Stuff

maybe goodbye

2009-10-30T14:35:00.007+05:30

I've moved here.

And since I now have a real name

and smaller more busy font

and a slightly more adult-looking theme

I have all I need to shame

me into trying to be a little less absent.

Not that it's enough shame to stop me from drawing the weird paintbrush animals and making you all look at them or anything.

gritty

2009-01-31T14:17:00.008+05:30

So I've been reading George R R Martin's series (its called A Song of Ice and Fire, if you're feeling masochistic) and the rant demon has possessed me. Since my rage is of an orderly compulsive sort, I have decided to vent in numbered points.

I should add here, that for all its faults, the actual plot of the series is quite excellent. I know I will keep reading it obsessively just to know what happens next. And when Martin forgets to make people thoroughly miserable, all kinds of exciting things happen, mainly involving Daenerys and her dragons, and Jon Snow and his awesome friends. Which makes the rant slightly redundant, but who cares.

1. I don't mind grittiness, in a general way, when it consists of a lot of non-bathing and death, but when it starts rolling around in the mud with torture and ruthlessness, and the writer in question starts making a game out of how much he can torture a character before they disintegrate, and then goes on to torture disintegrated people, it makes my head hurt.

Murders are fine. I just tend to like my deaths clean. And quick. All this four-book long, excruciatingly drawn-out torment really gets to me after a while, and I start thinking wistfully of my thesis. For future reference, GRRM, when all your main characters are hardened murderers and your readers just feel relief with every new death, soon enough no one's going to care enough to read further. Also you might run out of characters and that would be unfortunate.

2. Note to Sansa Stark, aged maybe twelveish, if that: Your life sucks. I've watched you get sold off to a louse by your oh-so-honourable father, I watched you sell out said father, I skipped horrifiedly through your endless list of beatings and strippings, I read on through your family dying/allegedly dying in awful ways, I even kept going when you were married off, and then kidnapped and then attacked by your mother's creepy sister and her obsessive and dreadful husband. And I've had to leave out a lot of the comparatively minor stuff, for brevity's sake. Stop being polite. It's driving me insane. Yell. Get up and leave. Set things on fire. Kill someone. Just do something about it. Please.

Perhaps you could consider moving to a Georgette Heyer novel? I can promise you no one will try and marry you for another 2 years, at least, and what with your good breeding and wonderful politeness you will probably get a Happy Ending, and I can stop cringing when I see you in a chapter.

3. And while I'm giving advice to fictional people:

Dear Brienne,

You are a girl. You're also large. However, since you are also terribly capable of killing anyone you happen to dislike, please deal with facts a and b; the rest of us are managing quite well. Stop making me have to blush for your issues. Also, keep away from Jaime Lannister, who is a sister-doing, child-killing, lying, all-round louse. Now go kill some more people.

4. Resurrections. I just don't like them. And resurrecting Catelyn Stark, was just low-down and stupid. She was pretty much played out, and honestly? I was relieved when she and Robb just died so I wouldn't have to watch her agonise over Dead Ned anymore. Beric being brought back to life was, since it was a novelty then, cool. Bringing Catelyn back to life just trivialises a) her b) Beric and c) all the other people dying in the series (which is a LOT. See point 1 on grittiness).

5. GRRM: Child marriage is just plain creepy. Please stop it. You world is harsh and cruel, we GET it. Now stop with the paedophilia.

6. And Eddard Stark? Is not the paragon you seem to expect me to think he is. He was stupid. He knew almost everything we knew in Book One, and watching him passive-aggressively ruining the lives of a) his wife b) his children c) his stupid dukedom d) poor moronic Robert and e) the whole goddamn kingdom only served to convince me of this. An actual genuine good person, even if he had a death wish for himself, would've at least sent his daughters home and away from all the machinations in court, before he begged the evil people to destroy him.

If you look carefully, you might notice that almost everything horrible that happened in book two (and even some of book three) happened because Ned Stark spent book one busily navel-gazing, and whining about his honour, and refusing to actually do anything. Except scattering his family around the map in convenient bite-sized bits for anyone at all to attack.

Having relieved myself of all the rage, I feel obliged to say, again, that for all its many faults the series is thoroughly exciting. A lot of the characters is actual real fun people, some are dire wolves (wolfs? Probably not) and I live in hope of meeting an aurochs.

More extinct animals and less torturing of sad people, I always say.

(Irrelevantly: it is very sad that the blogger spell-check cannot spell aurochs)

whinging

2009-01-04T15:54:00.010+05:30

Notice how there would be no whinging without hinging? I have a gross new shit-coloured door. It clashes with every single thing in my room, in addition to everything outside it. Clashing, thereby, with a universal set. My door is clashing with my universe. Clashing, smashing, clanging, hanging.

And it has allies.

Accompanying the door are the huge pits that are the remains of some nice shady trees (and the foundation to some new hell), and a tooth-gnashingly loud drill that smashes my brains to smithereens every time I dare have a thought.

I also have shiny white floor tiles that my hostel seems to have stolen from either a) a hospital or b) a bathroom. Either way its moderately reprehensible of them.

Ugh.

I tried to lighten things up a bit:

But you can tell it's intimidated by the door. Piteous. Piping. Pipsqueak. Pathetic. Piqued. Pachyderm.

I hope the drill and the door die a thousand gruesome deaths, but mainly I wish they'd just go away. Especially the drill.

tagged by benny

2008-11-19T18:19:00.005+05:30

Ok. So some of this will be in pictures, partly because thousand words blah blah blah, but mainly because its more entertaining for me this way.

1. If your lover betrayed you, what would your reaction be?
Complete erasure. Or so I like to think.

2. If you can have a dream come true, what would it be?
Being able to fly. I tend to have a lot of falling down dreams. They would be improved if my dream self knew it could save itself without waking me up.

3. Whose butt would you like to kick?
If I'm only allowed one I need some time to decide.

4. What would you do with a billion dollars?
Be indecisive. As with the one butt. Act furtive. Make a big shiny pile and hoard it.

5. Will you fall in love with your best friend?
No idea.

6. Which is more blessed: loving someone or being loved by someone?
Loving someone, probably, but it might depend on who's doing the blessing.

7. How long would you wait for someone you loved?
I might wait a fair amount of time if I had other things to do. Lots of exciting other things to do.

8. If the person you secretly like is attached, what will you do?
Go far away and then sulk and wish I were less wimpy.

9. If you could root for one social cause, what would it be?
Environmentalism.

10. What takes you down the fastest?
Headaches.

11. Where do you see yourself in 10 years time?
BLINDgeranium. Some things, I really don't want to see.

12. What’s your fear?
Lots. Illnesses, being run-over, cockroaches, big fires, some heights, large amounts of people, big red chillies, giant Sringeri fish, and many other things. If I were not an atheist, I would be a very god-fearing person.

13. What kind of person do you think the person who tagged you is?
She's a mushroom! (This is for tagging weird fruit and calling them me :P)

14. Would you rather be single and rich or married and poor?
Single and rich. Easy peasy.

15. What’s the first thing you do when you wake up?
Wonder if I can go back to sleep.

16. If you fall in love with two people simultaneously who will you pick?
Will they also love me? If yes, then I shall taunt them with impossible tasks involving dragons, sorcery, deep chasms and other dangers too terrible to mention here. Then my hoarded gold and I shall live happily ever after.

17. Would you give all in a relationship?
Who knows?

18. Would you forgive and forget someone no matter how horrible a thing he has done?
Depends on what they did. Probably not if it involved mass murder.

19. Do you prefer being single or in a relationship?
Dunno.

20. List of people to tag:
sancho-panza, ., d, roh, A.

one of my turns

2008-10-31T12:50:00.005+05:30

Or not.

Some days, moving looks too hard to try.
And thinking gives you a headache.
All the last straws weigh you down.
Like the chicken whose nose
Has been shoved into the ground
Whose beak has been rubbed in the mud
Til it thinks that the mud is the sole,
The only world it has.

Some days I'm a chicken.

But warm-blooded.
A donkey. Or a mule.
A beast of self-imposed burdens.
Some of which are purely imaginary.

And sometimes by lunch-time -
When the mud begins to get to me,
Making me sneeze ands sneeze and sneeze -
I may even look at the sky.

Tirra lirra by the river sang sir lancelot

2008-10-22T23:26:00.004+05:30

She's go-ing home bye, byeee

Sung to the tune of The Beatles' She's Leaving Home.

Notice how my feet are six inches off the ground, like Yudhistra's on an honesty spree. Since the last time I was here I have burnt bridges and boats and written almost 15,000 words of fiction, only a record-breaking 50% of which has since been deleted. My non-fiction score is a happiness-inducing 300 words.

All is well in my patch of mud.

beheadings

2008-09-11T15:27:00.008+05:30

I have had a recurring headache for three days now.
It makes life very unpleasant.
Saridon provides a spurious and fake relief that lasts a couple of hours and is then replaced by the usual pounding when I have finally managed to drag myself to dissertation-land.

A few more days of this nonsense and beheading will begin to seem like sweet sweet release.

Of course, when I do go on my rare and brief visits to dissertation-land I am quite sure I can hear the Red Queen yelling "Off with her head," in the background. So it should come as no surprise to the universe if I am found headless.

I can only hope my afterlife holds a horse.
The Headless Geranium Horseperson, striking terror into the hearts of the innocent, the Headless Horsanium Scourge of the Land.

I can't wait.

orange you glad: a tale of misery, doom, despair and insurmountable fate

2008-09-06T13:19:00.005+05:30

orange you glad you woke up this morning?
orange you glad you went to bed?
orange you glad you brushed your teeth,
and orange you glad your skin's not red?

The Mists of Avalon

2008-08-26T13:40:00.003+05:30

*****SEVERE RANT ALERT*****

Marion Zimmer Bradley's Arthurian books are quite simply one of the most frustrating books I have ever read. The first time I read them, I found myself in a simmering rage for days, until the last book was done, and I put it quickly away.

This time, I found myself beginning to feel sorry for the characters, but I still wanted to knock some sense (and also spine) into them.

Essentially the books are a re-telling of Arthurian legend from the points of views of the major female characters. The books link paganism with eco-feminism in the society of Avalon, composed of priestesses to the Mother Goddess who represents the land. They represent older cultures and civilisations, sworn to plurality that exist before Christianity sweeps the land, preaching of a single god and singular good.

While the theme is an interesting one, the debate gets a bit repetitive. By the end of the books Morgaine and Gwenhwyfar have yelled more or less the same arguments at every other character in the book - Morgaine is the spokesperson of Avalon, and Gwenhwyfar that of Christianity at its narrowest.

While I couldn't quite dislike Morgaine - her frustration with the book parallelled and fed mine - Gwenhwyfar is reduced to a caricature of piousness-cum-adultery who is no longer quite real.

There are four things about this book that make it such a frustrating thing to read:

1) We all know how it ends. Everyone dies or is miserable and war breaks out. There is nothing we can do about it, except wait for it. And Bradley *really* makes us wait.

2) The massive MPD that doesn't miss a single character. This isn't that much of a flaw - it is reasonably realistic, after all, and trauma has a way of making people behave uncharacteristically. Which brings me to:

3) For the characters, the books are one long trauma. It goes with the general theme of unavoidable tragedy, no doubt, but after a while the heaviness of the tragedy begins to pall - it is no longer tragic but just plain irritating.

4) The characters' blind faith is a bit unlikely. Given that the sensibility is frequently pretty modern, even post-modern, and that Arthur and his companions are primarily *soldiers*, I find it a bit ridiculous that everyone is so religious. The conflict of faith is reduced to a (slightly simple) conflict between the pantheistic followers of the old Druidic religions and the monotheistic followers of Christ.

Personally, I would've found a conflict between faith and a lack of it a lot more interesting. The only main character who is frankly non-godly is Morgause - and her character is a strangely uneven. She is simultaneously sensuous and calculating, perceptive and utterly blind, and the scenes from her point of view don't seem to quite add up to her actions. After three books that show her as pragmatic, shrewd, worldly, and ultimately someone who won't randomly knock down the applecart, Book Four! Morgause is a fairy-tale witch. She plots frantically toward world domination, spills blood lavishly for a stupid spell to talk to her spies in Arthur's court, she coos psychotically at Mordred. After three books that establish to us that Morgause couldn't care less about anyone's sex-life except her own (including her husband's) she is suddenly there plotting to catch Gwenhyfar and Lancelot in bed together.

At some point, it is as if all Bradley's good intentions towards the women characters, and all her reasonableness in making everyone's motives understood are suddenly swept away by the demands of the very plot she is trying to subvert: Morgause is the evil witch everyone made her out to be, because if she isn't then who is going to precipitate the final tragedy?
Mordred, likewise, flashes from sarcastic but earnest to Evil Plotting Child of Incest!, because if he isn't why would he kill poor senile well-meaning Arthur?

The book's frustrating-ness is inherent in its structure - both the reader and the characters are bereft of free will, as the story goes to its inevitable end.

The other thing I don't like - and this is linked with the first one - is the way the characters keep refusing to take any responsibility for their actions. When he's discovered in bed with Gwenhwyfar, Lancelot *kills* Gareth and a bunch of other people before running away with her. Later, he blames the whole episode on Mordred - and not say on the fact that he'd been sleeping with someone else's wife for 30 years - for spying on him, and Gwenhwyfar ascribes the murder to what an awesome knight her Lancey-poo is.
Morgiane *murders* her stepson (so he won't tell his father and her husband that she's having an affair with his son) and calls it the "will of the goddess" ?! And Accolon, the brother with whom she is having the affair, buys it!!!
It was at that point that I decided that the bad end I knew was coming to everyone was richly deserved.

The reason these things annoy me as they do, is because the book is an attractive one. It deals in relationships and conflicts of interest and myth, and the world it creates is sometimes very compelling. The characters are all (to begin with, anyway, before the events of the book tire them out) strong and vital ones - you *want* to know what they think and what they'll do. Arthur's loves for and conflicts between Guinevere and Lancelot and Morgaine (and all they each stand for) are dealt with subtly and delicately. You rarely know exactly what his own opinions are, but the pressures on him are built strand by strand, until the whole narrative is taut with them.

And then, somehow, the moment of reckoning never comes. Viviaine, (the lady of the lake who is to confront Arthur over his betrayal of Avalon) is killed. After that, the momentum dissipates and the series never quite regains it. Morgaine is married off and drifts along playing an unconvincing Wicca game, Lancelot and Gwenhwyfar romance boringly and angstily, Morgause and Mordred plot a plot that is strangely empty (it is as if Bradley *knows* they are the bad guys and must go forth and do evil, but until right at the end they do very little other then smirk and make snide remarks), the holy grail is a plot device to kill off Galahad and Kevin the bard (whom I *really* like. More on him later) and Arthur pretty much stops caring about anything except Excalibur, which he hoards with random zeal, simply because its his big sister's (Morgaine's) and she wants it too. And everyone gets paranoid about aging.

The only person who deals with their own inner demons - and when I say deals with I mean like a rational adult, not random sulking/mooning/going mad/swooning - is Kevin the traitor Merlin. He is a cripple but somehow he is minimally angsty, unfailingly courteous, thoughtful and kind. It is ironic that his stealing the Grail from Avalon and taking it to Arthur's court is punished with entrapment and death, while all the other characters get cheerfully (and piously) away with murder.
His path from being a druid to becoming a person who puts peace (even Christian peace) ahead of everything else is depicted as evolving with the times, not as the random fits (also known as the goddess) that take Morgaine, Igraine and Viviane from time to time, until they all become interchangeable.
In the end, when she comes in the barge to take a dying Arthur back to Avalon, even Morgaine can no longer tell which one she is. And while I understand that the whole Great-Goddess-who-is-every-woman-and-maiden-and-mother-and-wise-woman-and-crone deal is important to Bradley, taking away all your protagonist's character and free will, and reducing her to nothing but a tool of a (possibly loony) goddess is *not* the most empowering story you can tell.

life of a leech

2008-08-20T18:22:00.004+05:30

One of the few animals i truly truly detest is the leech.
Other than mosquitoes
leeches are the only creatures i kill
with little compunction
or at all.
Kill that is.
And in both these creatures
the thing in killing them
that makes me utterly disgusted
is the blood.
My blood.
Oozing out of the slime
that is the mortal remains
of the leech or mosquito.
it is the human in them that makes them so very unutterably gross.
Compare the dung beetle,
which in itself is a fine and upstanding specimen of beetlehood.

noah

2008-08-09T17:39:00.005+05:30

Its raining and raining and raining. I can't go out anywhere. My room will soon be flooded, and I shall have to build an ark.

And the animals shall come in one by one
Because my door is narrow
And wipe their paws on my doormat
If I have one
And outside it will thunder
And lightning will hit the conductor
I will so thoughtfully have put up
And with luck some of us may survive
Our excellent deluge
And may even live to find our missing seconds
And the most enthusiastic may even procreate.
And our cleverness in building the ark
Will be thoroughly rewarded
When we have descendants who will laugh
At how primitive and ugly it is.

Amen?

The animals rumble something which might pass for amen if one was deaf and wishful to think so.

Outside it drips some more.

2008-08-07T11:44:00.003+05:30

Once upon a time,
There was a man with a lumpy face;
And a huge-giant-massive nose-cum-upper-lip
All the better with which to sing bass.

Nasally, nasally down the river
He sang a song so free
Nasally, nasally bold and booming
His black eyes flashing beadily.

I wish I were that lumpy man
With his voice so large and wrinkly
I'd row that boat to the end of time
Though my arms be so spindly.

Gerilla the Hun

2008-04-16T01:37:00.004+05:30

When I was younger
- well, even four years ago -
I never wrote my name on books.
It seemed sacrilegious somehow.
Dirty. Smearing my garbage
on someone else.

These days, half the fun of a new book
is writing my name on it.

Its quite barbaric. Possessive.
I fear I have become a vile person.

I see an off-white wall

2008-03-27T14:11:00.003+05:30

and I want to paint it black.

Or something. But black for choice. Charcoal on whitewash is my besetting weakness.

My walls have just been painted. The manic whiteness of my tubelight makes them look so bare. Blank. My hand itches to smear.

My floor, of course, is as grimy as ever. Even deep washing can't remove its ingrained filth. And it makes my walls look paler and even less interesting.

I want to take thick, soft crumbly black charcoal and smear it on the insipid not-white. Draw weasels, weasels, riotously all over it; a snail, a log, some rocks.

And maybe smear some on the tubelight. Tiny bendy stick-people, skidding all over the curvy glass.

One day, when I own my own wall, I shall do so. I shall also keep a lot of whitewash for when I want more space.

So exciting.

die coursework, die

2008-03-20T14:32:00.003+05:30

I finished! at long long painfully delayed last.

I feel light-headed with surprise. My world has slowed down. Somewhere, winds are blowing in an absent-minded way. Its all cool pastels now, like the kind of cloudy bangalore day that makes all other days seem oppressive.

All the exciting things that have been getting put off are smiling encouragingly.

Wheeee!

cross-eyed

2008-03-17T00:18:00.005+05:30

I watched movies all day. Documentaries. Endlessly. Punctuated by discussions that made me want to claw my face off. Then more documentaries. I am cross-eyed.

I also realise that there are few things I do for entertainment that do not require the use of my eyes. No wonder my glasses are all askew with all the work they have to do.

And note that my left eye is redder and more cross than my right. A usual.

In which I grouch (some more) and project on helpless giraffes

2008-03-13T01:05:00.000+05:30

Summer is back (boo Hyderabad) and my complete inability to write anything sensible has driven me once more to whine here. Hurrah for the internet. Its such an awesome magnet for self-pitiers and whiners and idlers and idiots.

I feel all caged. I long for mountains and rivers and forests and rocks and cars and trains and even (shock!) long long uphill climbs.
At a pinch exciting milkshake will also do.

Talking of caged and exciting, I went to Mysore zoo some time ago, as a general liker of animals I didn't quite know what to think. On one hand, its nice to see a giraffe; and nicer when it sees you, and arches its lovely and impossible neck, and flares its wonderful nostrils downwards for your benefit.

But it is dreary as hell - sort of like visiting a friend in jail (not that I have done so or anything) but I imagine it feels similar.

Long-legged people like giraffes (named, hilariously, according to my cousin, Henry, Honey and their kid Jai Chamarajendra Wodeyar) ought to be seen against an eternal horizon, not in a tiny plot of grass that they can, like Vamana, cross in three strides.

And if that wasn't bad enough, there were tigers and leopards and jaguars in tiny little cages, two at a time. Some slept like the dead (perhaps they were) the others just went on pacing, pacing, pacing. If being too little for your universe gives you angst, what does being too damn big for your miserable cage give you? At a guess, utter apathy.

Seeing apes in a zoo is a lot like seeing relatives who have come down in the world and live now in tiny homes crammed with the things which were once so precious to them, helpless to change anything. Particularly harrowing for it and me was a hairless (hopefully old and not terminally chemotherapically ill) chimp that looked more like gollum than anybody else. It was small and wizened and utterly utterly hairless. Its skin was a greyish brown and its bones stuck out and it sat with its back to the people yelling "hello dost" to it. If the purpose of gollum is as a constant reminder to Frodo about just how he could've ended up, a hairless chimp is startlingly and horrifyingly human. I had a strong urge to get it a nice soft shawl and send it to bed with a glass of hot cocoa and a dispirin. We left the ape area in a hurry after that, unable to deal with the loneliness of the only gorilla in India.

I do not understand why these animals must be kept singly - or even in pairs. Why not a good six or ten of them so they can fight and politic and hang out together and have orgies and generally have something to do?

They said they had a wolf and a wallaby. Then it turned out they both died about a year ago. I do not blame them - stuck on a patch of grass with no company and nothing to do and nothing to look forward to, so would I die.

I seem to have written myself into a dead end.

Haha.

Oh well.

I suppose this is how Henry, Honey and Jai Chamarajendra Wodeyar feel every 30 seconds.

Hello sucky coursework. Did you miss me?

First Nail in the Coffin

2007-08-26T17:29:00.000+05:30

You said I was different; I thought perhaps you were.
But we weren’t. We aren’t.
Like a million ordinary people we were delirious.
It was madness and elation and all the other things ordinary people do not feel
We thought.
But we felt it; and we are both very ordinary.

The madness has left us now, and all we are is ourselves.
Ordinary.
All we always were.
Stereotypical, you say with disgust.
You are right – we are such stuff as stereotypes are made on.
You and I. We. Just me. Just you.

It seems enough.

But you longed for greener pastures.
Perhaps even purple ones.
Arrogant in their difference.
Special pastures.
Perhaps I did too then.
I do not remember.
It seems so long ago.

I miss you.
I miss the madness you evoked in me.

We were happy in our madness.
We were farther than happy – we were somewhere else.
Off the road entirely.
Perhaps a little track no one else has ever been on.
A little track that was all our own.
Different.

That was then.
Stereotypical, you said with disgust.
The track, the madness, the elation were gone.
And, mourning them, running after them, so were you.

I miss the ordinariness.
I miss the stereotype.
I miss you.

I wish I were special.

If wishes were horses,
We would both be special.
Different.

But they aren’t.

I am as much like everyone else as you are.
I am as much like you as everyone else is.
I am as much like you as I am like me.

And I miss you more than you will ever know.

Here, where wishes and horses are very different things,
I know that you are gone.

A Room Of One's Own

2007-08-05T11:00:00.000+05:30

After years of living with - and fighting with- my sister at home, when I finally got my own room, it was on the understanding that it wasn't really my own room - for about four months in the year it was my grandmother's; and in her absence any casual visitor could usurp it. I dealt with the situation as best I could - usually by making sure that my sister couldn't call her room her own either.
From such humble beginnings I have now risen to the dizzy heights of having my very own hostel room. It has the curtains I want and the bed-sheets I want. It has a wonderful desk cum bookshelf. And the bookshelf has an actual, functioning sliding glass front! It is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. There is an exhilarating promise in a new and empty bookshelf. I intend to run amok buying books to fill it.

The boy is back and the little bit of me that has been awol for over 10 months slid imperceptibly back into place - I didn't even notice when it arrived.
On second thoughts perhaps it is the bookshelf as much as the boy that makes the difference. I'm on shaky ground here.

Oh, and the editors of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows should be hung, drawn and quartered. It reads like the poorly-plotted piece of frenzied hack-work circumstances forced Rowling to write - I doubt she had enough time to even re-read it before it was published. What were the editors thinking letting it get to the printers in such tatters? I am hugely furious about so many many many things. The characters are caricatures of themselves; the plot even more so. While I appreciate the non-appearance of Harry's monster from Half-Blood Prince, I am furious that the entire deal about the hero telling his girlfriend to sit and home and be a good little girl while he went off to do his hero-ing wasn't addressed. I suppose all Ginny Weasley's newly-found HBP spunk was as phoney as it read.
One of the reasons I liked the first few books was because their heroes were nerdy kids, house-elves and werewolves. Because heroism there depended not on being cast as a hero but on being brave and intelligent. Because a scrawny bullied kid and his equally side-lined friends could defeat the bad guy. Now suddenly Harry gets a Genuine People Personality No 42 - The Hero - grafted on and stomps around armed with Right. I am so disgusted.
I was also quite horrified that what seemed to be a special case - Harry's barely-adult parents getting married and having a baby straight out of school - is the norm in Rowling's world. They really do all get married to the person they were dating at 15. Which is especially ludicrous if - as Rowling has been suggesting - they have a longer lifetime than normal. Why would you immediately get married to someone you crush on at 15 when you have another 130-odd years to consider and choose and decide?

I shall stop now. The entire rant would just take too long, and I have a bibliography on rationalism to finish. But I shall return. There is just too much scab still to pick at.

Reaper's Gale

2007-05-29T10:11:00.000+05:30

Steven Erikson has - once more - managed to do what few people in the world can do with competence, let alone genuine inspiration: he has written a fantastic fabulous book in which every plot strand lives up to its promise. This may sound like a modest achievement, except for the bit where its actually pretty rare - there is always something which rings false. And except for the bit where Erikson has about 200 times more plot strands than average.

Most books begin well - interesting-sounding characters and situations are introduced and you settle down to see what happens to them. Usually, once you are reasonably familiar with the world the writer does various bits of misdirection, of setting up a situation and then dashing expectations. This may work to surprise and delight the reader or it may annoy you and make you wish you had stopped reading when the plot started turning trite. If the first say 20 Agatha Christies you read work in the first way, by the time you have read a few more you can pretty much pick out the murderer in every succeeding book as soon as he or she is introduced.

With every page Steven Erikson sets up new expectations and with every page he subverts one of your expectations in a delicious and unexpected way. Seven books down, Erikson's plotting is so meticulous that I am neither bored nor in any position to guess the end. Reaper's Gale kept me on tenterhooks right through - between the immediate plots and the long range plots and the characters old and new and the jokes and the neat, unassuming writing. (It is such a relief not to have to wade through florid descritions that have no bearing on the plot. For those of you who like your fantasy farcical there is lots of Tehol and Bugg. And Erikson is getting better and better with the comedy. There is something so irresistible when you can tell that a writer you like is giggling himself or herself silly as they write.) When the final twist is one so wonderful that it never even occurred to you; when you should've seen it coming because now you think of it all the evidence pointed that way but you didn't 'cos its just that twisted and Erikson is that much more loony than you are; when it is funny and touching and ironic, that, comrades-in-reading, is happily ever after.

In other news the monsoon seems to have hit; and I haven't been able to breathe through my nose for days. Also I walked through what felt like miles of thigh-deep sewage water to get home a couple of nights ago and can inform those of you who haven't done this before that in a flood the actual rain water is cooler than the sewage water, which is kinda warmish. So if you find yourself in a flood, follow the cool water - unless of course you happen to be walking in sewage water out of choice.

That's all folks.

rain

2007-04-16T11:52:00.000+05:30

I am not going to wax poetic about the rains, so you can relax on that account.

The rain is merely relevant because it makes me generally less grouchy, and also means I rely less on the silly pictures and more on words. Also it means that the holiday mood the heat induced has been well and truly cemented. I do not know how I will finish my dissertation.

My vacation in the mountains will have to be postponed due to unavoidable circumstances, which is tragic, but :

There was actual hail last night.
And also rain and many many
Many winds and breezes
And thunder and lightning
And no electricity
And generally a splendid time was guaranteed for all.

So I shall bear up with fortitude.

Also the new Steven Erikson will be out soon, and a new Harry Potter, and I will be delighted and overwhelmed by the former and underwhelmed and bitter by the latter (not necessarily, but precedent certainly points in that direction) and I shall have my hands wondrously full.

And perhaps I shall finally finish off that damn cephalopod now.

Gertrude

2007-03-30T18:04:00.000+05:30

Again, my Shakespeare class has left me feeling vaguely dissatisfied and more than a little indignant.

When I read the play, I felt more than a little sorry for Gertrude. It cannot be fun having to discuss your sex-life with your self-righteous and prudish son, and to have him heap insult on you. That he happens to be right - and your new husband did in fact murder your old one makes it only worse.
So the situation is this: your husband is a murderer. His predecessor also kinda was (he murdered Fortinbras' father, remember? And given how much time he seems to spend in his armour I'm willing to bet Fortinbras senior wasn't his only victim.) And your son is well on the way to becoming a misogynistic prig and a frenzied murderer.

Under the circumstances no woman can be blamed for marrying Claudius. At least he seems to have been more intelligent and suaver and more attractive than his brother, if the ghost's ranting is anything to go by. Plus Claudius has the added attraction of wearing less of the poky armour. And he seems genuinely fond of her. Claudius certainly does draw the line at using Gertrude as bait for Hamlet, though he has no such qualms with Ophelia.

Ophelia, incidentally, is such a mess that I can do no more than give her up for a lost cause - as she does herself.
I know she is very young and confused and has an idiot for a parent and another for a brother, and Hamlet Prince of Dementmark for a lover. But really. Gertrude is making the best of a bad job - and doing it creditably. And she refrained from enacting any public scenes of angst. Ophelia is making the worst of it - and doing it as noisily and messily as she can.

Talking of which: Hamlet is such a boor. His behaviour to both women is completely unpardonable. Ophelia should kick him in the shins. Get thee to a nunnery indeed. Ideally he should've gone off to a nice monastery with no women to trigger off his psychotic spells and spent the rest of his life sitting there writing books on witchcraft. And been sodomised by some nice old friar for his pains. He'd've probaby found he quite enjoyed it.

It'll certainly make life easier for his mother.

(Almost) wordless

2007-03-28T16:57:00.000+05:30

I feel dull and dejected. Bloated.

bulbous

blobous, in other words.

Hppy bithuthdrday to you. May you brood long.

In which summer arrives and my words begin to leave me

2007-03-20T22:33:00.000+05:30

The heat makes me thirst for blue and green and water and tiny icy dabs of purple.

The watermelon lady has taken a day off and I am dry and desolate, and drinking a lot of lime juice instead. I have been faithful to thee watermelon lady, in my fashion.

Come back soon watermelon lady, for I am bereft of words without you and must rely on paintbrush.
For a little while, let me bask in your kind fruits.
For a little while, until some assignments are done and I can sink into a wordless stupor.
For just a little tiny while until I can go to the mountains.

Diplodocus

2007-03-20T12:06:00.000+05:30

I am feeling hot and bothered.
Cumbersome and heavy.
Antiquated.
Archaic.
Possibly extinct, potentially moronic.
A lump of green with patches.

I shall go eat grass now. I have arrived too late to feast on fabulous ferns and fruitful forests, too late to floomp through fetid fens, far too forward to frimp and flourish in Foongaloo with the rest of my kind.

Farewell my froods.

The animal instinct

2007-03-19T18:33:00.000+05:30

Blue animals ranging toodle dee dee

Blue animals grazing on the cold white sea

Having to do serious work makes a mental cretin of me. So does summer.

In other news, Iron Maiden is the bestest; and Parikrama is taking leaves out of Blind Guardian's book (Also out of Tolkien's. heh) and sounds pretty good. Steve Harris' daughter is gruesome and some other random band is almost as bad. The crowd was doing a slightly scary pushing thing where about 10,000 people fell on you and you fell on another 10,000 in front of you. It didn't help that everyone was sweating horridly and that many of them were much taller than me and managed to cut off my air supply completely, while jumping enthusiastically on my toes and bellowing "Fear of the Dark".

Good times.

I ate an entire box of strawberries all by myself on the journey from Bangalore to Hyderabad. I also finished two books in rapid succession - an Agatha Christie and a Richard dawkins. Wise words for future generations: Nice books always make one hungry.

Cordelia

2007-02-25T17:27:00.002+05:30

Writing an assignment on King Lear and Oedipus at Colonus, I find I have many bones to pick with Cordelia. She is supposed to be intelligent, kind, and modern enough to speak her mind in full court without worrying about such minor things as offending the king. Plus she gives every indication of knowing (or guessing) exactly what her sisters are up to (unless she just has a fine sense of the dramatic and was just doing the verbal equivalent of turning on her heel and stalking out in style and the rest was just ironic foreshadowing.) Under the circumstances, to walk blithely off to France and not even leave a flunky (she was a princess, remember? And she was going to marry a king. She probably had a surfeit of flunkies.) to keep an eye on her clearly semi-senile father was foolish. And to say that she was deeply hurt and offended by her father's behaviour doesn't explain her utter neglect. Goneril and Regan ill-treated their father, but Cordelia just plain neglected him.

Righteous indignation is all very well, but this was important. It concerned her own father. And an entire country, dammit.

And then having left in a huff to enjoy her high moral ground, to stomp back into the country at the head of an invading army (It was a French army she was leading into English territory. From a meta-point-of-view there is no way in hell Shakespeare could let her win the battle. He would've been lynched.) to rescue him is pure folly. I am beginning to have grave suspicions of Cordelia's good intentions. At every point she could've acted to halt the damage her actions only made things worse. If your father tries to make an ass of you in court, you might at least learn the lesson from it not to make him look a complete ass in the same court. But no. She can't just humour a senile old man; she won't tell a little white lie and then talk it over with him later, in private - where the whole discussion really ought to have taken place. She has to blunder into England at the head of the army of its traditional enemies (What was she doing? Trying to hasten the Norman Conquest?). She practically forced a war onto a country that was already reeling from civil strife. Make no mistake, to a lot of the people she was a traitor - their erstwhile princess attacking them at the head of the French armies? This was the worst behaviour this side of Coriolanus. Of course she was going to be lynched.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

For a girl who had grown up with Goneril and Regan (who probably played Machiavelli instead of hide and seek) she had no conception of subtlety, none of cautiousness.

Ok, you live in a horrible world and want to sail far far away. But having taken a ship to France, why didn't she have the sense to stay there? She was a queen. I refuse to believe she couldn't put together a neat, agile group of horsemen. She had already chosen to abandon her father to the tender mercies of Goneril and Regan - and as far as she knew, he didn't even have Kent. Of course she feels guilty, but surely a missing old man is an event for quick, stealthy action, not an invasion. (In the Kurosawa film the Cordelia figure does just that. It is tragic that his well-meaning father-in-law follows him with a giant army, precipitating the war) Twenty people who know the land and have swift horses are called for, not a mob of hungry noisy people. An armed mob of hungry noisy people.

I am so disgusted.

Hey oh

2007-02-22T21:21:00.000+05:30

I shifted to the new blogger so I think I owe it a post - however inferior. (As an aside, do you think google is gonna take over the world? I do. I think by next year when I go to foodworld to buy guavas and toothpaste I'll have to log in with my google account and they'll tell me if orange smoothies and ankle socks are in stock and try and charge me for them even when I don't buy them because I blogged about the smoothie the week before, and a friend and I were chatting about socks. Big Gugger is watching, people. Google it and see if you don't believe me.)

It has been an eventful absence. I went on a week trip to Lucknow which felt like a day (keep your snide remarks to yourselves) and a day trip to Guntur (Yes, you heard me right. No, it was lots of fun.) which felt like it lasted a week.

Some other stuff happened which I shall dignify by not putting in a blog.

My random day resolution: I will write for two hours every day. Atleast. One hour of fiction, one of dissertation. I must finish the latter in the next two and odd months and the former before all my hair falls out - which is not as distant as you might think.

The boy has posted a gruesome photograph of himself dying in hospital on orkut (remember what I told you about google?). I am most disturbed and slightly furious about it, though I'm not too sure why. I like to think it is not because I am squeamish about death and hospitals. I hope it is not because I am, deep down, a full-scale maami.
I suspect it is sheer cowardice - since it turns out that the boy is not dead after all, I do not want to face the prospect of his death every few days. Not again. I like to think the prospect and I have hung out together more than enough for people who don't even like each other. We have run out of conversation and we are too bored to even exchange smiles on the street.

Ok, enough lip-service to the new blogger. I shall consider this today's hour of fiction. Dissertation ahoy.

Two to go

2006-11-24T19:08:00.000+05:30

Home in a week! I remember a time when the thought would send chills down my spine and make me feel vaguely ill and depressed. But four months have since passed, and absence has made me terribly affectionate.

I want to listen to new music. Not new new music, which will require careful listening to but old music I know by heart, new after months of languishing in Bangalore and being sneered at by my sister. There is something very comforting when the riff begins exactly where you know it does, when the tape mangles exactly the same syllable it always does, when you can turn it over and begin at exactly the song you want to, when your father makes exactly the same silly pun about Mick Jagger's pronounciation he made that distant day in 1999 when you first heard the song...

Good times.
I would like to ascribe happiness to them. Or world peace. And why not?

Time wasn't a very good discovery, methinks. Or was it an invention? Is it a continent or a gadget?

I am addled in the head with writing pseudo-crap for the biggest fraud I have ever met. No more cultural studies for me, I can't stomach it - perhaps my liver is giving way. Curd rice and literature for me next semester.

- Enough I think, thou foster child of silence and slow time, enough.

- Step child, ignorant person, step child of silence and slow time - there is a reason I have been ranting about both of them.

- It is still enough cinder-person

- Perhaps it is, you who converse with the ashes, I shall retire now to my drudgery

There is something seriously wrong with a world where it is a virtue to have a work ethic.

Pangoism

2006-11-22T22:33:00.000+05:30

I feel overwhelmed. I think its time we moved away from all this hyperreal post-modern crap and went to a new place. Preferably somewhere with good coffee and very little work.

I've written approximately 10,000 words of non-fiction in the last week or so. And another 10,000 to go over the next week. At this rate I shall completely forget how to make up convincing and unsubstantiated lies and all my sf/f stories will curdle and die. Or just be boring as hell.

I propose a new state of mind. It'll be slightly dazed but happy. Externalities shall not bother it - they can be as hyperreal as they want, but to it they are just barely real. I shall be a Pangoist. A Pangoist is intelligent but unknowing, concerned but content. This means other people are nice. It also means that the Pangoist likes them. What it doesn't mean is that the Pangoist worries about them, or about anything at all for that matter. Work is a state of mind for a Pangoist - and not necessarily a good one. Its an interesting experience, but one that repetition will render painful. Pangoists are ocassional workers, sometimes social workers (like social drinkers) but never addicts. Moderation in all things is the Pangoist's motto, as far as it has one. Pangoists do not do strenuous things - unless it is fun.

Pangoan aesthetics are simple - if you like it it is profound Pangoist art, if you don't it must be some primitive post-modern nonsense. It might even be that enemy to Pango, angst. A Pangoist must beware angst - or at least not get too friendly with it, for it requires dedication that a Pangoist is ill-equipped to provide. Eventually, you too will wilt and fragment and regress into an unhappy modern.

If you have come thus far, my fellow people, say hello to me in tones of casual pleasantnes, for I am Pango.

And apologies, but blogger hates me, so you'll have to double click on the white patches to see pango and angst.

Six words to hell

2006-11-01T18:56:00.000+05:30

I just found the most fascinating page, with sf in six words:

http://wired.com/wired/archive/14.11/sixwords.html

Isn't it mind-blowing? Even Robert Jordan's managed to stick to six.

I tried too. Less successfully:

Awoke. Logged on. This is aaaaaargh

hrmph. Not so good.
Again?

Mmmm, morning stranger. Ready for breakfast?

Heh. I cracked myself up with that one. Dammit. This is addictive. I shall now write an entire fantasy series:

Evil wizard. Bwahahahaha. Weaklings. Bwahaha.

Small, brave and pretty. Oh dear.

Help! Battle. All is darkness. Bwahaha.

Sneaky person. War. Ooooh, powerful. War?

Cool technology won. Lets be farmers.

Heh. I love this. Can't stop.

Ok. Must. Stop. At five.

Must stop.

Ok. Stopped.

In other news, blogger refuses to let me turn that into a link. Only me. For no reason I can see. When it is linked, a huge black sopt appears on the screen, begging me to put a toupee over it. BAAAASTAAARDS, I say.

I hope they don't delete my account for this.

Tra la la lally

2006-10-31T17:55:00.000+05:30

The dog is back. And more vicious than ever. Every time I step outside my room people tell me about how it just attacked them. I have officially disowned it for being so utterly demonic.

When it rains, the hostel is filled with a strange stench which I have only ever smelt in Hyderabad. It is the stench of Hussain Sagar, and of every other place where Hyderabadis dump their sewage.

Unlike the smell of drains and stench-pits in the res tof the country, sewage in Hyderabad smells sweetish. It is most offensive. It is still stinky sewage, but now there's an element of sickliness that truly makes me feel ill.

This is not a pleasant post, though I actually I feel quite light - I just submitted one largish assignment,and I shall be done with the other tonight. So that is a major burden off.

Once that is over I shall go get the monster vaccinated, so then even if it bites people they won't accuse me of giving them rabies.

He said I said: In which I am melodramatic, but not very ably

2006-10-20T00:24:00.000+05:30

Two weeks ago I had a boy and a dog. I was panicking because I thought I was half-way married. Today, I have neither, and I wonder where they are. Also, I am considering getting a cat, so my lonely old spinsterhood will have suitable company. It is a pity that cats hate me, and that if they dont, they will bring me dead animals.

I talked to the boy last night. He is coherent, even in a bizarre way, logical. It is unfortunate that the present he is so coherent about is nothing like the one he's actually living.

I do not understand how someone who remembers every small joke up until the 10th of October so lucidly can somehow not remember the fact that he had an accident, that he is in Lucknow. You'd think the constant irritation of a million stitches would make the point, but apparently not. He still has to be told the entire story every time he wakes up.

I told him I collected his test paper, that it was good. He seemed interested. I said the dog was missing, presumed kidnapped.
He said a lot of nice things, several funny ones - promised he'd be here in a couple of days, said they certainly wouldn't keep him at home for any longer. I refrained from telling him that as per his brother, he's stuck there for at least a month, probably two, possibly more.

Not that it matters - I don't think he has any conception of time. I said it had been a while since we'd talked - almost a week. He replied, no it hadn't, we just spoke yesterday. He proceeded to recount a full-fledged coversation with me. It is unfortunate that it was entirely fictional.

I said I would visit him in December. He said ok, if I insisted, but why in Lucknow? It would be very cold, wouldn't it be simpler if he came to Bangalore? I said it didn't matter, either way, lets decide later. I shall book my tickets tomorrow. Its not like he'll remember anyway.

In other news a random shop lady persuaded me to invest in (literally. I have a 50% stake, not quite a controlling interest, perhaps a joint venture?) in a small and slightly expensive jar of under-eye cream. Once back, I begin to suspect I don't actually need it.

I've also been wondering: are my arms getting longer, or is The Hindu getting a little smaller every day?

Happenings

2006-10-16T16:48:00.000+05:30

So much has been happening the last week or so. I find that nothing I write about it - and I write plenty about it - is printable. It is either stupidly written, or expressing stupid sentiments. Drama makes morons of us all, apparently. Melodrama doubly so.

I feel as if I'm living in a book - and not a very nice one. Certainly not the kind of book I would write, and probably not the kind of book I'd read more than once either. It is not surprising then, that I cannot write it down.

And lets face it, if I did, I would have to delete the post immediately.

What to say then? How to say it, and where to say it?

Lets just say:

You really have a gift for some things:
For making me sentimental,
Stupid, worried, annoying, repetitive.
Bah! to you.
Come back soon.

Is this drama or melo? Idiotic or doubly so? Nauseous-making?

As usual, I have written and achieved nothing except feeling foolish. I shall post it anyway, for your express entertainment.

The longest day

2006-10-11T01:09:00.000+05:30

A bike skids.

Blood clots.

They surround and chant the dirge, they close in like so many harpies, feeding on disaster.
So much melodrama. Some people take the opportunity to show off their piety "Tell her I am praying" others their overdeveloped maternal instincts "Take care of her." Others merely gather around, surround, toll the bells.

I show off my ability to go for 40 hours straight on three hours of sleep - but discreetly - there is too much at stake here for my sleeping habits - always erratic - to be of any interest.

A pill is taken and I hope it will work.

He smiles blearily and goes instantly back to sleep, and I think all will be well.

My writer's block has gone; I galloped towards my laptop as soon as I got back.

I shall now collapse into bed and sleep 12 hours straight. I hope that the next time I am awakened, it will be for a 24-hour day, and that there will be no more unpleasant surprises.
I go gently into my (hopefully) good night.

Parenting Woes

2006-10-08T17:14:00.000+05:30

Ok, so I don't really have any. The dog has learned to do as it pleases, and I always did anyway. So we meet at meals - its - and random moments of leisure - mine.

I am waiting to get empty nest syndrome.

Blib blob bloo blog. blig blog black block.

There are some people who talk about the book that changed their life. Then there are the people who've read more than one book.
These are the people who realise one book doesn't really do much. The important thing is reading - present continuous, and to read, present perfect. Altogether implying that one has read in the past, is doing so nowish, and will continue to do so in the future.

Compare swimming. One doesn't swim one breadth and declare: I have swum. It changed my life.
One swims many breadths, many lengths, perhaps a lake, and says 'I swim' - or if you are desperately enthusiastic, 'I like swimming'
Note the tenses.

The point I really wanted to make: read detective stories by a man named Michael Dibdin. I've only read one, called Dead Lagoon. But I liked it very very much.
The question is, does that make me a reader, or one who has read once, and is therefore in no position to pontificate?
I like to think of myself as the former - and hold close my intention to read another as soon as possible.

The detective is called Angelo Zen. He is an Italian Morse - intelligent, somehow vulnerable, and permanently dabbling in the macabre.
I must find more.

Otto the Impaler

2006-10-05T22:52:00.000+05:30

I cannot write nicely these days. It is hard hard work. I feel exhausted already.

We did Rilke in class today, and the madman sang Oh Come All Ye Faithful in Latin. (I know. The connection is very very tenuous. Immaterial, even. But so what? He sang very nicely.) I was immediately seized by a desperate desire to learn and sing all Christmas carols in Latin for ever more.

Talking of Christian charity and marytrdom, the animal bites very viciously. Its beginning to look like the kid in The Omen. Little bloodsucker. As I type it is gnawing at its self-appointed aunts, and I am trying to ignore their cries of pain. I exaggerate but it is pretty much true. It is vicious. And possibly the anti-christ as well.

If I am found chewed up by wolves or pecked to death by ravens beware! Don't adopt the orphan.

Tiddly pom

2006-09-27T23:18:00.000+05:30

Blogs are not dogs. I simply should not feel guilty about not having fed this one for a month. Guilt is for wimps, as I am sure nietzsche never said.

That was a pointless train of thought.

I hate the middle of the semester. End of semester hard work is expected and almost rational in comparison - at the end of it, there are holidays. But mids-semester projects are just plain cruel. They are like prophets of doom, telling you that there is no end to your toil.

Not that I'm toiling much or anything - I have internet again after a very very long time, and have much more important things to do than research modernist poets on it.

The dog is called Otto; and when it eats too much - as it frequently does - it looks like a small killer whale. It also looks a bit like Prussian general staring out of not one but two monocles - all pompous and bombastic. I cannot wait for it to start barking out orders - not least because that'll mean its big enough to crap outside the hostel and stop offending the neighbours.
Plus then I'll be fond enough of it to put up pictures like a doting parent, which I just cannot bring myself to do right now, however cute it is.

I don't think I can ramble any more in good conscience while modernist poetry stares me accusingly in the face from the next window.

Metaphorical hug for you, Ro. It wasn't very hug-like, but it'll have to do.

Pooft to you

2006-08-02T17:51:00.000+05:30

Well, no, not really. Not unless you want it.

I'm bored, and rude noises are always amusing to write down.

I've just taken a class that occurs at 8 am thrice a week. Plus the man is a known demon for work. Since I haven't taken any extra credits, I can't drop it.

I feel foolish and inadequate. I realise that this is going to happen a lot this semester, so I should probably wait till I do some real damage, but everything has a feeling of foreboding. The sky is ominous (Of course, the sky has been cloudy for days now, and I've largely been calling it lovely weather) but today it is ominous. Vultures are circling and weird unseen beasties are shrieking unspeakable horrors in the distance.

Heh.

But there is finally a light in the room, and I don't need to gather up my books and flee to someone else's room at sunset - at least not unless I want to. It is nice not to have to flee.
The electrician scraped most of the plaster - and some of the cement - off the wall and all over my belongings, but at least now I can see the rubble.

So I am a tubelight richer and some wall poorer.

I feel like a Tranysylvanian villager who has just discovered garlic.
Yippee for bad breath.

Bah

2006-07-23T23:08:00.000+05:30

I miss the boy.

I don't want to be the girl who misses the boy.

I told maitreyi. She was much amused. May she be attacked by a thousand malls.

Bah.

And so to bed.

Though it is too early.

I'm reading Fermat's Last Theorem and find that when maths is written for non-maths people it is the most soothing thing to read. So lucid and calm and non-hysterical.

I want to sleep.

An apple peeled with a steel knife

2006-07-11T22:10:00.000+05:30

First things first:
Syd Barrett is dead. He has been creatively dead for a while now - so I will refrain from talking about the loss to music. That particular death is something everyone, including him, got over a while ago. And sang Shine On You Crazy Diamond to.

Sniff.

And why he came up:
I recently had my first taste of champagne. Champagne tastes gruesome.(The phrase in the title is Aldous Huxley's if you're wondering. I suppose he preferred mescaline.) The steel knife must have been lousy with rust. And the blood of a million innocents.

Mind you, it smells wonderful. Mmmm ambrosia, you think, fizzy drink of the gods! The smell holds the promise of a thousand luxuries - the lure of eternal youth, the sparkle of a thousand stalactites, of grapes and apples and cherries and pomegranates, of hot showers and frosty glasses, of apricots and peaches and agreeable decadence of the Ernest Dowson kind (flung roses, roses riotously with the throng) of caverns measureless to man, and of stately pleasure domes.
And no dead albatrosses to spoil the view.
You hail it with thirsty joy, you shower it with enthusiasm - and when you're being decadent enthusiasm very rare. We're thinking frankincense and myrrh.

You could get high just by sniffing it. (Like petrol, but less nauseous-making. And that rate things are going, it will probably soon work out cheaper for a litre than petrol.)

Then you sip. And gag.
I am digressing much today, but since extravagance is fun:

Remember the first time you tasted beer? How the wonderful smell translated into a mildly off-putting bitter-sour taste in the no-man's-land between your mouth and your throat?
Now ponder the fact that champagne is many many times as expensive as beer. So it smells many many times as glorious. And tastes many many times worse.
I do not understand the alcohol industry.

Be that as it may, the way it tastes is pretty much immaterial for our purposes.

We must return to the important thing:

The smell of champagne. It is the smell of Syd Barrett's music. The Beatles will forever smell to me of sunny lawns, Led Zeppelin of cedar trees, Lou Reed of cigarette butts - and I mean that in the nicest possible way.
In this world, Syd Barrett is all champagne, all sparkling promise. Exotic, but very very edible, and very very intoxicating.

A moment of regret for the man, before we cry for madder music and stronger wine.

Sniff, again.

And you! Lackey! Madder music I say!

This one's for mad

2006-07-05T15:55:00.000+05:30

http://www.ventcafe.blogspot.com

Tell comrade d too =-)

Ganglion

2006-06-22T09:45:00.000+05:30

Hypochondria is a wonderful thing, god wot.

Yesterday, I thought I had dislocated my wrist, (because every time I bent it, a little bump popped out of where I imagine my bone socket is, and my skin went taut over it) and if you've ever tried typing with one hand, you will realise that watching paint dry can only be thrilling and fascinating in comparison.

Now I'm not ambidextous at all - if my life depended on being able to hold a pencil in my left hand, I'd be dead. Unfortunately for me, the computer, that great equaliser of the postmodern world, has struck again.
It is weird and creepy that when faced with only one hand to type with, something in me decides oh, no, I'm not handicapped enough already, and uses only my index finger to type with. And so, without my non-preferred, borderline spastic hand, I cannot type.

It is a terrible fate.

As it turned out, it was merely a ganglion, a bit of nerve cell that had decided to swell up and act peculiar over my wrist bone. Apparently they happen all the time, and if it truly hurts, my doctor will be pleased to surgically remove it (his phrase, not mine) but otherwise he thinks I can just shut up and learn to live with the bump.

Typing isn't very comfortable though,(something I will never admit to either my mum or the boy, both of whom have been extremely strident in their opinion that the computer will be the death of me)and I can only hope it doesn't take it into its head to get any bigger.

All the same, ganglion is a nice word - it has a spring in its step, and it is far less unpleasant than 'tumour' and more sophisticated than 'lump' and certainly superior to the insipid 'nodule'.

I try it out: ganglion. gang-lee-on. ganglion, ganglion.

Hello ganglion.

I suppose I can live with it.

The Case of the Missing Link

2006-06-13T09:36:00.000+05:30

I know I just put in not one, but two entries, but still, what the hell, I am indignant.

It happened this way:

Someone (some two, actually) came to Baker Street, when Holmes and I were indisposed, and left offline links to http://www.my_best_new_pics.com with Mrs Hudson. She, good soul that she is, handed them to us, unsuspecting that disaster lurked around the corner.

A very ordinary sounding page, I thought. I clicked on one and was sent to an error page on yahoo photos.
There is nothing so unnatural as the commonplace, sniggered Holmes.
Bah to yahoo I said, and logged off.

I was in Chennai for the weekend, and got home one Sunday night. Now two days is a hell of a lot in cyberspace, so I logged straight into my gmail, to be greeted by a mail from yahoo saying my password had been changed.
Idon't see how that could've happened, I complained, it was an uncommon kind of id - I don't know how he guessed it.

You see Watson, but you do not observe, said Holmes, what one man can invent, another can discover.

I went to yahoo to get my password changed. My id didn’t exist, I was told. I logged all over yahoo – mail, messenger, music – a couple of times each. My ancient yahoo id (which we will call watsonwas12andreadtoomuchtolkien@yahoo.co.in) had been hacked into and then deleted.

The internet, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.
Oh no, Holmes, I cried, disaster has struck! It must be that mysterious napoleon of crime, the professor! Oh no!

Come, Watson, come. The game is afoot. Let us log into your father’s messenger and check you up on his friend list. All will become clear.

I logged in, and found an offline message from my (murdered) account – a link to http://www.my_best_new_pics.com

The man is a monster, Holmes, a very fiend from hell.

Ay, Watson, I must confess myself beaten. By the most dangerous man in cyberspace, it is true, but beaten all the same. You must get a new id.

My dear Holmes, why, enlightened post-gmail citizens that we are, should any one worry about such trivialities as a yahoo id? They are a dime a dozen and pretty useless to boot. I will, instead, get another gmail account. It'll be one in the eye for the prof!

I have two words for you Watson: stealth and Launchcast.

Stealth is easily acquired along with a new id, but training my Launchcast was a long and arduous process involving listening to hours of crap and rating it “Don’t play again.” It also involved a lot of surfing for favourite artists and rating them.

It is not a task I look forward to doing.

I confess I have been beaten, Watson, said Holmes.
Impossible! I said, hoping to prevent him from falling back on his old standby, cocaine.
It is not impossible, Watson, but merely improbable said he. And how often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?

But he will get more ids, Holmes, I cried. As we speak the terrible link is wandering through attacking innocent people!What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear?
He shrugged, and said, there are certain crimes which the law cannot touch.

And so Holmes sits in defeat, baffled by the evil genius that is the virus I hereby christen Moriarty. May it fall off the Riechenbach to a gruesome end!

Watson, said he, if it should ever strike you that I am getting a little over-confident in my powers, or giving less pains to a case than it deserves, kindly whisper "yahoo" in my ear, and I shall be infinitely obliged to you.

And so endeth the case of the Missing link.

Whew

2006-06-12T16:14:00.000+05:30

That was remarkably long. I feel catharised. And a bit sheepish.

2006-06-12T15:31:00.000+05:30

It has been a while - partly because I'm lazy, and partly because i honestly haven't had access to internet for the last month or so.

But there are somethings which must be shared immediately. Steven Erikson's The Malazon Book of the Fallen has been among the highlights of the last few months for me, and finally relinquishing Book VI of it, The Bonehunters, (Thanks Ro. My eternal gratitude and Peter Wimseys are yours for the asking.) made me realise how overdue this is. You send me the Communist manifesto, I now present to you:

THE STEVEN ERIKSON MANIFESTO

The world of The Malazan Book of the Fallen is a bleak and difficult one. It is war-ridden in the most frightening way so that war is the only way of life. And as we read further, we realise that this has always been so. The word fantasy is clearly a misnomer - this is not the kind of world you want to fantasise about.

In the present, the Malazan Empire – the all-powerful force, against whom so many of our protagonists are pitted – is largely a background force; but one who is repeatedly revealed to be behind some large bit of the action. It controls vast amounts of land and people, yet its existence is as precarious as that of any of the millions of individual soldiers dying in its armies. (Not surprisingly, the army is pivotal – most of the action and the deep thinking happen in the camps.)

Intrigue levels are so high that the first three or four chapters of every book are completely baffling – you read blind, in the expectation of learning to see if you do it long enough. This isn’t a bad thing, though – Erikson drops enough hints to keep you fully occupied, so it’s like doing a cryptic crossword where if you get enough clues, you can begin to see the letters and fill in the last, tough ones.

Only, it turns out, this entire crossword is just one tenth of the big one.

We all know - theoretically – how important backstory is to a fantasy world, for without it there is no motivation, and the characters and plot become irrelevant to themselves. Very much like a detective novel, in fact. History is one of Erikson’s strong suits – he uses it to enrich and legitimise his books, just as the books themselves flesh it out.

In some ways the Malazan series is like a giant detective story, where each book is one chapter, dropping tantalising clues, and building up to the denouement in the last book.

Since we are only at book 6 now, I see little point in elaborating on the plot-lines – which are many and hugely complicated, and only getting more so with each successive book. A lot of the reading is merely figuring out which of the millions of sub-plots and strands is a red-herring, and which is important to the bigger picture. As it turns out, they all are.

The various strands come together, satisfyingly, in the end, pushing the series plot further. The books aren’t chronological – some happen simultaneously, and there is a lot of back-and-forth-ing, but the picture that emerges when they are put together is breathtaking.

But unlike a detective story, morality in the Malazan books is muddied and sticky and compelling. Imagine quicksand so fascinating you wilfully struggle harder in the hope of digging yourself in deeper and deeper, faster and faster, consumed by an urgent need to get to the bottom.

There is no one murderer (or even two) who is to be discovered at the end of the book – though there are plenty all along the way. Instead, the world is one of Kafkaesque helplessness – with every character plotting stubbornly towards an unknown goal – often at cross-purposes, sometimes together – though even then they maintain their own motives. And though against the large morass that is their world (pardon the repeated bog-metaphors) they are small and powerless, they all insist on plotting furiously, anyway. No one is Evil, and even if they were, no one is all Good either. Even the least likeable characters are provided with enough motivation to make them, if not sympathetic, at least empathetic.

As far as I am concerned, the characterisation is perfect – even though there are so many of them, Erikson makes every single one recognisable. It is not the kind of book where you can, say, name five distinguishing characteristics for each person. But then, I can’t name five distinguishing characteristics for any of my friends either. Instead of a set of characteristics, you come to recognise real people – you may not entirely understand them, you probably don’t agree about a lot of stuff, but you enjoy their company; they change, you change, it doesn’t matter; they are still distinct people to you. If you ran into even the most insignificant character on the road, you’d recognise it and go up to talk to it – though if you are spotting Erikson characters on the road, you might want to consider seeing a shrink.

And when they die (And they are always dying - it is a book of the fallen, after all) it is as if a real person is dead. You don’t cry and wallow and say that was beautiful, what an affecting book – you cringe and swallow and make funeral preparations, and wonder what they left you in their will.

There are Houses – of Dark, Light, Shadow, Death, Life, and so on – but these aren’t necessarily antagonistic, in fact as the series progresses so do the various alliances.

The methods employed by Light are as horrific as those employed by Dark – war.

In fact, the immortal Tiste Andii, the Children of the Dark (and their leader, Anomander Rake) are in many ways more pitiable than the humans – they have been so battered by their history, they have lost the will to live. Though war is common in these books, it never loses its horrific-ness. There is no attempt to legitimise war – even though most of Erikson’s most likeable characters are soldiers (in this world, Everyman is a soldier – a frightening metaphor for the saying that to live is to fight). Instead, the only stable moralities are those of necessity and compassion. I have deliberately avoided calling the book gritty – a phrase that, to me, implies a general hardening and detachment in the characters ability to deal with suffering. For Erikson, war is uniformly gruelling, there is no suggestion of sado-masochism, of pleasure in pain – killing is a soul-destroying thing, yet it is the only thing people can do in their desperate attempt to stay alive. The heroic bit of war is not in victory, but in the soldiers’ acceptance of its necessity, even as they see its inherent wrongness. This makes the books war scenes much more potent and disturbing than those of many other fantasy novels. (Don't shrug innocently, Terry Goodkind - I am pointing at you.)

A dying soldier in most books has the (dubious) satisfaction of dying for a Cause. A dying soldier in The Malazan Books of the Fallen knows only that for him, the killing has finally ended, and that Hood will get him. It is a world Yossarian would approve of in its frightening meaninglessness. There is always a superficial reason for a death – usually because of one or more of the plots laid by all the powerful characters. But it is still eventually meaningless, nothing is achieved except a complexifying of the intrigue – the stakes are raised again, new alliances are formed, new players enter, but nothing changes for the soldiers.

There is an inexorability to the dying that is more powerful than anything Hood, the king of House Death – possibly, paradoxically, the least intimidating (and sympathetic) of the ascendants – can do. (Terry Pratchett’s Death, on the other hand would be much more understanding, I suspect. Forgive me, Steven, but there is nothing your Hood can do to supersede Pratchett’s Death as the real one in my head.)

The gods in this world (also called Ascendants) are not very omnipotent. And we soon realise that they are only a little more powerful than the humans, and the barriers between mortals, immortals and ascendants are not so much walls as much as thin lines that are regularly stepped across by the ambitious. (In fact, the last emperor of the Malazan Empire and his assassin seem to have ascended to become the big-wigs of House Shadow, just to escape being assassinated by the new Empress.)

The Empress is a (so far) shadowy figure; we learn of her only via other characters, tantalising fragments that help build up her mystique, rather than make her more tangible – no doubt at her own instigation. We know she was the head of the Claw (the deadly Malazan assassin squad) before she took over the throne. We know she is skilled enough at intrigue to pre-empt and dissuade attempts on her life and her power, to make all the most powerful people we have met so far wary of her. We know that even the immortals regard her as a viable threat to their freedom. (In one extremely poignant scene, the ascendant Anomander Rake explains to his ally (and ascendant) Caladan Brood that the reason for their antagonism to the empire is that they like a certain amount of chaos, to them it is freedom, while to the Empress and her kind, the immortals’ freedom threatens the ordered well-being of their human citizens. Plus, he adds wryly, they are automatically antagonised by the very fact that it is someone else, not them, who will rule the new stability.) It is a legitimate fear – the unravelling history shows us countless examples of new beings destroying the old ones in their search for a peaceful existence.

But we soon realise that some of this is coming to a head. Knowing the world as we do, it is unlikely that there will be a happy end where the High King is restored and everyone will live a peaceful rural existence, or even that there will be world peace. Since there was never a paradise, there is none to go back to.

There is after all, no true evil to be defeated – all the combatants are equally confused, hurt, and vulnerable.

The best the soldiers can hope for is that the Empire stabilises (and as a postcolonial member of an erstwhile colony, you will appreciate that this is a horrifying thing for me to say), concentrating on governance rather than expansion, so that it finds some peace – and so other races can find their own peaces too. Perhaps the gods and ascendants will find a realm truly separate from that of the other beings, so they will no longer use them in their manoeuvrings for power.

I like to think the mesemerising anarchy will go on for ever.

All we can say for certain is that since Good cannot triumph over Evil, there is one less Happy End in the world. But that’s not to say it won't be a good end.

In which we flash back to when I met Hyderabad, 'cos thats what all the cool postmodern kids are doing these days

2006-05-09T22:32:00.000+05:30

Once upon a time, I found myself in a muggy place with terrible food and very little else. Entirely my own fault, of course - I'd even been glad when the news arrived.
But I was sad, and, as sad people are apt to do, I went quietly off to sleep, to eat, to check my mail, and so to sleep again.

One day an unlikely-looking fellow prisoner came up to me and said: Lets go to Abids this Sunday.

I looked at her brown courduroy pants, and thought to myself, interesting.

"How is it spelt?" I asked, always the pedant.
"A-b-i-d-s"
"A-'beeds"
"No, 'Ab-ids. 'Ab' as in 'cab', and stressed; and 'ids' as in 'kids,' unstressed. "
"Bah," I said, but I went, anyway.

It was an uninspiring Sunday morning. The shops were shut. You, who live in a city of lights and noise and wonder will never realise the desolation of seeing rows upon rows of shops, all shut, their promises cut-off at the door by cruel shutters of jangly grey iron, doomed forever to proclaim their wares in cheery colours, their Keatsian mannequins forever pursuing a customer beyond the glass.

Anyway.

I was depressed, and walked along, dragging my feet in the dust, feeling none of my customary jubilation when I crossed the road in the teeth of the traffic, skipping neatly across a fleet of scooters, bounding onto the safety of the pavement in the nick of time, eluding the crushing wheels and horn of an evil lorry. But it brought only a wan smile to my lips.

"We are nearly there" said my courduroy Virgil.
"My velveteen Santa!" I exclaimed, as I caught sight of the next pavement but one.

There was no mistaking the sight - it was books.

A sea of books. Red and ochre and green and blue and yellow and black, merging into a delicate, musty brown in the horizon. The air acquired the sweet smell of mingled dust, camphor and paper, and the very drains seemed to transport it across the empty spaces, to me.

We bounded across, my saviour and I, not heeding the protests of the cyclists wobbling as we passed them.

When we got there, words deserted me. I stood at the beginning of a pavement of books. Where it broke to let in little alleys, I could see that they too were lined with more books. In the distance, the very sky seemed to have become the soft, crumbly caramel of old parchment.

I passed the afternoon in a daze of words. The phrases "Any book - Rs 10" and "Any book - Rs 20" became blurs. Instead, I searched the ground with the zeal of the entire Spanish Inquisition, stooping low, stopping to exclaim and pick one up.

I developed a whole vocabulary of exclamations - yells of greeting to a book I knew well and owned, shouts of disdain to books I'd met before but not liked very much, yelps of sorrowing rapture to books I recognised as better-looking than my own versions of them, cries of respect to venerable books I keep meaning to read but put off for more frivolous company, sobbing for a long-lost book newly found, and hiccups for a new and exciting-looking book with a handsome hard cover and minimal sign of previous ownership.

In the background, other people were making similar noises. It was like an orgy. Everyone bumped into everyone else a lot in the quest for the perfect book. For some reason, no one seemed to want the same books. I pounced with fierce joy on every book I wanted to buy, but found no rivals.

On the pavement, we were all too fond of our own books to pay any attention to anyone else's.

I got home staggering under a large pile of books, and went to bed. And as I lay there, and wrote my name on them, I realised that it was the seventh day, and I looked around and saw that it was, contrary to what I'd expected, good.

As you might've guessed, I don't entirely hate Hyderabad, these days.

In fact, hanging around at home, and wilting under the burden of explaining my activities and motives (and the lack of them) to my parents, I suddenly find myself very very fond of it.

In which a shoes are bought, hygiene is sacrificed and a beginning is made

2006-05-08T23:53:00.000+05:30

First post.

Big thing, in a not-very-momentuous way.

Intelligence is expected, and wit, and some sort of basic level of literacy.

What can I say that hasn't been said already?
Everything.
In this little corner of cyberspace, nothing has been said yet. I have made no remarks, set no expectations, raised no hackles, nor eyebrows, nor any other part of anatomies.

So, in the way of those who have nothing to say, and have said it already, I shall merely say: today was not all bad.

For one, I got new shoes - sneakers - so white they look like someone else's. It has been a long time since I wore sneakers. For many months now, the only thing I have worn on my feet have been Hawaiis. The next best thing to naked, so to speak, and possibly better - after all I haven't had a thorn in my foot, or a stubbed toe, in all these months.
I was amused to find that the man in the reebok shop gave me an old pair of socks to wear before I tried on the shoes. I don't know if the treatment is reserved for those who come in in floaters and slippers, or if there is something sacred about the socks.
I like to think it is the latter; that they are testing you in some way, and saying, "Appease the lesser god, the god of the sock, before you come face to face with the greater god of the shoe." I suspect that if the sock rejects you, you don't even get to go near the shoe.

If I had any sense of hygiene, I would've refused to wear something so clearly soaked in the sweat and mud of a million shoe-buyers, but in the sacred space of the shop, surrounded by little sock-godlings, and big sock gods, I didn't have the heart to refuse, and be struck down for my sins. A sacrifice was clearly demanded, and I was determined to be up to the mark, worthy of my new footwear.

And, to complete the baptism, I write this, the testimonial of my devotion to my new white shoes (May their laces never get frayed! Or tripping me would get too easy.) and declare my feet and myself all theirs.

In clean new socks,
Yours,
S

It is as much a beginning as any other.