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Sunday, April 6, 2014

Why I absolutely loved "Queen" (a Facebook conversation)... and Chetan Bhagat's column in today's ToI

Ramesh Prabhu
March 26
A COMING-OF-RAGE MOVIE LIKE NO OTHER

If more Hindi films are made like "Queen", I'll watch every one of them. I swear. Mummy-daddy ka promise.


AND HERE'S CHETAN BHAGAT WRITING ABOUT QUEEN IN TODAY'S TIMES OF INDIA:
There are hidden messages in the movie, perhaps more than the makers even intended. One, we have trapped our women. We think we care for them, but we suffocate them in the name of security, safety, morality, tradition or culture. We are not comfortable with an Indian woman expressing herself. A woman has to be a good daughter, sister or wife. It isn’t enough for her to be just, well, herself. In some ways, they endure disguised slavery. In the civilized, developed world, where women have choices, they do not choose to live like this. Every girl in India deserves a journey of self-discovery like Rani. 

Well said, Mr Bhagat! Bravo!
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How bad is my OCD? Judge for yourself (a Facebook conversation)

Ramesh Prabhu
April 1
HOW BAD IS MY OCD?

I don't like the idea of the daily help coming into a messy home, so I clear up the crumbs from the kitchen counter after breakfast, use a brush and pan to sweep away any stray detritus on the floor, wash (and, if possible, put away) the dishes left overnight in the sink.

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Saturday, April 5, 2014

If you think some things are indescribable...

...Harold Ross, the legendary founder-editor of The New Yorker, would have told you that you've got another think coming. Read this passage from an absolutely brilliant, and brilliantly funny, book by Brendan Gill, who worked with the iconic magazine for 60 years:

I recall on one occasion writing a "Talk" piece [for the magazine's "Talk of the Town" section] about a man who had invented a toy that became, as toys will, a seven days' wonder; it was called a Zoomerang and it sprang into existence as a result of its inventor's having noticed that a certain kind of laminated paper used in adding machines and the like had a tendency, when stretched out and then released, to curl back tightly upon itself. Well! The toy itself was so unimportant and at the same time so difficult to give an accurate account of in words that for what must have been the first time in my career, and was certainly the last, I fell back upon applying to it that lamest of adjectives, "indescribable".


 Ross was on the phone the moment he got my copy.

 "Nothing is indescribable, Gill," he barked. (Ross had no difficulty turning "Gill" into a bark; moreover, he gave it the same ring of contempt that he gave the "god" in "goddamn".) "Send that damn toy down to me. I'll show you."

 And so there appeared in the magazine a "Talk" piece in which Ross demonstrated to his satisfaction the triumph of the prose of reason, however lumpy, over the prose of intuition, however graceful.

 The piece began: "The hottest novelty in the toy line this season is an article called the Zoomerang, which consists of a two-and-a-half-inch-wide strip of tough, resilient red, white, and blue paper attached to and wound around one end of a stick somewhat smaller than a pencil. Using the other end of the stick as a handle, you flick the wrist or flail the arm and whip the coil outward in an elongated spiral for a distance of up to eight feet. The paper then springs back into place (if all goes well and it doesn't get tangled up)."

 The anticlimactic parenthesis is characteristic of Ross. It effectively drains much of the looked-for playfulness out of the piece by its earnest truth-telling. What had happened was that Ross, by then a grumpy man in his late fifties and one not regularly given to playing with toys, had felt obliged to experiment with the Zoomerang and had found that it didn't always work properly.

 Who cared?

 Why, Ross cared, of course. He would no sooner have withheld from the readers of The New Yorker the fact that the Zoomerang occasionally failed to recoil than he would have given them an inaccurate measurement of the height of the Washington Monument.

 Ross clung to facts as a shipwrecked man clings to a spar.

And there you have it: Nothing is indescribable, not even the endeavours of a magazine editor who is attempting to show the ropes to an underling, as proved by that masterly passage by Brendan Gill (what an eloquent phrase Gill has given us: "the triumph of the prose of reason, however lumpy, over the prose of intuition, however graceful"). It is no wonder, then, that Here at The New Yorker is one of my prized possessions.
  • Many books have been written about Harold Ross. Here's a review of one of the best: "Genius in Disguise".
ALSO READ: In the New Yorker — "Citizens Jain: Why India's newspaper industry is thriving" and "The amazing books that made me fall in love with journalism all over again-1"
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Tuesday, April 1, 2014

How to respond to crotchety language critics

"Where are you coming from?"

"I won't tell you because you ended that sentence with a preposition."

"OK. Where are you coming from, you pompous ass?"

 — From a fascinating book, The Glamour of Grammar, by Roy Peter Clark
  • WANT TO WATCH A GRAMMAR NAZI IN ACTION? HERE YOU GO:



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Monday, March 31, 2014

Insanely funny, and still able to drive us crazy with laughter after all these years

  • batty
  • bizarre
  • crazy
  • deranged
  • idiotic
  • irrational
  • nuts
  • preposterous, etc. etc.
There may be a surfeit of synonyms for mad in any decent thesaurus, but I doubt they will be anywhere near enough to describe the contents of MAD, the magazine many of us old fogies first discovered as teenagers.

Today, having recently stumbled upon the MAD website, I am back to chortling over the antics of Don Martin's seriously unhinged characters...
http://www.madmagazine.com/blog/2014/03/21/don-martin-one-day-in-a-run-down-shack

...chuckling over the ding-dong battles of the screwy (and mute) spies created by Cuban refugee Antonio Prohías in 1960 and currently being drawn by Peter Kuper...


...cackling at the frenzied stunts of Sergio Aragonés's "Shadows"...


...marvelling at Dave Berg's comedic genius...


Oh, there's more, so much more to enjoy on Classic MAD!
  • ADDITIONAL READING:
Remembering MAD Magazine’s ‘Maddest Artist’ Don Martin On The 13th Anniversary Of His Passing

The 10 Greatest MAD Magazine Covers
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Sunday, March 30, 2014

How's this for an incomparable example of the famed British stiff upper lip?

The original idea behind Lunch with the FT was to rediscover the art of conversation in a convivial setting. Good food was essential, preferably washed down with a decent bottle of wine to elicit insights and the occasional indiscretion.

The combination led to some memorable encounters, notably a liquid lunch of biblical proportions at the Cafe Royal between Nigel Spivey, a Cambridge don and freelance FT writer, and Gavin Ewart, the 79-year-old poet.

The next day, Spivey received a call from Mrs Ewart, saying that her husband had returned home happier than she had seen him in a long time. "The second [thing] — and you are not to feel bad about this — is that he died this morning."
— Financial Times editor Lionel Barber, in his introduction to

Talk about stiff upper lip!
  • A copy of this marvellous book has been placed in the Commits library.
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