Unfinished but not imperfect. Not by a long shot.

Go figure. For the life of me, I have not so far been able to understand why unfinished novels fascinate me. Could it be because they were works-in-progress that got interrupted by the author’s death, thus doomed to never get finished? Or, is it because, in Italo Calvino’s words, “A classic is a book which has never exhausted all it has to say to its readers.”? http://bit.ly/16NkyvQ

Here are the three unfinished works-in-progress that enthralled me, listed here in the order of their appearance in my life as a reader:  Truman Capote’s Answered Prayers; Kurt Vonnegut’s If God Were Alive Today; and, last though by no means the least, F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon. Curiously, all three were by writers who were besieged by alcoholism and/or substance abuse and all three are about celebrity and, in varying degrees, celebrity-bashing.

A distinguishing characteristic of Capote’s book (he called it his “posthumous novel” on the Dick Cavell show in May 1971, thirteen years prior to his death), peopled by Unspoiled (and Spoiled) Monsters, is a cavalcade of NHRN characters flitting across its terrain. NHRN ( = Not His/Her Real Name) because in Answered Prayers, Capote put into practice his belief expressed in his Playboy December 1976 interview, viz., “All literature is gossip.” He bravely – almost stoically – endured the wrath of − and ostracization by − his high-society friends for letting the skeletons tumble out of their celebrity closets by the advanced publication of excerpts from his work-in-progress. I was bemused by his trashing of celebrity and enjoyed the writing that no doubt is simply dishy. I have a feeling that being outrageous in all he did and said had by the end of his life become his chief oeuvre. This is what Capote said about himself: “I don’t know anybody who gets as much publicity as I do for doing nothing.” And, this is how he dismissed Jack Kerouac’s On The Road: “It is not writing. It is only typing.” Dorothy Parker agreed with his pronouncement. James Michener who by his own admission knew Capote “tangentially” wrote that he knew “four of the people T.C. lacerates” in Answered Prayers – which he thought was “[a] proctologist’s view of American society” but nonetheless capable of becoming “the roman à clef of my decade” – in the Proustian vein – if only Capote managed to complete it.

In If God Were Alive Today, Vonnegut too is engaged in a similar pursuit – celebrity mauling − although the characters don’t seem to be inspired by real people. The chief protagonist is a standup comic clearly off his rocker. He has been to the loony bin twice. Vonnegut’s take on politics and American values is often devastatingly cynical, occasionally hilarious and at times over-the-top bonkers especially because of Gil Berman’s overlong rants. Chances are, Vonnegut might have trimmed and polished the spiel had Death stayed its hand a little longer. In her interview in the Rumpus magazine http://bit.ly/1dKW3TV Vonnegut’s youngest daughter, Nanette, mentions her son’s opinion that Gil Berman would never have made it to the stage. It’s view worth keeping in mind as the said son is a practicing standup comic, no less. Well, well, well, summing up the world’s status in Vonnegut’s own words: “If God were alive today, he would have to be an atheist, because the excrement has hit the air-conditioning big time, big time.” http://bit.ly/15uXD9x

I read The Last Tycoon recently in its Penguin Modern Classic avatar. Fitzgerald’s close friend, Edmund Wilson, was the editor. He also wrote a brief introduction. In this incarnation, it includes the first six chapters followed by the author’s notes on the cast of characters and alternative plot development pathways. Publisher’s Weekly’s review of Matthew J Bruccoli’s critical edition of the novel  http://bit.ly/17swohl hints at it too being a roman à clef about Hollywood in the nineteen-thirties. The power struggle between MGM producer Irving Thalberg (Monroe Stahr, the chief protagonist) and MGM chief honcho Louis B Mayer (Pat Brady) presumably based on Fitzgerald’s personal observations of life in Hollywood during his sojourn there as a scriptwriter for MGM, Twentieth-Century Fox, United Artists and other studios from 1937 to 1940, was to form the core of the novel. The first six chapters in the Wilson-edited version in which the story seems to be about halfway developed barely suggests this, though. It is only when you go through the supplementary material that you begin to get a vague idea of what a rousingly powerful story it could have been had the author been able to complete it. Even in its truncated form, it is quite an absorbing read. Fitzgerald’s notes give the reader an opportunity to observe at close quarters how a master storyteller shapes his material and steers his narrative. In a review of The Last Tycoon (New York Times, 9 November 1941) http://nyti.ms/18y5lWl J Donald Adams, apparently a regular contributor, expressed his view that Fitzgerald was particularly suited to write about Hollywood “inside out” because he was a “romantic realist”. By this phrase, he implied that Fitzgerald possessed in abundance “a lively sense of the fantastic” combined with “intuitive perceptions”, in addition to an insider’s knowledge of how the system worked owing to a fairly long stay there. He also cites this observation of Peter Monro Jack, Professor and Chair of Rhetoric, University of Michigan (1927-1930): "Had his extraordinary gifts met with an early astringent criticism and a decisive set of values, he might very well have been the Proust of his generation instead of the desperate sort of Punch that he is." That, indeed, is high praise.

One picture is worth a thousand words. A proverb made in China, no less?

Reading about Sergey Brin’s “epiphany” concerning a new language of digital communication http://nyti.ms/1a4IAGu took me to my early days in advertising. There used to be an ongoing argument between writers and art directors about the relative prominence for copy vis-à-vis the pictorial elements in print ads. “One picture is worth a thousand” used to be the favourite last word on the subject uttered by the commercial artists some of whom fancied themselves to be Gauguins, van Goghs, Cézannes and Warhols of the ad world. I must confess, at the cost of sounding like a condescending snob, that not even two or three out of a score of them had even heard the names. The writers, on the other hand, were comparatively better informed. They would at least have taken the trouble to browse through the horrendously expensive, large-format, hard-bound tomes on occidental art direction strewn about in the studio space while waiting patiently for the nose-in-the-air art directors to give them a few moments of their precious time. This apparently was also the often uttered battle cry of marketers against competitors wielding catalogues as their marketing weapon and in similar skirmishes in the US marketplace in the early 20^th century. http://bit.ly/16YUXCi  This reminds me of what Ivan Turgenev wrote in Fathers and Sons (1862): “The drawing shows me at a glance what would be spread over ten pages in a book.” http://bit.ly/14XxHDk Turgenev, in case you missed it, was the “father” of the term “nihilism”. And, the just cited remark by Bazarov, the chief protagonist of Fathers and Sons who was a nihilist and a medical student, was made in connection with the geological formation of Saxon mountains – a conversation ploy he employed with his friends while feigning no interest in art. This is the right moment, folks, to hark back to Brin’s epiphany. It suddenly dawned on him that, in a digital milieu where Twitter posts are “hyper-abbreviated”, a single photograph clicked on one’s mobile phone was eloquent enough to answer a textual query – without a textual or verbal addendum.  Pictures have become text-substitutes, in short. Talk of word pictures? It’s happening here and now. So, photography is no more only for keeping a record of the past. Instead it is used to record this moment. A mobile photo messaging app for Android called Snapchat http://bit.ly/12T8Ayn lets a cellphone user shoot a picture or a video, send it to a friend and control how long it will be visible (up to 10 seconds) after which it vanishes forever as if it never existed in the first place.  Twitter’s Vine is happy with a 6-second lifespan for the visual while Facebook’s Instagram stretches it to 15 seconds. Finally, to place the matter in the larger perspective, think about what Guy-Ernest Debord wrote http://bit.ly/1a7p9Nr in The Society of the Spectacle, supposedly the blueprint for the Parisian student revolt of 1968: "The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images." This was one whole year before the uprising. In the same book, he also wrote: "In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all life presents as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation." Technology has finally made sense of his vision. Or, so it seems. 

Spare me this day self-promotion by celebrities, Beelzebub.

Yesterday must have been my bad scare day. No, the Lord of the Flies did not intrude in my early-morning dream. I woke up much later than usual, though. Thirty past six, to be exact. Like me, the newsboy too arrived late. But that’s hardly unusual for him. As I was doing some stuff on my PC, I did not get my hands on Bombay Times, my habitual entrée to daily news read via its comic strips till well past nine forty-five or thereabouts. As (bad) luck would have it, on turning the faux front page my eyes were ambushed by a headline that said: “I apologized to Milkhaji’s wife for not having written a love song for her”. http://bit.ly/17WM5l4 Without a thought for the consequences and breaking my habit of reading nothing except the comic strips and the SMS Joke in Bombay Times, I plunged headlong into one of the most skillfully plotted pieces of celebrity self-promotion I have come across in my whole life. Were you to accept all that you read in it, you will no doubt arrive at the following conclusions:

1. Unlike other mere mortals, Prasoon Joshi was born with a silver pen – not spoon − in his mouth.

2. Despite PJ’s parents’ assiduous efforts at gathering kafal – a berry specie nearing extinction – to feed him and despite PJ’s own ability to hear the faintly murmured message from Mother Nature about the coming extinction, poor kafal went the way of all flesh. Alas, in spite of his super hearing abilities beyond the ken of mere mortals, PJ could not save his beloved Uttarakhand in its hour of direst need when Mother Nature was shrieking at the top of her voice. I guess even super heroes have their bad hear days. What a sad PJ, sirji!

3. In the best of Bollywood and telly tradition, our hero had a widowed, white sari-wearing nani who educated herself against all odds, became first a teacher and later the school’s head honcho. With a Grade-A singer cum book author in Pahadi for a mom and a Director of Education for a dad, our hero with his exclusive nighttime access to a library in Meerut was well set to become a Grade-A jingle writer.

4. Our hero is far superior, in his own reckoning, to his erstwhile boss who he says is a patriarch. (Oh, oh! We know where this is leading to with violence against women hogging the daily headlines, don’t we?) Our hero also says that he has “no ego when it comes to accepting women as equals. Of course, our hero has magnanimously accepted his former boss’s difficulty in treating him as his equal. Needless to say, our hero confesses to being more into music and poetry than his ex-boss as also to needing his space and silence as compared to his ex-boss’s preference for being "always" surrounded by “more and more people”. So who is the better and more sensitive human being, boys and girls? Tell me, tell me.

5. In his infinite compassion for the female of the species, PJ actually said sorry to Mrs. Milkha Singh for not excluding her from a film on her husband.

6. The only reason our hero tolerates Mumbai: his idol Gulzar also lives there. He is not there for the money, folks – the filthy lucre that he gets for writing ad jingles and film songs, and, now film scripts.  

One could go on and on like this until one puked all over the page at the sheer gall of it all. Running down others is no way to prove one’s superiority as a human being. Equally, no amount of fudging with facts or playing with words no matter how poetically you do it can achieve it, either.

But celebrity can turn one’s head, I guess. Your sense of entitlement gets grossly and unhealthily enhanced. You want the world to acknowledge your greatness, your superiority every waking moment. You deserve it, damn it! If worse comes to worse, there is always the pay-as-you-go route. I’m told many publications don’t mind bending the rules these days. News mimicking ads, you see. 

How to “read” a book before buying.

Zounds! Truth to tell, I’ve been waiting all my life to use this expletive in the right context. I remember it being an often-used favourite of Porthos in the Classic Comics/Classic Illustrated (the series died a long time back, I gather) rendition of The Three Musketeers (1941). It caught my eye – and my fancy – there rather than while reading the Cassel’s yellow-jacketed edition of the Dumas classic. My use of “Zounds!” in the present case is more than justified in my shrewd estimation. It expresses my feeling of delight at having resisted resolutely the temptation of using a clichéd heading for this post, e.g., “Never judge a book by its cover.” (Frankly, though, I’ve followed that advice profitably on several book buying expeditions.) This “Zounds” also gleefully acknowledges my having finally stumbled upon the opportunity to fearlessly write “Zounds!” As you can see, the brief and to-the-point title I chose has just the right tinge of intrigue added to it by the read in quotes. As it must have dawned on all my intelligent and perceptive readers  by now, I am about to deliver, in my capacity as a veteran book reader and bibliophile of long standing, a how-to-do-it-yourself sermon on picking really worthwhile books in a bookshop or a book sale. Skip it at your own peril, boys and girls, especially if you don’t want to live the rest of your life buying and reading trash.

Here, now then, in brief, is my modus operandi of book buying. Once I enter a book shop or a book sale and start browsing, I allow an attractive book cover or an alluring book title to catch my eye. If the book seems to be within the ambit of my varied and catholic interests – and limited budget (yes, I tend to be a somewhat price-conscious book shopper which explains my preference for Strand Book Stall and book sales which the late and lamented Arun Kolhatkar too used to frequent probably for the same reasons), I pick it up and read the blurb on the back cover and elsewhere. (Glancing furtively over my shoulder to make sure nobody’s looking; I also take a hurried whiff of its new-book “fresh from the press” fragrance. Fungal hallucinogens alert for those of you who crave the “old book aroma”: Research suggests that sniffing old books infested with fungi may give the unsuspecting sniffer a “high”. http://bit.ly/S4545W)

I’m rather partial to relevantly catchy book titles, I must sheepishly confess. Maybe the copywriter in me is to blame for this blemish. Let me also add that, in most cases, I have not regretted falling for the alluring charms of such a come-hither. A recent example is my purchase of Martin Lindstrom’s Buy.ology (Random House, New York, 2009). The copywriter in me found the book utterly delightful and extremely enlightening – worth much more than the Rs.425/- less 20% price I shelled out for it in Strand Book Stall. Another rewarding purchase going merely by the front-cover names-dropping is Laurie Rozakis’ Comma Sutra (Adam Media Avon, Massachusetts, 2005), also from Strand. A third example is Patrick Scrivenor’s I Used to Know That ENGLISH (Michael O’Mara Books, London, 2010), bought in an Ashish Book Centre sale not so long ago.

I would be lying through my teeth were I to claim that I have never been laid astray by a tempting title. A glaring example is Stephen Markley’s Publish This Book (Sourcebooks, Illinois, 2010) that was tagged by the publisher promisingly as “Humour/Memoir” but turned out a dud and a drag and a waste of money and time. It is not badly written, mind you. It has its moments of genuine humour but is so stretched out that it tests the reader’s patience to the fullest extent without rewarding him commensurately in return. As the Good Bard would have likely said, “Much Ado about Nothing”, or rather nothing much! Could I, as an unpublished author, have wanted to share the agony of an about-to-be-published author’s rites of passage through purgatory?

If the blurb has whetted my appetite for further enlightenment, I go to the publication details which include the International Standard Book Number (ISBN) and copyright information (in other words, the publishing history of the book in my hands). This is printed behind the title page also known as “verso”. I’m always interested in knowing when the book was first published and which edition of it I’m holding in my hands. I do possess quite a few first editions although I’m not a first-edition collector in the real sense. The price permitting, I prefer hardbound books to paperbacks; likewise, new to second-hand; likewise, genuine to contraband, i.e., pirated. (Recently, however, New York Times told me that a hardcover book’s spine could be an ideal hideaway for bedbugs and their eggs. http://nyti.ms/UFnyc0 The University of Washington Library was among the first few to discover this menace. Question: Could the bedbug menace be used to promote ebooks?)

What I usually do after reading the publication details is to turn to the back of the book looking for an index. Show me a book with an index in its tail and I will show you a book that’s brimming with its own importance as a future reference source. Jokes aside, I adore simply books with indexes. They’re mostly non-fiction, though. An index makes it easy for me to quickly locate those parts of a book that I enjoyed most when I first read it and which I now want to reread. An index, in other words, is akin to a Jurassic Park imitation of a website’s own internal search engine, after all. Other telling backend clues to the writer’s presentation skills and dedication to his subject are an appendix (or appendices), a compendium of footnotes, glossary and a further readings list.

For me, a cast-of-characters listing is a useful indicator of the likely quality of content. When there is a huge galaxy of characters populating a novel, it is a real help to have a reference point to which you can keep returning to reorient yourself if and when you have kind of lost your way in the narrative. Most reading – and, of course, performing – editions of plays have a cast-of-characters page by definition as it were. I fondly remember – and sorely miss – the early Ellery Queen mystery novels with their long cast of characters, a cast-of-characters listing to match and, last but not least, the challenge to the reader to name the murderer (or “the perp” in contemporary lingo) before the Master revealed all. Some of the early Agatha Christie novels had the c-o-c listings too. I used to own all those wonderful Ellery Queen and Agatha Christie mysteries mostly paperbacks. I can almost see those scrumptious Ellery Queens in their signature Penguin paperbacks in a green-with-a-white-centre-band jacket. Alas, I lost all that precious caché out of sheer carelessness. 

Before I say adieu, take a look at this: http://bit.ly/Y17srx

Please, sir. May I have a kilo of books?

I kid you not, boys and girls. Here’s what the ad with a black borderline in the Mumbai Mirror of Wednesday, 13 March 2013 (page 3, top left hand corner), said. And, I quote verbatim:

BOOKS BY WEIGHT

New & Pre-owned Books

Buy Books by the Kilo.

Rs.200/- per Kilo for Children’s Books & Mills & Boon, Rs.100/- per Kilo for all other Books.

Minimum Purchase of ½ Kilo and In Multiples of 100 Grams there-of [sic]

All subjects included

One million books will be displayed during the course of this exhibition.

Venue:

Shri Sunderbai Hall

Nathibai Thakersey Marg, Opp. Churchgate Station

Behind Income Tax Office, Mumbai 400002

Tel: 95942 21040

Date: from Wed. 6^th to Sun. 24^th March 20013.

Time: 10 am to 8 pm

Sundays Open

CREDIT CARDS ACCEPTED

YOU CAN GET 9 LADYBIRD OR 7 PICTURE

BOOKS IN Rs.200/- A KILO

YOU CAN GET 4 FICTION OR 1 COFFEE

TABLE BOOK IN Rs.100/- A KILO

*We do not provide plastic bags please bring your own carry bags.

My guess? A lawyer (if not full-fledged, then an intern) – not a copywriter – wrote the text. (S)he lacked finesse, forgot to proofread (“there-of”). Also, please mark the euphemistic legalese (“pre-owned” for “second hand”, a usage borrowed from car trade). At least, they told a fair amount of truth if not the whole truth. I noticed that some of the books on display had on the front fly page a borrower’s record sheet, a familiar presence in library books. Also the pages of a lot of books were on the verge of yellowing.

The exhibition space was fairly well packed, a rare occurrence on a weekday afternoon. The shoppers were mostly young, enthusiastically lugging their shopping baskets behind them, jostling, pushing, jamming the aisles as most Indians are wont to do. A majority were buying mass market fiction, children’s books and computer-related books. In the former category, the best of the chaotically scattered lot seemed to be Grisham and Crichton.

As for me, after two hours of plowing through the tumult, I settle for three books, two hard-bound and one paperback. The first one, Molly Weir’s Spinning Like A Peerie (Lomond Books, Edinburgh, 1999), is the paperback sequel to Trilogy of Scottish Childhood. http://bit.ly/10T508G">http://bit.ly/10T508Ga>.  

The second book to catch my eye and fancy was Joseph Roth’s The White Cities: Reports From France 1925-39 (Granta Books, London, 2044). Roth was a hotshot German newspaperman who quit the Weimar Republic and relocated in France. His collection of essays (or, belles lettres, in deference to their vintage) would be worth reading, I thought.

My third purchase was a quirky collection of misprints, typos and other howlers: Martin Toseland’s A Steroid Hit The Earth (Portico Books, London, 2008). None of my esteemed fellow shoppers would have spared a glance for my eclectic and weird choices, I’m sure. Well, well, well. C’est la vie.

My rich haul did not cost much. Tipping the weighing scale at 1.2 kg, it left my wallet lighter by Rs.120/-. The other shoppers in the cashier’s queue had much heavier loads to carry and pay for. This masterstroke of exhibition marketing was the brainwave of Butterfly Books. Only someone who deals in books by the container loads could have thought of selling them by weight. Other booksellers ought to follow suit with suitably modified baits.  

The world owes me one. Really?

In the heat and dust raised by the Delhi gang rape and similar ongoing criminal atrocities, the mention of a key trigger of such events is conspicuous by its absence. I wonder how all the expert analysts forgot to dwell on it. This key spark, come to think of it, is the sense of entitlement every criminal, be he a rapist, a murderer, a petty purse or chain snatcher or whoever, has in abundance. (The sense of entitlement, mind you, is not even a distant cousin of self-worth, i.e., “the belief that one is worthy of accomplishments earned through hard work” according to the Why Is It Always About You? author, Sandy Hotchkiss.) This narcissistic trait overrides all scruples and moral restraints in a person about to commit a criminal offence. Such a perp’s self-justification may be couched along the following lines:

“I feel like I never had what I needed, so I didn't feel bad about taking what I wanted, be it taking credit for other people's work, sleeping with other people's girlfriends, or just taking whatever object I wanted at the time. Taking didn't (always) mean theft, but it did mean I sometimes shorted others, or made them wait, or whatever. If I wanted it, I would get it, because I deserved it. Rules, laws, and social contracts are for people who need guidelines. I don't, so I make my own rules and don't care if you don't like them. You just don't know any better. If you did, you wouldn't question me.” http://bit.ly/WJ7FUc>

No solution to India’s systemic meltdown is on the horizon. Certainly not in the short run. What’s essential is a total overhaul. How do you inhibit the endemic occurrence of the sense of entitlement? Concessions and reservations have only worsened the situation. Excessive economic inequalities are not making matters any better. The naked use of power, political and/or economic, to make anything – including the worst wrongs – right is not going to be tolerated indefinitely by the mango people. The day of reckoning is not too far away, it looks like. The sooner everyone – VVIPs, VIPs and celebs – join the mainstream and learn to accept it (no security at public expense, no sanitized living in gated quarters), the better it would be for all Indians. Maybe, urban guerrilla action based on the 70s-style Western template won’t be such a bad thing.   

Churchill, Hitler, Stalin, Mao: what’s the difference?

If my last post (From Sir Winston to Washington Post) seemed to suggest that I had joined the Churchill fan brigade – known more for its unseemly concern with the Great Man’s dentures than with his Imperial and imperious criminality – as a fresh and overenthusiastic recruit, let me clear the air. What I ought to have said in that post was that his Indophobic outburst in the June 1947 debate on the India Independence Bill in the British Parliament sounds prophetic in the prevailing Indian political context. I stand corrected and abashed for my haste. To save face, my only lame-duck – if that! – excuse could be that, in any case, a visionary – even an accidental one – is sighted and anointed only after the event. If Hitler was responsible for the Holocaust, Stalin for the Holodomor (“killing by hunger” in Russian) or the Great Famine of Ukraine (1932-33) and Mao for the mammoth number of starvation deaths in the Great Leap Forward (1958-62), Churchill needs must shoulder the responsibility for the 2000 a month death toll in the 1942-43 Bengal Famine. In his own words, Indians were “a beastly people with a beastly religion” who “bred like rabbits”. http://ind.pn/UofYOK Ergo, they probably were beyond redemption and not worth saving. What the King Emperor’s First Minister did to worsen the situation in the Bengal Famine was to deny food shipments to India and insist on rice exports from India to shore up the war effort. Churchill’s collaborators in his war crime were: the Japanese occupation of Burma that choked off rice imports to India; an untimely cyclone in the Bay of Bengal that wiped out the winter crop; and a panicky government that confiscated in a knee-jerk reaction all vehicles that used to ferry rice from Burma in order to keep them out of reach of the invaders. The government also started buying food grains on the open market to feed the troops and the war workers, thereby nudging the traders into hoarding the scarce stuff and spawning what came to be known as “the black market”. (I vaguely remember hearing the phrase repeatedly at 233 Khetwadi Main Road for the first time a bit after the Quit India call by Gandhi on 8 August 1942.) In a sense, Churchill was the blackguard who brought the black market to India. 

From Sir Winston to Washington Post.

Most of my life, I have been far from an admirer of the late Sir Winston Churchill. I had always looked at him through a jingoistic prism as an India baiter and an India hater.  Recent events, though, have made me sit up and revise my opinion drastically. Saying the following in the British Parliament at the time of the debate on the India Independence Bill in June 1947 showed acuity, perspicacity and wisdom that was nothing short of a visionary’s. “Power will go to the hands of rascals, rogues, freebooters; all Indian leaders will be of low caliber & men of straw. They will have sweet tongues & silly hearts. They will fight amongst themselves for power & India will be lost in political squabbles. A day would come when even air & water... would be taxed in India." Why are Indians so offended now that Washington Post paints Dr Manmohan Singh in these lurid strokes: “a dithering, ineffectual bureaucrat presiding over a deeply corrupt government”? http://wapo.st/Q6M00Q A part of the answer to this riddle may lie in the fact the urban Middle India craves for constant adulation from the West. Partly, it may be the backlash of believing in the hubris of India Shining and India-is-a-global-power brouhaha. Given these circumstances, the mildest rebuke or a slap on the wrist from an outsider, particularly an Occidental, may seem akin to public tar-and-feathering, even a torture rack.

Wee Bonnie Scotland.

Sir Isaac Pitman and I are old nodding acquaintances. It transpired thus. Smack after the conclusion of my Secondary School Certificate finals in March 1952, I enrolled at the Abhyankar Typing & Shorthand Institute situated bang next to the Rammohan High School at Prarthana Samaj. This much respected institution of that time happened to be within walking distance of 233 Khetwadi Main Road in South Mumbai where the Mankars used to reside at that point in my existential timeline. http://bit.ly/48tnw4. I had joined Abhyankar’s in order to learn touch typing to make up for my atrocious handwriting. The sacrilegious thought of trespassing into the venerated Pitman territory had never crossed my mind. Shorthand used to be all the rage among the young people then, particularly among girls because it was seen as a handy doorway – almost an open sesame − into the job market. The reason why I thought of Sir Isaac now is the late Ms Molly Weir, Miss Bonnie Scotland’s real- life avatar. Till the time I met Molly in print, the only Bonnie Scotland I had heard of was the eponymous Laurel and Hardy comedy http://bit.ly/N4c6ot.  I saw the hilarious movie as a child at the old Metro Cinema, a familiar Dhobi Talao landmark. To cut a long digression short, I picked a copy of Molly Weir’s Trilogy of Scottish Childhood (Diamond Books, London, 1988) at a sale in the Sunderabai Hall fairly recently. The book that I consider as perhaps the best autobiography I’ve ever read cost me a pittance: no more than a measly Rs.50/-. Molly, the bonnie Glasgow lassie, was a self-confessed whiz at Pitman’s shorthand. She toured all over Scotland as the Pitman brand ambassador in order to popularise the training course by giving live speed demos without receiving a single farthing by way of remuneration for her work. One of the most endearing things about Molly’s memoirs is her detailed description of the lengths she and her family would go to just to save a penny or two. That, I guess, gladdened my Third World soul. So also did the description of the way they had to tighten the belt in the World War II rationing regime. Then again, her chitchat about her tramcaur journeys downtown and elsewhere in Glasgow too touched a chord in my memory of things past. http://bit.ly/NjclbB. Molly’s most appealing characteristic as a writer, to my old-school way of thinking, is her self-deprecation, her humility, her modesty, and not the least her reticence in describing certain major events centring on herself. For instance, she describes in telling details the celebration of the wedding of her aunt but glosses over her own wedding with a sentence or two. Similarly, all through her courtship by her beau, she refrains from providing us with the details, even his name. Her autobiography gives ample scope for her humanity, her candour and her wry – at times, droll − sense of humour. It’s refreshing to meet someone who calls a spade a spade, doesn’t have a swollen head and misses no chance to laugh at her own foibles. For the record, Molly started her working life as a steno-typist, took part in amateur dramatics on the side and ultimately made a breakthrough to become a renowned BBC regular as well as an acting professional in British theatre and cinema. I sure would love to read the rest of her autobiography. 

The real tragedy of Rajesh Khanna.

Now that Kaka has made his exit from the worldly stage on the new moon day notorious for immoderately excessive imbibing and landing in the gutter at the end of the unbridled liquid orgy (“gatari amvasya”), it is time to ponder his real tragedy. After Devyani Chaubal, Bollywood’s own Hedda Hopper, rechristened RK “Superstar” in her Star & Style column “Frankly Speaking” and a wee bit later Stardust dubbed him “The Phenomenon”, his thirst for attention must have reached unquenchable depths especially because his “hit” count was dipping fast. This longing may have been further augmented also because he was by nature a loner, guarded – his reticence often bordering on total silence − in his social interactions and intensely insecure. Jack Pizzey, who made some of the episodes of BBC’s Man Alive, described RK on the sets of Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s Namak Haraam (1973) saying that he was someone with the “charisma of Rudolph Valentino, the arrogance of Napoleon, and he’s late.” http://tinyurl.com/MabfOE. His oft-quoted dialogue from Safar (1970) was: “Mein marne se pehle marna nahi chahta.” (“I don’t wish to be dead before dying.”) Unfortunately, at the end of his heyday, Kaka must have died a million deaths in his mind and finally resigned himself to an ongoing spell of mourning till his final exit for his loss of superstardom. Come to think of it, the real tragedy of Rajesh Khanna was not being here on earth to relish the eulogies from the media hyenas as well as his hypocritical Bollywoodian peers after his departure. He missed the grand hurrah. He did.

Only in incredible India, OTT goes ballistic invariably.

Correct me if I err. We almost always seem to overdo our eulogies shamelessly. I noticed this tendency in at least three recent instances: Dev Anand, Shammi Kapoor and Dara Singh. All these dearly departed were okay in their own way in their own fields. But to raise them to the level of cultural icons and societal milestones is scandalous − in fact, the height of hypocrisy, even if it is done in a fit of extreme nostalgia. Take the case of the most recent departure. He might have been Rustom-E-Hind but he made his mark in WWWF Free Style Wrestling in the fifties, sixties, seventies and early eighties which, if memory serves, was riddled with “fixing scandals” especially vis-à-vis “return bouts”. He featured in the Wrestling Observer Newsletter Hall of Fame in 1996 for wrestling in India, England and Canada and as a one-time holder of the Canadian Open Tag Team Championship. http://bit.ly/MsJPaF. In his other incarnation as a film star, he was at best a D-grade actor in mostly B- and C-grade movies. He was to all appearances a decent human being insofar as no gossip about unseemly behaviour ever seems to have attached to him. So, enough already.

Lentil soup for the Middle Indian soul.

Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen’s Chicken Soup for the Soul: 101 Stories to Open the Heart and Rekindle the Spirit is a worldwide bestseller. It got its start from their tours as motivational speakers. It was on the circuit that they picked up the short inspirational, life-affirming and soul-uplifting vignettes about ordinary lives. These stories are meant to nurse back the sick soul of the reader to emotional health, much like the yummy-smelling bowl of steaming chicken soup served to a patient to restore his physical and psychological well-being. The logic behind this sort of pseudo or placebo therapy runs along the following lines. Even the worst sinner hopes to find a sliver of everything that’s right with the world and to feel the hope, joy, love, peace, tears and healing that he suspects are lurking somewhere just beyond his reach. Offer him an access to his wish list at an affordable price and in comfortable surroundings and he will be in your debt for ever out of gratitude and relief. Is Aamir Khan’s Satyameva Jayate with its multichannel telecast as well as webcast doing anything less for Middle India? It’s weekly therapy made supremely palatable by his much venerated, soothing presence (don’t miss those empathetic umms he peppers his listening-to-the-victim spells with!) to rid Middle Indians of their guilt and superciliousness towards the less fortunate Others. Shrewd fellow that he is, loveable Aamir Sirji may have already struck a multi-billion deal for a print blockbuster with DVD included for all you know. Once this surefire antidote is safely stored in your medicine chest – er, bookcase,  who would need to join an NGO or a candle-lit march? 

Black and white.

Should you feel at the end of this post that I didn’t work hard enough to find a more tellingly appropriate title, let me stop you right here and assert that you’ve got it all wrong. “Black and white” is not about the skin colour of the main protagonists of the Essie Mae Washington-Williams’ book, Dear Senator A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond (Regan Books, New York, 2005). Far from it. It’s about the joyous discovery that we can read in black and white the strange tale of an always-under-the-wraps filial relationship. I am particularly impressed by the restraint, tolerance and sense of humour of the story teller – Strom Thurmond’s out-of-wedlock first-born daughter – while telling us what is mostly a sad tale beginning with a common-law wife’s rejection by her Southern aristocratic husband and finding a closure in her daughter being publicly accepted by her father’s family. Essie Mae did not betray the “state secret” of her politician father until after his death at the ripe old age of 100 − for nearly eight decades, to wit. What’s more, it took a lot of prodding from her family and friends, the way she tells it, to finally persuade her to quit the closet. Her life story seems straight out of a sudsy soap opera made on a fairly generous budget. What impressed me most is the way the book encapsulates the history of the emancipation of African-Americans and their integration in the main stream in the 20^th century – the civil rights movement, in other words − along with the pertinent Civil War background (including the Jim Crow “separate but equal” era highlights) without interfering with the main, poignant narrative. An unusual and rewarding read and an insightful document of immense societal significance, I vouch. And, to think that I managed to sniff it out from the pile of books at the Strand Bookstall’s Rock Bottom Sale for a mere fifty rupees! (P.S.: A lot of the credit for the enchanting and languidly elegant style and the lucid and logically organised flow of the narrative of this excellent memoir, I guess, belongs to the “as-told-to” collaborator and scribe, William Stadiem.)   

Right reasoning, Wrong man.

This once-upon-a-time whodunitphile happened to read fairly recently a vintage detective (Peter Duluth) novel by Patrick Quentin that intrigued him no end. Set in a virtual asylum in the post Wall Street crash period, the alleged detective is a Broadway producer who drinks himself to this place of confinement for fools and drunks. While recovering from his ailment, he falls for a fellow inmate, nearly solves the mystery http://bit.ly/IFfbYU but fails to pick up the right suspect. That honour goes to the head of the “institute” modelled in the Freud mould. The milieu is very country manorish as in Agatha Christie. The writing is quaint. For example, I had never come across the usage “the heel of Achilles” prior to reading A Puzzle for Fools (Penguin, 1986; originally published in 1936, the year I was admitted to the world). Quentin also uses a lot of sleight of hand stuff in the Christie vogue. It is a fairly engrossing debut for Peter Duluth, an about-to-become amateur sleuth in a somewhat Lord Peter Wimsey/Ellery Queen vein minus the scholastic and/or autocratic pretensions.

Why is Akshaya Trithiya like Valentine’s Day?

The answer is a no-brainer, come to think of it. Hint: Buy, buy, buy. Spend, spend, spend. Better still: splurge, splurge, splurge. Shop, shop, shop for expensive baubles and trinkets till you drop, drop, drop out because your credit card limit is kaput or ennui has finally set in. In short, both AT and VD have been spawned by Commerce as ideal days to prove how big hearted and deep-pocketed you are. Both AT and VD got a fresh lease of life in the heart of Middle India, post-liberalisation. Neither was top of the mind prior to the turn of the century. I know somebody who’s going to be very, very unpopular for telling the truth. But what to do? Satyameva jayate!

When will the Titanic sink, Dadi?

That was one of the most astute comments coming out of the mouth of a bored 5-year-old watching James Cameron’s much hyped Titanic bleary-eyed when it was first released in Mumbai. I was sitting in a seat within earshot and couldn’t agree more with the remark and the sentiment. In fact, watching the over the top brouhaha going on the wide screen, I could not help wondering if the much celebrated director had taken – prior to making his magnum opus − a sabbatical in Bollywood in order to observe how they blow everything out of proportion out here or sometimes make it crawl to a mind-numbing statis that pretends to be the very thing it is not. This rant was brought on by the reminder over the FM Monday morning that the centenary of the Titanic’s demise was on 14 April. To me, all luxury liners stand for monumental extravagance, wastage of precious resources, elitist vanity and an insult to common folks. So what are the losers the world over celebrating the centenary for?

Purple prose. Scarlet sirens.

When it comes to gossip, I am neophobic. Old is gold for this old timer. You may have noticed my predilection here http://bit.ly/HBk5Fl, here http://bit.ly/HeTW9E, here http://bit.ly/H8SxTE, and, here too http://bit.ly/HIDCEa. To indulge in my fondness for time-tested gossip, I recently breezed through two books of the canon. Truth to tell I had bought them both in the US in spring 2010 and devoured them hungrily post haste. Both the books deal with Hollywood’s dirty linen and scrumptious scandal of mid-20th century vintage. Of the two, Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon (Dell Publishing, 1981) is the so-called “legendary underground classic of Hollywood’s darkest and best kept secrets”. Anger’s angry and frenzied – though unauthenticated − narrative rips along merrily into the innards of the studio system, spilling rumours and innuendos galore and generally playing havoc with the filmdom’s carefully crafted propagandistic iconography. An entire chapter of Hollywood Babylon (Con Game) is devoted to the brief but sensational career of the tabloid that spawned the celeb-centric yellow-journalism culture. Confidential was its name. It trashed exalted reputations willy-nilly spreading terror in the hearts of the denizens of tinsel town for a span of no more than five years. It opened shop in New York in 1952 and folded for all practical purposes in 1957. The second book of the canon I ran through recently was Henry E Scott’s Shocking True Story (Pantheon Books, New York, 2010). A real page turner it is – fully living up to its subtitle: The Rise and Fall of Confidential, “America’s Most Scandalous Scandal Magazine”. Trying to live up to its don’t-give-a-damn motto: “Tells the Facts and Names the Names”, Confidential spawned an entire tabloid, paparazzi sub-culture whose banner is kept flying today by the likes of People, E! Online, Ok! and TMZ.

Corn sells. And, how?

Corn sells. That used to be the war cry of Mrs Tara Sinha in the good old late 60s as she restlessly paced the passage way in front of her office in Advent, next to the Golwalla Swimming Pool near Sachivalaya. http://bit.ly/Hls6wJ. This was her daily clarion call for the print ad for Tata’s Magic detergent. Almost every single morning, there used to be a planning meeting, sometimes because Mrs Sinha had come up with what she thought a better idea than the ad made by the creative team . A new layout would be presented in the afternoon. By evening, it was back to the drawing board. (The product manager for Magic was Camellia Panjabi. She was the Marketing Manager of The Taj Group of Hotels in the JRD-Ajit Kerkar era where she pioneered Szechwan and Thai cuisine in the 5-star restaurants. Later on, she made a name for herself as the trail-blazing restaurateur who almost single-handedly introduced Indian regional cuisine in the UK.) Mrs Sinha had just taken over as the Bombay Branch Manager of Clarion-McCann and was heading a group of clients as well. She was a dynamo of ideas and, later in her career, worked for Coca-Cola in India as well as the US. She was always ready and willing to chip in generously with advice for any problem, including a personal one. In the early 70s, my friend, RV Rajan, had worked closely with Mrs Sinha in the Delhi-based but unimaginatively christened Advertising Corporation of India, a Clarion-McCann sister company meant to handle public-sector accounts. In his self-published autobiography, Courage My Companion, Rajan recalls how she had clearly specified what a corporate wife should be like: her qualities and her duties, so to speak. On pages 63 and 64 of his book, he quotes Mrs Sinha’s advice “… on the type of girl I [he] should marry. Because I was a successful adman and had a bright future, she felt that my life partner should be a smart and capable girl. She said, ‘Marry a girl who will be comfortable entertaining clients at home. She must be sophisticated to be able to socialise with the wives of the clients.’ In other words, she wanted me to marry a girl who could support my career.” He did exactly the opposite. Maybe, in her heart of hearts, she thought of it as the corniest thing that could have happened to him.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers.

The book title is clunky. It doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue. When ordering my copy from Infibeam I typed ‘Beyond’ instead of ‘Behind’ in the search field. The search engine promptly amended it, though. The title comes from an advertising hoarding for Italian floor tiles that used to be on the since demolished wall behind which the by now world-renowned slum abutting the Mumbai airport, Annawadi, exists. Though clunkily named, the book is far from clunky. It reads like a Charles Dickens novel set in present-day Mumbai, though fiction it most definitely is not. Katherine Boo has done an exceptional job of making us feel – albeit at second hand − what it’s like to exist like a virtual nobody at the bottom of the social pyramid of Heartbreak City with the most tenuous “temp work” link with the life in the legitimate metropolis − and with all the cards in the deck stacked against the subsister. No names have been changed to protect anyone’s privacy or to ward off the peril of getting sued for defamation. The book is a piece of pure reportage devoid of judgemental subtext – an admirable feat rarely achieved in chronicling life, high or low. Being an outsider may have helped Boo to reach this state of equanimity while telling the Annawadi story. It certainly seems to have lent a down-to-earth perspective to the narrative. Will the publication of Behind the Beautiful Forevers make a difference to the lives of Annawadians? Local politician and 'slum boss' Asha Waghekar doesn’t think so. http://yhoo.it/GCn7bq. Her neighbour, Akhtar Husain, a younger sibling of Abdul who is one of the main ‘characters’ in Boo’s book, agrees with Asha. Boo is hopeful that the publicity garnered by her work may work in favour of Annawadi and other slums particularly because she has removed the cloak of invisibility from the unconscionable injustices heaped on the innocent slum dwellers. http://bit.ly/GEzqWg. Let us hope she is right. Only Time will tell, I guess.

Bad to worse. Then better, maybe.

“We are headed for a Malthusian crisis,” he said, with professorial confidence. “Plankton levels are dropping. Bees are dying. There are tortilla riots in Mexico, the highest wheat prices in 30-odd years.” He paused. “The question we have to answer is: How do we kill four of the world’s six billion people in the most just way possible?” http://nyti.ms/wPL7Ah


In early 2007, 75000 Mexicans rioted over the sharp rise in the price of tortillas, staple diet of the poor. This was not front-page news. http:// aol.it/zpnUlE Yet a sharp-witted troll in the US blithely cited the civil disturbance as one of the noteworthy symptoms of the coming global crisis. Trolls are member of a growing Internet subculture which is marked by a fluid morality and a disdain for pretty much everyone else online. If the reading of the situation by the troll sounds like loony tunes, please remember that it is the opinion of someone who lurks in the underbelly of the Internet and hardly ever comes in touch with normal folks. Come to think of it, there is more than an iota of truth in what he said although his final solution may sound extreme. Take a country like Incredible India of the Economic Miracle fame. Its citizenry is blessed with more mobile phones than access to toilets, more cars than roads to run them on, more electrical appliances than electricity to power them. Iniquity, inequality, corruption, make-believe ‘garibi hatao’ programs, child abuse, delayed and/or miscarried justice, hell holes doubling as prisons, orphanages, hospitals… such is the proletarian lot. Is the Malthusian crisis is at the root of it all? Even if it is, there may be a more humane alternative to the troll’s prescription of decimating the numbers of the lesser god’s progeny. How about asking old Karl Marx’s ‘opiate of the masses’ to ride to the rescue? Renunciation is a virtue in the Hindu scheme of things. So it may just do the trick. This way, the powers that be are also spared the worry of the likelihood of a bloody rebel. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World had soma, a tranquilizer without after effects. Should Brave New India not emulate the shining example?