Speaking in Tongues

Its long been an ambition of mine to read in a language other than English and my efforts have always turned out to be memorable. I have Kuvempu to thank for several laughs with SRS. The expression on his face when I cornered him on the basis of a (then) very slender acquaintance to ask him what “Loudi” meant was simply priceless. And once I moved languages, my grand mom’s attempts to explain the meaning of ‘suvaru’ in context still get me in splits every time I think of it. I am dedicated to the cause – I still refuse to read ‘Parthiban Kanavu’ in translation. One day, my Tamil will be good enough to read it. (sigh.)

At any rate, a couple of weeks ago, inspired by how well the unsuspecting French populace took to ‘mon francais’, I invested in a book written in (hold your breath) French.  Now, this book came with recommendations.

a)      It was the best that Relay had to offer at the airport. Everything else seemed to be a translation of the latest angrezi chick lit.

b)      I liked the blurb. ( i.e. I understood all of it)  

So I bought it. And now that I have disposed off Potter and given up on Pamuk, I have begun reading Ms. Muriel Barbery. Except that the blurb was deceptive. I seem to be reading Le Robert and Larousse de Poche even more than I read her. L 

I have decided to share my experience with reading in transliteration with a wider public as an experiment. You can go here to read a chapter a day from “The Elegance of a Hedgehog” translated by yours truly.  As a teaser, you can read the blurb below without making the extra click. ;-)

The Elegance of a Hedgehog

By Muriel Barbery

Translated by Gayathri

“My name is Renee. I’m 54 years old and I’m the caretaker of No. 7 Grenelle Road, an upper middle class building. I’m a widow – short, ugly, plump, with corns on my feet and on some mornings, bad breath that would knock out an elephant. Outwardly I conform so perfectly to the image the general public has of a caretaker that they never think that I could be a woman of letters. Better read perhaps, than all my bourgeois employers.”

“My name is Paloma. I’m 12 years old. I live at No. 7 Grenelle Road in an apartment that could be the last word in luxury. But for a long time now, I know that the final destination is to be life in a fishbowl – the vacuous and inept existence of all adults. How do I know this? Because I’m intelligent. Exceptionally integlligent. So, I’ve made my decision : at the end of this school year, the day I turn 13, I’m going to kill myself”.

Marginalia

Staying with yesterday’s theme… I wish this were my Catcher in the Rye story.

Marginalia

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
“Nonsense.” “Please!” “HA!!” -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
why wrote “Don't be a ninny”
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls “Metaphor” next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of “Irony”
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
“Absolutely,” they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
“Yes.” “Bull's-eye.” “My man!”
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written “Man vs. Nature”
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
“Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love.”

Billy Collins

Catch Catch!

Recently my mailbox received a recommendation for Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger. The recommendation had with it the usual commentary on Catcher which is, admittedly his most famous work. It said ‘no one reads catcher anymore’ and if Salinger was wishing for obscurity he certainly got it. L Depressing that thought. I’ve held the entire oeuvre of Salinger in high esteem for some years now. Despite its tendency to high drama, my vote goes to ‘Raise High the Roof beam, Carpenters’. Or maybe its because I love the imagery of the Sappho verse from which the title comes and its thanks to this book that I discovered it.

The quality of the best books is not just that one remembers reading them… one remembers where and when, and how did you get the book. In post-grad, some years ago, I set myself up as one of the ‘custodians’ of the book club which I then proceeded to use as my own personal library for the duration of my stay. Salinger was one of the reads from there. I’d been avoiding the book for some years. I’d heard of it a million times as an answer to the ‘what was the book carried by John Lennon’s assassin’ question at sundry quizzes and that didn’t seem like the best recommendation to go out there and pick up the book.

Partway through second term at b-school, I finally checked this book out of the club. There was an econ paper the next day and there were a couple of folks who’d come in to do ‘combined studies’. Yours truly was expected to join at some point, except I had just started Catcher. For the next 3 hours while the rest of the gang droned on about production functions and the like, I followed the fortunes of M. Holden and when I looked up at the end of it, the world looked different. The people going on about Cobb-Douglas seemed silly. I wanted to shake them and say ‘Don’t you see. This is not life.’ Today I have no answer to what life IS about, and I probably didn’t then either, but for a few minutes there I thought I knew.

Pottering Around

P thought it would be interesting to see who would turn up at the book store at 5:30 AM to buy HP7. I agreed. So Saturday morning found me actually waking up at 5 to drive by and pick up P so we could go do this ‘consumer insight’. It was all pretense of course – P wanted to pick up her copy as soon as she humanly could.

So P slunk into the store avoiding video cameras and sundry colleagues to stand in a queue for her copy. She braved a 10 minute queue and for her efforts got book and photo with it! By the time I finished wandering around the rest of the store and P convinced me to pick up my copy as well, the literate population of gurgaon was exhausted, the cameras were packed up and I walked up and finished the whole transaction in under 60 seconds. Now, 10 hours later, I'm done. How was it? Its over. And I can go back to Dawkins. Phew.

Mid-week Medicine

Live Free or Die Hard is a perfect movie for a Wednesday evening. For a good two hours, Bruce Willis takes you along on a mad, bad ride while he saves America from disaster. Woo hoo! I was ready to throw poos at screen and whistle and shout.

The guns are out from the word go and all the insane impossible Die Hard stunts are all there. Bruce outwitting an F35 from a truck is not to be missed.  Nor is Bruce taking chopper out of action by driving his car up into it. Nor the scene where our hero disposes off evil villainess by driving car with her clinging to it straight into the elevator shaft. Reminiscent of the first die hard movie that elevator shaft scene was. Full thrills in spine and gladness in heart to see ‘real’ action back!

I am definitely going to watch this one again – with paper planes and one rupee coins.

OMG!

In days of yore, before I settled into a gentle routine of belief, I worried a lot about things like ‘does god exist?’. I might not compare favorably with the sages who meditated in the Himalayas on one foot for thousands of years, but sufficient angst and suffering happened over the question and of course, I found no answer for myself and moved on to other questions such as “Is Vietnam better than Cambodia for a vacation?” 
 

Recently, to open a chapter I had since thought closed, 2 very theist members of my family have lent me ‘The God Delusion’ by Richard Dawkins. I am still on page 168 of a 400 page book but the experience is proving interesting. Dawkins feels compelled to insult anyone who does not agree with him and defends himself against sundry creationists and intelligent design exponents who are going to insult him upon reading the book, in a most proactive fashion. In doing so he comes up with some brilliant invective – some his own but a lot of it is from others. In the process of setting up his definitions (what do I consider god etc.) Dawkins cannot content himself with saying “The God Hypothesis: There exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who created and designed everything in the universe including us. This covers all religions whether they be polytheistic or monotheistic”. He has to take pot shots at everything and everyone along the way when setting up this hypothesis.  Example:

“What impresses me about Catholic mythology is partly its tasteless kitsch but mostly the airy nonchalance with which these people make up the details as they go along. It is just shamelessly invented.

Pope John Paul II created more saints than all his predecessors of the past several centuries put together…his polytheistic hankerings were dramatically demonstrated in 1981 when he suffered an assassination attempt in Rome, and attributed his survival to intervention by Our Lady of Fatima: ‘A maternal hand guided the bullet.’ One cannot help wondering why she didn’t guide it to miss him altogether… … The relevant point is that it wasn’t just Our Lady who, in the Pope’s opinion, guided the bullet, but specifically Our Lady of Fatima. Presumably Our Lady of Lourdes, Our Lady of Guadalupe, Our Lady of Medjugorje, Our Lady of Akita , Our Lady of Zeitoun, Our  Lady of Garabandal and Our Lady of Knock were busy on other errands at the time.”

There is more where that came from and he is equal opportunity nasty to all religions other than Buddhism and Confuscianism. My absolute fave CYA point of his though is what’s below:

“I am also conscious that the Abrahamic God is (to put it mildly) aggressively male and this too I shall accept as a convention in my use of prononous. More sophisticated theologians proclaim the sexlessness of God, while some feminist theologians seek to redress historic injustices by designating her female. But what, after all, is the difference between a non-existent female and a non-existent male? I suppose that, in the ditzy unreal intersection of theology and feminism, existence might indeed be a less salient attribute than gender.”

And my current fave fantasy – a debate between Dear Richard and our very own President-in-waiting.

Mad People in a Mad World

 

In line with the rest of the events of a very mad trip I went to see the Eiffel yesterday. Is it beautiful? Not exactly. But its the result of someone's mad idea to build the tallest structure in the world and today it makes brilliant amounts of money – close to 5 million Euro in profits for the city of Paris every year!

 

Self met companions at a bistro near the Bir Hakiem. Sat down and after the hellos, glanced at the menu. My heart literally stopped with joy – there was the first menu in Paris which listed 4 vegetarian items and in a separate green box at that!  While I sampled (okay… not sampled, I ordered almost ALL the veggie items on it!) the weather turned cold and wet and blustery. Once the wet bit passed, the cold and blustery remained encouraging one to give up all thoughts of the Eiffel (heck! I saw it out of the window everyday) and head to bed.

 

However, my companions were braver than I (and more dedicated to the cause of buying Eiffel key chains). So we showed up at the tower and had tons of fun trying to take photos that got a human being and the tower in the same shot.  Anyways, the supply side of Eiffel tower key chains is quite interesting. The Bir Hakeim side is handled by folks of African origin and the Ecole Militaire side almost entirely by Indians. You won’t see a single chap that is not in the ‘Fair & Lovely’ target segment hawking the things.

 

So we proceeded to bargain in good Dilli Punju Hindi with a gentleman from Ambala who was making his living selling Eiffels to passing tourists. 5 Euros gets you 25 of the things which seemed like a remarkably good deal to me. He confirmed to us when we enquired if only Indians did this stuff, “Hum hi nahin bechte. Doosre side pe sare kaaale bechte hain na”.

 

The stunning thing is only 1% of tourists coming to the Eiffel (atleast in 2006) were Indians. I bet half of that 1% said, “What a stupid city. No one selling water and trash souvenirs to tourists. Chalo lets turn up.” and came back on legit work visas, tourist visas or as illegal immigrants and voila, a new generation of ‘enterprising Indian entrepreneurs abroad’ is taking root. Watch out Lord Paul.