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Google translate is a good tool for translation, now that it has Hindi, Tamil and Telugu in it. Oh, when will Malayalam be in it?

I am @johnwriter on Twitter and John.Matthew on Facebook. I blog here.

Mrs. Frank Sinatra (Blue Eyes) Writes Her Biography

Blue Eyes, that's Frank Sinatra, has a wife who is known as Lady Blue Eyes, who in turn is Barbara Sinatra. Now, Barbara has written what is termed here as a "nuanced" portrait of her husband whose blue eyes women found irresistible. Don't know if the account is as frank as it is made out to be.
 
The hard-drinking, womanising Frank knocked on her bedroom door (ergo: they slept separately) at 5 a.m. one night and when she asked "who is it?" replied "Your Italian lover." This and other anecdotes form a part of the book referred above.
 
I am not a great fan of Frank Sinatra nor of the yodelling kind of singers of yore including Slim Witman and others. I find them boring. But I like Elvis though. But they were the swingers of an era gone by and a look at their lives is worth mentioning. So this post.

I am @johnwriter on Twitter and John.Matthew on Facebook. I blog here.

The Girl in the Garden - A Novel by Kamala Nair

The Girl in the Garden by Kamala Nair is a novel set in America but for the most part talks of happenings in Kerala. It's about Rakhee Singh who tries desperately to save her parent's marriage. Her mother Amma is thirteen years junior to Abba and on a visit to Kerala she discovers that Amma has other love interests in God's Own Country as well. What a perfect setting for a love triangle.

Well, all I can say is it promises to be a good read and hope to get my hand on it some time. One thing it reinforces, however, is that Indian Writers in English (IWEs) find better acceptance in the West than in India. Maybe, it's that Indian writers are so involved in the descriptions of their native country because of the general feeling of displacement and yearning they feel. Of the one spell of being an NRI in my life (around a year in Saudi Arabia), I did feel an intense nostalgia about my country.

I am @johnwriter on Twitter and John.Matthew on Facebook. I blog here.

Slut Walk and Being Trendy

Reading Annie Zaidi on Slut Walk made me change my view on it. Some what. Do not know how much.

For the first time I went into the mind of a pretty/beautiful/modern woman and thought of the dilemma she faces each day: will they criticise/deride this, will men be provoked to extremes, what will other women think, etc., because a woman is very vulnerable in our society. She wants to be a part of the mainstream, but she can't work after 9.30 because of some stupid rule, cannot freely walk because the roads are full of prurient men with their overgrown libidos. She is straining at the leash of being independent, successful and is somewhat cheesed off (-:humbly beg pardon for the term:-) at having to justify even what she wears everyday when a man can wear a track suit pant or shorts to office and still be considered a trendy dresser. (I have seen men dressed even worse. How about a trouser ironed at the sides with a shoes so pointed he has to step around gingerly in the cramped office. He dashed his toes against my chair and when another guy came wearing pointed shoes I had difficulty navigating the very short space which was left after we accommodated the sticky and muddy pieces sticking out like a dirty cow's hoof. Hm. More on this unsavoury subject in another post.)

Clothes is a sign of a woman's emancipation. While I understand a woman's need to express herself through her clothes, there are women in India who are comfortable wearing traditional dress. With great difficulty I persuaded my wife to wear a salvaar-kameez. The reason is though she is from Kerala I want her to be a little more in tune with Bombay and the way women dress here. (All men want women to be trendy. Amitabh once mentioned he likes women to be trendy. Jaya is a very conservative dresser as is my wife.) The reason wifey gave me is that all her friends at school and in church wear saris so she would prefer to wear it than anything more trendy. A majority of Indian women are conservative dressers. So the subject under discussion is "what is trendy?" and what exceeds the limits of being trendy. How do we define this? How do we get across to men that women who want to be trendy should dress thusly and should be allowed to do so without cat calls and wolf whistles.

There are women who would like to dress trendily and those who do not. Wifey is of the latter category. It's her choice. Today I saw a girl covered entirely in a wrap leaving only a small aperture for the eyes. This is a trend I have noticed increasingly in Bombay. In a free country nobody has forced her to do so, but she prefers this to being teased on the streets and stations. There is no dilemma she has faced as Orhan Pamuk mentioned in his novel Snow. Yet she covers herself to make herself unrecognisable for some reason only known to her.

So assuming the way she dresses is a personal thing and nobody's business, a woman would discover what she is comfortable in after a few trials and stick to that kind of dressing. I have seen women who only wear suits, I have seen women who only wear trousers and tops, I have also seen women who only wear skirts. I am a great watcher of women's fashions and my life would be drab if all women wore saris and salwar-kameezes. I like to notice the trend, the variety, the ultimate self-expression that is women's fashion.

Fashion! Why didn't anybody mention that much-maligned word.

For a woman what she wears is what is trendy and accepted by her friends as in fashion. She thinks being left out of the fashion race would be amounting to accepting defeat. Being fashionable is akin to losing her identity and hard-won freedom to be be what she is. So what is fashionable and what is not. What is trendy and what is not.

So the Canadian policemen chum who mentioned "Women should stop dressing like sluts," or something to that effect needs a round of strong condemnation. "How would you like to be punched and kicked in the solar plexus with stilettos dear sir?" You have denuded Amazon forests with the sheer verbiage you have unleashed on the poor suffering world. How could you do this to us sir?

But what I wouldn't condone is women wearing revealing dresses in the workplace. It defeat the purpose of business if a woman wear something provocative in the office and the whole office in some sexual frenzy instead of working. I have noticed that some Indian women - don't crucify me for that, I said "some" - do not understand the concept of formal dressing for business occasions. So classes for formal dressing would be in order. Right? Who wants me as tutor?

Gibberish Written in a Somnolent State

Sleep spreads it's silken sheets into a tired brain. But then I lose it. It's been a tiring day and I am wide awake, unable to sleep. "It's been a hard day's night, I been working like a dog," sang the Beatles in one of the best songs I have ever heard. I still love that song. Where are the Beatles, where is Elvis, where is Jim Morrison, where is that guitarist guy who kept audience enthralled with his guitar riffs in Woodstock, where is Woodstock, by the way. Consigned to the pages of history as a revolution that never was, many conscripted, but not many made it to the end, the hippies became entrepreneurs, the nerds became failures, the rebels became conformists, they dreamed the impossible dream, dreams too lost in utopia to achieve. Then they fell by the wayside. Destroyed themselves so that whoever came didn't see their rotten flesh, their ashes.

Some died of fame, some died of lack of it. Some sang themselves into a paranoid world, their songs without end, their songs without rhyme. Everybody wanted to be immortal, but mortality over came their greedy innards, tore into their evil designs and defeated their purpose. You will recognise them from their haggard looks on the avenues and the boulevards, unshaven chins, droopy moustaches, shaggy manes. They are of a different generation, now balding ancient men now, without forgiveness for their own stupid blunders. Cursing the younger generation and remembering how they cursed the old when they were themselves young.

Wrote this gibberish when sleep wouldn't come. I sit up late and key this in, stream of consciousness style (remember stream of consciousness?), to see how it will go, how it will look like. Stream of consciousness is to the mind what sleep is to the tired body. Relaxing! I haven't read all this gibberish, at least, not yet. I will do that tomorrow and see and agonise over the mistakes, the bad syntax and grammar, the anarchy of prose and would wish there was some hidden meaning to this writing as to all life, living or spiritual. I think I will stop. Apologies. Goodbye. 

Data Card Woes and Is It Rape Extortion?

Short take today. The laptop is behaving funnily. No. The Reliance
data card I mean. I get a good signal on the first floor and a bad one
on the ground floor. I didn't know a floor made all that difference. I
am not much satisfied by the service. And they are sanguine about
collecting their money. If you don't pay your bill they disconnect
pronto!

There are workers doing some pre-monsoon-turned-post-monsoon work on
the house. Fixing things. They talk in a Bengali dialect, which I
listen to intently. But on the little I know of Bengali I don't
recognise much except "aschi". Dang. Meanwhile, they bang, bore holes,
bang with a sledge hammer while I suffer in silence. What else can I
do? I found dampness in the top floor after the first rain. So the
idea is to cover it to give a permanent sort of cover from the forces
of nature.

I saw some gruesome videos of police atrocities on Indian TV. I don't
know how they captured a group of policemen beating up a robbery
suspect, so mercilessly. The man was crying. He was held face down in
the air by the policemen, while their colleagues beat him with a stick
and a whip. It's too gruesome to be on the net, how come it landed on
national television.

It's surprising how people are getting out of murder and rape charges
so easily. Look at the Maria Susiraj and Shiney Ahuja cases. I am sure
both will come out as celebrities and land reality shows after their
acquittal. Also see about Strauss-Kahn affair. Is it that people are
alleging rape to extort money or is it a figment of my imagination? Is
it a failure of the prosecution or is it shameless extortion. I don't
know. I am confused.

The Strauss-Kahn Affair Could Be a Good Book

Nothing much is know of IMF chief Strauss-Kahn's accuser, a Chambermaid named Opelia, who works at New York's Manhattan Sofitel. Her brother Blake Diallo who turned out to be her boyfriend had this to say about their relationship in this article:
 

"Le Monde learned soon afterward that Diallo is Senegalese, not Guinean, and that he was her boyfriend, not her brother. Contacted about this, Diallo explained somewhat ingenuously that he had said sister "because in Africa people call each other brother and sister."

Strauss-Kahn walked free because prosecution couldn't establish their case.  The l'affaire Strauss-Kahn could well be the next bestseller. A mystery at that.

Is Bigadda Shutting Down?

I received the following email from Bigadda.com, which is self-explanatory. Does it mean they are shutting down their blogging space, a space dominated by Amitabh Bachchan their star blogger? They clearly mention: blogs, audio files, video files and images, so what's up?
 

We value and appreciate your long standing support for Bigadda.com. In the past few months we explored our potential as an ecommerce portal by providing branded products at profitable deals to you and have found immense success. We are reaching newer heights everyday and hence are planning an expansion in the same arena.

We request you to download all your personal collection of blogs, audio files, video files and images from Bigadda.com as we are scaling down our Social Networking services.

Please note that all your old personal data, uploaded on Bigadda.com, shall not be available after July 15 2011.

Log on to http://www.bigadda.com/frontpage/bigaddaHomepage/ now and download your personal files.

In case you have forgotten your password please click here to retrieve it.

Remains to be seen. As they say on television, "Break ke baad."

Thanks Dr. Mladen Behara for Spamming My Inbox

What do you assume when you receive an email from one MLADEN BEHARA drbehara@open.telekom.rs? .rs is the domain name for Serbia and Dr. Behara is informing that I have been Awarded 750,000.00 BP In the British Premier Oil Plc. The guy is a doctor from the prefix on his name, so do I believe him or not? All he wants to know is the following:

Name...
Resident...
Age...

Just this short email. Short and sweet. See how enigmatic they can be. Pound 750,000 is going waste, I should grab it as fast as I can provided I can give them a processing fee. No, Dr. Behara from Serbia, I don't trust you enough. Why should you be in Serbia when the money offered is from British Premier Oil England? Why should you spam my gmail inbox, the trusted email has the best spam filters? Anyway, contrary to what people think (yes, I have been accused of that), I am not that greedy for money. I am just a poor old writer, hacking a living on corporate tosh (thanks Sir Vidia for the term).

Thanks anyway for your offer. I will think about it. In any case, don't think your chances of fooling me are that good. I have been a victim of such spams before. So I know.

Why We Can't Help Being Corrupt

Today a total stranger in the train told me, "Even if we have a thousand Lok Pals, we will not succeed in rooting out corruption. It has become a part of us, it is an integral part of our thinking." The train is over-crowded and there isn't space for the feet to rest on the floor. I am standing on one leg. The city is overcrowded and growing in every possible direction. There's no space to be the least comfortable.

Standing thus I nod a weak assent.

Before justifying such preposterous thinking let me point to the following weird facts that presented itself in the past few days:

1.  A parents has to pay a donation of Rs 1,00,000 ($ 2,222) to get his child admitted in a school. The teachers in the same school are paid a salary of Rs 4000 ($ 100) a month (yes, you heard right, $ 100 a month). If they complain, they would be thrown out and labelled as incompetent. If they apply for another job and give a reference to this job, they would be passed off as lunatics and trouble makers. End of their career.

2.  By buying a flat (a one bedroom flat costs Rs 50 lakh these days), a man should consider his life as having ended. He will pay around Rs 50,000 every month as installment for the rest of his life. (There are people who subsist on Rs 3,000 a month.) If he becomes unemployed his burden increases. 

3.  An average person from a well-to-do family draws a salary of Rs 50,000 a month which hardly pays for his installments, the children's education and commuting. Then what will he eat? Unless both husband and wife work, the family is doomed.

4.  The aspiration level is high. There are neighbours with fancy cars, women wearing fancy clothes. How will a man get these? How will he keep his wife and children happy? 

5.  To marry off a girl requires a dowry of 10,00,000 (around $ 22,000) and Rs 5,00,000 more for the feast and celebration. Where will a man bring the money? That why people prefer to have boys, not girls.

We have become corrupted because of reason we cannot grasp. We moonlight as life insurance agents, multi-level marketers, part-time creative consultants, writers, artists, etc. to make that extra money to survive. Any wonder we grab for those extra rupees? Any wonder we become corrupt?