#WHILE ALSO MANAGING AN ENTIRE A LITTLE TROUP OF VERY YOUNG KIDS

[star-mum]

literally the last 2 days of the semester and IM REALLY STRESSED OUT : D (pain and agony)

Im tired, hungry, I have 2 projects to finish for tomorrow AND a test today -> also I have to make lunch and do the dishes AND teach a class to my most rambunctious 9 year old students : D

[raven-at-the-writing-desk]

Wishing you a happy new year, Raven! Can I request fluffy headcanons for Vil, Malleus, Riddle, Sebek, and Silver taking their fem! s/o out on a museum (art or history) date please? Thank you and please stay safe! ~🍁leaf anon

“Art is something I have come to admire over the years. Favored artists and styles come and go as easily as the changing of the seasons. It is fascinating to see the gargoyles that come from every decade...”

Curiouser and Curiouser...

It’s easy to spot Malleus in a crowd thanks to his horns, staggering height, and overwhelming presence. When you arrive at the designated meet-up spot, Malleus gently takes you by the hand and leads you off into a lesser known street with hard to navigate twists, turns, and narrow bends. He tugs you inside a building tucked away in a forgotten crevice of town. Malleus calls it his hidden gem--hard to locate, but precious... a gargoyle museum!

Gargoyles are a pretty niche interest, so the museum’s business is slow. In fact, you and Malleus are the only two there--but that’s fine, it just means you get to enjoy some well-deserved alone time. You can hold onto his arm and lean into him as he shows you around.

From the way Malleus’s eyes glitter, you can tell that not only is he extremely enthusiastic about gargoyles, but that he is very, very familiar with each and every exhibit. Without even looking at the plaques that accompany each gargoyle, he can tell you the year it came from, the artist, and various other fun facts.

Malleus confesses that he has actually named each gargoyle and assigned them their own personalities. He has come here so many times by himself that he decided to make friends of his own in the statues. Gazing at you tenderly, Malleus declares, “... I am fortunate to have finally found a companion to call my own, and to share this happiness with.”

Poor Riddle--he’s so short and wide eyed that the employee at the museum entrance thinks he’s too young to purchase tickets of his own until he shows his student ID! Starting off the date on a mortifying note definitely was not how he had expected things to go, but Riddle intends to make it up to you by demonstrating how knowledgeable he is!

As expected of an honors student, Riddle knows a lot about Magic History! He’ll take your hand in his and help you trace the route that settlers marched in the air, or lean into your ear to whisper about an old folklore. “It cannot be helped,” Riddle insists, a little red-faced himself. “Given the limitations of the museum... Keep quiet and do not touch... this is the most efficient way to teach.”

Even outside of school, Riddle feels a need to enforce the rules! Whenever you let a gasp out or accidentally speak too loudly, he presses a gentle finger to his lips--or yours--as a reminder to keep your voice down.

Another rule of the museum is “no eating or drinking”! That means you and Riddle just need to grab a bite after your museum tour. Luckily, there’s a cute little crepe shop not too far away--and you grab a strawberry one to share, relishing in the taste, each others’ company, and all the indirect kisses that linger.

Vil shows up to the art museum decked out in massive sunglasses, a face mask, and a muffler--and yet he still somehow manages to pull the look off spectacularly. He doesn’t want to be noticed in public (whether by eager fans asking for a signature or a picture, or by members of the media)--that would ruin your date!

Once you’re inside the museum, you can start enjoying the artwork! However, you find your eyes continuously drifting back to Vil between glimpsing works of art--as though Vil were also one himself, and you are not able to take your attention off of him. He catches your gaze several times and sends dazzling smiles your way, which causes you to just... melt.

Unfortunately for you two, your date is interrupted by a stampede of frantic MagiCam followers who swear to the museum staff that THE Vil Schoenheit is somewhere there. So much for the disguise and keeping a low profile. Vil sighs and hastily tugs you behind a large exhibit to hide and wait for the fans to give up.

But... there’s so little wiggle room in your hiding spot that your bodies are pressed up right against one another. You can feel his heart beating--and surely he feels yours as well. A blush starts to rise to your cheeks, and Vil definitely notices. “Ara, are you embarrassed?” He whispers through a smirk, “You’d best not make a single sound, then. Here, allow me to help you.” And there, behind an art exhibit, Vil silences you with a kiss.

Silver is intrigued by the medieval history museum that you’ve selected for your date. He spends much of it ooh-ing and aah-ing at the various swords and suits of armor on display, just like a kid in a candy shop.

Silver nonchalantly points to various weapons mounted on the walls and tells you a story or two about how his father taught him how to utilize each one (”in case you are without your magical pen”). You almost can’t believe half of the grueling tales that leave his mouth, were Silver’s expression not dead serious.

He seems oddly tense at some of the exhibits you come across--specifically, whenever a particular figure in raven and magenta hair appears in paintings or is references in literature. (They look familiar; have you seen them somewhere?) Silver is quick to shoo you away from anything with the mystery man in it, telling you that “I don’t want to accidentally summon him,” whatever that means.

You spend a lot of time in the museum’s souvenir shop, picking out cute matching lockets to wear--one with a shield design, the other with a sword. Silver helps to fasten yours on, and once it’s in place, he jokingly bows to you and says you look just like royalty.

Sebek is shushed multiple times while inside e museum--it seems that even his normal speaking volume is considered to be too loud! In an effort to not disturb the other museum-goers, Sebek vows to keep his mouth shut the entire time and only communicates to you via hand gestures and facial expressions.

During a historical reenactment scene, Sebek is asked by the museum staff to play the part of a knight on the losing side of a war. He plays the role just fine until the actors actually start coming at him! His training as Malleus’s retainer kicks in, and before you know it, Sebek has completely disarmed the entire troupe or actors without breaking a sweat, or uttering a single word.

He visibly puffs up with pride when you look at the section of the museum dedicated to fairy history. Sebek points and shoots you eager looks whenever he comes across an artifact pertaining to the Witch of Thorns. His zealousness is cute, and reminds you of a hyperactive puppy dog!

Though Sebek can’t use his words, you can tell from his body language that he’s enjoying every single moment with you. His grip on your hand holds strong, and the toothy smile and the blush he wears never once fades.

[fantranslatorbychoice]

Kakuriyo no Yadomeshi Volume 6 Intermission 2 - Akatsuki, and a Letter from Utsushiyo

T/N: Heck yeah it's time for the two spider siblings to shine lol we haven't heard from Suzuran for a while now, well, spoiler alert she has left Kakuriyo and hasn't appeared yet since Volume 1 ended, or in the anime when she chose to live on someone's grave. *cough, Shirou, cough* Well, I guess that’s just that. I hope you enjoy reading this short one.

Also if you like this translation, you can heart it, share the link, reblog, I just respectfully ask that DO NOT REPOST ELSEWHERE. This is my contribution to the scant English content of this fandom, and I worked really hard to finish this thing, it’s not like I just copy-pasted everything. I even had to build the kanji in Jisho one by one. Try it and you’ll see what I mean.You can rave about this, rant about this, but if possible please link back to this page. If you’re unsure how to do that, just copy the web address of this page. If you’re on a blogsite just insert the web address as a hyperlink as a link back to here. Honestly if this light novel was officially-published in English, I wouldn’t even be doing this right now... And if it did, I’d take this offline to support the publishers and Yuuma-sensei. Creators support creators, is what I believe in. As previously-mentioned in earlier chapters, if you stumbled upon this one, the two seasons of the anime covered volumes 1-5, so other than the extra details, you didn’t miss much stuff.

OK Here we go-- P148 "Thank you for coming to Tenjin-ya, we look forward to seeing you again." I am an earth spider, a Tsuchigumo named Akatsuki. I am Tenjin-ya's head receptionist. The waitresses and the Gesokuban** has sent off the final guest for today with a smile, and my work as the head receptionist has ended. The moment that the last guest gets sent off, I always breathe a sigh of relief. The front desk's work ended before evening, and the day before the entire inn is closed on a break, we all soak in the feeling of liberation. The young Ogre bellboys were shouting "It's rest day! It's rest day!" and were running around the front desk. The Bake-Tanuki Gesokuban Chiaki-san gathered the ogre bellboys together and assembled in the lobby, and called them one by one in sequential order. Many of the ogre children were orphans, and not only does Tenjin-ya go beyond in providing them work, but also the day before the inn closes for a break, apart from their salaries they also receive a bit of pocket money, and the very first in the line gets freed off from work. "Alright you lot, return to your dormitories like adults, so you won't cause any trouble during work." "OK-- Gesokubanchou**-sama!" As the ogre kids were lining up one by one, Chiaki-san encouraged them to return to their dormitories quietly. "If you run your pocket money gets forfeited. Oh, and greet the head receptionist too." T/N: Gesokuban= doornan, in charge of the guests' footwear. Sorta like bellboys too. Gesokubanchou=head of the doormen P149 "OK--. Goodbye, Bantou-sama!" "Ohhhh..." It's impossible for me to take care of those brats... It must be difficult to be in charge of the footwear. It's better to be a receptionist. "Whew, it's finally over. Ah, Akatsuki, after this, won't  you come with me to Gintengai to have some drinks?" After sending off the ogre children back to their dorms, Chiaki-san called up. He always has this soft smile and voice with a subservient attitude, but he is my sempai as he started a bit earlier than me in working for Tenjin-ya. Among the management staff he is the most recent to join, and considerably has a lot of assigned duties and tasks. "Oh, but tonight you're also going to Aoi-san's place to have dinner, don't you?" "No. Apparently today only the girls got together, they seemed to be having a weird meeting or something." "That's also what Kasuga said. She says that Aoi-san is very friendly to everyone in Tenjin-ya. Ah, Waka-danna sama, are you free tonight? If it's fine with you, would you like to go out and have a drink with me?" "Oh, that sounds nice, Chiaki." Chiaki-san also called up Waka-danna sama. It's weird that he's up for it. Chiaki-san, he seems to have an air of softness and limpness that I don't have, and sometimes I don't think he's appropriate for the reception desk. But the person in question is, among the management staff is said to be the number one outlier with having the position of Gesokubanchou, as he said previously that he likes his job. T/N: Bantou=head receptionist P150 "Ah, uhm... Akatsuki-sama, Chiaki-sama, Ginji-sama.." "Do you have any plans for tomorrow?" "If it's fine with you, would you want to go out and have fun with us?" There were three waitresses, they seem to choose at their own discretion when to talk to us. Lately, I have been invited to go out a lot. But for me, I want to get some rest on a rest day. "That sounds nice. But tomorrow I'm called to go back home to my parents' house. I hope you can invite me next time." Chiaki-san rubbed the back of his head, he seemed to be used to it by now and was resolute. Waka-danna sama seemed to be puzzled by the invitation, and flatly refused by saying "I too, have other scheduled appointments." I just decided and told them "That's a no-go" because it's too much of a hassle. "Oh, I see..." It's easy to understand that the waitresses got disappointed as their shoulders went down. "If that's so, then are you free the next time the inn closes for a break?" "Uhm...." The waitresses weren't discouraged. Why did Chiaki-san and Waka-danna sama looked at me over here? At most, you're always free and going out during resting days, it seems. Are you pranking the kouhai? "Hey, wait a minute you lot. Tomorrow the famous Kabuki lead actor named Yukinojou from Youto is coming to the Kabuki Troupe in Kimon**. T/N: Apparently this is what 鬼門 reads so I apologize if I wrote it as Onimon before, I was too much of a dumbass to correct everything oh well at least I learned it before finishing this volume lol P151 You're going out with those guys? You'll just keep screeching and screaming out." Suddenly, O-ryo appeared behind us. The waitresses seemed to lap up what O-ryo brought about, and went "Really?--" "You're kidding, is that true O-ryo?" "I have to check the bulletin board!" "Yukinojou-sama--!" Just a while ago they were disheartened and now they went off somewhere. The girls' high-pitched voices were ringing out, and they didn't even look back as they left us. "As expected of you, O-ryo san. You saved us." Waka-danna sama gratefully spoke to O-ryo, but she just raised an eyebrow and laughed at us. "You three, you were targetted by the waitresses. Among the management staff, you had the lowest difficulty levels. You got cornered, weren't you?" "Is that praise or is that disdain?" "Akatsuki, I saved you, you could at least thank me for it." O-ryo pointed her finger at me, and forced me to say thank you to her. She's surely shameless, an impatient and distasteful woman. P152 "O-ryo sama!" It's the Bake-Tanuki waitress, Kasuga has come and pulled the bottom of O-ryo's kimono. "Let's go now to Yugao. Aoi-chan's waiting." "OK, OK. Those group of single guys seem to be going out for drinks, but aren't we going to a glitzy girls' night-out? Awww, what a pity, you can't go with us--, you have no means to--" "O-ryo sama. They're also having that in secret. It's the same level as ours." As expected of Kasuga to point that out. She's merely a waitress, but her wit and cleverness is effective, and she is a hard-working Tanuki girl. I also unintentionally asked her to do errands and what not here and there. "Ah..." Kasuga turned her head towards us again, but stopped whatever she was about to say.. No, not really, but when she looked at us, it seemed that she looked at Chiaki-san who was beside us. Chiaki-san didn't seem to move a bit, but he just lazily smiled.

Inside Gintengai, the riverside were lined up with food carts, and it was the busiest corner. It was the place were middle-aged men gathered after work before returning home. The fowl grilling place had three open seats, and we each ordered our favorite liquor and had them heated and poured for us**. "Ahh, it's nice to have some barbecued fowl every now and then in these food carts." T/N: Yeah I know it's weird but sake or rice liquor is actually drunk either warmed up or at room temperature, I don't know why though, maybe to help the alcohol evaporate IDK because normally beers and wines are chilled then served, but hey, it is what it is lol. Also I just translated the fowl, or poultry from the generic term 鳥=tori because it can range from chicken to duck to turkey to exotic birds like guinea fowls and peahens. Like the offal hot pot, we can only guess what they were grilling here. I'd call duck and chicken lol P153 "Yeah, I agree. Waka-danna sama, whenever you're free you always go to Yugao, don't you? Every now and then let's get together, please?" "Yes, well, I'm here now, am I?" After seeing that the Waka-danna sama seems to be in good spirits, Chiaki-san requested to the Oyaji** "Ah, I'll have the chicken wings and scallion skewers. Everything plain salted." "I'll... Have the gizzards with scallions, plain salted, as well as some liver with dipping sauce, please." "I'll have the parson's nose** and some chicken meatloaf, with the skin. With dipping sauce." While the liquor bottles were being heated, we had a chat. The barbecued chicken that they were cooking soon gave off a delicious smell. "To be honest, it was a good thing that Waka-danna sama has returned to Tenjin-ya. During the time that Waka-danna sama was away, Tenjin-ya was in trouble. Akatsuki, somehow everyday acts like a little girlfriend running around saying 'We need you Waka-danna sama, please come hooome--'. That image has been burned inside my head." "What?" "Wait, Chiaki-san!" Well, the Waka-danna sama's usual workload isn't run of the mill, it's like it left a void. However suprised the Waka-danna sama looked, his blank face looked at mine. "Uhm.. That is..Somehow, the front desk's work is sustained by the Waka-danna sama, and I happened to experience that personally." T/N: Oyaji=usually the dude who owns the establishment, they normally cook and grill and stuff. Their waifus handle the cashiers. Also srsly these dudes know their fowl well, especially Akatsuki. I mean, chicken butt/parson's nose is full of that fatty cholesterol-filled goodness, as well as the skin wahhh now I want some of these too T__T P154 I was muttering my embarassing thoughts as my greasy sweat overflowed. That busy time has been pardoned already... speaking of, when the grilled skewers were done, I ate them hungrily. Ah, even the cartilage tastes good. "Akatsuki... It's unfortunate to have experienced those troubles, wasn't it?" "Ehrmm.. yeah." Waka-danna sama seemed to have gotten quiet, and I was so embarassed I couldn't say anything. I drank the sake bit by bit. "Well, anyways.. Waka-danna sama is awesome though. It's because while planning activities and managing Tenjin-ya, you were also said to be assigned to the internal affairs of Kimon. You were also looking after anything that troubles the Odanna-sama's fiancee. If it was me I couldn't handle it. I already find it hard just taking care of the ogre kids." While Chiaki-san was talking, the topic shifted to Aoi. "Ah, ahahaha. I wasn't looking after Aoi-san, I just let her do what she wanted, I think that's the right thing to do.. And because Aoi-san is a dependable person, it came to the extent that she helped me. Even now, with the souvenir products that Tenjin-ya asked Dr. Saraku to make, she's still doing her best to help with it, it seems... She's really awesome." Waka-danna seemed to have remembered something, and silently laughed, before ordering another bottle of sake. That guy, isn't he a bit harsh... P155 "I don't normally work with Aoi-san so I don't understand but, she's somewhat special, that granddaughter of Shirou's." "Yes, that is, Aoi-san is an amazing person. Aoi-san's cooking. Say Akatsuki. Somehow in the beginning Akatsuki was harsh with Aoi-san, but now you're part of the Yugao gang, aren't you?" "Eh? No, uhm...." "Oh, you're pausing with your words, you're hesitating. You weren't objecting that time, Akatsuki.." "..." Someday, when you make fun of me again, I'll be prepared. But, I need to think how can I deal with this now... When these guys bring up that topic again after a while, I'll change to make quick and sleek comebacks. "Certainly I go eat Aoi's cooking since it's a great way to end the working day, but compared to me, O-ryo goes there to a greater extent, doesn't she? To think that she tried killing Aoi before!" "Ah, ahaha. For sure, O-ryo san has now become less snappy and harsh... She goes to Yugao and pesters Aoi-san a lot. After that Kasuga-san also goes a lot to Yugao too." After that, instantly, it seems that Waka-danna sama remembered a lot of things about O-ryo and Kasuga. "Speaking of Kasuga-san, until now she still calls O-ryo as O-ryo sama? Even though she has already lost the position of Waka-Okami she still calls her as such." P156 "It's because Kasuga likes O-ryo. It's because ever since Kasuga started working in Tenjin-ya, she always bothered O-ryo san to look after her because she doesn't know anything." "Really, is that so? Isn't Kasuga-san and Chiaki relatives?" "Uhm, yes, yes we are..." Good, the topic has changed smoothly. Being tipsy, Waka-danna sama and Chiaki-san started talking about Kasuga and O-ryo. I was relieved, and added an order of thighs and chicken meatloaf from Oyaji. I really love meatloaf... "Oh, right, Chiaki-san, aren't you about to say something about that Kasuga?" When I asked him about it, Chiaki-san's face got all stiff for a moment. It was weird, for that person to have that face. But immediately after that, his usual sloppy face went back. "Ah, it's probably due to tomorrow's stuff." "Tomorrow?" "Tomorrow, we have to go back home. Also, it's something important." Oh, it's true, because they were going back home, he didn't lie to the girls when he was invited. But it's weird how he said it. Could it be that he doesn't want to go back home? P157 "Isn't Waka-danna sama going back to Orio-ya?" "What, why?" "But that's what going home means, right? When you don't have a village to go back to. Don't you have an older brother?" Waka-danna sama only waved his hands in front of him, with regards to Chiaki-san's unsophisticated question.

“No, no, that, uhm.. Right now it's a bother to go home. Right, Akatsuki?" "Why is the conversation swayed to me?" When it comes to a home, I have no such place. I have been born and raised in Utsushiyo, my only living relative is in there right now, my younger sister... "That much- How is my nose stupid?" In an instant, the drunk and wasted middle-aged Tengu nearby started making a racket, and he hit me with a hot sake bottle by mistake. "..." What the heck is this? As I was staring fixatedly, I got lost in time. While looking at the Tengu who got caught in the moment, my former boss Hatori-san, the current head receptionist of our rival inn, and previously when the Tengus became violent in the front desk I recalled the memories, and I got angry. I wanted to tear out all of the feathers of the middle-aged Tengu, but Waka-danna sama and Chiaki-san P158 pacified me "Woah, woah there, Akatsuki", and nevertheless I peacefully settled down. I went back to drinking in desperation. When the other sempai noticed it they just start talking. It’s mainly due to Hatori-san. A lot of things happened, and the night grew late.

"Tch, I drank too much. Waka-danna sama is too tough..." Upon returning to the males' dorms, while my drunk head was spinning around, I entered the men's baths. I splashed on water to wash off the liquor smell, then opened the sliding doors to my room and burst inside, and collapsed on the futon that I kept lying around. My room is at the top floor of the males' dorms. As the head receptionist I was given my own flat, and I wasn't roommates with anyone. Ah, the cool breeze feels great. I went and opened the veranda's door, and I looked at Kakuriyo's faintly darkened evening sky. "Hoo-hoo. It's the hoot of the underworld's night owl." "Hmm.. what?" From the veranda a single owl feather flew inside, and somehow plopped down, and I went inside the room again. "What is this.. A letter for me?" It was a momiji-patterned stationery. I haven't received a letter for a long time. P159 A red stamp was attached, this was exclusively used by the underworld's postal service that goes between Utsushiyo and Kakuriyo. The sender is... "Suzuran" In one breath, I got sobered up. This was my younger sister, Suzuran's letter. I stood up and pulled out a pair of scissors, and cut the seal.

"Akatsuki-niisan, it has been a long time. Are you busy everyday? I'm worried about niisan, don't work too hard and neglect taking care of your health. Are you eating nutritious food? Are you sleeping enough?"

What the, her opening was only about her worries. Don't worry Suzuran, about your brother. That detestable Shirou's granddaughter's food, I eat those everyday and get healthier. It's full of nutrients as well as delicious. I'm not miserable.

"Akatsuki-niisan may be blunt and crude, but he's really very sweet, are you on good terms with Aoi-san right now? Did I guess that right?" P160 "What the heck." That woman Suzuran. I don't understand why she's on good terms with Aoi, but for sure, she's saying nice things about her because they bonded during the time she stayed here. My sister by blood, she forsees just about everything.

"While I was taking care of Shirou-san's tombstone, I was also looking after the businesses of the people in Utsushiyo. When the Ayakashi living here come and wreck Shirou-san's tombstone, I grow into a larger body, you know? Everybody flees, when they see my Jorougumo** form."

"Oh, goodness, so that's it..." Even I was, when she powerfully threw me out of Tenjin-ya, her powers were quite strong...

"I love niisan, who works his best as a receptionist at Tenjin-ya. But please, don't be too excessive. Take some time to rest. Because niisan dislikes taking a break. You also dislike having fun with girls every now and then."

"Stop it. Leave me alone." T/N: So while Akatsuki is a spider demon- a tsuchigumo=土蜘蛛 that burrows underground like a tarantula, his sister Suzuran is an orb weaver spider demon, a jorougumo=女郎蜘蛛 that hangs on trees. No wonder Akatsuki's mini-form looks so pudgy and cute gwahahaha especially the cute skull on his abdomen. Try searching for that image, when Suzuran beat the crap out of him and he got weak AF wahahaha poor bean P161 "Suzuran always thinks of niisan during the dawn**. Please take care."

After reading the letter, I suddenly laughed at my younger sister's noisy wordings. The letter you sent had composure, as such, from where you are, you're also in good health. While protecting the tombstone of Shirou, whom you love. "..." Instantly, from the edges I saw a reddish ray of light, and as I opened the sliding screen, I looked at the early morning sky. Oh, I get it... The wonderful early morning sky. She said dawn, as it was my name. "Today... That's it. I'll write back Suzuran a very casual letter." Since she has left Kakuriyo, I'll write up everything that has happened in here since then. Also, while by tired body already had its rest, it's fine to do my best at work again. T/N: Akatsuki's name is literally "daybreak", not like them Orochimaru peeps lol

End of Intermission 2, Volume 6. Previous - Chapter 4. Next - Chapter 5

References:

Wonderful site for the youkai references

Other stuff I used to do this: Kodansha Kanji Learner’s Dictionary (you can buy here, I’m not sponsored btw). I was about to buy the older edition but then the newer one came out 2013 so I bought that instead. Worth buying since I was able to find nearly all of the words I needed just by stroke pattern alone.

Merriam-Webster's Japanese-English Dictionary (the red-covered 1996 version is apparently out of print right now). This is what I have been using for a very long time, I bought it when I was still a fetus (yes I am old so what lol), and after so many years, when compared to newer editions, I still prefer this one since its entirety is Japanese-English, the English to Japanese gloss are just 16 pages tops, so you get more Japanese words for your buck. But that’s just my opinion, maybe other people prefer the Jap-En x En-Jap IDEK.

Basic online dictionary, Jisho. Knowledge of verb conjugations  and other words are necessary since not all have entries.

If you can read Japanese, you can buy the whole set in Amazon Japan, they’re shipping worldwide now, I think.

[sparklyjojos]

THE SAIMON FAMILY CASE recaps [1/13]

These will be full recaps of the latest JDC book, The Saimon Family Case (彩紋家事件) from 2004, which is a prequel taking place in the late 70s. While it’s a prequel, it can be read without any knowledge about the series. (It does spoil one death from Carnival at the end, but I feel like everyone already knows about this particular one).

It won’t be obvious in the recaps, but the book consists of seven parts seven chapters each (similar to Maijo’s Tsukumojuku) with two additional parts at the end.

The novel is light in terms of content warnings (for a murder mystery, anyway), but small kids WILL die in this, and we’ll be talking a lot about a specific type of systemic xenophobic violence near the end.

See that big family tree above? Save it somewhere for future reference. Believe me when I say you will need it. (Also, as always in the recaps, family name will be given first, Japanese-style.)

Well then—has everyone found their seats? Is everyone ready to witness the most splendid illusion?

Let's start the show.

PART 1

A note at the beginning informs us that soon 20 years will have passed from the end of the famous Saimon Family Murder Case, often called the “Crime Revolution” because of its impact on the future of similar complicated incidents. The details of the case have been hidden from the masses, but the time will soon come when everyone will learn the truth.

--

It’s the very last day of the year 1999. The mysterious first person narrator of the framing device is an older gentleman attending a New Years celebration in Las Vegas with his wife. They watch a fairly young blond magician perform close up magic for the guests. The magician borrows a 10,000 yen bill from the narrator, seals it in an envelope, sets it on fire, and it suddenly turns into a rose in his hand. When the narrator is asked to check his wallet, inside he finds a bill with the same denomination and serial number, but of a noticeably larger size… among a few other stunning differences.

“Happy New Millenium!” the magician exclaims.

This little illusion awakens memories from that case in both the narrator and his wife. As the world heads towards the new century, they are the only people left who were so closely involved in those tragic events of old.

--

It's September 19th 1977, and the entire Saimon family celebrates the 99th birthday of their old matriarch, Saimon Tamako. The celebration takes place on a performance stage next to the family's main residence in Tsuwano, Shimane Prefecture. Tamako’s daughter Akiko pushes the matriarch’s wheelchair towards the stage.

A perceptive guest may notice two other old women in the crowd who look astonishingly like Saimon Tamako, though they are a little younger (97). These are twin sisters called—if you can believe it—Tsukumo Tamako and Tousen Tamako. The three Tamakos look near identical, and in fact once used that similarity for their magic acts: all secretly shared the single stage name of Soga Tenju. That was decades ago, of course. The Tamakos no longer look like the beautiful young woman (actually women plural) known from her most famous illusion, Courtisane and Bell.

Once Akiko and Tamako take their place on the stage, all the lights suddenly go out for just a second, and in that brief darkness two things happen.

One: the red-and-white stripes of the celebratory curtain decorating the stage suddenly turn into black-and-white stripes of a funeral curtain.

Two: Saimon Tamako dies.

--

Saimon Tamako is ruled to have died of natural causes, not unusual at her age, and the curtain changing color must have been just someone’s attempt at a distasteful joke.

However, the threat of something darker going on still seems to lurk in the background. There’s a lot of people with bad intentions in this world. As part of the Saimons, Akiko is well aware of that. She recalls what she knows about the family's past.

Back at the beginning of the 20th century, Saimon Tamako made her living performing magic with a traveling circus group. Eventually she met a rich man, married him, and with his financial help established the Soga Tenju troupe.

Of course, the magician Soga Tenju was actually three women, all looking identical, all having similarly unclear pasts and wandering with the same group, all being called simply Tamako because no one even knew their real names.

It happened that three rich men of Tsuwano, who all have been friends—Saimon Taishin, Tsukumo Taigen, and Tousen Taikun—fell for the same “Soga Tenju”, and upon discovering the secret behind the magician decided to marry one member of the trio each. Since this was the era it was, the women didn’t really have a say in the matter. (Akiko hopes for more emancipation in the future and feels sad that she probably won’t live to see it; she’s over sixty herself.)

The tendency for similar names came with all sides of the family, it seemed. The three rich men were themselves a little weird, and that shared “Tai” in their names was something they added intentionally to show their bond. Their respective firstborn children—Tsukumo Haruko, Tousen Natsuko and Saimon Akiko—were given names referring to haru (spring), natsu (summer) and aki (fall). Since the Tamakos were so similar looking, their daughters also looked close enough that one could mistake them for triplets.

Akiko herself has three sons—Taishi, Akio, and Takayoshi—but now that they are all adults, they no longer feel so close to her, especially the youngest Takayoshi, who never felt inclined to stage illusion and broke all contact with the family. He didn’t show up for Tamako’s birthday and even now, a month later, hasn’t contacted them yet.

On October 19th, Akiko is busy sewing new props for a magic routine, the Five-Ball Cascade, in which juggled balls seem to change colors between red and white in mid-air. Remembering her times as the young magician Soga Tenshuu, she attempts the act just one more time. As she throws the balls in the air, she feels a stabbing pain in her chest and suddenly sees familiar faces in the balls—her mother, her husband, her sons—changing from white to red, like a bloody cascade. As they fall to the ground, Akiko does too.

--

A month later, on November 19th, a few members of the Saimon family are combing the Tottori sand dunes in search for young Saimon Yuuta, who went missing the previous day after announcing he’d like to show them something at the site. Everyone’s on edge; it’s barely been a month since Akiko's death.

A rope is found sticking out of Umanose, the famous “horse-back” dune, and several people pulling on it manage to unearth what looks like a giant card—four of diamonds—and Yuuta’s corpse tied to it.

--

--

Not even a few years have passed since JDC’s founding when young detective Ajiro Souji and his wife Mizuki take part in Saimon Tamako’s tragic birthday celebration.

The couple feels at home in Shimane, both because Mizuki was born in the prefecture, and because Ajiro has been friends with the Saimon family ever since receiving their help during the Ajiro Family Murder Case—the experience which prompted him to create JDC in the first place.

That case, as usual, was solved by his grandfater Soujin and mentor Shiranui Zenzou [and if you want to know more about it, read Carnival]. Both of them are splendid detectives, but decided young Souji should be the one to become JDC’s representative instead.

...but we keep saying "JDC" here, and the truth is the tiny group doesn’t call itself by the fancy English name Japan Detectives Club yet. It goes simply by Nihon Tantei Club and occupies the third floor of an office building filled with boutiques, clinics and the like.

Aside from Ajiro the representative, the staff consists of six office workers and twelve detectives (not counting Soujin, who is almost always out on business). The detectives are divided into the Shiranui Section and Kirigirisu Section, named after their respective leaders. There is some tension between the sections: the Shiranui part puts more value on past experience and doesn’t approve of choosing young Souji as their representative, while the Kirigirisu part praises his potential and thinks of the organization’s future.

So far Nihon Tantei Club is pretty unknown, no dramatic and giant solved cases to their name, and everyone has a strange conflicting feeling: at once wishing for the peace to never end and wishing for the inevitable tragedy to just happen already; to just get to the point where what should be unusual becomes the new normal, because everyone knows deep down it has to happen one day.

On November 22nd, Kirigirisu Tarou as usual takes the train to work, thinking about how the world will inevitably change as the new century comes around—though, of course, he can’t be sure he will actually get to see it, as nobody knows what will have happened in over twenty years.

Maybe he’s mulling over the passage of time and worries about the future so much because he's a man without a past. Kirigirisu lost all his memories to head injury a few years ago, at the same time when he was wrongly accused of murder. Fortunately, he was proven innocent thanks to both Ajiros, could begin new life as a detective, and even found a wonderful wife called Kano. He would love it if this usual everyday life could continue indefinitely… although without crime, a detective like him would be out of a job. For now he wants to focus on helping the Ajiros as he can.

Kirigirisu arrives at the office, which is mostly empty this early in the morning. Well, except for the delinquent detective Raiouji Rokenrou, looking just like you’d expect a punk named after rock’n’roll to look like (sunglasses, a lot of hair gel…) and taking a nap on the couch. Apparently Ajiro Souji had a long meeting with him about something last night, and now wants to talk to Kirigirisu.

Ajiro Souji is a sharply dressed 29-year-old man, easy to mistake for a normal office worker in the crowd. (Kirigirisu always flinches a bit seeing his elegant tie; he himself has a strange phobia of wearing anything around his neck, which he suspects has to do with an unknown event forever hidden behind his amnesia).

They each light a cigarette and have a friendly conversation. Ajiro mentions that he recently tried to switch to cigars, but alas, it seems that it’s still “too early” for him to appreciate them; about forty years too early, according to grandpa Soujin. [Seeing as Ajiro is a huge cigar fan in most of the series, grandpa miscalculated by at least two decades.]

Soujin is a thin man of short stature who hardly looks like someone in their seventies, although his hair is just as white as his usual suit, with just a black bowtie breaking the color. He always gives off the air of a mafia boss, his sheer power of personality taking hold of everyone around. Soujin apparently feels constant wanderlust, so he almost never shows up at the office. In fact, Kirigirisu hasn't seen him in over two months now. Who knows what he’s doing.

But back to the situation at hand, Ajiro wants Kirigirisu's help. For the next few days, they will investigate a case together in another prefecture, Rokenrou taking care of Kirigirisu’s section in his absence.

The case surrounds a strange series of deaths. First, Saimon Tamako dying (seemingly) of old age on her birthday on September 19th. Second, her daughter Akiko suffering a (seemingly) accidental death on October 19th, when a misplaced sewing needle stabbed into her heart. And third, a very strange but (seemingly) accidental death of another Saimon family member that has just happened on November 19th. Ajiro and Kirigirisu are to investigate whether or not the perfectly spaced string of incidents may be an act of serial killing.

The case is of personal importance to Ajiro. After all, the person who requested their services is the same man that helped solve the Ajiro Family Murder Case: Saimon Ryuusui, known better as the great magician Soga Tensui.

--

(The third person narration swaps here to a completely different font, and informs us helpfully: but ah, before the two detectives could head to Tsuwano, they would go to Yamaguchi first, to watch the magic show of the Saimon family, a marvelous experience that Ajiro has already had a few times because of his friendship with the family, and that Kirigirisu would witness for the first time.

And from the very moment they were invited to see the show first, they felt uneasiness settle inside them. Only much, much later would one realize just how deep the hidden meaning of the show really was, and that solving all its mysteries was crucial to solving the Saimon Family Murder Case.

You could even say that the show itself, filled with so many wondrous mysteries to solve, was the true Saimon Family Murder Case. If so, then the magician Soga Tensui could be defined as its culprit—and if so, then Ajiro and Kirigirisu have just walked right into a marvelous illusion indeed.)

--

[>>>NEXT PART>>>]

[zukadiary]

Beside the Foggy Elbe / Estrellas ~ Star Troupe 2019

First show of 2019! My home base in Japan is usually Kansai, but for the first time I’m in Tokyo for a lengthy stay. I saw Elbe/Estrellas twice in the theater plus the senshuuraku live view. Spoilers, because the ending of Elbe was one of my favorite things about it.

Beside the Foggy Elbe [Summary]

I caught Elbe quite late in the run, and most of the feedback I heard from talking to other non-Japanese fans beforehand was fairly negative, but I found it VERY enjoyable. Elbe is one of the most historically famous original Takarazuka works. While I haven’t seen more than clips and photos of the older productions, I was already familiar with much of the soundtrack, and I always love seeing and hearing classic Takarazuka elements live, especially as a relatively young fan coming in late in Takarazuka’s 105 year history. It’s a special kind of fun to be able to sit in the theater and sing along (even if only in my head) to a show I’ve never even seen. The story is most definitely dated, but I love the vintage-ness of it (if anything, I wish they’d pushed the aesthetics even more vintage). And because it’s an old classic, I was able to suspend my disbelief of the unlikely love story in the same way I can with old Hollywood musicals (is it believable that Dale Tremont falls in love with Jerry Travers three seconds after finding out he wasn’t actually Horace? No but I’m here for it). I also love that they don’t get together!! The first time I saw it, I looked at the clock when Margit and Florian began yelling for Karl on the docks, and went sort of wide eyed when I realized there wasn’t TIME for it to end any way other than heartbreak. I think it’s much more interesting that way.

Quick complaints out of the way first: while the show isn’t really hard to follow, I did find both Beni and Airi quite difficult to understand. Beni uses a very loud, slurred voice to play the foul-mouthed Karl, and while it’s in keeping with her character, I couldn’t untangle a lot of her words, even though they weren’t lines I’d find complicated if I read them. Airi put on a shrill voice that I also found difficult to understand. I get that her character is an ingenue to the extreme so it makes sense, but I still feel like she could have landed somewhere between that and her natural voice and been ok. Additionally, there is a parade in the beginning that I think was an UeKumi addition. I didn’t DISLIKE it, and I understand its usefulness because it’s a very top heavy show and the parade gives the secondary players a bit of fun extra spotlight, but it didn’t really fit the look or vibe of the rest of Elbe. 

I do think you need to like Beni and Airi to enjoy this show, because it is so top heavy (if you love them, I think this will be a really great show for you). I especially liked the role of Karl for Beni. Beni’s Karl was an extremely insecure person who disguised his self-doubt in brash mannerisms and generally poor behavior, which made his moments of sincerity very poignant. Since Beni is known more for her comedic roles than her serious ones, and sometimes seems to be questioned by fans re: her ability to be serious, I thought this really suited her in kind of a meta way. She leaned hard into the brashness because that’s more her strength, but for me she also nailed Karl’s vulnerable moments, and that made them sting extra because it felt like it was coming from a real place. I’m also kind of a sucker for the cross-social-class love story trope. Karl’s behavior for the most part is truly unattractive to the point where it can be hard to sympathize with him, but there are several scenes where you can feel his deep discomfort toward being amongst the wealthy, and how traumatized he is about his ex leaving him because he wasn’t rich enough, and Beni makes them hurt sooooo good (shout out to Otoha Minori who had the very small part of Karl’s ex but really helped succinctly convey that backstory in a way that impacted the whole show).

Margit is a hard sell for me because I don’t find her likable as a character, but I think Airi did a great job hitting the necessary notes. For the story to work, Margit has to be unhappy, but also sheltered, spoiled, frivolous, and naive enough to fall in love with someone she met in a bar at first sight just because he was a little nice to her and the polar opposite of the life she’s trying to escape. Airi made it plausible. She also plays the piano for real a couple of times (angrily!) and I was VERY impressed (Coto also does, but she can’t surprise me with unexpected talents anymore). I think Airi’s strength is sexier more mature characters and I hope she gets to flex that muscle in their taidan show, because in that sense Elbe left a lot to be desired.

As much as I think Karl suited Beni, Coto is the one who made me think it wouldn’t have been quite the same if they’d given Elbe to any current lineup other than Hoshigumi. The least believable part of the entire story is that Florian is too good. There are no men who are that good. Even for the not-men of our 夢の世界 it’s a stretch. But I completely believed that Coto was that good. I don’t even know what to say about her... she can do anything and it’s stupid. Muster up heartbreaking sincerity for a truly unrealistic character? Sure. Play the piano flawlessly while speaking? Why not. (And the way she brushed her coattails out of the way before seating herself at the piano bench made me feel A Way).

The newly inserted Tobias was a nice sendoff for Kai. Not quite as delightful and meaty a role as Kiroku, and not as strong of a goodbye present as Sho Fu Kan, but lovely nonetheless. Tobias was not inherently a remarkable character, but he was an excellent blank canvas on which Kai painted herself, making him cool, hot, and everyone’s big brother—all around lovable. Her costumes made NO sense (cowboy hat??) but she wore them so well I loved them all against my better judgment. Stage time dropped off pretty hard after Beni/Airi/Coto, but the scenes with the other sailors were my favorite, and Kai’s involvement in each was prominent enough (and CUTE enough) to make Tobias feel like a juicy role. She gets a lovely bridge solo toward the end, and fittingly leaves the ship crew to get married (to Mizuno Yuri/Karl’s sister), exiting separately in dramatic fashion to everyone else’s tears and well wishes. 

I found myself charmed by the supporting cast—including (especially??) the nameless lurkers of the background—more than usual. Was it the giant food props? Were they just exceptionally silly back there? I don’t know, but unfortunately the recording won’t illuminate them regardless. As for the named support, Mao Yuuki, Seo Yuria, Shidou Ryuu, and Amahana Ema made up the rest of the sailors with lines and stuff, and while there was barely anything for them to do, I (for reasons not entirely known) found Mao and Seo in particular extremely charming. Amato Kanon played a bratty screaming kid, the exact type of role I’d normally find annoying as hell, but she even managed to make HIM charming; she had a lot of very entertaining wordless interactions with some of the bigger players on the outskirts of various scenes while something else was happening in the middle. Mikkii used 5 of her 7 seconds of stage time prowling through the audience, and seeing her angry face advancing head on toward the gaijin seats was indescribably intimidating. The biggest surprise was I fell a little in love with Mizuno Yuri, who, to be fair, did not have to sing OR dance, but who did play a weird lanky adorably awkward country bumpkin with a stupid accent from Karl’s middle-of-nowhere hometown in a way that I for some reason could not stop watching. She, as Tobias’s bride, also bawled her eyes out on raku when the two of them ran off together. 

So far I still think Another World is the crown jewel of Benigumi, but I’d place Elbe second.

Estrellas

Seeing Estrellas was an odd experience because it got the New Year’s NHK broadcast, and I watched THAT before I saw it live—how often do you see a Takarazuka video BEFORE seeing the show live?? It’s my personal favorite Benigumi revue thus far. I fell in love with it pretty instantly, and interestingly I think a big part of that was the NHK cinematography, which combined with the song selection made it feel more like a concert or a FNS-style big televised music program. I found that fresh. It didn’t have QUITE that same vibe live, but still a good impact. I can see it being polarizing though; it’s very pop and not very Takarazuka at times, and I probably like it so much because I happen to personally like the song choices. 

Allowing for the fact that she was still performing very much within her own quirky style, Beni (up until Tokyo raku) seemed very on point to me, which I was glad to see; my last live Hoshigumi experience was Another World/Killer Rouge in Takarazuka toward the beginning of the run last year, and in Killer Rouge especially it seemed like she was being extremely cautious with her movements in a way that made me wonder if she was nursing or avoiding an injury. Every time I saw Estrellas though she danced full force. Airi had more than one sexy number to make up for Margit, most notably an all musumeyaku dance in the finale portion that I feel like I see pretty rarely from Hoshigumi. Beni and Airi’s duet dance was also VERY cute and very them.

Kai again got a lovely sendoff, a big long 3-song progression with perfectly chosen lyrics. The way she drank in the theater on the last day, like she was really trying to burn the image of the audience into her eyes, was SO much. 

Coto is stupid. She paints with her voice and that gets me real bad. There’s a solid handful of siennes in the top tier of vocals in Takarazuka, and while many of them are gorgeous singers, the only two I’ve heard play and emote with their voices the particular way I’m thinking of are Coto and Daimon. Her vocal control while she’s violently dancing is also astounding. She’s stupid.

Senshuuraku was an ordeal! Estrellas opened with Beni doing what I initially thought was some weird attempt at a sexy breathy thing, and then maybe thought she was trying not to cry, till it became abundantly clear that something bigger was wrong. She got hoarser and hoarser till some notes in “Tonight is What it Means to be Young” failed to come out entirely. She used her chuuzume ad lib time to apologize for her voice... sad, because that was the prime slot for cute and touching moments with the retiring actresses, but she was clearly too panicked and struggling to think of that. Then she explained during the curtain call that she broke her voice at the end of Elbe—and it must have been on the VERY last note, because the entirety of Elbe was COMPLETELY fine (I didn’t even notice a weird crack or anything at the end). I didn’t know you could break your voice that badly on one note, but I guess you can. She was very flustered and apologetic—also full on crying—though every curtain call, and while I can’t blame her for feeling remorseful I wish she’d dialed it back after the first couple of apologies and let the retiring actresses have their moment. But considering her state it was pretty remarkable that she powered through, and I hope she has a chance to recover before the next show.

I’ve lived through my share of Takarazuka retirements, including ones that turned a whole troupe’s vibe completely upside down, but somehow Kai’s feels unusually odd (I imagine Miya’s will as well). I think it’s gonna be a downer of a year. 

[heathinator]

Toy Story Human AU deets

I got an ask about a month ago concerning details from my human alternate universe, since I draw the toys as humans relatively often. I put it off until now since I was in the midst of college finals and losing my mind n’ all that. For like a year now I’ve been casually writing a web-comic style story that’d incorporate all of this stuff, and one day I really hope I can dedicate some time to actually drawing it out, but until then here’s what I’ve got:

The events take place in the 90′s, in a little county called Stanton (I’m so original I know...). It’s located in the Western US nestled in the Rockies. There’s a smaller town within Stanton where Woody Pride grew up.

Woody never knew his father, and his mother passed away when he was a teenager, so the town basically raised him. It’s always been his goal and passion to protect and be a leader over the people of Stanton, so naturally he’s been elected as sheriff for a few years and has every intention to remain so.

Bo also grew up in Stanton, and she’s known Woody since they’ve been kids. They’ve got an “It’s a Wonderful Life” George and Mary kind of relationship, where Bo’s probably been in love with him her whole life. She works as a teacher at the elementary school.

Buzz basically comes from the Buzz Lightyear of Star Command universe. As part of a dangerous solo mission, Buzz infiltrated Zurg’s lair on planet Z to gain intel on a secret invention Zurg’s scientists had been creating that had the capability to wipe out entire planets. Buzz was not only able to get information on the weapon, but he also stole a vital part of the energy source, a rare material that Zurg had to steal to get in the first place. The plan was to rendezvous with Star Command with the new intel, but Buzz was discovered and pursued in his ship. Zurg’s henchmen were able to damage Buzz’s hyperdrive, thus causing it to malfunction and hurl him light years away in uncharted space, inadvertently landing him in the Milky Way and crashing on Earth.

Woody and Buzz’s first encounter together go about exactly how you’d think: not great. The town thinks he’s some sort of super cool secret agent from NASA, while Woody’s convinced Buzz is some crazed loony. Things get worse when the town is enamored by Buzz and his ability to deal with criminals, and think he’d make a great county sheriff. All the while Buzz is trying to figure out how to get off the planet and back to his primary mission of stopping Zurg.

It all comes to a head when the two get taken hostage by a notorious criminal in the county and have to work together to escape. Buzz has to come to terms with the fact that he may never be able to leave Earth, and Woody opens up to the idea of sharing the responsibility of taking care of Stanton, even after he learns the truth that Buzz really is an alien from another planet. Buzz joins on as deputy sheriff, although the two get to the point where they work so closely together that either could be sheriff. Buzz decides that it would be wise to keep the alien stuff a secret from everyone else in town.

About a year later, after tracking down another notorious criminal in the county, Woody and Buzz are able to catch him at last. Just as they’re wrapping up, a member from the criminal’s gang targets Woody, shooting him in his shoulder. In all the confusion not only does the shooter get away, but the criminal escapes as well. Woody turns out to be ok, (except for an arm he’s not supposed to use for awhile) but he feels guilty and inadequate, like maybe he’s not the best one for the job, or that with Buzz there Stanton may not actually need him anymore.

When sort of lamenting all of this, Woody is caught off guard and knocked out by a traveling salesman who takes him out of Stanton, where he finally learns about his father, who was a musician, performer, and TV star who passed away years ago. He meets Pete, a man who allegedly knew him and his father when Woody was very young, and Jessie Pride, the sister he never knew existed. Abandoned by their father when she was young, Pete became sort of a second father to her. He manipulated her and convinced her that nobody else could love her, so she stayed feeling utterly trapped with Pete. The performing troupe led by their father was popular back in the day, and they’d been trying to revive it after all of these years with little success, but were convinced that if Woody joined the troupe (who was the spitting image of his father) they’d get their big break, getting them out of the poor living condition they were in.

At first Woody had no intention of staying, but Pete manipulates Woody into believing that he’s no longer needed in Stanton and that he’ll be happier to start a new life with them. They get an offer to do a long term Woody’s Roundup revival in Japan, and prepare to leave. In the meantime, Buzz has been leading a search party for his friend and finds him, where of course he has to talk some sense into Woody and prevent him from leaving. Pete becomes furious and forcibly takes Woody and Jessie to the airport. Turns out Pete wasn’t really living the hard life after all, since becoming Jessie’s primary caregiver he had taken possession of all the money their father had left them after he died. But after discovering Woody’s existence and terrified he would somehow show up to take back the inheritance, Pete set up a ruse to kill both Pride siblings and leave the country. They manage to stop Pete, and jump off the plane before taking off, but Pete escapes custody.

Ideally this point in the story would be where I’d start my comic, beginning with Jessie’s adjustment to Stanton and their adventures between what would be the 2nd and 3rd movies. Jessie would become good friends with Bo, and eventually would decide to join Woody and Buzz in tackling crime in Stanton and the strange occurrences that seem to have started ever since Buzz landed on Earth. Jessie’s growth would come from her becoming her own person, and taking on Pete again as a recurring vengeful villain. Bo would have her own issues from a mysterious past that even Woody was unaware of, and her ability to grow stronger from it. Buzz would would still wrestle with his guilt of not being able to complete his mission, and trying to express his feelings towards Jessie with whom he is absolutely smitten. Woody would still be struggling to understand his worth and position over the people of Stanton, and that he can prove to himself that he can protect them. All the while members of Star Command and Zurg’s empire alike are looking desperately for Buzz and the stolen bit of the device, and they’re getting closer than Buzz ever thought they would...

Anyway holy cow this was way longer than I intended it to be. Like I said, hopefully one day I can actually get this dang comic started, but until then at least you know what’s going through my head when I’m drawing these guys. 😬

[strawberrygiorno]

Hi there! I love your and Pari's avatar au, and I'd love to hear more about it, so here goes some questions! I think i'll divide them by character (Hope you don't mind me sending them in different asks, I have a feeling there is A Lot to talk about so this could get quite long fjvkasjv) This got kinda long already so for this one I'll only ask about any minor characters you already have figured out(Tome, Tsubomi, Mezato, the BIC, others that won't fit here). What are they all up to?

hehe thank you!! i’m glad you’re so interested omg fkjld i’m flattered!!

this answer got long, so it’s under the cut. also @rosenmarille was the one who wrote out the answer to this ask, just so u all know!!

I am so glad you asked about Tsubomi because out of all the minor characters we probably have the most content for her. She’s actually a part of the group, though she joins rather late, after shou has become a solid member, but before any of them meet momo! 

Known for her particular talent with elegant firebending forms, she’s somewhat of a minor celebrity along the eastern islands of the fire nation, travelling here and there as a performer, similar to how a travelling circus would operate. It’s less about fighting and more about style, a mixture between martial arts and dancing, and she uses fire effectively to accompany her, something that also makes her eventual fighting style unique – precise, even if it means skimping out on brute strength. 

She enjoys that part, though honestly, she could do without all the attention or the pressure to perform perfectly even outside of a show. Not to mention, her manager is an uncaring man who she has no doubt would replace her if she ever let her standard drop. So, with nothing else to do, and no where else to go, she remains. 

The group meets her when travelling the fire nation in search for a teacher for mob – now that shou has agreed to teach earth, they can finally move on to the next element. Reigen remembers hearing about her show before he left the fire nation, so he urges mob and ritsu to come with him (funnily enough, teru and shou conveniently disappear as soon as he brings up the topic). Mob decides to buy snacks for the others and wanders off, only he cant seem to find his way back to the performance tent all of a sudden, and asks a young woman for directions. 

Tsubomi, out for a walk before the latest show, dreads the water tribe boy’s approach, thinking him another fan (has her fame spread that far??), but when he asks for directions to….see her show? She’s not quite sure how to react. If that was his idea of a practical joke, she’s not very amused. 

Later, after she’s taking an applause break after finished her first set, the crowd starts to take a different turn, voices of “Is that the avatar?” growing louder and louder, until the masses part to reveal a very annoyed water tribe boy, though not the one she saw earlier. He crosses his arms just as another boy in blue steps up, looking very sheepish and uncomfortable. Him??

Her manager, quick to think of ways to bring home profit starts announcing their very special guest of today and wait no, that’s not in the program, I don’t know what to do. The boy is brought (shoved) besides her, and immediately she can tell he has no stage experience whatsoever, he can’t even bring himself to say a word. The silence in the tent grows along with the terrible atmosphere this interruption has created, and thinking quickly, she manages to end the show abruptly and with a flash and pushes the avatar backstage. As expected, her manager isnt happy with her, though this time she refuses to let herself be cowed again and starts yelling back, just as the other water tribe boy and a man dressed in overtly tacky fire nation garb rush in, looking worried. 

They start arguing but she cuts them off, then cuts her manager off by tearing off her costume and throwing it to the ground. She quits. Grabs her bag and leaves without another word, angrier than she’s ever been before. The humiliation of dealing with a poorly thought out plan put into motion without consulting her, the embarrassment of having been on the receiving end of the avatar’s prank and getting scolded for it? Bye! 

Meanwhile reigen does his best to calm an angry manager, trying his hardest not to deck him in the face. Mob is worried tsubomi got the wrong idea, he didn’t mean to mess up her show? But ritsu assures him that theres nothing to be done now, and as soon as reigen is done, they decide to find shou and teru as fast as possible (“no, we didn’t break into a rude rich guy’s house and steal his stuff,” Shou says. “stealing implies keeping it,” teru adds.)

As luck would have it on the outskirts of town, after travelling for about an hour, the group runs into a now-tired tsubomi, resting by a tree, and mob hops off the carriage immediately, eager to set the record straight. She seems amused by the misunderstanding and luckily not angry at him, and she agrees to catch a ride with them, at least for a while. Of course, she ends up staying. 

She and ritsu end up having a somewhat interesting relationship as they grow closer, what with both of them being firebenders, albeit with very different bending styles. (though we’ll talk about that more later)

Her relationship with shou is also a lot of fun, since he’s a big influence in teaching her to lighten up a little and they can tend to get into trouble at times. Shou just has that kind of effect on people.

Now Tome. To be honest, she doesn’t have quite as big a role as she should have but that might still develop more as we think of new stuff! Right now she and the rest of the telepathy club members are a bunch of orphans in the earth kingdom, living not very far from where one of touichirou’s military troupes has set up camp, slinking along their shadows and stealing food and supplies whenever they think it won’t show up as missing. They know of the brainwashing that’s happening there though, and even though they haven’t seen them up close, they know there’s a kid about their age with them. 

One night, during a very clear full moon, Tome and the others are roaming around the campsite (its easier when theyre asleep), only instead of food, someone barrels into her from behind at full speed, knocking them both down. To her surprise, it’s the boy they’ve seen at the camp, and he looks to be on the verge of a breakdown. After assuring him that they didn’t have anything to do with the soldiers, they take him back to their cave, and eventually befriend him. Skip to two years later, and by now Teru has gathered a lot more members to their little group, driven by confidence that tome doesn’t know the origin of. He sees himself as the protector of this forest, his “territory”, as he calls it, and has successfully driven the camp of soldiers out some time ago. With nothing else to do, they antagonize other militia and small local authorities as tome and the others watch with ever growing disdain. 

Then, one day, he’s gone. Left behind are the remnants of his gang, though they seem a lot less eager to fight pointlessly. Taking this chance, she strikes a deal with the defacto-leader Edano, and the two decide to join forces and start fighting real problems, with a particular eye on more of these strange earth kingdom soldiers that keep popping up everywhere…. 

NOW the body improvement club. There’s not much to them either, but they’re members of the southern water tribe as well. Back then, the south was in its entire height and glory, and growing up, mob looked up to them a lot. He befriends them after a few of the other kids pick on him for not managing to throw a spear right, or how to sneak up on prey carefully enough, which musashi and the others will absolutely not abide! He and ritsu spend more time with them, and it turns out, ample encouragement and practice was all that mob needed after all. 

Lastly, I regret to say that we haven’t talked about mezato being in this au at all, though that might change at one point :P

[ten-summoners-fails]

Book rec

Everyone please read ‘The Name of the Wind’. It’s a great story, very well written, exciting, original and actually promising. I also love its sheer eccentricity and the fact that the story and its heroes are actually able to laugh at themselves from time to time.

Now, the rest is rather personal - as much, of course, as things can get personal on a public online platform. It doesn’t matter... I feel some strange, perverted desire to pour myself out a little bit, just as I used to do when I was younger. Who knows, it may still do me a little good.

Reading this book is a very pleasant, but at the same time also quite disturbing experience. And as days go by and pages turn, it becomes all the more disturbing.

I bought the book last Monday. The thirteenth. In a normal case, I should have finished a novel of 600-something pages, like, last Thursday if it was any good. If a book is fine, it keeps me up at night; it nags on my mind while I’m jolting my way to work across all means of public transport; it pervades my dreams. (I had swallowed Anna Karenina in three days, damn it!) ...and where I am with the book? Not even in the middle! I’m struggling with it - in fact, I’m struggling because, in a way, I’m enjoying it too much. And while I’m trying to save all the honeydrops for my eager tongue, I’m letting time slip. From a certain perspective, it’s almost as if I was horrified to turn the pages - a self-admitted goal of George R. R. Martin.

I’m aware that I had started this entry with pure praise... and don’t get me wrong, I truly like 'The Name of the Wind’. I’m sort of becoming attached to it - I’m glad I actually bought it, and didn’t just borrow or put it out. I own a tremendous amount of books, and this one is already among the “precious” pieces... but what the hell is wrong then, one could ask?

My problem can be explained with two short words: Awakening. And, Resemblance.

It happens to me quite often that people inquire about my past - you know how things are, it all starts off with the friendly banter. And while I tend not to ask too much questions, I’m usually more than willingly give chunks of truth, such as: “I spent the first 8 years of my life with a troupe of actors”. Or, “I didn’t find my place in nursery school: the kids just wanted to talk about Barbies and Teletubbies. I could read, write, recite classical drama and I have never saw a TV screen in all my life. Imagine my confusion and fear.” Or, “I have once made a bet with a fisherman on a Greek island that I could swim across to Albania. I almost drowned.” - And all the stories I have told you were true: only, I’m very good at leaving the dark parts out of them. The less pleasant parts. The not-so-entertaining parts... Pain, suffering, loss, deceptions (though part of me is still convinced that, despite everything that happened, I don’t yet know their too nature).

Everyone is convinced of the uniqueness of their own situation and obstacles, I know. Everyone has problems, I know. The gripping, numbing claws that lure you back to depression with the illusion of blissful idleness provide no excuse to lose hope - I know that as well. And whenever I’m telling my story (I mean, really telling it, from the beginning to this day; though you might need to get me steadily drunk for that), I tend to be a little dramatic about it, just as most of us would. People usually don’t hold that against me; I grew up among good storytellers, men and women who could fill a stage alone, and though I have always lacked their talent, some of the technical details did manage to stuck with me. And I have always liked a good tale.

Let’s get back to the point! Awakening; and Resemblance.

My problem with Kvothe’s tale is that I see to much of myself in it. Autrement dit, Kvothe has too much of me or I have too much of him: I don’t know.

I had to admit myself that I understand his general anger and stiffness towards the world more than I healthily should. And I also find that even if I barely even hold a morsel of his wit and talent, I have been treated the same way quite often. I have been wronged quite often, and I know what it’s like. I know what it’s like to admit yourself that the revenge you seek is meaningless, and beyond your power. I know what it’s like to hate yourself because of an ache that should be still sharp and shrill, but has dulled too quickly. I know what it’s like to see the world fall apart around you. I know what it’s like to desperatly cling to the last few pennies you have. It seems like the only thing Kvothe knows and I don’t is the feeling of downright burying your own parents - and maybe that of starving.

Still, that’s WAY TOO much resemblance, wouldn’t you say? Even physically speaking. While reading, I remembered what was it like with the troupe. I remembered smells, colours, laughter, fake tears, my parents in masks that made them unrecognisable, a few lines from here and there, ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ mingling with ‘Tartuffe’, child’s says, strange lights, applause, beer and wine I wasn’t supposed to drink, “oww-s” and “aww-s” and “eww-s”, Midsummer Nights (which we celebrated), whistle and cheering, and the laughter of the audience... and all thse sensations - just as described in th book - opened several doors in my mind, doors that should have probably been left closed and (poetically speaking) barred with iron.

...which means I also remembered how everything had fallen apart at its time, and how my childish mind had tried to sew the pieces back together during great journeys, stuffing the holes with entirely new impressions. And I remembered the new sort of life that came afterwards - everything, that was more or less normal, more or less like a young teenager’s life should be (at least, period); everything and everyone who had failed to strip me of the unknown, gloomy-looking past that has always lurked around me like a cloak sewed from fog - impossible to put a finger on it, but still dark and dense as a stormcloud.

I could be around 12 or 13 when a friend once told me that I was living in my own world, and entirely: far away from all others, in my carefully bared castle. She also told me that I appeared perfectly content that way, and in peace, and she envied that. I had laughed half-heartedly.

We all use our imagination as a shield when we are kids. My shield was huge and shiny, and no sword or axe, not even the shards of reality could crack it. Nothing could. It was perfect. Imagination is hard to grasp, but I have always been quite good in recreating reality in my head. I was able to recreate smells, sounds, feelings, sight, the touch of something. I could (and to this day, still can) bring tears to my eyes with a single thought. I could just randomly start speaking and end up telling an adventorous tale for three hours. I could wander the woodlands alone, pretending that I was my own prey and own suitor, and I had to catch myself. I had played several dozen characters for the same time in my had, and we had interesting conversations: conversations I could later write down if I wanted, from the first letter to the last. They stayed with me. Stories and tales flew from my hands whenever I sat down to write, and I always had a song in mind. Believe me or not, I even found an old lute no one needed or used, and I taught myself how to play a few melodies. (According to some scarce recordings, I have always been terrible, but I was a kid, and it botherd me little. I had more the air of a bard with that lute in hand - and after all, in my childhood memories, I live as a master of singers).

As I grew older, though, the power of my imagination began to dull a little. It became much less - well, wild, much less physical; I felt more and more eager need to write my stories and not just act them out as I used to. I remember myself collapsing in the middle of my mother’s garden (after the apocalypse of my old life, already) and crying so hard it mad my whole body shake because I wasn’t able to reproduce a vision as clear as intended. That was some sort of a breaking point, and since then, I've been steadily losing my imagination. As time passed, I have come to terms with that, considering it an inevitable trait of growing up. With time, I have downright forgotten what these imagined sensations have truly felt like... until the moment Kvothe’s story brought them back.

I was sitting on the tramway, going to work, and - suddenly I wasn’t going anymore, I was just in the story. I can’t explain it more clearly, and you’ll probably think I’m crazy, or some sort of a huge nerd, or simply acting out. I’m not. My imagination - that of my childhood - suddenly returned with all its force, and crushed down on my mind like a steady wave of tunder. Nothing remained, but the reconstructed reality of what my mind’s eye was seeing. The sensation was so overwhelmingly wonderful I completly forgot to get off that goddamn tram and was truly and entirely late from work. Still, I couldn’t care less. I got what I have always wanted. My imagination had returned!

And it was frightening.

I’m now experincing the dark side of this sudden, newly rediscovered power: I have changed, and therefore so has my imagination. It is darker. I am darker. It can be frightening and unsettling. It can steal my sleep. Still... my consciousness is sharp. I feel like I have been awakened from a mindset of disturbing sleep: from the mindset that others have poetically bestowed with a complicated Latin name that stands for a certain kind of depressive disorder.  But I have always known better: I know that I have seen too much, that I’m too young and I have also told too much of myself in this blog entry that no one will read this far: still, I have to repeat myself: I could not care less.

Since I have understood all of this, I’m a bit wary of returning to Kvothe’s tale, but the book is like a magnet, and I carry it with myself wherever I go.

If you have got this far, you’re a hero, truly. I mean it.

...and my chest suddenly got somewhat less heavy.

[funface2]

When We Laugh at Nazis, Maybe the Joke’s on Us – The New York Times

Even if Max Bialystock hadn’t gone to prison for embezzling from the backers of his hit Broadway show, trouble would have found him one way or another. Didn’t he slap his business partner, the accountant Leo Bloom, after dousing the poor man with a glass of water during working hours? And while Max’s hanky-panky with Ulla, the receptionist, may have involved consenting adults, his whole business model was based on trading sexual favors with senior citizens for money. If ever a man in show business was in need of cancellation, it was surely Max Bialystock.

Not a chance! Max is a beloved figure who has, for more than 50 years, inspired not outrage but delight. The man is an institution, an archetype. He turned a song-and-dance spectacle about Hitler into a Broadway smash. Hitler! Max’s exploits have been chronicled in a 2005 movie and a long-running stage musical, both called “The Producers” and both starring Nathan Lane. Long before that, Max was played by Zero Mostel, in the first film directed by Mel Brooks. That original “Producers,” released in 1967 with a very young Gene Wilder as Leo, was a staple of my youth.

Now that fascism seems to be in bloom once again, it is a good time to revisit “Springtime for Hitler,” the show that made Bialystock and Brooks into household names. But like Leo when he first shuffles into Max’s office to audit the books, I’m a little nervous at the prospect.

The question of how much and what kind of fun it’s permissible to have with Nazis never goes away, and the resurgence of right-wing extremism around the world makes the question newly uncomfortable. When “Jojo Rabbit” showed up at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, the fact that it played Hitler at least partly for laughs — with the director, Taika Waititi impersonating a goofy, gangly, almost lovable Führer — you could hear the wincing from across the border. The relative innocuousness of the film (which won the audience award at the festival) doesn’t entirely dispel the uneasiness around it.

If you’re fooling around in the costume of history’s most notorious genocidal maniac, you’re working in proximity to a powerful taboo. Which is exactly what makes Hitler humor irresistible, in particular for Jewish comedians like Brooks and Waititi. (Brooks dressed up as the Führer not in “The Producers,” but in a 1978 television special called “Peeping Times” and then in the 1983 remake of Ernst Lubitsch’s “To Be or Not to Be.”) Such cosplay represents a form of exorcism, a way of appropriating the symbols of terror and hatred and stripping them of their power by exposing their absurd, idiotic banality.

The goose-step clowning in “The Producers” has a long pedigree. The film premiered two years into the run of “Hogan’s Heroes” on CBS, a madcap, Emmy-nominated comedy about a German P.O.W. camp in World War II. One of the prisoners would sometimes dress up as the Führer to bamboozle the hapless commandant, Colonel Klink, and his bumbling minion, Sergeant Schultz. Those guys were always being bamboozled, though Hogan and his pals never did manage to escape.

It was sometimes hard for a kid watching reruns of “Hogan’s Heroes” — as I did nearly every weekday afternoon that Gerald Ford was president — to square the foolishness of Klink and Schultz with the genocidal monstrosity of the real Nazis. Surely it’s in bad taste to take evil so lightly. But in 1967, when “The Producers” came out, World War II was still within living memory for many adults, and so was a wartime tradition of mocking the enemy. Brooks, who attacked the history of comedy with scholarly diligence, was following in the footsteps of two of the great comic minds of old Hollywood: Charles Chaplin and Ernst Lubitsch.

Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator” (1940) turned Hitler — thinly disguised as Adenoid Hynkel, dictator of Tomania — into a blustering, pompous clown, surrounded by snakes and toadies, drunk on ugly fantasies of world conquest. Lubitsch’s “To Be or Not to Be” (1942), set mainly in Poland just before and right after the German invasion in 1939, takes a less fantastical route to a similar destination.

These movies insist that what will defeat fascism — at the time a hope, not an assumption — is not so much military might or political cunning as an attitude that could be called the spirit of comedy itself. The fatal weakness in Hynkel, and in the officious SS men who spoil the fun in Lubitsch’s Warsaw, is their humorlessness. The simple, decent fallibility of the Jewish barber Chaplin also plays (a variation on his Little Tramp persona) is the opposite of the dictator’s buffoonish megalomania. The joke lies in the way the little guy impersonates the big shot, laying bare the empty grandiosity of his will to power.

Imposture is the ethical key to Nazi-mocking, a way of revealing the vanity and stupidity of people who insist above all on their own deadly seriousness. Bullies beg to be humiliated, and comedians are uniquely equipped for the task. In “To Be or Not to Be,” members of a Warsaw theater troupe pretend to be high-ranking Gestapo officers and Nazi operatives, and even Hitler himself. This ability to play, to pretend, to parody isn’t just a matter of professional training. The artistry of the actors — their ability to improvise and crack wise in potentially lethal circumstances — is what separates them from their foes. If the Germans were to win, all the fun would go out of the world.

The Germans didn’t win, of course, but unspeakable things happened anyway. With the terrible knowledge of hindsight, the gentleness of “The Great Dictator” and the high spirits of “To Be or Not to Be” take on a special kind of poignancy. Chaplin and Lubitsch saw the darkness clearly, but they could not yet measure its full depth and scale. Some of the jokes can make you wince. A vain German commandant is tickled to learn — from a fake source — that his nickname back in Berlin is “Concentration Camp Ehrhardt.” “We do the concentrating, and the Poles do the camping,” he says with a chuckle.

It wasn’t the best joke in 1942, and it sounded even more awkward in 1983, when Mel Brooks recycled it in his affectionate, puzzling remake of “To Be or Not to Be” (directed by Alan Johnson, who had choreographed “Springtime for Hitler” in “The Producers”). That film, unlike the Lubitsch version, is hard to find these days, but a snippet available on YouTube features Brooks as a rapping, break-dancing Hitler — a miniature tour de force of bad taste that reprises an immortal rhyme from “Springtime”: “Don’t be stupid, be a smarty/Come and join the Nazi Party.”

It’s funny because everyone knows the opposite is true. The only “real” Nazi in “The Producers” is Franz Liebkind, the author of “Springtime for Hitler,” a German exile too pathetic for any war-crimes tribunal, who keeps pigeons on the roof of his Greenwich Village tenement. His heartfelt tribute to the Führer is taken up by Bialystock and Bloom because they are looking for a surefire flop, a work of such stupendous bad taste that audiences will flee in disgust. But it’s precisely because no one could possibly take Liebkind and his ilk seriously that Max and Leo fail so spectacularly at their attempted failure. Because Franz is manifestly an idiot, any even moderately smart person could only take the show as satire. The triumph of “The Producers” is to suppose a world where the anxious hopes of Chaplin and Lubitsch have come true — where fascism has been expunged, its spell permanently broken by humanism and humor. That’s the world of “Hogan’s Heroes,” too, and also of “Jojo Rabbit.”

But what if we don’t live in that world? For a long time, laughing at historical Nazis has seemed like a painless moral booster shot, a way of keeping the really bad stuff they represent safely contained in the past. It never occurs to Max Bialystock that the audience might respond to “Springtime” as satire, and it never occurred to Mel Brooks that the show might be effective propaganda.

“The Producers” is naughty and silly, but it works to establish boundaries rather than transgress them. It plays with a taboo that it is ultimately committed to upholding. Whether a show like “Springtime” represents absolute bad taste or delicious good fun, it exists in a place far removed from the norms of civilized, rational discourse. A patron can be offended or amused by its nutty Nazis, but no one in their right mind — no one who isn’t operating at the mental and moral level of Franz Liebkind — could find it touching or persuasive. The very possibility of an actual, effective, politically empowered Nazi, a Nazi who could pose a real danger, is unthinkable. And the job of “The Producers” is to keep it that way.

Maybe that was always wishful thinking. In any case, recent history shows that the medicine of laughter can have scary side effects. Fascism has crawled out of the dust pile of history, striking familiar poses, sometimes with tongue in cheek. It has been amply documented that “ironic” expressions of bigotry and anti-Semitism — jokes and memes on social media; facetious trolling of the politically correct; slurs as exercises in free speech — can evolve over time into the real thing. A dress-up costume can be mistaken for a uniform, including by its wearer.

Meanwhile comedians advertise their racist jokes as bold challenges to the tyranny of political correctness, and brand their bigotry as boundary-pushing, taboo-busting bravery. The anti-authoritarian spirit of comedy that flows through Lubitsch and Chaplin to Brooks and his heirs is twisted away from its humanist roots.

At the same time, authoritarian leaders prove impervious to satire. Laughing at how stupid, pompous or corrupt they are doesn’t seem to break the spell of their power. The joke may be on those who persist in believing otherwise. If it were revived today, “Springtime for Hitler” might wind up being a hit for the wrong reasons. Or it might flop because those old Hitler jokes aren’t as funny as they used to be.

I don’t blame Max Bialystock. I find myself envying his misguided faith in the high-minded good taste of the public, even as I cherish Mel Brooks’s belief in our irrepressible vulgarity. Part of me looks back fondly on the days when fascism seemed like history’s dumbest joke. And part of me thinks we’d all have been better off if the opening-night audience at “Springtime for Hitler” had stormed out of the theater in a rage, leaving Max and Leo to make their way safely to Brazil.

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[unixcommerce]

Raju Vegesna of Zoho: High School Grads Get Tuition Free Training through Zoho University – and 1800 Get Jobs with the Company

I’ve been on a bit of a kick to start the year on the theme of “doing good and doing good in business.” The result can make for win-win outcomes and opportunities for small businesses to build important relationships.  And during this week’s Zoho Analyst Day among the presentations focused on the road ahead for the company in terms of product roadmaps and what it mean for customers, there was a lot of discussion on corporate culture and philosophy.  And while there are a number of areas where Zoho blazes their own trail and does things differently than most vendors in the industry, one of the most interesting and impactful is Zoho University. Zoho University provides kids who might not be able to attend a traditional university an opportunity to learn important math and technology skills – tuition free!

To learn more about the program, my CRM Playaz partner Paul Greenberg and I had a chance to sit with Zoho’s Raju Vegesna to learn more about the program, how it fits with the company’s overall culture and philosophy, and how the program has led to Zoho hiring 1,800 Zoho University graduates – equating to roughly a quarter of the company’s 7000+ employee base.  This definitely is a case of doing good and doing good in business leading to a win-win outcome.

Below is an edited transcript of our conversation. To see the full interview, watch the video or listen to it using the embedded SoundCloud player.

Small Business Trends:  This is Analyst Day number four, and it’s already bigger and better than the previous three years, so congratulations.

Raju Vegesna: Thank you. Thank you for joining us.

Small Business Trends:  One of the things I think we can talk about is what you guys are doing with Zoho Academy (University), and some of your social good stuff. So, why don’t we talk a little bit about that.

Raju Vegesna:  Sure. Zoho University is something that started back in 2004. A long time already.  The fundamental idea was different. One, we don’t believe in a few things, which is student debt. People getting into debt, making them debt slaves, and we philosophically are opposed to that. We said, “What can we do about it?” And so, we started … And that’s the point number one.

Second point, where there’s no correlation between your performance in school and your job work. Then we said, “Why are we even asking peoples resumes, and college degrees for hiring? Why don’t we radically not do that, and then hire people?” So, we said, “Okay. Let’s start hiring young kids out of high school.” And then instead of just hiring any kids, obviously, we looked and went to high schools, talked to the management and said, “Point us towards kids who would otherwise not consider higher education, not have the resources, or they would have very significant debt to even consider higher education.” We said, “Why don’t you point us to them?” And they did.

So, we went to six different kids and to their parents, and said, “Hey. This is a program we are thinking where we will train your kids for about a year and a half, and basically for free.” And on top of it, because in some cases they come from some stressed and tough economic situations, we said, “Instead of you paying us we will pay you, so that you don’t have to go through …” The last thing you want to do is them going through additional stress, because they are taking this education-

Small Business Trends:  Okay. Let’s stop right there for a second.  So, you are basically looking for folks, kids that might have had a tough time to get into a college anyway whether it’s a financial hardship, or maybe their grades weren’t up to snuff. So, you’re giving them an opportunity to come in, and learn a valuable skill and trade, in technology-

Raju Vegesna: Technology. Yeah.

Small Business Trends:  And you’re saying not only do you not have to pay tuition, you actually make money while you’re doing this.

Raju Vegesna: Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Greenberg:  God.

?

Small Business Trends:  I just want to make sure I got it. Can I sign up for this?

Paul Greenberg:  I was just thinking the same thing. I want to go back to school, can I get my MBA here?

Raju Vegesna: And fundamentally at the human level you realize that people have talent. Everyone has some talent, or another. Now, it’s the responsibility of the team, of the manager of the young technician, to recognize what that talent is, and put them in the right place to succeed. When a company hires someone, you just hired someone for the job, and if they don’t meet the requirement you usually just replace them with someone else. We don’t look at it that way.

We hire people who became excellent programmers, but then we realized that they have a different talent. They’re also an artist, or a musician. In some cases they are good with, say, public speaking. We said, “Okay. Why don’t you do that too?” And that is part of the culture.

Now, we really cannot take it for granted, but that’s another thing when we take someone into Zoho University program we don’t say, “You’re being brought in for the programming thing.” No. What we teach them is basic math, basic science, communication skills, and programming. But programming is just one portion of it. If you realize that they are good at marketing, well, that’s one of our field that helps us identify what their talents are, because at that age they themselves don’t know what they’re good at. So, it’s also helping them realize what they are good at, and then making sure that we put them in a position to succeed.

That’s a fundamental idea behind the Zoho University. It started with six folks in the first batch. Now, here we are in 2019 we now run two batches. Each batch is now, I think, 200, 250 people. About 1,800 of our 7,000 employee base came through Zoho University.

Small Business Trends:  That’s amazing.

Raju Vegesna: I was about say that about 1,800 employees do not have a college degree.

Small Business Trends:  Or college debt.

Raju Vegesna: Or college debt. That is more important. They’re happy with what they’re doing, and more important thing is you cannot tell the difference between the person with a college degree, and the person who went through this-

Small Business Trends:  That’s really good.

Paul Greenberg:  Well, that your culture is just generally like that. I remember two or three things that really struck home with me, not when I was first meeting you … What? We’re close to 18 years now-

Raju Vegesna: 18 years. Yeah. Yeah. That’s right.

Paul Greenberg:  One was that, as you said, you’re encouraging people internally to utilize their other talents and skills. And I remember a story that Sridar, your CEO, told me about a farm he had where he was examining, I think, it was a dozen ancient grains for seeing which one was sustainable. And that struck me, amazingly, first of all. But then he told me the person running the farm used to be a Zoho programmer, who when he found out her degrees, and so on he said, “Well, I’ll tell you what. I’ll pay you in fact you’ll do better, and I will make you the head of this so you can actually live out the dream you actually set out to have, and at the same time certainly makes the farm work better, and potentially significantly advance humanity.”

The other thing that blew me away, I remember, I think it was you, or Sandy, or someone telling me about you have your own dance troupe. Right?

Raju Vegesna: We have in house dance troupe, we have in house, I would say, pretty much the entire music thing. We have in house artists. We have in house construction team. We have in house designers, architects, and all sorts of crazy things you can imagine. And, of course, like the farm that we grow the food we bring them to our campus, employees go pick it up, and take it home.

Paul Greenberg:  That’s amazing.

Small Business Trends: And, actually, the way this particular office is designed he [Raju] actually had a hand in it.

Raju Vegesna: That’s another thing that Sridar noticed; that I’m interested in design. He came to me and said, “Hey. Why don’t you design this?” And I actually had a design up, and then realized that- It’s part of the learning, and that learning is spread to other divisions as well.

What we noticed was this external person cannot design an office, because we know the culture, we know how the company works, we think the spaces should reflect the culture. It should enhance this. But an interesting piece in absence of art … Like take this particular table I handpicked this particular table. Why? Because this is not a conference table, this is a dining room table. There is no work table anywhere. I made it specific to this. Why? When people come to the office I want them to feel like they’re going home. They want to come to the office. So, every element here is actually purchased from your home element from sofas to dining room tables to everything single element.

So, again, the space should reflect the company.

This article, “Raju Vegesna of Zoho: High School Grads Get Tuition Free Training through Zoho University – and 1800 Get Jobs with the Company” was first published on Small Business Trends

https://smallbiztrends.com/

The post Raju Vegesna of Zoho: High School Grads Get Tuition Free Training through Zoho University – and 1800 Get Jobs with the Company appeared first on Unix Commerce.

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Underestimate Donald Glover at Your Own Peril

http://styleveryday.com/2017/08/12/underestimate-donald-glover-at-your-own-peril/

Underestimate Donald Glover at Your Own Peril

The red-hot writer, producer, director, musician and now movie star takes a break from Lando duties on the Han Solo movie to dissect his extraordinary rise, ‘Atlanta’ Emmy hopes, his secret sit-down with Billy Dee Williams (in disguise) and how he plans to conquer Hollywood: “Convince them that you speak old white man.”

On a crisp afternoon in late January, Donald Glover arrived for the kind of meeting his younger, nerdier, Star Wars-loving self would never have dreamed possible. Having been cast three months earlier as Lando Calrissian in the eagerly awaited Han Solo spinoff movie, he was there, incognito with a pair of shades and a fake nose, to sit face-to-face in Los Angeles with Billy Dee Williams, the original Lando, for a top-secret torch-passing arranged by Lucasfilm.

Glover found himself frazzled and running behind, as he often is, and was more than a little nervous. Once the formalities were out of the way, he threw himself feverishly into a dissection of Calrissian and his possible virtues: “I was like, ‘I’ve always felt like this character could do this, and he represents this, and I kind of feel like he comes from here, and it’s very obvious he has a lot of taste, so maybe he grew up seeing that from afar? Because I’m like that. Maybe he saw it from other planets and was like, ‘I want to be that.’ ” Glover is full-on laughing now as he re-enacts the exchange. “He just let me ramble on and on, and then finally I was like, ‘So, what do you think?’ And he goes, ‘Yeah, I don’t know about all that. Just be charming.’ “

That Glover would want to search for deeper, nuanced meaning in what’s effectively a caricature of a smooth-talking hustler is at once comical and entirely appropriate. After all, what distinguishes the 33-year-old — arguably the most prolific creator of his generation, racking up accolades as a writer, producer, director, rapper, stand-up and, now, movie star — is not only his unique voice and versatility, but also his desire, through his work, to get under people’s skin and make them think, even if they aren’t always comfortable doing so. It’s been a theme of his music (he has sold more than 1 million albums under his stage name, Childish Gambino) as well as his comedy material; but the most stunning example of all came last fall with the introduction of his FX series, Atlanta, a sharply observed commentary on being young and black in today’s America that merely masquerades as a comedy about rappers in the southern capital. The show seemed to come out of nowhere and quickly scored the highest half-hour ratings in its network’s history, not to mention a Peabody, an AFI award, a pair of Golden Globes and six Emmy nominations, with at least a few prognosticators predicting it’ll unseat perennial winner Veep come September. As the head of FX, John Landgraf, puts it, “Underestimate Donald Glover at your own peril.”

When I sit down with Glover this summer in London — where he has been living since January, shooting the Star Wars movie that has had as much drama offscreen as it has had on (his thoughts on that later) — I wonder aloud what’s fueling his rise. He slurps up what’s left of his pea soup then attempts to explain. “I definitely have a chip on my shoulder,” he says, “about things not happening the way I think they should.” Or as quickly as he thinks they should. Among the first things that one notices about Glover is a palpable restlessness, a steady background hum of dissatisfaction with the status quo and an urgency to change it. This is due, in part, to his age and millennial mindset and, in part, to his upbringing and identity — each factor in its own way relevant as he claws his way to the top of an industry run by people who, at least in these areas, have little in common with him.

“I know it takes time,” he acknowledges, “and you have to make people feel comfortable. You have to make them understand that you speak their language — that you speak old white man.” A smile has now engulfed the lower half of Glover’s intricately bearded face (a trace of Lando, I learn later), and he continues: “I often feel like those explorers who go into the Amazon and then become friends with the tribe, or like Jane Goodall with monkeys, where it’s like, ‘I’m just going to follow you guys around for a while and then you’ll realize, Well, she hasn’t tried to steal one of our babies or eat any of our food, so she can’t be that bad, you guys. Let’s let her see how we mate and stuff; she’ll be fine.’ “

That’s the perspective Glover adopted when walking the halls of Hollywood back in 2013, pitching the idea that would become Atlanta, and in so doing recast himself as an auteur. “I don’t think any of the executives we pitched to quite expected this idea from him,” recalls his manager, Dianne McGunigle, now a producer on Atlanta. “He was coming off Community, and when you hear it in that stage, it’s existential and dark.” Once FX bit, Glover proceeded on his terms. He hired an entirely black writing staff, many of whom had never made a frame of television before. Eschewing an office on a studio lot, he assembled them in his Hollywood Hills home, which he ran more as a salon than a traditional writers room. Narrative conventions were upended — intimate scenes lasted several minutes, and entire episodes existed without the series’ star. The director, Hiro Murai, part of a creative team that hopscotches with Glover between mediums, was hired without any series experience, and the cast was filled out not by recognizable stars but rather undiscovered talent like Brian Tyree Henry (Paper Boi) and Zazie Beetz (Vanessa). Glover’s goal was less to prove that his way was better than it was to prove that there was another way.

But now he would like to be done having to prove anything to Hollywood, least of all himself. “I want to be like Spike Jonze, in a sense,” he says, “where I’m like, ‘I do what I want when I want to do it, and trust me because I also want to make you money.’ “

•••

Over breakfast in London’s Camden area earlier on that same July day, Glover reveals where his talent for what he calls “world-building” began. He was raised a half-hour drive from Atlanta, in Stone Mountain, Georgia, in a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses. His father worked at the post office, his mother as a day care manager, and they populated the house — which his parents still live in — with Donald; his brother, Stephen, now a writer on Atlanta; his sister; two adopted siblings and a rotating cast of foster kids. It was, at alternating points, chaotic, disturbing and hugely informative.

“I saw kids dying of AIDS in our house,” he says with a bluntness that startles me. “I saw people getting stabbed. I saw drug dealers stealing people’s address books so they could get to my house because people [there] owed them money.” Glover’s voice trails off, and we sit momentarily in silence. In conversation, his passion occasionally overtakes his ability to be articulate, leaving him tangled in his own thoughts, but on this he’s crystal clear: “I wanted to build my own world because then you get to make the world a little safer.”

His parents’ faith made most of the entertainment options that his friends got to enjoy off-limits in his home. Though he and Stephen — neither of whom subscribes to the religion as adults — would sneak in bootleg audio of Simpsons episodes, their primary source of amusement was their own imagination. “We used to record all of these fake TV shows and commercials, or fake movie trailers where Donald would also do all of the sound effects,” says Stephen, who, while sharing a strong family resemblance with his older brother, is quicker to laugh. (When I point this out to Donald, he smiles, and then adds: “I’m definitely more intense.”)

Glover found creative outlets at school, too, always involved in a musical or a play. Stephen remembers how his brother would go missing for days or even weeks at a time, as he got swept up in writing and acting and going out to shows. “That’s just Donald,” he says. “He’s always been doing a million things, and he picks things up really quickly.” By his senior year of high school, the admissions department at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts accepted Glover into its prestigious program. That he lacked the connections and privileged upbringing of many of his classmates never got in his way. “I just never saw the roadblocks,” he says with a shrug.

After graduation, as many of those peers toiled away in their parents’ basements, he parlayed some funny YouTube videos from his sketch-comedy troupe into a coveted gig in the 30 Rock writers room. He was all of 23, and it would take time for him to get comfortable with his good fortune. “Being the only black writer, you’re sort of like, ‘Why am I really here?’ ” he remembers thinking, before his father set him straight. “He’d say to me, ‘They’re not hiring a bunch of these black kids from middle of nowhere Georgia; there’s a reason you’re here.’ ” But after three seasons as part of Tina Fey’s Emmy-winning staff, he quit to pursue his next dream: acting. “Normally you’re in the position of telling people, ‘Maybe pursue it on the side. Don’t give up your income.’ Because you don’t feel like they’ll make it,” Fey has said. “But with Donald, the answer was clearly, ‘Yep. You’re wasting valuable time here. Go get famous.’ “

And in short order, he did. Glover landed the part of Troy, a washed-up jock on Dan Harmon’s NBC cult comedy Community, and, through brilliant, laugh-out-loud improv, made the character his own. “Writers sit in a room for hours — and there are 10 of them and they all went to Harvard — and they argue endlessly about what jokes to end a scene on, but a good portion of the ending lines to scenes in Community would be ones that Donald would just riff on the spot,” says Harmon, with whom Glover stays in touch and brainstorms ideas. “I remember there was a transitional point where we literally started writing in the script, ‘And then Donald says something funny.’ “

Glover lasted four seasons as an actor-for-hire before deciding he was ready to chase the next dream — and Harmon, like Fey, had no interest in standing in Glover’s way. “You can’t tell that guy, ‘Oh, now this is the time you’re going to fail, so you should definitely not keep moving forward,’ ” says Harmon. “Look at his ascent. If I were Donald Glover, I would try eating the moon, because we’re not so sure he can’t until he tries since everything he tries he succeeds at.” Harmon made one request of Glover: Stay on for a few episodes in season five to tie up the character’s storyline, which Glover agreed to do. The show would continue for a sixth season, though Harmon acknowledges it was never the same: “I needed to convince myself that Donald leaving wasn’t the death of the show, but now that it’s all over, I think we can agree that it was.”

At different points, that next dream has been music, screenwriting, stand-up and movie stardom. Some of Glover’s successes have come easy; others, like his part in this summer’s Spider-Man: Homecoming, he seems to have willed to happen. The latter began in 2010 with a tweet from Glover — who has since deleted his entire social media footprint — about wanting to play Spider-Man; it snowballed swiftly into a full-blown fan campaign, which then fueled a debate about the lack of diversity in superhero films and, years later, led to his casting in the July blockbuster. In fact, it was Homecoming director Jon Watts who approached Glover, no longer age-appropriate for the part of Spidey, to play a small but meaningful role, which could prove more significant if the studio decides to greenlight a rumored spinoff about Miles Morales, the nephew of Glover’s character. “If you don’t do [the part],” Watts told Glover before Homecoming, “we aren’t going to [include] it.”

In a sense, Glover’s career has just been one long continuation of his ever-shifting childhood aspirations. The only boyhood dream he seems not to have pursued is becoming a wedding planner, which sounds like an odd fit until Glover breaks it down. “What you’re really doing is giving people an experience,” he explains, “and the people are happy already, so you just want to give them something they can remember.” The irony, of course, is that Glover himself doesn’t believe in marriage. “It doesn’t serve the purpose that I would want it to serve,” he says cryptically. In the interest of space, I’m forced to leave out the philosophical debate that follows, in which Glover, a New Yorker subscriber who is as comfortable pontificating about Basquiat as he is about American Dad, unleashes a series of rhetorical flourishes. (For the record, he does believe in love.)

•••

Of all the opportunities that have come along in the half-decade since Glover left Community, nothing has vaulted him as high on the Hollywood food chain as the part of Lando. “It’s the biggest boat you can be on,” he says with boyish giddiness.

The only person who seems more excited about his casting than Glover himself is his father, a Star Wars fanatic who, more lenient than Donald’s mother, introduced his son to the franchise when he was a boy. In fact, the first toy Donald Sr. purchased for his son was a Lando action figure, which is why one of the biggest thrills of landing the part was being able to call his father with the news. “He just kept saying, ‘Woooow,’ ” says Glover, who has since hosted his dad on the London set.

But by June, the highest-profile project of Glover’s career had hit a snag. Directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller were fired, ostensibly over creative differences with the studio, and replaced by veteran Ron Howard. Though Glover is uncomfortable elaborating, he acknowledges that the change on set has been dramatic. “Ron is such a legend, and he knows exactly what the vision for what he is doing is … [but Phil and Chris] hired us, so you sort of feel like, ‘I know I’m not your first choice …’ And you worry about that,” he says, picking at a croissant. “To be honest, I don’t know exactly what happened. I feel like I was the baby in the divorce, or the youngest child. The oldest child is like, ‘We know what’s happening, but we are keeping you out of it.’ And I’m just like, [Glover’s voice rises several octaves] ‘Was that scene good? How did you feel?’ “

It has been a while since Glover was simply a “color in someone else’s palette,” as he describes his role on Han Solo, and the lack of control has, at times, been challenging. Which is not to say he won’t continue acting. He has already signed on to play Simba in Jon Favreau’s Lion King remake, and he’s not ruling out a future with Spider-Man. But the remainder of Glover’s schedule will likely have him back in the role of idea generator, where he seems most at ease. In January, he signed a sweeping production deal with Atlanta‘s studio, FX Productions, which is where at least a few of those ideas will incubate. The first of them will be an animated Deadpool series, for which he and his brother have enlisted several Atlanta staffers to help write.

But before any new project can be fully realized, Glover will need to deliver a second season of Atlanta, which begins production in September. It will be a different experience for him, in part because he has added the perspective of a father since the last time he was in the show’s writers room. Though he’s fiercely protective of his family’s privacy — he refers to the mother of his 1½-year-old son as his “partner,” but declines to name her or the son, and wants to keep their life together out of print — he acknowledges that he’s now better able to relate to his character, an Ivy League dropout struggling to balance his aspirations as a rap manager and his responsibilities as a parent. “I don’t spend as much time with [my son] as I want to,” he says, “but it’s because I want to give him everything.”

Glover is purposefully vague on plans for the show’s second season, just as he was for its first. “He likes to keep an air of mystery about himself and his process,” says FX’s president of programming, Nick Grad, who acknowledges that the tactic has presented its share of challenges when it comes to marketing the series. All Glover will offer on this day is that the coming season will need to be “better” than the last: “I don’t want to go into season two [with the mindset of] ‘Enough people liked it so just keep those people,’ ” he says, “because then you begin to give your audience a methadone drip of bullshit that keeps them happy as opposed to, ‘We did something controversial and more people were interested.’ “

To get himself in the proper headspace, Glover watches Planet Earth and whatever animal attacks the internet has to offer. “I just think it’s amazing that you can have something that has violence and sex, and you can show it to children and be like, ‘Yeah, that’s just what it is,’ ” he says, with a playful smile. “And that’s what I want to do with this show. Like, ‘This is life; it’s not us trying to be provocative.’ “

•••

As my time with Glover winds down, I try to engage him on the shape of his career and the extent to which he’s driven by the examples of others, like a Ron Howard, who at different points during his career was an actor, producer and director, or perhaps a Louis C.K. or Chris Rock, both of whom he has referenced during our conversation. Or maybe even an Eddie Murphy or Steve Martin, among the few figures I can think of who have succeeded in as many art forms as Glover has.

His answer surprises me. “I don’t want to be the next Ron Howard or the next anybody else,” he says matter-of-factly. “My job is to do what Ron could have never done.”

And as anyone in Glover’s inner circle will tell you, he has plenty of ideas already. There will be more music, says his brother, and possibly a musical movie at some point, too. He has a slew of ideas for virtual reality, and likely a play in him as well. Some will be wackier than others — as a Burning Man-style three-day performance he put on in the desert to promote his latest album proved last fall — and it will be up to Glover to convince those in Hollywood that he, like Jane Goodall with those monkeys, can be trusted. And he will, in part because of that chip on his shoulder that he reminds me about at least a few more times, as though somehow I’ve forgotten.

“I can be a very sweet guy, but I don’t like being told what things are and how things are going to work,” Glover says as we’re getting ready to say goodbye. “Because it’s all just a big puzzle, life’s all just a big puzzle, and it was created by people before me …” He pauses, thinking carefully about what he’s going to say next, and then he continues: “And I’m like, ‘Well, they didn’t know what I know.’ “

This story first appeared in the Aug. 9 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.

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Raju Vegesna of Zoho: High School Grads Get Tuition Free Training through Zoho University – and 1800 Get Jobs with the Company

I’ve been on a bit of a kick to start the year on the theme of “doing good and doing good in business.” The result can make for win-win outcomes and opportunities for small businesses to build important relationships.  And during this week’s Zoho Analyst Day among the presentations focused on the road ahead for the company in terms of product roadmaps and what it mean for customers, there was a lot of discussion on corporate culture and philosophy.  And while there are a number of areas where Zoho blazes their own trail and does things differently than most vendors in the industry, one of the most interesting and impactful is Zoho University. Zoho University provides kids who might not be able to attend a traditional university an opportunity to learn important math and technology skills – tuition free!

To learn more about the program, my CRM Playaz partner Paul Greenberg and I had a chance to sit with Zoho’s Raju Vegesna to learn more about the program, how it fits with the company’s overall culture and philosophy, and how the program has led to Zoho hiring 1,800 Zoho University graduates – equating to roughly a quarter of the company’s 7000+ employee base.  This definitely is a case of doing good and doing good in business leading to a win-win outcome.

Below is an edited transcript of our conversation. To see the full interview, watch the video or listen to it using the embedded SoundCloud player.

Small Business Trends:  This is Analyst Day number four, and it’s already bigger and better than the previous three years, so congratulations.

Raju Vegesna: Thank you. Thank you for joining us.

Small Business Trends:  One of the things I think we can talk about is what you guys are doing with Zoho Academy (University), and some of your social good stuff. So, why don’t we talk a little bit about that.

Raju Vegesna:  Sure. Zoho University is something that started back in 2004. A long time already.  The fundamental idea was different. One, we don’t believe in a few things, which is student debt. People getting into debt, making them debt slaves, and we philosophically are opposed to that. We said, “What can we do about it?” And so, we started … And that’s the point number one.

Second point, where there’s no correlation between your performance in school and your job work. Then we said, “Why are we even asking peoples resumes, and college degrees for hiring? Why don’t we radically not do that, and then hire people?” So, we said, “Okay. Let’s start hiring young kids out of high school.” And then instead of just hiring any kids, obviously, we looked and went to high schools, talked to the management and said, “Point us towards kids who would otherwise not consider higher education, not have the resources, or they would have very significant debt to even consider higher education.” We said, “Why don’t you point us to them?” And they did.

So, we went to six different kids and to their parents, and said, “Hey. This is a program we are thinking where we will train your kids for about a year and a half, and basically for free.” And on top of it, because in some cases they come from some stressed and tough economic situations, we said, “Instead of you paying us we will pay you, so that you don’t have to go through …” The last thing you want to do is them going through additional stress, because they are taking this education-

Small Business Trends:  Okay. Let’s stop right there for a second.  So, you are basically looking for folks, kids that might have had a tough time to get into a college anyway whether it’s a financial hardship, or maybe their grades weren’t up to snuff. So, you’re giving them an opportunity to come in, and learn a valuable skill and trade, in technology-

Raju Vegesna: Technology. Yeah.

Small Business Trends:  And you’re saying not only do you not have to pay tuition, you actually make money while you’re doing this.

Raju Vegesna: Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Greenberg:  God.

?

Small Business Trends:  I just want to make sure I got it. Can I sign up for this?

Paul Greenberg:  I was just thinking the same thing. I want to go back to school, can I get my MBA here?

Raju Vegesna: And fundamentally at the human level you realize that people have talent. Everyone has some talent, or another. Now, it’s the responsibility of the team, of the manager of the young technician, to recognize what that talent is, and put them in the right place to succeed. When a company hires someone, you just hired someone for the job, and if they don’t meet the requirement you usually just replace them with someone else. We don’t look at it that way.

We hire people who became excellent programmers, but then we realized that they have a different talent. They’re also an artist, or a musician. In some cases they are good with, say, public speaking. We said, “Okay. Why don’t you do that too?” And that is part of the culture.

Now, we really cannot take it for granted, but that’s another thing when we take someone into Zoho University program we don’t say, “You’re being brought in for the programming thing.” No. What we teach them is basic math, basic science, communication skills, and programming. But programming is just one portion of it. If you realize that they are good at marketing, well, that’s one of our field that helps us identify what their talents are, because at that age they themselves don’t know what they’re good at. So, it’s also helping them realize what they are good at, and then making sure that we put them in a position to succeed.

That’s a fundamental idea behind the Zoho University. It started with six folks in the first batch. Now, here we are in 2019 we now run two batches. Each batch is now, I think, 200, 250 people. About 1,800 of our 7,000 employee base came through Zoho University.

Small Business Trends:  That’s amazing.

Raju Vegesna: I was about say that about 1,800 employees do not have a college degree.

Small Business Trends:  Or college debt.

Raju Vegesna: Or college debt. That is more important. They’re happy with what they’re doing, and more important thing is you cannot tell the difference between the person with a college degree, and the person who went through this-

Small Business Trends:  That’s really good.

Paul Greenberg:  Well, that your culture is just generally like that. I remember two or three things that really struck home with me, not when I was first meeting you … What? We’re close to 18 years now-

Raju Vegesna: 18 years. Yeah. Yeah. That’s right.

Paul Greenberg:  One was that, as you said, you’re encouraging people internally to utilize their other talents and skills. And I remember a story that Sridar, your CEO, told me about a farm he had where he was examining, I think, it was a dozen ancient grains for seeing which one was sustainable. And that struck me, amazingly, first of all. But then he told me the person running the farm used to be a Zoho programmer, who when he found out her degrees, and so on he said, “Well, I’ll tell you what. I’ll pay you in fact you’ll do better, and I will make you the head of this so you can actually live out the dream you actually set out to have, and at the same time certainly makes the farm work better, and potentially significantly advance humanity.”

The other thing that blew me away, I remember, I think it was you, or Sandy, or someone telling me about you have your own dance troupe. Right?

Raju Vegesna: We have in house dance troupe, we have in house, I would say, pretty much the entire music thing. We have in house artists. We have in house construction team. We have in house designers, architects, and all sorts of crazy things you can imagine. And, of course, like the farm that we grow the food we bring them to our campus, employees go pick it up, and take it home.

Paul Greenberg:  That’s amazing.

Small Business Trends: And, actually, the way this particular office is designed he [Raju] actually had a hand in it.

Raju Vegesna: That’s another thing that Sridar noticed; that I’m interested in design. He came to me and said, “Hey. Why don’t you design this?” And I actually had a design up, and then realized that- It’s part of the learning, and that learning is spread to other divisions as well.

What we noticed was this external person cannot design an office, because we know the culture, we know how the company works, we think the spaces should reflect the culture. It should enhance this. But an interesting piece in absence of art … Like take this particular table I handpicked this particular table. Why? Because this is not a conference table, this is a dining room table. There is no work table anywhere. I made it specific to this. Why? When people come to the office I want them to feel like they’re going home. They want to come to the office. So, every element here is actually purchased from your home element from sofas to dining room tables to everything single element.

So, again, the space should reflect the company.

This article, “Raju Vegesna of Zoho: High School Grads Get Tuition Free Training through Zoho University – and 1800 Get Jobs with the Company” was first published on Small Business Trends

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