Crossing a Line

 Etc.  3 Responses »
Oct 112005
 

Adver­tis­ing enjoys a lot of lat­i­tude. It stretches the truth, exag­ger­ates the good, plays down the bad, skirts the incon­ve­nient facts and even fibs occa­sion­ally, yet we accept all this good naturedly and move on. It is part of the busi­ness (we say) or the nature of the beast.

For instance, I don’t seri­ously expect Sachin to serve me a hot cup of Boost (yuck!) when I visit him next time, nor do I expect Kum­ble to have a clue about the type of engine oil his cars use. I know a stu­pid piece of candy will not alter anyone’s mood (Believe me, I tried).

The key of course is to stay in the gray area between truth and deceit, and to never make claims that are spe­cific and false. Like a uni­ver­sity could claim to have “incred­i­ble facil­i­ties” and we’ll be fine with it even if they func­tion in a run­down ware­house; but if they claim to have seven swim­ming pools in the run­down ware­house, or 37 super­com­put­ers when they have none, then we are not fine with it. A line has been crossed.

Which is what this insti­tute called IIPM did. Cross that line, by blithely mak­ing false claims that were eas­ily dis­proved. Pretty dumb thing to do. Some dili­gent enquiry by some smart folks, and oops, they got caught. Now what? Stay put, and let the stu­pid thing die. Call the smart folks, and tell them, “well, we are work­ing on it — we bought the swim­ming pool on Ama­zon, their ship­ping pol­icy sucks,” what­ever. The smart folks were rea­son­able peo­ple, I am sure they would’ve lis­tened to you.

But then, if the insti­tute was dumb enough to make spe­cific false claims, then what do you expect them to do when they get caught? Bully their way out of it. That’s exactly what they tried, and it is such a mess now:

Read the whole story here or here.

On another note, this might be a test of how much the blo­gos­phere in India can really do. Every Indian blog I know of is talk­ing about this, and this might be the most con­certed effort by Indian blog­gers to take on an entity.

Can blog­gers shape opin­ions, or is it just a few thou­sand peo­ple delud­ing our­selves that we have more power than we actu­ally do?

PS: Do you think Boost’ll sue me next? Boy that would be fun. I could get Mal­tova to pay my legal costs. I would be an icon in the blo­gos­phere, and everyone’ll stand up when I enter rooms, and talk in hushed whis­pers behind my back.

 Posted by at 12:13 pm

Left Hooks

    Lit  3 Responses »
Oct 082005
 

John Le Carre, who used to write spy thrillers before he started in his cur­rent job as a writer of anti-Capitalist rants dis­guised as nov­els, dis­cusses his pol­i­tics (more than his books) in this ran­corous Guardian inter­view that would make a Naipaul proud. If you sift through the stri­dent attacks (on Blair, the US, anti-egalitarian estab­lish­ments, pub­lic schools) there are some inter­est­ing bits, like this one where he talks about movie adap­ta­tions of his books.

[…] it is unusual for Corn­well to feel other than mauled when his books hit the screen.

“I have been through the sheep dip with movies before but, like every­body else, I blame myself. I have writ­ten what I thought were very attrac­tive books that have bro­ken down badly for film. If they weren’t sat­is­fac­tory movies, I was part of the process that made them unsat­is­fac­tory. I don’t feel that I was used or tra­duced, but many weren’t very good. Some, though, were. The film of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold was pretty good. Tin­ker Tai­lor was really good.” He under­stand­ably for­bears from nam­ing those sheep-dip adap­ta­tions, but The Rus­sia House, The Lit­tle Drum­mer Girl and The Tai­lor of Panama are surely contenders.

And now, in Cornwell’s esti­ma­tion, the adap­ta­tion of The Con­stant Gar­dener is really good, too.

Le Carre is not a ranter. His will­ing­ness to make polit­i­cal state­ments out of his books makes their lit­er­ary qual­ity suf­fer — the writ­ing is too stri­dent and lacks the flair that’s needed to make the pol­i­tics palat­able. A flair that Kurt Von­negut, for instance, had loads and loads of.

And through Book­Slut, here is a Von­negut inter­view on USA Today to pro­mote his new book, A Man With­out a Coun­try.

“What do you want to talk about? Pol­i­tics? Our pres­i­dent is a com­plete twit. I’ll talk about the death of the novel. I’ll talk about any­thing you want.”

You may not know from the inter­view, but Cat’s Cra­dle and Slaugh­ter­house Five are per­haps the best exam­ples of overtly polit­i­cal books with lit­er­ary merit — they are great reads even if the pol­i­tics is unpalatable.

 Posted by at 11:24 am  Tagged with:

Meet the Bloggers

 Etc.  29 Responses »
Oct 072005
 

If there is some­thing that makes me incred­i­bly envi­ous, it is all those blogs that carry reports of blog­ger meets. You see, I live in a remote cor­ner of the world, a cor­ner where there is one Indian blog­ger. Why, even North Dakota would be a bet­ter place than this. These days, I am con­sumed by thoughts of blog­ger meets, and my favorite dream goes like this:

Venue: An expen­sive cof­fee shop some­where in the world. We had called ahead to book the biggest table in the house, but when we enter, some poor sod is sit­ting there all by him­self, sip­ping cof­fee. There are a cou­ple of guys on the next table, gawk­ing with­out shame, peri­od­i­cally inter­rupt­ing their gawk­ing to type some­thing on their laptops.

Amit: “Waiter, looks like our table isn’t avail­able yet.”

Waiter: “Why yes sir, let me go tell the guy to move to another table.”

Prufrock­Two: “One should give him a few min­utes. Let the poor guy fin­ish his cof­fee.”

Dilip: (Ears perk­ing up on hear­ing the word poor): “Who said some­thing about fin­ish­ing the poor? Haven’t we done that enough already? We should all give up our houses for them for this city runs on their sweat. I took a train jour­ney through India last week, and there was this poor lady who grinned at me through her tears of hunger. She had a red saree on her, how sym­bolic. That’s India for you.”

Mean­while, some­one arrives.

Hur­ree Babu: “Hello, I am Hureee”

Me: (to anony­mous blog­ger sit­ting next to me): “Hur­ree Babu is a cross-dresser?”

Anony­mous Blog­ger: “No you dork. Hur­ree Babu is her pseu­do­nym.”

Suit­ably chas­tised, I shut up for the rest of the meet­ing. The poor guy fin­ishes his cof­fee, and we are all seated. Another arrival now.

J Alfred Prufrock: “Hello every­one, sorry I’m a lit­tle late.”

Chan­dra­has: “That’s ok, dear sir. Dear waiter, can you please bring me a cup of cof­fee?”

Fal­staff: “Cof­fee reminds me of a poem.” Starts speak­ing in verse.

Amit: Looks around at the glum faces. “Ok, let me break the ice with a joke. The license raj is a joke. Big Gov­ern­ment is a joke. God is a joke. Heh. That was three jokes in one.”

J Alfred Prufrock: “Great joke! Let me ask you guys a ques­tion that has been both­er­ing me for some time. I’d like to find out how you tell some­one their cof­fee sucks.”

Nilu: “You puke on them.”

Wait­ers: “You seem to be hint­ing our cof­fee sucks. We smell supe­ri­or­ity. You are a pompous man.”

J Alfred Prufrock: “Oh no, That’s not what I meant. I mean, I was not try­ing to make a state­ment on the qual­ity of this spe­cific cof­fee. I was idly won­der­ing about a poten­tial social sit­u­a­tion.”

Tilotamma: “Idly? Idlies make my mouth water. Espe­cially with coconut chut­ney. Man, oh man.”

J Alfred Prufrock: “As an adden­dum, I would like to issue a clar­i­fi­ca­tion; your cof­fee might actu­ally be ok.”

Wait­ers: “Might?”

Fal­staff: “Give the poor guy a break will you, all he did was ask an aca­d­e­mic ques­tion.”

Dilip: “Poor? Did some­one say poor? Yes, the poor need a break from cap­i­tal­ist oppres­sion.”

Amit: “Cut it out will ya? Waiter, can I get another cof­fee please? With cow’s milk. Cows are very cool.”

Bridal­beer: ” Brian liked Moun­tain Dew. Bill does too. But I don’t. Mean­while, the dog barks. A good cup of cof­fee helps peo­ple rumi­nate. It also helps them uri­nate.”

Prufrock­Two: “One is impressed by your con­vo­luted logic. One would have never thought rumi­nate and uri­nate could be linked together so effort­lessly. One would like to point you to a story on how great writ­ers rumi­nate that appeared in this Zam­bian news­pa­per.”

Bridal­beer: “Brian surfs the inter­nets. He shows as always Away on Yahoo. Rumi­na­tors are wimps. The bark­ing dog is gone now.”

J Alfred Prufrock: “Inter­est­ing points. All three of them. I would like to add a cor­ri­gen­dum to my ear­lier response. Did I men­tion my ques­tion was purely aca­d­e­mic?”

Dilip: “Did you say poorly aca­d­e­mic? How can the poor think of aca­d­e­mics when their houses are being destroyed?”

Rohan: “Who said some­thing about let­ting the poor be? Haven’t we done that enough already? We should give up our houses for them for this city runs on their sweat. I took a train jour­ney through India last week, and there was this poor lady who grinned at me through her tears of hunger. She had a red saree on her, how ironic.”

Dilip: “Yes, exactly.”

Kiru: Sneezes.

Anon Com­menter 1: “That was cool.”

Anon Com­menter 2: “Very cool machan.”

Anon Com­menter 3: “I love the way you sneeze.”

Kiru: “Thanks. I will post pic­tures tomor­row.”

Rohan: “Ok, Let me break the ice by start­ing off with a joke. The license raj is a joke. Big Gov­erne­ment is a joke. God is a joke. Heh. That was three jokes in one.”

Prufrock­Two: “One gets the feel­ing one has heard this joke before..”

Dilip: “So what if he pla­gia­rized a joke? It was a bad joke to start off with. Gov­er­ment is not funny busi­ness.”

Bridal­Beer: “The smell of thiev­ery wafts in like a gen­tle breeze. Brian lacked chivalry. His shoelaces never stay tied.”

Nilu: “Puke.”

Jab­ber­wock: Lifts head up from book, checks out crowd, and buries head back.

Chan­dra­has: “Time to end, I guess. This meet is almost as long as my posts.”

Amit: “Wait, I wanted to talk about why Big Gov­ern­ment sucks. Maybe a few more min­utes.”

J Alfred Prufrock: “A few more min­utes is fine. I don’t know if I men­tioned that I thought the cof­fee here is actu­ally much bet­ter than the one I make…”

Amit: “I guess you were right, Hash. We should be leav­ing.”

As we walk out, I asked the anony­mous blog­ger next to me who the gawk­ers at the next table were.

“Oh them? They are the Desipun­dit guys. They keep track of every­thing that hap­pens in the blo­gos­phere.”

“Ah!”

PS: In case you didn’t notice, this post is cat­e­go­rized under Humor. Heh.

 Posted by at 1:03 pm

On Ranting

 Etc.  3 Responses »
Oct 052005
 

Every so often, I get mad at the way things are in this world. Very mad. For not turn­ing green when I approach, for start­ing off the Konkani songs seg­ment at the exact instant I enter my car. For cut­ting… the point I want to make is that when I am angry, I am even less coher­ent than I am usu­ally. I rave, I rant, I scream, I yell (Shut Up! I know yell and scream mean the same thing.) and make full use of my con­sid­er­able vocab­u­lary of home­made eight let­ter port­man­teaus. I stay away from the com­puter in such moods, for this is clearly not some­thing you want to read on a blog. Unless you are into that sort of thing, in which case I sug­gest you cut me off when I am dri­ving to work tomorrow.

But some peo­ple, they thrive on anger. Like DoZ here, start­ing off with an inno­cent sound­ing sen­tence that nor­mal angry human beings might use,

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

and then pro­ceed­ing to wax poetic on Lem­bas Bread, Capote, and (hold your breath) UN sta­tis­tics. Damn. Also some men­tion about a char­ac­ter called James Bond that was in the recent Halle Berry flick, Die Another Day … wait a minute, that was another post. Not the same amount of anger, but just as cool.

Manoj is angry enough to think Mad­ha­van deserves a left hook to his jaw for think­ing Black was a good movie. I shud­der. What would he do to Bhavna Giani, when he reads her let­ter?

Gay­athri mean­while points us to peo­ple that make money for rant­ing in this neat review. Shashi Tha­roor, who has declined con­sid­er­ably since The Great Indian Novel appar­ently col­lected his choic­est rants and pub­lished them in a book called Book­less in Bagh­dad. And Gay­athri paid money (I pre­sume) to read this. Inter­est­ing. I think I have a fair idea of who’ll cut me off tomorrow.

 Posted by at 11:19 am

Memento Redux

   Movies  10 Responses »
Oct 042005
 

Gha­jini, star­ring Surya and Asin and directed by A.R. Muru­ga­doss is a remake of Memento. Yes, that Memento. If you have even a pass­ing famil­iar­ity with the film indus­try in India, you will know right away that a remake of a Hol­ly­wood clas­sic means a watered down ver­sion that takes the orig­i­nal premise, and some­how con­trives to wrap it around a “love-story,” five songs, sev­en­teen fight sequences, and sev­eral voice overs that explain cru­cial plot points to the audi­ence. And so, there is a cer­tain recal­i­bra­tion of expec­ta­tions that is required to enjoy such remakes.

Viewed from a lens thus recal­i­brated, Gha­jini is an emi­nently enjoy­able movie. Muru­ga­doss bor­rows the rudi­men­tary plot from Memento — revenge of the amne­siac — and man­ages to Indi­anise it with­out too many holes. The script­work and screen­play are tidy, and the dia­logues refresh­ingly down to earth. Even the two hero­ines don’t seem too out of place in the script and that in itself is an achievement.

Surya and Asin act rea­son­ably well and Nayan­thara has a role that is periph­eral enough that her per­for­mance doesn’t mat­ter too much. Although, I must admit I was a lit­tle trau­ma­tized when I saw her dance to an item num­ber — every part of her lit­er­ally shook, and in a star­tling reminder of Newton’s first law, cer­tain parts kept shak­ing even after she had stopped dancing.

*Digres­sion* If you are a col­lege pro­fes­sor who came to this page through Google look­ing for “Nayan­thara, shak­ing, New­ton,” feel free to ignore my Cre­ative Com­mons license and use this exam­ple to teach New­ton to your stu­dents. You can even take them on a field trip to the near­est movie the­ater play­ing Gha­jini. *End Digression*

Sur­pris­ingly enough, the best part of the movie is the flash­back — the manda­tory sequence to explain how Surya lost his mem­ory and hair. Muru­ga­doss is very com­fort­able han­dling the roman­tic scenes between his lead pair, and the casual humor that per­vades the romance between Surya and Asin is a treat.

The songs are atro­cious, and the stunt sequences are a lit­tle too long, but over­all Gha­jini is one of the bet­ter masala movies out of Tamil this year.

The Fly On The Wall:

Reg­u­lar read­ers of this blog (can you laugh a lit­tle less loudly, please?) are prob­a­bly aware that we have sources all over the place. A cou­ple of them were will­ing to talk to us (off the record of course, what do you think?) for this review.

A con­ver­sa­tion between Har­ris Jayaraj, the music com­poser and Muru­ga­doss, the director:

“So Har­ris, what do you think about the movie?”

Har­ris mum­bles, then stops, grins, scratches his hair, picks his nose and mum­bles again.

“So Har­ris, what do you think about the movie?”

Har­ris mum­bles again. “Do you think my hair is long enough?”

“Let us get this straight man — you do a pathetic Rah­man imi­ta­tion. Now answer my frickin’ question.”

“Hmm, it is good. Grunt. Umm. The flash­back is funny. But the rest of it is very seri­ous. Need more comedy.”

“You think so? I asked the pro­ducer for more money to shoot some funny scenes, but he said no. Now I am worried.”

“Hmm. Umm. Hmm. Umm. I will take care of it with my back­ground music.”

“Huh?”

“Wait and watch.”

Watch we did. And we are glad to report that Har­ris was very, very suc­cess­ful in his endeavour.

When­ever Surya shows up on screen, a voice screams in the background:

“Bo Zo.…. Bo Zo. Booooo.… Zooooo.” The speed of the chant varies accord­ing to the need of the scene (nat­u­rally). To ensure that the same joke doesn’t get repeated too often the next time Surya shows up, the same voice chants:

“Zo Lo.. Zo Lo…Zo Lo”.

I have to admit, it had me in splits. Great job, dude.

A con­ver­sa­tion between Surya and his Dad:

“Dad, I have this role in this new movie and I am sup­posed to be an amne­siac for good two hours. Any advice?”

“Drink coconut water, don’t smoke, don’t drink, do Yoga and get out of your rela­tion­ship with Jothika.”

“Dad, I asked for act­ing tips, not this crap.”

“Oh, ok. Have you seen me act angry in movies?”

“You mean where you keep your body erect, roll your eyes and shake your head robot­i­cally back and forth?”

“Yes. Exactly. Do that.”

For once, Surya lis­tened to his dad.

PS: Hemant has a more con­ven­tional review up on Instant Kaapi, and I agree with most of what he says.

 Posted by at 2:23 am

Never Let Me Go

    Lit  4 Responses »
Oct 032005
 

Never Let Me GoMayavaram is a lit­tle town near Than­javur, and its most famous land­mark is the Vaitheeswaran tem­ple. The streets around the tem­ple are filled with prac­ti­tion­ers of a type of astrol­ogy called Nadi Josyam, which is based on the belief that every life is pre­or­dained, and that who­ever pre­or­dained lives wrote down what would hap­pen to a select few on palm leaf scrolls. The astrologers around the tem­ple (claim that they) inher­ited these scrolls, and if they can locate the scroll that per­tains to you, all they have to do to pre­dict your future is read it out aloud.

There are mul­ti­ple scrolls for every vis­i­tor (for the pre­or­dain­ers knew exactly who would visit) : a gen­eral one that pro­vides an exec­u­tive sum­mary of life, and more spe­cial­ized scrolls that zero in on spe­cific aspects. Among these is is a scroll that talks about the man­ner of death that awaits the vis­i­tor. Hardly any­one who vis­its the astrologers wants to know what their scroll of death says. For even if you know, you can­not change fate. Or can you?

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, his third novel to make the Man Booker short­list, is a sim­ple, beau­ti­fully tex­tured novel that is not quite what it appears to be on the surface.

A young woman named Kathy H runs into two of her clos­est friends — Ruth and Tommy — in unusual cir­cum­stances and starts rem­i­nisc­ing about their shared past. That past is decep­tively nor­mal — life at Hail­sham, a board­ing school not dis­sim­i­lar to the ones in those Enid Bly­ton books of yore, with nor­mal board­ing school type things hap­pen­ing: friend­ships, fist­fights, heart­breaks and the gen­eral feel­ing of hap­pi­ness that seems to pre­vail in such soci­eties of young peo­ple. But like a clever com­poser inject­ing occa­sional melan­choly notes in an oth­er­wise merry musi­cal score, Ishig­uro uses the sub­tlest twists of lan­guage — an odd word here, an unusual phrase there — to tell you that through the seem­ing veneer of nor­malcy, some­thing is just not right.

As the sym­phony pro­gresses, the odd note is more and more appar­ent, and we start dis­cov­er­ing that the stu­dents at Hail­sham are dif­fer­ent from the rest of us. They have been brought into the world for a spe­cific pur­pose whose con­sum­ma­tion will con­sume.. ok, extract a heavy toll on them sounds better.

This infor­ma­tion is doled out to the res­i­dents of Hail­sham in bits and pieces — usu­ally as after­thoughts to more imme­di­ate top­ics — and its impor­tance is played down, but over time they are able to piece together the snip­pets to form a hazy pic­ture of what lies in store for them. Their entire life is pre­or­dained, and the stu­dents accept the dis­sem­bled truth fatal­is­ti­cally, hes­i­tant to probe any deeper. Much like vis­i­tors to an astrologer, the stu­dents believe they are bet­ter of not know­ing all the details. Are they?

After school the three friends drift apart, and their lives diverge until they run into each other a few years on. A metaphor­i­cal visit to a stranded boat and a con­fes­sion later, Kathy and Tommy real­ize some­thing: they want to post­pone their fate. Can they? Can anyone?

There is some sci­ence in the book, but it is all inci­den­tal — Never Let Me Go is as much Sci­ence Fic­tion as say, Blind Assas­sin. Isi­hig­uro uses a con­tem­po­rary sci­en­tific devel­op­ment as a plot device to cre­ate a pre­or­dained soci­ety so that he can explore the ques­tions raised in this review.

The writ­ing is very Ishig­uro — laid­back and pre­cise — the sim­plest of words are employed, but when they are strung together in sen­tences, they mag­i­cally acquire a lyri­cal feel to them. Ishig­uro is one of the best prose styl­ists around, some­one who real­izes the virtue of sim­plic­ity. Where a Rushdie would have toyed with the words — Hail and Sham are par­tic­u­larly fer­tile words for febrile word­play — Ishig­uro just describes things exactly the way they are: what hap­pened when, and how things were when it hap­pened. If the char­ac­ter­i­za­tion is trite (Kathy could be the nar­ra­tor in any one of Ishiguro’s books), the styl­ish writ­ing more than makes up for it.

As Kathy rem­i­nisces, going back and forth in time, con­struct­ing a dis­jointed image of life at Hail­sham, the reader iden­ti­fies with her emo­tions. We want her to ask more, to find out more, but under­stand why she will not, why no one will. When life at school ends, we feel the way Kathy and her friends do — anx­ious and excited, and unusu­ally resigned. Is this how we would be when con­fronted with some­thing like this? (A Time arti­cle about the behav­ior of peo­ple in crises comes to mind — most every­one sits wait­ing for events to take their course).

Up to this point, the book was bril­liant. And then came the end­ing — a let us sit down and talk, and I will explain all of it to you end­ing — that took a lot of lus­ter out of the book. Sud­denly, the plot looked a lit­tle con­trived. The hack­neyed nature of the char­ac­ters became more appar­ent, as did the par­al­lels to other Ishig­uro works. (DoZ dis­cusses the obvi­ous par­al­lels here). A lit­tle bit of a let down.

Over­all, Never Let Me Go is a good book, but it is one that enter­tains more than it challenges.

This post is part of Veena’s Booker Mela.

Other Reviews:

Doz

Fal­staff

Jab­ber­wock

 Posted by at 5:28 am  Tagged with:
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