There is this incredible radio station on Yahoo Launchcast...a new one called Guitar Gods and words are not enough to describe its brilliance... Metallica,Sabbath,Satriani,Aerosmith,Deep Purple,Van Halen one after the other ...mesmeric.The sad thing about Yahoo Radio is that it does not run in Firefox..only IE.I read The Catcher in The Rye in the hols and was not too impressed.it is a nice book,the New-York lingo of the '50s is really appealing and I really liked Holden's idea of 'phoniness'...and how inadvertently he himself morphs into one...but was not ground-breaking in any way I thought.Guess I have a weakness for longer works of literature...small works don't leave much of an impression on me for some reason...


missing hostel and the ensuing hullabaloo and really miss laughing my guts out...haven't done that for quite a looooong time.feel like racking my head on a really hard quiz or a crossword.college is going to end in about 3 months...and it is ending in a very chaotic and hateful way....like a downward spiral ....anti-nostalgic with a bitter after-taste...and strangely I feel like a spectator in my own life...and don't feel sad about this...watching it unfold almost like a book.

My blog is not heading in any well defined direction...ends up being a rant post after post,so from now I vow to stick by coherence and humor....cross my heart etc

In other news.....

From the last 72 hours I have been eating and sleeping non-stop...12 hours of sleep almost everyday followed by eating...and having those amazing hot-showers for long periods of time(tired of the bucket-and-mug routine in the hostel) ah! time stands still in the steam and the serenity of the hot shower...have been planning to do a lot of stuff but end up doing nothing....TV is surprisingly boring with both Zee Cafe and Star World having become pretty much lifeless...I pick up the TV listings everyday to scout of interesting stuff but end up finding some obscure movie or the Nth re-run of Friends....I am sick of it.....except Roadies-4 on MTv which I think is a pretty cool show....gets to show that its not only ability but also politics which is the key to success on these reality shows....have been reading Crime&Punishment and I must say that its seeming to be a major force as far as my reading experiences are concerned.......I would reserve my opinions about it as I have not read it whole but I would recommend it to one and all...

The thing I like about Jam is that its not really a town in which I grew up(as my folks moved here after I joined engineering and was away from home) and it allows me to take an outsider's perspective when it comes to weighing its pros and cons over Ranchi...Its a fabulous city...neat..well planned and so so peaceful......tree-lined broad avenues and the house that we have here is just absolutely amazing!My room overlooks the garden at the back of my house and for all the complaining that my mom does about my lack of interest in the natural world...its just great waking up and looking at the lush green grass and the trees and the birds!!whereas Ranchi is the city of memories...of childhood..of the innumerable special things...there can't be any comparison really.Ranchi wins hands down...notwithstanding the beauty of Jam.

**have been fiddling with the digi-cam at home and though I am not much of a foodie....couldn't resist taking this: PIC OF THE PICKLES

2007

2007...already!! the last six months of college life stares at me and I feel so old!I will graduate in six months...the thought gives me a strange kind of chill down the back....I just got outta school and now I am almost...expected to be responsible and behave as an adult .... 2007 was always somewhere out in the distance...somewhere in grown-up time...the millennium just seems a short while ago...its not as if time flew by or something...but its just that as a kid 10 years back seems all hazy and you hardly remember anything ....but now 10 years back or 7 years back is so clear in the memory....4 years in Bangalore...its not a long time...its an era! and I have an eerie feeling I have not done anything worthwhile all these years...allow me to go out there and get a life..........

meanwhile why is it that Aerosmith have this uncanny ability to mirror just what you are thinking?...... leaving you a sample(lyrics) of one my favorite Aerosmith tracks,Hole in my soul:


I'm down a one way street
With a one night stand
With a one track mind
Out in no mans land
(the punishment sometimes don't seem to fit the crime)

Yeah there's a hole in my soul
But one thing Ive learned
For every love letter written
There is another one burned
(so tell me how its gonna be this time)

Is it over
Is it over
Is it over
cause I'm blowing out the flame

Take a walk outside your mind
Tell me how it feels to be
The one who turns the knife inside of me
Take a look and you will find there is nothing there girl
Yeah I swear, I'm telling you girl yeah cause
There is a hole in my soul that's been killing me forever
Its a place where a garden never grows
There's a hole in my soul, yeah I should have known better
cause your loves like a thorn without a rose

I'm as dry as a seven year drought
I got dust for tears
Yeah I'm all tapped out
(sometimes I feel broken and cant get fixed)

I know there's been all kinds of shoes underneath your bed
Now I sleep with my boots on but you are still in my head
(and something tells me this time I'm down to my last licks)
cause if its over
Then its over
And its driving me insane

Is it over
Yeah its over
And I'm blowing out the flame

Take a walk outside your mind
Tell me how it feels to be
The one who turns the knife inside of me
Take a look and you will find
There is nothing there girl, yeah, I swear
I'm telling you girl yeah cause there is a hole in my soul
That's been killing me forever
Its a place where a garden never grows there is a hole in my soul,
Yeah I should have known better
cause your loves like a thorn
Without a rose

Dystopian themes.....

I somehow have a great liking for Dystopian themes......I like it better than any mystery/detective stuff as this whole chaos in the future thing is strangely spine-chilling.The dark 'what-can-be' side of the future gives the author a canvass which he can enliven with any shade of gray and gives us a perspective of what can be wrong with the present world...My favorites being V for vendetta
,Ayn Rand's Anthem and Issac Asimov's The Foundation series though the last one cannot be called strictly dystopian.I am not a great fan of Ayn Rand's Objectivism shit but I like Anthem for its non-pretentious, threadbare story-line.I read The Foundation Series when i was a kid and was spell-bound by the wondrous theme of a galactic empire and its collapse...I also remember reading a story back in school in my CBSE English textbook about a time-travel back into the past for a strange kind of Dinosaur Safari and how these bunch of hunters end up trampling a innocuous butterfly which causes a Domino's effect through time causing a very drastic change in the present...... and oh.. I so want to read George Orwell's 1984 but somehow have never managed to lay my hands on it.


P.S :Its 2 in the night and i have no idea why I am doing this...I have got exams 5 days from now and really should be getting back to my books...the rest of the day being spent in watching Southpark on you-tube and Will &Grace on DVD.....god bless all of us toiling away under the tyranny of VTU exams.Best of luck to everyone.

Self tagging.....and the joys of asymmetric posts..

These long breaks from blogging have almost become a habit now...somehow I find it extremely hard to come up with sane topics to post on...what do I talk about?the most exciting that happens to me is a mass bunk in college(some might think it IS excting....for effective mass bunk latch the classroom door so that the cowardly student crowd hesitates to open it and the teachers are stuck by the finality of the act ;)) and life just rolls on from day to day.......

As i am shameful and desperately short of topics...I shall do the unthinkable and tag myself(claps and the WWF eh?).... it is a tag on books....here goes...
1. One book that changed your life?
Midnight's Children by Rushdie it shook me up and turned me around..read it during the hols after my first year..what incredible word play! what convoluted twists and turns! and the endearing part is the humaness of the characters and the one of the most brilliant endings I have ever read....seriously. go grab a copy and read it right now.even the Gold edition from your local Crosswords will do...
2. One book you have read more than once?
The House of Mr. Biswas by V.S Naipaul
brilliant.funny.moving.
3.One book you would want on a desert island?
How to kill and eat rodents the Maori way? naah...
4.One book that made you cry?
Microwave Engineering by Das&Das it not only made me cry but also grovel in the dust thrashing my fists to the ground.They should have a huge bonfire to burn unpalatable engineering textbooks and also kidnap the authors and push them down a cliff.

5.One book that made you laugh?
All of P.G wodehouse's work and also The Dilbert Principle by Scott Adams
6.One book you wish had been written?
How to deal with corrupt Indian govt. offcials with your ethical framework intact :-)
7.One book you wish had never been written?
none actually....maybe all those Dan Brown books which cause unecessary ruckus and turn out to be untruthful in the end....
8. One book you are currently reading?
Godel,Escher,Bach:An eternal golden braid...actually been reading/trying to read this for the past 3 or so months....
9.One book you have been meaning to read?
Ulysses--- James Joyce ;-)
10.Tag five people.
anyone reading this can consider themselves tagged.....

mistaken identity??

this happened to me in the ART OF LIVING silver jubilee celebrations in bangalore....

me: look at that guy doesnt he look like..prakash padukone(the ace badminton
player)
ak: no...cant be..what would could he be doing in such a crowd...you must be
mistaken.
me: i am sure its him...
ak: ok lets see

and then ak follows the guy in question....goes a little to his left and then looks at him from the side...the guy gets flustered...looks at ak then turns back and stares at me.....by this time ak walks back to me.....

ak: no he aint padukone....lived in bangalore all my life...i can tell.
me: i recognize a face when i see one....
ak: there is only one way to find out...
me: whats that??
cups his mouth and shouts-"prakash!!"

the guy turns back....... annoyed this time....

me thinks-"where is deepika then??" :P :P