An Ah-maaazing and Inspiring Story

I got this story in the mail from -- no, NOT Anvar this time -- but Amar. I don't know who wrote the article or where it was published.

[a couple of hours later. I found a number of blog links of which I'm posting just one. There seems to be some disagreement about the correct spelling of his name. I've decided to go with the one featured in this title, but the article spells the name with an "a"] Naga Naresh Karuturi

'God has always been planning things for me'
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Naga Naresh Karutura has just passed out of IIT Madras in Computer Science and has joined Google in Bangalore .

You may ask, what's so special about this 21-year-old when there are hundreds of students passing out from various IITs and joining big companies like Google?

Naresh is special. His parents are illiterate. He has no legs and moves around in his powered wheel chair. (In fact, when I could not locate his lab, he told me over the mobile phone, 'I will come and pick you up'. And in no time, he was there to guide me)

Ever smiling, optimistic and full of spirit; that is Naresh. He says, "God has always been planning things for me. That is why I feel I am lucky."

Childhood in a village
I spent the first seven years of my life in Teeparru, a small village in Andhra Pradesh, on the banks of the river Godavari . My father Prasad was a lorry driver and my mother Kumari, a house wife. Though they were illiterate, my parents instilled in me and my elder sister (Sirisha) the importance of studying.

Looking back, one thing that surprises me now is the way my father taught me when I was in the 1st and 2nd standards. My father would ask me questions from the text book, and I would answer them. At that time, I didn't know he could not read or write but to make me happy, he helped me in my studies!

Another memory that doesn't go away is the floods in the village and how I was carried on top of a buffalo by my uncle. I also remember plucking fruits from a tree that was full of thorns.

I used to be very naughty, running around and playing all the time with my friends. I used to get a lot of scolding for disturbing the elders who slept in the afternoon. The moment they started scolding, I would run away to the fields!

I also remember finishing my school work fast in class and sleeping on the teacher's lap!

January 11, 1993, the fateful day
On the January 11, 1993 when we had the sankranti holidays, my mother took my sister and me to a nearby village for a family function. From there we were to go with our grandmother to our native place. But my grandmother did not come there. As there were no buses that day, my mother took a lift in my father's friend's lorry. As there were many people in the lorry, he made me sit next to him, close to the door.

It was my fault; I fiddled with the door latch and it opened wide throwing me out. As I fell, my legs got cut by the iron rods protruding from the lorry. Nothing happened to me except scratches on my legs.

The accident had happened just in front of a big private hospital but they refused to treat me saying it was an accident case. Then a police constable who was passing by took us to a government hospital.

First I underwent an operation as my small intestine got twisted. The doctors also bandaged my legs. I was there for a week. When the doctors found that gangrene had developed and it had reached up to my knees, they asked my father to take me to a district hospital. There, the doctors scolded my parents a lot for neglecting the wounds and allowing the gangrene to develop. But what could my ignorant parents do?

In no time, both my legs were amputated up to the hips.

I remember waking up and asking my mother, where are my legs? I also remember that my mother cried when I asked the question. I was in the hospital for three months.

Life without legs
I don't think my life changed dramatically after I lost both my legs. Because all at home were doting on me, I was enjoying all the attention rather than pitying myself. I was happy that I got a lot of fruits and biscuits.

'I never wallowed in self-pity'

The day I reached my village, my house was flooded with curious people; all of them wanted to know how a boy without legs looked. But I was not bothered; I was happy to see so many of them coming to see me, especially my friends!

All my friends saw to it that I was part of all the games they played; they carried me everywhere.

God's hand
I believe in God. I believe in destiny. I feel he plans everything for you. If not for the accident, we would not have moved from the village to Tanuku, a town. There I joined a missionary school, and my father built a house next to the school. Till the tenth standard, I studied in that school.

If I had continued in Teeparu, I may not have studied after the 10th. I may have started working as a farmer or someone like that after my studies. I am sure God had other plans for me.

My sister, my friend
When the school was about to reopen, my parents moved from Teeparu to Tanuku, a town, and admitted both of us in a Missionary school. They decided to put my sister also in the same class though she is two years older. They thought she could take care of me if both of us were in the same class. My sister never complained.

She would be there for everything. Many of my friends used to tell me, you are so lucky to have such a loving sister. There are many who do not care for their siblings.

She carried me in the school for a few years and after a while, my friends took over the task. When I got the tricycle, my sister used to push me around in the school.

My life, I would say, was normal, as everyone treated me like a normal kid. I never wallowed in self-pity. I was a happy boy and competed with others to be on top and the others also looked at me as a competitor.

Inspiration
I was inspired by two people when in school; my Maths teacher Pramod Lal who encouraged me to participate in various local talent tests, and a brilliant boy called Chowdhary, who was my senior.

When I came to know that he had joined Gowtham Junior College to prepare for IIT-JEE, it became my dream too. I was school first in 10th scoring 542/600.

Because I topped in the state exams, Gowtham Junior College waived the fee for me. Pramod Sir's recommendation also helped. The fee was around Rs 50,000 per year, which my parents could never afford.

Moving to a residential school
Living in a residential school was a big change for me because till then my life centred around home and school and I had my parents and sister to take care of all my needs. It was the first time that I was interacting with society. It took one year for me to adjust to the new life.

There, my inspiration was a boy called K K S Bhaskar who was in the top 10 in IIT-JEE exams. He used to come to our school to encourage us. Though my parents didn't know anything about Gowtham Junior School or IIT, they always saw to it that I was encouraged in whatever I wanted to do. If the results were good, they would praise me to the skies and if bad, they would try to see something good in that. They did not want me to feel bad.

They are such wonderful supportive parents.

Life at IIT- Madras
Though my overall rank in the IIT-JEE was not that great (992), I was 4th in the physically handicapped category. So, I joined IIT, Madras to study Computer Science.

Here, my role model was Karthik who was also my senior in school. I looked up to him during my years at IIT- Madras.

He had asked for attached bathrooms for those with special needs before I came here itself. So, when I came here, the room had attached bath. He used to help me and guide me a lot when I was here.

I evolved as a person in these four years, both academically and personally. It has been a great experience studying here. The people I was interacting with were so brilliant that I felt privileged to sit along with them in the class. Just by speaking to my lab mates, I gained a lot.

'There are more good people in society than bad ones'
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Words are inadequate to express my gratitude to Prof Pandurangan and all my lab mates; all were simply great. I was sent to Boston along with four others for our internship by Prof Pandurangan. It was a great experience.

Joining Google R&D

I did not want to pursue PhD as I wanted my parents to take rest now.

Morgan Stanley selected me first but I preferred Google because I wanted to work in pure computer science, algorithms and game theory.

I am lucky
Do you know why I say I am lucky?

I get help from total strangers without me asking for it. Once after my second year at IIT, I with some of my friends was travelling in a train for a conference. We met a kind gentleman called Sundar in the train, and he has been taking care of my hostel fees from then on.

I have to mention about Jaipur foot. I had Jaipur foot when I was in 3rd standard. After two years, I stopped using them. As I had almost no stems on my legs, it was very tough to tie them to the body. I found walking with Jaipur foot very, very slow. Sitting also was a problem. I found my tricycle faster because I am one guy who wants to do things faster.

One great thing about the hospital is, they don't think their role ends by just fixing the Jaipur foot; they arrange for livelihood for all. They asked me what help I needed from them. I told them at that time, if I got into an IIT, I needed financial help from them. So, from the day I joined IIT, Madras , my fees were taken care of by them. So, my education at the IIT was never a burden on my parents and they could take care of my sister's Nursing studies.

Surprise awaited me at IIT
After my first year, when I went home, two things happened here at the Institute without my knowledge.

I got a letter from my department that they had arranged a lift and ramps at the department for me. It also said that if I came a bit early and checked whether it met with my requirements, it would be good.

Second surprise was, the Dean, Prof Idichandy and the Students General Secretary, Prasad had located a place that sold powered wheel chairs. The cost was Rs 55,000. What they did was, they did not buy the wheel chair; they gave me the money so that the wheel chair belonged to me and not the institute.

My life changed after that. I felt free and independent.

That's why I say I am lucky. God has planned things for me and takes care of me at every step.

The world is full of good people
I also feel if you are motivated and show some initiative, people around you will always help you. I also feel there are more good people in society than bad ones. I want all those who read this to feel that if Naresh can achieve something in life, you can too.

Kenyan poet, Shailja Patel

I'm posting a link to a poem I just read, called Drum Rider by a young Kenyan poet of whom I had not heard till this morning: Shailja Patel.

I'm also posting the poem, but I may remove it (-- okay, I've removed it. Had cold feet. Will send an e-mail asking the lady if she objects)(she DOES object. So please go visit her site).

I received the poem by e-mail from Rubin D'Cruz, director of the Kerala State Institute of Children's Literature (whom I met last November, in Goa as part of the Indo-Swedish workshop I attended there). He was present at the Swedish literary meet (WALTIC -- Writers And Literary Translators International Conference), at which Patel performed her piece. It must have been very powerful.

Loopy Logos

I posted some logos here earlier but on second thoughts decided they weren't worthy of being blogged for all posterity (ha). So I've left just one of them in. It -- and its friends -- got a chuckle out of me when I got it by e-mail from (you guessed it!) Anvar but up here in my blog they seemed to lose their sparkle. Whatever. Here's the best one:

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Sadness

The morning after taking the photographs below, I found E holding the bird in his hands. Then he looked up and said, "He's dying."

It was a painful shock -- even though I could see right away that there was something wrong with the little body. E said he'd found him that way a few moments earlier. There was no sign of any external injury. The eyes were shut but he seemed to be experiencing some type of convulsions. It was very sad to be unable to do anything to help.

We wrapped him in a bit of soft cloth and then I just held him in my hand till the tiny whirring sensation that signified he was still alive gradually ceased. It didn't take very long, perhaps ten minutes. I am glad that at the very least, it didn't happen in the darkness and all alone. It occurred to me that perhaps the saddest of fates is to be alone at the time of death. It must happen to so many people! Of course, one could argue that it hardly matters, since the dying person is not going to "know" -- since he/she will then be dead ...

Whatever.

We're guessing that it was the diet that did in our little guest -- we should've been able to hunt up a few spiders or at least some caterpilars to feed him. Instead we were lulled into complacence by the fact that he did appear to be managing on the tiny scraps of meat we were feeding him -- in the sense that we could see it was certainly being processed, judging by the little white deposits that appeared at regular intervals. Alas, we were wrong.

I will remember a sweet moment: I was lying on the bed, napping, when he flew down from his favourite perch, on the ceiling fan (off, of course) and landed on my tummy. Then he just stood there and had a bit of snooze too!

Bird Season (again)

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Four days ago, E was walking around the local Community Centre when he happened to see a tiny bird attempting to break into the Standard Chartered Bank ATM salon. According to the security guard sitting by the door, the bird had been there ALL DAY. So of course E picked it up and brought it home.

It appears to be a young robin, able to fly, but not quite ready to leave home. He's (I think it's male, going by the picture of the adults in Salim Ali) survived so far, but every day we worry about his prospects. He's an insectivore so we've been force-feeding him tiny kababs of mutton, but we realize that spiders would be much more to his taste. Ordinarily this house is awash in spiders, but of course now that we want to find some, there isn't a SINGLE ONE IN SIGHT.

Washington Post Invitational

In case it isn't already obvious, this post is aimed at women rather than at men. Or at any rate, those women (or men) who wear women's underpants, hereinafter to be referred to as "undies".

It's very possible that millions of you have never been annoyed by the need to remove undies while peeing. This could be because you either do not wear undies (perfectly reasonable -- one of my cousins (and I will NOT say which) told me, years ago, that her mother didn't believe in wearing 'em. I was deeply impressed) or because you have already discovered the solution I am about to reveal or because you wear split-crotch panties, which, I am told, nonscarlet ladies know nothing about, despite having seen salacious advertisements for them (the undies, not the ladies) in comicbook end-pages. Whatever the reasons, this post is not aimed at you but at all your friends and relatives who have not yet seen the light (but would like to).

The solution is this: you prepare yourself to pee without removing the undies -- whether sitting or squatting -- and then you just reach underneath yourself, pull your undie aside and, umm, pee. It's as simple and brainless as that. Most undies these days have elastic around all their edges, and even if they don't, it makes very little difference: the gusset underneath is very easy to pull aside and just as easy to return to its position.

Amazing as it may be to confess this, I have spent some part of my 55 years fretting about having to pee out in the open, while en route to a picnic spot (or indeed AT a picnic spot since I belong to the generation and type of family that believed it was utterly bourgeois to frequent picnic spots which had been created for picnickers, complete with cement-concrete benches and public toilets). I don't go out on picnics or long-distance car journeys anywhere near as often as I used to as a child, but it does happen now and then.

Just last week, f'rinstance, when I was in Bombay, I went up to Panchgani in the company of my friends A and J, who drive up every weekend, to visit their farm. I may blog about this visit at greater length some other time, but on this occasion, the relevant point I want to make is that, as one might expect of farmland that was only bought last year, there was no loo. A and J, being men, had no concerns. I knew that I would, eventually. When that time arrived, I was pointed in the direction of a handy tree, behind a screen of walls and bushes.

This was when I, for the first time, employed the above-described method of peeing without having to bare the royal bum to the elements. The weird thing is, I've thought of it many times but never actually done it. Can't explain why. After all, there are many occasions when (in trains, in airport toilets) the only available toilet is a floor-level squatter. If you are anything like me, then you will have cursed the need to be perched above the toilet-pan with your ankles shackled in a tiny elastic undie that has been stretched to breaking point, while you pee. The option is to partially disrobe. This means removing the undie from one leg, which means that you must balance on one foot while performing this operation, attempting all the while to prevent the intimate underparts of your garment coming in contact with your germ-laden shoe as the undie passes over it ...

Well. You get the picture. It's been a nuisance. And yet I've never, before last week, considered the very simple solution described above.

Isn't that astonishing? The funny thing is, it really is less hassle and yet I must report a peculiar resistance to doing it -- like discovering that I'm a closet-Nazi and not wanting to admit it. I don't even know if it's unusual. Is it? I don't normally discuss peeing procedures with my friends (or even, it must be admitted, with my enemies) nor do I attempt to watch what others do, so I have no existing fund of information to share on the subject. I did once review a book called THE BATHROOM, by Alexander Kira, but that was many years ago and anyway, it did not concern itself with undies at all but the design of bathroom fixtures.

I need hardly add, moving the panty aside is the easier solution to disrobing prior to peeing wherever one needs to go, at home as well as anywhere else -- yet I still prefer to take the longer route (i.e., the pull-'em-down approach)! This reluctance is, in my opinion, bizarre, so I have begun applying corrective measures.

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And when you've disentangled yourself from your underwear, here's a list of words distilled from the WASHINGTON POST MENSA INVITATIONAL, sent to me by my tireless buddy Anvar. Some really good ones. Lists like this are a serious JOBSTACLE ...


Contemporary words you should know

Pagerism
A journalist using someone else's beeper

Fartcical
A small, barely audible emission of wind from the anus, ridiculous in nature.

Forlornication
Unhappy, miserable, desperate sexual intercourse between two unmarried persons.

Meanderthal
Large, unintelligent, hairy people meandering obliviously in your path and not letting you pass by

Celebation
Party at a monastery or convent

Deja pu
The inexplicable sense that you have smelled that malodorous gas before

Assimilatte
An attempt to get people from different coffee drinking cultures to live happily ever after in caffeinated harmony

Cantelope
A species simlar to the antelope, who can't do anything

Anurhythm
A song that gets stuck in your head despite all your efforts to get it out

Guiltar
A musical instrument whose strings are pulled by your mother.

Screwpulous
A conscientious, meticulous, thorough fuck

Askhole
An individual who disrupts andprolongs a meeting with an irritating series of foolish questions

Mastabrasion
A genital injury resulting from overzealous self-gratification.

Plea Market
A flea market where you have to beg for the lowest price

Lessbian
A lesbian who's just not quite sure

Hindkerchief
Really, really expensive toilet paper. Like the kind you find at Buckingham Palace

Geekabyte
A unit of computer memory so enormous it can only be comprehended by Steve Jobs.

Foxymoron
A member of the opposite sex who you tolerate, despite their stupidity, because they are ridiculously good-looking.

Aeropain
Lower back discomfort experienced when not seated in business class.

Thyme-machine
A laundry appliance for washing futuristic herbs.

Deturdgent
Suds specially formulated to remove those embarrassing brown stains from underpants.

Chronic Fartigue Syndrome
Medical condition where excessive flatulence causes exhaustion.

Intepid Traveller
A tourist who is absolutely fearless of luke-warm water.

Centrifungal Force
A phenomenon in physics whereby mushrooms are pushed to outer edge of a high speed rotating object.

Infartuation
An inexplicable attraction to someone who can effortlessly and frequently clear a room.

Stereo-type
Keying words or data in time to a Rolling Stones LP.

Turnacious
A singular focus and complete commitment to taking the next street on the left.

Myxomatosis
A condition resulting when toe replacement surgery goes horribly wrong

Feng-shuin
The artful shifting, placement, and ultimate arrangement of butt cheeks to achieve harmony with the seat of a bicycle.

Slovereign
An unkempt monarch

Tequila Bunrise
A drink made from tequila that makes you want to shake your ass

Jobstacle
Anything that prevents you from doing your work

Rambodextrious
Hands like Sylvester Stallone

Edible complex
A man who is totally in love with his mother's cooking

Burniture
Chairs you get from a fire sale

ATTENTION: all e-mail users

Got this in the mail from my sister G, who got it from someone else ...


Subject: appreciate your mail-MANY THANX for keeping me on your E-mail address list!!

My thanks to all those who have sent me emails this past year........

I must send my thanks to whoever sent me the one about rat shit in the glue on envelopes because I now have to use a wet towel with every envelope that needs sealing.

Also, I now have to scrub the top of every can I open for the same reason.

I no longer have any savings because I gave it to a sick girl (Penny Brown); who is about to die in the hospital for the 1,387,258th time.

I no longer have any money at all, but that will change once I receive the "$$$150,000" that Bill Gates/Microsoft and AOL are sending me for participating in their special e-mail program ....

Or from the senior bank clerk in Nigeria who wants me to split $7 million with me for pretending to be a long lost relative of a customer who died.

I no longer worry about my soul because I have 363,214 angels looking out for me, and St. Theresa's novena has granted my every wish.

I no longer use cancer-causing deodorants even though I smell like a water buffalo on a hot day.

Thanks to you, I have learned that my prayers only get answered if I forward e-mails to seven of my friends and make a wish within five minutes.

Because of your concern, I no longer drink Coca-Cola because it can remove toilet stains.

I no longer can buy petrol without taking a friend along to watch the car so a serial killer won't crawl in my back seat when I'm filling up.

I no longer go to shopping malls because someone will drug me with an aftershave sample and rob and rape me.

I no longer answer the phone because someone will ask me to dial a number for which I will get a phone bill with calls to Jamaica , Uganda , Singapore and Uzbekistan.

Thanks to you, I can't use anyone's toilet but mine, because a big brown African spider is lurking under the seat to cause me instant death when it bites my bum.

And thanks to your great advice, I can't even pick up the £50.00 I found dropped in the car park because it probably was placed there by a sex molester waiting underneath my car to grab my leg.

If you don't send this e-mail to at least 144,000 people in the next 70 minutes, a large dove with diarrhoea will land on your head at 5:00pm this afternoon and the fleas from 12 camels will infest your back, causing you to grow a hairy hump.

I know this will occur because it actually happened to a friend of my next door neighbour's ex-mother-in-law's second husband's cousin's beauticians relative once removed.

By the way ....
a South American scientist after a lengthy study has discovered that people with low IQ, who have infrequent sexual activity always read their e-mails with their hand on the mouse.

Don't bother taking it off now, it's too late!
--

Updates, Updates ...

Markku Salo, Finnish Glass Museum, Riihimaki, 2008

This is just one of the many beautiful pieces of glass art I saw at the Finnish Glass Museum in Riihimaki -- the artist's name is Markku Salo and my photograph in no way does justice to the piece. My camera's battery died before I could take many more -- but even if it hadn't, I would urge you to take a look at his web-site if you want to see more of his work.

Briefly ...

... we're leaving for Delhi tonight. Regular blogging will resume (i.e., regularly irregular) in a day. I have much to report, having visited three very good and VERY different museums in Finland yesterday -- a wonderful glass museum, the excellent Tibetan show in Tampere and finally a most delightful permanent exhibition at the Moomin museum, also in Tampere.

Needless to say, my camera's battery failed almost immediately ... but I managed to get a couple of pix from the glass museum. I'll post them here once I'm back at my home 'puter.

Travel Notez

Sayre, PA. 20-23rd June. Unknown to the world this small town (one cinema house, two traffic lights) is the Centre of the Universe. All members of my clan and most of their friends have made the trek at some time of their lives. As a result, it should come as no surprise that I am going to be here for my 55th birthday (TOMORROW!!!! Yow). I plan to spend it lying on my back with my feet in the air, gorging on chocolates, but my sister tells me that she has more energetic planz for me ... *grin*

My journey to Sayre was via New York -- and I have been wanting to share the observation that for the ENTIRE FOUR AND A HALF HOURS from Boston to New York on the Peter Pan bus, two middle-aged men (possibly Italian) talked NONSTOP. They spoke in soft voices and were not irritating or annoying in any way, but by the end of the journey I wanted to nuke em both. Failing which, I wanted to blog about em. And now I have.

Boston June 18-19th. Arrived back in Bos from Newport. Went right over to the T-Mobile shop to complete the transfer of my %^!!&^%%@# Sprint number to the newly acquired T-Mobile SIM. So now I have two phones, both with the same number. According to T-Mobile, the Sprint account will "automatically" terminate itself (hysterical laughter fades into the distance) -- yeah RIGHT. Like life would be so easy. We shall see! By evening of the 18th, I had two phones with the same number. Both appeared to work, but I have turned the Sprint phone off.

We had a great dinner at home with my niece and her new beau -- as this is being aired on the web I will not puncture the lives and privacies of all and sundry, by revealing anything more except that she cooked shrimp a Creole-Inde (her spontaneous creation) with rice and fresh green salad, we all stuffed ourselves silly and talked nearly continuously for two hours -- quite a feat, considering we were all eating continuously as well -- I believe we took turns, holding forth.

19th was the day designated for E to leave for Vermont, which he did, at the crack of dawn. Dawn cracks around 4.30 a.m. in these parts, so immediately after accompanying him to South Station (yes! Wasn't that nice of me? I even managed to avoid eating a Dunkin Doughnut on the way back), I came back and slept till noon.

14-18th June: Newport. I am running out of time at this moment, so I will merely say that we had a wonderful stay AS ALWAYS and had to tear ourselves away with a huge effort.

11-13th June: arrived in Boston, checked in at my niece's beautiful little apartment in Alrington -- she was away, so we didn't expect to see her, but we were very grateful for the safe and comfortable haven, from which we could make forays to the mall (jeans and v-neck vests for E) and on Friday, had a wonderful day-spend with a Tibetan friend of E's, terminating with lunch at his home.

This is all for the moment! More later.

Finland!

... is where I am right now, en route to the US. We're staying with a dear friend, an exceptional, amazing person called Oppi Untracht, whose apartment is like a museum -- no, it's more accurate to say it IS a museum, but a residential one. It's filled to bursting with a display art objects created over a lifetime of collecting. Even the briefest description would take at least three pages -- and that would only cover the desk I'm sitting at! He had a special interest in India and Indian art and jewellery, so there are very many familiar objects around, but unusually beautiful and original versions of them. His wife, a highly acclaimed Finnish designer and artist called Saara Hopea who died many years ago, made marvellous jewellery and glassware. Her work and her personality fill the house too, so even though I never met her, I can feel her presence here, warm and creative. A wonderful influence.

Oppi's not well, so E and I take turns spending time with him in his room.

When we're not talking to him or sitting at the computer, we're walking around the small town of Porvoo, which is on a river of the same name (I think! I never do any research when I travel, which means that practically all my descriptions are based on sights, smells, tastes and sounds rather than hard fact). By the water's edge, there is a row of red 'barns' -- actually old warehouses -- which are so quaint it's quite unbearable. I made a couple of sketches of them, but am feeling frustrated that we're going to be leaving too soon (tomorrow) for me to really bond with them. There's SO much to draw! The barns ... their reflections in the river ... the church steeple behind ... the clouds, the sky, cobblestones ...

We're here at a time of year which I had previously only read about in my geography book -- the season of the midnight sun. Last night I actually set the alarm clock on my cellphone to wake me at 2 a.m. -- I had of course just gone to sleep at 1 -- to see whether or not the sky would darken any further. And it did NOT. I tried to stay up for the dawn, but only managed a bleary eyelid-prop around 4 -- not much change outside -- but the sky was heavily overcast, so it was hard to tell. As a result of the 24 hours of daylight, we arrive at 10.30 p.m. without any sense that the day is drawing to close! Quite amazing. It feels very much like two days being fitted into the space of one ...

Moomin (the comic strip) belongs to Finland, as do Fiskars scissors and Nokia phones. I don't especially see more phones or scissors around, but cute little Moomins peek out at us from every second curio-shop and also from occasional billboards and street signs! Very sweet. I realize now that I never managed to get quite enough Moomin in my life, and may have to rectify that absence with a book ...

Not that I want to spend any money. In years gone past, I used to visit England and think, "Oh! Only ONE POUND!" -- and my mental calculation skills were too weak to make the conversion to roops. Now, of course, my calculation skills are so weak that I don't even try -- but I can feel my credit card trembling whenever I look at a price tag expressed in Euros. So I don't.

Seen & Heard

PERFUME

I spent a week in Madras and managed to inhale eight movies while I was there -- WARNING: product endorsement coming up!! -- on my sister's gorgeous HP 17" screen laptop. At the Ah-MAAAAZING price of Rs 33K it is a glory to behold and works like a dream.

Anyway! I thought it was right and proper to file a handful of quickie reviews.
First up is PERFUME: The Story of a Murderer, directed by Tom Tykwer. I read the book of that name by Patrick Suskind maybe ten years ago and though I liked it, can't say I loved it or remembered it while compiling lists of favourites. The movie was faithful to the novel and strangely moving, all considered. After all, it IS about a murderer and his obsessive passion for the perfect scent but there was something deeply touching about the performance. I don't think I felt that way about the hero of the book, but in the movie, the English actor Ben Whishaw lent an air of extraordinary innocence and melancholy to the role. It was easy to sympathize with him. By the end of the movie, I could practically smell the flowers ...

I am going to list all the movies with their links right away and write my brief takes as and when I find the time.


THE KITE RUNNER directed by Marc Foster. I haven't read the book (by Khaled Abdalla) but I liked the movie even though the final third of it was so wholly unlikely that it was as good as a fairytale. I don't have any first-hand experience of the Taliban, but something tells me they would simply NEVER allow an USA-returned Afghan to leave their camp and/or their country alive and intact, no matter what the past connection. But I enjoyed the early scenes of pre-Taliban Afghanistan, which reminded me of my brief holidays in Iran as a child; I thought faces of the actors and bystanders in the movie were beautiful and I loved hearing the spoken language -- understanding odd words here and there -- which seemed highly refined, sweet on the ears; I thought the children's performances were good. And I was grateful that it wasn't too unbearably sad, even though I know that there must be a thousand-times-thousand stories that are both true and heart-rendingly tragic.

ATONEMENT directed by Joe Wright. I think I remember enjoying the book by Ian McEwan more than the movie -- right until the end, when I thought the book and the movie both produced a strange, unsatisfied result. All through the book, I had enjoyed the terrible sense of injustice which the book so knowingly explores, not merely that a child could get away with making an atrocious accusation but also that we can all be betrayed by time -- i.e., Time -- the cold imperviousness with which one moment of stolen pleasure separates the next moment of disastrous discovery, leaving us to spend the rest of our lives shattered by those intolerable if-onlys. Yet in the movie, just as in the book, I couldn't quite believe in the ending. It was appropriate, yes -- and clever, yes -- and insightful. But not satisfying.

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN directed by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen. The best part of this movie, for me, was the way that one is allowed to remain bizarrely hopeful all the way through -- in spite of all the portents that Xavier Bardem is a monster par excellence. There's nothing more to say -- it cleans you out -- and at the end, you marvel at the exquisite emptiness of it all. It reminds me of a toy I read a description of -- a clockwork hand which, when you turn on a switch, stirs to life, reaches around to its rear and turns itself off.

I AM LEGEND directed by Francis Lawrence. I've been wanting to see this ever since it came out -- and wasn't disappointed. It scared me more than I expected -- no, really: I had to watch the final quarter with the sound off. I find Will Smith highly watchable so it was easy on the eyes and the post-apocalyptic theme is one that I am, for various reasons, especially interested in these days. I don't know if I'd recommend it -- those Nasties (they've got several different names in the movie -- Dark Seekers is one) really are creepy and hopeless -- they take off from where the red-eyed zombies in 28 Days leave off. But I'm glad I saw it. In a gloomy sort of way.

JUNO directed by Jason Reitman.
Bitter-sweet, mildly amusing fluff about a pregteen-finds-foster-mom-for-her-unborn story. It was a pleasant relief to encounter a father who was just ... Dad, The Nice Guy (rather than Dad, The Hairy-nosed Raver or Dad, The Impossible Angel) and a step-mom who was ditzy but came through. Juno, the pregteen was believably 16 -- i.e., not a child, and yet, in that sad, confusing way not yet an adult.


BEE MOVIE directed by Steve Hickner. Fun! And VERY odd. I mean, what kind of movie even WANTS to attempt a romance between a human and a bee? As in WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY(swat)? But -- as it happens -- I'm fond of bees, I bee-lieve in them and I'm glad that someone's paid tribute to these amazing little critturs from whom we steal honey so shamelessly.

THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA directed by David Frankel. And finally, this light but unexpectedly thoughtful flick set in the fashion industry. Nothing that happens in the movie is a revelation but it's got a little spark of magic -- Meryl Streep is her name -- umm, so make that a BIG spark -- and for that reason, it works.

On the air again at Another Subcontinent

Red Field



Back in December 2004, I had a show at the Sarala Art Centre in Madras. I showed a collection of prints and collages, of which the prints were later featured at Another Subcontinent, a lively US-based site for netizens belonging to and interested in SouthAsiana. Currently, AnotherSub has very graciously displayed the collages (or "squiggle paintings" or "hybrids" -- I haven't found a particularly good handle for them -- they're not exactly paintings OR collages) at the site, in a show entitled Dit-Dot-Dash. Please go visit!

Elephantastic!

In case you've not already seen this, believe me, it's worth a visit. Don't worry about the French, since the video doesn't exactly require any explanation.

Un éléphant, ça peint énormément
LE MONDE | 22.04.08

©

Last week I wrote a review of The White Tiger in OUTLOOK magazine -- and a couple of friends called in response to the review -- one of them, while standing in Landmark Bookshop in Madras, with a copy of the book in his hand (he promised he wouldn't buy it ... but who knows? Maybe he lied)! On the rare occasions that someone calls to say he/she's read something of mine in the press, it'll be a slash'n'run review. When it's a favourable assessment the only person who MIGHT call is the author. Ah well. "Everyone Loves a Good Bloodletting" might make a good title for a collection of vicious book reviews.

Keeping this in mind, I'd love to post a link to a favourable review by me, this time in BIBLIO of Sara Paretsky's autobiography entitled WRITING IN AN AGE OF SILENCE -- but I CAN'T coz it's not "free" (i.e., it's not enough to register, you have to buy the right to read it). I liked the book and recommend it highly -- not just to admirers of Paretsky's novels -- very noir, very Chicago, centred on woman private eye, V I Warshawski -- but anyone who enjoys reading a tight, highly focused autobiography, as much about coming of age in the US of the sixties as about becoming a celebrated crime-fiction author.

I've been wanting to blog about the Starving Dog Exhibition for some time now. These pictures were being circulated along with an appeal to sign a petition to prevent the artist from repeating his "exhibit" -- but it turns out there may have been some mis-understandings regarding the artist's intentions. I signed the petition right away, feeling immediately nauseated by the pictures and the story and also forwarded the pictures on to friends. It's hard not to feel silly afterwards -- esp since I don't normally forward appeals or sign petitions. The artist claims that his intention was to draw attention to the wretched plight of street dogs in Nicaragua.

Regardless of what he and the gallery spokespeople now claim about the actual events (that the dog was NOT kept in the gallery to starve and die while callous visitors just looked on; that it was released in three hours and/or escaped anyway after the first day) it is surely deeply offensive to use a living creature in this way. It's bad enough that the poor creature and all its fellow-sufferers -- animal as well as human, everywhere in the world -- suffer at all, but for an artist to use that suffering to further his own career is really too degrading all around -- and supremely lazy. It's like, "Hey, I can't draw but so what? I can drag the subject of my artistic inspiration into the gallery and show it to y'all and call it an installation! Yow! Ain't I smart?"

He's received death-threats and universal condemnation, but what about all the visitors to the gallery who did not try to feed or water the poor animal, all those who did not react immediately with outrage? Everyone's to blame.

Earth Day

Grasses
For Earth Day I thought I'd post a couple of recent links. First up is We Can Solve It, an inspiring and positive site that tells you, me and the universe the many different ways in which we can all put our shoulders to the wheel of solving the planet's ecological crisis.

Then there's Ideal Bite which I heard of on BBC's TV programme, CLICK -- tips and self-help ideas for those who are keen to be green.

And this last one is something I noticed as a small adverstisement at some other website: Many Moons, a site at which NON-disposable menstrual products can be ordered online.

Amongst them is something I would REALLY have appreciated when I was a potential client (I had a hysterectomy more than ten years ago) -- a "Keeper" -- a small flexible cup-like object which, when inserted, contains rather than absorbs the flow of menstrual blood. It's reusable and safe, with no known side-effects. I read about it in my late twenties in MS Magazine, but never saw on sale anywhere. Nor did I meet anyone who said she had ever seen/heard of/used such an item. It sounded like a great idea, especially for someone (i.e., me) who absolutely detested having to keep track of dates and supplies. I travelled a lot and was often in situations when I couldn't be sure that the local chemist's shop would carry the brands and products that I preferred to use. And now, here it is, available at the click of a mouse ...

Very cool.

The photograph, BTW, is one I took last year, at Tiger Haven.

Mating-Games-and-How-To-Lose-'Em Dept.

This link came to me via my other most reliable source of juicy web-sites, Zigzackly (blog-link at right): The Eligible-Bachelor Paradox from the online magazine, Slate. Embedded in the article is a link to ANOTHER interesting read, here, from The Atlantic Monthly. It's a different take on the subject of singledom versus marriedom -- gloomier and sadder -- and contrasts weirdly with the post called Good Wife-Keeping featured at this blog (you have to click on the picture in order to read the text accompanying it -- a bit of a drag -- but well worth the effort).

I found myself sympathizing with the author while also wanting to argue with her all the way through. It seems to me her problem -- and by association, the problems of many millions of young and not-so-young women -- is the mistaken belief that you CAN have your cake and eat it too. She's so very articulate and self-aware, but doesn't appear to understand the role of luck and fate in all our lives. I would say, by mid-life, those of us who are realistic have understood that in spite of all our efforts, some of us manage to attain all their goals while others, however gifted and diligent, don't. There comes a point when one has to smile and say, "Well ... ta-daaaaa to all that struggling!"

Religion 1-2-3

Here it is, your handy, easy-reference chart on that subject of perennial interest to our species, RELIGION.

As with so many other great links at my blog, this one was sent to me by AA -- he knows Who He Is! A deeply religious multifaith friend ...

Misogyny, Racism, Sexism

Yesterday I read a reprint from the New York Times (in the Asian Age) that lead me to follow the electro-brick road to Nicholas D. Kristof's blog. It would probably take half the night to read ALL the comments, but I did visit the two test-sites -- links available in Kristof's previous post -- at which one can do a click-along test to check for latent racism and other types of bias (not esp. amusing or interesting tests -- presumably someone or other will be earning their PhDs based on our little rat-clicks) and I did stop to think about some of the issues he raises.

Of course the context of his questions (and the comments) is the on-going US prez elections and the nominees-to-be. One of the commentators made me realize that ALL THREE front runners represent unpopular minorities -- racist, sexist and age-ist (I don't like "agist" and feel uncomfortable with ageist. Hence the hyphen). Anyway, it's an interesting article and I would strongly urge a visit to Kristof's site.

On a lighter note: for those who use Gmail chat, here are two "new" (i.e., new for ME) smileys: :(|) and also :{ -- needless to say, you've got to try it out on Gmail chat in order to see the little face twist around and change. Also :-| but that's kinda boring. Here's what I've seen so far in this family of smileys: :-) and :-P and B-) -- I'm not listing the frowny and noseless variations, but of course they work too.

And ALSO: for those who continue to worry about my declining mental capacities (see the post, some weeks ago re my sudden loss of Sudokability -- I'll post a link the next time I log in here) there is some good news. After a week or two or feeling sorry for myself I returned to regular Sudoking, but with this change: I stopped struggling over any puzzle that took longer than about five minutes to solve. This has resulted in two interesting (to me, anyway) realizations. One is that there definitely seems to be a change in the way I approach solving the puzzles, so I continue to think there WAS some little blizzard in my brain cells about three months ago (but I have no idea what) that accounts for a part of the sudden loss of ability. Two is that about nine-tenths of all the puzzles I do are solveable so I am pretty much back up to speed. If any one of them takes longer than the five to eight minutes I just lose interest.

To go back to point One -- the difference in approach is simply that I no longer attempt to be methodical. Whereas I used to begin by attempting to solve for each of the numbers in turn, I now just leap right in and look for whichever "volunteers" leap out immediately -- i.e., the ones that are obvious, even in the most difficult category of puzzles -- then look for secondary patterns. I wholly avoid the pencilled-in candidates approach because it's too time-consuming. Maybe that's what caused the sudden disconnect -- I was beginning to spend too much time on doing them, as a result of which they suddenly ceased to be fun. So it's either ink or nothing, and no agonizing allowed.

I wish I could name my methods -- I'd love to know whether or not I am applying the famous "swordfish" or "X-wing" or whateverwhatever techniques. Alas, I find it too boring to read the descriptions of what these techniques mean, so even though it's possible that I'm using them, I can't be sure. My approach is purely visual -- I create imaginary "force fields" for each of the nine numbers, to push aside options in different rows and columns, flushing out the spaces in which the available candidates are reduced to just two or one. I have tried to colourize the force fields but they've resisted that: a peculiarly nine-ish -- or seven-ish or four-ish or whatever-ish -- feeling zips down the line, stops short at the end and if a candidate is flushed, great. If not, start again elsewhere.

And on and on until ... ta-daaaaa! Done.

Protest Movement

About this time last week, as the protests in Lhasa were getting underway, I consulted my friend Zig (of zigzackly)) about the means by which internet signature campaigns are begun. I said I wanted to add my twig to the slowly growing bonfire of discontent and I wanted to suggest that the world's athletes should boycott the Olympics. So he gave me several pointers and he also took the time to discuss the idea with me, for which I thank him. If ever you need protest/rabble-rousing/internet appeal advice, he's the one ...

So anyway, I wrote out the appeal that appears below, sent it off to Zig to ask for his opinion (which he gave -- I've incorporated his suggestion in this version of my appeal, in the final paragraph) and ... then I sat on it. Even by the time I got the appeal written, there were news shows debating the usefulness of Olympic boycotts. The fact that it's very hard on the athletes is of course the overwhelming reason for not liking this form of protest -- us keyboard-jockeys can hardly be the ones to judge the urgency of an athlete's need to compete in the planet's most prestigious sports meet. He or she gets a chance once in four years and if one such opportunity is missed, four years later is just too late.

Also, there were already a couple of internet signature campaigns in motion and I had the same reaction to them (sadly) as I always have: a sense of irritation and futility. I am sure that the campaigns always have the beneficial effect of raising consciousness (come to think of it, in our era, it's become something of an obligatory rite ... "What? You mean that disaster didn't even elicit a SINGLE signature campaign?? Wow.") but I don't know how useful any of them actually are.

Anyhow. Keeping all of these factors in mind, and yet wanting to register my concern about what's happening in Tibet I thought the very least I could do was to post my original appeal here, at my blog. So here it is:

A unique opportunity has arisen to do something about the situation between China and Tibet. As rioters in Lhasa take to the streets to protest the suppression of their culture, I believe it is possible to support the Tibetan struggle to free their homeland from Chinese rule by appealing to the world's athletes to boycott the Olympic games.

This is a hard thing to ask of athletes. They get opportunities to compete in the Olympics only once in four years. For many, each such opportunity is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to leave their mark on posterity.

But there's more than one way of leaving one's mark on posterity. If enough of the world's athletes choose to use their participation at the Beijing Olympics as bargaining chips, if they do so collectively and with single-minded determination, they can turn the tide of history for the Tibetan people. They can become heroes for an entire nation.

Landlocked Tibet has no oil or other conventional commodities to offer in exchange for the world's attention. In terms of spiritual riches however and as the home of Tibetan Buddhism, it is a powerhouse of enlightenment and higher consciousness. The Tibetan people have endured their oppression with pacifism and fortitude rather than guns and terrorism. They have met brutality with stoicism and resilience. They deserve the support of right-thinking people everywhere in their half-century-long struggle against Chinese occupation.

According to some news reports, as of March 16th, 2008, one hundred Tibetans have been killed in the rioting that began two days ago. Many hundreds more could die or be wounded or face imprisonment and torture in the days/weeks ahead unless the Chinese people can be made to understand the scale of the injustice being levelled against the Tibetan people and their culture.

It's not just the athletes who can make this protest a powerful one: advertisers and commercial sponsors can also withdraw their support from the games -- and TV viewers around the world can withhold their attention from the familiar, pulse-raising spectacle of the Olympics. Without sponsorship, without international viewers, even if the games DO take place as scheduled, they'll be flat and lifeless. That's a result that's worth aiming for and which we can ALL -- not just the athletes -- participate in.

Go click the link, pleeze

Ron Mueck



If this image intrigues you, please visit this link, via the Washington Post, to see a selection of work by the Australian sculptor RON MUECK

I remember seeing three of his pieces at the New York show of the Saatchi collection called SENSATION -- and they were creepy/amazing. These current images are equally creepy/amazing -- it's especially weird to see the pieces with spectators moving around the figures -- I would love to see the actual pieces.

GOOD WIFEKEEPING

GoodHouseKeeping, 1955

This came to me via Anvar Alikhan, who gets my prize for being the single most productive source of e-messages that I can post to this blog!

I hope the text of this priceless 1955 Good Housekeeping article is legible -- actually, I've just glanced at the page and realize that it ISN'T, but if you click on the picture, it'll load at full-size in its own window. It is truly a gem. A guide to all of us ...

THRILLZ, VARIOUS

Well, yesterday it finally happened: I outed myself as an actual physical presence by attending a social event. I spent the entire day cursing myself for having accepted an invitation to meet Paul Theroux at a dinner hosted by Larry and Ellen Schwartz at their Amrita Shergill Marg residence. But at the end of the evening, mercifully short, I had to confess (when asked) that I'd had fun. The author was pleasantly approachable -- and in my brief interaction with him, showed me a tattoo on his right hand that (he said) was an example of his own artwork. It was a simple symmetrical mark, rather like a logo design, which looked like a combination of bird-in-flight and cross-bow. About an inch long. Interesting.

This is my fourth or fifth recent public appearance and I am starting to feel it's time to get back into my shell coz otherwise it could get to be a habit. On Friday the 15th I officiated at the launch event for Amruta Patil's KARI and that was fun too. However, as I realized long ago, the trick to ensuring that one gets pleasure out of doing things like this is to do them VERY RARELY. It takes only two or three sightings to become a fixture and then a bore. Currently, it is still odd enough for me to be present in a crowd of well-dressed people that the few others who recognize me say "Oi! What are YOU doing here?" instead of "Gahhh. You again ..."

Meanwhile, on the recent-reading front, I have just finished an extraordinary book: THE ART OF MURDER by Jose Carlos Somoza. Yes, it's a murder mystery and I don't generally make a big deal about genre books. But this one is different. VERY different. The murder(s) are practically incidental to the main motif of the story which concerns itself with a new trend in art, call HYPERDRAMATISM. It involves the use of living models, many of them female and most of them nude, as the actual artworks. This means that the models must be painstakingly trained to pose for several hours at a time to remain perfectly still, including all kinds of drugs and chemicals to ensure e.g. that they do not need to evacuate their unmentionables or dribble, that their eyes will not stream with tears or need to be blinked. The models are referred to as "canvases" and from the time that they are contracted for a work, they are regarded as objects, rather than people. An extension of this art form is the design and creation of various subsets of art, such as furniture: live models used as tables, chairs, trolleys ...

When the first of these beautiful young oddities is murdered, one of the puzzles that presents itself immediately is: was this some form of Art? Was it an extension of the original work in which the model had been posed, or was it a despicable act of destruction, in which a young girl had been murdered?

The author is Spanish so the book is a translation. I feel sure, without any persuasive argument to back me up, that a Brit or American author could not have carried this theme to its logical conclusion, because the moral/ethical issues would have caused the narrative to break down. It required that special European sensibility -- a highly sophisticated artistic vision -- to make it convincing. Run out and order it at once ...

On The Road With Comix!

... so yes, I've been away AGAIN. Frankly, the past few weeks have felt a bit like a road movie -- just as soon as I arrive somewhere, I'm already organizing my getaway. I got back from Madras on the 4th of this month and left two days later for Bom-Bom-Bom-Bom.

This was a purpose driven trip -- the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival asked if I would be willing to come and to their immense surprise, I agreed. I was grinning (on the phone) as I told them WHY: because I wanted to go to Bombay anyway. It's been too long since I met a number of my friends there and I thought "Okay! Time to go!!" -- needless to say, getting a free ticket is a wonderful resolver of doubts.

In order to justify the expense to themselves, the KGAF asked me to sit on two panels. One was on Banned Books (BB), moderated by Jai Arjun Singh and the other was on Graphic Story Telling (GST) moderated by moi. I reached Bom on the night of the 7th -- it was kind of late and I had a brief panic attack when I looked around the arrival lobby -- nothing was even remotely recognizable. But then I stepped out to where the cabs were milling around and recognized the vaguely saucer-shaped outline of the Centaur Hotel -- it's being renovated and currently looks like a prop-in-waiting for Close Encounters III -- and calmed down. Took a cab to my cousin's house in Peddar Road, and flew through a largely alien landscape because it appeared to be entirely elevated (i.e., on the backs of various flyovers new to me) but the moment we touched down at Haji Ali recognition slipped back into gear and five minutes later I was stepping into my cousin's lovely old-style apartment on Carmichael Road.

This isn't going to be a detailed account because there's just not enough time to do all that and also manage to keep pace with my CURRENT life but very quickly -- I had a FUN TIME. It was especially great to catch up with my cousin. She is not merely that rarest of beings, a doctor who truly enjoys being a compassionate healer but is also the kind of reader who makes writers feel that the struggle of writing books is worth it after all. AND she's passionately interested in art, is a gifted artist herself ... Need I say more? A wonderful person to spend time with.

I had two separate stays in Bombay: four days in the south with my cousin, the KGAF and Kiran Nagarkar followed by two days in the north with my dearest of friends, G and J (okay, so THEY know who they are!) plus a Michelin-grade dinner at my nephew's Bandra apartment.

Speeding along: I would guess that my fellow-panellists on the BB evening have already blogged their accounts of the event -- Amit Varma and Devangshu Datta and Chandrahas Choudhury being the remaining three of the five of us -- so I am going to skip straight across to the GST event. I hadn't met any of the four members of my panel -- Orijit Sen, Samit Basu, Sarnath Banerjee and Amruta Patil (any misspellings will be dealt with later, sorry! Can't stop now) -- though of course I knew of them and had exchanged e-mail messages with them in the course of the ten days leading up to KGAF. But we did manage to get a little time together before the event and Amruta was good enough to spend a lot of time digging up images of some of the leading (international) graphic titles to use as a brief introductory presentation during the discussion. I'm going to post the list of favourite titles I extracted from the other panellists here today -- but I'm not going to say whose choices they are because maybe that's not entirely relevant. I will eventually include the images that Amruta researched for the event, plus links. For now, here's the list, presented in the order I received them:

LIST 01*
The Sandman (by Neil Gaiman).
The Watchmen (Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons)
Lucifer (by Mike Carey).
Kingdom Come (by Mark Waid).
Y The Last Man (by Brian K. Vaughan).
Buddha (by Osamu Tezuka).
V For Vendetta (by Alan Moore).
Pride of Baghdad (by Brian K. Vaughan).
Empire (by Mark Waid).
Transmetropolitan (by Warren Ellis).
Superman: Birth Right (by Mark Waid).
Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (by Frank Miller).
Batman: Year One (by Frank Miller).
Maus (by Art Spiegelman).
300 (by Frank Miller).
The New Adventures of Hitler (Grant Morrison).
Tim Hunter: Books of Magic (by Neil Gaiman).
War Story (by Garth Ennis).
Ocean (by Warren Ellis).
The Interman (by Jeff Parker).
Chronicles of Wormwood (by Garth Ennis).

LIST 02
1) Paul Hornschemeier's 'Mother Come Home'
2) Alison Bechdel 'Fun Home'
3) Dave McKean and Neil Gaiman's 'The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mister Punch'
4) Dave McKean and Neil Gaiman's 'The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish'
5) Craig Thompson's 'Blankets'
6) Guy Delisle's 'Pyongyang'
7) Marguerite Abouet and Clement Oubrerie's 'Aya'
8) Frank Miller's '300'
9) Adrian Tomine 'Summer Blonde'
10) Charles Burns 'Black Hole'
11) Joann Sfar's 'The Rabbi's Cat'
12) Joann Sfar's 'Vampire Loves'
13) Miriam Ratin's 'We are on our Own'
14) 'Safe Area Gorazde' by Joe Sacco
15) Marjane Satrapi's 'Persepolis' 1 and 2
16) Brian Vaughn and Niko Henrichnon's 'Pride of Baghdad'
17) Cris Ware ' Jimmy Corrigan - Smartest Kid on the planet'

LIST 03
FLOOD - Eric Drooker - USA
THE DEATH OF SPEEDY - Jamie and Gilbert Hernandez -
Mexico
NAUSICAA OF THE VALLEY OF THE WIND - Hayao Miyazaki -
Japan
THE RABBI'S CAT - Joann Sfar - France
MAUS - Art Speigelman - USA
EXIT WOUNDS - Rutu Modan, Israel
SAFE AREA GORAZDE - Joe Sacco, USA
BERLIN: CITY OF STONES - Jason Lutes, Germany
DAVID BORING - Daniel Clowes, USA
KAMPUNG BOY - Lat, Malaysia
BLOOM COUNTY BABYLON - Berke Brethed, USA
MY MOST SECRET DESIRE - Julie Doucet, Canada
CLASS WAR COMIX - Ciff Harper, Britain
BROUILLARD AU PONT DE TOLBIAC - Jacques Tardi and Leo
Malet, France
BAREFOOT GEN - Keiji Nakazawa, Japan
WHEN THE WIND BLOWS - Raymond Briggs, Britain
CALVIN AND HOBBES Series - Bill Watterson, USA
TINTIN Series- Herge, Belgium
ZAP, WEIRDO and other series - Robert Crumb, USA
PHANTOM Series - Lee Falk, USA
EARLY TITLES - Amar Chitra Katha, India

LIST 04
The Authority, we3 and Nextwave by Warren Ellis
Welcome to Tranquility by Gail Simone
Preacher, Hitman, The Boys by Garth Ennis
Lost Girls, Swamp Thing, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by Alan Moore
Fables by Bill Willingham
The Invisibles, Animal Man by Grant Morrison
Kingdom Come by Mark Waid
Astro City by Kurt Busiek

Titles that were disappointing:
ARKHAM ASYLUM - Grant Morrison and Dave McKean, USA
SKIN DEEP - Charles Burns, USA
GREETINGS FROM HELLVILLE - Thomas Ott, Switzerland
SIN CITY - Frank Miller, USA
NOTES FROM A DEFEATIST - Joe Sacco, USA
PYONGYANG - Guy Delisle, France
DR. FAUSTUS - Oscar Zarate, Argentina
RECENT TITLES - Virgin Comics, India
BUDDHA - Osamu Tezuka, Japan
SANDMAN - Neil Gaiman. Britain

--------------
I've only got just enough time to make a special mention here about a young man I was introduced to (electronically, i.e.) by K.D.Singh of The Bookshop in Jorbagh -- his name is Gaurav Panday and he is an extremely avid reader and keen collector of graphic novels. I mention him because it seems to me that he represents the Ideal Reader (for GST, anyway): fanatically loyal to his favourite authors/artists, but also very interested in augmenting his awareness and expanding his horizons.

*-- I haven't made MY list of faves (yet!) but of course there are a few titles here that would be on my list. Similarly with the list of "disappointments": they represent the choices made by one of the respondents. Incidentally, I asked each of the panellists (and also G. Panday) for 20 faves as well as a list of fave-hates (didn't specify a number, however) but only one person offered the second list.

Okay, I've GOT to stop. More, much more, later.

Cellular Weirdness

A friend gave me her SAMSUNG cellphone recently -- yes, some of us have friends like that! -- and as I struggle to adapt my poor, Sudoku-challenged brain to the vast gulf that separates a NOKIA from a SAMSUNG (for instance: the space-bar key is NOT the "0" but the "#". I've had it for five days now, and I STILL hit the wrong button all the time!) I've noticed a very odd feature: the phone seems to be travelling in an alternative universe. While I remain stationary in the house -- did I mention anywhere that I am currently in Madras? Visiting my Mum -- which should register under the location "CHETPET" in the phone, the phone manages to travel as far afield as MCNICHOLS ROAD and NUNGUMBAKKAM. Each time it travels it gives out a little buzz and does a jig on whatever surface it happens to be resting upon and a crescent-shaped alert-light goes on, on the front of the phone.

I forgot to ask my friend to tell me everything I needed to know about the phone, so there are lots of features that leave me puzzled and worried. Needless to say, I do not have a manual. It's a bit like walking blindfold through an unfamiliar house (we all do this periodically, don't we?? Ummm .. DON'T we???) -- I keep on bumping into stuff that seems familiar and then again ... isn't. Still. Now there's no going back to my previous phone, coz I have unaccountably managed to fry it. I mean, I wasn't TRYING to fry it, but I did insert a TATA Indicom SIM card into it, thinking that it would work just as well inside a NOKIA as it would (presumably) inside a TATA Indicom phone (which I don't have. Long story. Don't ask). WRONGGGGG! The NOKIA can neither find its own network now nor, it turns out, can it turn itself back on when I insert its original SIM into it (i.e., the one that's currently in the newly acquired SAMSUNG). Not only that, but it is displaying Japanese characters when it's got its original SIM inside it. Very disturbing. Fortunately, its internal list of numbers (i.e., the ones that were not saved to the SIM) are still accessible, so I can copy them (by HAND, what a thrill) into the SAMSUNG.

And so it goes! The joys of connectedness.

A New Year Gained, A Marble Lost ...

Yup. It's the fourteenth day of this new year and yet this is my FIRST POST. Ah well. So be it! We're slowing down in the blogging department, THAT'S for sure. But it's not been a bad year so far. Two weeks in. Hmm. We cross our fingers. We hope.

As for marbles lost, well ... a very weird thing began to happen, maybe two months ago. Quite suddenly I found, I simply could NOT complete the daily Sudoku in the newspaper. I get the Asian Age and it publishes two Sudoku puzzles every day, including Sundays. Quite generous of them! But whereas I used to be able to do both every day, I began to find that (a) I was starting to make fatal errors, resulting in unfinished puzzles and then (b) I stopped being able to do the harder of the two puzzles at all. I mean ... totally.

What does it mean? I feel very sure that it's not just chance or some change in the puzzle-format. I used to be able to do them and now, when I glance at the puzzle, I get nothing -- oh maybe one or two numbers to fill in, but that's all. And I used to be able to do the whole puzzle. I've never liked struggling with puzzles so either I did them fairly easily or I didn't bother. But this, now, is just complete blankness. I can even recall what it felt like -- a type of light melody, a note here, a note there and gradually the whole tune would fill up and the thing would make sense and all the bits would fall into place. For the harder puzzles, yes, I used to pencil in a few "candidates" then cross them off as other numbers found their niches.

So is this the beginning of the end? Should I make the effort of going to a neurologist to confirm that old Mr Al Z. Heimers has become a permanent lodger in my poor brain? I don't know whether I want to find out! Yes, I can still do the easy ones -- but I find them irritating, like nursery rhymes rather than a full-bodied tune. I hate acknowledging that this is ALL I can manage now, when just a couple of months ago, I was pretty confident I could get to the end of any puzzle I began. Still, I keep doing the easy ones, just so that I don't forget altogether. Every day I wonder when I am going to find that these are also beyond me!

It's an odd feeling. Like seeing myself fall off a cliff, in slow motion. Why is it a surprise? I'm 54 now and will turn 55 in June this year. So it's not as if the grey in my hair is just an illusion. There have been other marbles lost over the years, things I used to be able to do which I can't any more. When I was a pre-teen, I could write reams of doggerel, for instance -- but by the time I was twenty-five, I realized quite suddenly that I could no longer do it. It was like reaching into a cupboard for a jar of cookies that was normally always full, only to find that the jar had mysteriously disintegrated, vanished, ceased to be. I used to have a gigantic vocabulary but now, if I can find words of three syllables that reasonably express what I want to say, I feel grateful.

Weird, huh?

There's not much point feeling especially sad about it. There are millions of things I can't do -- have never been able to do -- and now there are a few more. Big deal. I'm concentrating on feeling grateful for the things I can still do. It's not much, and it's not a long list (it's never been!) but at least I still laugh a lot and I don't sweat the small stuff. I'm still drawing and writing. Still blogging and e-mailing. Talking to my Mum on the telephone every evening and hey -- I still like icecream!!

What a great gift to humankind icecream is! Yum. In answer to that question that used to be asked -- If you knew your world was going to end in 15 minutes (oh -- five, three, ten -- what matter? You get the point -- nuclear strike about to happen, the warning comes only moments before the end) what would you do in the brief time left to you? -- I've always answered, ICE CREAM!!!

*grin* And you? If you had 3/5/10/15 minutes left ... what would you do before the lights went out forever?

An EMBUGGERANCE...

Tha wonderful word belongs to author TERRY PRATCHETT, not to me. And he coined it on account of being given this bit of bad news by his doctors.

Go read. Just another sign (in case you ever doubted it) that life in this vale of sorrows is DEEPLY unfair!

Alzheimer's Test

It's been so long since I posted to my blog that I had to re-start with something ... unusual. So here's something I received from my friend Viji, by e-mail:

Alzheimer's Text
The following was developed as a mental age assessment by the School Psychiatry at Harvard University . Take your time and see if you can read each line aloud without a mistake. The average person over 40 years of age cannot do it!
1. This is this cat.
2. This is is cat.
3. This is how cat.
4. This is to cat.
5. This is keep cat.
6. This is an cat.
7. This is old cat.
8. This is fart cat.
9. This is busy cat.
10 This is for cat.
11. This is forty cat.
12. This is seconds cat.

Now go back and read the third word in each line from the top down and I betcha' you cannot resist passing it on.

ICE stands for IN CASE of EMERGENCY

I've been away for about 10 days and have lots of interesting stuff to report BUT ... before I do that, I'd like to share this information about an initiative that might save lives if acted upon by all CELL PHONE USERS:

ICE Campaign - "In Case of Emergency"

We all carry our mobile phones with names & numbers stored in its memory but nobody,
other than ourselves, knows which of these numbers belong to our closest family or friends.

If we were to be involved in an accident or were taken ill, the people attending us would have our mobile phone but wouldn't know who to call. Yes, there are hundreds of numbers stored but which one is the contact person in case of an emergency?

Hence this "ICE" (In Case of Emergency) Campaign ..

The concept of "ICE" is catching on quickly. It is a method of contact during emergency situations. As cell phones are carried by the majority of the population, all you need to do is store the number of a contact person or persons who should be contacted during emergency under the name "ICE" ( In Case Of Emergency).

The idea was thought up by a paramedic who found that when he went to the scenes of accidents, there were always mobile phones with patients, but theydidn't know which number to call. He therefore thought that it would be a good idea if there was a nationally recognized name for this purpose.

In an emergency situation, Emergency Service personnel and hospital Staff would be able to quickly contact the right person by simply dialing the number you have stored as "ICE."

For more than one contact name simply enter ICE1, ICE2 and ICE3 etc. A great idea that will make a difference!

Let's spread the concept of ICE by storing an ICE number in our Mobile phones today!=

Please forward this to all yr friends and nears.. It won't take too many "forwards" before everybody will know about this. It really could save your life, or put a loved one's mind at rest ICE will speak for you when you are not able to. This is released by WHO for the benefit of mankind....


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

... and onward, onward

Yesterday, I got a Diwali gift of such surpassing ugliness that I was quite impressed. It takes real talent to produce something so extremely horrid that it has no redeeming qualities WHATSOEVER. It got me thinking about what it means to give gifts that aren't meant to be taken seriously ... and whether we should all rise up and do something about all that wasted expenditure ... and what I should do to stem the rot. But then when I got to thinking about all the other causes and crises that exist in the world ... well ... it seemed kind of ridiculous to get carried away about just another Diwali gift. So I removed some of the more fruity descriptions I had posted here about the thing and have stowed the object out of sight.

Meanwhile, my travel agent (I'll post a link to his company web-site some day soon -- he's become a buddy over the years quite aside from being possibly the friendliest person ever to survive in his line of business!) sent me a kilo of fresh tasty almonds (unsalted) in a pressed-glass bowl that looks as if its designers put some effort into making a pleasing, durable object. It makes the point about the holiday season in the right way. Can't go wrong with almonds!

And for those who like to combine their word-game-playing skills with a spot of good-samaritanism, here's a useful link: Free Rice. Fill that bowl! You'll enjoy it -- and maybe someone else will too.

prepare to bleed

Click here.

Nalini Jameela

The first time I heard about Nalini Jameela was perhaps a year ago, in a newspaper article. There was a photograph of her -- she has a pleasant face, not a young woman's face, but pleasant, thoughtful and somehow questing. Maybe the tilt of her head, the gaze directed upwards was deliberately posed to give that impression.

But what caught my attention and caused me to clip the item out of the paper -- NOT something I do often -- was that she is a sex-worker, living and working in Kerala, who had written her autobiography and got it published.

Now her autobiography, originally in malayalam has been re-published in English, by by Madras-based WESTLAND(I'll post a link here when/if I find one). I picked up copies at my friend (and Westland editor) Nilanjana Roy's home and speed-read my way through the book last night. It's not long -- 143 pages -- and its translation doesn't feel right -- but I would say it makes complusory reading.

It is, in many ways a shocking book -- NOT because of what it says about the life of a sex-worker but for what it reveals about the lives of so-called "ordinary" Indians. Jameela's story is one of extraordinary resilience -- but how can I use this word "extraordinary" without qualifying it? Alongside her story, like the bystanders whose faces enter the frames of photographs of filmstars posing in public places, are all the others with whom she interacts. They are all equally resilient, long-suffering and strong -- surely as extraordinary, if measured against the yardstick of the lives we read about in novels or learn about through movies. Against the backdrop of Jameela's account, however, "ordinary" and "extraordinary" cease to have much meaning -- she shows us that the huge majority of "ordinary" people have "extraordinary" experiences, in which case they are no longer extraordinary in the sense of unusual, but merely the norm -- the norm that is never acknowledged on its own terms, the norm that is pixelled out of the record by the "India Shining" mythologizers.

Jameela's life and the lives of the huge majority of those amongst whom she lives -- not just sex-workers, but the tradesmen, the rickshawallas, the policemen, the small hoteliers -- are marked by unrelenting insecurity, hampered by such extremes of heartlessness that it is really difficult to understand how they can bear to face up to their realities -- yet the very fact that they do, is a clear indication that it is I who am mistaken, as I judge these lives against the smug certitudes of my own (and of others like me).

The malayalam edition of her book was snapped up -- 13,000 copies were sold in the first 100 days, according to the introduction of this book. It is not a salacious book -- no-one reading it, I believe, is likely to get any cheap thrills from it. To some extent, I miss the spice that has been (I think deliberately) left out. Then again, I can see that a book like this needs to be super-decorous in its appearance and the language of its presentation, in order to avoid being driven underground by its subject-matter. How ironic that less provocative books -- lacy fictions built on middle-aged fantasies -- are decked out like scarlet ladies, while this one, about and by a scarlet lady, looks as meek and saintly as a vegetarian recipe book!

My Phone Line's Down

-- and it's been down for 4 days already. The word is that the cable's been "stolen" from right outside the MTNL centre -- not quite sure what type of enterprising thieves actually dig up telephone cables in order to steal them -- but anyway. That's the reason for various levels of silence in recent days ...
[posted from Nilroy's home]

Paul Theroux's THE ELEPHANTA SUITE

Apparently, in my review in OUTLOOK MAGAZINE of THE ELEPHANTA SUITE I managed to suggest that I didn't like the book. I'm not sure why this this happens -- this isn't the first time -- maybe because I prefer to use up my 300 words giving a reader a sense of what the book's about rather than how much I liked or disliked it.

Anyway -- just in case it isn't clear -- I DID like the book. Quite a bit. I've already bought my first give-away copy and plan several more and my house copy is "travelling".

The three long short stories ("novellas"? Am never very sure when a short story becomes a novella. I would call these short stories) that make up the book certainly aren't cute and cuddly. Each story involves American characters interacting with Indians, in India. Neither culture is presented with its best foot forward. The overwhelming characteristic that comes through is greed -- interlocking neatly in some ways, and then, disastrously NOT.

What I always like about Theroux's prose is the clinical precision of his observations. He uses his characters like the subjects of a dissection, aimed at exposing one or two obscure glands, while he describes the ethos that surrounds the operation with a casual, throwaway flair. Ultimately, however, the "story" is secondary to the descriptions.

The picturesque India of tourist brochures is almost wholly obscured behind the maelstrom of crowds/dirt/beggars that assaults the senses of visitors from quieter, cooler climes. Many Indians regard this view of India as false and "colonial" (the epithet that Indian reviewers hurl at any foreign author who is less than enchanted by the subcontinent). I would call it "unsentimental" rather than colonial. Theroux's is the ultimate unsentimental gaze -- he reports on emotions without drowning in them -- and I thank him for his cool detachment.

Go on -- buy the book -- read it -- and pass it on. Especially to anyone planning a trip in this direction ...

HOME REMEDIES FOR DARWIN AWARD WINNERS*

An amusement sent to me by my niece M!
AMAZINGLY SIMPLE HOME REMEDIES (don't try any of these
at home)

1. If you are choking on an ice cube, don't panic.
Simply pour a cup of boiling water down your throat
and presto. The blockage will be almost instantly
removed.

2. Clumsy? Avoid cutting yourself while slicing
vegetables by getting someone else to hold them while
you chop away.

3. Avoid arguments with your partner about lifting the
toilet seat by simply using the sink.

4. For high blood pressure sufferers: simply cut
yourself and bleed for a few minutes, thus reducing
the pressure in your veins. Remember to use a timer.

5. A mouse trap, placed on top of your alarm clock,
will prevent you from rolling over and going back to
sleep after you hit the snooze button.

6. If you have a bad cough, take a large dose of
laxatives. Then you will be afraid to cough.

7. Have a bad toothache? Smash your thumb with a
hammer and you will forget about the toothache.

8. Sometimes, we just need to remember what the rules
of life really are: You only need two tools: WD-40 and
Duct Tape. If it doesn't move and should, use the
WD-40. If it shouldn't move and does, use the duct
tape.

9. Remember: Everyone seems normal until you get to
know them.

10. Never pass up an opportunity to go to the
bathroom.

11. If you woke up breathing, congratulations! You get
another chance.

12. And finally, be really nice to your family and
friends; you never know when you might need them to
empty your bedpan.

*Don't know what the DARWIN AWARDS are? Prepare to grin ...

BRAIN STRAINERS # 348: CONSTRAINED WRITING

From the incomparable Anvar Alikhan comes this nugget of information:

Constrained writing is a literary technique in which the writer is bound by some condition that forbids certain things or imposes a pattern. For example:

Gadsby is an English-language novel consisting of 50,000 words, none of which contain the letter “e.”
The 2004 French novel Le Train de Nulle Part (The Train from Nowhere) by Michel Thaler was written entirely without verbs.
Cadaeic Cadenza is a short story by Mike Keith that uses the digits of pi as the length of words.
Never Again is a novel by Doug Nufer in which no word is used more than once.
Alphabetical Africa is a book by Walter Abish in which the first chapter only uses words that begin with the letter "a," while the second chapter incorporates the letter "b," and then "c," etc. Once the alphabet is finished, Abish takes letters away, one at a time, until the last chapter, leaving only words that begin with the letter "a."
Mary Godolphin produced versions of Pilgrim's Progress and Robinson Crusoe Words of One Syllable.
One famous example from the Chinese language is The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den which consists of 92 characters ... all with the sound shi!


Meanwhile! My life has recently been overtaken (yet again!) by ... hold your breath ... FACEBOOK. I am resisting it in small ways -- for instance, I don't spend the WHOLE day online, but only 15 hours out of 24. Quite restrained, wouldn't you say? I've not signed up using my name as a (possibly feeble) means of keeping my presence there discreet but I realize this is a bit idiotic considering the site is really a form of existential striptease in which the participants hang all the wet and sticky bits of their lives out on the clothesline of the web for all to see. Since I need to reserve my sticky bits for exposure in my books, I simply can't afford to do any of that! So if some of you avid Facebookers want to catch up with my FB persona you're going to have to post messages to me and if I feel like it, I'll respond with a link and handle.

Free Heart Surgery

A friend who lives Madurai (I met him last year, at the American College) sent me a message to share with as wide a circle of people as possible. So here it is:

For all kinds of Heart-Related Surgeries, Free of Cost please contact:
Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Medical Sciences
EPIP Area, Whitefield,
Bangalore 560 066,
Karnataka, INDIA.
Telephone: +91- 080- 28411500
Fax +91 - 080- 28411502
e-mail: adminblr@sssihms.org.in
You can visit Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Medical Sciences online for further links and/or to clear up any doubts you might have about the authenticity of the institution. There are probably hundreds of people out there who might benefit from this information, so I figure it's worth passing on!


And meanwhile, on the subject of good works, I thought I'd share this list of Very Special People that MSN created. While I don't like their title for the list -- 10 Amazing Women You've Never Heard Of -- because in the first place I HAVE heard of some of them (at least five) and in the second place it seems a strangely condescending inclusion principle -- I must admit that I was impressed by the list and was glad to have pictures and brief bio-data to remind me of them.

I was going to post a picture to accompany the list, but decided against it on second thoughts. If you're curious, go click the link!