CONFESSIONS OF A SUSPICIOUS MAN

- A Rant By K.

Why does it all look so suspicious?

This was the cause of a major argument between my mother and me some days ago. She maintained that every person has a right to maintain their dignity about their nationality, and a right to oppose any affronts to the same – remarks usually labelled ‘Racist’.

I maintained that all that is fine, but where does the line of contention lie if certain innocuous (or descriptive) words uttered in normally and essentially human tones of sarcasm or animosity are immediately taken as ‘racist slurs’? Who defines them? It is common at inter-racial meetings to refer to candidates as ‘Indians’ and ‘Americans’ just to demarcate. Why then, if a normal person does that, on national TV, is it taken to mean so much more?

I was glad, one day later to see that two top columnists shared my ideas.

One of them said:
“Paying Shilpa Shetty Rs 3 crore plus for enduring a few vilayati gaalis, has been a smart move for the producers of the show, which of late, had become as sluggish as its slovenly participants.”

Another vituperated thusly:
“Saving Shilpa has become like saving the whale or saving Private Lynch. Have we lost it? Why should we get…in(to) a twist over Shapely Shetty being reduced to a sobbing lump because a bunch of white bullies gave her a few verbal punches in broad limelight?
Why elevate the vacuous bubble gum of a celebrity show to a Michelin-starred debate on multiculturalism?
I refuse to make 'Indian' into a racial slur. And I wouldn't make an UN-necessary fuss about being called 'Paki' either, now that we greet every cross-border delegation like baratis. If Limey louts want to make these into hiss words, that's their problem.”

But other than these quasi-political and quasi-moral issues, I think the main problem that I saw, which disturbed me so, was the essential incredibility of it all. I mean the word in the basic and the basest sense: something that cannot be believed. It was all so suspicious.

In a conversation yesterday with some friends, a comment was made:
“Macha, if we are lounging, stinking, in our Bermudas with some beer and making porn jokes, and this seven-foot tall too-sexy ***** comes in dressed in a silk designer saree, and says (Herein a very credible imitation was made of the famous NRI/Hoity-Toity Nasal Indian accented voice): ‘Hi!! I’m ShilPA!!’ We would obviously say ‘Aw **** off, *****!’”

Also was heard this statement:
“So? Any toilet-paper using mother-****** would find it hard to believe that we use our hands…(And here the conversation went into a whole harangue on cleanliness and Paper v/s Hand. Not necessary.)”

The point is this, sarcasm, especially in a foreign accent, sounds very rude. But it isn’t. Think Ozzie or Rolling Stones. A “FECK ORFF!!!” sounds rude, where actually it is more of a daily catchphrase.

And the point is also this: Big Brother has always been known for the wrong things: Participants going in the buff (whole websites are dedicated to procuring and providing videos-with-sound of same), participants sleeping with one another and finally, participants behaving in the most horrible manner to each other just to get the other voted out. So, you are actually required to be impersonal, and at times, very rude, and all this has come to be regarded as an actual trademark of the show, people trashing each other and all that.

Because the deal is this: if you remain, you win loads of money!!! ONE HUNDRED THOU!!! (QUID!!!)

With classic quidnunc behaviour, if you’ll excuse the pun, I shall proceed.

Now, when Ms Shetty was asked to go on, we made a HUGE fuss about it. All Indians who surf porn know the ‘quality’ of BB. It is surprising that Ms S or the media made no mention.

Some days later, the world is SHOCKED by allegations of racism. Everyone most embarrassed. All public support goes to Ms S.

Ms S sniffles and blows her nose and stands seven foot three in her stockinged soles with classic figure and world drools and weeps, basically shedding water from two orifices simultaneously. Some people tie themselves in knots saying how embarrassed they are that such behaviour came out of them, and then the same ‘some people’ depart under a heavy, dark cloud. Then the same people take a six-month paid holiday to India on a ‘Healing Trip’. Though why coming to India should be considered one, the situation screams ‘BRIBE!!!’

The whole of the limey population are falling over themselves trying not to look racist, doing everything to look friendly.

Every single person who agrees with this votes for the aforementioned Amazon. To try and look very un-Racist. Result: Ms S garners 64% or something of deciding votes.

One day later, the aforementioned Amazon wins. Almost EIGHTY LAKHS of moolah (plus the 3 crores that she was already paid to attend (and maybe to accept ‘racist slurs’, who knows?) And she’s all smiles.

Quien sabe?

It looks very very suspicious. A brilliantly executed series of events, I agree, but it makes me feel very weird. Like Einstein must have felt when he came up with a brilliant plan, and then found out that the Americans had used the idea to kill millions of Japanese with the result.

In short, I am saddened. This smacks of Below-The-Belt tactics to me.

I’m sorry, but I don’t approve.

K.

BLOODY HELL!!!

- A Scathing Review by K.

A while ago, I had published on this my blog my feelings about the kind of language used in the Times of India. I might have neglected to mention that the Hindu contains some of the best written articles, in the best English, by far. And this has been true from my grandfather’s days.

That image, unfortunately, was shattered rudely today.
See this review.

I haven’t seen this play. But even then, this review is GIBBERISH. That such things not only get accepted, but actually feature prominently in one of the nation’s largest papers – God!

BRING BACK THE SPANISH INQUISITION!!!

This is the first time I have ever felt like REALLY tearing a review apart. I’ve read some stuff in my time, but this takes the cake. I may get personal here, but really, this is something that must be done.

I shall take isolated examples. To prove my case. The review in BOLD BLACK. My comments in RED.

1) The play was executed well, with only a few technical hitches.
I am liking it!!! There is nothing else to say. This is as non-committal as you can get. Executed well – Okay!! Thanks!!! But no – wait! There were – only a few – technical hitches.
Right.

2) The stage is set to suggest these two locations with two Roman Coliseum like structures at the two ends of the front stage, and a pharaoh's chair at the centre.
A coliseum looks like this:

And a pharaoh’s chair like this:

I wonder how the stage would have looked with two Coliseums (or Coliseii). And classically, the Pharaohs were not known to use high-backed chairs. Most of the chairs of that period barely came off the ground.

3) The actions happen in the appropriate areas.

A VERY funny statement. I am liking ver' much.

4) The music too, occupies scenes between Anthony and Cleopatra…

Bad, bad music. It comes between the two lovers, thrusting its physical presence between their two physical presences.

...but (the music) ended rather abruptly...

every time.

Oops!!! Another hidden barb. Clever, clever writing.

5) The costumes were grand. Cleopatra was dressed in shimmering gold, and the rest of the cast in black.

Now this sentence, for some strange Grammarian reason, strikes me as INCREDIBLY funny. Classic usage of bathos or counterpoint. But let me not ascribe too much.

6) Keeping a basic style of the toga, the actors were given different styles in black.

Now this is amazing. A toga looks like the picture on the left.

From what angle do the costumes even resemble togas???

I really beg to differ on this point.

A Toga is classically a length of cloth almost TWENTY FEET long, wrapped around the body.

7) With same actors playing two roles, Tonse plays Charmaine and the soothsayer and the three main male characters — Agrippa, Anthony and Octavius Caesar — merged with other characters.

WOW!!! One woman, FIVE roles. Two female, three male. AMAZING!!!

And then comes this silent stunner:

8) The single flaw? The performance seemed rather dilute and unconvincing. The strength and resoluteness of Cleopatra even in her emotional shifts, vanity and diffidence is missing.

Now the thing is, this review contradicts itself every other sentence, and sometimes within the same sentence. And this above plum kinda negates everything else. The play was DILUTE (I assume the word is diluuted, but we'll let that go) and unconvincing. Cleo's strength and resoluteness were missing.

9) While none of the actors had any problems with lines, they too struggled somewhere with being convinced themselves.

I CANNOT understand this sentence. They weren't missing lines, but they struggled (somewhere), unconvinced about what????

Oops. I know, I know. You understood that sentence really well. Cool. Thou art better than me. I am just a nitpicker.

But, to continue:

I present to you, the FINAL PARAGRAPH!!! A SUPREME EXAMPLE OF THE WONDERFUL LANGUAGE OF GIBBERISH!!!

MAKE SENSE WHO MAY!!!

TAKE IT.

10) Sudarshana Gupta's work is apparent, nevertheless, her struggle to seem convincing as Cleopatra, only suggests that a play of Shakespeare, even if adapted, becomes in many ways both the best and the worst play for those who are working on it for the first time. Admittedly a difficult script such as this requires a lot of authorial and characterization support, otherwise faces the risk of showcasing good, potential talent, which ultimately does not touch.

Thank you.

I end here.

No, really.

I can go no more, my stomach hurts.

Luv,

K.

To Post or Not to Post

- By K, in a Quandary.

The thing is this. I went on a trip. I want to write about it.
But I am still daunted by The Middle-Class Brahmin's superlative posts of his travels.
Should I blog it or not???

I am thinking....

K.

More Travel!!!

Happy New year Everbody
So says the blogger named V

I finally did some travelling. Every year, my close knit group of wierdos also known as my family goes to visit our religious deity, in a temple town known as Tuljapur, which is about an hour away from one of The Indian Railway's main bastions, a place called Solapur. COntinuing with the information, Solapur also has one of the busiest railway schedules, and at any given time, one can see a train either chugging in or out of the platform.

When I was old enough to be made a part of this tradition, roughly at the age of 4, we used to rent a room at the railway waiting rooms. These are large rooms with two beds, and extremely airy ceilings. I used to always hope that we got room number 3. That was the one with the self-flushing toilet. Perhaos i should explain. There was something amiss with the plumbing, and as a result, this particular toilet used to flush every twenty minutes or so. Aside from laughing at that, there's not much to do in there. No television or radio. The rent is for the room, and two thermos loads of tea. Therefore, I used to explore. Down the stairs used to lead me to platform number one, where I was allowed to go on my own after the age of 10. The big trains come on this platform, the Grade-A trains so to speak. The Udyan from Bangalore, the Dadar-Chennai express with it's colorful engine, the Jayanthi-Janatha taking a pit-stop on it's way to Kanyakumari all found a halt on Platform number 1. Considering Solapur is a pretty important station, the halt is for about twenty minutes. In days gone by, you could exit the train, help yourself to a steaming cup of tea and some excellent onion pakoras. However, the railways, in some insane twist, felt that those stoves would serve as means to aid terrorists and hence discontinued it. Damned paranoid fools. However, they still serve the best omlettes on this station, and i will swear by that!!

Once you get out of the station, the next thing I'd be exposed to was the bus-stand. If people have read my earlier post on how much I love travel, they'd know that busstands have a special place in my heart. This is no difference. Buses coming from the very hearts of Maharashtra pull in, and the clientele that exists serves to remind me that there is more to this state than the city of Mumbai. People still wear the traditional Gandhi caps, these ones white, speak pristine Marathi, and discuss the price of livestock, all adding to the quaint old-world charm. Ofcourse, the dry heat does it's best to sap you of all energy, and the hard water does make you reach for the cola bottle a lot more willingly than usual, but it's all a part of the rustic experience I guess.

Once you leave the town of Solapur, it's about an hour's journey through some sugarcane fields to the town of Tuljapur, wherein lies the temple of Tulja Bhavani. This town used to be extremely well-protected by Shivaji's soldiers, considering it was his deity as well. The temple is part of a fort, and still has a back gate that leads into the hills and to some of the higher vantage points. The temple experience I wont go much into, considering it's not really something I like. The crowds are horrible, the place is incredibly filthy, and begging seems to be the prime occupation considering the droves who descend on you. What I do like is the authentic batata-vada and kadak cha we always have after a trip to the temple. It's been as much a part of the temple going ritual as offering our prayers to the deity itself.

Thinkpotty may complain that he can learn all this from the History channel itself, so I assure him that I have steered clear, for the most part, of giving a Lonely Planet description of the two places. I merely tried to convey the feeling of wanting to go somewhere that this trip always brings out in me.

However, we try and improve the experience each time we go. The past two trips, our pit stio has no longer been the waiting rooms at the railway station. Instead, it is now a rather modernistic hotel which goes by the name of Hotel Ambassador and allows it's guests to watch AXN on it's TV sets, and an excellent view of the biggest cowshed I have ever seen, not to mention an excellent to smell the manure as it is being cleared. Sigh. Somehow, as I sit in my air-conditioned room, and watch tv from a very comfortable bed, I feel that this just isn't the same.

But the omlettes here also rock. There is a silver lining.

Pack your bags people. The World is at large.

Cheers

V

DO GO HERE!!!

A wonderful site, with wonderful conversations. I believe it is to do with things English and Jeeves-ian, though I may be wrong.

Still, good fun.

Sample:

Ho Bloody Ho
Dear Boy,
GO AWAY, DAMN YOU. AVAUNT. BEGONE. YES, I KNOW. NOW JUST FARK OFF!!!!!!

(Apologies. I've just done the computer equivalent of embracing Rome in latter years and bought a Macintosh. As I have yet to work out how to turn off the STUPID PAPERCLIP, it keeps popping up and telling me that it looks like I'm writing a letter. Do you reckon St Paul had this problem? No wonder he was so bloody snippy with the Corinthians if he had a helpful animated paperfastener trying to reformat his scroll every third line).

Also do check out the Gentleman's Dictionary, full of words for those who haven't yet mastered the Queen's, King's or indeed, the Chaps' language...

Do visit this page:

http://twochapstalking.com/

Thanking you,

Yours sincerely,

I remain,

K-Man.

This Day I Share With Ye

- A Supreme Indulgence, by K.

I am, on this day out of the plethora of others I have lived, immensely pleased. I have consulted authorities and found out things about the day of my birth, being the Fourteenth Day of June.

Just the day, not the year.

The things I have found out, about the events that occurred, and the people who share this day with me, I hope, will be harbingers – of essentially good fortune.

It is considered lucky if someone great has been born on one’s birthday, for the reason that the same set of circumstances that made them great, might work for you, as well – since you fall under the same stellar and astronomical signs.

Similarly, it is also considered decently good luck if a great man passed on, on your birthday, for some essence of his greatness may bow be embodied to you, since that person no longer has use for it. Consider that Stephen Hawking, probably the greatest post-Einsteinian physicist, was born on the day that Galileo Galilei shuffled off, so to speak, his mortal coil.

These are the people that share my birthday in one or other way:

Alois Alzheimer.

Karl Landsteiner – Discovered Blood Groups – a great man to anyone who has studied Biology.

Che Guevara – Indeed, I don’t know how to take this. But it’s a fact.

John Logie Baird – He gave us the TV. Great man.

King Diamond – I LOVE MERCYFUL FATE!!!!!!!!!!

Boy George – Boy!! My Karma Chameleon must have been Iridiscent!!!!

Yasmine Bleeth – YAY!!!!! I am louing it!!!!

Steffi Graf – DITTO!!!!

And many of my favourite authors share this day:

Harry Turtledove – One of my favourite SF authors.

Alan Jay Lerner - He gave us My Fair Lady. I need say no more.

Yasunari Kawabata – Japanese Nobel Prize winning author of The Master of Go and The Sound of the Mountain

Jorge Luis Borges – Love this guy, even if he had written NOTHING other than THE LIBRARY OF BABEL.

Jerome K. Jerome – SHARMA!!! NODI!!!

G. K. Chesterton – Now for this I must feel immensely proud, for whether it is my favourite detective Dr. Fell (Based on Chesterton), one of my favourite actors, Alec Guinness (played Father Brown in the only movie made of that series), one of my favourite books (The Man Who Was Thursday) or my writing (I write a little of mystery, in which my main inspirations remain Van Dine, Carr and GKC)….

Roger Zelazny – Again, I am bless’d for this connection: Zelazny is one of the true SF authors I admire, and his Lord of Light remains a great influence.


ALSO:

Superman debuted on June 14th, but so did the Boston Strangler.

Paris falls to the Germans, and Hawaii is accepted by the US.

Bonaparte wins at Marengo, and America accepts the STARS AND STRIPES as its Flag.

The world’s first BOURBON was, it is said, made on this day, and named after the place at which the Rev. Elijah Craig (reportedly) distilled it. The sailors on board the Battleship Potemkin revolted, unaware of this sublime fact.

We are first introduced to PHILO VANCE on June 14th, in THE BENSON MURDER CASE.

I, for now, rest my case.

K.