Comics for big boys (and girls?).

Correct me if I’m wrong. These days, the syndicated comics strips in your daily and Sunday newspapers (Calvin and Hobbes, Dennis the Menace, Peanuts, Dilbert, Garfield, for instance), so full of irony, angst and other trendy stuff reminiscent of Woody Allen’s Annie Hall days, are strictly not for kids. That goes for many of the full-length animated cartoon feature films showing your local multiplex like Shrek and Ice Age.

Some of the contemporary comic book superheroes from the Marvel Comics family, to wit: Thor, Xena, Valkyrie, Elektra, Hellboy and X-Men's Jean Gray, are known to have Wagnerian antecedents ─ in many cases in the Asgardian universe ─ and operatic connections too. They are most likely to appeal to grown-up sensibilities, agreed?

A question for culture vultures: Are many adult readers of comic books in the US opera aficionados?

Forgive me but I, as is not unusual for a recently arrived stranger, don’t really know the answer.

I googled for comic reader demographics surveys, though.

Among those I found on the first page of my search results, a 1995 DC Comics survey http://digbig.com/5bbmbp described them in the following terms: 92% male; 80% ages 18-39 (median age: 29); a little over 70% attended college; 60% single (never married); 37 spending $100 or more in a month on comics (on an average 50 comics bough every month).

Another one http://digbig.com/5bbmbn ─ circa 2007 or thereabouts probably but hotly disputed ─ portrayed the average mainstream (superhero) comic book reader as ‘Male, 20-25, video-game player, disposable income, “techie”, single‘. More than 90% of the readers, it said, were male. There was some debate here on whether it was due to the predominance of T&A content. (Sidebar queries: Don’t you see a lot of it in the Marvel and Japanese Manga Comics? Doesn’t it suggest a preference for soft porn [Girls Gone Wild anyone?] ─ presumably an important cultural cue?)

However, whatever may be the exact nature of the latter-day US comics reader constituency, the most demography-sensitive marketer, Hollywood, has acknowledged its importance and significance as a body of consumers worth its focused and undivided attention. In the recent past, many of the successful movie franchises (Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, The Hulk, X-Men, Daredevil), television series (Smallville, Witchblade) and video games (Spider-Man) have had their roots in comicsdom or graphicnovelville. As a matter of fact, Hollywood has been the saviour-in-chief of the comics book industry after the lean times it went through in the 1990s. In a late 2002 article (“Comic Books: Bang! Wham! Pow!”)http://digbig.com/5bbmbq, Bill Jemas, President, Marvel Enterprises, was quoted as describing comic book reader as ‘bell cows’ — opinion leaders and adding that they “may not be socialites, but they're certainly affluent and influential and ... they’re enthusiastic about the things that they love." They are consumers of “… other entertainment media, especially music, movies, TV, and video games … and packaged snack foods, candy, and cereals”, according to David Ward, the columnist who wrote the cited article.

While I still do not know the answer to the riddle, what I see in LA book shops and libraries http://digbig.com/5bbmbr and read in the LA Times nudges me to wonder if superheroes and fantasy are very much a sine qua non of the contemporary American psyche or not. To continue in the belief that you’re the leader of the world, you cannot have anyone less than superheroes for icons. The more, the merrier.

That Middle America gets near-orgasmic pleasure from mere hints of the likelihood of American culture spreading especially among people in the Third World whom they believe the US was appointed to “save” from fates as varied as Communism earlier and Islamic terrorism now is fairly evident when you read rave reviews like this http://digbig.com/5bbmtb. Bahman Ghobadi’s Farsi feature film about how rock and roll gets dispersed in the Iranian youth underground, No One Knows about Persian Cats, was shot “on the run in just 17 days and without a government permit” (as film critic Betsy Sharkey gleefully reports) and became “a favorite on the festival circuit after winning Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2009”. All these frills add extra value to its provenance and gravitas in American eyes ─ a bit, I suppose, like converting films shot originally in the 2-D format to 3-D in post-production (Alice in Wonderland and Clash of the Titans, to cite two recent examples) in order to be able to justify $3 extra slapped on to the movie ticket price.

In my youth, during the post-World War II decades when the US was taking over the mantle from the UK, France and other lapsed Imperialists and those posted on US Government duty abroad to handle this newly acquired “white man’s burden” were vilified by the much shunned Ugly American nomenclature chiefly thanks to their insensitive and heavy-handed treatment of their charges, the symbols of American culture for me ─ not necessarily in chronological order of appearance on my mental landscape ─ were Coca Cola, comic books, denim jeans, Hollywood, hot dogs and rock and roll (kicked off by Bill Haley and the Comets in Rock Around the Clock I watched in the Strand Cinema in South Mumbai’s Colaba neighbourhood in the early 1950s). Those were the six principal conduits through which I remember distance-learning ─ and imbibing ─ American culture from across the oceans. These were, again for me at least, gradually reinforced over time by Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Eartha Kitt, Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Glen Miller, Jim Morrison, Simon and Garfunkel, Elvis Presley, Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany’s to Answered Prayers), Woody Allen (and Annie Hall), The Groucho Letters, Erica Jong, Kurt Vonegut, Andy Warhol, John Updike, John Irving, Mad Magazine, The Simpsons, Seinfeld, even Ellery Queen ─ and, last but not the least, by those dishy 1950s black and white sci-fi movies in which men in crumpled white lab coats kept muttering to one another: “There’s no hope. We’re doomed, Professor!” as well as by the equally scrumptious pulp fiction from those great times that are gone forever.

"Life is full of loneliness, misery, suffering, and unhappiness ─ and it's all over much too quickly," is what Woody Allen’s middle-brow Jewish comedian Alvy Singer confides in us somewhere at the beginning of Annie Hall. What better way to drown the resultant post-modern angst than slumming with the ever pumped-up-for-action superheroes in fantasyland, pray tell?

Signs.

The signs I have seen almost throughout my stay in the US so far, first in New Jersey from 13 March to 2 April and later in Los Angeles, have made me feel the recovery in selective perception. Wherever I've been I have seen Middle America spending money and having a rollicking time. On Saturday afternoon, I went with my young son Abhi, and his even younger children Armaan, 9, and Anika, 7, to the Dodger Stadium to watch the local team being outplayed and getting clobbered by the San Francisco Giants by a wide margin. (To their credit, the Dodgers avenged the defeat the very next day to gladden the hearts of the local followers,) Two home runs by the Giants I could understand - one done with a deft tap to land the ball close-by - but not much else. I am ignoramus as far as the rules of baseball go. The cheering and the general prevailing mood of bonhomie got to me, though, I am happy to confess. The fans really knew how to have a good time in spite of everything else. We were sitting plumb behind the catcher in - what seemed to me to - exorbitantly priced seats ($90 a pop), consuming unconscionably steep priced food and drinks and ice cream and what have you. We reached late (the Dodgers' first inning had already begun) and left early at the beginning of the sixth to avoid the rush hour traffic. It was, if I may hazard a guess, a bit like attending an IPL Twenty-20 cricket match back home. Anika in her wisdom wanted to know why we could not have watched the game on the idiot box in the evening. Very astute of her, considering her tender age. For me, it was a first of sorts and also a rare insight into the American psyche and culture. On Sunday, I got the opportunity to once again watch Middle America at play, this time in a swimming competition for school-going kids who were cheered by their enthusiastic parents, grandparents and peers. Armaan did really well for himself coming third and then second in the first and second of the three events he participated in. During the evening visit to the Glendale mall, the Borders bookshop and dinner at the Outback Steak House, the signs seemed all hopeful. By the way, I also got a virtually touchy-feely glimpse into the wondrous world of the iPad and the iPhone, courtesy of Anita's friend, Sheena. She teaches Gender & Women's Studies at California State University, Northridge and, to my untutored eye, looks like a spare-time techie. More importantly, she qualifies as a favourite "aunt" of Armaan and Anika.

How to turn the kiss of death into Midas touch.

The seemingly sudsy saga of Conan O’Brien is a classic example of sympathetic “positioning”. Positioning, if you care to recall, is the advertising canon (“how to be seen and heard in the overcrowded marketplace”) evangelized by Al Ries and Jack Trout originally between the late sixties and early eighties.

For his much flaunted martyrdom, the underdog in the present scenario has no one else but his erstwhile-mentor-turned-Judas and his own banishment from the idiot box till September 2010 to thank for. It is to O’Brien’s eternal credit that, instead of moping around and shedding copious tears over his tragic exit from the NBC late night line-up, he turned the setback into the “Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television” tour. His audacious coup reaped for him a bountiful harvest of support from his loyal fans in the shape of monumental Twittering and the “I’m with Coco” blitz on Facebook.

Meanwhile, he also managed to net the 11.00 pm spot on the TBS cable channel effective November 2001. In the process, the Red Skeleton look-alike (at least that’s how he has made an impression in my memory bank) did unto George Lopez, the incumbent of the said slot at TBS what he had refused to let Leno do to him at NBC and got fired for his effrontery. The far-seeing Lopez in his wisdom saw O’Brien’s stupendous young following as a desirable asset capable of adding an extra zap to the young but limited fan base of his still-in-the-rookie-stage “Lopez Tonight”. Does his ready and willing acceptance of O’Brien reflect his belief that one plus one is greater than one plus zero? Or, is he harking back to the tried and tested logic of Vaudeville and stand-up comedy artistes that the later acts in the evening continuum gain momentum from their predecessors?

Ries and Trout would applaud the O’Brien stratagem and his “NBC and Leno done me in” positioning whole-heartedly, I would think. What’s incredible, creditable and remarkable is that he did it all by subtle indirection: not a single Jay Leno joke, I understand, in his on-the-road comedic routine. This would be a sure way to earn him greater goodwill of and credibility with his loyal fans. As well as respect all round.

Better safe than sorry in the times of the Internet. (Or, how vulnerable r u, m8?)

Read very, very carefully the scary ─ I say scary because it has an eerie “it could happen to you and me” feel ─ Chapter 8 (pages 51 to 58) of David Baldacci’s Hour Game (Pan Books, London, 2005), America. Especially if you want to learn how easily and effortlessly a criminal can steal your personal details. In the course of these eight pages, a hooded killer in a “virtually untraceable” blue VW ─ who happens to be the real-life Zodiac killer copy cat ─ is able to acquire, within a highly productive twenty-minute span, the following information on three potential victims he spots in the shopping district.

1. He sees an old couple tottering out of a super market and notes the license plate number of their relatively new Mercedes station wagon. (After an Internet search, he would have their home address.) He already knows from the condition of the car and the logo of a country club on the man’s cap that they are not living off mere Social Security. The fact of them doing their own grocery shopping tells him they have no live-in help or grown children living nearby.

2. Next he notices an attractive thirty-something woman stepping out of a pharmacy carrying a large shopping bag. She withdraws cash at the nearby ATM and thoughtlessly throws away into the trash bin the receipt which he later retrieves. From this veritable treasury of personal information, he knows right off her name (D. Hinson) and would later get her home address from the phone book and her workplace details from the business listings. From the vanity license plate on her bright red Chrysler Sebring convertible (‘DEH JD’; JD = Juris Doctor, i.e., Doctorate of Jurisprudence), the current-year American Bar Association bumper sticker, the absence of a wedding ring, her healthy tan and a gold anklet on her left leg, he deduces she is a still-single, well-heeled practicing lawyer probably just back from a vacation.

3. Finally, there is the scatter-brained careless soccer mom her T-shirt bellows her status to the whole world!) of three kids (the baby strapped and totally unguarded in the back seat plus plenty of telltale clues about the other two strewn in the messy interior of the van). While doing her shopping, she has left her car unlocked, her keys in the ignition (he takes a putty imprint of what look like her house keys) as well as her cell phone in the holder (he takes shots of all the pages of her phone book with his mini digicam). By then, he knows enough about Jean and Harold Robinson and the names and phone numbers of those who matter to them. He also has in his possession the impression of her house keys.

So where do we go from here? Here are some simple safety precautions suggested by common sense. In the 21st century, the “If you got it, flaunt it” advice from good old Salvador Dali dispensed in a 1967 TV ad for Braniff Airlines http://digbig.com/5bbjyn has become as extinct as the airlines itself. (Braniff went kaput in 1982, remember?) And, totally unacceptable as well. There’s a time and place for everything one does. Wear your country club hat when you’re going there, not when you’re buying your groceries. Vanity license plates may be good for your vanity but not necessarily for your health and safety. Do not ─ repeat NOT ─ throw away your ATM receipts. There’s no such thing as being too careful with your car keys, your house keys, your cell phone and your baby when you go shopping. Be very caution of what you post on Facebook, Twitter and the like, too. Please, please do not tempt fate. Mack the Knife may be sneaking round the corner.

Jane Austen Redux. And how?

When last heard of, Aunt Jane is thriving merrily under the solicitous and caring tutelage from her great grand nephews and nieces across the big pond, wonder of wonders. Now she is solving crime – it’s Austen and not Marple I’m talking of, mind you – in Stephanie Barron’s Jane Austen mysteries sporting such antique-sounding titles as Jane and the Unpleasantness at the Scargrave Manor, Jane and the Man of the Cloth, Jane and the Wandering Eye, Jane and the Barque of Frailty and so forth. Their authentically Austenesque text reads thusly: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that the expectation of pleasure is generally preferred to its eventual attainment – the attainment being marred, at its close, be the resumption of quotidian routine made onerous by the very diversions so lately enjoyed.” (Jane and the Man of the Cloth, Chapter 1) More recently, Aunt Jane has made inroads once again into Regency-era England this time set in an alternative universe and infested by the persistently pesky undead (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies). Her other foray into Regency-era England set also in an alternative universe features sea creatures arrayed against humankind (Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters). Both the pastiche mash-ups in the gothic horror genre got fairly good (read “enthusiastic to middling”) response. PPZ is slated to spawn a series of spin-offs: a graphic novel, a video game and even a movie. This plethora of multi-media parodies seems to me to be an apt stratagem to lure contemporary young readers, game players and movie-goers to Austen.

All this reminds me of June 2006 when I found re-reading Pride and Prejudice after more than four decades somewhat daunting. I cannot quite recall what I had thought of Austen when I first read Pride and Prejudice, if memory serves, in the 1950s. In the late summer of 2006, I found her 18th-century spelling as quaint ('chuse', 'teaze', 'shew', 'stile', etc.) but her dialogue and storytelling impeccable, to be sure. Imagine keeping me riveted – in eager anticipation – to the exploits of young damsels in rural Regency-era England seeking desirable husbands! Austen's most popular and well-known novel was originally written between October 1796 and August 1797 (qua First Impressions) but published only in 1813. In 1811, her Sense and Sensibility was published and became an instant success. After that, she revised First Impressions and it was published a couple of years later. At the well-organized and copiously informative website http://digbig.com/5bbhrq, you’ll find more about Austen’s P&P characters, timeline and locales. Don't forget to take a good look at the 1895 edition illustrations by Charles E Brock, either.

Meanwhile back at 3252 Romulus St., L.A.

Arrived at LAX, 4 p.m., Good Friday. Haven’t posted till today, i.e., Sunday. Excuse? Just as I reached the Newark Airport, Friday morning, heard about Suresh, Anita’s dad, being on life- support at Holy Name Hospital, Bandra. Anita was already on her way to Mumbai when I reached LAX. I was picked up by Abhi, Armaan and Anika. No hassles about the baggage reclaim. Abhi’s place is fabulous, like something out of one of Shoiab’s coffee table books on American architecture I used to write folders for in the good old days if there ever were such times I lived through. Nonetheless, I’ve been off mood generally with Suresh’s condition being unstable ─ something everybody else seems already resigned to. I guess I’ve grown to be quite fond of the guy over the sixteen years since I got to know him. Never realized to what extent, though. Didn’t get much sleep Friday night/Saturday morning. Felt awfully cold, tossed and turned in bed. Went out yesterday afternoon to the park with the kids and Abhi for a couple of hours or so. This morning too for a few of their weekend chores, e.g., visit to the library. All’s as well as can be under the circumstances.

Alarming.

Home is where mishaps are. Especially for a mishap-prone person. Like me. Take his morning, for instance. I’m supposed to leave 541 Sayre Drive, Princeton with Nandini to while away 4 hours at Barnes & Noble at the Market Fair mall. It’s drizzling outside. At the last minute, I change my mind and decide to do a bit of writing at home instead. Nandini leaves for work. I get myself some pineapple juice and cereal. After working on my writing assignment for a couple of hours in the basement, I lie down in bed reading and nod off to a not-too-deep sleep. Suddenly, footsteps on the upper staircase nudge me half awake. I’m not quite sure if I really heard them. I get up, walk up from the basement and try to open the garage door. The security alarm goes into an overdrive with the siren wailing loud enough to wake up the dead, let alone the slightly groggy me. I get a call from the security company to enquire if all’s well. I say Yes. The siren continues to wail. In due course, firemen and cops arrive. In the meanwhile, my repeated attempts to get in touch with Nandini and retrieve the code to put the fire alarm off are in vain. Finally, she arrives in person quite perturbed. Apologies are offered and the mystery gets solved. The footsteps I heard earlier were Aditi’s. She came to get her iPod, found the fire alarm was off and, thinking nobody was home, turned it on along with the motion sensor. Had I continued with my snooze, stayed put and not gone up to investigate, there would have been no problem. Well, the mishap had to happen. And, like it or not, it did.

Love story. Chapter 11.

Romeo & Juliet. Beckham & Posh. John & Yoko. Superman & Lois Lane. Sonny & Cher. Homer & Marge. Penny & Kenny. Of the seven couples cited on the cute card from the hitched-for-25-years-"serious love"-birds-and-shoe-makers I found in the DSW Shoe Warehouse on Sunday, three are fictional. The Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection filed on 31 July 2009 in New York by Penny & Kenny ("... we LOVE shoes as much as you do!") is not. “Marge, it takes two to lie. One to lie, one to listen.” http://digbig.com/5bbgme And you thought love meant never having to say you were sorry?

Alexander the Great, Porus and the Walls of Jericho.

The Alexander-Porus confrontation happened long, long ago, in July 326 BC if you want the exact date. Does it really matter now? Is it really necessary for a school student to mug it up? In the 1962 movie Anpadh (literally “uneducated”), the young Kalu (Mohan Choti) wonders about it so much that finally he breaks into a song: “Sikandar ne Porus se ki thi ladaai/ Jo ki thi ladaai to mein kya karun?” (If Alexander the Great fought Porus [once upon a time] where do I come in?”) In other words, do I need to even know about it? Point taken. Which brings me to the Walls of Jericho. A school super drops into little Johnny’s classroom unannounced. “Who broke down the Walls of Jericho?” is his rather stern query to Johnny. “I don’t know,” confesses Johnny, “But it wasn’t me.” Appalled by the student’s lack of basic Bible knowledge, the super marches up to the school principal’s office to report the matter only to hear him say: “I know little Johnny and his family and can vouch for them. If he says he didn’t do it, I believe him.” Even more incensed by the school head’s ignorance, the super goes to the regional head of education and spills the beans. After listening to the complaint, that worthy says soothingly: “Take it easy. Why don’t we call for three quotes and get the darn wall fixed? Our insurance will cover us.” (P.S.: In the alternative version, little Johnny’s dad offers to get the wall fixed.) Just in case you’re wondering who really did it, it was Joshua, the son of Nun, according to Elvis Presley. http://digbig.com/5bbghb. Good ol' Josh did it with his 12-foot spear when he went into battle. Some infidels say the Walls were washed away by rain, though. Others claim they never existed.

P.S.: Finally comes my “Eureka!” moment with Jef Mallett’s Frazz in the Calendar section (p. D15) of Los Angeles Times, Thursday, April 8, 2010:

Mrs Olsen: '8) Define “platitude”.’

Caulfield: 'A duck-billed, web-footed mammal’s approach to life.’

C to Frazz: 'She gives me a word I don’t need. I give her a definition she doesn’t need.

Frazz to C: 'You give, you get.’ http://comics.com/frazz (Please search by date.)

Gloriously goofy.

What can you say when an author whose name spells to you thrills and suspense decides to give you goose pimples with romance? That he probably lost his marbles? That he is now in his second childhood? The plot kinda thickens when you realize that James Patterson has been called "the absolute pits, the lowest common denominator of cynical, scuzzy, assembly-line writing" by Patrick Anderson, a reviewer for The Washington Post. Either Patterson is the incredible writing machine with no writer’s block or he is the most skillful manipulator of the conjuror’s trick called ghost writing. The latter seems a distinct possibility because he has more than one publication, stand alone or series, in a single year to his credit. Plus, he caters to both sexes, all ages. Admit it or not, he is a big success in pop lit, someone Forbes keeps track of. He is quite the opposite of the failure-prone Orson Welles. http://digbig.com/5bbggq. Patterson has been criticized for using collaborators frequently to write on a prolific scale. But, remarkably, his many co-authors share an authorship credit on the cover. The co-authors agreement with Patterson has a non-disclosure clause about the terms of their working relationship, including the extent of Patterson’s involvement. My guess on the gloriously goofy Sundays at Tiffany’ in tandem with Gabrielle Charbonnet, principally a children’s book specialist, puts his plotting contribution at 100% and writing at zilch. In other words, I feel in my guts he is the mastermind but not the craftsman in this case. I could be totally off the mark of course. But there you are, boys and girls. Patterson is J Walter Thomson's former CEO, the ad pro who thought up the "Toys R Us" slogan, ergo presumably well versed in product development. I rest my case

Good 'air Day.

Life teaches you to expect the unexpected. There I was prepared for the worst as I boarded CO-49 on Friday night in Mumbai. Here I am in the 541 Sayre Drive, Princeton basement writing this post at 8:30 am Sunday, 14 March, safe and sound, not much the worse for wear except thoroughly exhausted. I did not sleep a wink on the flight, watched Citizen Kane and a bunch of idiot box comedies including The Simpsons, Back to You and stuff to while away the 15 odd hours up in the skies, not forgetting this traveller’s progress on the Flight Map. The only bad break in the Good ’air Day feeling was the bit of struggle at the baggage reclaim to get one of my two heavy bags off the carousel in Terminal C, Newark Airport, Saturday morning. Help arrived in the shape of a fellow traveller and I was out of Terminal C and into Ashu’s Toyota in a matter of minutes. The CO-49 cabin crew screwed it up a tad by serving cold veggie breakfast and handing out the US Customs and Security forms too close to the landing time. Everybody is happy to see me. Ujwal and Abhi are told of my safe arrival. It's a day of freak rains. After a bath, brunch and a 2½ hour nap, I go with the 3 A’s of the Princeton Mankars to a pet shop to look at crossbred pups who are cute like all young ‘uns. Looking at them reminds me of the 1950s Patti Page hit: “How much is that doggy in the window (arf, arf!) /The one with the waggely tail? How much is that doggy in that window (arf, arf!)/ I do hope the doggy’s for sale.” Nobody but me seems to know of it or the singer. http://digbig.com/5bbftk. The night is a dinner get-together with Nandini’s friends. Nice and relaxing except for a pinch of excitement added by Aditi and Nupur getting stranded for a couple of hours on their way back for the DVD rental shop because of flash floods. For a country yokel like me, it’s a big surprise to witness blackout and floods in the Land of Milk and Honey. All in all though, as they say, Saturday, the 13th was a lucky day for this 22-born. P.S.: At the end of it all, I cannot help but marvel at the fact that among The Mankars at 233 Khetwadi Main Road http://digbig.com/5bafde, I was the first one to fly in the early fifties. The rest of them, though well-travelled by the then prevailing standards, had done it by rail and road.

F for Fake. F for Failure.

“For it can be very hard to live with the belief that nothing matters in life, that nothing is solid or real, that everything is a show in the egotist’s head. It loses friends, trust, children, home, money, security and maybe reason. So it is comforting indeed, late in life, to come upon a proof that the emptiness and the trickery are valid and sufficient. A very sweet, shallow serenity is left.” (David Thomson, ROSEBUD The Story of Orson Welles, Abacus, 2005, p. 409)

Welles and I have at least two things in common, as far as I can fathom. Both of us never reached our full potential and were failures in worldly terms. (Pauline Kael wrote: "When Welles was only thirty-six, the normally gracious Walter Kerr referred to him as 'an international joke, and possibly the youngest living has-been.’” http://digbig.com/5bbejc) There is also the mutually shared belief so eloquently spelt out by Thomson in the quote above. This probably explains the strange affinity I have always felt to Welles without really having been a fan. I saw Citizen Ken and Carol Reed’s The Third Man when I was in London in 1971 and duly admired both the films, especially Welles’s contribution. Earlier, I had avidly sought, read and enjoyed the study of the CBS’s The War of the Worlds radio broadcast (Halloween 1938) by Hadley Cantril, Professor of Psychology, Princeton University (Invasion from Mars). In the meanwhile, I had started to think of myself as a film buff http://digbig.com/5bbehw. My cinema aficionado’s reading list included Pauline Kael’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. It was inevitable that I soon came across her 2-part New Yorker article (1971), Raising Kane, which accused Welles of being a credit stealer. This rekindled the ancient controversy about Welles having tried to deny credit of Citizen Kane’s authorship to Herman J Mankiewicz as well as The War of the World radio show’s authorship to Howard Koch. Both accusations had an element of truth in it. F for Fake (1973; 85 minutes), co-authored by Welles and Oja Kodar, is his retort to Kael. Here’s one terse summary of the film: “F for Fake opens with a couple of magic tricks, segues as though by sleight-of-hand into the story of master art-forger Elmyr de Hory and his relationship with biographer Clifford Irving (a sequence ‘remixed’ by Welles with extant footage from François Reichenbach’s documentary work-in-progress, Elmyr), then hones in on Irving when word gets out that his purported biography of recluse-mogul Howard Hughes is a first-class hoax in its own right. Here the film erupts in all directions, as Welles contrasts the sprawl of ‘70s Hollywood with the halcyon Tinseltown that produced Citizen Kane; contemplates the continent that provided him with an artistic refuge some 800 years after the anonymous construction of the cathedral at Chartres; and, lastly, recounts a meeting between that most un-anonymous of artists — Pablo Picasso — and Welles’ companion Oja Kodar, which took place in her youth…”. http://digbig.com/5bbejb. Rosebud (page 409) describes Kodor as “the naked lady who makes a monkey out of Picasso…”. Apparently, F for Fake is Welles’s definitive statement on contemporary reality. “Trust nobody. Beware especially of (s)he who asserts his/her authority without any proof or basis” is the message. “Ladies and gentlemen, that’s the end of the story” is how Welles would have summed it up.

Enormous audience of one.

I joined Clarion in 1965 soon after its collaboration with McCann Erickson. http://digbig.com/5bbcpa. One of the so-called benefits conferred on the Indian ad agency was the training of the creative, media and research staff by a “visiting faculty” from McCann. These Firangs would come and regale us as well as our clients with paens to their own intrepid exploits. Actually, this was a way to offer free junkets to the reigning favourites of the McCann international management at the expense of the Indian “partner” – a new twist to the time-tested imperialist ploy. What Clarion got out of it was the PR mileage. One of the worthies from out west was a Creative Director – I cannot recall his name – whose self-proclaimed secret of success was to write and design print and cinema ads to talk to the “enormous audience of one”. To prove his thesis he even had a 30-minute slide-and-sound show (an ancestor of the PowerPoint presentation) with examples culled from (hold your breath!) Keats, Byron, Wordsworth and the Bard of Avon set to music. What the Great Man did not clarify was how one was supposed to achieve it in the enormous clutter of ads in print and at the movie hall. The implication probably was that clever media placement could clear that hurdle. Being an impressionable rookie then, I was quite taken up by his act which further fortified my belief that I was engaged in a “creative” pursuit. It was much much later that I realised the common thread running in all these “winning” formulae. Zero in on an attention-grabbing key word (“positioning”) or phrase (“enormous audience of one”) and offer it as the secret ingredient for advertising success, a panacea almost. Remember what Dr Samuel Johnson said ? “Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement.” Bingo!

The joke’s on me.

This story is from my 233 Khetwadi Main Road days. http://digbig.com/5bafde. In 1952, after SSC, I joined the Sydenham College. My FY B Com class used to be then held on the third floor of the now demolished Sukhadwala Building almost diagonally across the Excelsior Cinema http://digbig.com/5bbbxe. No more than a block away towards Victoria Terminus was the Capital Cinema. In the same building in the lane leading to the New Empire Cinema was a book stall selling magazines, comics books and paperbacks. I always used to go there to browse. One day, a joke book by Powers Moulton, Best Jokes for All Occasions, in the Perma Books edition caught my eye and my fancy. It was a canary yellow hard bound pocket book with the edges of the pages tinged blood red. I can “see” it even today. What I liked most about the joke book was the "just applied" smell of the glue used by the binder. I can almost “smell” it even now. To cut a long story short, albeit the fact that I was at that time almost totally devoid of a sense of humour, I became the proud owner of it after shelling out probably Re.1.75 for it. The price was 35 cents, I reckon. Though I cannot swear by it, a dollar used to cost 5 rupees those days. End of story. But since we are on jokes, here are some squeaky clean ones that I find really amusing.

{1}
A medium was busy summoning people back from the netherworld. A nine-year-old kept insisting he wanted to talk to Grandpa.

“Quiet!” she shushed him more than once, quite annoyed.

“Grandpa! I want to talk to Grandpa,” he persisted.

“Very well, little boy,” she conceded, making a few hocus-pocus passes. “Here he is.”

“Grandpa,” said the boy. “What are you doing out there? You ain’t dead.”

{2}
A meek little man timidly touched the arm of a man putting on an overcoat in a restaurant’s cloak room.

“Ex - cu - se me,” he stammered. “Do you happen to be Mr Smith of Newport?”

“Certainly not!” said the man impatiently.

“Oh - errrrr – well,” replied the other. “I am. And, that’s his overcoat you’re putting on.”

{3}
Proud mom: “My son’s only 3 but can already spell his name backwards.”

Skeptical neighbour: “So what’s his name?”

Proud mom: “Otto.”

{4}
An English teacher assigned her class the task of writing four lines of dramatic poetry.

When the students handed in their papers, she chose the verse of her star pupil and read it out aloud. It went:

“A boy was walking down the track.
A train was rushing at him fast.
The boy stepped off the track
To let the train whizz past.”

“Ten out of ten for rhyming, Raju,” said the teacher. “But zero out of ten for drama. Do try again.”

Raju’s next effort at dramatizing the event left her speechless, though:

“A boy was walking down the track.
A train was rushing at him fast.
The train jumped off the track
To let the boy walk past.”

{5}
Hiker: “Can I catch the 6:45 if I cut through your field?”

Farmer: “If my bull sees you, you might even catch the 6:15.”

{6}
A college dean received a diffident letter from the father of a prospective entrant enquiring about the chances of his son attending the institute.

“Frankly,” wrote the father, “Henry may not be leader material but he gets along well with everyone.”

“Please send him along,” read the dean’s reply, “we need him. We now have 985 leaders in our freshman class. One follower would be a breath of fresh air.“

{7}
Hired hand: “I’ve been with you for 25 years and never asked you for a raise before.”

Farmer: “That is why you have been here 25 years, my man.”

{8}
Psychiatrist: “Do you have trouble making up your mind?”

Patient: “Well – yes and no.”

{9}
A man was woken up by the phone at his bedside ringing stridently at 3:00 a.m. It was the neighbour shrieking in his ear: “Your dog is barking so loudly I can’t sleep.”

Before he could protest, the neighbour hung up on him.

The next morning, at 3:00 a.m., the man rang up his neighbour. “I don’t have a dog,” he said and promptly hung up.

{10}
“Dad,” asked the son looking up from the book he was reading, “what does ‘diplomatic phraseology’ mean?”

“It’s like this, son,” said his Dad, “if you say to a homely girl, ‘Your face would stop a clock’ that would be plain stupidity. But if you said instead, ‘When I look into your eyes, time stands still’, that would be ‘diplomatic phraseology’.”

{11}
A veteran bank robber much hassled by his wife's demand for cash tries to placate her: "Just wait till the bank closes, dear, you shall have all the cash you need."

{12}
Then, there is the much harassed lawyer who keeps calling home and finds the line busy. So, he summons his secretary, tells her to take down a telegram for his daughter, Sue. "Send it by express wire," he tells the secretary. "Get off the line this instant, Sue," his telegram reads.

Guess which two of these jokes are past their expiry date? http://digbig.com/5bbbxk.

Losing the plot.

The last time I met Avantika, Ashu’s younger daughter, was when she came here last November-December to attend a big fat Punjabi wedding in her mother’s family. It was then that, in my time-tested arrogance, I had the temerity to recommend to her Padosan as a comedy worth watching. She had already seen it. “I didn’t like it, Dada,” she said matter-of-factly. It suddenly dawned on me there and then that this business of the older generation’s experience benefitting the younger generation is a non-starter. Avantika is a Digital Native from New Jersey. I’m at best a Ludditesque, reluctant, late-adopting Digital Immigrant ill at ease in the fast changing world. http://tinyurl.com/43fygl. In other words, my experience is of no use, value or consequence to her. For her, it’s maybe cool to pay Rs 320/- to see 3 Idiots in a multiplex and an extra Rs 50/- for a tub of pop corn. For me, it’s idiotic, nay criminal. Get the drift?

The Gift.

Pop culture has an entire mystical edifice built around 'giving’. The Biblical-sounding admonition, “’Tis better to give than receive” sums it up. Christmas is the season of giving. It’s the Christmas spirit, see? http://digbig.com/5bawdt. Santa Claus is also a part of it, I guess. What’s his role in the whole season-of-giving rigmarole? Frankly, he’s the guy who sits in a mall to act as a conduit of children’s wish lists. The marketing suits hire him. So, he owes them one. Things got murkier when ol’ O.Henry from good ol’ Greensboro hopped on the giving wagon with his The Gift of the Magi. http://digbig.com/5bawdw. This short story ranks with the best in the genre. O.Henry − William Sidney Porter in real life − was the son of Algernon Sidney, a physician, and Mary Jane Virginia Swaim Porter. His great-uncle, Jonathan Worth, was governor of North Carolina from 1865 to 1868. Dogged by bad luck, he was incarcerated between 1897 and 1901 for alleged embezzlement of bank funds. In1910, O.Henry died of diabetes and cirrhosis of the liver in New York. Five years earlier, he wrote The Gift of the Magi in the bar of Pete’s Tavern, extant even now, in the Gramercy area of Manhattan. http://digbig.com/5bawed. Giving is a sign of love was his message. But a sign to whom? In Della and Jim’s case, there was no need to prove their love for each other. In buying the gifts they could scarcely afford they were merely conforming to a pop-culture ‘tradition’ fuelled chiefly by commerce. Were the Magi’s "gifts of gold and of frankincense and of myrrh" to the new-born in the manger a wise and thoughtful choice? Frankincense and myrrh were probably for the baby’s body rub. What about gold, though? Was it a tribute to the perceived royalty and divinity of Jesus perhaps? P.S.: This morning, purely by accident, I happened to watch on the MGM Channel a 1988 movie called Masquerade. http://digbig.com/5bawfj. It’s about Olivia, a recently orphaned heiress swept off her feet by a dashing yacht racing skipper (Tim). To start with, his courtship is a part of a conspiracy to wed and kill her and share her wealth with his co-conspirators. But as their relationship grows, he begins to love her in right earnest so much so that, after marriage, he voluntarily gets his name removed from her will without her knowledge. He wants nothing from her, in short. He even sacrifices his life to save hers. How about that? (I know. I know. It's only a movie.)

Babes in the woods? Tiger lurking!

If what Jamie Jungers says http://digbig.com/5batwk is not an experiment with truth http://digbig.com/5batwm, Tiger has walked willy-nilly into the Mahatma league. He is now on par with MK Gandhi no less. (AN AUTOBIGRAPHY OR The story of my experiments with truth, Chapter 8: My Father’s Death and My Double Shame, p.16). How come nobody noticed it?

Amar Akbar Anthony, anyone?

Recently, one morning, I was listening on my iPod to Mohamed Rafi singing the qawali ‘Pardah Hai Pardah’ from Manmohan Desai’s Amar Akbar Anthony. It suddenly occurred to me what an ass I had been not to have made friends with Desai when I had the chance. I used to bump into him in the late fifties in our mutual friend’s (Vinay’s) den in the Bhagini Samaj building virtually next door to 233 Khetwadi Main Road http://digbig.com/5bafde. We somehow never hit it off. By all accounts, he was a gem of a guy whereas I used to be, in those days, an opinionated oaf who took himself too seriously. I remember thinking of him as a wastrel because he had quit college and was doing nothing. He used to borrow comics books from Vinay because he did not have money to pay the circulating library fees by his own admission. Then he disappeared from the scene. Vinay told me that he was probably assisting his brother in film production. In 1960, MD directed the Raj Kapoor and Nutan starrer Chhalia. It had hit songs and did quite well at the box office. His magnum opus unarguably was Amar Akbar Anthony (1977). I enjoyed it when I saw it in Apsara Talkies in spite of the innumerable cinematic clichés he peppered it with. For instance, in the opening scene under the credits, blood from the three long-separated sons of different religions flowed into the veins of the mother (Mother India?). Then, in the unabashedly exploitative ‘Shirdiwale Sai Baba’ sequence, the son’s prayer triggered a miraculous recovery of the mother from the jaws of death. There was nevertheless an infectious joie de vivre he managed to inject in the movie that made it a fabulous fun flick. The story, by the way, was credited to Desai’s wife who was from the Khetwadi Main Road neighbourhood. Even after MD’s success, the couple continued to live in the same neighbourhood. What was incredible in the Manmohan Desai saga was the ending totally out of synch with his persona. He jumped to his death from the terrace of his building abutting the Bhagini Samaj building. Inexplicable!

Alternative History: freedom or transfer of power?

Come to think of it, the Congress Party at the outset was almost a non-starter. It debuted, on 28 December 1885, somewhat anemically under the baton of Allan Octavian Hume, Esq., formerly of the Indian Civil Service, a decorated veteran of the 1857 rebellion and coincidentally also a noted ornithologist, with the aim of keeping a watch over native civil unrest and collaborating with the British Imperialist administration. The idea was perhaps to act as a facilitator for the Indian accommodation to the powers that happened to be.

I just finished reading Freedom Struggle Betrayed: India 1885- 1947 (originally entitled Indian National Congress: How Indian? How National?). Described by its publisher as a search for answers to basic political and economic questions, it tells a story about how India won freedom and what role the Indian National Congress played, quite different from what we read in school history and other popular narratives. The thrust of the argument here is that what we learned about what happened is a huge and horrendous lie.

The Indian National Congress was always a collaborator or comprador of the British Raj right from the beginning with a program of lukewarm petition politics. It was so when Dadabhai Nowroji, Gokhale, Sir Phirozeshah Mehta and like-minded moderates − closely linked with the Indian businessmen, financiers and landed gentry − were running it in the early days. It remained so even when Mahatma Gandhi took over the reins of the Party and steered it right till 1947. The book cites evidence, chapter and verse, from various published sources to make a case for the betrayal of the freedom struggle by the Congress Party at every step of the way. It points a finger at Gandhi as the principal villain. Among his many trespasses cited in the narrative are the famous Champaran campaign, his intervention in the Ahmedabad textile strike and the Kheda episode. In all these instances, Gandhi persuaded the victims of injustice − the working class and the peasantry − to settle for less than what they had fought for. The beneficiaries of his intervention were the exploiters who got away with having to pay less than the rightful penalty. Similarly, in other instances where Gandhi claimed to be agitating against the British Raj, he would stop the movement when it had gained momentum but before it had really started to hurt the Raj. The famous example was the Chauri Chaura incidence. All these are seen by the authors of the book as an abject continuation of petition politics at the cost especially of the downtrodden masses, i.e., the working class and the peasantry. Gandhi is also accused of manipulating the Congress Party to suit his will and whims. There is a long list of transgressions in the book to his debit. The book is sharply critical of Nehru as well for his socialist “pretensions” and his claim that he was a champion of the rural masses. But once again the blame is shifted to the puppet master or Svengali aka as the Mahatma for manipulating Nehru on many policy issues favouring the other side. The trouble with Nehru was that he was a fairly decent writer with probably a writer’s ability to deceive himself and others.

My own take on reading the alternative history of the Indian freedom movement and thinking about it in the light of what little I’ve managed to learn on my own about Gandhi is that there could be quite a bit of truth in what it says. Reading Girja Kumar's BRAHMACHARYA Gandhi & His Women Associates is a big eye opener. One of the grossest instances of his interference in the lives of his associates is how he punished an adopted daughter Jeki for her sexual transgression involving his own son Manilal. http://digbig.com/4yaae and http://digbig.com/4yaaf. In one of my earlier posts http://digbig.com/5basgm, I had written, inter alia, as follows: “This [Girja Kumar’s] narrative is based mostly on Gandhi's own writings. In it, the so-called Mahatma comes out as manipulative, pathologically obsessive about sex and sin as well as power-crazed. His logic sounds circuitous, serpentine and often self-contradictory and specious, at times even inane. He apparently played God with the lives of those close to him. He was too intrusive and interfering.” He could have lived up to the image the report in question accords him, in short.

Did India wake up to freedom at midnight on 15 August 1947? http://digbig.com/5basma Or, was there simply a transfer of power from the British Imperialists to their equally ruthless Indian compradors?

Take your pick or toss a coin.

Conspiracy by omission.

As a rule, I distrust and shun conspiracy theories. Today, I’m going to spin one. It has been bothering me for a long time. The more I try to shoo it away, the more it refuses to vamoose. It concerns the last months of Gandhi’s life. He had become something of an embarrassment and a liability to the powers that happened to be then and there as well as to his colleagues. His mahayajna – his by then notorious Brahmacharya experiments, to be precise − had infuriated his close associates including Sardar Patel who had accused him of committing adharma – of being guilty of moral and spiritual decadence, in other words. Long time colleagues like Kishorelal Mashruwala and Narhari Parekh and even Devdas Gandhi joined in the protest. Thakkar Bappa, a top associate of Gandhi, journeyed to Noakhali in December 1946 to dissuade him from continuing his mahayajna. Gandhi felt completely isolated. “For after all I am not God, “he wrote to Birla. “I can commit mistakes; … this may prove to be my biggest at the fag-end of my life. … all my well-wishers can open my eyes if they oppose me. If they do not … I shall go from hence even as I am … Whatever I am doing here is a part of my yajna.” He was totally transparent. “… when I take M[anu] in my lap, do I do so as a pure-hearted father or as a father who has strayed from the path of virtue? What I am doing is nothing new to me: in thought I have done it for the last fifty years; in action, in varying degrees, over quite a number of years.” In February 1947, he spoke of publishing the findings of his research but nothing came out of it. His honesty and courage to follow his convictions did not cut ice with his followers. The old man had to be punished with at least a slap on his wrist if nothing worse. Meanwhile his intervention on behalf of the Indian Muslims and his recommendation to the Government of India to pay Pakistan her share of the pre-partition finances (Rs 55 crore) had raised the hackles of the Hindu fundamentalists in and out of the Congress Party. Several attempts had already been made on Gandhi’s life. B G Kher, the then Chief Minister of the Bombay Presidency and a close confidant of the Central Home Minister Sardar Patel, had been apprised of the plot by Dr J C Jain after he had got an inkling of it from Madanlal Pahwa, one of Godse’s fellow conspirators. Balukaka Kanitkar, a well-respected Congressman from Pune, learned of the plot from G V Ketkar – a former editor of Kesari. He wrote a registered letter to inform Kher. The intelligence was passed on to the authorities in Delhi and yet the security was not beefed up. http://digbig.com/5baqge. The Godse Brothers, Apte, Madanlal and their colleagues were just some of the conspirators apparently. There were more who collaborated by omission. Culpable negligence, anyone?