When ToI got taken in by Google's April Fool's prank

• Item in The Times of India on Tuesday, April 3, 2012:

Gmail reinvents Morse Code
    Gmail has brought a new app on smartphones, the Gmail Tap. The application seeks to replace the clunky qwerty keypad and often uncomfortable touch keypad on smartphones by using two keys representing dots and dashes in Morse Code. Users will simply have to keep pressing two buttons for getting the letters. The big downside, you have to learn Morse code for the app.

• Item in The Times of India on Tuesday, April 9, 2012:

WE TOO WERE FOOLED
With reference to the Cyber Track item ‘Gmail reinvents Morse Code’ on April 3, it was an April Fools Day prank video by Google.

• Also read: The April Fool's newspaper gag that has achieved immortality

The April Fool's newspaper gag that has achieved immortality

DNA's idea of an April Fool's joke is a lead feature in today's "After Hrs." supplement on superstar Salman Khan's finally finding a bride. So tame. And so lame.

Compare it with Mumbai newspaper The Daily's hoax on April 1 sometime in the Eighties. The now-defunct tabloid published a broadsheet edition that day with a banner headline shouting out, "South breaks away". The whole front page, if I remember right, was devoted to the "news" of our four southern states coming together to form an independent republic.

Then there was the elaborate hoax in 1977 in The Guardian, which, like other British newspapers, has a long tradition of April Fool's pranks. That year, the newspaper published a seven-page supplement on the imaginary nation of San Serriffe, maps, pictures, factoids et al, taking in thousands of readers.

Journalists and media students especially will enjoy reading about this hoax: nearly all the names of places and people were taken from printing terms. Veteran Guardian journalist David McKie explained the origins of this gag in a column he wrote nearly 30 years later:

[the] April Fool hoax that the Guardian launched on the world in 1977 has achieved immortality. The notion came from a man called Philip Davies, who ran a department called Special Reports, which produced from time to time a page or pages where a theme, perhaps a country or region was chosen, advertisers responded, and unenthusiastic editorial writers were persuaded to produce the copy.... 

For April 1 1977, Davies suggested a set of pages commemorating a wholly imaginary island. Advertisers, he reckoned, would gladly join in the joke. And they did, in profusion. But the true architect of the project was a famously deft, adroit and inventive leader writer called Geoffrey Taylor, who thought up a group of islands called San Serriffe, the principal constituent parts being Upper Caisse and Lower Caisse, which together formed a shape like a semicolon. The capital was Bodoni: the president (ie dictator), a man called Pica, had been victorious in the latest in a string of three coups....

The impact of the seven-page survey was quite astonishing. The office all day was bedlam as people pestered the switchboard with requests for more information. Both travel agencies and airlines made official complaints to the editor about the disruption as customers simply refused to believe that the islands did not exist. Veterans of that time say there's never been a day like it in terms of reader response. Over the past 30 years, San Serriffe has entered the language as a kind of flawed utopia and one American writer has published a series of erudite books about its publishing industry.

Read McKie's column in its entirety to know more about the San Serriffe hoax and about other April Fool's pranks down the years: "Foolish things".

Also read:

• The leader's rise to power in San Serriffe

• Return to San Serriffe

• Guardian April fools — in pictures

UPDATE (April 9, 2012): In its issue of March 31, The Economist had a very interesting piece on how technology would soon allow us to design and build household pets to order. Turns out it was an April Fool's hoax. But it is written so well that it is easy to believe that we will actually be able to use 3D printing to create bespoke pets.

Only a careful re-reading of the article gives the game away. There is this line in the second paragraph: "GeneDupe, as the firm is known colloquially, has previously focused on the genetic engineering of animals." And then there are the concluding sentences: "If all goes well, these will be available by St Valentine’s day. If not, customers will probably have to wait until April 1st of next year." Read the piece in its entirety here — Just press "print" — and marvel at the Economist's ingenuity.

• Also read: When ToI got taken in by Google's April Fool's prank

An institution called College Street

I have just returned from Kolkata, my sixth visit in five years. You would think I now know Kolkata like the back of my hand. But that's not the case, sadly. These trips to the City of Joy have been what I call "flying visits" — I land at Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose airport on a Saturday and I'm back at the airport to board my flight to Bangalore the following Monday. So, as far as sightseeing is concerned, I have been to Park Street (and eaten there), I have visited the Victoria Memorial, I know my way around Gariahat.

But, because of the paucity of time, I have never been to College Street. Which will come as a surprise to people who know me and my love of books.

By a coincidence, the latest issue of The Week carries a fairly detailed feature on College Street. Titled "The heart of Kolkata", the article by Rabi Banerjee explains why the street continues to be a popular hangout. It also gives us some history relating to the area:

Thanks to its proximity to famous educational institutions, College Street saw major student movements in the '70s. A number of brilliant minds from Bengal, who could have led the country in different spheres, joined the Naxalite movement. Many of them lost their lives in police encounters in the alleys of College Street. Political protests and demonstrations take place here even today. But elders who were witnesses to the bloodbath in the '60s and '70s warn students not to get embroiled in violent movements.

But College Street is not all about books. To know more, and to understand why College Street will definitely be on my itinerary when I next visit Kolkata, read Rabi Banerjee's article in its entirety here.

BOOKED FOR LIFE: COLLEGE STREET IN KOLKATA. (Photo courtesy: The Week)

A tribute to an iconic Bengali actor

It was only five days ago that I was listening in fascination as Commitscions Kaustav Datta and Atreyee Sen talked in awe about the grand old man of Tollywood, Soumitra Chatterjee.

The three of us were having lunch at Zara, the spiffy restaurant in Kolkata's South City Mall, and since both Kaustav and Atreyee are production professionals the discussion veered around to films and television shows and the stars who continue to hold fans in thrall. That was when Kaustav told us about the time he went to interview Soumitra Chatterjee for a television channel and Atreyee chipped in with an anecdote about the iconic Bengali actor with whom she got an opportunity to interact when he came to her studio for a dubbing session.

SOUMITRA CHATTERJEE

And what I do see when I open Mint today? A tribute to Soumitra Chatterjee, who received the Dadasaheb Phalke Award this year, by veteran columnist Salil Tripathi.

"Over the years," Tripathi writes, "Chatterjee personified the nuanced angst of the modern educated Indian, bound by traditions and accepting them while being sceptical. When tragedy strikes, he is overwhelmed, but he finds the reserves within him to rise again and faces the future with equanimity."

Tripathi also pays tribute to Bengali cinema:

If quantity equated quality, Hindi cinema would be India’s best. For provocative cinema that stays with you beyond the three hours at a theatre, we turn to films made in other Indian languages, Bengali being the most prominent.

And then he returns to Chatterjee:

In his debut film [Satyajit Ray's Apur Sansar], Chatterjee showed a range of emotions that could only come from an actor of exceptional maturity and sensibility. Ray knew how to make his expressive face reveal emotions that words couldn’t depict.

Read the column in its entirety here: "A master of his craft". And if you're not a Bengali, you will understand, as I did, why Kaustav and Atreyee think the world of Soumitra Chatterjee.

The Hunger Games: A "young adult" series that even adults will love

I gave up on Harry Potter halfway through the first book — a great series for children, I thought to myself, but not for grown-ups. (I was wrong about that, though — many of my students, who were in their twenties when the fifth book came out, were Potter fans. Years ago, I remember, one of them snapped at me in exasperation when I mentioned casually to her that Dumbledore dies in the sixth book. I had no idea at the time that she was mad about Harry & Co.)

As for Twilight, I couldn't get into it at all, probably because I don't get what people see in vampires. (Not since Bram Stoker's Dracula has anyone written a decent vampire novel, not even Anne Rice.)

I came to the conclusion that young adult novels are not for me.

Boy, has Suzanne Collins proved me wrong!

I have just finished reading Mockingjay, the third and final (sigh!) book in Collins's Hunger Games trilogy.

It was only some three weeks ago that I began the first book, The Hunger Games. As I got deeper into it, I couldn't wait to finish it and start on the second one, Catching Fire. And, then, go on to Mockingjay. The plotting throughout the series is superb and the dystopian future is evoked brilliantly. You also rush through the pages because in none of the books is there a single word that you will have to look up in a dictionary. Surely that is the hallmark of a great writer.

There were times when I was reading the books on my Kindle Fire on the bus back from work that I would forget where I was. Once I almost missed my stop. And when I discussed this with my young friend Nastassia Michael, who lives in Toronto, she said that the same thing once happened to her, too, on the subway!

The three books have been billed as young adult novels, but, really, they are for anyone who is passionate about reading, age no bar. You are sure to love, as I did, the old-fashioned story-telling skills on display in all three books.

Suzanne Collins has made her characters so believable — especially the three main protagonists: Katniss Everdeen, Peeta Mellark, and Gale Hawthorne — and she has told a tale so riveting that, after having completed the series, I am now eagerly looking forward to watching the movie based on the first book next week.

BATTLER: JENNIFER LAWRENCE PLAYS KATNISS EVERDEEN IN THE HUNGER GAMES.

UPDATE (March 28, 2012): The executive editor of Mint, Niranjan Rajadhyaksha, writes in his column today that several important economic lessons can be gleaned from the Suzanne Collins trilogy. Read the column here: "The hunger games".

UPDATE (March 29, 2012): Hunger Games, the movie, is well-made and it deserved its blockbuster opening weekend — $150 m. at the U.S. box-office in three days— but the book does a much better job of describing the horrors of the savage games in which 24 young men and women are forced to fight to the death in a televised spectacle.

Prakash and Mandakini Amte: The most inspirational story I have read in years

An e-mail I had sent out to my students, friends, and relatives in September 2009 (I did not have my own blog at the time):

Prakash and Mandakini Amte tend to a skeletal inmate at Hemalkasa.

In 2008, Prakash Amte and his wife, Mandakini, were given the Magsaysay award for service to humanity. (Twenty-three years previously, Prakash's father, the legendary Baba Amte, had received the same award.)

Our newspapers (mostly) carried the announcement prominently and the weekly magazines published some positive features. But it's Tehelka that put Prakash Amte and his achievement on the cover (August 23, 2009) and it's Tehelka that has devoted the most space to the Amtes and their super-human efforts to help some of the most under-privileged of India's under-privileged people.

The magazine also has some splendid photographs (the online edition has very few): pictures showing the work done for the Madia Gond tribals of Maharashtra; pictures that speak of the sacrifices that have been made willingly, of the tough lives that have been led, again willingly.

Prakash Amte with an orphaned leopard in his backyard.

In the magazine, there are also photographs of Prakash Amte with his menagerie of orphaned animals, one showing him frolicking with a hyena with his grandson by his side, another showing him holding a baby monkey.

Here is a telling extract:

Ask him [Prakash Amte] what kept him in Hemalkasa through all this, though, and his response is instinctive and quick. "Manda's companionship — and the people's faith. That is what keeps us here. I have never seen such tolerance for pain. They come to us from a radius of 200 kilometres, we try to help them. Sometimes when I cut their wounds, the pus sprays onto my face and body. We never had gloves but it never mattered. When I watch their wounds — black, poisonous, foul-smelling — slowly turning red and healthy, that is my reward."

And here is another:

A severely wheezing bare-breasted woman is slowly stopping to gasp. She had just raced past us at the river, perched on a motorcycle between two men. Now the generator has been put on, a nebuliser is breathing gentle breath into her.

In the open air shed a short distance away, Prakash and Manda dress an amputated foot. The patient — an old man — lies stoically on the hard floor; he does not want a hospital bed. A wood-fire smoulders near him. A few feet away, a ragged skeleton is recovering from tuberculosis next to a toddler with kidney failure. 

All of this would make an urban doctor faint, but in truth, it speaks of daily miracles over three decades. It speaks of lives saved without elaborate investigations or prophylactics. It speaks of urgent operations under torchlight, of emergency deliveries and complicated cataracts executed on the run with a textbook on the side.

And an excerpt that speaks of Prakash Amte's strength of character:

Four years ago, while showing a poisonous Russel's viper to a visitor, Prakash was momentarily distracted and it emptied its fangs into him. But nothing can perturb him, his children vouch: he always exudes a quiet, unflappable dignity in a crisis. He is the shade tree you take for granted, until it is cut down.

Now, instead of flinging the snake from him, he gently extricated it and put it back in its cage before walking towards Manda in the clinic. She, always the fit partner, the shadow he leans on, did not panic either.

On his way back to the house while she got the antidote ready, Prakash collapsed at the threshold and his blood pressure dropped to zero. A long hot drive took him to Nagpur; ten excruciating days followed. His body swelled like a balloon, blistering in a hundred places. Not once did he complain.

Both husband and wife — still visibly and palpably in love — have this understated sturdiness about them. Not for them the glib sentence, the worldly pitch. Instead, you sense the close workings of Nature in them, a kind of wise acceptance born of daily grappling with life and death.

"One good thing came of the snake bite," Gopal Phadnis, headmaster and co-traveller at Hemalkasa, laughs. "Prakash was never a talker, but he began to talk more after the bite."

To read the full story go to "The Quiet Soldiers of Compassion".

Better still, try to get hold of a copy of the magazine so that you can experience what I experienced when I read this awe-inspiring story: My head began spinning, I felt the hairs on my arms rising, and I kept asking myself: Are the Amtes flesh-and-blood like the rest of us?

CHARITY BEGINS AT HOME: Prakash Amte and his family in Hemalkasa.

After reading this article again today, March 21, 2012, I must reiterate that this heartwarming feature by Shoma Chaudhury remains the most inspirational story I have read in years.

• Photos courtesy: Tehelka

• Also read: "Fresh ideas, fresh writing" (on the vibrant quality of writing in the incomparable Tehelka. And also in the newish Open and in the relaunched Caravan).

William Zinsser: My idol, my hero, my guru

In all the time that I have spent scouring the web for articles that will help us Indians improve our English writing skills, I have not come across any ONE piece that does the job satisfactorily. There are many brilliant how-to's covering different aspects of writing (a few of them have been written about on this blog) but ONE article that discusses all the important aspects? Nah, it does not exist.

At least that's what I thought.

Then I stumbled upon "Writing English as a Second Language" by William Zinsser on The American Scholar website.

Both the headline and the byline convinced me I had hit the jackpot. English is, after all, a second language to most (all?) of us and writing in English does not come easy to many (most?) of us. Who better to explain the intricacies of English and smoothen our path to becoming better writers than the Master himself?

William Zinsser has been my idol since I first read On Writing Well, the definitive guide to writing non-fiction that I recommend to all my students. It's a book you cannot afford not to read even if the writing you have to do at work is minimal. If, however, you are a journalist or work in corporate communications or advertising or PR, this is one of the books you should own so that you can grab hold of it to read every now and then, after you have already devoured it whole once.

"Writing English as a Second Language" is a transcript of a talk given by Zinsser to the incoming international students at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism some three years ago. He begins with a question: What is good writing? His short answer: It depends on what country you’re from.

Zinsser explains why, for instance, Arabic, which is decorative and ornamental, and Spanish, with its long sentences and melodious long nouns, would be the ruin of any journalist trying to write good English. And he then launches into the most fascinating discourse on writing in English that I have ever "heard".

LORD OF THE LANGUAGE: WILLIAM ZINSSER

Zinsser asks: "So what is good English — the language we’re here today to wrestle with?"

And he answers:

It’s not as musical as Spanish, or Italian, or French, or as ornamental as Arabic, or as vibrant as some of your native languages. But I’m hopelessly in love with English because it’s plain and it’s strong. It has a huge vocabulary of words that have precise shades of meaning; there’s no subject, however technical or complex, that can’t be made clear to any reader in good English — if it’s used right. Unfortunately, there are many ways of using it wrong. Those are the damaging habits I want to warn you about today.

Those damaging habits Zinsser is referring to are the habits we have picked up in school and college, habits we may not even be aware of but habits we need to get rid of if we want to become better writers. And the first step in the process involves learning a little bit of the history of English. No, this is not the equivalent of a dull classroom lecture; Zinsser makes it so interesting with modern-day examples and his writing is so fluid that you will read, absorb, and appreciate what he has to say about the Latin and Anglo-Saxon roots of the language.

Zinsser also gives examples of sentences written in bad English and teaches us how to transform them into good English. He provides us with some simple writing tools. And he then outlines, and elaborates on, his four principles of writing good English: Clarity, Simplicity, Brevity, and Humanity.

Read the complete text of William Zinsser's extraordinary speech here: "Writing English as a Second Language".

Now you know why I idolise this great man.

• ALSO READ: "A birthday tribute to the best teacher of writing ever"

• ADDITIONAL READING: "If you're serious about improving your writing skills..."

• EXTERNAL READING: "20 Strategies for Writing in Plain Language", by Mark Nichol, the editor of the very useful Daily Writing Tips blog 

THE GURU
OF WRITING GURUS
IS NO MORE
UPDATE (May 23, 2015): William Zinsser died in New York City on May 12 at the age of 92. Lavish tributes have been paid to him by a host of newspaper and magazine writers:

Corby Kummer in The Atlantic: Remembering Bill Zinsser

Mark Singer in The New Yorker: Tuesdays with Zinsser

The American Scholar, for whom William Zinsser wrote a popular blog, republished one of his seminal pieces: How to Write a Memoir

Laura Fraser in Al Jazeera America: William Zinsser, the man who taught a nation to write well

Douglas Martin in The New York Times: A book that editors and teachers encouraged writers to reread annually

 THE RIGHT STUFF: Commits student Priya Jain, Class of 2017, right after the university exams ended on May 30, 2016, came to tell me that she had bought On Writing Well on my recommendation because she realised during her recent industry internship that good writing skills will be crucial to her success as a media professional.

Nearly 100 fantastic pieces of journalism

Journalists and media students everywhere owe Conor Friedersdorf, a staff writer at The Atlantic, a HUGE debt of gratitude.

Friedersdorf, who is the founding editor of The Best of Journalism, a newsletter devoted to exceptional non-fiction (you can subscribe for $1.99 a month), kept his own running list of exceptional non-fiction throughout 2010 for the newsletter. The result, he says, is his third annual Best Of Journalism Awards — "America's only non-fiction writing prize judged entirely by me."

Friedersdorf says he couldn't read every worthy piece published in 2010, "but everything that follows is worthy of wider attention". And I agree wholeheartedly. Just take a look at his list — NEARLY 100 FANTASTIC PIECES OF JOURNALISM — which he has divided into ten categories:

1. The Art of Storytelling

2. Crime & Punishment

3.Sports & Leisure
4. Science, Religion & Human Nature
5. On Birth, Death, & The Afterlife
6. Multimedia Matters
7. The Innovative & Creative
8. Food
9. Profiles
10. This Is A Business

There is also a sub-category: Bloggers of the Year.

I can think of no better way to spend a day productively than by diving deep into this treasure trove.

Here are my favourites (what are yours?):

• MOTHER JONES

Inside India's Rent-A-Womb Business by Scott Carney

Wealthy Western couples are flocking to India, where the medical tourism industry is offering the best deal on a vital commodity: wombs.

-----

• THE ATLANTIC

Letting Go of My Father by Jonathan Rauch

"The author found himself utterly unprepared for one of life's near certainties — the decline of a parent." And then he discovered that he wasn't alone.

-----

• THE NEW YORKER

Letting Go by Atul Gawande

"Modern medicine is good at staving off death with aggressive interventions — and bad at knowing when to focus, instead, on improving the days that terminal patients have left."

-----

• THE PARIS REVIEW

The Art Of Non-Fiction Number 3: John McPhee by Peter Hessler

The aged master, arguably the world's best non-fiction writer, reflects on his career and his method.

-----

• THE AWL

Seven Years As A Freelance Writer by Richard Morgan

An insider's look at what it's like to write for glossy magazines. You'll envy and pity the writer by the end.

-----

• ESQUIRE

Roger Ebert: The Essential Man by Chris Jones

The defining portrait of America's most famous movie critic, the cancer that cost him his jaw, and the unexpected turn his career has taken after all these years.

• Thank you, Nilofer D'Souza (Class of 2009), for sending me the link.

• In his introduction to the list, Conor Friedersdorf refers to Byliner, "a promising new site dedicated to publishing and sharing feature-length nonfiction", where his annual awards dating back to 2008 are soon going to have a permanent home. I checked it out — and my mouth began watering... again. What an amazing site! Byliner's tagline reads "Discover & discuss great reads by great writers". How apt! Check out Byliner today.

UPDATE (July 24, 2016): I discovered just now that last year Conor Friedersdorf had followed up the list discussed above with "Roughly 100 Fantastic Pieces of Journalism", which was published in The Atlantic on July 23, 2015. Read this new list in its entirety here.

If you find writing hard — if you have ever been put off writing — you must read this

Stephen Fry is the impossibly accomplished actor and writer who makes both acting and writing look easy.

Fry, who played the brainy Jeeves in the Jeeves & Wooster television series and who has also written some very funny books, says, however, that writing is hard work; he always heaves a sigh of relief when he has managed to meet a deadline. He also quotes Thomas Mann on the subject: “A writer,” said Mann, “is a person for whom writing is more difficult than for other people.”

Fry began writing seriously — poetry, stories, and novels — when he was about thirteen. But the novels were always abandoned, usually half way through the second chapter. Fry writes: "It took my friend Douglas Adams [author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy] to encourage me to go further and he did this by pointing out that the reason I had never managed to finish a novel was that I had never properly understood how difficult, how ragingly and absurdly difficult, it is to do. 'It is almost impossibly hard,' he told me. 'It is supposed to be. But once you truly understand how difficult it is,' he added, with signature paradoxicality, 'it all becomes a lot easier.'"

Fry then offers encouragement to aspiring writers:

If any of you out there have ever been put off writing it might well be because you found it so insanely hard and therefore, like me, gave up and abandoned your masterworks early, regretfully assuming that you weren’t cut from the right cloth, that it must come more easily to true, natural-born writers. Perhaps you can start again now, in the knowledge that since the whole experience was so grindingly horrible you might be the real thing after all.

Of course finding it difficult and managing to complete are just the first stages. They are what earn you the uniform and the brass buttons, as it were. They don’t guarantee that what you complete is any good, or even readable. That is quite a different kettle of wax, a whole other ball of fish.

Read the instructive post in its entirety here: "Emerging into the Light".

• Time magazine commissioned Stephen Fry to go to Apple headquarters and write about the iPad back in April 2010 when the iPad was about to make its debut. Reading the article Fry turned in provides a unique insight into why Apple is today the world's most valuable company in the world by market capitalisation:

When I eventually got my hands on [an iPad], I discovered that one doesn't relate to it as a "tool"; the experience is closer to one's relationship with a person or an animal.

I know how weird that sounds. But consider for a moment. We are human beings; our first responses to anything are dominated not by calculations but by feelings. What Ive and his team understand is that if you have an object in your pocket or hand for hours every day, then your relationship with it is profound, human and emotional. Apple's success has been founded on consumer products that address this side of us: their products make users smile as they reach forward to manipulate, touch, fondle, slide, tweak, pinch, prod and stroke.

Read the cover story here.

The fraud that was "Sybil"

Who hasn't read or heard of "Sybil"? When I was in college back in Mumbai (this was in the late Seventies), the book had many avid fans who were apparently fascinated by this harrowing story of a young woman with 16 — that's right, 16 — different personalities.

There was also a 1976 drama film, based on the book, which starred Sally Field as "Sybil". It was aired that year as a made-for-television miniseries.

And there was a remake in 2007.


Two years later, in September 2009, Commitscion Madhura Chakravarty wrote a feature about the book in the college newspaper (see below).

Under the rubric "Books You Should've Read", Madhura discussed a few aspects of the book that made it a compelling read. "Sybil's ... dismantled identity is a result of severe mental and child sexual abuse by her schizophrenic mother," Madhura wrote. "... her narrow-minded, bigoted, religious family won't let her see a doctor."

And then Madhura paid tribute to author Flora Rheta Schreiber's skill in narrating Sybil's story: "...it is Schreiber's gripping style of narrative, complex plot, and exploration of human vulnerability that makes this book such a compelling read."

Little did Madhura, or I or anyone else for that matter, know that the whole "Sybil" tale was an elaborate fraud committed by three women: the psychiatrist who was treating "Sybil, "Sybil" herself, and a writer who appeared to be only too willing to believe everything she was told by the duo.

I was stunned at what I discovered in Sybil Exposed. If you have read or heard of "Sybil", you will be aghast, too.

• Want to know more? Read "Memory, lies and therapy (How three women fabricated the most famous case of multiple personality disorder and damaged thousands of lives)" by Laura Miller on Salon.