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Its two ten in the morning. I have to leave for Mahabaleshwar in three hours. Haven't slept. Dying to go through the 31 set 100 years of National Geographic Cd collection I recently purchased. Dying to play Jedi Knights Dark forces II. Dying to sleep. Vacations are here in full swing and it is already overflowing with too many things to do. Felt like writing a poem... the something-anything variety, so here it goes.



Experience



The sheer bloodymindedness

That you've felt all along

Nothing but your conscience

To tell you you are wrong



Reduced to nothing

But a sensation whore

No logic, no reason

No explanation before



You convince yourself

That the pain wont last

But you spend a future

Haunted by your past



And then do things

They never allowed

Just look at yourself

And laugh out loud

trees and weird light thingy

The tree is from a yeoor trip and the other one is a Chintanish photo of the cieling of the yeoor bungalow on the night of the party when I was tipsy. Never blogged before because the stoopid phone has issues with saving the pics in the memcard. Have to transfer in using fxplorer.

Why Vodka is bad

1) It makes you think that you can play the guitar: The cacaphonic outcome drove away birds, small children with bladder problems, old people with BP problems and normal people with music appreciation problems. Ok, Akshay played better when he was drunk.













2) It makes you believe you are an excellent photographer. See above and below for further clarification.



3) It sexually re-orients you. A video camera would have facilitated a very interesting home video which would have circulated around the net as one of those post drunk hot guy on guy action movies which twelve year old girls and forty one year old men get excited over. Unfortunately the only recording technology around was a mobile camera:



The foreplay




The agony




The extacy




The get your camera away and give us some privacy




The how the hell can two guys fuck like this?




The post fuck shame... guilt... humiliation...





4) It makes you play around with shadows.

Also see point 2)




5) Because its Russian



Just kidding. None of us were drunk (but not entirely due to lack of trying)(the timely tea brought us down)... we are like this irrespective of the booze.

nm

Did you know that eating chicken reduces the value of your real estate? There are people who instruct agents to find them flats owned by only veggies. This means that those who are veggies can sell their flats to nonveggies but it does not work the other way around. Such prejudices in the twenty first century... but the practice is not only rampant, but understood and accepted to such an extent that it is actually considered normal. Weird.

...

Was wondering what a loss to an atheist's ideas and philosophies there would be if some bloody scientist went out there and proved that God existed. Like we go around believing it to be a big question to ask, something that is fundamentally required for us to ask. Maybe the question is not fundamental, but just age old and unanswered. There is no proof either way, and God would be as stupid as dreaming up a hypothetical monster - say a pink dragon with eighteen tails and a trunk, and claiming that since no one has actually disproved the existence of these creatures, then they mught... or even do exist.


Existence of God may be a fundamental question that is conditioned within us by the society... I guess none of use really thinks so much about it that it consumes our lives - a lot of people do, but let's just leave them to it. For the most of us, really, it does not make a difference...


The funny part would be, as I said, no interaction with God, but a scientist proving beyond doubt that he existed, and God still remains silent.

Being Cyrus

Watched the movie today. Amazing movie... every single actor gave their best performances in this one. Including Simone Singh. Saif Ali Khan plays an enigmatic Cyrus Mistry, someone who seems to be a wanderer moving through life with no definate purpose. He holes up with Dinshaw Sethna played by Naseeruddin Shah, a potter looking for an apperentice. Smokes more pot than he makes though. First Fight Club then this movie have gone from showing cancersticks to drugs... nice move GOI! Anyway, so Dinshaw has this sexually frustrated wife, Katy Sethna (Dimple Kapadia), whose flirtatious overtures at Cyrus don't exactly make him terribly uncomfortable. There is an old guy who is Dinshaw's and Faroq (Boman Irani)'s father... and Boman's frustrated wife, Tina Sethna. An unhappy family that is going to be ripped apart more thoroughly than a chicken in a shark feeding session. Won't give away anything, but the interesting first half has revelations you will not think of in the second half. The movie changes tracks just after the intermission in the most alarming fashion. Dark, yet hilarious, and realistic. This is a crash course in (a) How to come up with novel ideas (b) how to swear in gujrati and (c) how to cast an post-prime bollywood actress in a PERFECT role. Must watch.

Planet M sale

There is a supercool sale at Planet M, where they are really throwing away shit. Mostly they really are throwing away shit - old punjabi, urdu and malyalam songs that no one ever really listens to, including punjabis, malyalees and whatever urdu-speakers are called, but hidden amidst all the shit are some really cool albums which otherwise would have cost a ton. I got Iqbal, A Herman's Hermits Album, a compilation of oldies, some natyashastra melodies that I purchased just to try out, AR Rehman's best, and the entire three cd harmony collection (Kumar Sanu + Abhijeet + Unfortunately, Sonu Nigam), and a compilation called intezaar all for a measly 596 bucks. The mrp on the cases amounts to 1502. Wonder why this is not publisized...


Also purchased Jedi Knight Dark Forces II, a pretty DOSish game that would have probably overloaded system resources back when it was released... already kinda addited to it... will keep playing...


Went to British Council in the morning, and to my surprise, found a book titled "how to reread Harry Potter" - contains the socio-cultural repurcussions of the book. Bound to make an interesting read... and a nice wikipedia update. Also reissued 2001: A space Odyssey, and a book titled tomorrow's people... all in an attempt to do something I forgot by the time I went midway to the sentance. Damn.

Snarfer

Snarfer is the best feed reader around, pretty simple to use, but gets fucks up if your comp hardboots. Feedreaders are a damn convinient way of keeping track of blogs. Vacations are in full swing and I am left in the dark, unsure of what to do. Will be travelling too much to have a static job or internship, so thats a summer wasted. Will probably enjoy as much as possible...



Sat on a slug today for a dare. Pretty durable slug actually... a little juice came out and must have wetted my kurta, so I told the slug "you wet me" but the flirt went over its head, which it had recently deantennated in the anticipation of my butt. Won twenty five bucks because of that, which is like easy money. Wonder if people will pay me for sitting on different things... am game for it.



Sat at home doing nothing today... and can't do anything throughout most of the afternoon because of the darned load shedding. Watching being cyrus tomorrow. Will blog how it goes.



Baaki nothing.

Creatures

Funny how when it is the middle of the night and you are in yeoor, every rustle of a tree, every leaf and shadow turns out to be a leopard. What the leopard acually do was slink around the compund a few times, and more or less got ignored by us and passed off as a dog. Once it actually came, we didn't really freak out because it was more or less excited, and we were tired after all the false alarms.

We got up early morning to the crowing of a rooster, and Wasim was telling me that the crow throghout most of the morning. Suddenly something struck me... why the fuck did roosters crow in the morning? Like something I have known all my life and never questioned it... obviously, the question will only arise after coming to understand how evolution actually works, but its weird for us to assume that roosters crow in the morning just to wake humans up and signal them the morn. Contrary to popular belief, it is not in happiness of the rising sun... this kind of ritual is actually virtually absent amongst animals... peacocks dance as a part of the mating ritual, and not in forecast of the monsoon. Hey, as a sidetracked idea, maybe human rituals evolved in this fashion. Coming back, it is also improbably that the rooster will crow as a part of the mating call, because if roosters were to mate every morning, I am sure I would have heard of it. Then why the hell do roosters crow? It would in fact make evolutionary sense for one to argue that roosters who signal the morn for the benefit of humans, as these humans would prefer to breed only sun-signalling roosters, but a) there hasn't been enough time in co-existence or this to evolve and 2) such a thing would forecast a disturbing picture of future animal evolution. Anyway, as the internet reveals to me, after putting me through a few gay porn pages just because of the use of the word "cock" and a few jokes like "The rooster crows in the morning because the husband has to utilise the little time he has in the morning to speak all he can and then he has to shut up"... I found the reason... the rooster crows because it is marking its territory like dogs.



came back from yeoor, got over the mild hangover, and visited a friend. The friend and I were contemplating on where to sit so we decided to go to a park. Note that the said friend is extremely afraid of dogs.



Aashray: Are you sure there aren't dogs there?



Me: If there are, I will throw a stone at them



A: (As if throwing a stone will anger the dog) NO! no, we don't throw any stones at the dog



M: Ok, we run away



A: (as if running away will encourage the dog to follow suit): No, I am not running anywhere



M: Don't want to waste your energy?



A: Don't want to waste the dog's energy in running behind me



M: Ok, I will throw a stone at the dog, then run away from it, drawing it behind me



A: How do you know it will not go after the stupid uy who stays back



M: If it runs towards you instead of me, then start running



A: Same bloody thing you bastard, by then it will be too late to start running



M: We both run then



A: It will probably come after me, I am larger and slower



M: That's why you should get thinner than I am



A: Fat bloody chance



M: OK then, I will throw the stone at it, and you start running away, I will stay back



Aashray is silenced at this point and goes something like "err..." The logic break is supplemented by the fact that we discover that there are no dogs in the park (which we have reached while talking). The conversation shifts to a couple we spot getting cozy on a park bench. We contemplate sitting on either side of them. We chuck the idea and instead contemplate pretending to be a couple too, and it finds expression in the form of a further contemplation of sitting on either side of a sleeping man, and to use a pathetic english translation of a very popular hindi phrase, waking him up and acting as if he is the bone in the kebab between us. We instead chuck all contemplations, find a place and start contemplating about dicks as somehow we invariably end up doing. At this point of time, a bird starts singing and another one starts too, further away.



A: Notice the change in tune of the two birds?



M: No whats the difference?



Bird A: ku-ku-ku


Bird B: ku-ku-ku-ku-ku



A: One is going (wave throughout) ku-ku-ku, and the other one is going ku-ku-ku-ku-ku



Bird A: ku-ku-ku


Bird B: ku-ku-ku-ku-ku



M: Aren't both going ku-ku-ku?



Bird A: ku-ku-ku


Bird B: ku-ku-ku-ku-ku



A: No listen carefully, one is going ku-ku-ku and the other is going ku-ku-ku and then ku-ku... there is a ku-ku more



Bird A: ku-ku-ku


Bird B: ku-ku-ku-ku-ku



Me: ku-ku-ku and ku-ku-ku-ku-ku?



A: No, ku-ku-ku and ku-ku-ku-ku-ku



M: (imating the bird) ku-ku-ku-ku-ku?



A: Yes



Bird A: ku-ku-ku



M: ku-ku-ku-ku-ku



He stays silent while I listen intently to notice the difference



Bird A: ku-ku-ku


Bird B: ku-ku-ku-ku-ku


Bird A: ku-ku-ku


Bird B: ku-ku-ku-ku-ku


Bird A: ku-ku-ku


Bird B: ku-ku-ku-ku-ku


Bird A: ku-ku-ku


Bird B: ku-ku-ku-ku-ku


Bird A: ku-ku-ku



A: Why the hell do they just don't save themselves the trouble and go fuck each other?



M: It does not work that way... maybe there are no females around and they are both males trying to attract them





Bird A: ku-ku-ku


Bird B: ku-ku-ku-ku-ku


A: By now they should have realised that there are no females around



Bird A: ku-ku-ku


Bird B: ku-ku-ku-ku-ku



M: Males of all species keep trying even when they know they don't have a chance in hell yaar...



Bird A: ku-ku-ku



A: hmmm



Bird A: ku-ku-ku



A: Hey one of them stopped whisteling



(long pause, where we both listen intently)



A: Hey! the other one also stopped now!



M: I think I got it



I start whisteling imitating the bird



M: Ku-ku-ku



A: Yeah, you got it



M: ku-ku-ku



Bird A: ku-ku-ku



A: Hey the bird started again!



M: ku-ku-ku



Bird A: ku-ku-ku



A: The other bird is not replying now!



M: ku-ku-ku



Bird A: ku-ku-ku



M: Hey! maybe it is replying to me!



M: ku-ku-ku



Bird A: ku-ku-ku



A: Shit! it IS indeed replying to you!



M: ku-ku-ku



Bird A: ku-ku-ku



A: Stop whisteling! A dog might show up, dogs have an affinity for whistles



M: The dog will anyway come listening to the bird



A: Dog's have an affinity for HUMAN whistles



M: (Ignoring his point) the bird must be whisteling for the dog since the other bird is not replying



A: Why? To tease the dog?



M: (Ignoring him again) ku-ku-ku



A: (Trying a new line of thought): You might wake up the sleeping man, and he might not be too happy with it



M: What now even humans have an affinity for whistles?



A: yes, and he might think you are calling him a dog, and not be too happy with that



M: I'll tell him I was imitating the bird



A: He will think you are calling him a bird, and might not be too happy with that



M: Oh I'll think of something



A: What will you tell him, "Should I call you a dog instead of a bird?"



The guy does not wake up, no dogs show up, and we decide to go our ways home.

Yeoor pics

Yesterday afternoon, we headed over to this place to get it ready for the party later that night.






there was a large lawn, and a larger one with this cosy little shelter at our disposal...






This would have been potential horror movie material at night... if it moved and shifted. Pretty nice place in the morning though.






Thats a friend, DJ, and renegade, Aniruddha.






... and daredevil






That's me, contemplating my position for turning into a junkie throughout the night...


And yeah, one more thing I forgot to blog about, I became slightly hair deficient...

My Givson Jaguar

Observe both the pics carefully. Guys in the extreme rights are holding the same guitars and are even the same guys. Guys in the extreme lefts are holding the same guitar...








Another installment of my guitar's history. When I went and purchased it, a quip was that the guitar was a more expirienced bandmember than I was. Riju, from whom I bought the base was surprised that I took it the first time I saw it. Riju is the guy in the extreme right in the first pic who is holding my guitar. The guy in the extreme left is Shiva, who is also in ONB and was in Old Monk.

Yeoor

Ten minutes to load shedding have to see if I can slip this post under that. Just woke up after going to sleep after coming back from yeoor.


Yesterday, we scoped out this bungalow at yeoor with three rooms and a pool and a terrace with a shed and a hut in the yard, as well as trees and stuff to sit on and play around.


We ended up in another bungalow with a broken fence and gaping holes through which panthers could enter, a dysfunctional lighting system, and flimsy little pipes being the only manageable acess to the terrace.



Was fun nonetheless, because the garden and the jungle around was the only thing that really mattered. Its a thrill to sit and chat in the middle of nowhere and suddenly go silent at the hint of an alien sound. And there were no lack of alien sounds, the trees rustling, the plastic bags flying around in the kitchen, the sound of dogs barking for no reason, and the scrape of a bottlecap or a chair on the ground (the last being a deliberate attempt by yours truly to scare the living daylights out of people).



You become more scared of the dark, more perceptive to the slightest sounds, more jittered by sudden movement, and even start hearing and seeing things (the last being wrongly aqttributed to the effects of alcohol - "come on, I can hold a drink" they say).



You also in the meanwhile, listen to music and bitch about people, about how fucked up your life is, about the leopards scaring you for no reason, about the marital matters of professors, basically you have one hell of a time.



And then you go to sleep on a matress in the middle of nowhere draping yourself with a curtain. Then you get irritated by the mosquitoes more than anything else, go back in, sleep so soundly that when you wake up its late and time to go home.



vacations ahead now! am going to meet a friend... payback for the loadshedding...

Am done

There is no exclamation mark after that because of a particular phone conversation I had yesterday night that made a friend oversleep and miss the tests. On that sad note, which I will temporarily overlook for the sheer euphoria of having finished the semester and sitting in the cybercafe in the time when I am actually supposed to be writing the paper... is somehow not cool enough anymore. Damned stupid phone... donno.... ... .. .. .. . .




blah



Party at yeoor today.

Bachelor of Mass Media First Year Semester - II

Daddy, daddy, I am through! four hours to go for the paper, and I have to study! and sleep! I spent most of the morning talking to Bhan and Ruhie and we bitched about this and that and basically ended up not studying. Damn I have to sleep now... or will not enjoy the end-of-exams party at yeoor. We have rented a house there for the night... will be pretty damned amazing. In fact, for sake of writing a killer farewell paper, I might not go to sleep cause I have to wake up in forty minutes anyway, so I will study. The stupid syllabus seems to be set by a lesbian African and a feminist naxalite.

eeee porico

So for some obscure reason that is none of your fucking business, I was watching a program called "chalti ka naam antakshari". the anchoring was as follows:



Male Anchor: OH-aye-OYE

Female Anchor: Oh-aye-OYE-uhh-AAh

Male Anchor: OH-aye-OYE

Female Anchor: Oh-aye-OYE-uhh-AAh

Male Anchor: Wah!


In English, that would translate to:


Male Anchor: OH-aye-OYE

Female Anchor: Oh-aye-OYE-uhh-AAh

Male Anchor: OH-aye-OYE

Female Anchor: Oh-aye-OYE-uhh-AAh

Male Anchor: Amazing!


And the audience went wild, began to clap without stopping, and the anchors went on to host the next round.



WTF?



Watched television for a bit, and it is funny how the people who act amazingly well in an ad screw up royally in films. Decided television had begun to significantly lower my IQ when I headed over to my room and decided to listen to some good music. Simon and garfunkel - the boxer - the one where they have a very pearljammish hum. Marcos Malo thinks they sang the song "bridge over Julie Walters" but no one knows exactly who Marcos Malo is, and in all probability, it is a screen name used for cracking bad jokes, so you can as well forget about that. I don't listen to Pearl Jam or SnG, so I wouldn't exactly know if they sound like each other, but what the hell, I might as well embarass myself by claiming that they do.



Damn literature is driving me nuts. I am expected to go through this goddamned book and read all the short stories and poems and then critically analyse it tomorrow. Apparently the questions are going to be difficult, but like anyone is really going to study. Study. Damn.



Seems to be the day dedicated to making obscure sounds. Moby is signing "why does my heart... feel so bad" and the chorus is going "eeee porico" in an endless repeated loop. Thank god the cranberries came up now. In your hair... in your hai-ai-ai-r... zombie... zo-om-bie... eh? eh? eh? eh? Ok will NOT give a running commentry of stupid sounds that I am hearing. Will go and occupy myself with something else. Television dearie, here I come again.


OH-aye-OYE-Oh-aye-OYE-uhh-AAh

Last day of sitting [in front of the computer indulging in various illegal, inane, and immoral activities pretending] to study

The really bad godforsaken idea this time around was to see if we could show the mirror the top of our heads and snap our heads back up REALLY fast in time to be able to see the reflection of the top of our own heads. Basically, I had to attempt to look back up before the light bouncing off my head went to the mirror, but Chirag pointed out that I had to do it only before the light bounced back, so I was given twice the amount of time...

Penguins are NOT to be laughed at. Eating spaghetti IS indeed a sin. Hail Hitler. Yes I am mad. Hitler is evil. He laughed at penguins and ate spaghetti and was mad.


8 inches away from the rear view mirror, photons hauling their butts at 299792458 m/s, having close to 0.254 meters to travel, and t=d/s m so I had to snap my head in 8.47252802 x— 10^-10M seconds. Thats not counting the time required for my brain to register the photons. Therefore it is not possible unless you can consciously follow two time streams in overlapping universes. Penguins are NOT to be laughed at. Eating spaghettii IS indeed a sin. Hail Hitler. Yes I am mad. Hitler is evil. He laughed at penguins and ate spaghettii and was mad.



==Look Back in Anger==



A jeuvanile attempt to shock the fuck out of a conservative audience hoping that someone would appreciate, and more importantly, pay him for doing so. Unfortunately, someone did.




==Things Fall Apart==




A polite way of ironocally avoiding to title the book "the pacification of the primitive tribes of lower Niger". A book that should have been written in Igbo and never exposed to the world. Infact, this is an intrusion of Okonkwo's privacy and is not respectful of his memory. We should mind our own businesses, and that is not laughing at penguins and atonin all our sins acquired by the consumption of spaghettii. The author probably drove a moped and wore cheap lipstick. Like the Hobbit should ave been titled "The nut who always just escaped being eaten by different weird freaky invented creatures". Sounds like a charachter sketch of anyone from lost, which in turn should have been titled "various nuts who always just escape being eaten by different weird freaky invented creatures".



Still have to read the book of short stories and poems. Will do it whilst laughin at penguins and eating spaghettii. Hail Hitler.

Red Ragtop

Listening to stupid old songs and playing quake again. Almost feels like the vacations are here... but there is still one more exam to go. Wrote the management paper today. Realised that if you study management and psychology, you can write the marketing paper, or if you study marketing and psychology, you could attempt the management paper.


Basically going to sleep now. Will probably dream of catching a sperm whale and eating it after boiling it with its own blubber. Or not.



Almost forgot to blog about this, came across this totally amazing short film with absolutely no dialogues... a pretty damned simple story, but the move simply makes you feel a lot of things. Its a one trick pony, but its one hell of a trick... strikes a chord. Its has exteremely basic animation, but somehow it took eight years to make. A must watch, download it here. Oh and one more thing, it won an oscar.

Chal jayega

so much for studying studiously... bastard that I am came to this keyboard leaving my mp3 player still playing old boring songs at my home. I will ignore keys that this keyboard does not throw up instead of going back and correcting them. It is a pity that any chars were not missing in the previous sentance, or in this one. maybe the keyboard stopped doing that because I wanted it to... damn Murphy's laws are true.
Anyway, coming to the point, where there really isn't any, just that I am hitting twn wit a fiend. ok the keyboad is missng keys left right and center now.
blogging so muc h out of pure nervousness damn bye

phleuuck

Ok so four exams down two to go. Pretty much aced the Pol Science paper, no one really cares what happens with ECS, the marketing paper was written on nothing but overconfidence and just came back from writing psychology.



Damn pissed with the godforsaken subject. The clever idea of mine to study off the net did not really pay of. Google's low search relevency, an affinity to throw up irrelevent porn, and Freud's theories with spectacular jumps of logic all combined to give me far more interesting a passtime than studying psychology. The end result was a sound sleep with multicolored dreams which Freud would have a nice time interpreting, and a hurried morning kicking myself in the posterior for going off to sleep when I intended to study.



The paper landed up in front of me, and I knew only two out of the eight questions, and one of them, I found out much to my distress after writing the paper, totally wrong. Ashamed of properly copying for the first time since coming into degree college, just realised the faculty has access to this blog, so the segment of the sentance previous to the last was written in a state of extereme delerium out of sheer pissedoffness at the subject.



Anyway, so I walk out of the examination centre, try to respond to stimuli but ended up kicking myself in the posterior... Did read some of the textbook in the morning though, was full of bullshit. My paper was also full of bullshit, so in accordance with a totally Freudian jump of logic, I am going to ace the subject.



On that positive note, and moving over to Roger's theory that every organism strives to achieve its fullest potentials, I am going to study managemnt for tomorrow right now instead of putting it away.

Where do babies come from?

Due a number of reasons, am pretty confused about the whole thing – this is what I have so far figured out, but I am sure there is more to this than meets the eye. First a bee pollinates a flower by sticking its proboscis into what I believe is the gynoecium. If you think that it is ridiculous that a bee actually fucks a flower (orally or otherwise), think again. There are some kinds of orchids that grow in weird ways so look like a wasp ready to mate, so that the male wasp comes in and… to use a totally inappropriate word… pollinates. So if bees help plants make kids, it may also help other creatures in the same kingdom. So the bee does it bit… which is the stage commonly referred to as “the deflowering.” Things going wrong at this stage can lead to disastrous consequences, from which phrases like “there is a bee in your bonnet!” and “don’t be such a bird-brain!” originate.



Anyway, after the bee has done its bit… in top secret organization called “Society for The cOnsumption of Rotting Kids”, not a terribly good acronym, but speaks of their eventual agenda, and the alien-Google management was hell-bent on making the organization an acronym of STORK. Anyway, so STORK processes the fertilized egg obtained and incubates them in test tubes, after which the artificially inseminated abducted aliens give birth to babies. Now Google, as part of its plans to breed an army of remote controlled people as part of their whole world dominion schema, implant tiny microchips into the brains of the kids. Storks then deliver the kid to the unsuspecting parents… in modern times however, the babies are directly teleported into the womb of the mother.



Of course, everyone knows how stinky, dirty, smelly little kids are pure evil. Look at all the evil guys in the world like Blackbeard, Al Capone, Dick Terrapin, Osama Bin Laden, Jack the Ripper, God, Jesse James, Ned Kelly, Tom Keating, Count Victor Lustig (a great con artist who sold the Eiffel tower to unsuspecting tourists, and inspired Bunty Aur Bubly, probably a con of its own), Guy Fawkes, Voldemort, Dawood Ibrahim, Robin Hood, Moses, Francis Drake, Phineas Barnum, Horatio Bottomley, Mahatma Gandhi et cetera ALL STARTED OUT AS KIDS. Based on this amazing finding, a life cycle of an average kid is drawn out here:






Ah well, as a wise man once said “when the birds and the bees come together, terrible things happen.”

Holi virgin.

Was thoroughly molested when I went to play holi. Headed over to Eden Woods where a bunch of friends threw me into a pond where weird creatures called duks were once rumored to move around in. There was no sign of ducks, but weird creatures called “excited little kids” joined in the fray, their weapons of aqueous ejection being imported Chinese water pistols that worked by the rigorous jerking of a very phallic handle.


After being ballooned and womped over the head with a disturbing mixture of mud, what I sincerely hope was not what I thought it was, and also a little color here and there, I escaped into the sunlight to shop my shivering body from… well, shivering. Don’t get why Raymond color is called Raymond color, but that was everywhere. Holi is no longer played with gulal and whatever the yellow, green and blue colors are called, but with black, silver and purple.



So this is the before.




Let’s just not look at the after.



After playing and enjoying myself, walked back home. Crossed my old building on the way, which suddenly brought back memories. I have spent close to fifteen years in that place, and yet, passed it by almost without doing anything. The building was empty, everyone had probably gone back home, and it was the first time I played holi without going there. Funny how life is, you end up greeting the watchman, but going past the aunties you knew without a hint of recognition on both sides.



Met another group of old school friends, we just chatted about nothing, but we were once a group of best friends. Really strong memories of school days that were hiding in some corner of the subconsciousness suddenly came to the surface. I hardly talked to them before heading back. The funny thing is if you extrapolate the part of life you have seen to the rest of it, the picture scares you.



Hell, screw that, if I were Dan Brown, then I would somehow create a contrived version of history by claiming that the Virgin Mary was also called the Holy Virgin. Like Isis was ever called L’Isa, and Da Vinci ever cared enough to name La Giaconda after some obscure Egyptian goddess.



Funny how a google of the Virgin Mary throws this up first:







Christians protest! Although, Dan brown would have spun quite a symbolic tale around this, including a conspiracy theory of google wanting to take over the world, which I guess wouldn’t be terribly far from the truth.



All that was just an excuse to play around with a picture of the Virgin Mary, unfortunately I don’t have photoshop so I had to use paint to pretend that Jesus’ Mom played holi.







But the spray feature makes you lose the original pixels, so I wish paint had an alpha channel. Word had an alpha channel though, but what the hell, this is still crap.



I WANT PHOTOSHOP!!!!



Ah well, happy holi people, and this is the after, BTW.

Holiday

Was talking to a friend about the horrible consequences of making kids. Pointless conversations apart (we did not commit suicidefor the sole purpose of having more fruitful conversations in the future), but the fact remains that, as a wise man once said, "people cannot keep track of long meandering sentances" and another wise man, coming to the point, once said "when birds and bees come together, terrible things happen."


Maybe not terribly wise, but at least SOMEONE is speaking out against all the creation. Kids are terrible creatures who like to randomly throw water baloons at you. Kids are weak creatures who get scared out of their wits by the simple threat of not being in a condition to play holi. Kids seem to think holi is some day where for once they get to test the capabilities of detergents...


Sometimes its not only the birds and the bees, apparently if the man is impotent enough, even a storks drops in a visit to the mom. The process is pretty quick, but thankfully such things don't happen too often, although little kids are scared using these stories.


Anyway, have to go play holi, and thought it would be pretty funny to have a zebra and a rabbit crack holi jokes, like eating Acontholimon, Playing in a church because its catholic, drinking bhang because its alcoholic, and the color not going off because it has acetylcholine chloride.


Then I thought it would be cooler if the zebra and the rabbit just talk to each other:





The colourful zebra is from Michcy

mid-exams

Or close enough to it in any case. The ECS and Pol sci. papers are done, and there are only five days to go before three months of total freedom. Holi tomorrow... will play with a few old friends. Then will have to go give the marketing paper... will fart my way through that.






The torrent is behaving in a pretty weird way. Lost season 2. Four nights, and seventy five percent done...

Side business

The entire endeavor is illegal, therefore it is impossible to post the details, but one man in churchgate has found an innovative way of robbing from the railways the fares of thousands of customers. This man runs a firm... an illegal one, but one with a customer base running into the thousands. Using the laws of probability to his benefit, this man issues passses for passengers in local trains. The cost of these passes are a mere twenty rupees per month. No, the railway stationary is not stolen using contacts, he even uses his own stationary. The question is, are these passes valid? Obviously not, they aren't. All you need to do is subscribe to him, and travel with or without the fake passes he issues in the trains - that part does not matter, you need the pass only to show this enterprising man that you are a part of his scheme. The scheme? - If the ticket checker catches you, you pay up the fine, and hand over the reciept to this man, on which, he will refund your fine.



Terribly easy money? Well, all of us know companies that operate on the same principle... insurance firms work the same way.

Ten lessons in life you can learn from Quake

10) If you die, don't worry, you'll be sent right back



9) If you shoot at people, they are likely to swear at you. Sometimes, they may shoot right back.



8) Try, try again, then choose a new weapon



7) Aliens are fugly and make weird noises



6) When there is a dearth of ammunition, have the balls to use your hands



5) Make sure there is something to land on before you jump off



4) Agression makes you horny



3) Cyborgs should NOT be programmed in DOS



2) Don't trust oriental guys with rocket launchers



1) Don't trust girls - they can fake anything

Money attitudes in India

“The Secret life of Money” by Valerie Wilson is a pretty illuminating study of the Australian Anglo-Celetic population’s perceptions and attitudes towards money. Basically the book proves that money is a mutating and psychologically complex concept, even a kind of a ritual if you will, and something far more than what economists define as merely a store of value, or wishes in a frozen form. What one does notice is that money is complex in different and even opposing ways in India.



1) Income class: In Australia, both the rich and the poor want to be perceived by the public as belonging to the middle class category. However, in India, everyone wants to cross the class barrier, and behave and act as if they belong to a slightly higher income class.



2) Money is not hidden: The personal income is usually hidden. While this is true for people who have been working for some time (30+ers), the salaries of young men however (particularly the eligible ones) are often talked about, discussed, and dissected by the grapevine. It is public knowledge as to how much so and so earns, if the unfortunate so and so has just found a job. Also, people generally know how much everyone around them earns, and looking into someone’s wallet does not bring about any discomfort and is not taboo. Basically, in India, money is NOT as taboo as sex.



3) Domestic Treachery: While domestic treachery exists in both countries (stealing money from your mother’s purse, father’s wallet etc), in Australia it is often ignored, and shoved under the carpet. Here, the grapevine catches on, says so and so has started stealing now. In fact, after a certain age, people start advising others to better hide their money in the houses. Domestic treachery is not only accepted, it is expected and punished.



4) Indians value versatile forms of money: Only cash is as good as cash. This seems to be the attitude elsewhere, where people are fooled that they have gotten play money when casinos hand over plastic tokens instead of their money. In India, however, paper coupons are as valued as the money itself. For example, there are small plastic tokens that the milkman gives everyone in the society. These are safely kept and as valued as the money, and parents do not let their children play with these plastic discs. (Funny I almost wrote dicks)



5) Indians are smart about pocket money: Pocket money in India has nothing to do with the amount of contribution to the housework, a percentage of what the parent earns, the extent of academic excellence or a combination of the above, as is true for Australia. Pocket money is given purely on a need-basis. There is NO expectation that the child saves up the money, in fact, this behavior is met with mild surprise because there is a very narrow margin where saving is possible at all. A need-based pocket money, in fact, encourages children to save up for things they want, perhaps something that should be recognized elsewhere.



6) Inheritance is not heritage: There is no attitude in India that an inheritance must be kept together. In fact, in the common case of more than one heir, the inheritance is dissolved as soon as possible.

An amazing day for sports

I knew there was the Bahrain Grand Prix today as I had been adviced to watch that... my mom wanted to watch the India Vs England match, so I skipped fighting for Iqbal and watched the match. India had all the major wickets down, and was still chasing the three hundred. Made it past that even though they weren't expected to cross two hundred. Didn't really understand much of the implications, so I went to sleep instead. Got up, saw the end of Hungama, and decided that I was too cool to watch other people play around in a stadium, and went and wrote about diplodoci instead. A decision I will live to regret for a long time. Maybe I should start watching sports after today.



So the exams were tomorrow (today now), and Chirag and I thought it was high time we went and purchased ourselves some tectbooks. Only glitch in the plan was that the said textbooks were unavailable in a few book stores, so we talked mostly about shit, and ended up coming home empty handed, when I recieve a call from a mutual friend, Bidisha.



Get the picture ok, chirag and I are on this scooter, whizzing through the traffic, and over the phone, an excited voice is informing us that there are four balls to go, and two runs for SA to win. Apparently Australia broke all previous records in ODI history and went ahead and broke the four hundred barrier. Then SA went right ahead and sucessfully chased it to a point where they were two runs short.


Brett Lee has the ball, and guess what? A wicket falls! A wicket, at this juncture, brings in a whole knew element... the SAs have only one wicket at hand. All three of us were too excited to speak coherently at this point of time. The batsman walked up. Bidisha said he didn't look too confident with himself. Brett Lee had just taken a wicket. He had only three balls to ball. I replied with a "obviously, he is the tenth man..."


The tenth man was on strike. Bidisha gave me the commentry, and I passed it on to Chirag. Brett Lee was running... and we started placing bets. I bet that Brett Lee would take a wicket. Didn't know what was happening, and bet that the SA will win too. Lee delivered and the SAs scored a run.


Now the teams were even. Two balls to go. One run to win. Brett Lee had the ball.


Guess what the SAs did? They sent the second last ball of the innengs to the boundry! They chased a record to create one of a whopping 448!


And closer back home, the Indians bowled the shit out of the English... 116 for five, an AMAZING tally... though that cricket was not nearly half as good as the SA/Aus match.


To top it all, Alonso won at f1 today. Was rooting for him at random... guess will randomly pick a team before every race, and root for it to win. At the end of the season, the team that wins will also win my fandom. Pussy way to go about it, but if I am going to be a fan now, might as well root for the winners.


And oh yeah, exams in five hours and twenty minutes.

Love in the Cretaceous

Spent most of the day writing this, and some other things that are half-completed. This is supposed to be a comic poem for little children...



Love in the Cretaceous



In aeons past when the earth was young

The late coniacian sun had hardly set

And against the stark starlit even-sky

Stood a bold diplodocine silhouette

For he received a call from his lady love

For far from her shadowed vale was he

In a glorious roar his long neck thundered

In adoration for his diplodocus bride-to-be



In the land of the cretaceous

They shall love and multiply

An adventure so flirtatious

Beneath the cretaceous sky



And he galloped across the parched plains

The diplodocus to his diplodocus maiden

In the darkened sky the pteranodons flew by

And the moonshine was with starlight laden

‘A night for romance’ the diplodocus thought

And hurried towards his gargantuan mate

And sent in his haste, his blood boiling over

Rising the lumbering cold-blood’s metabolic rate



In the land of the cretaceous

Danger was headed his way

An enemy so pugnacious

A very unexpected delay



For another cretaceous giant faced him now

With saw like teeth and a pungent breath

Small clever hands, and dino-claws to boot

The colossal clash was fated to end in a death

The diplodocus stood silent, but not nearly scared

And the Tyrannosaurus Rex roared in his rage

The ground thundered beneath the battling titans

The greatest battle of the Maastrichtian age



In the land of the cretaceous

A diplodocus so enamored

A Tyrannosaurus so voracious

Has never since occurred



A fight between two towering lizard lords

As spirals of dust wound slowly skyward

In a clash of teeth and tails it was done

And victory was the diplodocine love’s reward

And on he ran towards his love’s abode

And dawn had broken, the moon had set

And a few longisquama buzzed him by

And in early light, the diplodoci finally met



In the land of the cretaceous

A he-diplodocus so audacious

A she-diplodocus so vivacious

In tender love so tenacious



And nothing so sweet when two lovers meet

The ardor made even giants to act with care

They intertwined in a long necked embrace

And naught was to disturb the enormous pair

Save for the visit from their extended family

A herd of laughing diplo-mas and diplo-pas

And diplo-children too, frolicked about

All thundering in their diplodocus applause



In the land of the cretaceous

They did love and multiply

An adventure most flirtatious

Beneath the cretaceous sky

Pop art portraits

I went from







to









via



pop art portraits.

Exams

Exams are two days away, and here I am blogging away to glory, watching movies left, right and center, and fragging every single bot with supposed artificial intelligence as many times over as quake continues to run without overloading my system resources.


I also have to meet a friend in five minutes.


I am also currently wishing that it had rained, wishing that I hadn't run out of interesting reading material, and wishing that the exams were over and the vacs in front of me (hey only nine days for THAT), so that I could blog away to glory, watch movies and frag bots with dysfunctional AI.


Just watched contact. Segan is one hell of a writer. Nice film, but have already blogged about it the last time I saw it... but here is a thought: a destiny defeats the purpose of everything... whats the use of the process if the result is at hand? Which therefore means that it is meaningless to contemplate a deeper purpose or meaning, or even the process of creation. By some freak of nature, we are here, and we just have to be as selfish (as a part of a system, not as an individual), and make the best out of it.


Two minutes to go, have to rush.

The secret life of money

A book so boring should not be filled with such amazing information. Anyway, read it, and here are the startling revelations:



1) You are ashamed to put a worth on yourself

Is your own money harder to talk about than sex? Do you know how much your parents earn? Why does it feel so invasive if someone looks in your wallet? Do you hesitate to aska friend how much they paid for their new couch or car?



2) Money is not just a store of value or a medium of exchange:

A $1000 paycheck is not the same money as $1000 stolen from a bank or $1000 borrowed from a friend. And certain monies remain indivisible - an inheritance, for instance, or a wedding gift of money. The latter is a qualitative unit that should not be spent partly for a gift and partly for groceries.



3) Money is psychologically complex

Money gifts can be given to those who are younger, but not comfortably to your mother. In many relationships, no amount of money can substitute for a gift personally selected.


4) Money is not discussed in some professions

The patient pays the receptionist, not the doctor or the therapist. Teachers asking for payrises is looked upon as immoral.


5) Freudian explanation for spenders and hoarders

The psychological urge to save or spend apparently stems from the early childhood anal stage where children derive pleasure from either expelling faeces, or retaining it. The same pleasure is apparently expirienced while hoarding money or letting it go. Or hoarding it for a long time and suddenly letting it go.


6) Money has genders:

Public money is strong and masculine, private money is feminine.

Crash - the cheap tricks explained.

Crash basically reduces racism to a tool of entertainment. The somewhat jeuvenile combination of surprise and co-incidence, which drives the movie, is derived not from existing stereotypes, but those created by the movie itself. Take for example, this conversation between two apparently normal and slightly dissed blacks, walking out of a cafe where they weren't served cofee:



Anthony: Look around! You couldn't find a whiter, safer or better lit part of this city. But this white woman sees two black guys, who look like UCLA students, strolling down the sidewalk and her reaction is blind fear. I mean, look at us! Are we dressed like gangbangers? Do we look threatening? No. Fact, if anybody should be scared, it's us: the only two black faces surrounded by a sea of over-caffeinated white people, patrolled by the triggerhappy LAPD. So, why aren't we scared?


Peter: Because we have guns?



The non racist audience may look a point beyond, by considering the two blacks to be normal human beings who are carjackers independant of their color, but when you actually think about it, you know for sure, that these charachters, in the film, would definately not be carjackers if it weren't for their color. The movie, imposes a general charachteristic to every race - blacks are dissed about the rampant racism, whites are stigmatized of being the opressors, and feel threatened by this, Latinos are sidenlined, and know that they aren't trusted, but try to look past it, Irianians, intrestingly, simply don't fit in and fear they will be cheated because of the lack of proficiency in english.

The movie gets a lot of things wrong - it shows, for example, that guns in LA are always used for the wrong reasons, whether by a Iranian store owner, a black carjacker, or even a police officer. I cannot speak for the people living in LA, but apparently, the movie also got the city wrong when it comes to racism. Here are lines from Crash reviews by people living in the city.




"Pretentious, maudlin, and tedious. Be careful, critics will always shower praise on a movie that "tackles the tough issues." If I hear another critic call this movie "brave," I'm going to claw my eyes out. It's not brave to sit in your mansion in Santa Monica and write about what a racist hellhole the rest of Los Angeles is. This movie is utterly phony, and its story is ridiculously contrived."

-Blecch





"This film is as crassly manipulative as it is vapid. I have my own prejudices against L.A., which I freely admit, so to combat this prejudice I will not say that this is a natural situation stemming from the location, but rather probably from the author and director."

-John Richards (Monolith 94)



This film showed that there were no non-racists. The film made it look like everyone in LA walked around so conscious of their race that every single action and every single word they spoke reflected on their sentiments, and stemmed from their racial backgrounds. There are no racists and non-racists in the movie, there are people who are openly racist (like the med lady, Shaniqua, and Matt Dillon's police char), and others who simply suppress their racism - like Brendan Fraser's char, or that of Hanson (a nice policeman who reports Dillon's racist nature to his superior), but who ends up shooting Peter, a black guy, simply out of suspicion that wouldn't have been there if it were not for his color.



The cheap stunts that the movie pulls, is the manipulation of the story line in a very clever way to impress the audience with their own inherent racism - they make the audience predict the story on the basis of race, and then go against it, as an element of surprise, leaving the audience feeling guilty. Take this exchange between Fraser and Bullock for example.



Jean: I would like the locks changed again in the morning.

Rick: You what?... Look, why don't you just go lie down, ok? Have you checked on James?

Jean: Well of course I've checked on James. I've checked on him every five minutes since we've been home. Do not patronize me. I want the locks changed again in the morning.

Rick: Shhhh. It's ok. Just go to bed, all right?

Jean: Okay, didn't I just tell you not to treat me like a child?

Maria: I'm sorry Mrs. Jean. It's okay, I go home now?

Rick: It's okay. Thank you very much for staying Maria.

Maria: You're welcome. No problem. Goodnight Mrs. Jean.

Jean: [rudely] Goodnight. I would like the locks changed again in the morning. And you know what, you might mention that next time we'd appreciate it if they didn't send a gang member...

Rick: A gang member?

Jean: Yes, yeah.

Rick: What do you mean? That kid in there?

Jean: Yea. The guy in there with the shaved head, the pants around his ass, the prison tattoos.

Rick: Oh come on. Those are not prison tattoos.

Jean: Oh really? And he's not gonna go sell our key to one of his gang banger friends the moment he's out our door?

Rick: Look, you've had a really tough night. I think it'd be best if you'd go upstairs right now and...

Jean: And what? Wait for them to break in?

[yelling]
Jean: I just had a gun pointed in my face...

Rick: You lower your voice.

Jean: [yelling] ... and it was my fault because I knew it was gonna happen. But if a white person sees two black men walking towards her and she turns and walks away, she's a racist, right? Well I got scared and I didn't do anything and ten seconds later I had a gun in my face. Now I am telling you, your amigo in there is going to sell our key to one of his homies and this time it would be really fucking great if you acted like you gave a shit!




Again, I am not alone in the belief that the moviemakers rudely manipulate the audience without the audience realizing this:



Rarely is Hollywood elitism so effective in its manipulation of the dull-normal movie going audience. I expect it from obtuse moviegoers but for the critics to unabashedly praise this patronizing, often childish approach to racism is profoundly disappointing.

-pottz1.



The movie is sad because it wants to make you believe that every single conflict occors because of race and racism, and then, goes a step further by working the other way around and giving a racial flavor to conflicts that are totally not racial in nature - like the standoff between the Iranian store owner and the Latino locksmith.



The movie is brilliant because it effectively does what it intends to do, portray the explosive situations that come about because of the varied psychological responses to situations, originating because of the race. This brilliance is NOT to be appreciated, because this reduces racism, as I said, to a tool of entertainment, and reinforces the stereotypes. The movie is not only racist to the core, it disturbingly suggests that race itself is the origin of racism, instead of social conditioning. It puts racism across as a problem that stems from the different thought processes of different races instead of one that stems from a simple lack of tolerance, on a basis of race. Like someone who changes locks "just to be safe" - utterly stupid, irrational and unnecessary. An effort that should not be appreciated or applauded.

Western Disturbances

It rained today - exactly like last year, a sudden March rainfall and then nothing till the mediocre monsoons culimnating in a sudden revival in the form of the 26/7 floods. The cause was apparently certain "western disturbances" and the weather reporting was a little more inspiring than the rain itself - or the cause attributed to the rain - and the rain itself was more than anything somewhat unsettling and slightly pallid.



Western Disturbances



Born and raised cold

To worship the profane

A freezing, murky afternoon

Daylight reached the drain



And society lingers

Despite all the strain

Out of sync and out of tune

Another prejudice to sustain



Like staying safe inside

Mulling over the mundane

During a muddy monsoon

A mere mind driven insane



Blood red raindrops

And the hurts they contain

The insults they commune

The spoils of proud disdain



An obligation for sympathy

Perhaps parodied by the pain

Like a cloud cloaked moon

Or smoke strings in the rain

No Jokes

sometimes Amul just strikes a chord.

Phallic knee

Crash

Crash is a movie that depicts the interactions between - to put it in the style of the movie - chinks, honks, niggers, Arabs and Latinos in an unabashed, unapologetic manner. The city of LA is apparently the perfect setting for a movie, which more than anything, not only ends up somehow justifying the paranoia that leads to racism, but also makes you sympathizes with the basic human fears and prejudices that promote racism. A pretty disturbing movie of interactive forces, with witty dialogues, powerful moments, and melodramatic soap-opera style directing, but a seriously skewed purpose. Like the previous Oscar winning flick, Million Dollar Baby, this movie too leaves a bad feeling in the gut that makes you wonder why the people who made the movie are not in an asylum.

The storytelling is masterful, and the acting by the star studded cast (Matt Dillon, Brendan Fraser, don cheadle etc) is superb, although Sandra Bullock is unconvincing in her role, the only character in the entire film who does not manage to get any sympathy from the audience.

The Iranian store owner and the Hispanic locksmith stand out, the Iranian guy does not understand the Hispanic's advice, which leads to his store getting trashed, and this culminates to the most powerful sequence of the entire movie. In crash, there is a surprise at every turn.

The sad part is that, the story uses stereotypes that it hopes to dissolve. There is a thin line between depicting what you think is a realistic portrayal of racism, and what is made up just to drive home the point. The story, I suppose crosses this line, with the coincidences and ironies seeming extremely contrived. There are many interesting sequences, where the prejudices of the audience itself is brought out - you get suspicious of the motives of the chars, question their rationales, and make judgments about who is good and who is bad... for example there is a good white cop giving a lift to a black guy (cop does not know the black guy is a carjacker). The black guy starts laughing after seeing a statuette on the dashboard of the cop's car. The cop thinks the black guy is laughing at him. They have an argument, which leads to the black guy saying "do you know what I have in my back pocket?" and he reaches out to get it, the camera is outside the car and they show a gunshot inside. You assume that the black guy shot the cop, but its the cop's prejudices and need for safety that makes him shoot the black guy. Only then do you realize that the black guy is carrying a similar statue.

The movie cleverly manipulates the audience into believing they were racist too, but this is a carefully planned trick of screenplay, which brings out false racist emotions in the audience. According to me at least, this is a cheap trick to pull.

Guess it deserved the Oscars though, because the movie did exactly what it believed in.

the website has a cool "experience the film" feature, click here

Wordpress Vs blogger

Blogging is this activity where you record your boring thoughts in incoherent journals. Other people with blogs then come and share their gyaan in the form of smart-ass comments in a desperate attempt to get you to read their blogs. For some strange reason, blogging is spreading faster than the unnecessary fear of bird flu, and choosing a blogging client can be a baffling business.



There are only two really big fighters in the Arena. On one corner is the powerful, google owned blogger.com and on the otherside is the less well known, but certainly not less impressive wordpress.com, with features blogger.com users dream of.



Posting
Blogger has a simple to use, what-you-see-is-what-you-get editor (WYSIWYG) and has a spell check feature, something that wordpress lacks. The create post field also acts as an HTML editor, you can directly write in the code as and when you write your post.



Wordpress, has a basic WYSIWYG editor, along with an HTML editor, where you can actually play around with the code in a separate field from the normal post field. Scores above Blogger because Wordpress lets you upload ANY kind of file as a part of your blog (as well as attach it to a title and description). Note: It is possible to upload any type of file into blogspot as well, but this is a mild hack, as the service is designed for images. At wordpress, the service is designed for any kind of file, and this makes a difference, the effort is not yours in the final outcome.



Publishing: Publishing is faster on wordpress, and has lesser glitches. Blogger is known to stop suddenly, and not show that the post was published, and many times, while using opera, the posts disappear without a trace. Wordpress handles well across all browsers, and posts definitely don’t suddenly disappear.



Categories:
Categorizing your posts under different sections is a feature that Blogger.com lacks, and the most useful one at wordpress. An easy way to keep track of your past posts, wordpress lets you organize your blog better. People make the shift from bloger to wordpress, just to be able to use this feature.



Independent pages:
Another feature that blogger lacks, independent pages integrated with the blog. The blog can be only a part of a personal webpage, with a profile, a resume, a brief autobiography, a photogallery… whatever.



Sidebar:
While blogger has a highly customizable sidebar, which can carry anything as long as you know HTML, wordpress is simpler to use because of the features it allows without the need to know HTML. For example, a blogroll exists on every blog to keep track of the other blogs that the blogger reads, and while you have to code this thing in in bloger, Wordpress does this for you. It also has useful side-bar addons like the current book you are reading, categorized blogrolling etc.



Templates:
Blogger templates are easier to edit, look decent in the three columned ones, and the sheer quantity of choice is unbelievable, there are numerous sites dedicated to blogger templates. Wordpress does not have a template as customizable, but the default one looks better, and there is a decent enough choice available, but almost no competition for blogger here. The quality of the Wordpress templates, are however, superior to those of blogger.



Hacks and Plugins
Blogger has many hacks, where you can cheat blogger to throw up comments in the sidebar, or remove the navigation bar on top et cetera. In fact, you can make blogger throw up pages that don’t look like blogs at all. Where blogger has hacks, Wordpress has plugins, really cool plugins to keep away spammers, plugins for spell checking, filelists,
photo galleries, anything you dream of.



Republishing: After making template changes, it is necessary to republish your blog. Wordpress here is much much faster than Blogger, and the entire blog takes seconds to republish at Wordpress, instead of the minutes in Bloger. Wordpress does not have a preview feature though, where you can see how the new template will look before republishing your blog. Blogger let’s you do this, at wordpress you have to keep republishing your blog, but this is hardly a problem.



Upload time:
Uploading at wordpress is faster than uploading at blogger.



Outage:
Blogger has frustratingly frequent outages, where the servers are maintained, and like load-shedding, there are times when you simply cannot use blogger. This does not happen with wordpress, at least as frequently.



Community: Blogger has a larger, more interactive community, but people learn to interact with blogs of different clients. The only real problem is providing a link back to your own blog wherever its hosted… Wordpress has really interactive forums, where the noob can get his bearings corrected instantly. At blogger, you have to laboriously navigate through the help pages.



Import: Wordpress lets you import all your blogger.com blogs and posts, a feature not available the other way around. If you want to switch to wordpress, you can use this option. Although the importer is pretty quick, if not handled properly, it can leave your blogger blog in a mess, with all the template changes disappearing along with all the text formatting. No problems as long as you do not let the importer window close.



The verdict: the clear winner is wordpress, for all the extra features. Blogger is simply more popular, maybe because its for the novice blogger. If you are starting a new blog, go for wordpress, you will start craving for the features soon. If you have been using blogger.com for a while now, then you would have achieved the look and feel you want, so you may not really feel the need to move onto wordpress – maybe only for the categories. The best blogging client around, is wordpress.

LOST

Saw the first real episode of lost. After "The lost world" suddenly stopped, and actually, got too boring to be followed any more, I stopped watching all serials on television until "Enterprise" came along. Loved the title song, but quit watching after I missed a few shows, the show went off air, and for the fact that I am a Star Wars fan.


Then I stopped watching television altogether, until Lost came along with its string of grammys and whatnot. Just the sheer amount of planning that went into the crash sequence impressed the shit out of me. Think I am going to be hooked...



Will have fun theorising, things I noticed were (i) Charlie hears a scream as he and Kate are searching for Jack and (ii) The old guy is really spiritual.

Do guys have to pee with their pants down?

Or so was the query from a curious individual of a totally guessable gender.



Restrooms have been covered on this blog, but not the actual act of male urination, which I thought was something no one would have any doubt ever, but I thought wrong. Or as Hitler would put it "Ich kann pinkeln oben stehend! selbst wenn ich eine kleine Penis habe!"



So what happens is that if you are a guy, and most guys have a fly (average length = 4 in.), usually with a zipper (sometimes with buttons), so you need to make ABSOLUTELY SURE (or things will go horribly wrong) that the fly is opened and then either (i) push down the elastic of the underwear or (ii) use the fly of the underwear (average length = 2 in.). The totally pussy way to pee would be to unbutton the pants, remove the belts and then proceeding, which is really not different from letting them pants drop. Usually, you wonder why you shiver after the piss (something to do with relieved thermoregulation and nerve endings in the dick), after which you stare at the wall in front thinking about something or the other, and then you are sure that you are absolutely relieved, you either (i) leave, and refill your bladder or (ii) play with the weewee for a while.



So guys don't have to drop their pants to pee, unless (i) they want to wet their pants or (ii) are two years old and not toilet trained or (iii) are of the inclination to pee sitting down, for the sake of the added convinience of being able to crap simultaneously or (iv) are not wearing any pants in the first place.



It is totally understandable that females cannot pee standing up, but there are some gifted people in this world who are hell bent on equalising the sexes (you can do that with dicks, but NOT with brains), so blare the trumpets, and drum a drumroll, and basically imagine the grand entry of an innovative product called:



TravelMate





Its basically a dick for girls, so you can pee without having to drop your pants, and doing nothing more than unzipping the fly. Wonder why girls have flys if they aren't used for peeing... but I guess that's a stupid question for my gender to ask. Anyway, the dick extension is available here.



In case you are a girl and are not of the inclination to purchase a dick extension, then this site has instructions to pee without having to sit down.



If you belong to the stupider gender, and in case anyone was wondering, yes, this post was to a delibrate attempt to piss you off.

First gig

That's the show, Metakix was the guest band, and this fact is apparently so huge that the picture for the official poster is saved as "metakixfinalsmall11zp.jpj". I wish our band gets there sometime. However, our band did show up in the competition:




This was the second gig for One Night Band, and the first with me in it. The gig was at RAIT, Nerul. We are apparently supposed to be a nu-metal band, but that may be because its only supposedly apparent that we are a brit-rock band. A Brit Rock band that plays Perl Jam, but I guess Perl Jam performed in Britain at SOME point of time. If they didn't, they were probably losers who deserve to have their nationalities confused anyway, but they weren't. Losers I mean, not Brits.

But screw that, about our band,


That's the lead singer vocalist, guitarist and freak, Chirag.





That's Shiva, the Rhythm guitarist and Keyboards guy. Also probably a vocalist, but he sang one song... so I donno where exactly he stands. Also a freak.




And that's our drummer, Vivi. Hidden behind all the drums.




That's me. The bassist. Wishing I were hidden behind the amp or the plant or something.




Nice to go up and play... we played two coldplay songs "fix you" and "yellow", "last kiss" by Perl Jam and an original. Haven't heard "fix you" and "Last Kiss" yet, bought the bass ten days ago, and screwed up big time, but no one noticed. Good for me... and the band. We recieved decent reviews, although we were tighter at home. Click here for the fora. here are two reviews anyway. Remember, this is a review for the ENTIRE gig, not just our band.



"All i remember was the first few bad were bad although the one night band were pretty good to listen to and was fun to f**k around with the "one DAY band""

-motorguitarist




"yeah me too had fun with the ONE DAY BAND emoticon thingy!"

-hexar




We didn't win, but we are definately in the scene now. Oh yeah - personal reviews for me include "damn good!", "that was cool" and probably my favorite "you are like John Lennon" - although to be fair, that was more for my looks than my abilities. Ah well.


The funniest part is that I am currently listening to and thoroughly enjoying Enya.



Who can say where the road goes

Where the days grow

Only Time....

Num8ers - God's footprints

Some 1.7^21 seconds ago, something both insanely spectacular and terrible happened. The universe was born, and a lot of stuff was created. The initial explosion can still be heard in the form of background radiation - the static on the radio and television is nothing less than the birth of our cosmos.


Ok, kills the effect, but 2% of the static anyway.


Now it is not plausible to even contemplate the factors that created this explosion, but they were immaculately biased to later give rise to elements, life, and most interestingly, numbers... imaginary ones at that. If these factors were tipped even minutely, in any old way, then the elements wouldn't be stable, there would be no understandable laws in physics, and in all probability, no one to understand them at all.

Every single number is an imaginary concept. Although we can quantify items - like "I have four warts" or "I have four frogs" or "I can count only upto four", it's really not any different from saying "frogs are good" - we are just giving items a label.
Now the way numbers interact with each other is amazing... and cool ratios like pi and phi arise out of this - making their way into popular culture through the media of books, movies, songs and games.

Phi will be an instantly recognizable, recent example. Thoroughly disected in Dan Brown's Angels and Demons, Phi is said to be the most beautiful number in the world because the ratio shows un in everything in nature, knowledge of which is apparently used by builders, scultorers, artists, and songwriters to come up with the most outstanding art.

Pi, is another famous number. Simpsons makes fun of it when they claim pi=3. pi=3, is actually a pretty popular theory, Jimmy neutron, as well as a Clarke book where the universe falls apart because pi=3. Basically these books are out to say that if pi were not EXACTLY = whatever it is exactly equal to, then the universe would be a hellish place to live in. Working the other way round, people believe that pi is there fore a bigger reason. The basic ratio, universal to all circles, is custom made for a purpose - the purpose is to let any intelligent life know of the creator - let's just call it God - of God's presence. In the book contact by Carl Segan, a pretty amazing read, have blogged about it, millions of digits into calculating the accurate value of pi, the computer comes across a signature, a series of ones and zeroes which forms a circle,
at the base eleven and shows that there is a greater hidden truth down the line.
Basically, the code throws up this:



00000000000

00000100000

00100000100

01000000010

00100000100

00000100000

00000000000





Fiction apart, one fellow, has gone as far as to claim that he has already discovered God's message to mankind hidden within pi. The original article can be found here.



To quote the page;



Many people question why God would create the universe for us and then leave no proof of his existence. Well. I have found proof of God's existence in the number pi. If you calculate pi out to enough decimal places, you will find the following sequence of numbers:



pi = 3.1415 … 851212152089199197154191651119147851859113931851205420852
114922518195…



Yes, this may appear to be a random assortment of numbers, but if you examine these numbers carefully enough, God's word becomes clear. If we take each number to correspond to its placement in the alphabet, then the message becomes:



heababaeb0hiaiiaigaedaiafeaaaiadgheaheiaacicaheab0edb0heba
adibbeahaie



This makes no sense, so it can't be right. Plus, there are zeros that have no letter in the alphabet. So instead of doing that, we must take a zero to mean either 10 or 20. You'll notice that either a 1 or a 2 precede all zeroes.

a b c d e f g h i  j  k  l  m  
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 

 n  o  p  q  r  s  t  u  v  w  x  y  z
14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

Also, we will take 12 to be "l", not "ab" and so on. Decrypting the message this way reveals God's words:



Hello this is God speaking here I am I created the universe



This is absolutely incredible. If you still doubt, then verify it for yourself. A formula for calculating pi is:



pi = 4 * (1 - 1/3 + 1/5 – 1/7 +…)



(Alternately, you could very precisely measure the circumfrence of the universe and simply divide by the diameter.)



Examining the mathematical structure of nature has revealed God's unambiguous message. The only question now is what exactly does the message mean? It is clear that God exists, but since there is no way to use punctuation in the sentence, he was slightly impaired in his communication ability. For example, does the message mean:



Hello. This is God speaking. Here I am. I created the universe.



Or



Hello. This is God speaking here. I am. I created the universe.



Either way it is clear what God is trying to say.



Sorry to spoil the fun, but most of the above is BULLSHIT. It is clear what God is trying to say my ass. The best alleged God's-grand-message-to-mankind in all of fiction is probably Douglas Adam's "Sorry for the inconvinience."




A line that you might have missed in all of the above is "A formula for calculating pi is: pi = 4 * (1 - 1/3 + 1/5 – 1/7 +…)", the idiot gave the most impractical formula for calculating pi... how long can you really go on calculating till you get the string which he claimed? The other method suggested by him is "Alternately, you could very precisely measure the circumfrence of the universe and simply divide by the diameter" ... pretty impossible to do, unless he was God, so he suggests he found the numbers after calculation, to be precise: "If you calculate pi out to enough decimal places, you will find the following sequence of numbers". Sorry to say, but the number of numbers in the number pi is innumerable - you cannot stop counting once you start. Ahmes went up to a grand total of three digits after the decimal point, Aryabhatta got all famous for going a grand total of four, and a really dedicated fellow called William shanks spent twenty years of his life counting, and only went far as 707, and died without knowing that he had got it all wrong after the 528th digit.




Then supercomputers came along, and made the work easier and less tedious, and have counted into billions of digits, and are still dedicatedly at it. Now the string of text above does NOT appear in the known digits, which go into the billions, and it is unlikely that the webmaster will have calculated more into pi than the academecia around the world. But at some point of time, that message, and any message you want, is a part of pi. Don't get excited, infinity is a large, all encompassing number, just realise that. Therefore, you can invent almost any string of text you want, and it is bound to show up in pi at some point of time, especially if you have many bases for counting (base 2: binary, base 10: decimal etc). In fact, the probability that any string of text will NOT appear in pi is zilch... nada, nothing, zero, and as a class teachers would put it, one big circle.




Hell yes, Pi has my name in it, the 2930287933th digit onward, at the second base, appears 11000000000010010001001101001100100001000001011110
10100111101100 which translates to ,f_y,ijzl-g,,tbxn_aditya_wugvhlgzmmkiw. At the 1205751105th place appears "madgod". Any alphanumeric combination less than six chars in length is almost certainly embedded within pi (probability of 97 percent), and seven chars comes down to eleven percent, and anything above that is just highly improbable within the known digits... So all you need to do is write any message you want from God, translate it into numbers in any suitable base, and claim that God says this through pi, and no one in the world can prove you wrong.



Of course, to prove yourself right, you need to compute pi till the requisite digits, which is no mean task.



Or, you can search for words like :kinky" embedded within the basic fabric of the universe here and here. Both are pi search engines, which allow you to search for any string of numbers that YOU want within pi.



I guess life is cool as it is, without the necessity of God having to give a meaning to it all. Guess if there was a destiny for us, then our lives would be pretty purposeless...

Hyperlinks - (DON'T click here)

This is a piece of art. Porbably the cleverest piece I have ever written.
The point is that, everything is linked to something or the other. Obviously, you wouldn't have the patience to go through all the links, but if you do, it will more or less, totally be not worth the effort.
It all started with something that was smelling funny. The hyperlinks failed to work. Not that when they do work, they send me to some place useful, but when they didn't, I wasn't going anywhere, and stuck with one hell of a crappy page.
I was wondering why this was happening, but being a technofreak, no one will know better than me that computers have a mind of their own, are hell bent on taking over the world,
and more often than not,
do things without any rationale behind them.


Computers, I can safely then say, are pretty much like humans.
Especially, bhenchods
like these.
That was too good a point to be wasted in this post,
and anyway, if you are indeed clicking every single one of these hyperlinks,
then you will not be following what I am trying to say,
and therefore, I might as well not say anything that makes sense,
not that I have been doing that

so far.
Will not hide any secrets from you.
My blog is blatant and meandering,
like every other blog out there. I blog for no reason, about nothing, and with no intention.
Blogs,
being the ultimate union of the irrational acts of both man and technology,
are bound to have the fallacies of both,
and this terrible union is fated to end up in disaster.
I thought this would be funny,
and hope that it will,
but am almost sure that...
fuck it.
To hell with this,
am stopping right now.
Maybe there is a second installment on the way.