Vittachi

Music plagiarism for amateurs

I did it my way, said the Indian composer

By Nury Vittachi

*

When I was a junior reporter, I worked for an editorial department head who used to copy my work and re-sell it to other newspapers.

                One day, I worked up my courage and fearlessly stormed into his room, on my knees. Holding my head high, I threw my accusations in his face: “Look, terribly sorry to bother you, but I think you may have, er, accidentally copied my stories every day for the past three weeks and sold them to other newspapers.”

               “I most certainly did not,” he replied, looking most affronted. “I re-wrote them. If I re-write a story, it legally becomes my work.”

                I apologized and stormed proudly out of the office, backwards, bowing.

                The next morning, I took my own latest article and compared it with one which appeared in a different newspaper under his name. Not a single word had been changed.

               So I charged into his room and once more violently tore a strip off him: “Look, I’m really, really sorry to bother you again, but I think you may have forgotten to re-write any of my words in this one.”

                He pointed to the top of the article. “I changed those two words,” he said, pointing to my name, which he had changed to his name.

                That incident taught me a very important lesson about ethics in Asian business.

There aren’t any.

One of my all-time favourite Asian TV news clips is a CNBC report last year on music plagiarism in Bollywood. The TV anchor interviewed musician Pritam Chakravaty, who is credited with composing many famous songs that most of us thought were written by other people. For example, he, er, “composed” My Way by Paul Anka, which appears under his name on one of his soundtracks.

Now, it’s good interviewing technique to start with easy questions before shifting to tough ones which force people to admit their crimes. So the smart TV interviewer innocently asked: “To what do you credit your great success?”

Mr Chakravarty, wriggling with guilt, replied: “Er. Well. Er. I don’t know. You see I have been very, er. I just concentrate on my work. It just happened!”

Having got an instant confession without any work at all, the interviewer turned to Anu Malik, an Indian composer who “composed” many famous Western tunes, including The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Phantom of the Opera and Listen to the Falling Rain.

The interviewer said: “These are extremely well-known tunes. Do you think people in India would not know?”

“It’s no big deal,” replied Malik. He thought it most unfair that he should be accused of copying music when all he had done was copy some music, as many plagiarists had done. “Why single me out?” he whined. “Why not all the other composers?”

                The TV interviewer turned to an intellectual property lawyer named Praveen Anand and asked him to identify the prime factors for determining whether a song had been copied. The lawyer replied: “Whether there has been copying.” He then expanded on this point. “At the root of copyright law, there is copying.”

                Anyway, I’d just like to tell readers that they are free to copy any columns of mine containing libel and slander. Just remember to take out my name and put in your own.

True tale of the DVD designed for Martians

Earth scientists greet the people of Mars

By Nury Vittachi

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Scientists are sending a DVD to Mars. It is due to arrive on the surface of the Red Planet on May 25^th, which is next Sunday.

Now hang on a minute, I hear you ask.  What if Martians don’t have a DVD player?  What if they are still using video tapes? What if they haven’t progressed past Super 8 movie reels?

Well, scientists have taken that into account. The DVD is made of tough stuff that will make it playable for at least 500 years, which they reckon should be enough time even for the most primitive form of life, such as a single-cell bacterium or an American Idol judge, to build a DVD player.

Now I know you think I am making this up, but I’m not. They really have sent a DVD 680 million kilometres to Mars. Scientists spent months making the disk, which opens with a greeting to Martians.  “Let me introduce myself to you,” it says. “I am Peter Smith, the Principal Investigator of the Phoenix mission funded by NASA. My father, Hugh Smith, was born in 1902, an era when there was no radio or recorded music or television. “

I’m not exactly sure why it starts with this statement, but I suspect Mr Smith believes the sympathetic Martians will immediately use some form of Intergalactic Paypal to help with his funding challenges.

Mr. Smith then admits that Martians might not be able to understand the disk. “We will have no common language,” he says, in the language that they cannot understand. This reminds me of the safety card you get on airlines which says, “If you cannot read this, notify the flight attendant.”

Also on the disk is the radio version of HG Wells’ War of the Worlds, a story in which Martians try to take over the planet Earth, but are defeated. I can only deduce that this has been cleverly included to stop them trying to do the same thing again. “Curses!” the Martians will say. “Apparently we tried to invade them before but we failed.”

There are also messages from dead humans. There is an interview with my old friend the late Arthur C. Clarke, filmed at his home in Sri Lanka. And there’s a message from the late science writer Carl Sagan. He recorded it at his New York house, a beautiful home in Ithaca, New York, famed for its 200-foot (60 metre) waterfall. Mr Sagan greets the Martians and says:  “Maybe you can hear in the background, a 200-foot tall waterfall, which is probably, I would guess, a rarity on Mars.”

Mr Sagan is on pretty safe ground making such a claim, as there is no water on Mars. One wonders what was going through his mind when he chose to make this statement. “If people on earth are green with jealousy about my 200-foot waterfall, what about those poor schmucks on Mars, who don’t even have running water?!”

The latest space probes have reported that Mars is basically a large, icy plain, with virtually no signs of intelligent life.  No, wait, that’s Canada.

But Mars sounds pretty much the same as Canada, only with better nightlife.

Anyway, the DVD will arrive on the Red Planet at the weekend.

I suspect pirate copies will be on sale in most Asian cities by Friday night.

The world's worst songs

The ghastliest song lyrics ever will have you reaching for a ladder
By Nury Vittachi
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Schools all over Asia have started teaching English poetry using pop song lyrics. This plan is excellent in every way, except for one small drawback: the average pop lyricist has as much poetry in his soul as a bag of ready-mixed concrete with accountancy qualifications.

                Here’s proof. Your humble narrator was hanging out in a radio station with a deejay friend recently playing Rebel Rebel by David Bowie. We noticed the lyrics were just random phrases: “You got your mother in a whirl, she’s not sure if you’re a boy or a girl, hey babe, your hair’s all right.”

                So we faded that out and put on Champagne Supernova by Oasis, one of the top bands of recent years. It went: “Slowly walking down the hall, faster than a cannonball.” Hey, Liam, can I give you a bit of info? Fast things are fast, whereas slow things are slow.

We went to the cabinet for music from the 1960s, a time when they knew how to write lyrics. One of the biggest hits was Jimmy Webb’s MacArthur Park: “Someone left the cake out in the rain/ I don’t think I can take it/ It took so long to bake it/ And I’ll never have that recipe again/ oh no, oh no, no, no, oh nooo.”

                We switched to Asian rock groups. From India, we found a song from a group called Top Hero with a chorus which goes, “Smoking is injurious to health, smoking is fashion today.”

East Asians we found to be oddly sentimental. Cantopop star Leslie Cheung sang: “You have left/ Now everything is falling apart/ From that day on/ I fall in love with my left hand.” A hit by Japanese band Strawberry Path goes: “Every little thing you used to do makes my heart to cry.”

                Native English speakers were no better. Still You Turn Me On by Emerson Lake and Palmer has these lines: “Every day a little sadder/ A little madder/ Someone fetch me a ladder.” To which we can only, reply, yes, someone give him a ladder and somewhere high to jump from.

                The winner of a bad lyrics contest held by the BBC was Des’ree, with a song called Life:  “I don’t want to see a ghost/ It’s the sight I fear the most/ I’d rather have a piece of toast.”

Logic problems are common in lyrics. Consider Jailbreak by Thin Lizzy.  “Tonight there’s going to be a jail break somewhere in this town,” sings Phil Lynott. Okay, Phil, let’s talk about this. Where in the town do you think the jailbreak might take place? How about—just to pick a location at random—the jail?

Sometimes rock singers get ambitious and try to write lines that rhyme. So in Black Sabbath’s War Pigs, we have the couplet: “Generals gathered in their masses/ Just like witches at black masses.” Hey, guys, “masses” doesn’t rhyme with “masses”. Look closely. Yes. They are the same word! Incredible.

                But I think Asia can be proud of being the birthplace of the worst pop song in history. I refer, of course, to Haseena Maan Jayegi’s What is Mobile Number? Which goes like this: “What is mobile number? What is your smile number?”

                To which we reply, what is point of this song? Why it make us feel like jumping off ladder?

Today is Nylon Day

Never serve nylon food to a Serbo-Croat in polyester

By Nury Vittachi
*

Today, as everyone knows, is Nylon Day: the anniversary of the day the world’s most celebrated (in the journalistic sense of “hated”) synthetic fabric was invented.

                You may be thinking: why would anyone want to celebrate nylon? It’s icky stuff that makes the wearer fidget and sweat and smell funny. To which I would reply: Are you implying that there’s something wrong with being fidgety and sweaty and smelling funny? Huh? Huh?

                Nylon has an amazing history. In the 1930s, a scientist made blobs of transparent plastic. When he went out to lunch, his naughty young assistants pulled them into pizza strings. When one string turned out to be several metres long, they realized that they had stumbled on an amazingly useful invention: plastic pizza strings.

                No, I mean synthetic thread. They made vast amounts of it and then tried to think of a purpose for it.

                But thinking is not that easy, especially for young males. Scientific tests prove that ninety per cent of male thoughts are about leggy women (the other ten per cent are about busty women). So not surprisingly, the first thing the guys came up with was the Nylon Stocking, launched in 1938. These led to the invention of sex in the 1940s, the baby boom in the 1950s, and Bob’s your uncle (or, quite possibly, your father).

                Although stockings came first, nylon was soon being used for a variety of garments, along with its sister fabric polyester (Latin for “cheap and revolting”), invented in the same lab.

Nylon eventually reached Europe and Asia.

But this tale has a sad ending. The Serbo-Croats noticed that French were unable to mention nylon without sneering.  “Zut alors! Sank God you are wearing tres chic Parisian leather trousieurs instead of ’orrible American nylon pants,” they would say.

                The Serbo-Croats thought nylon meant nasty, and that’s what the word now means in their language. “Don’t stay there, it’s a nylon hotel,” they advise tourists. “It’s got nylon food and it’s near a nylon beach.”

                If a Serbo-Croatian approaches you wearing a suit made of man-made fibres, never say: “You’re looking very nylon today.” You could start another war.

*
BAFFLING INSTRUCTIONS DEPARTMENT: A reader from Malaysia sent the following message: “The cardboard cupholders at Starbucks each contain a small block of text making two points. One is that the things are recycled. And other is that they are for single use only. Er?”
*
READERS’ LETTERS DEPARTMENT: I wrote recently that in Swaziland, the most powerful woman had to be addressed as “The She-Elephant”. I also said you should not try this at your home or workplace. Well, I got a sad note from one reader.  “I ignored your warning and tried the She-Elephant thing in my office,” wrote Peter Emmett. “I should have heeded your warning.” Too bad, Peter. My office also has a powerful woman at its heart. We just call her “Sir”.
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BAFFLING ROAD INSTRUCTIONS DEPARTMENT. Reader David Wijekoon-Perera saw a sign on the road in Kurunegala, Sri Lanka: “Tourists bewearing, all cars have right of turns at the left corner road.”
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GRATUITOUS ABUSE OF WESTERNERS DEPARTMENT: When a French Canadian politician was applauded by an American audience, he beamed, "Thank you for giving my wife and me the clap. I thank you from the heart of my bottom.”

The tale of the funeral stripper

Take off your hat but leave the rest of your clothes on, please

By Nury Vittachi

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We’d like to ask readers to remove their hats as a sign of respect before reading this column. Thank you. Today we are going to discuss an extremely solemn topic. (Cue church organ music.) We are going to talk about funerals. Or to be more precise, the most popular part of the north-east Asian funeral service, which is, of course, the strip show.

People around the world are often highly amused (I use the word in its journalistic meaning of “horrified”) when they learn that scantily clad dancers are a regular feature of memorial services in Taiwan and parts of mainland China.

Indeed, visitors often express their delight with the sort of words that reader Anusha Nand used when I told her about it. ““Eww, that’s totally sick,” she enthused.

As far as I can tell, this is unique to Asia, yet bafflingly has never been used as part of any tourism campaign. (“Asia: home of the sexy funeral.”)

The tradition started about 20 years ago, when the Taiwanese mafia people who run the sleazy nightclub business took over significant sections of the island’s mortuary business. One day, a bright spark who had probably been reading business self-help books decided to use “horizontal integration” to combine the two sectors and expand their income. From then on, anyone who booked a funeral through their company’s mortician was entitled to an “exotic dancer” from the sister company at a deep discount.

Mourners responded with a decisive “Huh?”

The mafia’s business guy explained: “The presence of exotic dancers will greatly increase attendance at the funeral, you see, and thus show much respect for the dead.”

Well, the first part of the sentence was true. Attendance grew, and the new style sexy funeral became fashion. A survey at the turn of the millennium indicated that at that time, between a quarter and a third of Taiwanese funerals included strippers.

The tradition spread to China, and the funerals of nondescript farmers in Jiangsu were soon attracting crowds of 200 or more mourners, expressing their heartfelt condolences by cheering and hooting respectful phrases such as: “Get ‘em off.” (I know you think I am making this up but I am not.)

About three years ago, Chinese officials discovered this was strictly against the Chinese constitution, which says something like, “We hold it self-evident that all men are equally prohibited from having any form of fun unless they have uniforms, in which case they can do anything they jolly well like.” Officials have been trying to ban the habit since 2005, and sexy burials have now gone underground, so to speak.

However, the tradition continues in Taiwan. Cai Ruigong of that island recently hired a stripper to perform at the funeral of his father, who died at the age of 103. She danced for ten minutes in front of the coffin and was paid US$160. Cai told visitors that he felt it was the right thing to do, as the old man’s favourite hobby, bless the dear old thing, had been visiting strip clubs and drooling from the front rows.

Oh well, at least mourners in Taiwan can be sure that their deceased relatives are deceased. If the dearly departed's heart has not quite given out, it probably will after Little Golden Lotus Ming-Ming has shaken her flowers over him.

This will give a lift to your day

Elevators beyond Faith
By Nury Vittachi

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Imagine an elevator that never actually stops moving. It zooms up the east side of the building, disappears into the attic and then reappears, zooming down the west side. It goes round and round, endlessly, night and day. It has no doors. The only way to use it is to throw yourself in as it passes your floor, and leap out when it reaches the floor you want to get to.

Sounds like a nightmare? It was for reader Faith Ratnayake.

A lift exactly like that, called a paternoster, was the only elevator at a skyscraper in the UK’s Sheffield University at which she worked in 1962.

“Too scared to embark, I walked up and down umpteen floors every day,” she said. “After 46 years of sleepless nights, I appeal to your investigative brain to relieve my addled one: what happens when they reach the top and bottom? Do they turn tail and return upside down? Or cross over to the other side, like politicians?”

Faith, of Sri Lanka, had another reason not to use them—she wore skirts rather than trousers, so going accidentally over the top and descending upside down would have been indecent.

Well, Faith, your wish is our command. I’ve long had a death wish, so I was happy to visit that building, disobey the warning signs, and stay in the nonstop elevator as it disappeared up into the attic. (I took a lady friend for company, in case we got stuck).

It got very dark and noisy, but it didn’t turn upside down. After a while, it zoomed sideways. Then it started to head downwards.  We promptly stood on our hands to mislead observers into thinking it had turned over at the top.

Later, locals told us of rumours that people with nowhere else to go sometimes had sex in the brief period in which it disappears into the mechanical bit at the top before reemerging.

Well, I can confirm that this is impossible. There is simply not enough time for serious naughtiness to be committed by any normal person, with the possible exception of experts such as Bill Clinton.

*

SURREALITY DEPARTMENT: I’ve always had a problem with the word “surreal” which means “unreal in a strange, dreamlike way”. I’m not sure if it is just me, but life seems to me to be almost entirely surreal. Which makes reality unreal. Perhaps it’s Asia. Or maybe I just need to get out less. Anyway, from the “reality is surreal” department, I received an announcement telling me that “The Hong Kong China Food Oil Ticket Research Club” has just been disbanded. What a shame. Now the millions of people interested in researching Hong Kong China food oil tickets, and may even know what that phrase actually means, no longer have a place to do whatever they do.
*
SILLY SIGNS DEPARTMENT: Vast numbers of readers have been sending me signs, instructions and observations, so here are the three best:

Seen on a street in Kyushi, Japan: “Stop. Drive sideways.” Sounds like Faith’s elevator.

Seen on the front of a jewellery shop in India: “We shoot earholes.”

Seen in an ad for a hotel in Spain, sent in by reader Yammie Ting: “The provision of a large French widow in every room adds to the visitor’s comfort.” 

Now there’s an offer you don’t get in every hotel.

The truth about modern art

If dung can be art, does that mean art is dung?

By Nury Vittachi
*
The young Asian artist was sitting at a table drinking coffee with strange objects (a chopstick, a pencil and a bulldog clip) in her hair.

Being a connoisseur of modern art, I immediately realized what was going on. “Hi, Nisha. This is an actual piece of Live Performance Art, right?” I said.

“No,” she replied. “This is me having a cup of coffee.”

                That’s the tricky thing about art today. You can’t actually tell the difference between art and non-art.

There’s a controversy in the art world at the moment, because the latest art installation at a top gallery in Israel is a group of Europeans with lice in their hair. Incredibly, we had exactly the same thing at my kids’ school. Instead of grumbling, I now realize that I should have phoned the school principal to thank him profusely for providing the very latest modern art gratis to my offspring.

                The first principle of modern art is that the item must not look nice. “It must appear to fail on aesthetic grounds,” explained Nisha. She pointed out that in 1995, the world’s top art prize went to a dead cow, and in 1998, to elephant dung sculptures.

She told me that Sotheby’s last year auctioned an art object called Merda d’artisa for 124,000 euros. This is a good example of how things always sound better in continental European languages. In English it would have been called “Poop of an Artist” and I for one would have paid good money to have it kept away from me.

Last year, artist Anish Kapoor received 350,000 pounds in compensation after a storage company mistook his work for rubbish and threw it away. A piece of art was also thrown away in 2004, at the Tate gallery in London. I felt really sorry for the cleaner in that incident – the art object she mistook for a bag of rubbish was Gustav Metzger’s bag of rubbish. I mean, how does one know the difference when there isn’t one?

At this very moment, New York artist Justin Vignac is selling art objects labeled New York City Rubbish, which he has cunningly made out of—yes—New York City rubbish. When is rubbish rubbish and when is it art?

“I used to answer that question by saying art is something that has been manipulated by an artist,” Nisha replied. “But since I have been studying Duchamps, I’m not so sure.”

Marcel Duchamps, she explained, simply signed ordinary objects (one was a urinal).  Art critics loved his work, describing it as “the least amount of interaction between artist and art” and “the most extreme form of minimalism”.

My suspicion that the modern art movement is a massive joke being played by artists on the rest of us intensified why I heard that a man named Martin Creed won the Turner Prize for an installation which was actually an empty room.

                “Could a column making fun of modern art be classified as an item of modern art?” I asked.

                She thought for a moment. “Yes,” she replied. “But only if an artist wrote it.”

                If this column is replaced by rubbish or elephant dung tomorrow, you will know that I have handed it over to an artist. On the other hand, you may not be able to spot the difference.

What the shrinking dollar means for Asia

Falling currency means that we all end up dirt-poor
By Nury Vittachi

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I’ve just come back from the bank, where I had to change money from one currency to another. This really annoys me. In the queue, I worked out that if you change your money 13 times, you end up flat broke without actually having bought anything. Worse still, I’ve just realized I change money 14 times a year. That means I can save time and energy by just staying at home and burning my life savings.
               In ancient times, when the world was young (and Keith Richards had already began to rot), the practice of changing one form of money to another every time you crossed a national border began.
              This was particularly bad news for people from South Asia. Their currency, the rupee, was set at a very low exchange rate: one rupee was equal to one speck of dirt.
              I recall my father’s long face every time we used an airport money-changer. We got a handful of dirt. And those were the good days. Other times we just got a laugh.

Today, everything has changed. The various brands of rupee are still worthless, but thanks to financial terminology, the situation is expressed far more elegantly. We now say 0.9897 rupees equals 0.9897 specks of dirt or 1.075 seconds of laughter, which I think you’ll agree sounds better.

In the old days, the most confusing currency was the Pound, a British banknote which (rather suspiciously, I thought) weighed only a fraction of a pound.

The British currency was famously complex. The pound was divided into shillings, pence, florins and penny-farthings, coins which were so large they were used in Britain as bicycle wheels. The British also had a huge variety of coins, such as guineas, half-crowns, tuppences, quids, grands, optics, drams and snifters.

The first transaction I ever had on a visit to London went something like this:

Me: How much is that?

Airport shopkeeper: Two grand, a guinea-half-crown, three shillings, half a snifter and tuppeny-ha’pence-farthing.

Me: Oh. Do you accept rupees?

Airport shopkeeper: Yes sir. That’ll be forty googillion rupees, but I will have to give you the change in dirt and sneers.

Only after I got a job as a financial journalist did I learn how the system worked. The main world currency was the US dollar, colloquially known as Greenspans. The Greenspan was divided into bucks, dimes, nickels, quarters, eighths, sixteenths, semi-colons, jots and iotas.

               And after many years of earning a monthly handful of dirt in Asia, I eventually got a job where I was paid in a currency fixed to US dollars. I pictured myself swanning back to my home town, pockets overflowing with Greenspans.

                But what happened? From the day I started that job, the US dollar started falling in value. Down and down it went, into a hole which makes the Marianas Trench look like a scratch in a piece of marble or Kim Jong-Il’s head, whichever is denser.

               The last time I visited Sri Lanka, I took a wad of US dollars and a wad of rupees.  This was the way to get a good deal, I said to myself. No such luck. At the airport in Colombo, I checked out the rates for both my currencies at the moneychangers. I got two handfuls of dirt and a double-portion of sniggers.

Do you take this tree...?

This husband really is rooted in firm foundations

By Nury Vittachi

*

Do you want a spouse who doesn’t answer back, keeps both feet on the ground and never, ever runs around? Why not marry a tree?

                That’s what the mother of a Hong Kong reader did. Shrynne (pronounced Shireen) wrote to add her family tale to our file of stories about Asian weddings at which the bride or groom marries a ghost, a painting, a statue, a dog, et cetera.

Her mother was told by a fortune teller that her second marriage would work, but not her first. Wanting to save heartache all round, her mother’s parents reacted by marrying her off to a tree. “It’s easy to get divorced from a tree,” they explained.

After the separation was completed (the tree did not contest it), they married her off to a human.

I imagine Shrynne’s mother must have found her second husband a bit more animated and talkative than her first. (Or maybe not, who knows? He was an Asian guy.)

“It worked so far,” said Shrynne. “My parents have now been married for 42 years.”

                The tree was not available for comment.

                She could also confirm our allegation that the choice of partner was sometimes the least important item in an Indian wedding. She told us about an Indian guy who learned from his bride that the wedding date he had chosen was the day she was due to do her final exams for her medical degree.

                “No problem,” he replied. He changed the date.

No, of course he didn’t. This is Asia. He kept the wedding date and looked for another girl.

I can’t help but wonder how a guy like that breaks the news to his fiancé. “You can’t do June 19^th? Dang. Know any other chicks with incredibly low standards?”

His bride must have passed some names to him, because he married her cousin. That’s lurrve, Asian-style.   

Meanwhile, foreign correspondent Dan Kubiske was intrigued to read our item on Intelligent Elevators. “The Bangladesh Interior Ministry is accepting offers in a tender for Intelligent Equipment,” he said. “My first reaction was to think they were looking for intelligence-gathering equipment such as secret cameras, listening devices and such-like. But then I thought maybe they were looking for equipment that’s intelligent because humans are not.”

On the same subject, Peter Emmett from the Philippines reckons that Intelligent Elevators are a good idea. “We’ll get used to it and one day wonder how we did without them,” he said. He pointed out that few people would have thought that giving away plastic Snoopys with McDonald’s happy meals would be a good idea, yet they’re wildly popular. Actually, Peter, I think it’s a perfect match. Tasteless plasticky things given away with tasteless plasticky things.

From a business-watcher, I got a letter about an intriguing note spotted in a list of official company announcements last week. Shortly to be struck off a company register is a business called: "Hong Kong Loving Wife No 1 International Electric Industrial Limited".

                That’s one of those names has to hide a story. Did Loving Wife Number One not appreciate having an international electric industrial company named after her? How come this guy has to number his loving wives, anyway? How many does he have?

                And why doesn’t the poor woman have a name, anyway? Is she a tree?

News feature: Top Book Prize for Asia-Pacific

Next Generation Story Prize Tipped for Asia-Pacific Writer

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PERTH, AUSTRALIA: Win one of the world’s biggest literary prizes—from the keypad of your mobile phone.

The next generation book prize is here, and someone from Asia-Pacific is expected to cash in.

One of the world’s richest and most innovative literary awards is to be launched later this year—and will be judged by an East Asian author.

The revolutionary AALA prize, worth more than US$100,000, is open to cutting-edge novels designed to be read on mobile phones and computers, as well as traditional books.

The award is open to publishers worldwide, without the geographical restrictions of most other awards, although the book has to be set in Asia-Pacific.

Hong Kong crime writer Nury Vittachi, a syndicated columnist, will chair the panel of judges for the new prize.

The full name of the AALA is the Western Australian Premier’s Australia-Asia Literary Award. Winners will receive a cash payment of A$110,000 (US$103,000), making the prize far larger than the US$10,000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and putting it in the same league as the UK’s Man Booker Prize, which also stands at about US$100,000, depending on exchange rates.

               “This is a fabulous vote of confidence,” said Vittachi, who is chairing a three-strong judging panel. “It shows that while the West may have dominated popular culture up to now, it is time for world-class creativity from the eastern side of the planet to take its rightful place on the global stage.”

The Sri Lanka-born author will be joined by Kamila Shamsie, a Karachi-born author who judged the UK’s Orange Prize for Fiction, and a third judge, shortly to be announced.

Initial details of the award were revealed in Perth, Australia, by Mr Vittachi and Alan Carpenter, Premier of Western Australia.  The prize has been financed by the government of Western Australia as part of a major spending programme to make the area under its jurisdiction a regional hub for the arts. Entries for the new award are invited immediately, with the winner of the inaugural prize to be announced in the fall of this year. Entry forms are available on the Internet, at: www.dca.wa.gov.au. The closing date for books for this year is May 31.

In Japan, many of the recent top bestsellers were written on mobile phones and designed to be read on tiny screens. Readers in China also have an appetite for screen-published works. But while the new award is open to books published in new media formats, it excludes self-published works, thus avoiding vanity publishing projects.

Book industry executives in Asia and Australia see the new prize as an Asia-Pacific “Booker” and are enthusiastic about the message it presents to the world. Writing from Asians and Australians has made major inroads into world culture in recent years, with authors such as Thomas Keneally and Kiran Desai winning major awards.

Background: Book prizes

While the Man Booker Prize is arguably the world’s best known literary prize, it is limited to authors from the British Commonwealth and Ireland. A related prize, the Man Booker International Award, does not have geographical limitations, but is presented for a body of work, not for a specific book. The same is true for the Nobel Prize for Literature. The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction is for a single book, but is open to US authors only. In cash terms, the richest award is the IMPAC, a 100,000 Euro award presented in Dublin for books nominated by libraries around the world.
     The Kiriyama Prize is sometimes described as an Asian book award, but is actually a US prize, limited to Asia-themed books from North American publishing houses. Purely Asian book prizes do exist, but are generally very limited in scope, language range, cash size and publicity level.

For general queries, write to:
literaryawards@dca.wa.gov.au

To speak to someone about the award, contact:

Shauna Weeks (press officer)

Department of Culture and the Arts

Level 7, 573 Hay Street

Perth, Western Australia, WA 6000

Tel. +61 8 9224 7327

To speak to the chair of the judging panel, contact:

Nury Vittachi

P504 Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Hunghom, Kowloon, Hong Kong

nury@vittachi.com

Tel. +852 9806 8866

Hi kids, let's learn about life

Youth role models set astonishing new records for egotism

By Nury Vittachi
*
This is a key week in the history of youth culture for three reasons. Three of the world’s top role models for young people are poised to take the limelight.

                First, we have singer R Kelly, one of the top blues and rap singers of recent years. Mr Kelly has been charged with various unsavoury crimes involving children and is due to appear this week, [May 9] not on stage, but in court.

He recently expressed his deep contrition by saying in an interview (I am not making this up): "I'm the Ali of today. I'm the Marvin Gaye of today. I'm the Bob Marley of today. I'm the Martin Luther King, or all the other greats that have come before us. And a lot of people are starting to realize that now."

A lot of people are also starting to realize that Mr Kelly may soon have problems squeezing his ego into smaller quarters than those he is used to.

                Then there is the top selling female pop singer of the past decade, Britney Spears, who has a special gig today [May 6] in a court room. At the earlier hearing, judges decreed that wealthy mother-of-two Ms Spears does not have the ability to cope with (a) being wealthy or (b) being a mother of two or (c) being. Ms Spears expressed her humility by telling the media: “I don't like defining myself. I just am.”

                Many of us could probably think of good alternative ways of finishing that sentence.

                The third major role model for young people is Dan Houser, author of some of the world’s bestselling video games. Hitting shops this week is his latest effort, Grand Theft Auto IV. It teaches youngsters the following lessons about life.

All women are prostitutes or strippers.  Why save up to buy a car when you can just steal one? A good career choice these days is “transporter of illegal drugs”. No one but a fool goes out of the house without loaded weapons. Guns should be used at the slightest provocation. Driving is much more fun if you do it drunk or stoned. Add drama to your leisure time by running over innocent pedestrians. Drive-by shootings are also a good laugh. You get extra points if you shoot a police officer. Hire a prostitute and instead of paying, beat her with a baseball bat.

A few people dared to suggest that Grand Theft Auto IV might not be an ideal role model for children. Perhaps we shouldn’t market “murder simulators” to impressionable youngsters, said a lawyer named Jack Thompson.

Did Mr Houser respond by changing the game from age 15 to “adults only”? No. He replied by introducing a new character. A lawyer who looks suspiciously like Jack Thompson gets threatened by a gunman and replies: “Guns don’t murder people. Video games do.”

What do we do about people like the three role models above? The bad news is I don’t think there’s anything we can do. The good news is that being hugely egotistical is a surefire way of cultivating bad karma.  In the words of John Lennon: “Karma’s going to get you.” Mr Lennon wrote some great songs, but had a massive ego and a drug-addled private life. And events sadly seemed to prove him right.

The 2008 Olympics jump the gun

Games begin early but nobody notices

By Nury Vittachi
*
Contrary to foreign devil media speculation, we are pleased to announce that absolutely everything related to the 2008 Olympic Games is going brilliantly well. As proof of this, we have decided to begin the games early.

Indeed, the first set of races has already been completed! This was the international leg of the Torch Relay, a complex tournament with each round involving six teams. The event works as follows.

Team one tries to carry a flaming torch through a city centre. Team two tries to intercept the torch. Team three stands on the side and shouts abuse at team two. Team four stands on the side and shouts abuse at Team one.

Teams five and six are news media. Team five makes news reports that are incredibly biased in favour of team one. Team six makes news reports that are incredibly biased in favour of team two.

We are pleased to report that the Torch Relay went so well that it has received more media coverage than any other event in Olympic history.

               Now, here are the results.

Team one, the torch bearers, received favourable reviews from judges in almost all cities. The exception was Hong Kong, where the local government selected its secret network of buddies in business and favoured political parties to act as torch bearers. Guys—secret networks are supposed to be secret. That’s the whole point! D’oh.

Team two, the torch interceptors, did some impressive stunts, climbing bridges and buildings, but lost points for a somewhat tenuous grasp of political history.

Teams three and four (the shouters of abuse) and teams five and six (the biased media) did their jobs very well, with the exception of the BBC, which accidentally produced balanced reports. In this section, the silver went to CNN’s Jack Cafferty for being biased and silly at the same time. And the gold went to CCTV for its brilliant ruse of pretending teams two and four did not exist, thus misleading more viewers more comprehensively than any other media outlet in history. What a performance!

The 2008 Torch Relay garnered so much coverage that this game will almost definitely be repeated in the London Olympics in 2012.

But seriously, folks, I think anything that makes people discuss “sensitive” subjects and hear other points of view has got to be a good thing. And we mustn’t let the political diatribes on either side distract us from the fact that is cool to have a big, world event here in Asia.

So, in an attempt to bring a smile back to the subject of the world’s biggest sports event, I hereby present:

The Top Ten Rejected Games for the Beijing Olympics:

10. Drunken javelin toss.

9. Silly-Westerner-speaking-Mandarin impressions.       

8. Cross-country spitting.

7. Live seafood wrestling.

6. Armed dodge-ball.

5. Obese only child lifting.

4. Multiple foreign tourist fleecing.

3. Rapid street-side DVD selling.

2. Railway ticket window scrum.

1. Egg and chopstick race.

                Meanwhile, activists in China are giving interviews in which they explain that they are getting back at Tibetan separatists by boycotting a supermarket chain in China run by 40,000 Chinese people.

                That’s ridiculous. That’s as illogical, as, say, America being attacked by people from Saudi Arabia and then deciding to take revenge by attacking a completely different country, such as—to pick a place at random—Iraq, for example.

Asia's Loch Ness monster

A tale of two monsters, one of whom may exist

By Nury Vittachi

*

Happy Birthday, Loch Ness monster. Your present is a big yawn. This is the anniversary of the discovery of the strange creature who is said to live in the largest lake in Britain. Nessie fever started with a sighting on May 1^st, 1933. The Scottish lake now boasts that it has the most famous, best documented monster in the world.

                Yeah, right. What a load of rubbish. There hasn’t been a decent sighting of Nessie for years, and scientists reckon she doesn’t exist.

We have way better monsters in Asia. And that’s even if we exclude heads of state, premiers and army generals.

                I’m talking about the region’s non-human beasts, some of whom might actually exist. Best bet is Orang Pendek, a thing living in Sumatra, Indonesia. A friend from Jakarta described it as “partially human”, a phrase which for some reason made me think of Michael Jackson.

                Unlike the Loch Ness Monster, Orang Pendeks are seen regularly and top scientists are taking an interest.

                There have been numerous sightings of creatures in Sumatra “who move like humans but have unusually large amounts of hair”. I admit, it does sound like it could be the contestants of American Idol doing a location shoot. But some of the sightings pre-date the show.

Researchers have collected dozens of witness accounts, seen more than 20 footprints, and have gathered mystery hairs that don’t match other creatures in the area.  An Australian scientist did a DNA test on a hair and found that it did not match any known human or other two-legged hominid (although I don’t know if he tried Michael Jackson).

                What our creature lacks is the brilliant marketing that the Scottish non-monster has had. I mean, take our guy’s name. Orang Pendek is Bahasa for “short person”. It’s not exactly a term which catches the imagination, is it? It’s hard to imagine a team of Discovery Channel filmmakers saying: “We are going to spend a year living in an unexplored rainforest in the hopes of taking a photo of a real, live Short Person.”

                A tribe of jungle-dwellers who claim to very familiar with the half-human creature told reporters: “We often leave offerings of tobacco to keep them happy.” You probably knew that a carton of 200 Marlboro was a de rigueur gift for government officials in Asia, but did you know it also worked for monsters?

                Orang Pendeks have also been seen in the Himalayas, where they are called Yeti, and in China, where they live in Hubei and are known as The Wild Men of Shennongjia (which could be a good name for a rock band to back Mr. Jackson).

               Henry Gee, editor of top science publication Nature, admitted recently that sentiment was turning in favour of Asian monsters actually existing. “The discovery that Homo floresiensis survived until so very recently, in geological terms, makes it more likely that stories of other mythical human-like creatures such as Yetis are founded on grains of truth,” he said. “Now, cryptozoology, the study of such fabulous creatures, can come in from the cold.”

                The first thing we have to do is all agree that the species called Orang Pendek need a new name. A tourism marketing slogan which simply isn’t going to work in the west is: “Come to Asia and See a Short Person.”

Up up and away

Intelligent elevators are out of place on an unintelligent planet

By Nury Vittachi

*

They are spreading throughout our cities. They are set to appear soon in an office block near you. Someone may be assembling one in your building at this moment. They are a menace and your life will never be the same. I am talking about the Intelligent Elevator.

                These things are following me around. Twice I have moved office, only to find them appearing between me and where I want to go.

                They look pretty much like normal lifts until you get in and notice there’s no panel of numbers. They belong to a school of design known as “minimalist” (Latin for “utterly impractical”).

                This is how they are supposed to work.

A herd of passengers meanders into the building. They notice a pad of numbers on the approach to the lift lobby. Each uses a foreleg to tap in a floor number. The Intelligent Elevator’s hidden collective brain does an instant calculation and flashes a letter of the alphabet at each passenger. He or she gets in the lift marked with that letter and arrives at the chosen floor 20 seconds earlier than usual because “efficiency has been maximized”.

                That’s the plan. Here’s the reality.

                Typical unintelligent passenger (i.e. me) staggers into lift lobby in a state of deep coma, walks right past the pad of numbers and get into the first elevator that comes.

Propelled only by residual signals from my brain stem, my arm reaches out to press the number for my floor, which is seven. That’s when I remember that there are no numbers. I watch, helpless, as I am whisked straight past my floor and up to floor 31, stopping several times on the way.

                “Bother,” I say to myself. “I’ll get off at my floor on my way down.”

Several people get in at floor 31. Each one gets off at a different floor. No one stops at floor seven, and there are no buttons to enable me to pause there as we fly past it again.

We reach the ground floor. I leap out, race to the entry point of the lift lobby, find the key pad, press number seven, and then scamper back to the lifts.

A minute passes, during which time my mind has wandered to the ten things that men think about (a) early on the morning and (b) at all other times of the day: sex, food, football, food, sex, football, food, sex, football and sex.

I am soon deep in a fantasy in which I am scoring a goal with a burger in one hand and Scarlett Johansson in the other. An elevator arrives. Scarlett, the burger and I get into it.

I realize I have forgotten to look at the letters of the alphabet. This time it takes me to the 42^nd floor.

Now multiply this by a dozen sleepy people in each elevator repeatedly making the same series of mistakes that I make.

The result is that the Intelligent Elevators that are supposed to take 20 seconds off our travelling times actually add minutes, if not hours or days to each journey. I had a visitor once who was so unnerved that he abandoned the appointment and now refuses to approach my building.

On the plus side, my mother-in-law no longer visits me at work.

The world's dumbest criminals

Rising crime and why I want to be a victim

By Nury Vittachi

As food prices soar, crime rates are going up. This is bad news. Well, mostly bad. One good bit is that a revolutionary new type of villain is robbing people all over Asia. Readers of newspaper crime pages are learning about the victims, and sympathetically exclaiming, “Wow, some people have all the luck.”

                You see, being robbed by this new type of thief can be remarkably profitable.

                You’ve seen the “dumb criminal” stories going around? Like the one about the guy in New York who stole a shipment of meat and discovered he’d nicked 1,000 cow rectums?

Hah! Here in Asia, we have villains that make those guys look like rocket scientists. There’s a new breed of Asian thief which is dumber than any creature in history. These guys have the IQ of rocks, and I mean rocks educated exclusively on a diet of Fox TV News. Not only do these criminals fail to lastingly deprive people of goods, but they manage to transfer their own possessions to their victims.

               First, consider a man named Hirose in Japan. He successfully stole a wallet containing 1,000 yen from a man sitting on a bench in Fukuoka province. But he accidentally left his own wallet with the victim --- a genuine 80,000 yen designer one containing 40,000 yen in cash.  “I was so intent on getting away that I didn’t realize I’d dropped my wallet,” Hirose later told police. A few more successful robberies like that, and he’d be bankrupt.

Then there was the Malaysian housebreaker who drove his car to his victim’s house, broke in, and started to open the safe. But his victims arrived home unexpectedly and he leapt out of the window to run away.

                It was only after he had made good his escape that he realized that he had left his most valuable possessions behind—a box of tools, plus his keys and his car.

                Envisioning his life disappearing before his eyes, he went back to the victims’ house and rang the front door bell. The conversation that took place was not recorded in the news write-up but I can imagine it.

                “Hi! I’m the guy who just broke into your house and tried to steal all your stuff. Didn’t quite work out as planned, did it? Ha ha, life is funny, right? May I have my things back?”

                The householders sent him packing and went to admire their new car.

A gang of house thieves in India also left some tools behind. Stung by newspaper reports that they had been forgetful, the proud villains decided to pretend that this was their signature, and they now leave tools at every robbery, raising their costs considerably.

But most remarkable is the story of a Taiwanese man named Lu Fang-nan, 57, who was innocently riding his motorcycle when a large bundle of money—the equivalent of US$600,000—fell out of the sky onto his head.

He lost control of his bike and crashed, but was not badly hurt.

It turned out that kidnappers had asked for their ran