Sympathy

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

<*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

<*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!

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

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)

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.

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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

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

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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.

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1.

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

(Woody Allen)

Brief Interviews...

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

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.

Gloury

A day well spent. District 9 followed by Inglourious Basterds.

District 9 is brilliant. Definitely among the best SF movies NF's seen.

Inglourious... is spell binding. Christoph Waltz is unbelievable. It's not Brad Pitt that speculates (the very last dialog of the film) "...it may just be my greatest masterpiece." This is Tarantino thinking aloud, talking to his audience. Pitt's a mere proxy. And yes, it verily might be Mr Tarantino. Bravo!

Short Fictional Piece : Part 3

Part 1 here.

Part 2 here.

...

Limp Member walks back slowly and methodically down the dais. His gait is, just like his name, flaccid, non-erect and uninspiring. There are too many wrinkles on his face and his hair is matted and bushy. In particular he gives you the impression of a man who's been screwed over too many times, resents it and is dying to fuck someone over.

He takes his time coming down. He wants the feeling he's created tonight to sink in by the time he gets back to his seat.

Breaking News: It just sank (the feeling that is).

<*there is palpable tension in the auditorium and a few gasps of sudden understanding and cries of flash-epiphanies escape the ecstatic throats of the audience*>

<*Professor Cynic is visibly perturbed. he jumps up, totally agitated. the crowd follows him and what results is an overwhelming, rapturous standing ovation that continues for four-five-six-seven full minutes. Limp Member sits quietly, stony faced, expressionless, basking in the warm glow of appreciation*>

#1: <*tears streaming down her Che Guevara T shirt*> Oh my god...this is so, so...revolutionary!
#7: Wow...totally amazing. How does he do it man?
#3: Over and over again.
#11: Almost a religious experience man!
#29: <*coaxing his girlfriend, #31*> This calls for another joint. Let's move. To the Restroom!
#17: <*scratching head*> I, I...kinda don't get it. Isn't 'religion' an eight letter word?
#11: <*stumped*> What?
#17: Well, what's the big deal? It's obvious right?
#11: <*positively offended now*> You just don't get it man. <*shakes head*> Just don't get it.

Limp Member is being approached by all and sundry. He's being hugged by his colleagues who've been crushed by the bravura performance. Starry eyed lit chicks look at him the way hungry pythons look at rabbits. True to his form however, Member exudes no emotion and takes it all as if it were his due.

Cynic is crushed. He sits with his head in his hands fearing the onset of a black depression which he senses, will disable him now for sure.

Cynic: <*to himself*> Am I the only one who can see through all this? Are all these people insane, applauding a charlatan like this who's built a career on not saying anything meaningful? How can they be taken in by his tricks? Religion is not a seven letter word. Well of course it's not! And to pass off such tautologies as works of art? To win grants and prizes and accolades on the basis of such fraud? Jesus fucking Christ. Have the arts come to such a point that you cannot distinguish real from fake? High from low? Great from shoddy? Deep from shallow?

They'll pass it off as a work of genius. They'll defend him with their phony voices full of righteous indignation and ask what's wrong with tautologies. Is not all of Mathematics tautological? And what could you say to a titty-twister like that? They wouldn't even consider that that imbecile might actually have counted wrong! And his stubborn silence will be taken to be an enigmatic frown.

Parties will be hosted in his honor. The New York Times will carry a feature. He'll win the Nobel for sure the next year. And that will be the end of me. Ironic isn't it? The Cynic is the only one who cares now.

...

Cynic glances from the side of his eye to locate Member. He can see Jessica drooling over the hideous writer. Snatches of conversation buzz past his ear. "...eloquent in its brevity..." is heard more than chance would warrant. He casts a hateful glance towards Jessica who once threw a bucketful of goat blood on him for buying mink fur for his wife and for being a voracious meat eater.

Cynic: <*gritting teeth*> I knew it would come to this someday. There is no choice. <*smiles blackly*> Eloquence in brevity! Ha! I know a thing or two about minimalism too.

He let off a big sigh and sauntered towards the general area where Member was seated. People later remarked that his face bore an air of almost beatific calm. #31 also remembered seeing some vague, black object in his right hand.

<*Cynic walks towards Member. makes his way to him through the crowd and stands before his enemy. Member looks up insolently. Cynic lets out a quick, dry laugh and raises his right hand*>

Cynic: Dodge this!

#17 lets out a triumphant scream.

...

The End.

...

Short Fictional Piece : Part 2

Part 1 here.

...

There are minimalists and then there are ultra minimalists and then there is Limp Member - a master of the English prose who is to redundancy in expression what a good military boot is to a toadstool. The heir of Hemingway and Raymond Carver, he's to Contemporary American Literature what Che Guevara was to Revolution - the very fuckin' personification. His stories and novels are terse, very sparse and somewhat austere in their style with extremely pithy, aphoristic narratives and stripped-to-the-bone dialog as if the taciturn characters felt searing physical pain every time they uttered a word and so would speak not only grudgingly but very infrequently as well.

A very close friend, in the documentary "He Defecates Art", remarked that she hadn't seen him, in over twenty years of her interaction, smile even once. She also described him as challenged and challenging in the same breath^footnote.

And so here he was, the wizened white haired wizard of the lit pantheon limping along to the podium.

<*absolute silence in the auditorium. the students and faculty follow the hobbled trajectory of Member with bated breath, hanging on to his every step and feeling lucky to be witnesses to history in the making*>

<*Member reaches the podium, looks around askance, his eyes lingering on Jessica for a while longer than you'd expect (which pleases her to no end). in his hand is a small note at which he glances amusedly and puts back in the pocket*>

Member : <*in a slow, halting voice, his diction impeccable, his voice booming and articulating each syllable in a clear, crisp way impossible to find fault with*>

"Religion...is not a seven letter word. No. It is not."

<*the audience is drooling over every utterance of his. couples hold hands tight. even the cold, cerebral Professor Cynic - a long time critic of Member's style, sometimes indecipherable, vague endings and consistent aversion to discuss the themes of his own work - feels something alien, something of path/ground/genre-breaking importance hang in the air like the stench of imminent death in a Hitchcock film*>

<*necks outstretched. total silence*>

Slowly, as he had ascended, Limp Member descends and walks away to his seat.

<*shocked faces. total silence. realization dawns slowly on the audience - the story is over.*>

...

End of Part 2

...

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footnote. She described him as quantitatively challenged, vertically challenged and horizontally challenged which with the unfortunate pictures the author's name bring to mind, did not create a very wholesome overall impression on the viewers of the documentary. The makers of the prize winning documentary had gone even further with the analogy between the onomastic flaccidity of his member and his overall limp demeanor and constructed a whole new crotch obsessed Freudian interpretation of his oeuvre.

Short Fictional Piece : Part 1

A girl walks up to the podium and puts her mouth close to the microphone. She is lithe, slim, pretty and has long, brown hair. She wears a long, flowing skirt that reaches her ankles and a loose T shirt with a peace sign imprinted on it. She's sexy, but in a somewhat sloppy way. Fix a bandanna on her forehead and a joint in her hands and she is a walking, talking image of your yet-another-cute-hippie-chick-next-door.

But she's more into New Age than hippiegiri per se. She's also into vague, esoteric and sometimes unpronounceable Eastern Cults which pass off as serious religions on so many college campuses. She tried crediting for a Sankrit class once, but dropped the course when she discovered it required serious effort. It was then that she decided to get herself a tattoo on her arm in Sanskrit with her name engraved in that holy, classical, uber cool language of yesteryears. Even now, when she wore shirts without sleeves you could read her name : जेसका [pronounced 'jay_sucka' as opposed to the intended 'jessica' - this typo having become a constant source of in-jokes for her East Indian friends].

She's a grad student in literary theory, which means that she is poor, thinks highly of herself and her idiosyncratic tastes, is into extreme avant garde fiction, music and films and can spout off names of obscure people only a thousand odd people in the world would've heard of¹.

Jessica: On behalf of the University and the grad school, I am very pleased to introduce a man who needs no introduction. The winner of two separate MacArthur 'Genius' grants, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the subject of the Sundance Festival award winning documentary "He Defecates Art", a routine contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, a writer we all look up to and an alumnus of the University - Mr Limp Member.

<*deafening explosion of thunderous applause*>

Jessica: And now, I'll invite Mr Member to read his latest short story.

...

End of Part 1

...

1.

It might of interest to note that she'd recently broken up with a bright, young guy who'd loved her very much over an incident that had outraged her delicate sensibilities. [He'd said that he hadn't understood much of Camus when he read him first. Jessica was large hearted almost to a fault and would've forgiven this lapse on the boy's part but for his pronouncement of Camus' name as 'Kai_muss'. There's only so much a woman can take.]

Girl Power

Television history was created the other day. Contrary to popular perceptions and crazy, mean rumors (some of them championed by our very own Master Cynic Somnath Pal who's now referred to by his blogger name Sami in the exalted, artsy circles he waltzes through) and in a major vindication of Nanga Fakir's occult divination skills, Rakhi Sawant got engaged to the bald, loaded businessman from Toronto. The marriage is supposed to follow shortly and will be covered in detail, again, on NDTV Imagine.

The last time Nanga Fakir wrote about this Phenomenon, (note the big P) (Sympathy for Lady Vengeance) he was convinced that he was witnessing a watershed moment of deep and enormous sociological import. The two 'big brothers' of Rakhi Sawant - Ram Kapoor and Ravi Kishan ⁰ during the course of the final episode, stressed repeatedly how path breaking this series was and what a great example Rakhi Sawant was to the women of India¹ by having done what feminists and emancipators of women could only dream of (this subtext not spelled out overtly in detail) - that of turning the tables and giving the enemy a taste of his own medicine.

Nanga Fakir couldn't agree more.

You can easily see the impact of the wave of Girl Power blasting its way through the small towns and cities of India, the sonic boom of its passage reverberating through myriad nooks and crannies and destroying the iron shackles of the rotting, diseased patriarchal edifice that the Indian society is².

It is Revenge. And it's so fucking sweet.

A revenge on behalf of all females who're subjected to the degradation of being paraded before their future in-laws and are scanned by vulturous stares for possible defects. On behalf of all those who are asked to display their culinary skills. On behalf of all those who are scrutinized closely, found satisfactory and then jilted because the dowry isn't enough. On behalf of all those who are asked to sing devotional songs, fast, be on good behavior, mind their own business, shut the fuck up and stay where they belong (read kitchen).

It was bound to happen you know. It was like this big, cosmic credit card debt that was accruing for ages and then whack - just like that - the bill came home and you knew you were pwned.

And so this time around, it was the males competing for attention, hawking their wares, trying to wrap their deep insecurities in shades of humor, performing tasks, walking on cinders (this one actually happened), declaring their love only to get icy, cold stares in return, facing public rejection (and by 'public' is meant national-television-level-public), being subjected to ridicule, scrutinized by not-so-wholesome stares, being commented on for the (in)existence of their assets etc. It was the males' families being extra nice, accommodating and playing the part of professional ass kissers.

A complete turn around as they say.

Males, it's finally time for your comeuppance. All over India, this model is going to be replicated. In obscure, small, nondescript townships, women will rebel against the tyranny of their male overlords. They'll lose their sense of grammar, shed their clothes, pwn your asses and destroy your happiness by performing harrowing item numbers in front of your parents. Then they will beat you up savagely, rape you with strap-ons and post the video on youtube.

It's called Girl Power. It's real (and by 'real' is meant reality-TV-level-real). And it's here to stay.

Cheers.

...

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0. Quote Unquote:

(attributed to Mota)

I will pay, seriously, pay to be in the position of these two guys.

These two guys were having the time of their lives - sniggering, giggling, chuckling and bursting into spontaneous laughter at the inanities perpetrated all around - by both Rakhi and the grooms.

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1. An opinion endorsed by Rakhi who likened herself to Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi for her brave decision of organizing a Swayamvar.

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2. Waxing eloquent, aren't we today?

Project: Reading

The following is the list of books that Nanga Fakir's read in the past six months:

1) Brisingr (Christopher Paolini)
2) One Hunrdred Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
3) Much obliged Jeeves (PG Wodehouse)
4) Batman RIP (Grant Morrison)
5) Heavy Liquid (Paul Pope)
6) Midnight Days (Neil Gaiman)
7) Maus (The Complete) (Art Spiegelman)
8) Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) [Repeat]
9)-19) Transmetropolitan (Warren Ellis)
20) The Motion of Light in Water (Samuel R Delany)
21) Accelerando (Charles Stross)
22) Cat's Cradle (Kurt Vonnegut)
23) The Banyan Tree and Other Stories (R K Narayan)
24) Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card)
25) Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (Douglas R Hofstadter) [Repeat]
26) The Short Story Collection (Tolstoy)
27) 100% (Paul Pope)
28) Ghost World (Daniel Clowes)
29)-35) Sin City (Frank Miller)
36) I Saw You (Edited by Julia Wertz)
37) The White Tiger (Aravind Adiga)
38) Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace)

The playlist further consists of the following books (which NF reckons will take him a further 3-4 months to finish):

1) Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace) {the book that NF's currently re-reading}
2) India: A Million Mutinies Now (VS Naipaul)
3) Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (David Foster Wallace)
4) Inside Mr Enderby (Anthony Burgess)
5) Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov)
6) The Road (Cormac McCarthy)
7) Nausea (Jean Paul Sartre)

NF has been planning to take a break from reading fiction for a while now. He hopes to finish another (carefully handpicked) ten books or so and then leave off and stay sober for about six months. Should be a good experiment. Let's see if he can pull it off.

The Orgasmothon Continues

Featuring John Nash, Bob Aumann, Eric Maskin, Sergiu Hart, Peyton Young, Rohit Parikh, Al Roth among others.

Link - The Game Theory Festival.

...

Also, The Film Festival! (Link)

...

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men arrives on Tuesday and is next on the playlist.

...

Ah orgasm, spare me thy forbidden pleasures!

Moment of Zen

Question: "Have you ever had sex with a relative?"

<*Ominous background music; the camera swerves; the old man on the seat grimaces visibly (he's originally from Lucknow, it turns out!); the Soul Searching Subroutine is activated; his relatives are on the show and are now looking at each other (perhaps in wonderment) (Was it him/her he fucked?)*>

Answer: <*reluctantly albeit*> "Yes".

"Let's see what the polygraph machine has to say."

Polygraph Machine: "The old man speaks truthfully. It was a dark winter night when he came home drunk..."

...

The show is called Sach ka Saamna and (thankfully!) all its episodes are there on Youtube.

The premise is simple. Answer twenty one questions truthfully ["Ah but what is truth?", the philosophically minded among you would ask; NF: "Didn't you know? This deep philosophical problem was solved a little after WW II. The Polygraph Machine boasts of stellar success rates. As much as 61% according to a '97 study!"; "Huh, that's a little better than pure chance!", you counter; <*Nanga Fakir goes to an adjoining room for a minute or two*>; NF: "The machine says you're lying. It also says you're an absconding sex offender."] and you could win one crore rupees. Just like KBC, the initial questions are sitters [cf. "Have you ever gone without bathing for more than a week?";"Have you ever thought of killing your husband?"; "Have you ever stripped naked in a public place?" {actually this question was posed to Vinod Kambli who confessed to having done it. Turns out that Sachin Tendulkar put him up to it!}]. The later ones...not so.

"Do you remember the names of all the people you've slept with?"

So all those plagued by darkness, all those battling terminal diseases, all those who think life has no meaning, all those contemplating suicide as a way out of this whole ungodly boredom can turn their attention to Youtube now.

It's as the late George Carlin said - "When you're born, you get a ticket to the freak show. When you're born in America, you get a front-row seat." However, as in other fields of endeavor (business, science etc.), India is giving America a run for its money. The Chinese, since they don't believe in democracy, haven't caught up with such sophisticated standards of TV production yet.

"Do you have illegitimate children?"

But frankly, who will be interested in knowing sordid details of ordinary middle-aged housewives? So in a clever marketing move, the contestants will more often than not, be wannabe B grade celebrities, many of them from the same Saas-Bahu franchise which made them a household name in all of India. As again, the common, poor man loses out on earning one crore rupees and washing his dirty linen on national television by the moneyed, second tier celebrity bandwagon. Arundhati Roy is proven right. Yet again.

"Would you sleep with other men if your husband doesn't come to know of it?"

Nanga Fakir is also all taken up by the new breed of writers of such insanely groundbreaking TV shows. He knows for a fact that all of them are recruited from the Hogwarts School of Advanced Misanthropy and Indian Institute of Pure Cynicism - none of which are easy to get into. The entrance exam consists of raping an old woman to death and shooting a baby on her face in front of her mother.

So all those afflicted with the Truth Syndrome who want to earn a little easy cash on the side - Welcome!



Link to the TV Show the concept's been filched from - The Moment of Truth.

Sympathy for Lady Vengeance

To watch Rakhi ka Swayamvar is to audit a crash course in Enlightenment. Earlier, reality TV had Nanga Fakir convinced that there is hope for humanity; the show in question makes him want to be a first rate philanthropist.

It is tale of love, heartbreak, devotion, betrayal, family-values, dark secrets (the list could go on) and features a simple Indian girl steeped in age old customs and traditions who wants to play the part of a traditional-housewife-by-day and a sleazy-foul-mouthed-cabaret-dancer-who-can-crush-your-balls-to-dust by night. It also boasts of the highest number of WTF/Jesus-fucking-Christ exclamations from the audience per episode.

The show is gripping, enthralling, masterly suspenseful and full of Shyamalanesque twists and turns where delivering campy dialogue with a serious face is your biggest asset (that and performance of fiery Taekwondo fight moves on cheesy, filmi soundtracks). It is a watershed moment in the history of Indian television as it takes the two most explosively successful ideas - reality TV and saas-bahu sagas and amalgamates them into a unified (w)hole whose inexorable success is a testament to the greatness of human civilization.

And so it was that Nanga Fakir saw entranced, the exploits of a psychotic stalker who's been stalking Rakhi for over three years; the smartass commentary of the Astrologer who's got a hook into everyone else's character (and who very considerately went up to offer a hassled Rakhi a little sip of Bacardi at which she threw a tantrum and complained that her TV persona is totally orthogonal to her true Indian self and that she doesn't 'drink'. Little did the poor fucker know that the only thing she likes drinking is the dessicated soul of a small town, starry eyed, publicity hungry Neanderthal schmuck like him); the prayers for regrowth of the destroyed balls of the big hunky contender ('Luv', he's called) offered by Rakhi with a seriously cool Nirupa Roy expression; the serenading of Rakhi by a very genuine-looking Kashmiri cop (whom Rakhi respected the most...(now that's a compliment)); the badly acted tortured expression of shock on Rakhi's face as the same cop announced that he already had a wife and three kids and they were cool with his being on the show (imagine the kids (and perhaps their mom) in Srinagar rooting for their laugh-of-the-underground-terrorist-crowd dad) and the ingenious elimination protocol - a mithai (sweet) for those who've qualified for the next round and evil stares and heartfelt sorries for others who leave with heavy hearts, heavier baggages and even heavier pockets.

Another thing that struck NF as he kept watching episode after episode on youtube was that all contestant were from UP plus Delhi plus Mumbai (okay one Rajasthani too). Period. Apparently people from South India have more self respect than Northies. What is counter-intuitive however, is that there was absolutely no contender from Bihar - the land most ignoramuses like to make fun of at the drop of a hat. From personal experience, Nanga Fakir knows that Biharis are the simplest, hardest working and the most down-to-earth people that there are. (Every now and then, they freak out and go on a kidnapping spree but that's forgivable in the long run.) The people who were in overwhelming majority were small towners from UP (from places like Rishikesh, Kanpur, Lucknow (yes...<*sighs*>), Bulandshahar etc.). Heh...jobless fuckers!

On second thoughts, maybe the producers of the show thought that Southies wouldn't be funny enough (intentionally/unintentionally) and so were not good enough to be in the final sixteen. Because, out of twelve thousand odd people from all places in India, who volunteered to be on the show (including an 87 year old!) surely there must've been some not-so-self-respecting Southies. Plus the fact that they can't speak Hindi and that Rakhi's English/regional language skills are surely worse than her acting couldn't have helped matters much.

The blogosphere is lit up with lively discussions of "Will she...won't she?" - whether Rakhi will end up marrying the winner of the show. Most seem to think that a brief marriage and a speedy divorce assisted by Balaji Production lawyers will follow.

But what then about the cameos of the actors that are the surrogate family of Rakhi (read the saas-bahu franchise) - the truism spouting self proclaimed upholders of Indian culture and tradition who drop in shlokas with timed precision (and blissfully unaware, mispronounce all Sanskrit words with amazing consistency)? What about the claim of Rakhi Sawant being in actuality a simple girl who's misunderstood by all? What about the sanctity of marriage?

What about future TRP ratings?

NF has his doubts.

For answers to these and many more questions, stay tuned.

Maps and Isomorphisms

Warning: Very long post. Maybe boring for those not into either films or mathematics.

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Disclaimer: The word 'isomorphism' here is used in a very loose, non-mathematical sense. Probably a better word would be 'similarity/analogy' but that wouldn't sound cool enough.

Another description of the post is in terms of functions that map domain spaces (film directors) to extremely 'dissimilar' target spaces (mathematicians).

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Nanga Fakir has always wondered at isomorphisms lurking at a structural level in a wide variety of apparently unrelated disciplines of human endeavor. This post is about such isomorphisms in the (apparently unrelated) fields of Mathematics and Films - in particular, the similarities in the manner of work of some mathematicians and some directors. It is unfortunate that NF doesn't know even half as much as he would want to know about either discipline and so the possibility of errors is significant. (Hence it is a blog post and not an article in the New Yorker.)



1) Kim ki Duk & John Milnor : The former is a Korean film director and the latter is an American Fields Medalist.

That which brings them both together is the quality of minimalism in their works.

Kim ki Duk has been known to make films with hardly any dialogue at all and with each passing work, relying more and more on non-verbal cues, quiet, subtle gestures and dry, unusual humor. Milnor on the other hand is not only a legendary mathematician who's won all possible math prizes left, right and center, but has also won the Steele Prize for mathematical exposition. The books and notes written by him are thoroughly minimalistic - in fact sometimes notoriously so. (The standard lemma-theorem-proof-corollary style is followed in a sparse, somewhat austere style and the Proof sections of his books are peppered with remarks like "Not hard to prove", "Easily shown to be true" etc. - much to the frustration of your average math graduate student.)



Perhaps it was Hemingway who said that perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. Both of them seem (consciously or otherwise) to adhere to this view, for in both their works, taking anything away from what is there, necessitates the collapse of the entire edifice - the mark of a true minimalist. (NF sometimes fancies himself as a minimalist in the sense that he tries hard to put the minimal amount of effort required to barely get along. He wonders if he's a true minimalist though. Any lesser effort and we'll know the answer to that question.)

2) Andrei Tarkovsky and Bela Tarr & Alexander Grothendieck : There is no catchword here (like 'minimalism') that can be invoked to compare the two directors with Grothendieck (seen in picture here). In fact what is probably more at work here is the obsession with purity, perfectionism and mind-boggling care for details which is the hallmark of all these artistes.



This is easily seen to be so in the case of the two auteurs in question - both of them are obsessed with insanely long cuts (some of them as long as eleven minutes), excruciatingly slow camera movements, artsy and extremely highbrow literature, shots of breathtaking beauty and concerns with questions that are of deep philosophical value. The camera lingers on each shot, hovering on the subjects as if unable to tear itself away, trying to absorb the fleeting moment and record it forever. The concerns for purity and technical wizardry over audience-friendliness (and here the audience are considered to be arthouse regulars and not those who line up to buy tickets for the latest Transformers flick), the demand for patience and faith in the vision of the director (which is rewarded at the end by a deeply ambiguous and artsy climax which may or may not make any sense) and the paramount consideration of cinematic beauty over everything else make them to be champions of cinema as a pure, high art medium.

In order to see for yourself, look at the following videos:

a) A sequence from Tarkovsky's Stalker.



[probably one of the best sequences in world cinema]

b) A 'short' scene from Satantango - the seven hour plus long movie (yes, you read that right!) from Bela Tarr.



Like his counterparts in cinema, Grothendieck (Fields Medalist, greatest mathematician of the 20th century, according to some) was obsessed with purity and methods of great abstractness over more obvious routes to problem solving. In fact, his was such an abstract take on matters in Pure Mathematics that it is inaccessible to a lot of working mathematicians themselves, let alone the common man. His style of Mathematics - often dubbed 'Fortress Mathematics' (built around his cult of followers) was a major dampener for many-a-young wannabe mathematician who were overwhelmed by the technical virtuosity demanded of them to even begin to understand what was going on. Again, concerns for stellar, unimaginably stringent purity and an open disdain for anything even slightly contaminated (read less general/abstract - woe to applied mathematicians - the hacks who dare defile the sanctity of math!) make him the counterpart to Tarkovsky and Bela Tarr.

3) Quentin Tarantino & Benoit Mandlebrot and Paul Erdos : Cinema for Tarantino is not a meditation on deep matters (cross Tarkovsky, Tarr). He's definitely not into minimalism (cross Kim ki Duk). What's he into then?

Filmmaking for Tarantino is an expression of sheer joy. It's also about being all-over-the-place like a jumping, hyperactive kid suffering from attention deficit disorder high on methamphetamine. It is about exuberance, aesthetic violence, non-linearity, dialogue (his characters never seem to shut up) and a breakneck, blitzy pace. He doesn't care about conventions or boundaries or classifications. He breaks rules, bends them, amalgamates genres, rips off others' work and gives them a new spin and constantly reinvents and pushes the boundaries of filmmaking all the fucking time.



Somewhat similar was the approach to mathematics taken by Mandlebrot and Erdos. Mandlebrot was repelled by the Fortress Mathematics so in vogue when he took up studies of Math. His was a more intuition based, a more qualitative approach (often called 'Open Mathematics' by some). He was genre defying and refused categorization of any kind. His work in pure math soon spilled onto areas like Information Theory, Fluid Mechanics, Economics and Physics (one of his papers was on the stability of cotton prices over the years). Nassim Taleb considers him his guru and chief mentor.



Erdos is a legend in himself. His versatile work in Graph Theory, Number Theory, Analysis, Combinatorics and several other disciplines was the work of someone obsessed with and totally in love with what he was doing. [Perhaps it was he who said "When I am depressed I do math to become happy. When I am happy, I do math to stay happy".] Again, the hyperactive-all-over-the-place-kid effect can be seen here. His encouragement of budding young mathematicians, geeky sense of humor, astoundingly large collaborative body of work that changed the way Mathematics was done and championing of Open Mathematics makes him the ideal counterpart of Tarantino in Mathematics - perhaps even more so than Mandlebrot.

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Perhaps more such maps will be discovered by readers of this blog, maybe not in the same two fields, but perhaps in others where such isomorphism have not yet been discovered.

In Which He Does a Yoko Ono

It is said that Yoko Ono once stood up on stage and shouted long and hard (perhaps with the accompaniment of some background music for name's sake) that fateful, eternal query "Why?", swooning and shaking and stressing first the "Ai", then the "Wh...", then some mixture of the two and finally following it up with some good old fashioned mindless screaming into the microphone. Knowledgeable critics holding seriously hardcore degrees in various genres/sub-genres of liberal arts from awesomely badass ivy league universities nodded and smiled in smug appreciation of the avant garde musical performance.

"A cry of a wounded soul...a manifestation of the existential dread. The eternal Why", they said.

This is where Nanga Fakir does a Yoko Ono reprise.

Don't say you weren't warned before.

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Nanga Fakir: "Vaaaaaaaaieeeeeeee?"

<*picks up his phony spectacles and gives a meaningful look*>

<*a couple of lit theorists write books about the hermeneutics/semiotic implications of this symbolic gesture by Nanga Fakir; another one about the 'meaningful look' is adapted into a film which unexpectedly headlines the Chchapra Film Festival and becomes a cult favorite*>

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[Interesting little footnote here (I so see why David Foster Wallace found endnotes and footnotes so irresistible - even though they seem to piss everyone off): Little did Yoko know that this idea of an existential howl would be (unbeknownst to them) quite independently, lifted off by the duo SatyaVrat and Nanga Fakir in the first block hostel in that famous song which was to be the first Brahmasmi chart topper - "जीवन बर्बाद हो गया" (Life is destroyed). I doubt if the village dwelling runts had any conception of avant garde, but the idea was the same. The same line would've been put on an infinite loop and the self proclaimed charismatic swooner SatyaVrat would howl and blast through the pithy line (that by the way, NF claimed was a perfect description of the human condition) over and over again interjecting it with lyrical comments, improvised aalaaps and some (yes...) good old fashioned screaming. Nanga Fakir had also planned to direct an avant garde music video which was to feature bare asses and hairy testicles of mountain goats juxtaposed with footages of Gandhi, Amitabh Bachchan, David Gilmour and Chuck Norris. He hoped that the lit dons would pick up various sufficiently vague highbrow/ironic-lowbrow references peppered throughout the video to make it a brilliant contribution to the cinematic literature on the human condition right next to the works of Stan Brakhage and Tarkovsky and ensure a local fan base for the band. The avant garde experiment went too far however and the band never recorded the song or shot the video - an even more poignant summarization of the human condition according to some (cf. "Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines").].