Desperation of the Endless

So Long, Baby

2008-01-14T10:08:00.001-08:00

A year ago today, I was sitting and waiting for Baby to die. She had been heavily sedated after her second successive heart attack and she eventually passed away a little after midnight. She stopped breathing without ever really recovering consciousness though I think she knew we were there. She’d suffered kidney failure the day before and we knew there was no real hope when she went into convulsions that morning.

Despite all the warnings, despite the knowledge, it hurt when it ended.

It still hurts. I still go numb when I think of her, which is everyday. There are the other two; I love them and Tiggy I think, certainly loved her as well. He was there at her side, quietly waiting through that evening. I don’t think Pantha understood what happened though she picked up on the fact that we were down for weeks afterward.

Anyway, life goes on. I promised myself that I would not publicly mourn her or get maudlin. She wouldn’t have understood. If either of us were under the weather, she just got into bed and did her best to offer comfort. Like all cats though, she was practical and unsentimental, and mourning is not a concept that felines understand.

I have ten years worth of memories to run through. Quite often, she‘s there in my dreams – a construct of my memories of course, but very real. I wake, hearing her voice, processing the good, the bad, the little everyday details:

A little kitten with a triangular tail standing on the palm of my hand with her throat vibrating, saying “Peenh!”

A stately, beautiful matron, demanding primary rights to us and all round us

Always, a fierce little thing that spat cross-eyed when anything threatened her, or us

Farewell, Marabelle, my little lioness, my loyal, loving little one.

Asturas and Nivea creme

2006-08-07T14:25:00.000-07:00

Every time I cut myself shaving, I think of this guy I used to know. I will refer to him as “H” since that was the first letter of his name and I’m not that interested in protecting his privacy.

I don’t cut myself shaving very often nor do I find it particularly traumatic when it does occur. This is because of H. I think of him and end up giggling even as I mop the blood.

H was not a close friend. Nor was he an enemy. We would fall into the category of ships that passed in the night approximately 20 years ago. I have no idea where he is, or what he’s doing. If he’s around, I wish him well.

He was an interesting character. His personal life was a melange of contradictions. He was an apostate muslim; an atheist who ate pork happily and imbibed alcohol with great dedication (especially if somebody else was paying for it). He also indulged in generalised substance abuse – in fact, he embodied the definition of the goofball, cavalierly mixing dexies, codeine, charas and smack.

He also borrowed money right left and centre. But he never returned the principal, much less paid interest. So I suppose he wasn’t going against the tenets of his religion in this regard.

H worked in the visual arts and he knew a lot about art and cinema. He was the first person who informed me that a Shia school of representational Islamic art existed. On one occasion, he pulled out some 19^th century heirloom Isfahani pictures, which depicted the life of the Prophet (although the face was not drawn in any of them).

In other respects, he was more traditionalist. His folks were deeply religious. He lived with them and he generally invited a bunch of us home to participate in the eating of sewai and biryani on Id. Or indeed, on other occasions. He was a hospitable chap – if you stood him a drink, you were guaranteed lovely grub in return.

At home, he ate his halaal chaaps with as much enthusiasm as he did his French-style pork chops in restaurants. He was also a die-hard supporter of Md Sporting, which introduced a little variety into the endless MB-EB soccer debates of Calcutta.

And, he was also a traditionalist in that he believed in the Indian riff on the droit de seigneur. In other words, he enthusiastically perpetuated the tradition of banging the maid.

Now, India would be a very different place if a cross-sectional consensus on the desirability of banging the maid had not existed for centuries. Entire sub-castes are composed of little bastards, legitimised over time. These were all created by the tradition of banging the maid.

Indian history would be far less turbulent. So many of the protagonists of all those wonderfully fratricidial succession struggles would not have been conceived. Millions of sex-starved young bachelors would have gone virgins to their respective suhaag raats.

I doubt that H cared too much about either the tradition or the historical context. There he was, a sex-starved bachelor. There was his live-in maid, a relatively comely, and above all, willing young woman. So he banged her.

You may wonder why I knew about these aspects of his life in such intimate detail given that he wasn’t really a close friend. Well, you see, he had this rather irritating habit of offering graphic descriptions of his sex-life to all and sundry.

In fact, although his memory makes shaving nicks bearable, he also turned me off the use of Nivea crème forever. One time, he gifted the aforementioned maid a tin of Nivea. And, she responded with this deliciously flirtatious line about “did he think she really needed to improve her complexion?” So, he twirled his moustache proudly and leered and told her what he actually wanted to do with it. Etc. When I said that he was into substance abuse, I meant it!

I’d get the weekly bulletin of the H sex-life in grisly detail. I often wondered how much of it was true and how much figments of an outré imagination. That was until he ended up in hospital.

The maid's official swain happened to be a local barber. One night, when H was heading home, after his statutory drinking bout, he was accosted by Le Figaro. This was in the pre-AIDs era when straight razors were still the norm in hair-cutting saloons. And that was what the barber was wielding in his wrath.

Confronted by the flash of an astura and a roar of abuse, H turned to flee. He slipped and fell, flat on his face. Nothing loath, the lovelorn barber slashed away at the most prominently visible part of his anatomy. He slashed through H’s trousers and professionally etched a criss-cross design on H’s derriere. No major blood vessels were hit but H bled for weeks.

Unfortunately, buttock injuries are inherently risible. We visited him, as he lay on his face and groaned his way to recovery. We enquired sympathetically about the ease or difficulty of bowel movements (and other bodily functions). We pointed out the silver linings; razor scars on the nether cheeks are less visible than the same upstairs. And, at least the razor had been clean and hygienic and he hadn’t got tet in his anus.

People gifted him assorted patent piles medicines on the commonsense principle that these couldn’t do him harm and might actually do him good. And, we emerged and laughed ourselves silly after every visit.

Through it all, the maid was most solicitous. I suspect the relationship continued. But for some reason, he stopped talking about it.

Ambulance chasing

2006-07-24T11:24:00.000-07:00

So the Sarkar in its wisdom decided to block some websites and thereby buggered the happiness of gazillions of Indian net-users, some of whom happened to be bloggers. This was not a nice things to do - but then, governments are rarely run by nice people.
As common citizens we all have a duty to protect our own constitutional rights and to the credit of the Netosphere, enough of a fuss was made to get some key sites unblocked.
One will now have to fight a long, painful legal battle over an indeterminate period to ensure that we don't all get crapped on again by some random dickhead hiding behind a civil servant's designation. I doubt that too many people will last that particular course.
Like all journalists, I decided to try and exploit the screw-up for all it was worth.
Yes, like ambulance-chasers and drug-dealers, journos also make their living through exploiting misery.
I wrote two pieces on the subject that I will own upto
One was an unsigned edit.
The other was a signed edit. Both went through a process of editing/ headlining, which I don't necessarily agree with.
The text will disappear soon into the black hole of BS's archives. So here we go.
This was the unsigned piece.

At last count, over 42,000 bloggers on the Google-owned domain http://blogspot.com called themselves “Indian”. Typepad.com, another popular blog-hosting domain, had over 7,000 Indians on its site. And the Yahoo!-owned geocities.com hosts over one lakh Indian homepages. These three domains normally draw 10 million Indian eyeballs per day.
Last week, the CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) of the department of telecommunications demanded that Internet access to these three domains be blocked by all Indian Internet service-providers. It offered no explanations for this drastic action, and has since refused to make the list of blocked sites public.
On one occasion when a media correspondent (from rediff.com) did get through to the CERT director, Gulshan Rai reportedly responded, “Somebody must have blocked some sites. What is your problem?” Who is that “somebody”? What sites were blocked? Why? It appears that the CERT doesn’t believe anyone has a right to know the answers to these questions. The opacity of the blocking and the lack of accountability are astounding, given that this was done by a government organisation in what is proudly touted as the world’s largest democracy.
Dr Rai may have thought the question he asked was rhetorical. But it is possible to answer it. In detail. To wit, thousands of individuals and many organisations earn an income directly and indirectly from their online presence on these three (and other) sites. The blocks imposed by the CERT interfere with their ability to earn that income.
The concept of free blog-hosting is based on advertising. Free blogs display advertising targeted at their readership and receive an income from pay-per-view and click-through models. If there is no viewership because the site has been blocked, or the readership cannot be accurately tracked because it is coming through anonymising proxies, the income disappears. That affects pretty much every user of these domains.
Another sort of economic hardship is incurred by writers, artists, photographers, sculptors, designers, musicians, hardware assemblers and freelance software developers, who maintain blogs as the equivalent of virtual, interactive, calling cards. This community of professionals finds it useful to archive work on blogs and homepages. The homepages and blogs are brand-building exercises and communication channels in one. Potential clients can view the work, and contact them if they so desire. By blocking access, the CERT has taken away potential custom from these people and impinged on their collective right to earn a living. The published writers affected by this specific ban include dozens of freelancers in both the media and advertising.
A third category of persons who certainly have a problem with the blocks are various non-government organisations. A free blog and homepage are perfect extensions of an NGO’s presence, enabling it to showcase work-in-progress and to access aid across barriers of time and distance. Substantial aid is coordinated through NGO blogs. Blogs have proved useful in disaster relief as well. The tsunami help site at blogspot helped coordinate global aid to five nations. And the Mumbai help site, which was launched within an hour of the train bombings, helped tens of thousands contact their loved ones. Regrettably that site is now inaccessible to Indians. So, Dr Rai, there are indeed a large number of people who do have lots of problems with “somebody blocking some sites”. The one good outcome of this entire episode is that the outrage it has caused may eventually force a review of this opaque process.

This was the signed edit (Business Standard July 22, 2006).

In 1988, the home ministry cited the concerns of various religious forums to justify demands for a ban on Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses (TSV) on the grounds that it could cause public unrest. The ban was granted, despite the concerns of the author, the publisher and civil rights groups about censorship and freedom of speech, on the grounds of “avoiding communal tension”. The ban continues to be in force.
TSV caused a global furore but it is only one of hundreds of books and periodicals that have been banned at various times by the Indian authorities. Sadly, the constitutional protection of the Freedom of Expression (Article 19) is hedged with all sorts of caveats about being “subject to reasonable restriction—in the interests of the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency or morality, or in relation to contempt of court, defamation or incitement to an offence”, etc.
The gobbledygook means that if a government agency (or an individual) believes that these “reasonable restrictions” apply to a specific case, it can appeal for a suspension of the Freedom of Expression. If the court is convinced, the publication in question may be banned. In each case, the author and publisher have the right to appeal against the ban. Due process is always followed.
Every banned book and periodical is notified under the Customs Act, 1962, and listed in the Customs Law Manual. You can look up each case for details of the legal processes involved. In every instance, a state government or central government agency or less often, a private individual, approached a court and made a representation, stating the reasons why a ban was desirable.
Quite often, the right to appeal against a ban has been successfully exercised. For example, Khushwant Singh’s novel The Company of Women survived a challenge in the Madras High Court when a private citizen filed a PIL stating that he was offended by a raunchy encounter between an Indian man and a Pakistani woman that included the immortal line “Pakistan must be on top!” The court threw it out after consulting the home ministry, saying that it trusted to the “Good Sense of readers”, though subsequent editions were revised to omit the scene.
Again, in 2005, the Calcutta High Court lifted a ban imposed by the government of West Bengal on Taslima Nasreen’s Dwikhondita, observing this was “unjustified” and “untenable”. And, The God of Small Things survived two challenges in Kerala, one on grounds of obscenity, the other for making derogatory references to the EMS government of 1959.
However, when it came to the Internet, the GoI appears to have quietly shelved its commitment to due process. To put it in a nutshell, under the IT Act, 2000, bans and blocks on websites can be asked for by a string of listed government departments on roughly the same grounds as bans on printed material.
However, there is no need to go to court. The Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) of the department of telecommunications receives the request, processes it and informs all Internet Service Providers. A CERT order blocking a website is sufficient to keep it out of Indian cyberspace.
The list of blocked sites is not made public; the name of the organisation asking for the ban is not made public; the grounds are not made public; there is no right to redress; there is no process of appeal. Even the Saudis are more transparent.
Is the CERT competent at this task? Not on its track record. For the past week, it has blocked access to millions of websites apparently because somebody (we don’t know who) was offended by the diary of a US republican supporter (exposingtheleft.blogspot.com) and the 2004 journal of a teenaged virgin (princesskimberly.blogspot.com). It has attempted to obfuscate the issue by making vague references to national security, which are quite as ludicrous as the blocks themselves.
Is this constitutional? You tell me!

Butt plugged by accident or design?

2006-07-15T21:53:00.000-07:00

Has MTNL decided to block blogspot.com? Or is it just a router problem? I have access to several ISPs. At home I use MTNL Broadband and Reliance. Since Friday (Bastille Day), neither has opened blogspot.com except through an anonymizer. Both allow open access to blogger.com and wordpress, etc. So I can sign in, post, etc.
In office, I use Hathway cable (which also doesn’t allow blogspot.com access) and Airtel broadband, which does. According to pals in Mumbai, Cal, etc, VSNL and BSNL are both allowing unfettered blogspot.com access. I find it tough to imagine that it’s a GoI-imposed block because BSNL would be the first ISP to comply.
So Wilco Foxtrot Tango? Probably a router hassle of some description. No doubt it will be solved when sufficient numbers of people start jumping up and down.
Update 21:32 17/07.
It does indeed seem to be some sort of hamfisted buggery by government agencies. Updates flowing here and at a related wiki. With luck will hit a high technorati ranking fairly soon.
Since there are some 40-K odd Indian bloggers on blogspot alone and God knows how many on typepad and geocities, this DoS could be raucously entertaining. May even end up being a test case since we're by and large talking middle-class blokes with traction. I notice that the odd civil servants in the "blogger community" have been pushed into quiescience. Poor things!

Doctor Lector I presume?

2006-06-04T06:58:00.000-07:00

This is yet another piece which is unlikely to ever grace the Net. Did a review for Biblio of Gulliver’s travels and other writings (Edited by Clement Hawes). Swift is my favourite "Modern":

The ten-pound note of the Irish Republic features an image of Dean Swift, set against the backdrop of the Irish Rashtrapati Bhavan, the Áras an Uachtaráin in Phoenix Park, Dublin. Very few writers achieve the distinction of having their faces embossed on the national currency.

The Irish Central Bank didn’t, for instance, see fit to put Joyce, Beckett, Behan, Shaw, Synge, or Lady Gregory on its notes. (Yeats is there on the five-pound. If my memory serves me right, WBY designed the currency issued by the newly-minted Republic in the 1920s. Putting his mug-shot into circulation may have literally been his quid pro quo for performing that onerous task).

(NOTE: Actually Yeats designed the coinage for the Republic - my memory was marginally off)

Swift was perhaps accorded this unusual honour because of his historic influence on Irish coinage. In 1722, an English miner named William Wood bought a royal patent for the milling of 108,000 pounds sterling worth of Irish copper half-pennies. Swift made an almighty fuss about the debased metal of the “Wood Halfpenny” in a series of letters to the Irish people signed “Marcus Brutus Drapier”.

The pseudonymous dean of St. Patrick’s advocated that the Irish refuse to accept the new coin. His baleful influence was sufficient to render the new coins unsuccessful – these were legal tender but they did not circulate. Wood’s patent was finally revoked by the Crown along with the payment of a generous severance “pension”. The coins were sent off to the American colonies and numismatics experts now salivate over these “American Hibernians”. The irony is that Wood’s coinage was not debased. He wasn’t cheating. The pension made him rich, however, so I guess everyone was happy.

Everyone, except Swift, that is. In the 78 years of his existence, nothing and nobody ever made the dean happy, if one can dare to make such a sweeping generalisation on the basis of his writing. In all the ages of mankind, there can have been few people as angry, as bitter, and as determinedly misanthropic as the dean.

There have also been few writers who have made such an art-form out of bitterness. And, there has never been anyone who combined an imagination quite as weird and unpleasant with such a felicity for logical, verbal exposition of that imagination.

As a man of letters, Swift rocks. His combination of versatility and virtuosity is amazing. You cannot conceptualise the allegory without reference to “A Tale of a Tub” and to Gulliver. Nor can you conceive of modern science-fiction fantasy with all its colours and flavours without reference once again to Gulliver. He was an astoundingly entertaining correspondent and a very funny poet. And, any modern polemicist would swap her canines to be able to inject Swift’s effortless venom into her essays.

The other thing about Swift is accessibility. Despite the barrier of 300 years worth of changes in idiom, despite inevitable loss of context, Swift is still easier to read than most modern writers. When he wants to, as in Gulliver and Tub, he tells a rattling good yarn. His essays and certainly his poems can make you crack up in laughter through the sheer elegance of phrasing.

This edition certainly helps with the contextualisation because it adds the obligatory footnotes that for example, identify the throwaway reference to events in the early 18^th century. Another interesting section is the 18^th century perspective, which deals with Defoe’s inspiration, with William Dampier’s voyages and with the prejudices against “Papists” and the strange political anatomy of Ireland at a point of time when the Irish Parliament was bribed to vote itself out of existence.

Naturally the meat of the collection has to be the master’s own work. Apart from the complete Gulliver, it has a good representative selection of essays, letters and poems as well. The only thing that’s missing is “Tub” and that’s easily available on e-book. In addition to annotated text, the edition contains many contemporary illustrations as well.

In the end-section of criticism, there are four essays on different aspects of Swift by the editor himself, by Said, and by Carole Fabricant and Robert Mahony. While the essays are fine in themselves, they are all from the same discipline of modern literary criticism. Swift deserved a wider academic focus simply because of the breadth of subjects he wrote about and also, because of the kind of person he was. I’ll return to this subject later.

Knowing the context and thinking a little about it, Swift’s iconic position in modern Ireland seems quite anomalous. He was not only a member by birth of a hated and oppressive religious minority – the protestant Anglican occupiers of catholic Ireland during the first century of the invasion. Swift was a clergyman who preached that Anglican theology to earn his bread-and-butter.

A rough analogue to the modern Irish attitude vis-a-vis Swift would be to imagine a BJP government releasing stamps to commemorate an Imam from the era of Aurangzeb.

It is true that Swift’s co-religionists disgusted him and he made no secret of that fact. The concept of a king also offended him and so, he was a republican, in an era when that was extremely politically incorrect as well.

But then, he found the Catholics of his adopted land just as disgusting as his brethren across the Irish Channel. “A Modest Proposal” for solving the problem of high Catholic birthrates by selling babies to the Protestant occupiers as fare for their Sunday lunch is amongst the most frightening essays ever written.

The cool, clinical advocacy of fattening babies by giving “ample suck” so that they can be basted, roasted and jointed to taste, reads like a verbal rendering of one of Hieronymus Bosch’s nastiest triptychs by a 18^th century ancestor of Dr Lector’s. Of course, it was satirical – it was a literal exposition of England’s metaphorical gustation of Ireland. But it could only have been articulated in such fashion by somebody who hated the English, the Irish and children, with almost equal passion.

Despite his evenhanded hatred of both races, Swift was on the side of the Irish in the Anglo-Irish disputes because he also had a passion for evenhanded justice. He hated the tightening repression he witnessed in Catholic Ireland and he found the lack of an organ of political representation very offensive. But he didn’t have to like the Irish or indeed, the human race, to demand justice for all.

By the latter stages of Gulliver’s Travels, the hatred for the human race crystallises in the sojourn in the land of the Houyhnmhnms. Swift’s alienation from his fellow beings is mirrored by Gulliver’s incapacity to readjust to human company after his return to Yahoo-infested England.

By the mid 1730s, the misanthropy had calcified into something that smells like genuine psychosis. His essays from that period are over the top – not incoherent babbling, but crisp, acid-trip lunacy; the initial premises may come from outer space but each one is smoothly and logically developed into a glittering little jewel of an essay or a poem.

In the last decade of his life, the dean suffered from what was perhaps the worst disease that could afflict such a man. He developed aphasia, an inability to understand words caused by damage to specific areas of the brain. The early stages of the condition in the 1730s may add to the feel of a great mind finally breaking loose from the restraints of the left brain and free-wheeling into spaces where normal people cannot follow.

It would have been extremely entertaining and perhaps, enlightening, if a modern clinical psychiatrist had been asked to evaluate Swift’s mental condition. He wrote enough and enough is known about his life to come up with an educated perspective. How close to the edge was he really? Would medication have stabilised him or “Prozac-ed” him out of action?

Another perspective one would have liked is that of the economic historian. Swift was wrong about Wood’s halfpennies. But he hit the nail on the head when he inveighed against laws that prevented the growth of Irish trade and against the discrimination which destroyed the catholic land-owning class. He also had scathing things to say about the South Sea and Mississippi Bubbles, where he was personally burned.

The protestant-catholic sectarian perspective has been done to death over a period of centuries though Swift was one of the earliest commentators. The economic angle of the Anglo-Irish relationship has been explored in depth only from the potato famine era of the 1840s. Swift wrote with insight and sensitivity about economic conditions fully 150 years before that catastrophe.

Swift was one of the founding fathers of modernism but he wasn’t a modernist. No modern philosopher would have the stomach to produce “A Modest Proposal”. Anybody who wrote a similar “dead babies” essay set in say, Iraq, Rwanda, Bosnia, or Israel, etc, would set off a hullabaloo that dwarfed the Jyllands Posten ‘toons and Salman Rushdie’s verses.

Certainly 21^st century human beings are individually and collectively capable of perpetrating horrors as bad or worse. But the politically correct 21^st century mind simply isn’t capable of articulating this level of verbal viciousness anymore. What a pity!

Blues for Bobby

2006-06-01T12:58:00.000-07:00

I haven't got the copyright for this but the blokes who do haven't bothered to archive it.
I wrote it five years ago to mark the bugger's 60 B'day. Since it was his 65th recently, here we go again.
Warning - a long, frigging, self-indulgent whine follows. But then, doesn't that make it the perfect blogpost?

Here we go:

The best thing about Dylan is that you can sing along with him and feel superior. Yeah, he was a good poet, one hell of a talented musician with an instinctive grasp of complicated orchestral abstractions. But he couldn't sing for peanuts, that whiny, nasal, flat voice could barely hold a tune. That incomprehensible high-plains accent butchered his own poetry, mangled and mumbled the words and rendered his lyrics into a guessing game.

Over the years, I guess hundreds of millions have sung along anyway with Robert Zimmerman from Hibbing, Minnesota. In a thousand campus hostels, every idiot who ever fiddled with a guitar learnt his or her set-piece Dylan. Maybe some of them didn't want to but singing Dylan was the price they paid to keep an audience.

I stopped listening to Dylan as pure music a long time ago. He turned into background noise, something as familiar as driving a cantankerous old car with funny quirks in the gearing. I knew every trick of phrasing, I knew exactly when the harmonica would kick in just the way I knew the delicate balance of choke and starter. I knew the variations Robertson had done on it, I knew the Dead's bootleg version, I'd heard Tom Petty mugging it along with the Heartbreakers.

And Dylan has associations running back across the years. There are the stoner anthems that take me disappearing along the foggy ruins of time to when I travelled steerage to Goa, more than 20 years ago. There were the unending arguments with Cool Breeze - my black pal from Detroit who thought that Dylan did whiteman's music but he liked it.

There was the music that we played scratchily through the nights on the old gramophone as we stayed awake and waited for the hard rain to fall, for my girlfriend's dad to lose his long hard battle with cancer. There was my bitter empathy with the boy who swore that he wouldn't work on Maggie's farm no more as I totted up my week's commission on the typewriters I'd sold.

I remember driving up the Assam Trunk Road from Guwahati to Tinsukhia and blasting Buckets of Rain over and over again as the windscreen wipers went into overdrive. The lost weekend when a bunch of us got smashed in the grotty old Tiger Cinema bar and watched The Last Waltz three times post-exams. Every time the show ended we just stepped across the road to the Maidan, or down to Nizams and we drifted back again as the third and final bell rang.

Of course, it was "early" Dylan I listened to as a young adult. Sure I'd heard Dylan as a kid, but I started to relate to his poetry only in the grim gray 1980s. That was when Agnetha was wiggling her butt and most contemporary music was built around the metronomic backbeat of an invariant boring bass.

By then Dylan was well into his period of religious mania and he was writing complete crap. The first great manic association of talent clustered around him in the 1960s had broken up and dispersed. Half of his early comrades were dead, some were vegetables, still others had gone their own way. It would be a long time before he would again forge a team where the whole made better music than the parts, still longer before he would find his own feet again as a songster.

But he'd created the early oeuvre, the work that made him great. The first flowering was the great folk ballads of the early 1960s that came straight out of the Woody Guthrie tradition and transcended it. Those lyrics articulated what an entire generation felt was "wrong" with the way the world worked. He spoke for the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones and worse.

In the mid-1960s he started the transition from acoustic road balladeer with banjo, guitar and harmonica to composing and fronting for tight ensembles that stretched the limit of everything electricity could do. The return journey to the softer influences of country and Southron blues ala Nashville Skyline took him several years as well.

There were the flirtations with drugs, the statutory brushes with the law and the string of girlfriends, wives and relationships that turned sour. It was all grist to the creative mill throughout this wondrous 15-year odyssey that transformed popular music, even those aspects that Dylan never directly touched. Blonde on Blonde with its Visions of Joanna, and Sad Eyed Lady must be about the best album of love songs ever written or maybe it just felt that way. Like A Rolling Stone - well, who could write a more viciously brilliant allegory and set it to music?

Nobody who came after Dylan would ignore him; you just couldn't ignore him despite all the obvious flaws. Dylan created the original space for a poet who could sing. Even the rank amateurs often did covers that out-sang the original. It only enhanced his reputation - you realised the depths of the imagery, felt the itches he had so precisely scratched.

The great frequently built their reputations on the songs Dylan wrote. Leave alone pals like Joan Baez, Robbie Robertson and Neil Young, Jimi Hendrix's big popular breakthrough came with the electrifying variation he did of Watchtower at the Isle of Wight. From Jerry Garcia to Pete Seeger, everyone's tried their hand at Dylan.

Dylan still can't sing. A disability he's insisted on publicly flaunting for more than forty of the last sixty years as he's leveraged his limitations into a trademark style.

No other great has performed so often. Dylan still does a concert every three days. Some of them in really weird places, small towns in the prairies, provincial backwaters in Central Europe - somebody once calculated that Dylan did a round trip of the world every year. In his 60th year, in just the last five months, he has played 13 shows in Japan, nine in Australia, 15 in the USA -- with Scandinavia and Western Europe on the agenda for the second half.

He started putting the music back together in the late 1980s. There were hiccups, the Budokan performance led to a dreadful double album. But slowly the talented started drifting back to the master. Mark Knofler, Neil Young, the Dead, - who else would they ever have taken second billing to?

Recent albums like World Gone Wrong and Time out of Mind are testimony enough to the fact that he has found a second wind. And looking at his contemporaries, the "Never-ending tour" as it's been billed since 1988 makes sense.

Mick Jagger performs Start Me Up for the launch of Windows95, Paul McCartney accepts a knighthood, Jim Morrison fertilises a Paris graveyard.

Dylan travels endlessly. That's where he started from, the tradition of the roadie, the Okie who chronicled the working mans blues. The travel keeps him sane. He can still tell his audience that even the president of the United States sometimes must stand naked. And so, while others sign the endorsement deals, he's out there standing on the gallows with his head in the noose, watching with those wild wolf eyes and just waiting for hell to break loose.

These old shades

2006-06-01T11:49:00.000-07:00

Pitch Black, The Chronicles of Riddick, - bad movies *ing Vin Diesel; corny novelisations, one of them by a reasonably competent SF writer (Alan Dean Foster). The only thing worth noting is that Riddick wears “black goggles” (Amazon says this is a statistically improbable phrase) even in the depths of a dark, deep mine.

Shades are common props in many SF movies – Matrix, MIB, etc. Hollywood believes in them as “futuristical” props that nicely offset campy sets and uniforms. Odd because versions of these have been around since before H.G.Wells.

The Germans almost won the Battle of Jutland (1 June 1916) because they had Zeiss glasses that enabled them to maintain semaphore contact through shellfire (after they learnt that the Kiregsmarine radio ciphers had been broken) and to spot British ships emerging out of the setting sun.

Shades also featured in the election slogan of Jack B in “Bug Jack Barron”, which is an awesomely good organ-legging novel from the 1960s. Barron styles himself “The White Shade” to woo the black vote.

Shades are an integral part of the Southie political landscape. Bangarappa, MGR, Karunanidhi, et al, everybody uses shades. At first I thought it was just an affectation – much like Cow-belt politicians referring to themselves in the third person.

Later I realised that it was like a badge of belonging and a not-so-subtle means to establish hierarchy and seniority.

The common political thug wears his shades on the streets of Mylapore to show that he is a more evolved being than the average Tambram who wanders about with his eyes exposed. He takes his shades off in front of an MLC, who in turn, displays respect to a senior boss like MK Stalin by whipping off his shades. MGR was cremated in his shades as the mark of ultimate respect.

In contrast to MGR, Kamaraj was considered a lick-spittle of the Northies by Deccan hardliners because he was so often seen face-naked in the company of the Hindi-speakers. And in Mollywood, one sign that Rajnikant is finally taking the villain seriously is a deliberate removal of his shades before the action-hero rolls up his sleeves and goes into action.

Stalin acknowledges that the man who named him is still the DMK uberappa by going face-stripped in front of MK. And, as for Kalinger, he takes his shades off for nuthin' and nobody. When Jayalollipoppa had him arrested, the ultimate humiliation was that he was caught on candid camera with buck-naked eyes.

Sonata in blue and orange

2006-05-21T13:12:00.000-07:00

New jeans for old?

“No trade” says Marabelle

Noisome is good

Leonardo's Code

2006-05-21T12:56:00.000-07:00

Extract from The Leonardo Code, which is much more fun and far better written than the Dan Brown abortion. As with all of Pratchett's work, you actually have to have brains and a certain amount of education to start LoL. And then, you begin to think.

Leonard brightened up as a thought apparently struck him. ‘Now you asked me to construct some more ciphers for you. I'm sorry, my lord, but I must have misunderstood your requirements. What was wrong with the first ones I did?'
Vetinari sighed. 'I'm afraid they were unbreakable, Leonard.'
'But surely-'
'It's hard to explain,' said Lord Vetinari, aware that what to him were the lucid waters of politics were so much mud to Leonard. 'These new ones you have are…merely devilishly difficult?'
'You specified fiendishly, sir,' said Leonard, looking worried.
'Oh, yes.'
'There does not appear to be a common standard for fiends, my lord, but I did some research in the more accessible occult texts and I believe these ciphers will be considered "difficult" by more than 96 percent of fiends.'

Haiku

2006-05-17T05:07:00.000-07:00

Monkeys Masturbate

Fig leaves fall on the fence

Tiglath looks askance

Unique Eunuch Blessings

2006-05-17T03:57:00.000-07:00

My cat Pantha is destined to have a long life and prosper. She possesses the (probably) unique distinction of being the only cat in Delhi to be blessed by a Eunuch.

The little twit (Bongs will understand what the name means) fell off a tree and broke her left hind-leg. So, we had to take her off to the vet (Dr R.S.Chaggar of Saket and SDA, who has the fastest hands I’ve seen when it comes to cat surgery). Doc sent us off to get an X-ray.

Now small animals are x-rayed at the same clinics as human beings and quite a few city clinics will provide this service. However the average North Indian is squeamish at the thought that the same Roentgen rays which passed through a small furry animal may pass through his bones. So the clinics usually ask you to wait discreetly at the side-entrance and smuggle you in so as not to spook their two-legged clients.

Now the clinic we visited operates out of the front of the owner’s house. The daughter of the doctor who owns it was getting married. There was an ashirwad or some such interminable ceremony happening in the garden. This being North India, natch there were Hijras singing contralto (contrary to public opinion, eunuchs don’t sing soprano though some of them can do a nice counter-tenor).

We were waiting at the back door to be called in. Pantha was sedated and sleeping in her carry basket, which was discreetly covered with a cloth. (Hint: if you’re transporting cats it helps to cover the basket – the little buggers are always less antsy when they can’t see the world pass by.) To all the world, and certainly to the hijras on the lookout for a mark, we must have looked like a worried couple with swaddled child.

They leapt upon us with glad cries and were disconcerted when I made an obscene gesture, which is peculiar to Hijra sign-language. They were mind-fucked when my missus laughed heartily at offers of blessing. However, when we unveiled P, who slept through it all, one of them bravely offered to do the needful. What’s more, they didn’t charge us. So P is doubly unique – she’s been blessed free of charge by an eunuch.

Update: She is happily climbing trees and killing lizards so the leg has healed fine.

Infructious, Infuckious

2006-05-17T03:48:00.000-07:00

Do you know what an “infructious investment” is? It’s buying or creating a backup when somebody else believes that you don’t need one. For example, if you have a legal life partner and you go out and acquire another partner (perhaps because you’re dissatisfied with the first partner or fear that he/she may prove unsatisfactory in servicing your future needs), the expenses you incur may be considered an “infructious investment”.

The Indian government is a little confused on this subject. It’s okay for example, to create a new fibre-optic network in an area already serviced by one. Or to buy a new PC even if the old one is working fine. Or for an individual to possess two or more cars.

But it’s not okay to be legally bound to more than one life-partner unless you are a Muslim of the male gender – in that case, you’re allowed to have up to four before you're pulled up for making infructious investments (in this particular instance, it's called "polygamy").

According to the GoI, it’s also definitely not okay to lay a second gas pipeline in an area already serviced by one. It doesn’t matter if the extant pipeline is insufficient to service demand or if the transporter’s service standards suck.

The new PNGRBA – the Petroleum and Natural Gas Regulatory Board Act, which has finally passed into law after a four-year saga of drafting and redrafting, states that a second pipeline would be an infructious investment.

It may be noted that when GAIL laid its first-ever pipeline, it assumed that a capacity of 18 million metric standard cubic metres of gas per day was sufficient. Then it expanded to 33 mmscmd. By the time that expansion was complete, it was already planning to double capacity. The demand-supply gap is such that the gas transport market needs to minimally double capacity inside the next five years. Supreme Court judgments over the past few years also clearly point to the need to beef up city gas distribution networks across every metro-semi-metro in order to create public transport services that operate off less polluting CNG.

But any such investment in a new gas pipeline (unless it’s by Gail perhaps) would be infructious if said pipeline happens to fall within the service area of an extant pipeline. If this is the best Act that a multitude of drafts could produce, the lunacy must be both infectious and infructious across the stakeholder universe.

Underwhelmed

2006-05-17T03:02:00.000-07:00

I am underwhelmed. Sometime in the recent past, two of my pals randomly linked to this thingy.
As a result random hordes of people wandered in from all parts of the globe. Some of them even came back. Whyfore?

Anyway this is a non-blog. I grabbed the url to prevent somebody else from doing this (this form of identity theft has actually occurred to me - some bloke from West Virginia once opened an email id on verizon and started mailing people with (rather good) investment advice saying he was me.)

That led to major buggery because all the people I had refused to offer advice to got offended and demanded to know what they should do with their ill-gotten gains.

I am a refusenik I refuse to offer investment advice, I refuse to blog and I refuse all offers of employment.

But I didn't want somebody to set up a blog in my name and burble nonsense. Now I am informed by She who must not be named that if I don't occasionally post, blogspot will take this url away. I don't believe it. However here we go.

If I have thots on a subject and I cannot figure out how to bullshit somebody into paying me to write them down, I might put it down here .

Live in hope!

Motives

2005-12-29T04:58:00.000-08:00

Just squatting on my own turf and yes I like Gaiman!