One of the words that might just make into popular lexicon this year would be “Batgirling”. Though the usage and origin is confined to a narrow subset of people: comic book fans. More specifically, comic book fans that read ongoing mainstream titles. I am not one of them. That may soon be changing, thanks to the aforementioned word.

What happened was this: about a year ago, an editor named Mark Strong got artist Cameron Stewart to take on writer-duties on the ongoing DC series Batgirl.  This was a series that had recently been rebooted in the New 52 event, one that made Barbara Gordon Batgirl again. The only thing I noticed or cared about the original reboot (as opposed to this new reboot of that reboot) was that the covers were by Adam Hughes and Gail Simone wrote the series – the writer was well-known for her definitive run on Birds of Prey, the 90s series that featured Barbara Gordon in her wheelchair-ridden Oracle avatar, teaming up with Black Canary and later, Huntress. But as I have mentioned to various people who still care to listen – mainstream DC and Marvel are both too obsessed with shoving their readers’ heads up the dark cavities of continuity hell (My favorite way of proving this is to ask someone “Who is Robin right now?” and “what is the difference between Uncanny Avengers, New Avengers and Mighty Avengers?”). Add to it my basic gripe that Superman has never been used well and Batman is a self-obsessed asshole that gets a free pass from everyone just because he is “cool”, and there you have it – I walked away from DC/Marvel without looking back. With a foot in the door, to be fair, because I was still interested in the loony titles. Hawkeye by Dave Aja and Matt Fraction, Loki Agent of Asgard, and Ms Marvel, to name a few. 

But back to Batgirl. What really happened with Cam Stewart getting on board with co-writer Brenden Fletcher and Babs Tarr on art duties is a distinct change in tone. Mind you, I haven’t read the actual comics yet (read last part of paragraph above), but the sassiness of the cover and the online discussion about the change got me interested enough to check out a few sample interiors of Batgirl #35. I liked ’em quite a bit, the focus seemed to be on a distinctive teenage personality, not a cookie-cutter heroine subservient to the needs of whatever overarching plot-stuffing that DC editorial mandated. I decided to keep an eye out for the trade when it came out; but my default setting was still set to “skepticism – high”.

Until I read recently about how the success of the Batgirl relaunch, and that of other series like Harley Quinn and Gotham Academy – which is a school story set in our favorite crazy city illustrated by Becky Cloonan, she who has successfully straddled the indie scene with just as much elan as her forays into DC/Marvel territory – has led to a change in company policy. A lot of DC series are being relaunched with new creative teams in June. Which does not say much by itself, but when I hear of editorial call for pitches with “blue sky treatment” where continuity is given less preference over content. And the relaunches look good. Batgirl‘s Brenden Fletcher takes over Black Canary with artists Annie Wu and Irene Koh. Bryan Hitch, known for his widescreen action in The Authority and The Ultimates works on the Justice League of America. I get a comeuppance of sorts through a series called We Are Robin.

The city is overrun by Jokerized victims, but a small band of teenagers unites to take a stand. Their secret knowledge of Gotham City’s streets helps them survive, but will Batman take help from this young group of upstarts?

I don’t know where this may lead just yet, but if this works, it may be a great way to make these comics less cumbersome and more joyful. Because as much as one loves the grittiness of a Dark Knight Returns or a Watchmen, we do not deserve mutated fetuses of these story-lines churned out every year, dripping in blood, deaths, fake reverence that stands in for “heroism”. The need of the hour is less schlock, more aww. And yes, and a whole lot of diversity in comics. DC seems to have risen to that particular challenge, as Bleeding Cool says:

We have a black man (Dave Walker) writing one of DC’s most prominent black comic characters, Cyborg. We have a woman (Amanda Conner) writing and drawing (Emanuela Lupacchino) Starfire, often criticized for the character’s sexist portrayals of late. And a comic book creator (Steve Orlando) who already brought us a critically acclaimed gay graphic novel (Virgil), writing DC’s gay male comic, Midnighter. Criticism that despite attempts at diversity in character, it’s still a bunch of straight white men working on the comics, is a little harder to justify today.

(I probably shouldn’t even mention how worried and happy I am at the same time for the return of Garth Ennis and John McCrea’s Section Eight, one of the most deranged groups of people ever willed into existence. They appeared in the cult Hitman, and I have fond memories – and high hopes – of Messrs Ennis and McCrea)

Barbara Gordon getting shot in the spine arguably started this slow, morbid tailspin that DC fell into since the eighties. It would be fitting if Ms Gordon’s return to form – in a pair of yellow Doc Martens, no less – brings this company out of its storytelling slump.

Dear DC

We fine-tune our moods with pharmaceuticals and Spotify. We craft our meals around our allergies and ideologies. We can choose a vehicle to express our hipness or hostility. We can move to a neighborhood that matches our social values, find a news outlet that mirrors our politics, and create a social network that “likes” everything we say or post. With each transaction and upgrade, each choice and click, life moves closer to us, and the world becomes our world.

An excerpt from a sobering essay by Paul Roberts, adapted from his book The Impulse Society: America in the Age of Instant Gratification. Among other things, the article talks about rehab from internet/video game addiction, a proliferation of choice brought about by magnitudes of efficiency in the marketplace, compared to a few decades ago – “market-driven narcissism”, he calls it – and ultimately, the attempts of a few to withstand this economic and marketing onslaught on the senses. It links ideas such as the trend of companies to aim for short-term profits rather than entrenched long-term vision to the societal shift towards short-term pleasures, the Buzzfeed list and the Upworthy article instead of a New Yorker piece.

This hits home. While the article talks about the American population, I feel it applies everywhere, even to Indians. Hell, I once considered myself insusceptible to the charms of the free market, but obviously, I am not as smart as I think. Every morning, the Internet ensconces me in its comforting womb, and suddenly I blink, and an hour has gone by. Friends tell me how their reading habits have dramatically changed, especially with long-form articles. It is easy, so easy, to stumble across an article that is an extract from a book, and to open up Amazon immediately to order the book (Meta commentary, bitches!). Even though there is a pile of unread books already in my living room, and I just ordered another graphic novel just a day ago and it’s still in the mail.

I spent most of my teens and twenties sweating about packages in the mail. There was a six-month delivery cycle, on an average. Especially with comics, which I would buy in bulk, send to one address in the US, and then at some undetermined time in the future, a helpful traveler would consent to carry a few – or in some cases, all – of the packages back to India. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. I remember forking over a 100 rupee note (about $1.75, by today’s exchange rate) when I was a student – at a time when 100 rupees would get me comfortably through a week of non-hostel-food activities, to someone in IIT Madras just because he said he could get me a DivX of Natural Born Killers, burn it on a CD, and send it to my college address, in the post. He sent it, sure, but it would not play on my Celeron 32 MB RAM machine, and I had to ask someone to use their computer so that I could finally watch it.

It was a letdown, of course. I had read the script before, and Oliver Stone’s final cut was a watered-down version of what I had going on in my mind. I remember that biting feeling of having wasted 100 rupees on – this fucking movie? – and contemplated what I could have bought with that money, 10 comics from Best Book Stall, or 2 Terry Pratchett novels, or 5 other movie rentals from the local VCD library.

But you know what? I also remember that agonizing month-long wait for the CD. The act of looking forward to being gratified, to the Next Big Thing on the Horizon. And for all the numbness brought about by the relentless assault of Hype machine working overtime, there are still moments that surprise. There is music that finds you at the right time, and experiences that slide right into your life, like a stranger on a park bench who says a casual, tentative hello, and begins chatting with you with a familiarity that you never thought could exist between two unknown people.

Instant gratification is all around us. But everything need not be about instant gratification. Right?

Pal Dhritiman and I have known each other for 14 years now, and despite the fact that we have occasional differences – he spells ‘shonen’ as ‘shounen’ and ‘biryani’ ‘biriyani’ – he remains among the handful of people I can call up in the middle of the night, say “come over, remember to bring a gun, and keep your phone on silent”, and have him cheerily agree. (The food bill the next day would probably hurt, but trust me, the other guy had it worse.) Consequently, I had asked him to make a guest post on this rather infrequently-updated – ahem, fine, fine, nearly-dead blog. Things as diverse as ‘real life’ and ‘laziness’ got in the way, but he sent me an email recently that made me smile, and with his permission, I am putting it up on my blog.

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I was reading Arul Mani’s note on Magazine lust when the following passage reminded me of something from the past:

Satyajit’s other great love object, the children’s magazine Target, causes us to remember and share dangerous information from our non-metropolitan pasts. Reading Target somehow led him to develop a deep passion for kulchas and a generalised envy of Delhiites who could eat whenever they wanted at Nirula’s.

A few days ago, I had the pleasure of having a meal of stuffed kulchas with chicken saagwala. Since earliest childhood I have had a healthy appreciation for all Indian breads, but, as I sat there, eating the meal, my thoughts turned to my great love for the kulcha. It is a cause for regret that kulchas aren’t available in every shop offering North Indian food.

As it happened, that meal also reminded me of the first time that I ever ate a kulcha.

When I was a child, we, my family and our friends and relatives, rarely ever ate out. The town was small, the options few, and home cooking and rice resigned supreme. Even the wedding menus felt like they hadn’t been tinkered with in a century. My early love of Indian breads was cultivated on a diet of the basic roti – the phulka, the chapatti. My mother was an industrious producer of rotis – she had to be, given our appetite for the roti, my brother and I.

However, by the time I approached voting age, I had eaten out often enough to learn about tandoori roti and naans. [And chhola-bhatoras, which along with the masala dosa, remain the greasy eating out staple all over.] In addition, I had learnt the theoretical concept of roomali rotis, having once overheard some family friend talk about the lunch on a Rajdhani Express trip — the idea that lunch would be served as a part of a train journey was another theoretical concept for me at that time — which had included roomali rotis. But, despite my years of Target reading, possible because I can be a lazy reader, I arrived at Warangal innocent of any knowledge of kulchas.

Sometime soon after the first mid-term exams of the first year – going by my feeling of uneasy freedom and general unfamiliarity with the environment – I once walked into Kalinga Dhaba. I presume that I was with some friends, but I don’t quite remember. All I do remember is that I saw – or now think I saw – you and P at a table. As I walked up to talk to you two, your food arrived, and I saw these promising uber-rotis in the bread basket. When I asked what they were and after you told me that they were kulchas, probably seeing my puzzled face, you invited me to have a taste.

Though I largely remained a good loyal biryani man thorough my Warangal years – a decision party driven by the calculus of Rupee-to-calorie optimization, that bite of kulcha made an impression on me. It is one of the few Indian foods that I have a clear memory – possibly a false memory – of the the first time I ever tasted it.

So, when I was having my kulcha and chicken meal, I thought about mailing you, but I plain forgot, till I read Arul’s piece.

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Dhritiman infrequently blogs over at Proxanto. He misspells “shonen” more frequently on Twitter.

This is something that bothers me.

When in Guwahati, there would be periods when there was no more new reading material to be had. Specifically, January and February just after the Guwahati Book Fair was over, and around August-September after summer vacations. The local children’s library would not be updated for a few months, and booksellers would fend off questions about fresh stock. In that time of book-famine, one had to be sure that one’s biblical reserves were taken care of. Items bought at the Book Fair should not be consumed immediately, and there should be an adequate buffer of consumables for those never-ending periods. The same thing went for music. Back then, the only new music I actively bought was AR Rahman soundtracks, and those were twice-a-year releases, too.

This continued even in college, where weekends of Hyderabad travel, where trips to second-hand bookstores would yield stocks of reading material for a month or so, but one missed monthly trip and I was down to figuring out who had something readable in their hostel rooms, or worse – think of reading actual (shudder) text-books.

So I got into this habit of deferring consumption until there was a sufficient number of items in the queue. Pacing myself, not over-indulging. This served me well at that time, and forced rereads to a minimum. I call it the Scarcity Voice. It gives me pause before I go wild. As I look at a full run on my shelves, and am about to lunge at it, it whispers that if I read it, there is nothing else left. Once upon a time, this was a Very Good Thing.

The problem has long gone, there is no dearth of consumable matter, nowadays. But this habit of not pouncing on a book immediately after having bought it, it’s there still and it …it bothers me. There are times I want to froth at the mouth and go on a Rampage of Rapid Reading, just to show the Scarcity Voice who is boss. And sometimes I do. I chuckled over the first two (out of five) Vizbig volumes of Dragon Ball last night. Not caring that there are only three volumes left.

But the Voice comes back, it does. Which is why I bought the nine Vizbig volumes of Dragon Ball Z on an unplanned eBay run. (blush)

Fuck.

Apparently I crossed 700 posts on the blog. (This one is post #712) Which averages to about 70 posts a year, which does not make me happy at all. Especially since last year, I thought about getting to 200 posts in 365 days. I have no idea how that will pan out, unless I write multiple posts on the same day.

I sometimes go and look at my early posts, and see someone who has changed so much. Everything from how I think to how I write. How much I reveal online to the topics I write about. There was a point where I was chronicling my days in serious detail, naming names, others when I openly lusted over things that seem ….inconsequential now. But obviously they are inconsequential because I have experienced them, and the journey no longer matters once you’ve reached the destination. Which makes me sort of an ass-hat, but I can live with that.

Obviously, most of these 711 posts are completely irrelevant to anyone but myself. Unless you want a peek at the Indian pop-culture scene before broadband, Flipkart and Wikipedia took over, but why would you want that? Why click through 711 posts when I can curate you through the Ones That Matter? Well, fine, the ones that I can still parade in front of the world without totally dying of embarrassment. A humble best-of, from the worst-updated blog ever.

On music piracy. Definitely one of the most earnest posts I have written, with an eye to form and structure. I don’t usually do that.

A Love Polygon With Diagonals. Yes, it really happened. Some of the people involved are even on Facebook! I am not dead yet! Whee!

Watching Veerana in a movie theater. I was trying too hard to be funny. The style makes me cringe, especially the way I mangle Hindi and English here and there. But it was a fun night, and Vasu was the most excellent companion one could have, to watch a film like Veerana. Also, I like the term “WAH!” a lot. I did a lot of movie “reviews” back then, when it was still fashionable to shit your opinions without getting paid to do so. Here’s Dil Se. Here’s Kisna. Here’s me about DVDs when VCDs were still in vogue. But of course you punk kids wouldn’t know what VCDs are. About watching Ju-On 1 and 2 back-to-back. I used to rub my hands in anguish whenever a bad movie adaptation came out, like V For Vendetta.

About visiting Assam after a year. This was LJ-peak, when everything you did was a potential blog entry, and I can actually picture myself thinking about something funny to write, something that would get a lot of comments. BWAHAHA! If Twitter existed back then, this would be a series of tweets, obviously.

The preliminary questions to the first Nihilanth quiz I conducted. I put a mind-boggling amount of work into it (the quiz, not the blog post), and it was very gratifying to see that people liked it a lot, and it also kick-started my quizzing career, which was fun when it lasted. I have three protected posts about the Nihilanth experience, maybe I should open them up.

I talked a lot about AR Rahman, didn’t I? And comics. I tried to introduce people to the wonders of Lone Wolf and Cub. And Swamp Thing.

I tried too hard to be funny, sometimes. I like this just for the build-up, but it’s not as good as I thought it was, back then. This makes me grin, but barely. And I wrote about the weirdest things, like my experience while buying a book.

And there are some posts that are funny on a different level. Like me in 2003, talking about the virtues of eBooks. Or being all riled up about bad movie adaptations. (Obviously, I had not read William Goldman then) Getting very pumped after reading Batman:Hush the first time. (It makes me hurl now) And then there is the very cryptic post about the day I lost my virginity. Nope, no link for you, thanks.

The weirdness. I have no idea what I was on when writing this. Or that. Someone told me that the latter was used as the text in an elocution competition. Prizes were involved. I was happy.

In 2009, I moved to this domain. I began by writing two vanity-posts-to-end-all-vanity-posts. A hundred things about myself, in two parts. Four years later, I realize I have to write an updated version of this, because things have changed. Oh yes, they have.

The Livejournal does not exist anymore. But 10 years of (a part of) my life does, in this uncategorized, untagged and disoriented fashion.