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Of quizzing, and happy coincidences.

What have I been doing?

I conducted a couple of quizzes over the last month. Two of them were for IIT Kanpur, for their cultural festival Antaragni ’05. One (and a quarter) was were for IIM Indore’s management festival IRIS. They went off quite well, or so I would like to think. Met a lot of familiar and new faces over the trips. Happily enough, even the lych-worthy theme rounds were happily received, and that warms the cockles of my heart. ( That was just a figure of speech, I really don’t know what cockles are, and if they are associated with the heart, so whether they are warm or cool doesn’t really matter, because I wouldn’t know. Just saying…)

Though I am generally in varying levels of nervousness before a quiz I do ( the nerviness dissipates only when the quiz is halfway over, and as I reverse the direction of the questions, nobody faints or tries to lynch me.), there was one quiz in particular that made me shake in my shoes. It was the one I did for Class IV students, and it makes me sweat just to think of the fact that it required THREE tie-breaker rounds to figure out which teams got what prize. It is extremely unnerving for the quizmaster when he sees that someone who has answered his question (after standing up, and raising one’s hand even as the question is being read out) also breaks into a war-dance that would put a Native American Indian to shame. And that’s after every question, trust me. It also frightens me when students from Class III, when told that the round was going to be a flag round, start yelling “Eeeeeeeeeeeasy.” and proceed to crack every answer. Note to self – tougher questions the next time.

Did a comics quiz for the KQA yesterday. Note to self: scratch off one of life’s TODOs. Pretty good response, and really good answering by all the teams. Added to the already-generous official prize by adding a couple of comics DVDs/CDs as incentives. There, serioussam, that was me doing my bit for comics evangelism. Graphic Rampage ( for that was its name, precious) was followed by the Ganesh Nayak memorial quiz, conducted by tandavdancer, sonataindica, and their partner-in-criminally-good-quizzing Rajat. Blighters put paid to my no-excessive-geekery-in-the-comics-quiz rule by doing a seven question Sandman theme. One that I cracked at the fifth question, but refused to answer until Mother Teresa’s Racist Doglovers did so first. The propah excuse to make is that they were tagging behind our team by 5 points, and I didn’t want to upset the status quo. But the real reason was that other than Tori Amos, I could not figure out any way to connect the theme. How did I know it was Sandman? Because there is no way that Tori Amos can lead to anything ( or anyone) else in a quiz, other than Neil Gaiman. One of life’s little secrets, and the reason why I stayed away from Ms Amos in the comics quiz. Mwahahahahaha.

The whole question-setting/DVD-burning exercise added much to my stress levels on Saturday, which is probably the reason I fell asleep at 11:30 PM last night. One Perfectly Healthy Sunday night wasted – oh, the inhumanity of it all!

Frightening Coincidences Department

Ok, so last Wednesday night, I decide to read Miller’s Born Again arc off my hard disk. The reason why I hadn’t read this so far was that my Miller-Daredevil download, way back when downloads were at home in Hyderabad, comprised only issues 158-191. Managed to transfer the remaining issues ( 219, which I had owned and read way back, 227-233) from Sam when I was in Delhi, and yeah, so I read them at one go. Life was good, and the next day I came and checked out eBay prices. Just in case, you know.

Thursday Evening. A cursory trip to Magazines, Brigade Road’s gift to humankind along with Bookworm. (Blossom is exempted from the “gifts” category, and adds itself to the “necessary evil” part of the catalogue. ) Actually, I was on the way home from a trip to Bookworm, having bought a hardcover copy of Song of Susannah for a decent price, and Anthony Lane’s Nobody is Perfect, a collection of movie reviews and miscellaneous writings by the New Yorker reviewer ( trivia: where does the book get its title from?) Dropped into Magazines on a sudden impulse, and the guy tugs me by the sleeve and leads me to a corner stacked with Mojo and Uncut magazines, complete with CDs and astoundingly-high price tags. While I am still gasping for breath, he tugs at the other sleeve and leads me to the other corner of the shop, with the magic words “New comics.” And boy, oh boy, are they new or what! Get myself a stack of Supermans some two-three months old, a couple of JMS Spiderman issues, loads of Gotham Knights and Catwomans, when he brings out one more stack – which happen to be in packs of 5 each. I point out that because there’s no discount on the combo packs, he might as well open them up and display them as single issues – we comic-buyers always like to see what we are buying, right? As always, my powers of persuasion have the desired effect, and he slices open all 37-odd packs. At this juncture, I was about to go bill the comics I had selected ( along with a couple of Heavy Metal back-issues) when some familiar images peek out from the lot he’s diligently tagging. YES YES YESSSSSS! Issues 231, 232 and 233 of Daredevil, the ones I had read just the night before. More near-fainting spells ensue when I see the other comics in the lot – which include random issues of V For Vendetta, Elektra: Assassin, The ‘Nam, and Micronauts. (Yes, I love Michael Golden.) Had to pay 35 Rs per comic, but was worth it, really.

At the end of it all, I had to pay an auto-driver ten rupees extra to get the whole bundle back home. 99 comics, 3 magazines ( I totally ignored the Mojo/Uncut lot that evening), and two thick books. Now that was a night to remember.

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Beatzo’s Laws of Second-hand Book-Buying

First Law, or the law of pricing: A book will always be priced higher than what one is willing to pay for it.
Corollary I : The feeling of euphoria induced on seeing a book is inversely proportional to amount on the price tag.

Second Law, or the Scouring Law: You always find a book when you least expect it.
OR
The less the effort you put into finding a book, the greater the chances are that you will find it.
Corollary to the Second Law: If you decide to stop buying books for a limited period of time, the quantity of book sales around you will increase dramatically.

Third Law, or the Law of Boundless Optimism: A book will always be available at a cheaper price at some other place some other time.
Corollary to the Third Law: You will always meet a guy who has bought a book at a rate cheaper than what you paid for it.

Fourth Law, or the Serious Law: If you wait to buy a book you think is slightly overpriced, you will always find it on the shelf, but not on the day you give up and go to buy it.

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Guys, new meme

Don’t write anything on your LJ for a month. And then, make a post creating a new meme.

I tag ALL OF YOU! Muhuhahahahaha.

Daisy, Daisy,
Give me your answer do!
I’m half crazy,
All for the love of you!
It won’t be a stylish marriage,
I can’t afford a carriage
But you’ll look sweet upon the seat
Of a bicycle made for two.

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Ptolemy’s Gate, and the Bartimaeus Trilogy

One fine day, when browsing through the old books in one of the bookstores near Anuradha Theatre, Guwahati, I came across the novelisation of The Thief of Baghdad, the movie starring Errol Flynn and released sometime before the fifties. The only Thief of Baghdad I knew then was the Shatrughan Sinha version, but I still bought the book. It was by some guy named Richard Wormser, and what sold me was not just the price (8 rupees, for the record), but the way it began.

“My name is Abu Hastin, and I am a djinn, or as some people prefer, a genie, or a jinn, or rather impolitely, a demon. Me, I prefer to called a genius.”

The story concerned itself with guardian djinns of cities who competed with each other in various aspects, and our friend Abu Hastin was a peeved djinn because the sultan of Baghdad, his city was an old nincompoop. The old king was interested more in fireworks and circus acts than statesmanship, and he was planning to marry off his beautiful daughter to the Crown Prince of Mossul, which effectively meant that Abu Hastin was to eat humble pie for at least fifty years, because he was not pally with the djinni of Mossul.

So he decides to take matters into his own hands. Which involves making sure that the princess meets and falls in love with the Thief of Baghdad.

It was a fantastic story, full of wit and adventure and snarky comments, and I remember reading and rereading it quite a number of times. It’s still at Guwahati though, and I think it’s out-of-print, at least because the name Richard Wormser does not ring a bell with anyone.

Now when vrikodhara showed me The Amulet of Samarkand in Bombay, I was kind of pissed at Jonathan Stroud. I was pretty sure that he had read the Thief of Baghdad when he was a kid, and decided to use the first-person-smart-talking-djinn to create a post-Potter young adult fantasy trilogy. Similar feelings persisted when I saw Artemis Fowl for the first time, but the premise of Fowl was a little more contemporary than Samarkand.

But boy, three books and one trilogy later, I have to admit that I was wrong about Jonathan Stroud. The Bartimaeus Trilogy rocks. Not because it’s fantasy and it has a smart-ass djinn in it, but because Stroud’s mixture of magic, politics and ancient history surpasses your average Young adult novel by miles. Refreshing characterisation – Nathaniel, the young protagonist does not have any claptrap like ancient prophecies hanging over his fate, frankly speaking, we do not know whether to like him or hate him because he changes over the three books, his life completely taken over by the politics of the reigning magicians of the day. in Ptolemy’s Gate, he has become John Mandrake, Information Minister, feared by commoners (i.e the non-magic wielding populace of the nation), privy to the Council of politician-magicians closest to Rupert Devereaux, the Prime Minister. Devereaux is himself a skilled magician, and over the course of time has become a perfect despot, choosing to ignore the grievances of his people, indulging in his love for theatre more than ever, and most importantly, forbidding the use the Staff of Gladstone and the Amulet of Samarkand to quell the enemies of the Empire. It is a time of much turmoil in England, as more and more commoners have become resilient to magic, and secret rebel organisations have cropped up against the ruling elite.

Bartimeus the djinn is still working for Mandrake, but even as the book begins, we discover that Mandrake has kept Bartimaeus away from The Other Place ( where all djinns and afrits and marids hail from) for so long that the poor guy has weakened, and needless to say, he is disgruntled. Even more so when Mandrake sends him on a solo mission to track a certain fugitive who had escaped their clutches several years ago (from the previous book, The Golem’s Eye). But then, a djinn’s got to do what a djinn’s got to do…The general complaint about The Golem’s Eye was that there was too much politics, and too less Bartimaeus, and this is not a complaint anyone should have with this book, at least. The footnotes leave you in splits, everytime.

Kitty Jones, the fugitive rebel from Book 2 is the third protagonist of Ptolemy’s Gate, and she has been making plans of her own all these years. Some of them involve Bartimaeus and his former master Ptolemy. Stroud interweaves his story with brief vignettes from Ptolemy’s life, and by Part 3 of the book, which comes somewhere in the middle, the build-up is complete. Part 4 ends with a shocker that I had been expecting, and the rest of the book deals with revenge ( you would be surprised at how many people..erm…individuals are looking to get their dishes served cold in this book, and how many of them do get their comeuppance), redemption, and yeah, closure. What an ending! Seriously, I doubt if anyone would expect the trilogy to end this way. I sincerely hope Jonathan Stroud does not get carried away by marketting possibilities and come up with spin-off series involving the characters or something.

If you haven’t read any of the Bartimaeus trilogy yet, I strongly suggest you do so immediately. This one’s a white-heat read for sure.

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