Out with the old

This time two years ago, I had written that one of the easiest posts to write would be a “year that was..” style post. That is only if something significant or chronicle-worthy actually happens during the time. As you might notice from the lack of activity in this space for the past half year or so, nothing chronicle-worthy did happen(apart from a night spent sleeping in the middle of the sports ground and a certain period when I was busy being escorted out of the premises of half the Residences in NUS). Hmm. Maybe I am being too cruel on my  ability to spend time chronicleably.

Moving on, I saw this movie called Rock On a while ago. Now usually, I am grateful to the theatres in Singapore for having subtitles for the movies they screen. It helped me understand Sarkar Raj and it was something I could amuse myself with while suffering through Vettaiyadu Vilayadu(Humour in transliteration never gets old). While watching Rock On, in order to further advance my image as another abey rockstar, I tried to follow the movie without looking at the subtitles. The intro song started and I had a strange feeling I could actually understand the lyrics, but I was sure I was mistaken. After all, I still had enough faith in Indian Cinema to trust that no one would write stuff like “Why is there only one moon, why is the sky blue” and try to pass it off as a song. So I took a look at the subtitles, sure that my Hindi knowledge was, for the first time, letting me down. After 3 minutes of reading in stunned disbelief, I considered the possibility that maybe all Rock songs were in fact philosophical musings on daily life and fundamental facts of astronomy. After all, I never really understood who or what James Hetfield wasn’t forgiving(thrice, now) and basically had no clue what those fellows at Iron Maiden were screaming about. So with my unprejudiced mind, I continued watching the film. But as time went by and another song about laundry bills and telephone books got half the audience in a frenzy, I started wondering what this movie was actually about. Was it to show that lead singers in rock bands automatically become investment bankers? Or was it to show that Fish sellers dealers saleswomen entrepreneurs were hot by profession? Or was it to show that guitars, in fact, do not need amplifiers to prodouce sound? Maybe this could be the intro song of the sequel, Keep Rocking On.

Continuing with my High-society-status-suicide, I was watching this show called Roadies on MTV that day. There was this bald dude who was apparently conducting “orientation sessions”(to use a sad euphemism) for a bunch of Rock On inspired um..youngsters. As my Hindi vocabulary enabled me to only comprehend simple contemplations on the colour of the sky and the cardinality of the moons, I was not able to follow what Bald guy was saying half the time and whatever he spoke in english was censored by the channel. As I am not one to judge by appearances, I will not venture my opinion on why he would be subjected to such nazism. What little I understood what Bald guy was reading out from the application forms(why they would actually apply to be “oriented”(sigh we should really find another substitute) by a random Bald guyis beyond me), and some of the answers on the application forms were only marginally less amusing than Ms.Teen South Carolina’s views on maps and South Africa. My curiosity was piqued I set about trying to find out what these people were actually up to. I have come to the conclusion that MTV is undertaking a systematic campaign to reduce the IQ of Indians(or atleast those who follow its shows)  everywhere. There cant possibly any other reason why some of the shows they are running, are still running. It is a conspiracy. It has to be.

Why?

“No seriously, give me 5 reasons why Uttar Pradesh should still be a part of India”.

That is actually a very thought-provoking question.

Have you ever wondered why there are somethings so obviously wrong with the world, which can be easily remedied, but somehow no one seems to want to correct it? Its a strange phenomenon. You are sitting at Subway and are talking about Khalistan and Operation Bluestar while at the next table, the most intellectually stimulating observation your colleague from the other end of the country(albeit not from the region in question, but close enough) can make to his friends is “Abey, this phone doesn’t have a camera!”. The least he could have done was think about why his home state is called the “Rice bowl of India”, that is if there were schools in his township and they actually teach things there. Or he could atleast wonder why he and his compatriots are the only people in the whole freaking country(be it a small one) who still say “iskool”.

There is something about watching 30,000 fanatical Croats singing “Deutschland, Deutschland Auf Wiedersehen” while Ballack and co. are getting their asses kicked. And it makes going to office half an hour late worthwhile.

Ah, the joys of Euro2008. The world finally realised that wunderboy can only be wunderboy against Newcastle Utd and Bolton Wanderers. And R.Mad still want to pay a few billion pounds for him. Oh well, boys will be boys and fools will be fools.

Quote of the day : “Amitabh Bachchan has a bad boy image in Sarkar Raj”.

Murthy somehow never fails to amuse us.

Incidentally, I think Portugal was suffering from the “Dasavatharam-disease”. It fell for its own hype. I thought it was a decent movie though.

I am ofcourse talking about c.ron diving around like a little girl.

Insights

Someone mentioned to me a while ago that it was amusing that I had a separate tag for “Stupid People”. Thinking about that, Ive come to realise now that I didnt write about them because they got on my nerves. I wrote about them because it was endlessly amusing and entertaining. And besides, ranting was always more of my style. So in keeping with a time honoured tradition, here I go again

Some people might say that if you get annoyed by what someone is doing/saying/making videos of, just ignore them. Sure, thats what the whole world did when Hitler started expressing his opinion on the size of Germany on the world map.

Dont get me wrong, I am all for freedom of expression. I dont hold anything against people who claim that Eragon is a real book, I might just point out to them that they are douche bags. It is their opinion after all. But when you make a video of a bunch of people, all of whom rave about the writing talent of Christopher Paolini, and then label the video “Greatest Books of the Twentieth Century” and put it up on YouTube, thats when you start to piss people off. There is general silliness, there is stupidity and then there are affronts to public decency. Videos of people speaking about how they would rather be good at many things than be great at one thing, because thats what the cue card reads, falls under the third category. If you want to make videos about Valentines day, or “Accommodation fiasco@NUS”, go right ahead. But please, dont take up intellectual topics, make Miss.Teen South Carolina‘s descendants speak about it and make a complete mockery of the issue, if I can call it that. Thats all I wish to express on this topic.

Oh, and it is not cool to make your videos “Video responses” to random videos which have no relation to your topic. Just some food for thought.

Moving on, I was looking at Singapore GP circuit map the other day, and I saw that there was a Esplanade Steps “Grandstand”. And a “General Walkabout Area”. Wow, I cant think of many other places which would charge you $200 to sit on steps from where it usually evicts you 363 days of the year. But it shouldnt be too hard to find some 30 storey building within a few miles of the track to watch the race from, which the organisers havent spotted and ticketed yet. Then again, you never know.

Apologies if this post is very contextual, that cannot be helped.

On linguistics

English, if you think about it, is a very beautiful language. Even if most of the words are derived from Latin, Greek, French, Japanese and Polish(and thats as far as my knowledge gleaned from Scripps National Spelling Bee 2007 extends), any language which has words like “pwn” (“YOu gt pwned n00bzz!!”) and which has books like LotR written in it cannot be not cool. And once we have agreed that it is cool, we can also rationalise that the people who created the language should have been pretty smart. In other words, they must have been some sassy froods^. In other words, we mustn’t be questioning their judgement. And so, you can imagine my surprise when I learnt that the word “actress” had become persona non grata in the Oxford English Dictionary, apparently because it was “sexually discriminating”. What I dont get is, when in German even tables, chairs, notebooks, erasers and washing machines are assigned sexes, why cant we call an obviously macho Kiera Knightley an “actor” and a positively feminine Orlando Bloom an “actress” ? Feminist Bullshit. Snort.

And so, you can imagine my absolute horror when I heard that there are some out there who actually want to “indianise english“. Please, NO.

Are you watching closely?

If you listen to Raghavan, “Life in a metro” is one truly horrible movie. In fact, he said, it was one of the worst he had ever seen. But I found out that Eragon hadn’t released in India yet and he said that before we entered the theatre to watch Spiderman3 so I could forgive him for making bold statements.

*Read this if you want to save yourself a 100 bucks. 200, if you were planning on watching Eragon too*

What could possibly be more interesting than watching Spiderman 3?

Eating popcorn, one corn at a time and comparing the salt content of each corn with the previous one. Trust me, that is experience talking.

Spiderman3 sucked.

Thats putting it mildly.

Tobey Maguire is of the Keanu Reaves/Elijah Wood or Abhishek Bachchan in dhoom2 (if you want to be desi(Thats the only hindi movie Iv watched so forgive me if Im generalising)) mould. He emotes best with the spider costume on. I actually thought he was smiling when MJ told him to take a hike. And his er.. “transformation” into villain spidey was so comical, it almost seemed intentional. If he had a nice moustache I thought he would have made a great Hitler, with his hair combed down. That way, the mossad might have done him in and we might have had a Peter Parker who didnt have a dead pan for a face and doesnt make you go “WHY IS HE F***ING GRINNING ALL THE F***ING TIME??”. But I would be doing grave injustice to the film if I said Tobey Maguire was the only thing wrong with it.

The movie had absolutely no character development. There seemed to be so much going on in the movie but you could find solace in the fact that Mary Jane didnt have too much of a clue about what was happening either. Peter Parker’s screen time should have been cut in half. It looked as if the villains were thrown only to let the director add lots of special effects. The portrayal of the “struggle within” almost made me weep in agony.

Horrible movie. Please dont watch it at home, or anywhere else for that matter.

But I have to admit, Spiderman 3 doesnt hold a candle to Eragon when it comes to sucking.

How do you make a bad book into a movie which is worse? Take all 3 Lord of the Rings movies, merge them and cut off random scenes, ad lib random lines from the book and when that gets boring, make up gay jokes and add them. Take the Star Wars and Lord of the Rings movie posters and photoshop the faces of your actors onto them. Paint the whole thing blue and voila, you have Eragon (I also have a feeling the book was created in a similar fashion) .

A random scene from Eragon :

*Eragon is hunting in Fangorn forest the forbidden forest some random misty forest*

Eragon : Why hello there, thats a nice big blue stone. I think I will take it home and trade it for some food.

*Eragon goes to shop keeper*

Shopkeeper : Take that away, bad boy.

Eragon *takes it away*

*Later, in Eragon’s house*

Eragon : I think I will put you down here, big blue stone.

*Big blue stone starts cracking*

Eragon *grins at it*

*Big blue stone breaks*

Eragon *grins at it*

*A mini blue Hungarian Horntail random dragon pops out*

Eragon *grins at it*

*Blue dragon dives after a rat and gobbles it up*

Eragon : Ah so that takes care of our rat problem. LOLZ, IM SO FUNNY!!!

Blue Dragon : My hero !

I am not making this up, this actually happened in the movie. But really, if you have seen Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter or Star wars or any other fantasy movie, half of Eragon would evoke a strange sense of deja vu. I slept through the other half of the movie so I cant comment on that. The movie sucks. Big time. Avoid it at all costs. I wonder why they are releasing it so late in India though.

“The Prestige”, however, rocks. So I wont try to write a review about it.

Heartbreak

What was supposed to be a closely contested second leg between Roma and ManU turned out to be one of Aswin’s super-easy mode FIFA ’07 matches. 7 – 1 ? OMG. Even aswin wouldnt have managed that.

Its 9 am now, I have a CS1104 exam in 3 hours and I havent slept all night. I am vetti blogging, after drinking my 4th cup of coffee for the *night*. Sigh, I need a life.

:|

Disclaimer : All quotations/references made in the following rant are *purely that of the author’s creation*. Any similarity to any comment you/anyone you know might have made to me in the near past, especially in orkut or gtalk, is purely coincidental. Please convince yourself that no one can be that dumb. My god, its been a long time since I wrote one of these.

Air heads piss me off . Kill them all. Stupid people should be sent to concentration camps. For instance, if you didn’t know that after arranging a bunch of numbers in ascending order, the first number will be the smallest, you should have been a jew at Auschwitz. And, if I have my gtalk status message as “I found a girl friend in Cuba” and then remove it one week later, and if someone makes a reference to it and I say “hmmm….u blind or sumthin…..???y not have a luk again??rather dan crappin away to glory? “, I should be gassed right now. And I mean right now.

And how hard is it, really, to type complete words? Does “dat” takes lesser time to type than “that” ? And what are you going to do by saving that 1/20th of a second? And “luk” (refer disclaimer) ?? What on earth is that? If anything, it is positively homosexual. You cant script your own language. You are too dumb for that. Get a life. Leave English alone.

Now, if you are

a) Confused : Never mind. Be glad that your imagination isn’t as active as mine.

b) Pissed off/annoyed and think my disclaimer was full of lies : Now why would you think that?

c) Wondering if this post is about you : Nope. Refer disclaimer.

Ask me no questions..

Holding on to beliefs, while they slip through your fingers is painful. It hurts more when you still want to believe, but cant. Maybe this is a phase, or maybe it just passed. If there is one thing I cant be, its comfortably numb.

A thousand days. And poof, like that, its gone.

Confused. Annoyed. Losing hope, for myself.

On a saner note, we won ‘Rang’ today. Its this mini culturals thing. A smaller version of Saarang if you will. After all, every saarang has a rang but every rang doesnt have a saarang

ManYou got gunned .

(I shall not elaborate for lame ManU fans)

That was our teamname fyi.

Of lack of creativity…

Its been a long time since I posted. The reasons for that are plenty but the essence of it all is 1) I cant think of anyone to insult 2) My classes are over 3) I lost my nubbin. But us paddymen are resilient creatures, we dont give up easily. I shall write about my toenails if I have to but luckily, it hasn’t come to that yet. Its a new year and I can get away with writing one of those “the year that was..” posts.

2006 was a very eventful year, to say the least. I graduated from school, decided on my college(which wasn’t easy or simple) and finally, joined one. If I were given a chance to go back and live the year again, would I do anything different? Probably, but then, wouldn’t we all ? But I guess whats more important is that I dont regret not getting that chance. This is, after all, not a “bad deal”. Things dont happen for a reason, they happen only because I made them happen. Not being in control of my life is a very scary thought, though I dont know why. Wouldn’t it just be easier to assume everything will be taken care off and nothing is really up to me? I dont know, for some reason it isn’t. Should I analyze everything that happens around me ? Or just take things for their face value ? Is there always more to things and people than what meets the eye? Is it worth finding out, even if its at a cost ? Isn’t it easier to just live in ignorance? But who will I be fooling, besides myself ? Is it even worth it? I dont know. I just confused myself.

5 days, I will be back in college.

Do I want to go back ? Not really.

A pity, it could have been so much different. And better, maybe.

Oh well, if it wasn’t to be. I know who to blame.

The prince and the papers

A few days ago, a small boy in rural Haryana fell down a…big hole in the ground. The media were over him like vultures and special teams from the army were called him to rescue the boy. The Haryana CM spent an entire day at the spot, directing rescue efforts one would presume. The minister promised free medical treatment but the boy luckily had escaped unhurt.

First thing that struck me about this incident was the amount of media attention it received. The news channels were flashing streaming videos of the boy every 5 minutes and Headlines Today went further by inviting people to send SMS wishes and get-rescued-soon messages, which was so totally stupid. This kind of sensationalist, mass-appeal news reporting, which I thought exclusive to the Times of India and Deccan Chronicle, is beginning to sink in everywhere. The media is going to the dogs.

But it cannot also be denied that the boy wouldn’t have even been noticed if not for all the attention he received. After all, these kind of incidents happen quite frequently and how many times do we have Chief Ministers gracing the occassion ? The CM also spent an entire day there. Well so who said ruling the state was hard work ?

The boy ,besides the free medical treatment, was also awarded Rs. 2 lakh in “compensation”. Now, it is the government’s fault that the ditch remained uncovered, but why are the tax payers being punished instead? Shouldn’t the 2 lakhs come from the CM’s salary ?

This country is really on its way to houndsville…