Family elders play a crucial role in one’s life, right from the time they stop trying to control you to the time they start dribbling into their bibs and diapers. This window during which they make sense is sometimes so short that if you blink, you’ll miss it; but in that brief golden moment you’ll find the old bags full of handy tips. Their most consistently valuable advice to me has been: Don’t play with fire, knives, boys, or the stock market.
For the most part I have paid heed. I don’t play with fire, except for occasionally passing my finger slowly through a candle flame to see how it feels. I try to keep my pocket knife sheathed, because the memory of dropping my grand-uncle’s sword onto my foot, point first, is forever engraved in my mind and on my foot. I can’t find any boys to play with anymore. As for the stock market, I’m beginning to see what they were getting at.
Like many people who are very nice but no good at making money, I am very nice but no good at making money. I’m fortunate to have good infrastructure and quality of life, but the state of my liquidity and general finances can only be called dire. So, with a fire lit under my fundamentals by the prospect of a pension-less old age and a few holidays I wish I could take, I decided that I needed to Grow My Money. At about the same time, I discovered that the Sensex was not an English county between Essex and Wessex, but an instrument with which to acquire untold millions by doing nothing. This is probably the sort of thinking that the family elders were trying to nip in the bud.
I stomped off to see my brother, who has incredible financial instincts, which is very lucky because he’s busy working on a PhD in Philosophy. He said Risk Appetite, and Investment Horizon, and I immediately started to do crosswords in my head. He rolled his eyes and made me take notes on what I later found I’d earnestly recorded as ‘Madcap Stocks’.
Of course, I did nothing with the information he gave me when the Sensex was at 16,000. The workings of the market are, for me, buried within an impenetrable fog. All I know is that sometimes ‘Sensex Soars, Millions Make Killing’, and sometimes ‘Sensex Crashes, Millions Kill Selves’, and that almost always, the former is considered to be better.
But then, an old friend rang me up and described his life of leisure financed by stock market earnings, and another old friend scolded me for not having a Demat account. I didn’t tell him that I don’t even have a credit card. Momentum was building.
When the Sensex went from 16,000 to 20,000 I cunningly decided that it was time to buy. I gathered together my few beans, borrowed a couple of peanuts, and put the lot into Mutual Funds—which, it turns out, is not the technical term for "your parents’ money". I sat back and waited for five days, and in this interim there was a ‘Sensex Bloodbath, Everyone Buggers Off’. When I checked my Portfolio, I discovered that it had been reduced to a Portfol, which is to say that some of it was missing.
But I’ve re-evaluated my Horizon; I’m a Long Term Investor and I’m not going to get fussed about these blips. The whole thing is notional anyway, they tell me, so my next move is going to be to get myself a rich avatar on Second Life. At least there, if I lose my money, I can still be tall and thin.
Saturday, February 16, 2008
Saturday, February 09, 2008
Channel surfing
I love the Gary Larson cartoon captioned (approximately), “What people did before they had television”. It shows a family sitting shoulder to shoulder on their living room couch, staring fixedly at a bare wall.
The first time I ever laid eyes on a television was at the ripe old age of seven, in Switzerland. It was the size of a large toaster, and it beamed black and white images of news anchors reading bulletins about debates between French President Giscard d’Estaing and his challenger, François Mitterand. It bored us to tears, and there was lots of blizzardy stuff on the screen, but we were very excited about it anyway. (And it was thanks to the television that my parents discovered that there was something wrong with my eyesight; my mother asked me if I could see the screen from where I sat, and I asked her which one of the two she meant.)
It was eventually upgraded to a slightly larger colour set with no snow, as technology roused itself into a slow warm-up jog. French programming, however, is extremely liberal stuff—the French introduce their children to sex almost as soon as they introduce them to wine—so my parents authorised us to watch only a bunch of cartoons and Zorro (which sabotaged the whole idea of colour television by being shot in black and white), although we watched all the adult stuff anyway whenever they were out.
By the time I was a teenager in Jakarta, we had an even larger colour television on which we were treated to colour images of Indonesian news anchors reading bulletins about the lack of debate between President Suharto and the rest of the country. It bored us to tears, but we also had a video cassette player by then, and so were able to watch B-grade Hollywood films on VHS tapes, which my mother said were American Bilge but which the rest of us, including my father, loved.
It was a long time before I got to a point where there was a nice TV, enough time and enough moronic programming to ensnare me—only in the past five years, really. Now I’m hopelessly addicted to American Bilge, and even my mother admits to a pale enjoyment of Friends (though I don’t think she’ll ever appreciate the vacuous thrill of sitting through an episode of E! News Daily).
Before we had television, I read. It was great, even though there was a cockroach as big as my foot that lived somewhere in the bookshelf and got its jollies from charging me. I’m glad I developed the reading habit before the temptations of television came along, because if I hadn’t, I’d be a complete zombie (I think ‘remote control’ refers to the power of programmers over viewers). You know those people who don’t have a television and don’t want one? I’m not one of those people. There are worse things than to kick off your shoes and sit down to an episode of House or some particularly non-challenging movie on HBO—it’s certainly better than smoking, or getting drunk, or watching the Hallmark channel instead.
Despite my love for books, I’m having to remind myself to read rather than turn on some version of the television—especially since the television manufacturing industry, after going through the laborious process of making ever-larger sets, is now busy breaking them down again to smaller and smaller sizes, for treadmills, for watches, so that you can take your idiot box along wherever you go. I’m having to remind myself that the Delhi Book Fair is on, and that I like going there. It’s a bit of struggle, and I haven’t made it yet, but I live in hope. Now pass the remote.
The first time I ever laid eyes on a television was at the ripe old age of seven, in Switzerland. It was the size of a large toaster, and it beamed black and white images of news anchors reading bulletins about debates between French President Giscard d’Estaing and his challenger, François Mitterand. It bored us to tears, and there was lots of blizzardy stuff on the screen, but we were very excited about it anyway. (And it was thanks to the television that my parents discovered that there was something wrong with my eyesight; my mother asked me if I could see the screen from where I sat, and I asked her which one of the two she meant.)
It was eventually upgraded to a slightly larger colour set with no snow, as technology roused itself into a slow warm-up jog. French programming, however, is extremely liberal stuff—the French introduce their children to sex almost as soon as they introduce them to wine—so my parents authorised us to watch only a bunch of cartoons and Zorro (which sabotaged the whole idea of colour television by being shot in black and white), although we watched all the adult stuff anyway whenever they were out.
By the time I was a teenager in Jakarta, we had an even larger colour television on which we were treated to colour images of Indonesian news anchors reading bulletins about the lack of debate between President Suharto and the rest of the country. It bored us to tears, but we also had a video cassette player by then, and so were able to watch B-grade Hollywood films on VHS tapes, which my mother said were American Bilge but which the rest of us, including my father, loved.
It was a long time before I got to a point where there was a nice TV, enough time and enough moronic programming to ensnare me—only in the past five years, really. Now I’m hopelessly addicted to American Bilge, and even my mother admits to a pale enjoyment of Friends (though I don’t think she’ll ever appreciate the vacuous thrill of sitting through an episode of E! News Daily).
Before we had television, I read. It was great, even though there was a cockroach as big as my foot that lived somewhere in the bookshelf and got its jollies from charging me. I’m glad I developed the reading habit before the temptations of television came along, because if I hadn’t, I’d be a complete zombie (I think ‘remote control’ refers to the power of programmers over viewers). You know those people who don’t have a television and don’t want one? I’m not one of those people. There are worse things than to kick off your shoes and sit down to an episode of House or some particularly non-challenging movie on HBO—it’s certainly better than smoking, or getting drunk, or watching the Hallmark channel instead.
Despite my love for books, I’m having to remind myself to read rather than turn on some version of the television—especially since the television manufacturing industry, after going through the laborious process of making ever-larger sets, is now busy breaking them down again to smaller and smaller sizes, for treadmills, for watches, so that you can take your idiot box along wherever you go. I’m having to remind myself that the Delhi Book Fair is on, and that I like going there. It’s a bit of struggle, and I haven’t made it yet, but I live in hope. Now pass the remote.
Saturday, February 02, 2008
Irish cream
My mother was raised by Irish nuns at Loreto Convent, an institution that has produced thousands of Indian women known for their carefully neutral accents, good grooming, a ravenous appetite for lacy doilies, and a propensity to hum weird Irish ditties (“Pooot your eeer agaaainst the craaahck, somebody wants to heeer”—which, back then, referred to listening at a door).
She spent much of her youth saying Hail Marys and trying to be a ‘naughty fairy’ rather than an ‘eejit’; and while her essential nature is sunny and fun loving, she developed a lifetime supply of guilt about it. It’s become a bit of a family joke that, wherever she goes, she is attended by a ghostly cohort of moral supervisors, wimples agog. “We can fit in one car,” my sister might say, “though it’ll be a bit of a squeeze what with Mother Bernadine and Mother Damien.” If we plan anything even faintly fun, we assure mum, sotto voce, that we won’t tell Them.
On the upside, my mother bequeathed to us the incredible literary tradition that They left her—the tradition of Jonathan Swift, WB Yeats, Samuel Beckett and Oscar Wilde. The girls at Loreto weren’t allowed to read the likes of James Joyce, who used swear words, but I devoured them all, down to John Banville and Anne Enright. Of all the literary traditions in the world, it’s the Irish I feel the greatest affinity with. So, despite Delhi’s bitter cold, my cultural genes drew me out on many evenings this last fortnight to attend the first Irish Literary Festival, organised by the Embassy of Ireland and the Ireland Literature Exchange.
It introduced me to the work of novelists Dermot Bolger and Gerard Donovan. I loved photographer John Minihan’s iconic shots of Samuel Beckett, and his documentation of the “dying Irish art of dying”. Children’s fantasy writers Oisin McGann (that’s Oh-sheen) and Conor Kostick read from their books, as did novelists John Boyne, Claire Kilroy, and Northern Ireland’s Glenn Patterson, who brought high humour to the evening. Kilroy’s Tenderwire was the only book available for sale; I bought it, and read it, and it’s a treat.
It was a treat, too, to listen to poet Anthony Cronin, a frail old giant of Irish letters, and Anne Haverty, who is also a poet and a novelist. Poet Derek Mahon, introduced as one of the most important writers of all time, talked about his first experience of Indo-Irish links being the time he was almost mown down by the passing cortege of the Irish Prime Minister Eamon de Valera and President Radhakrishnan, who was visiting.
Micheál O Conghaile represented the small but dedicated world of Irish-language publishing. A native Irish speaker, he beautifully likened the experience of expressing oneself in a second language (English) with waking in an unfamiliar house and trying to get breakfast together in an unfamiliar kitchen. He read a brilliant short story about a dead man who crashes his own wake, with understandably disturbing consequences.
The festival was sadly under-attended, partly because of the clash with the Jaipur literary event, and partly because these writers are unfamiliar to Indian audiences—even though that’s the best reason to be in the audience. It’s too bad that contemporary Irish work is largely absent in our bookstores, and it’s too bad that most of the authors’ books were not available at the events, but I like to think that this will change with future editions of the festival. And maybe, next time, the authors’ lodgings at The Grand Hyatt won’t go up in flames midway through the festival.
I reported to my mother that there was a total absence of wimples at the festival. She said that in that case, she’d come next year.
She spent much of her youth saying Hail Marys and trying to be a ‘naughty fairy’ rather than an ‘eejit’; and while her essential nature is sunny and fun loving, she developed a lifetime supply of guilt about it. It’s become a bit of a family joke that, wherever she goes, she is attended by a ghostly cohort of moral supervisors, wimples agog. “We can fit in one car,” my sister might say, “though it’ll be a bit of a squeeze what with Mother Bernadine and Mother Damien.” If we plan anything even faintly fun, we assure mum, sotto voce, that we won’t tell Them.
On the upside, my mother bequeathed to us the incredible literary tradition that They left her—the tradition of Jonathan Swift, WB Yeats, Samuel Beckett and Oscar Wilde. The girls at Loreto weren’t allowed to read the likes of James Joyce, who used swear words, but I devoured them all, down to John Banville and Anne Enright. Of all the literary traditions in the world, it’s the Irish I feel the greatest affinity with. So, despite Delhi’s bitter cold, my cultural genes drew me out on many evenings this last fortnight to attend the first Irish Literary Festival, organised by the Embassy of Ireland and the Ireland Literature Exchange.
It introduced me to the work of novelists Dermot Bolger and Gerard Donovan. I loved photographer John Minihan’s iconic shots of Samuel Beckett, and his documentation of the “dying Irish art of dying”. Children’s fantasy writers Oisin McGann (that’s Oh-sheen) and Conor Kostick read from their books, as did novelists John Boyne, Claire Kilroy, and Northern Ireland’s Glenn Patterson, who brought high humour to the evening. Kilroy’s Tenderwire was the only book available for sale; I bought it, and read it, and it’s a treat.
It was a treat, too, to listen to poet Anthony Cronin, a frail old giant of Irish letters, and Anne Haverty, who is also a poet and a novelist. Poet Derek Mahon, introduced as one of the most important writers of all time, talked about his first experience of Indo-Irish links being the time he was almost mown down by the passing cortege of the Irish Prime Minister Eamon de Valera and President Radhakrishnan, who was visiting.
Micheál O Conghaile represented the small but dedicated world of Irish-language publishing. A native Irish speaker, he beautifully likened the experience of expressing oneself in a second language (English) with waking in an unfamiliar house and trying to get breakfast together in an unfamiliar kitchen. He read a brilliant short story about a dead man who crashes his own wake, with understandably disturbing consequences.
The festival was sadly under-attended, partly because of the clash with the Jaipur literary event, and partly because these writers are unfamiliar to Indian audiences—even though that’s the best reason to be in the audience. It’s too bad that contemporary Irish work is largely absent in our bookstores, and it’s too bad that most of the authors’ books were not available at the events, but I like to think that this will change with future editions of the festival. And maybe, next time, the authors’ lodgings at The Grand Hyatt won’t go up in flames midway through the festival.
I reported to my mother that there was a total absence of wimples at the festival. She said that in that case, she’d come next year.
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Curtains for topophobics
It’s been a very long time since I’ve seen a play, so I’m looking forward to director Tim Supple’s highly-acclaimed production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which has been performed all over the world. The acting, set design and costumes are meant to be spectacular.
It’s always thrilling to watch a good production, and the magical interaction between actors, sets, costumes, lights, music, dialogue and audience. But I can never quite gag the little part of my head that keeps asking, ‘How do they do it? How do they get up in front of an audience without forgetting their lines, or squeaking, or turning on their heels and bolting back into the wings?’
If you’re the sort of person who lunges for the karaoke mike, then topophobia, also known as stage fright, won’t mean a thing to you. But the rest of us can instantly evoke the terrible pounding of heart, dryness of mouth, involuntary twitches and general gibbering breakdown that accompanies a public appearance of any kind.
I have terrible stage fright, and am therefore inclined to preserve myself from those situations in the first place. When I was two or three, I had to run out on a stage wearing a piece of cardboard hung around my neck inscribed with the letter S (I was the second S in a line of kids who collectively spelled ‘SWEETS’). On that occasion I was nervous, but the performance was really more of an annoying hurdle in the way of what I considered the main event, which was having my teacher put lipstick put on my mouth, which she’d promised to do if I behaved.
In middle school, I was a stagehand in a school production of The Hobbit. I figured that if anything went wrong, it would do so in the blessed darkness between scenes; but as it happened, I was helping to raise a huge spiderweb backdrop when the whole contraption ground to a halt. They had to turn on the house lights to sort it out, at which moment my circulatory system stopped, along with much of my social development.
I’d also signed up for music class before I realised with horror that we were going to perform a musical. We had to mince about onstage in top hats and leotards, and I had to sing one line solo. It came out in a whisper, and the four or five people in the audience looked deeply puzzled.
There were only three other times when I had to do anything public. Once was to read something at my father’s memorial service to a hall full of his friends and colleagues, at which time I was such a wreck anyway that stage fright was only a small part of the problem. The other two times, I had to read bits of my own writing, which I managed only because I remembered a bit of advice from a university professor who’d told me that whenever she faced a new class, she’d imagine them sitting in their seats with their trousers around their ankles, and the consequent feeling of superiority gave her the confidence to proceed.
John Lahr wrote a brilliant article for The New Yorker (‘Petrified’, August 28, 2006) in which he described the hideous stage fright of performers like Steven Fry, Sir Laurence Olivier and Carly Simon (who asked members of her orchestra to spank her). “According to one British medical study,” wrote Lahr, “actors’ stress levels on opening night are equivalent ‘to that of a car-accident victim.’”
I hear their pain. I would any day exchange topophobia for arachibutyrophobia, which is the more entertaining fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of the mouth, or for hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia, which is, cruelly enough, the word that means ‘fear of long words’.
It’s always thrilling to watch a good production, and the magical interaction between actors, sets, costumes, lights, music, dialogue and audience. But I can never quite gag the little part of my head that keeps asking, ‘How do they do it? How do they get up in front of an audience without forgetting their lines, or squeaking, or turning on their heels and bolting back into the wings?’
If you’re the sort of person who lunges for the karaoke mike, then topophobia, also known as stage fright, won’t mean a thing to you. But the rest of us can instantly evoke the terrible pounding of heart, dryness of mouth, involuntary twitches and general gibbering breakdown that accompanies a public appearance of any kind.
I have terrible stage fright, and am therefore inclined to preserve myself from those situations in the first place. When I was two or three, I had to run out on a stage wearing a piece of cardboard hung around my neck inscribed with the letter S (I was the second S in a line of kids who collectively spelled ‘SWEETS’). On that occasion I was nervous, but the performance was really more of an annoying hurdle in the way of what I considered the main event, which was having my teacher put lipstick put on my mouth, which she’d promised to do if I behaved.
In middle school, I was a stagehand in a school production of The Hobbit. I figured that if anything went wrong, it would do so in the blessed darkness between scenes; but as it happened, I was helping to raise a huge spiderweb backdrop when the whole contraption ground to a halt. They had to turn on the house lights to sort it out, at which moment my circulatory system stopped, along with much of my social development.
I’d also signed up for music class before I realised with horror that we were going to perform a musical. We had to mince about onstage in top hats and leotards, and I had to sing one line solo. It came out in a whisper, and the four or five people in the audience looked deeply puzzled.
There were only three other times when I had to do anything public. Once was to read something at my father’s memorial service to a hall full of his friends and colleagues, at which time I was such a wreck anyway that stage fright was only a small part of the problem. The other two times, I had to read bits of my own writing, which I managed only because I remembered a bit of advice from a university professor who’d told me that whenever she faced a new class, she’d imagine them sitting in their seats with their trousers around their ankles, and the consequent feeling of superiority gave her the confidence to proceed.
John Lahr wrote a brilliant article for The New Yorker (‘Petrified’, August 28, 2006) in which he described the hideous stage fright of performers like Steven Fry, Sir Laurence Olivier and Carly Simon (who asked members of her orchestra to spank her). “According to one British medical study,” wrote Lahr, “actors’ stress levels on opening night are equivalent ‘to that of a car-accident victim.’”
I hear their pain. I would any day exchange topophobia for arachibutyrophobia, which is the more entertaining fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of the mouth, or for hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia, which is, cruelly enough, the word that means ‘fear of long words’.
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