On Reading The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction

Since it was first released in 2009, I had resisted the urge to pick up a copy of the Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction. The book’s cover, featuring a sari clad buxom young woman wielding a pistol, promised the kind of guilty entertainment that I associate with Bollywood potboilers of the 90s. Having grown up on a healthy diet of English Classics and eventually armed myself with a Masters in English Literature, I like to think that I am rather selective about my reading. Not for me the pretentious writers who claim to have arrived, with their urban dramas that demystify the IITs and address the issue of inter-caste marriages.

But with Tamil Pulp Fiction, the choice to ignore the book was somewhat tougher. The cover apart, the book promised an entry to popular Tamil culture of the kind that has always been out of my reach, despite having spent the best part of my formative years in Madras. I grew up in a home where English was predominantly used for communication and went to a school which actively encouraged mastery over the language. Speaking Tamil inevitably became a mere survival skill-it helped me get past the rickshaw drivers, pay bills and order for extra crisp dosas. What’s more, I stayed blissfully smug about the language hierarchy in my life and by the time I realised what I was missing, I had moved out of Madras.

When I finally bought the book last week, it felt like the culmination of an existential battle between my rather elitist approach to literature and my need to reclaim (discover?) my Tamil roots. Ironically perhaps, Pritham. K. Chakravarthy, the translator and compiler of the anthology says in her introduction to the book:

"This book is an attempt to claim the status of literature for a huge body of writing that had rarely if ever made it into an academic library, despite having been produced for nearly a century."

If buying the book was a culmination, reading this was truly the anti-climax. It has made me wonder if my Masters degree had closed some doors for me even as it had opened others.

My internal angst aside, the book delivers on its cover’s promise of entertainment. Detective fiction, love stories of the Mills and Boons brand, science fiction, social messages and supernatural thrillers-each short story contributes to a rather heady cocktail. The stories, originally penned in colloquial Tamil, have been collected from serialised stories in weekly magazines and the cheap glossy-covered novels that you would find stacked in roadside tea stalls. The selection spans half a century-from the late 1960s to the present and most of the writers are evidently household names amongst many Tamilian families. The collection also throws in interviews of the writers and the cover pages of the original publications, which make for a delightful insight into popular entertainment of the yester years. As I read the book, I could almost picture my aunts and uncles in their younger days, eagerly scrambling each week to find out what happened to their favourite characters-hurricane Vaij, Shankarlal, Jeeva or Susheela.

For me, the success of the book is in its translation. Chakravarthy manages to keep alive the Tamilian identity of the characters, while making the stories accessible to the wider English-reading audience. And in the rather twisted scheme of things, this seems to reflect my own state of limbo between the two languages that define my identity! Salman Rushdie in his Imaginary Homelands perhaps says it best:

“Sometimes we feel we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools.”

Smarter by the Phone

“Watch where you’re going, you really should take your eyes off that phone once in a while!”  A colleague of mine exclaimed rather irritably. I had barely acknowledged his presence in the corridor and had narrowly missed a painful collision against a pillar. I glanced away from my phone, guiltily thanking him and attempting to make small talk, all the while distracted by the gentle hum of my brand new HTC Explorer.

For years I had been disdainful about ‘those types’ who were glued to their phones…on busses and cabs, in cafeterias and waiting lounges, at their work stations and even in their homes. “What is it about wanting to be connected all the time?” I had wondered. And “No, I want an instrument that will serve just as a phone, not the entire universe!”  I had snapped at many a persistent salesman who had tried to urge me in favour of a more empowered phone.

And so, stubbornly, I graduated from one ‘mobile’ phone to another. My very first phone, a hand-me-down from my father, was the Nokia 1011, which resembled a cordless phone. My classmates at college had fittingly nick-named it ‘the brick’. During a session on self-defence, it was even added to a list of objects that a woman could use to protect herself, if she’s attacked! Then there was the Nokia 1100, which came with a little torch light. I think I fell for the advertisement, which featured a jolly Sikh truck driver who rigged the phone to the base of the truck because his headlamps had died out. The advertisement was spot-on in positioning the phone for working class Indians-sturdy, dust resistant, long battery life and of course, there was that torch light which was my reason for getting the phone, since it coincided with my stay at a dingy University hostel. If you use a pre-paid service and actually still recharge your phone at a kirana store, chances are that the store owner will use a Nokia 1100 to top-up your phone. I feel delightfully nostalgic when I see the flattened plastic keys, the paint peeling off. My third phone was a Nokia 1661, a cut above the other two because of its camera which faithfully gave me grainy pictures and its coloured screen which brought alive its little icons. By this time I had been sucked into the eLearning world. I couldn’t help but notice the similarity between the interface of the Nokia 1661 and some of the less visually appealing courseware I have created.

So, what changed after all these years? Why did I suddenly sign up for a smart phone when I seemed perfectly at ease with its less endowed, distant cousins? Well, I guess I was starting to feel alarmingly disconnected from the world, and I don’t mean this in the sense of not being able to update my status message every nano second. I realised how much lesser I knew about things that would actually interest me. I mean, of course the Hindu continues to update me about the latest scams in the country, the petrol hike and the IPL matches. But I want to know about other things as well! What does Janet Clarey think about mobile technology for learning? Why is Amitav Ghosh Tweeting about the atheist who won the right to wear a religious pasta strainer in his ID photo? How did the wedding of my friend’s friend to an Ethiopian look in the photographs? Sure I can read blogs and tweets and view pictures using a computer with regular internet connection. But that would involve taking time off. Why not instead enable myself to use minutes in the day that I spend waiting for cabs to arrive and depart, for my coffee to be made, for my computer to boot.

I think I was also influenced in large measure by an article I recently read in the Forbes magazine-Here’s Why Google and Facebook Might Completely Disappear in the Next 5 Years. It talks about how web companies that don’t adapt to the mobile space quickly are going to die out. It also quotes the example of Instagram, which has evolved almost exclusively for the smart phone market. The writer predicts that increasingly, companies will assume that users will prefer to use mobile applications instead of websites. It scared me to think that I would have to wake up one day to completely revamp the way I use technology. And as an Instructional Designer, the parallel with my work is not far to seek. If I am to be designing learning for a mobile interface in, say, another five years, I should at the very least be comfortable using mobile technology for my personal work. After all, I entered the web learning space under similar conditions.

So, a month into having a smart phone, and how do I feel? Well, I have smugly boarded the bus of ‘those types’ who are glued to their phones. But what I have come to appreciate the most in a smart phone, is the design. You have a 2x3 inch interface to fit a universe of applications; it needs to be visually appealing and intuitive to use. Having struggled alongside graphic designers to fit five lines of text and an image into a much larger space, I think my admiration for smart phone application designers is superlative. I have a fun application called the Bathing Cat on my opening screen. She’s quite a pointless battery drainer really. But I can never cease to be amazed by the detail that goes into animating the cat, her flirtatious looks, her little bathing tub, brush and towel, all packaged in an icon sized,  1x1 cm space.

Cut back to five minutes of distracted small talk with my colleague. My already minimal attention to our conversation is quickly reaching virtual nonexistence. The hum of my phone, at least in my head, has built into an irresistible whine. My phone seems to have taken on the character of the spoilt cat that’s constantly trying to get my attention.  I try stealing a quick peek, but my colleague catches on quickly. He says with a heavy sigh “I guess I’ll leave so you can go back to looking at your phone.” He walks away, perhaps aghast that I don’t so much as try to protest.