..things are interesting when they are amazing ..things are useful when they are amazing ..things are really nice when they are amazing..

is the description of a blog called Amazing Stuffs. Sigh.

Vacation

Girl: You bloody whore.

Boy: Yeah...a bloody expensive one.

Girl: Hah!

Boy: You are boring. I thought you would ask my price.

Girl: I know your price. 23 thousand, nai?

Boy: And what’s the calculation there? 1 thousand per year?

Girl: Neah. That’s what you earn.

Boy: Shesh! Anything. You know what? Let’s fix a price now. Suppose its 1 thousand per year.

Girl: Ookay? Now, that’s too low a price for you my prince.

Boy: Well, its 1 thousand per year till 18. But after that it’s a young boy’s innocence that I’m taking care of. Very wanton, very unscrupulous. So 5 thousand per year after that. 18 thousand and 30 thousand makes it 48 thousand. That’s my price.

Girl: Nice. Is this what you do at The Firm? Think up loony logic for pricing otherwise cheap objects? What are you so thinking about, eh?

Boy: Your rate, ofcourse.

Girl: Yeah, right. Scamp!

Boy: Supposing the 1 grand price for you too till the cherry starts assuming real value. When does that happen to you guys? 16? 10? 13? Not 18. That’s old.

Girl: Scamp!

Boy: What would you sell for? Don’t give jazz like my cherry. Priceless.

Girl: Why don’t you tell me, then?

Boy: Never really thought about it. And even if I knew, I wouldn’t tell. I want to hear it from you.

Girl: Ah, bull. Though it’s not priceless. A diamond necklace? A ring maybe. Diamond.

Boy: Wow! That’s nowhere near priceless. Although I’ll have to sell myself twice over for even that ring. Implies I could never have your misuage, that holy cherry.

Girl: No, but if it’s you I could go a little cheap. A solitaire ring should do.

Boy: I’ll still have to sell myself, you see.

Girl: Dirt.

Kids! *Sigh*

No book, no writer, no one has ever made me so acutely conscious of my language as a recent Orkut testimonial. Such intensity. No, not intensity. Orgasmicity. Such orgasmicity of emotions, such torrent of profound words, such impossible orthography, such mad lovemaking with the language, you sit, shift, cringe, grin with a drop of tear and read the ejaculation once again, again and again. Kind of orgasm ( expression is really not the word here. Please bear with me ! ) only capable for people who have recently discovered it. Eighteeners, I say!
Here is what I am talking about. Oh, and if you get any real insight about what the writer is testimonying about, please! Hint: I found this on my friend's profile.

I feel honoured to write a few words for my prodigious frd..
My fingerzz r assigned 2 keyboard at present bt m in articulate of words...
Its not so easy to write about him....coz hes an immensily talented guy...... but after meeting him wht experience i had.....i will jolt down here...he is such a consortment of ingenous entity dat it wud eventually b unattainable to delineate abt his disposition..dis amiable frnd of mine wid a benignant serenity on his comely face is xtrmly bounteous n complaisant at heart....u juss talk to him once n u gonna dive in an ocean of such a mellifluous n soothin colloquy 4m him u dont wanna cum out.. Friend is a guy with a unbeatable brain and a heart full of enthusiasm..when it comes to sweetness i bet no one can beat him... I wonder how he manages so many things. he never lets any1 enter his sorrows.... but true frnds find out...... i pray to god tht my frndship wid friend continues till ma last breath....keep smiling...cheers!

Note: I have used some words you would never find in a dictionary. What do you expect!

On the nature of memory and the art of novel.

I am obviously not going to write anything on the topic. Just came along a very interesting observation by Kundera in his collection of essays, Testaments Betrayed. This blog, nostalgia being its prominent motif, would do good to have it in its patio.

When we study, discuss, analyze a reality, we analyze it as it appears in our mind, in our memory. We know reality only in the past tense. We do not know it as it is in the present, in the moment when it is happening, when it is. The present moment is unlike the memory of it. Remembering is not the negative of forgetting. Remembering is a form of forgetting.

We can assiduously keep a diary and note every event. Rereading the entries one day, we will see that they cannot evoke a single concrete image. And still worse: that the imagination is unable to help our memory along and reconstruct what has been forgotten. The present - the concreteness of the present - as a phenomenon to consider, as a structure, is for us an unknown planet; so we can neither hold on to it in our memory nor reconstruct it through imagination. We die without knowing what we have lived.

The need to resist the loss of the fleeting reality of the present arose for the novel, I think, only at a certain moment in its evolution. In Boccaccio the tale exemplifies the abstraction that the past becomes upon being recounted: without concrete scenes, nearly without dialogue, a kind of summary, it is a narration that gives us the essence of an event, the casual sequence of a story.

Oh, the name!

In that last tag I mentioned a book, Sculpting in Time which I wished I had. News: I still don't have it. Crosswords has a genie-like sounding service called dial-a-book and I had their number saved for quite a while without really having to make use of it. Make use of it I did, yesterday, for Sculpting and heres how the conversation between me and a Crosswords executive went :

Me: Hi, I was wondering if you have this book called Sculpting in Time by Andrei Tarkovsky.

Executive: Sir, who is the Author?

( I would have been a little surprised if Sculpting in Time was the Author of Andrei Tarkovsky )

Me: Andrei Tarkovsky?

Executive: Oh!, Sir, Can you spell that last name for me? Its D . . . ?

Me: No, no. It's T. Uhh, T as in Tea?

Executive: As in Delhi?

Me: No, no. As in Thane...Uhh...Train.

Executive: Ok?

Me: Oh, alright. T as in train, A as in apple, R as in romeo, K as in key, O as in org . . . uhh, oscar?, V as in victor, S as in sugar, K as in key and Y as in you.

Executive: Sir?

Me: I meant Y-O-U. Ahh, Y as in yankee?

Executive: Sir, and the first name?

Me: Andrei? Its like the word "and" and then R as in romeo, E as in elephant and I as in India.

Executive: Please hold sir ( and poof! )

Those 3-4 agonizing minutes I waited like a pregnant lady - girl for yes, boy for no.

Executive: Sir, we used to have this book some time back but don't have a copy anymore. If you waant I can order one but it's going to be extremely difficult. The last book was bought in 1992 at Chennai.

With a haila! feeling I asked him to still order it and see if he got some other books on my list.

Executive: ( with a bored, Wt F-doesn't-he-have-any-work, raised left eyebrows, lowered right corner of the lips tone ) Okay.

Me: Great, the first one is Reason to Live by Amy Hempel.

Executive: Last name of the Author, Sir?

Me: Hempel. H-E-M-P-E-L.

Executive: Okay, H-E-M-B-E-L?

Me: No! P. As in Pain? Pakistan!

Executive: And what's the name of the book?

With raised expectations and a smile I told the name.

Executive: We do not have that book by Hempel.

Me: Oh, so which one do you have?

Executive: Actually we do not have any book by Hempel.

Me: I see. And, how about Clown Girl by Monica Drake?

Executive: ( On his deathbed of boredom or exhaustion or exasperation or something similar ) Is it D-R-A-K-E?

Me: ( with a pleasant surprise in the midst of ruins ) Yes, yeah!

Executive: No sir. We do not have anything by Drake Monica, either.

Me: Look, thats quite unbelievable. Whats the contact for Landmark?

Executive: Sorry Sir, I don't have that.

A neat zero probability of finding anything at Crosswords. Cute.
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"I love the music" acquires a totally different meaning when stupid maharashtrian punks does the pointing downward 'bizness' like the eminemised, bling-cartoons on TV while listening to bam-bam hip-hop, 12db flat.

Them Tags

And a book tag came along my way. I am so glad I was tagged for this and Ramya , for that I forgive you for misspelling my blogpage in your post.
In Nick Hornby's High Fidelity when Rob is asked to name his top 5 records of all time, he panics. His life revolved around music but when he was asked the question he was caught short, unprepared. That's the problem with things that you really like. Books, music, movies, the good things. All the books you ever read is what you are, your friends and you would hate to number them, prioritize them, let anyone down.
But the good thing about these book tags is that you get to talk about them and classify them into neat sections like the books in a library. Only if libraries had sections like, 'Books that change your life', 'Books that you would read more than once', 'Books that you would want to take to a desert' et al.

I shall start.

1) Books that changed your life :

Great Expectations, Dickens - Read it, re-read it, loved it as a teenager. Quite a book for the impressionable mind. Also, gave me a certain idea of beauty which I have still not felt a need to get over.

The Fountainhead, Rand - Incendiary. Pray tell me who has not been blown away with the ideologies that Rand had to preach. And especially when you are young and the mind is like a nymphet - randy for all things exciting.

2) A book that I have read more than once :

The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger - I think I have read it atleast 4 times. Nice, thin, comforting, extremely readable paperback.

High Fidelity, Nick Hornby - Theres a pattern here, isn't it ?

3) A book that you would take to a desert :

Anything by Wodehouse, or Hornby .
Did I forget Satanic Verses? Satanic Verses, Rushdie it would be!

4) Books that made you laugh

Lolita, Nabokov - That man of wantonly gorgeous prose and achingly beautiful narrative. People, humor is Nabokov. And so is tragedy and love and life. Ok, I am not forgetting Dostoevsky or Gorky and other Russian writers here. Just that the Nabokovian style is too seductive, too beautiful.

5) Books that made you cry

Requiem for a dream, Herbert Shelby Jr. - The movie, then the book. The movie made me sick in the guts. The book? Oh! If theres another book about drugs and shattered dreams, I would love to read it. I don't mind crying.

Love in the time of cholera, Marquez - For Florentino Ariza. How I wished he got Fermina Daza throughout and how I cried when, at last, they went on that voyage in the boat. How I related to all that!

6) A book you wish had been written

If I know of a plot that is never thought of , I'd rather write it than discuss it here!
I will change the rule a little and make it 'A book that you wish you had now'.

It is Sculpting in Time by Andrei Tarkovsky. I am sure it would be a delight to read the great filmmaker talk about cinema and music and life and all art.

7) Books you wish had never been written

No idea !

8) Books you are currently reading :

The Metamorphosis, Kafka.
Short Stories of Dostoevsky.
Mystic Masseur, Naipaul.

And then how could a book tag ever be complete without a "Books that you started but never finished"?

Mine are :

The story of a life by Konstantin Paustovsky - The size of the book weighs so much on my mind that even with its exquisitely beautiful narrative, I haven't been able to go beyond 80 - 100 pages. I will read it one day. I will !

Moby Dick, Herman Melville - Although I had heard a lot about the book and even found it deep and even funny at times, the language got too hard, too archaic for me to enjoy it without constantly referring to a dictionary. So I rest Moby Dick for the moment and the tag.

9 Seconds.

A click, a shot,

Bang, Pang!

Smoke.

Recoil, shear,

Sigh. Period.

Math !

How to have fun while travelling in a jam packed local train.

1) Stand at the door. Let the breeze hit your face.

2) Hum your favorite song.

3) Take the most fundamental mathematical formulae ( MF2 ), dress them up into some hypothetical situation and see if it stands.

So (+) * (+) = (+) , (+) * ( - ) = ( - ) and ( - ) * ( - ) = ( + ), eh? Fundamental indeed. For dressing them up into a neat hypothetical something, I introduce a buyer, (B) and a seller (S). BullShit? *Grin* I know. *Grin* . Anyways, a ( + ) for a buyer or a seller would be a profit in terms of money, good product or the outcome of the business, nai? And the ( - ) for both B & S would be a loss in terms of all those above mentioned. Suppose B & S does this business one day and someone ( L ) with no life at all but armed with all those mighty formulae ( conventions ? ) sits between them, picking teeth, and applying them to their dealings. B is a nice, old, honest B and sells goods exactly worth the money he gets. So far so good, the picking continues and the formulae rests. Then B gives S x amount of money to buy y kg of some good and the picking stops. Since B gave S x Rs, it could either be a ( - ) for B or a ( + ) for S considering that the good has not been exchanged yet. But the moment the good is exchanged, it is a ( + ) for B in terms of a good product ( and ofcourse ( - ) in terms of the money and hence considering only either one of the possibilities ) and a corresponding ( + ) for S in terms of the money he gained for the exchange. Thats the LHS. ( + ) and ( + ). The RHS or the outcome of the dealing would be a satisfied B for the good ( + ? ) and a satisfied S for the business he got ( + ? ) and hence a ( + ) eitherways on the RHS.
Very simple, straightwforward and non-revolting. So damn far and still so good.
So now, L , the guy with no life at all decides to try something which he then didn't realize would drive revolt up his ass. He very simply goes to S and buys a product which comes with a free something, F. S, honest and ambitious as he is, sells F alongwith the product with a logical expectation that the outcome of the dealing would be a ( + ) even if that amounts to a ( - ) in the actual dealing which is in the LHS. For L, the LHS is an obvious ( + ) and so is the outcome or the RHS. This means that when the LHS is a certain ( + ) * ( - ), the RHS can be ( - ) but according to business logic, it has a high possibility of being ( + ) too. Which then disproves MF2 atleast in one microcase and blows off L because he had read somewhere ( Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance ? ) that even if a formula stands in a million cases but fails in just one, it is a failed formula.
Ok, so I am L and I'm of course wrong. What I'd love is an argument good enough to disprove the disproved and re-prove the original convention.

Talking about conventions, conventions of orthography says that a curved anything would appear as a straight line in the front view. Does that apply for a person with a squint?