Friday, December 12, 2008

The weather in Bangalore is just perfect-blue cloudless skies and glorious glorious sunshine and you can see Jupiter and Venus almost everyday,only a bit farther away each day.The azure afternoons diffuse into golden evenings and then the sky becomes indigo once the sun sets .I just discovered that there are a lot more colors with names out there which I was totally unaware of.There is cream which is like dirty white and there is beige which is the color of very milky coffee and there is scarlet which is like bright red and is almost pink :-) How did these colors escape me? Quite long ago in the middle of a serious discussion- somebody(you know who you are!) talked about Turquoise blue and I was pretty confused.So all you men(women usually don't have problems with such things right?) who have problems with these things Wikipedia comes to your rescue here and here and here.So now you know why all these paints have corny names for shades even though they all look the same to you.Talking about Wikipedia,you can make contributions to the Wikimedia foundation here and cmon all you Wiki-junkies you have credit cards right?Wonder what I would do without Wikipedia.

Anyway,so what I really wanted to talk about was some of the lyrics of The Doors.Some of you might remember a Gtalk status message that I had once-"Mute Nostril Agony-carefully refined and sealed over" and DC had even asked me what it meant and I did not know then,but did a little research of my known.What I found out left me in awe of Jim Morisson's abilities as a poet and just how deep and beautiful his lyrics can get.These lines and the lines below are taken from a Doors song-Horse Latitudes-a spoken word piece from the album Strange days.

When the still sea conspires an armor
And her sullen and aborted
Currents breed tiny monsters
True sailing is dead

Awkward instant
And the first animal is jettisoned
Legs furiously pumping
Their stiff green gallop
And heads bob up
Poise
Delicate
Pause
Consent
In mute nostril agony
Carefully refined
And sealed over

Horse Latitudes are the latitudes on both sides of the Equator close to it where winds drop to a bare minimum and is a geographical term but is a terribly frustrating place to be when you are in sea as there is no wind in the sails to push you forward at a brisk pace.Hence Spanish sailors in the 18th and 19th centuries would have to resort to some very desperate measures to offset the prolonging of the voyage which would include killing and eating the horses on board or throwing horses overboard and this is precisely what is captured in the lyrics above.It just gets to show that most of Morrison's lyrics are still very under-appreciated .Because Horse Latitudes is a spoken piece it was usually included in the middle of an even more mysterious song-'Moonlight Drive' and it was inserted between:

Come on, baby, gonna take a little ride
Goin' down by the ocean side
Get real close
Get real tight
Baby gonna drown tonight
Goin' down, down, down, down
Goin' down
Goin' down, way down
Down, down, down, down, down
Down, baby low
Children of the caves will let the
Secret fires glow

and

Easy, to love you
As i watch you glide
Yeah, we're falling through wet forests
On our moonlight drive
Moonlight drive
Moonlight drive
Moonlight drive

Quite impressive considering the fact that Morrison wrote these lines when he was still in school.

It's been ages since I wrote anything about me self here. The last six months on ICISIF read like a news website.I wouldn't say nothing's been happening but at the same time not a lot :-).I realize that in a fortnight I'd be one and a half years old here in office;that seems like a lot of time only the nagging feeling that you have not learned much.Damn, I did not even want to talk about my work but it just creeps in .I switch off completely once I get home from work.This year has been nice to me(alright,this is not the year end post there is still time for that)So that's that and see you around. :-)

PS:Five points to anyone spotting a small attempt at recursion above ;-)

I am Jack's indecisiveness wrapped in a sheath of fatalistic tendencies