What tangled webs we weave!

"Oh what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practise to deceive!"

The famous lines are from Sir Walter Scott's Marmion, Canto vi. Stanza 17 http://tinyurl.com/583udf.

There is, I'm told, a seldom quoted follow-up to this famous quote. I could not find it in the poem. I found it mentioned at http://tinyurl.com/5kz7tr:

"But my – how we improve the score,
as we practice more and more."

The Dorothy Parker take-off (also attributed to "J. R. Pope") http://tinyurl.com/5n3j7h reads:

"Oh what tangled webs we weave
When first we practice to deceive.
And when we've practiced for awhile,
How we do improve our style!"

Marmion is a story of treachery and deceit, greed and lust, an almost worthy parallel to the contemporary morality tale I have been following on the Internet with mixed feelings. Not that it personally concerns me. But a dear friend, a trusting and sincere acolyte of a "spiritual teacher", is one of the unsuspecting "flies" in the tangled web that has been woven.

If one were to employ the traditional Christian ecclesiastical terminology (with trepidation, no doubt, born out of diffidence due to unfamiliarity), one of the major trespasses in the story could be termed a sin akin to 'simony', i.e., "the deliberate intention and act of selling and/or buying spiritual goods or material things so connected with the spiritual that they cannot be separated from it. Simony is a violation of the virtue of religion, and a sacrilege, because it wrongfully puts a material price on spiritual things, which can be neither bought nor sold. The term is derived from the name Simon Magus who, in The Acts of the Apostles, tried to buy the power to confirm people in the Holy Spirit." http://tinyurl.com/5kz7tr.

In the late fifties or early sixties, I used to be quite an acolyte (or 'fan') of Leslie Charteris's The Saint (aka Simon Templar, so called most likely after the Knights Templar whose chief raison d’être was the protection of Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem after the first Holy Crusade of 1096). Many of his adventures I then followed harked back to the twenties. He was a burglar par excellence who robbed, like Robin Hood, the "ungodly". The Saint's targets included corrupt politicians, warmongers, Nazi scientists, vanity publishers and similar consumer ripoff artists, greedy bosses exploiting workers, con men and similar scums of the earth. He used to often charge a "ten percent collection fee" to cover expenses when he extracted large sums of money from his victims, the remainder being returned to the rightful owners, given away to charity, shared amongst his business associates. I also fondly remember his habit of peppering his conversation with such irreverent asides as "As the actress said to the bishop".

I was reminded of The Saint because the story I have been following concerns a modern-day "Sage" (henceforth S for short). From all available indicators, he possesses business acumen of the highest order. In his career, he used it to build the business enterprise he ended up heading at the time of his retirement. In his later life, he seems to have been employing it to set himself in a lucrative "profession". Those in the know consider the spirituality business a very competitive and challenging field of endeavour worldwide. Our protagonist astutely decided to test the waters before plunging in. The late seventies or early eighties saw him serving as a translator/interpreter to an Advaita teacher with impeccable credentials and international repute who could not speak English. It was probably during his apprenticeship there, also S's golden opportunity to do in situ market research, that he might have stumbled on the ideal target audience for the new guru persona he was soon to let loose on the unsuspecting manifestation. He would formulate his teaching to appeal to the Western psyche impatiently looking for quick fixes.

According to the experts, what S cleverly did was to oversimplify the Advaita teaching into neo-Advaita or pseudo-Advaita malarkey (as detractors claim). He achieved this feat by blurring the distinction between three simultaneously existing levels of the one non-dual Reality and latching on to the absolute level ("Nothing is really happenng") as the only view. He also selectively presented absolute level concepts such as "Nobody is the doer", "Everything is a happening", "Everything happens by God's will" and so forth as the ultimate truth under the authority of such venerable sources as the Buddha and Wei Wu Wei (the Irishman Thomas Gray) rather than the guru whose mantle he claimed to wear.

By so doing, goes the argument, S offered what could be called "the lazy seeker's way to instant nirvana" with the "feel free to do anything without feeling guilt or shame" adjunct. Boys and girls, meet Kick-ass Advaita – just what you've been looking for! Canned wisdom you can store on your shelves as unconscionably high priced books, tapes, CDs, DVDs for instant referral. The daily talk at home is free but generous donations (guru dakshina) are always welcome. If you wanted to hear S at a luxury resort after paying a Western price for the priivilege, you were welcome to the annual retreat away from home.

S also gathered around him, goes the story, a coterie of cronies to help him package and market his products for a cut from the pie in the sky. He even authorised one of them, a wily Westerner, as his spiritual successor. When a few years back, there was a scandal at an annual retreat with charges of financial impropriety and serial adultery, the cronies rushed in to do instant damage control. The stigma continues to exist, though.

But, then, as the actress said to the bishop: "Who cares?"

The tongue cleaner.

I was born with a pure silver tongue cleaner in my mouth. http://tinyurl.com/5pctle. I could say this with utmost confidence and nary a hint of irony or hype. Yes, the very first tongue cleaner I remember using as a child at 233 Khetwadi Main Road http://tinyurl.com/48tnw4 was a baby-sized, horse shoe-shaped implement wrought in pure silver. Its tongue scraping surface was quite blunt. Both the handles had a cute ball-shaped knob. I think it was bought from Mhaskar and Company on Girgaum Road where my mother used to do a lot of shopping for clothes and silverware. The shop is no more like a lot of places from my childhood. A Central Bank of India branch has taken its place. (I have a Savings Bank account there.) Later on, as I grew up, I graduated in my high school days to strips of cheerful colour-spangled flexible plastic sold for 10 or 20 paise each. The wonderful thing about these flimsy little objects was that they had just enough sharpness to leave your tongue feeling properly scraped and clean without hurting it. Also, they broke ever so often so that you could treat yourself to a fresh new one every so often without feeling the pinch. Much later in life came the tongue cleaners made of stainless steel and copper. They seem to do their job okay as far as they go. As a child, I had heard from my mother that it was only hygiene-conscious folks like us who used tongue cleaners daily. If one went by the noisy and gurgling morning ablutions that one sometimes overhears in a public place, I guess they seem to be doing well for themselves without tongue cleaners. It was therefore quite an eye opener for me to read the pack copy of The Pureline Oralcare TONGUE CLEANER. http://tinyurl.com/6ekguk. Ujwal got it in a WalMart store in the US. Made from clear greem plastic, it looks like a dimunitive tennis racket with the guts missing. On the front of the pack where the tongue cleaner is embedded under a see-through plastic wrap, I read such wondrous stuff as:

Enjoy Fresh Breath (Thank you, Pureline Oralcare, for not using an exclamation mark. [!])

RECOMMENDED by DENTISTS & HYGIENISTS

QUICK & EASY TO USE

Promotes Fresh Breath

Improves Your Oral Hygiene

Removes Odor Causing Bacteria

Helps Prevent Periodontal Disease

From the back of the pack came further eye-popping revelations. Such as: "Scientific studies confirm that the primary cause of bad breath is odor-causing bacteria on the tongue. Primarily during sleep, the tongue accumulates this unpleasant plaque film, which is why fresh breath in difficult to maintain even after brushing your teeth. This bacteria can also lead to periodontal disease and other health problems."

The Directions for Use are equally clear and no-nonsense. "After brushing and flossing, rinse The Tongue Cleaner with fresh water. Extend your tongue fully. Place The Tongue Cleaner at the back of your tongue and pull forward while phsing doen GENTLY. Repeat if necessary. When finished, rinse thouroughly with warm water and keep clean for optimum oral hygiene."

If only instructions for software downloads and installation and digital devices were so crystal clear and easy to follow!

P.S.: Nary a mention of halitosis (a Listerine property since 1921), though. http://tinyurl.com/5ja46u.

Subtext.

Subtext = hidden meaning. Things left unsaid.

Are human beings suspicious by nature? I'm clueless. Nonetheless, every time I watch the television commercial for one of the two leading brands of women's high-end cosmetics, a warning bell starts sounding in my head as the final words are uttered by the actor. They are: "Take care" and "Because you're worth it" respectively. So, innocuous and innocent-sounding on the surface. In fact, the former makes you wonder if the marketer is not overly concerned and caring about the consumer, cloyingly so. The latter seems to be a ploy in the best of the contemporary tradition of boosting the consumer's self-worth or self-esteem. So far, so good. Take a moment or two to calmly contemplate both the messages though and you'll begin to wonder if there's not another layer of meaning being conveyed. When the actor tells the viewer in almost a conspiratorial whisper to take care, is she implying (not saying it in so many words) "because you're about to be fleeced considering the high price we are going to ask you to pay for our product"? Likewise, when the actor reassures the viewer that she is worth it in the other commericial, is she leaving unsaid the unpleasant "our price tag will convince you how high we estimate your worth" part? Maybe it's the cynic in me but I have a strong suspicion both are hidden warnings. Like the "Conditions apply" insert elsewhere (in most offer ads) = "Caveat emptor. [Let the buyer beware.] Please read the small print." After all, fair is fair. And, everything fair in love and marketing warfare. And, so forth. P.S.: This is also the case when a long warning is hurriedly read at the fag end of an ad for a financial ad to warn you that here money and market fluctuations are involved. So, better watch your butt, buddy. http://tinyurl.com/62lgkh.

Loud and louder.

Indians are loud and devoid of good taste, by and large, and I'm not being snooty. We speak loudly. We play gratingly loud music at home as well as in our cars and our discos and other gatherings. We install loudspeakers at the slightest pretext without a thought to the inconvenience they may cause the neighbours. We shout at the top of our voices to call attention to ourselves. We converse without caring to listen to the person we are supposed to be talking to. Our conversations are seldom dialogues, mostly monologues. We interrupt others all the while. Even our Parliamentarians who, in the Nehruvian era, were a well-behaved and well-spoken lot, have turned into hooligans who hurl abuse and shoes at their adversaries on camera. Our preference for loud noise is making us more and more prone to overstatement (look at most of our mainstream movies). Subtlety, suggestiveness, wit and irony are increasingly becoming alien to us. On our music-related reality television shows the participants make a loud show of humility by touching the feet of their mentors and judges. They in their turn make loud comments about the performances, good, bad or indifferent. Our clothes are becoming ridiculously loud and garish. So is our sense of design and décor. Even our commercial breaks are louder than the ambient show from which the break is being taken. If my anti-loudness lamentation does not please you, let me leave you the legacy of this advice on 'Rhetoric' in pulpit oration on page 308 of The Port folio, a US-based literary magazine in the times of Thomas Jefferson defunct since 1827: "For the same reasons that harshness of tone is to be guarded against, laboured loudness is to be avoided. This is not speaking, but bawling; it is not elocution, but vociferation, which some preachers aim at this painful and unnatural exertion of the lungs; they mistake loudness for force, and noise for oratory." http://tinyurl.com/5rnxut. A good preach, all told, methinks.

Dumb and dumber.

Does not knowing or remembering in which month Columbus Day (October) falls mark you as dumber than a 5th grader? Or, the first US President to be impeached (Andrew Jackson), for that matter? Or, the name of the ship on which the Pilgrims sailed from Southhampton in England to Plymouth, Massachusetts in the US (Mayflower), if it comes to that? http://tinyurl.com/64aqkg. Certainly not, in my humble opinion. All it means most likely is you're not up to scratch on trivia. In BAD or The Dumbing of America (Simon & Schuster-Touchstone, New York, 1991), Paul Fussell writes about a different and special strain of dumb: anything "phony, clumsy, witless. untalented, vacant, or boring that many Americans can be persuaded is genuine, graceful, bright, or fascinating" (p.13). He cites Lawrence Welk and George Bush as examples of BAD at the low and high end respectively. Advertising hype is one of the main targets of Fussell's ire. Another of his targets, viz., the Bride's Wishlist which "Miss Manners" (Judith Martin-Perlman), an arbiter of good form and etiquette via her syndicated advice column, thoroughly disapproved of in 1990 or thereabouts as being "in appalling taste" has become an accepted form of social behaviour thanks to the changing times and the influence of the Internet. http://tinyurl.com/68uvta. Some of the windmills in the US mainstream Fussell tilts at are the higher education focusing on athletics at the expense of academics, the pretentious sham of gourmet restaurants, the low IQ of blockbuster movies, the incoherent babble of modern language comprising euphemisms, corporate jargon and overly complex signs and so forth. (Please also see http://tinyurl.com/47jmjl.) This debunker of most things modern and post-modern doesn't approve of – surprise, surprise! – Wagner, Leonard Bernstein, Andrew Lloyd Webber, all reggae music, Beethoven and Brahms as also religious fundamentalism and materialism. What's wrong with contemporary culture? Fussell's answer would be, I reckon, the ubiquity of mindless pop culture, sports and advertising and the all-pervading anti-intellectual climate. Makes good sense, if you ask me. By the way, I find BAD making inroads into Middle India in a big way.

Smarter than a 5th grader?

Watching the original US game show yesterday night got me thinking about the contrast between how Indians and Americans look at people. The Indian version is SRK-centric, over-hyped, loud and garish. A preening Shah Rukh Khan is the hub of the show. The American version, debuted in February 2007 and replicated in several other countries, rightly focuses on the participants. It seems lighter, more fun and natural. The Emcee, Jeff Foxworthy, a stand-up comedian, doesn't behave like God's gift to mankind. Everyone else appears to be acting as natural as they can under a camera's gaze. They cheer and laugh but not overmuch. The atmosphere says "Let's have fun", and not "Let's worship God's gift to mankind, fawn on him and kowtow to him". There are no superfluous visiting celebrities cluttering up the action. In spite of all this extra baggage, the TRP score of Kya Aap Panchavi Pass Se Tej Hai is nothing to write home about. So, what's the problem? I haven't a clue. Maybe, the Indian idiot box viewer is no idiot. Maybe, he instinctively feels a screen star belongs to the big movie screen, not in his living room. Anyway, better ask the fifth grader. She or he is smarter than me, I concede. Remember The Beliot College Mindset? http://tinyurl.com/4w8xsk. P.S.: The Cultural Learnings blog http://tinyurl.com/5jmnkp hints at the "school kids" on Are you Smarter than a 5th Grader? being Screen Actors Guild cardholders and coached in advance. Also that their school chums peer-pressure-and-wisecracks act is a sham. A reiteraton of the same "scandal" theme is found here: http://tinyurl.com/6s6le7. If there is even a grain of truth in this, who comes out the smartest in the final analysis? P.S.2: Can you think of a smarter gift than the new digital camera that recognizes faces and waits for the subject to smile before it clicks? http://tinyurl.com/6f6z8t.

Faux pas.

Faux pas = (fashion) an error in style judgement; (social) gaffe, blunder, false step, embarrassing behaviour.

The Fake Steve Jobs ("Dude, I invented the friggin iPod. Have you heard of it?") http://tinyurl.com/2bockl reminds me for no reason at all of the fake Sachin Tendulkar, the fake Shah Rukh Khan, the fake Dev Anand and many other fakes scampering around close to home. They make a living and a career out of being someone else's faux avatar. To me, this tribe seems as nauseating and irritating as Austin Powers. FSJ is witty and funny, on the other hand. Unfortunately, on 5 August 2007, he was unmasked after surviving several attempts to find his real identity. New York Times Tech Correspondent Brad Stone must have left no stone unturned (pardon the pun, I just couldn't resist the temptation) to find who was behind the mask. http://tinyurl.com/yvcqlb. It turned out to be Daniel Lyons, Senior Editor, Forbes Magazine. Long before his FSJ incarnation, on 14 November 2005, Lyons wrote in his Forbes article (The Attack of the Blogs): "Blogs are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective. Their potent allies in this pursuit include Google and Yahoo." http://tinyurl.com/68j5ry. Then why did he decide to join the mob? Maybe, he found the idea of writing anonymously too, too liberating and exhilarating. He indeed confessed that it was addictive. He even tried to relinquish it, according to his own admission, but just couldn't. His boss and Forbes publisher Richard Larlgaard saw his blog as "the most brilliant caricature of an important part of American culture that I’ve seen". In contrast, Joe Klein, the author of Primary Colours (1992), a roman à clef about US politics, was sacked by his the then employers, Newsweek, for not telling them he did it before telling the rest of the world. According to some, Klein is a serial liar. http://tinyurl.com/59m6ox. Be that as it may, even after the unmasking, Lyons continues to write under the FSJ id. In other words, he persists with a lie that, for all practical purposes, has now ceased to be anything but. Seems to me akin to a theodicean situation. This is a theological-philosophical polemic where the theologian-philosopher tries to reconcile the existence of evil and suffering in the world with the belief in an omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent God. In short, the problem or conundrum of evil. http://www.problemofevil.org/. P.S.: By the way, last month, FSJ featured a Prabhu Deva video clip on his website, asking someone from India to explain what was going on. He thanked the person who offered a detailed annotated explanation including the cultural context. http://tinyurl.com/5oqzg3. Very decent of the bloke, must admit.

Privileged, who me?

I have more than a sneaking suspicion that I saw myself as a member of the privileged class in my childhood. No, I did not know the exact phrase for the state I imagined myself to be in. The reasons for this self-delusion were simple. I was waited upon by a couple of servants, one of them an old family retainer. We had a car. http://tinyurl.com/4m58jq. Not many others we knew had one. We took an annual summer holiday either in Matheran or Mahabaleshwar. http://tinyurl.com/4wljxg. We also used to go occasionally to Pune, sometimes staying at the Morarjee Gokuldas Sanitarium opposite the Pune Railway Station and eating out at Dorabjee's and the Railway Restaurant managed by Brandons. http://digbig.com/4xsxf. Our train travel was by first or second class in a reserved coupé. We lived in a fairly spacious terrace flat at 233 Khetwadi Main Road. http://tinyurl.com/48tnw4. I did not attend a posh school, though, like Ashu and Abhi. My first school was bottom of the barrel. The second one was fairly respectable. We ate and dressed well. We owned a gramaphone to play 78 rpm discs http://tinyurl.com/5t6cxx and a Bush radio http://tinyurl.com/4ndw75. I had plenty of toys to amuse myself with http://tinyurl.com/4grxkp. We went to see a fair number of movies and plays. The illusion of living a privileged life stayed with me till the time I joined the Forward Market Commission on a measly salary of Rs.400/- a month after doing my Master of Commerce by thesis. http://tinyurl.com/6cbkte; http://tinyurl.com/6qt87g. By and by, however, the scales fell from my eyes, as Pelham ("Plum") Grenville Wodehouse would have succinctly put it. What I should have realised is the so-called privileged status is ephemeral, like everything else in this world. Truman Capote would have most likely understood. http://tinyurl.com/64laor.

My life as a DI.

I became a Digital Immigrant http://tinyurl.com/43fygl about 10 years ago when I began using a PC regularly circa mid-1998, learning to surf the Internet and to use email later the same year. I continued for a while the use of my portable typewriter but after a bit I abandoned it for my PC. (I graduated to a laptop used as a desktop only a couple of years ago.) Unlike many DIs, I did not get into the habit of printing emails I received or, worse still, getting someone else to print them for me. Even now, from time to time, I go into the "Did you get my email?" panic (landline or wired) phone call mode. But that's more because of the unreliability of the MTNL DSL connection than a lack of trust in the Internet. I have always been editing on the screen instead of on a printed copy. I don't drag people to my PC to show them an interesting website I've found. I mail them the url, instead. I'm not at all comfortable, though, with fast-moving video games. Twitch-speed is not within my ambit. Having been digitally undexterous all my life, I play slow stuff like solitaire. Slow downloads rarely upset me overmuch. I haven't learned to multi-task and parellel-process as yet, except maybe as far as listening to music while working at the PC. When it comes to a choice between television and books (the tree-cutting kind, not online), I go for the latter anytime. I don't care for a cellular phone, don't carry one. No faxing for me. Email has been as far as I go in online messaging. I haven't graduated to instant messaging. The spellings that go with it make me uncomfortable. In fact, the phenomenon of aliteracy (the inability to spell, punctuate and construct a sentence) bothers me. http://tinyurl.com/3kjgyh. On a different note, I don't insist on bottled water like the Digital Natives do. I haven't taken in a big way to social networking although blog I do fairly regularly. For me, Google is both a noun and a verb (with a lower-case 'g'). Last August, I got a USB thumbdrive as a birthday gift. I use it rarely and sparingly. Recently, I got a basic iPod Shuffle also as a gift from Ujwal. I listen to Beethoven, Brahams, Tschaikowsky, Bach, Wagner and other classical masters as well as Glen Miller, Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Noorjehan, Geeta Dutt, Mohamed Rafi and similar oldies on it. I'm beginning to accept that digital information is ephemeral (44% of websites vanish within a year) and democractic, not authoritative (Wikipedia, not Britannica). P.S.: There are, I reckon, only two born Digital Natives among the Mankars: Anika and Armaan. From recent personal observation, I would add that Aditi and Avantika too have, by their own efforts and interest, attained the DN nibbana by now. Bully for them.

The Beloit College Mindset.

The Beloit College, Beloit, Wisconsin, in the midwest of the US, chartered in 1846, found an honourable mention in Loren Pope's best seller, Colleges That Change Lives: 40 Schools You Should Know About Even if You're Not a Straight-A Student (ISBN 0-14-029616-6) in 2000 http://www.ctcl.com/. "What Beloit turns out is a better, more effective person and one who tends to go on getting better...," writes Pope, 96, reputedly a fighter for colleges that have everything but Ivy League status. http://tinyurl.com/5ar8n3. Beliot was also among the top 20% of the five benchmark categories measuring the quality of the student experience in the 1999 National Study of Student Engagement, one among only four to achieve this ranking. Last year, it was ranked 35th for "Best Value" and 61st overall, among liberal arts colleges. Its chief claim to fame since 1989, however, appears to be The Beloit College Mindset List written by Prof Tom McBride claiming to summarize the world view of 18 year-olds in the fall of the year of enrolment via a broad-based list of the experiences and event horizons of the students as they commence higher education. http://tinyurl.com/8rj4g. Some think The M-List is a marketing ploy or gimmick. http://preview.tinyurl.com/6dfb7o. Even so, it seems to have caught the imagination of the media. More important, it seems to have acquired the status of an HRD buzzword. http://tinyurl.com/3kjgyh. And, what's ironical is that it has most likely earned Beloit a status better than or at least equal to an Ivy League school. Has it helped the school in attracting top graders, though? I have not a clue.

Decline and fall of the English language?

Maybe India-born Eric Blair, better known as George Orwell ("Every book is a failure."), fancied himself in the role of a prophet, if we go by his Animal Farm and 1984. As early as 1946, though, when the British were preparing to quit India more or less willingly, he had prophesied a bleak future for the English language in his essay, Politics and the English language. He saw "inflated style" ('..."a kind of euphemism" that hid the real meaning') and use of "swindle and perversions" as the chief villains. He was more perceptive than everyone else, I reckon, to see it coming so early on.

In Why George Orwell's Ideas Still Matter to Lawyers, Judith D. Fischer http://tinyurl.com/6c7oj8 pinpoints the parallel themes of his Politics and the English language: (1) writers should use plain English; and (2) "euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness" prevent or conceal clear thought ("necessary for cogent analysis" in his own words). 1984, published in 1949, the portrait of a dystopia set thirty five years thence, has been described by Bob Hodge and Roger Fowler in Orwellian Linguistics as his "major work on language". Remember Big Brother, Thought Police, Newspeak, Doublethink, Doublespeak, War Is Peace, Ignorance Is Strength, Freedom Is Slavery (the last three Newspeak slogans illustrate what he meant by "swindle and perversions")?

Orwell's six rules of style for English writers relating to his first theme were:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you're used to seeing in print. (For him, clichés were to living English what crutches were to a leg. )

2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. (In short, be succinct.)

4. Never use the passive when you can use the active. (There are two clear benefits. You clearly know who did what to whom, i.e. the identity of the actor. What's more, you need to use fewer words.)

5. Never use a foreign word, a scientific phrase or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. (About foreign words, Orwell wrote that a "mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details." Jargon is the specialised language of a particular field. For example, "void and of no effect", "give and bequeath", "whereas", "herein", "forthwith' and "aforementioned" are legalese, "lawyerisms" or legal jargon. Suggested alternatives: "Herein" = "in this document. "Forthwith" = "immediately. "Ab initio" = "from the beginning". "Ipso facto" = "among others". By contrast, "dictum", "habeas corpus" and "res ipse loquitur" are appropriate terms of art "conveying meaning more precisely and economically than ordinary English does".)

6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. (The final, and the most important, rule: use your own discretion. Rely on common sense. Writing is an art. For best results, eschew formulae.)

Coming to Orwell's second theme ("avoid misleading and duplicitous language"), his objection was to political speech and writing calculated to deflect attention from the facts, even to "make lies sound truthful". The Party of Oceania in 1984 encouraged Doublethink, i.e., holding two contradictory ideas at once and forgetting (banishing from the mind) "whatever it was necessary to forget". Doublespeak is "the language that pretends to communicate but rally doesn't. ... that makes the bad seem good, the negative appear positive, the unpleasant appear attractive or at least tolerable." ("War Is Peace" = War keeps the Oceania public pacified.)

Orwell gave instances of political euphemisms from real life of his time designed to conceal the truth. For instance: "Pacification" = Bombing of civilian villages. "Transfer of population/ rectification of frontiers" = Ousting peasants from their homes. "Elimination of unreliable elements" = Imprisoning people without trial/banishing them to the Arctic to die in prison camps. The intent behind this coinage is to refer to things without calling mental pictures of them and to defend the indefensible.

Orwell's examples of meaningless words (i.e., vague terms intended to arouse positive emotions of which the user has his own private definition but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different) were "democracy", "freedom" and "patriotic". A recent "almost Orwellian" variation is the post-9/11 USA PATRIOT Act. The acronym was cleverly coined from the awkward mouthful "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism". The emotive terminology is obviously expected to deflect attention from the Act's encroachment of civil liberties.

A recent illustration of the Orwellian euphemisms intended to make the bad sound better (killing seem respectable, for instance) is the current common phrase "collateral damage" to connote killing, maiming and wounding civilians while attaching military targets.

Finally, "tort reform" where there is merely curtailment of tort liability without even-handed reform exemplifies the Orwellian "evasion" (= hiding a concept's real meaning, masking disagreements/controversies).

The English language is also being abused and misused for other than political ends. Hype rules the life in the globalised world. Ask John Humphrys. In his Beyond Words: How Language Reveals The Way We Live Now (Hodder & Stoughton, London, 2006), his gripes are many. "The prevailing wisdom about language is that anything goes" is just one of them. The "new" (21st century?) vocabulary (semantics) bothers him no end. "Fun events", "deliverables", "silos", "product offerings" (of the US Army, no less), "empowerment", "passionate", "lifestyle", "awareness" and so forth turn him off. "Enjoy!" from a waitress instead of "Enjoy it!" makes his blood curdle. The decline and fall of formality in public life (Blair addressing him as "mate") makes him stop in his tracks. We're all doomed is his verdict. http://tinyurl.com/3p6yre. His row with Professor David Crystal via Her Majesty's Royal Mail reproduced here http://tinyurl.com/58yjwb in selected extracts is "virtual linguistic character assassination", in the Professor's words.

These dudes are from the linguistic Mars (= United Kingdom), mark you. Wonder what lengths they would have gone to had they been on the linguistic Venus (= India) where English after her big comeback has to cope hourly with Hinglish?

Mannerisms, not manners.

If William of Wykeham's "Manners makyth man", also the motto of Winchester College and New College, Oxford, has a grain of truth, equally true for the Indian films of yore is the just-coined maxim: "Mannerisms makyth the hero". This profound truth dawned on me while watching a part of Humjoli (1970). This super-hit film had a totally ludicrous Jeetendra with his absurd mannerisms in the male lead. The other two Hindi film stars with distinct mannerisms who readily come to mind are Dev Anand and Rajesh Khanna. They were a bit more tolerable than Jumping Jack. Speaking of tolerance, the level of this rather rare quality in the Indian moviegoers of that era must have been phenomenal. Imagine accepting J as hero, buying a ticket and patiently watching him for two and a half hours. Of course, those were the Jurassic Age, pre-multiplex days. You didn't have to pay through the nose for the seat or the snacks. (And, of course, even in those days, the scalpers made avid moviegoers pay prices comparable to what the multiplexes now charge.) Going back to the forties, Noor Jahan too had to make do with timid, insipid, vapid costars. There's a story narrated by Naushad about how she used to make the timid Surendra Nath nervous while recording a duet with him for Anmol Ghadi. http://tinyurl.com/37yhyr. She would sing her portion of the song and, instead of yielding the mike to him and turning away, would keep staring at his face. For that matter, even Suraiya's leading men were equally uninspiring. Shyam, Suresh, Karan Diwan and Bharat Bhushan, to cite just four instances. In such cases the willing suspension of disbelief http://tinyurl.com/66c7h4 had mainly to be about the male lead, I reckon. P.S.: By the way, Humjoli (1946) starred Noor Jahan who also sang two fabulous songs Raaz Khulta and Phoolon Mein Nazar Yeh Kaun Ayaa which I simply love.

Irani Cafés and I.

Right from my childhood at 233 Khetwadi Main Road in South Mumbai http://tinyurl.com/48tnw4 to this moment, Irani Cafes have been a part and parcel (takeaway?) of my life. At least three of them from those good ol’ days are extant just a five- minute walk away from my childhood home which unfortunately is extinct. The closest to the now non-existent centre of my erstwhile existence, New Yazdani Restaurant, diagonally across Dreamland Cinema http://tinyurl.com/4qyypb is now a liquor bar. This restaurant used to be a regular first port of call whenever I accompanied my father to the nearby Grant Road market, usually on a Sunday morning. I used to coax at least a rupee worth of boiled sweets out of him every time. A minute away from New Yazdani is Café Mazda Restaurant at the corner of Pauwala (literally unleavened bread maker) Lane and New Charni Road (now Raja Ram Mohan Roy Marg). I don’t remember ever stepping into this eatery as a child or as a grown-up, come to think of it. In the opposite direction on the same road http://tinyurl.com/3wbmt3 at about the same distance is Cosmopolitan Restaurant & Stores at the junction of New Charni Road and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Road (earlier known as Sandhurst Road). We used to sometimes do emergency shopping there: eggs, butter, loaves of pau (unleavened bread) supposedly a Bombay specialty, khara (salted) biscuits and stuff like that. Its next door neighbour is Famous Pharmacy under the same Irani management. The distinguishing mark Cosmopolitan and Famous shared was Mr Muchchad (Rustom Khodabux Irani), the unsmiling but jovial man with a gargantuan moustache who worked behind the counter at both the places. We used to rib him about his proud possession. He took it in his stride unsmilingly.

The Irani Café we Mankars occasionally went to on weekends was Café Darayush, quite close to the Central Cinema. http://tinyurl.com/3qwbcg. Now it is a liquor bar, restaurant, bakery, pastry shop, all-in-one. In those days (I’m talking 1940s), they used to serve home-made ice cream made in a hand-cranked ice cream maker. Darayush then used to have “family rooms” with swinging half doors allowing a measure of privacy to courting couples. Marathi short stories of that era have quite a few references to this feature of the Irani Café.

Later in the 70s, an eatery much favoured by courting couples as well as Blitz’s Rusi Karanjia http://tinyurl.com/4zb3n9 was the open-air one storied Café Naaz on top of the Malabar Hill. Commanding an awe-inspiring panoramic view of the Queen’s Necklace, it used to serve piping hot mutton samosas to die for and even beer. Naaz closed just at the fag end of the last millennium. http://tinyurl.com/44dzbz.

Going back a few decades, though, guess what scuttlebutt of yore offered as the inside secret of the refreshing Irani chai? Opium lacing, believe it or not. About as convincing as the use of pau to pollute well water and convert those who drank it to Christianity, what?

That brings me to the all-time favourite Irani Café of mine. Café Excelsior opposite the New Excelsior Cinema near the Victoria Terminus (now Chatrapati Shivaji Terminus). Although they serve decent Mughlai and Chinese fare, my favourite dish there is the simple Mutton Sandwich which I take away often enough even now.

My other favourite takeaway Irani café is Sassanian for mutton and chicken puffs and garlic bread. I started frequenting it after the closure of Bastani opposite Kyani at Dhobi Talao where I used to buy this stuff earlier http://tinyurl.com/426k4wl.

If you’ve been wondering why this Bombay bloke has not mentioned even once brun pau (hard brown bread) smothered in maska (butter), the Bambaiya fad food for slumming preferred by the denizens of Page 3, the answer is he simply doesn’t fancy it. But somebody close to him does. Yes, whenever our son Ashutosh, who lives and works in New Jersey, drops in to see us, one of his must-visit spots is Sunshine Café at the junction of Babasaheb Jayakar Marg (Old Thakurdwar Road) and Jagannath Shankarseth Marg (Girgaum Road). That’s very close to where we live now. This restaurant with an attached beer bar also sells bread, eggs, butter, cheese, milk, pastry and so on. We shop there occasionally.

And, if you haven’t still had had your fill of my geographically, chronologically and palatably mapped memories, here is the parting shot. About eight months after I joined Everest Advertising (October 1976) situated in Kitab Mahal behind Café Excelsior, I fell ill. During convalescence, I grew a beard which is extant even today albeit in an abridged avatar. This is what came out of a close encounter of the real kind in an Irani café immediately after the said beard’s debut:

a case of mistaken identity
summarily dismissed

i met a woman
with gaps in her grin
mad enough to mistake
me for saint francis

my bald pate and beard
were the clues
she said

i soon showed her
the error of her ways
by refusing to grant
her the boon of a measly
cup of tea

surely i argued
saint francis’s munificence
cannot stoop
so low

P.S.: Famous last words supposedly heard in a Mumbai Irani café: “Khaya piyaa kuchch nahin. Sirf galas todaa. Barah anna.”] [“Ate-drank nothing. Only broke a glass. Collect 12 annas.]

Copyright © 2008 by Deepak Mankar. All rights reserved.

[This is my article posted at http://www.iranichaimumbai.com/ on 04.06.2008 reproduced here. At that website, you’ll find pictures relevant to the text as well.]

May your car never stall in the street.

Having just written about the pedal powered scooters, cars and bikes of my childhood, it's time to tell you about a hilarious song Suraiya http://tinyurl.com/5urtpx & http://tinyurl.com/5t6cxx sang for the movie, Moti Mahal (1952), in which her co-star was Ajit of the much later Loin fame. What's wonderful about the song is the verve and comic timing with which she sang it. This is remarkable because she was known for her sad songs. I've translated this wonderfully happy song into English staying as faithful to the original text and true to the English idiomatic usage as possible.

May your car never stall in the street.
May you never have to stand helpless in the street.
May your car never stall in the street.

Clothes dirtied, face blackened
Never mind whether you're Suraiya (ahem!) or Madhubala (tra-la-la!)
The mightiest become the butt of a joke in the street.
May your car never stall in the street.

You crank the handle again and again.
Push the car again and again till you're light-headed.
She's virtually made mincemeat of you in the street.
May your car never stall in the street.

You feed her oil, top her water level.
To no avail, because the shrew's stone-hearted!
Cry your eyes out, remember all your forefathers in the street.
May your car never stall in the street.

The world is absolutely right.
Only she who runs deserves to be called a car.
A car with a puncture is akin to a bullock cart, no less.
May your car never stall in the street.

May your car never stall in the street.
May you never have to stand helpless in the street.
May your car never stall in the street.

I'm sure my rendering is nowhere close to the original Hindustani lyrics spraklingly penned by Mulkraj Bhakri and set to foot-tapping music by Hansraj Behl. The text I followed is on p.35 of Hit Filmi Geet, Suraiya compiled and edited by Ganga Prasad Sharma for Manoj Publications, Delhi.

I would like to end this post with a bit of Hindi film trivia. Suraiya and Madhubala were obviously big names by 1952. (This was the year I passed my SSC examination, by the way.) Suraiya was obviously the bigger of the two (she mock-coughed while singing her own name in the song in the second stanza). Mahal (1949) had already boosted Madhubala's popularity and star value. Coincidentally, Madhubala was to star six years later in Chalti Ka Naam Gaadi, the hit comedy that got its name from a line in the song above (the second line in the fifth stanza: "Only she who runs deserves to be called a car"). The back page blurb of the song book I mentioned earlier informs me that Suraiya used to do her daily riyaz with the help of a gramophone or phonograph. She would play a 78 rpm record and sing along. Suraiya acted with Prithviraj Kapoor http://tinyurl.com/44dzbz & http://tinyurl.com/6boovk in Ishaara (1943) when she was 18. Later, she also acted with his sons Raj Kapoor in Daastan (1950) and Shammi Kapoor in Shama Parwana (1954). I was surprised to find out from the same source that she knew Marathi apart from Hindi, Urdu and Farsi. Like Noor Jahan, Suraiya could team up with any hero and still make a success of the film she had starred in. Phenomenal!

On the terrace.

At 233 Khetwadi Main Road, we lived in a huge terrace flat. http://tinyurl.com/3wcmt2. The terrace in front was our cricket ground. http://tinyurl.com/4ot9wz. It was also where we anchored the poles of our Bush radio aerial. http://tinyurl.com/4ndw75. The tiny strip of a terrace on top of the flat was used mainly for flying fighter kites. http://tinyurl.com/52znpb. There were many more uses to which the terrace abutting the flat was put. Like drying stuff: home-made papad, just roasted seasamum seed before making the til ladoos, drying red chilli before grinding it on the hand-powered grinding stone http://tinyurl.com/3etyu7, making sun-dried pickles, you name it. As for me, I used to sail paper boats in the rain water streams that flowed all over it. I also used to park and drive my pedal powered cars and scooters there the year round. I don't remember ever riding a tricycle up there, though. I did have a rather natty light blue topless car with a dark blue trim all around it. After having weathered two or three monsoons, it acquired several rust spots all over it. Though I cannot swear on it, I have a feeling that the first car was replaced by a red roofless one. I remember being pushed around in my car as well as furiously pedalling it in all around the terrace, eyes screwed up in concentration. After the pedal cars, I also owned a couple of scooters. The scooter was a rectangular platform with a wheel at each end and a handle attached to the turnable front wheel. You planted your left foot on the platform, gripped the handle with both hands and propelled yourself around with your right foot. I used to play-act a script with some sort of a super-powered, caped character in it. The scooter played the supporting role of my super-fast vehicle. When I was 12, a Middle Eastern friend of my father's, Mr Kazrani I think his name was, gifted me with a sleek green Clyde semi-racer bicycle complete with wire breaks and a dynamo-powered head lamp. I learned to ride it on our terrace. Later on, after adding gears to it, I used to ride it on the Marine Drive and even take it up to the Hanging Gardens in the summer holidays. I learned to drive after age 18 on the second family car: a red Renault 4CV. http://tinyurl.com/4m58jq.

Purely archival. In anticipation of certain arrivals.

Now that the Mankars from New Jersey are coming to visit us – Aditi will arrive on Saturday, 7 June; Ashu the following Saturday; Avantika and Nandini, Saturday following that – I serendipitously found an old piece I had written about their Kunuchacha on 5 March 2005 in my now defunct Hindustan Times column, QuiteATake.com column. http://tinyurl.com/52cz7o. I thought I would put it here in anticipation of the girls’ arrival. Read on.


Kunal, Avantika's – or Tika's as the "spunky monkey" likes to call herself these days – and Aditi's uncle won the Filmfare Best Director Award for HumTum on Saturday, February 26, 2005. February 26 also happened to be Tika's twelfth birthday. Kunal proved second time lucky on that very day. HumTum was his second directorial venture, you see, after Muzse Shaadi Karogi. We were all rooting for him, of course. He was telling Ashu and Ujwal and his mother Yash just a couple of evenings before the awards night that there was simply no chance of his winning. Maybe, that was his way of mentally preparing for the unknown. Do your best and be ready for the worst.

From what I've seen of him, I've always found him to be a cool, no-nonsense sort of a guy. Ashu was telling me that despite shooting his movies at exotic locations abroad, he never overruns his budget. When he received the Scene of the Year Award, Sonali Bendre mistook him for Kunal Das Gupta. Maybe he looked more a denizen of Bhadra Lok to her than the Mumbai-born Punjab-da-puttar that he is, a Kohli.

This, I reckon, is a symptom of how low profile he is. (For instance, Saturday's Bombay Times covered all the leading contenders but somehow overlooked him.) I'm sure Kunal will go places and – what's even more important – handle success humbly and diplomatically like the cool dude that he is. He has a good sense of humour, which gives him a sense of proportion too. And, he isn't the least bit hypocritical unlike most of Bollywood. Here at movies.dcealumni.com you'll find a bit about Kunal's next project.


P.S.: Kunal’s new movie, Thoda Pyaar Thoda Magic, is due for an early release, I understand. He has smartly put an article on Wikipedia already .http://tinyurl.com/4dcojs. I’m sure he will be using all the social networks as well.

Rakish.

Ever wondered what rakish (ray-kish) meaning smart, sporty, flashy, breezy, jaunty, dapper, natty, debonair, dashing, snazzy, raffish, devil-may-care (according to Collins Essential Thesaurus 2nd Edition 2006 © HarperCollins Publishers 2005, 2006 cited by The Free Dictionary: http://tinyurl.com/65zmrm) looks like? All right. Follow me closely. Insert a Royal Wedding (1951) DVD into a DVD player. Press ‘Play’. Fast-forward to the scene where Fred Astaire, after accidentally bumming a light off her on the street, follows Sarah Churchill (right, Winston’s second daughter) to the theatre not knowing she is in his show, spots her among the actors waiting for the audition to start, asks an assistant to find out who she is and to start dancing. He then parks his butt on the back of the nearest seat in the auditorium and turns his torso slightly forward so can he watch her. Happy with her performance, he tilts his hat – there you go – at just the right rakish angle and grins rakishly. He has found love. Also, not to be missed is the Fred Astaire solo You're All The World To Me in which he literally dances on the walls and ceiling of his room. This optical illusion was made possible by a custom-made set quipped with mechanical rollers. Incidentally, Royal Wedding was directed by Stanley Donen who also co-directed and choreographed Singin’ in the Rain.

Which brings us to the second place to look for the perfect visual interpretation of “rakish”: the Broadway Ballet interlude in Singin’ in the Rain (1951). Here’s an account of it from my unpublished novel, The Last Gandhi Movie (pp. 28 -29):

“What a fabulously marvellous place for my hat to perch on?’ is the question writ large on Gene Kelley’s face as he glides to an abrupt halt on bended knees. He stares dumbfounded at his hat as it dangles invitingly from a green pump on an arched foot emanating from 1952’s sexiest stockinged leg emanating, in its turn, from Cyd Charisse’s emerald green-sheathed torso. Wow! This is what CC does in reply. She blows smoke through her nostrils with a half smile. She puts her hand on her hips. She elevates said leg, foot, pump and hat from a horizontal to a near-vertical position, sending all over collective BPs soaring in the bargain. Once Gene has retrieved his hat and his breath, she arises majestically from the chair she’s straddling to join him in an erotic – by the fifties’ standard! – rendition of the Broadway Ballet in Singin’ in the Rain. Born with an appetizing given name, Tula Ellice Finkles (for Pete’s sake) in Texas, this statuesque and icily chic combination of Scottish, Irish, French, English and Red Indian bloodlines had had ballet training that she put to good use in so many MGM musicals in the heyday of that genre in Hollywood. Va-va-vroom!, as Uncle Sam would eloquently put it. Me too.

Somewhere along the way in the action described above, Gene Kelley too does a Fred Astaire (whom he admired tremendously and co-starred with in Ziegfield Follies in 1946) with his hat, tilting it at a rakish, devil-may-care angle, if memory serves. Check it out.

Opening credits.

Regular readers of this blog, if such a specie exists at all, must have gathered by now that I fancy myself as something of a movie buff. For instance: http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2008/04/my-life-as-art-movie-buff-snigger.html. Even today, if a movie catches my eye and interest, I tend to watch it intently paying particular attention to the sub-text. Watching old Hollywood movies on TCM of late (and on TNT in the eighties), I realised that the emergence of opening credits as a work of art is a fairly later phenomenon – a post-Saul Bass phenomenon, you may confidently aver, of course not forgetting John Whitney, the clockwork and mechanical analogue computer animation pioneer. In fact, the Whitney title sequence for Arabesque (1975) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7h0ppnUQhE is looked upon by some as the (what pop sociologist Malcolm Gladwell would call) virtual “tipping point” of computer animation. Bass who, I suspect, may have had massive delusions of grandeur (he claimed he “directed” the shower scene in Psycho – Janet Leigh and others denied it http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3768/is_199901/ai_n8846083/pg_6) cast before us you-know-who these pearls of wisdom about movie titles designing: "My initial thoughts about what a title can do was to set mood and the prime underlying core of the film's story, to express the story in some metaphorical way. I saw the title as a way of conditioning the audience, so that when the film actually began, viewers would already have an emotional resonance with it." And: "Design is thinking made visual." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_Bass. Big words. Impressed? But then you must never forget Bass was originally and off and on a commercial graphic designer with an awe-inspiring line-up of award-winning logos who won a niche for himself in The Art Directors Club (New York) Hall of Fame. http://www.adcglobal.org/archive/hof/1977/?id=275. “…in an environment full of clutter, the first impression of the film in the movie theater, or on the television screen, prepares the viewer for what is to come just like the cover of a book. … film credits fulfill the important role of outlining the filmmaker's intentions and setting up the expectations of those watching.” That’s precisely how Melis Inceer justifies the cinematic credit title sequence in her 2007 thesis submitted to the University of Pennsylvania, An Analysis of the Opening Credit Sequence in Film. http://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1080&context=curej. If “Never judge a book by its cover” is advice worth following, does it apply to its cinematic cousin? One example that coms readily to mind is The Pink Panther series featuring Peter Sellers. Let me confess that I used to rave about it once upon a time. A recent viewing made me do an about-turn. Now I feel the only worth watching part of the series are the credits. The rest is limp and vapid comedy that doesn’t quite work. The only original and inventive touch of humour (or, is it merely wit?) is the way Inspector Clouseau speaks English with a ludicrous French accent. http://hss.fullerton.edu/linguistics/CLN/04S%20articles/picket%20pink.pdf. The verbal or phonological slapstick (“massage” instead of “message” and so forth) stops being amusing after a while, though. And, why a self-respecting Parisian should condescend to use the unequivocally abominable language of Shakespeare is the moot question never answered throughout the series. Willing suspension of disbelief http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2008/05/willing-suspension.html is the order of the day, I reckon. Coming back to the theme of this post, though, when all is said and done, I begin to wonder if too clever opening credits are not affectation, style posing as substance – somewhat akin to a Flash intro to a website. Am I sounding too cynical? I shudder when I recall the pathetic amateurish title credits Films Division of India used to make hapless moviegoers watch in the sixties and seventies. Saul Bass it wasn’t. Not even 007's Maurice Binder. What was worse, when the FD opening credits were merrily rolling along, all seemed lost, sort of. One was left desperately hoping the earth would open up and swallow the miserable watchers in the dark. In the Hollywood movies of 30s and 40s, they started telling the story straight off after quickly giving credit where credit was due. And, the movie ended when there was no story left to tell. Movies were as simple and as unaffected as life itself, remember? Being artless is real art, I guess.

LOL. In the good ol' days.

Chi(ntaman) Vi(nayak) Joshi (1892-1963) must have been quite a brilliant man. Televiewers all over India came to know him as the progenitor of Chimanrao. This middle-class protagonist from pre-Independence Maharashtra made his debut on Doordarshan in the late 70s (1977 - 1979) in the epinomous Marathi serial. A week back, I was fortunate enough to pick up seven of Chi Vi's books from the Peoples Book House, Cawasji Patel Street, close to Flora Fountain, at what I thought was a bargain price. Chi Vi was a Professor of Pali and a student of the world-famous Pali scholar and associate of Gandhi, Acharya Dharmanand Kosambi http://ddkosambi.blogspot.com/search/label/Dharmanand%20Kosambi. He had worked for quite a long time in the erstwhile princely state of Baroda. What's impressive about him is that not only did he write excellent humourous prose but also he could cogently explain the theory of humour. In fact, the introduction to his book, Na Maro Pichkari (= Don't splatter me with colour/Don't spew betel juice on me), first published in 1960, is about the types and origin of comedy/humour. What also impressed me about Chi Vi's humour is that it is based on his keen observation of social phenomena and his perceptive commentary on what he has seen and experienced. While reading his Aamchaa Pan Gaon (= We too have a village), which turns the popular simple-honest-villagers-versus-crafty-venal-city-folks paradigm on its head, I was a bit surprised by something he wrote on the topic of cottage or home industries in the village, Harangaon (= Deer Village?). One of them, a hand-operated grinding wheel, was run by Saloobai, a low-caste widow. The time of the narrative was 1941-1943. Mumbai and Pune were then believed to be under the threat of Japanese bombardment. A lot of the residents of these cities had decided to migrate to their villages until the peril passed away. Anyway, Chi Vi wrote that Saloobai's was the only grinding wheel left in the village. I found it a bit odd because I clearly remember that, at home, i.e., at 233 Khetwadi Main Road http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/07/morgue.html, we used to have a grinding wheel in daily use till as late as the mid-50s. That was in Mumbai, a metropolitan city. Given his accurate observation and reportage, though, my guess is he probably was stretching the point a bit. The other thing he mentioned that triggered a wave of nostalgia in me was a shopper at the weekly village bazaar planning to buy a tiny bit of opium for her child. I remember my father once nonchalantly offering me and Ujwal a miniscule black ball wrapped in a translucent tracing paper to help either Ashu or Abhi sleep. That we did not put it to medicinal use is another matter. Apparently, it was an acceptable practice to him. For all I know, I may have been an unknowing opium eater as an infant. Interesting thought, that. Two more things I remember about Chi Vi were two Marathi comedies, Lagna Pahave Karun (= Try getting hitched) (1940) and Sarakari Pahune (= State Guests) (1942) both based on material from his Chimanravache Charhat (= The long-winded tale of Chimanrao), first published in 1932. Both were directed by Master Vinayak http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0898521/ and had the cross-eyed Marathi comedian, Damuanna Malwankar playing Chimanrao and VS Jog as his body-builder cousin, Gundyabhau. I vaguely remember watching them either at Central Cinema near the Girgaum Portugese Church or Roxy Cinema near Royal Opera House.

Rocket science anyone?

In the fifties, I used to be an ardent fan of black and white B-grade sci-fi movies from Hollywood scripted using pulp magazine writers’ logic. You know stuff like It Came From Outer Space, the 1953 flick also made in the 3-D format which I remember seeing in the Eros Theatre at Church Gate. I had also seen and enjoyed The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and The Blob (1958), the Steve(n) McQueen debut vehicle. Somehow or the other, though, I had missed watching The Invisible Boy (1957). Well, I made up for the lapse yesterday. I happened to switch on Turner Classic Movies early morning and there it was, lo and behold! The hero is Robby, the Robot – who debuted in Forbidden Planet (1956) – with 10-year-old Timmie as his sidekick. A gargantuan Super Computer with hypnotic flashing lights (“Look at the pretty lights, Timmie”) and an ambition of world domination is the villain. The Matrix with its two sequels deals with the same theme of world domination too, you’ll recall. However, I found the idea of the doddering, plodding AI colossus, made and fed by Timmie’s computer scientist dad, in The Invisible Boy getting anywhere close to taking over the world ridiculous. Even his persuasive spiel at the end of the movie did not impress me much. ("Come, scientist! Let us reason together. I can still answer any question your mind can devise. I am an instrument of knowledge. I will lead you to the farthest planets. I will lead you to the farthest reaches of the galaxy. I will show you the stars!") The idea of Timmie being endowed with super intelligence by the far-seeing evil genius with flashing lights seems ludicrous too – at least the way it is presented. The boy is then able to reassemble and put into serviceable mode Robby whom his dad and his colleagues have discarded as a derelict piece of scrap beyond redemption. Nobody takes Timmie’s handiwork too seriously until the kite made by Robby carries his young friend aloft. This puts Timmie’s technophobe and techno-illiterate mom ("Did you have a nice day at the computer, dear?") into a ballistic frenzy. To grant his wish of being able to play without parental interference, Robbie – and the Super Comp – make Timmie invisible. He is kidnapped and held hostage to force his dad into surrendering a classified safety code that stands in the way of the Super Comp’s ambition and so on and so forth. What starts off as a fun sci-fi movie suddenly starts taking itself too seriously and ends up a damp squib which incidentally is a firework that fails to go off because it happens to be wet. http://www2.english.uiuc.edu/cybercinema/filmogra.htm. My discomfort with the theme of the film springs from my inability to accept the Super Comp as a sentient being, I reckon. True, it had AI but was it not fed information by his – and Timmie’s – dad, the computer scientist? Where then did the ability to feel and perceive subjectively, the (self) “awareness” as it were, come from? How could the ambition to take over the world arise? Am I making a mountain from a molehill, rocket science from pulp sci-fi? Horace would've approved, though. Was it not he who wrote: “Parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus” (= “The mountain will labour, a ridiculous mouse will be born”)? Much ado about nothing, the Bard of Avon aka William Shakespeare would've whole-heartedly agreed.