Shakti , age 1.5 , size 40gb , master volume and storage device of arun kedarinathan spun its disks one last time and gave up with a final wheeze at 10.11pm CST on June 29 2005.
Shakti is survived by a 2 month old 4gb ipod mini and a cheap free-after-rebate 128MB jump drive neither of which, while containing part of it's soul, can never replace it.its extra-brilliant owner who often refers to answers.com for word meanings, has now added one more word to his vocabulary.
backup
Additional resources or duplicate copies of data on different storage media for emergency purposes.
he plans to use this new word in many sentences in the near future or in just one sentence repeatedly viz. "i lost all my files because i didnt take a backup".
services will be performed on a future date. a fund has been established in shakti's name for the "purchase a new 200gb hard disk for arun kedarinathan" program. blogging will be suspended for a brief period, while this mac user works hard at re-acclimatizing with windows.(yeah its a bad excuse for not blogging..i've killed several windows machines as well, though its a comparatively easier task.)
Wednesday, June 29, 2005
Friday, June 24, 2005
a quick tale
the bite
there it was again. this bug was spreading faster than others. this one did not wait for the infected one to contact someone else. normal, sane people were succumbing to this bug one after another for no apparent reason. he clicked on a couple more, experienced instant gratification a couple of more times and with a sigh logged on to his blog and started typing "a qui.."
there are a lot of good ones where it all started, in this filthy, funny, flawed,gorgeous blog and all over in infected blogs. unfortunately for you brevity is not the soul of my blog. you will never know how i restrained myself from making this post a 30 chapter book filled with metaphors and past incidents where bugs have bitten me. i'll stop before this post nullifies its title.
there it was again. this bug was spreading faster than others. this one did not wait for the infected one to contact someone else. normal, sane people were succumbing to this bug one after another for no apparent reason. he clicked on a couple more, experienced instant gratification a couple of more times and with a sigh logged on to his blog and started typing "a qui.."
there are a lot of good ones where it all started, in this filthy, funny, flawed,gorgeous blog and all over in infected blogs. unfortunately for you brevity is not the soul of my blog. you will never know how i restrained myself from making this post a 30 chapter book filled with metaphors and past incidents where bugs have bitten me. i'll stop before this post nullifies its title.
Wednesday, June 22, 2005
a general theory of distant relativity
to sum it all up, math totalled me and the chemistry just wasnt there. but physics had a gravitational pull of its own. i'm an engineer by degree. i'm not sure if thats euphemism for geek or if geek is cooler these days. but if one were to extrapolate based on that fact, the conclusion would be that i had an interest for physics in high school.an interest that was exceeded only by a desire to become a board of education director and abolish certain math topics from the syllabus.
physics was glorious if i left out the proofs and equations that one was expected to memorise and churn out.my physics teacher in high school did the best to make us like it. he would liken a capacitor to a member of a tribal group and when they were in series, he would demonstrate, it was like a bunch of them holding hands and performing a tribal dance around an imaginary fire. while the description was pretty good as a memory aid, come exam time all i could think of was groups of male and female capacitors dancing in colorful costumes, feathers on their plates and some beating on drums. the equations were forgotten and even if i remembered some,i would often miss out mentioning units which in high school translates into exactly zero marks. describing the series capacitance equation as an item number probably didnt help much either.
college physics was much better. it should be mentioned that my college unlike others in india was a total party school.in fact it merits a post on its own..maybe some other day. but yeah, total party all the time.but due to the weird laws of physics governing engineering school seating arrangements, no matter how we tried, the girls always ended up on one side of the party, segregated from the boys. apart from the fact that we were made to sit in class from 9 to 5 , it was like a huge carnival without the tents and the rides and the jolliness. to convey how easily college can kick high school's ass, we were assigned 2 chemistry teachers and 3 physics lecturers in our first year. these guys were not ones to joke about the subject though. no singing or dancing. more work for my right arm as they competed with each other at breaking the official black-board speed writing records. we were like pythons, swallowing all that crap as a whole and regurgitating it on exam sheets spelling mistakes intact. yeah we skipped the digestion part. we were clever pythons. thermodynamics, acoustics, optics - all words that we were fluent with in high school merely represented different huge notebooks that reflected the blackboard. one such "ic" pursued me for 3 more years forcing me to learn and then participate in capacitive and then resistive tribal dances. that i managed to escape with an electonics degree was largely as a result of dancing in a huge crowd where my 2 left feet went unnoticed.
i'm done with physics for life. praise should indeed to go those 3 lecturers of my college who caused recurring nightmares in which schrodinger's cat and einstein were tag-teaming against me in a wrestling ring. if not for them i'd have become something pretty cool like a quantum physicist or an astrologist.
physics was glorious if i left out the proofs and equations that one was expected to memorise and churn out.my physics teacher in high school did the best to make us like it. he would liken a capacitor to a member of a tribal group and when they were in series, he would demonstrate, it was like a bunch of them holding hands and performing a tribal dance around an imaginary fire. while the description was pretty good as a memory aid, come exam time all i could think of was groups of male and female capacitors dancing in colorful costumes, feathers on their plates and some beating on drums. the equations were forgotten and even if i remembered some,i would often miss out mentioning units which in high school translates into exactly zero marks. describing the series capacitance equation as an item number probably didnt help much either.
college physics was much better. it should be mentioned that my college unlike others in india was a total party school.in fact it merits a post on its own..maybe some other day. but yeah, total party all the time.but due to the weird laws of physics governing engineering school seating arrangements, no matter how we tried, the girls always ended up on one side of the party, segregated from the boys. apart from the fact that we were made to sit in class from 9 to 5 , it was like a huge carnival without the tents and the rides and the jolliness. to convey how easily college can kick high school's ass, we were assigned 2 chemistry teachers and 3 physics lecturers in our first year. these guys were not ones to joke about the subject though. no singing or dancing. more work for my right arm as they competed with each other at breaking the official black-board speed writing records. we were like pythons, swallowing all that crap as a whole and regurgitating it on exam sheets spelling mistakes intact. yeah we skipped the digestion part. we were clever pythons. thermodynamics, acoustics, optics - all words that we were fluent with in high school merely represented different huge notebooks that reflected the blackboard. one such "ic" pursued me for 3 more years forcing me to learn and then participate in capacitive and then resistive tribal dances. that i managed to escape with an electonics degree was largely as a result of dancing in a huge crowd where my 2 left feet went unnoticed.
i'm done with physics for life. praise should indeed to go those 3 lecturers of my college who caused recurring nightmares in which schrodinger's cat and einstein were tag-teaming against me in a wrestling ring. if not for them i'd have become something pretty cool like a quantum physicist or an astrologist.
Monday, June 20, 2005
(re)verse gear
i was planning on posting this the day after my previous post. but a few world-altering events happened after that..australia lost to bangladesh in a ODI, only 6 cars started the US F1 race to which i almost went and this blog was reviewed in the Indian Express by a reviewer i do not know. you'll just have to take my word for it, it was in the magazine section of the paper edition and yeah i dont understand the logic of doing a blog review on paper either..but i'm glad to see my blog mentioned anywhere.
since this microbe of a blog is now under the microscope of some n readers, i thought i'll hold back my original post and put up something that fits the description in the review more. but you know what its my blog.
first a little introduction to what i'm about to do. chapter 7 of the hitch hikers guide to the galaxy begins :
given how H2G2 is revered all over and now that its a movie and all, its time that i laid claim to that most undesired of titles. so here is my entry for all of you to judge. it was written ages ago and lay covered under layers of dust when i found it in the archives of my mailbox.
Lust
Like molten gold
your form pours
through my senses,
filling them.
a monument to seduce my mind
a beauty melted and reshaped into perfection
am i a satyr?
so go ahead and let me know...if you were at the counter of the department of english literature, would i get a poetic license or would you confiscate my keyboard and give me the undesired title?
the poem ended up there..these 2 lines are not part of it
since this microbe of a blog is now under the microscope of some n readers, i thought i'll hold back my original post and put up something that fits the description in the review more. but you know what its my blog.
first a little introduction to what i'm about to do. chapter 7 of the hitch hikers guide to the galaxy begins :
" Vogon poetry is of course the third worst in the Universe. The second worst is that of the Azagoths of Kria.......The very worst poetry of all perished along with its creator Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings of Greenbridge, Essex, England in the destruction of the planet Earth. "
given how H2G2 is revered all over and now that its a movie and all, its time that i laid claim to that most undesired of titles. so here is my entry for all of you to judge. it was written ages ago and lay covered under layers of dust when i found it in the archives of my mailbox.
Lust
Like molten gold
your form pours
through my senses,
filling them.
a monument to seduce my mind
a beauty melted and reshaped into perfection
am i a satyr?
so go ahead and let me know...if you were at the counter of the department of english literature, would i get a poetic license or would you confiscate my keyboard and give me the undesired title?
the poem ended up there..these 2 lines are not part of it
Friday, June 17, 2005
bloggers on blogging
as a blogger i'm interested in feedback..heck i'll be honest and let you know that i've spent hours refreshing the page to see if there have been comments. i also like responding to comments..it makes for a good conversation. you are obviously interested in what i wrote( or not if u r one of those who i threatened into commenting) and thats more incentive for me to keep writing. i'll stop the lesson here.i didnt really want to don my professorial glasses and become the most boring blogger any side of the atlantic.
the point is that conversations are good. monologs...hmm..not so much. so when a not so random set of bloggers convened to answer a few questions about blogging, it quickly became an interesting conversation. for once its not about my boring past and for once i shall drop the silly metaphors .instead i'll point you to a very well sewn tapestry of all the bloggers' answer threads on ifaqs.blogspot.com.
whats in it for me ? nada..nothin..zilch..emi ledhu. just that i was one of those bloggers who sent in answers..and as a blogger i'm just interested in one thing..my ad revenue.oops.sorry for the typo. i meant your feedback
whats in it for you ? an insight into what bloggers think they are doing..a look into what blogs mean to us in this networked world. u can either agree or disagree..in the comments section of course and thats not the only post there..there is tons of brain food. links to articles that will make you think, to blogs that you should be reading right now.
check it out and leave some comments..i might just have the apt reward when you come back here. i'll give you a hint : its something that may defeat Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings and the vogons
go here : ifaqs
the point is that conversations are good. monologs...hmm..not so much. so when a not so random set of bloggers convened to answer a few questions about blogging, it quickly became an interesting conversation. for once its not about my boring past and for once i shall drop the silly metaphors .instead i'll point you to a very well sewn tapestry of all the bloggers' answer threads on ifaqs.blogspot.com.
whats in it for me ? nada..nothin..zilch..emi ledhu. just that i was one of those bloggers who sent in answers..and as a blogger i'm just interested in one thing..my ad revenue.oops.sorry for the typo. i meant your feedback
whats in it for you ? an insight into what bloggers think they are doing..a look into what blogs mean to us in this networked world. u can either agree or disagree..in the comments section of course and thats not the only post there..there is tons of brain food. links to articles that will make you think, to blogs that you should be reading right now.
check it out and leave some comments..i might just have the apt reward when you come back here. i'll give you a hint : its something that may defeat Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings and the vogons
go here : ifaqs
Wednesday, June 15, 2005
this post is injurious to health
i'm thankful to the govt of india for having cleansed the silver screen and getting rid of all that black smoke. i was beginning to have problems seeing the item number's face through all that haze. while we are on the topic, i'd also like to highlight several pertinent yet ignored aspects that the government should consider. the very obvious has now been removed from sight but the subliminal messages that the evil movie makers have been sending need to be carefully taken out of the equation lest they corrupt the movie-goer's mind and remind him/her of the tar monster
first of all , brand names.we'll start with scissors , no more scissors in any scene, even if it is the murder weapon of choice for a serial killer..additionally consider banning the scissor kick from being shown during the football world cup telecast next year. there shall be no gold (no more treasure movies :( ) or flakes (even if they are snow flakes) or kings(if it is an english epic, the word king shall be replaced with the rather safe and harmless 'raja')
there shall be no wills ( rama has to find something else to break in tamil translations of the ramayana, "will and grace" shall henceforth be called "dhill and grace")
and no more governor or khaja(whatever that means..i know its a beedi brand thats all) character in movies
thats as many brand names as this non-smoker can remember - oh yeah no camels either.
then the words associated with the evil, injurious,death causing habit. no more butts. yup though it will make me extremely sad and may cause several youth to pay attention to unimportant aspects such as acting and dialogs. no buts either,the phonetic similarity is too much to ignore. theatres shud be banned from selling puffs, the snack that has long been associated with intervals. you know what people do during intervals. they come out and take a long puff after getting reminded to do so by those puff-laden trays on the counters. thats actually two bans in one bill, considering that the puffs by themselves are probably more injurious to health than cigarette smoke.
i'm not done yet, but i have to go do some work. i'm writing an algorithm that when coupled with a smoke detector will automatically scan reels of film for the occurence of any of the above keywords and will instantly send notification to shri anbumani ramadoss.it will also obscure those illegal occurences with square black pixels and add a bright red warning that says : "smoke karne wale, thera mooh kala"
gosh i have to beat those guys on the bench at infosys.considering how hard-working they are , they might have thought of this one already.
first of all , brand names.we'll start with scissors , no more scissors in any scene, even if it is the murder weapon of choice for a serial killer..additionally consider banning the scissor kick from being shown during the football world cup telecast next year. there shall be no gold (no more treasure movies :( ) or flakes (even if they are snow flakes) or kings(if it is an english epic, the word king shall be replaced with the rather safe and harmless 'raja')
there shall be no wills ( rama has to find something else to break in tamil translations of the ramayana, "will and grace" shall henceforth be called "dhill and grace")
and no more governor or khaja(whatever that means..i know its a beedi brand thats all) character in movies
thats as many brand names as this non-smoker can remember - oh yeah no camels either.
then the words associated with the evil, injurious,death causing habit. no more butts. yup though it will make me extremely sad and may cause several youth to pay attention to unimportant aspects such as acting and dialogs. no buts either,the phonetic similarity is too much to ignore. theatres shud be banned from selling puffs, the snack that has long been associated with intervals. you know what people do during intervals. they come out and take a long puff after getting reminded to do so by those puff-laden trays on the counters. thats actually two bans in one bill, considering that the puffs by themselves are probably more injurious to health than cigarette smoke.
i'm not done yet, but i have to go do some work. i'm writing an algorithm that when coupled with a smoke detector will automatically scan reels of film for the occurence of any of the above keywords and will instantly send notification to shri anbumani ramadoss.it will also obscure those illegal occurences with square black pixels and add a bright red warning that says : "smoke karne wale, thera mooh kala"
gosh i have to beat those guys on the bench at infosys.considering how hard-working they are , they might have thought of this one already.
Monday, June 13, 2005
a cook in time
yet another search and rescue mission. my five years here have seen quite a few of this. this time though it was a matter of rice and death. i'll have you know that i'm the undisputed rice-cooking champion of the upper midwest south indian male graduate students association. among other traits that south indian males do NOT inherit from their moms is the ability to take raw rice and water and make it something edible. but its our staple food and sambar and rasam take back bench in deference for there can be no magic without the manna. so we start trying from a very early age (ie the day we step into the haloed apt kitchens and find out the flame is now a red,glowing electric coil). after 4 years of flying lids, whistling cookers and pasty white globs that are just one big,fused carbohydrate molecule i started to come into my own. i was conferred the title of l33t rice-geek by my roomies and promptly garnered the requisite CMM and six sigma certification. this caused rice making to become one of my primary duties and the art form that it was, it was a challenge, day after day, to come up with the quality that i'd made standard. it was an even bigger challenge yesterday, when i found that the all important weight/whistle had deserted me and gone awol.
if in all those words above , "whistling cookers" caught your fancy , there is some explanation in order. why not , you may ask, just go with an electric rice cooker like all those other grad students ? no spare parts that are small enough to get lost in the hell hole, all you need to do is plug and play. there are quite a few reasons but let me explain it in the worst way possible - through an unrelated metaphor. lets say you travel a lot by train. you go from madras to bangalore or hyderabad or wherever it is that you want to go in a train pulled by a electric locomotive. sitting inside one you really dont know what is pulling the train, the journey is quite immaterial and the destination is all that matters. now think of a trip from mettupalayam to ooty. the train is pulled by a steam locomotive. unless you are a ruthless serial killer hunting your next victim or you know that you are the next victim of a ruthless serial killer riding the train with you, you are bound to love the ride up the mountain with all the smoke and whistles. cooking with a pressure cooker as opposed to an electric one is somewhat exactly like that (due credit to mr.douglas adams for that line). you enjoy the sounds that scare your neighbors into thinking you have some sort of a mechanical monster and the sights that turn your kitchen into something that resembles a cloud gently invading a walkway in ooty. another reason is that i like giving out subliminal nods to things i enjoy, like heavy metal, and going by weight alone its tough to beat a Prestige in that category (ok..bad reason..sorry ). so steam beats electric and thats settled.
coming back to the weight, the rice was already on the heated coil and i was beginning to get flustered. timing was of utmost importance in my secret process and if things didnt go well i'd just have to start all over again. i ran through a mental checklist of what had happened after my extremely rigorous ritual of cleaning the leviathan vessel. the weight had to be in the corner of the drawer but it wasnt. i stole a glance at my roomie who was busy perfecting his version of a golt rasam for certification and decided against accusing him. it took all my knowledge of poirot and holmes to deduce that there was a possibility that the weight which can balance itself fairly well when vertical might've fallen on its side and rolled off into the deep recesses of my kitchen's closet and there it was , slightly dusty but still ready to face action.dinner was saved. my process is still intact , but the pressure has gotten to me. if only i could find a way to apply the same template to other south indian favorites. something tells me it wont work that way, the variables will change. so i'm stuck without an option unless.., unless the weight "accidentally" falls down from my window when i am doing a close visual inspection in daylight. something tells me its either going to be frozen parathas or sticky rice from lao sze chuan for dinner tonight.
lagniappe : madman has a restaurant..so he knows best. since my process is classified, i'm sure he wont mind if i direct you to his.
if in all those words above , "whistling cookers" caught your fancy , there is some explanation in order. why not , you may ask, just go with an electric rice cooker like all those other grad students ? no spare parts that are small enough to get lost in the hell hole, all you need to do is plug and play. there are quite a few reasons but let me explain it in the worst way possible - through an unrelated metaphor. lets say you travel a lot by train. you go from madras to bangalore or hyderabad or wherever it is that you want to go in a train pulled by a electric locomotive. sitting inside one you really dont know what is pulling the train, the journey is quite immaterial and the destination is all that matters. now think of a trip from mettupalayam to ooty. the train is pulled by a steam locomotive. unless you are a ruthless serial killer hunting your next victim or you know that you are the next victim of a ruthless serial killer riding the train with you, you are bound to love the ride up the mountain with all the smoke and whistles. cooking with a pressure cooker as opposed to an electric one is somewhat exactly like that (due credit to mr.douglas adams for that line). you enjoy the sounds that scare your neighbors into thinking you have some sort of a mechanical monster and the sights that turn your kitchen into something that resembles a cloud gently invading a walkway in ooty. another reason is that i like giving out subliminal nods to things i enjoy, like heavy metal, and going by weight alone its tough to beat a Prestige in that category (ok..bad reason..sorry ). so steam beats electric and thats settled.
coming back to the weight, the rice was already on the heated coil and i was beginning to get flustered. timing was of utmost importance in my secret process and if things didnt go well i'd just have to start all over again. i ran through a mental checklist of what had happened after my extremely rigorous ritual of cleaning the leviathan vessel. the weight had to be in the corner of the drawer but it wasnt. i stole a glance at my roomie who was busy perfecting his version of a golt rasam for certification and decided against accusing him. it took all my knowledge of poirot and holmes to deduce that there was a possibility that the weight which can balance itself fairly well when vertical might've fallen on its side and rolled off into the deep recesses of my kitchen's closet and there it was , slightly dusty but still ready to face action.dinner was saved. my process is still intact , but the pressure has gotten to me. if only i could find a way to apply the same template to other south indian favorites. something tells me it wont work that way, the variables will change. so i'm stuck without an option unless.., unless the weight "accidentally" falls down from my window when i am doing a close visual inspection in daylight. something tells me its either going to be frozen parathas or sticky rice from lao sze chuan for dinner tonight.
lagniappe : madman has a restaurant..so he knows best. since my process is classified, i'm sure he wont mind if i direct you to his.
Tuesday, June 07, 2005
paperback reader
as i watched this meme spread through the blogworld, i was wondering if i'll ever be tagged. suhail was the one who came out of the closet (no not that one..apparently he is a closet fan of my writing) and tagged me. since he also said nice things about my writing, i shall oblige...thanks for the tag, dude.
Total number of books I own: around 10 - 20 here, around the same number back home. after i discovered that there are places that give out books for free here, i stopped buying them..hey i'm just a student living in a not-so-cheap city. being frugal about things like books and lunch allow me to have the odd drink every day
Last Book that I Bought : must be that Calvin and Hobbes i got abt 2 years back, but i gave it away without reading..so it must be the lord of the rings i got in dec 2001 from odyssey, adyar...sigh
Last Book I Read : State of Fear , Michael Crichton sometime in Mar 05..got this and the selfish gene from the library, intending to multitask...took abt a day and a half for state of fear..selfish gene went back after 6 chapters because it was overdue and someone else wanted it more than i did
Books that mean a lot to me (at least five) :
what does this question mean anyway? if there was any lesson to be learnt from the books that i read, it was that i have to return them on time or pay a fine.. the ones that are listed here are the ones that got stuck in memory..there are others that i thought would make me seem geeky yet cool, bookish yet suave, smart and sexy all at the same time but they are all taken. damn all u bloggers who really read those books. most my posts are from the past , lets start from there :
the mystery of the stuttering parrot - the 3 investigators..jupiter jones, pete crenshaw and the bob guy kept me amused through many a summer vacation..but for some reason i remember more of this mystery than the others
H2G2 : cos its funny. i like to think my life is being run by mice...its much easier to give up and blame it all on them..i've only managed to read the first book in the trilogy and till the bit about elevators that knew abt the future from the second
lord of the rings : all that detail.i'm fascinated by really small,irrelevant details about anything. and am a huge fantasy/sci-fi fan. LOTR is easily the best combination of both these trivial interests of mine.
i,robot : a set of short stories each of which is a logically beautiful puzzle..i "solved" one of them as i was reading and am still patting my back for having done so . sci-fi rocks.
i'm finding it very tough to come up with a fifth book..i want to list 'ponniyin selvan' but i am still on the 4th book in that series and at the rate i can read tamil its going to take at least a year more to complete this and then the 5th book. i enjoyed reading the spy genre -ludlum,clancy and others- though none sticks out as being better than another. i also like some jeeves books, dont really remember any of them distinctly..i'll leave you with a couple of lines from one of them that i remembered and googled for..u have to get something in return for all this narcissistic crap :
It was a confusion of ideas between him and one of the lions he was hunting in Kenya that had caused A. B. Spottsworth to make the obituary column. He thought the lion was dead, and the lion thought it wasn't.
- from Ring for Jeeves
i've always been quite lazy , so if u've read this and are one of the few that are yet to post some form of this meme, by all means go ahead..in fact i'll even let you mention my blog as inspiration for the post
Total number of books I own: around 10 - 20 here, around the same number back home. after i discovered that there are places that give out books for free here, i stopped buying them..hey i'm just a student living in a not-so-cheap city. being frugal about things like books and lunch allow me to have the odd drink every day
Last Book that I Bought : must be that Calvin and Hobbes i got abt 2 years back, but i gave it away without reading..so it must be the lord of the rings i got in dec 2001 from odyssey, adyar...sigh
Last Book I Read : State of Fear , Michael Crichton sometime in Mar 05..got this and the selfish gene from the library, intending to multitask...took abt a day and a half for state of fear..selfish gene went back after 6 chapters because it was overdue and someone else wanted it more than i did
Books that mean a lot to me (at least five) :
what does this question mean anyway? if there was any lesson to be learnt from the books that i read, it was that i have to return them on time or pay a fine.. the ones that are listed here are the ones that got stuck in memory..there are others that i thought would make me seem geeky yet cool, bookish yet suave, smart and sexy all at the same time but they are all taken. damn all u bloggers who really read those books. most my posts are from the past , lets start from there :
the mystery of the stuttering parrot - the 3 investigators..jupiter jones, pete crenshaw and the bob guy kept me amused through many a summer vacation..but for some reason i remember more of this mystery than the others
H2G2 : cos its funny. i like to think my life is being run by mice...its much easier to give up and blame it all on them..i've only managed to read the first book in the trilogy and till the bit about elevators that knew abt the future from the second
lord of the rings : all that detail.i'm fascinated by really small,irrelevant details about anything. and am a huge fantasy/sci-fi fan. LOTR is easily the best combination of both these trivial interests of mine.
i,robot : a set of short stories each of which is a logically beautiful puzzle..i "solved" one of them as i was reading and am still patting my back for having done so . sci-fi rocks.
i'm finding it very tough to come up with a fifth book..i want to list 'ponniyin selvan' but i am still on the 4th book in that series and at the rate i can read tamil its going to take at least a year more to complete this and then the 5th book. i enjoyed reading the spy genre -ludlum,clancy and others- though none sticks out as being better than another. i also like some jeeves books, dont really remember any of them distinctly..i'll leave you with a couple of lines from one of them that i remembered and googled for..u have to get something in return for all this narcissistic crap :
It was a confusion of ideas between him and one of the lions he was hunting in Kenya that had caused A. B. Spottsworth to make the obituary column. He thought the lion was dead, and the lion thought it wasn't.
- from Ring for Jeeves
i've always been quite lazy , so if u've read this and are one of the few that are yet to post some form of this meme, by all means go ahead..in fact i'll even let you mention my blog as inspiration for the post
Monday, June 06, 2005
angels in the cricket field
in my infinte laziness i forgot to point you all towards my favorite sports-fiction blog(its a new genre-defying sub-sub-genre that is less sport,more tasteless fiction and is a blog that will hopefully be a book one day), where i managed to sneak something under the mawkish oops hawkish vision of dopppsy
yup i'm scratching his/her/its back, (s)he/it is doing mine (not 'me' ppl 'mine')..it happens all the time in the blogworld and now without much further ado, here's jagguG, the debonair cricket administrator cum world traveler cum bengali svengali, revealing more than we'd ever wished to see..oh wait, the warning first :
its rated R for Ridiculous and X for "Xcuse my offensive language and racial slurs, if they dont offend you enough, you cannot have your money back"
enough said, just go read it: ughsport
its the one about deepthroat
for those counting or not, that's 3 posts this week already and to add to all those words, someone i never knew just tagged me with that book meme thingy
yup i'm scratching his/her/its back, (s)he/it is doing mine (not 'me' ppl 'mine')..it happens all the time in the blogworld and now without much further ado, here's jagguG, the debonair cricket administrator cum world traveler cum bengali svengali, revealing more than we'd ever wished to see..oh wait, the warning first :
its rated R for Ridiculous and X for "Xcuse my offensive language and racial slurs, if they dont offend you enough, you cannot have your money back"
enough said, just go read it: ughsport
its the one about deepthroat
for those counting or not, that's 3 posts this week already and to add to all those words, someone i never knew just tagged me with that book meme thingy
Sunday, June 05, 2005
more than a peck of gold
i've always liked movies that are based on some kind of treasure hunt. i think i might've once been a soul who was really close to finding some great treasure and was cheated out of it. call it a fetish if you want but i only like the ones where the treasure is old (darn i missed a 'g' there). well stacked crisp currencies do nothing to me. i like parchment maps yellow with age and the way in which movie directors have forever navigated great distances by simply drawing a red line on the same parchment from city to city until they reach the destination in a tiny corner of africa or a snow covered village in nepal.
why would i not want to be the hero? ignoring the fact that i probably look and act more like the irritating sidekick,its probably cos the hero is too ideal in most cases. To shun all the treasure, escape with his life and later find that the horse he rode off into the sunset is the one that the villain tirelessly loaded up with some treasures before dying - he is also too lucky. talk about someone getting what they dont deserve. the villain who planned the whole thing, lusted for the moolah openly, transgressed in several inventive ways that included tying up love interests over a pit full of crocs, barely gets to see the treasure when a quake decides to use the ground he is on as its epicenter. its like those flight points you pile up on your credit card, when at the end you find they wont even take you from the airport's parking lot to the gate and just like us, the villain too is an optimist who finds his glass completely empty in the end.
dont really know when this post went from being one about treasures to being one about how villains are more human than all other characters. bottom line : once i'm a salaried employee i'd like to get paid in gold, even if its only a few gold filings a month. i'll collect them all till one day i can pump them through a shower. i'm sure that that day there will be a quake measuring 50 on the richter with its epicenter in my bathtub.
a peck of gold
why would i not want to be the hero? ignoring the fact that i probably look and act more like the irritating sidekick,its probably cos the hero is too ideal in most cases. To shun all the treasure, escape with his life and later find that the horse he rode off into the sunset is the one that the villain tirelessly loaded up with some treasures before dying - he is also too lucky. talk about someone getting what they dont deserve. the villain who planned the whole thing, lusted for the moolah openly, transgressed in several inventive ways that included tying up love interests over a pit full of crocs, barely gets to see the treasure when a quake decides to use the ground he is on as its epicenter. its like those flight points you pile up on your credit card, when at the end you find they wont even take you from the airport's parking lot to the gate and just like us, the villain too is an optimist who finds his glass completely empty in the end.
dont really know when this post went from being one about treasures to being one about how villains are more human than all other characters. bottom line : once i'm a salaried employee i'd like to get paid in gold, even if its only a few gold filings a month. i'll collect them all till one day i can pump them through a shower. i'm sure that that day there will be a quake measuring 50 on the richter with its epicenter in my bathtub.
a peck of gold
Thursday, June 02, 2005
must..write..something..S-O-M-E-T-H-I-N-G, something
more about me and my past. right now about 10,567 indi-bloggers have posted abt ABCDs, or to be politically correct indian-americans, kicking ass in the sport of orthography, or to sound less like a pompous ass, spelling, and this got me thinking about my childhood. yeah i know. this is getting to be a bad habit, this past-posting. but i have no option - my past just lends itself to posting. so what was i thinking about ? oh yeah..second standard (second grade to all you americans,indian- or otherwise ) or was it third when we had those dictation tests, i had been a stellar student till then as indicated by little silver (not gold) stars stuck on my report card..either i was eating my veggies and knew the solar system or my teacher was rather fond of stars. either ways i was one of those kids who sat in the first bench and built my right biceps by constantly lifting it whenever the teacher asked a question of the class. but wait , before you start judging me and words like nerd, geek and teacher's pet start spelling their way into your brain, there's more to this story.
one fine day the girl with the gold stars in her report card was absent. the same day we were having one of those dictation tests. with a gleam in my eye, i quickly scribbled down the words as the teacher called them out. the anticipation of what was coming up after the test was causing my HB pencil to quiver and tremble as it raced across the lines tracing one letter after another. i would show the world that all that glitters was not gold. when the teacher called out for us to spell the answers, guess whose hands would go up first. MWAHAHAHAHA. with ideas of class-domination firmly entrenched in my mind, i raised my arm, like a nazi adjutant eager to please the fuhrer , everytime the teacher called for answers. by the time she finally noticed that a hyper energetic kid was jumping up and down in the first bench, i was almost dehydrated. i rose up from my throne to accept the crown by completing this final quest. the word was "ENOUGH" and the phonetic champion that i was, i didnt even consult the sheet i'd written the words on. and proceeded to spell it I-N-A-F-F.
i am not sure what happened after that but i was scarred badly and i stopped lifting my hand even to say tata. my writing suffered the most, having had to wait till the invention of word processors and automatic spell-checking. i relinquished my first bench to the gold star girl when she came back and turned into one of those kids who defaced desks by writing on them. INAFF , i wrote on the last desk i shared with this guy who had no stars on his report card, INAFF , again and again and again...
disclaimer : obviously i just made up parts of the story .. to the teachers looking for the kid who wrote INAFF on second standard benches, do you have concrete, irrefutable evidence?..and to the girl who is missing one gold star from her report card..MWAHAHAHAHA
one fine day the girl with the gold stars in her report card was absent. the same day we were having one of those dictation tests. with a gleam in my eye, i quickly scribbled down the words as the teacher called them out. the anticipation of what was coming up after the test was causing my HB pencil to quiver and tremble as it raced across the lines tracing one letter after another. i would show the world that all that glitters was not gold. when the teacher called out for us to spell the answers, guess whose hands would go up first. MWAHAHAHAHA. with ideas of class-domination firmly entrenched in my mind, i raised my arm, like a nazi adjutant eager to please the fuhrer , everytime the teacher called for answers. by the time she finally noticed that a hyper energetic kid was jumping up and down in the first bench, i was almost dehydrated. i rose up from my throne to accept the crown by completing this final quest. the word was "ENOUGH" and the phonetic champion that i was, i didnt even consult the sheet i'd written the words on. and proceeded to spell it I-N-A-F-F.
i am not sure what happened after that but i was scarred badly and i stopped lifting my hand even to say tata. my writing suffered the most, having had to wait till the invention of word processors and automatic spell-checking. i relinquished my first bench to the gold star girl when she came back and turned into one of those kids who defaced desks by writing on them. INAFF , i wrote on the last desk i shared with this guy who had no stars on his report card, INAFF , again and again and again...
disclaimer : obviously i just made up parts of the story .. to the teachers looking for the kid who wrote INAFF on second standard benches, do you have concrete, irrefutable evidence?..and to the girl who is missing one gold star from her report card..MWAHAHAHAHA
Monday, May 23, 2005
take your pic
i hate digital cameras..mainly because i cant afford one. so my stand, as i've told a million others, is that in the order of depreciating image quality, the human eye is followed by a 35mm slr, the one-time use plastic camera and finally by any of those ubiquitous clickathon participants, the digital camera.
i like to think that photography is one of my hobbies. its not. my slr is hiding in a corner of a closet lest i take it out and shoot some really badly composed shots. the few that i took (about 15 rolls) are all organized by a random shuffling algorithm i devised on the fly while dumping them in the same closet. note to any obssessive compulsive visitor of my room (and mom): open the closet at your own risk. biologists are however welcome to hunt for new species as long as they are named after me. enough gross out closet details. that photography was my hobby of destiny had been quite obvious to me from the beginning. my father had a yashica slr that was built for a slight variant of the time-lapse photography technique. once we assembled in front of the camera, a lot of time lapsed while my father tried to get the picture right in the viewfinder and then there was one photograph at the end. needless to say when i took that camera to my high school farewell party, all i had were photos without people and in the rare case the chairs that a few hours ago had been vacated by the last of my patient teachers.
when we went on this trip to kodaikanal ,a summer when people still thought about saving a click for a better shot, i was the resident expert on loading film into the cameras. its not like the other guys didnt know how, they were just too lazy and i was too much of a nice guy to refuse a chance to unload a sarcastic comment as i gently pulled the film a little out of its cannister, fitted it on the backside of a camera and then shut it up. by the time the trip ended i was as trained as one of those crack commandos who dismantle a canon (oops i meant cannon) in less than a minute. the slr had long been traded for this ultra-modern zoom (or joom depending on whether u like captain or not) camera that could have possibly taken good pictures. but i was so adept at loading and unloading film that i was content to keep doing just that and came back to singara chennai with no snaps and 2 complete rolls of kodak chroma gold.
obviously my youth blinded me to the fact that my best snaps were ones that required my presence to explain what the object in the snap was. so i plunked down a further $500 to buy myself an slr..a good one, the best one..the one with a setting for each shade of the sky...the one that was supposed to make a novice take perfect snaps of dew drops and make tail-lights of cars look like someone had drawn parallel red lines. it was slightly bulky , so what. after a few more of the aforementioned unidentified objects turned up, i was quick to set it on auto. a little later when i realised that pulling it out quickly, focussing and then shooting a shot required more muscles than those in my eye it went straight into the closet and started its hibernation. it still comes out to take a peek during birthdays and the roll i loaded back in 02 is still there with undeveloped photos of me blowing candles ( oh yeah i still do it).
but i refuse to vacate my stand..in fact i vow that i will never start a photoblog. if i do none of those photos will be digital or film for that matter. it may take a lil while but my latest camera consists of a drawing pad and a pencil. i'll personally capture each image to the worst of my ability. you'll still visit it , right ?
the disclaimer makes its comeback : i do not endorse yashica (now part of Kyocera Imaging), kodak, biologists, slrs,drawing pads,pencils or candles..in fact if someone paid me for doing this, i'll promptly run out and get a digital camera
i like to think that photography is one of my hobbies. its not. my slr is hiding in a corner of a closet lest i take it out and shoot some really badly composed shots. the few that i took (about 15 rolls) are all organized by a random shuffling algorithm i devised on the fly while dumping them in the same closet. note to any obssessive compulsive visitor of my room (and mom): open the closet at your own risk. biologists are however welcome to hunt for new species as long as they are named after me. enough gross out closet details. that photography was my hobby of destiny had been quite obvious to me from the beginning. my father had a yashica slr that was built for a slight variant of the time-lapse photography technique. once we assembled in front of the camera, a lot of time lapsed while my father tried to get the picture right in the viewfinder and then there was one photograph at the end. needless to say when i took that camera to my high school farewell party, all i had were photos without people and in the rare case the chairs that a few hours ago had been vacated by the last of my patient teachers.
when we went on this trip to kodaikanal ,a summer when people still thought about saving a click for a better shot, i was the resident expert on loading film into the cameras. its not like the other guys didnt know how, they were just too lazy and i was too much of a nice guy to refuse a chance to unload a sarcastic comment as i gently pulled the film a little out of its cannister, fitted it on the backside of a camera and then shut it up. by the time the trip ended i was as trained as one of those crack commandos who dismantle a canon (oops i meant cannon) in less than a minute. the slr had long been traded for this ultra-modern zoom (or joom depending on whether u like captain or not) camera that could have possibly taken good pictures. but i was so adept at loading and unloading film that i was content to keep doing just that and came back to singara chennai with no snaps and 2 complete rolls of kodak chroma gold.
obviously my youth blinded me to the fact that my best snaps were ones that required my presence to explain what the object in the snap was. so i plunked down a further $500 to buy myself an slr..a good one, the best one..the one with a setting for each shade of the sky...the one that was supposed to make a novice take perfect snaps of dew drops and make tail-lights of cars look like someone had drawn parallel red lines. it was slightly bulky , so what. after a few more of the aforementioned unidentified objects turned up, i was quick to set it on auto. a little later when i realised that pulling it out quickly, focussing and then shooting a shot required more muscles than those in my eye it went straight into the closet and started its hibernation. it still comes out to take a peek during birthdays and the roll i loaded back in 02 is still there with undeveloped photos of me blowing candles ( oh yeah i still do it).
but i refuse to vacate my stand..in fact i vow that i will never start a photoblog. if i do none of those photos will be digital or film for that matter. it may take a lil while but my latest camera consists of a drawing pad and a pencil. i'll personally capture each image to the worst of my ability. you'll still visit it , right ?
the disclaimer makes its comeback : i do not endorse yashica (now part of Kyocera Imaging), kodak, biologists, slrs,drawing pads,pencils or candles..in fact if someone paid me for doing this, i'll promptly run out and get a digital camera
Monday, May 16, 2005
the truth and nothing but
the men on my father's side of the family don't lie to save their skin or to gain any kind of advantage. we just use hyperboles in a rather exaggerated way. my sister and i always needle my dad and his brothers about their ability to spin whole kancheevaram sarees out of a single yarn. its hard not to when my dad insists he got his rather long name (my last name) just because his eldest brother liked it more than Narayanan and changed it when enrolling him in school or that he'd gotten his birthday because his sister liked a date more than another.
there was the "true" story of how my uncle (the same elder brother) had won an obstacle race in college. his only contender was this suave individual with jet black hair that was maintained with a host of creams and concoctions(an early metrosexual if u may). after they'd all lined up at the start lane, the instructions were announced..now dont confuse this with your ordinary steeple chase. this was an obstacle race a la the ones in full metal jacket, fauji and other such army tales.so while the announcements abt the obstacles and how to negotiate them were being announced, our hirsuit hero was showing his mane off to the scores of feminine admirers who were watching. at the sound of the starting gun (or the blow of the whistle, how wud i know..i wasn't there) the racers set off. the competition was clearly between my uncle and the brylcreem guy..split end to end they raced to the first obstacle , a set of low ropes under which they had to crawl and get across. at the other end brylcreem slipped out a little ahead of my uncle and raced towards the next obstacle - a sort of hurdle jump. while my attentive uncle nimbly jumped over the hurdle, the other guy, having focussed more on his curls than on the announcement, continued to crawl under these as well and was instantly disqualified. thus my uncle became the world champion of coimbatore in the obstacle race event.
my dad is a more trained exponent of this art having observed his brothers in action. he embellishes and adds to a story in a subtle way that what was once just a collection of gases and dust, quickly becomes a rock and then becomes a new world for people to inhabit. here's an example. when my parents landed here in the US , they went through the customs and as they were cleared to set foot into the Bushland, they noticed another parent couple being escorted to a closer scrutiny by the customs people. at least thats what my mom told me. when my father told it to me the first time, they were arguing vehemently with the customs guy telling him that it was their constitutional right to bring lime pickle into a country and that it wasnt a WMD like he'd thought it was at one whiff. the second time was at a friend's place soon after...by now the "pickle terrorists" were being interrogated by senior customs official and one person who looked like an FBI agent. this time they rejected the husband's passport asking him to catch the next plane back. Seeing this the dharam patni instantly fainted thus converting O'hare International into a set for HAHK2-chocolate,lime juice aur aachaar.
if u know me , u r probably carrying a huge rock of salt around to take with whatever i say. dont worry too much though, unlike my elders, i've learnt to channel all that exaggeration into a written form - this blog.
there was the "true" story of how my uncle (the same elder brother) had won an obstacle race in college. his only contender was this suave individual with jet black hair that was maintained with a host of creams and concoctions(an early metrosexual if u may). after they'd all lined up at the start lane, the instructions were announced..now dont confuse this with your ordinary steeple chase. this was an obstacle race a la the ones in full metal jacket, fauji and other such army tales.so while the announcements abt the obstacles and how to negotiate them were being announced, our hirsuit hero was showing his mane off to the scores of feminine admirers who were watching. at the sound of the starting gun (or the blow of the whistle, how wud i know..i wasn't there) the racers set off. the competition was clearly between my uncle and the brylcreem guy..split end to end they raced to the first obstacle , a set of low ropes under which they had to crawl and get across. at the other end brylcreem slipped out a little ahead of my uncle and raced towards the next obstacle - a sort of hurdle jump. while my attentive uncle nimbly jumped over the hurdle, the other guy, having focussed more on his curls than on the announcement, continued to crawl under these as well and was instantly disqualified. thus my uncle became the world champion of coimbatore in the obstacle race event.
my dad is a more trained exponent of this art having observed his brothers in action. he embellishes and adds to a story in a subtle way that what was once just a collection of gases and dust, quickly becomes a rock and then becomes a new world for people to inhabit. here's an example. when my parents landed here in the US , they went through the customs and as they were cleared to set foot into the Bushland, they noticed another parent couple being escorted to a closer scrutiny by the customs people. at least thats what my mom told me. when my father told it to me the first time, they were arguing vehemently with the customs guy telling him that it was their constitutional right to bring lime pickle into a country and that it wasnt a WMD like he'd thought it was at one whiff. the second time was at a friend's place soon after...by now the "pickle terrorists" were being interrogated by senior customs official and one person who looked like an FBI agent. this time they rejected the husband's passport asking him to catch the next plane back. Seeing this the dharam patni instantly fainted thus converting O'hare International into a set for HAHK2-chocolate,lime juice aur aachaar.
if u know me , u r probably carrying a huge rock of salt around to take with whatever i say. dont worry too much though, unlike my elders, i've learnt to channel all that exaggeration into a written form - this blog.
Tuesday, May 10, 2005
everyday superheroes
yet another morning. Vice-captain Patience stepped out of the shower mulling if today will be the day when he finally asks that bus stop seductress, Flirt-Woman, out. he slipped his costume on. what looked like proper dress wear could at a day's notice turn into the most fashionable evening wear and he didnt even need a cramped telephone booth or a dark alley. the saunter to the bus stop was done in an unhurried manner befitting his sobriquet and there she was standing dressed to kill. but who was that standing next to her.it was that evil,conniving Babe-Magneto and boy was he packing it today. he had his babe-vision sunglasses, the flashiest 32-tooth smile and his flowing tie gave every indication that it had been designed to break hearts. articulate words flowed out of his voice box like polished cannonballs hitting their target with an equivalent force. Flirt-Woman was starting to look like Just-Another-Girl under the verbal attack. Vice-captain Patience ground his teeth silently and in a supreme display of his hidden waiting powers, stood a little away under the shade of a tree waiting for the bus. he knew his waiting powers far exceeded the villain's vocal abilities. he could stand there waiting the whole day if need be, lets see how long Babe-Magneto can keep talking. as if the devils had heard his prayers, a bus promptly came along. being the gentleman he was he kindly let the ladies go before him including a fragrant Flirt-Woman. be patient,he told himself, this is not the right time to talk to her. then in a flash Babe-Magneto promptly stepped on his toes and squeezed into the already crowded bus. in an almost never before seen display of his ultra-patience, Vice-Captain Patience silently bore it all, not even asking people to squeeze in to make more space. in fact he had used so much of his patience that growing woozy he stepped back for a minute , only to have the bus driver close the doors and take off. in that vulnerable moment, he almost let his weakness take over. repentance had a strange way of diminishing his wait time. no, he decided, this was no time to repent and summoning all his remaining patience, he turned back and went back to the shade and started practising waiting for the next bus. soon he was well on his way to becoming Captain Patience.
Friday, May 06, 2005
say no to reading
its a given fact that we are a very visual species..well i dont exactly know of any other species that can read pictureless books from birth but we do understand much more quickly with a picture. its probably safe to claim that barney has accomplished much more in teaching the importance of cleaning one's room than a manual on personal hygiene. my childhood was spent on a lot of comics that had talking animals. they were all created by a couple called amar and chitra and usually began with "once upon a time in a jungle". though i was clever enough to understand that a bubble above an animal's head meant that it was talking , the fact that a monkey was talking to a crocodile or that animals peacefully assembled at a banyan tree under the auspices of a lion king to ostracize a cheating hyena completely slipped beneath the radar of my bullshit detector. the point is that i learnt most of my morals - looking before leaping , doing things slowly so there is no waste, never to leave a royal garden under the care of a monkey etc - from a rich visual medium.
then someone told my parents about one of the Rs. the argument for reading a book against watching a movie goes thusly - you use your own imagination when reading, you imagine places things and people to have a certain form and assume certain features. a movie takes away from this "wonderful" experience. so the argument goes, reading will improve imagination but it doesnt stop there. the other 2 Rs -'riting and 'rithmetic - would quickly follow making life hell. its double the effort - not only does one have to read, you also have to translate the words into pictures. i know now that imagination produces false images 100% of the time. it stems from assumption and you all know what assumption is the mother of.
lets just do away with all the reading and go visual. everyone would then be on the same page. until N T Ramarao came along everyone had vastly different images of lord krishna and ben kingsley is for all purposes the only gandhi i know. i hope u didnt spend too much efffort imagining while reading all this. i'll try to come up with a 10 panel comic strip to substitute this post but no promises because the only thing i ever did right in arts class was writing my name on the left top corner.
then someone told my parents about one of the Rs. the argument for reading a book against watching a movie goes thusly - you use your own imagination when reading, you imagine places things and people to have a certain form and assume certain features. a movie takes away from this "wonderful" experience. so the argument goes, reading will improve imagination but it doesnt stop there. the other 2 Rs -'riting and 'rithmetic - would quickly follow making life hell. its double the effort - not only does one have to read, you also have to translate the words into pictures. i know now that imagination produces false images 100% of the time. it stems from assumption and you all know what assumption is the mother of.
lets just do away with all the reading and go visual. everyone would then be on the same page. until N T Ramarao came along everyone had vastly different images of lord krishna and ben kingsley is for all purposes the only gandhi i know. i hope u didnt spend too much efffort imagining while reading all this. i'll try to come up with a 10 panel comic strip to substitute this post but no promises because the only thing i ever did right in arts class was writing my name on the left top corner.
Wednesday, May 04, 2005
america's pastime/india's timepass
jagguG is the brainchild of dopppsy ..while to all others he is just a normal, multi-millionaire cricket administrator/manipulator , to me he is a ruthless think-tank capable of turning (fan)fiction to reality and baseball diamonds to cricket pitches and hence to real diamonds
sometime in aug 2005 when brownish-yellow leaves are strewn all over the outfield in a park in chicago, jagguG talks money with his fellow sharks - raju patel , raju shah, raju patel 2, raju patel 3 and kantibhai patel. did we give MLB a run for their money or what ?? i told u the grass is mightier than the beer. now lets see as per our schedule ,the regular cricket season should end sometime in november and the playoffs start the same day abt 2 hours after the last game. raju patel , the eldest in the group and the one with a grocery store in little india for the longest time, chips in with his infinite dal-packing wisdom. but , sir, but in november the grass will be gone..i mean from the outfield. it will be winter. no one will come here braving the chicago winds even if we give them free grass and viagra. the younger raju , with a gleam in his eyes, starts - we should move the playoffs to mexico, i've been to cancun, lots of nangi chokris there, heck we might even be able to cause a early spring break there if we market it right to the goras here. raju shah, in charge of logistics due to his experience in keeping track of frozen paratha packets - that would not work , sir, we've already announced the schedule, and this chicago crowd wont even go to indiana to see the latest rajinikant movie because gas is too expensive..they wont go unless we buy southeast airlines and fly them. hmmm....now this is a quandary. jagguG whips out his cellphone and calls his technical consultant - hey do u still have that rain machine we got to fix matches ? do u think u can reverse it and make it suck all the snow or something - we'll postpone the winter in chicago this time.what? it will take till next winter ?? phuck you man.kantibhai, the quiet chaat-corner owner - sir if i may, i have a canadian nephew who told me something. it seems the hockey league has cancelled its season because they wanted to keep all the money from the advertising, those greedy pigs.so i suggest we move the playoffs indoors and onto the ice. the NHL fans dont understand the rules of hockey and wont care less if they were seeing balls instead of fucks i mean pucks.the stingy desi crowd will definitely drive from the suburbs to downtown - we can hit 2 penguins with one snowball sir. all our sons and nephews can be the parking lot attendants and our daughters and nieces can be half-saree clad cheer-leaders. we can sell bhel and samosas out of the concession stands. well the players have to be taught ice skating but we have that 2 hour gap between the regular season and the playoffs. we can charge these fans for that training session also. everything is in place, we'll just sign the NHL agreement. jagguG interrupts - then we can sell this to the canadians too.despite inviting them to the world cup the canucks are still ignorant abt our game.maybe when they see the ice they'll make the connection that it is a sport. so everything is settled, the first ice cricket playoffs shall skate out in november. wait a minute what is that i overhear - what people in sharjah havent seen a sheet of ice at all.hey raju3 , sun baenchod, as soon as the finals end here, cut out the sheet of ice from the arena and have it shipped to sharjah u hear.we're having the next season of ice cricket in sharjah
sometime in aug 2005 when brownish-yellow leaves are strewn all over the outfield in a park in chicago, jagguG talks money with his fellow sharks - raju patel , raju shah, raju patel 2, raju patel 3 and kantibhai patel. did we give MLB a run for their money or what ?? i told u the grass is mightier than the beer. now lets see as per our schedule ,the regular cricket season should end sometime in november and the playoffs start the same day abt 2 hours after the last game. raju patel , the eldest in the group and the one with a grocery store in little india for the longest time, chips in with his infinite dal-packing wisdom. but , sir, but in november the grass will be gone..i mean from the outfield. it will be winter. no one will come here braving the chicago winds even if we give them free grass and viagra. the younger raju , with a gleam in his eyes, starts - we should move the playoffs to mexico, i've been to cancun, lots of nangi chokris there, heck we might even be able to cause a early spring break there if we market it right to the goras here. raju shah, in charge of logistics due to his experience in keeping track of frozen paratha packets - that would not work , sir, we've already announced the schedule, and this chicago crowd wont even go to indiana to see the latest rajinikant movie because gas is too expensive..they wont go unless we buy southeast airlines and fly them. hmmm....now this is a quandary. jagguG whips out his cellphone and calls his technical consultant - hey do u still have that rain machine we got to fix matches ? do u think u can reverse it and make it suck all the snow or something - we'll postpone the winter in chicago this time.what? it will take till next winter ?? phuck you man.kantibhai, the quiet chaat-corner owner - sir if i may, i have a canadian nephew who told me something. it seems the hockey league has cancelled its season because they wanted to keep all the money from the advertising, those greedy pigs.so i suggest we move the playoffs indoors and onto the ice. the NHL fans dont understand the rules of hockey and wont care less if they were seeing balls instead of fucks i mean pucks.the stingy desi crowd will definitely drive from the suburbs to downtown - we can hit 2 penguins with one snowball sir. all our sons and nephews can be the parking lot attendants and our daughters and nieces can be half-saree clad cheer-leaders. we can sell bhel and samosas out of the concession stands. well the players have to be taught ice skating but we have that 2 hour gap between the regular season and the playoffs. we can charge these fans for that training session also. everything is in place, we'll just sign the NHL agreement. jagguG interrupts - then we can sell this to the canadians too.despite inviting them to the world cup the canucks are still ignorant abt our game.maybe when they see the ice they'll make the connection that it is a sport. so everything is settled, the first ice cricket playoffs shall skate out in november. wait a minute what is that i overhear - what people in sharjah havent seen a sheet of ice at all.hey raju3 , sun baenchod, as soon as the finals end here, cut out the sheet of ice from the arena and have it shipped to sharjah u hear.we're having the next season of ice cricket in sharjah
Wednesday, April 27, 2005
a class act
recently i saw this kid twirling a book on his finger. this reminded me of the many small yet brilliant abilities each person seems to innately possess. there used to be this guy in school who could twirl a pen like a baton with just 2 fingers. while i now know that baton tricks are "talents" that may decide if one beautiful girl deserves a crown and a sash more than another equally beautiful one, back then it was just plain cool. after desperate begging and giving him half my lunch everyday for a month , he acquiesced to teach me. formal training began and everyday (after lunch of course) i would sit there trying without much success while guruji supervised. he would teach the fine points of holding the pen exactly 2/3rds of the way from the bottom and then give it a subtle flick so it made one complete revolution. several teachers never knew i was in their class for i used to spend most of the class under the desk hunting for the pen that seemed to be repulsed by the sight of my fingers.
i quickly got bored with it when we discovered that rulers while to outside appearances looked like measuring devices, also possessed latent musical talents when mated with the desk and twanged. we were probably the first to form a band comprised entirely of ruler-wielding maestros. wooden ones, plastic ones, short 6-inch ones and the big, bad foot-longers all produced sweet cacophony during recess.(don't take my word for it, do your own thing here ..just turn up the volume) .the rebellious among our band even risked it by practising when a teacher was expounding on the volume of a sphere and were de-scaled in front of the whole class.
so there was a talent, there was a band. all that was needed to complete this circus was animals and we didnt lack those either. the unsuspecting ants that came hunting for morsels spilt on the desks were quickly ensnared and sent to the far away other side of the desk. there they were trained repeatedly to climb the dizzying heights of a pencil while some worked on the delicate balancing act of hanging from the underside of a paper. one particularly super acrobat could do both and actually had me wishing school could go on longer beyond the final bell.
needless to say the circus broke up when we left school to pursue more "stable" careers. all that talent, all that practice a waste. i still twirl a pen now and then at work trying to get it right but there are no ants to train on my desk.
no ants, beautiful girls or fingers were harmed during the writing of this blog. a few scales did break when we exceeded the material's tensile strength
i quickly got bored with it when we discovered that rulers while to outside appearances looked like measuring devices, also possessed latent musical talents when mated with the desk and twanged. we were probably the first to form a band comprised entirely of ruler-wielding maestros. wooden ones, plastic ones, short 6-inch ones and the big, bad foot-longers all produced sweet cacophony during recess.(don't take my word for it, do your own thing here ..just turn up the volume) .the rebellious among our band even risked it by practising when a teacher was expounding on the volume of a sphere and were de-scaled in front of the whole class.
so there was a talent, there was a band. all that was needed to complete this circus was animals and we didnt lack those either. the unsuspecting ants that came hunting for morsels spilt on the desks were quickly ensnared and sent to the far away other side of the desk. there they were trained repeatedly to climb the dizzying heights of a pencil while some worked on the delicate balancing act of hanging from the underside of a paper. one particularly super acrobat could do both and actually had me wishing school could go on longer beyond the final bell.
needless to say the circus broke up when we left school to pursue more "stable" careers. all that talent, all that practice a waste. i still twirl a pen now and then at work trying to get it right but there are no ants to train on my desk.
no ants, beautiful girls or fingers were harmed during the writing of this blog. a few scales did break when we exceeded the material's tensile strength
Thursday, April 21, 2005
fish (me) out of (the) water
i am from madras. you wouldn't need exceptional reasoning abilities or mathematical induction to then conclude that i probably dont know swimming. you can always test that conclusion by dropping me in a puddle on the road. my legs will cramp, hands will flail about to catch hold of the nearest passing vehicle and i'll probably drown in my own tears. if by chance the whole of india were to instantaneously turn into a desert, only two groups would survive - the very rich who would still be able to buy those water-packets and madrasis. my mom used to give me 2 tumblers a day - one to drink and the other to take care of the other necessities. i've often stayed back in school to sneak into our principal's office which had a water cooler and my neighbors had to give 108 water-laden lorries as dowry for their daugher. ok i'm exaggerating, but given the copious amounts that gush into our reservoirs courtesy of the excessively generous karnataka government, we could barely fill a bucket let alone swimming pools and our youth,never having grasped the concept of swimwear, have always assumed that the anorexic bikini-clad models on FTV are really extremely poor people from 4th world nations.
the first time i tried swimming, i also learnt the importance of angles. having stayed on the shallow side of a pool (if u r wondering where, it was in madras not chennai) for abt 5 minutes, i decided to put all of my 6ft height to test and ventured over to the deep side and slowly clung to the side while a friend (its unhygenix, if u should know, and he probably learnt swimming at his favorite raibareli) beckoned me over to the other side. you see, he was better at math and having worked out that the breadth of that deep side section was barely 8 feet, he put 2 and 2 together and said that i just had to kick my 6ft frame off with a little power and my head will be hitting the other side even before i could say "save me". turns out he misjudged my expertise at staying straight (thats directional orientation ppl..no smirking or giggling). so for a moment i was like a torpedo headed straight towards the heat source and the very next i'd deviated from the straight line by 90 degrees. it was as if the navigational circuit blew a fuse and, as unhygenix would relate later, i turned slowly like a temple chariot turning around mylapore tank and was churning the water like a blender. when unhygenix came over with the noble intention of saving me, i did the first thing my genes and newtonian physics told me to do. i put my hands on his head and pushed down. as per the third law, i came up for air and then someone else seeing our plight managed to pull us both out to the shallow side.
the next time was when i decided to put my tuition waiver to proper use and signed up for swimming 101. though i was/still am scarred for life by the first incident, i just couldn't resist the sight of a large square space filled with chemical-smelling, sparkling blue aqua. the brief time i'd been living in the US had turned me into a greedy sponge lusting for water of several kinds. nope it wasnt enough that i had the marvel of plumbing that was actually used to deliver water instead of air like in chennai. i just had to get my feet wet and how better to do it than in a class full of undergrads. with the help of 2 instructors, freestroke and backstroke were mastered quite easily. the butterfly was not that easy, but i didnt give up. with a lot of effort i was able to slice through the water with the grace of a caterpillar that had half-wrapped its cocoon around itself only to find it had to go in search of more leaves. then one day they decided to take us to the deep side (u didnt think i was mastering all those on the deep side, did u?). while the others slowly swam from the shallow side onto the deep, i cleverly beat them to it by walking on the side of the pool. by blackmailing me with a E grade, my instructors forced me into deep waters and insisted on teaching what they called 'treading'. while i was discussing the semantics of using a term associated with terra firma for describing activities associated with natation, i realised that i was slowly going down and that my exposition on english usage wasn't exactly contributing to keeping me afloat.when feet touched the pool's bottom at 15 feet, i stood there like i was waiting for the bus. an instructor realising i wasn't buoyant like other humans, came down and indicated that i should try coming up. that was stupid on his part, it wasn't like i wanted to become poseidon and play with mermaids. finally he came down grasped my hair and yanked me up and soon i was in a familiar position , sucking in air like a vaccum cleaner.
despite all this i did try my hand at diving a couple of times later. only because the whole class (including some beautiful undergrads) stood around exhorting me to jump and more importantly because the whole set of instructors were in the water ready to pull me out. i got out of the water without help to thunderous applause and right then i knew that i'd nailed the course. there you go,the story of a man from the water-deprived streets of chennai who grew up to be a less-than-average swimmer (only shallow side pls).
suggestion for producers: in the movie version , lets replace unhygenix by a new starlet and let there be a song right after she rescues me. for obvious reasons let the song be in a water theme park.
the first time i tried swimming, i also learnt the importance of angles. having stayed on the shallow side of a pool (if u r wondering where, it was in madras not chennai) for abt 5 minutes, i decided to put all of my 6ft height to test and ventured over to the deep side and slowly clung to the side while a friend (its unhygenix, if u should know, and he probably learnt swimming at his favorite raibareli) beckoned me over to the other side. you see, he was better at math and having worked out that the breadth of that deep side section was barely 8 feet, he put 2 and 2 together and said that i just had to kick my 6ft frame off with a little power and my head will be hitting the other side even before i could say "save me". turns out he misjudged my expertise at staying straight (thats directional orientation ppl..no smirking or giggling). so for a moment i was like a torpedo headed straight towards the heat source and the very next i'd deviated from the straight line by 90 degrees. it was as if the navigational circuit blew a fuse and, as unhygenix would relate later, i turned slowly like a temple chariot turning around mylapore tank and was churning the water like a blender. when unhygenix came over with the noble intention of saving me, i did the first thing my genes and newtonian physics told me to do. i put my hands on his head and pushed down. as per the third law, i came up for air and then someone else seeing our plight managed to pull us both out to the shallow side.
the next time was when i decided to put my tuition waiver to proper use and signed up for swimming 101. though i was/still am scarred for life by the first incident, i just couldn't resist the sight of a large square space filled with chemical-smelling, sparkling blue aqua. the brief time i'd been living in the US had turned me into a greedy sponge lusting for water of several kinds. nope it wasnt enough that i had the marvel of plumbing that was actually used to deliver water instead of air like in chennai. i just had to get my feet wet and how better to do it than in a class full of undergrads. with the help of 2 instructors, freestroke and backstroke were mastered quite easily. the butterfly was not that easy, but i didnt give up. with a lot of effort i was able to slice through the water with the grace of a caterpillar that had half-wrapped its cocoon around itself only to find it had to go in search of more leaves. then one day they decided to take us to the deep side (u didnt think i was mastering all those on the deep side, did u?). while the others slowly swam from the shallow side onto the deep, i cleverly beat them to it by walking on the side of the pool. by blackmailing me with a E grade, my instructors forced me into deep waters and insisted on teaching what they called 'treading'. while i was discussing the semantics of using a term associated with terra firma for describing activities associated with natation, i realised that i was slowly going down and that my exposition on english usage wasn't exactly contributing to keeping me afloat.when feet touched the pool's bottom at 15 feet, i stood there like i was waiting for the bus. an instructor realising i wasn't buoyant like other humans, came down and indicated that i should try coming up. that was stupid on his part, it wasn't like i wanted to become poseidon and play with mermaids. finally he came down grasped my hair and yanked me up and soon i was in a familiar position , sucking in air like a vaccum cleaner.
despite all this i did try my hand at diving a couple of times later. only because the whole class (including some beautiful undergrads) stood around exhorting me to jump and more importantly because the whole set of instructors were in the water ready to pull me out. i got out of the water without help to thunderous applause and right then i knew that i'd nailed the course. there you go,the story of a man from the water-deprived streets of chennai who grew up to be a less-than-average swimmer (only shallow side pls).
suggestion for producers: in the movie version , lets replace unhygenix by a new starlet and let there be a song right after she rescues me. for obvious reasons let the song be in a water theme park.
mid-week movie mania
after a unsuccessful jeopardy try-out and omelettes for lunch at greek town i headed home and started the week's true end with 'Raincoat'. rituparno ghosh takes o.henry's 'the gift of magi' , tweaks it a bit and then thanks him in the end. ajay devgan in need of money seeks help from his friends in calcutta and while there goes to visit his past flame,ash, who is now married to an apparently affluent guy. 'apparently' because it turns out that the antique (pronounced wonderfully as 'aunteek' by ash's uneducated character) furniture in the hall is not their own but belongs to a furniture salesman who is renting their house. the script moves at almost the same pace as life which was just right to keep me engrossed. its tough to get devgan to overact and the effect that the lack of hamming had on each shot was quite shocking for someone who has been brought up on the staple crying and shouting in indian movies. i wonder if 'black' would've been better if it had been taken in this style of very-low-drama.
after returning raincoat, we braced ourselves for 'socha na tha' which from the cover promised to be the anti-thesis of raincoat. the DVD cover said that it was the story of a guy who turns down a prospective alliance to get engaged to his catholic girlfriend only to discover he is in love with first girl. fooled by the cover story's relative simplicity we took it home to find out how complex and utterly real this movie was. at one point one of the characters asks the aforementioned guy "tum paagal ho kya?" . i've never heard a truer line uttered in any movie abt its hero. both the actor and the character are frustrating enough that we were placing bets on who - among his brother, father,bhabhi,girlfriend and the girl - would kill him first. the funniest part happened after the movie ended. the dvd stayed in our apartment for 2 more days before getting returned with a late fee. i cried like salman in HDDCS while paying the fine. all the money i earned doing "work" was going down the video shop's drain
by then , a nice golt movie called 'Mass' had mysteriously found its way onto my laptop and seeing that the print was decent, i bought a DVi-to-TV converter,hooked up my mac to the tv + stereo and let sundara telugu fill the rather silent corridors of my apt floor. mass is the name of nagarjuna..he even gives some convoluted logic as to why he got the name but i didnt understand one word of what he said. a rather uncooperative golt room-mate , forgetting how i'd translated the prabhu crying "naan ippo enna seiyvaen saravana" joke just last week,refused to repeat or translate it for me. mass comes to vizag from hyd to rescue his lady love(a rather large tub-of-jo'thika) whose father and brother are huge dadas. he goes about smashing heads and killing the henchmen of the dada and the people of vizag stand around applauding and after finding out when the next show is , disperse peacefully. after beating up scores of bad guys and blowing up a few cars and 1 van, mass meets the evil brother face-to-face,again in front of a million jobless vizag golts and thulps him..seeing which the father dada takes a gun, and in a ending that might've surprised o.henry, shoots the brother (his own son) and then shoots himself. talk about ruthless villains, this one even killed himself . i was so inspired by his act that i ruthlessly deleted Mass freeing up about a GB of repressed hard disk space.
i ended this week's movie marathon with 'Mahanadigan', a really funny story with the ultra-sarcastic sathyaraj playing a conniving "young" man who stamps on everyone in his way, neatly arranges them as steps and then walks on them to a better life. along the way actors and politicians face his/the director's wrath. he imitates actors, disses the technicians, ridicules politicians on their own stage and still manages to become the CM. if anyone is still uncertain that tamil inherently lends itself to sarcasm, i would like to invite them to see this movie.
btw, does anyone know what sarcasm is in hindi ??
after returning raincoat, we braced ourselves for 'socha na tha' which from the cover promised to be the anti-thesis of raincoat. the DVD cover said that it was the story of a guy who turns down a prospective alliance to get engaged to his catholic girlfriend only to discover he is in love with first girl. fooled by the cover story's relative simplicity we took it home to find out how complex and utterly real this movie was. at one point one of the characters asks the aforementioned guy "tum paagal ho kya?" . i've never heard a truer line uttered in any movie abt its hero. both the actor and the character are frustrating enough that we were placing bets on who - among his brother, father,bhabhi,girlfriend and the girl - would kill him first. the funniest part happened after the movie ended. the dvd stayed in our apartment for 2 more days before getting returned with a late fee. i cried like salman in HDDCS while paying the fine. all the money i earned doing "work" was going down the video shop's drain
by then , a nice golt movie called 'Mass' had mysteriously found its way onto my laptop and seeing that the print was decent, i bought a DVi-to-TV converter,hooked up my mac to the tv + stereo and let sundara telugu fill the rather silent corridors of my apt floor. mass is the name of nagarjuna..he even gives some convoluted logic as to why he got the name but i didnt understand one word of what he said. a rather uncooperative golt room-mate , forgetting how i'd translated the prabhu crying "naan ippo enna seiyvaen saravana" joke just last week,refused to repeat or translate it for me. mass comes to vizag from hyd to rescue his lady love(a rather large tub-of-jo'thika) whose father and brother are huge dadas. he goes about smashing heads and killing the henchmen of the dada and the people of vizag stand around applauding and after finding out when the next show is , disperse peacefully. after beating up scores of bad guys and blowing up a few cars and 1 van, mass meets the evil brother face-to-face,again in front of a million jobless vizag golts and thulps him..seeing which the father dada takes a gun, and in a ending that might've surprised o.henry, shoots the brother (his own son) and then shoots himself. talk about ruthless villains, this one even killed himself . i was so inspired by his act that i ruthlessly deleted Mass freeing up about a GB of repressed hard disk space.
i ended this week's movie marathon with 'Mahanadigan', a really funny story with the ultra-sarcastic sathyaraj playing a conniving "young" man who stamps on everyone in his way, neatly arranges them as steps and then walks on them to a better life. along the way actors and politicians face his/the director's wrath. he imitates actors, disses the technicians, ridicules politicians on their own stage and still manages to become the CM. if anyone is still uncertain that tamil inherently lends itself to sarcasm, i would like to invite them to see this movie.
btw, does anyone know what sarcasm is in hindi ??
Sunday, April 17, 2005
so-so sunday
ladies and gentlemen, you are in the presence of mediocrity-ness. i am not a quizzer though i have a penchant for useless trivia that makes me appear like one. the last and only time i was on a quiz was in the ninth class when my geography teacher volunteered me for one. i upheld her clever choice by wrongly answering several questions including one about the tallest mountain in india( which i instantaneously answered as K2 and when given another chance, quickly changed it to the doddabedda peak). despite that the red house, who i represented, came in third out of 4 and i got a plaque that sits between a nodding dog and one of my sister's chipped vases in the showcase in our hall.
jeopardy is a game show that is said to be the toughest game-show and is a quiz of (mostly american) general knowledge. so when i got a few answers right while watching on tv, i quickly filled in a form online and registered myself as an ardent, brilliant nerd who was interested in appearing on the show. the huge lucky wave i've been riding all past month started swelling again and i found myself chosen to appear for a contestant try-out. i started preparing by memorizing state and country capitals and annoyed friends from other states by calling them up, deliberately mentioning that state's capital and then asking them if they'd been there. i also did a fair bit of reading on the civil war, the american revolution, the presidents, shakespeare (yup i now know that hamlet was a prince and not a danish omelette) and pretty much read all i could in a month. but in no way does that give you license to stop me on the street and ask me questions . on my part , i'll try to be quiet about state capitals.
when the day finally dawned , i knew i was going to fail miserably. its a 50 question test with about 7 seconds for each question and word on the web was that 35 correct responses would send me to the next round. in some practice tests the highest i'd managed was 25. there was still opera, american playwrights, vice-presidents and a thousand other topics i'd completely avoided. when i got to the test-center (it was just a small room in Navy Pier) there were about 60 other well-dressed normal-looking people with the engine of a nerd humming under their hoods. as we got in , we were given a pen and a piece of paper with 50 blanks on it. then after a short practice game , the test began. literary characters, first ladies, english grammar, english rulers, english poets and several other words flew by on the screen. i actually did much better than i thought i would and was guilty of secretly harboring hopes of getting called. it didnt turn out that way and as the organizers said, the people who didnt get through probably all just missed by one. so there you have it , i missed getting on the toughest game-show in the US by just one question. so, folks, i am mediocre and i got a pen with JEOPARDY written on it to prove it.
You can play a multiple choice version of jeopardy on the web at : http://www.jeopardy.com/indexflash.php
jeopardy is a game show that is said to be the toughest game-show and is a quiz of (mostly american) general knowledge. so when i got a few answers right while watching on tv, i quickly filled in a form online and registered myself as an ardent, brilliant nerd who was interested in appearing on the show. the huge lucky wave i've been riding all past month started swelling again and i found myself chosen to appear for a contestant try-out. i started preparing by memorizing state and country capitals and annoyed friends from other states by calling them up, deliberately mentioning that state's capital and then asking them if they'd been there. i also did a fair bit of reading on the civil war, the american revolution, the presidents, shakespeare (yup i now know that hamlet was a prince and not a danish omelette) and pretty much read all i could in a month. but in no way does that give you license to stop me on the street and ask me questions . on my part , i'll try to be quiet about state capitals.
when the day finally dawned , i knew i was going to fail miserably. its a 50 question test with about 7 seconds for each question and word on the web was that 35 correct responses would send me to the next round. in some practice tests the highest i'd managed was 25. there was still opera, american playwrights, vice-presidents and a thousand other topics i'd completely avoided. when i got to the test-center (it was just a small room in Navy Pier) there were about 60 other well-dressed normal-looking people with the engine of a nerd humming under their hoods. as we got in , we were given a pen and a piece of paper with 50 blanks on it. then after a short practice game , the test began. literary characters, first ladies, english grammar, english rulers, english poets and several other words flew by on the screen. i actually did much better than i thought i would and was guilty of secretly harboring hopes of getting called. it didnt turn out that way and as the organizers said, the people who didnt get through probably all just missed by one. so there you have it , i missed getting on the toughest game-show in the US by just one question. so, folks, i am mediocre and i got a pen with JEOPARDY written on it to prove it.
You can play a multiple choice version of jeopardy on the web at : http://www.jeopardy.com/indexflash.php
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