These Are The Daves I Know I Know- Rakesh Khanna

Today’s Dave is Rakesh Khanna, the lone male and the lone Rakesh in the Blaft Publications trinity. I asked him to send picture for blog post and this is what he sent. It is an eyefoot.



It reminded me of some art I had done myself, which I call The Happy Dolphin.




But let us get back to the eyefoot.



If you are a good person, you will think that little anklet thing is a little anklet thing representative and celebratory of Indian ethnicity and culture. If you are not a good person, you will think it is a kind of footcuff made of string and used in extremely soft forms of bondage. The eye looks a lot like the eye found in drawings of murderous gigantic squid, like it’s saying ‘You want to start something, son? You want a piece of me, motherfucker? You want some Milk Bikis?’ Ok maybe the eye wouldn’t ask if you wanted Milk Bikis. If it did though, I’d say no because I remember that Biscuit Gang that haunted Indian trains many years ago. Don’t Take Milk Bikis From Eyes! What is a Biki?

Anyway, the eyefoot is Rakesh Khanna who is Dave. And this is the interview.




km- So I know for a fact that at one point you were totally into Nigerian movies and editing math text books at the same time. Now watch how I connect this with your strange reading habits. Ready? Ok, here goes. Because you watched Nigerian movies and edited math text books at the same time, I am curious to know what attracts you to writing that might be called left-of-center, stuff people don’t always hear about or dismiss as being too something or another. You are one of the very few people I know who actually seeks out/reads non-mainstream stuff. What do you look for when you look for something to read or will you read anything?


rk- I think I'm just the sort of person who gets a really big kick out of saying "Oooh! Look at this cool weird shiny thing I found!" If you only go to see the highest-grossing movies, and you only listen to music that gets a lot of radio play, and you only read books that have won the Booker prize or something, then you are basically killing your chances of ever getting to excitedly tell all your friends about a brand new discovery.

On the other hand, if the only movies you watch are ones that do really badly at the box office, and the only books you read are ones that get bad reviews or whatever, then you're going to end up watching and reading a lot of lousy crap. A good way around this problem is to find things that are very popular in cultures that are really different than yours. Like, say, Nollywood movies. Nobody in India or in the U.S. knows about them. But they're massively popular in Nigeria, so you can safely bet that there's some good stuff there worth checking out while you're cleaning up a mess of multistep trigonometry solutions where the authors have incorrectly used significant figures and ended up with massive rounding errors.

(km- 'A good way around this problem is to find things that are very popular in cultures that are really different than yours.' word that.)






km- One of your posts on the blaft blog was about weird English writing on children’s clothing. What are some of the things that have struck you about English in India, in the literature and how it is used on things like clothing, song lyrics, etc?


rk- Actually I kind of want to skip this one because I've started to worry that we're obsessing a little too much about the English language on each others' blogs. I wouldn't mind talking about it so much if it wasn't called "English" -- it seems like we're talking about England, and we're not.

(km- word that too. And yes, this is so not about England.)






km- Five of the strangest books/short stories you’ve read. Go.


* "Or All the Seas with Oysters" by Avram Davidson.

* "Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron" by Daniel Clowes, and pretty much everything else from Eightball comics. There was a short piece about a furry rodent-thing and some ear buds that kind of won for weird.

* Liner Notes for Composition 165 (for 18 instruments) by Anthony Braxton.

* "The Epileptic Bicycle" by Edward Gorey.

(km- niiiiice title)

* "Ghost of Hoppers" by Jaime Hernandez. Grown-up Margarita Luisa Perlita Chascarillo is hands-down the hottest illustrated woman of all time. Like, in every frame. Ok yeah I know the question was about weirdness and not about hot illustrated women but still.

(km- I just realized that I don’t know who the hands-down hottest illustrated man of all time is. I must remedy this immediately.)

I wanted to include a couple of things Blaft has published in the list but then I thought I'd keep 'em separate.

* "Zero Degree" by Charu Nivedita.

* "Some Singular Event" by you.

(km- aw tanks)



km- You guys were at the Frankfurt Book fair a while back. What were some of the things about the book fair that really surprised you?


rk- How big it was. The number of hip Euro book-chicks with hip designer lime green specs and sassy business attitudes. The legions of German manga fans in outrageous homemade costumes.

(km- what's the difference between lime green and green apple green and green tea green?)




km- What’s with you and poetry?


rk- Not into it.

I'll admit that I have actually liked a poem once in a rare while. I went through an e e cummings phase in high school and "Salamandra" by Octavio Paz is super deadly and Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" is pretty great. Old poetry and epic poetry I'm ok with, Homer and Chaucer and the Icelandic Edda and all that. But most modern English poetry just rubs me the wrong way, all that wasted white space on the page bugs me and whenever I have to sit through readings I get really badly squirmy and uncomfortable.


(km- I’m going to write you a poem using the bad rhyme generator. Here goes.

rakesh khanna does not dig poetry
for the living outnumber the dead tonight
but that which has the most poetry.
Donkeys are always right

I bet this could get published if you sent it to the right place. I bet you it could)





km- One thing we have in common is we have very…oh, what’s the word…‘unconventional’ crushes. I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ve had an on-again, off-again crush on John Goodman and there was a time when I crushed on Jerry Springer. Now I don’t think your fascination with Chinnaponnu qualifies as an ‘unconventional’ crush because I sort of understand the attraction. But I would like to know what you like about her and how you first heard about her.


rk- I picked up a copy of her album Marikkozhunthe in Landmark several years ago mostly because she looked so hot on the album cover holding that goat in her arms. I was hooked from the first track, which is the super-rocking "Aadukku Thaara Vachcha", and then there is the slow and heartbreaking "Anbulam Konden Ammavukku Magal Ezhutham Kadidham" later on... that whole album is just so awesome. And then her Sivapaththikaram song was really good, and then there is "Nakku Mukku" of course... I dunno, she's just great. I really really really hope she comes for Sangamam cuz I missed her last year.

(km- ‘Anbulam Konden Ammavukku Magal Ezhutham Kadidham’, totally agree, great song)




km- I love many, many things about the show Torchwood (yay Ianto Jones!!). Like in one episode, this guy ends up going insane and screaming (like I-think-my-spine-just-decalcified-itself screaming) for 20 hours a day because he looked into the heart of a Dark Star (he had also been sucked into The Rift and been on a burning planet so maybe the whole Dark Star thing was just the last straw). What do you think he saw in the heart of the Dark Star? What would make you go so insane you would scream for 20 hours a day?


rk- Actually I have mostly managed to avoid American TV for many years, except on rare occasions when family members become obsessed with something and start buying DVDs of entire seasons. So I have never seen Torchwood and don't know really what you're talking about. There was an old John Carpenter movie they used to play on TV called Dark Star, which was a goofy low-budg comedy about a bunch of guys on an incredibly boring decades-long space journey, and they've got an alien pet who's very obviously made out of a beach ball, and then they've got to teach phenomenology to a computerized explosive device that's gone off its rocker. I enjoyed that movie. Here are a couple of things that would make me go insane and scream for 20 hours a day: Over-exposure to Hotel California by the Eagles or Summer of 69 by Bryan Adams; being forced to eat mayonnaise.

(km- Torchwood is British so avoid no longer! According to Wikipedia, which is always completely right and true, "A dark star is a theoretical type of star that may have existed early in the history of the universe before conventional stars were able to form. They would be composed mostly of normal matter, like modern stars, but a high concentration of neutralino dark matter within them would generate heat via annihilation reactions between the dark matter particles." This dark matter could very well be the songs Hotel California and Summer of 69 played on indefinite loop on a planet where it is always your birthday and everyone is so happy and giving you lots of presents which are bottles and bottles of mayonnaise and your cake is made of mayonnaise and they force you to eat the cake and you're like NO! but they don't listen and you get so sick you pass out and when you get up it's your birthday all over again. Although I kinda like mayonnaise. But I'm with you on the Hotel California and Summer of 69.)

What Is Blaftatronic Halwa?

Blaftatronic Halwa is

1) Stale, bus-stand halwa which causes stomach problems exactly 15 minutes into your 7 hour bus journey

2) Halwa that has something in it that is either soft, moldy cashews or partially fossilized raisins and when you eat it (which you do, because you are stupid), it tastes like french fries.

3) Halwa made from broken motherboards and battery acid.

4) The halwa you tried to make once that not only solidified into something much harder than granite, it swallowed up the frying pan, a small spoon and three casual acquaintances who were standing too close to the stove at the time.

5) The brand new blog from Blaft Publications

If you answered 2, that's really gross and possibly reflects badly on your eating habits and diminishes your worth as a person. But if you answered 5, YOU'RE ABSOLUTELY RIGHT!!! The Blaft Blog has finally arrived and we all of us together are so much looking forward to the blaftastic things they will spark and sparkle the internetz with.

First post is an interview with Myself. Here is excerpt:-

they see me just walking through the fields that are all droughted and stuff and they’re like oh my god you have to play for our team, you’re so awesome and I’m like no and I’m sad and emaciated but I can speak really good English so they’re like oh no please you have to, you speak good English and I’m like no but then I say yes and then we go for the tournament and the other team are like playing dirty and they have black hair and they keep glaring at us in slow motion but we persevere and we win because we are awesome and unconventional and it starts to rain and I say oh my village needs this rain and I am here in this rain and my village is over there and it’s not in the rain and everyone cries but I don’t because I am awesome and unconventional.

Click to read the rest. Go on, you know you want to.

k

Five Particular Things In No Particular Order

1. Song I Didn’t Want To Like But I Do
I really, really did not want to like Mutya Buena’s cover of Fast Car. For one thing, it's Fast Car and for one another thing, she was a Sugababe. But I like it. I think it is a good cover and she has a great voice. And the reason why it's not like the Tracy Chapman version is because the Tracy Chapman version is like the Tracy Chapman version.

2. Song I Thought I Would Like But I Don’t
I was totally ready to like this one. If this song had been on Facebook, I was ready to hit the Like button and add a comment that said LIKE!!!! This was not to be. I thought Coal War by Joshua James was catchy but the lyrics…

I ain't cutting my hair till the good lord comes
Arrive upon the mountain just to see what we have done,
I ain't cutting my hair, cutting till the good lord comes.

I originally thought he was saying ain’t cutting my hair till the girl don’t come, which I think is way better. He also says he ain't open his eyes 'til we all walk free and he ain't pickin' up a paper 'til the wild wind blows. Which is just as well, it would probably be hard to read the paper if you aren't into opening your eyes.

3. Journal Interestingness
Rakesh Khanna put me on to Words without Borders, specifically this story that was translated from Náhuatl. Now they have a new issue that features International Science Fiction with work from Stanisław Lem, Tomasz Kołodziejczak, Olga Slavnikova, Zoran Živković, Hiroshi Yamamoto, Machado de Assis, Liu Cixin, Pablo A. Castro, and Muhammad Husain Jah.


4. Speaking of Science Fiction
From a Blaft tweet- 'Convicted pornographer Dr. L Prakash has written a science fiction "graphic novel" from jail. ZOMG.' ZOMG indeed! Who knew that the Indian penal system was conducive to writing science fiction graphic novels! I foresee a lot of press linking his porno past to the word 'graphic'. I also foresee many people trying to get a hold of this book in the hopes of seeing boobies.


5. Upcoming Excitementness
All full excitements for Blaft's new blog, which should be honoring us with its mellifluous presence sometime in the near future. In the meantime, you can kindly enjoy this fast binding blaftness.

okbai.

k

These Are The Daves I Know I Know

Hai everybody!! Welcome to my blog!! Yay!!

First, a big thanks to everyone who helped/gave input on putting this together.

I would like to dedicate my very first blog post to something I hope to do on a somewhat regular basis- These Are The Daves I Know I Know. Inspired by a song from my youth, Daves are people I don’t know very well but I know them a little and I think they’re neat. So I ask them questions and they answer, sometimes they lie but what can you do.

Our very first Dave is Rashmi Devadasan. Along with Rakesh Khanna, who is her husband and Kaveri Lalchand who is not her husband, they run the publishing company known as Blaft. Rashmi is neat because she makes movies and her middle name is Ruth. She has worked in the Tamil movie industry for 35040 days and is part of the Podimaas Kavarchi Pachai Killis, an army/band of wandering poets who will work on poems on any subject for cash down payment, one installment only. They also do ninja style stalking on alternate Mondays and leap years, in case anyone is interested.


km- Why Blaft? Why couldn’t you name your publishing company something more Indian like Verdant Monsoon Tales from Under the Coconut Tree or Indus Elephant Press?

rd- They were already taken! We had considered "Blushing Crimson Brocade", or was it "Blushing Crimson Barcode"? And another option was "Fresh Indo Tumeric Press" and oh yeah, "Fragrant Saffron Routes Ink". We were sitting by the Kathipara junction nursing a flat tyre, when we heard this sound vibrating through the monsoon laden dusk. The sound became a word, and the word was, er, Blaft.



km- Do you like the song Don’t Touch My Ghaghariya Rangarasiya? Don’t tell lies.

rd- We love and embrace all music and all songs. Though Naaka Mukka has been the ruler of all things musical for some time now.

(km- Don’t Touch My Ghaghariya Rangarasiya!!! I love this song. I can't tell you how much I love this song because I love it so much.)



km- What are the things you don’t like about Indian writing today?

rd- System Alert-sorry we are unable to access the data, shutting down ...blip

(km- sorry, that was a very suicidal question.)



km- Where do you think the term ‘sidey’ comes from?

rd- From Chennai, but today it is a pan-urban Indian English adjective most commonly used to describe a certain set of males, sometimes females also.

(km- I heard it was a term used to describe the ‘side’ dancers in movies who always looked very unhealthy and sad like they just wanted to go home and die)



km- I think it’s neat that in some parts of our beloved country, the term ‘fully without’ means completely naked. I used it in this story. This is not a question, it’s just a plug for my story. This is also a plug for Rashmi's stop motion clip which you can see here (it's in Tamil but it's pretty to look at because it has large talking chicken leg and a salt shaker walking through beautiful night forest dotted with fiber optic treelets that look like electric blue broccoli under shiny paper moonlight which makes the heart feel somewhat. Also they repeatedly refer to Juliet as Soolee and there is a plastic pink unicorn type thing and some gender switching happens later on I think.)



km- Will the Great Indian Vampire movie only be made if it is about poor vampires? Why do so many Indian books/movies that are marketed to the rest of the world seem to be somewhat fetishized representations of our poor and if someone brings this up, why do people say ‘oh my god, you’re so mean to poor people’?

rd- Maybe, from a purely marketing pint of view, that is what sells. The West is comfortable with these images and this kind of content, because that is what has been selling for all this time: history, exotica, erotica, middle–class angst, sagas of immigration to the West, the hardships of cultural adjustment, second generation immigrant identity, and no-holds-barred abject poverty. If we ask why, we are accused of wanting to cover up Indian reality, gloss it over, as these are the topics that represent the true nature of the country.

Also it seems like when people say ‘the rest of the world’ in this debate they're always talking about the US and the UK. In other Asian countries, in African cities with a large Indian diaspora, I think people are more clued in and aware of the different facets of this country.



km- Living in Singara Chennai, you are well aware of the nasal clusterfuck known as the Cooum River, which I like to think of as a good friend whose body is decomposing and also spewing out toxic rotten eggs at the same time. Some years ago I vaguely remember some kind of harmful waste (nuclear? toxic? exotic?) was accidentally dropped into the Cooum and then they pulled it out again and then they dropped it in again and then they pulled it out. The Cooum is apparently the city’s biggest sewer and 80% more polluted than treated sewage, which is pretty special. And coupled with the fact that there was nuclear-toxic-exotic-waste in it at some point, I think there are mutant things growing down there. What do you think is at the bottom of the Cooum?

rd- Madras Mutant Virgin Maidens, who, a hundred years ago, jumped to their watery graves for love, defying arranged marriages. These daring dead lasses lie preserved by the chemical soup of the last century, entombed in sludge-covered pods made from matted, solidified hair and the bodies of the river shrimp that live and breed in the slimy, glutinous riverbed.

The maidens will arise in the year 2012 in the month of Margazhi, on the night of a full moon. The Cooum will boil like a boiling pot and the pods will shoot up like stones from a hundred demon-possessed catapults. They will burst open in mid-air and the MMVMs will take to the sky hissing and steaming like a battalion of Diwali-Offer Prestige pressure cookers. These unearthly maidens, it is told, will be terrifying to gaze upon, yet they will be curvaceous, clad in sand-caked pattu saris, and bedecked in temple jewellery from their crowns to their toes. Their fingernails will shoot bolts of current and if they are angered, their breath will create hurricanes.

The only thing they fear are keerai vadais.

(km- I am also very scared of keerai vadais)

** Rakesh Khanna also wanted to answer this question.

I used to live in Nungambakkam really close to the Cooum. I would walk on a bridge over the Cooum several times every day to a pottikadai on the other side to get a coffee and a cigarette. I was on this kick of reading a lot of evolutionary biology back then, too, Dawkins and Ernst Mayr and Stephen Jay Gould and E.O.Wilson and stuff, so I actually spent a lot of time thinking about the mutant things growing in the river.

It’s pretty amazing how much stuff actually survives there. It’s very green. There are a lot of plants and snails and dragonflies and bats. I saw a water snake once. People let their buffalos wade in it. Of course, it’s also clogged with plastic and human shit and weird chemicals and it smells horrible. Once I saw a big pile of circuit boards and wiring sticking out of the mud.

There was this big debate a while ago in evolutionary biology about “punctuated equilibrium”, which is the theory that evolution proceeds in fits and starts, rather than steady gradual change. Human civilization is really recent and sudden, in evolutionary time, and I don’t think anybody understands very well how our drastic changes to the environment will play out in the grand scheme. It’s generally agreed that we are causing a mass extinction event, but no one’s very sure whether it’ll show up in the fossil record 100 million years from now as a little minor blip or a catastrophic Permian-Triassic style wipeout. I guess a lot depends on what happens in the next few centuries; the human population of the earth has gone from 3 billion to 7 billion in my lifetime, and if that rate keeps up, I suppose life is pretty fucked. Anyway, I think places like the Cooum River—and Buckingham Canal near my new place in Neelankarai, which is even more polluted and disgusting—are probably right now acting as cradles for the evolution of new species that may eventually replace the ones we’re destroying.

Another place I’m really interested in is the Pacific Trash Vortex, which is an area in the Pacific Ocean roughly the size of South India that’s full of floating plastic. It all winds up there because of ocean currents, this thing called the North Pacific Gyre. I keep wondering if some organism will evolve there that can eat polyethylene or polyvinyl chloride. I guess there are people trying to build organisms like that, too, but I think it would be far cooler if something could evolve on its own in the Trash Vortex or Buckingham Canal or the Cooum. Maybe a plastophagic life form will arise from the bottom of the Cooum that can somehow use the discarded circuitry and e-waste to become superintelligent and then slowly take over the planet and enslave humanity and force us to live in grimy underground work camps producing polymers for it to eat. That would be awesome Darwinian karma.

(km- well that's something to look forward to.)



km- If you were to recommend five books to someone who wasn’t familiar with Indian writing in English, which books would you recommend and why?

rd- 1) Swami and Friends by R.K.Naryanan- why ? because it is simply pure, without any gyaan, pretense, natural and you can relate to it no matter what age you are or where you are from.

2) Jalebi Curls by Niveditha Subramaniam, illustrated by Kavita Singh Kale- a wonderful children's story about a Maharajah who likes ...

(km- who likes what, dots?)

3) Nagraj: Skin Shedder (Raj Comics)- a great home spun super Hero he is simply the best better than all the rest...he has super serpentine killer cool powers

4) Nagraj: Alter Ego (Raj Comics) same as above for 'why'?

5) Your book- Insects Are Just Like You and Me Except Some of Them Have Wings because it is a great collection of stories of people that you have met/ could have met /are going to meet who talk and think in everyday normal spoken Indian English and who are in situations that are both real and sometimes magically altered states of that reality. In a nut shell - the writing is quite Dhool!

(km- aw……)



km- What are the things you miss most about Old Skool India? And by Old Skool I mean the days when there was only one television channel, people drank Gold Spot and ice cream usually meant pista or tyootee-frootee.

rd- TV serials like' Nukkad', shows like 'Oliyam Oliyam' but is it still on though on DD? I do not have TV so cannot confirm, miss Barbapapa. In Chennai, the pre-flyover parts of the city. Also miss the sight of little girls from the age of 6 to 12 in frilly hauckoba and hand-embroidered dresses.Today lots of well meaning parents dress their 3-year-olds in the clothes Ash wore in 'Dhoom 2' or maybe I am fashion dinosaur. And as hard core lover of eatables I miss the days when restaurants in Chennai did not have to claim that their menu represents 'fusion food', by the by is there any 'fission food'? Or is that the next episode, I guess I am also a foodie dinosaur. But honestly 'Manuchurian Prawns Masala Dosai with mildly spiced date and lemon grass chutney'????? (yes I committed a chinna hyperbole, but not far from the truth ya not far from the truth)

(km- I miss watching Sharon Prabhakar sing English songs on DD. One time I watched her singing I Hate Myself For Loving You and she was running around in a circle on the "stage", pumping her fists in the air, round and round and round Sharon Prabhakar went. I miss that. I also miss Superhit Muqabla)



km- You make movies and that is very awesome. Let us consider this scenario. I sell off my eggs, my blood, my skin and all my internal organs and give you all the money. This doesn’t amount to much but luckily you also find 100 million American dollars lying in the middle of the road one day. With all this money and the nine rupees forty seven paisa you get from my consolidated body parts, what kind of movie would you make?

rd- ‘Madras Mutant Virgin Maidens’ and ‘Rise of the Madras Mutant Virgin Maidens’, two bilingual epics. And I would make ‘Aatha Naan Pass Aiyata’ a comedy that starts in Tuticorin and ends in Jo-burg.

(km- I thought you'd at least thank me for the body parts and money and stuff but whatever.)