What Ails Ye

www.indiangyan.com is a site that I came across about ten minutes ago while exploring a concept that I'd heard about. Onion (Allium cepa) it turns out is an aphrodisiac. Not just a regular one, the second best. Second to what you'll discover shortly. It's also been stuffed into mummies (the Tutankhamen kind, you perv), been the longest running tear-jerker for most housewives, though Ektaa thinks she can beat that record; sliced, diced, saute-ed, fried but never ever consumed before hitting the sack for some handkerchief-pandkerchief with the significant other when chocolate has failed.
The last thing I can imagine that's a turn on is sulphur breath. Horny, sulphur breath at that too. Anyway for those of you who're interested here's the excerpt from the aforementioned gyan site.

Onion is one of the most important aphrodisiac foods. As an aphrodisiac, onion stands second only to garlic. It increases libido and strengthens the reproductory organs. The white variety of onion should be peeled off, crushed and fried in pure butter. This mixture acts as an excellent aphrodisiac tonic if taken regularly with a spoon of honey on an empty stomach. The powder of black gram when dipped in the juice of onion for seven days and then dried, produces a mixture called kanji. This also acts an aphrodisiac.

More here.

Now if that bad enough the more perceptive of you would have realised is that at the zenith of all randy devices, more potent than rhino horn and tiger claw and the extract of a bull-elephant's prostate is Garlic. Allium sativum. The reek that chinese food gives you is apparently due to indigestible allyl methyl sulphide that seeps into the blood and then has to be gotten rid off by the lungs and skin. Leaving you smelling simply peachy for the better part of a day. The vampire myth is thence by simple extrapolation explained. That isn't the point.

This is. And if you don't feel like scrolling here goes.

Garlic is a natural and harmless aphrodisiac. Even Dr. Robinson, an eminent sexologist of America considered it so. It is a tonic for loss of sexual power from any cause, Sexual debility, impotency from over indulgence in sex and nervous exhaustion from dissipating habit. It is said to be especially useful to old men of high nervous tension and diminishing sexual power.

So Dr. Robinson lived a happy garlicked life, no longer bothered by the impotence of over-indulgence and the nervous exhaustion from dissipating habit. What in God's name is a dissipating habit? It had better not be what I think it is.

So all this came about when I realised that I didn't have any friends from school. Not from high school where I think I have the socially acceptable number of friends and acquaintances and voodoo doll needle stickers, but from kindergarten. Where apparently lifelong friendships take root, etc.
It turns out that my caretakers at the time (I'm not mentioning names here) used to fry a few cloves of garlic in good sesame oil and rub me down with the oil prior to a hot bath and feed me the fried cloves.
Every single day.
So I was the reeking randy four year old. No wonder no one stayed in touch.
More general garlic blade here.
Enjoy.

Season's greetings

So some many things have happened.
Discovered the marinara and how to make it. Belted Mojitos at TGIF. Got held up for 2 hours on the runway in Delhi. And 2 and a half hours off it. Managed to drive my mom who was traveling with me, up the fuselage. And got all privileges revoked by telling her, at 37,000 ft, that if she didn't like my company she could go outside.
Discovered also this really irritating-incomplete-sentence style of blogging.
Jesus was born some 21 odd centuries ago. Merry Christmas. And no, I didn't get any Ginger Wine this year. I did get sozzled on that noxious potion they serve at Noon Wines, which incidentally should either be declared illicit or come under some serious scrutiny. It's the only red wine I can drink without getting the mother of all headaches and the only wine that gets me drunk with half a glass. These two premises make me wonder if it's actually the Claret that it claims to be.
Internet is now unlimited which means some insane amount of quasi-legal activity will happen from my IP.
In the usual ironic vein that I seem to flow in, I have probably less than 2 weeks to make full use of this gift. It would seem that the world has conspired and almost successfully gotten me to head from my cosy world down south to the dreaded Capital. For what might be eternity.
Now Delhi I've decided is not a city. Not even a state. It's the Mothership.
It landed some millenia ago and since then has been in the continuing mission to assimilate and be assimilated. In the hope, as usual, of taking over the world.
"Abey!! Resistance is futile!"
That apart I think I've been spending sleepless nights in the worry that I have to pack, leave, leave my amp (Akai) and speakers (Bose) (yeah I had to put that into my blog. Shantanu, stuff it!) behind and actually live in the new Trauma Centre that AIIMS is running.
I guess it should be fun.
Hell it's a new year after all.

Branding

Because it fits well?



What will they think of next

Saving Grace.

And my sojourn to this higher latitude and lower almost everything else place comes to an end. And shocking as it may seem to the many hardliners (viz authors of vitriolic comments on previous posts) who believe that I do not approve or even tolerate this part of the world, I have found many a saving grace.
The Delhi Metro.
Incredible.
Traveled the Blue line as they call one of the lines, the other is called the Yellow line (which reminds me of an old, gross joke). This particular one (blue) is elevated. And the stations are just 100m long extensions of the platform accessed by stairs, escalator or lift. The trains run in a 5 min frequency, are air conditioned and as of now relatively empty when compared to Bombay. I still didn't get a place to sit at 11 am but at least I wasn't held aloft by people and completely dependent on the movement of those around me to get out of the train. There is of course an annoying announcement that keeps repeating itself telling one to stay away from the doors and what the next station is and which side (of the coach) do the doors open. Which if not for the rather generic voice and intonation is much better than trying to guess if the next platform is on the left or right.
Connaught Place (CP, yeah.) is called Rajiv Chowk and is a two level station. The blue descends to about 15ft below ground level and if you want to take the yellow line - as always it's down under. Add another 15 to get close to 30ft below Delhi and find the Yellow Line to North Campus etc. Sources tell me that the Kashmiri Gate Station is a three level station, will visit it the next time.
The metro as of now is cheap (what would have cost me around Rs. 5/- by bus and close to 50 by Auto was Rs. 9/-) and quick (what would have taken me between half an hour and forty minutes, took between 1o and fifteen). It's frequent as I saw 3 trains whizz by while walking to the station (100 m away and I walk at 4.8 km/hr. Go Figure). The only issue with it is they haven't quite covered south Delhi and they aren't making too much money. Which makes me wonder if they two are related or if the government if going to hike the prices. The Commonwealth games are going to be held here and apparently a criminal amount of money has been sanctioned to making Delhi a city of international amenities. It's getting there.
The other thing that makes Delhi worth my while (ok Ego, down boy) is Butter Chicken. Often called the official bird of the NCR and a close contender with Tandoori Chicken for the title of national bird of Khalistan, this dish is the best thing I've had in years. It is with great shame that I realize that I spent many years of my life in darkness eating many variants of chicken in tomato sauce under the impression that it was butter chicken. All that's changed now. The rich tomato gravy, the succulent meat and the atherogenic butter...
Gar Firdaus bar roo-e-zaminast, Haminasto haminasto haminast
Shantanu and other specimens from here who object to my transliteration of Firdaus, stuff it.

Visions...

This is what happens if the flight gets delayed and one has no entertainment
What better advertisement can one ask for...


I think H2Go is a funny name. And it's a bitch to take pictures in moving objects
For those of you who can read this. there is nothing funnier.


Will have to dig some more up if I can find them.

Enjai

Just Jobless...

Ok so I was in Chandigarh for a few days for reasons I’ll elaborate on shortly. I’m still up north by the way, and all ye who believe that I’ve served my sentence; this would be a good time to actually get that petition up and signed. And may be even delivered.

Now Chandigarh is a joint that essentially survives because of the cumulative governance of the Punjab and Haryana State machinery. To that add the chaos of a Union Territory. And the extreme planning of Le Crow. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again that place is the epitome of how one can make a city so monotonously well planned it creates a serious antithesis in the head whether one wants to live there or not.

Rediscovered a Single Malt(Whiskey, you Philistines) there called Ardbeg. In a failing attempt to not sound the male equivalent of la-di-da, it’s a pale whiskey with an incredible peaty flavour, best probably diluted with an equal amount of water. For a bit, sitting on a friend’s terrace in a Chandigarh winter watching the stars and sipping on a glass of Ardbeg felt like some Persian poet thinking Agar firdaus bar rooye zaminast to haminast, to haminast, to haminast. Though with a few modifications in time place and person it could be another Persian poet content with a book of verse and a jug of wine but there was no one singing in the wilderness.

The Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research, Chandigarh is one of those institutions set up like maybe the Missionaries of Charity and Tihar, by an act of Parliament. Thus it enjoys certain privileges, one of which is conducting it’s own entrance. A sop that thankfully Tihar doesn’t have. It would be the end of world when a jail started choosing it’s inmates. With guys getting rejected if they “passed their morality paper” or “turned out just too smart for here”.

The PGI (as it is fondly referred to by friend, foe, employee, auto-driver and patient) entrance is not just a test of knowledge. It’s one of endurance, patience and sheer nerve. The application process is by far the most complex. And one is never sure till the last moment that one is eligible. Then every once in a while you can pick up the hall ticket at the exam hall ten minutes before commencement. The exam itself is at 8 AM on a winter morning. In a freezing classroom on desks and chairs made for ten year olds. It thankfully lasts for only an hour and a half. After that all there is to do is wait in the midst of all that winter for the results. And for those of you who understand it, full AJM happened. For those of you who don’t it stands for akkan just miss and no I’m not explaining that further. So I wrote AIIMS over the weekend and I don’t know yet but it doesn't look too good.

Had a discussion with an uncle of mine over a bowl of mishtidoi and screw you if you don’t like my transliteration; about life, the universe, medicine, music and food. This is the food bit. So chaats, it turns out have been destroyed by the Punjabis and us Southies by the simple act of adding onions to them. So the Original Hing (Asafoetida) based Chaats got overshadowed by the Onion based Chaat like items (paav bhajji, for example) which apparently are favoured by teenage females of the human ilk. It might even be that the predilection that the aforementioned teenage females have for such items is related to hormones and their swinging. Teenage males may also be found flocking to the centres that sell such onion based chaat like items resulting in the illusion that such tastes are not gender specific. However, one must realize that such selective migration of males could primarily be due to the presence of teenage females in those areas in the first place.

And we win a hundred points for sheer joblessness.

AIIMS results tomorrow.

For more interesting images of up north wait a bit… on a dial up and can’t upload.

More north than I'd like to be

Funny stuff that one can see do on trips to airports and distant lands.

Indigo, the airline, not the radio station. I can fill jars with bile vented as a result of the radio station that would make Ali Baba, the black sheep, bleat a hasty retreat. Their music is ok, it's western and occasionally that Putomayo world music hour gives me joy, but if they don't do something about the RJs then we might just go back to listening to Uppi approved Big FM.
Anyway IndiGo as they put it has nasty blue crowd control things. The 3' high metal cylinders connected with 2" strips of nylon? Yeah that's the one. IndiGo's is bright blue with "IndiGo No Red Tape" written all over it. Wanted to take a quick picture with the cool phone but I was already getting evil-eye from the security guard for laughing too loud.
Stare at the guy staring into the laptop. Not his laptop, the guy sitting next to him's laptop. And sue me for my grammar. When the guy looks up give him a raised eye brow.
Generally get shocked at the NCR and how things work there. Sometimes it's a rude shock that they do. But apparently they do. Been here at annual intervals and the infrastructure that gets built is simply amazing. They have a Metro now. The next cretin who goes weren't they always one, is going to get poked in the eye. And with some Commonwealth Games happening in a few years that's all the excuse they need to make the entire NCR look like the future. Except that every once in a while it feels like the planet of the apes. Like one woke up in some otherwise nice future except that there were monkeys all around.
Not being overtly nasty and communal but things do irritate me sometimes. The butter chicken makes up for it but not always.
All the Delhi rants apart been listening to this band called Advaita which apart from the usual bunch of bassists and guitars and the usual has a sarangi and a trained vocalist in hindustani... Like Scott Matthews who sounds like... like I need to listen to his stuff some more.
Leave for chandigarh tomorrow. More on that when I return over the weekend.
Peace out. Like they say sometimes.

NCR again

Science fiction and Fantasy novels stopped being original after perhaps LOTR and Dune. Nowadays they try to be funny (like Terry Prachett) or extensive (like Robert Jordan). Robert Jordan. What can we say? Twelve books the size of the original facsimile edition of Grey’s Anatomy, another 3 planned, more characters and complexity than Ektaaaaa could ever conceive. But having read books one to nine, forgotten the story, reread 6,7,8,9 and read ten and found myself in more or less square one. I realize that I’m just another victim of some cruel publicity. And Robert Jordan has enough money to get his amyloidosis treated at the Mayo Clinic.

That apart he does say more often than not that the wheel of time spins the fabric of reality with men and women woven in to this continuum yada yada, now the only unfortunate offshoot of this is that a wheel does the spinning and so history can repeat itself. And so it does, every once in a while.

Like now I find myself in Delhi to write an entrance all over again. For Neurosurgery. Which should be interesting if and when I get through but ever so often I want to scream, “when will this all end.” And then I just go back to sipping my beer.

So here is the latest bunch of useless thoughts. Planes are cool. And old as I am I still want a window seat even though I ask for an aisle. And like to look at the flaps and slats and imagine falling out of the sky if the wings break off. And marvel and how humanity has progressed from watching birds, eating them mostly out of jealousy and then taming the skies and still eating birds. And one will never get a cute woman in the next seat. I even got an empty seat but no woman.

And need to get me a laptop.

The next thought I having to deal with the NCR for a couple of weeks. Not just the temperature, which for someone like from closer to the equator is pretty cold. Even though the locals are going, “Lovely warm winter - 12 degrees today.” I’m thinking, “@!%$!@#$ You’re kidding me…” But one can always find sheepskin or wolfskin jackets, baby seal gloves, mink lined shoes to keep one warm, it’s the natives I have an issue dealing with. Discovered a way to get that out of the picture too. Use Sony’s in-ear jams with the iPod. They’re those cylindrical, sit-in-your-external auditory meatus, deafen you, but cancel ambient noise and one-tenth the price of the Bose. So you can’t hear them and thus live in the denial that they don’t exist.

Went for a nice 40 minute walk in the cold this morning, listening to Jamiroquai on the aforementioned iPod-Sony combination. The one thought I had was to kill the guy who when Godzilla came out and I mentioned that Jamiroquai was interesting launched into some passionate Cesaresque speech on how the weird hat wasn’t quite where things were at that point of time. So I didn’t listen to more of that band till recently. And how I’m tripping on that stuff. Brilliant. As Mohayana would have said, “Full groovy da! Trippy only it is.” I agree. Despite reservations against the word ‘trippy’, Jamiroquai is a “Somewhere it is” band. And the natives of the NCR were treated to splendid display of me grooving to Dynamite. Whatever shocks them.

Wisdom yet again...

Sources of Wisdom in the world are often not evident to the untrained eye. One must be a seeker of wisdom to find it. Unlike opportunity, this particular entity may not even knock. Take this for instance.

Picture taken with the w810i, somewhere in Bangalore.

Addendum : Too many people seem to be asking me this so go here if you don't know what the thirukural is or want to know more.

Addendum

So to further strengthen my position on where I go when me and my professional bretheren go when we die and why it's not heaven here's another tale.
Cardiology and it's hallowed halls have oft been the chosen destination for practitioners of internal medicine who aren't happy dealing with the entire body and would rather make more money than they already are whist prescribing cold medicine and the occasional sleeping pill. So a friend decided that these economically and perhaps intellectually more appealing halls were for him to saunter through and is currently doing DM Cardio somewhere.
This is about him, unlike my usual initial digression. Those of you who've seen the Axe/Lynx Click deoderant advertisement with Bennifer (yep whether is Lopez or Garner he's still the same) and the clicker read on, those who haven't look here or here. The song by the way is "Gansta' of Love" by Johnny "Guitar" Watson.
So this cardio friend of mine plans to get himself one of the clickers and everytime he sees anyone obese, smoking, eating red meat or even clutching his chest in anginal agony he plans to walk up, grin and go "Click!"
I, as always, rest my case.

PS Have a theory that weird names are due to mothers in that peri-delivery (peri-partum is the technical term, I know) are still not quite used to the joy of motherhood and are still frustrated with all the labour and the pain. This situation leads to an occasional, hasty, borderline vengeful decision of naming their kids thus.

The Grim Irony...

... or how I may never see the light of heaven.

Despite all arguments that there may not be a heaven (though there may be a hell) or there may not be both and we all die only to be reborn as boll weevils or salamanders, or we just die and like Mozart, decompose or like Newton, disintegrate, let's assume for sake of argument itself and for sake of this post there exists a heaven and a hell, ruled by God and the Devil... respectively.
And that each of us has a personal heaven and hell, not the generic boiling oil-pearly gates pictures that some of us have been led to believe. For instance my heaven would involve wine, women and song and hell would be a joint filled with goody-two-shoes dressed in white with harps playing Coldplay or some such. I'm assuming the drift is being got. So this post deals with how contrary to everything I try I'm just not getting to my heaven.
Those of you who've seen the movie Constantine, where Keanu Reeves tries to play a exorcist who's sentenced to hell because he attempted suicide but was revived and the Good Book says that all suicides attempted or successful are condemned to eternal damnation without relief, would have realised that the movie was a waste of time. I didn't and am probably one of the ten people who actually dug (digged?) the movie. Anyway so he decides to become an exorcist to do God's work on earth and send every wayward demon back into hell so that he maybe allowed entry to heaven. Of course he also realises that if he fails, he's going to go to 'a prison where half the inmates were put in by him.' Life's a bitch, init?
In a very similar vein doctors I do believe have been sentenced to purgatory the minute they enter the hallowed halls of medschool. No amount of reviving dying people, wading through body fluids, staying up days on end, for pittance of a remuneration is going to change that.
Why? Simply because no amount of slavery can condone our inherent or developed insensitivity to the world at large. Our patients are the single largest source of humor in our lives. Well most of our lives, I have the Provider to give close competition. The jokes that get cracked when a patient is anaesthetised, being operated, in the midst of the OPD, being given CPR (yeah even then), while being discussed; are sinful in the average person's mind. That collective idea of sin overshadows the collective goodwill that we may ever get. The average person is often referred to in my book of life as the muggle or mudblood. Which in itself ensures a year or two of the rack. Let me show you how it works.
Take for instance the auto driver who was assaulted by 3 people for asking for '1 1/2 meter' post 11pm. He had a bottle of brake fluid (empty) stuffed into his nether. When he came to the hospital the first reaction was that he'd have put it in himself. The next reaction was that every nurse, ward boy, anesthetist who was involved in this man's surgery was laughing their heads off. Now if that wasn't bad enough his case with photographs and the bottle itself was presented at conferences and generated equivalent amounts of laughter there too. I could see the Devil ticking off names.
Or how one gentleman sauntered in to my out patient one morning and began to wax eloquent about how he was an Ayurveda specialist attached to ESI or something and he had this one wonder drug that would cure all kinds of colds, allergies, skin conditions, etc on daily consumption for 45 days. So after patiently listening for close to ten minutes at the advertisement I ventured to ask him what his problem was and he replies in the most sheepish voice I've heard, "Hernia." And I almost fell off my chair laughing. Not openly and though my initial response wanted to be, "Why don't you take your pill and see if it resolves after 45 days..." I ended up keeping a straight face and advising surgery.
Or the 23 year old with erectile dysfunction who was advised to watch porn and wank, or the 30 year old complaining of sterility when he hadn't been staying with his wife. Or the... these just go on.
So i wonder in the face of such terrible odds how can we ever be forgiven...

Obituary and obsession.

A 2L bottle of Sauza tequila in Houston can be procured for somewhere in the vicinity of $10 on good day in a good shop. That translates to roughly Rs. 500. Then why in God's name does every place in this city charge Rs. 200 for a 30 mL shot? Outside of Pondicherry where a bottle of some noxious drink that's labelled tequila except that it's distilled in an equally obscure chemical waste treatment plant can be got for the same price. The world isn't working quite the way I'd like it. There also exists in the good shop in interior Texas powdered Margarita mix. Just add water and tequila and aye caramba! One drunk night.
All that apart, it is with a heavy heart that I bid farewell to a friend of a few years. A comfort in loneliness, an entertainer when bored, a protector when vulnerable, this was one companion who almost never let me down. Outside of the time in hostel when a depression in the Bay of Bengal had knocked power out for 3 days but that was an act of God. But all things have a lifespan. And often not as long as Darwin's tortoises. Some they say are born to lead short lives, other's achieve it and some still have an early demise thrust upon them by technological advancement. My Nokia 3315 belongs to Category III. The world spun on it's axis and I find myself on the other side of the MS fence and in a position to claim the bonus of a new phone. So here I am the proud, new, obsessed owner of a w810i. And having spent two sleepless nights downloading themes and games and notorious Russian software to read the medical tomes in pdb and other unsupported formats I'm finally in a position to play Prince of Persia the Warrior Within and Sudoku. Joy to the world.
There is often a twist in the tale and occasionally a funny one at that. The Provider of food, shelter and technology also decided to get himself a phone considering the 3310 that he had and had just about come to terms with decided to start breathing it's last. And since presbyopia can be a bitch the obvious choice was a Samsung, wherein the text size makes children's books look like fine print. So the X 700 has an FM Radio, mp3 player, 1.3 megapixel camera and bluetooth to name a few. I still haven't managed to load sudoku onto it and have been promised much rewards when I do but that isn't the story. After the water filter incident the man's decided that maybe reading user manuals might just be a good way to start things (flight of ideas, start things - let's start the very beginning... - do re me fa so latte do, with credit to barista for coming up with that on their t-shirts). So after a day or so ardent perusal we find that he's caught someone to take a picture of him at work in the executive chair in all his resplendent glory and set it as his wallpaper. Also he's realised that the little silver disc above the camera is for taking self portraits and works reasonably well.
Apparently both a fondness for red meat and self-obsession are transmitted paternally so, in all likelihood are linked to the Y chromosome.

Um... Yes!

So I came to pass.

And whatever calamity that forced me to land in the Capital is done and I'm back to home sweet home, which is the best place to be despite the rodents running the government and the assorted insects that populate the city council. It is depressing to see the state of the state and the rather dismal progress in the establishment of infrastructure here when in sharp, stark contrast the NCR has a metro up and running and plans to get an elevated monorail up and running (in more ways than one I guess) in the next 2 years. A giant flyover connecting the airport to Gurgaon should be ready in a month which would shorted transit time between the two points to less than twenty minutes. Depressing but this is home.
After the usual digression we get to the point. Watched an open air concert - Indian Ocean. At the Garden of Five Senses. Yeah I couldn't believe they had a wiki on that but it's not a great one and the external link doesn't work anymore. I'm guessing Delhi Tourism doesn't think too much of it anymore.
It's a lovely place. A huge sprawling botanical park with curvy lanes that essentially go round in circles, effectively making one lose one's way ever so often. I found the amphitheater after about half an hour of searching. It looks a lot like Trans Indus if some of you've been there and know what I mean. A pit of sorts with benches and occasional rocks as seating. Anyway, Indian Ocean started at 7.30pm. The crowd was a spectacular one with almost every year from 17 to 70 well represented and applauding like it was going out of style. Yours truly perched on a rock in the midst of a crowd that started smoking tobacco, went on to weed and somewhere in the middle I could distinctly smell eucalyptus too. In the immortal words of Obelix, these Delhi people are crazy.
Indian Ocean is an amazing band. Rahul Ram on Bass, Sushmit Sen on Guitars (more about that later), Asheem Chakravarthy on tabla and Amit Kilam on Drums. Seamlessly integrating Indian classical with jazz and vocals that include everything from their own rather good lyrics to Kabir and Sanskrit shlokas. Though I've been listening to their music for a while now, their live concerts are always a treat. Vasanthahabba a couple of years ago had them on as the last act at close to 5am. On a post-rain Bangalore morning with the weather taking on just a nibble of cold, clear skies, an amphitheater, an appreciative audience. Perfect. Their show at IIM a year ago wasn't too bad either except that Strings was also playing and within a few minutes it was pretty apparent that Synth Strings are no real match to this band.
The Garden of Five Senses hosted them this time around. November in Delhi feels like Bangalore now. Replete with hordes of them from higher latitudes. And a cool stage setting with boom cameras swaying by every once in a while, since the plan for a concert DVD is on. The three hours were filled with the usual Indian Ocean repertoire of Jhini and Bhor, Bandeh, Hille Re, Ma Rewa (with the gab gubli, which is the strangest sounding instrument I've heard after the didgeridoo) and Kandisa to name a few. Interspersed with the songs are Rahul Ram's incessant chatter and the occasional listing of cars that were parked awry and in danger of being towed away. And the frequent video tape changes. Altogether a good trip.
Indian Ocean though one of the most original and refreshing bands to have come out of Delhi and perhaps India itself does leave one persistent thought. They sound the same everytime one listens to them. It is a good sound, there are no second thoughts about it but somewhere it gets a tad repetitive.
This incidentally was Sushmit's guitar. If you can read Japanese there's more here.

And Thermal should be playing in the same venue next weekend.
And Lounge Piranha plays tomorrow in Bangalore.
And a couple of posts in the pipeline.

Delhi Diary

Things as usual spiraled out of control and I found myself actually swiping plastic over the net and saying things like "don't worry I'm on the next flight out". Jet Airways, though the best private carrier yada yada, has a couple of glitches. The Boeing 737s that they use have smaller food trays than the A320s. Not a big issue unless you're trying to read a textbook on the tray. Why, you ask? Because here I am and this is me and that's what I do. And since when did they start having more men in the Mile high club than women. And yes I know what that sentence means. Too many stewards, so thankfully I disappeared into the recesses of my book for most of the journey.
The NCR is at it's pleasantest best in terms of weather. And only weather. I've hunted high and low for pleasantness everywhere else in vain. The usual culture shock of an airport the size of an airport as opposed to the corn field we have in our wonderful city, people completely unconcerned about your safety, nice roads, a Metro, a Monorail proposition to be done by 2009, construction of flyovers late into the night, the closing of every shop on MG Road. Now I used to think, after close scrutiny of Pondicherry and Bangalore that almost every town or city had an MG Road named after the father. Turns out that the NCR's MG is Mehrauli Gurgaon road dotted with factory outlets, furniture stores and Rohit Bal exclusives. All of which, thankfully have been shut.
Anyway whatever uncontrollable bit of fate got me here is now all back in place and an Indian Ocean concert happens at the garden of five senses this evening. That promises to be fun. Back to the hometown tomorrow for my results (of some examination that I'm close to forgetting I ever wrote).
On an aside studying medicine and it's allied branches for close to ten years does unforgivable damage to many parts of one's brain. The most significant is to the language centres. On one hand it's 'cool' to use words like palpable in daily language in the form of the phrase 'no palpable benefit'. On the other this is what I had to deal with. And I quote -
Calcium should be infused with caution in patients with hyperphosphatemia - it may precipitate.
And spent the next fifteen minutes wondering, "..precipitate what? A fatal reaction? Anaphylaxis? What?"
No idiot. Calcium, in the presence of Phosphate will simply precipitate...

Precipitate what?

Home and other stories

The second degree family's heard of the blog and is threatening to let the world at large know of it's existence and worse - of it's contents. Now the world learning of quietlyamused is a good thing, even though I don't have adsense, but if a part of the world is extensions of the second degree family and it comes back to the first degree then hell could break loose. Now if this sounds like an Ektaaaaa Kaaaapoooor, it is so no surprises there. So we need to find a way to stop the kid from babbling. Bribery is the only thing left. We shall see.

So the Provider had to go out for dinner the other day so I was left eating instant noodles or some such. He returned the next day and recounted the events and this was how it all went. He was invited to a Muslim house and he claims the most prominent feature in that house is an impressive, well-stocked bar. If there's an overall transgression quotient that needs to be calculated for this incident, it just climbed a notch. So after drinks and small eats dinner was served which was prawn curry and beef biryani. Which the man ate like there's no tomorrow (TQ climbs again). Since the story of my love for most things non vegetarian has spread reasonably far and wide, the host was kind enough to pack me a large serving or two of the biryani and some eggplant (it's sophistry to say things like eggplant and aubergine but at least they don't induce as much nausea as 'brinjal' does) and raitha. Half of this was consumed with great relish the following day since biryani always tastes better then (The TQ monitor usually goes kaput when applied to me). The other half our loving father took for lunch. With huge chunks of meat, etc.

The plan is simple when I die and reach the fork in the road where sinners are sorted out I'm going to smile and blame it all on upbringing.

Like one day, at the risk of severe repercussions, I pointed out to the mater and the pater that if the traits of any person depends on genetics and upbringing (what the neo Freudians like to call nature and nurture) I've absolutely no hope.

And I've been accused of being sexist.

Wtf?

Fear Of The Dark

It's been around for a while but I recently discovered a software that can replace Apple's Operating System on the iPod. Why? To make it more functional. Not that it'll cook breakfast or be a more active replacement for a spouse... Or even send emails or access the GPS to tell you where in the world in Carmen Sandiego. But what it can do is make file and music transfer a lot easier since it makes the 'Pod behave more like a hard drive than Apple's positively insane file system. And it can make the screen look like this.


This is the Vista Theme for those who haven't seen anything like it before, and there are more which look even better.
Add the options of using the device as a PDA (though typing involves scrolling through character by character), playing Games (maybe Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego, tetris for sure), easy file organisation a la the Creative Zen (as drive:\Artist\Album as opposed to F004 or whatever inane naming system the 'Pod already uses).
The only problem is I'm dead scared of hacking the iPod. Fooling around with Windows is not an issue. You can tweak, pull, rip to shreds anything at all and still get back to some bare bones version with only a bad memory of the incident. With the 'Pod I'm just not sure if I'll lose the 20GB of music, which is backed up somewhere but it's a Himalayan task to get all of it back and together with the proper tagging and album art and whatnot.
So here's the dilemma. To Rockbox or not to Rockbox.

Kids These Days

The weekend past was spent conducting a couple of lit events at St John's Medical College and attending a full paisa vasool concert. I did get in for free so theoretically it would have been paisa vasool if anyone but Himmesh was there but this was also a band that I have and would have paid to watch, time and again. The grammar in the previous sentence is of a dubious nature but there are reasons for that too. And the organisers at John's are a kindly bunch and thus the free entry.
Many thoughts have risen in the old cranium the past few days so this just might be a long ranty post so there's the headlines so you can scroll down to the relevant parts or just leave if you find them uninteresting
1. Lack of substantial participation in lit events
2. Rather depressing state of knowledge of the current TV generation
3. A somewhere it is Thermal and a Quarter Concert
4. The deplorable state of affairs regarding music taste or the difference between good music and popular music
5. Adobe Audition as the best audio editing software no matter how amateur you are or How what you hear is never what you get
6. What is this Gazzag anyway

Part I& II
So I was asked to conduct Word Games and 20 Questions at Autumn Muse 2006. It used to be a good fest in the years gone by attracting excellent talent in literary and debating events. Culturals will always be big anywhere. Vellore Engineering college gets some 15 western music bands so we shan't go there. Now there are hardly 5 teams in registering who know what the event is. And they don't know grammar. Or slang. Or difficult words. And in twentyQ somewhere along the way you realise that they aren't reading classics anymore. They aren't reading medicine either so what are they doing? TV? Awesome!!

Part III - Bring your Daughter to Thermal and a Quarter
Taaq turned 10. Have seen them and heard them for 9 of the 10 so I shall speak and not take flak. Like they say in Cheers, I'm rubber and you're glue, anything you say bounces of me and sticks to you. The concert started at seven and within twenty minutes of it's starting the heavens opened like they did an hour before the concert and the previous day. Incredible really. Autumn Muse does that to the weather. Clear skies for a week before and after the fest and torrential, end-of-the-world, let's all pair up and get on to the ark rains bang in the middle of the Rock Show. Squelchy but it's fun if you're at the sound console.
This was the song list
Galacktiqua, Look @ Me, Paper Puli, Sunset Man (Hallelujah!), Brigade Street, Wonderwall (yeah Oasis but I actually like the song now), Holy Jose (new), Sanity, Bend The World, How Can I Get Your Groove(clean, simple, awesome), Shine On You Crazy Diamond (another trip), Chameleon and Hoedown. How do I know? I've spent the last 36 hours trying to clean up the audio recording but more on that later. The one thing new that I saw this time was 23 year old Nate from the Chicago area who's here with his tenor saxophone which he cleans with used currency notes when it gets damp, by the way. Now Nate changes the way the band sounds to a level that I haven't seen in this many years. Be it blistering solos in Shine or Hoedown or fill-ins in Sanity there's something to it. Treading the fine line between staying in tune and straying off it, as he would say, it was trippy da.
Thank you lord that Bruce is back to singing and Pascal isn't. And like I said it was good fun and so was the 10 year anniversary bash after that.

Part IV - The serious bit
As the rains poured down the sound console had the usual influx of the audience who didn't think getting wet was a good idea but didn't mind the risk of electrocution with all the cables around. Now in the midst of the hoi polloi was one heckling gentleman screaming for rock. I do understand the individual preferences of the world at large and that would explain how Himmesh and the Backstreet Boys are oh so up in the ratings or why the only thing we get to hear in rock competitions is heavy metal. Or why Strings, Fuzon and Call are raking in millions by selling albums in India. It doesn't quite gel well. Shah Rukh Khan is a superstar while Nasserudin Shah is best known for his role in Tridev. Why no one's heard of Dave Matthews Band but would swear by 'Nsync. Why music with the shelf life of spoilt meat is so popular while enough good bands haven't gotten very far.
Time will change things they say. But a paradigm shift (how I love that phrase) in people's tastes is unlikely to happen and till then Himmesh is going to rule the roost.

Part V
Adobe Audition is so cool. That's all there is to it. Simple any moron (including yours truly) can work it with ease and actually get something that sounds almost, but not quite like perfect.

Gazzag. What kind of meaningless palindrome is that? The worst kind.

More editing remains me off.

And I made no spelling mistakes apparently.

A pass at glass

A refractory error is something that just happens. Either because you're genetically prone to it or your eyes and face are mismatched. Size-wise. The end result of such anatomical aberration is glasses about 3 times larger than your face by the age of 10 and a whole day of walking into school after the holidays and being treated like the new boy by classmates of 5 years. And being labelled 'soda' for a while. I'm guess the pride, privilege and pleasure of being the only kid with spectacles in class for four years made me decide that glasses were the mark of a man. And occasionally women.
Then school got changed to another more intensely academic and that was when I found many people with either similar genetic propensity or mismatched anatomy who had glasses of such thick glass that would bounce if they fell. Which they often did due to gravity. Thence I decided that glasses were the mark of men (and women) who spent most of their childhood like Boo Radley, locked up away from the sun devouring all manner of literature.
This is of course a unidirectional relationship since Boo himself didn't wear glasses. Statistics are so cool to play around with. That man wrote a best selling freaky book just by playing around with them. He did have a point to make about Ted Kaczynski though.
That's not the point I'm trying to make. Then came days of basketball and trying to decide between shards of broken glass in and round one's eyes, or lenses so scratched that it was easier with them off and with them off and missing the subtle eyebrow movement that indicated that I was supposed to pass but not the person who's face I couldn't discern.
Contact lenses are so cool. Nearly invisible. Reasonably comfortable and for the first time in 10 years the world looks equally clear in all angles of vision. It's not bounded by a metal frame, it doesn't get blurry on the edges and when topped up with ray bans, the world is a dull shade of brown but sharp and well defined. The basketball is big orange and has Spalding written on it, the jersey's have veritas curat in fine print and passes are to the right person with never-before accuracy. In such happy times Azozel and and Lucifer confer, angered by the joy in the world. And one drunk night you fall asleep with them on. And wake up with them stuck to your eyes and it takes a bottle of contact lens solution to get them off. Or alternatively you get sprayed in the face by some artery that an inept surgeon nicked. No it doesn't have to be a life threatening nick of a major vessel, even the small bugger bleed like crazy. A 120mm of mercury can push a spray from a 2mm arteriole up to 2 feet. A lower limb amputation would involve working around the femoral which is close to a centimeter in diameter. A 1mm nick can send blood up to the operating lights. Just so you know.
So we're back to glasses now. Plain and simple that don't turn brown at 8pm in the inside of a well lit banquet hall, that don't bounce and can break but don't get scratched and when at the receiving end of a camera glare like there's no tomorrow.
So we went with our occasional benefactor and source of all joy and money, viz., the materfamilias to procure ourselves another pair to see Red Riding Hood better with... which reminds me I need to see a dentist soon. And she needed a pair too. But considering she's on the wrong side of fifty and presbyopia can be a pain she needs bifocals. Now bifocals on the elders (note not elderly) are a treat when you're a kid looking at their eyes as they're looking at you. A few degrees of movement on your part, which is a small sacrifice, changes their eyes from small and beady to Poe's Vulture-eye. Which is worth it.
So the lady in the shop does the usual read the fine print thing and gives us the prescription and the man points out the various frames and pitches the latest technology in bifocals to the mater. She falls for it hook, line and sinker. The man then produces the bill. Mom's lenses, not the frame, the lenses cost half my erstwhile stipend because they're progressive and will be ready in a day. My lenses which are, as mentioned earlier; clear, plain glass will take four days. Apparently like vegetarian food at Empire or Fanoos the chef/optician's forgotten how they're made and needs to look up some encyclopedia for that.
So here I am with the Model T of visual aids the world looking just as it did with the old pair.

If you have issues with what's written read the label for this post.

Stumped... and trippy

And the blue eleven make fools of themselves yet again. Whoever went around saying things like we do well on our own doctored pitches and Sachin is back with a bang. Well maybe he was back with a bang, now he's out with it too. And there seems to be some 1 second delay between my typing something and it appearing on the screen. Need more coffee, I think.

So back to the rather dismal post-diwali damp squibness of the team despite some royal advertising by Pepsi and Nike. Which brings us to Sourav I-like-taking-my-shirt-off Ganguly in some pathetic Pepsi ad. What were they thinking?

Ranting and raving about how badly the team performs makes as much sense as banging the proverbial head against the proverbial wall. Just stopped the virus scan. Delay now reduced to negligible amounts. So instead we take a nice trip (more later on the "trip") into the history of sport with special reference to our motherland - England. Well the British Isles, broadly speaking, from whence the weirdest yet surprisingly popular sports have emerged - Golf, cricket and perhaps fox-hunting and hare-coursing.

What kind of jobless civilization decides to let all active sports go and invent games that could be "played" outdoors but with just about as much energy expenditure as say scrabble or Scotland Yard. Incidentally play Scotland Yard with new and improved rules, almost like Calvinball, it's a treat.

Golf - according to Robin Williams was invented by a drunk Scotsman who after a few shots of the ol' malt decided the following -

Mad Drunk Scotsman : I got an idea, I'm going to take a ball and knock it into a gopher hole with a stick.

Innocent Bystander : Like Pool?

MDS : @$#! Pool not like pool. I'm not going to use a straight stick, I'm going to use a little f@#$%d up stick.

IB : So like Croquet?

MDS : @#$! Croquet. Not like croquet. I'm going to put the gopher hole like yards and yards away. and put shit in the middle like trees and sand and a lake. So you'll keep hitting the ball with a tyre iron and every time you miss you'll feel like you're having a stroke... @#$! that's what we'll call it - we'll call it a stroke, 'cos every time you miss the ball you're going to die! And then... this is brilliant, I'll put some level and and a little flag near the hole, to give you hope. But I'll put a pool on one side and some sand on the other to @#$! with your ball. And you'll be stroking away thinking you're going to die...

IB : So you do this just once, right?

MDS : No, eighteen times...

And now that you've read all of this you can go here and take a look at the video.

My apologies.

Cricket is a very similar story. It's bad enough to have enough time and energy to want to hit a ball with a weapon of some kind, but these guys go all the way... the whole nine yards to come up with the weirdest set of rules.

The ball must be thrown with the arm above the level of the shoulder and the elbow extended at the point of release. Whatever happens before is fine. Paul Adams, way to go and that new Sri Lankan fellow, who's name escapes me.

Then you need to knock one of six sticks down. Or catch the ball or some such. Why is it so damn complex? Take this set of simple rules - Here's a ball, you can't touch it with your hands, or go out side the big white rectangle that we've drawn. Kick, head or chest it into that net on the far side and try not to kill anyone along the way. And you can only head the ball not your opponents.

Isn't that so much simpler. Or take this one. See that guy walking into our court muttering something? we have to grab him and hold him down or make sure he stops muttering. And if he grabs you, you're back on the bench.

Even chess and dungeons and dragons have a simpler rule book than cricket. Yet there are millions (thankfully restricted to the commonwealth and South Africa) who know all the rules and will come up with newer ideas to make things miserable for all concerned... and me.

Why me? Because you can't go around saying things like I'm not watching the match or I honestly don't care or Let them all go to hell without a significant proportion of the blue billion wanting to lynch you.

All that apart, here's on the word "trip"

A: Listened to that band da, the something quartet - ok it is.

B: Did you hear that one song, trippy it is.

A: It's ok nothing to go all crazy about. Supreme Beings is Trippy though.

C: Have you heard Hey by the Pixies? Trippy da, full addicting only that song is.

A: Yeah I downloaded it but I don't think it's all there.

D: I'm damn scared of this trippy word when you @#$!ers are around and drop it all the time...

That's all folks...

Nee Sandman?

All we read or get to nowadays is stories of how the kids just ain't right. And that some one's getting a face transplant. The last one got rejected on account of ugliness I think. It's interesting how medical research is funded. The first knee prosthesis released over a decade ago were simple hinge joints. In other words, they moved only in one plane and around a single axis. And cost the usual GDP of a tin pot little African country. The rich old men who could afford to both play golf and get their knees replaced realised that post getting enough metal in them to set of detectors in all airports except the ones in Bangalore, Delhi and Hyderabad, they couldn't play golf anymore. Not that golf is a game that requires one to be in the pink of health and prime of one's fitness but the issue here is simple - the swing, in golf, to be completed perfectly, requires a small amount of rotation in the joint. Now, the knee is easily one of the most complex joints in the body and though primarily a hinge, it does allow enough rotation to make Woods a Tiger on the fairway. It is also historically an extremely important joint and has been immortalised in the Tamil greeting "nee eppudi irruke". Digression apart, rich old men fuelled their rich old money into material research to give rise to this.

Miracle of modern engineering. And that's why as Chris Rock says we'll never find a cure for AIDS. Because then drug companies will go out of business. Then maybe they'll bring small pox back.
That apart been reading two incredibly creative and entertaining comic series - Fables and Sandman. More on them later. But this is a legend I read - every night as we tuck ourselves into bed, the Lord of Dreams comes along and sprinkles sand in our eyes. This makes us sleep (duh!) and the sand is what makes us dream. This also is why we wake up with a gritty, sandy feeling in our eyes.
So I did wake up with something that felt like sand all over my face for a long time. Maybe I need to start earlier. Circa 1980 when teak was actually available. So then the Provider decided to get himself some teak furniture that would look good and outlast us all. And in the midst of all the wood work were two beds. With proportions that required a custom built mattress (80"x30" - we were a tall thin race apparently). The headboards were out of a single piece of teak some three feet across, worth the GDP of a TPLAC (tin pot little...) in present day. And the years rolled on with little or no change outside of us becoming a tall not so thin race and the Provider's taste in wood changing. Albeit slowly but surely.
Then one fine shopping expedition a gargantuan bed with an intricately carved head board but with more acceptable proportions was procured and yours truly inherited the teak. The new bed though wonderfully carved is a dust magnet and if one is allergic the night is spent with the Sandman battling the Dust bunny. But that's not the story, is it? So the teak device was my place of somnolence for many a moon till I realised that I was waking up with the mother of all back aches every morning. And not because I was sleeping funny. Or anything. Investigation revealed that though the cool headboard was teak, the bed itself was plywood (incidentally invented by Alfred Nobel's dad). And teak lasts twenty years. Plywood on the other hand twists and turns with time and warps like the gravitational field of a small star.
The result is a morning-after back ache. The cure is to take the mattress and use it to soften the floor and enjoy a restful night or two. That's when the sandman came along with me waking to a faceful of dust. The legend we began to believe and dreams were in technicolour.
Till it all fell apart. The dreams, the legend and my mattress which was bought circa 1980. Made to order to fit the bed. It says Dunlop on top, like the tyre and over twenty years the rubbers becomes mud. Like the book says, "... and dust ye shall be." Looks like the folks got conned and got an adult rated mattress.
So it's now the not so soft floor. But I'll live. Looking for someone interested in buying the carved monster so that's one less piece of junk I have to deal with.

But on an aside on tyres, what do you do with 365 used condoms? Melt them down and make a tyre. Call it Goodyear.

Lead me not into...

...Temptation Wines.

Church Street is probably the most hedonistic place in bangalore. Unapt (it can't be inapt, can it?) nomenclature aside, greed and gluttony are worshipped and I'm sure in the recesses of the dark night you could add maybe lust and a couple more. And they call it Church street.

There was a plan, maybe a year ago to make it the upmarket "food street" like Ibrahim Sahib or that unnamed road of joy in the middle of VV Puram. And perhaps it can still be that. Some twenty odd restaurants dotting the 20 foot-wide asphalt serving everything from insipid samosas to appam and pandi curry, throw in some good biryani and a smattering of sushi and there you have it.

So a bunch of us where there last night under the awning of the very aptly named Temptation Wines. Sitting on the steps 6 feet from the road belting Bacardi and beer and making the worst jokes possible. For the record the link to silly puns was a hit with at least one person. I'm happy. As a certain commenter so succinctly put it, the rest of you can sod off if you don't like it. After much consumption of legal alcohol and discussions on the more illicit paakits which depending on the ISI (indian standards institute) mark on them may or may not turn you blind, we proceeded to the high temple of non -vegetarianism, videlicet, Empire. Now the normal grilled chicken/chicken kabab, ghee rice is an all time favourite but the management at Empire (who apparently have up to 60 Lakhs worth of outstanding Chicken credit with various sources of poultry in and around Bangalore) have opened an Arabian joint on the roof top. And to save time the menu (sans the prices) is printed on the door of the lift so one can decide what one's poison is on the way up. There are of course signs imploring one to use the stairs since it is perhaps a healthier way to ascend.

Standard issue pita breads and humus and sheekhs exist but the thing to consume is the Kabsa mutton. Which is a huge chunk of meat served on a bed of rice. We've done meat before but this chunk was simply incredible. Tender to a fault and when held up, meat slides off the bone under the influence of gravity. Gravity! No fork, hand, pulling, biting. Just slides off. Incredible. The chicken version isn't such a big deal, in fact it pales in comparison to the red meat.

Satisfaction guaranteed.

Orkut has decided to become user friendly and there's a new thing on the line which is innovatively titled "Gazzag". Cool palindromes apart will review it when I can.

Tell me about it

So things aren't as peachy or creamy as I thought they could be once I had the license. To take a knife to people with curative intent. Which would explain the lack of anything concrete to write about. Spent a few days in good old Pondicherry, essentially taking full advantage of the fact that the State has negligible taxes. At one point of time I wanted to fill a Jerry can with petrol and whisk it across the border. Which reminds me the car's off for the usual overhaul. Will be broke (me, not the car) for the next month so those of you who're planning on asking me to fund food, alcohol and other illicit habits, talk to the hand.
Discovered that Jamaican Passion Bacardi Breezer if spiked with anything above 60mL of Bacardi White Rum is an awesome drink. And also that the Lime Breezer is nothing but Limca. Yuck.
And the Beef Biryani joint in the vicinity of Muruga Theater is still active as ever and they remember old customers. As does the tea shop opposite the main gate of JIPMER.
Learnt a few filthy jokes in Telugu which due to a self-imposed prohibition on sleaze on the blog I can only relate in person. In any case there isn't anything worse than transliterated vernacular humor.
Discovered this.
And this story related by a friend on the etymology of a commonly used phrase.
Long years ago, during the Crusades, knights who due to insanity, peer pressure or sheer boredom decided to head to the holy land would usually lock their houses and their women. The famed chastity belt which now mostly features in strange BDSM pornography and perhaps museums of natural and unnatural history played a rather important social role in the locking up of the aforementioned ladies. These errant knights would leave the key with a trusted friend for safe keeping. And if and when they returned would be welcomed by a presumably fidel (what's the word derived from fidelity that should come here?) close friend and wife. So one such knight in armour decided to save Jerusalem and as custom determined, did the whole locking and stocking and maybe some barrelling before the locking and stocking and gave the key to his friend and rode off. He hadn't gone ten miles when a breathless friend on a breathless horse galloped up and informed him that the key was the wrong one. The knight replied, "Yeah? Tell me about it..."
Cheers.

3 weddings and my funeral

Got happily drunk on beer yesterday and in the midst of many irrelevant statements on life, the universe and everything realised a few things. One, Beer is God's way of telling us that we still hold a special place in his heart. Two, it's always a good thing to drink without having anything to do the next day. No work, nothing to read, no deadlines breathing down your neck - good thing. And three, beer is God's way of telling us...
Had an enlightening chat about a north Indian wedding with a friend. Which brings us in record time and space to the subject matter in dispute here. After Vadakancheri and this really cool Arya Samaj wedding I attended the discussion brought back memories of a Punjabi wedding that I was subjected to a while back. So here we are with a standard-issue compare and contrast.
Vadakancheri was you typical Palaghat Iyer affair, replete with the Kashi Yatra (where the groom, disgusted with the whole concept of marriage pulls this mock show of taking off to Kashi or some such place of spiritual interest to renounce this world of materialism. Methinks it's performance anxiety that made the first groom think of such a thing but can't say that out loud. The in laws-to-be then coax the poor sod back into the fold and proceed to get him married before he can think of escaping again.), the old women in heavily gold-embroidered silk sarees discussing everything from family gossip to potential suitors of every unmarried girl in a ten km vicinity, kids vying for a place next to the couple to inhale the fumes of the pyre. No, fumes of the fire. And the usual old men talking about how good the Railways was in 1932 and how the pension check isn't coming in on time, and how today's generation is simply too disgusting to be left alive and in charge.
The Arya Samaj wedding is a simple, highly interesting affair. Lasts for about an hour, maybe ninety minutes if the man in charge is a little on the slow side. Only the incantations specific to two people being united in holy matrimony and a quick spin around the pyre. Damn, fire. Classmates of the groom resorting the the usual hooliganism in the back chairs. The priest, usually one who's not playing with a full deck - I think he's got just the jokers - translates every line in Sanskrit to Hindi, Kannada and English (I'm sure the languages change with place but one never knows). And before you're done laughing at groom turning red at mention of his (potential) children or his rather frequent bored expression, it's over. May we all adjourn for lunch, never to return.
In stark contrast to all this is the shindig that happens to the north of the Vindhyas and, nowadays due to the exodus, all over the world. So much so that movies and even discovery travel and living, which the world seems to think the world of, does a documentary on the more expensive of these. After HAHK (which sounds like a cat with a fur ball problem) it seemed rather surreal that the many events depicted in that torturous film would actually happen in real life. And then I ended up at this wedding. Landed close to dinner time to a quiet open area with little activity outside of waiters and the buffet. The barat apparently was having trouble with traffic. This I decided needed investigation. So off we went following some distant cacophony to locate the problem.
A mass of humanity herded along on either side with similar humanity carrying tube lights was the first thing that was observed. Then the sound of a portable generator (to power the tube lights) and the sound of an live orchestra. Incidentally on the same truck as the generator vying to out sound the diesel motor with minimal success. Then the horse. With the groom on top and horse-byproducts behind. A million drunk revellers (which I can empathize with) and a brass band. A full brass band. Playing souped up jazzy renditions from the aforementioned HAHK and the more nauseating DDLJ. So this bunch after being temporarily hindered by an ambulance, a cow and the police, proceeded to arrive at the open buffet space.
Then someone wanted to steal shoes. That's when I realised that there sometimes is little difference between reality and celluloid. Stealing shoes apparently is a huge money making racket that persists despite all logic. And more money can be made with the aid of neem leaves and black mail.
And at around 3 am when the vampires have decided that it's time to head coffin-wards, the bride and groom decide to do the old fire spin egged on by close relatives, considering the rest of the invitees have either passed out or decided to go spend that dubiously earned shoe money.

In the midst of all this is me going why can't we just sign the papers and get on with it. But ours is rarely to reason why. And why should we? It's not my funeral. Yet.

Addendum : Condom sales from vending machines in Gujrat during navratri where the whole dancing thing happens for many a night in a row show an astronomical increase from the average for the rest of the year.

Reality Bites

It's one AM. And sleep eludes me in a manner that would make Carlos, the Jackal not Santana, raise an impressed eyebrow and smirk a "You're good kid, real good. But as long as I'm around you'll still be second best." This takes me back to a 36 stanza trip I wrote once one the Mask that has disappeared along with many cherished and not so cherished things in the midst of the four or five changes of residence that used to happen in my life.
It is done, by the way. A day long assessment of three years of learning that didn't go quite as well as one may have liked. Those who've trod (treaded?) that path have attempted to console me by saying that the point of post graduate exams is to squelch all resistance that one's ego might put up while being... squelched. The end result is a blubbering, hypoglycemic idiot who ends up watching Munna Bhai Part Deux.
It's not so bad a movie. But remove Arshad Warsi and it is. Not in quite a state to give movie reviews though Sin City is relatively fresh in the mind and a take on the Movie and comic might come around some time. File that with the waiters from idiotville who despite incessantly managing to make life for all and sundry a living hell have not made it to this blog.
Back to the blubbering blathering bashibazouk... (couldn't resist that. Just discovered all of Tintin on my computer in .cbz) Strangely an unfortunate fallout of the ego bashing, rather humiliating experience is a sudden fear that treating patients may not be such a good idea. That I'm hoping should pass. On an aside I've decided that unsolicited medical advice over the phone or via the internet will not be given any more. It may be given over coffee and beer but not over the phone. The next person who calls in sick will have to first rattle off their credit card number, it's expiry date and that cool 3 digit number at the back of the card. No more Mr. Nice Guy. With the possible exceptions of Kiera Knightley, Koena Mitra and the Ku Klux Klan (the last bunch will get a prescription for Diazepam and Lasix, just to see what happens) and any thinly veiled dancing girls who decide to call.
Results of the afore-oft-mentioned exam will be declared on the blog when they're declared to me.
If random TV trolling gave rise to a distaste for Power Rangers in any avtaar, it's also gotten me thinking about reality shows. What is it about us as humans that we want to see other's misery. And other's lives. In technicolour.
I will admit that a few of those shows are good- The Amazing Race and Pimp My Ride, off the top of my head. But the rest? Disaster Videos, Best Police Chases of All Time, Ripley's (for crying out loud some moron has a tissue expander in his forehead and is obsessed with body modification), How to get a date?, The Apprentice, that stupid designer show... the Cut (I think), Survivor, Indian Idol and finally the killer - Fear Factor.
What kind of weird prostitution is Fear Factor all about? I might give you money if you eat these worms faster than her. And your mom's watching. And some statutory warning to not attempt the stunts at home. Hey, lets all get some tarantulas and jump into the tub. After that we can get the eggs of some endangered species and eat them. Ostriches. The only upside to the whole thing is this woman called Summer Papania. Don't bother googling - there are no pictures of her. If you missed the ostrich egg episode and the favourite winner episode, you aren't ever going to see her again till the reruns. Reruns of Fear Factor is the end of creative television.
But why are we so fascinated with misery being inflicted on our brethren (and sistren)? I don't have the guts or the inclination to eat a worm, as early as I may be up, and I sure as hell don't want to see someone else eating them. But the rest of the planet seems to want that kind of entertainment. It's the modern day Colosseum. An arena of pitched battle and fatal fighting with a significant section of society watching and enjoying what deep down inside they know is disgusting.

Et tu?

Couple of quips on the net that made me believe in the existence of sentient sapient beings on this planet.

A: Dude would anybody be upset if I confessed to being turned on by her drinking an ostrich egg (w.r.t. the Summer episode)
B: Nobody but the Ostrich...

Still no Sleep.

Power Up!

A tryst with destiny is something that happens once every 50 odd years, they say. Like Haley's comet and perhaps a good hindi film song. That doesn't involve jhankar beats, Bappi Lahari or Babul Supriyo or some other skanky characters of dubious genetic make up. But I sway from my purpose, after all digression is my middle name. Actually it's my first name. Always works are my middle and last names respectively. For those not working with a full deck of cards that would mean my name is Digression Always Works.

If there's one thing worse than a bad joke, it's the explanation.

My tryst with destiny after that little scenic detour is tomorrow. It represents the culmination of years of training, the efficiency of which will be judged in a matter of may be an hour and a half. All ye who feel that's unfair and extend sympathy in my direction I'm deeply touched and a few prayers would touch me more.

That isn't the point either. During my rather long study leave I have managed to actually get some studying done between two hourly mail checks, three hourly catnaps (that would mean I'm dozing on the keyboard every six hours) and frequent trips to the refrigerator and the idiot box. The idiot box of course follows the universal law that the more number of channels the less the likely hood of finding something remotely interesting to watch. In one of these random surfs I discovered that I get Jetix - Disney's animation/unmentionables channel. Since I like animation (yeah I think the Swat Kats are cool, so bugger off), I thought this might just be the panacea for all ennui. But, alas, at various randomly picked times of day the only thing on Jetix was Power Rangers.

Which now brings us to the point. Which crazy, demented, high on LSD or some such synthetic psychedelic specimen thought up that show? Even worse which crazy, demented, high on LSD or some such synthetic psychedelic specimen decided to adapt the show from Japanese TV to international broadcast. With Disney at that. It all went downhill after Walt died. Japanese entertainment is tailor-made for a very specific audience - Japanese. Nobody outside of them and perhaps 6 year-old precocious boys can understand it. Pokemon, Beyblade have taken over the minds of these kids. So much so that they can't operate the VCR anymore which used to be exclusively a 6 year old's domain. I will at this point confess that Takeshi's Castle is entertaining. Very funnily so. It reminds me of the Darwin Awards and of lemmings.

But the Power Rangers... If one season of Morphin' idiots in opaque helmets in all colours of the rainbow was not enough, they now have some ten variations of it. All of which come at different, randomly chosen times of the day on Jetix. Now I agree I'm not meant to watch stuff of that intellectual calibre but I don't think anyone is. Especially 6 year olds. The last thing you need is some pesky brat in an opaque helmet running into everything thinking he's going to save the world. Then they have this talking dog ranger. Whose muzzle vanishes in the helmet. And throw in some corny humor. And some potential racism with an African American playing the Black Ranger, and an Asian playing the Yellow Ranger. Which brings us to a disturbing thought, did Quentin get his idea of naming everybody by colour from the Rangers?

The end is nigh. Of the world and maybe this post.

And the show was banned in Malaysia due to the fact that these goofs in spandex kept shouting "It's Morphin' Time!" And Malaysians don't take kindly to references, as oblique as they may be, to Morphine.

OK it's back to the perusal of the famed textbook so toodle-oo and pip-pip.

Microwaved rays

Ok this is, as embarrassing as it may be to admit, the third time I'm sitting down to write a post in 2 days. It's not just your average writer's block, apparently, which usually resolves in the second attempt to write a post, unless one is James Joyce. Or some pathologically deranged creature with suicidal intent every time a blog goes unwritten.
The problem is that this is to some extent therapeutic. If we could get the average agoraphobic sociopath to blog and of course throw in some fake comments to con them into believing someone was listening we'd manage to get old Sigmund into the Internet age. Of course these need to be access controlled since we don't want other agoraphobic, sociopathic, Internet junkies getting ideas to destroy civilian life and property from them.

So here goes attempt three.

The stingray menace is being actively tackled down under, apparently by dragging them onto land. What is wrong with people? Steve Irwin died. We're sorry about that but lopping tails off stingrays doesn't solve anything. I'm not even sure they taste good. But this might just explain things.

In other things that managed to mess my life up, albeit not significantly enough is the microwave. This device powered by electricity but more importantly radiation at 2450 MHz (that's a wavelength of 12 cm approx, which I thought was pretty large) was the brainchild of one Percy Spencer whose candy bar melted in front of a Radar. Stopping short of running down the streets naked and proving the Archimedes principle yet again, he patented it and for many generations ensured that his descendants could live off the interest from the royalties.
That's not the story. Of late the microwave oven has become an indispensable kitchen accessory. Of course it can't grill or roast but who wants the carcinogens anyway. We like boiled food nowadays - it's apparently healthier. And even more salubrious if we do away with salt and pepper. Garlic is still fine. But if you want to breakfast on it just make sure you stay out of the halitotic radius.
In a woman-less household the microwave is of prime importance. In many a bachelor pad, the day starts with paying obeisance to this mighty machine of easy cookery. And consuming it's offerings with relish. Mine is one such abode that resisted the temptation to get one for many a year till our fridge (which contains mostly cold stored pickle, beer and orange juice) died a sad demise. Some wheeling-dealing later we now have a new fridge and a microwave. Joy was that day. Food could be warmed in 2 minutes, pop corn was now do-it-yourself and aerosol cans were no longer kept in stock.
Things went along well. The bell was a joyous sound that meant food was ready and hot. The hazards of trying to heat plastic boxes of frozen food - most involving molten/melted plastic and a tendency for it to coat the digestive passage - were no longer present. The metal rimmed mugs were strategically broken beyond Araldite's reach and all was good. Till Dad decided to put a bowl (microwave safe) of rajma in without a cover despite there being a full roll of cling wrap in the immediate vicinity.
The third item to be tested in a microwave ever, was an egg. Apocryphal perhaps, but here it went in before the chicken and needless to say it burst. As do tomatoes. Boiling rajma also as a similar tendency. Dinner therefore, involved spooning it out from all 6 walls of the oven and spending the rest of my life dreading the bell.

Tomorrow, they say, is another day.