color me wrong

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

here take a look for yourself:


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

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

oka oorilo oka rojulo okamokka autos

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




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

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

aaj ki rot

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

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

special a 250 peaberry 250

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

crazy kiya re

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

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

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

capital times - 2

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

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

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

capital times - 1

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

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

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

a method to the mad(ras)ness

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

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

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

been there, done that

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

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

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

nobody does it better

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

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

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

change of address

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

vowel movement

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

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

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

Domo arigato, mr.Roboto

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

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

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

golt is my other tongue

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

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

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

take your pic redux

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

accentually speaking

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

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

rashtriya baasha

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

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

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

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

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

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

it's a rap, again

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

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

snippet

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

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

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

guess who's back?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

audiophile

so i got a Bose stereo system this weekend.

the packaging it came in was just awesome :

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

textosterone mini

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

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

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

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

adi thadi academy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the one two punch

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

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

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

bore yourself some coffee

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

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

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

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

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

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

it's all black and white

(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.