Many dedicated cyber-travelers will be familiar with Riverbend’s blog, Baghdad Burning ("Girl Blog from Iraq... let's talk war, politics and occupation"). In case you’re not, go read. Trawl the archives at great length, it’s worth it.
(Why am I doing this? Well, firstly because I always feel a little dirty inside after posting an anti-PR rant, and so feel the need to atone. Secondly, because I’m soon going to have a fortnightly column with blog reviews, and Baghdad Burning will be among the first sites to feature in it. The first column appears in one of our paper’s supplements on July 11, I think. Blog reviews - phew, that means some serious online reading. As if there isn't enough to do offline.)
Wednesday, June 29, 2005
Tuesday, June 28, 2005
Anti-PR rant 71: excessive politeness
Some people try so hard to be polite and obliging they don’t realise they’re just being a nuisance. Many of these are PR people, about whom I made an ancient promise never to blog again - but it’s time to break that promise now. The latest incident involves an appointment I had last evening with some corporate type, for the kind of interview whereI try to keep a straight face while asking questions like "What’s your turnover and how much did you grow last year?" The venue was Greater Kailash, which falls neatly on the route I take to go home from office, so I managed to get the appo fixed for a time that meant I could leave office once and for all. I explained this in great detail to the PR person: that I would be leaving office, reaching the venue in my own car and then proceeeding home after the interview. A sequence of events that should be simple to follow, or so I thought.
So yesterday afternoon, just as I’m staring darkly at a sheaf of press releases on watches, which have to be converted into readable stories, I get a call.
PR Creature: Hi Jai, just checking, what time should I pick you up?
Jai: I thought I told you I’d get there on my own.
PRC: Ha ha, don’t be formal yaar, we will pick you up from your office and then drop you back after the appo.
("We"? How many PR people are there going to be at this "one-on-one" interview?)
J: It’s not a question of formality. I have my car and I’ll be going straight home once the thing is over.
PRC (misguided attempt at being casual): Oh ha ha, I see, you’ll katto home straight. You journos have a great life man, no fixed timings or anything. You are just like nomads. Ha ha. Anyway, no problemo, we can drop you home.
J (through gritted teeth; despises people who say ‘no problemo’): But what then do I do about my car, just leave it outside office overnight?
PRC: Oh I see! Well then, we’ll drop you back to your office after we’re done and you can pick it up.
J: Why would I want to go all the way back to office and then drive back home in late-evening traffic?
PRC: Hmmm. Okay, so you’ll come by yourself then?
J: Yes please. As was agreed on long ago. Goodbye.
Fifteen minutes later, phone rings again.
PRC: Hi Jai, this is PRC. Listen, my senior is telling me we should pick you up and take you to the venue. We have only recently acquired a couple of new cars just for such meetings, and they are both fully air-conditioned.
J (temper soaring): PRC, I’ve explained the situation to you. The only way this can be resolved to your satisfaction is if you pick me up and simultaneously hire a large vehicle-carrier to transport my car to the interview venue.
PRC: Uh, I’m not sure if that is...
J: That was a joke. See, there are no easy solutions here. Just make your peace with the idea that I’ll be getting there on my own.
PRC: Are you sure about this, Jai? I just hope you don’t think this will be inconvenient for us in any way. Because it won't.
J (losing temper, sweeping TAG Heuer and Rolex press releases to the floor with dramatic swing of hand; colleague in next cubicle rises, scared): Listen boss, from the moment you called to brief me about this stupid non-story I’ve been thinking only about my own convenience and no one else’s. Which is why I tried to get out of the assignment in the first place. It’s entirely convenient to ME that I come in my own car, not in your foul, air-conditioned new pick-up truck, or whatever it is.
Long silence.
PRC: Err...so you'll come on your own then?
After killing the rest of us with large doses of Excessive Politeness, PR people will rule the earth.
So yesterday afternoon, just as I’m staring darkly at a sheaf of press releases on watches, which have to be converted into readable stories, I get a call.
PR Creature: Hi Jai, just checking, what time should I pick you up?
Jai: I thought I told you I’d get there on my own.
PRC: Ha ha, don’t be formal yaar, we will pick you up from your office and then drop you back after the appo.
("We"? How many PR people are there going to be at this "one-on-one" interview?)
J: It’s not a question of formality. I have my car and I’ll be going straight home once the thing is over.
PRC (misguided attempt at being casual): Oh ha ha, I see, you’ll katto home straight. You journos have a great life man, no fixed timings or anything. You are just like nomads. Ha ha. Anyway, no problemo, we can drop you home.
J (through gritted teeth; despises people who say ‘no problemo’): But what then do I do about my car, just leave it outside office overnight?
PRC: Oh I see! Well then, we’ll drop you back to your office after we’re done and you can pick it up.
J: Why would I want to go all the way back to office and then drive back home in late-evening traffic?
PRC: Hmmm. Okay, so you’ll come by yourself then?
J: Yes please. As was agreed on long ago. Goodbye.
Fifteen minutes later, phone rings again.
PRC: Hi Jai, this is PRC. Listen, my senior is telling me we should pick you up and take you to the venue. We have only recently acquired a couple of new cars just for such meetings, and they are both fully air-conditioned.
J (temper soaring): PRC, I’ve explained the situation to you. The only way this can be resolved to your satisfaction is if you pick me up and simultaneously hire a large vehicle-carrier to transport my car to the interview venue.
PRC: Uh, I’m not sure if that is...
J: That was a joke. See, there are no easy solutions here. Just make your peace with the idea that I’ll be getting there on my own.
PRC: Are you sure about this, Jai? I just hope you don’t think this will be inconvenient for us in any way. Because it won't.
J (losing temper, sweeping TAG Heuer and Rolex press releases to the floor with dramatic swing of hand; colleague in next cubicle rises, scared): Listen boss, from the moment you called to brief me about this stupid non-story I’ve been thinking only about my own convenience and no one else’s. Which is why I tried to get out of the assignment in the first place. It’s entirely convenient to ME that I come in my own car, not in your foul, air-conditioned new pick-up truck, or whatever it is.
Long silence.
PRC: Err...so you'll come on your own then?
After killing the rest of us with large doses of Excessive Politeness, PR people will rule the earth.
Monday, June 27, 2005
A Basel memory
Of all the photos my colleague and I took on our Baselworld junket in March-April, this is the one that means the most to me. On the left is your blogging Jabberwock (this is about the only photo from that trip in which I’m not glowering at the camera) and on the right is Stephen Urquhart, president, Omega, one of the many watch company heads I asked the same tedious questions to over and over and over again.
What makes this photo special is that tiny wisp of a watch in Mr Urquhart’s hand (barely visible here, click the photo for a larger view). It’s a 52-year-old Omega gold watch that belongs to my grandmother; it was gifted to her in 1953 when she and my grandfather (then a Brigadier) visited Switzerland for a diplomatic mission, and it was apparently the smallest wristwatch in the world at the time. Now I’m usually disinclined to do these things but sentiment won out this one time and I not only carried it with me for luck but also produced it after my interview with Omega Bossman was over. I was a bit embarrassed about the whole thing (the photo would never had been taken had it not been for my colleague’s over-enthusiasm – the one time on the trip I was grateful for it) but Mr Urquhart’s reaction made it all worthwhile. He had been cool and distant throughout our interview but his demeanor changed completely when I showed him the thing and related its provenance – he started gesticulating wildly, studied the watch through a magnifying glass, rushed out and called in some of his staff to show it to them, asked me if there was anything the company could do to fix the glass (which was slightly chipped).
This was one of the highlights of the trip; despite the general antipathy I developed towards all watches and watch-companies, I was quite taken by how childlike the CEO became when shown a fragment of his company’s history. Guess that will happen when you’ve spent practically your entire life obsessed with something: the man has worked with Omega for 30-odd years himself and lives and breathes watches.
Best of all, my grandmother was over the moon when I showed her the photograph of one of her most treasured possessions; apart from everything else it brought back memories of her own trip more than five decades ago.
Portrait of a writer and his city
My review of Pamuk's Istanbul; it appeared in today's Business Standard and the link is here but the para breaks on the website are meaningless as always. So here's the full review:
------------------
In the first chapter of this part-autobiography, part-tribute to his beloved city, Orhan Pamuk speaks of writers like Conrad and Naipaul, who "managed to migrate between languages, cultures countries, continents, even civilisations. Their imaginations were fed by exile...mine, however, requires that I stay in the same city,on the same same street, in the same house, gazing at the same view. Istanbul’s fate is my fate".
It isn’t inappropriate for the author to mention his own name in the same breath as Conrad and Naipaul. In recent years, especially following the international publication of My Name is Red and Snow, Pamuk has moved from being Turkey’s best-known man of letters to being considered one of the world’s great fiction writers, and a future Nobel candidate. This makes it difficult to think of Istanbul as just a paean to a city: it can’t be treated purely as a travelogue, or even as a personal remembrance by a lesser-known writer. The appeal of this book depends equally on the insights it provides into Pamuk;s life and how he became the writer he is today. From that point of view, a certain amount of familiarity with his fiction is recommended before reading this.
Pamuk begins his memoir on an intimate scale, with descriptions of his early life in the five-storey apartment block his large family occupied in the 1950s. He speaks of family squabbles, sibling rivalry, secret fantasy worlds and of childhood quirks that persisted into adulthood ("I have in all honesty believed that two people with similar names must have similar characters, that an unfamiliar word must be semantically similar to a word spelt like it..."). Then the world outside the apartment weaves its way into the narrative and the book’s structure turns schizophrenic. A discussion of the painter Melling’s depictions of the Bosphorus river is immediately followed by an unrelated chapter that gives us little Orhan in his house, making up games to deal with boredom (his account of adjusting a mirror triptych so that he could see the reflections of thousands of Orhans, many of them unfamiliar-looking, evokes the splintered, kaleidoscopic narrative of My Name is Red). Another chapter on the lives and work of four of Turkey’s great writers (including the poet Yahya Kemal) is followed incongruously by a personal account of Pamuk’s grandmother.
At other times a more careful link is established, as when the author recalls the various signs he saw on the city’s streets as a child, and then, to understand the "civilising mission" that these signs embodied, turns to a discussion of Istanbul’s newspaper columnists and city correspondents. This structure, or lack of it, marks an intriguing experiment but at times it almost feels like Pamuk is trying too hard for a freewheeling effect as he places the city’s life against his own.
According to Pamuk, the chief characteristic of Istanbul is the quality of huzun, the Turkish word for melancholy -- "not the melancholy of a solitary individual but the black mood shared by millions of people together". Much of this stems from Istanbul’s position as a city that stands at the crossroads of East and West (it is situated in both Europe and Asia), and as a once-great capital now reduced to ruins, bedevilled by reminders of its own lost glory. (Pamuk believes a key difference between his city and, say, Delhi or Sao Paulo, is that "in Istanbul the remains of a glorious past and civilisation are everywhere visible".) At any rate, this very particular form of melancholy is a theme that runs through the book, much like the Bosphorus winding through the city.
The author also writes movingly of Istanbul’s love-hate relationship with the western gaze: of "the ambivalence that besets literary Istanbullus on reading Western observations" about their city. He counts the tankers, liners and fishing boats that go up and down the river, and brings the clarity of a nightmare to an image of a looming Soviet warship rising out of the mist. In bringing the many shades of the city to life, he is aided by a wealth of black-and-white photographs (many of them by the famous Ara Guler) that are spread across the pages of this book; the pictures don’t quite illuminate the text in the intense, immediate way that, for instance, the ones in W G Sebald’s works do, but Istanbul would have been a lesser book without them, especially for a reader who is unfamiliar with the city.
Personally, I was more interested in the portions that dealt with Orhan’s life and his muses (there’s a beautiful chapter on his first love), and the frisson-creating little moments that echo scenes from his novels. But those portions can’t be sieved out from the whole, since, as the author admits, his own soul is part of the city’s. This book is so full of detailed information about Istanbul that it’s easy to overlook how much it reveals about Pamuk himself. In many ways, it’s more candid than a conventional autobiography might have been.
Istanbul isn’t always an easy read though. Some passages -- how to say this about a favourite author without flinching -- just aren’t as engaging as they should be. Pamuk isn’t really capable of being uninteresting but he comes close here occasionally, especially in a couple of descriptions that amount to little more than endless processions of semi-colons ("...of the mosques whose lead plates and steel gutters are forever being stolen; of the city cemeteries that seem like gateways to another world, and their cypress trees; of the little children in the streets who try to sell the same packet of tissues to every passer-by; of the clock towers no one ever notices...")
Whatever its shortcomings, however, Istanbul is an affectionate and informative work that has something in it both for Pamuk enthusiasts and for those who seek an understanding of a great historical centre (even though the book is unlikely to satisfy either group completely). And for a work that obsesses so much about melancholia and a forgotten past, it ends on a heartwarmingly forward-looking note: "I don’t want to be an artist," the young Orhan Pamuk tells his mother. "I’m going to be a writer."
------------------
In the first chapter of this part-autobiography, part-tribute to his beloved city, Orhan Pamuk speaks of writers like Conrad and Naipaul, who "managed to migrate between languages, cultures countries, continents, even civilisations. Their imaginations were fed by exile...mine, however, requires that I stay in the same city,on the same same street, in the same house, gazing at the same view. Istanbul’s fate is my fate".
It isn’t inappropriate for the author to mention his own name in the same breath as Conrad and Naipaul. In recent years, especially following the international publication of My Name is Red and Snow, Pamuk has moved from being Turkey’s best-known man of letters to being considered one of the world’s great fiction writers, and a future Nobel candidate. This makes it difficult to think of Istanbul as just a paean to a city: it can’t be treated purely as a travelogue, or even as a personal remembrance by a lesser-known writer. The appeal of this book depends equally on the insights it provides into Pamuk;s life and how he became the writer he is today. From that point of view, a certain amount of familiarity with his fiction is recommended before reading this.
Pamuk begins his memoir on an intimate scale, with descriptions of his early life in the five-storey apartment block his large family occupied in the 1950s. He speaks of family squabbles, sibling rivalry, secret fantasy worlds and of childhood quirks that persisted into adulthood ("I have in all honesty believed that two people with similar names must have similar characters, that an unfamiliar word must be semantically similar to a word spelt like it..."). Then the world outside the apartment weaves its way into the narrative and the book’s structure turns schizophrenic. A discussion of the painter Melling’s depictions of the Bosphorus river is immediately followed by an unrelated chapter that gives us little Orhan in his house, making up games to deal with boredom (his account of adjusting a mirror triptych so that he could see the reflections of thousands of Orhans, many of them unfamiliar-looking, evokes the splintered, kaleidoscopic narrative of My Name is Red). Another chapter on the lives and work of four of Turkey’s great writers (including the poet Yahya Kemal) is followed incongruously by a personal account of Pamuk’s grandmother.
At other times a more careful link is established, as when the author recalls the various signs he saw on the city’s streets as a child, and then, to understand the "civilising mission" that these signs embodied, turns to a discussion of Istanbul’s newspaper columnists and city correspondents. This structure, or lack of it, marks an intriguing experiment but at times it almost feels like Pamuk is trying too hard for a freewheeling effect as he places the city’s life against his own.
According to Pamuk, the chief characteristic of Istanbul is the quality of huzun, the Turkish word for melancholy -- "not the melancholy of a solitary individual but the black mood shared by millions of people together". Much of this stems from Istanbul’s position as a city that stands at the crossroads of East and West (it is situated in both Europe and Asia), and as a once-great capital now reduced to ruins, bedevilled by reminders of its own lost glory. (Pamuk believes a key difference between his city and, say, Delhi or Sao Paulo, is that "in Istanbul the remains of a glorious past and civilisation are everywhere visible".) At any rate, this very particular form of melancholy is a theme that runs through the book, much like the Bosphorus winding through the city.
The author also writes movingly of Istanbul’s love-hate relationship with the western gaze: of "the ambivalence that besets literary Istanbullus on reading Western observations" about their city. He counts the tankers, liners and fishing boats that go up and down the river, and brings the clarity of a nightmare to an image of a looming Soviet warship rising out of the mist. In bringing the many shades of the city to life, he is aided by a wealth of black-and-white photographs (many of them by the famous Ara Guler) that are spread across the pages of this book; the pictures don’t quite illuminate the text in the intense, immediate way that, for instance, the ones in W G Sebald’s works do, but Istanbul would have been a lesser book without them, especially for a reader who is unfamiliar with the city.
Personally, I was more interested in the portions that dealt with Orhan’s life and his muses (there’s a beautiful chapter on his first love), and the frisson-creating little moments that echo scenes from his novels. But those portions can’t be sieved out from the whole, since, as the author admits, his own soul is part of the city’s. This book is so full of detailed information about Istanbul that it’s easy to overlook how much it reveals about Pamuk himself. In many ways, it’s more candid than a conventional autobiography might have been.
Istanbul isn’t always an easy read though. Some passages -- how to say this about a favourite author without flinching -- just aren’t as engaging as they should be. Pamuk isn’t really capable of being uninteresting but he comes close here occasionally, especially in a couple of descriptions that amount to little more than endless processions of semi-colons ("...of the mosques whose lead plates and steel gutters are forever being stolen; of the city cemeteries that seem like gateways to another world, and their cypress trees; of the little children in the streets who try to sell the same packet of tissues to every passer-by; of the clock towers no one ever notices...")
Whatever its shortcomings, however, Istanbul is an affectionate and informative work that has something in it both for Pamuk enthusiasts and for those who seek an understanding of a great historical centre (even though the book is unlikely to satisfy either group completely). And for a work that obsesses so much about melancholia and a forgotten past, it ends on a heartwarmingly forward-looking note: "I don’t want to be an artist," the young Orhan Pamuk tells his mother. "I’m going to be a writer."
A good road day
Most times it’s ghastly driving to office at the peak of the Delhi summer. At the end of the 16 kilometres (which can translate into anywhere between 45 and 80 minutes, depending on how many cars have been bumper-kissing along the route I take, and how antagonistic their drivers are) I feel like I’ve lost 40 per cent of my body weight in sweat and aged a 100 years in the process. Today was different; I wouldn’t have minded one bit if I had to travel to another city. The weather was lovely (save for a spell of much-too-heavy rain near the Moolchand flyover) and there were R D Burman specials on radio channels (today being the great man’s birth anniversary).
When the weather is good, the traffic always seems much better behaved than normal. People even stick to their lanes, don’t honk all that much and there are hardly any traffic jams (except for waterlogging-induced ones). Interesting. And sad, because these are the days I wouldn’t mind being stuck on the road for hours. ("Piya tu ab toh aaja" was being played for the third time when I had to switch the stereo off because I’d reached office.)
When the weather is good, the traffic always seems much better behaved than normal. People even stick to their lanes, don’t honk all that much and there are hardly any traffic jams (except for waterlogging-induced ones). Interesting. And sad, because these are the days I wouldn’t mind being stuck on the road for hours. ("Piya tu ab toh aaja" was being played for the third time when I had to switch the stereo off because I’d reached office.)
Saturday, June 25, 2005
Of applied ethics and armchair murder mysteries
One of my many reading regrets is that I’ve taken so long to get around to the books of Alexander McCall Smith – the kindly-looking Scotland-based law professor who, in his spare time, writes with amazing prolificacy. Don’t judge a book by its cover, we’re told, but the bright, friendly covers of McCall Smith’s novels – with their colourful relief-print illustrations by Hannah Firmin – do in fact prepare the reader for what lies within: charmingly written amateur-detective stories peopled with the most likable protagonists. There’s something very reassuring about holding a new McCall Smith novel in your hand – the book is very nice to look at, and you’re assured of a good yarn and of spending some quality time in the company of someone like Precious Ramotswe, “the Miss Marple of Botswana” and the star of six books in the extremely popular No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency Series.
But the book I just finished is The Sunday Philosophy Club, the first of a new series set in Edinburgh and introducing a new lead character – Isabel Dalhousie, a philosopher and editor of the Review of Applied Ethics. As the novel begins Isabel sees a young man fall to his death from the upper circle of the Usher Theatre during a concert. “Accident, suicide or…?” is the inevitable question (though it’s typical of McCall Smith’s leisurely paced style that the word “murder” doesn’t even appear until around 130 pages into the book).
McCall Smith is sometimes likened to Agatha Christie and I see the point; I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend his books to anyone who enjoys Christie. They have the same old-world cosiness and almost demand that you read them while reclining in an armchair. But his novels aren’t as intricately plotted as the Grand Dame’s and they aren’t murder mysteries in quite the same sense. In The Sunday Philosophy Club for instance, during the course of Isabel’s investigations we are introduced to not more than four or five characters who might fit the bill, and one of them does turn out to be the killer. There are minor twists near the end but no jolting surprises of the sort you find in Christie’s best-known mysteries.
Much more is invested in the character of Isabel and in her relationships with her perspicacious housekeeper Grace, with her niece Cat, and with Cat’s former boyfriend Jamie. Equally interesting is Isabel’s habit of carefully studying the ethical implications of every situation she finds herself in. (“We have moral obligations to those who we come up against, who enter our moral space,” she says, explaining her curiosity about the boy’s death, “I was the last person that young man saw, and don’t you think the last person you see on this earth owes you something?”) An element of stream-of-consciousness (Isabel’s musings on the rights and wrongs of various topics: hypocrisy, half-lies and truths) runs through almost every chapter and some of the book’s best moments are vignettes that have nothing at all to do with the murder mystery – for instance, Isabel’s conversation with a young punk with facial piercings. “It shows I have my own style,” he says, “I’m not in anybody’s uniform.” To which she good-naturedly replies: “Unless, of course, you have donned another uniform in your eagerness to avoid uniforms.” With due respect to the ghosts of Poirot and Marple, McCall Smith has a greater gift for character development than Christie did.
Anyway, enough pontificating – it’ll probably take you less time to get through a chapter of one of these books than it did to get through this post. So rush out now and pick up the full No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series for starters. And an armchair to go with it.
But the book I just finished is The Sunday Philosophy Club, the first of a new series set in Edinburgh and introducing a new lead character – Isabel Dalhousie, a philosopher and editor of the Review of Applied Ethics. As the novel begins Isabel sees a young man fall to his death from the upper circle of the Usher Theatre during a concert. “Accident, suicide or…?” is the inevitable question (though it’s typical of McCall Smith’s leisurely paced style that the word “murder” doesn’t even appear until around 130 pages into the book).
McCall Smith is sometimes likened to Agatha Christie and I see the point; I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend his books to anyone who enjoys Christie. They have the same old-world cosiness and almost demand that you read them while reclining in an armchair. But his novels aren’t as intricately plotted as the Grand Dame’s and they aren’t murder mysteries in quite the same sense. In The Sunday Philosophy Club for instance, during the course of Isabel’s investigations we are introduced to not more than four or five characters who might fit the bill, and one of them does turn out to be the killer. There are minor twists near the end but no jolting surprises of the sort you find in Christie’s best-known mysteries.
Much more is invested in the character of Isabel and in her relationships with her perspicacious housekeeper Grace, with her niece Cat, and with Cat’s former boyfriend Jamie. Equally interesting is Isabel’s habit of carefully studying the ethical implications of every situation she finds herself in. (“We have moral obligations to those who we come up against, who enter our moral space,” she says, explaining her curiosity about the boy’s death, “I was the last person that young man saw, and don’t you think the last person you see on this earth owes you something?”) An element of stream-of-consciousness (Isabel’s musings on the rights and wrongs of various topics: hypocrisy, half-lies and truths) runs through almost every chapter and some of the book’s best moments are vignettes that have nothing at all to do with the murder mystery – for instance, Isabel’s conversation with a young punk with facial piercings. “It shows I have my own style,” he says, “I’m not in anybody’s uniform.” To which she good-naturedly replies: “Unless, of course, you have donned another uniform in your eagerness to avoid uniforms.” With due respect to the ghosts of Poirot and Marple, McCall Smith has a greater gift for character development than Christie did.
Anyway, enough pontificating – it’ll probably take you less time to get through a chapter of one of these books than it did to get through this post. So rush out now and pick up the full No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series for starters. And an armchair to go with it.
Wednesday, June 22, 2005
This gun for hire
Big professional development: I’m joining the growing tribe of freelance journalists. Have a retainership agreement lined up with my paper wherein I’ll be able to work out of home for much of the time, and will be free to write for others. It’s a decent deal, the good part being a fixed monthly cheque that will ensure a minimum amount of financial security - very important for someone who’s just cutting his teeth on the big bad world of freelancing. Plus my computer in office stays in place, which means I can come in and use office resources anytime. Again important, because friends with experience in this line tell me the shift from office-enforced discipline to self-discipline is a difficult one, and in the early days the solitariness can be tough to cope with.
I’ll probably discover the downsides to freelancing as it happens, but for now I’m enthusiastic about this change, it’s something I’ve been looking forward to for a long time. The knowledge that I’m not cuffed to one organisation means a lot, for one reason or the other.
[Collected bagfuls of advice from freelance pros like Devangshu, Nilanjana and Peter the Griffin at a get-together last night where Samit also sang his version of the Bubbly song for the benefit of those of us who know not what is television and haven’t heard the original. I was rechristened Jam-sandwich Jabberwock at this gathering, for reasons that have nothing to do with jam sandwiches or anything else.]
Will concentrate on Business Standard assignments for the first few weeks, while I figure out time management issues. Then will follow up on a few contacts, look at options in other places. Book reviews/profiles/features/a couple of columns will be the focus to start with but eventually I’m hoping to get back into the movie-reviewing business too; haven’t written an official film review for over a year now. And – dare I suggest it – perhaps even something on cricket, another of the areas I’ve neglected.
P.S. One definite disadvantage: the sound of screeching Pom at home, which will have to be muffled (though right now I’m unsure how best to do this. Suggestions welcome).
I’ll probably discover the downsides to freelancing as it happens, but for now I’m enthusiastic about this change, it’s something I’ve been looking forward to for a long time. The knowledge that I’m not cuffed to one organisation means a lot, for one reason or the other.
[Collected bagfuls of advice from freelance pros like Devangshu, Nilanjana and Peter the Griffin at a get-together last night where Samit also sang his version of the Bubbly song for the benefit of those of us who know not what is television and haven’t heard the original. I was rechristened Jam-sandwich Jabberwock at this gathering, for reasons that have nothing to do with jam sandwiches or anything else.]
Will concentrate on Business Standard assignments for the first few weeks, while I figure out time management issues. Then will follow up on a few contacts, look at options in other places. Book reviews/profiles/features/a couple of columns will be the focus to start with but eventually I’m hoping to get back into the movie-reviewing business too; haven’t written an official film review for over a year now. And – dare I suggest it – perhaps even something on cricket, another of the areas I’ve neglected.
P.S. One definite disadvantage: the sound of screeching Pom at home, which will have to be muffled (though right now I’m unsure how best to do this. Suggestions welcome).
Tuesday, June 21, 2005
Hotel Rwanda review
(Watched Hotel Rwanda at the India Habitat Centre last evening, a special screening to mark World Refugee Day.)
How many "acts of genocide" does it take to make a genocide?
- Reporter Alan Elsner, during the Rwanda massacres
And how many people do you have to save to be a saviour? At the heart of Hotel Rwanda is a story similar both in its structure and its lessons to Spielberg’s Schindler’s List: the story of an ordinary, worldly man finding depths within himself that even he probably never imagined existed, and risking everything to save the lives of a few hundred people faced with certain death. In the final analysis, one person can make a difference – even if, for the thousand people who survived, a million didn’t. What was that story about throwing a single dying starfish back into the sea?
Unlike Spielberg’s epic, which drew attention to the importance of its story with each beautifully composed black-and-white frame, Hotel Rwanda is an unassuming film that derives its power from a tight script and solid performances. To some extent, the understatement was a given: Schindler’s List was set against the background of the Holocaust, universally acknowledged as the greatest tragedy of the last century, but Hotel Rwanda deals with a much less known, or understood, horror – the genocide perpetuated on the Tutsis by Hutu extremists in Rwanda in the early 1990s. As one character even points out, this was a massacre most people around the world would probably have heard about on their TV sets, said "That’s terrible!" and then gone back to eating their dinners. This is not a film that can afford to take the viewer’s interest for granted - and so, instead of attempting to be an all-encompassing polemic, it focuses on one man who made a difference.
Paul Rusesabagina (Don Cheadle) is the manager of a five-star hotel in Kigali. He’s a shifty little fellow, not above ingratiating rich customers, taking and giving bribes to ensure the smooth running of the business, and unconcerned with much beyond the welfare of his own wife and children: unlikely material for a hero. His attitude is highlighted by an early scene: as political tensions increase across the country and soldiers raid people’s homes at night, Paul dissociates himself from a neighbour’s tragedy with the words "He isn’t family – family is all that matters".
Paul, a Hutu himself (though his wife Tatiana is a Tutsi), falls into the role of saviour almost by accident, but once he realises that he has the means to save Tutsi lives - by giving them refuge in his hotel - there’s no turning back for him. Using all the professional skills acquired over years of hotel management - buying time by serving beer to impatient soldiers, smoothly convincing a confused general that the Americans "are watching our every move through their satellites" - he staves off the marauding Hutus. Quietly, without much comment, the film traces how this man, faced with extraordinary circumstances, rises in moral stature so that by the end he is apologizing to the people he saved: "I wish I could have done more".
Hotel Rwanda has been accused in some quarters of not being hard-hitting enough, but I don’t know about that. It’s true that the film doesn’t take it upon itself to realistically depict the full scale of the Rwandan tragedy, but then it didn’t set out to be a documentary: it recognised that to be widely seen around the world (which was the principal intention) it had to be an engrossing, narrative-driven feature film. Given that brief, it is an almost unqualified success.
Besides, who says you need scene after scene of gruesome violence to make a point? Hotel Rwanda is most effective in its quiet moments. Like when a photographer (a bearded Joachim Phoenix, in an odd little appearance) tries to understand the differences between the two groups in terms of their physical attributes, then sees two friends - one a Hutu, the other a Tutsi - at a bar and remarks bemusedly "They could be twins." Or in a brief glimpse of Paul’s identity card which has "Hutu" stamped across it. A throwaway line by an officer as he agrees to spare lives in exchange for a bribe: "It’s okay, we’ll kill them later." A scene between Paul and his wife that begins as a relaxed romantic interlude but ends with him telling her to "not allow the children to see us die first, if it comes to that".
The one time Hotel Rwanda rang untrue for me was in its ending, which invests too much dramatic tension in whether or not Paul and Tatiana will find their orphaned nieces among the children of a refugee camp. In the end the reunited family walk off together, as if the story all along had been only about them. This is still nowhere close to a manufactured Hollywood ending – after all, the last title in the film mentions that a million people were killed – but it still feels a little pat compared to what went before. Even that, however, is indicative of how powerful the rest of the film is.
How many "acts of genocide" does it take to make a genocide?
- Reporter Alan Elsner, during the Rwanda massacres
And how many people do you have to save to be a saviour? At the heart of Hotel Rwanda is a story similar both in its structure and its lessons to Spielberg’s Schindler’s List: the story of an ordinary, worldly man finding depths within himself that even he probably never imagined existed, and risking everything to save the lives of a few hundred people faced with certain death. In the final analysis, one person can make a difference – even if, for the thousand people who survived, a million didn’t. What was that story about throwing a single dying starfish back into the sea?
Unlike Spielberg’s epic, which drew attention to the importance of its story with each beautifully composed black-and-white frame, Hotel Rwanda is an unassuming film that derives its power from a tight script and solid performances. To some extent, the understatement was a given: Schindler’s List was set against the background of the Holocaust, universally acknowledged as the greatest tragedy of the last century, but Hotel Rwanda deals with a much less known, or understood, horror – the genocide perpetuated on the Tutsis by Hutu extremists in Rwanda in the early 1990s. As one character even points out, this was a massacre most people around the world would probably have heard about on their TV sets, said "That’s terrible!" and then gone back to eating their dinners. This is not a film that can afford to take the viewer’s interest for granted - and so, instead of attempting to be an all-encompassing polemic, it focuses on one man who made a difference.
Paul Rusesabagina (Don Cheadle) is the manager of a five-star hotel in Kigali. He’s a shifty little fellow, not above ingratiating rich customers, taking and giving bribes to ensure the smooth running of the business, and unconcerned with much beyond the welfare of his own wife and children: unlikely material for a hero. His attitude is highlighted by an early scene: as political tensions increase across the country and soldiers raid people’s homes at night, Paul dissociates himself from a neighbour’s tragedy with the words "He isn’t family – family is all that matters".
Paul, a Hutu himself (though his wife Tatiana is a Tutsi), falls into the role of saviour almost by accident, but once he realises that he has the means to save Tutsi lives - by giving them refuge in his hotel - there’s no turning back for him. Using all the professional skills acquired over years of hotel management - buying time by serving beer to impatient soldiers, smoothly convincing a confused general that the Americans "are watching our every move through their satellites" - he staves off the marauding Hutus. Quietly, without much comment, the film traces how this man, faced with extraordinary circumstances, rises in moral stature so that by the end he is apologizing to the people he saved: "I wish I could have done more".
Hotel Rwanda has been accused in some quarters of not being hard-hitting enough, but I don’t know about that. It’s true that the film doesn’t take it upon itself to realistically depict the full scale of the Rwandan tragedy, but then it didn’t set out to be a documentary: it recognised that to be widely seen around the world (which was the principal intention) it had to be an engrossing, narrative-driven feature film. Given that brief, it is an almost unqualified success.
Besides, who says you need scene after scene of gruesome violence to make a point? Hotel Rwanda is most effective in its quiet moments. Like when a photographer (a bearded Joachim Phoenix, in an odd little appearance) tries to understand the differences between the two groups in terms of their physical attributes, then sees two friends - one a Hutu, the other a Tutsi - at a bar and remarks bemusedly "They could be twins." Or in a brief glimpse of Paul’s identity card which has "Hutu" stamped across it. A throwaway line by an officer as he agrees to spare lives in exchange for a bribe: "It’s okay, we’ll kill them later." A scene between Paul and his wife that begins as a relaxed romantic interlude but ends with him telling her to "not allow the children to see us die first, if it comes to that".
The one time Hotel Rwanda rang untrue for me was in its ending, which invests too much dramatic tension in whether or not Paul and Tatiana will find their orphaned nieces among the children of a refugee camp. In the end the reunited family walk off together, as if the story all along had been only about them. This is still nowhere close to a manufactured Hollywood ending – after all, the last title in the film mentions that a million people were killed – but it still feels a little pat compared to what went before. Even that, however, is indicative of how powerful the rest of the film is.
Monday, June 20, 2005
The jabberwock appears in a comic strip!
Please visit Manjula Padmanabhan’s blog for the dope on what happened when the legendary Suki came out of retirement for an illustrated interview with Yours Truly. This appeared in Business Standard’s Weekend supplement on June 18 and I’m glad Manjula’s posted it on her site, since I have zero-proficiency when it comes to putting up pictures on mine.
Here’s the link again. *burbles proudly*
Update: and here's the strip (click to enlarge)
Here’s the link again. *burbles proudly*
Update: and here's the strip (click to enlarge)
A thumbs-up for Ebert
The brouhaha over Roger Ebert’s review of the Adam Sandler-Chris Rock starrer The Longest Yard has raised some interesting points about subjectivity in reviewing. The gist is that Ebert gave the film a "muted thumbs up" in an episode of Ebert & Roeper just before leaving for the Cannes Film Festival. On returning three weeks later he now had to get down to the business of writing the full-length review and justifying his earlier endorsement of the film - but in the interim he had seen so many vastly superior, vastly more ambitious films that the Longest Yard review turned into an exercise in ambivalence and self-examination.
Even as he stands by his original opinion, Ebert writes:
"I do not say that I was wrong about the film. I said what I sincerely believed at the time. I believed it as one might believe in a good cup of coffee; welcome while you are drinking it, even completely absorbing, but not much discussed three weeks later. Indeed after my immersion in the films of Cannes, I can hardly bring myself to return to The Longest Yard at all, since it represents such a limited idea of what a movie can be and what movies are for."
Later, replying to a reader’s letter on the topic, he admits:
"I was trying to balance on the cutting edge between conceding that a movie ‘works’ and knowing that life is short and one should ideally be making a better choice."
Many of my movie-critic friends scoff at Ebert’s largely populist reviews, at his star-ratings which always seem to over-praise mediocre movies and especially at the simplistic "thumbs-up-thumbs-down" approach that has been a trademark of his TV career (first with Gene Siskel, now with Richard Roeper). But that’s doing the man an injustice. Ebert freely admits that he himself never sets much store by star ratings and the "thumbs" approach - that those are necessitated by commercial dictates. His actual reviews - if you bother to read them all the way through - are usually more complex and thoughtful, even when the star rating shouts out ****! In fact, he repeatedly cautions his readers not to go by the ratings (which are imposed by the newspaper he writes for) but by the text.
In fact, contrary to this misperception that Ebert deals in absolutes, one of the things I admire most about him is his insistence that reviews are subjective, shifting creatures: that there are no constants, that one’s opinion of a film will change depending on one’s age or even mood, and even that it’s pointless expecting one review to be consistent with another, especially when the reviewer has been in the business for 40 years.
The other thing of course is his slightly convoluted (but indispensable) guiding principle for reviewers: "Don’t judge a film by what it’s about but how it’s about whatever it’s about." Such openmindedness about genres is, in my opinion, one of the first requisites for any good reviewer, but it’s sadly lacking in many of the best writers among movie reviewers around the world. Anthony Lane for instance: now there’s a man whose every review I’d read devotedly, just because his writing is so entertaining (especially when he’s taking the hatchet to a film). But somehow I just can’t bring myself to think of him as a good film reviewer: one rarely gets the sense that he loves movies, it’s more like he’s in love with his own writing and obsessed with being clever. Ebert on the other hand has no such hang-ups. (Which is not to say that his writing is half-bad either!)
P.S. Here's a heartily recommended link: Ebert's essays on Great Movies.
Even as he stands by his original opinion, Ebert writes:
"I do not say that I was wrong about the film. I said what I sincerely believed at the time. I believed it as one might believe in a good cup of coffee; welcome while you are drinking it, even completely absorbing, but not much discussed three weeks later. Indeed after my immersion in the films of Cannes, I can hardly bring myself to return to The Longest Yard at all, since it represents such a limited idea of what a movie can be and what movies are for."
Later, replying to a reader’s letter on the topic, he admits:
"I was trying to balance on the cutting edge between conceding that a movie ‘works’ and knowing that life is short and one should ideally be making a better choice."
Many of my movie-critic friends scoff at Ebert’s largely populist reviews, at his star-ratings which always seem to over-praise mediocre movies and especially at the simplistic "thumbs-up-thumbs-down" approach that has been a trademark of his TV career (first with Gene Siskel, now with Richard Roeper). But that’s doing the man an injustice. Ebert freely admits that he himself never sets much store by star ratings and the "thumbs" approach - that those are necessitated by commercial dictates. His actual reviews - if you bother to read them all the way through - are usually more complex and thoughtful, even when the star rating shouts out ****! In fact, he repeatedly cautions his readers not to go by the ratings (which are imposed by the newspaper he writes for) but by the text.
In fact, contrary to this misperception that Ebert deals in absolutes, one of the things I admire most about him is his insistence that reviews are subjective, shifting creatures: that there are no constants, that one’s opinion of a film will change depending on one’s age or even mood, and even that it’s pointless expecting one review to be consistent with another, especially when the reviewer has been in the business for 40 years.
The other thing of course is his slightly convoluted (but indispensable) guiding principle for reviewers: "Don’t judge a film by what it’s about but how it’s about whatever it’s about." Such openmindedness about genres is, in my opinion, one of the first requisites for any good reviewer, but it’s sadly lacking in many of the best writers among movie reviewers around the world. Anthony Lane for instance: now there’s a man whose every review I’d read devotedly, just because his writing is so entertaining (especially when he’s taking the hatchet to a film). But somehow I just can’t bring myself to think of him as a good film reviewer: one rarely gets the sense that he loves movies, it’s more like he’s in love with his own writing and obsessed with being clever. Ebert on the other hand has no such hang-ups. (Which is not to say that his writing is half-bad either!)
P.S. Here's a heartily recommended link: Ebert's essays on Great Movies.
Saturday, June 18, 2005
My four-star movie guide
When I filled in my book-tag meme a few days ago, there was a serious omission in the list of “five books that meant a lot to me”. Thinking about it now, I’m amazed I didn’t include it – especially since the list by definition wasn’t necessarily meant to be indicative of literary merit; it was simply about five books that had had a deep influence on my life.
There’s little literary merit in Leonard Maltin’s TV Movie and Video Guide: 1991 edition, which I got early in the summer of 1991, the year I became seriously interested in English, specifically Hollywood, films. It was aimed not at the dedicated film buff but at the casual browser in a video library; even the hardsell on the cover – “Includes reviews of over 19,000 films!” – suggested quantity beating out quality. Each “review” was a capsule, rarely touching even a hundred words (usually much less), and supplying the most basic information – cast, director, Oscars won, trivia, with only the occasional sentence or two that might have been plucked out of a respectable full-length review. And it followed a facile one-star to four-star system, which is the sort of thing I sneer at today.
And yet, this was the book that had the greatest influence on me back when I was taking my formative steps as a film buff. I bought it on May 11, 1991 from Sehgal Bros in South Extension, just around the time I was tiring of Bollywood and getting interested in certain English films I had heard a lot about from my parents: especially the films of Hitchcock; in particular, Psycho. I remember the day vividly, remember leafing through the “P” section, finding the Psycho entry and reading with a thrill the first sentence: “The Master’s most notorious film, a jet-black comedy set in the desolate Bates Motel…” And the last sentence, the terse “Pure filmmaking at its finest.” I watched Psycho for the first time the very next day, May 12, and within the next month I had seen most of the films that constituted my entry point into non-Hindi cinema: Spartacus (I didn’t know, or care, who Stanley Kubrick was at that time, I was interested mainly in the bloated cast: Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis and the troika of Great Britons – Olivier, Laughton, Ustinov); Judgement at Nuremberg (the first time I saw Spencer Tracy, Marlene Dietrich, Burt Lancaster and Montgomery Clift); Becket; The Longest Day; and On The Waterfront.
In those early days my interest lay mainly in the actors, especially the ones from Hollywood’s Golden Age in the 1930s and 1940s. I would painstakingly make lists in a notebook, fill pages with the filmographies of actors like James Stewart, Katharine Hepburn, Henry Fonda, John Wayne, Bette Davis, Ingrid Bergman; classify the films according to the book’s rating system; cross-reference them. I would carry the book with me in a polythene bag when I walked across to the video library located in the modest four-shop community centre that has somehow, bizarrely, transmogrified into the PVR Saket complex. And then, as the shop attendants looked on amusedly, I would trawl their catalogue and refer to the relevant entries in my book before deciding what to rent.
The book remained an important part of my life in the years that followed: the cable TV revolution (we got our connection in March 1992 and for the first few months the only thing I was interested in was the classic Hollywood film that would be telecast on Sunday afternoons on Star Plus); the launch of dedicated movie channels (Star Movies and TNT); and later, my discovery of the British Council Library’s video section. I carried it around with me every time there was the remotest possibility that I might drop by a video library, or even when I was visiting a relative’s house where there might be a selection of films to watch.
Then of course the Internet came in, I discovered IMDB and the near-unlimited access to full-length, “proper” reviews penned by some of the world’s leading movie critics. And the Maltin was relegated to a distant bookshelf in a distant corner, where it still sits, torn and yellowed, many of its pages missing, peering at me forlornly. It knows I’m a little embarrassed by its presence, and it resents me for that.
But it’s also left a legacy that I might never be able to shake off: even today, when I think of the films I first read reviews of in that book, I think of them in terms of the star ratings assigned to them by Maltin and his staff. For instance, Notorious is one of my three or four favourite Hitchcocks (which would make it one of my all-time favourite films overall). But whenever I happen to think of it, I reflexively think of it as a three-and-a-half-star movie, not a four-star one (because that’s the way it was in the Maltin book). This completely screws my mind up. Books that once meant the world to you shouldn’t be allowed to lurk in corners of your mind long after you’ve outgrown them. That would be like turning 30 and still wanting to be Holden Caulfield.
But I have to admit it’s a comfort as well. It’s comforting to know that I still have those rating systems in my head, that I still remember whole sentences from those capsule reviews. In the final analysis there’s no turning your back on the things that mattered to one of your former selves. Without that silly little popcorn guide I wouldn’t be the movie-lover that I am today.
There’s little literary merit in Leonard Maltin’s TV Movie and Video Guide: 1991 edition, which I got early in the summer of 1991, the year I became seriously interested in English, specifically Hollywood, films. It was aimed not at the dedicated film buff but at the casual browser in a video library; even the hardsell on the cover – “Includes reviews of over 19,000 films!” – suggested quantity beating out quality. Each “review” was a capsule, rarely touching even a hundred words (usually much less), and supplying the most basic information – cast, director, Oscars won, trivia, with only the occasional sentence or two that might have been plucked out of a respectable full-length review. And it followed a facile one-star to four-star system, which is the sort of thing I sneer at today.
And yet, this was the book that had the greatest influence on me back when I was taking my formative steps as a film buff. I bought it on May 11, 1991 from Sehgal Bros in South Extension, just around the time I was tiring of Bollywood and getting interested in certain English films I had heard a lot about from my parents: especially the films of Hitchcock; in particular, Psycho. I remember the day vividly, remember leafing through the “P” section, finding the Psycho entry and reading with a thrill the first sentence: “The Master’s most notorious film, a jet-black comedy set in the desolate Bates Motel…” And the last sentence, the terse “Pure filmmaking at its finest.” I watched Psycho for the first time the very next day, May 12, and within the next month I had seen most of the films that constituted my entry point into non-Hindi cinema: Spartacus (I didn’t know, or care, who Stanley Kubrick was at that time, I was interested mainly in the bloated cast: Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis and the troika of Great Britons – Olivier, Laughton, Ustinov); Judgement at Nuremberg (the first time I saw Spencer Tracy, Marlene Dietrich, Burt Lancaster and Montgomery Clift); Becket; The Longest Day; and On The Waterfront.
In those early days my interest lay mainly in the actors, especially the ones from Hollywood’s Golden Age in the 1930s and 1940s. I would painstakingly make lists in a notebook, fill pages with the filmographies of actors like James Stewart, Katharine Hepburn, Henry Fonda, John Wayne, Bette Davis, Ingrid Bergman; classify the films according to the book’s rating system; cross-reference them. I would carry the book with me in a polythene bag when I walked across to the video library located in the modest four-shop community centre that has somehow, bizarrely, transmogrified into the PVR Saket complex. And then, as the shop attendants looked on amusedly, I would trawl their catalogue and refer to the relevant entries in my book before deciding what to rent.
The book remained an important part of my life in the years that followed: the cable TV revolution (we got our connection in March 1992 and for the first few months the only thing I was interested in was the classic Hollywood film that would be telecast on Sunday afternoons on Star Plus); the launch of dedicated movie channels (Star Movies and TNT); and later, my discovery of the British Council Library’s video section. I carried it around with me every time there was the remotest possibility that I might drop by a video library, or even when I was visiting a relative’s house where there might be a selection of films to watch.
Then of course the Internet came in, I discovered IMDB and the near-unlimited access to full-length, “proper” reviews penned by some of the world’s leading movie critics. And the Maltin was relegated to a distant bookshelf in a distant corner, where it still sits, torn and yellowed, many of its pages missing, peering at me forlornly. It knows I’m a little embarrassed by its presence, and it resents me for that.
But it’s also left a legacy that I might never be able to shake off: even today, when I think of the films I first read reviews of in that book, I think of them in terms of the star ratings assigned to them by Maltin and his staff. For instance, Notorious is one of my three or four favourite Hitchcocks (which would make it one of my all-time favourite films overall). But whenever I happen to think of it, I reflexively think of it as a three-and-a-half-star movie, not a four-star one (because that’s the way it was in the Maltin book). This completely screws my mind up. Books that once meant the world to you shouldn’t be allowed to lurk in corners of your mind long after you’ve outgrown them. That would be like turning 30 and still wanting to be Holden Caulfield.
But I have to admit it’s a comfort as well. It’s comforting to know that I still have those rating systems in my head, that I still remember whole sentences from those capsule reviews. In the final analysis there’s no turning your back on the things that mattered to one of your former selves. Without that silly little popcorn guide I wouldn’t be the movie-lover that I am today.
Friday, June 17, 2005
Internet monitoring
You know what’s really, really really annoying? Well okay, lots of things, but pretty high up on my list is when some moronic Internet-monitoring service classifies my site as porn and blocks it so that it can’t be accessed by anyone working in an office where this service is used.
There’s this Net-monitoring filter called Fortinet, which has, for no obvious reason, put my blog (and a few other blogs I know of, including India Uncut and Gaurav Sabnis’s Vantage Point) in the category “offensive”. This first came to my notice a few weeks ago when my own office started using this service. I came in to office one day, tried to access my site and found instead a message saying:
“Accessing this site is a violation of your user policy. This site has been rated: pornography.”
Of course, I raised hell with our systems staff and eventually got them to unblock my blog URL on our office server. But since then I haven’t been able to access a few other sites from office.
Anyway, things were quiet for a few weeks – none of my friends had a problem opening my site from their workplaces and so I didn’t follow up – until today, when Black Muddy Shamya, who works for Headlines Today, messaged to say he couldn’t access Jabberwock; his office had started using Fortinet.
So what process does Fortinet use to monitor and pass random judgement on websites? Well, one obvious way would be to scan sites that have objectionable pictorial content (mine doesn’t) or profanity (which I usually avoid) and to stamp “pornography” on them. Now this would be silly enough in itself – how can you realistically censor the Internet? – but what’s much worse is that there clearly isn’t a fixed set of guidelines for classifying sites. Blogs that are full of explicit language, for instance, have not been blacklisted and can still be accessed on my office server. I spoke to one of my systems guys about this selective screening and his theory is that Fortinet acts on people’s complaints: if someone writes to them saying my site is offensive and supplies a URL to one of my posts where, say, the F-word has been used (in the post or in a comment), well that’s enough “proof” for these guardians of cyber-space morality. Seems a reasonable explanation to me, based on what I’ve seen so far.
For now I’m trying to find out how I can contact Fortinet and send them a polite but firm mail asking them to kindly de-porn me. If you know anything about how these Net-monitoring services operate, or if you have been unable to access my blog, or have faced a similar problem with your own site, please write in.
There’s this Net-monitoring filter called Fortinet, which has, for no obvious reason, put my blog (and a few other blogs I know of, including India Uncut and Gaurav Sabnis’s Vantage Point) in the category “offensive”. This first came to my notice a few weeks ago when my own office started using this service. I came in to office one day, tried to access my site and found instead a message saying:
“Accessing this site is a violation of your user policy. This site has been rated: pornography.”
Of course, I raised hell with our systems staff and eventually got them to unblock my blog URL on our office server. But since then I haven’t been able to access a few other sites from office.
Anyway, things were quiet for a few weeks – none of my friends had a problem opening my site from their workplaces and so I didn’t follow up – until today, when Black Muddy Shamya, who works for Headlines Today, messaged to say he couldn’t access Jabberwock; his office had started using Fortinet.
So what process does Fortinet use to monitor and pass random judgement on websites? Well, one obvious way would be to scan sites that have objectionable pictorial content (mine doesn’t) or profanity (which I usually avoid) and to stamp “pornography” on them. Now this would be silly enough in itself – how can you realistically censor the Internet? – but what’s much worse is that there clearly isn’t a fixed set of guidelines for classifying sites. Blogs that are full of explicit language, for instance, have not been blacklisted and can still be accessed on my office server. I spoke to one of my systems guys about this selective screening and his theory is that Fortinet acts on people’s complaints: if someone writes to them saying my site is offensive and supplies a URL to one of my posts where, say, the F-word has been used (in the post or in a comment), well that’s enough “proof” for these guardians of cyber-space morality. Seems a reasonable explanation to me, based on what I’ve seen so far.
For now I’m trying to find out how I can contact Fortinet and send them a polite but firm mail asking them to kindly de-porn me. If you know anything about how these Net-monitoring services operate, or if you have been unable to access my blog, or have faced a similar problem with your own site, please write in.
Wednesday, June 15, 2005
Just key in your query
Have come across what is so far the longest Google search entry to have led someone to this blog. It goes:
“i just want to play a hindi song kal ho na ho in my piano and i am having 31 keys please show me the number keys to play”
Cho Chweet. Just like a little boy staring up into the chimney, hands clasped together, asking Santa for a toy car with at least 30 cc more horsepower than the one his best friend has. (Now don’t ask me where I got that image from!)
Share your longest Google searches, people.
“i just want to play a hindi song kal ho na ho in my piano and i am having 31 keys please show me the number keys to play”
Cho Chweet. Just like a little boy staring up into the chimney, hands clasped together, asking Santa for a toy car with at least 30 cc more horsepower than the one his best friend has. (Now don’t ask me where I got that image from!)
Share your longest Google searches, people.
Tuesday, June 14, 2005
Why Sidhu changed
Heard a Navjot Singh Sidhu interview on the radio today while driving. The RJ asks, “So Sidhuji, were you always such a sher-e-Punjab type, so bold and assertive?” Sidhu replies, in a surprisingly quiet, thoughtful tone, “You’ll be amazed but when I was in school and I was asked to participate in a debate or public reading I would bunk the next three days because I was so scared. And there was a time early in my career when I was even unhappy when I scored a century because I knew I’d have to speak to the press afterwards.”
RJ: So what changed?
At this point I was expecting to hear an admission along the lines of “Oh, my publicity agent told me that if I learnt to speak like a jackass and did it in a strong, declamatory tone, I’d make loads of money commentating and appearing on TV shows in this country obsessed with making celebrities out of dumb people.”
No such candour. Instead Sidhu goes:
“I found religion and meditation, my dear friend, that’s what changed. It made me a stronger, more confident person and that’s why I am the way I am today.”
Strongest argument I’ve heard yet for practicing atheism.
RJ: So what changed?
At this point I was expecting to hear an admission along the lines of “Oh, my publicity agent told me that if I learnt to speak like a jackass and did it in a strong, declamatory tone, I’d make loads of money commentating and appearing on TV shows in this country obsessed with making celebrities out of dumb people.”
No such candour. Instead Sidhu goes:
“I found religion and meditation, my dear friend, that’s what changed. It made me a stronger, more confident person and that’s why I am the way I am today.”
Strongest argument I’ve heard yet for practicing atheism.
The duck stops here
Great art is indeed born of desolation. Duck of Destiny Samit Basu discovers that his blog isn’t working and promptly produces this brilliant new version of “I Will Survive”. Go read.
Monday, June 13, 2005
The reading experience (June 1-13)
Reading has been very scattered the past two weeks. Too much else happening that’s been taking up too much time, and there have been days when I just haven’t had the energy to read late into the night.
So here’s a quick list of what I have managed to get through:
First 160-odd pages (or ‘Part 1’) of Shantaram. As compelling as I’d expected, and a fast read, but so much energy goes in just holding the thing that I haven’t yet managed more than 35-40 pages a night.
Quite a lot of non-fiction, which is unusual for me, but it’s an area I need to brush up on. Finished Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat (often overweeningly silly, blinkered and patchily written but not without its points of interest). Also Bernard-Henri Levy’s Who Killed Daniel Pearl?, which was especially fascinating for its portrait of the monstrous Omar Sheikh, who masterminded the Pearl kidnapping and murder. Levy’s intense, claustrophobia-inducing book took me back to those dark days in early 2002 when I was working on graveyard shifts for TheNewspaperToday.com and we were all waiting with a mixture of fascination and revulsion for the videos of the killing to be released to the press. The six months post-9/11...what a time that was for a journalist working overnight on a 24-hour website while a new story was breaking in the US every half-hour or so.
Still reading Steven Pinker’s excellent The Blank Slate, about the nature-nurture debate, given to me by Amit Varma a couple of months ago. Riveting though this book is, it requires such concentrated reading that I haven’t been able to get through it once and for all, what with the reviewing obligations that crop up intermittently.
Have started on Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul; am a big fan of the man’s fiction, especially Snow, and am keen to see what he does with this memoir. Love the early passages about his memories of a childhood spent in his familys’s five-storey house with its unused pianos and untouched Chinese porcelain figures.
A Bunch of Old Letters - a new print of a selection of letters edited by Jawaharlal Nehru, most written by or to him. I’ve been opening this book at random, reading whatever catches my fancy but I did go through the complete correspondence between Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose between October 1938 and April 1939, when the decisive parting of ways between the two men occurred. A very interesting look at a clash of ideologies that still casts a shadow over the country. Isn’t it such fun when great men scrap (even when they continue signing off their letters “Yours affectionately” until the very end).
So here’s a quick list of what I have managed to get through:
First 160-odd pages (or ‘Part 1’) of Shantaram. As compelling as I’d expected, and a fast read, but so much energy goes in just holding the thing that I haven’t yet managed more than 35-40 pages a night.
Quite a lot of non-fiction, which is unusual for me, but it’s an area I need to brush up on. Finished Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat (often overweeningly silly, blinkered and patchily written but not without its points of interest). Also Bernard-Henri Levy’s Who Killed Daniel Pearl?, which was especially fascinating for its portrait of the monstrous Omar Sheikh, who masterminded the Pearl kidnapping and murder. Levy’s intense, claustrophobia-inducing book took me back to those dark days in early 2002 when I was working on graveyard shifts for TheNewspaperToday.com and we were all waiting with a mixture of fascination and revulsion for the videos of the killing to be released to the press. The six months post-9/11...what a time that was for a journalist working overnight on a 24-hour website while a new story was breaking in the US every half-hour or so.
Still reading Steven Pinker’s excellent The Blank Slate, about the nature-nurture debate, given to me by Amit Varma a couple of months ago. Riveting though this book is, it requires such concentrated reading that I haven’t been able to get through it once and for all, what with the reviewing obligations that crop up intermittently.
Have started on Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul; am a big fan of the man’s fiction, especially Snow, and am keen to see what he does with this memoir. Love the early passages about his memories of a childhood spent in his familys’s five-storey house with its unused pianos and untouched Chinese porcelain figures.
A Bunch of Old Letters - a new print of a selection of letters edited by Jawaharlal Nehru, most written by or to him. I’ve been opening this book at random, reading whatever catches my fancy but I did go through the complete correspondence between Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose between October 1938 and April 1939, when the decisive parting of ways between the two men occurred. A very interesting look at a clash of ideologies that still casts a shadow over the country. Isn’t it such fun when great men scrap (even when they continue signing off their letters “Yours affectionately” until the very end).
Sunday, June 12, 2005
The jabberwock goes to a party!
Overheard last night at a party hosted by The Compulsive Confessor, struck down in her prime by clubfoot:
The Compulsive Confessor: Jai, you’re looking very lost and bored and out of things. Are you having such a terrible time?
Jabberwock (stunned out of reverie, spilling vodka on Compusive Confessor’s dog): Huh? No, not at all. Was just brooding about how difficult it will be to blog about any of this, knowing that you monitor my site. I’m starting to feel like mainstream media now.
Confessor (brave smile, lip trembling slightly): Oh, please feel free to write anything you want to. I promise I won’t mind. (Looks dangerously close to tears.)
Putu the Cat (sticking cigarette butt into Confessor’s dog): Putu is sure everybody is having a very good time at this fine party.
Enthusiastic young Purdue preppie to Samit Basu: Gosh, are you sure you’re Samit Basu? What a small world this is! We were talking about your book just yesterday.
Samit Basu (rolling eyes and pouting seductively, an expression agreed on before the party got underway): I’m sorry, I know I should be showing more enthusiasm but I’m comfortably high and I couldn’t care less.
Another enthusiastic young preppie: Now let’s all play “I Have Never…”
The charmingly named “I Have Never”, it transpires, is a party game where one person makes a startling revelation about his/her life experiences, e.g. “I have never made out with a dolphin in an elevator” and then the rest of the people present either sip from their drink (if the statement holds good for them) or leave their glass on the table (if it doesn’t). In the dolphin example, everyone sips, except for Putu the Cat, who has done many things with many beasts in many different places.
Compulsive Confessor: Okay, I have never…
Shawg the Dawg: …said anything clever.
(The sardonic Shawg the Dawg, a good friend who disapproves of blogging – and who, if he ever took to it, would be the most entertaining blogger on the circuit - was in his element, though he sat in the same fixed spot throughout the party, regarding everyone detachedly, much like the sage Vyasa during the Mahabharata war, and groaning when Mr Big songs were played.)
Confessor (looking stricken) Stop being mean to me!
Jabberwock: I have never been to a party this exciting.
No one sips. Everyone looks confused.
Samit Basu winks lasciviously at the jabberwock.
And soon after, we all leave.
Postscript: Some of the above is tasteful exaggeration, though considering everything I’ve had to leave out it more than balances out. Sorry, eM. And do invite us again.
The Compulsive Confessor: Jai, you’re looking very lost and bored and out of things. Are you having such a terrible time?
Jabberwock (stunned out of reverie, spilling vodka on Compusive Confessor’s dog): Huh? No, not at all. Was just brooding about how difficult it will be to blog about any of this, knowing that you monitor my site. I’m starting to feel like mainstream media now.
Confessor (brave smile, lip trembling slightly): Oh, please feel free to write anything you want to. I promise I won’t mind. (Looks dangerously close to tears.)
Putu the Cat (sticking cigarette butt into Confessor’s dog): Putu is sure everybody is having a very good time at this fine party.
Enthusiastic young Purdue preppie to Samit Basu: Gosh, are you sure you’re Samit Basu? What a small world this is! We were talking about your book just yesterday.
Samit Basu (rolling eyes and pouting seductively, an expression agreed on before the party got underway): I’m sorry, I know I should be showing more enthusiasm but I’m comfortably high and I couldn’t care less.
Another enthusiastic young preppie: Now let’s all play “I Have Never…”
The charmingly named “I Have Never”, it transpires, is a party game where one person makes a startling revelation about his/her life experiences, e.g. “I have never made out with a dolphin in an elevator” and then the rest of the people present either sip from their drink (if the statement holds good for them) or leave their glass on the table (if it doesn’t). In the dolphin example, everyone sips, except for Putu the Cat, who has done many things with many beasts in many different places.
Compulsive Confessor: Okay, I have never…
Shawg the Dawg: …said anything clever.
(The sardonic Shawg the Dawg, a good friend who disapproves of blogging – and who, if he ever took to it, would be the most entertaining blogger on the circuit - was in his element, though he sat in the same fixed spot throughout the party, regarding everyone detachedly, much like the sage Vyasa during the Mahabharata war, and groaning when Mr Big songs were played.)
Confessor (looking stricken) Stop being mean to me!
Jabberwock: I have never been to a party this exciting.
No one sips. Everyone looks confused.
Samit Basu winks lasciviously at the jabberwock.
And soon after, we all leave.
Postscript: Some of the above is tasteful exaggeration, though considering everything I’ve had to leave out it more than balances out. Sorry, eM. And do invite us again.
Fiction into film
While on the subject of adaptation, here’s a recommendation that most of my friends are already painfully familiar with: if you love books and films, and often ponder the nuances of translation from one medium to the other, please try to get hold of Joy Gould Boyum’s wonderful book Double Exposure: Fiction Into Film. After examining at great length the differences between the two art forms, Boyum goes on to illuminate these differences (and how they can be dealt with in adaptation) through a series of excellent essays on films like Apocalypse Now, Under the Volcano and A Clockwork Orange. It’s one of my favourite books, written by someone who clearly has equal regard for literature and cinema. And though Boyum is a Professor of English and Communication Arts, her writing never degenerates into unreadable academia of the sort that makes you want to give up reading and watching movies and living altogether.
Quick rant on Sunday newspaper content
In a box accompanying a story on films adapted from books, today’s HT City has this to say about the classic status of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather:
“Coppola tried to revive the magic through several sequels, but not with much success.”
Duh. And here I was thinking The Godfather Part II was widely regarded one of the greatest American films ever made (even if you don’t actually think it’s better than the first film – I don’t – you’ll probably concede it’s far more ambitious, and doesn’t have the bulwark of an existing work of literature to fall back on). Even Part III, though much criticized at the time of its release, holds up quite well when you pull it out of the shade of its towering predecessors.
Also, several sequels? There were two. I dunno, maybe technically that’s “several”.
“Coppola tried to revive the magic through several sequels, but not with much success.”
Duh. And here I was thinking The Godfather Part II was widely regarded one of the greatest American films ever made (even if you don’t actually think it’s better than the first film – I don’t – you’ll probably concede it’s far more ambitious, and doesn’t have the bulwark of an existing work of literature to fall back on). Even Part III, though much criticized at the time of its release, holds up quite well when you pull it out of the shade of its towering predecessors.
Also, several sequels? There were two. I dunno, maybe technically that’s “several”.
Saturday, June 11, 2005
I'm on the phone, you save our lives
One of the cardinal rules for anyone who’s just learnt how to drive and is venturing forth onto Delhi’s killer roads is: “Drive not just for yourself but for everyone else. Work with the assumption that everyone else on the road is a moron.”
It’s a sensible rule, though it can seem bitterly unfair to those of us who consider ourselves prudent drivers and believe the earth won’t stop spinning if everyone stays in their lanes for 10 minutes at a stretch. But something really bizarre happened today. The car on my left swerved suddenly and dangerously towards mine, and it was only by braking super-fast that I was able to avoid a paint-scraping incident, or worse. This wasn’t the bizarre part, it’s the kind of thing that happens several times each day. But as I pulled up next to the guy a little way further (the lights had turned red) I noticed he had been chatting on his cellphone. Catching my eye, he made a placatory gesture, pointed at his phone by way of explanation and mouthed “Sorry, I was busy talking.” Seemed a decent sort.
I rolled the window down and shouted across: “Ya, but you shouldn’t have been, right?”
His reply: “I know, but come on, you could see I was distracted, so it was your responsibility to make sure nothing happened.”
This wasn’t said sarcastically, he was being sincere. He completely believed in the logic of what he was saying: I was busy being a bad driver so naturally it was up to you to save both of us. Simple. Clearly there are some drivers on the roads who were taught the dictum “Break as many rules as you want to, just assume everyone else is very sensible.”
It’s a sensible rule, though it can seem bitterly unfair to those of us who consider ourselves prudent drivers and believe the earth won’t stop spinning if everyone stays in their lanes for 10 minutes at a stretch. But something really bizarre happened today. The car on my left swerved suddenly and dangerously towards mine, and it was only by braking super-fast that I was able to avoid a paint-scraping incident, or worse. This wasn’t the bizarre part, it’s the kind of thing that happens several times each day. But as I pulled up next to the guy a little way further (the lights had turned red) I noticed he had been chatting on his cellphone. Catching my eye, he made a placatory gesture, pointed at his phone by way of explanation and mouthed “Sorry, I was busy talking.” Seemed a decent sort.
I rolled the window down and shouted across: “Ya, but you shouldn’t have been, right?”
His reply: “I know, but come on, you could see I was distracted, so it was your responsibility to make sure nothing happened.”
This wasn’t said sarcastically, he was being sincere. He completely believed in the logic of what he was saying: I was busy being a bad driver so naturally it was up to you to save both of us. Simple. Clearly there are some drivers on the roads who were taught the dictum “Break as many rules as you want to, just assume everyone else is very sensible.”
Friday, June 10, 2005
The comments debate
There’s been quite a lot of debate in the blogosphere lately about comments on blog posts, and whether bloggers have the right to disallow them. Of special interest is this link from Indi Cubed, where a number of eminent bloggers expound on this and related issues. The peg was Amit Varma’s decision to disable comments on India Uncut, and fittingly enough the Indi Cubed post itself now has 50 comments with a range of fascinating opinions on blogging dos and don’ts. Do try to read the whole thing.
Many of the bloggers I know have recently had problems with offensive comments on their sites – to the extent of black-marking anonymous commenters, or sometimes even disabling the facility altogether; even the ones with the most interactive blogs sometimes just throw their hands up and say, okay it’s getting a bit much now, I need to take a break for a while.
I don’t know whether this is a trend (like ‘Blogger Burnout’) or something that’s just been happening in my own circle of acquaintances. But here’s my take: I’m starting to feel the pressure of dealing with offensive/antagonistic comments myself.
I never expected this to happen; I figured being thick-skinned, or using humour to drown out unpleasant sounds, was enough to guard against anything. But I’m discovering it doesn’t always work that way. It doesn’t work, for instance, when I’ve just come in from an hour’s traveling in foul weather, already stressed about work and deadline pressure, with personal problems to boot, and then I go to my blog and find that someone has used ‘Comments’ to pillory me for something unrelated to the post. Or launched a vehement personal attack just because he doesn’t agree with my views on a topic. Or put up a long, aggressive comment based on a single sentence from my original post, extrapolated into an easy, black-and-white judgement I never intended to make. At such times, being mature or insouciant is much easier said than done. The temptation is to drop whatever else you have to do and post a long, defensive reply that answers the comment point by point, line by line. (Apart from everything else, you don’t want the commenter to think he’s scored a point because you’re not replying.) Besides causing stress and unpleasantness, this sort of thing takes up far too much of one’s time.
In one of the recent ‘comments-or-no-comments’ debates, Yazad Jal made the point that a nasty comment reflects badly on the commenter, not on the author of the blog. Fair enough, but it still isn’t pleasant to have an abusive comment sitting on your site for other visitors to look at, possibly for several hours, before you discover and delete it yourself.
So am I going to disable comments on my blog? No way, because I’m not ready yet to let go of the high that comes with seeing a new, non-pejorative comment. Also, so far, the positives have far outweighed the negatives. Conversation is, after all, one of the best things about blogging - and meaningful conversations in the blogosphere help build tolerance for other people’s points of view and for the idea that one’s own opinion isn’t the final word on any subject. It’s heartening the number of people there are in the blogosphere who are willing to give other people a hearing, concede a point here and there and, if the other person’s views are really irreconciliable with their own, politely agree to disagree - without allowing the debate to degenerate into petulance or personal attack.
In fact, I’ve even had some rewarding exchanges with visitors who began by posting comments that were more strident/personal than I thought appropriate, but who were gracious enough to accept this when it was pointed out to them. A few days ago, for instance, someone put up a long, angry rant about an article I had written for my newspaper. I blew up and posted an equally incensed reply defending my position and also pointing out that he could have sent me an email, since my ID was mentioned on the site. To be honest, I expected an abusive reply in turn; instead, the guy sent me a much more measured, private email, apologizing for the tone of the original post and then proceeding to make his points about my article (which I, having cooled off, was now able to regard with more objectivity). At times like this one enters the Atticus Finch Dimension and realises that people can be “really nice when you actually get to see them”.
Some people of course will continue to be not so nice and post insulting comments for the sake of it. I have nothing to say to them; the ‘delete’ button will do the talking. But a couple of requests to visitors who don’t mean to be insulting:
1) Please don’t use ‘Comments’ as a lazy shortcut to deliver personal messages. Email still exists, and my ID is on the Profile page.
2) If you don’t agree with something I’ve written, feel free to express your opinion backed by your reasoning, but unaccompanied by personal attacks of the sort “If you don’t like Lewis Carroll you are a single-digit-IQed, cultureless, burbling jabberwock.”
3) It’s flattering when someone is moved enough by one of my posts to send in a 500-word comment, even if it’s to rant against what I’ve written. But please, please expend some of that energy in reading the post through so you get the gist, rather than just picking up a stray sentence and responding to it kneejerkily. It’s a big waste of time when someone posts a long, critical comment and I have to reply “I agree with whatever you have to say.”
And as Amit would say, thanks for your patronage.
“For all sad words of pen, tongue or keyboard, the saddest are these: 0 comments.” - The Anonymous Blogger
Many of the bloggers I know have recently had problems with offensive comments on their sites – to the extent of black-marking anonymous commenters, or sometimes even disabling the facility altogether; even the ones with the most interactive blogs sometimes just throw their hands up and say, okay it’s getting a bit much now, I need to take a break for a while.
I don’t know whether this is a trend (like ‘Blogger Burnout’) or something that’s just been happening in my own circle of acquaintances. But here’s my take: I’m starting to feel the pressure of dealing with offensive/antagonistic comments myself.
I never expected this to happen; I figured being thick-skinned, or using humour to drown out unpleasant sounds, was enough to guard against anything. But I’m discovering it doesn’t always work that way. It doesn’t work, for instance, when I’ve just come in from an hour’s traveling in foul weather, already stressed about work and deadline pressure, with personal problems to boot, and then I go to my blog and find that someone has used ‘Comments’ to pillory me for something unrelated to the post. Or launched a vehement personal attack just because he doesn’t agree with my views on a topic. Or put up a long, aggressive comment based on a single sentence from my original post, extrapolated into an easy, black-and-white judgement I never intended to make. At such times, being mature or insouciant is much easier said than done. The temptation is to drop whatever else you have to do and post a long, defensive reply that answers the comment point by point, line by line. (Apart from everything else, you don’t want the commenter to think he’s scored a point because you’re not replying.) Besides causing stress and unpleasantness, this sort of thing takes up far too much of one’s time.
In one of the recent ‘comments-or-no-comments’ debates, Yazad Jal made the point that a nasty comment reflects badly on the commenter, not on the author of the blog. Fair enough, but it still isn’t pleasant to have an abusive comment sitting on your site for other visitors to look at, possibly for several hours, before you discover and delete it yourself.
So am I going to disable comments on my blog? No way, because I’m not ready yet to let go of the high that comes with seeing a new, non-pejorative comment. Also, so far, the positives have far outweighed the negatives. Conversation is, after all, one of the best things about blogging - and meaningful conversations in the blogosphere help build tolerance for other people’s points of view and for the idea that one’s own opinion isn’t the final word on any subject. It’s heartening the number of people there are in the blogosphere who are willing to give other people a hearing, concede a point here and there and, if the other person’s views are really irreconciliable with their own, politely agree to disagree - without allowing the debate to degenerate into petulance or personal attack.
In fact, I’ve even had some rewarding exchanges with visitors who began by posting comments that were more strident/personal than I thought appropriate, but who were gracious enough to accept this when it was pointed out to them. A few days ago, for instance, someone put up a long, angry rant about an article I had written for my newspaper. I blew up and posted an equally incensed reply defending my position and also pointing out that he could have sent me an email, since my ID was mentioned on the site. To be honest, I expected an abusive reply in turn; instead, the guy sent me a much more measured, private email, apologizing for the tone of the original post and then proceeding to make his points about my article (which I, having cooled off, was now able to regard with more objectivity). At times like this one enters the Atticus Finch Dimension and realises that people can be “really nice when you actually get to see them”.
Some people of course will continue to be not so nice and post insulting comments for the sake of it. I have nothing to say to them; the ‘delete’ button will do the talking. But a couple of requests to visitors who don’t mean to be insulting:
1) Please don’t use ‘Comments’ as a lazy shortcut to deliver personal messages. Email still exists, and my ID is on the Profile page.
2) If you don’t agree with something I’ve written, feel free to express your opinion backed by your reasoning, but unaccompanied by personal attacks of the sort “If you don’t like Lewis Carroll you are a single-digit-IQed, cultureless, burbling jabberwock.”
3) It’s flattering when someone is moved enough by one of my posts to send in a 500-word comment, even if it’s to rant against what I’ve written. But please, please expend some of that energy in reading the post through so you get the gist, rather than just picking up a stray sentence and responding to it kneejerkily. It’s a big waste of time when someone posts a long, critical comment and I have to reply “I agree with whatever you have to say.”
And as Amit would say, thanks for your patronage.
“For all sad words of pen, tongue or keyboard, the saddest are these: 0 comments.” - The Anonymous Blogger
Tuesday, June 07, 2005
The Engelbert concert
Went for the Engelbert Humperdinck concert at Siri Fort auditorium on Sunday evening. The chief attraction was taking my mom, who wrote fan letters to him and Pat Boone and other golden boys back in the 1960s, but I was interested anyway. The first time I heard Engelbert’s voice was on his version of "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" on a 16 Super Oldies cassette. It was one of my favourite songs at the time, still is to an extent – soulful and stately, unlike the original version (which I heard much later) by B J Thomas. The original is faster, more playful and goes very well with the slapsticky bicycle scene featuring Paul Newman and Katharine Ross in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the film for which it was written. But Engelbert’s version was deeper and more melodic and sent a thrill down my 11-year-old spine when he sang the words "So I just did me some talkin’ to the sun/And I said I didn’t like the way he got things done/Sleeping on the job/Wo-o-o...".
Later I heard some of his other songs, or covers of songs – in particular "A Man and a Woman" (evocative of the ethereal French film of the same title), "From Here to Eternity" and "Quando Quando Quando". It didn’t matter much what others said about him – that he was just a pretty voice without much depth or range, part of a generation of assembly-line crooners who didn’t write their own songs, that what he did wasn’t Art. Yarbles, I said, great bolshy yarblockos to the snobbery of the rock-n-roll brigade, I loved the songs and I loved the way he sang them.
What I don’t love is sitting in the Siri Fort auditorium for over an hour and a half, waiting for a concert to begin - first because of an injunction to be seated an hour in advance, and then because important attendees are stuck in Delhi traffic. I’m not a big fan of Siri Fort, a place where you can buy tickets for Rs 1500 and find yourself enjoying the same view as those who paid half as much. This auditorium incidentally is also where I’ve heard some of the stupidest words ever to issue from human lips, during speeches made at numerous film festival inaugurations. So we were all very glad that when the concert did finally get underway it just began, minus long preludes. Engelbert’s 13-member band started tuning up slowly, and then the man himself just sauntered on stage and began singing. The waiting and grumbling was quickly forgotten.
He started with one of his biggest hits, "A Man Without Love", pausing so the audience could complete the refrain for him; but there was hardly a hint of participation at this point. I sank low into my seat, convinced the concert would fall flat - my mom and I were discussing the likelihood that not many Delhiites of her generation would have been into Engelbert compared to say Bombay or Bangalore (where the concert tickets are being sold at much higher prices). But we needn’t have worried; it took some time for the audience to warm up but by the fifth or sixth song everyone was in the right mood, and the balding man seated in front of us commenced a series of "woo! woo!"s that somehow managed to be endearing rather than annoying.
As concerts by international artistes go this was relatively modest in scale, but then that’s what we were expecting. Most of the audience was aged between 40 and 55, there were no spectacular light-and-sound displays, just a 69-year-old man singing one love song after another with a lot of panache. You don’t pore over the lyrics of the kinds of songs Engelbert sings, which meant that apart from the older tracks (because we were all familiar with those anyway) there was a certain sameness to the numbers; one song segued into the next, the music was hummable but unexceptional and what really held it all together was the golden voice and the occasional showing off by individual band members. But the concert was at its best when the instruments weren’t allowed to drown out the singing.
There were some nice stand-up comedy interludes too: Engelbert (who by the way has a wonderfully resonant speaking voice too, which isn’t a given when you’re a good singer) did some mimickry, took part in a cheerfully risqué act with a thong that was brought onstage for him to autograph; made digs at Tom Jones, did an imitation of Michael Jackson’s Moonwalk, even an Elvis-style bump-and-grind routine. He’s sprightly for his age but I suppose you can expect that once you know he does up to 140 concerts per year(!!). There were signs of tiring late in the proceedings; he started pausing more between sentences while he was talking, sang a couple of numbers sitting down ("because I’m almost 33, you know," he joked), took water breaks. Fortunately he found the energy to end the show in style, with a medley of songs including "Quando Quando Quando" and the classic "Release Me", and finally a rousing version of "My Way" (for many, that would engender unfavourable comparisons with Ol’ Blues Eyes Sinatra, but I love every conceivable version of that track, even Sid Vicious’s snarling, petulant one).
My one regret: Engelbert didn’t sing "A Man and a Woman". (I didn’t expect, or want, him to perform the intimate "Raindrops..." in this setting, with back-up musicians.) But that apart, it was a great night. As we left, my mother and her childhood friend, who had also come along, joked about the goofy expressions on the faces of the elderly ladies exiting the auditorium. "Now they’ll all have to go back home to their cranky husbands," they giggled. And boast that a nearly 70-year-old singer with black-dyed sideburns had released them from reality for an evening.
Later I heard some of his other songs, or covers of songs – in particular "A Man and a Woman" (evocative of the ethereal French film of the same title), "From Here to Eternity" and "Quando Quando Quando". It didn’t matter much what others said about him – that he was just a pretty voice without much depth or range, part of a generation of assembly-line crooners who didn’t write their own songs, that what he did wasn’t Art. Yarbles, I said, great bolshy yarblockos to the snobbery of the rock-n-roll brigade, I loved the songs and I loved the way he sang them.
What I don’t love is sitting in the Siri Fort auditorium for over an hour and a half, waiting for a concert to begin - first because of an injunction to be seated an hour in advance, and then because important attendees are stuck in Delhi traffic. I’m not a big fan of Siri Fort, a place where you can buy tickets for Rs 1500 and find yourself enjoying the same view as those who paid half as much. This auditorium incidentally is also where I’ve heard some of the stupidest words ever to issue from human lips, during speeches made at numerous film festival inaugurations. So we were all very glad that when the concert did finally get underway it just began, minus long preludes. Engelbert’s 13-member band started tuning up slowly, and then the man himself just sauntered on stage and began singing. The waiting and grumbling was quickly forgotten.
He started with one of his biggest hits, "A Man Without Love", pausing so the audience could complete the refrain for him; but there was hardly a hint of participation at this point. I sank low into my seat, convinced the concert would fall flat - my mom and I were discussing the likelihood that not many Delhiites of her generation would have been into Engelbert compared to say Bombay or Bangalore (where the concert tickets are being sold at much higher prices). But we needn’t have worried; it took some time for the audience to warm up but by the fifth or sixth song everyone was in the right mood, and the balding man seated in front of us commenced a series of "woo! woo!"s that somehow managed to be endearing rather than annoying.
As concerts by international artistes go this was relatively modest in scale, but then that’s what we were expecting. Most of the audience was aged between 40 and 55, there were no spectacular light-and-sound displays, just a 69-year-old man singing one love song after another with a lot of panache. You don’t pore over the lyrics of the kinds of songs Engelbert sings, which meant that apart from the older tracks (because we were all familiar with those anyway) there was a certain sameness to the numbers; one song segued into the next, the music was hummable but unexceptional and what really held it all together was the golden voice and the occasional showing off by individual band members. But the concert was at its best when the instruments weren’t allowed to drown out the singing.
There were some nice stand-up comedy interludes too: Engelbert (who by the way has a wonderfully resonant speaking voice too, which isn’t a given when you’re a good singer) did some mimickry, took part in a cheerfully risqué act with a thong that was brought onstage for him to autograph; made digs at Tom Jones, did an imitation of Michael Jackson’s Moonwalk, even an Elvis-style bump-and-grind routine. He’s sprightly for his age but I suppose you can expect that once you know he does up to 140 concerts per year(!!). There were signs of tiring late in the proceedings; he started pausing more between sentences while he was talking, sang a couple of numbers sitting down ("because I’m almost 33, you know," he joked), took water breaks. Fortunately he found the energy to end the show in style, with a medley of songs including "Quando Quando Quando" and the classic "Release Me", and finally a rousing version of "My Way" (for many, that would engender unfavourable comparisons with Ol’ Blues Eyes Sinatra, but I love every conceivable version of that track, even Sid Vicious’s snarling, petulant one).
My one regret: Engelbert didn’t sing "A Man and a Woman". (I didn’t expect, or want, him to perform the intimate "Raindrops..." in this setting, with back-up musicians.) But that apart, it was a great night. As we left, my mother and her childhood friend, who had also come along, joked about the goofy expressions on the faces of the elderly ladies exiting the auditorium. "Now they’ll all have to go back home to their cranky husbands," they giggled. And boast that a nearly 70-year-old singer with black-dyed sideburns had released them from reality for an evening.
Monday, June 06, 2005
Song tag (not to be confused with Sontag)
I’ve been tagged. Again! By J this time, and it’s a million times harder because the key question is about five songs that mean a lot to me. This is clearly impossible to do but I’ve been tagged and it must be done; and so, again, here’s the standard disclaimer: the list will be completely different 5 minutes after I’ve finished writing it.
The easy questions first:
Total volume of music files on my computer - pretty insignificant actually; I’ve never been able to listen to music while working.
The last CD/cassette I bought was the Kisna soundtrack
Songs playing right now none
And gulp, here goes:
Five songs that mean a lot to me - am dividing this into 5 Hindi and 5 English songs (as if that’ll help!)
Hindi
- “O Saathi Re” from Muqaddar ka Sikandar and “Chale the Saath Milke” from Haseena Maan Jayegi
One of the first music cassettes in my life was a collection of songs from Prakash Mehra-directed movies, and “O Saathi Re” and “Chale the Saath Milke” inspired my one serious attempt, at the age of six, to develop a singing voice of my own – with the aid of a double-deck tape recorder. As posterity will record I failed spectacularly, but these songs are still very special to me. “O Saathi Re” of course also carries associations with Amitabh at his most soulful; our most underappreciated romantic actor gazing longingly at Raakhee (and this was one time I could even put up with her shrill “Ameeeeeet!”)
- “Dil ke Jharoke mein” from Brahmachari
For the longest time I had two videocassettes featuring songs from Shammi Kapoor movies and this was my favourite of the lot. Great, vibrant track that manages to be menacing and melancholic all at once, and is forever complemented in my mind by the image of Shammi K sitting at the piano glaring daggers at Asha Parekh (I think) and Pran. And masked dancers dressed in black and white performing in the background. Awesome.
- “Katra Katra” from Ijaazat
Very difficult to explain why, but if you’ve heard the song I probably don’t have to…
- “Ae Ajnabi” from Dil Se
When Dil Se came out I preferred this quiet track to the other, more instantly catchy, radio-friendly songs like “Chaiya Chaiya”. But it became even more special when the singing star of our post-grad crowd started dedicating this song to me at each of our drunken get-togethers. Still have a very muffled version of one of those dedications recorded on my cell-phone!
English
Pointless, because my original idea was to include one song by each of my favourite artistes/bands but then I realised there are far more than five of those. Still:
- “Drive” by REM
If all traces of rock music from the 1990s had to be erased and I were allowed to save just one representative track, this would be it. There, I’ve said it.
- “Echoes” and “Atom Heart Mother” by Pink Floyd
Two 20 minute-plus tracks that show Floyd as they were (and could have been) before superstardom and ego-swell swallowed them up. Nothing they did post-1971 matches the breadth and ambition of these two songs (though the middle-section of “Atom Heart Mother” is a little too radical even for my taste).
- “My October Symphony” by the Pet Shop Boys
From PSB’s elegiac, underappreciated album Behaviour, this little-heard number alludes to the Russian Revolution, to the fall of the Berlin Wall, to lost love and to whatever else you like; but the real treat here is how beautifully the string arrangement works in conjunction with Neil Tennant’s mellifluous voice.
And, just one song each by Dylan and the Beatles? What a hoot! Oh, well…
- “Visions of Johanna” by Bob Dylan
Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re trying to be so quiet,
We sit here stranded, though we’re all doing our best to deny it…
Enough said.
- “I am the Walrus” by The Beatles
Because of “googoojoob”. Because of the semolina pilchard climbing up the Eiffel Tower. Because of the elementary penguin singing Hare Krishna. Because of Lewis Carroll and Jabberwocky. Because this song was the real Lennon in the Sky with Diamonds.
And I’m tagging:
Serendipits
Working Title
Mixed Bag
(Of course, anyone else I know is free to pick this up.)
The easy questions first:
Total volume of music files on my computer - pretty insignificant actually; I’ve never been able to listen to music while working.
The last CD/cassette I bought was the Kisna soundtrack
Songs playing right now none
And gulp, here goes:
Five songs that mean a lot to me - am dividing this into 5 Hindi and 5 English songs (as if that’ll help!)
Hindi
- “O Saathi Re” from Muqaddar ka Sikandar and “Chale the Saath Milke” from Haseena Maan Jayegi
One of the first music cassettes in my life was a collection of songs from Prakash Mehra-directed movies, and “O Saathi Re” and “Chale the Saath Milke” inspired my one serious attempt, at the age of six, to develop a singing voice of my own – with the aid of a double-deck tape recorder. As posterity will record I failed spectacularly, but these songs are still very special to me. “O Saathi Re” of course also carries associations with Amitabh at his most soulful; our most underappreciated romantic actor gazing longingly at Raakhee (and this was one time I could even put up with her shrill “Ameeeeeet!”)
- “Dil ke Jharoke mein” from Brahmachari
For the longest time I had two videocassettes featuring songs from Shammi Kapoor movies and this was my favourite of the lot. Great, vibrant track that manages to be menacing and melancholic all at once, and is forever complemented in my mind by the image of Shammi K sitting at the piano glaring daggers at Asha Parekh (I think) and Pran. And masked dancers dressed in black and white performing in the background. Awesome.
- “Katra Katra” from Ijaazat
Very difficult to explain why, but if you’ve heard the song I probably don’t have to…
- “Ae Ajnabi” from Dil Se
When Dil Se came out I preferred this quiet track to the other, more instantly catchy, radio-friendly songs like “Chaiya Chaiya”. But it became even more special when the singing star of our post-grad crowd started dedicating this song to me at each of our drunken get-togethers. Still have a very muffled version of one of those dedications recorded on my cell-phone!
English
Pointless, because my original idea was to include one song by each of my favourite artistes/bands but then I realised there are far more than five of those. Still:
- “Drive” by REM
If all traces of rock music from the 1990s had to be erased and I were allowed to save just one representative track, this would be it. There, I’ve said it.
- “Echoes” and “Atom Heart Mother” by Pink Floyd
Two 20 minute-plus tracks that show Floyd as they were (and could have been) before superstardom and ego-swell swallowed them up. Nothing they did post-1971 matches the breadth and ambition of these two songs (though the middle-section of “Atom Heart Mother” is a little too radical even for my taste).
- “My October Symphony” by the Pet Shop Boys
From PSB’s elegiac, underappreciated album Behaviour, this little-heard number alludes to the Russian Revolution, to the fall of the Berlin Wall, to lost love and to whatever else you like; but the real treat here is how beautifully the string arrangement works in conjunction with Neil Tennant’s mellifluous voice.
And, just one song each by Dylan and the Beatles? What a hoot! Oh, well…
- “Visions of Johanna” by Bob Dylan
Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re trying to be so quiet,
We sit here stranded, though we’re all doing our best to deny it…
Enough said.
- “I am the Walrus” by The Beatles
Because of “googoojoob”. Because of the semolina pilchard climbing up the Eiffel Tower. Because of the elementary penguin singing Hare Krishna. Because of Lewis Carroll and Jabberwocky. Because this song was the real Lennon in the Sky with Diamonds.
And I’m tagging:
Serendipits
Working Title
Mixed Bag
(Of course, anyone else I know is free to pick this up.)
Sunday, June 05, 2005
Bollywood: what's changed?
Further to my Bunty aur Babli post:
As someone who’s stayed away from Hindi movies since around 1990-91 but has seen large chunks of some of the ‘big’ films of the last few years on TV (Dil Chahta Hai, Kal Ho Na Ho, Koi Mil Gaya), I have an unusual vantage point for commenting on the major changes in mainstream Bollywood since the lowbrow 1980s. And honestly I’m saddened by some of what I’ve seen.
The disappointment is partly a result of all the hype about present-day Bollywood being so great compared to 15 or 20 years ago. Many of my friends, trying to encourage me to get back into the Hindi movie scene, have gone on about how classy the films have become, how the cinematography and editing has improved beyond imagining, about the “international” look and feel of the films. “There’s been a vast improvement in quality,” a friend said at a get-together a few months ago, “so stop being such a snob and get back to earth where the rest of us are.”
‘Vast improvement in quality’? I don’t agree with that, at least not based on what little I’ve seen recently (and while it is perhaps too little for a summary judgement, I’ve seen enough to make some specific points). For the record, of the movies I have seen I enjoyed Dil Chahta Hai enormously and thought Kal Ho Na Ho was nice and breezy in parts. But even in those films, especially the latter, there were a couple of things that gave the lie to this notion that Bollywood has somehow evolved in a major way in the last 15 years.
Enough rambling; the point is this:
Bollywood has changed drastically in some very superficial ways. Some of the best-received films today are a hotchpotch of visual gimmickry, flashy jump-cuts borrowed straight from MTV videos and OH SO MUCH posturing by the stars (they arrange themselves in a variety of poses, these guys and dolls, they look meanly into the camera and do cool-looking things with their hands, and it reminds me of Mad magazine’s spoof on the stock gestures made by boy-band members in music videos).
Watching one particularly garish, loud and pointless item number in Bunty aur Babli, I suddenly started thinking about Himmatwala. Mid 1980s. Jumping-Jack Jeetendra. Thunder-Thighs Sridevi. Lots of heavy breathing and dancing on giant tablas. Astonishingly poor music. (At one time in the 1980s it became common to fast-forward songs, they were so bad.)
Why was I thinking of all this while watching Rani and Abhishek shake their booty? Because to my mind Himmatwala was pretty much the nadir of one of the most mediocre phases in mainstream Hindi cinema. It represented all that was lowbrow about Hindi movies, all that had to be sneered at. I had an email conversation recently with a feature-writer friend who works on the films beat in Mumbai and who expressed disdain about those dark days. But now, watching Bunty aur Babli, I couldn’t for the life of me see exactly what has changed over the years. Well yes, the quality of cinematography is worlds away from what it was even 10 years ago…but given technical advances, wasn’t that to be expected? Meanwhile, the characters are still as two-dimensional as they ever were (even though the actors are probably better on the whole). On a few occasions here and there, when a talented director works with a solid script, the results can be brilliant. But mostly it’s just so much dross; the biggest difference it seems to me is that Bollywood has become pretentious about its place in the world. Fifteen years ago no one had any delusions about their standards; now they’re all falling over each other in an orgy of back-patting.
Now I’m not trying to pass blanket judgement on the elements that mainstream Bollywood fare has been built on; the lack of logic, the absence of “meaningful” films. Because the same arguments that have always applied still hold good today: these movies are made for the masses after all, it’s pure entertainment value, people need them to escape the humdrum of their daily lives etc, and watching them in our multiplexes it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that most of a movie’s business comes from the backward regions. I have no problem with any of that. What I do have a problem with is all this chest-thumping about today’s Bollywood being superior to the one I have childhood memories of.
Because in essence, things haven’t changed that much at all. I could give plenty of examples but here’s just one. Apparently one of the great developments in recent Hindi films is that characters have finally started lip-locking onscreen; even simulated sex is depicted. Forward-looking critics tell us this is such a welcome change from the bad old days when the camera would cut to a bush shaking or flowers nodding against each other. “People do kiss and have sex in real life,” they say sagely, “so it was high time Bollywood overcame its coyness about these things.” All very well Timothies, but how do you reconcile this obsession with “realism” with the fact that an intense lip-to-lip kissing scene is still followed immediately by the two lovers swaying their hips and dancing around trees accompanied by a dozen extras? Real people? Come on, this is still Bollywood! So for heaven’s sake stop being so condescending about those rustling bushes and bird-and-bee shots!
P.S. A couple of months ago Thalassa Mikra had some very similar things to say in a nostalgia post; she wrote:
“During the 1980s Bollywood was at its kitschy best and we embraced it wholeheartedly…the films didn't make for profound cinema, and the songs may not have any hipster appeal, but there was an honesty to them that I admire even now. Current Bollywood is over-stylized, painfully trendy, borrowing camera styles from MTV, populated with actors and actresses who cannot speak Hindi to save their lives.”
Read the full thing here.
As someone who’s stayed away from Hindi movies since around 1990-91 but has seen large chunks of some of the ‘big’ films of the last few years on TV (Dil Chahta Hai, Kal Ho Na Ho, Koi Mil Gaya), I have an unusual vantage point for commenting on the major changes in mainstream Bollywood since the lowbrow 1980s. And honestly I’m saddened by some of what I’ve seen.
The disappointment is partly a result of all the hype about present-day Bollywood being so great compared to 15 or 20 years ago. Many of my friends, trying to encourage me to get back into the Hindi movie scene, have gone on about how classy the films have become, how the cinematography and editing has improved beyond imagining, about the “international” look and feel of the films. “There’s been a vast improvement in quality,” a friend said at a get-together a few months ago, “so stop being such a snob and get back to earth where the rest of us are.”
‘Vast improvement in quality’? I don’t agree with that, at least not based on what little I’ve seen recently (and while it is perhaps too little for a summary judgement, I’ve seen enough to make some specific points). For the record, of the movies I have seen I enjoyed Dil Chahta Hai enormously and thought Kal Ho Na Ho was nice and breezy in parts. But even in those films, especially the latter, there were a couple of things that gave the lie to this notion that Bollywood has somehow evolved in a major way in the last 15 years.
Enough rambling; the point is this:
Bollywood has changed drastically in some very superficial ways. Some of the best-received films today are a hotchpotch of visual gimmickry, flashy jump-cuts borrowed straight from MTV videos and OH SO MUCH posturing by the stars (they arrange themselves in a variety of poses, these guys and dolls, they look meanly into the camera and do cool-looking things with their hands, and it reminds me of Mad magazine’s spoof on the stock gestures made by boy-band members in music videos).
Watching one particularly garish, loud and pointless item number in Bunty aur Babli, I suddenly started thinking about Himmatwala. Mid 1980s. Jumping-Jack Jeetendra. Thunder-Thighs Sridevi. Lots of heavy breathing and dancing on giant tablas. Astonishingly poor music. (At one time in the 1980s it became common to fast-forward songs, they were so bad.)
Why was I thinking of all this while watching Rani and Abhishek shake their booty? Because to my mind Himmatwala was pretty much the nadir of one of the most mediocre phases in mainstream Hindi cinema. It represented all that was lowbrow about Hindi movies, all that had to be sneered at. I had an email conversation recently with a feature-writer friend who works on the films beat in Mumbai and who expressed disdain about those dark days. But now, watching Bunty aur Babli, I couldn’t for the life of me see exactly what has changed over the years. Well yes, the quality of cinematography is worlds away from what it was even 10 years ago…but given technical advances, wasn’t that to be expected? Meanwhile, the characters are still as two-dimensional as they ever were (even though the actors are probably better on the whole). On a few occasions here and there, when a talented director works with a solid script, the results can be brilliant. But mostly it’s just so much dross; the biggest difference it seems to me is that Bollywood has become pretentious about its place in the world. Fifteen years ago no one had any delusions about their standards; now they’re all falling over each other in an orgy of back-patting.
Now I’m not trying to pass blanket judgement on the elements that mainstream Bollywood fare has been built on; the lack of logic, the absence of “meaningful” films. Because the same arguments that have always applied still hold good today: these movies are made for the masses after all, it’s pure entertainment value, people need them to escape the humdrum of their daily lives etc, and watching them in our multiplexes it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that most of a movie’s business comes from the backward regions. I have no problem with any of that. What I do have a problem with is all this chest-thumping about today’s Bollywood being superior to the one I have childhood memories of.
Because in essence, things haven’t changed that much at all. I could give plenty of examples but here’s just one. Apparently one of the great developments in recent Hindi films is that characters have finally started lip-locking onscreen; even simulated sex is depicted. Forward-looking critics tell us this is such a welcome change from the bad old days when the camera would cut to a bush shaking or flowers nodding against each other. “People do kiss and have sex in real life,” they say sagely, “so it was high time Bollywood overcame its coyness about these things.” All very well Timothies, but how do you reconcile this obsession with “realism” with the fact that an intense lip-to-lip kissing scene is still followed immediately by the two lovers swaying their hips and dancing around trees accompanied by a dozen extras? Real people? Come on, this is still Bollywood! So for heaven’s sake stop being so condescending about those rustling bushes and bird-and-bee shots!
P.S. A couple of months ago Thalassa Mikra had some very similar things to say in a nostalgia post; she wrote:
“During the 1980s Bollywood was at its kitschy best and we embraced it wholeheartedly…the films didn't make for profound cinema, and the songs may not have any hipster appeal, but there was an honesty to them that I admire even now. Current Bollywood is over-stylized, painfully trendy, borrowing camera styles from MTV, populated with actors and actresses who cannot speak Hindi to save their lives.”
Read the full thing here.
Saturday, June 04, 2005
Bunty, Babli aur Bollywood
Significant day in my life, the first time in nearly 10 years that I saw a Hindi film - Bunty and Babli – in its entirety (and on the big screen). I think I overdosed on Hindi movies so much in my childhood that when I finally went off them I just never felt the need to go back. Over the years I’ve faced countless charges of snobbery from friends; depending on my mood, my response ranges from denying the charges vehemently to accepting them and suggesting to the accuser that maybe they should tune the knob on their own viewing choices to ‘Mature’.
Bunty and Babli wasn’t a great film by any standards (not even by Masala Bollywood’s), it was wildly uneven and deteriorated towards the end but on the whole I enjoyed the experience. The first half was a lot of fun, Abhishek Bachchan and Rani Mukherjee are both charismatic and easy to watch, and most importantly I had great company. But this isn’t a review, I just want to make a few observations about this film and then a larger one about Bollywood.
Here goes:
- Rani Mukherjee, lovely girl and so on but directors/scriptwriters must heretofore work in unison to ensure that she never, ever again plays a character who has to scream, bawl or suffer labour pangs. In some circles, I’m told, her voice is considered huskily sexy. Well, sorry people, but that’s a fallacy. It’s a wicked lie. Her voice is only as sexy as, let’s say, husk. It’s just about tolerable when she whispers but when she weeps loud and long (as she does here in one agonizingly protracted scene at a railway station) it sounds like 700 cats being slaughtered all at once. Seven hundred, not one less. I leapt clean out of my seat when she suddenly screamed on seeing Abhishek being arrested by (copper) Amitabh. Later in the film she gives birth and this time it was like 700 cats being simultaneously slaughtered and reborn. And I didn’t have earmuffs, an aspirin or a cyanide tablet with me in the hall.
- Bachchan Senior made his first appearance midway through the film and while his first scene was electric, in the second half his very presence completely screwed up the movie’s narrative flow. I believe there’s been some hype about this film being the Bachchans’ first joint onscreen appearance. Problem is, their first scene together turned into an extended self-referential joke and the actual storyline was put on standby for at least 20 minutes (during which time Rani Mukherjee was altogether offscreen) while papa and beta joked around and talked about irrelevant things; I must admit though to being slightly shocked when Amitabh tells Abhishek about a brief relationship he had once, and there’s a Rekha song playing distinctly in the background. Anyway, this was followed by another of those incestuous Bollywood item numbers featuring a major star, in this case plastic doll Aishwarya Rai, who dances with the Bachchans. (There’s another one for the family video album, I was thinking.)
- Today’s stars are so articulate in English in real life that there’s a problem when, while playing bucolic characters, they have to speak a few words/a stray phrase in English; they sound far too sophisticated for their characters. This happened a few times with both Abhishek and Rani.
- Who did the sound effects editing for Bunty aur Babli? There was this horrible little noise that would appear on the soundtrack for around two seconds each time the two protagonists were planning a new scheme. I wish I could describe it adequately; the first few times it sounded like a rooster crowing in Hell but later it was more along the lines of a hungry, giggling hyena sneaking up on two fornicating goats in the throes of ecstasy – and all the sounds played together at once. (Okay, no more aural analogies from me.)
- In his first scene, Bachchan senior had this interesting thing going with his voice: it was guttural in a very distinct way, a voice I haven’t heard him use before, I think it might be a Lucknowi accent. But in his subsequent scenes he reverted to his usual style of speaking, and I couldn't help feeling this has to do with appearing in 10-12 movies a year. You’re moving constantly from one shoot to another, mixing up your roles and it becomes hard to maintain any sort of grip on one character. If that’s the case, it reflects badly on the standard Bollywood style of working and makes a case in favour of what Aamir Khan does: dealing only with one film at a time, even if that seems pretentious.
- Abhishek’s good, often very good, but nope, he’s not a patch on Amitabh in his prime. (Fine, I’m a Golden Age-ist.) This film’s bag of references included playing songs from older Amitabh movies in the background. For me this was counter-productive because I would stop paying attention to what was happening and start thinking about Amitabh and Kishore Kumar (when they played the original, vibrant, un-remixed version of “Main hoon Don”) and Amitabh-Rekha (“Salaam-e-Ishq”).
- Prem Chopra and Puneet Issar. When I last met Hindi cinema they were bad guys, now they’re both playing good Sikhs. They shake their heads around apologetically and say ‘Sat Sri Akal ji’. Prem Chopra! What happened?
(Another post on present-day Bollywood to follow soon.)
Bunty and Babli wasn’t a great film by any standards (not even by Masala Bollywood’s), it was wildly uneven and deteriorated towards the end but on the whole I enjoyed the experience. The first half was a lot of fun, Abhishek Bachchan and Rani Mukherjee are both charismatic and easy to watch, and most importantly I had great company. But this isn’t a review, I just want to make a few observations about this film and then a larger one about Bollywood.
Here goes:
- Rani Mukherjee, lovely girl and so on but directors/scriptwriters must heretofore work in unison to ensure that she never, ever again plays a character who has to scream, bawl or suffer labour pangs. In some circles, I’m told, her voice is considered huskily sexy. Well, sorry people, but that’s a fallacy. It’s a wicked lie. Her voice is only as sexy as, let’s say, husk. It’s just about tolerable when she whispers but when she weeps loud and long (as she does here in one agonizingly protracted scene at a railway station) it sounds like 700 cats being slaughtered all at once. Seven hundred, not one less. I leapt clean out of my seat when she suddenly screamed on seeing Abhishek being arrested by (copper) Amitabh. Later in the film she gives birth and this time it was like 700 cats being simultaneously slaughtered and reborn. And I didn’t have earmuffs, an aspirin or a cyanide tablet with me in the hall.
- Bachchan Senior made his first appearance midway through the film and while his first scene was electric, in the second half his very presence completely screwed up the movie’s narrative flow. I believe there’s been some hype about this film being the Bachchans’ first joint onscreen appearance. Problem is, their first scene together turned into an extended self-referential joke and the actual storyline was put on standby for at least 20 minutes (during which time Rani Mukherjee was altogether offscreen) while papa and beta joked around and talked about irrelevant things; I must admit though to being slightly shocked when Amitabh tells Abhishek about a brief relationship he had once, and there’s a Rekha song playing distinctly in the background. Anyway, this was followed by another of those incestuous Bollywood item numbers featuring a major star, in this case plastic doll Aishwarya Rai, who dances with the Bachchans. (There’s another one for the family video album, I was thinking.)
- Today’s stars are so articulate in English in real life that there’s a problem when, while playing bucolic characters, they have to speak a few words/a stray phrase in English; they sound far too sophisticated for their characters. This happened a few times with both Abhishek and Rani.
- Who did the sound effects editing for Bunty aur Babli? There was this horrible little noise that would appear on the soundtrack for around two seconds each time the two protagonists were planning a new scheme. I wish I could describe it adequately; the first few times it sounded like a rooster crowing in Hell but later it was more along the lines of a hungry, giggling hyena sneaking up on two fornicating goats in the throes of ecstasy – and all the sounds played together at once. (Okay, no more aural analogies from me.)
- In his first scene, Bachchan senior had this interesting thing going with his voice: it was guttural in a very distinct way, a voice I haven’t heard him use before, I think it might be a Lucknowi accent. But in his subsequent scenes he reverted to his usual style of speaking, and I couldn't help feeling this has to do with appearing in 10-12 movies a year. You’re moving constantly from one shoot to another, mixing up your roles and it becomes hard to maintain any sort of grip on one character. If that’s the case, it reflects badly on the standard Bollywood style of working and makes a case in favour of what Aamir Khan does: dealing only with one film at a time, even if that seems pretentious.
- Abhishek’s good, often very good, but nope, he’s not a patch on Amitabh in his prime. (Fine, I’m a Golden Age-ist.) This film’s bag of references included playing songs from older Amitabh movies in the background. For me this was counter-productive because I would stop paying attention to what was happening and start thinking about Amitabh and Kishore Kumar (when they played the original, vibrant, un-remixed version of “Main hoon Don”) and Amitabh-Rekha (“Salaam-e-Ishq”).
- Prem Chopra and Puneet Issar. When I last met Hindi cinema they were bad guys, now they’re both playing good Sikhs. They shake their heads around apologetically and say ‘Sat Sri Akal ji’. Prem Chopra! What happened?
(Another post on present-day Bollywood to follow soon.)
The walls had fallen down and the Windows had opened...
... says Thomas Friedman in one of the many inept passages in his book The World is Flat. Now Suhail Kazi sends me this link to a hilarious review by Matt Taibbi. Strictly speaking it isn’t so much a review as a long rant full of ad hominems, but it can be argued the Friedman book deserves no better.
Also, just had to share this bit from the closing pages of the book, it had me in splits:
"The flattening of the world...has presented us with new opportunities, new challenges...particularly as Americans. It is imperative that we be the best global citizens that we can be - because in a flat world, if you don't visit a bad neighborhood, it might visit you."
Also, just had to share this bit from the closing pages of the book, it had me in splits:
"The flattening of the world...has presented us with new opportunities, new challenges...particularly as Americans. It is imperative that we be the best global citizens that we can be - because in a flat world, if you don't visit a bad neighborhood, it might visit you."
17 years ago...
…the Americans robbed me of a Spelling Bee trophy in school when I spelt “tumour” T-U-M-O-R and had to settle for runner-up position. Today I’ve been vindicated by 13-year-old Anurag Kashyap, an Indian-American who won the 78th US National Spelling Bee Competition.
(“Beta, tumne meri laaj rakhi.”
“Yeah, dude, whatever.”)
Anyway, what I’m looking forward to now are the impassioned letters to the editor/opinion polls/editorials debating whether this is something for Indians to be proud of, or whether we should just give it the blasé “did you hear old Vidiiaa won the Nobel” treatment.
P.S. Thirteen-year-olds are expected to know the spelling of “”appoggiatura”? When was the last time any of you used that word in polite company?
(“Beta, tumne meri laaj rakhi.”
“Yeah, dude, whatever.”)
Anyway, what I’m looking forward to now are the impassioned letters to the editor/opinion polls/editorials debating whether this is something for Indians to be proud of, or whether we should just give it the blasé “did you hear old Vidiiaa won the Nobel” treatment.
P.S. Thirteen-year-olds are expected to know the spelling of “”appoggiatura”? When was the last time any of you used that word in polite company?
Friday, June 03, 2005
Book tag
Here, as promised, is my Book-Tag meme (thanks, Yazad):
Total Number of Books I Own
Could be anywhere upwards of 3,000 (though if I’m allowed to include every individual Amar Chitra Katha comic it’ll probably be over 5,000!).
Last Book I Bought
A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami
Last Book I Read
The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Globalized World in the 21st Century by Thomas Friedman
Five Books that Mean a Lot to Me
Five books? Pointless exercise, as any book-lover would know. But it’s great fun too, so we’re all doing it. In his meme, Amit Varma says his list might be different next year. Well, mine would probably be different tomorrow, or an hour after I’ve posted this blog. (Except for the Faraway Tree books, which will stay forever.)
Here’s the list:
The Enchanted Wood/Faraway Tree books by Enid Blyton
Blyton doesn’t seem to be much in favour these days, and besides there are so many clever children’s writers around now, but she’s given me some of my earliest, most precious reading memories. Even today, every few months I need to go back to the three Faraway Tree books. And every time, without fail, as I near the end of the last book I find myself wishing that a previously unread chapter would magically materialize. And then another, and another. And that the stories of the magical lands atop the tree would never run out.
The Mahabharata - Various authors
Am I allowed to include this? I’ve read around 10-12 versions by different authors and my favourite single-volume version is the Kamala Subramaniam one, which is over-sentimental at times (though mind you, I didn’t think so when I first read it at the age of 10!) but also superbly captures the pathos of the story – the interior lives, motivations and emotions not just of the obviously sympathetic characters like Bheeshma and Karna but also of the likes of Duryodhana (who was turned into a leering Hindi-film villain by B R Chopra in that gaudy TV epic we were all so addicted to 15 years ago). Just to clarify though, I’m talking here about the epic in general, not any one author’s version.
Cult Movies 3 by Danny Peary
Some of my crucial reading years were spent on film books and while I relished a lot of the academic stuff, one of my personal favourites is the simple, conversational – but very, very intelligently written - Cult Movies 3, which I happened to stumble upon at a sale in CP and picked up only because one of the movies discussed was Hitchcock’s Psycho. The great thing about Peary’s writing is that he has that first, most important quality of any true movie-lover: unconditional open-mindedness about what he’s willing to watch. He writes with equal passion and insight about such B-films as Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and the 1970s “thinking person’s porn film” Café Flesh as he does about “respectable” classics like Dr Strangelove. Without his example, I don’t think I would ever have been able to discuss movies like Star Wars and Deewaar with any confidence.
The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro
I’ve blogged about The Unconsoled at length before, but well, here it is again. Reading it at a time when I had started getting terribly weighed down by the difficulties of time management, I was enormously affected by Ishiguro’s great novel about a man who seems constantly to be treading a pre-determined path others have laid out for him, never gaining control over his own life, always losing sight of the things that really matter. The book’s circular, surrealistic narrative is seriously disconcerting; offhand I can’t think of another novel that provides such a vivid sense of a nightmare world from which there’s no waking (among films David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive comes close). At least, I thought it was a nightmare world until I went on a couple of high-activity, high-tension junkets and realized that Ishiguro’s book was an only slightly exaggerated version of our real lives.
And…that’s it. I’m leaving the fifth slot blank, as a reminder of how futile this exercise is. But just off the cuff, here are some honorary mentions, all of which would (probably) make it to my Top 500 (!):
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
A Cinema of Loneliness - Robert Kolker
Fiction into Film - Joy Gould Boyum
50 Great Innings - Peter Roebuck
Portnoy’s Complaint - Philip Roth
Shame - Salman Rushdie
Red Dragon - Thomas Harris
The Silmarillion - J R R Tolkien
The Ragman’s Son - Kirk Douglas
The Blandings Castle books - P G Wodehouse
Tag five people and have them do this on their blogs: Unfortunately everyone already seems to have been tagged. Clearly, I need to increase my blog circle!
Total Number of Books I Own
Could be anywhere upwards of 3,000 (though if I’m allowed to include every individual Amar Chitra Katha comic it’ll probably be over 5,000!).
Last Book I Bought
A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami
Last Book I Read
The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Globalized World in the 21st Century by Thomas Friedman
Five Books that Mean a Lot to Me
Five books? Pointless exercise, as any book-lover would know. But it’s great fun too, so we’re all doing it. In his meme, Amit Varma says his list might be different next year. Well, mine would probably be different tomorrow, or an hour after I’ve posted this blog. (Except for the Faraway Tree books, which will stay forever.)
Here’s the list:
The Enchanted Wood/Faraway Tree books by Enid Blyton
Blyton doesn’t seem to be much in favour these days, and besides there are so many clever children’s writers around now, but she’s given me some of my earliest, most precious reading memories. Even today, every few months I need to go back to the three Faraway Tree books. And every time, without fail, as I near the end of the last book I find myself wishing that a previously unread chapter would magically materialize. And then another, and another. And that the stories of the magical lands atop the tree would never run out.
The Mahabharata - Various authors
Am I allowed to include this? I’ve read around 10-12 versions by different authors and my favourite single-volume version is the Kamala Subramaniam one, which is over-sentimental at times (though mind you, I didn’t think so when I first read it at the age of 10!) but also superbly captures the pathos of the story – the interior lives, motivations and emotions not just of the obviously sympathetic characters like Bheeshma and Karna but also of the likes of Duryodhana (who was turned into a leering Hindi-film villain by B R Chopra in that gaudy TV epic we were all so addicted to 15 years ago). Just to clarify though, I’m talking here about the epic in general, not any one author’s version.
Cult Movies 3 by Danny Peary
Some of my crucial reading years were spent on film books and while I relished a lot of the academic stuff, one of my personal favourites is the simple, conversational – but very, very intelligently written - Cult Movies 3, which I happened to stumble upon at a sale in CP and picked up only because one of the movies discussed was Hitchcock’s Psycho. The great thing about Peary’s writing is that he has that first, most important quality of any true movie-lover: unconditional open-mindedness about what he’s willing to watch. He writes with equal passion and insight about such B-films as Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and the 1970s “thinking person’s porn film” Café Flesh as he does about “respectable” classics like Dr Strangelove. Without his example, I don’t think I would ever have been able to discuss movies like Star Wars and Deewaar with any confidence.
The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro
I’ve blogged about The Unconsoled at length before, but well, here it is again. Reading it at a time when I had started getting terribly weighed down by the difficulties of time management, I was enormously affected by Ishiguro’s great novel about a man who seems constantly to be treading a pre-determined path others have laid out for him, never gaining control over his own life, always losing sight of the things that really matter. The book’s circular, surrealistic narrative is seriously disconcerting; offhand I can’t think of another novel that provides such a vivid sense of a nightmare world from which there’s no waking (among films David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive comes close). At least, I thought it was a nightmare world until I went on a couple of high-activity, high-tension junkets and realized that Ishiguro’s book was an only slightly exaggerated version of our real lives.
And…that’s it. I’m leaving the fifth slot blank, as a reminder of how futile this exercise is. But just off the cuff, here are some honorary mentions, all of which would (probably) make it to my Top 500 (!):
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
A Cinema of Loneliness - Robert Kolker
Fiction into Film - Joy Gould Boyum
50 Great Innings - Peter Roebuck
Portnoy’s Complaint - Philip Roth
Shame - Salman Rushdie
Red Dragon - Thomas Harris
The Silmarillion - J R R Tolkien
The Ragman’s Son - Kirk Douglas
The Blandings Castle books - P G Wodehouse
Tag five people and have them do this on their blogs: Unfortunately everyone already seems to have been tagged. Clearly, I need to increase my blog circle!
Thursday, June 02, 2005
The charm of Big Books
My bed groaned loudly when I flung the 950-page Shantaram onto it; it’s already playing host to the equally thick Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (Susannah Clarke) and Underworld (Don DeLillo). Well, too bad. There’s a very particular charm that Big Books have (I mean the ones that can actually be read, not the Finnegan’s Wake variety). This is a strange thing for me to say considering my frequent complaints that I only feel up to reading short stories nowadays; I hesitate to get started on something really mammoth because there’s always a good chance that before I finish it something else will suddenly come along for review, and I don’t like deserting a book midway.
But as I came to the end of Murakami’s epic The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and turned it over in my hands as per ritual, I thought again about how comforting it is to spend time in the company of a big, big book. A few years ago movie critic Roger Ebert, reviewing the first of the Lord of the Rings films, wrote of Tolkien’s novel: "Reading it, I remembered why I liked it in the first place. It was reassuring. You could tell by holding the book in your hands that there were many pages to go, many sights to see, many adventures to share..." These words might seem especially relevant to a fantasy/adventure novel but they apply equally well to most of the really fulfilling Big Books I’ve read.
The first big books in my life were Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage and John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. If I’m not mistaken, both have suffered a decline in critical appreciation over the years (though East of Eden was never ranked among Steinbeck’s three or four best novels in any case) but I still remember them fondly. (In an abstract sense that is, since most of the plot details have slipped out of my memory.) They came along at a time when I had just started aspiring towards "higher reading", having moved beyond the Hardy Boys stage, and it was good to feel like I was reading something worthwhile, something substantial. Undoubtedly the very size of the things contributed immensely to that impression at the time.
In his review Ebert also says "Lord of the Rings is not about a narrative arc or the growth of the characters, but about a long series of episodes in which the essential nature of the characters is demonstrated again and again (and again)." I don’t completely agree with that bit - character growth and a narrative arc do have a part to play in LOTR and I don’t see how these things can be completely absent from any successful book, whatever its genre. But it’s certainly true that many of the great Big Books are built on an episodic structure: Don Quixote, Moby Dick, Tom Jones and The Pickwick Papers come instantly to mind. Naturally, this has a lot to do with the fact that many of the early novels were first published in serialized form in magazines or journals. (It might also help explain why classics like Tom Jones are surprisingly easy to read even compared to some modern novels that are half the size.)
Can go on and on about my favourite Big Books but my attention has been diverted. I’ve been book-tagged by my libertarian buddy Yazad Jal and while I’m terrified at the prospect of naming just five books that mean a lot to me, I think I will get around to it soon. Separate post for that one.
But as I came to the end of Murakami’s epic The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and turned it over in my hands as per ritual, I thought again about how comforting it is to spend time in the company of a big, big book. A few years ago movie critic Roger Ebert, reviewing the first of the Lord of the Rings films, wrote of Tolkien’s novel: "Reading it, I remembered why I liked it in the first place. It was reassuring. You could tell by holding the book in your hands that there were many pages to go, many sights to see, many adventures to share..." These words might seem especially relevant to a fantasy/adventure novel but they apply equally well to most of the really fulfilling Big Books I’ve read.
The first big books in my life were Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage and John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. If I’m not mistaken, both have suffered a decline in critical appreciation over the years (though East of Eden was never ranked among Steinbeck’s three or four best novels in any case) but I still remember them fondly. (In an abstract sense that is, since most of the plot details have slipped out of my memory.) They came along at a time when I had just started aspiring towards "higher reading", having moved beyond the Hardy Boys stage, and it was good to feel like I was reading something worthwhile, something substantial. Undoubtedly the very size of the things contributed immensely to that impression at the time.
In his review Ebert also says "Lord of the Rings is not about a narrative arc or the growth of the characters, but about a long series of episodes in which the essential nature of the characters is demonstrated again and again (and again)." I don’t completely agree with that bit - character growth and a narrative arc do have a part to play in LOTR and I don’t see how these things can be completely absent from any successful book, whatever its genre. But it’s certainly true that many of the great Big Books are built on an episodic structure: Don Quixote, Moby Dick, Tom Jones and The Pickwick Papers come instantly to mind. Naturally, this has a lot to do with the fact that many of the early novels were first published in serialized form in magazines or journals. (It might also help explain why classics like Tom Jones are surprisingly easy to read even compared to some modern novels that are half the size.)
Can go on and on about my favourite Big Books but my attention has been diverted. I’ve been book-tagged by my libertarian buddy Yazad Jal and while I’m terrified at the prospect of naming just five books that mean a lot to me, I think I will get around to it soon. Separate post for that one.
T’was brillig, and the Jabber blogged...
As Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice, ‘brillig’ means “four o’ clock in the afternoon, which is when you begin broiling things for dinner”. So I’m blogging now, even though it’s production day at work and there are pages to be broiled, er made.
Wednesday, June 01, 2005
How the laptop has improved my quality of life (I think, I hope)
I’ve been doing some math.
Between May 1 and May 15 (both days inclusive) I made 12 posts on my blog. In the same number of days between May 16 and May 30, after I became laptop-enabled, the number of posts went up to 21, a whopping increase of 75 per cent.
(Whopp! Whoop!)
Now,
Between May 1 and May 15 Amit Varma made 103 posts on India Uncut, and the number for the subsequent 15-day period was 110. An increase of only 6.79 per cent.
(Whoop again!)
Expressed differently, between May 1-15 the number of my blog posts was 11.65 per cent that of Amit’s; between May 16-30 it rose to a dangerous 19.09 per cent.
I’m getting there, dude!
Now I’m off to do the word counts on each post…
Between May 1 and May 15 (both days inclusive) I made 12 posts on my blog. In the same number of days between May 16 and May 30, after I became laptop-enabled, the number of posts went up to 21, a whopping increase of 75 per cent.
(Whopp! Whoop!)
Now,
Between May 1 and May 15 Amit Varma made 103 posts on India Uncut, and the number for the subsequent 15-day period was 110. An increase of only 6.79 per cent.
(Whoop again!)
Expressed differently, between May 1-15 the number of my blog posts was 11.65 per cent that of Amit’s; between May 16-30 it rose to a dangerous 19.09 per cent.
I’m getting there, dude!
Now I’m off to do the word counts on each post…
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