Award-winning author of science and fiction
This one is completely my baby as a writer with artist Vivek Goel. Comprising of five short stories, this anthology is a new take on a mythology. That’s all I can tell you right now, more will come laters. Oh, and it’s going to release next year during summer holidays. Hope some kids out there are excited!
Just read a report on how big, fat tarantulas manage to stick to things that they want to. Invisible spiderman-like silk threads keep them there. But this post is not really about the glues. Or about anything in particular actually. If I need a reason to post (this is my blog you know, and I can put whatever I want to, really) it would be that I loved the visual that’s put above. Spiders are such fascinating creatures for me and for a lot of many authors actually who keep creating superheroes, villains, monsters, horror stories and weird things with spiders in some form or another inserted. They inspire me in their creepy but slick style, almost make me poetic. Of all the creatures, spiders I would say, with their multiple hands and eyes which I cannot see, make me thing. What do you think this tarantula is thinking now?
I am about to jump
About to jump
On you.
One throw of thread
Silken and soft
Around your mouth
Silence abounds
As I weave around you
Thin, invisible bonds
Of horrifying fascination
That you may see, barely.
But that you may not still.
What do you think will happen
When you stop to see
To feel
To think
To be
And then you become
A strand of silk
Woven around
Misplaced
Misshapen
Crinkled
And lost.
See what I mean? Tarantulas make me attempt poetry. Which is a good thing, even if it’s sort of bad.
My first comic short story it out in the market. It’s a horror comic anthology of three authors with artist Vivek Goel. You can order it online at Flipkart
Would love to hear some feedback on it!
The excitement is building up for the May end release of Werehouse-The house of monsters. One of the three horror stories in the anthology are mine and I am quite excited about it as it’s my first horror comic coming out. Here’s what the Mumbai Mirror journalist had to say:
A graphic novel ropes in some endangered Indian species and narrates tragic tales of the human civilisation through their perspective
Ankit.Ajmera
Posted On Sunday, May 01, 2011 at 06:56:15 PM
w e have seen it all. From Benicio Del Toro playing the werewolf in the film The Wolfman (2010) to Rahul Roy becoming the weretiger in the film Junoon (1992). Cursed creatures have always been portrayed brutally devouring numerous innocent humans to satisfy their lust for blood. A graphic novel on similar lines of therianthropy (metamorphosis of humans into other animals by the process of changing forms through shape-shifting), titled Were House — Volume I, will be launched this month. The novel moves away from the cliched transformations of humans into wolves and tigers and introduces some lesser known but endangered Indian animals such as the Snow Leopard and the Dhol (Indian wild dog), along with a rat, as new therianthropes.
Graphic artist and creator of Ravanayan, Vivek Goel is self-publishing the novel under his newly formed publishing house, Holy Cow Entertainment based in Mumbai. With specie after specie becoming extinct from the world, the novel takes us closer to the heart of animals through therianthropes. Instead of being cursed, the creatures have been blessed with the power to change shapes. “We have conveniently exploited every possible living creature for our own selfish needs. But we hardly know what and how they feel about humans,” says Goel. “I thought it will be interesting to see the world through their eyes.” There is a lot of blood and gore in the story and it justifies the creatures’ need to kill as mere survival instinct instead of a mad blood-lust like that of werewolves and weretigers.
To read the full story, click here.
Touring the Vatican museum, the audio guide informed me that a beautiful Roman time statue I saw in front of me (that of a marble woman, her curves delicately hidden by a flowing gown) was in fact a copy of the same figurine of a Greek sculpture, now destroyed. Copycat! I shouted, gleaming at the fact that it wasn’t a new phenomenon. I thought this was the only one. To my surprise though, the whole gallery (and the Vatican museum has huge galleries) all the statues there had the same inscription. See how the plaque explained it.
Belvedere Apollo, by Leochares. Roman copy of 130–140 AD after a Greek bronze original of 330–320 BC. Vatican Museums (source: Wikipedia)
Laocoön and his sons, also known as the Laocoön Group. Copy after an Hellenistic original from ca. 200 BC. Vatican Museums (source: Wikipedia)
Copying you see was an ancient form of appreciation in the Greeks and then the Romans. The helpful audio guide continued while I stood there astounded. So you see the Greeks copied other cultures, the Romans copied the Greeks, the Renaissance artists copied both of them and then the neo-classical ones copied all of them. In the meanwhile the same period artists copied each other. Arch rivals copied with envy, while the students copied their master’s work to celebrate it. It was all in good faith. Woah! What was that again? For me, who belongs to an increasingly copyrighted world, this is downright blasphemy! ‘Copying is very, very bad! Almost evil! Don’t ever do it again!’ I remember by art teacher saying it as I peeked into a friend’s sketchbook on how she was making that tree. It’s the same with mythology btw. I just wrote a graphic novel on Krishna, a grand figure from the Mahabharata and am slightly ashamed by the guilt feeling that came in me which told me that it’s not an original (Gosh, did I just rewrite someone else’s story?).
I mean why didn’t the original Greek creator, the original one please, sue all these others? What did the law court do if not sue these copiers? As if telepathically, the audio guide gave me the answer. Apparently copying a sculpture in the ancient European world (Greek, Hellenistic, Roman, Renaissance and then Neo-Classical periods) was not only considered good, the copy was considered an ORIGINAL!How can a copy ever be considered original? It reminded me of something an artist friend of mine told me. ‘Shweta, he said. Don’t ever think that you copied a mythology. If you have written the story, it’s an original, even if it’s a story that all grandmothers of India know by heart.’ If you create it, a part of it becomes yours. Did he by any chance knew how the Romans thought? Maybe, maybe not, but that is not the question. The question is, Is copying, gosh I can barely say it, the highest form of appreciation? After all, aren’t we all copiers of nature? We try to xerox it in words, visuals and sculptures.
In our copyrighted world, where branding is everything, copying is the eight sin. Forget celebration, the copiers are usually struck with a lawsuit and sued for millions (depending upon who is the artist) and paralleled to devils and evil people. It’s considered the worse kind of creativity, in fact, there’s no creativity in a copy. Oh, and btw, I was sure about this myself. As an author who’s writing my first book, I dream of a time when I wont be financially dependent and the only way to do that is to copyright and sell my creative work. if someone copies it, I will be completely heartbroken.
But then what about the new copy-paste generation that is coming up? Aren’t they, with information just a google search away and no qualms about copy-pasting articles, thoughts, ideas from the online world, going the same way as the Romans? There’s one difference though. The Romans were crediting the master they copied. So if someone copies you as a creator and credits you for the original, would you be all right? Or do you need a part of the royalties?
I just took a two week trip to Paris and Italy. Instead of a one-shot summary of the travel, I am breaking my experiences up in thoughts, ideas and learning I took away from the beautiful continent. Presented in a series of blogs called Notes from Europe, it will be written across a few days, weeks or months, I am not sure which. I aim to present things I remember to have thought when I was in the continent from where modern culture as we know it has stemmed from.
Botox and fillers are fast becoming a way of life in the high-flying corporate world from Mohali to Mumbai. By Shweta Taneja
Rajesh M., a marketing manager based in Mumbai, constantly got into arguments with his colleagues and juniors because they found him too critical. Then one day, he was told by a friendly colleague that it was his frown which made him look “angry” all the time. “I had these three deep frown lines in between my eyebrows,” explains the 35-year-old, “which looked like I was always frowning.” His colleagues felt he was always disapproving of something being discussed, which led to negative vibes in the team.
“I had had enough of this. I wanted to get rid of these lines. Someone suggested Botox to me. I looked up on that online and liked the idea,” says Rajesh. Over a weekend at the start of this year, he got Botox injections to freeze the area between his eyebrows. “The process took barely 10 minutes at a clinic and after the weekend I was all ready to join back work without those lines,” he says.
“Botox injections for treating frown lines have become quite common for men,” says K.M. Kapoor, senior consultant and head, department of cosmetic surgery, at Fortis Hospital, Mohali, who also runs a private clinic in Chandigarh. “Freezing that frown gives you a relaxed and friendly look, giving you a pleasant look.” According to him, Rajesh is among an increasing number of men who are not thinking twice before opting for non-invasive procedures to “correct” a facial expression or hide ageing.
Dr Kapoor gets around 600-700 patients, both men and women, every year who want Botox injections. Thirty per cent of these are men in the 35-45 age bracket. Three years ago, the percentage of men coming to his clinic for Botox was only 10%. “They are all well-educated, senior executives in high-paying jobs who want to retain their young looks, especially among their juniors who are in their 20s,” explains Dr Kapoor.
Botox, fillers and other non-invasive cosmetic procedures such as peels and laser hair removal are popularly known as lunch-time lifts. “All lunch-time surgeries take less than an hour, are non-invasive or superficial, can be done with local anaesthesia and show results immediately,” explains Mumbai-based cosmetic surgeon Manoj Kumar J. Manwani, who handles approximately 5,000-6,000 cosmetic cases every year. Lunch-time procedures are very popular with professionals as there is little or no recovery period, explains Satish Bhatia, 43, a dermatologist and skin surgeon based in Mumbai. “Most of my patients want non-invasive or lunch-time procedures due to weekday office timings,” he explains. They can recover over the weekend and be back on Monday looking “refreshed and relaxed”.
According to Dr Bhatia, corrections for which demand is growing in the corporate world are mole removal, skin augmentation, double- chin correction, chemical face peeling, laser treatment for unwanted hair, and facelifts.
Quick makeover
“The idea behind preferring non-invasive procedures to a full-blown surgery is that these men do not want to change their faces remarkably, but just give themselves a younger face which makes one feel more confident,” explains Dr Manwani, whose male patient list is full of professionals—engineers, doctors, managers, etc. All of them want quick, non-invasive procedures because they want little alteration to their faces and want to get it done quickly. “They also know exactly what they want and which area needs to be ‘treated’,” he says. “Most of my male patients come to me alone and after an initial consultation where they tell me the problem area, we decide on the kind of procedure they want to take up.”
Looking good: Frown lines, laugh lines, moles, scars—you can get rid of them in a jiffy.
Priti Shukla, a cosmetic surgeon who has been running Priti Shukla’s Cosmetic Surgery in Hyderabad since 2001, believes that the trend of men “doing it” is here to stay and will increase in the coming years. “Already 50% of all patients I get are men,” she says, “and most of my older clientele who are in their 40s opt for Botox and fillers.” According to her, the trend is most common among software professionals in Hyderabad who want to get cosmetic surgeries done to boost their confidence and come in with their credit cards handy. Money is not a problem for them.
The risks
Though treatments such as Botox and other non-invasive procedures are generally risk-free, some temporary side effects have been reported. “There can be some reactions in case you are allergic to the toxin in Botox or fillers,” says Dr Kapoor. In the case of Botox, you can experience droopy eyelids, nausea, muscle weakness, facial pain, indigestion, or tooth problems. In the case of fillers, you can experience prolonged redness, swelling, itching or skin hardness and bumps.
He cautions against trying out these injections in a beauty parlour or a spa since they are unregulated and the results can be disastrous. A trained cosmetic surgeon knows facial anatomy, so the chances of his injecting the wrong muscle are very small, explains Dr Kapoor. So the chances of you looking like a frozen bitter gourd on Monday morning are slim.
Do your research beforehand. Dr Kapoor suggests: “Read up on the procedure, what it does to your body, consult with a known doctor who will know the right questions to ask and ask if there would be any side effects, especially if you have a history of heart disease or popping pills like vitamins, medicines or even herbal products. Your doctor needs to know it all.”
Another risk is infection, or wrongly administered anaesthesia. “You should avoid any kind of cosmetic makeover during summer as there is more colonization of bacteria and chances of infection are higher,” cautions Dr Manwani. According to him, winters are the best time to get these procedures done. “Also, before you decide on a clinic, check the place thoroughly for its sanitization to avoid catching an infection floating around.”
“The biggest risk in these procedures is that of unrealistic expectations,” says Dr Shukla, who gets patients who want drastic changes to their face. “A face filled with Botox is never a good idea, it can make you look too plastic. Your doctor knows best and if she says that a specific wrinkle cannot be filled, take her advice,” she says.
Take the example of 24-year-old Kanishka S., who is already worried that his face is beginning to resemble a dried-up walnut.
To read the complete article, click here.
Are you a regular on the fitness floor? If you want to earn a reputation for courtesy rather than boorishness, adhere to our gym etiquette guide. By Shweta Taneja
You might have been rocking the gym for years now and know all there is to know about weights and postures, but are you “that” guy? You know the kind—the one who talks loudly on the phone, leaves behind pools of sweat on the bench when he’s done, ogles at the ladies, and is forever showing off his triceps. Everyone dreads his presence. If you are nodding your head, chances are you have met such a guy. “Most of the gyms have basic rules like allowing others to use the equipment after a period of time or wiping the seat of the equipment after use,” says Delhi-based Reebok fitness expert Nisha Varma, “but not many people follow those rules.” Here are some definite no-nos if you want to be known as a true gentleman.
Wipe that seat
“Who wants to exercise in a pool of somebody else’s sweat?” asks actor Rajvansh Rai, who gets upset every time he has to touch a handle or sit on a machine covered with someone else’s perspiration. “You need to be considerate towards other people who are using the same premises and equipment,” says fitness expert Vesna Jacob, of Vesna’s Wellness Clinic, New Delhi. “Imagine if the same happens to you!”
Manners matter: Always carry a towel with you and dry yourself and the bench as you move from one machine to another. “As a rule, after you are finished with a machine, wipe off everywhere you touched—the handles, the seat, the back,” says Jacob.
Switch off your phone
“I hate people who talk on the exercise floor,” says Sandeep Makkar, an IT professional, who works out four-five times a week. “They disturb everyone around them.” Most people who come to the gym are there to beat stress and not to hear you fire your employee or dish out a dozen instructions. So when you are on the treadmill, keep the telephone at bay.
Manners matter: Leave your cellphone in the gym locker, or better still, at home. Treat the time at the gym as your personal time, where you relax, bust stress and whip your body into shape. Your life won’t change if you stay away from your phone for an hour.
Don’t hog that machine
You might be really good at reserving your seat in the first-come-first-served concerts, but when it comes to the gym, keep your running-to-catch-the-window-seat instincts to yourself. “Hanging your jacket, towel, purse, sweat rag or keeping a bottle on a machine does not make you its owner,” says Sanjana Eipe, a marketing professional who works out at a gym five-six times a week. “The gym is public space and you do not own the equipment there, so be courteous and stick to one machine at a time.”
Manners matter: If you don’t plan to use the machine in the next 2 minutes, don’t monopolize it, especially during peak hours. Even if you are doing multiple sets on a machine, as common courtesy let others work out on the machine between your rest periods. If your health club has time limits for a cardio machine, respect the rules and let others use it.
Keep it quiet
“People treat gyms more as networking spaces nowadays than a place to build up your body,” says actor Aditya Singh Rajput, who works out four times a week. “I like to focus on my workouts, which becomes impossible if the person next to me taps me on my shoulder while I am doing my last set of push-ups to ask me where I got my Adidas pair from.”
Manners matter: When in the gym, follow a vow of silence. This means no grunting, no crackling at funny things, and definitely no chatting to the person who might be sitting on a machine and crunching. Keep your voice and music low. And network in a café instead.
Stop ogling
“Ogling is bad enough anywhere, but if a man stares at me while I am sweating it out, I feel completely creeped out,” says Aruni Singh, a management consultant who works out at a gym at least four times a week. Jacob, on the other hand, has learnt to take ogling with a pinch of humour. “Sometimes guys just try to be funny while you are in the gym, laughing that the gym is not a place for strong men any more,” she says. “Instead of getting angry at that, I simply invite them for an abs and flexibility competition. You should see their sweaty faces when I beat them to it.” Staring at a woman (or a man for that matter) while she’s working out her abs or shoulders is invasive and rude.
Manners matter: The girls are working as hard as you to tone up their bodies, so give them a break. In case you like a girl at your gym, a smile’s enough sign of your interest. That’s much more gentlemanly than gaping at her while she’s doing her crunches.
Don’t display your wares
You might think that your abs are custom-made to be displayed around the floor but for others, seeing your sweaty chest is not a very relaxing experience. “I hate it when men at my gym enter a sauna bath but do not take a towel with them,” says Delhi-based businessman Amit Arora, who goes to the gym around three times a week. The gym is a public space, not your personal bathroom. Strutting around in the buff in any part of the gym, including the bathrooms, is in bad taste.
Manners matter: There’s an added benefit to covering up. Since cold muscles tear much faster, a layer of cloth on your body will absorb sweat and keep your muscles warm, protecting them from tear. If you plan to do a lot of floor-based exercises and push-ups, make sure your neckline is not too revealing and your clothes are not too loose or too tight.
Don’t give unsolicited advice
You might have spent the last 20 years in a gym and have the crispest of abs around or a mountain instead of a tricep, but that doesn’t mean that someone next to you needs to hear how much you know about your weights or how the person next to you should use the treadmill or for how long.
Manners matter: Keep your gym knowledge to yourself. In case you see someone doing an exercise incorrectly, be very delicate when you approach them. Don’t preach or be derisive; be polite and ask if they need help.
Read the complete story here
Do you blog, check your email or tweet as soon as you wake up? A tongue-in-cheek look at what your morning Net rooster says about you. By Shweta Taneja
Traditional Private Ryan
Your first window: Your personal email
Your medium of connection to the world is your personal inbox. Every morning, at home or after you reach office, the first thing you open in that browser is your personal email client. You generally don’t have any alternative windows open in your browser. All your social networking messages first come into your inbox. You check them as emails, commenting on other people’s Facebook status messages using the reply to comment link.
What it says: You are a person of habit. You took up email and have stuck to it for the last 10 years or more. It works for you and that’s the way you want to keep it.
Tweet tattler
Your first window: Twitter, Facebook or your favourite social network
As soon as am strikes, your fingers start flying on the Qwerty keyboard or its touch-screen avatar, typing thoughts, emotions and experiences in concise word lengths. It’s not one-way communication—every few minutes you also need to check for updates, tweets, links, videos or ideas that your friends, family, cousins or complete strangers are posting online. On a dinner date, you type 140 characters on the sly while ordering the lamb dish. While seeing a movie, you are constantly thinking of what you will say about it on Facebook. You are on top of the latest social network trends, be it the review of Abhishek Bachchan’s latest flop or a blood donation camp in Alaska.
What it says: You are experimental and addicted to sharing your experiences. Social networks have given you the space to constantly reveal your thoughts and experiences through minimal interface. You are completely comfortable in your online skin, much more so than meeting face to face. You are also a constant retweeter.
Hard-working Joe
Your first window: Your office email client
For you the Internet is just another medium to stay connected to your work. You have the office email client set into your smartphone and check your email as soon as you wake up. You keep checking your office mails through the day, even when you’re out for a family dinner. You need to reply to every official mail you get, be it on weekends or late at night. In fact, the best way for your spouse to communicate with you is through an official email.
What it says: You are bordering on workaholism. Even when you’re on vacation, sitting on a beach, beer mug in hand, you itch to check your office mail (and usually do) to see if there’s an emergency where you are needed.
Anti-establishment ace
Your first window: Your own blog or other people’s blog
You get to hear things that might never come into mainstream media. You most probably have your own blog. You live in the non-conformist space on the Net. Every morning, you open a list of blogs of people around the world you have come to respect and hear what they have to say. You don’t tend to go to big news sites. Your news comes from individual blogs or tweets.
What it says: You have a voice, a strong one, and an equally strong following. You will not be seen hobnobbing with the big bad wolves. You like to stay away, a lion in his own space. You also tend to be Leftist and anti-corporate.
Multitask maverick
Your first window: Facebook, Twitter, email, weather, you open them all together.
You need to do it all. You open all the windows in your browser—your email client, social networking sites, blogs, news sites—together and then toggle between windows, commenting, answering and reading.
What it says: You are a multitasker and technology, especially the online medium, is a boon for you. You like to do everything together, fast and furious.
Read the complete story here.
It was a place to remember and a place where some prejudices about Sanskrit, our ancient language, were discarded. Spent a day at the grand Sanskrit Book Fair cum conference held in Bangalore. With 1300 volunteers, 154 stalls with 128 publishers and 4 crores worth of sales (took it form the same website), the fair was a grand success. See the enthusiasm and energy for yourself.
I was also surprised by the sheer amount of people who spoke fluent Sanskrit (Read up the Wikipedia entry on it). Enthusiastic city dwellers, villagers, students, teachers, scholars and passionate people were just ambling along the area suffused with sunlight, chattering with people in sanskrit, picking up books, hugging each other like long lost friends and generally having a ball walking in the midst of the ancient language. The book exhibition was huge with publishers and titles from across the country on epics (which is why I was there). They also had a village built into the exhibition area (other than the all pervasive food stall of course) which had a post office, a school, a repair shop, a vegetable seller, the works.
Kudos to the NGOs and the government that made it happen. I aim to learn the language and practice it at the fair next year (or is that too hopeful?).
About the photograph:
It was during a recent trip to Ajanta Caves that I clicked this. The Ajanta caves which were excavated during 2nd century BC to 5th Century ACE, are a series of Buddhist monastery sites, still beautifully preserved. In one of the caves stood these tall sculptures of Buddha which are more than 1500 years old and still exquisite. Hovering around them was this throng of tourists, both males and females, caressing them softly with their eyes and capturing them in their memories and cameras as they stood unapologetically naked–emotionally, spiritually and physically.
About the exhibition:
Bangalore has hosted film festivals on themes related to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT or Queer) communities since 2003. Although they were small events, since their transformation into The Bangalore Queer Film Festival (BQFF) in April 2009, held at the Alliance Francaise, the festivals have made Bangalore a destination for international Queer films. Haptic is a photograph exhibition held during the Film Festival.