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Books, precious.

Six books in seven days is not too bad. Books, as in proper non-graphic-novelly books.

Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys.

Twice-22 By Ray Bradbury. A collection of short stories collecting two previous short-story releases- The Golden Apples of the Sun and A Medicine for Melancholy. I have read some of these stories before, “The Fog Horn”, for instance, but I just can’t get enough of re-reading Bradbury.

Carl Hiassen’s Skinny Dip. Entertaining as always. I loved the fact that I could figure out that the cover art was by Charles Burns.

Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club. Now an interesting thing happened. There are these book exhibitions happening at the Institute of Engineers from time to time, but of late I have been skipping them because of three reasons – one, the way they price their books is completely random – mostly it seems to be based on the thickness of a book, and not whether it’s good or bad;two, the books are completely unarranged. Which is good for your book-hunting impulses, but at the end of a terrible day at work, one hardly has the impulse to tilt one’s head sideways and walk from one end of a hall to the other trying to filter the white noise of titles ( 90% of the listed books are stuff you find at Abids on Sundays for 10 or 20 rupees, and I swear the next time I see five copies each of Alexandra Ripley’s Scarlertt and Terry McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale in a stack of 100, I will scream.) ; three – if you get books for cheap, all the restraints, all the mental promises you’ve made not to spend any more money on books, all of these are forgotten. So yeah, I try my best to ignore these sales, even though I pass the Institute of Engineers every evening on my way home.

Now this evening, it was drizzling, and traffic was suckadelic. Traffic is always suckadelic and it nearly always rains in the evening, but it was even worse this time because I was on riding pillion on a bike. So there, we decided to park the bike at the I of E and check out the book-sale. We gave each other 10 minutes. Now as I went up, the sign said “Last day of sale”, which was good, I told myself, because I would not be able to come back for second helpings if I saw something interesting, and because they were only taking cash. So off I went, nonchalantly checking around. Truth be told, I wasn’t looking too hard, because most of the good stuff would already be sold. Saw a book of Marilyn Monroe pictures, priced at 195, but decided to skip it. Too high a price for photos, especially after I had downloaded a 140 MB package called “The Ultimate Marilyn Monroe Photographs Collection, Ever” just a couple of days back.

And then I saw the familiar logo of Fight Club staring at me, with Brad Pitt grinning and Edward Norton looking sullen and “Chuck Palahniuk” written in bold on top, and I said “hallelujah!” and went and checked out the price, which turned out to be just right. Sixty rupees is not a high price to pay for this book, yeah? Then at the counter, the guy tells me, buy one book, get another free. GLUCK! Ten minutes were almost up, so I ran a bit and looked around for something good that would cost me 60 Rs, but alas, the only ones I could see were Terry McMillan and long-read Stephen Kings and the odd Steve Martini here and there. Finally, just picked up the Marilyn book, and asked the guy to price something.

“Pay 150”, he says. Woah! Has to be the first time I paid lesser for two books than I would pay for buying one of them. Began reading Fight Club right that night, during dinner, and finished it the next morning. Yummy. Can’t believe how faithful the movie was – except for the nip and tuck there, which added to the goodness of it. Seriously, it would take guts to make a script out of this book.

Bollywood Uncensored: What You Don’t See On Screen And Why by Derek Bose. Pretty interesting reading on the peculiar quirks of Indian film censors. I liked the attention Bose paid to the banned documentaries of the seventies and eighties, with a neat comparison chart of what happened to those documentaries. ( Some were allowed to be telecast on Doordarshan by High Court and Supreme court, and others were shafted by DD anyway, when they aired these post-midnight.)

Tim Dorsey’s Hammerhead Ranch Motel, that I finished on the train ride to Madras day before yesterday. One sitting. Another writer in the crime/comedy genre, and a thoroughly loony one at that. For the most part, the storyline hops around from one oddball occurrence to the other, and as pages turn and timelines mesh, a completely zany series of events transpire – the climax, naturally, happening at the Hammerhead Ranch Motel. A dancing chihuahua who meets a tragic end when he jumps off a weather-plane, a trivia-spouting schizophrenic who kills people by literally making stuffing of them. From what I have read about Florida courtesy of Hiassen and now Dorsey, the state seems to be full of lunatics and corrupt officials and fugitives on the lam from the other states.

Because I had coupons for Premier Book Stall left over, went and picked up Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian and Pratibha Ray’s Yagnaseni: The Story of Draupadi. Began the second book, really well-translated ( it was in Oriya originally, I think). If only Ashok Banker could write half as lyrically as Pradip Bhattacharya can translate, I would be a happy man.

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God is Dead. Meet the Kids.

I finished Anansi Boys last night, in two sessions. Now I am in that unhappy state of mind that is brought about upon the realisation that I would probably have to wait fo a long, long while before a new Neil Gaiman novel comes out.

Gaiman had already pointed out that the book was more humour than fantasy, and rightly so. There was the friendly Douglas Adamsy-PG Wodehousey narrator’s voice throughout the writing, and the observational gems that Gaiman indulges, the kind of opinions about everyday things that make you go – “Damn, now why didn’t I think of that?” I have been thinking of a way to write about the book without giving away any spoilers. Probably the best way to make you go and read it is to repeat the tagline – “God is dead. Meet the kids.” and to say that in the book, much like all other Gaiman books, Things are Not What They Seem, and Events Happen in Different Layers of Reality. I think it would also help if you read up on Kwaku Anansi, the trickster-spider-god character of African myth. I had bought a collection of Anansi stories off a sale sometime back, and could not but help smiling at the entertaining Gaiman spins on the myths.

It’s self-referentially humorous. I mean, just look at these lines:
Daisy made a noise. It was not a yes-noise and it was not a no-noise. It was a I-know-somebody-just-said-something-to-me-and-if-I-make-a-noise-maybe-they-will-go-away sort of noise.
Carol had heard that noise before.
“oy”, she said. “Big bum. Are you going to be much longer. I want to do my blog.”
Daisy processed the words. Two of them sank in. “Are you saying I’ve got a big bum?”
“No,”, said Carol. “I’m saying that it’s getting late, and I want to do me blog. I’m going to have him shagging a supermodel in the loo of an unidentified London nightspot.”

I must have spent three minutes, probably more, just laying back on the bed and laughing hard after reading these lines.

The version of the book I bought, the British trade paperback, has a deleted scene, a scanned excerpt from Gaiman’s diary ( which contains such entertaining information as an idea to begin every chapter in the book with a punchline of a popular joke, which was vetoed later) and an interview with the writer. On an aside: How much did I pay for it? Nothing at all. Bought it with the book coupons collected from KQA quizzes. Muhuhahahahaha.

Also picked up an Iomega 160 GB External Hard Drive yesterday. Looks really cool, but has an American 3-pin plug, so I need a converter for that, even though my spike-buster does have a socket that works with it. I need to work everywhere, that’s why.

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Couple of things

Tim Burton’s movie Big Fish was based on a novel?? Nobody told me!

My sister, now in London with her husband, has got herself quite a nifty accent. The nice, “pretty good, innit?”-kind of an accent that I always wanted to acquire. No, really. I have a thing for proper Brit/Irish/Scottish accents. Reading Garth Ennis and watching Guy Ritchie movies do that to you.

Re-reading one of the best books from my boyhood ( Ahahaha, the word “boyhood” always cracks me up) – As The Crow Flies by Jeffrey Archer. The man might be a swindler and a perjuror, or whatever it is they call him, but that doesn’t take away the fact that he writes neat plot-driven stuff. Used to, rather. I think I need to reread the best of his epic-family-squabble-thingie (Kane and Abel and The Prodigal Daughter, all his latter-day output degenerated to the same pulpy two-guys-seperated-by-class-and-with-interwined-lives plot that Kane and Co did to perfection) Man, As The Crow Flies is getting me all nostalgic. I read it the first time when my younger uncle was getting married, and pissed off a lot of my Evil Relatives by taking the book to the wedding and punctuating the assembly with occasional sighs and giggles and “yeah, BABY!”s. That was the closest I came to being interested in entrepreneurship, or commerce of any sort. Charlie Trumper, the main character of the book was on my Personal Pantheon for quite sometime after that; matter of fact, I think I need to put him on again.

So a quick trip to Planet M resulted in my finding an album long on the list of personal curiosities – The Essential Tri Atma. What’s so special about this band? Just that the third song on the album, O Moena was ripped off in the famous Siyaram ads of the eighties ( Remember that tune? “O Siyaram, coming home to Siyaram” and all that jazz…) Listening to the album right now, and the rest of the songs are pretty good. The band Tri Atma is made up of a Bengali percussionist Ashim Saha( “O Moena” starts off in Bangla, and it seems it’s about a Mynah bird) and a German guitarist Jens Fischer, who also sequences the tracks. Considering that it’s a band from the seventies, the sound is extremely contemporary, the tabla used to good effect throughout.

So I also moved flats in Hyderabad. I was there for two days this week, and thankfully, didn’t break my back lifting crates of books, because we hired a bunch of movers who did everything ( except the packing, which we did ourselves). The move was necessary because vrikodhara is all set to leave for Calcutta, and we were paying too much for the three-bedroom apartment, which was also beginning to resemble something that was a cross between a bombed-out refugee center and a set from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. So this new place is a two-bedroom flat, the only disadvantage being that it gets nastily hot in the summer. I was really worried my books would spontaneously combust or something – because I came into the house at 5:30 PM on Tuesday, about to leave for Bangalore, and it felt like I had walked into an oven. It’s not the house’s fault, though. Hyderabad is a bloomin’ oven in May. It rained sometime in the night during the bus journey and I woke up shivering early in the morning, as it entered Bangalore.

I took a picture of my room right after the packing was complete; Sasi, friendly reminder, send me the photograph, will you?

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A link-encrusted post

I love Charles Addams. He’s one of the few cartoonists with a truly macabre sense of humour – there’s Gary Larson, there’s the mindbogglingly brilliant Bunny Suicides, there’s Jhonen Vasquez with Johnny The Homicidal Maniac – but Addams came much before all of them, and his cartoons can still make you laugh and cringe at the same time.

Now I had seen Charles Addams’ primarily through Dell paperbacks picked up at various second-hand bookshops. While these books were printed on fairly high quality paper, I was always bothered about why the reproduction of those little pen and ink masterpieces was so blurry. At times, you had to squint really hard to figure out what the picture was all about. The tones would bleed into each other – the general appearance was that Addams liked his work very dark and hard-to-figure-out-unless-you-looked-carefully types.

But today, I realised why the Dell paperbacks of Addams’s work was that way. It was because they were reprints of oversized hardcover books, which were abso-freakin-lutely gorgeous. The artwork on these books was crisp and required no squinting.

Now how do I know this, you wonder? Because I picked up a first edition hardcover copy of Charles Addams’s Black Maria today, for only a hundred rupees.

And I also re-found the soundtrack to Ocean’s Twelve. And I bought the complete run of Preacher (1-66, and some specials) for $82.10, which includes shipping ( the seller refunded part of the shipping charges to me because he could ship it cheaper), and the remaining run of Swamp Thing Vol 2 ( issues 45-171), also for 83$. There was a sale on at secondspin.com and I ordered a 3-disc collector’s edition of Dario Argento‘s Suspiria and a ten-volume collection of Sonny Chiba movies for the grand price of 23$. My credit card is moaning rather loudly right now, so I will let it sleep for a while. Six months. No, three. Erm, let’s see.

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Reading Prince of Ayodhya by Ashok Banker. I had already formed a very bad opinion about the book after reading a couple of pages at Odyssey quite sometime ago; and the Terrible Attitude of the writer towards negative reviewers – contentedbloke‘s Amazon review, to be precise. But curiousity got the better of me, and so…

What IS this guy trying to do? He seems to be rewriting the Ramayana as a fantasy novel, terrible plot twists and Dark Lords and Joseph Campbell fundaes intact. Which is not a bad thing at all, we have had enough of watered-down grandmother’s tales – and I cannot think of any English version of the Ramayana which is long enough – there have always been bits and stories chopped away,unlike the Mahabharata, which has the Kishori Mohan Ganguli version as the definitive retelling.

It would have been a good thing, except for the fact that Mr Ashok K Banker is what one might indelicately describe as a hack. One might also call him a Tolkien-wannabe, but that would be a serious insult to Tolkien. He’s at best a Robert Jordan-wannabe, and let me tell you, I don’t like Robert Jordan at all. I think Robert Jordan is a Tolkien-wannabe, and at times a Robert E Howard-wannabe, like when he is writing Conan The Barbarian fan-fiction ( It’s of course a tragedy of sorts that people like Robert Jordan manage to get their fan-fiction published, and then go on making a career out of even more badly written fan-fiction).

Oh my gosh, the language. At the beginning of the book, Ashok K Banker says – “I simply used the way I speak, an amalgam of English-Hindi-Urdu-Sanskrit, and various terms from Indian languages. I deliberately used anachronisms like the term ‘abs’ or ‘morph’ because these were how I referred to these events.” This unique methodology yields sentences like this: “The red-beaded rudraksh mala around his neck , all marked him for a hermit returning from a long, hard tapasya. His gaunt face and deep-set eyes completed the portrait of a forest penitent, a tapasvi sadhu.” One line that makes sense to me because I am from India and know Hindi. But a fantasy reader picking up the book? “rudraksh”, “mala”, “tapasya” in one line, “tapasvi” and “sadhu” in the next – anyone would give up in disgust. I am disgusted becauuse the words don’t gel together at all, in either language.

Some more samples: “It was familiar with creatures that changed their bhes-bhav at will.” “In the bright light of the purnima moon, he could see the helmeted heads and speartips of the night watch patrolling the south grounds, moving in perfect unison in the regular rhythmic four-count pattern of a normal chowkidari sweep.” I mean, come on!!! “Purnima moon”??? What’s wrong with saying “full moon”? Does it make the full moon less exotic to be called “full” rather than “purnima”? Besides, the English equivalent is not “purnima”, it’s “poornima”, which tells me that Ashok K Banker’s Hindi is as seriously fucked-up as his English.

The dialogue – oh, boy oh boy, it’s that perfect B-movie screenplay that will never be made. Probably if you translate the lines spoken by the protagonists word for word into Hindi, you will get the same pompous mish-mash that’s the staple in our hallowed Ramanand Sagar-sir’s serials. For instance –

“It looked like a giant vulture. That round head, long hooked beak, that hunched back. But there was something odd about the body. It was broader than a bird, differently shaped, almost like a -”

“A man? A giant man-vulture, is that what it looked like, young novice?”
Young novice. George Lucas can get away with “You’ve done well, Young Padawan” in every other line, and that makes Mr Ashok K Banker feel he can too. Well, George Lucas is a multimillionaire, and he can get his characters to say whatever he pleases. You, on the other hand, young Ashok K Banker, have a lot to learn. Young novice. Humph.

Mr Ashok K Banker also says, at the beginning: “I based every section, very scene, every character’s dialogues and acctions on the previous Ramayanas, be it Valmiki, Kamban, Tulsidas, or Vyasa, and even the various Puranas.” In the first chapter, he has Rama do things like scan his bedchamber “with the sharpness of a panther with the scent of stag in its nostrils”, and carry a yard and a half of Kosala steel in his hand and do acrobatic martial asanas, while breathing in the pranayam style (whatever that means) while the Dark Lord Ravana sends him subliminal messages saying things like – “You will watch your birth-mother savaged beyond recognition, your clan-mothers and sisters impregnated by my rakshasas, your father and brothers eaten while still alive etc etc blah blah blah, oh, and yeah, the samay chakra, your sacred wheel of time, will repeat the cycle of birth and suffering infinitely.”

Wow. That’s all I can say. The last time I heard lines like this was while watching this film called Rudraksh. I wonder which version of the Ramayana that scene was based on.

Oh, great, now they have started talking about the Last Great Asura War. I am going to give this book thirty minutes more of my time, and then bid this fanfic writer a nighty-night.

Afterword: The stuff above was written last night. I read for about 15 more minutes, and gave up. Watched Stephen Chow’s Fight Back To School 2, a nice comedy that washed away the dregs of frustration brought about by PoA. I think these US publishers are really smart people – they have refused to release the subsequent books in the series until Banker cleans up his act (i.e his writing), and he refused. A vriddha dog can hardly learn new tricks, after all.

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