Music et al!

I am a highly emotional person, though the emotions show for the really weird reasons. One thing that never fails to stir the senses within is shows of patriotism. Okay, patriotism stirs almost everybody. Whats weird about me is that it doesnt have to be my country. Just any country's nationals doing something, typically the singing of patriotic hymns with emotion, for their homeland! Notable among them was Celine Dion singing 'God Bless America' on the first Anniversary of 9/11. And in case you didnt know already, for me, international football matches start with the singing of the national anthem by/for the teams. (An interesting observation here - During WC '03, only a pitisome handfull of Indians cricketers looked interested when the Jana Gana Mana was played. Though, two of them went a step further and emulated their Australian counterparts by keeping their palms on their chests. Talk about ignorance!

Well, a little while ago, I was youtube'ing for 'Casablanca' (which is one of the many movies I badly want to see, God knows when). And there was this scene in Rick's Bar, where the Nazi's are singing their national anthem, and Bogart, feeling overwhelmed with patriotic fervour, asks his buglist to sound the notes for the 'La Marsellaise'. They then team up to sing the anthem in brave defiance of the German anthem, culminating in a singing war between in the bar!

A malayam poem has some evergreen lines that goes, 'When you hear of India, you should feel goosebumps, And if it is Kerala you are hearing off, the blood in your veins should gush!" This were lines written when the the freedom struggle was at its pinacle, and served the struggle well. But it is depressing to thing that after we got what we fought for, we really dont care about using it with pride! But thats not for today.

Today, overcome by the beauty of the French national anthem, I went a surfing for that, ended up surfing for the anthem of most of the countries Iv remember, and winded up judging that the Star Sprangled Banner, is perhaps the best. Yeah, the American national anthem. Even though I am as much an America basher as most of us who've only seen them hegemoniously be frontrunners everywhere would be, I couldnt help feeling touched by this performance by the combined armed forces academies choir! Without superstars, without extreme vocal effects. Just the song, like a song, imo, should be. The song, at its best. I literally found myself clutching my cheeks in awe.

As to other national anthems, I have always been a fan of the arrangement of the German anthem, which almost sounds like a hymn! Little, wonder considering that in its land lies the laboratories of some of Gods best gifts to humanity, Ludwig VanBeethoven, and George Friderik Handel. Though I vaguely remember the music for this anthem is attributed to Mozart, an Austrian. Okay, I know Im going into deeply boring territory now, but if you ever go after National Anthems, scout for the Soviet anthem (which many claim to be the best), and even the Argentine one.

But the best video I stumbled upon today was this. An Englishwoman singing the Jana Gana Mana, much better than we ever did in school. Sometimes, it takes a foreigner to make you feel proud of your nation!

PS: Today may very well go down as one of the days I never forget in my life. Ill explain! Iv always had a long list of exotic career ambitions, none of them having anything to do with what Ill do for a living. One of them was singing Handels 'Messiah' in a good choir, which is arguably the composition with the most mass appeal, if not the best classical composition of all time. And needless to say, like, most of the other items on the list, this was more a wish than a possibility. But tell you what, early this year, by the grace of God, I got the opportunity to join the Madras Musical Association, and the first concert we did was Messiah. After about five months of practicing every tuesday evening, today we are performing. And man, will I not savour every minute of it. See you next week!

You'd think I was bored with being bored

Yesterday, like every other salary day, my ATM was a stop on my way back home. And yesterday, like most other salary days, the ATM was out of order. Well, not one to get put off by that, I trudged up to the bank to confront the manager (again, like I did last month) poor guy, he was packing up after another day at seven in the evening, and there I was with the old complaint.

No wonder he retorted by saying that it was only when I needed it that the ATM was going out of order! say what....

Actually sometimes I do wonder whether everyone else makes a big deal about such small inconveniences. Like, Iv been using a Hutch special card to call mom at a discounted rate. Now, its a pain in the neck actually using the service. And it didn't help my spirits that their toll free number to reach a live consultant was non existent (or so it seems) nor was the automated system which is supposed to tell me my account balance answering!

So I call up the regular Hutch number and get the usual excuses. So i ask to talk to the manager (and I know a thing or two about how things work in a call centre) and it seems he is busy in a meeting! Now would you believe, every time I ask for a hutch manager, I always get the same response. You would think that if they spent so much of time in meetings, customers wouldn't have problems!

Neither is it helping that Iv read TRAI regulations well enough to know that all these are actually 'offenses'. And it hurts even more to know that now Iv got them on the hook, with all the laws lined up against them, so Iv got to actually move my ass and go in for the kill.. Or atleast, do something apart from crib about it. Oh God, you'd think I was bored of being bored all the time!

Moving on, I was just surfing through youtube and chanced upon some videos made on Novak Djokovic (well, its pronounced just the way you did, never mind, anyway) Well, Djokovic, if you dont know, is considered as the practical joker of the ATP who, it seems, took over from where Dmitry Tursunov (if you read the last post) left off.

And he was imitating his fellow players on the tour like Nadal, Federer, Roddick Sharapova and the whole lot of them. Now I always have a thing for mimicry artistes. We seem to have many in Kerala. In fact, it became such a pastime with almost everybody that you could say it was a modern day art form, for its popularity. The favorite was an unlikely actor called Jayan, but soon followed impersonifications of Mohan Lal, Mammooty, later on, polliticians, like VS Achuthananthan, and when i was last there, even the bishops were caricatured on TV shows and sitting rooms!

Well, watching Novak, I couldn't help feeling that these people, they are so keen in observing small things about their models. Like, the way, Maria Sharapova fiddles with her hair before every serve, or Nadal with his, erm.., underwear (btw, I wonder why his mom never asks him to go and get the right size!). The way Roddick feels around for his shoulders whenever he prepares to face serve, or takes off his baseball cap only to put it back on from the back, after every point. And the way Federer greets the crowd after every match he wins (oh comeon, that's almost every match he's played)

Okay, so continuing with my wanderings, I find web surfing amusing for many reasons. One of them is being able to witness fights of all kinds (mainly ethnic).. Like, I was watching this video on Ana Ivanovic who is a serb, and the comments were mainly about wether she was a Serb or a Croat. And it mostly ended with th serb abusing th Croat's lineage (both collective and personal) and th Serb claiming, you can abuse all you want, but she's Serb!

Even better are the American racial fights. Maybe some day ill put up a few transcripts. Today, somehow I feel inclined to let this remain a boring post
chao

Writer unblocked

A few days ago Devanshi was talking about the writers block. Well, if it actually means what I think it means, she was talking about what all a faithfull blogger can do when he/she stops having the inspiration to write, or something in that line. Anyways, among the options she came up with (some of them, as bizarre as talking about the weather - man, you do that, and you're banished from my blogosphere for life, period) the only one that actually appealed to me was do nothing. And believe it or not, the lady herself seemed to take quite well to the suggestion. But tongue in cheek, the next day she comes out with a new post with an excellent theme !

Now, for someone like me, who is superstitious in a bizarre way, but also understands the concept of probability, it logically follows that whenever you find yourself short of inspiration, you just need to rant about the lack of inspiration, and touchwood, bang come the ideas the very next day!

Or maybe, I thought. ill atleast try to convince the few people who actually manage to reach this space that it isnt because of lack of effort that it seems forever since I last posted. To be frank, Iv started on 3 posts in the last two weeks. (phew!) One about Hutch having changed my price plan without informing me, again. (Oh well, btw thats a long story. last month they did it the first time and I almost took them to court before their chief accountant rang me up and admitted her mistake. And she was pleading so badly that I decided I wouldnt even press for damages - in terms of time and effort wasted digging through TRAI regulations and running from Hutch pillar to Hutch post ( I even felt a lot of our Govt offices give more customer satisfaction than a private telecom operator) - Anyway this time they had timed the change in priceing of sms's for the whole of Chennai to coincide with the day of my having completed six months of being a Hutch customer, so now they could fool around with me, and not give a damn!)

Then I thought, i think it was last sunday, of telling you of my secret so-called fears. Oh yeah, I was really depressed by the time I reached half way, with stuff like the fear that I would forever go on being lazy and lousy, sleep on unmade beds, with the lights on, littered with 2 day old newspapers, and sometimes even the clothes I wore to to office that day, or that I would never become India's answer to Warren Buffet combined with Peter Lynch (Well to save you from worrying your head off on that, they were two of the most successfull investors ever) or Siddarth Basu, Prannoy Roy and Rajdeep Sardesai combined. Tell you what, I got all worked up and started coming up with weird worries like going bald by the time I become 25, that i decided to stop right there! The third post i started on, i actually dont even remember what it was about, though it wasnt worth being on my blog anyway. For leads, it was an answer to a tag i really didn feel like answering

Anyway, today, when work became a little boring, I got hooked on to another blog from an unlikely source. Dmitry Tursunov, a not so famed tennis player, with a famed tennis blog. Somehow I get the feeling that he should be likened to the WTA players. The players that get huge followings for reasons completely unconnected to their game. Like lets say, the length of their skirts! anyway this guy used to have a really cool blog. He starts a post by saying that he wasnt feeling like writing anything interesting today, and goes on to keep you struggling to hold on to your seats. And he very freely picks on all his fellow players, which of course is great reading for our controversy scouting minds!

Well, reading that, like reading anything creative these days, gave me the really pinching feeling that I could write something that is damn funny even when i really dont have a special topic with a four syllable heading and three pages of long and winding prose! But then again, when i sit down to actually do it, Hermione Granger's (yo right, the Harry potter gal who knows just about anything) words keep echoing in my head. You cant make something out of nothing, even with magic. By the way she called it the law of some over-complicated word that even I cant remember.

So now, my only hope is the writers block unblocked, and that ill come up with some breakthrough ideas in tonights dream and tomorrow you'll have the blogpost of your life!

Two for the price of one

There are songs, and then there are great songs. Great songs with melody persuasive enough to keep you listening to it over and over again. Great songs with out of the world lyrics. Lyrics that are imaginative, and make you want to hear the song again just to catch the lyrics another time.

Among the many songwriters that I have followed, I have always been a fan of Elton John (of course, without forgetting his main lyricist Tim Rice (who wrote 'Candle in the wind', for Marilyn Monroe and 'Can you feel the love tonight' from "Lion King" for him as well as a lot of broadway musicals for Andrew Lloyd Webber). But the song that has enchanted me most is one that was written by Elton along with Bernie Taupin, who certainly had more than his share of disappointments like Elton. During their earliest days together, he and Elton were unhappily trying to be commercial songwriters.

The song talks about a youth who seeks to make a living in the "Emerald City", the land of opportunity, a town where troubles wash away. Instead, the youth is exploited for his talents and decides to abandon this place of vanquished dreams and decides to go back home where his future really lies.

For some reason or the other, this song reminds me of a world I struggled to like, never actually managed to do so, and finally give up for good, not even despairing about it. The world of being a budding Chartered Accountant. A world which, to me, can only be explained as unfairness impersonified. Even cruelty garbed in the sexy robes of hope.

And it appeals to me because it was quite obvious from the start that CA wasnt my destiny. Of course, it was a fine profession. It commanded a lot of respect. Money was there to be earned. They coloured it with the exotic hues of future prospects. But then yeah, the caveat too was accetable. Hard work, dedication. But then wasnt that a normal thing? But well, to keep it short, what transpired was a world where the mantra was work and only work, which again, isnt a bad thing on the face of it. But for a restless, fun loving guy like me, it was a bit too much. And anyway, i always studied it half heartedly.

To me, Charterered Accountants were just pretentious hypocrites. Pretentious, because they pretend they are happy, and that this is the life they yearned for (well, I know a few of them personally), and hypocrites, because they go around with the air of being the most knowledgable persons in the world, when, like most of you now know, they are just a bunch of arrogant self proclaimed intellectuals, who barely know anything (atleast, most of them) beyond the numbers they audit, who make a living -to crudely state the facts- finding fault, and even at their pinacle of professional excellence, cannot be trusted to give the truth (well, to be frank, while analysing companies, Iv been always suspect of the sanctity of its audited financial statements, which ultimately defeats the purpose - with a thousand standards and laws that justify not having to be absolutely certan)

So whenever I hear this song, there is an emphatic statement from the bottom of my heart to all those who think they can fool me about paradise, and to all my co labourers, who still go on believing in the dream that the suffering is for a moment and all that jazz... I actually compare you to the black slaves in 19th century America

So here is a dedication to the lot of you. Chartered Accountants, students, and most importantly, my old boss and colleagues who thought I wouldnt ever leave for all the threats I made. Who thought I actually cared!

When are you gonna come down

When are you going to land

I should have stayed on the farm

I should have listened to my old man

You know you can't hold me forever I didn't sign up with you

I'm not a present for your friends to open This boy's too young to be singing the blues

So goodbye yellow brick road

Where the dogs of society howl

You can't plant me in your penthouse

I'm going back to my plough

Back to the howling old owl in the woods

Hunting the horny back toad

Oh i've finally decided my future lies Beyond the yellow brick road

What do you think you'll do then

I bet that'll shoot down your plane

It'll take you a couple of vodka and tonics

To set you on your feet again

Maybe you'll get a replacement There's plenty like me to be found

Mongrels who ain't got a penny Sniffing for tidbits like you on the ground

And oh yeah, this is just my destiny. You choose yours. I decided that hyped up values arent worth dying for. But dont be fooled into thinking that success in life is just about working all day and night, money, deserved or not, and social acceptability. Hmm, maybe success is all about that, but then, Id rather not be 'successfull'... !

Well to leave you in a better mood, heres another song. Again, commemorating a favorite lyricist. Oh ya its ABBA (for those of you who dont know, my music begins and ends there - and Iv loaded my player with every ABBA song) but well, this song is different. For story telling it could rival Jeffrey Archer. Read on

He had what you might call a trivial occupation

He cleaned the platforms of the local railway station

With no romance in his life Sometimes he wished he had a wife

He read the matrimonial advertising pages

The cries for help from different people, different ages

But they had nothing to say At least not until the day

When something special he read

This is what it said:

If you dream of the girl for you Then call us and get two for the price of one

We're the answer if you feel blue So call us and get two for the price of one

If you dream of the girl for you Why don't you call us and you'll get two for the price of one

We may be the answers to your problem, a chance with we two

So call us and get two for the price of one

He called the number and a voice said, 'Alice Whiting'

The voice was husky and it sounded quite exciting

He was amazed at his luck The purest streak of gold he'd struck

He said, 'I read your ad, it sounded rather thrilling

I think a meeting could be mutually fulfilling

Why don't we meet for a chat The three of us in my flat I can't forget what I read'

She said, "I'm sure we must be perfect for each other

And if you doubt it you'll be certain when you meet my mother"

Cheers... Ab

The Gandhiji way!

So Sanjay Dutt is finally going back to jail. The judge, His honour (excuse me, is that allowed?) Pramod Kode of course had to choose between seeing himself decried on the evening news (which these days, goes on for about 24 hours) by social activists as being lenient to a public figure, and being decried by the rest of the nation as not being lenient to the only public figure who managed to convincingly remind us of Gandhiji's message in living memory.

Well, going by news reports, the scene at the courtroom could very well have been coreographed to oblige some director waiting to finish off a film before the protagonist is rushed off to jail. It seems, (and somehow, reading it in 'the Hindu makes it hard to disbelieve) Mr Dutt, after hearing the verdict, walked back to the witness box with folded hands and tried pleading with the judge (and you thought that could happen only in a bollywood movie) that he had spent more time in jail than with his family (NDTV). Well, to be frank, I think for that one sin, he ought to be jailed for six years, considering that the 48 year old had spent just 16 months in Jail... If he wasnt with family, where on earth was he?

the judge, on his part, consoled him saying that he had 'taken away' just 6 years from his life, and he could go on acting till he was 100! six years people, the judge would have retired by then, and who knows, grown tired of watching Amitabh Bachchan as the omniscient daddy. Oh and yes, and the judge also did mention that he was bound by duty.

So, anyway, pending appeal at the supreme court, the actor is going to jail for 'a mistake he committed 14 years ago'. (Before you laugh at how fast things are done in India, remember that a trial in Canada on a plane hijack in 1987 commenced a few months ago, and had much more loopholes) A few american papers latched onto the words 'with terrorist connections' for their headlines.

Okay, now lets get our thinking hats on. One, do you think its justice, and only justice, is what was done in Dutt's case? I mean, without donning the black robes. Im afraid not. Now dont go gaga about the law taking its course, or that everybody is equal in the eyes of the law.

More seriously, for sometime, I have been perturbed (and their seems to be a huge number of things that dont in the least concern me, that I am perturbed about these days) by the question, Does law, the way it is established, actually give any room for circumstances (as opposed to 'facts') of the case? Lets talk about the Indian doctor who found himself on the wrong side of the by now fabled, 'war on terror'. All he was, and could be convicted was of having unsuspectingly left a sim card in the hands of a cousin, whom he would have known since the younger of them was born. Now look, I exchanged the first sim card i bought with my then room-mate, whom I had known for few months, just because I didn like the number (duhhh!)

How much more common would it be for this doctor to have passed it to his cousin. But there was no limit to the mental torture that he had to endure. So, to repeat the question, does law, stony faced as it is, allow for an arbitrageur to take this into consideration?

Back to the question of Sanjay Dutt, there's no denying he has suffered more than most of his fellow convicts. He had a past. And he was raw meat for a controversy starved nation (hey, Im talking about 10 years ago, when Richard Gere and Mandira Bedi werent at large)

Of course, his peaking career is not a defense in law. His possesion of arms evidenced, as the judge rightly put it, a scant disregard for law. But an uncleared convict is no more free, than a man on parole. 14 years is a long time. And after all, we're all sure he just did something foolish. A foolish thing , which he, Im surer, had no idea carried a sentence of 5-10 years imprisonment.