Bring on the Blook

I’m normally not one to notice such stuff, but I was randomly browsing my site stats the other day and found that I had published 1997 posts till then (not including the three that I’d published and subsequently withdrew for various reasons). I’ve written two more posts after that which makes this one the 2000th post on this blog (including its predecessor). It’s taken a bit more than 11 years (I started blogging in August 2004) to reach this milestone.

A couple of years back, I’d considered writing a “blook”. “Blook“, for the uninitiated, is a book that is based on a blog. So you don’t really write a blook. You simply compile posts from your own blog, fix them in a logical order, write a foreword, and there it is! Back when I had considered the blook, I thought I didn’t have enough good posts on this blog. And then set myself a target of “another 200 blog posts”. I forget when I set this target. It doesn’t matter.

If I’ve written 2000 blog posts so far, I’m sure at least a 100 (5%) of them are pretty good, and good enough to share with a wider world than my readers? So this time, I’m seriously considering publishing a blook.

I’m looking for an editor to assist me in this exercise. The job of the editor is to go through my 2000 blog posts, and identify a 100 or so “good posts” (which are in a sense “timeless”) and figure out a way to compile and curate and put them together under  themes, perhaps, in order to compile a blook. I could possibly do it myself, but I might be biased, and attached in unhealthy ways to certain posts, so I’d prefer a trusted third party to take this up.

So if you think you can edit my blog into a blook, or know someone who can do that, please do let me know. I’m really serious about it this time. We can figure out a “structure” to compensate your efforts. And you will get editing credits for the blook.

A little celebratory speech before that: when I started writing in 2004, little did I know that I would hit 2000 blog posts one day. I thank all my readers, loyal and disloyal. I thank people who have cared to comment on this blog over the years (excluding the spambots), for it’s they who’ve kept me going. I thank people who’ve  brought up subjects from this blog for discussion in social gatherings. And last but not the least, I thank my wife, who I met through this blog (it’s predecessor to be precise), and who constantly berates me for not writing enough about her!

Oh, and don’t forget the blook!

Bangalore Book Festival

So today I made my way to Gayatri Vihar in the Palace Grounds to visit the Bangalore Book Festival, on its last day. It was interesting, though a bit crowded (what would you expect on the last day of an exhibition? and that too, when it’s a Sunday?). I didn’t buy much (just picked up two books) given the massive unread pile that lies at home. However, there was much scope for pertinent observations. Like I always do when I have a large number of unrelated pertinent observations, I’ll write this in bullet point form.

  • There were some 200 stalls. Actually, there might have been more. I didn’t keep count, despite the stalls having been numbered. Yeah, you can say that I wasn’t very observant.
  • All the major bookshops in Bangalore barring the multicity ones had set up shop there. I don’t really know what they were doing there. Or were they just trying to capture the market that only buys in fairs? Or did they set up stall there just to advertise themselves?
  • It seems like a lot of shops were trying to use the fair to get rid of inventory they wanted to discard. All they had to do was to stack all of this on one table and put a common price tag (say Rs. 50) on every book in that collection, and it was enough to draw insane crowds
  • One interesting stall at the fair had been set up by pothi.com an online self-publishing company. I’ll probably check them out sometime next year when I might want to publish a blook. Seems like an interesting business model they’ve got. Print on demand!
  • I also met the flipkart.com guys at the fair. Once again, they were there for advertising themselves. Need to check them out sometime. Given the kind of books I buy, I think online is the best place to get long tail stuff.
  • There was an incredibly large number of islamic publishing houses at the fair! And have you guys seen the “want qur an? call 98xxxxxxxx for free copy” hoardings all over the city? Wonder why the Bajrang Dal doesn’t target those
  • There was large vernacular presence at the fair. I remember reading in the papers that there was a quota for Kannada publishers, but there was reasonable presence for other languages also, like Gult, Tam, Mellu, Hindi
  • A large number of stalls were ideology driven. Publishing houses attached to cults had set up stalls, probably to further the cause of their own cult. So there was an ISKCON stall, a Ramakrishna Mutt stall, a Ramana Maharshi stall, etc.
  • Attendance at most of these niche stalls was quite thin, as people mostly crowded the stalls being run by bookstores in order to hunt for bargains. Attendance was also mostly thin at publisher-run stalls, making me wonder why most of these people had bothered to come to the fair at all.
  • I saw one awesomely funny banner at the place. It was by “Dr Partha Bagchi, the world leader in stammering for last 20 years” or some such thing. Was too lazy to pull out my phone and click pic. But it was a masterpiece of a banner
  • Another interesting ideological publisher there was “Leftword books”. Their two sales reps were in kurtas and carrying jholas (ok I made the latter part up). And they were sellling all sorts of left-wing books. Wonder who funds them! And they were also selling posters of Che for 10 bucks each
  • I wonder what impact this fair will have on bookstores in Bangalore in the next few days. Or probably it was mostly the non-regular book buyers who did business at the fair and so the regulars will be back at their favourite shops tomorrow.

I bought two books. Vedam Jaishankar’s Casting A Spell: A history of Karnataka cricket (I got it at Rs. 200, as opposed to a list price of Rs 500) and Ravi Vasudevan’s “Making Meaning in Indian Cinema”.

Arranged Scissors 15: Stud and Fighter Beauty

Ok so here we come to the holy grail. The grand unification. Kunal Sawardekar can scream even more loudly now. Two concepts that i’ve much used and abused over the last year or so come together. In a post that will probably be the end of both these concepts in the blogging format. I think I want to write books. I want to write two books – one about each of these concepts. And after thinking about it, I don’t think a blook makes sense. Too  many readers will find it stale. So, this post signals the end of these two concepts in blog format. They’ll meet you soon, at a bookstore near you.

So this post is basically about how the aunties (basically women of my mother’s generation) evaluate a girl’s beauty and about how it significantly differs from the way most others evaluate it. For most people, beauty is a subjective thing. It is, as the proverb goes, in the eyes of the beholder. You look at the thing of beauty (not necessarily a joy forever) as a complete package. And decide whether the package is on hte whole beautiful. It is likely that different people have different metrics, but they are never explicit. Thus, different people find different people beautiful, and everyone has his/her share of beauty.

So I would like to call that as the “stud” way of evaluating beauty. It is instinctive. It is about insights hitting your head (about whether someone is beautiful or not). It is not a “process”. And it is “quick”. And “easy” – you don’t sweat much to decide whether someone is beautiful or not. It is the stud way of doing it. It is the way things are meant to be. Unfortunately, women of my mother’s generation (and maybe earlier generations) have decided to “fighterize” this aspect also.

So this is how my mother (just to take an example) goes about evaluating a girl. The girl is first split into components. Eyes, nose, hair, mouth, lips, cheeks, symmetry, etc. etc. Each of these components has its own weightage (differnet women use different weightages for evaluation. however for a particular woman, the weightage set is the same irrespective of who she is evaluating). And each gets marked on a 5-point likert scale (that’s what my mother uses; others might use scales of different lengths).

There are both subject-wise cutoffs and aggregate cutoff (this is based on the weighted average of scores for each component). So for a girl to qualify as a “CMP daughter-in-law”, she has to clear each of the subject cutoffs and also the total. Again – different women use different sets of cutoffs, but a particular woman uses only one set. And so forth.

I wonder when this system came into being, and why. I wonder if people stopped trusting their own judgment on “overall beauty” because of which they evolved this scale. I wonder if it was societal pressure that led to women look for a CMP daughter-in-law for which purpose they adopted this scale. It’s not “natural” so I can’t give a “selfish gene” argument in support of it. But I still wonder. And my mother still uses scales such as this to evaluate my potential bladees. Such are life.