sala oloo ka patha char sau bees green card that was not even green.

Unlike the previous generation which is happy in its yearning, this one bends over backwards to get to the land of their dreams. When they get there, it’s too late to wonder why they wanted to go there in the first place. At one point, Biju wonders:

What was he doing and why?
It hadn’t even been a question before he left. Of course, if you could go, you went. And you went, of course, if you could, you stayed…

Perhaps the Anglophiles are the smarter ones – yearning lasts longer than attainment, and therefore is better?

…love must surely reside in the gap between desire and fulfillment, in the lack, not the contentment. Love was the ache, the anticipation, the retreat, everything around it but the emotion itself.

Dissatisfied as they are, the Anglophile and the Yankophile are a mild lot. The third bunch is so disillusioned that nothing short of political autonomy - a separate x-stan / y-land (replace x and y with your preferred minority community / region) – will do. A good part of this novel takes place in Kalimpong in the late 80s – at the height of the Gorkha unrest. How alien the very idea is to the first two classes is best expressed by Lola (the Anglophile widow):

And what is this with the GOrkha? It was always GUrkha.

My friends and I have frequently marveled at India’s uncanny knack for survival as a country. It is a matter we pride ourselves on, particularly when we see so many others falling apart with much less provocation. [1] But given the latest news from India, I can’t help remembering this passage:

What was a country but the idea of it? … How often could you attack it before it crumbled? To undo something took practice; it was a dark art and they were perfecting it. With each argument the next would be easier, would become a compulsive act, and like wrecking a marriage, it would be impossible to keep away, to stop picking at wounds even if the wounds were your own.

Desai’s novel is about class as much as it is about one’s sense of national identity. In any society, for a while these are maintained in hermetically sealed compartments, either out of ignorance or by force. But ultimately, people of different identities and classes do react to these differences. And when they do, some end up with illegal huts on their lawn, others get beaten to a pulp by the police. Yet others like Sai, the judge’s granddaughter who has a crush on her Indian-Nepali tutor, have their hearts broken.

The house didn't match Gyan's talk, his English, his looks, his clothes, or his schooling. It didn't match his future. Every single thing his family had was going into him and it took ten of them to live like this to produce a boy, combed, educated, their best bet in the big world. Sisters' marriages, younger brother's studies, grandmother's teeth-all on hold, silenced, until he left, strove, sent something back.

Sai felt shame, then, for him… The dilemmas and stresses that must exist within this house – how could he have let them out? And she felt distaste, then, for herself. How had she been linked to this enterprise, without her knowledge or consent?

I haven’t read Desai’s first novel (Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard), but I must say that The Inheritance of Loss still feels like an early work. Desai’s strengths lie in her ability to draw fresh insights out of characters and situations that appear clichéd at first glance. However, towards the end of the book, it feels as if the author is panicking – worried that she might not be able to tie all those lovely characters with their lovely stories together into one cohesive whole. And she doesn’t. There is no great so-what at the end of this great build-up. People just go back to their old ways, or grudgingly resign themselves to whatever lousy cards they’ve been dealt with. Perhaps this makes it more real. After all, even Spiderman or Superman don’t take on poverty and beat it to a pulp.

And the balance that Desai maintains so well through the first two thirds of the book, giving equal importance to the three main story threads, is somehow lost in the last one-third. Some stories and characters are ignored at the expense of others. I felt a little like waiting in the queue at Thirupathi – I’ve waited a long time to get to that spot, and just when I feel like I’ve earned my right to savor the moment, I am bustled along by some cop shouting, “Jaragandi! Jaragandi!”

Bottom line: The Inheritance of Loss is a very good read. Kiran Desai is definitely someone to watch out for. If you were born in India in the late 70s as I was, you’ll find many things to relate to, and therefore enjoy in this book.

[1] As Southies born in the late 70s, I realize that my friends and I have had no experiences that might be classified as being “provocative”, so it’s mostly idle posturing.
[2] Go here to read Falstaff’s equally positive review. And here to read Pankaj Mishra’s take on the novel.

Magic that makes you lose your illusions

2006-06-27T21:14:00.000-07:00

Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking

I have a tendency to expect the worst. I’m screwed up enough to believe that if I can prepare myself to face the absolute worst, then I should be alright, I should be able to survive whatever life decides to throw my way. Expecting the worst has worked for me, because, usually, things don’t get as bad as I fear they will.

Of course, I’ve had my share of times when expectations are met, even mine. And when something goes wrong, it takes me a while to get used to the idea of being miserable, as opposed to merely fearing that I’ll be miserable. The last am an expert at – the first feels new, every time. All that preparation is apparently worthless. So, why I do persist? Do I actively enjoy gloom?

I’ve have the last question asked of me by friends who believe I also have a tendency to read or watch what they label as “depressing stuff”. I faced the latest round of questions after foolishly announcing that I’d read Joan Didion’s amazing ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’. [1] To review Didion’s book does not feel right – it would amount to commenting on someone’s life, worse, on someone’s grief. It feels too presumptuous. Instead, am going to take a shot at answering the question my friends ask of me – why I read books like Didion’s and what, if anything, do I get from them.

It’s a tricky thing to read memoirs. When they’re filled with lists of accomplishments, I feel that I’m condoning self-indulgence. When they are about challenges overcome, I start to wonder if I haven’t been tricked into a self-help book sugar-coated as an auto-biography. When they’re about pain or grief, I feel like a voyeur.

Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking falls into the last category. In case you haven’t already heard about this book, it is an account of Didion’s life in the one year after her husband of thirty-nine years dies of a sudden heart attack. That their daughter is battling for her life at the time of her father’s death and for much of the time afterwards does not help matters. At some point, Didion hears herself being referred to as a “cool customer”. As you keep reading, you realize she is one. She counters the haze of grief with clarity: she reads up psychological studies on bereavement, reads what medical textbooks say about her daughter’s condition, jumps through bureaucratic hoops to get her daughter transferred to different hospitals. If you can define something, you can master it. The principle does not seem to apply to grief. For all her attempts, Didion doesn’t always manage to get her arms around this shape-shifting monster. The least expected things trigger memories and she goes right back to square one.

So much for what that one year did for Didion. What this book does to you is to make you question your opinions about a number of things (after it makes you admit that what you hold are only opinions, in the first place).

First, there’s the debunking of a number of theories I’ve come to believe simply from repetition.

1. “It’s ok to die after you’ve lead a full life”. Here is a couple who led a life that can easily be described as full. I’ve been told that that should be enough. You find out that it’s not. You think you have a ton of happy memories? Wait and watch, for they are likely to come back to haunt you.
2. “To die in a moment, without going through a prolonged period of illness is a good thing.” I hear this all the time, especially from my grandparents. You encounter both types of death in this book. Neither is one easy for the ones who’re left behind.
3. “With age comes wisdom”. Perhaps it does, but at 70+, there’s still one heck of a lot you don’t understand.

Then there’s the issue of judgment. To benefit from loss does not feel right. I couldn’t shake off the feeling that turning your grief into a successful book isn’t something that my mother would approve of. [2] Silent martyrdom feels like the only right response to the death of a close friend or family member. Of course, I immediately felt guilty about feeling that way. Who am I to impose rules on the ways people can deal with their loss? What has conditioned me to think of silence and martyrdom as being the best, or worse, the “right” reaction?

Along with this vague mixture of disapproval and guilt comes a bit of wishful thinking. Didion and Dunne appear to have had a wonderful marriage. Despite all the grief that the end of such a wonderful relationship entails, I realize that I should be lucky to have one in the first place. There’s also wishing that if I live to be Didion’s age, I hope I’d have even half the tenacity, half the clarity of this woman. And who am I kidding – I also wish for at least half her success.

At some point, I realized that this book was becoming a part of my internal calibration mechanism. [Bear with me while I take a detour to explain what I mean by this.]

If reading in general is a great escape hatch, reading about misery is the zenith of escapism. It not only helps you escape life at the moment you’re reading, but also long afterwards. I’ve been reading for about a couple of decades now (which sounds great, doesn’t it? This is the only instance where I’m proud of my age), and I’ve started to notice that “original” moments are becoming rarer and rarer. Everything I do or feel, I’ve probably read about already (and therefore experienced, even if only vicariously). Perhaps the accumulation of experience is merely an artifact of age, but reading certainly quickens the process like nothing else does [3].

For the most part, I compare and contrast my real experiences with ones I’ve already had. I read more than I do anything else, and so even when I come across something completely new, my immediate reaction is to think of an appropriate author and how he or she might describe what I’m going through. As a result of all this measuring and analyzing, lots of times, I escape from actually feeling (unless I remind myself to – which immediately makes the experience artificial, don’t you think?). At the bare minimum, I get to defer impact of feeling. The act of calibration always comes first because it feels so much more important than what I’m feeling, which can always be done later. While the worth of this “suspension” is debatable in happy times, it has become invaluable in bad ones. And the more I read, the richer my portfolio of experiences. End digression.

Didion’s book is now part of this mixture. The good thing about reading Didion’s experience is that it forces you to acknowledge that it is Didion’s experience – if something like that were to happen to me, I would have to find my own ways of dealing with it. There is no guarantee that just because Didion seems to have survived, I will. She makes it abundantly clear that deep loss is always personal, and that there is no escaping it.

When I read what I’ve written, I see that I haven’t given a straight answer to the question I set out to answer. Why do I read books like this one? I did not enjoy it, at least not in the way my friends imply. If this were fiction, I might have considered agreeing with them. [4] On the contrary, this is real, and all the more terrifying for that reason. It is brutal, like Alice Sebold’s Lucky, if less violent.

One reason I started to read this particular book was simply because I’d read uniformly positive reviews about it. [5]. Also, I’ve been moping around a bit lately, and felt the need to see the world as seen by someone older, and therefore hopefully wiser. To get some perspective, so to speak. It was an unsettling experience to read Didion, because what I finally got from her was that there is no way to escape bad things. And whatever my personal misery, it is different from Didion’s and there were no “lessons” I could learn.

But for all that, learn I did. Thanks to Didion, I think I understand the mechanics of my own approach to disappointment better. Will I deal with it any better the next time I face it? I don’t know. But understanding helps me fine tune my internal calibrator. More importantly, understanding helps me recognize my fancy calibrator for the illusion that it is. And both have value.

[1] To my credit, I did not ask them to read this book, despite the fact I was dying to *order* them to read this book. I merely told them what the book was about.
[2] Warning: I have a nasty habit of assigning responses to “moral” questions to my mother, especially to those answers I feel I “ought” to give. I have no idea if my mother approves or disapproves of this particular book. She hasn’t read it.
[3] The alternative is that I actually go out and live life. Are you kidding me? Why would I ever choose that option, when I can experience all there is to right from the comfort of my bed, and get to read awesome writing at the same time? Life’s totally overrated!
[4] Note, the term used is “consider” - stories about unhappy people unfortunately happen to be some of the best written – and that’s my reason for reading those books, so there!
[5] How many books get positive reviews from Michiko Kakutani and Falstaff? Go here and here to read them.

A 55-word salute for a 666 day

2006-06-06T13:36:00.000-07:00

The sign

06/06/06. A Tuesday at that.

She wasn’t afraid, just amused. And a little drowsy from tossing and turning all night. Was he the one? By dawn, she’d decided to wait for a sign.

He proposed. Today. Of all the days in all eternity.

God sure had a sense of humor.

A guided tour of the last days of the Roman Empire

2006-05-23T19:41:00.000-07:00

Review - Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

History is an interest I have only lately acquired. I believe my interest in history began shortly after I wasn't required to remember five salient points about the First Five Year Plan. But it has taken a good decade, and then some, for me to actively seek out and read an actual book of history [1].

OK. So much for the build-up - the book: Rubicon by Tom Holland. It covers the last 100 or so years of the end of the Roman Empire, with a focus on the latter half. Starting with Marius and Sulla, we're given a quick guided tour of the expansion of the empire and the implications of this expansion. The good things about the tour include interesting snippets of information about the personalities involved - Julius Caesar used to be a "loose-belted" dandy in his youth; rich Romans were curiously obsessed with fish; Mark Antony might have been bisexual, and more in the same vein.

That the tour is "guided" ensures that one rarely lingers at some spot interesting only to a few - one is ushered along the timeline, from dictator to dictator, pausing only briefly at scenes of great battles (Carthage, Gaul, Alexandria) and civil wars (revolts caused or put down by Sulla, Spartacus, Cicero, Caesar (both Julius and Augustus)). At the end of this book, I felt a bit like coming off a road trip with my parents. I've seen all the places I'm "supposed" to have visited on a trip to XYZ town; all meals (strictly vegetarian) were eaten on time, no sleepless nights or mad rushes to the train station or airport… I feel I've "completed" something I set out to achieve, but there's an unstated promise to myself to visit these places again someday, on my own, or with my friend J who abhors lists of all sorts.

Good things about Rubicon:

- It is a surprisingly fast read for a book that's mostly about two thousand year old politicians and despots.
- It accomplishes all it sets out to achieve - which, I assume, is to give the layperson a chance to quickly understand the most important aspects of an entire civilization. I may act snooty about my parents' preferred method of sight-seeing now, but traveling with a check list isn't entirely without merit.
- It does not read like a text book. There are foot-notes, but you're never in danger of losing yourself in asterisk marks and pluses and other assorted special characters. The language is not cumbersome or dry, which brings us to the not so great things about this book.

Tom Holland has a weird habit (weird for a historian, that is) of dropping any numbers of allusions all over the book. Here're a few samples:

Sulla, first in consternation and then in mounting fury, retired to his tent.
It was Lucullus... who had first made the rumors of incest public. No smoke without fire-and there must have been something unusual about Clodius's relations with his three sisters to have set tongues wagging.
Caesar would one day talk of rolling a die when he faced the gravest crisis of his life, and his taste for the metaphor must surely have derived from his childhood.

I appreciate Holland's wanting to make ancient history sound less ponderous. But frankly, I'd prefer that he leave emoting to novelists and the outright guessing to super-market magazines. Holland is at his best when he states facts, and in this case, I strongly believe the facts are interesting enough to never really need the props that he so eagerly supplies.

The book covers considerable breadth, and understandably, that is achieved at a cost. If you're the sort who loves to read about battle-ground tactics or the intricacies of political tap-dancing, prepare to be disappointed. Holland deals with such matters only cursorily. Be it Julius Caesar's defeat of Vircingetorix or Pompey's manipulations of the Senate in the months leading to Caesar's crossing the Rubicon, there are any numbers of fascinating stories that receive no more than a passing mention here. Had I not been fortunate enough to have read a book and a half from Colleen McCullough's Masters of Rome series, I'd not know enough to miss these stories.

Bottom line: Rubicon is a good book for history neophytes like myself, whose knowledge of Rome is limited to information (at times gravely distorted) from Shakespeare, the odd Hollywood tent-pole, and Goscinny and Uderzo [2]. However, this is just the beginners' course. Any extra credits on how little democracy has changed since the birth of the Republic; why despite all its ills, democracy still appears to be a lesser evil than the alternatives, and lessons, if any, for modern super-powers - you'll have to do on your own.

[1] History disguised as travelogues, or sugar-coated as fiction; movies and documentaries that involve one or more of the following persons or entities are all classified under entertainment, not history: Tony or Ridley Scott, Jeremy Irons, Geoffrey Rush, either half of Brangelina, Eric Bana or anyone-who-looks-as-good-as-Bana in a mini skirt (forgive me, I meant to say toga / battle dress (whatever)), a major Hollywood studio, or a Major Hollywood Studio once removed (which plugs the HBO loop-hole).

[2] Whose most important insight into the Roman psyche is captured in those famous words: "Ils sont fous, ces Romains!" also known as "These Romans are crazy!"

R.I.P. Hell no. At least not just yet… I hope…

2006-05-07T00:06:00.000-07:00

1. To drive across a continent simply because I feel like a long drive some afternoon
2. To get so drunk that I don’t remember how drunk I was
3. To imagine that this person may be “the one”
4. To meet at least 10 such persons about whom I might imagine #3
5. To be young and silly and make memories that I can bore /embarrass my future family with

Tonight, I think I should just accept reality and lay all these ghosts of dreams past to rest. Why tonight of all nights? Because it’s 1 in the morning, and I just got home from a baby shower. An event for which I:
- cooked all afternoon [1],
- unscrambled words like basinet, bingo’d others like Moses Baskets, listed ones related to giving a baby a bath, and ten more around a bed-time theme
- missed standing week end crib calls with 2 girlfriends
- was asked to dress up “girly” and so wore pearls and a skirt, only to be told that I should wear pants more, and get earrings to match the pearls [2]
- combined the names of 2 sets of parents-to-be to come up with baby names
- played seemingly endless rounds of antakshri, only with baby names instead – with alternating rounds of boy names and girl names

Life seemed to be fine. When did my world get overrun by the married-with-kids mob? I realize that someday, I may decide to have a baby or two myself. Hell, someday, I may even decide to marry someone. But until I do, I don’t think I should hang out with married couples anymore. And especially not married couples with children, present or future.

If any of my married friends is reading this, please do not be offended. It’s not personal. I enjoy your company. But I feel like I’m bypassing single-dom. As rotten as life feels like at the moment, apparently, these are the best years of my life. There’s a 99% likelihood that I will get to your phase, but not just yet. For now, I just want you to accept that there is that 1% chance that I might not do all that I ought to do, or all that I’ll end up doing anyways.

Somewhere between talk of whose parents are arriving when, fixing up car seats, and onesies and layettes [3], I woke up and didn’t recognize my life any more. Is this the dirty secret behind what happens to single people? One day, you realize that you’re living the life of a married person any way (attending baby-showers, cooking for “intimate soirees” for 25 friends, discussing housing prices, and having no sex), so why not go all the way? The next thing you know, you are married and find that life isn’t so bad after all, because it hasn’t really changed all that much.

I need to get a tattoo, a DUI, something, anything to remind myself that I am NOT married. For when it comes to marriage and children, it ain’t over till you actually buy one of them baby walkie-talkie thingummies.

[1] OK, so I made one dish. But tomato rice for 13 people isn’t exactly like turning up with a bag of chips.
[2] That has nothing to do with babies, but I am in the mood for ranting, so let’s not quibble.
[3] On the minuscule chance that you’re single, you’re probably hearing these terms for the first time. I’m not going to explain what these things are. Hold on to your innocence for a few hours more. Cherish it.

Snarky new blog

2006-05-05T09:43:00.000-07:00

Karthik & Manoj have a snarky new blog. This one's dedicated to Indian movies. Some guys are gluttons for punishment, but as long as they amuse the rest of us with updates about their movie adventures, I don't feel too badly for them.

PS: All this cross-promotion makes me feel as if I am Unilever. But that's what synergy's all about.

Why I love those who love sports

2006-05-04T22:04:00.000-07:00

I never realized till today how grateful I am to sports fans. OK, not all of them, but at least to the sports enthusiasts among my friends. Let me illustrate with 2 examples.

Sports fans:
Last Sunday, I found myself trapped in a house with 3 basketball fans. Never a good thing, that, especially this time of the year [1]. As luck would have it, a game was on, and I amused myself by waiting for the beer ads and browsing the internet on my laptop in the time between ad breaks. Once in a while I’d engage the one person who cared to listen to me, till the other two figured that the team (I believe it was the Lakers) they were rooting for scored better whenever we were talking. We were given strict instructions to continue talking, which of course ensured that I suddenly had nothing to talk about.

At some point, even I had to admire their childish enthusiasm for this game. And feeling like the aunt who offers to take you to the circus, and filled to the brim with goodness and tolerance, I made the ‘grand gesture’ – offered to go watch a game with them, featuring the local team, whatever it was [2].

Readers, OK – me.
In my experience, the best tele-evangelist can’t hold a candle to a reader [3]. We, and by that I mean readers, are constantly guilt-tripping ourselves and others into reading something or the other. If I had one Andorran Peseta [4] every time I’ve heard the words “you must read this”, “you’ll love it”, “no Indian authors, shame on you!”, and my personal favorite - “you’ll hate it, but you must read it”, I’d be richer than Crassus. Yesterday, I read the new Jhumpa Lahiri story. My first action was to email the story to select friends. They don’t know this, but they’re part of a pet project of mine. You see, I’m trying to save their souls. I’m doing this through the administration of frequent infusions of great writing. Great according to me, of course. And because I care about them, I’ve designed an easy to follow (also according to me) 7-stage process.

Stage 1: Reading emails with paragraphs.
Stage 2: Any article of 300 words or less
Stage 3: Fiction, happy / Humor. Samples include shorter pieces by David Sedaris, James Thurber and the like. (for those whose palate is not yet strong enough for Brokeback Mountain and the like)
Stage 4: Fiction, sad, but not too sad. Think Jhumpa Lahiri.
Stage 5: Fiction, with abstract elements. Like Haruki Murakami.
Stage 6: A whole novel.
Stage 7: This is the toughest level, and a person will have arrived at this stage when he or she sends me something from NYRB, or better yet, from the Paris Review.

Graduation: The day they go to a library all by themselves and borrow ten or more books. I plan to photograph the moment, and keep the snap in my wallet, and bore every stranger with proud stories of my children, er, friends.

I ramble on, as always. To return to the Lahiri story - one of my friends emailed back. He said he’d enjoyed the story very much, and asked me who Jhumpa Lahiri was. Clearly, the New Yorker is as important to him as the Dallas Mavericks are to me.

I replied back somewhat contemptuously, but soon realized how his reaction was practically identical to my own from earlier in the week. I also recalled that although he’s a huge sports fan, not once has he sent me sports scores or whatever it is that those people send each other.

Friends and family have, at various points, tried to explain to me, the intricacies of football or cricket or some other game. I’ve never really paid attention. In turn, I’ve tried over the years to get them to read / worship various writers, newspapers, novels and magazines. I must admit that I’ve had a teeny bit more success than the sporting lot. Or these sports fans are better actors than they are evangelists. In either case, thank you – for letting me be, and for being more generous with me than I have been with you.

[1] Their “playoffs” are on. If you’d wondered why this time of the year is relevant or don’t understand what a playoff is, can I join your hate-sports support group?
[2] Note to self: never kid yourself that you’re indulging someone else. My friends’ responded to this was a hoot of laughter (I happen to live in Dallas, which supposedly has a rather popular team) and the sort of look one gives children of 5 or below when they’ve said something particularly clueless and therefore amusing. They almost said those 2 incredibly offensive words ‘cho chweeet’. Then again, they didn’t have to - their look said it all.
[3] I do not include people who have the temerity to call themselves readers because they read a Tom Clancy novel 3 years ago or because they just can’t wait to get their hands on the latest issue of Woman’s Era.
[4] Why such fondness for an obsolete currency[5]? It had the least value against the dollar, as determined from a highly unscientific survey on oanda.com (1 US Dollar = 186.167 Andorran Peseta)
[5] And why the devil does oanda continue to list obsolete currencies? I found out the damn thing was obsolete only when I tried to hunt some more details about the country I should build my imaginary hacienda in!

Breaking the curse of the cross-post

2006-04-18T15:02:00.000-07:00

At one point in South of the Border, West of the Sun, the hero's father-in-law tells him that the hero's wife happens to be his (the father's) favorite child. The older man admits that no parent is supposed to play favorites, but that one cannot help it. I've always wondered about that[1]. Now I know. Sitemeter reports confirm the sad truth - this has officially become the less favorite child.

Cross-posting at two blogs is pointless. At some point, readers smarten up and go to just one. In my case the chosen one appears to be the other one. How do I give each of these identical twins his / her own personality? And at the same time ensure that we remain a family? If I followed the example of countless Indian, indeed Asian movies[3], the differentiation strategy would be simple. Starting from the simplest to the more sophisticated , I could:

1. Make an X mark against all posts in one blog but not the other. Well, the blogs already look different. Don't see what another X is going to add or take away.
2. Out myself on one, but not the other. And compete with myself? Besides which, I suspect that Earl Stanley Garnder sold more books as Earl Stanley Gardner than he did as AA Fair.
3. Tamizh-ize my posts at Stochastica. Become some sort of a web-enabled Junoon? Hmm... Not a bad idea.
4. Decide on an arbitrary boundary, and stick to it. Countries do it, why shouldn't I? Let's pick something random - I know - the names! Posts on books, movies and life go here. Assorted random stuff to Stochastica. Hmm...Also interesting - but pretty much all the random stuff I care enough to write about is to do with books, movies or life. There isn't going to be much differentiation this way.

So, turning into Junoon looks like the best option. Yikes! I think I'll think some more. I just heard the Pidivaadam tune in my head, and want to fight it out some more before admitting defeat. Meanwhile, I'll randomly post different things at both blogs.

[1] Thanks to my being an only child [2], the question used to be one of idle curiosity and nothing more.
[2] If you're thinking, "Oh, this explains so much", come off it, will you?
[3] I've watched Seeta aur Geeta starring everyone from Sridevi to Jackie Chan and yes, Jean-Claude Van Damme.

Homegrown talent

2006-04-10T15:04:00.000-07:00

Growing up in Tamil Nadu in the 1980s (we turn of the century souls are doomed to sound so old so soon, aren't we?), one of the most important questions that you were judged on was, "unakku yaar pudikkum? Rijini-ya, Kamal-a?"[1] This question was an important divider, a quick and dirty way of determining if you wanted to continue your acquaintance with the new kid in class, or confer upon him / her the label of "weirdo" (or "loosu", to use the vernacular) and take comfort in the knowledge that your life would not in the least bit suffer from not having this person in it.

I suspect this is a cultural phenomenon unique to the 80s. I don't know if my parents were divvied up based on their preference for Sivaji or MGR or who ever was big in their days. And I doubt that this question matters today. Can you imagine letting say, Bharath or the Chimp (aka Simbu) define your identity in any shape or form? (*shudder*)

But as always, I digress. Us 80s kids had one more question that was an almost equally important divider - the Crazy Vs. S.Ve.Sekar question[2] [3]. Like the first question, this one too appears to be a purely 80s hang-up[4].

Personally, I have always firmly been in the Crazy camp. I was introduced to Sekar first. My cousin (who being older pretty much dictated most things taste-wise for me in those days) was a big fan, and used to watch his plays. Since I didn't live in Madras, I used to borrow my cousin's recordings (I remember the audio tapes of Kaatla Mazhai and Mahabharathathil Mangaatha). I loved them, and tried to hold on to them for as long as I possibly could.

I might have continued life as a Sekar fan ( I remember that that old line "ullae veliyae ullae veliyae ullae veliyae" used to make me laugh uncontrollably), but something happened that changed my loyalties forever. 4 words: Michael Madana Kama Raj.

MMKR is, bar none, my all time favorite Tamil movie ever. And am pretty sure it will retain its position for the rest of my life. There may well be funnier movies, but none will have the "I grew up with this movie" cachet that this one has. I still watch this movie once in a while. I don't laugh at every joke any more - but just for my favorites (the incident of the poor mama's false teeth, most scenes involving the dad in the last third of the movie (his wanting to make tea at the tea estate, his wanting to relocate discussions to inside the refrigerator), and others that I love because I remember these are my parents' favorites (for some reason the line "kizhinjithu, ithula Telungu vera" used to make my Dad laugh the hardest I remember him laughing, the "thiruppu thiruppu" joke that always set my mother off, the "Beem boy Beem boy" thing that one of my cousins used to recite till we were convinced that the gift of speech, especially in boys under the age of 10, was something that the family should be able to turn off at will).

MMKR's cult status apart, Crazy has done some awesome writing for a number of other movies and of course, there are the plays. I'll move on after a brief mention of my favorites - A-Ha (my kingdom for the deaf thaatha, and the classic one-liners like "Sweet name. Jangiri"), Aboorva Sagodharargal (Manorama at the police station and Mouli get funnier with reruns and Janakaraj & Shivaji remain as fresh as ever), Thenaali (Dr. Panchabootham & his assistant Ramesh Khanna who always gets Thenaali's name wrong), and Kaathala Kaathala (I don't like this movie (too many kadi jokes), and mention it out of fear of legions of Crazy fans issuing a fatwa in my name).

I thought about why I came to prefer Crazy over Sekar. The answer lies in the fact that Crazy is closer to PGW than Sekar is. The intricate plots, characters that spill over from one play to the next, his masterly use of props (in one play, Crazy plays a character who's supposed to kidnap someone, and goes around begging all the characters in that scene to take the chloroform drenched handkerchief from him, there's another that involves a sack of coconuts), his use of Madras-English (he gets it bang on - his English dialogues remind me of grandfathers-who-write-to-the-Hindu-editor, convent-taught-kids (think Church Park, DB - the "old" schools), The Hindu, and well just Madras), and his ability to bend language to his purposes ("I mean what I mean, but they can't be so mean" is a priceless thing to say when your main characters are losing their minds about fish in the Sambar).

S. Ve's plays are funny too. In her post, Tilo calls him the Seinfeld of Madras. I agree. Seinfeld and Larry David are very funny, but do make their characters likable. The reason you laugh at Kramer or George or Elaine is because they are so uniformly obnoxious that it gives us immense pleasure to watch them falling flat on their faces. All of Crazy's characters by contrast are immensely likable (at least I find them adorable). They have a Wodehousian detachment from reality. No one is remotely evil, political or social issues of the times are almost never dealt with, characters are mostly bumbling and adorable idiots. If you like your comedy to be of the escapist variety, Crazy's a fairly dependable sort to turn to.

But of late, it's a pity to see both Sekar & Crazy stuck in a rut. It's as if comedians are like Russian dolls and have only so many jokes inside them. Once you've gotten to the last tiny doll, you can only reassemble them and start over. But I suppose it doesn't matter too much, really. All you need is MMKR and your family around to escape from

[1] The truly hair-raising part is that this question continues to be asked. Only this time as an outdated, but nevertheless important conversation starter in arranged-marriage-first-phone-call conversations. Even the possibility that judgements about one's character or personality are being made on the basis of one's response to this question is at least one important reason why the process sucks.
[2] Important disclaimer: I haven't watched any of the plays of either playwright, and my exposure is restricted to the movies they were involved with, the odd audio recording and any crumbs thrown to the masses via television.
[3] Somehow YG Mahendran never figured in this question. At least that was the case in my family. Perhaps there vast numbers of YGM fans out there put me in the, er, "loosu" category on the basis of my answer some secret question that didn't actually mention his name. To these YGM fans, I'd like to say, "You were right". I've never liked him, and we wouldn't have had much in common.
[4] Then again, what choice do kids these days have? To actually harbour a preference for Karunas or the hundreds of Karunas wannabes means that you have not only seen their work, but know enough to distinguish between them... When you have been reduced to such lows, it seems too cruel to ask you questions about wit and timing and plot and all the other qualities that mark the good comedian.

Update: For non-Southerners, the closest Hindi example to MMKR is Jaane bhi do yaaron. MMKR is no where as cynical, though. Similarities are limited to the way the plot is set up (layers and layers of carefully planned and executed scenes that all add up to a wonderfully hilarious finale)

A humorist after my own heart

2006-04-04T16:48:00.000-07:00

Some humorists make you laugh till your stomach hurts. Others can make you chuckle ruefully. Woody Allen makes me glad I'm me. [1]

I first fell for Allen's words, not his movies. I read White Feathers first (or it may have been Side Effects) and moved on to the scripts of Annie Hall, Manhattan and a couple of others I don't recall now. I must have been in my under-grad then. I'm not sure what directed me to his books at the USIS library, but I suspect I'd have found his works sooner or later. It's difficult to imagine who would have replaced Allen had I not discovered Allen.

Over the years, I've watched many of his movies (although I'm glad that I still have quite a few saved for rainy days ahead) - from the truly sublime ( Crimes and Misdemeanors , Zelig , Annie Hall, Manhattan), the utterly delightful ( Deconstructing Harry, Manhattan Murder Mystery) to strictly-for-fans only ( Sleeper, Don't drink the water, The Front, The Purple Rose of Cairo). It's good to be the fan of a man who is not only a genius, but also prolific. Just compare the experience of being a Woody Allen fan to being a fan of, oh, David Mamet or David Lynch - with Allen you simply get more.

I suspect age may have had something to do with how thoroughly I fell in love with Woody Allen. For a 17 year old, to live in a big city, have sparkling conversations with friends, listen to jazz, visit museums, and yes, deal with existential problems (Allen's characters almost exclusively have existential problems - infidelity, temptation, boredom... You don't often come across characters who have bad jobs, or no-job, no-money, and most certainly never no-apartment) all represented the very best of "adulthood". Allen's world was the stuff my dreams were made of.

I'm older now, and I still want to turn into an Allen character when I grow up. Technically, I'm supposed to be living that life I dreamt about at 17 (and in a way, I suppose I am, although I don't live in the Upper East Side or hang around Swedish film festivals). Now, I simply appreciate their fine escapist quality. I don't resent the 20-something artists their real estate. They seem to be so sweetly unhappy with their lot that I don't grudge them the odd 2-bedroom-apartment-with-terrace-and-view-to-die-for, in Midtown or Belgravia.

Also, Allen is an optimist. I can't think of a single movie of his at the end of which I felt cynical. Things that are liable to make one want to kill oneself in real life - losing the love of your life, getting caught committing murder, or having your spouse of several years cheat on you - only seem to leave Allen's characters perplexed and mildly annoyed. And in almost all of these cases, you just might manage to live happily ever after (or as happy as one's neuroses will allow) after all. No, you don't want Woody Allen for lessons in morality. You watch them to amuse yourself.

A good number of my friends are NOT Allen fans. Their complaints range from
"he looks like he does, and yet ends up with very pretty ladies", "he married his own daughter, for crying out loud!", "they talk too much in his movies", to "he's a twisted guy who makes twisted movies"... As for the first complaint, I admit it was a bit awkward to see him pair up with Julia Roberts, but in his old movies, honestly, it didn't feel at all weird to see him with Diane Keaton or any of his other leading ladies. He's never vain about his looks - whether he's playing a cheesy, unsuccessful talent manager, an oily Latin lover, or a husband dumped by Meryl Streep for a woman, his looks are an essential part of the charm. As for his personal life, well, he's no more or no less koo-koo than tens of other Hollywood stars (including the erstwhile matinee idol - Tom Cruise). Who cares what he does with his life as long as he makes such wonderful cinema?

This week-end, I watched Match Point. I found it a bit boring at first (the first two-thirds are pretty slow going), but the last third convinced me that the master hasn't quite lost his touch yet. It is such a thoroughly delightful movie. But I fear that Allen may have become dated. The average age of the audience was 55. This figure was skewed by 7 or 8 odd people below 35, all of whom, I was glad to note were desis. I can see how selling Allen may be a difficult proposition when the mainstream audience needs Kiera Knightly to draw them into watching Austen, and Ashton Kutcher to make sequels to Sidney Poitier flicks (*shudder*).

I turn to the other humorists I've been writing about when I need to be cheered up, or need to get away from my life's madness. I turn to Allen when I need to be reminded about myself. [1]

[1] Reading back, I realize some of this stuff sounds very vain - after all who am I to say that Woody Allen reminds me of me? I can only protest that when I say some of these things, I do so with the greatest degree of awe. A lot more of "Allen reminds me of the best I want to be", with just the odd dash of "he reminds me of who I am." [2]
[2] While I don't want to sound very vain, I don't mind sounding somewhat vain.

Memories of pigs, four-eyed secretaries, fat farms and dog races

2006-03-31T14:54:00.000-08:00

"Nostalgia's just the longing for a time you know you can survive."
- from The Well-Appointed Room by Richard Greenberg

It's weird to start a post on Wodehouse on that sentimental note. But Greenberg succinctly sums up what I suspect is the most important reason I continue to read PGW. I owe my introduction to PGW to a friend of my dad's. This friend is apparently a great fan, and my father remembered the author and got me The Head of Kays . I must have been oh, 10 or 11 then. I was quite livid with my father for buying me a book which featured neither Tin Tin nor Asterix, and worse, was apparently all about boys and cricket. I refused to read the book for I don't know how long. In those days, I actually used to read everything I bought, or could lay my hands on. Frequently, I actually ran out of books to read.[1] On one such occassion, I finally gave up my pride and truly gave Kennedy and Fenn a chance.

Kays isn't particulary funny. But having changed schools often myself, I completely related to Kennedy who finds himself in a new house. The book that made me a life-long fan was Leave it to Psmith , another gift from my dad. A serendipitous gift because it features Blandings Castle AND Psmith... I've never cared much for Jeeves (whom I consider to be the meanest character PGW ever created). Had I started with one of the Jeeves books, I doubt I'd have carried on with Wodehouse.

I'm not even going to attempt going over Wodehouse's style. Entire forests must've been mown down for the topic. Instead am just going to indulge in nostalgia, and say why Wodehouse is special to me...

- I remember reading somewhere that people who read do so in order to feel like they belong - borrowing Wodehouse from the Madras British Council library made me feel like I was part of a club - PGW books from the BC always had a lot of notes on the margins, lines underlined, references to other books where the same characters were featured, lines that some previous reader had felt were "the best!". Now, almost all of my friends read. But growing up, I didn't really have anyone I could discuss books with (my dad's participation was limited to footing the bill for my expensive hobby.) The doodles and underlines and notes on PGW books were the closest thing I had to a conversation...

- The suspicion with which my mom's always regarded PGW. Apparently, the sight of her one and only spending holidays cooped up with a book, and periodically letting out maniacal howls of laughter while clutching tummy and rolling on the floor wasn't my mom's idea of "normal" behaviour. I'd try to explain the joke to her, but you know how PGW is. My mom would only get even more convinced that her child was apparently daft as well as crazy - why else would anyone laugh at the idea of a fat pig being stolen, or a secretary in lemon pajamas? When the Stephen Fry / Hugh Laurie Jeeves shows were broadcast on televsion, I believe I made my mom watch them. She's never taken to PGW for some reason, and my forcing it down her throat didn't help. Something changed in my mom's opinion of me after she saw my tear streaked face as I read that last chapter in Leave it to Psmith - where Freddy Threepwood puts his leg through a rotting floor. I've done and read lots of things things that perplexed and continue to disturb my mom since then, but I'd like to think that that was the first.

In a fit of nostaligia, I watched the Fry-Laurie Jeeves series last week. It's just not the same. Laurie and Fry are still great (although Laurie wears too much make-up *shudder*), but the aunts are no longer menacing. In my memory, I'd also confused the actor who plays Steggles as being Gussie Fink-Nottle. Aunt Agatha looks just like Aunt Dahlia and Bingo Little & Tuppy Glossop feel more like a couple of extras rather than being the jolly chaps they're in the books.

I no longer howl with laughter when reading Wodehouse. But I still read him whenever I want to escape to a world where the worst thing that can happen is that an aunt might want you to steal a cow-creamer, and the most intelligence you need to possess is to not give your real name to the judge post boat-race night.

[1] Those were golden days, when one didn't carry all the world's guilt at not reading one or another book from a backlog longer than I care to make metaphorical jokes about. My mom told me that if I wish for many things in life, I'd be sent back at the end of this one so I could live out all my wishes. That was meant as a warning against wishing for too much, I think. Personally am not sure any number of lifetimes will get me through my reading back log.

Poking fun, with love

2006-03-30T15:55:00.000-08:00

For the next few days, I am going to write about my favorite humorists. This is my effort at reminding myself that there's still lots of stuff in life that can make me laugh (with pleasure, not hysteria).

I'll begin with David Sedaris. I was introduced to him by an ex- colleague who gifted me Me Talk Pretty One Day (easily the best gift I've ever received). I've been hooked ever since. Sedaris will be no stranger to regular readers of the New Yorker, or to listeners of NPR.

For the uninitiated, here are a few links where you can listen to the author. Warning: Do NOT attempt to listen to these recordings at work, or at any place where falling off your chair while searching your memory for something, anything to make the laughter stop can get you into trouble. After that build-up you're bound to find anybody unfunny, but here goes anyways:

Readings:The sex of French nouns, Excerpts from Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim.
To sample his writing, read Turbulence.

For the most part, Sedaris writes about himself, his family, life in North Carolina, his boyfriend Hugh and their adventures in France (the author & his partner split their time between France & the US, or used to till the last piece I read). It's a real pleasure to listen to Sedaris because he delivers everything in a vaguely regretful monotone, which somehow makes situations and characters funnier. My all time favorite piece is 'Jesus Shaves', a hilarious account of Sedaris's painful attempts at learning French. 'Santaland Diaries', an account of the author's short-lived career as a supermarket elf is a close second.

I'm a sucker for self-deprecatory humor, and Sedaris is about as self-depreciating as humorists can get. He doesn't bother with elaborate plots, or verbal pyrotechnics. His characters are drawn from life. But the effect is somehow not unlike PGW - both excel in developing a cast of characters that you come to love over time. His sisters, his lovable but weird parents, one very interesting brother, his rather sweet boyfriend (I suspect he says only the nicest things about him for obvious reasons) - you meet them all in different essays, and reading a new Sedaris piece is like catching up with a much loved and somewhat goofy family.

Humor can be caustic. Sedaris blends his with acceptance and love. Having grown up with Wodehouse and Thurber, I think I'm used to my humorists being nice people (or writing like nice people). Sure, I enjoy the more caustic kind, but poking gentle fun is somehow so much more fun.

Why too much TV is bad for you

2006-03-28T22:04:00.000-08:00

Of late, there's been a new topic to rant about in week-end calls with friends. Polygamy. At least 2 of my friends have watched the new HBO show, and well, so do I. There've only been about 2-3 episodes so far, and already I see a disturbing pattern emerging. My blood comes close to boiling when watching the show, and I relish making caustic remarks about it with friends, who in turn agree and come back with equally caustic responses. We swear we won't watch it again. And the next week end, we're having the same conversation all over again.

In this week's episode, the question that my friends and I had anticipated, and which has fuming with indignation but also stuttering with nothing better than "But…but that's not the same thing! At all!" finally came. If same-sex marriages are unions between consenting adults, doesn't the same principle apply to polygamy? Let's face it – it is the same thing. I just don't happen to like it.

I almost miss the days in which the only thing on TV that made me feel this indignant was Chitthiiiiiiii (God, I used to hate that show!). It felt so easy to rant against media empires that gave away prime time slots to shows where wives were beaten up (remember Deepa Venkat!), ambitious women were portrayed as evil, to rave against women content creators who were so lost to greed that they only cared about making money (did I find male content creators who were as greedy to be equally offensive? No – But I was more sexist then.)…

I digress. To return to polygamy. Would I like it any better if the question were about polyandry, as opposed to polygamy? I doubt it. Because in both cases, the victims continue to be women[1]. And that's the crux, really – my apparently unshakable conviction that in polygamy/andry, there are victims. Whereas that's not how I feel about same-sex marriages. Big Love doesn't make it easy for me to revise my opinions. Can't help feeling that the men are smug. The women come across as needy (wife # 3), don't-know-any-better (wife #2), or inscrutable (wife #1). It's impossible for me to feel sorry for the husbands who're under tremendous financial pressure to support multiple families, and get more than their fair share of wifely nagging. The minute I feel they must be regretting their lifestyle, along comes a bout of love-making that seems to make these men feel that the financial hassle's worth the trouble. One ~~fatso~~ character actually believes that taking on wife #4 is his way of answering God's calling. [2] Clearly, I have issues with the show.

Morality is a way to speed up decision-making. You don't have to agonize over the pros and cons of a situation. You agree with some side because it is the "right" thing to do. It's more efficient. In situations where morals fail or don't apply, one can at least fall back on personal preferences:
- stealing: bad (moral reasons),
- killing: bad (ditto),
- cosmetic surgery (to get sexier looking lips / boobs / whatever): bad (surprisingly enough, moral reasons – I feel that you're not dealing with the hand nature gave you - corrective surgery, OK - elective surgery NOT OK),
- smoking – bad (Here I leave morality and move into the realm of personal taste. I don't like it myself, so I won't do it. I vaguely think you're foolish to do it, but I won't hate you for it, or stop you from doing it, so long as you don't blow smoke in my face),
- eating meat – distasteful (to me. You can eat whatever pleases you, so long as you don't mess about with dead flesh in my kitchen), and so on and so forth.

I suspect I have strong "moral" beliefs about questions like stealing, killing etc. because these were instilled into me as a child (growing up with desi movies, for the longest time, I actually used to believe that the minute you commit a crime, you'd hear sirens blowing as the cops would be on their way. I must have been 12 or older before I figured out that in most cases the police really have no way of knowing the instant a crime is committed).

I'm sure my parents must have emanated a sense of "polygamy: not good" because I feel so very comfortable making that call. On the other hand, I am 100% certain there was no talk what so ever about same-sex marriages. (In all fairness we never even had the birds & the bees talk, so this topic had no chance at all. I was quite into science in those days, and they must've figured I'd get around to it sooner or later). And yet, I appear to have acquired strong "moral" beliefs, and unfortunately conflicting beliefs about both.

Here's the thing about morals ... They have this nasty habit of turning into umbrellas. Over-arching principles, which if they apply to situation A1 demand they be applied to situation A2 as well. With polygamy, I'm not sure what I'll decide. I see three options before me:
- go down fighting,
- after a while bump the question from an ethical one to one of personal taste.
- stop taking stuff on TV personally. HBO wants to make money. I want to spend money. We've already struck a deal. Why sour the relationship with silly questions?

In the meanwhile, I'll day-dream of situation A3 - nogamy - where people who wish to be left alone are left alone - by people of all sexes.

[1] I'm afraid I don't recall specific evidence that I can use to back my claim. Regular readers of Kalpana Sharma will know what I mean. Or you could try watching Matrubhoomi. Yes, the latter's fiction, but so is Big Love. All very apples to apples.
[2] My cattiness apart, the acting is really good. So far the show's been interesting, and one hopes it will not soon run out of steam, even if carton-loads of Viagra continue to keep it steamy.

Update: Update: When I say "polyandry as opposed to polygamy", I mean "polyandry as opposed to polygyny". Thanks to Sudha & Pete for catching that oversight.

Genre-fication aka Reverse-engineering the magic sauce

2006-03-27T16:17:00.000-08:00

Popular fiction is becoming like the restaurant business. If it's new, it's a good idea to try it now. In three months, you'll get the same gravy / sauce (if the cuisine's Italian) that is mass manufactured in Guangdong or Gurgaon and air-lifted to every restaurant in the world.

Take Austen. The lady writes a delightful comedy of manners and society. And since they didn't have the internet back then, it took several hundred years for the mass production to start. First came Georgette Heyer, then Helen Fielding. Now, you have whole sections devoted to Chick-lit, all of which read exactly alike.

The Name of the Rose was great. Foucault's Pendulum. Even better. We then move to 25+ million copies of a somewhat re-hashed Foucault's and before you know it, you have a whole genre of wannabe historical mysteries. The latest addition to this genre is Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian. The premise looked interesting enough. Problem: a good two generations worth of mystery surrounding Vlad, the Impaler (aka Dracula), plus at least one kidnapped Professor of History. The heroine: another Professor of History who looks into old documents collected by her father, and his mentor and travels all over Europe to unravel the mystery and to rescue the missing person(s).

It's such a pity that what made Eco's old sauce work has now been reverse-engineered into its individual components. The ingredients for Writing a Historical Mystery:
1. One pinch of history (vital that this pinch be from some area that even science majors will know about)
2. 5 heaped scoops of nerdiness (why would anyone who is truly cool be remotely interested in Sir Francis Bacon or a 400 year old Romanian landlord?)
3. 2 tea-spoon full of Great-Looks (for your oeuvre to really have legs, the casting director must be able to use leggy actresses) [1]
4. One attractive reward that awaits the intrepid scholar / librarian / diligent student at the end of his or her adventure (helpful hint: world domination, buried treasure, heirs to sons / daughters of God, even cataloging a rare and extensive collection of books and manuscripts - all taken - please think of something else)
5. The following are essential ingredients that you cannot replace, no matter how adventurous you’re feeling: Istanbul / Constantinople, Rome, obscure village in some-country-formerly-behind-iron-curtain, at least 2 piazzas, 3 water fountains (at least one of which should be functioning - remember leggy heroine must get wet), 4 chapels, 17 libraries and 1 railway station (to remind your US audience that Europeans are so archaic they still use trains!)
6. Very important: Pique the readers' curiosity at the end of every word / sentence / para / chapter. If you are confused about how you can do this, begin by replacing full stops with exclamation points!

Kostova sticks to all of these rules. I might have found the book merely tedious, but the "prize" (refer rule 4 above) offered by Kostova transports the book into the realm of the ridiculous. It's not "propah" to disclose more. I will merely say that the secret had two of my friends in splits. I was in too much pain to laugh.[2]

When I consider this genre-fication phenomenon, I realize that the fault lies with me (as it almost always does). When I see a good thing, why can't I just let it go? So, I loved Eco. I shouldn't try to seek that same thrill over and over again. I should move on. The hang-ups that served me well in childhood (if you enjoyed one book in the Tin Tin series, reading allof them is a good thing) no longer apply. A good friend's always asking me to expand my horizons. I'll try to heed his advice in at least one area of life. No more wannabe Tolkiens, Ecos, or Austens[3].

[1] In my more paranoid moments, I wonder if this whole history + mystery movement hasn't been started by academics who would appear to have finally hired Rick Renard or someone of his caliber. In my less paranoid moments, I wonder which celebrity is a Rosie Crucian / Free Mason / what-have-you (as you can see, Foucault's Pendulum has left a lasting impression.)
[2] For a fee of twenty-five cents, full plot will be disclosed via personal email.
[3] You should be so lucky to get wanna be Tolkiens, Ecos or Austens. You're more likely to end up with wannabe-wannabe-Tolkiens (a wannabe-Rowling or wannabe-Paolini for instance), wannabe-wannabe-Austens (the wannabe-Fieldings and the wannabe-Bushnells figure here)

When insomnia is a good thing

2006-03-27T11:37:00.000-08:00

A friend sent me this. This is one instance when muttering Bipasha Bipasha Bipasha (replace with your choice of item girl / guy) might have been so much better. Or perhaps that is what this chap did mumble, and got his words twisted around by an angry wife... This got me thinking about what would happen if the courts started taking action on the things we mumble when we're asleep...

A new clause will have to be added to the Miranda rights - whatever you mumble when you're asleep in your cell can and will be used against you in a court of law. You can get your lawyer to sleep with you, or one will be provided for you.

Interrogations will no longer feature those old bores (the good cop & the bad cop) - the most respected interrogators will now be the cops who can get you to fall sleep... Their expertise will lie in choosing the right material for the right person: Engineering text books for some, old issues of The Economist (or new ones) for others, and for the especially hardened cases perhaps even a lullaby (police brutality taken to unimagined extremes: picture David Caruso wearing sun-glasses and posing with his hands on his hips, giving you that sideways glance and singing a lullaby - I'd confess to anything under such duress!) The good cop'll now ask you if he can get you a nice warm glass of milk. Overnight, insomniacs will become the most difficult criminals to crack.

Losing something on the way from Madras to H’wood.

2006-03-17T07:57:00.000-08:00

I had big plans of enjoying a decent movie after the disappointment of Chithiram Pesuthadi. And I ended up watching Baasha, in English - with Viggo Mortensen & William Hurt playing Rajinikanth & Raghuvaran respectively. And I am curiously happy to say this - it was a lousy copy!

A History of Violence = Baasha ++ Sex ++ Violence (broken noses are particularly abundant) - - family drama - - 8-philosophy, no auto-kaarans, and especially no achakkus in any form whatsoever, not even the stray gumukku. In all a pale copy that fails to do justice to the original. Ed Harris & William Hurt play evil dadas nicely - but the man who matters, the auto-kaaran (well, he’s a diner-kaaran here) is wooden. The part I don’t get is why they nominated Maria Bello for her role. She’s alright, but her performance is quite ordinary. Harris and Hurt are much better even in their minor roles.

Age-old crime

2006-03-16T13:26:00.000-08:00

I am an un-married, un-pregnant, not-in-love-and-not-confused-or-sad-about-that, and getting-long-in-the-teeth person. Why has that become such a crime of late? With each passing day, the egregiousness of the crime only seems to increase. I’m not sure what irritates me more - being thought of as a hedonist, an “abnormal” person, or being treated with hope and sympathy - “you’ll change soon”, “everything’ll be alright”, “just wait till May”… People fail to see that I am just as miserable as married people, pregnant people, people in love, and people who’re just confused. Why this marked preference for one form of misery over another?

So, here are the top 10 ways to respond the next time someone tries to give you the “talk”:

- I actually want to be in a relationship, but since I’m fat, ugly and stuck in a dead-end job no one will have me. Can you set me up with your best friend / close relative?

- If the goal is to not fit into that pair of skinny jeans, which method would you say is more efficient? 1 1/2 hours at Olive Garden or 1 1/2 weeks at Presbyterian Maternity?

- And how are you enjoying Nickelodeon?

- Thank you for asking. My relationship with Netflix is everything I ever dreamed of.

- Last Tuesday, I finally did it. Fell madly in love - with myself. I give it two months.

- Children? I’m waiting till more book-friendly models become available.

- Ah yes – the pitter-patter of little feet. I convinced my parents to adopt. It’s been wonderful for them, really.

- Since you asked, research shows that single life after 35 is completely cancer-free. We singles don’t like to let that out.

- (This one’s for enquiries from anyone who’s 10 or more years elder to you) So, what you’re saying is, “If your best friend jumps into a well, so should you?” Oh well, I only wish you’d taken the trouble to tell me that when I wanted to (a) get my tongue pierced (b) drop out of school to get a head start in the pizza delivery business (c) save that money to move to a commune

- You’re just jealous that I might pull a Demi over y’all.

PS: In the last month, I’ve outed myself to some of my friends, and I expect threats, tears et al. from a number of you for this post. Remember your own advice - let’s wait till the end of the year, I’m bound to change sooner than later.

Of windows, doors, and fish in the sea.

2006-03-10T14:33:00.000-08:00

This has been an interesting week for me. Why beat around the bush? It's been a miserable week. Four, what should I call them - disappointments, i-knew-this-would-happen's, i-should-have-seen-this-coming's, still-it's-not-the-end-of-the-world's, c'mon-you've-been-through-worse's or my favorite at-least-i-have-my-blog-and-my-health's in seven days. Two out of the four were pretty solid whacks to the heart and ego. The other two would have gone by almost unnoticed were it not for their timing - their contribution is invaluable in giving life that perfect degree of bleakness.

As my back-end processors work on a pep-talk for myself, I am going to bore y'all for a while by examining the common theories of happiness / sadness to see if I can pick the right model for myself:

Alternating peak-trough theory. Sometimes, I think I put too much faith in the peak-trough philosophy - the one about life being filled with alternating troughs and peaks. This makes me feel entitled to a peak every time I hit a trough and fear a trough the minute I hit a peak. So I spend my whole life dreading peaks, because only a trough can follow & the bigger the peak, the deeper the trough, and so on. And what if some lives are all troughs or all peaks? It is, after all, as valid a theory as the alternating peak-trough one.

Widow-door theory or the "when a door is closed, a window opens" hypothesis. People really should have never bought this theory in the first place. From the very name window/door, you know they're pulling a fast one over you. The scale's all wrong. A DOOR closed. And a window is clearly a completely inadequate consolation prize. The door's usually of the magnitude of losing the love of your life, and the window's like your boss telling you that you're wearing nice shoes. Nice try, boss-man – can I be offered a day off?

Post-mortem settlement. This is very similar to the alternating peak-trough theory, but the crucial difference is that the time frame is considerably longer, and possibly never-ending. This one proposes that by facing tough times, you're either repaying debt from a couple of generations ago, or shoring up for future generations. I have many problems with this theory. One of which is that according to this theory, the act of dying is less powerful than declaring bankruptcy is and say what you will, that just saddens me.

Plenty of other fish in the sea theory: I suspect that this is the old window-door theory rebranded for fishermen.

Shit happens: Why are we so enamoured of patterns anyway? Why seek logic? Life is random. So long as one doesn't have to hear the story of a butterfly in Shanghai causing a storm in California, I think I'm actually ok with this one.

I don't know why I started this post, but when have we ever let minor things like that stop us? I must work on my pep talk now.

Killing machine, moi.

2006-03-10T13:48:00.000-08:00

I start the day with a smile, thanks to Falstaff. Then I come to this. The part that really got me was:

“High literacy rates in the state could be a major reason for this change,” said Chauhan.

And there’s more:

Activists said the cases that come to the women's commission are only a fraction of the rising number of marital disputes. Most were handled by relatives, friends and village councils.

"We must remember that most of the marital disputes are settled by relatives, friends and village councils and only a few cases of atrocities actually reach the commission, in any case atrocities against women far outnumber those against men. But 177 cases of men seeking justice is significant," Chauhan said.

I do pity the men of Himachal. Battered by their well-read wives! All 177 of them!

I’ve been wrong all along. Education doesn’t make you wiser, just more violent. That men have been violent with women for so long is perhaps all due to their being literate. As the tables turn, men had better watch out!

What happens in Kerala I wonder? Did 100% literacy lead to increased violence? Or is some steady state reached because both the sexes have weapons of equal power? And what happens next? Like some ever growing weapons stock-pile from the cold war days, will men and women go on accumulating more weapons? You may be counted among the literate if you so much as know how to write your name on a piece of paper. Let’s call it your average stick-type weapon. When both husband and wife have sticks, clearly the person who can progress to a more intelligent weapon would have the advantage. What’s next? Being able to read street-signs? Your ration card? No wonder people who read newspapers can wreak so much havoc!

Golly! I can read whole books! Several of them, in fact. In at least 1.5 languages! And write! Move over Attila, here comes DoZ!

The agony and the agony

2006-03-06T08:15:00.000-08:00

How do the sports fans do it? Year after year, championship after championship? How do they keep coming back for more? Every year, I promise myself I shan’t do this again. But come Oscar time, there I am, a simpleton, hoping against hope that this year it won’t be about past debts, about which movie is morally right, which movie evokes the right baby boomer memories or whatever crazy excuse they come up with each year in deciding the winners. In true Hollywood style, I’ll try to be positive, and count my blessings. So here are some of the things I am grateful for:

- Joaquin Phoenix not winning for the Johnny Cash movie.
- Munich not winning for best adapted screenplay
- Wallace & Gromit’s winning
- That the surprise winner was Crash, and not some song & dance movie

Karl Marx would’ve had tears in his eyes. Equitable distribution of wealth is possible. He might not have seen Hollywood in the role of the just distributor, but it does go to show that miracles do happen, just like Ron Howard says they do.

I don’t have the energy to sit through 3 more hours next year, to watch Paul Giammati win for a 2 minute appearance in some movie or wait for 30 more years to watch the Academy finally give Ralph Fiennes an Honorary Oscar. But this is the post-Oscar battered-me talking. For once I hope I will continue to feel this bad, so I’m not here same time next year, ranting about one more miserable ceremony.

A message from above

2006-03-02T21:29:00.000-08:00

When I was a child, I was told that everyone has something special about them, something that makes them wanted. I still believe that. You may be depressed, balding, too fat, too thin, jobless, too busy, religious, debauched – there's a telemarketer, televangelist, spammer, or at the very least, a flyer for you. Personally, I draw peddlers of every sort. Most of them come in batches – just when I think I can't take one more email offering Ciali$$ or Vi x gra (proof that humans will ever be wiser than all things mechanical, including spam bots), there'd be a home mortgage or a 0% APR credit card phase. My peddlers like to mix it up.

Spammers come and go. But the one group that has ever had a presence in my life, and made that presence felt is the "let us save your soul" group. They are persistent, inventive, and omnipresent. I don't know what it is about me that gives me away as a soul in distinct need of saving. I've sampled almost every marketing tactic known to man to get me to believe in God. That I may already do so seems to make no difference, which leads me to wonder if God is actually trying very hard in his / her own way to tell me something.

My suspicions were recently confirmed. My from-out-of-town friends & I were doing the sort of things one does when on vacation - visiting the aquarium, trying out local delicacies, visiting the famous local Hindu Temple (which we'd mentioned to our parents & would be asked to account for), and mostly importantly driving to each of locations (this being Texas, that is pretty much all we did.) None of us drives (at least not legally in the US), and we took cab-rides, a LOT of them. Since this is a highly expensive and silly way of intra-city transportation, it's a buyer's market. Cab drivers fell over each other to offer us their cell phone numbers, happy to wait for hours just so they could take us back home or to our next destination.

I had my latest brush with the soul-savers in one such cab. Yeah, you'd think you're safe because you're not in some airport or a busy street but in the privacy of a car that you hired. Makes no difference. You see, our cab driver was of a religious persuasion. I don't understand what made him decide my friends and I were godless heathens (especially given the fact that this chappie drove us for a good 3 hours to and from the temple). We spoke of our preferences for one temple or another, of friends, of marriage (of friends we'd lost to marriage, of recently wed couples who clearly "deserved" one another), of movies (Brokeback Mountain, which of course lead to Monster) ...Sheesh, I knew we needed to watch what we said out loud in Texas!

After the 3rd or 4th hour of driving us, Fred (our cab driver) started asking a few friendly questions. It began innocently enough. Where were we from? Where we here on vacation? Was that a Hindu temple we'd just visited? How many Gods did Indians believe in? (This question had us stumped for a second or two, and we valiantly fudged with "oh, thousands!") Was any one God considered more powerful than the rest? (the two Saivites in the car obliged him with a very Saivite version of the power structure). He spoke of the Gods in Nigeria (yes, he was from Nigeria). About a God of Thunder and a God of Iron and witch doctors (although I suspect the last was just for effect). All this time, I kept thinking - this is what traveling is all about! A bunch of Indians and a Nigerian discussing religion in Texas! A God of Thunder and a God of Iron! Would I get this at home from a PBS documentary? Possibly, but this was real.

Fred went on to say there was an interesting story behind his own faith. I should have seen the warning signals, but seduced by his talk of Gods of Iron & Thunder, I hmm-hmm'ed along. What followed was the longest "how God came into my life" story I have ever heard (and I have heard quite a few in my time). My friends promptly dozed off... I had to stay awake & continue to "hmm-hmm", occasionally "oh-wow", "really", "you-don't-say" along...

I suffer from obsessive compulsive listening disorder - I believe that if there's anyone speaking, a) I must listen b) I must provide visual or auditory proof of my listening, and (the last and most fatal rule) c) if I start hmm-hmm-ing, I must carry on. Ask my classmates - "noddy" is possibly one of my mildest nick-names... (because in class it is impolite to hmm-hmm out loud) Fred's path to enlightenment seemed never-ending. First we covered the free-as-a-bird years - the partying, the drinking... Life then started to resemble The Birds. Within a few days or weeks, Fred had had a series of accidents. How his car went up in flames, how he almost ran over a pedestrian (there must be some Nigerian pedestrian out there boring his family & friends with stories of his having discovered God after a near-death experience), how he was burgled not once but twice in 2 weeks - everything was described in loving detail. This was followed by the why-me phase, the friend-took-me-to-a-pastor days, the pastor-asked-me-to-fast-for-a-few-days phase, and after that even I stopped listening. By then I'd made a vital discovery about myself - I CAN put my hmm-hmm-ing on auto-pilot!

My friends would wake up every 15 minutes or so - see that Fred was talking, and that I was listening - and content that all was right with the world, go right back to sleep. Sure every 30 minutes or so, one of them would direct a giggle in my direction, break up my auto-pilot's rhythm, and get back to dozing. Finally, we reached our hotel. Fred offered to drive us around the next day. I felt I had earned the right to veto, and I exercised it. My friends agreed, and actually had the gall to ask for a summary.

That night, as I finally got my just sleep, I had my own epiphany. God was trying to tell me something. Fred was right, the message was loud, clear and very simple. Only in my case, God was saying "My child, get off your ass, and get a license!"

The joys of co-hosting

2006-03-02T12:26:00.000-08:00

Technically, it was Karthik who got tagged. But I've no powers of resistance against tags such as this. Am butting in. But Karthik - Veena & I are both eager to know your own list.

Total number of books I own
About 300-400 (counting stuff from the dark ages, including my collection of Russian children's literature). Practically of it is back home in India. I have less than 10 (although I suspect 25 may be a fairer number) in Dallas. My parents are under strict instructions to NOT lend my books out, and I conduct random, unannounced phone interviews to ensure that they're sticking to the rules. Thankfully none of my cousins is into most of the stuff I read, but my old Asterix comics are under constant threat and that's enough to keep me awake at nights.

Last book(s) I bought
Ponniyin Selvan Collection by Kalki as translated by CV Karthik Narayanan
Parthiban Kanavu by Kalki (another English translation)
Two Lives by Vikram Seth
Valuation: Measuring and Managing the Value of Companies by McKinsey & Company Inc., Tim Koller, Marc Goedhart, David Wessels - purchased in a moment of madness I still can't explain

Last books(s) I read
Howard's End by EM Forster
The Greatest Man in Cedar Hole by Stephanie Doyon
On Beauty by Zadie Smith
Caesar: A Novel by Colleen McCullough

Books I am currently reading
Two Lives by Vikram Seth
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
White Teeth - Zadie Smith
Shipping News - Annie Proulx

Five books that I have really enjoyed or influenced me
An Equal Music by Vikram Seth
On Beauty by Zadie Smith
The Head of Kays (my first Wodehouse)
Pride & Prejudice
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte
The last two are major 'influencers', and have contributed in a major way to my approach to life and romance - the conviction that I don't want to settle for anything short of the sort of romance that Elizabeth & Darcy have, balanced by the equally unassailable conviction that true love can only lead to a marriage like Helen Graham's. My friends & family wonder why I'm screwed up - well, now you know. I place the blame squarely on these two long dead Englishwomen.

Books I plan to buy / read next
Haruki Murakami - Kafka on the Shore
The White Mughals by William Dalrymple
Anything by Kazuo Ishiguro / Zadie Smith / Vikram Seth / Margaret Atwood
The next Harry Potter

Authors / Books that caught my attention and I have never read, but consider my "duty" to read
The Histories - Herodotus
Homer's Iliad & Odyssey
Niall Ferguson

Books I own but never get around to reading
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Salman Rushdie - Midnight's Children
Michael Cunnigham's The Hours
Valuation: Measuring and Managing the Value of Companies by McKinsey & Company Inc., Tim Koller, Marc Goedhart, David Wessels. I knew this would happen. It's lovely to be so right about things.

It was supposed to be for a month, but...

2006-03-01T12:01:00.000-08:00

My "month" at Stochastica is up. I expected to get ceremoiniously booted out, but so long as there are high stakes gamblers like Karthik around, I needn't have feared. I've been offered a permanent spot on Stochastica, and I've obvisouly jumped at the chance. Readers (I'm in a "the glass is half-full mood today, and I picked the plural term) of Dreaming of Zihuatanejo: I will continue to post here. Until I figure out a differentiation strategy, I'll keep cross-posting as I have been.

Dinner and a movie? Skip the dinner.

2006-02-27T22:02:00.000-08:00

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.

This week end, I found myself in the unenviable position of having to defend Texas to a couple of friends from out of town. The questions flew hard and fast – haven’t you heard of building vertically? How do you survive here without a car? Why are meals always prepared for families instead of for an individual? I didn’t have answers to those questions. I repeat what I told them. This is Texas. It took me a couple of years to get used to it, and I have. I am positive that when I make that trip back home and visit my favorite restaurants, I will ask waiters for the rest of my food / coffee / whatever. I will probably feel disconcerted to leave home and arrive at my destination in under 15 minutes. I may not feel motivated enough to drive without a Hummer honking away behind me. Yes, this is Texas, and I’ve gotten used to it.

I didn’t realize how much of a Texan I’ve unsuspectingly become until I watched The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. I felt completely at home in this movie – with the accent, the terrain, ever-present Spanish. I particularly loved the lonely old man who listens to listen to Spanish radio because he likes the way the language sounds. I love watching Telemundo myself for the same reason. And for the fact that someone gets slapped every seventh minute (Ekta Kapoor and Radhika – ladies, you can learn TONS of lessons from these Mexican soaps).

Alright, alright, I’ll get to the point. You’d think Three Burials is a western, about cowboys and Sheriffs and vigilantes delivering justice to one and all on horse back. You have all of this. But the cowboys of Three Burials also round up cows in the middle of nowhere, shoot coyotes, sometimes get shot themselves, speak Spanish, and are quite poor (as a one-time watcher of “Dallas” and sometime resident of Dallas, I have become disabused of the idea that everyone in Texas owns a ranch dotted with thousands of cattle and the occasional oil well). Far from finding true love (don’t even dream of “forbidden” love, all you Ang Lee fans), here, an evening out with the town slut passes for romance. No, the cowboys of Three Burials are not glamorous. Tommy Lee Jones plays the guy to whom you attribute all the “cowboy” qualities you’ve distilled from years of Clint Eastwood and John Wayne (loyalty, honor, an apparently unshakeable sense of justice), because you’ve been conditioned to do so. That he turns out to be all of that, and also mad as a hatter comes as a surprise.

You’d think Three Burials is a story of redemption and justice. If you harm someone, even accidentally, you must be prepared to face the consequences. Barry Pepper’s character reminded me of Matt Damon in Crash. You begin by hating him, but end up feeling sorry for him, even rooting for him as the movie unfolds. But when you start laughing at him just as he’s having hot coffee poured on his lap and his nose broken all within a minute, it comes as a surprise.

You’d think Three Burials is a commentary on illegal immigration and callous government officials. Mexican lives are not worth as much as American lives, or so appears to be the general philosophy of both the Sheriff and the Border Patrol. That the Sheriff suddenly feels the need to visit Six Flags or drive his truck off the road in order to delay his investigation comes as a surprise.

Three Burials is full of surprises. If you love your Zane Grey, Three Burials is not the movie for you. It features mad cowboys, Sheriffs who need Viagra, and embalming lessons you will not learn in Six Feet Under. The best thing about the movie is its sheer nonchalance. The violence, the humor, and some truly disgusting things they do to a dead body (Think of the scene in Pulp Fiction where Travolta blows off someone’s head in a car, and they clean the car of blood and brain. Multiply it by a factor of 10 – yes, it is that gross and that funny) – everything is treated with a casualness that takes your breath away again and again.

But for all that, the movie doesn’t quite come up to scratch. There’s no meaningful “so what” at the end of it. And there are too many things that feel completely out of place (Pete Perkins’s proposal to the waitress, the Sheriff’s suddenly sprouting a conscience, the whole mystery about Estrada’s family), and keep this movie from being a truly great movie.

Final verdict: it’s a decent movie, full of pleasant and unpleasant surprises. However, it is a bit disappointing, as all of these surprises don’t really add up to much. Watch the movie to get a taste of Texas and a few laughs that will leave you wondering about your own tastes. And do yourself a favor, please skip the pop-corn and coke.

Go here to read Falstaff’s more enthusiastic review.

Defense against demons

2006-02-20T09:20:00.000-08:00

I felt utterly happy today, weak-kneed with relief,
Mellow with satisfaction, even hopeful about the future.
It wasn't the sort of happiness that makes one
Shout out aloud from rooftops for all to hear,
Or grin like a fool for you to see.

I meant to savor the emotion in private,
As I do that Thurber cartoon you never quite get.
I called you anyway,
Because I felt utterly happy and wanted to hear your voice.
And because I thought my secret made me invincible.

Somewhere between talk of remorseful Shinagawa monkeys
And remorseless vice presidents, I forgot I had a secret.
Reality and my old demons steeped in,
Like color from a tea bag, turning my mood dark.
Even a tea cup typhoon has its share of heartbreak.

I lie on my bed, thinking about today.
Somewhere between thoughts of you,
Of Shinagawa monkeys and my demons,
I remember my secret, and my happniess returns,
As does my invincibility.

I fall asleep wondering what makes me invincible?
My secret, those monkeys or you?
----------------

No pain, no gain. Fine. But no guilt no pleasure?

2006-02-17T13:53:00.000-08:00

In the last three months, I was technically not supposed to blog. By that, I mean there was a self-imposed moratorium on writing for pleasure. I had to complete a series of writing assignments, and I had told myself that I shouldn't, er, dilute my creative energies by writing posts. But that resolution was treated with as much determination as a late night show host who vows not to make another Cheney joke.

Last week end, I finally completed my assignments. I'd looked forward to this day for the last 6 months, perhaps even longer. In my dreams, life stretched out, utterly beautiful and completely essay-free in every aspect. I'd made plans for a zillion different activities, whose only common trait was that none of them involved my sitting in front of a computer, forcing myself to be simultaneously creative and credible.

Early Sunday morning, I celebrated – by watching 15 Park Avenue at 3:30 AM (I'd just finished my last assignment, and wanted to celebrate right away!). Not a good choice. Make no mistake, it is a great movie. Konkana Sen gives a darn good performance as a schizophrenic, as does Shabana Azmi as her long-suffering step sister and care-giver. Just as Madhavan & Arvind Swamy blossom in Mani Ratnam movies, so did Rahul Bose with Aparna Sen (Rahul Bose is always good, you say? I submit as evidence 'Mumbai Matinee'. And rest my case). Even Kanwaljeet Singh is nice, and I can't remember the last time that that happened. But as you will find out if you watch the movie, it's hardly the movie you want to watch if your goal is to celebrate anything.

During the last 12 weeks, life was full of illicit pleasures – several of them worth writing about. There were movies to be watched, books to lose sleep over and which once watched or read, begged to be written about. There were crazy incidents involving friends and colleagues. There were any numbers of items in the news I was itching to write about, any numbers of friends I have stead-fastly ignored... Now that I have all the time in the world for guilt-free hedonism, suddenly pleasure seems to be playing a tough game of hide and seek with me.

I tried calling up long-ignored friends. I called one friend well past midnight because she'd mentioned long ago that she's usually up till 1:00 AM. After I woke her up and profusely apologized for it, we agreed to catch up later. I doubt that I'll hear from her again. Another friend cried off because he said he had to wake up early the next day (which was a Sunday – can't people come up with make decent excuses any more? Perhaps this ability wanes after 1:00 AM…). Determined to have a conversation, and beat the silly objections over lateness of the hour, I called up Mom & Dad, who being in a different time zone shouldn't have objected. But, they'd just returned from a trip, and were too tired to make idle chit chat, even with their one and only, and even if they haven't set eyes on this dearly beloved in almost 2 years. It was one of those "We're OK. Tired, but OK. Are you OK? Good. Anything else?" conversations.

I've tried reading. I read the Sunday Times, caught up with old unread issues of the New Yorker & the Economist, Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, Colleen McCollough's Julius Caesar¹, Vikram Seth's Two Lives, Annie Prloux's Shipping News, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway – just lost interest after about 5 pages in each novel. I've tried watching movies, was even lucky enough to catch a couple of good ones (Aparna Sen's movie, and Kanda Naal Mudhal). But you can only watch so many movies in a week end²...

The problem lies not with the book or movie, but in me. Take guilt away, and apparently, you lose the pleasure, too. This wasn't always the case. The problem is that with age, my ability to keep pleasure at bay has waned. When I was in 10^th grade, for example, I didn't read novels or watch movies when I had "exams" to study for. I admit that the presence of my mom might have had something to do with that. But since I moved out of home, I don't let pressing matters like exams or deadlines keep me away from reading. If anything, I read more - convincing myself that my over-taxed brain needs a break... Sure, I feel guilty afterwards. But when I look at my pathetic attempts to "unwind" after 10+ weeks of some very hard work (OK, that's not entirely true, but there most certainly were pockets of moderately hard work dispersed over 10+ weeks), I worry that guilt appears to have gotten all enmeshed with pleasure.

What lies ahead? A heedless hunt for deadlines, hated assignments, or any other gun to my head so that I can enjoy guilty pleasures again?

In the meantime, I was finally reduced to cleaning my room and doing the laundry. And I didn't even get the halo I usually get after performing such selfless acts of courage. Today, I've been toying with the idea of writing long emails to friends in India I haven't mailed since moving to the US, and calling up assorted aunts, uncles and cousins.

[1] This sudden loss of interest is particularly hurtful because I'm about a third into the novel, and had found it fascinating till this week end.
[2] Only so many movies in a week end? Egad! What alien force has taken over my body and mind?

From Denmark to Kolkata? Or Affair of the Danish Cartoons: Part Deux

2006-02-17T12:25:00.000-08:00

A friend sent this link today. Possibly realizing that I might object to the source, he backed it up with another source. Yes, I realize that the information is still open to question, but still.

Initially, I was too disgusted to react. For, even if one ignores her, er, peccadilloes (takes Herculean effort, but it is possible), let us remember that this is the person Robert Redford doesn’t even want around a film festival. A few hours later, I am more tired than disgusted. I do not look forward to the reams of newsprint we will use up writing about this new controversy, if it does indeed turn out to be a controversy. Will there be protests? Will the same director offer to cast, oh I don’t know, Snoop Dogg as Vivekananda to prove the point that he isn’t out to target a specific religion, but that his craving for attention is secular?

This could start a whole trend, and given the number of religions, we could spend the better part of this century insulting them one at a time. By the time we’re done with all of them, it’ll be time to start again. Anything to keep us from thinking about real problems. Sounds like a plan.

Three for the price of one

2006-02-05T00:47:00.000-08:00

I watched three Tamil movies this week. There were a number of reasons why I’d sworn off Tamil movies, but as any self-respecting addict, I’ve forgotten them and went on a binge. After watching Aadhi, Thavamai Thavamirundhu & Athu Oru Kana Kalam, I surprisingly am not yet close to swearing them off again. I think am waiting for one more movie - Paramasivam, which my roomie keeps threatening to watch. I can then safely go back to a three or four month hiatus.

Since I’ve been accused of, ahem, over-obsessing over inconsequential things, I’ll try not to.

Aadhi: Experimental cinema or Blame it on Rajinikanth
Precedent says punch dialogues are good for the hero, especially if the hero dreams of being the next Rajinikanth. So the makers of Aadhi figured why not have more of the good stuff, indeed why not have a movie composed entirely of punch dialogues? The hero, the comedian, the villain, the villain’s side-kicks, even walk-on characters, everyone in Aadhi communicates exclusively through punch-dialogues. Here’s a sample:

Main Dada to another dada: Perfecta plan pannu. Panna theriyalanna enakku phone pannu.

Comedian: Naan podra shoe thaan Reebok-u. Pannra velai porambokku.

Hero:
Unakku kaila than kathi. Enakkau kaiyae kathi.
Thoda mattein. Thotta, vida mattein.
Neruppa thirippi pudichaalum, athu nimithuthaan eriyum. (This is my personal favorite.)

Note to readers:
1. I didn’t translate the lines into English, because they’d just lose their “punch”
2. The list above is only a tiny sample, there are tons more in the movie.

If you take away these dialogues, Aadhi is just another masala movie. It has all the ingredients - a tale of revenge, a little bit of suspense, gratuitous violence (heads and limbs chopped off, little girls molested), some comedy (this I admit was painful, and limited to Manivannan hitting on a Punju auntie. I forget what Vivek was doing in the movie), some utterly ridiculous stunts (hero rips door off a moving car in order to defend himself from the bad guys at one point), a pretty girl and of course, romance.

The reason I truly enjoyed the movie were the dialogues: the binding agent that brought all these elements together to make that perfect bad-good movie. This is a great movie to watch with friends. Just make sure you don’t have any squeamish girls around.

So, will this movie make Vijay the next Super star? Vijay may get the manager, and copy the dialogues. But Dhanush has the hot shot director / brother AND big daddy / daddy-in-law. Do the math yourself.

Thavamai Thavamirundhu: Long, but alright
Karthik already wrote about this movie. Just wanted to add my two cents’ worth. I quite liked the movie. If Aadhi was good because it was bad, Thavamai Thavamirundhu is good because it could have been so much worse. I have seen this plot lots of times before, mostly by Visu. I am grateful to Cheran because he doesn’t go over-board as Visu does. People are treated badly in this movie, but they don’t rave and rant like they usually do in Tamil movies. I agree with Karthik that we could have done without all the cycling they do in this movie, but am willing to forgive Cheran anything for putting together a simple story, and keeping it simple. And I think I liked the movie also because my parents, who don’t watch very many movies, did watch this one, and really liked it. Had I watched it with them, I might have felt obliged to protest against any number of things about this movie – the length, the crying, the cycling, the printing press, the omnipresent misery… but I didn’t watch the movie with them. Just thought of how it might be like to be back home again, and make silly arguments just to tick my parents off… And mostly for that, I liked Thavamai Thavamirundhu.

Athu Oru Kana Kalam – not for cynics.
Spoiler alert!

Athu Oru Kana Kalam isn’t your usual Tamil movie. It has all the elements of a perfectly decent tragedy / “realistic movie”- an ordinary looking hero, a pair of star-crossed lovers, well-meaning characters whose actions somehow wreak untold misery for all involved… and just when you’re all geared up for a “life sucks, and there’s isn’t a thing you can do about it” conclusion, Balu Mahendra ends the movie on a happy note. The lovers get to live happily ever after, after all. It felt like slap in the face. I got all huffed up, and made a series of speeches on justice and rule of the law and idiotic policemen who have respect for neither, and crazy directors who think the audience is gullible enough to buy stories about benevolent cops who let murderers get away and live happily ever after with their girlfriends… I guess the fault lies not in the Balu Mahendra, but in me. I’m too cynical for movies like this one. Just because seven eighths of the movie felt down to earth doesn’t mean that the last one eighth has to stay grounded too.

And am willing to watch many more movies like this one, so long as movies like this keep Dhanush away from disasters like Thiruda Thirudi or the other one where he drives around pretty girl in a yellow convertible in some South East country (Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong – take your pick).

Three very different movies and each was not bad for its own reasons. Paramasivam, hit with whatever you got, and let’s get this over with.

Karma – what's in it for me?

2006-02-02T12:12:00.000-08:00

Today, someone was extremely rude to me. Understandably, I am hurt and angry. I didn't try to, er, return the compliment. But this post is not about my desire or ability to be rude. No, this post is about musing what might constitute fair restitution for all manner of hurts, particularly those cases where there is a clear distinction between the injured party and the party to blame. The way I see it, I have the following options:
- swear
- curse, or wish upon this person anything from a flat tire to a mosquito bite.
- do nothing, but take comfort from the belief that some mysterious accountant in the sky (or is it below ground? My Hindu mythology's a little rusty) will update the karma accounts of all parties involved
- act noble

Option 1 may provide a temporary release, but really, it doesn't do much else. So I won't bother with it. The other three are worthy of deeper contemplation.

Option 2: Curse
While this offers a very tempting promise of quid pro quo, here's why it is not a good enough option in the long run. Let's say I wish this person had a flat tire, and some genie actually makes my wish come true. That still leaves too many questions unanswered. When will the flat tire happen? Today? Next week? Twenty years from now? And a mere flattening of a tire isn't going to do anything for me. It has to be made clear to the rude person that the tire was flattened because he / she hurt someone (ok, moi). Otherwise, what's the point? They're going to think they're the victim. OK, so that may be true, but they must realize why they've been singled out for victimization, right? In order for this to happen, retribution must be swift, and not take place a decade and a half after the initial act of rudeness.

There's another aspect to the question of timing. Sure, I want rude person to be inconvenienced, but what if flat tire happens when he/she is rushing to the hospital to see / save a [dying] loved one? That would be terrible! Even I'm not such a monster… after all, only my ego was hurt – no damage to life or limbs occurred… So, maybe the curse idea isn't such a good one. Moving on.

Option 3: do nothing, rely on Karma
This is my least favorite option. I am still not sure a 100% about the mechanics of Karma, possibly because I am a crass materialist. But being the crass materialist I am, this is my interpretation - Karma is like a bank account. Good karma dollars get put into your account if you behave well, and bad behavior takes your accumulated savings away. Of course, there is such a thing as a deal size, or in this case, a deed size - letting roomie watch game on superbowl weekend may be worth about 10 or so karma $. Actually sitting with said roomie and watching a game you neither understand nor like because you remember that the same football loving roomie watched Memoirs of a Geisha with you, that's got to be worth at least a $ 1000, if not more.

But here's what the problem is with having an account - money comes in, money goes out, and at some point you lose track of individual dollars, (unless one happens to be on some Interpol / FBI / SEC watch list for money laundering - and considering that I am neither Mother Theresa nor Saddam Hussein, my karma cash flows, whether positive or negative, are no where close to "laundering" status yet). So whether your boss suddenly goes on vacation or your car breaks down on the 635, you're never sure what brought it on. So where's the opportunity to learn? Sure, I could be "sensible" and try to only those things that I think will bring in the karma moolah, but really, let's get real.

And the other thing about karma is that is too personalized. I only seem to have a direct say about what goes on with my own account. Causing minor emotional injury may cause rude person to lose a few dollars from his or her account, but what does that do for me? I can't, for instance, say I want $9.99 taken from rude person's account and put into mine. And even if we assume that I receive some form of compensation (that I got to write a post about it may be one for all I know), I'd really like to be able to choose my own compensation. Even if it's a lousy choice, like the ones that Readers' Digest gives you, I'd still like to be able to choose. If asked to choose between an idea for a new post, losing 0.2 pounds with no physical or mental exertion, and oh, something to day-dream about when am stuck watching that silly game on Sunday, I might want all three, but hey, at least I can grumble about life being unfair, pick one and move on. (and in case you're wondering, I'd have picked losing 0.2 pounds. I watched "Aadhi" AND had the presence of mind to take notes AND I can survive a bunch of men in helmets chasing a ball with an identity crisis any day (it's not a ball, for balls are round. It's not an egg. What is it?) - but losing weight by doing nothing, now that's an idea - ask any infomercial)

Conclusion: I don't want to rely on an accounting system that seems to be almost as good as Enron's.

Option 4: act noble
As you can see, through out this post I have taken great pains to raise the question "what's in it for me?" in very many subtle and not so subtle ways. Acting noble (without the option of good karma) is clearly not an option to spend too much time thinking about. OK, I take that back. You can act noble, in cases when you're confident it will drive the opposing party wild. In my case, and this particular rude person, I don't think it's going to work. As I know this person rather well, I know that the rude person is simply going to think I'm a prat and continue being rude.

One thousand words and counting. Still no answer to the original question "what constitutes fair restitution?" Now the question is what restitution would you want for having spent those precious minutes of your life reading this post? Think about it, and let me know. As soon as I receive mine, I'll get by to thinking about yours.

Making an honest start

2006-01-27T16:48:00.000-08:00

I have for long wanted to take a break. Not the usual “break”, where the boss pretends to let me get away from work but gives me enough teasers about what’s in store for me on my return that I spend most of the nights away dreaming up new horrors, and my days doing most of the things I myself expect myself to do on vacations – read, watch movies, talk with friends, or think about doing one of these. Or go to the sort of places I am likely to go to – museums, movies, parks, walks, etc. All of these are very enjoyable, but also quite predictable. It doesn’t make too much difference even if I change the city or country, because this new city or country would still be something I’ve always wanted to visit…

Sometimes, I don’t want to take a DoZ holiday. I want to take a holiday from DoZ. And then go back to being DoZ, because my neuroses are dear to me, and I would miss them frightfully if I permanently exchanged them for someone else’s. (I assume everyone has them).

When Karthik asked me to be a guest on his blog, I thought, what a neat idea. (That sounds composed, but said composure after a considerable time: the head swelled, and the heart went a pitter-patter from the flattery, then from the nervousness). Writing a blog under a pseudonym is an escape of a sort from my true self. Writing for someone else’s blog under said assumed name is [escape]², as it were. (Sorry to disappoint any who thought DoZ was my real name…I lied, but DoZ does reflect the essence of my true self. I doubt that I’ll get re-invited on the Oprah show for making this disclosure, but hey, you have to be invited first before you can be re-invited.)

From the SEC to Oprah Winfrey, everyone wants to be told the truth these days. So in my first post, I would like to give fair warning of some of the things I may not be entirely truthful about when writing for this blog, or my own.

- The degree of frustration I feel when watching a bad movie. No person involved in the making of a movie has, till date, entered my home and tried to hack me to pieces with a blunt knife. (I added the “till date” clause because one shouldn’t make rash statements. Movies and those involved in their making surprise me all the time)

- The degree of joy I feel when reading a book. I am known to get easily carried away by books, and start writing glowing reviews before I finish a book. I have noted that my sentiments are prone to change by the time I get to the end of the book. Sometimes, I do not update this change in sentiment on the post.

- The degree of pain I feel when considering work related matters. Here’s it’s a case of understating the true state of affairs. Am trying to cheer myself up when writing and I don’t want to encourage any more suicidal tendencies than the ones I already live with.

- Extent of reading I’ve done: After finishing no more than one half of a book by a novelist, I am known to consider myself an expert on said author. I will try to warn you if this is the case, but this is a blanket cop-out, in case I forget to.

- Memories, good and bad: If my memory about where my house keys are at this very moment is any indication of the general state of my memory, I wouldn’t rely too much upon the exact proportion of fact vs. fiction about some incident that happened when I was 8 (Note: I may claim I was 8. In truth, I may have been 26, or 17 or it may have happened only yesterday)

- Any other subject where I feel that fiction sounds better / more entertaining than the truth. This is just a blanket just-in-case.

When I go back and read what I’ve just written, I realize that I’ve successfully made myself sound like a pathological liar. But honestly, I’m not so bad. Really. Or may be I am. I just made sure that you’ll never trust me enough to know the actual truth, if there is such a thing. Now that is what I call an honest start to a few weeks of pretense.

Going major league – for a while

2006-01-27T16:37:00.000-08:00

As much as it pains me to use a sporting terminology, I console myself with the fact that using the term does not mean I know any more about baseball (if the term is to do with baseball in the first place, and it may not...in which case I feel greatly reassured.)

Enough beating around the bush. I will be blogging for Stochastica for the next few weeks, or until Karthik’s regular readers bribe him into coming back sooner from Sepia Mutiny, which ever happens earlier. In the interests of efficiency, I will merely copy/paste my posts. Efficiency, ha! I just want to pretend that I have hordes of readers who shun all blogs other than this, and would go into a nasty withdrawal phase if I ignored them for a while. As for the regular readers of Stochastica – hang in there, for this too shall pass.

Why I read - the long version.

2006-01-19T09:16:00.000-08:00

I thought all day to come up with a suitable metaphor about what it feels like to begin reading a new novel. I can't really equate it with any one experience. I was going to say something really corny like 'sinking into a new novel is like falling in love'. But I won't say that. Unlike love, a novel is undiluted pleasure.

Early this week, I started reading A.S. Byatt's Babel Tower. Personally, I think I get the most pleasure from a novel in the first four or so chapters. If it's an author I am familiar with, the experience of reading the first couple of chapters is like walking back from the mail room with a letter I think is from a friend. I still don't know the details, but I know enough to be positively inclined to continue investigating. More importantly, I still have a choice, to carry on or not. After about 100 or so pages, usually I no longer have a choice. I must read on.

In those first four chapters, I'm still testing the waters, getting a feel for the texture and colors of the universe the novel offers. This is why I love long novels, because I can give this process of discovery the due diligence it demands. I read partly in order to escape my world, and the greater the details I have about the world I am escaping to, the more real the flight feels. I love authors like Ishiguro and Amit Choudhary for this reason. No floor, no room, no garden, no setting is too trivial for them. Everything is described in loving detail. This is the same reason why I love a book like The Blind Assassin. Before you get to the messy details of what someone did, it's vital to know who they are, so you understand just why they ultimately do what they do.

In the beginning, a novel is just a novel. I vaguely remember some law from bio-instrumentation – that the very act of measuring a natural phenomenon alters the phenomenon being measured. I don’t suppose a novel ever is just a novel, except in those first few pages. Perhaps novels are created in order to be measured, to be viewed through the eyes and the individual experiences of every reader. But in the beginning, I haven’t yet begun relating to the characters and the situations, to see them through the eyes of who I am, who I think I am, or who I wish I was. All that comes later.

Mind you, it is not that I dislike novels that hurtle you into the action in the second sentence. That is a thrill of a different kind. If you're listing the merits of different escape mechanisms, the epic is like a 10 course meal with your best friend, in a place very far away from the reality of the present lives of you and you friend, where you have all the time in the world. Pleasures from the past are remembered, and even as you enjoy that meal and that conversation about remembered joys, you know this experience will forever be a part of you, to be recalled at future feasts. The thriller that begins with 'There was blood everywhere' or something similar is like doing something immensely pleasurable after you’ve gotten very drunk. Afterwards, you will remember that there probably was pleasure, but the details will be vague. The ten course meal, and getting drunk - both are pleasurable. And both have their own times and places.

Having said that, I really do prefer works like the omnibus edition of the Lord of the Rings where initial perseverance is demanded. Perhaps my love for thick tomes is also a tad motivated by the wonderful feeling I get from adding that imagined regal tilt to my actually rather stubby nose, as I look pityingly at friends who gave up too early.

The pleasure does not go away after the first few chapters. If you think of those chapters like the road to a self-contained world in a castle, the next few chapters (you still haven't reached the mid-point yet) are like crossing the moat. Some things start making sense, but there is much that is yet to be discovered. I crossed the moat into Babel Tower two nights ago. I now know that the narrative deals not with three parallel story lines, but two. Perhaps the remaining ones will merge, too. I don't know, and am prepared to find out in my own sweet time. (Update from last night: the story has unexpectedly diverged, with a couple of additional parallel story lines)

Having crossed that moat, I will be in the thick of things. This is when the fever to find out "what happens next?" catches on. From this point on, I’m a lost cause. I only turn off the lights when it's 3:00 AM or even later, after I realize I absolutely MUST get out of bed in roughly 3-4 hours time. The next day, caffeine from several cups of hot Darjeeling tea is the only thing preventing my head from crashing into my keyboard. Finally the work day ends, dinner is a hurried affair, and I can't wait to get into my bed and into my book.

By this time, there's pressure to finish the book. I don't have the patience to linger on, savoring each line. Sometimes, I purposely call off the chase, when I feel I'm completely missing the point. I have done this repeatedly with Golden Gate. Time and again, there comes a point when I stop relishing the poetry and care only about the story. I have yet to finish that book. Perhaps the only solution is to read it through, and come back for a second, slower reading.

Not all novels get me this worked up, thank goodness. I'd never get any sleep otherwise. The average Woodhouse is an example. I re-read three Jeeves novels over a three week period, rarely reading more than a chapter a day. There's no hurry to finish. I knew that Jeeves will rescue everyone, which cheered me up. I knew that poor Bertie will end up with egg on his face, which depressed me more than it usually does. I prefer Blandings Castle books, where there's never even a suggestion of evil. Lady Constance at her most livid and the worst pig stealer are benign creatures compared to the menace that Jeeves is. Lord Emsworth is NEVER hurt, unlike poor Bertie. And Gally Threepwood is infinitely superior to Jeeves, when it comes to spreading lightness and joy in this world. But I continue to read Jeeves books in the blind hope that someday, one day, Bertie will get to keep his purple socks or his eye-sore of a mess jacket or his moustache... It hasn't happened so far - but there are many Jeeves books. Am sure there are a few I haven't read yet, there just may be one where Bertie will finally be recognized by one and by all for the genuinely nice chap he is, instead of being labeled 'well-meaning ass' / 'of negligible intellect' or whatever other insults he collects by the end of a book.

As always, I get distracted. Apologies. To go back to before I veered off at a tangent, not all books have me sleep deprived. Whether or not they make me lose sleep, most of them (at least the good ones) leave their mark. Before I am even conscious of it, another pearl of wisdom or inane remark becomes part of my own make up (the latest addition - “What [people]’re really thinking about isn’t the one they are marrying but the one they aren’t.” From the Byatt I am reading). Sometimes I wonder if my life completely vicarious lived only through the lives of the people I read about… But the fact is I am not Helen Graham or Colonel Fawcett. Just as I am not Shanti Seth or Jack Aubrey. Books teach me lessons I will never have a chance to learn otherwise.

I think I will stop here. There literally is no end to the reasons why I read, and the pleasures I get from it. Despite rambling on for all this time, I am positive that the minute I click the Publish button, at least five other things will occur to me, as they will keep occurring to me through out today and later tonight. What brought on the rambling? This morning, after taking one look at my blood shot eyes, a colleague innocently asked why I read... Ha.

My heart’s desire

2006-01-17T07:43:00.000-08:00

What are the big things one sets one’s heart on? Why do we choose them? When it comes to the qualities I think define me as a person or my greatest ambitions - the reasons I selected them are often so trivial that it’s frequently embarrassing, and occasionally frightening.

Let us take 2 examples: How did I get this book-crazy? My parents. When I was around 6 or 7, mom and dad grew bone weary of meeting my ‘tell me a story’ demands and handed over a book. I still remember my first book. It was a story about a kingdom famed for its sweets and which was overrun with rats. The king tries all sorts of schemes to rid his kingdom of these creatures, and finally as the very first illustration of the ‘if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em’ philosophy, agrees to let the rats stay on, provided they stick to the official quota of sweets set aside for them by the citizens.

To think I actually resented my parents for weaning me away from the half-hourly ‘story-time’ ritual… Gad, I can’t imagine how life would have been if I’d simply given up in a huff (yes, we used to huff quite a bit then, as we are still wont to on occasion), and decided to play with toys instead (Egad! Thank you, the powers that be, for saving me from that fate worse than death!)…

Moving on to example #2 – travel. Someday, I plan to visit Norway. Reason: Marco, the linguistically-challenged Italian from my high school French text book (Le Mauger Rouge). The poor man spouted some line about the ‘Land of the Midnight Sun’, the idea, in all probability, was to teach us those vital words (land, midnight, sun) that we will no doubt need if we ever found ourselves in Paris and had to quickly find out where the rest rooms were. But I found myself enamored at once. The minute talk of fjords started, I was lost forever. And mind you, this was before any mention was made of aurora borealis. Of course, over the years, I have found numerous other reasons for visiting Norway, similar to the original reason only in the extent of their triviality –SlartiBartfast’s fondness for fjords, Bill Bryson & ‘Neither Here Nor There’, Stefan Edberg (under the handy, if misguided rule of thumb that to see one Scandinavian country is to see them all) and God knows what else.

Now, everybody expects me to have a clear idea of what I want to do with my life. I am expected to have short term goals and long term goals, and short-term and long-term plans to achieve those goals. Having those goals isn’t sufficient. I must somehow explain why those goals are my goals. And sound sufficiently important and earnest when I do the explaining. When I dig into the roots of my single greatest passion in life, and discover neither initiative nor a burning desire to accomplish some inspiring goal, but only my parents’ weariness and my own annoying behavior, the less I explore the true reasons behind my other ‘interests’ and ‘goals’ the better it probably is.

So much for the reasons behind my fondest dreams. What is the likelihood of my achieving these goals? Apparently not much. For, there doesn’t appear to be any such thing as a sure thing. Please remember that this is not about knowing that the sun will rise tomorrow from the east. It’s about finding my one true love, getting that dream job, buying that perfect car, winning the Pulitzer, finding a cure for cancer, or whatever crazy seemingly impossible things which for whatever crazy reasons I have my heart set on. As you can clearly see, these are complex goals, influenced by hundreds of thousands of factors, any of which could go wrong, and are therefore inherently unsure bets.

This is growing into a long post – so we’ll do a quick recap. Even the most important goals are set for random and utterly trivial reasons. The likelihood of achieving those goals is any one’s guess.

Let us move on to the rewards. For whatever silly reason, fact remains that I want to visit the Land of the Midnight Sun. Let us suppose for a minute that I do actually make enough money to afford the trip and have enough vacation time. What is the expected reward? A sense of untold happiness, which I believe I will experience once I accomplish that goal. With some other goals, the reward is not pleasure, but the absence of pain. For instance, my mother managed to keep me studious through my school and college years with one very effective threat – how I would starve slowly to death if I didn’t study well enough to get a job. So, for 20+ years, I toiled on, with the aim of avoiding hunger pangs.

Rewards - combination of begetting pleasure and avoiding pain. So be it. Even if I assumed that I will achieve all that I want to achieve, and get the rewards that motivated me to achieve them, the next question is how much will these rewards be worth, after I’ve earned them?

I read somewhere that men and women tend to overestimate future happiness as well as disappointments. I suppose that's true. Indeed, I know this to be true from experience. At 8, my big goal in life was to become a scientist (the word was always uttered breathlessly, think Marilyn Monroe in Seven Year Itch). I was going to wear a white lab coat, work in a lab, and be surrounded by multihued test tubes. And oh yeah, wear glasses. A nice specific, tangible goal if there was ever one, wouldn’t you say? In my third year of undergrad, I was doing precisely that. The moment I realized that I was living my childhood dream, what do you think resulted? Tears of joy and smugness? If you ask my classmates, they will tell you a different story, one closer to the truth. The peal of my hysterical laughter still lives on in their memories, triggering the occasional nightmare. Did I mention men and women overestimate future happiness? Amen to that.

Another recap. Goals are random and trivial, set for equally random, trivial reasons. The likelihood of achieving those goals is slim. Once you’ve achieved even complicated, seemingly impossible goals, there is a real possibility that you’ll feel no different from say a week before you achieved these complicated & seemingly impossible goals.

I performed a highly unscientific poll around the lunch table today to verify these conclusions. Out of 5 including self, these were some of the disclosures:

a) X: My uncle talked me into majoring in electrical engineering because he saw a bright future for me in Tamil Nadu Electricity Board.

b) Y: I was specialized in high voltage engineering. Am still not sure how I ended up as a software engineer.

c) DoZ: Once upon a time, I wanted to be a scientist. Boy, am I glad, I am not.

d) X: Amen to that. Before I wanted to be an electrical engineer, I wanted to be a doctor.

e) A: I wanted to make movies, but parents wouldn’t let me apply to film school. I almost became a civil engineer. But boy, am I glad I am an electrical engineer.

f) X: I was positive I did not want to move to the US. That’s why I married a desi from India (as opposed to Jersey). Did not plan on said desi moving to the US.

All 5 agreed that their presence in said lunch room / current job was no cause for either great happiness or utter despair.

(Note from pollster: There is no double counting - we just have a surfeit of lost electrical engineers).

So, it would appear my conclusion stands. Life happens.

And now, the clincher: when you’ve acknowledged the above, what does it do for your sense of commitment? How can you put in the sort of blood, sweat and tears that anything worth having seems to demand? Will as many poems get written or movies made about love after one knows that love most probably isn’t as great you imagined it would be? Will Devdas or Romeo or Juliet have made the crazy decisions they did if they knew that a few weeks or a few months after they broke up, they’d have picked up the pieces and simply carried on? Aren’t Parvati and Joan Didion the characters / personalities we should truly celebrate? After all, they not only moved on, but married rich men or wrote best sellers from their passing phase of despondence.

Moral of this overlong and winding post: The heart desires. But in life, there may be rich men & bestsellers even the heart doesn’t know about.

Ignorance is bliss

2006-01-15T16:51:00.000-08:00

What a promising start to the New Year – asserting that, I mean. I get sentimental about a lot of things, and I really wanted to start the New Year with a post with a whopping dose of goodness and confidence and what not. As always things that move me enough to write aren’t usually brimming with goodness and confidence and all that. What started this post? Last week’s episode of CSI. Shudder! Yes, I watch Jerry Bruckheimer shows. But after that night, I think that the statement will soon be amended to “I used to watch popular television.”

A lifelong bibliophile, I’ve never questioned the inherent superiority of knowledge over ignorance. There may some matters that are guaranteed to bore you into an unrecoverable coma, if you ever took the trouble to find out about – like the intricacies of American Football, or most sports. But there wasn’t much on this planet or beyond which I felt was better to never inquire into, or pay attention to if someone else happened to mention them in the passing. Knowledge, till recently, was divided into boring and interesting, and varying degrees of boring and interesting. There was no “good” or “evil” cubby-hole, just as there was no “NOT to EVER find out about” compartment.

I shan’t go into the plot of the CSI episode – I’ve already lost one night’s sleep over the silly thing, and I really don’t want to waste any more time on it. And after all, who am I to judge? Perhaps the idea of reading is as nauseating to some folks as that plot felt to me.

No the point of this post is something else. I have come to the realization, perhaps too late, that omniscience is no longer desirable. I really don’t want to know about everything about everything any more.

Maybe that will be the theme I will focus on this year. Not bother with the things I see are starting to bother me. I don’t want to lead a life in the constant lap of comfort (yeah right!), but then again, if there is something am losing sleep over, I only ask that it be worth losing sleep over. This afternoon, for instance, I finally got around to watching Million Dollar Baby. The last few days have been really stressful, and I pretty much cried my way through this movie – giving vent to all the misery and doubt walled up in me over the last couple of months. Yes, this movie’s probably going to keep me up tonight, wondering about life and death, but at least this was worth it.

I sound disjointed, I know. I have a ton of things to take care of. I will finish those, and come back with a more coherent post. For now, no more CSI. Boy, that feels good.

Happy new year

2005-12-30T20:18:00.000-08:00

The Complete New Yoker & Seth's Two Lives - mine. Happy New Year to me. And yeah - the rest of you, too.

Forms and skeletons

2005-12-28T16:29:00.000-08:00

At the moment, I have forms coming out of my ears. At work, I’ve been testing a forms automation software; at home, I’ve been filling out application forms – web forms, paper forms, mobile forms, immobile forms, I’ve filled almost every kind. Imagine my consternation when I go to a favorite blog in an attempt to restore some sanity into my life, only to have posts about forms! But at least this was a heck of lot more fun than the other forms I’ve been churning out. It reminded me that not everything about forms is the opposite of fun.

Karthik’s post also reminded me of a funny form story from my own family. Amazing how it’s the passport that serves as the one medium that long forgotten family ghosts elect to speak through. Graduating school, applying to colleges, jobs, getting insured, hospitalized or married, even dying – all these other form-filled experiences lack that certain Ouija-board-ness of the Passport application form.

A few years ago, my Periamma (aunt) was filling out a series of forms. As anyone who’s traveled abroad knows, forms beget forms (LOTS of them, since the concept of birth control is alien to forms). Periamma needed a visa. For which she needed a passport. For which she needed a birth certificate. She also needed her High School and Graduation Certificates, and mark sheets or ‘transcripts’ (God knows why, but governments like to be thorough in these matters) Coming from a typical Tamil family, of course, she had every one of these documents, safely preserved in an assortment of meticulously labeled plastic folders and envelopes. That she had them all was part of the problem.

I don't want to get too deep into the clashes in birth dates between her birth certificate and her school and college certificates. OK, I just changed my mind - birth date confusion is an important cultural phenomenon that's worth contemplating. It is exceedingly common among people from my aunt's generation that it's considered the most natural thing in the world to have multiple birth days, a ‘real’ one (the English month, date and year you were born in), the ‘official’ one (or the date that your parents gave when they enrolled you into school a few months or years before the school would officially accept you – you had to be 6 years old to be accepted into first grade, and parents’ patience rarely lasted so long), and finally the ‘star birthday’ (or the birth date as per the Tamil lunar calendar). Of course, it goes without saying that the ‘real’, ‘official’ and ‘star’ birth dates aren’t remotely connected with each other. (And just in case you were wondering, your parents only allowed you to celebrate one.)

Forms being the dumb information recording devices they are simply lack the intelligence to deal with a cultural phenomenon this complex. They give you 6 tiny boxes against ‘Date of Birth’. Which one? This is the question that stumps pretty much most folks from my parents’ generation. [Thankfully, they’ve learnt their lessons, and folks from my generation only have 2 birth days – the ‘real’ one and the ‘star’ one. We owe eternal gratitude to the introduction of kindergarten, which got us out of our parents’ hair & into our teachers’ at a much earlier age]

My Periamma had Date of Birth problems. That was only to be expected. But that was nothing compared to ‘Father’s name’. Simple question, you’d think. Except that she had Kannan (my grand father, and her actual father) on her school & college certificates, and ‘Appaswamy Mudalayar’ (or my great-grandfather) in her birth certificate. This had the entire family stumped for a long time. Since Appaswamy Mudalayar was my aunt’s maternal grandfather, my grandfather even felt a little miffed – “if someone gave the wrong name, why couldn’t it have been my father’s name?” was the unspoken question. The mystery and the passive aggressive grumbling continued for a few days. My grand parents wracked their brains, trying to retrace the actions surrounding the birth certificate. Considering my aunt is the first of five children, and was over 40 years old by the time anyone had taken the trouble to look at the damn certificate, this was quite challenging.

Finally, my grandmother remembered. In those days, one didn’t have to fill out the birth certificate form at the hospital, like one does now. Families would usually send someone over to the Thaluk office a few days after a baby was born, and get the paper work done. Our family must have had its form filler too. This form filler dropped by to get the details from my grandmother before going by the Thaluk office. The conversation must’ve gone like this:

Form filler: Kozhantha peru? (Baby’s name?)
My grandmother: XYZ
Form filler: Ennaikku poranthuthu? (Date of birth?)
My grandmother: 15 Oct 1953
Form filler: Appa peru sollunga (Father’s name?)
My grandmother: Appaswamy Mudalayar

That, you see, was the crux. My grandmother, still a young girl, had given out her father’s name.

Oh, how we laughed at my sheepish looking grandmother. After recovering, my Periamma had a bit of a row with her mother. Understandable, because she had suffered a panic attack before this deeply troubling question was resolved. That there was a confusion regarding any question was bad enough - every one in my family is trained to fall apart when faced with troubling forms. [Troubling questions in life rarely bother us. We pass them blithely by – but give us a troubling question in a form, and you’ll have a nervous wreck before you can check one of those ‘check this box if you have ever received electro shock therapy for mental illness’ questions. It’s ok to be dumb in life. But to have a form point that out to you makes it so very official.] That the troubling question could have so easily had a life-altering answer was too much.

We had the devil’s own time getting the name corrected. My aunt was born in Chidambaram. The family had long since moved to Madras. Zones had been rezoned, and Thaluk offices changed. Someone had to figure out the new Thaluk office, and go there personally to get it all sorted out. And it was. My aunt got her passport and her visa, and was able to visit her son. All’s well that ends well.

PS: I hate that line. What about all the suffering in between? But that’s a question for me and my Gods, as it applies to so much more than mere forms – life itself, come to think of it.

Munich - good, but not nearly bad enough.

2005-12-24T23:48:00.000-08:00

I just got home after watching Munich. Am trying hard to think of a suitable analogy that will describe my state of mind at the moment. It feels like coming home from an exam you expected would be a nightmare, but which turned out to be merely comme ci, comme ça (said with a Gallic shrug and a shake of the palm, which somehow adds heaps to the sense of ambivalence that phrase so aptly signifies).

First the positives: Munich is good entertainment. For a movie where you figure out what’s going to happen over the next 2 hours in the first 40 or so minutes, it is nevertheless exciting, and frequently caused me to hold my breath and gasp and jump a couple of inches off my seat. The art direction is particularly commendable (who knew the 70s were old enough to feel like a “period”? Wonder what the 00’s will look like 30 years from now…), as is the cinematography. I love spy stories because they’re a good way to go sight-seeing from the comfort of a theater near you. And in Munich, you get to do a lot of that – Jerusalem, Beirut, Athens, Rome, Paris, Munich, New York, and even a teeny bit of Holland are all thrown in for the price of one movie ticket.

The cast is impressive, the action slick, and the violence gruesome. All in all, it delivers most things you’d expect from a political thriller. Thankfully, there aren’t too many cutesy one-liners, so it all feels quite ‘real’, or what I imagine would be real for a bunch of professional assassins. After all, what do I know of international intrigue? For all I know, spies and terrorists could actually lead glamorous Bond-like lives, or it could be something far more boring. At any rate, Munich combines the right doses of sophistication, dry wit, grittiness, and soul-searching to make the post of a super-secret Mossad agent attractive, but to also make you question your willingness to be so readily seduced. As you should.

That brings us to the reasons why I finally didn’t like Munich. There are no surprises - everything in this movie is as it should be. The violence is messy, not stylized to make it appear almost beautiful, as so many action movies are wont to these days. The righteousness that drives the bloodshed is shown to be questionable. Both sides get hurt, innocent lives are lost and the middlemen make a lot of money. The hero, who leads an Israeli assassin team slowly transforms from an unquestioning soldier boy to a paranoid, disillusioned and tortured soul, who’s afraid for the safety of his family and desperately wants to be reassured that his actions meant something. After Mr. Spielberg taught the mass audience to question violence in Saving Private Ryan, we already do. I was sorta hoping for a new lesson in this movie, which it finally didn’t deliver. Even as it piles on the moral ambiguities, Munich somehow ends up as a goody-two-shoes type of movie, very propah in depicting current social attitudes toward terrorism, what we all know we ought to feel - that there are no pure causes, that violence only begets violence, that even cold-blooded killers probably question their actions at some point.

As for the conflicts faced by Mr. Bana’s character, it’s been done already – by Aidan Quinn in The Assignment, a movie about another spy recruited by the government to kill Carlos The Jackal, whose accession to the throne of master terrorist was apparently aided by the characters whose story Munich tells. And Ben Kingsley’s and Donald Sutherland’s characters in The Assignment did a far better job at making you suspect that spies are among the most used people on earth, than do the slick Frenchman (played by Mathieu Amalric with the most delightful sneer), his papa (Michael Lonsdale as a French Don Corleone, only more he’s more politically aware, sophisticated and possibly a better cook) and the Israeli case officer (Geoffrey Rush replaying his ‘Sir Francis Walsingham’ role, but with suitably accented English).

Final verdict: Watch Munich. Expect to be entertained, you will be. While this is no feel-good holiday fare, my complaint is that it doesn’t make you feel too bad, either.

More on lists

2005-12-21T17:01:00.000-08:00

I bow to the list-meister. Falstaff, you do know your stuff. However, I'd like to defend myelf. I am not a complete novice, and actually do some of the things you talk about. Having said that, I did expose my greenness by not having thought the post through before publishing. (Reminder to self - make a list of what you want to cover before you publish a post, then publish the post.)

1) Losing lists - don't do it with all my lists - just the shopping lists. At any point, I have at least 7 different WIP-shopping lists - on my person, in my bag, the car, on the computer, etc. Yet, every single one of these magically disappears the minute I enter a store / mall. Things to be bought at Indian grocery stores are particularly hard to locate, and emerge days or seconds afterwards from the weirdest of places – like my person, my bag, the car or my computer. It’s a complete mystery.

2) Using the list as a way of making yourself feel spontaneous. Brilliant idea. Situations like the one with the eggs you describe have happened only by accident, but clearly, there’s way to systematize these serendipitous events. And what you say about the big ticket items – I had tears in my eyes as I read that. That’s the way to deal with life. Thank you!

3) Revising lists: My masochism hasn’t proceeded thus far, yet. I have no list-buddy I can conveniently blame / laugh at. It’s a purely solo activity, and now that I know what to do about ‘get into a relationship’ items, it is likely to remain that way. I can barely bring myself to take a re-look a list as it is – let alone revise it over & over again. All that reiteration of how wastefully I spend the one life I have would be too painful. Perhaps that is the solution – revising that one-life philosophy. If I start believing in multiple lives, AND eliminate the karma component, list-revising could become my favorite pastime, after reading and watching movies.

4) Higher order lists. I already have higher order lists of lists I have, but see the advantage in planning super-lists of lists I don’t have yet, or don’t intend to make.

5) Lists as security blankets. Spontaneity sucks, especially in areas that matter to me. Walking into Blockbuster without a plan is one of the most painful experiences in life. Unlike books, I prefer to order movies online, & the Netflix Queue is manna from heaven. That is one list I love revising. And as much as I love browsing in book stores & libraries, I rarely act impulsively. Browsing is essentially list-making, performed into order equip myself with a conscience-proof reason to visit to the store / library again.

Make a list of what you want to cover before you publish a post, then publish the post. Check. Oh sweet heaven, does that feel good!

Oh, for a spot of spontaneity.

2005-12-20T16:47:00.000-08:00

I have a love-hate relationship with lists. As a kid, I used to be mighty taken up with them. I realize how strange this makes me sound – other kids raised a series of stray dogs, squirrels and other assorted pets. Moi, I raised lists. Every night, I’d make a list of things I’d do the next day. ‘15 hours of studying’, ‘no TV’, ‘no comics’ were the most frequent items. I can’t recall a single day when I wrote a satisfying “done” against these. But they regularly made their appearance in list after list, based on the ‘Tomorrow’s another day’ philosophy. Occasionally, items like “drink 3 glasses of milk” or “drink at least 3 glasses of milk” (on days I felt particularly optimistic) would make an appearance, and meet the same fate as the “no TV”, “no comics” goals.

When I was younger, making the list was itself a very pleasurable activity. Listing was sufficient – I didn’t actually have to study for 15 hours. With age, I discovered guilt.
Happiness slowly shifted to accomplishing those goals. I had to put in the hours in order to feel happy.

Every once in a while, I’d feel that my life was being taken over by these silly lists, and stopped making them. That worked till something or the other went wrong, and I’d have a relapse of the ‘organization’ fever and start all over again. This has gone on for pretty much as long as I can remember. Over the years, I’ve tried to compromise, sought a balance between the ‘free spontaneous spirit’ I long to be, and the anal dork I really am. I do not write down things on paper any more – I kid myself that not having things down on paper makes me that much more spontaneous – I can say, oh, I just thought of doing this. And of course, it adds a delicious twist to my worrying – do I remember everything I need to remember?

Right now, I have a zillion things to take care of. Yeah, yeah, I realize that that’s the case for hundreds of zillion souls on earth and beyond – but I do have a series of deadlines coming up and am scrambling to get a number of things done. So am very much in the list mode at the moment. In fact, mentally, I’m already preparing for the next phase after my current ‘thing’ gets over (hopefully by Feb).

Couple of days ago, I went to the library to pick up ‘Greatest Man in Cedar Hole’. When I was there, I also picked up a Neal Stephenson and a Raymond Carver (authors I haven’t read) and Howard’s End (a reward to myself for my sense of adventure in picking up all these new authors). When walking back home, I thought about all the authors I hadn’t read, but was ‘supposed’ to. Felt a bit overwhelmed by the vastness of the seas I haven’t explored yet. So, plans for post-Feb start forming inside my head. At the top of the list was ‘make a list of genres you haven’t read, and devise a plan to attack them systematically’. At 15, the high from just that thought would’ve lasted 2 days. Yesterday, I simply felt heart-broken.

Boggarts are shape-shifters. Lists are pleasure-shifters. The pleasure you derive from any action is shifted from the action to the list. If I had ‘Read the Sunday Times fully’ on my list, then I the pleasure I get from reading the Times moves to the point when I strike that item off my list. There is also a distinct difference in the emotion involved - it’s not that reading Nicholas Kristoff is any less enjoyable, only that writing a ‘done’ against ‘Did justice to Sunday paper’ feels more satisfying.

So, you feel a sense of accomplishment. That’s joy, too, right? The pleasure is still there, the timing is a little off, that’s all. But is it only pleasure delayed?  Isn’t it also pleasure deformed? Worse, it becomes pain if you don’t do something on the assigned day. Reading the Sunday paper should be unalloyed fun. Reading your favorite Op-ed columnist all the more so. I was able to do neither yesterday, and plan to use the rest of the week to feel guilty.

To get back to my post-library depression – I had started thinking of authors I haven’t read, genres I haven’t tried, places to visit, friends to meet (in short, life after Feb). I felt sick to my stomach. Did I have to reduce everything, even reading to a list? If you start listing your pleasures, don’t they automatically cease to be pleasures? You’re supposed to list things like ‘pay phone bill’ – (Give me a few minutes while I quickly pay that bill. Good thing I started this post – I actually do have to pay my phone bill… perhaps it is a good idea to write stuff down!) not things like ‘ask friend S about ‘Last Tango in Paris – it might be fun’. Even ‘call friend S’ is OK, but anything more than just will move the pleasure you have in the conversation, to after the conversation when you can tell yourself, yes, I did discuss Last Tango in Paris, and yes, it was kinda fun. Btw, I didn’t get to speak with my friend about the movie, either. It was one wasted week end, list-wise.

And people take undue advantage of you once they figure out your weakness. My roomie refuses to make shopping lists. He knows he only has to mention something to me, and I’ll lie awake nights making sure I remember everything to get from the grocery store. Among friends, I am the designated worry wart – have something to take care of? Don’t bother putting it in your planner - just mention it to DoZ, it will get taken care of. So, now not only do I have my own list demons, I’m baby-sitting other people’s demons, too. (The only people who are worse than me are my parents. With them, I know I can do what my friends do to me with impudence. No wonder my parents don’t see the ‘responsible’, ‘dependable’, ‘salt of the earth’ DoZ that my friends see.)

Once in a while, I attempt minor rebellions, only to have it bite me in the ass.
Roomie: What do we need to get at Kroger today?
DoZ: I don’t know.

Fast forward to the next morning – no milk. These things never bother my roomie as much as they do me. Axiom of life – it’s always the ring-bearer, er, list-bearer’s ass that’s on the line, and I hastily re-don my mantle of list-keeper.

It’s great to be organized. It’s great to have a plan. I just wish I could leave some things in life well alone. Knowing me, I’d probably make a list of which things I’m not supposed to make a list about. Am not asking for too much, really. I don’t want to get to a point where I have a ‘do something spontaneous at 3:17 PM’ item on my list.

Things to do when you’re sick. Or Not.

2005-12-12T20:02:00.000-08:00

I love the flu. 3 days of blissful sleep. A valid excuse to, well, not do anything. Lots of bad TV. What else can you ask for during the holidays? Mild sarcasm apart, I really do prefer the flu of the Western world to the old “viral fever” we get in India. Viral fevers, for me, usually come combined with nasty sore throats, ear infections & what not. Not a way to have fun. The last couple of times though – the flu has been nothing more than sheer enervation, where I am too exhausted to do anything but sleep. & Just in case I broke a solid 14 hour nap, I kept myself pumped with Tylenol Flu – the bestest medicine in the whole wide world. With an alcohol content greater than most wines, you betcha it’s good.

But what does one do during those 2 hour gaps, when the next round of Tylenol and exhaustion are yet to do you in? As I hadn’t planned this, I wasted those brief windows of well, consciousness. So, here’s what to do when you’re sick (& this time of the year, there’s a good chance you will be – so be prepared)

Keep a few good books around. Something light. Not a good idea to be reduced to reading ‘I, Lucifer’ as yours truly was. Somehow all that satanic imagery didn’t help put the bloom back on my cheeks. Preferably nothing more serious than Wodehouse. No, not even Dahl. Wickedness in all forms is to be avoided.

Let word of your illness spread – but be subtle. Make sure that all your out-of-town friends know about it, & see to it that they hear about it from someone else. With the in-town friends, you always run the risk of a personal visit. I prefer being sick alone (unless I am really sick, in which case I’d prefer to be surrounded by 23 doctors and 45 nurses each watching my vital signs like a hawk). The out-of-town friends make a lot of sweet phone calls after you’ve recovered. Nice.

Fall sick on a Thursday, if you can. I got lucky this time. Extended week end. And no groceries or cooking. Talk about lucking out.

Use the opportunity to watch movies like ‘What Alice Found’ – a tale of a teen-who-runs-away-from-home-only-to-turn-into-a-truck-stop-prostitute-but-still-has-a-happy-ending-of-a-sort. If you watched this movie any other time, you’d need to have your head examined. If you watched it when you were sick – well, you poor baby – with no one at home, and nothing to do. Think of all the money you save by not going to a shrink, and the time you save not beating yourself up for watching trash.

Do NOT go shopping within 24 hours of recovery. You are liable to buy 10 pairs of woolen socks. 2 humongous bags of salad. 2 bottles of carrot juice. I did. And trust me, you’ll regret the carrot juice more than the socks. Your sense of “eat healthy or die trying” is rather skewed in that time frame. 40 hours into recovery, and 2 glasses of carrot juice later, I’m starting to realize that the ‘die trying’ part is going to come true. And no amount of bitterness or irony is going to help with the remaining 2 liters of the damn concoction I still have to gulp down.

Learn from my lessons. Be prepared.

On Beauty: La belle dame sans foi ni espoir

2005-12-03T17:11:00.000-08:00

Zadie Smith writes beautifully. For a retelling of an old favorite (Howard’s End), On Beauty made me pull two almost all-nighters as I had to read just one more page. Despite gravely depleting my already small reserves of faith in the human race, this book has nevertheless been one of the most enjoyable reads of this year.

Reading ‘On Beauty’ is like watching whole bunch of coins tossed into the air. As each coin tumbles through the air, you see both sides of several coins - black / white, rich / poor, fat/ thin, liberal / conservative, moral / immoral, young / old, until one by one, they all fall down. And every last one does fall to the ground – no last minute gravity-defying flights of eternal happiness here.

Although this book is based on ‘Howard’s End’, it is not a strict retelling. The Belseys and the Kippses stand in for the Schlegels and the Wilcoxes respectively. The setting is an imaginary college town in the North East. The plot of ‘Howard’s End’ is made somewhat more complex because the Belseys are a mixed race family – the mother is black, and the father white. The writing, as I mentioned, is beautiful. The characters are so well etched out, you feel that you might recognize them if you ran into them on the road.

While ‘Howard’s End’ leaves me deeply saddened, ‘On Beauty’ almost killed what little faith I have in humanity. I am so very glad that I read this book at 27, and not at 20. Anyone who believes in anything in this novel is ultimately disappointed. It doesn’t matter what the object of their trust is – husband, father, lover, a university, or even Haiti, ever trust is broken, and every hope shattered. Claire, the woman Howard Belsey has an affair, with is the only character whose beliefs hold out. Perhaps because the woman believed all along that she will end up unhappy. This is the sort of book that is a toughie to recommend to anyone who doesn’t care to read a book simply because the writing is great. Many of my friends want at least the semblance of a happy ending. A few, like my mother, even want morality and this is certainly NOT the book for them.

As I read the novel, I couldn’t help comparing it with Saturday. Saturday was so positive. On Beauty, by contrast, is deeply cynical. Do the authors’ ages have something to do with the difference? I feel you have to be quite young to see the world with such cynical eyes, and yet have the strength to even carry on. Saturday is the voice of someone who has been through it all, and who carries the stamp of authority, when they tell you that it’s all going to work out, somehow. It’s not a cheesy Hollywood brand of happiness, but the acknowledgement of the possibility of happiness. The pace, too, was much more sedate. On Beauty is quite racy.

I am very glad I got to read On Beauty. But after a shopping spree to cheer me up, am still not over it. No wonder my friends think I’m mad. Why would anyone do this to themselves? But boy was it worth it.

Explain with reference to the context

2005-12-01T16:52:00.000-08:00

For the greater part of my schooling years, the pleasure I derived from English exams was marred by this one section. Given that English and French were the only exams I took any pleasure in, I felt pretty miffed about anything that took away even a part of this rare emotion. It is a bizarre section almost exclusively limited to the Matriculation Board, which is itself a Tamil Nadu-specific curiosity. This is how it worked (well, kinda, because I never did get these right) – they’d give you a couple of lines (could be prose or poetry) from your text book, which you had to, well, explain with reference to the context. You’d start with which lesson or poem the passage had been sourced from, who the author of the piece was, what happened till just before this line and what happens afterwards… Kinda like explaining Desperate Housewives or Chitthi to an annoying ignoramus who walks in, with no background information whatsoever, and asks, “So, what’s happening?” The clincher was the “inference”. You had to end your response with what could be inferred from those lines. This involved some creative thinking, as it was the only original contribution you made to the whole exercise. The rest was simply setting context and summarizing.

Explain with Reference to the Context, or as it was fondly called - the ERC, was my least favorite part of an English I exam. I didn’t have trouble figuring out which chapter / poem something was taken from. Unless you had never ever read the chapter, it was pretty easy to figure that out. And of course, giving a gist of the story till that line made its first appearance was alright too. It was always the “inference” bit that got me.

The exercise worked well if the teacher picked a significant line. Think along the lines of “Tomorrow’s another day”, said Scarlett, or “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”, so you could produce reams of material about the “significance” of that line. But not all English teachers were so kindly disposed. Some wanted to make the exercise challenging, and picked obscure lines that you really had to have a photographic memory to correctly place, other teachers, possibly as bored with the exercise as I was, just picked a random line. The consequences of the latter were always more dangerous than any that might result from a determination to “let’s make this difficult”.

Now, while an author may strongly dispute this, not all lines in a passage make sense, or have any significance attached to them. For instance, this entire blog is dedicated to insignificant prose. (Clearly, I am from a more magnanimous breed of authors, but you knew that.) I have suffered years of cruel and unusual punishment, having to come up with sparkling insights into lines that perhaps even the author had no idea why he or she wrote.

Once, and only once, did I snap. The line was from a chapter about Gandhi. I don’t remember the exact line or the book that the chapter was sourced from. All I remember is that it had something to do with Gandhi’s handwriting being quite illegible. I wracked my brains to see if I could spot some deep, hidden meaning. Perhaps through that line the author meant to question bourgeois ideals of what constitutes “good handwriting”, or an elegy, regretting a lost opportunity (Gandhi should have taken up that calligraphy course when it was offered at that introductory price!), or a protest against the language of the oppressor. I don’t know now, and I certainly didn’t know then. Perhaps, it was merely an interesting tidbit, mentioned to make the man sound more like a man, and less like God. But you can’t ever say that in an English exam, not in single one of the many schools I went to. “Oh, the author just put it in there, because he thought you might find it interesting. Just being chatty.” That goes against every last grain of a convent education.

As the clock ticked on, I grew desperate. As more minutes passed, I began to get angry. “How in the world is one supposed to make sense of a silly bunch of words like this line clearly is? What the devil does any of this have to do with learning English?” When I get angry, I ask myself such questions. Just to pass the time, really. God knows, I haven’t a clue about the answers, but then again, if I did have a clue, I wouldn’t be so angry in the first place, would I? Anyway, it all got increasingly convoluted. Finally, my mental bulb switched itself on, and I dashed off what I felt was the single most relevant inference a student could possibly draw from that line. Congratulating myself on my own intelligence, nay genius, I wrote, “Inference: If Gandhiji himself had bad handwriting, it is alright if we do, too.”

That little line put me on the map. It brought me notoriety. Until then, I was a quiet kid in class, almost the teacher’s pet, you could say (at least in English – let us not talk of Math). After this answer, I became the designated class-subversive. The one that the more innocent kids needed to be protected from. What if I put my powers of literary analysis to evil use, and went around whispering into guileless ears, “Psst, why do write so neatly? Gandhi’s writing sucked! Do you want to be the next father of the nation? Or do you want to be a nobody who writes his own neat goodbye note, as you fade into insignificance?” Or worse, told my fellow 4-line-copy-yoke-bearers, “Hear ye! Hear ye! I have news from the real world – lousy handwriting did not prevent a man from becoming famous or important! It is possible to live a life as a non-calligrapher!” Being only 11 or 12 at that time, I would have of course, expressed myself in simpler terms, but that did not make my possible intent any less wicked.

My rebellion, sadly, was not shocking enough to get the school to scrap the question category. Besides, the state level school board would have had to get involved, and a school-level notoriety only takes you so far. Perhaps, had I written “Because Gandhi’s writing was bad, he went on to become India’s greatest leader. All Indians who wish to become great leaders should start by writing badly”, there might have been a chance. But, there’s no point in entertaining these sad thoughts now. Hindsight, as they say, is perfect.

What did happen was that the teacher started paying extra attention to my ERC answers. It was torture I could not bear. Any chance of slipping the occasional too-smart remark under the radar was lost forever. I HAD to toe the line. I, too, began to write canned inanities that began with “By this the author wishes to convey that…”

And so died my short-lived status as the James Dean of English, 7A. Today is the 15th death anniversary. I wished to commemorate the occasion.

Me and You and Everyone We Know

2005-11-27T19:13:00.000-08:00

A highly decorated film, ‘Me and you and everyone we know’, should come with a warning. “Watching this movie can cause death by boredom or at the very least spoil a long week end, otherwise lovely in every aspect.” It’s one of those movies that make you go, ‘what were they thinking?’ ‘They’ is an all-purpose pronoun that stands in for numerous groups – producers, film festival juries, and newspaper critics.

After watching Garden State, I felt that my being a neither-here-nor-there immigre was to blame. Had I grown up in the US, I’d have found the movie as enjoyable as the rest of the audience in the theater did. With Miranda July’s movie, I don’t know what you have to be to enjoy the movie. It’s most distinguishing character is blandness. Everything, especially most lines spouted by the leading actors are told in a dead-pan tone. From time to time, the movie provokes sheer disgust, leaving you yearning for the blandness, which is then promptly delivered to you.

The premise is simple – girl meets boy, likes boy, boy having been burnt by recent relationship (literally, as you’ll find out if you watch this movie) is hesitant, but love conquers all in the end. You have a few sub-plots to keep the pace going – an old couple in love, some kids indulging in behavior that would be considered kinky in adults and is therefore nauseating in children, and of course, adults indulging in some kinky behavior of their own. I don’t know if you’re supposed to laugh at any or all of this – the New York Times called it a ‘romantic comedy’. I didn’t, I couldn’t.

Movies like this are Hollywood’s attempts at making “hatke” movies, an endeavor whose results are about as painful as the “hatke” movies from back home.

I’ve tried to think of what steps I can take to guard myself against lemons like this in future.
a) I could read more than one review. In this instance, the Times loved it, but the New Yorker did not. But I hate reading reviews till after I watch the movies, as most reviews make watching the actual movie rather pointless.
b) I could check with friends. Only most of my friends have more sense than I do, and steer clear of “Winner: Cannes, Winner: Sundance” label, to which I am drawn as moth to a light.
c) Watch trailers to judge for myself. But trailers are the most evil propaganda devices ever conceived. Am sure a trailer of this movie would have the 1.5 funny lines and the thimbleful of thought this movie provokes all condensed into a sexy, irresistible package, liberally smeared with quotes from every “serious” newspaper or magazine whose reviewers gave this movie a positive review

So, there’s not a thing I can do, really. I’ll just chalk it up to occupational hazard. ‘Me and you and everyone we know’ is the price you pay for getting to watch movies like Crash, or Capote, Good Night, and Good Luck, other movies I got lucky with this year.

All grown up

2005-11-27T18:15:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving week end over. Not a dime spent on stuff I do not need. I came very close to blowing $500 on a Toshiba laptop. Obviously, I don’t need a laptop. But ‘need’ and ‘bargain’ have not a single thing in common. Thankfully, my roomie talked me out of it, with vague mumbles about newer models that are apparently just round the corner, and that will be available for an equally great price. That didn’t really convince me, but combined with images of my usual & fail-proof reason to get through week ends (the old I-don’t-have-the-files-with-me-sorry-will-do-it-first-thing-Monday-morning) not working anymore just did it for me. I walked away with a tremulous smile, amazed at my own audacity. I did not even turn back to look at Circuit City or Best Buy or wherever we were confronted with that tempting deal. A slight variation of that old story about Lot’s wife turning into a pillar of salt applies to me – only I turn into a walking credit card bill.

When I confront a sale, I panic. It’s not that I so desperately need what am looking at (that happens only in Flora Fountain, where no pavement bookseller worth his salt can ever get me to bargain – the gleam of desperation in my eyes is just too easy to read. Believe me, some have actually tried, disappointed by my “OK, I’ll take it attitude” – apparently, the average pavement book seller likes to believe in “earning” a living). Not many people may ever need a low-pressure practice chamber that you use to train for a trip to the top of Mt. Everest, but heck, you may NEVER get it for $21.99. At that price, surely, it’s worth even climbing the damn peak. After all, it is as good as reason as “Because it was there.” Mine could be “Because I got a bargain on the equipment.”

Besides, if I don’t buy it now, I’ll surely regret it on my deathbed – as I watch images of my life, a compilation utterly lacking in pictures of conquering peaks of any sort. All because early in 2006, the prices of low-pressure practice chambers shot up to $115,000,000. I breathe my last, croaking out, “Why? Why? Why didn’t I buy it when the damn thing cost just $21.99?”

This Thanksgiving, I promised myself that I won’t give in. Such resolutions are par for the course. It wouldn’t be thanksgiving if I didn’t make such resolutions. But this year, I actually stuck to it. Hallelujah!

I feel so grown up. I am celebrating by making a grilled cheese sandwich with the new toaster that my roomie bought (hey, if I didn’t pay for it, I didn’t buy it. It is VITAL that you appreciate the definition of “purchase”). I’ll even cut off the nasty corners off the bread. Did I mention I was feeling all grown up?

Questioning stereotypes

2005-11-25T16:15:00.000-08:00

In Die Hard, Bruce Willis made the ‘action hero’ a human being, a man who also aches as he bleeds. Over the years, the humanization project has been extended to cover superheroes, too. Spiderman hits a bad patch and is unable to swing across rooftops; Batman has yet to really recover from a childhood trauma; Harry Potter’s voice is cracking. Black and white cinema had evolved into all-gray, ‘am-in-touch-with-my-sensitive-side’ cinema.

At first, I enjoyed this tinge of reality in the fluffy yarns that Hollywood excels at spinning. As a macho cop, the hero battles a horde of baddies single-handedly. Unrealistic, but hey, we did warn you he was a ‘macho’ cop. But when this individual winced as he walked barefoot across a floor strewn with broken glass, it suddenly made him seem a shade less wooden, and that much more attractive. Invincible, but equipped with soft soles is apparently how we’ve come to like our heroes.

But soon, this seemingly endless gray started to tire me. I grew weary of having to feel sorry for everyone in the movie, having to root for everyone, from the hero down to the 4th side-kick on the bad side. Slowly, I increased the proportion of Cary Grant movies I watched, where the worst quality the hero can be accused of having is too much cheek. Bogie movies were good, too – while the hero was not as white as Grant, the villains were certainly pure evil. No one can ever accuse Renard or Kasper Gutman of possessing a single good quality. Even the side-kicks were uniformly and satisfyingly slimy.

After that trip around the world, we finally land in Los Angeles, where ‘Crash’ unfolds. This movie is all gray. But it is the most pleasing shade of gray I’ve seen in a very long time, perhaps ever. There are good cops and bad cops, good kids and mixed up kids, rich people who discriminate and are discriminated against, and the best part is that all these are often the same characters. No one is quite what he or she seems like.

The plot is too complicated and too simple to recount. The predominant theme of the movie, if you can narrow it down, is how misleading and also how true to type stereotypes can be. As you are faced with characters that repeatedly turn the tables on you, just when you think you have them pegged, you end up questioning your own beliefs about racism, about first impressions, about miracles, about sheer rotten luck. And frequently, you catch yourself chuckling, mostly at yourself, as the characters give vent to emotions the politically-correct-you keeps to yourself.

The cast is brilliant, and has everyone from Ludacris (yes, the rap / hip-hop star) and Ryan Phillippe to Sandra Bullock and Matt Dillon (who plays the most counfounding character in the movie), most of them in roles I’d never thought I’d see them play. With its numerous sub plots and star-studded cast, this movie could have been so easily messed up. Instead, it can serve as a how-to manual for any ensemble tale.

Usually when Hollywood tries to appear real, it gives you a layer of good and a layer of bad, which mix about as well as oil and water do. In Crash, Paul Haggis has achieved the smoothest emulsion yet of goodness & evil. Crash is a brilliantly executed complex ensemble piece that interweaves tens of stories into a surprisingly cohesive and ultimately uplifting whole. Watch it.

‘Tis the season for togetherness

2005-11-23T21:11:00.000-08:00

This last week, my friends and I have exchanged a flurry of emails about the new Potter movie. The strength of the email flood is a couple of degrees weaker than the one that followed the release of the 6^th book. After all, this is just a movie. As book snobs, we place a greater value on the written word, as opposed to crude commercial entertainment for the masses. (Yes, we choose to turn off our disdain switches when it comes to crude written commercial entertainment for the masses.)

Someone watched the movie first, wrote a review, and sent it to everyone else. Reactions are still in progress. As for the one or two poor souls who haven’t watched the movie yet – tough luck, for the reviews were full of spoilers. As a group, we have been perverse enough to make sure that we copied every single crib mail (obviously, the movie is NOT as good as the book.) to ALL our friends, HP fans or not. Our reaction to the movie is predictable, given that it’s written into the group’s bylaws. (That was item #2 on the initiation oath – “we swear allegiance to the group and we swear to HATE every movie ever made from a book with a 0.001% margin of error (the bit about the margin of error was an amendment introduced a few years ago when older members were still reeling from LOTR – that good books AND great movies were not mutually exclusive was a revelation. Those 3 movies had the same effect as Copernicus’s pronouncement about the earth not being flat. It shook our basic beliefs in the meaning of life and everything else.))

Having gotten over that digression, let us return to the email list. As I said, we took great pains to copy the one or two misfits who care as much about Harry Potter as they do about, oh, the debate on Pluto’s being a planet or an interesting bit of fluff at the edge of our solar system, which is to say, zilch. Our insistence on getting them up to speed on the new movie stems from a number of reasons:
a) We still nurture wild hopes of getting them to see the light
b) We wish to impress them with our wondrous movie reviewing skills – how we can skillfully compare and contrast a given movie with any numbers of older movies that may or may not be related to the first movie
c) We wish to impress them with our photographic memory & how this superior skill allows us to remember every scene, every minor character, every insignificant subplot from the book that the movie being discussed is based upon, as well as any numbers of other books that may or may not be related to the first book
d) We wish to prove to ourselves and each other that we’re all really brilliant casting directors, who’re temporarily pushing time at our current jobs till we get discovered by Hollywood
e) We don’t want them to feel left out
f) We want them to feel left out

Items e and f contradict each other. Yes, I am aware of that. This contradiction forms the crux of any group, really.

People come together all the time, drawn by common interests. Formally and informally, I belong to several myself. Little, private clubs of movie-watchers, desi-food lovers, book-readers (there ever so many sub groups under this one – Wodehouse-lovers, Dostoevsky-haters, secret-Henry James-readers, open-M&B readers and very many more), holders of crushes on Gaël Garcia Bernal and Mikhail Baryshinov (yes, we believe that age is merely a number, when it comes to dashing men), haters of Hummers, lovers of New Yorker cartoons, disdainers of popular Indian movies, guilty watchers of The Commander in Chief, secret fans of Paris Hilton & Backstreet Boys, and well, you get the picture.

At first, I used to revel in the goodness of it all – a group of like minded people getting together to share ideas, find companionship, share joy etc. Unity, ha! We only really get together in order to leave others out.

Of course you can be a snob all by yourself. But there is strength in numbers. If nothing else, it is reassuring. A lone 28 year old obsessing over a children’s book sounds like he / she belongs to Loserville. A group of nearly 30 somethings who love Harry Potter, and are planning to gear up for the Narnia tales are wise old souls who remain young at heart, despite all the disillusionment the big bad world has thrown their way in 30 long years.

Forming a group or getting accepted into one isn’t easy. Truckloads of compromises have to be made. Be it a decision to keep thoughts of what you really think of ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’ to yourself when surrounded by the Marquez groupies, or keeping your documentary-viewing habits a secret from the Tamil-Masala-Movie-Fan-Club members, to much larger sacrifices like watching the occasional Jane Campion movie and worse, pretending to like John Malkovich, every surrender is carefully weighed and carried out with coldhearted precision.

All this is done so you can look down your nose upon those who do not get the Lord of the Rings or Wagner or Scenes from a Marriage or whatever. It is as if we are too pug-nosed individually, but together, we create a patrician nose a Roman would be proud of. And from atop that noble proboscis, we gaze down upon the world. For all our toils for the sake of being included, exclusion is the ultimate reward.

Given the number of groups we belong to, it is always interesting to watch which loyalties take precedence. When I read Karthik’s post about the Goblet of Fire, my blogger loyalties had a face-off with my HP loyalties, and the teen wizard won. Because I’ve been on his bandwagon longer? Because I have more HP-loving friends than friends who think it’s all a big bore? Because I like JKR’s creation that much? I don't know.

Do I ostracize Karthik? Kinda – but that’s the whole point, isn’t it? All I can say is, Karthik – you’re not alone. I just forgot to include you on the email list of other friends I’ve been excluding all week. And happy thanksgiving y’all. ‘Tis the season for getting together and killing the turkey.

Saving grace

2005-11-22T13:54:00.000-08:00

Harry Potterum Maya Theekoppayum. Seems to be doing good business in Madras. Thank God for small mercies. Maya Theekoppay? The mind boggles at the thought of the Tamil versions of polyjuice potion and Bulgarian horntails and even He Who Must Not Be Named…

And here, I was disappointed with the English version. At least I understood what was going on. With the Tamil version, I’d need subtitles.

The Goblet of Fire

2005-11-21T12:14:00.000-08:00

Watched the new movie on the big screen. One of the biggest screens available – that’s right, the IMAX. The size of the screen, sadly, did not improve the movie any. Yes, I am going to be a curmudgeon about this.

The Goblet is my favorite Potter book, bar none. It’s the reason I have stuck with the series. Given all that baggage, I suppose I was begging for a disappointment. But thanks to Peter Jackson, I’ve developed a glimmer of hope for almost any movie made from a book. If someone can make LOTR work, and work so beautifully, surely, there is more to Hollywood than I usually give it credit for.

Mike Newell is no Jackson. Sadly, he’s not even Alfonso Cuaron. Most of my Potter-mad friends didn’t much care for Prisoner of Azkaban, the movie. They do however, seem to like Goblet. I am afraid the reverse is true for me. Cuaron captured darkening mood more successfully than did Newell, although there is a heck of lot more darkness in Goblet. Yes, yes, Ralph Fiennes was pure evil, Cedric Diggory was heart-breakingly handsome, and Mad-Eye Moody was, well, mad. But these did not make up for a complete and utter lack of quidditch, (in a story featuring the World Quidditch Championships), no dementors, practically no magic (spells were limited to Accio FireBrand), and only ordinary looking Vila…Michael Gambon is a lousy Dumbledore. Gambon has taken away the dignity Richard Harris so easily infused into the character. Harris had a twinkle in his eye – Gambon spends his time screaming or holding up his robes, indeed most of the time, he’s doing both. What a nifty feat for the greatest wizard of all time!

Over lunch, a colleague and I listed all the stuff that was in the book, but not in the movie. But we had to conclude that all the scenes that were really important were not overlooked. The most important thing at the World Quidditch Championships is the appearance of the dark mark. The Yule Ball provides an opportunity for some light hearted romance in an otherwise dark and depressing tale. The key-take away from the Triwizard Competition is that Voldemort appears, Harry wins and Cedric dies.

Given two movies that aren’t completely faithful to the books, I’ve thought hard about why I liked Prisoner of Azkaban so much and Goblet of Fire not at all. I can only say this – Azkaban captured the mood of the book brilliantly. To show flowers withering away when dementors fly by is practically poetic. Even the portraits in Goblet don’t move! Goblet feels like a McKinsey synopsis of the book, neatly summarizing the three key take-aways, with a couple of fun facts thrown in to please the crowd, but hey, it’s all about ‘what’s important’. When you’re summarizing a 250 page analyst report, that’s exactly what you want. But not when you’re translating a tale of wondrous magic and adventure into a movie. And that is what the problem is with the Goblet of Fire – it has all of the important facts, but none of the soul.

Making up for lost time

2005-10-28T23:13:00.000-07:00

Ah, the last week end of October. A special time, when children dress up as the monsters they are. And scare the bejudas out of people, as they do from the moment they are born... As special as Halloween is, I love this time of the year for a more mundane reason. This weekend, time becomes time again. Not the pretend stuff we put up with during the other seven months of the year. Soon, we're to have this fake time for eight months. Yipee! One less hour to sleep everyday. How did the Government guess this was just the pressing problem I wanted them to solve? World peace, eradicating malaria and AIDS, nominating Supreme Court justices - we'll get around to that stuff by and by. Taking away an hour's sleep from our citizens, now that's an urgent problem.

They tell me that daylight savings has a laudable goal - energy conservation. The Government says, "Daylight Saving Time "makes" the sun "set" one hour later and therefore reduces the period between sunset and bedtime by one hour. This means that less electricity would be used for lighting and appliances late in the day." Forgive me for butting in, but doesn't Daylight Saving Time also "make" you get up an hour earlier? And since I'm not exactly overflowing with vim and vigour in the mornings, I do not use the opportunity afforded by my waking up in the dark to play hide & seek with my tooth brush, or wear night vision goggles to find my way to the kitchen. This may come as a surprise to you, but I turn on the lights! An hour earlier!

And if you're so worried about saving energy, I'd suggest that providing a SWITCH for plug points would be a start. I don't turn off my television, my bed side lamp, my microwave or any of tens of appliances when am hitting the bed earlier as a dutiful citizen. Because I CAN'T. Not unless, I risk life and limb to crawl beneath all sorts of obstructions & unplug the damn device in question. And what of the thousands of stores and offices that leave lights on the whole night? And the all terrain vehicles that are apparantly the only way to go from suburban residence to downtown office and back again, given that one has to cross three rain forests, a couple of marshlands and a stretch of desert on the way? I don't want to make a list of the ways in which energy is wasted in this country. I'll simply be wasting even more by staying up all night.

Tell you what, you want to delude yourself that you're saving energy, I'll let you kid yourself. Just don't try to kid me that an hour being taken away in March is simply notional, and this hour is returned to you come October. The hour that will be returned to me on Sunday morning is simply the one I lost the Sunday in March. What about the 200 odd hours I've lost everyday in the meantime? And you want to swindle me out of 30 more! If all office workers can be given those 8-9 days off, now you're talking real savings - imagine, a week's vacation. No lights in offices, no lifts, no coffee machines, no photocopying or printing or tapping away at computers... Megawatts of energy saved! And if people wish to spend their vacation traveling, or shopping, spending money here and there, that's good for the economy isn't it? Isn't that the same principle as getting a $200 tax return?

Where does all this lost time go? It probably joins the time I save by using a microwave to warm my glass of milk instead of using a stove, the time I save by using a computer instead of a typewriter, the time I save by ordering goodies instead of cooking for Diwali... Is it going into some invisible 401K account, and will be returned to me when I retire? I doubt that. These days, one can't even retire. No, one is headed for life as an active Senior. I'll be expected to account for all the time I didn't spend kayakking or waltzing or golfing when my limbs still move by doing them all when I just want to sleep in late. Perhaps by the time I get to 85 or 90 (yeah, no one retires before then. If you do, you simply move onto a second career - as a writer / consultant / potter / actor, or whatever), they'll have Daylight Saving Time all the time! And my wish to sleep in late will never happen.

I'm too depressed to continue. I think I'll go waste some time watching TV. There're enough people saving time already.

An evening’s adventure.

2005-10-28T13:00:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, thanks to some brilliant orchestration on my part, I managed to get locked out of my apartment. It all started in the morning (as so many nasty experiences often do, for me). It’s been a few months since we moved to our new apartment. Perhaps, it is time to stop calling it the ‘new’ apartment. But I digress… The reason I bring this up is because something like last evening would have never happened were we still living in the old apartment…

Now play close attention, because things are complicated, and to truly appreciate the extent of my brilliant planning and execution, it is vital to understand the layout of my apartment. There are two ways to enter my apartment – through the main door, and through the garage. If the fancy takes you, as it often does me, you may also exit through these very same doors.

I’m usually quite bad at drawing maps, giving directions and the like. Here’s my attempt at listing the complicated sequence of events that precipitated in the heinous crime, er, I mean my getting locked out. Feel free to ask questions. I won’t hear you, and you won’t bother me at all.

We will begin with the evidence.

Exhibit A: The Main Door: The main door has two bolts – the upper bolt, and the lower bolt. Only the lower bolt may be opened from outside the apartment. (not outside the apartment complex, say, remotely from Timbuktu, but by standing on the other side of the door and using a key. Remote opening of apartment doors from Timbuktu is technology one will simply have to wait for). The upper bolt (also called the ‘privacy bolt’ by the apartment management, possibly with the aim of gouging a few dollars more in the name of ‘additional safety features’) cannot be accessed with the key. It is no doubt meant for scared home makers who wish to make their home in as secure an environment as possible.

Exhibits B1 and B2: The Door to the Garage (B1) and The Garage Door (B2): The Door to the Garage is not bedecked with a multitude of bolts. But lest there be sibling rivalry between the two exits, the benevolent apartment builder has provided the garage with its own charms. Et voila, we meet the remote operated Garage Door. Now, if you find your attention wandering, take a deep breath, and focus! The Door to the Garage is different from the Garage door. The former connects the living room with the garage, while the latter connects the garage with the outside world. And just in case you were curious, the Garage Door, while remote operated may not be opened from Timbuktu either. Most days, it doesn’t open (or close) when you work the remote from 2 feet away. Success is usually achieved by banging the remote against your palm or the car (or any other handy object) two to five times in rapid succession, giving the thing a good jiggle or two, mouthing a few choice swear words and trying again. (Swearing doesn’t actually do anything to the door, but my roomie & I find it has a somewhat calming effect on the nerves. So it’s just for you, not the Garage Door.)

Yesterday morning, just as I was about to step out the Door to the Garage (Exhibit B1), I was overcome with the sudden and pressing urge to bolt the upper bolt to the main door (Exhibit A). With a life-long history of succumbing to sudden and pressing urges, I decided that yesterday morning (an early one, as we had to reach office by 7:30 AM for a conference call) was not the best time to take a stand and resist temptation. I yielded, and bolted the door, using both bolts. We left through the Door to the Garage (Exhibit B1), closed the Garage Door (Exhibit B2). The apartment is now as safe as a house.

Fast forward 12 hours to the evening. Roomie wanted to attend a Microsoft conference. So I get a ride back home with the boss. Boss drives off. I reach Main Door (Exhibit A). Even as I reached for my key, the door momentarily turns into a screen, and in slow motion, I watch a movie of a younger me (well, it was 12 hours ago) bolt the upper and lower bolts and turning away towards the garage. The movie played to the very apt background score of yours truly screaming silently to myself.

You give up too easily, you say. You should simply go through the garage, you say. Sure. I would have done just that, had I had the foresight to get the remote to open the Garage Door from the roomie. Prescience is always in short supply & I’d already used up my quota for the day when I double bolted the Main Door.

I had two options – call boss and go with him & spend the evening at his home, and wait for the roomie to get back from conference. Or go to the mall, hang around, and wait for the roomie to get back from the conference. Let me rephrase that. I had one option. Go to the Mall.

So to the Mall I went. Spent a few hours walking around. Foraged the deep discount racks at Foley’s, looking for that $5 Ralph Lauren sweater that has magically skipped the notice of the hordes that frequent the mall. As always I did not find it. Next time, I say. Somehow, am the eternal optimist when it comes to Ralph Lauren. Someday, I will no doubt be able to afford him. Went around to Bath & Body Works – smelled their pots of creams and lotions. Why is it important to have your Body Cream Whipped? In the interest of scientific inquiry, I bought a jar. If I suddenly turn into Nicole Kidman, I’ll know why.

At the end of what felt like hours (hold on, it was hours) of walking around in what were easily the most uncomfortable shoes on God’s earth, I spotted Walden Books. Praise be, I told myself. I’d promised to myself that I shan’t buy any more books this year. (Us book-types do that frequently, just to pass the time – no reader I know ever keeps such promises). But here I felt was a golden opportunity to bypass guilt. I hadn’t specifically set out to buy books. After all, fate put me in that mall. That only meant one thing – the Powers that be wanted me to buy books.

So I enter the store. I check out their new arrivals section. And start feeling uneasy at once. They had paper-back copies of Guns, Germs & Steel and The Time Traveler’s Wife – under NEW ARRIVALS! That should’ve warned me. But the eternal optimist I am, I walk up to the counter and start a conversation with the High School kid they’ve entrusted the store to.

Me: “Do you have Two Lives by Vikram Seth?”

Kid: “Hold on, let me check my computer. What was the name again?”

Me: “S-E-T-H. Vikram Seth. V-I-K-R-A-M.”

Kid: “Hmm, I’ve never heard of that name.”

Sound of my heart breaking into a million pieces, accompanied by the shattering of the Sphygmomanometer, as my blood pressure shoots way up, as it does in cartoons. (It was a curious sensation, and one I should have documented better for the scientists. Hypertension accompanied by a breaking heart – a feat that should be technically impossible, but there I was, experiencing it.)

Kid: “We don’t have Two Lives. But I do see two other books – A Suitable Boy and Three Chinese Poets.’

Me, breathing again: “Where do I find Three Chinese Poets?”

Kid: “Oh, we don’t actually have either of the books. Sorry.”

Me: “Oh. OK.”

So, nursing a broken heart and 23 blisters on my feet, I trudged back home, feeling as whipped as my jar of Body Cream. And I still had at least an hour to go. I limped over to the hot tub, rolled up my pants, and soaked my aching feet into luke warm water (why they insist on calling the damn thing “hot” tub, I’ll never know), flipped open my cell phone & called up a couple of friends to share my woeful tale and pass the time. Roomie eventually arrived, sounded me off for my folly, and I gratefully slinked into my room & my bed.

Still the day was not a complete waste. Many valuable lessons were learned:

- You may feel you have the keys to unlock the mysteries of the world, but pal, life is incomplete without the garage opener.

- Just like there is daylight savings time, there are bookstore employees in this world who have not heard of Vikram Seth. That their presence goes against everything that good and honest and true and natural does not preclude their existence.

- It’s OK to forget the Garage Opener, as long as you have your credit card with you, and a mall across the road.

- And oh, wear comfortable shoes. Always.

Farewell to Madras

2005-10-25T08:09:00.000-07:00

When I left India, I stuffed as much of “home” as is humanly possible into two large suitcases. I consoled myself with the fact that life in my adopted country comes equipped with broadband, Google Talk, cheap calling cards and numerous other devices, each a symbol of reassurance that I’ll always stay in touch with home.

What I didn’t realize then, is that the instant I stepped on the plane I also stepped into a parallel universe, equipped only with my two suitcases which function as time capsules filled with memories of that other world I used to inhabit. The instant the plane lifted off Indian soil, I lost all touch with home. This week end, I decided that I shall no longer insist on calling Madras “home”. No more clinging on to this imaginary ideal.

What brought on this maudlin state? Hard to point a finger at one specific cause – it’s been building up for sometime now. ‘Ghajini’ was the final straw.

As I watched Surya prance about in hot pink cargos, I realized that I’ve become a complete stranger to the way of the Tamils. If one considers popular entertainment as a barometer of prevailing tastes, I can no longer call myself a Tamilian. I’d looked forward to Ghajini, despite knowing that it is an attempt at the desification of Memento. In fact, I was impressed that a Tamil movie was ‘inspired’ by such challenging original material as Memento. I knew it would be asking for the moon to expect them to tell the tale backwards (remember this is the audience that found Michael Madana Kamaraj too hard to follow). I was prepared for a chronologically simpler retelling. I was even prepared for a second heroine, and a second chance at romance & a happy ending.

What I was not prepared for was a sorry Bollywood-import for a villain, who’s been imported twice over, possibly due to a mix-up involving two copies of bills of lading (don’t ask why I say these things – effects of a summer internship at P&O NedLloyd apparently still linger on.) And while this is mere wishful thinking, I do keep hoping that Tamil cinema would rid itself of actresses who represent inspired casting decisions for the ‘before’ segments of weight reduction ads. Or if you must have “healthy” looking females, would someone please clothe them! Or does that defeat the whole purpose? I find it painful and embarrassing to defend Tamil cinema to non-Tamil friends when our “item girls” look they way they do. Every time I bring up, say, Govinda, they come right back at me with Mumtaz & the like. Nayantara appears to be the latest addition to our line of “svelte” beauties.

As I’d mentioned, Ghajini was merely the last straw. I also found Anniyan disappointing & Chandramukhi painful. Movie wise, it has been a painful year. I’ve survived gems such as 7G Rainbow Colony, Mumbai Express, Devathayai Kanden, Krishna Thulasi, Chellamay and others my traumatized mind has succeeded in suppressing the memories of. My experience with Bollywood has been no better. I watched 71/2 Phere. And if that weren’t enough, I also watched Ek Alag Mausam. I shall never let myself be seduced by the presence of Irfan or Nandita Das. Particularly Ms. Das – the lady has disappointed me across languages.

It’s one thing to get suckered into watching duds (you watch more of them when you’re outside India, out of a misplaced and questionable sense of Tamizh Pattru). But another thing entirely to scoff at the year’s best movies. For starters, the latter makes for some uncomfortable silences during calls home. One cousin has watched Anniyan thrice. How do I continue the conversation after hearing that piece of information?

I worry about my Tamil-ness when I find myself unable to sit through these masterpieces even once. If you dislike Tamil movies when you are in India, you might be considered merely ignorant. Having spent 6 years in Delhi, I am considered something of a non-Tamilian by the Madrasis, and non-Tamilians who watch Tamil movies are treated with a fond indulgence – as you would foreigners attempting to speak your language. But if you dislike Tamil movies and you happen to live in the US, you’re a snob. If you’ve ever made the mistake of mentioning a foreign language movie or two (even if you personally watch them more for Ziyi Zhang or Gael Garcia Bernal than for their subtle story-telling), you are a pseudo.

When I read Naipaul or Lahiri, it’s always been with a sense of curiosity. Till date, I’ve not felt any sort of kinship with those misplaced souls. I’ve never thought of myself as an immigrant. This week end, I realized that that is what I am. I suppose it had to happen sometime – when you stop saying dah-nce and learn to say day-nce, you catch yourself asking friends to order a movie on NetFlix, when you celebrate Diwali on a convenient weekend, instead of on Diwali day.

All of these little changes have been accumulating over the last year. When I watched Surya in a Mustard T-shirt (tight, with no sleeves, please – we want to show the world that we spend at least 10 hours a day at the gym), and Mustard pants, I realized that Madras may no longer be “home”.

I love the movies. And an important reason I watch them is to get material for day dreaming. Hollywood movies are great. As are Chinese movies, Spanish movies, Polish movies and well, you get the idea. But Tamil movies have always been special. Because, culturally, they capture one’s aspirations bang on. Heroes perform their heroic deeds in familiar settings, making it that much easier to imagine yourself in their shoes. While James Bond kicks ass, being a cryptologist from Madras who cracks codes for the Indian government wasn’t a bad dream either.

A necessary pre-condition to all this day-dreaming is that the characters be desirable. A man who has repeatedly failed his exams, and can’t get a job, until the love of a good woman helps him discover a superior vocational talent (auto-repair, dish-washing - take your pick) is most definitely NOT desirable. Granted, Sanjay Ramaswamy from Ghajini is an HBS alum who owns a large mobile phone service provider. But let’s not forget that he is also the man with the chunky silver bracelets and the hot pink cargos. I’m not planning a visit to Fresh Choice when I day dream – I’ll take X’s money, Y’s charm with the ladies, and keep my own clothes & build the perfect salad, er, hero. No, I want it to be simple – a case of find hero, replace with DoZ.

For a while, I felt perhaps age was the culprit – the other top reason behind why so many things don’t seem to make sense any more. But, naah. My parents loved Chandramukhi. And liked Anniyan. So, I’ve decided it must be the distance. Perhaps the chlorinated water of Madras passes on that je ne sais quoi that tells Tamilians in Tamil Nadu that pretending to be rappers with lots of bling is “the” way to look. Drinking fluorinated water in Texas, I’ve become ‘phoren’.

As I mourn my loss, I take comfort from fellow displaced Tamilians who appear as bewildered by Tamil movies as I am. At least, they appear to be taking it better than I am. For now, home will be virtual, like this, this , and this.

3 1/2 minutes of escape

2005-10-20T16:23:00.000-07:00

A crisis at work had me all in a tizzy today. My favorite stress guru offers these wise words:

You work and work for years and years, you're always on the go
You never take a minute off, too busy makin' dough
Someday, you say, you'll have your fun, when you're a millionaire
Imagine all the fun you'll have in your old rockin' chair

Enjoy yourself, it's later than you think
Enjoy yourself, while you're still in the pink
The years go by, as quickly as a wink
Enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself, it's later than you think

You're gonna take that ocean trip, no matter, come what may
You've got your reservations made, but you just can't get away
Next year for sure, you'll see the world, you'll really get around
But how far can you travel when you're six feet underground?

Your heart of hearts, your dream of dreams, your ravishing brunette
She's left you and she's now become somebody else's pet
Lay down that gun, don't try, my friend, to reach the great beyond
You'll have more fun by reaching for a redhead or a blonde

Enjoy yourself, it's later than you think
Enjoy yourself, while you're still in the pink
The years go by, as quickly as a wink
Enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself, it's later than you think

You never go to nightclubs and you just don't care to dance;
You don't have time for silly things like moonlight and romance.
You only think of dollar bills tied neatly in a stack;
But when you kiss a dollar bill, it doesn't kiss you back.

Enjoy yourself, it's later than you think
Enjoy yourself, while you're still in the pink
The years go by, as quickly as a wink
Enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself, it's later than you think

- Guy Lombardo

Now if only I were wise enough to heed his advice...

The intrepid traveler returns

2005-10-17T12:09:00.000-07:00

Back home. Back at my desk. Feels good. Am pleasantly surprised that it does. Have concluded that the anticipation of misery is much worse than actual misery. Just as actual pleasure usually falls short of pleasure anticipated.

On Saturday, as my friend & I walked back home from Time Square, before I bid good bye, I felt quite miserable. How had the week gone by so quickly? Would I ever be back here? God, I so do not want to think about work! Couldn’t believe I was going to miss this city, which had given me nothing but rain!

One of the worst kinds of miseries is when you’re in the middle of something and you miss it already. There’s a desperate attempt to memorize as many things as you can about your surroundings, about the day. A silly, obsessive need to touch everything, as if the happiness you associate with that place will rub off on you & will stay with you even after you’ve physically moved away. I completely understand why people buy idiotic souvenirs & other assorted junk at the places they visit. I will revisit the junk I preserved from this trip (two tickets for Goodnight and Good Luck, a “You’re Special” flyer a lady handed me after I’d asked her for directions, used up Subway passes) when it’s time to move. This is how I collect the assorted junk I never do muster the courage to throw away.

But now that am back at my desk, it feels alright. I was dreading this moment, but now that am living it, it’s not so bad. In a day or two, I can check off the “miss New York” item off my list. This is a favorite obsession – checking items off an imaginary list. On my last day, I look forward to the unbeatable satisfaction I will no doubt derive from a “Life – done”. Morbid? Sure. But hey, at the end of a vacation, this is a far more cheerful me that I myself expected!

Enough of the misery. What did I do over the last week? Apart from getting drenched on a regular basis, I read 2 novels, and watched 2 movies. Yes, we like even numbers. The books were quite bad, but the movies were both good.

First the books. Dan Brown’s Digital Fortress & Hari Kunzru’s Transmission. I feel a need to defend my even choosing the Brown, so I’ll start with that. It’d been a long while since I read pulp, and after all, this was supposed to be a vacation – a break from the usual. As I had a couple of train rides (to New Haven & Philly) in addition to the flights, I figured this would make for some nice easy reading.

For me, reading pulp is like eating tomato ketchup. I loathe the stuff. But every once in a while, I feel the urge to reassure myself that I still hate it. So, I try some ketchup. And immediately realize why I’d vowed to stay away from the stuff for all eternity the last time I’d tried it. Dan Brown did not do anything to alter my scripted response to pulp. What was tiresome about Digital Fortress was the amount of jaw-dropping the author expects from the reader. The heroine works for the NSA! The NSA is the National Security Agency! She can break codes! There is such a thing as an unbreakable code! Yawn. It’s one thing to read Dalrymple’s In Xanadu and see how this author has evolved into someone who wrote White Mughals. It’s an altogether different and far less enjoyable experience to see how Dan Brown could become the sort of author who wrote the Da Vinci Code.

The Kunzru was better than Brown, but only marginally so. Kunzru also demanded much jaw-dropping. Not for the characters or the plot, but for his own smartness. He’s a very “with it” author, or at any rate wants us to think he is. Reading Kunzru is not unlike reading Candace Bushnell. The language and the issues are all very current – like Bond-girl gowns. Hot, but with a rather short shelf life. But the crucial difference between Bond girls’ fashion & Kunzru is that well, Kunzru’s not very hot. Sure, he deals with all things “contemporary” – the typical software engineer, the Bollywood hero with underworld connections, the brand guru… But each of these characters is so stereotypical that I felt that I didn’t really have to read a novel to find out about. The Times of India would’ve sufficed. This novel came strongly recommended by an American friend. I decided to read it despite Karthik’s review, figuring it might be worth it. I suppose perhaps that’s where the crux lies. This is a novel written for Indophilic goras for whom getting inside the head of a miserable software type is a “new” thing. I am a miserable software type already, indeed am surrounded by miserable software types. So, I didn’t get much out of this book.

But it doesn’t stop there. After 3 years of Delhi Times & cover page stories about ‘Salman / Ash Break Up’ and “investigative journalism” on Salman being caught on tape, a Bollywood producer’s having connections with a Baby someone (Btw, “Baby” is a sorry transliteration for the “Chota” characters from real life) is something I’ve come to live with. It is not a surprise, it is not an interesting tidbit, it is not even funny. Ditto for the controlling-mother-of-the-heroine character, the sister-who-works-for-a-call-center, and oh, just about everybody else in the book.

Flavors did a far better job of giving us a peek into the lives of these stereotypical immigrants. Because it was unambitious, it was also more endearing. Page 3 is another example. The selfish socialites of Page 3 are by no means endearing, but you are provided with some opinion on these characters and their motives.

Kunzru expects us to love & admire his characters just because they are. Or does he expect us to love & admire him? For having taken these characters out of Delhi Times & Mumbai Times & movies-made-by-NRIs-for-NRIs and putting them into novel form, for easier consumption by a gullible western audience? A few years ago, westerners used to think India was full of snake charmers and burning widows. Now they know it’s full of software engineers day dreaming of Bollywood girls. As with Dan Brown - yawn.

Now the movies – Capote & Good Night and Good Luck. Enjoyed both. Capote is about the writing of ‘In Cold Blood’, Capote’s most famous work. My personal exposure to Capote’s work is limited to reruns of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. No doubt I’d have enjoyed this movie all the more had I read In Cold Blood. Perhaps in a few years, I will read the book. Even as you cringe at the selfishness, a part of you feels sorry for Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Capote. Is every great writer screwed up in some way? My friend & I made a list, and concluded in the affirmative. Philip Seymour Hoffman’s performance makes Capote’s character credible without turning him into a genius who evokes more pity than awe.

In Good Night and Good Luck, George Clooney proves that he’s not just a pretty boy. I haven’t watched Solaris (Clooney’s directorial debut, I think), but intend to watch it now. More about this movie in a later post.

In short, it was a good break. And now am glad to be back.

The Intrepid Traveler

2005-10-07T15:32:00.000-07:00

Temperature in Dallas finally hits the 50s. I’ve bought a new woolen cap to honor the moment (for as with all things cool, this too shall pass). I leave for New York tomorrow morning, where if Yahoo Weather is to be believed, temperatures are expected to be in the 70s the whole of next week. Isn’t that nice?

Yes, am being tiresome. After all, am off for a whole week, and away from Dallas, and in New York – I should count my manifold blessings. Problem is I loathe the run up to the whole leaving-town-process. Upon careful reflection, I realize that I:

a) love to see new places. Indeed at this point, any place other than Plano & Richardson, Texas will be regarded with the same awe as would Cairo, Istanbul, or Machu Picchu. Am not too hard to please.

b) not helped by the fact that places I plan to leave (Madras, Delhi, Dallas, Gurgaon - it doesn’t matter where) suddenly turn beautiful 24 hours before I’m due to leave. Relatives who never visit decide it’s time to visit. Malls go into deep discount mode. Friends who spend the rest of the year flitting from work to home get together for assorted adventures. (Just so they can tell me, “Oh, you’re never there when we do fun stuff.”) State Fairs with fat pigs set up shop for just the time when am gone. (Last year’s week end visit to New York caused me to miss seeing “the fattest pig in all of Texas.” A life long devotee of Lord Emsworth & the Empress of Blandings, I may never recover from the heart break)

c) don’t mind the journey itself, because am usually well stocked on books

d) abhor preparing for the journey (the endless packing & re-packing, the forced short-listing of books & music, the remembering to charge up a zillion electronic devices that I will not use, but nonetheless will NEED the minute the battery runs out, the remembering to write down all sorts of phone numbers, the remembering to wrap up tens of details at work, each more irritating that the other…Well, I just find all this “remembering” a rather draining experience)

e) am crushed by the day after the last day of the vacation

I did my first round of packing last night. With me, you see, there are always several rounds. When I start packing, I rarely remember that I’m traveling coach with hand-baggage only. I always start under the assumption that I will have a state-room, and an army of underlings to carry my baggage. That’s Round 1. Round 2 commences when I try to fit the stuff I’ve ‘set aside for the trip’ into a suitcase of any size. Rounds 2-5 consist of ranking aforementioned items in the order of their perceived importance, and discarding the once at the bottom of the list.

Round 6 is the same as rounds 2-5, but involves a greater degree of courage & determination as I force myself to pare down even more. Round 7, usually performed between 1/2 to 5 minutes before I leave home consists of stuffing back some of the items painfully discarded during earlier rounds because I’m still not entirely convinced I won’t desperately need them. The secret to the success of this round is the short time frame available – when am in a hurry, I don’t think. I stuff first, and reflect later. After all, I have a longish plane or train journey plus the rest of my life to regret my choosing to carry this heavy item or that.

As I mentioned, I’ve completed round 1. Every time I pack, I appreciate those immortal lines ‘And miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep’ at a whole new level.

But, packing isn’t all bad. For instance, to my very great joy, I realized that I do not possess enough sweaters (I was told by a friend in New York to bring some). I only have 3 serviceable* ones, and 3 are clearly NOT enough for any soul. Even my Mom would agree. It’s a marvelous feeling to have objective evidence to support the claim that one has no clothes. Will remedy the shortage immediately upon return, or perhaps when I’m in New York.

Packing is also an adventure of discovery, equivalent to a minor scale moving experience, as it were. Last night I found myself repeatedly experiencing a sense of wonder, and suitably expressed these sentiments with “Wow! I bought that? When?”, “I can still fit into that? Oh Joy! There is a God, after all!”, “So this is where you’ve been hiding!” and so on.

But all the dubious delights in the world don’t take away the fact that my vacation will end. Before I can say “I am so glad to be away from work”, I’ll be right back… at the same desk, with the same inspiring view of Taco Bell, tapping away at the same damn keyboard. How cynical do you have to be to mourn the completion of your vacation even before you start it?

Note to self: Use vacation to acquire a more cheerful outlook on life.

* serviceable as per the definition according to DoZ, not OED or MOM (both well known for their exacting and rather narrow definitions of objects, emotions & experiences).**

**What did you expect?

On Ranting

2005-10-05T21:42:00.000-07:00

Karthik's last post got me thinking. Ranting is an honored literary tradition & masters across centuries have engaged in it with highly entertaining & edifying results. Here’s a short list of the ranters I love:

James Thurber
An undisputed master of art (in my opinion). One of his funniest is 'File & Forget' - a collection of his correspondence with his publishers over a mix up involving among other things a number of copies of the book "Grandma Was a Nudist". Strictly NOT for office reading, or any place else where you don’t want to fall off your chair & roll around the floor laughing.

(Unfortunately, I do not recall the name of the piece that is my personal favorite. It features Thurber, his wife & a confused lady at a party, who all get increasingly drunk as the evening proceeds, with hilarious results. The lady accuses Thurber of having written something he has not, and he tries very hard to disabuse her, but...Well, am making an absolute hash of it here - but if someone remembers the title or the collection in which this appears, please let me know.)

David Sedaris
Sedaris's wit lacks the rapier sharpness of Thurber's. But his rants are equally hilarious. From his experience working as an Elf at Macy's (or was it Bloomingdale's?) in Santaland Diaries to his adventures in France, Sedaris is also NOT for office reading. Go here for sample sound bites. The author’s dead pan voice makes it all funnier.

But when it comes to rants, the Bard wins. As he does, am sure, in just about everything under the sun... My all time favorite rant bar none is:

To bait fish withal: if it feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge. He hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million, laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies; and what's his reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge! If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge! The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.*

What wouldn’t I give to be able to rant like this...

* The Merchant of Venice, Act III, Scene 1

Let's make this an open tag. Favorite ranters & their rants, movies included.

Coming up with hackneyed responses to common greetings

2005-10-04T16:15:00.000-07:00

Am all for politesse. But frankly, coming up with responses to common greetings is starting to tire me. As an Indian, am used to ignoring people, and in turn being ignored. It’s a beautiful system. After moving to the US, I felt completely traumatized by complete strangers not only asking me how I was doing (or as they say in Texas, “how y’all doin’?”), but actually expecting a response. What did these people want, I used to wonder. Should I take them seriously, and actually tell them just how crappy a day I was having? Or how much their seemingly innocent question had contributed to the overall crappiness of the aforementioned day? Or was Texas full of kind souls who actually wanted to hear about my insomnia, my headaches, and a wide assortment of other illnesses?

If there’s someone I dislike more than the persons asking such questions, it’s the ones who reply “Wonderful!”, “Fantastic!”, “Super!” (you can see the exclamation marks in the air.) What do these people find in life to be so bloody cheerful about? We once disowned a friend who started saying things like that. You see, the poor chap had joined a cult (er, Amway), and was never the same again. But that’s for another post.

After several months of jumping a couple of inches into the air every time I encountered yet another well-mannered person (oh where have all the rude people gone?), I got used to it. I am now able to rattle off bromides like, “Am good, thanks. And you?”, “Have a good one” and so on. I suspect I may have crossed a major milestone because infrequently, I can even pose the question myself. (It used to be never.)

But what still has me stumped is the question “What’s up?” It is, by far, the most irritating question anyone can ask. Because, I never ever have anything to say, other than ‘absolutely nothing.’ When am in one of my dark moods, I’ve tried to be, well, dark, and responded with “Not me” or “the sun, but am asking it to go down this minute” & other mutterings in similar vein. No effect. Because no one pays attention. (Although it is sometimes worse when they do pay attention, because they usually don’t get it, and I have to spend 10 minutes explaining what I meant.)

It’s apprently enough to ask an inane question like that, and wait for some response that involves the respondent producing a sound. Some folks (the nobler ones) are happy with mere mumbles. Others have their brains tuned to only accepting some decipherable response. My best and only response is, as I mentioned, ‘absolutely nothing’. On very rare occasions, I vary it a little (let it not be said that I’ve no imagination). If the fancy takes me, I may say “nothing”. Whether I say this with a cheerful smile or a scowl depends on the time of the day & whether I happen to be headed toward or emerging from my boss’s office.

My response always seems to leave the inquirer feeling vaguely dissatisfied. I really don’t know what these people want from me. I should spend some time & come up with a few expressions that I can kill with overuse & therefore no longer have to cringe when saying them out loud. What is the ideal response to “What’s up?” Let us see:

a) Gas prices? – may work for the foreseeable future. Keep.
b) Unemployment / interest rates / house prices? – too volatile. I need something I can use forever. Discard.
c) The Eiffel Tower? – not bad. Keep.
d) The sky? – lousy. Keep for emergency use only.

If you know what the perfect response is, please, for the love of God, let me in on the secret. Until I hear from you, am starting an email campaign to rude people, begging them to move to Dallas.

Saturday (Contd.)

2005-10-03T16:28:00.000-07:00

I suffer from a case of ‘let’s publish this NOW’ syndrome. After hitting the button, I realized I have quite a few things to add to my last post. Here goes:

Perowne’s character is easy to relate to for many reasons. He is ambitious, and has worked hard to achieve his successes. However, perhaps in keeping with the so called ‘liberal way’, at critical moments, he feels almost ashamed of his own achievements. Was he right to use his medical knowledge to get out of a beating? When I think about it now, I realize that of course he was. If your professional training does not help you get out of a sticky situation, of what use is it? Watching a possible drug addict from his window, Perowne wonders what made this young lady turn into an addict, even as he waits for the arrival of another young lady who is having her first book of poetry published.

I loved that part. Because, of late, I do seem to keep reminding myself of how lucky I’ve been. Lucky to be an Indian, and not a Somalian, lucky to have born into a Tamil family on one side of a narrow stretch of salty water, than the other. Lucky to have had a childhood characterized by the complete absence of guns, starvation and disease. Lucky to be literate. Lucky to have a job. A seemingly endless list of things about which my opinions swing between heartfelt gratitude and ennui. To read Saturday is to realize that this internal pendulum apparently isn’t yours alone.

There were too many instances where it felt incredibly easy to replace Perowne with myself. Perhaps it just helps my ego to imagine myself as being anything like Perowne; after all, he’s made it. A flourishing career, loving wife, children who're not only incredibly talented, but also genuinely nice, a home in London, a soon to be inherited château in France… Yes, he certainly has it all. And what’s so bad about wanting all that? At 15, it was easy to imagine myself in any number of characters’ shoes, be it Scarlett O’Hara or Elizabeth Bennet or Anne Frank. At 27, the task has become more challenging. You’re jaded, you think you know yourself more, and worse, you think you know how most things work, even if you’re yet to experience them personally. Saturday let me day dream like I haven’t in a long time.

Sure, the climax felt contrived, but after 250 pages of utterly beautiful writing, who cares?

Updated verdict: Read Saturday. Read it now, before the world changes. Read it now before you do, too.

Saturday: Comfort read for the media weary.

2005-10-03T15:25:00.000-07:00

Read Ian McEwan's Saturday a few days ago, and found it is sublime. While I've read Atonement & Amsterdam, I wouldn’t call myself an avowed fan of McEwan's. That might just change after 'Saturday'. Saturday is a day in the life of Henry Perowne. Perowne is someone we all dream of becoming, someone we’d be lucky to be at 50. Successful career. Reasonably good health. A wife of many years, whom he still loves, and who still loves him. Two children any parent would be proud of.

The novel is immensely enjoyable for two reasons – Perowne's sharp observations on life that make you repeatedly think, "I know just what you mean!" And the fact that the book is contemporary in a way that doesn’t in the least bit feel contrived. Afghanistan, Iraq, 9-11, Africa, Saddam, Bush, Blair, Hans Blix, the theory of evolution, Islam – they're all part of the props, and seem to belong there.

I resisted reading this novel because I felt vaguely resentful of the intrusion of these subjects into fiction. My thinking was that at least some places should remain sacred and aloof from the messiness of every day life. Anyone who’s been around for the last five years has read hundreds of op-ed columns, or watched any number of news clips, documentaries, etc. on these issues and will continue to read and watch hundreds more. Why must we endure more of the same in fiction, too? I also found it a little sad. Had non-fiction and our growing obsession with it put fiction on the defensive, turning the very genre into yet another wannabe-newsroom pundit, delivering its own verdict on how life has changed? Or how one must now proceed to deal with this “changed life”?

I am so very glad to report I was wrong. In a way, Saturday does do all of the offensive things I feared it would (dwell upon current events, show us how people deal with them), but does so in a completely disarming and therefore very likeable manner. Perowne tries to grapple with the problem of Iraq, as almost every one must have. He tries to gauge his stands on broader issues that impinge upon his own life only peripherally, if at all.

I wonder if men have always done this. Did your parents have endless discussions on the Indo-Pak war or your grandparents on the Second World War? It must have been hard not to, as these would have impacted every day life much more than the current “global struggle against violent extremism” does. Sure, we have to go to the airport an hour earlier than we used to, and can’t carry nail-clippers in our hand-baggage any more. Sure, color coded terror alters have become a part of our vocabulary. While I admit I’m hardly a representative sample, personally, I haven’t had my food rationed. Or had to turn off lights in response to air raid alerts. Or been drafted to the army.

What I’ve done instead is read or watch the news. Debated with friends about the news. Actually discussed would be a better term, as we mostly appear agree with each other, at least on this topic. The least enjoyable experience has been having to revise my opinions about how much I trust the news itself. I don’t know if this is part of growing up, when one day you wake up and realize that even The Hindu exists in order to make a profit, as does the New York Times, and as do any number of other institutions you believed were sacred and far above the cheap motives of making a buck.

There was a point to that digression – it was such a great relief to simply peek into someone else’s opinions, sans judgment. When am reading about Henry's sense of ambiguousness over the war on terror, I simply get to satisfy my curiosity over what another person feels like. I am not simultaneously calculating how many pinches of salt I'll need to take with this opinion or attempting to divine whether the source of these opinions is from the left or the right of an imaginary political fence, up for re-election, or has a major merger deal awaiting regulatory approval. Fiction beats all the expert commentary, well-researched or otherwise by being, well, fictitious.

Would reading Hemingway or Maugham hot off the presses have felt the same way? Possibly. I’ll never know. What I do know that Saturday felt like a breath of fresh air. And reading McEwan in the middle of a particularly taxing work-week (aren’t they all?) made the experience that much more wonderful.

Bottom-line: Read Saturday. Read it now, before the world changes once again.

On trial and commitment

2005-10-03T10:11:00.000-07:00

More long term relationships start at Match.com than anywhere else. Start your free 3-day trial today!
- Excerpt from TV ad.

Yahoo Launch Cast – listen to 200 songs a month, for free!
Guardian Online – news and opinion, free.
Walmart-DVD rental (erstwhile) – 1 month free trial.

Finding your one true love & a shot at happily ever after – 3 day free trial.

We sure feel finding the one is all important, don’t we? After we’ve found the right song, the right date movie and the right conversation starter, that is.

Lembas Bread for the next year

2005-09-30T18:12:00.000-07:00

We're a society under siege, at the mercy of tykes & teens. Every where you turn, you're confronted by yet another instance of someone bending over backwards to cater to children.

Popping a simple head-ache pill, taking a dose of flu medicine, finding a breakfast food without sugar or SpongeBob, enjoying a movie, watching television, reading a book... There's absolutely nothing out of the ordinary about any of these activities. They're the sort of boring little details that might eat into the 2 minutes of flashback provided to you on your deathbed (given a lifelong history of never thinking of the right thing at the right time, am convinced that my flashback will be almost exclusively composed of shots of me buying stamps, buying groceries, sitting at my desk at work, doing the dishes & other fascinating memories), but that's about the only reason they might bother you. But every single one of these insiginificant actions has become a minor equivalent of climbing Mt. Everest. Let's tackle them one at a time:
a) Pill-popping: This is what provoked the current rant, and hardly ever fails to get a raise out of me - ranging from a defeated sigh to a full blown tantrum (the extended version includes swearing, screaming, heavy breathing, foot stomping, vein popping, bottle throwing etc.). My idea of child-proofing a bottle consists of placing the damn thing on the most unreacheable shelf at home. But no. That would suck the excitement right out of it. We have "press down & turn", "hold sides & turn", "start turning clockwise but immediately afterwards turn anti-clockwise" & a whole range of other physically impossible actions. They might as well replace the instructions with stuff like "Pain killers are bad for you. Have you tried a glass of warm milk?", or "Convert to Buddhism. The Dalai Lama swears by meditation" or "Are you sure you're in pain? Maybe it's all in your head (no pun intended)."
b) Drinking of Flu medicine: See above
c) Finding breakfast: Walk past breakfast aisle at any store to see a live illustration of this point
d) Watching movies: Dukes of Hazzard. No more need be said.
e) Watching television: I pay $15 a month so that I can watch "adult content". And by the way, "adult content" is far less prurient than the sort of images that the term invokes. Am talking of romance and comedy, of loss and grief, of history... Do you get any of this on "network" television? Nope. If you want to watch Sex & the City (the uncut version - Kadavulae, what times we do live in! That we feel the need for an uncut version of cotton-candy concoctions like Sex & the City?) stand-up acts by George Carlin or Robin Williams (Williams as benevolent genie OK. Williams as retarded man who does not know if he's fathered a son. Fine. Williams, the comic genius - hush! The children might hear!), Six Feet Under, Rome, Deadwood or even Entourage - get HBO.
f) Reading: OK, here I'll own up to reading every Harry Potter book & wanting to read Inheritance (the sequel to Eragon). But just because I enjoy these things doesn't make the phenomenon any less skewed. Why are millions upon millions of adults waiting in lines outside bookstores awaiting the release of what is essentially a children's book? Or are we supposed to express our gratitude to Rowling for having gotten these people to read anything at all? Can't folks even write decent pulp anymore, that grown ups have eschewed sex & violence for a 15 year old wizard & his wand?

Yes, this is years of embittered frustration talking. When I was a kid, the only kid stuff on TV consisted of a 1/2 hour cartoon program broadcast on Sunday mornings. I grew up eating Idlis & Dosas & driking milk. No vitamin-and-essential-nutrients-enriched-fun-cereal-with-a-signed-autograph-by-wierd-looking-sea-sponge(who-may-be-gay).
I watched the same movies my parents did. If there were "scenes", the family would honor the moment by observing a few seconds of strained silence, and move on. I swore as a kid I wouldn't say this, but at 27, what's one more broken resolution? So here goes- those were the days.

If you're still reading, you may be wondering, "So what's with the Lembas Bread?" Patience is always awarded. This morning, I remembered one more reason I love this time of the year. Right now, you're in the 2 week window when Hollywood releases movies for grown ups. The season for summer tenpoles is over. The unbelievably dispriting "holiday season" is yet to start. And the Oscars still count for something. This is the time when I note down movie names religiously from the movie sections of newspapers. This year movies like Capote and The History of Violence are the Lembas Bread I stock up for the next 12 months. I dare not watch them all at once. It's 52 long weeks before the next two week gap, when Hollywood takes a breather from its obsession with 8-18 year olds.

Am quite proud of myself, seizing a happy ending from the jaws of misery. How Hollywood :)

I take heart. Today the average age is around 30 & everything's tailored for 5-15 year olds. When the average age hits 50, perhaps life will adapt to 25-35 year olds. I don't have long to wait. According to the UN, it'll be a short 300 year wait.

Reality check

2005-09-29T22:34:00.000-07:00

Last night, I read a New Yorker profile on the fashion designer & bon vivant Valentino. While I've had a vague idea that I share a planet with some fabulously wealthy people, I suppose I've never personally confronted true wealth. As I read that his wedding gown collection starts at $35,000, I realized with a start that $35,000 will allow me to buy the car I would buy if I could afford:
a) the downpayment
b) the insurance
c) the gas
& buy this car not once, but at least twice, if not thrice.

I read on about Valentino's many homes around the world. Palaces / castles / yatchs are more accurate terms to use. I did not feel the sense of yearning that comes over when I read say, the Travel pages of the NY Times. Surprisingly, there was no feeling of 'God, I wish I had that.' Although it doesn't sound like it, I'm not beatifying myself. I'm merely registering surprise. Apparently, there are limits to my materialistic fantasies. Or wealth of this magnitude is so clearly out of reach, that I accept it without fuss - just as I do the fact that I will never visit Mars.

Couple of days ago, I read another profile. This time, one of Colonel Fawcett, a British explorer who went into the Amazonian forest in 1927, and never came back. Hundreds have tried to find him / his party / his remains. And the crazy thing is, I can see what made these poor buggers go out there, risking their necks for this stranger.

Reading this article brought back memories of Desmond Bagley novels read long ago. No high tech gizmos, no GPS, no satellite radios, no helicopters, no all terrain vehicles - just a bunch of hardy, adveturous souls. And as much as I know am not one of them, I like to think I am. It's the sorta day dreaming that a really good Bond movie triggers (NOT ones that have Halle Berry in them!). You know it's fiction, ridiculously unrealistic fiction at that. There's nothing noble about it - it's not as if you're casting yourself in the role of Albert Schweitzer. And yet, you allow the silly plot to seduce you. You invent this parallel universe where you're suddenly a suave, heart-breakingly handsom super spy who dodges every bullet & repeatedly saves the world. Not like Schweitzer who probably wanted to save the world, but incidentally, when your mind was elsewhere. That makes it so much cooler.

OK. Major digression there. To return to poor Colonel Fawcett & all the poor slobs who went looking for him. The closest I've been to a "jungle" is a resort in the Jim Corbett park. One morning, we ate hot aloo parathas, got all bundled up & went around what looked like a nice neck of woods in what was easily the noisiest jeep in the world & kidded ourselves that every tiger in the park was waiting to come out for a nice stroll at the precise moment we drove by. Even as the ridiculous footage of me, my 2 friends & this old driver flits through my head, I lay there thinking to myself, "Hmm, the Amazon...with the right equipment, I could do that." Right equipment? As though I would even know what that is. I am the person who had to be taught how to tie shoe laces properly! Yes, all of us were taught this valuable lesson at some stage in life. My moment was 2 years ago - just outside Central Park, when the friend I was walking with was fed up stopping every 25 steps to wait for me to tie my laces again.

There is a point to this rambling, and am getting there. What makes some crazy stuff so appealing, while other equally crazy stuff leaves us totally cold? I have no wish to own a home in Holland Park, or sail a yatch around Mediterranean hot spots. I also have no wish to actually be stranded in a rain forest - but somehow the latter is more appealing than the former. When it comes to two utterly hypothetical options, why do we chose one over the other? It's not as if we were talking from experience. Lots of times neither option is something we even want to do. And yet, we're able to chose. How? And why?

Scary thought - do arranged marriages work on this principle? Do we make all decisions like this? Picking colleges, majors in those colleges, jobs, lovers? Yes, we may have a teeny bit more information when making those decisions, but really, what do we know? Is this where the famed gut feel comes in? What I want to know is what does my gut know of the Xingu Reserve? And what pray does it know about owning the Château de Wideville?

Let us set aside for a brief moment all the day dreaming, and intellectual cogitation on the mechanism of decision making, and consider the truth. Truth is:
a) in this lifetime, I cannot fit into that red dress, much less afford it;
b) I cannot afford that car in the next five years, if not longer;
c) I won't be visiting even the outskirts of that forest in the next 10 years, if ever and
d) I will never ever meet that man, let alone be him.

That's all for tonight folks.

Prayers answered.

2005-09-29T12:01:00.000-07:00

16ْC. In Dallas. Well, what do you know, there must be a God after all. The sky is full of clouds. The sun is, well, not there. There’s a decided nip in the air. This morning, when I got out of the house to come to work, it was chilly outside. I was going to say cold, but realized that even my powers of exaggeration are limited. Inhabitants of the north, wipe that pitying look off your faces. If you lived in Texas, you too would be on your knees, thanking a multitude of benevolent Gods for a day like today.

On the commute, I dared to dream – is it time to bring out the “winter garments”? Time to put away the summer stuff, and bring on the jackets, baby! (note to the uninitiated: these “jackets” are made of the thinnest cotton, worn mostly to kid ourselves) Time to replace the sandals with 2 spaghetti straps with, er, sandals with pasta straps – oh, you harsh Texas winter, how I’ve missed you!

I LOVE winters. I hate the sun. As someone who spent most of my childhood & adulthood in the saunas of Madras, Delhi, Cuddalore & Trichy, I justifiably feel that I’ve had all the sun a person needs in one lifetime. Give me cloudy days. Air without a bite to it is no air at all. Life is better in the winter. You can walk all you want and not get exhausted. You don’t sweat. You can take piping hot showers. Savor your cuppa tea. Snuggle into your sheets. The pleasures are endless.

Because I’ve mostly lived in cities that can so easily pass for Turkish Baths, I’ve learnt to make the most of meager winters. In my two winters in Trichy, I believe I was the only one in college to not only own a sweater, but actually use it. Those were good days, for Madras doesn’t even give you that much of an excuse. Moving back to Delhi was terribly exciting. I actually needed a winter wardrobe! I’ve spent many a gleeful hour, shopping for cardigans and shawls and jackets and oh, a whole bunch of other stuff that would cause the average New Yorker to die of apoplexy brought on by excessive laughter.

Moving to Dallas presented yet another milestone. For the first time, I was going to be in a city where it snows! I know now why friends & colleagues were so amused by my gleeful winter shopping last year. Oh, yeah it snowed, alright. For about 4 hours, two days before Christmas. And that was it. But I nevertheless bought a pair of leather gloves in honor of the sparse white stuff that dotted roof tops for a day or two.

I now live right next to a mall and can buy all sorts of protective gear any time the fancy takes me. What do I do this winter? The mouth curves in a sly grin & the eyes gleam at the very thought. Mittens. Shoes, nay boots. Scarves. Skis? Perhaps for next winter...I have it on excellent authority that this global warming business is all hogwash.

I’ve some shopping to do. Before the sun comes out and melts my day dreams.

Waiting in vain

2005-09-26T16:53:00.000-07:00

This week end was a trip down memory lane for a displaced Madrasi. Expected lightning, thunder, strong winds, heavy downpours et al & got zilch, as Hurricane Rita bypassed Dallas altogether. I am certainly grateful that Rita did not wreak the sort of havoc Katrina did, but it did bring back memories of those innumerable "depressions in the bay" that promise rain to Madras, but almost always fail to deliver.

I suspect that Madras is rather like an "engine driver" - the one thing that so many little boys want to be when they grow up, but few actually do, and if they do, it doesn't look like it was by choice. Every baby depression in the Bay of Bengal expresses similar ambitions, "When I grow to a decent size, I want to blow all over Madras!" But once maturity hits them, they always find more popular destinations - Andhra Pradesh, Orissa, West Bengal or decide to go "phoren" & pack their bags off to Bangladesh...

Come November, every Madrasi would allow himself to get all excited over yet another depression - the older members of the family allow themselves a fond, if elaborate dream - two days worth of rain seeping into the parched earth of Madras, and miraculous raising the water table to a level that lo and behold, you turn on the tap, and water (not air) flows! The children dream dreams of schools declaring a holiday... The folks over at the electricity department dream of the number of hours they can shut off power "poyal kathula kambam vizhunthidichu, saar!" The bitter irony is that only the TNEB employees' dreams ever came to fruition most of the time.

Hurricane Rita was the same - well, almost. Of course, Americans are more fun to watch, as they panic so adorably. People bought cans & cans of drinking water, groceries (only stuff that'll keep even if the power & ergo the refrigerator goes), torch lights, DVDs (we may be stuck inside the house for ages!), board games (in case the power gets cut off), called friends & family to reassure them that they were well prepared, and of course filled up their Hummers & F-150s convinced that gas prices would hit $5... Finally, not a drop. It was pleasant on Saturday evening - a pleasant breeze was in the air, brining a brief respite from the stifling heat. By Sunday, Dallas realized that Rita was just a hoax & the temperature climbed back to the usual 90s (It's practically OCTOBER! When will Mamma Nature realize this?) .

Ah well. Born Madrasi that I am, I still nurture hopes. One of these days, Dallas is going to have to realize that this is fall. And that day, the temperature will start to fall, and this city will become habitable again. As for Rita - you tease, you don't break my heart. Been there, done that.

My first sonnet

2005-09-25T22:46:00.000-07:00

Who am I?

How inventive! How unobvious!
How superior to all that prevails!
Exclaim the green-tinted envious,
Even as I preen, revealing all my glorious details.

Backed by official sanction,
I claim dominion over an exact kingdom,
And seek to confer protection
From knaves who dare infringe upon this fiefdom.

My creation is anything but ordinary.
For I am trimmed with the choicest red tape
And although bounteous goodness accrues to my signatory,
‘Tis an experience that leaves your battered mind nowhere near shipshape

Am I some crafty diplomatic agreement?
No. Merely a regular utility patent.

----------------------------------------

Yeah, I was supposed to be gone for a month. But, vanity is an exacting mistress. Not that the above is anything to be particularly proud of... It was the only enjoyable part of a rather excruciating experience of writing & submitting (if you've done this, you'll know why "submitting" deserves a separate mention) two patent applications. That is what I've done over the last couple of weeks. It was, as I said, a completely painful experience. I had to exorcise the stress one way or the other, and bad poetry seemed as good an idea as any other. Wow, that rhymed! Bear with me - I am new to this & easily pleased :)

Farewell for a month

2005-09-02T20:19:00.000-07:00

I am off for a month. Wish I were hiking around Europe, admiring stained glass windows in obscure out of the way churches, writing my first novel, hiking up Machu Picchu, or well, a lot of other dreamy things. Truth - I need to study. Got a coupla exams. And blogging is way too much "fun", and my conscience, in seargent-major mode has made the guilt too much to bear. Will return again, hopefully triumphant & full of beans. A bientôt.

55 or less

2005-09-02T17:35:00.000-07:00

Eight ways to stimulate ‘Prefect’ Connor.

Flowers. Dinner at an intimate bistro. Orchestra seats at the Opera. Take the scenic route on the drive back home. Keep top down. Light candles. Turn on Harry Connick Jr. Move to patio, gaze at night sky.

Wait, did you say sImulate or sTimulate? And Connor not corner, right?

-------------

Yes, it TERRIBLE. I know. The outcome of a bad joke at work - an extension of me trying to write documentation abt a "stimulated" protractor, instead of a merely simulated one :( Such is life.

Sorry Karthik. If I can think of anything better, I'll let you know.

Never Let Me Go

2005-09-01T21:41:00.000-07:00

Just finished Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. Karthik, I know this is supposed to be your 'homework'. If you're still stuck with winsome sales girls peddling Danielle Steel novels, stop reading now.

OK, the Ishiguro. For an almost anti-septic / hospital corners sort of book, I must say, it had me all choked up by the end. With my 3 1/2 books worth of experience with this author, am beginning to discern the common themes. The actual pattern of each book may have some fancy (and in this case, not so fancy) penmanship, but it’s starting to feel like all the tales where woven on the same frame – memories of a better life, loss, and the absolute inevitability of that loss.

Never Let Me Go, for all its faults (& I’ll come to them) offers a sense of closure that I haven’t experienced before with this author. (For the record, I’ve read When We Were Orphans, Remains of the Day, about half of An Artist of the Floating World, and a teeny bit of The Unconsoled.) I vaguely remember reading some complaints about the climax of Never Let Me Go – just want to say that the climax is the least of my complaints with this work.

Is Ishiguro a fatalist? Well, that doesn’t matter, really. I suppose it would help if you were a fatalist when reading Ishiguro. The butler from Darlington Hall, the detective from Shanghai, the grandfather from post-war Japan, and now Kathy H. from Hailsham all try to reach out for happiness. Happiness is almost always equated with restoring some period from the characters’ pasts – an idyllic time, whose worth they were too young or too busy to notice back then. It isn’t that they sit back and twiddle their thumbs. As much as it goes against their grain, each of these characters does make the effort to reach out for his or her share of happiness. But in novel after novel, they fail. Because it’s too late. Because no one can bring back the past. Because it simply wasn’t meant to be? Reading Ishiguro always makes me sad.

So much for my two cents worth on Ishiguro’s “broader themes”. Let us return to the specifics of Never Let Me Go. Ishiguro’s brilliance has always been in painting that perfect world – that perfect past that his characters so desperately yearn to restore / relive. Till date, he has done an excellent job of selling the reader on the attractiveness of this past. He fails to do so in Never Let Me Go. I really didn’t see what was so fantastic about Hailsham.

The reason I fell in love with this author is because he is so darn amazing at evoking a certain period, a certain world. God, they say, is in the details. And so is Ishiguro. The large English household, the social hierarchy downstairs, the mannerisms, the white lies, the preparations involved in hosting a grand dinner party, right down to the tea cups, and the napkins, and the cucumber sandwiches – every intricate detail is captured. And presented to you in a way that you don’t ever feel overwhelmed or bored. Hailsham is no Darlington Hall.

Nor is it the International Settlement of Shanghai. The elaborate games two little boys play over a summer made for fascinating reading. Hailsham, while full of children, is also full of forgettable characters, forgettable incidents.

As for the actual “theme” of this book – the allusions to science, and our misguided advances in science, Ishiguro leaves too much unsaid. By choosing to remain vague, he doesn’t even provoke, let alone answer troubling questions. If you’re looking to get jolted into thinking about where we might be headed, I’d suggest you try Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid's Tale. If you’re not into reading, watch Gattaca.

The final verdict (as if one were needed after almost a page and a half of dissing the poor book) - Never Let Me Go is most certainly NOT my favorite Ishiguro. But not unlike Ishiguro’s characters, I also remember the good old days. I remember Christopher Banks & Akira and the fun I had reading about their games. I remember Stevens & his Miss Kenton, and the daily crises at Darlington Hall. I remember Masuji Ono & the grand times at the Migi-Hidari. Perhaps in his next book, I’ll find another place, another character to add to my memories of great reads.

And we have a winner!

2005-09-01T16:21:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, I’d mentioned interesting spam snail mail. Ladies & Gentlemen, we have a winner. Yesterday’s post included a postcard, addressed to ‘Resident’.

Front: All black. Letters in white saying “friends. with benefits.”

Back: “Good to have friends to hook up with. Even better if they can hook you up with a really sweet pad, right? That’s why you should have "ABC Properties"* on speed-dial. They can get you into "XYZ"^*, their premier condominium development for people just like you. Single. Successful. Terribly good looking. A community that fosters neighborliness, some more than others…if you get the drift. Call us. Better yet, stop by for poolside cocktails and appetizers every weekend, or drop in our sales office at /<Dallas address>^*”

(caps or the lack thereof, as well as punctuation have been reproduced faithfully from said card)

I simply stood at the mail room, mouth agape for a few minutes, before I remembered to move the lower jaw back to the ‘close’ position, and started walking back towards my apartment. I set foot in the house, and the first thought that actually goes through my head - “Easwara! Enna karumam!” I burst out laughing at my own reaction. I don’t know why this shocked me any more than spam email – after all I’ve had everything offered to me from Cialis to the latest Paris Hilton video. Seeing something in print always deepens the impact.

Then, I started thinking about it. (Obviously!) As nudge-nudge-wink-wink as the mailer sounds, what exactly are they offering, I wondered. And like retirement communities have minimum age limits, would this community (ha! and what a “community” it must be!) have “look” limits? After all the mail claims the place is full of “good looking people”. And like me, too! Gee, shucks, I sure am flattered! I think. For, if the rest of them are going to look anything like me, just what kind of place is this??? In fact, they don’t know anything about me, do they? Other than the fact that I can apparently afford the rent at my current apartment. They don’t know my gender or my sexual orientation. Or, this being Texas, am I supposed to assume that all will be “normal” and staunchly hetero? And what the hell is a community like this doing in Texas, anyway? As an old New Yorker article put it, isn’t Dallas supposed to be the buckle of the Bible belt? I probably have as many churches in the 5 mile radius around my apartment as there are in the whole of Jerusalem!

And how can you have a property developer actually developing something like this? And spending money on direct mail marketing, which I know from my previous job, is the most expensive form of advertising? Aren’t there laws about these things? And more worryingly, what about my roomie’s or my activities in the recent past has gotten us onto this list, for crying out loud? I usually get mailers from KERA (PBS TV / Radio in Dallas) asking for money. My roomie gets discount coupons from Osh Kosh BGosh. What have we done to besmirch our good names with the list people? I thought we were good, solid temporary residents in this country – listeners of BBC news, and looker-outers for good shopping deals. When did we turn into swinging-from-the-chandelier-party-animals, who are so into “neighborliness” that we might want to move to a special community so we can, well, be “neighborly” all the time!

Or is it just my dirty mind that insists on seeing more than what’s on offer here? Perhaps they really are just a friendly bunch of people, barbecuing together, sharing recipes for apple pie, enjoying the occasional picnic by the pool, even borrowing the cup of sugar or kaapi podi… And while they’re engaging in these perfectly innocent activities, just happen to be “single, successful and terribly good looking.” Just like in any ad. Shiny, happy, beautiful people. Who love their neighbors. After all, didn’t Moses or someone ask us to?

I will assume that the latter explanation is correct. The first one is too alarming… Am certainly not planning to seek the truth by attending the poolside cocktail do.

^*Disguised, because I do NOT want to spend my time & space putting out an ad for these guys

Rise and Shine? Not.

2005-08-31T12:44:00.000-07:00

Today, the roomie & colleague & ride is at home, waiting for a new mattress to be delivered. Had to hitch a ride with the boss. The icing on the cake – the boss leaves for work at 6:30 AM so he can drop his kid off at school. He picked me up at around 6:45 AM. If you take gosh-awful daylight friggin’ savings, 5:45 AM. As you may have caught on, am most definitely NOT a morning person.

While waiting for the ride to arrive, I try reading. I have half-read books strategically stashed all over the house, so I can always reach for something, no matter where I am. I try Atwood’s Good Bones and Simple Murders. At some point, as I listlessly move about the house, I pick up Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. Authors I find scintillating by moonlight, even twilight, fail to please at the crack of dawn.

Switch on the TV. I HATE watching TV in the morning. I detest all morning shows – filled with bright / cheerful types gushing on about whatever the hell it is they gush on about. Turn to cable. Pause for a while on FX – Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. Are they kidding? At 6 in the morning? HBO – Mad City and a bunch of other movies that would make any self-respecting insomniac kill himself. What audience are they trying to cater to at that hour, I wonder. Am pretty sure that the ‘early to bed / early to rise’ crowd would be as interested in Mad City as the insomniacs and the am-drunkenly-just-about-making-it-back-home crowd.

During the ride, with whatever handful of neurons which are up & working at that hour, brief, very brief thoughts flit through the brain:

- Please God, please¸ no conversation

- Aah! Shiny things! Oooh – that’s the sun getting reflected off windows / glassy structures on them building thingees… Kinda psychedelic, really. Is this why the “morning people” like mornings?

- Is the sun this orange? Really? All the time?

- Why is there a traffic jam at this hour? On the “freeway”? Isn’t this the “debauched west”? Folks are supposed to be nursing hang-overs at this hour, not cheerily driving to work, or wherever the hell it is people go to at 7:00 in the morning…

Reach work. Cannot believe am actually at my desk by 7:40. It feels like I only just left. Did I leave at all? Oh yeah I did. I watched TV last night, didn’t I…

At 9, am still in that twilight zone between wakefulness & brain dead-ness. So I go down to Starbucks. Get myself a Vanilla Latte. Detest coffee (am a Chai person), but see that it has its uses. Coffee does not help. Just makes me feel full, and somewhat nauseous, as it always does. And I have the rest of the day to go! Yippee!

Prime time swearing, sex, violence, & tons of other goodies!

2005-08-30T19:18:00.000-07:00

Just got HBO!!! Gave in to temptation, and succumbed to the 1/2 price scam... Have a feeling that I'll not have the heart to cancel the service a few months from now, when the "deal" ends, but for the next few months, blissssssssssssss :)
I will continue later. Bill Maher & Larry David await...

Technophobe no more?

2005-08-28T16:41:00.000-07:00

In the not too distant past, a number of us used to engage in this rather elaborate ritual. One would begin by taking a piece of paper, finding a pen, writing on the paper, and walking down to the post-office & paying the nice folks there to get this piece of paper delivered to some corner of the world. This crazy ritual was called 'writing letters', a practice I thought was now extinct. I was pleasantly surprised earlier this week, when I received two postcards and a letter - from a friend stuck in a picturesque little village in Bretagne. The only way she can reach the outside world is, well, by writing!

It gave me such a thrill to see an envelope addressed in a hand I could recognize. Ever since I moved to this country, the only folks who "write" to me are the cable guy, the gas guy, the electrcity & cell phone folks, and yeah, of course, the rowdy lot over at the credit card company. The only pleasure a visit to the mail room provides is the occassional more than usually ironic example of direct marketing gone wrong (a discount coupon from ChristianSingles.com tops the list at the moment, while an invitation to join the American Civil Liberties Union is possibly the spam I am the proudest of triggering). When I saw this innocent little envelope, I didn't even wait to get home - I just tore it apart right there & read the whole 2 pages, or whatever, and had a goofy smile pasted on my face for the rest of the week. In fact, I showed off the postcards to everyone at work the next day (when you see the picture on the right, you'll know why. My friend, temping as a guide, lives in this castle!)

I was sorely tempted to write back. Indeed, as late as 2001, I was still writing long letters (mostly during Economics lectures, with mad Dr.P believing I was furiously taking notes) and spending hundreds of rupees every year on stamps. I did use email, but not for pleasure. That sounds quite naughty, but the actual explanation is more mundane than you might expect. Email was for ex-classmates / distant cousins you didn't care too much for. The truly special friends always received a letter. Email was for job applications, acquaintances, and the like...

I stopped writing letters after I started working. It was so much easier to type up something at the end of the day. The Haryana Postal Department also went a long way in building trust in email. Then of course, I realized that an email lets me rant on much more than a letter does. I am ashamed to admit it, but email lets me copy & paste stuff... Shameful, I know, but, when you've written something particularly witty, it feels like such a shame to not share it with as many friends as possible.

All this time, I never felt I was betraying the written word. After all, I could always go back. Email's just a temporary phase. I can quit any time I want to. I just have to put my mind to it. Receiving an actual letter made me realize just how far deep I have gotten into this terrible habit. My friend invited me to 'write' back, even provided a snail mail address. What did I do? I emailed her back!!! Sends shivers down my spine even now, when I think about my disgusting deed.

I have been exposed for the hypocrite I am. Sure, I still carry on, pottering about with a fountain pen (adventures of my attempts to buy a bottle of ink reserved for a later post). I may rant against technology and curse all computers. But come high noon, when I'm faced with a write-or-type situation, what do I do? I fold, like the lilly-livered ex-technophobe I am!

Perhaps there is hope for someone like me. If I start again, slowly, with postcards perhaps, I can still teach myself to write again. It will be challenging - I will actually have to think about what I wish to communicate before I put pen to paper. I will have to find my way around a world without backspace, ctrl x, ctrl c & ctrl v. I will have to remember to buy stamps, dig out snail mail addresses of all my friends... And of course, I must steel myself for the heart-break - when no one writes back to you, it feels so much worse than when they don't email back. Friends will curse me for putting them on the spot...others'll laugh at another example of my anachronism, USPS will make a lot of money... but surely, there's hope?

I have to believe I can redeem myself yet. Today, it's email, tomorrow, what if I let this mania grow and God forbid, stop subscribing to magazines & newspapers, just make do with reading online? Or worse, trade in my library card for some e-book membership? Quelle horreure! Vive la France, for continuing to have villages without even a dial up connection. Were it not for a bunch of way-behind-the-times villagers in Bretagne, I'd have never had a chance to save my soul. Thank you, good people of Achères-la-Forêt - we need more of you in this world.

Jumping through invisible hoops, or making friends

2005-08-26T15:56:00.000-07:00

S is one of my closest friends in Dallas. When I think back, the first time I ever thought, “Hmm, a kindred soul”, was when I found out that we both love Sting. Then there was nothing for a few months. This was followed by what is often one of the best phases in the process of establishing a friendship – a series of realizations that you have a number of things in common.

I am a boring person. But I’ve always thought of myself as a unique sort of boring person, with esoteric tastes in everything from food to movies. So it always feels amazing to come across another soul who shares even some of them.

From Sting, S & I went on to discover we also loved off-beat movies, BBC documentaries, cold weather (we’re fellow aliens in Texas, surrounded by idiots who jog shirtless at 3:00PM when they’re not driving around in convertibles), discussing half-baked theories of history & spirituality, hogging at Madras Pavilion (essentially tasty food cooked by someone else), laziness…To top it all, we are fellow insomniacs.

I believe that each of us has a few hoops, some critical, that we hold out for folks to jump through, before we start thinking of them as “friends”. With some friends, like S, the progression is clear. With others, it’s a mystery, how one proceeds from “I wouldn’t kill myself if I had to spend a ½ hour that person” to “This is the one person who can help me snap out of my Dumbledore-blues.”

Like so much else, friendship appears to be fraught with risks - an extremely complex process that can fall apart at any instant, and for the most trivial reasons. To continue with the S example – if he knew of my LOTR / Potter twin obsessions before he knew of my preference for overcast days, and if I knew of his sports mania before I let him convert me into a Tarantino fan, would we be the sort of friends we are today? There appears to be some sort of invisible threshold that, once crossed, suddenly makes us think of differences as endearing, rather than as annoying. Pain-in-the-backside type behaviors (inability to talk of little else during basketball season, waiting outside Barnes & Noble in the middle of the night to buy a kid’s book, health-food crazes, an interest in the politics of Zaire & nominations to the Supreme Court (honestly, who gives a damn?!), and so much else) suddenly become “that’s-what-makes-them-special” type qualities.

The one encounter that bumps people up from acquaintance to friend is the weirdest thing, though. Don’t remember what it was with S. With other friends, it ranges from a shared horror of amusement park rides to a single shopping spree where a now-close friend & I discovered a taste for things that we don't ever see ourselves using, but find them irresistible all the same.

When I think about my friendships, the one feeling that’s common across all of them – ‘Who’d have thought?’

What started me on this maudlin train of thought? S is leaving Dallas. He’s moving to a better job in a colder place. The best of both worlds. Am very happy for him, and look forward to a free place to crash when I feel a need to escape this unbearable heat. Here’s to you, friend! Dallas will be drearier without you. But here’s hoping that you find another Sting fan or another Lakers-hater in your new city.

Mind games for the sleepless II

2005-08-18T20:29:00.000-07:00

Am in the process of attempting a number of changes to my life-philosophy (make a grandiose statement like that & you're tempting fate, but we'll ignore that for the moment, and you will see very soon why am asking you to do just that). One of them is to try to be more positive. I realized from Swami's comment that perhaps tweaking my approach to the list I started yesterday was called for. Instead of feeling bad about methods that clearly don't work, why not rebrand it (a la 'global struggle against violent extremism') to 'What NOT to do if you're trying to fall asleep'. So, here goes (the first two are Swami's contributions):

WARNING: THESE METHODS HAVE BEEN PROVEN TO BE EXCEEDINGLY HARMFUL TO A PEACEFUL NIGHT'S SLEEP. THEY ALSO HAVE BEEN PROVEN TO INSINUATE THEMSELVES INTO SUSCEPTIBLE MINDS, SO READ FURTHER AT YOUR OWN PERIL.

1. Counting sheep (being unable to count above 400, this is a little challenging for me personally)
2. Matching letters of the English Alphabet with names of cities and/or countries (haven't ever tried this, but see the possibilities)
3. Thinking about what you did that day / two days ago / 5 years ago / 25 years ago
4. Thinking about what you should have done yesterday, etc.
5. Thinking about what you want to do tomorrow / two days from now / 5 years from now / 25 years from now
6. Thinking about what you HAVE to do tomorrow, etc.
7. Making top 5 lists of any sort ('all time favorite' lists start off innocently enough - top 5 books or movies are the usual culprits. This can rapidly degenerate into top 5 books featuring English Butlers, or planes crashing in the desert, or the character (fictitious, but of course!) you wish the most was in bed with you at the moment (it's all downhill from there))
8. Making bottom 5 lists of any kind (the worst 5 Tamil movies, Hindi copies of Hollywood movies, the worst 5 road trips you've ever been on, the 5 biggest regrets of your life till date (this one is particularly disheartening, as you'll find you that you have more regrets competing for the top spots than Indians trying to get accepted into an IIT or IIM))
9. How much you hate your boss (anger never solved anything, & this holds for insomnia, too)
10. And the absolute WORST thing you can do when you're trying to fall asleep - playing 'Six Degrees of Separation'. If you don't know this game, you still have a chance. Save your soul, and close this browser window, NOW! If you like living dangerously, here's how the game is played: Pick an actor, any actor. Pick another actor, and try to connect them within 6 mov(i)es. Kevin Bacon is the worst. You can connect Mr. Bacon with practically EVERY actor on this planet (alive & dead) in 6 moves, including Tamil ones. Trust me, I've tried this. This is a game that looks like fun, and it is, at first. I got hooked to this after some one mentioned it in an episode of Seinfeld, I think. I was so happy in the early days - proud of my knowledge of Hollywood movies, intrigued by the twists and turns, challenging myself with more difficult connects at each try... After a week, I started to wander around in a haze, my hair in wild disarray, eyes red, mumbling movie names to myself, expressions varying within the limited range of i-know-this, gotcha!, and damn-damn-damn! It took me weeks of self-administered therapy to snap out of this. But even now, I dare not think of this, as I know that the monster will sieze me again. When I read my first Harry Potter, I felt an immediate kinship with the people from the wizarding world, all fearing "he who must not be named". I knew how they felt like, having lived for years in the shadow of the "game that must not be named". (Tonight am a goner.)

So, there you have it folks. My list of the worst cures for insomnia. I am positive that I've missed out vital, equally unpromising methods. I would love to hear from Manoj, a self-proclaimed insomniac. I am confident that there are experimental would-be-cures that are really anti-cures being attempted in all corners of the world even as I type . And that's the most consoling thought I've been able to come up with on this rather painful subject. I may be awake, but there is definitely at least one other person in this world, who's also twisting & turning. No, that would be the second most consoling thought. The winner - I may be re-examining my life at 4 AM. But at least, I'm in bed. The poor slobs in Europe are already at work, and poorer slobs in Tokyo or Australia are preparing for yet another sleepless night.

Mind games for the sleepless

2005-08-18T10:42:00.000-07:00

I've been having trouble sleeping. Oh, I fall asleep. Just wake up promptly after an hour, and twist & toss the rest of the night. I thought this line wasn't supposed to come up for another 40 years or so. But then again, I always knew that 'Oracle' was never going to be the metier where I would make my first million.

Wondering just what will make me that first million is one half of the trouble, the other half is disappointment. I will never be a half-starved, fainting virgin who smokes stinky volcanic fumes, and delivers cryptic, and completely useless content, and probably faints away even before she can get that out properly! And after doing such a smashingly bad job of it, gets worshipped by everyone starting from the Emperor. What a job! In our modern society, we don't have a use for these 'women of foresight'... We've opinion polls, Gartner, and Dataquest instead. Progress & evolution are overrated (the Kansas Board of education will agree with me on the last - we're still negotiating over the first).

Too much on the mind. Unable to take a break from obsessing about myself, my future, or lack thereof. Have already alienated vast droves of friends (alright, the 3 who bother to read my emails) with my endless whining. Frankly, even my parents can't take it anymore. They just wish to get off the phone, I think... So they can sweet talk someone into marrying me - the job of consoling me will be that someone else's duty.

It would be an exagerration to claim I've tried everything. But here are a few things I have tried:
a) 'pursuing a healthy activity', or a punishing, long walk (well, I did walk for a whole hour) - goal: to tire myself out
b) 'twice, in one day - am I up to it?' or stuffing myself at dinner - goal: to see if the blissful state of sleepiness I ascend to after lunch may be reached again, when I can actually do something about it
c) 'killing brain cells' or late night TV - goal: to lull the brain into a temporary state of coma
d) 'the midnight nettoyage' or taking a long, warm shower in the middle of the freaking night - relaxing (quite like it - love the sense of knowing I don't have to get out of the nice warm water NOW to get to work), but certainly not sleep-inducing
e) 'return to childhood' or the warm glass of milk before going to bed - makes me feel great, I congradulate myself on my 'wholesome', 'nutritious' food choices (just the thought to assuage guilt from a day spent stuffing myself with chalupas, a variety of fried stuff (with and without cheese), topped off with ice-cream or Coke (regular - do not touch the Diet stuff) or both))

Result: am still here, tapping away at the darn key board.

Trading skills

2005-08-16T12:48:00.000-07:00

When I was in the 1^st standard, my Dad was transferred to Delhi. It was the middle of the school year, and we had to scramble to get me admitted into a school. That was my first brush with the ‘entrance test’. I applied to two schools. One of them asked me to write the numbers from 1 to 400. I recall coming home and expressing a degree of surprise – if you knew how to count till 100, surely, that was sufficient? The other school asked me to spell the word ‘hundred’. I did not get accepted into that school. I still remember coming home, and spelling out h-u-n-d-r-e-d to my Mom, proud of the new word I’d learned that day. The kind teacher at the second school had taken the trouble to teach me the correct answer.

Writing out numbers from 1 to 400 was the last time I did well at a ‘quant’ test. As a banker’s family, we’ve moved to new towns, new homes, new schools every once in a while. I’ve taken more than a fair share of ‘entrance’ tests and interviews. When applying to Union Christian (from where I eventually completed my 12^th std.), I was asked to solve a bunch of problems, that I promptly bungled, and asked to write an essay (on a ‘rainy day’), in which I raved and ranted on for three pages or perhaps even more (Mrs. Ranjini Mathew, the lady who graded my paper, and my soon to be English teacher, told me that vital to the art of writing an essay, was knowing when to stop).

So here I was – alarmingly lacking in quantitative skills, but apparently not as big a dunce at language… My Dad convinced the Principal, that yes, I was weak in Math, but with their excellent training, he was confident I would improve. Mr. Vergheese took a chance. That should have taught him a few lessons in the futility of gambling.

For the next two years, I went through abject misery, writing not one but two papers in Math every year. (My school fell under the ‘Matriculation Board’ unique to Tamil Nadu. This possibly the ONLY board in the world that insists on putting its students through a seemingly endless list of core subjects – English I, English II, Math I, Math II, Hindi I, Hindi II (or Tamil I, Tamil II – as the case may be), Biology, Physical Sciences, History, Geography – that’s 10 exams, each taken thrice a year!)

The only thing that kept me going was the light at the end of the 10^th Std. tunnel – the ‘Pure Science’ group that my school fortunately offered. When choosing subjects for 11^th & 12^th, my father (an optimist, if ever there was one), actually attempted to talk me into taking Math. He still nurtured hopes of his child becoming an ‘Engineer’. It did not take me too long to disabuse him of his illusions about my ability to add two and two and consistently arrive at the answer of four.

Suddenly, I felt liberated, surrounded by 11 others (there were only 12 of us whose fear of Math proved greater than our fear of Mrs. Benzie, the dragon lady who taught Biology), all of whom didn’t even notice the irony of Math being left out of a group that was supposedly ‘Pure Science’. For those uninitiated in the arcane nomenclature in use in Madras High Schools of that time – subjects that fell under ‘Pure Science’ were Zoology, Botany, Physics and Chemistry.

I was happy. At 17, even stop-gap solutions have a way of appearing to be permanent fixes. Well, to cut a long story short – Math has persistently dogged my steps, despite multiple attempts to run away. Every time I get tested for one more thing, there’s that quant section again – masters degrees, jobs, life…

What got me started on this trip down memory lane? Yesterday, I took a test, and big surprise, bungled the Math section. I’ve done a lot of soul searching in the weeks running up to the test. From detached curiosity to abject martyrdom, I’ve been through every mood. I have asked myself a vast number of piercing questions – ranging from the spiritual to the petty:

- Does God NOT mean to give some people the gift of numbers?

- Was I reading a novel in some corner when God did in fact hand out math skills?

- Is there a God? If not, who can I blame for my stupidity? Will the party responsible please stand up?

- What degenerative disease of the brain makes my neurons turn to mush whenever there’s the slightest talk of cylinders being filled or emptied at a certain constant rate? How then, do these very same cells spring right back to life when the Booker Long List is released?

This morning, I think I finally came up with a solution. Skills should be made into securities that can be freely traded, preferably on a barter basis. How awesome would it be to exchange some of my reading speed for a little ‘adding’ speed? This way, it wouldn’t always be the folks with money who, well, have it all, or could have it all. If not trade your skills, then at least, you should have the ability to shore up your skills for a rainy day. I am sure that over 27 years, I could have, a tiny bit at a time, saved up enough to save my life yesterday.

While we’re at it, why not give emotions the same status too? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to put away some self-esteem from your cocky days for days when you want nothing more than to believe that you’re worth something? Or store away some of the feeling from days when everything seems to make sense for those when nothing does? It would simply be a more efficient use of resources. Why isn’t a killer business model like this already out there?

Guilt or resentment – let’s flip a coin

2005-07-27T17:25:00.000-07:00

The new apartment saga continues. When my flat mate & I moved to the new apartment, we were faced by the mother of all questions (well, at least as far as new houses / apartments go) - who gets the master bedroom?

Being two individuals who detest confrontation above all else (makes for a peaceful, if at times too full of passive-aggressive door-banging behavior), neither of us wanted to come out and say – I want it! If an outsider observed us at that time, he’d have nominated us for the Nobel Peace Prize or slammed our heads together. Both of us repeated our own versions of “You pick whatever room you want. Am OK with anything. After all we work so late – I just need a place to sleep.” At least in my head, the thinking was somewhat different, ranging from “Oh God, Oh God, please pick the smaller room’ to ‘Why don’t you say you want the bigger room. That way, I can fight for it, and try to win it fair & square!’

This happens way too often for my liking. When I was a child, I had no problems staking my claim on all sorts of things. Of late, some gosh-awful age-related gene’s gotten activated, and I have this overwhelming urge to do the ‘right thing’. Unfortunately, the old genes haven’t been completely inactivated. Result: I feel the simultaneous need to do what I know I ought to do, as well as what I truly want to do. A damn confusing state to be in.

In some cases, the goody-goody feeling you get when you do the 'right' thing is better than the alternative. An example would be not insisting on watching a movie when the Chithi finale (or whatever soap they now have in India) is on. Even I realize that something like the Chithi series finale is a very big deal, and butting in would be petty.

In other cases, this decision is not so easy. The whole of last week, I could talk of nothing but the Half Blood Prince to all and sundry, even when some of my audience showed visible signs of agony (the yawn suppressed for the 39th time, the urge to holler 'Grow up, will ya? It’s only a BOOK. For CHILDREN. Just LET IT GO.' kept under strict control, lame attempts at changing the subject, the works...) Not all of my friends are JKR fanatics, and I know that. Just chose to ignore that for a week, that's all.

There’s nothing wrong with this state of imbalance, except that my mind expects to either receive or pay some form of compensation after the fact. When I feel that I’ve just acted ‘better than a saint would’, I automatically climb up a pedestal, and expect to be worshipped, at least by the parties involved. And life being as it is, of course, this doesn’t happen. And I go around resenting the world at large and that person in particular. When I’ve been selfish, I spend at least a week thinking up suitable ‘return gifts’ or dreading what blood-money I may be demanded to cough up…

The long and short of it – I got the bigger room. And I’m still cowering under the guilt. Why is it that I seem only capable of feeling guilt or resentment? For once, I would give anything to simply take a generous gesture at face value, be grateful, and move on. And just for kicks, I’d also like, at least once, to be generous, and not feel like a martyr.

Karma & The Wisdom of Trees

2005-07-26T11:45:00.000-07:00

I moved to a different apartment this week end. Given that am alive to tell the tale, I suppose it went well. I hate it – the whole process, I mean. Of course, no one loves to wrap all of their possessions in a combination of old newspapers / cardboard / plastic held together by cellophane that sticks everywhere but the places it is supposed to stick, put them in a truck, drive about for a while, and repeat the whole process in reverse. And having done that part (or most of it anyways), it still doesn’t feel like ‘home’. It helps that am so tired that when I hit the bed, I fall asleep instantly. But the day is not too far off, when the muscles will have returned to their normal limp state, and the Tylenol will wear off…

Why do human beings feel the need to move? Maybe, the bigger question is why do human beings feel the need to accumulate? Among my ‘cherished’ possessions – an envelope from a purchase made at the American Museum of Natural History (this envelope made it from New York to Delhi to Dallas in the last 2 years), clothes I didn’t know I had, tubes of toothpaste with about 0.2 grams of toothpaste, a broken shoe-rack (that cannot be mended), old magazines, and God, so much more.

I did the math this morning (when my brain got off the NyQuill I took last night to get over the cold I now have because of all the dust I’ve been inhaling) – on average, I have moved once every 2.7 years in life. And all this experience has taught me zilch. I still buy books as if I owned an ever-expanding, wood-paneled library. I cannot resist buying clothes or shoes or well, not throwing away old toothpaste, or really nice shopping bags (you know which ones - the fancy ones, with the handles & everything...they look soooo nice! How can you just throw them away??!)

Are human beings unique in this need to accumulate assorted junk? If other animals are doing it, do they just collect the stuff they ‘need’ – just like they eat only when they’re ‘hungry’? Why does a place not feel like ‘home’ unless it has, at the bare minimum, 20 things that you have absolutely no use for?

Trees are more sensible about these things. They find a spot that offers decent food & light, and say, “Well, this is it, baby. I’m putting down me roots right here!” And the more sensible trees even shed the unwanted stuff (old leaves, dried up branches, other assorted junk) once a year. None of the questions that concern us matter – is there a Wal-Mart or Kroger in the neighborhood? What about a Pizza Hut – will they deliver? How many minutes can I shave off the commute? What school district? Which floor is the apartment on? (Minor math involved for folks, like me, who only recently moved to the US – the ground floor is the first floor, the first floor is the second floor, and so on.)

According to The Economist, 40 million Americans will move house this year. 40 million – in one year! Can we imagine even 1% of that many trees moving? An evergreen from up north saying, “I think the weather’s really nice in Florida. I’m getting out of this cold.” Or a tree from Dallas going, “I’m moving to Manhattan to see some action – catch the shows, visit the museums, have a life!” Or hear the trusted Neem from India - "The opportunities in California are soooo much better! There're hot Biotech start-ups around every corner... I could make it BIG!" No. Because trees are wise. You’ve got to admire their commitment.

I think I want to be a tree in my next birth. But knowing my luck, I’ll probably be cut down & made into a damn shoe rack, and be lugged all over the place, all over again. The concept of Karma blows, doesn’t it?

When enough is enough

2005-07-09T22:36:00.000-07:00

One situation when someone did say enough is enough. A few days ago, Hemangini Gupta, a very brave lady put her foot down, opened her mouth, and screamed. And then followed that up with a police complaint. After reading her post, I talked about it with some of my female colleagues, and it is amazing how many women have had experiences like Hemangini's.

And the minute that something goes wrong, girls are trained to look inside themselves first - did I do anything to bring this upon myself? Girls must have eyes in the backs of their heads, my mom says. What about boys? Do they look inside of themselves? In fact, do they think at all? Even when someone tries to cheat in an exam, I would think they would spare half a thought for what happens if they get caught? When you wear a seat-belt in your car, or a helmet when riding your bike, you do it as much to avoid shelling out 500 rupees to a cop, as protect yourself. Apparently not with "eve-teasing". Why do men who abuse / harass women (I detest the term 'eve-teasing' - which feels more like Rishi Kapoor chasing Neetu Singh around a tree before every one marries everyone else, and all live happily ever after) never stop to think? The answer is quite simple - the threat of getting caught is practically non-existent.

It's not just the men who're to blame. Our values are skewed towards apportioning at least some of the blame on the women - if someone kidnapped a girl in Delhi , raped her, and dumped her back at the same spot, the questions asked include what was the girl thinking walking around so early in the morning, what was she wearing, did she do anything to "incite" the men? And these are not questions that some ignorant chauvinist asks - these are questions that our own moms could well ask, and at times, do. Even in this day and age, movies, hell, courts would still have us believe that marrying her attacker is the 'honorable' thing to do for a Bharatiya Nari. Are you kidding me?

And when someone actually has the courage to report an instance of abuse, everyone from the attacker (who, thanks to the fact that he's an impoverished idiot from Bihar, suddenly morphs into the "victim") to rank strangers, even her own family suddenly makes the woman feel guilty. Why does she have to be the forgiving one? Do I care that this man's future could be spoilt by a stay in the jail? Yes, indeed - I want it to be spoilt - it is a simple concept called facing the consequences of your own actions. A speedier version of Karma, if you will.

It is amazing that issues of class crop up in such cases. When she was sleeping in her berth, Hemangini was an educated, wealthy (well, wealthier than her abuser at any rate) single woman and her attacker was a poor man from one of the poorest states in India, who is out looking for a way to improve his lot. But the minute that Hemangini officially files a complaint, she's the rich chick who's out to bully this socially & economically disadvantaged soul? Considering that he's from Bihar, surely, that makes him something of a victim himself! What hogwash!

Hemangini's awful experience is a lesson to us all - women, speak up, scream when you must. And when we raise our children, and teach them that he who lies will not get a meal (my lousy translation of 'poi sollra vaikku bhojanam kadaikkathu'), we should also teach them that harassing a woman will mean that the next meal will inside a prison.