To Mackenzie

Dear Mackenzie Jean Rowling Murray,

Welcome to the world that your wonderful mom has made so much more fun to be in. Do you know she thinks you're 'ridiculously beautiful'? I sure wish I could see you.

Best wishes, and happy birth day. :)

Wendelin

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Stuff about the boyfriend has been removed following death threats

Since this is a promotional post, I can't help but slip this in: the prologue of my oft-mentioned novel-length HP fic is up on Olympe Maxime. Strictly for fans, of course. Random comments of "WTF are you writing?" will not be tolerated. :P

Reverse Ethnocentricism

(Heh, big words sound good in titles.)

[long post with too many disparate points]

Years ago, when I was in Fifth Std (fifth grade, as they say here in the US, i.e. 10 yrs old), my then-best friend Shwetha Swami and I decided we were going to write a book. Shwetha got a big, 300-page notebook and for about two weeks, we spent recess planning out our story. It was going to be a mystery-adventure book, because Shwetha was bang in the middle of her Famous Five stage, and I was into the Hardy Boys. One minor incident that happened while we were enthusiastically planning it sticks out in my mind.

Around the second or third day of the planning, we were mulling over the question of what to call our characters (who, I might add, were painstakingly modeled after the Famous Five). Shwetha wanted to call them Reena, Leela, Raju and something else, I forget what. And I was of the opinion that our book would never be a 'real' book if we didn't call them by Christian names - I think the names I wanted were Jane, Sally, Sam and Tim.

We fought over it for one recess, and the next day, Shwetha came back to me and apologised. "I asked my parents," she said. "My mother thinks you're right." So off we went, and continued planning the Adventures of the Unimaginatively Named Kids. The book never got past chapter 2, and we didn't even have a title or any semblance of a plot, so I suppose the project was doomed from the start.

The thing that gets me is that my only exposure to fiction was books by western writers - it was Enid Blyton for a long time, all the way from Noddy to the Five Find-Outers, and then it became Carolyn Keene and Franklin W. Dixon (who were rumoured to be one and the same person - anyone know if this is true?), and then it became Agatha Christie and Earle Stanley Gardner. I didn't discover R. K. Narayan and Satyajit Ray till I was 12 or 13. All the way until then, I'm sure I was under the impression that 'real' books were only written about white kids with Christian names who lived in England and USA. And you know what's telling? My friend's parents apparently thought the same, too.

And that's reverse ethnocentricism.

We Indians have it pretty good, compared to others. We're like a continent all to ourselves, even in this borderless age. Our indegenous media manages to hold its own in competition with the all-white "global mainstream" media, never mind the hue and cry about us 'apeing the west'. We still get to see Indian faces on the big screen. Others have it worse. Bulgarians, to name but one example. My roomie tells me there isn't a big movie industry there at all. Think about African nations - Nigerians and South Africans and Kenyans and the Sudanese... how many movies do they see themselves in? And when they do make it on the news, what sort of news do they usually make?

And think about this: we must have seen about a billion photographs of tsunami victims by now... dead Asian bodies scattered in the streets, hungry Asian children begging for food, brown bodies with their limbs torn off. It doesn't shock us too much, we've seen it all before. National Geographic specialises in snapping artistically wretched pictures of black and brown and yellow children. How eagerly the media covers it - western media and local, both!

And yet, when earthquakes hit San Francisco, how many bodies are we shown on the streets? When hurricanes hit Florida, killing hundreds of people, how many torn white bodies make it to the TV screens? Can you find a single picture from the Mt St Helens tragedy that shows horribly disfigured, charred white people begging on the city streets? ... Or are we supposed to believe that these things didn't happen, that in a scrubbed-white country like USA, natural disasters are clean and victimless?

Western media has been known to keep its cameras to itself when it comes to such tragedies 'out of respect to the victims' and because publishing the pictures would be 'traumatic' for the public. Because, of course, the 'public' is only ever shocked by the destruction of white people.

And you know what? Local media in our (non-white) countries seem to have adopted this nonsensical coda, too. We show piled up Indian carcasses but not Western... We don't seem to care about how much trauma these pictures might cause to our own people.

You might ask why this matters, and how it will affect us in practical terms. Well. Here's an example.

Think of the class of people who are portrayed as victims of physical assault in most movies. Yes, you got it right: women. G.I. Jane-type flicks aside, it's always women who get assaulted, raped, slashed, beaten and otherwise subjected to violence in movies. It's different with men - men who get beaten up always fight back. Most of the time, they manage to physically defeat their assaulters in the 'final battle' in the end. Not so with women, who are usually purely victims... the best they can do is run away and try to escape.

Statistically, victims of physical assault are split pretty evenly between genders. Hard to believe, isn't it? From movies, we get the impression that women are weaker, women need to be protected, women are the people who best fit the label of 'victim'. You don't think this has an effect on the way we think and behave?

Let's talk about an example of how what we see around us affects us in a big way.

African-Americans in USA are typically underachievers in school. When you rank school kids according to SAT scores and such, the highest scorers tend to be 'Asian' immigrants (I don't believe West Asians are included in this, because the term 'Asian' in America means anything east of China... which is weird). Then come the white kids, and at the bottom of the bunch, you have the black youngsters. When you look at the percentage of black people who make up the professional part of the population, the statistics speak for themselves. The disparity is huge.

Does economic status explain it? No. Asian immigrants tend to be in the same income category as black people, and even in studies that compare kids from similar income groups, African Americans bring up the rear.

Does racism explain it? Not really. Asian immigrant children tend to be teased and bullied and kept outside the school cliques too. And whatever racism might be present in the adult professional circles, there is certainly no lack of opportunity at the school level - it's compulsory for kids to go to school till age 16, and it's practically free - and so there's nothing to explain the high dropout rates among black kids.

Does genetics explain it? This would be an incredibly politically incorrect thing to say - and a lot of people may actually believe that this is the only reason why it's not being said. After all, we can accept that genes determine physical characteristics and capabilities - and we know that black people are make excellent atheletes because of their genes. We know that IQ is at least partially genetically determined. Is it impossible that black people genetically have a lower capacity to learn?

I don't have any evidence, of course, because a study to determine differences in IQ between various races will probably never be commissioned... but I'm guessing this isn't the reason for underachievement among black children, because something else explains it more than adequately.

It boils down to what we see around us, what people we identify with are telling us, who our role models are. Or in a word, culture.

Think about it (and here, I'm addressing my Indian readers): if your peers and your parents hadn't been madly driven about academic achievement, would you, of your own accord, have cared? If everybody around you was dropping out of school and getting jobs, would you have bothered to concentrate so much on studies? If your culture didn't place such a high value on learning, if your parents hadn't asked you "Where did you lose the two marks?" when you got a score of 98% on a maths paper, if it wasn't ingrained in you to think that you're a failure if you're not a doctor or an engineer (even though you know that's bull)... where would you be?

Say you were black, and you were brought up in a ghetto. People drop out of school all the time - and there's no Michelle Pfeiffer-type English teacher to imspire and rescue you. Your community's idea of a successful person is one who manages to reach the age of 18 without a police record.

Even if you are from a well-off community, not a ghetto, there simply isn't that ingrained idea that school is everything, that college is an inevitable part of your future. Even if your parents try to tell you that, you look around you, and see that there aren't many black professionals anyway - so do you really belong in that sphere of life? Should you go to go the academic route and be a fish out of water, or should you try to join your peers and try to get by on sporting ability? And then, you're constantly reminded of how white people will tend to be racist, will tend to look down on you, no matter what (whether or not this is true). No wonder your us vs. them attitude is hardened, worsened. Perhaps not even without cause.

It makes a difference. What we see around us makes a huge difference. What we are today is mostly environment, and any academic aptitude that we might have is purely incidental to our success in acads.

[/long post with too many disparate points]

Rant, Gollum, Abortion and Lorem Ipsum

Where have all my readers gone? I know, I know, it's my fault that I effectively stopped blogging for two months, and you could scour my posts with a microscope without finding so much as an interesting word, and those of you who were betting I'd give up on my Harry Potter mania are now several hundred dollars in debt and beginning to bet instead that I'll start stalking J. K. Rowling. It's all my fault, yes.

But I'll make it up to you, I promise. I will post (yes!) thought-provoking links and discuss them in a thought-provoking manner that invites more thought-provoking comments in that back-room labyrinth that is the Haloscan comments box attached to each of my posts. I will relocate all my HP fangirl enthusiasms to my other blog. I will even help you win back your money by giving serious consideration to my plan to stalk J. K. Rowling and evesdropping on her conversations to get hints of what's coming in her next books.

So come back and read a bit. Help me keep my Googlular distinction (see 'brag board', item 1).


PS: I mean those promises I made above, and here's proof:

1. This speaks for itself. The reason for my interest in it, aside from the obvious (Gullum, duh), is that I've just taken a couple of psychology courses, including one on abnormal psych. Fun.

2. So some nutcase in the Virginia House of Delegates, called John A. Cosgrove, proposes this bill during one of the sessions in the first week of January. This bill provides -

"... that when a fetal death occurs without medical attendance, it shall be the woman's responsibility to report the death to the proper law-enforcement agency within 12 hours of the delivery. Violation of this section shall be punishable as a Class 1 misdemeanor."

Since a foetus in Virginia is defined as a product of conception at any point in the duration of a pregnancy, this bill means that women who suffer a miscarriage after, say, six weeks of pregnancy - and may not even know that it was a miscarriage - would go to jail for up to 12 months for not reporting it to the police. Even worse: a woman who has just been through this traumatic experience has to gather her wits and willingly violate her privacy within 12 hours after the miscarriage has occurred.

The question that readily springs to mind is why. Cosgrove claims that his intention is to reduce the number of 'trashcan babies', i.e. babies dumped or left abandoned in the streets. It took me a while to figure out his logic, which is probably that if you make women accountable for what happened to their babies, they can't simply say "I had a miscarriage and that's how my pregnancy has magically vanished." (Even this doesn't make sense to me, not much. But it's the best explanation I could come up with. Any other guesses?)

How is this whole measure supposed to help live babies if all it does is track dead foetuses? Why are they violating the privacy of an involuntarily traumatised person far more than that of a person who chooses to abort her baby? Though Virginia requires that abortions be reported, those reporting forms require only a “patient number” and information on the procedure. The “report of fetal death” asks for the woman’s full name, her history of prenatal care, her marital status, her education history, her previous deliveries (if any), and a number of other very intrusive - even traumatising - data items (e.g. : weight of foetus in grams, sex of the foetus, etc).

The saving grace for Virginia is that after female senators bombarded Delegate Cosgrove with mail and e-mails and other protests, he withdrew his bill.

3. On a much lighter note, ever heard of "Lorem Ipsum"? Think... think... it rings a bell, doesn't it? I'll put you out of your misery by telling you where you've seen it:

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book.

It's survived to this day... wherever you see templated for blogs and websites, Lorem Ipsum is the filler text that people use in the templates. Not bad, huh. We're still using something five centuries old. But there's more:

Lorem Ipsum comes from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum" (The Extremes of Good and Evil) by Cicero, written in 45 BC. This book is a treatise on the theory of ethics, very popular during the Renaissance.

This link takes you to a site that generates any amount "Lorem Ipsum text" you want. Not a bad way to kill a couple of minutes.

Bye Bye Dave

This is a bit late, but here's my fond farewell to Dave Barry, who's just quit his bloody dream of a job to take at least a year to goof off. Man, I wish I could do that.

But here's to Dave. May he find within him so many booger jokes that he is compelled to come back and write them just to get them out of his head.

Review Mania

Books

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1. Iacocca by Lee Iacocca

So I'm probably the last person in the universe to read it, but better late than never, eh? Easily the breeziest autobiography I've ever read (it's not like I've read too many, though).

Lee Iacocca (and you all know this, so feel free to skip the paragraph) was the brilliant son of Italian immigrants who worked his way up to the top of Ford Corp. from way down there. His was the genius behind the design and success of the Mustang - and several other Ford cars after that. And then, when he had finally reached the top and become the president of Ford, Henry Ford inexplicably (and according to Iacocca, for absolutely no reason) fired him. Instead of retiring to enjoy his already considerable wealth, Iacocca went on to head Chrysler Corp and save it from financial ruin. Clearly, there's a story worth reading here.

There were times in this book when I wished Iacocca would get off his pedestal and stop lecturing me about his politics already - but I did mostly agree with him, he's earned the stature to give lectures, and it is his autobiography, after all, so I guess he's allowed to indulge a bit. On top of that, it's all very engagingly written. It's fun and it's entertaining and if you want a good overview of how the car industry works, it's loads better to read this than Arthur Hailey's abominably boring Wheels.

2. Kolyma Tales by Varlam Shalamov

It's been a long time since I read something that was a must-read, but this book is way up there on the list. It's difficult to overstate how important I think this book is, and if it were up to me, I'd make it compulsory reading in all schools.

Kolyma Tales is a collection of short stories by a Kolyma survivor - which was the harshest of the forced-labour camps that were collectively known as 'Gulag'. The original work in Russian wasn't published until long after the author died in 1982, and the version I read is a translation by John Glad (a professor of Russian literature in a university here in USA - I forget which one), who translated selected stories from smuggled copies of the original work. The book displays prominently a disclaimer: "This book has been translated and published without the author's knowledge or consent."

Even as a stand-alone work of literature, judged solely on its artistic merits, Kolyma Tales is awesome. Shalamov's style is sparse and non-judgemental, and I love his descriptions of the taiga (Kolyma was located in the far northeast of Siberia). Events of unspeakable horror are related with a detachment that is strangely appropriate to an inmate of these camps, whose plans and anxieties and hopes for the future extend to no longer than a couple of hours, and no higher than getting warm or managing to get an extra ration of bread.

In one story, Shalamov's wood-cutting partner is asked to stake his sweater in a game of cards, but he refuses. The bullies kill him and take the sweater. Shalamov turns and leaves, thinking that he'll have to find a new partner. In another story, a member of the author's party commits suicide by sticking his neck between two branches of a tree, and Shalamov is unable to tear his eyes away, fascinated by what he thinks is the most unusual means of suicide he's ever seen.

There are some stories in this book that will wake you up at night... but the author manages to find the lighter moments that inevitably crop up in anybody's life, no matter how wretched. Sometimes it's as simple as sharing a 'smoke' (just a rolled up leaf with nothing in it) with a work-partner, and sometimes a prisoner manages to lay his hands on unimaginable luxuries - in one case, a can of condensed milk, which he drinks and savours to the last drop in front of a crowd of prisoners who have gathered to watch him eat. By far the greatest compliment that I can give this work is that despite how absolutely sickening the subject of these stories is, it doesn't leave you depressed.

It leaves you marvelling that a talent like Shalamov's survived those seventeen years of hell in Kolyma.

3. A Short History of Nearly Everything, and African Diary by Bill Bryson

Bryson has to be the most engaging writer currently putting words down on paper. The questions he explores, the trivia he puts in... I'm always left wondering how on earth he knew that that was exactly what I wanted to know. And he does it all with a wit and charm and humour that leaves the reader mesmerised.

In A Short History, Bryson travels the road often taken by pop science writers, and turns his pen to the origins of the Universe, the Earth and us. Knowing Bryson, I expected fun stuff - all the little details that would make knowing the things he was writing about all the more interesting, and I wasn't disappointed. In this book, his genius lies in introducing us to the major characters who propelled our understanding of the world forward - eccentricities and quirks, to put it mildly, are so common among these people that I have no doubt now that genius and stark raving madness go quite hand in hand. Did you know that Newton was - there's no other word for it - crazy? This man once inserted a long needle into his eye sockets and scraped around enthusiastically at the "back of his head", "just to see what would happen".

Anyway, that's not even a tenth of the stuff you'll find in this very long (480 pages of the larger variety) book. I give it an easy 9 /10.

African Diary, in contrast, is a very short book I finished in about an hour. It's a book that Bryson has written for charity about his trip to eastern Africa to see the CARE refugee camps. Suffice to say, it doesn't disappoint any high expectations that you may have when you pick up a Bill Bryson book. One passage that describes an unsteady train journey, in particular, is sheer genius.

An extract from the book is available on the CARE International UK website: here.

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Movies

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1. Heavenly Creatures (Starring Kate Winslet, directed by Peter Jackson)

You'd probably guess this was a true story even if they didn't tell you. It's a weird, weird movie that is also very arty - always a bad combination, at least for me.

Two fourteen-year-old school girls in New Zealand become fast friends as soon as they meet, and start doing everything together. They're writing operas and books, they're building shrines to tenor singers, they're making clay figurines to inhabit an imaginary world that they've built for themselves.

The 'depth' of their friendship (to use a euphemism) quite justifiably alarms both sets of parents, and they decide very prudently to put a large geographical distance between the two girls by shipping one of them off to South Africa. Of course, the girls don't want this to happen... and together they conspire to kill off one of their mothers. (Don't ask me what they thought this would achieve.)

I quite like the direction, and the visual effects used in the movie are really very good. But that could just be the Peter Jackson fan in me speaking... Overall, it's a slightly disturbing, but mostly weird movie to watch.


2. LotR: The Return of the King, extended edition

I splurged for my first EE LotR DVD, and yes, it's soooo worth it. The extra footage, though not quite on par with some of the scenes that were added to TTT, was really good.

Not to put spoilers in this review, but I did think the Eowyn-Faramir romance was handled beautifully given the time they spent on it (though of course a 10-minute scene developing the whole thing would have been even more welcome). Actually, all the additional Faramir scenes were spectacular - Faramir talking to Denethor about Boromir and the Ring, Faramir in a gem of an interlude with Pippin, and Faramir in the Houses of Healing... all amazing. The Mouth of Sauron is very, very cool also. Really cool. They gave it a smarmy personality, man... it's genius!

I didn't like the extra Merry scenes - particularly the one with Merry and Eowyn. It was completely pointless and illogical to boot. The additional 'Paths of the Dead' footage was so-so, and did nothing to enhance the movie. And I have to say that even though Christopher Lee does a marvellous, marvellous job in the 'Voice of Saruman' , the scene itself wasn't nearly as satisfying as I expected it to be. Seven minutes of footage sounds like a lot, but the whole thing was very rushed, and very abbreviated.

The documentaries are great, if a tad self-indugent... but that's only to be expected, because this is the last of the movies and everyone's a little sentimental about saying tata. It's awe-inspiring, the amount of work and sheer effort that went into the making of these movies. The set of Minas Tirith - oh WOW. They actually built a scale model of four or five levels of Minas Tirith, complete with gates and houses and shops and pathways. I wish they'd left the structure right where they built it and turned it into a museum or something... sheesh. It looked so brilliant just on my TV screen.

Final verdict: why do you care? If you're a fan, you have gotten it already... and if you aren't, you're not going to be interested whether I recommend it or not. But for the record, I do.