The Indian Express reports that George Andrews and Bruce Berndt (associate editor of the Ramanujan journal) are on the verge of releasing a decrypted version of the first of Srinivasa Ramanujan’s famous Lost Notebooks.
Link through SepiaMutiny : An exhaustive post that provides a lot of background about the great man. Genius is an overused word these days, but he was the real thing. Pity that he died so early.
Every kid that went to an “English Medium convent” school in India will have at least one to tell. Most of them are apocryphal. Some are classics that everyone wants to claim as their own. Y’all must’ve heard at least one. If not, you will after you’re done reading:
The bad English incident.
The tales all involve a teacher with a less than perfect command of English, forced to talk to students in English. Why? Because it is an English medium school, dummy.
Like the teacher that warned his mischievous class about the impending arrival of the principal thus. “Be careful, the principal is rotating the school”. Or the guy that asked someone on a particularly sultry afternoon to “go open the window, and let the atmosphere come in.”
When I was in college, a favorite story that did the rounds was that of a professor who went to a movie with his wife. He ran into a student at the cinema. So the next day, he tells the bemused student, “I saw you with my wife at the theater.” Lavanya’s teacher was known to tell everyone that “their education was surrendered under the inside of his shoes.”
What I am going to narrate really happened. I heard it with my own two ears. And to make sure I heard it, the guy repeated it at least thirty times a year for ten years. We had strict hair-length requirements, and Monday when we gathered together for the school assembly was when we were checked.
Mr. L in particular enjoyed this chore. He would stand in front of a student, run his fingers through his hair, let it linger for some time and pull it out. And then, he’d advise him: “You should cut your hair cut.” He would then pull back, look at all of us in the line, and loudly bark, “Look your own eye”. Yes, that’s exactly what he said, and no, I don’t think any of us knew what it meant. We all kept mum though because he had a long cane, and when he beat us with it he would keep asking us to “Take up front”. I think that meant he wanted us to stop covering our asses with our hands, which by the way is bad career advise.
Link: The bad English league. Or this.
This was one dish I was smug enough to think I had mastered. Put rice in electric cooker, add a cup of water, glance at tv, add another cup, glance some more, smile sheepishly when you miss count, turn cooker on and wait till it gets to “keep warm.” Until I read this: Shiok — Chef’s Notes: How to make perfect steamed rice
Babyji, the second book by Abha Dawesar, revolves around its narrator Anamika, a high school student in Delhi who is precociously intelligent and more than a little promiscuous. Anamika’s the type of girl that draws her insights from chaos theory and thinks of Black Holes and Sartre when watching people shit on streets; and carries on affairs with three different women at the same time while actively considering starting a couple more with men. A fascinating setup for an Indian novel, but sadly, most of the promise of Babyji ends with the premise.
Dawesar is adept at creating authentic characters, and there are plenty of those walking the chapters in Babyji. Anamika herself, a bit of a stretch for an Indian teen, is believable because she is so conflicted — mature woman one moment and clumsy child the next.
The writing — even if it is a bit gimmicky — is another plus on balance — the author can be impishly funny at times (“The air was a milky translucent color, like the cover of a Chinese dumpling”) and rather clever when she weaves in a lot of high school science into her narrative (“trapped in a benzene ring”, “I want to collapse my wave function into you”). Often though, she takes the irreverent humor a bit too far, and passages start to sound like entries to the Bulwer-Lytton contest, like this excerpt where Anamika is mulling over Ray Bradbury’s Foghorn.
The story was lonely. It was the opposite of mine in someways because I had too many people in my life. But deep down it was my story, too. I had split myself like an atom into many electrons and neurons. Each subatomic particle danced with a different person and led its own life. But all of me, the whole me, did not exist for anyone but myself. On a day like today I was so alone I didn’t feel whole, even from within.
In spite of the (mostly) clever writing and the believable characters, the overall narrative is contrived and awkward. It doesn’t help that gags run through the length of the book, distracting from the main plot — Dawesar has Anamika call one of her lovers India, because “she is as vast and mysterious as” the country. Please. And for a plot this bold, the encounters between Anamika and her lovers are strained, mechanical, and laughably unerotic. Nothing salacious or steamy: sterile, like the coy, clothed sex in Indian movies of yore, with flowers covering kissing lips.
Babyji is a frenetic book with a lot of stuff happening, but events seem forced, transitions are jumpy and nothing binds events together. What could’ve been an irreverent coming of age story ends up a loose collection of clever gags. An easy read, but it probably won’t get on this list.
“Lolita”, a review for Babyji had claimed, “would have debuted in this book if she were Indian.” Yeah right. Maybe a distant cousin of Lolita’s, maybe if she was drunk.
Links: Abha Dawesar’s blog.
You get asked certain hard to answer questions a lot if you are Tamil. Like why are your film actresses [insert favorite euphemism for fat here]? A matter of preference, you think? Good guess, but you are dead wrong. The real answer is a ruthless clan of [insert second favorite euphemism for fat here] actresses, operating in and around Madras. Don’t believe me? Read on.
Take the case of Rahasya, a svelte, slim, pretty (ok, ok, I’ll take that back) vamp. She appeared first in an item number in Kamalhassan’s remake of Munna Bhai MBBS, and has fast become the go-to girl for one-song numbers in Tamil. Popular enough, that the cabal started taking note. So, when she went to a bar in the city to chill out and practice a dance move or two, she had a surprise in store.
As she is dancing, she feels something strike her from behind. Turning around, she sees the culprit: the corpulent behind of Kiran, rumored to be pretty high up in the hierarchy of the clan. Probably an accident she assumes, and continues dancing. Bad assumption. Soon, strike two. With a lot more intensity, causing her to almost fall. “What the …”, she turns around and asks in whatever language she speaks. Bad move again. You never talk back to a cabalite.
Kiran calls for reinforcements. Enter Sangavi. In and out of the cabal, but never so out to make the cabal angry. Together they do their thing to Rahasya: mostly standard cabal operating procedure, just falling on the victim from different angles. It can be pretty effective: When you have two 300lb objects falling on you from different directions simultaneously, it tends to hurt.
Last I heard, Rahasya is now on a diet consisting exclusively of things rich in saturated fat (no trans fat though: that is bad). “Maybe,” she was heard crowing, “I will become a cabalite one day.” Sure.
PS: What about Simran, you ask? Well asked wise reader. Answer: This.
PPS: Does this sound like a stupid fantasy of a deluded engineer? Again, good thinking. But I have a link to prove this happened. And they are far more descriptive than I am. Although, they have a question mark at the end of the page title, which makes you wonder if they are speculating …, but hey, no one’s imagination is that good. Kiran, Sangavi and fought with Ragasya?
Believe it or not you can read it. I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer inwaht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? yaeh and I awlyas thought slpeling was ipmorantt.
Trhough Sluekha
Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead bags the Book Critic’s award for fiction. Going by the amount of acclaim it is getting, (it was already on everyone’s list of best books of 2004, ) Gilead might just jump to the start of my reading list.
New York Times Review and an excerpt from the book.
When Vadim Perelman made House of Sand and Fog , I am sure he was thinking Hebbel: “Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights.”
Kathy (Jennifer Connelly) — a depressive, recovering alcoholic — is evicted from her Southern California home due to a clerical error, and Colonel Behrani (Ben Kingsley) invests all his savings to buy it from the county. To the Behranis, still suffering from delusions of a grand lifestyle in native Iran — the house is the means to a dignified life in America. And thus the conflict begins. Connelly is outstanding as the vulnerable Kathy, and Kingsley turns in yet another stunning performance — subdued, alternating with ease between happiness and anger, confidence and self-doubt, with a taut energy lurking behind his persona all the time. Great movie that barely broke even.
House of Sand and Fog reminded me of “Veedu” (The House) — a Tamil movie by Balu Mahendra that came out in the late nineties. Veedu is the story of an independent working woman and her grandfather, and their dream of owning a house in Madras. Superb pacing and great performances make this one of my all time favorites in Tamil. Better production values, and the movie could have been Oscar material. Needless to say, it tonked.
McDonald’s is looking into outsourcing it’s drive through operations to professionally run call-centers.
“If you’re in L.A.… and you hear a person with a North Dakota accent taking your order, you’ll know what we’re up to,” McDonald’s Chief Executive Jim Skinner told analysts at the Bear Stearns Retail, Restaurants & Apparel Conference in New York.
I am sure a North Indian accent isn’t that far behind. At least the girls from Bangalore won’t proffer disbelieving “Huhs”, when I ask for a Big Mac with everything but the meat.
