“Google buns”: The first ever use of the word Google?

No,  “Google Buns”  isn’t the long-awaited follow-up to the justly famous “Studmuffins of Science” calendar. (By the way, Dr. September bore the caption “Buns. Biceps. Bunsen Burners.”)

Like most, I’d always believed that the word Google originated with the mis-spelling of Googol by the company’s founders.  Googol refers to the number represented by the digit one followed by a hundred zeros. I know this because I once read a Richie Rich comic where Richie identifies the enemy, who goes by the code name Googol, as their associate who’d once been followed during war time by a hundred Japanese planes; these planes were called Zeros. Of course I recall all this perfectly but always forget my ATM pin.

(Pic. from http://www.progressiveruin.com/2007_09_30_archive.html)

I finally arrive at the meat of this post: the British author Enid Blyton seems to have coined the word Google waaaaaay back.  I recently (re)read The Magic Faraway Tree  (first published in 1943) and came across this passage:

“Come on,” said Moon-Face. “Come and eat a Google Bun and see what you think of it.”

Soon they were all sitting on the broad branches outside Moon-Face’s house, eating Pop Biscuits and Google Buns. The buns were most peculiar. They each had a very large currant in the middle, and this was filled with sherbet. So when you got to the currant and bit it the sherbet frothed out and filled your mouth with fine bubbles that tasted delicious. The children got a real surprise when they bit their currants, and Moon-Face almost fell off the branch with laughing.

Pic from http://www.enidblytonsociety.co.uk/book-details.php?id=216&title=The+Magic+Faraway+Tree

I don’t know if anyone else has discovered the Blyton-Brin connection, but for now–I AM THE ONE.

“India’s Number One Magazine” copied my work.

India Today, which describes itself as “India’s Number One magazine”, has plagiarized this blogger’s work.

In April 2007, I posted a piece titled “Mills and Boon: An Indian Romance”. The post, which chronicled my teenage fascination–and subsequent disenchantment–with Mills and Boon romance novels, was also featured on the Indian blog aggregator site DesiPundit, which has over 20000 feed subscribers.

India Today, according to the company website,  “is the most widely read publication in India—a position it has held for over a decade—with a circulation of 1.1 million every week and a readership of more than 15 million.” Ms. Damayanti Datta, Deputy Editor of India Today, writes a blog “Personal Choice” for the publication. Her post “Grow up, Mills and Boon”, published Nov. 2008, is clearly plagiarized from my post.

The full text of my blog post can be found here, while the India Today article is  here.  Here is a paragraph-by-paragraph comparison.

Brown Paper:
Having shipped more than 3 billion books since 1949, Harlequin continues to write its own remarkable publishing story.

3 billion. And I bet a billion of them found their way to India; I personally devoured several hundred thousand in my mid-teens. I had favorite Mills and Boon authors (Betty Neels, anyone? Catherine George?) And favorite jacket colors (turquoise).  And at the local lending library, I’d read the plot summaries carefully before making my selection.

India Today:
Over 300 crore books have been exported across the world since 1949. 300 crore Mills & Boon romance. If even one-third of that 300 crore reached India, I have been a breathless reader of hundreds in my youthful past. My favourite writers were Anne Mather, Betty Neels, Penny Jordan. And my favourite cover colour was blue. I clearly remember those frenzied hunting hours spent every month amidst the termite-laden lending libraries of Free School Street of my city, Calcutta.

 

BP: Most embarrassing: I never remarked that the heroines were always in subordinate positions to their male counterparts– nurses to the he-doctors, secretaries to the businessmen and so on. And that interracial romance was noticeably absent; the tall dark handsome men were all Spanish or Italian.  The women were usually younger, usually virgins, and always so grateful to have been chosen for love by these rich successful men. (Disclaimer: I gave up reading these books when I left my teens; perhaps the books have changed over the past decade or two to include more than straight, white-on-white, doormat-meets-matador romance. )

IT: I am ashamed to admit that as an M&B reader I was never stirred by any feminist sensibilities. I never noticed how the heroines were always less ‘successful’ than the heroes—if the hero was a doctor, the heroine would be a nurse; hero businessman, heroine secretary, etc. I never asked why the heroines—simple, sweet, pure and always a virgin—were always way younger to the heroes. Or why at the end of the story, the M&B ladies were so full of gratitude to life for managing to be the love interest of the super-rich, super-successful, super-handsome men (I must point out: I have not been in touch with Mills and Boon ever since I moved on to my 20s; the doormat-heroines and larger-than-life heroes may have changed their love-talk now).

 

BP: Back in eighties/early nineties India, every girl I knew read (or had read) Mills and Boon romances.  They were especially sought-after during boring college lectures–the books were small enough and bendy enough to slip comfortably into Samuelson’s Macroeconomics text, or P.L.Soni’s magnum opus on Inorganic Chemistry.

IT:All the girls I knew back in the ’80s and ’90s—in school, in the neighbourhood—read (or flipped through relevant pages of) those Mills and Boon romances. We would narrate stories to each other, lend and share books, and fall asleep clutching an M&B. Not just that, those handy volumes were our best friend at all those sleep-inducing, yawn-invoking classes, slipping neatly inside a Resnick & Halliday physics tome or an A.L. Basham’s Wonder That Was India and enveloping us in a warm glow.

 

BP: I wonder why these books were so bloody popular. Perhaps the insanely competitive Indian academic scene, where doing well in the Class 12 board exams was a matter of life and death, led us to cherish the guaranteed happy ending the books offered? Perhaps it’s because there was no formal sex ed. class in our school curriculum, and we sought enlightenment wherever we could find it? The Mills and Boon books I read were pretty tame though; sex was described, if at all, in cagey and coy terms–”and then the room rocked and tilted, and she was borne aloft on a shower of golden sparks till she knew no more”–pshaw!

IT:Why were M&Bs that popular with us? Perhaps, those winning tales of wholesome love brought joy to lives juiced dry with the pressures and competitions of Board exams? Perhaps, without any meaningful lesson on sex and sexuality in school, we got a whiff of adult life from those? Not that, one could learn much about adult goings-on from the M&Bs that we read. Man-woman relation was always clothed in high-sounding metaphors: “then the room swam around her, and she soared on the wings of a sudden burst of golden light” etc.

BP: I think there’s more to the phenomenon than comfort or curiosity about sex, though. Many of us Indian readers had our love-lives mapped out for us early-on by family; a comfortable arranged marriage was both inevitable and desirable in the eyes of most.  A Mills and Boon  was perhaps the closest many would get to love-at-first-sight, lust-conquerors-all territory.  The latter wasn’t something everyone necessarily wanted, but certainly something that everyone wanted to know more about. And the books were unrealistic, yes, but no more than the average Hindi film…

IT: Were we interested just in sex? For most girls my generation, love-life was neatly mapped out since childhood. An arranged marriage with a boy chosen by one’s parents, a happy home, children, cars were all that we were destined for, and probably couldn’t think beyond. Perhaps, M&B gave us the first inkling of a life beyond arrangements where one could fall in love at first sight and step into a dream life of made-for-each-other ecstasy? Not that we all dreamt of falling in love. But we all wanted to know what it means to fall in love, how does it feel, how different is it from those arranged marriages? Sometimes, of course, we found the M&B route to romance absurd. So what? So are Hindi films…

I have a Creative Commons License on my blog that explicitly disallows sharing of my content without attribution or derivative works based on my content. Ms. Datta works for a respected publishing house and knows all about copyright; in fact, she emailed me back in April 2008 to ask for permission to use one of my articles which appeared in The Smithsonian Magazine. I wrote back explaining that copyright reasons prevented the same, and I never heard back from her. I learnt about the suspicious similarities between our two posts from another blogger last week.

I am upset. But I am upset not just for myself, but on behalf of bloggers everywhere. Why is our creative content and our copyright not accorded the same respect given to a piece in a print publication? Ms. Datta obeyed the law of copyright when it came to my article in The Smithsonian Magazine, but apparently felt few qualms about plagiarizing my blog post.

I have written to the editor of India Today, Mr. Prabhu Chawla, informing him about this incident. I will update this post if/when I hear from him.

UPDATE:  As of Oct. 18, 2010, I haven’t heard a word back from India Today. Following the outcry over their editor-in-chief’s plagiarism of an article from Slate, I wrote this post about the culture of plagiarism at this magazine.  India Today showed its customary good sense and posted a weak-kneed apology for the Slate incident as a comment on my blog while continuing to ignore my complaint.  I hence emailed India Today yet again on Oct. 14. Here’s the text of my email:

Hello, India Today Group Corporate Communication People,

Your unmitigated gall in posting an explanation for your plagiarism of the Slate story ON MY BLOG, while ignoring your plagiarism from this VERY BLOG leaves me amazed.  So Grady Hendrix deserves an apology because he’s from Slate, and I don’t because I’m an independent blogger? You couldn’t have demonstrated your stunning lack of principles better than with this incident. I never received a reply, let alone an apology, to my complaint made eighteen months ago, though you were quick to disable comments on the article on your site. And yet, you’ve reacted remarkably fast to the outcry about the Slate article.

Do the right thing and have your deputy editor apologize already. And no, you can’t blame jet-lag for this one.

Niranjana

No, I’m not holding my breath.

The Interpreter of Ladies: misplaced letters in book titles.

Have you heard of The Interpreter of Ladies by Jhumpa Lahiri? It’s about a man who, following an incident with a spice grinder and a bolt of lightning,  is able to read the minds of Ivy-educated Indian-American Bengali women…

The ever-dependable Guardian has come up with yet another enjoyably pointless nerd game: what the classics might sound like with  misplaced  letters.  And so we have “Louisa May Alcott’s Little Omen, in which the idyllic Massachusetts childhood of Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy is suddenly ruptured when their mother gives birth to her first boy, young Damien March…” No anagrams, and no substitutions–you can only drop letters, not re-arrange them.

I’m contributing my mite to the cause by focusing solely on writers of Indian origin. Besides Lahiri, I have:

Five Pint Someone by Chetan Bhagat : Surviving competitive beer-drinking at IIT. 

Same by Salman Rushdie: In which the author discusses his entire oeuvre.

The Eros Walk by Anita Rau Badami: A Bharatanatyam teacher in a small Indian town gives private lessons…  

Beastly Ales by Vikram Seth: Author describes his tour of England’s pubs in iambic pentameter.

Sacred Gams by Vikram Chandra: Bollywood actress insures her legs for a million rupees; underworld gangsters want their “cut”. 

The Mistress of Ices by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni : A seller of exotic gelato discovers her inner Dairy Queen.

God I could go on and on… Do take a stab.

Trust Me by Rajashree

Trust Me  marries one of India’s greatest national obsessions, Bollywood cinema (the other of course is cricket), with the tested chick-lit formula.  It’s a marketer’s dream, whispers my long-dormant inner MBA; my inner reviewer is busy gagging,  recalling that other sure-fire winner, Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination. 

Interestingly enough, Trust Me’s author Rajashree is identified solely by her first name.  The only other mononymous (thank you, Ms. Internet) female author I can think of is Colette. 

Let’s get it out of the way–Rajashree is no Colette.  The subject is indeed the same– the exploration of female sexuality in a masculine world–but Rajashree uses a trident where Colette  wields a tuning fork.  Trust Me‘s plot is perfunctory at best.  A  small-town girl Parvati moves to the big city, has a disastrous romance and consequently swears off men. She leaves her advertising career to assist on the sets of a Bollywood film. Enter the tall, fair, and handsome hero Rahul, who just might be the One. Can they work it out?

Since this book has a hot red cover with a grown-up Powerpuff Girl gazing saucily over her shoulder, the answer is glaringly clear.  And yet, there is much to like about this tale of love and longing in Bollywood. The innocent-meets-rake formula, so loved by romance writers,  fills me with fear and loathing (see my earlier post on Mills and Boon romances for more this subject).  I am so grateful that the “biggest-selling Indian chick lit novel”  does not fetishize the heroine’s purity. Parvati is no virgin; in fact, we find out in the first chapter that she has recently had an abortion. The romance genre usually demands that the heroines tend to be younger, shorter, poorer, dumber and less sexually experienced than the alpha-male; thank you, Rajashree, for confounding almost every element of this miserable equation. Protesting against his character having to strut shirtless, fully aware of his precarious toe-hold in the industry, concerned about his looks, and all of twenty years old, Rahul, rather than Parvati, is clearly the babe in the (Bolly)wood.

Rajashree is a film-maker based in Mumbai, and Trust Me incorporates several cinematic devices, including wonderful sound effects (two characters run into each other with a “dhapak”), carefully visualized settings, and much much more. All of which work very well indeed with the story. More importantly, Rajashree brings an insider’s look at Bollywood.  While India’s film industry offers all-too-obvious fodder for satire, Rajashree manages to caricature the process without ridiculing those who find meaning in it. A tricky balance indeed, and one that she strikes with just the right note of bemused detachment. I’m inclined to laugh along with the author when she describes how a particularly goofy dance sequence featuring a buffalo and a mostly-naked heroine successfully tips the distribution rights to the film. We trust Rajashree to poke fun of the film industry without making us feel mean-spirited.

The chick-lit aspects of this book, however, constitute its weakest link . It’s like Rajashree switched the jet fuel for Enfamil when she moves the story away from the Bollywood sets. There is no real exploration of the complexities of the relationship or the sexual tension between Parvati and Rahul. The characters never move beyond whether the heroine should trust the hero or not–that’s the the issue at the first meeting, and at their final blow-up. The romance is consequently flatter than a dosa.  

My other grouse is with the scenes featuring Parvati and her friends. The heroine’s friends are a pillar of the chick-lit genre, serving to demonstrate that the protagonist has a life beyond her feelings for the hero. Parvati’s interactions with her friends remind me of those high-school days when we’d earnestly analyze one another based on Cheiro’s handy palmistry reckoner.  Parvati’s girlfriends exist solely to explain her romantic choices to the reader; there isn’t a single original aspect to their personalities or existence. I wish the leopard reputedly roaming around Film City had swallowed these characters the instant of their creation. 

In sum, Trust Me is not frothy enough to work as a chick-lit novel nor deep enough to succeed as a literary work, and thus ends up falling between the two stools.  But now that she’s got the first book out of the way, Rajashree will hopefully hunker down to really write, and I’ll be first in the line for that novel.

Many lie over books ‘to impress’

Four in 10 people have lied about what they had read to impress friends or potential partners, according to an article on the Beeb website.

I’m really heartened by this news. Being widely read makes a person attractive! Deal with that, you iphone flaunting skinny jean wearers. I see your piercing, and I’ll raise you my Rushdie.

“The men polled said they would be most impressed by women who read news websites, Shakespeare or song lyrics.

Women said men should have read Nelson Mandela’s biography or Shakespeare. “

Of course I lied about reading when I was younger.  Joseph Campbell. Shakespeare. Couple of French writers. A surfeit of poets. Upon reflection though, I think I lied more about what I hadn’t read. Self-help books. Linda Goodman’s Love Signs. Woman’s Era.

I don’t lie about reading any more–it’s too dangerous and stupid, now that I’m a professional reviewer.  Moreover, one of the few benefits of growing old is that you don’t care as much about impressing people–co-existence, that’s my goal.  So: I haven’t read Nelson Mandela’s biography. The last song lyrics I looked up: Bohemian Rhapsody. 

What books have you lied about?

This article made me fondly recall Changing Places by the incomparable David Lodge.  The novel mentions a party game called Humiliation, where each person names a book he hasn’t read but assumes others have, and gets a point for every one who has read it. So the person who hasn’t read a book everyone else has gets the most points.  For instance, if you haven’t read Harry Potter but everyone else has, you’d be winning. 

The players at this particular party are English professors from a large American university. I don’t remember the exact details, but there’s a Type-A character whose need to win is only matched by his need to look good–a real dilemma if you’re playing Humiliation, eh?  Anyway, this professor admits to not having read Hamlet, and wins the game–but is subsequently rejected for tenure because everyone knows he hasn’t read Hamlet. My description does no justice to the sparkling irony that imbues Lodge’s writing…please, if you’ve never read his work, do so at once, and I’ll bet his backlist will head your 2009  TBR list.