bloh bloh...

I am a big admirer of Tamil music . I think the Tamil music industry and the Tamil film industry have have created some of the best music in this world - and by world ,I mean the world and not just US ,Canada & Puerto Rico.

Being a keralite (Yes Payilukale..Iyam a mallu ) helped as there was always easy access to tamil movies and songs and we malayalees are culturally very close to tamil makkall except for one Mr TR Balu (angeru vaangikkum !) and some people on the wrong side of the Mullaperiyar dam..

This plus the fact that I am a born again Kamal Hassan fan led me to tears when I listened to "Yaar Yaar sivam " from Anbe Sivam.

My wifey is fed up with me as usual because that seems to be the only thing that comes out of my Mouth…

W : Cooked food?
M : Yaar yaar Sivam…
W : Washed dishes ?
M : Anbe Sivam….
W: $%$^%^

Pathetic jokes aside, I really enjoyed listening to the song and it led my memories back to Thenpandi Cheemayille and a couple of others melodies rendered by Kamal. And then..Wow !! What a guy !

I am not seeing or listening to Kamal for the first time, but every now and then , I can't but stop and appreciate this man.I know that people have their own diverse share of opinions, but the stupendous effort that Kamal puts into his works alone is enough to inspire people.While our home grown " superstars" are still cashing in on past glory ,here is one guy who really reinvents himself with each movie he does.Thanks Kamal for not taking us for granted.
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Results of the Musical chair competition conducted by Sonia Gandhi last week :-

RL Bhatiya, Governor of Kerala became Governor Of Bihar and
RS Gavai, Governor Of Bihar became Governor of Kerala

The orgainizers of this event reserve the right to change the results anytime - The decision from 10 Janpath will be final ,binding & beyond comprehension .

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So Jesse Jackson Sr wants to cut off Obama's nuts and Jesse Jackson Jr says he vehemently opposes it. Whoa ..what a family !!
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bloh...

So finally the dust has set down on a lot of things, the primaries in US, santosh madhavan in Kerala,indiana jones in hollywood,the olymbic torch relay in China,Euro 2008 in Spain and the Phoenix in Mars.

And life seems to have achieved a new super low in terms of excitement , that I have started deriving my daily dose of moitvation by focussing my skills on keeping track of the count of cockroaches I kill ,the missed farts, the # of flush downs I do every morning to get a clean Kakkoose and even the mileage of my car.

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Saw WALL E last Friday, as usual Pixar delivers what it promised and more.Its time for a dud from them,its high time they stopped making great movies ...be human,be hollywood.

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I am playing Call of Duty in my Wii now, its getting difficult….got to find out few excuses to call it trash and return to the store.

Action...

Recently I have started having dreams with logical conclusions. Every one of them seem to have a
well defined plot,characters with personalities, climaxes and sometimes even anticlimaxes.
Overall my dreams seem to have very good production values , and sometimes bizarre too..I had this
scene in one of my dreams in which I was romancing with the female lead while relaxing on top of
a huge sleeping croc and suddenly the croc awakes..

Too much of movies may be…people say that when you get obsessed with something ,things like this
happen.If that’s case then I would forever be obsessed with cinema and film making.After all its free
entertainment with lot of ideas with scoop value - only if I ever make that one movie which has been always
playing there in the imax in my head…

Have been reading "Rebel without a Crew" by Robert Rodriguez…
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Last saw : Paradise Now - Palestinian movie by Hany Abu- Assad and as the director said is an artistic
view of the Palestinian political issue.Winner of the 63rd Golden Globe award for Best Foreign Film
***************************************************************************************
I need help - Can some one tell me why Hillary is still there in the race for nomination??

Life goes on..

The "improvement in the diets of people in India and China", which is forcing the governments there to keep food "inside" is a cause for the current global supply shortage, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has said.

This and what Dubya said (pretty much the same ) a couple of days later shows how hypocrisy & self indulgence have dwarfed the thoughts of the developed world.Blaming the development of the third world and the desire of its people for a better standard of living for the global food crisis as they call it, is nothing but disgusting & preposterous.

PS : US is the nation which consumes the most calories per person along with the most gas per person.

*************************************************************

Saw Antonia's Line two days back - Amazing movie , a definite recommendation to all free spirited people

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The past few months have been very exciting and I am sure like me a lot of you people might have become addicted to tracking & following the Democratic Primaries and Caucuses.

I really wonder how Hillary feels now, the transformation from being the Queen waiting coronation to her present state must have been quite an experience for her.Who would have ever thought that the primaries would become such a tough race for her and America would get a new and inspiring leader in Obama….

By the way…I don’t have anything to do with US politics..I am not even a US citizen…but yes..Oobaamaa Oobaamaa does sound good :)

Into the Wild

Finally got Sean Penn's "Into the Wild " off my wish list.Have been wanting to watch it for a while , I missed it when it hit the theatres.Got the CD from netflix and as I had thought the movie was more poetic than I read in the media.The life and death of Chris (read here) gets a new life through this movie and kudos to Sean Penn for making it.

Emile Hirsch has done a fantastic job as Chris.Infact every one of them in the cast seemed alive to me, especially Hal Holbrook( he deserved 'the' nomination).


The movie leaves you with a feeling of loss and admiration,loss of a friend,son,bother..and admiration for someone who tried to defy all odds to get what he wanted,however stupid it may seem to the rest of the world.

Genre: Drama
Starring: Emile Hirsch, Marcia Gay Harden, William Hurt, Jena Malone, Catherine Keener
Director: Sean PennScreenwriter: Sean PennProducer: Sean Penn ,Art Linson, Bill Pohlad
Composer: Michael Brook, Kaki King, Eddie Vedder

Wow !

The Ukulele orchestra of Great Britian has done a really brilliant job with this...

Why I still hang around rediff..

Rediff has always been 'the site' , atleast for me..right from the baby days of internet in India
to the present day of WIFI and cell phone browsing. Not because of its content or lightening fast Email, but because it symbolizes India for me in many ways…right from the zillions of pop-ups which blast out ,irritate you and refuse to go away like the vendors in a baazar to the crappy user comments centered around topics like Sachin -Sourav , Rajni-amithab,Mohanlal -Mammotty,North India- south India, Hindi- Tamil and what not. You can also find the occasional champion for national integration putting up his concerns and geting booed by the others ,who, my best guess, could be jobless software engineers like me trying to kill their time by practicing creative sadism( ya..'v been there..done that )


It is the ideal virtual microcosm of India where cricket gets a lot of space along with Mallika Sheravat,Astrology,outsourcing,how to file your income tax ,tips to succeed in the stock market and yes, more cricket.Not even a bit of space is vacant.Links to thousands of resources cover the whole page along with advertisements coaxing you to get your horoscope report ,get employed,get married ,invest for your future..buy stuff..phew..It has everything ..doesn't it....


Click any article on anything, scroll down to the user comments and you can invariably see an often moderated "healthy discussion" which borders on the verge of exploding into a full grade war had it not been for the fact that everything is virtual in the virtual world. It could be a topic as distant as life on Mars, but somehow every topic translates into something Indian and often to virtual fights. Sometimes I wonder why ? Is this how it should be.Is it something human or is it something Indian.? Not that being Indian is not being human or vice versa..Well I guess having done the rhetoric ,I should leave it to the social scientists to do the research…


But maybe this is how it must be, and this is what makes rediff ,rediff ;a place where you can shout, sing,learn and ofcourse check your email at the speed of lightening and feel at India (that’s home) I can go on and on..after having created my first email Id with rediff which I still keep.. its been a long journey for the past 8 years.. And I am sure it will go on..

Idiocracy-- hows that for a change?

If there is one thing on which the 'evolutionaries' and supporters of Intelligent design would concur, it would be on the impossibility of Idiocracy.Evolution is the survival of fittest supported by intelligence and can go only forward.And as far as Intelligent Designers are concerned ,its all been already planned and thought of .

Well Mike Judge and Etan Cohen doesn't seem to think so and so does the hilarious movie they made an year back.Idiocracy is all about the reversal of evolution or biological devolution and how stupid the world can end up being if things go the way the movie says its going.

But as in all American movies the world in this one also means America & Americans(all of whom look like immigrant labourers from Mexico,whether a pun was intended is still unknown at this point of time).May be Mike and Etan had second thoughts on portraying their idea on a planet earth scale due to obvious reasons which need not be made explicit(Did you not see the word 'Obvious'??).

Well those who want to know more about the movie can read on here.

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/idiocracy/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy

Christopher McCandless

I doubt if anyone knows this guy.

It was in a small article in last week's TIME that I came to read about this guy.Sean Penn is making a movie on him,after the best selling book on him by Jon Krakauer 'Into the Wild'.Curious to know what this guy was all about I did some research and well ,not a day has passed since without looking up and finding something about him.He was no scholar,actor,statesman or biz leader,just a 24 year old guy who got fed up with the world and went into the wild to bring sense to life.

Chris McCandless(Feb 12, 1968 – Aug 1992) came from a well to do family,graduated from the Emory(FYI..Salman Rushdie teaches there now..)and at the age of 22 severed ties with the whole world,burned all the money he had,hitch hiked around North America under the name Alexander Supertramp and disappeared into the Alaskan wilderness only to return dead.

Was he an anarchist? He was no Abbie Hoffman.But what he did was anarchism of a different order to the world. To him, it was the only way , the true way.

To me he embodies the thirst for realization and courage to go to any extreme for that.He once remarked to his friend (who employed him as a help for a short while) ,

“Sometimes I wish I hadn’t met you though. Tramping is too Easy with all this money. My days were more exciting when I was penniless and had to Forage Around for my next meal… I’ve decided that I’m going to live this Life for some time to come. The Freedom and Simple Beauty of it is just too good to pass up.”

Chris died of starvation.His body was found by moose hunters in an old abandoned bus in the woods.Whether he found what he set out for is something nobody knows.And what he would have told the world had he come back alive is also something we dont know.

But he set out..he had the courage..

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1661699,00.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_McCandless
http://www.chipbrown.net/articles/intowild.
http://www.emorywheel.com/detail.php?n=24126

Missing the company..

In the past few months, the thought of again being an active blogger must have crossed my mind atleast a zillion times.But everytime it just whooshed away through my stray thoughts and nothing happened.

Its not just me.I have seen a lot of active bloggers in the same path.It was not a
sudden disillusionment of sorts,but more of an uncalculated drift away from writing stuff.
It starts with long gaps between posts,once the gaps become too long,it is again broken
with a comeback post.Two or three more may follow to keep company,but the same story
follows.Sort of a slow death for which nobody might ever write an obituary.

The count of 'dead blogs' all over the net are increasing day by day.Atleast a dozen I
regularly tracked have completey withered down save the lone comment by a stray scavenger.
Sometimes I wonder..where are these people? Who used to post by dozens every week?
All the Comments and courtesy comments? Was blogging just a fad of the time?

Where are you guys?

See this..

"It will take time to restore chaos" -George .W. Bush

It is quite obvious that he did not have any idea regarding what he was talking about(well he rarely has !), but I guess this will go down in history as one of the most prolific philisophical quotes ever made
by a dumb politician.

What Dubya intended to convey will always remain a mystery like his political intellect or administrative prowess.But taken as an independent quote, the interpretations this quote has received hints that the butterfly effect of this will be tremendous.

I have attached the video for your reference :

Does it really matter?

The Indian political scenario currently is very active thanks to the upcoming presidential poll.

Speculations on who will get to laze around(there are exceptions) as the first citizen of the world’s largest democracy have almost come to an end, though some still believe that it is still not a lost cause and is worth putting more time and effort into. It really amuses me, that people can( me included) get hooked to something in which they have the least or almost no choice and which never has been a cause of terrible nightmares.

Historically, the office of the Indian President has always been just another office in New Delhi. A sort of five star retirement home for the old political stallions who could no more win a derby,but wanted very much to be part of it.They never intended to do anything great,nor felt it was a really great office that mattered.

Seems the story is no longer so.Ever since Abdul Kalam, the accidental president, turned things around in Rashtrapathi Bhavan by making sensible use of the office as well as the paraphernalia that came along with it, the Presidency of the Union of India seemed to have gained much charm,even to the surprise of those who made him the first citizen.

But it’s a sad thing that none of the political parties of India have not learned from this example.They still want it to be part of their extended political ego rather than a symbol of Indian unity and belief in democracy.

Im not here to comment on the credentials of the others in the fray, for it serves no purpose.Any candidate can invite the wrong questions,for the age we live in is filled with events that creates the reasons for these questions.But atleast we could have found someone like Kalam,to whom the entire nation looks up to,adorn the position.

Afterall this is one position whch holds minimal powers, but a lot of respect; Can't we just think beyond the silly differences ?

Or is it too much to ask?

Jhansi ki Mademoiselle..

Saw the kid on her back?

Good! So you know where its all going to...

Hotel Rwanda

The high...

I am going through a bout of laziness,which of course is an every now and then thing for me.Its again therapautic.You feel so pissed of with yourself at the end that you finally start doing things ..yeah we do!


All sorts of things happen in between.Visions of life a going to be wasted,dreams of operating the tv remote with the mere spark of a thought,the fear of de-evolving into one of those slimy slothy creatures which sleeps for a 100 years,wake up to walk a millimetre,eat a fly and go back to sleep for another 100 years..all the while the delusions seem to echo with the angry words of somebody's wife..(yeah it has always been a little vague)


And when the high is reached,well always a new one every time,you just cant believe you are there,and when its over you just feel proud , of having experienced a never before feeling ...It might seem abstract,but thats the whole philsophy of it..


hehe..:)

'Barber'ic

Which canthree are you fam?
India..
U speak guth engleas far Endians…
Thanks!
And you mam?
I cam from the Nederlands..u kna Hollanth?
Of course I ve learned in geography?
U wenth to collage in Endia?
Yes.

Whath didh you larn?
Computers..
Ok u on business?
No Im a consultant..u know..

Ya..u like America..
Just moved in…
You?
I don’t….too hot here…Nederland is cold…I like Cold..
So you wanth it shorth?
Yes..

Size 4 or 2..?
I dint get you..?
Short or too short?
Sides and back …too short
Up and front …short..

Client demo follows.

Will that do?
Yep…

Roar of machines..
Is that fine?

Nothing was left..,it was the most tragic sight..the magic tuft which strategically covered my forehead was gone..
Light took turns in bouncing to and fro from the head of the guy in the front me and.. well my own….

total tragedy..

It hot in Bombay?
Yes..
You like America…?
No
Why… ?

Ith too cold..
I wanth to go back to Endia….i like. hoth..

Missing..

Its been over a month now here in the US..And for all its greatness,America seems to me as a superbly boring country..Empty roads,sleepy malls..and silence all the way ..you might as well believe this is a huge empty parking lot rather than the united states of..

All the thank yous,welcomes and the courtesy bickerings seems to be taking its toll on me..No filled up transport buses blowing up the dust,not autorickshaws to have bumpy rides ending in arguments..no paan stains on the walls..no crowded theatres..no cricket,no spicy fish curries..no cow dung on the road,no elephants blocking traffic..

I guess I'm missing India, and missing it badly..

Those days...

I hope all of you ,if not at least most of you might ,or maybe at the least some of you might be very familiar with 'Malgudi days'.I am not talking about the book,which incidently I have not read,but about the televised version which I saw as a kid every week in Doordarshan some 20 years back.

The reason why this has come back to my mind and fingertips is that I happened to read about this somewhere in the net last week,and I happened to get this link( of the copyright owners)where you can see some of the episodes.

Casually I hovered over the links wondering whether I had enough time to spent over this, but ultimately made the click.I was riveted for the next 2 hours and watched 4 episodes at a stretch.

The freshness of Malgudi and the innocence of Swami (played by Manjunath) took me back through my memories to the nights when we three kids,Achan,Amma and Babychechi,our maid servant ;used togather in front of our old Dyanora TV to catch 30 minutes of Malgudi.Babychechi did not understand a bit of Hindi,but laughed along with us when my eldest sister gave the running translation for each of the dialogues.Achan of course was the serious one,breaking out with a laugh only once in a while.

It was not just Malgudi,there was Wagle ke Duniya,Fauji and Mahabharath..of course everything used to be in Hindi,we were sad that nothing was there for us in the south.But all of them had some standard and the whole neighbourhood could enjoy them.(Something like the Bill Cosby Shows in US)

My parents always made it a point that we watch all these as a family,if not as a neighbourhood.Everybody was welcome.
And these 30 Mins played a very important role in building up our characters as kids,it was not just the show.

Twenty years later we have more than 300 channels nationwide,but not a single program or channel has been able to replicate the magic which DD did for us.India has changed a lot,the people,the economy,lifestyles..and I sometimes feel that those good old days were the best,though they were not the best in all ways.And these thoughts are reinforced by the trash we have in TV now..

Clearly,Those were the magical days; when even TV serials had souls..:)

:)

hihi..

Its been no blogging for quite sometime now..and i felt i was out of this..but i guess, i can never leave it alltogether and that i have to make visits often if not every now and then.



So many things happened meanwhile..I got married , bid goodbye to my bachelor life, had an exciting duel with chikungunya(spell check:)),missed a honey moon,moved to theUS for a while
and missed out on many things which i loved doing..



Reading,writing,movies..it all seems long ago now..I guess everyone has one of these phases in which they lose touch with what they used to enjoy doing.. due to domestic and other reasons.

But its sort of good,because it makes the stuff more exciting and fullfilling..:)



Well guess now its time for me to be back in action ....and lets see how long i last this time..:)

A GOOD YEAR

REVIEW :A GOOD YEAR (2006) Director: Ridley Scott
Cast: Russell Crowe, Tom Hollander, Marion Cotillard

A Good Year is a good movie..:)
Apart from the histrionics of Russel Crowe, Tom Hollander and Marion Cotillard, the movie also boasts of engaging dialogues, wonderful screenplay and picturization.

The Story by Peter Mayle, is nothing exceptional.It asks us to take a break from our busy lives and look beyond everything to what life actually is..in this case what the author thinks..more precisely a relaxed life in a French Vineyard..maybe possible for the lucky few who have the double luck of being able to afford to chuck out a high profile job as an investment banker and at the same time inherit a chateau in France.

But the movie by Ridley Scott makes it feel better.The humourous dialogues ,the frames dipped in gold and ofcourse Rusell Crowe as Max..

Well nothing exceptional... yet not that bad..

A Good Year is a good movie...:)