a cook in time

yet another search and rescue mission. my five years here have seen quite a few of this. this time though it was a matter of rice and death. i'll have you know that i'm the undisputed rice-cooking champion of the upper midwest south indian male graduate students association. among other traits that south indian males do NOT inherit from their moms is the ability to take raw rice and water and make it something edible. but its our staple food and sambar and rasam take back bench in deference for there can be no magic without the manna. so we start trying from a very early age (ie the day we step into the haloed apt kitchens and find out the flame is now a red,glowing electric coil). after 4 years of flying lids, whistling cookers and pasty white globs that are just one big,fused carbohydrate molecule i started to come into my own. i was conferred the title of l33t rice-geek by my roomies and promptly garnered the requisite CMM and six sigma certification. this caused rice making to become one of my primary duties and the art form that it was, it was a challenge, day after day, to come up with the quality that i'd made standard. it was an even bigger challenge yesterday, when i found that the all important weight/whistle had deserted me and gone awol.

if in all those words above , "whistling cookers" caught your fancy , there is some explanation in order. why not , you may ask, just go with an electric rice cooker like all those other grad students ? no spare parts that are small enough to get lost in the hell hole, all you need to do is plug and play. there are quite a few reasons but let me explain it in the worst way possible - through an unrelated metaphor. lets say you travel a lot by train. you go from madras to bangalore or hyderabad or wherever it is that you want to go in a train pulled by a electric locomotive. sitting inside one you really dont know what is pulling the train, the journey is quite immaterial and the destination is all that matters. now think of a trip from mettupalayam to ooty. the train is pulled by a steam locomotive. unless you are a ruthless serial killer hunting your next victim or you know that you are the next victim of a ruthless serial killer riding the train with you, you are bound to love the ride up the mountain with all the smoke and whistles. cooking with a pressure cooker as opposed to an electric one is somewhat exactly like that (due credit to mr.douglas adams for that line). you enjoy the sounds that scare your neighbors into thinking you have some sort of a mechanical monster and the sights that turn your kitchen into something that resembles a cloud gently invading a walkway in ooty. another reason is that i like giving out subliminal nods to things i enjoy, like heavy metal, and going by weight alone its tough to beat a Prestige in that category (ok..bad reason..sorry ). so steam beats electric and thats settled.

coming back to the weight, the rice was already on the heated coil and i was beginning to get flustered. timing was of utmost importance in my secret process and if things didnt go well i'd just have to start all over again. i ran through a mental checklist of what had happened after my extremely rigorous ritual of cleaning the leviathan vessel. the weight had to be in the corner of the drawer but it wasnt. i stole a glance at my roomie who was busy perfecting his version of a golt rasam for certification and decided against accusing him. it took all my knowledge of poirot and holmes to deduce that there was a possibility that the weight which can balance itself fairly well when vertical might've fallen on its side and rolled off into the deep recesses of my kitchen's closet and there it was , slightly dusty but still ready to face action.dinner was saved. my process is still intact , but the pressure has gotten to me. if only i could find a way to apply the same template to other south indian favorites. something tells me it wont work that way, the variables will change. so i'm stuck without an option unless.., unless the weight "accidentally" falls down from my window when i am doing a close visual inspection in daylight. something tells me its either going to be frozen parathas or sticky rice from lao sze chuan for dinner tonight.

lagniappe : madman has a restaurant..so he knows best. since my process is classified, i'm sure he wont mind if i direct you to his.

paperback reader

as i watched this meme spread through the blogworld, i was wondering if i'll ever be tagged. suhail was the one who came out of the closet (no not that one..apparently he is a closet fan of my writing) and tagged me. since he also said nice things about my writing, i shall oblige...thanks for the tag, dude.

Total number of books I own: around 10 - 20 here, around the same number back home. after i discovered that there are places that give out books for free here, i stopped buying them..hey i'm just a student living in a not-so-cheap city. being frugal about things like books and lunch allow me to have the odd drink every day

Last Book that I Bought : must be that Calvin and Hobbes i got abt 2 years back, but i gave it away without reading..so it must be the lord of the rings i got in dec 2001 from odyssey, adyar...sigh

Last Book I Read : State of Fear , Michael Crichton sometime in Mar 05..got this and the selfish gene from the library, intending to multitask...took abt a day and a half for state of fear..selfish gene went back after 6 chapters because it was overdue and someone else wanted it more than i did

Books that mean a lot to me (at least five) :
what does this question mean anyway? if there was any lesson to be learnt from the books that i read, it was that i have to return them on time or pay a fine.. the ones that are listed here are the ones that got stuck in memory..there are others that i thought would make me seem geeky yet cool, bookish yet suave, smart and sexy all at the same time but they are all taken. damn all u bloggers who really read those books. most my posts are from the past , lets start from there :

the mystery of the stuttering parrot - the 3 investigators..jupiter jones, pete crenshaw and the bob guy kept me amused through many a summer vacation..but for some reason i remember more of this mystery than the others

H2G2 : cos its funny. i like to think my life is being run by mice...its much easier to give up and blame it all on them..i've only managed to read the first book in the trilogy and till the bit about elevators that knew abt the future from the second

lord of the rings : all that detail.i'm fascinated by really small,irrelevant details about anything. and am a huge fantasy/sci-fi fan. LOTR is easily the best combination of both these trivial interests of mine.

i,robot : a set of short stories each of which is a logically beautiful puzzle..i "solved" one of them as i was reading and am still patting my back for having done so . sci-fi rocks.

i'm finding it very tough to come up with a fifth book..i want to list 'ponniyin selvan' but i am still on the 4th book in that series and at the rate i can read tamil its going to take at least a year more to complete this and then the 5th book. i enjoyed reading the spy genre -ludlum,clancy and others- though none sticks out as being better than another. i also like some jeeves books, dont really remember any of them distinctly..i'll leave you with a couple of lines from one of them that i remembered and googled for..u have to get something in return for all this narcissistic crap :

It was a confusion of ideas between him and one of the lions he was hunting in Kenya that had caused A. B. Spottsworth to make the obituary column. He thought the lion was dead, and the lion thought it wasn't.
- from Ring for Jeeves

i've always been quite lazy , so if u've read this and are one of the few that are yet to post some form of this meme, by all means go ahead..in fact i'll even let you mention my blog as inspiration for the post

angels in the cricket field

in my infinte laziness i forgot to point you all towards my favorite sports-fiction blog(its a new genre-defying sub-sub-genre that is less sport,more tasteless fiction and is a blog that will hopefully be a book one day), where i managed to sneak something under the mawkish oops hawkish vision of dopppsy
yup i'm scratching his/her/its back, (s)he/it is doing mine (not 'me' ppl 'mine')..it happens all the time in the blogworld and now without much further ado, here's jagguG, the debonair cricket administrator cum world traveler cum bengali svengali, revealing more than we'd ever wished to see..oh wait, the warning first :

its rated R for Ridiculous and X for "Xcuse my offensive language and racial slurs, if they dont offend you enough, you cannot have your money back"

enough said, just go read it: ughsport
its the one about deepthroat

for those counting or not, that's 3 posts this week already and to add to all those words, someone i never knew just tagged me with that book meme thingy

more than a peck of gold

i've always liked movies that are based on some kind of treasure hunt. i think i might've once been a soul who was really close to finding some great treasure and was cheated out of it. call it a fetish if you want but i only like the ones where the treasure is old (darn i missed a 'g' there). well stacked crisp currencies do nothing to me. i like parchment maps yellow with age and the way in which movie directors have forever navigated great distances by simply drawing a red line on the same parchment from city to city until they reach the destination in a tiny corner of africa or a snow covered village in nepal.

why would i not want to be the hero? ignoring the fact that i probably look and act more like the irritating sidekick,its probably cos the hero is too ideal in most cases. To shun all the treasure, escape with his life and later find that the horse he rode off into the sunset is the one that the villain tirelessly loaded up with some treasures before dying - he is also too lucky. talk about someone getting what they dont deserve. the villain who planned the whole thing, lusted for the moolah openly, transgressed in several inventive ways that included tying up love interests over a pit full of crocs, barely gets to see the treasure when a quake decides to use the ground he is on as its epicenter. its like those flight points you pile up on your credit card, when at the end you find they wont even take you from the airport's parking lot to the gate and just like us, the villain too is an optimist who finds his glass completely empty in the end.

dont really know when this post went from being one about treasures to being one about how villains are more human than all other characters. bottom line : once i'm a salaried employee i'd like to get paid in gold, even if its only a few gold filings a month. i'll collect them all till one day i can pump them through a shower. i'm sure that that day there will be a quake measuring 50 on the richter with its epicenter in my bathtub.

a peck of gold

must..write..something..S-O-M-E-T-H-I-N-G, something

more about me and my past. right now about 10,567 indi-bloggers have posted abt ABCDs, or to be politically correct indian-americans, kicking ass in the sport of orthography, or to sound less like a pompous ass, spelling, and this got me thinking about my childhood. yeah i know. this is getting to be a bad habit, this past-posting. but i have no option - my past just lends itself to posting. so what was i thinking about ? oh yeah..second standard (second grade to all you americans,indian- or otherwise ) or was it third when we had those dictation tests, i had been a stellar student till then as indicated by little silver (not gold) stars stuck on my report card..either i was eating my veggies and knew the solar system or my teacher was rather fond of stars. either ways i was one of those kids who sat in the first bench and built my right biceps by constantly lifting it whenever the teacher asked a question of the class. but wait , before you start judging me and words like nerd, geek and teacher's pet start spelling their way into your brain, there's more to this story.

one fine day the girl with the gold stars in her report card was absent. the same day we were having one of those dictation tests. with a gleam in my eye, i quickly scribbled down the words as the teacher called them out. the anticipation of what was coming up after the test was causing my HB pencil to quiver and tremble as it raced across the lines tracing one letter after another. i would show the world that all that glitters was not gold. when the teacher called out for us to spell the answers, guess whose hands would go up first. MWAHAHAHAHA. with ideas of class-domination firmly entrenched in my mind, i raised my arm, like a nazi adjutant eager to please the fuhrer , everytime the teacher called for answers. by the time she finally noticed that a hyper energetic kid was jumping up and down in the first bench, i was almost dehydrated. i rose up from my throne to accept the crown by completing this final quest. the word was "ENOUGH" and the phonetic champion that i was, i didnt even consult the sheet i'd written the words on. and proceeded to spell it I-N-A-F-F.

i am not sure what happened after that but i was scarred badly and i stopped lifting my hand even to say tata. my writing suffered the most, having had to wait till the invention of word processors and automatic spell-checking. i relinquished my first bench to the gold star girl when she came back and turned into one of those kids who defaced desks by writing on them. INAFF , i wrote on the last desk i shared with this guy who had no stars on his report card, INAFF , again and again and again...

disclaimer : obviously i just made up parts of the story .. to the teachers looking for the kid who wrote INAFF on second standard benches, do you have concrete, irrefutable evidence?..and to the girl who is missing one gold star from her report card..MWAHAHAHAHA

take your pic

i hate digital cameras..mainly because i cant afford one. so my stand, as i've told a million others, is that in the order of depreciating image quality, the human eye is followed by a 35mm slr, the one-time use plastic camera and finally by any of those ubiquitous clickathon participants, the digital camera.

i like to think that photography is one of my hobbies. its not. my slr is hiding in a corner of a closet lest i take it out and shoot some really badly composed shots. the few that i took (about 15 rolls) are all organized by a random shuffling algorithm i devised on the fly while dumping them in the same closet. note to any obssessive compulsive visitor of my room (and mom): open the closet at your own risk. biologists are however welcome to hunt for new species as long as they are named after me. enough gross out closet details. that photography was my hobby of destiny had been quite obvious to me from the beginning. my father had a yashica slr that was built for a slight variant of the time-lapse photography technique. once we assembled in front of the camera, a lot of time lapsed while my father tried to get the picture right in the viewfinder and then there was one photograph at the end. needless to say when i took that camera to my high school farewell party, all i had were photos without people and in the rare case the chairs that a few hours ago had been vacated by the last of my patient teachers.

when we went on this trip to kodaikanal ,a summer when people still thought about saving a click for a better shot, i was the resident expert on loading film into the cameras. its not like the other guys didnt know how, they were just too lazy and i was too much of a nice guy to refuse a chance to unload a sarcastic comment as i gently pulled the film a little out of its cannister, fitted it on the backside of a camera and then shut it up. by the time the trip ended i was as trained as one of those crack commandos who dismantle a canon (oops i meant cannon) in less than a minute. the slr had long been traded for this ultra-modern zoom (or joom depending on whether u like captain or not) camera that could have possibly taken good pictures. but i was so adept at loading and unloading film that i was content to keep doing just that and came back to singara chennai with no snaps and 2 complete rolls of kodak chroma gold.

obviously my youth blinded me to the fact that my best snaps were ones that required my presence to explain what the object in the snap was. so i plunked down a further $500 to buy myself an slr..a good one, the best one..the one with a setting for each shade of the sky...the one that was supposed to make a novice take perfect snaps of dew drops and make tail-lights of cars look like someone had drawn parallel red lines. it was slightly bulky , so what. after a few more of the aforementioned unidentified objects turned up, i was quick to set it on auto. a little later when i realised that pulling it out quickly, focussing and then shooting a shot required more muscles than those in my eye it went straight into the closet and started its hibernation. it still comes out to take a peek during birthdays and the roll i loaded back in 02 is still there with undeveloped photos of me blowing candles ( oh yeah i still do it).

but i refuse to vacate my stand..in fact i vow that i will never start a photoblog. if i do none of those photos will be digital or film for that matter. it may take a lil while but my latest camera consists of a drawing pad and a pencil. i'll personally capture each image to the worst of my ability. you'll still visit it , right ?

the disclaimer makes its comeback : i do not endorse yashica (now part of Kyocera Imaging), kodak, biologists, slrs,drawing pads,pencils or candles..in fact if someone paid me for doing this, i'll promptly run out and get a digital camera

the truth and nothing but

the men on my father's side of the family don't lie to save their skin or to gain any kind of advantage. we just use hyperboles in a rather exaggerated way. my sister and i always needle my dad and his brothers about their ability to spin whole kancheevaram sarees out of a single yarn. its hard not to when my dad insists he got his rather long name (my last name) just because his eldest brother liked it more than Narayanan and changed it when enrolling him in school or that he'd gotten his birthday because his sister liked a date more than another.

there was the "true" story of how my uncle (the same elder brother) had won an obstacle race in college. his only contender was this suave individual with jet black hair that was maintained with a host of creams and concoctions(an early metrosexual if u may). after they'd all lined up at the start lane, the instructions were announced..now dont confuse this with your ordinary steeple chase. this was an obstacle race a la the ones in full metal jacket, fauji and other such army tales.so while the announcements abt the obstacles and how to negotiate them were being announced, our hirsuit hero was showing his mane off to the scores of feminine admirers who were watching. at the sound of the starting gun (or the blow of the whistle, how wud i know..i wasn't there) the racers set off. the competition was clearly between my uncle and the brylcreem guy..split end to end they raced to the first obstacle , a set of low ropes under which they had to crawl and get across. at the other end brylcreem slipped out a little ahead of my uncle and raced towards the next obstacle - a sort of hurdle jump. while my attentive uncle nimbly jumped over the hurdle, the other guy, having focussed more on his curls than on the announcement, continued to crawl under these as well and was instantly disqualified. thus my uncle became the world champion of coimbatore in the obstacle race event.

my dad is a more trained exponent of this art having observed his brothers in action. he embellishes and adds to a story in a subtle way that what was once just a collection of gases and dust, quickly becomes a rock and then becomes a new world for people to inhabit. here's an example. when my parents landed here in the US , they went through the customs and as they were cleared to set foot into the Bushland, they noticed another parent couple being escorted to a closer scrutiny by the customs people. at least thats what my mom told me. when my father told it to me the first time, they were arguing vehemently with the customs guy telling him that it was their constitutional right to bring lime pickle into a country and that it wasnt a WMD like he'd thought it was at one whiff. the second time was at a friend's place soon after...by now the "pickle terrorists" were being interrogated by senior customs official and one person who looked like an FBI agent. this time they rejected the husband's passport asking him to catch the next plane back. Seeing this the dharam patni instantly fainted thus converting O'hare International into a set for HAHK2-chocolate,lime juice aur aachaar.

if u know me , u r probably carrying a huge rock of salt around to take with whatever i say. dont worry too much though, unlike my elders, i've learnt to channel all that exaggeration into a written form - this blog.

everyday superheroes

yet another morning. Vice-captain Patience stepped out of the shower mulling if today will be the day when he finally asks that bus stop seductress, Flirt-Woman, out. he slipped his costume on. what looked like proper dress wear could at a day's notice turn into the most fashionable evening wear and he didnt even need a cramped telephone booth or a dark alley. the saunter to the bus stop was done in an unhurried manner befitting his sobriquet and there she was standing dressed to kill. but who was that standing next to her.it was that evil,conniving Babe-Magneto and boy was he packing it today. he had his babe-vision sunglasses, the flashiest 32-tooth smile and his flowing tie gave every indication that it had been designed to break hearts. articulate words flowed out of his voice box like polished cannonballs hitting their target with an equivalent force. Flirt-Woman was starting to look like Just-Another-Girl under the verbal attack. Vice-captain Patience ground his teeth silently and in a supreme display of his hidden waiting powers, stood a little away under the shade of a tree waiting for the bus. he knew his waiting powers far exceeded the villain's vocal abilities. he could stand there waiting the whole day if need be, lets see how long Babe-Magneto can keep talking. as if the devils had heard his prayers, a bus promptly came along. being the gentleman he was he kindly let the ladies go before him including a fragrant Flirt-Woman. be patient,he told himself, this is not the right time to talk to her. then in a flash Babe-Magneto promptly stepped on his toes and squeezed into the already crowded bus. in an almost never before seen display of his ultra-patience, Vice-Captain Patience silently bore it all, not even asking people to squeeze in to make more space. in fact he had used so much of his patience that growing woozy he stepped back for a minute , only to have the bus driver close the doors and take off. in that vulnerable moment, he almost let his weakness take over. repentance had a strange way of diminishing his wait time. no, he decided, this was no time to repent and summoning all his remaining patience, he turned back and went back to the shade and started practising waiting for the next bus. soon he was well on his way to becoming Captain Patience.

say no to reading

its a given fact that we are a very visual species..well i dont exactly know of any other species that can read pictureless books from birth but we do understand much more quickly with a picture. its probably safe to claim that barney has accomplished much more in teaching the importance of cleaning one's room than a manual on personal hygiene. my childhood was spent on a lot of comics that had talking animals. they were all created by a couple called amar and chitra and usually began with "once upon a time in a jungle". though i was clever enough to understand that a bubble above an animal's head meant that it was talking , the fact that a monkey was talking to a crocodile or that animals peacefully assembled at a banyan tree under the auspices of a lion king to ostracize a cheating hyena completely slipped beneath the radar of my bullshit detector. the point is that i learnt most of my morals - looking before leaping , doing things slowly so there is no waste, never to leave a royal garden under the care of a monkey etc - from a rich visual medium.

then someone told my parents about one of the Rs. the argument for reading a book against watching a movie goes thusly - you use your own imagination when reading, you imagine places things and people to have a certain form and assume certain features. a movie takes away from this "wonderful" experience. so the argument goes, reading will improve imagination but it doesnt stop there. the other 2 Rs -'riting and 'rithmetic - would quickly follow making life hell. its double the effort - not only does one have to read, you also have to translate the words into pictures. i know now that imagination produces false images 100% of the time. it stems from assumption and you all know what assumption is the mother of.

lets just do away with all the reading and go visual. everyone would then be on the same page. until N T Ramarao came along everyone had vastly different images of lord krishna and ben kingsley is for all purposes the only gandhi i know. i hope u didnt spend too much efffort imagining while reading all this. i'll try to come up with a 10 panel comic strip to substitute this post but no promises because the only thing i ever did right in arts class was writing my name on the left top corner.

america's pastime/india's timepass

jagguG is the brainchild of dopppsy ..while to all others he is just a normal, multi-millionaire cricket administrator/manipulator , to me he is a ruthless think-tank capable of turning (fan)fiction to reality and baseball diamonds to cricket pitches and hence to real diamonds

sometime in aug 2005 when brownish-yellow leaves are strewn all over the outfield in a park in chicago, jagguG talks money with his fellow sharks - raju patel , raju shah, raju patel 2, raju patel 3 and kantibhai patel. did we give MLB a run for their money or what ?? i told u the grass is mightier than the beer. now lets see as per our schedule ,the regular cricket season should end sometime in november and the playoffs start the same day abt 2 hours after the last game. raju patel , the eldest in the group and the one with a grocery store in little india for the longest time, chips in with his infinite dal-packing wisdom. but , sir, but in november the grass will be gone..i mean from the outfield. it will be winter. no one will come here braving the chicago winds even if we give them free grass and viagra. the younger raju , with a gleam in his eyes, starts - we should move the playoffs to mexico, i've been to cancun, lots of nangi chokris there, heck we might even be able to cause a early spring break there if we market it right to the goras here. raju shah, in charge of logistics due to his experience in keeping track of frozen paratha packets - that would not work , sir, we've already announced the schedule, and this chicago crowd wont even go to indiana to see the latest rajinikant movie because gas is too expensive..they wont go unless we buy southeast airlines and fly them. hmmm....now this is a quandary. jagguG whips out his cellphone and calls his technical consultant - hey do u still have that rain machine we got to fix matches ? do u think u can reverse it and make it suck all the snow or something - we'll postpone the winter in chicago this time.what? it will take till next winter ?? phuck you man.kantibhai, the quiet chaat-corner owner - sir if i may, i have a canadian nephew who told me something. it seems the hockey league has cancelled its season because they wanted to keep all the money from the advertising, those greedy pigs.so i suggest we move the playoffs indoors and onto the ice. the NHL fans dont understand the rules of hockey and wont care less if they were seeing balls instead of fucks i mean pucks.the stingy desi crowd will definitely drive from the suburbs to downtown - we can hit 2 penguins with one snowball sir. all our sons and nephews can be the parking lot attendants and our daughters and nieces can be half-saree clad cheer-leaders. we can sell bhel and samosas out of the concession stands. well the players have to be taught ice skating but we have that 2 hour gap between the regular season and the playoffs. we can charge these fans for that training session also. everything is in place, we'll just sign the NHL agreement. jagguG interrupts - then we can sell this to the canadians too.despite inviting them to the world cup the canucks are still ignorant abt our game.maybe when they see the ice they'll make the connection that it is a sport. so everything is settled, the first ice cricket playoffs shall skate out in november. wait a minute what is that i overhear - what people in sharjah havent seen a sheet of ice at all.hey raju3 , sun baenchod, as soon as the finals end here, cut out the sheet of ice from the arena and have it shipped to sharjah u hear.we're having the next season of ice cricket in sharjah

a class act

recently i saw this kid twirling a book on his finger. this reminded me of the many small yet brilliant abilities each person seems to innately possess. there used to be this guy in school who could twirl a pen like a baton with just 2 fingers. while i now know that baton tricks are "talents" that may decide if one beautiful girl deserves a crown and a sash more than another equally beautiful one, back then it was just plain cool. after desperate begging and giving him half my lunch everyday for a month , he acquiesced to teach me. formal training began and everyday (after lunch of course) i would sit there trying without much success while guruji supervised. he would teach the fine points of holding the pen exactly 2/3rds of the way from the bottom and then give it a subtle flick so it made one complete revolution. several teachers never knew i was in their class for i used to spend most of the class under the desk hunting for the pen that seemed to be repulsed by the sight of my fingers.

i quickly got bored with it when we discovered that rulers while to outside appearances looked like measuring devices, also possessed latent musical talents when mated with the desk and twanged. we were probably the first to form a band comprised entirely of ruler-wielding maestros. wooden ones, plastic ones, short 6-inch ones and the big, bad foot-longers all produced sweet cacophony during recess.(don't take my word for it, do your own thing here ..just turn up the volume) .the rebellious among our band even risked it by practising when a teacher was expounding on the volume of a sphere and were de-scaled in front of the whole class.

so there was a talent, there was a band. all that was needed to complete this circus was animals and we didnt lack those either. the unsuspecting ants that came hunting for morsels spilt on the desks were quickly ensnared and sent to the far away other side of the desk. there they were trained repeatedly to climb the dizzying heights of a pencil while some worked on the delicate balancing act of hanging from the underside of a paper. one particularly super acrobat could do both and actually had me wishing school could go on longer beyond the final bell.

needless to say the circus broke up when we left school to pursue more "stable" careers. all that talent, all that practice a waste. i still twirl a pen now and then at work trying to get it right but there are no ants to train on my desk.

no ants, beautiful girls or fingers were harmed during the writing of this blog. a few scales did break when we exceeded the material's tensile strength

fish (me) out of (the) water

i am from madras. you wouldn't need exceptional reasoning abilities or mathematical induction to then conclude that i probably dont know swimming. you can always test that conclusion by dropping me in a puddle on the road. my legs will cramp, hands will flail about to catch hold of the nearest passing vehicle and i'll probably drown in my own tears. if by chance the whole of india were to instantaneously turn into a desert, only two groups would survive - the very rich who would still be able to buy those water-packets and madrasis. my mom used to give me 2 tumblers a day - one to drink and the other to take care of the other necessities. i've often stayed back in school to sneak into our principal's office which had a water cooler and my neighbors had to give 108 water-laden lorries as dowry for their daugher. ok i'm exaggerating, but given the copious amounts that gush into our reservoirs courtesy of the excessively generous karnataka government, we could barely fill a bucket let alone swimming pools and our youth,never having grasped the concept of swimwear, have always assumed that the anorexic bikini-clad models on FTV are really extremely poor people from 4th world nations.

the first time i tried swimming, i also learnt the importance of angles. having stayed on the shallow side of a pool (if u r wondering where, it was in madras not chennai) for abt 5 minutes, i decided to put all of my 6ft height to test and ventured over to the deep side and slowly clung to the side while a friend (its unhygenix, if u should know, and he probably learnt swimming at his favorite raibareli) beckoned me over to the other side. you see, he was better at math and having worked out that the breadth of that deep side section was barely 8 feet, he put 2 and 2 together and said that i just had to kick my 6ft frame off with a little power and my head will be hitting the other side even before i could say "save me". turns out he misjudged my expertise at staying straight (thats directional orientation ppl..no smirking or giggling). so for a moment i was like a torpedo headed straight towards the heat source and the very next i'd deviated from the straight line by 90 degrees. it was as if the navigational circuit blew a fuse and, as unhygenix would relate later, i turned slowly like a temple chariot turning around mylapore tank and was churning the water like a blender. when unhygenix came over with the noble intention of saving me, i did the first thing my genes and newtonian physics told me to do. i put my hands on his head and pushed down. as per the third law, i came up for air and then someone else seeing our plight managed to pull us both out to the shallow side.

the next time was when i decided to put my tuition waiver to proper use and signed up for swimming 101. though i was/still am scarred for life by the first incident, i just couldn't resist the sight of a large square space filled with chemical-smelling, sparkling blue aqua. the brief time i'd been living in the US had turned me into a greedy sponge lusting for water of several kinds. nope it wasnt enough that i had the marvel of plumbing that was actually used to deliver water instead of air like in chennai. i just had to get my feet wet and how better to do it than in a class full of undergrads. with the help of 2 instructors, freestroke and backstroke were mastered quite easily. the butterfly was not that easy, but i didnt give up. with a lot of effort i was able to slice through the water with the grace of a caterpillar that had half-wrapped its cocoon around itself only to find it had to go in search of more leaves. then one day they decided to take us to the deep side (u didnt think i was mastering all those on the deep side, did u?). while the others slowly swam from the shallow side onto the deep, i cleverly beat them to it by walking on the side of the pool. by blackmailing me with a E grade, my instructors forced me into deep waters and insisted on teaching what they called 'treading'. while i was discussing the semantics of using a term associated with terra firma for describing activities associated with natation, i realised that i was slowly going down and that my exposition on english usage wasn't exactly contributing to keeping me afloat.when feet touched the pool's bottom at 15 feet, i stood there like i was waiting for the bus. an instructor realising i wasn't buoyant like other humans, came down and indicated that i should try coming up. that was stupid on his part, it wasn't like i wanted to become poseidon and play with mermaids. finally he came down grasped my hair and yanked me up and soon i was in a familiar position , sucking in air like a vaccum cleaner.

despite all this i did try my hand at diving a couple of times later. only because the whole class (including some beautiful undergrads) stood around exhorting me to jump and more importantly because the whole set of instructors were in the water ready to pull me out. i got out of the water without help to thunderous applause and right then i knew that i'd nailed the course. there you go,the story of a man from the water-deprived streets of chennai who grew up to be a less-than-average swimmer (only shallow side pls).

suggestion for producers: in the movie version , lets replace unhygenix by a new starlet and let there be a song right after she rescues me. for obvious reasons let the song be in a water theme park.

mid-week movie mania

after a unsuccessful jeopardy try-out and omelettes for lunch at greek town i headed home and started the week's true end with 'Raincoat'. rituparno ghosh takes o.henry's 'the gift of magi' , tweaks it a bit and then thanks him in the end. ajay devgan in need of money seeks help from his friends in calcutta and while there goes to visit his past flame,ash, who is now married to an apparently affluent guy. 'apparently' because it turns out that the antique (pronounced wonderfully as 'aunteek' by ash's uneducated character) furniture in the hall is not their own but belongs to a furniture salesman who is renting their house. the script moves at almost the same pace as life which was just right to keep me engrossed. its tough to get devgan to overact and the effect that the lack of hamming had on each shot was quite shocking for someone who has been brought up on the staple crying and shouting in indian movies. i wonder if 'black' would've been better if it had been taken in this style of very-low-drama.

after returning raincoat, we braced ourselves for 'socha na tha' which from the cover promised to be the anti-thesis of raincoat. the DVD cover said that it was the story of a guy who turns down a prospective alliance to get engaged to his catholic girlfriend only to discover he is in love with first girl. fooled by the cover story's relative simplicity we took it home to find out how complex and utterly real this movie was. at one point one of the characters asks the aforementioned guy "tum paagal ho kya?" . i've never heard a truer line uttered in any movie abt its hero. both the actor and the character are frustrating enough that we were placing bets on who - among his brother, father,bhabhi,girlfriend and the girl - would kill him first. the funniest part happened after the movie ended. the dvd stayed in our apartment for 2 more days before getting returned with a late fee. i cried like salman in HDDCS while paying the fine. all the money i earned doing "work" was going down the video shop's drain

by then , a nice golt movie called 'Mass' had mysteriously found its way onto my laptop and seeing that the print was decent, i bought a DVi-to-TV converter,hooked up my mac to the tv + stereo and let sundara telugu fill the rather silent corridors of my apt floor. mass is the name of nagarjuna..he even gives some convoluted logic as to why he got the name but i didnt understand one word of what he said. a rather uncooperative golt room-mate , forgetting how i'd translated the prabhu crying "naan ippo enna seiyvaen saravana" joke just last week,refused to repeat or translate it for me. mass comes to vizag from hyd to rescue his lady love(a rather large tub-of-jo'thika) whose father and brother are huge dadas. he goes about smashing heads and killing the henchmen of the dada and the people of vizag stand around applauding and after finding out when the next show is , disperse peacefully. after beating up scores of bad guys and blowing up a few cars and 1 van, mass meets the evil brother face-to-face,again in front of a million jobless vizag golts and thulps him..seeing which the father dada takes a gun, and in a ending that might've surprised o.henry, shoots the brother (his own son) and then shoots himself. talk about ruthless villains, this one even killed himself . i was so inspired by his act that i ruthlessly deleted Mass freeing up about a GB of repressed hard disk space.

i ended this week's movie marathon with 'Mahanadigan', a really funny story with the ultra-sarcastic sathyaraj playing a conniving "young" man who stamps on everyone in his way, neatly arranges them as steps and then walks on them to a better life. along the way actors and politicians face his/the director's wrath. he imitates actors, disses the technicians, ridicules politicians on their own stage and still manages to become the CM. if anyone is still uncertain that tamil inherently lends itself to sarcasm, i would like to invite them to see this movie.
btw, does anyone know what sarcasm is in hindi ??

so-so sunday

ladies and gentlemen, you are in the presence of mediocrity-ness. i am not a quizzer though i have a penchant for useless trivia that makes me appear like one. the last and only time i was on a quiz was in the ninth class when my geography teacher volunteered me for one. i upheld her clever choice by wrongly answering several questions including one about the tallest mountain in india( which i instantaneously answered as K2 and when given another chance, quickly changed it to the doddabedda peak). despite that the red house, who i represented, came in third out of 4 and i got a plaque that sits between a nodding dog and one of my sister's chipped vases in the showcase in our hall.

jeopardy is a game show that is said to be the toughest game-show and is a quiz of (mostly american) general knowledge. so when i got a few answers right while watching on tv, i quickly filled in a form online and registered myself as an ardent, brilliant nerd who was interested in appearing on the show. the huge lucky wave i've been riding all past month started swelling again and i found myself chosen to appear for a contestant try-out. i started preparing by memorizing state and country capitals and annoyed friends from other states by calling them up, deliberately mentioning that state's capital and then asking them if they'd been there. i also did a fair bit of reading on the civil war, the american revolution, the presidents, shakespeare (yup i now know that hamlet was a prince and not a danish omelette) and pretty much read all i could in a month. but in no way does that give you license to stop me on the street and ask me questions . on my part , i'll try to be quiet about state capitals.

when the day finally dawned , i knew i was going to fail miserably. its a 50 question test with about 7 seconds for each question and word on the web was that 35 correct responses would send me to the next round. in some practice tests the highest i'd managed was 25. there was still opera, american playwrights, vice-presidents and a thousand other topics i'd completely avoided. when i got to the test-center (it was just a small room in Navy Pier) there were about 60 other well-dressed normal-looking people with the engine of a nerd humming under their hoods. as we got in , we were given a pen and a piece of paper with 50 blanks on it. then after a short practice game , the test began. literary characters, first ladies, english grammar, english rulers, english poets and several other words flew by on the screen. i actually did much better than i thought i would and was guilty of secretly harboring hopes of getting called. it didnt turn out that way and as the organizers said, the people who didnt get through probably all just missed by one. so there you have it , i missed getting on the toughest game-show in the US by just one question. so, folks, i am mediocre and i got a pen with JEOPARDY written on it to prove it.

You can play a multiple choice version of jeopardy on the web at : http://www.jeopardy.com/indexflash.php

S U P E R saturday

groups of desis stood smoking below a sign that said stratford square mall. surely we were at the right place but way too early. it didnt take too long to guess that we had entered the mall during the interval of the previous show. the rest of the mall looked and behaved like a typical suburban mall during a weekend. when we came back to the theater entrance about an hour and a half later, it was like the mall had suddenly announced it was having a sale for janmashtami. the last time i'd seen so many of our ilk was when the temple was having its annual diwali celebrations. but this crowd was to celebrate an even bigger event. even before seeing the movie, i was reminded of the charisma of the superstar. he'd managed to pull all of my university's (tamil?) alumni from every nook and corner of the midwest to one place. people were soon talking of zooming careers, imprisoned lives and the movie itself
"hey are u still doing ur masters??"
"yup...hey whos that chick over there"
"umm..she's my wife, i got married in december"
not every conversation was like that though. after several warnings that the line to get in was long,i finally joined the tail of a rather long and wide line and thanks to my enterprising golt friends managed pretty good seats. the movie finally began after thanking everyone from the airport baggage-handler who handled the "potti" when it landed at o-hare to someone called vasu , who was using the superstar ticket like other politicians before him. briefly, rajini is a psychiatrist who comes down from the US to meet his friend prabhu. prabhu is going to a village where he has a road-building contract but the house he is moving to is apparently haunted.strange things start happening once they move in and how thalaivar solves the problem is the rest of the story. i'm deliberately skipping a few beautiful damsels , some very well canned songs, a fight and a lot of double entendres there. if u r a rajini fan, you'll like it. if you are not, you'll just find reasons not to.

as most other reviews would tell u thalaivar looks much better than he did in baba and that intro -any other star in that sort of a fight sequence wud've been out of place,not rajini. we did the best we could crying ourselves hoarse almost throughout the intro and the first song. the movie moves along at quite a brisk pace in the first half with thalaivar and vadivelu producing quite a lot of guffaws . we then broke for samosas in the interval. rajini fans were put to shame by a caucasian/hispanic lad behind the refreshments counter wearing a t-shirt with thalaivar showing his pearly whites. damn the organizers, giving rajini t-shirts to popcorn vendors. the movie takes a more serious turn in the second half and p.vasu manages to tie it all up with a few loose ends. with that we came back to reality and stepped out from a theater that for a brief while had assumed the Santham moniker.

Sin City

gore is a dish best served in plenty. sin city creator frank miller and director robert rodriquez dish the violence out with style and have created a genre that most indians would succinctly identify as "masala". movies that take off from books suffer the scrutiny of readers who'd compare each scene to its corresponding page. sin city dives right off a comic storyboard and comes out not as a adaptation but as the comic itself. despite being only a small time comic book fan , i could imagine portions of the dialogs appearing as talk bubbles and there is a fair amount of narrative that could appear in a narrative box on its own. a lot of close-ups, exaggerated expressions and over the top dialog delivery complete this movie's make-up as a comic. oh yeah another thing, this movie is drawn in good ol' black and white (and lots of grey) with certain portions highlighted in really bright color (like a blood red car, shining blonde hair and piercing blue eyes). even the blood when it pours (and pour it does) is in a sort of fluorescent white which doesn't detract from the gore at all. the laughter from the audience at each decimation and decapitation was quite reminiscent of 'kill bill'. no surprise considering that tarantino is a "special guest director".

it starts with the story of hartigan who rescues a young girl from her abductor but quickly moves to another about marv , an ugly hulk who sleeps with a kind hooker. the hooker is killed when she's in bed with him and he seeks revenge. the body count starts there and soon you lose count.whether its due to the lack of fingers and toes or the spectacular,vibrant grey imagery is debatable. the next is about a bartender shelley and her lover dwight. dwight takes on her ex-lover who is finely chopped by another sword-wielding hooker while dwight looks on. they later find he is a cop and have to cover it up. the third is about hartigan again but now the small girl has grown up and blossomed into a fine young jessica alba. there are times in the movie when one wishes it was in plain color. her scenes were some of them. the abductor hunts her down again but hartigan saves her yet again.

as is obvious , i'm skipping plenty of comic strip panels here, including some very stripped ones that had more of the aforementioned hookers. i didnt think it was the best story ever told but the way it was told was quite unlike any i've seen. it certainly wont please everyone. i'm looking forward to see how it goes down with the indian audience who i'm sure will take it up only after feasting on chandramukhi,sachin,mumbai express and anniyan.

Website : http://www.sincitythemovie.com/
ogle at jessica alba and others there or at a theater

The Breakfast Club

the 80's arent really a generation i identify with. Among the few memories I have are one of running to my neighbor's house to watch the spiderman cartoon in color and another of playing the emperor in emperor's new clothes without knowing how the tale ended.. embarrassment has a strange way of increasing long term memory. ok enough illustrated about how little i remember of the 80s. So when someone at work told me they could lend me The Breakfast Club(1985) , I wasn't really going for it till someone else told me it was by the same guy who made Ferris Bueller's Day Off - in my opinion one of the best Chicago-based movies ever.

The Breakfast Club was quite different from Ferris Bueller. It is not linear in the sense that there isn't a continuous storyline. There are 5 characters - high school students - who are forced to spend detention together in the school library on a Saturday. They represent the different subgroups in school and if left alone would have passed out of school without speaking to each other. what happens is a catharsis where each relates his/her thoughts about parents, their mistakes, their insecurities. If you adjust a little for the differences in societies , you have a picture of what every high school student goes through.

With a minimal cast (apart from the 5, only a janitor and the teacher have any real talk time) and some very well written conversations, writer/director john hughes(writer of Home Alone, for the 90's children) does an excellent job of representing the whole high school population with its myriad problems that seem to mysteriously vanish when something called "growing up" happens. the movie starts with the teacher confining them to the library asking them to write an essay about who they think they are. the essay never materialises on paper but you can see it on your tv screen if you care to rent it.

appadi Podu podu podu

my favorite 'ism' - materialism
read the fine print. click for a closer look


at times i think i made my sister and B-i-L buy this for me just to do a post like this

mandatory post on death

death and life start at the same time..life is initially faster..death just catches up and goes on to win

today my speed increases some more. after much thought and after scanning my rearview mirror for cops , i've plunged my foot and accelerated to 26 years / year.

for the metaphorically challenged : its my birthday..yeah i was born surprisingly close to a day that celebrates stupidity.
but this year its different..i'm 26...finally.i have waited a long time for this.
in terms of achievement, year #26 ranks right up there along with #1 when i learned to sit on my ass. but i have a feeling theres a lot more to come.

ideas for a (techno)logical state

in the age where much has been bandied about india's superiorITy, so much that americans are against state governments in the US are using indian IT firms to computerise their departments, isnt it rather sad that the Indian govt itself is still run on paper ? here then is my e-governance solution for a nation that as a whole will soon be suffering silicosis brought on by the number of microprocessors around.

most technology experts recommend easier user-inteface designs , while knowing they'll have to find new jobs if someone comes up with one that is perfect. But thats not going to happen now is it? my iBhavan ("i" is the new "e" folks, get used to it) will not be the most user-friendly but what it will do is to make the government and its workings appear easier to the public . Another expert claim regarding the rapid e-conversion is that the new technology should not infringe on the regular working of any organization. To that effect paper-pushing will now take the new moniker of file-pushing. If an official wants to send a file or folder to another using iBhavan, he will send it via e-mail to the peon. The peon who will be busy watching streaming video of the cricket match will then take a look at the file, notice the lack of gossip in it, save it on the desktop and proceed to chat with peons from other departments. Any attempt by novice peons to instantly forward the message to the receiving official will cause the inherent delay mechanism to kick-in which will display a series of dialog boxes through which the peon must click till its time for the file to be delivered. lunch and tea will obviously be ordered online but anyone wanting to do so must still (mis)use the peon for doing so.

anyone who wants to file a petition, pay a bill etc will still need to take the overcrowded bus, hang on to dear life and walk the miles of office corridors to get to the correct government office. The reason for this is that iBhavan is designed to be a highly secure system, hence the terminals you can access iBhavan from will be located right next to or inside the office you want work done at. Obviously there are only 5 terminals and a hundred others waiting in line. Once you get to machine, wipe the beedi stains of the keyboard and close the browser windows flashing "Brittany naked photos" , you'll be presented with the chat window and a list of the officials you can chat with. You'd think we would've made it easier for you by enabling u to directly chat with the "babu". Think again. Regardless of the messenger handle you click on, all clicks will lead to the peon , who not surprisingly is not listed on that screen. You quickly glean that the officer will chat with you only if the right buttons are pushed on the peon's interface. With a sigh , you proceed to supply the peon with a couple of passwords to a porn site and a folder full of the latest hindi mp3s that you'd brought along in a jump drive. With a "What no item number videos? " retort and a couple of expletives, the peon adds you to his conference with the officer and scoots to serve the next chat window. so far so good. the officer asks you for your files, you upload them at once to him. After a wait, the officer comes back online :
Officer :"Your files are not of the right format"
You : "But i followed every rule on the iBhavan website, every comma is right where it should be and i even bought an anti-virus software to make sure it was clean"
Officer : "All that is fine but you havent used MS Word as we recommended.."
You : "I used Staroffice and I am very sure its compatible with Word"
Officer : " LOL , we dont care if its compatible, dont you know we have a contract with Microsoft..go back and bring the file in the proper format"
With a poof , the window is gone and the next guy in line taps on your shoulder indicating you should take your cd-rom and leave.

So you see, iBhavan is the ultimate in e-governance . You wont miss a single thing from the old government office except the cheap quality paper forms. Its ideal for the next generation most of whom will either work in a tech company or in a call center. Don't worry about the tons of e-waste that will be caused by iBhavan, instead spare a thought to the millions of trees you will be saving because of my innovative system.

iBhavan is a un-copyrighted name owned by the author. Any attempt to duplicate this idea or use it as a template to improve anything about the government will result in loud guffawing and incessant laughter from the author