Facebook Weekend

Face-book Status Off!

Same sex marriage and immigration

Paavum.

Here’s a video on their judiciary committee hearing.

Tiller’s Murder and O’Reilly

After Dr.Tiller’s murder, I have been seeing the foolish O’Reilly’s foolery a lot lately.

Youth Radio went ahead and wrote a post on my thoughts. Here it is.

My first reaction to all this was, Why are we talking about O’Reilly? Some crazy person murdered one of the strongest pillars of women’s right to choose and instead of making a serious attempt at understanding why this happened, we are giving space to some fool who got lucky? It’s like talking about Manson’s music after Columbine’s school massacre. In the real world, television is not so important as much as it is inside the tv’s reality. It is important to remember that.

Activism

I am told it is easy to criticize and point fingers. (It is not so). There is this feeling of standing still and raging against all the ills that is going on. Well. Do something. I do not want to. It is not my place. It is not my place to actually do something. I have done enough! Which is … what? Not sure. But my blood, sweat and tears have been shed. And I want to now un-plug, sit back and tell you what to do. Is that so wrong? I believe it is not.

Experiencing Love… and Money

Tommy wrote the Google Team a poem yesterday.

what is wave
i do not know
but like love
it must be experienced and not read about

I had a totally weird dream last night. It was about Tommy. So it is only fitting that I will paste his poem today. I dreamt that me and Tommy went into a business venture together. It was a website where people could exchange their own goods with other people GLOBALLY. The reason this would be a good business is because Tommy has mad connections with the Shipping people and so we can ship goods back and forth anywhere practically for free. This reduces cost dramatically and people can exchange their furniture, books, clothes, jewelry with others internationally and get foreign goods for local prices.

Seriously, I dreamed all this. Tommy does the website and pulls his connections. I sit back and drown in cash.

I am a daredevil

A few days without blogging. I do feel vaguely defiant about it. Anyway, one of the blogging rules is to never write about how you are not writing. Well, here I am breaking all kinds of rules. What can I say? I am a geek’s daredevil.

Wounds

Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s heart-breaking line “When the wounds of your memory begin to heal. I find some excuse to think of you.“…. has been on my mind. I experience this pain like a gash that has stopped bleeding. One nudge from my thoughts, and it starts gushing again. As it heals, I find myself going back to that pain again and again. Trying to understand. And failing.

I posted up the full poem a while back. Click here to see.

Today’s thought

…to keep in mind and TRY and remember.

Every moment is a chance to turn it all around.

Every moment.

Not my Problem

It is not my thing to solve the problems of the world. No, not at all.

Yes, I know class and gender are playing their games here in this room. But this time around my privilege (class) is erasing my oppression (gender). So I don’t care. Or don’t care Enough. For me to speak up. Out loud that is. I will do it in my blog later. And feel good about my self-reflection.

I spend years being in the minority, never really tasting privilege (Folks mistake privilege for ‘a good life’, it is not). It is only in India that I taste privilege. And turns out I like it. Like I said, it is not my game to solve the problems of the world. No, it is definitely not my problem that the normally very vocal woman from the sex workers union has not said a word. No, I don’t care if the ‘poors’ have not spoken yet in a dialogue that will claim later to proudly include them.

No, it does not matter that for the past 2 minutes, we have been discussing our miliue’s problematic inclusion of hetero-patriarchical norms and values. Unfunny jokes are passed off as banter. Local language translations are sparse. But of course, that’s not problem. I have nothing to say except to be provocatively analytical. That’s my game. Dispassionate brooding. Not saving worlds.

The Waterboarding Experiment

Conservative Talk Radio Host undergoes waterboarding to learn that it is torture to feel like you are drowning. This video is fascinating for many reasons. Watch.

Bad morning

Sick. Or getting sick. No end in sight to the mountain of work in front of me (so I blog instead).

On the way to work this morning, I saw a dog with its guts spilled out in the middle of the road. Its intestines looked like dusty, yellow plastic tubing. Somehow the absence of blood was more disturbing than a bloody mess would have been. Maybe. Who knows. I didn’t look for long. I retched and tried to concentrate on the book I was reading in my auto.

Only You: A (very) Short Story

“Please don’t go. I want to keep looking at you all day,” he said to her. In a heartbeat. she squealed and told me about it. I had my back turned to them and I was brushing my teeth, already late for work. I turned around, wondering how I feel. I saw them both giggling and Samuel looking sheepishly at me.  He had whispered it to her, not wanting me to hear.  I smiled and made a joke about not being able to turn my back for a couple of seconds. Raucous laughter. I am declared funny. I turned back to attend to my teeth. The air in the room had gained weight. It would not be proper to frown and loom above them. And of course, I could not be crabby and jealous about a joke. I walked out the door without looking at him. He immediately understood, and protested, demanded that I kiss him. “You haven’t kissed me!!,” as if this was a particularly grievous deed. I leaned down and smashed my face into his dark one. I loved doing this. I did it now and momentarily forgot my heart wincing earlier.

All day, what she told me stayed with me. A stain in the back of my mind. I remembered it when I gave my salwaar kameez piece to be stitched and the tailor asked me what kind of collar I wanted. “I am not sure. Round.” I frowned. Did it start again? What was it?

My Friend Sancho by Amit Varma: Book Review

There are lessons to learn on writing from every novel that I read.

Lesson #1: Being funny and  writing funny are too entirely different things. When writing humor, it is important to remember that you don’t have the luxury of voice inflection and timing to get across the punch. Lesson #2: It is important to re-think and re-evaluate a story’s flow and structure. In other words, it is important to edit. I don’t care how delicious that burst of writing at midnight was. All you have there is the raw materials, it must be molded into a story first before becoming a story.

I went to Amit Varma’s book launching here in Bangalore. I really liked the guy. He was funny and smart with just the right measure of self-deprecation for it to be endearing. But there were warning signs early on that this would be the novel that it turned out to be (spectucularly mediocre). It was when Varma shared that he didn’t believe that plot was particularly important (”it’s just a tool to develop characters”, he had said). Turned out, plot wasn’t very important in this story. Nothing that happens to Abir Ganguly (the main character) much matters accept in relation to the woman (Muneeza) that he meets and how it changes him (and to a lesser extent her). There is murder, police corruption, ethics of journalism, love. But they are back drops to Ganguly checking his email, drinking black coffee, eating out and making wise-cracks that can be predicted pages ahead. Varma never bothers to flesh out the ethics of Ganguly’s actions (except in a masala-movie-style dialogue towards the end and Ganguly’s quick internal narratives. These narratives are short bursts which are supposed to display “growing up”. More time and space is dedicated to movie-theater-couple-making-out joke).

During the book launching, there was a lot of marketing on the point that this was a “quality popular” novel (which apparently doesn’t exist anymore) that “literary-types” might read with “guilty pleasure”. So I guess this is supposed to fit that “niche”. The one thing that sells popular, fluff novels is that the characters are constantly doing interesting and fun things that the reader wants to know about. They are having weird sex, (or atleast a lot of sex), they are shopping and rich, they are fighting crime, they are living life. But Abir Ganguly doesn’t do much of anything (even with his interesting life). He naps a lot, browses the internet, and eats out. A lot. Which might be interesting if Ganguly’s internal narrative was interesting. It’s not. (see Lesson #1 above for why). In Varma’s case, this is especially odd because India Uncut (Amit Varma’s blog) is often deliciously funny and witty.  Which brings me to…

I would have forgiven all of these short-comings if Varma had not done the one hallmark of bad writing — India Uncut was plugged Four times in the novel (not including the author’s profile).  In a novel this slim (it only took me about an hour to finish), in four separate instances Ganguly is thinking how cool India Uncut (the only blog Ganguly reads) is. Meh.

Stray Judgements in a coffeeshop

Who was the David-Lodge-reading kid with the thick glasses? He looked earnest. Nerdy. I am immediately judemental of David Lodge. Which is odd because the one book I have read of his, I liked. So why the superiority I am feeling? Such are the ways of stray judgements…

Casanova Was a Book Lover by John Maxwell Hamilton: Book Review

I am just not very good at writing good reviews. That’s my problem. So every time I race through a book, I end up writing a mediocre review.  (Mediocre reviews discussed in delightful detail in Hamilton’s book). I have words to say. I want to

say how much fun I had reading this book.  That I raced through this book, and shut it a little regretful that it was over. It delivered all of its promises of being provocative, funny and fun. Even though I would not have minded it so much, it also delivered on its promise of not being too reverential about books and writing.

It is easy to forget that this kind writing is incredibly difficult to do. That such a book required research, thought and solid writing skills to kick it into a book that was pleasurable to read. It is not everyday that the business of publishing books seems interesting and worthy of turning on your Nokia phone flashlight and reading it during a power cut. But again and again, I found myself lost in the inanities about a book—their acknowledgments, their cataloging, their preservation, their marketing, their reviews. Who stole which books? Why? The Library of Congress (LOC)  is a vast, delicious maze filled with the written word from everywhere. (A moment of regret that I never bothered to visit the LOC while I was living in DC).

My absolute favorite chapter was the one on presidents’ writing where Hamilton successfully argues that they should really stop writing. The book catalogues all the presidents’ writing, except of course, President Obama who wrote his brilliantly beautiful memoir long before he ever considered the presidency. I was delighted to learn just how incredibly unique Obama’s memoir was. I didn’t know we had such suck for writers among our presidents.

One of the clever things that Hamilton does is preempt such things by saying that books often get written and published at unlucky times. Gives several examples. I don’t think Hamilton’s book made any such grievous error. But I would love  to see an updated chapter where he adds a few remarks about Obama’s book (and the role it played during the campaign. As Hamilton rightly points out, most pre-presidency books are used against the candidates as Obama’s book was).

A similar feeling (but less forgiving) came over me when I read the chapter on reviews. Hamilton’s main thesis is that there are not that many reviews around and those around, don’t have teeth. But he does not discuss blog reviewing at all while he takes the time to quote some random Amazon reviewer.