aaaaaal izz well
Apr. 7th, 2012 12:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ravenThis has been a strange week, in which we have learned a) I am not very good at being ill and b) I am not one of life's born litigators.
I didn't go to work on Monday, and went in on Tuesday promising friends and relations I would take it easy, and ending up coming home at seven because stuff needed doing; then I went to work on Wednesday morning to do some urgently early-morning work and be ready for a morning meeting with a man who sells bolts. I did the research, which my supervisor asked several incisive questions about, before conceding that I'd found the case he wanted me to find, then he told me that the meeting with Bolt Man had been cancelled, and then he told me to go home.
He's my supervisor, I have to do what he tells me. I came home. Shim got me soup and sushi and told me not to do anything, and to emphasise, if I had to do anything, to lie on the sofa and read fanfic. I did manage to do this! Sort of. I might have cleaned the house a little.
So then I said, well, I'll go to work on Thursday and take it easy. This went so brilliantly well I got home at quarter to ten. I'm told City lawyers do this all the time, but luckily I'm not in such vaunted company. Eleven straight hours of redacting documents does funny things to your brain, though. (By hour eleven we were throwing paper aeroplanes at each other and scaring the cleaning staff.) I was particularly proud of the letter that had everything redacted except "Dear", "and", "the" and "Yours sincerely". It was a work of art. We got through twenty-one files, five reams of paper, five whiteboard markers and six packets of post-its. I hand-delivered the disclosure this morning at the crack of dawn, and now I have four days off and don't know what to do with myself, so this evening I took a nap for three hours and watched 3 Idiots again for another three.
3 Idiots! Let's talk about that. I watched it vaguely in India over Christmas on a four-hour bus journey from Chandigarh to Delhi (and, alarmingly, Shim watched it happily despite not knowing the language) and thensuch_heights kindly me got a copy with decent subtitles, so now apparently it's a film I watch when skies are grey.
3 Idiots is the highest-grossing Hindi language film of all time. It has Aamir Khan in it, whom I have been somewhat starry-eyed over for the last decade, and it is three hours long, kinda melodramatic and bits of it have clearly been commissioned by the tourist board of India. So far so samey, but I adore it. It's based, very loosely, on Chetan Bhagat's Five Point Someone, and is on its face an anecdotal film about three friends atIIT Delhi the entirely fictional Imperial College of Engineering. But unlike the novel, which I liked but didn't love, it's full of heart and clarity and ideas, and it's... well, it's remarkable. It opens ten years on, with two of them driving from Delhi to Shimla to find the missing member of the trio, and they tell the story in flashback on the way. (Shim found the depiction of the Delhi-Shimla highway very aggravating. "Where are the crazily-overtaking lorries and the herds of cattles crossing the road?" Artistic licence, dear.)
So, okay, some of the stereotypes about Indians are true. (Okay, maybe a lot of them are.) Middle-class Indians in particular have this Thing about education, about good grades, about getting 100% in everything. (My family, too: while not as bad as some, they're bad enough. When I was at school, they used to alarm my teachers by never being at all impressed by my grades. A's across the board isn't something to be excited about, they explained; it's just how things are supposed to be. I mostly chose to see this as heartening rather than demoralising as sin.)
And, of course, middle-class Indians are very much known for setting out their offspring's lives for them at birth. Those of you who've been around a while will remember my three-year-long epic battle with my parents about how they wanted me to be a doctor, and I wanted to do PPE at Oxford. (Spoilers: I won.)
So, says Farhan, the narrator of the film: I was born at 5.15pm on a sunny day in 1978. At 5.16pm, my father said: "My son will be an engineer."
Cut to him rolling up on his first day of classes. The class are ready to do battle: for good grades, to be first, for perfection. His brand-new roommate, rejoicing in the name of Ranchodas Shamaldas Chanchad, suggests to him that he might be here to learn. He doesn't take this very well. The third roommate, Raju, is too busy doing puja to get good grades to even pay attention to this. Over the next four years they get drunk a lot, Rancho gets them in a lot of trouble, they end up on very firmly on the wrong side of Virus, the belligerent dean. Rancho falls for his daughter, Pia-the-very-magnificent, and that causes more trouble, and with time it becomes evident that there is something about Rancho that he's not told his two friends.
And it's clever and very witty - Raju's home life, Farhan notes, is like something out of a 1950s black and white movie, and the camera accordingly switches to black and white whenever we see anything of it; there's an adorable running joke about engineers not being allowed to name things, e.g. the three campus puppies, Gigabyte, Megabyte and Kilobyte - and the dialogue is hilarious. (Raju complains at one point, paraphrased, "I am the only man in history to drive from Delhi to Shimla with nopants.") But more than that, it really has something to say which I didn't think Indians were saying: that memorising rote facts is not learning, and A's in everything are not necessarily education; that doing what we love matters, sometimes, more than family; that we're worth more. It leaves me with a great deal of warmth and joy. And it ends on top of the world, in Leh-Ladakh, in a landscape only of sky, and it just has such breadth and wonder at what we can be. I love it.
(Also it has lines like this: "Until yesterday I was a law-abiding citizen of India. In the last twenty-four hours I have grounded an aircraft, threatened to flush a man's ashes down the toilet and now I've kidnapped a bride from her wedding.")
Okay, now I'm going to bed.
I didn't go to work on Monday, and went in on Tuesday promising friends and relations I would take it easy, and ending up coming home at seven because stuff needed doing; then I went to work on Wednesday morning to do some urgently early-morning work and be ready for a morning meeting with a man who sells bolts. I did the research, which my supervisor asked several incisive questions about, before conceding that I'd found the case he wanted me to find, then he told me that the meeting with Bolt Man had been cancelled, and then he told me to go home.
He's my supervisor, I have to do what he tells me. I came home. Shim got me soup and sushi and told me not to do anything, and to emphasise, if I had to do anything, to lie on the sofa and read fanfic. I did manage to do this! Sort of. I might have cleaned the house a little.
So then I said, well, I'll go to work on Thursday and take it easy. This went so brilliantly well I got home at quarter to ten. I'm told City lawyers do this all the time, but luckily I'm not in such vaunted company. Eleven straight hours of redacting documents does funny things to your brain, though. (By hour eleven we were throwing paper aeroplanes at each other and scaring the cleaning staff.) I was particularly proud of the letter that had everything redacted except "Dear", "and", "the" and "Yours sincerely". It was a work of art. We got through twenty-one files, five reams of paper, five whiteboard markers and six packets of post-its. I hand-delivered the disclosure this morning at the crack of dawn, and now I have four days off and don't know what to do with myself, so this evening I took a nap for three hours and watched 3 Idiots again for another three.
3 Idiots! Let's talk about that. I watched it vaguely in India over Christmas on a four-hour bus journey from Chandigarh to Delhi (and, alarmingly, Shim watched it happily despite not knowing the language) and then
such_heights kindly me got a copy with decent subtitles, so now apparently it's a film I watch when skies are grey.3 Idiots is the highest-grossing Hindi language film of all time. It has Aamir Khan in it, whom I have been somewhat starry-eyed over for the last decade, and it is three hours long, kinda melodramatic and bits of it have clearly been commissioned by the tourist board of India. So far so samey, but I adore it. It's based, very loosely, on Chetan Bhagat's Five Point Someone, and is on its face an anecdotal film about three friends at
So, okay, some of the stereotypes about Indians are true. (Okay, maybe a lot of them are.) Middle-class Indians in particular have this Thing about education, about good grades, about getting 100% in everything. (My family, too: while not as bad as some, they're bad enough. When I was at school, they used to alarm my teachers by never being at all impressed by my grades. A's across the board isn't something to be excited about, they explained; it's just how things are supposed to be. I mostly chose to see this as heartening rather than demoralising as sin.)
And, of course, middle-class Indians are very much known for setting out their offspring's lives for them at birth. Those of you who've been around a while will remember my three-year-long epic battle with my parents about how they wanted me to be a doctor, and I wanted to do PPE at Oxford. (Spoilers: I won.)
So, says Farhan, the narrator of the film: I was born at 5.15pm on a sunny day in 1978. At 5.16pm, my father said: "My son will be an engineer."
Cut to him rolling up on his first day of classes. The class are ready to do battle: for good grades, to be first, for perfection. His brand-new roommate, rejoicing in the name of Ranchodas Shamaldas Chanchad, suggests to him that he might be here to learn. He doesn't take this very well. The third roommate, Raju, is too busy doing puja to get good grades to even pay attention to this. Over the next four years they get drunk a lot, Rancho gets them in a lot of trouble, they end up on very firmly on the wrong side of Virus, the belligerent dean. Rancho falls for his daughter, Pia-the-very-magnificent, and that causes more trouble, and with time it becomes evident that there is something about Rancho that he's not told his two friends.
And it's clever and very witty - Raju's home life, Farhan notes, is like something out of a 1950s black and white movie, and the camera accordingly switches to black and white whenever we see anything of it; there's an adorable running joke about engineers not being allowed to name things, e.g. the three campus puppies, Gigabyte, Megabyte and Kilobyte - and the dialogue is hilarious. (Raju complains at one point, paraphrased, "I am the only man in history to drive from Delhi to Shimla with nopants.") But more than that, it really has something to say which I didn't think Indians were saying: that memorising rote facts is not learning, and A's in everything are not necessarily education; that doing what we love matters, sometimes, more than family; that we're worth more. It leaves me with a great deal of warmth and joy. And it ends on top of the world, in Leh-Ladakh, in a landscape only of sky, and it just has such breadth and wonder at what we can be. I love it.
(Also it has lines like this: "Until yesterday I was a law-abiding citizen of India. In the last twenty-four hours I have grounded an aircraft, threatened to flush a man's ashes down the toilet and now I've kidnapped a bride from her wedding.")
Okay, now I'm going to bed.
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no subject
on 2012-04-07 03:27 am (UTC)And you! Um. "Get better at being sick!" isn't precisely the message I want to convey here, but oi!
no subject
on 2012-04-07 06:37 am (UTC)And I hope you feel better, and enjoy your four days off thoroughly.
no subject
on 2012-04-07 03:47 pm (UTC)Also, that sounds like a GREAT film.
no subject
on 2012-04-08 12:36 am (UTC)That sounds like an interesting film and yeah, that sort of thing isn't really evident in middle-class Indian ideas about education. There's more to life and love and learning than a set of perfect grades.
no subject
on 2012-04-08 05:13 am (UTC)no subject
on 2012-04-10 10:01 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2012-04-10 10:01 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2012-04-10 10:03 pm (UTC)(It is a great movie! So melodramatic! So delightful!)
no subject
on 2012-04-10 10:04 pm (UTC)Thank you, my dear, you are v. sweet.
no subject
on 2012-04-10 10:04 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2012-04-10 10:46 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2012-04-07 03:02 am (UTC)Also, hurray for redacted letters that are works of art. XD Sounds like you had a fun if tiring day.
no subject
on 2012-04-08 05:52 am (UTC)no subject
on 2012-04-10 03:25 pm (UTC)And I'm glad you got sent home from work (and were home for the Easter holiday?) enough to make up for the late hours you were working some days.
no subject
on 2012-04-10 10:09 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2012-04-10 10:10 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2012-04-10 10:10 pm (UTC)Me too, in retrospect. Feel much more human now! :)