I don’t know how to describe it. “Writing club” or “literature club” makes it sound too serious, and if it were indeed one, then we need not have put “informal” when we put it in our CVs. “Slander club” makes it sound like we were all bitches, which we were not – though I must admit that once in a while we used to bitch a bit. We weren’t even doing campus journalism – we were hardly regular, and never came in print. And we weren’t storytellers, either, since most of what we wrote was based on what actually happened.
Twisted Shout began when Hunger tried to murder War. However, the defining moment for the group happened when Snow White Meets Gandalf (a trilogy in five parts) was released. I must say it was a fairly random story. So random that most of you won’t understand it. If you are not from IIMB, you can give up every hope of figuring it out. If you are from IIMB but not from our batch, you might understand one joke in the entire trilogy. If you are from IIMB and from my batch and not from my section, you might probably understand half the stuff.
SWG had so many characters that I won’t blame you if you would get confused. Most of these characters are based on people in my batch and the batch senior to mine at IIMB. And it’s not a one-to-one correspondence between real and fictional characters. Some people in my batch were so colourful that multiple characters were based on them. On the other hand, the entire commie half of Sumo Yet So Far (my quiz team) had gotten merged into one character called Swaadisht.
We drew inspiration from several sources, with the primary source being our first test in Economics, which had a certain Queen Shilpa taxing coconuts. A number of other characters, and scenes were built based on interactions in class in term 1. There was heavy punning on people’s names, and even seemingly random sentences like “I find Aishwarya Rai so hot that I want her as my wife” found their way into the stories.
If my memory serves me right (it usually does in the long term), the first three parts of the Trilogy were written by Disease, who then proceeded to put NED (this was a full three years before the term NED was coined, btw). Madness, the correspondent from H Base, joined the great institution when he wrote the fourth part. The fifth part, which involved a Great War, based on the Mahabharata, was appropriately penned by War. And he had ensured that he gave due footage to himself, as well as to the Footage Queen.
The beauty of the series was that characterization was not constant. People would change sides more frequently than Disease would change his shorts – which means that they didn’t change sides too often, but did it once in a long time. Characters would disappear from the plot, and occasionally reappear at a strategic time. There would be sudden updates in relationships between characters – to account for similar changes in the real world. Every event of note that took place on campus, and even some insignifcant ones, got due footage. It was a masterpiece of its times.
Looking back at these stories today, I’m feeling nostalgic, and at the same time proud to have been part of such an august institution. We were to come up with a few other masterpieces during our tenure, but SWG would remain our best known work.
Two months back, more than three years after we had first folded up, we thought we should make an attempt to recreate the magic, and thus started the Twisted Shout blog. I admit that we haven’t been too regular in updating it, but each of us has been managing an important transition in our lives, and thus haven’t really had the time to update it. We hope to fix this in the coming months, though I’m not sure how funny we will be since we will be writing for a general audience. In hindsight, it was really easy writing for a restricted audience that knew exactly who each character was based on. Making inside jokes, it seems, is much easier than making generalized jokes.