Life, Weirdness

The Myth of Good Handwriting

I have come to the conclusion that the importance of good handwriting is one of the biggest lies we were taught in school.

Most of it boils down to the fact that the art of writing by hand is no longer a broadcast medium, nor a medium of exchange. In the real world, that is. In schools, or at least in most schools around most parts of the world, pen on paper and chalk on blackboard is still the default medium of information exchange. It makes sense that children are trained to write down words in a uniform legible script, and all idiosyncrasies and personal quirks of writing have to be stifled, ironed and rinsed from their system. After all, they have to write examination papers, which have to be checked and corrected by time-constrained examiners, and you do not want illegibility getting in the way of that. Obviously, nobody tells the kids that the time and effort they put into getting their cursive writing right makes absolutely no difference outside of exams. Oh, and do not sidestep the fact that teachers themselves have fairly atrocious chalk-on-board handwriting.

I am not aware of how much good hand-writing matters in schools right now, but I can make an enlightened guess things are exactly the same as they were 20-25 years ago.

Doctor-prescription jokes aside, does handwriting matter any more after you get out of your academic life? Writing has already been superseded by typing, which itself is on its way out. Sure, you take notes during a meeting, which in all likelihood you will glance at once or twice, and maybe capture it in a more permanent format. No one will come to you and remark on the aesthetics of your handwriting or the deficiencies in your personality because you were not legible enough when taking notes. You sit down and write a letter by hand, to make it more personal. But why does good handwriting matter in that act? Isn’t the very effort of taking time out to write the letter reason enough for the receiver to feel good about the act? I cannot think of a situation where they would complain about bad handwriting – sure, it can be hard to read, but it is you, not an artificial, homogenized hand. (If they do complain, I suggest that you type it out next time, and add a signature at the end. Make sure you say “Yours faithfully” too, just to rub it in.)

The more I think about it, and the more I discuss it – on Twitter, yeah, where civil discussion and clear exchange of ideas is possible, despite what you may think – the more I think that the myth of “good handwriting” is just something that is propagated through memetic traditions prevelant in India. Like the music of Pink Floyd or the sayings of MK Gandhi, where a combination of nostalgia and personal belief that something is “important” or “good” stiffs any attempt to rationally understand why it is so, or look at alternatives. “It helps”, one may say, but it is hard to explain how good handwriting helps. “First impressions.” Really? Like you will appreciate a person better after you have seen the way he writes down – what exactly? Signing a check? A signature is meant to be unique, not aesthetically pleasing. It is highly unlikely that people besides the ones closest to you will ever get to see what your hand-writing looks like, and as long as your handwriting is not brazenly illegible, there should be no problem at all. Pretty handwriting may impress someone, but if you try to figure out why they are impressed by it, it will probably be because your handwriting is prettier than theirs. Or so they think.

You could also point out about the importance of graphology, the science of handwriting analysis and people interpreting your personality (especially in organizations, as a means of identifying character traits. However, I have never really seen any organizations actually resort to graphology to judge potential candidates). But there again, the traits in your hand-writing, the way they are, represent you as an individual. “Good” or “bad”? Does not matter.

Let it be noted, however, that I am not talking about calligraphy. Which is an art that needs to be sustained and encouraged. Calligraphy is something that is to be evaluated purely from an aesthetic perspective (after all, it is ‘beauty in writing’) and I do not need to go into how much modern typography revolves around it.

I also pondered about the complete lie that is the concept of participation certificates, but that does not need any explaining. At all.

Food, Myself

TT

Traveling when I was a kid was always special, more so because of something my mom cooked. She made a specific dish to eat during the multi-day train journeys. Nothing special, just spicy fried potatoes, but they lasted 2 days at least, and we would buy freshly-cooked chapatis from train stations and eat the potatoes with that. I even had a name for that particular dish, a name that was considered acceptable by the household. I called it TT, short for Train Tarkaari. TT attained quite a bit of favor among my high-school friends, when we made our trips to Calcutta and Delhi, for scholarship exams, Brilliant Tutorial tests, for entrance examinations for colleges. Coming back to college after summer and winter vacations were made a little more tolerable because of the tiffin-ful of TT that ma sent back with me. I hated the oiliness of it in my luggage, but what the hey, I loved eating it on the train. Especially on the top berth, where nobody could ask for too much of it, or see how much I had left.

A few years after I began working, I began to cook for myself. Hesitant, tentative attempts at first, and most of the time I would be on the phone with my mother, asking about spice proportions and marination time and the number of pressure cooker whistles. We’ve all been there, right? I got better at it and the distress calls wound down. It would get weird on Sundays when we would have our weekly conversation, and ma would say something like, “I cooked this the other day, you would have liked it”, and I would say, “That’s fine, I will cook it tomorrow” and then she would be like, “Oh. OH. I forget you cook nowadays”. A little accusatory, a little proud and happy.

Now TT, that was something I never cooked for myself. I would get the recipe every single time I was at home. Day 3 would be around when ma would serve it on the table, usually at dinner. (Day 6 was when I would get completely sick of home-cooked food and long for some biryani) And it tasted great, of course. Every time, I asked her the precise steps – and it was simple – no onions, just ginger and garlic. Mustard oil if possible. That’s it. But somehow, somehow, TT was her’s specifically, the memory and taste of it associated with Guwahati and train journeys. I never even tried to cook it myself.

I met my mother at Amsterdam last month, for a day. She was visiting my sister in Brussels. I was on the last leg of my trip, and met her on a rainy Sunday morning, after having spent the whole night dancing like mad at the Sensation White festival. For some demented reason, my sister wanted to visit the Heineken Experience. I had absolutely no desire to go myself – the hotel receptionist’s horror when I asked for directions to the place was reason enough (“It’s shit! Don’t go!”, he shrieked. “I have to meet someone there”, I said. “Well, tell them to not go! It’s shit!” “Too late, they are already there”) I went there, waited an hour at a delightful pub next door – it was a rainy day, and the cup of coffee and the apple and nutmeg pie cheered me up despite the tiredness I felt. I had not seen ma in a year and a half, and as it turned out, she had woken up at 6 AM that morning and cooked some TT for me, along with fried chicken and some puris. We sat in the car, rain pouring around us, and wolfed down the food hungrily. I did not care much for the chicken, the fried potatoes hit every pleasure center in my brain. And then some.

So I’ve been lying around at home thanks to a bout of chicken pox. (I know, right? Who on earth gets chicken pox at age thirty goddamned two, forgoshsakes) And the craving hit me. I needed to eat some TT. Which also meant I needed to cook me some TT, and I did. But I got adventurous too, and added cauliflower to it. And sausages. Some thinly chopped carrots. When it was done, I finished the whole dang thing with a packet of microwaved tortillas. I made some the next day too, and finished it in two meals. And later that week, I called up my mom and told her that I had made my version of TT. Or as I called it, TT2. Fuck yeah.

Comics, Movies

A Reaction of sorts

Ok, this is it. Nine years – counting the time we knew of Christopher Nolan about to direct a movie called Batman: Intimidation Game, taking over from Darren Aronofsky’s I-just-snorted-four-lines-of-coke re-imagining of Bruce Wayne as an orphan working for a car mechanic named Big Al. No clue of what to expect from a director whose only credentials were a movie that played backwards and a remake of a Norwegian thriller.

Intimidation Game sounded like it meant business. Begins sounded like a Nintendo product – kid-friendly, whimsical and not at all Batman-y, if you get what I mean. Until you saw it. When did you see it? Do you remember at all? Before I saw it for real, at the IMAX theater in Hyderabad, I was there that first Friday, at Rex at Bangalore. I am fairly sure other people I came to know later that year saw it there too, and the comic-karma part of me – the one that gets goosebumps at the cheesiest references and storytelling loop-backs – sort of wonders if all of us roared at the screen in unison when Bruce Wayne stood up in the cave under his mansion, even as the agents of childhood dread swooped around him. That moment when the two-note leitmotif throbbed and soared through the speakers in the theater and you could not stop grinning like an idiot because good God, you never thought things would look this good, Christopher Nolan, you magnificent man.

Digression: If there has ever been a case of my wanting to go back in time and apologize to a creator, it would be to Hans Zimmer, whose theme for Batman Begins I dismissed as being ‘not memorable enough’. I thought his two note theme was pedestrian, that they could not stand up to the grandeur of Elfman’s Spider-Man, at that time my personal benchmark for memorable superhero scores. I was wrong. I was so, so wrong. Those two notes, coupled with the variations on the swirling sonic tapestries in the lower register – the rumbly whoosh of bat wings, and the slowly-building orchestral sweeps – showed me how less is more. Add the dissonant Joker variant of the same two notes in The Dark Knight, and the primal chants echoing throughout the third movie, and you have probably one of the finest examples of minimalism and compositional idiosyncrasy on display. And I won’t even get into the playfulness of the piano-based Catwoman theme. Deep breath. This soundtrack is destined to be on repeat in my playlist for quite some time.

And you should also go check out the official app. Yes, Zimmer has actually come up with an iPhone app for the soundtrack, where the music, on auto mode, shifts based on what you are doing. In-app purchases let you buy the complete music suite (far more than the 52-minute soundtrack release) for $4, and enhanced auto-modes (there is one that plays at night, and another at sunset). Your fingers brushing against the mic can create interesting Gotham-city effects in the music. It’s been a few hours since I downloaded the app, and I feel giddy with happiness.

End digression.

So, uh, you watched The Dark Knight Rises, right? And you hated it, or were underwhelmed, or loved the shit out of it. Does not matter, really. What matters is this:

For the first time in the history of this 73-year old character, we have a complete story, with beginning, middle and end. The life and times of Bruce Wayne as the singular vision of a creator (and his sidekicks, if you count Jonathan Nolan and David Goyer along with Nolan senior) No studio interference, no pandering to fans, no insulting the audience. With all respect to the likes of Frank Miller, Denny O’Neil/Neal Adams, Jeph Loeb/Tim Sale, Bill Finger/Jerry Robinson/Dick Sprang et al, you tried, gentlemen, and you got really close, but this man did it. He gave us a beginning, a middle and an end. He stole, borrowed from and was inspired by you, he built on your work in a different medium, took audacious decisions on his own, paid absolutely no attention to studio demands (the Riddler? Seriously?), did not throw us knowing winks and in-jokes (or as I call it, scraps and bones for the masses). These weren’t the comic-book movies that Marvel Studios churn out every summer, those disposable, interchangeable three-act popcorn fests.

These were Something Else. Something that gave us a city where street names do not end with surnames of artists and writers. The Mark of Zorro was replaced with Mefistofele, and instead of skin bleached by Axis Chemicals, we had knife-blades and make-up. We saw that third-degree gasoline burns are just as potent as acid thrown at one’s face. Analgesic mists instead of steroids pumped into one’s bloodstream, a complete lack of resurrection-inducing medicinal pits or wise-cracking youngsters. A butler with a military background rather than one in theater. Random characters that had more lines of dialogue than Bruce Wayne’s mother ever did, the poor woman. Concentrated writer-directorfu thrown at your faces, howdja like that, huh?

But of course, with great directorial vision comes great personal baggage as well – gobs and piles of unadulterated plot, movies that felt crammed with Things Happening everywhere, a trilogy that could probably have been unpacked into a septalogy, or at least a quadrology. I would be lying if I said that all three movies do not exasperate me at times, with their convenient cause-and-effect scenarios and their over-reliance on technological paraphernalia. It would have been nice to not see the Batman buffeted about by agents beyond his control – because we all know that Bruce Wayne is a control freak who plans every contingency, who has all the escape routes mapped out. (and we are wrong. Wrong fucking universe. Repeat after me – this isn’t a comic book.) I am hardly a Nolan apologist, the man does not get everything right. But even with some atrocious trees in there, the woods are lovely, dark and deep.

The Dark Knight Rises is also the first work that manages to come out of the shadow of Frank Miller’s imposing epic. Rises makes use of its ending to tell us that Bruce Wayne’s story is done, that there is no comprehensible need for a man who has given his all to his city to return as a broken old man. (it’s somewhat fitting too that the acronym TDKR leaves people confused about what’s being talked about – the 1986 or the 2012 version) And let me tell you, this is monumental, you guys, this getting-out-of-Miller’s shadow thing.

(Oh shit, I think I am now getting into emo-mode when talking about the film. Let’s talk about old-timey boyhood stuff instead)

Knightfall, cheesy as it feels now, was the Batman storyline when I was in high school. The first time I found back issues in Guwahati stores was in 1996 or so, and I did not finish completing the run (yes, Knightquest and Knightsend included. Yes, single issues painstakingly bought from the AH Wheelers and Western Book Depots and various Book Fair sales over the years. This was before BitTorrent and Flipkart made your lives easy, young ones) until 2003 or so. One painful moment in 2002 was seeing Legends of the Dark Knight #63, the final issue of the Knightsend saga in nemesis Chun’s collection. I found it a year later at a book-store in Delhi, if memory serves correctly, but the sting of seeing that one elusive comic-book in a collection that is not mine still lingers. Knightfall is also emblematic of 90s DC, where the company was shaking up every major character right after Superman’s death. Batman was broken, Wonder Woman was replaced by Artemis, Green Lantern went nuts. It was fun just looking at the house ads at that time. And things did not end with Knightsend, no sir. There was Prodigal after that, where Dick Grayson became Batman. Troika, that was Bruce Wayne’s return, complete with Black collectors’ cover. And followed by an endless slew of editorial-mandated crossovers – Contagion, Legacy, Cataclysm, No Man’ Land.

Times and editorial divisions changed, all these nineties “events” were swept under the rug like embarrassing relics of a chromium-cover-infused past. Batman fans got onboard with Hush, along with recommended Bat-canon books, the perennial Millers, Loeb/Sale’s Long Halloween and Dark Victory. Funnily enough, Batman RIP and the newer Morrison stuff did the exact same thing, getting rid of Bruce Wayne and having Dick Grayson replace him in the regular comic-books, and obviously nobody bloody remembered that it had all been done before. Bane became a one-note character used for much sidekickeSuch is the nature of the comics business.

Bully for Nolan, for a masterful use of a little-remembered, much-misused character in a lucha mask and the concept of a dystopian Gotham City cut off from the rest of the world. Most of the No Man’s Land comic read like sci-fi to me, somewhat divorced from the tone of what we expect from a Batman story. The way the winter of the Gothamite’s discontent was portrayed in the film is completely in line with what has gone before, Cillian Murphy’s I-am-not-quite-all-here appearance being the icing on the cake.
“Life-affirming”, the person I talked about this movie for the first time after watching it, said. “It’s like Bruce finally understands that not having a fear of death is great. but having the will to live is far far more powerful. It’s such a great, counter-intuitive message to put in a Batman movie, man.” I know how it feels. The Dark Knight Rises made me want to go to work (my 3:40 AM show finished at around 6:22 AM) and finish all my goals for the next quarter in a single day. It made me want to go rewatch the first two movies – yes, I had not indulged myself, partly because I did not need to, I remembered every detail of the last two movies. I did watch them again over the weekend, and now I need to figure out how many times and when I should pop in next-door (one of two true IMAX theaters in LA, FYI) to take in the moments of the film again.

Last point: I loved the way Anne Hathaway is introduced. Was the simpering maid act in the beginning a back-handed reference to Michelle Pfeiffer’s clueless Selina Kyle in Batman Returns, before the cats resurrect her? The way she changes her expression as she realizes that she’s been found out – oh hell yeah. Oh, and the “cat-ears” are sunglasses. Well-played, production team!

Books, Myself

The Great Book Transfer

I sold a lot of books before I moved to LA. A ton of reference books, lots of comics that I knew I would be able to buy again or owned multiple copies of, a bunch of books I was pretty sure I won’t read again. There was also a year of minimal book-buying – I think I bought about 5 or 6 books in 2010, just because it was getting out of hand.

It took about a year to move my books here. I was undecided about whether I should cart them off to my parents’ or my sister’s place. Chandru, over in Chennai, offered to put them in cold storage in a room at the office, but I wasn’t sure how I would get them over. A lot of people had conflicting opinions to offer about moving stuff to the US. Some said books in bulk were not allowed to be imported, others reported packages being returned to India after months of sitting in customs. I spoke with second-hand book sellers – none of them had experience taking books into the US, just exporting them out of the States. Thankfully, pal Ajanta had no problems babysitting the books, but time was running out – even she was to move out by end of the year.

I am not sure how I stumbled onto the R2I forums, but that got things moving. Based on the positive experiences people had with movers in some sticky threads, I emailed a couple of the names mentioned there. 21st Century Relocations, based out of New York was the first to respond, and their responses left me pretty confident that they would do a good job. They went to the apartment one weekend, sent me a reasonable quotation and a week later, packing was complete. I did not even have to mail a check, just sending a scan was enough. Had to printout, sign and scan in a boatload of documents, but they did all the running-around for customs clearance. Things got a little complicated because my departure ticket to LA was not a direct flight – I had to stop at Romania for a month, and my ticket was through Delhi, while the books were in Bangalore.

But it all went well, and by end of November, the books were enroute.

They arrived end of January, in a truck whose size made me very nervous about whether all the books would fit in the apartment. But fit they did, though my room looked like a cardboard hurricane hit it.

I had a Minor Adventure while buying bookshelves from Ikea, where the gentlemen with the pick-up truck decided to hijack my items and go make three other deliveries on the way. With me in the truck too, of course. And then proceeded to give me a ride to a movie theater, with a convoluted 20 mile side-track. It was a weird day.

In the course of the week, shelves were assembled, cartons were unpacked, muffled curses echoed through my chambers. It’s not an easy task, arranging 70-odd packages of books on your own, but I managed. Strangely, I managed not to get distracted by the books I hadn’t seen in a year. Though I confess I felt complete when I arranged the Walter Moers volumes on the top shelf, and smiled at the Tom Sharpe collection, putting them aside to reread Riotous Assembly and Indecent Exposure. Srividya Natarajan’s No Onions Nor Garlic joined the maybe-I-will-read-soon pile, as did the Lee Siegel books. Some left me rolling my eyes – what on earth was I thinking when I bought the Clarke Gable biography (called Long Live the King) or the book on Obie award-winning plays. Or the piles of Star Wars novels. Oh well, at least 2004-version of me must have been a happy camper.

And it was done. Almost. The comics and manga were in my room, and the books went to the living room. The DVDs (the manageable pile of originals that I had the nerve to get into the States, the rest being disposed off quite some time ago) were still packed (2 boxes), and about 4 more boxes of comics remained still – I had run out of shelf-space. There was no way I was going back to Ikea any time soon, and so these boxes remained unpacked for a few weeks, affecting my zen calm every time I entered my room. Last weekend, I figured I had had enough – went to Target, bought a non-Ikea shelf and finally, finally, it was done. My preciouses were home! मेरा पिया घर आया! やった!

And now, presenting a bunch of pictures. Whee!