Watching Halla Bol

I just finished watching halla bol. The inspiration came from an evening at Safdar Hashmi Marg in Delhi and remembering the name of the street play he was murdered performing – Halla Bol. But the movie is not a biopic on Hashmi as I naively expected. In fact, what had struck me the irony of how the government which had had Hashmi murdered in cold blood in public view, and never had had to face any difficult questions for it, had now so graciously granted a road’s name to the man – I believe that these rich narratives will only be discovered two hundred years from now. Instead it’s blatantly about the Jessica Lal murder case, where a rag-to-riches actor Sameer Khan and a witness to the murder rediscovers his conscience and fights the “system” to speak the truth. The last scene is a tribute to the memory of Hashmi tho’ – and despite being delivered with the bollywood stridency of Sukhwinder shouting in the background, is well rendered and a fitting tribute to the courage of that man.

I have followed Santoshi with a slient wait – waiting for the time when he would rise above his Bollywood mindset completely and do justice to the bold themes he chooses. In Daamini, a movie where the script held the promise of making it one of the most important movies of those times, he squandered the chance when he chose the thousand-expressions-a-minute Meenakshi Sheshadri, whom I’ve heard he was desperately wooing then, to essay the role of a woman who undergoes a thousand-revolutions within and that multiplied meant a million expressions every minute of the movie – like watching Jim Carrey essay the role of a neurotic hyperactive man with multiple-personalities; thus he traded the promise of celestial fame for a celestial lay – something I would have done too. I liked China Gate, despite Mamta Kulkarni, a more faithful copy of Seven Samurai than Sholay, even though he drew the Hindu-Muslim conflict in Amrish Puri and Naseer to the point where the audience wept every time they came on the screen together.

Raj Kumar Santoshi somehow reminds me of Sudhir Misra in terms of the themes he chooses. But somewhere his desperation to keep it mainstream makes him keep committing mini hara-kiris in between.

In his working, a more apt comparison would be Vidhu Vinod Chopra. The difference between the ranting VVC (this is the VVC network vrought to you vy Johnson Vavy Powder) and RKS is that the former is a technically-proficient mostly-mediocre person who fancies himself a genius and blames the junta for not understanding his pathetic mix of “commercial art” (in Mission Kashmir, Hrithik, to pave way for his eventual deliverance, is a feared terrorist who never kills the soldiers but just kicks them around – and with that condition he flushes the movie into the realm of the comically absurd and then expects the audience to lap it as serious cinema). RKS is a man with genuine talent for finding good scripts and characterisation and yet he fails to live up to the promise of his scripts by riddling it with many mediocre plot-points, letting some characters become caricatures, bad music, and inability to escape the mental clutches of Bollywood masala.

Santoshi’s success has always come in the subplots of the powerful plots he squanders. In Daamini, Sunny stumbled halfway into the movie as a has-been alcoholic lawyer and lit the screen. In China Gate, it was the Amrish-Puri-Jagdeep chemistry which was the crowning point (a similar chemistry was evident in the now forgotten Muskuraahat, a remake from some SouthIndian movie starring Revathi and the launch pad of the producer-son hero). Even though these themes work, the movie hinging on the central plot gets lost.

The subplot here is Guruji.

Here, the director very intelligently chooses Pankaj Kapoor for the role (Any other country, and Pankaj Kapoor would have had the top billing, above Ajay Devgun and Vidya Balan.) It is Pankaj Kapoor who elevates the movie to its moments of greatness every time he is on the screen. (He even makes a re-entry into the script in the fashion of Daamini’s Sunny Deol when the hero hits the nadir of no-hope ala Daamini.) Pankaj’s character too is very well fleshed out. A dacoit who had his change of heart while slipping into a play performance (but did it have to be the totally literal ‘Raja Harishchandra’?) while evading the police and became a theatre actor – a nice and full sketch except for the RHC part which made his eyes water even after decades (maybe a nukkad-naatak on second chance would have sounded more credible.)

If I see the movie a second time, I will keep fast forwarding the movie till I see Pankaj Kapoor on the screen, watch it till his exit and then hit the remote.

I wonder why RKS lets subplots dominate his Bollywoodishly-rendered plots. Subplots are supposed to bolster the central plot, to add nuances and dimensions to it, and not to take away the spotlight from them completely. The central plot and dialogues is like any other Bollywood movie. Since the hero is a Muslim who marries a Hindu, vignettes from his past force down the harmony of his M parents with their Hindu neighbours though, and this is a Bollywoodian dichotomy only the Indians can understand, by Bollywood standards it is actually subtly done. Vidya Balan’s character is a character in wait to play the role of the wife-standing-behind-the-husband-on-dock in the latter part and the romantic bits in the start are recommended to be followed while talking dirty to a stranger over the phone and cutting your toenails. Anjan Waagle Srivastava essays the role of the father with the same innovation with which Alok Nath essays his. Ditto for Sulabha Arya. * as the actor's secretary repeats an old act, but you don’t mind it, since he does it with the same finesse as he’s done it earlier.

Actually, the choice of characters points to the same lapses of imagination which plague RKS. He takes fine actors by the roles they have already essayed instead of discovering a Langda tyagi in Saif and Deepak Dobriyal in Rajoh. If there had been a grandfather, it would have been AK Hangal who would have midway through the movie made a heart-wrenching statement about fighting for ethics to the hero while the other characters stood around, heads hung in shame, and then left after hearing the azaan.

The new element is Darshan Jariwal, who takes over from Amrish Puri to play the villain of the same mold as those of Ghayal and Daamini. There’s even a tribute to ‘Jhatakna bhool jaoge’ with a ‘ting’y confrontation between Ajjay Deol and darshan Puri. Darshan is totally out of elements – the more I see of this actor, the more I realise that earnestness is not quite a perfect substitute for aptitude.

The movie moves from one screaming level to another, like all BW fare. When the hero in the start is a dissipated soul, within minutes he lies to old out-of-luck directors, screws starlets, tramples on other people’s careers and acts like Salman Khan all the time. Then after a murder most unsubtly-rendered his pangs are still suitably shown. But once his isolation starts, the hysteria of the world against him becomes absurd. The politician dad incites the public opinion against the hero and he’s thrashed unrelentingly by the press and the public; Prabhu Chawla does himself no favours in a badly-scripted talk show where he attacks the actor for changing his stand and speaking out. I feel a lot of people would have dismissed the movie here. Since when did people start believing in politicians, other than the managed goons who burn books and thrash couples on their behalf? The day YSR’s chopper got lost, discussion forums were flush with gloating glee that a politician, usually surrounded by more police than our smaller towns, is in any sort of physical danger. In fact, Jessica Lal case has brought to fore the estrangement of public opinion with the feudal system – the politicians, the police and the ineffectual judiciary. A grave error, I think.

Also the irony hit me again when the movie, after showing for half an hour how easily the politician schemes a superstar’s reputation to the dustiest and brownest of dust in weeks, despairs over a street-play performance announced to be performed. Ironic considering how easily Hashmi’s own death was effected and how easily the dust of its protest and public memory swept away and buried beneath the well-paved road bearing his name.

Part of RKS’s dilemma, and people like him who want to inject some discussion on our society in the distorted escapist world of cinema which surrounds us all the time, is the total dumbing of the audience that BW has effected. In a scene where the hero is approached by some Muslim-brethern to give his victimization a communal angle, the hero rises screaming to the duo, caricaturised from the beard to their tummy and the gamchha on their shoulders, telling them it would be a disgrace to cite his Muslimness as the cause of his being targeted (as opposed to his standing to a system of lies and feudal tyrannies) when the PM is a Sikh and the Prez a Muslim. Loud as this scene is – how else do you communicate a scene to the Indian masses – I write this after reading a report where a Mumbai college-student derides HallaBol as being too arty.(!)

In the end, Halla Bol is a movie which disappoints like a book where the author, in haste, dissipates a good plot and idea. And yet I would rather read it to the end, perhaps even buy it, than a sanitized bestseller.

Why statisticians are bad conversationalists

Some1: And you know what! This has never happened to me!

Me: Well, that's why it happened. The odds were piling up (though each individual event starts with the same odds, of course). Continue.

Some1: Forget it.

Watching Ambedkar vs Gandhi and thoughts on nature of debates

I caught a play today down at SRC, Mandi House, called Ambedkar vs. Gandhi.

With an ensemble of over seventy, I guess, and a fultoo Congress, if not Gandhi-bashing, an ambitious and brave effort.

But despite the ensemble, only four characters – Ambedkar, Rama his wife, a middle aged associate of Ambedkar and Gandhi have any significant role, with Ambedkar’s slice of the pie looking like a PacMan gobbling a dot. And therein lay the biggest drawback of the play – that it was only built around one character and it would not have been too much of a stretch if the entire play had been one man Ambedkar act with soliloquies interspersing with debates with voices in the background. Even the actor playing Ambedkar towered over the pretty ordinary Gandhi, with the entire T-bone of the dialogues on his plate, and instead of a clash of cults, personalities and ideas, the play was just Ambedkar bulldozing over Gandhi. A notable exception was Rama, his wife, who in a brief scene with Ambedkar left her mark and gave the most surprising and warm moment of the play.

Nevertheless, the play was marked with brutal and bold honesty in Ambedkar’s pronouncements and the characters had to pause many times for the applause to die down. What overwhelmed me most was the discussion.

I usually despair that we Indians would rather sweep things under the wholesome carpet than have a brutally frank discussion on what ails our society. I was wrong. Affirmative action for the Dalits has generated the most real debate of our lifetime. The debate which ensued was no-holds barred, did not hide behind euphemisms and had that most definitive characteristic of a real debate – it worked from first principles up. The principle that every man is born equal.

All the religions in the world ultimately become tyrannies after they impose the cultural context they originated from to different contexts. I do not know what this tendency is called but I will call it literalism.

In Semitic religions, it translates into the words as written in a book some millennia ago. In Hinduism, it was the Varna system. As the play beautifully depicted, even Gandhi struggled to accept the idea of renouncing the Varna system. In a dialogue, he tells Ambedkar, in words to this effect, ‘What Muslim is a Muslim who does not believe in the whole sanctity of the Koran; what Christian is a Christian if he rejects even in part the Bible; what Hindu is a Hindu who renounces then the tenets of Varna?’

Exactly.

The turning point of Western free thought, even after the French revolution, was the acceptance of Darwinism. Whereas other scientific discoveries could be rationalised and assimilated into God’s words (much like Nostradamus’ predictions which are found to have predicted an event exactly – after it’s happened) as another evidence of man’s infinitesimal understanding of the true meaning of them, Darwin let no such room for post-hoc manoeuvres. The Bible said man was created by God on the seventh day, directly, in the present form, and Darwin said he evolved from fish to apes. There was no way of accepting one theory without rejecting the other. Christianity was never the same after Darwin won.

Hinduism is in the throes of that change and it would be reasonable to expect another few centuries for the evils of the caste system totally dissipate. (The problem of RSS is not of Hinduism but of regular Fascist tendencies – we are the majority hence we should have all the privileges.)

Islam still has to move away from the literalist mindset. I have seen even educated friends rationalise some ritual they follow by giving me some reason of hygiene and long-sighted eventual betterment of humanity. If that is the central concern, why not just work from the principles of hygiene and betterment of humanity and do whatever is best to attain that, whether it is ascribed in the book or not? That is why I used the word rationalise since it means – to ascribe (one's acts, opinions, etc.) to causes that superficially seem reasonable and valid but that actually are unrelated to the true, possibly unconscious and often less creditable or agreeable causes.

It is not surprising that all these literalist tendencies have been marked by the greatest violence humankind has seen. The centuries of violence against the untouchables, the reign of terror for a millennium in the Christian world and the violence which the literalist Wahabi sects have unleashed.

The questions were brutally to the point engaging, though always cut short because of time constraints. If only we can take this honesty to our everyday debates, we might still attain soon the greatness we feel we’ve always deserved.

Man on the prowl - Talk by Chandrahas Choudhuri

I finally ventured out of Gurgaon into the far faraway land of Delhi literati whose escapades, so far, I have followed only on their cross-linked blogs.

The event was a talk by Chandrahas Choudhuri, author of Arzee the Dwarf, who – along with Tarun, a friend, and Jai Singh – will always keep alive in me the fire of the shuddering realisation that there are people who’ve read more books in a year that I will ever read in a lifetime. Chandrahas is the excellent book reviewer from Mint and I’ve followed his blog without actually reading most of the books he reviews.

The talk was a British Council in Delhi, a place, as I discovered, just outside the Outer Ring of CP near the Statesman building. It took me a lot of time to get there and get the car parked. The building was very beautiful but like much of Delhi virtually inaccessible to a daily-wage earner from Gurgaon like me.

I entered the auditorium just as Chandrahas was beginning his talk after an introduction by someone called Mark that I’d missed.

A little about my expectations from the talk. I had read the first teaser chapter in the blog of the author and had not liked it very much. Coming as it did around the time I had skimmed through the disasters of ‘You are here’ by Meenaxi Reddy and ‘My friend Sancho’ (Earlier, the Sancho-author’s claim in an interview that his favourite author at ten was Dostovesky had put me in a depression – I graduated to Hardy Boys at twelve!) I was getting increasingly suspicious of bloggers turning authors.

I browsed a little more in Landmark (it might sound I browse there every day but it’s more like five times a year) and started liking it. First of all, it’s a novel – finally. And not an extended-blog of an ego-inflating exercise. The author has obviously chosen a story alien to his own self and it sticks. Being short and having a glorious personality is not as easy I make it seem; imagine being a dwarf. In an interview, the author talked about he saw a handsome dwarf once and thought if being good-looking at that height didn’t make things worse for you and therein lay the spark for the tale. I was surprised as the thought had occurred to me too a long time ago, tho’ no handsome dwarf fell on my head from the apple tree I ruminated under.

As I browsed through the first forty-odd pages of the book, I realised that it was a brave book since it ventured beyond the author’s own habitus and that whatever I have learned of forms and contents from my readings – though not a scratch on Chandrahas’ own expressions at the start of many of his reviews – the book performed very well on those fronts. I remember at which phrase I actually kept the book back on the shelf – a poet-driver telling Arzee ‘Requited love – that is the paradise raised from nothing but a pair of synchronized imaginations.’ I was put off by the too many words and especially the “synchronized.’ He’s talking about love – goddammit, I thought. Why not use something like ‘imaginations commingled’? Doesn’t ‘commingle’ replicate the angelic euphoria and the bells you hear within more than the mechanical ‘synchronized’, I thought. (I am not making this up – this is what I thought then.) Lyricism, for me, is very important in a novel. Something the greats like Dickens understood. Try reading his books aloud to yourself and you will understand.

My second reading of the book happened yesterday at LM. I had been sick for a couple of days and the fever broke yesterday. During this time, I had hardly eaten and I was craving for a Zinger burger meal. LM’s luck that it’s placed right next to a KFC on MG Road (Having a flat between LM and KFC is paradise for me – stuff love, requited or not.) Here, I finally decided that Arzee is a very good book indeed. The author, in successive chapters, throws light on some of the main characters, beside the protagonist, in a beautifully described Mumbai chawl-like building, where the protagonist’s thoughts range from almost falling dizzy with a temptation of suicide yawning under him as a hole to pathetic self-pity to a sudden pang for someone lost to falling in love with a voice – belonging, as he realises later, to a blind girl. All very credibly portrayed. And the best of authors can falter at this. A brilliant scene. The next scene, where the protagonist is clowning in a mall dressed as a Limzee bottle, starts with panache, as if the author is atoning for the almost grey morose tone, similar in texture to the building where most of the previous scene takes place, of the previous chapter.

‘All afternoon, a big green furry bottle – big for a bottle, that is, but small for a human being, which under the surface it undoubtedly was, since it walked on two legs, wildly waved two arms, and emitted a medley of squawks, neighs and moos, mixed with snatches of dialogue from movies and ululating calls of – ‘Auto! Auto!’ – a large green bottle had been scooting around the Inorbit Mall in the suburb of Malad, creating a stir.

A very good beginning to a paragraph as it is, I feel that the impact would have been more if the author had truncated it to this effect –

‘All afternoon, a big green furry bottle wildly waving two arms – and emitting a medley of squawks, neighs and moos, mixed with snatches of dialogue from movies and ululating calls of ‘Auto! Auto!’ – scooted on two short legs around the Inorbit Mall in the suburb of Malad, creating a stir.’

For even though, I started liking the book well enough to thinking of buying it, I found it still a bit laboured on its humour. None of the delightful – Buddha running through a village wit. And it makes Arzee's relentless self-pitying stream of thoughts tedious to read after some time. In my opinion, humour is the most brilliant ink that a pen which speaks of human tragedy dips into. The reason I go back to reading 'English Augist' once every coupe of years is to relish the brilliant wit with which Upmanyu underlines Agastya's alienation and his inner throes. In fact, the wit in Arzee reminded me of a friend's, a comparison I will speak about later. The author needs to work there.

Coming to the lecture, after the browsing, I realised that the book was not for the casual reader – though the writing is very simple and straight-forward – since the freshness of breath from the urban angst and my college strongest my life coolest sophomoric stuff churning by the gazillions would be lost in most people who have not anguished between the yawning gap between the writings from other countries, even Pakistan, and our own. I imagined a small quiet high-brow huddle where I will furtively lurk in the shadows like an interloping mosquito looking for a silent suck of blood while no one was looking.

Imagine my surprise, when the door opened to an auditorium with around a hundred people sitting in plush sand-brown seats and the author confidently standing on the bare stage, bare but for a Perspex lectern with the British Council logo on the author’s right and a low table with a glass top and spindly legs on his left with a few standing copies of his book. I was directed to one of the two seats available somewhere in the middle. As I sat, I realised that there were a few seats available in the front two rows where I thought, rightly so as I later realised, I recognized a few faces from some of the cross-referential literati blog posts.

The talk was short – an hour at the most – and I soon realised, too basic for my taste. Instead of budding writers, or even mature readers, it was catered more towards budding readers. And in this, as the Q&As revealed, the author had gauged the standing of the majority of the audience well.

Chandrahas is a natural speaker, reminding me again of the friend whose unfortunate short-coming (I couldn’t resist the pun) of low wit he shares, but seems like an honest and nice guy. And no doubt, humble. (Here the author describes his reading skills as humble which, after listening to him talk impromptu and make much sense, I am sure, are not.)

He spoke mainly about rules of writing which to sum briefly were – read without a plan and outside your comfort zone, the power of knowing the etymology of the words you intend to use (I found his “my favourite book being Oxford Eng Dictt” a bit fatuous), keeping a notebook (Loved the phrase he used – catching a thought on its wing), making notes on the book you read (which I do, read Anne Fadiman’s excellent Ex Libris for an entire chapter on this), reading poetry (alas! My Achilles’ heel!) to understand why words need to be used sparsely and powerfully – though Arzee itself, I feel, is a bit too worded, think about form beside the content – not very well explained but I understood what he meant – the thought he’s put on form shows beautifully in Arzee, using the internet and being patient.

He spoke almost nothing about the book – the wings of whose expectation had flown me fotry kilometres from my Aravali perch after taking a half day leave. Where he labored the most, which word he spent a couple of months searching for, the pangs of self-doubt, the brilliant epiphanies on the darkest nights, the inspiration for some thoughts incidents and characters, the subtle interplay he’s trying to point towards – none of it.

And once the Q&A started, I realised that most of the audience, and by most I mean something over 95%, hadn’t read a word of Arzee.

The beginning question was ‘I read the line by Atal Bihari Vajpayee “You can choose your friend, not your neighbours.” How do I include them in some Hindi poetry I want to write?’ this was uttered in halting English by a young man, something that usually makes the British Council tuitions attending types either snickering or nodding in vigorous guilty awareness of their privileges, and was so attended.

With this question, I realised one another aspect of Chandrahas – his greatness, or perhaps his astounding ability to not let his befuddled frustration show. For me this question is like asking ‘Meri nani mar gayi hain, main kalkatta kaise jaun?’ in a forum to answer question on AIDS. Kudos to Chandrahas to actually form some reply to it with lots of laughs and warmth.

An unlikely trio sat in front of me, behind the girl with a smile to stop your heart, a tall thin man with hair of a shape I do not have the vocabulary to describe, another with a looooong pony tail and again bony features, and – here the unlikely part starts – a well built sardaarji, slightly towards the flabby, with a mountain of a turban. Throughout the lecture, they exchanged meaningful glances (no, not those meanings) and even titters – if that word could be used to describe the giggles of males like these. I was rather awed by their act and decided that they must be knowing something about the author that I didn’t. A passing mention of the young gentleman on my right who brought memories of attending lectures in audis like this when, for some reason, he would get flustered every time I took some notes, and then hurriedly copy them from my pad to his.

After this brilliant start, the sardaarji raised his arm. I caught my breath waiting for him to stand tall and reveal that he was Rushdie in guise. Instead, the sardaarji started with an introduction to his doctor self (Chandrahas had mentioned his admiration for people who can follow literary fiction besides working) – I was shocked when he mentioned that he had eight years of experience, same as mine more or less, when the man was clearly a decade older than me at least but thankfully he mentioned that he’d switched a few jobs before medical. After the brief biodata, the question came. The author had said that you should read deeply and stuff you can’t comprehend right away, while in competition exams you’re required to read comprehensions in minutes! Laughter.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have the wit! The sort you find in small-town parties tottering with a glass in hand and placing a hand over your shoulder and shouting in a stale whiskey-laden breath ‘Young Man!’

I would have rolled my eyes all the way back if the girl in front had not been turning her head behind to have a look at the sardaarji.

More questions were asked. All of them almost screaming that no one (save perhaps a couple) of the questioners had even attempted to understand where the author was coming from. Some of the questions were like asking Geet Sethi about carrom. These are the times you want to kick Delhi in the nuts. Its loudness, its obsessive hankering to talk talk talk and strut strut strut without caring to first nurture the substance within. I doubt if these standard of questions would have been asked in Bangalore or Chennai.

The sardaarji tried to butt once more in – without feeling the need, this time, for the author to pass him the turn to speak or the mike to be passed to him – but the author was able to cut him very skilfully.

The session over, we lined to buy the book. The author had mentioned that he’d sold only 20 books so far and I hope to heavens he was joking. Working on sales projections this month, you realise that even the tiniest niches of India’s emerging consumer class translates to a consumption of billions of dollars. And here you have this fine famous blogger and reviewer with a commendable book and he’s managed to sell twenty?!

I shuffled and ran into a discussion where an author suggested I join his fan club, and I politely refused. Behind me in the line stood a lady I recognised from a jacket blurb of short stories collection I had browsed through the day before. Mridula Koshy. A down-to-earth sweet lady. I had read only one story of hers, and not been able to concentrate enough – she doesn’t write easily – to form an opinion. Some other time maybe.

After some time we realised that the line was being cut abundantly and concentrated on moving ahead. And so I finally met Chandrahas who took the book I had just bought (at 20% discount! Touche, LandMark!) and hurriedly scrawled over it uttering some polite gurgles both of us didn’t give much weight to – especially after the couple of minutes he’s spent bending an ear to listen better to the girl ahead of me. (Yes, he’s not quite dwarfish.) Just as Chandrahas took my book to sign, the sardaarji made an appearance behind him and shouted that the author seriously consider his question -- to which Chandrahas laughed and promised to take it offline.

Once over, I hung around the back of the audi. A stage always makes me feel sad and remember my happy days on it; and I sat on a seat in the back drinking the stage, the curtains parted aside, the wings, the stereo, the lights, the carpeted aisles dropping to it – and left after some minutes.

I walked from there to CP, taking the outer circle where the shops are more crowded and bustling than the inner, drinking in the sights I always took for granted and am so denied in the sanitized cocooned urbania of Gurgaon, had some bhelpuri, followed some cops as they went about harassing street hawkers and push-cart vendors, even those with licenses, and sat under a tree for an hour, at the corner of the inner circle. I watched people board autos – I still vividly remember the African teenaged boys, the Keralite huddle in their mundus(?) haggling with a boy selling handkerchiefs, a very pretty girl cross the street with a bearded admittedly-handsome fella, and listening to a spindly young man on my right, who sat on his haunches on the cemented circle under the tree, and told someone on the phone that things will improve after September and not to think of marriage before that as his good time is staring after October.

I don’t know why I wrote so much today. It’s been a day without meaning – a day like the ones I used to spend a long time ago never knowing how much I will miss them. This is the first time I am speaking in words about these days. My last years in Lucknow and then Bangalore were spent in the shadows of such events (not in Lucknow tho’) and shunting around markets watching people – always absolutely alone. And silent. When I came back home, when home was not an empty apartment and I had people to ask me where I had been, I would give non-committal replies – and not that I knew the answers. These were my happiest days.

I didn't want to write this

Rediff is doing to Internet news what TOI did to the paper press a decade ago.

That is why I check it out every hour for updates.

Sample the headline of this new novelist off the block article titled "I didn't think I would become a Rushdie". Naturally, if I came over and told you "I never thought I would see two seven-feet tall guys with amputated arms kissing each other", you would assume that I just had. Far from it. It's more like - in my case at least - 'I never thought I would have girls screaming and clawing over me'.

I assumed that the guy is the next Rushdie being hailed by the press. Nothing like it. The guy just mentions that, for good reason, he knew he would never be Salman Rushdie. He might as well have mentioned Marilyn Monroe - because, from what his TobyYoungish book sounds like, his chances of ever becoming her are definitely brighter.

My only disappointment is that Rediff could have spiced it up a little more.

Something like 'I never thought I would be raped by Rushdie while Arvind Adiga pinned my arms and Anita and Kiran Desai held one leg each.'

or

'I never thought Rushdie would get obsessed over my fat nipples.'

Hello, I love you. Would you be my fan?

What the fuck is this new fan thing in facebook going on?

I got an invite to become a fan of a rock group some of my batchmates in IIT have started. I hold absolutely very high respect for them since they’ve taken the road few take, persevered for a decade, and realised their dream. But I am not a fan of their music.

Similarly, I got an invite to be a fan of IIT by another batchmate. What the hell does a fan of an institution mean??? Freedictionary defines a fan as (a person who admires or is enthusiastic about a pop star, actor, sport, or hobby) Exactly. Because there’s something specific the fan is enthused about. What am I a fan of – the food, the professors, all the students who ever went there, all the students sitting there in the night time in front of the laptops shagging to glory, its architecture, the bogs, the turds that drop through it, the SIS guards shooing away the stray cattle, or the sum totality of all this? If it’s an institution I really have to choose, I would rather choose casual sex.

Today, I met two authors. When I asked one of them for his email address he told me that he has a fan community in Facebook I can join. Taken aback, I blurted – But I am not your fan (I haven’t even read the dude’s book.). He seemed to be more taken aback and told me to send an invite in Facebook instead.

Now I am asked to be a fan of a company I’ve never heard of.

It’s time someone starts a “doesn’t care a shit about” invite. Then see the memberships multiply.

Marry me, will ya?

An attention-deficit, chronically-depressed and frightfully honest alcoholic gamma male seeks alliance from someone with big tits – everything rest follows. No job, no career plans – hence expecting a huge dowry.

Girl should contact directly – contact from parents and other assholes not welcome.

Is a man who's not your uncle...

Your cle?

A requiem for my city

Khushwant Singh I guess.

The tragedy underlined is a tragedy I've identified with acutely.

लहजे में वो नफासत, वो रंग-ओ-बू कहाँ है?
वो दिल फरेब बातें, वोह गुफ्तगू कहाँ है?
था जिसपे नाज़ हमको, वो लखनऊ कहाँ है?

वो खुश्बुओं के रेले, दिल्कश हसीन मेले
दिल की जवाँ तरंगें,वो ख्वाहिशें उमंगें
जैसे बरस रही हो, रस रंग की फुवारें
अब तक बसी हैं दिल में,लव लेन की बहारें

अब भी है काफ़ी हाउस, लेकिन था एक ज़माना
जब शायरों अदीबों का, यही था ठिकाना
सिगरेट का धुआं जैसे हर फ़िक्र का बादल था

यह गंज यूँ तो अब भी चाहत है लखनऊ की
बदली हुई सी लेकिन रंगत है लखनऊ की
अंदाज़ वो नहीं हैं आदाब वो नहीं हैं,
आँखें वही हैं लेकिन अब ख्वाब वो नहीं हैं

इखलास की वो बस्ती वीरान हो गई है
इस भीड़ में शेहेर की पहचान खो गई है
तहजीब मुख्तलिफ है माहौल भी जुदा है
अब कैसे कह दें हम लखनऊ पर फ़िदा

Taken from here: http://madhukarshukla.blogspot.com/2009/08/blog-post.html

Visualize this

Rediff here questions the sagacity of Dravid's inclusion in the light of WC2011. "does Dravid form a part of the selectors' vision for the 2011 World Cup?"

I have been hearing this preparing the squad thingee since the day I started following cricket. The only time we ever won was when we had no squad! I think sports should be played more and discussed less. And whoever's the best for right now should be let to play.

And we should delete the word vision from any other usage as the facult to see with your eyes. We get too much of that bull in corporate and biographies as it is.