Wednesday 11 May 2016

A Happy Flowering of Discontent

I wrote a few months ago about the general lack of good Indian politically charged, satirical, webcomics. There was of course Crocodile in Water, Tiger on Land that one could look forward to every Monday. But the heart wants excess of it.

magine my surprise when I found an article about a happy flowering of discontent on Jabong of all places. I'm not complaining, I just didn't expect it to come from such a platform.I It obviously mentioned CWTL, and Appupen's newly created Rashtraman. I had seen the work on newslaundry (Full disclosure: I'm a proud patron and subscriber of News Laundry),
Image Source: Appupen
Then there was Sanitary Panels that has been featured on The Ladies Finger. So you can say I was generally aware of it but not really following it.
Image Source: sanitarypanels
Another one there was The Royal Existentials. Again I had seen an image or two floating around on the social media but it didn't occur to me to follow the trail and find the source. 
Image Source: The Royal Existentials
The one that was absolutely new to me was Inedible India. This is similar to Royal Existentials in the sense that they use older paintings, but they don't restrict themselves to miniature paintings.   
Image Source: Inedible India
Both Inedible India and Royal Existentials remind me of Wondermark by David Malki who uses illustrations from old books and newspapers to make his bizarre and wonderful comics. Some of these are just Facebook pages, others are blogs and websites. It's great to see the wide variety of expressions that are flowering. 

Monday 2 May 2016

Afternoon Birdsong

Soaring on the score
Of Poplar leaves swishing
In a summer afternoon's warm breath
The incessant crow holds forth
Hopping from branch to branch.
Birds I never learnt to name
Call back, counsel, correct, comfort -
In a variety of tongues
We generically call Birdsong.

Saturday 30 April 2016

Pray, would you care for some tea?

I just read this Brain Pickings post that talks about Gorge Orwell's 1945 essay, A Nice Cup of Tea. He starts off by saying 
"Anyone who has used that comforting phrase ‘a nice cup of tea’ invariably means Indian tea." 
Image Source: scroll.in
I found that intriguing, because just today I read this Scroll article that says we have British Propaganda to thank for our national obsession with tea. I'm particularly fond of this sari-and-shoe clad tennis player, enjoying a tea break. I think she represents beautifully what it means to live in a post-colonial world. How we take something very British and make it our own. Some would argue cricket is the best example of that, but I'd go back to tea.

Orwell's essay ends with these very specific instructions
"Lastly, tea — unless one is drinking it in the Russian style — should be drunk without sugar...how can you call yourself a true tea-lover if you destroy the flavour of your tea by putting sugar in it? It would be equally reasonable to put in pepper or salt."
Me thinks the people of Western UP (where I am right now) would just laugh on his face and then pour him a cupful of diabetes-inducing tea. And he'd have an aneurism if he realizes that we drink tea not only with sugar, bit some people will add salt, ginger and that masala chai can have cloves and pepper and all manner of spice.

My personal favorite is the one my friend makes with ginger and anise seeds. It's really refreshing and hot and cooling at the same time.

So long Gorgey boy!

Wednesday 30 March 2016

In defence of Wormholes, Rabbitholes and other Cavties and Appertures

Image Source: worldcat.org/
Wormholes are great things. These tunnels that connect two points that are either very far, or are in different universes - you get the picture. Not like anyone one of us has actually seen one, but I'm sure them physicists know what they're talking about. In any case I'm not planning to argue with them, I just think the concept is really cool - if you stumble down one, you could emerge in a completely new universe (or an old one). This has of course inspired a slew of science fiction and speculative fiction set in alternate universes. My favorite in this line of thought is of course Haruki Murakami's 1Q84. I've talked about the lyrical quality of the prose earlier

Image Source: brainpickings.org/
Coming back from our little detour, Wormholes are great things. So are Rabbit holes, like the one Alice fell down. Because half a century before Einstein got around to writing about the General Theory of Relativity, which laid the conceptual foundation for wormholes, the nerdiest writer of all time, Lewis Carroll (or Charles Lutwidge Dodgso, if you will) needed something to escape the banality of human existence. And so we had a curious Alice tumble down a Rabbit hole and emerge in a Wonderland. We also have a beautiful, enigmatic song by Jefferson Airplane, White Rabbit, which poked holes in Censors' efforts to curtain freedom of expression. It is widely touted as one of the first songs to sneak drug references past censors on the radio. Here is a kickass cover by the absolutely badass Amanda Palmer

'Down the Rabbit hole' is now fairly common expression to describe what we do on the internet. You're reading something and you follow a link to something else and before you know it, you're reading about something completely different. Going down the Rabbit hole in Wikipedia is a genre in itself and gets it's own word - a wikihole. There are those who have explored the depths of these wikiholes and claim that if you keep going down one, you'll eventually end up on the page for philosophy.

I went down a Rabbit hole recently with some very curious results. I was reading one of my favorite bloggers, Jai Arjun Singh (whose blog is incidentally called Jabberwock - a Lewis Carroll character)
Image Source: olx.in
interview author Jerry Pinto. I stumbled on this hilarious poem about an algebra text book written by Messrs Hall and Knight. It talks about how they conspire to torment little hapless little children.

'How hard it is', said Mr Knight, 'to hide the fact from youth
That x and y are equal: it is such an obvious truth!'
We'd put the problem well beyond our little victims' reach.
'It is', said Mr Hall, 'but if we gave a b to each,
- Dr E V. Rieu

I've been there and suffered through it, as have an entire generation of engineering aspirants (if not more). So I was pleasantly surprised to find a poet who shared my woes. I went on a trip of my own, down the memory lane (or hole, if you will). Speaking of memory, I'd like to sign off with a quote from someone who has mined the depths of memory like no other:

People claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years.

- Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

Thursday 3 March 2016

Ink on Paper

Some would say that I've been neglecting writing and it's partially true - I haven't been writing new posts on this blog for some time now. But I've been traveling and I find I don't always have much to say to an impersonal audience. I've been writing letters to specific persons, sharing with them all the random thoughts I've been having. A fair criticism would be that I haven't been posting these letters - the way work timings don't match with post office timings, means I've been carting some letters around for months now. That is set to change and you (you know who you are) are going to get mail soon.