A Book, An Odyssey and a Football Novice

JeevaNayagi2 Comments

 

I am a football illiterate. My vocabulary in football is limited to a mere goal, foul, Pele, Maradona, Messi, Ronaldo, Neymar and probably a few club names thanks to the newspapers I read. Not long ago, FC meant Food Court to me and not a Football Club. I have had friends and colleagues who used to swear that football isn’t a matter of life or death but something more than that. I could never comprehend the madness over it. I would laugh them off saying there are better things to fight and die for rather than chasing a ball into a net. In my defense, none of the football clubs had neither a Sachin Tendulkar nor a Rahul Dravid. Yet, when I travelled around Europe, I ended up taking stadium tours in Camp Nou, Santiago Bernabeu and Stamford Bridge because my friends loved football and I loved them. Just a walk through the stadiums listening to its stories was enough for me to be goose bumped. As I walked out of these stadiums, my respect for the game increased by manifolds. That was two years ago and that helped me add more words to my football vocabulary – Copa America, La Liga, UEFA and some more.

Fortunately for me I have this friend who says football is in his blood (sometimes I think there is only football and no blood) and wouldn’t rest until he contaminated mine too with football. So he sent me a birthday gift that read ‘Tiro – A football odyssey from Amazon to Alps’. A wicked move, I must say because he knew it was easier to make me read a book on football than get me to watch a football match. I fell partly for his trick and partly for the cover of the book. It looked beautiful in white and couldn’t let it get dusted in the book shelf.

tiro

Tiro is a collection of articles from goaldentimes.org, a renowned group of football story-tellers winning accolades all over the world. Hence the book has multiple authors and a diverse flavor to it too. The first impressive thing about the book is their ‘Line up’, where the ‘First Half’ of the book features 15 football stories from Latin America, the ‘Second half’ with another 15 stories but this time from Europe and then there is an ‘Extra time’ with 3 articles that has stories flowing across the continents. For an ardent football fan this would give the feel of a football match but for someone like me that was a very important first lesson. If not for Tiro, it would have taken me forever to learn that these regions have a very distinct and distinguished culture and history when it comes to football.

As the match began, the first half was terrific. There was a occasional drag towards the second half probably because some of the stories were a little too longer than the other ones, but the later part of the second half made up for it. And the extra time finished it just perfect. Every article carries an interesting short introduction of what is being covered in them that helps you decide whether or not to read it. However even if I was dozing off exhausted, reading these introductions through half droopy eyes would wake me up and let me finish the article. As for the articles, almost all of them are inspiring and engrossing stories knit very tactically and presented very poetically. I must say the GT boys are brilliant story tellers. I had to sneak out in between conversations with friends, during office hours and even during sleep to finish reading the stories that I had started. I wasn’t expecting to be hooked on to the book, but I was. And at times to YouTube too replaying few shots especially the ‘hand of god’ goal.

(I have replayed it so many times now and even different versions of it. Did he or did he not? This has been driving me mad. How do you people live with such suspense stories?)

The book starts from Brazil tracing down in detail the history of various footballing nations, their greatest victories, their biggest humiliations and their mighty come backs. It sings the glory of unsung heroes and paints the struggles of their lives. It makes you fall in love with those fallen stars and tells you why some deserved more than being forgiven. The book tells you how football has been an instrument of change bringing about a revolution in the political landscape of many of these countries and how footballers were not only sports icons but also champions of nationalist movements. I realize how ignorant I was to think of football as just a game of a ball and net with few mad men running around it while this ‘beautiful game’ has been the beacon of hope for multitudes across continents over generations. The stories of the lives that were saved by the game, the lives that were spared by the game, lives that were sacrificed for the game tells me why this not just a matter of life and death but a lot more than that. While the world is well aware of the wars on a football ground, Tiro also tells the world about the games fought on war fields with a knife hanging over their heads. And that is why Tiro is going be a very significant piece of sports literature not only for football aficionados but also for history enthusiasts across the globe.

Tiro has been a thoroughly enlightening, enriching and entertaining experience for me. I have just one thing to complain about at the cost of being called a lazy reader. But hey, how would you feel if you must switch television channels while watching a nail-biting match. That is how inconvenient it is to flip over the pages to read the chapter notes. It would have been wonderful had the chapter notes been added at the end of the page, especially for people who like me do need the help of chapter notes. I am still a football illiterate and will continue to blink when you say a quarter back or a 4-4-2 formation. Nevertheless, I have tremendously improved on my football vocabulary. I know what derby means. I know Alfred Di Stefano, Ruth Malosso and Barbosa. I know what a bicycle kick is. I even know some football chants. Finally, I know what Srinwantu Dey means when he says “Football is a palette of life which reflects all the emotions – joy, sorrow, grit, helplessness and determination”. And for that I am immensely grateful to my dear friend Aritra Biswas and the GT boys.

 

A blunder of Poetry – Po’try

Abhishek Jha2 Comments

Bangalore got its own Poetry Festival this year. Considering the fact that the city has a strong and vibrant poetry community that thrives in the bookstores, cafes, and parks; a poetry festival was in fact due and perhaps should have even come earlier than now. The festival was liked by most of the attendants. I must most sincerely thank the organizers for such a Herculean effort.

There is one more thing that must be spoken about. A book was specially commissioned to be unveiled at the festival. Po’try was released as an anthology of poems that were shortlisted from the entries that were received in response to the poetry contest conducted as part of the festival. The entries were supposed to be in English, Hindi, or Kannada and required the number of lines to be more than 25.
As per the claim made by the publishers, some 300 poems were received out of which 159 were shortlisted to be published. The selected poets were asked to pay a sum of 1000 INR for 5 copies of the book. They were given a transaction code upon payment and were told to collect their copies after the unveiling of the book during the last session of Day-1 of the festival. 159 poets – 5 copies each, this amounts to a bare minimum of 795 copies of the book. However, the publisher company brought only about 50 copies to the festival. What followed reeked of complete absence of professionalism, humility, or any kind of empathy for the poets who had gathered to collect their copies. At this point, I must disclose the name of the publishing partner of the BPF 2016 – Raindrops Company headed by one Mr. Bernard Dsa. Though such a company must be ignored and not be given any kind of reading space on social media, I thought it prudent to write about the experience I had with them so that the people who are coming next are aware of the narcissism of the company. Rest of the evening of the festival was spent in remorseless series of selfies by the publisher while the poets stood by another poet who somehow had volunteered to keep 2 copies of the book on display so that people could come and get a photo clicked with the publisher holding their book.
Click. Done. Return the book. Next!

potry-1

I got hold of the book 2 weeks after I had forgotten about it. Though I was never much excited about my poem getting published in the book, it was still a good feeling to have the book in my hands. However, after having a glimpse of the inside pages, that feeling was short-lived. The book stands out for its shoddy editing, floundering the rules of the contest laid down by the organizers themselves, publishing same poem multiple number of times under different poets’s names and titles. Horrid editing will be an understatement. This book has not been edited at all. There are poems that are in Hindi but published in Roman script without any transliteration marks. In spite of all these blunders, the biggest irony of this book would be the strong-arming of the contributing poets to pay up 1000 INR in advance without giving them a control on the number of copies they wanted. Raindrops Company sent a sermon that the poets would need 5 copies each and hence they must pay 1000 INR in advance to receive those 5 copies. The company didn’t stop there. It wanted to spit in our face, so it priced the book at 180 INR on Amazon.

poetry-2

I still had sympathy for the poets who had landed up in the hands of such a terrible publisher and hence went on to read all the poems except 3 or 4 poems written in Kannada. Well, I found a silver lining. Please find below the list of 58 poems that I loved from the book. If you have already decided to not buy the book, try looking for the poets on facebook, they might be kind enough to share their published poems with you. Please note that this is not a ranked list.

  1. Hark! - Abhishek Kumar Singh
  2. Empty Piece of Paper Flutters Around - Dr. Aakash Dhruva
  3. Cracked & Splintered - Aishwarya Soni
  4. प्रतिबिंबित - Akanksha Bumb
  5. Distant Vespers - Amrendra Pandey
  6. I am Indeed - Ankit Mishra
  7. These Kindnesses - Ankush Banerjee
  8. पहाड़ और समंदर - Anshul Nagori
  9. Unfettered - Apoorva Viji Shivaram
  10. Aquarium - M. Ashitha
  11. Deathwish - Ashvani Sachdev
  12. Scatterbrain Syndrome - Avani Jain
  13. The Unchanted Souls - Dr. Debashish Sengupta
  14. She-An Unparalleled Work of Art - Debarati Saha
  15. वाद विवाद  - Gaurav B Gothi
  16. Antarctica - Gaurav Chauhan
  17. खून पतला हो चला  - Gaurav Tiwari
  18. Ice'scapades - Gayathri Rao
  19. Sun's Story -  Ilu
  20. प्रकृति हूँ मैं ही  - Jaya Srinivasan
  21. A Cuckoo Calls - Lovie D'sa
  22. Does a Bonsai Tree Dare Dream?  - Lynessa Coutto
  23. Theatre du Reve - Praveen Dhawan
  24. जन्मदिन  - Priyank Anand
  25. It was a Dream - Mahima Prasanna
  26. Bliss in solitude  - Mahua Sen
  27. Back Home  - Maitrayee
  28. Twilight - Mallika Bhaumik
  29. The Pendulum Heart - Mihika Shankar Shivni
  30. All Things Put Aside - Nishu Mathur
  31. Pacification - Nitish Nair
  32. The Impossibility of Us - Purnima Gopalakrishnan
  33. Sitting There - Rahul Raghunath
  34. कर्ण का धर्म   - Rajesh Joshi
  35. याद है सिर्फ  - Ranjana Tripathi
  36. A Trilogy of Musings - Rashmi Jejurikar
  37. Circling into the Center - Reshma Mudirakkal
  38. Us and Them - Rohit Nand
  39. Journey to You - Aimey Maggie Augustine
  40. Chikku Mara - Sandip Mondal
  41. No filter - Shachi Srivastava
  42. Death - Shruthi Vishwanath
  43. The Oracle - Shyni kp
  44. Meet - Srinivasacharya Darbhasayanam
  45. Disclaimer - Siddharth Shukla
  46. On My Grandmother - Sihi Nagathihalli
  47. A Disjointed Symphony - Simran Sethi
  48. Father  - Sindhu Verma
  49. The Earth you Fought - Soujanya K.
  50. Cry of Wicked Souls - Sarala Balachandran
  51. Saudade - Sreeparna Chattopadhyay
  52. Inheritance - Suganya Lakshmi
  53. थोड़ा और पकने दो - Tarundeep Kaur
  54. तलाश - विभूति/Vibhuti
  55. निशब्द - Vidya Krishna
  56. A gloomy rose - Vignesh
  57. H.O.M.E - Yamini Acharya
  58. Declarative Memory - Yumna Harisingh Jawa

This is not to suggest other poets were not good. Yes, there were a few who should have been more serious with their contributions but perhaps the publishers didn’t deserve better. Nevertheless, congratulations to every poet who has got published. Good Edit-Bad Edit – You are a published poet now and you have our best wishes.

Mandatory Disclosure – Writer’s poem was also published in the Anthology. 

In Conversation with a Neighbourhood Hero

JeevaNayagiLeave a comment

Have you ever wondered how mysterious the game of life is? How something nice happens to you out of nowhere making you feel all charged up and excited. It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon. As I walked through the Church Street of Bengaluru hunting for food, my legs stopped involuntarily in front of this beautiful place. It had a long inviting rack of books put up on display, a sight too tempting to not yield to especially if you are a BookStalkist. The name on the board  read “Bookworm”.

Continue reading “In Conversation with a Neighbourhood Hero” →

(Part 2) Books – The Used and the Abused!

Abhishek JhaLeave a comment

There is one particular incident that must be recounted here to make my point. One day, since I alighted from the bus at a stop which wasn’t exactly mine, I had to saunter till my residence through a stretch of road that I wasn’t familiar with. The stretch was eerily dark and quiet. After walking for some distance, I saw a minuscule, thatched hut to my left, and a lady standing outside calling out.


It took me a few seconds to realize that she was inviting me to have her. I wasn’t sure if she would have taken a refusal well, so I paced up and stopped only after attaining a safe distance. I could see lamp posts getting larger and shops appearing in sight. There was a used-book store that was selling books at Rs. 100 and 200 per kg. I had heard of this concept before but hadn’t seen books getting sold this way. Initially glad to have found such a store, I was left disillusioned once I checked the books. Most of them were run-of-the-mill books that people should avoid reading if they care for developing good taste. The only bright spots were the books on technical subjects but considering their weight, the deal was not very sweet. I wasn’t exactly looking for technical books either.

I had to decline both the offers – that of the sex-worker and of the bookstore. From whatever I could see of them and comprehend, both appeared battered. Both were unkempt, abused, marked, and scarred. Both were ordinary.

So what goes into deciding the prices for sex trade in squalid belts of a city and old books stacked upon each other under a rugged tent-house? I ask this not because I have complete understanding of these trades. I just have a fair idea about the value of presentation. A procurer (pimp) adds glitters, polishes, and qualifies the services and the prices shoot up. Another procurer (publisher) does the same with a book. For some people, I might have crossed a few lines here but a procurer is not necessarily an evil person unless he is indeed an evil person regardless of whether he is a pimp or a publisher. Books that got published some 100 years ago are getting re-branded, re-edited, reprinted and resold at higher prices than the previous editions. Does the same happen with escorts? Till a point in their lives when age doesn’t start showing, it does. As they grow in the trade, the prices go up. However, flesh trade is not an exception. This is the norm in any industry. It’s an age when the quality of every product or service is measured against the benchmark of porn. #foodporn #bookgasm #foodgasm #wordporn  – any acquaintances in those hashtags there?

At a subconscious level, think of a sex-worker you have had, met or seen while going through the following lines.


What happens to the books that can no longer afford a publisher? They are sold like potatoes and onions in a last ditch attempt at making some money. What happens to the books that we buy and are long done with? What happens to the books that at least outwardly have nothing more to offer to us? I was not sincere when I had suggested to my friend that I would be selling them all. However, if one must sell, I think a second hand book should be sold at a higher price than the new one. In fact, the older a book gets, the higher its price should be, at least till the time it becomes really old and unreadable. It’s not very difficult to understand the reasons.

An old book, by the time reaches your hands has already enriched a few other lives before you and it has already gained some experience in changing lives. That experience, you do not have in a first edition first print. A freshman might make mistakes, a first copy might not give you what you expect of it, but in the case of an old one – more often than not, you are in safe hands because you have reached the book either of your hunting accord or after recommendations from someone you trust, and if you find a few scribbled notes in the book – you are perhaps luckier than many, and undoubtedly luckier than the first edition snobs.

Getting a glimpse into another life or going through a live commentary while you read those rusty pages is a priceless experience. Priceless things usually get sold at ambitiously steep prices. Hence, used books deserve better prices, abused books and you will find plenty of them – deserve our respect for having taken the blows of an untrained pretentious reader. In either case, I would choose to either go the capitalist way and sell them at higher prices than they were purchased or invoke my socialist side and give them away for free. The second option, would have to meet with great resistance from my faithfully capitalist enchantress bookshelf. The first one sounds more viable. I hope the world is ready when I sincerely mean to sell them. 

The essay  Books – The Used and the Abused! concludes with this part. Read the first part of the article here.

Books – The Used and the Abused!

Abhishek Jha17 Comments

Barely a minute after the gift books had reached the recipients, I got an email from Junglee, an Amazon subsidiary, saying something to the effect of – ‘Now that you have bought books from amazon, how about selling some on Junglee?’ Though this was a routine pitch, it got me into wondering about a lot of things of recent past. Just a day earlier I had told a friend in jest that I was going to sell all my books, take note – it was not a serious statement!

I don’t own a lot of things. My friends who know me well are completely sick of my wardrobe and at times have to take me hostage to get me to buy stuffs. This is not because I am on some money-saving mission, I don’t save either. So where does the money go? I don’t claim to have some sort of library for myself, but I have a respectable number of books with me and the number increases at a staggering rate. In fact, our Government could define BPL (Below Poverty Line) mark by just contrasting between my wardrobe and the bookshelf.  Rich gets richer, the poor gets poorer.

Capitalism-Socialism-Communism all sleep in the same bed here. I had read somewhere that the day you own more than single pair of clothes to cover yourself, you cease to be a communist. Now, most of the present day communists would certainly fail this test in today’s age and I don’t blame them. The condition itself is too stringent and suffocating. However, if for a few considerations, I am allowed to take it as the benchmark, then the beggar who just had a garbage box to comfort his spine in and almost no rag on his body,  just outside my workplace in Chennai would perhaps make the greatest Communist on earth. Marx and Lenin would miserably fail this test. Taking heart from this, my wardrobe stands a much better chance to be regarded as at least a reluctant communist, reluctant because perhaps it wants to get a few more clothes for itself, but its master is lazy as a dead bone in such matters. This opens up two new ways to become a communist –

1. Have a very bad master!
2. Become lazy, lazy like a dead bone.

Sitting on an antipodal citadel, my bookshelf is a shelf-ish enchantress. If there ever was a true capitalist, it is her. The master is possessed by her beauty and she makes him do all that she desires. When much of what the master earns goes into her wishes and fancies every month, it is not very difficult to understand how enslaved and smitten by her the master is!

There is no end to her desires. I have never left my bookshelf alone, but perhaps on one occasion when I was moving to a new city and all her possessions had to be transported beforehand. For about a month, I couldn’t see her due to delays in courier service. That was the only time we were separated. A thing to note here is that this Capitalist monster owns a lot of anti-communism books, and since sits just beside my reluctantly communist wardrobe, leaves no opportunity to jeer at him and show him how communism failed the day master’s friends bought him a second pair of clothes. I can’t tell you any method here to become a capitalist. It can’t be done. Capitalize is a verb, but capitalism is a noun. So, you might think you can capitalize to become a Capitalist but Capitalize in turn depends on some noun, say in this case – situation! That situation comes by itself, you just have to be greedy enough. Like I said, the day you work your ass off for another pair of clothes in your wardrobe, you have embarked yourself onto the voyage of Capitalism.

To let myself wander for some more time, I would want to touch upon capitalism in books-industry and what’s going wrong there. I remember my boyhood days when books containing spiritual or religious messages used to be distributed for free and if I talk particularly about a few organizations, they used to encourage their first readers to pass on the books to somebody who hadn’t read them and continue the relay so that someday in distant future, entire planet would know about these organizations. Backed up by huge grants and charity money, this was their way of marketing. To be candid about it, I used to collect all of them just to sniff the fresh-from-print pages. Not that I didn’t try reading them but failed to make any sense of the content matter then. Interestingly, many customers stood benefited as even if they never opened these books, never turned over a single page; they could always keep them on their study tables and shelves to show off.

This still continues with the Quran and the Bible. You get them for free most of the times and the people who throng on the stores to get these books for free, generally don’t belong to Islam or Christianity. However once they rack up these books in their house, it helps to prove their broad-mindedness and establish a secular image to their guests without having read a word. That notwithstanding, let us think from the perspective of an involved reader. For him, these socio-religious books still come at nominal costs. Additionally, most of the dedicated readers share these books on their own after having read them. While he can get a Bible or a Quran, or a Gita for almost nothing, Das Kapital will cost him somewhere between Rs 500 to Rs 1500 on Amazon.

The socio-religious book segment is more communist than the segment that sells the works of Karl Marx. Marx would perhaps say today – ‘Socio-religious book is the new opiate of the masses!’
Think of all the socio-religious books as public owned and the fact that anyone can read them easily, re-interpret, comment, criticize, and burn them amidst a few fatwas from selected communities – not very difficult to fathom! Unwittingly and ironically, the bible of communism can’t be bought by the segment of the society that needs to read it more than anyone else. They have to be content with mind-numbing tall tales of leaders and impostors, not that the leaders and impostors have much of a difference in today’s age.

The article continues in its second part.

Of Flips, Flaps and Soaring High

JeevaNayagiLeave a comment

He was there almost every morning, perched on top of the roof adjacent to my kitchen’s window, during the year I lived in the United Kingdom. My friend hated him and even his entire clan. She called them cunning, notorious thieves. She was indeed right. They were the best in stealing food. Yet I took a special liking towards him because he reminded me of someone I had known from a book. A beautiful handwritten note on the cover page of the book says “A journey towards a dream is always an enchanting experience. So here is a book for you, to be a companion in all the endeavors of your life”. Continue reading “Of Flips, Flaps and Soaring High” →