Death of the Email Forward

Winehouse. Dead.
    Celebrity deaths leave me in a soup. There are these die-hard fans who mourn like hell and cry and make a scene. The black. There are these non fans who don't give two owl hoots about Amy Winehouse and are content with their Punjabi hip hop. The White. The pseudo connoisseurs of "World Music" (Me included) have listened only to one song, "Rehab" and liked it immensely. The grey.  What do I do?
   I update my fb status, conveying deep condolences and wait hungrily for likes.
   Before you judge the writer for making light of a poor woman's annihilation into the after life, you can't deny she brought it upon herself with that incessant drug habit of her's. Sad. (She did join the Forever 27 club though. People are literally dying to join that club).
   Being a real ignoramus in the realm of Internet trends (As the last post demonstrated), I continue to dish out observations without any research as.... research. I'm not much of an email forwarding person. I archive whatever I get, see them vanish in a silent whoosh and bask in the contentment that I just occupied a few more Megabytes of them Google Hard drives.
   I don't get forwards anymore.
  Is it just some "I don't send you 'cos you don't send me" thing or have users actually gotten bored with forwarding emails? The writer harks back to the days of "Forward or Yahoo! will delete your account" and (With all due respect) "Two day old Jessica has Paraneoplastic Syndrome. Forward and AOL will contribute 10c".
  One would  naturally blame Zuckerberg and StumbleUpon for this. Found a website interesting? You put it on your wall and 'earn' likes (or +1s, Sheesh). Found a cute little Internet Meme about wannabe nerdo school girls? Put it on G+ along with your trademark #hashtag. All this criticism notwithstanding, the reader would've most probably visited this post through the link on my fb wall. What kind of a hypocritical world is this?
  My hols are drawing to an unholy end and I am praying to god that I don't develop withdrawal symptoms towards the extremely, extremely sedentary lifestyle I've been leading at home.
  Off to Pack. Over and out.   

Soul of Wit

   Yes, this is going to be one of those horribly pretentious (not to mention boring) 'observations-of-society-by-an-enlightened-intellectual' posts. So save yourself, before it's too late.
A few disclaimers first:
   The control group was very small, just a few college mates. Others significant factors blatantly ignored. Bad economics, overall. But who cares? It's my ducking blog.
   Let's rewind the clocks a bit. Blogger (The blogging site) was launched by Pyra Labs in 1999 and later bought by Google in 2003. Facebook let go of its snooty "For ivy leaguers only" tag in 2004. Yahoo! acquired Flickr in 2005 and Twitter arrived in 2006. Stumbleupon though started in 2001, hit ten Million users by 2010.

Anything click?

Here's more. The average blog reader stays a nice 96 seconds per blog. You are a facebooker. You tell me how much time you spend on someone's profile, status update or a photo album. Unless one is a connoisseur who admires the 'nuances' and 'inner depth' involved in photography, one is not going to spend more than 12 seconds on a photo (I'll get to the captions later). Twitter allows only 140 characters. And if you're a stumbler, you'd have realized the point the writer's trying to drive home.
   Let's talk about two things, status updates and photo captions. Not just normal 'We are Pardayying!' photos but the aesthetic, professional worthy-of-Photog-club ones which a few friends of mine post regularly as well.
  Status messages of school goers were usually a long affair, starting with a quote or saying, then blowing it completely out of context and ending somewhat stupidly with an indifferent reference to acads or parents.

"Ncessty s da mothr f invnshn. Ma mothr joind fb. ztkfi del my acc?? Wt do i do??? :P:D:):|:( "  (Two years ago)
"Damn... hate examz...." (One year ago)
"Dang." (Now). Other examples: "Roxanne", "Inis Mona" and "Sheesh". (Don't ask me what they mean.)


     Photo captions by few school friends of mine were longer too. They felt the need to explain the pains taken, the result in mind and the means to achieve those ends. Then they became a line from the lyrics of a never-heard-of song. Now they're just one word. "Corrosion" (Describing a rusted gate), "Headspace"(Palm trees billowing in the wind) and "Diablo"(A black man in three-fourths taking a drought). Just one word.

Brevity.
  The writer stands vindicated, when they declared to the world that companies are "capitalizing on the younger generation's increasingly decreasing attention span." As supply of content (Statuses, photos, wall posts) increases, demand (Read attention span) decreases and therefore sentences began to get shorter to keep the demand going. Intelligence is being curt. Brevity is now the soul of it, pun intended.
  This will help clear the air in case you're yet to be convinced. Internet Memes. Very Short, very Sharp and very, very sexy. 
Convinced?
  This does not mean you run to your broker and ask him to buy up as many shares of that brand new internet social site where users can post and comment in only one word. And later sue me when the bubble bursts. In case you haven't noticed, I just disproved my theory by writing a 500 word post and keeping you glued till the very end. Worship me.

Whoa

Thousand Hits. Thank you.

Slum Road

  The Scooty Pep+ sped on, making note of the piling traffic ahead. A slow drizzle started, wetting his spectacles as he took a short-cut into a narrow, tar road situated in a slum area. He slowed down a bit.
  Thatched huts, all fighting to get a little more of the road to encroach upon. Extremely small doors that you would have bend double to get through. Loudspeakers every 50 meters or so, blaring Shlokas. Ladies and girls standing outside a Syntex tank to receive their Kodam of water for the day. The quintessential politician's poster, with a politician walking, clutching the hem of his veshti, politician smiling, politician talking on his cell phone. Below were smaller pictures of the constituency representatives, hooligans, gangsters with outrageous side-burns. The posters of Prabhakaran the LTTE chief, were there about a year ago. They had been removed now. The drizzle slowly stopped.
   And the children! Their innocence still preserved, the road their second home. Teenagers with audacious low cut cheap jeans playing marbles, five year olds with plastic toy cars, dark skinned girls playing that hopping game, all on the road. Others ran off into roads that snaked in and out of the area, cars screeching to a halt behind them.
  The scooty slowed down to a crawl. The hands that rode it were alert, lest some child came running across unexpectedly. It stopped. There was a row of small stones kept on the road, a cheap barricade. He looked ahead.
   Up ahead stood a stage, propped with thick wooden sticks, six feet high, on the road. On it were miniature bulbs, the ones used in decorative lighting, connected with wires, which twisted and twirled to light up a huge Parvathi Devi. Further ahead was the temple, packed with devotees attending the Pooja. He smiled. He should have paid more attention to the loudspeakers.
  He considered squeezing through whatever bit of road was left. Beside him, old men on plastic chairs gave a knowing smile.  He turned around. Slum dogs, he muttered. The scooty traced back and sped into another world, a world it was more comfortable with.
  The slummers carried on, oblivious to him and the world surrounding them.  

Goan Learning Curve

    It's like the hand of God(A rather mischievous one. I'm guessing that brat Krishna) shoved in and turned his sand pit upside down, exposing the city's rather dark underbelly. No, 'dark underbelly' is not a metaphor for some non-existent mafia or it's nexus with the cops here. Literally, the whole city is being dug out, whether it is for Metro rail construction in 100 feet road or for storm water drainage in T Nagar. It's not like roads were world class or anything, but hey, at least you could spot a bit of black tar here and there, reminding you that you gotta pay road tax for it. Right now it’s time to test that Scooty's off-roading skills, eh?

   Was speaking to this BITS, Goan(Oops, BITS, Pilani, K.K. Birla Goa Campus) about how his first year had been. Generic answers. Either he’s bored or showing attitude. Attitude. Must stem from somewhere. So I decided to stun him with my level of exposure about internships. (The level being I know that people are going for internships in their first year holidays itself. Worship me.)

Uh, oh, HUGE learning curve ahead...

Me: So, you thinking of any internship options? (You can almost taste the smugness the air reeked of...)

Him: Already went for one. Lasted a few weeks…

Me: Oh. (Thank god for Facebook chat. He didn’t have to see me do the Kangaroo hop around the room, mouthing out muffled expletives and curses at myself…)

   The next hour was spent kissing ass and asking him where and when he went, how he got it and what exactly he did there. Sheesh. The next day was spent asking dad about them and applying for one. The following days were spent eating at Subway, Pizza Hut and Rajdhani respectively and sleeping for 8-10 hours, convincing oneself that ignorance is bliss, only if you’re ignorant of the fact that you’re ignorant.

Leftover Clocks

    The complete and resounding success of the previous post A Dream inflated an already bloated ego of the writer to the limit, thereby pushing him into an era of complacency, laziness and apathy, and resulted in nothing less than the forgetting of consecutive birthdays of two women very dear to him. Jolted out of my permanent supine and almost comatose(This thesaurus thing is awesome) posture, I begin to dish out more and more crap.
   Well, the prolonged summer, the even more prolonged summer holidays(more than two months), the scorching heat and humid weather, the power cuts and rolling blackouts, the soaring Petrol prices and House MD are to blame. My brain has stagnated, bored to death and has run completely out of ideas. Should have joined that German language class at Max Mueller Bhavan my dad was telling me about.(The definition of Aryan racism is throwing up red squiggly spelling error lines for Bhavan while Max Mueller sir gets a clean chit...)
    All of us friends met up at Creamy Inn, an Ok ice cream joint in Anna Nagar to discuss what the first year in college had done to us. The IITians and wannabe IITians huddled together, discussing internship prospects(After only a year in college), how low the sex ratio was, coding(Doesn't matter even if you're in Naval Architecture, everyone discusses coding) and other stuff which went way over my head the moment the chatter started. Us mere mortals, crept around, talking about how our brothers who were now in the vicious circle of school and JEE coaching were doing. Mere mortal talk.Well, other mundanely interesting things also crop up.

Me: I left a few things in my room while packing by mistake. Damn, I forgot my door mat!
Sid: I had a few problems too. When I came out, I noticed I was late for the train and left in a hurry. Retrospecting, I thought, "How did I notice I was late?", and answered myself, "By looking at the clock".
Me: And where was the clock?
Sid: In my room! Almost missed the train in running back to get it.
Gautham: Shit. I forgot mine!
        
      It doesn't matter which college you go to, as long as you have friends who lighten your heart and keep you laughing, I guess. 

A Dream

      He walked down Gandhi Marg, the default chillness of the night barely negating the searing heat of the day that had just passed. He liked walking alone in the night, a denizen of the dark. He was a shadow, black, stark in contrast to the white that gleamed the road, painted so by pigeon droppings. His destination was near. His weary feet that had been complaining of the claustrophobia that usually accompanies upper-side berths in an uneventful 2000 km long journey by rail and an even more nauseating drive down from civilization to well, 'civilization', trudged along, silently plotting rebellion.
      He was a sophomore now, as he loved to call himself. It made him feel, 'senior'. The  past academic year had imbibed in him certain changes, some for the better, some for the very worst. To his achievements, he proudly remembered going to the temple at least once a week, every single week. Whether it was just to get away from Ghatam practice or screwed up acads or general flotsam and jetsam floating around meaninglessly in his wandering mind. He did pray, but not as much as he did just sitting there, watching the multitudes of pigeons flying round and round the temple's towering structure, having his twenty minutes of blankness every man supposedly has.
     The night was fresh. The end was near. He approached Shankar Bhawan, just beyond Patel circle. He smiled.
     The steps which lead to the upper T-wing were suddenly easier to climb as the mind was prowling on some other chain of thought, one that involved knocking on the poor junior who had just been assigned the room he had stayed in, the past year. His 'room-son' must be sleeping now, his bio-clock hardly accustomed to what it was in for in the next couple of years. Kid was just a day old in college.
     263, Shankar Bhawan, Raj-333031. The day he discovered he had got a single room.The incessant banging when he slept in the afternoons. His own door mat.  Empty packets of chips and coke bottles on the floor. The mound of sand and dirt when he decided to clean it. "Siddartha", which he never finished reading. The torn Physics I quiz paper. The "ANNA" written with Duct tape on his door. It later became his hostel nick name.
  He approached his old room, his head pounding. The light was on. Good.
  He heard voices. Parent voices. Damn. Tonight is not the night.
  Suddenly, the kid's dad came out and examined the door. The "ANNA" sticker shone in all glory in the white corridor light. The newly admit's dad swore. "We have to complain to the chowki. Otherwise they'll slap a fine on you for scribbling on the door instead of the idiot who actually did this", he said to his son inside.
     Blood rushing in his ears, the protagonist tried to walk past coolly. He didn't know nothing about this. He almost reached the end of the corridor, ready to break into a run. How the hell had the they not seen the damn thing when they had entered  the room for the first time?
    "ANNA! My favorite south Indian!", boomed a familiar voice. The protagonist froze. Shit. The dad turned, first towards the silhouette at the other end of the corridor and then at him, his face a mixture of surprise, confusion and increasing anger.
  Apparently 257, Shankar Bhawan had decided to visit his old room too. 

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.