These days, I seem to have such negative feelings for contemporary Indian music. There’s nothing redeeming about them – everything is so freakin synthetic and …well, the exact term escapes me…..everything’s routine. That’s it. Routine.

What got me thinking like my grandparents is this freakin video I saw. ( Me and TV are generally two divorced entities. Just happened to be around in this case ) Sunidhi Chauhan. Bhoot Hoon Main. Lots of half-naked guys dancing around Sunidhi as she sings Bhoot Hoon Main over and over again. Nothing improper about half-naked guys, but what’s the freakin point here? Why have a female + male dancers when you are supposed to be talking ghosts? What’s the point in having a drum-beat that doesn’t sound like a freakin drum at all, but a metal pole being struck, with a constant chikichikichik in the background. Are ideas for music videos dead? The standard storyboard for 60% of whatever’s made as videos seems to be – guy sees girl on road. Guy falls for girl. Something happens. Guy gets girl. Wheee! How freakin original!

Three kinds of Indian music composers as of now. Nadeem-Shravan type jhankar beats and a tune that sounds like a hundred other songs you have heard and you can actually predict the way the song will sound a minute later. These are like the MD has given the basic tune to the singer, and has told him “Ok, so this is where you start, and when you start, keep going.” He then turns towards the orchestra and says, “Play”. Who cares WHAT the musicians play? And there it is, “emotional soul-stirring” music. Oh, did I forget to mention that you can also call it “timeless melodious” music? Really, that’s what the posters say.

Then there are the Pro-tools MDs. These are the guys who have just bought a new Korg, or are being exposed to “latest technologies in mujik”.( Optionally, they have their own sound designer.) Forget the tune. Anything will do. You just gotta spice it up, and yes, you need a catchy chorus. Add a bass-line that’s a half-forgotten sample from Dr Alban. Lots of sample beats that keep changing every thirty seconds, so that the listener doesn’t realise it’s a “programmed loop” and not a live drummer playing. (Yeah, right, like a live drum EVER sounds like that! ) Exotic instruments galore. A voice modulator plugin does wonders for the singing part too. Layers, lots of layers. Sonic Assault unlimited. Served piping hot.

The innovators. Who think they are innovating, but well, they keep sounding like the last song/album they composed. I guess that’s a problem with every other artiste/band in the world. And what a rut it is! If they stay in the same mould for too long a time, they are accused of repetition, and if they try to veer away from the routes already taken, there is a hue and cry about “where IS the guy? What the heck is he trying to pull?”

The newbies – Salim-Suleiman (whoever!), Sandeep Chowta, Himesh “same-beats-ad-infinitum”Reshammiya, Lalit Sen and old-timers like Anu “sound designer=ranjit barot” Malik, they are all part of the Pro-Tools gang. heaven knows what the heck they are up to. With a plethora of beats, they are trying hard to say that what they dish out is “music” but for goshsakes!!! How many four-five note tunes with mindless beats can we take? A friendly note of warning – our friendly neighbourhood Nadeem-Shravan will be around forever. Choke on it, but they and their half-boiled concoctions will keep pounding away at our ears and the fragile ecosystem around us. They don’t care what they direct (hey, they are music directors, not composers!!! ), it will sound good to them, it sounds different from whatever they have directed so far. My, how nice short-term memory loss is!! And bon tonerre, they are unleashing their sons to carry on their timeless legacy. I shudder.

It hurts, you know, to see how the mighty have fallen. And how neophytes do not soar. I refer, of course, to ARR. And the trio of Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy. Even Ismail Durbar. Or, if I want to stretch the line a bit – MM Kreem, Vishal Bharadwaj and Vishal-Shekhar. Yeah, I know. They put out good music. Some of their stuff is good at times. That’s it, just good. Where’s the freakin’ consistency, I ask? I don’t want a peppy-sounding song, followed by two unhearable ones, and then one that’s good to dance to – standard cliched album sequence. Where’s the meat, goddamnit? Where’s an album that can move me the way Dil Se did? Where is a song like Man Mohini that blows away the cliche called ethnicity? Where do I get an album like Kandisa, that makes my jaw drop when I hear it the first time, and stays put in my head for the rest of my life? (OK, so the rest of my life is not technically correct, but I am pretty much sure about this. )

I am pretty sure ARR, SEL, Durbar and the rest of their ilk can come up with something that will rock my socks off. But who wants them to?????? Our friggin directors, the whole bunch of them are still stuck with love-triangles and cheap Matrix-ripoffs. How many tunes can someone come up about LOVE, for goshsakes? Twenty? Thirty? Eight hundred? Forty thousand?

Why doesn’t anything happen? Why doesn’t something like Roja, or Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam, or even Dil Chahta Hai happen again? Why am I not enthu enough to keep bugging the Music Shop guy whether this CD has come or not, why hasn’t it come, WHEN is it coming? I would give anything to listen to a HIndi song that has an authentic drum, that doesn’t sound like the plumbing system in an alien spacecraft. I want a musical revolution that blows away the entire concept of hero-heroine-twenty-dancers-in-the-background videos. Please, please, please! Is that too much to ask for?

Maybe then I could stop sounding like my grandparents.

For the record, Parasuram is in stock now. But I am just not interested enough to go buy it. Me not buying an ARR album….even when I have the money. What a laugh!

RGV strikes again.

That guy tries, I must say that. Making a horror film is difficult. Couple of reasons being – the limited boundaries of the medium; the question of show-all or show-none. How much gore – it’s easy to make a film that hits on the viewer’s sense of revulsion, rather than one’s fear factor. The schlock value – getting actors to convincingly portray fear on screen. And the most important factor – the moronic Indian cinema-goer, who refuses to be scared. Whose staple diet happens to be Mann ka Rishta – The Power of Emotion type of movies. But, he did it with Kaun once, and I think he can do it once more. I follow my standard pre-movie procedures – Don’t look at promos, do not over-expect, and have an open mind.

Yeah. A theatre filled with 500-odd people, most of them out to have fun rather than be scared. Catcalls. Laughter and more catcalls (intended to be look-at-me-i-am-scared-out-of-my-pants-kind of attention-seeking morons at work )as soon as the titles begin. A herculean task, I tell myself, scaring this crowd. NO way this is going to work.

I wish.

The storyline is cheesy. I didn’t like Urmila’s acting too much. Some of the scenes were repetitive. Some, no, most of the actors and actresses are wasted…too many underdeveloped roles. But anyway, I got scared. And that was part of the expectations-thingie, and I am happy.

The other guy who spiced up my weekend was Bryan Singer. X2. Heh heh heh. That guy knows his characters. I think my faith in movies-based-on-comics has been somewhat rekindled. Let’s see what Ang Lee does.

Just for the record, since yesterday, I have been flexing my wrists and going “Snikt!” in my head every ten minutes. Anyone know where I can get white contact lenses?

The Akira run I was bidding for, issues 1-33, suddenly skyrocketed at the end. My fault, actually. Made a stupid mistake and bid my max price 10 minutes before the auction was due to end. The network was too fast, and I pressed “enter” on the confirm-bid button….boom! The price bounced from 20$ to 43$, and somebody outbid my max bid of 62$ just when 45 seconds were left.

Tchah!

There was a slim chance though. I had been secretly hoping for a full run of Lone Wolf and Cub (issues 1-45), and the same seller was selling a lot which was due to end an hour later. And there was another LWAC run (1-29) up for sale at a Buy-it-now option of 35$.

So two chances. Hope for the best and snipe for the 45-issue run, and failing that, go for the Buy-it-now bid. Had misgivings about the second one, though. The seller had a couple of negative feedbacks, and he was a little vague about his lot.

Anyways, sat it out. What if someone opts for the Buy-me-now bid before the 45-issue lot gets over? What if somebody beats me at the last minute again?

From what I found out, sniping is the best option. And like they say, aim for the head when you snipe. The lot was hanging at 50.13$ at a minute for the auction to end. Deep breath. How much can I afford? Not more than cover price. The market-price of Lone Wolf and Cub, the original editions is now touching something like 10-30$ each. Depending on the condition and the issue number. If some heavy hitter decides to get into the game, I am gone. I opt for a safe, double-the-nuber price. 45 comics, I can go upto 90$. Add two for luck. 8 to be gone on postage, if it comes to max bid. There.

45 seconds. I key in 92$.

Refresh. Bid accepted, I hope. Then I realise I had refreshed the wrong page. Aak!

Right page, refresh again. Why is it taking so much time? OK, finally, it opens. The auction is over.

I win. 71$+8$ postage for 45 issues of Lone Wolf and Cub. Check out this to find out how much they sell for.

None of this would have been possible without 2fargon. I will save the Thanks and the heartfelt gratitude for later, da. A week.

I don’t know how this happens, jayasankarvs. I google randomly for some Frank Miller interview, and this is what I get.

Philip K Dick – Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Bruce Sterling – The Hacker CrackDown.

Also available, Douglas Rushkoff – Cyberia, Douglas Adams’ You-know-what. William Gibson’s Count Zero, and Neuromancer. Huxley’s Brave New World. Check out the site.

More to come. The Illuminatus Trilogy!!!!!!! Found it online here. I dunno how this happened, seriously.

I would suggest you people download these stuff as soon as possible to your own HDs. Never know when they might get knocked off. ;-)

Ain’t I good?

Why do I get so psyched up about comics?

I don’t have too much of love for funnybooks – Asterix and Tintin are fine, I finished reading them(the entire run available then, minus the new Asterix titles) way back when I was 12 , and now I don’t find them funny enough to evoke laughter ( I remember laughing loudly quite a lot while reading Asterix, forcing the librarian to go “Hush!!” a lot of times, although with an understanding smile on her face. ) Archies were ok, I ODed on them just after I passed my Class X exams, and a month later, I started to find all the stories the same. That went for all the rest of ’em funny-books – they were all stories about characters in a setting, but the stories were all fragments, if you know what I mean. Story A does not necessarily have to follow through into story B; like I said, the characters and the setting remains the same, but something that happened in story A has no bearing in a different storyline. I don’t remember Archie coming and asking Betty, “Hey! Remember the time when Veronica did so-and-so thing?”

Then there were the mandatory Indrajal and Amar Chitra Katha comics too. Even now, if I try to talk superheroes to some guy, the standard names that come out of it are Superman, Batman, Spiderman, He-Man(because of the DD cartoons. Bah! ), and then follows the Indrajal menagerie. Phantom. Mandrake. Flash Gordon. (I have not met too many Flash Gordon fans though, maybe no one except for a distant uncle ) Seems there was a time when Phantom comics were hip and really IN! If you didn’t read the latest Indrajal, you were a loser or you were lying. I had my fair share of purple-clad and top-hat wearing heroes too, courtesy my uncles’ collections. But again, the storylines refused to grow up. Or maybe I got pissed off at the declining quality of the artwork and stories. Every newspaper runs Phantom and Mandrake strips even now, with the Phantom rescuing some dame in distress from some tribal witchdoctor, or apprehending gun-runners, or maybe drug-smugglers, or, on a bad day, a feudal tyrant or two.

Amar Chitra Katha comics are genius, plain and simple. Anant Pai (and Ram Waeerkar, of course) deserves the Bharat Ratna more than anyone else, in my opinion, he has done more for Indian culture than any other psycho saffron-lover. But again, you can’t evolve too much with Indian mythology and history. I think ACK is doing the best thing, reprinting high-quality editions of its titles and maintaining a decent market. Stuff like this deserves to stay on, at least for my kids and my kids’ kids.

That was it for comics in India, at least.( I won’t even consider the likes of Chacha Chowdhary and Tauji and the rot churned out by Diamond Comics, with its bad English and equally horrid illustrations. This guy Pran, he has the temerity to show people’s heads being chopped off and stuff like that and claim these books are for children. What crap! ) Among the regional language stuff, the Hindi comics are ripoffs of Image and DC titles, with characters having weird names like Jozumba and Super Commando Dhruv battling it out in tights in Delhi. (Tights in Delhi !Awk!!! ) I loved just one character – Nagraj, I couldn’t help but love the way his origin was written, and even now I think of making a movie on Nagraj. Real eerie it would be, with snakes and all. I have read some Bangla comics, which had two of the most hilarious characters I ever met – Baatul the Great, a deadpan jock who’s strong enough to have bullets bouncing off his chest ( that’s what was featured on every cover of Baatul the Great comics, Baatul whistling while his scheming nephews shot bouncing bullets at him. ) and Haada-Bhooda, the Bangla equivalent of Dumb and Dumber. Brilliant, both of them.

Of course Target also had its Detective Moochwala (and Pooch) by Ajit Ninan, and Gardhab Das by Neelabh and Jayanto, and for a brief period of time, the awful Tegrat.

Again, the same problem with all the aforementioned titles is the same story-a-has-no-relation-to-story-B syndrome. After sometime, when you’ve read enough stories, you stop giving a damn about the next one. At that point of time, I wasn’t just looking for good stuff to read, I was looking for anything that could be read and enjoyed without being too predictable. Literary value be damned, at least give me something that can keep me at the edge of my seat and make me refuse to have dinner when I am reading it.

That’s when, at about the grand age of 15, I discovered a world that actually gave me what I wanted. I refer to, of course, the continuity-crazy world of DC, Marvel, and Euro-American comics in general.

Nine years later, I am so freaking caught up in the loop that here you are – it’s me in my office at 3:30 AM in the morning, waiting for an eBay bid on two comic-lots to get over. I need those comics. I have waited too long for them.

I am so freaking sleepy.

HP Lovecraft works available online here.