Archives for category: Myself
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January

February 2, 2012 //
9

It’s been a good month.

New Year Resolutions are trite. If you talk about them, they do not last more than a few weeks. If you do not talk about them, you make excuses and cave in. The solution, for me, was to tell some friends, people who are no-holds-barred with their criticism and liberal with their scorn, and just dive right in. And it worked!

Blogging

Once upon a time, I made a bet. There were six of us at a table, or maybe seven. We were having a South Indian breakfast at Yatri Niwas, Hyderabad, and somehow the topic of blogging came about. The pretty girl sitting next to me commented on how I never updated any more. This was in early 2010, the nadir of my blogging regularity. Foolishly, I claimed that I could, if I put my mind to it. The number ‘two hundred’ came up, I have no idea why. I would write two hundred posts that year, and if I hit that number, the people sitting around the table would take me out for breakfast wherever I wanted to. If I did not, I would take them out instead, and pay for their flight tickets to wherever I was – economy, not first class. The big guy with the glasses chuckled into his filter coffee, the dark guy smiled and continued puffing at his cigarette. The girl and the other couple at the table, the ones a little more used to my deviousness, tried to figure out the loophole in my argument.

“What if you make one-line posts?”

“OK, fine, all of them will be at least 500 words or more.” (I will confess that at that point I was thinking of how a picture is worth a thousand words, and mentally evaluating the inherent mirth in putting up half a picture for a post)

“You’ll just paste your old articles every day, won’t you?”

“Maybe one a month, but only if I have nothing else to talk about.”

The big guy with the glasses laughed out loud. “Are you seriously saying that you will write 100,000 words this year?” Incredulous, and rightfully so. “Of course I will”, I replied. “I can, if I want to.”

I bought breakfast for them the next year. Well, for some of them, the big guy could not join us. And thankfully, the rest of them were all in the same city. I managed twenty posts that year. I skipped the Challenge for 2011. Blogging was dead, after all. Time to move on, and all that.

This year, I am in a country many thousands of miles away, the pretty girl is in another country too, and the rest of the Breakfast Round Table are in different cities in India. If I take up the challenge (and I have, yes) and lose, I will have to pay for flight tickets. But. BUT. Regardless of whether I win or lose, I get to see them again. My deviousness knows no bounds, eh? And just to make things more interesting, I have been trying to update every single day, just to see where I falter. It works well, because I see that if I miss a day, the next post gets even harder to write.

29 posts in 31 days, and no cheating.

Learning Spanish

Yup, that’s the other long-term goal this year. My goal was to finish 10 Pimsleur lessons by end of the month, and I did. I admit that people on the bus may have been a little freaked out at the sight of a brown guy with headphones going “¿dónde está? ¿dónde está el Hotel Colon?” in the back, but they soon got used to it. Possibly because I get profiled as a Mexican anyway. Instead of saying “No habla espanol” when old ladies at bus-stops ask me for the time (how do I know they ask me the time? Because they helpfully point at my watch, smart-ass) (and I learnt that it’s technically hablo and castellano), I now say “perdón, no entiendo”. Which confuses them even more.

And I guarantee you that this initiative won’t turn out this way. Why? Because I need to be in good Castellanic shape in order to go meet Magda again talk to my soccer-mates in Sevilla, the next time I am there.

Driving

With all my complaints about cars and driving, I found myself at the DMV this month, getting myself a driving permit and joining a driving school. The main impetus for this is a friend’s visit next month. The non-main impetus is to just get off my lazy ass and get a little more used to driving in the US. I can handle a car, but it’s stupid to not be able to go road-tripping when I feel like it. I will probably sit for the driving license test next week. And then I rent a car and head to Vegas. I am even making myself an On-the-Road Mixtape, hoo ah!

 Vegetarianism

‘Drea the Awesome, Roomie extraordinaire and Ardent Non-Meatarian was talking, one fine day towards the end of December, about her January Jumpstart. For one month, she and a friend avoided alcohol and turned vegan. I had this bright idea of trying to be vegetarian for January too. Part of this was bravado. Some the conscious realization that I had consumed way too much meat this last year, my carnivorous impulses reaching a frenzied peak in November and December, when meat plates laden with chorizo and jamon were set upon with as much enthusiasm as possible. And yes, some part of it was just an experiment to see if I could.

And I totally could. Well, I caved in one day at a party, where I had some shrimp fried rice sans the shrimp, and some eggs at a breakfast because I was starving and that was the only form of nourishment available. The rest of the time, I cooked myself copious amounts of miso soup with tofu and mushrooms, lots of Axomiya vegetarian cuisine for dinner, a great deal of investigation of what ingredients were present in the grilled vegetable tortilla and the falafel sandwiches served next to my office (The answer: pretty fucking tasty ingredients if you were really hungry). I had things I never knew existed, like avocado rolls and fake (shudder) hot dogs. I made myself the awesomest broccoli in the universe which, I swear, would renew your faith in Brocco, the god of tasteless things.

And obviously, the first thing I did on the first of February was to head to Dinah’s, office standup be damned, and order myself a well-deserved helping of huevos y bacon. Applaud, goddamnit!

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Categories Myself

Nostalgia: The first Nihilanth

January 25, 2012 //
14

For those who came in late, Nihilanth is an inter-IIT-IIM quiz festival that is held every once in a while. It’s technically supposed to be organized on an annual basis, but that does not happen. It is held at a random IIT or an IIM, the choice of institute being decided by the sudden death of two randomly selected quizzers from every institute on a deserted island, or so I hear.

My association with this festival goes back to the very first time it was organized – brace yourselves, young ‘uns, it was way back in 2003. NINE YEARS, holy moley! I was 23, about to turn 24, and the only quizzes I had conducted so far were in my own college, and in a local Warangal school, where the kids really enjoyed the impromptu Harry Potter round. Except the ones that had not read Harry Potter by then, the little losers. Well anyway, what happened was that we had organized a quiz festival (called Trivium) in our college a few years ago, and I did the music and movie quiz. A bunch of students from REC Surathkal were in attendance, and proceeded to make a killing at the events. They won nearly every quiz, and were kind enough to take us quiz-masters out for dinner as well with their hard-earned prize money. One of them happened to go to IIM Indore a few years later, and it was him – Suryakrishna Tamada Tatineni, ‘Suki’ for short, who had the bright idea of organizing an inter-IIT-IIM event. And the brighter idea of inviting me to conduct the Entertainment quiz.

Somewhere down the line, people seem to have come to the conclusion that I was responsible for naming the aforementioned quiz the ‘MELA’, short for Music(or Movies) Entertainment Literature and Arts, thereby starting the tradition of referring to every entertainment quiz by that name. People are wrong. Personally I thought the name is a ghastly one and I have no idea who coined it. But for better or worse, it has stuck, and I suppose it does not really sound that bad now.

I wasn’t paid much for my services. But that did not matter, I was over the moon at being invited. Why? Because the General quiz was being conducted by a certain Siddharth Basu. I was going to conduct a quiz with – okay, technically just at the same venue, but still – the guy who got a majority of college students in India addicted to quizzing. Yes, this was a Fucking Big Deal indeed. I found out later that the man was paid a 100 times my fee. Heh, now that was a Big Deal.

But screw that. A lot of things came about thanks to that quiz. It jump-started my alternative career as Quizmaster for college festivals around India – which in turn nourished finances for my fledgling comic art collection. The spurt in invites happened primarily because the people who attended the MELA liked it a lot, and when they needed a quiz-master for their college fests, they gave me a chance. Gaurav Sabnis was there. I remember his college contingent being a little late to my quiz, because of which I had go through my prelims again. He had very kind things to say about it – little wonder then that the second quiz I conducted was in IIM Lucknow the next year. Arnav Sinha was in IIT Delhi, and was one of the reasons I was the first QM they locked on when Nihilanth happened there the second time, a few years later. This was also the first time I met Shamanth and Siddharth (who, as I realized recently, keeps popping into the blog every now and then – hi again, Bofi!) They did not make it to the finals of my quiz, but kicked ass in all the others. Fellow Hyderabad-quizzers Dhaaji and Anil were in attendance too – Anil could not participate that year, but Dhaaji did, as a solo IIM Bangalore representative if I remember correctly. I believe I lost all chances of doing a quiz at IIM Bangalore because one of my questions involved identifying the Beatles, from a demo of  ’Strawberry Fields’, and that pissed him off beyond belief. Sheesh. I wish I have an excuse, but I don’t. What the hell was I thinking?

It was not entirely by coincidence that I ended up in the same taxi as my fellow-Quizmaster doing the Science and Sports quizzes at the event. We were housed in adjacent rooms at the Hotel Sayaji Grande after all, and over genial breakfast conversation on Saturday, we learnt of common interests. Phone numbers, as well as trivia about Richmal Crompton and Tintin comics were exchanged. We promised to stay in touch, more so because he tantalized me with news about how a friend from the USA had gotten him six CDs full of digital comics. I had heard of Arul Mani before, but that was the first time I met the Good Doctor. Neither his magnificent whiskers nor his patented Thigh Grab were on display that day, but it was an auspicious start to a long and lesbian-vampire-enriched relationship. Meeting Arul was also how I found myself in Daly Memorial Hall one fine Sunday that year, asking questions about Malini Iyer, HP Lovecraft and Artemis Fowl to a mostly-befuddled audience of Karnataka Quiz Association members.

So why am I talking about this today? Because of my books, surprisingly. You see, all my books just arrived yesterday from India, and are currently taking up a bulk of my apartment-space. I have been halfheartedly opening up some of them this evening, trying not to hyperventilate in the process. And I came across a bunch of pictures. Most of them were taken by a helpful student on my camera (trivia: the camera was part of my winnings at the Saarang 2001 Main Quiz at IIT Madras). Yes, it was a film camera, and yes, the photographs are mostly crap. But still, a hearty steaming slice of nostalgia.

This year’s Nihilanth was held at IIM Lucknow a few days ago, and it was the first in which I did not conduct a single quiz. On the plus side, I go to watch Porco Rosso in the Egyptian theater tomorrow.

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Categories Myself, Quizzing

Over and over

January 23, 2012 //
1

Christmas Eve last year promised to be a sedate affair. I was recuperating from my (nearly) month-long trip, and all I had on my mind was an evening of peace and quiet, alone with three cats in the house. But Bryan Lee O’Malley, he of Scott Pilgrim fame, tweeted about the movie Battle Royale being screened at the Silent Movie theater. That’s a quaint-looking location on Fairfax I remembered passing by and wondering about quite a few times on the way to Hollywood. Battle Royale being one of the few movies that fall in the viewed-5-times-and-above category for me, I was tempted. Despite having owned and seen multiple DVD versions – The Regular version, the Extended Director’s Cut and the Uncut Edition had all appeared in National Market, I had never seen it in a theater. Further investigation revealed that the film had never seen a theatrical release in the US, thanks to the Columbine incident occurring the  same year it released in Japan. So this screening would be the first official screening, based on a high definition conversion of the upcoming Blu-ray release by Anchor Bay. All of the above reasons were enough for me to drop my plans of lying back on my couch with a purring cat on my belly and sipping on metaphorical pennyroyal tea. Off I went.

Needless to say, I had an amazing time, and even met O’Malley at the popcorn stand.

Cheesy and show-off-y picture proof

The last time I saw Battle Royale was in 2007. None of my love for the movie had waned in five years, but there was a strange outsider-level objectivity that crept in this time. I never realized, for example, how annoyingly earnest the two lead characters were. Both Shuya and Noriko were too sugary, too good to be true. Maybe it was the Hunger Games experience from a few weeks ago that had supplanted my blind devotion to this movie. Or maybe it was the manga I read a few years ago, which made the characters of Mitsuko and Kiriyama so much more engaging than the one-note killing machines they turn out in the movie. I also found myself chuckling along at some of the over-the-top acting – Nobu’s death, the dramatic gestures some of the students make when they exit the classroom at the beginning, Kitano’s star-tinted turn.

I like re-watching movies with different people. Primarily because of the fresh perspective such a viewing brings. The odd little reactions you happen to notice in others at scenes that you reacted to differently. Or because you are focusing on a something other than the primary plot and pay more attention to the details that passed you by the first time. Maybe a snatch of a soundtrack, an in-joke that you did not get the first time. Something that resonates from an article you read about the movie, maybe.

But real life has been catching up. I did not watch too many films the past couple of months, barring the occasional Laemmle marathon and the quickies at the Rave theaters next door to my office. I cannot seem to sit down before the laptop/TV and watch anything at a stretch. Terabytes of old movie dumps have been “liberated” on random whims, because I know I will never get around to watching them.

Yesterday, I went and watched Lagaan – this time with a group of people of which I knew only one. We made a proper movie evening out of it, with bhelpuri, samosas and popcorn aplenty and a generous smattering of enthusiasm in the audience, most of whom had seen it already. It was my 20th viewing of Lagaan, my obsession with that movie having lasted through multiple cities, different levels of Aamir-Khan-reaction and Rahman-adulation, and a constant loathing of cricket. (And yes, I started keeping count after the 8th viewing) I enjoyed it thoroughly. It still makes me laugh at the right story and character moments. Paul Blackthorne as Captain Russell and Chris England as Yardley fill me with fanboy glee, and I am tempted to reread England’s book as soon as I can (it’s called From Balham to Bollywood, and it was a great read the first time).

There is a peculiar happiness also to noticing the same somewhat-bloopers – like Bhuvan saying Radha’s husband is Anay, instead of the correct Ayan, or the presence of two cricketers named Smith and Wesson in the English XI, especially the fact that Elizabeth dances with just the two of them at the ball.  Thanks to the DVD being an American release, the scenes with the British characters alone had English dialogues, instead of Amitabh Bachchan’s baritone explaining the proceedings. We did skip over the ‘O Paalanhare’ song, which to me is the nadir of the movie, an unnecessary face-palm of a sequence rendered even more painful by Lata Mangeshkar’s voice.  1

I spent a total of 4 hours on the bus, both ways. But totally worth it.

A two-week-long retrospective of Studio Ghibli films begins this Thursday. They include fifteen classic Miyazaki and Takahata films being screened at the Egyptian theater in Hollywood and the Aero theater in Santa Monica. I have made up my mind to attend every one of them. Sure, I own all the DVDs, and have seen the films multiple times, but the joy of the rewatch compells me. Besides, I’ve heard enough shit from pal Jussi about how he saw them screened in theaters in Helsinki and it’s high time I get back at him.

The only ones not being screened are EarthSea, Ponyo, Arrietty and Grave of the Fireflies. I can understand the absence of the fourth film, but not the first three. Oh well.

Notes:

  1. Earlier musings on Lagaan here and here. ↩
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Categories Movies, Myself

Hard drives, Trilogies and an Omnibus

January 21, 2012 //
0

A few nights ago, a friend and I were Skyping each other. Since it was a little past dinner-time for me, the laptop was on the kitchen counter when I was making myself some healthy cauliflower and carrot curry. I was also Team-viewering my way into his computer, because he had one of my old hard-drives and I wanted to peek into it.

Looking at old files on a forgotten disk is a sort of perverted self-archaeology that is both life-affirming and creepy. Things that used to be seem relevant once upon a time are now distant, embarrassing. The documents folder yielded old resumes, stray downloaded pictures and half-written Rolling Stone reviews. Most of the other folders had been stripped clean before I left, or had backups of backups in other drives that are here with me. There was the dump of comics that I had transferred temporarily from the piles of CDs and DVDs I had lying around, and my friend was a little overwhelmed by the content. I have never been too tidy with my downloaded files.

We talked about Kyle Baker and Army@Love, remembering old comics and new manga and everything else on our pop culture plates right now. Yes, almost all my conversations morph into variants of this, so don’t judge. At some point, my friend mentioned that he wanted to read an old-school horror book, something that would creep him out and be unputdownable at the same time. I thought about Joe Hill, but he had read all of Hill, most of it before I did. Both of us could not think of anything else at the moment.

I finished Chuck Hogan and Guillermo del Toro’s The Strain last night. And this is what we were talking about. It starts with a plane landing in JFK airport with everyone but four people aboard the flight dead. The Center for Disease Control gets involved, and the plot proceeds like a tight medical thriller, only with fantastical elements. You can easily find out for yourself what it’s really about, because the first line of the Wikipedia summary gives it away. But I went in without knowing anything except that it was a horror book, and I loved the conceit of the plot. Halfway through the book, I was fairly sure it could not be a standalone story, and I was right! The first reaction was disappointment  - I had not finished The Passage, a book based on a similar premise, because the second and third books are due to come out 2012 and 2014. Happily, both sequels to The Strain are out already, the third came out this November. I have now begun The Fall, the second book. Things are proceeding swimmingly. The survivors of the first book are doing well. The dead ones – oh dear. I better shut up right now.

But it’s heartening to find out that my distrust of trilogies seems to be going away slowly, thanks to good content.

I should also mention that you should probably go check out this British movie called Cashback. It’s about break-ups, love, nudity, art and freezing time.

In the middle of the day today, there was a knock on the door. Another USPS package had arrived in my name. ‘Drea the Awesome looked up when I bring it in and open it up, knowing already what it’s going to be. The X-Statix Omnibus, by Peter Milligan and Mike Allred, along with a whole bunch of guest artists like Darwyn Cooke, Philip Bond and Paul Pope. It’s 1200 pages long, and when I pass it over to ‘Drea, she nearly keels over with the weight. “This is a comic?”, she asks. She flips through the pages and then looks up at me. “So you’re going to spend time reading this thing?” “I’ve read this before, but I will probably reread it in a bit, yeah”, I reply, grinning. She shakes her head, mumbling about starting a blog on her experiences with living with a nerd, with a special mention of the many packages that arrive every week. It was not a prudent time to mention that she had been playing Plants vs Zombies the last few nights with the TV on, with an obsession that puts my magpie complex to shame. But I did anyway.

Categories Books, Comics, Myself

Zeroth world problems

January 19, 2012 //
4

USB slots are capricious, fun-loving creatures. They love a good practical joke, and probably have entertaining stories to tell each other, especially with the volume of data that passes through them every day. I am convinced that one of their favorite pranks is to randomly reorient themselves whenever they feel like it. This seems to be the only conclusion that explains why I am never able to plug a USB cable in at the first try. The first attempt meets with resistance, and leaves me confused whether I aligned the cable the right way. I turn the cable over to the other side and push again. That does not work either. Then I sigh, and bend over to see what exactly is going on. By that time, the USB slot has had its fun, and as it turns out, the cable now goes in smoothly.

I’ve found out that I spend about 40 seconds every morning untangling my earphones. This despite the fact that every evening – every single evening, I kid you not – after I get home, I take the little buggers, gently roll the wires and let them retire for the night. But all to no avail, because the next morning, they are back in disarray, like someone tousled them in the middle of the night. I would suspect the USB slots have been talking to them, but then I don’t think they speak the same language.

I figure that this untangling process costs me the time equivalent to about two songs every week. That is most alarming, but to compensate, I make sure that I listen to a few extra songs every evening. All in all, I am about three songs ahead by the time Friday evening comes around.

Last week, our office administrators announced, as part of a go-green drive, that we would no longer use paper cups and plates and disposable cutlery in the kitchen. Which was great news, because I always felt guilty about using a paper cup to drink some water and then having to throw it away. Sometimes I got some coffee in the same cup just to relieve a bit of the guilt, but I always felt that the coffee tasted weaker because of the little water that remained at the bottom. This also meant that I made myself a coffee every time I drank some water.

Things are looking better now, because we use the china cups in the office. Except the quantity of the cappuccino that the vending machine serves is slightly more than the size of an office cup. Which means that the coffee overflows, unless you pay close attention and whisk the cup out just before the tipping point is reached. Two problems with that: you should pay close attention to know the exact moment to pull it out, and the coffee overflows into the bin below anyway. Social responsibility dictates that you wipe the spilled remains, which means more valuable time lost. So instead of downsizing my cup of cappuccino, I have opted to switch to espresso instead. Two shots of espresso fits the cup perfectly.

You may wonder why I don’t just buy myself a large enough coffee mug, but the one that I want to buy is currently out of stock at ThinkGeek.

Goddammit, I don’t even like espresso.

Categories Myself
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