Now who says only dogs bite?

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Nasty competition participation pre-requisite

Please go to their website and check the terms and conditions again. They’ve made some changes.

The world must be all fucked up when men travel first class and literature goes as freight.
Gabriel García Márquez

I was going through the text of terms and conditions of a short-story competition being held at http://www.oxfordbookstore.com. They’ve mentioned that all the submissions irrespective of making to the finals or not, will be the property of the organizers. This means you can never use the stories for publication and as competition entries at other places. Not only that, you’ve to submit 3 short stories. This is nothing but insult of literature.

Why should the stories that don’t make it belong to the organizers? What do they want to do with them exactly? Put them in their corporate museum? And anyway you can never be sure how they judge the entries. Last time when they organized a somewhat similar competition they had asked the participants to re-write the final chapters of some chosen classics. I had chosen A Tale of Two Cities — you can read my entry here. I made it to the honorable list but the entry that was chosen for the first prize was a mediocre piece of work — a badly re-written last chapter of Gone With The Wind. I have some taste of literature and I know that entry didn’t deserve the place it got. I don’t know what the criteria of their selection were. Call me arrogant, but compared to the top 3 entries, my submission should have been at the first place.

Anyway, may be they had some preferences or some altered literary proclivities. But keeping all the stories? What if some of the entries are master pieces but just because the judges cannot comprehend them they are relegated to the corridors of oblivion forever? Wouldn’t that be a tragedy? Or they don’t want the real writers to take their competition seriously?

As a writer I love my stories — if I ever am able to write them. You don’t appreciate them, well, fine, but let me present them to other readers then. Why do you want to keep them from others?

There could be a sinister reason behind it. It has so happened in various literary competitions that many stories and books that were submitted as competition entries were ignored by the judges. The same stories and books were then submitted to other competitions where they won international acclaims making the previous judges laughing stocks. This could be a reason. Another reason could lurk around the fringes of being illegal. They might, later on, chose the best entries and then publish them as an anthology in the name of some famous, but literary incapable author for a hefty amount.

Folks, if you love your art, respect your art; don’t take part in such predatory competitions. It’s not worth it. Want to make it to the literary heights? Just work hard and persevere.

The real woman of substance

We were yesterday talking about our maid — Anita — and we concluded that she is the real woman of substance — despite the fact that she secretly takes away 4 almonds everyday and despite the fact that she is highly irritating if allowed to do her own thing.

Now, she is totally illiterate, she has a good-for-nothing abusive husband, and she has 5 kids. Perhaps she and her eldest daughter — both work as house maids — are the only earning members. She is continuously trying to improve the lot of her kids.

Some days back I noticed her learning the elementary tables. Alka told me she’s learning to read and write. She constantly plans to get her children either decent education or some good career-oriented vocational training. She works 15-hours a day in two houses without resting and still she is always laughing. She never grudges her work and does everything cheerfully. This is I think her strength. In the conventional sense she’s got nothing to feel cheerful about. Her husband beats her up on a weekly basis, he doesn’t work, one of her children is perpetually sick and she herself often doesn’t feel quite well. Her attitude is her strength that keeps her going. She not only takes care of her children, she also tries to improve herself by gradually studying, in small proportions.

I wonder if women like her — and there are thousands like her in India, even millions — can ever feature in the glossy magazines that are specifically published for “the women of substance”. These magazines can publish pages on self-obsessed bimbos but can never in their wildest dreams imagine featuring people like Anita on their pages. Their basic definition of women of substance is that they should know what dress to wear on what occasion, how to put that lipstick without smearing the already stained teeth, how to patao that guy in the party and how to get the maximum out of their g-spots.

If they really want to experience the real substance, they should feature women like Anita in their magazines.

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On the occasion of the Republic Day

My mother used to love watching the Republic Day parade on TV. When we were small – when we hadn’t grown cynical, that is – we used to bathe quickly and get ready so that we could watch the parade. After the parade she always used to cook something special such as puree-chole and halwa and such. As we began to grow, we started finding it a bit tedious. We stopped getting up. While we slept my mother used to switch on the TV and watch the parade alone. She even used to watch the Beating Retreat Parade.

The song I’m putting here is from the film Hum Hindustani. It seems full of pseudo-optimism now but at that time it must had been a highly patriotic and optimistic song. At that time corruption was not rampant and the country hadn’t seen yet the worst faces of our civilians, administrators and politician. I love this song. Whenever I hear it it brings tears to my eyes.

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A very comfortable winter indeed

Alka just now brought to my notice what a comfortable winter we spent (spending) in this new apartment in NOIDA. Whereas at the old place the winter-associated maladies were perpetually waiting around the corner to nab us at the slightest moment of negligence, here I not only spent the middle-half of January without the sweaters, I kept having cold beverages (Coke – yes, guilty as charged) without catching cold or getting the horrible tonsillitis. Yes, Alka’s timely doses of the homeopathic medicines have certainly been playing their indispensable parts, but these medicines were there at the old place too. So a lot has to do with the amount of sun we get – lots of it at this place.

Considering that the chill in Delhi broke many records, we spent January as if it were the early part of December, either with half-sleeve pullovers or even without them. There have been the occasional bouts chilly winds sweeping all the corners of the apartment when we by mistake left one door or the other open, but it would have been abnormal if in the thick of a record-breaking winter we hadn’t experienced even that. The nights become chilly – not always – it reminds me of the old times when my fingers used to ache while typing on the keyboard.

It so always happens that I end up working harder in winters – may be people in general work more in winters or something – but I have observed that some way or the other I have more work to do in winters and summers I usually spend in somewhat less strained manner. Good thing though as I’m a summer animal and wouldn’t like to waste those sweat-soaked (OK, we had the AC this time) sultry days working my ass off. In fact it is a blessing in disguise that I have more work in winters because anyway I’m not really happy in the chill. So the time flies by quickly.

I have taken very few wise decisions in life but moving to this apartment in NOIDA was I think one of the wisest decisions I’ve ever made, especially considering what a terrible time Vasu would have had otherwise. She was already beginning to get routinely sick at the old place. I’ll be fair – I like my parents’ house for the sentimental reasons and there are still dense motes of feelings that get stirred when I think of the place. I met Alka there, got married to her there, we spent the tumultuous years there sorting out things, Vasudha was conceived and born there, the rainy nights that we spent outside getting wet listening to the raindrops, working all night figuring out how to increase my work-flow. Alka grew her tuition work exponentially and within a few months half of Sarita Vihar knew her and people started calling me Amrit Dwivedi! All these things have left an indelible mark on the sheet of my life. We could only stay in that inhospitable house just because of us; because of the moments we had spent there. There was simply no other reason.

Having spent such a nice winter here, I’m looking forward to the summer.

The power of perseverance

The power of perseverance is amazing and it solves many seemingly unsolvable problems. I need to re-launch my content writing website with a totally revamped layout to make it more SEO-friendly and standards compliant, to make it more CSS-based, and to give it a more neat look. Now, the Internet Explorer has its own quirks while dealing with CSS layouts. Since a majority of my visitors still use the IE to browse the Internet, no matter how much I want to create designs just for FireFox I have to make sure that the layouts look decent in both the browsers.

So anyway, something was screwing up the layout completely in IE. I don’t use the “IE hacks” prevalent in the designer community due to two reasons: (1) I don’t know how to use them; (2) If someday Microsoft decides to sort out the issue, all those hacks will have to be removed. Instead, I programmatically check what browser the visitor is using, and then load the browser-specific CSS file. Sounds tedious? Believe me, it is much, much better than writing those cryptic hacks. No matter what I did, the DIVs would either run helter-skelter or wouldn’t align. I started working on the problem at 1:30 AM in the morning, gave up at 6:40 AM, and then again resumed at 2:00 PM. Finally I was able to do what I wanted to do by 5:00 PM.

There is a reason why I talk about perseverance here. I’m completely comfortable with the conventional form of creating HTML layouts using nested tables. All my old websites have been fairing well in the search engines too. But this time I had decided that I won’t launch the new design unless it is totally CSS-based. My forthcoming business direction depends on this launch so I’m in a hurry. I want to finish the website and upload it on to a new server while making sure that old links are not found missing (another long story) because they rank well on Google and Yahoo. In the 8 hours while I spent time trying to find how to write those 4 extra lines to make the layout behave I could have finished the layout part and started porting the content to the new server. Add to that the client deadlines. Also add to that the freezing cold that was hurting the knuckles while I typed-tested-deleted-typed-tested while the neighborhood cat gave out the mating calls — they were the indeed the mating calls. It became like a pressure-cooker and there was an overwhelming desire to chuck all this and revert back to something I was totally comfortable with. But I kept trying. And eventually I solved the problem.

I’ve many times tested the power of perseverance and it has always worked for me.

Getting lazy

I needed to go work on my PC – that is on the adjacent table – and I kept delaying it till the last moment. One, I have gotten used to working on my laptop; I like the keys and the display, and the general small-spaceness of it. Everything is here, the keyboard, the mouse, the screen – one piece. Two, I’ve simply grown so lazy that moving from my table to another table seems like an arduously needless activity.

I used to go work in the NIIT computer dome at CP when I was studying there. Whenever we needed to work on our semester projects or one of those inane presentations we had to go to the computer dome because there we could work on a computer for hours without running out of time. My class partner used to come all the way from DLF, Gurgaon.

Those were the days of DOS, so even creating those fancy square boxes around our data-entry screens used to work us all up. For three consecutive days we visited the dome just so that we could figure out how to create those single-line and double-line boxes. I used to take an auto to CP from Nauroji Nagar and my partner used to come in her car. Even after reaching there I had to first walk a long distance, then climb down the stairs – the dome was I think over the Palika parking space – then again walk a long distance, then wait at the entrance because the dome was usually full, then again walk a long distance inside the dome until I could find an unoccupied terminal.

Here I am now – I need to work on a website that earns me money, and for that leaving my laptop and going to my PC seems like an avoidable activity.

The fundas of life and death

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After night comes day
and this is how, through the cycle
of coming and going
is spent our life

This song is from the film Boot Pollish. It evokes a feeling of philosophical melancholy. Although in the movie the song depicts the positive hope for the slum children, these four lines hold another meaning in themselves – life just passes away before we know it. Another light-hearted Urdu poem goes somewhat like this:

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Evenings and mornings kept coming
so this is how I spent my life

Life is an enigma. All your life you run from pillar to post. Your try to secure your future and your children’s future. Then you die. You die either after arranging everything for the next generation, or you die an “untimely” death. I wonder what’s the purpose of all this. Sometimes I’m really put off by the overwhelming nihility of life. Right from the single-cell ameba to the human beings, life is paramount – we have to survive no matter what; for us, for our posterity. What are we achieving in all this? We become painters, writers, actors, scientists, musicians, mathematicians, politicians and god knows what and then feel great and after having felt great and all we die smug in the thought that the future generations will remember us. Big deal! We justify all this by saying that we’re constantly making this world a better place for us and for the others. I don’t disagree. But I’m not talking about the betterment of the human kind or all the species of this planet. I’m talking about something else. I’m talking about the existential logic.

What exactly are we doing here? Are we a part of some gargantuan cosmic assembly line? “Who” is a very human expression, what we should think about is, what are we? What the hell is it all about? Because otherwise it doesn’t make sense. There are planets that go round the sun, and the sun spews out all sorts of gases and it gives us heat so that we can survive as if it has been put up there just for our benefit. There are billions and billions of stars – Carl Sagan’s expression, not mine – and there are infinite galaxies. There are comets and there are asteroids and there are galactic clouds. There are dimensions we know and there might be dimensions we are not aware of. Life may exist as a totally different concept in another part of the galaxy, or for that matter even in some neighboring solar system. Time may hold different meanings in different constellations – they say time doesn’t exist in the black holes.

So you see, there are such big things, and there are such small things as the husband of our maid beating her up and feeling all powerful. What’s macro and what’s micro, we don’t know.

Unless we know the primordial truth, the reason of our existence, living and dying seems quite silly. The universe seems silly. The planets and the stars and the seas and the clouds and the forests and the mountains and animals seem silly. Osama seems silly. What’s this hoopla about if we are all going to die in the end?