The Sandwich Horror

Have you noticed how a lot of fantasy books have similar themes? Magic, elves, dwarves, orcs, swords with names, and other sundry elements find themselves being repeated too often in the same genre, and there is one series that I have read which goes on a refreshingly different path.

That is the Gameworld trilogy (The Simoqin Prophecies, The Manticore’s Secret, The Unwaba Revelations) by Samit Basu. Dhoti-clad biker gangs, Bengali princes, Asurs, Rakshasas, assassins, The Unbelievable Bulk (!)… A very Indian take on the world of fantasy fiction, and a sometimes-acid, sometimes-humourous near-obvious spoof on fiction as a universe! After Tolkien’s universe, the Sandman graphic novel set, and the Wheel of Time series, my favourite fiction.

I just finished The Gathering Storm, by Brandon Sanderson, from the late Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. The book, as all others in the series, impressed me. WoT is a thirteen-book-long series, each slightly thicker than a standard novel, some much more so. If I were to sum up the series in one word, it would be “Detail”. The intricacies of plot, the attention to detail, even down to glimpses of the everyday life of the people, the beautifully complete treatment of the structure of magic, the careful building up of characters and stories, everything is so meticulously perfect and near-encylopaedic, yet there is enough to leave you wondering, dreaming of the world you are reading about. The most impressive thing about this series is that even with so much backstory, even with so much world background construction, the author (Sanderson is mostly following extremely detailed notes left by Jordan to complete the series) brings the plot up at the appropriate pace.

The Wheel of Time is Robert Jordan’s labour of love, in a sense. Despite his being in the advancing stages of cancer, he made sure that his dreams, his ideas, his world was given to us.

After reading Lord of the Rings, the Eragon rubbish, and the Wheel of Time, I noticed one glaringly obvious plot point. Innocent villagers with hidden strengths and secrets, a world of evil suddenly swoops down on their idyllic and peaceful lives, mysterious, hidden and secretly-famous Great People come rescue a group of the villagers (one/many of whom lose loved ones to the afore-mentioned swooping of evil), these villagers become Very Great People and save the world.

LotR, of course, is the granddaddy of them all, and has a right to this plot point as the Original Granddaddy.

Eragon, is a stupid series. Very childish, with glaringly obvious plot holes and idiocies. I did not like it at all.

WoT, though it started off with this plot point, went off on a tangent of its own, and grew up into a near-perfect series.

Currently reading: Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman. Previous works of his I have read: The Sandman graphic novel set, Neverwhere, Stardust.

Queued up: Anansi Boys, American Gods, both by Gaiman.

Needed: More comics to read!

0. Since he was 99% plastic, he is going to be melted down so that little boys can play with him for a change.

1. Mattel’s buying his corpse and auctioning it off to his victims, again so that the kids can play with him for a change.

2. He is being shipped directly to Madame Tussauds, as a special (recession-induced) deviation from their standard usage of wax.

3. Greenpeace is setting up anti-plastic-burning protest teams in case his will states that he wishes to be cremated.

4. His survivors are setting up a booth at his graves. 10 cents per urination. Buyback of Neverland Ranch in the works.

These are some of the jokes I have heard from people / thought of myself, to my own shame.

The man was found NOT GUILTY by a jury of his peers. This is a classic case of “Guilty until proven innocent”. He lost so much of his money on some greedy little teenager’s money-making evil grabsmash scheming.

Cut MJ some slack. The verdict was NOT GUILTY. To hell with the media.

Some say that life is but a dream, and when you die, you wake up. MJ’s life was bittersweet; towards the end, it was a nightmare. May the earth welcome him into her last embrace.

What I want to blog about is the state of our defence. I may sound like a Tom Clancy fan (which I was) or a gun nut (which I am) but this is purely logical.

And yeah, this may sound like Counter-Strike, but hell, the game is between terrorists and counterterrorists, innit?

The Defence Forces

Although most (not all) of the police force carries sidearms, they are not trained on how to use them. Shooting at static or slowly marqueeing targets in a firing range is not the same as firing at live, dodging targets while on the move. The stance, the way you hold the sidearm, everything is different. When firing in a live situation, you don’t look down the sights like in training, you look at the enemy and have a moment’s notice to fire, which leaves no time to aim. It has to be instinct. NSG may be the top force of our country, but when a properly-trained counterterrorist force like the FBI’s HRT or the GSG-9 or the Delta Force goes in to strike, they emerge victorious in a matter of minutes, at the most a few hours, no matter how large the target may be. NSG troops were inserted more than 24 hours ago, and they still have not flushed the scum out. The 5-6 terrorists who are in there have had more than enough time to take hostages, to take up optimal defensive positions, et cetera. The video taken by the citizen journalist pigs shows how the inserted troops were operating. Highly unprofessional, compared to videos and accounts of other counterterrorist forces. Nobody even bothered cutting off the cell network to cut off the terrorists’ communication. Doing that may have scared hostages and their families, but is it not better to be alive and to have had your wits scrambled by fright than to be dead and have been reassured by the deluge of information? We need a contingency plan to deal with this, and we need well-trained troops. More than ever, we need a police force whose gun hands are not tied by red tape.

The Coast Guard. If it had been doing its duty well enough, maybe this would not have ever happened. Two mother ships sail into Indian waters and disgorge terrorists in motor boats, and nobody notices? Wow.

Oh, and I bet that within a month from the end of this situation, the police will have captured suspects and uncovered the racket. I wonder if they know all along that an attack is being planned, from the speed and efficiency with which they act after the attack, after any attack. I wonder why they wait until after the attack. Is it red tape, or is it corruption? Whatever it is, I am disgusted.

Also, these terrorists must have checked in a few days ago, taken their time to study their targets well from the inside, then pulled out their arsenal. Our security is lax, to make a gross understatement. These guys have a huge supplies of AK-56 ammunition, as well as grenades and even RPGs! They successfully snuck in an entire armoury under the noses of our country’s watchdogs.

The Media

They are the worst of the lot. Almost in cohorts with the terrorists. We may need news, but we don’t need to see where the snipers have been placed, we don’t need to see where the CTs are hiding, we don’t need any citizen journalist bastards jumping into the fray and giving the CTs one more element to worry about. Interfering, nosy, irritating pricks. And they scream in anger when some terrorist fires upon a reporter. Do they think they’re gods? We especially don’t need them telling us when the NSG’s making a move, when it’s sending more troops in, where it’s sending them in from, and so on. For all we know, the terrorists have someone on the outside sitting at a TV and sending them the news by cell phone. We need to enforce a media muzzling / blackout in times like these. Starting from whenever the sting operation changed the meida, they have proved to be a bunch of insensitive, pompous and dangerous pigs, like any other media force in a sovereign democratic nation.

Politicians

And The Game begins. Expect other countries to make condemning statements. Expect the one which makes the strongest condemnation to be the culprit. Expect the USA to do nothing but make vague, impotent statements concerning their ineffectual war on terror. Expect the guilty nation to be further emboldened by another display of the impotency of the country with the mightiest armed forces.

The heads of our nation fly down to the warzone and thus put themselves in terrible danger, all to appear shining and brave in their politics-infested world by sentimentally visiting the injured, and nobody in the defence brass protests? Sickening.

Being a blogger, I can not resist offering my opinion about The Solution. We have to face the facts. We are a nation at war, and we have been fighting this war ever since 1947. It’s time we keep this in mind all the time. Otherwise, India is just embarrassing herself in global company. The “Rising Economic Superpower” brought to her knees by 5-6 terrorists who are better trained than their opponents.

Cannibal Bottle

In Soviet Russia, vodka drinks YOU!

So I am on 61 percent.

My photo albums are at 99.

Adi is at 85.

Bhargava used to be on 66, but now is on 74.

Chit, despite all the (Saur)kundi talk and sports writing, is on 53, as is the quiz blog.

Some first year is on 51.

Google.com is “not written in English”.

I also ran my blog past the Typealyzer.

So I am the entertaining and friendly type. I am especially attuned to pleasure and beauty and like to fill my surroundings with soft fabrics, bright colors and sweet smells. I live in the present moment and don´t like to plan ahead – I am always in risk of exhausting myself. I enjoy work that makes me able to help other people in a concrete and visible way. I tend to avoid conflicts and rarely initiate confrontation – qualities that can make it hard for me in management positions. During writing, the sensual and spiritual centres of my brain were dominant. Sensual spirituality, maybe I should become a godman and sell this idea.

And here I am with my screwed grades, some machine telling me that a management position would be a hard place for me.

I look around my room but I still don’t see any perfumed blue and green coloured giant brocade cushions, or any other such jazz.

The world is dark and dark blue toned, even at noon. Or maybe everyone wears invisible blue-tinted contact lenses, a la Oz. (Invisible blue-tinted lenses would be my homage to The Invisble Pink Unicorn.)

If the kid says that there is something in the closet, or that there is something under its bed, then there definitely is.

Ordinary people may be killed, but the ghost-defeaters will always return (relatively) unscathed.

If it is a toss-up between the hot female, the cute kid and the obnoxious middle-aged man, guess who dies?

All females are good-looking with perfect figures and never ruin their make up even after a long terror-induced weep. All males are either rugged or stereotypical nerds. And everyone has flawless skin with no tumours/pimples/unsightly blemishes/et cetera.

You learn never to put any of your appendages into any hole (example Plumber cleaning out sink!), especially at night. Eurgh.

The neighbours do not notice shotgun blasts and screaming even if it is a tad late at night.

The cutest one does not die, but most, if not all, of her (unfortunately for them, less cute) friends meet with gruesome endings.

I have watched too much Supernatural over the last few days.

Supernatural, the TV show. I have watched eight episodes so far, and I do not know whether to laugh or to attempt to feel the delicious fear that one feels when watching a scary TV show while reminding self that it is all on the other side of the screen. I tried watching the last two episodes in mute with the Reservoir Dogs movie audio playing. Ehehehehe watching the two scarily handsome brothers (one the stereotyped college white boy, the other the stereotyped smoothtalking who-needs-college-when-you-can-go-bow-hunting redneck) investigate the occult while Tarantino talks about a “f*ck machine remembering what it was like to be Like A Virgin” and while Mister Pink explains why he does not tip is fun!

Stuff I did:

Comics

• QC makes great reading.
• Y – The Last Man was a series I enjoyed from start to finish.
• American Virgin. Not at all what the name suggests, or so I claim.
• The Sandman. Lovely artwork, superb storyline, it is my favourite series to date.
• Sin City. Frank Miller! ‘Nuff said.

Music

• Metal – Suidakra, with Celtic folk (!) influences.
• Softer stuff – the album Brushfire Fairytales by champion Australian surfer Jack Johnson.
• Funny stuff – Flood by They Might Be Giants, accordion meets alt rock!
• Imagine, by John Lennon. I listen to it over and over again. It is one song which always puts me in a funk. You imagine the world without religion, and then it is depressing because you know that it is not going to happen.

Books

• Just finished The Motorcycle Diaries and was not that impressed. Guess it was a case of too much buildup and also I am not in the mood for retrospection right now, what with recent events.
• Cell by Stephen King. King’s writing is excellent, the mental vistas he can conjure up are simply excellent. He may be viewed as “mainstream”, but I do not give a hoot about mainstream and all that jazz, just like reading good stuff.
• I just have to put this in. The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. For those who do not like religion.

Movies

• Old Boy. Korean action movie, very nice.
• Also saw Lord of the Flies recently, was a chilling movie. Verrry thought-provoking. Would suggest you watch it and then read Cell, both have similar basic themes.

The title is just the name of my favourite Corinne Bailey Rae song. It’s good, go have a listen.

So, the holidays. One month. I am already feeling bored, what with the lack of company. Went jogging in a nearby walkers’ park today. The sight of obese uncles doing stretches and weird exercises (imagine some fellow swinging his arms above his head while waddling like Donald Duck, only in 3x speed!) was a tad too much for me, so I got slightly disgusted and went freerunning instead. So now I have curious Vijayanagar denizens wondering why this tall guy is running around at eight in the morning. I wonder why my parents had to buy a place (or should I say “crib” now that Homies rule the world?) in one of Bangalore’s most useless village-like areas. I really should get a project or internship or something, I’m wasting too much time.