Just when I thought there was nothing to say, I get an excuse.

I am in Guwahati now, spending two weeks with my parents, and four days left before I get back home to work.

What have I been doing?

Reading, for one. Reread part of Sandman, the complete Game of You, Brief Lives and World’s End arcs. Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice Candy Man. Kiran Nagarkar’s Ravan and Eddie. A whole lot of academic ( ahem!) stuff.

Eating. A lot. What do you expect? I do this four weeks a year (eating a lot, I mean, not just eating. Hmm. This line didn’t sound quite right.)

And, yes, this is the time of year my parents conduct every Hindu ritual prescribed in every Hindu text dedicated to each of the three hundred thousand Hindu gods. Er, you get the picture.

My father seems to have taken a fancy to this TV channel called Aastha that shows a rather dated-looking video of a mass Yoga session every evening. I was rather alarmed to hear weird noises coming from the tv room. “Nothing to worry about”, my mother said. “It’s just your father practising his yoga.” Yeah, right. He sits on this cosy armchair and does weird things like neck-constrictasana ( “hunnnnnngh…*cough* *cough*” ) and periodically turns to me and says – “You should try this too, it will make you healthier than ever.” Me, I can but gape and slowly walk backwards to my room.

And then there was this ayurveda guy that told him to drink a litre of salt-and-lemon water in the morning. “Cleans your bowels”, he told me, sipping glass after glass. “You should try it too.”

Unfortunately, my father gets too obsessed with all this stuff. He decided to do this every alternate day ( later, when he went and talked to the Ayurveda guy, the man did a double-take. “You need to do this ONCE A MONTH. Or once EVERY THREE MONTHS! NOT once every three days.” he sorrowfully told my father.)

The only good two days of salt-and-lemon water drinking did to us was that my father, groaning tells me at the end of the second day – “You don’t have to try this, m’boy.”

Poor dad.

* * *

The Best Indian Business School Blog. Go Arun!

I learnt about the Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho from a short story in a 1982 comic-book called House of Mystery, published by DC comics – in which a character says something about getting nightmares from seeing the Hitchcock movie when she was a kid.

Now my uncle owned a video cassette parlour back then, one of the swankiest ones in Guwahati at that time, in fact. Just for the record, his was named Kareng(Kareng is the Assamese word for palace, and it was actually a store selling everything from swanky gift items to (slurp) Leo Mattel toys.) The other good parlours in the city at that time were Forbidden Fruits and Channel 2000, both of which had good collections, but demanded an advance payment of two hundred rupees before you were allowed to rent any tapes, so no wonder that I preferred to stick to the goodies Kareng offered. Needless to explain how much fun it is, for a thirteen-year old kid, to browse through the racks of VHS tapes. Occasionally, that is, after half-yearly and annual examinations were over, my father would borrow a VCR (my mother, worrying about the state of her son’s educational tendencies, vetoed the idea of buying one) and I would be given carte blanche to watch movies.

My uncle was, of course, very particular about which tapes I took from the library. But that was ok, because there were tonnes of good stuff I was allowed to watch. Nagina and Nigahen were perennial favourites of mine – and so were movies like Commando(both the Mithun and the Schwarzenegger version), Rambo – all the standard bang-bang stuff that’s part of one’s boyhood.

But then there was the sudden urge to watch Psycho, based on a recommendation in the aforementioned comic-book, and further aided by the sight of this nice looking lady screaming on the back-cover, and she was, of course, decidedly wet – a potent combination, you’ll agree. A sinister looking house on the front cover and a silhouette of a man standing there – can you imagine how much an over-active imagination can make out of all these black-and-white images? I wanted to see Psycho, boss, and as far as things were concerned, the world would end the next day if I didn’t find a way to see it. ( These kind of world-will-end-if-I-don’t-do-this- feelings still persist, I am sorry to say )

I was a nice little mamma’s boy back then, so I followed the best option I could think of – I went to my uncle with the videocassette and asked him – “Can I watch this, please? A friend told me it’s very good.” ( Let it be pointed out that comics are indeed a boy’s best friend, so this wasn’t technically a lie)

My uncle took a good look at the cover. “Hmm, Alfred Hitchcock, eh? Your friend is right – it’s a classic movie, but you might get scared. You sure you can handle it?” I tried very hard to look offended by that query, but of course, the grin just wouldn’t go away and I walked home a happy man. Woo-hoo, it’s great when a scary movie turns out to be a classic movie at the same time.

My mother threw a fit. “I don’t care if it’s Alfred Hitchcock or Pomfret Some-hen. I won’t have you seeing these frightful films at this age. Go and return this AT ONCE! And tell your uncle that I’ll have a word with him sometime about this.” Foiled! And inspite of being so close. Ah, well, I was thirteen anyway, and I decided it was high time I got into the adolescent rebellion phase every thirteen-year-old guy indulged in, at least back in those days. So I went to the my corner of the room me and my sister shared, and sulked. I didn’t dare refuse dinner,but chewed my food in a very cold way, which I am fairly sure convinced my mother about my teenage angst.

She relented, of course. But I knew she had a talk with my uncle, because the next time I asked my uncle for a videotape, he said – “Are you sure baidew knows about this?” before handing over the tape. Poor guy.

As I was saying, she relented, and I watched Psycho with all the enthusiasm I could muster. Which involved locking up all the windows, and in particular the door that led to my parent’s bedroom – so that the screams wouldn’t be too audible ( I was also concerned about whose screams they would be, mine or those of the nice lady on the cover) And I began, prepared to be scared out of my wits.

The movie began with a (gulp) scene in a hotel room, which made me extremely glad that Ma wasn’t around to check out classic movie what her son was seeing. Then the slow parts began. This happens, that happens, everything happens except for the GOOD bits, you know, the scary stuff I was preparing for. But the background music made me queasy at times, especially when the girl with the money was on the road and she thinks her boss is crossing the road ahead of her. To be frank, I had a hard time following the story, it was too “talkey” for my taste, and I had the vague idea that this girl was running away with a lot of money and wanted to be with her boyfriend.

Then she checks into a motel, and things get suitably atmosphery, because I recognised the house in the background as the same one on the cover. Could the silhouette be the same nice, embarassed guy who runs the motel? Let’s see, but things were definitely getting interesting, because the guy tried to spy on the girl through a hole in the wall behind a painting.

Woohoo, and then it happens. The “infamous shower scene”, as the back cover of the videocassette put it, the one that was supposed to give me nightmares and make me scared of going inside a bathroom for at least a week. Bloody hell, it came and went, and the only thing I could make out of it was the screaming, definitely not mine, and strangely not the lady’s, but that of the violins in the background. And what was this? A black figure whose hand lifted and struck, and the girl JUST DIES? What an obvious con-job of editting, I thought, of course, those two are in seperate frames, and it was all camera angles and sticking different bits of film together. And what a waste of a pretty face!

At this point, I confess that the finer points of film-watching was lost on me. I had been cheated out what had been promised to me – and it appeared obvious to me who had killed the girl. Of course, it was the mother, that old lady with the scary voice. Poor Norman Bates, his tentative affair with the girl was ruined because of his mother! Humph!

But sanity still remained, and I decided to stick with the movie. Let me see how she gets her just desserts, the old crone, I thought.

About an hour and a half later, when the movie ended, I was stuck in my chair, grinning to myself. Because I had realised why Psycho was a classic movie, and why my uncle had said that Alfred Hitchcock made good movies. I wasn’t still scared – nosirree – but just awed by the twists and turns of the story, how I had been pulled into believing what was not, how everything, right from the silhouette on the cover, to Norman’s vaguely embarrassed attempts to make conversation with the girl, to his scream of “Oh NO, MOTHER!”, and everything else – made sense, and was tied with that thread of completeness that warms every little boy’s heart. I loved the way every question was answered towards the end, and I loved the ending. Though I would have been happier if the pretty lady in the shower hadn’t died.

I saw Psycho many times again, the same tape, which I never returned, because my uncle sold off his videotape section of his store to some lucky guy from Shillong, and that part of Kareng became a showroom for television sets. Over the years, I recommended, and passed it over to friends, and would occasionally watch it with them too, maintaining a suitable dead-pan face on the good bits, especially at the points they would try to guess what happens next. Guess who laughed loud when the ending came about, and those guys were gaping at the screen? But there were times when people would accurately predict the outcome, and that would make me vaguely disappointed about my own inability to have done so, once upon my first time. But then, I would console myself, a thirteen-year old is only supposed to know so much.

Nowadays, I doubt if anyone would be taken unawares by the first viewing of Psycho. There are far too many ripoffs, far too many stories about serial killers, and pretty young things getting killed at the beginning of the movie, and of course, television shows. I think I got lucky, and saw it at the right point of time in my life, eh?

Miscellaneous Personal Trivia about Psycho and Beyond

So today I decided to go to Chenoy Trade Centre, Hyderabad’s official Fish Market For Computer-related Purchases, and buy a 50-pack of blank cds, so that I can clear my hard-disk of space, and also please assorted lj-friends/ex-college seniors by finally burning them stuff they’ve been asking for. Everything was done, I also picked up a sexy-looking 100-cd case, and successfully controlled the urge to pop into Sangeet Saagar, and by 3, was back at home, eager to begin the burn session.

Nero refused to work! It said ‘current program area empty’ and then ‘Could not perform fixation’ and then ‘Burn process failed at 8x’. Damn. That has indeed happened sometimes before, and so I restarted the writing at a different, slower speed. Nope, still didn’t work. I decided – ‘To hell with Nero!’ and downloaded something called DeepBurner, which is freeware, and is also quite small in size – the installer being only 2 MB. Installed, began burning. Refused to work.

That’s when I realised that my three year-old CD writer has kicked the bucket. Which was a grusesome thing to happen, because I was so confident of its ability to carry on burning until the End of Time, that I hadn’t even thought about such a thing happening. The first emotion, therefore, was one of panic – ‘My hard disk is going to overflow!’ and then ‘Udatta is gonna kill me – he’ll definitely never believe this excuse.’ And to this the fact that I was, post-Persepolis2 and Universal-CD-sale, officially Over-Budget for the month.

Then it struck me – What perfect timing! I can now go ahead and buy a DVD writer without the slightest amount of remorse and a clean conscience. An Omen!  Here I was, worried about the intricacies of having THREE optical disc drives in my machine, and one of them is out of the picture.

I shall go out for a walk tomorrow. Maybe a bag of money will fall out the sky. You can never be too sure of the mysterious Ways of Fate, you know.

Per·sep·o·lis ( P ) Pronunciation Key (pr-sp-ls)

An ancient city of Persia northeast of modern Shiraz in southwest Iran. It was the ceremonial capital of Darius I and his successors. Its ruins include the palaces of Darius and Xerxes and a citadel that contained the treasury looted by Alexander the Great.

But the Persepolis I am talking about now is an autobiography, written by an Iranian lady named Marjane Satrapi, and needless to say, the medium she chooses to recount the story of her life is the Comic Book. It worked well, the original French publication earning quite a lot of accolades, and Pantheon Books brought out the English version of the book last year, as a beautifully designed hardcover. I learnt about it from Tom Arnold’s review in time.com, and after noticing it in the stores, bought it. Loved it immensely – the combination of the honest childs-eye-view of the proceedings in Iran and Ms Satrapi’s deceptively simple artwork gave me goosepimples, an aching heart and a smile on my face all at the same time.  So did a lot of other people I lent the book to.

I was lucky enough to find the book at Walden a couple of days ago, a single copy, when I was searching for Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, and yesterday I bought it. I finished reading it just now.

Truth be told, I want to read it again. With a slightly more detailed look at the artwork – it is both sparse and striking at the same time, the depth of emotion this lady can bring to a face with a couple of black-and-white lines is just incredible. The cover design is the same as that of the first time ( see below), except for the colour, and the fact that the woman we see in the picture is an adult. My only complaint with the book lies in the fact that some of the ink seems to be smudged at certain pages. Whether this is a problem with my copy or whether Random House goofed up during the printing process I shan’t know.

The story continues from ‘Memoirs of a Childhood’, from where the teenaged Marjane leaves her parents behind in Iran and comes to Vienna to study. It’s tough going for her, as she faces resentful relatives, sullen nuns, unhelpful classmates and worst of all, a language barrier. “Every morning, I was rudely awakened by the sound of Lucia’s hair dryer”, she says, Lucia being her roommate, “Woken by a hair dryer to return to a school where I had no friends. ” But slowly, she accustoms herself to the new life, earns quite a few friends, reads Simone de Beauvoir and tries to pee standing up and then proceeds to get herself thrown out of boarding school.

Her life changes again, as she begins to stay with a friend. A hilarious introduction to the wild partying scene follows ( “..the party was not exactly what I imagined. In Iran, at parties, everyone would smoke and eat. In Vienna, people preferred to lie around and smoke. And then, I was turned off by all these public displays of affection. What do you expect, I came from a traditional country.”) Her mental transformation by all those cultural differences is followed by her physical growth – “between the age of fifteen and sixteen, I grew seven inches. It was impressive.” At the same time, Marjane is slipping away from her own cultural background, at times even denying her Iranian origin to her peers.

The book is hilarious and serious by turns, like the way Marjane’s mother( who she meets after nineteen months) takes to her eight gay roommates, and how the two women bond again. The story continues at a perfect pace, not skimming over the details of Marjane’s first love and heartbreak, and her near-fatal encounters with dope, after which she decides to come back to Iran.

The second half of the book is all the more fascinating, because the eyes of the child-Marjane are now replaced by those of the woman, and we receive an adult’s point of view of Iranian society. Her rebonding ( reluctant!) with her relatives, the cultural clashes that her Western years have brought her, and the price she has to pay for being outspoken and fearless ( which, sometimes, did hold her in good stead, even in Iran)

The book ends the same way as the first did, with a tearful farewell between Marjane and her parents and her grandmother, as she leaves Iran again, leaving behind a broken marriage and a life of strict laws. “The laws of Iran are not for you.”, her mother tells her, “I forbid you to come back.” But freedom has a price, as Marjane tells us, because she saw her grandmother only once again in her lifetime, a year later – and she died after two years.

All in all, Persepolis 2 is an honest book, a book I would love to reread from time to time on lonely afternoons. It might not have broken my heart the way the first book did, but it did bring quite a few smiles on my face. It is easy to think you know Marjane Satrapi after you’ve read Persepolis, but to know and understand how a couple of years can change a human being, any human being, for that matter, read Persepolis 2. It’smore personal that the first one was – I wonder how the actual people in the book must feel when they see themselves in it, and Ms Satrapi does not flatter anyone, including herself.

I only hope there will be more books forthcoming from the lady.

India-centric Trivia: The English translation of The Story of a Return is by a lady named Anjali Singh.

Is not anywhere near.

But prices of Universal CDs have come down, and how! CDs originally priced at 525, 475 and 395 rupees each are now on sale at Music World for 95 and 195 rupees each. Double CDs for 295 rupees.

Universal owns the rights to the music of Metallica, U2, Nirvana, Bjork, Bon Jovi, Aerosmith, Guns ‘n Roses, among others. Though I saw only some Bon Jovi, Aerosmith and U2 albums in the pile on sale right now, I think the others will come up for the same prices soon.

Personal buys: Khaled’s N’ssi N’ssi for 195, The Best of Bill Haley and The Comets and The Cranberries’ Bury The Hatchet for 95 each.

With prices like these, I think I will stop downloading albums, and buy up all those stuff that I own as mp3s, to show my appreciation for Universal music and their nice gesture. Viva Legitimacy! Viva Fair Price!