Rimi B. Chatterjee's Blog, page 3

Hush Launching Today

Hush

Rather belatedly I got a message from Dileep Cherian re Manta Ray's launch of Hush at Oxford Bookstore today at 5pm (its already 4!!). I don't think I can make it but I'm very happy a new comic is coming out. Our little band is slowly growing.

All the best to the Mantarians.

Bee and the Buskers Live at Trincas 10 July

Bee and the Buskers

Bee and the Buskers plays at Trincas on Sunday 10 July at 3.30pm. Bee there. Bzzzzzzzz.

Lineup: Durjoy Chaudhury, vocals, harmonica and guitar, Avijit Chatterjee, bass, mandolin, clarinet, Anindya Sundar Maiti, drums, Tathagata, guitar lead and rhythm, Indradeep, flute, Priyanka, vocals, tambourine, Atish, sound. With thanks to Rajdeep.

What is Wrong with WordPress Statistics?

Ever since I've upgraded this blog, I've had no stats. I've uninstalled, deleted and reinstalled a double handful of plugins to no effect: all I get is a big bunch of zeroes. I installed Google Analytics, which is good as far as it gets, but it delivers offsite and it means just one more thing to waste time logging into. WordPress.com Stats was equally useless. Then I trawled the forums, and found that in early 2009, there was a stats meltdown at wordpress: no one was getting any statistics, either in wordpress.com or wordpress.org. After many irate posts by people who wanted their statistics, wordpress.com was fixed, and my defunct blog at livelikeaflame.wordpress.com is steadily measuring its negligible hits. However the scenario for owner-managed blogs like this one is much bleaker: nothing seems to have been done.

WordPress exists in two forms. There's the onsite form which lives at wordpress.com and functions like blogger, which is administered by wordpress staff. And there's the php zip verison that you can unpack in a site you own and run yourself. This latter is called wordpress-org, though of course it lives wherever people give it a home. This blog is one of the latter category. I used to use Cystats, which worked fine until I upgraded wordpress to version 3.x.x. Now I have no idea who visits my blog, how they get here, and what they do while they're here. I don't know whether my hits are up or down, or which posts people like the most. And it looks like this situation will continue indefinitely.

In other news my much vaunted Linux machine has died on me and now will not boot to POST. I have changed the SMPS to no avail. Now I have to check the RAM. If it isn't the RAM, I may be looking to have to change the motherboard or the processor or both. And this machine is less than two years old.

Sankar's Launch at Crossword, 22 April 2011

From the dais, taken with my phone. Sankar centre, Chittatosh Mukherjee to the left

Belated post, but I'm running to catch up. a head cold has made other work difficult, so blogging it is.

I launched Sankar's The Great Unknown for Penguin at Crossword along with Pandit Ajoy Chakraborty and ex Chief justice Chittatosh Mukherjee.

This was the English translation of his first book, Koto Ajanare. Authors always have a particular connection with their first books, and Sankar shared with the audience the story of how he became a writer after rising from poverty to become a lawyer. His profession brought him in contact with the lives of many people, and fed the storyteller in him. It's dedicated to his mentor, Noel Frederick Barwell, a fiery Scotsman who appears in the stories.

The humour and humanity of Sankar's work travels easily across linguistic boundaries, which is probably why he's now enjoying a well-deserved boom in English translation. Soma Das's translation of this book is, however, just about adequate. Even the translation of the title is too literal. It is to sankar's credit that you don't notice the inadequacies of the translation: the stories carry themselves in spite of them.

I read a passage from the story of Helen and Surojit in chapter 7.

Bring Back Stargate Universe

The cast of the series

Normally, I am not a big fan of sci fi TV series. This is because I like sci fi, and i think most series sell the genre short. Hence it was with some scepticism that I began to watch two seasons of Stargate Universe (downloaded via illegal torrent of course, long live piracy). Indeed the only reason I watched it is that Avijit insisted it was worth it and I shouldn't give up on it.

Well, the first couple of episodes were a little shaky, rather like a messy collision between Battlestar Galactica and Lost, but there were also some interesting narrative concepts and some characterisation with much good raw material wrapped up in it for further development. I watched on. My patience was rewarded: by the middle of the first season, I was hooked.

Partly this was because of the ensemble cast who knew how to take their characters between their teeth and run. In the first couple of episodes the characters initially seemed a bit too schematic, their alliances and animoisities as neatly plotted out as a flowchart, but this sketchiness quickly dissolved into a much more rewarding and complex set of interactions. To explain this I must summarise the story so far:

The story starts with a young game-addicted slacker, Eli, who solves a  mathematical puzzle embedded in a video game. The next morning, the brilliant but erratic Dr Nicholas Rush comes to see him, and he's handed a confidentiality agreement. The next thing Eli knows, he's been beamed aboard a spaceship heading for a planet called Icarus. There, a mockup of an Ancient stargate has been erected, and using Eli's solution the military is about to dial the ninth and final chevron, and create a wormhole to travel…well, no one knows exactly where. This part of the story refers to previous episodes and movies in the stargate continuum which is why I fould it a little hard to follow. While the scientists are working on the math, the base comes under attack. Facing imminent death, the survivors dial the ninth chevron and end up aboard an alien spaceship that's millions of years old, travelling faster than light through the universe.

The ship is called Destiny, and it's following a path laid down for it by the seed ships, which went before and planted gates on habitable worlds. Presumably the people who built it were humans, because they breathed oxygen and sat in chairs. On this ship this motley group of soldiers, scientists and bureaucrats find themselves stranded. They immediately face challenges to their survival and have to repair and maintain the ship's failing systems while fending off various threats to the ship and themselves. The biggest threats, at first at least, come from within: some can't adjust to their predicament and insist on complaining to the authorities: others think they can easily fix things and get back.

The Stargate in action

It becomes clear that the people stuck here come from a corrupt society: the older generation are all rotten in some way or the other used to manipulating or forcing their way out of trouble, but they also know what they ought to do even though they find it hard to do it. The younger generation are more guilt-free, less stained, but they're also in awe of their elders and unwilling to take over, or challenge them. As the series progresses, all of these ill-assorted people have to learn the hard way how to trust each other and respect each other's skills. It becomes less about the hard tech, the FTL drives, the wormholes, the blue-skinned aliens, time travel and all the other paraphernalia of space opera, and more about the personal terrain between the characters, their hopes and fears, their heroism and cowardice, their triumphs and failures.

The series ends with a cliff-hanger, where we don't know if Eli (or any of the characters) are going to survive and escape the mechanical drones that are hunting them down. But now it seems we'll never find out. Syfy, the channel that sponsored the making of the series, has cancelled it, apparently for two reasons. One is that the fanboys of the previous series, finding to their outrage that they were being offered grown-up fare rather than the steroid-pumped teen-hero stuff they were used to, sabotaged the initial ratings and posted poisonous messages on the forums. Then Syfy, who seem to be rather pusillanimous for a science fiction channel, bumped SG-U off its prime time slot so they could air WWE Smackdown instead (I kid you not, this is true). Ratings went down further, until Syfy announced that it would pull the series. What! Just when the writers Brad Wright and Robert Cooper were getting into their stride? When the characters had really begun to flower and develop? Yeah, real mature. And this doesn 't seem to be a rumour, because the set has been dismantled and bits of it are being auctioned on the net.

Trust the money men to balls it up once again. Are there no safe havens for storytellers? Rather like Destiny itself, do they have to run from the mechanised drones of profit forever? Season 2 was way better than 1, and the episode called 'Cloverdale' was, I think, one of the most brilliant pieces of storytelling they have attempted yet.

It's unlikely that SG-U will run in India, so you'll have to find some underhand way of watching it, I'm afraid.

Events This Weekend

It's going to be a busy three days. Today I'm on a panel at the Conclave sponsored by the Bengal Post on 'The Future of Print in the East'. That's from 3 to 5pm. Then tomorrow I'm at the Victoria Memorial, sponsored by the Victoria Memorial and British Council, from 6pm introducing Amitav Ghosh's new book River of Smoke, the second in the Ibis trilogy. Then on Monday at 7 I shall be at Starmark South City, introducing Amitav again.

Am reading River of Smoke now. It's a big book but it flows easily. Let's see if I can finish it by tomorrow.

Signal Red E-Book Free Download

It's now been six years since Signal Red came out, and the rights have reverted to me. The history of this novel and its publication is rather checkered, as you will find from the author's note in the e-book. I've wanted for a long time to revise it and upload it for free distribution, and I've finally done it. So here it is in PDF form. Signal Red. But be warned, it's 4.3MB.

Goe, litel boke.

It is also available on Goodreads.

Feel free to download this novel, read it, pass it to friends, post it on your sites. I ask only that you (a) make no changes to the text, and (b) always acknowledge me as the author of the whole or parts.

Discussion at Oxford Bookstore

Me and Subir Bhaumik being instroduced by Maina Bhagat

Here are some pictures of the discussion on Black Light on 27 May 2011 at Oxford Bookstore. Subir Bhaumik of the BBC was in attendance, but unfortunately Suhrid Sankar Chattopadhyay of Frontline couldn't make it as he was trying to get back from Bardhaman on post-election business.

The discussion went well (though more books could have sold, I personally feel). We had a capacity crowd which was more than I had hoped for, and people I hadn't seen in years such as colleagues from the Telegraph turned up. The discussion ranged very widely over the many complex topics raised in the book, such as the roots of Maoism and the reasons why the central authority is so uncomfortable about difference, especially around the edges of the country. We also talked a bit about the art theme. This book is perhaps the one most rooted in the pasts of the various families I am part of: both the artistic heritage of the Chatterjees and the  rather checkered Jharkhand past of the Mukherjees.

The audience at the discussion on Black Light

Subir Bhaumik got very excited about the portrayal of journalists in the book, and tended to go into reminiscence mode about his own frequent and varied encounters with extremists, including one bunch of hostage-takers, and his attempts to nail them in his writings. However, when he could be persuaded to come back to topic he had nice things to say about Black Light. So did many of the old friends in the audience, including several journalists. Satya's battle for independence in his job was greeted with shudders of recognition by many of them.

I wish Suhrid could have been there as he's been one of my biggest fans from before I ever published anything. The manuscript of Black Light (or the 'Trail of Truth' as it was first titled, then retitled 'Live Like a Flame' a year after birth, before being renamed in 20 seconds over gtalk before my publisher's deadline for the title expired) was written and the character of Satya firmed up long before I met Suhrid for the first time, but the angry young journalist has rather uncanny similarities with him such that if I had met Suhrid when I was writing it I'd have been forced to base Satya on him. So as far as characters based on real people are concerned, Suhrid is the one that got away. I could have ribbed him about that but he escaped again.

From the back of the hall

Of course people asked the inevitable questions about the title. As I've said, the title of this book was the hardest ever to come up with, and a lot of people are still not happy with it. It's also been used before, mostly by gritty whodunits. But the title did give Avijit and me a crucial idea to solve the problem of chapter 10 where Potla has to put up an exhibition of paintings: the black light theme provided a concept on which to build the exhibition, and also to reveal that Billy has a black light tattoo. It also gave Avijit inspiration for the kickass cover design.

I'd have to borrow Rana Bose's phrase 'ideas thriller' to describe the book. It is a mystery story but not in the way people expect: there's no doubt that Medha dies by her own hand, without foul play. But the mystery goes deeper than the question of whether she fell or was pushed. It's about what can bring someone who has faced misfortune but apparently overcome it, and who also seems to have enough to live for, nevertheless gives up hope.

Before the discussion

It's also about the cost of opening yourself to the big truths of the cosmos, and whether that can blow the fuses of your head. And about the space you might (or might not) have to explode safely and then put yourself back together again. It can be a very frightening journey, but it can also be a refuge from even more frightening things—the utter emptiness of death, or the inevitability that everything will pass. Why else make art?

It's also about telling the truth, and that theme predominated in this discussion, whereas the question of art was discussed eight months ago at Worldview. The journalist is ostensibly paid to tell the truth, but even if she or he does, they can't tell all of it, all of the time. So there must be compromise, and compromise always costs.

Furthermore, one persons' truth is another person's sedition, or sensationalism, or zero newsworthiness. And some truths simply can't be put into words. Sometimes they can still be put into pictures, but there is an event horizon beyond which nothing can be brought back. Medha crosses that horizon. Maybe that is her pilgrimage. Maybe she is bored with her toys.

_____________

Thanks to Avijit Chatterjee for taking the pictures.

Lucid Lynx

At last

This is my first post from my now totally free and open source system. I have finally kicked windows off my machine and am running Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx.

This is how it happened.

I have had a fascination with Linux for a long time. I had a bootable CD of an old version of Knoppix given to me by my brother way back in (I think it was) 2003. Then at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences I had a dual boot machine that ran KDE alongside Windows (great fun to play Frozen Bubbles in between work bouts). I recently bought a Lenovo G560 on which I dearly wished to load Ubuntu, and I got a Lucid CD from the good folks at the School of Cultural Texts and Records, Jadavpur University and tried to load that. However, all I got was a blank screen with no command prompt: a completely crushed machine.

However, I wasn't about to give up. My Kaspersky was running out in May 2011 and I wanted to upgrade my current crappy XP to something better. Before capitulating once again to Microsoft, I thought I'd have one last bash at freedom. Having fond memories of Knoppix, I downloaded the Knoppix 6.4 DVD. I tried running it off the DVD drvie (which is how its supposed to work) and was delighted.

Knoppix is ingenious. It's a whole OS on a DVD that you can carry with you, so if you have the DVD and a flash drive for your data, you can use any computer anywhere regardless of how crappy its hardware, how virus-ridden its hard disk, or how commercially cut throat its OS. You will have the coolest gadgets, the most awesome screensavers and the most user friendly OS on the planet, following you faithfully on your travels. The only hassle is, if you make any changes to your system you have to burn it all onto a new DVD to keep your changes. You can use the bootable DVD to detect and delete viruses from the systems you visit, to scan hidden data (if you feel like being James Bond) as well as do your ordinary stuff.

I was so impressed with the ineffable coolness of Knoppix that I installed it to hard disk. It booted just as advertised without a single hitch, and effortlessly detected all my stuff including my digital camera which had been invisible to windows and had needed a proprietary package just to dump photos. It had Libre Office 3 preinstalled that could read all my word docs, and it had a fabulous collection of free fonts in its guts. The one problem arose when I tried to install my HP 1020 laserjet printer. A quick search on teh net showed that a lot of people had faced problems with this. No problem, I thought. I'll just open a terminal window, crunch some code, and it'll be up and running. I discovered that my printer uses something called ZJstream and something called foomatic would fix it for me. I went to command prompt and ran the code I found on ubuntu forums to get it installed. Knoppix and Ubuntu are both versions of Debian, which is the brand of Linux that runs on desktops (the brand that works on servers is called Red Hat), so I figured that what works for Ubuntu ought to work for Knoppix.

Then my troubles began. Terminal kept telling me that it couldn't find something called 'dc package'. I looked this up and found that Ubuntu uses something called 'bc package'. I looked for hacks that would fix the broken link for me. Just when the whole thing was turning into the kind of mess you'd expect if Kafka was a computer programmer, I looked up Knoppix documentation and found this. Apparently Klaus Knopper, the man who invented Knoppix, was basically interested in creating a version of Debian that would run anywhere, in any conditions. So he cobbled together bits and pieces from several different distributions to get the best fix. As a result, while Knopix works well without human interference, the moment you try to get into its guts and change things, it has a tendency to fall apart. Which is basically what windows does, right? So back to square one.

However, by now my blood was up. I downloaded The Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx CD (the latest version is 11.04 but I figured next-to-latest might be more bug-free). I wiped off both knoppix and windows from the hard disk and formatted it (by the way, I have two physical disks in my system and a version of windows 7 that I briefly tried did not recognise the second one, my data disk. So that OS bit the dust). I rebooted from CD and installed Ubuntu.

So far so good. This time I actually got an install screen, and a rather plain-looking purple thing duly appeared which looked very unexciting after Knoppix. So I took the CD out as instructed and rebooted.

Black crush again, no prompt, nothing.

I put in the cd again, and ran the OS off the CD. Unlike on my laptop, the desktop has a net connection, so I prodded it into life and trudged over to Ubuntu forums to see what the mavens had to say. Turned out more people than most had this problem. The reason was Ubuntu's native graphics drivers were incompatible with my graphics card (I have an NVIDIA 8400). I read the instructions carefully, then rebooted and changed the install settings to NOMODESET, having deleted QUIET and SPLASH (don't worry if this doesn't make sense. Computers can understand it). Reinstalled Ubuntu, which then autodetected my graphics card and called the necessary drivers from the net. I fired it up again, confident that I would see purple instead of black.

Still no joy.

Then I discovered that Ubuntu had stuck the boot loader on the data physical disk, because that was on sr0 while my system disk was on sr1. I reinstalled a third time, copying the bootloader to the right disk using advanced install options, and did all the other stuff to get my graphics drivers.

Whew. It worked.

So Ubuntu is now up and running. It doesn't have the fizz of Knoppix, but it faithfully updates itself from the net, and there's something called synaptic package manager that lets you micromanage what capabilities your system has. It installed my printer with four lines of code. Minor beefs include the very ploddy screensavers, the fact that Mozilla firefox no longer autoupdates and I have to crunch code to get the latest version, and the FSpot photo viewer is very temperamental.

And I have to play Prince of Persia on Avijit's machine

Other than that, it rocks like Jimi Hendrix. It has Open Office 3.2 which effortlessly reads all my data. I had a slight hiccup in that my pagemaker files were unreadable, and I had to open them in pagemaker on another machine, laboriously save all the text as txt files and set em up again in Scribus. But that was more Adobe's fault than Ubuntu's. I'm still working out how to use some of the packages, but the forums are a great help.

Now for a celebratory game of Tux Racer.

Moonward

I've been reading and rereading Appupen's Moonward (Blaft, Rs 395, paperback, ISBN 9788190605670)  for some months now, always intending to post on it, but always finding something new in the next reading that changes my perception of it. It's a book that's very hard to describe, let alone evaluate. But one thing that hits you between the eyes when you open it, is the fact that you're dealing with a formidable mind here.

The trees weep, and capitalism is born in Halahala

I've been a fan of Appupen (alias George Mathen) for some time now, having come across his stuff on his blog. He has a wide variety of styles which he uses in this book to telling effect. I could probably dig up and list a few influences (I wouldn't be surprised if Robert Crumb was one of them), but that wouldn't tell you anything useful about his work. Like Crumb, Mathen's lines radiate a kind of cosmic anger. They leap off the page and grab you by the throat.

The little tale that bookends Moonward and gives it its name is a case in point. Deceptively simple, it features only the moon and a moon-faced creature. The creature is happy only when he can see the moon, but the walls grow until the moon is caged, leaving the creature with only one option. A tale about the death of dreams? Maybe, but who is the little creature? What is the moon to him?

The curtain raiser gives way to the main act, which starts in some undefined origin-time in a place called Halahala, populated by strange animals that prey upon each other. This state of nature persists until a mountain erupts, raining death from the skies. Frightened, the creaturs go to the wise old Tortle who lives in a tree to ask him what this means. Tortle tells them about God, and how God is angry with them for behaving badly.

So the creatures become moral, and treat each other with consideration. Since they no longer hunt/are hunted, they have little to occupy their time but worshipping God. Tortle told them God was everywhere, in the trees and stones and rivers, so the creatures worship wherever they find a convenient place. Then one day a worshipper makes a slight alteration to his worship stone: he gives it a face. Pretty soon this innovation catches on, and each group of cratures makes a God in their own image.

The Prophit dines on his favourite food

War breaks out. The various factions are all fighting for the glory of their God, and it looks like the war won't end till they've all killed each other. So Tortle intervenes again. He makes a God unlike anything ever seen in the valley, and sets this God up for all the creatures. This God has two legs, two arms and a head. The war ends, and the creatures are at peace again.

But not for long. A man comes, a skinny ascetic who falls asleep in the valley. His name is Ananthabanana, and the creatures see him and note how similar he is to their God. So they leave an offering of fruits and vegetables for him. He is delighted, and for some days they worship him in this way. Then one day he kills and eats one of the creatures. He likes meat. So now each offering is accompanied by a sacrificial volunteer.

Things go rapidly downhill from there. Ananthabanana becomes Mahanana, the tribal God, and then the Prophit, who eats money. Religious tltalitarianism segues seamlessly into state capitalism. The satire, er, bites harder as a new cast of characters arrives on the scene, Tiku the painter, who has a secret: he makes magic paintings with his own blood. The Prophit rewards him with gifts and power, and then finally he gets a taste of the diet of the gods: money itself. Until the blood dried up, and then Tiku must hit the road again. He gets off lightly.

At a very basic, back-of-the-book level, this is a creation myth issuing from the mind of a fantasist, wrapped in mordant wit and terrifying art. It'll take you all the way from protozoic life to late capitalism in one breathtaking, death-defying swathe of brilliance. Much of the book is no-copy, but believe me you won't need the words.

Strange Boy Fails to Kiss Helicopter Girl

For those of us who despaired of  Indian comics after a dose of this, Appupen is a knight in shining inky armour. He's a man of many talents: he also paints and plays drums for Lounge Piranhas in Bangalore.  His art is complex and wacky and courageous, and he's willing to take risks. In Moonward, his visualisation mixes horror and wonder in equal measure, whether he's describing the republic of monsters of Halahala or the 'Supa Kola Walk of Life' in one of the alternate endings of the book. He clearly comes at a story from the visual angle; the words turn up later. This gives his artwork great strength of metaphor and economy of meaning. He's not afraid to stand aside and let the images speak for themselves either.

This is not to take away from his storytelling skills. He shows an Eisner-like ability to create a character in a few panels and give it depth by just one or two takes of its face (I say 'its' advisedly, because some of his characters are very strange indeed, and working out their gender is the least of your problems). His style for this book draws heavily on caricature, but there's also a lyricism in the way he exploits the properties of paper and ink, water and white paint. He is very very good at fucking with your mind.

Perehaps this is one reason why the Indian public have not risen in a body and acclaimed him as their chosen son. So far, the audience for Indian comics has been timid and sheeplike, afraid to stray very far from the well-watered banalities of Amar Chitra Katha. Appupen's anti-religious tone in the first part of the book will have come as a slap in the face for them, and he only makes it worse by then skinning the faces off all the little godlings of modern existence, from consumer culture to television to sex to urbanization. Actually it's all one big mass of evil in his book, and it plays games with the characters until it gets bored and opens its hands, letting them fall into the abyss. The abyss was once a nice place, but they harvested all the thela (oil?=tears of the trees) and no one has any tears left to waste on it now. The machine has consumed us and spat out the bones.

Halahala becomes the city

Kudos to Blaft for having had the moxie to publish this book. However, they clearly don't have much of a budget for publicity, for there was very little attention showered in this book outside of Appupen's home range (typical). Journalists tend not to care about a comic book unless it has morons in spandex on the cover.  In fact, I doubt if they even know its a comic book without the morons: I mean, it's practically diagnostic, right? And speech bubbles: this book only pops one out way after the number of pages they usually read before giving up.

A pity, because this book cries out for rabid viral promotion and bites your ear for good measure. All you young idiots who think X Men is cool, go out and buy this book and glue it to your face for a day. If you don't have a religious experience akin to having fire dropped on you from a height by a mountain, you need a new brain.

But you don't need to hear this from me. Look upon this face. And then tell me how many comics artists can produce an image that is profoundly moving and tragic in context, and would still look kickass on a t shirt? Eh?