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Of Surprise Gifts

Someone seems to have anonymously gifted me a paid LJ account for two months.

I know I should be really happy about getting a free gift ( What? Oh yeah, also moaning and being outraged about the violation of my rights to Free LJing), but what really scares me is the thought of what exactly I am going to do with a paid account. Frankly speaking, I have never even considered getting myself one. Partly because I am a lazy something of a some-other-thing LJ-er who would rather click refresh on his friends’ page the whole day instead of musing about life or venting my ire at things that annoy me. ( No, Kisna doesn’t count, O Unkind Dissenters to the previous statement of mine.) In fact, I have realised that I am quite happy not musing about life and indulging in fanciful consumerist rampages every other day. Most people I know, including myself, treat these rampages as impending signs of my landing up someplace where the jackets are strait and people carry electric prods in their back-pocket, or ending up bankrupt, or both. Writing about my acquisitions are thereupatic. I write about, say, one of every ten things I buy, and when I look at my LJ later and read about how less I seem to have bought the past couple of months, the juices begin flowing, and eBay beckons yet harder.

Sorry, got sidetracked there for a moment.

So, a paid account. Lots of iconspace, which means I will have to spend some time searching for those tiny pics that make me laugh. The only ones I like seem to be taken by other people, and I dunno, it seems like a very personal thing to do, stealing using someone else’s icon. Not that I would use them anyway. Somehow I seem to forget all about the “change userpic” option everytime I leave a comment on someone’s post, and end up using the default userpic. It’s not funny, I know, seeing Gollum’s leery face accompanying a rather serious comment from yours truly ( *giggle* “serious” comment), but I convince myself that the expression on my default userpic can be interpreted in multiple ways. Try looking at him real hard, can you detect that vein of emotion in his evocative eyes? Can you? Bah, you weren’t looking hard enough.

There are also these neat customizable options I can now apply to my Livejournal and make it really spiffy, but I went to the “manage” page and got a headache. Tried reading the FAQ, and then figured that reading my friends’ page and clicking “refresh” was a more entertaining option. Besides, I always thought the minimalist, black-and-white approach to my main page really kicks ass.

Voice posts – you crazy? I already have people looking at me strangely everytime I am reading through vrikodhara‘s old posts, and now I am supposed to talk to myself in my cubicle and have all my colleagues, on top of gazillions of unknown people ( well, that was just a random number I thought up, to be honest) listen to what I have been doing? No way, Jose!

Erm, in case you are reading this, O anonymous gifter, and wondering at the ingratitude I seem to be displaying at your gesture of goodwill, allow me to assure you that ingratitude is the last thing on my mind. I was really, really zapped when I saw the mail in the morning and, with emotions ranging from euphoria to unbridled curiousity, I called up a couple of friends I know to figure out if they were responsible for this. It turned out to be none of them, and I was even more enthused. My, my, Houston, we have a secret paid-account-bestower, and probably I will never know the reason why I have been gifted one.

Then, of course, familiar beatzoian paranoia won through, and I waited for sometime for a mail from LJ that said – “We are sorry, there has been a mistake and this paid account was meant for someone else.” Or one from some other LJ guy named “beatz” or “beatxo” that said “eh, I misspelled my name while filling in the paid account form, give me my money back.” Even did a quick check around other users to figure out if this was LJ’s idea of a Christmas gift. All the time remembering to click efresh on the friends’ page every now and then, yes.

None of this happened, and by the end of the day, I became pretty sure that I had indeed received a gift. MINE, ALL MINE!!! Which is when it hit me, the question of what exactly I would do with a paid LJ account.

So I thought and thought, and came to a conclusion. ( Part of me itches to say “And the conclusion is – I am shutting down my LJ. Bwahahahaha!” We be thinking nassty thoughtss, precious) The conclusion being, yeah, I will pay better attention to my Livejournal. I will not neglect it the way I have this year. Not that I will blather meaninglessly, but expect the frequency of posts to increase. In other words, this will be a live Livejournal, instead of the intermittently-zombified Journal that it is right now.

Whoever you are, thank you for your gift.

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Moochwala, Retief, Holiday.

It’s s a good day when you find a Detective Moochwala collection – one of those Lost Childhood Treasures – in a forgotten corner of a bookshop. Getting it for twenty rupees is an added bonus, true.

This is the part I go into a nostalgia session about Target and Ajit Ninan Matthew and Mooch and Pooch and names like Besan Lal and Bhujiya Singh and Inspector Doodhmalai, but what the heck, fuck it. I am not in the mood for nostalgia right now.

Another interesting find was a hardcover graphic novel called Retief!, based on a sci-fi series I had come across once on the Baen bookshelf. The character was created by a gentleman named Keith Laumer, and Baen has an interesting write-up on him, mirrored in the foreword to the graphic novel. What interested me more than anything else was the artist – Dennis Fujitake – whose earlier collaboration with Jan Strnad, a comic about a dog-faced alien named Dalgoda was another Lost Childhood Treasure, picked up at second (and first) hand bookshops in Guwahati. Fujitake’s style is a clean, warm cross between Moebius’s linework on The Incal and Varley’s soft colours on Ronin (in Dalgoda, that is. This one is black-and-white.) Yummy!

I heard Ranjit Barot’s soundtrack to Holiday last night, from a colleague’s MP3 CD I whacked. Awesome stuff, really, and just to prove that I support good music regardless of its non-Rahman antecedents, went and bought the CD at lunchtime today. All the songs sung by very aptly-chosen singers – Ranjot Barot’s vocals on ‘Aashiyan’ worth the price of the CD alone. A quick look at the liner notes – not too much of it, unfortunately; too many pictures of Dino Morea and whoever that lady is, along with a couple of obligatory beach-babes in bikinis and a happy-grinny family – reveals that the saxophone solos were by Raghav Sachar. This uncanny Sax-man is the multi-instrumentalist who released a catchy remix album about a year back, full of instrumentals of Asha Bhonsle cabaret numbers, and one that I cannot seem to find anywhere anymore. His latest album sounded very electronic the first time I sampled it, so wasn’t too interested. Acoustic drums by Mr Barot himself, flute by Navin. Dominique Carejo’s voice appears on a semi-English song, which gets very embarassingly Celine Dion at times, but manages to stay right in the groove. The bulk of the female vocals are by Shreya Ghoshal, and the lady’s rocksteady success rate is starting to scare me. All in all, an album that manages to stay in tune without veering into item-number territory. Market logistics dictate the presence of an obligatory dance remix of ‘Aashiyan’, however, and DJ Nasha does the …umm…honours.

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The Sands of Time

There are two things that piss me off about Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. One is the camera-angles that decide to act up at the worst of times and make me want to bash my keyboard and froth at the mouth. The second is the strange jumping move – you are stuck between two vertical walls, and you will have to make your way up to a ledge by multiple-jumping from one wall to the other. This move understandably gives me the heebie-jeebies everytime, and it’s very hard not to sob aloud when you fall to your death ONE FRIGGING JUMP AWAY from the top for the four hundred and thirty fifth time.

Or maybe I am just a bad gamer.

But it’s a great game, really. Like serioussam put it, when I was moaning away to him about my experiences with the camera-angles, the game glows, both in terms of eye-candy, storyline and gameplay. It makes my post-Half-Life-2 pains a thing of the past. ( I have this major hangup after playing a good game – it takes me about a month before I can even condescend to look at some other game – even if I do, I end up uninstalling the thing in disgust because of comparisons to the last game I played. This happened with Painkiller recently.) Ah, well, I am done with 33% of the game, and with a little bit of luck ( and loads of button-tapping) I should be done withit in a couple of days. After which, I shall torture my camera-addled third-person adventure gaming self by playing Prince of Persia: The Warrior Within.

Also, in related news, Princess Farah has replaced Alyx Vance in the “hottest game babe to bowl me over” category.

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RDB

Confirmed news of the Rang De Basanti music release came in at 1:30 PM, from Vasu, who informed me that Sudhir had bought the CD on the way to the office, in the morning.

On the way to Planet M, I told myself that there was a fair chance this might be the CD that breaks the 200 Rs price barrier, and I talked myself into agreeing that I would NOT buy it if it were so. Well, it wasn’t. 160 Rs, 10 songs. What makes me crack up is that I also saw the CD of Rajkumar Santoshi’s Family, on sale for the same price, along with a couple of songs from Khakee included. Would really like to know how well sales of that soundtrack fares…

First Impressions:

Current count: two listens. And counting.

Begins with a one-and-a-half-minute Punjabi track ‘Ik Onkar’ which is all vocals ( songer: Harshdeep Kaur). Neat mutitracking. The title track, by Daler Mehndi and Chitra comes next – though pretty catchy, I thought it a trifle too long. The banjo beginning was not a banjo after all – sounds like a very familiar (Korg?) sample. ‘Paathshaala’, both the normal and the remix version ( which guest-stars Blaaze) is the kind of dance song that you really cannot dance to. I sincerely hope Blaaze’s version stays on the album and does not appear in the film. Boys was the pinnacle of his career – let’s leave it at that. ‘Khalbali’ was the most interesting song – faux Middle-eastern percussion, faux Middle-eastern lilt to the singing, authentic Arabic lyrics/vocals by Rai singer Cheb Nacim ( Or is it some other Nacim? No idea, really), Rahman’s grating accent when he sings it being the only minus to the song. I shan’t let my occasional hatred for Madhushree’s voice taint my judgement of the song ‘Tu Bin Bataaye’, but it sounds run-of-the-mill, really. ( Which means I will consider this the favourite song of the album after about two weeks.) Naresh Iyer’s voice sounds fabulous on this song, though.

One good thing about the album is that it gets better, or seems to, at least, with every song. ‘Khoon Chalaa’ by Mohit Chauhan ( of Silk Route) is a soft ballad that would sound like a Silk Route number if you replace the violin with the recorder. Minimal percussion, orchestral strings, well-written lyrics. Two very acoustic guitar-driven songs round off the album – ‘Luka Chhupi’ by Lata Mangeshkar and ARR, which is decent. Would have been catchier with a different female voice, but I feel that about every Lata song nowadays, so nevermind. ‘Roobaru’ is radio-friendly 90’s alt rock. The much-hyped Aamir Khan number, called ‘Lalkaar’, is more of a poetry recital, sounds like ‘Unnodu Naan’ from Iruvar than anything else, the words being nearly the same as “Sarfaroshi ki Tamanna” from the Legend of Bhagat Singh.

How’s Rang De Basanti going to fare as far as the charts go? Not too much, I guess. Aashiq Banaaya Aapne will win the Filmfare Award for best music, probably best singer too, beating Salaam Namaste in a close race. Do I look like I fucking care?

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Continuing in the same obnoxious vein as yesterday…

Dear anonymous comicbooklover who reserved Scott McCloud’s Reinventing Comics at Bookworm and did not pick it up for a week,

I picked up the book yesterday, after waiting six days and thirteen hours. Be a little careful next time, you cannot afford to be so complacent in this dog-eat-zombie world of comics, you know.

Regards,
Beatzo.

P.S Thanks for giving me the added incentive to buy the Complete Calvin And Hobbes. That was the last copy Bookworm had, so…

P.P.S Yes, that Dark Horse TPB of Godzilla was the impulse buy of the day, and it was completely painless.

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