28.10.2012

Oh Leukemia you heartless murderous bitch.

21.10.2012 : The Weekend Rant

I remember during our discussion on the Book Club (oh there is a post due on my con job - how I disguised myself as a blogger and made it to the Bloggers' Meet), Lekshmi mentioned during conversation there were some events slated to happen over the weekend. By the way , this is an excellent first hand account of the Kovalam Literary Festival that she attended.

Thankfully this weekend didn't carry the prospect of being called to the office again on the weekend, so I just shot a random mail to her asking if she would know of anything that might be happening over this weekend by any chance? And the good lady replied promptly saying there was a book reading by Manu Joseph on his second book "The Illicit Happiness of Other People" to happen at some place near Statue at 5:30 PM and also told me to check the Events Section in The Hindu Supplement. My untrained eyes though couldn't find anything in the Friday Review.

Manu Joseph. I had surely heard the name during the days when we used to subscribe to Hindu here at home. His book was one of the contenders for The Hindu Literary Prize (which it ended up winning) and some of the supplements carried reviews, interviews and the like. The book had even made it to the holy grail that is my flipkart wishlist. Here is the introduction of the author on the back cover reproduced verbatim "Manu Joseph is the editor of the Indian newsweekly, OPEN, and a columnist with the International Herald Tribune, the global edition of The New York Times. His debut novel Serious Men was translated into several languages and won him The Hindu Literary Prize and the American PEN/Open Book award. It was also shortlisted for The Man Asian Literary Prize and the P G Wodehouse Prize for the Best Comic Novel."

That he is the editor of OPEN Magazine was news to me, and this was all the more fascinating. The OPEN is an interesting magazine, and is on my staple reading diet on the way home - after Tehelka, of course.

So, noob that I am, I thought Lekshmi meant the event was to happen on Friday evening, and didn't give much thought upon that. I checked here for any interesting events on Saturday and found out something was going on at the Vailoppilly Samskruthi Bhavan (I ended up really enjoying a Mohiniyattom recital by Miss Lakshmi K J which.. oh later. Else this will turn into a postinception) and made plans. It was indeed a pleasant surprise when at around 5 PM, I found here that the book reading was slated to happen on Saturday, and that it was to commence in 30 minutes. I started out immediately from home, and boy didn't fresh oxygen work wonders. There was heavy traffic on the way, but I weaved my way through and reached the place around 15 minutes late.

The event had already started on time (Well what else was I expecting? That they'd wait for me?) There was a month-long book fest by DC Books going on, and this was an event associated with the same. The venue was just a makeshift space in the bookstore, and there were some chairs put on. The crowd was quite less, and there were at the most around 20-25 people there. The setting was peaceful and humble. I entered, and my favorite aroma of fresh books greeted me.
(Like the Amortentia-struck Hermione Granger said, "I can smell freshly mown grass and new parchment and.." )

There he was, sitting along with a lady who was reading something from the book. I didn't know who the lady was then, but she turned out to be Dr Meena T Pillai, an academic who is the Director of Centre for Comparative Literature at Kerala University.

Now thanks to my memory of a 90 year old, I don't remember much to actually make a first hand account on the whole thing. I have these snippet images from yesterday in my mind, most of them incomplete, but what the heck I will postaa however I feelaa.

The function was underway, and Meena was speaking. She remarked that she found the book "wickedly funny" and she quoted from the book to exemplify. These were a couple of them :
"Morality was probably the invention of unattractive men."
"And that language is a trap, that a dark evolutionary force has created language to limit human thought. That writers are overrated fools. That all religions came from ancient comic writers. And that the ultimate goal of comics is the same as the purpose of humanity - to break free from language"

I didn't have a clue about the novel, but from what was being transpired I gathered that the characters were from a Kerala setting, and Meena was going on about the central character named Unni.

"..Unni suffered from a single malady - absolute sanity. He had so much clarity of vision and thoughts that it was dangerous. Absolute sanity is such a dangerous thing to possess. We all should be happy that we are insane at some levels... It is the misanthrope who alone has clarity"

I remember her to have made a good point afterwards. After going through many of the Indian English Literature of the present, she said she felt so disenchanted and jaded but Manu's novels once again gave her the thrills of losing herself in the quicksand of language - and made her find again that sheer joy of drowning in the language.

When she was done with the reading, it was Manu's turn to speak/read from the book - He said he preferred taking questions and then agreed to read just a paragraph from the novel - to introduce the novel and set the tone of it to the uninitiated.
It went like this :  

 As things are, it does not take much to be a spectacle on this narrow tarred lane, It waits all day to be startled by the faintest hint of strangeness passing through. Such as a stray working woman in the revolutionary sleeveless blouse, who has the same aura here as a divorcee. A man with a ponytail. A north Indian girl in jeans so tight you can see the daylight between her legs. It is as if such apparitions are a sign that the future, which has arrived in other places, is now prospecting the city. Here now is the final stand of an age, the last time one can profile a street in Madras and be correct. Men are managers, mothers are housewives. And all bras are white. Anglo-Indian girls who walk in floral frocks are Maria. 

(If you thought that I remembered that whole paragraph then you don't know me. At all.)

He then took questions from Meena and the audience.

One of the first questions were as to how did he zero in on the title "The Illicit Happiness of Other People". Was the story developed around the title, or the other way around ? He said he choose to have the title beforehand, and develop the story around it. He also revealed his first chosen title was "Mariamma Wins". That would depict the battle between a husband and a wife, "the only battle that really matters", as he put it. This was an initial thread he toyed with, in which Chacko is a journalist - an alcoholic journalist, "if there is such a thing as a non-alcoholic journalist", he quipped. Chacko did a regular column in paper when he would interview one miserable person - people perceived as or rather, expected to be miserable by the society that is - a cripple, or an invalid, or a prostitute for example, and he proved in his columns that the person was happy. But then, he said, he would have had to write all of Chacko's columns in the novel, and that would take a serious toll on the pace of the novel, which he was particular to maintain and hence he changed the course.

"My first chapter is called the Underdog Family. Every lane would be having an underdog family - whose job is to make the others happy by their own misery". The lot which others look down upon and derive a certain sadistic happiness which he calls the "Illicit Happiness of Other People."

At some point someone asked him whether at any point of time during the evolution of the novel did he think about not killing off the character Unni Chacko. (Which means Unni Chacko dies at some point in the story, which, as I found out now, isn't a spoiler at all). Now I was pretty still much clueless about the story at around this time and I didn't know how or why the question was significant. Manu responded saying it was an excellent question, and that he felt exposed. He answered with his, and the general obsession among the writers about pleasant and happy endings for the story. He admitted he too prefer happy endings. "Serious Men was accused of being of too low stakes", he said. "But", in his own words, "as writers we cannot escape the unpleasantness. We can tell powerful stories only if we don't run away from them". He also revealed he considered putting Unni in a coma, but since the story's present is about 3 years after the death of Unni, putting a 17 year old boy in a coma for 3 years is more tragic than letting him die.

Meena asked him about his literary influences, if any, and Nietzsche and Shaw by any chance? God why is that lady obsessed with Nietzsche and Bernard Shaw? I remember her trying to draw out parallels between Manu's characters and some of these celebrated philosophers' works while she was doing her first reading as well. He politely replied in the negative saying there was no literary influences, and joked that he, a student of literature would not want to have to do anything to do with Shaw. (My wild guess is that it was a reference to the course curriculum of which Shaw might be an integral part of. Pretty much like many of the literature students end up hating Shakespeare as opposed to being able to appreciate him more.) He told about his influences from Cinema though. The structure of his stories, he said, would have been influenced by Tarantino films. He also talked about the characters in the story, where instead of having a central character who would be researched into to minute details by the author and would be so vividly sketched and portrayed but would be hogging all the limelight, he liked to bring in short-lived cameo characters having an impact on the story.

"I find most of the heavy stuff boring. I am very suspicious of the Nobel Prize books, especially. I mean we need not be judgmental just because some Scandinavians decided to award it a prize."

"Writers should not be afraid of being tagged 'interesting'. The false notion is that 'interesting' is not art"

So did he have any plans to make it into a movie script, was one question. Frankly from what was being discussed I didn't think the book was movie material, and I mean it as a compliment. Manu laughed and said "No." He revealed there was a time when he used to seriously experiment with movie scripts as well. He also said he had even done a script for a Hindi movie which he jested, was not going to reveal because it will lie down in his murky "dark past". He reasoned that movie scripts were more time consuming to him, and demanded more commitments, with regards to selling of the movie and all.

Some point later he was talking about the "online" media versus print. He remarked that the evolution of the media was a natural thing, and there wasn't pretty much anything you can do to withhold the process. He might have seen the stack of fresh copies of his books lying nearby and then laughed, "Oh I shouldn't be saying this".
With reference to the bibliophile argument regarding the smell of the pages, he joked, "You can smell kindle also. Probably they will come up with a perfume for that."
So will the books as we see it now die?.
"I think it will take a long time to if it does eventually. I believe it will co-exist with the online medium, albeit in a much diminished state, perhaps."

Meena observed his books of being too "manly" and even in this book, apart from a couple of female characters, it was the same. "I'm thankful that the accusation is that I'm a man", was  his reply. He admitted he has struggled with female characters to get them right, to get inside them and think like them. There is only a point till which conjecture works, and all what he has written is what he has heard from the female characters in his life.

The last question was more of a general one. I didn't like the loud and rude way the person who asked it though. He took a copy of the book, and showed the back cover of the book and pointed out that all books nowadays had these glossy back covers which more or less had the same quotes saying Hindustan Times says its awesome, The Deccan Herald says its not to be missed, etc. His question was that weren't these reviews trying to create a preconception and weren't the media actually trying to influence the decision making and judgement of the reader? Manu replied saying he didn't think reviews are such a powerful medium as we imagine it to be, and that at the end of the day we take recommendations from only people/friends we trust. He also added that reviews are helpful in publicizing the book. (Who are we kidding? The OPEN Magazine has a regular column for book reviews. ;) )I didnt expect him to speak against the system either.

Manu Joseph came across as a pretty chilled out bloke, resembling one of your cool professors in college. He spoke freely and with an undercurrent of humour which made him all the more pleasing, without really being conscious about the need to be politically correct.

And then, after it was all done, I grabbed a copy and went to him, who signed graciously. There is my first one to the signed-by-author collection.
"Thanks", I said.
"Thanks for coming", he smiled.
I stood there awestruck and mumbled "Pleasure..", after a good two minutes to the guy who brought tea.

14.10.2012

I wouldnt have gone, normally. There are usually a lot of people who turn up for the weekly game. And most of them are very good players, most of them players of Infy Team, so I save myself from huge levels of embarassment by not going, even though the temptation is there. But Aswin checked the numbers and told me the turn out was going to be very less, guess due to most of the players resting ahead of the Inter DC Championship to happen on the weekend at Mangalore, so basically the day's game could turn into a tiki-taka practice. (So he told me) Thats how I ended up in the Loyola Ground, only to find (to my despair, perhaps) quite a healthy number of people turned up, enough to play an 8-per-team match.

The team split was very unfair and unbalanced and left them stronger.Now I want to state with the least self effacing tone that my physique doesn’t really favor me having a good go at my favorite sport (or any other sport for that matter.) I get easily outrun, outmuscled and outpaced. This wouldnt have mattered if my technique was good enough to mask the other shortcomings. Sadly, no. May be stamina can be improved over time with practice, but 25 years of being has taught me I am not going widen into the normal human size.

^I have this gift of being able to drift off from any topic and end it up in extolling my virtues. It’s an irritating habit.

So Aswin took me into his team. I said in jest I'd be Sergio Busquets, to be safe. I didn’t want to start on the wings, it required pace, breaking away and delivering accurate balls into the box. (And there wasn't enough players on each side to have a couple of wingers per se on the left and right). And also since the numbers per side was less, it meant one had to do a lot of tracking back to help in defense too if one's playing on either of the sides, more so since their team was offensively much better. Starting in a central midfield wasn’t an option either, it required good vision and creativity to initiate moves. So I started just in front of the back three, in the Busquets role. As the game progressed I found that I sucked at breaking up play, something the defensive midfielder should be good at, if I may dare enough to call my position as such. Most of the players I closed in dummied and got away easily. I was enjoying the luxury of being novice since no one from my team shouted at me.

Fatigue got the better of me after odd 15 minutes and I saw myself ball watching at times their players started swift counters. Aswin was his usual brilliant self, and Pradeep and Biju was quite solid at the back. Pradeep ventured out forward at times and even scored our first goal. Twijin was on right back and was quite good, so was the guy who played LB, who introduced himself as KK. Ratheesh lacked a good partner upfront, as Aswin had to play almost box to box. Sreerag prevented himself from committing any heroics to save himself for the tournament ahead as he was to be the team GK. But the player who impressed me most in our team was Athul. He was everywhere. Last man defending, collecting the ball from midfield and attacking upfront. I would like to know someday how it feels to play without tiring at all like that.

Towards the later part of the game I found myself in more advanced positions. I got the ball a couple of occasions in their box when it was too crowded, but I always looked to pass even then, since I was so unsure of myself to shoot it. On one of those occasions, when I was standing just ahead of the centre line in their half facing my own goal, we had just broken one of their attacking moves and Athul had passed the ball to Aswin. Aswin advanced, looked ahead and caught my eye. The look on his face told me he would give it to me, and by some instinct I darted forward, with only one defender to catch me. Aswin's ball was perfectly weighted. It evaded the defender who was closing on me, and fell just ahead of me and bounced high. Dhanesh Bhai was their goalkeeper. He saw the threat and advanced too. Both of us were equally near to the ball and I raised my feet quite high to nudge the ball over his head. That judgement proved to be wrong, since he was able to parry the ball away just in the nick of time. That was one of the best chances of the game for me. I should have tried to control the ball and get around him instead of trying the shot. Misjudgements like that can leave you ruminating later and sighing over with a lot of what-if's. The next best chance came sometime later, again in one of the counters when Aswin advanced through the left. I ran forward too through the right, to give him options, just in case. He shot for goal to far post, and was inches wide. But had I not paused in my run I could have been there to connect it for the simplest of tap ins.

The score was 4-3 in favor of them when this happened. I was once again in their box near the D, the ball was free in the air and I tried a shot, it was weak and was blocked and came back to me. This time my right leg guided it to Aswin who was free, who shot it for goal. I dont care if you say that it is debatable if that can be called as an assist, because I'm going to.

22.08.2012

What is the worst thing that can happen to you in a masjid?

I don't know about you but what tops my list is getting next to you in the line someone who literally has to SHOUT all their prayers during a namaz. You do a sujood, and while you really want to be all submissive in humility and all, all you can think of is to stuff something into his mouth to choke this guy who's next to you going at the TOP of his voice "SUBHANA RABBI AL A'ALAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA". Something like an irritating high pitched whisper. Heavens sake, whats the matter with you weirdos? How hard is it to understand and follow a basic code of conduct, huh?  How I wish to God there were some verse which went something on the lines of "Oh those of who you believe, I am very much being capable of reading even your thoughts, that too even before you actually think of them, so do NOT shout them while you pray (with them). Verily, the best among you are those who shall not be a irritating nuisance to others" in one of the surahs.

Written in high emotions after one of these kinds ruined a prayer.

20.08.2012

Kids,

So this story happened because Dr Sriraj, a good friend, decided to get married, by actually winning the war against the zillion obstacle monsters that his horoscope kept putting along in his family's quest for a legal match, or may be because it happened because he remembered to invite me for the same, or may be because I happened to be in town, available and free on the day, or may be.. forget it. So he invited me for his marriage reception today at this auditorium about 9 kms from yours truly's home. So le me is chilling out doing what he is best at - doing nothing - and still in the Eid hangover. You know, the drowsiness induced by excessive sleep on the day of Eid? Some celebration. Way to go.

So I pick myself up in the evening, act all important before Mom saying "Oh I have this marriage to attend. So dont count me for dinner" talk. Kicks myself up for the action and chooses to go after Magrib, lest I be tempted by the food there to delay the prayer. And I am riding for about a couple of kilometres, when the bike chokes, pants for dear breath, and turns off, in a NO MAN'S LAND on the way. Since I am not very adept at understanding the Language of the World and in taking hints from the Omens, I didn't turn back and head for home. I vented myself at the kick starter of the bike, because the self starter has been dead for some days you know. Also the horn. Basically anything that would require battery. Even the neutral indicator. I kicked on, and the bike would rumble like a lion who makes growls in his sleep when annoyed by a tick. I stood there, kicking for dear life, enacting a Just For Laugh Gags scene to the people in the house in front of which I had stopped to do my show.

If you are itching to make a sadistic smirk now, do it with all grace. So on one eventful kick the bike wakes up, and I flee. Only to reach a small junction where it dies again. Now I am doing the show again to a bigger audience. Offering entertainment with my life since 1987. Once again after 5 minutes it starts for some reason, and I go for some half a kilometre by some engineering miracle, and stops again. Now I am at an even bigger junction, so I walk with my stud looking for a workshop - to just leave the stupid thing there and make a run. And quite expectedly, after pushing it for about half kilometres, I find out they are not open for the day. Apparently the Eid hangover is a much more widespread phenomenon than I thought. And this kept on happening, but I didn't turn back, because of the food that may be waiting for me at the function as the fruit for my efforts. Oh and also meet Sriraj and wish him, if I get the chance. I reach the auditorium and what do I see? The function has been over for good, and the security is actually closing the gate. I called Sriraj, and he said it was cool.
If that had happened to someone in a sitcom you'd have heard a chorus laugh in the background by now wont you. How we love to laugh at someone else's misery.

And now I have to cover the whole distance back. I dont want to elaborate with all the gory details as to how I did it, but I will give you some stats. The bike covered a distance in quantums of 400 metres when it was hit by the life-particle-boson. It took some 5 minutes of activity/inactivity to actually kick life into it after every pseudo death. I pushed along the thing with my own hands for 2 kilometres. Number of potholes I ran into because of  the absence of streetlights = 6. Number of bridges on the way = 2. Probability of me dragging the thing uphill = very high. No.of times it happened = zero. So I am alive.

Bruised, humiliated, exhausted, one reaches his home and Mom asks, "Did you sweat yourself by eating or what?"

So whats the moral of this not-even-remotely-funny story?

There is nothing like you cant hit more embarrassing lows in your life.
The worst is only yet to come. 

Always.

27.5.2012

Funny I didn't think of it till now, but blogspot does have a cool android app which I'm using to pst now.
Dear millions of readers who frequent this page and check for updates every second minute, I know you aren't treated to much of my awesomeness as I want to these days, but my laptop has screwed up me very royally by committing suicide. These gadgets man. I feel crippled.
See ya when I see ya.
*limps away*.

09.05.2012

Nothing like travelling with people with whom you can be your full psychotic self.

I intended to make a boring travelogue, but it ends up in just this picture, one of the best moments of our journey.
(Apart from when Kompany scored that header, of course ;) )

A lot of moments in life have to be savoured and not read about. There is only so much you can transfer on to words.

Thanks guys.
It was a privilege.