Angst In My Pangst

Office Annual day on Monday. Moi was entertainment ( read “cultural programme”) incharge. Thanks to laziness ( or the loadbalancer-related work, if anyone would believe me , the actual practice for the songs got postponed to Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Friday, I didn’t come to the office. Saturday, the key player in the skit ( yeah, there was a musical skit ) was AWOL. My role in the selfsame skit was…umm, remember the black guy in Chicago who played the piano and introduced every song? That was what I was supposed to do, minus the-introducing-every-song part.

Hey, but the skit was fun, it lampooned everything in the office, right from the “vision” part of it, to people getting hooked-up through Yahoo Messenger. ( try singing E-Mail Se Maine propose kar diya, chat par unka jawaab aa gaya to the tune of Aankhon Hi aankhon mein ishaara Ho Gaya ) And miracle!!! With 45 minutes of practice to sync up with the music, people managed to stay in scale!!! What else could a lazy pianist hope for?

The music part was four songs, or rather five songs, if you count a 2-song medley as a single one. All but one featured me on vocals; Baahon Mein Chali Aa was me on piano and Laitha on vocals. Champagne Supernova and Time of Your Life were blasts from the pasts, both Deepak and I don’t have to think when we’re doing them…..ditched Creep, because I got worried people would start running on the “run, run, ruuuuuuuun” part.

The FUN began when Chandru decided to check out Rishi’s guitar after lunch, he started strumming something in G, and moi decided to fit in Blowing In the Wind…and voila, 15 minutes of practice and we had a decent medley of BITW along with Neil Diamond’s I Am A Believer.

A decent time was had by all.

Veerana, Ramsay Brothers’ immortal epic is in town, and come what may, I am not missing it. Besides, I think it will get me in the mood for Bhoot.

Currently Reading:

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay – Michael Chabon. This one is a lulu. One night and I am already into the 370-th page. 1940. Joe Cavalieri (or Kavalier) and Sam Clayman. Two Jewish kids. Cousins. One a refugee from Prague, an art-school graduate, HOudini-admirer and non-practising magician. The other a Bronx-native, good with words, and an avid comics-fan. 1940, remember? The Golden Age of American comics, with sales of Superman touching nearly a million per month. (Afterthought: The sales right now, for an average comic is about 20 thousand in the US) These guys create their own comic-character, the Escapist, and strike gold. Sam Clay writes comic-book history to flee from his own mundane existence, and because he’s good at writing and coming up with ideas (“The important thing”, He points out early on, “is not what the Escapist can do, it’s why he does whatever he does.”). Joe Kavalier paints to finance an escape for his 13-year old brother from Nazi-occupied Prague. Beautiful writing by Micahel Chabon throughout…..especially the parts where he points out how the partners were influenced by a screening of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, just before which Welles himself had professed to be a fan of the Escapist. I hope the euphoric high the book has taken me to persists until the last page. And I also thank the unfortunate moron who sold off his copy to Blossom’s at Bangalore. And also my Boss for sending me to B’lore at the right time.

Kishore Kumar – a Biography – I forget who’s written it, but it was good enough for me to read a second time. The nicest thing about this book is the anecdotes, I am a sucker for movie-related anecdotes, and this guy claims these aren’t half baked “legends”, but stuff straight from the horse’s (in this case, Ashok Kumar’s) mouth.

I am enjoying myself.