Happiest day in my life...! -- May 30, 2005

No ! I wasnt about what happened today, but rather how today happened.

I simply woke up laughing in my bed, triggered by some really funny event in a dream that I dont remember now. And I just checked the time in my phone and it was 7.29 sharp, and an instant later the alarm started to ring out one of my favourite songs (the alarm tone was a Mp3 file in this case).

Compare this to the average day, where I always switch off the alarm, sleep for 30 mins more, and wake up hurriedly and groan " Oh! S*** ! " , and let out a few more curses before getting out of bed.. SOMETHING was seriously right today..!

Just continued smiling and giggling my way to office, and attended some training. And like every other classroom , my circadian cycle turned upside down and started feeling sleepy. Thats when I unleash my best anti-dote to slumbering during a lecture or a meeting..And thats Not a cup of coffee..!

I just watch someone else dozing off, and struggling to stay awake. This is bound to make you laugh, sending in those crucial pints of blood to the brain, and you are back again. Today it was my friend, who slept exactly the way , the guy advertising for some Airline company does- well stretched out and completly relaxed posture in the chair.

The day ended with a showtime premiering the old comedy movie- Taxi (original french version). And here I am , armed with a smile to goto sleep, instead of a sleeping pill.

Now tell me how many people get to smile from the moment they wake up, till the instant the fall asleep ??

Bowling & Bowling..

Just mused about Bowling, after participating in a tournament on May 07..

To all those who know the game of cricket, and those who would like to know...

A bowler has to bowl a hard ball, with a core of cork wound with string and covered by leather, weighing between 156 and 163 grams(slightly larger but a lot heavier than a tennis ball). The ball is directed towards 3 stumps (cylindrical wooden post, 25 mm in diameter and 813 mm high) arranged in a row perpendicular to the bowling direction with a maximum separation of 228 mm apart from the edges ...I omit the detail about 2 little bails, sitting on the gap between 3 stumps.

The aim is to unsettle this combination(wicket) by directly bowling at it from a distance of 22 yards. To top it all, you could bowl inswingers,outswingers,yorkers,bouncers,fast,medium pace,gentle medium pace, leg spin,leg break, off spin ,chinaman,leg-cutters and other species of balls.

(note if you are feeling dizzy about the statistics given above, you are not fit to listen to a standard cricket commentary..You need to work on your appetite for numbers before you read on. start befriending the 'deep blue'..)

Thats not all..To prevent the bowler from achieving this aim of hitting the stumps, stands the guardian of the wicket..A Wicked Batsman with a dangerous weapon simply called a bat, whose dimensions are well specified, but not the maximum weight. This guy's job is to despatch the ball you just bowled, to the farthest corners of the playing field, and send your teammates on a leather hunt..

I barely had a happy moment in my bowling career, and mostly left the field demoralised and dis-oriented. Now you can understand why a failed bowler like me, would readily love the friendly conditions of an Bowling alley

----------------One fat heavy ball, 10 fat little stumps, tame rolling the ball on the lane will do, and most importantly no batsman to prevent it from reaching there. Though you could never flatten all the 3 stumps in cricket, you could strike down all the 10 pins in Bowling.

Getting a strike, could be quite gratifying for normal cricketers, and absolute bliss for sloppy bowlers(in cricket) like me. When I still see other novices bowl and miss all the pins, I cannot imagine how they would fare if they were playing cricket. Now dont ask me how I fared in that tournament..All I can say is I scored centuries in almost all the games I played..(well, that last sentence is intended to wow a cricket batsman, who has never been Bowling !!)

Last heard that our team could been selected for the finals..A big thanks to my 3 teammates, for triple-handedly taking me along to the finals on June 04..

Just Another Movie ?

It became a rather unsatisfying week to the not-so-much movie maniac in me..three of the latest Tamil movies Chandramukhi,Mumbai express,Sachien seen within a week, and here I am yelling at myself.."Why dont I just learn to, see only the movies that i really want to ??".. And thats what i did..

I have heard from my old Rwandan friends, back in college days about the civil war in their country in 1994. When they told me about a million lives lost during that war, I might have said "Oh ! my god ! thats terrible", and probably continued eating my dinner after a 30 second pause.

And there was a scene in the movie Hotel Rwanda, where the lead actor Don Cheadle exactly predicted the way most people in other parts of the world would react, when they come to know about such a massacre.

I realised that a million lives is about 5 times or so the number of lives lost in the tsunami(Dec 26,2004). No natural phenomenon, or force of nature can take away as many lives as the weapons of hatred or men at war can snatch. So tell me who is our greatest enemy ?

This inspiring movie is about Paul Rusesabagina, a hotel manager from Kigali, Rwanda who saves more than a 1000 people from certain death, at the hands of the opposing militiamen. Watching the movie , made me feel a lot more connected with the brutality and pain endured by the survivors, and also a few good lessons about resoursefulness and hope.

Having watched Schindler's List last week for the first time, and this one now, you can guess the state of mind now..

If you are of the kind who looks for much more than just entertainment in a movie, watch this one.

And for Nshakabatenda Ramadhani , Nzamutuma Ismael, and Nyandwi Alphonse who narrated the happenings of the war to me... I now understand..!

Digital Frustration !

There are a million reasons why one should compose a blog, or write a poem, or scribble something in a diary, or just scream aloud. But nothing can come out as suddenly or as passionately as the expression of pure and unparalleled anger & frustration.(did you think i was abt to say something abt love ?)

I have been lazy, hesitating, unimaginative or just plain disinterested to write my first blog ever. But the day has come... for a spontaneous outburst of annoyance ..

Electronics is my study and profession. But today I would like to deep fry the brains of the people who invented transistors, batteries, integrated circuits, CDs, DVD players, and even cables. and pulverize the lousy fellow who imagined great wonders could made out of silicon instead of leaving the mud(silica) alone... How can so many things fail at the same time ?? How far should I go to listen to just listen to one nice song ?? How could one of my favourite CDs gets stuck in a brand new branded DVD player ?

It only proves my theory about the existence of a Goddess of Circuits- Electronica , who simply decides for or against any user on a given day. Most users of electronic equipments,circuit debuggers would readily agree that certain inexplicable events/ failures would have left them puzzled on one day, and the very next day, they start up the system and lo! it works as if it always had. At such a moment look above , and you would find Her smiling to glory.

Having typed all this, my anger seems to have been dissipated. But thinking again, I might have made Electronica throughly unhappy...I hope I can save this blog, post this entry..and the PC does not hang up before that or a disruptive power glitch ruins this already wonderful evening....or a ....."Pllunkkkk"....................................

Yesteryear's Musicplayers

Yesterday, I have just gone through one full circle in the possession of music players . A strange feeling of 'retro' started to sink in.

The first year in my college life, I didnt have any device to listen to music. Then my first ever music player was organic.. it was a hostel mate who resided in the adjacent room, and sang all his favourite songs in his inimitable genre. This unfortunately caused the old hostel walls to quiver as if hit by mild tremors. This also made 11 other souls who could hear his voices , to respond with their own style of 'returning the music'- using the same language like angry young rappers always do..!

Then came along my most loved and inorganic Aiwa cassette playing walkman, whose spools had to rotate on battery power almost every night of 3 long years. In the final year however we inherited an amplifier and a large speaker which resembled a small fridge, designed to bring the roof down. This strange combo was still used to render all of ARR's and HarrisJ's latest hits and endured endless hours of playing 'Vaseegara'. But there was one fatal problem of the 50Hz power supply noise which got added to the music, so a listener would get the impression of riding a diesel-powered motorbike and listening to the music at the same time !

The days of the Compact Disc had become a reality in India, by the time I left for Singapore a CD player was among first in my list after getting my first stipend. My friend Ravi and I actually bought an unknown brand Compro for $99, within just a few weeks of university life - the reason being the walkman could play it could ACD,VCD and Mp3 for just 100 dollars! But we realised only later that we got much more for the money than what we desired. The MP3 decoder inside had a soul of its own, and would improvise any song rendered as a Solo by adding some ghost voices and making it sound like a chorus instead !



A few weeks later a beautiful slim blue-eyed model became our roommate disguised as a 2.1 multimedia speaker with a cute looking bass speaker. She was sooo photogenic that I even practised my modelling photography on her ! And she could really SING , and I truly understood that music with no bass was like a night sky with just stars but no moon..! With her, I enjoyed 2 more years of moon-lit skies and soothing music.

Photographers and Audiophiles have one thing in common - they cannot stop yearning for better quality features and higher performance devices to enrich their passion for photography or music, and can fall into the trap of burning their own purse in pursuit bigger , better gadgets. And imagine the plight of someone, who is both ! Eventually the blue fairy was getting older, and needed replacement.

This time it was Toshiba DVD player which seems to play everything including photos CDs. And another audiophile friend who overgrew his system of Rotel amplifiers and PSB speakers, sold it to me. Just how nice it was to shut off all the windows, put all the noise-generating flatmates to sleep, switch off the ceiling fan, and even breathe slowly-- just to listen to the music without distractions.

All was well, but something was missing! There was too many songs in many different genres, too much technology involved, too many CDS and Mp3 compilations ....but all seemed too familiar and offered no element of surprise, reminded nothing close to the heart.

I remembered how my tamil teacher in high school Mr.Baskaradoss once told us, how every kid in his native village were new fans of the 'radio box' but had a fear hidden deep within their hearts. All of them apparently thought that it was a little 'bhootham'(ghost in tamil) which resided and sang all the melodies from inside the box, whenever invoked.

I too longed to be mesmerised by the bhootham and bought a little AM/FM tuner, put it unobstrusively by my bedside, turned on the late-night old melodies programme on 'Oli 96.8', enjoyed the songs that mydad would have enjoyed as a kid and ....... slept !

Balance of Terror

I am extra lucky to have this mean machine at my home- which makes me feel happy or sad, depending on what I want..! Before you let your imagination run wild, let me tell you that its a simple weighing scale gone wrong.

When stood upon, the scales point to some number - when body weight is shifted slightly more to the left leg, the weight decreases- And when I shift the balance to the right it increases exponentially. With such amazing linearity, it is one instrument you just dont want to believe. But on the positive side, on days when I want to feel supremely positive, I stand entirely on my left leg..! (Scale reading = (My weight) - 8 kilos, and lets not fix a value to the variable My weight)

The point is not about some malfunctioning springs. Its just that this is the only balance I have control over, and know how to get pleasing results. The other balances..?

We keep listening to this 'One should learn to strike a balance between bla-bla-blah'-- Think about it ; Is that insightful or useful or atleast interesting to hear? Without any proper definition for what exactly is the balance, most people are still left groping in the dark, figuring out the perpetually oscillating value shown in the scales of balance. Lemme describe 2 big ones -

Professional/Leisure activity : Among many things that young adults writing their resume or attracting their partners, like to portray themselves as, ia a well rounded personality. The ability to juggle a profession (to earn for the rice), and leisure activities (flavor the rice with sambar,rasam) is something everybody recommends. But as the author found out, it aint that easy.

It starts with 5 weekdays-2 sleepdays- 5 WD-2 SD.. kinda routine - leading to the jolting realisation that 28.5714% of ones life is being cruelly wasted. Then follows a scheme of enrolling into various sports, classes and other voluntary activities over a period of time designed to enrich life. The weekends get packed slowly, and the important yet insane things-to-do spills over into weekday evenings and nights(like this blog). Today I just realised I am more relaxed during regular work hours that outside or weekends..! Gotta work to achieve a balance in this.

Food and Diets : "Eat in moderation" claims every health bulletin. Good idea , but whats moderate ? I absolutely hate it when they gives figures in calories, which is quite immeasurable when I think of the variety of stuff we eat throughout the day.

Follow the food pyramid says the wise one. But wise ones havent seen through the different food pyramids thats available - for meat eaters, for lean meat eaters, for vegetarians, for vegans, for non-dairy diets, low cholestrol diet, low saturated fat diet, low carb diet, e-diets , and then ofcourse the McSpicy Double meal. All this for somebody for forgets what he is talking about, when interrupted by the very thought of lunch !
-----
By now you must be wondering where or when is this guy going to end this winding passage on the incompetance of regular humans to know what to do, and how much. You might even debate if you should spend time reading blogs in future, of people who do not want to think aloud but just type it down and forget all about it.

My last word here, would be to learn to strike a balance on the amount of time you spend online and the time rather spent on other equally worthless activities!

Opening in the clouds..

Atlast..the first post..
a very cautious and unambitious first step towards the massively proliferating blogworld.