As Bad As It Gets

    Lit, Etc.  1 Response »
Jul 292005
 

As I read the win­ning entries from this year’s Bulwer-Lytton con­test, laugh­ter gushed forth from my per­sona, trav­elled at the speed of sound, cut­ting through the cold air (for the air con­di­tioner was on)and went into my wife’s ear, where it was con­verted into elec­tri­cal vibra­tions and trans­ported through the audi­tory nerve into the audi­tory cor­tex; which pat­tern matched it to laugh­ter and spawned a series of processes that resulted in the words “What is it?” gush­ing forth from her per­sona and trav­el­ling the same route (but in the oppo­site direc­tion) to reach my ears. I explained thus:

Every year, just like the Indian Gov­ern­ment awards National Awards for movies, the Eng­lish Depart­ment at the San Jose State Uni­ver­sity announces prizes for writ­ing — incred­i­bly bad writ­ing, sev­eral orders of mag­ni­tude worse than the first para­graph of this post.

This year’s win­ner was this one:

As he stared at her ample bosom, he day­dreamed of the dual Stromberg car­bu­re­tors in his vin­tage Tri­umph Spit­fire, highly func­tional yet pleas­ingly formed, perched promi­nently on top of the intake man­i­fold, aching for expe­ri­enced hands, the small knurled caps of the oil damp­en­ers beg­ging to be inspected and adjusted as described in chap­ter seven of the shop manual.

I browsed through the list of past win­ners, and I loved these two…

“Ace, watch your head!” hissed Wanda urgently, yet some­how provoca­tively, through red, full, sen­su­ous lips, but he couldn’t you know, since nobody can actu­ally watch more than part of his nose or a lit­tle cheek or lips if he really tries, but he appre­ci­ated her warning.

The moment he laid eyes on the life­less body of the nude socialite sprawled across the bath­room floor, Detec­tive Leary knew she had com­mit­ted sui­cide by grasp­ing the cap on the tamper-proof bot­tle, push­ing down and twist­ing while she kept her thumb firmly pressed against the spot the arrow pointed to, until she hit the exact spot where the tab clicks into place, allow­ing her to remove the cap and swal­low the entire con­tents of the bot­tle, thus end­ing her life.

Here’s a com­fort­ing part­ing thought for all wannabe writ­ers. Some­one got paid to write this.

From Even Cow­girls Get the Blues (more in Sticks and Stones)

“It is not a belly but­ton. (The umbili­cus serves, then with­draws, leav­ing but a sin­gle foot­print where it stood: the navel, wrin­kled and cupped, whorled and domed, blind and wink­ing, bald and tufted, sweaty and pow­dered, kissed and bit­ten, waxed and fuzzy, bejew­eled and ignored; reflect­ing as graph­i­cally as breasts, seeds or fetishes the omnipo­tent fer­til­ity in which Nature dan­gles her muddy feet, the navel looks in like a plugged key­hole on the cen­ter of our being, it is true, but O navel, though we salute your motion­less mater­nity and the treams that have got tan­gled in your lint, you are only a scar, after all; you are not it.)”

 Posted by Karthik at 7:07 am  Tagged with:

In Death She Scared

    Life, Etc.  6 Responses »
Jul 282005
 

Usha Mami was always nice to every­one. She was frail and timid, and spoke so softly, we had to strain our ears to hear her. We took more lib­er­ties with her than the other adults. Much to our amuse­ment (and her con­ster­na­tion) her harsh­est admon­ish­ments came out sound­ing like gen­tle entreaties. Inso­lent smile, back to play. We weren’t afraid of her. No one was. “She couldn’t scare her­self if she wanted to,” was the gen­eral consensus.

On the other hand, every­thing scared her. Snakes and ghosts, dogs bark­ing at night, peo­ple knock­ing on neigh­bors doors, son sleep­walk­ing. A lik­able, pleas­ant scaredy cat. Paava­mana Ponnu.

She had recently acquired an elec­tronic chant­ing machine, a gad­get that chants a phrase over and over again when you turn it on. Om. Om. Om. An eerie sound­ing female voice, dan­ger­ously close to being labelled a male voice; sound­ing eerier still due to poor acoustics. Flip a switch, and it’ll chant some­thing else. Nama Shiv­aya. She would turn it on for a cou­ple of hours every day, a prayer rit­ual of sorts.

She turned it on that day and for­got to turn it off when she stepped out to go enquire about Yoga lessons. Yoga, she had been told, could help her achy legs. Called my uncle, locked the house, put her eye­glasses into a yel­low bag (with best com­pli­ments from the bride and groom at a wed­ding she had been to) and off she went.

Off she went in a city bus. Enquiry done, she hopped back on to another bus to go home (or so she thought). She got down where she had to, and died when cross­ing the road, hit by a speed­ing scooter dri­ven by an unli­censed young man in a rush to buy school uni­forms for his boss’s daugh­ter. Who then carted her off to the near­est hos­pi­tal, claim­ing she was a rel­a­tive to avoid being beaten up.

She was pro­nounced dead on arrival, and the hos­pi­tal promptly moved her to the near­est Gov­ern­ment hos­pi­tal where she was left to lie, uniden­ti­fied except the yel­low bag with her eye­glasses. A few vain (but valiant) attempts were made to call the phone num­ber on the bag (Mar­riage Hall in Salem: “Don’t know saar”) and the opti­cian (Trichy: “Many peo­ple buy glasses from me”).

Finally my panic stricken uncle arrived there through a cir­cuitous route that took him through the yoga school, a cou­ple of police sta­tions, and the hospital.

Mean­while, their house had lost power. She was moved to her native town to be cre­mated, and a full two days after it tripped, elec­tric­ity was restored to the neighborhood.

That night, the neigh­bors next door heard weird chant­ing noises and spent the next few hours mor­ti­fied, wor­ried her ghost had returned to haunt them. The maid refused to go near the house.

Had she been around to lis­ten to the story, she’d have enjoyed it.

 Posted by Karthik at 7:25 am

PriyaSucky

   Movies  14 Responses »
Jul 262005
 

Priyasaki, star­ring Mad­ha­van, Sada, Sada’s waist. Directed by K.S.Adhiaman.

Mad­ha­van, Sada engaged in roman­tic ban­ter. Sada play­fully punches Maddy on his (recently)well devel­oped, cor­pu­lent chest.

Him: “Hit me any­where but there.”

Her: “But why?”

Him: “Coz you live in my heart.”

Inane Music. End the most strained courtship ever.

...

Hero, preg­nant hero­ine seek divorce. Judge invokes one year sep­a­ra­tion require­ment. But grants request from boy to be allowed to stay in girl’s house until their baby is delivered.

Him: Kisses her on the waist.

Her: “What are you doing? Take your hands off me”

Him: “I’m not touch­ing you. I’m actu­ally kiss­ing the baby inside you.”

Her: “Oh! Ok.”

’nuff said.

 Posted by Karthik at 5:04 am

Sunny Side

   Movies  8 Responses »
Jul 142005
 

The pres­ti­gious annual Indian National Awards have been announced, and there has been much con­ster­na­tion about how things have hit a new low. If you ask me, I think peo­ple are over-reacting a bit.

Ok, so Page 3 was adjudged the best movie of the year. Dis­ap­pointed? You shouldn’t be. I am quite con­tented that it was Page 3 and not “Cha­ras — A Joint Effort”. I heard it was the run­ner up. I have to admit though — I am a lit­tle dis­ap­pointed that my per­sonal favorites won noth­ing. Not Girl­Friend. Not Julie. Not even Mur­der. How­ever, I heard that there may or may not be another movie of Ms.Sherawat that might be a con­tender for some awards next year.

Saif Ali Khan, appar­ently was the best actor this year. Bad choice, you think? Hah. Just wait till next year, when Amitabh wins for Black. This deci­sion will look like a masterstroke.

On a side note, if these tran­scripts had been released in 2004, Salman would’ve walked away with awards in the comic vil­lian cat­e­gory. Hands down.

The best lyri­cist is Pa. Vijay for his song in Auto­graph. For a song that starts off so:

Each flow­ers (sic!) will tell you…

Nat­u­rally. How can you not reward some­one that dar­ingly breaks num­ber agree­ment rules in the first line of a song.

All said and done, it wasn’t all that bad, right? About par for the course.

PS: I heard Vidyasagar (best music direc­tor) called Chi­tra (best play­back singer), and asked her “What did we do wrong?” After a long dis­cus­sion, they con­cluded that it was just rot­ten luck.

 Posted by Karthik at 4:11 am

Never a Dahl Moment

    Lit  6 Responses »
Jul 132005
 

The New Yorker has a story this week about Roald Dahl, describ­ing him as “the British author of children’s books.” Although Dahl is bet­ter known for his children’s books, it is a lit­tle unfair to call him a “children’s writer”. He has writ­ten a lot of enter­tain­ing adult fic­tion — mostly short sto­ries that ended with O. Henry like “twists in the tail.”

Dahl came to me through a stranger. I was in the check­out line at a book­store in India, when this old man accosted me. Point­ing to the copy of the Twelve Red Her­rings in my hands, he informed me politely: “This is no good. No good, young man.” Sumaar, he added in Tamil for empha­sis. And con­tin­ued, “If you want to read good short sto­ries, read Dahl.” When I told him I’d never heard of Dahl, he deri­sively clicked his tongue and told me unequiv­o­cally that Roald Dahl was the mas­ter of the twist in the tale. And then he per­son­ally walked me back into the store, took a copy of the Col­lected Short Sto­ries of Roald Dahl, pat­ted it lov­ingly and said, “Take it. You will like it.”

DahlSuck­ered in by his infec­tious enthu­si­asm, I bought it. For the next few weeks, Dahl was by my side, look­ing at me from the cover — eye glasses in his hands, a pen­sive half smirk on his face. He turned out to be a grumpy, morose com­pan­ion, nar­rat­ing the out­landins and the omi­nous in the same tone: brisk, matter-of-fact, straight faced. Every tale had some­thing that would spook, sur­prise, or gross you out. And of course, at the end there was the promised (occa­sion­ally con­trived) twist.

What made the sto­ries fun was the bizarre things that would hap­pen in them: Moth­ers would swal­low kids, fin­gers would be chopped, and humans would turn into bees like it was the most nat­ural thing in the world. Dahl rev­elled in the macabre, and loved to shock read­ers. Add in what the New Yorker calls a “clin­i­cal fas­ci­na­tion with body parts,” and you are guar­an­teed entertainment.

If Dahl had writ­ten The Gift of the Magi, Della would’ve been James’s secret lover, he would’ve cut his nose off to buy Della a ring, and Della would’ve chopped her fin­ger off to buy him a nice bot­tle of cologne.

This excerpt from the New Yorker arti­cle is a good win­dow into Dahl’s per­son­al­ity, and why kids love him:

(The)kids … liked the fact that Dahl, unsat­is­fied with desks, had designed a baize-covered writ­ing board, to bal­ance on his lap just so. And they loved that he kept, on a side table, a jar con­tain­ing gristly bits of his own spine, which had been removed dur­ing an oper­a­tion on his lower back. Next to the jar was a waxy-looking knob that turned out to be Dahl’s hip bone, along with a tita­nium replacement.

“It makes a good let­ter opener,” one lit­tle boy said of the pros­thetic hip.

“Has it got blood on it?” another asked hopefully.

Dahl’s work seems to be very per­sonal — many of his sto­ries have auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal ele­ments in them. Stung by a series of rejec­tions mid­way in his career, (the New Yorker alludes to this), Dahl wrote The Great Auto­matic Gram­ma­tizer, a thinly veiled satire about the pub­lish­ing indus­try. His fan­site has back­ground infor­ma­tion for all of his sto­ries — fas­ci­nat­ing to see where writ­ers draw inspi­ra­tion from.

The kind old man at Land­mark wasn’t too far off the mark. And to pass his kind­ness on, I tell you all: Read Dahl. You will like it.

 Posted by Karthik at 12:15 pm  Tagged with:

No Magic Carpet, this

    Lit  10 Responses »
Jul 062005
 

The Red Carpet : Bangalore StoriesThe Red Car­pet is a col­lec­tion of eight short sto­ries by Lavanya Sankaran, — first time writer, born in India, stud­ied in Amer­ica, returned to India.

The sto­ries are more vignettes than con­ven­tional tales, vignettes cen­tered around Ban­ga­lore and its high rollers — nou­veau riche young men and women rolling in soft­ware money,rolling the occa­sional joint (and yes, the occa­sional roll in the hay, still seem­ingly rare) and gen­er­ally liv­ing in a par­al­lel uni­verse removed from the rest of the pop­u­lace. Peo­ple that reg­u­larly spend more on a sin­gle meal than most of the peo­ple in the coun­try make per month; Diesel wear­ing, Coach tot­ing, Ray Ban peer­ing folks walk­ing around in the same city as peo­ple who can­not afford a saree a year. (Yes, I know about the trickle down effect, and am glad that the num­ber of peo­ple that can afford such lux­u­ries is grow­ing and that more spend­ing is good, but it still makes me feel queasy.)

In her eight sto­ries, Sankaran tries to cover the entire spec­trum of peo­ple that pop­u­late her uni­verse — the smart geeks and the slick mar­keters, the timid wimps that do all the work and the aggres­sive unwimps that take credit for it, the self made and the daddy made; migrants to Amer­ica, migrants from Amer­ica and the par­ents of all these peo­ple (to pro­vide a cross gen­er­a­tional per­spec­tive), most of whom have a sin­gle pur­pose in life (or so it seems): to get their son or daugh­ter mar­ried off as soon as possible.

Ramu stud­ied the ani­mated woman in front of him, a slight smile on his lips. And apart from the minor vari­ances: his gen­der, darker skin color, the care­fully trimmed goa­tee rest­ing on his chin, and the wor­ri­some hair­line that danced away from his fore­head in the coy man­ner that plagued so many men in their early thir­ties, it was prac­ti­cally a Mona Lisa smile — full of mys­tery and hid­den amusement.

After this uncer­tain, stilted start to ‘Bom­bay This’, the first story in the col­lec­tion about a superficial-at-first-glance, but-actually-quite-deep girl from Bom­bay, a few techies and (yes) mar­riage, the sto­ries steadily get bet­ter until the Red Car­pet, and then they seem to get worse. Either that or ennui — it is dif­fer­ent ver­sions of the same peo­ple, and if you look closely enough, it is the same story repeated over and over again. And the author comes across as a lit­tle talk­a­tive: choos­ing to vividly describe things when hints would’ve done the job, prob­a­bly part of try­ing to cater to a wide (phoreen) audience.

When Lavanya lets her guard down enough to throw in a few inside jokes, the book can be quite funny, like this exchange from the Alpha­bet Soup, an oth­er­wise con­trived tale about an Amer­ica reared girl (with a slight per­se­cu­tion com­plex) who wants to explore the “strength” of being “Brown in a Brown country.”

Mr. Iyer liked to sit on the veran­dah, on a swing made from a sturdy plank of rose­wood, leav­ing his wife to bus­tle about the house and occa­sion­ally steop out with tum­blers of pip­ing hot cof­fee. He him­self was retired, and spent his days read­ing his news­pa­pers in a skirt.

‘Not a skirt,’ he said, pained when Priya first phrased her care­ful inquiry. ‘Not a skirt at all. It is a veshti. A lungi, a dhoti. Men’s wear. Just like suit­ings, shirt­ings, and cuff links. But,’ he said, ‘more com­fort­able for the heat.’

Oh, a sarong,’ said Priya.

‘No,’ said Mr. Iyer. ‘A veshti.’

Mostly though, the guard is up, and the book suf­fers for it.

The book does offer some inter­est­ing insights, espe­cially when nar­rated from an outsider’s per­spec­tive: The title story — Red Car­pet, nar­rated by a chauf­feur, and to a lesser extent, Closed Cur­tain — told by an old man with a win­dow (lit­er­ally) into the life of a hep, very today young cou­ple are the most inter­est­ing tales in the book.

But in these as well as most of the other tales, the end­ings seem con­trived and abrupt, loose ends tied up a lit­tle too well, or a care­ful, delib­er­ate attempt made to leave some ends dan­gling. Almost like real­iz­ing on the last page that the story had to end here.

Rather refresh­ingly for a first time Indian writer, Lavanya chooses to write in plain Eng­lish: sim­ple and unadorned, no lin­guis­tic flour­ishes from the Salman Rushdie school, thank you. That and her obvi­ous famil­iar­ity with her milieu help make the book a pass­able read.

 Posted by Karthik at 12:47 pm  Tagged with:
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