On being told I'm a Komodo Dragon

Nothing earth shattering to report today, except Google thinks I'm a Komodo Dragon with an appetite for life and goats. I admit I do have a thing for goat brains especially if it has passed through a black box labelled Mughali Cuisine.

Among other things I learnt how to take a screenshot on my phone to be able to report this not so earth shattering find of the day. Now that I know how to take more screenshots, except I don't have anything to really frame in my screenshots.

What does one do with learning that one cannot use as often as one would like to? Getting a life is one way of dealing with it. But for the sake of argument, if one wants to not let a new learning drift slowly into the cesspool of stuff-you-don't-wanna-throw-but-you'll-never-return-to. How does one go about creating avenues for using it so that it become routine?

I wish screenshots could be used to bring World Peace or just prohibitionary orders against blasting inane Bollywood music in the neighbourhood. But then again, if wishes were horses, beggars would fly. And I'd be able to swallow life in general without choking on it.

On Monday Mornings

When you're not quite ready to hit the treadmill running,

When you'd rather linger in your bed and catch that last snatch of sweet morning sleep,

When you want to day dream,

And window shop across the interwebs - looking for something amusing,

You find just such a thing from the masters:

A Drink With Something In It

There is something about a Martini,

A tingle remarkably pleasant;

A yellow, a mellow Martini;

I wish I had one at present.

There is something about a Martini,

Ere the dining and dancing begin,

And to tell you the truth,

It is not the vermouth--

I think that perhaps it's the gin.

by Ogden Nash

Image Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/

I could use a mellow dirty martini or a gin and tonic this morning. Except Frost keeps knocking at the back of my head - what was that line about promises?

On word blizzards, uncertainty and versions of reality

I read this really sweet article the other day in the New York Review where the author, Tim Parks bemoans the mountain of books being published today - both as physical printed-on-paper books and ebooks. He posed the question: how does one make sense of it all and navigate through the blizzard of words. He takes you through a short history of writing and publishing and the rise of the Critic and Literary Prize, which have also proliferated to the point of pointlessness. He leaves us with the following options suggesting that it is a battle you have to fight on your own everyday:

"How to respond, then, to this now permanent condition of overproduction? With cheerful skepticism. With gratitude for those rare occasions when we come across a book that speaks to us personally. With forgiveness for those critics and publishers who induce us to waste our time with some literary flavor of the day. Absolutely without indignation, since none of this is anyone’s particular “fault.” Above all with a sense of wonder and curiosity at the general and implacable human determination (mine included) to fill endless space with dubious mental material when life is short and there are so many other things to be done."

Image Source: http://www.goodreads.com/

This reminded me of a character from Murakami's Kafka On The Shore who had a very interesting filter - he would only read books by an author who had been dead for at least 25 years. Clearly its a jape at the reader who isn't applying any such filters (otherwise I'd have to give up reading Murakami himself who is very much alive and writing wonderfully strange, delightful and insightful works).

A friend of mine once described him as The rock star among contemporary writers. What I appreciate about his work is that no matter how strange his worlds get, they are always lyrical. He uses a lot of songs and music references to express a certain mood or to underline a point. One of my favorite examples is how he repeated these lines from the song Its Only A Paper Moon:

Image Source: https://www.worldcat.org/

" It's a Barnum and Bailey world,

Just as phony as it can be,

But it wouldn't be make believe

If you believed in me."

in his novel 1Q84 to underline how displaced the protagonists felt in the world with two moons. You'd be forgiven for thinking the song was written for the novel.

Image Source: http://lipmag.com/

Marquez had explored the theme of two people separated by life and circumstances reuniting decades later in life in Love In Times Of Cholera but unlike the stubborn hope and certitude that Marquez gave his characters, Murakami's characters in 1Q84 know the pain of real danger to their existence and the very real possibility of dying without ever meeting one another. But then again, one shouldn't compare one's right eye to the left. In very much the same way the absolute, impossible, foolishly romantic and final 'forever' that ends Love In Times Of Cholera cannot be compared to the courage and hope with which Aomame tries to alter her reality in 1Q84 - knowing fully that her new reality may differ from her older reality and that one cannot really go back to what was.

Going back to Tim Parks' dilemma - how does one deal with this reality? I tend to stick to recommendations from trusted friends. It is a Barnum and Bailey world, but I get by with a little help from my friends.

On fluid words, lives and identities

Recently I had the good fortune of attending a talk by Prof. Jonathan Gil Harris titled Shakespeare and Bollywood where he tried to explore if there are any similarities between Shakespeare's work and staple Bollywood fare.

He was of the opinion that Shakespeare wrote for an audience that ranged from the English gentry (who were relatively erudite) to the masses (who were largely illiterate). That is the reason why scholarly exploration of themes like Hamlet's existential crisis get juxtaposed with limericks replete with puns and double entendres. He further believes that Shakespeare's language fluidly navigates across classes by borrowing words from a variety of languages including Latin, French, Italian, etc. According to him Shakespeare's language, wordplay and puns are the original item numbers designed to entertain the masses. In that Shakespeare's work is very closely related to the ethos of Bollywood and hence it lends itself to be creatively re-imagined in the genre a thousand times over.

This really insightful and entertaining talk (in the middle of which the venerable professor broke into an item number routine more than once) got me off my butt and reading again. I was procrastinating picking up Prof. Harris's non fiction work, The First Firangis. It has been such a rewarding read that it takes all my will power to not abandon the world and immerse myself in the book completely.

Image Source: http://www.livemint.com/

In the book Prof. Harris tries to tease out what was life like for Europeans who came to the Indian subcontinent roughly two centuries before the set described by William Dalrymple in his work The White Mughals lived out their aristocratic lives and The English East India Company was already an imperial force to reckon with.

While I haven't read The White Mughals, I have read The Last Mughals which is an account of Delhi during the First War of Independence on 1857. Dalrymple's account of life in that time was absolutely masterful and led me to read the fictitious account The Last Mushaira at Delhi (in translation) and a better appreciation of the Ghazal poetic form. So I guess The White Mughals moves up on the To Do list after this book.

Coming back to The First Firangis, Prof. Harris intersperses it with his trademark odd ball humour and insights in equal measure. The white man's burden also includes falling violently sick in foreign locales and he quotes historical evidence of the same:

"Is the Bottom falling out of your World? Eat a Vindaloo and the World will fall out of your Bottom!".

In another section he talks about Ladino - a vernacular mixture of Spanish, Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic that was used by Sephardic Jews fled persecution from the Spanish and later Portuguese Inquisition. 

"And the Ladino word for freedom is not the Spanish 'liberdad', but 'alforria' - derived from Arabic 'hurriya'. Make what you will of that, but clearly Sephardic Jews did not associate the idea of liberty with Spanish Christian rule."

Right now I'm reading about the life of Garcia Da Orta, Portuguese National Hero, Quit-rent master of Bombay, Firangi Physician in the court of Burhan Nizam Shah (Sultan of Ahmadnagar 1503-53), author of Colóquios dos simples e droga da índia (Colloquies on the simples and drugs of India), and subversive questioner of classical system of Greek medicine.

More about this later.

lo que será, será

Image Source: http://www.cdandlp.com/

A friend of mine sent me this song today - Doris Day's Que Sera Sera (whatever will be, will be). The song was a part of the original soundtrack of Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much staring Doris Day and James Stewart.

In the song the narrator asks questions like "what will be?" and "what is to come?". The chorus goes " Que Sera, Sera,/ Whatever will be, will be/ The future's not ours, to see/ Que Sera, Sera/ What will be, will be."

According to Wikipedia, the phrase "Que Sera Sera" has no history in Spain, Italy, or France, and in fact is ungrammatical in all three of these Romance languages. It is composed of Spanish or Italian words superimposed on English syntax. It was evidently formed by a word-for-word mistranslation of English "What will be will be", merging the free relative pronoun what (= "that which") with the interrogative what? *

Image Source: https://fi.wikipedia.org/

This little digging reminded me of another song I was quite fond of in college that involved ungrammatical translation - A Tout le Monde by Megadeth. This song has a far darker tone where Megadeth frontman Dave Mustaine tries to express what a person who wants to end his/her life would want to say to the world. The chorus goes "à tout le monde, à tous mes amis, je vous aime, je dois partir" which roughly translates to "To everyone, to all my friends, I love you, I must leave". 

Unlike what most people think, this song doesn't glorify suicide. The lines from this song that haunt me the most are "Moving on is a simple thing/ What it leaves behind is hard/ You know the sleeping feel no more pain/ And the living all are scarred"

In a way both the songs look at future and uncertainty from very different places. While one talks about accepting and making the most of life's challenges with a rose-tinted optimism, the other talks about highlights how messy and ugly and painful life can get, especially if someone very close to you leaves.

I've not had to deal with any great personal loss so far. I've been fortunate in that regard. I cannot even begin to imagine what what would be like. But it is one of those things that is a given in life. I hope I have the fortitude to deal with it when it comes.

Finding Soul Sisters

Image Source: http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/

I recently had the pleasure of getting to know Soumya and Niveditha, or rather Nirmala and Normala. And we had a gala time connecting over nerdy boys with and over the top flicks.

Its a shame that I didn't get to see Nirmala in avatars other than the 'intellectual woman' (a single half page panel as a pole dancer doesn't count). Meeting Normala was like stumbling upon a soul sister...especially when she judges a guy for reading Chetan Bhagat and still goes for him because he has great shoulders. After all, when the dust has settled on all the commitment drama, a girl needs the right shoulders to rest her head on.

Together they taught me that romance lies where men believe it lies, it's a trick, a shadow on the wall, and a broad shouldered man casts a really good shadow. (I'm also on a Game of Thrones /  A Song of Fire and Ice overdrive...I guess it shows...Varys is totally awesome)

On Persistence or the lack thereof

Not really my forte, you can clearly tell that. I started this as a daily blog because I wanted to keep myself on my toes. I wanted to make sure I reflected on my life regularly and I didn't slip into a sort of complacent coma of daily humdrum. The beginners' enthusiasm waned and daily became every-other-day, and then a couple of times a week, that petered off into a long drought as I hid behind excuses like work, and lack of connectivity, and just lack of brain-space to write something.

What better way to make a change than to share one's source of inspiration: the weird, sublime, and witty Grant Snider talks about words, their characteristics and how they shape you while you shape them in Your Words.

My fav part: 

"Keep your words weird

They will attract like-minded people."

Image Source: http://www.incidentalcomics.com/

Amen!