A year in books

It has been my year in books, literally. For, looking back, there seems precious little I did with my spare time this year other than devouring books. Quantitatively, the count is at 52 and growing, perhaps the largest number of books I have read in a year. Qualitatively, the endeavor to tame some beasts that I have hitherto been afraid of has paid off very well. And, lastly, my attempt at diversity in genres has been well rewarded, I must say.

Here goes a list of random observations from this year's reading pack:

The best of the best

Middlesex was one of the first books I read in 2015, that I instantly fell in love with. Easy language, right pace, structured thoughts, a dash of history, and a very sensitive subject at hand, Jeffrey Eugenides did not win the Pulitzer for nothing. The book made me think of sexuality, nature vs nurture and genetic mutation in a different light, and I cannot thank Eugenides enough for that.

When one reads Midnight’s Children, everything else one has read thus far does pale, dim and then disappear into obscurity, and so was the case with me. “To understand me, you’ll have to swallow a world”, says Salim Sinai, the protagonist. To understand Rushdie, one has to swallow this book over and over and over again. One reading cannot be enough. He employs magical realism to weave together words and thoughts and imagination and reality, irreverently at that, transcending governments, faiths, religious beliefs, tolerances and intolerances.

“O fortunate ambiguity of transliteration! The word ‘buddha’, meaning old man, is pronounced with the Ds hard and plosive. But there is also Buddha, with soft tongued Ds, meaning he-who-achieved-enlightenment-under-the-bodhi-tree”, says Rushdie, through Sinai. His writing enlightens me, makes me believe that a writer becomes truly one when he holds himself back no more, when he is honest and fearless and unafraid of the dead and the living, and everything in between.

Bring in the old, and ring in the new

When the going gets tough, the comfort books get going. For me, these are largely Archers and Christies, and the occasional Georgette Heyer. In one such stream of tough goings, I picked up Clifton Chronicles this year. Archer has fine-tuned the art of writing so much that it feels engineered to the T, like precision equipment, that is designed to emit alternating positive and negative signals, at agreed frequencies. The man has a set timetable per which he writes, so it isn’t surprising he can churn out books at an alarmingly high rate, seemingly similar to one another, yet being attractive to the reader within us.

When the going is smooth, it is a good time to ring in the new. This year, I discovered some interesting authors, alive and dead, normal and abnormal.

Anthony Horowitz resurrected Sherlock Holmes for me in House of Silk. While he is no Doyle, it is no mean feat to attempt a Holmes' recreation, even if it is only 50% successful.

Wilkie Collins is apparently one of the first people to write full length mystery novels. I imagine this guy must have had Christie’s head and Austen’s face as he churned out novels set in the Victorian era, resplendent with dinner gowns and large grounds, butlers and valets to go with, and an unraveling mystery stretching well over 600 pages each.

Keigo Higashino is my favorite pick for the year though. The man writes not about who was responsible for a certain crime. The whodunit is obvious from the initial chapters. How the person did it is the mystery, and a mind-blowing mystery at that.

The genre experimentation

I don’t understand fantasy fiction, I cannot relate to science fiction, and I am averse to graphic novels. All these myths have proven to be exactly that this year. FunHome by Alison Bechdel is a graphic novel I am sure to read and re-read many times over the rest of my life. Andy Weir has ensured I lived in a claustrophobic spacecraft with a largishly blown up bedroom and only the brown sand outside for company, while reading The Martian. And, it will be many years before I forget what happened to Angier, the magician, from The Prestige, which, at 360 pages, was the most difficult book that I traversed through this year. Thanks Chris Nolan, for making such a beautiful movie out of this monster.

Will history be the same anymore?

And while speaking about genres, I am not sure where I should classify 1984. It is dystopian at the least, and highly disturbing, disorienting and maddening at the most, as I struggle to come to terms with history as I have known it for so long. Did the Second World War truly happen? Was Gandhi really peace-loving? Did Julius Caesar die only because of Brutus? Is Big Brother watching me as I type this out? Gosh! If I go crazy earlier than I am slated to, it is because of Orwell and Orwell only.

Where do my loyalties lie?

Bookless in Baghdad by Shashi Tharoor is a book I am reading as I write this piece. This guy is truly a genius at writing, and when he writes about the books he has read, the outcome is fantastic. But, how can he, how can he possibly throw mud at R. K. Narayan, my Swami and Friends idol? Should I not follow Tharoor anymore because he doesn’t like my childhood author? Or, should I stop being respectful of RKN because Tharoor is the writer of my dreams? Perhaps, I can live with both and love them both, one dead and another alive, one traditional, the other modern, one for my childhood, another for my adulthood.

And, now for the not so nice

No, it has not all been hunky dory this year. In fact, more is not the merrier as I have learnt to my chagrin. Indian authors have let me down with weak language (Sita’s Sister), bad plotting (White Tiger), and insipid writing (R. K. Laxman – you took the right call by sticking to cartoons). Harper Lee was happily immortalized in my memory till Go, Set a watchman came along. And, I promise I will never get swayed anymore by a book because the title attracted me (Madras Miasma, I am looking at you).

As I move into 2016, I promise myself I will not pounce on every book that my eyes come across, but that is going to be impossible. My shelf for 2016 is at 44 and increasing, and not all of them seem tried and tested and enjoyed by all. But, then, to understand this world, one should swallow all its books, after all, while remembering they may not all be true, that fiction will remain fiction, and some non-fiction will be fiction too. 

The new normal

I have never spoken much about it, but the floodgates opened today when I read this. No tribute this, nor a structured essay. It is a raw note, that may serve no purpose I am aware of. 

It was April '01. I was in school and my dad didn’t come to pick me up. Instead his friend and my aunt came to pick me up, driving down in my dad’s car. How strange a partnership, I told myself. But, I didn’t want to face reality just then, it was just a short distance home from school, and any horrible event could wait those 20 minutes. There was an ambulance leaving the apartment complex when I got home, albeit empty. Just a coincidence, I told myself and I went up home.

After that, life has never been normal again.

I was 15 when my dad died – neither here nor there. Not young enough to forget the normal and get acclimatized to the new normal. Not old enough to have already charted out a normal of my own. Well, that can be argued in different ways. Death alters the living irreversibly, no matter what age we are left at, after all.

All we talk about when someone dies is how we miss that person, how they leave behind a void, how we yearn for happy memories etc. Yes, I have gone through and still go through all those emotions. But, something more fundamental changes when someone close to you dies.

The biggest change when someone close to you dies is that nothing is something that only happens to someone else anymore. Sometimes, I wake up in the middle of the night to put my ears to the lungs of the person sleeping next to me, to make sure they are still breathing. At other times, I get paranoid when my mother doesn’t pick up the phone even when I call her 2-3 times in a span of ten minutes, and I promptly start calling everyone else she knows in the city to track her down. When I see an ambulance in the apartment complex, I am not able to brush it off any longer as happening to someone else; it could very well have been summoned for my house. Anyone calling me out of the blue is no longer a social call. It only means something has gone wrong with someone close to me that I am being called to be informed about.

In every scenario, in every next step, in every otherwise normal situation, death figures as a highly possible outcome and that’s how the normal changes. Living with this paranoia of facing death of a loved one again is the biggest punishment that this life has bestowed upon me. I think, no, I know that I had much rather die than live through the death of a loved one ever again. 

Whenever I am depressed with life, I tell myself that my dad’s death made me stronger, made me more resilient to face life’s challenges, geared me up for chaos and unhappiness and the transience of life. And then, the other me screams from within, “I didn’t want to be resilient. I just wanted to be normal and happy. I have no tangible use for this experience.” I have no answers to myself in those situations. Life can be led happier when there are no harsh lessons to learn, perhaps.

Most times, I feel guilty that I am not doing enough justice to my father’s memory. I do not necessarily miss him for the person he was. I only miss my own normal life that can be no more. But, seriously, think about it. It has been almost 15 years now since I last saw him in flesh and blood. Memory is a bitch, and I do not remember his smile, his facial features, his idiosyncrasies, his weird handwriting, in totality. I remember those things in bits and pieces, in individual situations. For instance, sometimes I sense the strong presence of his perfume. Not always though. 

We used to go out once every month for dinner – Mom, Dad and I. Same restaurant, same table, same orders, same waiter (yeah, they were called waiters then). A ritual.

We used to have home-made pooris and mushroom for dinner every Saturday – Mom, Dad and I. A ritual.

We would drive down to random places, right from East Coast Road to Pondicherry to Bangalore, mom and dad in the front, me sprawled at the back of the car. Random trips, no planning, no outside food. All food cooked and packed by mom, the entire journey driven around by dad. As familial as it can get.

And that’s what I lost with the death of my dad. Not money. Not a cushy life. Not that sense of protection that a male presence brings in. Because my mother has always made up for all that and been more than what my father could ever have been to me. 

I lost the feeling and sense and notion of being a family, and that’s something irreplaceable, and irreversible. That’s something that doesn’t heal with time. It never heals. And that's death's contribution to my life.

The Marathi Manoos

I was born and brought up in a land proud of its culture, heritage, and more importantly, its language. So much so that we made sure Hindi never entered our land for many years. And, even with the IT-BPO boom and the influx of migrant population, when Hindi became an inevitable necessity for doing business, we made sure Tamil never died. It is still evident in how the state government gives tax sops to movies that have Tamil titles. For instance, Happy New Year would never have been made in our land, only because it would have been re-titled “Iniya Puthandu Nal Vaazhthukkal”.

Some of our most beautiful books were and are written in Tamil, our theater quality is decent (though not as great as that of some other regional languages, I am told), and we make some of the most brilliant cinema there is in the Indian film industry. We preserve Tamil that much.

So, when I moved out of Chennai many years back, I moved out with the biggest disadvantage of all – a terrible lacking of Hindi. It has taken me many years to acquire mastery over basic Hindi, which still sucks, I am told. For heaven’s sake, our Tamil words are gender-free! 

But, just learning Hindi has been overwhelming enough. So, I have gone easy on other regional languages. Like most other migrants in Mumbai, I have never bothered to learn Marathi. And, I shudder to think what would happen to my beloved Tamil 50-100 years down the line, if the migrant population constitutes over 50% of the state’s population and behaves just like how I have. Will Tamil become near extinct?

Waxing eloquent about the importance of regional language is so cool, right? But, in reality, I was miffed when I heard about the compulsory screening of Marathi movies in multiplexes. The film business blood in me boiled, if not a little, a lot at least, as I thought about how producers, distributors and exhibitors of Hindi and English film movies in Mumbai would die. Imagine all those lost prime-time revenues, especially on opening weekends of hot and happening Hindi and English movies. But, my film business blood is erstwhile, so it ceased to boil as quickly as it had started.

And, then I went to the movie hall last weekend, much earlier than show time, and the theater was open and empty. As I took my place and submitted myself to a string of god-awful music (sounded like a Punju-Gujju-Bhojpuri mix of random tunes in an extremely irritating hoarsy voice) and Manyavar ads (Have you ever seen them? Don’t they give you a headache?), the trailers eventually came up. 

The first one was “Margarita with a straw”. At the risk of sounding politically very incorrect, it frankly bored me. I don’t think I will watch that movie, not till at least twenty rational connects on my Facebook list update a positive review (rational being highly subjective). 

And then, I was hit by a Marathi trailer. Perhaps the state legislation also stipulates airing of Marathi trailers in prime time slots, but the very thought pissed me off. Who are these people to influence my movie watching experience, I argued to myself? 

As I prepared to diss the trailer without bothering about its content, I got hooked on to it. Just like that, as the trailer progressed, I was reading the sub titles, following the portrayal of situations, getting enamored by the performance of the cast and the witty dialogues (even the sub-titled ones). It is one of the more interesting trailers I have come across in recent past. I think I will watch it in the theater, if they include English sub-titles. 

Perhaps, Marathi will live and thrive for long, and, so will Tamil, if only with a little help from fanatic State Government legislations. Well, I am not complaining.

P.S. Incidentally, the Marathi movie has an English title – Court.

All in a day's work

(This story was originally published on Readomania on April 1, 2015)

Eraniyan Govindswami, or ErGo, as he was fondly called by friends, fans and the fairly-well-wishing-public, woke up in excellent spirits that Monday morning. He had had a satisfying weekend, a fun one at that, not very different from his weekdays. However, unlike on weekdays where his durbar was confined to the studio, this weekend, he had held court at a homestay around 50 kms off the NH420, at his team’s offsite. And, he had come back with fodder that could potentially last him an entire month. 

ErGo took pride in being a news channel anchor with a difference. Unlike his colleagues who ran boring shows and debates on political unrests, socio-economic challenges and public policies, ErGo was ahead of his time. His target audience was Young India, those soldiers of the future who thrived on hashtags, twitter rages, change.org petitions and Whatsapp selfies. He knew exactly what this audience wanted and delivered on it with a vengeance. 

To read more, click here.

The curious case of the missing houseguest

(This story was originally published on Readomania on March 20, 2015)

“Have you found him yet?” yelled Raghu from the kitchen.

Kunal lazed languidly, semi-asleep on the couch, as he dipped his hand into a large box of peanuts placed strategically on top of his stomach, spilling a few on the sofa. His mind was contemplating whether it was worth the effort involved in disturbing his relaxed position to pick up the T.V. remote or to let things as they were. Status quo is such bliss, he told himself, as he pushed the remnant peanut skins on his t-shirt into nooks and corners of the sofa that Raghu wouldn’t be able to find easily, hence reducing the net anger in the apartment.

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I carry your heart, in my heart

(This story was originally published on Readomania on February 20, 2015)

She was born in the beautiful port town of Yazhpanam (Jaffna, for the anglicized). The year was 1968, and Jaffna was a buzzing beehive of activity in those years, second only to Colombo.

Her grandmother Jayaragini christened her Nayanarani, for she had beautiful eyes and a smile that could melt the hardest of stones. Nayana’s mother had no say in the decision, for she died at childbirth, as if she knew of the fate about to befall her six children, and had the strength not to witness it.

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If I had to do it all over again...

MBA bashing is the only constant in an otherwise changing world. Every year, I read at least one article with over a hundred thousand likes and ten thousand shares (just guesstimating, like a typical MBA), that lynches the mad MBA race, with the author going on to regret having spent time and money on a management degree.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I always was the kind that couldn’t make up my mind. Sometimes, it was music, sometimes writing. Some other times, it was history, only I never wanted to sit around excavating remains of 14th century Ming dynasty. Biology? Couldn’t draw to save my life, so the whole medicine business was out of the window. Look at me, calling medicine a business!

I wanted to specialize in languages, particularly English literature. It was promptly vetoed by my super-conservative-we-will-go-to-US-for-PhD family. So, I was left with little choice but to generalize rather than sit and code on Java and J2EE and .Net (I know those names, I am a ‘specialist’ Computer Science Engineer). 

I don’t remember much of my MBA. I think it had some vague terms like Black Scholes, law of diminishing returns, marginal utility, MBTI etc. But, I made a lot of very intelligent friends there whose brains I pick now (for free) to learn the answer to life, the Universe and everything (which apparently is not 42). And, somewhere down the line, I started liking being this generalist-nobody who doesn’t commit to specialist things, but just brings things together and packages them well for the market. 

So, what’s the harm? Some of us, perhaps many of us spend a good decade or two of our lives as confused souls with no knowledge of what we want to do and hence end up being generalists. And a few of us, after having got into specializations, are worried sick that we will become obsolete. And, consciously move towards the general with a management degree in hand.

The MBA is actually a consequence of our confusion, not cause for our confused careers. The MBA is a consequence of our risk aversion, not cause for our incapability to do innovative things. So, before bashing and blaming an inconsequential degree (for that’s what the "bashers" believe it to be), let us take a minute to reflect whether two inconsequential years can really wreck our lives so much that we will spend the rest of our lives writing about “If I had to do it all over again”.

The tip

(This story was originally published on Writer's Ezine on February 2, 2015)

Kiran Shah had a 2 p.m. appointment at the beauty parlor, her regular round-the-corner neighborhood jaunt. She arrived promptly at2.30 p.m. in a chauffeur driven Honda Accord, and barged into the parlor calling out for Sheetal, her regular beautician. 

Pure Beauty Salon, Powai was used to Kiran, her loud voice, flamboyance, penchant for “punctuality” and, most of all, her memory. For, Kiran had the memory no woman would vie for, the memory of a goldfish.

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Depressed Christmas Tree, ignored by selfiers, attempts suicide

(This article was originally published on My Faking News on January 14, 2015)

A large Christmas Tree in High Street Phoenix, one of the most high end and crowded malls in Mumbai, seems to have attempted suicide, in a bizarre incident late last night.

The Tree had been installed a week before Christmas, with colorful decorative balls and a shimmer of golden light glowing through a wire across its body. It was this wire that the Tree apparently used to strangulate itself, in what is touted to be the strangest case of attempted suicide in the city so far.

To read more, click here.