Frost/Nixon: Shall we interview

Frost/Nixon was nominated for the 2009 Oscars. Here's a brief review which I cobbled together a week or so back. Don't miss the tidbit at the bottom. It's a riot.

A popular British talk show host called David Frost is interested in interviewing deposed American president - Richard Nixon as Frost believes that a telecast interview would rake in the viewers and make him famous in America where “fame is unlike that in any other place.” Frost stares in nearly an entranced state at the television screen as Nixon resigns and waves at television cameras without a trace of remorse and over 500 million people from across the world watch. The former president has a Hollywood agent to negotiate with the media and see which broadcaster is willing to pay the most for an interview in which Nixon hopes to set the record straight and have people remember him for his achievements and not just Watergate. Frost gets his foot in the door and arranges the interview for which he raises the money on his own steam.

Frost puts together a team of crack researchers, hitches himself onto a damsel and sets about the task of serious socializing. The researchers don’t see much of Frost as he flits from one place to another. The cameras start rolling and Nixon gets his moment in the sun even as Frost looks on entranced; this time the light in his eyes is missing.

Frost has got everything to lose if the project bombs and yet he doesn’t seem to be suitably concerned. He appears to be extremely media savvy in the beginning of the movie and it’s hard to understand that he went in to the duel expecting Nixon to not have prepared iron clad defences. It takes a chance conversation with Nixon to galvanise him. The entire saga is a true story and this bit sounds a bit hard to believe.

Conversations define the movie. The author researcher who’s written four books on Nixon is unable to speak to him in person, the journalist researcher plays Nixon as the team practices mock interviews, the Frost – Nixon conversations and mind games are a great index of how the tables turn and the movie ends with the parties musing if they would’ve been better off if they’d switched places from the very beginning.

Meanwhile, in India when a hardnosed interviewer attempts to speak to a "merchant of death" (forget about extracting a confession!) here's what happens. Enjoy.

My word, a noteworthy letter

A couple of Sundays back, I read a cover story done on graphic novels done by Brunch - the Sunday magazine of Hindustan Times, a national Indian daily. I am no expert on graphic novels and have only read a couple of such novels but a couple of friends of mine are quite knowledgable about them. So, I have heard their conversations at times and framed my own view of sorts regarding them. Anyhow, I read this story with interest and felt that there were a couple of things amiss in it. So I thrashed out a feedback note of sorts on my cell phone, saved it as a draft and sent it across to them in the next few days. Here's how it read:

"Your cover story on graphic novels was an interesting read. While it was informative as to how graphic novels have developed in India, I was no closer to understanding the nuances of this branch of novels. The comparison of graphic novels with comic books was brief to say the least and unsatisfactory in my view. Examples of the works of world acclaimed graphic novelists such as Neil Gaimon and Alan Moore could have possibly helped the reader to understand how graphic novels came to be and if at all a blend of text and graphics communicates differently. What are graphic novels really? That question remains unanswered. "The case of the graphic novel in India" would probably have been a more suitable title for this cover story."

This wasn't the first time that I was sending a piece of writing to a newspaper. I had written a piece on how work in a software company compares with engineering college and sent it across to the Hindu, an excellent newspaper whose readership is primarily in South India. Nothing came of it and when I look back at it, I'm not surprised. While I think there is a good flow in the writing, it's more of a personal rant with no perspectives gleaned from other people. I did discuss the issue with some of my batchmates but then I didn't incorporate their thoughts as quotes. I remember having thought then that I can't go about talking to people and putting quotes and stuff in writing. It's only I've started work here that I've realised the importance of doing so and also how to go about it. For the first week or so after I'd sent in the note, every morning I would religiously check the newspaper to see if my article had been published. It wasn't, ever. I don't mind them not having published the piece but would some feedback have hurt them? I had actually met the supplement's editor and sent the piece in as a demonstration of my interest to work with them.  

The past is well, past. 

Last Sunday I skipped down the hostel stairs and returned to my room with a bundle of newspapers. Flipped open the Sunday Brunch, half expecting my letter to be there. And, it WAS! :D It was an amazing amazing kick :) Went around the hostel showing the published note to some friends. 

Maybe I'll look back at this too and think that it wasn't really such a big deal. Sure, a lot of people must be writing in to the paper but heck, isn't it just a feedback note? Maybe. And, no one saw the note and then got in touch with me to congratulate me. (I'm sure my uncommon surname ensures that I have no namesakes.) 

This is how it was printed. A phrase removed and an italicised word straightened. But I'll take it happily. 

"Your cover story on graphic novels was an interesting read. While it was informative as to how graphic novels have developed in India, I was no closer to understanding the nuances of this branch of novels. The comparison of graphic novels with comic books was brief to say the least. Examples of the works of world acclaimed graphic novelists such as Neil Gaimon and Alan Moore could have possibly helped the reader to understand how graphic novels came to be and if at all a blend of text and graphics communicates differently. What are graphic novels really? That question remains unanswered. "The case of the graphic novel in India" would probably have been a more suitable title for this cover story."

It's an outright critical letter that got published in the supplement of a national daily. At 22, I quite like it :)   

  

Blogging versus writing for self

I ran a 5 km marathon last Sunday. One real experience it was. Came back to the hostel and made sure that I blogged about it. Was quite happy too with what I wrote. Was putting off posting it over here and just re-read it. I still like it as a piece of writing but wouldn't want to put it out publicly. Hell, I wrote it because I really wanted to blog about it. Exhibitionist? Maybe. Anyhow, I shall write a proper piece on blogging and what it means. Not now. Age matters.

(I hope to get hold of a better phone when I'm in cal (read: whack my sister's phone. Actually, she wants to give it to me.) and then hopefully I shall have an internet connection at hand in the ruddy hostel. Then I shall blog, a lot more. And I will make it a point to write blog posts only on this interface on blogger.com. Don't know whether it's just me but where I write affects what I write.)

!exclamation mark

I really should write more and so I will. There’s simply loads of stuff to pen down but for now I’ll go with what’s on top of my mind.

In the first half of 2008 I interned at a software company called EMC Corp. I won’t go into the details of what I was doing there, suffice it to say that the work was coding related. A little bit of information though is required to make sense of what I’m going to be talking about. I was assigned the task of coding something called a ‘debugger extension’. In a nutshell, this piece of software involved running a set of commands and viewing the results thrown up by the extension. Now comes the interesting bit – suppose you had to run a command called ‘print’. What you would enter in the command window is - !print. And, this was read as being ‘bang print’. In essence, an exclamation mark was called as ‘bang’! Now I don’t know whether it’s because of this or something else but for a while now I’ve been monitoring people’s punctuation and particularly their usage of the exclamation mark.

Firstly, I don’t know whether I’m a bit unusual but I do attach some amount of value to correct punctuation and grammar. And this extends to the way in which I type my SMSes and GTalk chats. (I have put together a piece of writing about punctuation on this blog) A comma here and not there, some ellipses (three dots - …) at a place instead of a full stop, an emoticon for blank space and you get the drift can completely alter communication. Or maybe, people simply don’t read that carefully.

Coming to the exclamation mark now. I’m not a person who really favours it. Don’t really use it unless I really want to get a point across. The reason for that is simple. A sentence ending with an exclamation mark just seems to have all the emphasis at the end. It almost strikes one as if the writer is really being loud! (Now, I really had to use it there isn’t it.) Italicising words in a sentence strikes me as being a much better way of going about matters. The emphasis gets through neatly and no one’s left with ear ache. Sweet. However, there’s a slight problem. At least for the writing that I do on the job because for some reason that I don’t know, newspaper articles rarely use italics. And by newspaper articles I don’t exclude opinion articles or columns. Regular articles are supposed to be/supposedly neutral pieces of writing but opinionated articles should have italics wherever required, methinks. Would probably add a lot more emotion and emphasis in the places the author chooses rather than a one-size-fits-all exclamation mark. In fact, I just read a couple of column articles which did use italics so maybe it’s not as bad as it seems to me.

As far as people’s usage is concerned, here goes. I’ve noticed that a lot of people really favour the exclamation mark in their SMSes. (I’ve noticed that a lot of people really favour the exclamation mark in their SMSes! Naaaah, right? Glad you get it.) Maybe that’s got to do with the limited space and time that people have when they type out an SMS but I think it runs deeper than that. Maybe I’m being a touch judgemental here but it’s possible that they don’t really have what it takes to write what they actually want to and therefore opt for the ‘safe’ exclamation mark as the entire sentence gets emphasized or ‘banged’. I have another theory which goes somewhat like this. The chatting over the internet concept got really very popular when I was about 15. I have memories of a gang of us playing cricket in the courtyard of a house off Lansdowne and people scurrying off in a rush at around 8 PM. Reason? Because it was time to chat over the internet with folks from the girls’ school. Girls with whom they could have very well spoken over the telephone! I would imagine that the abstraction of the internet sure allowed for some solid conversation in the chat windows. Anyways, so maybe the exclamation habit kicked in from there and then. Of course emoticons weren’t really in at that time. And, the smiley’s been around for over 25 years now.

Maybe I’m reading a bit too much into how people type out their SMSes and chat messages. Maybe they simply don’t care. Maybe. One thing that I do know is that you hardly see exclamation marks in Hindi. At least I rarely did in the Hindi that I did in school. In Hindi, what you always do see is a good ol’ straight line with no gaps in it to allow for any shouting. What I also know is that however cold and lifeless code always seemed to me, someone sure as hell coded something correctly – the code for an exclamation mark. Bang, bang. Beautiful. Or was it just someone who really really liked ‘Kill Bill’. Really do beg your pardon, I simply couldn’t resist that.