Date a girl who reads (Part Deux) and writes (Part Un)

You will never have to worry about using a perfect opening line because there is no perfect opening line. A girl who reads knows that there's more to you than an opening line. She's not big into impressions either; you are who you are. You don't have to look hard to find her - she's all around; in the coffee shop around the corner, in the mall, in the car next to you, in a fancy corporate office or a chilled-out advertising hub, on the street or busy reading and/or typing away at a nondescript address.

There's something about the written word that a reader and writer will never be able to explain. It's a love affair that begins as inconsequentially as the birth of a new day. However, that doesn't mean that she'll love you less. She doesn't expect you to understand her love for the written word; she doesn't even know if she understands it herself! All she knows is the enthralling, enticing adventure that the marriage of thoughts, ideas, feelings, emotions and words create. This adventure possesses various hues - sometimes it's as wild as the African jungle, other times it's exhilaratingly joyous, ever so often it may be sad, heart-breaking almost, and at still other times it could be calm, peaceful, and silent. 

However, whatever journey she is on, she will hold your hand, embrace you and share her travels with you... only if you want. She may talk passionately about Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra and his passion with books on chivalry, she'll wonder aloud on what Fyodor Dostoevsky was thinking when he wrote 'Demons', she hasn't even gone through Chapter One yet!, she'll talk about Khalil Gibran and his passion for love, and she'll quote Pablo Neruda when she can't find words enough to express how she feels about you. She won't expect you to know the writers she's passionate about, but, she will talk to you about them because she loves you and loves them too. 

To her, love is about romance and all the things that go with it. She doesn't expect you to act romantic if you're not, but be assured that she will. She may act all collected, but she loves all of life's simple pleasures, most of which she finds in your arms.

A reader and writer will be in a relationship only if she believes that it's going somewhere. It’s not about the time one “invests” in a relationship; it’s about how you feel when you’re with someone. If she's with you, you can be sure that she's head over heels and all the way back in love with you. Don't ask her to explain, for all this love of the written word, she will not be able to (though she will try, falling short of words, and then give you a kiss that seals it all)!

Her vocabulary may include words that often need a dictionary reference, but she tries to simplify her language in conversation and writing. To her life and love are intertwined, because she has learnt that life is love; there' no other way to live.

There'll be times when you lose her completely; in fact, she'll be lost to the world. But that's only because she hypnotised with the written word. Once she’s out of her trance she will look up at you, smile and thank God that she has your arms to fall into.

She will never expect you to live up to the protagonist from her books; she loves you for you, not for whom you may represent. Okay, so she understands syntax, but that’s only because she’s passionate about language. She may even edit people’s sentences in her head, but she resorts to that only when she’s bored. Literature, like all else personifies romanticism of an era gone by. Ever ready to love and be loved, this girl cried over Shakespeare’s writings and still wishes that she could change the end to Romeo and Juliet.

She won’t ever assume or perceive what you’re saying based on your pauses. She will hear you out, and have a heart-to-heart with you after. This is not someone who points an accusing finger based on her knowledge of syntax. She may edit the world’s sentences in her head, but you’re not a ‘part’ of that world – you ARE her world, and she wouldn’t subject you to that.

Yes, the girl who reads can probably feel the plot of her book in her very bones, she is also prepared for the end; but only because she knows that ends are ends only when she wants them to be. Books, plots and protagonists change, but her end remains the same, and that’s an end she sees with you. Only, she will not call it an end, because with you it’s never an end, it’s a fabulous journey with smooth highways, and curved mountain roads. But then, she’s loves it all.

Yes, we girls who read and write are storytellers. Us with Kafka, Nietzsche, Keats, Murakami, Neruda, Gibran, Hemingway and the rest! We’re everywhere, well, nearly everywhere, but not here to make anyone’s life a misery. Quite the contrary actually! So, we love reading, adore writing, and may even pen our stories, but, we allow our listeners and readers to make their own conclusions. They decide if the narrative is rich, they conclude if the story has meaning. No one can ever conclusively say that X story is one that’s as enthralling as Utopia. Utopia to us bookworms could be something else to you, and all of us respect that because that my dear is the beauty of the written word.

These beautiful words strung together through a fabulous marriage born from a writer’s imagination allow everyone to make their own conclusions, and dream their own dreams.

We, bookworms and writers do not expect you to live up to the protagonist in books; in fact, we don’t even want you to. No, we love you just the way you are, and if that means sprawling before the television and yelling at some sport, well, we’d sprawl with you. Sure, we accept nothing less than passion, and never will. We believe that you should be passionate about whoever you’re with and everything you do, if not, there really is no point, just reason.

Yes, we’d like to live our life like a story, but here’s one story that we wants to write with you; this is a story with two authors and both their names are “Us”.

We’ve got a couple of tickets on that southbound train, only we’d rather take the train up north. Are you with us readers and writers on this? Oh come on already, don’t worry about failing here, we’re certainly not worried. In fact, if and when you do we’d hold you tighter still because failure gives birth to newer dreams. You are allowing us our dreams, and you have already given us the most precious one yet, you.

So get on that train, make that proposal, walk down the aisle, have a couple of children (yes, we will play Mozart when we’re pregnant and introduce them to the written word), and make our own stories a reality. We may be readers and writers, but ever so often we like listening too, and when it comes to you, we’re all ears.

And, if you’re not much of a storyteller, you can just put your arms around us and we’ll watch our story unfold.           

Underbelly of a life we choose not to see

Book: Eunuch Park
Author: Palash Krishna Mehrotra
Publisher: Penguin

Palash Krishna Mehrotra writes about men locked in the prison of their minds. His book, Eunuch Park, opens a tall grim iron gate that leads you into a dark morbid passage and before you can light a match to know where you are, the cold sweat rising from your temple tells you there’s no turning back.

If there’s one thing to gather after you’ve read his collection of short stories, it’s the stuff foreboding nightmares are made of. It’s original and even makes Shantaram shy away from a distance.

Palash is not writing to please you with purple prose and descriptive melting imagery that most Indian writers tend to write. He writes no far-fetched fashionable tales of slum dwellers, of ordinary hope or lush romance. Instead, in terse, short, simple and articulate sentences he tells you gory stories that you will never hear sitting in a plush living room. He writes stories in a manner in which it’s meant to be told, that gets you to sit on a dry, dusty hard floor dotted with cigarette butts and empty booze bottles rolling, with the taste of blood, sweat and tears in your mouth.

In his 15 stories, Mehrotra covers an expansive ground as smoothly as one flicks ash from a cigarette. There is murder, drug addiction, sexual abuse, homosexuality, prostitution, lust, bullying, stalking, repression that takes place in big cities and small towns. Hidden in his writing is a certain void of life, an irony within an irony that unlocks the myth from fantasy and upturns the underbelly of a life we merely choose to not see.

In all his stories, one realises in bitterness, that the events, instances or churlish situations are no vivid imagination of a sick writer that derives a certain pleasure by jabbing a finger at you. Palash takes you down familiar routes whether it is New Delhi, Bombay, Dehra Dun or Allahabad with a perspective of a person that easily slips between the barriers of class into a territory where perversity exposes vulnerability and honesty trips experience. Often the stories are told in first-person or in-and-out recollections, often they are so short and heady that they end up in a certain abruptness leaving a charcoal stain on your mind as you rush to meet the new one.

In Fit of Rage, the story is about a tenant, a murderer in the past, who lives in Defence Colony of New Delhi, and is taken into confidence by the servant of the house and his smack-addled friend who plot to murder the landlady and make a runaway with the loot.

In Eunuch Park, the story is about a Delhi University hostel student who is on the lookout for a safer option to make out with his girlfriend after having run into trouble with college authorities and the girl’s stringent parents. In Okhla Basti, the story is about the experience of an uneducated 26-year-old, who in order to wash away the memory of an old lover drowns himself in country liquor and chillums of ganja smoke, in one desolate night in the basti. In The Nick of Time, the story is about a student studying in Oxford, who recounts an episode when he cross dresses and has to make a dash to the loo without being caught. In The Other Evening, it’s an episode between a man and a prostitute, an indelible moment they share and the meaningless of it.

Palash in his style of writing brings a welcoming change in Indian writers writing in English. He has the ability of instantly captivating the reader by the sheer force of simple storytelling. Even the weaker stories, the ones that sometimes bounce on a thin line of obscurity covered in grime, resonates the continuity of the voice of a writer that’s taken some sort of a solemn pledge.

If one has to quibble about Eunuch Park, perhaps it is that Palash doesn’t dwell in his stories; these candid vignettes give a cursory peek of living on the wild side leaving the reader digging his fingernails in the pages wanting to know more.

What he does best is kill the concept of literary elitism, he shreds the aloofness and allows you to witness a spectacle perched in an amoral vantage point

Basterds, Nonetheless!

There are two ways of telling someone that s/he is dumb. Either you say “You are plain dumb” or “You have been deprived of common sense”. The latter is only a subtle yet a stylistic manner of telling the friend in question that he is a fool.

In his latest Nazi slugfest, Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino has used the latter version to mock the entire exercise infamously known as Nazism.  Told in four chapters, the film deals primarily with three aspects of the Nazi occupation in France---the oppressive Nazis, the defiant Basterds and the victims of Nazism. Each aspect has been embodied through characters, who in their own way, are as blood-thirsty as the leader of the Nazi pack, Adolf Hitler. Colonel Hans Landa of the SS is cruel yet dynamic, an oppressor who has a way with words. In the opening scene of the film, he kills a Jew family taking refuge in a French dairy farmer’s house. The daughter, Shosanna Dreyfus, manages to escape. Four years later, Shosanna herself assumes a new identity as Emmanuelle, heading a small but a well-known theatre in Paris. The petite and beautiful Shosanna becomes an object of fancy for Fredrick Zoller, a young war hero who is all set to star in a film that glorifies his role in killing hundreds of Jews. In the meantime, the Basterds, under the leadership of Aldo Raine continue to cause mayhem, killing SS soldiers and scalping their heads with the Swastik (as against the inverted Swastik, a symbol of Nazism). In his endeavours, Raine is helped by a famed German actress Bridget von Hammersmark.

As Zoller and his filmmaker/ Nazi propanganda minister Joseph Goebbels agree to hold the premiere at Shosanna’s theatre, the Basterds and Shosanna herself come up with their respective plans to blow the auditorium where the ‘Fuhrer’ is also expected to come. The second half of the film puts the four chapters into a perspective with a sole mission---to kill the Nazi leaders who are to attend the premiere.

The plot aside, what holds the film together is the sheer flamboyance exhibited by different characters. Alda’s portraiture, be it in terms of the appearance or the gestures, is not entirely different from Hitler himself. His brand of anti-Nazism is as lethal as Nazism itself, except that he happens to be a reactionary. Add to this the thirst for revenge in Shosanna. So who exactly are these inglourious basterds? The Nazis, the Basterds, who, though operate in small numbers, have waged an equally bloody war against the Nazis, or the revenge-seeking Jews like Shosanna?  The answer lies in the title itself and the fact that no character is spared a redemption, not even Hitler himself who instead of committing suicide (which he is believed to have done in reality), is shown dying in the locked auditorium screening Zoller’s film. This very aspect of the film is an evidence of the mockery that Tarantino very consciously plays on each of his protagonists. There are more, but I don’t intend to spoil the film for you by revealing the end.

Any discussion on a Tarantino film is incomplete without an insight into the violence that is an integral part of his art, if his films were allowed to be called so. The violence in Inglourious Basterds works at several levels. Beginning with the title itself. Obviously one couldn’t have named it ‘French Connection 3’. At another level, the nature of the social and the political context the protagonists live in are equally violent. Take this remark from Landa as an example. “What a tremendously hostile world that a rat must endure. Yet not only does he survive, he thrives. Because our little foe has an instinct for survival and preservation second to none. And that is what a Jew shares with a rat.” It is another matter that towards the end the survival instincts in Landa take precedence over the ‘Hail Hitler’ syndrome. Finally, the physical violence. Portrayed in its rawest form, violence is a almost like a universe that the protagonists inhabit. For Tarantino, brutality is brutality. There’s no escape from it. And the finest aspect of his brand of violence is that he doesn’t even want to keep his viewers under an illusion that what they are seeing is a drama which is going to offer the rights and wrongs to them.

The lead actors Brad Pitt (Aldo Raine) and Diane Kruger (Bridget von Hammersmark) put up a decent act, but an ‘act’ nonetheless. The Greek God of Hollywood (read Brad Pitt) has a meaty role in the film, but it is only in few scenes that Aldo Raine takes precedence over the star. Ditto for Kruger. In contrast Christopher Waltz (who plays Hans Landa) and Melanie Laurent (who plays Shosanna) come close to living their respective roles. The other actors do not disappoint either.

Don't wait, just bask in the glory of the Inglourious Basterds.

Digital Disgorge

Ok! I have to write this... Even it means missing out on watching Bambi tonight. Have we suddenly started living through our cameras? One look at Facebook or archaic Orkut, and the answer is loud and clear. About 70-100 pictures for a birthday or night out and 200 for a vacation is standard.
Back in the day when our parents were growing up, it was the age of the still camera that graduated from black & white to sepia to eastman colour to colour. They still treasure their albums (Heck, I still treasure my albums!), some of which are neatly placed in scrapbook format. Most of them, if not all were special. The camera was meant to be lovingly taken out of the cupboard, loaded carefully with a film reel, and the shutterbugs were only supposed to flash at significant moments. The film was expensive and not to be wasted on random things/ people/ places/ moments.
Digital cameras and the odd 2 megapixel cameras in our cellphones have done away with the tedious process of buying film and getting it developed. Things are easy as pie now, more so if you don’t want prints of all your pictures. Surely saves space, time and money. Upload them online and it’s safe forever, even if your hard disk crashes. But there’s a flipside. Aren’t we all becoming slaves to our digicams? Don't get me wrong. I'm all for embracing new technology (even the Mac at work is growing on me) and conveniently sharing pictures with sundry friends and cousins et al, but the obsession with posing for FB profile pictures every now and then is a bit much to chew on. We are failing to live in the moment in order to capture it. We are so overwhelmed by “clicking lots of pictures” and “uploading them on FB” and “tagging them” that sometimes we end up forgetting why we are clicking them in the first place.
It has happened with me many times. When I look at pictures after an occasion or those resulting from an impromptu photo session, I think to myself, “When did this happen?” or “Why don’t I remember this?” Take it all in guys, you’ll remember it better without your cams (click some for bees saal baad's sake though)! Maybe it’s just a memory problem, I am 25 after all!
But I do believe it’s time we start experiencing more and clicking less.

We are too much with the world

I've been following the XYZ's Got Talent (India, America, Britain) shows on youtube the past few months. I've seen many stories of obscure people - a farmer (Kevin Skinner), a cancer survivor (Barbara Padilla), a village mom (Susan Boyle) a group of laborers (Prince dance group in India), making it big instantly, almost in fairy tale, fantasy fashion. There is something about people climbing from obscurity to great heights that captures everyone imagination, and that is the stuff these shows feed off.

And these people indeed seem to be living a dream. When they tell their story over and over (i had never stepped out of my town before this/i battled cancer for eight years/i couldnt attend last years audition because my brother died), one can see the stars in their eyes blazing, the distant look. Although the channel may add violin music for effect, and stage manage the settings, one can see the truth, the earnestness behind their constant refrain "this is the best moment of my life".

As the judges of the show, pile on the praises, educate us about our own greatness, we drink, savor, wash ourselves in every word. Maybe all of us want to be washed in the gaze of the world, to be aknowledged by the world for our worth, our talent, to be given sympathy for our sufferings, our tragedies. To absorb the applause, and see tears for us in everyones eyes. This really is what in our heart of hearts, where we always wanted to be, what we always considered finally being what we were constantly becoming. The culmination point of our life. It was great to fall in love, the first intimate touch, to have children, to spend joyful moments with friends, revel in everyday acheivements, but, this really is the "best moment of my life".

And then comes the grand finale, the big moment, when your greatness shall be finally sealed, your place forever guaranteed amongst the stars, the final brush stroke in the grand script of your life.

And the winner is - someone else!

Your dreams are shattered with the force of a hammer driven through a glass pane. Or like a lovesick girl who thought she had finally found true love walking into the room to find her lover in another's arms.

The smile is still there on your face, the smile you had imagined for yourself for the victory, but the eyes are bewildered. The applause is still there, the drumroll, the confetti. But it is not yours. The limelight has moved away, and you are left in the darkness of the stage to assess your state.

You suddenly feel like an absurdity.

Where did the grand script, with you in all your great suffering and struggle, the grand hero, go wrong, and you suddenly become an absurdity?

It never was your script. It was their script. A circus sequence, where you had a part.

To be fair, someone wins. But even he (or she) is living their script.

Finding the meaning of life on the stage has its perils.