T + L launches T + L South Asia

Travel + Leisure, one of my favorite magazines, launched its South Asia edition this month.

According to the Editor's Note, "Sophisticated and experienced travellers from Karachi to Kathmandu and Colombo to Chennai now have their very own edition to bring them the best new destinations, travel trends and up-to-date news.... You can look forward to seeing fresh and unexpected itineraries in the region and abroad, a selection of luxurious and unique travel experiences and the most user-friendly information to help you plan your adventures."

The glossy travel magazine filled with exquisite photographs is a sight for sore eyes, but I wonder, Why launch an issue with a South Asia focus? Is the focus on South Asian destinations or is the focus a South Asia clientele?

The first issue contains a cover story on Goa, "Exploring Goa, Its Heart, Soul and History", by blogger, novelist and journalist, Sonia Faleiro, a story on Kochi, "Jewel of India", by Tad Friend, a story on the latest "designer dens in Delhi", by Monalika Namchoom, a story on fashion accessories available in India, and Anindita Ghosh's piece on The Imperial in New Delhi. Other than these, small items in the Reports section on Paparazzi, a new restaurant in Bangalore, a Salvatore Ferragamo store in Mumbai, a heritage hotel in Kathmandu, a luxury yacht in Male and accessories from Mauritius, a roundup of four spas (in Uttaranchal, Chennai, Mumbai and Udaipur) round out the first issue's coverage of South Asia.

The rest of the magazine is given over to other international destinations such as Africa, China, Hong Kong, Thailand, Armenia, Paris, London, Orlando, Rome, Middle East markets, etc. that you might find in a Travel + Leisure magazine if you picked one up in the US.

I'm sure the American or Australian readership of T+L magazine will be as or perhaps more interested in Faleiro's nicely done story on Goa accompanied by warm and loving photographs by Prabuddha Das Gupta and will equally enjoy Friend's wonderful commentary and Overgaard's scintillating photography (check out the one of coconuts laid out to dry to be crushed for coconut oil) in the Kochi article.

At Rs. 150 per copy, the South Asia version is as expensive as its American counterpart (in terms of exchange rates), but a tad more exclusive in that it is a tiny part of the vast and populous South Asian market that can afford the price. If there is even a little doubt as to the magazine's intended audience, it is banished the moment you turn to the page on the fashion accessories - there is a Louis Vuitton scarf for Rs. 12,500, Louis Vuitton sandals for Rs. 34,000, a straw hat for Rs. 1,790. You get my drift.

The magazine's initial print order is apparently 80,000 strong and judging by the ads in the magazine (around a quarter of the 160 page magazine is filled with ads for high end products, including quite a few pages advertising T+L magazine itself), many advertisers have reposed faith in the reach of the magazine.

As you make your way through the issue, you conclude that the intended reader is a South Asian resident, the one with a lot of disposable income and an appetite for high-end consumables. And such a reader will not rest satisfied with traipsing around his own backyard, now, will he? Hence the alluring descriptions of a Byron Bay in Australia and that tiny vineyard in Provence.

One hopes, however, that having the luxury of producing an entire magazine focused on South Asia will prompt the publishers to look beyond the clichéd South Asian destinations and overrun hotspots. It would be a great pleasure indeed to open the magazine, flip through the pages and never have to read about Bali.

You Really Should Not Read Bill Bryson in Public Places

I had ignored the warning on the cover of Bill Bryson's Notes From a Small Island. "Not a book that should be read in public, for fear of emitting loud snorts", said a blurb from the The Times' review.

I was reading it not in any ol' public place, but in one of the very busy lounges at the Frankfurt international airport. There was not a chair to spare as far as the eye could see. Passengers were milling about, the chairs, stacked closed to each other, did not even lose their warmth as one passenger left and another took his place, there was a steady buzz in the area from many conversations - in short, it was as public as a public place could get.

I had started reading the book a couple of days earlier and was now almost at the end, trying desperately to subdue a snort that had started at the pit of my heaving stomach from exploding out of my nose.

I really should have heeded the warning because I am, very famously, given to snorting when laughing.

I had valiantly suppressed a rather long stretch of giggles until then, only the gentle shaking of my body, the swishing noises coming out of my mouth and tears running down my face betraying my helpless condition. In the end, it was no use. The snort exploded any way. Before I could recover from that one, another one followed and then another.

I put my head down, resting my forehead in my palms. That was no help at all. I stole a quick glance around my immediate vicinity. There was a Scottish woman talking in earnest to my husband about her trip, her lilting Scottish accent only slightly eroded by years of living in Canada. That was it. I couldn't take it any more. I slapped the book shut and rushed to the bathroom to compose myself. Five minutes and repeated washing of my face later, I made my way back to my seat and picked up the book. I wasn't done yet.

I picked up where I left off, with some trepidation, but I could not stop myself.

Bryson's trip around Britain is coming to a close in Glasgow, Scotland. As he is wont to do in all of his trips at the end of a long day traipsing around town and wandering in museums, Bryson fancies himself a drink and a sitdown at a pub. What follows is entirely to blame for the snort fest.

He enters the bar, which he describes as dark and battered and spies two "larcenous" looking men sitting together and drinking in silence. He waits at the other end of the bar to be served but no one comes out for a long time. He does all the things people do when they're trying to express impatience - he puffs his cheeks, drums his fingers on the bar, and "makes assorted puckery shapes" with his lips. Then follows some brilliant-as-usual introspection on why we do the things we do when we're waiting for someone. He adds cleaning-of-nails-with-thumb-nail to his routine, but still no one comes.

Eventually I noticed one of the men at the bar eyeing me.
"Hae ya nae hook ma dooky?" he said.
"I'm sorry?" I replied.
"He'll nay be doon a mooning." He hoiked his head in the direction of a back room.
"Oh, ah," I said and nodded sagely, as if that explained it.
I noticed that they were both still looking at me.
"D'ye hae a hoo and a poo?" said the first man to me.
"I'm sorry?" I said.
"D'ye hae a hoo and a poo?" he repeated. It appeared that he was a trifle intoxicated.
I gave a small apologetic smile and explained that I came from the English-speaking world.
"D'ye nae hae in May?" the man went on. "If ye dinna dock ma donny."
"Doon in Troon they croon in June," said his mate then added: "Wi' a spoon."
"Oh, ah." I nodded thoughtfully again, pushing my lower lip out slightly, was if it was all very nearly clear to me now.

Then the bar man comes out and he's in a foul mood.

"Fucking muckle fucket in the gucking muckle," he said to the two men, and then to me in a weary voice: "Ah hae the noo." I couldn't tell if it was a question or a statement.
"A pint of Tennent's please," I said hopefully.
He made an impatient noise, as if I were avoiding his question. "Hae ya nae hook ma dooky?"
"I'm sorry?"
"Ah hae the noo," said the first customer, who apparently saw himself as my interpreter.

"Interpreter" was where I had sunk my forehead into my palms.

You might say that this passage is the written version of slapstick, and I might agree, but it is also a sterling illustration of why Bryson's books exist in that rarefied atmosphere reserved for wildly successful and popular writers of travel memoirs. I am certain that this is not a faithful rendition of what transpired in that bar, but, as he says, his writings are faithful to his memory and perceptions of that day, and give the reader a wonderful sense of a place - which is what I'm looking for when I crack open a travel memoir. If I want straight facts and a report of what a city is all about, I'd reach for a travel guide.

Bryson's books are a heady combination of many factors, each one of which, on its own, is praise-worthy.

He conveys facts in terms that help you grasp them instantly (for example, in Down Under (also published as In a Sunburned Country), while rendering facts to illustrate how scantily populated Australia is with its population of 19 million, he compares it to the fact that China grows by more than that amount each year). He approaches all the things he sets out to see with an endearing sense of wonder - he might end up being disappointed in them, but he will hardly hesitate to tell you that.

He leaves himself wide open to all experiences, pleasant or unpleasant. His enthusiasm and appetite for travel - which after a while can approximate the daily grind - are nothing short of infectious. His books are filled with passages resulting from insight into and introspection about the human condition, a virtue we could all do with a little bit more of. To top it all, all this is conveyed with a remarkable sense of humor and comic timing.

I'll leave you with this passage from Down Under. Bryson is listening to cricket commentary on his car radio on a lonely drive from Canberra to Adelaide on Sturt Highway. Ironically, you will need to understand cricket to enjoy the point of view of a man who was born and grew up in a non-playing country.

After two whole pages of some rather insightful thoughts on cricket ("there's nothing wrong with the game that the introduction of golf carts wouldn't fix in a hurry", "I don't wish to denigrate a sport that is enjoyed by millions, some of them awake and facing the right way", "It actually helps not to know quite what's going on. In such a rarefied world of contentment and inactivity, comprehension would become a distration" and many such gems), including a passage in which he compares cricket to baseball for all his American readers, he carries on.

Neasden, it appeared, was turning in a solid performance at square bowel, while Packet had been a stalwart in the dribbles, though even these exemplary performances paled when set beside the outstanding play of young Hugh Twain-Buttocks at middle nipple. The commentators were in calm agreement that they had not seen anyone caught behind with such panache since Tandoori took Rogan Josh for a stiffy at Vindaloo in '61. [A sentence which conveys Bryson's perception that the bowling run up is long.] This was repeated four times more over the next two hours and then one of the commentators pronounced: 'So as we break for second luncheon, and with 11,200 balls remaining, Australia are 962 for two not half and England are four for a duck and hoping for rain.'

I may not have all the terminology exactly right, but I believe I have caught the flavor of it.

Indeed.

Call for Papers: Book Titled "Women: Balancing Home and Profession"

If you are interested in writing an article for a book titled "Women: Balancing Home and Profession" to be published by ICFAI University Press, please contact Sukhvinder at the following address at the earliest for details:

sukhvinderUNDERSCOREmATyahooDOTcom

Some Memories Haunt You

Growing up, our radio occupied the pride of place in the family rooms of the various houses in which we lived. The radio was a wide, rectangular, wood-paneled Phillips model with gray serrated knobs for dials and square, off-white, push down buttons for the different wavelengths. Ameen Sayani's voice filled our home with his dulcet tones and simple commentary introducing beloved songs from Hindi cinema.

My aunt (my paternal uncle's wife) was a gold medalist at the state level in Carnatic music. My maternal grandmother played and taught the veena and the harmonium. My father and another of my paternal uncles broke into "Lambodara, Lakumikara" at the drop of a hat.

So there was no way I was going to escape from having to take music lessons.

Being the first grandchild on my mother's side, everyone was in awe (rarely justified, I will confess) of my supposed abilities at numerous activities. Singing was one of them.

My mother found a Carnatic music teacher for me when I was in fourth grade. We lived in Tumkur then (we moved every two years to a different town going wherever my father's work with a bank took us). My classes were in the evening, after school.

The teacher's house was about ten minutes away from our house by walk. His house itself was very modest. My teacher's family owned two cows and they supplemented their family income by selling the milk. The cows were tethered to the right side of the front door.

Inside, in the main room of the house (the "hall"), they had a large wooden vessel sitting on the redoxide floor and a long wooden stick resting in the vessel for churning butter out of buttermilk. The wooden stick was tethered to a pole loosely near the top and about three quarters of the way down, and in the center, it had a rope that had two large knots on either end.

The process of churning the buttermilk with this contraption is really simple and if you did not have to do it every single day, even fun.

You stand with your feet planted firmly against the vessel and hold on to the rope with both hands with the knots serving to hold your grip. Then you pull on each end of the rope alternatively. The wooden pole spins clockwise and anti-clockwise repeatedly and churns the buttermilk. After a while, you see chunks of butter floating to the top.

If I went in early and if my teacher was not ready to take my class yet, I churned butter while waiting. Dipping your fingers in and popping a fingerful of freshly churned butter into your mouth is everything it's chalked up to be, I assure you.

The room in which my teacher taught me singing was on the first floor, up a very narrow and steep flight of stairs at the back of the house.

One day, as my teacher and I were climbing up the stairs, I spied the moon between the trees. It was a spectacular full moon, creamy against the starless, velvety sky.

"The moon is so beautiful! You've got to see it!" I burst out.

A nanosecond later, my heart dropped. I wished the stairs would just fall away and take me with them. I was so ashamed, horrified, aghast at my own colossal stupidity. It is one of those things whose memory makes you cringe even years later.

A long, awkward silence followed at the end of which my teacher just cleared his throat. As he reached the top of the stairs, he ran his left hand along the wall, reached the door to the room on the left and slowly ran his hand along the door till he found the light switch.

He turned on the light. It was for my benefit alone because it was of no use to him. He knelt down and felt around the floor under the switch for the mats. He handed me one, spread one out for himself, sat down with his back against the wall and asked me where we had stopped last.

The class began. But it was a life lesson I learned that day.

Romanies: The Forgotten Victims of the Holocaust

Hegel once said: "what history teaches us is that men have never learned anything from it". One lesson we must learn from the Porrajmos (the devouring), as the Romanies described their fate at the hands of the Nazis, is that there is one holocaust as the ashes of the Romanies mingled with the others in the ovens of the death camps. We lose our humanity when we arrogate to ourselves the exclusivity of suffering while diminishing the suffering of others.

[...]

By the act of denying or ignoring other holocausts, we rob history of its meaning and commit the folly of not learning from it.

C.R. Sridhar's very interesting and informative post on the Romanies killed in equal proportions to the Jews by the Nazis.

Travel Essay: Dreaming of Rajasthan

Given my experiences in and around Bangalore, I'm justifiably leery of road trips. Even so, when we were faced with the choice of waiting in an Indian Airlines lounge at the New Delhi airport for six hours for a delayed flight or getting in a taxi and driving to and reaching Jaipur within five hours, we chose the latter. Everyone (including the Indian Airlines customer service desk attendant who was happy to refund us the air fare rather than having us wait for the flight) assured us that the roads were good.



And they were. The roads were wide, very well paved, well maintained and devoid of traffic. Suffice to say it was one of the best drives I've had in India (the drive from Jaipur to Ajmer to Pushkar and back is equally good).

As we entered Jaipur around 2 pm, we caught our first of many glimpses of Amber Palace sitting majestically on top of a hill to our right.


Amber Palace

There are three ways to get to the top of the hill - by walk up a winding path, by elephant, or by car. With the April sun beating down on us and with me less than two months away from having a baby, we decided trekking up the hill was not the best option. And apparently, the elephants are mighty popular. They were all taken by 9:30 am - all twenty five of them!


An elephant gets ready to ferry people back down from the palace

Amber Palace is a wonderful combination of brute strength and delicate beauty. The kings and queens paid incredible attention to art and architecture within the walls. The walls and the exterior of the palace are themselves foreboding and somber. The road leading up to the palace is lined with imposing, ancient houses in which ministers and courtiers lived.







Once inside the palace, you will find that the structures are a marvellous coming together of form and function. There is an intricate, latticed vent through which air and water flowed to keep things cool - a sort of an ancient cooler,



lawns laid out in the design of a carpet for the viewing pleasure of palace residents,



mirrored and bejewelled ceilings and walls that retained warmth or rendered the room cool as the season demanded,


Yes! That is a ceiling!



and latticed fronts that served to shield the women folk from the men but at the same time allowed the women to witness all the action outside.


The eldest queen sat at the window in the center to throw flowers at the king as he entered the living quarters

There is one courtyard, a rather large one, flanked on all sides by what appeared to be separate apartments (each section was walled off from the other) that has a rather fantastic story that our guide took enormous pleasure in recounting. The king that built the courtyard, one of the Mansinghs, had twelve wives. Yup! You'll have to use your toes too for that one. And, he did not want any of his wives to talk to the others (even though some of the women he married were cousins). So he built this elaborate apartment complex around that courtyard, three apartments to each side. There were also watch points "manned" by eunuchs to enforce that rule and to make sure they didn't pass notes to each other. (This photo was taken from one such watch point.)

See what you can accomplish with inexhaustible resources? Why, you can even keep all your wives apart!


The Mansingh Courtyard

This outdoor hall used for musical performances brought on a sudden, intense longing for scallops. Wonder why.



As you may have noticed, nature seems to have painted much of Rajasthan with a single palate. Which is why I think the thing we most associate with Rajasthanis is - color. It is everywhere. It is painted onto the buildings,


The ultra-famous Hawa Mahal (another elaborate latticed front to hide the women folk

and it's most definitely an inextricable part of Rajasthani couture.




Umbrellas used in Rajasthani weddings. I thought they'd make cool parasols



The other thing that catches your eye is how ubiquitous camels and elephants are. Camels are like what cows are in south India. The elephants, we were told, are a vital part of Rajasthan's tourism and film industries. In fact, the day we visited the palace, there was a shooting going on with a few elephants thrown in (see the lawn carpet pic).







Can you imagine this rush hour? Traffic jam!

The Rajasthan tourism department has done some wonderful things to encourage tourism. The roads are worth mentioning again. At the palace, we could hear local guides jabbering away in German, French, Japanese and Spanish to their wards. Our guide went out of his way to arrange an elephant ride for my son.

We ventured out of Jaipur, by road again, to Ajmer to visit the Dargah and to Pushkar to visit the only Brahma temple in the world.



The Brahma Temple
I must say, the most striking thing about Pushkar was the clothes available for sale there. They were many, many shops dedicated to clothes, almost all of them selling western fashions. It was obvious they were targeting the insane number of foreign tourists Pushkar gets every year and not only during the annual camel fair.

But even as I appreciated this "know your market" attitude, I was totally unprepared for this:

"Every Shoe Tells a Story"

We wear our hearts on our soles. "Shoes are the best indicator of how poeple are feeling", says June Swann, a shoe historian based in Northampton, England. To hear Swann tell it, you can chart the rise and fall of prosperity from the elevation of a heel; hear the distant rumblings of war in the configuration of a toe; measure social change by the thickness of a sole.

Every shoe tells a story. Shoes speak of status, gender (usually), ethnicity, religion, profession, and politics (the Russian writer Maxim Gorky said a strong pair of boots "will be of greater service for the ultimate triumph of socialism ... than black eyes"). Last, far from least, they can be drop-dead gorgeous.

Every Shoe Tells a Story, in September's National Geographic magazine. Do read. And take the National Geographic poll.

Are beautiful shoes worth the pain that sometimes comes with wearing them? Hell! No.

What say you, Shoefie?

Tagging Along

I've been tagged.

So here goes.

Eight things about myself:

1. Am a mom.

2. Am sleep deprived, but that's my normal state of being.

3. Am doing at least two things at once at any given time.

4. Am an extrovert, very talkitive.

5. Don't like talking to people about personal issues.

6. Love to cook once in a while for a lot of people, tolerate everyday cooking as a necessary evil.

7. Get grumpy if I have to tell people what to do.

8. Love to see new places.

I'm not going to tag anyone else, but if you do decide to follow this tag trail, please do and let me know when you do.

Girl Escapes From Captor 8 Years After She Was Kidnapped

What a story!

Yesterday Natascha's father, Ludwig Koch, said he recognised his lost daughter immediately. In an interview with Austria's Kurier newspaper, he said she looked in bad shape physically and had wasted away. "She has very, very white skin and marks all over her entire body. I don't want to think about where they came from," he said. After being reunited on Wednesday they had both wept. "She told me: Papa, I love you. And her next question was, Papa, do you still have my toy car?'

"I told her I did, and we had never given it away. We still have all her dolls as well."

Career Women's Houses Are Dirty, and Other Male Delusions

There's a bit of a brouhaha on the Internet over an article published on Forbes. The article was originally published on August 22. The following day, Forbes took the article down. A few hours later, the article was back up on the site, but this time right alongside an article with a counterview.

What was all the fuss about? Well, the article in question, written by a Forbes.com news editor Michael Noer, is titled "Don't Marry Career Women". That should explain it all. Right? But wait, there's more. The title is merely the tip of the iceberg. The article itself - in which rocky marriages, husbands' ill-health, dirty houses, dysfunctional kids, divorces, extra-marital affairs and lower rates of childbirth are all blamed on working women - is priceless.

In support of his assertion that men should not marry working women, Noer quotes many "studies". However, in many instances, the author's paraphrasing of the studies, or the quotes he uses, talk about "individuals", "spouse", "people" and not about women specifically. Here are a few examples that Noer ropes in to argue that career women are more likely to cheat and run away with someone:

• When your spouse works outside the home, chances increase they'll meet someone they like more than you.
  


• According to a wide-ranging review of the published literature, highly educated people are more likely to have had extra-marital sex (those with graduate degrees are 1.75 more likely to have cheated than those with high school diplomas.) Additionally, individuals who earn more than $30,000 a year are more likely to cheat.
  


• "I also find that the incidence in divorce is far higher in couples where both spouses are working than in couples where only one spouse is employed," Johnson [who "examined data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation"] says.
  

It is baffling that the author relies on these statements to conclude that only working women cheat, run off, have extra-marital sex and are responsible for the rise in divorce rates. In a similar vein, Noer makes an argument about "labor specialization" - if both spouses work, the household suffers. Again, the argument should not and does not translate to mean that women should stay home.

Furthermore, people - men and women - will cheat if they are so inclined and if the opportunity presents itself, whether they stay home or go out. What about spouses who stay home and are exposed to the mailman (or mailwoman), the fedex man (or woman), the pool boy, the baby sitter?

The essay is chockfull of other "insights" into marital relationships.

• Households in which the women work are dirty, he says. Really? Is it any surprise? This is a reason why men should not marry career women? And is this really a problem? Where are the men in the equation? Do they really expect the house to be spic and span? If they really do (which I doubt - someone should go check out some bachelor pads and see how they stack up on the cleanliness scale), why not pick up after themselves, take the trash out, mop and dust a little, eh?
  


• Husbands in households in which the women work are more likely to fall ill, he says. Are men really such babies? Did anyone check to see if the women in households in which the men work are more likely to fall ill? No? Why not? Because women are expected to take care of themselves, but the men need handholding and need to be taken care of or else they fall ill?
  


• Husbands will be unhappy if their wives make more money than they do, he says. Well, all the men need to do is to tweak their attitudes a little bit. How about feeling happy that the family is earning more money? How about feeling proud that your wife is earning more than you?
  


• Wives will be unhappy if they earn more money than their husbands, he says. Well, don't worry Noer. This character flaw won't last long. I suspect this feeling stems from having a crabby husband around and women will stop caring what their husbands think or feel if their illogical behavior lasts long enough.
  


• If women quit their jobs and stay home with the kids, they will be unhappy, he says. Sure, there will be some sadness. There's bound to be unhappiness over lost friendships, over the loss of professional connections. But that's life. Priorities change when kids arrive. But is this a valid reason not to marry a working woman? That's a myopic view if I ever saw one. And what about the unhappiness a non-working woman may feel that she doesn't work? Does this not count?
  

Just in case the men reading his essay are horrified and are thinking they will never ever marry, Noer exhorts men to marry. Do marry, he says, because marriage is positively correlated to higher incomes for adult men. How wonderful! If you want to make more money, you want to be happy, have children and children who are well-adjusted, stay healthy and have a clean home, marry. Please do. Just follow Noer's advice and make sure the woman of your dreams doesn't have a college degree and makes less than $30,000 a year.

The puerile and inane ideas expressed in this essay are trumped only by Forbes first pulling the essay from the web and then republishing it with a counterview written by Elizabeth Corcoran, also with Forbes. If Forbes did not think that the essay would not stand on its own merit, why did they publish it in the first place?

And oh, before we go, please do read Forbes? You Suck. Lively and quite on point.

Comments

Comments are back on! Thank you for your e-mails and feedback on this topic. They all made a lot of sense. While I may not be able to reply to all comments, I do look forward to reading them. Thank you for reading and commenting.

"Punny" Headlines Driving You to Pull Your Hair Out?

Puns have no place in headlines. That's what you are taught in Journalism class in that chapter on newswriting. The thought behind this edict is that puns can harm a story in several ways - they tend to distract the reader from the story; they make light of what may be a serious news item; headlines with puns may be clever, but they may not reflect the actual content of the story.

Two Gannett editors, Meg Downey and Frank Sutherland, exhort headline writers to avoid puns, which "elicit groans rather than draw readers in or they make light of a serious issue." They point to this headline to illustrate their point: "Levi Strauss to button up six plants" on, they say, "a serious story about the clothing manufacturer laying off 36,000 workers."

"The disease of pun-ism seems to be spreading," says Jim Barger, sports editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "Used in moderation, like bourbon, they can leave the reader with a pleasant glow. But too many groaners can lead to glassy eyes and and readers wondering what's on television."

The San Antonio Express-News (via Poynter) went so far so as ban puns in its headlines after one particularly productive day in which copy editors produced nine pun headlines. According to Editor Robert Rivard, the decision to ban puns came on the heels of "predictable e-mails from readers dismissing us as a serious newspaper."

That, in my opinion, was a rather drastic step. I enjoy puns in headlines. If I don't go on to read the story following it, it's probably because the subject matter did not interest me in the first place any way. While there are terrible puns (such as the Levi Strauss one, for example), I have come across some mighty clever ones too that actually add to the story.

I was therefore happy to find that in spite of the prevailing wisdom in the newspaper industry, there were a number of "punny" headlines in the newspapers over the past couple of days - all relating to the one story of the forfeited cricket test match between England and Pakistan at the Oval and each one a play on the umpire's name Hair. (I haven't seen a photograph of Hair with his umpire's hat off. I wonder if he has any.)

'Pakistan demand Hair cut' read an August 21 headline in the Guardian (a clever headline, and I did go on the read the story). "A hair-raising past" says this Cricinfo headline. "Series with fraught histroy sitting on a Hair trigger" opines a Telegraph headline. "Pakistan lay blame on Hair for parting of ways". Now, is that a pun? The headline seems contrived. You can almost feel the effort that must have gone into the drafting of that headline. Moreover, "parting of ways" is not exactly how I would describe the Hair-Pakistan relationship.

Here's another "Hair cut" word play though not as good as the Guardian headline: "Hair cuts an over-officious figure in the game". "Pakistan no stranger to bad Hair day" according to The Times. "Hair's some more bad news for Pak" reads a not so good pun on the CNN-IBN website.

Before we go further, let me confess to my own attempt at punning in my post titled "Umpire Alleges Ball Tampering: Hair Today Gone Tomorrow?" Here's another in Desicritics writer Desh's post, "Darrell Caught in Pakistan's Hair."

Some of them - OK, may be a couple - are good, the rest rather insipid. So what makes a headline with a pun a good headline? A Capital Idea quotes a book called Headlines and Deadlines:

Two tests can be propounded for puns, whether in a headline or elsewhere. The first is whether each of the two meanings of the word forming the pun is appropriate. ...

The second test is based on the theory that the basis of humor is incongruity and unexpectedness. This means that the pun should not be obvious; it should not be just lying around waiting to be picked up ... The best advice that can be given to the headline writer is to avoid the pun unless he is convinced that it is exceptionally good. If there is one thing that most newspapers need, it is more sophistication. The bad pun, like the childish rhyme, is the mortal enemy of this quality.

Almost all of the Hair puns were just lying around waiting to be picked up.

Book Review: Hitchhiker, Vinod George Joseph

Most people cherish three things in their lives - family, friends and career. Ebenezer, the protagonist in Vinod George Joseph's debut novel, Hitchhiker, is no different. He loves his family the way most of us do - he grumbles at them, he complains about them, but he wouldn't know what to do without them. He prepares himself meticulously for a career in engineering, doing all the things one must to in India to get into a good college, and looks forward to the day he can become and engineer and lift his parents and sister out of the financial dire straits they are in. He falls in love with a smart, educated, independent young woman, the kind he had always dreamed of marrying. He and his friends plot and plan their way through high school, teasing each other about their dreams for their future lives, wives and careers.

In other words, Ebenezer is a normal kid with normal dreams.

There is also a crucial fact, however, that rules over Ebenezer's fate with a ruthless hand - he is born a Verumar, an untouchable. There is nothing he or his family can do to escape this unfortunate happenstance. Moving away from their ancestral village does no good because the necessary visits back to the village bring home to Ebenezer exactly who he is and what his place is in society; converting to Christianity proves to be a double-edged sword - on the one hand there is the suspicious eye with which society looks upon them (did they convert for money?), and on the other hand, Ebenezer loses the advantage of the quotas for scheduled castes in colleges because he is now a Christian and therefore no longer eligible for reservations.

This one fact, the fact that he was born the son of scheduled caste parents, lifts Ebenerzer out of the world he is so desperately trying to create for himself, spins him around and hurls him back to the ground, shattering in the process every single dream he has for himself and his family.

Ebenezer's mother and sister are hacked to death by the "higher" caste Edayars on a visit to his village; his family finds out that his aunt had been raped when she was a young girl by the son of her Edayar landlord, and subsequently drives her to commit suicide; his father loses his job because he joins a union demanding reservations for backward classes in the Christian institution run by his employer; his girlfriend's parents refuse to accept him because he's a Verumar although he converted to Christianity; a chain of events starting with the murders of his mother and sister ensures that he fails in the crucial exams leading up to admissions into engineering college, and culminates in Ebenezer never finding the engineering career he dreamt of.

Hitchhiker is a gut-wrenching story. As you read about young Ebenezer, you are hopeful for him and his sister Gwendolyn, two smart kids who seem to have spurned all that their history holds for them; two kids successful in their school, hardworking, extremely capable of achieving their dreams. You feel affection for Esther and Peterraj, Ebenezer's parents, who did what they thought they had to do to give their children the best possible start in life - they converted to Christianity, sought jobs and financial help from their church, obtained education for their children in the church's school and lived life quietly in their corner of the school compound. You secretly applaud when Ebenezer and Gayathri, his girlfriend, decide to marry.

It is almost too much to bear when the threads of Ebenezer's life start unraveling in such rapid succession as to leave you breathless.

Hitchhiker has all the ingredients that make for a great read.

The plot is very well thought out, researched and executed. The events leading up to Ebenezer's aunt, Karuppamma's suicide are set up brilliantly and the section ends chillingly,

Bhadrakaali [Ebenezer's grandmother, Karupamma's mother-in-law, who goads Karupamma into committing suicide] hugged Karuppamma by her feet and burst into loud sobbing. The tears were for real. Bhadrakaali had really liked Karuppamma. She knew that if she were in Karuppamma's position she would have acted exactly as Karuppamma had done. But, she had no choice. Her duty to Alagiri [her son and Karuppamma's husband] and his children came first. Matters had taken the only course they could and the world was now a better place.

Each character (and there are many, many, characters) is fleshed out and the attention to detail is welcome and refreshing in many places. In this passage, for instance, the author takes the time to paint a picture of Esther's workplace, the nursery section in the school run by her church,

There were three-year-olds all around her and most of them were crying out aloud. Deserted by their parents, they were making their fear and anger known in the only way they could. Many of the parents liked to hang out in the school after leaving their children in the nursery. But, Victoria Miss who had been handling the LKG class for the last twenty-five years, insisted that all parents clear off after depositing their children. A few parents, however, could just not be chased away.

The language is simple, and there is ample background information to round out the situations and events in the book. The life of each character is examined under the microscope of religion and its various aspects such as caste, conversion, reconversion, the politics behind reservations for scheduled castes in educational and governmental institutions and untouchability.

And therein lies one of a couple of minor drawbacks - every character in the book is somehow affected by some issue related to religion to the point where the reader feels the message is being pounded home relentlessly. The other is the sheer number of characters which the author spends considerable space fleshing out in such detail that the reader is left wondering where the story is going.

These drawbacks, however, are mitigated to a large extent by the author's simple and evocative writing style and the plot's ability to draw the reader into the lives of the characters.

At the bottom of it all, Hitchhiker is a simple story of unrequited love, of carefully laid plans going haywire, of circumstances beyond your control taking over your life, and it is well told. Reason enough to want to read the book.

Hitchhiker, Books for Change, 395 pp, Rs. 350 (India), USD 19.00 (outside India).

How sick is this

Did anyone, one man asked, know of girls’ camps willing to hire adult males as counselors? Meanwhile, elsewhere in cyberspace, the second group celebrated the news that one of their own had been offered a job leading a boys’ cabin at a sleep-away camp.

[...]

In this online community, pedophiles view themselves as the vanguard of a nascent movement seeking legalization of child pornography and the loosening of age-of-consent laws. They portray themselves as battling for children’s rights to engage in sex with adults, a fight they liken to the civil rights movement. And while their effort has brought little success, they celebrated online in May when a small group of men in the Netherlands formed a pedophile political party, and they rejoiced again last month when a Dutch court upheld the party’s right to exist.

How sick is this.

Of Furry Eyebrows and Hairy Upperlips

“On both coasts, everybody wants a thicker brow that reminds you of Elizabeth Taylor and Ava Gardner,” said Robyn Cosio, an eyebrow stylist who works at the Salon by Maxime in Beverly Hills and Eiji salon in Manhattan. “People love that I leave the two bottom layers of undergrowth and don’t take out so much in between the brows so that they can stick up and look feathered.”

Ladies, lay down your tweezers. Facial hair hasn’t been this much in demand since the advent in 1978 of Brooke Shields. Indeed, this month French Vogue devotes an entire page to the tinted, brushed and glossed eyebrow, recommending a “dense and proud” brow as the best way to structure a face.

There's one fashion trend (NY Times link; requires free registration) I've been way ahead of. Now if they would only catch up to hairy upper lips and sideburns...