it's all black and white

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

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

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

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

Would you like to update now ?

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

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

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

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

videopalooza

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

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

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

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

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

two movies and a birthday

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

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

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

escaped artist

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

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

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

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

gotcha!

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

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

get a load of this

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

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

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

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

the most useful post here, ever

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

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

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

black as hell,strong as death,sweet as love

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

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

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

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

compare and contrast

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

early morning nirvana

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

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

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

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

happy snoozing

a moving story

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.