Author: Jo

Most of the schoolmates I see after many years are faces or names that I do not remember. Yet they all had stories to share that sometimes would make you wonder how to respond. There was one I met in a bar while I was with another friend. This guy came to me and asked if I remembered him. I had no clue. “Are you not Joseph?”, he asked. I was surprised. Then he told me he was my schoolmate and how he remember me singing in the school and all that. I was dumbstruck that he remembered my name and recognized me after all these years. Then he told me the story of his life. Romancing and marrying a girl who was the daughter of a top police official and how his father-in-law got furious at him and made life difficult for him and he had to run to Gulf. “Now we are settled”, he said. “Her family has come to terms and we are visiting them now.” I felt happy for him though I didn’t recall who he was. And then while he was leaving, he said “Never had I imagined that I would see you in a bar”. I didn’t know what to say to that. I just smiled.

I met another old friend and I remembered this guy’s name, Suresh, who is an autorickshaw driver now. I was just walking out of the fireworks store when I spotted him. He asked about my family and I asked about him. “That went up as a disaster”, he said while he was still smiling at me. “I lost a lot of money and I don’t know where my life is headed”. In our society where divorce is still a taboo, I could see what he meant. But I was at loss of words. I did try to console a bit though but I was pitying myself.

What are the odds you remember a face that you last saw while you were nine years old or so? None I would say, if I was speaking for myself. So I was waiting for an autorickshaw at midnight on a Sunday and this autorickshaw drops by. I get in and after a short while he says my name. Surprises again! Not only my name, but he recalls many other names from that small lower primary school we all studied in until 4th. This came as a real surprise to me. “I have our annual group photo with me and I check on it from time to time. And you haven’t changed much that it was easy for me to recognize!”, he said with a big smile. I apologized to him that I didn’t remember anything about him. He said that he understands completely but those were some of the best years he had. He added much life to that night which otherwise would have been a sleepy, homesick trip to the railway station.

You know what, I believe in people and their inherent goodness even with so much evil around. Oh, so much.

One of the most famous quotes of the movie “The Godfather” is “It’s not personal, it’s strictly business”. It says so much about our everyday life. That even though it is all personal – ultimately we are all just people dealing with other people like us – we always try to find a way to make it look like it’s just business. You might have faced the situation in your personal life, or business or at work. At times you might have been the one who said it or the one who heard it. In “The Godfather”, it is Tom Hagen who says that first and then Micheal puts it in his way, then Tessio says it to try and change his luck and in Godfather part III, it is Micheal at the receiving end. Life, is a cycle. And “The Godfather” is a textbook in many ways.

Track: “The Complex” by Kevin MacLeod

9^th Edition of ViBGYOR International Film Festival is scheduled for February 11-16, 2014. There is a Selection Preview. Send your own films or circulate these files among your friends filmmakers, media/social activists. Last date/deadline is December 15th, 2013. All details regarding Film Submission are on their site www.vibgyorfilm.org.

I’m not a sports person. I don’t know any rules in any sports, except that I can understand when a ‘goal’ happens in soccer. Never felt like watching any game except soccer during a couple of world cup matches, but that too was just to observe the moves. Never watched a cricket match too, except for once at a friend’s place to watch some game that Indian team played during cricket worldcup but what drove me to that was the friends’ company to booze. While almost all my friends, right from the childhood are crazy cricket fans. So I am not emotional about Sachin’s retirement and probably would never understand his legacy. What I understand is this – if there is one person about whom people in India would equally talk about with such love and admiration, one person about whom people in India would unitedly agree upon, irrespective of their religious/political/regional conflicts, one person that they looked upon as an icon, a role model as such – that was Sachin Tendulkar.

So after two years of camaraderie, I bid good-bye to my good old Nokia E7 that operates on Symbian Belle. Nokia E7 was my first smartphone and first Nokia phone. The very first phone I had was a Motorola that had the basic call and message functions, then I moved to a Sony Ericsson Cybershot model (which had cool camera features and Xenon flash) and then I had Sony Ericsson P1, which was my first touch phone. Then came Nokia E7. There are a couple of things I loved and hated about the phone.

On the positives, it had a QWERTY keyboard which I found very useful to type longer notes. The Symbian Belle worked almost like the Android, though the apps were a few, and since I hadn’t used an Android I liked the experience. The camera worked fine too. Some people in Facebook asked me about the camera when I posted some mobile pics. But on the negatives, the device weighed heavy and it hang up at times and, with the immovable battery, it was impossible to reboot (though I found a hack later). The hardware also wasn’t good enough to support the app requirements. For example, a few minutes long use of Facebook’s native app would heat up the device, making the battery drain fast, and the app was too slow to load.

I was still hesitant to buy an Android phone because the good ones were priced heavily. But when I saw a Macromax Canvas 4, I fell for it. Primarily because it has Jelly Bean, the hardware is much better than my previous phone, has a 5 inches screen and priced at about Rs. 17499. The only thing I was concerned about was the camera but Micromax Canvas 4 has a good camera and I like the auto focus feature of it. So this is a value-for-money purchase (I also had a couple of freebies from Flipkart like a travel charger and bluetooth headset). I always thought a 5 inches phone would be too bulky to carry but I am totally loving the experience of browsing on this phone. I don’t think I will ever go for a smaller screen now. The responsiveness of the device is breezy though it’s a bit difficult to use the menu buttons on the device. I’m not a gamer so can’t comment on the hardware or software of this device for that use.

So to summarize, though it’s just two weeks since I bought it, I am happy that I moved to an Android phone with a larger screen and it’s a Micromax.

Meanwhile in HBO, they play the movie “What Women Want”.

……..
Lola (audio): “You’re totally and completely gay!” (Subtitle: You’re totally and completely queer!)

Nick (audio): “Yes, I am gay”. (Subtitle: Yes, I am queer.)

Lola (audio): “How gay?” (Subtitle: How queer?)

Nick (audio): “I’m as gay as it gets”. (Subtitle: I’m as queer as it gets.)
……..

I’ve seen the subtitles showing ‘crap’ for ‘shit’ or ‘f**k’, but what’s wrong with the use of word ‘gay’? Even Pope Francis has said the word in one of his interviews.

Rumpelstiltskin. What a weird name and a freaky character, I thought. As we younger kids were listening to my sister telling us the stories in one of those evening story-telling sessions. We could barely see her face as we sat in the shadow of a kerosene lamp that barely lit up the small verandah. But we clearly saw the freaky imp and the girl who spun golden straws. We could see the house that was made full of chocolates and the witch who was waiting for kids to trap them to it. We could not have known those stories and characters if not for the translation and story-telling skills of our elder sister. Those stories had come up from her pre-degree text books.

I was introduced to the classics and world literature through the translations. Remember those beautiful Russian stories that made Masha/Pasha/Thasha a household name among Malayalees? And the works of Victor Hugo, Dostoyevsky and such. Imagine what would have the clergy done if not for the local language translations of the Bible. Translations opened up a whole new world before the readers’ eyes. It helped see the places, people, culture and above all the human emotions are the same everywhere in the world. It gave wings to our imagination which otherwise would have been limited. These days, so many classic and contemporary literature are made available to the non-English speaking Malayalees. And DC Books does a great job on that.

Today, I say a big thanks to all those translators. Our world would have been much smaller without your work. Happy International Translation Day!