These Are The Daves I Know I Know- Ellen Parker

Today’s Dave is Ellen Parker who I like to call Allen and who is a writer and also the editor of the amazing zine FRiGG, which began way back in the spring of 2003 and is still here in all its awesomeness. Behold the FRiGG! Dig the bloodshotedness of the pretty eye!





Allen is also from the exotic land of America! America is where everyone is rich and happy and the streets are paved with marshmallows and Coca Cola grows on trees!

FRiGG was one of the first zines I ever fell in love with. FRiGG will also be putting out a themed issue very soon on …world peace? Poverty? Injuns are Just Like You and Me Except Most of Them Have Funny Names? NO! It’s going to be on the show Law and Order! I think more magazines should have themes like this.

I remember this one episode of Murphy Brown, where there was this guy from Minnesota and he had a wife called Ellen and 2 boys and whenever he referred to that segment of his family he called them Ellen and The Boys only I guess because he was from Minnesota he kept saying Allen and The Boys. If Ellen Parker ever starts a boy band, I think she should call it Allen and The Boys. I also think there was an 80’s country band called Bailie and The Boys. There was also a band from India called Les Boys. Anyway.




km- So you and I have 142 common friends (update-146) on Facebook, which means we’re superduper close friends. And yet I do not know why you named your magazine FRiGG. Did you really want to name it fuck?


ap- It makes me feel kind of bad that you think the magazine is named "fuck."

(km- I’m sorry. I don’t know why I even thought that because you never use the eff word ever.)

This is hideously crass--and yet it is partially correct. Yes, to some people, "frigg" means "fuck." To others, "Frigg" is a Norse goddess. She was the wife of Odin--in fact, she was the goddess of marriage, and her primary domain was the household ... but she allegedly had affairs with several men besides the hubby. Sassy! (So, "frigg" could also mean a married Norse goddess who ... well.)

(I have researched this matter: http://friggmagazine.com/volumeonearchive/parkerellenfriggquestion.htm)

Whereas "frigg" doesn't only mean "fuck," you're probably not the first person to think so. Sometimes I see bios of writers who have been in FRiGG but they don't include FRiGG among their publications, and this hurts my feelings a little, but then I think: Well, bitch, why would they want to include "fuck" among their list of publications?

Although I have heard of a print poetry magazine named "Fuck." A poet who was in FRiGG a while back told me that he'd also appeared in Fuck. I'm like, There's a magazine named Fuck? And he was like, Yeah, it's a good mag. So now that writer can list FRiGG and Fuck in his creds. I'm sure he's proud.



km- So what’s life like in America? No, I’m kidding. No seriously, what’s life like in America?


ap- Today in America I am freakin' sizzling mad that bankers might have given themselves large bonuses for their "work" in 2009. This absolutely makes me go ballistic and I want to rise up and slice off some people's heads.

(km- I don’t understand, why aren’t you talking about the Coca Cola trees?)



km- In an interview you did in 2006, you said that if you had to describe FRiGG in one word, it would be ‘good’. Is that how you would describe FRiGG today? How do you think FRiGG has changed since then?


ap- FRiGG is still "good." Sometimes it is "very good." Sometimes it is even "excellent"! Depends on your mood.



km- How would you describe Allen the writer in five words? They don’t have to be English words also. And you can make up words if you like.


ap- I love that you call me Allen! I would describe her (me) as a writer like this: "She is not ever disinterested." Wait--that's a double negative, which is confusing. How about: "She is always very interested." Hmmm. More like: "She is always very engaged." What's the point of writing if you're not engaged? (Why do we keep talking about marriage?)

(km- for work of allen the writer, see this awesome vid of Gabriel Orgrease reading/doing performance art type thing of her flash Home Pharmacy. You can also read this and this.)



km- Whenever I get rejected by a magazine, I like to blame it on racism or xenophobia. What do you like to blame rejection on?


ap- I like to blame rejection on the fact that some editors do not know how to fucking read.

(km- oh nice, illiteracy)



km- Please complete this little micro so I can send it out under the name KuzhaliEllen ManickavelParker and maybe finally get pubbed in elimae.

Coffee mornings hang in thick strands, curling around the heart like a long word that starts with ‘z’ and ends with ‘a’. It’s been three days since anything has happened here. It’s been the best three days ever.


ap- Coffee mornings hang in thick strands, curling around the heart like a long word that starts with ‘z’ and ends with ‘a’. It’s been three days since anything has happened here. It’s been the best three days ever. I am trying to think of a long word that starts with "z" and ends with "a." There is "zebra," but this is not long. Unless it's a zebra that is made out of rubber and then stretched like Gumby!

(km- so I decided to edit this a bit, you know really hone it down to the absolute crystal core, the ultimate being, the universal spark that makes this microfiction a living, breathing entity. So here it is,

coffee mornings. the best three days ever. gumby.

I took out the exclamation mark because I think muted tragedy is far more effective. I now believe it is too good for elimae and I will sub it under my own name because I did all the real work and all you really did was add Gumby, which I'm not really sure works but I kept it in anyway because I felt sorry for you.)




km- According to the ‘In what BADASS way will you TOP YOURSELF’? quiz, your result was that YOU WILL CUT YOUR OWN FLUNKING HEAD OFF IN FRONT OF A SCHOOL BUS. How do you see that happening and what are your feelings about the word ‘flunking’ being used as an expletive?


ap- Ohmigod, I love BADASS quizzes. They are the FUNNIEST ever. But I think Facebook banned them. Or else they made them use euphemisms for swear words. Like using "frigg" instead of "fuck." But this fools no one! So "flunking" is like "fucking" or "frigging." It's funny that they thought I would cut my own head off in front of a school bus. I forget why they thought I would do this. Actually, I would like to cut off bankers' heads in front of a school bus. A school bus full of American taxpayers. We would clap and cheer.

(km- Allen wanted to reiterate the following,)

Bio: Ellen Parker writes fiction and edits the online literary magazine called FRiGG, which is named for a goddess. A goddess, I tell you!

(km- here’s how I see the whole cutting off your own head thing happening. You are walking down the road paved with marshmallows and you have a chainsaw in your hand because you are going to cut some Coca Cola trees. And then you see this bunch of American bankers who are standing in front of a school bus that is filled with American taxpayers and you cut the bankers' heads off and everyone goes Yay Allen!! but they also say you have to go to jail because you made the marshmallow road dirty. And being unable to bear the thought of jail because maybe you’ve watched Oz and so you know all about what jails are really like, you take the chainsaw and cut your head off to avoid going to Oz where everyone eats oranges.)

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.)

These Are The Daves I Know I Know- Jai Undurti

Today's Dave is Jai Undurti who is part of the Hyderabad Graphic Novel Project. Jai offered the following bio- Jai is from Vizag and has been known to make things up. I'd like to add that he has also had dengue fever and he likes taking pictures of graveyards. He also claims to have been unbelievably close to the hallowed halls of Delhi's infamous Haagen Dazs but never made it inside, possibly because he did not have an international passport with him at the time.



km- These Are The Daves I Know I Know are supposed to be people I don’t know very well but I know them a little. I’m not sure if you qualify because I don’t know you at all. But I’m interviewing you anyway. Do you think this will hurt and betray the four people who read my blog?


ju- First off, I'd like to mention that this is the first time that I've ever been interviewed and I thank you for this opportunity to talk about our project.

I can sympathize with your constant readers, I picture them calling out each to each, "Friends, let us direct our faithful browsers to Third World Ghetto Vampire, that bastion of good taste in this vale of uproarious inequity, that site redolent with Kuzhali-goodness which we know and adore from the days of yore." And what happens when they get there? They see all this. And they will be much discomfited.

(km- you speak truly. I feel the only way to assuage their discomfitication would be to give me money which I believe would go a long way in making them feel a lot better.)




km- You are part of the Hyderabad Graphic Novel Project. What is it and why are you doing it?


ju- The Hyderabad Graphic Novel Project is a part of Yugantar (a Hyderabad-based NGO)'s Archive Hyderabad project. It all started in 2005-6 when my co-writer Jasraman and I scoured the streets of the Old City taking photographs of street livelihoods. People running small businesses like selling toys, crows (if you've been hit with a black magic spell, you transfer it to the crow and release it), professional flagellators, that sort of a thing. Over several months and visits, we could observe the physical fabric of the city being torn, old havelis being pulled down to make way for piles of concrete, neighborhoods being broken up for new development. We began thinking of the effect all this would have on the mental/spiritual fabric - what happens for example, when you can no longer tell a joke, when a joke ceases to be, when the cross-cultural references needed to understand the joke no longer exist. One idea I was obsessed with was the necropolis, an invisible city, the city beneath the city, that sort of a thing. We joked about starting a magazine called the "Necropolitan", a rag for the ghoul-about-town.

In 2007, we began working with Yugantar, a Hyderbad-based NGO, in an archive project - to interview elderly people whose childhoods were spent in the Hyderabad of the 1930s and 40s. We would encourage them to talk without trying to impose any structure - eventually we interviewed about 20-25 people with a total of 60-70 hours of footage. This was to be a pilot and the major IT company which was paying for it wanted to extend it, perhaps interviewing over 100 people. Well this major IT company got into some...ahem...major difficulties and funding dried up.

So we had all this material and didn't know where to go. One approach would be to cut it into some kind of documentary, probably centred around the single most disruptive event in the city's history - the "police action" of 1948. For that we would have to shoot plenty of extra material, to relieve the tedium of just having talking heads. Then, more importantly, all of these people were talking about a city that was, and we would need to recreate it, either through sets or CGI. Then we thought perhaps the best medium, in fact the only medium which could convey this lost city was comics. We were fortunate in finding a talented and experienced artist from Calcutta - Harsho Mohan Chattoraj.



As we worked on the concept, we decided we could expand the scope, spanning over 400 years of the city's history. In a nutshell, Hyderabad was built by the Persians as a model of Paradise, when paradise meant gardens and a fountain, the charbagh, which itself was a model of Eden. Today the idea of paradise is a mall with multiplex. Essentially, the comic looks at these two ideas of paradise and everything in-between.

(km- ‘what happens for example, when you can no longer tell a joke, when a joke ceases to be, when the cross-cultural references needed to understand the joke no longer exist.’ That’s a really, really good point.)




km- Why do you think Hyderabad is good graphic novel material?

ju- Hyderabad is many cities in one, like heaped carpets over one another. Every now and there, the badly worn fabric of one carpet shows its predecessor beneath. From the markets of the anterun which have a very Central Asian flavour it is only a short drive to the glass and concrete towers of the new city. The people have a ready, fantastic wit - we hope to reproduce it as faithfully as possibly.



Our story will start with the original builders – the Persians. Incidentally, the word paradise originates from Old Persian – pairi meaning around and diz meaning wall, i.e. a walled-in compound denoting garden.

The Persians who built Naavi-i-Isfahan (New Isfahan), the original name of Hyderabad, were driven to recreate heaven on earth itself, or rather, the gardens of Eden, from which man had been thrust out from. The four flowing channels of Charbagh reflect the four rivers of Eden. The ambitions of the primeval builders can be seen in the fact that at the time of Hyderabad’s founding, Isfahan was one of the largest cities in the world, indeed a popular saying would have it, “Esfahān nesf-e jahān ast” (To see Isfahan is to see half the world).



A hint of the feast of wonders that the city contains:

• Hyderabad was a base of the so-called "Thuggees", who much exercised the colonial imagination and have continued to do so ever since.

(km- Hyde = OG thug. word.)

• The Hyderabad police had an official exorcist who was deployed in cases of possession.

• Hyderabad was a Freemason hub with the Nizam, himself a Brother, donating one of his palaces to serve as their lodge.

• Golkonda was India's largest diamond mine at a time when all known diamond mines were in India. The mines were later closed, allegedly due to demonic infestation.

(km- why didn’t they didn’t call in the official exorcist?)

• There used to be Poet's tables in cafes, you had to pay just to sit at the table and listen to them. The poets got free tea. Also, "special tea" sometimes meant tea which was served without the waiter dipping his fingers in them.

(km- you know, it’s not so bad when they dip their fingers in the tea because you can convince yourself that the heat of the tea will somehow kill waiterfinger germs. It’s when they put their fingers in the drinking water that all is really and truly lost.)




km- I understand you once made a documentary on kolams. Why did you do this and what unexpected things did you learn about kolams?


ju- This was way back when I was an infant. It was part of a misguided attempt to enroll in a film-making course abroad. As they needed a portfolio, (and no, my numerous photographs of graveyards did not suffice) I had to make a short film. I travelled around Andhra, Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry, shooting with borrowed cameras from friends en route, entirely innocent of formats - it was shot in Mini-DV, VHS, Betacam etc. It was eventually edited in a marriage video studio.

I was interested, because muggulu (as they are called in Telugu) were always a part of the life around you, yet most people didn't have much of an idea about them, except that they have been around forever, one of the "givens" that you accept when you come into the world.

Another thing which attracted me was their transience, something which took so much effort to draw the previous night, usually was smudged beyond recognition as people left for the day's work - in fact crossing the muggu is supposed to be good luck. Incidentally, the idea behind the kolam is that of the labyrinth, a labyrinth where evil is supposed to lose its way. So, by being on the threshold it performs an important task, policing the frontier so to speak.

(km- that's kind of awesome)

Generally, observing the whole ritual, washing the threshold, the smell of that powder, it tells everyone that all is well in the world. In fact, one of the stories I've heard is that - you don't draw it when there has been a death in the family - during the Kurukshetra war - people in a neighborhood would know when someone had died in the war when there was no kolam outside. Knowing the absolute level of casualties in that war, you would slowly, day after day, see the kolams wink out as news from the battlefront would trickle in.

And kolams have been around for a long, long time. You can see such designs in Iceland, in Micronesia, in Cornwall. The omphalos, the navel of the world, of the ancient Greeks, had similar designs on them.

One of the highlights of the experience was filming a giant kolam drawing competition in Mylapore around the Kapaleeshwara Temple. It was organized by Mr Vincent D'Souza's "Myalapore Times". Imagine hundreds of mamis (is that the word?) with different approaches - some going for size, others making the designs as intricate as possible, some were very abstract reminiscent of Islamic art, some had incorporated text, poems within the designs, and you had the usual Disney motifs too, Goofy and Mickey et al.

The contestants were allocated patches of ground on the street, and soon the organizers had their hands full. Obviously as the drawings proceeded apace there were instances of "encroachments" - as rival kolams began overrunning each other - furious border disputes broke out - some women decided for a kind of "line of control" approach while others altered their edges and got the kolams to "flow" together. Equally wonderful was how some contestants had to incorporate existing conditions - potholes, telephone poles, rubble, etc into the designs.

Incidentally there was only one man who was participating and by the time the contest got over he was quite the media star, as all the TV and press people wanted to get their "bites" and his kolam was always surrounded by kibitzers.

To answer your question on unexpected things, it would be the relation between kolams and fractals. Kolams exhibit many of the features of fractal curves, the self-similar nature of the designs is quite obvious. A lot of work has been done in Madras - especially looking at kolams as a form of picture language.

(km- I love fractals! One of the things I liked in 2009!)

I believe that the mathematicians have divided kolams into three categories: the Regular Matrix Kolam, the Finite Matrix Kolam and the Context-free Regular Array Kolam!

(km- and there is a Matrix movie trilogy. Coincidence? I think not.)



km- I’ve come across this argument that the graphic novel is really just a marketing gimmick. How do you respond to that and what do you think makes the graphic novel unique from comics, what sets them apart?

ju- I am perfectly okay with comics. Graphic novels - well its just a toff way of saying it, if it allows more people to be seen reading them, that's fine.




km- I think the song ‘If You Come Today’ speaks differently to different people. In the end, I think we all take our own meanings from it and that’s what makes it such a superduper special song. What does the song 'If You Come Today' mean to you?

ju- The song, to me, really is about quantum indeterminacy. The seeming paradox of the lyrics is the paradox which can be heard throughout the universe like the beat of a mighty heart.

In ideal mechanics, a particle (point mass) follows a classical trajectory, which means that at every instant of time its position and momentum can be simultaneously and precisely determined in principle and in practice.

A quantum particle however always has some indeterminacy, for you can never determine its position and momentum simultaneously - if you know the position then the momentum is completely indeterminate and vice versa. It is this indeterminacy, this impreciseness that Dr Rajkumar returns to again and again with those hypnotic lines.

Dr Rajkumar also is not above subtle in-jokes. Quarks, for example, the fundamental particles of matter, are found in "flavours", up, down, charm, strange, top and bottom. You will agree that Dr Rajkumar's activities in the video of the song encompass all these flavours.

The song is a diamond rocket into that whirling void which is within us, without us. The jazzy syncopation cannot hide the destruction of the Newtonian cosmos. The revolving chandeliers cannot distract us from the ambivalent universe.

(km- epic props for connecting this song with quantum indeterminacy. Your last line in particular is very poignant and moves me to write a poem, using the bad poetry generator.

The revolving chandeliers cannot distract us from the ambivalent universe
Blister fish death wish cancer sticks
Let us now ride in a hearse.
filtering through smoke from candlewicks

Ep. Ick. Re. Sult)

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.)