Illusion

Among the many illusions that mankind harbors, the funniest is thinking we (and we alone) live in a special time, that we are at the crossroads of destiny. 
Everyone was, is and shall be.

Terminology

Sometimes I feel managers come up with newer terms for the same concepts just out of lack of anything better to do... Only sometimes...
It generates a lot of jobs for sure :)

The more I read Calvin the more I like it... :) :)

Oothukadu

For most people trained in Carnatic Music, he is just Oothukadu. For some, Oothukadu Bhagavathar. Very few identify him as Oothukadu Venkata Subbaiyer. And yet, if you have been in the South and heard any music at all, you have definitely heard "Alaipayuthe Kanna".. (I hope the connection is obvious- he was the composer.)

Random thoughts...

One of the things that make me happy and keep me going is seeing a mind work as good as or better than mine...

People think that you hate people who are better than you... But often, people whoa re better than or as good as you are those who keep you going...

Math Haiku

The real is unknown and the reasons are imaginary,

Oh, sometimes even dreams are complex!!!

Maraindhirunde Paarkum....

I started off this post to include some of my favorite Old Tamil Songs (Senthamizh Thenmozhiyal, Kannum Kannum Kalandhu and so on), but decided that "Maraindhirundhe Paarkum" deserves a separate post for itself.

WAYN?

If you are wondering why I vanished and why I am not writing and asking me "WAYN"..

Am I going through Writer's block? Did I stop thinking of things I can write about?

Or the impossible- Did I stop having coffee?

No none of the above. I got a little too busy, but hope to keep up the blogging from now on...

Hope this resolution doesn't turn like the one to gym everyday ;)

By the way, in case nobody was wondering this, I would like to add this to my list of forever alone moments :D (And yes, do check the link on Forever Alone)

Padmanabhaswamy Temple...

Padmanabha Swamy temple.... Among the few temples I will never forget.. (That list includes lesser known temples such as Quarters Pulaiyar Koil, Rathna Girishwarar, NIT Trichy Pulaiyar Koil etc)

Anyway, the temple has suddenly loomed to a different kind of glory in the last few months after they discovered the treasure vaults... I might say that people who are truly religious will not care about money. But then, if one looks at religion closely enough, one would realize that "truly religious" is a vastly misleading term.

Anyway, back to the point. I will never forget it because I will always remember how when we were in Trivandrum, they found out that the idol in this temple was made of gold. Yes. Solid gold.(Also because I must have done this tourist guide business of showing the temple and the clock they have on the temple museum to anyone and everyone who visited us during that time!)

It is like, you keep going to this temple every other month and you have seen an idol made of normal black stone. Then suddenly one week you hear all of it was actually gold. And you go and see the same moorthi in gold. It is awesome like that.

I personally don't like gold all that much, but this was an exception. The gold thing was just too good. If I were a king and I was into temples, I would have wanted God to look like that. Grand. Awe-inspiring. Godly. (Oh no, I am punning again!)

Anyway, there was also the story about how they found that the idol was gold. And how they left the face untouched, so the face still looks like stone. I will leave that part of the story for later.. Or maybe I will let you wonder about the mystery of it all... :)

Thank you!

If you have ever started a blog, you will know how you keep looking at number of page hits.. When I first started blogging, you couldn't track page hits unless you were a software geek.. I don't count myself to be one, so I never could... And much much later, I added the page hit counter on my blog, but by then, I didn't have the excitement to track it.

For this blog, however, I could add ti right at the beginning and every time I open Firefox, my eyes go to the number of readers... And today, when I crossed 100, I was smiling.. 

It is a simple thrill... 

And, Thanks to those who read this blog and brought it so far... :)

Porumayai kaathal...

I like this song from Avvai Shanmugi for sheer cheek. The point of singing Ruk Ruk Ruk in a Sumangali pooja used to irritate me before. But I have grown to realize that it is quite possible. If you look at the number of Sanskrit slokas and Telugu songs people parrot out without any clue of the meaning, we could even be singing "Bhaag DK Bose" in some ceremony. (Note I still don't know the meaning of that phrase..)

Anyway I find the lyrics (of Ruku Ruku Ruku, not Bhaag DK.. ) quite funny.

And I especially like some lines for the tune. "Oru maadhu thalaivanai...", for eg. But I always liked the following line most for the tune and the amazing emphasis on the "jaangri"..*

Poosalgal vandhal dont be angry,
Porumayai kaathal vaazhkai jaangri :) :)

 I also realized it was such a common piece of advice, completely ignored by me most of the time. But think about it people, really...

Porumayai kaathal vaazhkai  jaangri.. :) :)

* Translation: When there are scuffles, don't be angry. If you are patient life will be sweet (like jaangri).

Some people...

There are people who like taking up the toughest tasks. Often they are also the ones who are able to do them.

Then there are people who don't take up tough tasks themselves but encourage others who do so. (Or at least leave them alone).

Unfortunately, there are also people who stop you from doing any kind of work. The minute you take up something that is really worth doing, they step forth and ensure you go back to mundane data entry level work. 

And then you go back to this routine:

What. A. Week.

And finally I get to blog again....What. A. Week!

Too hectic :( First I had multiple evening meetings and lots to do at work. This quarter is supposed to be critical and has just begun and I can't breathe already! Second I had this book review I had to finish for BlogAdda. Thirdly, HP7.2 (or 7.5 or 8 or whatever) released today! Oh and I forgot, my brother had turned up somewhere in between and I had to go meet him one and half hour across the city one of the evenings.

Ya I know that 2 and 3 don't sound hectic. But then just the tension of getting the review done on time was eating me a bit.  I finished the book by Wednesday evening, but still couldn't get the mood to write until Friday morning. But in the end, it was ok. I have always enjoyed reviewing stuff, so it was good.

Now for HP. I wanted to do a HP Movie Marathon but for reasons listed above, couldn't :( :( At least I got to watch it first day! And it was worth it. There are some HP movies that don't quite meet the standards of the book, but this one wasn't one of them.
Ya, agreed, some dialogues were a bit too slow, and there were parts that were overly dark (same as all of David's movies), but then the movie captures all the most important parts of the book (unlike some of the movies in between, which missed out some essentials). So over all it was pretty good!
The thing about HP is that one could go on and on, but I wouldn't want to. Only thing I can say is the series has a completely different impact on theater (in a positive way). So do watch it, if you like HP.

And ya, there ends a saga. With greater success than the self-proclaimed one!

And I am happy I grew up with Harry Potter and Hermoine and all the rest! :)

Language

I just read this line on bscpn. Debatable, but echoes my own opinion:

Language is a beautiful gift. With it, we can convey the full tapestry of human emotions and experiences. We can figuratively dive into our intellectual depths and further explore ourselves and each other. How we use language becomes a representation of how we see ourselves and how we want others to see us.

Quick expressions are OK, but then, overdoing the cool dude-ness, and over-ignoring grammar just doesn't fly well...

Bitter taste

Some mornings just start out with a bitter taste....

Let me see if it lingers on till end of the day...

Enthiran

Every time I hear this song, I really love this line:

"Karuvil piranda ellam marikkum, arivil pirandadu marippade illai".. ("Everything born from a womb dies someday, but anything born from the mind never dies!")

Amazing line by Vairamuthu! As usual!

Anyway, I was watching Enthiran now for the second time (first time was of course in the theater LLASLATNKHLA*). And I find it quite entertaining. It is really long since I found any Tamil movie entertaining, so credit to Shankar. I also remembered one thing about Rajini**. He was always bad at dancing, and dad used to say that his dance moves look like exercise. Enthiran has given him a chance to do the same dance (i.e. exercise) but with the excuse of being a robot! Good excuse, I'd say... :P 

For that matter, the movie gave him a chance to do all the supernatural stunts also, again with the excuse. Though the excuse didn't really sound valid enough to me for this one...

*Long Long Ago, So Long Ago That Noone Knows How Long Ago :P
**Somehow Rajni sounds Northie aka jade (No, no offense, it is just an identity thing!). Rajini only sounds like Tamil :D

Popular dishes

I was in Chennai this weekend, and that should explain why no posts.

Anyway, I read Adyar Talk, Mambalam Talk, and Tambaram Talk on the two days (Explanation elaborated :D )

And anyway, on any of the Talk magazines there is a column by K Balakumar, which both me and my dad used to like. (One of the few columns my dad recommended to me!) It is sort of like Krish Ashok's column without the Brahmin slights and in a style equally appropriate for my generation AND my dad's.
This week's post on Indian food was as usual, very funny, and luckily there is a blog version of the column, so do take your time to read it...

VHP and Slutwalk

Anyway, for the morning readfeed I was reading this. (VHP issues warning to women joining New Delhi SlutWalk)
I remember an article that Sudish Kamath and Shonali Muthalaly wrote for The Hindu when I was in college. This was against the implementation of dress code in Anna University. (The original article should be somewhere on this site, but I will leave you to search it out :D ) I used to simply love both of their columns and I think I have read articles simply because I spotted their names on top. But, where was I? Ya. Women, liberation, Slutwalk.

Well there was this article on 'He says, She says' about why it makes absolutely no sense to control what people wear and use it as a justification to sexual harassment. That's my point. whether or not I support Slutwalk, I think that clothing is an individual's freedom. And if VHP thinks "India will not tolerate anything that crosses the limits of our culture." then 1) their idea of India is narrow. 2) they are calling themselves India. Oh, but that's the same as 1.

So yes, whether or not I personally like Slutwalk or bitchwalk or whatever else it is, there is nothing to say it is against my culture and I won't let it happen and India will not accept it. If India can accept lame duck PMs and corrupt PMs and hordes of scams, India can accept this as well. Besides, that is beside the point.

Habituation

Reading xkcd has made me hover over every damn photo/cartoon I see.
If I were a cartoonist I would have made a cartoon with that. Maybe I should try....

Plus plus...

I still remember the days when I used to go to a browsing centre to access net. And Yahoo and Altavista and Askjeeves were the popular search engines at the time. Then there was this site called Google.

I remember how I liked it for the name and for the Goooooooo...gle at the bottom. Just for the 'o' s I started liking this site. Much much later I found the search results were loads better. But I repeat, it was much much later.

Then came Gmail. Then gchat. And then orkut. Somewhere in between I started using blogspot. And though I tried wordpress, I somehow still like blogspot a lot more. Maybe because I never got around to HTML editing. And later someone introduced me to Google Reader. That was good as well. In fact. I have loved all of it. I still don't use Picasa much. 

Buzz- Yes. I tried Buzz. And I wanted to blog why I didn't like it, but I never got around to blogging that. I tried Wave also, though I knew from the beginning it wasn't for me.

Chrome I have tried, but maybe because old habits die hard, I am still on Firefox.

It seems like a long journey, but it is hardly 10 years since I started using the net. And now there is plus. Whatever the public reaction, I like the interface.  I don't know if Plus will have as good apps as fb. Can only wait and watch. If it does go well, I can imagine a "Wall-E" (and "I,Robot") type world where everything is run by Google.

Anyway, here is another thing to leave for the grandchildren. The days when plus meant symbol for addition and not social networking... 

Past, we will miss you sometime in the distant future...

Money

This post was originally published at 11.04AM on Thursday, June 30, 2011

Two things I wanted to write about today.


One is the demise of the 25p coin. RIP. I will miss you, but not as much as the 10p coin. (I haven't found any coin as likeable as the 10p. Not even the golden color 5 Re. ) But still, I will miss you. And you are already on the queue of things to tell my grandchildren.


The other is this article I read in TOI today. (not able to find the link - Man killed in train by people impersonating as eunuchs for not giving them the money they asked) Someone actually, ACTUALLY killed a man for not giving them money when they were begging?! It irritates me. To say the least.


The third is Google plus. I am trying it. But I really got to go. Promise to finish later.

Atheists

This was originally posted at 11.41AM on Wednesday, June 29, 2011
 
So I read this one line about atheists--
Despite their emphasis on reason, evidence and a desire to see through false truth claims, many atheists hold surprisingly ill-informed beliefs about religion


Though I didn't agree with the rest of the article, I really liked this line.

Why another blog??

The inevitable question, huh?

Well, I was actually trying out multiple templates and blog names for sometime. And landed on this one. I had long ago started a blog in wordpress to have a personal blog  but mainly to try out wordpress

For some reason, I  was never able to stick to wordpress. Thought I will import it back to blogspot. Somehow the import feature isn't working for me right now. But anyways, I am continuing here.

I am thinking I will just write short posts. With my coffee.. (Explain blog description. Check.)

And ya, i will continue blogging on "Among other things" but I intend it to be a more serious blog. Longer posts. All the stuff about religion, politics, literature.. you get the idea. This blog will be more of a journal. More of links, quick posts, stuff I like/recommend. More of me.

P.S: Ok. I confess. I wrote the "More of me"  only because it sounded nice. ;) Each blog is as much of me as the other.