No Smoking: Day 2

It is now 50 hours since I decided to quit smoking and it was something that had to be done coz I’ve gone out of my own control and hit the rock bottom in terms of my behavior, attitude and general being. None of them can be directly attributed to smoking, but I think it would be a decent first step to start changing the kind of person I was becoming.

As I watched what I intended to be the last of my cigarettes flush down the toilet, I was a bit frightened that I was giving up something that I haven’t stayed apart for the last 7-8 years of my life. As the blazing tip extinguished itself silently into the muddy water, the abiding thought was that I had committed a mistake. It was foolish to even think about quitting it, but somehow I weathered that storm and came back in, had a deep breath to process the decision and knew it was the correct one and had to be made. It was about bloody time.

The first day was remarkable for it made me feel that it was so easy to quit smoking. The day went past like a breeze and till the end of it, I wasn’t thinking about smoking at all. Maybe the one cigarette I had in the morning helped me get through it but all it gave me was a false sense of victory and an illusory hope of how easy it would be. It also helped that I spent the whole day at home, most of it asleep, but still I didn’t get the craving many said I would. It turned out that day one was always the easiest and it was the same for everyone.  

Today is Day 3 and I feel and look like shit. I haven’t felt this way ever before. I feel weak in my knees, legs, hands and every moving part is in some or other discomfort. I can literally feel my blood rushing through my veins like a distant observer. I can’t sit still or stay at a single place for a while. I constantly want to move somewhere, put the legs into motion and yet even that doesn’t help. I had 7 cups of coffee and I wonder if I’m buying one addiction to get rid of the other. Nothing helps. I’m restless, weak, vulnerable, irritable and just plain miserable since 6 AM this morning. I haven’t eaten anything in the last 16 hours and I don’t feel hungry at all. It’s as if every part of my body decided at once to stage a revolt against me. 

The worst thing is that this feeling occurs for about 20-25 minutes for every hour or so. I have no idea what to do and how to overcome it, so I end up reading about withdrawal symptoms and how to rectify them. I don’t want to use patches or gums and just want to depend on plain old grit, and it hasn’t been easy sailing so far. Probably the most difficult day in recent times and it has started again. It also made me realize how easy it was for me to succumb and consequently how difficult and demanding it would be to resist. I have never been a person of any sort of discipline whatsoever which is what makes this exercise even miserable. I want to scream my anguish out, tear my hair apart and I probably deserve a smoke, but I wouldn’t let myself think about it too much.

That’s why I write. I haven’t written anything in a while and I feel this is the time I put my mind somewhere else. I can’t control the shiver in my hands by sitting and doing nothing but feeling miserable all day long. This is just the third day and I have read online that days 3-5 are among the worst from the experiences I’ve read of the withdrawal symptoms. A Difficult week lies ahead and I’m too hungry without an appetite to look forward to it.

I would like to make this a journal to see how I’m dealing with the decision and I hope to make this a long one. Even though the writing may get tedious, I intend to visit this space as often as I can. It didn’t provide me any release per se, I’m still feeling all shitty and dirty, no headaches yet, and I’ve filled up a page.

My NaNoWriMo Novel ~ Age

I’ve been a member of the NaNoWriMo for more than three years, that’s what the website told me when I logged in by chance today. I never created a novel there coz I knew I couldn’t muster the requisite discipline to sit straight for 30 days and produce 50,000 words. I never felt the stories any problem for me, I thought I could conjure them up and I had enough material to write the words needed, but never dared to take the plunge. The reasons vary; maybe I didn’t want to dilute the story by hastening it through in a month, or I was afraid that it would end up being one of the things that was beautiful in thought and shallow in execution. Whatever might be the reason, I resister NaNoWriMo for 3 years but as it turns out, I could do it only so long.

I don’t know if I would be able to take the challenge through and finish the novel, in fact I’m about 99% certain that I wouldn’t, but I’m not getting any younger and I thought it better to let the novel out and see how it ends up, instead of dreaming up the popularity and literary merit of the imaginary unwritten one. So, I created the novel and the first thing they ask me while creating is to choose its genre, and Drama is not in the list to choose from, may be they read the same book I did where the author says all stories are Drama in their basic form. I choose Romance, though I can hardly call my idea a romantic one. It is closer to being a Romance than YA Literature or Adventure, but I’d not myself get carried away too much by its genre at this point.

The next one is the title. I always had difficulties in titling my posts on the blog, and it became even more difficult with the novel. I was afraid I could take up the entire month of November for choosing an apt title, so after thinking long and hard about the kind of people I want to write about, I decided to title it Shallow. It is an apt title, and I was about to create the novel with the title until a better one came. The protagonists in my idea (novel) are three different characters but the striking contrast that everyone can make out while reading it is their age. So, Age seemed a better title than Shallow, and I like it better. It is short, has certain gravitas to it when seen on the cover of a book, and age shows on my characters and reflects in their actions. 

With those two out of the way, I created the novel. I’m not expecting any great things to happen. I’m not even looking forward to it. I know that I can abandon it by 2^nd November that is if I can sit and write on 1^st November. Like all my previous efforts, abandoned midway and completed, this is another to inculcate discipline in me and just sit and write. I wish I could just do that. If I can sit and write for 30 hours in a month, I’d consider myself successful even if I don’t finish the book or the word count. 

You can find me here, though I wouldn’t know what you would (should) do afterwards.

Book Review: Selection Day by Aravind Adiga

One of the depressing facts that Aravind Adiga’s Selection Day brings up is that some careers, and by an unfortunate extension even lives, are decided at the age of 14 or even less. At 14, I had no idea what life would be at 15 and the brothers Kumar (Manju and Radha) in this book know that they should be the world’s best batsman and the second best, world here translates to Mumbai Cricket, since that is the extent of their career and this book.

Many an Indian student who faced the aspirations and ambitions of the parents thrust upon him would nod his head in ironic approval with the kind of rigorous routine thrust upon the children. The setting here is Cricket, and batting in particular, where the brothers are fighting for 1 or 2 out of the 7 batting spots places the odds insurmountably high, yet Adiga finds humor in the darkest of the places in creating the grim realities of the life of youngsters who have no chance but to aspire, survive and work hard against the odds. Indeed it is surprising how hilarious Selection Day is, as I found myself laughing out loud at the kind of farcical methods of preparation and the justification behind them that Mohan Kumar, the father, sets out for his kids which also include posing with a bat in hand as a 4 year old, a la Sachin Tendulkar.

Aravind Adiga’s research is immaculate, not in the sense that he throws up numbers and anecdotes about Cricket Matches in the way most books about Cricket tend to do, but in the way a cricketer’s journey is traversed right from the familial beginnings, to the rising through the ranks under an able and determined coach, only to reach a destination that doesn’t seem as coveted to the cricketer as much it was for the men around him.

The father Mohan Kumar is an interesting character, my favorite in the book, as he admonishes his children about the vices, girls and shaving, checks on them every night, working on their techniques, temperament and anything that he feels will help making his sons the best cricketers of the world. For all his efforts, Mohan Kumar, is still hated by anyone he ever comes across, including his own kids who swear to kill him when they come of age, yet he never undersells them and steadfastly negotiates their worth, for they are the last straws he is clutching at, their careers the only thing he has in his life as a slum dwelling chutney salesman. The character is a delightfully devastating portrayal of the ultimate tragicomic.

As much as the father borders on being tyrannical, there are other players interested in the brothers, like the coach Tommy Sir, whose sole aim in life to unearth the next Tendulkar from Mumbai Cricket, and Anand Mehta, an NRI who wants to do a few good things and chooses to invest in the the great nastiness that is Cricket, and a rival cricketer Javed, the love interest of Manju the younger brother, thrown in to complete the circle of obstacles. Above them all, Manju has his own brother Radha to overcome who tries to guilt-trip him into believing that Manju has usurped his place in the team. All of these men overwhelm Manju, who does not seem to be quite adequate with dealing with them, his timid nature and his unease with his own homosexuality and the distance from his mother, make him a loner with no place to go and that shows in the kind of choices he makes in the days leading to the Selection Day.

The book starts three years before the Selection Day, and we all know it that it is going to be a doomed affair even before reading any of the events unfold, only because of our knowledge that the Kumars (all three of them) of the world don’t have a chance of surviving the ordeal and coming out in triumph. There is no mention anywhere if the brothers love playing the game, because that is never considered even an option, much like students taking up engineering or medicine, often clueless as to what they mean. In this particular similarity it resonates with a lot more teenagers around the country. In that sense this is an important book for the average Indian Parent who needs a lesson or two.

Strongly Recommended.

Book Review: One Indian Girl by Chetan Bhagat

There is a scene in One Indian Girl where Radhika Mehta, the protagonist asks her husband-to-be if he knew what Feminism meant, and when the guy Uh-huh’s, she proceeds to tell him the definition of feminism, which may as well be from Wikipedia or Dictionary.com. It is one of the unintentionally hilarious scenes in a book which provides genuine laughs otherwise; still it is an important scene, one that tells the readers to not take its feminism too seriously, coz it is difficult to take the characters seriously when they rote feminism as if it is Newton’s First Law or something. I don’t think anyone would ever get the answer that Radhika gives in this book, when asked what Feminism is. Alright, that’s more about feminism than even the book could offer in its 272 pages, so we should skip it like the good readers we are and dive head long into this.

Chetan Bhagat may have been blowing hot and cold off late, but in One Indian Girl, he is in fine form and the book is really a breezy read if one can set their prejudices apart. The travails, relationships, frustrations and confusions of Radhika are laced with trademark Bhagat humor, with the character’s inner voice proving to be an able companion, especially when the conversations fizzle out between the leads. I finished the book in a couple of sittings, never bored, grinning to myself as I flipped the pages, and heaving an all-knowing sigh of relief with the girl’s choice in the end.

None of this is to say that we haven’t read or seen the story earlier, or this is an original or different creation, one that made Bhagat do all sorts of weird things like waxing himself to understand a girl’s POV. Sure, we get to know that girls like (fish for) compliments a lot, they tend to lean emotionally on men far more than what they would like, and if they are Punjabi, they want a lavish wedding even if they hate every relative that drinks or dances to celebrate the occasion. These are the things we already have a certain idea about, so Bhagat doesn’t add much or any finer nuances that the book could have benefitted from having a female POV.

Radhika Mehta, the book’s lead girl is a weird character in that she does not have any girlfriends to confide in and her family look curiously disinterested in everything about her except her marriage. All we know about her is through the choice of men she likes to spend time with, so it is difficult for her to be a fully rounded character that the readers can constantly root for. Still, Bhagat infuses charm into her, by giving her a pithy sense of humor and a job that doesn’t allow her to wallow much and move on constantly.

Chetan Bhagat has been spending some time with screenwriters too and it shows in his writing. One Indian Girl moves confident and unhurried through its narrative and rarely meanders (except the feminism one we noted earlier, and a marijuana scene in Goa). When writing about Indians and Weddings, the stereotypes are hard to avoid and Bhagat never challenges or advocates them fully. He pokes gently at them, but lets them be in their own place. This is not a book that overreaches with its ambition. It is a little Rom-Com at its heart, may be aimed at Bollywood, and can even be a winner if it lands in the right hands.

If only it didn't not have to wear and bear the cross of feminism, One Indian Girl is a quick read that has its moments.

Book Review: Six Four by Hideo Yokoyama

This year I’ve been reading crime and mystery from Japanese writers and after savoring the brilliance of Keigo Higashino, I decided to buy Six Four by Hideo Yokoyama, after reading some glowing reviews it had on Amazon. I was expecting an easy read with a twisty plot, but boy was I wrong.

There are some books that you absolutely love, some that will bore you to death, and some you can’t stop thinking about but only a few books have the ability to overwhelm you and Six Four is definitely one of those. I can’t remember having read anything quite like this. At 656 pages, this is probably the longest book I’ve read in the last 5 years and it wasn’t done quickly as well, but ultimately it turned out to be a rewarding experience. It is like reading the full screenplay of a 20 episode Television Series

This isn’t the kind of detective novel that goes through its plot at a breakneck pace maneuvering through its red herrings with purpose. Instead Yokoyama serves up a vastly detailed police procedural that concentrates majorly on the relationship the Japanese Police have with their Press.

When the Commissioner of Police decides to visit a 14 year old botched up kidnapping case to offer solidarity and support to the victim, the local Media Relations Office had to get the Press to cover the visit. The Press meanwhile were grappling with another issue altogether over anonymous reporting and a major chunk of the novel builds up the tensions raising between the three departments Media Relations, Administrative Affairs and Criminal Investigations, while the Press Club that constitutes representatives from leading Newspapers in Japan, decides to abandon coverage of the commissioner’s visit in order to make the Police kowtow to their demands,

It’s all heady stuff with a lot of key players involved and each one playing their own angle to get their own version of the result. The narrative is further complicated by the similar sounding names that make it a bit difficult through the first 100 pages to make out who are who. There are about 6-7 different people with names starting with M, 5 with A and another 5 with K, so it can get a tad confusing.

To make sense of this level of detailing into the day in the life of the key players, the readers need a hand to hold on to and a sort of pedestal upon which they can look at things and decide where they stand. This is where Yokoyama scores high by giving us a protagonist in Press Director Mikami, who is vulnerable, angry, empathetic and righteous in equal measures so as to create a rounded, ultimately tragic character that the readers would like to travel with. Mikami learns everything as he goes on about his job, even as he goes through the personal tragedy of his daughter missing and his wife going into a shell. He does everything in his capacity to stop the press from holding the Police to ransom, including getting into a physical fight with them, yet when leading his team he gets protective while still being confident of his abilities to deal with the situation.

The moral implications of anonymous reporting, the rights of the media to publish the names of victims of rape or kidnap, the differences in the three offices and their score and jurisdiction, are all the issues that are gently touched upon, but at it’s heart this book is still about the trauma of the father whose child has been killed by a kidnapper and his quest to find out the kidnapper even when the entire Police department of Japan were unable to do so for fourteen years.

I didn’t see the twist coming at the end of the book, but this isn’t about it at all since there are still some lose ends and subplots awaiting closure at the end of the book.  In Mikami, Yokoyama has given us a memorable character, one that the readers would root for and one they want to see through the ordeal and how he faces it, and he doesn’t disappoint.

A quick note on, and a definite nod, to the translation as well. Jonathan Lloyd Davies, credited as the translator does a fine job of the material presented to him. One can imagine the task ahead of him when he started to go about it. It could be challenging, overwhelming and a tad frightening too, but the language was easy to read, the differences in characters and their thought processes clearly distinguished, never confounding the readers. Damn good stuff Sir.

I’d recommend Six Four by Hideo Yokoyama to anyone who has the patience to give into an ambitious and richly detailed work on the Japanese Police Procedurals. Just don’t expect a Higashino.

I

Book Review: Patang by Bhaskar Chattopadhyay

Indian crime fiction scene is a mess littered with works, which at their best can be generic and predictable and at worst lazily written and poorly edited “thrillers”, written with the broadest of the strokes. I don’t think I ever read an ingenious crime fiction written by an Indian set in our milieu, our best crime stories come from Bollywood, or the news channels. Bhaskar Chattopadhyay’s Patang has a glowing review from Sriram Raghavan, the best genre filmmaker we have, and it is definitely a cut above the rest, Silence of the Lambs meets Shutter Island if you will, but ironically suffers both from predictability and improbability.  

A serial killer strikes Mumbai in the monsoon season, writing to the media and the Police that he would be killing 4 people. A massive manhunt ensues, the modus operandi of the killer is explored, and he was even given a nickname by the media based on a theme he kills with and a clue he leaves at the scene of the crime. The Patang Killer, since he kills people at dizzying heights. Not particularly ingenious, I told you.  

Mumbai Commissioner seeks help from Private Eye Chandrakant Rathod and I’m not sure what he is. He seems like a journalist turned private detective, but he seems to know who’s who of the entire Police Department, most of them fan-boys of his work and willing to put their jobs on stake for Rathod. Everyone calls him a genius and he in turn calls the killer a genius. We know each of them is a genius because the writer keeps telling us in every chapter, lest we forget that we are dealing with a couple of geniuses here. He nabs the connection between the murders, as is any detective’s wont, but the story isn’t strong enough and there are no red herrings, making it all easy for the genius detective. 

There are some stray references to Mumbai monsoon, but the detailing is not as meticulous to consider the book to be atmospheric. The book scores some brownies in the way Bhaskar explores Chandrakant Rathod’s psyche and towards the end of the book, Rathod, seems to be overwhelmed and defeated by the task in hand and shows ominous signs of spiraling out of control. These parts were dealt well and the reader can sense Rathod’s desperation in solving the puzzle, but the ending spoils them all. Still as a character study, Rathod’s journey towards the end seems complete and the book redeems itself to become slightly better than the sum of its parts, in retrospect.

Bhaskar infuses the narrative with a sense of urgency and the pages fly through at a breakneck pace. It is difficult to put it away for a long time, which is an achievement in itself, and the writing shows up a lot of efforts that went in towards the later part of the book. As a genre piece, it checks all the boxes, right up to the twist ending, but all of it is a tad underwhelming for the genre fans. As I said earlier, it is better than a lot of Indian crime fiction we routinely find on book shelves across the country, but that is not saying much about the book. 

PS: I decided to read only crime and noir fiction this year, so please suggest any great works by Indians or setup in India, in the comments that you have come across.