I bought my first original comicbook art just before the year ended – on 25th December, to be precise. Two pages from Swamp Thing, artwork by Phil Hester. From issues 148 and 162, you can still check out the pages, if you are interested, here and here. It took me quite sometime to actually pay the guy – I had totally forgotten to check whether he accepted Paypal or not. He didn’t, only cheques and money orders were acceptable, and 2fargon stepped in with a little timely help. The downside was that, instead of shipping them to me, the seller shipped them to 2fargon instead, and so it will be some time before I get to touch them. But that’s ok. I paid 73$ for both the pages, including shipping. Which, in my humble opinion, is a bargain.

I also bought myself a nice new computer table cum bookshelf, at home, and the bookshelf is now occupied by CD-cases. My books still remain packed in cartons, giving me a claustrophobic feeling everytime I enter my room. I need to do something about that, in all likelihood I’ll end up buying a steel wardrobe, to keep some of the books in.

If you are a fan of historical fiction, or Indian fiction, or good fiction, for that matter, you ought to check out Cuckold by Kiran Nagarkar. It’s been quite sometime since an Indian writer made for a white-heat read, without any of the fussy Indian-linguistic-term-dropping that comes with writing about the past and Indian characters of the past. ( yes, AKB, I am talking about you. ) Nagarkar’s Maharaj Kumar is a character that’s going to stay with me for quite sometime, I suspect.

Also found Larry Gonick’s Cartoon Guide To Sex at Bookworm a couple of weeks ago, which I promptly finished on the bus back to Hyderabad. Excellent balance of humour and information.

My trip to Guwahati revolved around two things ( other than the quiz, that is). Portishead and Wicked. Portishead, of course, being the Bristol trip-hop band who I had listened to only in passing, and had found the tunes quite the right mix of Bjork and Massive Attack. I took an mp3 CD that had all of Air and two albums by Portishead on it, and I spent three days listening to ‘Dummy’ over and over again. Beth Gibbons – *sigh*.

Wicked: The Life and Times of The Wicked Witch of the West is the kind of revisionist tale that gives me hope for the future, in times when I am bothered that I have passed that age of blissful reading that enables a reader to enjoy an Oz book, or Enid Blyton stories unconcerned with subtext. Now, I am not too much into subtext, but there is only so much that you can shut down your mental processes to. Wicked is a look at the popular Oz mythos from the point of view of the Wicked Witch Elphaba ( whose name, I figured, the author Gregory Maguire borrows from the honourable Oz-meister himself – L Frank Baum -> El Pha Ba, get it? ). A story that charts out Oz as a land oppressed by the machinations of the Wizard, a man from “our” world – and hence given to ideas that are drawn from our societal taboos. “What is evil?” – a number of characters in the book seek to ask, and try to answer that question in course of that book, and they manage to do so without sounding pretentious, or diverting me from the fact that it’s an Oz story, forgoshsakes. What amazes me is how an author manages to make a character like the Witch so sympathetic, and rewrite the familiar storyline as a series of threads, which are linked to each other in ways that make you get goosepimples towards the end.

The oddest part is, I read part of Wicked first as an audiobook, couldn’t complete it that way, and found the book the other day at MR book stall.

I also watched A Tale of Two Sisters when in Guwahati. No, it wasn’t running at a theatre there, I just took my 2-disc Tartan DVD with me, heh.

And oh, before you ask, the quiz went well. Questions got answered left, right and centre, and it was finally won by an army major from Chennai ( and he called himself, very appropriately, One-Man Army) who had a train to catch at night and popped over at Assam Engineering College when he saw the poster for the quiz right on the way to the city, just to check out how the quiz would be.

Right, off to Guwahati again in two hours, this time to conduct a quiz for Assam Engineering College. Extreme flutter-byes in tummy – this is the first open quiz I am doing in hometown ( if you do not count the intra and inter-school stuff I did, once upon a time), plus the first quiz where parents will be present. Will be at home at about 4 today, unless Air Deccanitis kicks in. Be back on Monday, of course.

All batteries charged, all chargers packed, quiz CD written and packed.

To do:
Select which book to take, select which CD to take, buy some food for the flight, print-out ticket for Cal to Guwahati.

26th January is not a good place to be in Assam. The days leading to Republic Day were fraught with bomb blasts in Guwahati, one after the other. Not that it made much difference to the people there – except for yours truly, whose plans to go to Shillong were scuttled by two panic-stricken parents who calculated the probability of a bomb blast in the immediate vicinity of their son as a clear 1 out of 1. Seems the ULFA had been quite busy in January, demanding some X crores of rupees from ONGC and IOC ( where X is a figure that would give normal men heart attacks), and refineries, pipelines and key installations were on high alert for quite sometime. By high alert, I mean that if you were a group of young men out on a picnic, there is a fair chance you might have gotten arrested on charges of being suspected terrorists.

(The interesting thing I noted about one of the bomb blast was the total filmy set-up – someone threw a hand grenade in front of a police station. One person was hurt, and then half an hour later, a high-intensity blast occurs in the SAME PLACE. The funda being that the hand grenade had been used as a lure for policemen, senior-level ones to arrive at that place to “take stock of the situation”, while the actual bomb had been planted much before, and was timed to go off half an hour after the grenade blast. These terrorist guys are getting smarter everyday.)

One good (umm, kind of) thing that happened because of these is that when we went to watch Rang De Basanti on the first day, the theatre was empty.

Most people in Assam weren’t really bothered by the bomb blasts or threats. The topic which would send Axomiya Ryze ( that’s “folks from Assam”, for the Axomiya-challenged) into a frenzy would be “Debojit”. Ask around, and the people everybody would want to choke to death in broad daylight would be either Adesh Srivastav or Himesh Reshammiya. ( Ismail Durbar was being considered for canonization, last I heard) Reliance, about the only GSM service that’s of any consequence in the North-East, had put up hoardings saying “Vote for Debojit, son of the soil”, posters that were huger than the ones that are displayed whenever a new Rajini movie is released, the ones where you can count the number of teeth in His Grinning Mouth. They also brought down SMS rates to twenty paise. Which means that most people, including my uncles sent about 40 SMSes every day. “A matter of honour”, they said, when I pointed out that this was technically cheating.

For people who were clueless about the above paragraph, it was about this series on Zee TV called ‘Sa Re Ga Ma Pa’, which once upon a time used to be a musical talent show of much repute, with very serious contestants and judges and a presenter who dripped sugar and honey. Until all these other TRP-friendly shows like Indian Idol took away much of viewership, because of which SRGMP decided to reinvent itself as a vote-show, and a clash of music composers’ “apprentices”. There was some major controversy to do with this particular segment of the show, detailed here and here.