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Moral Science

On 15th March last year, madhav bought Samit Basu’s The Simoqin Prophecies at Premiere bookstore, and a week later I borrowed it from him. I returned it to him at the beginning of May 2005, i.e this month, unread.

This Saturday, I found a copy of Simoqin at Blossom, and bought it. I was done reading it last night, took me about six hours.

Moral of the Story: The next time a friend wants to borrow a book, ask him to bugger off and buy his own copy.

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Couple of things

Tim Burton’s movie Big Fish was based on a novel?? Nobody told me!

My sister, now in London with her husband, has got herself quite a nifty accent. The nice, “pretty good, innit?”-kind of an accent that I always wanted to acquire. No, really. I have a thing for proper Brit/Irish/Scottish accents. Reading Garth Ennis and watching Guy Ritchie movies do that to you.

Re-reading one of the best books from my boyhood ( Ahahaha, the word “boyhood” always cracks me up) – As The Crow Flies by Jeffrey Archer. The man might be a swindler and a perjuror, or whatever it is they call him, but that doesn’t take away the fact that he writes neat plot-driven stuff. Used to, rather. I think I need to reread the best of his epic-family-squabble-thingie (Kane and Abel and The Prodigal Daughter, all his latter-day output degenerated to the same pulpy two-guys-seperated-by-class-and-with-interwined-lives plot that Kane and Co did to perfection) Man, As The Crow Flies is getting me all nostalgic. I read it the first time when my younger uncle was getting married, and pissed off a lot of my Evil Relatives by taking the book to the wedding and punctuating the assembly with occasional sighs and giggles and “yeah, BABY!”s. That was the closest I came to being interested in entrepreneurship, or commerce of any sort. Charlie Trumper, the main character of the book was on my Personal Pantheon for quite sometime after that; matter of fact, I think I need to put him on again.

So a quick trip to Planet M resulted in my finding an album long on the list of personal curiosities – The Essential Tri Atma. What’s so special about this band? Just that the third song on the album, O Moena was ripped off in the famous Siyaram ads of the eighties ( Remember that tune? “O Siyaram, coming home to Siyaram” and all that jazz…) Listening to the album right now, and the rest of the songs are pretty good. The band Tri Atma is made up of a Bengali percussionist Ashim Saha( “O Moena” starts off in Bangla, and it seems it’s about a Mynah bird) and a German guitarist Jens Fischer, who also sequences the tracks. Considering that it’s a band from the seventies, the sound is extremely contemporary, the tabla used to good effect throughout.

So I also moved flats in Hyderabad. I was there for two days this week, and thankfully, didn’t break my back lifting crates of books, because we hired a bunch of movers who did everything ( except the packing, which we did ourselves). The move was necessary because vrikodhara is all set to leave for Calcutta, and we were paying too much for the three-bedroom apartment, which was also beginning to resemble something that was a cross between a bombed-out refugee center and a set from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. So this new place is a two-bedroom flat, the only disadvantage being that it gets nastily hot in the summer. I was really worried my books would spontaneously combust or something – because I came into the house at 5:30 PM on Tuesday, about to leave for Bangalore, and it felt like I had walked into an oven. It’s not the house’s fault, though. Hyderabad is a bloomin’ oven in May. It rained sometime in the night during the bus journey and I woke up shivering early in the morning, as it entered Bangalore.

I took a picture of my room right after the packing was complete; Sasi, friendly reminder, send me the photograph, will you?

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There’s a Ghost…in the Shell.

In my 3rd year of college, psasidhar, then in final year, was The guy in the CSE department. He had the right contacts, an unshakeable reputation, and consequently, unlimited access to the (extremely slow) College Internet Line. He didn’t abuse this power, no sir. Except for the short time when he diverted all outgoing mails to trash while his script to download the complete Calvin and Hobbes strips from a site ran on the server and ate up the complete bandwidth, and I would hardly call that abuse.There were other such scripts, of course, the most notable one being a script that downloaded a CD-load of Windowmaker themes. I hardly used Linux even then, except for finishing weekly assignments, and that was a rare occurrence anyways. But Sasi’s themes forced me to use Window-maker, if only for to check out the cool wallpapers that came bundled with them.

Ghost in the Shell

And one of them was this, a sexy-looking woman with loads of attitude. As a little googing ( Yes, we did have google back then, a new curiousity that was waaay faster than Hotbot and Yahoo and all those trashy search engines that we depended on) showed, the lady’s name was Motoko Kusanagi, a character from a manga called Ghost in the Shell ( which I had vaguely heard about, right after The Matrix was released) by a guy named Masumone Shirow, and made into a movie by Mamoru Oshii.

I happened to watch Ghost in the Shell recently, after years of reading about its greatness, and about the influence it has had on mainstream movies like The Matrix, and the influences it has borrowed from cyberpunk traditions ( William Gibson, Bladerunner). I was not disappointed. Stylish without being overtly violent, with genuine “Oh-my-god” moments. As usual, it was the road to the movie that was more memorable. I got the comics from a Bandwidth-rich junior, then the soundtrack album a year later when I got my connection at home. Then the soundtrack to the sequel Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence. Followed by the soundtrack of the TV series. Then found the DVD of Innocence, a version with terrible subtitles, in The Market. Then, a couple of weeks ago, the movie.

The soundtrack of the movie deserves a seperate post in itself. Kenji Kawai, the composer, uses a striking theme for the opening, called “The Making of Cyborg”, which is a choral piece in Japanese, backed with booming taiko drums and chimes. The chorus is hypnotic – I am left wondering which parts of it is synthetic and which parts sung by real people. “Ghost City” and “Reincarnation” play on variants of the same choral-drum theme. The second track is like just a bass drum playing a single beat, slow, evocative.

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, also by Kawai has almost the same soundscape, with minor differences in tone and intensity. Brilliant, is all I have to say. So are the soundtracks to the TV series, which are composed by Yoko Kanno, the lady best known for her Cowboy Bebop compositions. As expected, these are tracks that cannot be slotted into a single genre, a single track might hop from a Big-band orchestral arrangement to spanish guitar music and then, as you are gasping for breath, move into heavy metal mode.

Trivia:

1) The title “Ghost in the Shell” comes from Arthur Koestler’s book The Ghost in the Machine, which also lends its name to an album by The Police. Koestler himself borrowed the term from a British philosopher named Gilbert Ryle who coined it to refute the Descartian ( or is that Cartesian) principle of seperation of mind and matter.

2) The US dubbed version of the movie had a track called “One Minute Warning”, with music by Brian Eno and U2. While this is nowhere to be seen on the official soundtrack album, I found it on a CD called Passengers, at a sale in Hyderabad. This was even before I got the manga.

Ironic Nostalgia Moment of the Day: This post, dated May 2003, where I mentioned the shock value associated with discovering a DVD of Ghost in the Shell at Music World. I did find it in Music World two years later. (not the genuine Music World, this is the shopping centre at Basheer Bagh that shares the same name) Now is that prophetic or what?

P.S: Some of Sasi’s wallpapers are now part of RECian legend – they were used (without any form of acknowledgement whatsoever) as backgrounds for the brochure of Trivium 2001, our very own Quiz Fest. Not the GITS one, much to my regret.

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There was this song tune that popped up in my head yesterday morning and kept starting up at very inopportune moments. How irritating it is to have a tune bouncing around in your brain without an anchor! I knew that the voice was a whiny voice and the song sounded like one of those top-20 hits, which meant it could be any band in the whole world.

But I figured out what it was just two minutes ago. It was Greenday’s Boulevard of Broken Dreams, that I heard on VH1 a couple of days ago, while sipping on a cappuccino in JavaCity.

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I am a member of ebay.co.uk. Why? Because when I passed out from college, and joined the company I work in, I found out that ebay.com was a banned site. Mostly because you get adult stuff through the site and the automatic site blocker ensured I could not access it. The catch was that ebay.co.uk was accessible, and I proceeded to sign up, with nothing in mind other than browsing through the comics-listings. Then a year later, I managed to convince the sysadmin about ebay being safe enough, after which he allowed access to it. So I was an ebay.com member.

Today morning in the mail, I get a mail saying “Welcome to ebay India”. Whoa! Baazee is now ebay.in. Heh heh heh. Since I was an ebay.com member, I am, by default, a member of ebay.in too.

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Now that I have seen The Last Temptation of Christ, and been suitably pissed off by a blonde and white Jesus Christ with an American accent (Though Willem Dafoe was good, really good), and followed by American-looking Israelites who used modern-day expressions in their speech while the middle-eastern-looking guys looked on and whispered and gestured to each other, I feel like watching The Passion of the Christ once again. I think the best thing about the movie was the use of Aramaic as the language. I didn’t like it at all the first time I saw it, and I don’t think I will – if only it had a storyline like the Last Temptation, or a soundtrack half as good.

Happiness is – waking up in the morning and listening to the Passion: Soundtrack to The Last Temptation of Christ really loud. On 5.1 speakers.

The Rahman-Passion connection goes deeper. Apart from the familiar bass track of Of These, Hope being copied in Anbae ( Jeans ), there’s also the (unauthorized) use of the main refrain of Baaba Maal’s Morning Prayer, which is a track in Passion: Sources, and appears in the movie as is, when Lazarus is being brought back to life, a very creepy moment. Funnily, the Passion album has a track called Lazarus Raised which does not feature in the movie. A bit from Morning Prayer is used in the One Two Ka Four theme music.

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I just found a copy of Art Spiegelman’s Maus in Blossom Book House. For 250 Rs. I am signing up for membership in al_lude-sir’s anti-Blossom campaign. Er, on second thoughts, will sign on after 5 PM. Right after I go and buy that Moebius-illustrated Ray Bradbury collection that’s available there for a paltry 100 rupees.

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Quizmasterly Tips

How Not To Be A Jerk When Conducting A Quiz, part 1: When you are doing the prelims on powerpoint, NUMBER the bloomin’ slides. Otherwise, when someone asks you in the middle of the round – “Was that question 19 or 20?” and you find yourself fumbling for an answer, much Egg shall drip from your face. Especially when the marauding masses ask the same thing every two minutes (with varying question-numbers).

How Not To Be a Jerk When Conducting a Quiz, part 2: Have a test slide before the powerpoint show with embedded audio and video clips in it, and play them before the quiz begins. That way, you will know, when you click on a slide and find out that the bloomin’ audio clip does not play, whether the problem lies with the audio cable, or your moronic miscopying of the folders from the CD. And you will have an idea of the volume levels.

How Not To Be a Jerk After the Quiz is Over, part 1: REMEMBER THE QUESTIONS YOU ASKED, DIMWIT!!!!! Not just the answers, THE QUESTIONS. Because there might be a chance that the quizmaster the next day might ask a semi-mutilated version of the SAME QUESTION YOU ASKED yesterday, and you might be the only person in the auditorium not writing down the correct answer. Faugh!

p.s: Remember my experiences about asking a question onstage and then forgetting the answer? At least that didn’t happen this time. Whew.

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