The Swiss-Indian comics anthology is out. It is called When Kulbushan met Stockli (I still think my title suggestion was far cooler, but I’ve forgotten what it was so maybe it wasn’t) and it is full of multicolour graphic goodness. Again, this post is a linkdump for now – though I seriously doubt there will be as much coverage as there has been for the anthology mentioned in my previous post, which interestingly is also quite graphic. Asian Age Mint Business Standard
…made a brief but glorious comeback last evening. First played one evening in late 2004 by myself, Rana Dasgupta, Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta and Sayoni Basu, this game involves the identification and classification of great apes through sets of two cunning clues. Two classic examples:
What do you call a green-transport-using great ape of ambivalent sexuality?
BiKing Kong
What do you call a decidedly non-saintly heavier-than-water great ape?
SinKing Kong
And one from last night, courtesy Sumana Bhoothalingam:
What do you call a Nordic, constantly questioning great ape?
ViKing Kong
There are hundreds more. Consider this an invitation to provide some.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
