New Year Post 2020

2019 was not a good year.

Let me elucidate: 2019 was an extremely bad year. It started bad, kept getting worse, and ended with me in a hospital bed with a temperature of 41.7 degrees Celsius, being pumped full of antibiotics intravenously four times a day. In between I got hardly anything done: writing became something I did not even want to think about.

I lost one good friend: Jerry Larson, known to friends as Harry Hamid, and a daughter: Juno, my Neapolitan Mastiff. I did gain a couple of babies, Vesta and Shaka. So.

I drew some cartoons, not as many as I might have wanted. Motivation became more and more elusive. Why should I do anything when almost nobody cared?

I left all social media in 2019, probably permanently and forever. The one I was still using, VKontakte, suspended my account on plainly fictitious grounds, making it perfectly clear that their only reason to suspend me was to silence me. I have had it with social media.

Meanwhile, personally, my life was crumbling. I endured extreme stress, waking up in the middle of the night and lying awake for hours. I had to literally force myself to get out of bed in the morning to face the day.

In Hindunazistan the Modi regime created situation after situation that wrecked the country beyond repair. In this very town violence caused curfew to be imposed for weeks, and it may and probably will break out again anytime soon.

Being put in this kind of situation made me decide some things:

First, I have to get out of dentistry. I have never pretended to like this profession, but now it is literally killing me. I can’t get the last thirty years of my life back and start over, but I can try and at least see to it that my next thirty years are at least tolerable.

Secondly, since I don’t know how to earn a living at anything else, and I can’t take years off to retrain (and then compete for employment against people less than half my age) I can only try and earn money writing.

Third, in India it is impossible to earn money writing.

Therefore I need to find agents and publishers elsewhere.

And I need to write more, and hope to find success somewhere, sometime.

Meanwhile, I will have to earn a living however I can, because I can’t go on with dentistry.

Because of my hospitalisation I couldn’t even draw my usual New Year’s cartoon. Last year on 1 January I had predicted that the final implosion of the Amerikastani Empire would begin in 2019. The end of the year saw Amerikastani war criminals crouching fearfully on the roof of the Amerikastani “embassy” in Baghdad as Iraqi security forces prevented Iraqi protestors from ripping them limb from limb: the same Iraqi security forces whose members those Amerikastani war criminals had murdered the day before. I submit that my prediction was correct.

So, a happy 2020 to you all, with more writing from me, and damnation to all things Amerikastani.

Help Me Out Here (Or Out Of Here)

Google Plus is being murdered on 2 April.

Back in the day, until about 2017, I used to be very active on Google Plus. It was the anti-Fakebook, free of adverts and cat videos, with a high intellectual level, and, at first, little to no censorship.

But Google was not making any money out of it. So it killed it.

The writing was on the wall for a while, really. Google stopped, for all intents and purposes, maintaining Google Plus around 2016. It allowed it to wither away, while looking for an excuse – any excuse – to kill it off. And the wishes of its users be damned.

That excuse came in the shape of a “security breach” a year or so ago, which even Google admits did not expose its users’ data to anybody (unlike, you know, Fakebook). But, rather than just fixing the breach and moving on, Google chose to close down the social network altogether.

It’s just the latest in a long, long, line of things Google has killed off. And it almost certainly won’t be the last.

The next, or the next but one, or the next one after that, I believe, will be Blogger.

Why?

The signs are unmistakable.

Between 2006 and 2012, I was on the greatest blogging/social media website ever created, Multiply. It was killed off after being taken over by a South African corporate criminal called Stefan Magdalinsky, who was far too greedy for his own good, and chose to convert it into an e-shopping network. While he only murdered Multiply in 2012, the signs had been clear since mid-2011, though, that the site was doomed. And those of us who recognised those signs, like me, began to look for an alternative site to move to.

Today, I see those same signs in Blogspot.

Let’s be clear about this – I do not trust Google as far as I can throw it. I do not trust it to not kill off Blogspot, which it owns, because it can.

But, more than that, I have some observations.

First, most of Blogger is free. It has no adverts. The majority of users don’t pay Google to use it. What that means is that Google is not making any money from it, and we know Google is all about money.

Secondly, and, yes, I am blaming most of you who are reading this, blogging is headed down the road to the same extinction that visited such concepts as chat rooms and Orkut. Why? Simple. You don’t read. Even those of you who would think nothing of writing ten thousand word long stories ten years ago don’t want to read anything longer than ten word long memes and tweets now. You don’t have to pretend – I can see it in my stats. And that means, in turn, that I have less and less incentive to spend my spare time doing the hard work of writing. Right?

Right. And though I’m just one person, the whole of Blogger is headed down the same route. And it's getting worse. People who used to write a hundred or more posts a year ago can scarcely be bothered to type out one or two short blogs in six months now.

Do you think Blogger and its owner Google are unaware of that? They are not unaware of that. No.

The other signs are equally clear. I don’t know if you’ve noticed it, but Blogger has become, essentially, maintenance-free. Spam comments are no longer delivered to spam folders, but to your inbox. All these years, and Blogger still hasn’t managed to create a comment edit function, something, you know, just about everyone else has had for fifteen years if not longer. And more!

Recently, it’s become harder and harder to post or edit posted articles. Typically, when I post something and click on save, I get this:

 An error occurred while trying to save or publish your post. Please try again. Dismiss

And no matter how many times I click, I keep getting it. Only if I open a separate window to my blog do I see if the damn thing has posted/updated or not.

This is most definitely Not A Good Sign. This is not a sign of a site which really cares any longer whether it still exists or what the hell you do on it.

In other words, it’s a site which is, sooner or later, doomed.

As such, I have decided to look for another blogging site. I need, at the very least, to create an online backup of my posts here. Here are my requirements:

1     It needs to be free (I can’t pay in dollars even if I wanted to, and I don’t).

2     It needs to be no-censorship, as Blogspot still is.

3    It needs to be easy-to-use (without any fancy formatting troubles).

4     It must have no limits on uploads (unlike WordPress, for example).

5    Readers ought to be able to comment with the minimum of trouble.

6.    I need to have a reasonable expectation that it won’t vanish tomorrow.

I realise that most of these points could be addressed by my own website, but I’ll be frank.

First, much as I want my own site, I cannot afford it, and will not be able to in the foreseeable future. You realise that unlike a lot of other bloggers, I do not have a donate button, I do not beg for money via Patreon from you people, and anything I put online is free for you to read and share. But by the same token, I do not make a penny for my writing, and I cannot afford to divert funds from more important purposes in order to pay to maintain a website of my own.

Second, I have zero skills at web design, and the costs of paying a professional web designer to set up a website for me are far more than I can even conceive of affording.

Third, a readymade blogging site comes with other users and readers. This is not true of a website I have to start from scratch. I do not expect more than five of you (you know who you are) to follow me wherever I might go.

Therefore, I need suggestions. Tell me what other blogging sites (not WordPress, thank you, I already use it for my cartoons and I hate it, thank you very much all the same) you know about.

Thanks in advance in case you have suggestions. Or, you know, not.

Memories Of St Edmund's

Note: This is an essay I wrote for the alumni association magazine of my old school, St Edmund's, which I attended from March 1976 to March 1986.

      ******************************************************************

“Apricot CRP!” Mr Lama shouted, the brass knob on the end of his stick flashing in the sunlight. “Get in line and stand straight!”

“Yes, sir,” Apricot CRP said, and got into line and tried to stand straight, trying not to blush.

How do I know that Apricot CRP was trying not to blush?

Because I was Apricot CRP.

Mr Lama, known to us as Drill Sir, had a way with names. I was Apricot because back in those days I was plump, and also because I was fair and had some of the reddest cheeks you saw outside a make-up advertisement. And as for the CRP, which stood for Central Reserve Police – well, for that, blame my parents and their obsession with having my hair cut as short as it could possibly get.

I was no good on the drill field. I couldn’t run, I couldn’t dodge, and though I could march and drill with the rest it was hardly an accomplishment anyone else couldn’t do. But that didn’t change the fact that I absolutely loved – loved, I tell you – drill period. Being out in the sun in the middle of school day, instead of class; that was heaven. It was heaven even though I was terrified of Mr Lama and his flat cap, of his pocket watch, and most of all his brass topped cane.

It was famous, that cane. I recall once Brother Gaffney, then the principal, told us to behave ourselves on the field or else Mr Lama would be there “and with his seasoned cane.” Oh, it was seasoned, all right; it was seasoned by giving us “benders”. That is, I suppose, not something that would be permitted today. Still, it did no harm to us; it might even have done some of us a power of good. And it most certainly did not prevent me from enjoying my time away from class, on First Field, doing drill.

No, I did not enjoy class. To this day I do not enjoy any form of regimented education, but back then I absolutely hated class. This was probably instilled in me in Class One, when I was thrown into the school without speaking or understanding a word of English (no kindergarten or nursery for me) and had to learn fast, or sink. I learned fast, but it left scars which remain to this day.

How did I cope? At first, I tried to become the class comedian. It is not a role that comes naturally to me, and all I did was make myself ridiculous and disliked (by teachers whom I myself intensely disliked). And then I just retreated from the scene; I kept to myself as much as possible, a retreat that continued for the rest of my school years. I still do not regret that one little bit. Spending the lunch period in the library was preferable to being picked on in First Field. It also gave me an education, more than the textbooks did.

I am afraid that if I were to go back over my memories of ten years in St Edmund’s, class and teachers would not occupy the good ones. I’d rather not write here about the things that still, so many years later, make me angry, and focus on the memories that I still smile over.

The first of those was undoubtedly Silly Billy, the janitor. I don’t at this distance in time recall his real name – Dila Ram, maybe – but he was an institution. There was the huge brass bell near the tuck shop that he used to ring four times daily, and the other one, the gong that he had to bang at the end of every period. I still recall watching him, from the class window, bring it over and hang it on a hook and then bang it with the padded gavel, and then take it back again.

Only many years later did it occur to me to marvel at the routine he had to maintain; among all his other jobs, precisely every 45 minutes he had to drop whatever he was doing, bring over the gong, bang it, take it back again, and then get back to his work. If I could meet him again now I would thank him and commend him for all he put up with from us, because of course everyone teased him mercilessly.

It was in Class Five that, in the mysterious manner of schoolboys, we all suddenly discovered the existence of sex. Even before that, whispers had been going around about the word “fuck”, which I did not understand at all except that it was something boys and girls did together. Somehow it got into my mind that it meant “marry”.

So, this happened. One time in Class Four we were doing some English lesson in the Radiant Reader (hey, remember the Radiant Reader? Does the series still exist?) I think it was a chapter from Heidi or some other 19^th Century novel. In any case, there was this girl who met a boy in the course of the story, and had just started becoming friends with him at the end. So the teacher looked around and asked, “Right, now, can anyone tell me what the two of them might do next?”

I (proudly, raising hand): “I think they’ll fuck.”

I brought the house down, and I didn’t even know why.

Sometime in Class 6 or 7 we had this Anglo-Indian teacher called Mr Jones. He was probably in his mid to late twenties, but looked awfully old to us, of course, and he terrified all of us. He also had some decidedly strange ideas about evolution.

Once, he was attempting to teach an English lesson. It was a story of a dinosaur and a mammal arguing; the only thing I remember from the story is the term “Jehovah’s jejune juvenilia”, a bit of artsome alliterative authorship that deserved better than the story it was stuck in. But there was a mention of a “mastodon.” What was a mastodon?

This is how Jones explained it: “A mastodon was a dinosaur, with three horns, you know, one on its nose, and one on top of each eye. That’s what a rhinoceros is descended from.”

Over thirty years later, this remains my absolute favourite bit of confusion so entangled it can’t possibly be disentangled again. Where to start? Let’s see!

First, a mastodon was one of the two families of archaic elephant, the other being the mammoth.

Secondly, the creature he was talking about was one of the ceratopsian dinosaurs, probably Triceratops or possibly one of the other horned dinosaurs like Styracosaurus.

And, for heaven’s sake, no dinosaur gave rise to a damn rhinoceros! It’s just a case of evolving to fit the same ecological niche.

Even then I knew all this, most of us did; but do you think any of us would dare to contradict a teacher? Of course not!

There were a couple of other little episodes between Jones and me.

One time, Jones had asked us to write an essay as homework. The essay was to be on a chemistry diagram which was, for some unaccountable reason, in our English textbook. The experiment was a fairly straightforward one, something we were familiar with, so it wasn’t much of a job to write the essay, and I wrote it that night in my exercise book. Jones had told us to bring the essay two days later – and I’d have done that. Only, I forgot. Yes, I forgot to put the exercise book in my satchel.

I still remember that Jones was in a proper foul mood that day. “Woe betide anyone,” he declared on stepping into the classroom, and in exactly those words, woe betide anyone. “Woe betide anyone who hasn’t brought the essay with him.” As I said, we were all terrified of this guy. Anyway, he then glared around the room and said, “Stand up whoever hasn’t brought the essay.” A scattering of people actually stood, I not so brave as to be among them. Jones stared at them, and just when we were all expecting him to call down the fires of heaven on their heads, he just said, quietly, “OK, bring the essay next time.” Then he turned to the rest of us. “You,” and he was pointing right at...me!!...”yes, you. Am I cockeyed or something? Come up here and read your essay.”

Now I may not be a quick thinker most of the time, but on this occasion I acted with commendable efficiency. I got out an exercise book from my bag at random, walked up to the front of the class, opened a page at random, and began “reading” the essay out loud (making it up as I went along, of course – remember that the experiment was nothing unknown to us). And I must say i did it rather well too. I was terrified that Jones would ask for the book at the end of it, but all he did was glare around at the class. “See,” he said. “That’s the way you should write an essay!”

And then the bell rang for the next period. You should have heard my sigh of relief.

This particular episode had a sequel. For Jones’ next class, of course, everyone made perfectly sure to bring their essays, and Jones took them for correction. He called me over to his desk. “Somehow,” he muttered, as he went over my effort with a red pen, “it doesn’t read quite as well on the page as when you read it out to the class...”

If he only knew.

Then there was the time Jones asked us to write a story as homework. The only criterion was that it should be about a crime; length, style and content were up to us. My own not particularly distinguished effort revolved around a pair of crooks, a male and a female, who used to break into people’s houses on false pretences and steal things. Finally they were arrested by a cop who caught them in the act of...

Now at this point I stopped.

You see, there was a fancy word I was trying to think of, a synonym for burglary. The problem was that the word had for the moment totally slipped my mind, and – try as I might – it was slipping further and further away. I didn’t possess a thesaurus (hell, I didn’t know what a thesaurus was), so I couldn’t open it and discover that the word I wanted was larceny. Another word finally came to mind, a nice word, whose meaning I wasn’t quite sure of, but which I thought was the right one (I’ll tell you in a minute which word it was). The cop caught them in the act of...

I put my pen on the paper to write the word and hesitated. After all, I wasn’t quite, one hundred per cent, sure. But still...

I thought and thought about it and finally chickened out, and wrote that the couple were arrested for burglary, and submitted the story, still wishing I had the moral courage to submit the word I’d wanted.

A day or so later I found a dictionary. I decided to confirm that I was right and the word was in fact a synonym for burglary. I opened it to the A’s, found the correct page, and ran my finger down the column of words until I found it. There it was, in bold type:

Adultery. 

Then I remember Patricia Ann Beddoe, who remains a friend of mine to this day, 35 years later, when she is in her mid-80s and I am far from young. Mrs Beddoe with her red boots, her small mirrors and her elocution lessons. She was one of the only two teachers in my entire ten years of school I ever attempted to search for afterwards (the other, Mrs Bhattacharya from Class 2A, has unfortunately almost certainly long since departed from us into the world of shades). Mrs Beddoe, who I later found out rushed from the Air Force station in Upper Shillong to the school every morning, and sometimes again in the evening to Loreto Convent; if there was someone who genuinely loved teaching it was Mrs Beddoe.

I wish I could say the same for the others.

Then there was JP – “Jungle Pig” to us behind his back. His real name was John Prakash. Oh, JP; I owe the poor man a debt of gratitude he never could imagine. It happened this way.

In Class 8, JP was our class teacher. He was also the science teacher. And he was also incredibly reluctant to take us to the chemistry laboratory, which for the subject of science caused a few minor problems, as you can imagine. He waited until he could no longer put it off, and then, when marching us along the corridor towards the lab, would as likely as not find some pretext to shout “ABHOUT TURN and go back to class!” And if he lost his temper in class he would pick up the big – wait, no, not big, enormous – ruler used to draw diagrams on the blackboard, and, swinging it in both hands, try to physically chastise us with it.

This, as you can imagine, made him something of a cartoon figure to us. Sooner or later some of us with writing talent would have inevitably started satirising him; it happened to be Siddhartha Deb, who is now a journalist and author as far as I know. He wrote a poem starting “Our teacher is JP...” I don’t recall how it went, but it was pretty funny.

This poem was a hit among the class, and got me thinking of what I could do. So I wrote a poem also starting “Our teacher is JP” and which continued, as I recall (it was so many years ago, 1983, give me a break) thus:

“Our teacher is JP

JP or Jungle Pig is his name

He goes around snorting like a pig

And everyone teases him like it was a game.

Oh JP, poor JP, what did you do

When you chose the job you did

And joined this school as a teacher too!

Oh JP, you should have been a soldier

Serving in the Indian Army

You’d have been in the Bihari Regiment

And everyone would have thought you were barmy.

You’d have worn a helmet

In the very hottest weather

In the winter you’d have worn a cap

And in it you’d put a hen feather.”

And so it went for many more verses. Not exactly Nobel Literature Prize material, you’ll agree; but I was surprised to see that it was received rapturously by my classmates, and even enjoyed by Steve Beddoe (the aforementioned Patricia’s son, who was then a young monk). It was only then that I started writing more than homework essays. It was fairly juvenile stuff, of course, but without it I would not have been an author of several novels today.

It was all due to JP. Thank you, thank you.

The last two years of my time in St Edmund’s were miserable. The cause was a particular teacher; I won’t mention his name, but those who were in 9B and 10B in 1984 and 85 will know who I am talking about and know exactly how he made my life miserable. If it were today I would have gone to the principal and formally demanded to be transferred to Section A, but then we were unaware of student rights; we were discouraged from imagining that we had any rights. From these two years, I can only identify one real highlight.

It was the actor Victor Bannerjee’s visit to the school, his alma mater. It was, if I recall correctly, on 15^th September 1985, the day on which, coincidentally, I broke the best fountain pen I have ever owned. I hardly knew who Victor Bannerjee even was; I had never watched any of his movies (I still have never watched any of his movies) and I had little interest in him. However, everyone else was certainly either most interested or acting most interested; all of a sudden everyone was planning to get the man’s autograph. (I did too; I still had it ten years later, but then lost it. This isn’t about that.)

The high point of the Great Visit was a kind of press conference at the Concert Hall, taken by us Class 10 pupils. Do you remember the Concert Hall, with its lines of desks, the stage at the far end, and the huge framed charts of a fly’s life cycle, et cetera, on the wall? Bannerjee, standing on the stage, lectured us on how he would give us benders if we even thought of acting instead of studying, and then asked for questions.   

I managed two.

The first: “In which of your movies did you give your best?”

Bannerjee: “In both of them.” (Nice, safe, boilerplate, meaningless answer, but it was an answer.)

Then right at the end, I had another question, and raised my hand.

Brother Noronha, principal : “Right, we have time for one more. Yes, what do you want to ask?”

I stood up, ready to ask my question, opened my mouth......and my brain froze. I absolutely couldn’t remember what I’d wanted to ask.

I waited...nothing happened.

I waited a little longer...my brain was still frozen. I tried to get my mouth working.

And this is what came out:

“Oh hell, I’ve forgotten my question!”

That was the high point of  everyone’s day.

I wish I could end this essay on a positive note, talking of how I look back with nostalgia to my St Edmund’s days. But it would be a lie. I’ll just add a few words to explain what I think of St Edmund’s:

I am not a parent. I will never be a parent. But, assuming I was a parent, would I have sent my children to study in St Edmund’s?

Not in a million years. 

There, I’m done now.

Notice to Reader

I refuse to make any explanation for my recent absence. Let it be enough to say that I have had a hard few months, and that writing was not the first thing on my mind.

I will be writing again from now, but when I want, and what I want, as usual.

Thank you for your concern, etc.

Important notice

I long ago stopped getting any pleasure from drawing cartoons. I continued because they gave you pleasure and because I thought they had some positive effect on the world.

I no longer believe that.

Therefore, this is the final one.

Thanks for all your support over the years.

I love you all.

The Stalking Zone

Does acquiring an obsessive, mentally disturbed stalker mean that I'm now officially a celebrity?

Leaving Facebook

A few weeks ago I left Fakebook permanently and forever.

This was not a spur of the moment decision. This was a decision I had been mulling for a long time, and delayed, I believe, for far too long already.

Here is why I left.

I had had enough.

I had had enough of the drama queens, who think every moment of their existence is worth shouting out to the world. I had had enough of the liberals and their “Russiagate”, their anti-Putin rants, and their rainbow flagwagging. I had had enough of the “transgender activists”, the “gay rights” rubbish, and the neurotics who validate their existence by how obsessively they use Zuckerberg’s site.

I had had enough of pretending, even by my silence, that I give a damn about homosexuals or “transgender” people, or breeders who pretend that not spawning is somehow selfish and anti-human. I had had enough of Jew-hating Holocaust deniers, zionazi-supporting fascist vermin, Islamomisiac racists, Modifellating Bhaktonazis, and the rest of them.

And I had had enough of Amerikastanis. Back in 2003, when Bush invaded Iraq, I had made a statement that went like this: “If you are an American citizen, and you do not go out of your way to explicitly prove that you are opposed to the warmongering policies of your government, you are a war crimes enabler and a war criminal as far as I am concerned.” That was after 90% of American citizens had approved Bush’s declared “crusade” against the world in 2001.

Think about that a moment. 90% of American citizens supported a war of aggression without end, against people who had done them no harm.

There is no forgiveness for this.

Oh, I tried. Over the next few years I deluded myself into the mistaken belief that only the government and the media of America are corrupt and evil, and that the basic American has the same redeeming qualities as anyone else. That idea began to die when the blood soaked war criminal George W Bush left office to be replaced by the even more vile blood-soaked war criminal Barack Hussein Obama – and the very same Americans (people whom I had known for years) suddenly traded their opposition to war carried out by the Shrub for enthusiastic approbation of war carried out by the Mulatto Messiah with the Nobel Peace Prize.

Still, I hung on. I hung on until the Amerikastani 2016 election and its aftermath (which is still dragging on to this day). I hung on to see the same Amerikastani liberals who allegedly opposed American wars proudly pose with their spawn in uniform; I saw them become cheerleaders for the same FBI and CIA which they had been shrilly condemning a decade earlier. I saw people who spent their time hating everything about Trump either stay completely and deafeningly silent on his wars abroad, or attacking him because he simply wasn’t doing enough killing.

I repeat – these were the very same people.

And I had had enough.

Finally, I have gone right back to my position in 2003, which I now am fully convinced was essentially correct: “If you are an American citizen, and you do not go out of your way to explicitly prove that you are opposed to the warmongering policies of your government, you are a war crimes enabler and a war criminal as far as I am concerned.” I would however add one extra phrase: "... irrespective of the party in power in your country" after "policies of your government."

I do not intend to be fooled again.

Telling them this was, and is, pointless. Amerikastanis think they know everything already. As President Putin said recently, after unveiling Russia’s new missiles, Russia had been begging Amerikastan for years to understand that the current path led down to nothing except dangerous confrontation, but Warshington would not listen. “So listen now.”

They did not listen to him, either. Putin doesn’t really have an option; as a national leader, he has to deal with Amerikastanis. But I don’t.

This was another major reason why I left; I wanted to limit my exposure to Amerikastanis as much as I could. It was essential for managing my own stress levels, on top of everything else. On other social media I use, I interact either with relatively few Americans (who are not Amerikastanis, but thinking humans) or where politics are not discussed, like on the comic satire blog on the left of this page.

Then there was Fakebook itself.

What is Fakebook?

First, it is a tool of enslavement. Fakebook is like a drug; it drip feeds you “likes” in an effort to make you a neurotic whose self-worth is measured in those likes, and who therefore keeps trying to get more. In order to get those, of course, one has to fit in with the tastes of one’s contacts (Fakebook keeps suggesting an ever expanding list of contacts) and so you find yourself conforming to whatever propaganda Zuckerberg decides you should believe. And he censors the rest.

This censorship is both direct and indirect. Fakebook direct, or overt, censorship is crude and highly visible. Links from RT or other non-Amerikastani or NATO-controlled media disappear quickly; I once had a link from RT vanish within thirty seconds of posting it, while one from the CIA-controlled Washington Post on the very same topic, saying the same thing, stayed intact. That’s obviously to compel adherence to the War Party line, as is the arbitrary banning of (invariably pro-Russia and pro-Syria) users for any or no reason whatever.

The indirect, covert, censorship is much less well known, and that is the one that makes a lot of money for Zuckerberg. You may miss this fact, but Fakebook has no content. None. It’s like an empty building. All the content is provided by users, and all of it is free of cost to Zuckerberg. He just has to make money from it.

And he does it by quite simple means. You have a page on Fakebook where you want to post your music, or art, or writing, or anything that you want the world outside your contacts to see? Fine, you can do that...as long as you pay Zuckerberg to promote it. If you don’t, said page might as well not exist as far as 99.99999999% of Fakebookers are concerned; they’ll never see it.

Then there are the adverts. Fakebook keeps trying to mine data, endlessly, so that it can tailor adverts to you. Any of the “games” your idiot friends keep trying to get you to play aren’t games; they’re tools to get information about you so that advertisers can hit you with their lies. And, of course, the data also goes to the CIA. Of course it does.

I was sick of the attempts to brainwash me into a neurotic zombie spending every waking hour making money for Zuckerberg. I was sick of the censorship. I was sick of the “promoted material” being pushed on me.

This was although I was using far less than all the tools Fakebook kept trying to push on me. I did not download the Fakebook App. I refused to use Fakebook Messenger or Fakebook Lite. I did not play any games. I disabled all text messages and emails from Fakebook. And still it was far too much to tolerate.

So I quit.

Even quitting wasn’t easy. Fakebook makes it as hard as possible. The site only gives you, from the site itself, an option to deactivate your account, meaning it’s still there, and any time you sign in it gets activated again. There is a way to permanently delete your account, but you would never know it from Fakebook. Google “How to delete my Facebook account permanently”, and you will find a link on this page. From it you can apply to have your Fakebook account deleted. But you would never know it from the main Fakebook site. Even then I had to wait two weeks before they wiped my Fakebook permanently.

How do I feel now that I am without Fakebook? Do I miss anybody? Do I have any withdrawal symptoms? No and no. As I said in a farewell message I put up before I left, those who were interested would know where else on the net to find me already. Those who didn’t know weren’t interested. And I am far from surprised to find that just one single person followed me to my alternative sites, no matter how much many of them pretended sorrow (or, a sad emoticon, :( ,because writing a line is too hard and taxing on the attention span) at my leaving Fakebook. Just one, who left one message for me on VKontakte and stopped being active there. The rest of those who are still connected to me on alternate sites were already connected.

I am still writing my novel, and I am still drawing cartoons, and I have some more peace of mind since I freed myself from Zuckerberg’s shackles. If you think you should, too, you know what to do.

Goodbye, Fakebook, won’t ever be back, won’t miss you.

 

[Image source]

Explanation for recent absence

As some of you might have perhaps noticed, I have not updated this blog in the recent past. Here are some of the reasons for this:

First, my six-month-old new laptop’s (the one on which I’m typing this) hard drive crashed, taking with it most of my files. A lot were backed up on my old laptop, on which more anon, and what I wrote in the last few months was also online, but all my downloaded material went.

Since the laptop was under warranty, I could get the hard drive replaced for free, but I had to return it to the shop from which I’d bought it, which in turn had to send the crashed hard drive back to the company for a replacement. When I had done that, I went to turn on my old laptop – only to find it wouldn’t turn on. Something hellacious had gone wrong with it too.

This was hardly a new thing; the reason I’d bought my new laptop last year in the first place was that the old laptop was breaking down so frequently I was spending more on keeping it going than I’d spent originally to buy it.

However, at the time I’d no idea if the files on the old laptop were gone as well, and I had a dreadful couple of days until I’d got it confirmed that, no, it wasn’t a hard drive problem, and my files were safe.

With both my laptops in for repair, I’d only my desktop. However, here, too, I had problems. For one thing, with my worries about the laptops and my files, I had hardly any desire to write. Secondly, the desktop isn’t portable, and my internet at home seemed to be down all the time. Third, I began having episodes of recurrent back pain, which precluded sitting upright for too long. I could do a cartoon or two on my desktop, but I couldn’t post them until the net was up. And half the time I didn’t want to.

When I got the new laptop back, it came with a temporary Windows 10 installed, which was valid for just a month. I had to order software from the company, which when it arrived (less than a week before the end of said month) had to be installed again. And while installing, the computer shop managed to misplace all of my recovered files...and claim they never existed in the first place.

To say I was infuriated would be an understatement.

In the end, I did locate the files. They were in the computer shop’s removable hard drive, sitting there without the shop checking to see if they were there before saying they weren’t. They had to be uploaded and reinstalled, which they were...eventually.

My files are still in a bit of a mess and require organising.

By the time I had my laptops back, I had another problem (to which I’ll allude in a moment). Meanwhile, my desktop suddenly packed it in. It didn’t stop working, but all its USB ports did stop. This meant that I couldn’t even connect my scanner anymore, and my desktop (as I may have mentioned) is where I do all my cartoon work. So it turned out that my desktop wasn’t working either; it turned out to need a new motherboard.

And when I got the desktop back with a new motherboard, my modem fried. No modem.

Let’s get this in sequence:

New laptop loses hard drive and all files.

Old laptop stops working.

Desktop stops working.

Modem stops working.

As of this writing the first three have been (mostly; the sound system on my desktop still doesn’t work) fixed, but I still have no modem at home, and I absolutely do not trust any electronic devices to work at all anymore.

Why do I not buy a modem, or for that matter, a tablet to do cartooning, and an external hard drive? Well, that brings me to Reason Two:

A severe financial squeeze.

In terms of money, the last two years have been a nightmare. The worst point was Modi’s Great Big Demonetisation Jamboree in November, which crashed my finances through the floor, and it took over six months before my earnings recovered to the October level. Of course, my insurance premiums, rent, salaries payable and taxes weren’t reduced, though my income was.

I have been hurting, badly.

On top of that, I am going to have to shift my clinic to another place in August, since the owner of this commercial building wants to use these rooms for something else. After much dickering, he withdrew the eviction order he’d served on all the tenants, and has offered me alternative space in this same building. It’s actually bigger than what I have now, but any shift requires a lot of money. On top of which specimens will take time to relearn where I am going to be. They literally can’t see the signboards before their own eyes.

Simply put, I have no money to spare on inessentials. None at all.

Meanwhile:

There was a death in the family. This was an uncle of mine, who was a doctor, and who died of a heart attack. I don’t want to say anything more about this, except to say that his death unleashed a disgusting tidal wave of politics and backbiting in the extended family, in which I most emphatically did not join.

I will, however, say something about the fourth reason I have been away. Specifically, I have been having great problems motivating myself to write. At some points the very idea of writing has filled me with revulsion. It has seemed to me that I’ve been pouring out myself to the point where I have nothing to give anymore, and quite frankly I was feeling desolate and unappreciated. That was compounded by the fact that I never get any kind of material reward from my writing, and there’s a limit to how much the approbation of casual readers can carry me. I’d reached that limit.

Along with all this I reached a saturation point with the internet. Far too much faking, far too many drama queens, far too many exhibitionists, far too many establishment liars. I just could not take it all any longer.

I still can’t.

Obviously, the worst of the meltdown – if meltdown it can be termed – has passed, and I am picking up the pieces. I will be writing again, and posting while I can. However, electronic breakdowns are not under my control, and if I can’t afford to fix them right away, then that’s too bad.

For me, and perhaps, I might dare flatter myself, for a few of you as well.

Birthday Thoughts

Today, on my birthday, I’m thinking of my ancestors.

I am, actually, not particularly interested in genealogy, and I only know my family about five generations back. Beyond that, there are only family legends, and I place no faith in legends.

Still, I am thinking of my ancestors. Not any particular ancestor, just a line of shadowy figures stretching into the distant past.

What might they have thought of me?

I can say that to them I would seem to be a strange creature. I am now 46 years old. By my own standards I am middle aged, and I am probably the physically fittest I have been in my life. But to them I would be very old; until very recently, living to the age of sixty was considered to be such a feat to most Indians that “may you live sixty years” was a blessing. I am also the only child of my parents, something so astonishing that even when I was in college in the 1990s I was asked by my classmates why my parents hadn’t bred other kids – what if something happened to me?

On top of that, I am not only childless by choice, I am equally by choice the last of the direct line. Why I have done this I’ve explained elsewhere, in response to this article:

I am not a "millennial", whatever the hell that is, but I, as with many of the people quoted in this article:

1. Have zero parental instincts. None whatsoever. 2. Don't like children. That's right, I totally do not like children. 3. Have better things to do with my limited time than breed. 4. Have better things to do with my limited finances than breed. 5. Don't give a tenth of a damn what "society" -that meaningless word - thinks I should do with my genes.  6. Think anyone who brings a child into today's polluted, overpopulated, dying world is a monster of depravity.

And also:

7. I'm not interested in creating a genetically obtained lifetime slave to "take care of me in my old age", the standard argument of Indians.

Besides which:

I have a rich genetic heritage of:

1. Diabetes mellitus, which as yet I do not have.  2. Hypertension, which as yet I do not have.  3. Myopia, which I have. 4. Incurable, progressive bilateral sensory neuron deafness, which I have.  5. Obesity, which I had and which I have to work out an hour every day and stay off anything remotely tasty so as not to ever have again. 

And I also have

6. Bipolar disorder, owing to which I'm a suicide survivor and have to live on literally one day at a time.

And I'm supposed to be "selfish" for not inflicting all that baggage for a lifetime on some innocent kid just to satisfy some kind of "social expectation"?

Screw that. 

This would have all gone light years over the heads of those worthies who had passed on their genes, one to another, all of which had culminated in me. Not one of them would have failed to blink in confusion if asked the simple question, “Why do you want a child?” It was simply beyond their mental processes to examine the idea of why. They bred because of the same reasons as they got married, the same reasons as they took to whatever line of employment they did...because they were expected to, because that was preordained from the moment they were born. They never paused to wonder if they perhaps had a choice in the matter.

One of the stories from my father’s youth, I only got to know when I was in my late teens. My father was an electrical engineer, but he was never happy in the job, at which he was a consistent failure. He’d always wanted to be a doctor, and even in his old age would sometimes sigh with regret that he’d never got to study medicine. I finally was told by my grandmother that my father had actually applied for admission to both medical and engineering colleges, and had been waiting for information on whether he’d been selected. This was back in the 1950s, long before the era of competitive examinations. Anyway, it was his grandmother – my grandma’s mum-in-law – who decreed that whichever college accepted him first, he’d join that course of study. As it happened, the engineering college sent in its acceptance letter. The very day my father left home for the engineering college – in fact, within minutes of him leaving, while he was still near home – the letter of acceptance from the medical college arrived.

So what did my father’s family do? Though they knew quite well that he wanted to study medicine, did they call him back? Did they at least even discuss what to do? Of course not. They shrugged, threw the acceptance letter in the trash, and so totally ignored its existence that my father himself only found out many years later how close he’d come to becoming a doctor. And none of them cared about it, because the matriarch had decreed what was to happen, so it was up to them all to obey.

I wonder what these people, with their mindset, would have thought of me now.

I think they’d probably have taken me for an alien. In many ways, my generation of my family, which grew up in the 1970s and 80s, are aliens. Though we might live in the same places, even in the same houses, we’re psychologically and emotionally of a different species. I doubt my ancestors would have recognised us now.

Most of us in my generation are childless. Most of us are unmarried. Most of us have no intention of passing on our genes. Most of us are fine with that too.

It’s, of course, not just we who have changed. Let me give you an example.

My grandmother – the same father’s mother I’d mentioned – was married at the age of 12 to a man who was over twice her age...and was mocked by her sisters-in-law for being an “old woman” for being married so late. She was also exceptional for actually having some education, being not only able to read and write but actually having completed six years of formal education. She even taught herself the English alphabet. How she did this was a story in itself. She used to sit outside the room in which her brothers were being taught their ABCs and would eavesdrop, and with a piece of coal scrawl out the alphabet on the back of an old shovel. One day her brother – whom I later got to meet several times – caught her at this. That very day he went out and bought her a notebook, and taught her how to do it properly.

That was my grandmother – mostly self-educated, married at twelve, mother to as many as eleven children – and, though by instincts a total liberal in the best sense of the word, a complete product of her age. As far as social rebellion went, she never had an impulse towards that in her life. She told me that it was expected for women of her time to be barefoot in the presence of the older men of the family. If a woman happened to see, for example, her husband’s elder brother while she was wearing shoes, she’d have to take them off and carry them until she was past him. She would also have to pull the hem of her sari low over her face to hide her features in the presence of men, a form of burqa, and a much more inefficient one than the straightforward Muslim version. And, of course, it would be inconceivable for her to get a job of her own or do any kind of remunerative work whatsoever.

All of this – marriage as a child, subservience to the men of the family, breeding like a machine – disappeared in the course of just two generations, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with legislation. The legislation passed by successive governments has been, actually, spectacularly ineffective and even counterproductive. What worked was social change over the years, which led the granddaughters of semiliterate child brides to be independent career women openly living with their boyfriends and who would only consider having children if they really wanted to.  

I have this mental image of one of my distant progenitors, say three hundred years ago. Let’s call him Shanand Ram (this was actually the name of one of my putative ancestors). He would probably have been an old man by the age of forty, and a grandfather by then several times over. What might he have thought of me, today, on my 46^th birthday?

I don’t know, but I think he would have been bemused more than anything. I don’t think he could have begun to understand just how vast a space there is now between him and me, in mindset and experience, and how different life is for us. If I could meet him, I wonder what we might have talked about, and what he would have to say.

Well, at least there won’t be anyone in a few hundred years wondering the same thing about me.

That’s a happy thought for today.

The Ending Story

There’s a special feeling to finishing writing a book. I don’t know how to express it, though I’ve felt it several times before.

The first book I wrote, eleven years ago, was Rainbow’s End. That was a monster effort, taking me a year and a half. I’d write in longhand first, and then after I’d got a few days’ worth of material ready, I’d shift to the desktop and rewrite at the same time as getting it on Word. It was a very time consuming process, not helped by the fact that I literally made every single first time author’s error, starting off with assuming that this was my one chance ever to write a book, so I should put in everything I could.

I still recall the day I finally completed it. I’d taken the day off work owing to the death of a relative. By that time I’d given up writing on paper first, and begun tapping away directly on the keyboard. I wrote all the morning and into the afternoon, and, suddenly, before I quite knew it, I was within striking range of finishing the whole thing. So I did.

I didn’t sleep for two days afterwards.

The act of finishing that book was so draining that I felt as though I had been scooped out from the inside. Now, elsewhere, I’ve described how, at that time, I was under the insane delusion that one had only to write a book in order to find a publisher. After all, that’s what publishers were for, right?

It took me two full years to acknowledge to myself that I was wrong.

Today, I am no longer proud of Rainbow’s End. It’s execrably overwritten, crammed with pointless subplots, and fairly stuffed with purple prose. I am not exactly broken hearted that it sank without a trace. Someday, if I’m ever famous enough for someone to ask me for a book, any book, I might totally rewrite...and drastically curtail...Rainbow’s End, and get it published. But until then, may it stay buried.

For a few years after the crushing disappointment of Rainbow’s End I wrote nothing in the way of long fiction. For a fairly long period I wrote nothing at all. And it was only after joining multiply.com (a wonderful website, now sadly murdered by corporate greed) did I start blogging, and then writing stories, again.

It was at some point during these years that I read a story by Lucius Shepard, The Man Who Painted The Dragon Griaule, about a gigantic buried dragon and an artist who sets out to murder it with paint. My reaction was instant – I hated, hated, hated every word of it. To this day, I hate it. And, somewhere in my mind, there rose a desire to write a story specifically as a Take That to Shepard.

It was somewhere during those years, too, that I saw a snippet of a film – I think it was The Neverending Story – which featured a laughing child atop a furry flying beast. The two ideas came together in my mind to make a short story – it was all of some 5000 words long – called Dragonsdawn. I wrote it, exorcised my bile, and thought I’d forget about it.

                                            Yes, this was it.                                  [ Image Source]

Only my readers didn’t. My readers, especially one young lady, insisted on knowing what happened next. And so, against my better judgement, I wrote a sequel. And in order to justify that sequel, I had to expand the original story to about double its length.

And of course that sequel raised the demand for another...

To date I have written four novels. I have already spoken of Rainbow’s End. That was planned from the start, as was my third novel, Fidayeen. In between I wrote The Call Of The Khokkosh – a lighthearted little book of which I’m quite fond, and which took all of three weeks to write, from start to finish. That, too, started with what I imagined would be a one-off short story, and then gathered additional chapters due to reader demand. And, that, too, took like forever before it found anyone willing to publish it.

And when that was over, I remember sitting back from my computer with a feeling of being emptied –I’d written a chapter a day, every day, for three weeks, and I needed the rest. But I’d not worked on the book for nearly as long as Rainbow’s End, and I had correspondingly less of a reaction of feeling drained when I finished it.

Fidayeen was a different matter altogether. This was a book I had worked hard – very hard – over. I’d researched everything I could, and actually kept the first draft sitting in my computer for years...years!...while I decided whether I should continue it. By then I’d no illusions left about publishers, and the repeated heartbreak of pro forma rejection notices wasn’t something I was willing to put up with anymore. But unfinished business has a way of preying on one’s mind, and unfinished business about a topic that’s dear to your heart, much more. At that time I’d no way of knowing it would be my big break.

So I finished Fidayeen, and as I expected, all I got was rejection notices. I remember telling a friend then that I’d never again write anything expecting or hoping for it to be published; I’d rather put it all online because then at least it would be read. But when I finished it, once again, I felt drained and exhausted.

But the next day I was back at my keyboard, writing.

Today – this morning – I finished writing The Day Of The Dragon, which began merely as a fit of pique against an author who’d never, ever, read it. This is the first time I have ever written anything (anything at all) with the clear knowledge that it would be published, because, as I said, my publisher has taken it on, in advance, sight unseen. I am pleased with the results, with my account of the adventures of Batali and the dragon Yamond, but whether it will be popular with readers...well, time will tell.

But what are my feelings now? Do I feel drained? No. I am glad to get this one over with, and I hope it does well with readers. But I’m now thinking of the next two books.

My next novel to go to a publisher will be The Chronicles of Chheechkaduni, which is actually a series of linked stories featuring the adventures of the titular, and very conceited, character...which also grew out of what was intended to be a one-off short story and then caved in to readers’ demands. I’ve already written eleven of the stories. I intend to do a baker’s dozen, and in all likelihood future volumes as well. But since it won’t be a real novel, just stories written over a period of time, I doubt I’d react to it as a novel, even if everyone else might.

So my next writing project- the next full novel – will be the sequel to Fidayeen, tentatively titled Black Flag. I did not intend a sequel. But apparently everyone else expects one. And, reading the book, it seems to me that I apparently had expected to write a sequel as well, given the number of characters whose fate I left uncertain.

And, of course, Kashmir has not been resolved, and maybe never will.

So...