Domain Maximus

I am back. Again.

Ahem. Hello there. Welcome back.

As you may be aware this blog was away for three months doing authorly things like launching, reading, interviewing, posing for pictures, reading good reviews, reading bad reviews, crying ourselves to sleep and so on. And amidst all the celebrity-ing, Pranab Mukherjee presented a Union Budget. The union budget is pretty much the highlight of the annual calendar for the business journalism business. (Whatay play on words.) Which means the Union Budget is one of those “do anything as long as you are doing something” periods in the office. And boy did we do things. Many, many things.

Of course today no one remembers anything Minister Mukherjee said or announced during the budget. Read the rest of this entry »

For the last several months Whatay.com has been suffering silently. Why? Because Dork: The Incredible Adventures of Robin ‘Einstein’ Varghese has been the cynosure of my non-office creative pursuits. Dork, as I have begun to refer to it lovingly, is the book.

The book.Yes. High fives all round.

Dork was the thing I referred to sheepishly when people asked what I’d been doing with this writing business for the last four years. “Where is your book dude?” blog readers would ask. I’d squirm and hem and haw impatiently.

You see this publishing business is slow. Slow and nerve wracking. Slow and nerve wracking and soul-draining. But it is awesome when it happens.

And now that the book is at advanced stage of completion, I think it is time we had a long talk. Sit down. Espresso? Good.
Read the rest of this entry »

Now I can finally tell you peeps why the blog slowed considerably over the last one year. Look what came in the mail today: (I’ve blacked yellowed out some bits due to contractual obligations.)

Paper work

Couple of things to point out:

1. Yes my name is still causing trouble. Sigh. I might change it to something else so that it looks better in book stores. Like “Dan Brown Vadukut”.

2. Will update on expected dates, title, excerpts and so on as soon as I get inputs and go-aheads from the Penguin people. Currently I am thinking of calling it “A short history of nearly every five point someone slumdog white tiger’s letters to Penthouse”.

3. A very big thank you to all you guys. This blog is quite the community story you know. So collective high-fives all around.

4. Set aside money right now to buy it when it eventually comes out.

Yay!

Sniff. Cough. Wheeze.

Quite pleased with this longish cover story in last weekend’s Lounge. Too long to cut and paste the whole thing here. But here is a little amuse bouche of the story and a link to download the pdf of the two-page spread.

Have a terrible cold. So don’t expect anything cheery for a day or two. Or week. Sigh.

—

The telegram is dying

After a century and a half of binding the country together, the messenger of the masses is slowly becoming a remnant of the past

Shruti Chakraborty and Sidin Vadukut

On a recent weekday evening in south Mumbai, the Central Telegraph Office (CTO), a stone’s throw from the raucous Flora Fountain traffic circle, is abuzz with noise—not of customers but carpentry work. CTO, one of the district’s many heritage buildings with solid stone facades, humbly stands in the shadow of the considerably taller Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd (MTNL) office behind it. The MTNL office itself is overshadowed by the even taller and more imposing Videsh Sanchar Bhavan tower next door that houses VSNL offices. The three form a pecking order of telecom offices—from the swanky Tata-owned building at one end to the sad, sorry old CTO at the other.

Finding the telegraph counter in CTO means walking through an unmanned metal detector, past a dark, gloomy foyer, which is being converted into what looks like a modern bank with counters and glass partitions between them, and into a narrow corridor on the right.

There is not a single customer in sight. When asked for a telegram form, there is a moment of hesitation before one of the two employees behind the counter gets up and hands a piece of paper through the slot—it is a telegram application form that doesn’t look much younger than the CTO building itself.

“The telegram business has gone down a lot. Before, we used to send 1,000 a day. Nowadays, we get 100, sometimes 200,” explains a portly man behind the counter with a smile on his face. He counts the words on the filled-in form handed to him, checks on a laminated sheet of paper for the charges—Rs26 for overnight delivery of a 22-word telegram to Delhi—and then he hands back a counterfoil.

But when he checks the billing machine at the counter, he looks a little embarrassed. It was a few minutes past 5 in the evening, the end of a working day, and the Mumbai CTO had only sent 37 telegrams the whole day. Visibly upset, he quickly says: “We will send more today. We are open 24 hours for your service you know. Maybe some more people will come.”

In all likelihood, however, they won’t.

—

You could read the story online here. But I’d rather you download the PDF here. And no there aren’t any jokes in it. So for your daily dose of amusement you may want to revert to the dependable people at Newsmax.

And thus, I was sent forth into the perilous world of luxury suits. A world where prices are an inconvenient element of the conversation and pocket squares lead to debates not unlike those about the West Asian peace process. In this merciless world, all that stands between high fashion and eternal sartorial damnation is one, solitary pleat.

Read the whole story here.

That is not one of those existential angsty type statements. "This is not a pipe." That sort of thing. No.

I merely wish to reiterate to the world that I AM NOT AMIT FOR GODDSAKE!

Amit Varma is possibly the most famous (also popular) Indian blogger out there. A very popular question at blogger meets is "Where is Amit?"

Also one can consider oneself to have arrived in the world of blogging if one can start an intellectual anecdote, dirty joke or mental whimsy with the words "I was talking to Amit Varma the other day and he was telling me about this fascinating electric inflatable doll…"

Or some such thing. Also Amit recently, and famously, won the Bestiat Prize. This award is a renowned prize in Journalism. Most famous for the fact it is merely two letters away from a sexual pervert most weird. Not to say that Amit is anything but most ordinary. I may have caught him in a delicate situation with a Doberman once but he assured me it was platonic. So you should let him be.

And me too!

Every once in a while I get welcome emails from people who want me to write for them. Newspapers, magazines, people who want a kind word written on the blog. That type. This is all quite exciting of course. For a struggling freelance writer nothing fuels the ego like people wanting you to write and willing to pay for it too.

But I have increasingly begun to notice that half of these emails begin with the salutation "Hi Amit!" or "Hi Mr. Varma!"

I am not Amit Varma.

My theory is this. The party concerned decides to link up with the half dozen or so more popular blogs around. Amit, obviously, ranks up their right at the top. I come just below him, merely three hundred blogs between us. So the party whips up an email addressed to person number one on the list, i.e. Amit Varma, and then cuts and pastes it to everyone else on his list. Without changing the salutation.

So this means, more often than not, I get an email addressed to Amit Varma offering big bucks, if seen from very very close, for my modest writing abilities. This deflates my ego so. I feel crushed and belittled. And then I reply in the affirmative because I am an MBA and my priorities are very clear.

Nonetheless I am not Amit Varma. Stop sending me emails like that.

Unless of course you are the Bestiat Prize people sending out the prize cheque. In which case I am Amit Varma! Here! Me! Yes!

Otherwise no.

(Update: The book synopsis is currently being reviewed by publishing house no. 1. Fingers crossed. Latest rediff column here. Over and out.)