Preserving Them All – One Keystroke At A Time

Loops not notes are the building blocks of modern music. The 19th century composers had their ‘theme and variations’ for days when they were feeling lazy. The modern composer has canned, fast-food loops. Every third song you hear these days gives you that ‘where have I heard it before’ feeling. Here’s a recent ‘déjà vu’ – what do the tracks “Gadbadi Hadbadi” from Rocket Singh and “Nenjathilae” from Pirivom Santhipom have in common? The composers zeroed in on the same loop to begin their song:

1. Gadbadi Hadbadi (Composers: Salim Suleman)
2. Nenjathilae (Composer: Vidyasagar)

We were a snooty lot at St. Stephen’s college. While other colleges had ‘canteens’, we had a Café. One of the first things you encounter there as a vegetarian, are the cutlets. They are served with a small helping of inedibly (or at least that what your taste-buds conclude at the first encounter) sour chutney. Then begins a journey which ends with you liking the chutney so much that you begin to wonder if you should be asking the chef for the recipe. It’s a rite of passage a bit like college life itself. Entering college after more than 12 years in the same school is a bit unnerving. Your first reaction is to want to flee! But then days go by, you begin to soak in the new routine in a new environment and importantly, you make new friends. Then at some point in time, you actually start enjoying college so much that when you look back at those days a few years later, it is not without the touch of a degree of mistiness in the eyes.

I say this because all of this applies to a certain bookshop at Bangalore – Gangarams. I go there to buy stationery (which has happened just once – when we were looking to buy hand-made envelopes to put our wedding cards in) or computer books (which happens quite often). You take the staircase all the way to this huge room on the third floor with rows of tables on which the books are kept with their spines facing up. Only 2-3 tables are relevant for someone looking for computer books. You patiently browse and try to locate what you are looking for – O’Reilly publications get a significant chunk on one table, Manning another, Microsoft Press and Apress take up the remaining significant area. Pragmatic press books make an occasional appearance on, what I call, the O’Reilly table. Chances are you won’t find what you are looking for, so you’d ask one of the ‘helpers’. They’ll give you a significant look and reluctantly amble to that old machine running DOS, look up the book’s coordinates and fetch it for you. It is easy not to be intimidated – because the place somehow has an air about it that reminds you of your college library – complete with curmudgeonly librarians. Within a few visits however, a switch inside you begins to flip. You actually begin to start liking the place! The old-worldly pace, the reluctant but often effective helpers, the portly middle-aged proprietor of the shop telling someone on the phone about having to import a book from Singapore thereby justifying the ludicrous exchange-rate defying price the customer at the other end would need to pay for it. But most of all, you learn that magical incantation which gets you 10% off the book’s price!

Before joining Cricinfo, my interest in the game was a casual one. Sure, I’d sit glued to the TV (back at my parents’ home where I had a TV) whenever India would play an ODI, but Tests were something that only greying (or balding or both) uncles watched. It must be that I am fast transitioning to the aforementioned stage of life because I cannot wait for the South Africa v India Test series to commence!

The hot-off-our-CMS match preview by Sidharth Monga nails it:

Virender Sehwag and Gautam Gambhir play for the same club, same state, same IPL side. Dale Steyn and Morne Morkel play for the same franchise in South Africa. Sehwag and Gambhir are close friends, Morkel calls himself and Steyn best friends in the team. Sehwag and Gambhir run on intuition, their batting styles compliment each other. Morkel goes for raw pace and bounce, Steyn goes for swing, presenting a varied attack. Sehwag and Gambhir are the best openers in the world, Morkel and Steyn the hottest new-ball pairing going around.

Can we fix the toss for the first Test to ensure we start the series with its biggest selling point? Gambhir and Sehwag v Morkel and Steyn. Morkel knows how to build it too. “It’s going to be a very good challenge,” he says. “Gambhir and Sehwag have played very well for India. Myself and Dale are pretty new with the new ball, and it will be a big test, especially in Indian conditions. Luckily, the challenge is going to be for them too at the end of this year in South Africa. It’s not going to end here.” Imagine the first morning of the series, three slips and a gully, a fresh pitch, and Zaheer Khan bowling to Ashwell Prince. What a dampener it will be.

That was before I met Injkyji. And now I tend to notice them. Which is not such a good thing because the ratio of bad lyrics to good lyrics is about the same as the ratio of planets in this universe to the planets that can sustain human life.

I am not sure what the present state of pop lyrics is. If I were to judge by the limited exposure to contemporary pop through iTunes, I’d say it is as bad as the 90s. Back then boy bands were the biggest culprit. I am thus reminded of this wonderful example of timeless lyric writing by Backstreet Boys:

I don’t care who you are,
where you’re from,
what you did
as long as you love me.

Sounds like someone was living inside a dog’s head for one full year.

…the 80s were the goofiest years of human civilization.

The tracks on this disc oscillate between the memorable (Ninnu Kori Varnam) and the utterly forgettable (Botany Class). All in all, you cannot help but exclaim – we’ve come a long way!

Second-hand books can be strange. Often it is the affectionately handwritten dedications on the title page that give me a start. Occasionally, all sorts of things tumble out of them – old movie tickets, grocery bills, postcards, handwritten notes – the works.

A book that was a Christmas present for someone in London in the 1930s somehow makes it to a second-hand bookstore in Bangalore and almost finds itself on my bookshelf. Surely it must have an interesting story to tell – apart from the one printed in it.

Here is another remarkable coincidence that happend this week. I picked up an old copy of Oliver Twist along with a copy of The 1982 Annual World’s Best SF. The 1964 edition of a 19th century Dickens novel shouldn’t ordinarily be related in any way to a compilation of science fiction short stories from 1982. But to my surprise the latter begins with Dickens’ famous lines from A Tale of Two Cities. Let me reproduce the first paragraph here:

“It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.” That was Dickens’ comment on the crisis of the 18th Century. It could apply now to the outlook for many periods of the 20th. There were the times just before the great wars – and just after. There were the times before the economic crisis that have racked this century… the times of ideological debate, of fog and confusion… times confronting the advent of surprising new scientific achievements.

The remarkability quotient would be so much higher if the book I had just picked was A Tale of Two Cities itself!

Let’s face it, Avatar isn’t winning any awards for best screenplay, dialogue or acting (wouldn’t that be going to the animators anyway?) and yet watching it for the second time wasn’t as big a bore as I had thought it would be.

A good deal of Pandora’s charm stays intact even on second viewing, but there are some tedious scenes – especially as the movie draws to a protracted end – during which you can take time out for certain random experiments/observations:

1. Closing one eye makes the 3D “go away”. Expected, because most theaters, including the one we went to, use stereoscopic projection – which, to put it crassly, relies on each eye seeing its own thing. After all, we’ve all got Wikipedia to do the heavy lifting.

2. The font used for the English sub-titles of Na’vi dialogues was Papyrus, which looked a little jarring. I’ll try to see the glass half-full here – it could’ve been Comic Sans.

Today was supposed to be the last day of the Ranji trophy final in Mysore, but obviously that won’t be needed now. Apparently matches in India have been rescheduled in the past to avoid eclipses.

Anyway, in a few hours from now, I plan to work from our office’s terrace and even if clouds ruin the show (which I am sure they will) I’ll enjoy the evening sky at noon.

8:26 AM IST It’s a very cloudy morning with barely a hint of breeze. Doesn’t look like this will clear any time soon.

10:15 AM IST The sun came out, but only just. It’s back to being cloudy. Worse, it might just rain. We’ll see. Off to work.

10:40 AM IST At work. A gentle breeze has picked up. The clouds are drifting leaving an occasional patch of blue through which the sun can be seen. We’ll hopefully catch fleeting glimpses of the eclipse.

10:54 AM IST On the terrace but don’t see the sun. The breeze is still around so there’s hope.

11:00 AM IST This is how the sky looks:

11:37 AM IST It’s still light and shade. The eclipse isn’t here yet. We’ll be seeing it live via the iSight camera on my MacBook.

12:01 PM IST The pinhole camera shows that the eclipse has begun! Still too bright for the camera but we are about to try.

12:13 PM IST The sun is obscured by the clouds. Hard to tell what’s up. Cannot even say if the loss in light is due to the clouds or the solar eclipse.

1:22 PM IST It’s very surreal here. The birds are beginning to get befuddled. The shadows under the canopies of the trees are crescent shaped. Nature’s very own pinhole camera!

1:50 PM IST None of the digital cameras (including iSight) work. We just get a flare of light – cannot underestimate even the eclipsed sun!

2:14 PM IST It’s fast getting over. That was fun!

…not here at any rate. Not even if it is a not-so-closely, not-so-keenly fought contest between India and Sri Lanka who’ve played so much cricket together of late that it’s a miracle to see Dhoni not do his press conferences in Sinhala.

Café Pascucci at MG Road has a big LCD TV inside that drew a small crowd of onlookers outside. I don’t know what’ll happen during IPL or the World Cup. I guess they’ll learn that big TVs tuned to cricket channels and glass facades are bad a idea in this country. The Reebok showroom on Brigade Road has a small LCD TV – where, by virtue of them being the official sponsors of the ICC, cricket must be the sole (pun unintentional) programming. But it drew a big enough crowd outside to probably start a mini-riot. The smaller the TV and the harder it is to catch a glimpse of the action on screen (let alone read the score), the bigger the crowd. Like moths flocking around the tubelights at a garish Indian wedding on a humid summer night.

A big German Shepherd, named after an American electronica musician quite popular in the UK, caused us considerable panic by charging straight towards us. Turns out, it simply wanted to play its own peculiar brand of “fetch” that involves the human subject kicking a piece of stone or wooden stick, which the canine will then promptly fetch and gingerly place at your feet. This was done till one of the parties tired out (invariably us).

The rules were quite like football in the sense that trying to touch the stone or stick with your hands carried a penalty – which in this case was the dog’s undiluted scorn that might have translated into a bite, causing you to lose the appendage that intervened for good.

All said and done, Moby turned out to be an adorable dog – like most dogs are. We might visit the Red Hills again just for a game of fetch with Moby.