VIPs and VVIPs

I'll break the celebrity-gossip silence of this blog with the following article, from the Mumbai daily DNA India:

HYDERABAD: It would have been the ideal film script except that nobody is in a mood to oblige. Last week’s elopement by Telugu megastar Chiranjeevi’s daughter Srija has set the film industry and the elite of Hyderabad on alert to the likely dangers from their rebellious offspring. The star, though, said that all was forgiven and extended his blessings to the young couple.

Despite the olive branch from dad, the next day the same paper reported that Srija was seeking police protection from Delhi for her husband, who was still threatened by angry family members. It's easy to focus on the silly side, but I should note that the sense of threat (and, for the "aggrieved" family, shame/dishonor) presumably make a lot more sense in a non-Western, less-individualistic cultural context (though the role of Indian film stars in adapting Western-style stardom adds some shades of irony). In any case—and back to silly—if Chiranjeevi's film roles are any indicator, he's not someone you want on your bad side:

The DNA article continues:

Film producers, directors and financiers in the city have tightened security arrangements and cut short holiday trips of their children. They have now sent them to closely guarded resorts and bungalows around the city where their contact with “friends” and associates is restricted.
The city police have also been considering a special cell to keep a tab on children of VIPS and VVIPS as a matter of routine exercise.
...
Hyderabad is home to nearly 1,275 powerful families of industrialists, politicians and settlers from West Bengal, UP and Delhi. There are 27 private security agencies of which seven specialise in personal security for children of the rich and famous.

It took me a second or two to figure out what VVIPs meant (think Very, Very). I guess in a country the size of India you need the distinction. I wonder what the cutoff is to garner the extra V? Also I love the humble specificity of "nearly 1,275".

All this brought to mind—and this will be no comfort for the concerned powerful families in Hyderabad—this catchy song, by the androgynous (and on multiple other counts bizarre) French pop artist Katerine:

Love the Blob You're With

From an cell phone banner ad from a Sydney Morning Herald front page of a few months back:

Anthropomorphism: it's not just for higher organisms!

Thumper in Jerusalem

I've been enjoying some of the super-long 1960s New Yorker article-cum-books that are hidden in the DVD set I got last year for Christmas—this week it's Truman Capote; before that it was Hannah Arendt. The tradeoff for having to read 'em on the computer screen is that the lovely timeless prose is interleaved with the very ephimeral ads of the day—it's amazing how differently they wrote and paced ad copy and chose suitable illustrations back in the day. So I was reading "Eichmann in Jerusalem" and learning about the banality of evil and the banality of Bergdorf-Goodman's clothing sketches, when I came to the following full-pager (The New Yorker, May 16, 1963, p. 87):



That headline reads: "New Inner Circle is for women with delicate skin". Here's the ad copy:




I remember the 1980s and 90s anti-vivisection campaigns directed at cosmetics companies testing on rabbits* — unearthing yet another ugly secret from the beauty industry, with the clutch photo being of a lab rabbit with harspray in its rheumy taped-open eyes. What's amazing about this ad (aside from its ironic placement in of a history of individuals designing and perpetrating exceedingly evil acts against other people, many under the impression that they were doing something for the greater "good")** is that the cosmetics bunny isn't the secret, she's the salesman. This is definitely of the pre-Vietnam, all-trusting era: "you know we'd never hurt this bunny with our products, ergo our product will never hurt you".

* How much was it the cuteness that made it seem so awful? I don't know that rabbits are more deserving of protection or outrage-on-behalf than rats or mice.

** I actually think this irony may be less than it seems. There's an unfortunate temptation to equate cruelty/misuse of people with that of animals. I think they're both awful, but are by no means the same — and indeed a blurring of the human/animal distinction has historically, I think, tended to make it easier to be cruel people more than it's made it harder to be cruel to animals. Great minds and men may disagree (didn't Gandhi say something about it?) but that's my hunch.

Take a Sad Song and Make it Better?

I'd remembered Gandhi's last words, after he was shot by his asassin, were "He Ram!", which was translated, perhaps a little too universal-ifyingly, as "Oh God!" Though it may be that's what Gandhi would have intended.

Anyway, so it was the alternate transliteration of he that got my attention in this headline, from the Mumbai newspaper DNA:

The article raises a lot of issues from India's recent past, particularly the place, literally and figuratively, of the god Ram, and stories associated with him, in Hindu (and Indian) identities. In the 1990s the flashpoint was a mosque torn down in Ayodhya because it stood on a site associated by some with Ram (his birthplace? I forget). Now it's to do with plans to dredge a canal through Adam's Bridge, the shallow archipelago that links India and Sri Lanka, which has traditionally been linked with the bridge built by the monkey-god Hanuman in the the Ramayana. An atheist minister in Tamil Nadu made some comments about it being silly to think of the bridge as an architectural site worthy of protection (as some from the anti-canal camp were arguing), and then the argument got to be over whether said minister ought to have made those comments, whether it was an insult to Indian-ness/Hindu-ness.

Anyway, so Ram-awareness is on the upswing among Hindu nationalists, even to the point of coopting Gandhi's favorite Ram-hymn (despite the fact that the mahatma himself was quite at odds with the anticedants of today's Hindu nationalists—or at least the extreme ones. And they (witness the asassination) with him.

Serious and complex matters. But, a little pathetically, the main thing the headline made me think of was The Beatles' song "Hey, Jude". I'll hold off on deciding whether that song could, with the simple name substitution, be used to illustrate an episode or two from the Ramayana (and whether or not that'd be a good thing).

Laugh not, it's been done before: witness animator Nina Paley's mesmurizing, inspiring, and vaguely troubling Betty-Boop-meets-Busby-Berkley-meets-the-Delhi-Durbar series, The Sitayana, in which episodes from the Ramayana are given a feminist slant and set to the alluring melancholy music of 1920s jazz vocalist Annette Hanshaw:



If you liked that segment, head to the The Sitayana site proper, which has segments from several episodes/songs, in a slightly better quality form.

The Ballad of Aussie Raccoon

Here's an ad that sometimes runs the full bottom span of the Sydney Morning Herald. I just thought it was odd to use a raccoon as a spokes-animal, especially given Australia's many zany indigenous species. Does a raccoon scream "North America" like a kangaroo screams "Australia" hereabouts?

Rate Your Tamil Script!

A brief South Indian typography lesson from John Murdoch, Classified Catalogue of Tamil Printed Books (Oxford: 1865). In some ways I think I prefer the "BAD" to the "MEDIUM"—the former's blotchy, but the spacing is more even.