Editorial JAM

April 10, 2012

Earlier today, I was talking to Vikster on twitter about how, the next time we are in Mumbai, I should bring along RED Full Blooded Romances so that he could read them out loud at dinner. This may seem like a surprising thing to the uninitiated – but allow me to assure you that to hear him doing a dramatic reading of terrible South Indian romance novels is one of life’s greatest joys. I’m hoping to persuade Anand to come along to dinner with his mic so that the joy can be shared with the world at large. But I digress.

During the course of this conversation I realised that I could adapt JAM (Just-a-Minute, the thing you play at college cultural festivals) into a game for editors. Here’s what you’d need:

  • someone to read out loud – ideally Vikster, but then he is very busy and important, so anyone else with a clear, bell-like voice
  • a game master to arbitrate – so someone who has mad language and grammar skillz
  • contestants – the best sort would be editors, sub-editors, or people planning to become editors or sub-editors
  • one buzzer per contestant
  • and finally, a RED Full Blooded Romance, a Srishti novel, or a copy of the Times of India or The Hindu (or any Indian newspaper really – just that those are the two worst offenders, though in different ways)

How to Play

The game master comes up with a list of violations of language and style. Depending on what exactly is being read out, these could include:

  • errors of grammar (almost every sentence in Srishti)
  • errors of fact
  • logical fallacies
  • inappropriate use of business or technical jargon (alarmingly common in RED)
  • cliches
  • pompous language (pretty much every other sentence in The Hindu)
  • completely irrelevant puns (pretty much every other headline in The Times of India)

This is only a starting list – I’m sure more can be added.

Then, one contestant is picked to start. After that, the elocutionist starts reading the material out loud. The contestant who starts has to buzz every time she catches a violation on the list. If she manages to do this for a whole minute (or article, or chapter – this bit needs to be worked out), she scores 100 points.

To make things interesting and JAM-like, any of the other contestants can also buzz if they think the contestant in the hot-seat missed something. If their objection is sustained by the game master, the original contestant gets negative points and the interjector gets a shot at going for the 100 points. If the objection is overruled, the interjector gets negative points.

Now you could play this for points, or, to make things interesting, you could turn it into a drinking game. So, instead of getting negative points, you’d have to take a shot every time you either missed an error, falsely identified something as an error, or someone else got the 100 points. With every shot you’d take, your reflexes would slow down further, making it even more difficult for you to identify the language violations in the next round – so the worst editors would be the ones who got tanked first.

That actually makes this drinking game a Darwinian method of selecting good editors: the weak and unfit will be culled from the herd by alcohol poisoning, while the good ones will be the last people standing. That way, this could be an excellent training program for interns at newspapers – or even an entrance test for journalism schools. I mean, it would eliminate the chance that you’d have someone grammar challenged spending two years at J-school, then six months in editorial training, and finally turning out to be completely incompetent as a copy editor.

The only disadvantage I can see with this idea is that rather than selecting people with really good grammar awareness, it may just end up selecting people with really good alcohol tolerance. But then, being able to function despite being absolutely sloshed could also be  major advantage if you’re an editor, and you need to drink  to drive away the pain of  editing freelancers who forget to use the Oxford comma.

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The Tragedy of Fresh and Updated Pop Culture References

April 10, 2012

At the end of March, when year-end despatch pressure was driving me loony, I resorted to retail therapy, and bought the box set of The Princess Diaries. Unfortunately, I asked Flipkart to ship the box to my flat in Chennai, and I’ve been at Kanchi almost incessantly, so I didn’t get to open the box until yesterday. Unfortunately, since I had already paid for the set, it did mean that I had no money with which to buy my mixie. But then it is hard to take a long term view where the Princess Diaries are concerned.

Quick clarification: I had read the first four books in the series back in 2004, when I had a bookshop-cum-lending-library membership in Patiala (I think they had never counted on a reader as voracious as myself and I drove them bankrupt by issuing two books a day). After that, I was in Bangalore for two years, and lost track. In 2007 or 2008, I read up to Book 5 or Book 6 as pirated ebooks that Aisha had scored. And after that, I decided that since the series was coming to an end, I’d just wait for the box set to come out.

Well, the box set came out, and after many months of always having something more important to buy first, I finally got it and started reading it (right from Book 1) last night. And Alamak! It’s terrible!

Well, the diaries themselves are not terrible. They are still as funny as they were when I read them eight years ago. But the editing is awful. This set is the UK edition, published by Pan Macmillan. Unfortunately, it uses the updated, 2007 edition where:

  1. a bunch of pop culture references from the original 2000 books have been updated to more contemporary, 2007 popstars and movie stars. Thoo.
  2. Worse, this updating is not even done consistently – so that in one paragraph, Britney Spears is changed to Ashlee Simpson twice, but there’s still an instance of Britney (which is how I realised that this jigger-pokery was going on)
  3. And this is just part of really sloppy editing throughout the new editions – there are howlers like “an ten extra bucks” scattered throughout the two and a half volumes I’ve read so far.

Even if the editing had been good, and the pop culture updations consistent, it would have been lamentable. This is because the original series existed in comic book time: so while the characters aged only a month from one book to the next, the setting they were in aged in real time. This can be exasperating to the literal minded – but is part of the charm of the books, especially if you have one of those perverse (*cough* quizzing *cough*) minds that delights in listing contradictions and anomalies. Besides, as Ford Prefect says: “Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.” And on a slightly weightier note, as Fraa Jad says: “There is no backwards.”

One other series that used comic book time was Richmal Crompton’s Just William series, where William was always eleven years old, even though he could remember things that he had done three years ago (when he was still eleven years old).  This complete changelessness of William, his friends, and surroundings, was in fact made the key plot point of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s comic horror spoof of the William series, Good Omens.

By coincidence, the William series is also published by Macmillan – and they have taken it out of print. So they have mutilated the Princess Diaries, and taken away the William books. Scoundrels!

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Carnatic Music Movie

February 12, 2012

Chandru and I had met for coffee today, and we were wondering about what fad a Bollywood movie set overseas would inspire in 2012 (after all the Tomatina nonsense in 2011).

At this point, Chandru said that the Music Academy (the one on TTK Road) should get someone in Bollywood to do a movie about Carnatic music. Barely had he said this than we look’d at each other with a wild surmise, and agreed that actually we should be the ones to make it.

So. This is our movie. We shall faithfully stick to the cliches, er, template, er, tropes of the sports movie genre. It will be like every other sports/ competitive event movie ever – Chak de India, The Karate Kid, Sister Act, Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar – except with Carnatic music instead of sports.

Our underdogs will be three guys and two girls (or two guys and three girls, depending on availability of stars) in their teens. Each of them, in their preteens, rebelled against the oppressive and straitjacketed tutition that their traditional Carnatic music teachers were putting them through. Then, all of them found themselves drawn to the mentor figure.

The mentor figure is loosely modeled on Krish Ashok. He acts with disdain for Carnatic purists who frown on experimentation and fusion. Eventually he gets so frustrated with them that he trolls a kutcheri by going up to the stage while the performance is on, and then breaking into an unsolicited jam with the performers. On the bagpipes. Everyone is so shocked and outraged that only one thatha and one maami actually notice that the bagpipe jam is in the same raagam which the guys on stage were putting. But their observation is drowned out in all the outrage by the so-called rasikas. The bagpiper is than made an outcast from the Carnatic music scene and he becomes embittered.

Fifteen years later, he finds these other rebellious kids and takes them under his wing. He teaches them Carnatic music from the concepts, instead of just making them mug and practice endlessly. Like Mr Miyagi got Daniel-san to internalise blocks by doing wax-on wax-off, this mentor makes the vocalist have an epiphany about vocal range by making her scream and shiver in #chennaisnow. And so on and so forth.

While the Margazhi season is on, the mentor tells them to ignore the season itself and focus on the bigger goal – the International World Music Festival, which is being held in… it’s being held in whichever country or city’s tourism agency is willing to strike a deal with the movie’s producers, dammit! So while the mean Carnatic prodigies who bully our heroes are getting condescended to by The Hindu’s reviewers, the heroes themselves fly off to said International World Music Festival. This is kind of like how in The White Feather, Sheen gets over the disappointment of not being allowed to box for the house by going to Aldershot.

Unfortunately, their luggage is lost by the airline (that is, whichever airline that did not strike a deal with the movie’s producers. How do you like them apples?) and they land up at the festival without instruments. They panic until the mentor inscrutably tells them to make music with whatever they have.

There is then a battle of the groups sequence with European classical, reggae, Asian instrumental, jazz groups performing until finally our Chennai heroes come up and unleash jazz fusion Carnatic world music. The gathered metrosexuals orgasm over it. They win the Festival and return like heroes to Chennai, and the Hindu puts them on the front page of Metro Plus.

At the end, the mentor is reintegrated into the Music Academy, our heroes win the awe and fear of former Carnatic music bullies, and unresolved romantic tension between the mridangamist and the vocalist is finally resolved.

People with money who want to invest in this surefire blockbuster – please do the needful and contact us.

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Posted by Aadisht

Disdain for Elders is Paramount

January 12, 2012

It’s been more than sixteen years since Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge was released. That means that the people who were impressionable teenagers when it released have now started having kids of their own. And in about six or seven years, they will be enthusiastically telling the kids about what an awesome movie it is and how the kids should watch it too.

The kids will then watch it, and a whole new generation will get infected with the idea that being an annoying jerk and a stalker is a good way to get the girl. (Hollywood, for all its faults, has never combined the two – either you have straight up stalkers as in Twilight, or you have the annoying jerks. Or to be fair, none that I’ve noticed.)

The only hope for future generations is that Kids Those Days will have no culture and values and thus ignore the advice of their parents, or if they watch it, to watch it with extreme sarcasm and eyerolling about the shit their parents watched.

Similarly, the tendency for Kids These Days to be Kids These Days is my greatest hope after reading this very scary story about the Bajrang Dal’s summer camps (link via Mihir S Sharma, discovered via Prayaag Akbar‘s retweet):

THERE WERE speeches: “Be weary of six M’s,” the boys were told from a booming microphone. “Muslims, Missionaries, Marxists, Lord Macaulay, foreign Media and Maino [UPA President Sonia Gandhi’s middle name].”

The warning of an apocalypse: Kalyug is upon us. The Muslims are taking over the country by converting Hindus, by pretending to be Hindu and marrying our women. Hindus will soon be extinct. Already the Muslims exceed Hindus in India. We must remove the mullahs from our country. They kill our Gau Mata; each cow has 2,300 devis inside her. (“We can’t trust Muslims, they don’t even spare our cows, why will they spare us?” says Anil, 14, the son of a vegetable vendor in Delhi.)

Since it is only a week long, I am optimistic that eventually about ninety percent of the boys who attended will discover girls (or boys, if that’s what floats their boat), and put the camp completely out of their mind, much to the despair of their parents and camp counselors.

We probably should be worried about the other ten percent, but if it wasn’t for the tendency of teenagers to treat the instructions of older people with contempt, things would be so much worse.

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The Wave Theory of Pillion Riding

August 7, 2011

From the annals of either sloppy editing or improbable contortions comes this:

Looking up, she saw Srija whizzing past on the pillion of her boyfriend’s bike. Srija waved and Charu waved back. Yuk, she thought, the boyfriend actually sported a ponytail and a tattoo. But Srija seemed to love both, as she had had her arms quite closely wrapped around the boyfriend’s middle when she had taken the trouble to wave.

This raises the important question: how? I personally would find it impossible to wave if my arms were wrapped around anybody’s middle. Is this one of those 65 Positions Guaranteed to Drive Him Wild that Cosmopolitan teaches you? Or is something more unspeakably non-Euclidean at work? Has Srija passed through eldritch dimensions that have altered her very being? Did she wave with tentacles? Did it lead to Sri-king madness? Ia! Ia!

(Psst. The awful books podcast I’ve been promising on twitter for a while now is under way. Recording will happen on my vacation in Kodaikanal in a couple of weeks. The first episode should be out in September, unless I trip up very badly when it’s time to edit.)

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Buying Music Legally

July 15, 2011

In recent months I have become a rich bugger. And so I have bought a shiny new smartphone.

One of the delights of Android is that the phone’s address book integrates and syncs with Google Contacts. So for the first time ever since I started using a mobile phone, I have all my contacts on my phone, and navigating through them is actually easy. I can create separate groups in Google Contacts, both based on the type of relationship I have with the contact (family, friend, work relationship, service provider), and on how frequently I call that contact (people who should be called every day, people who I should catch up with every few months, suppliers who I never want to speak to but whose number I should store so I know when they’re calling – you get the picture). So I can keep a priority address book, and archive everything else. What delight. This is the Platonic ideal of address books.

I can also assign each group of contacts its own ringtone. And here is where I need help.

Last week, I discovered a version of the Ode to Joy on grooveshark. It was a short, choral, full of sturm-und-drang version from the Neon Genesis Evagelion soundtrack that would have been perfect for a ringtone.

Now one of the things about being a rich bugger is that I can afford to buy music legally, and when it comes to music I really like, I want to do so. Unfortunately, when I tried to buy it from grooveshark, Amazon claimed it didn’t have it.

Many internet searches later, including the Neon Genesis Evangelion music wikipedia page, lots of fanvids on youtube, and a Neon Genesis Evangelion forum, it turns out that this is from Rahbari conducting the Brussels philharmonic, and just a short clip from the fourth movement of Symphony No 9. Which is not too big a deal – mp3 cutter is there.

What is a big deal is that even the Rahbari Symphony No 9 doesn’t seem to be available anywhere. Flipkart doesn’t have it. Amazon UK doesn’t have it. Amazon US doesn’t have it on its own, but has five affiliate retailers who have it. Unfortunately, the shipping prices will probably be more than the CD itself, and more importantly, I’ll end up waiting a month or more before actually receiving the CD. Napster does have a digital version, but only lets me stream the track, but not download it. Bah.

Beloved readers, do you have any idea of how to get this track legally? If nothing else works, I’ll just rip it off youtube and use that while simultaneously ordering the CD of Amazon.

Update

I gave in to temptation and torrented the Neon Genesis Evangelion Symphony. Now it turns out that they’re not the same track. Someone has just found a very badass Ode to Joy, incorrectly tagged it Neon Genesis Evangelion (or possibly NGE had it in the anime but not on the soundtrack), and caused confusion. Oh sigh. I seemed doomed to not know the actual performers of this version.

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The Power of Visiting Cards

July 2, 2011

I have commented about the awesomeness of visiting cards earlier. Today I found out that I have actually been underestimating their power. This was a footnote in The Berlin-Baghdad Express by Sean McMeekin:

The origin of Oppenheim’s title of Baron (‘Freiherr’ in German) remains unclear, aside from the fact that he put it on his own calling card. It took some time, but eventually the moniker stuck. After his name burst into the headlines in 1906, he was generally referred to both inside and outside Germany as ‘Baron Oppenheim’.

Wow. Evidently if you keep something on your visiting card long enough, it becomes true.

You know what this means, don’t you? If only Kiruba had stayed the course, he would actually be a Wikimedia director by now.

About the book: I’m three chapters in so far. It has Ottoman Empire politics, German railway engineering, and Orientalists. So it is awesome and badass.

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Victorian Ladies and Financial Ninjitsu

May 30, 2010

Samtaben’s post has led to a massive comment discssion about financial independence for women. Oddly enough, I had recently been reflecting on financial independence and financial awareness among the women characters of late 1700s to early 1900s literature (English, that is). They are personal finance ninjas!

These women couldn’t inherit much property, and they couldn’t work either. This lack of financial independence led to acute financial awareness. They know how much their net worth is (and also how much the net worth of an eligible bachelor is). In Pride and Prejudice, we’re told Bingley’s annual income a mere fourteen paragraphs into the book. By contrast, The Diary of Bridget Jones doesn’t mention income or net worth at all in hard figures – it’s only alluded to in descriptions of where Bridget’s parents live, Mark Darcy’s job, and so forth. And then the rest of Pride and Prejudice goes on to talk about various quirks of inheritance, the income of various men, and so on and so forth. (And yes, there will be a blogpost or column at some point about how the book is about Goldman Sachs). In Vanity Fair, Becky Sharp knows exactly how indebted she is and how long she can keep her creditors at bay.And so on up to Saki in the early twentieth century, where there are so many female characters who talk about the interest rates on various bonds.

Then the Edwardian era starts, and we get PG Wodehouse and people start marrying for love instead of money. Money problems are now resolved by unleashing entrepreneurship – health farms, onion soup bars, buying rubber estates in Malaya – with the seed capital arranged through stealing diamond necklaces, holding pigs to ransom or simple blackmail. But there’s a sudden crashing of financial awareness – none of the characters is bothered about how much something yields. There’s a blissful unconcern for the mechanics of finance. Then again, there’s blissful unconcern for pretty much everything in Wodehouse, so perhaps I should go and reread Somerset Maugham and make sure this is the case throughout the era.

The Gift of the Magi (to be fair, it’s American) is written in 1906 and is a sort of turning point of financial awareness. Della knows that she’s broke, but has no idea of how much her hair is worth until she goes to get it appraised. On the other hand, she’s sort of financially independent – she doesn’t work, but she does run the household accounts herself. (Incidentally, I can’t read that story without rolling my eyes at that couple and the poor communication in their relationship. Here is xkcd’s much funnier take on the story.)

The odd thing is that while the women in Victorian literature is hyper-aware of what investments yield, my own relatives are not quite as keyed in. My (alive) grandma is paranoid about her cashflow and how she handles her accounts, but is clueless about investments. My aunts are better off in that they know about investments, but stick to fixed deposits and (sigh!) property. Actually, I now recall that this is not strictly true. In my childhood, my bua would not give me presents for my birthday as she didn’t know what I wanted, and she didn’t give me cash as she was afraid I would blow it all on riotous living. So she gave me US-64 units, and the Unit Trust of India blew it all on riotous living. But that is a separate matter. She was aware of mutual funds, is the point. However, she was the exception – my mum and other aunts usually stay away from financial securities, and park their money in the nearest available fixed deposit. Any shares were bought by the menfolk on behalf of the ladies, with the ladies usually not even aware of what they owned or what they were getting.

I was discussing this with Nilanjana Roy back when I was in Delhi last month, and she said that the financial ninjitsu was pretty common in Real Life India as well, because women would come into a marriage with nothing but their dowry. (I was a couple of beers down at this point, and they were the first beers of 2010, so I may not be repeating her words with great accuracy.) So this is weird. Is my family atypical in not having women who monitor their net worth madly, or is this an artifact of being Arya Samajis and so not putting dowry?

Beloved readers, put fundaes in the comments! What is your experience of financial awareness, and that of the women around you? Does it match Samtaben’s worries that women without financial independence have no financial awareness either? Does it match the Bronte sister’s characterisation of financially dependent women being acutely financially aware? Or are you in the happy position of being a financially aware and independent lady?

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That’s So Black Feathered Wound-Bird!

April 27, 2010

The Saga of Cormac the Skald, which I mentioned in my post on Icelandic awesomeness is notable for the badassery of its subjects, the beauty of its language, and many, many songs about ravens. Sample these:

The friend that I trusted has failed me
In the fight, and my hope is departed:
I speak what I know of; and note it,
Ye nobles, – I tell ye no leasing.
Lo, the raven is ready for carnage,
But rare are the friends who should succour.
Yet still let them scorn me and threaten,
I shrink not, I am not dismayed.

and

Of the reapers in harvest of Hilda
– Thou hast heard of it – four men and eight men
With the edges of Skrymir to aid me
I have urged to their flight from the battle.
Now the singer, the steward of Odin,
Hath smitten at last even Bersi
With the flame of the weapon that feedeth
The flocks of the carrion crows

and

I have smitten Toothgnasher and slain him,
And I smile at the pride of his boasting.
One more to my thirty I muster,
And, men! say ye this of the battle:
In the world not a lustier liveth
Among lords of the steed of the oar-bench;
Though by eld of my strength am I stinted
To stain the black wound-bird with blood.

The love songs are not spared:

I tell you, the goddess who glitters
With gold on the perch of the falcon,
The bride that I trusted, by beauty,
From the bield of my hand has been taken.
On the boat she makes glad in its gliding
She is gone from me, reft from me, ravished!
O shame, that we linger to save her,
Too sweet for the prey of the raven!

Nothing improves a love song like the presence of Corvidae.

Anyway, the presence of the ravens is only one instance of how hardcore the songs of the Icelandic sagas are. This led me to ask the obvious question – are there any Scandinavian metal bands which incorporate songs from the sagas into their lyrics. The natural person to ask was Rahul Raguram.

Rahul, being a cute guy, pointed me in the direction of Oakenshield and Amon Amarth. Oakenshield has in fact incorporated text from the Poetic Edda into their lyrics. At least, they claim to have done so. In their The Death of Baldr, I was hard pressed to make any lyrics out. Their name definitely takes its name from the Poetic Edda, specifically the Völuspá. And here’s a cool bit of triva – Tolkien took the name for the Dwarf Thorin Oakenshield (the one who was King Under the Mountain) from the same source. Anyhow, here’s The Death of Baldr:

Googling also turned up this delightful webpage about Norse/ Asatru/ Heathen inspired music. There is chanting, folk, and of course metal. Such joy.

But can there be true joy without ravens? No. And therefore, here’s Oakenshield again, with Twa Corbies:

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You Don’t Fuck With Surtr’s Own Country

April 24, 2010

Last year, when Iceland’s Landsbanki collapsed, Great Britain invoked the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act to freeze all Icesave accounts opened by British depositors. Thus, while the British government was happy to bail out Northern Rock, it decided to give Iceland the shaft.

Perfidious Albion’s treachery was not to go unpunished for long! Six months later, Eyjafjallajokull erupted; and shut down European airspace. In what seems like divine justice, the United Kingdom was worst affected. British airports opened after six days of being shut down, well after continental Europe and Ireland.

If it is in fact divine justice, the divinity responsible is probably Surtr, the Norse fire-demon who is inspired by Icelandic volcanic activity. But even if you wish to stick with a rationalist view that does not rely on gods, demons or others, the English made a terrible mistake when they decided to screw Iceland, a country that is legendarily badass, as we can see in the old Icelandic sagas.

The Saga of Cormac the Skald, for instance, has this description of what Cormac did when someone showed insufficient politeness when offering him a black pudding:

Now, in the autumn, Narfi’s work it was to slaughter the sheep. Once, when Cormac came to Tunga, he saw Steingerd in the kitchen. Narfi stood by the kettle, and when they had finished the boiling, he took up a black-pudding and thrust it under Cormac’s nose, crying:

“Cormac, how would ye relish one?
Kettle-worms I call them.”

…

And in the evening when Cormac made ready to go home he saw Narfi, and bethought him of those churlish words. “I think, Narfi,” said he, “I am more like to knock thee down, than thou to rule my coming and going.” And with that struck him an axe- hammer-blow…

That’s right, he hit Narfi with an axe-hammer-blow for dissing a sausage. When vengeance is involved, things get even worse, as we see in Egil’s Saga:

Kveldulf had in his hand a battle-axe; but when he got on board, he bade his men go along the outer way by the gunwale and cut the tent from its forks, while he himself rushed aft to the stern-castle. And it is said that he then had a fit of shape-strength, as had also several of his comrades. They slew all that came in their way, the same did Skallagrim where he boarded the ship; nor did father and son stay hands till the ship was cleared. When Kveldulf came aft to the stern-castle, he brandished high his battle-axe, and smote Hallvard right through helm and head, so that the axe sank in even to the shaft; then he snatched it back towards him so forcibly that he whirled Hallvard aloft, and slung him overboard. Skallagrim cleared the forecastle, slaying Sigtrygg. Many men plunged into the sea; but Skallagrim’s men took one of the boats, and rowed after and slew all that were swimming.

They didn’t kill everyone. They kept a couple of people alive to go back to the king with this song:

‘For a noble warrior slain
Vengeance now on king is ta’en:
Wolf and eagle tread as prey
Princes born to sovereign sway.
Hallvard’s body cloven through
Headlong in the billows flew;
Wounds of wight once swift to fare
Swooping vulture’s beak doth tear.’

You get the picture. The impression conveyed is that when the Bride told Sofie Fatale that she was allowing her to keep her wicked life, she was merely scratching the surface of threatening messages.

With heritage like this, volcanic eruptions are only the beginning. When the British treated the Icelanders like terrorists, perhaps they did not realise that this could become a self-fulfilling epithet. With their economy in shambles, the Icelanders may now turn to the way of their forefathers and return to setting out in longboats and go a-viking on the British coast. Taking the names of Thor and Tyr, their depredations shall make Brown and Darling pay. Lindisfarne!

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