The Ten Rupee Book Club 001

Stack of Ten Rupee Books 001
Over the past five years I’ve been amassing an eclectic collection of cheap used books on my trips to Bombay. At Rs.10 apiece (around $0.25 US) they aren’t expensive or significant (most of them are, in fact, the very opposite), but they are valuable to me, insomuch as they are weird — and I love weird. I have read very few of them; Of the hundreds (and by now, thousands), I have only finished a handful. There have been plans ever since I started blogging to talk about them, to read and review them, but this has so far not happened.

I was reminded of this recently when Dan blogged about his bookshelf, and in the comments I lamented that most of my books were in boxes (he suggested I just take a picture of the box). “That’s it,” I said to myself, “enough dawdling!” I looked through a small box of them and chose seven — none of which I have read — but which I think are interesting. Maybe this will give me the impetus to actually read some, but for now I will talk of their weird and wonderful subjects, their pretty and often breathtaking covers, and their all-round coolness. I hope you find them as fun as I do.

A Bit of Background

Used Booksellers 01Used Booksellers 02
India has a huge English-speaking population, especially in the cities. In a culture that values education and knowledge as much as we do, it stands to reason that books and reading are still a significant part of life (at least among the urban middle class). So nothing is thrown away, old books move from private collections into small neighbourhood libraries where they get read by thousands of people over dozens of years, and eventually when they’re tattered and worn, or riddled with worm holes, they end up in raddi.

‘Raddi’ literally means ‘scrap’ and raddi merchants deal in paper and other valuable things like copper and metals. They buy in bulk by weight, and pick and sort things by hand into various piles in their usually hole-in-the-wall shops. The loose paper ends up in things like newsprint, and single-side printed matter is cut and bound into cheap notepads, while some of it even ends up as sandwich wrapping from roadside vendors. It’s a fun game to read the scrap on which you get your sandwich; usually it’s some kind of internal documents from companies — memos and letters and photocopied invoices — and sometimes it’s even old school textbooks (which are crap anyway, so no big loss).

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The books, however, are kept aside and resold. In raddi shops the price is not fixed and is negotiable; you choose a book, ask the vendor how much he wants for it; he inspects it and quotes something ridiculous (5-10 times what it’s worth) and then you haggle. In South Bombay where time is money and people just want to get from their office to the train station and vice-versa, things are a little more advanced, and in addition to the stack of negotiable old tomes, there will usually be a display of fixed price 10 Rupee books.

Remember, these people buy by weight, not title (and most of the hawkers don’t know English, but can read the words), so it’s quite common to find something you might pay a hundred rupees for just sitting in that pile because it’s too worn or the cover/author’s name is uninteresting. Many bargains are to be found. And below are just seven:

(Oh, and you can click on the front covers for larger versions)

1. Envoy to New Worlds/Flight From Yesterday

Envoy to New Worlds by Keith Laumer - Click to EmbiggenFlight From Yesterday by Robert Moore Williams - Click to Embiggen
Our first book is even greater value for money than the others, because it’s actually two books. Published by Ace Books’ ‘Ace Double’ imprint, this is two novels for the price of one. When you get to the end of one, just flip it over and continue reading! It’s a gorgeous format from a design point of view alone, and there were hundreds of these, including this which was published in 1963.

Of the two tales, Keith Laumer’s Envoy to New Worlds is significant because it marks the first appearance (in a novel) of Jame Retief, ‘The Machiavelli of Cosmic Diplomacy’ as it states on the cover. He’s apparently an intergalactic diplomat, a role modeled somewhat after the experiences of his author in the United States Foreign Service. Retief would go on to star in upwards of sixteen books. The absence of a back cover summary prevents me from making any guesses as to the plot of this first adventure (I’m guessing there will be diplomacy), but any cover that depicts a man who has descended from a ladder with a cape, a gun, and a cummerbund, has piqued my interest.

Not your average flip-bookOn the flip side (haw haw), the slightly less well-known Robert Moore Williams (his name is so plain he couldn’t have made it up) gives us Flight From Yesterday. ‘Yesterday in America, tomorrow in Atlantis’ the cover blurb reads. Surely, hey must be talking about lost airport luggage. No? Oh well. Keith Ard (‘es well ‘ard, I hope) is an unemployed test pilot who answers a mysterious classified ad and apparently meets up with vanishing men in togas (or is it vanishing togas?) and girls with literally flaming hair. If this is any kind of good SF, the man with the vanishing toga teaches him stuff, and he gets off with the truly hot hottie. If this is progressive SF, then the roles of the man and the girl are switched. Either way, Keith Ard!

The cover reminds me of The Phantom Tollbooth movie, which is one of the reasons this book caught my eye. Sadly, no artists are credited on either of the covers. The books themselves are slim (Flight From Yesterday is 120 small pages, 11 pages longer than its ‘book-mate’) and both have a certain charming brevity to the narrative. For instance:

“How’d you get this, Keith?” he asked.
“I was struck in the back by something that felt like a hot wind made in part of living electricity,” Keith said.
Dr. Riker made no comment.

I love old SF.

2. Mushrooms, Molds, and Miracles

Mushrooms, Molds and Miracles, by Lucy Kavaler - Click to EmbiggenMushrooms, Molds and Miracles, by Lucy Kavaler - Back Cover
To say that author Lucy Kavaler’s work is eclectic would be an understatement. Anybody who writes books called The Private World of High Society, The Artificial World Around Us and The Wonders of Algae deserves to be taken seriously, and by all accounts, Mushrooms, Molds, and Miracles is a very well received and regarded book. It covers everything from fungi as miracle foods and medicines to yes, even hallucinogens and extra terrestrial speculations. The writing style is a perfect mix of conversational and academic; not shying away from big words when it needs to, but eschewing them when something simpler will suffice.

Mushroom book interiorIf it still aren’t convinced, here’s the first section of the back cover copy:

Martinis and the secret of heredity, Penicillin and The Angel of Death, Truffles and L.S.D., the Irish Potato Famine and the Fall of the Roman Empire, Astronauts, Gourmets, Scientists, and Indian Medicine Men
What does this wildly assorted list have in common? The answer is Fungi.

How could I not pick this book up?

3. A Dictionary of Geography

A Dictionary of Geography by W.G. Moore - Front Cover - Click to EmbiggenA Dictionary of Geography by W.G. Moore - Back Cover
All this talk of mushrooms should get you in the mood for the great outdoors, yearning to fulfill that romantic ideal of going out into the nearest wood and poking around under a rotting tree bark. It might help, therefore, to have a handy guide to tell you the difference between a gryke and a gulch; to be able to properly interpret the hachures on your map and to watch out for precarious talus.

Geography book interiorAll these and more things can be found in the Revised an Enlarged edition of Penguin’s A Dictionary of Geography by W.H. Moore. This surprisingly weighty paperback does exactly what it says on the cover, and even has a bunch of pretty black and white pictures in the middle. It’s fun enough if you are a closet geography nerd like me, but is also useful as an idea mine (there are several terms I’m going to steal for story titles already). We’ve all been at a dinner party where we’ve needed to know the difference between a Mercator’s Projection and a Sanson-Flamsteed Sinusoidal one, haven’t we? Well now we can be ignorant no longer.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to the top of that there drumlin to see if I can spot that dingle I’ve been trying to find all day.

4. Our Language

Our Language by Simeon Potter - Front Cover - Click to EmbiggenOur Language by Simeon Potter - Back Cover
Big words scare people. It’s the truth. But big words needn’t scare you any more after you’ve read (Prof.) Simeon Potter’s Our Language. The beautiful Romek Marber cover was enough to convince me to buy this book long before I opened it. Its ambition of telling the history, structure, dialectic branches, trends and future of the English Language (also known as ‘Merican’), and that too in only 200 pages, sealed the deal.

Our language book interiorThis is the kind of book that publishers seemed to just pop out on a lark back in the 1950s and 60s, and is now unjustly forgotten. They do not make them like this anymore. Here’s something that doesn’t claim to have the answer to everything, is not a trendy pop-culture phenomenon, the latest gee-whiz-ain’t-it-spiffy nonfiction breeze that gets blogged to death and launches a thousand speaking tours (even though I greatly respect and love things like Tipping Point and Freakonomics). It’s just a simple, well-researched, intelligent account of a subject, and we’re all busy reading about Britney’s navel grit.

Shame on you, human race.

5. Teen-Age Vice/Designs in Scarlet

Teen-Age Vice or Designs in Scarlet by Courtney Ryley Cooper - Front Cover - Click to EmbiggenTeen-Age Vice or Designs in Scarlet by Courtney Ryley Cooper - Back Cover
Speaking of the human race…

Oh, where do I begin? This 1939 (but 1957 edition) book is so deliciously cheesy. Told in a Bob-Woodward-channeling-Raymond-Chandler style, only bad, it apparently took Cooper eighteen months of “relentless, coast-to-coast personal investigation to ferret out the facts. If you are shocked by what he found, remember — he meant you to be.”(!) — this from the inside flap.

The entire book is like this. I should probably point out here that the author started his career as a clown, and at the time of his suicide in 1940 was the chief publicist for a circus. Of course, nothing I could say about this book could match the back cover copy, so I’ll just let it do the talking:

teen-age vice interiorWhat makes them do it?
Who is to blame?

They hold orgies in cellar clubs, go on juke-joint “honeymoons.” They get hopped up on liquor and dope, then rob and rape and murder. They are the young people under 21 who commit more than half the major crimes in the U.S.A.

Inspired by J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Courtney Ryley Cooper gives you the grim and tragic answers in this brilliant and blistering exposé of TEEN-AGE VICE.

…To paraphrase Renée Zellwegger, “You had me at ‘Hoover.'”

6. Cool Kids with Hot Ideas

Cool Kids with Hot Ideas by Jules Archer - Front Cover - Click to EmbiggenCool Kids with Hot Ideas by Jules Archer - Back Cover
Likewise, this book had me the second I saw its cover. No, I’m not just talking about the naked girl on the bike (although it is a well-posed photo, and she isn’t bad either). The cover design is remarkable, though entirely uncredited (and in a rare instance, they paid attention to the back too. Cover, that is). I routinely pick up books I have no interest in if the cover is particularly good. Being a graphic designer (with the emphasis on graphic), strong stark covers like these have always appealed to me over today’s wispy, layered and overworked Photoshop monstrosities.

cool kids with hot ideas interiorThe text itself is a lot less sensationalist than the cover would have you believe; certainly, it’s not as SHOCKING(!) as Teen-Age Vice. A compilation of articles, Cool Girls… may have lost its edge when viewed from our media-saturated times. Perhaps, in 1968, this boook chronicled the kind of shocking behaviour people associated with fringe sorts like hippies and beatniks, not ordinary teenage daughters. Most stories deal with unplanned pregnancies, unwed mothers, and illegal abortions (remember, Roe Vs Wade only happened in 1973). The others deal with drugs and teenage prostitution, and none of them are made to look sexy.

It’s interesting that a book with such an unabashedly titillating cover disguises what is fairly straightforward, even depressing, content. I could go on and on about how news has always been latently pornographic, but that’s another story. This book is the perfect example of ‘Don’t Judge a Book by its Cover.’

But what a cover.

7. How to Build Your Cabin or Modern Vacation Home

How to Build Your Cabin or Modern Vacation Home, by Harry Walton - Front Cover - Click to EmbiggenHow to Build Your Cabin or Modern Vacation Home, by Harry Walton - Back Cover
“Enough!” I hear you say, “all this teenage vice is too much for anyone to take. Can’t we talk about those nice mushrooms or sexy dingles again?”

Well, sure, I’d love to, and if you do want to chuck it all and move to the farthest wood, it would be a good idea to have some place to live when you go there. The first thing that strikes you about this Popular Science Skill Book (other than the splendid Bauhaus cover by Frederick Charles) is the little note on the inside that says it’s printed on 100% recycled paper. Somehow I never imagined that people highlighted that fact before the 1980s.

How to Build a Cabin InteriorThis is an honest to goodness 160 page attempt to teach you how to build a cabin. It’s pretty successful too, and I have little doubt that a person of average intelligence might actually end up with a functioning home in the woods if he used it as a rough guide. The genius of the book lays in the fact that it doesn’t just show you ‘four methods of supporting rafters on top plates in gable-roof construction’, but also covers things like ‘how to develop a spring’ (as a reliable water source), how to choose a site for your home in the hills, and an overview of the tools you might use (of chainsaws it says: “Gas-powered chainsaw speeds log-cabin building. It is strictly for outdoor use.“).

My favourite part has to be an early chapter showcasing classic and avant-garde cabin designs to inspire you. I have half a mind to buy a plot of land and try one out, but I think I’ll start in miniature with ice-cream sticks. The fun doesn’t stop there, though; the back cover gives the names of several related titles, including How to Work with Concrete and Masonry (for my closet brutalist, of course) and How to Build Your Own Furniture (I’m also vaguely intrigued by How to Do Your Own Wood Finishing by Jackson Hand, but only so that I can giggle like a schoolboy).

How to Build Your Cabin or Modern Vacation Home is strange; it’s set up almost exactly like every book on drawing I have ever seen or purchased, only at the end of it you get a house. How cool is that?

In Conclusion

Used Booksellers
I hope you’ve enjoyed this short trip through a little corner of my book collection. Even though I didn’t look through the majority of them, there were enough good ones that I was spoilt for choice, and could even group them by theme. This first one was a pick-and-mix of strangeness to whet the appetite, an amuse-bouche for your bibiomaniacal palette.

Vishal

Neat stack of books.

Comic Konga! Begins Tomorrow!!

Comic Konga LogoWell, folks, less than 24 hours to go before Comic Konga! begins! I hope you’re excited and if you’re participating, I hope you’ve got a bunch of ideas (or better yet, finished comics) already! Truth be told I haven’t begun work on my finished comics yet. I do have a few of the ideas chalked out and I know what tomorrow’s comic will be… now I just have to do it!

In case you feel so inclined to announce your Comic Konga! participation on your blogs, I’ve provided a couple of versions of the logo for you to use:

Comic Konga LogoComic Konga White Logo

The one on the left is a transparent background PNG, 240×240. On the right is a GIF of the same dimensions with a white background. Feel free to right click and ‘Save as…’ (or your browser’s equivalent) and put it up in your site’s sidebar or into your Comic Konga! posts. Feel free to resample or resize it to fit your blog (I kept it large so that it would shrink down well).

Comic Konga! Logo (Plain SVG version)

If you like, I’ve provided a plain SVG version of the logo. You can use Inkscape to view it, but I think even other programs like new versions of Adobe Illustrator support this vector file standard. With the vector version you can export the image at higher (or lower) resolutions, or even put the logo into the comics themselves.

In case there were any doubts, you can begin to post your comics whenever Monday is in your timezone. Just putup one every day until Friday. I’ll also be collecting links to all the participants’s daily entries the next day(so Monday’s comic will be collected on Tuesday afternoon GMT), and of course there will be a final list of links after Comic Konga concludes on Friday, 02 November.

I encourage all of you to check out the other entries; to comment on, link to and pick your favourites. Mostly, don’t be disheartedned if you haven’t begun… there’s still a while to go and a great comic doesn’t need to worked on forever.

Good luck!

Announcing Comic Konga!

Comic Konga LogoSo the other day, in the comments section of The Future of Human Transportation, Spyder challenged me (and others) to a ‘comic-off’ — a comics festival of sorts. We’d each do five comics over five days. I accepted of course, but work — o wonderfully banal, low paying work! — reared its head and I couldn’t jump right into it. I figure this is a blessing in disguise for us as well as you, dear reader(s).

Being the delusional brandsmith that I am, I figured an august venture such as this should have its own silly name and stupid logo, so I rechristened it Comic Konga!… um, that’s the second name I though of (Comic Orgy is something I’m reserving for another time, hehe). Read on for more astounding details!

The Basics

Comic Konga! is a little event where you and me and everyone we know posts five short comics over the course of five days. Think of it like a film festival or a jam session, only with people showing off their comics on their blogs or other online spaces. We’ll start on Monday, the 29th of October and so it will end on Friday, 02 November 2007.

There aren’t many rules — this isn’t one of those ultrahardcore endurance races where you have to finish every comic in twenty-seven seconds with one hand tied behind you — but I think a few guidelines should be stated here to keep things clear and running smoothly:

– There’s no easy definition for comic strips (just like pornography, we know it when we see it), but single-panel, multi-panel and even multi-page entries are fine (and good luck to you strong sir/madam/robot if you attempt the last type.

– Comics can be presented in the medium of the artist’s choice. This means everything from hand-drawn doodles to 3D models, photographs, origami, sculpture, collage etc. etc. can be used to create your comic.

You may collaborate with others in the creation of your comics. Just make sure you do covers before somebody’s wife breaks you two up, ‘hear?

Please don’t use anyone else’s copyrighted material unless you have permission or they’re free to use. This means photos and artwork and characters and anything else. It’s stupid and you can get into trouble. It’s only a comic, man.

The comics you present may be worked on or even be completed before the 29th. I only ask that you post them — one per day — between next Monday and Friday. So you have a little under a week’s head start: get cracking!

The comics should be self-contained. This means that if you’re doing, say, five strips that lead into one another, I’d appreciate it if the story concluded in #5. It doesn’t matter if you’re using characters from your existing strip or whatever, I just want some closure. Ooh, closure…

– And yes, you can do five completely unrelated comics. I plan to.

– We don’t have any fancy-schmancy registration forms, forums or mailing lists this time, so if you wish to participate in Comic Konga! please leave a comment in this post with your details, especially the address of the blog (or DeviantART or Flickr site or what have you) where you will be posting your work. I won’t be hosting any comics on this site except my own, but if you don’t have a blog it’s very easy to set one up.

You are responsible for your own content and any kooky repurcussions. Don’t blame me if some kid sues you for telling people Santa isn’t real in your comic… oops.

Fees & Prizes

There are NO FEES and NO PRIZES, except my undying gratitude and eternal love.

*mwah*

Misc. Stuff

Let me just say that I’d love to see people who don’t or haven’t ever made comics participate in Comic Konga! It doesn’t matter if you don’t know how to draw, go to YotoPhoto, get some royalty-free pictures and put word balloons on them. Or take pictures of yourself and miscellaneous friends and loved ones (I am not responsible for your friends and loved ones hating your guts as a result, mind you). Hey, it works for comics like A Softer World.

(btw, Wikipedia has an excellent list of public domain image resources)

Even if you want to doodle stuff on post-its or MSPaint, that’s okay too.

I’d love to see people try out new stuff. If you’ve had a funky comic idea sitting in your brain for a while but haven’t got around to it, do one for Comic Konga!. If you only use Photoshop or the GIMP but really like that clean vector look lately, try to make a comic in Inkscape — it’s FREE!

Entertain me. Entertain us.

Go on, then.

(If you have any more questions — or just want someone weird to bombard you with prolix 2,000 word emails about crap when you send a simple “What’s up?” message — drop me a line at allvishal (at) gmail (dot) com. I can’t wait til next monday!)

V

allVishal.com Has Been Redesigned!

allVishal.com Redesign Banner

After months of slacking off, I finally got round to doing something I should have done way back in March: I’ve redesigned the site’s look!

When I switched over to Drupal I used the Minnelli template, a default template that comes with the program. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a very nice and functional template, but being a graphic designer and using a standard template on my own site is a bit… well, shameful.

It took me a few hours yesterday to come up with a design that’s been more or less stewing in my brain for ages. It took the better part of the last 24… well, 32 hours for me and Samir — well, mostly Samir — to convert it from a graphic in Inkscape to a working HTML and CSS template.

This is the first time I’ve worked with the guts of Drupal, and it’s been an illuminating experience. In my previous CMS, Pivot, a lot of the functions were handled in the backend’s configuration, which meant that the template was more of a ‘wallpaper’ and it would take me about a day after it was ready to get all the right settings done in Pivot admin to make it look like what I wanted. Drupal is far less, um, guided and that is really it’s strength. You can pretty-much do anything with this CMS if you know enough PHP programming (I do not). You can probably run an entire small country using Drupal.

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Unlike most people, as a old school techie I warm to complex and highly tinker-friendly things like this. In order to get the words ‘read more’ and ‘2 comments’ to work right and reposition them in the right place, we’ve had to put in a dozen or so lines of PHP code, most of which sounded like Greek at first, but have now started to make some kind of sense.

The final result is a design that is 99.99% exactly like the Inkscape mockup I made yesterday — usually in the conversion things don’t always look quite the same — and it’s certainly the tightest, most finished layout I’ve done so far.

I like it — I like it a lot, actually — and it’s a lot more functional than the older one. Post categories, for instance, have been moved up to under the title of each post, and no longer jostle for space with the ‘read more’ and ‘comments links like they used to (Amit, you should find it easier to read. When a post was under several categories that area would get really messed up).

Please note that since I’m not an idiot I don’t use Internet Explorer, and this design may not show up correctly in IE. It has been tested in Firefox and is rendered correctly in Mozilla browsers. I know that in IE6 the Journal graphic on top doesn’t show up well; it may be better in a newer version, but I figure that jumping through hoops (and trust me when I say it’s like pulling teeth) to get something to work there is only encouraging Microsoft to continue to make crappy non-compliant browsers.

So there.

There are now two sidebars while still retaining the same width on the main content, so now you don’t have to scroll halfway down the page to see the recent comments (but you all subscribe to the Comments RSS feed anyway, don’t you? Hmm?). I feel it’s a better use of the space, and it allows me to have more important things like that picture of me giving you a big, loving smooch on every page.

*mwah*

Believe it or not, this is only the third custom template I’ve ever done for one of my own sites. I’ve actually used more templates by others than my own! Some of you may recognise these:

iLevel layout by Vishal K Bharadwaj, circa 2004This design was on the old iLevel page, my first non-blogger blog. It came in around 6 months into my using that site which ran Greymatter. I did this design on vacation in India on a 166Mhz Pentium 1 laptop with a wonky power cord, uploaded over a 56K connection. It was my first experience with CSS and was great! I still love this layout and may end up reworking it as a standalone free template for other people to download and use someday. You can even read all the old content from that time in the ilevel.prohosting section of the journal (there are some nice photos there. If you’ll recall, iLevel was almost exclusively a photoblog).

allVishal.com layout by Vishal K Bharadwaj, circa 2006This was the template I used on my last free host, and indeed it was the template that the site was running until March 2007. I was using Pivot as the CMS for a year or so — and used a slightly personalised version of the popular Kubrick template — before designing this one (hmm, spotting a trend here). While I like it I’m not really in love with it anymore; it doesn’t quite reflect the site. Again, it might return someday as its own thing.

If you’re wondering why I didn’t just use some of those old looks (I don’t think they’ve gotten old or outdated) it’s because the site as it is now would not be best suited by those templates. The look of a webpage is a very important thing, and it should complement the content and the personality of the author in order for the site to grow. allVishal.com is not iLevel, nor is it the site that it was a year ago. Sure, the journal (that used to be the blog) has all the old content for archival purposes, and it will continue to have photos and sketches and strange musings, but a website is more than just a blog for me, and I want to explore all of those possibilities. This new layout will be a better canvas on which to do that.

I’m actually one of those old crones who remembers a time before blogs, when we just had websites, and believe it or not those were wonderful things in their own right. I love the blog medium, but to solely focus on it and forget everything else the internet and the HTML page is capable of is like abandoning books because magazines and newspapers have been invented (I stole this analogy from my brother, amongst several other things).

Anyway, I hope you like this new layout (tell me if there are any bugs!) and now that I’ve decided on a visual look I can get to work on the rest of the site’s content!

V

Vishal vs Apartment

Vishal K. Bharadwaj, circa 1986, in the balcony of his family's apartment in Ghusais, Dubai. Photo by either Keshav or Sneha Bharadwaj.
My mother let me draw on walls. It was 1986, I was three, and we were living in a one bedroom apartment in Ghusais, back when there was nothing there except for a block of already decrepit government flats, Al Mulla Plaza (closed because of a border dispute), and a procession of electrical towers between there and Sharjah.

She got a lot of flack for it, of course. Neighbours would come round and wonder why on earth I was still alive after such a heinous crime, and then look worryingly at their own children as the young ones gaped at the sheer audacity of the red and green scrawls, their eyes luminous with the shock of seeing freedom, tolerance and understanding — and of course, whimsy — for perhaps the first time in their fragile lives. Several adults vowed never to bring their children into contact with my parents, not the first and certainly not the last time that was said to them.

The rationale my mother offered — since the simple truth of “Why not?” was far too much for others to bear — was that since it was a rental, once we moved out the landlord would paint it for the next tenant anyway as per the local norm; if the landlord objected, she was gladly willing to pay for the painting herself. They never objected, but I would have liked to see the look on whoever came to that apartment after we had gone. The building itself was torn down sometime in the 90s to make way for a compound of houses.

It was the only place I ever drew on the walls, and even I am not sure why exactly. The rationale to my three-year-old self probably had something to do with not wanting to waste paper, and the fact that if I drew straight on the walls it would forego entirely the costly and time-consuming framing and hanging processes.

Mostly I just wanted to draw, and my parents wanted great art on the walls, for which I gladly obliged.

Vishal K. Bharadwaj, circa 1986, at the door of his family's apartment im Ghusais, Dubai. Photo by either Keshav or Sneha Bharadwaj.

So Much for Pathos

So Much For Pathos -- a cropped banner version of the illustration
The other day I finally bothered to buy an optical mouse again. The old one had gone wonky and had been replaced, for a few months, with a ball one. While installing it I suddenly realised that the little graphics tablet attached to my work computer — hidden beneath a pile of well-intentioned clutter — was indeed working. Samir had fixed whatever byzantine driver issues were afflicting it, and in typical Samir fashion had now forgotten quite how he did it and when it had happened (btw, have you checked out his spiffy new blog and site?). With another hour to go before The Simpsons, I decided to give it and the new mouse a whirl.

Firing up the GIMP I loaded up a random picture from my vast collection of junk and played around with various unfamiliar filters and script-fu widgets. One I did have some familiarity with but hadn’t used in years is called iWarp, and is sort of like the liquify tool in Photoshop, or like that old turn-of-the-century tech show favourite, Kai’s Power Goo. It allows you to grow, shrink, warp and shift around various parts of the image, and it’s therefore very useful in creating anime-style characters. That’s what I did to the celebrity picture that formed the base of this. The result looks almost nothing like the original.

From there I took it into Inkscape and used the bitmap tracer to turn it into vector art, then fiddled around with the colours, added in details and shapes to make it more graphic and less like a traced picture. Finally, a background and a random caption (from Monty Python’s Flying Circus, of course). The oversized text in the background is done with a stylus using Inkscape’s calligraphy tool. The word balloon is a standard union boolean of an ellipse and a triangle.

Overall, only twenty minutes of work, which by my standards is a blink of an eye (you all know how many months I can spend abandoning… um, finishing work).

I should do these quickies more often. Hope you like it (and I hope you actually clicked on the image to see the whole, wallpaper-sized thing 😛

V

Mall of the Emirates Atrium

The Mall of the Emirates is supposedly the third largest mall in the world. The parking building is certainly the biggest I’ve ever seen, and the shops are huge, but I still wouldn’t mind a larger one to roam around (In a couple of years we’re supposed to get at least a couple of contenders for biggest mall in the whole wide world). My favourite part is the huge atrium in the centre. This picture is just a small part of it, and was taken in the early evening one Friday wth the new Kodak c875, before we took in a screening of Music & Lyrics.

“Interview Me!” Meme

The concept is simple. You read one of these posts. You put in a comment at the end that says, “Interview me!” and the author of the post sends you five questions — any five questions — to answer on your own blog or site. Dan answered some, and a bunch of us asked him to interview us (Spyder, Caren and Big Tony have answered already). Click on read more for my answers, which are, as usual, long and hence have to be broken into multiple pages:

1) Other than yourself, do you have an intended audience in mind when you write?

Saying “Everyone!” here would be a bit of a cop out, despite the fact that any human would (I hope) like to exert some kind of positive influence on all other humans (especially hot chicks).

I think I like to write for geeks. I’m especially interested in entertaining polymaths like myself (All polymaths are geeks, but the reverse is not true). I like to write stories that have the particular kind of chaos-embracing, seven-hundred-genres-in-a-single-bound style that I find completely satisfying. I don’t think there’s enough of it, and I’m sure there are others like me who think the same.

It’s a tricky thing to write well, because despite the fact that it very often has something for everybody, the lack of a traditional focus and a religious adherence to the tropes of a genre puts off a lot of people (this is especially annoying in Speculative Fiction genres because, hell, it’s supposed to mess with your preconcieved notions, not stroke it until a dull orgasm is reached).

The paradox of omnifiction — well, omnipunk — is that it’s the smallest genre in the world.

The only genre that has been wrestled by its very nature into being omnifiction friendly is conman and caper stories. All of them involve characters performing tasks of various skills from physical to mental and social.

I love con and caper movies.

2) If a Savant story had a soundtrack, what would it sound like?

Hmm, I think I came up with a songlist around the time I was writing Tale of a Thousand Savants (I think I still have it, …somewhere). It was basically a lot of Japanese Anime and video game soundtracks mixed in with modern Indian pop and other influences. So basically lots of Yasunori Mitsuda, Yoko Kanno and A.R. Rahman.

If I had to describe it now, I would say that like Savant and like the multiverse he plays around in, any soundtrack would have to be complex and varied. It would probably not be angsty (not even when he’s angsty), but it would be soulful. The kind of music that fills you both with joy and wonder. It would embrace genres but experiment, take bits from here and there and put them together in strange, unexpected and wonderful ways. No genre or type of music would be off limits, and no type of music would be treated like a sacred cow.

The three composers I mentioned earlier do exactly that. I find that composers who come from cultures other than the one in which a genre is born and settled, do wonders with it. For example, I think the work of The Teriyaki Boys and The Streets is much more interesting than any American hip-hop I’ve heard. Mitsuda does Celtic stuff with aplomb. A.R.Rahman does wonders with the entire gamut of Indian music (and beyond) because he’s a strange South Indian man with no Pavlovian training in the ‘right way’ to do a bhangra song (also, he’s A.R. Freaking Rahman, and sometimes genius can’t be explained).

3) What inspiration do you most wish Hollywood would take from the Indian film industry?

I wish they’d do things on a smaller budget. Seriously. Have you seen those Dead Man’s Chest DVD extras? Not only do they build a huge marina (a ‘tank’) to shoot boat scenes in, but on another untouched island they built a road across it and shuttle their small city of crew to the other end because the location scouts thought the palm trees looked cool there. Do you really need three hundred people on set to make a movie about a bunch of mangy pirates?

The philosophy in Hollywood seems to be, “Let’s just throw money at it!” rather than actually thinking a shoot through and doing it with the minimal impact. I’m not saying people should be walking two hours to their set, but really, when movies have “million dollar shooting days” something is seriously whacko.

And after all that, they still deliver a movie with no soul whatsoever, which, given all the mucking about with the Caribbean they did, is both a tragedy and exactly what they deserve.

Indian films are nowhere are sophisticated, we have sucky special effects and spotty technical work, but minute for minute I find myself being entertained more by the super-expensive 25 million dollar Indian film than the average budget 125 million dollar American one.

The unfortunate truth is that more Indian movies are starting to follow the Hollywood philosophy of money conquers all, but there are still a good bunch of people around who make nice movies. Also, all the good American movies are the ones made for relatively low budgets, so there is hope there too. Anything Wes Anderson does is bound to be less expensive than the average blockbuster, and is in no way lacking in the imagination and guts departments.

(And yes, I do know that the next Wes Anderson movie is set and shot in India, and I. Can’t. Wait.)

4) You have something of a knack for spotting plot holes and other problems in story structure. What advice would you give writers to help them avoid losing readers like you?

(Until this question was posed I never really thought of myself as being plot and structure sensitive, but after thinking about it — and noting the number of times I’ve discussed it in my old blog entries vis a vis both my own and others’ work — I guess it’s true: I’m a Plot Nazi!)

I’ve reached a point where I can watch a movie as a consumer of cinema parallel to appraising it on a technical level. So while I’m going, “Ooh!” at the latest special effects wizards (and/or Jessica Biel’s behind) I’m also thinking about whether or not the effect is working on a design level, a technical level and so on. I’m not one of those anal retentive people who submit things like, “His finger moves one inch between shots!” to movie mistake sites, but I tend to notice when there’s a sudden drop in pace (Casino Royale), characters behave inconsistently (Dead Man’s Chest), or that the director is masturbating behind the camera (Skull Island and everything after, Peter Jackson’s King Kong).

Weak plot points can be overcome with great characters, so keep your characters doing solid work and people may not notice the rough spots (which there inevitably tend to be). Last year’s Casino Royale did the stupid mistake of not only dropping the pace for no reason whatsoever (preceeding it was a poker game, and it despite being the most boring ‘sport’ in the world next to motor racing, was still written well), but after this drop the characters start spouting the most inane dialogue. Suddenly they’re going all Mills & Boons with cheesy lines about stripping off armour and all that. This is a James Bond movie — you can and should be romantic at times, but at least do it in character!

The Matador is a great example of good characters breezing past a few plot holes and structural inconsistencies with aplomb. So is, on a more magnified level, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. Shaun of the Dead is pretty-much perfect and you can study that film to see why it works.

I think in all this seperation of plot, structure and character, I’ve failed to mention that absolutely everything in your story should be treated as these three things. Your protagonist is as much a character as he is the plot and the structure; the latter two are defined and shaped — and will appeal to you audience — based on how much they gel with and seem to be extrapolated from that character. Your world is also more than just a stage to put your stuff in. Describing it, in an indirect and abstract way, also shapes your structure, plot and character. Transmetropolitan and Kieron Gillen’s Phonogram spring to mind.

Most of these aren’t things you can plan ahead, but if you are a writer and have written enough shit you start to have strange hunches and gut feelings that won’t make sense, such as, “My character shouldn’t be eating pie here, he doesn’t like pie.” Stuff like that is your inner supercomputer crunching things far beyond your conscious thought, and you’re well on your way to being better writer.

Or, maybe you’re just a sick bastard who doesn’t like pie.

As far as technical advice is concerned, keep things consistent, first and foremost. If people speak a certain way, have them speak that way unless you wish to use a different style to generate comedy or surprise. Understand that the audience’s imagination doesn’t enjoy being thrown around, and that language is key to that: if your character is in the upper canopy of a tree don’t use language that describes the tree from the bottom up for one line. It immediately puts the mental camera at the ground level and throws the reader out of the story.

Storytelling is a magic trick. You’re using words and language to form pictures and sounds and people and smells in someone else’s head. Any magic trick needs to be well done or it won’t be as effective, even if the audience doesn’t consciously percieve it. The sloppier it is, the more attention your audience is going to pay to the funny lump in your sleeve.

Don’t limit your idea of plot structure to a particular genre. What I’m trying to say here is that you don’t necessarily need to learn all of storytelling by reading more novels. Comics can teach you a whole lot about the economy of storytelling, and both comics and movies can teach you about the way imagery affects perception, about pace. There’s a reason a panel may be seen from an askew angle (it unsettles you without saying “SHOCK!” in big red letters), and a large close up that takes up much of the page can be translated into prose structure as a large, descriptive paragraph.

Storytelling is a lot like graphic design: you’re using the symbology and syntax of a medium to deliver information in a smooth, interesting and pleasing way (while also hopefully being unexpected and engaging).

Songs are a great way to learn plot structure too. I’m not just talking about single guy with guitar wailing about his love life and the state of the world type songs that use polysyllabic words (singer-songwriter stuff as it’s called) — you can get good stories in techno!

A song appeals to us on an abstract level, just like a good story does. Try to take a song and write it as a story, and usually, if you can manage it, there you will find a well-structured plot.

The basic advice here is write, write, write. Everything you write is gold, and everything you write is shit. Look for plot, structure and character in your emails. Observe and try to deduce why some real-world conversations are memorable and entertaining without being in any way literary or theatrical. Sooner or later you’ll be able to tell what in a given story is shit and what is gold, and then rearrange the shit to enhance the look of the gold.

Then you’ll write another story and be back to square one.

Enjoy!

5) Despite already being a skilled polymath (Gosh, thanks!), what talent do you most wish you could add to your repertoire?

This is the kind of question a polymath will never give a single answer to, but off the top of my head I’ll say I’d love to be able to tailor my own clothes. (Being able to sing, super yogic powers or growing my own food were my first answers, but Spyder already beat me to the last one!)

define this: iamgadi


Go on, give us all your brainpoop.

(Also, I am jealous of Blogger Captcha’s mad design skills. I mean, just look at it!)

he’s such a poster

I suppose that as a graphic designer and movie buff, it must come as no surprise that I pay particular attention to film posters. Next to trailers, posters represent the overall feel of a film best. A million interviews and sneak peeks usually end up sounding the same anyway. A picture is worth a thousand words, and a thousand words paint a thousand pictures, but when you’re trying to sell a film — in essence a big, long picture — then it’s best to cut the chatter and distill it down to an image. More often than not I find myself swayed by a good poster (my views on trailers have been made clear several times), and here’s a few that caught my eye recently, for various reasons.

The Nightmare Before Christmas is a film I’d heard a lot about, yet somehow never got around to seeing, which I finally ended up doing a few months ago. It wasn’t that I was expecting something mindblowing — and it was certainly better than Corpse Bride — but it failed to make a great impression on me. This poster for the new 3D rerelease, however, impressed me because the colour palette of the image is more in tune with some of the later sequences of the film instead of the usual blue and black tones associated with the film.

It’s rare to see US film posters — even those aimed at children — which are not monotone in nature. Somewhere in the shift from the illustrated and painted posters of the 60s and 70s to the photographic ones of the 80s and 90s (and today’s photoshopped-to-death monstrosities) the posters have started to look more like the films themselves. I suppose this is good, in a way. No sense wasting a perfectly composed Robert McGinnis poster on a film that is composed mainly in gunmetal grey.

Walking into a theatre used to be fun just to look around at the pictures. Nowadays, not only do I have to contend with the blandness of multiplex design, but the somewhat intended purpose of that bland design — to act as a blank canvas for the promotional materials such as posters and standees to catch your attention — is lost due to the fact that the poster row is a landscape of sepias, cobalt blues, and pastels on white for chick flicks. There are definitely good uses of monotone (the Miami Vice posters spring to mind) but most of them are quite unremarkable.

On the other side of the pond things don’t seem to be faring much better. Here’s a bunch of posters for Eragon which, as I recall, is some kind of fantasy book written by a teenager. The book itself sounds interesting (although it does seem to suffer from High Fantasy Names syndrome, in which every character has some kind of unpronouncable name with either too many syllables or random use of the apostrope), but we aren’t discussing the book, its upcoming movie adaptation, or its pretty looking videogame, we’re talking posters (specifically, this one).

Let’s see… General green/brown cast: check. Principal players all lined up and looking menacingly at the viewer: check. Weapons drawn: check. Castles disappearing behind ominous atmospherics in the background: check. Bad photoshop on absolutely everyone: check. Oh, and then there’s the dragon, who seems to be bored and passing through like some kind of fantasy version of a jumbo jet at the corner of your holiday snaps.

Also, the perspective changes between cast, castles and dragon are quite ridiculous.

Am I going to see the movie? Yeah, sure. It has dragons (even bored ones are nice), John Malkovich, Robert Carlyle, Djimon Hounsou, Jeremy Irons (oh wait, he was in Dungeons & Dragons too, eeeep) and Sienna Guillory (her presence alone is enough to sway me).

Also some emo dude* and a guy named ‘Speelers’ — yeah, probably wait and see if there’s anything better that week.

*Oh, that poor boy. His name is Garrett Hedlund. If you’re Indian and multilingual, that name is hilarious. hehe.

The Eragon posters remind me of the Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire posters, although some of those were quite well done  — they contain all the same elements, but the composition is certainly more interesting.

Speaking of Harry Potter, Alfonso Cuarón who directed the third (and best) Potter film has a movie coming out called Children of Men. Here’s a few posters, and these are the perfect example of a muddled, inconsistent brand image. The one sheet at the top of the page is, well, boring. It looks like it could be the poster of a documentary on the birthing process, and the copy is so generic it hurts. Must be aimed at the American market, then.

Scroll down on that same page for the teaser posters, which are much better. We’ll forgive the designers their trendy Banksy homage, because the copy is interesting and the stark design seems more in tune with what the film is about.

Living in a place that is influenced by many different kinds of media cultures, I suppose I’m in a privileged position that I get to walk in to, say, Virgin Megastore and see imported design that is aimed at US, European or Asian markets, usually for the same product (eg. three different versions of the same book) and can compare. The American one, I’m sad to say, is usually the most boring. The Asian one, regardless of its origin, is usually like the American one only with looser composition, and the European one is minimalist and crazy and takes you by surprise.

Globalisation, of course, has its flipside. I’ve talked about Farhan Akthar’s remake of Don before, and here’s the teaser poster, which I have mixed feelings about. On the one hand, it perfectly illustrates that this ain’t your father’s Don, but on the other hand it is a lot more monotone than Hindi film posters usually are. I’ve noticed this in many of the top films this year. The fact that now nearly half or more of a film’s potential box office comes from outside India (albeit from NRIs — Non Resident Indians) as well as commerial Indian cinema’s simmering desire to make it to #1 at the US box office, is now clearly dictating the style. The films themselves are now slicker, but in aping the west they may unfortunately be adpting the bad as well as the good. Having seen the teasers for Don, one does notice a green tone to the film, but it isn’t as heavy as in the poster.

Of course, there are somethings that will always be uniquely — and terribly — Indian.

the ten thumbs of interwubbing

I was at IKEA yesterday looking for a knife sharpener and some clothes hangers (nearly typed ‘hangars’ there, which I’m sure IKEA will be stocking flat-pack versions of someday), and, as usual, spent two hours walking through the store, sitting on every couch, imagining myself inhabiting every show apartment (I quite liked this little two-bedroom number that was 55 sq. metres — unfortunately I can’t afford an apartment of that or any size for the forseeable future). I ended up with not only the (red) hangars and the sharpener, but a cute little milk foamer (it was less than a dollar, how could I resist?) — and I spent far too much time sniffing the chocolate-scented candles. I love going to IKEA even if I have nothing to buy. It’s a great, relaxed way to kill an hour and take in a steady, unrelenting stream of good, and often great design.

IKEA, however, has nothing like this.

Somewhat along the same lines is this concept, although its applications are much more noteworthy than a (non-functional) motorcycle-styled armchair could ever be (a functional motorcycle chair, on the other hand…). However, the concept still doesn’t make a place like Dubai any more wheelchair friendly, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.

Completing a trifecta of strange and new things with two wheels on them, this scooter ‘mod’ is apparently from the same person who made the rocket powered VW Beetle from a while back. I must say, this one seems a tad more exciting. Put some wings on it and I’m sold.

Why do I get the feeling I’ll be seeing one of these pelting down Sheikh Zayed Road sometime soon? (Also, does it need rustproofing?)

There’s a rumour going around that Richard Curtis (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, and my favourite, Love, Actually) may be writing Bond 22, i.e. the one after Casino Royale. It’s a bit of a straneg choice, but who knows, it might work. Curtis’s writing talents — albeit in the romantic comedy genre — are phenomenal. His dialogue and characters are always memorable, so who’s to say he won’t be able to inject something brand new into the franchise that others who have been hired with a back catalog of similar action/thriller work have not been able to. One thing’s for sure, though, with Curtis writing, the lead Bond girl has to be American, and Bond has to have five supporting friends. Also, at some point during the climax the mute supervillain will turn to Bond and sign, “Your fly is open.”

Here’s the superbly designed poster for The Prestige. Is that really Scarlett Johansson? Can’t really tell. The very modern poster is an interesting design direction to take for a film set in the Victorian Era (by contrast, the Batman Begins posters were more classical looking.

Dominic Purcell is maybe/probably/hmmm/dunno going to play Bruce Banner in the Incredible Hulk project. Cool. I haven’t seen Prison Break, but I loved Purcell’s previous TV series, the criminally overlooked (and then cancelled!) John Doe. There’s no doubt in my mind that even though he may not physically look like the meek geek steerotype of Banner, he can sure bring that kind of crazed nerd mentality to the role, and also do a good job as a template for the Hulk. Here’s hoping this is true, and they don’t end up giving it to Colin Farrell or something*.

(* Were such a choice to come up, I would gladly go with ‘Something’.)

I guess that, being the cinephile and video game junkie I am, eventually I’d have to replace the 12-year-old 21 inch TV with a widescreen HDTV (waiting for CRTs, no plasma or LCD for me) and set up a proper home cinema. When that occurs, I’d much rather plonk down for one of these Open Source-powered media PCs than any of those Windows-based machines out there. Sure, I may not be able to play some PC games, but that’s what the PlayStation 3 will be for.

Do you want to teach your kids to dance? Can’t get a decent instructor for less than the cost of a small island? Very soon, your robot vaccuum cleaner may be able to do the job.

Further to last time’s mousepads with, um, ample cushioning, here’s a pad [NSFW] that may not keep your wrist comfy, but it is for a good cause. One case of a flat chest actually being more attention-grabbing than a more rounded one.

And finally, the gift for that Resident Evil fan in your life (sorry, no trendy, up-to-the-minute Dead Rising reference here).

the nine empires of interwubbing

Some more info on the now confirmed Wes Anderson/Owen Wilson India project. It has the kickass name of Darjeeling Limited, and will be co-written by Anderson, Jason Schwartzman and Roman Coppola.

Dear God, multiple geekgasms.

Simon Pegg is going to star in the film version of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, which, following The Devil Wears Prada, seems to be setting up a whole new genre: the Thinly Disguised Exposé by a High-Level Secretary of Life in a Major Company Under Crazy Boss chick-lit bookflick (T.D.E.H.L.S.L.M.C.U.C.B… Toodeholslemcucob? Sounds like some sort of gyroscopic Swedish sexual dysfuntion correction device). Don’t get me wrong, I’d see any movie with Pegg in it (and regarding DWP, I may have already mentioned that Anne Hathaway = drool, therefore I’m sold), but can The Dalai Lama Wears Ecko and Condi’s first bestselling ‘fiction’ book be far behind (and will it also be called How to Lose Friends and Alienate People)??

I live in a hot country. I know this fact, it doesn’t escape me, even locked up in my constantly air-conditioned home one needs only walk into the bathroom when the exhaust is off to be met by a cloud of warm, humid air. Still, for some inexplicable reason, I’d really like one of these radiators.

Here’s an old trick made new. The upshot of this is that it’s a service, which means that doing a bulk order for say, a promotional direct-mail campaign might be economical. Hmmmm (gears turn…)

This watch looks a bit impractical, and the paint job on the fascia is ugly, but hot damn do I want one. Granted, ideally it would play Pong and Space Invaders and be able to hook up with a wireless bluetooth headphone, but if you don’t mind running the wire up your sleeve it shouldn’t be a problem. I have to admit, though, that what I like most about the entire watch is the design of the time readout because it reminds me of some ’80s animated show like Pole Position. I’m so lame.

Finally, someone mates a hand-crank radio set to a cellphone charger and makes one of these things properly useful. The problem with hand-crank radios, to me, has always been their lack of a killer app for urban customers. Fine, it may be subsidised and designed to be used by poor people in the African bush and whatnot, but any device such as this should have a sustainable commercial presence to offset its more charitable arms. Also, the addition of a cellphone charger will not only help us more wired folk, it will be quite useful for some of those remote areas the older ones were intended for. Wouldn’t you like to be able to charge a satellite handset if you were stuck in the middle of nowhwere?

I remember these when they had anime characters on them, but it seems that like in videogames, every year brings about new innovations in realism.

And finally, something to go with those Levi iPod jeans you bought.