Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Friday, June 25, 2010
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
FAQ
The Name
1. What is your real name?
Sparkle Vera Lynnette Hayter.
2. No, seriously, what is your real name?
This is the name my parents gave me when I was born. Seriously. No, they weren't hippies and they weren't on drugs. They were young -- my mom was just 17, and I was the first-born.
3. Were you named after a character in Dick Tracy?
Apparently not, though Sparkle Plenty existed before I did. My rule used to be that if I told someone the truth three times and they still didn't believe me, I'd tell them a big whopper and move on, like, "I was named after a Dick Tracy character," or "It's a traditional Canadian name."
4. Are there other Sparkles?
Plenty. The name is particularly popular in the West Indies. I hope to go there some day and have an all-Sparkle meetup.
5. Can I see your birth certificate?
Not unless you have a warrant. I used to show it on demand but it made it too hard to lie about my age. In a world of Moon Units etc. it seems unnecessary, and the name Sparkle itself seems almost vanilla. I read of a kid named Audio, which on the playground is short for "kick me till I'm stupid." I sure do sympathize with Obama. People have been demanding my birth certificate my whole life.
6. Would you give a kid an unusual name?
It's a blessing as well as a curse, but probably not.
7. Sparkle is a name for a dog or a stripper.
Also, a writer, an R&B singer, and hundreds of West Indian women.
The Bollywood FAQ.
1. What is your real name?
Sparkle Vera Lynnette Hayter.
2. No, seriously, what is your real name?
This is the name my parents gave me when I was born. Seriously. No, they weren't hippies and they weren't on drugs. They were young -- my mom was just 17, and I was the first-born.
3. Were you named after a character in Dick Tracy?
Apparently not, though Sparkle Plenty existed before I did. My rule used to be that if I told someone the truth three times and they still didn't believe me, I'd tell them a big whopper and move on, like, "I was named after a Dick Tracy character," or "It's a traditional Canadian name."
4. Are there other Sparkles?
Plenty. The name is particularly popular in the West Indies. I hope to go there some day and have an all-Sparkle meetup.
5. Can I see your birth certificate?
Not unless you have a warrant. I used to show it on demand but it made it too hard to lie about my age. In a world of Moon Units etc. it seems unnecessary, and the name Sparkle itself seems almost vanilla. I read of a kid named Audio, which on the playground is short for "kick me till I'm stupid." I sure do sympathize with Obama. People have been demanding my birth certificate my whole life.
6. Would you give a kid an unusual name?
It's a blessing as well as a curse, but probably not.
7. Sparkle is a name for a dog or a stripper.
Also, a writer, an R&B singer, and hundreds of West Indian women.
The Bollywood FAQ.
Monday, June 14, 2010
Saturday, June 12, 2010
Saturday Ramble
I’m just a terrible blogger, aren’t I? I manage to update my Bollywood blog on a semi-regular basis, because I am doing some writing about the industry, but this one is so neglected the readership must have dwindled to surfers who have lost their way and tumbled here by accident. The blog needs a revival, a bit of fresh blood. So, today, a ramble about gossip.
The issue of gossip came up several times for me in the past month. One person tried to pass gossip about another to me, I heard a rumor about myself, and one person I queried generally about his experience in the business indignantly said he wouldn’t pass gossip along.
I don’t want gossip, I said.
I’m working up an article on the increase in foreign talent in the Hindi film business, both in front of and behind the screen, and what that portends for Bollywood and for Hollywood. This non-Indian contingent has attracted the interest of the ultra right Hindu nationalists in Mumbai, who fail to note the increasing numbers of Indian film professionals working in Hollywood and London. It’s the new world economy, but it’s also about the success and quality of Bollywood,
Who is diddling who is not only irrelevant, but just plain boring. I don’t believe most of it, partly because of my own experience, and partly because I once worked with a gossip reporter who, it turned out, made stuff up out of whole cloth. As fiction it was great. As news, it tanked. I quit and she got fired, but I told her I got fired too to make her feel better because she was going through a rough time in her life. This is true of most people who gossip a lot. Gossip tells you more about the teller than the subject of the rumor.
I’ve never been as interested in the content of gossip as other people seem to be (nor much in fashion -- I read Vogue for the articles, which may indicate chromosomal damage).
But I used to like this kind of gossip more, and never had a right to, because as an odd girl with odd ideas and an odd name, I've always attracted a lot of speculation and gossip. One of the more ridiculous rumors that made it back to me was one I heard when I transferred from CNN New York to CNN Atlanta. My first day, people kept passing my desk, giving me puzzled looks. It made me feel pretty bad. Finally, someone told me what was going on: one of the assignment editors had told people I was an Indian princess raised in Canada and thanks to my unusual name and his storytelling skills, quite a few believed him.
For two years I’d been working with these people over the phone, and the subject never came up, even though all that time they had believed me to be a princess from India -- until they saw me of course. It was one of those rare cases where the gossip was juicier than the truth.
The older I get, the less interested I am in what and who people are gossiping about, and the more interested I am in the phenomenon itself. It’s an integral part of journalism -- news stories usually start with a rumor, rumors are true sometimes, and gossip plays into the books I’ve written in a significant way. (I love, best, Dear Tweets in Naked Brunch, who hits near the truth when it comes to the shallow personal details of celebrities, but who utterly fails to see the big picture and the real story.)
Thanks to several gossip-related experiences, it is back, front and center, in my mind at the moment.
The first incident involved a rumor that someone I don’t know very well told me about someone I happen to know very well, and have known for a long time. I knew for a fact the rumor wasn’t true, and said so (gently, I thought). This made the teller very unhappy and this person isn’t speaking to me now, maybe embarrassed at being caught spreading a false rumor, maybe unhappy that it wasn’t true. I already knew this would happen because I’ve been on the other end, repeating rumors that turned out not to be true, but rumors I wanted to believe.
So, I am sorry “Person.” I didn’t mean it as a judgment because as you can see, I’m guilty too, and when I was your age I was probably guiltier of it. It’s human.
But one thing I have learned is that, as lousy as it feels to piss someone off, it feels better than repeating a nasty rumor, or even nodding a little and smiling here and there when you hear group gossip because you want to fit in and not offend.
Another piece of gossip that sparked this line of thought was hearing the same rumor from two people who don’t know each other, both wondering which intelligence agency I work for, a crazy rumor I've sadly heard before. One was half-joking, the other serious. I was tempted to say, “for the big intelligence agency in the sky,” but that sounded sort of conceited, even to me. On one hand, I can see where this comes from. I travel a lot and I’ve gone to a few dodgy places, I know some people in intelligence through my work - more through publishing than journalism as many former spooks write books, but have encountered a few through human rights work too. On paper, you could make a case, if you really tried and left out a lot of stuff, and, you know, haven’t spent a lot of time with me in real life.
I don’t much like governments or corporations, the big employers of spies (but I greatly admire folks like Wikileaks who are using their evil for good, instead of for evil). I’m accident-prone and outspoken, and I stand out. Seriously, on what planet could I be a spy? Maybe a spy for another planet. Maybe if you’re operating under the least-likely-suspect theory in the school of Maxwell Smart and see my life as a meandering writer, backpacker and oddball stumbling into adventure and misadventure as just an elaborate cover for the crack operative known only as “42.” Makes a good story, but it has also made me paranoid enough to cancel a trip I hoped to take later this year to a certain dodgy country to see friends. The kind of rumor that makes my friends laugh till they choke is also the kind of rumor that can land one in jail or worse. It’s a crazy world.
Anyway, have to get back to work. When I’m not spying for God, I’m working on a book, trying to make sense of Indian education statistics (which are very unreliable, depending on the state in which they were compiled), and researching an article on foreign talent in Bollywood.
If you work in the Hindi film business and are not native to India, I would love to talk to you about what you bring to the game, and what you get out of it, and where it might lead in the future. Like that.
The issue of gossip came up several times for me in the past month. One person tried to pass gossip about another to me, I heard a rumor about myself, and one person I queried generally about his experience in the business indignantly said he wouldn’t pass gossip along.
I don’t want gossip, I said.
I’m working up an article on the increase in foreign talent in the Hindi film business, both in front of and behind the screen, and what that portends for Bollywood and for Hollywood. This non-Indian contingent has attracted the interest of the ultra right Hindu nationalists in Mumbai, who fail to note the increasing numbers of Indian film professionals working in Hollywood and London. It’s the new world economy, but it’s also about the success and quality of Bollywood,
Who is diddling who is not only irrelevant, but just plain boring. I don’t believe most of it, partly because of my own experience, and partly because I once worked with a gossip reporter who, it turned out, made stuff up out of whole cloth. As fiction it was great. As news, it tanked. I quit and she got fired, but I told her I got fired too to make her feel better because she was going through a rough time in her life. This is true of most people who gossip a lot. Gossip tells you more about the teller than the subject of the rumor.
I’ve never been as interested in the content of gossip as other people seem to be (nor much in fashion -- I read Vogue for the articles, which may indicate chromosomal damage).
But I used to like this kind of gossip more, and never had a right to, because as an odd girl with odd ideas and an odd name, I've always attracted a lot of speculation and gossip. One of the more ridiculous rumors that made it back to me was one I heard when I transferred from CNN New York to CNN Atlanta. My first day, people kept passing my desk, giving me puzzled looks. It made me feel pretty bad. Finally, someone told me what was going on: one of the assignment editors had told people I was an Indian princess raised in Canada and thanks to my unusual name and his storytelling skills, quite a few believed him.
For two years I’d been working with these people over the phone, and the subject never came up, even though all that time they had believed me to be a princess from India -- until they saw me of course. It was one of those rare cases where the gossip was juicier than the truth.
The older I get, the less interested I am in what and who people are gossiping about, and the more interested I am in the phenomenon itself. It’s an integral part of journalism -- news stories usually start with a rumor, rumors are true sometimes, and gossip plays into the books I’ve written in a significant way. (I love, best, Dear Tweets in Naked Brunch, who hits near the truth when it comes to the shallow personal details of celebrities, but who utterly fails to see the big picture and the real story.)
Thanks to several gossip-related experiences, it is back, front and center, in my mind at the moment.
The first incident involved a rumor that someone I don’t know very well told me about someone I happen to know very well, and have known for a long time. I knew for a fact the rumor wasn’t true, and said so (gently, I thought). This made the teller very unhappy and this person isn’t speaking to me now, maybe embarrassed at being caught spreading a false rumor, maybe unhappy that it wasn’t true. I already knew this would happen because I’ve been on the other end, repeating rumors that turned out not to be true, but rumors I wanted to believe.
So, I am sorry “Person.” I didn’t mean it as a judgment because as you can see, I’m guilty too, and when I was your age I was probably guiltier of it. It’s human.
But one thing I have learned is that, as lousy as it feels to piss someone off, it feels better than repeating a nasty rumor, or even nodding a little and smiling here and there when you hear group gossip because you want to fit in and not offend.
Another piece of gossip that sparked this line of thought was hearing the same rumor from two people who don’t know each other, both wondering which intelligence agency I work for, a crazy rumor I've sadly heard before. One was half-joking, the other serious. I was tempted to say, “for the big intelligence agency in the sky,” but that sounded sort of conceited, even to me. On one hand, I can see where this comes from. I travel a lot and I’ve gone to a few dodgy places, I know some people in intelligence through my work - more through publishing than journalism as many former spooks write books, but have encountered a few through human rights work too. On paper, you could make a case, if you really tried and left out a lot of stuff, and, you know, haven’t spent a lot of time with me in real life.
I don’t much like governments or corporations, the big employers of spies (but I greatly admire folks like Wikileaks who are using their evil for good, instead of for evil). I’m accident-prone and outspoken, and I stand out. Seriously, on what planet could I be a spy? Maybe a spy for another planet. Maybe if you’re operating under the least-likely-suspect theory in the school of Maxwell Smart and see my life as a meandering writer, backpacker and oddball stumbling into adventure and misadventure as just an elaborate cover for the crack operative known only as “42.” Makes a good story, but it has also made me paranoid enough to cancel a trip I hoped to take later this year to a certain dodgy country to see friends. The kind of rumor that makes my friends laugh till they choke is also the kind of rumor that can land one in jail or worse. It’s a crazy world.
Anyway, have to get back to work. When I’m not spying for God, I’m working on a book, trying to make sense of Indian education statistics (which are very unreliable, depending on the state in which they were compiled), and researching an article on foreign talent in Bollywood.
If you work in the Hindi film business and are not native to India, I would love to talk to you about what you bring to the game, and what you get out of it, and where it might lead in the future. Like that.
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