Crap

OK.
  I don't know. But for some reason, my voice has started slurring whenever I speak English of complicacy a little more than "Uhh", "Um" and "What?"... See? I don't think there's even a word called complicacy! It's throwing up a spelling error! Got to go over this logically. Yeah, I just finished three seasons of House MD, so a little bit boolean shouldn't be much of a problem... What changed after coming here?
   
1. I am in Chennai, TN. Very homogeneous society in terms of linguistics. Language: Tamizh. English negligible. Seri.
          I have also, for some bizarre reason, cut myself off from the outside world. Just the odd, politically-incorrect comment in Facebook. A like here and there...
2. I have just finished reading The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger and think the protagonist is this lousy, rich idiot with a hormonal imbalance problem. But still, there's no denying the book became famous because the character gets to you. (Or rather, you know it's famous and controversial. Therefore, you know it's supposed to get to you. So even if it doesn't, your brain convinces yourself that you're being gotten by it. Kinda like the anti-placebo. You're given water, but if you think its poison... )

Hmm...

3. I haven't posted in a long time...

    Ah...

That should nail it. Will keep posting... 

Till then... A little bit of gen randomness...

Geethadhunikku thakadheem thatri kita thom
NachurahE gori ta tattai tai tattai thirakatom 

(Listen to it..

.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ms1uCciowog )

Entry

 The writer's entry for Cactus Flower, the annual magazine by the English Press Club, BITS, Pilani. (Didn't get selected though, so read and comment) 

THE GRAND UNIFIED THEORY

-          Prasannaa Venkatesh

A mulatto…

    “You listen to Indian bands?” intimidated the senior’s voice, “Name some.”

An albino…

   “Um, Lounge Piranha, Junkyard Groove, E Flat and others, sir”.

A mosquito…

   “E Flat? Ok, imagine that lappy over there is me and sing an E Flat song to it, nicely.”

My Libido…

   Fixating my eyes on the computer, I sang, “Wwould, ssomeone please open up thiss ssarcophagus, ‘cos I’m a living zzombie…”. Of course my voice was trembling. It had only been a few days since I’d arrived on campus, proudly strutting about like I owned this blue blooded institution and voila, I was in a senior’s room, singing my favorite Chennai band’s song like some sub Saharan who had been dropped in Siberia, shivering and splattering.

   “Do you listen to metal?”

My Denial… My denial… My denial…

  “Not much, sir. Only grunge; I’m more into alternative rock.”

  “Metal is good man. I’m not surprised. The metal scene in Chennai is yuck.”

My Denial… My Denial… My Denial…

 “Not exactly, sir. Null friction is a decent band…”

 My Denial… My Denial… My Denial…

  “Null friction is not metal, dumbo… Listen to Lamb of God or Pantera...”

  Kurt Cobain and I remained in our state of denial in the background…

     

                                                                 A few weeks later…

“Let’s start. One, two, three, four…”

      The room, hitherto very still and silent suddenly burst with music as the violin and the veena blended together, touching notes, making one’s heart flip as I listened on, resisting every urge to just get up and start dancing. I was amazed and more so, confused. Since my ‘initiation’ a few weeks ago(The senior’s voice still booming inside my head), I had made it a point to become a proper metal head, listening to all genres; thrash, folk, death, doom, melodeath, progressive and black.

  The tempo of the percussion rose steadily and the veena followed suit…

     Even alternative rock is supposed to sound boring right now. Metal is what everyone’s supposed to like, right? The rest was all ‘kiddo stuff’, no?  Why did I like this then?

  The duo reached a crescendo as the last few notes danced off their wooden bodies…

     Every other form and genre of music was supposed to be ‘boring’. Metal was way different from Carnatic. I closed my eyes, thinking; and listening. It’s a whole universe between them, isn’t it?

Isn’t it?

   The veena let out a violent riff as the able hands that played it traversed the full length of the fret, a wild blur.

    And I was immediately transported to Music Nite with the lead guitarist playing Eddie Van Halen’s “Eruption”, as people bowed in respect while some headbanged and others were left simply speechless. The mind was confused. What was I hearing? Carnatic or Rock? Van Halen or Veena?

   The veena ended with a challenging note, snaring at the violin to prove its worth. The violin took it up, beginning with a sober note. The bow and the hand which controlled it soon started snaking back and forth, doubling its speed as it mocked the percussion to follow it successfully while the other hand which held the violin struggled to hold still.  As the tempo reached a feverish pitch…

    And I was reminded of a song which I had listened to very recently, “Inis Mona” by Eluveitie. The genre mattered very little now as it hit me. Music was not so much about listening to only a particular style or genre as it was about music itself. Nomenclature is a creation of man, who desperately tries to classify sights and sounds which he sees and hears, in vain. The notes, the music which flowed did not question the instrument from where it poured; violin, veena or electric guitar. Music was not a random collection of notes to be strummed at will. Music is not limited, is not held back and is not burdened by the taxonomic curse man tries to cast on her.

    I hung my head in shame for being so narrow minded. I also bowed my head in respect. The experience had moved me.  Back in my room, I closed my eyes and quietly listened to “Nagumomu “, notching its rating up a few stars in my iTunes library...

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Walking Billboard for Stumbleupon

  It is in. It's now and it's wow. Its's bigger than parodies of Friday and the single biggest entropy generator since the Big Bang. It's caught my attention ever since I started noticing that suddenly guys and girls had started becoming more and more random as the days passed by. A conversation with a fellow stumbler:

Me         : I heard Metallica is coming to Delhi this October...
Stumbler : I know. Porcupine tree had came over for MoodI. Do you know they sell condoms in Amazon.com?
Me         : How much do you think the tickets... Wait, you what?
Stumbler : Which reminds me. The icy rings of Saturn are actually ammonia crystals,
Me         : How exactly did that remind you of..?
Stumbler : And down in the Projects, they haven't got good restaurants and that's what leads to gang shootouts...
Me         : Huh?
Stumbler : Stumbleupon.com FTW. (Fists the air...)
      Ok, if you did understand an ounce of the second stumbled-upon statement(which doesn't mean that you gotta feel like crap if you didn't) you are an intellectual. Apparently, the Projects refer to public housing and development projects mainly in South Boston, built for poor and homeless African Americans, which eventually turned into Black Gang HQs and crack cocaine addicts. If you have either read the "Why do drug dealers live with their moms?" chapter of Freakonomics or played GTA San Andreas, you would know what I'm talking about. For the rest of y'all, keep it real and keep the hood clean, dawgs...
    Stumbleupon is devilishly simple. It capitalizes on the younger generation's increasingly decreasing attention span. It asks you for your interests, say economics or books or communism or poetry, and once you press the Stumble! button, it shows you websites which have been classified by other stumblers based on your interests. It's basically a directed search, where you aren't exactly looking for something. Once you're done with the site, you rate it and click Stumble! again, and it takes you to a different site, slowly refining the sites it shows you based on your ratings.
    Coming up: Something which is giving serious competition to Blogging in the world of good vocabulary. Life is good.

End sem woes

" I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."
                                                                         - Douglas Adams
   Planned studying. Always believe(d) in it. If you know me well enough, you would know I keep a diary for planning out studying ops and "motivational quotes"(Yeah, that's me, all the peripheral, unnecessary BS and not the actual studying). The quote above should also tell you that this special planning book has got "Don't Panic" in large friendly letters and I named it The Hitchhiker's Guide to Planning. Cool, huh?  Three end sem exams have whooshed by. Three exams whose studying deadlines were not met. Three more to go, Dayyym...
   The 'cool' (?) colleges are known for their very relaxed norms regarding general students' day and night lives. Dad always used to brag about how he used to go college in shorts. In that way, BITS is the coolest college around. I dare you to find another college which has an exclusive All Night Canteen for students to blow cash over(It's open till 3:30 AM). But there is a general feeling that the rules have been tightened up a notch. Only Jeans and full pants are allowed in the Lecture complex and the IPC these days(Totally justifiable, there is a censored reason behind that!). I myself, while walking from one class to another, was just whistling "Little bird". Just whistling. In the corridors. A haggard old man, complete with moustache(Why does the text editor report a spelling mistake?) and an all knowing smile(He could have tattooed "Bah, college students..." on his forehead) says, "Caaleje hai bhai, Caaleje... "
And your point is?
    Another completely random stream of thoughts. Obama killed Osama -> Global markets rose in unison -> Gold prices also rose -> An incident which comes to my mind.
   I was ten or twelve then. We had gone to Tanishq 'cos mom's jewelry fixation center in her brain had suddenly gotten activated. I, still in the inquisitive stage, asked the guy why Platinum was costlier than Gold. While returning back, my dad explained, "He said  Platinum is rarer than Gold, that's why. Though Platinum is 20 times rarer than Gold, yet it is only around 1.2 times costlier. So the only way Platinum prices(and therefore it's value) can go are - up. It's a stupid argument. But unfortunately, I've fallen for it."          
Aww...