Category Archives: Uncategorized

Uncategorized

Reading Prince of Ayodhya by Ashok Banker. I had already formed a very bad opinion about the book after reading a couple of pages at Odyssey quite sometime ago; and the Terrible Attitude of the writer towards negative reviewers – contentedbloke‘s Amazon review, to be precise. But curiousity got the better of me, and so…

What IS this guy trying to do? He seems to be rewriting the Ramayana as a fantasy novel, terrible plot twists and Dark Lords and Joseph Campbell fundaes intact. Which is not a bad thing at all, we have had enough of watered-down grandmother’s tales – and I cannot think of any English version of the Ramayana which is long enough – there have always been bits and stories chopped away,unlike the Mahabharata, which has the Kishori Mohan Ganguli version as the definitive retelling.

It would have been a good thing, except for the fact that Mr Ashok K Banker is what one might indelicately describe as a hack. One might also call him a Tolkien-wannabe, but that would be a serious insult to Tolkien. He’s at best a Robert Jordan-wannabe, and let me tell you, I don’t like Robert Jordan at all. I think Robert Jordan is a Tolkien-wannabe, and at times a Robert E Howard-wannabe, like when he is writing Conan The Barbarian fan-fiction ( It’s of course a tragedy of sorts that people like Robert Jordan manage to get their fan-fiction published, and then go on making a career out of even more badly written fan-fiction).

Oh my gosh, the language. At the beginning of the book, Ashok K Banker says – “I simply used the way I speak, an amalgam of English-Hindi-Urdu-Sanskrit, and various terms from Indian languages. I deliberately used anachronisms like the term ‘abs’ or ‘morph’ because these were how I referred to these events.” This unique methodology yields sentences like this: “The red-beaded rudraksh mala around his neck , all marked him for a hermit returning from a long, hard tapasya. His gaunt face and deep-set eyes completed the portrait of a forest penitent, a tapasvi sadhu.” One line that makes sense to me because I am from India and know Hindi. But a fantasy reader picking up the book? “rudraksh”, “mala”, “tapasya” in one line, “tapasvi” and “sadhu” in the next – anyone would give up in disgust. I am disgusted becauuse the words don’t gel together at all, in either language.

Some more samples: “It was familiar with creatures that changed their bhes-bhav at will.” “In the bright light of the purnima moon, he could see the helmeted heads and speartips of the night watch patrolling the south grounds, moving in perfect unison in the regular rhythmic four-count pattern of a normal chowkidari sweep.” I mean, come on!!! “Purnima moon”??? What’s wrong with saying “full moon”? Does it make the full moon less exotic to be called “full” rather than “purnima”? Besides, the English equivalent is not “purnima”, it’s “poornima”, which tells me that Ashok K Banker’s Hindi is as seriously fucked-up as his English.

The dialogue – oh, boy oh boy, it’s that perfect B-movie screenplay that will never be made. Probably if you translate the lines spoken by the protagonists word for word into Hindi, you will get the same pompous mish-mash that’s the staple in our hallowed Ramanand Sagar-sir’s serials. For instance –

“It looked like a giant vulture. That round head, long hooked beak, that hunched back. But there was something odd about the body. It was broader than a bird, differently shaped, almost like a -”

“A man? A giant man-vulture, is that what it looked like, young novice?”
Young novice. George Lucas can get away with “You’ve done well, Young Padawan” in every other line, and that makes Mr Ashok K Banker feel he can too. Well, George Lucas is a multimillionaire, and he can get his characters to say whatever he pleases. You, on the other hand, young Ashok K Banker, have a lot to learn. Young novice. Humph.

Mr Ashok K Banker also says, at the beginning: “I based every section, very scene, every character’s dialogues and acctions on the previous Ramayanas, be it Valmiki, Kamban, Tulsidas, or Vyasa, and even the various Puranas.” In the first chapter, he has Rama do things like scan his bedchamber “with the sharpness of a panther with the scent of stag in its nostrils”, and carry a yard and a half of Kosala steel in his hand and do acrobatic martial asanas, while breathing in the pranayam style (whatever that means) while the Dark Lord Ravana sends him subliminal messages saying things like – “You will watch your birth-mother savaged beyond recognition, your clan-mothers and sisters impregnated by my rakshasas, your father and brothers eaten while still alive etc etc blah blah blah, oh, and yeah, the samay chakra, your sacred wheel of time, will repeat the cycle of birth and suffering infinitely.”

Wow. That’s all I can say. The last time I heard lines like this was while watching this film called Rudraksh. I wonder which version of the Ramayana that scene was based on.

Oh, great, now they have started talking about the Last Great Asura War. I am going to give this book thirty minutes more of my time, and then bid this fanfic writer a nighty-night.

Afterword: The stuff above was written last night. I read for about 15 more minutes, and gave up. Watched Stephen Chow’s Fight Back To School 2, a nice comedy that washed away the dregs of frustration brought about by PoA. I think these US publishers are really smart people – they have refused to release the subsequent books in the series until Banker cleans up his act (i.e his writing), and he refused. A vriddha dog can hardly learn new tricks, after all.

Standard
Uncategorized

A Happy Bihu for me

So yesterday was Rongali Bihu, the Axomiya New Year, and a holiday in the office. The upside – an unexpected break. The downside – everybody else I know were still at work. It’s a rare day when such a thing happens, so I ended up doing some…oddball things.

I cleaned up the kitchen in the morning. The place was being shared by the three of us with the denizens of the night – quite a few of them, I found out, because as I lifted a plate that hadn’t been washed since the Dwápar Yuga, a family of cockroaches scurried away. I let them go. I didn’t want to start the New Year with any genocidal activity. Scrubbed the dishes, cleaned up the garbage ( genocide was out of the question, but emigration was still possible), wiped the grime out of the stove and the cupboards – all to the tune of Trickbaby.

Quick decision-making time – do I stay at home and swig packets of Appy and watch Futurama until my brain explodes, or do I go out and get undone things done? Spent five minutes laughing at myself for even considering the first option, and headed out. Quick stop at National Market, just for kicks. And found…stuff. War-dance-inducing, Sinful stuff. Tra la la. Hopped into the office ( you’ll notice my unnatural mental perseverance at this point, because instead of heading home straight, I was taking a roundabout way. Prolonging the pleasure, they call it ), did hasty monetary calculations – and..

Oh wait, did I tell you about the hard disk crash that happened on Sunday? Graaah. Music most painstakingly downloaded was gone, GONE! And what was that they said about unheard sounds being sweeter? Ever since I lost those albums, there is this urge, more than ever, to listen to Ornella Vanoni singing L’Appuntamento ( That’s from the Ocean’s Twelve OST, one of the best albums I’ve heard this year, though the movie tried so hard to be over-smart it collapsed under the weight of its own setup, and the combined coolness of the (ahem) actors ). GRAAH! I can’t find the album anywhere now, suprnova.org having collapsed a long time ago, and the rest of the sites are all underground, and with seedless torrents. I swear, if I see this in any of the stores, I am buying it. No second thoughts there.

So that’s what happened, about 10 GB of stuff vanished – because I didn’t have them backed up. I generally do that by writing CDs and passing them on to Sasi or Vasu, who are smart enough to make copies for themselves. So anytime we lose anything, the other guy’s copy comes to the rescue. That’s foolproof, let me tell you. But what happened was – my CD-writer crashed sometime in October, so no backups since then.

Which brings us back to, boo hoo hoo, my plans for the day, and I decided to find my way to SP Road and buy myself a device that will allow my Hard disk to be backed up periodically, in short, a DVD-writer. Boy oh boy, SP Road was a mess, both in terms of the locality and prices. Didn’t really have much to bargain, because every freaking dealer was quoting the same, and once or twice, they even said “VAT” and made me sneer impudently.One of these impudent sneers of mine seemed to work, got a Samsung drive at a price I could call decent, but still 300 Rs more than what the dealers in Hyderabad are charging for it, as I found out. But what the heck, I OWN A DVD-WRITER!!!

Right. Now the problem was, the dealers now tried to overcharge me on blank DVDs. No deal, because I had already asked for prices at National Market, so I went back. The guy at Amith went a little pale when he saw me there – there must have been a lot of faulty discs among the ones I bought, for me to be back there so soon, or so he thought. Picked up some blanks, and found a couple more movies, making the man a lot happier. Nice!

The evening was spent in Commercial Street, where a nice time was had by one and all – partly because of a Book Fair in the wilderness, and a Singin’ In The Rain moment. *snicker*

And at night, when the world slept around me, I watched Sin City, mouthing Marv’s lines and Dwight’s and Hartigan’s and grinning every second. With two packets of butter-pepper flavoured popcorn, Appy and Soan Papdi. I have a feeling it’s going to be a Great New Year for this Axomiya guy. Woo Hoo!

Standard
Uncategorized

Because…

….what goes around comes around.

1. Total amount of music files on your computer:

35 GB. Because my hard drive crashed two days ago, and one partition had to be formatted. Bye-bye, my complete Aphex Twin/Sigur Ros collection. *sniff* Some of you will be back again soon enough, and some will have to be downloaded again. ( already have, in fact)

And oh, some of it is legal, ripped versions of CDs I have back at Hyderabad.

2. The last CD you bought was:

Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose: The Forgotten Hero OST,
Humko Ishq Ne Maara OST
Hanging Around by Trickbaby.

Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose: The Forgotten Hero or Bose, for short, was a disaster. Humko Ishq Ne Maara was a pseudo-gift from moccacino – because I was the one that had to pay for it – but quite a worthwhile buy, containing a number of peppy feelgood songs from the nineties. Most likely the movie never got released, but the music has endured. The music is by Aadesh Srivastav and the singers are all winners of Meri Aawaz Suno, the TV show that ran on Doordarshan ( and then on other channels, as if I care which ones…)

3. What is the song you last listened to before reading this message?

Juno Reactor – Pistolero
Varrtina – Itkin

Both these songs played as I was answering the questions above, and considering that I have only these two enqueued on Winamp, I mustmention both. The Juno Reactor song is mucho different from the Matrix work these guys have done, it’s off their album Shango, a flurry of acoustic guitar riffs and Spanish vocal samples, with the occasional gunshot.

Varttina is every bit as good as I thought it would be – this is the three-girl band from Finland collaborating with AR Rahman on the Lord Of The Rings: The Musical. Itkin reminded me of the title song of Parthaley Paravasam.

Incidentally, I got both these songs from a Finnish friend in the office.

4. Write down 5 songs you often listen to or that mean a lot to you.
This is going to be tough, I can feel it.
For starters, I am going to exclude all AR Rahman and Björk songs. Among the ones that remain:

1) The 5-6-7-8’s – I Walk Like Jayne Mansfield – The song that the house band of The House of Blue Leaves is playing in Kill Bill Vol 1, when the Bride is spying on O-Ren Ishii and the band. Possibly my first Japanese song. Life has never been the same since then.

2) Indian Ocean – Village Damsel – The first Indian Ocean song I heard, and possibly the one that cemented my love for the band forever. I will always associate this band with my Higher Secondary Board Examinations. And Goa. And sitting in my college room wondering if I will ever see this band live and kiss Susmit Sen’s hands.

3) Vangelis – Chariots of Fire – I was 10 when I heard the Hindi version of this song, and then a couple of years later, someone played this in a quiz. Floored. One of the songs I used to play before exams to pep myself up bigtime, along with Koncham Nilavu ( That’s a Rahman song, hence not in the list) Also the first song I taught myself to play on the keyboard.

4) Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan – Musst Musst – I love all the versions of this song available, the sparse, voice-dominated Qawwali, or the Infinite Guitar-backed fusion piece, even the trip-hoppy Massive Attack version. Not to mention the innumerable other versions mixed by the holy mixmeisters from T-Series. Of course, I first heard of this through Viju Sha’s adaptation in Mohra.

5) Nirvana – Smells Like Teen Spirit – If there is a song that reminds me of my College years, it has to be this (or maybe RATM’s Killing in the Name)

5. Who are you going to pass this stick to? (3 persons) and why?
moccacino, because I think I know what she’ll put in, and just want to double-check.
psasidhar, though he is out of town at the moment. He doesn’t do memes, but I have a feeling he’ll like this.
vrikodhara, because I want to find out what the boy’s been downloading. Humph!

Standard
Uncategorized

There’s a Ghost…in the Shell.

In my 3rd year of college, psasidhar, then in final year, was The guy in the CSE department. He had the right contacts, an unshakeable reputation, and consequently, unlimited access to the (extremely slow) College Internet Line. He didn’t abuse this power, no sir. Except for the short time when he diverted all outgoing mails to trash while his script to download the complete Calvin and Hobbes strips from a site ran on the server and ate up the complete bandwidth, and I would hardly call that abuse.There were other such scripts, of course, the most notable one being a script that downloaded a CD-load of Windowmaker themes. I hardly used Linux even then, except for finishing weekly assignments, and that was a rare occurrence anyways. But Sasi’s themes forced me to use Window-maker, if only for to check out the cool wallpapers that came bundled with them.

Ghost in the Shell

And one of them was this, a sexy-looking woman with loads of attitude. As a little googing ( Yes, we did have google back then, a new curiousity that was waaay faster than Hotbot and Yahoo and all those trashy search engines that we depended on) showed, the lady’s name was Motoko Kusanagi, a character from a manga called Ghost in the Shell ( which I had vaguely heard about, right after The Matrix was released) by a guy named Masumone Shirow, and made into a movie by Mamoru Oshii.

I happened to watch Ghost in the Shell recently, after years of reading about its greatness, and about the influence it has had on mainstream movies like The Matrix, and the influences it has borrowed from cyberpunk traditions ( William Gibson, Bladerunner). I was not disappointed. Stylish without being overtly violent, with genuine “Oh-my-god” moments. As usual, it was the road to the movie that was more memorable. I got the comics from a Bandwidth-rich junior, then the soundtrack album a year later when I got my connection at home. Then the soundtrack to the sequel Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence. Followed by the soundtrack of the TV series. Then found the DVD of Innocence, a version with terrible subtitles, in The Market. Then, a couple of weeks ago, the movie.

The soundtrack of the movie deserves a seperate post in itself. Kenji Kawai, the composer, uses a striking theme for the opening, called “The Making of Cyborg”, which is a choral piece in Japanese, backed with booming taiko drums and chimes. The chorus is hypnotic – I am left wondering which parts of it is synthetic and which parts sung by real people. “Ghost City” and “Reincarnation” play on variants of the same choral-drum theme. The second track is like just a bass drum playing a single beat, slow, evocative.

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, also by Kawai has almost the same soundscape, with minor differences in tone and intensity. Brilliant, is all I have to say. So are the soundtracks to the TV series, which are composed by Yoko Kanno, the lady best known for her Cowboy Bebop compositions. As expected, these are tracks that cannot be slotted into a single genre, a single track might hop from a Big-band orchestral arrangement to spanish guitar music and then, as you are gasping for breath, move into heavy metal mode.

Trivia:

1) The title “Ghost in the Shell” comes from Arthur Koestler’s book The Ghost in the Machine, which also lends its name to an album by The Police. Koestler himself borrowed the term from a British philosopher named Gilbert Ryle who coined it to refute the Descartian ( or is that Cartesian) principle of seperation of mind and matter.

2) The US dubbed version of the movie had a track called “One Minute Warning”, with music by Brian Eno and U2. While this is nowhere to be seen on the official soundtrack album, I found it on a CD called Passengers, at a sale in Hyderabad. This was even before I got the manga.

Ironic Nostalgia Moment of the Day: This post, dated May 2003, where I mentioned the shock value associated with discovering a DVD of Ghost in the Shell at Music World. I did find it in Music World two years later. (not the genuine Music World, this is the shopping centre at Basheer Bagh that shares the same name) Now is that prophetic or what?

P.S: Some of Sasi’s wallpapers are now part of RECian legend – they were used (without any form of acknowledgement whatsoever) as backgrounds for the brochure of Trivium 2001, our very own Quiz Fest. Not the GITS one, much to my regret.

Standard