The Ramayana movie!

My fixation with Ashok Bankers Ramayana continues.... I just started reading "Siege of Mithila" and its as enthralling as the first.

I wish there already was a movie based on Ashok Bankers books, but sadly there isn't yet. I read on his blog (readerswrite section) that there was interest from a US studio to turn the books into movies, but that seems to be falling through. Ashok seems fairly dissappointed with that turnout. 

All I can say is that JRR Tolkein's Lord of the Rings had to wait approximately 50 years for his work to be turned into a movie.  His book was good, but he couldnt even get a publisher to publish his second volume, hence LoR ended up being the only one at that time. 

Your books are brilliant and way way way ahead of their time, inspite of the story being thousands of years old. It will take a while for any moviemaker to be able to execute what you have envisioned. Hopefully, a day will come within my lifetime when it does happen!

Slumdog (no?) Surprise

Slumdog Millionaire swept the Oscars with 8 wins! Wow! It was a fantastic movie and deserved every accolade it has received. I'm very proud that a film made in India, with a large part of the crew and cast as Indians has won Oscars. I wish everyone would let it rest at this sweet taste of victory for a great movie which was about India and made in some part by Indians. 

But it won't rest there. It never has. The press and the khadi-clad activists (last standing upholders of our sanskriti and samskar) will have a field week, month or year perhaps...

The great sense of national pride that was deemed lost when Jamal jumped into a shithole to make it to Amitabh has no doubt been restored, nay doubly replaced by 8 shiny Oscars. 

Another thought that has always got me a bit pissed is how people always want to associate ourselves with the success of unrelated folks using ridiculous threads. Take for example desi rockers who pride themselves on the fact that Freddy Mercury was in fact born Farukh Balsara in Parsi Colony in Mumbai. SO WHAT!

Another one that gets my goat everytime is "we invented zero".  It's been approximately 2500 years now. Can we move on to a new source of national mathematical pride?

Of course the question is where do you draw the line between distant relation to the event and not so distant.....any thoughts?

Fame, fortune, fun...its all mine!!!!!!

Not!

But hey - Ashok Banker, yes, the Ashok Banker of the Ramayana series fame visited my blog and answered my question about the spelling of Rama. I feel like the kid who actually saw Santa Claus. 

A huge kudos to Ashok for being uber-cool and unbelievably down to earth!

Being stuck in China, all I have is Prince of Ayodhya, but hopefully someone will travel to India soon, and I will be able to talk them into carrying 3 kgs of books for me!

I didn't see the much famed Paul van Dyk of house/trance fame last night. Instead, I attended a wine appreciation class at my friend Matthieu's company www.yangjiu.com. It was excellent, with antipasti and Cloudy Bay Sauvignon Blanc and Chardonnay. I learnt some pretty funky stuff about wine. Whats great about Matthieu's style of conducting the class is that he is just a friend telling you about something he knows rather than an exclusivist wine expert who is throwing morsels of information down from his ivory tower of knowledge. His style is extremely relaxed and that helps you let down your guard, ask some silly questions and enjoy the wine.

Here is something I learnt yesterday that I had absolutely no clue about before.

Port wine is a fortified wine. The fermentation process is halted before all the sugar from the grapes is converted to alcohol by adding alcohol externally. This is why ports are generally fruitier and sweeter. For the less informed, such as myself - this is wine making 101 

1. Grow grapes

2. Crush grapes

3. Store in big containers and by changing the temperature upwards a little, allow the yeast (micro-organisms) to convert the sugar in the grape juice to alcohol. They eat the sugar and "reject" the alcohol.

4. Either this solution is bottled directly, or aged in casks.

After this, you buy the wine, invite me and then we drink the wine! If Matthieu is reading, please let me know if I got stuff wrong ;)

The Story of My Assassins

The advantage of not blogging for a long time is that I have tons on my mind and none on my blog!

I read Tarun Tejpals second book The Story of My Assassins recently and it was fantastic in a refreshingly Indian way! He shows you the dirty viscera of India, not the lovely shiny bindi walla face and sari-draped, yet sexy midriff. This is India Uncut, raw and brutal. This is the India that middle-class Sam has blocked out of cognition all his life...If you are reading this, you probably blocked it out too. So go out there and buy this fantastic book. 

I cant express how much I hate shitty excuses for authors like Shobha De and Arundhati Roy. F$#king shitall, soft porn writers is all they really are. So you took freaking 7.4 pages to describe some womans breast, that doesnt make you a great writer, it just makes you an inefficient one.

Also Arundhati Roy should be taken out and shot twice, at least, once for being a shitty author, and twice for being a priority-less dumbf#$k activist who doesnt know her ass from her elbow.

As a student of economics, my belief is that resources should go to where they will give the maximum return. As an idiot, Ms Roys belief is that effort should be expended to make some publicly poor people happy. Irrespective of how many other people will stay hungry/poor/waterless as a result of her activism. As you can see, she is stupid and should be shot, at least twice.

Weekend coming up, with a football match lined up. I hope we win. I will dedicate the victory to the defeat of idiots like A. Roy and Shobha De, and the rise of brilliant and authentic Indian authors like Tarun Tejpal and Ashok Banker.

Ashok Banker's Ramayana

I just finished reading Ashok Banker's Prince of Ayodhya, and it was absolutely awesome. As some american dude mentioned in a letter to him here, J.R.R. Tolkein's work is childs play compared to this.

An unfair comparison since the Ramayana is a story that was in existence before, and Ashok is retelling it in a contemporary way, whereas Lord of the Rings was an original piece of work. However, having read the first piece of his work, I have to read the rest. 

Perhaps in some strange, late attempt for me to connect with my hindu roots, (albeit in a pop way), I also bought the Mahabharata TV series when I was in India. The Mahabharata was badly produced then, and it looks terrible now, but I'm skimming past the quality of the production to absorb the story in a quick way (as I said - this is 21st century pop hinduism at its worst).

I can only hope Ashok Banker writes the Mahabharata soon....

I still have a question for Ashok and all other well versed folks. If we say and write राम and not रामा in Hindi, then why is it Rama everywhere? Same question for all the hindi other words that have an "a" at the end when written in English?