a moving story

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

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

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

the dog ate my blog

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

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

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

add arizona to that list

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

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

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

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

stop the blog

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

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

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

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

english as the first language

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

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

roomie1 : whats that

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

roomie1 : so what is the shri ram factor

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

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

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

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

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

little streams of alcohol

the last time i tried singing was in a cottage in top slip on the TN kerala border. the wildlife which is supposedly quite abundant in that area bolted to god's own country after my rendition of the spoken word version of 'mujhse naaraz ho' from papa kehte hain (remember jugal hansraj singing the more popular "ghar se nikalte hi" thinking abt mayuri kango). so when i start posting about a small subset of my most played songs over the past few days, you need to understand that its entirely subjective. here goes :

cornershop - brimful of asha : sepia mutiny has always been a regular haunt of mine and a post about mathangi arulpragasam aka M.I.A had a link to this song by cornershop. the last time i heard this song was probably when i was in my first year of college when it used to play on MTV. cool,trippy song with the kind of lyrics that one neednt really concentrate on.sm also had a link to this article by someone on kuro5hin with an explanation for the lyrics. one cool song.

stealers wheel - stuck in the middle with you : heard this one on 'malcolm in the middle'..it just got stuck in my head till i googled for the lyrics and found the song. it was on the reservoir dogs soundtrack too and there is a version by bob dylan. i also read somewhere that the stealers wheel singer deliberately used a dylanesque voice.

big rock candy mountain from the " o'brother where art thou ? " soundtrack is a sweet sweet folk song. lyrics that make you chuckle as the song continues its slow course. they are here .the version i'm referring to is the one on the right and the title to this post is part of it as are these awesome lines:

I'm bound to stay
Where you sleep all day,
Where they hung the jerk
That invented work
In the Big Rock Candy Mountain

music has this amazing ability to create a mood. some songs do this through memories we have of listening to them and some merely by the sounds and lyrics . the 3 i've listed distinctly scream summer .i'm sure each person has their own list.wud love to hear from anyone who cares to share.

rahman had 2 releases - the rising(hindi) and ah aah(tamil) - over the past few weeks. i havent gotten around to listening to them since i've been doing other insanely interesting things like moving apartments and pushing a loaded moving truck. theres too much invective in that story.i'll let it simmer down a bit before i write a PG version of that rant.

current events

darkness engulfing space like a giant, black marshmallow. candles placed on tins,floors and the rare candlestand. kids running about with torches howling and trying to scare other kids. small flames and weak beams of light that interfered with the electricity board's agenda for the night. except for that weird marshmallow reference, you probably know what i'm getting at. a powercut in chennai( and elsewhere too i guess) was like a festival that wasn't on the calendar. sweltering chennai heat meant that familes would often move out to the balcony or to the front of their houses in the hope of catching a breeze. the powercut would thus transport families to a time when the best primetime show was put up on the sky (its still running but most of us are watching the wrong channel). the ones that remained indoors would feel their way to the special corner that always housed the candle which would then be lit.

and thats when i would take off from my house taking along a huge orange torch which was almost never the first thing that one would find in case of a powercut. most of my friends had those bulky stainless steel ones with ridges along the sides. ours was in orange plastic and had a plasticky yellow button that was once white. it was a tad too heavy and when tinkle or some such general knowledge magazine featured a DIY torch , i jumped at it. went to the tiny electrical shop on the main road, bought a couple of AA batteries and a small bulb. went back when i realised i needed a small wire to complete the circuit and finally had the shopkeeper do all the work. i'll point out that my life's ambition at that time was to be an engine driver of the nilgiri express. so if u r thinking budding electrical engineer, hold that thought right at that railway crossing. the DIY torch didnt work out. i could never find a way to hold the bulb and the wire to the terminal and investigate dark recesses like frank and joe hardy.

i'm not sure if the orange torch went out in a blaze of glory but it was the season for something bigger and better. twas, after all, the night of the emergency lamp. it was a device that from front-on looked like an iron box and had a handle on top. the designers i heard were aiming at the niche market of people who wanted to build muscle during powercuts. it was so heavy that the handle was probably put in so you could tie a rope and tow it when you moved. one thing was clear though, no kid was going to run up and down our street flashing the emergency lamp in other kids' eyes. it had a tubelight, a searchlight and an orange light that could be set to blink. kind of like an indicator..but of course, dumbo.. u'll need it when you are towing it. but why would someone name it an emergency lamp. i mean its a lamp and all , but "emergency"..maybe it was invented during a certain period of indian history. the only emergency that i can think of is maybe when your boat springs a leak and you need to unload some weight off..the first thing to go overboard would be the emergency lamp. how your boat started floating in the first place with the emergency lamp on board will be left as a homework for you to solve.

the power would always play spoilsport coming back just when the fun was reaching its peak. a few kids would still linger around till their parents called them in.i was probably already inside doing my homework ..heh heh..i meant watching the last few songs being called out on super hit muqabla. stupid current cut. made me miss most of the show.

weekend self suicide

stop stop...stop ... STOP
i've been here for 5 years and except for a really insignificant incident at a grocery store the first day i stepped here ,culture shock was just a term i heard in the international services office. i didnt flinch one bit when i faced shelf upon shelf of different kinds of cereal and quickly picked out the cheapest one without confusion.i thought i was immune to the phenomenon. until today. my culture , traditions and values were jolted right out of the comfy sofas and swimming pools they were lounging in and were treated to about 50 million volts of the most shocking combination of visual and auditory sensations. there they were. ash and sonali kulkarni stepping out of a shop in what i presume is one of those bylane bazaars in amritsar. one where indian culture is displayed in all its colorful splendor on store fronts , available in kilo and meter measures for british directors to buy and then shock endlessly. it looks like any normal indian market till ash and sonia kulkarni burst into some of the worst english lyrics set to an indian tune by that gifted music director anu malik. and thats when i heard a huge thud inside my head and looking inside found culture lying shocked on its side near its couch and tradition pulling its hair in despair was running circles around it.

as i continue seeing bride and prejudice, i keep repeating to myself that this must be a satire. surely gurinder chaddha didnt shoot a english video of ash near the golden temple. i can't make out some of the genres that were cut up and pasted together to make this frankenstein creation. dialogs often acquire a victorian accent (ok ok maybe thats just english and my ears are blocked) with people asking permission to introduce their family. i shouldnt carp abt it so much i guess cos the movie has been funny in parts , especially the part where this indian dude who has struck gold in amrika comes back to seek the hand of ash. hey alexis bledel just entered the movie. you go GILMORE GIRL. and a mariachi band has just started singing in english in a hindi tune. stop stop...STOP...STOP..no wait let me watch the movie..maybe i'll spot anu malik playing a harp in the snow, singing "let it snow,let it snow". ok i stop here. i have to go finish my sambar rice and appalam before the appalam loses its crispness.

collector's edition

i can imagine this like i was there shooting it all on home video. in one of those triasic or mesozoic or some other era my ancestor along with his fellow neanderthals through luck and sheer stupidity managed to stun a huge brachyosaurus. the giant lizard which was chewing placidly on the leaves from some tree was shocked when a group of tiny humanoids jumped from somewhere making guttural noises that unknown to them consisted of the choicest bad words in dino lingo. like any garden variety dinosaur it should've normally responded with a sweep of its tail knocking attackers of their feet,but now it was confused. its tiny brain, unable to decide between responding to those bad words in kind and giving a command to its tail to thwack the neanderthals (my ancestor included), went into overload, burst a few arteries and succumbed to internal haemorrhage. while the other neanderthals harvested the meat ,most of which would go waste because they chose to invent fire before ziploc bags, my ancestor after having a small bite was busy scavenging for the 113th neckbone from the skeleton. on finding it he carefully and clinically jumped on either side and then hit away with a club till he was able to separate the neckbone. he then lifted it and added it to his velociraptor skin pouch. for you see he was one of the earliest to take to a hobby. he was a bone collector (no reference to that serial killer movie) .

this trait had passed unhindered through generations of wiser men and women till one day (in the past of course) it surfaced. out of the blue i decided i had to start a collection of marbles. those glass spheres were like tiny worlds that were begging to be discovered. i was fairly good at the game but i think i played it only so i could buy more of these. i had a large collection in various sizes and colors. some of these were blue or green ones that one could also find inside those ancient soda bottles. one just had to admire the ingenious way by which the makers had sealed those bottles with those marbles and had ensured that no eight year old, with the singular aim of increasing his marble collection, could possibly extract them. thus a 50 paise panneer (rosewater aka attar ppl..not that cardiac clogging cottage cheese) soda would surely result in a sticky but fragrant t-shirt for the rest of the day as i quite literally showered in that sweet stuff in my hunt for the precious orb of glass. the last time i counted i was upto 102 of them stored in a piggy bank that was actually quite representative of my savings.

when i grew up (not a lot) i quickly jumped onto the bandwagon that many a indian kid was already riding. coin collecting and stamp collecting were the hobbies du jour. i took to stamp collecting after i discovered a huge cache at an older cousin's place who was only too happy to give it all away as he had other "interests" to occupy his time. so without effort i had a huge stamp collection that was neatly organized already. i'd pester our neighbors ,whose daughter was abroad, everyday to see if she'd sent them a letter and had a hand in several shady dealings in school. the dealers would almost always meet up under a tree or a corner of the playground. out came the stamps from the middle of textbooks or dirty pockets. after a quick recce of the other one's offerings and a nod to seal the deal the stamps would quickly exchange hands. one had to be extremely clever to avoid being fooled by the "fakes" for once the deal was closed that was it. the stamp mafia had its own set of laws and no one dared to break it. i got a stamp album that alloted pages to each country , intending to populate it with my collection but grew tired of maintaining it soon and it was mostly empty after Australia.

the whole collection/hobby thing was becoming less fun and i gave it one last try with the bus ticket collection. frankly i dont remember why i even started collecting them. i guess i was trying to be the anti-conductor...he would tear out the tickets and i would collect them and create books organized by denomination. my noble intention to recycle the tickets by selling them back to the pallavan transport corporation was shattered, rather bit, into pieces by a family of rats. they deemed their need for comfortable bedding more important than my intention and that was the end of that collection.

people collect all sorts of things these days. everything that was ever made before 2000 has become a collectible and thanks to ebay even toasted bread has a significant value. i stopped collecting bus tickets after the rat event . the cta issues a silly magnetic card that neither me nor the rats particularly favor. but i'm still collecting memories, real and imagined, by the busload and filing them all away. i'll give you a couple of guesses to figure out where they end up eventually.

a fair evaluation

i went to "the taste" last week. 'the taste of chicago' is a 11 day feastival dedicated to gourmands from all over the greater chicagoland area who try to solve an age old problem. given an infinite number of food choices, a limited amount of money and a stomach with a somewhat finite capacity, how best to fill it while still retaining the train fare to go back. being a member of the ilk that sprints as far as possible at the mention of math , i wasnt too worried about those choices confusing me. the choices were also severely limited considering the fact that i am of the species that eats fruits and leaves. 10 minutes after i'd purchased 11 tokens for $7, those plundering pirates, pillaging poltroons who call themselves chicago's best restaurateurs had decapitated my long, perfectly perforated token sheet leaving me with exactly 1 token. 3 tokens had fetched me a "taste" of some pita,hummus + tabouleh salad (of course i had the recording of "is this vegetarian?" handy and just had to press play to the first pirate) ..a taste being a small portion of the full dish. they should actually be calling that a "sniff" , cos thats all i did once i got the plate of hummus and salad and it'd vanished. one not-so-good funnel cake later i was pretty much done for the day. wandering about in the jostling crowds, i soon got a familiar feeling and the tortoise mosquito coil that should've been the logo for this blog made its appearance in front of my eyes ..rotating slowly.

i was staring at a stall with strings of chillis hanging around the sides with a small crowd of people around. i smacked my lips and waited for my dad. he was somewhere in that crowd trying to justify our long bus ride to get here. he was getting one of those large appalams that combined with the chilli powder,sprinkled on it with finesse, made for one super snack. it was an essential part of our annual summer excursion to what we kids referred to as the egjibichan and the tamil nadu govt referred to as a trade fair. it took place without fail every summer (how we chennaiites differentiate between the seasons is a highly classified topic not covered in this post) on the Island grounds which was surrounded by the perennially stagnant Cooum. there were a lot of stalls put up by different state departments. the only ones i really remember are the police department , probably because of the weirdly scary, smiling statues of policemen saluting, the one for the fire department, which had this fire engine outside and a stall that sold books from mir publishers of USSR.

i was never aware of the politics between india and the erstwhile soviet union. all i knew was that it was an awesome bargain when one could buy bundles of 5 books for Rs.10 each. i would carefully choose bundles that only had russian and ukrainian folk tale books. it was almost impossible though and i would always get one book in the bundle that had puzzles about old men who bequeathed a princely sum of 17 kopeks to their 3 sons and we were responsible for dividing it in a fair manner. the folk tales also had such puzzles but the authors themselves solved them in a rather creative manner by sending the sons on a long journey towards 3 mountains each taller than the other and with a wooden,silver and golden castle on top. of course each castle also contained a maiden each named evening star, morning star and the sun princess respectively who turned into song birds during the day and a evil tsar who guarded them. so at the end the sons would've forgotten about their poor father who'd probably spent his lifetime saving up those 17 kopeks. i clearly digressed there but i guess u get the story. i must've bought at least 3 bundles over a 3 year period of which only the puzzle books survived, the others having being sent on long journeys themselves after "friends" borrowed them.

the other big buy on every trade fair visit was this top + flying saucer. there was this ingenious little mechanical device to which one could either attach a plastic top or a flexible saucer which was pretty good at flying in the air. the saucer would be lost the same evening having being sent out of our second floor flat's window to explore outer space and moments later the top would unsuccesfully try to emulate the saucer. lacking the aerodynamicity it would plummet down to the concrete floor and fail to make the emergency landing thus reducing a 3 component toy to one useless piece which would also be sacrificed to my curiosity.

our evenings at the exhibition would always end at the rides. i would aways go there no matter what to stare at great giant wheel and wonder if i'll ever be brave enough to go up on one. another tortoise coil and there i was back at the "taste" staring at the ferris wheel that'd been put up at one end. the kids on it seemed to be having a fantastic time. i just turned around and went back searching for a stall that would accept my lonely token. where was an appalam stall when you needed it most ?

lost ... and found

so there i was staring down at the ground . i was looking at a lonely ant scurrying for its appointment with that black bug over there. standing at long off or long on or whatever that far end of the ground was called was rather boring business. despite assurances from both the captains of our under-10 cricket team that my corner was one that was frequently visited upon by the ball , i was rather skeptical. i knew enough cricket to realise that a tennis ball hit by a 8 year old with that rather cheap plank of a bat would never reach me without rockets attached to its rear. everyone knew that the bat was all that mattered. now had that been an SG , i'd believe that even the next door toddler who practiced tirelessly with a hollow plastic bat would be able to blast that ball to the moon, without rockets.

the ant had by now concluded business with the bug and was heading towards the pavilion. i looked up and realised play had been stopped and that meant only one thing. my game was about to start. you see i didnt own the bat or the ball or the wall on which the 3 squiggly stump lines were drawn. i could hit sixes and fours at will but only if everything including the bat was imaginary and of course during my long stands at the far end of the field i'd even imagined some hatricks while bowling ... to myself. yet my inclusion into any game of cricket being played in the staff quarters we stayed in was a foregone conclusion, for i was a golden retriever. wait let me rephrase that before u go thinking this is the story of a dog. i was a seeker a la harry potter long before rowling even imagined quidditch. any cricket team playing anywhere in that huge quarters knew about my unique capabilities and those were the days when a slazenger tennis ball, even a tattered old one was worth a lot more than one of those silly snitches.

soon there was a call that echoed all around the ground and to a man, the whole cricket team started chanting my name. i looked around and started to slowly walk towards the evil bushes that had recently gobbled up our ball, acknowledging the cheers from the crowds. then quickly broke into a run as the captain of one of the teams told me that i would not get the customary baby-over batting if i didnt come sooner. after interrogating the batsman and the fielders, i quickly calculated trajectory, accommodated for bounce and age of the ball , added in a few of my favorite constants for luck, dived into the bushes, scratched my scrawny arm on some of the branches, tore up some leaves to do unto the bush as it had done unto me and came out with the ball. i even declined any assistance to help me out of the bushes. i knew my job and the baggage that came with it. fully satisfied with my performance i went back to search for my ant when a boy from the other side of the quarters came huffing and puffing across the ground. that could only mean one thing. i strained my eyes to look at batsman, realised no one had given him an SG bat. assuring myself that there was no way he was going to hit the ball to me, i quickly left with the other boy. some other team needed my skills more than this one did.

yesterday i got to play the gentleman's game after quite a while. my first ball bounced near my legs and went towards long on, my next went one bounce towards point and my third ball went right over the batsman's head. yup i was bowling. my batting fared much better though. a greek guy who'd never played before insisted he wanted to try bowling and the other team, seeing it was me with the bat, gave him a chance. after much swishing and slashing, i made contact for a single. the best part however came when someone edged a ball into a corner of the concrete courtyard we were playing in. play stopped and i started walking slowly towards the corner with a lopsided grin. compared to evil bushes, this one would be a piece of cake.

powerbook sans power

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.)

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.

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.

(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 :

" 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

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

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.

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.

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

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