etcetera

David Segal’s pro­file of an unscrupu­lous online oper­a­tor in the New York Times is the most fun story I’ve read in a long time. Deeper impli­ca­tions aside, how can a story with lines like this one not be fun?

“Do you think I would think twice about uri­nat­ing all over your frame and then return­ing it? Com­mon.” [NYT]

The vil­lain of the piece is Vitaly Borker (“thug­gish Rus­sia born Brook­lynite”) who runs his online oper­a­tion in a man­ner fami­lar to any­one that has shopped for gro­ceries in India. It is a hilar­i­ous read that leaves you feel­ing slightly queasy at the end.

“The cus­tomer is always right — not here, you under­stand?” he says, rais­ing his voice. “I hate that phrase — the cus­tomer is always right. Why is the mer­chant always wrong? Can the cus­tomer ever be wrong? Is that not possible?”

The next day, a man named Tony Russo called to say that DecorMyEyes had run out of the Ciba Visions. Pick another brand, he advised a lit­tle brusquely.

“I told him that I didn’t want another brand,” recalls Ms. Rodriguez, who lives in the Chelsea neigh­bor­hood of Man­hat­tan. “And I asked for a refund. He got rude, really obnox­ious. ‘What’s the big deal? Choose another brand!’ ”

With the con­tacts issue unre­solved, her eye­glasses arrived two days later. But the frames appeared to be coun­ter­feits and Ms. Rodriguez, a life­long fan of Lafont, remem­bers that even the case seemed fake.

Soon after, she dis­cov­ered that DecorMyEyes had charged her $487 — or an extra $125. When she and Mr. Russo spoke again, she asked about the over­charge and said she would return the frames.

“What the hell am I sup­posed to do with these glasses?” she recalls Mr. Russo shout­ing. “I ordered them from France specif­i­cally for you!”

“I’m going to con­tact my credit card com­pany,” she told him, “and dis­pute the charge.”

Until that moment, Mr. Russo was merely ornery. Now he erupted.

“Lis­ten, bitch,” he fumed, accord­ing to Ms. Rodriguez. “I know your address. I’m one bridge over” — a ref­er­ence, it turned out, to the company’s office in Brook­lyn. Then, she said, he threat­ened to find her and com­mit an act of sex­ual vio­lence too graphic to describe in a news­pa­per. [NYT]

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

Upup­date: Apolo­gies, folks. Check back tomor­row. Are you done with that book?

Update: We are col­lat­ing posts, and will be post­ing the mela soon. Until then, read a book or some­thing.
This blog will host the Bhara­teeya Blog Mela this week, and etcetera (Motto: “Oh no, not again!”) invites you to nom­i­nate posts sub­ject to the fol­low­ing rules:

• Posts must be writ­ten by Indi­ans, or have an Indian con­nec­tion of some sort.
• Posts must be dated between the 9^th and the 16^th of Feb­ru­ary 2006.
• Only nom­i­na­tions received before mid­night on the 16^th will be con­sid­ered for the mela
• Nom­i­na­tion does not guar­an­tee pub­li­ca­tion, non-nomination does not pre­clude pub­li­ca­tion. In other words, we will get one of the under­lings to scour the web for posts.
• One post per writer, please.

etcetera ( Motto: “If you think our name is banal, wait till you read our posts”) is one of the few blogs nom­i­nated for the Best Indian Blog of the Year award. Pause for laugh­ter. Sepia Mutiny is not in there. Longer pause.

We strongly belive that the only thing that stands between great­ness and us is our com­ments pol­icy. So peo­ple, as soon as we find an email provider who gives us enough room to store all the emails we get (mostly pic­tures of admir­ers inter­ested in roman­tic rela­tion­ships with the hand­some guy that writes all these posts) we will dis­able com­ments. And then there’s no stop­ping us.

Update: etcetera (New Motto: “Bad jokes are our forte, if you hate them, take us to courte”) would like to men­tion that through the flip­pant exte­rior it is all mushy and is actu­ally hum­bled by the honor: The wife actu­ally voted for it, and if you add Chenthil it got TWO votes. Beat that, Amit.

PS: etcetera ( Newest Motto: “We are run­ning out of mot­tos”) promises that it will not update this post anymore.

Wel­come to the Blog Mela.

The Arts:

We’ll kick off with a beau­ti­ful Chan­dra­has post on Nazim Hik­met, “the most promi­nent name in mod­ern Turk­ish poetry.”

The Jab­ber­wock “scratches the sur­face“of Sid­dharth Chowdhury’s first novel — Patna Rough­cut. He scratches pretty well, methinks.

wit­nwis­dum says that crit­ics are being unduly harsh on Michael Crichton’s State Of Fear, while Anup thinks Crich­ton deserves all that and more. [ In the opin­ion of the dude that hunted down this post for us, The it’s-just-fiction defense doesn’t hold too much water, espe­cially when the book is qual­i­fi­ca­tion enough of Michael to be an expert wit­ness on global warm­ing. I am sure y’all care a lot.]

While we are on lit­er­ary crit­i­cism, Prufrock­Two asks us to quit whin­ing about harsh crit­i­cism and look at Europe.

Hur­ree Babu sums up the year in fic­tion for us. In case you are won­der­ing, the Babu blogs at Kitabkhana.

Jo and Anup do a cover ver­sion of a song from one of their favorite bands.

Zero’s detailed analy­sis of Guna, a Kamal­has­san star­rer from the early nineties. [We thought the music was great, every­thing else was ordi­nary. But that’s just us].

Bharad­waj Ran­gan “traces some key aspects of Tamil cin­ema through Mani Rath­nam and his Iru­var.” Now if only other peo­ple were con­sid­er­ate enough to put post sum­maries below their post titles, I could’ve saved half a day. You’re wel­come though.

Arnab has an illus­trated review of a “clas­sic”. No spicy pic­tures though. Note that I put clas­sic in quotes, so that means I did read the review.

Manoj, the res­i­dent sub­ti­tle expert in the blog­sphere, tries his hand at sub­ti­tling a cou­ple of clips. Hilar­i­ous.

And we’ll close this sec­tion out with an elo­quent Fal­staff review of Broke­back Moun­tain.

Sports (read, cricket):

Sunil appar­ently lived down the street from Anil Kum­ble. He speaks with a tinge of regret about never get­ting to talk to Anil, but we’d like him to look at the bright side, and be glad that it wasn’t Sania Mirza. Ooh, just imag­ine. By the way, all the bad jokes on this post: not me.

A sar­cas­tic take on the Gan­guly issue here.

For great cricket analy­sis, you need to look no fur­ther than Prem’s blog. I mean, I know it is one post a blog and all that, but still…

Cre­ative Writing:

Anna hosts another nanofic­tion orgy this week at Sepi­a­Mutiny. I’ll break the rules and link to another one of the orgies. Plus men­tion­ing orgy and orgies in this post will get me more hits.

Amardeep leaves us hang­ing with half a short story. Amrik Bad­naam Goes To The Library. Since the blog­mela lim­its me to one post per author, I’m afraid I can’t link to his neat review of a few films.

Mis­cel­la­neous:

Amit dis­cov­ers that a gene whose name sounds sus­pi­ciously like a Sri Lanka Air­lines flight num­ber could mean the dif­fer­ence between star­dom and vam­p­dom on Bol­ly­wood. Another A-lister, Abhi hails the selec­tion of Bobby Jin­dal as its Per­son Of the Year. Heh.Glad you’re still reading.

Man­ish points us to a reen­act­ment of the Con­stant Gar­dener in India, except that there is no Tessa and it is hap­pen­ing for real. Just check out the whole blog here, will ya. It is, like, an epic orgy of incred­i­ble blog­ging. Epic Orgy. More hits.

Nilu says some­thing about dilem­mas and deaths and such like. I am tempted to say some­thing bad about the post, and get on his pukeroll and become famous and retire early, but that’ll be for the next mela.

Megha ush­ers the Hol­i­day sea­son with a poem, and Fal­staff recre­ates the nativ­ity sequence for us. I think. Actu­ally, scratch these two posts, please. They were posted after the dead­line. Let’s try again. Minal on Christ­mas Car­ols. And Shruthi on the evo­lu­tion of birth­days. Since I men­tioned evo­lu­tion, let me also men­tion Intel­li­gent Design and Cre­ation­ism. We don’t want to offend any­one that might be listening.

Ganja Tur­tle is a mean guy that tor­tures ani­mals. He also has the gall to write a lovely post about it. Here. What are the odds Uma’ll go after him?

And JAP (the orig­i­nal Prufrock) writes evoca­tively about Bom­bay in the morn­ing. Out­stand­ing. Really, truly.

Doz, who writes as well as any­one else in the blo­gos­phere, waxes elo­quent about lists. Lavanya talks about a man in her life.

Sonia Faleiro has the post of the week: an inter­view with R.K. Lax­man. Such fun she has. Okay, here’s the last rule I’ll break, but I have to link to this post about Rakhi Sawant (note to Google: item girl, bikini, panties).

Sak­shi tries to trick me with her post titled “And yes, Aus­tralia is racist.” I am glad I read the last line of her post, and she seems to be say­ing that that’s not the case. Phew, close shave.

While we are on hatred and stuff, here’s Chenthil on the “Kizhaven­mani inci­dent” where a whole bunch of peo­ple were burnt alive by their land­lords. On Christ­mas day, (2005−1967) years ago.

JK wants to rename Kochi. Again.

Navin bemoans the lack of tol­er­ance in India. In another avatar, he posts a pretty pic­ture of the Wankhade sta­dium in Bombay.

Shoe­fiend takes us on a whirl­wind tour of Ams­ter­dam. Mean­while. Rhyn­cus: rain, pic­tures, words. Pretty.

And with that we end. Hope you all had fun, coz I sure didn’t. Ok, ok, I am kid­ding. I did have fun. Next Mela: Chan­doo.