नंगा फ़कीर

Inexistentialism

2012-01-26T13:58:00.000-08:00

NF's often been led to wonder if the existentialists' claim of finding subjective meaning in a meaningless, objective universe via love or religion or music or art or whatever isn't the classic case of the placebo effect's surprising efficacy even when its being placebo is known to the subjects.

The Reader

2012-01-24T05:18:00.000-08:00

Books read in the last year: January '11 to January '12

1) Sacred Games (Vikram Chandra)
2) The Black Swan (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
3) मंटो की विश्वप्रसिद्ध कहानियां (सआदत हसन मंटो) (Manto's World Famous Stories (Saadat Hasan Manto))
4) Through the Glass Darkly (Donna Leon)
5) The Big Short (Michael Lewis)
6) Our Band Could be Your Life (Michael Azerrad)
7) 2666 (Roberto Bolaño)
8) The Overcoat and Other Short Stories (Nikolai Gogol)
9) Death in Venice (Thomas Mann)
10) The Immoralist (Andre Gide)
11) Between Parantheses (Roberto Bolaño)
12) Blood Meridian (Cormac McCarthy)
13) Liar's Poker (Michael Lewis)
14) River of Gods (Ian McDonald)
15) No Longer Human (Osamu Dazai)
16) The Windup Girl (Paolo Bacigalupi)
17) What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (Haruki Murakmai)
18) सतह से उठता आदमी (मुक्तिबोध) (Man Rising From the Surface (Muktibodh))
19) Sputnik Sweetheart (Haruki Murakami)
20) Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (Haruki Murakami)
21) Demons (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) (reread)
22) The Blue Bedspread (Raj Kamal Jha)
23) The Third Reich (Roberto Bolaño)

Werner Herzog will eat his shoe

2011-12-25T16:07:00.000-08:00

It is hard to tell when genius assumes the mantle of madness. In the world of films, the kind is exemplified by the Kubricks and the Herzogs - genius madmen in the wake of whose creative destruction we all cower spellbound.

Welcome the new (and may we suggest 'the looniest') example - Ilya Khrzhanovsky.

NF has been a fan of Ilya for a couple of years now. His scorchingly original film - 4 - was mindfuckingly brilliant. (For the uninitiated NF sometimes describes the film as Linklater-meets-Tarkovsky-meets-György Pálfi-meets-Lynch. Though this should not let you think he's a linear combination - instead, his vision is as unique as these directors' when they were coming of age.)

Witness the fabulous article in GQ on his latest film that he's been working on since '06 - Dau - based on the life of the genius physicist Lev Landau. It's an account of genius, madness, obsession, pedantry; and a social experiment on such a grand scale that it relegates Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo to small time tinkerers of the human psyche.

Personally for Nanga Fakir, this is the most anticipated film of all time. All hail Ilya!

It's that time of the year

2011-12-24T01:54:00.001-08:00

After ten back to back episodes of The Dewarists you are left with the impression of having seen a very well made, slick series. It was heartening to see so many of NF's favorite musicians featured on one program - from Indian Ocean, Mohit Chauhan (of that legendary Silk Route), Rabbi and Shubha Mudgal to Midival Punditz and the Raghu Dixit Project. Some of the collaborations come off well enough; and that's more than what you can ask for. Personally, Papon (of that fabulous East India Company fame - nods to Somnath) and Swaraatma come off as minor discoveries of sorts, as NF promises himself to pay more attention to their music in the future.

The otherwise topnotch series has some irritating moments in between when the hostess Monica Dogra (of Dhobi Ghat fame) is compelled to add her private commentaries on the nature of music and life in general in the most cliche-ridden voiceovers ever (though truth be told, she's not the only one guilty of this misdemeanor). One comes off of this series strongly suspecting Monica Dogra of being a hack - albeit a very cute one.

Thumbs up overall though!

...

It's that time of the year again when Nanga Fakir visits home. All those brave souls who haven't quite forgotten him and can spare some precious, precious time are enjoined to visit Lucknow any time during the first two weeks of January.

Wittgenstein's mistress

2011-11-16T12:25:00.001-08:00

Does modern Mathematics, with its empahsis on the trappings of austere, formalist (read axiomatic) conventions, in defining things on the basis of their operational roles (e.g., a 'line' is that which minimizes distances between points (lines are geodesics on manifolds); an 'open set' is that which is closed under arbitrary unions and finite intersections etc.) carry (consciously or otherwise) a Wittgensteinian baggage in being heavily influenced by his concept "meaning is use"?; or did the Bourbaki just discover the notion independently?

Weekend readings: part 2

2011-11-12T21:19:00.001-08:00

It's no secret that Nanga Fakir is an avowed fan of Roberto Bolaño (see his fanboy review of 2666 here) and that he finds his books (in particular 2666 and The Savage Detectives) drop dead beautiful. The latest work of Bolaño to have passed through NF's hands is his collection of non-fiction writing - mostly reviews and literary essays - Between Parantheses.

The literary terrorist doesn't disappoint. (As a brief aside, let's note here that Bolaño was the bête noire of the Mexican lit establishment - a painfully bright poet gone rogue, terrorizing all the others who in his opinion were 'unworthy' of donning the mantle of a poet - in a manner not-so-dissimilar as that in which SatyaVrat (that rogue street-fighting philosopher who made people sit back and become self conscious) would terrorize those around him for not thinking things hard enough and thoroughly enough; for their bourgeois tastes and their intellectual timidity (q.v. his famous interrogation/grilling of that 'academic' philosopher Sundar Sarukkai of NIAS). Bolaño and his guerrilla style literary movement - infrarealistas (visceral realists) - would haunt the Mexican literary establishment by storming poetry reading sessions and hijacking events with their own avant garde poetry recital ceremonies. The writer Carmen Boullosa (who later became a good friend of Bolaño) spoke of her fear of approaching the lectern lest there should be visceral realists lurking around.) His accounts are full of brilliant observations - mostly on the nature of literature and the role of the writer/poet as (anti)hero and his reviews are direct, honest and interspersed with nuggets of deep insights. (His opinions, often very strong, on the current status of literature in the Spanish language and on the current writers' from Latin America's post boom phase were hard to evaluate independently though.)

Bolaño's genius is not just in his writing (which is obscenely pretty) but also in his stories of vagabond writers traveling across deserts and towns and cities; disappearing in the unknown, leaving behind vague memories of mercurial temperaments, to be recalled by lonely friends or old girlfriends during static, stationary, painfully long, never ending afternoons when wallowing in nostalgia is the least boring thing to do. His accounts of obsessive writers compulsively scrawling poems under the spell of an imperative creative burst, soaking in the pleasant smell of a decaying bookstore; his punk do-it-yourself attitude to avant garde literature (which literature, he famously declared “is the product of a strange rain of blood, sweat, semen, and tears. Especially sweat and tears, although I am sure Bertoni would add semen”); his championing of Mario Santiago - his blood brother on whom the lead character Ulises Lima of The Savage Detectives is based; his wonderful, though fanboyish reviews of the works of Borges, Nicanor Parra, Cortazar, Vila-Matas, Twain, Philip K Dick and Vargas Llosa; and excoriating, biting assaults on those who're not 'real' writers (he reserves the worst for Isabel Allende) makes you want to abandon everything you're supposed to be doing and plunge into the punk underground of literature.

If, however, you've not read him directly, you've not experience what's it like to've read Bolaño. So here's one of the many breathtaking passages from Between Parentheses (you're welcome!):

...A right wing young woman sets up a house with a right wing American, or marries him. The two of them aren't just young, they're good looking and proud. He's a DINA (National Intelligence Directorate) agent, possibly also a CIA agent. She loves literature and loves her man. They rent or buy a big house in the suburbs of Santiago. In the cellars of this house the American interrogates and tortures political prisoners who are later moved on to other detention centers or added to the list of disappeared. She writes and she attends writing workshops. In those days I suppose, there weren't as many workshops as there are today, but there were some. In Santiago people have become accustomed to the curfew. And at nights there aren't many places to go for fun, and the winters are long. So every weekend or every few nights she has a group of writers over to her house. It isn't a set group. The guests vary. Some come only once, others several times. At the house there's always whiskey, good wine, and sometimes the gatherings turn into dinners. One night a guest goes looking for the bathroom and gets lost. It's his first time there and he doesn't know the house. Probably he's a bit tipsy or maybe he's already lost in the alcoholic haze of the weekend. In any case, instead of turning right, he turns left and then he goes down a flight of stairs that he shouldn't have gone down and he opens a door at the end of a long hallway, long like Chile. The room is dark but even so he can make out a bound figure, in pain or possibly drugged. He knows what he's seeing. He closes the door and returns to the party. He isn't drunk anymore. He's terrified, but he doesn't say anything. "Surely the people who attended those post-coup culturally stilted soirées will remember the annoyance of the flickering current that made lamps blink and the music stop, interrupting the dancing. Just as surely, they knew nothing about another parallel dance, in which the jab of the prod tensed the tortured back of the knee in a voltaic arc. They might not have heard the cries over the blare of the disco, which was all the rage back then," says Pedro Lemebel. Whatever the case, the writers leave. But they come back for the next party. She, the hostess, even wins a short story or poetry prize from the only literary journal still in existence back then, a left-wing journal.

And this is how the literature of every country is built.

Weekend readings: part 1

2011-11-11T14:28:00.001-08:00

Cormac McCarthy's vision is uncompromisingly bleak, apocalyptic and über ultraviolent. Nanga Fakir finished reading Blood Meridian over the weekend and was struck by the fondness McCarthy has for savage violence, gore and brooding, dark storylines that push the characters to the limits and forces them to come to terms with their animal instincts. Having read The Road a couple of years earlier and having heard mountains of praise heaped upon the writer (Harold Bloom (who Nanga Fakir read somewhere, can read 400 pages an hour!) reckons McCarthy, along with Pynchon, DeLillo and Roth is among the great Big Four American writers now) Nanga Fakir settled on Blood Meridian which, apparently is not only on the Time's list of hundred greatest novels but was also one of David Foster Wallace's favorites and his hushed tone in interviews whenever the book's name came up, compelled NF to pick the tome up. Another reason why the reclusive writer fascinated NF was his unusual style of not hanging out with fellow writers but instead staying in New Mexico's awesome Santa Fe Institute and preferring the company of scientists (for SatyaVrat, with whom NF discussed this idiosyncrasy, just this fact was sufficient to convince him to become an avowed fan of McCarthy from then on).

It's obvious that it's a deep, great book - you don't need an NF review for that. What however, is funny is that just like in The Road, NF had to force himself to read the book - which, given McCarthy's style of writing - terse, pithy, bone dry, compact, without quotation marks, commas or other such punctuations - makes NF's task way harder than usual. Reading McCarthy is like watching a Kurosawa period piece - not a riveting experience at all except for the "a-ha" moment at the end when the depth and vision of the creator overawes you. There were times when frankly, despite the awesome violence and obsession with apocalyptic imagery - a sufficient condition for NF to become a big fan - plodding through the book became work, a task in edification as opposed to fun and enjoyment.

So is Nanga Fakir going to read No Country for Old Men? You bet your ass he will! The "a-ha", somewhat cryptic endings are so worth the plod.

...

On a tangential, somewhat different note, the website Yelping with Cormac imagines Cormac McCarthy on a restaurant reviewing mission. The result is a brilliant, hilarious pastiche of the McCarthy style of writing. Here's a wonderful example:

Whole Foods Market
Noe Valley - San Francisco, CA
Cormac M. | Author | Lost in the chaparral, NM
Four stars.

The sheriff and the posse were now a block away and riding seven abreast rifles in hand and horses snorting and wildeyed. The outlaw dropped his pistol and stiffwalked into the parking lot of a grocery store. Around him young women in skintight sporting clothes stopped and stared.

The ground shook as the posse rode up on the parking lot entrance but the sheriff stopped his riders with a raised hand and sawed his palamino around sending the animal sidestepping like a showhorse into a newspaper box which fell over with a great cacophony. When the noise subsided the neighborhood and the parking lot were silent. The riders and the outlaw and the women frozen like actors in some gypsy roadshow.

A rider wearing an elaborate mustache and carrying a Winchester onehanded nudged his quarterhorse toward the sheriff. Hell he’s right there sheriff.

I know it. Im lookin at him same as you.

What are we waitin for then.

We caint touch him now deputy. They got their own way here.

The riders watched as the women left their station wagons and strollers and encircled the outlaw. As if some ancient instinct united them. Silent as wolves and staring intently at the broken man standing there. He saw his mistake and called out to the riders reaching toward them with his one good arm but was struck down with a savage blow from a rolled yoga mat.

Notes for a future film

2011-11-04T16:14:00.000-07:00

Omkara meets Stalker, in a near future Lucknow.

Long, Tarkovskian shots of dung heaps, urban waste, old city architecture, listless faces, the lawlessness in the anarcho-capitalistic Hindi heartland.

A Gulzar voiceover, a mish-mash of B&W and color photography, slo-mo porn and swoop down camerawork, deep focus lenses and a potpourri of khari boli-Awadhi-Bhojpuri dialect that's the lingua franca of the then Balkanized north India.

A Kumar Gandharva soundtrack with bits and pieces of Indian Ocean, My Bloody Valentine and Radiohead.

The atmospherics of Wong kar Wai, the minimalism of Kim ki Duk, the brutality of Park chan Wook, the effortless humor of Vishal Bharadwaj, the savage, savage intelligence of Tarantino.

The poetry of SatyaVrat.

Naseeruddin Shah, Om Puri, Pankaj Kapur. Tabu, Nandita Das, Tannishtha Chatterjee. Nanga Fakir in a cameo appearance.

Acid rains and impending calamities; rogue AIs and Turing police; decaying Mayawati statues with Hello Kitty handbags; high tech and low life.

...

The only person in the world who can pull it off is Somnath.

Notes on recent filmic impressions

2011-10-23T12:20:00.000-07:00

There are reviews and there are reviews. Many months ago Nanga Fakir came across a series of masterful one sentence reviews of famous films. Some examples that remain etched in NF's memory are those for The Lord of the Rings ("Midget destroys stolen property") and Lakshya ("Heart-broken boy climbs hill").

Thoroughly inspired and awakened from his own rather staid style of film reviewing, Nanga Fakir decided to use the same snarky, dismissive, one line review style from then on - only problem - his film viewing phase, unbeknownst to him, had sadly come to a full stop; and so the one line reviews never caught on and were never featured on his weblog.

A curious by-product of the end of the era of manic film watching was NF's resurgent interest in contemporary Hindi cinema of the commercial variety. Gone now were the days in which he would swear by the names of obscure, arthouse directors of the Far East (though occasional forays into the circuit were not ruled out: see for instance, his attendance of the 2011 Film Festival in which he saw on the big screen the ass kicking Tokyo Nagaremono by the fabulous Seijun Suzuki); instead, he eased into the role of the casual film goer and put his wannabe critic self to sleep.

So after mandatory viewings of recent Hindi films like Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara ('You won't get to live life twice') (one line review (OLR henceforth): debauched Indian nouveau riche spout new-age, hippie carpe diem slogans); Yeh Saali Zindagi ('This bitch of a life' (?)) (OLR: Sudhir Mishra thinks hurling random expletives at the audience makes him cool - well, it doesn't); That Girl in Yellow Boots (OLR: Nice try, but Anurag Kashyap is no Kim ki Duk); Shaitan ('Satan') (OLR: Pretentious, though very, very slick, especially the remixed Khoya khoya chaand song - slow motion porn at its best); Well Done Abba ('Well Done Dad') (OLR: Well done Shyam Benegal!); No one Killed Jessica (OLR: Rani Mukherji destroys an otherwise good film in a mere twenty last minutes); Road, Movie (OLR: Nice, refreshing, artsy - the Hindi Cinema Paradiso); Shor in the City ('Noise in the City') (OLR: Thoroughly enjoyable - much like the director duo's previous: 99), Nanga Fakir is, on the whole, very pleased overall with the recent upsurge in the quality of indie/semi-indie Hindi films coming out in recent times.

The Far East, though, to be honest, has not lost its allure. Hong Sang Soo, Lee Chang Dong, Sogo Ishii, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, Masaki Kobayashi, Johnnie To, Jia Zhangke remain thoroughly unexplored.

He enjoins friends, readers of the blog and fellow cinephiles to undertake this journey to the East Asian heartlands since he himself probably can't venture forth anymore. He's now stuck in the cow belts of his native Hindi hinterland, cocooned and ensconced in the warm, cozy underglow of a culture, country and language he has an instinctive understanding of. Let's not bemoan his final downfall and consequent relegation to the wastelands of laziness and stasis. Let's remember him fondly for what he used to be. He's done enough already.

Hasn't he?

अथ गुलज़ार उवाच

2011-10-22T16:49:00.000-07:00

दुपहरें ऐसी लगती हैं, बिना मोहरों के खाली खाने रखने हैं,

न कोई खेलने वाला है बाज़ी; और न कोई चाल चलता है.

...अथ सुस्ती उवाच:

थक सा गया हूँ,

नींद सी आ रही है.

The insulted and the ignored

2011-09-15T22:30:00.000-07:00

Courtesy the NITK Numbskulls' weblog - a fabulous and very funny open letter from a South Indian chick in Delhi to all its male denizens - a region dismissed by Shandy in his unique, regal, offhanded manner as "the city of boors" not so long ago.

Do read it.

...

The disdainful treatment of the macho, flamboyant, alpha male type in the letter makes Nanga Fakir's heart burn with envy. We poor UP-Biharis didn't even warrant wordy denunciations from those charming, graceful, dusky, snobbish, frighteningly literary, English-speaking South Indian beauty queens; our presence perhaps concealed, relegated to the background - much like the case of Kagerō Usui - that absolute paragon of non-descriptness (caution: Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei reference), our stature reduced to obscure objects of gentle amusement - a stark reminder of the wild, wild North - that ultimate embarrassment zone for the techie, shining India of the South and that ultimate white man's, nay, South Indian's burden.

If only our kind was denounced and derided - I am sure many a Northy UP-Biharis' Neanderthal throats would've choked with emotion.

Being hated is better than being ignored. No?

Djoker grinds the Grinder

2011-09-12T17:47:00.000-07:00

Was it not the greatest match in recent memory?

Sarcasm

2011-09-04T15:04:00.000-07:00

Scene: An oldish gentleman and Nanga Fakir in the Math Tower's new elevator.

<*NF eyes the copy of Dune in the hands of the gentleman with an amused expression*>

Old man: ...
NF: Great book.
Old man: Oh is it?
NF: You haven't read it?
Old man: No. My wife's reading it.
NF: <*tries to be clever*> She has good taste.
Old man: Ohh...that remark's so meaningful!
NF: ...<*?*>
Old man: ...given that it comes from a total stranger.
NF: ...
Old man: ...
NF: Are you British?

The host

2011-08-29T18:26:00.000-07:00

C: So you're Buddhist?
R: Yeah!
C: Wow!

<*eyes NF*>

C: Are you also one?
NF: <*faintly amused*> No!
C: Uhh...okay!

NF: Why this default assumption that one must be associated with a religion at all? It's almost like being accused of having bad taste - only third rate, lazy, somnambulant minds with no discernment at all can claim to be taken in by such stupid mumbo jumbo.

<*realizes the rant was not called for and that he's been terribly, terribly rude*>

NF: <*a little defensively*> You're not religious, are you?

<*now it's her turn to be faintly amused*>

C: Well...not really.
NF: Ahh...thank God!

...

Hosts shouldn't drink more than guests.

The man the machine redux

2011-08-22T14:44:00.000-07:00

The great Ted Chiang wins the 2011 Hugo Award (again!) for best novella - The Lifecycle of Software Objects. (News.)

Here's the link to the novella in full. (Link.)

...

Here is an old NF post in which he gushes over Ted Chiang's 'Stories of your life and others'.

Compliments and complements

2011-08-19T10:35:00.000-07:00

The greatest compliment ever - from Bryan Caplan, for Robin Hanson:

When the typical economist tells me about his latest research, my standard reaction is 'Eh, maybe.' Then I forget about it. When Robin Hanson tells me about his latest research, my standard reaction is 'No way! Impossible!'

Then I think about it for years.

...

To quote the eminently quotable Shandy, apparently "...news of happenings in my life have forestalled my own poor pen." (see AK's post about NF's visit). However, here's a complement (and compliment) to AK's account.

Yes, jokes told were retold and they remain as fresh as ever. The two obscurantists NF and AK (sidekick NF and hero StanMan in Subbu's never-attempted masterpiece graphic novel) traded in obscurities - AK rhapsodizing about Ramin Bahrani and Wilbur Sargunaraj and NF returning the favor by paying misty-eyed tributes to SatyaVrat, Shandy, Wittgenstein and David Dhavan. They also prostrated themselves before that master obscurantist - Ra - who swayed to the crescendoes of Godspeed You! Black Emperor back in the time when NF and AK were busy discovering the magical beauty of Backstreet Boys.

The streets of Stanford reverberated with sober laughter as NF poorly attempted to mimic Shandy in his post-'Fortress of Solitude' phase of life. The militant Californian hippie AK and the country-bumpkin-from-rural-hinterlands NF tried contacting SatyaVrat too, but had to settle with the memories he had graciously accorded them.

And so the nostalgic, happy weekend ended and AK and NF, chained to their cubicles and content with their neglegibles, lived happily ever after.

Schadenfreude!

2011-08-11T12:13:00.000-07:00

A very funny, longish, brilliant piece by the great Michael Lewis whose wonderful, excellent book The Big Short NF had such a great time reading. Heartily recommended!

Notwithstanding the threat of spoilers, the piece is about Germany's new status as the king of the EU; the heavy, thorny crown the new formed status necessitates Germany wear; the (in)famous Teutonic pedantry and superhuman levels of abidance by rules; the German culture's apparent Victorian hypocricy and fascination with shit (the smelly waste product periodically expelled from the human anus, that is); and of course about the current EU financial crisis and Germany's role in the subprime mortgage crisis and the Great Recession. All in all, a very Michael Lewis piece.

Do read it!

The perils of Platonism

2011-08-01T19:42:00.000-07:00

NF: You're so foolish!
S: You're foolish!
NF: No, you're foolish!
S: You are!
NF: Ha! Who believes in zodiacs?
S: ...
NF: Who believes in horoscopes?
S: ...
NF: Who believes in god? Who believes in voodoo? Who believes in black magic? Who believes everything-happens-for-a-reason?
S: ...
NF: So who's foolish now?
S: <*big sigh*> Who believes in the existence of numbers?

...

The putdown David Hume would've approved of!

Junkie needs fix

2011-07-03T02:05:00.000-07:00

It's official now. NF just can't be trusted inside bookstores. Two more acquisitions - Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges (from the germ that AK had transplanted in NF's head during his last visit grew a mighty oak tree) and Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. Who knows what would've happened had Deniz not rescued our poor hero just in the nick of time?

The part about genius

2011-07-01T20:07:00.000-07:00

2666 is a ridiculously good book. No, not just good - it's obscenely great actually. Impossibly brilliant, deep, funny, perceptive, brutal and ultimately beautiful. It raises the bar for greatness to more than stratospheric heights. Nanga Fakir might just have read one of the greatest books ever. And he fears he'll become jaded and not appreciate just a regular, next-in-line, your run-of-the-mill great work of literature.

Comparisons with Boris Pasternak and his magnum opus Doctor Zhivago immediately come to mind, although to be fair, 2666 is perhaps, (if it were possible) even more, soul crushingly great than Zhivago. It fuckin' hurts that Nanga Fakir discovered Roberto Bolaño after his death (yet again! Add Bolaño's name to the list of masters discovered just after their deaths (Nirmal Verma and DFW) - in fact, actually because of their deaths and the subsequent howls of bereavement emanating from the literary establishment).

The book is divided into five parts - The part about the critics, The part about Amalfitano, The part about Fate, The part about the crimes and The part about Archimboldi. As was the case in his previous, gorgeous The Savage Detectives, the nine hundred page story is about a reclusive, mysterious master writer; a writer of many obscure cult books whose readership comprises mostly of hyperliterate critics; a writer who's recently become the contender for the Nobel Prize and is hunted by zealous writer-critic followers. And yet this is hardly what the book is about. From the part about the critics, the book jumps to the part about the professor of Philosophy who's worried sick of his daughter's safety and is conducting bizarre philosophical experiments on geometry books by hanging them upside down in his backyard and exposing them to the real, non Euclidean forces of nature and relishing the primal assault on their Platonic, sublime, Euclidean existence. Then comes the part about Fate, where the prenominate reporter from New York comes to write about a boxing match in Santa Teresa on the border of Mexico and the US but gets hooked on to the series of unsolved murders happening in the city.

The part about the crimes is a harrowing 280 page description of the serial killings of hundreds of women in Santa Teresa - a real life incident that makes Jack the Ripper seem like an unmotivated, distracted amateur. Page after page after page we're hounded by the detailed, hardboiled, brutal descriptions of the bodies found in dumps and the shrugs of the policemen as they file away the cases as unsolved. NF cannot find the name of one contemporary writer who could've carried this part off with such aplomb as Bolaño manages to do. In the hands of a lesser writer this could easily turn out to be a sappy, melodramatic and most unforgivingly boring exercise; but Bolaño's fast paced, digressive, dark humored descriptions are nothing short of terrifyingly beautiful - evoking scenes of deep sadness and hair raising cruelty.

The world-trotting, continent strolling, post national story then goes back to where things started from - the part about Archimboldi - his childhood, adolescence, youth and rise as the writer for whom the critics have been looking for. Bolaño uses his blitzy, fast paced, meandering, story-within-a-story-within-a-story format to trace out his lineage, his conscription as a Nazi soldier, his travails on the Soviet front and his departure from society and ascent in the literary firmament. The breathtaking, last forty or so pages neatly tie a couple of loose ends from the previous parts and bring the book to a closure of sorts.

Bolaño deals with extremes - his protagonists will either be overeducated, philosopher-quoting/name-dropping cultural elites or they'll be hapless, clueless Mexican policemen who, for all their jaded weariness with death, crime, destruction and mayhem, cannot help crying over the raped, dead body of a twelve year old girl. Again and again, Bolaño juxtaposes the extremes of the heart stopping beauty of high art with the cruel, Darwinian reality its existence clashes against. Perhaps Archimboldi is not the hero of this unfairly beautiful novel. Perhaps it is the countless dead women of Mexico who remain violated, killed, dumped, and, ultimately, forgotten. Perhaps the real hero is Bolaño himself with his sheer, superhuman power of spinning a great yarn, making it possible for aesthetics to be ugly, for horror to be edifying.

2666 is a majestic work of awe-inspiring beauty and unimaginable depth. It's not genius. It's more than that, more than that.

Much more than that.

!

2011-06-20T03:26:00.000-07:00

Time is scarce.
Energy is scarcer.

Pick your battles very carefully.

Bookslut

2011-06-15T02:43:00.000-07:00

SatyVrat once told his best friend Nanga Fakir a story about von Neumann (in their S'kal days). According to him, von Neumann died one of the most painful deaths possible. Immediately, this set NF's mind racing to check if the giant had died of starvation or suffocation or some other such horrendous cause; but his thoughts were interrupted by Satyavrat's declaration that von Neumann's death was preceded by a noticeable (according to von Neumann that is) reduction in his powers of thinking which disturbed him no end and he died a miserable death - cursing his slow-wittedness and the emasculation of his superhuman intellect to mere mortal levels.

As all SatyaVrat stories go, the origins and veracity of this story are suspect. (Another one of his von Neumann stories went like this: von Neumann's daughter (who apparently was also some sort of prodigy) once claimed that there was only one person in the whole world who knew more Mathematics than her father - namely she herself. The tragedy was that she was a paranoid schizophrenic. The only true part of this story is that von Neumann had a daughter. She was not a paranoid schizophrenic. Nor was she a mathematician. She is a business school professor at U Mich, alive and a well functioning human female. Her name is Marina and this is her Wikipedia page.) And as all SatyaVrat stories go, the facts of the story somehow don't matter so much because the moral behind them is deep and non trivial - in this particular case the moral being that dying a grisly death is a sufficient but not necessary condition for dying a painful death.

Despite his pretensions to the contrary, Nanga Fakir has always prided himself on being a great reader and, more often than not, on being the most literate (though according to SatyaVrat the least educated), well read person in the room. In '09, he read about 45-50 books (though truth be told, many of them were comic books and therefore, easily readable in a day or two) and in '10 he read about 23-24 books. His reading tastes remained diverse, eclectic and idiosyncratic - ranging from science, technology, mathematics and philosophy to fantasy, science fiction, graphic novels/comics, Indian writing in English and postmodern American literature.

So when during the first six months of 2011, NF managed to read only 3-4 books and confided the distressing new development to Bejin Hakumei (who refused to believe him and expressed her dismay in no uncertain terms); and as NF, to his horror, began empathizing with AK who'd once declared that he just couldn't read anymore, he suddenly remembered the von Neumann story and prepared for the onslaught of the bout of depression that was sure to hit him hard. The fact that he'd been stuck on Gravity's Rainbow for the past many months; and had been plodding through the notoriously hard to read magnum opus (though truth be told, the book's uproariously funny in places) for the past many, many months (three? four? five?) added to his sense of loss.

So he got himself a big truckload of new books - hoping that their sense of newness will kill the ennui induced by the ferociously hard Pynchon tome.

It so worked!

Among new additions to his bookshelf are The Windup Girl, River of Gods, The Pale King (DFW's last unfinished book), Our Band Could be Your Life, The Big Short, Conversations with Economists and Roberto Bolaño's 2666.

To add, he got hold of The Dispossessed and The Best Short Stories of J G Ballard from the Science Fiction Forum. Within two weeks, NF read The Big Short and Our Band could be Your Life; and is three hundred pages into the thousand page 2666.

He's feeling so much better now. If he manages to read up the final three hundred pages of Gravity's Rainbow anytime soon, he'd wind up throwing a party.

In praise of Dubeyji: Monday nights, Spring '11

2011-05-26T13:44:00.000-07:00

बेजिन हाकुमेई के लिए !

2011-05-21T18:26:00.000-07:00

ओजारुमारू मेरा नाऽऽम,
करूँ मैं बऽड़े - बऽड़े काऽऽम
ज़्यादा नहीं सोचता हूँ मैं
मस्त रहता हूँ सुबह-ओ-शाम

नए, एडवेंचर्स पे मैं जाऊं,
ये ही तो शौक है मेरा, चलो हम साथ में चलें!

ओजारूमाऽऽऽरू!

...

मज़े की बात ये है की जिस बंदी ने ये सिरीज़ बनाई (रिन इनिमारू), उसकी मौत आत्महत्या से हुई! किसी ने ठीक ही कहा है : अति सर्वत्र वर्जयेत (लम्पटगीरी में भी !)

Quicksands of make believe

2011-05-18T17:10:00.000-07:00

The Stockholm Syndrome Theory of Long Novels - a terrific piece on why you'd ever want to finish reading that million page tome. A long time sufferer who's currently held prisoner by Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow - after nearly a year of efforts - on now, off again), NF connected to this clever observation on a rather fundamental level.

Fellow sufferer, understand thy ailment!

Shut the door

2011-05-16T21:56:00.000-07:00

I burn a fire to stay cool
I burn myself,
I am the fuel
I never meant... to be cruel

...

Have you ever been cruel?

Homecoming

2011-04-24T01:30:00.000-07:00

He will have you believe that if you haven't discovered cinema coming out of South Korea, Japan and Hong Kong in recent years, in particular the extreme cinema movement overseen by the likes of Takashi Miike (Japan), Park Chan Wook and Kim Ki Duk (South Korea), you don't take your cinema seriously. He will also tell you that the story doesn't sort of end there, that extreme cinema is not the entire body of astoundingly original work that's pouring out uncontrollably from these nations, that focusing wrongly on just the works of the few mentioned above will leave you with a blinkered vision of what actual, current Asian cinema has in store for us. He will take the name of the old master Takeshi Kitano (Japan), the (somewhat) new sensations Kim Ji Woon and Bong Joon Ho, Lee Chang Dong and Hong Sang Soo (South Korea) and Fruit Chan (Hong Kong) to convince you that there's much, much more than meets the eye. Lest you think that it's an Asian women fetish masquerading as Asian cinema fetish, he'll swear to you that the characteristics of these great filmmakers (particularly the more extreme ones) and their forays into taboo territories are not all that uniquely Asian and will supply you with the names of Michael Haneke (Germany), Lars von Trier (Denmark) and Harmony Korine (USA) whose works are equally unsettling and subversive.

But don't you pay attention to what Nanga Fakir has to say.

There's nothing, nothing in the world of cinema that warms the cockles of his heart more than a good, just good, not necessarily great, Hindi film. The average state of affairs somewhat saddens him, more so because every now and then he'll come across an Anjana Anjani which will have our titular young hero clench his tiny little fists, grind his teeth to powder and take deep breaths to rein in his violent side. This makes him worship anyone who shows the slightest promise whatsoever (insert names of Anurag Kashyap, Dibakar Bannerjee and Vishal Bharadwaj) and elevate them to pedestals no human should have a right to. Then comes the big crash in which the aforementioned deity fails to perform (insert names of Anurag Kashyap, Dibakar Bannerjee and (sadly) Vishal Bharadwaj) and NF switches sides in favor of more young, upcoming dark horses (like Amit Dutta, whose FTII thesis film Kramashah, is Om dar Ba dar, done right).

Where have the Basu Chatterjees and Hrishikesh Mukherjees gone? Does it have to be true that there is only the Shyam Benegal way and the Anees Bazmi way with nothing, absolutely nothing in between?

What about Shakti Samanta, Manmohan Desai, Chetan Anand, Raj Khosla? Were they actually any good? How about Raj Kapoor, V Shantaram, Bimal Roy, Kamal Amrohi? Were these good? And what do we mean by good? Should it be a nostalgic eulogy that'll be sung over the graves of these giants of the past or should they be hauled over coals too? Those suffering from Somnath syndrome (named after the notoriously-heard-to-please Somnath who will not deign to see a film if it's not an Emir Kusturica level production at least) show the middle finger to all such filmmakers of the past. Nanga Fakir is not so sure however.

Such thoughts led to our protagonist's return to the world of films (he'd seen almost no films for the past year and a half or so) where for the past few months he's been assiduously collecting films of Shyam Benegal, Raj Kapoor, the old and obscure stuff of Hrishikesh Mukherjee (who still remains NF's all time favorite director - in all languages, across all time periods - not necessarily for the 'art' in his movies (Somnath scoffs silently) but more for his warm, life affirming, taking-the-Buddha-like-middle-path, simple films), Raj Khosla and other commercial Hindi filmmakers of the past.

It's possible that he writes about his impressions as he sees such old Hindi films, not with the eyes of an entranced ten year old (which sadly, he's not anymore) but with those of an old hardened, jaded movie cynic (sigh, sigh, sigh). It's also possible that he won't find them worth commenting upon, or that he'll concede the argument to the Somnath camp and not have the heart to say anything anymore about it.

Anyway, let's start the commotion.

Unforgiven

2011-04-20T19:39:00.000-07:00

Saat Khoon Maaf (Seven Murders Forgiven) is a stupid, third rate film that is so bad that you're almost embarrassed for Vishal Bharadwaj. The story is uneven, the plot nonsensical with no motivation for things turning out the way they do. The acting, on the whole, is uniformly bad and hammy. The so called twist ending is so absurd that it's actually supremely comical - a fitting, disastrous end to an egregious film.

So what if Ruskin Bond has a cameo of sorts at the end? So what if the film is peppered with big names all through? So what if the story movements in the film are (with the filmmakers trying too hard to be clever) juxtaposed with interesting little tidbits from contemporary Indian history? So what if it's a Vishal fucking Bharadwaj production?

The only saving grace of the film is Annu Kapoor - absolutely brilliant in his ten minute cameo as the lecherous police officer Keematlaal - head over heels in love with Suzanna (Sunaina). Him and the technical aspects of the movie - excellent cinematography, photography, special effects and shot composition all through.

It's not enough though. What's up with you VB - the genius behind Makdee, Maqbool, The Blue Umbrella and Omkara? Have you gone the way Anurag Kashyap seems to be going - all style and no substance? Will you break my heart too?

Will you?

Miniscule Musings

2011-04-18T17:52:00.000-07:00

Nanga Fakir has joined the ranks of those who consider The Wire to be a masterpiece of unimaginable proportions. As he watched the sixty odd, one hour long episodes over a period of ten days, he was totally taken in by the tight story-arcs, efficient, compact and unwasted movements in direction and screenplay; and the overarching theme of institutionalized dysfunction and disillusionment. As befitting a series focusing on the macro level, societal behavior of public institutions, character development takes a back seat to story progression and to the charting of the course of the lumbering bureaucratic behemoths' trajectories. Yet, there are gems of fascinating character sketches in the form of Omar Little and Bubbles - the Robin Hood stick up man and drug addicted informant - that make the series not just intensely edifying (which it so is) but thoroughly enjoyable as well. As someone coming from a cocooned, obscenely well educated, privileged background, NF cannot comment on the realism of the tales of drug trade, institutional corruption or the Baltimore slang - things for which the series is famous for - but the understated, subtle, very believable and extremely plausible characters and stories that slowly populate the five seasons (with the minor omission of the character Brother Mouzone and the irritating Greek background music whenever The Greek and his team are featured - a very overlookable-on-the-whole, minor annoyance) seem to resonate oddly long after the watching experience is over.
After the very funny initial forty minutes, Love Exposure degenerates into a very uneven, not-very-well made film that dies a simpering, lame Bollywoodish ending. However there are some things that do save the movie from being a total waste of four hours (yes! four) - the kung-fuish art of tosatsu (up skirt photography - which although done in a very over-the-top and funny manner, should come across to most women as extremely offensive); its savagely funny attack on Christianity that even Richard Dawkins cannot top; and the delectable, absolutely adorable Hikari Mitsushima (pictured here) as Yoko chan. On the whole, a disappointment, however.
In Dogville, Lars von Trier takes the idea of minimalism to a whole different level altogether. Not only does he do away with most conventions of movie making, he also does away with the idea that you need to have sets, props or other such bourgeois artefacts. Instead of houses, we have chalk linings delineating the boundaries of such aforementioned houses with labels "X's house" written on it. Instead of shrubberies, we have vague chalk markings indicating the boundaries of the same. There are no doors, but the actors walk, talk, behave, open, close and enter through them as if they were there. Anything not absolutely essential to the story (a door's just a door, a shrubbery just so - mere ideas in human minds - not essential at all. Apparently.) is erased and left for the viewer's imagination. It's actually more a play than a film. But whatever it is, is beside the point since the end product is wonderfully deep and absolutely brilliant. Bravo Lars! Bravo!

Resigned Epicureanism

2011-04-03T09:41:00.000-07:00

An excellent, excellent piece in Slate on Woody Allen and his oeuvre. Essential reading for all his die hard fans.

How's this for an incentive? An excerpt.

...Felix (I'll use his surname to avoid confusion) says he's attracted to "emotionally disturbed women," and that's not an exaggeration. The depth of his perverse inclination becomes clear when he approaches a woman looking at a Jackson Pollock drip-painting, and asks what it means to her. She answers: "It restates the negativeness of the universe. The hideous, lonely, emptiness of existence. Nothingness. The predicament of man forced to live in a barren, godless eternity like a tiny flame flickering in an immense void with nothing but waste, horror, and degradation forming a useless bleak straightjacket in a black absurd cosmos." She's just the kind of woman Felix has been looking for, and he asks her what's she's doing Saturday night. "Committing suicide," she responds. Unfazed, he counters: "What about Friday night?"

Because a picture is worth a thousand words redux

2011-04-02T11:32:00.000-07:00

...

Australia. Pakistan. Sri Lanka.

...

Ah revenge! Thy taste is so sweet!

GY!BE - 03/14/11

2011-03-19T21:41:00.000-07:00

Godspeed You! Black Emperor (henceforth referred to as GY!BE) start from where Echoes left off. That, however, is not to deny them originality or to comment on some supposed derivativeness or undue Pink Floyd influences. Their long, unending, grandly ambitious instrumental sagas with somewhat minimalistic, vaguely relevant found footage films running on projectors in the background (see picture) to which their music seems to provide a narrative of sorts; resemble Floyd only in the most superficial way.

Almost classical in scope (Shekhar used the word 'meditative'), with none of their songs-with-no-vocals clocking in less than ten minutes, they can seem to be an acquired taste - especially their meandering, experimental, purposeless-on-the-surface initial phase jamming which will then suddenly gel together to form an intricate harmony in which the projectionist's footages of panoramic views from trains/arbitrary industrial landscapes suddenly seem to acquire a meaning of their own.

Although musically the band they might resemble most is Mogwai, it is easy to see that they transcend their predecessors by focusing not just on creating "serious guitar music" but by also incorporating sounds from instruments not generally associated with rock music (the eight person band (?) has members playing violins, cellos, two sets of drum kits and at least three guitars).

When the venue's Terminal 5, a good vantage point is of paramount importance. With the ever-resourceful Shekhar at his side, NF was lucky to have found that and a set of very comfy ass-rests. The mild state of buzz - courtesy the beers - and the background GY!BE footage viewed through the partially filled mug, added to the ambience and sprinkled a dash of good weirdness (in the form of inebriation) to the already very heavily atmospheric music.

And GY!BE? They didn't speak a word. No hi, no bye, no sorry, no thank you.

They arrived, they played, they fucking destroyed!

Goddo supiido yuu! Burakku emparaa !!!

2011-03-17T21:24:00.000-07:00

Nanga Fakir (and I am sure fellow Japanophile Bejin Hakumei is with him in this) awaits Japan's coming back to life - the land of gojiras, samurais, anime, manga, seppuku, gomi, harakiri, the insane J-pop culture, kamikaze, Takeshi Kitano, Takeshi Miike, robots, ninjas, cosplay, otakus, hikkikomoris, an army of kawaii gyaru chans, gore films, Boris, Mono and everything that is awesome about our shitty, shitty world right now.

Zetsuboushita! Serious, hardcore zetsuboushita!

...

Nippon Banzai !

बकैती !

2011-03-10T14:59:00.000-08:00

Those who've known Nanga Fakir are well aware of his almost obsessive, bordering-on-the-creepy, hero worship of SatyaVrat.

Now the august company of The Hindu joins him. (Link: Join the rationalists online or over chai.)

The link above is The Hindu's profile of that mysterious master belletrist, gonzo-street-fighting-philosopher-on-the-loose, who's vowed to hound the dark forces of ignorance and irrationality, corner them, capture them and then bijli dance them to death.

...

Too bad he doesn't blog more often - despite promises to himself of maintaining a one-post-a-fortnight schedule.

Perhaps this is his way of telling us that he is also human. What a relief! And yet, what a disappointment.

Vignettes

2011-03-06T17:58:00.000-08:00

मिस्राजी अपनी धुन के पक्के थे. उनके समूचे व्यक्तित्व से हमेशा एक वीभत्स-सा आत्मविश्वास टपकता रहता था - ठीक उसी प्रकार का, जैसा एक उज्जड, अनपढ़, अल्हड़, बेतकल्लुफ कूपमंडूकता से उत्पन्न हो सकता है.

और फिर मिस्राजी वो काम करते हुए पाए गए जिसकी पूरे गाँव में किसी को उम्मीद न थी...

Debug this bitches!

2011-03-04T11:51:00.000-08:00

/* The अटरिया.c program */

#include(stdio.h)

void main()
{

{
गुटर गुटर ... [टूँग तादुंदुंग!];
गुटर गुटर ... [टूँग तादुंदुंग!];
गुटर गुटर ... [टूँग तादुंदुंग!];
गुटर गुटर ... ;
} while ('sanity lasts') ;

printf("Bappi Lahiri is the latest avatar of Vishnu\n");

}

From Sweden Pradesh, With Love

2011-02-21T22:05:00.000-08:00

The great Jabberwock reviews it here.

The humble Nanga Fakir reposts.

Do yourself a favor and click on the image for a larger size.

Then read carefully.

...

Sounds so fucking awesome!

All About Bombay

2011-02-20T11:24:00.000-08:00

(Warning: Very long post.)

Sacred Games is a big, fat, bloated, monster of a book. Subject matters include stuff about Bombay, more stuff about Bombay; and then some more stuff about Bombay.

Indian writing in English has mostly been about grand family sagas (cf. Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy), political allegories (Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children), political allegories with a healthy dose of family saga (Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things), deeply felt, sensitive-human-angle pieces (Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance), stuff about Bombay (Rohinton Mistry's ouevre); and of course the ones about ordinary Indian people going about their everyday business written in a language they don't speak (the ordinary Indians that is; the extraordinary ones long ago switched to the master race's preferred mode of communication) (R K Narayan's and Mulk Raj Anand's ouevre). (The savagely funny and biting English, August is the oddball in this sense. All hail Upamanyu Chatterjee!)

It is in this sense that Vikram Chandra's book is so thoroughly, so refreshingly brilliant.

Lest the irreverent tone of the last paragraph suggest that Nanga Fakir has a low opinion of the aforementioned books and its authors, be assured that he totally hearts most of these works and these books form the backbone of the heavy reading NF did in his initial phases of addiction. But he now thinks them more like the mildly addictive semi-gateway drugs that marked the beginning of his lifelong addiction to reading - hence the smug, self satisfied, dismissive tone.

Sacred Games is more crime fiction with literary ambitions. It's about gangwars in Bombay, the business of being criminals (bhaigiri), the police in their roles more as anti-criminals - criminals fighting on the good side - as disorganized as their counterparts, as skilled as their counterparts, as poor as their counterparts, as ordinary as their counterparts; as extraordinary as their counterparts. It's also the only (yes!) book NF has ever read that has people from RAW (Research and Analysis Wing) among its characters. The near absence of any mention of this shadowy Indian organization in contemporary discourse of any kind leads NF to suspect that they must be awfully good at their jobs. (But time and again, experts aver that it's the most lame and incompetent of intelligence agencies in the world and NF has on more than one occasion, detected a secret jealousy in such experts' pieces when they (unfavorably) compare RAW to the (mighty) Pakistani ISI.)¹

It also features 'insets' - a look into the past of the more minor characters - and uses these as an excuse to write about the partition, the Naxalite movement and espionage - both national and international. In particular, towards the end of the book (the final 150 pages or so) these insets tie all the not-so-tight ends together and give a supremely satisfying, complete reading experience. The great thing about the book is that the sheer, awesome power of storytelling wins the jaded reader over - no literary gimmicks needed at all!

And yes, how can one forget the use of language in the book! For long now, Indian writing in English has resorted to chutneyfication - peppering their otherwise impeccably crafted sentences with Hindi (mostly) words, thereby giving the impression of telling stories about foreign, exotic locales (nod to Salman Rushdie who championed this trend taking cues from (perhaps) R K Narayan and Mulk Raj Anand). Vikram Chandra does so with a vengeance! And one is tempted to conclude that this is done with a very specific agenda in mind - the very same 'take that' agenda that led Anurag Kashyap to make Dev D as a riposte to the soppy, melodramatic Devdas of Sanjay Leela; and Govind Nihalani to make Ardha Satya - a dark, brutal reply to the gritty, but ultimately very commercial Amitabh Bachchan launcher Zanjeer.

Criminals are referred to as apradhis, Bollywood songs are quoted at length without any attempt to explain their meaning/context in which they are relevant, people burn agarbattis (incense sticks), meet up in akhadas (Indian gymns), feel jealous over the presence of arabpatis (billionaires) in their midsts, stay away from badmash people (bad people). Ass, cunt, dick, sex etc. are unapologetically referred to by their Hindi appellations. And although generally NF is somewhat of a purist when it comes to language, he was totally won over by the savage agenda, raunchy jokes and the brilliant effect such language managed to produce. In fact, such was the frequency and pivotal-ness of this conscious use of Indian languages in the book that Nanga Fakir wonders if the others will not feel totally turned off/miss critical points while wading through the sea of prose. (A glossary of all Hindi/Marathi/other words used in the book is on the writer's website and runs over twenty pages!)

And to those snobbish lit-crit theory gurus who believe that great novels cannot emerge from the dirty hovels of crime fiction - take that and shove it up your gaand (ass)!

Vikram Chandra has made a lifelong fan out of Nanga Fakir. And you'd be one too if you give him a try.

BACK TO POST

1.

The following is a somewhat obscure joke NF came across many years ago and cannot resist throwing in at the first mention of ISI. As far as he remembers, it was first stated by a Pakistani journalist in one of the English dailies in Pakistan.

In the joke, the journalist goes on to aver that real intelligence agencies are almost invisible to all people - even to the public of their own countries. He then cites RAW and Mossad as the prime examples of such efficient organizations. Building on this theme, he suggests that the popular and very well known intelligence organizations, thus, are either very incompetent or merely decoys. Then comes the punchline - since ISI is so well known, it can't be a real intelligence agency at all. It must be a front put up by the Pakistani government. The real intelligence agency must be well hidden from all political discourse - even from the general public. Hence, he concludes with impeccable logic and a sudden, sharp force of clarity, that the real Pakistani intelligence agency must the Pakistani Agriculture Ministry!

The Take That Series Continues

2011-02-10T13:21:00.000-08:00

On the rock scene in the Northeast; Shillong and on Bob Dylan jayanti - essential reading. (Link.)

All hail the Northeast - that last bastion of genuine yo-ness in our increasingly phony world of hipsters.

Take that you wannabe Bangies! Take that!

For Bejin Hakumei

2011-01-31T15:50:00.000-08:00

Books read in the past year (Jan '10 - Jan '11):

1) Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
2) Kyaap - Manohar Shyam Joshi
3) Neuromancer - William Gibson (reread)
4) The Silence of the Lambs - Thomas Harris
5) Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert M Pirsig (reread)
6) The Story of Philosophy - Will Durant
7) The New York Trilogy - Paul Auster
8) Logicomix - Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou
9) Broom of the System - David Foster Wallace
10) Love Creeps - Amanda Fillipachi
11) Girl With Curious Hair - David Foster Wallace
12) The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen
13) The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon
14) Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace (reread)
15) Anathem - Neal Stephenson
16) Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson
17) Stories of Your Life and Others - Ted Chiang
18) The Savage Detectives - Roberto Bolaño
19) Freedom - Jonathan Franzen
20) White Noise - Don DeLillo
21) Persepolis - Marjane Satrapi
22) The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (reread)
23) Maximum City - Suketu Mehta

Currently on the playlist:

1) Sacred Games - Vikram Chandra
2) The Black Swan - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

2011-01-18T10:51:00.000-08:00

A wonderful review of Kuru Kuru Swaaha - probably the greatest literary work NF has ever read. Consider it an exhortation to read this unfairly, impossibly, obscenely brilliant book.

Take that redux

2011-01-17T11:08:00.000-08:00

Lucknow has become obscenely beautiful. So much so that it hurts the eyes. So much so that it's a blot on the consistently impeccable third world, poorest-nation-in-the-world credentials of India.

Just plain unfair!

Take that you Dilliwallahs! Take that!

Bildungsroman

2010-12-27T07:05:00.000-08:00

Udaan is a fantastic film. A coming of age adventure not just for the protagonist but also for Ronit Roy - from his weak, floundering beginnings in obscure flicks like Jaan Tere Naam (remember its undeniably catchy title song - "ये अक्खा इंडिया जानता है हम तुम पे मरता है/दिल क्या चीज़ है जानम अपनी जान तेरे नाम करता है." (translated as:"This, the whole India knows that I('ll) die for you/What is the heart O love! I pledge my life to you.")?), to his stardom in the saas-bahu sagas of Balaji Telefilms to Udaan in which he reinvents himself as the impossibly strict, tyrannical, borderline psychotic father and gives a brilliant, bravura performance.

Bravo!

The Croak of Rana Tigrina

2010-12-26T08:42:00.000-08:00

Om Dar-ba-dar is the arbitest film NF's ever seen. Period. He very, very humbly posits that he didn't understand any-fucking-thing in the movie. Total overhead transmission.

Take that you David Lynches, you Luis Bunuels, you Andrzej Żuławskis. Yes take that! The mother of all supremely arbit films was made in India.

The film is shoddily made, the voice dubbing is horrible, the production standards are of dubious quality, that NFDC produced it, is cause for concern for the taxpayers, the plot is totally nonsensical, the scenes are crazily funny at times and the dialogues seem to be out of a random word generating machine.

No Smoking is just a very slick urban cousin and is just a couple of decades too late. Anurag Kashyap, take that, you too!

Kamal Swaroop's balls are bigger than Pamela Anderson's boobs.

Rather than spill more digital ink, NF'll direct you to read this fantastic review. Do read it and do see the film for a very rustic, very Indian kind of mindfuck.

Pandora's Box

2010-12-15T18:31:00.000-08:00

#1: Pandora's music classification system is totally brilliant.
#2: ...
#1: So I create this Kumar Gandharva station right?
#2: <*nods*>
#1: And it totally gets what I like in Hindustani classical. It's so cool that an AI knows what you'll want based on what you want. It categorized my preference for Kumar Gandharva on the basis of his insane skills in improvisation, his transcending of musical gharanas, his favoring of vilambit laya over drut laya and went on to play Mallikarjun Mansur, Bade Ghulam Ali Khan Sahab and Ustad Amir Khan.

<*#1 gets a little overpowered by emotion*>

#0: Man, that is so punk rock!

On Pedantry and Antfucking

2010-12-14T22:26:00.000-08:00

B: You see that Japanese girl over there?
NF: Uh huh...
B: She's very hot.
NF: ...
B: You don't seem to agree.
NF: I don't think she's hot. But I think she's very cool though.
B: Oh but you have to be cool to be hot.
NF: Yes. Necessary but not sufficient.

दुबे कौन कुमति तोहे लागी?

2010-12-04T14:52:00.000-08:00

(टाइटल काशीनाथ सिंह की कहानी "पाणे कौन कुमति तोहे लागी?" से चुराया गया है.)

...

दुबेजी लम्पट नगर के उभरते हुए पंडों में से एक माने जाते हैं. उम्र भले ही बीस/पचीस की हो, लेकिन अपनी पैनी सोच, विद्वता, हाज़िरजवाबी और सबसे गौरतलब - अपनी आधुनिकता के कारण वे लम्पट नगर के धार्मिक, ज़रा-प्रौढ़, मध्यवर्गीय तबके के विशिष्ट सत्यनारायण-भगवान-कथा-संचालक माने जाते हैं.

पण्डे भले हों, लेकिन पुराणपंथी और दकियानूसी वे कतई नहीं हैं. बड़ी ही खुली सोच है दुबेजी की. उनकी कथाओं-के-बीच-छुपी-हुई आध्यात्मिक/लोकज्ञान-वर्धक सूक्तियां (जो विशेषतः अपने तीसरे दशक की चौखट पर खड़ी महिलाओं में आश्चर्यजनक रूप से लोकप्रिय हैं) अक्सर अंग्रेजी फिल्मों, पाश्चात्य संगीत और उत्तर-आधुनिक साहित्य से प्रेरित होती हैं. अपने बिचारे यजमान भले ही इनके स्रोत से अपरिचित हों, यह अज्ञान उनके रसास्वादन के रास्ते नहीं आता है. अपने इन्हीं सब गुणों के कारण लम्पट नगर में दुबेजी की बड़ी पूछ है. आप ही बताइए, दुनिया में कितने पण्डे आपको मिलेंगे जो धोती-कुरता-गमछा धारण करते हों और ब्लैक सैबथ के हेवी मेटल पर हेडबैंगिंग करते हों? (उनके साथी पण्डे इनकी इस आदत को "मुंड-कम्पन" का नाम देते हैं.)

ओह! और आपको यह बताना तो हम भूल ही गए कि दुबेजी अपने घोंघा बसंत के स्कूली सहपाठी, पड़ोसी, घनिष्ठ मित्र थे (घोंघा भइया भी अपने बचपन में लम्पट नगर के निवासी थे).

खैर, इन सब बातों को जाने दीजिये. फिलहाल हम दुबेजी को लम्पट नगर के पहले लैंडमार्क-पुस्तक-भवन में प्रवेश करते देख रहे हैं. अपने धोती-कुरते-गमछे-हलकी-दाढ़ी में बड़े ही सुदर्शन लगते हैं हमारे दुबेजी! और वह काली छतरी, काले बूट और मैचिंग ज़ुराबें तो क्या खूब ही फबती हैं उनपर!

पहला आधा घंटा दुबेजी साहित्य सेक्शन में ग़र्क करते हैं. कामू और सार्त्र के गहन अध्ययन से उत्पन्न बोझिलता से मुक्त होने के लिए वे कुछ हल्का पढ़ते हैं और हास्य-व्यंग्य की विधा में सिद्धहस्त लेखकों की शरण में कुछ समय व्यतीत करते हैं. टॉम रोबिन्स, क्रिस्टोफर मूर, गैरी श्टेन्गार्ट आजकल उनके प्रिय व्यंग्यकार चल रहे हैं. वे अपने आप से वादा करते हैं कि श्टेन्गार्ट की "सुपर सैड ट्रू लव स्टोरी" ज़रूर खरीदेंगे, और आगे बढ़ जाते हैं.

खैर, अगला पड़ाव म्यूजिक सेक्शन.

एक लड़की बोस हेड फ़ोन लगाये म्यूजिक सेक्शन में कुछ सुनती हुई दिखाई देती है. लम्बे, काले बाल, घुटनों पर हलकी सी फटी जींस; एक लम्बी, ढीली, गहरे गले वाली टी शर्ट (उसके साइज़ से ज़रा बड़ी सी - "शायद उसके बड़े भाई की होगी" - दुबेजी आशापूर्वक सोचते हैं) जिसपर आयरन मेडेन के मैस्कट "एड्डी" की वीभत्स तस्वीर चिपकी हुई है. लड़की के हाथ हेड फ़ोन पर हैं और उसका सिर हल्का-हल्का झूमता सा दिख रहा है.

यह देखना काफी आसान है कि लड़की ज़रा भी बन-ठन के नहीं आई है. और यह देखना उससे भी ज़्यादा आसान है कि उसे बन-ठन के आने कि कोई ज़रुरत नहीं है. उसके पूरे व्यक्तित्व से एक अलसाई मादकता टपक रही है; एक लापरवाह, लापता सी नैसर्गिक खूबसूरती, जो ज़रा चढ़ी-चढ़ी, उबासी भरी आँखों से आपको देखती है और बेबस सा कर देती है. सैद्धांतिक/दार्शनिक तौर पर दुबेजी इस प्रकार की सुन्दरता से भली-भांति परिचित हैं. यह खूबसूरती एक अजब प्रकार के वैभव से उत्पन्न होती है जिसकी व्याख्या करना ज़रा मुश्किल होगा. इस ख़ास प्रकार की खूबसूरती में धन के माध्यम से खरीदी हुई एक अलग-ही प्रकार की अत्याधुनिक/उत्तराधुनिक शिक्षा से उपजी साहित्य-संगीत-कला-रसास्वादन की क्षमता, बोरियत से भरी हुई बड़ी बड़ी गोल आँखें और आम खूबसूरती के पैमानों के लिए एक अनूठी हेय दृष्टि आरक्षित होती है. खैर, इसकी व्याख्या दरअसल समय खराब करने सरीखा है इसलिए इसे फिलहाल ज़रा रहने ही दीजिये.

गहन आकर्षण से खिंचे हुए दुबेजी अचानक से अपने आप को इस लड़की के समक्ष पाते हैं.

लड़की की बोझिल, अलसाई हुई आँखें धीरे धीरे खुलती हैं और अपने हलके हलके झूमते हुए सिर के ठीक सामने एक सत्रहवीं सदी के नमूने को पाती हैं. एक तीखी टेढ़ी-सी मुस्कान उसके चेहरे पर फैल जाती है. दुबेजी अपने जीवन में पहली बार अपनी धोती में हलचल महसूस करते हैं और एक दबी हुई झल्लाहट से जेब के अभाव को कोसते हैं.

और एक टांग ज़रा पीछे किये, एक हाथ कमर पर डाले, अपने खुद की एक टेढ़ी मुस्कान से उस लड़की का प्रतिकार करते हुए दुबेजी कहते हैं:

"सप बेब ! हाओज़ इट गोइंग?"

A la Ra...

2010-11-27T06:30:00.000-08:00

Isn't New Sincerity merely second order cynicism - cynical people feeling cynical about cynicism?

The Solution of a Zen Kōan

2010-11-20T02:41:00.000-08:00

Q. What is the sound of one hand clapping?

A. One tight slapping.

...

Can't believe the following was not discovered earlier!

The Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal webcomic.

In order to incentivize you further:

(Click to see bigger image)

The Truth Behind Amputation:

Disturbing Image:

WISE - Women in Science and Engineering:

The Grand Design:

Superman's Dilemma:

And of course, The folly of Man:

Not so trivia-l?

2010-11-12T21:59:00.000-08:00

Scene: The Café. The Instrumental Variables in a pre-match huddle.

...

NF: These quizmasters are from the Psychology department.
Shishir: Yeah?
Nick: You bet your sorry ass they'll have us answer questions like "Who in 1956 wrote the seminal paper 'Mindfuck'"?
Shishir: He he he...
NF: Just to piss them off, to every question they ask, we should answer 'Freud'.
Shishir: Make that 'Freud' or 'Your mom'.
Nick: He he he...
NF: He he...
Shishir: <*reclines back*> Both of which are very Freudian.
NF: Or Fraud-ian?

...

Lexical jokes just don't crossover well into verbal domains.

Let the Healing Begin

2010-11-10T18:54:00.000-08:00

While reading Stories of your life and Others Nanga Fakir was reminded of Greg Egan and in particular, of the story collection Luminous. This is tall praise indeed for the remarkable Ted Chiang who's admitted to being inspired by Egan. (For the uninitiated, Greg Egan is probably among the most brilliant talents in the contemporary science fiction world. In particular, the short story Reasons to be Cheerful by Egan is one of the best short stories NF has ever read - all genres, all time periods, all langugages included.)

Ted Chiang is not what you'd call a prolific writer. In over twenty years of writing career, he's written only a handful of short stories, but nearly all of them have met with overwhelming critical acclaim and have been showered with literary prizes left, right and center. Indeed, a small body of output need not detract from the artistic merit of the creator in any way. Examples of Indian Ocean, Rohinton Mistry, Andrei Tarkovsky, William H Gass, Terence Mallick come almost immediately to mind.

Science Fiction can be of many varieties. Look for example at William Gibson. His stories are terse, prose somewhat minimalistic and themes mostly sociological - how science/technology permeates societies, how the street finds its own uses for things, about the evolution of the common sphere where technology and human society intersect and the evolution of artificial intelligence and how the aforementioned process parallels human evolution. Another example is Neal Stephenson who writes sprawling, interminable novels (both Cryptonomicon and Anathem are close to a thousand pages with the former being his magnum opus and the latter a not-so-satisfying experience) which deal with his preoccupation with overly grandiose themes - philosophy, mathematics, technology and economics with complex storylines that integrate these disparate thematic influences into one unified whole. Philip K Dick focused on metaphysical themes and his not very lit and sometimes outright pulpy literary output was characterized by simple but thought provoking plotlines, twist endings, druggy atmospherics and obsession with pop culture, advertising and paranoia. Asimov and his cohorts were technological utopians - J G Ballard - the exact opposite.

Ted Chiang's fiction however, is not grandiose, or with a hidden agenda of its own. It is in fact deceptive in its utter, utter simplicity and straightforwardness. His best stories are nothing but thought experiments - not very clever or convoluted or look-at-me-how-smart-I-am type. And his stories have a component that is very, very rare in science fiction - indeed in most genre fiction (which is why even mediocre, run-of-the-mill literary fiction writers turn up their noses at genre fiction) - that of a lively, throbbing, understated but readily identifiable human connection in its simple, unobtrusive, unassuming, even self-effacing, turning-attention-away-from-itself prose.

The best stories in his collection are Hell is the absence of God, Liking what you see: A documentary and the eponymous Story of your Life. There are some very deep issues explored in these stories from a remarkably fresh, wonderfully new perspective. NF is tempted to include blurbish introduction to these stories but realizes the spoiler potential of this exercise and so decides to refrain from the same. Nevertheless, he recommends all and sundry to indulge in this edification program and follow the writer; and to those who're not shy from trying their own hand at writing science fiction, there's probably no other writer whose stories will make you think harder and from whom you'll learn more fruitfully than Chiang.

In Which Ghongha Gives it Those Ones

2010-11-04T10:47:00.000-07:00

Scene: A not-so-swanky, not-so-jam-packed restaurant. Ordinary people sit, eat, talk and go about their ordinary, day-to-day, somewhat shallow lives.

#1: It's been a while, knowing you, being with you.

<*#0 eyes #1 with a faint amusement*>

#1: Perhaps I am not putting this well. Perhaps words are not meant to capture this well. Perhaps even the tiniest range of emotions can't be expressed in hopelessly limited constructs such as language.

#0: <*A little baffled*> What are you talking about?

#1: The fact that I love you? that (subliminally perhaps) I've been in love with you the moment I set my eyes upon you, that you complete me, that knowing you is knowing what Plato referred to as what it was to find your other half as it exists out there in the world, the finding of which and eventual communion with which is what gives meaning and purpose to a life otherwise so full of misery, suffering, shallowness and pain.

<*#0's (rather lovely one might add) cheeks are suffused with a deep blush. Intensely self conscious, she tries to fight the giant grin that's stretching her lips from ear to ear.*>

#1: Will you marry me?

<*#0 contracts into herself. A barely audible "yes" escapes her luscious lips. Gently, she holds #1's hand and gives him a look full of affection - a moment/instant/freeze-frame for which all humans in the world would gladly sacrifice a limb or two. #1 will later recount this scene and recall the thin, watery film stretched across #0's eyes, about to attain critical mass and fall off, float across those cheeks as a million dollar dewdrop tear.*>

#1 stands up and addresses the small restaurant crowd.

#1: Guys, I am extremely happy to let you know that the greatest woman on earth has just consented to marry me!

<*Cries, claps and cheers all around*>

#17: Whoa!
#19: Way to go man!
#13 (to #11): Ah it's so touching! Reminds me of our time.

Date: Oh this is so romantic!
Ghongha Basant: He he he...
Date: What are you smirking at?
Ghongha: Another divorce in the making?

Because a picture is worth a thousand words?

2010-10-19T20:18:00.000-07:00

[Nanga Fakir had predicted this way back last year during the dream run of Rakhi ka Swayamwar and Sach ka Samna (see Girl Power, Moment of Zen and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance). He'd expected an Indian Jerry Springer Show to emerge but not a union of the same and Judge Judy hosted by the lady herself!]

[The great Greatbong has covered the story in detail. Do read him. Here's the link.]

...

Statement of Purpose:

भई लाइफ में टांग खींचने वाले बहुत होते हैं,
लेकिन हाथ पकड़ने वाले बहुत कम.
दोका (sic) देने वाले बहुत होते हैं,
लेकिन मौका देने वाले बहुत कम.

...गज़ब भारत की अजब कहानियां मैं आप तक पहुँचाऊँगी.

(Loose translation for the Hindi disabled follows.)

Brother there are many in life who pull your leg,
But those who hold your hand - very few.
Many who betray,
But those who give (you) a chance - very few.

...I will bring Incredible India's wondrous stories to you.

...When the plaintiff gets overwhelmed by her emotions and spontaneously walks out, delivers a soliloquy Shakespearean actors would be proud of, bares her heart open and expounds on the love between brothers and sisters; sisters and sisters and other assorted permutations and combinations thereof.

...An outraged audience auntie condemns the loose morals and rampant lying much in the spirit of Hugo Chavez decrying American imperialism.

...A shocked Rakhi Sawant after hearing the plaintiff swear on the holy Quran. Note the black and white background - a subtle nod to the black and white basis vectors that span(m?) the human nature vector space and give us such heartwarming TV shows that give us these naughty little peeks into the awwwing cuteness within.

...The maulvi saying he doesn't condone beating of children in madrassas. (Read: We don't have no sex with supple young boys in here.)

...The audience thirsty for blood.

...Dude says WTF?

[A little back story: Plaintiff claims dude is 'practically' a brother. Dude says "Totally". Rakhi Sawant exposes their lies by broadcasting their porn video (yes!). Turns out it was brothership with privileges. The audience wants blood. Dude says WTF.]

The only recourse now left to these two lovers is to marry. It comes in handy that the couple is Muslim and that the Dude has only one previous wife and just four other children. The maulvi blesses the couple and everyone lives happily ever after.

Which brings us back to this random Surd in the picture who gets up and sings praises of god whose presence was proven by this little romantic escapade undertaken by the couple. (Don't ask how. The dude is a Surd.)

And Nanga Fakir wipes his tears.

Dark Humor

2010-10-17T10:13:00.000-07:00

#3 : You know he was so different before marriage. He used to do everything. Now he sits back and lazes around.

<*Quiet chuckles heard all around*>

#0 : So this is how women are trapped eh?

#3 : <*mock nod*> We, poor women.

#1 : Think of it in this way. It's like catching a fish. You lower the angle, lure the fish and then catch it.

#0 : Ha ha ha...and then you're done for life!

#1 : Not really.

<*Quizzical looks shared all around*>

#1 : Then you eat it.

Hello, hello, hello how low?

2010-10-06T01:53:00.000-07:00

A somewhat sad little consequence of not having as much time as you used to have (cf. undergrad years) is that when it comes to consumption of art/entertainment, your ability to experiment, be adventurous and watch a totally arbit film on the LAN just because the title is redolent of a hot ninja woman massacring a phalanx of hideously deformed, bloodsucking zombies; indulge yourself a little and watch Hatim_tai, Himmatwala and Justice Chaudhary back to back; listen to Backstreet Boys' desire to want it their way; listen to "In the night no control, kya kahoon kuchch to bol" on repeat mode - basically consume something just plain bad/of dubious artistic quality - plummets harder than the price of BP stocks after an oil spill.

What the fuck's up with that?

In the words of Yuri, pronounced with a marked air of solemnity after the two hour, three dimensional disaster-of-an-experience also referred to in some circles as Resident Alien: Afterlife, "Life is just plain too fucking short for consumption of bad art".

It's a testament to the flatout wretchedness of the human condition; the nasty, short and brutish nature of existence; a reminder of the sad, inevitable end that awaits one and all.

Enough of the Ramin Bahranis however, the György Pálfis, the Nuri Bilge Ceylans, the William H Gasses, the Jonathan Franzens, the Roberto Bolaños, the Faith No Mores, the Eels, the Flaming Lips, the Snow Patrols.

Enough.

Time now for some defiance - some deeply meaningful Judd Apataw flicks, some classic, soul shattering Raj Babbar films, some heartwrenching Sameer and Anjan poetry, some Jersey Shore.

A denial,
A denial,
A denial.

Funny as hell

2010-10-01T17:48:00.000-07:00

Here's an iPhone charger...for David Cronenberg.

...

Courtesy Boing Boing.

Arriving Somewhere

2010-09-25T15:06:00.000-07:00

And I may, just waste away
From doing nothing;
But you're a martyr,
To even less
To even less
To even less.

Dot Three

2010-09-22T18:47:00.000-07:00

This too, shall pass.

Recent Acquisitions

2010-09-08T12:23:00.000-07:00

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen, The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon and Crytonomicon and Anathem by Neal Stephenson.

Busy days ahead.

Otaku-san : Part 3

2010-08-29T06:02:00.000-07:00

A spoiler free description of some of the animes Nanga Fakir's been watching over the past two months or so follows.

...

Planetes : Planetes is about humanity in the year 2075. Efforts to colonize space are in its infancy and barring a station at Moon, much of the other heavenly bodies have not yet been molested. (Mankind plans to correct this mistake soon though.)

Planetes is also about space janitors. Waste management in space has become a big problem and previous missions' debris orbit the earth at various distances and are potential hazards for spaceships/stations/satellites orbiting/entering/leaving the earth. A collision will cause not only loss of property/human life but will also create more debris which if not cleared will obstruct even more space creating even more problems for future missions.

Enter the Debris Section - Technora Corporation's department responsible for clearing space junk and making the near-earth orbit a safe place for astronauts and space missions, the creation of which section was deemed necessary after an encounter with flying trash destroyed a passenger spaceship. The 26 episode anime concerns itself with the greenhorn Ai Tanabe who joins the ranks of debris-cleaners; her encounters with various members of the crew and the fate of her eventual love interest Hachimaki. (The second-in-command officer is an Indian called 'Arvind Ravi' - a very goofy, incompetent officer with hordes of children (seven actually) back home in India.)

The reason NF opines that this anime qualifies as a genuine masterpiece is the astonishingly high degree of realism, an attention to scientific detail generally not heard of, the socio-political ramifications of humans trying to colonize space (with the inevitable clash over the spoils of the aforementioned endeavors - the developed countries grabbing the lion's share and feeding the space-colonization machine while the developing/underdeveloped ones still mired in poverty and civil wars and therefore opposed to such ambitious ventures and demanding a more fair and equitable distribution of this new source of wealth - sometimes violently/resorting to terror tactics/sabotage); the effect such an endeavor in space must have on humans' psychology and their relationships and the long, arduous, lonely, claustrophobic space missions' fallouts on the human psyche and the questions it raises about what human communication/connection/love etc. is all about.

Basically an excellent, excellent watch. The only gripe NF had about the entire series was the sophomoric, mostly contrived humor that actually wasn't necessary and an ending that the feminists will not be really crazy about. But this very, very minor glitch shouldn't dissuade you from watching an absolutely awesome, wonderful series.

Neon Genesis Evangelion : To say that you're into anime and haven't heard of Neon... is saying that you're into Indian arthouse cinema and don't know what Ardhsatya is; or that you're into music and don't know what Pink Floyd is; or that you're into literature and don't know what Infinite Jest is. Basically we're talking of path breaking, forever-changing-the-course-of-their-field-after-they-come-along kind of works that in turn, have a major, polarizing effect on the audience.

Ever since its 1995 debut, the multiple prize winning series has been dissected, criticized, glorified, vilified, overrated, undervalued, and talked about in circles. On one level, it’s a standard mecha anime - the kind that the Gundam series had helped define many years before Neon... Basically your exact idea of giant robots with human pilots combating and killing the alien enemies of humanity after an apocalypse has drastically changed the nature of human existence on planet earth. But, as the director Hidaeki Anno would have it, the series nosedives into the heads of its fourteen year old protagonists, almost blithely giving up the affectations of having to deal with a story of giant robos trying to save humanity. The end result is a bleak, bleak series no fourteen year old can see without getting seriously mindfucked. Extraordinarily artsy, slow, brooding, (with long pauses and interminable silences at times) and grandly ambitious, the enigmatic anime invites comparisons to the works of David Lynch (talk of polarizing!) and can best be summed up as a science fictional Mulholland Drive. (Yes you have been warned!)

The beginning of the series itself lets us know that the pilots of the EVAs (who have to be fourteen year olds, we're told) are not in total control of the machines and that there's much more than meets the eye. Couple it with the most reluctant hero (in Shinji Ikari) ever conceived of, comparison with whom makes Humphrey Bogart's film-noirs'-reluctant-hero-character look like a self righteous white missionary in Africa; a memorable character in the tortured, enigmatic Rei Ayanami; the brash, insufferable (and German) Asuka and the cold, calculating, Machiavellian scientist Gendo Ikari (who also, almost incidentally, doubles up as the father of the hero Shinji) and you get the absolute best character sketch ever done in anime history.

The series starts off slow and ponderous. It picks up in the middle with some juvenile comedy and some attempts at utilizing some standard tropes of anime conventions - all this done somehow in a half hearted, lazy way, as if merely trying to keep up appearances. Complexity sets in the middle and the Angel-busting-mecha-action takes a backseat to give way to a plot that gets thicker. The final seven or so episodes however, send the protagonist kids through sheer hell, torturing their minds, crushing their souls and battering hard their already fragile egos with the touching delicacy of a blacksmith presiding over a neurosurgery.

Nanga Fakir remembers a quote from some writer who was once asked the formula for writing a good story. The writer's supposed to have replied something to the effect that one should spend the first half in trying to let the reader fall in love with the character and the second half in making horrible, horrible things happen to those lovable protagonists. Was this what Hideaki Anno had in mind? We can only guess, for the last two episodes happen inside the head of the hero, with the total abandonment of any kind of pretense of connection with what had happened in the past and we see the hero introspect and torture himself for over two episodes trying to come to grips with what his existence might mean. The series ends with the iconic scene in which all characters gather around Shinji and congratulate him on his victory over his inner demons. (<*NF in a very scholarly tone*>: See attached figure.)

You've been amply forewarned. You'll either love the series or totally tear it to shreds.

...

End of Part three; Part four to follow.

The Big Picture

2010-08-22T17:57:00.000-07:00

Alan Taylor's The Big Picture column for the Boston Globe does it again! This time's it's Russia, one century ago. Stunning pictures, breathtaking views and killer resolution color pictures from a hundred years ago.

Russia in color, a century ago.

If you're not following The Big Picture at Boston Globe, you're missing out on the big (and so beautiful!) pictures.

Burn bitches, burn.

2010-08-20T10:22:00.000-07:00

August 19th, 2010, from Comedy Central's World News Headquarters in New York, this is The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

With Nanga Fakir in attendance.

...

The guest was Jennifer Aniston. NF thinks he spotted Vatsa peeing in his pants a bit when she turned back and waved at us. Or maybe it was just tears of joy squirting from sundry tiny orifices all over his body. We don't know just yet.

Otaku-san : Part 2

2010-08-13T08:47:00.000-07:00

It wasn't with a heavy heart that Nanga Fakir left the cosy confines of NIT S'kal, armed with the dubious distinction of being the worst Chemical Engineer the institute had managed to manufacture till then; having barely graduated thanks to jaded, world-weary and sick-to-death-of-NF's-shadow professors who let NF get the passing grade in all courses and a certain someone called AK whose lightning speed of effortlessly solving problems in exams would cause the answer sheets to burst in flames.

And so it was that NF's second stage of anime viewing began. Cowboy Bebop was watched next - another Watanabe masterpiece that featured his trademark use of soundtracks (in this case, Jazz) as a main, series-defining construct, featuring an assortment of characters - wild, unruly, laidback, quietly proficient lone wolfish men and women with mysterious pasts. Serial Experiments Lain - the short, cyberpunkish, a little surreal and very, very artsy anime series followed next, a blurbish introduction of which should be that it's the story of a little, lonely girl whose receipt of an email from a recently dead classmate turns her to investigate, the quicksands of which aforementioned investigation pull her deeper and deeper into the recesses of the Wired - an internet like communication system.

NF had also seen Ra sing praises of the series The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya whose hilarious, wonderful theme song featuring the famous Mikuru Asahina and her Mikuru beam and an entreaty to 'c'mon let's dance baby' compelled NF to follow the non linear, bizarre, juvenile-yet-very-funny series. In fact, since he thinks the theme song is so incredibly funny, he has decided to embed it here itself. Watch it!

The last series that NF followed in his second wave of anime viewing was the killer, somewhat absurdist, somewhat blackish comedy Sayonara, Zetsubou Sensei (which translates to "Goodbye Mr Despair/Goodbye Teacher Despair"). It features a school teacher Nozomu Itoshiki - a person so extremely negative and pessimistic that it's uproariously funny; his plans, attempts and eventual failures at committing suicide and his class of equally crazy-in-their-own-way girls most of whom end up falling in love with their teacher which leaves their object of affection totally baffled and aghast. A model for the protagonist is the legendary Japanese writer Osamu Dazai whose multiple, failed suicide attempts are the inspirations for the highly stylized, very funny antics of the school teacher. Anyone planning to start off on anime, this series is a very good place to begin things from.

Highly recommended!

It was after these two waves that NF sunk deep into anime anhedonia, a phase that lasted for more than a year. He tried to pick up an interest in the popular franchises Bleach and Naruto but after a long period of sometimes-interested-but-mostly-disaffected viewing, he stopped following the same and does not see himself following the never ending series anytime in the future ever.

However, all of a sudden, totally unanticipatedly, the last month saw NF take a plunge into what he now terms as the third wave of anime watch.

...

End of Part 2. To be continued in Part 3.

Otaku-san : Part 1

2010-08-11T05:04:00.000-07:00

It was another arbit, nondescript final year evening/night when Rohan Choukkar approached Nanga Fakir in his final block abode (Room 188, H Wing to be precise) and convinced him to look at what he claimed was the next big thing in the not-to-be-taken-lightly business of killing time. Since killing time is the second name of Nanga Fakir and since Rohan was, notwithstanding his talents, a mere naïve junior, NF inwardly smiled and braced himself for a rather boring half an hour he would have to kill as a favor to this brat.

What he saw then however, was the first episode of Samurai Champloo - a 26 episode anime by Shinichiro Watanabe. By the end of the first episode, NF had been taken in by the totally slick style, wacky, idiosyncratic storytelling, dazzling visuals, a quirky, groovy soundtrack and an aestheticization of violence that seemed out of place in a mere cartoon - Japanese or not.

Unbeknownst to NF, the dark master of all arts and entertainments obscure and idiosyncratic - Ra - wielded considerable expertise in such matters. ("It's pronounced 'Ae-ni-may'", he jadedly answered NF's question: "Do you follow 'Ae-nai-ms'?") He smiled evilly and rubbed his hands in glee as he took NF aside and led him to his lair in the G Wing and exhibited his machine slaves downloading 'copious amounts' of anime. (NF doesn't know if Ra uses 'copious' copiously anymore.)

And so it was that NF found himself in the company of Ra, following his lead in finishing anime after anime, often teaming up with him to watch the following in either G or H Wing, high or dry: Elfen Lied (the much hyped first few minutes of awesome violence made way for a mediocre series featuring countless instances of totally gratuitous and sometimes unintentionally funny nudity), Ghost in the Shell - SAC and Second Gig (What a series! It remains one of the best anime series NF has watched ever) and Death Note which was airing during the final sem and every Thursday (or was it Wednesday?), courtesy Ra, the LAN would be aglow with yet another new episode for which NF would have waited with bated breath and barely concealed impatience the kind of which had not been seen since the end of The Jungle Book on Doordarshan's Sunday morning kid's slot.

...

To be continued in Part 2.

Another One Bites the Dust???

2010-08-09T07:10:00.000-07:00

Vinay Deolalikar of HP labs claims to have shown that P ≠ NP (no surprises there!). Apparently mathematicians and computer scientists are excited and this one seems to have some genuine chance of success.

Those with enough background/technical know-how and most importantly, enough time at their hands are encouraged to visit the following link: CLS Blog.

...

<*pops open champagne bottle in anticipatory celebration*>

Found Footage - Part Three

2010-07-30T19:15:00.000-07:00

Part One; Part Two

...

Shuchikar is busy compiling the unreleased filmography of his recently deceased mentor Andy Umbrage. Unbeknownst to him however, we have managed to find a cozy little corner wherefrom we can secretly spy on him, view the avant-après garde never before seen films pushing-the-medium-up-to-its-maximum-stretchable-limit-till-the-medium-tears-apart-noisily-and-reveals-an-inside-out-perspective-on-the-vacuousness-of-the-aforementioned-pushing-the-medium-up-to-its-maximum-stretchable-limit approach and record the impressions that these works of art have on our troubled, tortured, self doubting, potential genius-in-the-making protagonist.

It is notable how the new works of the late filmmaker incorporate settings, themes and concerns of science fiction, previously dismissed by him as adolescent fantasies of socially inept, autistic geeks. In fact, Shuchikar still cannot ascertain if this new fascination that the director showed was a parody ridiculing the ascendancy of the geek squad or a genuine late appreciation of the genre, for his science fictional tropes are often awkward, irrelevant, idiosyncratic and often totally orthogonal to the subject matter in his films.

His unreleased filmography includes the following films:

Soliloquy : Umbrage's first digitally shot venture. The film credits indicate only one name - that of Jenny Nosecondname in what would be her fifth collaboration with the director. ¹

The scene shows a dark room, so dark in fact that one can't make out anything at all. There is a vague appearance of someone sitting in a couch or a recliner, speaking in a monotone. From the voice, it can be ascertained that the figure is a woman and Shuchikar remembers the voice well enough to know it's Jenny's.

You claim that crudely speaking, music is for the head or for the feet. So I come along and ask you what does it mean and you respond with a smirk on your face (which I can't see now since it's so dark) that The Who, Marvin Gaye, Dick Dale, Cream, Rolling Stones, Peter Frampton, Deep Purple, Hendrix etc. - these are for the feet. Okay, I say and you continue with your 'for the head' brand of music - The Mahavishnu Orchestra, Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, Neil Young, Frank Zappa, you say and give me a smug smile. Ha! I laugh. Where does Pink Floyd go? And you fall off your high chair, tumble down, roll about, pick the katana and commit harakiri.

Yes, where indeed does Pink Floyd go?

The lighting in the room is not back, but the room seems to have been bathed in some sort of strange glow. Blacks are becoming slowly, oh so slowly, greyish; the change in luminosity is barely enough for Shuchikar to make out the outlines of the couch and Jenny's figure. The grey scale manipulation of the image seems slow, deliberate and displays a mastery of technical aspects of film technology and image processing/editing that Umbrage wasn't known for. Greyness seems to be seeping into the image, at the expense of the black parts - as if blackness were being drained off/greyness was pumped in slowly. Meanwhile, the soliloquy of the unnamed female protagonist continues and the camera, excruciatingly slowly, in a long, slow take begins focusing on what seems to be the outline of the face of speaker.

Take the example of progression of, say, rock music. You start off with certain basic set of themes - guitar based music for example, with easy, singable, likeable, short pieces. Then slowly you see complexity set in. The bands become more ambitious since they see that the competition warrants them to be different from the herd so that it's cooler for the fans to proclaim themselves as their fans and thereby appropriate from the bands the 'differentness' from the herd. So now mainstream rock music (which started off itself as a 'rebellion') begins to exhibit aversions to its own popularity and crumbles under its own weight and branches out as different 'kinds' of rock music. Some of these new forms are more mainstream friendly, some are rabidly otherwise. So you see critics coming up with taxonomy programs for labeling these movements with weird, sometimes funky names that in a sane world should make no sense at all. What does technical death metal mean, or indeed jazz punk? Is it that one is at liberty to take the basic building blocks (Blues, Jazz, Punk for example) and combine and permute them in any arbitrary order to label that which passes for music these days?

The pitch of the delivery has steadily been climbing, mimicking the monotonous increase in the greyscale level of the scene. The face of the protagonist is somewhat visible now. It's a beautiful, beautiful face that bears marks of supreme erudition and thoughtfulness. Even though the soliloquy steadily descends into a rant, the beauty, intelligence and profound sincerity of the face creates a deep impression on the viewer.

The camera begins to zoom out now and the image is more than well lighted to make the objects in the room visible. As the rant continues and becomes harsher, for the first time, the viewer gets to see the entire figure of Jenny Nosecondname.

She is dressed badly, skimpily and her overly exposed body bears the marks of numerous tattoos - most of them extolling the virtues of living fast and loose and championing the fulfillment of all carnal desires. Her legs are spread out wide and on the insides of her right thigh can be seen a huge pink tattoo proclaiming "I heart sex", with the heart being the somewhat angular cardoidish, red symbol so commonly referred to as the heart shape. The walls of her room has pictures of Justin Bieber, Paris Hilton, Backstreet Boys and Lindsay Lohan. The rant has become a full fledged shriek against the lack of quality and intelligence of modern music and the greyscale level of the scene has reached whitish proportions so much it hurts the eye and in one final, continuous swoop of incomprehensively loud noise and glowing white light so harsh that one can't make out anything in the room, the screen goes totally white and all activities cease.

And then comes over a badly cutout figure of an astronaut who takes off his helmet, winks at the camera and flashes a corny thumbs up sign on which is tattooed "The End."

BACK TO POST

1. A promising undergraduate in the Cinema Studies department of the University at the time of her first collaboration, Jenny was also once the big, great, larger-than-life, true love of Shuchikar at the time when he was a devoted disciple of Umbrage. In fact, it was he who had suggested to Umbrage to cast Jenny as the actress after the sad demise of the director's wife for the film "No Obfuscation, No Prevarication" for which he was the Assistant Director.

No sooner did her voice fill the room, than Shuchikar experienced a sharp, painful pang. He hadn't seen her in over two years now and as her monologue occupied the enclosed space aided not in small measure by the surround sound equipment, her suppressed memories took form and flooded his mind.

See Film, Will Review

2010-07-22T01:27:00.000-07:00

It has been suggested and not without reason if you care to ask, that little girls are the closest approximations of actual angels we humans deserve. So when such an angel decides to just break, break your heart and ask with actual, unfeigned, utter matter-of-factness "Okay you cunts, let's see what you can do now", "Show's over motherfuckers"; hack through limbs and mercilessly rip apart bodies of unfortunate cocksuckers who get in her way (her words, not ours) with Joan Jett in the background urging her to not give a damn about her bad reputation, what is it that we can do?

What we can do and indeed, what we should do is to weep out loud without fear of looking ridiculous and rue her loss of innocence, hold her close in our arms and just plant a big, fat, sloppy kiss on her blood stained, squeeze-worthy cheeks and promise to become her abject, abject fans, for Chloë Moretz as Hitgirl is the sweetest, most wonderful thing to have happened to cinema in recent history.¹

She was the only saving grace of the unbelievably pretentious and manipulative crap of a movie called (500) Days of Summer and single-handedly takes what-would-otherwise-have-been-yet-another so-called postmodern take on the done-to-death genre of superhero movie to a wonderful, entertaining, often very violent, yet at the same time hilarious, delightful experience.

Fuckin' A. Anybody not pathologically averse to some healthy dose of violence has to love the film.

Having delved rather deeply into the emergent field of extreme cinema for the past year or so, NF had naïvely come to think that there's only so much that can now catch him by surprise, only so much that can even remotely tickle his nerves - jaded, hardened in the extreme, toughened by a series of weird, ultraviolent, nonstandard, bizarre films from the far east. And frankly speaking, if there were a danger of ever finding more mindfucking films, the threat had to come from Japan or South Korea. Hungary was more of a Bela Tarr territory - slow, epic, deep, brooding, suffering from long, exquisite shots and acute melancholitis.

That NF was woken from his dogmatic slumber and not just woken up but shaken hard and slapped tight and plunged into subzero, icy cold water was what Taxidermia did. The film is obsessed, simply obsessed with the human body and the sundry fluids that are inputted in and outputted out from it. From it, is derived the film's odd sense of beauty, dazzlingly slick cinematography, pervasive grotesqueness and a very subtle, very dark and very often, very bizarre sense of humor. Most humans that walk, talk and populate this earth will at least at one point of time, simply feel disgusted, perhaps recoil in horror and yet find themselves laughing crazily - all within the unfolding of a single scene. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is highly, highly, highly non trivial. To compare the experience of the film and György Pálfi's vision to that of Cronenberg or to Terry Gilliam or to both combined and high on acid is just plain missing the point, for there is striking originality in the director's vision that is flat-out awesome just because such purity and singularity of vision is so fucking rare.

The movie is not for the faint hearted, not for those with weak stomachs, not for prudes, not for those who're turned off by secretions of bodily fluids and definitely not safe for work. The film is covered in vomit, sweat, piss, semen and bucketfuls of blood. And yet the sense of humor that permeates the atmosphere is not just scatological or sophomoric/slapstick but more preoccupied with irony and tragedy.

It is unfair and just plain obscene to see such scorchingly original a movie have such a small following. Perhaps the trailer might help. If not, you're all just a bunch of philistines.

...

BACK TO POST

1. The only thing that comes even close is Ivana Baquero as little Ofelia in del Toro's brilliant Pan's Labyrinth.

T'has been brought to our attention

2010-07-20T23:14:00.000-07:00

...that Sami (a.k.a. Somnath) saw the film Inception with director Anurag Kashyap and gave him a very sweet, heartfelt, personal blowjob at the end.

Sami - the man, the machine.

Nostalgia Nystagmia

2010-07-14T08:40:00.000-07:00

The child is grown, the dream is gone.

Oh the irony!

2010-07-12T05:39:00.000-07:00

That the Dutch - the land of players like Johann Cruyff, Marco van Basten and Dennis-fucking-Bergkamp (what a man!) - were beaten by the very same tiki taka/Totaalvoetbal brand of football they pioneered and passed on to Barça in favor of a rough, street fighting, trench warfare game epitomized by the spectacularly dirty killer-on-the-loose van Bommel.

Three cheers for our Paul the Octopus!

Found Footage - Part 2

2010-07-11T06:54:00.000-07:00

Part 1 here.

...

We see Shuchikar in the recently deceased Andy Umbrage's office located on the sixth floor of the Arts and Cinema Studies department. He was informed of his late mentor's bizarre suicide by a call from Umbrage's lawyer who let him know that it was the express wish of the late artist that his one time protégé Shuchikar be informed of his demise wherever and whenever it comes to pass and that his many unreleased (and some of them incomplete) films, still housed in his office in the University be made available to him and that Shuchikar be the sole custodian of the same and decide on whatever he thought was appropriate vis-à-vis their release to the general public/art/film/academic community.

So we see our hero in the environs he hasn't visited in quite a while and we watch him sympathetically - indeed somewhat admiringly as well (he's the hottest underworld filmmaker these days) - as he lazily casts a glance around the office that used to be such an important part of his life a few years ago. The place is stacked with books that lie around somewhat haphazardly not just on the shelves but also on tables and the floor. The walls in front of him are bare except for a giant poster of Takahiko Iimura playing chess with Michael Bay who's dressed in black cape as Death, recreating the iconic scene from The Seventh Seal by Bergman.

The table in front of him carries on it a sealed box with Umbrage's unreleased films. He's decided to take them home and watch them on his projector and write short reviews of the same before deciding their fate as regards their release. He's also decided to not participate in the discussions on and regarding the death of his mentor and the symbolic significance/interpretations of the particular manner in which he killed himself, the latest of which is that Umbrage's head-in-the-sand-legs-in-the-air suicide was supposed to mirror the ostrich's cowardly behavior. As a dyed-in-the-wool symbol-minded artist, Umbrage would have been thoroughly amused at this turn of events, Shuchikar thought. Indeed, nobody in the present art world championed Duchamp's art semiotics more than Umbrage who's first major performance was opened by the following lines:

The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.

Interestingly, the aforementioned first major performance of Umbrage had ended in disaster (for him personally) as he, just after quoting Duchamp had jumped off a small cliff, all naked but for a quill in each of his arms and had fallen down thirty feet or so directly and had broken every major bone in his body. This piece had created a sharp rift in the art community where some praised the artist for his extraordinary courage, some praised him for symbolizing man's eternal quest for flight which in turn was interpreted as progress, some praised him for choosing ostrich quills as symbolic feathers (since quills also stood for 'the pen' which is not only mightier than the sword but metaphorically represents all creativity itself and in having chosen an ostrich quill, Umbrage had underlined the inevitably tragic nature of all such creative, artistic endeavors) and the remainder praised the act and its dénouement (or the lack of it, as some commentators quipped) as standing for the personal danger to bones and (remaining) limbs that artists the world over have to face up to alone, singlehandedly, notwithstanding the collaborative nature of art and the jaded spectator's as-important-as-artists role of bringing out the art in art.

This stuff totally makes you teary eyed!

2010-07-06T04:00:00.001-07:00

<*sounds of muffled cries of gratitude*>

Found Footage - Part One

2010-06-30T16:15:00.000-07:00

After having lived a rich and fulfilling life, Andy Umbrage took his own life last night. As a cross platform, multi faceted artist (he was a celebrated painter, poet, filmmaker, musician, art theorist, performance artist and socialite), his suicide comes across as a major shock to his not-so-many-in-terms-of-sheer-numbers but small-but-rabidly-devoted-and-deeply-influential trendsetting powerful artist and patron fans across the world. Expect festchrifts and tributes in plenty and obscure and often very subtle homages in the form of jump cuts interspersed with sickening footages of tigers eating humans in graphic detail and a brown, long haired boy pleasuring himself in the shower - a sly wink to Umbrage's now notoriously famous film "The Revenge of Mowgli" - by arthouse filmmakers across the globe.

Umbrage is not survived by his wife and children. They died seven years ago while protesting against tree felling in the jungles of Amazon. They had bound themselves to immense redwood trees with metal chains and although this was sufficient to deter the tree fellers, it certainly wasn't enough for the creatures of the night who were seduced by this grand gesture on the part of the Umbrage family and secretly paid them a visit to thank them for this magnanimity. The following day, Mrs. Umbrage's face was found chewed off and the body of Master Umbrage was nowhere to be found, metal chains notwithstanding. As this news traveled, a visibly perturbed Andy Umbrage declared this the Ultimate Performance Art of the century.

When the police arrived to the scene of the suicide this morning in Mr. Umbrage's house, they found the tiling on the floor destroyed and dirt all over the house. They also found a shovel near the deceased Mr. Umbrage's corpse. A copy of the novel The Tunnel by William H. Gass was also found. Umbrage had dug out a pit and had committed suicide by putting his head inside it and had covered the space with dirt. Presumably the cause of death was due to asphyxiation. As rigor mortis had set in, the police found the head and neck stuck into the ground and the torso and legs stiff and erect and pointing towards the ceiling. In the outstretched, clenched hands of the deceased, the police found a suicide note with only a few words etched on it in red ink - "Who's your daddy now?"

Critics are already claiming that the suicide was part of another profound piece of performance art. They are basing their claims on the terse suicide note and interpreting this act as a revolt against the recently-in-vogue tendencies of the neo-bourgeois artists who've been committing suicide painlessly and are claiming that by dying in such a grisly fashion, he reminded everyone that committing suicide ungrislyly is seriously uncool and such people are better off existing which in turn (the existence, that is) can only be either horrible or miserable. His detractors on the other hand simply point out that this was another attempt on his part to one-up his dead wife (with whom he had a long standing rivalry) and by the suicide note, he simply wanted to remind her who her daddy was.

The obituary is brought to halt by noting offhandedly that Andy Umbrage had many gifted disciples and that Shuchikar was once his protégé who'd rebelled against his style. Hearing the sad demise of his teacher, however, he decided to open up some windows into his past and pay a last visit to his dead mentor.

Miscellany

2010-06-23T22:42:00.000-07:00

Those of you with extra, disposable cash are directed to the following link - Science Fiction Anthology - which features a short story by Shuchikar - a close friend of Nanga Fakir and Ghongha Basant.
It is said that the song Professional Widow by the crazy-alien-from-outer-space-visiting-earth-in-the-guise-of-the-absolutely-brilliant-Tori Amos is about Courtney Love (cf. "Don't blow those brains yet/
We gotta be big boy/We gotta be big"; "Give me peace, love, peace, love/Give me peace/Love/And a hard cock."(See also the 'peace, love (and empathy)' reference in Kurt Cobain's suicide note.)). If it's true, then she's just harsh. Harsh, harsh, harsh.
Recent acquisitions are Gravity's Rainbow and V. by Pynchon. NF also dithered for a real long time over the question of To-Acquire-or-not-to-Acquire Cryptonomicon by the great Neal Stephenson. He eventually decided to not acquire the voluminous (1100 pages to be precise) tome deferring the acquisition to some perhaps more opportune time. Meanwhile, back on the bookshelf, the pile of unread books keeps climbing higher.
The absolutely too-crazy-to-be-real match's venue should be shifted from the Wimbledon to the Lord's. They play test matches there, don't they?

Recursion

2010-06-09T15:06:00.000-07:00

The Droste Effect in Escher's Print Gallery. Very sexy!

...

A brief technical article, explaining the Droste Effect and techniques used in making the video can be found here. To follow the article, a working knowledge of Complex Analysis is recommended (but not required).

DFW is not a Quickie

2010-06-06T08:59:00.000-07:00

Oblivion is quintessentially DFWish - longish stories that meander and digress and ruminate and dwell on details in a way that is typical of the fiction of DFW. Compared to his previous short story book - Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (which has been made into a not-so-bad film by John Krasinski), the stories are longer; and the humor - much more subtle and dark. Apart from Incarnations of Burned Children (click on link to read the story - one of the most killer, heart rending, brilliant, absolutely unendurable-in-what-it-describes pieces of short fiction with an unforgettable, devastating-yet-uplifting last line¹), which is only two and a half page long, the others are somewhat lengthy and take their own sweet time to build up and have a nasty tendency to hang around somewhat languorously in your head a long time after you're done reading. Don't expect twist endings, clever plotting or character building; the stories have an amorphous, hard-to-point-but-easy-to-experience quality that compels you to revisit the book again and again and the experience is augmented after each such iteration.

The best stories in this volume are clearly the aforementioned Incarnations..., Good Old Neon, Another Pioneer and The Soul is not a Smithy.

If there were ever a quintessential, representative, archetypal work that summarizes, condenses, distills and weaves into one all the multifarious, hidden, interconnected-yet-divergent themes that any writer (or for that matter, a director or musician etc.) might address in her entire oeuvre - if there were a single piece of work that characterizes completely, a creative mind and typifies her Weltanschauung - then Good Old Neon is definitely DFW's representative work.² It opens with:

My whole life I've been a fraud...

...

...all I've ever done all the time is try to create a certain impression of me in other people.

The narrator is a hyper-self-aware, obscenely well educated and an intensely self critical, successful, modern yuppie. His bouts of self criticism and perception of his own shallowness and remarkable ease with which he can manipulate people's opinion of him drives him to despair and eventually to suicide. The prose stretches the limits of self consciousness and relentlessly probes the very limits of communication amongst humans.

...what goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant...

The story Another Pioneer is:

derived from an acquaintance of a close friend who said that he had himself overheard this exemplum aboard a high-altitude commercial flight

The aforementioned story turns out to be a quasi-mythological tale of a wonderboy in a prehistoric society who seems to have answers to all possible questions, albeit in a literal, somewhat robotic manner - so much so that he becomes the chief counselor of the village and a clique of wise people emerges who charge the villagers to frame their questions and anxieties in precisely the correct form so that the response of the wonderboy is meaningful. (The garbage-in-garbage-out paradigm of programming and the way the wise-people-of-the-village construct is mapped on to the modern day programmers of computing behemoths is unmistakable.) However, jealous of the village's subsequent prosperity, the neighboring village's wise man 'bugs' the system and the boy transcends his previous (autistic) savantness and becomes wiser - but in a somewhat grotesque way.

In The Soul is not a Smithy the narrator recounts a violent episode from his childhood, in which he and three classmates were allegedly held hostage by a deranged substitute teacher. However, he never quite gets to it, as he's preoccupied with the story that he was imagining at the time, visualizing it in the panes of the schoolroom window - a story of a blind girl and her lost dog, which becomes increasingly bizarre as the real world situation around him becomes life threatening.

...

Believe it or not, but Nanga Fakir has begun reading Infinite Jest again.

<*must... not... give in to... temptation. must... resist*>

...

BACK TO POST

1. Although decontextualized, it should still hit you hard enough to sit back and take notice. It ends with the child...

having learned to leave himself and watch the whole rest unfold from a point overhead, and whatever was lost never thenceforth mattered, and the child's body expanded and walked about and drew pay and lived its life untenanted, a thing among things, its self's soul so much vapor aloft, falling as rain and then rising, the sun up and down like a yoyo.

BACK TO POST

2. Like Annie Hall is Woody Allen's, Eraserhead is David Lynch's, Slackers is Richard Linklater's, Adaptation is Charlie Kauffman's, Godaan is Premchand's, Laal Teen ki Chchat (Red Tin Roof) is Nirmal Verma's, Neuromancer is William Gibson's...

High and Hippied

2010-05-19T17:19:00.000-07:00

D : So what does your name mean?
NF : Huh...what does yours mean?
D : Uhh...it means an Ocean.
NF : Yours?
B : Peace.
NF : And yours?
A : Halo...as in around the sun.
NF : His I know - Wise Hero. Right?
S : <*Nods*>
D : So...what does yours mean? Or is it like one of those American names like Todd that probably means your parents thought your were a toad when born?
NF : <*Smiles*> Well, let me think and give you a precise answer.

<*Thinks*>

NF : It means 'Novel Bliss'. 'Novel' as in novelty and not a novel.
D : Novel Bliss.
B : Novel Bliss.
A : Novel Bliss.
D : Ha! Just like being on drugs. Right?

...

2010-04-18T14:45:00.000-07:00

#7 : The fuck!

<*reads*>

"It is mandatory to include at least two women in your team for the intramural volleyball tournament."

This year's tourney is so gay.

Eavesdropping on Ghongha

2010-04-07T16:33:00.000-07:00

Ghongha: How's your life-as-soap-opera metaphor holding up?
Girl: <*coyly*> That metaphor's metamorphosed. <*smiles*>
Ghongha: ...
Girl: ... <*sporting a quizzical-something-wrong(?)-type-expression*>
Ghongha: I think I just fell in love with you.

...

Nanga Fakir's planning to capture more incidents from the life of his close friend Ghongha Basant. Shuchikar - Ghongha's closest friend and roommate for four years in college (and the exact opposite of Ghongha in personality (read suave, smart, glib and raconteur par excellence - quite the ladies' man) - promises me to help dig up on Ghongha's stories - past, present and future.

दिन कुछ ऐसे गुज़ारता है कोई

2010-04-02T01:38:00.000-07:00

कुछ रोज़ से वक़्त कुछ यूं गुज़ारा जाता है - शाम को उठना, तनिक चहलकदमी उपरांत काम की कोशिश और जबड़ा फैलाए, लार टपकाते, इंतज़ार में बैठे मौत के घंटे से (जो मई के अंत में बजने के मूड में है) चंद लम्हे चुरा कर नागराज और ध्रुव के रोमांचक कारनामों का लुत्फ़ उठाना और उनके भीषण पराक्रम और धमधमात्मक लड़ाइयों का; और महामानव, त्रिमुंड और ड्रैकुला सरीखे मंजे हुए दर-शैतान खलनायकों के चीर हरण और मान मर्दन का ऐसे कुछ लम्पट ब्लॉग पोस्ट्स में बखान करना.
...

ये पोस्ट निम्न कॉमिक्सों के अध्ययन के आधार पर लिखी गयी हैं:
१) परकाले
२) ज़लज़ला
३) ड्रैकुला का अंत
...

'धमधमात्मक' नामक शब्द का कोई अस्तित्व नहीं है. (लेकिन चूंकि सुनने में सॉलिड लगता है इसलिए इसका ऐसा इस्तेमाल किया गया, जैसा इस्तेमाल किया गया.)
...

पांडू/सत्यव्रत का नया हिंदी ब्लॉग ज़रूर देखें - सॉलिड कवितायें. ज़ीरो लम्पटगीरी.

लिंक.

Miniscule Musings

2010-03-08T22:04:00.000-08:00

There is a scene in Shutter Island in which the warden (a cameo of sorts played by Ted Levine who is more famous for flashing his dick and skinning his victims as the serial killer Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs) and DiCaprio ride in a jeep and have a little talk about violence. The jeep is ambling through the woods as Ted Levine leans over and conspiratorially remarks how similar the two of them are - how they're both 'men of violence' and relish this streak in themselves. There is considerable menace in his voice - a hint of vast reserves of physical energy just barely held in control by his better sense, to be unleashed with considerable pleasure at the slightest opportunity that walks around and decides to present itself. The warden is aware of the enjoyment he derives from blood and finds in DiCaprio an accomplice that shares the guilty pleasure in much the same way. There is considerable understated violence and hint of some big, impending disaster in the sinister smile and casual wink directed at DiCaprio - insinuating some deep, profound, primal connection between them - the kind that is prized precisely because it's so rare - the elusive bond that blood brothers, soulmates, mystics et al. claim to share.

DiCaprio is horrified at the thought and yet by the end of the scene indicates his willingness to flex his muscles and not back down from the fight if the warden were foolish enough to initiate one. "Attaboy", the warden's response seems to say. DiCaprio gets out of the jeep and walks away. It could've easily been the best scene of the film.

The theme of not backing down and never running away from a physical fight is a somewhat recurring theme throughout the movie ("You've never backed down from a fight haven't you?", remarks the German doctor (played by Max von Sydow) when they first meet in Ben Kingsley's mansion) which theme's supposed to reinforce in the audience an appreciation of the gritty, hard, tough, (if-need-be)-more-violent-than-you-can-imagine motherfucker DiCaprio's character's supposed to portray. And herein lies the biggest flaw the film - the miscasting of DiCaprio as the gentle-outside-but-uberviolent-beast-lurking-inside character that his persona just doesn't reflect at all. The entire (tongue-in-cheek one might say) premise of the film - it might just be better to die a good man than stay alive a monster - relies fundamentally on DiCaprio's characterization as the monster.

Make no mistake about it - DiCaprio is a great actor. For those who've been his sworn enemies ever since Titanic came out need to look at his absolutely brilliant role in the film The Basketball Diaries (orders of magnitude better than his more celebrated Oscar nominated role in What's Eating Gilbert Grape?). DiCaprio was, before the superstardom of Titanic, with good reason, an indie sensation. He's himself conceded that perhaps rather than Titanic, he should've acted in the abso-fucking-lutely awesome Boogie Nights by the brilliant Paul Thomas Anderson. In particular, he is able to evoke the hallucination enforced loneliness and intense sense of loss that his character is haunted by throughout the movie; but for all his awesome acting skill, he just can't fit the part of the monster he's so thrashed out to be. Scorsese has made the little, harmless Joe Pesci far more intimidating and monsterish in his previous flicks.

And so, as Ted Levine gives us a chilly yet casual glimpse into his ambient low-level, loosely chained violent side, we groan and curse him for misjudging the intense, smart, yet fundamentally weak DiCaprio as his counterpart.

Sigh, sigh, sigh.

Deniz is right when she says we don't expect this from Scorsese.

Not-so-brief an Interview with not-so-hideous a Man

2010-02-05T12:05:00.000-08:00

David Foster Wallace didn't give out interviews generally; and most of the ones he did end up giving were either print or radio. (Two notable exceptions are the interviews he gave to Charlie Rose.) So to see him respond to questions on screen was a rare privilege. (However, such intimate/direct knowledge of people whom you love/idolize in a somewhat blind, larger-than-life way can sometimes be a rather jarring experience. After having joined the abject-fans-of-Nirmal-Verma cult, Nanga Fakir was jolted to hear his voice reading a passage from one of his books. His voice was weak, pathetic and old-womanish - not the rich Gulzarish baritone NF had hoped it would've been.)

So when Nanga Fakir came across the 84 minute youtube interview of the (erstwhile) saddest person on earth, he watched it with a little hesitation. Let's just say that he was not in the least disappointed.

The interview is conducted by a German team and the interviewer is a girl with a thin, squeaky voice (who gives the impression of being blonde, thin, studentsy and a little on the plainer side) and is overawed by the interviewee. The interviewee is a nerdy/geeky looking mental titan, incredibly shy and self conscious and nervous and mindful of his own self consciousness and obvious unease that he exudes in front of the camera. He's also very honest and earnest and is very much uneasy when the interviewer asks him big, grand philosophical questions (Cf. first question: "Do you think humor comes out of something sad or is it a cliché?"). DFW's is aghast that such questions are being put to him. He twitches, bares his fangs and grits his teeth. Intense surprise contorts his face and yet, to his credit, he decides to answer such questions in all seriousness⁰.

To see for yourself, here's the screenshot of the guy when this question's put to him:

The screenshot above is funny. DFW's face gives the impression of a deflated balloon. And yet, time and again, as these questions are put to him, and as he gets ready to answer them honestly and in detail, a spasm of painful contortion zaps his face. He repeatedly asks, full of self doubt and misgiving after each such answer: "Does that make any sense to you?", "You're not going to use that for the interview are you?", "I doubt if it makes much sense." and "I can hear in my head a voice making fun of this stuff.". It is clear that the problem of meaningful communication among humans comes to the fore here - something that David Foster Wallace has written about numerous times. He refers to it in the interview also when talking about the purpose of good art and how it helps one consciousness transcend its being trapped in a body and reach and enter another, howsoever fleetingly. Hence his response "Since it can't be talked about directly, we need to make up stories about it."

However, the best thing about the interview (apart from the fact that it is one of the really rare pictures/video of the man without a bandanna and long hair) is that it is uncut. So you can see the microphones being set and the off camera crew passing off-hand comments on DFW's on-screen persona (in one such encounter an off camera voice jibes - "You're pontificating" to which DFW rolls his eyes over and says "Yeah, yeah") and the clear discomfort of David Foster Wallace at being treated like an important "writer".

Here's the first part (of ten) of the interview on youtube.

One wishes the son of a bitch hadn't killed himself!

...

0.

BACK TO POST

DFW's (eventual) response to this question:

"I know that Wittgenstein believed that the most serious and profound problems and questions can be discussed only in the form of jokes.", and

"There are forms of humor that offer escape from pain and there are forms of humor that...transfigure pain. Does that make any sense?"

आगंतुक

2009-12-21T18:52:00.000-08:00

Nanga Fakir will visit Lucknow from 26th December to 26th January. He enjoins all those who can, to take time some time out and pay him a visit.

लिटगीरी रीडक्स

2009-12-12T18:17:00.000-08:00

Lit links:

The Use of Poetry : An excerpt from the latest Ian McEwan novel about a fictional Nobel Prize winning physicist Michael Beard. Read this to experience first-hand, the sheer breathtaking awesomeness that McEwan's prose is. From one of the foremost writers of our times. Totally killer!
Midnight in Dostoyevsky : Don DeLillo is currently the reigning lit grandmaster of American literature. This somewhat longish, eight page story set in the blistery upstate New York winter about two lonely, intensely competitve students, a mysterious old man and a logic professor who reads Dostoyevsky day and night needs to be read. Nay, demands to be read.
All That : And yes, our very own David Foster Wallace!

Recommended Setting/Background/Ambient Sound: The epic 19 minute Farm Aid '98 version of Down by The River by Neil Young and Phish.

...

Yes, you are welcome!

Phishing for Words

2009-12-04T02:06:00.001-08:00

Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod...

Link 1

Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod...

Link 2

Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod...

OOOOOOOOOOhmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod Ohmygod...

Link

2009-12-02T05:18:00.000-08:00

Link to the story 'Stalker' that NF penned a few months ago.

(Warning: Is long and unfunny and sometimes takes itself too seriously. Story content is softcore-pornish. )

Recent Musical Adventures

2009-11-26T23:15:00.000-08:00

Buddy Guy and BB King (August 29th '09): The King has gotten old. His teeth are falling, he's going senile and probably has attacks of debilitatingly intense incontinence. The seventy-or-something-minute performance on the slowly rotating stage was half hearted at best. It included lots of boring conversational pieces about music, beauty and love to the accompaniment of a staid rhythm that could have been generated by drowsy amateur musicians on autopilot mode. The angry outbursts ("Shut the fuck up and sing you old man") from a row or two behind confirmed NF's suspicion that this sentiment was shared by many.

Verdict: The thrill is gone. Totally.

Contrast this, however, with the positively brilliant Buddy Guy performance who (technically) "opened" for the grand old man. His remarkable wit, sharp humor, awe-inspiring stage presence⁰ and excellent song selection confirm his stature as the best Blues musician alive today. So much charisma in a seventy three year old in a loose shirt and polka dotted guitar is unfair - obscenely so.

Porcupine Tree (Sep 24th '09): Nanga Fakir had been taken in by the awesomeness of the band when he was in 3rd year in S'kal and PP had come one arbit day to announce his latest favorite rock fetish. "Arriving Somewhere..." had been a bolt from the blue from which Nanga Fakir, in some sense, never completely recovered¹.

The concert was at Terminal 5. Despite a couple of setbacks², Nanga Fakir managed to enjoy the show which comprised mostly of songs from the new album - a decidedly heavier sounding record, it's melody notwithstanding. Right now, NF opines that Porcupine Tree are one of the very few bands at the extreme frontier of heavy-metal-fused-with-progressive-tendencies that are able to maintain a semblance of melody in the presence of heavy and harsh sounding guitar work. Much of that credit must go to the frontman Steve Wilson's mellow and somewhat dreamy, mellifluous voice.

An out and out excellent concert but for the presence of the random bastard who kept shouting Free Bird after the end of each piece.

Indian Ocean (October 09th '09): At Times Square's B.B. King's Blues Club & Grill. Credit goes to Somnath Pal for bringing the concert to NF's notice which he attended with a friend from the nearby Rutgers University (which by the way, is supposedly one of the most boring places on earth). The great John Turturro, apparently a big Indian Ocean fan was in attendance somewhere in the dark hall.

As is usual with their concerts, Indian Ocean impressed with their improvised jams, their new songs (yes! finally) and their rather bawdy, in-your-face and rustic brand of humor³. The funniest thing was the presence of white chicks in search for an exotic Indian sounding band that they could put up as their latest new authentic musical discovery on Facebook. Nanga Fakir had a hard time controlling his laughter as they swayed/swung their heavy round asses to the sounds of Hille Re.

Among other, relatively minor adventures are the Friday night Jazz Jam sessions in the University Cafe and the Mongolian throat singing concert that The Horse (who's name has now been changed to 'Sama') took NF to.

The final stage of this series of adventures includes NF's killing blow - his upcoming appearance at Phish's reunion concert on 2nd December in Madison Square Garden!

The most breathtaking, the most versatile and definitely the best band of the '90s - Phish had blown NF away when he was in the seventh block in his 3rd year in S'kal. He had recently discovered the Grateful Dead and had overheard some conversation in which Phish were compared to the Dead. An immediate download of songs followed by an instant conversion to their cult had happened. Now with the benefit of hindsight, NF can definitely assert that although Phish must have started out as a major Grateful Dead inspired group, not only did they find their own voice totally distinct from The Dead, but in fact, they beat Dead at their own game - long improvisational jams that seem to continue forever (especially if you were high on grass).

Their break-up in 2004 had brought on an existential crisis for a lot of their phans⁴ including Nanga Fakir who gave up hoping to ever see them together. But the fat lady sang, and sang far better than Susan Boyle. And how Grateful are their Dead Phans to see them back!

BACK TO POST

0. Actually "stage presence" is technically a misnomer since he jumped around so much - frequently running up the rows, coming back down, going off again - all while doing his guitaring calisthenics Hendrix ultimately got so famous for.

BACK TO POST

1. Porcupine Tree is the last great rock band NF got hooked on to (along with Radiohead). After that, his musical education came to a standstill. Despite entreaties by juniors and fellow music geeks to follow Opeth, Tool or Death Cab for Cutie, NF has felt too sapped and enervated to follow any band in earnest ever since.

BACK TO POST

2. A couple of friends NF went with were thrown out of the venue for drunken/disorderly behavior; how NF survived is another story altogether. He claims his impeccable behavior and extraordinary tact and cool saved his ass. But we know enough to not believe him when he talks about himself, don't we?

BACK TO POST

3. Quote-Unquote: (Translated from the street-level Hindi they usually speak)

"Next year we'll play at Carnegie Hall. But we probably won't see you there (since you won't be invited?). (Nudge-nudge-wink-wink.) <*Oohs and aahs from the audience*>. But for you, we'll be back next September at this same place. How about that?"

BACK TO POST

4. The comparisons with the Grateful Dead are long and well reasoned. Just like the Dead, Phish had a huge community of fans who would follow them around on tours and these dedicated, hardcore followers, had a special name (the Deadheads in the case of Grateful Dead) - Phans.

Yay!

2009-11-22T15:59:00.000-08:00

Nanga Fakir's science fiction story "Stalker" wins the first prize in the Scientific Indian's Science Fiction story writing contest.

Link.

Thanks to Mons_thaa, Garnet, Ranaji, Tejo, Ra, Agent, Man and Somnath Pal.

Fuck the Police!

2009-11-07T07:59:00.000-08:00

(Click for a bigger size)
(Courtesy: Vatsa)

PS: Probably photoshopped.

Life Under the New Regime - 3

2009-10-30T16:19:00.000-07:00

Nanga Fakir has probably run out of clever, meaningful, witty, smart, funny or even interesting things to say. So he planned to put out a last, final, somewhat maudlin, self indulgent, morosey post announcing the quiet demise of this space. Procrastination intervened however. And a little later, NF decided to not take himself seriously after all.

The adventures of the book junkie continue well - even in the face of deadlines, crises of all shapes and sizes and just plain old routine work. For keeping up with this rather unfriendly and reclusion-inducing habit, (which most of his old friends who shared the same passion for reading in their younger, halcyon years at S'kal (AK, Pandu, Ra, Subbu...) or perhaps even earlier at school (Somnath, Man...) have rather readily shed) Nanga Fakir would like to formally pat himself on the back.

<*pat, pat, pat*>

Reading continues to be a source of delight. NF's eyes have got keener, more discerning. His playlists continue to grow in quantity and quality, in the girth of the volumes and the width of the subject matter, in fiction and in non-fiction, in style and in substance. Technical details at the sentence and the word level, the idiosyncrasies of form and content, the art's heart's purpose - speak to NF in low, hushed voices, laying bare the mechanics of communication, fueling the communion (albeit one sided) of ideas. And the benefits are not merely theoretical/abstract⁰.

Recent Lit Adventures:

The Road: Lit giant Cormac McCarthy's unanimously celebrated Pulitzer grabbing post-apocalyptic saga hailed by some to be the most depressing book ever. NF loved the book and its ultra minimal style. But the most depressing book ever? No fucking way. Just a very good read. Nothing earth-shatteringly saddening.

Nausea: NF had tried to read this so-called Jean Paul Sartre existential masterpiece three times previously but had failed spectacularly at each try. Then he read some random remark by David Foster Wallace in one of his non-fiction pieces saying it's a work of genius, clenched his fists and ground his teeth in grim determination and forced himself to read it. Verdict? It's a damn fine book. Only too reader-unfriendly - like some early version of Linux dreamed up by a sadist geek. If you're patient enough and have nothing better to do, go through the much hailed novel. (Spoiler?) There is an Aha! moment at the end of the book. And a real one at that.

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men: No-one writes fiction quite the way David Foster Wallace does - as ecstatically, with as much self consciousness, with as much breathlessness, with as much black humor, with as much style. His incredible attention to detail - in descriptions as much as in the style of writing, just plain brilliant subject matter and the insistence of addressing the important, universal and grabbing-you-by-the-balls-and-demanding-an-immediate-answer-type questions have made a lifelong fan out of Nanga Fakir.

The Depressed Person, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men #2, Octet, Suicide as a Sort of Present and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men #4 are just plain gems of short stories. NF plans to read this book again. And again. And maybe again.

When Infinite Jest had come out, a lot of people had compared David Foster Wallace's style of writing as similar to Nabokov's. Naturally, once NF was converted, his hunter instincts led him to Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. A hundred pages into the book, Nanga Fakir can totally dig why such claims of similarity were made. It manifests in the attention to detail, the delightful wordplay, the abso-fucking-lutely delectable prose and the location of humor in the most unlikely places. The way Nabokov bends and commands the English language and makes an abject slave out of it is simply jaw dropping. Read it to experience this feeling first hand. And on top of this, the transformation of the adventures of such a borderline pedophilic protagonist as Humbert Humbert into a hilarious comedy is a truly non trivial achievement for a belletrist of any order.

And so Nanga Fakir trudges on, slowly, patiently, painstakingly - reading for half an hour, one and sometimes on good, easy, relaxed days, two-three-four (or more!) hours. It's lucky to be taken up so much by some overarching, engrossing activity that holds your attention and trusses you up in a warm, glowing blanket of self sufficient happiness.

BACK TO POST

0. Quote-Unquote:

<*the first floor lobby History Honors Society's book sale. NF with two books in hand - The Best American Short Stories 1986 (Edited by Raymond Carver and featuring stars of the lit firmament like Donald Barthelme, Ann Beattie, David Lipsky, Alice Munro and Tobias Wolff) and Alice Mary Hilton's Logic, Computing Machines and Automation*>

NF: I heard that there's some buy one get one free offer or something?
The (presumably) History Grad Student: <*eyes NF fixedly*> To himself: Who bargains at a book-for-a-buck sale? (Ans: Indian.)
Aloud: Not really. You get one free if you answer a history trivia.
NF: Shoot.
The (presumably) History Grad Student: Where was Josef Stalin born?
NF: <*sports a big grin*>
The (presumably) History Grad Student: <*notices the grin. grins back*>
NF: It's a rather trivial question.
The (presumably) History Grad Student: You think so? The answer might be tricky.
NF: He was born in Georgia.
The (presumably) History Grad Student: Whoa man! You're good.
NF: Can I answer another one and have both of them for free?
The (presumably) History Grad Student: No. You can't.

खूनी खोपड़ी जाग उठी!

2009-10-27T22:23:00.000-07:00

दो हफ्ते से सुशुप्त, मूर्छित खूनी खोपड़ी⁰ अंततोगत्वा आज जाग उठी. विकिपीडिया के विरह में लबालब भरी अश्रु-संचित बाल्टियों को नंगा फ़कीर ने उल्लासित चित्त से विदा किया.

निश्चय ही, भगवान् के घर देर है, अंधेर नहीं.

BACK TO POST

0. नंगा फ़कीर के लैपटॉप का नाम.

Sympathy

2009-10-23T16:26:00.001-07:00

There is no sight in the world as singularly heartbreaking, as incredibly saddening, as that of an obese girl in the Romance section of a bookstore.

Ninja Tips for Healthy Living

2009-10-20T17:43:00.000-07:00

<*Nods to Garnet for the great gift!*>

Exercise is important but jogging is for wimps. Plenty of exercise can be had leaping bushes and kicking joggers in the head.
Laughter is medicine. Ninjas practice the art of inappropriate laughter. Laughing when hearing about cancer also shows the ninja's strength.
Ninjas occasionally, without warning, stab friends in their faces with dirty, blunt knives. Life is random. Ninjas embrace this fact of life.
Killing the wrong person happens. Ninjas know this. It's useless to live in the past.
Everyone knows yoga classes are filled with women. Ninjas prove their skill and impress women by killing off the yoga instructor.
Samurais are the source of much stress for ninjas. They think they're sooo cool with their armor and swords and awesome helmets. It is in a ninja's best interest to not think about such things.
When eating the still beating hearts of their enemies, ninjas eat it all. For every one such lucky ninja, there are ten in Africa who don't have any hearts to eat.
Cleanliness is important. If ninjas get ketchup stains on their outfit when eating out, they throw smoke pellets and teleport, only to appear outside their den where they burn their besmirched outfits.
Theoretical mind control is one of the most powerful ninja sciences. Applied mind control involves inducing small children to give you their money.
It's good for ninjas to treat themselves to occasional Western pleasures. That's why it's okay to put on a clean ninja outfit, light candles and watch "Ninja Vixens: Virgin Nightmares".

Nuggets of (Questionable) Wisdom

2009-10-10T13:03:00.000-07:00

<*Nanga Fakir makes a faux-sad face, buries his head in his hands, makes a show of being in terrible, agonising pain, whines and lets out a low moan*>

NF: This is not cool. Not cool.

The Horse: <*stares blankly*>

NF: I am hungry. I don't want to move. Not cool.

The Horse: <*stares blankly*>

NF: You know...there should be a machine, which when you snap your fingers and say "Me hungry...need food" should automatically make brilliant dishes come out of thin air.

The Horse: <*stares blankly; smiles*>

NF: Huh.

The Horse: That machine is called a girlfriend.

Drinkers of the World, Unite!

2009-09-28T22:09:00.000-07:00

So NF has, for some time now, been busy enjoying the company of his new best friend from Mongolia who, as it turns out, needed a little help in Angreji. NF has been known to have done this left, right and center all through his waking life (and has scores of SOPs to his credits) and through the passage of time, has begun to enjoy this rather unearned power that summary comments, editorial executions (and flourishes) and condescending tones explaining why 'a troubled dream' is better than 'uneasy dreams', grants him over others. (See link: Nabokov edits Kafka.) His latest continuing fascination with Inglourious Basterds played a pivotal role in framing the style of this ESLish essay.

So without further ado, here's the speech NF coached (and coaxed!) the guy into delivering.

Something Interesting About Myself

I am happy to be here speaking to you as part of the assignment. Since the topic for the assignment is “Something interesting about myself”, I will talk about my fascination with alcohol.

1) Chapter 1: Drinking Experiences in Mongolia

I come from Mongolia where winters are very cold and summers warm. So it is very important for the survival of people to eat large quantities of meat and drink a lot of alcohol. In particular, I especially miss the local Mongolian drink “Airag” which is made from the milk of mares and the drink “Arhi” which is a specialty drink made from yogurt. I drank often and in large quantities and enjoyed my time in Mongolia before moving to Japan. However, my favorite drink in Mongolia was not a local flavor, but Vodka which is extremely popular there.

Chapter 2: Drinking Experiences in Japan

I moved to Japan for higher education and stayed there for seven years. I lived in Tokyo and this was the first time that I got a chance to appreciate more popular and famous drinks. It is in Japan that I first drank whiskey, beer, rum, gin, tequila, wine and others. I also acquired a taste for the local Japanese drink "Sake" which is made from rice.

Chapter 3: Drinking Experiences while traveling

I have visited South Korea, Hungary, Czech Republic, Taiwan, China, Russia and Hong Kong among other places. And I made sure that during every visit to a foreign country I found time to taste the finest local brands of alcohol. So I am proud to say that I developed a taste for Korean sake ("makgeolli"), Hungarian wine, chose among 5000 different kinds of Czech beers, enjoyed "Choujiu" – a Chinese wine and authentic Russian vodka while I was visiting these countries.

Chapter 4: Drinking Experiences in America

I arrived in USA a month ago and was pleasantly surprised to see a good variety of American beer and wine in the Orientation ceremony. Within this short span, I have been able to, along with my Indian friends, taste many local beers, scotch and vodka. I have also recently added Indian Whiskey to my list of drinking experiences.

I look forward to more opportunities of traveling and discovering more varieties of drinks worldwide. In the end I would like to invite all those interested to join me in my quest for development of more advanced tastes in alcohols of all varieties.

Thank you.

Quote-Unquote:

<*NF, Mota and Vatsa huddle expectantly around The Horse (as he's fondly called) and ask how the speech went*>

The Horse: The students loved the speech. The teacher...<*hunts for words...*> so...so.

Poetic Justice

2009-09-22T14:47:00.000-07:00

Brilliant link here: Link

Nanga Fakir didn't know this guy very well (how glad he is on that account!) but second order reports from friends and juniors who were unfortunate enough to have first order dealings with him made his blood boil with rage. Hence the unconcealed glee!

Burn motherfucker. Burn!

Life Under the New Regime - 2: (It's been ages)

2009-09-20T13:52:00.000-07:00

It has been ages since NF saw a film. Any film. (He did catch up on Kaminay (which he thought was fantastic), District 9 and Inglourious Basterds and some old Hitchcock numbers like the excellent Shadow of a Doubt and Notorious and mandatory reruns of Andaz Apna Apna every fortnight or so but this is a far cry from his previous awe-inspiring, jaw-dropping, ball-crushing bouts of movie-mania in which he would sit for hours and devour one film after another.)

It has also been ages since NF read. Anything. Either fiction or non-fiction. He's formed a habit of reading himself off to sleep for a long time now and that's about the only reading he's been doing for quite some time. (No prizes for guessing which book. It's the Infinite Jest tome. A couple of pages are heavy enough to induce sleep in even the most chronically insomnia-ravaged patients.) That and some light, fast David Foster Wallace short stories while traveling. Not much, given NF's formidable past reading record.

It has been ages since NF listened to some good music. Any genre. (The last major outing was his unexpected guest appearance at the Chicago Blues Festival with a mug of beer in hand. That and being witness to Blues legends Buddy Guy and BB King a month ago in concert.) He's been trying to appreciate a little Jazz (Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Oscar Peterson and Ella Fitzgerald in particular) but opines that Jazz's perhaps more of an acquired taste than Blues.

It had been ages since he worked. Hard. However, these days somehow grind themselves away at work rather than at other pursuits. Staring at blackboards full of arcane expressions, trying to make sense out of Mickey Mouse models and taking life a little more seriously seem to be the order of the day. (Not much to his liking, we say in his defense though.)

It has been ages since he's felt so creative. NF feels almost a sense of a natural high as he trudges along home late at night from work day after day. Lines from Maggie's Farm ("I've got a head full of ideas that are driving me insane") seem to take NF by the scruff of his scrawny neck and whisper secret words of wisdom in his ears. Sometimes their power is such that he has to go away somewhere alone, clutch his head hard and do two or three short, but intense pelvic thrusts and let off screams of "Ouu...Ouu-Ouu" to relieve the mind-boggling mental pressure that's crushing the poor little sod under its weight.

If you ask him seriously though, he'll shrug his shoulders a little, throw his goggles up in the air à la Rajnikant (where they'll joggle and somersault a little and give out classy "woosh-woosh" sounds and sit right atop his nose-bridge), give a corny thumbs up and say "I don't mind it at all."

Quote-Unquote⁰:

NF: <*slightly tipsy perhaps*> Fine. Life is meaningless. So you just proved the problem is NP hard. Now what are you going to do with it? Acting cool, jaded, blasé, superior and invoking the meaninglessness of life as a justification for the aforementioned behavior is the same as (read isomorphic to) feeling satisfied and smug about the helplessness that the intractability of the problem induces. You've gotta fucking come up with a provable, well functioning heuristic. That's what's non trivial. That's what a True Ninja would do.

Listener: Dude, you've had too much. You better sleep.

BACK TO POST

0. Another one of those flashes that NF's been having so many of of late, good enough to be included in a separate "Nuggets of Wisdom" series.

Life Under the New Regime

2009-09-05T10:14:00.000-07:00

Imagine the human lip as a two dimensional geometrical figure. View it in isolation - an abstract, mathematical shape. Now locate its center. Imagine the X and Y axes passing through the center in the usual, orthogonal, Cartesian way. Consider the part of the lip in the first quadrant (x>0 and y>0). Now imagine what happens to this part when it is hit hard by a squash racket in the dying arcs of a full-blooded swing.⁰

The first-quadrant-lip develops a stubborn tumescence in response to developments it must've not really liked. The swelling just tumbles out spontaneously, outflanking its counterpart in a remarkably uncool, hideous way. The whole appearance is not unlike that of a lip recently bee stung. Smiling and laughing become searingly painful; the promise of food, a panic inducing, all too matter-of-fact suffering.

Life under the new regime also involves dutiful, painstaking study of Infinite Jest (again) and a slavish devotion to all things David Foster Wallace (the short story collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and Oblivion being duly acquired and lovingly gazed at everyday) - including shameless pastiches such as this.¹

BACK TO POST

0. This may be analyzed in the following two main parts:

a) The primary impact of the synthetic, boron coated outer frame of the racket on the first-quadrant-lip which cuts the skin and leaves a deep reddish bruise on the upper lip.

b) The secondary (and the more devastating) encounter between the inside of what the first-quadrant-lip is the outside of and its dragging and grinding motion against the razor sharp, mucronate canine tooth - all while the racket frame on the outside is tearing through the sturdy, unyielding epithelial tissue in a way reminiscent of Shakti Kapoor&Gulshan Grover's tearing through the Clothes of the Hero's Sister in the quintessential mainstream '80s Hindi film.

BACK TO POST

1.

Don't steal. But if you have to steal, steal from the best.

(Woody Allen)

Brief Interviews...

2009-09-01T14:56:00.000-07:00

Interrogator: So...what do you want to do...after this?

NF: I dunno...I guess I kinda like teaching...
Interrogator: Uh huh...so you're gonna hang around universities and shit?
NF: I guess so.
Interrogator: How's that man? You like teaching and all?
NF: <*shrugs noncommittally*> I guess I just like sucking young blood.

The Nugget Series Continues

2009-08-25T03:37:00.001-07:00

A good sense of humor is a sufficient condition for the existence of serious intelligence.

PS: The Turing Test could be restated as "If a machine cracks a really funny joke, it must be deemed intelligent."

PPS (for those interested): See also: Computational Humor.

नंगा फ़कीर

Inexistentialism

The Reader

Werner Herzog will eat his shoe

It's that time of the year

Wittgenstein's mistress

Weekend readings: part 2

Weekend readings: part 1

Notes for a future film

Notes on recent filmic impressions

अथ गुलज़ार उवाच

The insulted and the ignored

Djoker grinds the Grinder

Sarcasm

The host

The man the machine redux

Compliments and complements

Schadenfreude!

The perils of Platonism

Junkie needs fix

The part about genius

!

Bookslut

In praise of Dubeyji: Monday nights, Spring '11

बेजिन हाकुमेई के लिए !

Quicksands of make believe

Shut the door

Homecoming

Unforgiven

Miniscule Musings

Resigned Epicureanism

Because a picture is worth a thousand words redux

GY!BE - 03/14/11

Goddo supiido yuu! Burakku emparaa !!!

बकैती !

Vignettes

Debug this bitches!

From Sweden Pradesh, With Love

All About Bombay

The Take That Series Continues

For Bejin Hakumei

Advertisement

Take that redux

Bildungsroman

The Croak of Rana Tigrina

Pandora's Box

On Pedantry and Antfucking

दुबे कौन कुमति तोहे लागी?

A la Ra...

The Solution of a Zen Kōan

Not so trivia-l?

Let the Healing Begin

In Which Ghongha Gives it Those Ones

Because a picture is worth a thousand words?

Dark Humor

Hello, hello, hello how low?

Funny as hell

Arriving Somewhere

Dot Three

Recent Acquisitions

Otaku-san : Part 3

The Big Picture

Burn bitches, burn.

Otaku-san : Part 2

Otaku-san : Part 1

Another One Bites the Dust???

Found Footage - Part Three

See Film, Will Review

T'has been brought to our attention

Nostalgia Nystagmia

Oh the irony!

Found Footage - Part 2

This stuff totally makes you teary eyed!

Found Footage - Part One

Miscellany

Recursion

DFW is not a Quickie

High and Hippied

...

Eavesdropping on Ghongha