ay dappankuthu !! uttalakdi !

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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.