Neil Gaiman on Dave McKean.
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I am going to Warangal this weekend. Last chance to meet the batch that’s making its way out this year, my immediate juniors. Will miss the buggers – they were really among the coolest people I ever knew. Shit, man, I didn’t bother at all when people of my batch were leaving, and I get all choked up thinking about whether I am going to meet these people ever again or not. Huh, yeah, that’s college life for you. PK Mishra might have written awful lyrics for the Hindi version of Mustafa Mustafa, awful and corny, but there are times when you feel them – jeevan to gaadi hai, isko to chalna hai, raahon mein station to aate hai jaate hai. Sheesh, I am ashamed of myself, I have actually started quoting lyrics. Something that was 33Man’s domain – or maybe cash’s.

By some miracle, my room is very clean. It stays clean no matter what I do. The odd cobweb here and there, but that’s it. Guess that’s because I don’t stay in it any longer. I mean, I only sleep there. And my stuff is in it. ALL my stuff. Right now, my domain is the cubicle in my office. Jeez, man! What’s life coming to?

I am blabbering again. Shouldn’t.

We’ll be presenting an Unplugged music show on April 21st. Two guitars, no, maybe three guitars, a keyboard, and Chandru says he can get bongoes. So that’s it. And one voice. So far the only songs that have been decided are Radiohead’s Creep, Oasis’ Champagne Supernova, and maybe an instrumental of Naalo Unna Prema. All the songs I can think of require vocal harmonies. Chandru, as usual, says it’s fine, that we’re doing cover versions, so we can as well reinterpret the songs. Ow! Wish Asthana was still here. We once tried out a Hindi medley, that had around 4-5 songs melding into each other….something like, we start off with the male voice from Roja’s Dil Hai Chota Sa, the part that goes “Ye le lo…”, with harmony, and Asthana starts strumming the guitar, and we pick it up from “Baithe Hai Mil ke, sab yaar apne” (Papa Kehte Hain), and that in turn fits into “Aaj kal tere mere pyar ke charche….”. Some more songs, and well, it sounded corny, but was fun! We did some oddball jamming when Asthana was around. Like singing Britney Spears’ ..Baby One More Time to the chords of Hotel California, Asthana would play the intro and then we would sing “Oh Baby Baby how was I supposed to know…” instead of “On a dark desert highway…”. Fun!

I need some sleep. I need to think of some more songs to practise. I need a new keyboard. I need a hug.

If wishes were horses……

Is it just me?
I can’t seem to take sides in this War. I can’t seem to care there is a war going on.(I am not even sure I should call this a war, but that’s beside the point) I mean, here I am, in a country that itself wages a long-drawn-out “war” with a neighbour over a piece of land, half of whose people don’t know what’s going on, and the other half don’t bloomin’ give a damn. How fair would it be for me to make comments about the President of a country, even though he might be a moron, a savant, or just a bumbling warmonger? I can scream “President Bush! You asshole! You are wasting lives and hurting the economy!!!” As if that’s going to matter. Instead I think about Neville Chamberlain, pre-World War II British Prime Minister, and him trying to placate Hitler just as he was coming into power, and going all-out on an anti-war stance. People sided with him then, and later when Hitler stormed across Europe, everybody was of the opinion that Chamberlain sucked big-time and peace was for wussies, up and at them, boys. You can’t blame Bush. He’s taken his lessons from History. And of course, Mom.(The bad guys are to be punished, beta. Eat this gaajar ka halwaa, finish off the pie, and go sock’em! )

I don’t think I am comparing Saddam Hussein to Hitler either. Jeez! This is all so funny, how can I have an opinion about a guy whom I have read about in newspapers and bad-guy novels? Honour Among Thieves, anyone? That had Mr Hussein stealing the Declaration of Independence to shame Bush Sr, and a band of intrepid adventurers going all out in a race against time to grab the stolen Doc. (For that matter, there was another Archer story about some carpet merchant, ex-Saddam Hussein minister. The same villainous portrait of the Iraqi president. But that’s jingoism for you )

So we have the two World Leaders screwing around with normal life as we know it. There might be nothing normal about life in Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Like I said, I don’t freaking KNOW. And I’m not too sure if I ought to care, because my life here in Hyderabad, India is going on quite hunky-dory. And before people start screaming that I am callous, and I am uncivilised and I am a blot towards humanity, allow me to further say that even if I care, even if I worry and tear my hair out about WHY this war is happening, or what’s going to happen to those poor Iraqi civilians, or who’s going to bury those wretched American soldiers who got shot down, it wouldn’t matter!!! The war might get over tomorrow, or it might get over in a month, or it might continue for five years. But I am not gonna care. Unless a nuke drops on my office building, or in my backyard, or I get run over by a car tomorrow morning, under which circumstances I might be too far gone to give a damn….or somebody I know gets killed in the war, or because of it.

I sound like such a loser. But that’s just me, I guess.

I am a big Nirvana fan.
The bug caught me when I was in the second year. Right when I was getting into things beyond the usual Indipop/Spice Girls/Now 4-stuff. That was the year I became aware of how different bands sound different. Know what I mean? The year the Matrix hit us. Bought the soundtrack. Got initiated into Marilyn Manson, The Prodigy, Rob Zombie, Rammstein, and Rage Against The Machine all at the same time. Somebody brought a cd which had the Matrix OST mp3s ( mp3s were pretty rare in those pre-Napster-500Rs-per-mp3-cd days), and by some freak chance, the songs from Nirvana‘s Nevermind.

That wasn’t the first time I had heard Nirvana. The was a girl named Pankhi I studied with, way back in junior college, who was a Kurt devotee. She tried getting me to try out Nirvana, but since I teased her too much about – you know – things like “you’re actually listening to the ravings of a loony who committed suicide??” – she gave up. Then my roomie in the first year would play “On a Plain” over and over again – Ajay “Hozzy” Hazarika would get high at night and his sole peace-keeper happened to be, you guessed it, Kurt. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what it was about a monotonous-sounding voice and a jangling guitar that soothed him so much. Although, I have to admit, there were times when I would be walking down the REC campus alone at night, and suddenly would find myself humming “I’m on a plain, I can’t complain.” Nothing else, just those words over and over again. It was irritating, and not only to myself.

But Nevermind didn’t sound monotonous or jangly at all. I found the opening guitars of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” awesome. Gave the songs – all of them – a couple of listens. And the buggers just refused to get out of my mind. The tunes were catchy as hell! And they kept buzzing around in my head at odd times, just parts of them. No words, I couldn’t figure out most of the lyrics, but I kept humming the bits and pieces that stick. Someone got me the lyrics, and I tried figuring out what they mean. And thus, slowly, i entered Kurt Cobain’s troubled world….

It was the first time I was paying attention to lyrics. Also the lyrics he had written were words that could actually mean so many different things, depending on how you interpret them. Polly, the whole of which is based on three chords, is a paean to girl’s innocence lost. Kurt once said it also alludes to Courtney Love ( his wife). Something In The Way. Just four NOTES in the song, forgoshsakes!! Four notes and a cello, that’s it. And those words about his homeless meanderings – hence “Underneath the Bridge, the tarp has sprung a leak…”. In Bloom was about me. “He’s the one who likes all our pretty songs and he likes to sing along and he likes to shoot his gun, but he don’t know what it means.” About guys who mouth songs without knowing what they actually mean. (Not anymore, though!) The frenzied Breed, the sonic-assault of Territorial Pissings, it took me time, but I fell in love with ALL the songs.

The MTV Unplugged: Live in New York album was the next one I heard, and it was a revelation, too. It was also an anticlimax of sorts, because I found out that I couldn’t listen to the plugged version of the songs on In Utero (when I heard it later), the unplugged ones stayed on. Needless to say, I listened to On a Plain with a much, much, more open mind. Lake of Fire and Where did you Sleep Last Night showed how Kurt could use his voice to astounding effect. A girl I met on a train to Bangalore suggested I listen to All Apologies properly. I did, and promptly fell in love. (with the song, not the girl.) The catchiness bug caught up again, with the “I think I’m Dumb” line from Dumb. Somewhere down the line I fell in love ( with a girl this time) and also…well, you know what happened next. Spent nights crying and singing along with with Kurt’s voice. Love makes us appreciate music better, I guess. In the Final year at college, we would try doing a three-piece unplugged medley of Nirvana’s songs onstage – “Polly”, “Come As You Are” and “Jesus Don’t Want Me (For a Sunbeam)”. And somehow I gathered the courage to sing “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in my last college concert. I guess the craziest thing I attempted to do with a Nirvana song would be trying out a 140-bpm trance remix of Something In The Way, dropped the idea after certain close friends threatened dire consequences.

Kurt Cobain died in 1994. There are six Nirvana albums ( seven if you count the latest one, which is a compilation) Somewhere down the line, I decided I had listened to enough of Nirvana. It was time to move on. And let’s face it, The Unplugged album has become a lot overplayed. I started getting a headache everytime the DJ in the pub played “The Man Who Sold The World”. And he did that every other time somebody wanted chillout tracks. (Chillout tracks, indeed!!! )Winced everytime I heard a guitarist strum the opening bars of “About A Girl”. Yeah, it was that bad.
So I made this conscious decision to STOP listening to Kurt for sometime.

Until yesterday. An office colleague asked me if I had the mp3 of “Oh Me” in my system. For a couple of seconds, there was a blank. And then it struck me, “Oh Gosh, that’s a Nirvana song.” And THEN it struck me, “Oh Gosh, I can’t recollect anything about the song.”. Nothing at all. Not the tune, not the chords, not even what the chorus was. Shame on me! This is what comes of “control”, eh? I am sorry, Kurt. I shouldn’t have done this to you.

Only Nirvana for the next week.

there was a lovely princess.

But she had an enchantment upon her of a fearful sort which could only be broken by love’s first kiss.

She was locked away in a castle guarded by a terrible fire-breathing dragon.Many brave knights had attempted to free her from this dreadful prison, but none prevailed. She waited in the dragon’s keep in the highest room of the tallest tower for her true love and true love’s first kiss.

Want the full story? Click here, then!!

And yeah, my favourite lines….

Donkey: – All right. Nobody move. I got a dragon here, and I’m not afraid to use it.
{Roars}
Donkey: – I’m a donkey on the edge!

Semi-autobiographical, trust me.