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Kickass Bongs #3: Batman was Bengali
Posted on June 7, 2009 by samit
or spent a lot of time in Calcutta; how else would he know about the relationship between a ghoti and his fish?
From the Batman TV Episode An Egg Grows in Gotham [2.13]
Robin: “Ghoti” is “fish”?
Batman: See here. English phonetics. GH becomes F, as in “tough” or “laugh”. O becomes I as in “women”. TI becomes SH as in “ration” or the word “nation”.
Robin: Holy semantics, Batman. You never cease to amaze me!
Batman: No time for compliments, Robin. We must thwart some criminals. To the Batmobile!
I knew it all along. Must go watch another Bong superhero, the bnoti-fingered Ulbharin from Uluberia, sometime soon at a movie theatre near me.
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MP3
Posted on June 5, 2009 by samit
Was part of the audience for an NDTV show last night where three young MPs, Deepender Hooda, Kalikesh Singh Deo and Manicka Tagore were fielding questions from an audience of students about what it meant to be young and in Parliament. These guys are young, smart, camera-friendly and clearly capable of so much. Wonder what they’ll do with the power they’ve inherited/earned/achieved. I think the show’s on NDTV at 10 tonight. Amidst the flurry of questions, you can see me nodding and smiling and trying to stay awake (not because the discussion was uninteresting, but because I’d just been driven to St. Stephens’ from south Delhi in a really comfortable air-conditioned car and had slept like a baby through most of the journey)
Update: Here’s the video
Unrelated, but am reminded of another public event where staying awake and alive was a real problem: sometime in 2004. An event at Oxford bookstore, where I was supposed to deliver a short speech about something or other as part of the panel of judges for whatever it was we were judging; clearly a writing contest of some sort. I remember Diya Kar Hazra, Jairam Ramesh and other stalwarts were there with me. Now I had a terrible hacking zombie-like cough that had been bothering me for a few days and had rendered me (fortunately, according to some) incapable of speech. To soften, smoothen and otherwise harmonize my vocal chords, I had chugged a fair amount of Benadryl just before leaving the flat; as a result, the entire evening was a blur. I nodded, smiled fixedly and tried to keep from gently swaying from side to side without much success. When it was my turn to speak, I remember the audience blurring and weaving. I felt like Gussie Fink-Nottle.
I think the speech was a huge hit, though. I don’t really remember.
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Exploding pens
Posted on June 1, 2009 by samit
Had much fun yesterday reading to kids at Eureka Bookstore, probably the best-known store in the city as far as younger readers are concerned. Was asking grave young readers, who were arranged in Roman military formation for some reason. Scholastic should be pleased with me – many copies of Bewitched were sold, though I was wary of signing for a young gentleman who had previously revealed that he wanted to possess a pen that could blow people and kill them in 10 seconds – and this when asked how he’d change the world if he could. Why 10 seconds, I asked? So they could suffer for a bit, he said.
Rama Lakshmi of the Washington Post was there too, and wrote this piece on the long-awaited explosion in Indian children’s literature, which hasn’t really happened yet but is expected to happen tomorrow. Or maybe in a few years.
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Tall Tales
Posted on May 28, 2009 by samit
Just found this lovely review of The Tall Tales of Vishnu Sharma at Sequential Smarts. Thank you Elena – of all my work, Tall Tales is the one whose publication history I’m saddest about – it was never made available in India and, lacking any publicity whatsoever, disappeared without a trace in the flood of monthly comics coming out elsewhere. I actually found the last 3 of the 5 issues that were printed at a Forbidden Planet store in London. Here’s hoping that your review will some day help push Liquid Comics into at least bringing it out as a TPB. I had huge plans for the series, running to at least 50 issues. Nothing materialized because of various crises Virgin was going through, but Tall Tales was great fun to work on – unlike Devi, it was something I’d cooked up, and something my editor at Virgin, Mackenzie Cadenhead, was also very fond of. Good to be reminded of its brief existence.
Filed under: comics | 7 Comments »
Comics quiz :)
Posted on April 21, 2009 by samit
Which British superheroine has killed a fearsome monster from Bihar Province?
Which (American?) superhero briefly fought alongside a group of heroes called The Unclean in Delhi?
Which British superhero’s power-activating magic word translates as ‘How fat!’ in Bengali?
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Susan Boyle sings for the Kolkata Knight Riders
Posted on April 18, 2009 by samit
I dreamed a dream that we had won
But somehow Saurav’s bat was broken
And though he’s Bengal’s favourite son
It seems the fates, oh, they have spoken
Now our fortunes seem to lie
In the hands of this young Brendon
He seems an ok kind of guy
The kind of Kiwi we’ll depend on
And we still have Shah Rukh Khan
And those plastic dancing tribals
And that mantis-like Ishant
And that Shoaib who eats his rivals
And so this dream could still come true
Consider all the fans from Dhaka
So even if we’re beaten blue
We’ll be rolling in their taka
(music)
I had a dream that I would be
hitting fours off Aakash Chopra
And if I don’t, well twiddly-dee
I still get to sing on Oprah
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Ninja Pandav
Posted on April 13, 2009 by samit
There’s a TV show on called Ninja Pandav, the existence of which was revealed to me by a review I read in the Indian Express this morning. While potentially as brilliant as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (which I can’t wait to read) I can safely say, having seen a few youth-oriented Indian fantasy serials a few years ago, that Ninja Pandav would be just the kind of rubbish that would make me regret having a TV connection (and I haven’t had one in about two years) BUT that’s not the point here.
In her review, the Indian Express TV critic disliked two things about the show.
1. The kung fu was stolen from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
2. The plots of Ninja Pandav appear to be copied from the stories of the Pandavas in the Mahabharat.
Which means, essentially, no matter how bad the entertainment, the criticism is generally worse.
I worry about the world sometimes.
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