Vaibhav Anand's Blog, page 12
August 23, 2015
Acknowledgements: The Great War of Hind
It is customary, I guess, for authors to thank people. It is out of this custom alone that I thank people here; and not because of any sort of gratitude!
Jokes apart, I grew up on books. Even for our meager means, my parents never refused me a book, however expensive. My love for books has grown so much that till this day, I find it difficult to enter a bookstore and exit without a book in my hand, as also equally difficult to not enter a bookstore if I have spotted one. Thanks, thus, to my parents for buying me all those books and thanks also to those authors who have shaped my thinking and taken me to their own worlds – various, variegated and vibrant.
I must say not a day has passed after If God Went to B-School was released that people haven’t asked me and irked me with questions about my next. It is almost like people constantly pestering a newly-wed couple when they are going to have a baby. I am thus thankful for all those who asked and thus pressured me to birth this one. The labor pains were horrendous – not least because I have a mind and energy sapping day job.Most of this book was written in the backseat of my Alto with Ram – my driver – weaving in and out of traffic on the nightmarish jam-ridden journey to office. (I bet you have never seen a ‘chauffeur driven’ Alto.) I thus attribute any and all spelling and grammatical errors to Ram’s jerky driving style. Over the past ten years in an effort perhaps to keep Delhi authors writing in the backseat of their cars, the state governments have grown road coverage by 30% while vehicles have gone up 3000%. I must thus thank profusely Delhi’s own Sheila Dikshit and that UP politician who has that big hideous expensive handbag and elephant sculptures to her credit and their respective governments as through Kanwariya, monsoon, weekly accident, traffic police barricades, ill planned road/ flyover/ metro construction, VIP movement and random inexplicable traffic jams, they have almost singlehandedly ensured that this book got written. My vote is and will forever be for you, ladies!
I am grateful to all my friends, colleagues and fellow human animals, for their stories & their banter. In no particular order- HK, MG, Avtar, KV, Vijay, Bajrangi, Anshul, Dharam, Rajat, Nauty, Sikka, Khulla, Bengali, Sartaj, Lisa, Varsha and Shilpi – people I met and befriended during my education (which is mostly fraudulent). Also thanks to all the friends I made at work (no particular order again) – KDK, Yaka, Cartoon, Sashi, Deutsch, Doshi, Doshi’s wife, Ashwin, GTJ, Rungta, Chulbul, Pratyush, Taufees (actually the entire Citi MA Batch of 2010), Monz, Shahani, Nirajana and Aman. Thanks for making me laugh and laughing at me and my jokes. And thanks for letting me observe the human animal so closely.
Thanks also to my array of friends and family members– all my masis, uncles, cousins, nephews, nieces, aunts, neighbors– all those who bought If God Went to B-School and having read it, were kind enough to say kind things about it. Several of them actually bought more than one copy of the novel, almost as if it were a collectible. Eternal gratitude.
I will also hold an eternal grudge against the many people who I presented copies of IGWTBS free of cost to and who did not read it. You are the reason I will never gift a single soul a single free copy of this one. (Good looking women might be exempted from this rule.)
Special thanks to HK who went through the various drafts of this book, kept my spirits up and most importantly, kept my cynicism in check. Well, at least she tried. Also she is, till this day, quite sure that someone is going to sue me. Eventually.
The highest praise in my mind for If God Went to B-School came from one of my mother’s best friends who told me that reading the novel was like listening to me talk. Sarcastic, bitter and cynical. It tells me my writing has a voice. Perhaps.
Jokes and tomfoolery aside and as always, infinitely grateful to my parents, all my teachers and God.
Best,Vaibhav
PS: If I have missed thanking you here and you feel wronged, please do email me at vaibhav.a10@fms.edu . I’ll be sure to thank you in my next. Or to write back explaining to you in painstaking detail why I am not grateful to you. If I do not email you back, it means you have hitherto sent one too many emails with pics of cute kittens or babies or monkeys or ‘Forward this to 20 people and you will meet the love of your life near a green dumpster today’ and I have blocked your email ID. I spent one whole week at a foul smelling dumpster and no one – ‘love of my life’ or otherwise – ventured near me.
It was singularly disappointing.
August 19, 2015
The Legend of Ramm: Words for the Wise
My obsession with the gods is almost as old as my fascination with the written word. At the age of fifteen, I wrote a short novella as a project for our Creative Writing course in school – a story of about twenty thousand words about the interaction of God, man and Hades and I must say that that seminal idea forms the crux of this story. I was disappointed with this short novella and felt at the time that I had done terrible injustice to a potentially beautiful story (though my teacher at the time was suitably impressed and wrote ‘Gripping narrative!’ at the end).
But to give credit where it is due, this idea is, in fact, born again from the concept of historical fiction I encountered not more than two years ago. I read Phillipa May Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl followed by the Game of Thrones series and then the Empire of the Moghul series by the husband-wife duo which goes by the pen name of Alex Rutherford. I realized that such stories harnessed the image and the back stories of all the heroes and historical figures we have in our minds and having bolstered them, feed them right back to us. The greatest limitation of an author is to get his readers to imagine what he writes – to see his world as he sees it – and with heroes (and gods) already known to readers, the task – though tricky – is somewhat easier.
The birth of this novel was in a dream. I saw the image of a man, a monkey and a demon, and they simply sat beside each other looking at me silently. I felt as if they were waiting for me to re-imagine them and tell their story again. After all, all our epics and prayers are but stories written to bind us in a particular faith; all I have done is to give these characters a new story to make their home in.
I have to say here I had no intention of hurting anyone’s religious sentiments. For the sake of all glorious religions in our world, I will go as far as to say that all the characters mentioned in this book are entirely fictional; yet if you find your faith shaken by this story, then maybe your faith was never strong enough to begin with.
This novel, if studied by a historian, would perhaps prove to be terribly anachronistic. I have used techniques of warfare that range from ancient Roman to Mughal. The army structures are modelled on the manner of the Mughals, simply because it seemed a more colorful and intricate way of organizing an army to me. I have gleaned information on wars ranging from Greek conquests to Carthigian, Roman conflicts to Mongol successes to the Mughal wars and finally, to the more recent World Wars. And though you may not find it explicit perhaps, all the battles in this book are a mix of all my learnings as I studied warfare.
This story is just the beginning of the legend of Ramm. I realized, as I began to write it, to cram it all into one book would be a grave injustice to the reader. There are questions left unanswered in this book, but rest assured they shall be answered in the next. So having read this, I implore you to be at peace. Your hero, Ramm, and his concomitant villains are safe in my hands.
Until he returns again…
But to give credit where it is due, this idea is, in fact, born again from the concept of historical fiction I encountered not more than two years ago. I read Phillipa May Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl followed by the Game of Thrones series and then the Empire of the Moghul series by the husband-wife duo which goes by the pen name of Alex Rutherford. I realized that such stories harnessed the image and the back stories of all the heroes and historical figures we have in our minds and having bolstered them, feed them right back to us. The greatest limitation of an author is to get his readers to imagine what he writes – to see his world as he sees it – and with heroes (and gods) already known to readers, the task – though tricky – is somewhat easier.
The birth of this novel was in a dream. I saw the image of a man, a monkey and a demon, and they simply sat beside each other looking at me silently. I felt as if they were waiting for me to re-imagine them and tell their story again. After all, all our epics and prayers are but stories written to bind us in a particular faith; all I have done is to give these characters a new story to make their home in.
I have to say here I had no intention of hurting anyone’s religious sentiments. For the sake of all glorious religions in our world, I will go as far as to say that all the characters mentioned in this book are entirely fictional; yet if you find your faith shaken by this story, then maybe your faith was never strong enough to begin with.
This novel, if studied by a historian, would perhaps prove to be terribly anachronistic. I have used techniques of warfare that range from ancient Roman to Mughal. The army structures are modelled on the manner of the Mughals, simply because it seemed a more colorful and intricate way of organizing an army to me. I have gleaned information on wars ranging from Greek conquests to Carthigian, Roman conflicts to Mongol successes to the Mughal wars and finally, to the more recent World Wars. And though you may not find it explicit perhaps, all the battles in this book are a mix of all my learnings as I studied warfare.
This story is just the beginning of the legend of Ramm. I realized, as I began to write it, to cram it all into one book would be a grave injustice to the reader. There are questions left unanswered in this book, but rest assured they shall be answered in the next. So having read this, I implore you to be at peace. Your hero, Ramm, and his concomitant villains are safe in my hands.
Until he returns again…
August 15, 2015
July 17, 2015
The Great War Of Hind (Legend of Ramm #1): Cover Launch
...And so comes to fruition a dream that was borne two years ago.
The Great War Of Hind (Legend of Ramm 1): Cover Launch
...And so comes to fruition a dream that was borne two years ago.
July 8, 2015
Auntie who told Rahul Yadav to not drop out from IIT feeling vindicated
Dedicated to all the nosy aunties in the world... Satire!
New Delhi: In the aftermath of Rahul Yadav being asked to quit from Housing.com, the firm that he founded in 2012, his fifty year old auntie called Satvinder Bir Singh Bhalla today said, “I told him so.” Ms. Bhalla spoke to Faking News from her Kirti Nagar residence.
“When Rahul’s tauji told his mausaji that he was quitting, our family driver came to know as our family driver and Rahul’s mausaji’s driver are friends,” Ms. Bhalla said. “I immediately picked up the phone and called Rahul’s father, telling him what a big mistake this was. Everyone in India is dying to get into IIT and here is Rahul who is getting out.”
“Ab dekho jee,” she continued. “Had Rahul completed his degree, uski naukri kahin bhi lag jaatee… Infosys-Shinfosys, TCS-SheCS, jee. And now he is on the road, without a job.”
“That’s why I have told Manpreet and Gurpreet to not look up to their Rahul bhaiyya,” she concluded. “Even if you are Rahul, you can either be Rahul Dravid or… Rahul Gandhi.”
http://my.fakingnews.firstpost.com/2015/07/06/auntie-who-told-rahul-yadav-to-not-drop-out-from-iit-feeling-vindicated/
New Delhi: In the aftermath of Rahul Yadav being asked to quit from Housing.com, the firm that he founded in 2012, his fifty year old auntie called Satvinder Bir Singh Bhalla today said, “I told him so.” Ms. Bhalla spoke to Faking News from her Kirti Nagar residence.
“When Rahul’s tauji told his mausaji that he was quitting, our family driver came to know as our family driver and Rahul’s mausaji’s driver are friends,” Ms. Bhalla said. “I immediately picked up the phone and called Rahul’s father, telling him what a big mistake this was. Everyone in India is dying to get into IIT and here is Rahul who is getting out.”“Ab dekho jee,” she continued. “Had Rahul completed his degree, uski naukri kahin bhi lag jaatee… Infosys-Shinfosys, TCS-SheCS, jee. And now he is on the road, without a job.”
“That’s why I have told Manpreet and Gurpreet to not look up to their Rahul bhaiyya,” she concluded. “Even if you are Rahul, you can either be Rahul Dravid or… Rahul Gandhi.”
http://my.fakingnews.firstpost.com/2015/07/06/auntie-who-told-rahul-yadav-to-not-drop-out-from-iit-feeling-vindicated/
June 21, 2015
Book Review: Amritsar: Mrs. Gandhi's Last Battle by Mark Tully, Satish Jacob
I have recently gotten hooked to Indian history again, after a few years. To be honest, except Guha's "India after Gandhi", I wasn't aware of any good book on India's history post Independence. And I have recently come across around five...I read 'Amritsar' right after Kuldip Nayar's fantastic 'Emergency Retold' and loved it. Mark Tully and Satish Jacob take the reader behind the facade of the players and play-makers in the great Punjab game of the 80's. Tully/ Jacob lay bare the machinations behind the Bhindrawale movement - making crucial revelations such as the Congress and Akali hand in creating the monster. 'Amritsar' is a thriller from start to finish; Tully/ Jacob keep the narrative taut from the start - discord in Punjab to finish - Indira Gandhi's death.
Delectable read.
On my reading list next, Manoj Mitta's 'When a tree shook Delhi'.
Book Review: Emergency Retold by Kuldip Nayar
I remember asking my mother if she remembered the Emergency in the 70's and she told me, "Yes, a lot of people went to jail; but corruption went away. Trains, buses used to be on time." That and the undeniable fact that Indira Gandhi had induced the Emergency to satiate her hunger for power, had been my narrow viewpoint on the Emergency. I came across Nayar's book and picked it up, wanting to know what had really happened.I loved Nayar's 'Emergency Retold'. Except for certain parts where Nayar lends voice to lengthy diatribes by leaders against the Emergency, the narrative is taut and thriller-like. If you think the Congress leaders of today are sycophantic (towards that magnificent buffoon Rahul Gandhi), you must read 'Emergency Retold' to understand where the seeds of this sycophancy were sown. The Indira/ Sanjay combine killed the spirit of the Congress to such an extent that sycophancy became the norm as opposed to the exception.
A fantastic record of Indira's India in the 70's.
June 15, 2015
HBO to replace George Martin with Ekta Kapoor, all GoT characters to come back from dead
Heeheehee... Satire...
Mumbai/Los Angeles. Facing enormous backlash over having killed over hundred central characters in Game of Thrones, HBO, the maker of the series, has decided to replace George Martin, the current writer, with Ekta Kapoor. Reliable sources from within both HBO and Ekta Kapoor’s office have confirmed the news.
“We killed off so many of our principal characters that we had begun losing some of our loyal viewership,” an HBO official said, on condition of anonymity. “After a point, even the sex scenes did not help. So we looked offshore and found that there was apparently a lady in India who had expertise in bringing characters back from the dead. We have replaced George Martin with this lady, with immediate effect.”
Sources from within Ms. Kapoor’s office told us that twenty of the characters including Joffrey, Eddard Stark and Drogo would be brought back from the dead in the next few episodes. Most of these characters would likely get facial transplants as well, in case the original characters were not available.
“Ekta madam has also suggested that we also move the storyline thirty years forward since Westeros has become a little boring; so we might do that as well,” the source said.
http://www.fakingnews.firstpost.com/2015/06/hbo-to-replace-george-martin-with-ekta-kapoor-all-got-characters-to-come-back-from-dead/
Mumbai/Los Angeles. Facing enormous backlash over having killed over hundred central characters in Game of Thrones, HBO, the maker of the series, has decided to replace George Martin, the current writer, with Ekta Kapoor. Reliable sources from within both HBO and Ekta Kapoor’s office have confirmed the news.
“We killed off so many of our principal characters that we had begun losing some of our loyal viewership,” an HBO official said, on condition of anonymity. “After a point, even the sex scenes did not help. So we looked offshore and found that there was apparently a lady in India who had expertise in bringing characters back from the dead. We have replaced George Martin with this lady, with immediate effect.”Sources from within Ms. Kapoor’s office told us that twenty of the characters including Joffrey, Eddard Stark and Drogo would be brought back from the dead in the next few episodes. Most of these characters would likely get facial transplants as well, in case the original characters were not available.
“Ekta madam has also suggested that we also move the storyline thirty years forward since Westeros has become a little boring; so we might do that as well,” the source said.
http://www.fakingnews.firstpost.com/2015/06/hbo-to-replace-george-martin-with-ekta-kapoor-all-got-characters-to-come-back-from-dead/
Arnab Goswami claims Times Now impact as Sun’s temperature reduces by 0.02 degrees Celsius
Inspired by the daily 'Times Now Impact' bulletins. Satire.
Mumbai. Times Now and Arnab Goswami took credit for the twelve millionth thing this year – the sun’s temperature reducing by 0.02 degrees Celsius last week.
While the Sun’s actual temperature is 15 million degrees Celsius and scientists said that such a reduction would not have any material impact on anything, Arnab Goswami still went ahead and claimed that the the temperature reduction was because of non-stop and meaningful reporting by him.
“Out Lower Parel office gets direct sunlight from one side of the building where Arnab’s Goswami private soundproof cabin is,” a Times Now official revealed, “Our editor-in-chief had been vocally complaining about the sunlight for some time now, threatening to force the Sun out of solar system if it didn’t stop sending scorching rays. Last week Arnab threatened the Sun of dragging it into the surya namaskar controversy around Yoga if it didn’t lower down its temperature.”
“The temperature came down immediately the next day by a staggering 0.02 degrees Celsius – the number is bigger in Fahrenheit I think,” the official proudly claimed, “If this is not Times Now Impact, then what is?”
Meanwhile AAP took credit for the temperature reduction too. “Yeh hai aam admee ki takaat,” Arvind Kejriwal said.
http://www.fakingnews.firstpost.com/2015/06/arnab-goswami-claims-times-now-impact-as-suns-temperature-reduces-by-0-02-degrees-celsius/
Mumbai. Times Now and Arnab Goswami took credit for the twelve millionth thing this year – the sun’s temperature reducing by 0.02 degrees Celsius last week.
While the Sun’s actual temperature is 15 million degrees Celsius and scientists said that such a reduction would not have any material impact on anything, Arnab Goswami still went ahead and claimed that the the temperature reduction was because of non-stop and meaningful reporting by him.“Out Lower Parel office gets direct sunlight from one side of the building where Arnab’s Goswami private soundproof cabin is,” a Times Now official revealed, “Our editor-in-chief had been vocally complaining about the sunlight for some time now, threatening to force the Sun out of solar system if it didn’t stop sending scorching rays. Last week Arnab threatened the Sun of dragging it into the surya namaskar controversy around Yoga if it didn’t lower down its temperature.”
“The temperature came down immediately the next day by a staggering 0.02 degrees Celsius – the number is bigger in Fahrenheit I think,” the official proudly claimed, “If this is not Times Now Impact, then what is?”
Meanwhile AAP took credit for the temperature reduction too. “Yeh hai aam admee ki takaat,” Arvind Kejriwal said.
http://www.fakingnews.firstpost.com/2015/06/arnab-goswami-claims-times-now-impact-as-suns-temperature-reduces-by-0-02-degrees-celsius/
