One thing is certain. Tennis stars ARE handsome :D

Something I miss in the hostel life is not being able to watch TV or rather not being able to watch TV programmes of one's own choice. I missed it very strongly on Republic day when I wanted to watch the parade ( its been ages since I had seen the parade) and now recently when I wanted to see the tennis matches. The rogerer-safin match wud have been gr8 to watch.

Books and movies

Have you heard the soundtrack of Kisna ? Its very good especially the track Hum rahe na rahe reminds of the book The Far Pavilions by MM Kaye. This book had a similar theme: that of an Englishman in pre-independence era who grew up with Indian guardians and falls in love with an Indian princess. This book was written by an english-woman who lived in India at that time. The book is what people call spellbinding. The story is told in a very Indian way without the look-down-upon-you attitude that the British generally take up. The story takes place in Kashmir, Bombay, Rajasthan, MP and finally ends in Afghanistan which was a part of the British India at that time. A very romantic book and worth going through the 1400 and odd pages.
Well the soundtrack of Kisna does give me a feel of that kind and I hope I get to see the movie. I cant stand Vivek Oberoi but will give the movie a try, atleast for Subhash Ghai's ability to give a movie that dream-like quality.

Its amazing the way some books have the ability to weave an imaginary world around the reader. I felt the same with Gone with the wind, Lord of the rings, and recently with Holy fools and Chocolat by Joanne Harris. I firmly believe that the original books are 100 times better than their movie adaptations as when we read the book we use our imagination to picturise what the author says but the movies always leave us with a sense of could-be-better-shown. I felt this in the case of the Harry potter series and LOTR series.

A different perspective

I tend to do this at times :D

Happy new year !!!!

New year for us started in a very solemn way. Not that I stressed my muscles to do anything for the tsunami victims except for the usual easy way out. But even then, hearing accounts from people who actually went to the disaster-struck regions had its effect. After a lot of arguments about whether to have a new year party or not, we finally decided on a small scale party on the roof-top. It was really lovely with all the good food stuff, a clear sky, a half moon, and fire crackers being burst at a distance. Then I slept the new year day away :D. Its really shameful, what with people going to temples etc to pray for a happy new year and me lying there on the bed for the whole day. When I say whole day I mean exactly that (till 4.30 pm). Now this is a bad habit I have developed, that I sleep on saturdays like this without food or anything else. I will try my best not to repeat that tomorrow. ok bye for now. I am expecting a lot from this weekend. I hope everything works out for me and for you too :D.. Have fun and have a nice weekend.

same feelings :D

me tooooo

Merry Christmas

There's gonna be a Christmas party tonite. Lots of grub and fun and frolic waiting for me. Only crib is that I had been planning to catch up on my sleep tonite. But christmas comes only once a year and Ill be with these friends only for a couple of years. So staying awake is worth it :D
I have been skipping my meals so much that I can feel the difference in my looks and my work schedule too. So, I have resolved to be regular in my meals from 2row. I bought salad and fruits from the market too 2day.

Somehow, I have always felt very low in spirits around the yearend. The new year also brings my dear friend so it will be a good start. Im already counting the days.

cant remember..

I can recall only the 1st line of this sher.. dont remember whats the other one..

it goes as :
sitaaron ke aage jahaan aur bhi hai.

guess the next line says:

abhi ishq ke imtihaan aur bhi hain..

I say:
abhi phd ke imtihaan aur bhi hain

ooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaannnnnn

Ahmedabad trip

Long time since I blogged. So here's whats been happening with me and I hope I can give a brief account.
I spent nearly a month in Ahmedabad. Initially I didnt sight-see much because of a rigorous but a very enjoyable lecture schedule. The organizers took us to the Modhera sun temple and Adalaj step well in the first weekend. Amazing architecture !!. I'll soon get pics of those places ready and lemme see if I can put them up here.

The lectures were boring in the later half of the second week and I ended up taking a panga with one of the lecturers too. He was too arrogant and rude to the students in general with the result that hardly 10 students attended his last class. Third week was interesting cos I was actively involved in that week. I had to take a couple of classes. I enjoyed doing that and I got compliments from my friends also who said that I will be a good teacher. Hope this comes true.

3rd week was also interesting cos I started my sight seeing around that time. Actually I just visited the gandhi ashram and the shopping areas. I passed the Sidi Sayyed mosque. I wish I had more time and more enthu ppl with whom I cud cover the other places.
Overall, I liked Ahmedabad. Its a nice place to visit. There were riot reports and tension in the city but what I noticed was that life goes on in the city. People don't stay in their homes because of the riots. We visited the riot neighbourhoods twice after the riots but thankfully nothing happened to us either. Overall this trip will remind me of nice new friends, good food ( especially the restaurant called ZK - tasty non-veg food yummmmmmmmmmm) and nice places + a good school.
I enjoyed the train journey too. Believe me India is gorgeous. Each place has something new to offer. This diversity ensures that one never gets bored in the train journey if one is blessed with a side-lower birth seat :D. But I suppose living in those places will be full of hardship.

news news news

So 1st orkut is working and dumbest me !!! I cudnt login to orkut cos i didnt set the proxies porperly all these days..apparently the secure blah blah had been left blank and that made the difference. neways nice to catch up with the latest there :)

and Im going to Ahmedabad. hurrrrrrrrraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah.........After all these pains, Im a teeny weeny bit scared. But as amitabh said in khuda gawah - "main waapas aaoongi". After all I have to get married, have kids and get them married b4 I die.
ok very sleepy now ..so tadaaaaaaa

I will come back

Im just back from a long weekend spent at home during which I enjoyed Diwali and celebrated Eid and slept through a considerable part of it. The weekend started with the very sad news that Arafat is no more. Though this was very expected after the sudden collapse of the leader, it still was a sad news. I have never followed world or national news that closely. But Palestine and Arafat are almost synonomous to me. My last impression of him is the grinning Arafat on the pages of Hindu saying I will come back. Im sure it will take more than a generation of people to forget him.

Unfortunately, we had to depend totally on DD News which happens to be very repetitive. They dont even change the order or their exact sentences throughout the day. So, we heard innumerable times that India was the first non-arab state to recognise Palestine as the legitimate authority of the Palestinian people and that a kid in Chennai will burst crackers and then take oil bath and go meet his relatives. Oh boy did I miss BBC and NDTV !!!! Believe me DD is lousy. They are going to now make it digital. Access is through the cable operators. God knows who will want to pay for that channel.

OK now back to work. Hundreds of things to do and thousands of worries on my mind. I wish I can skip these years and directly go to the sweet blissful days that Im fervently hoping will arrive soon. Woh din kabhi to aayenge.

Phir Milenge

I saw Phir Milenge this weekend. I liked the movie a lot. It deals with a serious issue like AIDS but with the right amount of sensitivity with humour sprinkled here and there. Surprisingly, this is the first time I have seen a Shilpa Shetty movie. I liked her too. She had a no-nonsense voice plus tons of attitude. Abhishek was adorable. Nice eyes and good height were always an attraction to me :D. On the other hand, we dont know how we will react when we are faced with a situation like this. Everyone is afraid of death.

On the book front, I am reading Chocolat now. Its written by Joanne Harris. She is a very good writer. I had read her Five Quarters of an Orange and Holy Fools earlier. She writes in a frank, clear language and gives a nice thrilling twist to her stories. And she also flavours her story with the mention of delicious food stuff. I just cant wait to finish the day here and get back to the novel.

Ok now back to the drab work. Just a thought - If we have a very limited time to live, why do we spend years in a boring lab in front of a boring comp.

My fantasies and naadooooooooooos

The days are filled with the same routine work, the same faces and the same old me. But little things happen which leave me with a little smile at the end of the day.
One such thing was watching the movie Kuch Kuch Hota Hai for the nth time on TV. This again is one such movie which I can watch anytime. And I have to admit I like Shahrukh after all. Why would I watch his movies with such delight if I didnt like him. I, ofcourse, quit watching the movie after the complication aka Salman Khan entered the scene. Salman Khan acts only in Sanjay Leela Bhansali movies or rather only SLB can make him act. I was really surprised when I saw him in Khamoshi. I regret missing the last scenes of KKHH. Kajol's ghaagra is very pretty in the wedding scene.
On a different note, there was a newsitem today in Nature about the discovery of fossils of a hobbit-sized Homonid lady found in Indonesia. This is a nice discovery for the scientific community. But imagine if one believes in Tolkien lores and there actually was a hobbit-like creature around !! If all the charm of Lord of the Rings had actually existed in that era. That brings in a possibility of handsome elves walking on this earth :D Legolas where are u ????????? aaja tujhko pukaaare mere geeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet re mere geet re :D
I have heard that there used to be gipsy clans who lived in the Tolkien world and lived the way Strider lived. People have tried to compare the places Tolkien imagined with the real world. LOTR does make one want to believe in such fantasies.
At the moment, the real world also is not very bad. I am relishing a delicacy called naadu which my friend brought from her home :D...ahaaaaaaa tasty !!! So long then. The naadu beckons.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

This seemed to be a long weekend but lo its already getting over. Friday was spent working. Yesterday, after the breakfast I slept for full 6 hours without a break. I had planned on sleeping for some 30 minutes and then getting back to work. But didn't wake up until 3 in the afternoon. I missed my lunch too :(. Then I watched Spiderman2 in OAT. Got terribly bored. Its so painfully slow. Until now I thought Dilip Kumar won the prize for the slowest speaker but Toby Maguire wins it hands down. Another big disappointment was the absence of STRINGS' "Najaane kyun..". It was criminal to have cut that song from the movie..God knows who did it. I wouldnt be surprised if the OATwalas did it. They are famous for cutting the interesting parts of a movie to make it fit the 2.5 hrs timeline.

Then I finished EM Forster's Where angels fear to tread in one go. The book has yet to sink in. But overall I didn't much like it. I also read a few good articles in ET's Corporate Dossier. There was an article about Don Quixote being an inspiring book. To follow your dream no matter how strange and believing in yourself is the main theme of the book. It also says madness is thinking different from the world. After that article, I was motivated to check out the book in the library. But the book in itself looked very formidable and so I decided to add reading it to my some-things-I-want-to-do-before-I-die list which includes many exotic ideas like learning Arabic, Persian, French, going on a world tour, being a maestro in Renormalisation Group theory etc. I have a faint idea of these ideas never working out. That's why they are on this list. Maybe in my spare time after PhD, I will work on them.

By the way, the way madness is perceived is very clearly portrayed in another book I read partially which is Veronica decides to die by Paulo Coelho. Here Veronica writes a crazy letter before committing suicide in which she says she is disillusioned with the world and some such thing. But her attempt fails and she is saved. Then she is put in a mental asylum because of her letter. Some books have a power of taking you with them. I believe this was one such book. That's why I stopped reading it after nearly a 100 pages. This almost convinces you that what we perceive as sanity is thought of as madness by the inmates of the asylum. Its the way you look at it. Anyone who differs from our conventional ideas are branded as mad and caged lest they harm our simple ways of life. Paulo Coelho is an amazing writer. His Alchemist is brilliantly written. I didn't much like By the river Pedra, I sat and cried. I am yet to read 'Eleven Minutes'.
At the end of a long post, let me tell you something: Sleeping is addictive. I'm again yawning after sleeping for 14 hours yesterday. I guess Ill again take my siesta this afternoon. I have to wake up early morning tomorrow and reach the department by 7.30 am :( May the heavens above help me in this daunting task :D

Veerappan and kakka kakka

Veerappan is dead...

Now that this news came up, I was reading the reports and only then I realised the extent of his brutality and the terror in which he is held. (I should keep more track of the happenings arnd)..somehow the simple end of such a clever bandit seemed very out of place...One would imagine an hour of fighting and a death like that of Amjad Khan of Sholay... But kudos to the team who finally brought about this at the risk to their own lives..Imagine!! Getting into his gang is like entering the Lion's den..what bravery !!!

And somehow his death also reminded me of the movie "Kakka kakka".. This was a Tamil movie oriented around police department. The officers face hardship because of a gangster and finally the hero manages to kill the gangster.. It was a typical tamil movie with 100 other movies already made on the same theme but it made an impression on the audience.. The death of the police inspector Harikrishna, shakeel ahmed ..etc there were so many similarities..but as they say films mirror real life..A friend told me there was a movie called 'captain prabhakar' based on veerappan's life story.. Vijaykant was the hero..
But what was saddening was the rustication of veerappan's daughters from their schools ..these daughters who didnt even know abt their father.. This shouldn't be done.. Why blame the kids for their father's misdoings ??
Hope this act doesnt lead THEM onto a wrong path..I wish some NGO does something abt this..

CRians

Before I start off my discourse on CRians, let me first introduce them to u. They are the denizens of the Common Room which is my favourite place in the hostel apart from my room. There are so many of them whom I meet regularly in the CR ( u shud guess by now how often Im found in the common room)..I dont even know their names. Still its always a pleasure to meet them.. Even a 'kyunki saas..' becomes watchable in their company..U guessed it right..we know exactly when to boo together and when to laugh when we watch those serials..And there are some ogres who want to see their choicest serials as soon as they enter the room. I think the only way a CR can be prevented from becoming an akhaada is when everybody does some give and take or go by the majority votes.. I hope they will learn someday to live in peace and harmony..Oh God hope I dont sound like one of those Miss World competitors who vouch to die for world peace. Anyways I will now get back to finishing this task before 10 so that I can go and watch "ye meri life hai ...hoo hoo"

Sense Nonsense

One of the couplets in one of Ghulam Ali's ghazal goes as

Mujhe phoonkne se pehle mera dil nikaal rakhnaa
Yeh kisi ki hai amaanat kahin saath jal na jaaye

(I forget the poet.I know that's criminal as half the beauty of a ghazal sung by somebody lies in the lyrics themselves)

A crude translation will be :
Take out my heart before cremating me
Its somebody's trust..It should not get burnt with everything else

Ahem... Correction...Thats the crudest translation..the whole beauty of Urdu is destroyed.
But if one takes it literally (I mean actually removing the heart), it sounds so gross..Its a poetic creation but sounds so violent..People with no poetic sense (sometimes me) should perhaps keep away from this ghazal..
I'm a big fan of Ghulam Ali's ..His 'Hungama hai kyun barpa...' should be declared as the anthem for those who love drinking..It almost tempts me to try it out :P. 'Chupke chupke...' is too good for words.. Other favourites are 'Aawargi...' and 'Itni muddat..'
Abida Parveen's ghazals are of a totally different class and talking about them will take another half an hour flat... Too mind-blowing...

The reason for my absence from the blog these days has just been the absence of anything of substance happening these days..

ok lets see whats on my mind right now apart from the workload which doesnt seem to reduce, the clothesload which also is screaming for a wash, the room which has been begging for a sweep ?? movieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeees :D

Many interesting movies have/will be released these days. Gurinder chaddha's Bride and Prejudice tops the list..I have seen her Bend it like Beckham 5 times :D Hope this also is equally interesting..Mr. Darcy appears to be pretty interesting.ahem... Besides, I loved Pride and Prejudice.. I used to be a big fan of Jane Austen. I have read all her novels and I wud rate PaP the best of them followed by Mansfield Park.. I admit of late Im amazed at my ability to have read them in the first place. Presently they are too slow for my liking.

Ok now the next interesting movie seems to be Swades.. Somebody told me its about a NASA scientist who sees the small town India and settles down here. mmm pretty interesting.. though SRK is the attraction.. I dont know ..there is something about him.. I cant stand him still I have seen all his movies released after DDLJ.. I tell myself its his ability to carry off comedy and romantic portions so well..

Shrek2 has been on my list since a long time :( but never got a chance to see it.. I loved Shrek and have heard that Shrek2 is equally amusing..

I had a thought today..Imagine if one could bring one's imaginations to life.. If such a thing is possible, I would like to fly :D . (Im sure this has been a dream of every soul on the land). Somehow the vast, open sky free of any obstructions, rules and regulations is a big temptation to everybody. By the way, if (at all) everybody hates restrictions so much, why impose them on others. My list of dreams is endless. So I better stop it here.

yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaawn ... another day of boring work tomorrow. I hope this piece of work gets over soon. It hardly inspires me to sit and work..

Good nite for now..

No Orkut !!!!!!!!!

The proxies in my insti refuse to connect to Orkut :( No idea why this happened ... This is such a big disappointment.. The community posts were a good timepass when I got too bored of programming..I hope this doesnt continue forever :( Im already missing it ..sob sob.........

Tujhe dekha to yeh jaana sanam........

Hi !! me back from a very very short weekend spent at home. The weekend was shorter cos it was spent just lazing around the place ;)

I saw Dilwaale Dulhania Le Jaayenge at home. I have lost count of the number of times I have seen the movie. Its still fun to watch it. Maybe its Shahrukh's comedy, maybe its Kajol or maybe its just DDLJ that does it. One (atleast I) never gets tired of it.

Also I had Mr. Cold to give me company. Somehow my holidays and Mr. Cold are inseparable.

As I was returning today, I saw a billboard advertising for Indian Express. The billboard showed the charred bodies from the Kumbakonam tragedy. For newcomers, in the Kumbakonam tragedy, a primary school was gutted in fire because the thatched roof of the school caught fire. Because of narrow exit routes and many other avoidable reasons the kids could not come out. Nearly a 100 or so died in that tragedy. The scenes were indeed heart-wrenching and believe me Im not being melodramatic. The fact that the dead were all kids excepting one made it more painful. Now this billboard under discussion had one of these pictures in clear details in the left half. The right half said "I express anguish". I felt that this was done in bad taste. Somebody's tragedy converts into money for some. There were many other ways of putting the point across. For eg. something highlighting the still existing thatched roof schools could have been used to make the same point. What the renowned newspaper did was sheer exploitation of the tragedy. This is not a single case of media exploiting the masses. We see it done very often. Serials, news channels, magazines, movies - you name it. Its there.

In contrast, I saw a news item in NDTV this weekend. This was a piece of investigative journalism . They had helped unearth a child sex racket in Delhi. Now thats something constructive.

Media plays such a huge role in putting the right message across. And I believe they can still make money if they choose the other route. The approach is what matters.