I had never thought I would be so enchanted by someone mutilating books. ( link via Eddie Campbell)

Had the most awesome experience last night when I saw, for the first time, a 20-minute video of Yoko Kanno and the Seatbelts performing along with singer Mai Yamane live in Tokyo. Must have been the best audiovisual experience for me since Bjork: Live at Royal Opera House. There are videos of the Seatbelts floating around on youtube, but I had resisted watching them, bad audio-visual quality being part of the reason. Yamane, by the way, is the singer most associated with Ms Kanno's compositions, her distinctive voice the hallmark of tracks like 'The Real Folk Blues' ( WHAT? You haven't heard it? Go check out my mixtape already. Track 13, to be precise), 'See You Space Cowboy' and my personal favourite, 'Rain'.

SQUEE moment 1: Yoko Kanno, dressed in a red trenchcoat and black top and shorts starts dancing to 'Tank!', the Cowboy Bebop theme, as the saxophone soloist goes wild.

SQUEE moment 2: Mai Yamane and Yoko Kanno start doing a bizarre robotic dance during 'Want It All Back', coordinating each other's movements and adding to the fun of the song.

SQUEE moment(s) 3: Ms Kanno plays a plethora of Cowboy Bebop tunes on the piano, each tune effortlessly flowing into the other.

All in all, an amazing video. You can download it from most bit-torrent sites around, if you are interested.



Which reminds me, demonoid.com has been down for more than 48 hours now. Even Wired.com takes notice and talks about possible litigation by CRAI ( the Canadian version of the RIAA ), so fingers crossed.



Reading Barry Lyga's Adventures of Fan Boy and Goth Girl, something that I had been on the look out for since I read the preview chapter. ( Hmm, I wonder how I got to the site in the first place...Neil Gaiman linked to it? Possibly. ) Lyga wrote some bad comics - a couple of Warrior Nun Areala in the dark-and-speculatory nineties, and this is his first novel. Falls squarely into the YA category, and managed to get my complete attention by mentioning the words "Giant Size X-Men #1 in mint condition" in the second paragraph. As it turns out, the Fan Boy in the book is the narrator and the book namedrops Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Promethea and Swamp Thing. Seems there's also a guest appearance by Brian Michael Bendis, heh. And oh, I am "reading" the audiobook, because the actual thing isn't really available in India.

Buy copies of all the biographies, autobiographies and resources on Indian cinema available in the market. ( Sample: Kishore Valicha's Kishore Kumar, Raju Bharatan's Lata Mangeshkar ). Read and take copious notes of the interesting bits.

Read and memorise all the anecdotes in So Many Cinemas by BD Garga.

Ask Shyam Benegal to write short paragraphs on topics like Amitabh Bachhan, Raj Kapoor and Guru Dutt.

Optional: Hire a proofwriter who knows about the placement of commas in your sentences.

Optional: Get some knowledge of what it is you are writing about. Have editors who know the facts you are talking about and have basic knowledge of Hindi.

Optional: Don't contradict yourself on two consecutive pages. ( Page 250: "He had set up Navketan and asked Guru Dutt to direct Navketan's second production Baazi. The success of the film established Guru Dutt as a director." Page 251: "In his early years, Dutt made crime thrillers but, after the failure of Baazi, a costume drama set on the high seas, which was panned by the critics and hated by the masses, he decided to make different kinds of movies." )

If you are a Bengali writer writing aforementioned History, feel free to go on a trip down memory lane whenever Bengali actors, directors or composers are mentioned. Objectivity shmobjectivity.

Make sure you write a long introduction about some random adventure while writing your book which has no bearing on your book whatsoever other than driving home the fact that Indians are prudish about sex and yet like their fallen women. Make sure your account Bordes everyone to tears.

- Watched the complete Firefly, followed it up with Serenity, the comic book and followed that up with Serenity, the movie.

-All of that instilled in a newfound zeal for watching TV series, so I watched half of Berserk and two seasons of Spaced. Started watching The Adventures of Brisco County Jr now.

- Five copies of this are available at MR Book stall, right opposite my office, at 250 Rs each. I have no idea how and why the book is there in the first place. Filed under "Rude-shock-of-the-month". ( Rude because I have no money to spend. )

- I did have Walden gift coupons to spend though, thanks to a Special Hard-working Person who agreed to let me use 1000 Rs worth. I bought Ramesh Menon's Devi Bhagavatam ( swear the guy's writing Indin mythology books faster than I am reading them ) ( and good ones at that ) and Mihir Bose's History of Bollywood. Reading the latter right now, periodically wincing at the lack of editorial supervision that pervades the writing. Subhash Ghia? Anupam Kher was an up-and-coming star of the nineties? Sheesh. At least the facts seem to be in order so far.

- More lustworthy releases include the two disc edition of 300. 699 Rs and way beyond my budget at the moment.

- Also drooled a bit over the new Koji Suzuki collection that seems to be available at Walden. I already have, and have read Ring, Spiral and Dark Water. Loop was there, too, but I'm holding out for the hardcover, so didn't buy it.

- There was also the Mammoth Book of War Comics, which had, among other things, two stories by Darko Macan and Edwin Biukovic, Will Eisner's Last Day in Vietnam, a Commando issuem, an early version of Keiji Nakazawa's Barefoot Gen and some Sam Glanzman Blazing Combat stories. 704 Rs, pass.

Comics artists interpreting literary figures and characters.

via Chris Weston's blog. Weston has drawn the latest contribution to the site, Winston Smith and Big Brother from Orwell's 1984, and Weston has this to say about his work -

"I 'm particularily pleased with my depiction of Big Brother, which is a rare case of something turning out exactly as I saw it in my head. He'sa mash-up of propaganda images of Hitler, Stalin and Lord Kitchener."

Personal favourites:

Eduardo Risso's Sandokan.

David Mack's Miyamoto Musashi.

Mike Mignola's Jacob Marley.

Ben Templesmith's Hunter S Thompson.

Bruce Timm's HP Lovecraft

Dave McKean's Salman Rushdie.

Tony DeZuniga's Sherlock Holmes.

Jock's Carlos Castaneda.

What a great idea for commissions!

Read List:

Pankaj Mishra - Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond Slightly misleading title, but interesting read nonetheless. I knew of Pankaj Mishra as a travel writer, and I had assumed that the book would be about stuff like mall culture and consumerism, but this dealt more with the ramifications of Western culture. Yes, this is a travel book, and the articles are interspersed with blogish anecdotes and observations. But that in no way subtracts from it the sheer persuasiveness with which Mishra etches the impact the West has had on people in Kashmir, Mumbai, Kabul, Nepal and Allahabad, just to cite a few examples. Pretty revelatory at times, the chapters on Kashmir made me feel ill - small wonder that when the articles were printed in a journal in the USA, Mishra's family was paid a friendly visit by agents of RAW ( Research and Analysis Wing, India's intelligence agency) for his "anti-Indian" ideas. Brrr.

Ramesh Menon - The Ramayana What can I say? The guy totally rocks. He makes Ravana a virile Love-god, the kind of person who "took virgins to bed and then a week later, when he was done with them, they would exit from his inner chambers looking ten years older." ( I am paraphrasing from memory here, so bear with me ) Menon isn't the top of his form here, but his version of the Ramayana is completely meaty, without deviating into creepy Ashok K Wanker "The-One-Against-Dark-Lord"-territory. He includes the Uttar Ramayana as well, and the main story of the exile is followed by a section on the other characters of the epic. Now I only have Krishna: The Dark Blue God to pick up, and I am done with all of Ramesh Menon's works.

Harry Potter: Books 5,6 and 7: Read the three of them on three consecutive days, with the last the day it was released. Totally loved the series.

Cerebus Vol 2: High Society: I had bought Cerebus vol 1, 3 and 4 before on eBay.( At a quite decent price too, as far as signed editions go. ) But because Volume 2 was missing, and because I hated to read it on scans, I finished book 1 and hung around looking for a good deal. Which I managed to get, from my Brady Deal, and carted all the remaining volumes back t India from my US trip. High Society is the transition book, that took Cerebus from being a Conan-The-Barbarian parody to a Serious Work Of Socio-Political Relevance, which reached its creative peak with volumes 3 and 4. In High Society, Cerebus The Aardvark leaves his uncouth barbarian life and checks himself into a hotel in the city-kingdom of Iest. The book progresses from Cerebus's shady dealings in order to get himself wealthy to, eventually, running for the post of Prime Minister of Iest. The book has everything going for it and does not disappoint. At all. Though I have a mild headache from trying to wrap my head around the heavier themes in it. Onto the two volumes of Church and State, the next two Cerebus books, where the aardvark runs for Popehood.

Neal Stephenson - Zodiac Sangamon Taylor, the protagonist of Zodiacis to ecology what Spider Jerusalem is to journalism. Irreverent, unscrupulous and completely jacked-in to his profession of choice, Sangamon is happiest when he's pissing off CEOs and PR managers of Big Corporations that spew industrial waste into the swamps and the rivers of the US of A. It took me quite sometime to get into the book ( which is why I had stopped in the middle of it the last time I started reading it, sometime in 2004) because the actual story does not begin until about the middle of the book. But Stephenson lays his subplots and his characters wisely, and the book chugs merrily along, culminating in a major feel good ending.

Robert Rodi - What They Did To Princess Paragon Interesting premise, slightly flawed execution. 'Princess Paragon' is one of the three flagship characters of Bang Comics, all three of whom are in the process of being revamped by the company for the nineties. Nigel Cardew, a British writer has already reworked Moonman as a brutal murderer and another writer/artist is taking over Acme Man. This leaves Brian Parrish, who's getting the short shrift at Electric Comics, Bang's rival, to come and lay the groundwork for the Greatest Reboot Ever - he makes Princess Paragon a lesbian. Needless to say, it infuriates fans. A lot. Jerome T Kernacker, who has memorised all 149 issues of Princess Paragon takes it on himself to avenge his heroine's honour. How he does that, and what becomes of Brian Parrish is something that Robert Rodi writes well, but does not really manage to carry off towards the end.

Thank you, JK Rowling. Thank you.

I nearly screwed up my journey home. I had assumed that my flight was in the night, just like my colleague's was, a couple of weeks ago. The plan was to come to office on Monday morning and bid farewell to my colleagues. Happened to glance at the time on my tickets on Sunday night, and gah - the flight was at 2:15 in the day. Take into account the fact I would have to be present at the airport 3 hours before the check-in time ( I had excess baggage - yes, haha, I know ) and that Monday morning was peak traffic time on the freeway, getting to the office was out of the question. Took several deep breaths to calm self down. Man, if I hadn't double-checked, I would have been stranded. Phew.

Check-in went by completely bereft of incident, major or minor. The person behind the counter didn't even blink when I hefted the three pieces of baggage onto the scale - not even at the fact that all of them were on the higher side of the 32-kilo limit. I took out two of the heavier bits of my handbaggage, the mammoth Ode To Kirohito and the two volume Finder/Keeper collection before putting it onto the weighing machine, it came to 7.98 kgs. The limit was 7. The guy waved me in. Whew!

Again, fairly uneventful flight, marked by the successful reading and rereading of Ode To Kirohito, a 788 page medical manga that blows the previous Tezuka works I've read ( Buddha and Astro Boy ) out of the water. From what I had been hearing about it, this is more of gekiga than Tezuka's all-ages stuff, marked by a lot of adult content and Christian symbolism. Turned out to be just that. What I had assumed was the way the book would end turned out to be addressed by Tezuka in the first 200 pages. It then proceeds in a direction that - goddamnit, I don't want to ruin this for any of you, but rest assured it ends on a note halfway between upbeat and bittersweet.

Oh, and also read Finder and Keeper, Greg Rucka's Atticus Kodiak novels, which The Flatmate got at the grand price of a dollar at a clearance sale. Effing excellent!

Born Under A Lucky Star Department: The Asian Art Museum in San Franciso was the exclusive US venue for an Osamu Tezuka retrospective exhibit. It started on June 2 and I went there on June 9th. Pictures were not allowed inside the exhibit, so instead I hung around the exhibit for about 5 hours. Amazing, amazing experience. Sample black and white pages from all of Tezuka's major series, Phoenix, Melmo, Buddha, Blackjack, Kirohito, Astro Boy ( obviously! ), Apollo, Metropolis, Vampire, Crime and Punishment, Princess Knight. Coloured endpapers and chapter frontispieces from some of them, and gigantic facsimile pages ( which I didn't particularly enjoy). The best part about the exhibit was the way it gave an insight into Tezuka's growth as an artist - the creative use of the splash pages in works like Melmo, the detailed crosshatching in his later works, the increasingly adult-oriented stories he did as he progressed from being the pioneer of Japanese comics to The God of Manga. I also spent an agonizing half an hour in the museum store drooling over Tezuka prints. A day well spent.

I leave the US of A on Monday night.

In the last one and a half months, I have -

• been part of a team that's delivered a feature-complete product a day ahead of deadline.


• seen my first Monet, Titian, Manet, El Greco and Gainsborough. And these were names I remembered off the top of my head.


• visited my first comicbook shops.


• bought out full runs of comics and manga and exceeded my weight limit by 20 kilos.


• been to my first Comic book convention. Woo Hoo!


• indulged in Major Comic art acquisitions, 32 in all.


• managed to buy Perfect Gifts.


• visited 5-level used record/CD/DVD outlets, each of which made me want to sit in a corner and whimper to myself.


• held original first printings of the first three Dark Tower books in my hands, caressed them for about twenty minutes, put them back gently in their display cases and cried on the way out.


• eaten The Crappiest Biryani Evah, and priced at 8.99$ to boot.



• had surprise packages mailed to me from Spain.
  
  
• become part-time Web Elf for the coolest Electronic Dance Music site ever.
  
  
• not had the time to write about all these. Mostly because of point (1), but that will soon be remedied.

Heh, now that the Spider-man 3 movie featuring Venom is out , there is a flurry of eBayers who are selling their Hot Copies of Amazing Spider-man 300 at very Hot ( read: expanded) prices. Now if only someone would tell them that Venom made his first (though admittedly brief) appearance in Amazing Spider-man 298. 298 also happens to be the first issue in which Todd McFarlane elbowed his way into Spider-man history. I think I shall go take out my autographed copy of ASM 298 and gaze at it fondly for a minute or two today.

Bought Absolute Watchmen off White Drongo the day it landed. Whoo hoo. What is Absolute Watchmen, you ask? It's the remastered version of Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, newly coloured, oversized with a couple of pages of extras in which Dave Gibbons shows off his thumbnails, Alan Moore shows off how he can write a page describing a single panel, and DC figures out a new way to get you to buy an old favourite. You ought to be happy with the trade paperback, really, leave the Absolute versions to the maniac Completist Bastards. Either ways, I am happy I got it at a discount and proceeded to reread it again. As always, Moore's characters are too talky, and all of them, including Rorschach are quite erudite when it comes to explaining their motives and writing in their journals. The book is magnificent, the story is a landmark effort, but I still think Miracleman is better, and From Hell knocks both of them out of the park with its glory.

And then Vasu sent me Fragile Things, Neil Gaiman's second collection of short stories which was released last year and made it to India just last month. I love you, Vasu.

( Sidetrack: Ennio Morricone on my playlist after a long, long time. )

52, DC's 52-issue-long series which was released weekly over a period of one year, has just gotten over. eBay, here I come!

Kurt Vonnegut died last night.

Since I've been flying around the country quite a bit (urm, planes, not newly developed wings), I have been able to find time to catch up on a bit of reading. And buying. Reread Gaiman's Smoke and Mirrors on the Kanpur trip. Also started a Diana Wynne-Jones collection of short stories just after that got over. And graphic novels, loads of them.

Landmark, Mumbai was a revelation. I had been hearing raves about it from oceansandearth and suku. The former gave me a near-apoplexy by mentioning that not only did the place have Samurai Executioner volumes 8 and 9, which yours truly had been searching for high and low, it also had volumes 14 and 15 of Blade of the Immortal, of which I had read volumes 1-13 in white-heat some time ago. And indeed, when I landed up there, the collection sent a rush of blood to my head. It had all that, and much more. Is anyone looking for volumes of Akira? What about David Lloyd's latest original GN Kickback? Complete runs of Fables TPBs, Y The Last Man, Flash Gordon collections, Promethea - basically whatever mainstream comics has to offer. Even the first two volumes of the Koike/Kojima release Path of the Assassin, which is just being released by Dark Horse.

But hold on a second, no discounts. Wankers. Just went ahead and bought some bare necessities, Samurai Executioner and BotI included. Glared at the hardcover edition of The Complete Conan by Robert E Howard. Wankers. I will just have to pick up the softcover version the next time I am in Blossom. My patience has run out.

It pains me extremely to realise that nowhere in Hyderabad can I buy new books with a 20% discount, like I used to in Bangalore. It's partly a blessing, because most of my book-buying is now confined to second-hand books ONLY while in this city. And boy oh boy, Best-Frankfurt-MR do manage to throw up surprises every now and then, like the original Tideland novel by Mitch Cullin for just 50 Rs, and a beautiful fairy tale book called Wingless which I picked up the other day just because it has illustrations by Atanu Roy. I do frequent the bigger bookshops - Odyssey and Walden - every now and then, but that's just to check up on the latest releases. If I like anything, I buy them at 20% discount the next time I am at Bookworm or Blossom. Both Odyssey and Walden have these "Sales" twice every year, in which they sell all their stock at a grand 10% off. Phoeey! Walden does one better. It takes out the worst books of the lot, the marketting manuals that were out of anyone's radar eight years ago, Java 1.2 API guides, Windows 98 tutorials, and tags them with "special prices" - which we customers are supposed to drool over and buy immediately. They are selling unsold hardcover copies of Harry Potter and The Half Blood Prince at 15% off - well after the paperback has been released. Morons.

Count your blessings, Bangalore-dwellers. For all the cribs I have against your city, there are certain things that make me gnash my teeth and wish I were still in that office on Museum Road. Ah, to be able to drop in at Blossom every day at lunchtime.

Did you know that Barefoot Gen, the seminal manga on the horrors of Hiroshima, and considered to be one of the inspirations behind Grave of the Fireflies is now available in an Indian edition? Yes, and quite well-priced at 250 Rs, also comes with an introduction by Anand Patwardhan.

Marjane Satrapi's Chicken and Plums is also available at most bookshops, though the cost price of 600 is somewhat off-putting. I will just wait for a Bangalore trip to pick it up.

Volumes 5-8 of Osamu Tezuka's Buddha are available quite freely in the market now. ( How freely? Even a backwaters bookshop like Odyssey, Hyderabad has them on display. The last time I asked them if they had Buddha, one of the salesmen pointed me to the "religion" section. Bah! ) Prices also seem to have come down quite a bit. 295 per book, and if you buy them from places that offer a discount, you get them for REALLY cheap. I ought to be peeved that I spent almost twice the money on the first four volumes, but this lowered price makes me quite glad because more people will pick up this superb series, which deserves hosannahs and praise and our eternal gratitude to Osamu Tezuka for creating it all. Highly recommended, folks. Storytelling does not get better than this.

I tried watching Nacho Libre the other night, but fell asleep midway. Is it just me, or is Jack Black trying too hard?

Mickey Spillane died. Damn. I used to love the guy's work, ever since Max Allan Collins mentioned him in the letters pages of an issue of Batman and I happened to chance upon I, The Jury - incidentally the man's first novel - in one of Guwahati's second-hand bookshops. True to the way my life has always been, I couldn't find any other Mickey Spillane novel anywhere until after graduation. A Sunday trip to Abids gave me 20 Mickey Spillane novels, which were being sold at the very competitive price of 10 Rs each. Some collector must have sold off his entire Spillane set at a go, because there is no human way for me to explain that haul. Went on a Spillane binge for about a month, finished 17 books one after the other, and I remember quite vividly that in my thoughts, I constructed Mike Hammer-ish sentences. Probably the only other character I can compare to Mike would be Andrew Vachss's Burke.

Did you know that there was a Mike Hammer comic strip in the 1950's? Ironic, considering that Spillane had originally concieved of Mike Hammer as a comicbook character named Mike Danger and was turned down by quite a few companies. After the success of the novels, the comicbookization was easier.

Spillane managed to do something no other writer has ever done - he played his the role of Mike Hammer in a 1963 movie. ( No, Stephen King as Jordy Verrill does not count) This bit of information, unfortunately, came to me after a rather gripping prelim round in the A/V quiz of an instalment of IIT Madras's cul-fest Saarang. We missed out qualification by half points, bah. There was also a comic called Mickey Spillane's Mike Danger published by Tekno comics ( the short-lived company that did the excellent - ah, well, in my opinion anyways - Mr Hero The Newmatic Man.) written by Max Allan Collins and featuring Mike Danger in the future. Haven't read it, though I have seen house ads in the pages of Mr Hero.



I saw this excellent Telugu movie this weekend. Anukokunda Oka Roju, which translates to Suddenly...One Day. Rather neat concept, and nearly flawless execution. A friend brought it up first to me, during a long walk. The premise was this - this girl, at the insistence of a close friend, goes to a party during a weekend. Someone drugs her drink, to the strains of Sunidhi Chauhan and Dominique's I Wanna Sing ( I will talk about the music, hold on a bit), and the next morning she wakes up in her bed and finds out that she's late for her college. Only, when she gets to classes, she finds out that there's no one around, and the lone clerk on duty asks her why she's come there on a Sunday. Yes. There's a day missing from her life, and she cannot remember anything about what happened to her between the night of the party and the time she woke up in her bed.

Which is rather bad, because there are random people trying to kill her. A guy accosting her for money she owes him. A scary recording that gives an ominous portent of what might have transpired that night. And a couple of disturbing dreams.

Throw in a juice-swigging police officer who has a crush on the lady, a confused taxi driver, a gentle giant with a penchant for theatre of the mythological variety, a rather cryptic old man who stays in the same apartment complex as the lady, and a series of odd incidents that are more connected than you could ever imagine. To that, add a hilarious bunch of dialogues that are subtitled really well ( now that's an issue I have with watching Tamil DVDs, the subtitles suck. This one had pretty good subs in comparison), MM Kreem's peppy music, and completely down-to-earth performances by everyone concerned. You have a movie that makes me want to go and buy everything Chandrashekhar Yeleti has ever made and watch them back to back. The guy shot into prominence with his first film Aithe, which Sasi raved about for quite some time. Erm, actually, I've already gone and bought Aithe - the original DVD is available for a measly 99 Rs. I am eager to see it, but I doubt if I can, before the weekend. Ah well.

A note about the music. There are not too many songs, this is a thriller after all, but all of them are potential earworms. In particular, 'Righto Lefto' by Shreya Ghoshal - the combination of the melody and Charmy's expressions in the film are just TOO much. The party song 'I wanna sing' is like a stripped-down item number, if that makes sense to you. Excellent.

Stop smirking, vrikodhara.



I had a couple of book coupons for Walden, and redeemed them for a book called Helen: The Life and Times of an H-Bomb by Jerry Pinto. No, this is not a modern retelling of the Illiad or anything - it's about our favourite dancing lady of the fifties, sixties and the seventies, and it's somewhat disappointing because the writer could not really involve the lady herself in his enterprise. I am halfway into the book, and there are no remarkable insights into Helen's career other than the ones we already know courtesy stray Filmfare articles. What the book managed to do was to get me to listen to old cabaret numbers early in the morning, ensuring that I spend quite some time at the keyboard plonking away 'Mera Naam Chin Chin Choo".

And I finally got my hands on the Omkara CD last night, heard the first song, and I decided I needed some quality time to listen to the album. Fun awaits, yeehah.



And an OS crash ensured a reformat of the primary drive, followed by a Windows reinstallation. Stuff lost: saved game files, stray images, all installed programs, and, worst of all, the FL Studio files from last year, some of which I was rather proud of. Ouch.

First Law, or the law of pricing: A book will always be priced higher than what one is willing to pay for it.
Corollary I : The feeling of euphoria induced on seeing a book is inversely proportional to amount on the price tag.

Second Law, or the Scouring Law: You always find a book when you least expect it.
OR
The less the effort you put into finding a book, the greater the chances are that you will find it.
Corollary to the Second Law: If you decide to stop buying books for a limited period of time, the quantity of book sales around you will increase dramatically.

Third Law, or the Law of Boundless Optimism: A book will always be available at a cheaper price at some other place some other time.
Corollary to the Third Law: You will always meet a guy who has bought a book at a rate cheaper than what you paid for it.

Fourth Law, or the Serious Law: If you wait to buy a book you think is slightly overpriced, you will always find it on the shelf, but not on the day you give up and go to buy it.

One fine day, when browsing through the old books in one of the bookstores near Anuradha Theatre, Guwahati, I came across the novelisation of The Thief of Baghdad, the movie starring Errol Flynn and released sometime before the fifties. The only Thief of Baghdad I knew then was the Shatrughan Sinha version, but I still bought the book. It was by some guy named Richard Wormser, and what sold me was not just the price (8 rupees, for the record), but the way it began.

"My name is Abu Hastin, and I am a djinn, or as some people prefer, a genie, or a jinn, or rather impolitely, a demon. Me, I prefer to called a genius."

The story concerned itself with guardian djinns of cities who competed with each other in various aspects, and our friend Abu Hastin was a peeved djinn because the sultan of Baghdad, his city was an old nincompoop. The old king was interested more in fireworks and circus acts than statesmanship, and he was planning to marry off his beautiful daughter to the Crown Prince of Mossul, which effectively meant that Abu Hastin was to eat humble pie for at least fifty years, because he was not pally with the djinni of Mossul.

So he decides to take matters into his own hands. Which involves making sure that the princess meets and falls in love with the Thief of Baghdad.

It was a fantastic story, full of wit and adventure and snarky comments, and I remember reading and rereading it quite a number of times. It's still at Guwahati though, and I think it's out-of-print, at least because the name Richard Wormser does not ring a bell with anyone.

Now when vrikodhara showed me The Amulet of Samarkand in Bombay, I was kind of pissed at Jonathan Stroud. I was pretty sure that he had read the Thief of Baghdad when he was a kid, and decided to use the first-person-smart-talking-djinn to create a post-Potter young adult fantasy trilogy. Similar feelings persisted when I saw Artemis Fowl for the first time, but the premise of Fowl was a little more contemporary than Samarkand.

But boy, three books and one trilogy later, I have to admit that I was wrong about Jonathan Stroud. The Bartimaeus Trilogy rocks. Not because it's fantasy and it has a smart-ass djinn in it, but because Stroud's mixture of magic, politics and ancient history surpasses your average Young adult novel by miles. Refreshing characterisation - Nathaniel, the young protagonist does not have any claptrap like ancient prophecies hanging over his fate, frankly speaking, we do not know whether to like him or hate him because he changes over the three books, his life completely taken over by the politics of the reigning magicians of the day. in Ptolemy's Gate, he has become John Mandrake, Information Minister, feared by commoners (i.e the non-magic wielding populace of the nation), privy to the Council of politician-magicians closest to Rupert Devereaux, the Prime Minister. Devereaux is himself a skilled magician, and over the course of time has become a perfect despot, choosing to ignore the grievances of his people, indulging in his love for theatre more than ever, and most importantly, forbidding the use the Staff of Gladstone and the Amulet of Samarkand to quell the enemies of the Empire. It is a time of much turmoil in England, as more and more commoners have become resilient to magic, and secret rebel organisations have cropped up against the ruling elite.

Bartimeus the djinn is still working for Mandrake, but even as the book begins, we discover that Mandrake has kept Bartimaeus away from The Other Place ( where all djinns and afrits and marids hail from) for so long that the poor guy has weakened, and needless to say, he is disgruntled. Even more so when Mandrake sends him on a solo mission to track a certain fugitive who had escaped their clutches several years ago (from the previous book, The Golem's Eye). But then, a djinn's got to do what a djinn's got to do...The general complaint about The Golem's Eye was that there was too much politics, and too less Bartimaeus, and this is not a complaint anyone should have with this book, at least. The footnotes leave you in splits, everytime.

Kitty Jones, the fugitive rebel from Book 2 is the third protagonist of Ptolemy's Gate, and she has been making plans of her own all these years. Some of them involve Bartimaeus and his former master Ptolemy. Stroud interweaves his story with brief vignettes from Ptolemy's life, and by Part 3 of the book, which comes somewhere in the middle, the build-up is complete. Part 4 ends with a shocker that I had been expecting, and the rest of the book deals with revenge ( you would be surprised at how many people..erm...individuals are looking to get their dishes served cold in this book, and how many of them do get their comeuppance), redemption, and yeah, closure. What an ending! Seriously, I doubt if anyone would expect the trilogy to end this way. I sincerely hope Jonathan Stroud does not get carried away by marketting possibilities and come up with spin-off series involving the characters or something.

If you haven't read any of the Bartimaeus trilogy yet, I strongly suggest you do so immediately. This one's a white-heat read for sure.

We had five consecutive holidays at the office. Monday was a working day, but someone sent a mail asking all of us team leads to petition for a holiday on that day, and we did so, earning countless blessings in return.

What did I do these five days? Nothing. Unless you count the fact that on Wednesday night, I finished the fifteenth level of the Punisher game after an undocumented number of being killed and respawned and killed again, and am now onto the last level, called "Ryker's Island". In other news, inspite of a 256 MB graphics card, Half-Life 2 refuses to run on my machine. Does it require more than 1024*768 resolution to run by default? My monitor ( which happens to be moccacino's monitor), was bought just before the last tyrannosaurus rex on earth forgot to breathe and brought about premature extinction on himself, ergo, low-res. GTA San Andreas does run, though, but I don't want to play it before I complete 100% of Vice City. What? I didn't tell you? Of course I haven't completed Vice City! I am a busy man. (Oh wait, that kind of negates the first two lines of this paragraph.)

The kind potnuru agreed to bring along two items from my amazon wishlist on his recent trip to India, and he also agreed to bring them along from Hyderabad to Bangalore. The items in question happen to be the humongous graphic novels Locas by Jaime Hernandez and Palomar: The Heartbreak Soup Stories by Gilbert 'Beto' Hernandez. Two brothers, both amazing storytellers, two hardcover publications collecting ten years of stories published in the indie comic called Love and Rockets. I had one of Gilbert's short fiction collection called Fear of Comics from an eBay sale ( autographed, too, hyuk) and one of Jaime's, called Death of Speedy - needless to say, I did cartwheels when I heard of both these books coming out sometime in 2004, completist bastard that I am. It's impossible to get complete runs of the L&R comics, as far as I know, and the early issues go for about 50-60$ each. Have begun reading Palomar, which is the story of a village, and hence has innumerable characters to keep track of. The cool thing is that Beto includes proper pronounciation guides for all the characters as footnotes - I didn't know a Latin American character named Jesus would be pronounced "Hey-sooz", for instance.

( First pages of Locas and Palomar, and drawing samples of both the brothers... )

A one-stop link for all things Hernandez Brothers-related.

There's a neat interview with Neil Gaiman and Susanna Clarke over at Salon.com. You will need to click on a free day-pass ad-thingie to read the complete thing, but it's worth it, seriously.

In other news, The Complete Calvin and Hobbes has come out, and both Bookworm and Blossom have it on sale at 20% discounts. I have a feeling I might end up buying this next month.

Of late, I have also been suffering from frightening lapses in memory. A casual conversation about horror writers led me to mention Shirley Jackson and HP Lovecraft, and then I wanted to talk about this author of I am Legend, a book that has been out of print for quite sometime, and has been plugged by Stephen King in his Danse Macabre and On Writing. Damn. I couldn't remember his name! I remembered ( quite correctly too) that he had also written The Incredible Shrinking Man and A Stir of Echoes and What Dreams May Come, and that Charlton Heston acted in The Omega Man which was adapted from I Am Legend and I also bought one of his lesser known books called Hunted Beyond Reason, buit I COULD NOT REMEMBER HIS NAME! It was scary, let me tell you. Steadfastly avoided googling for it, even stopped thinking about it consciously - no use at all. It took me about a week to remember that the guy's name was Richard Matheson. Scary. More so, because I've been looking for his other books for quite sometime.

Six books in seven days is not too bad. Books, as in proper non-graphic-novelly books.

Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys.

Twice-22 By Ray Bradbury. A collection of short stories collecting two previous short-story releases- The Golden Apples of the Sun and A Medicine for Melancholy. I have read some of these stories before, "The Fog Horn", for instance, but I just can't get enough of re-reading Bradbury.

Carl Hiassen's Skinny Dip. Entertaining as always. I loved the fact that I could figure out that the cover art was by Charles Burns.

Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club. Now an interesting thing happened. There are these book exhibitions happening at the Institute of Engineers from time to time, but of late I have been skipping them because of three reasons - one, the way they price their books is completely random - mostly it seems to be based on the thickness of a book, and not whether it's good or bad;two, the books are completely unarranged. Which is good for your book-hunting impulses, but at the end of a terrible day at work, one hardly has the impulse to tilt one's head sideways and walk from one end of a hall to the other trying to filter the white noise of titles ( 90% of the listed books are stuff you find at Abids on Sundays for 10 or 20 rupees, and I swear the next time I see five copies each of Alexandra Ripley's Scarlertt and Terry McMillan's Waiting to Exhale in a stack of 100, I will scream.) ; three - if you get books for cheap, all the restraints, all the mental promises you've made not to spend any more money on books, all of these are forgotten. So yeah, I try my best to ignore these sales, even though I pass the Institute of Engineers every evening on my way home.

Now this evening, it was drizzling, and traffic was suckadelic. Traffic is always suckadelic and it nearly always rains in the evening, but it was even worse this time because I was on riding pillion on a bike. So there, we decided to park the bike at the I of E and check out the book-sale. We gave each other 10 minutes. Now as I went up, the sign said "Last day of sale", which was good, I told myself, because I would not be able to come back for second helpings if I saw something interesting, and because they were only taking cash. So off I went, nonchalantly checking around. Truth be told, I wasn't looking too hard, because most of the good stuff would already be sold. Saw a book of Marilyn Monroe pictures, priced at 195, but decided to skip it. Too high a price for photos, especially after I had downloaded a 140 MB package called "The Ultimate Marilyn Monroe Photographs Collection, Ever" just a couple of days back.

And then I saw the familiar logo of Fight Club staring at me, with Brad Pitt grinning and Edward Norton looking sullen and "Chuck Palahniuk" written in bold on top, and I said "hallelujah!" and went and checked out the price, which turned out to be just right. Sixty rupees is not a high price to pay for this book, yeah? Then at the counter, the guy tells me, buy one book, get another free. GLUCK! Ten minutes were almost up, so I ran a bit and looked around for something good that would cost me 60 Rs, but alas, the only ones I could see were Terry McMillan and long-read Stephen Kings and the odd Steve Martini here and there. Finally, just picked up the Marilyn book, and asked the guy to price something.

"Pay 150", he says. Woah! Has to be the first time I paid lesser for two books than I would pay for buying one of them. Began reading Fight Club right that night, during dinner, and finished it the next morning. Yummy. Can't believe how faithful the movie was - except for the nip and tuck there, which added to the goodness of it. Seriously, it would take guts to make a script out of this book.

Bollywood Uncensored: What You Don't See On Screen And Why by Derek Bose. Pretty interesting reading on the peculiar quirks of Indian film censors. I liked the attention Bose paid to the banned documentaries of the seventies and eighties, with a neat comparison chart of what happened to those documentaries. ( Some were allowed to be telecast on Doordarshan by High Court and Supreme court, and others were shafted by DD anyway, when they aired these post-midnight.)

Tim Dorsey's Hammerhead Ranch Motel, that I finished on the train ride to Madras day before yesterday. One sitting. Another writer in the crime/comedy genre, and a thoroughly loony one at that. For the most part, the storyline hops around from one oddball occurrence to the other, and as pages turn and timelines mesh, a completely zany series of events transpire - the climax, naturally, happening at the Hammerhead Ranch Motel. A dancing chihuahua who meets a tragic end when he jumps off a weather-plane, a trivia-spouting schizophrenic who kills people by literally making stuffing of them. From what I have read about Florida courtesy of Hiassen and now Dorsey, the state seems to be full of lunatics and corrupt officials and fugitives on the lam from the other states.

Because I had coupons for Premier Book Stall left over, went and picked up Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian and Pratibha Ray's Yagnaseni: The Story of Draupadi. Began the second book, really well-translated ( it was in Oriya originally, I think). If only Ashok Banker could write half as lyrically as Pradip Bhattacharya can translate, I would be a happy man.

I finished Anansi Boys last night, in two sessions. Now I am in that unhappy state of mind that is brought about upon the realisation that I would probably have to wait fo a long, long while before a new Neil Gaiman novel comes out.

Gaiman had already pointed out that the book was more humour than fantasy, and rightly so. There was the friendly Douglas Adamsy-PG Wodehousey narrator's voice throughout the writing, and the observational gems that Gaiman indulges, the kind of opinions about everyday things that make you go - "Damn, now why didn't I think of that?" I have been thinking of a way to write about the book without giving away any spoilers. Probably the best way to make you go and read it is to repeat the tagline - "God is dead. Meet the kids." and to say that in the book, much like all other Gaiman books, Things are Not What They Seem, and Events Happen in Different Layers of Reality. I think it would also help if you read up on Kwaku Anansi, the trickster-spider-god character of African myth. I had bought a collection of Anansi stories off a sale sometime back, and could not but help smiling at the entertaining Gaiman spins on the myths.

It's self-referentially humorous. I mean, just look at these lines:
Daisy made a noise. It was not a yes-noise and it was not a no-noise. It was a I-know-somebody-just-said-something-to-me-and-if-I-make-a-noise-maybe-they-will-go-away sort of noise.
Carol had heard that noise before.
"oy", she said. "Big bum. Are you going to be much longer. I want to do my blog."
Daisy processed the words. Two of them sank in. "Are you saying I've got a big bum?"
"No,", said Carol. "I'm saying that it's getting late, and I want to do me blog. I'm going to have him shagging a supermodel in the loo of an unidentified London nightspot."


I must have spent three minutes, probably more, just laying back on the bed and laughing hard after reading these lines.

The version of the book I bought, the British trade paperback, has a deleted scene, a scanned excerpt from Gaiman's diary ( which contains such entertaining information as an idea to begin every chapter in the book with a punchline of a popular joke, which was vetoed later) and an interview with the writer. On an aside: How much did I pay for it? Nothing at all. Bought it with the book coupons collected from KQA quizzes. Muhuhahahahaha.

Also picked up an Iomega 160 GB External Hard Drive yesterday. Looks really cool, but has an American 3-pin plug, so I need a converter for that, even though my spike-buster does have a socket that works with it. I need to work everywhere, that's why.

Tim Burton's movie Big Fish was based on a novel?? Nobody told me!

My sister, now in London with her husband, has got herself quite a nifty accent. The nice, "pretty good, innit?"-kind of an accent that I always wanted to acquire. No, really. I have a thing for proper Brit/Irish/Scottish accents. Reading Garth Ennis and watching Guy Ritchie movies do that to you.

Re-reading one of the best books from my boyhood ( Ahahaha, the word "boyhood" always cracks me up) - As The Crow Flies by Jeffrey Archer. The man might be a swindler and a perjuror, or whatever it is they call him, but that doesn't take away the fact that he writes neat plot-driven stuff. Used to, rather. I think I need to reread the best of his epic-family-squabble-thingie (Kane and Abel and The Prodigal Daughter, all his latter-day output degenerated to the same pulpy two-guys-seperated-by-class-and-with-interwined-lives plot that Kane and Co did to perfection) Man, As The Crow Flies is getting me all nostalgic. I read it the first time when my younger uncle was getting married, and pissed off a lot of my Evil Relatives by taking the book to the wedding and punctuating the assembly with occasional sighs and giggles and "yeah, BABY!"s. That was the closest I came to being interested in entrepreneurship, or commerce of any sort. Charlie Trumper, the main character of the book was on my Personal Pantheon for quite sometime after that; matter of fact, I think I need to put him on again.

So a quick trip to Planet M resulted in my finding an album long on the list of personal curiosities - The Essential Tri Atma. What's so special about this band? Just that the third song on the album, O Moena was ripped off in the famous Siyaram ads of the eighties ( Remember that tune? "O Siyaram, coming home to Siyaram" and all that jazz...) Listening to the album right now, and the rest of the songs are pretty good. The band Tri Atma is made up of a Bengali percussionist Ashim Saha( "O Moena" starts off in Bangla, and it seems it's about a Mynah bird) and a German guitarist Jens Fischer, who also sequences the tracks. Considering that it's a band from the seventies, the sound is extremely contemporary, the tabla used to good effect throughout.

So I also moved flats in Hyderabad. I was there for two days this week, and thankfully, didn't break my back lifting crates of books, because we hired a bunch of movers who did everything ( except the packing, which we did ourselves). The move was necessary because vrikodhara is all set to leave for Calcutta, and we were paying too much for the three-bedroom apartment, which was also beginning to resemble something that was a cross between a bombed-out refugee center and a set from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. So this new place is a two-bedroom flat, the only disadvantage being that it gets nastily hot in the summer. I was really worried my books would spontaneously combust or something - because I came into the house at 5:30 PM on Tuesday, about to leave for Bangalore, and it felt like I had walked into an oven. It's not the house's fault, though. Hyderabad is a bloomin' oven in May. It rained sometime in the night during the bus journey and I woke up shivering early in the morning, as it entered Bangalore.

I took a picture of my room right after the packing was complete; Sasi, friendly reminder, send me the photograph, will you?

I love Charles Addams. He's one of the few cartoonists with a truly macabre sense of humour - there's Gary Larson, there's the mindbogglingly brilliant Bunny Suicides, there's Jhonen Vasquez with Johnny The Homicidal Maniac - but Addams came much before all of them, and his cartoons can still make you laugh and cringe at the same time.

Now I had seen Charles Addams' primarily through Dell paperbacks picked up at various second-hand bookshops. While these books were printed on fairly high quality paper, I was always bothered about why the reproduction of those little pen and ink masterpieces was so blurry. At times, you had to squint really hard to figure out what the picture was all about. The tones would bleed into each other - the general appearance was that Addams liked his work very dark and hard-to-figure-out-unless-you-looked-carefully types.

But today, I realised why the Dell paperbacks of Addams's work was that way. It was because they were reprints of oversized hardcover books, which were abso-freakin-lutely gorgeous. The artwork on these books was crisp and required no squinting.

Now how do I know this, you wonder? Because I picked up a first edition hardcover copy of Charles Addams's Black Maria today, for only a hundred rupees.

And I also re-found the soundtrack to Ocean's Twelve. And I bought the complete run of Preacher (1-66, and some specials) for $82.10, which includes shipping ( the seller refunded part of the shipping charges to me because he could ship it cheaper), and the remaining run of Swamp Thing Vol 2 ( issues 45-171), also for 83$. There was a sale on at secondspin.com and I ordered a 3-disc collector's edition of Dario Argento's Suspiria and a ten-volume collection of Sonny Chiba movies for the grand price of 23$. My credit card is moaning rather loudly right now, so I will let it sleep for a while. Six months. No, three. Erm, let's see.

Reading Prince of Ayodhya by Ashok Banker. I had already formed a very bad opinion about the book after reading a couple of pages at Odyssey quite sometime ago; and the Terrible Attitude of the writer towards negative reviewers - contentedbloke's Amazon review, to be precise. But curiousity got the better of me, and so...

What IS this guy trying to do? He seems to be rewriting the Ramayana as a fantasy novel, terrible plot twists and Dark Lords and Joseph Campbell fundaes intact. Which is not a bad thing at all, we have had enough of watered-down grandmother's tales - and I cannot think of any English version of the Ramayana which is long enough - there have always been bits and stories chopped away,unlike the Mahabharata, which has the Kishori Mohan Ganguli version as the definitive retelling.

It would have been a good thing, except for the fact that Mr Ashok K Banker is what one might indelicately describe as a hack. One might also call him a Tolkien-wannabe, but that would be a serious insult to Tolkien. He's at best a Robert Jordan-wannabe, and let me tell you, I don't like Robert Jordan at all. I think Robert Jordan is a Tolkien-wannabe, and at times a Robert E Howard-wannabe, like when he is writing Conan The Barbarian fan-fiction ( It's of course a tragedy of sorts that people like Robert Jordan manage to get their fan-fiction published, and then go on making a career out of even more badly written fan-fiction).

Oh my gosh, the language. At the beginning of the book, Ashok K Banker says - "I simply used the way I speak, an amalgam of English-Hindi-Urdu-Sanskrit, and various terms from Indian languages. I deliberately used anachronisms like the term 'abs' or 'morph' because these were how I referred to these events." This unique methodology yields sentences like this: "The red-beaded rudraksh mala around his neck , all marked him for a hermit returning from a long, hard tapasya. His gaunt face and deep-set eyes completed the portrait of a forest penitent, a tapasvi sadhu." One line that makes sense to me because I am from India and know Hindi. But a fantasy reader picking up the book? "rudraksh", "mala", "tapasya" in one line, "tapasvi" and "sadhu" in the next - anyone would give up in disgust. I am disgusted becauuse the words don't gel together at all, in either language.

Some more samples: "It was familiar with creatures that changed their bhes-bhav at will." "In the bright light of the purnima moon, he could see the helmeted heads and speartips of the night watch patrolling the south grounds, moving in perfect unison in the regular rhythmic four-count pattern of a normal chowkidari sweep." I mean, come on!!! "Purnima moon"??? What's wrong with saying "full moon"? Does it make the full moon less exotic to be called "full" rather than "purnima"? Besides, the English equivalent is not "purnima", it's "poornima", which tells me that Ashok K Banker's Hindi is as seriously fucked-up as his English.

The dialogue - oh, boy oh boy, it's that perfect B-movie screenplay that will never be made. Probably if you translate the lines spoken by the protagonists word for word into Hindi, you will get the same pompous mish-mash that's the staple in our hallowed Ramanand Sagar-sir's serials. For instance -

"It looked like a giant vulture. That round head, long hooked beak, that hunched back. But there was something odd about the body. It was broader than a bird, differently shaped, almost like a -"

"A man? A giant man-vulture, is that what it looked like, young novice?"
Young novice. George Lucas can get away with "You've done well, Young Padawan" in every other line, and that makes Mr Ashok K Banker feel he can too. Well, George Lucas is a multimillionaire, and he can get his characters to say whatever he pleases. You, on the other hand, young Ashok K Banker, have a lot to learn. Young novice. Humph.

Mr Ashok K Banker also says, at the beginning: "I based every section, very scene, every character's dialogues and acctions on the previous Ramayanas, be it Valmiki, Kamban, Tulsidas, or Vyasa, and even the various Puranas." In the first chapter, he has Rama do things like scan his bedchamber "with the sharpness of a panther with the scent of stag in its nostrils", and carry a yard and a half of Kosala steel in his hand and do acrobatic martial asanas, while breathing in the pranayam style (whatever that means) while the Dark Lord Ravana sends him subliminal messages saying things like - "You will watch your birth-mother savaged beyond recognition, your clan-mothers and sisters impregnated by my rakshasas, your father and brothers eaten while still alive etc etc blah blah blah, oh, and yeah, the samay chakra, your sacred wheel of time, will repeat the cycle of birth and suffering infinitely."

Wow. That's all I can say. The last time I heard lines like this was while watching this film called Rudraksh. I wonder which version of the Ramayana that scene was based on.

Oh, great, now they have started talking about the Last Great Asura War. I am going to give this book thirty minutes more of my time, and then bid this fanfic writer a nighty-night.

Afterword: The stuff above was written last night. I read for about 15 more minutes, and gave up. Watched Stephen Chow's Fight Back To School 2, a nice comedy that washed away the dregs of frustration brought about by PoA. I think these US publishers are really smart people - they have refused to release the subsequent books in the series until Banker cleans up his act (i.e his writing), and he refused. A vriddha dog can hardly learn new tricks, after all.