Echoes

Looking Back? Looking Ahead? Looking over my Shoulders?

2007-03-12T09:15:00.000-07:00

For a few dollars more

2005-08-15T16:01:00.000-07:00

After witnessing a quiz contest that was about as interesting as watching a group of not-so-athletic slugs doing a slow cycle race to determine their next ruler, I was at a friendly neighbourhood eat-out having my dinner when my mobile decided to beep the Walk of Life, and I knew that it had to be a message reminding me not to be late to the meeting where there were things waiting to be discussed and finalized, ostensibly in an atmosphere of brotherly hostel spirit. The Narmad mess at 9:30, the message said.

On arriving at the said spot, one would have been tempted to mistake it for a conclave of angry rugby players bracing up for the referee outside the stadium after losing the game owing to poor decisions on field. And he would not have been too far away from the truth. The meeting was the first of the four General Body Meetings that would be held every academic year. As the name suggests that is when the General Body of the hostel meet for the first time and discuss if pigs really have wings that have a matching colour to their skin complexion. But before that they usually discuss issues of lesser significance like the hostel budget that the secretaries would propose for the coming academic year.

It was the Gen-sec, better known to the watchful reader as the one who sent the message, when I was at the f.n. eat-out, who was presenting his budget when I entered. The issue under discussion was regarding the selection of volunteers to monitor the computer room. The G-S. was of the opinion that he needed a vol with computer fundaes to ensure nothing goes wrong with the computers and another to ensure that the computer room is closed at 11. Now, the closing of a computer room, as you would discern is not a job for the weak hearted. In fact every young man, starting his life ought to be a vol who closed the computer room at 11 in his hostel to build character. But the Narmad brethren seemed to think otherwise. And this meant a cut of about Rs.500 from his budget as there certainly was no free dinner for non-workers. For the uninitiated, the hostel tradition is to reward every hard working young vol with a dinner treat at the end of the academic year. Then there was the issue of transportation, miscellaneous transportation and transportation for the hostel night, that was settled in a not-very amiable manner, but settled finally, it was. But then there were other smaller issues like the purchase of washing machines etc that the cash-conscious general body pooh-poohed.

And then it was the turn of the Sports-Sec. He went about giving his plans for furthering and promoting and developing sporting facilities at the hostel. There were of course a few hiccups when the g.b., rather generously suggested the purchase of ten pairs of socks and studs for fourteen players and came up with a mind-blowing suggestion to do away with the purchase of a chess board and instead involve the largely untapped Narmad potential of budding pop art exponents to draw 64 squares, alternating black and white in colour, and stick them on a good cardboard sheet to further the interests of the chess prodigies. But they had to reluctantly agree to the purchase of a chess board (the cheapest one, no less) when they were reminded that though there were many budding exponents of pop art, there certainly were no wood carvers etc who could make the chess pieces.

Yours truly, as the poet Whatsisname once said had the responsibility thingummy on his shoulders, before he could say What Ho! Being the Lit-Sec of a hostel, and presenting the budget would have made me a red carpet invitee into the sixteenth chapter of Thomas and his nerves of ISO certified Steel, where our brave protagonist braves the fire breathing jaws of the fiercest of the Romanian Dragons, while warding off the attack from the Loch Ness monster. After a quick introduction I proceeded to present my budget. There was a bit of haggling on the question of how much the winner of an intra hostel event ought to be awarded. For some time the scene was reminiscent of a beam balance with empty pans. Then some kindred souls in the g.b. decided that they needed more money for the thingy rather than for the nonameyet as opposed to some others who felt the exact opposite. Abraham Lincoln would have been a proud man had he seen me diffuse the argument with the greatest of ease and bring calm amidst the growing unrest (hell, I am the author here!). And he certainly would have sung my praises during the dinner table conversation and later on had he seen how quickly I concluded the haggling and brought about a peaceful agreement with the g.b. So there was peace at last, but then there were these moments that occurred during the calming process that would have gone a long way in clearing any doubts that Ol’ Abe had in my abilities.

Firstly, there was this question on which was the better event the thingy or the nonameyet, which took some masterful explanation to prove the qualitative superiority of the thingy.

Then, the allocation of an annual budget to buy books. It is a great tradition at the hostel library that we manage to expand our impressive collection of books every year, to ensure that the average Narmadite continues to remain head, shoulders and waist above the mainstream sheep. But there was a bean in the g.b. that seemed to think otherwise. He was politely told by a half of the g.b to go and boil his head off. ‘There you go, Abe! That’s support from unexpected quarters’ I said, and Abe nodded in glad approval.

While we are still on the topic of the allocation of an amount to buy books, there was this old egg, not an altogether bad one that wanted to know how many books (exactly, mind you) that I intended to buy in the coming months. It took me some explaining on the lines of how a book is not a tennis ball that has a fixed price, and how I intended not to buy any book that claims to thrill you and chill you and is written by a number without a name, or by any other person who has a fair knowledge of revolver brands and is on a mission to fill up 700 odd pages with useless info about the same in the hands of a smiling assassin or for that matter of anyone who seems to think that the world is essentially full of phallic emblems. Having understood the basic difference in the economics of a tennis ball and a book, he looked an enlightened man.

And then the meeting was largely devoid of any interesting occurrences that would register a good 7 on the Richter scale till the Garden-sec came along (yessir! We have one!). He wanted to buy about a million saplings for half a million rupees and was promptly told by the enlightened g.b to eat cake. And he gladly conceded.

A piece of information which if I fail to mention here would haunt me for the rest of my life is the one concerning our Warden. Narmada like any other self-respecting hostel has a Warden, a thorough gentleman who is always there in every Narmadite’s hour of need. He had the rather unenviable position tonight of having to endure the entire meeting and watch the g.b. lose the sight of the forest for the wood. Yet like one of those heroes in fables whom you find braving the storm with an upper lip that was as stiff as an iron rod, he braved it.The meeting, lasted, I must add for three hours, and the secretaries finally tabled their budgets, which were passed by the g.b., who were glad that the overall budget was just over a lakh of rupees less than what their immediate predecessors had tabled.

All’s well that ends well? I think this is just the beginning.

The Delicate Sounds of Blunder

2005-06-20T13:35:00.000-07:00

Heres to peer pressure. My first post since 44 BC, as the gasoline guzzler pointed out. So it was this other day when we had a very happy reunion of school friends, we decided to go around the city. And then, Hari wanted to go to his college to check something out, so we went with him. After the work was done and when we were waiting for the bus back to his place, we noticed that the signposts had long black patches on them. It didn’t take us long to realize that it was another of those apparent missions carried out to further the cause of Tamil and for the general welfare of the Tamil language and her people. And the man who has captured the imagination of all, albeit for all the wrong reasons regarding the language issue as well as most other issues is a certain Dr. Ramadoss, arguably the heir apparent to Captain, should the latter decide to quit his I-am-THE-honest-cop-who-fights-ISI-miscreants and enter politics.

With great difficulty this writer managed to get face to face with the man himself. When asked what the language issue and the black paints were all about, he said: “It is about furthering the cause of Tamil, and making it the mandatory language for all international communications. Understandably, any other language is a hindrance to people’s welfare. And since we fight for people’s welfare we make more than merely a conscious attempt to wipe all other languages from the face of the Tamil soil. Anyway, a long black patch on an otherwise boring green or yellow signboard looks cool from a distance.”

Hmm fair enough, I think. I mean nobody is against adding a dash of colour to the boring city-scape, and come to think of it a black patch on a yellow or a green signboard kicks ass.

“But what about those who don’t give a damn about your astonishing aesthetic sense but are plain pissed because they cannot understand what’s written on the boring green board in front of them because they cannot read Tamil? “

Ha! Gotcha there! That was a trick question. Now let’s see you wiggle your way out of this!

He said: “Three times four cannot be thirteen, and seven times eight is fifty-six everywhere.”

“Huh? Yeah I know that. But what about the people who don’t know Tamil?”

“Don’t they know it?”

“Yes, they know it too.”

“So there. That solves it.” he said.

I was lost for words here. I tried to ask him the same question again. But apparently he was against rhetorical questions. So I had to let go.

Another thing that gets me a little worked up is the practice of giving rhyming names to siblings. So it goes like this. If Ram has a younger brother he automatically becomes Shyam , and Narendran’s younger brother better be a Surendran, and should there be another son in the family, he is Sudhindran or may be Suchindran, but mind you any name not ending with a –dran is deemed unfit to even be mentioned as a possible option.

This is being extremely unfair to the second child. I mean what are the chances that he would get a name that does not sound like a violent mix of crimson and electric turquoise? And all this because he was born after the first guy? The first guy, of course has limitless possibilities, from a plain Suresh to a more exotic !Xobile (ask me how to pronounce it!). The third guy, of course fares even worse. For he has one possibility less. All this is partly because of those insipid story tellers of Bollywood who had hit an all time low in imagination while trying to name their protagonists. So what’s the fun in having a seven syllable name that takes about ten seconds to call out, just because your name had to rhyme with your elder brother’s? Thankfully for me I don’t have to worry about that, for I am a first born. And no, my sister’s name does not rhyme with mine, nor is it in any way derived from my name. She probably wouldn’t have forgiven me for eternity had that happened.

On a brighter note the Sensex has touched 7000. In case you were wondering what all the fuss was about, it’s like this. There is this Bombay Stock Exchange that decides it needs to monitor the growth of the Indian share market. So one fine April morning in 1979, some names that matter get together in what is the first meeting of the Index Committee and then choose 30 companies which according to them are indicative of the cash flow in the Indian market and then say that the index is 100. And that was the basis. Even today, the Committee reviews the list of 30 companies that are similarly indicative of the cash movements in the stock market and the general performance is reflected in the Sensex. A higher value means the economy doing great like the black patch on the yellow sign, and a lower value means a seven syllable name. But then again, one has to take all this with an extra helping of salt, if we have to relate it to the general state of the Indian economy. That is because the percentage of the Indian population who invest in shares is low, and hence a general well being of the share market doesn’t mean Kallu Ram is automatically taken care of in Ballia.

Another piece of news that might actually make me watch cricket this summer is that Australia have been beaten by Bangladesh. To make matters worse for the baggy-green-kangaroos they were beaten by England the next day, and by Somerset the day before and by England again in a Twenty20 match a couple of days before that. It would be good fun if the Ashes for a change would be between two evenly matched sides rather than those dreary one-sided affairs in which the Poms get mauled.

And this is not the Nine o’ clock News.

The Summer-Winds of Change

2005-05-12T14:48:00.000-07:00

If there was no change, then there would be no butterflies. And that would mean one thing less to worry about for Indonesians, for there would certainly be no butterflies flapping their wings in South America. Unfortunately, for them, that is not the case. Change, as we all know oh-so-clichéd-well is the only permanent thing. That clearly, has not been the case with this blog. It has remained, for most practical purposes, without a change for about a couple of months now. The cry went around, saying ‘Echoes don’t sound anymore! The saneman’s blog won’t voom if you put four thousand volts through it!’

Not being the utterly-unconcerned-about-his-blog kind of person, I woke up from my slumber, and decided to breathe life into this blog that was seemingly pushing the daisies. So, what you have on your monitor screens, is what I would prefer to call Echoes Resounded.

Other things have been happening. On a relieving note, the fourth semester has ended, and the summer vacations have begun (three months, baby!). Relieving because, this semester was as interesting as watching Andy Warhol's Sleep alone, whilst being subjected to the musical virtuosity of a bullet-proofed mosquito droning away in your ears.

Elsewhere the Lakers have failed to make it to the NBA Playoffs. Talk about dramatic turnarounds! After a three-peat, nobody would have expected the Lakers to take this kind of a nosedive. Having moved from LA to Miami, Shaq is definitely turning the Heat on in the Eastern Conference, as they start as favourites. And no, he is not the reason why it has become unbearably hot here. The mercury has been on the rise here, with temperatures touching 42 on the Celsius scale, leaving most folks high and dry, trying to find an answer to all this.

And now for something completely different...

2005-04-05T05:37:00.000-07:00

Arthur: I am your king!
Woman: Well, I didn't vote for you.
Arthur: You don't vote for kings.
Woman: Well, how did you become King, then?
Arthur: The Lady of the Lake... her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water signifying by Divine Providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. That is why I am your king!
Dennis: Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.

-Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Monty Python’s Flying Circus was a hugely popular television comedy series, which was aired for four seasons on BBC. The Python lineup included John Cleese, Eric Idle, Graham Chapman, Michael Palin, Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam. Of these, the latter was the animations expert, while the rest were the main characters in their sketches.

The series itself had been named in a rather unusual way. The producers at BBC decided to name the series Circus in response to the way the six Pythons-to-be were scuttling around like a circus, and decided later to prefix Flying to make it sound like something from World War I. The name Monty Python was chosen by the Pythons themselves, referring to it, jokingly as the kind of name that a really bad theatrical agent who would have brought them together, might have had. So the phenomenon that was to be Python was born, in 1969. The rest, as they say has been a heady mixture of history, geography, economics and quantum chemistry.
Over the years, the Pythons have redefined comedy of the television kind with their unconventional style of narration and bizarre content, like vicious attacks from gangs of armed “Keep Left” signs and the friendly neighbourhood Bicycle Repair Man. They came across as a more-than-just-welcome breath of fresh air to the stale ‘two-men-across-a-desk’ comedy sketch that invariably ended with a corny punchline that was prevalent in British television then. Other notable variations, in their narrative were, the absence of punchlines, the nearly, but not quite seamless transition from one sketch to another using Terry Gilliam’s animations.

The animations actually became a hallmark of Python sketches. Starting from the famous left foot, inspired from Agnolo Bronzino's 'Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time', to other cardboard animations of the Pythons, and others they have remained an integral part of these sketches - as integral as 0.545 is not.

The Python Fan Club has among other names the likes of The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and Douglas Adams. In fact the latter once famously remarked, “I wanted to be John Cleese, but it took a long while for me to realize that the job had already been taken.” He remains only one of the two non-Pythons to have written the scripts for their sketches. Pink Floyd were big fans of the television series and have been known to postpone recording sessions to catch the television episodes. They also funded the production of the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Ex-Beatle George Harrison was of massive support to the Pythons in the late 70s. He funded and starred in Monty Python’s Life of Brain, and also appeared in Eric Idle’s series titled The Rutles, which parodied The Beatles which had rather imaginative titles like Can’t buy me lunch and All you need is cash. He once said in an interview, "Monty Python helped me get over the trauma of the breakup of the Beatles."

In fact, they were to television comedy, what The Beatles were to music, in the sense that they were essentially British, and were not afraid to experiment creatively on their content. Both were internationally popular, and broke away from stifling demand that their respective producers laid on them. And like The Beatles, the individual members have been extremely successful, with their solo projects after the collective broke up.
Graham Chapman, a vastly talented actor, writer and alcoholic, died of cancer in 1989. John Cleese’s tribute speech barely two months later left the audience in splits, notwithstanding the reference to the Dead Parrot Sketch and the use of that four letter word. “And the reason I think I should say this is, he would never forgive me if I didn't, if I threw away this opportunity to shock you all on his behalf”, he said. Later on, commenting on the possibilities of a reunion, Eric Idle said “We shall have a proper reunion, once Chapman comes back from the dead. We have sent a note to his agent!” Keeping with the loving eccentricities of the Pythons, Chapman is referred to, affectionately as ‘the dead one.’

The Pythons have enjoyed huge success, and have been honoured with a number of distinctions. The earliest being a request for producing Flying Circus episodes for the German audience, which they gladly complied with the Fliegender Zirkus. Recently, Monty Python’s Flying Circus has been inducted into the Rose d’Or Hall of Fame, an international television festival that is now in its 45th year. The programming language Python has been named in honour of the Pythons, with sample program codes containing pythonesque references, reaffirming their status as a nerd-staple, among other things. The word spam traces its etymological origins to an eponymous Python sketch. Not too surprisingly, there is a snake species in South America named after them. The Broadway adaptation of Holy Grail, titled SPAMaLOT opened recently.

Post Python, the Pythons have had comparable success with their individual projects. While reuniting for their movies, they have been working independently, collaborating as pairs at times for select projects.

John Cleese acted and produced Fawlty Towers, another hugely popular television comedy series, and later on appeared in a multitude of movie roles like Q in Die Another Day, replacing David Llewellyn, who had played the role in all previous Bond flicks, and as Nearly Headless Nick, in the first two movies of the Harry Potter series.

Eric Idle, famous as the King of one-liners, and the soul of sketches like ‘Nudge Nudge’, has been working on similar television series like The Rutles and lately has been busy with SPAMaLOT, the Broadway adaptation of Holy Grail.

Terry Jones likewise starred in some television series, and later switched over to writing. He wrote among other things Douglas Adam’s Starship Titanic, based on the computer video game, screenplays for Labyrinth, Wind in the willows, and is a regular columnist with The Guardian, where he has been voicing his anguish and complete discontent with the war in Iraq, with essays like George, God here…

Michael Palin has been doing several travelogues, and has given rise to what is called the Palin Effect in tourism. The number of tourists to a particular spot increases after a Michael Palin episode featuring the same, like for instance the Sahara desert!

Terry Gilliam, the undoubted silent spirit behind the not as silent animations, has been involved with a variety of directorial projects, like Don Quixote and Brothers Grimm.

That three of the Pythons - Cleese, Palin and Idle were in the top 50 of the list of Comedian’s Comedians stands testimonial to the respect and love that the Pythons enjoyed among their peers.

Perhaps their outlook is best summed by the closing lines of their last movie The Meaning of Life. Unfortunately, printing them here would mean that the PG-13 certification tag that this magazine, so proudly carries, would cease to be, expire, breathe it’s last, kick the bucket, go on to meet it’s maker and rest in peace. So, in the best interests of the certificate, the article ends here.

This article appeared in Alchemy 2005 the Chemical Engineering Department magazine

Mechanical Haiku Operations

2005-02-20T23:32:00.000-08:00

It has been a long week, and it's only Monday today! Five quizzes gone one to go. So I have this course called Mechanical Unit Operations which any chemical engineer worth his vacuum evaporated salt must do (sadly). The course per se is somewhere between separation and mixing and I don't know where, exactly. So far as I know, it is in CRC 304. Anyway, I have been inventing new methods to spend the class time usefully, while still sitting in the class.

So the prof went on with his "Size reduction muggawuggayadayadawuggamugga Chamber yadayadayada grinding muggawugga particle ...." and it was mostly an overhead transmission, primarily because I was not able to hear the prof clearly enough... and no I am not hard of hearing, just that I did not try hard enough!

So there were a lot of particles and their size being reduced and then the customer requirements and then I drew Groucho Marx and then ashish said he looked like paul mcartney and I mocked and said he looked more like munkey schaffer and then I decided to write haikus.

Now I am not throwing in that obvious line that would say that I am a greenhorn and I know nothing about writing haikus save the 5-7-5 syllable count,and apologize profusely for even having dreamt about writing a haiku. For all I care,they looked pretty neat to me once I finished writing them.

So here goes... my haikus in chronological order:

I'm learning to fly
A particle blown away
In the D-slot class

The class happened to be in a D-slot, and was about size reduction of particles...

And soon enough ashish came up with one of his own, which I promptly forgot and then I wrote another one

Didn't know what it was
Looked like nothing I had seen
The Invisible

and then as a dedication to the week that has been, the kind of which I have seen and shall see in numerous occasions, I came up with this...

We shall soon see
What has not been seen till now
'Morrow's quiz paper

and then ashish wrote two more to catch up with me. However, the prof felt that enough was enough and started taking the attendance, and then announced that we had to submit some simulation program, working as groups of three and dismissed the class.

So until next time
When there'd be probably more
Auf Wiedersehen!

That that is is is is and that that is not is not is not is not

2005-02-05T07:25:00.000-08:00

As I sit down to pen this article, I step into deep meditation, I close my eyes , take a deep breath and take a view of the human life from the exterior. Having transcended the limits of the human body I am now in a position to comment on the sheer nothingness of the human race… well ok I didn’t do that! anyhow I decide to write about the first thing that comes to my mind and so continuing with my deep breath and all that I launch myself into a state of rather futile brainstorming and the first thing that came to my mind was… well, nothing! So I decide to write about nothing to see if it could mean anything at all!

So… as is the convention when writing earth-shaking articles of such vital importance, the Webster’s Dictionary refers to nothing as… um.. forget it I am too lazy to look up the definition. Anyways I shall now let you out on a little secret that is bound to send shockwaves in the community of the astrophysicists and related people who strive to find what exists beyond the universe. Well, ladies and gentlemen contrary to popular belief, there does exist something beyond the universe and it is (trumpets, drum roll) nothing.

The next obvious question in the mind of discerning reader would be to ask if we actually have to travel such a helluva distance like the end of the universe to find nothing. I mean, can we not find it at any other earthly spot? After all not all of us could become Arthur Dent! Well finding nothing is tougher than finding Nemo! That’s because you can see nothing, hear nothing, smell nothing, feel nothing or taste nothing when you see, hear, smell, feel or taste nothing. So perception of nothing with the five senses as we know them is totally impossible! But one place where we could find it for sure without travelling a helluva distance is the Webster’s Dictionary. So out goes my laziness and I retrieve the one-place–to-find-nothing-for sure-without-traveling-a-helluva-distance from my bookshelf. And it says nothing is “not anything”. As the above definition is detrimental to the raison d’atre of this article it shall be deemed heretical and condemned with immediate effect.

However a positive outcome of the whole exercise is that it has helped us evolve a cure for my laziness and it is nothing. It is only now that I understand the profound meaning of my mother’s oft repeated pearls of wisdom! She has been telling me all along that nothing could cure my laziness! And it has taken me so long to actually realize it.

So people, that’s the last word. Nothing is the universal cure to laziness(anything that could cure my laziness shall surely cure yours too!) as nothing gets you up on your feet as nothing else could!

This article first appeared in Alchemy, the Chemical Engineering department magazine, last year and later in The Sabre, the Narmad hostel magazine. And just in case, you were not able to punctuate the title... it is supposed to be read as "That that is 'is', is 'is' and that that is not 'is not', is not 'is not'! "

Lessons, Captain taught

2005-01-20T13:18:00.000-08:00

This Pongal, I was at home. My first Pongal at home, since I left school. My cousin Arun had also come there. As always, the channels had a lot of movies as part of their Pongal programme lineup. This of course, included all the first time on Indian TV…movies, which we would gladly forgo, if given a choice of watching either those or Andy Warhol’s Sleep (which is a ten hour film that focuses on a sleeping man, and only on him.) What interested us, however were the movies of the most beloved son of the soil, that the Tamil speaking populace have ever seen (trumpets, drum roll, bomb blasts throwing up colourful dust in the background)Captain Vijayakanth- a man whose exploits, include among other things, fighting evil Pakistani militants or saving the nation from the clutches of an immoral minister, whose partners in crime are international mafia bosses or terrorists who threaten to wreck the national integrity of our motherland. He is forever the honest cop. The one man, who is an answer to all vice in the society.

Most people tend to think that he is the greatest comedian ever to have starred in a Tamil movie. Well, for that matter the greatest comedian to have starred in any movie. I was one too, till very recently. Then I decided to take a Captain’s never-mind-if-it-is-bloodshot-eye view of the whole situation. It was, quite literally tough to step into Captain’s robes, for they were too many sizes too large for me. So, I decided to wear my own clothes and take the view from you-know-where. Then, it was more of a vermillion haze in my mind.

When it all cleared up, I knew I had found the answer. The method to Captain’s deceptive-if your-eyes-aren’t-as-bloodshot-as-his madness. Captain’s movies portray him as the ultimate man. It is a mocking parody on the millions of superheroes of the West and their zillion make-believe superpowers.

An average moviegoer who would believe that James Bond (Pierce Brosnan, in Golden Eye) could have an acceleration due to gravity of 20 m/s², finds it hard to believe that Captain could melt a huge block of ice with just a stare from those bloodshot eyeballs of his.

Captain’s computer skills are, well, to say the least the stuff that legends are made of. He is the world’s first and only red-eye hacker who has hacked his way into typing in the Windows Media Player and erasing an upper layer to reveal what is within, (after jooming, of course) in Microsoft Paint. This is of course, an extremely well thought of take on those wiry nerds one gets to see in English movies who hack into just about anything that they like to. The make-believe factor here, is that the guy is normally a brainy chap, who is romantically challenged and avenges that by hacking into some of the most improbable places. So who said, you cannot hack into WMP and type into it? Just that Gates and Co. overlooked it. It took the genius of Captain to figure it out .How, we shall never know. After all, Captain is entitled to his intellectual property, which he might probably share with the other sons of the soil who live by his tenets in those eighteen villages, and not with doubting cynics like you and me. ‘Prove me wrong. If you can!’, he says.

Another topic on which there is a divided opinion among people is on his choice of heroines. Some feel that they are half his age, while there are those die-hard cynics who believe that Captain is something like four times their age. However, everyone accepts the fact that he is roughly seven times as heavy as they are. Needless to say, this is Captain’s moral science education (albeit, in a very teasing way) to the West. He wants to imbibe in people like Michael Douglas the Tam values that he holds, on a higher pedestal than his life, or his sister’s life (who invariably marries the villain and dies at his hands after being separated from Captain), or his wife’s life (who normally lives till the end to see Captain accomplish his mission), or his parents’ life (who walk naively into the villain’s trap, but are rescued in the end) , or his dog’s life (that he doesn’t usually have) and so on…

Then come his dancing skills that would make 50 Cent feel like Fred Astaire. Here’s a man who could make his jaw dance to the tune and let the remaining part of his body wobble as it would please. For the proponent of the Captain’s Jaw form of dancing, he is extremely modest about it and prefers to examine spinning tops on bellies, instead. The clever take that Captain does here, is to silently mock at the pop divas of the current era.

There is also an unverified fact that he holds the record for uttering the most number of di’ s in a given song. Researchers put this value to be around the perimeter of Captain’s belly, in centimeters, rounded off to the nearest natural number, which is presumably, a very large number. This is Captain’s answer to all those Gangsta’ Rappers who drop in a pointless yeah at the drop of a hat. The comparison is particularly interesting because the number of times the latter say yeah in any given song is said to be equal to the perimeter of their tummies. So as they say, a belly for a belly and a di for a yeah.

The greatest things about Captain are his fighting skills. Be it catching a hand grenade and throwing it back at the baddie, or gravity defying mid air miracles, Captain is on home turf. His other achievements include electrocuting electric current with his mind power, having piloted 342344 planes to safety after the pilot had been fatally wounded, giving a 20 minute sermon that changes an evil terrorist into a peace-seeking monk, delivering a wise judgment to about 4567882 cases in about eighteen villages, in a little over three hours, fighting about 157 bald headed baddies per minute in each fight sequence, using bare hands to finish ‘em off even when there is a gun with him, being the foremost upholder of Tam values, and so on. In fact, he is said to be on every Pakistani terrorist group’s hit list as enemy number one. All this, of course are real happenings, as opposed to his other deeds which serve more as a lesson on life and moral principles.

The next time you see Captain, don’t even for a moment, scoff at his enormous belly or his bloodshot eyes. For behind all that, is the mind of a man whose primary mission in life is to teach ethics to the value-deprived social order that we live in today.

Of New Year wishes, text messages and disturbed sleeps...

2005-01-09T11:49:00.000-08:00

This post must have been out at least five days earlier. But then, I decided to wait until I got my computer in. So since three times two is six, i have got a new comp in my room. That was about three days ago, when TJ suddenly said, OK we'll get a comp today and whooooosh... there was a comp in both our rooms after making us poorer by a few grand. So, I have this ergonomic keyboard and all, and it's amazing fun to see that the text appears the way I type it and not otherwise as with the one back home, the one that seemingly has a mind of it's own.

New Year time is when people actually rediscover most of their friends and relatives and then suddenly you have an assumed lost fifth cousin coming up with a nice e-card to your mailbox, or some not-seen-or-heard-of since last January aunt who never fails to remark how much you have grown since your fifth birthday calling you up. All in all it feels good to have people remembering you. This New Year, I got quite a few wishes on my barely six months old mobile phone. One of them, however was an anonymous one, which ran to about two-and-a-half screens. It sounded extremely nice and wished me well. Now, apart from feeling happy, I also felt curious, very curious. I mean, no one actually spams you with nice messages. Spams are mostly corny, but this one was nice. However, packing my bags for college got the better of my curiosity and I promptly forgot about the message, until about six days back when I saw it again while I was lazily looking through my then congested Inbox to see what messages that I could delete. So there was the message, my sim-card had been recharged and I got my curiosity back!

Then I did what any curious person would have done. I messaged the author back asking who he was. My message was something like :

Hi there, New Year wishes to you too. But then… may i know who you are? Your name is not in my phone book.

Five minutes and thirty seven seconds passed. (OK kidding! I did not time!) and then my mobile beeped the Walk of Life and I knew, the identity was to be revealed in seconds. With bated breath and sweaty palms (OK that did not happen either!) I opened the message. It said

Vijay Kumar!

Osarsk!

Infy!

TTYL

I have to tell you two things here. One, I did not realize that it was past midnight when I sent him that message. Two, I did not know what TTYL meant!

Realization dawned on me- that the anon well-wisher, was really Vijay. Unluckily for him I still had not realized that it was past midnight. With the true delight of having discovered the identity of my anon well-wisher, I sent him another message.

Hell, sorry da. I had the last digit of your number wrong.

And this time there was no reply for fifteen minutes and fifty seven seconds (I timed this time around!) and it still had not dawned on me that the time was now closer to one than twelve. So, I was really concerned and all, and also thought it would be nice if Vijay reads my blog and all. So I sent him a message asking him to read my blog sometime, you like when he is free or something. I also asked him btw what does TTYL mean.

Vijay by now was well and truly like the his silver screen namesake, as played by Amitabh Bachchan- the angry young man! He sent me a reply that went something like,

It means talk to you later. And not at this royally uncivilized hour. Send your reply to this tomorrow. Shall read your blog .

Of course, I was clearly a sane man and it was really clear this time that it was a royally uncivilized hour. So I decided to do what most civilized people like me do- I went to bed!

The next day was largely uneventful, as in devoid of any event. We generally waited for the prof to turn up. And he didn’t! This was in two classes out of the four that we had that day and the remaining two were spent, half asleep past the halfway mark!

Then I came back and did what one generally does if one had woken up at 5:30 that morning and gone for a real refreshing morning jog ( needless to say, I did that!)- I slept. I was still sleeping when I got a call from some vague number that looked almost like Vijay’s number (the right one) but for the second last digit. He was, visibly (whatever that is over the phone) angry because some message from my number, that apologized for having got his number wrong had reached him at 12:30 last night.

Even the marginally bright reader would have figured out what had happened. From Vijay’s perspective, there is this school junior, some six years younger than him, sending him a message asking him who he was, in the middle of the night, and then about twenty minutes further into the night, a presumptuous one from the same guy asking him to read his blog! And the other guy, for no fault of his gets a message from some vague moron (reflecting the ideas of the receiver, have no congruence with mine!) telling him that he got his number wrong. And then, there was I.

Impatient to tell Vijay all about this, I did just that.Apart from being deliriously happy that someone actually interrupted my sleep he sent me a series of interesting responses

It was not midnight y’day dammit. It was today and have not slept ever since. Remind me to wake you up one night.

There you go Vijay, if you are reading this, you might be reminded of a task whiling it’s time away, in cold-storage. (You’d better leave it that way, though!)

This was followed by another one that went like

And don’t tell me you had the nerve to send that apology note In the night itself. I’ll skin you alive. @#$%^&* thank your stars I was a good 20 miles away. Else you would have been a would-have-been.

And then there was a lot of friendly banter that followed for the next couple of hours that included each of us wishing the other eternal impotency and a pleasant stay at hell. And then, I guess both of us were tired of messaging each other. Of course, I need not be telling you here that the next day, he read my blog and was highly impressed and…

And the clock says it’s time to go now.

Indigo Blues

2004-12-30T00:24:00.000-08:00

I don’t want the first line of this post to be a Heavens be blessed! I am back!!! type thingy, since that is what every blogger says when returning from a brief hiatus. So, Heavens be blessed! I am back!!! A lot of water has flown since my last post and some of it, tragically, in the form of a killer tsunami causing immense destruction and the loss of precious lives. I express regret and profound solidarity with the victims of that fateful day.

I had been to Bombay for a week, ostensibly for participating in the largely self-proclaimed Mother of all cul-fests –IIT Bombay’s Mood Indigo, though, I had a much better time outside the campus, than inside. The post is a critical deconstruction of the travails of Der Pfeifer (for the uninitiated, that’s me!) at MoodI.

Ok so this is how it all began… My hitherto modest wanderlust, sees the IP on the Narmad notice board calling for applications to MoodI and, without much effort convinces me to take the plunge (into Powai??!!(pardon the sad pun )). As Forrest Gump would say, ‘and just like that I decided to go to Bombay!!’. Now, I reached B a couple of days prior to MI for I wanted to roam around the city (a BIG one, as I was to discover.) and of course to watch the pigeons near the Gateway of India and elsewhere. There were just too many and they were all over the place. So a couple of days spent rewardingly, going around the BIG city seeing the sights and hearing the sounds and of course devouring those heavenly pav bhajis dripping with ghee. (all that and more in another post)

Soon enough, it was that Monday morning (yes, O holy lasagna lover! It was a Monday!) and it was that time of the year when some crazy bovine drank ink and belched, I mean moo(e)d indigo. So there I was, all set for the indigo! The blues however began to settle in incredibly soon. First things first. There was the assistance and registration desk and some helpful hospitality folk who dutifully gave us a room number and also informed that, besides the three of us, there would be two others, sharing the room. All this, of course was done in a jiffy- the whole thing taking just a little over forty-five minutes. We walked all the way to the room indicated, which happened to be in one of the farthest hostels in the whole campus, from the main indigo area. That did not help us stay away from the blues, though. Those roommates of ours whom I never got to see (phew!, thankfully!!), had for some reason chosen to lock the room, preferring to take some other room instead. Now then, the reader might be prompted to think that D.P and his friends were three stooges, incapable of even asking a thing as obvious and as simple as the duplicate room key to avoid the quandary that we had walked into so effortlessly. D.P. would just like to add here that those friendly hospitality folk had assured us that the room would be open anyway – hail or high tide! Mercifully, we were not sans sanity and the sane man (that was me, of course :-P) in our midst figured out a solution that was thirty-eight million times smarter than 42! That was to leave our bags safely chained to the window grill in the next room, and go in search of our absconding roomies get a duplicate key from those friendly folk sitting at the you-know-where. Eventually, my friends managed to locate those a.r. and get the key from them at midnight, when they came for mattresses. I have to tell you here that the accommodation at the Mother of all cul-fests was nothing that my mother would feel pleased about. We were put in a room barely 10’by 6’ with only three mattresses and no blankets for the five of us and… actually the less said about it the better for in an attempt to give you the actual details, I might get to speak like one of those Now See This! episodes that I fervently despise.

The pro-shows were a free for all, provided one was ready to get the passes at three p.m.and again stand in a loooooooooooong queue for another couple of hours and go through a quick frisking procedure to get into that crowded open-air-half-theatre for the shows that were invariably ninety minutes late. The concert by Pt.VishwaMohanBhatt was special. There were of course shows by the likes of the Colonial Cousins and Remo, none of which were very engaging. There was supposed to be a rock-show, which got cancelled owing to the sad demise of Shri.P.V.Narasimha Rao.

Vogue is an annual fashion show conducted by IITB during MI. The finals were held at the open-air-half-theatre, and needless to say, the whole place was bursting at the seams. A lot of freebies were distributed then. I, of course held out my hand for a T-shirt or something and all I got was a handshake from one of the judges.

The quizzes at MI had questions like Hashan Tillekeratne holds two milestones in test cricket. What are they? The answer was that he was Kapil’s 432nd wicket and Warne’s 500th wicket! They were milestones, alright, but definitely not Hashan Tillekeratne’s! The audience quiz was another apology, despite being organized in an air-conditioned Audi. The entertainment quiz was the lone silver streak in the indigo lit-clouds.
The art and crafts events though, were very good and there were some displays that were too good to be classified in the amateur category. There were some good workshops and lec-dems by professionals and there were those like the Archeology lec-dem that had three people (not all cords!) other than the speaker in the Audi that could seat about 200 people.

Overall, the mood was bluer, with shades of grey rather than the anticipated indigo!

Careful with that axe, Eugene!

2004-12-10T08:17:00.000-08:00

Like bad hair days, I seem to be having bad keyboard days when my keyboard absolutely refuses to let me type in peace. Actually, it is quite boring to go on with the story of My experiments with my keyboard. However, I would urge the curious reader to read my first blog – The Piper…for further insight. So here I am trying to make hay while the sun shines, writing out my blog while my keyboard is still on the helpful side!

At home, the TV is a viable means of entertainment, unlike, the Narmad common room where TV programs are limited to intellectual stuff like MTV’s extended chitrahaar or perhaps some contemporary gult rock. So with the regained remote control freedom, I was channel surfing this morning when a delay in the test match between India and Bangladesh, made espnstar telecast some city leg of the Dream Job- the hunt for Harsha’s heir (if I may say so!). I must admit, I like the way the espnstar guys handle shows. I mean John Dykes, Jason Dasey with all his CNN pedigree and of course our own Harsha Bhogle, not to forget Alan Wilkins and his Wimbledon-strawberry-and-cream-analysis with the redoubtable Vijay Amritraj. However this article is not aimed to be a eulogy to those guys (A Few good men…as they like to be called!). It is about the mushrooming of the TV Reality Series shows.

TV has been, among other things, a favorite of all those debate organizers who seem to run out of ideas. They are totally safe in throwing in a TV-boon or bane topic. The contestants are perfectly content to give all those clichéd arguments, while the judge finally rules that TV is indeed a necessary evil and hands over the best speaker trophy to the person who shows the best vocal and histrionic skills, for there would be nothing to choose between them on the basis of ideas presented. Coming back to the reality shows (coming back to life?!), the current reality is that they are very real and are a part of our lives (Gosh! Dubya would have been proud of that statement, but I shall not delete it, as this happens to be a reality article! I am not deleting anything. I am letting the article stay as I type it, correcting only the spelling mistakes) .

I am not going to bore you here (that’s if you are still reading) with all the trivia and statistics about reality shows like the first reality show on TV or who has won the most money in a given show. I shall however tell you what I feel about them. The show that probably set India on this reality craze was KBC hosted by the impeccable B. There were other shows before but none of them offered a crore to the winner! The green notes that happened to remain happy, despite it’s owners,( even the ones with digital watches,) being sad managed to set the shows rolling (wonder what DNA would have said about this). So you have the weakest link torn apart with pretty caustic remarks, you get to sms who you think would be the next superstar, vote for the national idol (if not for the PM), hunt for the next nightingale, the next pace sensation and of course for the next Harsha Bhogle. There are of course those survival shows, not to forget the sleaze.

That such reality shows have bred a whole new channel for themselves, is reason enough to suggest a qualitative evaluation on whether or not these shows are of any entertainment value, if at all they be reckoned necessary. The channel in question is, ostensibly devoted to promoting action and adventure in real life. The programmes dished out leave a real bad taste in the mouth and of course every one of them is preceded by a warning that asks viewers to take it all with a pinch of salt! They ensure that fortune favours the brave, offer you a half-minute appointment with dame luck, make you believe that the one thing you must fear is fear itself, and after all the make-believe reality they just say ‘Now see This!’

There was this friend of mine, a ‘bright’ chap, who liked these shows very much and the channel particularly for all the mind-blowing reality that it offered!(sic). He once said he liked that fear show because there were people made to drink maggot milkshake(sic) and eat tarantula sandwich and at the end of it all there were females who puked!(like he wouldn’t!).

If for people, that is entertaining, then I must say we have lost all sense of sense itself. Don’t get me wrong here, I am not for those silly soaps that portray Utopia and assert that it is real, nor am I for movies of a similar genre. What I feel is that the reality shows have been pulled a bit too far. To think that seeing a Eugene or a Mary struggle their way through some deserted ghost-house (but for the omniscient TV camera and perhaps the whole crew filming it! Nah! It won’t be reality then.) with a 15th century axe for ‘safety’ would match the excitement of a Sampras-Agassi five-setter just because the former is as live (and not deferred live as in DD!) as the latter is,is downright stupid. If the shows go on it must then mean that there are those desensitized morons amongst us who are happy to cheer those greater fools who have chosen to participate in them. All I could say is ‘Careful with that axe, Eugene!’

Is there ANYBODY out there?

2004-12-08T12:24:00.000-08:00

About thirty meters from my study here, is the Officer’s Club, known popularly as the Kailasapuram Club, KC for short. KC is or at least used to be a major component in the everyday entertainment/leisure activity/hobby pursuing centre/ (the reader is urged to add similar words or phrases that convey a sense of) relaxing after a tiring day’s work or after a not-so-tiring day’s work. KC is replete with a library, a reading room, a swimming pool (Olympic size, of course!), a pool room, cards room, a mini gym, a cafeteria, a mini conference hall, a lawn, a badminton court ,a kid’s playing arena and an OAT(open air theatre, for the uninitiated). Oh! and did I mention the swimming pool (Olympic size, of course!).

I still kind of remember that lazy Sunday morning. I think I was five years old then, maybe six and my dad said -‘say, why don’t we go to the library and find something for you to read.’ I vaguely recollect asking him in all my five year old innocence, what a library was. I don’t recall his reply though. Before long we were on his Bajaj Super (then we stayed about a mile from KC) on our way to the KC library. After about twenty minutes, we took two illustrated children’s classics (if my memory serves me right, they were The Gingerbread Man and Three Billy Goats) and went home. Of course you would not want to know that I finished both the same afternoon (signs of things to come! More on that later), would you? I mean, I told it just in case you would.;-)

That was the first time I had been to KC and to say that I was madly excited would be an understatement. However for a long time KC remained to me, just a library and the place where we went for the Saturday movie. The movies were invariably kitschy 70s/80s stuff and being the cosmopolitan (!) place that the Township was, there was a good mix of Tamil, English and Hindi movies with an occasional gult or mallu movie thrown in. I don’t remember most of them but do vividly remember the patient explanations that my parents had to give me between every scene in Aaraadhana, or was it Sholay or perhaps both, actually all Hindi movies that they dared take me to.

Soon enough, I had Enid Blyton make way for Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys, who were in turn replaced by the likes of Agatha Christie and A.C.Doyle. For the sheer kick that I got out of reading a six hundred odd page book, I switched to reading Archer, Robin Cook and the like. The madness thankfully did not last for long, and it was time for PGW!KC was always There!

I was soon learning to swim and it was the KC schwimmbad that had the privilege of catching me in suspended animation. When I was tall enough to reach the Billiards
Table, it was KC again (you would never have guessed!). (And now the mandatory senti line!)KC has seen me cursing, at my loss and on a greater number of occasions, seen me in high spirits, having won a game or some kind of quiz.

OK so you get an idea of the steeped past and if I might add the significance of my beloved KC.

So it is to this KC that I went to some time back with Kashyap, a school friend of mine and (need I say) who has fond recollections of KC. What we saw there was appalling to say the least. It was heartbreaking for us to see that the TT tables had vanished and some crazy dress exhibit taking its place, that the badminton courts have now become the scene of some marriage reception, that the OAT has stopped screening English movies, claiming a lack of audience while most people whom I know are sore about missing their regular Saturday fair, that the swimming pool is a shadow of it’s past self, that there are no more quiz contests at KC and what used to be monthly events have now been relegated to being held on special occasions like Children’s Day! The whole place looks eerie now. So deserted that one would not realize that one is in a club when just about the only sound one could hear is from the blaring FM radio in the canteen. Actually, I found it very tempting in a perverse way to shout the title of this article out, just to see if there was anyone there. I fail to understand if it is the lack of patronage or the lethargy and creative inability of the management that has lead to the once splendid KC, my KC, to its present state of affairs -a far cry from the halcyon days. Call it bigoted if you wish, but I tend to think it is because of the latter! Anybody out there?

Piper at the gates of an almost delayed dawn

2004-12-07T07:36:00.000-08:00

Far, far, far away - way

People heard him say - say
I will find a way - way

There will come a day - day
Something will be done.

Now, now, now is the time - time
Time to be - be - be aware

Something in his cosmic art
And glowing slightly from his toes
His psychic emanations flowed

Actually not too far away from here, three hundred and thirty seven kilometers to be precise, people heard yours truly (a.k.a.The Piper, henceforth referred to reverently as
Der Pfeifer) say how there would come a day when he would find a way and something would be done. The less forgetful among those would, readily recall D.P. saying something about launching(sic) his blog on the seventh day of the last month of the fourth year of the third millennium since the birth of a certain J.C. (Ok, I could have put it simply as 7.12.2004, but then…)

D.P. is now seated smugly in his couch in front of his beloved (what the hell!) computer, listening intently to A Saucerful of Secrets and voicing out his echoes from within through his not-all-that-helpful keyboard. Not-all-that-helpful because it types out a “b “ whenever D.P. wants a space in his text and has the backspace key control jammed with the ‘t’ key control and return with ‘v‘ for reasons unknown to him. The conspiracy theory buff in him urges him to put fundaes on why his keyboard behaves with him thus… but being the devoted follower that he is of a certain lasagna-loving orange feline whose name he does not want to disclose, he decides to leave it to his fellow c.t.b.s and other c.t.b.s and other not-so-c.t.b.s (whatever that means!) to figure out plausible reasons.

D.P., as the knowledgeable reader would have guessed is at home now. He is here after completing his all-aftis-free third sem… after completing his grueling (he prefers to call them thus, solely for the purpose of soothing his pride) exams. D.P. personally does not like using ellipsis’s but then… Fine all he wanted to say was that likeable or not they provide the writer with a sense of conveying some deep thought, not doable otherwise and of course, they lead the readers to believe, well, whatever he wants them to believe in, besides frustrating them if they occur in excess. D.P. of course firmly believes in allowing as many ellipses’s as he cares to include in his text.

Bis morgen!