Author Archives: A N N A

I Can’t Drive 55…

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…but I can write it. So can all of you, apparently.

Dear, excessively creative readers writers, since we commenced our sweet Friday festival of nanofiction fun, it feels like someone put a chip and new exhaust system in that vehicle called time. Those around me will attest that I can often be found muttering, “Where do the hours go?” several times a day; thanks to this delightful ritual, I’m even more incredulous. It’s Friday? AGAIN? Didn’t I just write this post? Yowza. It’s like Groundblog’s day.

In any case, indulge me in my disbelief, that it is already time to write an uber-short story and leave it or a link to it in the comments section below.

If you’re just tuning in, you might want to read this and then this, so you learn what I’m going on about, as well as how you can join in the chant. That second link established yet another tradition I’m sticking to– I like the idea of selecting the three short-shorts that made me swoon. Without further blathering, here they be:

When Jai Singh said, “I guess I may as well kick this off….” he wasn’t playing, y’all. The following gem left me daydreaming with a wistful smile on my face, as I concomitantly recalled my fond days in History 196A AND a certain battle scene from LOTR. Suh-wooooooon.

60,000 Rajputs waited in the crisp dawn, armour glinting in the sunlight, horses battle-ready. The track down the mountainside twisted ahead, the green flags of the approaching legion already visible.
With a thundering evocation to the Almighty, they raised their curved swords skywards in unison. The black smoke from the pyres billowed above the fortress.

Jay’s 55 was adroit; it captivated all of us, as we attempted to solve the ingenious riddle he posed:

Ice broke under the ankle. In a hospital room they conspired friendship. Set to work, she fumbled at the remote clumsily. In the boardroom she spat venom as they cornered her – then unbelievably granted reprieve. From the loft she saw the little woman walking towards the cab. She knew that it should have been her.

Continue reading →

“There was confusion everywhere…”

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I had to bring this to your attention: a five-year-old Kashmiri girl named Lishba who lived in one of the areas that was most affected by the quake spoke to the BBC about her memories of the tragedy and what she felt during and after it. I wish there were a picture of her; even without one, she’s captivated me. I don’t remember being this eloquent when i was five…

Where she was when the quake hit:

I was at home watching television and my sister was playing outside, my parents were in at home as well.
I felt the house shake and I got scared and ran to my father.
My sister was playing outside and at first we couldn’t find her, then my father went and got her home and all of us came out into the garden.
At first both my father and I thought the painter doing up my room must have broken something since the house shook, but then my father said this was an earthquake.
After the earthquake everybody was out of their houses and there was confusion everywhere.

Lishba, like so many others, is now homeless:

My house is completely broken all over.
We are now living in a field near my grandfather’s house.
When it rains, we all take shelter in the balcony of my grandfather’s house. It’s all broken and there are cracks everywhere but we all sit there.

Continue reading →

Breaking the Girl: IIPM’s Virtual Thugs Bully Rashmi Bansal

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This post is about IIPM‘s deplorable, misogynistic, retaliatory attacks on Rashmi Bansal, a female blogger who runs a magazine (JAM) which gave IIPM, a B-school in India, a less than stellar review. If you’d like, you can skip the Red Hot Chili Peppers lyrics and vignette below them; Rashmi’s story commences right before the jump.

:+:

Twisting and turning
Your feelings are burning
You’re breaking the girl
She meant you no harm
Think you’re so clever
But now you must sever
You’re breaking the girl…{rhcp}

:+:

After I finished my last degree, my next step–like every other desi who didn’t feel like going to medical school or being an engineer– was law school…or so I thought. I took Kaplan, took the LSAT and took obscene amounts of time filling out applications and writing essays, like everyone else who applied to be a 1L during the 2001-2002 school year.

My heart wasn’t in it.

I refused to go unless I was accepted at a school I loved because frankly, Mr. Shankly, I didn’t need to be a lawyer (and $100k in debt) that badly.

Out of the blue, I got a scholarship to a school I had no interest in…my Mom forced me to keep an open mind and at least visit it with her when she came east for my graduation.

“Fine, Mummy. For you, I will”, I said.

The materials made the campus sound fantastic; the truth was, ’twas a hole. I didn’t really hold it against them though– we all bullshit a little bit to make reality seem more fabulous. I’ll accept that proclivity– within limits.

Exactly a year later, when I was tending to my interns, I told them all about my experience with the law school suitor I had rejected. I felt like it was the right thing to do; almost half of them were in the process of applying themselves and a guest speaker who had graciously enriched their time with a speech was an Alum of the school I had found so hole-y. As I tried not to wince, he talked it up ridiculously. If I had had the time to blog during the summer of 2002, when I was working 70+ hour weeks, I would’ve told the world my story, in an honest, unflinching way. Aside from potentially getting flamed via comment, I wouldn’t have had anything to worry about, after posting my opinion.

Lucky me.

:+:

Rashmi Bansal, the blogger behind “Youth Curry” runs Just Another Magazine or JAM. JAM did brown youngsters in the Amma-land a favor by discussing B-schools, a topic which must be quite popular judging by my daily updates from Rediff.com, which inevitably include an article on the subject.

Here’s what JAM had to say about IIPM, a somewhat controversial school that reminds me of that sleazy guy at the bar who talks a good game– i.e. they’re full of shit. The bar-scum doesn’t have a porsche and IIPM isn’t a 10 ten school which is better than IIM, in fact IIPM has been removed from B-school rankings for misrepresenting itself. Though I’m a St. Thomas Christian, I don’t have to go to a sleazy garage to place my hands in the hole where the ultimate daily driver should be nor do I have to visit one of the “plush” IIPMs to tell you that they lied, too. Some things, you just know are true. Continue reading →

Give and take

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south park.gif Well, this is delightfully unexpected. A technology support services company called SlashSupport just announced that it’s outsourcing—to America. Yummy globalization.

HereÂ’s information from the press release, via SAJAÂ’s email discussion list:

SlashSupport, the technology support services company announced today the opening of a new support center in San Jose, California. It is SlashSupport’s sixth center (adding to its existing four locations in India and a redundancy center in Singapore). SlashSupport is a part of Cybernet Software Systems ( CSS ) Group.
SlashSupport’s core support delivery backbone at India employs over 2000 representatives, at four distinct support centers spread across 180,000 sq. ft. in Chennai, India.

This might only be the beginning?

The new San Jose support center will help SlashSupport meet some of the local support needs in providing complete range of support services, significantly strengthening its support infrastructure outside India. Depending on the needs of the business, SlashSupport has the option of expanding its North America operations.

Jason Alexander, erstwhile-Costanza and current…um…outsourcing guru was unavailable for comment. Continue reading →

“Anna asks. We write. Friday afternoon :)”

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Once upon a time…well, it was actually just a week ago, a beloved Sepia personality asked:

yay! I love Fast Fiction Fridays at the Mutiny. Can we do it again next week?

Of course we can, darling. “55 Fiction Friday” is a meme I’ve been faithful to for a while; I’m happy to infect the Mutiny with it.

For those of you who missed last week’s brilliance and have no idea what I’m going on about, the idea behind “Fast Fiction” is simple:

Flash fiction, also called sudden fiction, micro fiction, postcard fiction or short-short fiction, is a class of short story of limited word length. Definitions differ but is generally accepted that flash fiction stories are at most 200 to 1000 words in length. Ernest Hemingway wrote a six-word flash: “For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.” Traditional short stories are 2,000 to 10,000 words in length…One type of flash fiction is the short story with an exact word count. An example is 55 Fiction or Nanofiction. These are complete stories, with at least one character and a discernible plot, exactly 55 words long.[wiki]

More than a few bloggers have been writing a piece of nanofiction every Friday, for weeks.

I was elated at the response that my post on this meme inspired– comment after comment containing perfect little gems of story– we’d be crazy NOT to create a tradition out of such goodness.

What goodness it was. By the time I closed comments at the end of the weekend (a practice I think I’ll continue), we were in the triple digits.

Umair made me lightheaded when he channeled the book I love most:

Transported back to 1951, the thought of making money by betting on cricket matches yet to happen was for some strange reason furthest from my mind, which should give you a sense of just how at home I felt with the whole affair. But then: “I wish she’d married either Kabir or Amit. . .”

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Guest blogger: Ads

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I met a fit (and you’ll know it), witty blogger at our fantastic SF Meetup this summer and I was immediately smitten like a kitten. She played it cool though, observing all the shenanigans around her while remaining slightly apart from the hoi polloi, a sphinx in our midst with an inscrutable smile. Either that or she was bored. Or pissed that I made her leave the east bay for North Beach.

No matter. Next to her, I was tigger, bouncing about, pouncing on Oms and Vinods alike, leaving glitter on everyone who had the misfortune of being accosted by a squealing, hugging, air kissing, scenery-masticator. Leaving the Meetup was like walking out of Scores après-laptease, you were marked by the shimmer of this social beast.

Not her, though. I didnÂ’t dare sully her hipper-than-thou, old skool track jacket, nor did I ever notice the omniscient eyes behind her alternagirl specs change their appraising gaze. Who was this woman? What was she considering so carefully as she observed the dozen desis around her? Where did she get that outfit? I wanted her. To tell me, I mean. 😉

I always get what I want (even when itÂ’s so late in the game, I no longer want it, but thatÂ’s not the case here so letÂ’s cut the parenthetical chitchat, shall we?)

Meet our next guestblogger, Ads. SheÂ’s a Buddhist guitarist, a left-coast dwelling east-coaster, an all-around original who remains anonymous, because you would all stalk her if you could (you know you would).

Sigh. I havenÂ’t had a pledge to haze since college (Cicatrix wasnÂ’t interested in getting paddled by ME). It feels ridiculously good to be someone’s akka again.

Now. Just because I

  • make her do flatliner shots whenever she forgets to state everything in the form of a question
  • lie to Abhi about how she’s a Creationist so he’ll follow/berate her
  • wake her in the middle of the night via airhorn
  • lock her in the freezer for kicks
  • force her to answer Ennis’ fanmail
  • have her pick the lint off all the teeshirts in the store room
  • order her to Trader Joe’s to fetch my preferred brand of 1% milk

or otherwise torture her doesn’t mean you are allowed to do so– be good to her or feel the wrath of my stiletto heels. And no, you won’t enjoy it. Ladies and Gentlemen, straight out of a very small and uncomfortable spot in the North Dakota bunker– Ads!

Continue reading →

True Lies

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mush bush.jpg Last week, I wrote about my disgust with all things Mushie. When women rightfully rallied against him in New York on September 17th, he criticized them as if they were just anomalous Vestern Feminazis:

As the human rights and women groups protested outside the Roosevelt Hotel against the treatment of rape victims in Pakistan, Gen Musharraf said that such protests should be held in and not outside Pakistan.

Okay, fine.

On Thursday, women in Pakistan protested his utterly inappropriate remarks and I wholeheartedly supported their rage against an insensitive jerk. Ever-excellent and on top of things, The Acorn points me to an editorial which I missed, since I haven’t opened the Saturday paper yet (Note to self: retrieve newspapers or purchase canine for said task).

I’m pink-cheeked with joy over how the Washington Post let him have it:

PAKISTANI President Pervez Musharraf complains that his country is unfairly portrayed as a place where rape and other violence against women are rampant and frequently condoned. In fact, it deserves such a reputation. According to Pakistani human rights groups, thousands of attacks are reported every year, including gang rapes and “honor killings” of women who are accused of having affairs or who refuse an arranged marriage. Most of these attacks go unpunished. So retrograde are Pakistan’s laws that there are more than 1,500 women in prison as a result of rapes — they were prosecuted for adultery — while arrests of men occur in only about 15 percent of reported cases. [WaPo]

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Why they hate Bali

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More terror, more mayhem, more bloodshed, more hate:

Three bomb attacks in two tourist areas on the Indonesian resort island of Bali have killed at least 26 people – among them foreign nationals.

London mutineer BongBreaker posted about the tragedy at Pickled Politics, our bloggy cousin across the pond:

India and Indonesia have intertwined histories. Before Islam came to Indonesia via India, the country was Hindu and Buddhist, two Indian religions. The Arab-centric ideologies supported by Islamist terrorists despise India and it despise Hinduism. Osama bin Laden himself has identified India as an enemy of the caliphate and Al Qaeda. With the Arabisation of Indonesia, Indian influences have been purged from the vast majority of the country. The largest Buddhist monument in the world and a contender for 8th wonder of the world, Borobodur, is left woefully under-maintained and under-advertised, as it is a Buddhist stupa in the heart of an Islamic Java.
Despite all attempts to erase India from Indonesia, Bali remained unchanged. Over 90% of the 1.81% of Indonesians who are Hindu reside in Bali. The very culture that attracts tourists in droves is the culture that the rest of the country has rejected – such as traditional Balinese dancing, which is rooted in Hindu mythology. Bali is a slice of ancient Indonesia. Bali is a Hindu infidel of an island. Worse still, Balinese Hindus are leading what is called the Hindu Revival.

Read the rest here. Join me in praying for an end to this madness wherever you are. Continue reading →

Pakistani Soccer Hooligans?

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kick.jpg Caaaat Fiiiiighhht!! :

Pakistan’s women footballers, used to battling hardline Islamists opposed to their activity, ended up fighting themselves in a landmark final.
A mass brawl broke out after the award of a penalty in the first final of the National Women’s Football Championship in Islamabad’s Jinnah Stadium.

I wouldn’t want to get punched by one of those girls. Wait, if it was footie, why were they using their hands? That’s not allowed! 😉

“The girls of both teams freely kicked and punched each other. The catfight forced the tournament organisers to enter the ground and put an end to the brawl,” it reported.
The federation dismissed the incident as a “football flare-up” and said there would be no inquiry but images of the scuffles were widely covered in the local press.

Of course it was widely covered in the local press. The mens, they loves them some girl on girl action. Not that they got to see it live:

The women players were fully covered to avoid offending Muslim sensibilities and no male spectators were allowed.

Wha-? No men? Huh. I guess they were all covered up so that they wouldn’t offend the Muslim sensibilities of females or hermaphrodites, then.

Hell, why term it “Muslim sensibilities”?

Un-Muslim and insensible me was watching a football game last week when I noticed that the cheerleaders were essentially hopping about in bikinis. They looked like idiots. If you’re the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, that’s one thing…but the rest of you vomen of the NFL– rediscover the allure of a wee pleated skirt. Sheesh. Continue reading →

If you dare, write short-shorts

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Today is Friday and that means that at some point in the next 21 hours, I’m going to write 55 words which contain an entire story. I’m not that big on memes but this one (“55 Fiction Fridays”) is precious to me, because it reminds me of writing exercises and workshops and english minor-y goodness. Por ejemplo:

She nervously adjusted her sari, hoping no one noticed. So far, the night had gone flawlessly; she had made a good impression on everyone, she could just tell.

The older woman at the table noted how silk was tugged upwards. Taking a delicate sip of tea, she thought, “She’s not good enough for our family.”

I’ve consistently written one of these uber-short shorts for weeks now, but last week was the first time a fellow mutineer noticed. Abhi’s interest in the concept of nanofiction made me ponder the possibility that some of YOU would find it fascinating as well. If I further needed to justify making a mutiny out of it, know this: the good Professor Guest Blogger himself reads my “55” and I am aware of this because he referenced one at the last NYC meetup. Not that I need to defend it or anything… 😉

Flash fiction, also called sudden fiction, micro fiction, postcard fiction or short-short fiction, is a class of short story of limited word length. Definitions differ but is generally accepted that flash fiction stories are at most 200 to 1000 words in length. Ernest Hemingway wrote a six-word flash: “For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.” Traditional short stories are 2,000 to 10,000 words in length.[wiki]

That Hemingway example is ridiculously inspiring. One day I want to write a short that short. I don’t even know if there is a name for a short so short. There is, however, a name for the type of writing this meme encourages:

One type of flash fiction is the short story with an exact word count. An example is 55 Fiction or Nanofiction. These are complete stories, with at least one character and a discernible plot, exactly 55 words long.[wiki]

The virus is spreading throughout the brown blogosphere. SM readers Maisnon, Andrea and Chai are the three whom I go out of my way to check on (hee! no pressure, kids!), but if you decide to try it, please leave a link to your work of art in the comments. I’ll be happy if you flash me. 🙂 Continue reading →