they know something

This is the year where hope fails you
The test subjects run the experiments

Such are the words of a song by one of the groups that raise extremist sentiments… u either love this guys or hate em… there is no middle path on this one… yep em talking about slipknot… granted that they r peculiar to the extent where u might actually feel like calling from galaxy alpha rather than planet earth… but I find solace in the music they make…

nyways… after 13 months I decided to scribble something here… basically more out of the need to get myself registered on blogger.com in addition to blogspot.com… and then I had something else to add as always… not that it means anything to anyone, but doesn’t hurt blabbering anyway ;-)… this was more of a response to someone else’s email rather than my own mumblings…

lemme begin this way... the world is an insane place... and it is crazier today than it has probably ever been in it’s entire some four and a half billion year long history... mortality rates reaching all time lows and the percentage of centenarians reaching all time highs... governments of the "developed" world looking for immigrants in the younger age bracket to get taxes for supporting the older populace... governments of the "developing" world trying to reach "urbanization" levels and become “developed” which is resulting in soaring energy usages in the eastern hemisphere and rising crude prices... and funnily enough now that i think about it, for some reason i think i can attribute all this insanity to be an outcome (fortunate or unfortunate is left up to the individual) of the GATT or something like dat which was apparently a big issues when I used 2 be in high school... globalization is pushing economies with more than a billion mouths to feed into the forefront of the energy and soon to be food hungry world... and m thinkin in a couple of decades a thirsty world... quite honestly a doomsday scenario mite suggest buyin property in canada or along one of the great lakes, given that they hold a fifth of the entire world's fresh water content...

and yes of course... last but not the least the 49.8 odd freakin Rs i paid for every darned greenback back in '02 now at sub-40 levels... not necessarily helping the loan repayments ;-)... and gone are the bloody globalization. .. well maybe or maybe not... again it is in the "eye of the beholder" as one of my favs wud scream at ya... :-D

as far uncle ben goes... although m so glad dat he did wat he did (maybe my trip to the canadas did pay off ;-)... i just hope that it does not bring the insane liquidity back into the market... or else this time around the downturn will b so bad dat even a point rate cut will prob not b able 2 help... from wat m hearing the worst of sub-prime is not over yet... ppl seem to think that over the next few months as many as a million houses will be forfeited for non-payment. .. not good given that this is a country of three hundred million only... and i already m hearin the pricing on houses being struck down 25-30% for "clearance" purposes...

nother thing... fallin dollar against rupee can only mean bad things for poor guys busting theirs butts back home... m guessing their 12 hr workdays r now gonna b strechted to 14 hrs, so dat the corporates can make the same profit despite the appreciating rupee and keep the dalal street and in infy/wipro/tcs case wall street also happy... i just hope (probably hoping against hope) that it doesnt head in dat direction...

dat shud do it for now… will b back 2 ramble more… don’t know when… but will b back…

what's new?

i break my long silence, to put down in words some of my latest hookups on the music scene... a direct result of listening to XM Channel 48 almost 24/7 :-)...

if you happen to love led zep kinda music, "Wolfmother" is definitely a force to reckon with...
they r a band from down under (yes australian mates) and their music comes tantalizingly
close to led zep music... listen to their tracks "woman" and "Joker & The Theif" and you'll
see what I mean...

the other band that has caught my attention recently is "The Exies"... some of their coolest songs, you ask...
hmm i would say "ugly", "kickout", "my goddess" & "Lo-fi"... the nice thing about them is that they incorporate
a certain degree of variation in their music...

"Hinder" is another up and coming band... my personal favorites "get stoned" and "lips of an angel"...

i cannot finish this blog entry without mentioning this texan quintet "Flyleaf"... if they continue to make
music they r doing right now, m sure they'll make it big... their best songs? i'd say "fully alive" and
"i'm so sick"

there now that i've mentioned four bands, i can go back to my hibernation mode... :-)

until next time (maybe today, maybe two years down the line, who knows?)

I'm still alive!

A repeat of the title! But very apt, nonetheless. After two months of non-stop work, finally got a chance to kick-off the summer in a grand way. Went to Pearl Jam concert yesterday night in Camden, NJ. It was my first PJ concert and undoubtedly they are an awesome live band. High point for me during the concert; definitely when Ed started singing Alive. That song puts me into a trance like state every time I listen to it on the radio. Just imagine what it must have done to me, when they were performing it live. And the entire freaking 20K+ crowd chanting along with Ed! Woo-hoo, it felt like the entire Tweeter centre was in a state of nirvana. Can't wait until the next time I am able to attend a PJ concert!

Rock on.

stuck in the 80's

old time rock and roll... for some unknown reason it seems like i'm still stuck in that old time rock and roll... i love the 80's... no offense vh1classic... i love metallica, iron maiden, black sabbath, ac-dc... born in the wrong decade... maybe so maybe not... i guess there is no term such as being "wrong"... it is all upto the individual to make something of the "thing" that is...

do my dirty work you scape-goat

every so often when one goes through the pangs of bluesy feeling does one remember the blogs... ever so often have my buddies reminded me of the blogspot, but that was never to happen... i was ever so "busy" not to be able to spend some time to transcribe the de facto alter-ego...

yet again, shall i procrastinate, but again the very thought of "thinking out loud" suffices... just the fact that i mention that i have to mention is gud enuf... it suffices @ putting my mind at ease, and will help me get a good night's sleep with no alligators involved...

Alive!!!

One song that gives me that "ecstatic out of this world, yet so in it" feeling... Alive by Pearl Jam; it doesn't matter if I am at work, relaxing in my living room or if I am drunk sitting in a bar; it is the same feeling that I always get after listening to this song... a feeling not quite different from feeling "flushed"... flushed with what, i dont know but it is amazing... pearl jam man are they god or what... ROCK ON...

yay, i got a DISTI !!!

aah the word still rings in my ears... like some soothing potion for an aching being ... "DISTI" that magic word... i guess all RECians prob spent the last few weeks of each sem. trying to make or break that disti... a word that determines if u will be eligible to land that dream job of yours or if you will be able to make it into that grad school u've always dreamed of going to...

i guess this is or shud i say "was" more of a tradition at krec, surathkal... a name slowly fading away as it is washed away with sands of time... i guess that is a byproduct of "re"naming the RECs to "NITs"... no doubt it has improved a lot of things for the campus, but i am sure for alumni like me the old KREC sounds like a home, somehow i can't bring myself to call that place NITK...

i guess where all these senseless "ramblings" derive their driving force is from a book titled "five point someone" by chetan bhagat. Well, it is a piece of fiction 'bout life at an IIT, its 'bout three best friends... but thinking about it; I realise it can well be anyone of us... and hey if i start 2 make generalizations it is indeed every single engineer who has graduated from an engg college in india... no doubt, the IITians despise us RECians for calling ourselves being i "good" engineers i guess... but then hey you ought to give it to "us". For, if v were not there to accept the "runners-up" or "under-dog" position, who would appreciate the #1 guys? ;-)

Worthless piece of @#$# as Mr. hanky (south park fans u outta recognize this) wud say... nd pondering back in time, quite frankly i'm SO happy dat i can claim myself being a member of this much acclaimed runners-up club/community rather than making myself belong to that of the fore-runners. I have NEVER wanted 2 be amongst da fore-runners,never in my life !!! And i feel that much more is accomplished when u have ur feet down on da ground rather than up in the air trying to fly - without any idea whatsoever where you wanna go what you wanna do. Ending up doing what has been done or blindly following what has been followed by the erstwhile graduates. There goes a life - the only one that you may get as a human species, and sit back and think what have you done? Being 2 steps behind has its advantages and it's easy for us not to follow the same @#$# path, and learn not to falter on our way to "the" achievements !!!

If you have managed to reach this point of this blog, I adore your persistence. It would undoubtedly take courage to read through this much of crap. Well, I guess I was not planning to go anywhere with this, it is probably a random collections of some thoughts that i've had over the past few years... and i just decided to pen them down in any random order as i felt like...

procrastination? wait may be not!

Well, it's been a while since I blogged, 10 day to be precise. Started to ponder as what might be the reason behind that. (We the engineers can't help analyzing stuff, pretty much anything and everything ;-) ) And BAM it hits me, probably the first time in my life I "really" don't have time to do this. Yes many of you might claim that it is a few minutes job and how difficult is it to take out a few minutes every day. But thinking about my lifestyle (between learning to play the guitar, living in a dump and trying to regularize some sort of physical activity), I really cannot seem to find those few minutes monday through thursday. And as for the remaining three days, you know the story. Once in weekend "mode" it becomes really difficult to do anything productive, whatsoever. :-(

Chicago... City of the Century...

Love Chicago? You’ve got to love this (for all you trivia lovers)!

There is literally a gazillion trivia on the internet, about our dear Chicago. I have picked out some of the lesser known ones. Hope this provides some interesting reading material for you people (Don’t about others, but I certainly didn’t know some of this stuff, despite claiming myself to be a die-hard Chicago fan)…

• 1772 : – Humble beginnings of Chicago; started off as a settlement called Eschikagou on the north bank of the Chicago River by a Haiti man named Jean-Baptiste Pointe du Sable.
• 1833 : – 12th of August - The town of Chicago was incorporated with a population of 350.
• 1861 : – The entire Chicago Police Department was fired by John Wentworth (then mayor). The city went without any police protection for twelve hours until some new officers were sworn in to take their place.
• 1891 : – Chicago’s elevated railway “The El”, went into operation to begin the “Loop” that circles the downtown.
• 1891 : – The 16-sotry Monadnock Building at 53 W. Jackson Boulevard was the city’s first skyscraper.
• 1901 : – Walt Disney was born in December, in “The Disney family house” located at 2156 N. Tripp Ave. Disney lived there until he was 4 (before moving to a farm in Missouri), and then returned to Chicago in 1917 to settle on the Near West Side.
• 1925 : – The Tribune Tower was completed. The building's large gothic entrance contains pieces of stone from other famous buildings: Westminster Abbey, Cologne Cathedral, the Alamo, the Taj Mahal, the Great Pyramid, and the Arc de Triomphe.
• 1927 : – Originally called the Chicago Municipal Airport, Midway Airport opened. It was renamed in 1949 to honor the Battle of Midway in WW II. Midway was the world's busiest airport until 1959.
• 1927 : – Kate Sturges Buckingham donated $750,000 to the city for construction of Buckingham Fountain as a memorial to her brother Clarence. The largest fountain in the world, it shoots a water jet 135 feet high.
• 1937 : – Chicago became the home of the 1st US blood bank.
• 1949 : – O’Hare Airport comes into being. (I simply love that airport!) By 1961, O'Hare Field surpassed Chicago's Midway to become the world's busiest air travel facility.
• 1953 : – At 6052 S. Harper Street, Hugh Hefner started the publication of "Playboy." (How about that people!)
• 1955 : – The first McDonald's franchise restaurant, owned by Ray Kroc, opened in the suburb of DesPlaines. (I’ve seen this one, from the outside it looks like any other McD’s. It was only after my friend informed about it’s history did I come to know!)
• 1964 : – Marina City apartments and offices were completed on the Chicago River. The 60-story round twin towers were designed by Bertrand Goldberg. The first 18 floors are parking! (I have probably spent countless hours just plain staring at this beauty from across the River standing on the Wacker Drive. It is an astounding view, and as far as I can remember every single visitor that I’ve ever had from out of town was captivated by this place. Prospective visitors to Chicago, you don’t want to miss this one!)
• 1969 : – The 100-floor John Hancock Center was built.
• 1969 : – Rail service in the Dan Ryan Expressway median commences. This marks another transit innovation made in Chicago - the first expressway/freeway median rail service ever - now commonly used in cities all over the world. (After probably having traveled on it a gazillion times, I still am as awestruck and amazed as I was the first time I used it.)
• 1971 : – 9th Sept. - The Woodfield Mall regional shopping center, one of the world's largest, with 2 million square feet of selling space, opened for business. The name "Woodfield" was an amalgam that combined the names of Gen. Robert E. Wood, chairman of Sears Roebuck & Co. at the time the mall was built; and Marshall Field & Co. Sears and Fields were two of the mall's original department stores.
• 1971 : – Sears Tower opened with 3.6 million square feet of rentable space. The $200 million 110-story structure rises 1,455 feet into the sky.
• 1992 : – 13th April - , the "Great Chicago Flood" occurred when 124 million gallons of Chicago River water poured through a crack in the forty-seven-mile network of freight tunnels under the central business district. After filling the tunnels, the river water rose into the basements of many downtown buildings, knocking out electric power and natural-gas service.
• 1997 : – 7th October - the Chicago City Council approved a resolution which absolved Mrs. O'Leary's cow of all blame for the Great Chicago Fire. (Oh come on people!)

Some more trivia (this is non-chronological stuff):

• The 4 stars on the Chicago flag represent Fort Dearborn, the Chicago Fire, the World's Columbian Exposition, and the Century of Progress Exposition.
• Chicago is home to the world's largest population of Poles outside of Warsaw.
• The Chicago Public Library is the world's largest public library with a collection of more than 2 million books.
• The world's largest cookie and cracker factory, where Nabisco made 16 billion Oreo cookies in 1995, is located in Chicago.
• The central water filtration plant, located on the lakefront north of Navy Pier, is the largest in the world.
• The Chicago Post Office at 433 West Van Buren is the only postal facility in the world you can drive a car through.
• The Chicago River is always dyed green on St. Patrick's Day.
• Illinois State Motto: State Sovereignty, National Union
• The ice cream "sundae" was named in Evanston. The piety of the town resented the dissipating influences of the soda fountain on Sunday and the good town fathers, yielding to this churchly influence, passed an ordinance prohibiting the retailing of ice cream sodas on Sunday. Ingenious confectioners and drug store operators obeying the law, served ice cream with the syrup of your choice without the soda. Objections then was made to christening a dish after the Sabbath. So the spelling of "sunday" was changed. It became an established dish and an established word and finally the "sundae". (yum!!!)
• The Illinois state dance is square dancing.
• Illinois boasts the highest number of personalized license plates, more than any other state.
• Chicago's Mercantile Exchange building was built entirely without an internal steel skeleton; it depends on its thick walls to keep itself up.
• New York Sun editor Charles Dana, tired of hearing Chicagoans boast of the world's Columbian Exposition, dubbed Chicago the "Windy City." (Apparently that’s how the name “Windy City” came into being!)

PHEW! I think that is enough trivia for now.

Can't stop...

Been silent for a while now... well i have a reason, and quite a valid one too... this recent interest i've developed has gotten quite a hold on me... i can't have enough of my newly acquired baby... yeah i ended up buying an electric guitar and an amp... and since then have been at it pretty much all of my waking hours... [after 3 hours] see, i can't even manage to complete a single blog... it's simply amazing, how much addictive this thing can be... so i'm not even going to make an effort to write anything more... back to the strumming and plucking... :-)

Look out, world: Here comes booming India

Click here to read the article

I just stumbled across this article on the web. One of the many wonders of Google search I guess. An article well-written and quite credible (Of course me being an Indian, will always view this article favorably). However, it is my personal belief that this article draws it's conclusions based on strong foundations and that India indeed has a very good potential of capitalizing on it's mentioned resources. I just hope that we don't blow away this opportunity. I think it has been more than a millenium since we have led the tech race and this is an opportunity well presented.

I'll raise a toast to that!

IT'S TOOL TIME !!!

No I am not talking about Tim Allen and his Tool-time. I am talking about "Tool" and their entrancing and oddly enough soothing music. For some odd reason, today I had this sudden urge to listen to hour long blocks of Tool pumping out of the speakers. For weeks now I have been reveling in the hard rock almost 24/7 constantly blaring on the XM Radio that I got just before the Christmas, but now this powerful urge to listen to Tool just overtook the affection I have developed for XM. It is just amazing how much soothing power Maynard James Keenan and the gang has packed into the songs they have written and composed.

IRRESOLUTE RESOLUTIONS???

Ever so often people ask me as to what was my new year’s resolution or something to that effect. It never fails to amaze me, as to how many different types of reactions (spanning anywhere from surprise to shock) are inspired by my response of “I don’t make resolutions”. As if those reactions are not enough, I go ahead and try to provide my rationale behind not making resolutions. The way I look at it, making resolutions is a symbol of person’s weakness. When one goes ahead and declares his or her resolutions to the world; in essence what that person is trying to do is instill a fear of public humiliation in his mind. The logic generally being now that I have made my intentions public, I will at least attempt to fulfill them. But more often than not what really happens is after a few weeks or sometimes days even; those resolutions are forgotten about and become a tool of ridicule for others. People can poke you with this tool at the most inconceivable of times. And I am the kind of a person who has a hard time dealing with public mockery, so I just find it easier not to make resolutions. Also I believe that if I “really” want to do something I would not have to make a resolution, I would do it come whatsoever. However, this is just my personal interpretation of general human psyche and some others might think differently. Regardless, I wanted to share this train of thought.

Consequentiality of Inconsequential Objects

"Movin’ to the country gonna eat a lot of peaches
I’m movin’ to the country I’m gonna eat me a lot of peaches
I’m movin’ to the country I’m gonna eat a lot of peaches
Movin’ to the country I’m gonna eat a lot of peaches"

Heard this song being played on the radio today morning. A song time titled "Peaches" by Presidents of the USA. My very first thoughts, "Whoever in the world writes a song about peach". What an incosequential thing and why would anyone want to listen to this song. Just as these thoughts were going through my head, came the next lines.

"Peaches come from a can they were put there by a man
In a factory downtown
If I had my little way I’d eat peaches everyday
Sun soakin bulges in the shade"

And BAM it hit me. It is not the peaches that they are talking about but rather the longing for the country-life, a life away from the din of the city. Apart from that message subtly placed in there, there is one more thing to it. In conveying their message they have glorified such an inconsequential object such as a peach. I guess it takes talent to write a song surrounding such a seemingly trivial object and bringing it to glory.

Finally I got one for myself...

I guess I have been putting this thing in "that dusty old closet in the corner" for long enough now... call it lethargy...call it procrastination... call it plain laziness... call it what you will... but finally for a reason that seems to elude me... i wake up from my slumber on the very first day of the year and end up creating a blogspot... well so be it... let's see how long or rather at what frequency will I manage to come out of the cocoon of my daily routine and blabber something here... i guess that something even i don't know of... some things only time can unravel... or atleast we happen to think so... anyway am gonna put an end to my senseless ramblings for now, until i find something more credible to ramble about... adios...