This Day That Age

Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2005 13:58:26 -0600
Subject: its that time of the year
Half a dozen years ago, you didn't have to be told what time of the year this is...

Besides the Crossword, the occasional Art Buchwald column and the half-page MRF tyres advertisement, in the last page of The Hindu is a daily feature titled This Day That Age. It's a small column reproducing verbatim The Hindu's articles from the same day but an earlier age. I thought I would do something similar, dig through my memory, carefully sift and clean the remains I stumble on, glue them together and give you a peek into that age on this day. But...

R.K.Laxman, in the foreword of one of his books, once wrote about the "timelessness" of his cartoons. He claimed that "things had hardly changed with time" and that he could safely reproduce any of his older cartoons from the book, in the day's newspaper and that the reader would hardly notice anything amiss. Today, as I began to write, I realised that "things had hardly changed with time" and that I could safely reproduce any of the newer articles from the newsletter, in the day's blog and that the reader would hardly notice anything amiss!

OK, wipe that smirk, most bloggers cog from others and they are even getting awards for the same. At least, I took the trouble of cooking up a reason. And even Conan does it - "I saw this segment on Jay Leno and thought to myself, why not just rip it off, baby". So, here's a little something, ripped off in toto, and you tell me if things have changed!

Philosophy Section: The Memoirs of Casonovix

Cosmopolitan gives you details on how to get a soul mate. Here, in the newsletter, we aren't going to aim that high. I mean, if you really want a quality, meaningful relationship or some crap like that, you can always have one vicariously through watching America's Sweethearts. And then saying 'how sweet' whenever John Cusack makes an ass of himself. And after that, maybe you'd like to eat lots of chocolate ice cream in your pajamas and keep talking about how you're waiting for 'The One'. But if you do that, you won't really get anywhere with women (you shouldn't, if life's fair). And you'd probably have freaked out all your guy friends, so you'll die a depressing, lonely death. So looking for life partners isn't really such a good idea. Take that, stupid Cosmo writers.

No, hitting meaninglessly on random women is definitely the way to go. And that's what we'll teach you how to do here.

I guess that at this point, you'd have guessed that the target audience for this article is pretty specific. Specifically, male. This is because a) Only guys would be stupid enough to read a dumbass article like this one; b) I have no idea what women want to read; and c) Do women really need to actually go out and hit on guys?

Anyway, now that that's done, we get down to specifics.

First and I cannot stress this enough, do NOT wear one of those stupid insti T-shirts. Most guys are probably going to bring the fact that they're from IIT into any conversation some twenty times a minute. Loudly proclaiming it on your clothes isn't gonna help much. And plus, even if you're dumb enough to think otherwise, the stuff written on them isn't really witty or anything. Come on, the guys who wrote it did it for a lousy free T-shirt.

Second, pick the time well. No one wants to flirt with you if they're rushing to catch an event, or if they're tired and sleepy after a pro show, or if their hair is on fire. Keep that in mind.

One thing that's sure to work - go up and ask for the time. Then, when you get the time, ask her if she's sure. Then ask her when some event is scheduled. Then ask her if she's sure about the time again. At this point, she'll laugh out loud thinking you're the stupidest person to walk the earth, and live off this anecdote at dinner parties for the rest of her life. Now, the thing is, even though you've totally struck out with her and she thinks you're a complete idiot, your friends ten feet away won't know that. Just tell them that she laughed at your classy humor, and you can get the hundred bucks or whatever some guy there bet you. And hey, a hundred bucks is a hundred bucks. People work for hours to make that much.

This one, I think, should be pretty obvious, but surprisingly, very few guys get it. Going to the dance workshop to learn the jive or the salsa is ok. But don't really expect to cash there, unless you're at least kind of graceful. Or, you have Hugh Grant's self deprecatory charm. And his good looks. And his sexy blue eyes. And his British accent.

That's pretty much it in the self-help section of the newsletter. I know it's not much, but if you're really looking for pointers in the random speculations of some guys in a lousy rag no one really reads, then you're beyond help and I'm not going to waste my time on you. Anyway, in a place where talking to anything that looks vaguely feminine is taken as a huge sexual conquest, and getting any kind of response, even a monosyllabic grunt, means that you're Don Juan (God rest his soul) resurrected from his grave, it can't really be that difficult. Best of luck.

And by the way, never forget the power of lying - to yourself about your chances, to women about yourself, and to your friends about the women.

Famous Last Words

You know that Reality TV is in - when you find reality shows even on cartoon channels; when the quickest way of raking in those millions is by going public (not an offering of your fledgling tech startup but an offering of yourselves on a reality show); when your boss at work starts sporting a Donald Trump hairdo and keeps saying, ”This is yooge!”; when kids refuse to take baths because they are playing Survivor; when your friend insists that you refer to his engagement party as the Final Rose Ceremony; when Chinese restaurants start offering Fear Factor specials; when your roommate living on a graduate student stipend dreams of doing a ‘Jai Millionaire’… OK, let’s not get personal but you get the point.

The latest bestseller, “How to Make a Reality Show for Dummies”, says that the creator of a successful reality show has to perform three very important tasks. First, get a video camera. Second, lock up a set of contestants in a house or an island. Third, have a weekly elimination ceremony. While the book has detailed notes on how to perform the first two tasks (like, eBay is a good place to find a cheap video camera; and when you lock up the contestants, basically make sure that you’ve sealed all their escape routes), it is surprisingly brief and vague on the third.

The elimination ceremony, I think, is what makes or breaks a reality show. A good elimination ceremony should be elaborate (so that it can be frequently interrupted by advertisements that cost more than the GDP of a few banana republics) and should also employ some symbolic gestures - like not giving a rose in ‘Bachelor’ and ‘Bachelorette’, extinguishing torches in 'Survivor', consigning their voodoo dolls to fires in ‘The Real Gilligan’s Island’, tearing up and burning their million dollar checks in ‘For Love or Money’ and turning off the lights of their refrigerators in ‘The Biggest Loser’. In the ‘Biggest Loser’ show, obese contestants try to resist the Temptation Refrigerator and work out to lose weight. Each week a contestant with the minimum weight loss is eliminated from the Loser Lodge. And in a dramatic climax when the host discloses, “Sorry, you are not the biggest loser”, and turns off the light of his refrigerator, the hapless contestant breaks down crying inconsolably at his misfortune.

More than the symbolic gestures, again I think, it is the final punch-lines, the unforgettable last words that set the tone for a climactic elimination ceremony. Nobody does it better than The Donald in his show ‘The Apprentice’ when he pouts decisively, does the cobra with his palm, bares his fangs and hisses, “You are fired!” to a petrified candidate. One show that became famous solely because of the host’s last words is ‘The Weakest Link’. When the host had finished asking questions (Whose village is missing an idiot?) she would bark with palpable repugnance, “You-are-the-weakest-link, goodbye!”, and force the contestant to take the walk of shame.

Not all hosts have the presence or the pizzazz to carry out a dramatic elimination ceremony. Some are just informative like the host of the show ‘The Amazing Race’. With his trademark deadpan expression, he simply informs the final team in a monotone, “Sorry, you are the last team to arrive”. And equally pedestrian is the ‘Survivor’ host’s pronouncement after the tally of votes, “The tribal council has spoken. You are banished from the island”. Some hosts are plain unlucky because they don’t have much of a role in the elimination ceremony. The host of 'Bachelor' gets his token moment to sneak in a mere, “Bachelor, ladies, this is the final rose”. And after the elimination he gets another chance to put in a very polite and sober, “Ladies, take a moment to say your goodbyes”. Some shows get the candidates to eliminate themselves or each other, like the celebrities in the “I’m a Celebrity, Get me Outta Here” show. And sometimes even though the candidates have the choice to get creative, like the guys from ‘Elimidate’, after each round of wanton public indecency they utter a predictable, “All of you are fine ladies. We had a good time. But the name of the game is Elimidate and so I have to eliminate one of my dates”.

The observant reader might have noticed that clearly I don’t watch all these shows and have simply googled around for some dirt. The inobservant reader needs to stop watching that reality show and start paying more attention. Anyway, I did watch a promo of the new reality show ‘The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Model Search’ that made me suspect that America was running out of ideas. The promo showed fifteen women, all wet ’n’ wild, each of them baring yards of a well sculpted midriff and each of them willing to do anything to be on the cover page. “I’m ready to play hardball”, revealed a particularly mean looking vixen. A caption appeared on the screen that read, “Time Magazine asks - Is this the sound of claws being sharpened”, promising viewers at least one round of clawing and mewing. And just when I started thinking that this show cannot not be a hit, the voice over continued in a baritone, “Who will be on the cover page of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue and who will hear the dreaded, You-Are-Being (dramatic pause) Dropped”. “You are being dropped”? I tell you, this show isn’t going to last.

Three CEOs, Three Videos

Many writers, when they age, may not want to talk but would definitely hope to look like Samuel Beckett. Many CEOs, when they age, may not want to look but would definitely hope to hawk like Steve Jobs.

The return (he was once thrown out of Apple) and rise of Steve Jobs is a tale that rivals the best of our mythological legends. While Apple's products are primarily known for their design and elegance by virtue of being fashionable, Steve Jobs, once famously made an akand pratignya and renounced these very attributes from his personal life to better serve Apple. (He vowed to wear "black turtlenecks" everyday, because he didn't want to waste time picking a look in the morning!)

Bill Gates in contrast, who was once declared by the spouse of a popular Indian businessman as being too cute - bilkul Harry Potter jaise - is but an old shadow of himself and looks every bit a grumpy old armchair know-it-all.

Carly Fiorano, like most women of any substance, looks completely amiss and seems to have stepped into the tech world purely by accident. HP, in spite of the latest re-branding exercise has a lot to learn from Apple. Its new home media box is so ugly that Fiorano herself hesitantly tried to salvage the show by saying that she liked the other 'pink box too'.

The Juvenilia Files

Dear Students,
This is just a reminder that our first class will be on Tuesday, January 11th. By now you should have received your 1st assignment, but just in case you haven't...

1st Assignment:

Write your own credo. What do you want to bring to the world of fiction? What is meaningful to you? What do you think makes a story great? Who are your favorite writers? Faulkner has said that the tools he needs for writing are paper, tobacco, food and a little whiskey. What do you need?

---

Many sunsets ago, when I first felt the need to write, I wrote an article titled ‘Juvenilia’. I wrote primarily because I liked the title. It was a very convenient and liberating, one-word disclaimer that boldly said, “Dear reader, I know that this piece of prose is embarrassing and pretentious but I’m still OK with it. Because it constitutes my juvenilia and I’ve grown up since. And I look back at it indulgently the same way I look back on my childhood years”.

Writing, in one way or the other, helps me grow up. It helps me filter and get rid of the multitude of thoughts and ideas that plague me day and night. I’ve learnt that the only way to ascertain the true worth of my thoughts is to transcribe them onto paper. If I like what I write, I put it up on the web and make sure that Google can find it. If I don’t like what I write, I label it my ‘Juvenilia’ and still put it up on the web and again make sure that Google can find it.

I want to write because I have a lot to say. And I think that a good book is, in many ways, like a good conversation – engaging, provoking, discursive, obsessive, humorous, amorous, vacuous, scandalous and largely irreverent. I think that it was a character in J.D.Salinger’s book ‘Catcher in the Rye’, who remarks, “You know that you’ve read a good book when you want to pick up the phone and call the author even if it’s just to say ‘hi’ and talk vacuities”. I haven’t written much but a lot of my friends and other acquaintances often call to talk to me and I think that it’s a sign. They want me to start writing and I have to do it for them.

The idea of a good book as a good conversation was largely influenced by my obsessive readings of Salman Rushdie’s works. His books, as the cliche goes, have no beginning or ending but only a thick middle. He once wrote, “Writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things – childhood, certainties, cites, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves – that go on slipping, like sand, through our fingers”. Long before I read that line, I knew that I wanted to write to reclaim my own past. Initially, I thought that it was a case of acute nostalgia, the kind that you are prone to when you leave your country (India) and spend a sizable amount of time in another (U.S.A). But soon, I realized that this affliction was more widespread and the cause had less to do with spatial displacement and more to do with temporal displacement. I am, we all are, growing up and a healthy stimulus to dust our memories frozen in the recesses of past seems inevitable.

While an engaging, discursive conversation is the hallmark of the modern mind, the classical mind is purposeful and relentless in its dealings though the same might not be immediately apparent. I like books in which the seemingly desultory conversation is actually being steered by some broader structure and themes with a universal appeal. When asked what inspires him to make his movies, Manoj Night Shyamalan, the director of the movies ‘Unbreakable’ and ‘Signs’, said that the conflicts in his movies are something a ten year old and even a ninety year old can identify with. ‘Unbreakable’ was about finding one’s true vocation and ‘Signs’ was about our faith – themes that are still being explored in different contexts and books.

“One writes”, V.S.Naipaul once wrote, “to learn about oneself”. I think that this is true because we only know how to begin stories. Once begun, the story has to evolve and write itself and in the process reveal who and what we truly are. Because, as Umberto Eco said, “Writing is a cosmological event”. We get to play God and determine the fate of the very characters we create. We begin by setting the rules (such as, in this story the Animals shall take over the Farm) and then evolve the story within these bounds. As an engineer by profession, this kind of interplay between deliberate design and inspired improvisation is very appealing to me.

I like books which can seamlessly merge truth and fiction and history and memory. I like books in which authors have successfully dumped their visions of cities as they remember them or as they ‘want’ to remember them. I haven’t been to Bombay in a long time and have never been to Dublin. But I love the way they are recreated in suffocating detail in Salman Rushdie’s and James Joyce’s books. Joyce, I’m told, frequently wrote to his friends and relatives in Dublin asking for precise answers to questions such as ‘how high a particular tree in the backyard seemed when seen from a window in the attic of his childhood home’. These kinds of details, conceivably, do not constitute a sparkling conversation. But I like irreverent writers who still record them to largely amuse themselves and not the reader.

Beyond all these loaded reasons is a more sober pretext for writing. Writing is a very narcissistic exercise. We write because the writer of a memoir is also an exhibitionist, who by design, never comes off as being the second best. Our writings, however bad they are, always make us feel good. And remember, these days, a little vanity is everybody’s favorite virtue.

These and other contrived excuses compel me to defiantly write my own tales. In spite of my predilection for the beginning-to-end experience, I often find myself trying to structure my narratives with the right pace, a sound plot and the optional surprise ending. I try to write regularly, but in the same line, let me confess that I’m not trying hard enough. I picture myself waking up early, having a warm cup of coffee and getting down to the business of writing. But unfortunately, I don’t drink coffee. So I find myself feverishly scribbling on any piece of paper I can find, late in the night, drunk on a grande sized container-ful of some other stimulant. And the next morning, I wake up a sober person, bemoan my self-wrought torturous indulgences and put away the write-up along with my other ‘Juvenilia Files’.