Author Archives: fofatlal

One Night @ Bad Fiction Hell

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You may have heard of One Night @ the Call Center, an Indian novel attempting to ride the call center trend. It’s sold multitudinous copies and is being made into a movie. The script will be penned by the same author, an i-banker whose author’s voice brags about not being a writer.

He’s right. The story has an interesting premise, but it’s one of the worst-written books I’ve ever read, falling somewhere between bad high school love poem and sixth-grade book report. You’ll laugh out loud. The hilarity will be entirely unintentional.

The best review of a book this bad is to quote from it liberally. Enjoy the stank. Spoilers below.

~~~

The author writes groaners rivaling the one from Notting Hill:

‘Deep inside, I am just a girl who wants to be with her favorite boy. Because like you, this girl is a person who needs a lot of love.’

There are even more lines straight out of a Bulwer-Lytton bad fiction contest:

‘It is time to face the real world, even if it is harder and painful. I’d rather fly and crash, than just snuggle and sleep…’

‘Do you have a dark side, Shyam?’ … ‘I have so many–like half a dozen dark sides. I am like dark-sided hexagon [sic].’

Then he pats himself on back for minor-league wordplay:

‘Sorry, but calling is not my calling,’ Vroom said. I thought his last line was quite clever, but it wasn’t the right time to appreciate verbal tricks.

Telling, not showing — the author can’t write action, so he grasps at a voiceover:

‘We’re hanging above a hole, supported only by toothpicks. We’re screwed,’ Radhika said, summing up the situation for all of us.

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Nessie? Desi

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My fofatminions, I’ve been hearing back-chatter about the mystery of me. Rrrreeeally? I’m so flattered, though gentlemen don’t kiss and tell, they kiss and post.

But as I am a gentle and one-track uncle, let’s talk about how Everything Comes From Desiland. A study just published in a British science journal pushes the idea that the “Loch Ness monster” was actually an Indian elephant on its way to performing in a circus:

Neil Clark, curator of paleontology at the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow, sees striking similarities between descriptions of Nessie and what an Indian elephant looks like while swimming. And perhaps not coincidentally, a traveling circus featuring elephants passed by the misty lake in the 1930s at the height of the monster sightings.

“It is quite possible that people not used to seeing a swimming elephant — the vast bulk of the animal is submerged, with only a thick trunk and a couple of humps visible,” thought they saw a monster, Clark said in an interview Tuesday…

But he said the vast majority of sightings occurred not long after 1933, the first year of the A82, a road that runs alongside the lake. Around that time, Mills’s traveling circus was visiting nearby Inverness and “would have stopped on the banks of Loch Ness to allow their animals to rest.”

You can judge for yourself whether Nessie is desi. Take a long, sensitive look…

Convincing, na? One shadowy mystery solved, one to go.

Only fools in pools see lumps and trunks as things that go plunk in the night. That dark summer night, in your jacuzzi, that was me. My humps, your aquifer, please excuse. I was on my way to performing in a circus.

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Media Roundup: The Trip Part II

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With the visit only a couple of days away there are of course ever increasing stories on the Presidential visit to India and Pakistan. Again this roundup is in no way comprehensive, and some mutineers may or may not cover one or more of these articles in greater detail.

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Media Roundup: The Trip Part 1

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As many of you know, President Bush will be visiting India and Pakistan next week. Because of the plethora of stories that will be written in the next couple of weeks, and that have already been written, one of the better ways to alert you to these will be doing a periodic roundup of some of them. In this round:

  • Newly anointed Yale Trustee Fareed Zakaria says in his latest Newsweek column (2/27/06) that President Bush’s upcoming trip to India is equivalent to President Nixon’s visit to China. I don’t know about that, MSingh isn’t exactly Chairman Mao.
  • The AP summarizes a roundtable President Bush gave to Indian journos in DC. Among other things, we find out that Bush is a fan of cricket (I wonder if his Texas people know that) and will not be visiting the Taj. (AP 2/23/06)
  • Matthew Cooper writes in Time (2/23) that India, amidst all the troubles the administration is currently facing, is a bright spot and that “it’s probably safe to say that a President who hasn’t always loved to travel abroad is very much looking forward to his latest getaway.” He must have never heard of Delhi Belly. “When the President jets off to India (as well as Pakistan) next week, it will be his first visit to the region and the first by a Republican president in 35 years, since Richard Nixon traveled there.”
  • The Economist, one of my favorite newsmagazines, has a great article with a great lede that summarizes the past India-US relationship the best. “On the 13-hour flight next week from Washington to Delhi, George Bush could do a lot worse than to put aside his briefing books and curl up instead with E.M. Forster’s best-known novel. “A Passage to India” is a tale, above all, of misunderstanding: of wrong signals, exaggerated expectations, offence unwittingly caused and taken, and inevitable disappointment. It is a parable of the complications that arise when eager Anglo-Saxons go travelling on the Indian subcontinent.”
  • The WSJ 2/21/06 (subscription only) writes about the potential tension that could occur between MSingh and President Bush because Singh’s daughter Amrit is an ACLU attorney. Thanks WSJ for finally writing about this, although we’ve previously covered it. From the WSJ:
“Ms. Singh’s dogged pursuit of U.S. government information has subjected the Bush administration to withering criticism of its treatment of suspected terrorists. But among the ironies of the post-Sept. 11 world is the fact that this particular critic of the Bush administration is also the relative of one of its newest friends. Amrit, 36 years old, is the youngest daughter of Manmohan Singh, prime minister of India. Mr. Singh, 73 years old, will host President Bush at a summit in New Delhi early next month. While the soft-spoken Indian prime minister and his daughter share views on many issues, according to acquaintances, their public personas stand on opposite sides of the debate over the Bush administration’s foreign policy.

Related Posts Brimful of Amrit; Indian PM’s daughter says Bush personally authorized torture; Indian PM’s daughter works for the ACLU; President Singh

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Jail Time for Salman Khan?

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For those of us in America, high profile hunting continues to be part of the regular news cycle. After all, our Vice President did shoot, by accident of course, his hunting partner Harry Whittington in the face and body just last week (guns don’t kill people right, its people that kill people?).

So it was kind of humorous to see the parallels between bad boy vice president, and our own Bollywood bad boy Salman Khan, who this week (thanks Bong Breaker) was found guilty of killing two blackbucks, a protected species of antelope, in the western state of Rajasthan in 1998, and sentenced to one year imprisonment. (link)

Salman Khan and Fans

Charges against Khan were pressed by the local Bishnoi community in Rajasthan where the killing took place… “The court can hang me. I am tired of such lengthy proceedings,” Khan told the court. The poaching case is not the actor’s first brush with the law. He is also facing trial in Mumbai (Bombay) in a 2002 hit-and-run case. One person was killed and three others injured when Khan allegedly drove into a group of homeless people sleeping on a pavement. Khan faces 10 charges, including causing death by negligent driving which carries two years in prison. He has pleaded not guilty on all counts.

It was unclear if Khan was drinking while he was allegedly poaching blackbuck, but he was I believe, driving under the influence when he allegedly hit and killed the homeless people. As an aside Vice President Cheney when asked if they had been drinking while hunting noted in his interview with Fox News correspondent Brit Hume: “No. You don’t hunt with people who drink. That’s not a good idea.”

In that same interview with Fox News, Cheney did later indicate that he had had a beer with lunch earlier in the day. Maybe I am dumb, but doesn’t that constitute drinking? Hell a few months ago, you could get arrested in Washington DC for drinking and driving after having only one drink.

A BBC correspondent says the actor, who has also been fined 5,000 rupees ($111) has a month’s time to appeal.

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The romantic adventures of Fofatlal

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Please forgive me. I had just finished noshing on the goat cheese and was starting in on the arugula canapés. Then my gray-eyed Hades (half-desi) date flashed me the look of You-Could-Be. The dew-not-drop-me. The mooning cow. I will not perjure myself — I was startled. I rose from my seat and tripped backwards in a half-crouch. That, in short, is how my elbow found itself in your gazpacho. A shame, it was such a fine gazpacho.

Try and understand, I had no forewarning. We swapped flirty texts, but she knew I plugged my profile in every port. She was on the same page, that minx. She had a Francophone mother. The French and Indian War raged within her as I spilled myself upon her Valley Forge. After all those unreturned volleys, I gave up hope. This dinner was to be my surrender. Looking at the bill I saw a Magna Carta indeed. And then she gave me The Look.

My wrist. Your polenta. Please excuse.

V-Day means Victory.

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The Price of Being Brown

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What exactly is the price we pay for being brown in America? Is it just the stares? Is it the acceptance that after 9/11, and the July bombings in London, that we are automatically suspicious because of our skin color? That notion of presumed innocent, it seems, has been thrown out the door, and the idea that its ok to treat people who have a brown-ish tint with a bit of suspect has slowly become common practice.

Thanks to tipster Simran, we have learned that there were more than incidents involving t-shirts at last weeks’s State of the Union Address (SOTU). This other incident involves an anonymous Indian-American, invited by Florida Congressman Alcee Hastings to be his guest at the SOTU, who was at the end of the address, surrounded by about ten law enforcement officers in the Capitol gallery, taken to a mysterious room in the Capitol, and questioned for an hour. Why, you ask? Not because he was wearing a t-shirt with a political statement, but according to Capitol Police chief Terrance W. Gainer, because police thought the man resembled someone on a Secret Service photo watch list. It took Capitol Police an entire hour to figure it out. I wonder if that isn’t excessively long. Shouldn’t security officials be able to identify an SOTU guest’s identity in less than an hour? After all, the man works with the Department of Defense and has a security clearance. On the other hand, we all do look the same anyway.

From the Time Magazine Article: But on the same evening that President Bush was lauding democracy and freedom, there was one other person in attendance whose rights were infringed upon. The man, who did not want his identity revealed after the disturbing incident, was a personal guest of Florida Democrat Alcee Hastings. He is a prominent businessman from Broward County, Florida who works with the Department of Defense-and has a security clearance. After sitting in the gallery for the entire speech, he was surrounded by about ten law enforcement officers as he exited the chamber and whisked away to a room in the Capitol. For close to an hour the man, who was born in India but is an American citizen, was questioned by the Police, who thought he resembled someone on a Secret Service photo watch list, according to Capitol Police Chief Terrance Gainer. Eventually, the police realized it was a case of mistaken identity and let him go. Gainer has assured Hastings that the Capitol Police, Secret Service and FBI will investigate why the man was detained for so long, and try to “sharpen our procedures.” But the man was “very, very scared” by the incident, says Fred Turner, a spokesperson for Hastings. On Tuesday night, he told the congressman that the experience was “maybe just the price of being brown in America,” Turner says.

It saddens me to think that at this point the positive in this story is, at least it was only an hour, and at least he was actually let go. Is it ok that this HAS BECOME the price of being brown in America?

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I’m Fofatlal, and don’t you forget it

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Hi there!

Fofatlal Popatlal, Esq., at your service

The folks at the Mutiny in their infinite wisdom have finally chosen a new permanent blogger. I was buffing Salman Rushdie’s cuticles the other day — oh yes, he’s quite the dandy, don’t let the jacket photo fool you — when up rolled a black Honda Civic with a metallic Ganesh on the dashboard. Two brown valets built like linebackers emerged and silently unveiled their cargo. Inside there was a hard-looking guy in a pink tutu and a flattop. Instead of a moll, this guy had fourteen. They crammed into the back seat, sitting on laps, alternating like checker squares, and my personal favorite, the layover. After the molls disembarked, the guy in the tutu put on a headlamp with high-lumen LEDs. All of us were agape. The guy in the tutu looked coolly at me, snapped his fingers and incanted these magic words: ‘O no you di’nt!’ Then the big boss, the molls and the linebackers squeezed in and rolled away.

Three days later a strange transformation came over me. From dawn to dusk I had an uncontrollable urge to spew my thoughts about everything: current events, movies, bowel movements. At first I jotted down my thoughts hurriedly in red and blue, but I soon realized that out of one pen flowed only truth and out of the other only lies. In desperation I downed a fifth of Black Label and passed out drooling on my laptop keyboard. When I awoke I found that I had been typing frantically in my sleep. It was all half-baked gibberish which posted itself on the Internets.

You know what happened next. The Mutineers knew I was a perfect fit. I could no longer fluff Salman’s combover between bouts of obsessive blogging, so he fired me over the phone from South America. Padma left him for me because I had bigger glasses and he was too self-effacing.

One day the earth opened up and swallowed her whole. It all came out in the investigation: the mole-men operating the mole-machines drilling the last big tunnel in New York. In a city of fury, the gods must be appeased. The last instant of her life was captured by a photojournalist who happened by, a stricken Medusa-haired goddess teetering on heels, the pavement rent behind her. That photograph is all I have, a sepia-tinted fame, a palimpsest of privacy, her final words my name:

F-f-f-fofatlal!
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