Youthpad – Page 5

‘New and improved’

I went to the optician today to get my eyes checked. Yes, I prefer an automated refractometer (or whatever that thingymajig is called) test done rather than stumble blindly around for one whole day because of those dilatory eyedrops given by ophthalmologists when testing. I got that done only once – when I first got spectacles – and then never again.

I’ve been using Essilor‘s Crizal lenses for quite some time now. Nah, I wasn’t swayed by images of people giving Colgate smiles after wearing those. What I did find interesting was that my optician said that the lenses are ‘scratch-free, dust-free’ and whole bunch of other ‘frees’ (except for the price-tag, which is nowhere near free). But hey, it works. I was happy with is since it really is what all they said.

New and improved is an oxymoronic term (if it’s ‘new’, it can’t have been ‘improved’; if its ‘improved’ then it can’t be ‘new’) often abused by the likes of Cadbury Bournvita marketing executives. So when today I need to choose new lenses (power increased by .5 dioptres), I was very curious when the optician told me that now they had the new and improved Crizal A2 lenses.

Now since Crizal lenses are already (supposedly) ‘scratch-free, dust-free’, what more am I to expect from my Crizal A2 lenses which I ordered? Probably a laser tracking system that shoots down dust particles mid-air. Or maybe the previous one was merely scratch-free, while this one can be used to cut upon bank vaults. Crizal’s India site gives a few clues.

"You can become Superman simply by buying our lenses!"

If I don’t ge X-ray vision enhancement (I assume that’s what it means) with these new lenses instead of just vision correction, I’m taking them to court. 😀

I’ll slip in something sideways here. I went to the British Council library yesterday to return some books. I was browsing through the shelves to find something new to issue, when I came across this:

iPod and iTunes for Dummies — iPod and iTunes...for *real* Dummies

Steve Jobs will probably have a heart attack if he comes across this book. If you need a fricking manual, scratch that, a fricking for Dummies book to operate an iPod / iTunes then it’s a probably a good indication that either technology is way too complex or that the preson reading the book is from Jajau. Lest you accuse me of Photoshopping the image, check out iPod & iTunes for Dummies at Amazon.com

Speaking of spectacle lenses, it isn’t as if I’ve not tried to switch to contact lenses. Bausch & Lomb allows you to try on their contacts, so I gave it a shot once. A sales assistant is assigned to help you put on the contacts for the first time. Try all I might I just can’t keep my eyes open when the contacts come close to my eye. The sales assistant tried many many times, but each time my eyes started blinking so rapidly that the contacts couldn’t even come close. Half an hour or so later, one sales assistant was trying to hold down my upper eyelid open, a second one was trying to keep my lower eyelid open, while yet another tried to put the contacts on – and failed miserably. I found out that day my eyelid muscles were stronger than hand muscles of grown men and women.

Seems like I won’t be wearing contacts without a whole entourage of people to hold open my eyelids.

PS – One of the artsy-fartsy types found out what a Mission Impossible 3 type start is called; the term I was referring to is ‘in media res‘.

Between these covers

My rating of Between The Assassinations by Aravind Adiga: 5.7 / 10
Publisher: Picador India
Price: Rs 295

I’ve read both the novels that Aravind Adiga has published till now, but I thought I’ll first review his second novel since it was what he wrote first. In a George Lucasian universe, this is the ‘right’ way to count what came first. Between The Assassinations was published after Aravind Adiga won the Booker Prize. A longish excerpt of the book was published in a issue of Hindustan Times’ Brunch Sunday supplement (this was before the book was released), and that had me hooked. I went ahead and bought the book as soon as it was available in stores.

Between The Assassinations is collection of short stories on the lives of people based in a small town called Kittur in Karnataka, where Aravind Adiga hails from. The book is titled so because the timeline of the stories is between the period of Indira Gandhi’s assassination to Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination. In praise of the book, each and every short story is exquisitely described – you will feel as if you yourself are present there in each situation. (This trait of Aravind Adiga’s writing comes up in his later book The White Tiger too.)

There was a reason this book wasn’t published earlier and it is this – it is goddamn boring. All the short stories are just a description of lives of people in a small town city. Nothing sets it apart as being in Kittur; you can transplant the stories to any other place and they’d still be the same. Nor do you give a damn about the characters; they aspire for nothing and go out of memory after a few pages. This situation is similar to a short story in this very book where an aspiring writer’s stories are turned down because although they are well-written, yet the characters ‘want’ nothing. None of the stories are related to each other in any way. I kept hoping maybe he’d do that a la Crash / Babel, which would make the effort spent reading worthwhile, but no. Stories have no bearing to the two Gandhi assassinations either, except that the author said so. The incidents could be set in any other period without making a difference.

Between The Assassinations feels like a scientifically accurate paper describing the lifetime of snail – written in excruciating detail but utterly pointless. In isolation some of the stories are good but the novel doesn’t work as a cohesive unit; more importantly, it is marketed as a novel and not as a collection of short stories. Only a resident of Kittur would give a damn about it. Also, everything is written from a firang perspective. Dal becomes lentil stew; everything else is similarly translated. Ironic when you consider that Picador released this book only in India (at least, that was the situation when I bought the book).

What happened, I guess is, that Aravind Adiga using this novel as a ‘shooting practice’ before moving on the to ‘Olympic Games’ (his next novel) and chose the easiest topic which came to mind. Once he won a Booker, the greedy bastards publishing companies knew they could pawn this other book off as “…from the Booker-winning writer of The White Tiger“. Released it only in India since they knew nobody other than an Indian would rush out to buy and read this.

But for Aravind Adiga, this was good practice. For what he wrote next was truly praiseworthy…