Textosterone

Lostalgia

2010-03-16T21:00:00.000-07:00

Someone blogged about it first and someone else started a wiki that lists some obsolete skills. You know the stuff that you used to do but no longer need to because either the technology has changed or the times have changed. That set me thinking. What about all the skills that you haven't had a chance to practice as much as you did before. Not just skills, but also habits that you unfortunately shed because, well, you are now grown up.

I was blessed with a unique knack for losing things when i was in school. Pencils, especially the DMK friendly red and black ones made by Messrs. Nataraj & Co, were my favorite to buy and to misplace. They would go from the stationery store to a black hole under my bench, stopping briefly for a sojourn in my pencil box and a dalliance with the sharpener. Rulers (yes Camel or was it Camlin, ones with a ridge in the middle), would wait at the bottom of the same pencil box till the pencils got sucked by the black holes and would then make a break for it, never to measure line segments again. My only hope is that the critters inhabiting the netherworld below benches got an education through my generous donations. These days the keyboard has replaced the pencil and has proven a lot more difficult to lose beneath my desk. I tried requesting a new one on that premise, but was turned down.

At various stages in my life, one person or another has exploited the long limbs that came free with me at birth. To the disdain of several high rise shelves, I was always around to rescue bottles and jars from their lofty clasp. The only problem with that was the cumbersome nature of said limbs. They would get in my way often and I fell victim to their long reach. Literally. After tripping on objects that were measurably meters away, I would often come back home with an injury and a slightly lower count of antigens A and Rh+. The protective cushion of my cubicle walls and a zealous avoidance of anything but spectating of sports has meant that my stockpile of differently shaped bandages circa 2003 is intact as are all my antigens (touch wood).

I thought I'd grown enough over the past year to kick this writing habit but then I joined twitter this past month. I was sucked right back in - 140 characters or less at a time.

Also where amazing happens

2009-05-27T17:19:00.000-07:00

The map they hand you when entering giant log gates of the West entrance does have a scale legend on one corner, but it gives no indication of the amazing journey you are about to embark on. Like frantic ants in a candy store, we stopped at every possible visual cue that seemed to indicate a treat. First it was a few elks lazing on a riverside. After shooting them to the extension of our zoom lenses, we were back on the road, only to slow down to a crawl behind a few cars. Before we could wonder why everyone had stopped, a trio of bison strolled (rumbled?) across the road, one right in front of our car. For someone who has never seen bison before, they can best be described as cows that, when not grazing, hit the gym. These bulked up jockeys of the bovine world were quite content to graze and walk slowly among cars, while occasionally scaring us off with a snort. Driving on, tracts of mysterious, smoke emitting grounds lured us in for a quick walk. 45 minutes later we realized this was not going to be quick at all and all we were looking at was boiling water - a breathtaking sapphire pool of boiling water through which,with a little imagination, one could peer into the netherworld. Between the smoking earth, the resting elks and bison outside our car window, Yellowstone, with its splendors, had begun to seep in to our memories within the first few hours. It will take me a bit more time to dig up more metaphors and adjectives to write about the subsequent hours of that trip. Do hang on.

Jai Ho

2009-02-22T19:59:00.000-08:00

So I spent parts of the weekend plagiarizing Shepard Fairey's Obama poster and making it fit the occasion better. No words this week. Only an image and great pride at sharing a hometown with A R Rahman.

Note: The image is from a google image search. I have no idea who took it but if you did, let me know so I can credit you properly. The original,iconic poster is by Shepard Fairey. The steps I got from this post (Thanks, Rick, whoever you may be) : GimpTalk. It's easy if you have Gimp and Inkscape (both are free!!).

Ports Illustrated

2009-02-10T17:49:00.000-08:00

My wife and I fly quite a bit. So airports play a somewhat important role in our lives. Here's a disconnected paean/rant about two of them. (Current, satisfied?)

MAA was where I first set foot on a flight - the one that would take me out of India for a while. Obviously it trumps any airport. If you haven't heard or are not human, returning home is the best feeling ever. You are in for a surprise as you get out of the plane at MAA though. Water molecules that were relaxing in their subdermal, cellular residences, rush out to greet the parched atmosphere with a frenzy. The water carriers (us) are pleasantly surprised/highly annoyed when we find we have taken a shower without asking for one. Quickly finding yourself standing next to similarly sweaty/glowing co-passengers, cooped in a bus taking its time around the tarmac, doesn't help your extra sensitive olfactory nerves. Inside the airport, you find that MAA has learnt from it's western counterparts and is now charging Rs.35 for a tiny cup of coffee and Rs.40 for 12 pieces of chiclets. You will need to sell aircraft that you do not own to buy a samosa and some ketchup. The paper plates are free.

You need to be wary of any airport that has terminals 1,2,3 and 5 but not 4. I liken ORD to the mofussil bus stands in Chennai. The only thing missing are the hawkers and handkerchiefs on seats. Buses..er..flights operate on ORD Standard Time, a timezone that always extends beyond your flights ETA. Instead of conductors yelling 'Mayaram, Mayaram' or some other destination and banging on the sides of buses, there are irate gate attendants. Go on a Friday evening and you can find them yelling for people to give up their seats in exchange for a later flight or a hotel room and a round trip ticket. I wonder if someone can stay at the airport indefinitely by just paying for one ticket and then giving it up repeatedly for more tickets. Anyway terminal 3 really has the best choice for food. When buying a sub causes a credit check to be triggered, wouldn't you rather have a choice? Can someone really explain what is there in the food at airports that makes them so exorbitant? Gold dust??

Finger chips and pics

2009-01-25T12:35:00.000-08:00

I am not one to speculate on Intelligent Design. I just have a hard time believing an intelligent designer who failed to recognize how the human mind may ~~evolve~~ manifest. Let us randomly, and without ulterior blogging motives, take an aspect of life - photography. If the omniscient intelligence had foreseen how much we will want to capture day to day life visually, shouldn't it have factored in a USB port or two into our fingers. For a force that gave us a nearly infinite memory, the USB port could have been slipped on in the time it took to design that completely useless appendix. Instead of a vermiform vestigial structure, that may or may not cause extreme pain, we would have a way to just plug ourselves to a 46" HDTV and show off some pics from that recent trip to Disneyland. Of course, you will need built-in censoring software. But that should take no more time than it takes a pair of cherubim to change a light bulb.

As it is, I don't have a USB port or two. My memories are captured on a finitely limited memory card and stored on apparently unlimited storage that I purchase for $25 a year. I occasionally (read always) harass family and friends into looking at my experiments with light and have written about it before. There is still a long way to go but, over the past year or so, I have had some help improving. The better of my halves is a really good photographer and we've had quite a bit of fun shooting together. It only makes sense that when I run out of words for a post, I supplant it with what our viewfinders found. Coincidentally, I just exhausted my vocabulary. She is on the left, my half on the right.

Suddenly

2009-01-18T07:37:00.000-08:00

Suddenly, you realize that this song is mind blowing. You wanted to use a complex simile to compare the steady vocals and slightly audible violin strains to something in nature, but you can't. The song has infected areas in your brain responsible for similes and hearing is the sole sense you are aware of. The song rises in a crescendo, letting a wonderful orchestration take center stage before the vocals return and then it slowly recedes to a ripple. Dil gira kahin par daf'atan.

The lyrics are supposed to be good. I'll pay attention to them after I've had my fill of the music. The Delhi-6 soundtrack sounds like Rahman grew his long hair back and just let loose on the recording floor. If this is how the rest of '09 will roll out musically, it is going to be a happy new year for his fans.

p.s Daf'atan, I found, is Urdu for at once, instantaneously, suddenly.

Suspicion (1941)

2009-01-11T08:55:00.000-08:00

Suspicion is a rather alarming title for a rather light flick from the master of suspense. I'm guessing it was conjured by RKO Pictures' marketeers to capitalize on Hitchcock's record of thrillers. A fast talking Cary Grant, mesmerizes Joan Fontaine and despite protests from her father, she goes on to marry Cary. Cary plays Johnnie Aysgarth as a flippant trickster who repeatedly causes Tina McLaidlaw (Joan Fontaine) to doubt his intentions. Then he reels her back in with an act that indicates that he has changed. Tina vacillates between trust and distrust till she finally dispels her suspicion.

The book from which the screenplay was adapted, was apparently much darker and ends with the Johnnie character killing Tina. The DVD also had an alternate ending fashioned by Hitchcock that showed this. The movie would have been much better had it ended that way. This is yet another case of the studio meddling with the director's true intentions. Despite being unaware of this while watching the movie, I never thought Cary Grant looked menacing enough. He plays Johnnie with much levity and lacks the smarminess that can convince us of his darker intentions. Coming out only a year after Rebecca, Joan Fontaine is asked to play a mature woman compared to the subservient nameless girl and does well. IMDB says that this was hers was the only Oscar winning performance that Hitchcock directed.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

2009-01-07T19:33:00.000-08:00

If Changeling is Angelina's vehicle to the awards, Benjamin Button's frail and withered form is the horse on which Brad is betting. Eric Roth takes F.Scott Fitzgerald's short story and attempts to make it into a fable. In the process he also extends it to a length that is just beyond the reach of one's patience. Button is born with an old man's body, a part that Pitt plays wonderfully. He then proceeds to grow younger, really slowly. Among all the weird characters that accept Button's affliction without flinching, his dad who finds him a freak is the only normal one. If you experience a heavy Forrest Gump undercurrent, do not fret. Eric Roth also adapted the screenplay for that movie and has adopted a similar narrative style with Button even sounding like one of Gump's Southern cousins. But for someone born as a grandpa, his fairy-tale lacked the magic. Like the screenplay, it relies on gimmicks and has no real story. The only thing I was curious about was when it would all end.

Slumdog Millionaire

2008-12-21T08:47:00.000-08:00

We have always been suckers for underdogs. Maybe we see something of ourselves in every David who takes on the seemingly invincible Goliath. Maybe a part of us aches to be the common man who rebels against the establishment. 'Slumdog Millionaire' taps into this springwell of emotion while lulling the nearby center of logic into a nap. The David of this story is a young Jamal who finds himself at the center of an implausible run of events that has left him close to winning millions in a gameshow. These events are running on a track that Jamal hopes will take him to his final destination, his love, Latika.

The screenplay is the prime mover of this movie. It whizzes you through like a fast train to Borivali. It does not stop to give you the Lonely Planet spiel about Mumbai. It cannot for the only objective of this movie is to tell the story of Jamal, not to add to your general knowledge. This it does through a series of flashbacks. We are taken along for the ride to watch the kid grow into a man and then to cheer him on when he is at the threshold to riches. The camera captures much of this ride wonderfully exposing a side of Mumbai that is not seen very often. Given that the narrative doesn't bother to provide the explanation, the camera pulls off the double duty expertly, showing us what we need to know. Back to the screenplay, there are no incidents to show how observant Jamal is or how fantastically photographic his memory is. Nothing at all that really explains how he knows obscure trivia. You just understand that he needs to be on his feet just to survive in a world which treats his ilk as something disposable. The out of place luxury in his otherwise slumdog life is his love. This he pursues despite the dire circumstances he finds himself in.

All 3 actors who portray Jamal fit the role like a T. But Dev Patel has the most scope and doesnt waste an inch of screenspace offered to him. From dogged determination when he is looking for his love to silent pain when she turns him out of her house, his earnest face conveys them all with ease. The camerawork again adds to this via some nicely composed close ups and great lighting. Irrfan Khan walks on as the police inspector who in listening and questioning Jamal, substitutes for the audience. From language to body language, he essays the role perfectly. The other characters are aptly cast but the Jamals are brilliant.

Though there are images moving on the screen for the first few minutes, the chant of O..Saya is what really kicks this movie off. Rahman's score sets the tone for several other scenes and showcases the creativity of the man in a format we are not quite used to. Even the bollywood musical style Jai Ho at the closing titles, while seemingly incongruent with the rest of the movie, is a fitting finale that the crowds need after watching Jamal triumph. The soundtrack has already won some awards but he is now up for a Golden Globe and despite being a household name in India, is a relative unknown to the West among the other names in the race. I am rooting for him to bring this one home. Of course he doesnt need this validation, but this is one underdog for whom we have always been suckers. Jai Ho !

Fists full of fun

2008-12-06T19:08:00.000-08:00

A little known corollary of one of Newton's laws states that the amount of fun a handheld object generates will quadruple every 2 years. By that count kids today are having about 18 million times the fun that I had growing up. Fun, during those childhood years, depended on the availability of certain things - a messy toy, an active imagination or at minimum, an irritable elder sibling. As a result on boring vacation afternoons, you could either do your holiday homework (the first oxymoron I inadvertently learnt) or worse, watch UGC programming on DD.

That was until the introduction of the handheld,technological revolution that was the ball maze. I never knew what it was called back then and I cant remember what I would call it when telling my mom that I lost it. Maybe that is why I never got in trouble for losing it - how can you lose something that never existed? But I digress. You know what I mean - round, plastic casing, transparent plastic window looking into a maze trapping two or more steel balls. Hours of my childhood were spent trying to defeat gravity and jittery hands in guiding those lonely balls to join the party at the center of the maze. If I got too irritated, I could just shake the thing hard and transfer my irritation to the elders. Alternatively I could just break the plastic on top and add those two balls to my growing collection of small, shiny metal balls. Later - go back to the exhibition, point to that round thing with my hand, rinse and repeat. I never counted how many of those balls I collected. Not enough would be my best guess.

The next stage of pocket playmates was with the somewhat strangely named water video game. At least my friends called it that and, caving to peer pressure, so did I. Since there was no video involved, the etymology remains suspect. If the ball maze taught one that intense concentration without success led to irritation, the water video game imparted the great lesson of patience. The rather simple interface consisted of a rectangular, water filled plastic case and one large, rubber button, only a little unlike the interface of a fruity phone. Depressing the button caused some behind the scenes magic and the water reacted by churning and causing tiny plastic rings to float up. Did I mention transparent plastic window looking into the water? There was one so you could watch in amazement as the rings would go up and then float down in extreme slow motion and in the process, attempt to drop over the swords of two vertically affixed swordfish. The objective was to somehow make sure you get the most number of rings on the stick..er.. sword. My strategy was to start off by applying violent pressure to the button and then praying fervently. Did I say that this was a variety of handheld fun? I apologize. This was clearly in the category of ancient Chinese water torture. The first part of my strategy of course soon led to the tearing of the button and the water would be reclaimed by the parched Chennai atmosphere with the same speed that a tanker full of water is drained into colored plastic pots. Turns out water was also the source of fun for this game and into the trash it went. To make life more pleasant, I had to revert to trapping strange worms and lots of leaves in horlick's bottles in the hope that they'd grow into butterflies or at least moths. Sadly, I wasn't allowed to carry that around in my pocket.

We can now play first person shooters and racing simulators in mind bending color on a device that is smaller than my water video game and the interactivity is at such a level that you can grow dogs virtually, let alone caterpillars. I am not jealous. In fact if there is one thing I've learnt, it is that nostalgia is infinitely marketable. My plan for world domination is to release the two games I described above as games for handheld devices and then watch them fly off the virtual shelves of app stores. However I am hoping there will be some magic happening between now and the release date so that these games automatically program themselves. I shall use the same strategy that I used while playing those games - concentrate intensely, wait and pray, fervently.

p.s The ball maze is already out - http://www.simiotica.com/index_amaze.html but I have high hopes for the water video game. Somewhere some kid is waiting to be taught patience.

Rebecca

2008-12-04T21:25:00.000-08:00

Rebecca has been haunting me to get this posted for the last few weeks. The movie is a close to faithful adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier's book of the same name and Hitchcock, on the extras DVD, does not hide his displeasure, irked with the novel's lack of logic. A plain,young girl falls in love and marries a young widower. She goes to his mansion where she finds his first wife inhabiting, in spirit, the mansion and its residents. The glamorous Rebecca is the first wife and her death is the mystery that must be solved. It is rather striking that the young girl does not have a name while the iconic R of Rebecca makes its presence felt in every scene despite the fact that not even a photo of her is shown in the movie.The Criterion collection extras DVD had so many extras that I didnt have time to watch all of them before I had to return it. I caught the best of it though - screen tests and Hitchcock's remarks about more than 2 dozen leading ladies who auditioned for the part that Joan Fontaine finally got.

~~Daphne Du Maurier's other, more famous work is Gone With the Wind~~. Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind was also produced by David O.Selznick. Apparently he was working on Gone With the Wind when he decided to bring Hitchcock to work on other commitments he had undertaken. Good thing he did. He set Hitchcock free in Hollywood and this "other commitment" won an Oscar for best picture in 1941.

of really long songs

2008-12-02T17:40:00.000-08:00

'Manmohini morey' from Yuvvraj is the longest Rahman song that I know of. The last time I heard it, it ran a continuous 35 minutes or so. Impressive for a song that Rahman originally tuned to run about 3 minutes. The song is a techno marvel sans the meaningless repetitive lyrics that always seem to accompany such beats. What lyrics there are, are sung in a classical style that one expects will pair with those beats like Wall Street and common sense. But the combination is an aural revelation which I would liken to to a beautiful fractal equation, if not for my utter mathematical ineptitude. This song might beat Yakkai Thiri for the longest Rahman song in my library. However there is no way it will get close to the sheer number of plays which stands closer to 10s of thousands.

In case it interests you, I also mused about the really short pieces earlier in this piece

Gambling on memory

2008-09-22T17:16:00.000-07:00

The flame of the match did a brief, lively dance before it was snuffed out by the strong beach breeze. I lit a second one. Cupped with both hands, it lived the few moments it took to light the cigarette.

I took a long drag and looked over at my friend.

"Do you remember," the words were exhaled with the smoke,"the time we used to play cricket on this road? We used to spend entire afternoons here playing game after game."

Another long drag and more words came out more smoke,"That monument thing used to be the boundary. They always made me field there."

"Because of your exceptional fielding skills, I am sure," the friend offered slyly, and added,"And it's a memorial not a monument."

I glared at him and continued."I know every brick of that memorial", emphasizing the last word more to indicate annoyance. "I've climbed up and down those stairs so many times while waiting for someone with superhuman powers to come to the crease and swat the ball there."

"So you must know about the guy they built it for. I bet you a 100 that you can't name him." Words spoken by his confidence in my observation powers. The lack of those powers that is. But he was in for a surprise.

"That's the easiest 100 I've ever earned. His name was Schmidt. K A J Schmidt. Cough up the 100."

As he reluctantly pulled his wallet out, he asked,"So you really know all about that memorial?"

"Yes," I answered absent mindedly. My eyes were on that crisp 100 rupee note making its way out of his wallet.

"So for another 500, can you tell me when Mr.Schmidt carried out his heroics?"

I hesitated. I had never been good with dates. History class had always been a blur. The Industrial revolution while helping nations progress had also left an indelible low mark on my 10th standard marksheet. Maybe I should turn this offer down. Then I remembered the plaque on the bottom corner and blurted out, "1984. It was in 1984 that he drowned rescuing others from the sea."

The 100 rupee note started receding into the wallet like a turtle head into its shell. He smirked.

"Hah. He saved those souls in 1930. The monument was renovated in '84. Now how about that 500."

I remembered the other plaque on the inside clear as day now. I glanced back up at the vandalized memorial.

"I hate nostalgia."

This snap is from a while back. Some kind souls have since given the memorial a makeover.

keepin' it real

2008-08-27T16:03:00.000-07:00

i switched on the tv last night expecting to see Hillary recite paeans to the democratic donkey and barack. for a moment i was startled to see jerry springer introducing a group called the dc cowboys. as 7 men started to square dance, i thought to myself, god what has the DNC turned into. my shock subsided as i realised it was the tuesday night episode of 'america's got talent'. this is what comes out of having a garishly decorated stage with multiple large LCDs at a political convention.

reality shows are the fake swiss army knives of television. they fill in the empty void of the idiot box during summer, help americans learn how voting works (you start by flipping a cell phone open) and are incredibly dull . from choosing the chef most capable of cursing at his/her employees while garnishing foie gras to dogs that show character in the face of a trumpeting elephant, everything goes on today's reality shows. here are some ideas that show producers haven't thought of yet. they will get to these eventually (they have buildings full of rooms full of monkeys on typewriters). i am just speeding it up a bit

big fish little phelps
different shark species are trained by olympic coaches to perform synchronized swimming routines. the final winner gets to swim with michael phelps and compete for 4 of the 8 olympic golds. no fish will be hurt during the filming of this show. we cant give the same guarantee about phelps though. this will be judged each week by guo jingjing, manju bhargavi and eight cephalopod judges from oceans other than the ones that the sharks came from to avoid partiality.

this is real! really!
reality show producers compete with each other to produce the ultimate reality show. each week they will get a set of people on whom they will film a reality show and find out more inventive ways for at&t/verizon to suck people dry ..er.. maximize revenues. season 1 has clowns competing with iphone app programmers who are fighting with folks who think they can beat jim kramer..literally. notice how i cleverly left out a set of reality show producers thus avoiding the infinite loop it would have caused. this one is judged by the geico gecko and the aflac duck. who better to judge a reality show than a talking lizard and a duck that does not know how to quack.

3 AM
we are already watching this one. it is aired once every 4 years and lasts about 2 years. it starts with the donkey team and elephant team steadily eliminating one candidate after another till only the richest is left on either side. however this is the least real of all the contests. most of it is scripted to avoid a slight chance that one of the candidates utters the truth. variable such as a vulnerable diebold voting machine and random chads on will be available to add suspense to the proceedings. the show producers are seriously considering introducing cell phone voting as they found that american idol gets more votes than the population of the united states. the winner gets an alarm clock that will wake them up at 3 AM and a lifetime supply of rechargeable batteries. you can be the judge of this one.

an easy route to heaven

2008-07-25T17:30:00.000-07:00

just so i make things clear, this post has nothing to do with religion. rather it has a lot to do with that philosophical place in everyone's mind that is referred to as heaven. it means different things to different people and i found mine relatively easily. all that was required was an awesome visit to india and then returning with suitcases loaded with sweets. i am getting ahead of myself

here then is the proper route to heaven. the ingredients you need are as follows ( somewhere between the title and now, the route became a recipe but the destination er.. objective remains the same)

1 superduper trip to india (getting married while there is optional..if you ask me i would like to get married on every trip)
1 suitcase full of adhirasam ( preferably the ones that were made as part of the wedding, or grand sweets at adyar makes equally good ones...murukku, mixture optional)
1 additional suitcase with backup adhirasam (some moron at the airline may reroute your adhirasam suitcase to San Diego, though the barcode clearly scanned for ORD)
1 microwaveable plate
1 microwave
1 fridge - 2 teaspoons ( i kid, i kid. everyone knows u need at least 3)

first frantically open the suitcase that has been delayed by about 48 hours to make sure your adhirasam packets are safe and then carefully, lest they crumble, transfer those ghee-fogged packets straight to the freezer. then, (this is very crucial) sleep well and lose the jet lag. now you are ready.

transfer one adhirasam carefully to microwaveable plate.if u dont have one, feel free to use the microwave's rotating plate. but please clean it first. more crucial steps follow so pay attention. once in microwave, set the timer to 30 seconds or lesser BUT dont let it stay there for the entire 30 seconds. if you did that you just created a veritable hockey puck/discus . rather after every five seconds, remove the plate and gently ( i didnt know how else to make this sound decent) assess the ahdirasam for softness. when sufficiently soft, remove plate from microwave. wait a few minutes, then when you cant take it anymore, break a piece of it and place it on your tongue. there. you just reached heaven.

monumental visage

2008-06-21T06:21:00.000-07:00

kamal could've added just one more element and boosted dasavatharam to another level. instead of the introductory ilakkiya tamil sorpozhivu he engages in at that horrendous rendering of a stadium, he could've requested aby baby to do a voiceover. i'm guessing amitabh's tamil would fit between junoon tamil and khalifulla's ridiculous diction. so more unintentional fun for the tamil folks and instant love from our hindi speaking brethren. even better, kamal should've thought of a 11th role as amitabh but then the title wouldn't have fit.

apparently surveys done a few years back revealed that aby baby had the highest recall among desis. thus his face or voice is on nearly everything you use on a daily basis. he is on for some hair oil, pens, chocolate, suits, tvs, banks and so on. soon a stage will come when a kid watches sholay and will remark to his appa that jai looks strangely familiar to the thatha who was hawking bubble gum in the ad break that just ended. i think the indian govt should declare him a protected monument and levy fees from anyone wishing to use him (100 times more for foreign companies). in return, the ASI would give him therapy to keep his voice in shape, shave and shower him about once in 10 years and if needed conduct reconstructive plastic surgery. the simplest alternative is to invent cloning. that makes 2 folks i am recommending for cloning - 1 specializes in jooming, the other in selling.

kamal goes decimal

2008-06-19T00:46:00.000-07:00

what does one do when in india for an extremely short amount of time, that too for a wedding - spend 3 hours at a multiplex watching sivaji's competition turn up a year late at the finish line and still manage to finish second. kamal spent 2 years making dasavathaaram, about 1.5 of which i am sure were spent putting his masks and wigs on and then removing them.

kamal plays god/fate of his own story as he unleashes several threads (10 to be exact) and then weaves them back into a small yet somewhat complete ladies handkerchief (what else can you weave with 10 threads). the magic of kamal is such that he manages to completely disappear in some of those threads letting the character take over the screen. balram naidu for one was outstanding. khalifulla on the other hand looked (and sounded) like one of the masked sivajis from uthama puthiran. with most of the characters donning prosthetics, kamal's vivid expressions were missed quite a bit. body language and voice only go a certain distance.

the story is indeed novel for a tamil flick and kamal does a fine job walking the fence between the mass and the elite. keywords (chaos theory anyone) are sprinkled to pique the interest of the elite while the mass is entertained with some good fight sequences and for a while by an ex-cia agent / part time stripper/full time killer who in addition to fluent tamil also knows the way to heaven. seeing her talk tamil was like watching jackie chan speak tamil in the afternoon star vijay movies (for those who havent seen police story in tamil, it is very similar to shriya speaking tamil in sivaji).both sections of the crowd are however bound to hate asin who screamed like a banshee whenever she opened her mouth. the music was a huge letdown. kamal could've at least courted illayaraja for some tunes.

all in all, a jolly ride. one of the two main aims i had when coming to chennai is now fulfilled :)

post flight postcard post

2008-06-14T22:27:00.000-07:00

international flights have their share of contradictions. 6 foot 2 economy class passengers (me) are expected to squeeze into seat spaces measured in cubic inches, yet the petite air hostesses struggle to reach up and close overhead bins on those humongous 777s. i requested and got the emergency row seating on each leg. it's next to the toilet and usually a lot of screaming kids but it cant be beat for the comfort. put in an excellent on-demand entertainment system and i am all set. 3.75 movies were taken off my to-see list.

back in madras for my wedding, i am enjoying this trip more than any in the past. the weather is awesome, bhelpuri from shree mithai and mango duet from aavin complement it very well. my body composition is slowly changing from tofu and black coffee to paneer and filter coffee.

i'm finished

2008-06-02T16:04:00.000-07:00

after nearly 3 years during which my senthamizh vocabulary grew by a smidgen, i am done with 'ponniyin selvan' [links to a review of the english version]. i rushed through the first 3 parts like an express train heading towards central but like the very same train hitting the maze of tracks at basin bridge, i slowed to a crawl for the last 2 parts. a small part of reading this was for gimmick ("hey look i am reading a tamil book"). but i started reading it because it is a historical retelling set in my own tamilnadu and is told in a language i love. a language that i am still not fluent enough to write in..hence this post in the step-mom tongue.

my next tamil book is a collection of crime stories by sujata. with any luck, you can expect a post in the summer of 2010

level-o-levelu

2008-05-21T17:23:00.000-07:00

so what have i been up to while not writing this blog..reading this one mostly:

Doing Jalsa and Showing Jilpa

go read it and then bookmark it..you will get a full serving of laughter and more. enough said

also when not writing this blog, i turned my attention to what i call my deficient photography skill and attempted to improve on it some more over the past couple of months. the rather flat improvement curve has been sufficiently captured by a somewhat random posting of photos on my flickr account (yup the one i paid for and then regretted on this very blog). once again, click below.

oh and the 1st level and the 2nd levelu in the title refer to the jilpaman's blog..in case you mistook my photos to be level

(insert clever post title here)

2008-03-18T21:03:00.000-07:00

many movies over many weekends

bheema - awesome movie..NOT.they could've utilized the budget to produce a 100 PSAs to carry the message that one has to die by the sword (or unmarked pistol) if one lives by it.instead the insane torture that the movie inflicts is enough to push the most peaceful human being into violence.and i am not even going into the display of man-love that vikram and prakash raj put on. it was probably conceived by the director as a different kind of relationship but it came across quite awkwardly. you still want the story? vikram admires prakash raj, a honest rowdy..then everyone dies. i consider this the most wasteful 2.5 to 3 hours of my life..not counting the 2.5 i'd already spent on kaalai - a flick i shall not review.

happy days - was the wasabi to wash out any remaining thought of bheema. and it worked rather well. the movie is a rather simple story about college days..engg college to be more specific. friendship, love and a hot lecturer (female) make up the main themes as is the norm with college flicks. the lack of old comedians playing college students was surprisingly refreshing..i half expected ali or brahmanandam or charlie to pop up.i sincerely hope it is not remade into tamil with jayam ravi, charlie,murali and dhamu

billa - the new version is a 2.5 hour ad for suiting, shirting and gel shoe implants. the characters walk the walk for roughly 1.5 hours of the movie with a cool techno inspired tune from YSR. then they all stop on cue and pout/glare at the camera. one cant question the story since it's a remake but several questions remained unanswered - how many sun glasses were broken during shooting? how many were not returned by the actors?how does nayantara run in 8 inch heels?why does she climb up and walk on a car clad in stretchy latex while walking on the street and standing still were viable options?why does billa swim with a cell phone in one hand?did he take the battery out and dry the cell phone before he receives the call from a fellow drug smuggler? who gave prabhu those chocolate bars? does he really need them? can we stop walking, ranjith just pulled a muscle back there and is searching for iodex? i'm just too tired to stop and explain the story..it's not worth it. i'm walking away from this movie.

the departed partly rescued me during the week only for me to laugh myself to tears over jodha akbar.those two will come up later..like i said i am too tired.

oh one more thing. if you were filling overwhelmed by the number of videos lined up on youtube, add to your overwhelmence by heading over to hulu.com. a few old movies in full length with minimal ads and lots of SNL sketches including one of my old favs:

Ran (1985)

2008-02-13T18:54:00.000-08:00

armies have lined up on hills for a long time to gain a strategic advantage. while having the high ground helped tactically, spreading one's forces across a line also gave an impression of a much larger army. none of the great commanders however saw their own armies in cinemascope. kurosawa makes this sight and several other war scenes look so glorious in 'Ran' that soldiers would've stood by and applauded if not for the advancing foes. the movie is a visually delightful adaptation of King Lear.

a warlord father turns over the reigns of his fiefdom to his 3 sons only to find out that he is no longer wanted by 2 of them and the one that he kicked out before is the one who really loves him. the characters of the warlord and his ruthless daughter-in-law who manipulates his sons are the ones that stand out. the outstanding acting of these 2 make you want to empathize with them. kurosawa also employs a jester like character who through an occasional song and dance routine helps the viewer spell out what they may be thinking. weirdly, this kind of reinforcing was somewhat reassuring to me and made me appreciate the movie some more. and i havent even started on the visual yet. the scenes depicting the siege of a castle give the CGI battles of LOTR a run for their money. the man had an uncanny ability to come up with a perfect visual accompaniment to really good storylines. the wikipedia article[wikipedia.org] for this films even has a storyboard that shows the planning that went into the castle siege scenes.

the war scenes instantly reminded me of sundari kannal from thalapathi[youtube.com]. as many on the net point out, mani was sufficiently inspired by kurosawa(and i think this particular movie) to picturise rajni as a samurai warrior on horseback but i have to wonder which of his muses made him cast shobana as a desi village belle. this chronological and geographical mismatch is however rescued by illayaraja's brilliance - soulful love ballad one moment war drums the next.

p.s 'ran' in japanese apparently means chaos..'ranam' in tamil means something similar..the languages probably share a root somewhere..

mughals in melody & triplicane

2008-01-31T22:03:00.000-08:00

jodhaa akbar's music is out and it's good. google's servers will be busy for a while trying to keep up with word geeks looking up urdu words and their meanings. this post was going to be about how movies based on mughals have a couple of things in common - melodious music and a tragic storyline. turns out that out of the 3 films that i thought were mughal melodramas, only one was (mughal-e-azam). the other 2 i stereotyped purely based on their urdu names (pakeezah and umrao jaan). besides i havent seen any of them and i would never pretend to know more than i do (heh heh). so i guess all i am saying is that i thought i had a post but never mind. i'll go back to listening to jodhaa akbar.this one is clearly mughal and has some melodious numbers but is it also going to be tragic?

i am still listening to the sounds rather than the words but these piqued my interest enough to be looked up.. from 'in lamhon ke daaman' pakeezah means pure, kalma means word and was likened to om in one website or the 'word' as christians know it. at least a couple of the words in 'khwaja mere khwaja' can be referenced back to other rahman numbers - khalbali from rdb and rehanuma (apparently meaning guide) from udhaya - listen to 'thiruvallikeni rani'. (a nice song despite sukhwinder's attempt to once again mangle thiruvallikeni's fair name..apparently it was once thiru-alli-keni..due to a pond(keni) filled with lillies (alli) and became thiruvallikeni before the british with a slightly better tamil pronunciation than sukhwinder changed it to triplicane. wonder how rahman's hindi sounds to seasoned northy ears..doesnt sound all that bad to me.)

groovy, baby!

2007-12-26T17:07:00.000-08:00

for the next few days i will not be able to shake your hand. neither will i be able to write properly and this post is being dictated to apple's dictation software. the reason for all this is screwdriverosis, the main and probably only symptom of victims of an IKEA trip. millions of carpenters all over the world are cursing ingvar kamprad for the DIY* madness that he has unleashed on the rest of the world while millions of hapless individuals happily succumb to this not so fatal disease in their hunt for bargains

we had a sofa set that had a black wooden frame and some sort of plastic intertwined over the frame forming holes of a multilateral shape. (btw we just stepped back about 20 years if those 2 'had's didnt give it away). we also had a dining table with a sun mica top made to look like wood. needless to say my family had no part in assembling either. when the plastic intertwinings gave way and started sagging after i had jumped on it a few hundred times, an intertwiner would be called up. he would take a seat in our hall and when plied with enough tea (and cash) restrung them to tensile strengths capable of bearing a jumping 8 year old. we later moved on, to a bigger flat and to a better sofa (ie one with no plastic). along the way we acquired a shoe rack that was so nicely crafted in expensive wood that it became a partial dresser and a solid but shoerack-like shoe rack that was wide enough for 4.67 shoes. both created under the influence of my mom's tea by a carpenter and his seemingly more talented apprentice. expert worksmen that they were, they even created a bookshelf with the remaining wood and added it to my room where it housed some computer books that i never read and a super-power memory book.

but none of these wooden marvels had ever had my fingers laid on them except after they were varnished and lacquered and in most cases also dried.

when i finally finished last night, the screw count was close to 2 scores. on the flip side my house is now home to pieces of furniture with exotic european names. in one corner vika curry and vika amon coupled to become the desk that holds my powerbook-monitor-keyboard-mouse-wires entity while flarke posed with grace befitting any tv stand, despite having to bear a non-lcd, non-hd, non-cabled TV. i've done what every budget-minded person does in these united states - put together a veritable menagerie of ikea furniture and have done so without making a single cup of tea. if i were more intelligent, i would start a deIKEAting institute where for a price, recent ikea victims can choose any piece of furniture and unscrew and dismantle to their heart's content. however no such thing exists. so, for a while, don't mind it if i refuse to shake hands next time we meet. it's nothing personal.

*DIY is short for Do It Yourself. in case you've always had others do your things for you or are living under a rock
^ IKEA stands for Ingvar Kamprad(the founder) Elmataryd(farm where he grew up) Agunnaryd (his home village)..or so says wikipedia..no wonder he shortened it, would've cost a lot of money for a super bowl commercial otherwise.
^ Here is an interesting quote from a woman who names the furniture:
"For bathrooms, it's Norwegian lakes. Kitchens are boys, and bedrooms are girls. For beds, it's Swedish cities. There's a lady who sits there and comes up with new names, making sure there isn't a name that means something really ugly in another language. But it doesn't always work. We gave a bed a name that means 'good lay' in German." if you have the time read the complete guardian article

what's up, doc?

2007-12-10T18:03:00.000-08:00

after 16 years i realized that mahesh bhatt was an inspired man. dil hai ki manta nahin was not a movie i particularly enjoyed watching but watch i did, for whatever aamir khan touched those days was gold..actually it pretty much is today as well. i watched movies of his that no one else probably did - awwal number, love love love, daulat ki jung to name a few. and so it was that dil hai ki manta nahin was watched. i dont remember much of the movie..there is a watermelon song as my sister put it. and a kind of funny (then) hitchhiking scene where aamir tries and fails to stop a car while pooja succeeds with a display of her (shapely?) leg.

fast forward to a couple of nights back and i'm watching the exact scene unfold in black and white as claudette colbert stops a car while clark gable and his defeated thumb watch in amazement. this was in 'it happened one night'. the scene appears halfway..so,yes, it did not strike me till then that 'dil hai..; was a hindi speaking evil twin of 'it..'. i should've guessed as much. isnt he the same one who gave us criminal, which despite an alluring manisha, was still a straight lift from fugitive? someone please review his other movies and let me know where else i've been fooled.

a bit of trivia i gleaned from the wiki is that the hitchhiking scene, where gable chews a carrot while explaining the nuances of asking for a ride, is also one which inspired friz freleng to create a carrot chewing bunny named bugs...amazing , eh?, the amount of mutual inspiration film makers share.

a flickr of speech

2007-11-08T17:08:00.000-08:00

i've never paid for someone to keep my stuff except during the early days of grad school.

back then a few hundred golts and fellow tamils invaded a university en masse and caused the "senior" grad students hosting us a lot of grief. our moms, deeming it necessary, had sent along a microcosm of india in 2 humongous bags fittingly called india pottis. so to add to the 10 or so parasites er.. new students being hosted in each one bedroom apt, several mini indias encroached the corners,sides and middle portions of all the rooms. when, one day, the hosts found that the bathroom had been rendered inaccessible by the great wall of india pottis, they decided to fight back. they rented some storage for us to keep them till we found apartments of our own. my 2 tamilnadus were in the first batch that were sent there. i thought that would be the last time i paid to store my belongings. how wrong was i?

an india suitcase at least has some substance to it (actually there is a lot of substance..ask the cranes that are used to lift them). what i am paying for now is a bunch of pixels..they are colorful and all that but they weigh next to nothing and in most cases carry not a single packet of grand sweets mixture or adhirasam. yet here i am touting their existence so i can get a few more hits and justify the $24.95 fee. damn you flickr!

here is what i said about this before and here is a sample that also doubles as a rather large hyperlink.

is it just me

2007-11-06T18:23:00.000-08:00

or does timbaland's 'apologize'[youtube.com] sound a bit like new york nagaram[youtube.com]?

i've been wrong before though..

Letter to the Sculptor

2007-10-27T11:36:00.000-07:00

dear madame tussaud,

kindly apologize our rude interruption of your wax modeling session. as you must already know, you recently held a vote to choose the next bollywood star to enter your museum and ended up choosing that poor boy salman. we dont know if you wanted to save the expense of making a wax shirt or you mistakenly thought his doll would make a good pair to that ash doll( you are reading an old edition of filmfare..ash is married to a banana tree, happily). our concern, as true tamizh fans, is that you are missing the big picture.

one of the greatest stars of our time is spending his life in relative reality while he is actually the one worthy of standing unmoved in your great hall. no we are not talking about the south indian superstar you might've also heard about. we're referring to the other superhero par super, the man who can freeze ice itself..the one and only captain.

we kindly demand that you start creating a wax figure for him. with two guns. like this. we realize that you might not have the requisite amount of wax to model him..such is his girthness and greatness. not to worry though. we solemnly pledge that from now on every true tamizh fan of the captain's will donate all the candles from his/her birthday cake so you will have a never ending supply of wax for the rest of your figurines.

please do the needful.now please go back to your waxing.

sincerely,
true tamizh fans of captain

p.s we just realized captain is a man of action..immobilizing him is a rather difficult task..we thought we'd warn you.

Azhagiya Tamizh Magan

2007-10-24T05:32:00.000-07:00

ATM is out. Valayapatti and Nee Marilyn Monroe are my current favs. rahman remixing Ponmagal Vandhal was a shocker. For a moment people turned back the tape cover to ensure it was not a product from Yuvan or Mani Sharma. However I see that aslam is rapping for him in this song. At least I hope its him. Wonder if Lakshminarasimha Vijaya Rajagopala Seshadri Sharma Rajesh Raman fell out of favor.

valayapatti gets props due to the ragam mentions. ok ok i have no idea how to spell ragam but i'm still vaguely interested if only to act knowledgeable if i ever visit chennai during dec. kelaamal sounds a wee bit like 'aagaya vennilavae' from arangetra velai [youtube.com]. (the video deserves its own post, especially to describe prabhu's break dancing in the second half of the song).

going by the songs alone, looks like vijay is yet again a student. however i sincerely hope that the 'ella pugazhum' song is one that he sings to his kid as he sends him off to the first day of lkg classes. one can still dream.

gravity sucks (i obey inverse square laws)

2007-09-20T18:31:00.000-07:00

after trying for about an hour to get a screenshot that

a. didn't reveal completely what i was doing but did enough to pique your interest
b. seemed to somehow show that i was frightened,excited or had an adrenalin rush
c. made me look good

i gave up

c is out of the question..skydiving is not makeup or plastic surgery. b didn't really happen..ok maybe i was excited just before and for a brief 2 seconds after i was pushed out of the plane.a is not possible either - human nature dictates that i brag about this so i don't really care about hiding things and piquing interests.

so you get the pic below..the all revealing, rather frightening image of me falling down with another guy strapped to my back. a minute later he saved me from going splat by opening the chute strapped to his back. the float down was a complete let down after the first couple of seconds of free fall. kind of like the scooter rides from childhood when you were made to stand in front.

so by all means go for a jump. it's kind of expensive. like many other things its hype exceeds reality and for god's sake remember to keep your mouth closed or you'll get an image like this. the video - i plan to sell it to parents as a scare aid to be used instead of the bogeyman or boochandi as the case may be.

p.s you dont know it but you just had a narrow escape.i was going to start this by explaining how i once fell from a mango tree sans parachute.but the screenshot extraction process frustrated the nostalgia out of me.

saroja saamaan nikalo

2007-09-13T17:27:00.000-07:00

i run..now and then. a mile or so. my usual schedule is a long run over the weekend followed by 2 or more weeks of intense whining that my ankle / calf muscle / stomach / (insert muscle name here) has been sprained / inflamed / ooh..aah..ouched. but i've come to enjoy it so much that i go out and try it again as soon as i feel better. the person mainly responsible for this is my runner roomie and now he has started blogging on his runs and more here:

http://stridewrite.wordpress.com

written in a conversational style, it is quite informative (unlike this one) and is updated whenever he runs..which is like every day or so. (you can say that about my blog as well. the update frequency that is). so mosey over and give it a shot.

oh and the title - in my opinion, the best running song. it is always the last in my playlist so i gain an additional boost for the last 4 minutes 15 seconds of my 5 minute runs.

the fruits of labor (day)

2007-09-05T22:22:00.001-07:00

3 day weekends rock..4 day work weeks are better

naan avan illai , the new version, is a horrible way to waste time. the lead is played by jeeva who is a con artist who tricks women, marries them and escapes with their jewels. my take - his insipid dialog delivery wouldn't have fooled any crow into dropping its vadai, let alone tricking 5 women. the story unravels through court scenes in which, lest you forget, they make him repeat the film's name about 276 times. finally the judge decides to let him go and some random woman kills him. the director tries hard to con everyone into thinking it was a good movie by (literally) filling the screen with distracting visuals of namitha. i heard quite a few fell for it and managed to make this a hit. if you are going to watch it, go directly to the last 3rd of the movie and save yourself some time.

urchagam [raaga.com] sees ranjith barot back after a long time. none of the numbers reach the heights of minnal oru kodi from VIP but they are all pretty good. i liked veyil and naram pookal. the other soundtrack that's been getting some play time is kannamoochi yenada [musicindiaonline.com] by yuvan. typical yuvan sans the rap piece and a complete koothu piece. of 5 songs, sanjaram is a nice number. isnt there something similar to proofreading for lyrics? in sanjaram madhushree makes pani (snow) sound like paani(thats hindi for water in case you scored 68 in your 10th board hindi exam) and thangi(stay) sound like thaangi(support/bear). my guess is that it was caused due to the transliteration into english. does anyone know how that process works - getting north indian singers to sing in tamil that is? do they get the lyrics in english or hindi or do they just make them up as they go?

finally i read next by michael crichton. its rather similar to state of fear. this time he takes up genomics. through a thin storyline, various technical papers and articles he tries to teach us about the science and ethics of genetic science. as a story its not that gripping but he does discuss some rather pertinent points about gene therapy, cloning and the likes. while it reads like one long opinion piece, its still quite absorbing. the fact that it is very relevant at this point in time is obvious. just this morning bbc had this article.

i think i said finally by mistake..there is still ooh la la la that i've started watching thanks to current. if u havent heard of it, it is a pretty decent band search tv program that is being telecast on sun tv. they are streaming it for free and legally at oohlalala.in (click on the Videos section). some of the original compositions were awesome and so were some of the remixes. take a look if you have the time.

that's it..i'm done..u can go back to work or whatever else u were upto. thanks for listening

a word of action

2007-08-29T17:46:00.000-07:00

ever noticed how superheroes have adjectives and adverbs built into their names. like the costume they wear, it makes them different from their alter egos. making them appear more powerful while at the same time describing what they can do so there is no way you are caught unawares. when spiderman swings down to rescue you, you can be rest assured the ride is going to be kind of sticky and will involve some swinging.

now swing the cameras southside..i mean south of india side. captain. one word that encompasses all the adjectives,adverbs, nouns, pronouns and prepositions in any language, mainly tamil. its mostly a verb though cause when said aloud each syllable screams action. and no silly costume for captain. the occasional colored contact lenses and a police uniform maybe but he doesn't need a cape. there are no masks or trickery involved either. he is just captain. did you notice there is no indication of what his powers are? that's cause he can do everything. one would need the entire dictionary to describe his special powers.

with so much going for him, there is still no comic book...when amateurs like peter parker naturalize themselves as pavitr prabhakar, why this discrimination? someone start a publishing company and start one for him already.i guarantee it will be a collectible even before the first page is printed.

p.s
for those unfortunate enough to have never known the captain click here [youtube.com]

past posts on this topic: Accentually Speaking

vegetables, water, air, the music of sivi

2007-08-16T17:38:00.000-07:00

remember what i said about familiarity and instantly likeable songs a couple of posts ago. forget it. if possible delete that post from your feed. i just changed my mind. fresh music is awesome in a way that that tripe from harris can never hope to beat. listen to sivi. dharan is a relative newcomer who has just one other movie to his credit - the bhagyaraj directed parijatham whose music was apparently a hit though i totally skipped it. so i am going back to take a listen. if you are sort of jobless, click here to listen to the songs from sivi. time well spent.

oh and the two of you who read this through a feed, here is a link you might not've seen:
www.workanhour.com
do your bit and earn free karma points. this offer wont last forever.
(karma points are not redeemable for airline tickets, magazine subscriptions, electronics or cash.)

just another day

2007-08-15T00:00:00.000-07:00

waiting here tied down as the sun rises and the activity starts. mostly just chairs being drawn up just in front. the kids all march in, happy that in a short while it'll all be over. their clean pressed shirts wont have to suffer the entire day..just the tiny prick of a pin as paper meets cloth. important folks walk up and take the seats. a few of them stand up and take turns speaking. the kids applaud eagerly as if that will speed things up. the most important of those folks walks over. at first its just a little tug and then the climb begins. almost there. the binds seem to be tightening up. it'll be over soon.higher and higher. suddenly with a jerk the ties are released, flowers fall and the wind blows. freedom.

harris and the templates

2007-08-11T11:10:00.000-07:00

do your senses have a tough time acclimatizing to all the new tunes? never fear cos template man is here. bheema represents yet another iteration in the neverending loop that harris jayaraj has been spinning for a while now. the songs being vaguely familiar hook into those parts of your brain that propagate the warm, fuzzy feeling that familiarity breeds and are promptly pushed to the top of your playlist. talk about reusability of code. harris has his algorithm down pat.

two of the songs - mudhal mazhai and siru paarvayalae - feature his signature meaningless lyrics. i wonder if it is to make it tough to render the songs on stage. the singers would feel silly doing that before a live audience. maybe it is to hook the kids in so they have something to repeat endlessly and irritate their parents. ranga rangamma has some drumline beats that get inducted into the library of tamil film music beats. it is somewhat of a koothu song but doesnt come close to his own kalyanamthaan from saamy. the rest of the songs are neat

if you are so inclined sit down, dissect the songs and find out where the individual bits have been inherited from. i tried for a bit and gave up. its easier to just enjoy them for now and hit up itwofs when they finally post the original source of the songs.

Listen to the tunes here

of roaring lions and foxes in the 20th century

2007-08-08T22:06:00.000-07:00

three more movies went down this past weekend and it all probably started with a small video shop called 'video age' in the kilpauk neighborhood. my neighbor's father owned it and i remember with some clarity my many visits to the shop, with its cassettes neatly arranged in the wall and my favorites tom & jerry volumes 1 through n among them. i probably cursed my neighbor a lot for being born into a video shop, especially one that had so many tom & jerrys.

we initially had a b&w idiot box that gave way to a color one with 8 fantastic channels. 7 of those received the most beautiful static ever seen(or heard) and 1 broadcast DD and its sonorous yet hypnotic intro scene in all its faded glory when they chose to broadcast something. the sunday evening movie was the highlight of the week (i tried the 1.15 pm regional ones..but couldn't read the subtitles fast enough). there were several times we would be out on sundays and on the way back fervent prayers would be offered to the gods of buses and traffic signals to somehow take us home in time for the movie. then came the video shop and the concept that for some money you could borrow things like a VCR (or a VCP if u like) and some 5 or 6 flicks that could be watched over the weekend. it was like someone giving you all the big fun in the world for the price of 1, that you could chew and then return after the weekend. yeah it was that good a deal.

the vcr and the tv formed a two-part act which happened with great fanfare during a few summer weekends and what a show they would put on. the vcr, the star attraction, would arrive in a mini procession all decked out in its velvet-lined leather costume and windows that revealed nothing of the sights it held within. the flicks were carefully chosen to take into account everyone's tastes - a bond movie for my dad, a cartoon for me and my sis, a tam flick for my mom, a random yet somewhat famous hindi one (taken mainly because we'd seen one song on chitrahaar) and maybe one more cartoon. there would be a marathon session over the weekend as we'd hurry to get through all the rented flicks before the clock struck 12 and the tv turned back into being just a box. until the same cycle was repeated again a few weeks later

now, the library is my new video shop. every visit results in at least 2 or 3 dvds borrowed on my friend's account. if i'm too lazy to go to the hall and watch it on tv, my laptop plays them for me. weekends are still movie weekends and except for the nearly extinct VCRs and VCPs, the video age still marches on and till it does you will have to bear the posts i make about them movies. its a glorious age indeed.

the gentle notes of a shehnai playing the dd theme close out the broadcast for the day

Vertigo

2007-08-01T17:15:00.000-07:00

Vertigo is a flick i've wanted to see for a while. there is a definite break in the film after which you can sense the mood changing. as an investigator suffering from vertigo, james stewart gets manipulated in the first part and plays the manipulator in the second. its set in san fran - the sloping streets always adding another dimension to the screen. i missed the hitchcock cameo so i guess i'm going to have to see it again and of course blog about it again.

will be taking a short break..from the short stuff that is. a full length feature which can wrap around the blog world twice when laid out end to end is on its way out..or will it be as long as 1.6 times the distance from my main blog to its one of its satellites...dont hold your breath though

disclaimer: that image..not mine. its from imdb.com. so were the others. so if anyone's copying them, dont complain if the MPAA catches up

Good Bye Lenin!

2007-07-28T14:38:00.001-07:00

Ux - danke schoen
Good Bye Lenin! is german for "funny scripts, excellent characters and neat acting equals awesome movies". a son has to prevent his mom from knowing about communist germany's fall as she wakes up from a coma shortly after and should not hear anything exciting. he goes about recreating the east of the past and hilarity ensues. the "making of" special feature on the dvd reveals how the crew had to recreate a 90s germany in 2001 through some amazing conversations with the director and editor.

Live Free or Die Hard

2007-07-21T22:37:00.000-07:00

the u.s govt is under siege by a cracker who hacks into their systems and who else do they turn to but john 'profanity bleeped' mcclane. had to wait a bit for the action to start. once it did, it was a gut punching, bullet ridden, mcclane screaming ride all the way. plenty of awesome punch lines and a weak hacker story that has its logic confused balance each other out. mcclane's final act reminds us once more why we enjoy this series so much.

Downsizing

2007-07-21T22:32:00.000-07:00

so i watched more than my share of movies last week. no i wont bore you with detailed, opinionated write-ups about each one of them. instead you will get detailed, opinionated snippets that are pocket-sized for your convenience. like snacks before mealtime you wont even realize they are gone till you see that your feed is empty. however unlike those snacks, these are actually good for you in a not-so-verbose kind of way. enough said already..here comes the first of those

Transformers

2007-07-08T15:29:00.000-07:00

p.s. spoiler alert...i have no idea if i have revealed important parts of the "story". read at your own risk ..and this post is almost as long as the transformers movie

what if robots could do everything that humans could? think independently, feel emotions, act, ham? yes ham. when bots start hamming you know that you've wasted a hard earned $5.75 on matinee tickets to transformers. my childhood robotic hero was the one and only giant robot. transformers cartoons werent shown on DD and i didnt get caught up in the mecha revolution till i started watching anime. just want to make it clear that i am not a transformers fanboy. go on.

what could one do wrong when you are given robots to play with? what if they were awesome bots that can go from mundane vehicle to mechanized warriors in a blink? well you get involved in them so much that you can forget to build a coherent plot. the first half of michael bay's toy story is a mishmash of scenes that cut from an attacked qatar US army base to the power corridors of DC to teenage suburbia really quickly. each scene barely lasts a few minutes. through these rapid cuts we come to know that
a. your car may be a bot. if its yellow and has racing stripes try talking to it
b. U.S. intelligence uses australian signal processing experts who know the top U.S hackers more than the U.S intelligence and together they all agree that something alien is attacking them
c. the U.S has secret agencies that the secretary of defense does not know about..really? No...are you serious?

the yellow car bot has some other vehicle buddies who all descend to earth in time to explain why a certain cube is so important that it has to be renamed and shrunk to a smaller size. their vehicular foes meanwhile are plotting to awaken their boss, get the cube and use its awesome power to make bots out of your toaster and microwave. Their goal - to conquer the universe. using your oven and fridge. hence proving that artificial intelligence has some ways to go.

despite my general griping, the transformation effects are awesome. i liked the mostly gray, black and silver decepticons (the bad robots) more than the autobots (the good ones) who looked like clowns stepping out of a carnival in their yellows, reds and blues. the action scenes between them are well choreographed. however perspective is something that the cgi people chose to ignore and in an effort to thrust the action on you, show two grappling hunks of machine parts so close up that you dont know whose exhaust pipe is on whose tire.

the finale takes you from hoover dam to the streets of LA where the bots pull out all the stops and transform, protect and destroy in a metal orgy (metallurgy. get it? :) ). shia labeouf runs around with the unwieldy cube which i thought could've been shrunken some more to fit in one of his pockets and megan fox who plays his girlfriend utters stellar lines like "i'll drive, you shoot". however the star of the show is a near-maudlin optimus prime ( one of the autobots) who instead of kicking the decepticons' ass offers to give his life for the human race. give him/her/it a lifetime achievement oscar and retire her/it/him. left to continue its act, its going to star in the sequel and i dont want to spend another $5.75 on a 2 hour commercial for toys and detroit cars.

scan artist

2007-06-30T09:01:00.000-07:00

so you are one of those old enough to have started out with an yahoo account. remember your surprise when you found that you could upload photos to your yahoo account and get a snazzy url where you could point your relatives and enemies to suffer roll after roll after roll of vacation snaps. signing up and waiting in line till the sole scanner in the computer lab becomes available was an experience. as was taking up residence in the lab for the rest of the night so you could scan rolls beginning with "My first birthday" to "when vetti boys toured chicago - yesterday". yup those days are gone

yahoo closed its photo shop and invited several folks who still had photos there (me) to migrate to one of many choices (flickr - yahoo's new photoshop in case you just woke up after a decade long sleep, shutterbug etc). i was only happy to oblige. i hadnt visited those in ages and looked quite unrecognizable in some of them (ok that one was the sears tower not me). i proceeded to choose flickr as i already have an account there that i occasionally post somewhat ok looking pics to. the photos got uploaded and what do i see. a tiny little icon that says "pro" in sweet blue. that is apparently yahoo's way of saying "sorry we caused unnecessary nostalgic feelings by making you go through your old photos and then made you move them". this is something that i have been resisting for a while now. i dont take as many photos as this $24.95 yearly investment warrants but if you give it for free i am more than happy to take it. it only lasts 3 months though. so lets see if that ups my photo count. quite sneaky of yahoo though. in all probability i'll end up signing for the yearly account. if u want to test those flickr goodness before you take the plunge, look in your inbox for that mail from yahoo and migrate your scans to flickr. your snaps will be happy. for 3 months.

passive voice

2007-06-26T20:16:00.000-07:00

i hate sore throats. suddenly my room-mate and maybe my neighbors too are happy that i am no longer singing (yup no quotes around that - typed or finger) when i cook. several people are delirious with joy that i have not called them in a while and overall the world is feeling perky despite all the other miseries. i had to find some way of ridding myself of this condition and others of their happiness and landed upon a pack of halls. its working..slowly..i'll have a voice soon.

that obviously drove thoughts back to vicks and the sway it held over me when i was young. chocolate was always there and one had a myriad assorted sugar treats that you could invest in and let dentists reap the benefits years later. but i had a thing for the vicks pill. first off it came in a neat till packet unlike the twisty wrapper. it was triangular in shape - far more geometrically attractive than the usual, boring cylinder and it had one awesome ad going for it. i still remember vicks ki goli lo kich kich dhoor karo and the animated kich kich monster that would rotate and shrink to a point as a glossy,brown molasses like vicks screen descended down the magnified throat . everytime that commercial came on i wished that i had kich kich and given a choice would've picked vicks to be distributed in class on my b'day over any of parry's offerings.

now i am troubled by that stupid kich kich monster on a yearly basis. each time that happens i pop in a zillion mentholyptus pills and as one of them slowly dissolves i realize that i may have something to write about in the next summer blockbuster post. coming soon to rss readers near you: prickly heat powders and the image of cacti and thorny bushes on people's backs.

sivaji the boss

2007-06-17T11:19:00.000-07:00

so after the long wait outside the theater we were let in but not before several imaginary guards frisked us. they removed things that may hinder us from having fun - logic, reason, the ability to comprehend gravity or any physics for that matter. those things have no place in mythology. you dont question anything when gods reincarnate even if it is only on a theater screen.

every frame is a technicolor fantasy where each pixel has been carefully choreographed to display a precise combination of red, green and yellow. the background music/rap mix adds a dose of adrenalin to some stunning fights. all i'll say about the music is that it has been composed by this guy called a.r.rahman. the camera angles and lighting nearly perfect in every scene, song and fight, causes the already outlandish costumes to shine with a new resplendence. did i mention the colossal sets yet? they were colossal. and while all this brilliance jousts for space on the screen, the style maven, who made millions grow their hair longer just to brush it back like he does, takes center-stage and rules the movie. he dons wigs, imitates other stars, woos his woman and fights with the energy of a sprightly young star in a 3 hour sequence where he is rarely off the screen.

there is a plot somewhere and it is as old as the sherwood forest. it is about one man creating his own government from the black money he reaps in dubious ways. who cares about that when style looking like a million bucks is bouncing chiclets off villain's foreheads and tossing coins laterally. the dialogs witty and clever in the first half are delivered with the timing that only vivek can manage. in the second half they burst out like bullets when the superstar utters them in his inimitable style. the scene i liked the most is the one in the tea stall with thalaivar eating vazhakka bajji with the villain. just awesome. the songs were spectacular though for some reason athiradee reminded me of smooth criminal more than desperado. some scenes could've been removed from the first half if only to shorten the movie but it looks like shankar decided to give the fan his money's worth knowing fully well that the black ticket costs are going to soar during the first few days.

while all the supernova references and "god returns" cliches bounce around the blogs, it may be tempting to leave out Shriya. she didnt have much of a role but boy was she hot. and that girl can certainly act and dance. hopefully we'll see more of her on the screen after this. shankar is the man behind the whole show though. he proves yet again that he is a master showman. if at all any god chooses to reincarnate, i am sure they will choose this man to orchestrate their entrance and manish malhotra to design their costumes.

we finally returned from the land of the dancing maharaja at 1.55 am and regained enough logic and sense of gravity to start our cars and drive back home. the 3 hour experience was quite unlike any movie i've seen in the recent past. and yeah i realize some lines could've been removed from all this if only to shorten this paean of a post but then i wanted to give you your free subscription's worth.

from the newsdesk, wherever that may be

2007-06-15T17:05:00.000-07:00

the word 'sivaji' has become the word that was transmitted most via text message in a given period of time. earlier the record had been held by 'happy' followed closely by 'new' and 'year'. several people in chennai reported that they had typed the word so much that their fingers were refusing to type anything else. over across the oceans and mountains, recipients of the text messages interviewed in the U.S liberally cursed the senders (mostly good friends) in their mother tongue(mostly tamil, followed by telugu) for not thinking about the high text message rates.in a cruel twist of fate several recipients were forced to seek employment in theaters showing sivaji in order to pay for those charges. incidentally the second most transmitted word record is now held by 'super'

in other news, the CEOs of Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, even U.S.Cellular submitted a petition to the Super Star asking him to act in at least one movie a month. they also suggested his movie names be longer than the single text message limit.

how loud is too loud

2007-06-10T00:42:00.000-07:00

every man has a breaking point..mine came when the electronic sounds that form the start of athiradee started to pour out of the speakers. i stood up to dance and didnt really sit down again.actually i dont remember much of what i was doing after that. the decibel levels rose to near ear-splitting levels and caused droves of demure desi damsels to change into dancing queens. the men werent far behind. many ran up and down the aisles forming trains and others who had been sitting were dancing in place (like i suddenly found myself doing) with arms and legs flailing trying to keep up with the beat. and try doing that while also screaming your lungs out. my voice is gone, my ears are ringing and legs ache. all side effects of experiencing rahman's music live. an awesome experience. now i am properly primed for sivaji next week.

the ipod of t-shirts

2007-05-15T19:57:00.000-07:00

damn it damn it damn it..in the recent past at least 2 of my ideas have been lifted from my brain by some clever folk and used in their posts. the best one was to screen print tees with Che-like imprints of thalaivar and it looks like ravages in collaboration with mdeii posted something very similar like 2 months back. how they did the time travel and read my thoughts can only be explained if we assume these two are the time travelling japanese guy and the mind-reading cop from heroes. well serves me right to not write as soon as the idea strikes

i shall go ahead and post this anyway cos i have nothing else to post about. so the idea was to market to rajni's fantastic following. ok so he lacks a name that rings so well with Che as does Cho but you have to accept that his style is pretty revolutionary. commemorative t-shirts would celebrate his hold over the masses. the images would be from his movies - thillu mullu could be represented by the title scene where rajni pokes his head through a 'wall' and the back could say "IAK Chandran" and have a varsity-letter style number like one of those sports jerseys, basha could have any one of his poses and then just "ULLE PO" on the back or any one of the words of wisdom from that flick..and of course one from Sivaji..all to coincide with the movie release. u get the idea.

those tees priced reasonably (ie below the rs.500 range that tantra sells in) will sell like those hot cutlets one gets near adyar signal. we would blitz the market. coupled with a decent non-profit it can actually also do good while making money. (see i am not all that greedy).

p.s i'd like to apologize to any person who in the future will think of such an idea and curse me like i am currently cursing ravages (more than mdeii as I dont know him as well)..

did i miss anything while i was gone?

2007-05-11T15:52:00.000-07:00

thats it. after a long, hard struggle i've finally given up trying to become a film snob. my computer was plotting to kill me after i put it through movies like Z, rashomon, to kill a mockingbird, following. i even saw the start of an orson welles movie called the trial. turned out to be the best over the counter soporific you can order for me.in its defense i watched it after a slightly heavy meal. and so it was that i landed upon chennai 600028.

the movie and its characters are out to have some fun and do so without taking themselves too seriously. there is not much of a story. team a loses to team b in the beginning and then wins over them in the end. in between, you meet team a. the screenplay is what makes the difference. nothing path breaking but some regular scenes get treated in a way that made watching them quite enjoyable. there are some that use old music in a different context - in particular a retake of a song from manvasanai. the cricket commentary had me in guffaws.

i'd only recently been tricked into taking up cricket for a day. i thought it was a tennis ball match but was asked to wear the full gear and face the cherry. watching this movie after that match was quite enjoyable. it scored close to 100 considering my recent watch list. me, i scored 3 and came home limping on a really stiff knee. i think i'm also giving up on my dream to make it into the US cricket team.

flaws of motion

2007-03-05T20:45:00.000-08:00

motion is inevitable. speed is addictive. control however can prevent bloody,scraped knees. i learnt this first hand as i went through an out-of-cycle experience rounding a corner on my sister's bsa slr when 10. tired of falling off my sister's bike i quickly graduated to several first rate spills from my own bike. slowly balance was achieved and by that time my sis had upgraded to a moped. i took to it like a fish would take to a motorized fin. it could go faster and i didnt have to change the chain as often.as a bonus i also learnt how to steal petrol by watching the helpful petrol bunk attendants. my sis then went and got herself one of those kinetic hondas. being a speed demon, i decided to one up her and grace my dad's scooter with my lead wrist. there was one small hitch though.

left hand back brake, right hand front brake. right? wrong. the more variables that are introduced into a problem, the tougher it becomes to solve. i now had one break in hand, one beneath my feet, a clutch that could rotate clockwise, anticlockwise and otherwise in the other hand and a lot of confusion in my head. carry over the fact that the scooter is perhaps the most unbalanced piece of machinery ever invented and you got yourself a lot of problems on the street. the result was that between balancing and changing gears, i was sufficiently scared off geared vehicles for life.

(one has to take time out of life to ponder the strangely asymmetrical beast that the scooter is. now is not the time though.)

still peer pressure is a rather coercive thing. it makes people do things that they didnt think themselves capable of. i, for instance, joined a driving school after Ux started taking lessons. i didnt learn much with the instructor controlling most of the drives using his set of pedals. but after sitting behind the wheel for a month or so i entered the driving test stage of my driving life cycle. the guys who assess driving tests must be descendants of the vikings. how else can one account for the courage and sense of adventure that causes them to repeatedly get into a 4 wheeled metal shell of terror under the control of someone whose hand-to-eye coordination skills are hitherto unknown. i slowly started in the first gear, didnt stop or make my car buck like a horse, went into second and was just starting to dig my spurs in when i was asked to stop. that was it. the metamorphosis from relatively harmless on ungeared two wheeler to homicidal with one foot on the clutch had taken abt 100 meters and 3 minutes. fortunately for scores of pedestrians i didnt own a car and the few times that i drove Unhygenix's it was in iit where even the deer would hide knowingly.

i conveniently chose an automatic when i bought a car. none of that clutch nonsense for me. Unhygenix, ever so trusting, did let me try his bimmer here a couple of times - the time that it spun its wheels like crazy without moving an inch was the last. the burnt rubber can still be seen on a section of I-90 somewhere in indiana. the drive continues however sans any clutch or shift but with a lot of control including that one incident where with total control i skillfully guided my vehicle's left side onto a stationary pillar. my next objective is the space shuttle. heard that there are no gears on that ride(must be easy). i wonder if i can get underground parking though.

the woefully short

2007-03-03T18:42:00.000-08:00

disclaimer: music, a subject that i know nothing about yet write up one pretentious post after another. anyone who knows better (i.e. everyone) please feel free to school me.

this one is about short tunes..the dittys that have so much potential to fill a full 5 minute slot yet wrap up in a minute or so and pretty much leave us wanting for more. i have no idea why they are so short. maybe the studio owner chased the crew out or the producer didnt pay the music director's entire fee. nevertheless here is a short list of my favs:

en jannalil therivadhu ( mozhi) : a spanish guitar, a simple rhythm and karthik's voice - this song just takes off in one small minute

hari gori ( majnu) - slightly longer. the indecipherable words lend a mysterious aura to it..seriously though, if i remember right it also fit in really well with the situation.

Ninaichu Ninaichu (sethu) - a love song on a rocket. maybe illayaraja felt it would not be able to sustain that speed so the flight only lasts 51 seconds

aathukulla athimaram (rajathi raja) - its an oldie and gets mention here as it reminded me of the other short numbers. this movie also has another ditty - ulaga vazhkayae - which never fails to make me grin when i listen to it.

ore nyabagam( minnale) - short and catchy

the only a.r.rahman number of comparable length that i really liked was the mangalyam bit from alai payuthey. though it is the slow paced version of endrendrum, its a good mix.

did i leave any out?

yuvan and his bling bling

2007-03-03T00:01:00.000-08:00

yet another mutant offspring of tamil and hip hop snakes its way into the airwaves courtesy who else but yuvan. jalsa (remix) from the chennai 600028 soundtrack has hey-yo-yuvan dropping lines like fiddy drops bullets..wait that doesnt sound right. well neither does yuvan talking about riding his bimmer with the woofer and the tweeter. the lyrics still sound a little stilted. nevertheless yet another attempt by yuvan. the man certainly doesnt tire of trying this genre and as a nod to his western gurus, he manages a self-referential line ( "4 mixes in a row and i'm still in my game" what?) and even includes a diss at the end of the song.

though he regularly dips his toes into the rap world, he manages to restrict them to a specific genre of movies - the young, urban kind. for other movies he spins some pretty good numbers. check out thaaliyae thevaiyilla from thamirabharani or kadhal vaithu from deepavali. the latter with some fresh lyrics by na.muthukumar and a catchy tune is a rather nice number.a far cry from the cookie-cutter tracks that harris is rolling of the assembly line in his massive song factory. i am not getting into the debate of whether a cover is better than the original but it does get a little stale when you hear the same sounds over and over again.

here is a nice assignment though...identify the 4 mixes that yuvan has blended so far.. tons of extra points for using google...u will then shine like the sun and be number 1 like yuvan..rhyme unintended

ay dappankuthu !! uttalakdi !

2007-02-11T21:35:00.000-08:00

i had a small chat with the roomie arguing that rahman would never win a grammy cos though his music rocks, he doesnt have hips...ok what i meant was that a shakira with her ruthless truthless hips was bound to hit the charts and have more exposure just cos she was more marketable than a reserved man from south india (that vande mataram video was awesome but was probably a bit too patriotic for an american awards show).

fear not for the desi sound though..hottest record of the world this past week on bbc radio 1's zane lowe show..mathangi arulpragasam aka M.I.A gets down and does the koothu at miauk.com

update: the video is on m.i.a's psychedelic site..Ux aka my legal counsel prevailed and made me pull the plug on youtube

plumbers wanted

2007-02-10T23:13:00.000-08:00

at first there was dial up and the bits dripped to us through our ultra thin telephone lines like water out of chennai taps. then came tcp/ip connections or as we liked to call it "the one with more pictures of [insert covergirl/actress name here] than you would ever be able to see in your lifetime". these days the net is 'free' and i have a decent number of feeds in my rss reader. more than half of those go unread. lets just say that if the information onslaught were a snowstorm, it would take a while for us to dig our cars out. realising that bloggers like me might soon start misusing more weather related analogies, yahoo decided to introduce a spanking new snowblower called pipes

the pipes are a neat tool. quite like their unix counterparts. they are meant to let you create a sort of filter to retrieve the essence of the growing information stockpile. it took me a while to figure out that it does not work with safari or opera (the faqs mention it, i didnt think to read there first).but on camino/firefox i found it rather easy to hook up my blog to one of their 'modules', produce a stream of keywords from the titles of my posts and then pass it on to flickr which promptly displayed images that were not at all related to my blog. a quick search revealed that a hundred other folks had applied pretty much the same logic and so there are a lot of flickr related pipes already. tim o'reilly has more on this in a neat write up

pipes are new. the buzz will be enough to cause several bloggers suffering writer's block to chime in with their thoughts.they are still a little tied down in terms of what they allow one to do. but i'm sure they will catch on, more features will be added and ppl will probably clone that flickr pipe and apply it to youtube and google videos eventually creating seveal more ways to search for porn. but for the rather brief time that i tinkered with it, it made me feel a little intelligent. so get off that rss reader's scroll button and make yourself a nice, warm cup of filtered information. its a blizzard out there.

here is the link again: http://pipes.yahoo.com

slide show

2007-02-06T18:34:00.000-08:00

a parrot riding on a monkey sitting on a cart pulled by a labrador. this strange menagerie working with such symbiosis is rarely spotted in nature. i spotted it in an awesome movie called durga a long while ago(and yes i watched it more than once to be sure). however this one is not about any of these species because there is one creature that above all is revered in the indian movie industry. it appeared in this movie too but i dont think it had a license or it would have also driven something.

if one were to slice the tamil/telugu movie industry pie based on species ( omitting homo sapien sapiens to avoid statistical skew and the use of mathematical terms), you will see that nearly the whole pie is taken up by the hisstrionics of various snakes (sorry abt the typo heh heh). there is a thin sliver that is occupied by the monkeys, parrots, dogs (all of whom were at one time or another called ramu) and the lone camel that bit goundamani in indian but i dont think they emote as well or contribute as much to a story as our reptilian friends do. u can watch any movie whose title has the 3 letter code 'nag' embedded in it and be assured of learning nothing about the reptilian life cycle. pretty much the only take home message from these movies is dont mess with snakes in heat. also beware of women wearing light colored contact lenses and forked tongues who love milk and steer you away from the mongoose cage at the zoo.

snakes have also appeared in several non-NAG movies. they would often play wingman to the heroes - frightening their lady loves and enabling the heroes to step in and display their courage. wont work as well if a cow or say a bunny were trying to scare the lady. they also play able henchmen helping villains to swiftly eliminate foes. there are very few folks who'd be scared of a villain with a monkey on his shoulder, unless it were a gorilla that is. you get where i am going. snakes are indispensable to a good movie.the ultimate movie however would pit a viciously venomous viper against the courageous captain. snake after snake would bite the captain and fall down dead while the captain would grin and say "paambu enna kadicha saak adichu sethu poidun" . would make the dog and monkey act look like a street act, i tell ya.

an open letter

2007-01-26T18:27:00.000-08:00

someone (probably u current since u r the most recent export) call me and remind me how one sings A,B,C in india. my nieces have drilled the "now you know my abcs, next time wont u sing with me" rhyme into my memory and i cant, for the love of language,remember how we rhymed with Zed. and yes Ux, I have to go back and read that "Super Power Memory" book again. i forgot most of that book.

as an aside, i hope they are teaching all the indian kids to pronounce Z as Zee. i see a not-so-distant future where all the call centers move to china & other lands because they decided to teach the Zee and the indian schooling system daftly stuck to their british ways. wouldnt like the indian economic engine to lose steam due to a single letter.

tv with a twist

2007-01-16T21:35:00.000-08:00

there are few things as irritating as knowing the end to a suspense drama. coming a really close second is knowing for certain that a twist is not what it seems. let me illustrate with the only example i know of. i belong to the average tv watching crowd. which means that i probably watch at least 3 unique versions of 2 different crime dramas(name these and pat yourself on your back- you've just toured the US from the east coast to the west), 2 completely opposite doctor dramas(one comic, the other acerbic), 1 insecure budding superhero saga and i can go on and on without ever reaching the end of my slot.

all of these except for the funny medico and the rookie man of steel are 1 hour dramas that have as their goal identifying either the murderer(a human) or the potential murderer( a disease). the trouble however is that to make things interesting, they introduce a villain about halfway through the show. the average human brain, being what it is, quickly calculates the time left (1 hour minus 40 minutes is roughly...wait let me open calc) and makes the logical leap to the fact that this cannot possibly be the villain. the villain has to be someone who is identified within the last 10 minutes of the magical hour. so one moment you are happily analyzing clues in ur mind and the next moment you realise that none of those are valid anymore.

a corollary to this is the crime drama that has an arrest in the middle but by then you see another apparently clean character played by an actor you know is more well known than the one who got arrested. case in point a law & order svu episode which has all fingers pointing to this indian doctor. when he gets arrested, you see Kal Penn in the background, as a janitor. any desi who is familiar with this actor of indian origin will instantly realise that he is the villain. he is too good an actor to play any role lasting less than 10 seconds.

my room-mate and i were discussing one possible solution to this issue a while back. just dont specify any time for these dramas. the show can end in the 21st minute or the 66th. of course we are yet to figure out the revenue stream from such a stupid idea. by the time we do that, you will all be downloading these random length tv shows into your iLens - the gazillion giga byte, Ultra Super Duper HD viewer, satellite communicator, 6 channel dolby surround sound stereo player, 5 giga pixel camera portable device that is actually a contact lens you can buy in green, pink, blue, white or black. your head will have a slight downward tilt when you wear it and you have to use iRenu to clean the iLens but gosh imagine your surprise when you discover who the murderer really is.

color me wrong

2007-01-07T20:47:00.000-08:00

after hearing a lot abt the new opera browser (yeah the rock was heavy and it took a while to wake up and wiggle out) i finally downloaded the free version for mac and imported my safari bookmarks. running it thro its paces i quickly noticed something weird. my flickr page appeared rather dull. thinking it might be a browser problem, i quickly opened safari and camino to the same page. while safari makes my images look like they took a dip in a pantone river, the other two make them look like they've been washed by bleach.

here take a look for yourself:

so if it seems like i get carried away when shameless plugging what (to you) looks like barely tolerable pics, it is cos safari fools me into thinking they look vivid. if u've read this far and are even remotely interested in how macs are fooling you(us), read this

p.s. it might be worth your while to follow the pantone link from above. link courtesy:the hold all

oka oorilo oka rojulo okamokka autos

2007-01-02T18:46:00.000-08:00

so i went to hyderabad for a day about two weeks back and was shocked rudely. no nothing wrong about the city. the weather was fantastic. crowds just like madras and a delightful early morning auto ride through banjara hills were all rather pleasant. it happened when my cousin and i headed to charminar. we boarded this vehicle that was commandeered by someone who can only be called the caretaker of dharma. in madras we would call it the auto and the person driving it as a highway robber. getting down at the charminar, the meter* showed rs 51.80.. my cousin, new to city, handed out 55 rupees with trembling hands expecting a short course in choice hindi/telugu curses or at the least a rebuke. we instead got Rs.3 in return. shocked badly i walked straight into one of the minars, forgot several website passwords including the one from where i had to print my online air ticket and so nearly missed my flight the next day. despite my condition, my camera managed to snap these

*an object that based on wheel revolutions and some amount of timing correctly calculates how much it cost someone to go from point A to point B if turned on at point A - in madras it sits on the left side of the auto and is used to balance the auto because the auto driver usually drives sitting on the right edge of his seat...auto drivers in madras dont need it as they are expert statisticians who use a combination of approximation methods and actuarial sciences to determine the mysterious variable called "flat rate"..footnotes nearly as long as the blog post, only on this blog

p.s. google helped me find this article when i was looking for a meter photo. obviously the author has not visited madras

aaj ki rot

2006-12-29T18:19:00.000-08:00

so many movies, not enough keyboards..don followed dhoom2 down the drain that my head is. don pretends to be modern with a traditional outlook..something we know cannot exist. despite being non-existent, it managed to irritate me to no end. farhan akhtar seems to have tried reversing the roles of the protagonists and managed to confuse my memories of the first movie. while srk makes don feel loopy and eccentric, everyone else in the movie tries to carry off the cool,silent,brooding type and fails. to say that the second half has twists would be misleading. the first half actually had more twists and many of these were by kareena. the "twists" in the second half are more like stop signs on a really bumpy road. at least one of them is utterly unnecessary and you are given so much time while navigating the bumps that you see the others coming from a few scenes away.
considering that i remembered more of dhoom2, don now slips to first place, in the "worst movies i saw during my vacation" ranking

spoiler alert: the movie will spoil your memories of the old don

special a 250 peaberry 250

2006-12-19T23:00:00.000-08:00

fresh out of the grinder, here is a mix of moments from when i was in madras over the past 2 weeks

crazy kiya re

2006-12-06T06:47:00.000-08:00

dhoom 2 is an assault on your senses. it is packed with sequences that are visually incredible, emphasis on the incredibility. thanks to mayajaal deciding that ppl paying 200 per ticket should get their full worth, the volume had been cranked up all the way up to "are you mad?". except for that and the lack of a story the movie was quite watchable..and i just lied. it was barely so.

hrithik is an international indian thief, baby b as before is a brooding cop. uday chopra is again a tapori cop and bipasha, who joins the gang, is a model cop, nope not an exemplary cop, she is a cop who also happens to look like a model. the kind of model with a really healthy bmi that is approved by madrid's regional govt. ash is supposed to be the second best thief. she still looks good at 34 but seems to think she is 16, uttering "like" , like, a gazillion times. after hrithik and ash team up, hrithik forgetting his life's ambition - to write really huge A's on the face of the earth with his heists - plays basketball in the rain with ash and on the pretext of training, bungee jumps off cliffs with her. he feeds her burgers+coke, plays russian roulette and finally bites her hard on her lips. to seek revenge she decides to love him and punish him by not turning him over to the bumblng b. how they all get out of it alive and manage to maintain their tanned skintone is explained by songs and action sequences that must've had a subtext that i could not read. because my head was hurting from the visual and aural assault.

uday's sequences were somewhat funny but before a cbse hindi educated tamil boy could fully understand his mumbaiyya ishtyle utterances, abhisheks sporting water scooters between their legs and roller skating hrithiks would burst out of the screen. i'm still puzzled by hrithik's extra thumb and the date based mathematical puzzle that abhishek solves with his left brain, included to confuse the geeks into thinking that there is a hidden puzzle a la da vinci code. here is a real puzzle for you though - who'll be there in dhoom 3? i predict dev anand will return as a jewel thief. any takers?

capital times - 2

2006-12-06T05:54:00.000-08:00

the next day of course was the all important day. except for taking up 4 hours of my vacation there was nothing remarkable about it. i got out of the embassy and back into vacation gear visiting a few of my kin. in all this visiting i found that the delhi traffic is run on a system of mutual consent that if existed the world over would promptly make it utopia. of course it will also be a little loud.the horns warn, inform, plead and cajole ceaslessly. collisions like in madras are for the most part avoided (rather narrowly)and when they do happen the drivers and the owners get out, do a quick assessment, ensure limbs are in place and drive away. all cars are dented leading one to think that these dents are probably birthmarks or are part of the car's design.

day 3 found us relaxing at home. except for collecting the stamped passport we barely went outside the house. we lunched at home and then went out for dinner at a somewhat overpriced haldiram's restaurant. day 4 was spent in central market shopping for my sister's clothes, at my mom's friend's place and then some sightseeing. we visited the qutub minar, took a ton of pics and then headed to humayun's tomb which'd closed by the time we got there. from there we took an awesome drive on the DND flyway where my uncle's maruti 800 hit 100 easily. it was quite easily the best road i've been in india, ever. four lanes each way with exits and ramps meant that driving was a pleasure (no i didnt drive..it was a stick shift)

btw this is my 100th post or so blogger informs me. so to celebrate, i give u a flickr gallery. ok ok, i'd have forced this thing on you nevertheless.

capital times - 1

2006-12-04T05:54:00.000-08:00

in an effort to retain both my 2 readers, i've decided to appeal to their short attention spans and release my travelogue in bits tiny enough to be assimilated in one sitting (or by ADHD patients). part 2 will be up shortly

on monday we left for the capital to get the blessings of the gatekeepers of the west for my flight back. the chennai domestic airport was very well maintained though the road till there has been dug up in an effort to provide adventure enthusiasts with thrills in the league of bungee jumping or sky diving. the pre-flight rituals were rather easy and the flight itself right on time.

if chennai behaved like home, welcoming me warmly(it was a balmy 33 when i landed), delhi was mysterious and cool. mysterious because half the city was obscured by what i assumed was fog and later found was smog. on day one we went to the akshardam temple - a recent addition to delhi's southside. it is a fantastic architectural achievement though the organization's policy not to allow cameras inside is sure to irritate amateur photgraphers. i managed a few shots from outside and would soundly recommend it to anyone who has a few days to spend in delhi. that evening we went to a mall that was in most respects similar to its western counterpart. it even had a barista coffee shop that was selling different forms of the bean at prices similar to the west. i resisted the rs.60 cappuccino opting instead to have a sooper chai in a nearby gali for rs.4.

a method to the mad(ras)ness

2006-12-02T03:34:00.000-08:00

the first two days in chennai were bliss albeit quite dusty and filled with sounds and sights i'd not experienced in some time. went around town looking for some good footwear and happily got out of the smelly running shoes after locating a pair at kobblerr. the sunday was spent going around to meet friends' parents..my friends werent home. those morons were away working their asses off in far away countries.

driving to those places on my trusted kinetic honda proved to be a little harrowing. the traffic was obviously even worse than last time. if the traffic out west is an opera, the roads in chennai play host to a 24 hour circus. with a band made up of angry horns, furious revving engines and a bevy of screeching breaks, the hapless traffic constables play powerless ringmasters, looking on as the beasts perform amazing feats of collision avoidance within the confined pot-holed arena. i did my part, honked without rhythm or reason and whizzed around narrowly escaping the menagerie.

no change in chennai though - at least the parts that i've seen so far, which is mostly south madras. no espn at home. so no cricket yet or MNF.

been there, done that

2006-11-24T22:04:00.000-08:00

that mandatory i'm-back-in-india post
sat morning, filter coffee in a stainless steel tumbler..steaming hot but not for long..frantic search for the hindu crossie after finding someone had moved it from the top left corner of the last page. 1 clue solved on paper. yup..i'm back.

What weighs approximately 100 pounds and will cause dentists in india to rejoice in the near future?

2006-11-23T06:48:00.000-08:00

my two check-in bags. i also heard this huge cry of joy from hershey,PA when i crossed the checkout counter at a target

nobody does it better

2006-11-18T00:21:00.000-08:00

one after the other we've watched each bond deftly handle anything with wheels , tank treads or long sexy legs in nearly every photogenic city in the world from udaipur to moscow. while each one had his own style, he was still being paid by the queen to cavort around the world enjoying gizmos and girls and to me it seemed like he was not working hard enough for his paycheck. or so i thought. the first few minutes of this movie were enough to justify the salaries of many future bonds.

the bond character begins his nascent journey with a black and white opening montage that shows his first kill. the title song that follows hints that something is different by eschewing the sexy silhouettes and instead opts for some wonderful animation which along with a great song had me mesmerized for a bit. the main movie opens with a spectacular, gritty chase/fight that quickly leads us to another - the pace of the movie and the camera trying really hard to keep up with daniel craig as he races down streets and tarmacs. by the time the camera finally catches up, he has settled down with a martini built to order to play a round of poker. for a good 45 minutes or so you forget that it is bond, as he sits battling wits with his nemesis instead of using a pair of x-ray glasses to look at his cards and his girlfriend's choice of lingerie. this one is certainly a little different. martin campbell,knowing that his US audience has been trained on non-stop tv screenings of world poker championships, deftly swaps bacarrat for texas hold em and it results in an engaging game that everyone vicariously enjoys. i know i did.

the movie then switches to a gear that none of bond's aston martin vanquishes or bmws have ever experienced as he falls headlong in love with the bond girl. eva green does not emerge from the ocean in a bikini. she instead proves to be a bond girl who is aware of bond's nature - a side that other bond girls are happy to ignore. remember though that this tale is of bond's yesteryears. he will change and sadly so will his women. the movie however loses its pace at this juncture. we are forced to wait and watch till he shows up at the end again, utters the most famous line in movie history and monty norman's legendary soundrack fills the theatre for the first time in the movie as the credits start rolling. we now know for sure that bond is back.

change of address

2006-11-17T16:57:00.000-08:00

i'll be temporarily relocating to my awesome madras from the 25th of this month till the 11th of the next. anyone who's around there at the same time and sort of knows me pls crawl out of the woodwork and give me a sign ( a mail will do). we can attempt to meet up and agree that nothing has changed one bit in all this time.

vowel movement

2006-11-11T22:33:00.000-08:00

the series of tubes that are the internet are, more so than ever, filled with jobs and money jostling for space with porn while shooting across continents. like the ever mercurial corporation water (no folks i'm not pointing rather slyly to trace amounts of mercury in chennai's water), these tubes lead to taps that pour these jobs in the far eastern (and southeastern) while drying up and spewing just air in others and the money into the coffers of the corporations of the west ( or so i heard) (wow 3 parenthesised sub-sentences within 1..wait now it's 4)..where was i? oh yeah so the internets are filled with these already. i say we add to the traffic and create global equality in yet another dimension.

during a nets basketball game i noticed a player named krstic. the paucity of vowels in the name struck me. here is a 7 foot man whose ancestors probably had no appreciation for the 5 greatest letters of all time and labelled him with a 3cm name. without a lot of research i promptly concluded that entire serbia & montenegro football team probably has lesser vowels than a respectable south indian last name. this imbalance is shocking. on one hand are people who are embarrassed by the shortness of their names while the ananthapadmanabhans of this world relax by drowning in bathtubs of leo coffee, secure in the knowledge that they have a million a's locked up tight.

so i propose a charity that is run not on money but on phonemes - the very letters that make our names. i'm still working it all out in my head, but i suppose that we (ie south indians with long names) will be the largest donators of vowels. from the chinese and the poles we shall take some x's, z's and y's . the russians can give us some v's and from africa's bushmen we'll get some clicks. its time someone made the rules up and led the way to a fair and balanced world where no one will be asked to spell their last names thus saving me about five minutes each time i call customer service. i will gladly give up the 7 vowels in my name. how much will you give to make the world, not only flat, but also a uniformly lengthy place?

Domo arigato, mr.Roboto

2006-11-03T17:51:00.000-08:00

conversations that begin with the question "what is name of the chief villain in giant robot" often end up increasing the ranks of sites containing words like jhonny sokko, giant robot and giant robot+monsters. they also often end up hitting the rewind button in the brain with the effectiveness of a two ton hammer.

i belong to the age when the number of channels on tv could be counted using the binary system. we had on and then off. the on state followed a rather strict schedule. monday - vayalum vazhvum, tuesday-some sad stage drama usually featuring a crying anandhi (thats her on the left) , wednesdays - chitrahaar, thursdays - i dont remember, it used to be honi anhoni or some such strange thing and fridays - olium ozhium. it was also the time when a sheet with some weird lines would be shown to indicate that there was nothing being transmitted. yup there were long stretches of time when there was nothing on tv (yikes!!). the national pastime was to wait till the swirling galaxy-like twin swooshes of dd arrived to some ominous (tabla?) music announcing that it was showtime. it was rare to see anything in a language that was not tamil, hindi or one of the million regional languages that usually got the 1.30pm sunday movie slot - the one that'd get turned on if u ever wanted to sleep after a nice sunday meal.

in between this cornucopia of high quality tv entertainment, we were also treated now and then to what can only be described as the best sci-fi series evvvver. we knew it as giant robot while the west knows it as jhonny sokko and the flying robot. it probably made several kids want to be a japanese kid with a flip watch on the wrist to control a giant robot. i was one of them. i could recognize the sounds that the robot made (as it went through some elegant calisthenics before its flight) from the playground and would be in front of a tv in moments. the villainous monsters were equally good (or bad). i dont remember the complete series but i do remember dracolon, the gargoyle gang and - as my friend pointed out the answer to the question - emperor guillotine. the search of course led us straight to you tube and so i have a video to show. i dedicate this one minute video ( though it is not mine) to our old black and white dyanora with its glorious 2 channel twisty knob.

golt is my other tongue

2006-11-02T20:41:00.000-08:00

as the story goes, my first spoken word was "koochu". nope, i wasnt trying to say koochiekoo to myself like adults who use that with babies assuming that something that sounds funny to them is obviously funny to everyone else. it is not. try explaining a joke. neither is it a mangled version of "couture" which if i'd been the offspring of a french designer and a super model might've been perfectly acceptable. koochu translates to "sit" in mana andhra naadu and in most neighborhoods of chennai. despite its obvious meaning it made my mom jump to attention and take notice. my neighbors then who were from the golt land often took care of me and somehow the rarefied golt air that i breathed while there had found its way into my vocabulary. i kind of lost touch after we moved and while hindi and english would torture me to no end, golt became, as the cliche goes, like hebrew and aramaic to me.

sometime in the late cable tv age, like a radio picking up ceylon signals on a rare night, i began picking up on it again. the signal was much stronger though and emanated from the strong transmitters of gemini and eenadu tvs. i spent a large portion of time on these channels in college and realised that despite the language, all djs were born with really strong neck muscles that enabled them to bob that head a million times a minute. and when the sunday cartoons ended after mowgli went swinging away to "cheddi pehen ke phool kila hai", i'd promptly switch over to whatever was on those channels.

so where is all this going. well it ends up in something i need. i'm one of the biggest tamil fans of golt cinema. i see them whenever i can and really like the music but it is kind hard to appreciate the song without understanding the lyrics. what i need is some information from the large golt population that regularly cause my blog to become unavailable (of course i know of none, so if u r there, pls raise your hand) to point to me some place that translates golt songs into somewhat proper english. actually i'm open to a barter...i'll translate any tamil song you like for a golt song.

take your pic redux

2006-08-31T21:21:00.000-07:00

whatever i said before, i recant
today i join the ranks of several people who've made it their aim to record their lives in all its digital glory. i succumbed to a really low price and the added impulse of an upcoming trip and finally bought a digital camera. i'm probably one of the last to join in the fun but as soon as I swiped the plastic (and made sure it was approved) i decided i had to enforce some rules. i've been observing the species of digital photographers for long. like an SUV owner who has just won an Alaskan oil field, they often go on a rampage with their all-seeing friend by the side. i rank sitting through an online gallery of an yellowstone trip only slightly below being forced to watch the wedding video. of course i was also jealous, my bulky 35mm put in an appearance only when ratio of the view i had to the cost of developing that one shot was significantly higher than 1

and hence these basic tenets which i hope may one day be passed into law:

1. i shall never go to yellowstone as an excuse to shoot pictures. actually i've seen enough of it in pictures. lets just say i shall never go to yellowstone..ever. so i'll probably miss seeing yogi bear in person..big deal. oh wait that is jellystone

2. no reflections off the water, off mirrors, pet's eyes or chicago's bean. a reflection photo is like saying something with a hidden meaning/pop culture reference etc. it screams "look at me, aint i clever". that this blog totally subscribes to that view will not be debated now.

3. no grotesque pics of me when i tried to hold the camera at arm's length. this one should be made into a commandment. way too many beautiful people have managed to mangle themselves in this attempt. if u want a photo of yourself please ask someone else to do the clicking. do not attempt shooting at a reflection on a mirror while trying not to have the camera appear in the photo either. see rule 2.

4. the words aperture, focus, polarized, f-stop etc will not be mentioned in association with any of the pics. actually i dont know what these mean. i've heard others refer to these as being not proper, when they dont get the effect they desired in a pic. one word i do reserve the use of is zoom and its correct pronunciation "joom"

5. thats all i could come up with for now. will add rules as and when i find out what a pain it is to take photos and upload them. you will of course be privy to yet another boring online gallery but only if you ask. this blog will forever remain text based

the usual disclaimer : none of the above is guaranteed to be enforced. you cant catch me on the street one day and say - "i had nightmares because of that self-photo you took." and ask me to give me back the money you never paid. people seem to do strange things when possessed by a digital camera. i am,after al,l the people,the mob. off i go then to cash in these many thousands of words i've written and get some pics in return.

accentually speaking

2006-08-20T21:58:00.000-07:00

i recently had an encounter with a south korean individual. he has probably been here only for a few years and a few words have distinctly different pronunciations from the normal. his "z" pronunciation was what fascinated me most. the z was more like a j. so "size" would come out as "sije" and "zoom" came out soundling like "joom". putting two and forty together, i'm hypothesizing that the one and only captain has a south korean gene swimming in his extraordinary gene pool. one gene down from around 25000. i wonder which one gives him the ability to shock electricity. i'll track them all down. if there is one life that is worth cloning, it has to be captain's.

staying on the linguistic vein, can an indian trying to imitate a southern accent construed to be speaking in a south indian accent?

rashtriya baasha

2006-08-02T15:59:00.000-07:00

"are you hindi?" asked the drunk guy standing next to me. i knew exactly what he meant - "you mean hindu". "oops", he said, "sorry. you musht shink i'm obnoxious. so what ish hindi?". and thats when it struck me. what is hindi? am i just a hindu, not a hindi? that statement had just woken up a ghost i thought i'd exorcised a while back. hindi has long been torturing poor tamil souls who would've loved to take math twice instead. of course i was different, i'd have sat through approximately 276 classes of all the other subjects instead of math.hindi wasn't far behind math though

it wasnt all that bad to begin with. at 5, i had the tamil vocabulary of most 5 year olds (except maybe the numbers, see note abt math above) and english at that point was mostly words rhyming with cat. when hindi was introduced, it seemed exotic in comparison and i took to it with mucho gusto. as i stood up to read about my favorite thoyhaar(1) or why vignyan(2) was a bane and not a boon, an audience would gather at the class door. several primary school teachers would stand by the class door admiring the flawless diction and command i had over words like "kyon ki"(3), "nahin"(4) and "isiliyae"(5). none of them knew hindi but like the sole hindi newscast on the only tv channel (it was just DD then and yes i'm from the stone age), I was pretty much the only source of entertainment for many. some predicted pundithood and at least a few were sure that i was prequalified for a Ji at the end of my name. i surfed the gentle waters of primary school hindi on the strengths of really long sentences that confused my really nice hindi teacher

when i switched to a new middle school, i found myself amidst a new set of characters. among them a hindi teacher who not only taught hindi but that supreme ancestor of hindi, sanskrit.i was no super hero but it quickly became apparent that if i'd been one she would've been my arch nemesis. her aims were very clear - total world domination of tamilnadu through the use of hindi grammar. to say i struggled would be like calling hindi a dialect. my fights against sandhi(6) and munshi premchand's tragedies were chronicled in school history as being among the most one-sided. tuition didnt help either and things steadily went downhill till independence was thrust upon us rather suddenly by the arrival of a new teacher. i probably treated the whole class to poppins and eclairs. the new guy was a total pushover and my scores steadily improved.

the brown cover of my course A hindi book slowly started fading a bit. tears appeared all over and the label slowly lost its stickiness till it was hanging by the last molecules of adhesive.it was time. i finally faced the ultimate challenge of the 10th standard board exam. the day our scores came out, i went with my mom to the school. we'd barely entered the school office when the hindi master came rushing out, all beaming and said i'd scored 97. he even thought i might be the national topper. imagine that. a tamil kid topping in hindi, beating all those northies who had supposedly invented the stuff. there was no way out now, i had to take up hindi in college and become a hindi pundit. i shall be a good teacher i thought and an even better speaker. i'll be the one to demolish that stereotype that mehmood had so carefully built in padosan. as these thoughts lit up like fireworks inside the hindi half of my brain, the teacher came around again. this time he was rather subdued. turned out that it was the other arun who'd scored 97. that genius had jumped to french a while back. that exam was the last time i wrote in hindi. i still speak it though and till recently it was always greeted by peals of laughter from my northy roomies.

a prod to my ribs brought me back to the present. obviously the amru unable to disturb my reverie with his belches had resorted to this physical gesture. he still wanted an answer to his question. "hindi", i said, "is the national language of india". "can you teach me some curse words then?"

(1)thyohaar - i think it actually means festival but to me it always meant diwali
(2)vignyan - is not scientology. it is just science and is a boon
(3)kyon ki - see isiliyae
(4)nahin - illa, ledhu, kidayathu, kaadhu, nein, NO
(5)isiliyae - that's why..if in doubt see kyon ki
(6)sandhi - the peculiar set of rules that govern how two words collide to form a new one or how one breaks up to give birth to new ones or the most torturous feature in hindi. no examples, if i'd studied that well, i'd have gotten 97

it's a rap, again

2006-07-04T10:16:00.000-07:00

i've already commented(ok it's not a comment, but a rather long post) on the influx of hip hop sounds into tamil film music before. i thought it was an innovative thing and lately it seems like yuvan shankar raja has taken it upon himself to feature at least one such song in his albums. here is someone who is trying to shake things up a little bit by adding a new element to the rather stable tfm compound. i liked his version of aasai nooru vagai in kurumbu and boom boom from Raam. Thee pidikka from Arindhum Ariyamalum was one suweet remix. then in kanda naal mudhal there was one line that caught my attention. it goes "i've got the magic stick, i'm the love doctor" . wait a second, doesn't someone else this side of the atlantic (or pacific, actually the world) also own a magic stick. Indeed. Not only does Curtis James Jackson III aka 50 cent aka fiddy own a magic stick, last i heard he also owned a candy shop which has the exact line. then i listened to Vallavan today which has a remix of "kaathal vandiruchu" from Kalyanaraman. again i liked the remix but are the mangled lyrics from 'In da club' really needed in the first few minutes (kudos for slipping in the four letter word in though..must be a first in tamil film music history). i kind of understand the urge to be a rebel and move away from the mainstream and to create new things. but sampling lyrics is not the way to go. that way i think blaaze's lyrics are much better. they are much more relevant to the song and because of that they don't stick out like a sore thumb despite being in a different language.

The blogger formerly known as aNTi says that he is planning a hip-hop album sometime. hope it's more original or one day the G-unit is going to send down a couple of hummers to chennai to investigate and i don't think they'll be there to "party like its your love day" (whatever that is )"

snippet

2006-07-02T10:00:00.000-07:00

i found it..the short film that was in thewebsite that i would not pay to watch. thanks to some nice beings that mirrored the website the short film is here :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-5cJse8_Zk
(thanks to patrykrebisz)

a bit about the movie: it is composed of individual snaps from a digital camera. i've seen a similar ad (for playstation i think) and have no idea which one came first. so i am not commenting on the novelty. unusual way to make a movie but the only anomaly (according to me)was that it had a rather normal background score. should it not have been composed of individual snippets of sound corresponding to each snap?? why didn't capturing sound bytes take off like capturing image bytes ? maybe it is cos writing captures the sound like a picture captures the image. somehow the analogy does not gel.

guess who's back?

2006-07-02T06:26:00.000-07:00

pretty much the only difference was that the red in the cape was a little darker. bryan singer tries to walk the thin line between retaining the image of superman as portrayed by Reeve and trying to do something new and radical (and fun) with this amazing toy he has been handed. he just about manages to balance while leaning heavily towards the past serving up a version of superman which looks slightly better but retains the same core.

i don't know any more about superman than most people. i have watched the previous ones but don't remember much except for the one with the solar powered creature in IV(i know, worst superman ever. that being uses its nails to infect superman like some cat). i do remember some scenes with the clumsy, bumbling Reeve and the slightly hysterical lois lane(imdb tells me it was played by Margot Kidder). Bryan Singer in his role as guardian of the superhero temple probably told Brandon Routh to study tapes of Reeve and imitate him as best as he can. Kate Bosworth does look quite beautiful but i missed the wide eyed, surprised expression that Margot Kidder showed when meeting superman. kate makes that fantastic flight over the city seem like a bus ride. i guess it's cos lois has had a ride on superman before. the best character of course is lex luthor. kevin spacey brings extra wit and beautiful sarcasm to a character you know is a little crazy. other than that it is much of the same old, same old. there is a evil masterplan, it involves kryptonite and superman going down before coming back up.

the special effects i guess are really advanced and it was probably really hard work to make superman fly but i doubt that the older audience noticed anything different. it's come to the point where the effect really has to be something special for me to notice it. bryan remembers to showcase each one of superman's abilities just in case the younger crowd have not been taught enough by their parents. watching it in imax 3d however was a slightly different experience. i really liked the sound effects but was not too impressed with the 3d aspect. it maybe because there was no flying ice cream as in "my dear kuttichathan". the only other thing that bothered me was that metropolis seems stuck in the past. apart from the nifty product placements ( samsung, nikon and audi) there is nothing modern about metropolis. i am not a couture expert either but why is everyone dressed up like its the 80s. i bet that there was not a single pair of jeans in the entire movie and any superman worth his salt would've noticed the young lady he rescues from a runaway car is wearing an outfit that would be a better fit at the ascot or kentucky derby than an american city's downtown.

i saw this cool video on the net that showed how they reused marlon brando's face from the first movie. bryan could've as well done the same with the rest of the movie. he returns the toy to the showcase in the same pristine condition it was in before he took it out.

the random post i've been trying to avoid all these days

2006-07-01T15:55:00.000-07:00

i don't claim to be a techie sort of a person..i am not. i like gadgets and technology and on the rare saturday get rather stale ideas about how the virtual life imitates the real one. i tried accessing a website featured on boing boing and it turned out that site host had suspended that account. most tech enthusiasts would of course be familiar with slashdotting and that is precisely what had happened. apart from sympathizing with that poor slashdotted soul, my point ( and there is one somewhere in this post) is that this is really similar to any free event. the moment you say its free and interesting the only ones who really get to see it are the early birds.the rest just lose out like i did. some nice being may have a video camera and record that event and put in on the web for others to watch it (that this may also get slashdotted is an offshoot i wont traverse). but what is the equivalent on the web. some may try to mirror the site on their own servers but how many have the patience to do that. i still think that the number of people online is quite small. what if the number of people online doubles overnight? contrast that with a ticketed event where you actually pay for and get a nice seat and are assured of watching the whole thing without hunting for it on the net.

that begets the question : should the net really be free?

(the actual question is : was that link something i'd pay to see. the answer is no :) )

audiophile

2006-04-22T15:42:00.000-07:00

so i got a Bose stereo system this weekend.

the packaging it came in was just awesome :

a gorgeous lump of black metal forged into a sleek,aerodynamic shell, with wheels and a v6 heart

textosterone mini

2006-04-21T04:59:00.000-07:00

like that of a mosquito's caught in a room full of healthy people. i was describing my attention span. i barely read these days. magazines that have interesting main features on the cover last merely minutes. the first para of each story gets my focus for a bare second before i flip away to the next page. they say it's because of this information overload we face. so i've decided to innovate. change something. it's what bloggers do when they have a dearth of comments..and yeah, i could've just changed the colors and the font and called it a day

a steamin' cuppa time
this has been popping up in my head each time i see my room-mate's collection of shot glasses. apart from the thought that he has visited way too many places than i have that is. what do we have in india that is equivalent to the shot glass. the tea glass of course. many a day has been better spent along NH 45 with a piping hot nair kada tea in one hand and a butter biscuit in another. from the exalted iits to the one building engineering college dotting the backroads of a city, there'd be few students who've not enjoyed chai. the idea is to market the chai glass as a nostalgic souvenir..something that reminds you of the times more than the place... any takers?

really small words
i dont know about other languages, but (madras) tamil is so ingrained (some say adulterated) with english that there are many words that i dont know the tamil equivalent of. so when do bilingual children learn to differentiate between languages? at what point do they learn that they are speaking 2 languages. is it when they learn the word language?

snatch x chick-flick
that x stands for "opposite of" if you've never played those interesting word games in first or second standard. and yup, i just saw this movie in its entirety after several attempts went awry. a diamond, replica guns, people with missing fingers and illegal,underground bare-knuckle boxing. there are multiple plots and they are all connected? precisely what my overloaded brain ordered. each piece stays on screen for just the right amount of time before another great one nudges it out to claim centerstage. as an outsider i felt sort of privileged that i may have been the only one (apart from the director) who knew all the pieces and the connection while the characters themselves did not. very satisfying..why don't magazines adopt this stand, have one story but have several sub-stories? i guess it's cos as strange as it is, fact can only be twisted this much.

adi thadi academy

2006-03-27T20:13:00.000-08:00

with age comes wisdom. so what was that stuff they taught us in school and college? pointless question. the wisdom i've gleaned from so many years of movie watching is about to take tangible shape. it is time do something constructive. i'm planning on starting the rather cheekily named International Institute in India for Professional Practice of Movie Material (henceforth referred to as IIIPPMM). the main reason for this decision, is a concentration that is not offered in any university,college or film institute. IIIPPMM shall be the first institute to offer a graduate degree geared towards making violent,angry young men out of mostly vetti young men.

our vetti youth have always relied on tamil movies for their "original" acts in life and the recent trend has moved the focus away from US bound (or returned) youth to inner madras youth who anyway end up getting the lass. taking advantage of this trend, i predict that this program will be a runaway hit though the movies that inspired it haven't really made much. the course will of course cover all aspects of rowdyism and thuggery.

for starters there will be an "introduction to angry flashbacks" in which students will be taught the unique skill of choosing a template and filling in the blanks to get a teary/violent/blood-filled flashback that sufficiently establishes reason for the massive bone breaking that will occur later in life. there will be a final project in this course based on which the students will get to choose a girl from our other program that offers a post graduate degree on "how to love a rowdy". you have to understand that these girls are already literate (and zoom around on a scooty/sunny) unlike our vetti brethren who due to their childhood( see "intro to angry flashbacks" final project) have not had the same education. while this may seem like a swayamvara, it actually serves to irritate the less "bright" students and the prettier the girl is, the harder-to-get she'll play. thus irking all the youth just a bit.

the following semester this irritation will grow into a small rage that will be just right for the next course "solid DEInamics". this is a interactive class where students stand about 3 feet from each other and try to blast the other across the room by just yelling "DEI". other courses will teach valuable skills like choosing a nickname . the rationale is much like that of choosing your starwars name. you start with the vegetable you hated most in your childhood( or fake childhood from flashback 101), cut out the last part and add the name of a street on which your friend lived. this does not always work though.mine is something like "kathri fourth seaward", menacing eh? in between all this of course lies another course where you'll have to sneak off to meet with your life-partner in crime while the professors (real life rowdies of course) chase you all around the campus in a toyota qualis carrying aruvas. there is a bonus for students who totally avoid other students which is of course rather easy. how often have you seen rowdy heroes from five different movies set in the same city around the same time cross paths? it just doesn't happen.

for those that don't clear this stage, we'll be offering a shortened program. a diploma in sidekickonomics - the art of playing second fiddle. your girl will be stripped...wait, wait..i meant stripped from you and given to a more deserving, aspiring rowdy. you'll gravitate towards courses where they teach skills like telling bad jokes, advising your graduate friend and in general how to die in such a way so as to stoke that rage in your pal into a flaming anger.

finally the graduates from the angry youth program will get one year to setup and win a showdown with the graduates from the bad guys school of ultimate badness. at the end we'll call eminent personalities from the city who've all been rowdies to reminisce about their past. we are sure this will inspire our students to follow their chosen career path and beat up at least 20 people before donning white clothes, let loose a few doves and start colleges of their own.

as all ideas go this is all still in my head but i'm hopeful it'll pan out. if not a building, i'll probably create characters like harry paruppu and a magical rowdy school called "roguewarts" on a post-it note and hope that it becomes a best-seller. you'll all buy it right??

disclaimer: IIIPPMM is not affiliated to any other weirdly named official body. it is located on the very little gooey grey matter that helps power my feeble imagination.

the one two punch

2006-03-13T19:44:00.000-08:00

by now its common knowledge that i'm a connossieur of fine motion pictures. continuing in the same vein i present to you 'thotti jaya'. a film that redefines words like trite and hackneyed in its own banal style. i was rather curious as to how they'll work the name of the movie into the story and had some glorious theories that evaporated in the very first scene. as a child the eponymous hero works in a restaurant washing dishes using thengai naaru in a 'thotti' full of water. now why they'd choose the thotti and not the thenga naaru as a title is beyond me. the boy quickly discovers that he doesnt really like washing vessels and that fate has more in store for him. fast forward a few years and our thotti has a beard and is now cleaning up enemies for his boss, a rather avuncularly named cheena-thaana.as expected the story is unexpectedly predictable after that. he goes to calcutta to hide from the police where this girl quite literally bumps into him asking him to save her from some drunk goons. he brings her back home, tells her he is not the kind that suffers sitting in a plush chair in a ac cubicle just to play stickcricket(addictive.u've been warned). yet she chooses to love him. later he finds out she is cheena-thaana's daughter, the twist being that she herself did not know. he runs with her and due to some particularly inept project management practices cheena-thaana keeps losing the pair until in the end thotti kills cheena-thaana and then apologises to him. the first half was quick with only 2 songs and even better chimpu does not speak/act much. the second half drags as he gingerly breaks the arms of about 40-50 goons and causes orthopedists everywhere to declare holidays in his name. he also attempts to educate the masses that rowdies have hearts and though they may throw acid and break other's arms they deeply repent doing so. so next time you encounter that friendly neighborhood goon of yours do enquire about his health.

if you thought it difficult to follow such an act, fear not. thotti was rightfully succeeded by a screening of delta force 2. to watch chuck norris single handedly dismantle a whole south american cartel including drug labs, poppy fields, dangerous henchmen and ancient inca artifacts standing in the drug lord's bedroom is like flipping through a set of postcards of the seven wonders of the world. that was a random metaphor. what i meant to say was that it is beyond comprehension or description. i didnt catch much of the story, given that there was none. i could guess it was south america because there was mention of a president alcazar (nope not the one from tintin). because they named it thus there are some 4 or 5 commandoes who, while sweeping through the remains of aforementioned carnage, take care to attach explosives to each of the few strands of grass that survived norris. the ad breaks in between made me a little sleepy but i vaguely remember there was an ad in between for a drug that promised to make one look 20 years younger and i woozily wondered what would happen if a 19 year old took the drug. of course i woke up as soon as the annihilation resumed. between two breaks i counted around 174 roundhouse kicks from his right leg alone. the main villain is again a moron. having never seen delta force 1 , he puts chuck norris in an unbreakable glass cabin and releases nerve gas into it. chuck, never having learned prefixes like 'un-' , 'im-' or 'non-' , ignores the labels on the glass and breaks out of the cabin. after losing their entire economy, the natives lustily cheer chuck norris as the delta force arrives in time to airlift him.

the similarities were remarkable to ignore even at 2.00am. two heroes both wearing all black and sporting beards remorselessly breaking arms and necks of fellow humans to save what they treasure most - one his woman and the other his country. and to top it all both their names start with 'ch'. coincidence? i think not.

bore yourself some coffee

2006-03-09T16:50:00.000-08:00

the setting is quite familiar. one-time avid blogger has been posting rather infrequently due to various reasons. millions of readers grow weary waiting for posts, there is worldwide speculation about the blogger, a meme about the top 10 guesses for the absence of posts is started by the blogger himself. it traverses exactly 0 blogs. blogger dreams up vague topics then trashes them as they are worse than the meme idea. like a caffeine addict who has gone the first half of the day without coffee, a nagging feeling starts taking control. mere facts are hypothesised to have mucho blogging potential. some one-liners start looking like inner cores around which planets and solar systems could be built.

that is for most other avid bloggers. i am too lazy to get that worked up (or so i claim). i just decided to go the gimmicky way. it is fast, easy and i don't have to think. so what does an idea-starved blogger do when he/she is in the caffeine capital in the world (in the united states that is). he decides to blog about coffee. seeing that i've already praised the nectar to heaven i had only one recourse. i decided to rate the baristas of seattle.

any valuable scientific study such as this requires samples and most researchers who undertake such studies have vast armies of research assistants and government backing. i had a road map of seattle's downtown and my trusty piece of plastic. armed thus i started at the somewhat-tall-but-totally-not-worth-$14 space needle. needless to say there was a starbucks on its top. what was surprising that travelling a brief 600 feet vertically had caused the coffee to appreciate in value by about 60 cents. a quick calculation aided by my abysmal math skills revealed that if and when they put a starbucks on a space station (they surely will) one cup will probably cost the same as your arm(your cybernetic arm that is). the extra 70 cents made no difference in taste but a thought popped into my head. i had to rate the baristas so my 'millions of readers' could benefit from my experience.

the next cuppa joe was at another starbucks rather strategically placed near a bus stand at the base of the space needle. the very fact that it was cheaper by 60 cents made it taste better but my study was not one that would be swayed by external factors. the taste and taste alone would matter. it was a different blend. they called it nutty flavored. my sensitive palette however detected no difference. thats when it struck me that i had to use a wasabi equivalent in order to wash my mouth of the previous cup's taste. enter some breath mints. the next cup took awhile. a bus ride up to the south side of the city took me to pioneer place. this quaint side of town had relatively fewer starbucks per sq inch and my next cup was at tully's. i liked this cup a lot. the chalk board above the counter described it as smooth and bold. i thought it smelled good and was not too watery. 3 cups gone and tully's had been the best cup by far.

if u r a coffee drinker you proably also know it is a diuretic which means that it dehydrates the body rather quickly. which means that in studies such as this it is not enough if you find where the next sample will come from, you'll also have to make sure and locate somewhere that the previous sample can be evacuated in a sanitary manner. thankfully the coffee shops provided such outlets. the next stop was at a seattle's best shop. by far the worst cup i'd had that day. it was too light and i found after ingesting half a cup that i hadnt noticed the choice of a darker blend. by now the study was far from scientific and lacked the meticulous journaling that seem to accompany such ventures. nevertheless i pressed on and located this neat little shop called juan valdez. i found later that juan is the colombian guy with the donkey who symbolizes colombian coffee the world over. the coffee was good i guess.my taste buds were too tired to even realise that the drink was hot. i'd reached the extremes of coffee intake for a day and so i reluctantly gave up.

so that was that folks.i liked tullys but have thankfully gone back to drinking free coffee at work. then today my friend pointed me to this article on the web. i havent read it yet, will go fetch a cup and sit down to read it at leisure.

it's all black and white

2006-02-27T21:40:00.000-08:00

(as usual i'm late, this time by a few weeks. of course it can all be a clever ploy to post about a topic long after everyone else has. of course you know that i am not that clever. as usual, i'm just late )

there are 3 kinds of movies in this world. and the plagiarism stops right there. you can't write about a movie like 'rang de' by lifting lines from it. there are many scenes that make you think and there are whole sequences that hit you where it hurts most (the heart, lads & lasses). the whole movie is as fresh as a review that lacks cliches comparing it to a rainbow of emotions. i don't deny the presence of emotions though since there is a message to deliver.but the message will probably linger much longer thanks to a fantastic group of messengers and a brilliant screenplay. obviously i don't envision hordes of youngsters turning into activists overnight. but i feel that the way message was delivered will appeal to some. it did to me.

i tend to play the music on a loop for about a week after i see any movie. i find that the visuals add a nice sub-dimension. with this soundtrack i was (pleasantly) surprised to find that most of my guesses about the songs' picturisation were wrong. it's an awesome soundtrack and prasoon joshi's lyrics complement the music very well as do the vivid images.

my brightest idea in a long while : deciding to see rang de basanti.

Would you like to update now ?

2006-02-06T16:46:00.000-08:00

keeping yourself updated is a pain. especially in this info age, do you really want to keep track of how much was spent on an ad in this year's superbowl or would you rather keep tabs on a friend you swapped stamps with in school? i say go for the former. i'm too lazy to call someone up and talk to them unless i really need something (like my weekly calls to my sis to repeatedly ask her for the same capsicum curry recipe...it's just easier to call her than write it down..besides if i'd made it edible at least once,i'd have probably written that recipe in stone). my best friends are those that call me to get me upto speed on their life. in the process i trust the info they gain abt me is also spread to other mutual friends thus eliminating the need for me to ever use the phone.

i'd go as far as to say that the rare call to a friend is actually quite interesting.it has an element of surprise. i hope one day i'll have a conversation that goes like this :
me : so what's up?
frnd : nothing much
me : so how's the carpal tunnel you were suffering from because of your excessive chatting at work?
frnd : gone..i switched jobs
me : where to?
frnd : remember i had a dream of running away and joining the circus
me : ada paavi
frnd : yup i'm now assistant ring master, jumbo circus, hoboken, nj (for now)
me : what? but how the heck did u wind up there with a masters in CS ?
frnd : my job experience da..after a few stories about how adeptly i'd handled my managers, they practically gave me the whip and threw me in the cage
me : wow!!..congrats da..so what's the pay and any perks?
frnd : the pay isn't too great , but i get to put my head in a lion's mouth, one of the trapeze artists said she wants to drop me from the top of the tent and one of these days i'm going to open up a couple of cages and see if we can create ligers at circuses.
me : hmmm...good luck da..hey you know what? maybe i could maintain a blog about your circus
frnd :(rather hurriedly)no..no..no blogs, we use only pamphlets da.

instead if i'd kept tabs on this guy, i'd have ended up listening to his whole transition from keyboard to whip, his tense interviews with the chimpanzees, the clowns and finally the lions themselves. in the end my surprise would've been minimal, not to mention the number of minutes i'd have lost that i could've spent usefully by updating this blog.er..not such a perfect analogy but you get the picture right.

so here's what all the ppl who know me have to absolutely know about me : i'm still the same. no change.well, i'd like to blog a bit more than i have o'er the past few days.but you never know, someday you might call me and catch me priming the nilagiri express's diesel engine as it leaves jolarpettai junction. the only blogging engine driver in tamilnadu. i wonder if the indian railways has a job profile for that on monster.

videopalooza

2006-01-24T20:54:00.000-08:00

my roomie said i should post more "useful" stuff and even gave me a suggestion. so even though i'm aeons late on the scene with regards to this particular thing, i shall not deny this request. but before that i'll put you through some pain. as someone said, long before this blog came to be, "no rain, no grain".

and as someone else also said, there are two kinds of technophiles in this world. some of you are early adopters. you jump on to the first trends as they slowly sprout from the ground . as the trends rise like magic beanstalks, you sit comfortable on the top and lend a helping hand to those below you, enabling them to get to the top and enjoy the view with you. some others among you lag behind a little. not by much, but you lounge around comfortable with your current settings. a little hesitant to jump arms akimbo onto a bandwagon that still maybe missing a wheel and whose destination is still unknown. you don't want to change unless forced to. given these 2 sets of people any technology that makes the second group adopt it as early as the first is likely to win the race.

enter google video. "old news" you say. yup it's been around for a while. but the content it carries has multiplied like rabbits to reach a mind boggling amount. a brief search yielded telugu wedding videos in 20 parts( i did not watch any of them..ok maybe part of 1), tamil movie scenes, not to mention the tons of sports clips. so many in such an uncategorised mess that even an obsessive compulsive organiser would just give up and start watching some of the videos. despite the megabytes of viewing pleasure, the interface is so simple that anyone can search and view videos. no annoying codecs or waiting for the video to download. and if the uploading is as simple as it seems, i expect the content to grow exponentially thus making everyone happy.

google has trained us well. it has drilled into us that the long textbox is not a mere html construct, but is in fact a genie capable of granting your every online wish. so go forth, command the genie and gently rub the Search button. may all your wishes come true.

p.s oh yeah i even found a video related to a golt movie i wrote about almost a year ago. search for takkari donga at your own risk

two movies and a birthday

2006-01-15T11:34:00.000-08:00

though it follows a group of mossad killers seeking retribution for the munich olympic village attack, munich is not about revenge. it is about people defending their home. told in a way that does not lend credence to either side, it's something like a filter that instead of separating the differences, shows the similarities in most bilateral fights going on in the world. two scenes got stuck in my head. one is when the mossad assassins are holed in a safe house waiting for their quarry to show up. fighters of the PLO who are there to meet the same guy also come to the safe house. for a brief moment there are guns pointing everywhere and after the confusion is resolved the 2 arch rivals share quarters for the night.the other scene follows immediately where the heads of the israeli fighters and the palestinian fighters talk about their struggles and we find it's all about having a place to call home.makes it quite difficult to take sides. i was immediately reminded of another movie that followed a bilateral issue. 'Roja' had an eerily similar scene where pankaj kapur in his broken tamil speaks about aazadi to arvind swamy. i liked munich for (once again) showing the human angle and for not taking sides. there are several cliches though(like an israeli and a palestinian settling for a common radio station) and one long scene towards the end where the protagonist's love making and flashbacks from the munich event intersect each other that just didnt make sense to me. it has a sort of abrupt ending and i think it was deliberately left hanging to indicate that there is no end for this conflict

the magnificent seven is about people defending their home too. a village hires a bunch of gunmen to protect them from the tyranny of a bandit. though i've seen this movie several times before, the thing i noticed anew during last night's viewing is the amazing amount of music in the movie. each scene has this score that is usually played when the camera slowly rises above a canyon's rim to show us a breathtaking view of the valley and then proceeds to focus on the lone horseman in its center. the movie isn't all guns and horses. it shows the human angle too. one of them has nightmares about his past coming back to kill him, another finds love in the village and the others after a life so close to death want to settle down and find home. all is well at the end of this movie though. the bandits are killed as are 4 of the 7.many westerns were inspired from samurai stories and it didnt surprise me at all to find out this story was lifted from a japanese film. it's still quite a fun watch but don't expect the classic western.

and my blog turns one on the 17th. i thought i'll make the anniversary post a gimmicky one. i had ideas of running a 'blast from the past' highlighting some of my posts from the archives but i'm too lazy to dig up those links. besides you are clever enough to find them yourself, right? i also thought i'd thank every one of my readers( all 5 of you :) ) and then type out a long list of my blog friends. this group is special cos i dont know any of them but i bet that if i met any of them in a chat room , i'd be able to identify them by their writing. ok that's a lie. if u want to meet any of them all you have to do is click on the links on the right. anyway thanks for hanging around. unfortunately for you i plan to keep writing. so like the old man says to the fighters who are about to ride off into the sunset:
vaya con dios
(i think it means "may god save you from this blog" though i have no idea why the old man said that)

escaped artist

2006-01-04T16:57:00.000-08:00

art continues to elude me to this day. my sister, like most other elder sisters who set the bar for the younger sibling, had a mini portfolio of her sketches and paintings by the time she was 11 or 12. whereas her art was a deliberate study in designs and colors, mine was more of the modern kind. i painted on cloth and for want of material my shorts and t-shirts would usually serve as canvas. the unidentifiable "dyes" that my play areas abounded in mixed chaotically on my clothes and imbued them with a unique fragrance that my sister's paintings never had. of course as most master painters, i too was much ahead of my time. my unappreciative mom with soap and water would quickly turn masterpiece into blank canvas only for me to start painting again.

as you've probably guessed, i was a school-fearing kid who studiously sat through the entire rigor a christian school imposed on one. i was lucky to be born with the skill to avoid direct eye contact with teachers and like many others experienced euphoria when fate chose to grant us a reprieve of a mere 40 minutes in the form of a sick teacher. drawing class was different. it was usually a riot whether the teacher was sick or not. i had this box of camel oil colors that came in really small tubes with tiny caps that looked like lilliputian toothpaste. most colors came out looking nothing like what the label indicated and the lemon yellow tube had a cap that was sealed to the tube. i discovered it was usable only after i ingeniously opened up the other end and promptly created "little drop of sun on white shirt". they had us draw strange things at that school. once we had to draw an angel fish , which to me was the simplest as it was white and all i had to do was trace an outline of the fish in black. that it turned out to look like the ghost of an octopus was well noted by my teacher who promptly issued a redraw. of course everything paled in comparison to the dreaded S.U.P.W where we were made to create paper roses and plaster of paris wall hangings. yup 8th standard boys making paper roses. have never really found out what was socially useful about that. after those 2 classes any art that was left in me, packed up its easels and moved on to artsier minds.

for some reason i really like architecture. before you jump to the conclusion it might've been rand's tale of roark that caused this turn, i'll step in and clarify that its more of an art vandelay kind of a thing. and by extension i like any art that captures architecture. i was recently touring the web on a search engine when i came upon these 2 guys who toured india a long time ago and captured some beautiful images on canvas. several ancient structures posed as subjects for these fellas and one in particular was to my liking. so here you go, for your patience in reading so far : some free art.

and if you do know of sketches and paintings of the ancient architectural kind, drop me a line will ya ? i'll thank you with all my art :)

gotcha!

2005-12-28T18:31:00.000-08:00

woah!! a month..and 6 days..that's how long it has taken me to return to my warm, cozy corner of the web. i've not been lazy though folks. i've been making stuff up. mostly words. there is this group of fantastic wordsmiths who've been kind enough to let me post on their/our blog. so while i google my puny brain for a memory worth exploiting, here let me goose you over to the wordmint for a gander.

and you thought this was a regular mile long post..ha

get a load of this

2005-11-22T17:05:00.000-08:00

regular programming resumes. opening the past-facing eye, i peered into my distant past once again. and just so you know its not all that distant. despite my regular "past"ing dont picture me in an armchair, white shawl matching the color of the few wisps in my head , puffing an ivory pipe and coughing intermittently while i reminisce thus. i said DONT. i spy (as usual) a small kid struggling with the burden that low school imposes on all its temporary prisoners. a canvas bag full of somewhat neatly brown-wrapped,labelled notebooks and tattered textbooks. that's me. i used to think of the 200 meters or so from my quarters' home to the quarters' school as my own epic journey with the cross. my cross of course being the canvas bag . with multiple front flaps that closed pockets that could at the most hold a breath of air. shoulder straps that were once the width of my pencil box had twisted themselves into helices the width of dna strands thus causing the maximum stress on a 10 year old's shoulders. still i liked that bag. it was way better than the aluminium boxes that some kids used to lug to school (if you havent seen one of those, you are probably too young to be reading this).

when i moved to middle school, the workout increased. while i suggested switching to a meat-based diet to supplement my rapid muscle growth, my parents citing religious reasons simply upgraded me to the next level in backpack technology. so in sixth standard i was the proud owner of a waterproof duckback..in chennai. Ha! take that you pesky rare droplets of rain. waterproofing of course had no relation to load bearing capacity and within a couple of weeks, i came home dragging the backpack with one strap severed from its moorings on the bottom of the bag. i suggested hiring a few million ants. i'd just learnt they could carry 50 times their weight and our house already employed them to signal us when i spilt something on the floor. one small,high density schoolbag shouldn't really be a problem. turned down again. having expended my bag budget for the year, i had to get it repaired at a roadside shop. the guy there, fashion guru that he was, tore down the other strap and attached what he claimed were the most reliable bag straps ever. created by the goddess saraswati herself,so kids like me could bask in the glorious light of education. appositely they were in brilliant yellow and gave out this beatific glow that am pretty sure made me visible from outer space. he was right about one thing though. that strap lasted till the bag was in tatters and even now a piece of that strap lies somewhere in my home, with pieces of rats' teeth stuck to it.

my next few bags weren't in the same class as the duckback. some couldn't take the leaky pens i'd throw into the side pouches and would safely and securely transfer the ink onto my notes. a few others weren't made to be carried on one side as the style was in high school. their center of gravity pulled me to one side and everyone had to twist their head sideways while talking with me. i went through school causing no problems to the bag manufactures, ensuring them of a steady revenue till i reached college. that age of rebellion. i started making plans about the fuel to be used and checked the old newspaper supplies so i'd know the right composition of the bhogi bonfire to set the backpack alight. turned out that my college was just another school. albeit one without uniforms. and back to the bag it was.

(just one more paragraph and i'll stop, i promise). i've done a lot of absent-minded stupidity in my life. but i may yet be unable to beat my friend who used to sleep everyday in the college bus. he would get off on a stop before mine and it was my duty to awaken the kumbhakarnan from slumber. one day our fellow is over sleepy, almost misses his stop, wakes up, asks for some coffee and somehow gets pushed off the bus, still a little woozy. as i look at him standing there i realised that he does not have his bag. good friend that i am, i just assumed that he didnt bring the bag that day. turns out he did and it was apparently sitting right beside me for the 5 mins between his stop and mine. after a high-speed chase of the bus on a tvs champ, he finally caught up with it in the depot and rescued his precious. an olive green bag containing an empty stainless steel lunch box. now what do you think my next post is going to be about :)

the most useful post here, ever

2005-11-20T15:48:00.000-08:00

since you've pretty much gotten nothing for being such a loyal reader i thought i'd make it up to you and post about something that is fast becoming public knowledge on the blogosphere. to give credit where its due, i came across this atSepia mutiny and then saw another post over at anti's fortress of gregaritude.

this is what i did today. went to GVtamilfilms.com registered for free, chose to download Agni Nakshatram (for free again...its among the 20 or so titles that are up for grabs) and am watching it as i write. it took me about 2 mins to register and about 10 to 15 mins to download the 3 wmv movie files. its not dvd quality as they promise on the website but its much better than that vcd quality crap that floats on various websites. they have a motley collection of titles, many of which belong to the time before asin was born. but hey they are free for now.

so go forth and enjoy the utility of this blog for now. it's a rather limited time offer.

black as hell,strong as death,sweet as love

2005-11-08T15:18:00.000-08:00

i'm a coffee drinker. wait, i take that back. i'm more like a mochaholic. if i knew swimming i'd probably be diving off a high board into slightly lukewarm coffee. i dont know who got me started me on this stuff but till i did i was the poster child for complan. like the very nice complan boy, i too took off vertically achieving heights that few in my family had ever achieved. in fact when I was in my teens my mom ditched the step stool and ottada kucchi(the long stick with a broom attached to the end that'd remove cobwebs) and used me instead. once i reached the elevation where the loft was within my arm's reach, they promptly discontinued the rather expensive complan and switched me to the even more expensive coffee lest i get tired while working thus.

i fell for the trick quite easily. coffee was nice. the smell of filter coffee and the distinct sound that a full tumbler made as it clanked on the bottom of the davara were enough cues for me to wake up in the mornings. now i'm still talking abt the pre-qwiky era when the only hot drink that was cool enough to be drunk outside was a nair kadai single chaya. when i got to the US, i went through the experimental stage and tasted various beverages of varying temperatures and alcohol content. and when i finally turned to coffee at my host's place i hit the tasteless wall of instant coffee. having repeatedly seen that ad where arvind swamy happily gallops away to office after drinking this filter coffee doppelganger, i'd figured it wouldn't be that bad. little did i know that he was running from this crystallized abomination. i refused to believe in the granules as a manifestation of the supreme nectar and stopped drinking it.

it was at the height of my non-caffeinated stupor that someone pointed out a starbucks. i went in, ponied up my lunch money for a cafe latte (the menu has the right accents in the right places) and then promptly decided i would be a long term investor in the company. while the baristas smiled sweetly and swiped my credit card till the black strip wore off, my money mixed with theirs like coffee and low-fat soy milk. lattes and mochas and frappys took pleasure trips on my blood stream till one day ,out of purely non-monetary reasons (yeah right), i decided to try the coffee of the day. and hey with a little milk and about 6 or 7 packets of cane sugar it wasnt bad at all. i soon got back to eating lunch

i've moved on from starbucks since. i even subject myself to instant coffee as long as it has enough sugar in it to give the mug cavities. but like the millions of coffee lovers i'm thoroughly addicted to the bean to the point where i can probably snort it. Step 1 of the mocaholics mysterious: "I admit that i am powerless over the potent mix of dark french roast with skim milk." Having sampled most of the decoctions that the midwest has to offer, i'm sure i've tasted the worst cuppa joe's. it was at a burger joint that i won't name. but the best coffee, i havent had that one yet. a fine italian restaurant came quite close but it was still missing something. maybe i'll brew it myself . so in a few years when local.google.com hits chennai, look up "Okka Mocha" (TM). that's where i will be , davara in one hand, tumbler in another, serving up the best brew to chennai's millions.

compare and contrast

2005-10-25T16:36:00.000-07:00

it was towards the last part of my drive that I started noticing it. The long beams thrown out by the headlights of the oncoming vehicles pierced my brain like pins entering a cushion. silent and painless. they reacted with my cells changing them more than my own thoughts could.the fusion caused my brain to burst out releasing metaphors like the many offices ejecting workers at the stroke of 5. there were metaphors of all kinds. some as colorful as the expletives uttered by our honorable members of the legislative assembly. some were plain like white text on black paper. a few were unnecessarily long like oscar acceptance speeches. and a few succinct like mani ratnam's dialogs. but among all of them one stood out like a sore thumb. it was the one comparing my mistake to that of an unlicensed poet:
"these are not metaphors, you fool, all of these are similes"

early morning nirvana

2005-10-04T04:39:00.000-07:00

things are invented regularly. more than anything else purpose determines their design. and if you dig a little deeper, the purpose is almost always determined by something that already exists in nature. and thats just a way of taking a trip around the moon and then saying we copy shamelessly. being "cleverly designed", we conveniently use a saying that justifies means and the collective human conscience is appeased. besides nature can't sue us for plagiarising, can it?

one such amazing creation (like many others) probably had its seed in one of the -asic eras. the caveman had been enjoying peaceful sleep after devouring a rather rare bear stroganoff when he was woken up by this hideous sound. he woke up and ventured out of his cave to discover the yellow ball slowly climbing from between twin mountain peaks. the very picture that would later become the template for every 2nd standard student's drawings. he looked around for the source of the sound and found this most regal of birds standing on a rock. it was brown and had a brilliant red crown on its head and when it opened its beak to render what it thought was melody, the hideous sound emanated again. he admired the beauty for a moment,carefully took aim and flung a stone, missing the bird and his breakfast at the same time. but this memory imprinted itself in his genes and evolved till finally a rather evil scientist invented the alarm clock(yeah thats how subtly i state the obvious).but this post is about something that followed.

going back in the past again. the next morning the same thing happened and it repeated again and again for centuries and our Man evolved on the side.his work load increased significantly and one morning our guy wanted to sleep-in while the bird continued to alarm (covering the name origin angle ppl) him without stopping its cries. a strange combination of his half-awakened rage and the rooster's concentration on screaming its crown off, meant the stone thrown by our man knocked the rooster out cold. only temporarily though. it was back at its crowing best within a few minutes. but in those few minutes our man experienced the sleep of gods. this too went into the gene pool's memory banks and aeons later the evil scientist met his nemesis. the snooze button.

in the dark early morning hours when dreams are projecting your fantasies in amazing technicolor and 5.1 Dolby surround sound, evil lurks outside in the form of the alarm clock. and when the hour strikes, succor is at arm's length. and as you press it down, remember this quote by an anonymous soul who no doubt experienced the pleasure of the snooze button :
"Your future depends on your dreams.
So go to sleep"

happy snoozing

a moving story

2005-09-21T17:55:00.000-07:00

several days ago i woke up, stretched till my long hands hit the ceiling and then yawned loudly making a sound that resembled a certain dialect of ape. it was a good day to blog and i promptly did the first thing that years of grad school have trained me to do. i put off blogging for another day. and that day is today

the time off helped. first i found that my body didnt consider paper a foreign substance not having felt it for ages. and though my fingers and wrist had evolved into the best possible conformation for typing , i was able to reverse a bit and take up a book or two. i went with the mammoth harry potter first (found a typo in one of the starting pages, so found i could still spell), used a few of the narnia ones for breaks. yeah i know. mostly juvenile stuff but good fun still. i'm now going through a few crichtons that i missed. i bought that bill bryson 'history of the earth' book but i fear it might be too heavy right now. if u have any other recos do throw them across.

oh yeah i moved a few miles north as well. but i still consider chicago home, so that's that. new place. new people.and more folks to whom i need to explain my food habits. its become a little tiring to say the least. "so you are vegetarian eh? " . " yup" . " do you eat fish? " . "no". "what abt other seafood". "no, but i eat eggs". "hmm interesting. what abt caviar". "no". "but they are fish eggs". "never thought abt that". stumped. what is more confusing for the questioner is the reason for my lack of appetite for well roasted meat. i've repeatedly failed to explain sufficiently the link between my religion and my food habits. anyone know why a certain sect of hindus stopped eating meat a long time ago? for once i'm a little lazy to google it myself. got to get back to reading. the sphere beckons. later

the dog ate my blog

2005-08-26T13:36:00.000-07:00

yup if u can believe it thats the best excuse i could come up with.doesnt matter that i dont have a dog, not even a nintendog. you wouldn't have believed my other excuse of suffering from temporary dyslexia of the kind where one forgets long blog addresses. i had to learn language all over again, competed in a spelling bee with a few 7 year old south asian kids and i lost out spelling T-E-S-T-O-S-T-E-R-O-N-E.

i was doing other far less interesting things when i could've written abt the time when my cycle was swallowed alive during the night by a giant robot that needed the grease (or at least thats what my parents told me). turns out its going to take some more time for me to reorganize and sort my brain and remove the cobwebs that've been woven between the links on the right.

but as one of the future great rulers of this noble country so succinctly put it :
"ah'll be bach"

add arizona to that list

2005-08-15T16:41:00.000-07:00

a week without the net and i am still alive.i didnt jump off mather's point or the abyss in search of a wi-fi signal. just a couple of quick thoughts and i'll be gone :

in vegas the party is still going on with no sign of relent. i wrote about it at length(measured in meters) after my first visit but will not subject you to the worst travel writing ever. did get to the top of the stratosphere at last. also learnt to navigate the side streets of vegas like a vegas cabbie.

the grand canyon is incomprehensibly vast. probably the closest i'll ever come to experiencing the Total Perspective Vortex. at most points it was quite difficult to assess the depths/heights. google didnt reveal where shankar shot that song for jeans so had to skip the idea of asking ash to go out there for a run around the stubby bushes.

unfortunately a digital camera fell into my hands and the total mayhem that resulted was like a version of die hard with cameras instead of guns. i went about like bruce willis shooting his enemies behind, above and all around him without aiming. my (t)rusty slr was there too and made a case for its instant execution by running out of film just as the sun was rising over the canyon. after such a long break, it'll take me a bit before i remember how to do things like uploading pics, so hang on for a bit.

stop the blog

2005-08-07T21:26:00.000-07:00

i've been thinking and thats a pretty rare occurence. nevertheless i've been thinking about my blogging and i've realised that all i've really blogged abt has been about my past memories (u'd say DUH and i concur ). but the point is that many of my memories have jumped from being mere encoded neural connections to the physical realm taking the shape of a collection of words. no longer are they vague and hidden in a corner of my mind only to be woken up by a smell, sound or visual cue. they are now monsters on their own, roaming the blogworld scaring the wits off anyone who comes here looking for some decent writing. whats more scary is that i still have some more dormant in my head.

there are some consequences to this permanent form i've given them. lets say in a few years or decades i attend a family get together. having been blessed with some nice genes i volunteer myself and my memories to entertain the assembled masses and start to recollect how i was once saved by unhygenix from near drowning and a niece interrupts saying 'oh is that the one where u pushed him down..we've heard that' . after affirming that fact i begin relating another of my spelling prowess only to have some other child ask "can we watch the live webcast of the India vs Indiana cricket match now..we've read ur blog a thousand times after u made it compulsory reading for any child who knew the alphabet in the entire extended family". would i be happy that my blog could now suitably pass off as my clone or should i be sad that no one wants to listen to my stories any more?

another consequence is of course one that any blogger would be afraid of. what if someone steals my identity. its pretty easy. people can already comment as if they are someone else , so why cant some moron with no memories of his own steal mine. (the moron part of course quite obvious..who would want my memories in the first place). it would be like an old bad joke if i ran into him. he would be from the same country, city, street and house as i am but he would be like my evil version ( in all probability my good version). would i be worried that he has my identity or would i be more concerned about the fact that he gets more page hits than i do?

two many questions and not many answers. should i then stop this blog and save my memories from permanence ? the good consequences however may yet outweigh the bad. what if by some strange sequence of events i completely lose my memory? maybe the clever, beautiful lady doctor (who took me in from the fishermen who rescued me) would read my blog and then painstakingly relate it back to me while feeding me tomato soup ( no chicken stock pls). i'd probably do the same thing that many of our fillum heroes do - pretend that i dont recollect a single thing even after 6 months of tomato soup (double advantage, one more unique visitor to my page..HA). for all this to happen i need a way to convey my blog address to clever, beautiful lady doctors. if my memory serves me right a new tattoo parlor opened up down the street. i'm rushing there right now. how do u think textosterone.blogspot.com would look in a nice gothic font ? and once its inked in i'm going to have to stick it with it for a lil while.sigh. i guess i'll stick with this blog for a lil while too. lets see where it takes me and my not-so-fleeting memories.

english as the first language

2005-08-02T22:15:00.000-07:00

this conversation happened close to 12am . the scene - me & my 2 roomies at their lab, where i'm supposedly working on my thesis while they work on theirs. we decide to take a break to get a drink from a vending machine.3 cans and $2.25 later we are walking back. one roomie has his can open, other roomie and i are struggling hard to get our cans open. thirsty and lazy, we hand our cans over to him. he opens both with relative ease. i start referring to an age old joke

me : you got it open cos of the shri ram factor

roomie1 : whats that

me : roomie2 and i'd already put a lot of effort trying to open it and we gave up just before we could get it open. all you did was put a little more effort into it and got it to open

roomie1 : so what is the shri ram factor

me : in sita's swayamvara, all those other kings tried breaking the bow one by one and successively increased the stress on the bow. when shri ram finally stepped up, the bow was almost broken. all he had to do was touch it and it crumbled instantly

roomie1 : the point is why did shri ram's turn come only towards the end after all the others?

me : maybe they were going in the alphabetic order..i mean "s" does come towards the end of the alphabet right ?

roomie2 : so they already knew english during the time of ramayana ?

at last count each of us had a masters degree in engineering