Personal

What our books say about us

I was browsing through some of my old posts, in sheer disgust, when I came across the book-tag meme. Remember that? It was a meme that demanded that we list down our favourite books and suchlike, and a whole bunch of Indian bloggers, not yet cynical enough at the time, duly did so. A lot of it is fascinating reading, and as I’ve spent the last 40 minutes revisiting those posts, I might as well point you to them as well. Here’s my response to the book tag, and here’s my list of all the other book-taggers.

The dominant meme these days, of course, is the “Ignore All Memes” meme. That works for me!

On internet connections

Dear readers

For your enjoyment, an email conversation is reproduced below, between me and my kind friend Manish Vij, who has consented to the publication of this most-enlightening exchange. Please read from the top. As I am blogging this via broadband, the grain of rice in front of me lies unsullied.

Warm regards and Happy Holi

Amit

Guilt. Despair! Panic!

So much to do, so little time. On a regular basis these days, I go through the cycle mentioned in the headline of this post. I wake up in the morning (somehow!), get to work, and soon fall behind schedule. Sometimes non-IU work does not allow me to post on this blog until lunch: immense guilt then comes. (As I mentioned here, guilt is a key reason for the frequency of my posts.) If, FSM forbid, I cannot blog by evening, despair sets it. And if the sun sets and the blog is still showing yesterday’s post, panic happens. I go on the internet then, and feel paralysed. What to blog? How can I make up for an entire day gone by?

Pretty much the same phenomenon happens with email as well. Often, when I am travelling, even if it is for a day, the emails pile up. So I use the immensely useful functionality that Gmail has, of starring a mail. The action is supposed to be my way of telling myself, “This is important and I will reply to this email later.” But the message that effectively gets communicated is, “You don’t have to worry about this right now. Chill. Do something else. You can come back to this.”

And, of course, I never do. If fact, the starred mails are so many, and so guilt-inducing, that I’m in denial much of the time. I do not dare to click on the folder. Panic arises at the thought, and alternates with resignation. No doubt I have lost many friends in this way, and upset many readers. Sigh. Weep. Wail.

It has to be said, though, that readers of my blog have less cause for complaint than those who correspond with me. I am, after all, writing a post now—not an email.

Also see: An earlier post on this predicament.

Blowjob Nation

Caitlin Flanagan writes in the Atlantic Monthly:

The moms in my set are convinced—they’re certain; they know for a fact—that all over the city, in the very best schools, in the nicest families, in the leafiest neighborhoods, twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls are performing oral sex on as many boys as they can. They’re ducking into janitors’ closets between classes to do it; they’re doing it on school buses, and in bathrooms, libraries, and stairwells. They’re making bar mitzvah presents of the act, and performing it at “train parties”: boys lined up on one side of the room, girls working their way down the row. The circle jerk of old—shivering Boy Scouts huddled together in the forest primeval, desperately trying to spank out the first few drops of their own manhood—has apparently moved indoors, and now (death knell of the Eagle Scout?) there’s a bevy of willing girls to do the work.

In her piece, Flanagan tells us about how the nature of teenage sexuality has changed in her lifetime. She is horrified by what she calls “Blowjob Nation,” and believes that we are “raising children in a kind of post-apocalyptic landscape in which no forces beyond individual households—individual mothers and fathers—are protecting children from pornography and violent entertainment.”

Full RSS feeds and email subscription now available

India Uncut is a work in progress, and we take feedback very seriously. Many readers wrote in to me complaining about partial RSS feeds, so I’m pleased to announce that every section of this site now has its own RSS feed, which will carry posts in toto. (The Extrowords crossword cannot be replicated in a feed, so that will have a few sample clues to give you a taste of what to expect.)

So, to get to the point, here come the feeds. Please copy the urls below and paste them into whichever feed reader you use. If you use Bloglines, that subscription link is provided, simply open it in a new window.

The India Uncut Blog: http://feeds.feedburner.com/IUB. (Bloglines users, click here.)

Linkastic: http://feeds.feedburner.com/linkastic. (Bloglines.)

Rave Out: http://feeds.feedburner.com/raveout. (Bloglines.)

Workoutable: http://feeds.feedburner.com/workoutable. (Bloglines.)

Extrowords: http://feeds.feedburner.com/extrowords. (Bloglines.)

There is also a combined India Uncut feed you can subscribe to, which carries content from all these sections except Linkastic. (The volume of posts there would overwhelm the rest of the content.) That feed is here:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/indiauncut-full. (Bloglines.)

If you want to subscribe to the content of the above feed by email, you’ll find a place to leave your email ID on the right column.

In spite of all this, I hope you continue coming to the site itself. We’ve worked very hard to make it look good and function well, and will be introducing new features, and maybe sections, as time goes by. Also, you can only play the Extrowords crossword on the site. Have you had a crack at it yet?

I also get asked about comments. Well, comments are open on Rave Out, and will be opened once in a while for selected posts on the India Uncut Blog.

Please keep the feedback coming, either by using the contact form here, or by emailing me directly. I often fail to reply to all the emails I get, because of the sheer volume of them, but I take all feedback seriously, and I thank you in advance!

La Sania

Yesterday I was at dinner with some friends at a restaurant, and there was a television set near us showing some tennis. One of us looked at the menu and, making her mind up about what to eat, said, “Lasagna!”

Another friend, gazing at the TV screen, remarked, “Yes, she’s winning.”

Loving poetry again

Do you find poetry intimidating? I do. I don’t understand most of the poems I read these days, or the ones I listen to at literary gatherings like the Kitab Fest that I’ve been attending this weekend. Sometimes I feel bewildered, sometimes I feel sleepy, and often I feel inadequate. I’ve told myself that perhaps I just don’t get it, like some people are tone deaf or colour blind.

But some poetry does give me pleasure. The work of Philip Larkin, for example, or Vikram Seth. And at the Jaipur Lit fest last month, I thoroughly enjoyed Jeet Thayil’s reading. I landed up at his reading at Prithvi Theater a few hours ago, thus, duly prepared to shoot it with my cellphone video recorder, and upload it later for your enjoyment. There was no electricity, and the reading happened in torchlight, so my recording hasn’t come out too good. Most importantly, the sound volume is just too low, and I have no idea of how to make it louder. So I won’t upload that, but I’ll simply ask you, if you ever hear that Thayil is reading in your city, to go over and ask for the “how to” poems and the ghazal about Malayalam. Even if you’ve never liked a poem in your life, you’ll love these.

What kind of a scoundrel would I be if I didn’t leave with some nice poetry now? So here, check out Billy Collins reading The Dead:

Last chance to vote in the Indibloggies

Today is the last day of voting in the Indibloggies. If you feel India Uncut deserves to win Indiblog of the Year, please do vote. I suspect it’s going to be a close contest this time, and every vote counts.

You do not need to have a blog to vote—that field is optional. A valid email ID is enough. And voting is optional in all categories, so you can vote in as few or as many of them as you wish.

Take that Goog

I went to the airport today morning to receive a friend who was coming from Delhi to attend the Roger Waters concert, and while waiting at Arrival, I checked out the signs that people were holding up. One guy had a sign that said Bhogle. The guy besides him had a sign that said Google.

And you know just how I pronounced the second one, don’t you?