Somebody gonna get a hurt real bad...

Well...Russell Peters did not use this famous line of his in his show on Tuesday in Bangalore but he did use his other famous line 'Be a man!'

Tickets were tough to get but finally we were able to get them and go see this really funny guy. He in his usual style took people of all ethnicities on a ride and didn’t spare anyone. Like when he asked a sardarji in the front row what his name was the man replied in a very guttural voice so pat came the reply “Did you just burp or actually tell me your name!” Then he joked about the Gujarati people how they use ‘cho’ and ‘che’, even their swear words are all like cho#$, chu!!#@ etc. :)
He cracked that we Indians are so cheap that we invented the number ZERO! Its what we like to pay for everything :D I have seen so many mails claiming how India invented zero but this guy put a twist on that and surprisingly it made more sense :) Then he went on about George Bush about how he is the biggest moron. When Bush came to India he gave us nuclear secrets and we Indians being good at striking deals gave him mangoes (!) in return!

These were his clean jokes. He started clean but by the end he was on a roll and as explicitly dirty as you can get. There were several ROTFL moments and we had a ball of a time…

Snipet of the winners at the Oscars:
Best Picture: The Departed (Other nominees: The Queen, Little Miss Sunshine, Babel, Letters from Iwo Jima)
Director: Martin Scorsese for The Departed
Screenplay: Little Miss Sunshine
Actress: Helen Mirren in The Queen
Actor: Forest Whitaker in The Last King of Scotland
Foreign Film: The Lives of Others (Germany)
Animated Film: Happy Feet. I felt Cars was better...
Al Gore's movie about global warming and climate change "An Inconvenient Truth" won the "Best Documentary Feature" award.

Haven't seen a few of the movies so can't argue much or agree/disagree but 'The Departed' definitely deserves the awards. Anyway so the next must watch movies for me are:

• Little Miss Sunshine
• Letters from Iwo Jima
• Pan's Labyrinth (nominated in the Screenplay, Cinematography, Foreign Film and Art Direction categories).
• An Inconvenient Truth

And the wars go on with brainwashed pride...
For the love of God and our human rights,
And all these things are swept aside.
By bloody hands time can't deny,
Are washed away by your genocide
And history hides the lies of our civil wars

--- 'Civil Wars' - Guns N' Roses

Grand Unified Cosmos Theory

Now life devalues day by day
As friends and neighbours turn away
And there's a change that, even with regret, cannot be undone

Now frontiers shift like desert sands
As nations wash their bloodied hands
Of loyalty, of history in shades of grey

--- 'A Great Day For Freedom' - Pink Floyd

Save Darfur

Down and out
It can't be helped but there's a lot of it about
With, without
And who'll deny it's what the fighting's all about
--- 'Us and Them' - Pink Floyd

There is a genocide going on in Darfur, Sudan. An estimated 400,000 people in Darfur have died since the conflict began in 2003. An estimated 2 million people have been displaced from their homes, mostly seeking refuge in camps in Darfur's major towns. Two hundred thousand have fled to neighboring Chad.

First, I cannot understand why such killings happens at all, what goes on in the brains of people where all of them just start taking lives on such a widespread scale. What prompts not 1, not 10, not 100 but like half a country to take to killing the other half.

Second, why does the international community take so much time in reacting. Do something, arrrrgh...God!

Have we human beings just absolutely lost the plot? What are we doing to each other on this planet and what the feck are we doing to this planet....sigh!

Educate yourself:

Darfur Genocide
Save Darfur
Darfur Conflict

Some music that is currently on my playlist...

Audioslave - Revelations
Audioslave was the band that was formed when the lead singer of Rage Against the Machine left and the rest of the members joined up with Chris Cornell. Chris Cornell was the lead singer for the band Soundgarden and was coming off a couple of solo projects. Together they formed a super group called Audioslave.
INXS - Afterglow
Athlete - Wires
U2 & Green Day - The saints are coming
Snow Patrol - Chasing cars
All American Rejects - Move along
Nickleback - Far away
Angels And Airwaves - The adventure
Stone Sour - Through glass
Flipsyde - Trumpets
The Fray - How to save a life

Athlete...

...is a brit soft rock/pop band that I have been listening to recently. I saw the video of their song "Wires" and went ahead managed to get their whole album. They are a very musically inclined band. As in, they are very similar to Coldplay, lots of piano, soulful melodies and lyrics dripping with emotions and feelings.

Their latest album is ‘Tourist’ and the song ‘Wires’ will get to you immediately. The song is about the singer’s new born daughter lying in the ICU of a hospital. The song is pretty horrific in the sense that it is about a new born all hooked up in the ICU but at the same time there is a lot of hope in it and also something very enduring about it. It goes:

You got wires…going in
You got wires…coming out of your skin

Running down corridors, through automatic doors
Got to get to you, got to see this through

Some of the other songs that stand out are Chances (the chorus ‘Those first steps that I can't calculate’ is really nice on this song), Half Light, Trading Air (It has these lines ‘someone better hit the alarm…set it off’, that I found really intriguing!), Twenty four hours (this song has a beautiful & haunting chorus). The striking thing about ‘Twenty Four hours’ I think is that the song could be about just about anything, anything that someone is anticipating anxiously...

"If I was asked to wipe tables I would ensure that I was the best table wiper around"

This is what someone who I used to report to at one point and have a high regard for, told me once. To the same effect, yesterday, I read a really beautiful and inspiring story written by Satyajit Ray.

The story is about a man in his early fifties who many years back used to be an active stage actor and was really good at it. But he had given up acting long back when he moved to Calcutta in search for a better job. He had eventually lost the job and ever since has had it tough to make ends meet.

One day suddenly his friend gives him an offer to act as a walk on in a commercial film which has a famous director and a very famous actor. The role is of a person who the hero of the film bumps into and then walks away. He is told that the role does have spoken lines. Excited at this prospect he tells his wife about how he began his stage career acting as a dead body on stage and this role might bring about a similar change in his life.

The next day he shows up on the film set and finds out that his spoken line is ‘oh!’ He is very disappointed and irritated that the role is just one word, in fact it is not even a word it is just a sound. Unsettled he stands in the shade in one corner waiting for his shot to come. He is really unhappy but then the words of his mentor, when he was a stage actor, come to him. He remembers in reverence how his mentor used to say that no part is small and it is one's responsibility to make the most of every opportunity. He then starts thinking about ‘oh!’ and quickly realizes that there are many different shades to say 'oh!'. Standing there he calculates how different emotions can be mixed to come up with different ways to say ‘oh!’ He figures out his ‘oh!’ requires 60 parts of irritation and 40 parts of surprise.

When his shot comes along he even musters up courage to suggest to the director that in the scene maybe he should be reading a newspaper while he bumps into the actor. He is given a newspaper and the shooting starts. He does his best as he bumps into the hero harder than he had anticipated and manages to exclaim ‘oh!’ with 50 parts of anguish and 25 parts of surprise and irritation each. And just like that his work is done. He is asked to go wait in the tea stall for his payment.

At the tea stall he sits contently and has a sense of deep satisfaction. He knows people on the film set would not appreciate or even understand the effort he had put in and then he thinks about how much his payment would be 10, 15 or maybe even 20 rupees. Even though he needs the money badly, at that moment a thought strikes him 'what is twenty rupees when measured against the intense satisfaction of a small job done with perfection and dedication?'

The end of the story is that someone from the film set comes to the tea stall to hand over the payment and finds that this person is gone…

The story gives the same message as what someone put to me in a different form that no matter how insignificant you feel something on your hand is, always strive to put in your all and do your outmost best.

The story is really simple but I think it is a masterpiece and I really loved the story and also the way it is written. It is so simple yet capable of having such a huge impact on our attitude in life, whether it is in our work or in our personal lives…

Tea, hold the milk please...

It seems tea loses all its wholesome benefits as soon as you add milk to it.

Tea has a protective effect on the cardiovascular system. Black tea significantly improves the ability of the arteries to relax and expand thus accommodate increased blood flow. Tea exerts antioxidative, anti-inflammatory and artery dilating effects, which give protection against cardiovascular diseases.

All this is wiped out when milk is added. This is mainly due to some protein in milk that prevents the ingredients in tea to have the much desired biological effect.

The Apple iPhone rocks!!!

Looks like Cisco already has a resitered product called iPhone and has sued Apple but apart from that just look at the features...

• It’s a combination of iPod, Phone and Internet device.
• Screen size is 3.5”.
• Has Mac OS and full Safari. Safari is Apple's web browser.
• All functions are through touch screen. No stylus, just use your fingers.
• iPhone allows the user to glide the finger over the screen to activate it.
• Glide your finger up and down (or left and rignt) to scroll the screen.

Turn the iPhone to horizontal position and the display will automatically change to horizontal (landscape).

This is just so damn cool!!!!!!!!!!!

• SMS is more like a IM where you can track the messages as threads...in bubbles.
• Struck deal with Google to provide google maps on the phone.
• Struck deal with Yahoo to provide push email for FREE.
• It also has widgets…stocks, weather…etc.

Had a lot of fun at Mood Indigo this time again after missing it for lots of years.

Parikrama, who have played at MI 7 or 8 times, again played their regular set. Then I was able to catch Pankaj Udas, KK and Kailash Kher. Also caught a dutch blues/jazz guitarist named Jan Akkerman who was pretty good.
Then saw a play "Sa Hi Besura" directed by Makrand Deshpande. It was a decent play but felt it was a little too long.

One of the most spectacular things I saw was the next version of lighting cigarette lighters during slow songs/ballads. When KK was performing his slow song Pal, instead of the lighters going up, hundreds of cell phones went up!!! It was so impressive seeing those cell phones flickering their tiny lights all around the open air theater and it went really well the touching song "Pal". In fact KK instead of ending with his latest hit did an encore of Pal and asked the rest of the lights to be dimmed and requested everyone to "do that thing with your cell phones". Sadly I don't have a photo of that but it was a really stunning sight to see...you can do that in the next concert you attend :)

And then there was this on the MI'06 mural... :D

There was a really impressive rangoli display at Mood Indigo. Here are some pictures and it is just so hard to believe that these are rangolis. The attention to detail is simply amazing...

Amitabh from the movie "Sarkar".

Portrait of a man...

Zakir Hussain

Software Geek aka Superhero!

Huh?
I just found out that Parikrama had recorded a song for the launch of some Microsoft products. The song is called "Superhero" and the tagline is "Celebrating the Indian Developer". The song is nothing great, its a jingle at best but still worth a listen and read. The first line of the chorus is quite catchy. He’s no less than a super hero!

It is so strange and weird to have a song about us, software developers and that too a "Superhero" song...LOL!
Song and lyrics available at:


He’s no less than a super hero! :)