The Mainstream Hopes

Liverpool's History Now Counts for Nothing

2012-02-13T10:28:00.001+05:30

Atleast he's cut that hair. Kenny will be so proud.

If you follow English football with the devotion that some people I know do, you already know about Evra/Suarez racism fracas from October. If you don't, here's a quick run through.

Manchester United played Liverpool at Anfiled in October when Uruguayan forward Luis Suarez 'racially abused' United's French left-back Patrice Evra, who reported the incident to the English Football Association. After long drawn proceedings, during which Liverpool maintained that their man was innocent and almost insinuated that Evra was being a crybaby by reporting the incident, Suarez was handed an 8-match ban. Liverpool still maintained that Suarez wasn't racist, in an expression of the kind of feeling a blindly trusting mother has about her son not being The Wild One. Suarez served the ban, and in the first United-Liverpool Premier League derby since the October game, at Old Trafford, led the scouser forward line out, just days after United lost to Liverpool at Anfield in the FA Cup.

Patrice Evra was the United captain for this match. You don't need to be a psych major to figure out why. The clubs lined up pre-match, and contrary to what Luis Suarez had told his club and manager, he refused to shake Evra's hand and moved on to United keeper David De Gea and the others, resulting in Rio Ferdinand refusing to shake Suarez' hand and young Danny Welbeck merely offering a touch of flesh on glove to the Uruguayan. United won the match 2-1, dominating for long periods as Kenny Dalglish looked as clueless as Jay Spearing. Post-match, Kenny came out to defend Suarez, in a statement that he contradicted in an official Liverpool press release the next day, while Sir Alex Ferguson (kindly note the knighthood), in a far-fetched, almost archaic notion, asked for Suarez to be ousted from Liverpool for being a racist child.

Liverpool are a club that's proud of their history, not because their history is glittering, which it is, but because their history is all they have (left), Hillsborough and Heysel notwithstanding. And as much as The Kop might want to celebrate Istanbul 2005, the fact that Liverpool won *that* final was a few strokes of divine intervention. Apart from that, Liverpool managed just 16 goals in 15 games in Europe, including a 1-0 aggregate win over Chelsea over two legs in a semi that the Londoners under Jose, in his first season after winning the Champs League with Porto, should've won. It was all put right in 2007 final at Athens though, when Pippo Inzaghi scored a brace in a replay of Istanbul 2005 and Milan beat Liverpool 2-1. Even before the match though, even the routinely anti-English hooliganism Michel Platini-led UEFA remarked that Liverpool's fans were probably the worst on the continent. Still, a fifth European title in 2005 meant that Anfiled got a trophy for keeps, good for them.

A few decades before Liverpool issued their own version of the art of dramatic European final comebacks now-perfected by Fergie's Men, they were a more than decent outfit that played good football with the ethos and bravery that goes with a club aiming for the stars. John Barnes played numerous Merseyside derbies facing Everton fans chanting 'niggerpool niggerpool niggerpool', so it was frankly depressing to see Dalglish and the rest of those that have been knocked off their perch moan and whine relentlessly over a racism ban handed out to what happened to be the only guy in their team who seems to be able to score goals these days (what with Andy Carroll now officially categorized as milch cattle). While there should've been condemnation of the act and resurrection of common sense, Suarez then 'misled' and 'disrespected' and 'let down' Liverpool by refusing to shake hands with Evra and let water flow under the bridge, even after the Frenchman held out his hand despite being the 'victim'.

And then there are the fans. Nick Hornby describes the fans of traditionally strong football clubs as people who wield their own brands of delusional, he talks of Arsenal fans and their stoic self-pity, United fans and their predilection for drama and the Evertonians celebration of meandering genius and work ethic. In the same vein, he talks of Liverpool fans being imbued with a (now misplaced) sense of demented grandeur, as if it were their divine right to win, as if winning was the right thing to do.

Now knocked off their perch, and without a title in sight for years to come (Liverpool are 7th in the League, United's win over them put the Red Devils at the top of the pile, temporarily), Suarez' ban could not have come at a worse time for the Reds at the Kop End. But it did happen, and Liverpool essentially condemned the wrong guy, and while they should now at least fine Suarez a few weeks' wages for grossly unprofessional conduct the way United did to Cantona when he kung-fu-kicked a Crystal Palace and got himself banned for 8 months and cost Manchester United the title in 1994-95, chances are, Dalglish will not do anything to the player that I suspect he has more than just a soft corner for. I actually liked Luis Suarez and his brand of intelligent twists and turns in the opposition penalty area, often wondering if our own well guided battering ram of a Rooney could learn a few things from him. Clearly, we're better off with Shrek banging them hos behind his wife's back instead of being a racist prick with no manners.

And Liverpool fans, face it. Your club is now as good or as bad as Everton are today. They have the most top flight seasons while you have the most top flight titles.

Oh, my bad, you don't.

What the Papers Don't Say.

2012-01-28T05:48:00.001+05:30

That The Hindu needed to release a bunch of ads proclaiming their superiority as a newspaper over The Times of India is shameful. The fact that they did so in a manner most unimaginative on too many levels makes their issue of the advertisements ghastly, distasteful and a metaphorical slap across the gleaming faces of the very internet user who is sharing, liking and commenting about how 'cool' these are.

In my first year at MICA, the coolest guy I will ever know and call a friend told me about how his dissertation was about the future of the print industry. His inference, based on research, was that in this modern day and age, the fact that people employ newspapers for reasons other than just getting the news, is the reason that print will never die. That people, no matter what colour iPad they get, will never take it to the loo in the morning, for fear of shitting all over themselves if & when they drop said iPad into the commode, like a million now-defunct cellphones. That they need newspapers, not only to perform their daily bodily duties in the morning, but also, to wrap things like shoes and sandals in, when traveling, or to wipe the dust off their expensive boots when they're just about to go into the boardroom for that most important meeting, or, at worst, to crush their weed in. There is also the wee bit about revenue through advertising for a newspaper that is the major source of income for any serious print media business, which means that as long as there are local businesses, there will forever be local newspapers.

So when I read & saw the millions sharing the advertisements, it meant that I was going to have to write this blog-post, if not to put forth what I think was right, then at least as a critique of what the print media, and allied advertising has come to mean for middle class India.

The Hindu's advertising strategy with the campaign against the Times' predilection for all things movies is pathetic. To start with, let's try and contextualize this.

The Hindu is a newspaper based in South India. South India is a classic example of a market that is media isolated on multiple levels, a fact that everyone, ranging from politicians, perverse parodists in the performing arts, print media barons and people in the streets, have made use of to form a cult that will have you believe that South India is the vanguard of culture, progress and spices in India. By contrast, the Times of India is a media conglomerate headquartered in a building called 'The Times of India' building, in South Bombay, that vanguard of all things scantily clad and/or moving fast. Given that statesmanship has entirely disappeared from Indian polity, clearly, neither newspaper has done a very good job of being a newspaper, and to criticize the Times, a company that literally, owns the entire distribution chain that comes with being a snazzy newspaper, replete with websites, allied press issues, glitzy events and full page ad-spreads, for playing to the gallery and being a Page 3 newspaper, is like calling the pretty girl dirty names in class, because, well, she's pretty. For those who're wondering what my problem is, by now - The Hindu's advertisements do precisely that, and that's where my problems just about begin.

If right now, you go here, and check the ads out again, you will be able to visualize my arguments much better. The Hindu's campaign essentially begins by telling you that there are things you should be concerned with, apart from you know, the 'glamorous' stuff, and that's about where the 'good' in the campaigns grinds to a halt. That the campaign goes on to tell you, in a manner that is beyond bland, at least on the all powerful internet, that to read the right stuff, you need to read the Hindu, is a pathetic attempt at a newspaper trying to tell its customers, "Hey! We're a newspaper that tells you news."

If you still don't get the problem here, let me articulate it better so you understand. Unless you're an Anna fan.

How would you feel if, even without the little or no educated 'debate' that goes into political debates on TV in India, Anna Hazare just marched into the Prime Minister's Office, slaps him across the face, as is in fashion these days, and tells him - "Dude, fuck you. I think I'm the better Prime Minister.", all this while 'live' news cameras are rolling? Would you share that video, with the gusto and without the thought, that you share and propagate the Hindu's campaign? Because, in its barest essence, with this campaign, the Hindu is trying to get you to buy their newspaper, by slapping the Times for being the Times, and telling you that they're better, without actually proving anything through their advertising and/or content.

If your newspaper is indeed better than the Times, the people who read it will tell you, by subscribing to it. Again, and again, and again. That you need to tell very same people that your newspaper is better than the Times because you said some clever things, is worse than trying to turn your lesbian friend into a female heterosexual, because you don't think you like girls that much anymore.

The problem with this campaign, goes deeper: that's not advertising. I was told, advertising is a way to tell the consumer to buy your product. That it was a way, to attract a customer into believing that your product fulfills a deeper need, without which the customer might not find as much happiness. Of course, advertising has evolved, and now, with the internet offering complete recreation of a board game as complex as Monopoly in the real world scenario of London, that the Hindu chose to merely put up a few .jpegs of their print ad online is ridiculing the Indian internet user and advertiser to the point after which there is indeed no return. They couldn't link an intelligent act to their intelligent stand? Couldn't think of incorporating a Facebook page into the whole thing, at least some-place where like minded fools would come and leave forever the proof that is needed to validate the Hindu's claims? They couldn't think of sounding a little less like the pretentious and yuppie college educated fools who want you to think like them? Like the Cola wars on TV advertising in the late 90s last century, the Hindu's advertising reeks of desperation to overtake a clearly stronger opponent, not by taking them on in the field and recreating another David v. Goliath, but by calling Goliath names from the top of the Pyramids of Despair, hoping that he doesn't figure out a way to climb up and bring David down. That the Hindu thinks no one will notice the irony of an advertisement that says 'Sense. Not Sensational.' is clearly an indication of the low opinion that those media barons down south have, of the people that read their newspapers. Or that the Hindu didn't realize that if this was a conversation with the Times, the necessary and sufficient reply to - 'Also has pages 1,2,4,5,6,7...' would simply be 'So do we, and more!.', only points to the bankruptcy of good ideas, and of good people to implement them that this country currently faces.

Now, I'm not saying the Times is a great newspaper, or that the Hindu is a bad one. I'm not even asking you to buy newspapers anymore, because they're redundant in the process of applying thought in the age of the internetz. That in these Times of instant gratification, puns intended throughout the phrase there, no one who considers themselves on the cutting edge of any thought likes to read their news the next morning, that by the time the newspapers trickle in with their 'views' and 'counter views' and 'opinion', the matter that was food for thought yesterday, has already been digested, and is probably on its way out as you tuck the newspaper under your armpit and rush into the facilities for a vicious dump.

'Gimmickry' is a funny word. It's funny because it has an 'immi' in the middle of it and a 'c' and a 'k' and an 'r' and a 'y' at the end, and that there is really no other word for it, the reason being that 'gimmickry' is an ancient concept, probably born in the mind of the least intelligent Greek-Roman orators of yore, around when he lost the argument from his grasp, and came up with something he thought was clever in an entertainment sort of a way, and peddled it to try to divert the Senate's attention from the fact that he had nothing of note to say. The Hindu's campaign is thinly veiled gimmickry at best, and a slap across the faces of everyone who read those advertisements at worst.

Last I checked, a newspaper was supposed to tell you nothing but what happened, and leave you at the doorstep of 'thought', and in this post-modern world where you can wear a hat in classrooms and expect people to look the other way, there is no singular right way of doing the same. The fact that the Hindu has had to resort to repeated below the belt kicks to get over their inferiority complex when it comes to the Times is as pitiable as the myriad sets of breasts that the Times uses to lure the repressed Indian to read their paper.

Doggystyle - A Three Act Story of Lifelong Canine Affiliations in Modern Indian Suburbia.docx

2012-01-13T22:48:00.002+05:30

Welcome to the new year. I hope you've suffered your first major disappointment this annum already, and fervently wish it goes up all the way from here, before the world ends.

There's a new blog title, and then there's the short story that the title told you about. Being a dog lover doesn't won't make a substantial difference in how much you enjoy reading it, so if you aren't, go right ahead.

Doggystyle - A Three Act Story of Lifelong Canine Affiliations in Modern Indian Suburbia.docx

For as long as I remember, dogs have beenan integral part of my life, and for as far as I am concerned, I have been apart of theirs. My memory begins at discovering about the death of mypre-cellphone era, part time pariah dog, full time family member Jolly, onreturning from one of the several trips to Calcutta/Asansol that my youth seemsto have been well-endowed with. It felt like losing one of my grandparents whenBobar, Jolly’s elder cousin and family dog for my maternal grandparents’ family-friendsthe Bhattacharyas, who lived in a house called Parijat in plot C-19, six houses and lane down the road, died.Bobar had been around since time immemorial really, and in a universe populatedby the equivalent of either Orcs or young Hobbits of dogs all around WastushilpNagar, Bobar was Gandalf and Elrond and Celeborn, though by calling it aBalrog-incident, I might be mythologizing his truck accident death a little toomuch. But the deaths of these two didn’t cause an American soap-like discord inmy family's home. There was nothing like that Kipling (or Chekhov, or O. Henry, I'm not sure.) short story where the familygoes twisted with the death of a pet hamster. I remember very little crying, almost nowailing and certainly no parental diktat of ‘no more pets’; it juststrengthened a resolve to take better care of pets, atleast between my sisterand my mother. So there were more, there always have been pets at home, fromparakeets to turtles, rabbits, pigeons, cats, and parrots, and while they won’tlet me have any pigs or snakes, one time, I was certain my mother was seriouslycontemplating getting one of those giant South American birds to complement herfish.

We took in a brace of little puppies that Ialways suspected were doomed to die an early death, naming them Stanley andCharlie, after characters from The Mask – two little brown dirtbags, Staley the more handsome, with the kind ofwhite lightning bolt spread across his forehead that would have made both J.K.Rowling and Mountain Dew proud. The pair died in quick succession, more, I havenow concluded, out of the love we showed them than despite of it. They wereprobably never meant to be fed with processed milk and Parle-G, their bowelswere probably resigned to consuming refuse, before our act of godliness ‘saved’them, and my sister, now hardened a little by previous deaths of pets, onlycried while burying them in the front garden.

So, my folks decided, we should get a petthat’s bred to be a pet, no more emotional charity on mother nature’s‘rejects’. After all, if dog is man’s best friend, he should have someunderstanding of man’s ways. A pre-natal canine experience of how to behave inthe company of man was now thought to be the perfect antidote to unnaturalcanine deaths in my childhood home.

Owing to this newfound scientific method topet acquisition, we got a furry little white Pomeranian who had been named Whiskey inthe house of her birth, but since her real foster parents’ home was teetotallerin nature, on my mother’s suggestion, we changed it to an in-retrospect,tongue-in-cheek Pepsi. I was later to discover that a friend of mine fromschool had a similar Pomeranian called Pepsi, identical in all ways, except hisdidn’t have the elaborate back-story to what would seem like alarminglypro-consumerist nomenclature.

It was around this time that my parents’family-friends, different from the family-friends mentioned earlier, and yesthey know each other, had had a delivery of young Doberman puppies from theirfarm. Having tasted the joy of watching two little puppies assault one anotherwith gay abandon with Stanley and Charlie, my sister and I were convinced that Pepsineeded a mate: into the picture came ‘Coke’, a cross between a farm Dobermanand a pariah bitch, he was about 45% Doberman by proper lineage, the rest lyingdistributed across various species of stray dogs and a couple of Alsatians.There was also a slight deformity in design that he had to contend with – thekind gentleman who cut his tail off to give him the final Doberman touch gothis measurements as well as timing way the fuck beyond wrong, and now, Coke wasto forever look like something between a dog whose tail was too short to be anythingbut a Doberman, and a Doberman-wannabe who was brutally assaulted by theneighbourhood kids. To add to that, Coke had an amazingly bad colour schemethat totally did not work for him or any of the rest of us, with his variousshades of sparse muddy brown populated by patches of black and white rendering an image completelyunviable for a TV friendly urban middle class home to have him.

And with this began the Coke and Pepsi era ofdog-related incidents in my house, a series that included several nights ofpraying that they stop barking at the neighbourhood strays gathered to eat thegarbage, two thieve-chasings, one of whom was just stealing a steel bucket,daily dog chases, and eternal hoping that they return home while you cursedyourself for leaving the house gate open. Both my paternal grandparents haddog-related accidents in their relatively short time in the house, and they’vescratched or bitten, in the unwittingly ill tempered childish fit way that mustbe unique to domesticated dogs almost every regular visitor to my house in the four years. Despite their mercurial (read: erratic)behaviour the dogs were loved like they were where they belonged, in aconventional semblance of home. This image was completed to perfection inwinters, when bedspreads replete with water, food for the night and threelayers of warm rags were laid out every night for the dogs’ comfort, anarrangement that must’ve seemed right out of canine paradise to theunsuspecting hairballs.

Coke and Pepsi were a change in ways for myfamily, and it showed in more ways that my parents would’ve liked to admit atthat point in time. There was now a fixed time to walk the dog, a duty that waslater passed on to my good natured daily gardener-driver-carwasher-dogwalkerguy, aptly named Raju bhaiyya, adding to the long list of Rajus, Bharats,Akshays and Harishs in my life. The dogs had fixed meal times and bathingschedules too. My family had found a method to the madness, with my sistertaking full responsibility for Pepsi, providing metaphorical proof for abundantmaternal instinct making for a beautiful six months of puppy rearing, starringbitten off bathroom slippers, gnawed on sofa ends and indeed, half-eatenhomework. A thoroughly canine but slightly alternative method of using thetoilets seemed to have come about which consisted of my dogs using the floor astheir commode, and my father, alarmed at the prospect of slipping on the same,hired a trainer. He came, every morning at 8 as we were getting dressed forschool and taught the dogs how to sit and walk and sleep and shake, remindingus frequently that we should practise those with them as often as we could to ensurewe verified Pavlov’s for ourselves. It was fun for a while, and Pepsi was quickon the uptake, forever justifying her lineage and parenthood, except she stillhadn’t given up her taste for the wild side and still made a break for it whenshe found the gate was open. Coke on the other hand, got nothing from thetraining, only barely realising that someone with his index finger stretchedout shouting “NO!” at him meant he was not supposed to eat the item in context.They still ran about for an hour in the wild, with early evening to duskseemingly being their favourite time, but were hopelessly loyal every time theyentered ‘Shilanil’ or its modest but unique front garden.

With the arrival of the organised petindustry in my house, also came the dawn of the veterinarian. Dr. Marwah wasthe man when it came to dogs and you could sense it every time you went to seehim. For years, we maintained files on dogs, and on his advice, got the bestavailable products to bathe and feed them, along with a separate batch of milkand roties made every day by a rather intelligent and efficient domestichelp/girl. About three times a year, my mother or sister would get the dogsinto the car in what used to be a highlight of the evening effort, and make forDr. Marwah for a check-up on the dogs, returning with sullen animals who didn’tneed to be able to talk to tell you that they’d just been given an injectionshot. But with time and distance and the overcrowding of Nagpur’s inner city,as well as the sprouting of businesses in outer parts of Vidarbhan suburbia, wefound a short term vet in a young doctor guy, eventually ending up trusting himto deliver Pepsi’s puppies, fathered ostensibly, by Coke or conceived during someother cavort that she’d been party to and were consequently, too large to beborn normally. This was before the internet and we’d never prepared for theeventuality of puppies, there was no understanding in the household about whatwe were to do with them, except that there would be an increase in the quantityof milk that my mother purchased every day. Despite our cluelessness, my mothertook a pregnant Pepsi to the vet’s on delivery day to have a Caesarian, andthough Pepsi delivered a live black puppy successfully, the white one wasstillborn. To add to this, the fool sewed into one of Pepsi’s intestines whileputting her back together again.

Pepsi died sometime during the night. Theysaid there was a pool of blood.

After this setback, my family decided thatit would be prudent of us to let Coke go, in the sense to lose the hope wepinned on him turning the leaf someday into a majestic brown dog who was allthe things Coke wasn’t. We let the doors open, and he came and left as hepleased, always fed when he was around, and for a while, always cursed, in anevocation of the emptiness of a household bereft of its youngest, when hewasn’t. There was an unsaid acceptance of a period of mourning where no onespoke of Pepsi at all, and although there are now a couple of pictures of thecutest thing that I have ever held in my arms, in my house, it took us a whileto get there. A few months passed, and Coke stopped visiting us altogether.

When we weren’t actively rearing petanimals full-time in my parent’s house, we were constantly feeding oursubconscious on virtual ones. Believe it or not, every cartoon series that Iwatched with any interest had a canine component, and here, in no particularorder are a few examples (corresponding series name) to support my claim –Astro(The Jetsons), Dino (The Flintstones), Scooby & Scrappy (On various,eponymous or otherwise, issues of The Scooby Doo Show), Pluto (you reallyasking?), Spike & Tyke (from the Tom & Jerry canon), Droopy, Dribble, Mumbly/Muttleyand other extras that were on the Laff-A-Lympics, and Odie (Garfield) and whileHobbes’ perpetual companionship with Calvin does put him in conspicuouslycanine territory, I’ll leave him out of the list. We graduated to Santa’sLittle Helper (The Simpsons) & Brian (Family Guy) and while my sisteralways tried to get me to watch it, Ren (Ren & Stimpy) was simply gross.

And there were always Caesar and Cuddles, andSultan, later, Crespo, Pasha and Buddy the Great, dogs of friends who lived inthe colony, the last one owned by a Sikh family who moved in to a house thatseems further down the road now than I remember. And then as if this recountingneeds a cherry on top, there were the ever changing dogs of my visits to mycousins around the country. The idea that I want to present here clearly isthat there are a lot of dogs in the world, and I’ve casually interacted with myfair share of them, so you wouldn’t judge me when I say it came naturally to meto buy a packet and distribute crushed pieces of the iconic Parle-G biscuitswhen I see stray pups in what can only be classified at SEC-B marketplaces:quadruplets – black, white, grey and brown, so identically malnourished atfirst glance that it takes you a while to figure out which ones have the bestchance of surviving what is turning out to be a rather cold start to the yearthe world is supposed to end, the fourth in my lifetime only. But hey, thistime they’re serious.

The first day that I saw the puppiesprancing around the chai kitli that I’m a regular patron of, I thought theywere only three, till the fourth came running over, only to find that hissiblings ate all the Parle-G, and their benefactor had passed the remaininghalf of the packet to one of those boot-polish boys who remain in hiding,emerging from their private shadowland only when you have food to distribute.The pups were clearly hungry and from the rate at which they consumed thebiscuits, it was easy to tell that they were going to need more food. I wonderedif I had time to buy another packet before I’m in the ‘you’re dead, son.’region of the probability density curve of my boss beckoning for me, only tofind me missing and then blowing his top in a manner typical, I’mextrapolating, of people too used to too much power for far too long. I stoppedshort of buying said additional SKU of Parle-G when I saw another guy doing thesame, with intentions of distributing them to the same quadruplets, nowcomplete in their four-ness. With a heavy dose of not feeling special, Imounted my motorcycle, and started to look over my shoulder as I dragged it inreverse, responding unwillingly to a very different kind of duty.

The second day I had more time and a friendalong. We decided to sip on chai and share a Marlboro Gold before proceeding torepeating yesterday’s act of buying and breaking biscuits. The Marlboro Goldis, in my opinion, one of the best new cigarette blends to have infiltrated theIndian market, and while it is clearly aimed at weaning away those with adiscerning eye for luxury from ITC’s Classic Milds and Gold Flake brands, itmight find greater acceptance among the younger smokers in the country. As thecigarette lived out its short lifespan, we fed the puppies, talking about howthey’re probably going to die anyway, given how cold it was that morning. Thebrown one among the bag of fleas brought what looked like a rather sturdy pieceof string, but on closer examination I was sure it was the severed tail of a dead rat. No soonerhad did said rat’s ass arrive on to the scene, our biscuits were forgotten. Thenow alerted trio leapt towards their brown brother, at once engrossed in thenovelty of the rat’s tail. We felt rejected, my friend and I, but at the time Ididn’t hardly realize that for the second day straight, the little puppies in ashady marketplace were seemingly giving me a sign.

The third day, I was alone, and short ontime. I was hurting from the snub the previous day and essentially, occupied bythe decision of whether or not I should buy the packet of Parle-G, forgot thatI was short on time. The puppies were there, all four, mucking about in thedecaying debris from an upturned dustbin. There was something gray, graspedtightly in the small, almost wraith-like delicate jaws of the black puppy. Iwalked over, already submitting to the desire to feed, to see very clearly thatit was the remains of a pigeon wing that the darkest of them all had in hispossession. I crumbled the biscuits, to no response from the puppies. I madethat sound your mouth makes, at least mine does, especially when beckoning to beingsin a tone most loving, like with my lips puckered shut, pulling in short drags ofair and letting the wind do the rest, which drew the white puppy to me. Hewalked over, slowly, almost unwillingly, sniffing at the biscuits, but noteating them. As I realized the possibilities that the puppies might be over myoffering, that in their short lifetime, Parle-G is now ‘so 90s’, a simultaneousdawning of the source of my joy also appeared clearly to me – that sound of thebiscuits crunching in the little puppies short, still developing teeth as theybegan assimilating you in their lives, acknowledging your offering withconsumption in a manner clearly opposite to most deities I’ve heard of or dealtwith. That sound, like shrapnel wounds that are testimonials to wars that yourfavourite war hero won for whichever side of history you’re on, was the proofthat it was difficult for the puppies, even though it was easy really, like howyou got all your toys from your parents in childhood? That sound encapsulated athousand errands that I ran for people in my life, and it was my firm beliefthat my source of the simple joy of feeding another being stemmed from hearingit chew; from an act that would buildcharacter. That sound, which wasn’t in the sniffing of biscuits. A minutepassed and the last look on the white puppy’s face seemed in my head like itwas one of pity. It pranced away, rejoining the quest for the parts of thepigeon wing, already the late entrant in the puppies’ new game – one thatinvolved tearing the pigeon wing into pieces and littering the rest of theplace while the black puppy gnawed on the cartilage. I watched what looked likeNational Geographic for the underprivileged, amused, holding a Marlboro Gold inbetween the fingers of one hand and a cup of rapidly cooling tea in another,till a group of three very similar looking from Delhi/Gurgaon, straighthair/black fringe, a-little-too-short-to-be-statuesque-a-little-too-tall-to-be-shortwomen in ominously attractive dark-coloured clothing walked by. I was sure the one on the leftlooked at me a little longer than she should have.

I see those puppies now and then, never allfour at once any more though. I feed them on days that I have the time, withoutreally expecting them to eat. I leave the biscuits on the ground next to thedustbin, always appreciating the juxtaposition in hindsight as I turn to go. I’mguessing, among other things, that even dogs have the right to be fed up of love.

III

After that necessary detour through time,allow me to welcome us back to present day. My life has alternated betweenspells of dog-less-ness and not, and while most people would superstitiouslytouch-wood at the proclamation, the last eight years have provided us plenty ofcanine company in the house of my birth and rather enjoyable growing up. A fewyears after Pepsi, we got ourselves a shiny black little Labrador retrieverpuppy, one that look wise beyond years and has proven to be precisely that by looking20x scarier than he actually is. In a tribute to the Centurions’ ultra-coolspace dog, we christened him Shadow. Having learnt the tricks of the trade fromsome childhood social conditioning of our own, my sister and I trained Shadowto learn the most basic of commands – come, go, sit, no, and the misnomer, get,which was the best we could come up with while trying to make him run aftersomething. It was almost sunshine in paradise again, well almost, because therewas the recurring problem of the alternate toilet usage method and it took us awhile to devise a selection of doors that would force the growing puppy out tothe garden every time it wanted to use our facilities. And although Shadow’sbark was a few hertz lower on the frequency scale compared to Pepsi and Coke’ssqueak and whelp respectively, it made up for the shortage in decibel. Shadowcould give an early 90s Monica Seles a run for her money when it came toloud. Thankfully, his nights of heat were well regulated and the passage oftime had led to fewer dogs in the neighbourhood clamouring over the garbage.

It was around the time that someone suggestedwe should get Shadow to mate, I decided to talk our parents into getting anotherdog. Except that we got a gloriously golden Labrador Retriever puppy who wasdecidedly male, instead of the glorious Golden Retriever that should be female. For the uninitiated, those are two different breeds, the potential mating of which would surely result in a litter of puppies that could eat their way through anything. Still, too enamoured by the puppy’s puppiness, we decided to keep him, shelvingall plans forever of mating any of our pets, in a final surrender to whatever wentagainst us in that regard, getting the freshman canine checked up by Dr. Marwah before we gave it a rather frolicking first bath.

Staying with tradition and the themes that ranwith the keeping of dogs in ‘Shilanil’, I offered my mother the options ofShipwreck or Shamrock, after the GI Joe or the wrestler, Ken Shamrock,respectively, while my sister, with her not-entirely-undue emotional attachmentto Bryan Adams, wanted to call him, Spirit. My mother chose Spirit, and therehe was. Another puppy in my living room, gnawing at the carpet, eating thestrands of those typically Indian sofa covers that hang below, tearing acrossthe house with someone’s towel in his mouth – he had spirit alright. Spirit waseither easier to train or we’d gotten better at training, but he was done with learninghis house etiquette sooner than Shadow, acquiring a Casanova appeal as he grewup, always finding the right bitches to sniff around when taken out for a walk.He was also the first of my dogs to obey the command to enter the house atonce, no matter how far away his interests lied, and the first that I could safelyhave walking next to me without a leash on without worrying about where he wasabout to dash off to, allowing me, and now a vital cog of the functioning of my family household, the good natured daily gardener-driver-carwasher-dogwalkerguy, Raju bhaiyya to walk both dogs at the same time. As much as this was adeviation from the time it was standard practice to keep the gate shut foreverso as to prevent the family dogs from running out, the newfound confidence inour pets’ sense of belonging was a moral victory for the modern family, establishingthe completeness of the home in a fiction-worthy manner.

And in what would be perhaps fitting, Ihave little doubt about Shadow and Spirit being the last dogs that my familywill raise, considering that both my sister and I have moved on to towns andjobs that we don’t intend to return home from, anytime soon. The departure of dogs will leave no space for Dr. Marwah in our annual routine, and it will markedly alter Raju bhaiyya's daily duties - he'll walk a couple of kilometers less, probably get fatter by the week . And soon it will be time when my parents and priorities will be too old to enable the kind of effort that taking the decision to get a dog requires. And given how things have been,I might end up living with someone who really doesn’t care too much for dogs,like my last girlfriend. That said, I absolve myself of any end of the era delusionsabout the life of dogs in my parent's house, there will always be a dog aroundthe corner looking for the odd weekday lunch of Parle-G biscuits. Like I said, for as long as I remember, dogs have been an integral part of my life, and for as far as I am concerned, I have been a part of theirs.

Dumbing Down Sherlock

2012-01-03T23:31:00.002+05:30

While the new Sherlock Holmes does keep up Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's tradition of mysteriously sexy titles, the second installment of the Guy Ritchie-helmed movie duology (and maybe more) clarifies the universe that ensconces his interpretation of the most loved misogynist in popular culture this side of Doctors Sheldon Cooper and Gregory House, and although it has proved to be markedly different from what you would've expected from London's finest, it's not all that bad. There are many many many versions of Sherlock Holmes, most recent and contemporary to the film is the BBC's Steven Moffat-written, much lauded update starring Sherlock reincarnate Benedict Cumberbatch, and while purists will point to a sort of full circle with the comparison between Holmes & House, considering that Doyle based Holmes on a medical practitioner in the West Indies, Guy Ritchie's Holmes (series) is not a complete waste of time.

For the uninitiated, Sherlock Holmes is a consulting detective - he's not as much a celebrated, meddlesome know-it-all, as he is a violin-playing society-rejecting anarchist who believes his brilliance compensates for an acute shortage of social graces or seeing the need for them. He's beyond observant, cultivates information into the sorted shelves of knowledge in his mind, and is the occasional coke-head, and while he does have a profound working knowledge of the martial arts, he rarely engages in physical combat and only carries weapons on himself when imperative. His relationship with Dr. Watson, his trusted aide, blown so far out of proportion with the gay jokes in the films, is one based on respect from the 'good doctor' and a sort of good-natured though remorseless exploitation of the doctor that is brought to life in the now epochal "Come at once if convenient, if inconvenient come anyway." The doctor is often the metaphor for the bored common man, tagging along, watching the genius of Holmes at work from close quarters, safely assuming the security blanket that Holmes' ways provide extend over himself, documenting what needs documenting in a clerical fashion typical of understudies and apprentices.

But if you grew up in a world that opened its eyes to satellite TV and never picked up a Sherlock Holmes, making a beeline for that (apparently) great mystery writer Agatha Christie instead, you will end up expecting tight-wound mystery where there's supposed to be none. Fact is, very few of the short stories are about great mystery - The Speckled Band being the most oft-cited example. The literature around Holmes as written by Doyle was always just that, literature around Holmes - a convenient room-mate & living conditions, well juxtaposed siblings and symbolic, unnatural tendencies. Right from the Sign of Four to The Valley of Fear (or the Case-book), Doyle showed us what we wanted to see, how we wanted to see it throughout his canon - an Ubermensch through the eyes of someone who wasn't - Watson's critique of Holmes in early stories could be interpreted at times as suitable jealousy pangs. And while the pleasure of reading Sherlock Holmes was in the unwinding of the case that his genius let us in on at the end, those that aren't familiar with the literature and yet feel an urge to get with the films because hey, it's Gaye Reechee, might not feel shorthanded.

That we live in a world where we love to super-size everything, it is these eccentricities of Holmes that get blown way out of proportion on the big screen, which means an erstwhile mellow gentleman who gets around well with the urchins and street-dwellers becomes a manic, thrill-seeking, parkour-wielding wit monger who attends bachelor parties and peace conferences with a swagger that is unrecognizable to anyone familiar to the canon. The boxing and drug binges that are often left to the unwritten word and the reader's imagination in the 'texts' becomes the mainstay in the set of films, with tame witticism and expert CGI brought in to supplant the evocation of character; to the point that in a scene where Robert Downey Jr. throws the rather lovely Kelly Reilly off a train in one of the sequences, he proceeds to markedly parody/pay homage to Heath Ledger's joker in a sort of retarded misplaced reference trope. It doesn't help that he smokes the pipe exactly once throughout the marathon runtime of the film.

Although I wasn't hoping for a great mystery plot, the Game of Shadows does have some imaginative story arcs. The meetings between Holmes and his arch-nemesis to-be-or-not-to-be Professor James Moriarty are enjoyable in the same vein that that one scene from Dhoom when John Abraham & Abhishek Bachchan sans kid walk side by side. The funniest scenes of the film feature a naked Stephen Fry; our daring duo lying on the floor on a train in the midst of heavy machine gun fire and Jude Law firing a believably early version of a mortar cannon, and while that might be problem for the pedantic Holmes fan in you, it does redeem what is a thinly veiled giant allusion to the creation of a pan-European business order, another badly placed reference to the real world outside. I'm a fan of Rachel McAdams' Milady De Winter-filtered Irene Adler, her character's early death in the film is disheartening.

Compared to this, and the comparison is automated in my head because of the contemporary nature of the projects, the BBC series is Kanye West/Jay Z-level GOLD - the update to the 21st century is well rounded, a snazzy woolen trench coat-clad Cumberbatch & Martin Freeman play believable tenants and the liberties that the script takes are well compensated by a healthy dose of all that is awesome about Holmes, including his occasional naivete, tobacco and a shiny new minimalist magnifying glass.

So if you know nothing about Sherlock Holmes, have no clue what he does and how he does it, care little for the increasingly alienating nature of story-telling in mainstream global cinema, I propose you watch Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows - if not as a surely more entertaining alternative to the Anil Kapoor-starring rehash that is Mission Impossible Whichever to spend your weekend grand on, then as an entry point into the world of a man, whose existence if conclusively disproved will surely be a disappointment to young boys and old men everywhere. This, I'm afraid, is the only aspect of the film that makes it worth going to watch - that in pandering to the slick violence and empowered women brigade, the film looks good enough to watch once, and at the very least leaves the audience exiting the cinema hall poised to potentially cross the threshold to being a Sherlock Holmes fan.

New Programming

2011-12-26T11:46:00.000+05:30

This goes out to all my overworked, underpaid, lung-torn backbench.

#include
< stdio.J >
< conio.J >
< math.J >

Problem?

Teaspoons of Irony from the Digital Age in a Sillier World

2011-12-22T01:24:00.001+05:30

Anyone (read: rebelling against boredom, school going Indian boys with regular access to television) who grew up around the late 90s to the middle of the first decade of the 21st Century will agree when I say that by comparison, the quality of professional wrestling broadcast on our 'sports' channels was far superior then, than it is now. I remember a time when the belief that The Undertaker had indeed returned from the dead and could be controlled by none other than the man with the 'lamp' was rampant among the masses, fact that it was an urn notwithstanding, and I clearly recall friends of mine discussing Debra/Sabel with a passion reserved these days for the exhaustive list of Messi, Dravid, Tendulkar and Federer (almost a Gillette ad, no?). Wrestling today involves lame taunts, relentless post-luchador athleticism, plant driven crowd reactions and R-Truth, interspersed with Rambo-style career reboots, most recently for one-time dahling The Rock, replacing what the stuff we imagined gladiators to be made of.

Pro-wrestling has gone from Hulk Hogan to Bret Hart to Shawn Michaels to Stone Cold to The Miz, somehow by the way of Ric Flair. That facet of the quality of programming that inspires believability in said 'sport' has declined to degrees far worse than most Indian politicians these days. There is reason to believe that it might be a case of the onetime 'Federation' aiming their marketing gun at the kids, who became their primary target audience, and are mostly into their rather enjoyable console game version, like an effort to replicate the game experience in real life programming, in a twisted inside-out joke, something similar to a reverse lampshade.

I wonder if the rate that we're losing touch with quality, en masse, is a direct function of the numeric growth of our species. It's either that, or money is indeed the root of all evil.

No it's not all that bad. Apart from the number of TV channels that run 'Telebrands' late at night. Or the constant re-run/nostalgia mode that our sports television is in, subjecting viewers to worn out tapes of Australia-India tests from the past, as if there isn't going to be enough with the several tests that are going to be 'live'. Or that we have seven tasteless shows across said sports channels that offer the Premier League highlights bouquet garnished with some alarmingly pathetic 'insight' from some suspect experts, Steve McMahon, despite his Scousiness, notwithstanding. Really, who exactly is Shebby Singh again? And why exactly is a Bruno Mars concert on TV in India? Does no one care about these things?

It clearly runs deeper than Chetan Bhagat, this symptom of the malaise. Even Dutch football isn't what it used to be, and deny it if you like, but deep down, you know that it's a sign that the Gods demand sacrifice!

In the universe I come from, you have to be born between '85 and '89, last century, to qualify to save the world and a sense of humour is an aphrodisiac the equivalent of the perfect LBD. Also, I wonder if someone's already thought of starting up a kindness consultancy.

Welcome to your birthday. Now get lost.

2011-12-21T00:31:00.000+05:30

So Facebook's made people's birthday a bulk affair, hasn't it?

I just witnessed some guy who's presumably really busy, pasting "HBD :)" on 5 people's wall, right from his homepage. Not happy b'day, not many happy returns, whatever that means, not even your ultraconventional and heartless "have a great one". Just "HBD :)", as if to say, look dude, I've got three and a half minutes to save the world but what the heck, I still found time to wish you on your, you know, birthday. And you know I mean it, because there's that colon-bracket thing at the end of the abbreviated goodwill.

For people who have had to wrestle with reason and reconcile to the very importance of birthdays in modern life, considering you're essentially celebrating getting older, consequently, you approaching the end of life, an event whose underlying tenets are directly opposed to man's eternal search for immortality, the perfunctory wishing of birthdays is something to be taken seriously.

HBD just won't do. Not with a Danielle Lloyd poster too.

Good Morning. Good Night.

2011-12-09T19:58:00.001+05:30

For days now, the realization that last night would've been less than perfect to die in her sleep was the first thought that entered the overused melting pot of her two-timing mind as she woke up to prepare for another unsuccessful attempt that came with a new morning. She recalled the days when an Uma Thurman sprawled across a collector's edition poster of Pulp Fiction, replete with charisma and cleavage would be her first morning vision, staring at her invitingly from the wall across her solid wood Queen sized bed, the only worldly possession that her mother had begrudged her on the day she announced her plans to the family, but those days were long gone, now replaced singularly by un-stretchable living hours filled with thoughts of making the easiest possible travel from what people called this world to the next. Her quest was daunting - uncoventional to say the least, it appeared an exercise in Nietzschean futility to those who claimed to know her well, an exploration that would quite literally, take her life. She had foreseen the cons of taking up the experiment, in what she termed was a scientific attitude towards death, allowing the entire focus of her living experience to dwell on making her death as quantifiabl-y easy as possible - to leave no scope for screams or premise for pain. Easy, simple.

Of course she doubted her choices before she embarked on this most unusual of journeys, but her mind was made up when her mother said the only thing that could almost in an instant make her mind up. When confronted with this unusual decision that her ward had taken the liberty of, the mother, perturbed, only said with heavy foreboding, as if breaking the news of another stillborn delivery at the hospital she'd been a nurse at for the better part of her motherly life, to her daughter most beloved - You will regret this. And as if struck by a stoner's clarity in her own living room, the daughter saw how there could be no regrets about dying as peacefully as possible, that even the consideration of feeling remorse after such a death would be oxymoronic to say the least, and hence unfathomably stupid and unforgivably vain.

What did concern her once she was on her path was how no one she knew or knew of had tried it before. It was the simplest task if you put your mind to it, yet everyone's minds had been elsewhere, strung out on electricity, data, love or drugs. She had no reference manual, and she told herself, well, that might be a little bit of a problem. But it had to be done. Someone had to do it. She had chosen herself, and she was going to see this through. She's even picked out the song that she would want to die to, rejecting Riders on the Storm as too popular, and the Cocteau Twin's For Phoebe Still A Baby as too pure , settling on Primal Scream's monster hit from the beginning of the 90s, Loaded, for once listening to how we wanna be free to do what we wanna do, indisputably, on her way out.

Superkvlt Literockstar Worship

2011-12-05T21:17:00.001+05:30

Before the few of you who read this space go further, you must know that this isn't as much a book review, as it is a lapse into familiar ranting territory, that found me as opposed to the usual rigours of looking for stuff to write about that my television-addled brain is used to. Before you go further you must..

"Know the Author:
Prithvin Rajendran has a fascination for adventure and fantasy. He is an avid traveller and his visits to the United Kingdom, continental Europe, South East Asia, West Asia and different parts of India have enabled him to interact with and understand the beauty of different cultures. His joy for travel is weaved into his style of thought and approach to fantasy. Prithvin is an engineer in electronics. He has excelled in academics, having been awarded over forty certificates of merit, gold and silver medals. He has also completed an economics course at the London School of Economics. Prithvin has been an out performer in leadership and quizzing. As Chair, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering (IEEE), Prithvin organised the collection of funds for flood relief efforts in Orissa. He was also Secretary of the EEE English Club at college. Prithvin loves quizzing. Winning the all-India Image of France Quiz enabled Prithvin to undertake a prize trip to France. He also won the National Quiz on Japan twice. Prithvin currently works at Cognizant Technology Solutions and resides at Chennai, India."

I have no idea why anyone who has a resume like that would want to write a fantasy based-children's book. But that's not the point.

The point is, Prithvin Rajendran wrote a book, and through strange new-age capitalism-inspired fate, it landed in my lap, more accurately on my office table, dressed in the immaculate off-white tinted paper that these delivery guys are so fond of, held close and firm by yarns of scotch tape strong enough to suggest a 3M-conspiracy. After struggling enough to look stupid to my colleagues, I finally removed the book from its confines, gazed at its unfathomably disturbing excuse for a cover, immediately recalling reading another hideous book adorned in a similarly hideous cover. The only difference was that I only read aforementioned hideousness because I had no other way of dealing with knowing that it was Grace's friend who authored it.

I've always threatened to review that one but didn't have the heart to. I believed what I held in my hand, in office, on a warmish winter afternoon was a divine peace offering for being a good friend's friend. I thanked BlogAdda for sending me a book that I would've never ever EVER even looked at, mostly because I don't frequent the children's page on Flipkart, and in part because of.. hey, didn't I say the cover was hideous?

So, allow me to be cliched beyond redemption and say - this time, it was personal.

The story begins, in Goodabaiya, which should make you go seven colours of what the fuck, but if it doesn't, you move on to realize that there's going to be a pregnant girl in there somewhere because, you know, there's a prologue. I'm guessing the author wanted you to have to be patient for the story to set in before Chapter One begins with introduction of Dashter a land ruled by Dashtum and then Darum, a like father unlike son duo. Darum is as evil as his father was good, and his daughter, Princess Nova is the result of meditations on deep and repressed misogyny from the author. On the third page, the type goes: "Princess Nova was physical gifted, but she had one drawback: she was very proud.", discussing Princess Nova's features and characteristics as if it were an essay guided by the marketing copy on the box she must have come in. There's also the wizard type thing that Princess Nova likes to abuse, verbally.

Cut to the kingdom of Greatix where lives our hero, Princix. He is kind and brave and the whole square of awesome. More hungry for glory than plastic Manchester United fans, Princix sets out on some totally random quest to recover the Iron Tooth, probably to fill his superhero cavities with, taking two more suspected American college football rejects along for an awesome male bonding experience. On this quest he has to dispel gory predictions about the fall of civilization, rescue a princess who clearly hasn't seen the smoke from the burning bras, battle Medusas and some other handily conjured up creatures... you know, stuff you do while you're on your way to being awesome times awesome. While there are too many characters in the book for you to keep track of without resorting to real-time memory tagging or at least an excel sheet, there is a certain retarded freshness in the attempted poetry, except for the fact that there's too much of it, some of it in a language that the author claims to have invented. Presumably, it's the language that the book is supposed to be read in to deeply and entirely appreciate the Iron Tooth. The rest of the book peters out in a to-and-fro between achieving said goals by the male protagonist, while the rest of the world watches him be awesome, in what is a storyline that feeds off too many Ekta Kapoor serials. Maybe he won a quiz about those too.

This is a children's book inasmuch Juno was a children's movie. There's the occasional 'bastard', but that's not really why. The book is horrifying in its usage of the English as a language, and often reads like somebody's forgotten laboratory journals, replete with 'Aim', 'Apparatus' and a rather pointless 'Conclusion' all over its own belly. The only saving grace is that not enough children are reading these days, if you believe the research, and very few are actually going to read it because they found it overwhelmingly interesting. However, if you actually do find a child reading this book, consider yourself licensed to slap the living daylights out of whoever's in-charge of them.

I have no idea if said book was a labour that resulted in a deep self-fulfillment, the kind that's supposed to take you closer to resolving some deep conflict that no one else cares about, as a writer. Or if it's a memoir to an unloved childhood; a playing out of fantasies unfulfilled and yearned for throughout adolescence or the substantiation of "Hey, I'm a writer!" as estrogen-bait. I'm sure it is all of those, in varying measures although whatever the case, it certainly is story-telling as a metaphor for having terrible, terrible collective taste. There is no one, anywhere, who should read this book, except to find out what really bad literature and total, absolute kvltness is. There's a review somewhere that wonders why this was published, but the reasons are clear to me - it is a demonstration of when not to think you're a writer fit to be published. Even if it is for a 'children's book'.

(If you're someone who knows the author, don't feel all that bad. You can spout the same kitschy to the point of kitsching Chetan Bhagat nonsense about fulfilling the reading needs of people who live in some non-existent culture that holds reading his books as a signifier of achieving the greater things in life.

Also, the book has a favourable review here.)

The only real good thing about The Iron Tooth, by Prithvin Rajendran is his photograph on the inside leaf of the back cover, which, in a word, is resplendent, although there can be no excuse for the hair slicked back in what I'm assuming is a slightly delayed tribute to Andy Garcia. The ladies will surely love the red and it has definitely viral capabilities. Lay low, because after reading this, you will be right in believing the world owes you one, sir.

____________________________________________________________________________This review is a part of the Book Reviews Program atBlogAdda.com. Participate now to get free books!

Nostalgia is Not For You.

2011-11-10T12:37:00.000+05:30

People have several uses for nostalgia in their lives. Slowly but surely, everything done, about to be done, knowingly or unwittingly becomes part of some personal folklore, tinged with the variety hues of something that feels very similar to joy, a yearning for what will always be a better time. The inescapable present creates the necessity to keep harking back, to places and situations that might not have been more enjoyable to live in or through (per se) yet form the core of an experience that is etched clearly in your mind and on the blueprint of the auto-pilot that your life is on. Nostalgia is a scary feeling, a deep reminiscing that reeks of desperation with the present and a muted acceptance of defeat in your struggle to have been in control of your days as they passed you by.

There are people I know who use nostalgia as some sort of inexpensive rocket fuel, refilling every time they stop around the elements that construct their personal histories, revising the details that form the inscription on the artifacts of their very own personal memorabilia, remembering who they are or aren't, like a pit-stop in the middle of a long grueling race, sieving for inspiration or happiness or some other abstract, hard-to-find concept to get them through the next leg as it takes from them more than they have to offer, only to return again.

For some, this act of fond remembrance is best served with old friends, real and hallucinogenic. Some like to go about it alone, in solemn solitude, as they deal with emotions & memories rushing back and forth, still unsure and awkward if the place that once held them as a part of itself, still belongs, or maybe, with time, and the consequent unwilling sharing has rendered them as much still a part as furniture - where the furniture itself, without the cocoon of nostalgia spun around it, is just some wood and cloth that you used to sit on. There are some that reject remembrance, fake forgetfulness, eschewing the memories and all that comes with, not realizing that this is their own variant of the nostalgia bug, and you can tell from the effort they make to not remember about how important the memories are to them.

Glamourized histories play on your mind as markers of your distance from them in time pass you by. Your personal living shrines fail to recognize your one time love affair, and disappointment befriends you as you watch and listen to the sights and sound of the new yous.

I Have Too Many Eligible Bachelor Friends

2011-09-29T13:09:00.002+05:30

(O hai, another one! More sing-song too.)

There's one who's good with words,
They're good with numbers too.

Some have stories to tell.
I'm sure he'll listen to you.

We meet in shady bars
A lot of them don't own cars, yet.
They can all hold their drinks.
Most are smarter than I think.

I agree some smoke too much
And some aren't athletic as such.
Most will break into a smile,
If you just look at them for a while.

Some you can call dandy but,
None of them are bland.

Some naive, some chivalrous,
some cheesy and some are ridiculous.

Some are generous givers, although most are mostly fair.
My dying wish is that some of them begin to give a shit about their hair.

P. S. If you've got any imagination, the first thing you'll think of on reading this is Set Theory.

The Morning (And Many Nights) After

2011-09-27T21:30:00.001+05:30

This is an ode to lost weekends.

The sun rises bleary eyed and late for work, shits, showers and shaves
The morning wrestles free from memories of a convenient yesterday
From holidays from real to real holidays, redoing what was undone,
Colour running from your million moles to my skin.
My fingers recount to the keyboard, stories of where I've been.
Talk about talking of getting older in words you can only pretend not to understand.
Basking in glory of the days frittered away, buried under weight of days to come by.
Love is scattered, strewn around, left in the streets all the way from your arms to my front door, wandering wasted, wondering wide-eyed, which way is home.
And I'm lying awake in sheets that're too cold from the air conditioning,
wearing the grayscale of neither sleep nor rampant wakefulness, floating in you.

Book Review: The Secret of the Nagas

2011-09-26T15:06:00.000+05:30

That Amish Tripathi is someone who worked in finance for 14 years is not something you can easily tell from the first two books of his 'Shiva trilogy'. What you can decipher about the author from his post-modern reinterpretation of one of the key protagonists in Indian mythology is his keen eye for history, perfumed heavily with what was, presumably, a particularly Bollywood upbringing.

The first book in the series, titled 'The Immortals of Meluha' starts off with a barbarian, a la Attila, smoking a chillum in the Himalayas, wrestling with existential doubt over matters of destiny. The book meanders through religious Indian towns and cities in the great Indian plains, taking our hero, the Neelkanth, through trials, tribulations and a marriage to the Emperor of the India, even as a revolving door of (largely unidimensional) characters come and go, making for a narrative that drives home the point, but leaves you muddled on the specifics. The fact that it is a refreshing read though, is underlined by its surprise surge to the summit of the sales charts, being a national bestseller and what not.

The second book, an outcome of said surprising success, called 'The Secret of the Nagas' sees Shiva and his wife Sati, continue their journey to uncover the meaning of Evil, even as they perfect getting ambushed in the woods to an art-form. The sheer number of times someone in the story-line walks into a life-threatening trap makes for unforeseen hilarity, but it isn't really a drawback for the book; although for an author constantly inventing new twists and newer old-lands, the repetitive modus operandi does get tedious by the second read.

As an author, what marks Amish's two books is a style that is knowingly simple diction, to the point where he repeats entire phrases, especially around the time people are fainting due to loss of blood (another author favourite). But the inventiveness that he lacks in language is made up for by valiant attempts to add sub-plots to story arcs that reunite with the metafictional narrative and keep the plot trodding along. Particularly notable among these are the gates of Bhranga, the affair with the lions in Kashi and most interestingly, the depiction of the high-priests of the clergy as political masterminds who communicate with each other and the Neelkanth through a system of temple radios in a manner that is as ingenious as it is commonplace.

The emergence of the Nagas in this book characterizes them as the most misunderstood of the lot, sharing troubled trade relations with Bhranga, and facing the brunt of distrust from all the other kingdoms who continue to regard them as 'the others' (a little like LOST, imo). From this distrust though, emerges one of the better twists in the tale, as the Naga Lord of the People and the Naga Queen assume significant positions as far as the development of the books as a trilogy goes. There are certain factual mistakes, but they really don't get in the way of the reader.

The Secret of the Nagas is tamer than the first book, probably because by now the novelty has worn off, and is replaced by a reader's expectations. The forgivable excursions of the first book become laborious in the second, and even though there is redemption in some measures by the slew of new characters that Amish throws your way, the most interesting people in the book remain pretty much the same.

The Neelkanth, on his trip guided by the gods, sails across the breadth of the country, constantly altering his own perspectives trying to wrap his head around his own ascension to the heavens as a deity, while his worldly responsibilities grow. Now with a young son to worry about, the second book sees Shiva grow from an erstwhile barbarian/political greenhorn to a mature man of the world, masquerading as a part-time diplomat. More centrality is added to Sati's character, with her penchant for following Lord Ram/Rudra's rules appearing to be replaced by a more well guided personal sense of judgement, clearly influenced by her husband's adventure-seeking ways. By the end of the book, her equations with almost everything from her childhood and family life have changed in light of startling (read: a tad predictable) revelations about her father's misdeeds.

If I were reviewing the first book, I think I would've called it pathbreaking in the smallest measures for someone finally mustered up the courage and imagination required to re-imagine the treasure trove of characters that Indian myths offer us for consumption by the English-reading Indian. The second book, although along the same lines, is less exciting, a little like re-reading some of your standard eight Hindi school texts in adapted English language, but that is pardonable considering the mass market nature of the subject. Where the book succeeds even less spectacularly is as a trilogy, with very little liberties taken to develop or portray traits of the newer characters. The political to-&-fro in the Naga kingdom would've been a great stage for Amish to tell us more about what he was aiming for with the fictionalized ostracizing of the community, but it largely plays out as a stoic metaphor for grandiose patriotism on everyone's part.

The best, most amazingly well thought out facets of the book are it's simple style, although some might tend to call it 'lucid', which it really isn't. I read the book in a single session of about 5 hours, and considering that I got it for free from BlogAdda, I'd say the investment was worth it.

"This review is a part of the http://blog.blogadda.com/2011/05/04/indian-bloggers-book-reviews" target="_blank">Book Reviews Program at http://www.blogadda.com">BlogAdda.com. Participate now to get free books!"

Obituary: RHCP

2011-09-16T11:35:00.000+05:30

The Red Hot Chili Peppers are dead. Or like front-man and seasoned on-stage delinquent Anthony Kiedis sings on what is their recent album’s best offering, ‘almost dead, almost gone.’

The Red Hot Chili Peppers have been among the four/five big/huge bands out there, alongside less sex-crazed but eternally lovelorn Coldplay, the manic egos of musicians and messiahs at U2, thrash pioneers-out-to-do-it-again but need to get a clue metal moguls Metallica and those big bad boys of grunge gone by, Pearl Jam. Having been around for more than two decades, the Peppers released their tenth (yes, tenth!) freaky styley album “I’m With You”, emerging from the departure of ex-guitarist and resident secret weapon John Frusciante sounding like even though the party’s raging in the back, they still have no idea about what they’re going to do after they run out of gas.

When your music illiterate friends can tell it’s an RHCP song the first time it’s played around them, even though it’s been five years since the last album, you know you’ve had too much of a good thing. So much so, that there’s really no point trying to review this album. It’s pretty much the same pretty, alternative rock with the vocalist rapping various versions of “let’s do it everywhere from the dance floor to the kitchen counter”, and being more or less enjoyable at that. Criticism of the Peppers has usually tended to be aimed at Kiedis’ heavily coached, cotton-candy voice delivering rap-rock lyrics that make defending the band an arduous task. Thankfully, not everyone around me is jobless enough to develop a taste in music.

The Peppers have stuck to the same fundamental elements to their albums, since Blood Sugar Sex Magic and Californication, limiting experimentation to a couple of songs here and there. Even the Stadium Arcadium double album was more a compendium of the RHCP sound than a creative liberty to take the music somewhere different around. That said, I expected the album after Stadium Arcadium to change things a bit. Frusciante had announced his departure with the monster lick on Snow and the majestic mourner-album closer ‘Death of a Martian’, about the death of Flea’s dog, was a hint about the direction that the band was going to chart.

But true to Stadium Arcadium form, the Peppers return with what is slightly washed Frusciante-nostalgia. Replacement guitarist Josh Klingoffer steps in to the shoes of his guru with admirable courage, and adds his own dimension to the Peppers sound most notably on Monarchy of Roses, that chugs on in the typical Peppers four by four. In what is slightly reminiscent of Frusciante’s own emergence from the shadow, Klingoffer is understated, by choice or design, texturing his solos and riffs with muting drones, where his predecessor might have opted for a more bluesy, Hendrix fuzz. Flea shows off new chops, after the two years off, and with side project influences, taking his position as a beast on the bass further while Chad Smith, sounds fresh, picking up devouring the drums where he left off from with Chickenfoot.The album hits highs at Brendan’s Death Song, an emo-existential tribute to a friend’s death and to mortality; ‘Ethiopia’, with its nursery rhyme bridge feels like the fitting sequel to ‘Death of a Martian’. The big rock on ‘Goodbye Hurray’ lends the band more dance-punk credibility even as the last song on the album, ‘Dance Dance Dance’ punches above its weight by the third time you’ve heard it. And Anthony Kiedis finally flexes some lyrical muscle on ‘Police Station’ even as he summarily refuses to indulge in anything deeper on the slow burning ‘Meet Me at the Corner’, but his choice of words ruins more songs on this album than they make. Such moments of musical evolution are few and far between though, the sound on most songs is staple RHCP.

You might as well be listening to the Greatest Hits album and it won’t really make a difference to the kind of feeling evoked. The feeling that the band is just channeling earlier hits almost never leaves you, especially on ‘Factory of Faith’ (Parallel Universe) and ‘Look Around’ (Stadium Arcadium). On Happiness Loves Company, the band tries to create a Sunset Strip orchestral, that probably deserves a spot on Robbie Williams’ Escapology.

Which brings us to the sort of verdict end of this.

Around 2000, when Bon Jovi released ‘It’s My Life’, as a last gasp effort to stay relevant, we sang along, just because we still could play ‘Keep the Faith’ whenever we wanted. But the turn of the millenium old media resurgence offered them the redemption they sought, as millions of new fans tuned into Samborra molesting the talk-box, as the lyrics read out the simplest, uni-polar thought there exists. Iron Maiden have perfected this art, as they routinely release an album of obscure new songs that no one is going to remember or talk about every decade just to add to album sales and find a new reason to tour. A similar feeling came over you with U2’s effort to attempt to dismantle an atomic bong (oops), and Metallica’s scramble to set things right with Death Magnetic, as the ghosts of music past returns to haunt big name artists. Even though the Chili Peppers had context for a radical makeover with I’m With You, perhaps learning from the One Hot Minute misadventure with Dave Navarro in the early 90s, the band stuck to formulaic hit making, keeping Klingoffer largely in wraps, at best presenting the album as, albeit more refined and concise than Stadium Arcadium, a repackaged regurgitation of old tricks, re-coloured with an almost knowingly juvenile interpretation of more local trends in alternative music. So that’s that really, the new album isn’t great, and it isn’t all that bad. It just slots itself somewhere between ‘oh-this-is-our-job-now’ and ‘hey-look-we-can-still-do-this’. There are the one or two songs you’ll probably remember off I’m With You, if you’re an RHCP around my age.

If you’re younger, download the Uplift Mofo Party Plan.

So, what's on TV?

2011-07-20T14:55:00.006+05:30

Warning: This post has too many single quotation marks and parentheses for any broadsheet's liking.

Three months into my job has reinforced my belief that to be gainfully employed over a period of time longer than needed to put food on the table for the foreseeable future is a total and absolute waste of precious third generation, independent-Indian lives, and the iffy, Western sensibilities of 'talent' that come with. It served as a constant hark back to a beloved friend's famous lament about having to work in life, because all he wanted to do, was, familiarly, 'chill'.

So I took this time to catch up on watching some television, because the idiot box is an S&M slave driver of bored minds with nowhere else but the office to go to. Thus, at around 6 or 7, which is when we finish our shifts (assume we're stevedores), with the religiosity of Catholic priests, my friends and I took up our stations in our modest (not so much) drawing room, in front of the picture tube, waiting in anticipation to be entertained after a hard (again, not so much) day's work.

The first few moments were like breathing in air after holding your breath underwater for the longest time. Or maybe it felt that way because every channel, seemingly, had taken up the mantle of acquainting you well with Jacqueline Fernandes. It was breezy, the beginning, so what if there was an Emraan Hashmi that tagged along every few frames, making you wonder if his hair was really a wig made of discarded dog clothing.

But every modern day professional learning and applying his/her chops in the modern urban business environment must watch the news, once in a while. And considering the boutique of news channels to choose from, we flipped channels with a nerdy eagerness, although the faint realization that disappointment was around the corner, under our feet and in your pants, hovered close. (see what I did there?)

The news channels fared worse than Ajit Agarkar batting against the Aussies before he finally got that one century at Lord's. Apparently, despite the fact that we have more than our requisite number of corporate media houses, everyone decides to cover the same events, and say the same things, at around the same time. So we flitted from Goswami to Sardesai to Dutt and back, as they discussed how Ramdev's mother felt about his relationship with Anna Hazare or which biscuit yielded the best results when dipped in tea, hating them for their (rightful, or not) self-appointed position as the vanguard of the Fourth Estate. It made me wonder if the time to curtail information sharing had come upon us, completing a full circle from the days of yore when all you gave a flying fuck about was Prannoy Roy and The World This Week, and the familiar tune of 'Samachar'. This is not to take away the supposed media freedom, but since the news channels believe that coverage from all angles is about camera positions, it begs the question about how and when journalistic fervour lost out to a diamond-studded brassiere. It also makes you wonder if Amartya Sen was joking when he wrote of the argument to be part of India's rich, varied, perforated and fragmented tradition in reaching ends desired. No one argues, or debates at news channels on Indian news channels, unless that's a euphemism here for the most unattractive people indulging in mud-wrestling.

EDIT: As I type this, Live India has been running a show called 'Sher se Bade Soorma' for the past half hour, about people who wrestle tigers or leopards or some such, interspersed by advertisements for a (paid) feature on the new Harry Pothead movie, title 'Wanted Jadugar Dumbledore'. If your imagination permits you to, conjure up a visual image of Dumbledore in the Devanagri, and a fair assessment of the contents of programming will follow without effort.

But news isn't what this is about. There is a half-decent critique of Indian media here that uses the Murdoch/NOTW scandal for a gun-rest to take shots at ethical standards in the media today.

We flipped channels a little more. From 23 to 76, in 30 seconds flat, before more Jacqueline got us to pause for a few seconds to admire her fine body of work.

If I was a believer (not in Beiber), I'd put down what happened next to the almighty God finally forsaking us. We were hoping to be entertained in the dull confines of Gandhinagar with most of this month's salary and savings spent, instead, a spate of reality TV programming was headed our way with a vengeance that would shame all the scorned women on our good Earth.

Emotional Atyachaar was where we began, with a 'healthy' Bengali girl giggling effortlessly as she sat and watched footage of her supposed long-distance boyfriend of five years canoodle with an 'undercover agent', after he borrowed money from said rotundness. The girl admitted she'd never let him get physically close to her, as she saw her man repeatedly, in a manner that would probably make Mystery turn in his head full of women. A verbatim account of the lines of dialogue are as follows:

Guy: I want to kiss you.
Undercover Agent: Hmmm?
Guy: I want to kiss you. I don't know how to kiss, teach me.
*censored kiss*
Guy: I want to kiss you. (YES, AGAIN!)
Undercover Agent: But I want to talk to you.
Guy: Okay. Kiss me now, and we'll talk after that.
*censored kiss, no noticeable change in blur area*

After watching a few more such inane clips of dirty laundry, the show informed us that instead of regular righteous man Ajay Devgn, this episode will feature World Cup warhorse Yuvraj Singh delivering moral justice. At this point, as a collective cry of 'There is no way this is happening!' emanating from deep inside our already-in-knots stomachs filled the room, engulfing the TV in its wake, we decided to flip channels, landing, what we though was safely, on the much lauded new soap - Bade Acche Lagte Hai.

The show is about The Ram Kapoor who wants to marry Sakshi Tanwar who's still channeling Parvati, in a drama about late marriages et al. The papers were abuzz about how the show is brilliant and is charting territory that no one dared venture into earlier. So we watched, and waited for the promised quality to come our way, except hopes were dashed as an asexual tsunami of freeze frames coupled with the 'ta-na ta-na ta-na' soundtrack staple made its way towards us. The show is marred by the same shortcut stereotyping that plagues everything we do around here on TV. Except for the lead couple on the show, everyone else seems to behave in a manner that was as unbelievable as the guy-girl-Yuvi situation. Obviously, everyone is so rich that no one goes to office, no one has to work to earn a living and all and sundry are afforded enough time to indulge unto eternity in a discussion about how many times the wedding should be postponed. Furthermore, The Ram Kapoor has a younger sister who believes that the institution of marriage is a re-usable bus token, and uses the threat of 'finding someone else' against her fiance to lure him into being intimate (how I loathe the term) with her, this, despite the fact that they're engaged to get married et al. If you know of any such men, who are hesitant about getting it on with their 'life partner' folk, tell me about it. If you are a woman who faces such issues, my phone number is on my Facebook.

Positing films and television as a reflection of society was the punchline that a majority the new age penny-dreadfuls (yes, I'm talking about you '*insert city* Times') used to discuss and debate the use of profanity in a recent well-made Hindi film. This very reflection of society, missing as it is from most of the content we put on our television, hasn't been at the center of attention for far too long. With repeated offences and slights to the sensibilities of youth, using cheap tricks and shenanigans to substitute for any real storytelling or insight into life or anything like it, if you aren't wondering why Indian television doesn't produce more acclaimed, laudatory or even mildly palatable without the money shots, content, you're probably working too hard.

So everyday, we switch on to MTV, that last bastion that you will ever turn to, to be entertained, encountering a re-run of Roadies 8.0 - a Behind the Scenes special about where the Taklu-Twin Circus stopped to pee. And soon as that moves on, you're lucky *if* it does, the absolutely tasteless Coke Studio @ MTV comes on. I would like to take this opportunity to point out to MTV, and I sure as hell hope someone from the organization reads this: Sirs, dames. Please try and understand, putting a '@' in the title of your show will make it tacky, leaving only the paan-wallahs who don't stock Benson Lights watching it. Also, no more Sunidhi Chauhan please.

Hot on the heels of Cock Studio @ MTV comes the party that everyone was paid to attend in their skimpiest best, while dancing to the kind of music that the DJ at most MICA parties received many brickbats for. Really, if you have ever been dancing to the kind of remixes they're playing in that house, I will gladly never speak to you, or implore you to read my blog again. I remember the Grind coming to us from Miami when I was younger, with many faces that were actually grooving, chilling and having fun at said party. Compare and contrast that to VJ Gaelyn and VJ Ayushmaan flitting from bridge to houseboat amid sunglass-and-bikini clad women and the odd washboard ab-wielding male model/Deuce Bigalow dancing out of step. Anusha Dandekar, now of 'Hate You (Like I Love You)' notice, is an almost saving grace but her surroundings outweigh all the goodness she brings with her.

The worst bit about all of this is that they're are on constant repeat, with more airtime dedicated to the Axe and that kissing spray-mint thing commercials than to thought behind putting the show up. Flashback to the laughter challenge riots leave you in sever trauma too, as you wonder when was the last time there was a truly enjoyable Indian drama on television. If you're going to cite an Ekta Kapoor show or say Jassi Jaisi Koi Nahin, I will personally ensure that internet access is ripped from your soul. The lack of respite from said shows, coupled with the obvious lacunae, leads me to wonder (yet again), when exactly is anything good ever on TV?

And just then, you see, they're showing DDLJ on SetMax. Digressing, but not really, you realize how the film is progressive in the sense that despite the fact that his daughter is set to be betrothed to his childhood friend's son, Amreesh Puri while needlessly eye-fucking everyone in the film, allows his daughter, the delightlessly clad Kajol (seriously, she wears some hideous things, the only drawback of the film IMO) to take 30 days out of her own life and travel to Europe, an anomaly in Indian film that this article talks about.

If the tide of American humour, culture and preferences is to be stemmed, and the youth of this country is to be in touch with anything that is less affected by the ways of Bing, Stinson, Cooper, Moody, Gold, House and McNulty, the sooner someone writes a few good Indian TV shows, the better. The sheer lack of a viable Indian TV show, to me, seems like either a disgustipating cop-out on the part of those responsible for content in the face of the advertising revenue that they need to rake in to keep the operation going, or a lack of maturity that will forever be the bane of cable television in India, given that most programming that is consumed these days by opinion leaders is created far away from these shores. Without the risk of running something remotely different, chances are, we're stuck for the next couple of years watching The Ram Kapoor dilly-dally over yet another marriage situation on the telly, as his waistline triples, with Ekta Kapoor still trying to bluff us into believing he's an 'eligible bachelor.'

Through the Lens of Your Eyes #1

2011-07-08T14:35:00.002+05:30

Cups for those with low ambition.
You'll find the same pattern on them at all quality 'kitlis' across Gujarat.

Little Girl

2011-07-07T23:20:00.002+05:30

Like mercury
on the summer porch, she
Rules her stage.

The Death of Bunny Munro

2011-06-16T12:50:00.004+05:30

This review is an in memoriam to a glorious book ride that has been abruptly halted because typically, I can't remember who I gave it to.

I read The Death of Bunny Munro the year before last after chancing upon a Nick Cave book at an obscure Crossword store in Nagpur, when I was home on Independence weekend. The book also made me kinda realize that I will remember my time at MICA by approximating memories to the nearest related (or not) MICANVAS activity.

Bunny Munro is the father of all fuck-ups, which is to say he is the quintessential man-child, unable to find a balance between his desires and responsibilities which might be down to his constant need for amorous entertainment. He drives around suburban England in a yellow Fiat Punto, looking for his next sexual mis(adventure) while he sells what he describes as "hands shit, face shit, body shit, hair shit". He also has a son, aptly named Bunny Junior, who is mostly confined to what seems like personal acid trip of a childhood on the front seat of his father's car.

Bunny's life has come to a strange crossroad with his wife's suicide, and the combination of a son he doesn't know what to do with, and friends that your mother didn't warn you about because her imagination ran out, Bunny Munro is seven different ways of fucked. Unruffled, though, he continues to try and hit on every woman who answers the door to his salesman call, trying to exorcise the ghost of his wife Libby, and simultaneously trying to escape the meaning of being a father. As the title suggests, the book is a ride to death with sand running thick and fast from Bunny's hourglass.

Based in a tight English setting, the book makes several references to contemporary pop music/sex symbols Kylie Minogue and Avril Lavigne's as they populate Bunny's radio preferences. At one point, Bunny envisages the teenage pop-punk princess' privates, in what is a deliberate drive towards evoking papal disgust amid the vagrant voyeurism that is the life of Bunny Munro. Also featuring in the novel, is the Horned Killer - a media myth/urban terror who makes many appearances in the story, often as an alter-ego to Bunny himself.

Nick Cave excavates a vile form of humanity that is strangely enjoyable and provides empirical evidential support to the last bastion of unaffected human sensibilities - irrationality. Addled by constant abuse, both sexual and otherwise, the Death of Bunny Munro is tragic and triumphant at the same time, exuding a sort of linguistic fluency that makes it wish we all were making more of our personal Hollywood stories, only to note that as if the lack of Godliness in Bunny's lifestyle will lead to his death, which is the only way to save his son, Bunny Junior.

Cave's masterclass in black humour has a soft emotional underbelly, and follows a surefire chronology (Cocksman. Salesman. Deadman.), building up to the Big Bang of Bunny's death with a riveting crescendo. Bunny is beyond redemption, much more so than the raving sex addict, Victor Mancini, from Chuck Palahniuk's Choke.

Now that you've read the review and probably want to read the book, be nice and help me find it. I'll dedicate a rain-shower to you.

Film Review: Hanna (2011)

2011-06-07T12:01:00.003+05:30

That Hanna is a 16-year old girl born and raised in Scandinavian wilderness, is well established in the opening sequence of the film where she ruthlessly hunts a deer. She then proceeds to fights a man who turns out to be her father (or something like that) and drags the deer back to her house on a sled, after removing the creature's intestines.

Joe Wright sifts through his Atonement team to put together a brilliant film about Hanna (Saoirse Ronan), a teenage assassin, raised and trained by an ex-CIA, now-rogue agent Erik Heller played by Erik Bana. Hanna has been isolated from the rest of the world by Erik who fears for her life, and trains her in self defense, hoping to keep her out of the sights of another CIA agent, the homicidal Marissa Wiegler, portrayed by Cate Blanchett whose southern accent has a mind of its own.

Now it is around here that you might feel a certain deja vu take over as vivid images of Hit Girl start developing from memory, but Hanna is a great deal more than just a girl equipped with enough to kick your ass twice over, a la Hit Girl. She's intelligent, fluent in several languages, has facts and figures memorized as if her brain was powered by the Android OS, and she probably can slay an Oliphaunt quicker than Legolas. Yet, she's clueless of the real world and everything that comes with it - namely, electricity, friendship & boys.

But Hanna, in the exuberance of her obvious youth, thinks she's ready, after spending one too many lazy evenings wondering what music would feel like. Not satisfied with the dictionary definition offered by her father, she chooses to return to a confrontation with the CIA in an effort to find out more about herself. What begins when she flips the red switch, so to speak, is an irresistible series of chase sequences between the CIA and Hanna as well as Erik, who we are told, is an agent to be reckoned with, being a repository of intelligence and info potentially damaging to the cause of the United States in Eastern Europe.

The film is handled very well by the team of Joe Wright and Seth Lochhead. Wright explores the emerging genre of teenage girls trained to be killers, allowing space for a coming of age story, wrapped within what is essentially a struggle for identity in the face of some very deadly action. To add to all of this, there are some genuine comedic moments in the film, especially when Hanna bumps into Sophie (Jessica Barden) and her British family on vacation, and stows away with them to Spain, where goes out on what is her first ever date. The encounter shifts the focus squarely back to Hanna djusting to life in the real world while she isn't fighting the neo-Nazi goons that the

The plot winds up expectedly, yet merits special mention for the Chemical Brothers who lend the film that much of an edge with their taut soundtrack, which is engaging, tense, light and frivolous when needed. The film is let down in part by what seems to be a weak performance from Cate Blanchett and a kind of glossing over of the history between Wiegler and Heller. If the CIA believes Erik is a threat to the national security of the United States, surely the viewers have a right to know a little more. The chemistry between Hanna and Marissa is interesting though, always giving off a mother-daughter vibe, compounded by their similarity in appearance.

Saoirse Ronan carries the film with a performance that the rumour mill suggests will land her an Oscar nomination, which is maybe a little premature, but not far fetched. She pulls off what is a complicated role which awkward ease and elan, lending an unnatural depth to her character, which contributes to the connect that the viewer builds throughout the film. Eric Bana seems to be channeling parts of Avner from Munich which does him good, as he looks more & more like a concerned father than an ex-CIA sleuth as the film rolls on. The references to Grimm's fairy tales serve as a reminder of Hanna's innocence and youth, blending beautifully as the story takes the characters across Europe.

Hanna is an example of well crafted, disciplined film making, and keeps you involved and on-edge, wondering what will happen next. At times, it does suffer from looking like too many films you've seen before, but it pulls through admirably in the end, leaving you wondering what happens next in the life of a 16-year old ust coming to terms with revelations about who she is and her questionable humanity.

It also leaves you with wet dreams starring Saoirse Ronan and a drop kick, but that's for another time and place.

Paging the Hell's Angels

2011-06-06T17:54:00.003+05:30

From To the Angels, by Allen Ginsberg.

"If you dig pot why don't you dig that the whole generation who don't dig the heat war also dig pot and consciousness & spontaneity & hair & they are your natural brothers, rather than the moralistic rigid types
who have fixed warlike negative image of America?
The great image - which all can buy - i your own ideal image - Whitman's free soul, Camarado, also of the Open Road!
I asking you be Camarado, friend, kind, lover, because vast majority of peace marchers actually respect & venerate your lonesomeness
& struggle & would rather be peaceful inmates
with you than fearful enraged frightened paranoid enemies
hitting each other.
That probably goes for the police too who have human bodies under uniform."

A Wedding & A Funeral

2011-05-02T15:23:00.002+05:30

The headline's half and three quarters true, really. There isn't going to be a funeral, since Twitter's already got a Ghost Osama talking trash. But the last few days have been a pertinent example of the great Fourth Estate that has now become part and parcel of everything that we ridicule day in and day out, adding itself to a list with illustrious company in the traffic police, most municipal bodies and physical education trainers in schools.

The hoo-haa over the Royal(-ly lame) Wedding was, well, a throwback to a time when bad teeth were the rage and the words 'sovereign' meant more than America. Add to that the presumed death of the greatest terrorist that ever lived at the hands of the Leader of the Free World, and you have enough pseudo-diplomatic drama unfolding right in front of your eyes to begin to question if it's all true in the first place, and if it is, do you really need to know so much?

Friend of mine finished reading 1984, and was surprised when we figured we were Big Brother now, given our spanking new jobs in the depressing Old Sachivalaya. But what the book doesn't tell you about is that there's a bigger Brother. Or that everyone's a Big Brother, rakhi not included.

That the wedding ring on Middleton (*that's* her name?) became a topic for discussion on the internet, that only halted for a breather when that man David stepped into the fray, making the women swoon as he watched a, and that they ran a half-hour special, replete with a Batman like 'shall we kiss now?'from the Prince himself (talk about stiff!) board hanging between them, only shows that all we really care about is who puts on the better show.

The silver lining was clearly the fact that about 46.4% of all urban women under the age of 25 turned to a news channel for an average of the third time in their lives.

And as if on cue, Osama died this morning. Or was it Obama. Or are they the same. Because to the naked eye, Obama does look like a cross between a clean shaven bin Laden clone and a Kenyan long-distance runner, who is seemingly, slightly more efficient than the real deal. Even then, the internet buzzed with what Osama was upto in heaven, or hell, depending on which side of the religious coin you're on.

The Ahmedabad Times though, completely untouched by any of these controversies, runs their front page headline asking you to vote for who's the hottest item number of the year, Sheila or Munni, reigniting an age-old debate that has held the country in rapt attention over the past year or so, while everyone made hay as the 2G shined.

The only thing missing from this enormous, senseless jigsaw that reminds you of reliving a less palatable version of someone interesting's acid trip is Rakhi Sawant. I wonder where the 'media' is hiding her, maybe the same box Poonam Pandey went into.

So celebrate the wedding, but hold your breath for this is Diana's spawn, and might choose to walk out on her. And celebrate the funeral, and look down on everyone who doesn't. Who cares what's happening elsewhere as long as there's a pretty face on TV?

Hey, isn't the Champion's League this week?

A Cricket Laden Summer.

2011-04-14T15:55:00.003+05:30

Twenty20 cricket and the IPL seem to have ridden the crest and the highs of 2007-09 now seem a ghost of time that was good while it lasted. After the resurrection of the One Day International, thanks to the power-play ruling and in part, to Twenty 20, the IPL seems to pale in comparison. Shane Watson might have had something to do with that too. The poor Bangladeshi bowlers must've been wishing they were still East Pakistan.

With the World Cup victory fresh in our memories, the addictive strategy-making that has come to be synonymous with 50-overs cricket these days, and as much as I loved Mohnish Mishra making paper planes out of everything Muralitharan had left in the tank, the cliched wham-bam-thank you ma'am seems distinctly out of place this decade.

The re-birth of interest in ODIs should be music to the ears of everyone though, especially advertisers on cricketers bats. Except for Sehwag, who, even though he did get us some brilliant starts in the World Cup, has been off colour and due a few slaughters. Says a little bit about our collective penchant for design and strategy. Whether it was team selection or batting order, the World Cup was just too much of a guilty pleasure for enthusiasts and armchair experts. They even managed half-decent commentary with the happy threesomes in those bright yellow ties on ESPN. And although I don't really mind hearing a new name next to an unreal number of big hits, (you know what I mean), the tactical battles of the one-day internationals has repaired the T20 to the last spot in the hierarchy of cricket formats. Too bad all forms of cricket are just too long for sustained interest in any sort of IPL-like league, no matter how many t-shirt jerseys are selling off the shelves. There will never be a derby match; no pub-brawl between fans of King's XI Punjab and Pune Warriors India [doesn't it look like they forgot the zipcode?] because after the match, they will all go back to suburbia, eat dinner and sleep cursing the traffic jam that brought them home, not realizing they were part of the reason too.

What's more exciting is the calendar that follows the IPL. Cricket's number one test team will travel to play a West Indies team that needs repair and time. Pakistan will just have played them, and the prospects are mouthwatering, to be conveniently cliched. And then, it's off to England where if memory serves, Tendulkar was out 4 times in the 90s on our last tour. Think about it, what a difference about 20 more runs would've made in his life.

On Monday, 20th June, 2011, India will begin playing the first of 7 consecutive tests, four out of which are against quality opposition in difficult conditions.

The point of writing all of this was the fact that we're wondering which TV connection to get. If you have any suggestions, do write in.

Too bad they don't realize the best form of cricket is the longest version. Too bad I'll have to go to work.

Genre of Choice: Light Humour

2011-03-27T22:53:00.007+05:30

Would you like to hear a story

of a man who pried open his toenails,

as if hoping to find something under them?

Would you like to know,

where he was from? Or would you throw up,

a little in your mouth?

Or would you rather hear about,

the tale of the boy who, under his bed found,

a journal of his mother's wet dreams?

Only person you will ever hear of,

to have died of insomnia.

And he was so young.

Do you know about the time that guy's uncle,

cleaned, cut and cooked his cat,

only to find his own finger in the meal?

Said it tasted half-decent too.

Should you have a moment to spare,

come listen to the greatest story ever told.

Not sure if you'll like it though.

Monogamy.

2011-03-23T19:36:00.005+05:30

"We'd been married for 13 years."

Somehow, despite what happened, that was the line that bothered him the most. Despite the years away, and the years together. The past tense was something that had never crossed his mind in any previous utterances of the the present continuous form of the sentence.

Two weeks ago, she was here. Next to him in bed as they laughed about all the good times and the bad sex. As the clichéd twinkle in her eye shone brighter than the blue-green night bulb, the thought of death crossed his mind, as he tried to convince himself that they would be happiest if the world ended right now, painting a convenient picture of her in his arms. A faint blanket of blue-green covering them.

But it didn't really happen. What did happen was a needless argument about her best friend's domestic trouble.

He'd always wanted to find out what would happen to the other if one of them died. Strangely, in his twisted fantasy, one that he sometimes lamented, in the only way it could've been, would never be realized, it was always she who survived.

Just Visiting

2011-03-19T01:43:00.001+05:30

There’s a certain safety in being touristy. Something about the camera hanging around your neck, at hand to capture any moment you unnecessarily deem noteworthy, to wave around as proof that times were once better. Or not.

There’s a certain comfort, in those hideous sunglasses mounted on the brim of your cap, as your fidget from one sign to another, for a clue to tell you where you are. And if you’re a man, you won’t do the right thing and ask.

The great thing about being a tourist is the there’s always novelty. Always that element of fun, or so you think because you realize it’s the first time you’re climbing this cliff, or jumping off it with a rope tied around your waist. There will always be the times when you can hark back to those 8 seconds of free fall, not really realizing it was only a movie fragment.

You’re safe as long as you’re just visiting.
If you plan to stay, you’re not going to get out alive.

Speaking of Which.

2011-03-05T09:20:00.002+05:30

Spoken words have an unsettling completeness about them. It's stark, what he said, but also subtle and ephemeral, because it's never going to come back. But it doesn't need to. You heard it, and you understood. No two ways about it. That's exactly what he meant, and those words are never going back, no matter how hard you try.

Text on a page gives you far more comfort.

You're left open to interpreting how the words were meant, and you casually decide along the way on which ones to accord the most importance to. You create a more believable model of communicating, one where your understanding of the content transmitted is central to your position on the subject. One, where the reader is in control, despite the intentions of the author.

Also, when you write, you leave permanent proof of your stupidity. No wonder you hate it when you read it again. Like a part of you, that you find no use for anymore, something you lived through. Like gum you chewed till the flavour was lost and all that remains is a sticky, gooey mass that tastes like rubber in your mouth.

I bet your tongue tastes better.

Home Decor

2011-03-05T08:28:00.002+05:30

Prized Persian rug,
to adorn your palace with.
Sweep dreams under.

Writer's Block

2011-02-16T16:08:00.001+05:30

And I debate it again in my head, hoping this time I’ll get to a different conclusion, knowing that hoping scarcely ever conquered much. All I really wanted from you was to hold your hand, and you duly obliged with a hand-shake, but there is this lingering sense of something evermore about to happen, yet never almost ready.

Half-baked aren’t the words, but they’re the first ones to spring to mind.

May be, it’s just me. May be I’m just a junkie and you’re my fix, which, given the way things have been for me, won’t be very unbelievable. But as you stand there, making eyes at me, you have me somewhere between making them back to you and wishing you’d never stop, and spend all eternity, just standing at the door, looking like you’re about to leave.

But you’re waiting for me.

Vicarious Karma

2011-02-11T19:41:00.006+05:30

I'm return to life on the internet after a full 3 weeks, in what was a small step for mankind but a giant leap for me.

I feel dizzy right now. The air here is very rare. Lights are dim. No wait, that's just my new laptop screen. I have now fully well realized what the liquid in LCD stands for. At about Rs. 8,000, and driving in Ahmedabad's dusty streets, after I lost my wallet and all that goes with it - not an experience worth having. I am full of gratitude to the folks who let me use their computers to access the vicarious world intermittently though.

I wonder who had the first idea of adding the function keys on computers. Did they just think, "Hmm, these F-keys don't really do much. Let's make them prettier."? Because earlier, there used to be the twelve odd F keys on top of your keyboard, and you pretty much had little or no use for them. But now, they've topped in up with a key that goes 'Fn', which kind of works like the 'Shift' key, but is only smaller. It has its own identity though, what with being 'blue' and shit.

Saw a Dilbert cartoon about making bathroom showers voice activated.
Science gives 'The Evil That Men Do' a very strange, twisted meaning.
India's going to win the World Cup again.

I haven't lost it. I'm trying to create my own writer's block, and work my way around it.

Yeah, I've lost it. Heard one of Mitch Hedberg's lines the other day, that made a lot of sense. What truisms they spout, these speedballers.
"I don't have a girlfriend. But I do know a woman who'd be mad at me for saying that."

I got my laptop fixed. Wrote an email to Football365. And wo0t. Second mail from top. On a Friday too. Fun.

If you're a gamer and you don't like Age of Empires II - The Age of Conquerors, don't even try talking to any of us.

I love karma.

The Age of Coldplay

2011-01-13T21:35:00.003+05:30

The first time I heard of Coldplay was about the same time 'In My Place' came out on a compilation called The Modern Rock Album. Most bands who shared cassette space with the (god-only-knows-why) hugely popular British quartet on The Modern Rock Album have since descended into obscurity, or have hardly made a mark on the English music listener in, well, MICA.

I liked 'In My Place'. Not much else after that really, though.

But, in a world where the flag-bearers of democracy are the favoured children of destiny, often, you end up listening to a lot Coldplay.

Often, you have Christ Martin (aren't those two last names?) 'texturing' the music with absurd love/loss/time/space lyric variation, invariably employing his December/remember rhyme scheme. And whenever he does digress from it, the results are largely unimaginative songs like Fix You.

Often, you'll have an argument over an after noon polyjuice session about which Coldplay song is playing, because you can never tell between Clocks and Speed of Sound.

Often you'll find yourself wishing they just start playing Radiohead instead.

But it won't happen.

Often you'll wonder how they've survived despite being so boring and repetitive, sometimes sounding like a jack-hammer's playing the keyboard?

But still they'll persist.
Morning, evening and night. From some corner, floating on the serene winter wind.

Maybe it's because they're middle-class. Maybe because they really don't know how bad they are. Maybe because they're marketed too well. Maybe they broke out too late and just look like a cheap U2/Radiohead xerox copy. Maybe, they just want to put you to sleep.

Maybe, I might be wrong.

But please. No more Coldplay. Get over them. Look beyond the plastic. A Rush of Blood was all that was worth it, and until they plan to really hit the highs they tease listeners with, Coldplay just adds to my 'what-was-I-thinking' list.

The Best Football League in the World.

2011-01-02T22:06:00.003+05:30

My dad's never understood my interest in the game of football. I vividly recall my cricket obsessed father quizzing me intently about watching the now epic '99 Champion's League final. Yes. That one. More on this later.

Strangely, all my 'room-mates' have been Real Madrid/Spanish League enthusiasts, who have a strange proclivity for proclaiming La Liga to be the best in the world. Now frankly, there is no such thing, as the best league in the world. The argument can go back and forth and back again, but it is only going to leave you with a bad taste in your mouth, and a mountain of work that you've neglected while engaging in said argument.

The English, Spanish and Italian leagues, with the immense media spotlight and megabucks transfers, have staked a claim to being the best league in the world in recent times. The English have the Sky Four, with multi-billionaires investing chump change in recreational clubs and trying to take Europe by storm. The Spanish have probably the most bitter club rivalry, with the ever widening sea of media spends concentrated around them as the rest of the league squabbles over peanuts. The Italians have dinosaurs and Berlusconi's whores. Going by statistics, which is the worst thing you could really do about sport, you'll find a cycle, with certain clubs or leagues dominating Europe for a while, and then fading into obscurity. Claiming that they're the best in the world, except for just that moment, is taking a lot away from the likes of Steaua Bucharest or Borussia Dortmund, who, in their own right, have been Champions of Europe, something that Arsenal, club of pedigree and all that, really don't have a claim to.

So please, before you jump the gun and proclaim your club to be the best in the world, shoot yourself in the foot and the telly.

Saying that any one of these hyped leagues is the best in the world is discrediting football as it should've been. You know, a sport. Where people play. Where how great your expression is after you miss a free kick is immaterial and hands on hips mean little more than frustration, not a mob run circus of agents and owners and models and WAGs. Really, why do they need their women to travel with them? Does your dad take your mom to office with him in the morning?

Fatbaby and I had this entire argument while returning from Goa, and I just had to get this off my chest. And I had scarce else to do. Eat me.

Of Celebration.

2011-01-01T16:09:00.003+05:30

Past year, epic and all. Rini moved to Orangie; we blew the lid off MICANVAS; mom finally quit school; dad's looking stellar at 52; United on top of the Premier League; Sachin cemented it as the greatest ever and I reached a new high with the number of blogposts in a year.

The world's being nice to me, guess it's time to be less of an asshole, no?

It also came with a certain degree of social ineptitude, or what Loker would call 'radical honesty'.

I'm going to be nice to you.

At least for a while. Till it all goes downhill again.

If there's something you want from me, now would be a good time to ask for it. Even a trip to the supermarket.

Happy New Year.
Thank you for reading.
Love & restepc!

Akon

2010-12-21T22:36:00.002+05:30

Just discovered Akon has a song that's called 'I Just Had Sex'. Reminds me of a post I'd written about the great lyricist James Blunt and his Captain Obvious epic You're Beautiful.

Damn.
Akon's a millionaire for wailing that he just had sex.

I'm waiting for us to wake up from this bad dream.

2010-12-21T22:18:00.002+05:30

"If there were only one religion in England, there would be danger of tyranny; if there were two, they would cut each other’s throats; but there are thirty, and they live happily together in peace."

- Voltaire, Letter VI. On the Presbyterian, from The Philosophical Letters by Voltaire.

If only Voltaire's tall claims could be extra-polated to the Indian scenario and make religion irrelevant for the market can India ever see secularity as defined in global parlance and not resign itself to a circumstantial approximation.

Procrastination

2010-12-16T04:03:00.002+05:30

In the middle of my BOSS assignment, I came across this.

Dawes "Love Is All I Am"
http://www.songmeanings.net/songs/view/3530822107858774996/

Kthxbai.

Seriously.

2010-12-06T16:02:00.003+05:30

Too much seriousness going on around me these days.

Rohit Prem Mani thinks the P&G mail was funny.

Vivek Krishnaswamy is an ardent believer in wearing the MICA suit to all occasions. Maybe he'll get one done for his wedding too.

Sankalp happened. There's little else left in this academic year anymore.

There's a great class on Supply Chain Management. The professor's asked for calculators to be brought to class. What's more, taking a notebook to class is for granted again.

I'm still looking for a definition to the word 'pfaff'. Help me out if you were jobless enough to be reading this.

Suddenly, MICA looks like real life again.

Le sigh.

Bharti(ya) Airtel

2010-12-01T08:14:00.001+05:30

It was there for all of us to see. Suddenly, on the morning of the 18th, when online banners flashed the new swirly red. We wondered why, most found the change from the rather conventional predecessor unpalatable, deriding it as ugly.
JWT Bangalore, the agency behind Airtel’s new, global corporate identity has unlocked the doors and paved the way for a truly global giant of an Indian MNC. At a cost of Rs. 300 crore.
Bharti had always been progressive and ahead of the curve. It implemented long-term visionary changes in its plans through the first decade of the century, moving towards convergence in a big way. Understanding the importance of the telecom industry in a market that is poised to grow for a long while, Sunil Mittal, Chairman & Group Managing Director, the man who named his company after his mother has been hailed as a leader in Indian business and now, his flagship company is poised and ready to arrive on the big stage.
In March 2010, Bharti Airtel bought the African operations of Kuwait-based Zain Telecom for US$ 10.7 billion, driving the Indian player into the league of top ten telecom players globally.
The development is major in the Indian telecommunications market since Airtel is one of the largest players, with forays into multiple segments. Ranked among the six best performing technology companies in the world by BusinessWeek, Airtel’s change of global identity comes at a strategic point of time in Indian business, a fact that is only emphasized upon by the mass reaction, bordering on calling it mundane and uncalled for. Mittal’s whole-hearted endorsement of the new logo as lighting the way forward is a sign of a shift from a more market-centred orientation in the Indian business circles to one that makes the customer a greater partner in the transaction.
“Fifteen years ago Bharti airtel started its journey in India with a promise of delivering world class and affordable services. Today, as we expand on the global stage, this new brand identity gives us the opportunity to present a single, powerful and unified face to our customers, stakeholders and partners around the world. It reinforces our promise to deliver innovative services and a superior brand experience to our 200 million customers across Asia and Africa.”
Already a legend among Indian brands, Airtel is now known as airtel in what Mittal refers to as the sign of the brands humility to its customers and acknowledgement of the role that they have played in the building of the brand. Mittal and JWT Bangalore seem to have done their homework well, and as an observer and consumer, the move to the new logo seems most thought out and logical both on the part of client and agency. It is, after all, the very same brand that gave us the now unmistakeable Airtel tune by pre-Slumdog Millionaire AR Rahman, which went on to become the most downloaded ring-tone ever, with over 150 million downloads, globally. Airtel have refreshed the tune too, in line with more youth-centric brand approach that aims to leverage on, in Bharti’s terms, the rampant ‘googlization’ of the consumer.
The move makes perfect business sense too.
In a market that is getting more competitive with every billing period, the only way to maintain profitability is to enlarge the customer base. With its recent acquisition in Nigeria, and the massive base of operations in India, Airtel is poised to grow and control two large markets in Asia and Africa. The move to a more customer-centric approach is sure to generate a lot more than just revenues for the new-old red giant of Indian telecom. Airtel already has sponsorship rights to all cricket matches played in India till 2013, as well as rights to distribute official Manchester United media content on its network in India. The trend should continue, with Airtel’s business development team keeping an eye out for trends affecting Indian youth and their consumption of media.
The convergence dream that Mittal spoke of in 2001 when Airtel undertook a brand philosophy change seems to be nigh at hand for the company. The brand has taken leaps and bounds with forays into different markets and associated itself with a variety of high visibility brand-building options. With this new direction, Bharti aims to use the foundation of consumer contribution to Airtel’s success to the best effect, which, with the splash of the new logo and identity is bound to make a long and lasting impact on the business, especially brands & marketing scenario in India.
With Bharti Airtel defining the new rules of the game are the ones that are old, going back to the basics in defining an Indian aspect to its corporate identity, many are going to follow. Maybe not in revamping corporate identity, but in treating India as more than a market. Talk of India’s emergence as a market has taken focus off the fact that we are investing elsewhere in the world as well, and taking Indian companies and brands to a new level.
Continuous implementation of this visionary strategy by Sunil Mittal will lead to India’s private sector roaring in the years to come. A simultaneous revamp of public administrative structure as well as social sentiment, and India’s years in the darkness will nearly be over. For good.

Man United Fan Gold-Diggery.

2010-11-28T20:16:00.001+05:30

No more questions about Berbatov. No more booing of Rooney. No more questions about not having spent money in the market. No more worrying about what after van der Sar. No more Park, Anderson or Nani bashing. No real worries about Europe. And the title really ours to lose from here on. It's good to be a United fan, right now.

Geetanjali

2010-11-28T16:51:00.001+05:30

So, a few days ago, after being inspired (again) by Errora, I started something called Geetanjali on email. I mailed, more like, tried mailing, one song a day to a few people.

After a successful first few days, things got a little slow since work kept me occupied but now I re-boot Geetanjali. For keeps sake, here's the first two seasons of Geetanjali.

Season One
A Certain Shade of Green by Incubus
In These Arms by Bon Jovi
Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels ...) by The Arcade Fire
Bombay Rain by Blackstratblues
New Noise by Refused
A Singer Must Die by Leonard Cohen – recommended by Gaurav Bannerjee
Paranoid Android by Radiohead
I Wanna Be Adored by The Stone Roses
Death Whispered a Lullaby by Opeth
Blitzkrieg Bop by The Ramones
Always Like This by The Bombay Bicycle Club
Drugs Don't Work - The Verve
Cause = Time by The Broken Social Scene
Summer Moon by David Guetta feat. Africanism
Hilikus by Incubus

Season Two
White Knuckles by OK Go
15 Step by Radiohead
Penny Lane by The Beatles

I'm in season three now. Hope I get better at doing this.

Cricketers & Gentlemen (& women) at MICA.

2010-11-25T04:19:00.006+05:30

I can't stop laughing right now.

At the people who wrote blog posts about what happened today, and at the people who read them. But mostly at myself for writing this blog when I really should be doing P&G stuff. It is my firm belief that the secret of success lies in the quality of procrastination that precedes it.

So MICA has this in-house make-believe IPL-type tournament where every now and then, we play cricket. It's mostly a feel thing, to celebrate the spirit of competition and all that. But as is with most things human, some folk forget that at the end, it's only a game, that's played on the field. Insane source of entertainment, a ready topic for discussion with most males, and a few females on campus.

Last evening, saw a brilliant match marked by some pedestrian umpiring. Now you know, a match can never be brilliant if the umpiring is being discussed in any but a positive light at the end of it. End of.

Then Godzillus Iyer wrote a blog post, where in the only way Godzillus knows how, he went on to lambast the umpire, using a literary (& graphic) tool for satire, called exaggeration. You must have come across something similar with Fake IPL Player.

Some people lost the taste in their mouths, most their minds.

It started out being cute. Really, cute was all it was. Almost reminded one of the infamous Bhai Waah! campaign of yore.

And then the emotion!

Post. After post. After post. Of sheer entertainment flowing.

So if you're free, and wish to see people forget their senses of humour to assuage egos and establish themselves as the vanguard of morality, in the process trying to violate one of the fundamental rights of an Indian, head on to Vasant Iyer's Facebook.

Couple of things that came out during this largely interesting, entirely childish exercise -

1) Gender. Women, man, you really have it going for you. Equality and all that on one side, you wish to be spoken to (or at) with respect, because you're a woman. Collective atonement and all that for sins of generations past are really taking a toll on us modern day kids. A couple of years ago, this would have been an angst-ridden rant against how women are more hypocritical than men are, but right now, it's amusing how seriously most women, and men, take the feminine gender. You abuse a guy, that's okay, you ask a woman to get mouthwash because she thinks what you did left a bad taste in her mouth, and they'll get their toothpicks out and try to poke you somewhere between your butt and inner thigh. Peculiar. Especially the men who let such behaviour pass in the name of being gender sensitive.

2) Objectivity. They should really drop this word from all lexica. No one seems to have a grasp of what it means, or why it's important. Everybody wants to win. Everybody was, apparently, born to rule the world.

3) "Until lions have historians, hunters will be the heroes." - Ancient Kenyan Proverb. The uncompromising truth, is often compromised in the hunters' story. And if the lion finds himself a historian, he's called a hunter.

4) Value judgements and authors. Any writing that seems to pass value judgements at incidents, no matter how well worded it is, makes me feeling like choking on my own vomit. I don't know why, but I've been obsessed with biases. Tell me if you agree when I say that a bias towards being unbiased is the only right kind.

5) Pacifists. Condescension personified. No, I don't think you should be stopping anyone from doing what they want to, especially when they have a cricket stump in their hands; or have chosen to make fun of someone, particularly online. Who do you think you are? Do you know that he's going to use it the way you think he will, if at all? Are you here to change the course of history by stopping what could be radical revolution that unsettles all of the known world? Do you think your intervention is wholly necessary, failing which anarchy and chaos will ascend from hell and take over our lives? Please, before telling someone that violence is not the best option, ask yourself, if the delivery of your opinion is the best option. Let things run their course, life's too short to be stopping things.

Some guy today explained, in true motherly fashion, about how violence is the hallmark of the uncivilized. Well, my (almost) friend, I disagree.
It is often the last resort when dealing with cattle.

Also, this guy I know, he's my room-beta and all, writes an everyday account of his life and times at MICA. Swell guy too, what's even better is how he makes the effort nearly every day to write something down. If only I had that kind of resolve towards the writing and I'd be churning out pages after pages of low grade, semi-slasher stuff.
Maybe even come out with my very own web-comic about what makes people so great - stupidity.

But the beauty about the public is collective amnesia. There'll be another email about Boppana's hair and it'll be forgotten, thus emphasizing the entire pointlessness of the whole point.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues. Problems begin when the suspicion turns into belief.

5AM, and I hear Aashish Sharma playing The Fray. Someone's going to ask him to lower the volume soon.

Good morning. Get well soon.

The Secret

2010-11-21T13:23:00.002+05:30

Playboy recently republished Steve Jobs' interview from back in 1985.

Excerpt:

"The key thing to remember about me is that I'm still a student. I'm still in boot camp. If anyone is reading any of my thoughts, I'd keep that in mind. Don't take it all too seriously. If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you've done and whoever you were and throw them away. What are we, anyway? Most of what we think we are is just a collection of likes and dislikes, habits, patterns. At the core of what we are is our values, and what decisions and actions we make reflect those values. That is why it's hard doing interviews and being visible: As you are growing and changing, the more the outside world tries to reinforce an image of you that it thinks you are, the harder it is to continue to be an artist, which is why a lot of times, artists have to go, "Bye. I have to go. I'm going crazy and I'm getting out of here." And they go and hibernate somewhere. Maybe later they re-emerge a little differently."

And there. If he says it too, do you believe in dying to really live?

FIFA & I

2010-11-20T01:39:00.002+05:30

As a pre-globalization middle class Indian kid born in semi-urbia, the Electronic Arts game title, FIFA has been an integral part of life for me as a man-child, and will, hopefully, given my economic conditions let me fulfill lower needs, as defined by Maslow, I shall proceed to be the consumer I am, and play the game year on year.

Recently, a friend of mine and I had an argument about who the better FIFA player is. To understand my connection with the game, you would have to walk down memory lane, deal with the stench and re-live four long years at VNIT, where 3 nights a week used to be spent pursuing this madness you call football, only, off the field. After losing a couple of games, where I used this battered old computer, which can really be substituted for paperweights, with the force of the argument of the 'better player' hanging in the balance, a challenge has been issued.

Two days from now, there shall be a series of games. If I lose, the Rohit Prem Mani moves into 20, Amaltas.

Your Spectacles

2010-11-14T23:50:00.000+05:30

It was dark and damp.
Shining, blue, metal, glass.
I was about to explode, clutching at thoughts,
reaching out.
You caught my eye.
And like slamming a door behind me,
they were gone.
I could see your face through the hands,
because they should've been in mine.

The Choice

2010-10-05T11:36:00.001+05:30

But you can’t piece it back together again,
To make it whole
No umbilical elevator
Or red carpet unrolled
Even if the jigsaw falls into place
Where does the puzzle to go?
And you float like a feather,
Like a square fitting a circular hole
You know too much, you know
You’re going to die
Why suffer the tears
Of saying goodbye.
If this was the plan
something went wrong
Why else would I be writing this song.

I never wanted to leave you ma
I want to go back
I’m afraid I can’t find myself
I want you to look.

Exactly. Maybe.

2010-09-26T06:37:00.003+05:30

(What follows is my first short story, atleast the first one that I've taken the pains to write down. Please let me know how you like it. Thanks.)

This isn’t all in my head, right?

I wake up, in the middle of two women, naked, sweaty and numbed down there. So many parts of my body are throbbing at the same time, I feel like your household plumbing when it gets rusted and the pressure’s too high. About to blow, any moment now.

My eyes refuse my brain’s command to open. For a second I wonder if they’ve been sewn shut.

It’s bright and blurry. Too much for my nerves to handle at once after a night I can’t seem to remember very much about.

I’m never drinking again.

I look around to try and recognize who the women are, with a knowing sense of hopelessness surrounding me.

I suppress the urge to yell my pain out.

There’s a blonde. And a brunette - both lying motionless; except for their out of rhythm breathing patterns that I feel on my chest. I can’t see the blonde’s face but I vaguely remember her tugging hard at my dick. She’s skinny and her breasts are small. More like really large mosquito bites. The brunette’s a fuller woman. And you know what they say about fuller women.

Variety’s always been my thing.

I feel wet near my crotch.

I wonder if I embarrassed myself in bed last night and a cold sweat pours thinking of what my guests might think. Then I realize they were probably as fucked up as me last night, and might not remember a thing.

And I was the early bird.

I try moving the brunette’s arm from around me. Her breath smells of vodka mixed with Vaseline. She has big eyes, hair like Nicole Scherzinger’s if it wasn’t so manufactured in the videos. You don’t honestly believe her hair looks like that all the time, do you?

Searing pain shoots through my body the moment my feet touch the floor. I realize I’m covered in what seems to be my own blood. Beads of sweat feel cold on my forehead as the air conditioner maintains 18 degrees Celsius with a low whirr.

I check the sheets, tug and pull them out of what has now started to look distinctly like a perverse recreation of the Sistine Chapel. Only this time, Michaelangelo didn’t fuck it up with two naked men.

The blood is gushing from my face.

I don’t have a left ear anymore.
What the fuck?
I’m still coming to terms with losing an ear.

It’s not as bad as it seemed at first.

When pain is searing through your head, everything seems like eternity. You try and block it out, but it gnaws at your resistance, cutting through every barrier you ever thought impossible to bear.

You love what you’ve lost. And sometimes, it hurts. It’s just one of those things we’re supposed to do. Mourn the loss of those who’re dead, lament for the crippled, feel sorry for the poor.

I’d lick your asshole just to stop the pain right now.

I manage to walk to the john.

It gives me solace to think of the fact that whoever did this left the rest of me intact. I don’t have a single cut on the rest of my limbs and torso, and much to my relief it still hangs with the usual disdain, a little to the left, unharmed.

Wikipedia will tell you that a study of fifty men who had their penises reattached found that 98 percent of them found their penis functioned again. Fourteen men, out of the fifteen had their prayers answered. I wonder if the one guy who couldn’t get it to work asked for a refund. I bet if he was Larry Flint, he would’ve.

There’s no real damage, when you come to think of it, except that I can’t collect sound waves to funnel them into my brain to process. It’s a little like listening to your music without an equalizer. Who needs those anyway?

Like I said, not as bad as it seemed at first.
My head is spinning with thoughts of when, how, who and what, as the pain rushes back to my ear. I curse under my breath but that doesn’t really help my cause.
I rush to the toilet cabinet, and pull out some gauze. There’s an empty bottle of anti depressants in the corner, just behind a couple of neatly rolled joints and an empty box of Marlboros.

I vaguely remember telling myself that I need to fill out another prescription.

Everyone wants you using their drugs. They won’t let you smoke in an airline, but they certainly don’t mind if you’re going to abuse their version of Valium.

The tap is still running, as the sound of the flush peters out in the background. I look in the mirror and see that the ear hasn’t been cut clean off, more like torn, with jagged edges; like someone ripped a page from an old notebook. I want to see if it hurts when I touch it with my fingers but I resist the urge.

I collapse to the floor the moment the anti-septic touches my ear.

It wasn’t always like this.
I used to be happy.
I had a job. Got paid. My parents were proud of me. Attractive women wanted to go out with me.
I was Captain America with a grin on my clean cut Gillette face. The world was my stage, and I was playing my part.
Or so I thought.

If only everything was as simple as they say it is. If only you could read between the lines.

What’s the point of fine print, if it’s as important as it is?

I was a good boy. Every Christmas till I was about 8, I made lists for Santa Claus, telling him how I’d been a good boy all year, and wish for the latest Nintendo (age 8), the coolest tricycle (age 4), the death of Suzie D (age 6). I went to college, got a degree, went to prom, smoked some weed, got wasted often enough to be put in jail and really, really piss my father off. But he never found out.

I wonder what he’d say, if he found out what I’d been upto all these years.

He’d say nothing. The dead can’t talk.

As I lay collapsed at a cheap hotel somewhere at the other end of nowhere, I wish my life flashes in front of my eyes. And it does. Blurry and all at once.

To begin to tell you where it all went wrong, we’d have to start right at the
beginning. It’s all the tiger’s fault. Really.

The carpet has stains of dried blood on it when I come to.
Lying with my remaining ear to the sofa, my head wrapped in gauze, I feel my missing ear. I am my own personal mummy, only, one who ran out of bandage. Maybe eternal life is not for me.

Everyone you know will tell you to fear for your life. They’ll tell you to be careful. Not to do things that put you in the way of danger. Scuba diving with the sharks? Are you nuts?

You could be driving down the highway thinking about how pretty your girlfriend looks naked and how much you love her, miss a sign and fall off a cliff. It could be worse, you could slip in your expensive, Italian marble floored bathroom, hit your head on the shiniest stuff available to take a dump in, and die of a concussion. You could step out of your house, and be hit by lightning, while you choke to death on a crayon in your favourite hamburger as you talk on your cell phone laughing at a joke about your ex, and your body could be run over by a sports car enthusiast for whom, time is money.

To fear the day you will die, knowing, that time is relentless and unforgiving in its pursuit of your ‘soul’ is as pointless as trying to carve a Halloween pumpkin using nothing but peanut butter and jelly.

Fear that you might not live to be allowed to be who you want to be by those who want you to be who you don’t want to be. Read that again, to be sure.

Fear.
F-E-A-R. Fear is the key. Used to be love when The Beatles were around.

There’s a note on the table.
I jerk up to see what it says but the pain reminds me of my predicament. Slowing down, I reach for the letter, straining my eyes to read the neat, stylish strokes of someone I instantly put down as a woman’s handwriting.

‘I’m sorry. But you asked for it.’

She rounds off the ‘i’ with a neatly drawn heart.

Holmes would’ve known what to do. He would’ve known which paper this was, where it came from, if the author of the note was right or left handed, what the author’s cup size was. And he’d explain it all to Watson. The doctor, always jobless and jolly, accompanied our cocaine-addict of a hero on many a travel around the world solving mysteries and smoking a piple.

Everyone needs a Watson - someone to talk to, someone to bounce ideas off, someone to document your brilliance, refill your pipe, massage your ego, swallow your cum.

Holmes always knew who it was.
Except about Irene Adler.

I have no idea who the fuck wrote this.

It’s not true – what they say about counting sheep. Three thousand six hundred and twenty seven wooly, hardy sheep later, I am wide awake and painfully aware of the ear that is missing from my head without a clue about who was being apologetic, and for what.

Maybe I should do a self-portrait.
My cell-phone rings.

One thing about the advent of telecom in the world is that you rarely get to hear the old school ringing of a telephone. Everything’s about personality. Personalise your ring-tones. Personalise your t-shirts. Put your face on a shiny ceramic coffee mug that breaks if the beverage is too hot. The illusion of control. Everyone wants a piece of it. The universe still revolves around the earth.

I pick up, and have to instantly pull the receiver away from my un-bandaged ear to shield it from the shock of the volume from the other end.
‘Who is this?’

Obviously, the caller isn’t one for pleasantries. I like that. The whole ‘hello’ bit
got a little old after Achmed did the Lindsay Lohan joke.

Who is this? I ask back, feeling a little stupid.

By now, I’ve recognized the voice at the other end.
‘When the hell are you going to pay the rent?’, the voice of a sexagenarian, Vietnam-widow screams down the line. Mrs. Kowalski is a little deaf, but she doesn’t know that yet. She believes the rest of the world functions at her volume. How kind.

I’ve been AWOL from life for a little over three weeks now.

For a second, I forget about the fact that my ear’s just been cut off and I think of when I’m going to pay the rent.

Once you believe in something that’s against the law, you only have two choices left. Run for your life, or stay and fight till they beat you down. And they will, because they are the law. All the rhetoric you’ve heard about Guevera and James Dean being rebels without a pause and a cause respectively, are just the results of a tightly written screenplay. When Achilles went to war, he wasn’t doing it for immortality. He was just doing his job.

Just like you.

I mumble something about her having the wrong number and that I had no idea what she was talking about, and put the phone down off its hook. I can still hear Mrs. Kowalski’s high pitched screaming in the distance as I try walking around for the first time since my episode in the bathroom.

They tell you, you can’t drive too fast, or drink too much. Can’t drink if you’re too young, can’t if you’re too old. Oh, and if you’re not dressed right, you can’t even get in. They tell you, you’ve got to do your job

For a moment I wonder if this is the end. If I was ever going to get myself out of this; and even if I did, what was I going to get into next?

You can’t get on the train if you don’t have a ticket. Not even if your mother is about to die and you’ve forgotten your tickets in a magazine lying on the sofa in your expensively assembled living room. You feel like a fool, standing there, unzipping, checking and re-checking every single pocket of your bags as the train starts rolling out of the platform, sending a puff of dust your way as if to mock you. You wave goodbye to mommy and start the heavy walk back to the parking lot, cursing it all.

They find me, four days after my death, when the smell begins to be unbearable. Throw open the front door, to find a man spread eagled on the floor, with his one and only ear to the floor. Parts of my flesh beginning to rot.

I know that’s not going to happen, so I decide to walk out the door and go. Somewhere. I can’t remember.

Three nights a week, at midnight, I work at parties, mostly. Celebrities, high rollers, the mafia, corporate heads. It’s bored women mostly. Depraved, unsatisfied cougars, who don’t get enough time from their husbands because they’re out attending an important business meeting with their secretaries, or getting to know the innards of an international client. They wear the most expensive jewelry a woman can own; have the best surgeries done to the most intimate parts of their body; buy cosmetics worth enough to feed half the dying children in Bangladesh, but can’t get their husbands, their lawfully wedded husbands to make love to them.

Not even when they do the things they do to me.

I light my third cigarette as I order another round of whiskey. The barkeep nods. He knows I’m going to be here all night. He knows the kind.

I look around again, looking at the hopping crowd as it goes crazy dancing to the electronic trash the DJ spins out. And they said disco was dead. Only good things die. Crap like disco morphs into something worse, mostly. Like fuckin' rap music.

I know she is looking at me from behind the dark glasses.

I look away, knowing that it is her, as I spot a waiter heading to her table. She slips something to the waiter that he puts in his pocket. She looks at me and I get the feeling I would’ve if our eyes had met. She’s dressed in a black dress, the kind you wear at a funeral, with a hat pulled low over her eyes. Or where her eyes would’ve been if she wasn’t wearing the dark glasses.

Corny, if you’d ask me. But after what I’ve been through, not improbable in the least.

A waiter comes around to the bar and hands me a brown paper bag, the kind you carry groceries in.

I ask him what it was.
He points towards the general direction of her, but she isn’t there anymore. Gone, just like that, and I feel like I’m in a movie again.

I feel the insides of the brown bag.

I’m holding my left ear in the palm of my right hand.

I Hate Mondays.

2010-08-23T08:38:00.004+05:30

Don't you too?

The pain, the agony. The realization that an entire week lies in front of you and there's no way you're going to escape it. And that all that you planned over the weekend has now to be put into the painful inertia of motion.

All the work calls you promised you were going to make, all the rooms you were going to clean, all the people to meet.

E-F-F-O-R-T. Too much.

I'm off to make mine, after another night of not sleeping.

Soon, teacups shall pile, cigarette butts shall be disposed off, emails sent and received. Facebook statuses changed. Life shall go on. Weekend to weekend.

But this week's special. She Who Must Not Be Blamed returns to the Orange City and I shall cross the Seven Hills to meet her. Wo_0t.

And I get to meet mommy. <3

Here's a song for your troubles:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8AvtYJDBoA

See you on the otherside.

Dark Chocolate Is The Only Kind.

2010-08-09T03:10:00.002+05:30

In other news, Manchester United don't need to buy anyone else. Chelsea, see you in May. Arsenal, maybe next season. Liverpool, heh. Citeh. On nevermind.

A friend of mine works at a very respected consultancy, one of the big four. During one of my many commute conversations with said friend, who is also a senior of mine from MICA, he was narrating to us the stringent, formal atmosphere at work at the company he was now sold to. Said consultancy required formal attire all week, only three colours to be used in presentations, and had high security at every level - physical and electronic. No cellphone file-transfer, no personal laptops or pen-drives - which is all understandable in the world of consultancy and sensitive information.

The only respite that the employees received was the allowance of a half-sleeved shirt on Fridays.

No fancy colours. No corduroys. No t-shirts, round neck or collared. No jeans, no fancy belts, no ear-rings or jewelry.

To celebrate the arrival of the weekend, the company decided to give its employees the discount on half-a-sleeve.

That. Is. It.

I wonder what the Human Resources guy who took this decision was thinking when the board meeting was going on. Was he wondering if the half sleeve on Friday made the employees life better? Was the employee really thinking of the half sleeve on Friday as a company policy? Was "Half a sleeve, please! Give us half a sleeve off on Fridays and we'll do a better job for you!" really going through an employee's mind? Or was it "Half a sleeve less on Fridays is going to make the world a better place."?

Also, does this mean the corporate world doesn't need people, but only really needs skill sets?

The discovery of meaning is an important juncture in life.
Have you had yours?

Time.

2010-07-14T01:39:00.002+05:30

Funny thing, isn't it? The cliched ever changing, ever moving on, emotionless ticking of the clock and you wasting away.

I see people doing exactly what we did, last year, and I can't stop them, knowing how useless it is going to seem a year on. No one can.

It's stopped being funny how bored we all are. Gah. Boredom is something that has clearly known no limits, and never will. Heh.

Loud Music

2010-06-28T10:59:00.001+05:30

..makes it all alright!

Gah, fine I'll Write it Anyway

2010-06-27T18:27:00.002+05:30

Just had one of those - universe conspires against you moments. Thought of writing a post, wrote around 300 words, and deleted them, only to read a comment and think of something strange.

Is it just me, or are you also thinking of how similar everyone's lives are? This summer, I met two friends of mine after a year, both of who had graduated with me last year from NITs, as Engineers, working in basically the same Parsi banner company, one in steel and another in software. One of them, was a topper in my class, got a job at a Day Zero company, (for those not familiar with the term, read Sidin Vadukut's engaging Dork), and worked there for about 8 months now. I met him before his first day at the plant in Ahmedabad, and he was bristling with confidence, and all credit was to him. He deserved it. When I met him last week, he sounded bored out of his wits, tired and looking for a way out, preferably into management.

Second friend, know him from school. Brilliant footballing, good looking guy. Not really the type you'd expect would be working at a software coding mundane place. He's been doing the grind for a while now. Spoke to him earlier in the day, after I met him in Mumbai over the summer, and he told me the same things. He wanted to quit and work in management.

And then I realized how similar they were to me, or to you, if you're a mid-late eighties born, middle class, suburban or small city boy with dreams of making it and getting out of here, never really knowing where the here and where the there was.

Which got me thinking about how many real divisions across social platforms that we make and how the classification that happens these days is nigh scientific. About how there's always the vamp on a show on TV, and how there's always little children in advertisements, always playing the stereotype, always dividing, creating aspiration.

Strange duality, but coming back to the story at hand. Two different people, both with long term female commitments, in a similar situation, from incongruent, yet majorly overlapping backgrounds want the same thing. And that's just from the few people that I've had the good fortune to know.

How many people want the same thing that you want? And do they want it or need it or deserve it more or less?

There was a time when I used to think - man, there is no one doing exactly what I'm doing right now. And I used to be like - damn, that's so cool. But this just got me thinking.

Anyway, check out http://www.kevinpollakschatshow.com for some great interviews.

Autobiographers and the Ilk

2010-06-26T23:53:00.003+05:30

I've always wondered. How do you decide if your life is worth writing a book about? Is it the number of people you kill? Or re-unite? Or fuck or fuck-over? Does gulping down more whiskey or owning the most number of jets make the grade? I know it makes the cut if you're Hugh Hefner, now he's one dude we all would like to read about, right? Who decides, when it's time to write an autobiography? Was my life less readable than yours? Or his? Or are you, autobiographer, trying to rub it in, and make some money out of telling me: Haha, idiot! You're going to make me rich by reading about me!

I don't know if my life is more interesting than yours. Do you?

I don't know. I want to write a book. Now if I only knew how.

The Samba Boys are Home.

2010-06-21T14:51:00.004+05:30

Trust Brazil and the Samba Boys to bring colour back to the World Cup.
After what has, at best been a Premier League season style World Cup thus far, with most matches resembling dour, bottom of the table scraps, Brazil and the Ivory Coast finally came up with a match to remember.

Three goals from Brazil, Kaka setting them up with sublime passes, showing why he's still much better than any one else around at ball distribution. And then, a fairytale Didier Drogba goal. What a player! Broken hand, almost not making it to the world cup, then starting the second match and getting a goal. And then, the play-acting, reminiscent of Rivaldo's antics 8 years ago, getting Kaka sent off for a second yellow.

Brazil qualified. The match was worthy of a World Cup. I still want the Dutch to win.

But if anyone questioned Brazil's perpetual favourite status at the WC, now you know why!

Kaka's sending off: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJrHi1oUG-4

K-Wing Core Committee

2010-06-12T14:37:00.001+05:30

Saurabh Datar asked me a few days ago, why I wrote poetry these days and not prose. I told him, my prose kinda sucked. I promise I’ll try harder on this one.

The last two years at my alma mater, VNIT Nagpur, were by far the most spectacular in every meaning of the phrase. The people I hung out with, the things we did, the inimitable collective style in which we did them - are all a part of all of us, as much as we’d like to accept or deny them. So this warm summery night, as I sit alone in Nagpur, at around 3AM, I feel like writing an ode to the people who I practically lived with for a long, long time, despite having a perfectly nice home to go back to.

There is so much to say, and there is so much recollection to do, that despite the cliché, I really have no clue where to begin.

Or maybe I do.

The formation, maintenance and nostalgic references to K-wing have their origins in one rather large man-pig. Prathamesh Adhikari is probably the most genuine, loveable, nice guy you’ll meet, despite definitely being one of the dirtiest motherfuckers this side of Dharavi. I met Dukk-E (move over, Wall-E, his is bigger), one evening before Fresher’s in my first year, when we both were auditioning for compere. None of us got the part, which went to some ridiculous, and some marvelous people; but the seeds for something brilliant were sown. A lot of people call him ‘Dukkar’, meaning pig, and I frankly, don’t really like it. I can bet my bottom dollar that most of them don’t even know how he got the moniker, or that he calls me the ‘Other Dukkar’. After a brilliant Admatazz at Axis in our second year, Dukks and I were on our way to BajajNagar, singing Sweet Child (as badly as we could), to get some Pepsi for the impending celebrations. A pig came flying out of nowhere, hit my Activa and we fell. I rolled on the ground, Pratham rolled over me. The result is a scar that I bear even today, and his nickname. So the next time you call him Dukkar, remember that blood was spilt to get him that name.

Tanmay Milind Chitale, a human teddy bear, if there ever was one, is one of the smartest people with numbers around. I kid you not. People were afraid of him, the year I took the CAT, and there was a collective sigh of relief heard around the halls of VNIT when it was discovered the he was ineligible (for reasons not gone into) that year. I’ve spent more time than I should have in his room, as well as at his house before we embarked on that trip to Daman which is etched in my memory as if it happened yesterday, and he’s been infinitely kind and nice to me, personally. I don’t like the word cute when used in reference to with men, but Tanmay is infinitely so. Once, a couple of us walked in on Tanmay, playing DoTA, as usual, and singing “chutiya banaya bada maza aya” at the computer screen in the most childlike manner you can possibly imagine. The pizzas, the impossible number of 600ml pet bottles under his bed, the cooler and the water-filling, the DoTA games 10 minutes before exams, the dirty room where clothes once taken off could never be found, the double bed where Datar and I have suffered the wrath of Tanmay’s snoring, night after night after night, the bleeding nose of K-wing. I’d give anything to be back in Room 33, Block 1 right now.

Vinayak ‘Ugam’ Desai is a winner. He doesn’t play, he wins. Quite simply, that’s his philosophy. But it’s not like he’ll do anything to win or whatever, he’s just that good at everything. Really, no kidding about that. FIFA, CompScience, technology, how to entertain friends. All of it. He was the only guy on the ground floor in Block 1 who used to be up till morning, every freaking night during the exams, play FIFA with me, or someone else, go to Shankarnagar, come back and then sleep till one, waking up for a 2 o’clock paper, and still come back with a smile on his face. First year, communications skills classes used to a threesome between the teacher, him and me, with everyone else just wondering what the fuck we were upto. Ugam also never ate in the mess, unless it was feast time. NEVER EVER AT THE MESS. There’ve been nights when we’ve played about 25 games of FIFA on the trot, and I used to proud to proclaim I was the second best at it in VNIT.

Anand R. Dedhia is an engineering working with the research and development department at Bajaj Auto. He was also always the one on the lookout for anything and everything, the quintessential teetotaler, does not smoke Kutchee – called Daddy for good reason – he was the father figure at K. He steered Axis, and then took over the Newsletter with Datar, taking it to better places than it was destined for. Fuck, I really can’t remember a single place where Daddy’s ever, EVER fucked up! Except for maybe the job, but then you really can’t call landing a dream job a fuck up. What happened goes like this, Daddy had a killer GPA, clear fundae, sexy CV and all, but wasn’t getting placed for a long time, for whatever reasons. And then, BOOM!, Bajaj happened. And life was good again. Daddy is also my inspiration for losing weight. He used to room with two pretty cool guys in second year, and we had some killer times then too. He was also the voice of reason on the Daman trip, something that I am eternally grateful to him for. But, I’m still not sleeping next to Dukk-E.

Saurabh Datar is a cunt. Musically, as far as my limited understanding goes, he’s brilliant. He’s honest, he’s thorough and he refuses to move on stage. BUT he does not practice for himself. And I hate him for it, not because he played guitar in our band, but because he would’ve made a damn fine guitarist if he did. Someone who’s compulsively sarcastic, Datar has always shared my philosophy of living to critique. Pappu, as he is lovingly called, is also a hit with the ladies, although he will deny it to Armageddon. He’s probably the only positive by-product of my friendship with a certain Mr. Digipedia. Once, when we were about to go to a place called Krazy Kastle to play a competition, we were handed a card that said -Glasnost – Band Boys. Has a nasty habit of showing up on gig days with oil in his hair, but that’s better than Sax getting fake tattoos all over anyway. My partner in crime when it comes to being a grammar and a pronunciation Nazi, we still trip over Dukk-e’s ‘Whatsaygo’ and ‘Fessbooook’. Something about Pappu that probably no one outside this sextet knows is that he has the worst direction sense in the world, after Prathamesh, and a certain Aarohi president I know. (Yes, Chopde, that means you) And, he has this habit of sometimes asking the dumbest questions, but that’s alright. Chief Editor of the newsletter at VNIT, and the guy slept on my left for one fine summer. Ooooooooh Datar is so cute. :P

And finally, Mr. Ashvin Balivada. I really don’t know what to say about him. Bali and I had been in touch on and off for a year, playing telephone hide and seek, and so this time when I was in Bombay (fuck you, it’s not Mumbai) I told Bali that I was furious with him. He called me and said one line – “Pupu, I want your left testicle.” How do you come up with stuff like that man? Bali and I hosted our batch farewell, some impromptu lines, some practiced ones and we did the lot of those sitting there, and most of them didn’t even know. Also, Bali can do the whole hindi translation of the disclaimer you see before every TV show or film.

I know, this is weird, with the way it’s come out. It’s just my stream of consciousness running through and there is no particular order here. Blame Prathamesh for this, I just went through his album and became terribly nostalgic and tried getting some closure on a time that is never going to come back to us. There were others along the way, irreplaceable in their own right. I know there’s always something more that I could have/should have written about all of you guys. Consider this my attempt to relive K-wing, one warm, summery night.

Speaking of the Weather

2010-06-02T20:31:00.004+05:30

Why is it that whenever you're talking to a member of the opposite sex you fancy, and this won't happen when you're talking to your boy/girl-friend, you almost always end up discussing the weather? I really try not to talk about it, make a conscious attempt too, but it always creeps in. Like the dampness that always seems to surround you in Bombay. It's quite freaky. No more weather talk. None. At. All.

This Is Random (Don't Blame Hoffman)

2010-06-01T20:18:00.003+05:30

My internship's over. No more Fridays in my life for a year at least. I'm just itching to write because I just went through some fools' blogs, and I kinda went - Oh, I have one of those too!

Please bear with me while I indulge myself.
After that, maybe, we can, you know..

1) Tripping over Christopher Walken in a Mumbai local is brilliant! 'You know...'. Mr. Walken, thou art the Lord.
P.S. Marcellus Wallace does not look like a bitch!

2) Please don't use the word 'mate' if you're not Aussie or English. It's really not pretty.

3) Facebook privacy? WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU ALL! Your governments have always known everything about you. Your home address, your telephone number, how old your children are, your bank account numbers, your vital statistics (no wait, that's just Playboy). And now Facebook's using your info to direct ads towards you and you've got a problem? Talk about being stupid. No wait, talk about celebrating the fact that you're stupid. And there are people who want other people to quit Facebook. Seriously man, I know we're hit by recession and all, but have you ALL lost your jobs? Boppana, do something about this, please. Thanks.

4) The other day, one of my friend's friends went - "Robbie Krieger would own Slash's ass."
Really, what does that even mean? Are you trying to say that if you were judging a guitar competition, Krieger would win over Slash? Really? What does that even signify? You're whack.

The Doors sucked. Sorry, but that's the truth.
Oh, and G'nR were a lot more fun.
Led Zep FTW!

5) I've had this conversation over and over in the past few days with people and I really want to put it out there once and for all: The Beatles VS The Rolling Stones.

With the possible exception of a certain Mr. Shakespeare, the Fab Four of Messrs Lennon/McCartney/Harrison/Starkey are the most influential act in entertainment history. They were there, in front of the screaming girls, before the Drug Lord took over and sent them to Lucy in the Sky. They got the girls, a lot of them, holding their hands and making them moan. And in the short time that they were around, they sang about love, and love, a little bit of help, and a lot of love.

The Rolling Stones were there too. Always. Just watching and playing their rock and blues tunes, with Micky strutting on stage as Reefkeef figured out how to survive Armageddon with the roaches, en route to becoming easily the greatest band to ever perform live. Oh, and Jagger probably has an army of illegitimate children hiding somewhere, plotting world domination. And the legalization of marijuana too. (#GOFORIT, MAAAN!)

Tom Wolfe put it quite simply: “The Beatles want to hold your hand,” he quipped, “but the Stones want to burn down your town.”

Ever since the swingin' 60s, the music listener has always faced the question - who do your loyalties lie with, the clean cut, mop-topped Liverpudlians, or the streakier, wilder, bad boy babies from London?

It's a question that seems to be unanswered by all, but clearly, anyone who's listened to music for what it says, will swing to the Stones! The Beatles came to stand for the flower power, while the Stones were more Left leaning, turning their behemoths of musical careers into subjects for post-doctorate studies in culture.

The Beatles today are an icon of manipulation of the masses while the Stones continue to rock on as the masters of what they do. The Beatles, a motley crew of four rag-tag musicians from Merseyside presented to the world as Four Respectable Gentlemen (Fuck that, The KINKS FTW!), while the Stones from the sub-urbs of London, took on the world with rock-star schlock.

To this day, The Rolling Stones are the highest grossing band ever. The Beatles' music has been played in outer-space to greet fellow Beatle-maniac extra-terrestrials.

The similarities between the two are uncanny.
Draw your own conclusions.

But remember, you can't always get what you want. =)

6) "Honestly, your band sucks." (Indiecision ad behind some random rock mag in Bombay. Take a bow!)

Ode to a Friday

2010-04-30T18:02:00.000+05:30

I guess we've all come to love the term, TGIF. Well, you're in love upside down, idiot. Thank God because it's Friday? Are you nuts?
Fridays just show that God doesn't love me, you, you or you. Read on to find out why.
Inspired by a conversation with Surabhi Suri.

Ode to a Friday.

You spam, you post, you chat away
All morning, and then all day.
An invitation here, a snide remark there
'Cuz you know, love and war, it's all fair
A few laughs and jokes around,
Some international, some unfound
And you look at the clock
Wishing it didn't stop
And you secretly hope
That the boss will let you go
That much early, in that much light
Except you know, it's going to be a fight
And that you're going to be in a fix
Till atleast five-forty-five, if not six.
And all that you'd planned
Has got to be canned
Because by the time you head
The town's already painted red
All you have with you
Are cans of beers, afew
And a bunch of friends known,
Waiting, at no place like home.

TGIF, or something similar.

2010-04-16T12:59:00.003+05:30

So my mentor's not coming in today. Woo-fuckin'-hoo! An entire day of free internet, air conditioning, non-veg delicacies and the likes, and not an iota of work to do! I can certainly live with this. Well, almost.

Citing my lack of work as a suitable excuse, I'm going to talk about all that's wrong with the world here, with a view to rectify it and make it a better place to live in. Not that I really gave a flying duck, but hey, I'm free and I'm easy.

1) I spent the first few days on my internship taking in the sights and sounds of the place I worked in, and before Bops and I were done on the first day, we'd already nominated an office slut. Now I know that I am rather frivolous in my usage of said term, given my nickname and all that, but this woman is brilliant. She's got it all going - screechy voice, random mannerism, weird conversations! The only thing that seem to be missing from her wardrobe and repertoire are a pair of glass heels, and this woman is all set for the Hos Convention. Vegas awaits, not-so-eagerly.

P.S. It's just fun to categorize people. Hell, if they do it to you, you might as well do it to them!

2) Fucking idiotic auto-wallahs. Man, these fuckers should be skinned alive, atleast most of them. If I had a 100 bucks for every time an auto-wallah has turned me down in Bombay, I'd probably be able to pay my MICA tuition without an education loan. Heck, I'd be able to sponsor half the batch! If you get down at Bandra West, and try and get an auto for say, Santacruz, and succeed in less than 20 minutes in the sun, let me know. Treat's on me!

3) Women's compartments in local trains - now, I thought I was the only one who thought they were a little out of place, but no. Friends of mine share the same view, and it is this - why the fuck do women sit in a normal compartment, if they have, say an average of 3 entire bogeys dedicated to their gender on a local train? Whywhywhy?
I'm all for gender equality, but the last time I checked, it meant equality, not woman favouritism. They want a Women's Bill in Parliament, they want reservation on local trains, they want you to get up if they's standing and you're not, they want you to be polite and nice and suave and good in bed! What the fuck! What next? Reserved oxygen for women? A law stating 33% of all elastic in the world is for women? I really don't get this shit, as much as I love my women. Like *REALLY* FUCKING DON'T!

4) SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM

Have net, will spam. MICAMAIL baby! You get the picture, no?

5) It's friday. I've been planning to go for a couple of gigs, ever since last Monday, and finally, I'm going. Pentagram and Swarathma, and ToT @ the HRC. Should be fun, could be expensive.

Oh, the lunch at Komli Media is insane. Mutton on fridays, chickens on Wed! I'm going to eat.

Arctic Monkeys - Humbug - A much delayed review.

2010-04-07T12:22:00.013+05:30

I feel the urge to write something about the Arctic Monkeys' last album, since Neeharika beat me to it at Split. Well, I have been going over and over it in the past week or so. Yeah, I know, but I really didn't have the time. And I was still tripping over Favourite Worst Nightmare.

Humbug is a much more relaxed album, after Favourite Worst Nightmare's high-strung, nigh-cardiac arrest feel. It picks up, right where FWM's last track, 505 left off. Josh Homme (Kyuss, QOTSA and Eagles of Death Metal) joins the boys from Sheffield on this album as producer and he certainly leaves his imprint, bringing out in vivid detail the darker, melancholy strains that have always marked Alex Turner's songwriting.

The album kicks off with Cryin' Lightning, and that's about as much excitement that this album sees in terms of aggression. Turner writes in his inimitable, detailed style - something that has clearly worked for the Monkeys over the last two albums. The song talks of an over-indulgent obsession to consume confectionery and sweets, while the bass line builds the song up with a sense of apocalyptic foreboding. Jamie Cook does great work on the understated guitar parts when the song starts out, and a tight rhythm section holds it all together beautifully.

Turner cements his position as the dirty boy with My Propeller. 'My propeller won't spin and I can't get it started on my own/When are you arriving?', the song is replete with references to getting it on good with, well, whoever it is you want to get it on with. Continuing with his snide social commentary about the scene around which he grew up, Turner writes deeply personal tunes in an almost off-hand way, and although he gets it a little wrong on Dangerous Animals (spelt out chorus, really?), the track is ably rescued by the band with tight rhythm parts. Matt Helders is the Monkeys' not-so-secret weapon, keeping it together with some great drumming and vocal harmonies. There's a bootleg of him singing Last Christmas somewhere on the internet, and it's pretty darn good.

The centre-piece and crowning glory of this album is the ballady Cornerstone, wherein lies Turner's simple lyrical genius. "I smelt your scent on the seatbelt" is his idea of a romance, if this song doesn't leave you with a wry smile and some nostalgia in your head, chances are that it's been a while since you got laid. The song speaks of this girl that he can't get over and he wants to call every little whore, tramp and floozy that Turner meets in the dank pubs in Ol' Blighty, that very girl's name - like he's stuck in a time warp, infested with her memories and the strange hopelessness that comes with them. If misery begets company, we're with you till you're writing such tunes, Mr. Turner.

The album returns to familiar Arctic Monkeys territory with Pretty Visitors, punching and clanging it's way in much like 'D is for Dangerous', this one is a doff of the hat to the more violent fans of band. Great lyrics on this one too, 'All the pretty visitors came and wave their arms/And cast the shadow of the snakepit on the room' & 'What came before, the chicken or the dickhead?'.

The band has always stayed close to the formula that created the huge hype around their first album, and it has never failed them. On this record, the Monkeys make forays in several new directions, and although Homme could have pushed them even further, this album is pretty avant garde for the Monkeys.

Humbug is not better than either of the two albums they released before, but it's only because it treads a different path in terms of arrangements, feel and production. And it also goes to show that the Arctic Monkeys still have their heads right on their shoulders, clearly an achievement for a band that could've easily drowned itself out in the hype and hooplah that surrounded them, even before their first album.

One thing is for sure, after this album, no one's going to ask who the fuck are the Arctic Monkeys anymore.

And here's a pretty neat video for Cornerstone:

Weatherman

2010-04-06T18:08:00.000+05:30

The storm brews.
The weatherman tells the camera,
Breaking news!

The Blot Thing - Colours Were On A Holiday

2010-04-06T16:43:00.003+05:30

So, a friend sent me this link yesterday and I put off listening to it till later, first day at work and all that playing on my mind. But when I did listen to the song, I just couldn't stop!

Introducing, The Blot Thing, a "new, experimental trip-hop band from Mumbai" with their first song, armed with a strange video and Mughal-E-Azam scenes. Sure, they sound like the illegitimate children that Four Tet and Portishead were supposed to have, but what the heck! I think it's brilliant, and I know you will too!

Remember, here's where you saw it first.

It's Weird.

2010-04-03T00:51:00.000+05:30

An original work by Vineet Kanabar, in honour of Rini Handa, grace personified.

It's weird.
How everything I see, reminds me of you.
How everyone I meet, asks me what you're upto?

It's strange.
When everything you say, stays in my head for days.
When every time you laugh, around me, I feel music play.

It's amazing.
How you bring out the best in me, everyday.
How we're always going to be together, even if it's only cliched.

Haiku Autobiography

2010-03-31T22:56:00.000+05:30

Summer comes;
As the good for nothing
procrastinate.

Yeh Shareefon Ka Mohalla Hai

2010-03-31T05:49:00.003+05:30

Conception by Gaurav Puri.

The Palaash T-Shirt, for the batch of 2009-11.

Now, let's go back to your favourite program, Waiting for Mani to roll.

My Blueprint For Next Year

2010-03-31T03:58:00.000+05:30

Since all the fancy shit has already been done, I’ll keep this simple and random.

Fact: Our last few days in Palaash, have been a vacation that most of us have taken from life and are basically just wasting away, clutching at the throes of the life we cherish and love, and the fact that the internship that looms large on the horizon is a change that most of us don’t want. Not for more than a couple of weeks anyway.

I have grown to despise memories and the fact that they make you want to stick around where you’re not supposed to for longer. I know, most of whoever takes the pain of reading this is going to say, “Dude, it’s only three months!”, but there are a few who understand where I come from. Aashish & Chopra’s text message from the train was an example of what I mean to say.

We are whores. Pathetic little whores, whose singular remaining objective is to suck the marrow out of life in any way, means or form over, atleast, the duration of the next year, and then prolong it for as long as we can. I’ve had real work to do for the past three days, but I have just refused to do it – traded it in for a period of, in no particular order, amazing drama, inebriation, elation, dejection, anticipation, betrayal, adrenaline, love, lust, hate, murderous rage and just a general sense of renunciation towards the big, bad world. Anyone who knows, won't disagree. And the best part of it is, all of it just doesn't matter. Or atleast doesn't in the way you think it does.
There are those who work, but really don't like it and think they'd rather chill, but really, they'd probably talk about not working while they chill as well. Yes, I'm speaking to you, Roommate. I’ve seen the boy who cut his head on the baddy court during early days here rampage on an anarchy trip, and tripped with him. The big fat ox who couldn’t put one step right all year, except for the *real* one step right, is going to remain the big fat ox. I dread Chopra being next door next year. I dread the opulence that internships will bring next year to the 4. The ogre who lived next door will be next door, and a pain the nuts, again - only this time, he’ll smoke, drink and hopefully, get us a job. (Fuck, my room is (*was*) sandwiched between two giants') There'll always be those little angry women and though Bumbay bitch will be King of Cool next year, I sincerely pray for the muscle-man and his stony silence. Iceman Suppandi is already back with a new, old haircut. And MICANVAS!

There’s so much more I want to write, but I’ve always wondered why anyone would want to read this. It’s the same crap that all of us have thought of, in our own contexts, it’s just weird for me to know that I know all of this and, that I will continue to be, well, whatever.

Rini's going to be here. =)

Thanks.

Random Thoughts of A Writer's Block

2010-03-18T14:25:00.001+05:30

Capture a thought,
Ramble on.
Take a literary snapshot,
and tear it to shreds.
Summarize it all in one sentence,
wax eloquent for hours at end.
Put ideas to paper with the help of a pen.
Discuss what came before, the egg or the hen.

Beat around the bush.
Get straight to the point.
Hit the nail right on the head.
Or something, equally cliched.

Character sketch.
General nonsense.
A textbook, an essay, a novella.
Maybe even an a-capella.

Movie deal, Warner Bros.,
Megan Fox.
Champagne on ice,
whiskey, on the rocks.
Sign a book, socialize,
hold my drink.
When you read my book, do let me know what you think!

A Child in the Woods

2010-03-02T21:01:00.000+05:30

I’ve spent hours looking at the screen.

Staring. Blankly, at the blinking cursor against the white electronic facsimile of paper, thinking, imagining, simulating. Things that can never be, things I don’t want to be. Things that have now become me.

As my temples throb with a headache you will not believe, I wonder how it got this way. We used to be different. Human. Someone who bled, when cut; not respond with a flowery description of how much the cut doesn’t bother him and that it is only natural that it heal in some time; and how the screaming when you’re cut is only a disturbance in everyone else’s lives.

Now, we wander the world, crashing into people and places, one after another, vaguely remembering the past, not knowing where we are to end up, but always aware of where to go. How?

It’s not like we remember our past well. And neither does it. Our relationship with the past is one of a strategic impasse. You don’t bother me, and I don’t bother you. As long as our paths don’t cross, we’re happy, or well, as happy as one can be, without the recognition offered by one’s past. But it is cathartic in a way, the renunciation of all origin. But it is also important to realize the necessity to be continuous and thorough in said renunciation, because believe it or not, your origins change and evolve, just like you, every day.

How did it get this way? When did we change from being society to awkwardly fit together pieces of different puzzles, almost meshing yet almost breaking up at the cracks? Has anyone else noticed how we’ve become smaller units, micro-societies, where the common denominator are no more our tribes, our neighbourhoods or our families, but us alone. In our search for an identity, we fear losing whatever remains of it in the first place, starting afresh, only not knowing where the starting line is.

I’ll ask one more time, just for the sake of convenience. For the simple joys and infinite sorrows of the world, for the sake of once again beholding fleeting beauty and everything else that it brings with itself, and for breathing them in and out just the way they are, simple, majestic and humbling.

How did it get this way?

Where did we lose ourselves?

Vitriolik: Issue # 2

2010-02-27T20:07:00.001+05:30

I found a name for this series! =D

Estranged Strangely presents

Vitriolik

Random Play: Starlight - Muse (Black Holes and Revelations - 2006)

Word of the Day: plasticity - The property of a solid body whereby it undergoes a permanent change in shape or size when subjected to a stress exceeding a particular value, called the yield value.

What your face feels like when the boyfriend punches you in the jaw, after he sees you dancing with what he thinks is his girl.

What I Learnt In School Today:

Basketball practice with paper and a bin on an iPhone app is an effective way to kill time.

Click on the picture to get a better view at today's In Camera.

And if you don't get something, ask aloud.

We're only here to help you, Frodo.

Naked

2010-02-26T04:39:00.000+05:30

Okay, the title is misleading. It was a marketing gimmick. Go figure.

In an effort to increase my frequency at this blogging thing, I'm going to do what is to follow, as regularly as possible, with the ideal scenario being, *surprise surprise*, everyday.

Random Play: When The Sun Goes Down - Arctic Monkeys (Whatever People Say - 2006)

Word of the Day: pneumatics - the use of pressurized gas to affect mechanical motion. Makes finding a job when you have severe gas, easier.

What I Learnt in School Today:

Everyone likes their two minutes in the sun,

And if they didn't, it just wouldn't be so much fun. =)

The accompanying picture shall henceforth be referred to as In Camera.

Hope whoever's reading enjoys this as much as I do. Leave a comment. Be random.

Blur

2010-02-19T02:56:00.001+05:30

The years don’t blur memories.

It seems like yesterday,
that I smelled your hair,
as I held you close;
fragrant and warm; alluring,
like a drug that I’ve been craving for.

It seems like last night,
when you lay, arched,
beckoning to me as I followed;
to be sheltered with you.
In bliss.

It seems like moments ago,
that your laughter echoed in my ears,
as I beheld a sight as enchanting as you.
Tracing the shape of your face with my finger,
and feeling the loud thud in my chest when
you look at me like that.

It seems like so long ago,
when I walked you to the train;
watched it rumble out as I pushed back tears.
The feeling of lead in my feet;
and of general unfairness taking over.
The years don’t blur memories.
They just fill in the empty spaces;
in colour.

Animus

2010-02-04T04:13:00.001+05:30

I can,
wail till my lungs collapse,
I can,
sing you a sweet lullaby.
I can,
light up your eyes with a smile, perhaps.
I can,
spring an oasis, in the desert dry.

I can,
find my own way home, without a hand.
I can,
stumble drunk to your door.
I can,
be a stranger in a strange land.
I can,
be the pimp and the whore.

I can,
throw you to the sharks to be eaten alive,
I can,
carry you through the fields of blood, safe and sound.

I can,
be your pride and joy,
riding your luck into battle.

I can,
tell you the answer you’re looking for.
I can,
make you go round in circles looking for me.
I can,
buy you these words, a dime a dozen.
I can,
give myself to you, for free.

I can,
write your name in smoke, across the bright blue sky.
I can,
watch as the waves wash it away.

I can,
kiss your lips, fraught with desire.
I can,
watch and pine, as you turn away.

Morningrise

2009-11-14T21:13:00.000+05:30

Sunshine breaks

In through the window

Darkness falls, under my bed.

A distant bark

A crash and a fall

Silence reigns.

A misty morn

Colours unseen

At the break of dawn.

The wind blows

Between the sheets

As I lay awake.

The last drop

falls; as I still long

for another sound.

A Not So Glorious Return

2009-08-22T15:32:00.000+05:30

It's strange, that I tend to write when it's dark inside, and strangely, despite the infinite darkness that seems to surround me at the moment that I am writing this, I don't seem to be writing a lot. And it's not because I don't have a lot to say, for those who know me, know that I always have a tonne of shit to yap about and am compulsorily opinionated about everything. It's just that I haven't had a chance to organise and edit my thoughts (and feelings, maybe) and put pen to paper, or keyboard to blogger and write the darn things out. So this lazy afternoon when I have time for myself, by stroke of good luck, and I know I haven't had a lot of that lately, I shall write, rant, entertain and maybe even dance like a performing monkey would if he could.

So here goes something, enjoy.

1) MICA happened. And it's strange, but what I enjoy most about this place is going to some of the classes. A return to the Kana who likes to study happened, and then it didn't and then it happened again. A lot of other shit also happened. People, places, thing, music.

Change.

Coping is fun, it's also tiring and taxing and after a while, boring. I wonder why there isn't a provision to just pick up your old like, transform it into the way you want to and change the minor details so you don't have to waste time thinking about it, instead, you can just get high and fuck around.

2) HATE!
Man, I used to believe that lust and fear are the only true emotions, and people who know me, know I do believe in that axiom of mine. But of late, hate, or minor substitutes of the same are a part of me. It's fun, in a Batman vs Joker sort of a way. And it's also interesting when I psycho-analyse myself about why I hate things.

3) Music. Man, I miss my band. And whatever else came with it. Yelling at Saxena, getting yelled at by Datar, the insanely random 'cheeeeck's at gigs, the 'Smoke Some Ganja'. Dude, if there was one thing, apart from the K-wing and other friends that I got at VNIT was Glasnost. I went home a few days ago and played a song with 'Safer Monday' (:P) and boy was that a throwback to old times. If there was one thing I want back right now, it would be Glasnost. That music was catharsis in so many ways, it isn't even fucking funny.

4) Idiots. Everywhere. God, if you had so much time on your hands to make such idiots, why didn't you use it to eradicate swine flu, malaria, AIDS and Manchester City Football Club?

5) Gujarat. For India's fastest progressing state, there isn't anything grand about this place. No alcohol; very little non-veg; loud, more-obnoxious-than-I-am people with the strangest dressing sense. Right now, it's just me and Steven Wilson singing away to glory hoping things get somewhere soon around here.

6) Swine flu. What? Dude, trust us to divert our minds from the real troubles in life with propaganda based idiocy and concentrate all our resources on it. Less than a 1000 people around the world have died coughing their lungs out. And it's a pandemic! And AIDS, malaria, and Manchester City Football Club continue to claim catastrophic numbers while we sit in our rooms and drink our bootlegged Royal Stag!

7) Needy people. Please, people. Stop being needy. Really. STOP! It's not very becoming, it isn't. If the giant panda Po could get the fact that the secret ingredient is 'nothing' I don't get why you can't! Bono sang, you don't need anyone or anything at all. Believe that, stop messing with others' lives, get one for yourself. I can arrange for a discount at eBay for you if you wish that.

Wow, I wrote. Badly, but hey, after a long long time. I want to do this more often. Someone give me pointers. Datar, that means you. Fuck you chut, get to MICA and we'll play some music. Like, please and shit.

Time for a shower. Laters.

And here's a parting gift, courtesy XKCD.

Things That Have Ended in The Past One Year

2009-04-19T15:55:00.000+05:30

My last few days at VNIT got me thinking about this. A whole lot of things that I was majorly into have come to an end, and are still coming to an end in the last one year. Here's a list of whatever I can make public. :P

1) Zero - The greatest band in the world. India's contribution to rock and roll. Last show played was at Independence Rock last year. Too bad there won't be another album for me to listen to all day and all night and then rave about how Zero changed our lives.

2) Aarohi/Axis/Quizfest/Ganeshotsav/Janmashthami/Lohri/Freshers - Being an obsessive compulsive organiser, along with a few other fair and dark folk of Hostel Block One at VNIT, this marks a complete shift in the cosmos. There is practically nothing left for me/us to organise. A feeble attempt at resuscitation was the 'batch farewell', but the whole magnum opus feel that we wanted to bring to that was shot down by some strange bitches around college. Too bad for them, I still have my glass of whiskey to go home to.

3) Newsletter - When Datar and I joined the VNIT newsletter committee last year, we were struck by how sad the scene was. NO offence to our seniors who worked a lot, but in general, the effect of the newsletter wasn't like it was supposed to be. A few days later, Dedhia joined the committee too, and the time for change was upon us.

One year under the aegis of Messrs D&D, Datar and Dedhia, and Eyes Only is a transformed rag. People await its arrival, and it feels like something that we're leaving behind that has made a mark. I hope someday to contribute another editorial to EO, even if it only as an alumnus. :)

4) Going Late To Classes - At VNIT, in the last four years, I have never attended a class on time. The minimum time difference between beginning of class and my entry has always been around the 15 minute mark. And this has scarce little to do with factors like, the class is early morning, or I overslept. Even if the class was at 12 noon, I've strolled in at 1220PM.
Alas, with graduation, comes the responsibility of getting to class on time at MICA. Too bad for me, I guess.

5) Going to Asit's Every Day - If you spoke to me last year, on the same date, you'd know that for about 4 years before that, I went to Asit Sharma's place every day of the year. Every. Single. Day. Sadly, with college ending and so much left to say and do, that's changed. It's a bittersweet emotion, in some way that I can't seem to fathom, but hey, I'm not supposed to know everything, am I?

6) Glasnost - The best goddam thing to happen to the four of us - Espy, Sax, Pappu and Kana. Driven by Pappu's guitar and improved because of Espy and Sax, my funky band is all but done for. If in case Espy turns up at Baroda, and I'm at A'bad, with Datar getting some time too, we can think of playing in the future, else, it's curtains for us. Thank you to those who've been there and liked what we did. One last time, check!

But, to use a cliche, every dark cloud...silver lining...blahblah. New things to look forward to, new people to meet, new fests to organise. :)

The only thing that I'm not so sure about, is that if I really want those new things. Everything is in its right place. Soon, nothing will be. Soon, I will wake up not knowing what to do with rest of my day. Soon, I shall be an engineering graduate, and I don't even know if I want to be there yet.

Bomb Ourselves Back To The Stone Age

2009-04-12T15:31:00.000+05:30

Hello folks.
This is going to be a good ol' fashioned rant, so get your popcorn and sodas ready, and buckle up.

1) Environmentalists.
Noun. Also, synonym for people with too much time on their hands, and too little in their personality to actually make others care about them. So they go ahead and make it a point to find a fault with everything around, and condemning said everything to high hell. Case in point, the Tata Nano. Some idiots think that the Nano is going to pollute and pollute and pollute. Are chutiyon, you know we've norms for the environment, don't you? Just because some politicians made a case ten years ago against a cheap car, you get sucked into their perspective and criticize what is every middle class man's dream? I suggest you get a life, and while you're at it, pull your foot out of your mouth, because if you really did care so much about pollution, you'd quit the comfort of your cosy homes, and head for the Himalayas. But that wouldn't help much either, because you'd just melt the ice off with your warm and fuzzy farts.

Let's get a little technical here. A Nano will give you 23kms to a litre of fuel. On the other hand, an SUV gives you what 8-10kms to a litre. If you still don't see my point, the Lord, if there is one, wasted a set of eyes and a brain on you. Stop the SUVs if you care so much. Or be like me, and don't. Please, don't waste our time with your opinions, and if you are a hot enough environmentalist who'd only give me some if I heard you out, just save it for the morning after.

2) Facebook.

Dudes. Seriously. Social networking used to mean keeping in touch with people. Not sitting and quizzing your personal highway to internet iconism. Get a life. Get utorrent. Download. Watch a movie. Watch porn. Get it up and let it out. Stop quizzing on Facebook, and even if you don't, stop sending me the goddam updates letting me know that your favourite band in the whole wide world is Backstreet Boys. They're not even a band, they're a group, idiot.

3) The Third Front. The Fourth Front. Whatever else.

So suddenly, Mayawati wants to be PM. And it will soon be mandatory for everyone going in for a job or an education to produce an open category certificate. I'm not one to ask about a person's standing in life or any of that jazz and I generally take shit the way it comes, but when it's about to hit the fan, I'm not going to stand behind it. Are Maya-ben, aukaad pata hai? On one hand, you've got people rooting for Barack O-haha, who's atleast qualified enough to be where he is, and in the largest democracy in the world, we have a proper swayamwar for the top job in the country. But who really know what's going down when these politicians make their pre-poll, post-poll, pre-earlymorningpoop, post-coitus, pre-mature-ejaculation alliances?

To anyone who reads number 3 - Be a man. Do the right thing. Shut up, and vote. Show these idiots the finger.

Oh, and the Samajwadi Party is like the laughing stock of Indian politics. After the BJP, of course. Amar Singh spends more time on Page 3, while Mulayam tries to get mulayam ladies to give him hand jobs since his hands are all dirty from the shit Laloo and Paswan are dragging him through. Poor old chaps, even Mayawati raped them upside down and hung their cocks to dry in the Arctic Circle. When will they learn? No wait, will they learn?

Wow, I feel better, so I'll give you a life update on me.

I was in Delhi for a week, met Rini after a long time. Had the most amazing time ever. Love her to death.
Was at a few farewell functions, since it is our last fortnight at VNIT. I laughed and cried at the same time.
My final year project group is awesome. We have done nothing yet, and since tomorrow is the seminar, I don't think we're going to. Cheers Mayur. :)

Life is good right now, but I don't know how long it will last. So for any of my friends reading this, you know who you are, thank you for the time of my life.

So, I got in to MICA.

2009-03-28T13:22:00.000+05:30

Last year, I made a choice. With placements round the corner, I told my parents, 'Dudes, fuck it. I'm not up for a techie job, and there's no way in hell that I'm going to endure more engineering bullcrap.", obviously, in distinctly different, and far more politically favoured lingo, but yeah, that's what I said, and that's what I did. So, I didn't get a job. Reminds me of Sanchal Malhar of Indigo Children going, if you don't want a job, just don't get a job, fuck it. Yeah well, at the fag end of my engineering life, 'fuck it' would be an appropriate and fitting description.

Anyway, after not-so-much deliberation, I started what many might call un-preparing for CAT. Joined TIME, didn't go to class, played music instead. Anyhoo, I managed a less than decent 98.35 percentile on the CAT, and had no shot at the IIMs. I had already made my mind up about either HR or Communications, with MICA or MDI as my main options. And there must be someone watching over, because I got into MICA.

So here's how the shit went down.

After the MICAT, I was quite sure of a call, I have no clue why, but I was. And I got one.

So I got down to Ahmedabad, on the last day of my second midterms, with the words chassis, disc brakes and axle still ringing in my ears from the Automobile Engineering exam earlier on the same day. I flew in late on Saturday night, and headed for this place they call Country Club. For what these self-sodomizing elves charge at the CC, their service is worse than that at the Doctor Tapri outside VNIT. Trust me, like Vinny used to say.

Anyway, so I had no lunch or dinner on Saturday, and I didn't take the in-flight alpahaar that the truly inspiring hot chinky stewardess was serving because strawberry mousse is just not my thing. Who eats that shit - strawberry mousse?

So right. Sunday night. I try sleeping, but my bed's right in front of the AC blower, and my ass is freezing, like literally, right. I saw icicles in the crack the next morning. So, no lunch, no dinner, no sleep, no 'diet supplements' either, if you know what I mean. Brilliant way to go for your preferred institute, and a brilliant foot forward towards your future.

Morning comes. I call for a cab. Now the reason I was at the bloody CC was that it was the closest to MICA and I wouldn't a) be delayed the next day, and b) have to shell out a bomb to the cab. But guess what, both happened! Ruddy brilliant, no?

Right, overlooking the brilliance here, I get to MICA. Pretty campus, nothing out of the ordinary, or maybe I'm just spoiled because of the lush green 250 acre VNIT, Nagpur campus. So I go, good shit, this should do. Time for a little registration, quickly done. I manage to get yelled at because I hadn't printed my Personal Info form on two sides of the same A4 sheet. I know, I'm awesome.

Time for the GE. Groups of 10, three ladies in ours, the rest full blooded males. Decent folk, most of them.

We headed for the GE and we rated a few cartoons based on some random criteria that we invented. Random fun, most of us spoke for a bit, some of us dissented about the size of the group, and one of went on to prove that he was a complete ass-wipe. Ruddy brilliant!

Time to chill, since my interview was post-lunch. So we headed to enjoy the 'beauty' of the campus. ;)

P/I time. This one was fun.

There were three people on my panel, an old gentleman (OG), a really hot lady (HL), and one of the ladies from the GE (GW).

Here's how it went down.

Enter Kana.

Kana - Good afternoon.

All - God afternoon, sit down Vineet.

Kana - Thanks.

HL - So, Vineet, why don't you like Hindi TV soaps?

Kana - Well, I don't think they truly reflect the values of Indian society. People just like watching otehrs fight, and that's the funda applicable here.

HL - But a lot of these shows draw huge audiences, do you know why?

Kana - The target demographic of the shows is bored/frustrated housewives. These shows become their window to the outside world, and even though it is a sad window, almost despicable, it sells. I am not foreced to be watching the shows, so I don't.

HL - Okay. You also don't like writing essay type lenghty answers. We have a lot of them at MICA.

Kana - Well, the fact that I don't like them doesn't mean I won't. I'll exercise my hand and write those.

GW - So your hand is the problem?

Kana - Well, yeah. You see, when you're writing for too long, you hand hurts. So you stop writing for a while. But you can't stop thinking. So there's a lag between your writing and your thinking. And you can't stop thinking because your hand hurts, that would be a little odd, won't it?

*laughs*

HL - So, Vineet, how have you prepared for this interview?

Kana - I had a planned, three-phase preparation. Step one - go to the bank, and get the DD for the 50k. Step two - get to Ahmedabad and dress up in a shirt and trousers in this ridiculous heat, and step three - introspect a little. *smile*

*laughs*

HL - So, what myths have you encountered about MICA?

Kana - Well, people keep saying that this place wants creative people. So I've been wondering if all you churn out is poets and painters, because otherwise, who needs 120 'creative' people at the same time?

*laughs*

HL - So, what do you think are your chances of getting in?

Kana - I think I'll get it, and I'll be a great fit.

GW - And what reasons will you give yourself if you don't?

Kana - I'll probably come to you, for the reasons.

GW - Probably? You're not sure you'll come to us?

Kana - Of course I'm not sure I'll come to you, I might just get in. *smile*

OG - So where are you from, Vineet?

Kana - I am from Nagpur, sir.

OG - So Kanabars are from Nagpur?

Kana - No sir. My grandfather was born in Borka. I've never been there, so I think I'm safe to say I'm from Nagpur.

OG - Okay, thank you.

All - Thank you.

Kana - Thank you all, and have a good day.

And so, I got in. Good shit, man.

Laugh All The Way to The 'City of Manchester'

2008-09-03T11:44:00.001+05:30

Okay, I can’t help but laugh all the way to bed when I hear the absolute shite that the new owners of Manchester City Football Club claim that they are going to be “the biggest club in the world. Bigger than both Manchester United and Real Madrid.”
Obviously, new owners ADUB, a UAE based group of rich old farts with nothing except their fathers’ wealth and a small brain at their disposal know nothing of football. Just as with Chelsea, when they were in the infancy of the ownership of the Russian billionaire and oil mogul Roman Abramovich, Man City think they can just buy every player there is to buy and win everything there is to win. Obviously, someone wasn’t paying attention when Real Madrid tried to buy Cristiano Ronaldo from Man United and the entire club and the players went up in arms, first supporting the move, and then slowly breaking away saying that it would cause unrest and disrupt the harmony at the club. Although Dr Sulaiman Al Fahim, that’s the new owner at Citeh, thinks he can buy the world, it is much easier said than done, as Real Madrid and Chelsea have already discovered.
Now comes the funnier part. City bought Robinho. City bought Robinho for a British record £32.5 million. City bought Robinho who wanted to play for Chelsea and whined and cried all summer asking for a transfer to Stamford Bridge. If you’re not laughing your head off by now, you’re going to be, soon.
Robinho said he wanted to bring ‘joy’ to the supporters and the fans in the blue half of Manchester. And Dr. Fahim says they’re going to buy Cristiano Ronaldo for £135 million in the winter. If there ever were two statements that were not going to be true, you’re looking at them.
The fact of the matter is, Manchester City are an average club, with no sense in business. Robinho was a catastrophic failure at Real Madrid, and managed a measly 25 goals in over two seasons there. On the other hand, buying a player like Fabregas, considering the amount of money they have, and the way Arsenal seem to be leaking their good players, would’ve made a lot more sense. There are also rumours that Man City will be building a dream team with Henry, Torres, Ronaldo, Fabregas, and a few others. A

And as for Mark ‘Sparky’ Hughes’, former Man United star, now Man Citeh coach, claims that Robinho is going to be the world’s greatest footballer, surpassing Kaka and C. R. 7, I see the greater chance of Sparky being Sir Alex’s successor than that happening.
Rest easy, O Mancs of the Red. The blues are going to the Blues.
All hail Berba.

The Top 10 Action Movies From the Last 25 Years.

2008-08-22T16:12:00.000+05:30

11) Gladiator (2000)

Director: Ridley Scott

Ridley Scott sure as hell knows what he's doing when he sets out to make an epic movie. Where Troy and the likes have flushed themselves down the boring toilet seat, Gladiator - right from the opening sequence which is a course in Roman History 101 down to the coloseum and the Caesar fighting the General - takes you on an adrenaline ride, with a few stops for water on the way in Caesar's political chambers.

10) The Matrix (1999)

Directors: The Wachowski Brothers

When you have Carrie Ann-Moss riding a mean bike with an East-Asian dude sitting behind her, in the wrong lane with cars coming at them from every side - you know you're watching something special. And when the same movie has Keanu Reeves and Hugo Weaving doing the martial arts version of the tango at a subway station, the special just graduates with a business degree in kicking ass.
Like Lawrence Fiscburne's Morpheus so succinctly puts it - "Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself."

Do yourself a favour.

9) Casino Royale - 2006

Director: Martin Campbell

Say what you might about Daniel Craig's hair or his pout, and about how Clive Owen should've been the James Bond to follow Brosnan, Craig puts the double-oh back in 007. Playing the smooth MI-6 agent who doesn't know where his heart is, until it's being ripped to shreds by Eva Green's Vesper Lynd, Craig, and Martin Campbell re-discover and resuscitate what was becoming a stale franchise.

Quite frankly, there cannot be a better Bond film than one in which James ends with his fabled introduction.

Bond. James Bond. Salut.

8) Apocalypto - 2006

Director: Mel Gibson

Screw the subtitles. Screw the dialogue. Shut the fuck up and watch the last 40 minutes or so of Mel Gibson's second directorial venture, and marvel at the genius of the man. My father's folks had Clint Eastwoon, we've got Gibson. Edgy, experimental, eccentric - whatever you call his style, with two really awesome movies under his belt, Gibson sure as hell knows what he's up to.

7) Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon - 2000

Director - Ang Lee

Chow Yun Fat. Zhang Ziyi. Michelle Yeoh.

Four names, that's all there should be to this. There's something for everyone in this movie - Ang Lee's attention to detail is what makes him one of the best there is today. There is no glossing over the story or the plot since he's making an action movie. Unconsummated romance, a troubled father-daughter pair kicking some major ass and some of the smoothest action sequences known to man. It's all there. Watch.

6) Desperado - 1995/ Once Upon A Time In Mexico - 2003

Director - Robert Rodriguez

Guitars. Guns. G...Salma Hayek. Three reasons why this movie should be in this list. If you can give me one why it should not, I will kick you in the face and call you Bucho. Capice?

The sequel to Desperado, has Johnny Depp stealing Antonio Banderas' thunder as the CIA agent. With a plot designed to maim your gonads and make you want to watch the whole movie again, Rodriguez wraps up his trilogy in true Mariachi style. Oh, and it's got Salma Hayek and Jessica Biel too.

5) The Terminator - 1986/ Terminator - 2: Judgement Day - 1991

Director - James Cameron

Before he made the sappy old piece of pulp romance that we call Titanic, James Cameron used to make real movies that made you cut and bleed like broken glass. With Arnold Schwarzenegger playing the badass robot from the future, twice, sent back on different missions in the two movies, but kicking ass equally well in both, he proved to the world that the muscle men could actually get away with not acting at all, and yet making legends out of themselves. Don't worry Arnie, we forgive you for part 3, Kindergarten Cop and for California.

4) Rambo: First Blood - 1982/ Rambo : First Blood Part 2 - 1985

Director - Ted Kotcheff/ George P. Cosmatos

Alongwith writing the screenplay for Aliens, James Cameron kept himself busy in his play time writing another one for John Rambo, taking him from Vietnam War veteran to the quintessential all-American hero. Along with his trusted Colonel, he rids the world of all evil.

3) The Professional - 1994

Director - Luc Besson

Debutante Natalie Portman's 12 year old Mathilda falls in love with a cold calculative hitman, Jean Reno as the story unfolds around this plot of Mathilda's brother's death. Luc Besson's first American movie was a masterpiece beyond any of his work, and Jean Reno was an instant international star.

2) Kill Bill Vol. 1 - 2003

Director: Quentin Tarantino

The Bride: "Those of you lucky enough to have your lives, take them with you. However, leave the limbs you've lost. They belong to me now."

And that's how the Crazy88 fell. That one sequence is enough to make the cut on this list, I guess the rest of the movie was just an appetizer for O-Ren Ishii's death. Either way, Uma Thurman, also known as Mia Wallace to a few, but mostly as the ass kicking, pussy wagon riding Beatrix Kiddo is one helluva woman, and Kill-ing Bill is one helluva joyride. Only people above *this* height allowed.
Here comes the bride.

1) Die Hard - 1988

Director - John McTiernan

Bruce Willis as a sarcastic cop on a mission to save the United States. A couple of buildings blown, a helicopter, fear of flying, guns, barefoot fighting and a whole lotta yippee-ka-yay, motherfuckers. There's Miles Davis, and there's Die Hard. The epitome of cool.
By far the best of them all!

...And Chaos Will Reign... - Reviewed for a metal magazine.

2008-08-19T23:03:00.000+05:30

There’s a good chance that when you do download Sahil ‘The Demonstealer’ Makhija’s (Demonic Resurrection, Reptilian Death) solo album, you might just want to laugh at the kvlt album nomenclature. But believe you me, “…And Chaos Will Reign…” is probably the strongest answer that The Demonstealer could give the doubters and critics of the Indian metal scene.
Coloured with all the shades of black metal, coupled with some gifted keyboard work and inspired guitar playing on a couple of tracks, the album – available for free download on a variety of websites – is worth every penny, or in this case, every megabyte of your internet bandwidth.
The album opens with ‘There is A Calm Before Every Storm’, a track that is the perfect foil for the rest of the album to be wrapped in. The Demonstealer sings, and does it well, some respite from his well known screeching and growling ability. After the calm is over, begins the onslaught that leaves you wind blown and shaken, for good measure. The next track is ‘Whirlwinds of Devastation’, and if this track is anything to go by, then WMDs are a thing of the past. Sure to knock you off your feet, the song is definitely the gem of the album, and would be an ensemble piece on any death metal compilation. Great technical guitar play and keyboard work follows on ‘Seething Pain That Leaves No Scars’ and ‘The Empty Wasteland of Despair’.
The Demonstealer shows off his most advanced guitar work on ‘Elegy for the Grieving One’, another one of the slower tracks that helps you get back to your chair, before the last track ‘In Desolation A Prayer’ leaves you in awe of the sheer range that the Demonic Resurrection frontman has. Horns up to the man.
If Nathan Explosion was to hear this album, he would sum it up in just one, weighty word – brutal.

Light Tribe

2008-08-19T22:53:00.000+05:30

This post can also be found at www.split-magazine.com.

The second Shaa’ir + Func album suffers from what I call the “Second Child Syndrome”. Here’s how it goes – you put in all your creativity and effort into the first child, analogous to the first album – New Day – The Love Album – that you have none left to actually deal with the second, namely Light Tribe, which consequently runs amok with all the wild things in your head.
Randolf Correira and Monica Dogra’s second effort at being the orgasmic electronic duo falls flat on its face. Most of the songs on the album sound like residue from a pop remix album released by some obscure DJ. Monica’s sexy voice seems wasted as they try and dance hopelessly around some insanely kindergarten lyrics. The first album sounded fresh from the oven – hot and making you drool all over it, while this one is more like leftovers from a bad Diwali meal.
Songs like “You + Me” and “Pull Myself Together” give you instant déjà vu and you end up trying to remember where you’ve heard those bass lines before. Now, I know the lyrics are not what I have to be concentrating on when I listen to a dance-pop/electronic album, but the fact that they’re so ridiculously insane make you think about how little work has been put into them. A new lyrical low is reached with “All My Colours”, a song that is sure to be a hit at any kindergarten school you play it at. As Monica Dogra points out so astutely during the song – ‘nothing rhymes with orange’.
Honestly, I couldn’t go through the entire album in one sitting without getting a splitting headache, and the only songs that made me want to listen to them again were “Do It Again”, “Embrace” and “Selling Our Souls”, the latter built around a chant that goes – “Hey Kid! Rock and Roll.” The bumpy “Lord Inside” is a fun track to listen to, something like a modern day prayer, thanking the Lord for all the good things in life. “Embrace” more or less runs away as the best song off the album.
The reason that this album lacks the fizz that the first one generated is that Messrs Correira & Dogra try and do too much with every song here. The layer after layer after layer of beep-bop-beep-beep gets on your nerves when you’re not on the dance floor, which, normal people will agree is most of the time.
To put a lid on this, let me just relate to you the gist of a paradigm change – when I reviewed the first album by Shaa’ir + Func, I was thinking – here’s our very own Portishead. Now, I’m wary of having our very own Pussycat Dolls.

Take a Bow, Knight of Gotham.

2008-07-22T12:35:00.000+05:30

The much talked about sequel to Christopher Nolan’s Batman – The Dark Knight hit the big screens last week and how! Stellar cast, stellar technical cast, stellar performances mark the return of Gotham City’s caped crusader against crime as he rattles up the numbers at the Box Office and also settles in snugly with all the critics around Tinseltown.
Christopher Nolan started the journey with Batman Begins in 2005 with a vision to portray his vision of Batman in the realest form possible, and he only takes it forward with his second movie in the ensemble piece. Gotham City is dark, gritty and always has a dark cloud looming over it. What is Nolan’s greatest achievement with his movie is that he shows us a Batman for who he is – a normal human being disguising himself to fight crime without superpowers, without a web sprouting from his wrists and without the comical ‘Krrack’ and ‘Thwwack’.
Christian Bale is the most definitive Batman ever. What sets him apart in the movie is that he plays Bruce Wayne playing Batman, and not the other way round. Bale shows a remarkable believable transition between the bratty billionaire and the Human Bat. Along with the Nolan brothers (Jonathan Nolan has written the tightest screenplay you will find), Bale’s understanding of the conflict between the Bruce Wayne-Batman alter egos is the truest representation of the graphic novels. Michael Caine is probably the closest you come to a real life Alfred Pennyworth, who is not just the butler, but a father figure to Bruce Wayne and Batman. A surprise addition to the cast is Morgan Freeman, playing the CEO of Wayne Enterprises – Lucius Fox – a designer extraordinaire who helps Batman with his gadgetry, which by the way looks cooler than ever in this one.
Aaron Eckhart and Maggie Gyllenhaal play their roles to the T, as the Gotham City public prosecutor and his girl friend respectively. What is a testimony to the sparing, yet amazingly well done use of CGI and special effects is the Two-Face make up. Gary Oldman is his consistent self with a strong role as the wily old Commissioner James Gordon, Batman’s police liaison and friend.
If the movie was limited to the aforementioned characters, it would’ve been a good summer blockbuster anyway. But Heath Ledger’s Joker brings that something extra to it. The late actor delivers another performance of a lifetime as the maniacal Joker. The comprehensive research on the part of the actor about the character shows as the Joker is scary, cunning, intelligent and well and truly the Batman’s worst nightmare. Ledger was indeed a brave actor, and his stunning attention to detail shows with the Joker’s ticks and his voice.
Despite all this, the latest instalment in the Batman series is a success because it inspires a connect in the audience. There is a fair share of the chaos and the anarchy that ensues in an everyday affair. The portrayal of the conflicts within the Bat and the Joker and the love triangle between Dent, Wayne and Rachel Dawes is well played out. The emotions in your head when you watch the movie fly by you, and at the seemingly long 2 hours 34 minutes, you are left wanting for more and more and more.
My only grudge with the movie is the underplayed Two-Face. I’m sure that the Nolans could’ve found a grander stage for another strong Batman villain to go out on.
And although the film ends on an ambiguous note, I am sure everyone who watched it will hope for another instalment of the unending adrenaline ride that is The Dark Knight.
To anyone reading this, I will say what a friend of mine said to me – do yourself a favour, go watch the film.

Color!

2008-06-30T22:27:00.001+05:30

I coloured my blog! Thanks to my first wife, Aditya for all the help!

Now you can read your favourite awesomeness, in colour!

Thank you.

Karmic Solutions

2008-06-30T16:51:00.000+05:30

Now listening to Red Cube - Somewhere In A Corner
Okay, first things first. I quit drinking. As in, no more drink binges for me, no more 12 shots of vodka over rum, no more 16 pints of beer, no more. I am going to remain awesome, so all you folk don’t need to worry about it all. Really. Awesome.
Anyway, this isn’t going to be another evil rant, it’s just going to be a normal blog, about things in my life. Anyone who wants to shut the window/tab right now, you know where the red cross is. Don’t blame me if Santa’s evil elves come after you to sodomise you in your sleep after you cross it out.
So, as I was saying, normal blog.
It’s a great thing to have your best friend and your girl friend rolled in to one. And no, I really don’t have alternate definitions for girl friend. So yeah, it’s awesome. You can fight, and then bitch about her to her, and she can give you an honest opinion about what you should do to make things better, and that’s what you go on and do/tell her, which leads to some awesome make out sessions. Pretty nifty. Really, takes away all the pain. Well, mostly. xD

The Three Mistakes of My Life

2008-06-30T14:44:00.000+05:30

Now listening to Tool - The Pot [Album - 10,000 Days]

So it’s review time again. I wasted a few days reading through the new Chetan Bhagat, along side Rohinton Mistry’s Fine Balance and maybe it was Mistry’s awesomeness, or some new found superpower that helped me see through Bhagat’s third book, ironically titled – The Three Mistakes of My Life. I’d have cracked the joke about reading the third book being my third big mistake, but no, I’ve made seven, and they’re all called Harry Potter.
Anyway, coming back to this book/screenplay – bad character definitions, really, really, REALLY loosely held together by a love story, and the traditional pathetic ending that is now characteristic of the Singapore based writer.
We begin with what I believe is a pseudo-real conversation and series of unfortunate events, a la his last book – One Night @ The Call Centre. And then we join Govind, a young dude in “Ambavad” who is apparently a genius but doesn’t get into an engineering college to help his mother and to further his entrepreneurial dreams. What makes me wonder, and wonder it makes me – has he never heard of education loans, or the benefits of higher education?
Anyway, the story meanders on and on with takes on communalism and cricket, two of the most important aspects of an Indian society and predictably winds up where it began.
It might just be the glaring gaps in character development between the two books, Mistry’s book also has a backdrop of national importance – the Emergency, that prompted me to dislike this book so much, but then I didn’t really like One Night either. The same trend of writing a book with a film in mind continues in Bhagat’s work makes it sound more like a screenplay than a novel, and though the book boldly claims that Bhagat is India’s largest selling English author, I am not so sure about him deserving that accolade.
What works in Bhagat’s favour is that he can capture the average first time readers imagination with his deliberately(?) simple English and easy diction, but that isn’t really an excuse for really bad portrayal of the story – which, I must say, to me seems like leftovers from his previous work cooked in a really old pressure cooker of communalism and cricket.
All in all, really just a rehash of the same old story, as bad as it can get. I’ll rate it just about “Ta Ra Rum Pum”. xD

Now listening to Tool - The Pot [Album - 10,000 Days]

Will Rant for Beer

2008-06-27T13:24:00.000+05:30

----------------
Now playing: Jack's Mannequin - Dark Blue

I guess the people of this world will never cease to provide me with cannon fodder to blow them up. I have issues with a lot of things in and around here, and I guess you’re the lucky ones who get to hear about them today. So buckle up for a fun ride.
Issue number 1) Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fucking fuckety fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fook. Fish. Fuck. Fuck.
There, I said it more times than you ever could in a single sentence. Now, stop saying it. The word is overrated, and using it twenty three times, every time you open your mouth is not the female equivalent of ejaculation. So shut the ‘fuck’ up. Yes, I am talking to you, you and you. You know who you are, and if you don’t stop using the word so often, I will refer you to the evil elves again. (Please read the previous post for the reference.)

Issue number 2) Yeah, I’m online a lot. And yeah, I still do have a life; I choose not to live it too much to interact with the fools and trollops that waste your time. Anyway, coming back to the burning issue at hand – I came across this status message on Gtalk the other day – “Watching Juno (for the nth time), but that doesn't mean that you can disturb me..” – And the reaction that it evoked in me would put most drunk Irishmen to shame.
Pertinent question number one: Why are you watching that godforsaken movie for the nth time? It’s the suckiest piece of lame shit in a long time, and I am still wondering how it bypassed “The Assassination of Jesse James” for a spot at the Oscars? I mean, why in the name of patheticl glam rock from the late 90s would you want to keep a baby from an accidental pregnancy in high school and fore-go 9 precious months of promiscuity?
Pertinent question number two: Has no one told you the benefits of a “Sign Out” button? If not, here’s a crash course – it signs you out.
For a dictionary definition of the phrase, click here – sign out.
Lamest piece of shit ever man! If you don’t want people to IM you, get the hell off that chat client. It’s called a chat client because it helps people talk to each other on this certain innovative invention called the internet. Next. Time. Just. Do. It. Sign out. I know you can.

Issue number 3) This one is to all the ladies – stop being real bitches. To each other. To me. To other guys. To your parents. And to your pets. Really. Stop. Stop begging for attention. Stop telling your friends that this certain is really in to you if he’s talking to you. And if a certain guy asks you to stop sending him the ‘kiss’ emoticon, that’s when you know your time is up. Beat it, while you can, in a graceful way. That’s what the world expects. Next.

Issue number 4) For those who’ve seen Shoot 'Em Up, this joke should be fairly easy to understand. “You know what I really hate?” Feminists today. It’s surprising how this breed of women can make an open minded guy, who is all for female equality squirm and barf all his bile when he reads something about their ‘cause’. Oh shut the fuck up! And this time, do it for good. There is no male ego that you have to contend with, there is nothing like the female forging through, there is Santa Claus. No wait, that's not true. There's a Santa, and his green helpers. It's all true. What isn't true is feminism. HOGWASH!
And before all the lovely ladies I know start throwing their stuff at me, here’s a thought – if the woman was really so empowered today why is the ratio of successful women entrepreneurs so dismal. You want to tell me about Indra Nooyi and Martha Stewart, (two whole women!), well here’s a thought bitch, in the Medieval Ages, there were Joan of Arc and Queen Victoria (wow, two whole women again!), so that much for your progress report on female empowerment.
Ladies and gentlemen, I am not against women, or their liberation. I am just fed up of shenanigans. Society in today’s day and age is individualistic, and no where is that more evident than among the fairer sex where I personally know two cousins who are pretty close to each other who have dated the same guy, in quick and rapid succession. It is indeed every girl for herself. For further proof refer one of these badly made films – Mean Girls, John Tucker Must Die, etc.
Sigh. So much to say, so little time. Anyway, my phone isn’t working too well, so I’m off to get that fixed. Laters.
Enjoy.

----------------
Now playing: Jack's Mannequin - Mixed Tape

Bond with the Best? I think not.

2008-06-27T02:47:00.000+05:30

So I just saw Shoot ‘Em Up. Late yeah, I know, don’t even think of leaving a comment about that here, I will personally ensure that Santa’s little green elves turn evil and castrate you in your sleep. Now, back to Shoot ‘Em Up – Clive Owen is as close to what should’ve been the new James Bond as it is possible to be. Whoever thought of Daniel ‘Pouty’ Craig? Since the next Bond ‘extravaganza’ is about to hit the ground running with its hype, let me set the record straight. I am a Bong purist, and cannot tolerate a blonde Bond, no alliteration intended. A blonde Bond is the equivalent of an Anna Nicole Smith, may her soul rest and her videos be leaked onto the internet, with a triple Harvard degree in Medicine, Law and Hebrew. No one needs an Anna Nicole to tell them they have cancer, just like no one needs a spastic-looking Daniel Craig in a love scene with Caterina Murino. Granted, Craig is a good actor, but he just isn’t Bond material. He’s great being the lackey to an Angelina Jolie popping out at strategic points in a pathetically made Lara Croft movie, but to defile the genre and range of caper flicks that so many of us hold sacrosanct is beyond blasphemy – it’s like saying God is blonde. And we all know, he’s a brunette, with a salt and pepper beard. Just like Clive Owen. This guy combines the awesomeness of Connery with the great comic timing of Brosnan and the swagger from Roger Moore to give you what should’ve been doing Eva Green in “Casino Royale”, in stead of that shock of yellow hair on Craig’s head, with his thin lips stuck out as if he was a platypus in his previous life.
Lord, save us from further mediocrity.

----------------
Now playing: The Superfuzz - What I Really Think (GIR MIX)
via FoxyTunes

Real Madrid sign God, England thank Steve McLaren and some last minute Turkey tips.

2008-06-21T23:27:00.000+05:30

The biggest news to rock the world of football in recent times has been Real Madrid’s signing of God. Stating in a press conference, Real Madrid chairman, Ramon Calderon said, “It is but natural that we sign the best player on the planet, and money has never been an issue. Since Manchester United were so adamant about not letting us sign that boy Ronaldo, we decided it was time to show them who the boss is. The signing of God should ensure that we win all our games despite the lack of a defence.”
The latest signing in a series of big money transfers at Real Madrid that include a few men from Al Qaeda to stand in their defensive line with guns to scare attackers off is bound to send shivers down the spines of other clubs.
For the uninformed, and since most of those in our large, and generally football illiterate country support the Red & White of the English national team and hence must definitely need to brush up their soccer lessons - Euro 2008 is an international football tournament held every four years as a stop-gap for desperate football supporters who need their footy fix before the start of another exciting season of the English Premier League. England had the option of fielding a team but chose instead to concentrate on the domestic program, which yielded great results as three English club sides, largely comprised of non-English players and backed by moguls with pockets deeper than the Grand Canyon reached the semi-finals of the European Champions League.
Some England fans have formed groups to thank former coach Steve McLaren for saving them the agony and despair of participating in an international tournament with a team that is entirely English. McLaren is estimated to have saved three hundred thousand kilos of hair from being torn out, apart from the odd fifty thousand kilos of nails being bitten off. Most English audiences are greatful that they will be spared the terrible boredom of watching their dour and unimaginative, not to mention terribly amateurish football team beat infinitely stronger opposition by consistent strokes of luck, or arm wrestling/beer drinking and brawling bets, only to stumble at the quarterfinals, losing, sadly, on penalties.
On the family front, England players are relieved that they did not qualify for the European Championships as it allowed for Wayne Rooney’s wedding to his long time fiancé. The wedding was celebrated as the Gordon Brown declared a national holiday and free fish and chips to any one who can score past Paul Robinson. When counted last, all stands on the London road side were found empty. On the occasion, the English FA announced a tax exemption for all footballers whose wives garner more newsprint than they do. On hearing the news, loud cheers were heard from the tables that seated David Beckham, cAshley Cole and the newly wed couple. Given the time on their hands, the footballers will now proceed to practicing their acting skills as well as hoarding up on any and every sponsorship deal that flies there way.
For the rest of the football fans who are actually interested in the game and take the pain of staying up late and watching the European Championships, here is a piece of advice – don’t bet on Italy taking the title home. The dinosaurs are extinct for a reason, and Cesc Fabregas’ Spain will dance circles around the ones that still tread our beautiful earth. I predict a scintillating Spain vs. The Netherlands semi-final, which should really have been the final but for the pathetic scheme of matches that the UEFA plans. Obviously, Germany will win their semi-final against Turkey with a goal in the 45th minute, and three goalkeepers and seven defenders on the field after half time. Some one should remind the Turks and the referees in their matches that there is only one last minute in every football game.

Into The Wild

2008-04-22T12:35:00.000+05:30

“Mr. Franz, I think careers are a 20th century invention and I don't want one.”
- Chris McCandless, Into the Wild (2007)
This single line from the movie sums up its entire premise.
Sean Penn’s directorial venture, Into the Wild has an indie classic ring to in. Penn has moulded in to a masterpiece, an adaptation of Jon Krakauer's best-selling Into the Wild. Krakauer told the true story of Chris McCandless, amazingly played by Emile Hirsch, an honors grad from Emory University who walked into the Alaskan wilderness in 1992, to find himself outside the confines of estranged family, well-meaning friends and any governing impulse besides his own questing heart. McCandles donated his college fund, $24000 to Oxfam, and cut up his ID cards, before leaving without notice, to experience life, the way he wanted it to be. If you read the book and pegged Chris as a wacko narcissist who died out of arrogance and stupidity, then Penn's film version is not for you. If, like Penn, you mourn Chris' tragedy and his judgment errors but also exult in his journey and its spirit of moral inquiry, then this beautiful, wrenching film will take a piece out of you.
I confess that I have been a Sean Penn fan ever since I saw him play Jeff Spicoli in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High”. There has always been an endearing sincerity and an intelligent deeper meaning to his often ostensible simple work. In the movie, Hirsch and Penn seem to be one with Chris McCandless, almost down to the nerve endings that tingle when McCandless feels what he does.
Hirsch gives an award-caliber performance of astonishing depth and humanity. What helps you enjoy the movie by getting into it so much is the fact that it is shot entirely on location, in more or less the exact same places that McCandless, or Alexander Supertramp, that he called himself, went to. Adding more emotion to the narrative is Carine McCandless (Jena Malone), Chris’s sister, who expresses the feelings the forced her brother to break free, and her own troubles and the trauma they undergo as children, in a repressed, angsty, yet surreally calm voice.
An unconsummated romance with underage Tracy (Kristen Stewart) in Slab City, an RV camp in the California desert, also speaks to his character. Chris' ache for connection is movingly portrayed in his relationship with widower Ron Franz (Hal Holbrook in his shining hour onscreen). And Penn makes the lack of that connection palpable when Chris heads to Alaska, enduring four months of isolation until his starved body (Hirsch lost forty pounds for the role) is found in an abandoned bus.
Penn’s direction, Hirsch’s portrayal and Pearl Jam vocalist Eddie Vedder’s songs and score are what make this movie a ride few will forget.
What hits you hardest is the simplicity with which the book, and now the movie express the materialistic futility of the human existence, and yet reinstates in more ways than one, your belief in the humanity of it all.

How Arsenal Lost the Premier League

2008-04-22T12:34:00.000+05:30

How Arsenal Lost the Premier League: An Ode to Arsene Wenger.
Date: February 11, 2008. Arsenal lead the Barclays Premier League, 5 points ahead of Manchester United, and 8 points ahead of cross town London rivals, the Russian fuelled Chelsea. After the loss of Theirry Henry to Barcelona in the summer, Arsene Wenger’s young charges have played with style and panache to pose a threat to the title this season.
Pan to April 13, 2008. Arsenal lay deflated at the Theatre of Dreams that they set out to conquer, as goals from Cristiano “That Boy!” Ronaldo, and a Beckham-esque free kick from Owen Hargreaves turned the tables on the Gunners, who seemed to have shot themselves in the foot in the two months since February. United won, 2-1, leaving Arsenal tasting the well cut grass at Old Trafford, and essentially, putting paid to any hopes that Arsene Wenger harboured, of winning the Premier League.
To say that the wheels have come off Arsenal’s season, would be an understatement of monumental proportions. And the fact that Arsene Wenger remains adamant about not buying established players to boost the Arsenal squad seems to be a major cause for the derailment of the Gunners’ engine.
There seems to be a problem at Arsenal, one that stems from their charismatic manager, Arsene Wenger. It is a known fact that the Professor is one of the best in the game, but the repeated failure in Europe, and the lack of depth to the Arsenal squad can only be attributed to the Frenchman. Also, the way he has dealt with the stars (?) at Arsenal leaves a lot to be desired. The Bendtner-Adebayor bust up, the perennial Lehmann issues and the fact that his most consistent player this season, Matthieu Flamini, will be without a contract at the end of the season are only glaring examples of how Arsene’s strategies have glaring flaws that need to be ironed out as soon as possible. The Professor’s long standing rival, Sir Alex Ferguson, at Manchester United has been an epitome of this very characteristic that has kept the stars at Old Trafford in, and ostensibly, ones that shine brighter than at the Emirates Stadium.
Yes, there have been some instances that have contributed to Arsenal’s downfall, the injury to Eduardo, the loss of Flamini in the quarterfinals of the Champions League against Liverpool, the absence of Robin van Persie and Tomasz Rosicky and consequently, the intense pressure on Francesc Fabregas as the lone ranger in mid-field. But all of these can be traced back, yet again, to some strange policy planning on the part of Wenger. Also at the back, Arsenal developed a deep vulnerability. Losing the excellent Bacary Sagna to injury was a blow, but did Wenger make the right decision in moving Kolo Toure from centre-back to right-back? The fallible Phillipe Senderos only reminded us all of the gaffes that another Frenchman, Pascal Cygan committed, when he was in the Arsenal defensive line.
It is time, that Arsene Wenger quit proving to the world his young talent managing skills, and wakes up to the fact that it is a football team that he is responsible for. Rather than enhancing his squad in January, Wenger actually reduced the numbers by agreeing to let highly rated midfielder Lassana Diarra, signed from Chelsea the previous summer, leave for Portsmouth. Wenger insisted his squad was strong enough to maintain its challenge for silverware but clearly enough now, the results have proved him wrong.
The line between success and failure can be very fine indeed. But perhaps cracks have appeared at Arsenal that need more than papering over.
And maybe - in contrast to Wenger's opinion and despite the side's many moments of brilliance - this current crop at Arsenal is actually just not quite good enough.

Race for the Fourth Spot - (ISport)

2008-03-25T00:14:00.000+05:30

As the race hots up in various football leagues across Europe for national glory, the clubs which are already out of the race are busy fighting for a spot in next year's Champion's League. Vineet Kanabar finds out who will secure that in England, Italy and Spain.

It is that time of the year when the leaders in the football leagues around Europe begin to make their statements for the title heard loud and clear, and the pretenders begin to fall behind, while the dog fights for the last spoils of elite European soccer become more and more aggressive. And why not, the difference in the money that is awarded to the team that qualifies in the last Champions League spot, and the first UEFA Cup place in every league in Europe is incentive enough to make every match for the last spot in their respective leagues for the contenders a virtual cup final.

ImageThe scene in England seems crystal clear. Traditional powerhouses Arsenal, Manchester United and Russian Revolutionised Chelsea will vie for the title and the Merseyside rivals Everton and Liverpool will fight it out for that lucrative last spot of sweet European action. Liverpool are the obvious favourites, and considering their strong performances on the European scene in the past few years, and traditionally, they will be the pragmatic man’s choice as well. But the blue half of Liverpool is not expected to roll over and play dead. With the last 8 matches to go, Everton are three points behind Liverpool, but the Toffees do have a game in hand. And with nothing but the League to concentrate on, David Moyes will fancy a strong shot at the Champions’ League. Rafa on the other hand has finally proven some of his detractors wrong with a quarterfinal place secured in Europe, but that might just be the downfall as Liverpool will have to deal with some big matches on both the fronts. Apart from the quarterfinal against Arsenal, the Reds will face them in the league, making it three successive matches against the Gunners for Rafa. And the sternest test of them all will come when they travel to Old Trafford to face the champions, Manchester United. But with Spaniard Fernando Torres scoring at will, a decent run of victories in place and history on their side, Liverpool will always be a force to reckon with.

ImageJumping ship now to Italy, the scenario is a little more complex. Juventus, Fiorentina and 2007 Champions League winners AC Milan will have to struggle to fit in to two spots for qualification as Inter Milan and Roma have cemented their spots atop the table. Serie A has had its share of torrid times off late, and an intriguing last stretch of action is what might redeem its image. Juve are in pole position with 51 points, and 11 games to go, as Fiorentina have 47 and Milan 46, having played an extra game. In the end, it is expected to come down to the latter two, and Milan certainly have the wherewithal to respond successfully to the Fiorentina challenge. The Rossoneri were dumped out of this year’s Champions league by Arsenal and will be hurting after that. Also a few tricky fixtures mean that this will definitely go down to the wire. Watch out for the April 13th weekend, where Milan travel to Juve, and Fiorentina go to the San Siro to face Inter. It may well prove decisive.

ImageComing to the scene at the Primera Liga in Spain there is a four way tussle for the fourth spot, as Real Madrid seem to have one hand on the title, while Barcelona and Villareal are almost asured of a second and third place finish. The tussle for the last Champions League spot is going to be a bloody battle between Sevilla, Athletico Madrid, Racing Santander and Espanyol, all of which are within touching distance of one another. With 10 games to go, Sevilla lead the pack with 45 points having played a game more than the other three. Three points separate the four sides, with Espanyol in seventh spot. The logical bet would be on Sevilla to qualify with their strong showing in the Champions League this year, and a side that is firing well. But as we have often seen, things are rarely logical in football. Sevilla face some stern tests, including matches against Athletico and Real Madrid in March. Sevilla will back themselves to take the last spot, but Athletico’s form and temperament has been nothing short of brilliant despite the departure of Fernando Torres this season and they will pose the most serious threat to Sevilla. If I were a betting man though, I’d still place my money on Sevilla to go through.

It will only take a couple of months to find out who will be in next years Champions league, along with the title winners across Europe, and the race in all the top leagues will be hotly contested, giving us only the best to fight it out with the elite clubs.

http://isport.in/content/view/150/57/

Wolfmother - Wolfmother Review (Split)

2008-03-25T00:12:00.000+05:30

One fine day, I was walking by my TV, the idiot box that no one really cares about anyway these days, and I was stopped by what I thought was a new Led Zeppelin track that I hadn’t heard. Turning around, what I saw next was as close to the sexy hard rock of Messrs Page and Plant that Generation Y will get.

Ladies and gentlemen, Wolfmother and their old school rock ‘n’ roll gibberish is here to stay, and for good reason. Andrew Stockdale, the frontman for this Australian trio, plays and sings what the past masters can’t any more, and in a way, recreates that magic.

The lead singles of the album, “Woman”, “Dimension” and “Joker and the Thief” are all a blend of the Jimmy Page-inspired fuzzy guitar tones, and the thrashing drums that some times remind you of the White Stripes — easy on the ear, and catchy as hell. “Joker and the Thief” is the definitive Wolfmother track, a track that, with its brilliantly laid out song structure, showcases how talented these guys are as an original outfit. The song also leans less towards old hard rock, and blends all that is good about modern rock with the music of that era, a la The Darkness. Another great track off the album that I personally think belongs on the Led Zeppelin IV album is “White Unicorn”.

All in all, Wolfmother do sound like a Led Zeppelin rip-off at times, but what they lack in their originality, they do try and make up for with their enthusiasm. While the band might not last very long with their Led Zeppelin, Oasis and White Stripes-inspired sound (with a whole lotta Jet thrown in), for the time being, I’m satisfied listening to Stockdale and Co. rave on in true 1970s style.

http://split-magazine.com/2008/03/18/wolfmother-wolfmother/

Joint Family - HotBox Review (Split)

2008-03-25T00:08:00.000+05:30

There’s something about good nu-metal. I mean really good, great, from-the-soul nu-metal. Joint Family is THE band these days on the Delhi metal circuit and their new album ‘Hotbox’ is as close to brilliance as you can get in the nu-metal genre. Great production values with expert recording and a variety of song themes — this is all the Indian metal scene needs to push forward from the heights that PDV and Bhayanak Maut have taken us to.

The album opens with the PDV-esque “Drummer’s Advice”. The drumming on this song is, needless to say, killer. The variety on this track sets the tone for some awesome stuff on the rest of the album. The vocals seem ordinary here, but that might just be because of the spoken vocals for most part. Only the lyrics seem a little emo. “Fight Back” begins with Ed Norton asking Lawrence to, and I quote, “Put your fuckin’ mouth on the curb”, in American History X. The lyrics on the song call out for people to stand up and fight back for themselves. It is interspersed with some routine metal riffs, and some dialogue tracks running in the background.

“Change” brings to the album what it says it does, change. A brilliant song about change being the only constant. The vocals showcase lead vocalist Akshay De’s singing ability. Bringing to the fray some Tool-like instrumentals, is “(If Only I Could Sing)”.

The clincher tracks on the album are “Life’s a Bitch” and “Juggernaut”. The intro into “Life’s a Bitch” gives you that feeling you get while slipping off a cliff. Awesome stuff, really. Add to that the stop-starts and the lyrics and Clarence Gonzalves’ bass line, and you have a song to savour. “Juggernaut” was featured on the very metal-heavy ‘Great Indian Rock 2007′ compilation, and with good reason. Heavy as hell, this song will make your grandmother get out of her hospital bed and mosh her way to heaven.

Joint Family are as good as, if not better than, any band they have on the international circuit. If marketed well, we might just have India’s first big international metal act, right here in New Delhi.

http://split-magazine.com/2007/12/19/joint-family-hotbox/

Sino-India Relations

2008-01-19T11:10:00.000+05:30

Dr. Manmohan Singh made his maiden visit to China this week with the hopes of pushing forward bilateral talks which have been on the upswing. He was to have discussions with Premier Wen Jiabao during his three-day top level visit and discuss bilateral issues over a Sunday night tete-a-tete .

High on the agenda would have been the border dispute which has been a thorn in the neighbours’ flesh over the past few decades yet a complete resolution is nowhere in sight. There can be no solution to the problem till other troubles exist between the nations. An effort is being made at the corporate level. A high level business delegation also accompanied the proverbial convoy to Beijing and is expected to make some important breakthroughs to improve relations. The only clear change in the border issue is expected to be on the technological front where the 3500km long border is going to be delineated.

The Prime Minister is also scheduled to meet Presigent Hu Jintao, for the second time in his tenure, and the National People’s Congress chairperson, Wu Bangguo.

China is clearly emerging as India’s focal point in the Look East policy, and peace and prosperity are the buzzwords at the Indian PMO these days. It is important that China and India remain on the same page on world issues for the region to advance and continue to advance at the fervent pace it doing so, at the moment.

With ambitious trade budgets, India is certainly making the right noises in the direction of unified financial growth, but there are other issues where Beijing is disgruntled with New Delhi’s attitude. The proximity of the UPA government to the USA is a cause for concern to China. With Pakistan, too, a staunch USA ally in the war against terror, China must be beginning to feel the American heat in the region, after Islamabad’s secret nuclear deal with North Korea was discovered to have had Chinese interference as well.

China needs to ensure that India partners her on issues of energy consumption and anti-terrorist activities. Both India and China are soon to become the largest consumers of energy in the world, and a common stand in the world will be mutually beneficial to both nations. The terrorist organizations on the border and in the Nepalese areas, too, are a cause for concern to both countries.

Sino-Indian relationships are at a high, after the countries jointly celebrated the India-China Tourism year in 2007, with over a million tourists visiting China from India.

With such confidence building measures in place, China and India should be on the way to strong bilateral relationships. However, the feeling of suspicion is mutual, according to diplomats, with New Delhi suspecting support from China to Islamabad and Yangoon, in particular, while China suspects that the US and the West are trying to use India as a strategic vantage point to encircle China. Also impeding the rapid advance of relations is the Indian refusal to sections of the Chinese industry, due to concerns over security. An upset Beijing, in a world that seems to have only two flavours, one of which is Sino, might not work out in favour of India in the long run. And the sooner the disputes get solved, the better it will be for New Delhi and the rest of India.

Vineet Kanabar - for the Viewspaper - http://theviewspaper.net/politics/2008/01/1563/

Tangled Up In Blues

2008-01-19T11:05:00.000+05:30

Having been comprehensively outplayed in the Boxing Day test at the MCG, India went into the second test at Sydney against Australia with everything to play for. And when they did play as the cohesive batting machine, the world champions have cried a very shrill and ugly foul, and uncorked the biggest controversy in the cricket world since the match-fixing scandal to mark the Australians’ second 16-test unbeaten run, in recent memory. Caribbean umpire Steve Bucknor added his own brand of calypso to the encounter by managing to get as many as 13 crucial decisions wrong, adjudicating key Australian batsmen – not out – when India were on top in the first innings, costing Anil Kumble’s men dearly. Yet, seemingly the last bastion of the true followers of the Gentleman’s Game, India did not complain, atleast audibly, and carried on with the game.The dams weren’t going to hold very long, and the beginning of the end of all things gentlemanly was on the third day of the test match.Like all big things, it started with a proverbial resistance, when Harbhajan Singh, a turban wielding, former tormentor of the mighty Aussies, albeit with the ball, partnered Sachin Tendulkar to steer India into the lead, scoring a valiant 63 while at it. Amidst the chaos that is a cricket field in Australia, he seemed to have patted Brett Lee’s tender behind, which ignited the patriotic and team fervor in one Andrew Symonds. “Friendly” Words were exchanged between Bhajji and Symmo, and all look hunky dory between the men in Blue, and the Baggy Greens.However, the end of day’s play was to hold something other than just celebrations on a magnificent knock for Harbhajan Singh. News trickled out that he was being reported for racism — specifically, for calling Symonds a ‘monkey’. As memory lane would refresh us, Symonds was subjected to monkey chants the last time Australia toured India. After India’s inexcusable last over defeat, match referee Mike Proctor heard both sides out. With five players including Brett Lee, Symonds and skipper Ricky Ponting representing Australia, only Tendulkar, and Jumbo represented India. Harbhajan was banned for three matches, opening another Pandora’s box for the ICC. The ban has since been appealed by the Indians, and Ponting and his men have come in for some strong criticism from cricket experts in the fraternity. The choicest quotes were from Peter Roebuck, who called for Ponting to be sacked, and called his brand of cricket ‘ugly’.It was only a matter of time, before the high and mighty of the BCCI became involved. Tendulkar shot off an SMS to the Maratha warrior, Sharad Pawar, and the world’s richest cricket body jumped into the fray to defend its prodigal sons from further humiliation. In an attempt to undo the damage done already, they even threatened to pull out of the remainder of the tour, halting it, interim. They also demanded the removal of Bucknor from the rest of the series, and the ICC has complied, replacing him with Kiwi umpire Billy Bowden. Subsequently, Bucknor has been called on by Dickie Bird to retire because he has gone too long, and too far.With Ponting vehemently defending his side of the story and Kumble now unhappy with the integrity of his Aussie counterpart, the series is set for more than just a tight finish. Ponting is under immense pressure from the world media, and his team’s record equaling 16th consecutive test victory has hardly resulted in the kind of celebrations he would’ve hoped for. ‘Punter’ has been found wanting of any diplomatic skills that come with the territory of being skipper, and inevitable comparisons to his equally tough but drastically different predecessor, Steve Waugh, only leave Ponting wanting in many quarters, as captain. Ponting claims that the series had been played in good spirit, up until Bhajji abused Symonds. This has been denied by both Harbhajan and his batting partner Tendulkar, someone with substantially more credibility in cricket, rendering the claims of the Aussie skipper paradoxical.Harbhajan has been cleared to play, pending an appeal on his ban, and the Indians are expected to continue with their tour Down Under. However, the reputation of a game already struggling for air in the world of sport has taken a severe beating, the redressal of which might just take the cricketing world apart.
Vineet Kanabar - for the Viewspaper - http://theviewspaper.net/sports/2008/01/1451/