Race, what is it good for?

We’re watching "Anita and Me" at the moment. It’s one of those rare Indian movies made in English. There are a few of those around and we’ve gathered all of those together and watch them avidly since these movies have an experience beyond Bollywood and Hollywood. They are unique in their own terms because they provide an Eastern perspective of the West – or something like that 🙂

"Anita and Me" is the story of Meena, an Indian girl living in an English backwater village in 1972. She is fascinated by Anita Rutter (though the way they pronounce it, it sounds more like "rotter" :p) the local troublemaker and glamour girl. It’s an unlikely friendship and highlights a lot of things that we’d rather not think about. There is of course the racism, it is an underlying theme throughout the movie – both the racism of the British towards the Indians as well as the reverse racism of the Indians towards the British. But there are all the other subtle variations – wanting to be somebody you are not, wanting to belong, wanting to be your own person.

We haven’t seen the whole movie yet but so far it is interesting though sometimes a bit hard to understand because of the thick brogue of some of the characters. Even Meena, who is Indian, has a real thick accent which is unlike any Indian accent I’ve heard but then again, given she was probably brought up in England, it probably makes sense that she’d speak more like the natives of her village rather than her own parents 🙂

What interested me was the strong undercurrents of racism of all stripes and colours that the movie portrayed. We’re used to the usual stereotypes of racism and how the brown/black/coloure (make your choice) people are always looked down upon by the white folks. But what about the reverse? Sure, it’s true that most of the folks in post-colonial countries (at least) bow down to those with white skin as if they were aliens, or messengers from God :p But at the same time, they have this habit of disparaging the whiteys (or "goras" or whatever the common local term) and their morals and culture and so on. Is this not racism as well?

In truth, what should matter to us about another person is how they conduct themselves and how they treat you and others around them. Their skin colour or the country they were born in (or brought up in) should not matter at all. Unfortunately, it might be a long time before all of the human race comes to realize this ….

The phantom purchas pains

The saga of my notebook purchase woes, which was started almost a week ago, continues :p The last I wrote, I was supposed to get the RAM upgrade on Monday. And now the continuation of the exciting saga …

On Monday, I learn that it is a public holiday and that no shops are open due to it being May Day. And of course, the guys at the computer shop were either ignorant of it or didn’t care. Well, nothing to be done. So I waited till yesterday and call them back. The salesman who dealt with me is not there. I call him on his mobile. He tells me that he’s at a meeting at their head office and gives me the name of another sales guy at their shop and asks me to ask him about the RAM.

I call the guy and ask him about the RAM and he’s like, I’ll find out and call you back in ten minutes and takes down my phone number. Ten minutes go by – nothing. Twenty minutes. Still nothing. I call him back and he’s like, "Oh yeah, I’ll call you back in ten minutes – can I have your phone number again?" He’s done nothing in all that time! I just give him my phone number again since there is no point in getting angry with them anymore. They are just not going to care. Of course, he doesn’t call back after ten minute or for that matter, twenty minutes. I call him back and he says that he had to speak to the other sales guy (the one I originally spoke to) and that the other guy will call me back in 15 minutes. I’m like, "I call him and he says that I should call you and now you say that I have to talk to him to get this resolved?" and the guy can only stutter something incomprehensible.

Fifteen minute go by and not surprisingly, there is no call from the other guy. I wait another five minutes and then call him and he says that they don’t have the RAM because of shipping delays and that I’ll have it on Friday "for sure". Of course, knowing how good their assurances have been so far, I’m not holding my breath :p Come Friday, I’m almost certain that I’ll get another excuse. This is the way they do business here in Sri Lanka and people wonder about us being a third-world nation? If they had a category for fourth-world nations, we should probably be demoted to that, the way these guys do things. Ah well, the joys of life :p

The good, bad and the plain stupid

We watched two movies yesterday (well, the second half of one and another one fully :p) and while both were basically on the same subject – family – they were miles apart in how the stories went. Of course, this is no surprise given that the stories were set worlds apart – one in Detroit, USA and the other in Chennai (or Madras), India. But let me get to the movies themselves.

I like Tamil movies. They try to explore "real" issues instead of getting all fluffy like Hindi movies (not that there is anything wrong with fluff mind you :p) and while they still do adhere to the story-song & dance-fight formula, they do tend to be entertaining. We watched the latter half of "Bose" yesterday and it certainly was entertaining … but perhaps not in the way the director intended.

The story is about Bose, your ordinary Indian commando, who is cashiered from the army for shooting a minister in the family jewels to save a girl who is about to be raped by the minister. This being a Tamil movie, it is all about the corruption in politics and the lone struggle that Bose leads against the forces of the minister who wants revenge. What was funny (or irritating) about the movie was the fact Bose’s whole family appears to be composed of stupid people. His whole family knows the story about him shooting the minister but his mother brings a thug searching for Bose home, his father reports Bose to the police, his brother takes his whole family and runs to the very minister who is trying to kill Bose for protection. The sheer stupidity of the plot made me pause the movie and shake my head quite a few times but the action sequences seemed to be derived from Hong Kong flicks rather than recent Tamil movies and so, if you are an action aficionado, you might still want to watch this one 🙂

The other one we watched yesterday was "Four Brothers" – about a four brothers (naturally :p) who team up to hunt down their mother’s killers. Now this one, I must say, was most excellent 🙂 I don’t believe that the movie was shot in Detroit but it does give you a feel for Detroit (I used to live there, so that might explain the "feel" in part :p) and I loved the characters in the movie. There was so much camaraderie, so much brotherhood between those four disparate individuals that they seemed to be "real brothers" (as they say in the movie). It’s a bit violent but a good movie nevertheless 🙂

The perfect query

As I’ve mentioned before, query letters are pretty important in the process of getting published – unless you want to self-publish or happen to have a rich uncle who owns a publishing house that is :p The problem of course, is crafting the perfect query letter.

After my adventures mentioned in the earlier entry with streamlining and pruning my query letter, I thought I had it down pat. That I had my query down to the essentials, that it was concise and that it flowed well and that that was all I needed. However, I have since come to realize maybe that wasn’t enough 🙂 (But it never is, is it? :p)

Somewhere on one of the writing forums I frequent, (probably Absolute Write Water Cooler …) there was a thread about how sending a sample of your writing along with the query was important. I had not considered this originally. My reasoning was, that if they wanted a sample of my writing, they’d ask for it, right? Wrong! Most of the agents do not seem to ask for a sample in their submission guidelines but of course, if they had something that would help them to gauge your writing, it certainly would help, wouldn’t it?

So, I’ve started including the first chapter of my novel in text format in the body of the query e-mail now. (In this day and age of mass-scale viruses, attachments are a no-no … unless they ask for them :p) If the agent asks for a certain number or pages or chapters in their submission guidelines, then I cut it down to that length. Otherwise, I include the first chapter.

Of course, its too early at the moment to say if this tactic is paying off or not but one of the recent queries that I sent actually got a two line reason as to the rejection (they didn’t think that they did well representing humorous fiction) than the usual form rejection of "Sorry, we’re not interested". So maybe it’s working. Of course, the question is, is it working for me or against me? :p