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.

Life update, Bombay ramblings and a weekend getaway to Lonavla

Yeah, yeah. I know I haven’t blogged in a while and I should’ve but then I couldn’t and so well, I didn’t. But I would check this space every once in a while, I swear! Anyhow, what’s done is done or rather what’s not done is not done.

Not so long ago, a planned (not chance, mind you) conversation with friends over coffee in Bangalore had me saying that my ultimate dream would be to be a newspaper columnist, a travel writer and a visiting prof. Romantic all right and I myself didn’t know till then that these were my goals. Well, at pagalguy.com I wouldn’t say that I’m a newspaper columnist but I sure got my name going with my articles. And one of the reasons for me getting back to this space is because I might be traveling a touch as part of the job. Oh and I'd be blogging too. 

After I read ‘The seven day weekend’, I really wanted to work for exactly that sort of a company. One thing’s for sure, PG is as close as I can get to that kind of a setup. And after starting this space, I so wanted to get paid to blog. Ooops :-) 

I had just reached office on Saturday morning when Apurv (my Editor) turned around and asked whether anyone in the office would be interested in a trip over the weekend. I was immediately interested and said,”I’m in!” We left office early and I rushed to the hostel because I had to change rooms (oh, that often happens here at Seva Niketan. I know that Bombay’s a ‘fast’ place but judging at the pace at which I’ve changed rooms in this hostel, I would be forgiven if I thought that I was staying in a vacuum of sorts!) and pack my stuff for the trip to Lonavla. Pack my stuff for a one day trip?! Err, yes. I tend to overpack on trips. Don’t look at me, I’ve got that from my mom.

So anyhow, the room changing happened peacefully enough and I was off to catch a ‘fast’ train to Kurla station. Reached Byculla station and as usual found some helpful souls to tell me from where I could catch the train. That’s one thing that I’ve got used to now – The nice and helpful people in this big, bad city. Well, how nice could it be? I had a thousand rupee note returned to me in the hostel. Not because it was a fake but because I had paid extra. Don’t roll off your chair yet. It was returned to me a full day after I had overpaid. And apart from that, the people around here are so bloody helpful that it’s not funny. Ask one person on the road and a couple more who’ll overhear will come to your aid. And all this at the manic pace at which people walk in Bombay, mind you.

This was supposed to be a nice, simple piece of writing about me going to Lonavla with some nice office folks, clicking some nice pictures, breathing some nice air and basically feeling nice. And here I’ve rambled more and travel written less. Forgive me, it’s been a while. And my subconscious self really does seem to have a mind of it’s own, what’s there. (I really should watch less of ‘Heroes’. Getting influenced by it, I say.) 

Well, I caught the fast train to Kurla. Even though it was the fourth Saturday of the month which is an off day for offices, the train was as jam packed as it could possibly be. I found myself like all others, occupying the minimum amount of space in which a human being could possibly stand. I also noticed that one gutsy (or maybe deluded is the correct word) co-passenger had got along the day’s paper to read in the train. No harm in dreaming, is there.

I met Apurv at a Barista in Chembur. He was with Kunal, a guy who had earlier worked at PG HQ and who’d be coming along with us to Lonavla. The techies also arrived soon and six of us were off to Lonavla in a gypsy that we shared with three others and a driver. The road to Lonavla was good and there wasn’t much traffic too. We passed the new DY Patil cricket stadium, saw Vashi station from far and began to doze off, one by one.

We reached Lonavla in around an hour and three quarters and made our way to a dhaba to tuck into some dinner and sip some drinks but of course. You know, there’re all these eateries in the city which call themselves dhabas but a dhaba ain’t a dhaba till it’s nice and open, not too well lit and next to a road but no honks coming from there. This one fit the bill on those counts plus it wasn’t too crowded and had some nice music playing. Quite the ambience for a late night dinner with some drinks, I must say. 

‘Coffees and conversations’. ‘Coffee and cigarettes’. Mocha’s slogan and a movie. Would ‘cigarettes and conversations’ follow by logic? And where does alcohol fit in? Maybe it’s not out there in print but there sure as hell is some link between the three I just mentioned. As the night rolled on, we talked of stories we’d heard or experienced and random things related to books, movies, whatever. Dinner over, the search for the hotel began. We must’ve roamed around for about half an hour when we came across it. Not that we were complaining, the air was fresh and the sky was clear. The original booking didn’t seem to make sense any longer and we trotted off to look for some other place. Found another easily enough, fixed the arrangement and grabbed some shuteye for a couple of hours.

It was 4:30 AM when we all were woken up. Did the usual morning rituals, changed our nightwear and set out to explore the day. I had just put on a thin t-shirt and as the auto raced up the hill, the chilly morning wind snapped at my body. We reached a place called Lion’s point in about twenty minutes. It wasn’t light yet and yet the place wasn’t empty as such. There were some tea stalls set up there and a couple of groups of tourists. We called for some tea and waited patiently for the day to wake up. The tea was hot and just a touch too sweet – exactly the way it should be.
As the time approached for the sun to rise, the sky lightened and the place become more active. Kunal and Apurv had come armed with their pro cameras and set about clicking. I had a camera too but it was more of a casual observer rather than a professional shutterbug. As they clicked, I waited patiently for some more light.

Light was here and we could see the world we had come to. Lion’s point looked out onto a vast expanse of mountains delicately shrouded by a veil of morning mist. There was also a hill with grassy slopes which we walked up for some time trying to find a trail of sorts but unsuccessful. And the air; oh so fresh and clean! We split up into groups.
Kunal and Apurv went off in search of photography. The techies just roamed around absorbing the surroundings. And me? I was here and there, clicking sometimes the camera duo, sometimes the techies and other folks that seemed interesting to me. Oh and there was also this group which was playing some mindless music not too far away from us, jumping up and down mindlessly and doing some mindless drugs. I clicked. One of them even came up to me and asked gruffly, “You sure that you’re not taking a video”. Mindless, I tell you.

It was a great morning. We roamed around together and enjoyed it in our own ways. We stopped to chat at another point. Apurv regaled us with stories about the trekking experiences that he’s had. We also enjoyed the silence, sitting there. The sun was out by now. We moved back to Lion’s point where we had left the autos waiting for us. There we had some more tea and a couple of plates of delicious corn pakodas. 

Rather than wasting our time by sleeping in the hostel, we decided to keep moving and went to the dam that was there. It was a bit of a walk from our hotel but we didn’t really mind it. There wasn’t much traffic or lots of people on the road. I also got chatting with Deepu, one of the techies. It was quite interesting chatting with him. He told me about his engineering college – Dhirubhai Ambani Insti of I & C T, Ahmedabad. Quite an interesting setup they have there. Students can avail of various kinds of courses in Socio, Psycho, the works! Hope this deals spreads across the country. We reached the dam and it was totally worth it. A great view, cool breeze from the water and lots of nuggets regarding animals and wild life courtesy our camera toting friends, self excluded.

We spent an hour or so there and then decided to head back to the hotel. As always, the walk back seemed to pass in a jiffy. We reached, took a shower and then headed out for lunch. Lunch was at another dhaba, this time on the highway. We had some choice non-vegetarian cuisine.

And soon we were on our way back, this time in a public bus. The bus was hot, rickety and choc-a-bloc with people. We settled accounts in the bus after which I simply dozed off. When I came to, we were in Bombay proper. I didn’t need to be told that, what with the heat and stickiness in the air. I got off at the last stop – near Dadar station and had something at the station to quench my  thirst.

It was a long wait for a fast train to Byculla but then I had a friendly stranger to keep me company.