Oh, Nikki Haley. I believed in you. You said you were someone I could trust with what matters to me most.

But then the rumors started. At first I paid them no attention. But the whispers just wouldn’t die down.

And then, one day, as surely as smoke begets fire, it burst into plain view. And now I can no longer deny what’s right in front of my eyes.

J’accuse, Nikki Haley. You’re not who you said you were. You had electoral relations with that woman Sarah Palin.

Oh, sure, you seemed like a mainstream Republican when I first heard of you. You said you were fiscally conservative. But then you flip-flopped on economic stimulus to win the Tea Party endorsement. And you won big: from 11% in the polls to the current frontrunner for governor. At age 38, in South Carolina, for someone born Nimrata Randhawa, that’s no small feat.

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Had a good time at Mountain Echoes. Didn’t attend all – or even most of – the sessions, but I still spent more time listening to discussions than I’ve done at any lit-fest in the past three years. The festival wasn’t stuffed with heavyweights but it had a respectable collection of names, a decent-sized hall with good acoustics, and enthusiastic (but not overwhelming) attendance from Indian invitees as well as Bhutanese book-lovers. Very efficiently organised by Mita Kapur and the Siyahi team too. In some ways it reminded me of the first edition of the now-carnivalesque Jaipur Literature Festival, which, believe it or not, was once an intimate event where it was possible to attend a discussion without getting in the way of a stampede. (For more on this, see [my] January 2006 archives.)





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Who would’ve guessed that an airline famous for staging a mid-air fistfight, sleeping through a destination and forgetting to drop a heavy’s landing gear (PDF) would plunge Flight 812 into a smoking grave?

The best thing that could happen to Air India, a flag carrier treated as both sinecure and dumping ground by countless babus, is to get blacklisted internationally as an unsafe carrier. Because being banned from leaving the country might be the kick in the ass they need.

Air India needs to be taken private like Tata’s original airline. It needs to shed reams of unproductive employees and rebuild its training procedures from ground up. India as a whole needs an effective, independent aviation regulator.

Air India has a fatal accident-per-million-flights rate 12x higher than most U.S. airlines (list of incidents). Until these basic reforms, its customers will keep dying in the most gruesome ways imaginable.

“This airline is a disgrace. They’ve ground it into the ground… I think this airline should die…”

In the mid-1980s, a disgruntled flight crew whose two members weren’t talking failed to deploy their aircraft’s landing gear on arrival in Kolkata… political connections and threats of a lawsuit saw them reinstated.

“They’ve been very lucky not to have a fatal incident since 2000… they almost need another fatal crash to wake up.” [LAT '09]

Wow, this week went by super fast. A lot went down this week, from celebrating my birthday to getting my bike stolen... WTF! I'll see you guys next week with some new posts for sure. See you then. Enjoy the jam...

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The second of my "Persistence of Vision" columns for Yahoo! India is up. This one is about Agatha Christie filtered through Manoj Kumar's quivering lower lip, Helen's swimsuit dance and Mehmood's Hitler moustache. Here's the link.

As far as I can tell, I've been hit on twice in my life. The first time was during my graduation party. Boy whom I'd barely spoken to in three years said something along the lines of him thinking he and I would be good together. I clutched his shoulder and vomited on to a rather expensive carpet (not because of him but because I'd drunk Kremlin vodka without having eaten anything all day; ghastly night). I do remember I managed to miss his shoes, which I thought was rather considerate of me. The second occasion was almost ten years later, at an art gallery where a man who could barely stand straight slurred that I was so beautiful that I should be in the works that were on display and did I want to "you know, be appreciated". This is when I felt terrible that I can't vomit at will and that there was no Kremlin vodka to induce some regurgitation.

Some of my closest friends have told me that I'm "un-hittable", which sounds like we're judging my suitability for bride burning but never mind that. Apparently I'm intimidating. However, if men are intimidated by short, bumbling, round brown people, then I think that says more about men than me. Others have told me that I'm an idiot and I just don't know when someone hits on me. They don't believe me when I say that in my experience, "Let's meet for coffee" isn't strategy; it's a guy who wouldn't mind some company while he gets his caffeine fix. When I point out such things, my friends become even more convinced of my idiocy. Today, however I have proof that a) I'm not intimidating and b) what might be a line in case of most women is actually an earnest enquiry when the woman in question is me.

There I was in the Andheri Landmark, minding my own business and giving my biceps an exercise by clutching books I can't afford to my chest. When I was at the Philosophy section, I realised there was a chap staring at me. He tailed me past Hindi, into Religion and Non-Fiction. While I looked at the Amartya Sen reader, he managed to make a dozen books fall to floor, as if the residents of the shelf in Non-Fiction had fainted because they couldn't believe this man was looking at them. In the world of Richard Curtis, such a man ends up being Hugh Grant. In my life, he looks like a moustache-less Sivaji. Finally, when I was almost at Literary Fiction, he came up to me and said in Hindi, "Excuse me, are you an artist?" I blinked and replied in the negative. "No, you are an artist. I've seen you at Prithvi." Double negative. "You don't come on stage?" Triple negative. Poor boy looked entirely perplexed. "You are sure you're not a stage artist?" First positive. Scratching his head, he walked off towards Indian Fiction without another word, called someone on his phone and said to them that no, I wasn't the actress. Then he picked up "Johnny Gone Down".

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‘I really like that Indian Idol singer Sourabhee,’ I told a desi friend the other day.

‘She’s from the northeast,’ she said. ‘She’s Assami.’

‘She’s from Tripura,’ I said.

‘Ya, same thing.’

I love this! Here’s my handy, highly inaccurate guide to what natives of one region call people from another:

From	Called
Tripura	Assami
Mizoram	Assami
Manipur	Assami
Assam	Nepali

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Deep inside the forests of Bastar in southern Chattisgarh live a mass of Indian citizens – tribals – who speak a tongue that bears no resemblance to the major Indian languages; subsist on broken rice, salt, dried fish and roots; have no gods or religion in the sense that has now become normative, and have no comprehension either of many basic axioms of democratic politics and market economics. As soon as we look at them, we begin to misunderstand and patronise them: their minds are almost impossibly foreign, and in popular discourse they are mostly referred to in a pejorative way. They occupy territories rich in mineral and forest resources, and yet are themselves desperately poor.

In and around these tribals, there exists in these jungles a shadowy but substantial force of guerrillas, the Maoists, including both men and women, non-tribals and tribals. The Maoists, or Naxals, seethe at the neglect of the Gonds by the Indian state, believe that the rapacity of capitalism is inimical to the forests and the tribal way of life and advocate "an alternative mode of production", think that Indian democracy is a sham, and are seriously committed to the idea of an armed revolution that will overthrow the Indian state. They have seized control of much of the forest in Chattisgarh, and now run a parallel government of sorts there with the support – sometimes voluntary, sometimes forced – of the tribals.

Finally, alongside these two presences in the jungle, there is a significant absence: that of the Indian state – spoken of internationally as a rising superpower, but present locally only in a severely attentuated and debilitated form, and uninterested in implementing its own legislation on matters like tribal community rights over forest resources, such as the Recognition of Forest Rights Act of 2006. It has none of the attributes of efficiency, accessibility, neutrality and trustworthiness that are minimally to be expected of it, and has over time, by its own dreadful avarice and callousness, lost its moral claim to the allegiance of those in its domain. The fascinating story of these three forces is told in the greatest detail, from a point of view sympathetic to the first two and hostile to the third, by the Punjabi writer Satnam in Jangalnama, his lacerating memoir of a few months in the forest in 2002.

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...or, a new literary festival in Bhutan. Am going for it next week. Should be an enjoyable four days. Here's the full programme.

The interaction between these two is hilarious. Robert Popper (the granny) is the man behind this hilarious prank.

He is currently working on a new television series and website for Adult Swim, based on spoof religion— Tarvuism. He's also the guy behind the mock BBC documentary called Look Around You, which stars one of my favorite characters of all time... Synthesizer Patel.

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Now that I'm unemployed and don't have to go into South Bombay every day, I'm spared the sight of the godawful graffiti that is splattered across the walls along Tulsi Pipe Road. The damn thing is the reason that graffiti gets a bad name: it's ugly, badly-drawn, hideous colours, and slogans that sound like quotes from a Miss Universe pageant. Remarkably, the graffiti actually manages to make the decrepit walls worse than they used to, and that's quite an achievement. Bandra graffiti used to be even worse. All you'd see on different walls would be nonsense like "J-Boyz Rulez" and "Game's on" (yes, well, if it's on, go and watch it instead of wasting spray paint and defacing walls). Then the Wall Project chaps came on and while not everything they've come up with is nice, they've made bits of Chapel Road and Waroda Road look adorable. When I went for a walkabout around Chapel Road the other day, I spotted a couple of new ones. Like the surly boy and the doe-eyed smoker chick (loved how her head popped up from the back of a beat-up, dusty little Maruti car).

Click to view slideshow.

And then I came across this one:

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Yann Martel’s “Beatrice and Virgil” is the second book I’ve read in the past few months that has as its central character a hero who is a thinly-disguised avatar of the author himself (the other was Aatish Taseer’s “The Temple Goers”). The lives of the character and the writer have significant similarities. The supporting characters in the story seem to have obvious real-life counterparts. The lines between the real and the fictional are possibly meant to be blurred by the author’s use of elements and details from his own world. All it serves to do, however, is to highlight how different the fictional is from the real because there are certain parts in both novels that don’t seem to fit and seem to scream “Fiction!” Of course, it’s entirely possible that those are real too.

The standard cliché is that writers take the stories and characters they see around them and conjure their fictional narratives out of them. And it isn’t always appreciated. Henry James lost friends, for example. Jhumpa Lahiri has been accused of writing the same plot out with differently-named characters. The veneer of fiction is far more opaque in these kind of works though. Now, in the books I’m talking about, there is no dividing wall between the narrator and the writer. But technically, the official guiding principle is the same: write what you know. Except writing only on the basis of your own experiences is often lazy and frequently considered weirdly parasitic. Why can’t a writer imagine a story? Isn’t that what writers are supposed to do? As far as I’m concerned, a writer is supposed to tell a story, a good story, and s/he’s supposed to tell it well.

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From Manjula Padmanabhan’s blog, a post about a Friendicoes rescue – a reminder that there are scattered pinpricks of light in the unfathomably dark and lonely universe of uncared-for animals.

I’ve only interacted with Friendicoes a few times, but each of those encounters has been very positive. The first set of vaccinations for the litter of pups that Foxie belonged to was done by them. Shortly after we adopted Foxie, we decided that her mother Rani and older sister Nanno (from an earlier litter) had to be spayed, otherwise generations of pups would be starving or getting run over by cars near our house in the years to come. So we called Friendicoes to pick up the two dogs for the operation. Shankar, the watchman who had been looking after them, was very reluctant to let the ambulance take them away – he feared they’d take the easy way out and put them down – but four days later I received a call from the ambulance driver, who was on his way back to Saket with Rani and Nanno in the back-seat. I rushed across, took charge of them; they were composed, in good health, very happy to be back, and their reunion with Shankar was one of the most joyous things I've seen.

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Here’s the first edition of my film column for Yahoo India. I was asked to do an introductory piece that touched on my journey as a movie-buff, but the column will get more specific from next time. [...] comments welcome.

Update: the full post

A boy’s notebook

This being an introductory column, I thought I’d say a little something about my journey as a movie buff - perhaps to provide a sense of the sort of mind that is going to be writing this fortnightly piece.

For me, the link between watching films and writing things about them goes back (at least) to age seven. It began, inevitably, with the most masaledaar Hindi movies, and a little notebook in which I would scrawl the titles and star casts of every film I saw, along with a conveniently pliable rating (love a film so much that you want to allot it 16-and-a-half stars? Can be managed).

At this point, like anyone who engages with films at a very elementary level, I saw them mainly as “pictures of people talking” (or singing, or dhishum-dhishum-ing). The actors and the fight scenes were the important things, one didn’t think about the craft (or the art) involved.

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