New translator’s weblog

Robin Stocks links to a new translator’s weblog. Narasimhan Raghavan has started Musings of a Translator. He also has a Tamil blog, for those who can read that kind of thing. And he links to a list of English-language Tamil blogs, if I expressed that correctly. Here is Aravind:

bq. For some vague reason, the act of playing Snooker has been associated with bad-guys in tamil cinema. I just cannot recall any tam movie where the hero/good guys are shown playing snooker and I can recite off-hand at least 10 movie names where the villains are shown playing snooker and plotting a frightful death for the hero or some such thing. I wonder if there is some strong subconscious cultural thing that’s influencing this factor.

4 thoughts on “New translator’s weblog

  1. “For some vague reason, the act of playing Snooker has been associated with bad-guys in tamil cinema.”

    Nothing mysterious about it. It is a legacy of the colonial past. Snooker is associated with the white man in his exclusive clubs, where the admission of a native Indian is a big no no. And white men were the bad guys in the eyes of a typical Indian.

    Regards,
    Dondu N. Raghavan

  2. “That was quick! But you must tell Aravind, not me. What do the good guys play?”

    Amazing it may sound, the good guys play cricket!!! There was this Hindi film “Lagaan”, which described exclusively a cricket match between the English and bare-footed Indians. No marks for guessing the identity of the winning team.
    By the way, I just now provided link to your blog in mine. Am proceeding slowly but steadily to reach out to my fellow translators in this manner.

    Blogging is a heady experience and in my case it was doubly so, as I started blogging in my mother tongue Tamil.

    Regards,
    Dondu Raghavan

  3. Thanks. I will get round to putting up a link.
    Very good about the cricket. Obviously not a white man’s game!
    I had a West Indian cab driver in New York who was keen to talk to me about cricket, although I wasn’t really able to oblige him.

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