Palimpsest

Only recently have I started working on the Mac OS X and was appalled, yet unsurprised, at its lack of resources for Indic language inputs other than the devanagari based ones. Tamil, as usual, has enough clout to have not one but two keymaps that ship in the box. Telugu has none. Neither does Urdu.

As I was groping around the net for something to type a fancy status message on Adium, I found this keyboard layout creator called Ukelele (bless the putative souls of those good ole Christians and the fortuitous philanthropy which their misled faith exacts of them).

I'm sharing a rudimentary Telugu INSCRIPT keyboard I created as a result of a half-an-hour's play on the Ukelele in the hope that it might save someone else 30 mins of their time. I have no pretensions of it being a perfect keyboard. Just try it and share it if you like it. Else just junk it: don't bitch. :)

Verse has not been a very popular way of reaching out to the novel-readership out there for more a century. Poetry daunts most of us, especially when it’s set to rhyme and meter, one almost involuntarily hunts for annotations and/or anecdotes periodically to retrieve what allusions are assumed to have slipped through the sieve of lay reader’s well-holed literary background.

But Vikram Seth keeps it simple. Without winging too much into surrealism, nor showing off Classical knowledge of legend or myth, he makes his verse accessible to the less than semi-erudite and yet manages to enthral the wannabe erudite among us. His analogies are transparent, his little learned jokes far from Nabokovian. And in the one place he uses an abstruse French borrowing (“petrissage”), he unabashedly footnotes its meaning on that very page, heedless of the hisses he might incur from more sophisticated quarters.

The plot is simple enough: its flow mostly linear with a generous dose each of comedy, irony, tragedy and romance. In dealing with the lives of yuppies, it has almost all the major Californian lifestyles covered in well-rounded 3D characters: John, the lonely hunky geek; his Stanford bud Phil Weiss, an ex-geek converted to socially responsible environmental activism and father to a motherless son; their mutual friend Janet Hayakawa, the sculptor-musician daughter of Nisei; Ed, a young Christian tennis-player coming to terms with his budding gayness; Liz, a blonde lawyer with pacifist leanings and a family in the Californian wines business.

Between these, all viable romantic connections are made (John, Liz; Phil, Ed; Liz, Phil, and thence John, Janet). The gaps in the plot are masterfully filled with events and emotions precipitated by the more ancillary participants: children (John’s son), pets (Liz’s cat Charlemagne rejects John, and later so does Liz), neighbours and siblings (John & Phil are reunited at Liz’s sister’s concert).

The air of the novel is balmy, yet cool: the synecdochical Golden Gate standing for the much-hyped Californian sunny lifestyle of the young and the beautiful. Like the steady humour, the constant undercurrent of angst and pathos is controlled and subtle, right until it erupts into a dramatic car crash at the end, fatal to one of the central characters. That apart, there are no moments of high pathos aimed at making the more sensitive reader wriggle in pain; neither are there any deliriously belly-huggingly laughable parts. The overall tone is serene and easy-going.

All said, the book could have easily lapsed into the ranks of the predictable if it were not for timely twists in the tale that make Liz chose Sense over Sensibility (Phil over John), and allows a neighbour to laugh outright with warm understanding at a newly orphaned child with two fractured arms. The issue of Environmental responsibility & pacifism is dealt surprisingly with a homily coming from a priest.

This very social book seems almost ready-made fodder for a TV adaptation. It is, hopefully, just a matter of time before some enterprising producer cinematises or serialises this delightful and quirky book into a sure-fire romantic tragicomic hit.

http://stoneandscott.com/humor.asp

Nonsense writing workshops anyone?

As a volunteer educator, I assure underprivileged city kids that they too will be able to afford middle-class dreams one day. That Education and Awareness is their way to achieve freedom from the constant hardship that ignorance entails. I try to help them preen themselves into being thinking units in what will hopefully be tomorrow's largest functional democracy. A lot remains to be done to help people make informed choices.

I know I know, it's like whittling at this mountain of Weltschmerz armed with a teaspoon but I'd still want to believe that this counts. The Old Man once said "Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it. "  Even though we're up against the infuriating ignorocracy of the juggernauts: religion & tradition, I still see hope.

Nevertheless, I still can't help philosophising (so shoot me): isn't Philanthropy a supremely selfish thing? Isn't it something wannabe social butterflies indulge in to exorcise their class guilt? Isn't it ready fodder for boasty reunion-time conversations? The perfect padding to otherwise infernally dull résumés (professional & personal)? A strut to prop up flagging self-esteems? Hmm?

Untrammeled by the burden

Allusions and allegories have no hold on me,

For you have read too much--

I speak wantonly,

Nay no escape shall I cede you,

Into this academic game.

©Rohit Dasari, April 2003

Chomsky says the apparatus for language learning is built-in into a human brain and is independent of its owner's ethnography. That everybody is capable of learning any language, it's just the cultural acclimatisation which decides what cases are vocalised and what remain implicit in the language being learnt.

The sounds in a language are (empirically) tied with the ethnic origin of its speakers. But are these sounds really arbitrary? Is there some nexus between meaning & sound which cuts across linguistic boundaries?

Would that be a good thing, though, I wonder: I remember having this argument with a friend ("friend" (Freundin, more like)) of mine about how it's silly to assume that /*ma*/ (regexese ;) is the "most natural" sound to be learnt first because it represents the "universal" sound for mother and is "easiest" to produce physically. Bosh, quoth I, citing Disraeli (was it him?) who said, "Forgive him, for he takes the customs of his tribe to be the laws of nature." What about the Japanese who go "haha" & the Dravidians who go /*ai/? Are their kids any less "natural"?

Imagine if the "faculty for meaning" was inbuilt into our heads like the "faculty for grammar"...

Yum, I'll freeze that thought for now and thaw it out over a conversazione some other day.

I thought it was a technical term meant to represent the adding of an 'n' (a sound represented by the Arabic letter 'nun') at the end of latin nouns ending in ~tio . e.g. Latin constitutio becomes constitution in French/English, constitución in Spanish, or how Plato in English becomes Platon in French, etc.

That opens up the question of this whole debate going on about kids nowadays relying on google too much. It's a bit like a religion.

I remember when I used to spout arcane words back in college just to impress some pretty thing who almost invariably went back, cutely did some cute homework, and came back to me with the cute plaint "I couldn't find it in the dictionary--is that a word at all: you're just making it up, aren'tya?"

Kids!

What's the meaning of committing to someone when both know that attraction is beyond Will?

I know what you're thinking "sexual attraction is not everything." I guess at 25, it seems kinda pointless to stick around with someone you're not really attracted to.

I wonder what sexual attraction is substituted with when one grows older...