Dinner Of The Absurd

 Uncategorized  46 Responses »
Aug 312006
 

And so, I am back. With plans — big ones — a Bangkok trav­el­ogue, sev­eral book reviews, the usual (at least a ) post a day promise, more Ileana pic­tures on the other blog, a short story, three nov­els and many, many such things I know you could care less about.

And so I am back, and what’s the first thing I read? Plans for a Sepia Mutiny meetup in Los Ange­les. A rare desi blog meet in this very coun­try, and where is it held? As far away from Florida as humanly pos­si­ble. Not a coin­ci­dence, I assure you: I know planned it that way.

In case you think I am over­re­act­ing, then how do you explain this: Peo­ple wait for me to leave Chen­nai, and the very next week, they hold some sort of Blog­Camp there. Clearly, it is part of a dis­trub­ing trend: Blog­gers just don’t want to meet me. I know my intel­lect can be a lit­tle off­putting to all you dum­b­asses, but still… You know what? Screw all you blog­gers. (Poor Manoj excepted, of course. The jerk meets me every­day so that he can have some­thing to laugh about with his new wife.) If you are a non blog­ger, the hot pic­tures are over on the other blog.

I’ve done it before, and I’ll do it again now: My own blog meet, right down the street from my own home. At my favorite cof­fee shop, run by dear old Mandy and her hus­band, who were nice enough to give us exclu­sive access to the place for the whole evening…

Here are snip­pets from the meet…

________

Blog­gera: Smells cof­fee. Then tastes it. “Wow, this is great cof­fee. Ummm… just awe­some. What would the world be with­out coffee?”

Fal­staff: “A World With­out Cof­fee. 1. It would be illu­mi­nat­ing to con­sider what the word world means in this con­text. The world…

Blog­gera: “Excuse me, but that was a purely rhetor­i­cal ques­tion. I don’t really want to know what the world would be with­out coffee.”

Fal­staff: “Oh, I see. But can I fin­ish off this speech though? I only have 37 more bul­let items to go through. And then, about 18 footnotes.”

Blog­gera: “Please, no. Let me drink my coffee.”

Megha: “This cof­fee is cho chweet. Gleat.”

Blog­gerc­thruz: “What a thought­ful sentence.”

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 Posted by Karthik at 2:24 pm  Tagged with:

It’s a constellation out there…

   Movies  46 Responses »
Jun 082006
 

Harpreet Kaur lives for Hindi cin­ema. She loves Amitabh Bachchan (in a pla­tonic sort of way) and can’t imag­ine life with­out her daily dose of Lata. Harpreet is about a year into her Master’s in Com­puter Sci­ence at the Uni­ver­sity of Alaska. Her dad, back in Lud­hi­ana and prone to hyper­bole, never tires of telling peo­ple about how the Amer­i­cans were bedaz­zled by his daughter’s intel­li­gence and gave her “full aid” at the “best uni­ver­sity in the world.” Harpreet did get finan­cial aid, but she can’t get Com­puter Sci­ence for the life of her.

Srini­vasa is the tall guy that sits with her in the Data Struc­tures class. He hails from Nel­lore and has only a vague idea of how big Amitabh Bachchan is up north, but he gets Data Struc­tures really well. He used to look down upon Harpreet because she sucked at Com­puter Sci­ence, but every time he did , he ended up star­ing at the pret­ti­est pair of boobs in the world. And so, he fell in love with her.

Harpreet, on the other hand, liked the guy — espe­cially on days he did her home­work for her — but she wasn’t in love with him or any­thing. It didn’t help that he kept mix­ing up Lata and M.S.Subbulakhmi all the time. “I always have trou­ble dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing between old women singing in alien tongues,” he told her when con­fronted. She wasn’t impressed at all by that answer…

Harpreet didn’t know it then, but change was in the air.

A few days later, Harpreet came down with a nasty flu that brought the mean­est headache along. She took a Tylenol, and asked her room­mate Aparna Shah if she could bring her a bowl of Camp­bell soup, but Aparna refused because the Camp­bell soup in the refrig­er­a­tor was pur­chased from her share of the gro­cery fund.

Unable to counter her roomate’s sound logic, Harpreet went hun­gry that after­noon, and was deliri­ous by the time Srini­vasa came to visit her. He had stopped by to find out if she had really bunked classes to “be with her boyfriend,” like his friend Raviki­ran had speculated.

Moved by her plight (and by the sight a pretty girl coiled vul­ner­a­bly on a used Sealy Mat­tress), he made her some soup, and then sat by her bed and said com­fort­ing things to her until she fell asleep. He then watched the Tonight Show and spent the night on the couch in her apart­ment. He could’ve walked to his place, but it was his turn to cook today.

The next day, he woke up, used Aparna’s Lis­ter­ine, made some cof­fee and drank it together with Harpreet. He expe­ri­enced bliss, or some­thing like it.

This pat­tern con­tin­ued for a few days, and Harpreet no longer had the flu, though she was still not attend­ing classes because she felt weak. Sri wasn’t going to classes either, “to pro­vide her some com­pany.” He was now a reg­u­lar in Harpreet’s apart­ment, reg­u­lar enough that his tooth­brush was in her bath­room, and reg­u­lar enough for Aparna Shah to demand that he pay 14% of the rent that month. Things were going very well indeed…

“What do you like? ” he asked her that after­noon, act­ing on advice from Raviki­ran “to find out her likes and dislikes.”

“My favorite thing in the world is Amitabh Bachchan”

“My favorite thing would be my iPod. But I do like Amitabh Bachchan. He is a great actor.”

“Really? Thats so sweet. What’s your favorite movie of his? ”

“Err…I thought Sha­hen­shah was great. So was Giraftar ”

“Sha­hen­shah? Even I couldn’t stand that one. Tell me the truth now — how many Bachchan movies have you watched?”

“Only those two on the video coach bus from Madras to Ban­ga­lore. Nel­lore the­aters only play Tel­ugu and Tamil movies. But there was a lot of poten­tial in his angry eyes.. I could see it very clearly.”

“Oh you poor thing. That’s such a sad story… I need to show you how much you are missing.”

So she said, and put in a copy of Black into their Apex DVD player. A few min­utes into the movie, and Sri hits the pause button.

“So you say Amitabh Bachchan is a big star in Bol­ly­wood, right? ”

“Of course, he is a superstar. ”

“If that is so, how come the title card doesn’t say Super­Star Amitabh Bachchan. If I call him a Megas­tar, would that be ok?”

“Yes, he is a megas­tar, a super­star, a huge star. The biggest there is.”

“He can only be one star. Tell me which one. ”

“I don’t think I under­stand where this is going. ”

Sri takes her hand, and holds it against his chest.

“Baby, before you explain Amitabh Bachchan to me, let me explain the South­ern movie indus­try to you. ”

“I am all ears. ”

And thus the les­son begins.

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 Posted by Karthik at 11:44 am

Slim Pickings

    Lit  5 Responses »
May 152006
 

Sonia Faleiro’s The Girl, a book I’d briefly men­tioned in this post at Sepia Mutiny, is a melan­choly novel set in Goa about two men and The Girl they both loved. The book begins with the young woman’s sui­cide — yet another tragedy in cursed Azul — and the two men are “achingly curi­ous” to find out why. And when one of them stum­bles upon her jour­nal, they use it to recon­struct her life lead­ing up to the sui­cide — the death of an unhappy woman whose last big hope had vanished.

Just a few pages into the novel, and it is obvi­ous that it is as much about show­cas­ing the writ­ing as it is about the actual plot. The Girl is a care­fully crafted book: every sen­tence is metic­u­lously assem­bled from delib­er­ately cho­sen words, each page is filled with pre­cise para­graphs con­struced from metic­u­lously assem­bled sentences.

There is plenty of word­play, and large doses of descrip­tive detail. Noth­ing is too insignif­i­cant to be let off with­out a metaphor or two, rang­ing from the inven­tive to the cliched.

Thus we have the earth “encrust­ing the cas­ket like pas­try bub­bling into hard­ness,” a bar and its loca­tion as mis­matched as “veg­e­tar­i­an­ism and a Goan” and as “pro­foundly antipodean” as the “Rua’s many lit­tle old ladies and the one young lady who lived oppo­site Breto’s in a stone man­sion, and many years later flung her­self into the well in the cor­ner of her garden.”

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 Posted by Karthik at 6:48 am

Introducing SilverScreen

   Movies, Etc.  6 Responses »
May 052006
 

Some­one talk­ing to me for the first time is usu­ally struck by two things: How incred­i­bly hand­some I am, and how incred­i­bly smart I am. If they can get over this, they’ll be struck by two more things: How much I love movies, and how much I love books.

Some­one meet­ing Manoj for the first time is usu­ally struck by two things: How much he loves movies, and how much he loves music. Ok, maybe they’ll also be struck by how smart he is. What­ever. That’s not the point.

So any­ways, Manoj and I spend the bet­ter part of our days IMing each other. In nor­mal Eng­lish, cap­i­tal­ized first words and all. (The only allowance for IMs­peak is the ubiq­ui­tous brb, which I thought was a mis­spelt female under­gar­ment when some­one first used it on me. Now I know, and love to use it coz it sounds so, um, kinky.)

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 Posted by Karthik at 12:17 pm

Friends, Rolexes and Shirtless Men

    Life  5 Responses »
May 032006
 

Pic­ture Cour­tesy Wikipedia

Golden drag­ons sit atop the strik­ing green fa�ade, flanked by golden arches on the left and (over­priced) gold topped taxis beneath. A unsightly blue roof stretches along the entire street, designed to keep out the ele­ments and what­ever lit­tle charm the façade has to offer. “Jalan Petal­ing,” the mul­ti­lin­gual sign­board sus­pended from the low­est tier says. Petal­ing Street.

Petal­ing Street, a nar­row stretch of road in down­town Kuala Lumpur is the green dragon facaded, blue roofed home to a gigan­tic flea mar­ket sell­ing boot­leg mer­chan­dise. Fit­tingly, the mar­ket oper­ates from dawn to mid­night, draw­ing an enor­mous throng of bar­gain hunters look­ing for Rolexes and Patek Philippes; Guesses, Guc­cis, Givenchys and Louis Vit­tons; Star Wars and Flight Plan and Sims and Civ­i­liza­tion and food.

A row of stores on each side of the street, and down the mid­dle of the street a dou­ble row of stores with their backs to each other, split­ting the nar­row alley into two nar­rower alleys. Enter through the left, bar­gain your way up the street till the end, gawk at the ven­dors sell­ing fried fish, and kabab rolls and ice kacang, and a Rolex or two; turn around and hag­gle back down the other way. Along the way, a sen­sual treat: the bright flouroscent light­ing, the smell of sweaty bod­ies laden with faux Ital­ian fash­ion goods mixed in with the the smell of bar­be­cued fish, the sounds of hag­glers hag­gling and touts touting.

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 Posted by Karthik at 11:09 am  Tagged with:

This will do just fine…

    Life  17 Responses »
May 022006
 

In which a forced break from blog­ging causes one to over­com­pen­sate by writ­ing an overly long post.

I was six­teen. She must’ve been a few years older.

I was the kid that snot­tily buried his head in a book through the hour­long bus ride to school, except to look at the occa­sional poster. After her, I was the kid that was start­ing to fan­ta­size about bury­ing the head else­where. Dirty thoughts, I know, but not as dirty as you think. I didn’t know all that then.

In truth, she wasn’t all that pretty. Thin and wiry and bespec­ta­cled and fair and squeaky and rude and unsmil­ing. But she wore excep­tion­ally short skirts that fell just below the knee. Can you imag­ine? And trav­eled the same route as me every sin­gle day for two years, stand­ing but a few feet away from me. And most impor­tant of all, she went to Nrimala[1] Col­lege. What could be hotter?

Ever since a we’d heard that story about a bunch of girls at Rin­mala who raped the milk­man that went to deliver milk to their hos­tel, the hot­ness quo­tient of every­one that spent any time at all in the gen­eral vicin­ity of the cam­pus had increased by sev­eral orders of mag­ni­tude in our eyes. Espe­cially because Rex — who assured us all that he knew — informed us that the story was very true. He also threw in a few details of the inci­dent — oh my! — that made me think that being a milk­man wouldn’t be a bad way to make a liv­ing. Wake up, clean bull­shit, milk cow, visit col­lege, get raped. Bliss.

Could the girl on the bus be a rapist, I won­dered. And then hastily assured myself that she couldn’t have been. Given the time of the inci­dent, she was prob­a­bly in this very bus when her class­mates were doing the nas­ties to the poor milk­man. Unless it was a pre­de­ter­mined crime, and she had stayed back that night. Quite pos­si­ble, you know, with these young col­lege going types.

Now, in case you think we believed every story we heard about IrN­mala, you are so wrong. That story about the girl and a bro­ken test tube for exam­ple: In spite of the obvi­ous truth that in those days — most young girls pos­sessed rather loose morals and were capa­ble of most acts of debauch­ery a male brain could think of, this one was a lit­tle too far­fetched to be true. Also, it coin­cided a lit­tle too well with our entry into the world of pipettes and burettes and — you guessed it — test tubes. So we only partly believed the story.

And then one day, the girl didn’t show up. After she kept up the habit of not show­ing up for a few more days, I knew I had lost her — either she had grad­u­ated or she had fled the law. It must’ve been the lat­ter — how could some­one grad­u­ate in Decem­ber anyway?

She had van­ished with­out a word, my schem­ing rapist shrew girl­friend. Thank God I hadn’t intro­duced her to my par­ents or bragged about her to Rex.

We’d been see­ing each other for a good year and a half, and what did I get out it? A sorry glimpse of knee.

This won’t do.

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 Posted by Karthik at 10:56 pm

When Crummy, Cruddy, Cheesy and Crappy Compete

   Movies  15 Responses »
Mar 092006
 

The last month has seen sev­eral truly remark­able things hap­pen to this blog: We turned into a group blog with two real con­trib­u­tors, and sev­eral imag­i­nary ones. Our fan fol­low­ing among phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies seems to have increased, and like all deliri­ous new fans, they can’t seem to stop writ­ing to us. (We might trash your let­ters, ladies, but your affec­tion means a lot to us.)

We watched four hor­rid Tamil movies. While that in itself is not remark­able, what is remark­able is that we have refrained from review­ing any of them. Even this post is not a review per se. It is about cel­e­brat­ing the movies in ques­tion and reward­ing them for the things they did.

And so, with­out fur­ther ado, Ladies, Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal Indus­try Rep­re­sen­ta­tives and other Gen­tle­men, here we go.

The Freak­ist Bird Flu-ke Award:

Kamna Jeth­malani, the lead girl in Idhaya Thiru­dan wants to send an anony­mous email to her mom. She types up the email — whose con­tents are the proud recip­i­ents of another award — but she can’t fig­ure out how to sign the email.

Unable to pick a ran­dom name, she picks up a pigeon hov­er­ing nearby and lays it gen­tly on top of the key­board. The pigeon walks back, then forth. Then forth again, and back once more. And then flies away, to leave the half dressed girl star­ing at the screen.

The pigeon had just keyed in T. Mahesh, which hap­pens to be the name of.. you guessed it, the hero of the movie. What an incred­i­bly clever way to move a story for­ward. Any­one out there who still thinks our moviemak­ers are unimaginative?

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 Posted by Karthik at 12:23 pm

Listening, Looking, Ignoring

 Etc.  6 Responses »
Mar 072006
 

I’ve been a spec­ta­tor for a while now.

I watched silently, Krishna in tow, when a bunch of class­mates decided to take a peek into the girls dress­ing room on a trip to Ban­ga­lore. And lis­tened to their sto­ries — much exag­ger­ated, much embell­ished — after­wards, and won­dered for a sec­ond if Krishna and I had missed out on some­thing. Later, guilt.

I expressed a bit of dis­be­lief and not much more when I heard that some of the guys that I stud­ied with worked. Where work­ing means get­ting off stand­ing behind a girl in a crowded bus. Really get­ting off.

I’ve seen a lot. In buses and movie the­aters, upscale malls and veg­etable mar­kets. From cat­calls to breath­ing down the neck, from elbow­ing a fel­low pas­sen­ger to things a bit more than elbow­ing. Every­time, a silent “What the…” and I’ve moved on. Some­times, not even that.

And for the last week, I’ve watched an incred­i­ble lineup of posts for the Blank Noise Blo­gathon, and stayed silent myself.

Until now, until this post. In the hope that something’ll come out of it all.

Tag: blog-a-thon 2006

 Posted by Karthik at 5:03 am

Itemized Reductions

  Travel  4 Responses »
Mar 062006
 

When is the right time to write about Penang?

After is when.

After the ini­tial fas­ci­na­tion that mag­ni­fies the slight­est of con­trasts into exotic sin­gu­lar­i­ties has worn off. After over­com­ing the shock of being sur­rounded by peo­ple speak­ing my lan­guage, of hav­ing to watch what I say; of not look­ing too out of place in a large gath­er­ing of peo­ple not dis­cussing immi­gra­tion issues. After the joy of see­ing an Indian restau­rant at every street cor­ner has been washed away by the watery sam­bar, after real­iz­ing that tea with con­densed milk is not such a great idea.

Now is when. But what?

Surely not the archi­tec­tural dichotomy of George Town, fos­tered by arcane rent con­trol laws. Through which the mas­sive, utterly char­ac­ter­less Kom­tar sits right next to the mod­ern Pran­gin Mall, and seedy, unpainted estab­lish­ments occupy most of down­town. Noth­ing we haven’t seen before, right? Even though blind mas­sages aren’t exactly the norm in most places.

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 Posted by Karthik at 12:16 am

A Tepid Testimonial

   Movies  14 Responses »
Mar 042006
 

Bhavna clutch­ing an umbrella, Sunil clutch­ing an underarm.

The boy: toughie, hired goon, bearded brute, all rough edges and bad act­ing, tall and dark and not so handsome.

The girl: heart that bleeds for all, assists help­less peo­ple cross roads, smooth and pretty and volup­tuous and rich and pretty and smooth. Sigh. I mean, scratch the sigh.

How could they not fall in love? And how could he not turn over a new leaf, bring­ing a few odd­ball leaves along with him to keep him enter­tained at new­dom? And how could their wed­ding plans not be rudely inter­rupted by her see­ing him visit some­place not nice? And how could they not… well, no spoil­ers on this blog folks. By the way, for the record, this post is about a movie called Chithi­ram Pesudhadi.

“Ordi­nary plot,” you want to say, “hack­neyed and trite, tried and tested (and failed).” True, we say, the movie is all that, but it has a lit­tle bit more going for it — it is dis­arm­ingly unpre­ten­tious and heart­warm­ingly earnest. The earnest­ness of a first time direc­tor striv­ing hard — very hard — within his con­traints to sal­vage some­thing out of a mediocre script shines through every frame, draw­ing empa­thy from his view­ers, and Chithi­ram man­ages to get off with sym­pa­thetic winces where another movie would’ve got­ten a groan or two.
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 Posted by Karthik at 5:31 am
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