The Chasing iamb

exit stage right followed by bear

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 18:19:58 GMT

People, I am taking a short walk over to blogger. Come visit?

I will be here.

The Internet runs on love

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 12:46:01 GMT

Clay Shirky's Here comes Everybody is one of the best books I have read about the Internet and culture. The last time I was this enthusiastic about an Internet culture book was when I read David Gauntlett's Web Studies, five years ago. When Gauntlett was writing the first edition of Web Studies most media theorists were talking about the internet without talking about the web. Bizarre but true. Most books were still talking about cyberculture and cyborgs and cyber punk which while I am sure was important to some people, bored me entirely to death. Gauntlett's book and his work online was my first source of insights into what the world would look like very, very soon. At that point, the book dazzled me.

Shirky develops on some of the nascent ideas about social change that Gauntlett spotted in sites like imdb and Teacher review and xena fan clubs then and sharpens them. Shirky popularised a phrase that I felt incoherently with my first brushes with the Internet and continue to feel each time I go online: The Internet runs on love. There's something about the altruism of the internet that stuns you afresh each time you go online. This is an elegant book that analyses the ways and means by which the Internet changes social organisations... everything from encyclopedias to Vatican II. The case studies are fresh, the themes are interesting and the insights very, very useful.

The book will be out with Penguin very soon. Buy it if you are even slightly obsessive about the internet.

Internet Confession Queens

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 16:51:58 GMT

Iris Scheiferstein, She thought

I am mostly bored by personal blogs. Very, very rarely do I enjoy sex-and-the-city blogs. It's probably comes from being incredibly old but there's another tiny reason. I have listened to enough stories about other people's love lives (and talked about mine) to last three long-running television shows. It's fascinating only because we get to say "I told you so, you stupid cow" Or some kinder version of that.

And for pure titillation, sex bloggers don't seem to have enough sex to be interesting. Girl with a one-track mind used to be slutty enough with plenty of messy bodily fluid. The sex worker blogs are sometimes just depressing.

Wierder, after being super-girly my entire life I find my favourite sex blog is written by three men.

Tao of Geek has a gorgeous strip explaining why so many people like personal blogs.

One of the few exceptions to my general veto on girls rambling on is One Trick Pony. Her blog I love you Rasna is one of my favourite pick-me-ups. I like reading it between waiting for the water to boil for coffee and the toaster to ring. She is inevitably funny regardless of whatever she is talking about.

This week she has: Classic Bollywood lines that would make hilarious April Fools’ pranks.

- Tulsi? Tulsi ne to bees saal pehle, un paharon se kood kar apni jaan de di.

- Tumhari maa hamare kabze mein hain

- Apko lymphorsarcoma of the intestine ho gaya hai. ab dava nahi, dua ki zaroorat hai.

- Boss! Maal pakda gaya.

... and so on.

A couple of recent posts had me bursting into tears. One trick pony has no angst, no self-pity and thank god, no coyness. Just spunk and style.

Khuda Ke Liye

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 16:04:38 GMT

Working on Sundays makes me grumpy and I still haven't got my mojo back but you should go watch Khuda Ke Liye.

mal

Jonesing

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 12:48:08 GMT

Some odd conversation with Bottle Imp started me thinking. Who is my favourite character in Indian writing in English? I don't know! It should be shocking but it isn't... what characters has IWE thrown up so far that you feel attached to them afterwards... as if they meant anything.

My responses surprised me a bit.

Akilan of No Onions Nor Garlic ranked very high.

YoungUncle from Vandana Singh's series

Toby from one of the short stories in Nalini Jones' What you call Winter

Sartaj Singh from Vikram Chandra's Love and Longing in Bombay

Bharat from Kavery Nambisan's The Truth about Bharat (Almost)

The cook in Kalpana Swaminathan's Page Three Murders

Thin, thin, thin pickings...

Which ones are yours?

Meanwhile: I love Patricia but really! I mean really!!

Via: Patricia of Booklust

The Siren Who Stayed Away

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 02:23:09 GMT

Sometimes I am terribly eager-beaver about an interview and then I screw up the writing. Here is Chitrangada Singh.

Memories of Murder

Sat, 29 Mar 2008 05:03:21 GMT

Bong Joon-ho's Memories of Murder is one of the most satisfying movies I have seen in ages. This movie precedes Joon-Ho's brilliant monster movie Gwoemul and has much of the same cast. Unlike Gwoemul it's set in small-town Korea in the late 80s.

A group of policemen with vastly varying degrees of competence try to track down a serial killer.
Joon-ho has a true gift for the comic but what amazed me is how much of the incongruous seemed completely plausible to me as an Indian. In one sequence, two cops who had been torturing a simpleton to force a confession are seen sitting in front of the television. All three sit side by side watching television, eating vast quantities of food and commenting gleefully about what's on screen.

The tension is beautifully maintained but with the tiniest of touches Joon-Ho shows that its possible to make a movie about sex crimes without being voyeuristic. He also creates the disquieting but compassionate notion that thinking violence is not the same as doing it. Suspect after suspect turns out not to be the killer but several of them do nurture elaborate rape fantasies. In counterpoint, a policeman (one of the few competent ones in the film) is in a high school talking to a pretty young schoolgirl. She is in the school clinic looking for a band-aid to stick on a scratch on her back. When the policeman offers to do it for her, she balks. The policeman tells her, "Feeling shy, why? You are just a child".

To me this is the moment in which Joon-ho takes this American genre (in which the policeman must have a lecherous moment or two around a precocious piece of jailbait or a sexually active woman thus supposedly creating moral ambiguity about the violence) and returns it to the world with watercress (or possibly kimchi) around it. Take that, you idiots, he seems to be smirking.

It doesn't hurt that it's beautifully shot.

The revolution may not be televised but

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 16:30:19 GMT

There are videos now for the wierdest things. Books! IPL cricket teams. Even NGOs, that last bastion of anti-aesthetics. Some of these NGO videos are surprisingly charming.

A music video by the exec director of International Rivers

Good clean feminist fun from Feminist Majority

These days

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 07:19:05 GMT

If you go to youtube and type 'speech' the first thing that appears is Barack Obama's landmark speech on race. Here is moving, incredible oratory.

this samoa doesnt even have the beach

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 02:59:57 GMT

7 am is a barbaric practice. Paying a 1000 rupees to travel 40 km in a matchbox is barbaric. Journalism is barbaric. Tandoori chicken and its variants are barbaric. This land is meant for___ (insert rude local name for community that your mother looks down upon and you only utter in your most private thoughts)

I want to lie at home and squirm in embarrassment as I watch Manhattan again. If that movie did not have the shaming honest face of Tracy (Mariel Hemingway), would it have worked at all? I suspect not. It would have only been what that man in the Telugu movie said, "You dance, I glance", a formulation Schopenhauer would not have been ashamed of.

tt

Totems against self-pity

Sun, 23 Mar 2008 20:19:53 GMT

Diane Arbus, Blaze Starr at Home, 1964

Joan Osborne with the Holmes brothers singing Nobody's Fault but Mine

Bilkis Bano

VI Warshawski

the Dippy Diplomat

Snegum

UR, Druthers and MP

Lorelai Gilmore

Harriet Vane

The Grand Sophy

Buffy and Spike

All about Eve

Paula

Jimmy Rabbitte Senior

Volume 1 of Women Writing in India

Crushing

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 16:53:18 GMT

I may learn to love Josh Brolin, the hottest Hollywood moustached lead since Tom Selleck. He has a great strut and a great grinning-lean-over-a-fence but did he really hit Diane Lane? How sad is it that he was the highlight of both American Gangster and No Country for Old Men? For me, I mean. How can two movies be so technically right yet do so little?

F

christian holidays are boring

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 18:14:41 GMT

But then amu says Happy Easter!

Bookshelf porn

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 16:33:55 GMT

What I want for my birthday

Pilgrim's progress

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 19:34:39 GMT

Luncheon Party, Raghu Rai

At Rajnish Ashram, Raghu Rai

Duststorm in Rajasthan, Raghu Rai

Trying to not be gushy but sometimes I slip.

There be dragons and bandwagons

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 20:25:57 GMT

Last evening I wandered around in Mehrauli trying to locate someone I was supposed to interview. The cab-driver annoyed at being in dark, narrow lanes abandoned interest in the project fairly early on. He parked the matchbox and refused to budge. In the last few minutes of daylight, I saw that he had decided to park next to a bull. A huge bull straight out of the epics, mad as hell because of a skinny dog annoying it. So the bull was tossing his head and leaping about and the cab driver decides to park next to it. I am not a big believer in eugenics but I really hope he has no children. Anyway I snuck out of the cab and raced away. About thirty seconds later it was pitch-dark (Take the lane along the jungle, I had been directed on the phone. I had sniggered at the point but, what the hell, there are trees in Mehrauli.) The address matched what appeared to be an abandoned apartment building. There were no lights or signs of occupation. But there were an assortment of vehicles in the basement. I found a man squatting in the dark who said there was no lift and that I would have to walk up to the 4th floor. Even on the fourth floor there seemed to be no human beings. (Turned out there were plenty, but that's another story.)

As I groped my way upstairs, I was asking myself, why I felt such a strong sense of deja vu. Was it the perfect memory of a night about six years ago? My roommate and I had walked, as stealthily as we could, to the top floor of a dirty building where we thought a friend lay after being beaten up by our classmates. We had seen the grime and the broken glass of those stairs any number of times. But at midnight everything was terrifying. It is still jolting to remember that on the street, earlier, when we recognised the distinctive lopsided gait of one member of the lynch party, by his shadow, we had instinctively hid behind a wall. We didnt even need to tell each other that all of our classmates were such unknown quantities that they merited paranoia. Upstairs, we knocked for what seemed like a long time before our poor, battered friend answered the door. Later, my roommate and I compared notes. We had both thought that our friend had died. In reality, he wasn't badly hurt, just bruised and frightened. Usually tactiturn, it was near-impossible to prise the details out of him. We sat there for a few hours, holding his hand and trying to clean up his room. When the lynch party had arrived, his flatmates had considerately left the apartment, he said. After a while, he said that there had been some speculation among the mob about draining some petrol out of one of their bikes to set him on fire. One of the non-participating observers had demurred at that extent of permanent damage. So we had him to thank for the life and limbs of a frail, strange boy who was little more than an acquaintance.

The next day began the treks to the police-station, the discovery that friends had turned Judas, that there were acquaintances who said that the boy had it coming to him. Years later I wondered what would have happened if we had got there a tiny bit earlier, the two most unpopular women in that class. My ambitious, brilliant roommate had consistently made the rest of the class look stupid by being better at everything they wanted; I was wierd. I had slapped one classmate for feeling me up, threatened to break the Neanderthal jaw of another for feeling my roommate up. I wonder now what they would have done, those big hulking jeunesse doree. (They all now work for television companies, advertising agencies and PR companies. They were already so compromised then, tongues black from lying, spines bent in slavery. Could they possibly be any worse now?) What had we been thinking running in the dark from our safe little house to the dirty lane in which that silly boy lived?

Fear flourishes as we grow older. As our parents grow malleable, as children look absurdly small, as your skin seems thinner. The impossible-seeming grotesquerie of newspaper columns shows greater possibilities of becoming your life. You could be the one gored by a bull, bit by a rabid dog, hit by a runaway truck, raped in the basement, broken in a dark stairwell. That could be you. Every day becomes tamer and you remember your random acts of courage, truth and beauty with shudders. 'Anything could have happened. How did I do that then? What was I thinking?' In my case, each year has eroded the tiny store of physical courage I was born with.

What a comfort it is to sink into VI Warshawski's Chicago, a dirty corrupt town as familiar as one of our own dirty, corrupt towns. What a comfort it is to know Warshawski is that old-fashioned thing, a heroine. She jumps out of buildings onto moving trains, is beaten, slapped, jailed, tortured, betrayed and belittled. She is sweaty, dirty and constantly accused of being boorish or slutty or desexed. She is poor. What a comfort it is that at 43 she is still wishing for her mother and more money but jumping onto moving trains.

Like the crusaders, carry your sword and the Good Book into battle and let it be a Warshawski.

Ubiquitous Bunnies

Sun, 09 Mar 2008 12:02:01 GMT

My old favourite from the Perry Bible Fellowship (which is now a book)

Ellen Forney's Perv Bunny

The Bunny Meets Randall Munroe

Riding in the Fossil fuel Zenana

Sun, 09 Mar 2008 09:22:49 GMT

I am definitely receding. Watching music videos is more appealing than anything else these days. I wonder whether when I leave Delhi I will be the girl who has forgotten how to talk to people but has read everything on her unreadable-books list and has discovered an ear not entirely made of tin. This week, glam rock, next week Chinese opera? Will I ever be thankful for my exile in the national capital?

Perhaps not. The day before yesterday, I went to work in what used to be everyday clothes before Delhi. A kneelength skirt and a crumpled black sleeveless T-shirt. I suppose at traffic jams there were men peering. I don't know because I was reading a murder mystery. I say they were probably peering not because of the sterling quality of my legs but because in this village they stare. (Here's something I have never seen in any other city but happens ten times a day in Delhi. You are in a vehicle that's rattling along at 40 km/hour. If you look ahead of you, you are sure to see men driving vehicles at 80 km/hour with their necks twisted around, doing an excellent imitation of the chick in Exorcist. Now, here's the thing. They are not turning around for a second look because they have spotted a sexpot in the taxi. This is them turning around for a first look at what maybe a woman in a vehicle. It may not be a woman. It may turn out to be a hairy middle-aged man who also has his head twisted backwards. But how is one to know unless you look backwards like Lot's wife and endanger the lives of everyone on the road?)

Right. So I get to work and then most people have conversations with my knees. I believe that if you dress differently you must deal with people looking. (I reserve my right to be rude if I catch you at it though) So thus the day trundles along with my wondering as usual how Delhi happened, Tehelka happened... whose life is this...I want a brownie... can I watch the Mika video again at work... then my 40-year-old colleague from admin walks past me and comes to a shuddering stop. "You came from Dwarka in that! In an auto?" When I told her that I had, she clucked in alarm and said, "Make sure you go home early."

I said, "If someone is going to get turned on my fat Mallu legs, let them." Seeing the crazy look in my eyes, she backed off. I like her but she left me irritated.

My colleague from admin pretty much sums up Delhi. Show skin, be a complete fashion victim, if you are driven about, in a ridiculously large car by Bhaiyya, to and from social situations all of which maybe crammed with men and women who judge you on the basis of your appearance. In these cases Bhaiyya is very useful because he picks up things, drops off things, so you never have to get out of the car and be exposed to the eyes of Bhaiyyas who you or your father do not own. (My colleague L was shocked out of her wits last year when another colleague, whom we shall call Baby, arrived at her house to drop off some documents. Baby called L when she had turned the corner of L's street and asked her to come downstairs. L came downstairs and found a large car . The rear window closest to L rolled down and Baby was revealed in her weekend glory. Baby pushed her sunglasses back and smiled at L. Then she handed the papers to her driver who got out of the car, walked around the car to L and handed her the documents. Baby waved at L, put her sunglasses on, rolled her window up and then drove away.) The important thing to remember is that Bhaiyyas whom you don't employ always want to rape you.

For the record, I left work and went to Kailash Colony in an auto, went from there to Sarojini Nagar in an auto, took an auto from there back to GK2 and at night took another auto back to Dwarka. Was any auto-driver interested in anything other than telling me (not my knees) that the complete absence of a meter would not prevent him from chiding me for living so far from civilisation? No.

It seems unlikely that cities will have decent public transportation as long as they are keen on preserving class distinctions. Which is why the growth of the metro system in Delhi astonishes me. What will this city be like in ten years? A decade from now will Baby find herself sitting next to Bhaiyya in the metro at least once a week? I can't imagine it at all. Meanwhile my dabba Bangalore is turning into a city full of fortresses on wheels. Where do I take my knobby knees now? Like James Bond, I am beginning to feel like the World is not Enough

Almost wednesday, almost happiness

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 21:16:21 GMT

Tuesdays. Insane Tuesdays. But L is right, hateful little wretch that she is, I do love Mika.

Mika, Grace Kelly

Click

Sat, 01 Mar 2008 20:55:57 GMT

Trekked to Okhla to the Vadehra Gallery to see Click, an exhibition of contemporary Indian photography curated by Sunil Gupta and Radhika Singh. Scooted around at a rapid pace without making eyecontact with anyone. Was out of there in half an hour but it was worth the trek. While some images were remarkably blah, there are at least half a dozen really interesting photographers. Here are some of my favourites

Vivan Sundaram, Marxism in the expanded field: Geeta's bookshelf

Ishaan Tankha, Superhero Junkyard

Zui Patravali, Omani Tree and Arab

Joseph M Daniel One (Revisit)

There are a few more images, some very special, I thought... but I can't find images online right now

Things I know you would like

Sat, 01 Mar 2008 20:19:53 GMT

I think Stuff White People Like is an incredibly funny site. But it would work just as well if it was called Stuff Yuppies Like.

Today's nice-article-I-wish-I-had-written is The Charms of Wikipedia. Now how can I get Spellcheck to read it?:

The steady influx of top-hat-and-spatted sources elevated Wikipedia's tone. This wasn't just a school encyclopedia, a backyard Encarta—this was drinks at the faculty club. You looked up Diogenes and bang, you got something wondrously finished-sounding from the 1911 Britannica. That became Diogenes' point of departure. And then all kinds of changes happened to the Greek philosopher, over many months and hundreds of revisions—odd theories, prose about the habits of dogs, rewordings, corrections of corrections. Now in Wikipedia there is this summary of Diogenes' provocations:

Diogenes is said to have eaten (and, once, masturbated) in the marketplace, urinated on some people who insulted him, defecated in the theatre, and pointed at people with his middle finger.

And yet amid the modern aggregate, some curvy prose from the 1911 Britannica still survives verbatim:

Both in ancient and in modern times, his personality has appealed strongly to sculptors and to painters.

The fragments from original sources persist like those stony bits of classical buildings incorporated in a medieval wall.

More here on the addictive nature of wikipedia. But as usual the astonishing Randall Munroe says it best.

Booksonbooksonbooksonbooks

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 17:46:22 GMT

So I finally was persuaded to give ebooks a shot and i may be on my way to being converted. On Wednesday I spent the whole day in bed reading books on my laptop. It was disconcerting to open microsoft reader and see that the library on my laptop already contained books with titles such as Interstellar Service and Discipline. (You are reading this, Certain Person, I know you are! Next time, warn me that you have left behind android porn on my laptop) After choking a bit, I started on the books I had downloaded. There is actually a murder mystery for every mood. Australian aborginal,Chicago gay, countryhouse parody, hardboiled futuristic, frilly with spandex, welsh priests... academic murder mysteries are dime a dozen now. I was in the mood for a bookish murder and was disappointed to not find Joanne Dobson (working class professor in snooty New England college keeps stumbling on bodies) online but I did find the first of the Dido Hoare series by Marianne Moore. Dido runs an antiquarian bookshop, has a father called Barnabas and a policeman lover. Only he is a wee bit married. Very nice.

I have also started reading the Thursday Next series. Comic detective fiction in a parallel dimension Britain where books are immensely important. Thursday next, our heroine, is a detective in the squad in charge of literature-related crimes (arguments about Shakespeare sometimes lead to murders). She has a pet dodo called Pickwick and in the first book, The Eyre Affair, somehow ends up inside Jane Eyre. It is beautifully loony and set in a world where Wales is a socialist republic and genetic engineering is really common.

Meanwhile has anyone caught sight of this insane goth-girl version of Jane Eyre, the illustrated version by *cough* Dame Darcy? It looks fascinating.

Once you get past the name, her illustrations are rather fun. Here is something nice called Dolls do Heroin. Not from Jane Eyre!

Last Sitting

Sun, 24 Feb 2008 16:27:17 GMT

Monroe's last sitting, photos by Bert Stern. And horrendously horrendously recreated this year with Lindsay Lohan.

This information comes via a new blog which I want to guard jealously for a while longer.

Howards End: Only don't connect

Sun, 24 Feb 2008 08:57:04 GMT

I haven't read EM Forster since I was 16 when I read them all in a fury of Merchant Ivory. From that point of pure ignorance and my dubious feelings about A Passage to India, I had to be told that my favouritest book Zadie Smith's On Beauty was a tribute to Howards End. Now, two whole years later, I am re-reading Howards End and enjoying it enormously. It is an incredibly energetic, witty novel, only foiled by my On Beauty flashbacks. I am halfway through the novel and still comparing it to On Beauty. This is a bad thing. Like being abroad and constantly converting local prices into rupees. Very unfair to a brilliant novel.

UPDATE: It's wonderful and wonderful. Go read.

Doing Jalsa, Showing Jilpsa

Sat, 23 Feb 2008 04:16:57 GMT

Never have I regretted being in North India so much before. When I found Krish Ashok's site yesterday I had to cackle all by my lonesome. Ashok is an IT boy, amateur violinist, writer, graphic artist and all-round crack person. His website is full of astonishing schematic diagrams and photoshopped ads all shot through with the funniest lingo that ever had juice on Besantnagar beach.

A sample from his wedding flowcharts:

And the facebook newsfeed of the Mahabharata