jaisiri

MERLIN ED Ebonite Fountain Pens - from Warangal, Andhra Pradesh, India

2011-10-31T14:43:00.007+05:30

In my quest to locate Indian handmade fountain pens, I often take the help of my colleagues in the college where I teach…I had mentioned earlier in one of my posts that Andhra Pradesh, the state where Hyderabad is located, was at one point of time a hub of fountain pen manufacturing activity…and many small towns had FP-making units…almost like a cottage industry… names of places like Rajahmundry, Tenali, Vijayawada, Guntur Machilipatnam, Kadapa keep cropping up when one talks of fountain pens from Andhra Pradesh…Rajahmundry, Tenali, Vijayawada are names still associated with pens...but pen units in Machilipatnam and Kadapa seem to have closed down…

And when my colleague Pavan told me the name of a pen shop in a town called Warangal (a town which is two hours by rail from Hyderabad)…I added the name of one more town to this list…and got in touch with the owners and asked them about ebonite fountain pens and they said they had two models…a large one and a small one…I requested them to send me two large pens (in fact, they had only two)…

And when I received the package and opened it, I was surprised to see the size of these pens…one pen was slightly longer than the other…the name MERLIN appears clearly on the clips of both pens…I called them simply Merlin-1 (the bigger one) and Merlin-2!!

Merlin-1 is slightly less than 7 inches capped; 5 ¾ inches uncapped; and 8 ¼ inches posted; and Merlin-2 is 6 ¾ inches capped; 5 ¾ inches uncapped; and 8 inches posted. Both are ED filler pens and really huge. I filled the barrel with water to check the reservoir capacity, and though I didn’t measure the amount of water it held, I realized one could go on for quite some time with a single filling. The nibs are regular iridium point nibs; though I feel a pen of this size needs a nib that is equally solid in terms of name and looks. Both pens look very strong and sturdy and the photos of the thickness of the barrel walls bear this out. When I saw the clips first, I felt there wasn’t enough gap near the top, but when I clipped the pen to my shirt pocket, it went up till the top and sat snug. Here are some pictures…

Both Merlins capped...

Both Merlins posted...

Clips with MERLIN on them...

I like this swirling design on the cap jewel...

Oh yeah...BTW, that is the MB 149 in the middle...

Thanks...

SOME OLD INDIAN FOUNTAIN PEN BRANDS - 3 - PRESIDENT

2011-10-20T15:04:00.004+05:30

The third in this series of Old Indian Fountain Pen Brands is a fountain pen brand called PRESIDENT…I am presenting two FPs here…one has a black plastic body and a gold coloured metal cap…and the other looks like it has a celluloid body, but from my experience with the Parko FPs, I am not too sure…but the silver and black pattern looks very good…

The pen with the black barrel has a kind of nib which is partially open…the front is open and the sides are covered… a semi-hooded nib or a semi open nib? The other pen has an open nib…both nibs have the brand name imprinted on them…the imprint can also be seen on the barrels of both pens…clearly visible on the black pen and the colour on the imprint seemed to have disappeared on the celluloid-like FP…and it says ‘unbreakable’ below the brand name on the celluloid-like FP…

I have come across the name PRESIDENT w. r. t. fountain pens earlier…but I not sure whether these pens and those are made by the same company…I will have to do a little bit of re/search in the pens shops to find out if PRESIDENT FPs are still being made and sold…

Here are some pictures of the PRESIDENTs…

There are some more...

Still on the crime fiction trail - 2nd haul @ Best Books Sale - Part 2

2011-10-17T20:05:00.009+05:30

So, I walked around looking at the books on the shelves and books arranged on the floor hoping to see a book or books that would put a kind of closure to my second visit to the books sale…and among the books arranged on the floor I happened to see the spine of a biggish book with ‘Ian Rankin’ on it…I was not too sure initially because Rankin’s books are usually of the paperback size and then picked it up tentatively…the book surprised me…it was the most unexpected book that I hoped to find…and I didn’t know it existed…this was Ian Rankin – The Complete Short Stories, comprising two of his short story collections A Good Hanging and Beggars Banquet plus Atonement – A brand new Rebus story … was this book going to signal the end of my quest this time? Should I quit and leave while the going was good? This book provided that slight rush and I wanted to linger a bit more…

That week, I had read Jon Stock’s column in The Week where had written about John Le Carre, the espionage novelist (?) and mentioned the film version of a novel written by Le Carre and another novel by Le Carre praised by Graham Greene as the greatest spy novel ever written…I couldn’t remember their names at the Sale, but still thought I’d take a look and see if the titles gave off clues…I went over to the shelves near the door where Le Carre books were stacked and went through the titles…no clues…then I started reading the blurbs…I wanted to buy at least one Le Carre novel…I zeroed in on Smiley’s People and then temptation overtook me and I selected Our Game too…but I knew these were not the novels that Jon Stock had written about…and then from the nearby shelf I thought I saw Rankins beckoning me…I once again succumbed and went over but didn’t know which one to pick up, because I was not sure which ones I had purchased recently…I chided myself for not preparing well before coming to the sale and took a chance and picked up Strip Jack hoping that this was not already in my collection…I knew my wallet would become considerably lighter and there is a higher authority who would wish to know where these books came from…but at that moment I was after my fix and didn’t think too much…I paid for these books and came home with the bundle…

The first thing I did was to check my Rankin collection…Strip Jack was not in that collection…relief…I then searched for The Week and read Jon Stock’s column again…alas…the Le Carre novels he mentions are Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold … well, something to look forward to in the next Sale…

In the meanwhile, I finished reading three Parker-Spenser novels…Early Autumn, Valediction, and A Catskill Eagle…Spenser is so addictive…

Parkermania - still on the the crime fiction trail - 2nd haul @ Best Books Sale - Part 1

2011-10-10T14:09:00.006+05:30

When I went to the Best Books sale the first time this time, I got pretty much what I was looking for, except books by Robert B. Parker. I asked them about it and they said they'd be getting a new lot of books and that they'd inform me about the Parker books and took my phone number. I didn't think much about all this and left. But I was pleasantly surprised when I got a call from the Best Books people informing me that they have some Parkers and asked me come and get them. I said I'd come and see the books, but couldn't go there soon because of the strike here in Hyderabad. I got a call again and also a message informing me that they had extended the last date of the exhibition. So, I took some time off two days ago and went there...

I was shown at least 25 books by Robert B. Parker...ooofff...I was not expecting this...I didnt know what to do...how many to select...I tentatively started looking at the books...I was a bit careful this time...I wanted to look for only Spenser novels... Parker has other books too, which I discovered when I ordered 5 books online without doing a bit of homework...while sifting the books I realised that I had quite a pile of Spenser novels in front of me...I then took away the books that I already have and was left with nine Spenser novels...I didn't want to leave behind any of these and with a glad heart I took all of them...Chance, Valediction, Playmates, Small Vices, A Catskill Eagle, Back Story, Hush Money, Early Autumn, and Pale Kings and Princes...

This was an unexpected bonanza for me...but somehow, despite the depletion of my wallet weight to a great extent, I still went around to see if could lay my eyes on something that was not really on my list...

SOME OLD INDIAN FOUNTAIN PEN BRANDS - 2 - SEVIKA

2011-10-04T14:47:00.003+05:30

This is the second in the series on Old Indian Fountain Pen Brands. The featured brand here is SEVIKA; and we have three models of this brand and these three models are distinctly different… two of them have open nibs and one has a semi-hooded nib (can we call it that?)…the name ‘SEVIKA REGD’ (Regd. Meaning ‘registered’, implying that the brand name has been registered at the government office concerned with brand names, and therefore the pen is ‘authentic’) is imprinted on the barrels…the nibs too have the brand name imprinted on them (further strengthening the authenticity??)…and one of the feeders also has the brand name engraved on it…one cap has a metal covering and this cap also has ‘sevika regd.’ imprinted on it…the other two caps have bands, one broad and the other narrow…the clips are again different, as are the cap jewels and barrel ends…

I have no clue regarding the date or place of manufacture or name of the manufacturer…the pens are NOS and are in fairly good condition…there is tarnish on one of the clips and on the cap jewels and barrel ends…the nibs look good and when inked they would write well, I suppose...here are the pictures...

Thanks for looking...there's more to come...

SOME OLD INDIAN FOUNTAIN PEN BRANDS - 1 - PARKO

2011-09-30T01:24:00.005+05:30

On one of my wanderings in my city Hyderabad a few months back I saw a small stationery shop, actually very small, more like a hole in the wall, but was stuffed with books, ledgers, ball pens, and other kinds of stationery items. I hoped to find some fountain pens and I was not disappointed. The owner showed me a big box full of fountain pens, but it was more fountain pen parts than fountain pens though, and the few pens that were whole were very old ones. There were names of old Indian brands that I didn’t know existed (not that I know all the brands!!) and the metal on some of these were discoloured, sometimes rusted, but the insides, especially the nibs looked good and the feeders too. And some of the nibs were unique; some were open nibs, some were semi- hooded. I selected the good ones and bought them, at least for posterity’s sake and for documenting & cataloguing them. I had bought similar old brands from various other places too. I don’t want to do a full blown post with all these pens; instead, I want to keep posting pics of one brand at a time, once a week or so. For some brands I have more than one kind of pen, and for some there is only pen. For starters, here is a brand called PARKO…

I don’t think there is any doubt about the inspiration for the brand name…at least the body of one of the three PARKO pens that I got looks like the legendary Parker Vacumatic…there is a broad cap band on each, and if looked closely, one can see the passage of time in the tarnish…the material looks like celluloid, but I think it is not...though I felt I detected a faint camphor odour, it could also be wishful smelling… I don’t know how old these pens are, but my guess is they are more than 40 years old…the outer design could well be a thin sheet of plastic covered over a plastic body, because one can see the joints where the two ends come together…all the nibs have PARKO imprinted on them; and the barrels too have PARKO along with ‘leakproof’ printed on them…all these three are ED fillers and are NOS pens…

Here are some pictures…

The Deccan Masterpiece in White

2011-09-18T11:10:00.003+05:30

Some three months back when I had dropped in at the Secunderabad branch of Deccan Pen Stores to generally be among pens, Zubair, who is in charge of that branch, told me that a new pen was being designed and that it would be white in colour and that he has asked one to be kept aside for me. I started dreaming about this pen from that day on…what would be its shape? Would the material be ebonite? and white ebonite would indeed be a rare thing…or would they use celluloid? Flat top? Round top? Ball clip? Flat clip? What nib? All this and more…

I didn’t hear from Zubair after that for a long time and I was getting impatient…so, I called him…he said they were getting made and I’d surely get one…some more days went by…I called again…similar response…and after some more days I called again and then he said...only a couple of these pens were made and they were already reserved for somebody else earlier…and so… the white pen dreams began to fade away…slowly…he was apologetic though…almost feeling helpless…

And then…out of the blue…I get a call from Zubair informing me that he had managed to get one specimen for me…his uncle had made a couple more…the pen started taking shape in my imagination once again…I couldn’t go there the same day, but my excitement kept mounting…I went two days later and he handed me over this pen…I went ‘wow’… I hadn’t anticipated this shape and size…it was the Deccan Masterpiece in white…with the cap jewel and barrel cap in black…it didn’t look like ebonite or celluloid…I asked Zubair about the material…he said that this material came as part of a packaging from Germany some years back and was lying around…some kind of plastic…or nylon based plastic…and his uncle saw this and decided to attempt a pen out of this material…

I opened the cap and saw the nib…good…and opened the barrel and saw the aerometric filler…I was not thrilled…I am partial to ED fillers and piston fillers…I asked Zubair about this and he said the initial attempt was to make an ED filler, but there were leakage problems and so the aerometric filler was fitted…I got it inked then and there and it writes beautifully…I tried taking photos against different backgrounds and it was against the blue silk background that the pen stood out…I have also included a couple of photos against a maroon silk background…

As usual, the Deccan Pens people don’t have a name for it…since it the Masterpiece in white, I wanted to give it an appropriate name…so many names came to mind…The Deccan Masterpiece Pristina…The Deccan Fleur de Lis…the simple Deccan White…The Deccan Masterpiece BnW…the Indian ‘Dakshin Shweth’… and so on…maybe all you readers can chip in with your names too…

Here are the pictures…

On the crime fiction trail - haul @ Best Books sale

2011-09-15T13:15:00.005+05:30

This time when I decided to visit the old books' sale by Best Books @ YMCA, Secunderabad...I wanted to look out for crime fiction...and buy only crime fiction...of late, Vinod has been writing a lot about crime fiction and crime fiction writers who he had recently encountered and I have picked up the madness...I am already a fan of Elmore Leonard, whose books Vinod recommended and I have around 10 books of Leonard now...and recently Vinod wrote about Robert B. Parker and in a fit of enthusiasm and impatience, I ordered five Parkers from Indiaplaza...three of them are from the well-known Spenser series, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading them...and Vinod was at it again more recently when he wrote about James Patterson...and fortunately for me Vinod also mentioned in a recent blog that the Best Books sale would be on soon at YMCA Secunderabad and that stopped me from ordering James Patterson books from Indiaplaza...and the Best Books people also sent me a message about their sale...and off I went there two days back...I had four authors in mind...James Patterson, Robert Parker, Elmore Leonard, & Ian Rankin...

And this time at the sale, I didn't have to ask anybody where the books of these authors were stacked...most of the time it would be a random selection of all pulp fiction on one table, romance on one table, and two shelves of 'Literature' books and other genres scattered around...one had to really search through the stack of pulp fiction to find one book that one was looking for...but this time, quite surprisingly, I didn't have to search...all Pattersons where stacked in one place, similarly, were the Elmores and all the Rankins were on a shelf...so, no time wasting searching this time...only selection was left...I selected 3 Pattersons...Kiss the Girls, Roses are Red, and Four Blind Mice; 2 Elmore Leonards...The Hot Kid and Out of Sight; 3 Rankins...The Black Book, Mortal Causes, and Black & Blue...and I wanted to try reading an author who I'd never heard of earlier...and the books by Peter Robinson looked tempting...I added 2 Robinsons...Past Reason Hated and A Dedicated Man...I could not find a single Robert Parker book and enquired at the counter, and they promised to search for some from their stock and let me know...after putting together my murder and mayhem books, I strolled around to see if I can find anything interesting...I found a rather thick and nice looking book calling me out...I went closer and saw that it was Haruki Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle...I bought it for a lark and later I read about it on the net and discovered that it would make very interesting reading indeed...

The Conical Nibs in Indian Fountain Pens - Journey from America to India via China

2011-09-02T10:23:00.005+05:30

Way back in the 1980s, when I was in school in Mangalore, a coastal city in Karnataka, India, fountain pens were still seen around with students and I remember we coveted the Hero FP with the hooded nib…the Hero 330…it was a foreign pen, you see…and it had a pump filler (as we called the aerometric filler during those FP lingo-ignorant days)…much better than the locally available ED fillers (mainly Camlin and Wilson) that we were compelled to use (and now rue our ignorant decisions to cast them aside…)…the pump fillers did not leak (so we thought) and they looked sleek with a hooded nib and wrote a fine line and all that…the fathers of many students in our school worked in the Persian gulf countries like Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain, Oman, etc., and on their half-yearly visits to Mangalore some of them would bring back Chinese FPs as gifts for their children…and these guys would get a chance to flaunt them in school the next day and we would beg them to have us use it for a while…and one day one of them brought an entirely enticing and charming FP to school and we couldn’t stop drooling…it had a different kind of nib…an encircled nib…and it also had a retractable ball pen at the other end (if the ink is exhausted, you don’t break any sweat, you hold the other end, and you unscrew and let out the ball pen and continue writing…wow!!)… it was like an FP dream coming true…and for many many months this guy carried the most enviable FP in school…it was the Wing Sung 727…and the nib was so utterly innovative and charming that we marvelled at the manufacturer’s ingenuity and all that…and now in retrospect, I realised that that was my first introduction to the ‘conical nib’… FPs were only for writing at that time and we carried on with whatever we got grudgingly, longing for the fashionable use-and-throw Reynolds ball pen that some of my friends (the same sons of Persian gulf-based fathers) flaunted … ironic…

And now many years on and re-entering the quaint and wonderful world of FPs, I learnt many things…the nib on the Wing Sung FP that I saw then was actually ‘inspired’ by the legendary Triumph nib introduced by Sheaffer in the 1940s…and as many FP sites tell us, it was an innovative design and vastly improved the functionality of the nib…and my efforts at getting hold of the legendary Triumph has so far not proved successful…and the only Triumph kind of Sheaffer FP that I managed to locate in a small old shop happens to be an Australian Sheaffer…though I don’t feel entirely fulfilled with this Triumph(!), I thought this can be a useful starting point to look at how far the nib and its design has travelled…from USA to China and from there to India…

A year or so back, on a visit to Deccan Pen Stores, here in Hyderabad with Hari, I saw the Wing Sung 727 again, and the sight of the pen took me back to my school days…and, mostly for nostalgia’s sake, I bought two, one in burgundy and the other in black…I filled the burgundy one with black ink and used it for a while…the writing is smooth and all that…and when I took it to my workplace and showed it to my colleagues, they were amazed at the shape of the nib, similar to my reaction 30 years ago when I saw it first!! Some things don’t change…here is a picture…

Just as I was re-entering the world of FPs…I heard about Ratnam Pens in Rajahmundry and remembered having read about it in a magazine article…one of my colleagues told me she had actually been to their manufacturing unit while on a visit to Rajahmundry and had purchased a couple of FPs, but alas, she had misplaced them or lost them…I started hounding another colleague who was also interested in FPs and he finally managed to trace some distant cousin who lives in Rajahmundry and asked him to send two pens…he kept one for himself and gave me this ebonite pen with the conical nib…as soon as I saw the nib, I knew that it was the ‘legendary’ Wing Sung nib…I still had no idea that an ‘original’ existed…!! I remember I was slightly unhappy on being given a Ratnam FP with a Chinese nib, whereas my colleague kept the other open nib Ratnam for himself…again, in retrospect, I am pleased that I was given this pen…I hear Ratnam no longer makes this kind of pen…(I am not completely sure of this though…)…In fact, this Ratnam ebonite FP was my first conical nib FP, even before I bought the two Wing Sungs…this is how it looks...

And then on another visit to Deccan Pens, Abids, I came across a Brahmam ebonite FP with the Wing Sung conical nib…it looks like the 146, with a white dot on the cap and all that…again, this Brahmam FP also has a two-toned conical Wing Sung nib…

The Swarna ebonite with the conical nib was totally unexpected…a friend of mine had seen my post on the Swarna Sumo and wanted a similar pen and asked me if I could help…I called up the Swarna people and requested them to send me 3 Sumo pens in different colours…they sent me 3 totally different pens…anyway, my friend was happy with one of them and took it…and I had the rest for myself, and one of them was this black ebonite with the conical nib…now, this nib is not two-toned as the Ratnam and Brahmam FPs…looks similar to the ones on the Wing Sung 727s…

It was after I got this pen that a pattern started forming at the back of my mind…and I thought of putting these pens together as examples of pen-fusions…Indian ebonite bodies with Chinese nibs inspired by an iconic American nib…the nibs are all Wing Sung nibs, but, I am not sure how these Wing Sung nibs came to the Indian FP makers…does the Wing Sung company sell conical nibs in bulk? Or were these nibs cannibalised from old Wing Sung 727s? Or is somebody else making these nibs with the Wing Sung insignia?

Anyway, keeping that part aside…if you had noticed, the feeder in each pen is different from the other…lets have all the feeders (Wing Sung and Indian ebonites) together in a combo photo…

But I still didn’t have the Sheaffer Triumph to complete the picture…I was becoming desperate, I wanted to do the post, but felt it’d be incomplete with the Triumph…and then out of the blue I came across this Australian Sheaffer conical nib FP... I don’t know whether this pen is also called the Triumph…and so, this Australian Sheaffer was the last one to become part of my ‘conical nib’ gang ironically…

I don’t know whether these examples of Indian ebonite FPs with conical Wing Sung nibs are examples of ingenuity or just fusions or attempts to make an Indian variant of pens with conical nibs… I felt I should put them together in one place…

And...finally...I had posted this on Fountain Pen Network and had received a number of responses and in all this hullabaloo I forgot to mention a unique Indian handmade conical nib made by Ratnamson (Rajahmundry) which is called the Ratnamson 42P...this is a pen made to order by my friend Hari...He chose the plain body silver model (P denotes plain). The interiors of the pen are made of Black Hard Rubber, The barrel overlay and the cap are solid silver. The 14CT gold conical nib is hand hammered to give the shape and engraved with Hari's first and last name. The tip has been flame torch welded at his request, usually they use reistance welding to fix the tip...here are a couple of pics of this example of an Indian handmade conical nib...(these photos were taken by Hari and is part of his post on FPN...)

The post has become too long, but I couldn’t help it…

The Brahmam Duofold - Big Orange

2011-08-24T09:46:00.004+05:30

Dear friends...

I have resumed posting after a long long time…lots of things happened in between which kind of prevented me from posting on a regular basis as I was doing before…that means I was not off reading and writing as such, but somehow something went awry and this kind of lethargy engulfed me and sometimes even when I had strongly made up my mind to write, I would sit there staring at the screen…anyway, hopefully all that would be gone with this re-start…during this time some of my friends would urge me to write and post something and after sometime, they too gave up…but this time, I am determined, I am sitting here in front of my laptop typing this out...I am back…

This post is about a pen that I instantly desired the moment I saw it...this is the pen I’d like to call the Brahmam Duofold Big Orange. I was at Deccan Pen Stores, Abids Branch, Hyderabad, on a mission some time back; and after that, as is customary with me, I asked Mr Wasim if he had anything special to show me…and he took out his special folder and showed me this pen…I fell in love with this pen at first sight…I was shocked and surprised (honestly!!)…I asked him the price and when he told me, my face kind of fell…I wanted this pen desperately and I was in a wretched condition, financially (I still am!!); but I think I lost my senses…I was not in a position to listen to my heart, my head, my conscience…anything at all…I told him confidently that I haven’t brought the money, and that I would buy it and that he should keep it in reserve for me till I call him and tell him that I can’t buy it…Mr Wasim knows me quite well in this sense because I have enacted this drama once before, but the cost of that pen was only a fraction of the cost of this pen…so, what to do now…the only recourse was to beg, borrow, or steal…the only option that appeared sane was to borrow…and so I borrowed vehemently from different sources and managed to put together the total cost of the pen…and triumphantly went and bought the pen, without even giving a thought to how I was going to repay the loans…I had the pen with me, that was enough…

I called it the Brahmam Duofold Big Orange…it is an eyedropper, made of celluloid and looks like a Big Red (Parker Duofold Red Permanite Lucky Curve Pen...look it up!!)…I always wanted to have a Big Red, but when I realised how much it cost, I put my desire in the backburner…and this was the closest that I could get to the Big Red…this is the Big Orange…I loved the orange colour and the natural black patterns on orange…the nib as the picture would show is Iridium Tipped Broad and is a US made nib…the name ‘Brahmam’ is engraved on the clip and ‘Brahmam Pen’ on the barrel…it has three gold coloured rings on the cap; a broad one in the middle, and two thinner ones around it…Mr Wasim told me that the clip and rings were ‘gold filled’…the cap jewel and the barrel cap are in black, and I think are made of ebonite…because discussions with a couple of fountain pen makers on celluloid fountain pens revealed that celluloid pipes are usually closed with ebonite caps to make fountain pen caps and barrels…

This pen is now more than 6 months old and you can make that out by the partly faded imprint on the barrel…and in the initial days I think the cap fell on a hard surface, (I don’t know when this happened, I don’t remember) and chipped the edge…I didn’t realise this and I happened to see this suddenly and couldn’t do anything about it…couldn’t have got a replacement even if I was willing to pay for another cap…these are designer pens…only a few are made and sold out as soon as they reach the shop…I felt sad, for the pen…such a lovely pen and this chip on the cap…this made me love the pen even more…it had a flow problem initially, but the Deccan people got it rectified and it now writes like a dream…

Misunderstand Me Correctly ...

2010-08-16T10:34:00.002+05:30

Misunderstand me correctly…

Music begins where words cease.

When music ceases, silence!

When all arts aspire to

the condition of music;

What does music aspire to?

Silence.

The logic of music leads

eventually to silence!

Music must come from silence.

Come from it and return to it.

Perhaps everything will end in fire.

Fire, then silence.

That is how everything end, after all.

But, misunderstand me correctly.

I do not choose silence,

silence chooses me.

Anyway, I’m not taking any chances.

For a moment I savour the silence.

I listened until my ears could hear no more,

and silence resumed.

and I wrote this.

*****

This is a kind of a ‘magpie’ poem…my recent visit to the Best Books’ second hand books exhibition at YMCA Secunderabad yielded two (only…unfortunately…) good books…one of them was Granta 76: Music…I picked it up as soon as I saw it, being a music nut and all that…anyway, it contained a good collection of fiction and non-fiction…I started reading Julian Barnes’ ‘The Silence’ and the sentences and words from the piece and the idea of silence re-arranged themselves into this piece…I am only the arranger…

NO, U R ENGLISH

2010-08-03T16:01:00.004+05:30

Those of who lived in the CIEFL Hostels during the years 1995-96 would have been witness to a great revolution among the participants in the form of an in-house participants newsletter called /InsaIt/ initiated by Srinivasa Prasad, Rita Ghosh and John Varghese…(remember them, guys?) it was very good while it lasted…I think it ran continuously for one year successfully and slowly faded out…I managed to save all my copies and it is in these pages that I wrote some of my humour stuff back in those days of innocence…and I thought, why not reproduce some of them here in my blog…I have already posted some pieces…my poem which appeared in the very first issue and my spoofish take on the ‘to be or not to be’ soliloquy…and the one which appears in this post is a humourous take on … what? (come on guys…I don’t have to tell you this…) anyway…read on and if you liked it…please leave a comment…and there is more to come…

**********

Hi Pops!

Hello Sonny, any interesting questions today?

Oh yes…one Mr Roman Claudius from Copenhagen asks, ‘What is hamlet?’

Let me see…yeah…here it is…according to the Sow and Pig Handbook, ‘hamlet’ is the Danish name for the young one of a pig, otherwise known as ‘piglet.’ The Handbook says that it is derived from ‘ham,’ which as we all know is ‘pig’ and therefore, ‘hamlet’ means the young one of a pig…

Surprising… coming from Denmark, Mr Claudius doesn’t know the Danish name of ‘piglet’…

Indeed, I think something is rotten in the state of Denmark…!!!

That means ‘chicklet’ is the young one of a chick, no?

What son? Yeah, elementary, my dear…next letter, please…

Mr Kang Fu Shan from ConFuJing is confused and wonders if you could help him…

What a strange combination! No wonder he is confused. What does he want to know?

He says, “I read a book on English grammar and it says that the plural of ‘mouse’ is ‘mice’ and that of ‘louse’ is ‘lice’ and I want to know whether the plural of ‘house’ is ‘hice’ and that of ‘blouse’ is ‘blice.’ You see, I am an English teacher and my students asked me this question. I am confused.”

Voila! His deduction and derivation is exact to a T. Congratulations, Mr Shan!

Popsy, does it mean that the plural of ‘spouse’ is ‘spice’?

Absolutely!

Then, if there is no ‘spouse,’ there is no ‘spice,’ no?

Automatically, my dear, automatically…

Aah…this is interesting…Ms Poe-Duvall from Baltimore wants to know the meaning of ‘gruesome.’ Popsy, could she be related to Edgar Allan Poe, the great American writer?

If she is, then her question is wasted here. She’d better ask her legendary ancestor. Anyway, since she has asked us, we’d better give her an answer. The Dictionary of Growth and Death tells us that ‘gruesome’ actually means ‘something that was shorter earlier.’ Sonny, I am really famished…I could eat a whole hamlet. These language lessens are really gruesome. I have to meet a couple of people in their hice…and pick up some blice for my spouse…I have to hurry…otherwise there will be less spice in my life…!!

(Excerpted from Language Lessens and Plays by Bhiktri and Sunny. Amnesia: Apprentice Lyceum, 1982. First published in Tongese by Mepolalynesia. Neduqsowzxijkyl: Tonga, 1975)

Another poem...

2010-07-11T11:49:00.002+05:30

I would like to call myself an occasional poet, who writes poems sporadically… at one point of time, I used to write poems regularly…general amateur poems…but as time went by, I was fascinated by the process of writing poems itself and tried to write ‘poems about writing a poem’… and I go back and edit or change or add a phrase…and so there are different versions of the same poem… I have already posted two poems in this blog…here is one more…

it is a tale…told by

Once upon a time

long long ago,

I felt

a tingle in my loins;

snakes slithering in my heart;

monkeys marauding the silence

of my mind.

Today, as I remember these,

the mind struggles to go back.

The tingle has left behind a searing pain

and an ugly scar.

scattered blood.

Snakes have vanished leaving behind

their venom.

Monkeys have abandoned the inert

mind to its frozen silence.

Exhausted, unable to think,

blood, venom, and thawing silence

coagulate and meander along

my veins;

laboriously metamorphose and

flow into this page.

The books I bought and read in the last six months...

2010-07-02T20:28:00.004+05:30

This is an exercise that I carry out semi-annually ever since I started this blog; making a list of books that I purchased every half year…it helps me keep track of what books I bought and how many of them I read …they are roughly in the order that I bought, I sort of remember the order because this time, I bought more than 5 books at a time more than once……so, here goes…

The Girl who played with Fire – Stieg Larsson (read)
The Girl who kicked the Hornet’s Nest – Stieg Larsson (read)
Invisible Cities – Italo Calvino (unread)
Hermit in Paris: Autobiographical Writings – Italo Calvino (unread)
In the Castle of My Skin – George Lamming (read)
Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha – Roddy Doyle (unread)
The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler (read)
Dave Barry Does Japan (read)
Dave Barry Turns 50 (read)
Dave Barry – Greatest Hits (read)
Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys (unread)
Penguin’s New Writing in India (1974) – Adil Jussawala (ed.) (read in parts)
The Englishman’s Cameo – Madhulika Liddle (read)
The Curious Case of 221B – Partha Basu (read)
The Switch – Elmore Leonard (unread)
The Big Bounce – Elmore Leonard (unread)
Tishomingo Blues – Elmore Leonard (unread)
Pagan Babies – Elmore Leonard (unread)
City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit – Elmore Leonard (unread)
Knots and Crosses – Ian Rankin (read)
Strange Pilgrims (short stories) – Gabriel Garcia Marquez (read some stories)
The General in his Labyrinth – Gabriel Garcia Marquez (half-way through)
The Autumn of the Patriarch – Gabriel Garcia Marquez (unread)
The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor – Gabriel Garcia Marquez (unread)
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation – Lynne Truss (read in parts)
Yakada Yaka – Carl Muller (read many times over…this is my replacement copy, I lost my first one…hilarious…inimitable…)
The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency – Alexander McCall Smith (read)
Tears of the Giraffe – Alexander McCall Smith (read)
The Kalahari Typing School for Men – Alexander McCall Smith (read)
Morality for Beautiful Girls – Alexander McCall Smith (read)
In the Company of Cheerful Ladies – Alexander McCall Smith (read)
Singing Emptiness: Kumar Gandharva Performs the Songs of Kabir – Linda Hess (read)
BPO Sutra: True Stories from inside India's BPOs & Call Centres – Complied and Edited by Sudhindra Mokashi (read…hilarious…)
India: A Wounded Civilization – V S Naipaul (started reading!)

A good haul I suppose…there could be a couple of books hiding somewhere…or maybe not…

Deccan Retro Series Fountain Pen - A new FP model from Deccan Pens, Hyderabad

2010-06-30T08:09:00.007+05:30

This time I am showcasing a new model by Deccan Pens, Hyderabad…called the Deccan Retro series by them… Made of ebonite, it is light brown in colour with prominent black streaks, a natural design that ebonite lends itself to. It was very difficult to capture the pen in its right colour while photographing as the light brown would turn into dark brown in the photos and the first photo is one of the three photos that show the pen in its correct colour. The rest of the photos that follow that show the pen as dark brown…the photos are sharper though and the pen looks beautiful in dark brown too…

The pen is an ED filler and pen connoisseurs would recognize many influences on the design of this pen…the flat conical cap and the ball clip reminds us of Bexley’s ‘America is Beautiful’ model (as noticed by my friend Hari), Montegrappa Extra 1930 model, and some Eversharp models as well…the distinctive feature of this pen is the curve at the cap lip, not a straight horizontal cut…Deccan Pens have fitted this pen with a Swan Oxford fine tipped nib… the line is slightly finer that I normally would have liked, but the ink flows well and writing is a pleasure… I filled it with Chelpark turquoise ink and didn’t like it at all, mostly because the ink itself was light…I emptied the barrel and refilled it with Camlin Royal Blue and it writes like a dream now… and as always with Deccan Pens (IMHO&E), no starting problems… and for the statistically minded, the pen is approx 5 ½ inches capped, 6 ¼ inches posted, and 5 inches uncapped…

As I had mentioned in one of my earlier posts on Deccan Pens, when you see a new Deccan model, pick it up immediately, because it might just not be there the next time as all new models are made as limited editions initially…and they are all handmade, so the pen-maker himself has to make these pens…there is no assembly line process here…and this pen was no exception…but one of the second generation brothers alerted me when this model was being made and I told him to keep aside two for me…one for my use and another for my friend Hari…

Thanks for watching...

Going to Botswana - Reading Alexander McCall Smith's The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series

2010-06-28T07:42:00.007+05:30

Some time back I got heavily into reading crime fiction… I like reading general pulp fiction, but ‘pure’ crime fiction was something I started reading seriously only recently…my friend Vinod was instrumental in introducing me to Elmore Leonard’s novels, and now I am a confirmed fan…I bought a couple of Indian crime fiction novels (The Englishman’s Cameo, The Curious Case of 221B) and liked reading them…Ian Rankin was in India recently and his interviews with a couple of ‘powerful’ people appeared in newspapers here and I was intrigued…I hadn’t read any of his novels…and as luck would have it when Best Books put up their next exhibition at YMCA Secunderabad, I managed to get the first novel in the Inspector Rebus series, Knots and Crosses…and I also got about 5 more Elmore Leonard novels…and in between all these I read Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy (highly recommended!!!) … and so, I was hooked…and wanted to read other writers of similar ‘criminal’ persuasions…the name Alexander McCall Smith also came up while searching for crime fiction authors and the search said that he had written a series of crime novels set in Botswana…starting with The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency … I thought I’d give the first one a try … and as luck would have it, I was in Bangalore some months back and there is this mall near my brother-in-law’s house which had a bookstore called Depot … I was delighted to find that all books there are being sold at 50% discount … something like a stock clearance sale … I went in and saw The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency on the rack and decided to pick it up…and then I saw two other books in the same series…Tears of the Giraffe and The Kalahari Typing School for Men…the discount being offered tempted me and I bought all the three…

I started reading the first one … I thought it’d be a tough cloak and dagger high adrenaline hide and seek between detective and criminal…and I was surprised...nothing of that kind…if at all one can use the word ‘gentle’ for a crime fiction novel…it should be used for this…it tells the story of Precious Ramotswe, who sets up a detective agency in Gabarone, the capital of Botswana … Precious Ramotswe tells her story of how she decided to set up the detective agency (the first in Botswana, mind you) and what attracted her to this profession … and a lot about traditional Botswanian way of life, their morals, and how these things are slowly changing…She says she loves Botswana and she loves Africa and wants to do something to solve the little problems that people have to make them live easier…how her father was one of the most upright and good persons who followed the traditional way of life and taught her the positive values … her failed marriage to a musician … and all these constitute the major portion of the first novel … and the initial skepticism among the local people about how a woman could fancy herself to be a detective and whether she could solve any problems at all … the cases she gets initially are ‘simple’ in nature, cheating husbands, car thefts, petty crime…and she solves them…and in the subsequent novels, the crime scene does get grittier, and slightly more dangerous than in the previous cases…

But most interesting are the people that inhabit her world…the kind and gentle Mr J L B Matekoni, mechanic and owner of Speedy Motors, B K, the beautician who owns the Last Chance Hair Salon, Grace Makutsi, the nervous and worried secretary of the Detective Agency, who has the distinction of scoring 97% marks (the highest in the history of the country) in her Diploma offered by the Botswana Secretarial College, and who also always laments that despite her distinction she was never offered any jobs at offices because she did not look or behave like many other young girls…Cephas Buthelezi (who grandly calls himself Ex-CID, Ex-New York, Ex-cellent!!), who sets up a rival detective agency, Satisfaction Guaranteed Detective Agency…Note Mokoti, the jazz trumpeter, who marries Precious Ramotswe and then abuses her physically and from whom she separates…”Two Shots” Pulani, the local impresario, who organizes the Botswana Beauty and Integrity contest…and many many more…

I did not realize that I enjoyed reading the novel…no crime would be reported to the police because Precious Ramotswe believed in solving problems and allowing people to realize their wrongdoings and sort out the emotional fallouts themselves… soon I was reading the second and the third novels … and wanting more … and sure enough, when I visited Bangalore, I visited Depot again, and happily for me, I found two more novels of the series which were not there when I visited it first…Morality for Beautiful Girls and In the Company of Cheerful Ladies…and finished them soon enough…

Above all, Precious Ramotswe takes us on a tour of modern Botswana and one begins to almost smell the soil and become part of Precious Ramotswe’s world…go, read them and Enjoyment Guaranteed…

Swarna 'Sumo' and other Swarnas

2010-06-17T10:58:00.006+05:30

The pattern on the barrel

All Swarna fountain pens

The cap

The whole pen...

Continuing with my explorations for handmade fountain pens from the state of Andhra Pradesh in India, I came across the SWARNA brand of ebonite fountain pens…this was an unexpected lead given to me by my colleague, who I had infected with the FP virus. He had gone hunting pens in his hometown and hit upon a stationery shop which stocked these pens. He called me while still in the shop and told me about the pens and asked me whether I’d like to have them in my collection. The proprietor then took over and then I had a chat with him and decided to buy a set of whatever he had in all colours. After I had started collecting and using ebonite FPs, I had seen that ebonite FPs came in many designs and styles and sizes and colour variations. And true to form, the SWARNA pens that I received after a week were all different from the ones I had (i.e., Ratnam, Guider, Deccan, Prasad, and other smaller brands), but the biggest surprise was the biggest one in the gang. The object of my penfection here is the big ebonite ED filler pen from SWARNA. This pen did not have any name and I decided to call it the SWARNA SUMO…it is a solid looking pen, worth being mentioned along with the ebonite greats of AP...the pen has a very unusually shaped cap...we have all seen tapering down caps, but this cap has a completely black cap jewel...I think a separate part...not part of the swirling mottled brown ebonite body...and I think (again), for this reason, the pen maker decided to have a separate black part at the bottom too, to seal the barrel...normally the barrels of ebonite pens are stand alone single pieces, because ebonite for pens is available as rods and the rods are hollowed to make the caps and barrels...so, this design here is unconventional...the natural swirl pattern on the cap is really nice...and that is the beauty of ebonite pens...no two pens are alike in terms of colour patterns, whether mottled green or mottled brown...

an interim poem

2010-02-19T14:21:00.002+05:30

Please find below a 'letting off steam' poem...

morning blues

trundling along with the uneven pulse

of dated buses on moonscape roads;

half sleepy head nodding in counter pulses;

half wake eyes trying to gauge the gaps

left to reach the impending destination.

dreading the mass of

sleepy heads suppressing yawns;

stunned looks and bus-lagged eyes.

shunned dreams or dreams shunted

of lives engineered to perfection;

and a teacher trying to teach

accent and rhythm and intonation and stress.

stress accentuated.

finished...

Marut and his Pens - Story 2 - Marut at the airport

2010-01-12T10:35:00.003+05:30

Ever since I wrote the first Marut Pen story, I have been inundated with numerous letters from fans of my blog for more Marut Pen stories…

What?

Well…this I can say with confidence that at least 50% of my fans implored me for more of Marut…(!!)…

What?

Yeah…it is true…

How?

Let me clarify…ha ha ha…I know for sure that two of my friends read my blog…and one of them asked me, ‘when are you going to post the next Marut Pen story?’ See…50%, no?...ha ha ha…

Anyway…I enjoy recounting and writing about Marut, his pens and his face-offs with his missus because of his passion for fountain pens…so, here goes…

The other day Marut had gone to the airport along with his missus to see off his in-laws who were going to the US of A. Marut hails from a village and he attended school there and then went to the nearby towns for his college education…and he was forced to come to the capital city after marriage. He is distinctly uncomfortable when he is made to go out of his comfort zone. Poor chap…you should see it to believe his discomfort…he has to wear shoes and tuck his shirt in and all that everyday in the name of formal dressing…he just detests it…and for somebody like him, the airport is something way out of his league. He feels lost in such ‘posh’ spaces…He doesn’t want to go to such places, but his missus is a city person and on top of that is a strong willed lady and Marut’s wall of resistance crumbles after some time and so he has to willy nilly go to such totally alien spaces…

Anyway, and so, Marut goes to the airport. His missus’ father was once some grand panjandrum in some important government department and so, he was able to pull some strings and the see-off-ers were also allowed inside the airport…the inside of the airport was a mind-blocking experience for our Marut…and what happens once they are inside the airport?

Marut was minding his own business…kind of…and then Marut sees this tall beautiful lady walking towards him…(this is real, he was not dreaming and I am not making this up…!!)…Marut, not used to such direct walkings, looked around, hoping that she was heading elsewhere…but, no, he couldn’t see anybody behind him, neither was there anybody standing to his left or right…he was kind of paralysed…he just stood there, gaping! The aforementioned lady approached Marut…(tension…tension…tension…) and asked Marut of she could borrow his pen…phew…oof…Marut looked at his shirt pocket…yes…his trusted black ebonite Advocate fountain pen was peeping out…he recovered his balance…OK…she wants to borrow my pen…he took out the Advocate and told her hesitantly that it was a fountain pen and that she won’t be able to write with it if she is not used to writing with fountain pens...she gave him a disarming smile and said that she uses fountain pens and that she’d forgotten to bring hers and she would have no problems writing with the one that he had, provided he lends it to her…Marut couldn’t say or do anything further and gave her the Advocate fountain pen…

The lady took the pen and went to a desk and started filling out some form…and after a while she came back, returned the pen and thanked Marut for lending a fountain pen (Old Efpi saying: people who use fountain pens don’t lend it to others…)…and gave a nice smile…Marut smiled and took back the Advocate and secured it in his pocket…

And all this while Marut’s missus was watching the proceedings…wonder what she was thinking (!&?*%$)…GOK… from what Marut told me she was slightly disturbed, I think…

Marut’s missus is a beautiful lady, but another beautiful woman approaching her husband to borrow a pen was not to her liking…and Marut is no pushover in the looks department either …tall, well-built, with a nice guileless smile…and theirs was a ‘love’ marriage…so, I think, her thinking was…if I can fall for him, another woman too could and he fell for me, he could fall for others too…so, this could be the disturbed bee buzzing around her head…and after the deed was done and the pen came back to Marut’s pocket…she delivered her devastating one line judgement…she gave him a nasty look and said…

“Don’t ever use that pen again…”

Good catch at Best Books sale

2010-01-08T15:50:00.004+05:30

Yesterday morning while on the bus to my college, I saw this banner at YMCA Secunderabad advertising a used books sale…I sat up… but, there was no name of the seller on the banner…is it a books sale by Best Books, I wondered? Because it is they who regularly have their books sale at YMCA and I had found some good wish-listed books at their sales on earlier occasions…I made up my mind to get down near YMCA on my way back from college in the evening and see what I can get this time…

As expected, there were stacks and stacks of books on the tables on shelves on boxes waiting to be unpacked…books books books everywhere…and it turned out that it was the first day of the sale…so I was in with a fine chance of landing a good catch…I checked my wallet and gave myself a tolerably good budget with which I could comfortably buy 3-4 books…

So, armed thus, I set out on my book seeking odyssey inside the sale hall…I was surprised to George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin right away…this book has been in my wishlist since 1993(?!)…yeah, that long…I never thought that I’d encounter this book in a used books sale…I read this novel as part of the Commonwealth Literature syllabus at Pune University, and the unique narrative structure of this novel stayed with me and two years later I decided to work on this novel for my MPhil…I wanted to own a copy of the novel, but it was not available anywhere in India and I remember I had to make do with a photocopy. Much to my regret, I completed my MPhil thesis without owning a copy of the novel that I worked on. This regret remained and I ventured many times to buy a copy, but getting one from abroad would be an expensive proposition, and so, this wish remained just that…a wish…until yesterday when out of the blue I find a copy and that too for maybe 10% of the price of a new copy…cool…I clutched it tightly…

I saw a lot of interesting books... I picked up a couple of them tentatively and continued to walk around…I then came upon a stack of books on humour and located some Dave Barry books…wow…wonderful time pass books…Dave Barry became one of my favourites ever since Vinod gifted one of his books to me when he first visited us…I picked up three Dave Barry books…Dave Barry Does Japan, Dave Barry Turns 50, and Dave Barry-Greatest Hits…I had reached my budget limit and decided to jettison one of the two books that I’d picked up earlier after I found In the Castle of My Skin…I retained Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle…enough…I was moving towards the cash counter and I turned and saw a book by Italo Calvino…can’t leave a Calvino behind, can you, even if you have to breach your budget? I hadn’t heard about this book earlier – Hermit in Paris-Autobiographical Writings and as the title says, it contains autobiographical essays…good one…and good that I found it, but I am certain it was not there when I passed by that stack before…I hungrily added the book to my growing stack, not without a fleeting thought at my breached budget limit…this book was more expensive than the others…because it is a Calvino? I gave myself a budget raise…what to do…

Good, I thought and then I thought I spied a familiar name…one of which I already had in my hands now…another Calvino, a thin one, was hiding between two fat books…Invisible Cities…never thought I’d find this masterpiece in a used books sale…but I know now that nothing is impossible…I found three such books in one evening…needless to say, my budget exploded…couldn’t keep any of these books down now…at least 3 books more than I thought I’d buy…I then carried these small treasures to the cash counter and requested the proprietor to give me a small discount…he graciously did…maybe he saw a pleading book lover’s face or maybe it was a largish enough purchase on the first day of the sale and he didn’t want to say ‘no’…can’t say…

The sale is on till 24^th January…I might visit once again…ha ha ha…

2009 - Books I read

2010-01-07T14:59:00.004+05:30

What else happened in 2009? Well, I read and read a lot and bought a lot of books. I don’t remember the names of all now and must remember and make a list. 2009 ended with my reading the first novel of the Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson – The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and the new year began with the second, The Girl who Played with Fire…real crackling stuff…the most thrilliest(!) page turners that I have ever read in a long long time. I can’t wait to sink my teeth into the third one. This one will arrive by post, because I realized that I get a good discount when I order these books online and in most cases there is no postage, so I get to gain both ways.

I located and bought some wonderful books on music – Bhairavi: The Global Impact of Indian Music (Peter Lavezzoli), Music and Modernity: North Indian Classical Music in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Ed. Amlan Dasgupta), and Mixed Tape: The First City Interviews 3-Music. And along the way, bought some English translations of classical Sanskrit plays by Kalidasa and Bhavabhuti; these were to help me identify and annotate some Sanskrit verses used in an early Kannada novel that I was translating into English. And then I ventured into the Bengali literary territory to read English translations of Manik Bandyopadhyay’s and Mahasweta Devi’s short stories (I also bought these books published by Thema, Calcutta).

Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Beach is the other book I bought along with Larsson’s first of the Millemmium Trilogy. 2009 was also the year when I tried to read a bit of western philosophy and bought quite a number of books and the funny part is that I am still trying to read them; not easy reading at all… Derrida, Adorno, Horkheimer, et al. Pablo Neruda’s Isla Negra was one book that was a long pending purchase and the good old book store still had it on its shelves…thank god for that. I wanted to read something non-fictional by Umberto Eco and it was a slippery watery ride with Eco’s How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays.

The book exhibition at YMCA, Secunderabad yielded a good catch of 3 Dave Barry books (Dave Barry turns 40; Dave Barry’s Greatest Hits; Dave Barry’s Only Travel Guide You’ll Ever Need) and an Elmore Leonard novel. And I also found a refreshing stash of Asterix comics at a used book store and got them at a very affordable price…nothing like an Asterix for a dull or boring day…

There are some more books out there…I know…but all in all, a good productive year as far as reading was concerned…good only…

New Year - Bringing up Father

2010-01-06T12:32:00.001+05:30

Wishing you all a Happy New Year and all that jazz…

The past year has been as eventful as the ones before it…but 2009 had one major life changing moment…the birth of my daughter made 2009 into an unforgettable year… I am still tongue tied…can’t say how I feel even now…happiness, joy, et al, are OK, but don’t capture how I feel…so, I am just allowing myself to be carried away…my precious now smiles freely and openly and I just feel like I am melting…I try to be as useful and helpful as I possibly can at home, I carry her around when she is in a cranky mood or when she just wont lie down on her bed…I prepare her feeds…I play music for her and sometimes dance holding her…I can generally look after her, and the other day, I tried diaper-changing and felt that I can do it…but I still can’t feed her successfully and dress her up or give her a bath…but I think, I can do all of these eventually…and the political developments in December here in Hyderabad inadvertently, but pleasantly, gave me lots of time to spend with my little one...I think, I can interpret out some of her baby-talk...and when I make this long chirping kind of sound to draw her attention, she gurgles happily, says "hakkoooo" and gives a twinkling and uninhibited toothless laughter...and her hands and legs are just going up and down in pleasure...and my day is made...

MIXED TAPE - a chance find

2009-12-23T12:48:00.004+05:30

That is Trilok Gurtu in full flow…he appears on the cover of a real gem of a book … MIXED TAPE – the First City Interviews 3: Music … you can call it luck or chance or more profound names as karma or serendipity … or whatever … if I hadn’t visited the bookstall at Hyderabad airport, I wouldn’t have known about this book at all … and I am sure, I wouldn’t have been able to find this book at any book stall in Hyderabad … it is not an old book published years back, but one which came out sometime this year… I was actually putting together a pile of books that I wanted to read, planning to buy at least a couple, and I was looking behind the books kept in the foreground on all the stacks in the shelves…and I saw this book…the word ‘music’ held me…I pulled it out and as it happened many times before with books on music, I forgot all about the other books that I was piling up…

This is a book of interviews with musicians…all these musicians were interviewed for FIRST CITY, a Delhi-based magazine, and these interviews appeared in the magazine between August 1990 and July 2009… the moment I saw Trilok Gurtu on the cover, my pulse quickened…TG has been one of my favourites ever since I heard the first album of his that was released in India, The Trilok Gurtu Collection, and after having bought listened to all his albums and his various collaborations, I still go back to the first TG piece that I listened to…Once I Wished a Tree Upside Down…(first in Living Magic and in then in The Trilok Gurtu Collection)…it begins with the ringing of cowbells and moves slowly into a mesmerizing saxophone part played by Jan Garbarek and all the while TG is busy creating magic with his drums and other percussion instruments…I digress, sorry…so, the prospect of reading TG’s interview was a pleasant one and I open this book and want to see who else is there…and wow!!…who else is not there? ... some of my most favourite musicians – vocalists, instrumentalists, and composers straddling the Indian Classical, Film, ‘Fusion’ (so called…!), and every conceivable kind of music that one can imagine that has some connection with India… Ustad Vilayat Khan, Kishori Amonkar, Pt Hariprasad Chaurasia, Zakir Hussain, Pt Ravi Shankar…Indian Ocean, Shankar Ehsaan Loy, Midival Punditz, Karsh Kale…Girija Devi, Ustad Bismillah Khan…Talvin Singh, Anoushka Shankar, Madhup Mudgal…and many many more…

And the interviews are not in the question-answer format, which tends to get boring after some time…the format is informal here and the interview also comes across as a friendly banter more than anything else…and it is very clear that the musicians are enjoying themselves…the interviewers describe the actions of the musicians and have masterfully captured the myriad way in which the musicians speak…the ‘na’ at the end of every sentence by Trilok Gurtu, the ‘you know-s’ of Talvin Singh, the guffaws, the cackles, pride, modesty…you feel that you are part of the group interviewing your favourite musicians…delightful…there are no clever (or so called ‘intelligent’) interventions by the interviewers…and the questions are not posed as such, but you can ‘hear’ the answers, which helpfully are in quotes…

The reader gets a ringside view of the changing scene of music…you can see the ‘Asian Underground,’ lounge, trance, etc., fuelled by electronica coming into their own through Talvin Singh, Karsh Kale, Midival Punditz…the Indian rock/pop scene gaining recognition…the second generation, Anoushka Shankar and Ayaan and Amaan Ali Bangash, getting comfortable in the limelight… and the tragic passing away of Ustad Vilayat Khan and Ustad Bismillah Khan…in short, a delightful journey into music in India from 1990 to 2009…

I am trying to inform all my music loving friends about this book…I think this book can become a good companion on many a journey…and many a lonely evening (mornings and afternoons also…)

Thanks FIRST CITY…for this lovely book and moreover, for this wonderful idea… I wish many more magazines emulate this idea and come out with 5-year or 10-year compilations of Music/Film/Art based articles…

A (sort of) review l(r)eading to a crime thriller...fANTASTIC...

2009-12-22T11:52:00.006+05:30

Hi…

Bought some books last week…one of them is a current international blockbuster…yeah… Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo…usually, I keep my eyes open for interesting new books, keep myself updated on latest releases through reviews, but somehow, I didn’t know about this book at all…until I read Sandipan Deb’s piece on this novel in his regular column Rear Window in the weekly Open (Sandipan Deb is the editor of this weekly)…this was an unusual piece…not a review per se (though Deb says it is one…of a kind…review)…but intriguing enough for me to want to read it anon…I will not repeat everything that appears in Deb’s piece here, but it had enough points to arouse my curiosity (in case you are interested, you can read Deb’s piece at this link http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/voices/marked-for-life) …I have since bought the novel and finished reading it…and it is everything that I read in Deb’s piece…I used all the spare minutes that I managed to scrounge in between preparing my daughter’s feeds, washing feeding bottles, running errands, and generally carrying her around the house…it is, to use book readers’ killer term ‘unputdownable’…and is worth all the praise that is heaped on it…and to think that, the author, Stieg Larsson (a Swede), died even before seeing his novel becoming a blockbuster…He wrote two more novels (both crime thrillers and I think, sequels to ‘…Dragon Tattoo’ …correct me if I am wrong…) before he died…together they are called the ‘Millennium Trilogy’…unable to resist the temptation, I have placed orders for the second and third ones too…

There are two other books that I bought …I am reading one…this is about music…books of this kind are not published frequently and I am glad I found it… I hadn’t heard of this one too…until I saw it lying unconsoled, consigned to the back stack, last but one stack from the bottom of a shelf at the airport book stall…for me it was like finding a hidden treasure…more next…

My precious...

2009-12-03T15:21:00.003+05:30

Hi…

Isn't she an absolute darling... I was away for the last 5 months preparing to welcome her into our lives... and I am happy…very happy…

Shruti and I have a baby girl with us now…so, now you know where I was all these days…I was with Shruti in the hospital trying to do my bit during those anxiety filled days and later sorting things out at home after she came back…our daughter was born premature…6 weeks before the expected date of delivery…and she was in the neonatal ICU for close to 3 weeks…

She is now three months old and is a delightful bundle of joy…we see a lot of things that she does as tantrums and some as demands and some as requests…but do we know actually? She manages to communicate effectively…she doesn’t want to be left alone…she is fond of music…she likes melodious music, not a big fan of beats…partial to instrumental music, I feel, but Shruti says she likes Hindustani classical vocal more…I’ve bought a harmonica and try and play random music on it hoping that she’ll appreciate my musical explorations…she listens intently sometimes and sometimes she screams…ha ha ha…so much for my music…

Now…both our lives are centred around her…anything else is incidental…we have named her ‘Sudhriti,’ meaning ‘positive courage’…and of course, we call her anything we feel is an endearment…chonu…sugar plum...precious...poochu…putumayo…buthros buthros [these two are mine… : )] …shona papa…putti…chinna…and her doctor calls her ‘bangaram’ (gold!)…

Truly amazing…

Marut and his Pens - Story 1

2009-08-01T14:11:00.000+05:30

While I enjoy a very high degree of freedom with regard to indulging in my passion for fountain pens…an occasional warning (from you know who!) suffices to douse my ardour for quite some time till temptation strikes again…but I have been remarkably successful in recent times in resisting fountain pen temptation…more so because I now have my grail pen, Montblanc Meisterstuck 149, with me and the other pens in my wish-list are quite high priced too…so I don’t want to venture too far…but some heavy discount offered on Parker Sonnet pens left we weak kneed and I dissolved into ink…and bought 2 Sonnets…see, I am running away with my pens…I have to link up somewhere near the second line and continue with what I wanted to say initially…I will come back with another post on the Parker Sonnets…god promise…

My colleague Marut is a fountain pen enthusiast too…but he doesn’t enjoy a great deal of freedom to nurture his hobby…his missus lays down the rule…but Marut is a clever fellow…I have so many stories to tell…well, at least three good ones about Marut and his pens and his missus…she was once a colleague as well, for only a brief while though… and sometimes this ‘everybody knowing everybody’ leads to tricky situations as narrated below…

This happened almost a year ago…I had to make some pen purchases at Deccan Pen Stores, Abids and I thought I’d alight at the last stop, Koti, instead of my usual Secunderabad stop, and go to Abids from Koti…Marut also travelled in the same bus and gets down at Koti…when I told him about my plan to visit Deccan Pen Stores, he was tempted and decided to accompany me there… and while on our way to Abids from Koti, he switched off his mobile phone…I didn’t know why…I asked him and he smiled…at that time I didn’t know about his travails…it was later that I understood it as a strategic move…I had already informed home that I’d be late…but Marut had just impulsively joined me and no information to missus!!!

Going to a pen shop is not a brief affair for a pen freak…we were there for almost 45 minutes when my mobile phone rang…Marut looked at me and smiled and said, ‘must be my missus’... I looked at the number…it was not a ‘saved’ number, so no name…I read out the number to Marut…he said, ‘yes…that’s my missus …’ and smiled again…he was enjoying my discomfiture…I now had to answer the call… I pressed the ‘speak’ button…and there she was asking me about Marut’s whereabouts …I wondered how she knew that her dear hubby was with me… Marut would have reached home by now and he was now missing for more than 20 minutes from the scheduled time of arrival…she must have dialed her way around some of our bus-mates and somebody would have said innocently that Marut was seen with me last at Koti…Marut had purchased 4 pens by that time and the total cost came to Rs.280/- or so…I wanted to buy something in a higher range, but didn’t find anything within my limit…so I generally chewed the air for some time with the knowledgeable people there…strange fountain pen lingo…feeder, section, aerometric, eye dropper, cap lip, piston…anyway, coming back to the phone call…I told her that it is true that Marut had come with me, but he dropped me at Deccan Pen Stores and went home… how long ago was this…about half an hour ago…he hasn’t yet reached home…must have been stuck in a traffic jam, don’t worry, he’ll reach soon…and all this time Marut was grinning like a cat which had stolen, eaten, and digested the cream…I didn’t know that I could lie like this…must have sounded convincing…she said thanks and closed the conversation…Marut and I decided to make a move…it was now close to an hour since we entered the shop…I wanted some empty pen boxes to store my pens…I got some…Marut paid for his pens and we went out…Marut then told me to take his pens with me and give it to him the next day in the college…I was surprised…why?…you don’t know, saar, I will be interrogated and searched, pockets, bag, everything, now that I have come from a pen shop…we were now together in this pen-spiracy…he had unwittingly made me a partner in this caper… I had to play along…I took the pens he had bought and put them in my bag…

We went our separate ways…it must have wrenched his heart to see his newly bought pens going with me…that too with his approval and consent!! I hopped on to a rick and was winding my way home when my mobile rang…the number seemed familiar…I pressed the ‘speak’ button…and whose voice do I hear? Shouldn’t have surprised me…Marut’s missus…where is he? Why, what happened? He hasn’t reached home yet…he must be riding, can’t say with traffic these days, don’t worry, he must be close to home…when did he leave the shop (very tenacious, this lady!)…around 45 minutes back (I had to do a quick calculation, look at my watch, guess the time she called me when we were in the shop…and bingo! 45 minutes)… he hasn’t reached yet…(oh god!)…I then started weaving around some pointless sentences like traffic, potholes, time he left, time he’d reach, etc., intending to confuse her…I think she got the drift and closed the talk…Marut must have reached home soon enough as I didn’t get any more calls from his missus…

The next day Marut said he got an earful…in fact, two earfuls…for more than an hour…I said he got away lightly…because his pens were with me…imagine what would have happened if the pens were found on his person or in his bag…I shudder to think!! I then handed over his pens…she promptly discovered the pens that evening when Marut reached home (because she is a very tenacious lady…I told you so!)…and interrogated him…Marut told her that all these pens cost only Rs.80/- (!!!) … and self-pedestalled himself by telling her that I had bought a pen worth Rs.600/- or so… What? Oh my god! So expensive!…Don’t be too friendly with him…ok?

(Haaen!! I helped him cover his tracks and this is what he does to me...discredits me?? Traitor!!!...but as a fellow fountain pen enthusiast...you understand...and know how one feels...!!!)

A much awaited book...and a small, but impactful, publishing house

2009-07-29T15:20:00.001+05:30

I have been watching out for the publication of this particular book about Hindustani classical music for a long long time…when I saw the reference of this book for the first time, sometime in 2000 or so, it was in the catalogue of the publisher, I thought I must have this book…at that time, I was totally ‘into’ music…reading about and listening to ‘fusion’ and Hindustani classical music…so much so that my actual research got derailed for some time…anyway, it said ‘forthcoming’ under a brief description of the book and a tentative list of topics…I wrote to the publisher and it was still ‘forthcoming’… I wrote after six months or so and it was still ‘forthcoming’…I had seen another book in the catalogue and decided to buy that…it was Ustad Alladiya Khan’s ‘autobiography,’ called ‘My Life.’… Ustad Alladiya Khan is the founder of the Jaipur-Atrauli Gharana, and his autobiography, dictated to his grandson towards the end of his illustrious life, is a fascinating moving picture of Hindustani classical music from the mid nineteenth century to almost the mid twentieth centuries … though I was vaguely aware of a bygone Hindustani classical world – the world of small principalities, their court singers, royal patronage, musical one-upmanship, singers and their families, bandishes being closely guarded like family treasures, etc. – Ustad Alladiya Khan’s book revealed this world in full colour…not through photographs, but through words…this is still a cherished book in my musical library…

For some time, I forgot about ‘forthcoming’ book…and recently, a few months back, I remembered that book again and felt that it would have ‘forthcome’ by now…I decided to check if the publisher had a website and I was pleasantly surprised to see that the publisher, Thema, had a website (www.themabooks.com) and more pleasantly, the book had forthcome!! …

Thema is a small publishing venture in Calcutta and publishes books in both English and Bengali…and it has got a compact and ‘impact’ful list of books in its various subsections…women’s studies, oral history, Indian history, children’s literature, culture studies, film studies, radical literature, science…

I browsed the site and saw two more books that interested me… I then spoke to them and placed an order for these three books…the books arrived yesterday…

Ok…the much awaited book is ‘Music and Modernity: North Indian Classical Music in An Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (edited by Amlan Dasgupta) … what first struck me was the subtitle…a reference to the famous essay by Walter Benjamin…The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction…the articles in this book range from early gramophone records to the forms of the Sarod and from women musicians to reflections on the Khayal…some articles do look tough…but that is challenge…

The other two books that I bought are Imaginary Maps, a book of short stories by Mahasweta Devi (Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak) and Manik Bandyopadhyay: Selected Stories (Edited and introduced by Malini Bhattacharya)… there are more that I want to read from Thema…one by one…

Carl Muller's Yakada Yaka and other stories...

2009-07-20T10:51:00.001+05:30

The other day I was re-reading Carl Muller's A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Cemetry...in fact, I have lost count of the number of times that I have read this book...the book relates a number of humourous, and sometimes hilarious, incidents from the life of the author... some of these are from his navy life...absolutely 'laugh-your-head-off' hilarious...and there are some incidents taken from his life as a journalist in the Gulf (Persian/Arabian Gulf)...and some inincidents from the general life in Sri Lanka...

I bought this book long back on the strength of his wonderful abilities as a 'riotously' humourous writer as seen in his wonderful trilogy...The Jam Fruit Tree, Yakada Yaka, and Once upon a Tender Time...this trilogy introduces us to the Railway life of the Burgher community in Sri Lanka...like the Anglo Indians in India, Burghers are a Eurasian ethnic group in Sri Lanka, and formed the bulk of employees in Railways...and this trilogy traces the three generations of the Von Blosses...a thinly disguised retelling of the events of the three generations of his family...the Mullers...the protagonists are Cecilprins Von Bloss, the patriarch, who we see in The Jam Fruit Tree, his son, the uncontrollable Sonnaboy Von Bloss, holds fort in Yakada Yaka and Sonnaboy's son, Carloboy Prins Von Bloss, who comes to the foreground in Once Upon a Tender Time...of the three, my favourite is Yakada Yaka...it is a laugh riot...and this book has rescued me many times from low moods and gave me company on many lonely rummy saturday evenings...and I have invariably ended up laughing uncontrollably at the end of each funny railway episode... 'hilarious' would be a mild term...how Sonnaboy thwarted the pentecostalists, how he ruined the perfect party, how his railway colleagues almost ate a human heart and had to be rushed to the hospital, ...all this and much more...Sonnaboy's volcanic anger...his brood of children...his cranky brothers and sisters...their spouses...their children...a real volatile mix actually...and each episode explodes with laughter, songs, ribaldry, sometimes innocence, and many a times, the English Railway officials, are left wringing their hands at the perfectly loony explanations given by Sonnaboy and his equally crazy railway colleagues...

The Urge to Write with Fountain Pens

2009-07-13T13:48:00.001+05:30

I actually wrote a letter today!! I mean 'wrote,' as in 'writing with a pen/pencil'...not typed on the computer...!! This was a letter of thanks to someone who had given me a couple of pieces of something which is part of his heritage and which he hands out very carefully...and this also gave me a chance to test the flow of a recently acquired fountain pen...and also to see how Pelikan brown ink, an ink colour I hadn't used till now, looked when curled into letters on a white sheet of paper... and it was all these three... and I was completely satisfied with the flow of the ink in the new fountain pen...the Pelikan brown ink looked good on white paper...and the letter came out very well...though I was exra profuse with the thanks...I think I can safely blame that on the urge to write some more and some more...what with the ink looking good and flowing well in the pen...

Though I collect fountain pens and use them, I don't get the chance to use them as much as I would like to...so, I create situations where I can use them...I keep a small notebook in my pocket and I write down a lot of things in that with my fountain pen...sometimes I feel I need to write and I don't know what to write, because most of my professional and personal 'writing' is done on the computer...including this post on this blog...and I feel I am cheating the fountain pen fellowship by hoarding pens and not using them...that too expensive ones...

I have made a mid-year resolution...that I will write at least one letter every week to someone I know...far or near or even in Hyderabad...those of you who want a letter from me may please enter your addresses in the comments section and you can also specify the pen and ink! and if I have that pen and ink...I will write a letter to you...sounds terribly stupid?

Google to the rescue...

2009-07-07T11:54:00.003+05:30

The author of the Kannada novel (Chandramukhiya Ghatavu) that I had translated, Rodda Vyasarao Venkatarao, from what I could make out from his novel, appears to be a well-read person, interested in Sanskrit classics and also English literature...he has used verses from Sanskrit plays almost at will, whenever he wanted to illustrate a point or where the words of a higher authority would settle the issue...

But he never ever says from where he has taken these verses from...I am not sure how his readers reacted to this use of verses from Sanskrit plays...who did he have in mind as his readers? Once I started translating, I realised I hit a wall when I came across the first Sanskrit verse in the second page itself...and it was in devanagari script...I tried to guess the meaning from the context... and I could make out two words...'hans' for 'swan' and 'kshira' for 'milk'...and I put two and two together and surmised that this verse could refer to that well-known concept of 'hamsa kshira nyaya'... which refers to a celestial bird (swan) which had the power to drink only the milk and leave the water mixed with it behind...and this is given as an example for somebody who has the ability to sort the 'grain from the chaff' so to say... the positive power of discernment or judgment... it is also given as an example for a job or assignment that needs judiciousness or refinement for it to be completed successfully...Many people in India are aware of this concept...

That done...but from where is this blessed verse taken? which book or who should I consult? How should I go about consulting a book? Did I know any Sanskrit scholar? all questions the result of incomplete formal Indian education!! But now I was stuck...

Somehow, as a last independent resort, before consulting people and books, I thought of an old trick, a trick by which I would detect plagiarism during my 'editor' days...I decided to transcribe the Sanskrit verse into English and give it the 'google' treatment...and you know what...it worked and worked beautifully... I now know that this 'swan' and 'milk' verse is taken from Kalidasa's Abhijnana Shakuntalam... some kindhearted souls had put up something related to the play and I also located an English translation of the play...and things started to fall into place... and I gave the same treatment to all the Sanskrit verses that are in the novel...and I discovered that the author had taken verses and phrases from Kalidasa's Abhijnana Shakuntalam and Meghadutam, Bhavabhuti's Uttara Rama Charita, the Hitopadesha, and (now I feel) not surprisingly, a quote from Herbert Spencer too...and I found out from where all these verses, phrases, and quotation were taken with the help of Google...after locating the origins, I had to refine the references...and make them consistent...that is another story...for another post...

Thank you Google for helping me in my search...and all those who had written, hosted, or contributed to various websites on Sanskrit literature...

(the usual disclaimer...I am a happy Google user...in no way connected with Google)

A paper published and some publicity...(!!!)

2009-07-06T11:43:00.005+05:30

Last week some good news came in the mail…I received the recent issue of Journal of Karnataka Studies…this journal is published by Kannada University, Hampi, Karnataka… the good news is that my paper is published in this issue…in fact, 2009 has been good in this sense so far…this is the third paper to see the light of the day this year, though I had submitted them some time back…so suddenly, my list of publications has increased…feels good…

This paper is about one of the prolific translators of novels during the early days of the novel in Kannada…Venkatesha Tirako Kulakarni ‘Galaganatha,’ popularly known as only ‘Galaganatha,’ translated 16 novels from Marathi into Kannada…and all of them were historical novels and most of them were written by Hari Narayan Apte originally…

The paper is titled “The Novel and the Nation: Galaganatha’s Rewriting of Historical Novels in Kannada”… and a part of this is taken from my earlier research for my PhD…and of course, the editors wanted me to make substantial changes in the draft I had submitted…which made me read some more and which was really good because I was able to see the whole issue from a slightly different perspective…I had written about the how the ‘novel’ as a genre is analogous to the idea of the ‘nation’ and how the ‘novel’ could be used to ‘plot’ the idea of the nation…especially historical novels…and since this is a family blog I don’t want to get into graphic details which could result in extreme self-torture…!!!

I must thank my friend Tharakeshwar, who was earlier teaching in the Translation Studies Dept at Kananda University, and who encouraged me to send this article for publication…now he has come to Hyderabad and is a reader at EFL University…

Among the many issues that I worked on, I enjoyed working on this aspect of the novel the most…the idea of the ‘nation’ and the novel…

Ad-sense of humour...non?

2009-06-23T11:08:00.002+05:30

I knew this would happen...the only question was 'how soon?'... and today morning when I went to my blog, there it was...a few days back I had posted a piece on how a student had mis-(dis?) understood the term 'waste management' and went on to write about how the college 'management' is 'useless'...

Bloggers would know that the embedded ads on the blogsite always reflect the contents of your posts...and therefore for most of the time, the ads on my blogsite are about pens and occasionally about real estate and/or hotels in Hyderabad...not that I have made any money out of these ads...but that is another matter...

And after I posted my previous item, I wondered what ad would come up next to it...and more or less expected it would be something to do with 'waste management'...and true to form...the ad is there today...

I intended my post to be a kind of light humourous take on the use of the word 'waste' in the Hyderabadi lingo and how the meaning was transferred to a totally different domain and how this resulted in a hootingly hilarious interpretation... and see what these Ad-sense people interpreted it...bhaste phellows...

***end note***

Glasses have a remarkble effect on the eyesight......

Especially if they are repeatedly refilled......

yenzoi...

Waste Management…Management of Waste…same? Or what?

2009-06-19T10:50:00.001+05:30

I am not making this up…honestly…this really happened…a kind of blooper you find in examination scripts…

A couple of years back on the directive of the Supreme Court, ‘Environment Studies’ was introduced as a subject in all undergraduate colleges across India…in the university where the college I teach in is affiliated, environment studies was initially introduced as an ‘audit course,’ meaning, teaching-learning will take place along with tests and exams, but the subject itself did not find a place in the final marks card…so one can imagine the seriousness with which teaching-learning of this subject took place in many colleges…anyway, in our group of colleges, the teaching of environment studies was ‘pushed’ to English teachers! The English teachers decided to something different with this and used the allocated class hours to make students practice presentation skills, group discussion, public speaking, etc., using topics from the environment studies syllabus…some students enjoyed it…some, as usual, did not want to do anything with this… anyway…

During one of the exams, the teachers had asked a question on ‘waste management’… an important topic in environment studies… about managing domestic, industrial, medical waste… and this was related to me by a colleague working in one of our sister colleges… many students had written brief answers indicating clearly that they had not prepared well for this examination…one student wrote about 2 ½ to 3 pages on this topic…and the teachers were curious to know what he had written…the answer was a scathing criticism of the college authorities…talking about lack of proper sanitation facilities, photocopying facilities, insufficient books in the library, benches and boards in the classrooms, lab facilities, indifference of faculty members…and the tirade went on for close to 3 pages and finally, he said, the college management is a ‘waste management!’

It was then that the teachers realised why he had launched this attack…he had ‘clearly’ understood the question in a different sense…in Hyderabad and most of Andhra Pradesh, the English word ‘waste’ is used as an adjective (across English, Telugu, and Hindi/Urdu) to mean ‘useless,’ ‘worthless,’ ‘hopeless,’ etc., (as against the standard English usage of ‘waste’ as an adjective which means leftover, excess, unused, discarded, spare, etc.) and it is a common to find people saying, ‘he is a waste fellow,’ ‘ waste film,’ ‘waste hotel,’ ‘mera bhai waste hai re,’ ‘waste cinema ra, damagkharab aayi poyindi’…

And for this student, the college ‘management’ clearly came under the category of ‘waste’… ‘waste fellow’…

Translating an early Kannada novel...first draft completed

2009-06-11T09:58:00.002+05:30

I am returning to blogging after a long long time...not that I didn't want to or didn't have anything to write about...maybe it was the scorching summer that sapped my interest...or maybe I was just lazy...(see, I have written three lines without saying anything...!!)...If my I put my mind to it, I can write... and this is what I thought I should do and went ahead and translated an early Kannada novel into English...it is an extremely short novel called 'Chandramukhiya Ghaatavu' (The Murder of Chandramukhi) written in 1890...I have researched and written about the translation scene during the early days of the novel in Kannada...and I had always wanted to translate a novel from Kannada to English and felt that this short novel would be an ideal beginning...I thought it would be easy translating a 26-page novel into English...a-page-a-day kind of schedule will take me a month to complete it...only when I started to translate that I saw and felt the real challenges...I found it really tough to locate synonyms for certain words and phrases and idioms and proverbs of the Kannada being spoken and written more than 100 years ago...sometimes the parallels for proverbs and idioms were easy to find in English...like the Kannada idiom 'go-mukha vyaaghra' (a tiger with a cow's face) was easily rendered into the familiar English idiom 'wolf in a sheep's clothing'... and many examples of people and events quoted in the novel were from Ramayana and Mahabharata...mythological figures entered and exited at will...verses from Kalidasa and Bhavabhuti appear at crucial moments...but the story is essentially about 'reforming' the 'Indian' society, a topic that was popular with the early novel writers in almost all languages in India...here, it is about the nefarious activities and final repentance of a fake swamiji...but this novel fascinated me for its narrative style which was unique for an early novel...It finally took me 3 months to complete the translation...I am now doing the proof reading and corrections...this is again taking its own time...there is so much to do after that...and since I studied novel as part of my doctoral research, I want the English translation to be slightly academically inclined with an introduction, preface, notes, glossary, etc. I want this translation to be published...lets see how soon I can release the draft from my hands... for a larger release...

My Grail Fountain Pen...never thought I'd manage it so soon!!

2009-04-24T14:18:00.002+05:30

Hi...

This was two weeks back and happened on a Wednesday...that was the day when I was finally able to lay my eager hands on my grail pen...Montblanc Meisterstuck 149...this fountain pen, the king among pens (IMHO), was in my sights for the last 15 years or so...days before fountain pens became my regular passion...at that time I didn't even venture to find out the price of this pen...and after I got a job and all that the passion to own and write with a Montblanc got intense(r)...and a few years later, I heard that MontBlanc had opened their boutique in Hyderabad...I tentatively called them one day to find out the price...they quoted a price which was double my monthly salary at that time!!!...and whenever I telephoned to ask the price, it would have increased and I would find it impossible to even think of buying one... and sometime around 2007 December, I happened to join the fountain pen network and met Hari and one of the first things that I told him was that I wanted to own a Montblanc Meisterstuck 149...he kind of laughed...I think the pen is one of the targets of FP lovers...and it took me over a year since to even think of seriously buying the pen...I wanted to buy it from the boutique, but knew that I could never afford it on my own...I then asked for contributions from near and dear ones...!!! and my near and dear ones were so good that they generously contributed...I could collect quite a bit, but still needed an equal amount to run after the increasing price of the pen...then one find day, Hari told me that he would soon be acquiring his MB 149...and he then told me that he'd be getting a pre-used pen from one of the sellers on FPN...I then saw that this was a sensible way and asked Hari to help me out...the money that I had collected would cover the pre-used cost of the pen...Hari got in touch with Bryant Greer who owns http://www.pentime.net/ and Bryant sent me some pics of the prospective MB 140 and I was hooked!!! right and proper!!! and Hari helped me a lot in acquiring this pen...right from getting in touch with Bryant to sending him the money and keping track till the pen reached me...and it took close to 4 weeks for the pen to arrive from the US...and to add to my anxiety, there was a major incident with the post office...which unnerved me and finally, after a great deal of waiting...I could get it finally...never thought I'd see and have my own Montblanc Meisterstuck 149... (the first photo is taken by me; the other two are taken by Bryant)

Second visit to Books Sale

2009-04-20T09:31:00.002+05:30

I just couldn't resist going back to the Best Books' used books sale just one more time...the proprietor had told me on my previous visit that he'd search for Dave Barry books and asked me come back again before the 20th...and when you know that two or more Dave Barrys could be hiding in there somewhere, you just can't afford to miss the chance...so I thought...

So, once again, I dropped down mid way on my way home from college and went to YMCA... as soon as I entered the room where the books were stacked, I saw Dave Barry coming towards me with two books in his hands...I thought 'wow! if not any more Dave Barry books, at least I got to see Dave Barry...' how cool is that?

I left Dave Barry to his devices and went straight to the counter...the moment the proprietor saw me, he shook his head...and made a clicking sound...and said 'nahin hai, sab'... I still had some time, but I didn't feel like browsing...I thought I'd walk over to Al Classic (permanent) used books sale near Sangeet and see if I could turn my disappointment to appointment...while I was thinking of going out, Shruti called on my mobile and I was talking and looking at the titles on a shelf in front of me...I had seen this shelf during my previous visit and didn't expect to find anything new...I reached the last row and I thought I saw the words 'Dave...' on the cover...I pounced on it and it turned out to be one of the Dave Barrys that Vinod had mentioned...Dave Barry's Only Travel Guide You'll Ever Need ... I was enthused and emboldened now and started my hunting all over again...hoping to snare the other Dave Barry...Dave Barry in Cyber Space...I spent around 15 minutes searching and was not able to locate...maybe, somebody has purchased it...so I thought...then the proprietor's assistant came over to me and gave me a book...I was delighted to see that it was a Dave Barry...but it was not Dave Barry in Cyber Space...the one I was looking for, but Dave Barry's Greatest Hits...so what...? my mission was accomplished...partly...I went looking for two Dave Barry books...got three, one of them seen by Vinod and two which I got on my own...one more is still lurking somewhere...today is the last day of the sale...should I go again...one last visit...? what say you?

What I finally bought at the used books sale...

2009-04-18T10:10:00.001+05:30

I landed at the books sale at YMCA on Wednesday evening on way back home from college and needless to say, I was looking only for Dave Barry and Elmore Leonard…I found Maximum Bob soon enough and picked it up…saw some other novels and books that I thought I should buy, but then felt that I might not read them…but I couldn’t locate any Dave Barry books…I eventually had to ask the proprietor at the counter…he pointed to a shelf and there it was…a Dave Barry book. But it was neither of the two books that Vinod had seen when he visited the sale…the one I saw was Dave Barry Turns 40 …

I got Maximum Bob for Rs.45 and Dave Barry Turns 40 (hardback) for Rs.95…I then found a long-searched-for novel in the adjoining room where pulp fiction was stocked…The Silence of the Lambs… I had seen the movie sometime during 1990-92 in Pune. I didn’t understand much then and don’t remember anything now, but liked Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter …I’d seen Hannibal, its sequel, when it was released here in Hyderabad and liked it…Anthony Hopkins was as usual brilliant, but I would have liked Jodie Foster to have reprised the role of Clarice Starling…

I must be one of the few persons who’d read the sequels first and then came to the first one in the sequence…I had read Hannibal and Red Dragon earlier and had bought these books at a used books sale and so, I was kind of determined to buy The Silence of the Lambs too at a used books sale…and I found it here…might go there again today and see if the proprietor has managed to locate the other two or any other Dave Barry book…

Thanks Vinod…for the tip (in/advertent?)…much appreciated…I have already read 5 episodes from Dave Barry Turns 40...and Dave Barry is true to form...

Book Pointers from another Blog?

2009-04-17T11:23:00.001+05:30

I had been noticing this ‘Old Books Sale’ (by Best Books) banner every morning our college bus passes YMCA at Secunderabad for the past 10 days or so. And every morning I see this banner, I promise myself that I’d get down near YMCA on my way back from college and see what I can lay my hands on. This wasn’t happening and I felt bad for myself.

Then on Monday, I went across to Vinod (Ekbote)’s blog and saw this post on ‘A midweek haul at a book sale.’ This was about the books that he’d bought at this ‘Old Books Sale.’ As I was reading, I reached a particular point where I strongly felt that Vinod was talking to me! He wrote, “I saw two books by Dave Barry – Dave Barry in Cyberspace and Dave Barry’s Only Travel Guide You’ll Ever Need. I also saw Elmore Leonard’s ‘Maximum Bob’ that I have.”

Vinod is the person responsible for introducing me to Dave Barry and Elmore Leonard. In the case of Dave Barry, Vinod actually gifted me my first Dave Barry – Dave Barry is not making this up. I had also subsequently asked him if he’d come across any more Dave Barry books during his various visits to book haunts across Hyderabad.

After I’d heard Vinod talking passionately about Elmore Leonard’s novels, I couldn’t resist reading his novels and found and bought three in a used book store and read them. I was hooked, but couldn’t locate more. Maybe I didn’t search in the right places.

Now you know why I strongly felt that Vinod was directing these sentences at me…!!

I have become notorious in my (own) eyes for not posting in my blog regularly…but, this time, believe me, I will post on what happened next…the next day…

Fables Heard and Seen - I...Space Pen...

2009-03-24T10:34:00.001+05:30

I heard this anecdote from somebody or read it somewhere…can’t remember which now… anyway, here it goes…

When the Americans started going to space, the astronauts in the space ships supposedly faced the problem of leaking pens due to pressure related issues…I don’t know whether they were using fountain pens or ball pens…but since both contained liquid…of varying viscosities though… the leaking problem would have existed for both kinds of pens…the astronauts had problems writing in space because of this…and they had to do quite a bit of writing…making notes of their experiments and noting down observations…so, they reported this to their ground staff…and asked the engineers to find alternatives…the ground staff people started in right earnest and commissioned the designing of a new pen that would withstand pressure so that the ink wouldn’t leak…pen experts were consulted…and while all this was going on, it dawned on one of the engineers that the Russians too were sending their cosmonauts to space and they too would be facing the same problem of leaking pens and they too would have found some solution to this problem or maybe are in the process of finding one…so, this person goes to his superior who had enough powers to speak to the Russians directly and told him about what he thought…and suggested that instead of reinventing the wheel, they could make use of the Russian solution in this matter and as this was not a state security issue, the Russians would cooperate… and this American general or whoever called up his Russian counterpart and spoke to him… told him about the problem American astronauts are facing and asked him what Russians are doing about this…the Russian general or whoever replied… “We use a pencil.”

Here endeth the lesson…

This could be an apocryphal story…this might never have happened…this could be a cold war story made up by the Russians…this could be…anything…

Is the ‘story’ about the pen and the pencil, Americans and Russians, or something else altogether…?

Watching Dev D...Anurag Kashyap's take on Devdas

2009-03-23T11:27:00.001+05:30

I watched Dev D at PVR's yesterday...I had wanted to see what Anurag Kashyap had done with the theme...I was not disappointed...in fact, I got more than I expected...the movie is an interpretation of the Devdas theme, first conceptualised by Sharat Chandra Chatterjee in his novel called Devdas...it was subsequently made into movies, and many movie stars in many languages in India immortalised the role of the hero...so much so that any young man in India who suddenly starts growing a beard is thought as growing it out of being rejected by his girlfriend...and is called 'devdas'... and if he starts drinking, the name becomes all the more appropriate...because all the movie Devdas-es start growing a beard and start drinking...ostensibly to forget the pain of losing the girl...Paro...

I often wondered why Devdas became so famous...in fact, he is a loser, who has commitment-phobia, and who didn't have enough guts to run away with Paro...and Paro having had enough, marries a widower with two kids... then Devdas starts pining... and in all the movies based on the novel, Devdas is shown as a tragic hero...

Anurag Kashyap shows Devdas as who he is actually supposed to be ... a loser ... the movie then starts becoming interesting ... and gives it a different spin... and the treatment that it gets is really edgy...it kind of flies very close to being 'dangerous'...but comes back to terra firma in time...

Anurag Kashyap thanks Danny Boyle in the initial credits and I again wondered what Danny Boyle had got to do with an essentially Indian themed movie...that too brought onto the silver screen many times over... and then when the movie started 'moving' and 'grooving,' I got it... Anurag Kashyap is obviously inspired by Danny Boyle's Trainspotting and it shows in the many ways in which scenes are framed... and sometimes some scenes and images are obvious nods to Trainspotting images...and the ending is, if I may so after reading so much about Danny Boyle's films and also having seen Trainspotting, is also inspired by Danny Boyle... watch the movie and you'll know... and surprisingly, I don't recall any review mentioning this Danny Boyle connection... maybe I didn't read all of them or didn't read whatever I read carefully enough...

The Deccan Masterpiece...

2009-03-19T19:55:00.002+05:30

Hi friends…
The pen under discussion was a chance find at the Deccan Pen Stores, Secunderabad … it is called the Deccan Masterpiece... and here I think the Deccan people have tried to style this Masterpiece on the lines of ‘The Masterpiece’ that all pen lovers know about… you have the twin gold coloured bands on the cap, the clip is golden in colour with a ball at the end and on top of everything (literally!) is a round white circle, reminding you of something similar of a different shape …
The nib is the king in this pen…honestly…I hadn’t seen such a ‘big’ nib before… when I was shown the Masterpiece for the first time, I refused to buy it saying that the nib looked like a knife point… and even when I reserved one for Hari and when we went to buy that one, I was once again not enthused enough…the nib again! And just as it happens with pen addicts…I decided to buy it only to complete the Deccan brushed ebonite collection… and when I asked for the Masterpiece… I liked the design, of course… I opened the cap and there it was…the ‘bruiser’ nib… and so, I bought the Masterpiece … I got it filled with black ink… and it lays down a slightly more than fine not-so-wet line… and as with Deccan Advocates, the Masterpiece also has no starting problems… and I picked up the Masterpiece after 10 days today and it started writing from the first stroke onwards… This is the best thing that I like about Advocates and now the Masterpiece…

Now, something for the statistically minded…the pen is made of Ebonite; Brushed surface with polished barrel end and cap top; polished also at cap lip and barrel lip; the section looks like it is ebonite; and the nib and feed are fitted perfectly – no movements at all; the pen is slightly shorter...the pen has a screw cap – 7 turns to unscrew; two gold coloured bands on cap; golden coloured clip with a ball at the end, and the clip gives a satisfying click when clipped to and unclipped from my shirt pocket… Nib is Size 40 steel…length capped slightly more than 6 inches; uncapped 5 ¾ inches; posted 7 ½ inches…

Doesn't the pen look grand? like a true masterpiece...no?

Jayasrinivasa Rao

Reynolds Ministere...an unexpectedly good looking FP...and a good writer too...

2009-03-07T09:28:00.001+05:30

I didn’t know the existence of this Reynolds fountain pen, though Reynolds is well-known in India for their ball-pens. It is also ironic because quite a few traditional fountain pen makers in India attribute the shutting down of their units to the soaring popularity of Reynolds ball-pens. I remember seeing a Reynolds fountain pen-ball pen set long back in a stationery shop here, but the FP did not impress me much (I later found out that it was called Reynolds Accent). A couple of years back, Reynolds (India) opened their showroom in Hyderabad in Prasad’s Multiplex. I had gone there to watch a film and I had some time to spare and decided to go in and see what they stocked. I saw this very good looking fountain pen available in 2 colours, marbled green and marbled blue. The price was not too high, so I decided to buy the green one. They said that this FP was an imported piece!! That settled the matter (ha ha ha…)…No model name was written on it anywhere. I came back and tried their website to get the name of the pen…no luck. The Indian Reynolds site doesn’t list this pen at all…the French Reynolds site was under construction (and still is)…Anyway…I started using this pen and I was very pleased with its performance… It looked good in my shirt pocket, especially if you are wearing a light coloured shirt…the gold plated clip and bands gleam with glee!!! This FP is not available in other pen stores; you have to buy it from their showroom, which is called ‘Write Site’… and the Reynolds India site lists the locations in India… and I visited the Hyderabad Write Site recently to buy a similar pen for my friend on his birthday…I bought the brown one for him… he is mighty pleased…and it was after a couple of days later that I happened to read the payment receipt and noticed that this pen was listed as ‘Reynolds Ministere’… I again tried to cross verify on the web… no reference anywhere to this model name… I don’t know if this is the model name of this fountain pen…but, it writes well…and looks good…

And since Prasad’s is a place that we visit on and off, I was there a month back and ‘sneaked’ in to Write Site and bought the marbled brownish coloured FP…I was looking for the marbled blue, but it was not in stock…it is really stunning...

Jayasrinivasa Rao

One year of blogging...Looking back with thanks...

2009-02-25T10:45:00.001+05:30

I wanted to write these some time in January in the New Year …that was when I completed one year on blogosphere … I was busy…very busy…and my mind was occupied with lots of unfinished work… I have managed to complete most of what I had planned satisfactorily… so I thought I’d get down to writing what I had wanted to … all of you would have noticed my fascination for fountain pens by now … it was in the initial days of this fascination that I got introduced to blogging … the early days of a hobby are days of searching for information; trying to gather as much knowledge as one can… and these days of course, Google has made it easier… so, while searching for information about fountain pens, especially fountain pens in India, I hit upon many sites…one of these was www.fountainpennetwork.com and among the others was the blog of a prolific blogger from Hyderabad … I made two good friends through these sites…I met Hari through FPN and Vinod through his blog (I got connected to Vinod through his post on Mont Blanc Meisterstuck FP; which is now my 'grail' pen!!)…

I tend to think of myself as somebody who is not easily swayed…but once swayed, I stay swayed…so, now I am swaying… Vinod’s blog inspired me to start my own blogsite and Hari’s phenomenal knowledge about fountain pens inspired me to stick to this hobby and develop my own knowledge base… I decided to concentrate on Indian fountain pens and I am happy that I was able to ‘discover’ for myself some obscure handmade fountain pen brands from my adopted state, Andhra Pradesh… I learnt a whole new vocabulary…

I started my blog tentatively and my first post was on my fountain pens…rather, a list of fountain pens I owned… before I knew it, there was more and more of fountain pens in my blog rather than books and music…my long-standing passions … and then I felt that collecting FPs and blogging had come together at the right time … I was able to concentrate on my writing and was forced to think, especially while writing about music and books … I had never written anything about music before and I tried it hesitatingly here… Shruti says my writing has improved…coming from her, it is high praise indeed, as she has always been a trenchant critic of my writing…

So, some good has come out of all this one year of blogging … I have, since those early days of blogging, met Hari and Vinod … they have visited me at my home (remembering my fascination with Mont Blanc FP, Vinod had thoughtfully brought his MB along with him for me to see when he visited me and Hari brings many 'pen' goodies from Mumbai whenever he comes to Hyderabad; Hari has recently acquired a MB Meisterstuck 149 and I am dying to see it...) and we have been interacting and have become my good friends… after leaving CIEFL, I have stuck to some of my old CIEFL friends and due to a variety of reasons, I could make friends out of only a couple of people from among my colleagues in the past 8 years…and when Shruti saw me interacting regularly with my new ‘pen’ friends, she was surprised and happy for me … Thanks Vinod and Hari…

Yellow Fellows...Celluloid fountain pens from Guider

2009-02-22T16:29:00.001+05:30

I became an inadvertent recipient of some new celluloid fountain pens designed by Mr G Lakshmana Rao of Guider Pens, Rajahmundry. He was kind of asked to design a celluloid FP on the Duofold model. And I think all his red celluloid material was used up and so he used his yellow celluloid tubes to create these pens. He sent me four of these…these have no names, except that the 3 flat end ones are Duofold designs, and maybe called Guider Duofold … the one with the rounded end is the usual Guider celluloid design for that thickness and size…the red coloured one was the first celluloid FP that I purchased from Guider… and there is another brainwave design… the black ebonite with yellow celluloid bands…a kind of 'reverse' celluloid-ebonite design…

You can see the various design novelties in photo 1 …the first one has 2 metal cap bands…the cap on the second one is without any bands…the third one is the red acrylic with the usual Guider design with the flat clip…the fourth is the one with the reverse celluloid-ebonite design…the cap has a yellow celluloid band at the top where the clip begins and another yellow celluloid band at the bottom which gives the pen its reverse look…the fifth one has a black celluloid band at the cap lip…and the sixth one is a yellow celluloid in the usual Guider design with two metal bands on the cap and the arrow clip…

All these pens are ED fillers…if you notice all the celluloid pens have black cap tops and barrel ends…this design is an inevitability of celluloid pens manufacturing, at least, of what I have seen of celluloid pens made in India (Prasad, Guider, Wilson, Leader, Brahmam)…celluloid material comes in the form of tubes, unlike ebonite, which comes in the form of rods…therefore, while making pens, the celluloid tube ends have to be closed and ebonite comes in handy here…so, the black ends are actually ‘stoppers’… and what is unavoidable when it comes to making celluloid pens was converted into a ‘reverse’ design when Mr Lakshmana Rao made a similar Duofold design in black ebonite and put in those yellow bands at the top and the end… and these ebonite stoppers can also be strategically used to save celluloid material!!

I had asked Mr Lakshmana Rao to fix arrow clips for the Duofold celluloid FPs too… but for some reason, he decided to fix this elongated oval kind of clip, which I don’t fancy much …

These yellow fellows do look good, don't they?

Aye Laila-Misty Rhythms...an unusual music album

2009-02-20T15:53:00.001+05:30

Album cover-Aye Laila - Misty Rhythms

Ramana Gogula

Kush Khanna

I accidentally found my once-upon-a-time favourite music album online…some blessed soul had uploaded it…and I discovered that it is still one of my favourites…

Music has this strange quality about it that flashbacks you exactly to the same time and place and Aye Laila did that exactly to me…I was transported back in time to my days in the hostel where musical explorations was a thrill and an adventure by themselves… Aye Laila landed in my collection as part of one such musical expedition…I was, maybe, a year or so into ‘fusion’ music and anything out of the ordinary was acceptable musical fodder…some were not ‘fusion-istic’ enough…some were ‘good’…some were ‘imitations’… some did not have what I felt was essential for ‘fusion’…an inexplicable thing called ‘namak’… Aye Laila had two totally unknown names…Ramana Gogula (then) and Kush Khanna…both were based in the US and had formed a musical collaboration and named their band as Misty Rhythms… Ramana Gogula would eventually go on to become a household name in Andhra Pradesh due to his ‘different’ compositions for Telugu films…but Misty Rhythms was probably a kind of portfolio of Ramana Gogula…Kush Khanna is a trained tabla player…and whereas Ramana Gogula, growing up in India, was fascinated by reggae, rock, and obviously admired Bob Marley, Kush Khanna, in the US, grew up learning the tabla and Indian rhythms…and they met in San Francisco and musical interactions resulted in their forming a band called Misty Rhythms… ‘misty’ being a tribute to the misty mornings in San Francisco…and ‘rhythms,’ obviously to the Indian, African, and Reggae rhythms…

This album was released by Sony India and at that time I did not have enough money to buy a CD, and therefore bought a cassette…when I hear those songs now, I look back and try to ‘see’ how I felt when I heard then for the first few times…this album had a total of 12 tracks… and for somebody like me who was exploring different musics, it was a musical treat…the opening bars of the first song ‘Aye Laila’ got me hooked…the song starts of as strumming of an ektara kind of sound and slowly the rhythm sneaks in and before you know what is happening the tune segues into a full blown reggae rhythm…and from somewhere else comes the harmonica…breathes in a tune for a few seconds…and the song begins with Ramana Gogula’s vocals… just lovely…! I thought that the first song is a sample Reggae song and that there would be many more ‘kinds’ of music that this album stores…I was wrong…the album is soaked with Reggae rhythms…at least 5 songs are infused with Reggae and this was for me the first non-Bob Marley album that had so much hypnotic Reggae rhythm…and that too an Indian music album…! There are other kinds of music also…for once you some kind of a European folk song (which I learnt later, was a Bulgarian folk song), and one also gets to hear 3 straightforward instrumental renditions…with lots of Indian classical sounds… and this album also brings in Telugu lyrics …the first song ‘Aye Laila’ is reprised as ‘Aye Pilla’ with Telugu lines replacing the Hindi ones…

And this album so fascinated me that I’d have presented copies to at least 6-7 friends on their birthdays…and they were more than pleased to listen to such refreshing ‘Indian’ music…but the saddest part was this remained their one and only album so far and I don’t see any hope of a second…and therefore, it is also one of a kind musical treat… search online and you find the album somewhere…and you will not regret listening to Misty Rhythms…

Camlin Trinity Fountain Pen-a handsome pen

2009-02-19T13:48:00.001+05:30

I had written in one of my earlier posts that I had visited this town called Malappuram in Kerala …and the most pleasant surprise was finding a Camlin Trinity fountain pen on the first day of my visit itself…

Camlin is a long-standing pen and ink and other stationery manufacturing company in India and makes inexpensive fountain pens…and for most of us the first fountain pen that we got to use was usually Camlin…and many of us also have lots of memories of our first Camlin FPs…

I had seen a photo of Trinity pen in the Camlin website and from among the fountain pens featured in the website, this was the most good looking and the most expensive (Rs.70/-; around 1½ dollars) (of course, I didn’t know that Camlin had already brought out their signature pen called ‘SD’ in honour of their founder Sharad Dandekar which costs Rs.600). I couldn’t find this pen in the big pen stores that I usually visit in Hyderabad, and therefore it was a nice surprise to see this pen in Malappuram. It must have been a left-over pen or a never-bought pen because of its price considering the size of the town. Anyway, I bought this pen and the pen looked really good for its price. And the cardboard box in which it was housed said, ‘FIRST TIME IN INDIA: 3-IN-1 INK FILLING MECHANISM.’ Ink can be filled through a convertor (comes along with the pen), or a cartridge can be used or the pen can also be used as an eye . This could be the reason why it is called ‘Trinity.’

Looks-wise and considering its cost, the Trinity looks really good with a brushed steel cap and a black plastic body. Cost-wise, I would grab the pen just as I did as soon as I saw it. The most interesting part is the clip, which is gold coloured and not very wide. The clip originates from the centre of the upwardly tapering cap and kind of flows down till just above the company and model name engraved at the cap lip…like a tuft of hair flowing down from the top of a shaven head…the name Camlin and TRINITY are engraved at the cap lip.

Once the pen is uncapped, you see gold coloured trimmings at the neck of the section…and a gold coloured nib…the nib doesn’t have a hole (kind of an 'eyeless' nib...I got this tip from a fellow FP enthusiast on FPN) , though there is a faint circular indentation at the end of the slit on the nib…the nib itself is smallish and is curved on both sides half embracing the feeder…only half of the feeder can be seen and it has got horizontal fins running around the feeder (this kind of feeder has a technical name, I am sure). A gold coloured ring forms the border between the section and the barrel…this ring is not fixed, and therefore comes loose whenever the barrel is opened. The pen has a snap cap. It is 5 ½ inches capped; close to 6 inches posted; and close to 4 ½ inches uncapped.

I filled the convertor with Sheaffer Skrip Black ink. The nib is tipped ‘fine’ and lays down a fine wet line while writing with a hint of writing whisper. The nib is not ‘butter’ smooth, but is not scratchy either. The flow is smooth and looks like the feeder is functioning well. I wouldn’t take back points for lack of ‘butter’ smoothness. It is a really good, inexpensive and handsome pen for everyday use...

Celluloid Dreams...

2009-02-18T20:10:00.001+05:30

This happens to only addicts…when you need that regular dose for that periodic high…ha ha ha…what to do? I’ve been angling for a marbled celluloid FP for a long time…I saw these pens at Deccan Pen Stores in Hyderabad, but what they showed me were all with gold nibs and I couldn’t afford them…I then asked for steel nib celluloid FPs and there was a lot of dilly dallying…and ‘no stocks now’… and ‘will let you know’…and so on and so forth…and one day, I was in Abids, and had no business with Deccan Pen Stores and buying FPs was not even a speck of thought on my mental horizon…without my knowledge, my feet led me to the shop and I kind of lazily shuffled around…and suddenly remembered my marbled celluloid longing and shakily asked Mr Wasim if he could offer me a steel nib celluloid…he gave me a smile and a laugh and took out a pen case and offered me a beautiful red marbled celluloid FP…a Leader…he said the clip and band were gold filled…the pen is so beautiful that I felt strange emotions…honestly…the marbling, and the different effects at different light angles…I had to have this pen…I immediately decided to own this one…Mr Wasim then took out another pen…a marbled gray Brahmam…what was happening? I had asked for one and was now getting two…and the clip and band were not gold filled, and so the pen was within my range…I couldn’t resist…the addict was getting excited…two shots…I was beginning to float…and then, Mr Wasim took out another celluloid FP…a marbled green celluloid similar to the marbled red…a Leader…I was going bonkers…I would hit the roof anytime now…I was kind of mentally paralysed…I couldn’t even calculate how much money I had in my account and whether I could afford all three…reason went for a toss…my ‘celluloid’ dreams were coming true in the most unexpected manner… But reason triumphed…only for a brief while though…I could afford to buy the red and the gray pens, without seriously compromising my wallet…and I bought them, with my heart and mind still stuck on the green that I was leaving behind…I felt I was leaving something personal and precious behind…and I knew that I’d come back to claim it…and it was soon enough…and this ‘soon enough’ happened soon enough because through sheer luck, I got some unexpected money for some extra job that I did at my college, just about enough to pay for the green and claim it…and I acted frantically, calling up the Secunderabad branch of Deccan Pen Stores and asking them to get in touch with the Abids branch to get the green over to Secunderabad, so that I could pick it up on my way back home from college…within two days, I had the green also with me…it was then that I could breathe easily…

Simple and cute pen stands at handicrafts fair in Malappuram

2008-12-30T13:11:00.002+05:30

While I was in Malappuram, I couldn't help going on a pen hunt… Malappuram is a medium sized town and one wouldn’t expect to find a full fledged pen shop there… but, I saw a couple of stationery shops in the street where the lodge was located… and I found some FPs there…well…that’s for another post… A ‘handicrafts mela (fair)’ was also on in the town and Shruti and I decided to see what they had on offer…our lodge was located in a place called Down Hill and it was literally ‘down the hill’ and this if you have visited one handcrafts fair in India, you know what to expect when you visit another… but you never know … things which wouldn’t have attracted my attention a year ago seemed to call out to me … like these two inexpensive pen stands that I saw in the Kerala State Handicrafts Stall … very ingeniously made from bamboo … bamboo looks suited for pen stands.

I bought two, in fact, they had only two models… the smaller diameter ones and the larger diameter ones … and the larger pen stand also has a small receptacle … for a specially made inkwell? or for a round shaped eraser… though when I bought them, I didn’t think in these terms … these looked nice and inexpensive…and I liked the ingenuity of using bamboo for pen stands … and those small paint dabs look like Japanese style flowers … For the purposes of this post, I have used the small diameter stand for my Leader and Brahmam celluloid FPs…you can see them in the photo…the stand looks made for these pens… and I have used the larger stand for the heavy thick FPs like the Guider Jumbo, Ratnam Supreme, and Deccan Major (brushed ebonite) … the bigger Deccan Masterpiece will be more appropriate I think…I have yet to get one…

I took some photographs of the pen stands at various nooks inside by flat…just to make them look interesting…

Our Enchanting Kerala Trip

2008-12-29T20:12:00.002+05:30

Backwaters at Ponnani
At the Bharatapuzha River-gently swaying in the breeze

A two-storeyed Kerala style house opposite Thiruvegappura Mahakshetram

Kunthippuzha River from atop the Pulamanthole Bridge

The Thirumaandhamkunnu Bhagavathi Temple, Angadippuram

Shruti and I visited Kerala a week back…the first time I was stepping into God’s Own Country after 1978…I was thrilled…we were invited to conduct a 2-day workshop for District Resource Group members (high school teacher trainers) of Malappuram District…we were put up in Malappuram town…and the experience of conducting the workshop and the sightseeing, both were fabulous…the workshop was hosted by the EMEA College of Arts and Science, Kondotty and the District Panchayath, Malappuram…we visited Calicut beach, but it was dark by the time we reached there and the there was some kind of a power cut…so, no power and we saw the beach in darkness! Shruti is a regular water baby and even the darkness did not deter her from having a brief encounter with the Arabian Sea…this was on the evening of the first day of the workshop…

After the two days of workshop, we had kept a day in reserve for sight seeing…the coordinator of the workshop, Mr P P Roy and his colleague, Mr Prem Kumar accompanied us on this sightseeing tour…it was extremely gracious of them to spend a whole day with us...Mr Roy was with us throughout the 12 hours that we spent…we almost went around the district…we visited a couple of temples, just to see the lovely and earthy Kerala style temple architecture …we travelled through roads, lanes and bylanes and were rewarded with enchanting sights of greenery all around and the rivers and the backwaters and the Arabian Sea once again… I have lots to share about this trip … I will only post some photos now … more later ...

A Rare Find - Prasad Celluloid Pen

2008-11-20T09:35:00.003+05:30

All right…after the Prasad ebonites, here are some photos of the Prasad celluloid FP…I thought I’d do a separate post and not add it to the original Prasad post, because this is a special and beautiful pen…I have seen plain celluloid pens (the Guider yellow and red) and marbled celluloid pens (Brahmam Leader), but this one was unique for me…but I think there are many designs that can be made possible with celluloid…I don’t know how to describe this colour…is it maroon-ish, with a light pinkish tinge?… maroon ‘mosaic’ would be a better description and the pinkish bits look very shiny…the pen looks good to eat…I wonder how they manage to get this design…

The pen is a screw cap ED filler…5 ¼ inches capped; 4.6 inches uncapped and 6 inches posted…the thickness is the same as the Guider celluloid FP…the nib is engraved with the name ‘Iriloy’ and it is an ex-fine nib…the nib also has the letters engraved ‘Ae’ inside a circle…I have been using one of these with Chelpark crimson violet ink and it writes very well…as is usual with Indian celluloid pens, the barrel end is topped off with ebonite…we can see two cap bands, and they are slightly loose in both pens…the cap bands also have a slightly old brassy look…the clip looks like the ‘Parker’ arrow clip with ‘Prasad’ on it…the pens are definitely old, but unused ones…we can see a number of blemishes here and there…

In fact, this is an ‘afterthought’ pen…I have noticed this with pen-makers here that they don’t offer celluloid pens to their customers initially…and if they do offer, it is only one…it might be because they have a limited number of celluloid pens and want most of their customers to have one celluloid pen at least…Mr Jain also offered me this celluloid pen after I had placed the order for the ebonites…so, in that sense, I am lucky…I tried asking for more…I am addicted, you see!…and he kind of gently told me that these are all he had…

Bling on My Blog...

2008-11-19T14:11:00.001+05:30

Regular visitors to my blog (I would like to feel that I have loads of visitors...!!!) would have noticed the drastic changes in the page...I binged on gadgets...and added a lot of good natured bling on my site...in fact, I was getting bored of seeing the same old bespectacled mug and pitchers (sic!!!) of pens on my blogsite...and I was fooling around in the layout section and decided to explore the gadgets...actually, I was looking for a 'counter'...but instead, I found a lot of interesting 'gadgets'...and went on adding them to the site, oblivious of the 'havoc' it was creating on the page...I found some of my favourite painters - Rene Magritte, Matisse, Klimt, Jackson 'Jack the Dripper' Pollock, Wassily Kandinsky, Monet, and my all time favourite Dear Van Gogh...I tried looking for my favourite Indian artists, Ghulam Mohammed Sheikh, Tyeb Mehta, J Swaminathan, Husain, K G Subrahmanyam, and others...but unfortunately, they were not listed there...

Now you can see a new painting every day of these famous painters of the Western world on my blog...and a couple of photographs...National Geographic photo of the day and Nasa photo of the day...and for the poetically inclined, I have a daily Haiku...those succint single drop poems... and for those who want some cogitation, there are daily quotes from some of the most famous and sometimes iconoclast writers...Confucius, Nietzsche, Orwell, and Chanakya...how can I leave my blog without any music...so now you have streaming music...again, my favourite...Jazz...

A feast for your senses...some colour relief for your jaded eyes tired of seeing fountain pen photos...and some 'sukoon' for your ears...some 'masala' for your mind...

Stay as long as you want...enjoy the paintings, music, and quotes...in case you want to add or delete or replace a gadget...drop a line...your comments are always welcome...

Jai...

Watching 'Charandas Chor' at Ravindra Bharati

2008-11-17T12:00:00.001+05:30

Two weeks back...on the 5th of November...I got to watch one of the legends of Indian theatre on stage...I watched Habib Tanvir on stage as be appeared briefly playing the role of the queen's counsellor in his iconic play 'Charandas Chor'...this play was a part of the Qadir Ali Baig theatre festival held a Hyderabad...I love watching plays and used to catch quite a few plays during my student days at CIEFL, but of late the travel to and from college has made sure that I return bus-lagged in the evening and so going to plays has become a rarity...so I was in two minds when I got this pass for Charandas Chor...I really had to plan...fortunately, one of our college buses touches a spot near Ravindra Bharati where the play was staged and I could make it on time...the hall was packed and I think most of the audience came to see 'Habib Tanvir's Charandas Chor' and not the play...there was quote a jostle for seats...and a few high and mighty babus were seen looking for seats and they had arrived fasionably late...I tried very hard to get involved in the proceedings...the play was very much up my alley...folk songs, folk dialect, folk humour...all these things I cherish in Indian theatre...I enjoyed whenever I drifted into the play...I enjoyed the melodious singing of Nagin Tanvir, Habib Tanvir's daughter...the actor who played Charandas was really good and brought out the 'hoot' quality of the role...the best part of the whole experience was to see Habib Sa'ab on stage...he is old and frail now and agreed to don the grease paint at the request of Qadir Ali Baig's son Mohammed Ali Baig...and the gesture was liked and appreciated by all...and when he spoke before and after the play, one could see glimpses of his wit and humour...in a extremely unselfconscious manner, he said that he has brought his 'ghasa, ghisa, pita' Charandas Chor to Hyderabad...ha ha ha...

For me, there was another bonus...during the interval, it was announced that a CD containing folk songs of the troupe was being sold in the foyer...I went out to see what the CD was about...it turned out to be folk and other songs sung by Nagin Tanvir...as I had already heard her singing on stage, there was no hesitation in picking up this CD...and I enjoyed a variety of songs...

I had earlier seen a Telugu version of this iconic play and this first-time viewing of Charandas Chor kind of filled a gap in the must-watch list of modern Indian plays...

R(ea)iding The White Tiger

2008-11-13T12:14:00.001+05:30

It is two weeks since I read Aravind Adiga's Booker winning novel...when the book was released and I saw it at Book Selection Centre in Secunderabad, I wanted to buy it...it had received some 'interesting' reviews and moreover, he is my country cousin...from Mangalore, Karnataka...the same place where I hail from...and there is an 'Adiga' branch in our family and who knows, he could be related through some roundabout route...anyway, I thought I'd wait till the paperback is released...then Aravind got nominated...then shortlisted...and then he won...now, what to do? no more waiting for the paperback...I bought it the next day...and read it in two sittings...it is a page turner...a different kind of narrative...that means, a simple straightforward narrative...no styles and flourishes...no digressions...and it uses an kind of 'epistolary' style...though not the same as the one used in the early English novels...I don't want to describe the plot or characters here...I enjoyed reading the novel...

I wanted Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies to win the Booker...for me personally, Sea of Poppies is an infinitely better novel than The White Tiger...since I have read both novels, I also feel that The White Tiger is an important Indian novel to have come out at this point in time...it does offer some glee material for some critics...and some sulk material for Indian critics...last week's The Hindu's Literary Review on Sunday carried a longish article on The White Tiger saying essentially that the novel is 'inauthentic'... one doesn't want to start a debate or hold forth on 'authenticity' here...if I can use a cricket metaphor, this novel is a 'reverse swinging' ball...for the ball to reverse swing, the players have to keep one side shining and allow the other side to lose shine and colour... Adiga has tried to show the other side of the shining ball...to say that if only one side is kept shining, the ball has the capacity to reverse swing...

Fountain Pens of AP - Prasad Pens (Part 3)

2008-11-12T10:38:00.001+05:30

Once this entire exercise of discovering, ordering, and finally receiving the pens was over, I realised reflectively that the time taken from my first phone call till the delivery of pens was actually to make the pens with the existing material…and this batch of pens was probably one of the last batches of pens made by Prasad Pens…

When you see the photos, you will detect some blemishes, slight pitting, scratches, and so on…but these didn’t deter me from liking them…and again, like all other handmade pens from India, and especially, Andhra Pradesh, keen readers and collectors might detect a number of elements copied from more illustrious international brands, for instance, the Parker arrow inspired clip on the Baby…I dip tested all these pens and most of the pens are good writers and nibs are smooth and feel good to grip and write…

All the 4 models of Prasad ebonite FPs are ED fillers and the nibs have “Prasad – 1st Quality – Alloy – Tipped Fine” engraved on them and an encircled letter ‘A’ at the bottom probably indicating that the nib maker ‘Ambitious’ is the manufacturer of these nibs…if the nibs are actually ‘Ambitious’ nibs, then going by previous experience, these nibs would last quite long…and again, all feeders too have ‘Prasad’ engraved on them…

Prasad Duofold: ED filler…this is the largest of the 4 models the Prasad Duofold can be compared in length and girth to Lamy Safari…
Prasad Major: around half an inch shorter than the Prasad Duofold; compares with Waterman Hemisphere GT in length and girth…
Prasad Medium: can be compared with Parker Rialto in terms of length and thickness…
Prasad Baby: ED filler; the thinnest ebonite FP that I have seen so far; the clip is different though, it is the arrow clip similar to the Parker model clips, with Prasad engraved on it…

Friends…more than acquiring the pens, it was the journey towards locating the pens that was more exciting and tense…at one point, I wondered whether I’d get the pens or not…but thankfully, they arrived minus some promises, but all the same, the search has been eventful…

I keep hearing murmurs and rumours about other already extinct and soon to be extinct pen brands in many small towns in Andhra Pradesh…this is a small effort to rescue some of that entrepreneurial legacy of hand made fountain pens in India…I have sent out feelers to my friends and acquaintances across the state, something interesting might turn up…who knows…

Jayasrinivasa Rao

Fountain Pens of AP - Prasad Pens (Part 2)

2008-11-11T09:34:00.001+05:30

While speaking to Mr Jain, I asked him a little bit about how Prasad Pens came about and he told me that his chief pen technician, Mr Poornachandra Rao, would be able to help me. Mr Rao has been working as a pen maker & technician with Prasad Pens for 40 years, he proudly said, and gave me some bits of history of Prasad Pens…

Prasad Pens was started by Mr Taniganti Prasada Rao in 1953 in Tenali, a district town in Andhra Pradesh. At one point of time in history, Tenali was a very important town in Andhra Pradesh known for its rich cultural and literary legacy. Tenali is best-known as the hometown of Tenali Ramakrishna (also known as Tenali Rama), the legendary poet and wit in King Krishna Deva Raya's court. Three canals of the Krishna River flow through Tenali making it a part of the rice bowl of Andhra Pradesh.

In its early days, Prasad Pen Company used to manufacture fountain pens and ball-pens in ebonite and celluloid. The company also made gold nib pens. But, their stock of celluloid is over and since celluloid has to be imported at exorbitant rates and is no longer viable, Prasad Pen Company now makes pens only in ebonite. They have also stopped making gold nib pens because of the increasing cost of gold and total dearth of skilled workers proficient in making gold nibs.

In 1977, the Prasad Pen Company was sold to the Jain family and the family has been managing the fortunes of the pen company ever since. It is clear that of late they haven’t been able to sustain the onslaught of various trendy, colourful, and lightweight ballpoint/gel pen brands and the rapid decline in the use of fountain pens has added to their gradual disappearance from the pen manufacturing scene. One of the signs is that one rarely hears of Prasad Pens. Let alone Andhra Pradesh, even most of the residents of Tenali don’t know that a fountain pen company exists and is struggling for survival in their midst.

I waited for a long long time after placing the order for the pens to be delivered…and finally after innumerable phone calls and almost one and half months, I received the pens and was disappointed to see that the pen I dreamed about most – mottled white ebonite – was not among them…I examined the other pens and they were uniformly good…the clip, nib, and feeder all had the ‘Prasad’ imprint on them, making them exclusive…I later spoke to Mr Jain and he said that they couldn’t get the material for the mottled white pen and therefore were not able to make it…the Duofold (it may not look like ‘the’ Duofold’, but it is what Mr Jain calls the pen) is the largest (both thickness and length) of the 4 models and the ‘Baby’ is the thinnest…in fact, it is the thinnest ebonite pen I have seen so far…

Fountain Pens of AP - Prasad Pens (Part 1)

2008-11-10T09:59:00.001+05:30

It was a PM by Hari in my mail box on Fountain Pen Network that sent me on this hunt. In the PM, he sent me a URL which mentioned the name of a pen brand in Andhra Pradesh called Ashoka Pens based in a town called Tenali. I enquired at the pen shops in Hyderabad and none of them had this pen and most of them hadn’t even heard of this brand. I then decided to take another route. I teach in a college in Hyderabad and a fair number of my colleagues are from other small and large towns in Andhra Pradesh who have gravitated to the capital city. After numerous enquiries, I discovered that a member of our library staff is from Tenali. When I asked her if she knew anything about Ashoka Pens, she gave me a blank look and then told me that she had left Tenali long years ago and had settled in Hyderabad and that she’d call up and ask her uncle, who lives in Tenali.

After a couple of days, she gave a phone number and told me that her uncle had managed to get in touch with the proprietor of Ashoka Pens and asked me to call the number and speak to the proprietor. I spoke to him the same day and the news was not so good. He told me that he had closed down his pen manufacturing unit almost 6 years back and had sold away all his machinery and stock. He said his pen manufacturing unit couldn’t withstand the ballpoint pen revolution and since it was a small scale industry, almost like a cottage industry, it couldn’t sustain prolonged sluggishness in business. I felt very sad and asked him if he had at least a couple of FPs for my collection and for posterity. He said that even he doesn’t have a sample of the pens manufactured by him and that his friend had taken away the lone FP he had. I continued the talk for a little while more, prodding his memory in the hope that he’d remember some forgotten cache where he had stowed away some pens. No such luck. But he said he knew another pen company called Prasad Pens in the same city and would ask the proprietor if he had any pens to spare.

I had heard about Prasad Pens…Hari had told me that Satish had gifted him 2 ebonite Prasad ED fillers and had also sent me the photos…In a sense, Prasad Pens follows in the footsteps of Ratnam Pens and Guider Pens, who set up pen companies in small towns in Andhra Pradesh…

I waited for a week, and then called the person at Ashoka Pens to enquire if he had spoken to the people at Prasad Pens. He said he had and gave me the contact number. I called this number and spoke to the current owner, Mr Anil Kumar Jain and told him what I wanted. He was happy that someone had taken the trouble to get in touch with him and that someone still used fountain pens in this age. He said Prasad Pens manufactured pens in four basic models – Duofold, Medium, Major, Baby – in four ebonite colours. I was aware of the three usual colours – black, mottled brown, and mottled green – but he said they also manufacture pens which are mottled white in colour. I was fascinated by this. I wanted one of each model and each colour…and I asked him if he had all of them…he said he had them and that he’d send them... I then asked him if he had any celluloid pens…he said he’d check and let me know…a couple of days later, he said he could give me 2 celluloid pens as they were left over from a batch of pens he had made earlier for a customer… I had always fancied celluloid pens and I was more than happy to accept the offer…and then…I waited…and waited…

Raghu Dixit soars with Santha Shishunala Sharief...

2008-10-28T17:12:00.001+05:30

A friend of mine gave me news of a surprising and pleasant nature while chatting last week...she directed my attention towards an album by a singer named Raghu Dixit... I had seen this album in my favourite music store in Hyderabad, Sangeet Sagar, but for some reason did not pick it up...what with young singers releasing albums at the drop of a hat, I didn't have the patience to even check out the names of the tracks... while directing my attention towards the album she said that Raghu Dixit has sung two Kannada tracks in the album...she obviously knew what to say so that I'd move expectantly towards the album...'Kannada tracks' caught my attention...I had to listen to this album...but I did not have the time to go Sangeet Sagar, but she had also helpfully given me the url of a site which had limited time downloads of tracks, so there I went and first checked the names of the tracks...and to my great surprise and delight, the two Kannada tracks were songs written by Santha Shushunala Sharief...a sufi saint, highly respected and popular for his mystical and metaphysical songs... Santha Shushunala Sharief's songs were made popular in Kannada by Dr N S Lakshminarayana Bhatta, who unearthed and researched most of Santha Shushunala Sharief's songs and Sri C Ashwath, who sang them with emotion and great verve, so much so that C Ashwath's voice became synonymous with Santha Shushunala Sharief... so, with all this at the back of my mind, I waited to listen to 'Sorutihudu maneya maaligi,' an extremely popular song...the opening of the song is superb...with thunder and rain and rain drops falling...in tune with the opening line 'Sorutihudu maneya maaligi...agnandadinda....sorutihudu maneya maaligi' which means 'the roof of the house is leaking...with ignorance'...then Raghu Dixit comes on with his soaring vocals... I was hooked... the music is superb... and the other Kannada track 'Gudugudiya sedi nodu' was equally superb... the songs doesnt take away anything from the initial popular renditions by Ashwath...in fact, Raghu Dixit's interpretations enhance the songs and take them to a different level...

I am sorry Raghu Dixit, I didnt pick up this album when I saw it... I will pick it up soon...thank you for bringing Santha Shishunala Sharief that much more closer to the contemporary Kannada youth...

Jayasrinivasa Rao

Chutney Music...my experiences-IV

2008-10-14T12:31:00.003+05:30

In the initial days of listening to Chutney Music and reading web-based articles, I had this great urge to write a scholarly article on this…all kinds of ideas were hopping around in my head…making connections…trying to give it an attractive title and sub-title and a good opening paragraph…and after listening to the D’Bhuyaa Saaj concert, I was enthused and pepped up and made several tentative openings…I wanted to situate Chutney Music in the midst of various India Diaspora musics, the most famous example being the Asian Underground Music scene in England with its mixture of Bhangra, Indian classical, and electronica…and as I was also listening to loads of Asian Underground bands and individual artistes, this was a natural kind of inclination…

But the one issue that caught my attention was the question of identity… and this was triggered off by Ajeet Praimsingh’s comments…we were discussing Chutney Music and then Ajeet Praimsingh related an incident… “yesterday I went to ma hotel room and switched on my TV, maan, and was watching songs…and I see this maan singing on TV…Lotay La… maan…he has taken our song, maan, he was singing our song, maan…” Initially, I did not understand what he said…then it dawned after a couple of seconds… those days, a bhojpuri style song and music video was a rage on TV music channels for a brief while…called ‘Lootela,’ it was a lavish music video in the remix style, done quite well actually with Urmila Matondkar as the focus of attention, and the actors too did their job well and the singer himself, called D' Raja, appeared on the video singing the bhojpuri style song (see it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVOo_JgvBng) … I tried to figure out Ajeet Praimsingh’s statement and realised that he was talking about a Chutney song that became a mammoth hit in the 1960s-70s in Trinidad and catapulted the singer Sonny Mann into instant fame…the song was called ‘Lotayla’… (catch the song here, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOcH3NbzupM; though it appears in youtube, there is no video here, only the song sung by Sonny Mann, but this is a later version, sung along with Denis Belfon and General Grant, which is actually a Soca; but you can see the similarities and differences)… and this was what Ajeet Praimsingh was referring to when he said, ‘he has taken our song, maan…’ it sounded amusing then, and then I thought about it and felt that this posed an interesting question… the question of the song’s identity … Whose song is it anyway? Where did the song originate from? Where did it go? Who took it there? Whose song is it now? Who does it belong to?

I am still searching for answers…

Chutney Music...my experiences-III

2008-10-12T09:46:00.003+05:30

Princess Priya Kelly in the foreground, on the right sitting on the floor is Rasika Dindial

You can see Rakesh Yankaran on the Harmonium to Rasika's right on the floor, and Surender Ramoutar on the Steel Pan standing between Rakesh and Rasika

My best experience with Chutney Music came in February 2005 (14th Feb 2005 to be exact). I heard from Shruti that a series of Indian Diaspora music concerts were being held at University of Hyderabad and that a group from Trinidad has come…I couldn’t hide my excitement…Shruti and I reached the venue almost an hour before the scheduled start…and on the steps of the auditorium I saw a man in a distinctly colourful shirt chatting with a group of students…I too sat down to listen and discovered that this man was part of the music group called D’Bhuya Saaj [a bhojpuri term meaning ‘sitting on the ground (bhuyaan) and singing/entertaining (saaj)’] from Trinidad which would be performing that day…

I still remember…we were talking and I told this man that I had visited a site called www.ajeetpraimsingh.com and learned a lot about Trinidad and Indo-Caribbean music...about Dhantal…about Doubles...about this person called Ajeet Praim Singh, an industrious merchant and music producer who is working hard to keep Indo-Trinidadian traditions alive in Trinidad...the music of Kabir Das…and he said ‘it is myself’...I was stunned and surprised and delighted and clasped his hand …it was totally unexpected and it turned out that he was the manager of the group and also was on stage with the shak shak…I spoke to him for quite some time about chutney music and it was a delight to hear the sing song West Indian English…he urged me to write a book… ‘you write a book, maan’…

After we talked, I entered the auditorium and to my surprise, saw that Dr Helen Myers was also there...I had read her book and here she was in person and I couldn’t believe my luck that day...the entire Diaspora music concert series was organised as lec-dems with one expert talking about the music before the actual performance and Helen Myers was the expert for Chutney Music…she was one of the earliest to write about chutney music and according to the person who introduced her, Dr Myers has followed the Bhojpuri Diaspora around the world and has researched, written about and recorded their music in such distant lands as Fiji, Mauritius, and of course Trinidad and Guyana…I could speak to her briefly and told her about my interest…she was happy to know that I had read her book and gave me her e-mail and asked me to keep in touch…

And then the music began ...it was mind-blowing...a live chutney music performance at my doorsteps literally!! I heard and saw famous names like ‘D’ Rani Rasika Dindial, ‘D’ Raja Rakesh Yankaran, Lily Ramcharan and just like any Bhojpuri song performance in India, the group also had a dancer, ‘Princess’ Priya Kelly… who came in on some songs and danced in typical thumka style (for quick reference…‘beedi’ and ‘namak ishq’ songs in Omkara!!!) which had the audience roaring in approval… I had heard Rasika's song on tape and it was so nice to hear her live on Lazy Man, her mega hit of the late 90s…Rakesh Yankaran sang a devotional song ‘ganga jamuna saraswati’ at the beginning and also his most famous Mousie … and also Dholak Baje… Lily Ramcharan sang The New Dawn, a song written to mark the arrival of the first Indians in Trinidad…and talks about the trials and tribulations and progress made by them… and the group also sang some typical crossover chutney soca songs like Lover Boy, Lazy Man and we also heard typical Tan singing by Rakesh Yankaran who sang Savari Surat, a devotional Trinidad style thumri…

The live sounds of Dhantaal, Dholak, Steel Pan Drum…and the other members of the group Molly Ramcharan, Devarnand Nagessar, Rishi Ragbir and Jagdeo Deebaram (on Dhantaal and Dholak…in fact all singers took their turns with the Dhantaal…) Surender Ramoutar (steel pan)…and of course, Ajeet Praim Singh on the shak shak… and all of them were moving and dancing on the stage and it was infectious…they urged the audience to come on and dance on stage…I had half a mind to go, but didn’t see anybody else volunteering and so suppressed my urge to dance with a live chutney band….maybe sometime in future when I go to Trinidad, I will muster enough courage to go on stage and dance to chutney tunes…

And the icing on the cake… ever the entrepreneur, Ajeet Praim Singh had brought some chutney music CDs produced by him and I hadn’t forethought this…Shruti and I fished around in our wallets and pockets and pooled together enough to buy 3 CDs ... of my favourite singers that day...Rasika's and Rakesh's and the special CD on India Arrival Day...

It was truly a memorable evening for a chutney fan… I didn’t have a digital camera or any camera at that time, but I wanted my readers to have a feel of the performance and so I searched the net and found some photos in online editions of newspapers of their tour in India and I have pasted a couple of photos of the D’ Bhuyaa Saaj performances in India (they performed in 7 cities in India)…these are 2 photos of ‘Princess’ Priya Kelly dancing with other members of the group in the background…

More to come…ha ha ha…

Jayasrinivasa Rao

Chutney Music...my experiences - II

2008-10-11T12:42:00.002+05:30

I was getting more and more interested in chutney music and located a lot of samples on the Internet, some of which I could download and listen… I enjoyed listening to the swinging rhythms and the West Indian accented Hindi lyrics sometimes interspersed with English lyrics… I wanted to know more about this wonderful music from India which had taken root in alien soil and had grown into a totally fascinating flowering tree… happy to incorporate influences and yet retaining its basic core… my friends helped me in acquiring books on Chutney Music…and so I read Helen Myers’ Music of Hindu Trinidad: Songs from the Indian Diaspora (The University of Chicago Press)…but unfortunately, I was not able to get the CD of songs which accompanied this book…

The next book that I read was Peter Manuel’s East Indian Music in the West Indies: Tan Singing, Chutney, and the Making of the Indo-Caribbean Culture … as is my usual practice, I had harangued my friend Vijay in the US to send me this book, as I didn’t want to miss the CD that accompanied this book… the book was riveting and I read it in two instalments…Peter Manuel has given a detailed historical and musical account of chutney music and his writing style is very engaging…but the most enthralling part was in the music in the CD…Manuel has written about and included songs that are part of what Indian-West Indians call Tan singing…this is a repertoire of songs, basically religious, that the Indians have nurtured and developed into a kind of ‘classical’ music, as opposed to the more ‘popular’ chutney music…

So, you have Trinidadian/Guyanese/Surinamese thumris, bhajans, tillanas, holis, dhrupads, and ghazals as part of this Tan singing…for people familiar with Hindustani classical music, these genres mean something specific, but when you listen to Tan singing, you realise that these genres have taken a life of their own with little or no connection at all to the genres of the same name in Hindustani classical music…they have built a separate repertoire of ‘classical’ music with remembered music and developed these genres as years went by…Manuel quotes Trinidadian sitarist, composer, and music authority Mangal Patasar, who once remarked about tan-singing, “You take a capsule from India, leave it here for a hundred years, and this is what you get.”

More to come...

jaisiri: Chutney Music...my experiences - I

2008-10-10T11:36:00.002+05:30

http://aingram.web.wesleyan.edu/chutney.html
http://www.toronto-lime.com/music/articles/the_history_of_chutney.htm
http://www.triniview.com/douglamusic.htm

Chutney Music...my experiences - I

2008-10-10T11:31:00.003+05:30

It must be sometime in 2004 or so…that I heard about chutney music as the music of Indians living in Trinidad…and then began my deep interest in this music…I scoured the internet in search of information and samples…I got a considerable amount of information and some articles and details about books…and for the first time, I heard the music…it was Bhojpuri songs with a twist…a tangy twist…what they called ‘chutney music’…as tangy as chutney…I then discovered that this music is prevalent in Guyana and Suriname too…that is, wherever Indians were taken in the Caribbean as indentured labourers in the 19th century by the British (pl read Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh)…so, what is chutney music? A lot has been written on this subject by many experts and researchers…so let us say that chutney music is the music of the Indians in Trinidad, Guyana, and Suriname…basically songs of the area around Uttar Pradesh and Bihar known as Bhojpur, now famous all over India as Bhojpuri songs… so what is so special about this?

When the people from this area were taken to these Caribbean islands as indentured labourers, the only imperishable items that they could take with them were their songs…and in an alien land with alien people in the sugarcane fields, singing their songs was the only solace at the end of the day…these songs were the only links to their motherland that they had left behind…these sings sustained them and their families and when slowly and surely their financial situations improved and the second generation of Indians began to flourish in these distant lands, these same songs became songs of celebration and of identity… and over a period of time local musical elements also started influencing chutney music… even the religious and ritual songs began to sung with an upbeat tempo…apart from the dholak and harmonium, instruments which they had brought along with them, chutney music began to use the Steel Pan drum and ‘dhantaal,’ a musical instrument believed to have been invented by Indians in Trinidad, and Tassa drums…Tassa drums are used in the Muslim Hosay festival in Trinidad…so chutney music is now a mix of Indian, Latin American, and Islamic influences…and now a new strand has evolved called Chutney Soca…which incorporates elements of calypso rhythms…and English lyrics…

More in future posts…

The Guider Jumbo (XXL!!!) ebonite Fountain Pen

2008-10-09T12:28:00.001+05:30

Satish Kolluru had posted a review of the Guider Jumbo ebonite pen on Fountain Pen Network…and I was tempted…and after reading Satish’s review, I decided to get one for myself and spoke to Mr Lakshmana Rao and told him about the review and that I wanted a similar pen...and I received my own Guider Jumbo 5 days later... I liked its looks…it looks really solid…I inked it immediately and it writes wonderfully…I was initially apprehensive when I took it to college as I wearing a white shirt and was worried that with so much of ink inside it and what with our college bus jumping up and down on potholes disguised as roads, there might be some ink-jumps…but the pen held out and both my shirt and the pen emerged triumphant at the end of the day…

The pen capped is 6.3 inches; uncapped 5 1/2 inches; and posted 7 1/4 inches. The clip and the top jewel reminds one of a Parker and the body shape that of a Danitrio Densho pen as some members at FPN have pointed out. The feeder is smooth without any striations like in the Jinhao GN FP that I have. “The feeder on the Guider Jumbo has no fins and has only one central fissure for air,” says Hari, whereas, “the feed on the Jinhao has fins on the upper side flush with the nib.” The nib looks good (as of now) with Guider India Fine engraved on it along with an encircled 'G'...and it is slightly smaller than the Advocate nib (size 10), could be size 9...(Hari reckons that it could be size 8, the same size as Wality 69TL)…

The pen is thicker than the thickest ebonite FPs that I have...I took some close ups of the pen and I can tell you that it is a collector’s item…you might not get one like it in a couple of years’ time…

Jayasrinivasa Rao

Slightly longer than the longest...the 2-in-1 ruler black ebonite from Guider Pens,

2008-10-08T10:55:00.002+05:30

Some time after I had purchased the 2-in-1 ruler pen (in green ebonite) from Deccan Pens, Hyderabad (posted earlier), I was browsing the net and hit the usual pen sites…I saw that Guider Pens had renovated(?) their site and it was looking much better…they now had moving images on their masthead…and one of the images was of the 2-in-1 ruler pen in mottled brown…I wanted a FP-BP combination so that I could use a red ink refill for the ball pen and fill the FP with black or blue ink…as I had purchased a ready-made 2-in-1 pen @ Deccan Pens which had FPs at both ends, I had no choice then…

I teach in a college and there are frequent tests and many occasions for me to use red ink…and sometimes the answers are so exasperating that I indicate my state of mind and inflict great force on the pen and paper while correcting answer scripts… I tried this with a FP and ended up with a damaged nib… I then felt that a BP would be ideal for such purposes…but I wanted something unusual, and decided to ask Mr Lakshmana Rao of Guider Pens if he would make me one such pen… I spoke with Mr Rao and told him what I wanted…complete black ebonite, with one FP and one BP and the BP end should be marked in red to indicate the colour as well as the type of pen… I left it to him to decide the length and thickness…He then asked me to decide the refill model and size that I would be using for the BP so that he can prepare the BP accordingly… I told him that the only BP refill model and size that I was familiar with was the Reynolds 045…and that if he could make the BP compatible with this model, I’d be happy…he agreed to this…

I received the parcel about 5 days later…the pen was dismantled and packed…I put them together…it looked good…I had already purchased 2 red ink Reynolds 045 refills and fitted the ball pen with one of these…the FP, I left alone for the time being… I found out that Mr Rao had very thoughtfully fixed a red celluloid band at the end indicating the BP…it looks very cute… and sophisticated…

The pen is about 14 ½ inches in length and is a couple of millimetres longer than the Deccan 2-in-1 ruler pen…both pens uncapped are 7 inches each…and the middle section acts as a common 2-sided cap and is hollow unlike the Deccan 2-in-1 ruler pen, the capped BP is 9 ¼ inches in length and the capped FP is ever so slightly more than 9 ¼ inches…the nib is Guider custom and so far I have only dry tested it, and it is smooth…should see how it reacts to ink…

Jayasrinivasa Rao

The Brushed ebonite fountain pen brigade from Deccan Pens, Hyderabad

2008-10-07T08:22:00.002+05:30

There is this one thing with Deccan Pens… if you see a new FP model, buy it…you may not see it for a long time if you choose to postpone the purchase…it happened to me with the Deccan Diplomat…I haven’t yet been able to lay my hands on one… Hari told me during one of our pen-cussions that their pen maker is a very innovative person and sometimes makes unique one-of-a-kind pens…and if the pen comes to one of their showrooms and if you happen to see it, grab it! This is what I did with 2 of the 4 pens featured here…

There are 4 brushed ebonite models made by Deccan Pens that I have seen so far…they don’t have specific names and all are called ‘onyx’ and as I had said in an earlier post, they distinguish them by size…I have given them size-wise names…the first photo that you see has all the pens in their capped positions…the smallest one, forming the horizontal stroke of T, I have called ‘Mini’… the largest one, forming the vertical stroke of T, is the ‘Maxi’… to the left of Maxi, with the steel clip and steel cap band, is the ‘Major’… and the one to Maxi’s right, the one with the gold plated clip, is the ‘Mega’…

As you can see in the photos, no two pens are similar… if the nibs of two (Mini and Maxi) are similar (Ambitious), then their clips are different, one has a steel clip and the other has a gold plated clip…Maxi and Major have polished ends, but one of them has a cap band and the other is cap bandless…and if you look at the sections, each one is different…I don’t know what names these different kinds of sections have..

I had purchased the Mega a long time back…and among the four, this is different from the rest in many respects…this is the only one which has a snap cap…the rest are all screw caps…and this is the only one which is cartridge filler, the rest are all ED fillers…the nib, the feed, the section…all are different from the other pens featured here…and it has a smoother brushed feel and look…the other 3 have a rough feel and look… and if you notice, the clip is ‘inspired’ from Pelikan FPs… and I used it for 3 months continuously and it is a fabulous writer… no complaints…

MAJOR – capped 6 in; uncapped 5 ¼ in; posted 7 in; cartridge filler; snap cap; open two tone nib; Pelikan style clip; plastic section (I think) with gold plating at the section lip; smooth brushed feel and look

I am currently using the Mega…it has got that Lamy Safari feel while writing, though the width is narrower…and the nib also reminds you of the Safari…I feel a slight difficulty in screwing/unscrewing the cap now…this is the only pen in this batch that has a cap band, which is at the cap lip…its top and bottom ends are polished…and if you look at the photo, you can see that the clip is curved, unlike the others which are flat against the cap…and this is the only one among the 4 to have the distinctive calligraphic ‘D’ (the Deccan Pen Logo) on the cap…

MEGA – capped 5 ¼ in; uncapped 4 ¾ in; posted 6 ¼ in; ED filler; screw cap; Lamy Safari style one tone nib with no brand name; curved steel clip; Ebonite section tapering towards the nib and ending with a ridge slightly below the nib; rough brushed feel and look; 7 turns to unscrew…

I have yet to start using the Mini and the Maxi…will do so soon…

MINI – capped 4 ¼ in; uncapped 3 ¾ in; posted 5 ¼ in; ED filler; screw cap; Ambitious nib with an upturned ‘V’ nib hole; gold plated clip flat against the cap; gap between cap top and cap visible; Ebonite section tapering in and flaring out near the nib; rough brushed feel and look; 7 turns to unscrew…

MAXI – this is the longest of the batch… capped 6 ¼ in; uncapped 5 ½ in; posted 7 ¼ in; ED filler; screw cap; Ambitious nib with upturned ‘V’ nib hole; top and bottom ends polished; steel clip flat against the cap; Ebonite section tapering towards the nib stopping with a ridge; rough brushed look and feel; 7 turns to unscrew…

Jayasrinivasa Rao

Deccan Pens...A New Model...

2008-09-22T18:26:00.002+05:30

Just when I thought that we (Hari & I) had covered and reviewed all the major models made by Deccan Pens, Hyderabad, the pen people sprang a surprise… or, shall I say penprise…?

I had placed orders for around 5 Advocate Black FPs (yes…you have to place orders, especially for the complete black model) for my colleagues and brother and I had called the Secunderabad branch to find out if the pens are ready…I had also asked them to get me a couple of Pelkan models…the Advocates were ready and they told me that they have a couple of Pelkans too…I decided to pick them up on my way home in the evening…

I went there and they immediately brought me the Advocate FPs and I asked them to show the Pelkans…what they showed me was not the full ebonite Pelkans that they had earlier but a kind of variant with an aerometric filler and metal cap…I thought I’d pick them up later…and then they showed me a new ebonite model…they didn’t have a name for this model…in fact, they call all their models as ‘Deccan Onyx’ and refer to each model by their shape or size…in my post on Deccan FPs on Fountain Pen Network, I had shown photos of mottled green ebonite FPs with aerometric fillers and called them as ‘the’ Onyx…I guess I was wrong…anyway, the model that they showed me was a medium sized ED filler FP around 5 inches in length with a band at the cap lip…both ends rounded…with a black tip at the bottom…the clip is of thin elongated oval shape and the thin clip band can also be seen (seasoned FP users from around the world might find some similarities with clips of international models!)…the nib is of a brand called ‘Preema’and is tipped fine…with both sides serrated feeder…they showed me four colours…plain green, plain brown, mottled green and mottled brown…I bought all 4! The plain green and plain brown ones have light black spots on them…the plain green one looks really good…I dip tested all nibs and except for one which is slightly scratchy, the rest are all smooth…

I don't know how many more models they are going to make...already burning a hole in my pocket...but what to do...madness, no?

Jayasrinivasa Rao

jaisiri: My article published...

2008-09-21T21:35:00.002+05:30

jaisiri: My article published...:

http://www.anukriti.net/tt6/article1/page1.asp

Ustad Amir Khan...memories by Pt Amarnath...A Book...

2008-09-21T21:02:00.002+05:30

A few posts earlier I had written about my fascination and admiration for Ustad Amir Khan’s singing…I think one has to hear him singing once to realise the difference between his style and the others’…it is said that most of the singers who came after him, irrespective of Gharana, imbibed a number of features of his singing…Pt Bhimsen Joshi has publicly said that he was influenced by Ustadji’s singing…Ustadji had a number of disciples, though we may not be aware of many of them…Pt Amarnath, a disciple of Ustad Amir Khan and considered to be a genius of Indore Gharana singing, has chronicled his discipleship and relationship with his guru in great detail…and in recent times, his daughter Bindu Chawla has made every effort to place these chronicles, along with Pt Amarnath’s renditions, before the music world… and in this effort she has received solid support from Underscore Records, a unique record company run by Shubha Mudgal (yeah…the eminent Hindustani classical singer who captured the nation’s imagination through the unusual ‘Ab ke saawan’) and Aneesh Pradhan, the tabla maestro… the first of these reminiscences by Pt Amarnath was in the form of an audio CD called ‘Pioneer of the Khayal – the music of my guru Ustad Amir Khan Saheb’ (Underscore Records)…the CD is in the form of a lec-dem and was recorded live in 1982…here Pt Amarnath speaks about Ustad Amir Khan’s style of khayal singing and sings to demonstrate the unique style…listening to this CD gave me a lot of insights into Ustadji’s singing – the merukhand style, his taans, taranas, and other features…the brief liner notes say… “Called the Bernstein of India, Pt Amarnath … tells you the story of how his legendary guru, Ustad Amir Khan Saheb, not only pioneered a new gharana, but also created a new road to the khayal altogether, changing all earlier perspectives to the form…”

I was listening to Pt Amarnath’s singing for the first time in this CD…I liked it immensely…and I remember writing a mail to Shubhaji asking her if it was possible for Underscore Records to come out with at least a couple of albums of Pt Amarnath’s khayal renderings…Shubhaji wrote back saying that Bindu Chawla held all the rights and that Underscore Records would be happy to produce the albums…this was a long time back…at least 2 years ago… and they did produce 3 albums of hindustani classical vocal by Pt Amarnath sometime last year… the moment I saw them on the website, I wanted to buy them…but as it sometimes happens, it took a long time for me to actually buy them…which was…as recent as 10 days ago…I bought 2 CDs… Pandit Amaranth – Stirrings from the Soul: Vols 1 & 2…there is one more called Seep ke Moti: Pearls from the Oyster, which I intend to buy soon…

But what made me to finally buy these 2 albums was the fact that Underscore Records recently put up a book for sale in their print section which really caught my attention…and I had to own and read this book…Prophets of Indore: Memories of Ustad Amir Khan Saheb by Pandit Amarnathji … this amazing book (I am half way through…) is translated from the Hindustani into English by Bindu Chawla and published by Pandit Amarnath Memorial Foundation …

It is a bilingual book with the page on right in hindustani (devanagari script) and its translation in English on the left… the language is everyday spoken hindustani with all mid sentence pauses and stops and interrogatives…and makes for very interesting reading…as though Pt Amarnath is sitting right in front of you and speaking to you… Pt Amarnath talks about the world of Ustad Amir Khan’s khayal in the 40s-50s-60s…and it is a different world of music...of discussions, soirees, chamber concerts…and significantly, Pt Amarnath’s narration of the recognition of Ustad Amir Khan as a pioneer of a new gharana and style of khayal after Khansaheb’s death by critics and experts…and more than anything else, the emphasis in the Pt Amarnath’s narration on Ustad Amir Khan’s reflection and thinking about khayal & Hindustani classical music which made Khansaheb a great singer and an innovator…

Thank you…Shubhaji and Bindu Chawla for bringing out such gems for the aam aadmi… a forgotten magnificent piece of music history and music is now before us…

I really didn’t think that I’d write so much…but, I think I got carried away…

Jayasrinivasa Rao

Another article...hilarious...embarassing

2008-09-20T09:39:00.001+05:30

I got to know recently that another article of mine has been published...the circumstances were so bizarre that rather than feeling elated on knowing that my article was published, I was embarassed and had to coduct a major fire fighting operation...

I had submitted this article to one of the oldest and most respected literary journals in India one year ago...It was my college dream to one day have at least one article published in this journal...anyway, they were supposed to intimate the acceptance or otherwise of my article within 3-4 weeks...I did not get any response during the next 4 weeks...as September/October is the festival season here, I thought people were busy and I waited...I waited for 3 months and then wrote an e-mail to the editor...no response...then I wondered whether the editor opens his e-mails ever...I waited...patiently...3 months later, I wrote a letter and sent it along with a self addressed and stamped envelope, so that it would be convenient for them to send a reply...no response...I waited...it was nearing one year...I then felt that either they were not interested in the article or my article did not reach them at all...so I decided to send the article to another journal...as is my usual procedure, I first wrote to the editor about my article to find out whether they'd be interested in considering it for publication...they asked me to send it...I sent the article...I felt I had done a fairly good job with the article, but reviewers might want some changes...so, I hoped that the final outcome would be good...

Two days later I receive a mail from the consulting editor of this journal informing me that the article that I had submitted has already been published by the earlier journal and that they (the second journal) would not be considering it for their journal...the consulting editor congratulated me for this...I was stunned and surprised...I did not whether to laugh or to cry...nothing makes an academic happier than to see his/her work in print in a journal...but here my credibility was at stake...the people in the second journal would feel that I was trying to palm off an article already published by another journal...I wrote an explanatory mail apologizing profusely for this unintended fiasco...I told them the whole story, how I did not get any response from the earlier journal and at the end of one year, I had to assume that it wouldn't be published and then decided to send it to the their journal...I don't know whether they were convinced, as I did not receive any reply from them...

But the funnier part is I don't have a copy of the issue of the journal in which this article is published...I asked my brother to help me and he sent one of his acquaintances to this place to purchase a copy...the people there told him that they don't sell individual issues and one has to be a subscriber to get a copy...I was at a deep end now...I then approached a senior academic in the same city whom I know and narrated him the whole story and requested him to help me out...he then wrote back informing me that he knew the editor of the journal and would arrange to send a copy to me...

I haven't received the copy yet...am still waiting...

Sometimes life surprises you...when you don't know how to react...

Jayasrinivasa Rao

My article published...

2008-09-14T09:15:00.003+05:30

I returned to blog yesterday after a break…the break just happened, though I had a lot of things to write about…maybe the 50 blogs really overwhelmed me…though I was not blogging, I was thinking about my ‘not blogging’…my lack of enthusiasm and also wondered whether I should stop at 50…but in the end I think wiser counsel prevailed…I don’t know about all of you out there, but I have come back…I felt really sad when I read the news of Vidwan Kunnakudi Vaidyanathan’s demise and remembered the episode which I recounted in my previous post...

The week that ended brought in a couple of happy surprises…one was tinged with embarrassment and was tricky…let me tell you the‘full’ happy surprise…

I had mentioned in one of my previous posts that one of my research papers had been accepted for publication by the journal Translation Today…on Friday I received a mail from one of the editors (Prof. Giridhar) saying that the issue in which my article is published is now online and that I could see it…this journal has both online and print versions and the online version comes out first…and I personally feel that this is one of the important and intellectually stimulating journals on translation related subjects in India today (I am saying this not because they published my paper)…and since this journal is online (www.anukriti.net) and free, interested readers can see this for themselves…

My article is on the novels translated into Kannada by B. Venkatacharya…and it is called “B. Venkatacharya’s Novels in the Kannada Literary Polysystem and the Founding of the Novel in Kannada” and it can be seen and read at http://www.anukriti.net/tt6/article1/page1.asp ... I request readers of my blogsite to please visit this page and I would be happy to receive your comments, criticisms, suggestions, praise…

Jayasrinivasa Rao

When Vidwan Kunnakudi Vaidyanathan played for me…

2008-09-13T09:16:00.002+05:30

The passing away of Sri Kunnakudi Vaidynathan was a sad piece of news for me. This great Violin Vidwan was the most popular classical maestro in the world of Carnatic Music. All the obituaries have discussed the multifarious talents of this wonderful vidwan. The Thyagaraja Aradhana at Tiruvaiyyaru was an especially memorable yearly event, where Sri Kunnakudi Vaidynathan would lead the young and old and the greats and students in rendering the Pancharatna Kritis of Tyagaraja. I particularly liked his devotional renderings and thematic compositions, especially his album called Colours, where he played with Zakir Hussain, Sivamani and Dilip (now known to the entire world as A R Rahman). He rendered thematic pieces with Carnatic ragas like maayamalavagoula, shanmughapriya, hindolam, and bandhuvarali. This album came out sometime in the early nineties and was presented to me by my senior at the then CIEFL, Anita Devasia, whom some of us affectionately called Chechi (elder sister). This is an album I deeply cherish for its lovely music.

I also had a personal moment with Sri Kunnakudi Vaidyanathan which I would like to share with all of you. This happened long ago, when I was 6-7 years old…I don’t remember the year…my father was posted in Tiruvananthapuram and he was a member of the Swati Tirunal Sangeetha Sabha…a number of classical music concerts would be held by this organisation every year and my parents would attend most of them…so, I too attended some concerts with them, though I had no idea what was going on…Sri Kunnakudi Vaidynathan was playing his violin in one such concert and my parents had taken me along…it must have been a particularly popular concert, given the stature and popularity of Sri Kunnakudi Vaidynathan and all seats were full and since I was not a member as such, a small chair was produced and it was placed in the central passage (aisle?) for me to sit…I was sitting straight in front of Sri Kunnakudi Vaidynathan’s line of vision…the concert was in full flow and suddenly Vaidynathanji stopped for a second and played the opening line of a popular tamil film song thoongade thambi thoongade (don’t sleep, brother, don’t sleep)…the audience was surprised and didn’t know what to make of it…he kept at it for some more time…then suddenly my parents must have realised what had happened and looked at me in my small chair…I was fast asleep…they were totally embarrassed and hurriedly woke me up… Vaidynathanji had spotted me sleeping and in a light hearted way played this line… he smiled and then continued the raga from where he had left it…

My father keeps reminding me of this whenever Vaidynathanji’s topic comes up when we are generally talking of music…

I can proudly claim that Sri Kunnakudi Vaidynathan played a line especially for me…

Thank you Vaidynathanji for making such glorious music…May your soul rest in music…

Jayasrinivasa Rao

50 posts and still going...or what...?

2008-08-21T12:04:00.001+05:30

So...I have touched 50...anyway...out with all the cliches like when I started blogging, I never thought I'd survive so long and write 50 posts and it seems incredible and all that...

Cliches or not, blogging has really helped me...in the sense that I have never written so much in such a short span of time...and I never thought that I'd be able to write on all the things that I have written so far...then there is this enthusiasm, which of course waxes and wanes, depending on the workload and mood, but overall, I have ridden this enthusiasm well enough...and of course, keeping a close watch on events to capture blog-moments...events and incidents which one would normally ignore after a brief while assume a different kind of significance now, now that I am blogging...

I don't know who my readers are...I don't know whether there are regular readers of my blog...but I do suspect that some of my friends do visit from time to time...when I started out, I thought I'd write a lot about books and music...but early 2008 was also the time when I was slowly getting infected with the FP virus and now it has become a full blown disorder...and most of the posts are about FPs...and from whatever responses that I have received, the most is for FP-related posts...so far so good...

I am fairly comfortable writing about books, but I start shivering when I venture to write about music...but I am happy that I was finally able to write about Shakti and Mynta...two indian classical-jazz fusion groups...my absolute favourites...and I was also pleased with what I wrote...but I need to write more about music...not only that, I want to write more posts on music, rather than, say FPs...I feel I have so much to share, but somehow I don't want my listening experience to get translated into adjectives or flowery nothings...which is what I read most of the times in the guise of music reviews...

I also feel that I have become a little more patient and am willing to wait for things to become clearer before I write...

Thanks everyone...whoever visits this blog...I didn't set targets when I set out, I thought one post a week would be the maximum that I can afford to spare time for...but I see that I had underestimated myself...I have 4 months till December...and it will be one year since I started blogging... should I go for 100...?

Books bought so far in 2008...

2008-08-20T14:38:00.001+05:30

Sometimes I feel that my blog has become a fountain pen blog because of the time and attention I devote to these beautiful creatures in searching, researching, photographing, discussing and writing about them with such devotion and love... sometimes I feel I am moving away from my core areas of reading and music...and I tell myself that this is not true...jai...you do read a lot...

I had wanted to do this exercise at the end of June, but things kept happening, and here I am now with a list of books that I purchased, received as gifts, and acquired so far this year… I have also written the fate of these books after they reached me (in brackets)…I have also written about some of these books in my earlier posts… I think it is a good enough collection so far…I might have missed mentioning a couple of books…I am not sure…henceforth, I will keep a record of books bought…

Novels:
1. Hocus Pocus – Kurt Vonnegut (yet to read)
2. Ragtime – E. L. Doctorow (read earlier; but this was a better looking copy!)
3. Red Dragon – Thomas Harris (read – scary)
4. Hannibal – Thomas Harris (read – same as above!)
5. The Music of the Spheres – Elizabeth Redfern (read – interesting; novel theme)
6. The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz – Mordechai Richler (read library copy as part of MA syllabus; finally found a copy to own)
7. The Bourne Ultimatum – Robert Ludlum (read – good read)
8. The Sea of Poppies – Amitav Ghosh (read – want to read it again and again; that good!!!)
9. Baudolino – Umberto Eco (read – lost my earlier copy; a new one)
10. Pronto – Elmore Leonard (read – good one; nice plot)
11. Killshot – Elmore Leonard (read – my first Elmore Leonard novel; found it a bit sluggish)
12. Rum Punch – Elmore Leonard (yet to read)
13. Mandra (Kannada) – S. L. Bhyrappa (yet to read – read rave reviews about it; bought recently on a trip to Bangalore)

Others:
1. The Music Room – Namita Devidayal (read – super; check out earlier post on this book)
2. Early Novels in India – Meenakshi Mukherjee (ed.) (reading in parts – a reference book for my research)
3. The Last Mughal – William Dalrymple (started reading – given as a puja gift to Shruti’s mom, a teacher (retd.) of history; she re-gifted it back to me after reading)
4. Hobson-Jobson – Yule & Burnell (reference book – bought while reading ‘Sea of Poppies’ as a accompaniment)
5. Vasahatushahi mattu Bhashantara (Kannada–Colonialism and Translation) – V. B. Tharakeshwar (started reading…)
6. Lear Maharaja (Kannada) – Tr. of King Lear by Masti Venkatesha Iyengar (bought this for my research on translation in Kannada – yet to read)
7. Laughter is the Best Medicine – Reader’s Digest jumbo compilation (hilarious – dip into it regularly…too good) (got this through a circuitous route; not intended for me initially, but will now not let it go…)
8. Roald Dahl Treasury (Shruti’s book actually…one of her favourites…)
9. Tipu Sultan – B. Sheik Ali (father’s gift…yet to start)
10. The Holy Quran (got it as a gift at City Centre, Chennai)
11. King Lear (bought this for my research on translation in Kannada)
12. Twelfth Night (bought this for my research on translation in Kannada)
13. Macbeth (bought this for my research on translation in Kannada)
14. The Tempest (bought this for my research on translation in Kannada)
15. The Merchant of Venice (bought this for my research on translation in Kannada)
16. Dave Barry is not making this up – Dave Barry (must have read at least 4-5 times starting from anywhere…hilarious…a gift from Vinod Ekbote… Thanks, Vinod…)

Looking for Sultan Pens in Charminar area, Hyderabad and discovering them and other treasures-II

2008-08-19T11:55:00.002+05:30

Once inside, I asked him if he had any ebonite pens…he said he had and opened the glass topped case and pulled out a mottled brown medium size ebonite pen with the name ‘Sultan’ in white on the cap and the barrel…I then told him I was searching for ‘Sultan Pen Stores’ to buy their brand of ebonite pens and I was pleased that I found this brand here…he said Hilal Pen Stores were the manufacturers of Sultan Pens and that there is no such shop called Sultan Pen Stores…I asked him whether he had any more Sultan Pen models or more specimens of the same model…unfortunately, no, he said, but promised that he’d make or get a thicker FP in a week’s time…so far so good…

He took out a red coloured Waterman’s India FP and told me that this was a rare piece and that he’d sell it to me…I inspected the pen and it was an Waterman’s India 65…all plastic body with a pump filler (aerometric filling system- as in Parker 51 and a lot of Hero imitations 616, 330, 329)…I have a Waterman’s India 63 with gold nib that Hari got for me and I felt that WI 65 was worth the effort…I kept it aside…I then spied a similar WI model and asked him to take it out…the pen looked good, but the sac inside the pump filler was missing…he then took out some dusty boxes from a cupboard inside and brought out 3 more WI 65 pens…and there was some problem with each, but he managed to put together 3 pens out of the 5…not bad…I took all three and then there was another WI pen, and this pen had a plastic body and steel cap with hooded nib and aerometric filling system…this model was named WI 71…this one was unexpected actually…as he was piling up the boxes searching for good pens…I started my own searches and happened to locate 3 Sultan pens…2 of them with ebonite body and steel caps and another with full plastic body with hooded nib…all are ED fillers…I managed to put together 8 pens by now…

I thought this was a good haul…and then came the surprise, at least for me…he showed me those old handle pens where you inserted nibs and dipped them frequently in inkpots to write…I don’t know who uses them these days, but I feel that Urdu and Arabic scholars still use them, because one of the two that he showed me initially was a calligraphic nib…he then proceeded to demonstrate the smoothness of the nib by writing in Urdu…looked fabulous…I was totally hooked…sensing my enthusiasm, he took out small rectangular boxes and showed me different kinds of nibs…nibs made in India, England, and USA…names like Resterbrook and Waverly and GC Law…he called them ‘patta’ (leaf)…he then showed me a nib with its tip curved slightly upward…According to Richard Binder, “the nib presents to the paper what appears to be a lower angle of elevation. This design, introduced by the Waverley Pen Company (British), results in smoother performance. It also offers more usable surface toward the end of the tip so that the nib works better for users who hold the pen at a high angle of elevation, and it is consequently well adapted to many left-handed writers”…I couldn’t resist and bought two sets of whatever was available with him…

I don’t know whether or when I am going to use them…but for a collector, these are antique pieces and moreover these handles are made of ebonite…I have taken a photo of these nibs in their holders with my laptop webcam… just for kicks…I need to take a more elaborate photo with writing samples… Shruti had taken the camera with her to Delhi and so I couldn’t take photos of the shop and its interiors and the genial owner Mr Nawaz (I hope I am right about the name)… I think he was pleased that someone came asking for fountain pens and that he was able to show the kind of pens that his shop used to manufacture and stock during the heydays of FP use…he sensed that I was a collector and that I was visibly excited on seeing those old Waterman’s India FPs and holders and nibs, but didn’t try to take advantage by quoting exorbitantly…I was happy with the prices that he quoted… he told me that he’s selling the pens at cost price and was happy that I didn’t bargain with him…

All handle pens with nibs

I must say he was a gregarious person with a booming laughter and proud of his pen-making heritage and happy that I was pleased with what he could offer me…he also showed me photos of his visit to Canada recently as a member of an Indian business delegation…

He pointed out to the photographs mounted on the wall of his father and grandfather, who started this business and said that they would have told me more about the holder nibs…sometimes I feel that an entire past generation is slowly leaving taking away its collective wisdom and practices with it…we come across some such evidence of past practices now and then and these holders and nibs are good examples…

jayasrinivasa rao

Looking for Sultan Pens in Charminar area, Hyderabad - I

2008-08-18T21:42:00.001+05:30

Finally...I was able to make it to old city yesterday (Aug 17th)...this urge to go to Charminar was partly fuelled by the desire for fountain pens...and partly to have the delicious biriyani at Shadab...and this urge actually started after I started collecting fountain pens and saw this stall put up by Sultan Pens at the annual exhibition at Hyderabad... I did not know where Sultan Pens was located in Hyderabad...I searched all the yellow pages and telephone directories, but still no luck...I then felt I could try my luck in th

Finally...I was able to make it to old city yesterday...this urge to go to Charminar was partly fuelled by the desire for fountain pens...and partly to have the delicious biriyani at Shadab...and this urge actually started after I started collecting fountain pens and saw this stall put up by Sultan Pens at the annual exhibition at Hyderabad... I went to this stall and asked for ebonite pens and I was shown a mottled brown ebonite FP with ‘Sultan’ in white paint on the barrel…I would have bought it, but the clip looked rusty and as this was the only piece they had, I had to leave it unbought by me…after I seriously started collecting Indian ebonite/celluloid pens, I thought I should find out more about this ‘Sultan’ pen…I did not know where Sultan Pens was located in Hyderabad...I searched all the yellow pages and telephone directories, but still no luck...I then felt I could try my luck in the area in and around Charminar...I asked a couple of people and one of them said that the shop is in Lad Bazaar, the famous street of Bangles shops near Charminar...I had a clue now…

So I set out, heart full of hope and a reasonable amount of money…I reached Charminar and it was only around 11.30 in the morning and the famous Lad Bazaar which would be overcrowded in the evenings was so wistfully empty…people were just about opening the shutters of their shops and only a couple of bangle shops were open… I wandered down the street looking at all the shop signs…and decided to ask a gentleman standing near a bangle shop…he told me that the shop is at the junction further down…I reached the junction and I couldn’t locate the shop…I wandered further down and again decided to ask a gentleman sitting in his perfumes shop…he told me that I should go back and search as I had come beyond the Lad Bazaar area…I went back to the junction and asked a bookshop owner…he told me that no such shop exists in this area and asked me what I was looking for…I told him ‘ink pens’…he asked me to try my luck at Hilal Pen Stores near the arch…I was not convinced…

I was not going back without finding out where this shop was located, whether they had pens or not…I asked an elderly bearded gentleman sitting in front of his ‘old newspapers’ shop…he told me that he remembered a shop of this kind, but it is no longer there, and could well be relocated elsewhere, and asked me to enquire with another gentleman sitting in the shop opposite selling Islamic books…this man told me that there is no shop called ‘Sultan Pen Stores’ in this area and asked me to check out ‘Hilal Pen stores’…the name again…so I walked my way back and tried to locate ‘Hilal Pen Stores’ near the ‘kamaan’ (arch)…as the day was a Sunday, the pavements in front of the shops located in the ‘kamaan’ area were full of temporary shops selling anything from clothes to books to iron scrap…while negotiating my way through this crowd of shops, I finally happened to see an old fashioned shop with the board ‘Hilal Pen Stores’… a man (whom I subsequently discovered was the owner) was sitting on the steps and selling Islamic books…I wondered whether the owners had changed their business…then I looked inside and saw a forward tilted showcase with pens…I felt relieved…but the shop was full of plastic decorative items, toys, books and other items…then the owner saw me standing in front of his shop and asked me what I wanted…I told him ‘ink pens’… he took a few more seconds to negotiate the sale of the book and stood up and said ‘aayiye saab’ and went inside the shop…I followed him inside…

I was once a poet...

2008-08-16T21:58:00.000+05:30

I was once a poet...sounds surprising to me too...but then at some point of time in our growing up years most of us try writing poems...I used to write a lot of poems... in Kannada and in English...I prided myself on being able to write poems in two languages...those were heady times...sigh!

My BA years were especially fruitful in terms of poetry...love, heartbreak, again love...and so on..and sometimes idealism...a couple of poems got published in the Fergusson College student magazine and I was ecastatic...then the muse stopped visiting...

Then in early 1995, when I was in CIEFL, Hyderabad, my friend and fellow participant there, Srinivas Prasad (now Princiopal of a Government College in Kakinada), out of the blue asked me write a poem and give him...I told him I had stopped writing poems...he persisted and told me that I could and forced me to write one...I didn't know what to write...I thought for a whole week...the muse eluded me...then I sat down to write and managed 2 stanzas and gave it to Srinivas Prasad...I then asked him the reason for his asking me to pen a poem...he said it was a surprise...after a while, I forgot about it...then suddenly one day there was this small impromptu gathering that was arranged in the hostel mess and Srinivas Prasad, along with three other participants - John Varghese, K. Jayashree and Rita Ghosh, announced the launch of the Participants' Newsletter...managed and written wholly by the participants for the participants...we were all surprised and happy... then the copies of the newsletter were distributed to all present...it was an 8-page newelstter and I opened the pages and was stunned to see my poem printed in page 5 of the newsletter...I thought Prasad had asked me to write this poem only to egg me on to re-start my 'literary passion'...I was happy and embarassed at the same time... I definitely did not intend my poem to become public property...now it was before my fellow participants...

I was going through my old files and was happy to see the old issues of the newsletter (it ran for 2 years continuously and thereafter intermittently and closed down after 3 years)...I thought, why not put this poem in my blog and whoever my readers are can 'enjoy' it...I haven't written any poem after this...this is my last poem...so, all you readers...enjoy...

Smoky Thoughts

The whirring fan stirring up stale cigarette smoke
re-igniting the desire for the half-cigarette,
now lying brutally mutilated.
Now, again pining for it, and chiding myself
for being so thoughtless in disgust.

Does the muse come riding so, on smoky thoughts?
Why doesn't sleep come similarly?
Oh, it has already gone to sleep, tired.
Use the muse as a ruse.
Write poetry and lure sleep.
But poetry must be made of sterner stuff, no?
_______________________________________________________________________

So friends...

The Longest Pen?

2008-08-09T10:27:00.002+05:30

Hello friends...

This is a unique pen from the range of pens made by Deccan Pen Stores, Hyderabad. It is called the 2-in-1 Ruler Pen (I do not know whether it has any other specific brand name) and it must have served as a great utility tool at one point of time. As you can see, this ebonite rod contains two pens – one at each end. This is designed to be a desk pen. One pen was supposed to contain blue ink and the other red. And this 2-in-1 pen also doubles as a ruler to help users draw straight lines for margins, etc. It served people like lawyers, bureaucrats, etc., (at one point of time) who needed to use both colour inks to make notes, make corrections, etc. This must have been a common pen in colonial and early post independent government offices in India. The pen is about 14 inches in length – both pens capped, 10 inches with one pen capped, and either pen is 6 ½ inches uncapped. As this is a desk pen, it doesn’t have a pocket clip. If at all anyone wants to carry it along, they would have to carry it in a long enough bag or a flute case! The one displayed here has 2 fountain pens, but this model also comes with an FP at one end, to be filled with blue ink usually, and a ball pen at the other, with a red ink refill. Guider also produces a similar pen, with a FP at one end and a BP at the other, and the ends are helpfully marked in red (FP) and blue (BP).

I had seen this pen at DPS many times before and Hari had bought a mottled brown one with an FP and a BP at either ends on his last visit to Hyderabad and had shown it to me. I was not too keen as I didn’t know what I’d do with this pen. And then when I visited the Secunderbad Branch of DPS around 5 days back to buy Advocates for my brothers, I also bought a Pelkan (Hari has also posted on this) and 2 Onyx-es, and then out of the blue, the salesman there took out this pen and offered it to me. The pen looked good and I liked the mottled design on this pen, which is not streaky, but kind of loopy. I then inspected the FPs and thought ‘why not’ and bought it. I have written with both pens and I must say they write very well. The nibs are called ‘Preema.’

I feel that if both pens can be made as BPs, then this pen can also be used as a pointer. Unless one is a regular pen user with lots of paper work to do and has a large enough desk, this pen can only be an ornamental piece. But, if one is crazy enough about FPs, one can always find excuses to buy this pen…like I did. This is not an antique pen (only the style is) and can be manufactured by any good pen-maker with ebonite stock. But, this pen’s value lies in its unique usefulness and the ingenuity of the first pen manufacturer or user who thought of something like this. This particular pen does not have the usual ‘D’ logo that one normally finds in DPS pens, which kind of makes the pen look bland.

Jai

My dazzling Jinhao FP

2008-08-02T10:17:00.003+05:30

I never thought I’d own a Jinhao FP one day…I had read about and seen pictures of Jinhao FPs here on FPN and was wondering how on earth am I going to get one of these fab looking pens…I browsed around the net and saw that isellpens.com sold Jinhao FPs, but I was not sure about how I’d go about ordering them from India and whether the pen would reach safely…then this happened…a friend of mine, Anuradha, was posted to China…I have known her for the past 15 years… she had come home to Hyderabad for a brief holiday and was talking about her work in China and I asked her what had she got for me from China…she said she didn’t know what I wanted and if I specified what I wanted, she’d try and get it the next time she came to India…at that moment, I didn’t know what to ask for…I told her that I’d let her know…a couple of months after she’d left, I was again browsing the net and ogling at FPs…it suddenly struck me that I can ask Anu to get me a Jinhao FP…I immediately sent her a mail, thinking that Jinhao FPs would be available in all Chinese cities and it wouldn’t be difficult to buy one…there was no response for quite some time and I again asked her whether she’d been successful in bagging a Jinhao FP…she wrote back telling me that she had tried in her city and that the shops there didn’t know that such a thing called a Jinhao pen existed…that came as a surprise to me…I then scoured the net again and saw that Jinhao has a website…almost 90% of the information available there was in Chinese, but I found the address written in English and forwarded the URL and the address to Anu…she then sent both to her colleague working in that city and asked him to buy a pen for me…As I couldn’t specify what model I wanted, and Anu too didn’t know which model to buy, it was left to the discretion of her colleague to decide and buy what he thought would make me happy…Anu told me that her colleague called her up to find out which model he should buy and described some of them to her…and said that a particular model came in with a wooden box…Anu told him to buy the one with the wooden box…and that’s how I came to proudly own this Jinhao…after Anu returned to Hyderabad, I went to her house to collect the pen…and before this Anu had called me and told me that she’d come back and that she’d come home during the weekend and give me the pen… both Shruti and I had to go to our places of work on that Sunday for some reason and Anu couldn’t come to see us…it was not until another week that I finally could see this pen…and all the while I had this feeling that if I didn’t go soon and take possession of the pen, Anu would start using it…she said so to me, and also told me over the phone that the pen was so tempting that she had half a mind to keep it with her…I was scared…and I could breathe a sigh of relief only after I could hold the box in my hands…

Now about the pen…it is a beautiful pen, no doubt about it…it shines brightly…but I don’t know the name of the model…the website and the brochure that came along with it were of no help in identifying the name, because as usual, most of it was written in Chinese…I tried isellpens.com again…there were similar looking pens, but none like this one… the only thing I know for sure is that it has a 14 kt gold nib and it writes like a dream … I haven’t filled it with ink yet… and the pen looks so rich that I need to wear it with something suitably ostentatious, which I don’t have at the moment…and therefore, it stays in its velvet pouch in the box… the box is beautiful, with its Chinese inscriptions on the lid as well as the inside lid… there is also a scroll, which actually is like a mat, made of bamboo or wood flats linked with a thread…the inscriptions on the box lid, inside lid, and on the scroll are all in Chinese, I can’t make head or tail of what is written… there is an engraving of a Chinese lady on the lid and a Chinese man on the scroll…I don’t who they are…maybe the man is Confucius… the engraving on the clip and on the cap lip is again in Chinese… there are 2 characters on the cap lip, which might stand for ‘Jinhao’… and the clip has 4 characters… and they are engraved very clearly and look very good… the feeder looks plain without any striations…and the design engraved on the nib extends to its sides too… the nib too looks very good, not too broad… and the pen has a piston filling mechanism…

When I showed this pen to my colleagues, some of them told me that they are contemplating turning into pen thieves…

Ustad Amir Khan and me...

2008-08-01T12:54:00.002+05:30

My relationship with Ustad Amir Khan's music is like my liking for Amitav Ghosh's works...Ustad Amir Khan is one of the most influential Hindustani classical vocalists in the 20th century...I just fell in love with his kind of singing at first hearing...not that I had heard other singers and in comparision, Ustadji sounded better or anything...it is something that I haven't been able to understand...I began looking out for cassettes, books, CDs, etc., to listen to his renderings, know more about this great singer...and all this without knowing even 5% of what constitutes Hindustani classical music...and its nuances... I was thrilled when a fellow music enthusiast sent me a copy of the documentary on Ustad Amir Khan made by the Films Division...I was able to see Ustadji actually singing and talking and moving around...I was ecstatic...and later Patrick Moutal hosted a couple of videos of Ustadji singing Malkauns and Rageshree...these videos can be downloaded from Patrick's website (http://homepage.mac.com/patrickmoutal/macmoutal/rag.html) and I must have watched these many many times... I like his Lalit, Malkauns, Bilaskhani Todi, and Hamsadhwani very much... and with great devotion to his immortal singing, I managed to host a webpage on Ustadji almosgt 6 years ago ... which I am proud to say is the first website on Ustadji... and whatever I felt about Ustadji and his music, I have written in the brief introduction to the site... and over the years, many admirers of Ustadji's music have written to me and everytime I feel embarassed, because I am not aware of the nuances of hindustani classical music and I tell everyone so... the webpage is only a labour of love, not an exposotion or analysis of Ustadji's music ... in case you are interested...please visit www.geocities.com/jaysrinivas and please leave your comments here...I will be happy...

Amitav Ghosh and an admirer...

2008-07-26T09:56:00.002+05:30

There are some things that I am not confident of writing about, though they are very close to me, almost like vital parts of whatever is my intellectual make up... though I have written two posts on Amitav Ghosh, these are mostly external to his works...I enjoy Amitav-da's novels tremendously and derive great joy and satisfaction after reading them...I have my favourites and at present they are In an Antique Land, The Calcutta Chromosome, and Dancing in Cambodia, At large in Burma...and Sea of Poppies will soon join this list...there are various reasons why these books have become my favourites...I have read his other novels and liked them and enjoyed them immensely...there is this reverence that I have for Amitav-da as a writer, which I slowly discovered growing in me over the past 10 years...I don't know why...He is great story teller...no doubt about it...and even before I had seen him for the first time and heard him speak, I somehow felt that Amitav-da was a very soft-spoken person and a powerful and dedicated writer...his writings has a very different quality...and, even though at some point of time I felt that I should maybe write a paper on one of his novels, I could not bring myself to even start work on this little project... therefore, meeting him and hearing him talk was a big experience for me... especially this time, I wouldn't have made it if my cousin Shubha (Chennai) hadn't come forward to help Shruti, when Shruti was frantically hunting for passes... I feel happy when my family and friends indulge me, but it is also a tremendous feeling of responsibility...

I can share my reading experiences of Amitav Ghosh's novels with you, I can talk about his novels...things that I liked... but I will never be able to write about his novels...maybe I am a mad fan ... but, as long as there is a method...I am ok with it...

An evening with Amitav Ghosh

2008-07-25T12:20:00.002+05:30

Hi...

Yesterday, June 24,2008, was a wonderful day...I met or rather saw my literary idol Amitav Ghosh...heard him speak and read out from his latest novel Sea of Poppies... this was the second straight time that I was attending a 'reading' by Amitav-da... the first time I heard and saw him was when he had come to Hyderabad for the launch of The Hungry Tide...I must thank Shruti profusely for running around and trying and succeeding to arrange an invite for the event...She was really furious at me for making her run around, when Vinod told us that invitations are not required as the organisers had announced the event and venue in the papers...and that he just walked in...

I don't have to tell that I was very happy...and even mustered enough courage to stand up and make an observation about the bhojpuri songs that Amitav-da had included in his novel...and also about my experience of reading the novel with the missing pages...I also videographed a small portion where Amitav-da is reading from Sea of Poppies...I will treasure this video...

I must thank Shruti, without whose efforts and support, I would not have made it to the reading yesterday evening...she also patiently took photographs when I went up to Amitav-da to get my copy of the novel autographed...

Thanks to ITC Hotels Kakatiya for arranging this beautiful book-reading evening in the sparkling Hyder Mahal hall and thanks to Penguin for bringing out a good looking book and for their excellent production values...

Going totally bonkers...A Fountain Pen Dream!

2008-07-23T11:01:00.002+05:30

It was absolutely crazy and bizarre… it was Saturday, 19th July, the college was closed due to a bandh called by a political party (we work 6 days a week)…I was at home…though Shruti works only 5 days a week, she had some work at EFLU…I completed some pending jobs in the morning and finished my lunch…I thought I’d take a nap…I had fallen asleep and sometime after that the power would have gone off, as it usually does these days in Hyderabad…I must have been really tired not to have woken up immediately, because the minute the ceiling fan stops moving, I start sweating immediately…it must have been after the power cut that I had this dream…

I was in this place, which was vaguely familiar…can’t place it…sort of a compound with old houses, patchy moist walls, overgrown plants and so on…and one of my teachers (where she came from, I don’t know!!!), who is also a friend now, asks me to help her in discussing something with her students…for this we had to go from this place I described to another place…I went in a car and the driver was Anthony, the driver of one of the professors in our college (how Anthony came in to all this is something I don’t understand…)…so, Anthony drives me to this place, which is totally unfamiliar, which is a nice enough kind of a building…I get down and proceed towards the building when I see this rather shed like structure with earthen floor and thatch like roof…this structure had a door like opening over which hung a kind of banner or board announcing the name of a stationery/book shop…I forgot all about my teacher-friend and went inside…

As I entered, I saw that the shop was to the right…an open kind of shop, which had stuff arranged in wooden steps on a platform kind of structure at a height of some 5 to 6 feet from the floor…there was this person sitting there…I asked him if he sold fountain pens…he said ‘yes,’ and showed me a fountain pen made entirely of wood, not ebonite…I have never seen anything like this before…it was sort of flat looking…had a flat but ‘bulged in the middle’ kind of barrel, and a similar flattish section…it had a nib, but the pen did not have a cap…I asked him the cost, and he said, ‘six’…and then added, ‘for 10 more rupees, I will fix a better nib’… so I presumed the cost to be ‘sixty’ rupees…and asked him to fix the better nib… the entire shop looked like a pen workshop…he then took out a box and hunted around for the ‘better’ nib…this much is still clear…then, things appeared vague for some time…

Sometime during this, I reminded myself that I had sauntered in to this place and that I had actually to go and meet my teacher/friend…as I was thinking about this, and slowly started walking out, with an intention of informing them of my whereabouts and coming back, I saw that my friend had come out to see where I was and saw that I was coming out of this pen shop…and she smiled, saying, ‘haan…it had to be a pen shop, that’s what was keeping you, are you coming in or not?’ I remember making a silly face and sort of said that I’ll be there with all of you soon and went back in…and what I remember is this person giving me this wooden pen with a nib fixed and of all things, a ‘lantern’ attached to the nether part of the barrel …I was kind of taken aback…it was not a battery operated torch, but a proper kerosene or spirit ‘lantern’ with a wick and glass cover and a bottle like thing to hold kerosene/spirit…and it was sort of fixed…a lantern usually swings from its handle, but this lantern didn’t swing from the bottom of the pen…it was not a big lantern, but it was longer than the pen…around 8-9 inches…the entire thing measured around 15 inches…slightly longer than a foot-ruler…he gave me this ‘pen’… I didn’t know what to do with this…how am I going to use this, I thought? I asked him the price and he said, ‘1,500 Rupees’…from 60 to 1500 was a big jump…I was hesitant…

And then I remember asking him if he had any ‘Wilson’ fountain pens…he then asked a young chap to look after my request…this young man then came and sat cross legged (I don’t know where he came from…I didn’t seem to notice him before) at the counter-like structure and pulled out a wooden tray kind of thing, which had a lot of compartments…each compartment contained a different part of a fountain pen…some familiar and some totally unfamiliar like thin light blue plastic-like rectangular pieces…I was intrigued …and this young man proceeded to put things together from this tray to make this pen… I have never seen anything like this…he looked like a jewellery shop worker… I asked him something, I don’t remember what, and this man looked up…to my surprise, I saw that this was no longer a young man, but a man clearly above 50 years of age…when this replacement occurred, I can’t say…I don’t remember what I had asked him, but what he said must have been in response to my query…this elderly person asked me not to buy that particular brand…because that is not good…or something to that effect…by that time, the pen I had asked for was ready…I hadn’t realised that a pen could be made like this…assembled in front of your eyes…like pizza with your choice of toppings…I asked the price of this pen, and he said 1,000 rupees… again, I was taken aback…a thousand rupees for an ordinary pen!…but I wanted to buy that pen…

Somewhere around this time, I must have woken up…and I could recall some parts vividly…I haven’t dreamt of fountain pens before…must have been an overdose of fountain pen related talk and discussions with Hari and shopping in Gaya and Hyderabad, all those photos and posts here and at FPN…must have taken its toll… when I realised what had happened, I sent an SMS to Hari telling him that I had gone totally bonkers and related in a few words what I had seen in my dream…Hari is understanding in these matters and sent a reply soon enough, saying with written laughter that I was now totally assimilated…

I might have taken some liberties with the sequence of events, but I have tried very hard to retain in memory whatever I had seen in the dream by going through the whole sequence every day till today…But, that image of the ‘lantern pen’ will remain for a long time…I wish I could draw well, I would have sketched a rough drawing of this great multipurpose pen…!!!

Discovering some vintage Indian fountain pens in Gaya, Bihar

2008-07-12T12:47:00.002+05:30

Plato 14 kt gold nib pen

Indian Waterman Cap and Body engraving

Indian Pilot Capped

Dear friends…

This time around, I am writing about some FP discoveries that I made in the pilgrim town of Gaya in Bihar, India…Gaya is Shruti’s hometown and I was visiting her parents and I was there for a week…ok, before going there, FP buff that I have become now, I was wondering whether there would be some shop in this town that would have some FPs…I wrote to my good friend (and fellow FPN-ian) Hari, informing him that I would be going to Gaya and that I’d be on the lookout for FPs there…promptly, in his next mail, he sent me the address of a pen shop in Gaya…

It was with a great deal of scepticism that I went to this shop, Sainani Pen Corner, on the third day of my stay in Gaya…I imagined it to be a big shop, bustling with customers, and would have undergone changes and would now be selling Indian Parker Vector FPs and left over Camlin FPs, the ubiquitous FP brands that one commonly finds in Indian stationery shops… if I was not on the lookout out of the car window, I would have missed it, the look of the shop turned out be an anticlimax…it was slightly more than a hole in the wall…what could I find here?

Anyway, Shruti and I went to the small counter and there was this man (Anjani Kumar Sainani)…I asked him whether he had any fountain pens…he gave me a recent model called Montex…I asked whether he had any ebonite old FPs…I think, that cooked my goose…he realised he had a mad FP fan…he said that he used to have such pens in the past and maybe one or two are still left over and that he’d have to search…the shop was stacked till the roof with old dusty cardboard pen boxes…he then proceeded to show me some really old Indian steel nibbed FPs…names like Kingson, Olympic, Wilson … I had heard of Wilson, who used to manufacture FPs in India with their HQ in Bombay…I asked him the prices of these pens and he told me that the price list is with his brother and that he’d let me know…and all these were steel nibbed ones…he told me he also has Swans and Waterman and Pilot gold nib pens…and that he’d have them in the shop in a couple of days…and asked me to come back two days later…and then he showed me a brand called Plato…with 14 kt gold nib…it was really good looking, red in colour with a broad band on the cap…vintage… almost 40 years old…and the price he quoted was too much…I didn’t have the heart to buy the pen, though good looking, at that price…that day, I could buy only a Kingson FP, as that was the only FP that he was able to quote any price…in the evening, I called up Hari and told him about my visit and the pens that I saw and the prices that were quoted…my heart was really after the Plato G-Nib pen…Hari told me that the Wilson steel nibs were ok, but the price for the Plato was way beyond even the most inflated rates that anyone would quote…and Hari also requested me to buy spare specimens (if available) of any pens that I bought or saw…and Hari, ever practical, also asked me photograph the Plato gold nib pen, even if I didn’t want to purchase it…this was real good advice…with Hari’s various advices in mind, I went there two days later, with hope in my heart and a reasonable amount of money in my wallet…

I had kept aside a couple of Wilson and Olympic FPs earlier, and when he saw me, he took them out and told me the price…I was stunned…it was too much…he then showed me Swan (Cambridge) steel nib FPs and an ebonite Wilson…and a mottled orange flat top/bottom Wilson (this looks like ebonite, but I am not sure), also steel nib…I was sorely tempted…but the price he was quoting for these steel nibbed FPs was too much…once an FP addict, always an FP addict…with a heavy heart, I started selecting the proffered pens…he had two mottled orange and two zany designed Wilsons…I took them all…he had two Swan Cambridges…I took them too…and the Wilson mottled brown ebonite, he had only one…I took that…so, I had purchased 8 pens, along with the Kingson, two days back…I mentally counted the money I had and decided that I couldn’t afford the Olympic FPs…then I remembered Hari’s advice on photographing the G-Nib pens, and I asked him to show me the Plato…and wonder of wonders…apart from Plato, he proceeded to display some more G-Nib pens…an Indian Pilot GN, an Indian Waterman, and another Plato GN with piston pump filler…I was stunned…I have posted the photo of the shop and I think you can understand my reaction on seeing these pens…but the price that he quoted for each of these was astronomical…he was not willing to even reduce 1 rupee…therefore, buying them was out of question…so, following Hari’s advice, I managed to photograph them in their various poses…and have posted them here…

But the bigger and important point is that at one point in time in the 1960s, international pen makers like Pilot and Waterman and Swan had set up shop in India and were manufacturing these pens in India…and they were manufacturing machine made gold nibs here in India… and many old timers have said that they were using these pens, albeit steel nibbed ones, in their school and early college days…it also speaks a lot that an obscure shop in an out of the way town like Gaya has old stocks of these pens…and as Hari said, during one of our ‘pen-cussions,’ the Sainani Pen Corner must have had its glory days…but, all that is history now…these pens are no longer manufactured here and all that we have are some left over FPs and these photos…

I thank Hari wholeheartedly…as you can see, he has been with this episode right from the start…giving me the name of this pen shop to offering various suggestions during the purchase and discovery of these pens, and finally for uploading all these photographs, so that I could post them…you can see all these photos at www.fountainpennetwork.com in the pen photography forum…

This post is written and photos are posted, more with a sense of history than anything else…a kind of glorious chapter in the history of Fountain Pens in India…

I hope this entire narrative was not too tedious for your reading pleasure…

Thanks…

Jayasrinivasa Rao

Musings on turning 40

2008-07-06T11:19:00.001+05:30

Hello friends…

I touched forty yesterday…a momentous occasion in anybody’s life…(from where does anybody come in, haen?…it is I who has touched 40…so it should be a momentous occasion in my life)…ok…ok…let’s not quarrel…you see, I am having a concurrent conversation with myself…actually, on this momentous occasion (second time…), as I started reflecting (when did you become a mirror…?) on the decades that I have spent on this blessed earth…I realised one thing…nothing has changed… (wow…) anyway, on this momentous occasion, (come on…this is too much, you should use such clichés only occasionally…) as I woke up, I started to worry…(haen…!!!) I haven’t started greying yet!!! (super…) This is terrible, yaar!!! …I especially wanted to start greying at the temples…then I again reflected (you should have mirrored…), since I am not much of a temple-goer, it is not likely to happen anytime soon…so be it…maybe, I should start going to churches… I am not very much into religion and all that stuff…maybe, that is the problem…maybe, it helps one grey…all the same, I feel fit and fine…I can hear my two baby chins sometimes having a chinwag…wagering, actually (on???) …apart from this, things seem to be ok with me…the left knee is trying to act smart…these days, it has started to protest…(very smart) it smarts sometimes…but I don’t bother about such knee-jerk reactions…I wear smarty pants, you see…but I need my left knee…(eh…!! You kneed your left knee? With your right?)…gives a sort of balance, you know…left and the right… help me stand and walk (right…well said, dude)…and of course, I have to have many farewell ceremonies…the lush black hairs on my crown constantly wave me good bye and disappear…strand by strand…but I am an eternal optimist…the hairline recedes and I gain more face…less shampoo… see, I told you…there’s faayda in everything…look at the bright side, maan…I am actually totally fit and fine…looking forward to many more such momentous occasions (you couldn’t resist, na, just to irritate me…)

Here I come (bad word…) ok…ok…arrive…fiery forties…look out…

The Long Locked Hamlet - a parody

2008-07-04T12:17:00.001+05:30

Hello folks...

I think I have a tolerably good sense of humour…ha ha ha…(see…I told you!!!) …at some point of time in the past, I thought I should seriously pursue humour (huh?) …so, I thought, I’d write humour-laced stuff …my first attempt at writing, as it turned out, was combined with acting it out…I had joined CIEFL in 1992…and there was this Participants’ Day and I thought I’d participate in the entertainment programme…if you observe carefully, there was a lot of thinking going on at that time…mind it…if I have to go on stage, I had to either act or sing or tell(?) jokes…I thought I’d do some acting…and write my own script for that…at that time Prof. Balasubramanian used to teach Phonetics…it was a new subject for me and I liked it and Prof. Bala’s enthusiasm in teaching it…I liked the way he would speak in various English accents…and for some reason the way he pronounced the word ‘cut’ struck me…I had grown my hair long at that time, not very long though…and I liked Hamlet…somehow, all these came together and I wrote a parody of ‘To be or not to be’ and enacted it on stage…Prof Bala was sitting in the first row and in the next class he said, so, you parodied me too…or some such thing to that effect…then this parody was also published in the CIEFL participants’ newsletter… people liked it…I have a photo of that brief performance…but too many microphone stands have covered my princely stature and clouded my royal visage…so no photo…only the parody…my first attempt at comedy…if comedy is the stuff of laughter please read on…(I am trying to write Shakespearean!!)

The Long Locked Hamlet
[with profound apologies to the bal/rd]

To cut or not to cut
that is the question.
Whether it is manly in this world
to suffer the itchings and scratchings
of long hair or to take arms against and by
cutting…end them.
To cut, to shave – No more –
and by a tonsure to say we end
the tortures and a million natural
locks that head is heir to.
‘Tis a deliverance devoutly to be wished
To cut, to shave – to shave –
perchance to bleed; ayyo, there’s the nick.
There it is suspect, that makes
a nuisance of so long hair.
For who would bear the itchings and
scratchings of lice, mice and dandruff ?
The owner’s envy and the neighbour’s pride.
The locks of untended growth,
the love’s delay.
When I myself might pare it with a
bare pare of scissors.
Who would fardels bear,
To sweat and stink under such heavy
locks?
But the dread of identity after tonsure.
Thus locks make idiots of us all.
And thus the natural hue of hair is
covered over with a horrible
layer of dandruff.
– Soft you now,
The fair Ophelia! – Nymph, in Thy
prayers be all my locks remembered.
Take me to a barber-y, Ophelia –
Lead thy ways to a barber-y,
Where’s your father, the Barber!

*****

Ok only or what?

Tryst with an Early English Novel

2008-07-03T14:06:00.001+05:30

Hi friends…

I was reminded of this incident when I was writing the previous post…this happened way back in 1997 in Bangalore…I was working on my PhD at (the then) CIEFL, here in Hyderabad, and my parents were residing in Bangalore…I had gone there for a brief break in June… I was working on the early days of the novel in Kannada and books and information and research material on this topic was difficult to come by and moreover, scarce…so, Bangalore was the place where I would visit all kinds of book shops, old and new, and places like Kannada Sahitya Parishat and Karnataka Sahitya Academy and Kannada Pustaka Pradhikara to see whether I could get hold of early novels, articles in old Kannada journals, books on criticism in Kannada, etc., and one such bookshop that I would visit every time I visited Bangalore was located in Jayanagar 4th Block in the shopping complex there…I would also buy other kinds of books also there like English novels…and one such English novel I purchased there was one of the earliest novels to be written in English…

‘This’ novel was published in nine volumes between 1760 and 1767 (yeah…that early!!!)…Prof Aniket Jaaware, who taught us English literature at Fergusson College, Pune, would often talk about ‘this’ novel when discussing early English novelists like Richardson and Fielding, though ‘this’ novel was not prescribed for our study… ‘this’ novel, he said, defied the conventions of novel writing at a time when the ‘novel’ was just about beginning to establish itself as a genre in English literature and pointed out the unique narrative employed by the novelist…like distortion of chronological sequences, blank pages, blank sections in within chapters, actual drawn squiggles to indicate the movement of how a particular character flourished his cane, chapters only with chapter number headings with nothing else in it (almost telling the readers that I don’t have anything to tell in this chapter!!!), chapters that begin with a lot of star marks, and so on…the novelist looked to be actually laughing (sarcastically, I think) at the entire convention of novel writing…and poking fun at the various trappings of the new genre…I was intrigued and curious and went to the college library to take a look at ‘this’ novel…a cursory look was enough to understand the novelist’s intentions, though I didn’t read it at that time…

So, when I saw this novel in this shop in Bangalore, I bought it…and it was one of those inexpensive editions and didn’t burn a hole in my pocket…the first thing I did when I went home was to flip over the pages trying to locate all the ‘interesting’ things that the novelist did with ‘this’ novel…and as I was doing this, I noticed that almost ten pages, from 209 to 128, were missing…I was frustrated and was getting irritated thinking about the distance that I’d have to travel to return this and get an unflawed copy…I went there the next day and (fortunately, I hadn’t written my name or covered it with a polythene sheet as is my usual practice…) showed them the book and the page number jump and asked them to give me a complete copy…the shopwallah (again, I forget the name…) took out another copy of the novel and gave it to me…

I thanked him and before leaving, I thought I should verify this copy to see if it was complete in all respects…I did a good thing…this copy too had the same page jumps…I showed him this copy and he was surprised…and then he brought out all the copies that he had and we started flipping pages…I found the same problem in all the copies that I examined…and he too found the same problem…by now, I was getting angry…he then told me that probably all the copies in the stock that he got were flawed and started blaming the publishers and printers for not paying attention to such things…he said he had another unopened box of novels from the same publishers in his storehouse and that he’d get it the next day and it might have whole copies of the novel and that I can get my fresh copy then…I was thinking of another wasted journey and a return the next day…

I don’t know what struck me, but I paused for a few seconds and told myself…this can’t be possible, decided to further examine the novel…when the novelist has done so much to twist around the form of the novel, he could be ‘trusted’ to make further mischief…I went to page 208 and read the page …it had continued from the previous page and I saw the heading ‘Chapter 23’ in the middle of the page and the page ended in a sentence with a full stop…so, Chapter 23 has only begun…it probably continues in the missing pages…and I then saw the next page, 219, it began with a chapter heading ‘Chapter 25’…oh, so, the entire Chapter 24 is missing and a substantial part of Chapter 23 along with it…without much interest, I glanced disinterestedly at the opening paragraph on page 219…I struck my forehead with my palm…dhath teri ki…why didn’t I guess…being a literature student, I should have had some literary instinct and after everything that the novelist had done to ‘this’ novel, he was not above pulling another narrative trick…and there it was on page 219 opening paragraph of chapter 25…the evidence of another narrative trap…

“ – NO DOUBT, SIR – there is a whole chapter wanting here – and a chasm of ten pages made in the book by it – but the book-binder is neither a fool, or a knave, or a puppy – nor is the book a jot more imperfect (at least upon that score) – but, on the contrary, the book is more perfect and complete by wanting the chapter, than having it, as I shall demonstrate to your reverences in this manner. – I question first, by the by, whether the same experiment might not be made as successfully upon sundry other chapters – but there is no end, an’ please your reverences, in trying experiments upon chapters we have had enough of it – So there’s an end of that matter.

Very clever…and then the novelist goes on to tell in the next paragraph…

But before I begin my demonstration, let me only tell you, that the chapter which I have torn out, and which otherwise you would all have been reading just now, instead of this – was the description of my father’s, my uncle Toby’s, Trim’s, and Obadiah’s setting out and journeying to the visitation at ****.

I don’t know how many of you have experienced this…I then showed this to the shopwallah…he was not at all amused…

The novel is Tristram Shandy and its writer…Laurence Sterne…

In the current post-modernist age where playing around with the narrative is de rigueur for many novelists…Laurence Sterne stands out as the ‘dada’ of all post-modernist novelists in a pre-modern age…sadly, this ‘art’ was not taken up by subsequent English novelists and we had to wait for the post-modernist age to see such ‘deceptions’ again. That part will be for another post…