To better cater to these mythical people, we’ve redesigned ourselves. Please check us out, and pay close attention to the Asides section, for that’s the culprit that has been flooding your feedreaders. Also, after checking it out, please let us know who you are. I’d like to make friendships with the morons that read such drivel.

PS: By the way, efforts are underway to split our feeds. Until then, bear with us.

PPS: Efforts have been underwent, and split feeds are now available. The default feed offers the Asides, but you are welcome to subscribe to the no asides feed  here . And yes, we do offer an asides only feed , but why mention that here, right?

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.”

It is also a book where shredded hills of coconut meat stand like “sentinels awaiting instruction” and the boring parish priest read for so long from the bible that “the cuckoo in the clock retired for the night” and so loudly that “a row of miniature Dutch houses slumbering on the edge of a small table trembled with the anticipation of their fall.” “Dewy golden hinged” windowpanes rock in the wind from their roots, “like butterflies pinned to the wall.”

While the care taken with the writing lends an erudite, suave feel to the book ( the classy production helps too), it also robs it of all spontaneity. Even the rare playfulness has a planned feel to it – one can almost sense the author pausing for applause before moving on to the next sentence. Perhaps that’s why The Girl comes off as verbose, a surprising thing for a book this slim. Some things are best left to the reader’s imagination…

At the very beginning of the book, for example, Sonia tries hard – way too hard – to convince her audience that there is something sinister about Azul, the Goan village where the tale is set in. Azul, we are told, enjoys a well deserved reputation as the Village of the Dead and the average Azulian resident has come across an excessive amount of tragedy. So much misfortune that the villagers are now inure to death and sadness and have grown to expect it.

And she doesn’t flinch at mentioning the fact over and over again – this supposed reputation of the village – devoting almost an entire chapter to it. And like the kid who keeps telling us over and over again that he didn’t really tear the five rupee bill (I really didn’t daddy), we start doubting the author, and an incidental detail that should’ve added a bit of intrigue to the narrative ends up creating a vague uneasiness in the minds of the reader about the whole story.

There is a village by the sea, a sea so blue they named the village Azul, the Portugese word for blue. But most people who have heard of or have passed through this forgotten clasp of Goa, know it not because of its unusual name but for its very real reputation as the Village of the Dead.The village is but a pinprick upon a map, so small and, as many believe, so potently cursed, that visitors who thronged to our part of the world after the incidents which I am now about to recount came to light, were unable, except perhaps by mistake, to stumble upon us.

***

In the house beside mine live Maria Coutinho and her three unwed daughters. Six months ago, Thomas Coutinho sunk to the bottom of the sea after his stomach cramped up during a particularly sharp movement of the breaststroke. Now Maria, Rosy, Daisy and Petunia feel like guests in their own home, unsure of the kitchen entrance or the exit door. They sit uneasily in their garden, sewing, drinking tea, weeping soundless tears to fill the empty space left behind by a beloved husband and father. I have another neighbour, a young man of indeterminate age. Perhaps a writer expecting to be discovered. a painter searching for a muse. Most likely he was once a cheery professional, eager for fame, desperate for a drink, who, having lost his way to someplace important, found himself in Azul and was immediately drained of all strength, perhaps even life, to turn back and go home. This is the effect we have on outsiders.

***

Yet I take meager solace in the fact that the entire village shares my fate. That is why we are of the Dead, perpetually in grief for losses real and imagined. There is not one in Azul who has not been denied a beloved too young, too soon. A wife whose husband drowned at sea, a brother who stumbled across an unlit path after too many glasses of arrack. A child born with an eye scooped out, another whose butter-soft skull lolls like a rubber ball on the dunes. A young girl, newly engaged, who lost her fianc� to a motorcycle accident that left the air thick with the smell of burning rubber and iron. A midnight stabbing at Happy Joe’s bar. And, of course, suicides. These are the sort of stories shared by the villagers at council meetings.

***

Soon enough, we realised that nobody understands death like the Village of the Dead, and no one expects to encounter it more. I suppose when you have nothing left to lose, you are finally freed of the terror of losing it.

Behind the veneer of beautiful writing and classy production, the story The Girl tells is nothing new. One girl, two men, unrequited love. The book is almost formulaic: A little bit of background about the girl – her family (dysfunctional), her life otherwise (lonely, boring). One of the men (sweet, lovable, timid). The other man (mysterious, traveler). Even though the Girl’s character is beautifully done – the quiet suffering, the hesitant hopefulness, and later, dignity when all hope fades – the rest of the people in the book veer dangerously close to being caricatures.

Perhaps a Marquez could’ve worked some over-the-top magic with this mix, but in the hands of this talented newbie with a gift for words, the book is just passable. One could be harsh and call this standard issue Bollywood, where you get great camerawork, flawless skin, beautiful costumes, plenty of cleavage, awesome locales and nothing else. One could, but that wouldn’t be fair. For all its flaws, The Girl is a pleasant read, and probably one of the better Indian books this year.

Comparisons can be odious, but I can’t help mentioning Siddhartha Chowdhury’s Patna Roughcut in this context. On a superficial level, the similarities are obvious. A short novel, a new author, a small town setting, released around the same time. The similarities end there though. Chowdhury’s unadorned prose is so much more believable, a quality that Sonia’s suave prose somehow lacks – her flowery prose is the book’s biggest strength, and its biggest weakness.

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.)

Illeana is hot, man.

BRB.

Damn, Bluffmaster is a copy of Criminal.

BRB.

Nayantara sucks, dude.

I am sleepy now.

BRB.

Please bear with me, this is going somewhere.

To cut a long story short, we thought it would be fun if we could start a movie blog focusing on Indian movies. As an added incentive for me, I get to hang out with great writers at both my blogs.

Although the ostensible purpose of the blog is to share bits of movie wisdom we find interesting, to review movies we like and to share the occasional photo we like (*slurp*), the real purpose is to bash Nayantara. She sucks.

We’re tired of writing long posts (at least I am) and we’ll try to keep the entries short, snarky and sweet. (What’s wrong with lofty goals?). In other words, it’ll be like an IM conversation with the whole world. Damn, thats almost patentable.

And before I forget, here’s the URL: http://www.silverscreen.in (aren’t you jealous we got such a cool name?).

To give credit where it is due, the idea originally came from Lavanya. Now she’s someone that loves movies. Enough to watch even the worst movie in the world with patient indulgence to the very end, and then stoically comment on how bad it was before changing DVDs. Enough to watch at least a movie a day – language no bar – for several years now. Enough to accumulate a database in her head of all the obscure movie trivia that’s fit to print.

I tried to recruit her to write, but it didn’t go too well.

Will you write for the movie blog you wanted us to start?

No, I’d rather watch a movie in that time.

Why don’t you try?

Can you not talk during the movie?

PS: Thanks to DoZ for looking over the template, to Kuzhali for looking over the template a million times (and asking me to remove shady banners), to Prash for help with (what else?) the template.

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

First up, this delectable little gem from Sidin. Certainly the funniest post of the week, and possibly one of the funniest ever. One post like this can make hosting a mela so much fun.

The esoterically named Gounder Brownie comes up with a splendid use for cabbages. An innovative twist on the idea that I came up with all by myself would be to use a lettuce in much the same manner – it has the added advantage of costing less money. Veena chimes in with some Valentine’s day advice of her own. Gawker manages to look through all this Dick Cheney brouhaha and draw conclusions that lay certain dodgy old demons to rest. Nice. And here’s a post from Megha I forgot to include the first time around – about what people seek and what people get.

Next up, the usual suspects. Jai Arjun Singh writes an awesome review; Chandrahas has a great post on literature – poet Jeet Thayil in this case; Amit has a series of offbeat posts about Pakistan; the folks at Sepia Mutiny churn out great posts. Humility prevents me from linking to this post on Thai Pusam, but not to Chenthil’s post on the same topic. DoZ on this blog, waxes eloquent about pleasure, pain, books, movies, life. Falstaff rhymes, then rants. And does it well. In other words, it was a week like any other.

The obligatory State of Fear post of the week. This time from Patrix. Unrelated, but here’s Sunil’s comprehensive review of Indu Sundaresan’s The Twentieth Wife. And Karthik just realized that one can use as many as three apostrophes in a single sentence.

Gayathri on the perils of choice. The title of her post reminds me of the funniest Subway story I’ve heard yet: My freshly arrived friend’s reply to the “For here or to go” question was: Both. And look ma: Three colons on this paragraph. Make that four: Sibyl, bless her soul, has a post on crossdressers and transgendereators. Now if that doesn’t bring me visitors, what will? By the way, great word, isn’t it? Transgenderators. Must be a smart guy that coined it. To keep the dressing thme going, here’s Tilo on non-violent silk; and the thread continues as she talks about the silk weavers of Madurai. Did I say one post per person? Bah.

Full2Faltu reminisces about the good old times when DoorDarshan was the only game in town. Oh, what’s the big deal if a guy makes a few (million) bucks on the way to killing a lot of bad people? Let him go, for he does what we cannot says Navin. From Cynical Nerd, a longish post about cheerleaders. Before you rush to click, be warned: there are no pictures, and many of them are old and male. Arrgh.

Spaceman Spiff wants states to be reorganized, Jeyavel has some predictions for India’s cities, Incredibly Me talks about oil changes, the Soliloquist muses on being an Indian. Or something like that, it was a long post, so pliss excuse me. Vivek talks about a village that built its own railway station.

Zero – who wants me to make no jokes – qualifies for the longest post of the week award with this. Speaking of which, Sandeep writes a Joyceian post about ballgirls and wins the longest sentence without any punctuation award hands down.

On Sports – cricket, of course – Prem Panicker’s outstanding blog still outstands, the atrocious interface notwithstanding. Anti isn’t too pleased about Moin Khan shooting his mouth off and Ruchir Joshi (who shares Rediff’s horrid interface with Prem) links to a video on who chucks and who doesn’t. By the way, if your vocabulary is not tuned to cricketese, let me clarify that rhyme notwithsanding, chuckin’ doesn’t mean what you think it means. Dirty chuckers.

The quote of the week, from PrufrockTwo. “Books may be easy to burn, but they aren’t that easy to get rid of.”

The next Mela is at Ashish’s Niti.

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 9th and the 16th of February 2006.
• Only nominations received before midnight on the 16th 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.

And while I am out traumatizing a wider audience, Doz, who runs a delightful little blog at Dreaming of Zihuatanejo will take over here. Please be nice to me when I come back.

Let me go back to gloating now.

In which we squelch malicious rumors that you have to pay to view this site henceforth. Not this year, no.

In which we promise to put an end to bad jokes, and post something substantially unfunny substantially soon. We don’t want to drive Sybil away.

In which we must mention that our internet connection isn’t all that bad, so we don’t really have excuses for not updating for a while.

In which we direct you to go read this blog. This post notwithstanding, rumors that we want to wrest the byline away from them are untrue.

And finally, a public service announcement: We warn you to not search for sneak peek on google images.

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.

Scientists at the Universities of London, Birmingham and Warwick “loaded Christie’s novels onto a computer and analyzed her words, phrases and sentences.” The results of the study show that

[S]he peppered her prose with phrases that act as a trigger to raise levels of serotonin and endorphins, the chemical messengers in the brain that induce pleasure and satisfaction.

[Another] finding was that she used a very limited vocabulary. “It means that readers aren’t distracted and so they concentrate more on the clues and the plots,” said Dr Pernilla Danielsson from the school of humanities at Birmingham University. [Link]

Here’s Mark Lieberman’s take at the Language Log.

Christie used a limited vocabulary, “pleasing and gentle” language even though the plots were macabre, and repeated certain “mesmerizing” phrases over and over again to stimulate serotonin and other chemicals in the body.

Favourite words or phrases, repeatedly used in a “mesmerising” way, help to stimulate the pleasure-inducing side of the brain. They include she, yes, girl, kind, smiled and suddenly. Common phrases include “can you keep an eye on this”, “more or less”, “a day or two” and “something like that”. [Link]

Let’s summarize the recipe for bestsellers: Repeating the same things over and over again, gentle presentation, familiar phrases, sixth grade vocabulary. And let’s also state our opinion of the whole stylometric study: Duh! Just read any three books by Robert Ludlum, and you’ll know. Familiarity sells. Familiarity and simplicity, we are convinced, are the key ingredients that make popular art so… popular. Actually, duh again. There is a whole industry in India, um.. I mean, South Asia that has been using the formula successfully for ages – Indian movies are all about familiar settings, dumbed down plotting and an insistence on making audiences feel good. The next time someone asks Ram Gopal Varma why he keeps remaking his own movies (and those of others), he should quote Professor Danielsson, stylometry, serotonin, Agatha Christie and Antara Mali. And Anu Malik – what can I say? I respect him a lot more now. Something like that.

The repetitive nature of Bollywood means titling movies is a hard, hard task. How many ways can you headline the same article? Guy beats up Bad Guys, falls in Love with Girl. Girl Falls in Love with Guy who beat up Bad Guys. Bad Guys beaten up by Guy that Fell in Love with Girl. Love fallen into by Girl and Guy who beat up Bad Guys. And so on. Which, by the way, is a great segue into the next Agatha Christie finding.

According to a statistical study commissioned by Lulu.com, Agatha Christie’s Sleeping Murder is the “perfect title” for a bestselling novel and John Le Carre is the most consistent producer of “good” titles. [Link]

Figurative or abstract titles, such as “Sleeping Murder,” or “Presumed Innocent,” produce more top-sellers than literal ones, such as “The Da Vinci Code.”

A title’s length does not affect sales — contrary to publishingindustry wisdom, which decrees that bestseller titles be short. Another increased respect moment here. Remember all those Hindi movie titles: DDLJ. HAHK. K3G. Damn. These guys knew.

Through the Language Log a link to the statistical analysis tool used for the study. The Lulu Book Title Analyzer. Please don’t forget to leave comments complimenting the intriguing figurative title I chose for this post.

[Previous Post on why Bollywood is high literary art.]

PS: Agatha Christie picture courtesy The Free Library.

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.

I donated money to the local temple, and got God’s GoogleTalk id in return.

“yo,” I said.

“yeah?”

“You’re the first lady ever to respond to my IMs. Thanks.”

“gentleman, but ur welcome.”

“Goddamn! eh… sorry.”

“thatz ok, whaddya want?”

“Secret of Immortality.”

“take a cupful of…”

“Go on”

“can’t. your 55 words are up.”

Previous efforts: 1 2

When the first Nobel Prize in Literature went to Sully Prudhomme, in 1901, the choice was regarded as a scandal, since Leo Tolstoy happened to be alive. The Swedish Academy was so unnerved by the public criticism it received that its members made a point of passing over Tolstoy for the rest of his life—just to show, apparently, that they knew what they were doing the first time around—honoring instead such immortals as Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, José Echegaray, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Giosuè Carducci, Rudolf Eucken, and Selma Lagerlöf.

English says that for prizes to “matter” they need to be thought of as “fundamentally scandalous” by the public – scandalous in the sense that art should really have nothing to do with winning or losing.

In English’s view, therefore, [Toni] Morrison’s friends and admirers violated the protocols of prize-bashing not because they publicly criticized the choice of the National Book Award judges but because they acknowledged that the award really matters, that it is (in their words) a “keystone honor” that helps to validate a book and establish its author. Their statement pointed out, in the frankest terms, that there is a literary marketplace, and that power and authority–”cultural capital,” to use the term that English borrows from the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu–accrue to those who succeed in it. Art does not receive its reward in Heaven; it is one of the things that belong to Caesar.

English speculates that this willingness to speak without embarrassment about the significance of prizes and awards, and about the whole economy of cultural production and consumption, may, paradoxically, signal the demise of the prize system.

The book also sounds a hopeful note for wannabe creators:

There are now more movie awards given out every year–about nine thousand–than there are new movies, and the number of literary prizes is climbing much faster than the number of books published.

Nice. I’ll remember that for the next time I run into an award winning writer.

This blog will host the Bharateeya Blog Mela this week, and all the underlings that work for etcetera (Motto: We pay you after only 85 emails) join the boss man in inviting you to nominate posts, subject to the following edicts:

• Posts must be written by Indians, or have an Indian connection of some sort.
• Posts must be dated between the 16th and the 22nd of December 2005.
• Only nominations received before midnight on the 22nd 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.

PS: Our proufreader also not availabale.

The problem, according to Meyer, was that [Graham] Greene’s spelling was “deeply dubious”, and the pair did not have a dictionary. During a stay in Tahiti, Greene produced the words “zeb”, which he claimed was an Elizabethan word for “cock”, and “quoign” which he insisted was Shakespearean, quoting: “Yon castle’s quoign that Duncan’s spirit haunts.”

Meyer thought the line was as dubious as Greene’s spelling and, in the sultry Tahitian nights, tempers frayed. The pair were still arguing when they reached San Francisco, months later. They ran straight from the ship to a second-hand book store and found a dictionary.

The word was in, spelled “quoin”, which satisfied Greene, though as Meyer pointed out, “quoin” would not have landed on a triple letter score.

I don’t feel so bad now for tricking my eleven year old nephew into believing that qyonder was the one of the few words in English where a u didn’t follow the q. Think it meant a problem at a distant place. I hope he mentions me in his autobiography, but given that he hasn’t bothered to look up qyonder yet, that is a very distant possibility. He isn’t that good at cricket either.

Mr Greene and Scrabble (Through Bookslut)

Meanwhile, everyone else in the world seems to have watched the new Potter movie. I want to go watch it tomorrow, so that I can tell people that the book was so much better than the movie. To make that statement with authority, I had to read the book first, so I read it online here – check back next week for the post that tells you the book is so much better than the movie.

The Guardian Digested Read is my (very belated) find of the year.

Why, I even read the entire dirty book that Falstaff talks about so much. In five minutes, no less. Let’s see you beat that buddy.

And before I sign off, check out Gayathri’s crisp little review of Harold Pinter’s A Birthday Party. And wish the soon to be marriajed (damn, that’s better than qyonder) Veena. To balance out the sexes, here’s another bad speller exposed.

Update: Somehow, this post would like to think it spawned this one. It feels rather proud about the fact.

It is as if we are too pug-nosed individually, but together, we create a patrician nose a Roman would be proud of. And from atop that noble proboscis, we gaze down upon the world. For all our toils for the sake of being included, exclusion is the ultimate reward.

Blogging seems to be an activity with a very limited lifetime, and quite a few people are retiring rather early. Burnt out, bored, tired, whatever. As I toss and turn, I know that some day in the future, I will have to call it a day. And when I do, what would I leave behind? What will I be remembered for?

You see, dear reader, I am worried about my legacy. I am also slightly concerned about dozing off at work tomorrow, but let’s set that aside for a minute and talk about my legacy.

After giving it a lot of thought (three nights, no sleep) I think I have figured out what I need to do – I need to transfer my considerable knowledge of almost everything under the sun (except Konkani classical music) to people. After some more thought (one night, no sleep) I have decided that the best place for me to start this process would be movies.

As I write this, visions of numerologically correct movie titles that say “Thanks to Stochhasticcca” or “A Klassic Koncieved at Karthik’s Blag” cloud my mind. Maybe someone from Hollywood’ll pick up these lessons, and when she wins an Oscar she’ll say “I owe it all to Karthik”, as tear drops roll down her cheeks, fall on her neck and continue on downwards. Nice. Why did I not think of this earlier?

I will sleep a little and then come back and start off with the first lesson in the Stochastica Sinema School Series.

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I am up now, and visions of that lonely tear drop still linger. Tempting as it is to start off with the acting school for women, I will selflessly start off the first lesson with tips on writing good punch lines for Indian movies.

But the truth is, if you don’t know how to write good punch lines, you will never make it big as a screenwriter in any language but Hindi. To be successful in Hindi, screenwriters need to make it big in Hollywood first. And oh, before I forget, the acting school for women will meet next week, soon after I get my haircut.

Let’s start with a question.

A fat man is beating up fit people. Unable to bear the overpowering strength of his flab, the fit guys have no option but to try and electrocute the fat man. But he is stronger than that, so the moment the wires touch him, the power station that generated the electricity that dared approach the fat man explodes. Spectacularly.

The fat man turns to the fit guys, and tells them, “Don’t be shocked! I can shock electricity!” He then swishes his hands, turns around and walks away in slow motion – the camera focusing on his fat ass. [Navin, you know now.]

What did he just do?

Answer, students, is that he just mouthed a punch line.

A punch line, to start off with a formal definition is:

1. A pithy piece of gibberish.
2. Spoken by mostly fat men in lead roles, but there are exceptions.
3. The point of which is to (appear to) highlight the virtues of the speaker.
4. The speaker of the line is the subject. (In other words, fat man on himself).

Another example of a punch line would be:

“If you try to touch a woman when George is around, George will turn into a man and turn you into a woman.”

Notice that George is the speaker, and the subtext of the sentence is that George would castrate the toucher. This technique of referring to oneself by one’s first name is quite popular and is employed in every other punch line. It is something you should file away for future use.

We will close this part of the lesson with a few more examples. Please try writing some more at home, and test them out by saying them out loud in crowded places. If you get into trouble, sue me, please.

Whenever people are in need, I help them. I can’t help doing this.

God might forgive you for this sin, but I will never forgive you. May God forgive me.

A type of punch line that is less frequently used is the pithy sentence about nothing. These are mostly spoken by the hero to a skimpily clad girl. After this sentence is spoken, the girl usually falls in love with the hero.

For a woman, not wearing mini-skirts is the only way to skirt trouble.

If you wear a dress with a plunging neckline
On you bad men will want to recline.
On them lies no blame,
for you have no shame.

.

The amount of trouble you invite is inversely proportional to the amount of clothes you wear.

This is only for classy movies, I think. Will work in A centers.

If your blouse is always cut high
and you act shy (by lowering your eye)
no man will open his fly
this is not a lie.

This one is poetic, so please email me before using this in your movie.

After the girl falls in love, she will proceed to dance with the hero on the alps, clad in a bikini. It is quite important to not have your leading man speak any punch lines now.

We are almost at the end of our lesson, folks. The last type of punch line is similar to the first type, except that some leading men don’t feel comfortable talking about themselves all the time. In such cases, we have a comedian mouth the line and this gives us the latitude to make it even more outrageous.

Lo and Behold!
Brother will turn sand into gold;
the young into old;
He will never be sold.

If you make women cry,
Brother will take a pan
put you in there and fry
you until you turn tan.

Nice observation, student number 1. Yes, indeed, a comedian should always call the hero brother.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the end of Stochastica Sinema School Lesson #1.

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Before you leave, remember this: I am an electrical fire. Even water cannot touch me. Let me go back to sleep now.

“I am not sleeping.”

“Oh yeah? That’s good to know. So are you dead then?”

“Do I look dead to you?”

“I see that sarcasm goes right over your head. Let me ask you this then: what the heck have you been up to? Am I not in your scheme of things anymore?”

“Hmm… I traveled half way around the world, and saw my hometown ravaged by a freak storm. Trees down. Traffic lights out. People without power, homes without roofs. The trees especially, what a waste.”

“Oh, I see. Very sad. But how come you’re grinning now?”

“Coz I called my dentist, and his voice mail said something funny.”

“What?”

“Due to the hurricane last week (it said) our voice mail system was down, so we didn’t get all of your messages. We all know how hard this can be. But stay strong, and together we’ll get through this adversity. Thank you for calling.”

“Why is that funny again?”

“God, you are worse than me. But then that’s why you are in my scheme of things, you make me feel good.”