Here’s wishing everyone much fun today.
Oct 312005
Oct 292005
The incessant patter of rain through the night. Dawn, the trees greener than before, drops of water clinging to leaves. Rays of sunshine reflect off the water, and find a way to enter the room through carefully placed layers of window dressings fortified with towels and sheets. Crows cawing, interspersed with sparrows chirping. The maid screaming at her son, in a voice that would have made a tenor immensely proud, asking him not to pee outdoors. A lone mosquito buzzing malaria and dengue in my ear, waking me up several hours ahead of schedule. Bad days, I now know, begin this way.
Later that evening, I finished Chetan Bhagat’s Five Point Someone, a book that the author’s website describes as a contemporary classic. Hmm.
Now if a book starts with,
Before I really begin this book, let me first tell you what this book is not. It is not a guide on how to live through college.
you really have no business reading it. But I did. I mean, who can resist a low priced book that promises to let you relive the best years of your life?
Five point someone is about the lives of three underachievers at one of the Indian Institutes of Technology — a series of missteps bring them to the brink of (academic) extinction. And then, a magical missive arrives and sets things straight. But the book is not about the plot: it is a just a series of incidents that are supposed to make you all nostalgic about your own life at college.
Five point someone is also about atrociously bad writing that hovers precariously in the region between just awkward usage and outright bad grammar.
“God, you look a mess,” Ryan greeted in the toilet as we were shaving together.
I kind of went inside myself in that short span of time before Cherian’s office door opened again and sealed our fate, just sat quietly and ignored what Ryan and Alok said, that is if they did say anything.
The writing manages to effortlessly overshadow any merits the book might have — believable characters, realistic dialogues and (on occasion) funny incidents, resulting in the poorest read since the likes of um… can’t think of anything right now. The Inscrutable Americans, maybe?
The book did (is doing) really well in India — apparently due to a smart publishing strategy that priced the book very low. Chetan Bhagat even got himself a follow-up deal to write another book called One Night @ the Call Center, and that book is out now. Ominously, Bhagat’s website touts this one as another contemporary classic. Hmm once again.
Jai Arjun Singh has good words for One Night @ the Call Center — he calls it an improvement over Five Point Someone. Now that’s not saying much, is it?
Oct 232005
Talking about Foucault’s Pendulum, there is a sense in which you did the Da Vinci Code before Dan Brown did. Of course, you did it as a myth that takes on a strange reality and he did it as it was historical truth.
I told Dan Brown’s story. My characters are his. I gave the broad picture of this kind of literature.
Umberto Eco, in The Hindu. I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that Mr. Eco is claiming he is Dan Brown’s inspiration. Oh, well, Christmas is approaching and I guess people want to confess to their crimes. Good Lord, please spare Umberto. He is just a professor who writes books on Sundays.
Oct 212005
Making a movie is hard work. There is much thinking involved — plots and premises; characters and camerawork and a whole slew of such things, but if you ask me who has the hardest job in filmdom, I’ll unhesitatingly raise a metaphorical arm and say: The Dialogue Writer. What is the easiest job then? Why, Lyric Writing, of course. Now if you are one of those fancy-schmancy Hollywood types that knows not what a Dialogue Writer or Lyric writer is, go away.
On second thoughts, do stay: Losing sixty percent of my two person strong regular readership is bad, so I will explain. Now here is how it works. After a plot is decided upon, a screenwriter sits down and writes the entire screenplay but wherever the screenplay has characters talking, he leaves the page blank. Like so:
Shriya enters the room from the left.
Sanjay is sitting on the bed.
Shriya:
Sanjay:
Shriya:
Sanjay:
Now Sanjay hugs Shriya. Takes off her red saree to reveal a black saree inside. Sanjay now brings his lips closer to Shriya’s lips. Giant rose covers lips. Shriya wipes off her lips sensuouly; camera focuses on her waist. Music begins. Cut to song.
Shriya:
Sanjay:
Shriya:
Sanjay:
Now Ms. Fancy-Schmancy, if you are still there, the person that fills the first set of blanks is the Dialogue Writer. And, yes, the person that fills the second set of blanks is the Lyricist.
In the real world, a conversation between Sanjay and Shriya would probably go,
Shriya: Hi, you are late.
Sanjay: Hello, you are hot.
Shriya: Thats so sweet, thank you.
Sanjay: Let me take off your clothes now.
Shriya: Ok.
Ok, I will stop here. My mind wandereth.
Once upon a time, the person that filled the first set of blanks had a clear-cut job description: he was to write exchanges that were completely different from any real world exchange ever. So he would write something like
Shriya: Sweetheart, why art thou cometh late. I waited long, took a shower, and have withered like yonder flower.
Sanjay: Huh? I had to go to the loo. But now that I’m here, let me stick to you like glue.
The more unrealistic it was, the more people would clap and whistle. Easy enough. Today though, things are murkier. The Dialogue Writer is expected to be a little bit more realistic, but if he writes something like “Um, you smell good, let’s have a go at it,” the censor board will immediately intervene and do a couple of things:
1. Misspell the dialogue as “Um, you small goon, let’s have a go at it.“
2. Mark the dialogue as offensive, and ask that it be removed.
So now the dialogue writer has to go back and write something that fits the lip movement but is not offensive anymore. Like, “Um, your mail came. Let’s take a look at it.” Imagine doing this constantly for every line. Very hard work. There is some hope though: A new technique that consists of Sanjay making violent speaking motions with his mouth, with sound muted is doing the rounds. But that will be for a later post.
Fancy-Schmancy? Please don’t go away now. I will grovel. Will buy you coffee when we next run into each other. Maybe a Mocha Latte from Starbucks.
Now a lyricist has no such worries. All that is required to be a successful lyricist is is a certain set of easily available tools — the metaphor, the simile and the names of ancient works of Tamil literature. There is minimal interference from the censors, and whatever interference there is can be circumvented with ease. Say you are asked to write a steamy song to describe the courtship betwen the lead couple, you just reach into your toolkit and pick the tool of choice. For example, in this song, the lyricist uses a metaphor (from the movie Mazhai, starring someone called Ravi and the real Shriya, who is not in any way related to the Shriya in our screenplay).
Let your kisses be the hammer
that drives a nail into my brain
It should be obvious by now that metaphors in songs don’t really need to make sense. You just say Y is like X, where X and Y can be quite random. And there is plenty of latitude. Imagine Ravi saying “Let me put my sword into your scabbard” to Shriya. That would drive the censors into apoplexy (and create a new record for bad spelling). But on the other hand, a lyricist can effortlessly slip in stuff like that in a song and no one will blink.
Let out bodies unite
like a sword and a scabbard
Or you could say,
Let me be the Thriukkural
to your Kurunthokai
where Thirukkural and Kurunthokai are the names of literary works. Naturally, the names chosen here are random. You could put Silappadhikaram instead of Thirukkural and no one would care. In this case, people will call this gibberish literature and even try to slip a few awards to you. Yes, that’s how easy it is.
Occasionally though, some lyricists go overboard and the censors notice.
In your hand a pile of books
And you, a pile of sex.
And when they gently chide you for using the word seks, you just pick a random word from the dictionary that rhymes. In this case the song became,
In your hand a pile of books
And you, a pile of Vicks.
Yes, that’s how easy it is. We got our favorite lyricist to comment on this, and he said:
This is easy, I sound the horn
as easy as eating a cob of corn
you can even slip in some p*rn
and the dialog writers will go darn.
Fancy-Schmancy, please wake up and smell the corn. If you are wondering about the releavance of the title to the post, I’ll put you out of your misery by confessing that I am not too sure either. But it seemed very cool, and the words simile and camera appear in the post.
Also posted at teakada
Update: Manoj manages to find a few (non-blogging) people who translate verses much better. Go here. I hope Venky listened to Shriya and let her stay in his cute smile during one of his watery orgies.
Oct 192005
A few months abroad. Fun, but still, home being what it is, we want to come back. Just walk around, check the yard, read junk mail, clean the AC filter, etc. (if I listed out seventeen more things, this could be my to-do list).
After several phone calls to travel agents, we finally work out the most complicated itinerary ever that involves (among other things) a quick one week trip back home.
One week.
And guess who decides to greet us on arrival? This unpleasant woman. Sigh.
Oct 172005
Time Magazine makes a list of the best books of this century — a list skewed towards popular literature — and me likes it very much. Le Carre makes it and so do William Gibson and Neal Stephenson. And Bellow and Roth. Very cool.
Update: John Le Carre has long been a personal favorite — I’d argue a bit over the book chosen to represent Le Carre in the list (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy or The Little Drummer Girl would’ve been better choices, but at least they didn’t pick The Constant Gardener), but no quibbles with him being in the list. He did the hardest thing you could ask a writer to do: making literature out of the most dumbed down fiction genre. Now if he’d only start writing codebreaking books set in the Vatican…
William Gibson and Neal Stephenson are much overlooked writers. Just because they write Science Fiction, the literary types sneer, hold their noses and walk away from them. But if the value of a book lies in the amount of (smart) entertainment it provides, then NeuroMancer and SnowCrash are right up there with the best. Cryptonomicon too, but I’ll live with this.
Oct 152005
Let’s call this guy Krishna, because I don’t know what his real name is. He is an assistant director in Tamil movies, and like everyone else employed thus, his life is
a) currently very miserable.
b) centered around dreams of making it big some day.
One day, Krishna says, he got to meet the head of a large production house. After complimenting the head of the large production house on his magnificent pecs (you can be a hero saar!), Krishna went on to narrate the screenplay of his dream movie to the guy. The narration went well, Krishna says, and the head thanked him and told him he would keep him in mind for his next movie.
A few months on, the large production house announces a big budget movie. And wonder of wonders, Krishna says, it is based on his screenplay. So he approaches an arbitration body. The hearing went like this:
“Mr. Krishna, you claim that this movie is based on your screenplay.”
“Sir, yes, sir.”
“Can you prove it?”
“Of course sir. I will narrate the screenplay line by line right here.”
Proceeds to narrate it.
“That’s pretty good. But you could’ve just sneaked a peek at it when it was lying around somewhere. Got more proof?”
“Sir, yes sir. I will now tell you exactly when and where I narrated the screenplay to the head of the large production house.”
Proceeds to tell them exactly when and where he narrated the screenplay to the head of the large production house.
“And that’s proof? Give us something more concrete man.”
“I will go to the temple of your choice, light some camphor and swear in front of the deity of your choice that it is my story. I dare you to ask the head of the large production house to do the same thing sir.”
“Holy cow, that is irrefutable proof. Let me call the head of the large production house and set up the showdown.”
Other members of the arbitration committee nod sagely.
No not 55-word story that ran over, though I wish it was. This came straight out of this story from an online newsmagazine. Link (in Tamil). The only part I made up was the line about the arbitration committee members nodding sagely.
I believe this legal strategy has a lot of potential. For starters, I sent an email to Mr. Banville today claiming that The Sea was my work. I’ll even go to a church if he wants me to.
Oct 132005
Lord William[1] was the British Collector of Salem sometime in the nineteenth century, and he didn’t particularly care for the job. He governed with callous arbitrariness, caring and kind one day, cold and heartless the next; mixing up bizarre administrative decisions with incredibly smart ones.
He was in a particularly foul mood that October afternoon — he had already walked a couple of miles, and had 3 more miles to go to get to his car. There were no roads in this godforsaken cluster of villages west of Salem, and it is not clear why Lord William was there in the first place. But he was there, and he was tired and hungry. The smell of food coming from a house nearby was not helping.
And then, in a typically brash gesture, Lord William decided to step into the house. The people that lived in the house were cooks, and on that day the family was making Adhirasams. There must have been a hundred of them in the enormous drum-like container: Little brown discs; a glossy, satiny brown, glowing from the ghee. The fat man was making more, pausing only to wipe the sweat off his face with his veshti. His son, no less corpulent, no less sweaty, was napping at the front door.
Lord William nudged the son gently with the roll of paper in his hand. When he didn’t respond, the Lord walked into the kitchen, shoes still on, and after a friendly glance at the dad, picked up an adhirasam from the container and bit into it. Oh, the pleasure! Later, he would tell his wife, the Doraisani, that as the thing melted in his mouth, he could feel his tiredness melting away. She would think he was nuts.
But now, he was eating his third adhirasam, oblivious to the anger of the fat man. The poor fellow was making these for someone’s dhevasam[2] and he wasn’t at all sure the dead guy would appreciate this heathen man eating stuff meant for him. Especially if the heathen had licked his fingers after finishing one adhirasam, and used the exact same fingers to pick up another one from the drum. This batch of adhirasams was doomed.
After three, Lord William stopped eating. He was stuffed. He took a few more and put them into his pockets. He then told the dad he didn’t have any cash on him at the moment, but he was the collector and all, and that he should come meet him tomorrow at Salem and collect money for the Adhirasams. He added as an afterthought, “And bring a few of these with you when you come meet me tomorrow.”
The next day, the fat man woke his son up early in the morning and asked him to go to the city with the (defiled) drum full of sweets and get some dough from the collector. After a sumptuous breakfast, the son started for Salem, drum on his head, a thirty mile walk.
He walked and walked and walked, and in about an hour, he was very tired. Another hour, and the sumptuous breakfast had worn off. He decided that he needed some serious R&R, so he sat under a tree and ate a few adhirasams. And then he walked and walked, and took another break.
If his progress were to be plotted against time, one would have noticed that for higher values of t, the distance covered had decreased considerably. If one were to look for reasons for this alarming decline, one would have to look no further than another graph of time vs breaks. It might also be pertinent to note that with each break he took, the consumption of adhirasams increased at an alarming rate.
By the time the fat son arrived at the Collector’s office that evening, he had eaten all the adhirasams. Not one left. After some layers of low level bureaucrats, he is ushered into the room of Lord William. Lord William pays the guy a few rupees, and looks covetously at the drum.
“Got more?”
The fat son grins sheepishly and tells the Collector that he did bring a few, but he ate them all, long walk sir, sorry. Disappointed, Lord William asks, “Why not bring more man? Your dad had a lot in there yesterday.” The fat son grins even more sheepishly and tells the good Lord that he brought the whole lot, and ate the whole lot.
“Get out of here man,” the Lord says and as the son starts walking away, he tells him that the phrase is an expression of disbelief and that he shouldn’t really get out of here. The Lord is sure the son is messing with him, given that he only ate three the other day and had to skip dinner. About an hour of intense questioning follows, and the son keeps insisting that he did indeed eat the entire batch of adhirasams. Finally, the exasperated Lord William sends the son home, with an ominous warning: “I’ll find out sometime.”
A few months passed, and the good Lord William has to take a trip to Mamundi again. The reasons for his trip are unclear, but it has been suggested he was consumed by the thought that someone could eat so much food, and wanted to go back and find out. The evidence for this theory is strengthened by the fact that he headed straight for the house of the fat cooks. And in an interesting stroke of luck, it was lunchtime and the family was getting ready to eat.
“You,” Lord William says, pulling up a stool in front of the fat son, “I want to see you eat.” Then he gets up and walks to a charcoal stove, a pot of rice simmering on top of it. “How much rice in here?” he asks the fat dad. “Six kilograms, Durai,” is the reply. Six kilograms of rice, in case you are wondering, could feed a large family for a large number of days. The Lord takes the entire pot, places it in front of the son and tells him, “If you eat all of this, I’ll make you a rich man.”
Over the next hour, the fat son ate all of it.
Lord William couldn’t believe his eyes. It is his turn to be a little sheepish, for having questioned the integrity of this remarkably talented young man. “Come with me,” he says, and takes the fat son on his horse drawn carriage to a secluded spot near the village.
“Run, young man. Start here and run as far as you can. Stop only when you tire. Run.”
“But why sir?”
“I wronged you. I questioned your integrity. So run now.”
“I am not sure that makes it any clearer, sir.”
“Run as far as you can, and I will give you all the land you cover. That’s my way of making up things to you.”
The fat son believes this is reasonable evidence that the Lord is slightly off his rocker. He stays put. Then the Lord brandishes an offical letterhead, and writes down what he just said and hands it to the son. The young man cannot believe his luck. A lot of land would mean a lot of food for the rest of his life.
So he runs and runs and runs, and in a few minutes he is tired. But he won’t stop to rest. He runs some more, and gets tired some more. No stopping now. He thinks he could use an Adhirasam though. That thought propels him for a few minutes more, and then he stops to rest under a tree. He then proceeds to die right there.
The good Lord is apalled, and his sheepishness is now replaced by remorse. But true to his word, he draws an imaginary circle using an imaginary compass and gives all the land that the young man covered to his family.
If you ever go to a village called Mamundi, and see a big piece of farmland called the “Six Kilogram Brahmin Farm,[3]” do tell the people around you that you know the history of the land. If they ask you how you know the story, tell them you read it on the blog of the great nephew of the fat son. Cluck your tongue in sympathy when they tell you that most of the land is now residential. And get someone to make you an Adhirasam.
[1] My dad, who narrates stories much better, wasn’t sure what the Lord was called. He kept calling him Dorai, but I told him it was very unlikely a British family would name their son that.
[2] A Dhevasam is an yearly ritual to honor dead people. The food is usually very good.
[3] Aaru Padi Pappan Kadu is the name of the farm. It passed through a couple of generations, and today, the original owners have sold most of it.
[4] The son may not have been fat. Or even the dad. But somehow, that’s always the way I think of them.
Oct 122005
Boyd Tonkin in the Independent
Yesterday the Man Booker judges made possibly the worst, certainly the most perverse, and perhaps the most indefensible choice in the 36-year history of the contest. By choosing John Banville’s The Sea, they selected an icy and over-controlled exercise in coterie aestheticism ahead of a shortlist, and a long list, packed with a plenitude of riches and delights.
The Dublin novelist, whose emotional rage is limited and whose prose exhibits all the chilly perfection of a waxwork model, must today count himself as the luckiest writer on the planet. This was a travesty of a result from a travesty of a judging process.
In the end it came down to a debate between The Sea and Never Let Me Go, and we made the right choice. The Sea was the best book of the year. It is not going to be the most popular, and after the award was presented I was immediately bearded by an irate bookseller from one of the big chains, who told me that it was a “disgraceful” decision, and that The Sea would be impossible to sell. I don’t know if that is true, and I don’t care. Banville has written a complex, deeply textured book, with wonderful, sinuous and sensuous prose. You can smell and feel and see his world with extraordinary clarity. Banville has written a complex, deeply textured book, with wonderful, sinuous and sensuous prose. You can smell and feel and see his world with extraordinary clarity.
John Sutherland, in the Guardian.
Banville doesn’t always help his own case. A few hours before the ceremony he confided to an American journalist that The Sea was “a bad book”. With authors like that, who needs Tibor? Nor, it would seem, was Banville indulging in false modesty. He came over to London from Philadelphia on the day of the award and booked his flight for 8am the following day. He wouldn’t win. No chance. Bad book. Pack your bag.
Banville is, as I observe him, an egregiously modest writer. He is also, as I read him, an egregiously good writer.
This is almost Oscar quality bitching, but not quite there yet. The language, guys, work on it. Avoid plenitude, egregious, travesty and sinuous. Avoid bearded too, unless you want to refer to someone with excessive facial hair on the chin. You can use weirded if the person sporting the beard is not male. Sensuous is ok, use it a lot more. But please, no Joan Rivers.
In case you are wondering, I haven’t read The Sea. I am planning to go to the local bookstore tomorrow and ask them if they have “The Sea.” I have even odds on what I’ll get:
1. A C Language Primer.
2. An incredulous look.
But then, tis’ the season for long odds.
PS: The Babu doesn’t like the choice, even after a (prescient) parody of the agonizing wait.
And oh, if you have time, check this short story by Falstaff out. Very cool.
