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Sunday, April 6, 2014

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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Saturday, March 29, 2014

If you want to become a journalist, the least you can do is read newspapers and magazines. Here's why:

I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that I must "understand" why young people are reluctant to read newspapers and magazines. (There's one theory about this phenomenon that you can read here; and here's another, this one written by a journalism teacher.)

 But if some young people say they want to become journalists, and they refuse to read newspapers and magazines — well, that I don't understand (no need for finger quotes here).

In the first place, if they are serious about journalism, they need to be aware of what's going on in the world around them.

Second, they need to read closely so as to absorb writing styles.

Third, only by reading newspapers and magazines will they understand the issues that affect readers; this is how they will develop empathy for readers, which will help them ask the right questions when they are doing their own research as journalists. This applies also to those who say they want to become television journalists, who, by the way, often get good story ideas from reading newspapers.

(And if you want to be a good television journalist, you will have to understand the "how" and the "why" of a story before you report the "who, what, when". It is newspapers and magazines, more than TV news programmes, that help us understand the "how" and the "why", in addition to helping us answer two other key questions: "So what?" and "What next?" I certainly can't see "news alerts" on our smartphones going beyond answering "who, what, when".)

There is another important factor to consider: If they don't read what other journalists are writing, how can they expect people to read what they themselves will be writing when they become journalists?

Here's something else that should really give them pause for thought: If they and people from their generation do not read newspapers and magazines, then the future of these publications is bleak. Falling sales will result in falling advertising revenue. Where will newspapers and magazines get the money for news-gathering, which is a very expensive process?

And here's the kicker: Where will newspapers and magazines get the money to pay THEM?
OTHER MUST-READS:
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Tuesday, March 25, 2014

EXPLODING STEREOTYPES: A Commits alumna (and mother of a two-year-old boy) shows the way...

...in exactly 454 words. This is classy writing on a touchy subject.
SANAA A'ESHA
Classy because she does this with such style that she stands out as an unusual young person in a world where there are few standouts.

Touchy because too many people believe in stereotyping and not enough people believe, like she does, in exploding stereotypes.

But classy or not, touchy or not, what she has written deserves much wider coverage and so...

GIRLS
By Sanaa A'esha
Class of 2008

There are so many people talking about bringing up girls. Raise them strong, raise them independent, teach them to play with trucks, don’t read fairy tales to them, throw away the Barbies, learn to throw a punch.
‘You don’t need rescuing, my baby.’
‘You can be anything you want to be.’
‘My girl is not at all girly, she loves her carpenter tools.’
‘How dare he buy her a kitchen set!’
Well, I want that abandoned kitchen set. For my son. I think it’s wonderful that he loves the world of food. How he loves his cousin's shiny shoes and wants the butterfly hair clip she has on her pretty head. 
WANT TO WATCH THE VIDEO? CLICK HERE.

‘No, don’t take that. That’s for girls!’
‘Why are you wearing a clip on your head? Are you a girl?’
‘But that’s pink!’
‘No, put Dora down. Here’s The Hulk!’

I want people to talk about raising sons as daughters. To stop saying ‘be a man’. To let them shriek with the girls, and want their purple tutus. They are going to be chasing skirts in a few years, why not wear one now?

My boy loves to wear pretty beaded chains. And I am always asked if I wanted a girl and if that’s why I let him wear the pink beaded chain for as long as he wants to. Yes, that’s exactly what it is, you genius waste of space. I wonder if mums of daughters are asked the same when their babies are in a pair of jeans instead of frilly skirts playing in the dirt with their trucks. 

Why wouldn’t you let your son cry when he gets hurt? Why is hanging on to mamma’s leg such a bad thing for a boy? I am all for fist fights and dirt puddles, but is it so bad that he let the girl beat him up in school? He has probably already figured out that’s how you get the girls.

I want him to be tough and strong and be a rockstar at every sport. I want him to be able to charm his way into everything he wants. But I also want him to know it’s okay to cry when he gets slapped for being an ass. It’s okay to wear an apron and cook that special meal to impress someone. To know it’s okay to be sensitive to all the drama hormones bring to this world. 

He’s only 2. And he doesn’t realise he’s being judged for a string of pink beads. But it works out, because at all of 2 he can cook and eat his silly version of peas and buttons rice in a real rice cooker, because nobody let me buy him that darned kitchen set.

----------------------

“THE COOLEST SUPERMOM I KNOW”
Here are some of the comments Sanaa's post attracted on Facebook last week:
  • ARCHANA ABRAHAM: I don't have a son but I'd like to believe that if I did, I'd have the same attitude towards raising him as my firecracker of a friend Sanaa A'esha.
  • ASHWIN SHANKER: Very well-written. I was thinking on the same lines as well... I always wonder: Why can't boys cry? Why is it cowardly to run away when you sense danger? Why can't men who cook be seen as 'cool'?
  • ELVINA DAVIS: Banishing gender stereotypes by encouraging one sparkly clip at a time. Penned by my friend and the coolest supermom I know, Sanaa A'esha.
  • DAVID D'SOUZA: A mother's angst crafted well.
  • PAROMITA CHAKRABORTY: So brilliantly written... I agree with every word. Raising girls to be strong and 'manly' will not help... Unless boys are taught to stop acting tough. Sharing.
  • MRIDULA SWAMY: It's all this and more... I never realised the intense pressure I'd face bringing up two boys... or having to explain and justify your actions to everyone. I was a tomboy and did nothing "girly" except Bharatanatyam in my childhood, and no one found that odd 30 years ago. But even now there are such archaic notions around raising boys.
  • ANN THOMAS: My son loves pink, chooses a Barbie brush over the others and wants to style his sister's doll. I know that look of "What are you doing to the child?" so well. Oh, and I did get him a kitchen set when he was two and if he asks me for a Barbie, I will if I could. Cheers to you!
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