Blogs We Read Regularly

Which is another way of saying, we're updating our broglorr, sort of

This is the height of laziness in the blogging world, this writing about other blogs. Even so, we're doing it after two years. But then we're the Sultans of Laziness. Can't even be bothered to make this remotely amusing. Without further ado...

The Top 10

These we check more or less every day, in no particular order.

• The Spaniard In The Works - The Spaniard, when she can take a few microseconds out of her busy daily schedule of vampiring and zombieing and defenestrating, always and regularly has poems worth reading, movies worth watching, books worth buying, and links worth clicking.


• Nanopolitan - It's a blog, and it's also a portal. An almost one stop shop for all kinds of happenings, especially in science, engineering, and academia. What we've actually done is outsourced our bookmarks to Abi, who does (apparently a lot of) triage on the messy world that is the Internet and only lets the latest and the greatest slip through. This one is a must if you're remotely interested in science/technology, academia, debates on policy, especially in the desi context. Go ahead, bookmark it.


• Fanaa - CSM is to the world of development what Abi is to the world of sci-tech. Updated regularly, always something interesting going on.


• musings from mumbai - Kenny was our senior in college, and co-infested a couple of Massachusetts campuses with us. She writes about life in Mumbai, journeys, stories, and about this kid of hers. Who appears to be absolutely delicious and kidnappable.


• sElecting a President in New Hampshire - Longtime Asha buddy, and co-conspirator in world revolution, Melli has just started a fascinating and regularly updated blog on the election process in the US. The Democratic primaries in New Hampshire will get underway in January, and then there's the presidential election in Novembar, and this is one blog we will stay glued to.


• Of shoes -- and ships -- and sealing-wax - Our blogs are actually siblings (observe the names) that got lost in some blog mela when mine went to buy inji mittai for hers, and the fireworks accidentally went off, and the elephant stampeded, and the rangula ratlam flew off its axle and rolled towards the elephant, and the heat, and the dust, and the screams, and Rakhee and...and... You get the picture. Sheetal writes about travel, and birding, and sports, and writing, and whatnot. Woh kya kattey ji, horizonaan broadenaan ho jaate.


• k'uvvat-e-guftaar - Another almost bachpan mein bichad gayaa blog. If the Choultry wasn't named after something from "The Walrus and the Carpenter" or "Jabberwocky", and didn't have utterly obscure sayings from the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, it would surely make a ghazal type statement. Even more so, it might've made a k'uvvat-e-guftaar statement, seeing as one of our all time #1 ghazals is Mehdi Hasan singing ek bas tuu hi nahiin mujhse khafaa ho baitha (see footnotes). Shweta also writes about travel, birding, music, and Federer and will occasionally let fly little nuggets of shaayiri
  
  But the siblings Vyas are somewhat overly fixated on Harry Potter and his lethal salutations, and being very hoity toity, we deplore!


• Blogical Conclusion - Read without fail every week for Baradwaj Rangan's sometimes funny, sometimes sober, always thought-provoking takes on the Indian cinema.


• Yossarian Lives - This woman is on ayahuasca. Fullto fun will come here. If you see a somewhat harassed, academic looking Bong who answers to the name of Bill (Billabong!) in the vicinity, be nice to him. He needs it!


• A writer and his web-blahg - Samanth holds forth. Very erudite. Discourses with equal Felicity on Herodotus, the Poincare conjecture, Brecht, maayamaalawagowlam and so on. Poor Felicity. He's either very learned, or very very very good with search engines and typing. Lives some kind of latter day Caligula life in the fleshpots of New York, and occasionally infests these parts to win most quizzes he attends, and once safely back in Manhattan writes about such intensely annoying things as how to spend Rs. 10,000 worth of Landmark coupons. Bah.

Blogs We Check Regularly But Aren't Updated So Often(1)

• Not all who wander are lost - No indeed they aren't. Some are merely very very jobless. They should write more often. Ram Ram.


• Muesli harmless - The only blog in the world known to be written by an Irrawady dolphin. Nowadays a very very lazy Irrawady dolphin. These conservation types have made life too easy for some species!


• Da Black Mamba - Why for she is not writing more often? Is she engrossed in researching shades of pink, perchance?


• Phantasmagoria - Is becoming distressingly irregular. We will get to the bottom of the matter. Is it wrong for a blog whose name ends in goria to annoyingly trigger off a song from Coolie No. 1 in one's head?


• kufr - Actually boy is writing quite often nowadays, and we're visiting very regularly too. But we're placing him under observation, if he keeps up the good work, 2 years down the line we may bump him into the other list. Blog is about a lot of diverse policy type issues, and we seem to agree on many things so we likes to read.


• Dev's Walden Pond - Writer, journalist, author of Touch Play which is a must buy book if you're into inspirational sports stories and are looking for an Indian hero.


• Horse product - Utterly irreverent, and utterly funny. Seems to have utterly stopped writing.


• I *heart* Bombay (and well..Boston) - The Vikster has recently moved from Bombay to Bangalore, and consequent angst is in progress. Sekk it out.


• Last Man Blogging! - Is where Rithesh writes about many things including the life of the Hyderabadi entrepreneur, but not so often...


• Flying in a blue dream... - Is also updated only irregularly, is by a Hyderabadi quizzer, and has one fantastic post (read comments also) on food joints in the city.

Other Ones We Check Reasonably Regularly

• these amiable drifters - Srini who is short, squat, bespectacled, bewhiskered, and from Tiruchirapalli used to blog at cha-biskoot, but then Japanese Martian monkeys took over and now she's recuperating here. Her hairstyle rocks.


• Mango Indian - Just Kishore's "Death by PJs" (be very afraid) website, spiced up by the occasional rant!


• Raves and Rants of a Demented Cinephile - Promises to be the last world on definitive cult movies!


• Dangling conversations - Sudhir Pai writes about everything!
  
• Dhammonia - D-man about books, running, and quizzing usually. This boy is the Energizer Bunny of Bangalore middle and long distance road races.


• Zoo Station - Dr. Abraham about economics, entrepreneurship and so on. When he can find the time from hanging out with George (Soros), Montek (S. Ahluwalia) and so on.


• Easy Bedtime Reading - Mr. Google himself. Once in a while write something, lep.


• Rajni's Blog - Rajni about life in the US, in India, education, travel, Deathly Hellos, and so on.

Excellent Blobs We Used To Read Very Regularly But For No Particular Reason Seem To Have Stopped Looking At (Which Is A Bad Bad Thing)

• A Walk in the Clouds - What to say? :( It's really her fault, though. She keeps disappearing for inordinate lengths of time.


• 2x3x7 - Can't blame the boy, he posts regularly and copiously. Then why? Wovon mann nicht sprechen kann, daruber muss mann schweigen.


• Indian Writing - This also somehow slipped through the cracks. Boo hoo. Too much catching up to do.


• Who is Buchu? - Used to get our daily Harvard Square fix from here. Alack, those days are gone.

Group Blobs

• pō’ĭ-trē - Audio poetry!


• How The Other Half Lives - Reality checks


• The Indian Economy Blog - It's not what you say, it's how you say it :P


• Urban Babblers - Hyderabad birders. Should babble more regularly.


• Hyderabad Quiz Club - Une kochhanaa poochthey kettey, ansaraan denaan padingaa, nahin tho @$$^@*(!#$%...


• Daly Haal - The Karnataka Quiz Association blogs here


• Bombay Quiz Club - Blogs here...


• Interrobang - The Boat Club Quiz Club (Pune) blogs here

Few. As in, "Phew!" This is only about a quarter/third of all our bookmarks (including all the boring techy ones). But it'll have to do for now. Have we missed anyone? That would be really bad, no? Let it be, let it be, let it be, let it be, speaking words of wisdom...

UPDATE

We forgot to mention (maybe because we only got to know about this one very recently), but Bombay Boy is also being read nowadays. It's about "food, delhi, bombay and chicks". Lesley has a post linking to The Delhi Walla which appears to be an excellent, excellent piece of work that tries to poke and pry into facets of Delhi that aren't exactly the most visible ones.

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Notes
1. When we say "we check regularly", we mean to say that we're utter novices at such things as reading feeds and so on. So for us reading blogs means painstakingly navigating from bookmark to bookmark.

The Mathematics Genealogy Project

In which the below mentioned is about the above mentioned

The Mathematics Genealogy Project is one of those internet curiosities that are worth visiting from time to time. The algorithm is fairly simple.

   ∀x|x∈M(the set of all doctorates in mathematics)
   find x's adviser

For example, take Ludwig's onetime roommate. Boy is widely recognized to be very, very, very smart (Maths Olympiad medalist smart) and his dissertation on the Smoothed Analysis of Gaussian Elimination is of suitably overwhelming obscurity, befitting boy's pedigree. Follow boy's academic ancestry.

One passes through a few generations of unknown (but doubtless worthy) names, until the first tentative signs of recognition occur at Marvin Minsky. After a brief detour into Minsky, we move on.

Somewhere at the turn of the last century, the geography shifts to Europe - sometimes to France, more commonly to Germany. Also, the names start becoming a whole lot more familiar (Klein 1 2, he of bottle fame, for example. Further, see here for a very funny cartoon, one that should join the ranks of the jokes here).

From the mid nineteenth century onwards, the names are all scarily familiar. Scary mostly because you've heard these names in various classes before, and now nothing - nothing - comes back.

Eventually, it is very likely that you will end up at the very obscure (hitherto unheard of, in fact) Herr Erhard Weigel. Why, you ask? How, is it possible, you wonder?

The reason is not hard to seek.

Erhard begat Gottfried
And Gottfried begat Jacob, (en passant, he also begat the calculus)
And Jacob begat Johann (which sounds very odd, because they were in fact siblings)
And Johann begat Leo, and ay there's the rub.

From Euler, it's hoppity-skippity-hop and suddenly we're spitting out the Gods of mathematics. Euler is Lagrange's mai baap and Fourier (of transform fame) and Poisson (of distribution fame) were the apples of Lagrange's eyes.

As the image on the homepage suggests, there's another path through this tree, which leads via Klein to Gauss. Indeed, if the tree/graph were a railway network, Klein would be Mathura.

Go on. Head over to the project, and find out how your mathematics Ph. D. buddy is a descendant of Mencke or Weigel. It's an utterly absorbing pastime, we assure you.

Teams

Which is about teams we've been following lately

This is apparently now business as usual.

These guys apparently lost by a whisker to these guys. Who gives a shit?

The Dynasty are in the process of whipping the aquatic mammals in the third quarter as we type this, and seem to be sublimely unbeatable.

He lost. But this might simply mean that He has used up His allotted quota of losses for next year, and will therefore win everything.

And finally, the only thing that really matters, and has mattered for the last couple of weeks, is what will happen to them? Hail Mary...

Dramanon Presents...

Which is a plug for a local event

Theatre seems to have taken off in Hyderabad in recent days. First there were the Naseeruddin Shah/Ratna Pathak Shah plays, then the Metroplus Theatre Festival, and now a friend and his friends have gotten together for a production. Details follow. Come one, come all etc. Help Hyderabadi theatre flourish.






The Original Last Wish Baby
    - The Hyderabad adaptation of William Seebring's satire

Date: 18^th October
Time: 8 p.m.
Duration: 60 minutes
Venue: Bhavan's Auditorium, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Basheerbagh
Tickets: Rs. 200, Rs. 150, Rs. 100
Contact: Sudhir Pai (99089 33318)

ABOUT THE PLAY

Dramanon’s current production, William Seebring’s ‘The Original Last Wish Baby’ is a blend of black humor, pathos and unexpected moments of tragi-comedy. Throughout the play, there is a strong criticism of popular culture and sensationalism. The play begins with all of Hyderabad caught up in what may be the last wishes of a baby born without a heart. The irony of the sad event is covered by the media, which later succumbs to capitalistic urges. The mother of the baby goes on to star in a reality TV show so that everyone can hear baby’s last wishes every night. Subsequently, the whole country wakes up to this miracle baby’s wishes. The World takes a note of all the events that follow, thanks to Media coverage. An expose about the baby’s identity briefly sows seeds of doubt among the Indians and many controversies follow. The play’s radical element lies in its brilliant roller coaster scripting and the use of visual medium in such a way that theater borders on cinematic effect.

An irreverent dissection of the media stranglehold on the mass mind, The Original Last Wish Baby takes fluffy news casting, sympathy mongering, and the "right to life" movement to their logical conclusions and well beyond.

ABOUT DRAMANON

Founded in 1991, Dramanon, a theatre fraternity, originally comprising of the faculty members and students of Manipal, has grown from strength to strength and evolved into a team which has staged 22 successful plays till date, all of which have recorded rave reviews and wide critical acclaim. Now settled professionally at various places all over India, the alumni of Dramanon now want to carry their passion for theatre wherever their career takes them. After staging 4 successful shows in Bangalore, Dramanon now endeavours to entertain the Hyderabad audiences.

Three Quarks for Muster Mark

In which Ludwig is reminded of food and music by an unlikely book that SpaceBar showed him

We used to live in a first floor hostel room that, through a brace of ashoka trees and over a rusty phalanx of forgotten bicycles, looked down at an eatery judiciously named Quark. Judicious because Quark is the kind of name that carefully attenuated to be simultaneously cool and geeky enough to appeal to a wide cross-section of the student populace.

The fare at Quark was mixed. Variations on the "oily gobs of semolina with shreds of vegetables and meat" theme were passed off as products of Szechuan and Manchuria. Vanilla ice-cream was cheerfully and sometimes inevitably (given Madras temperatures and power cuts) melted, optimistically christened "milk shake" and peddled for a princely Rs. 10. The menu was written on a whiteboard, and some of us went there just to find out what spelling they'd used today ("Kobe Manjuriyan - Rs. 15").

The piece de resistance of the cordon bleu experience, as it were, was the delicious kheema porotta. The porottas were of the excellent Mallu variety, and for the connoisseurs amongst our readers, enough said. The kheema was fine grained, spicy, in generous quantities (enough to warrant an extra porotta) and quite sexy. In hindsight, one fervently hopes that the meat came off some traditional ungulate, or at least an herbivorous quadruped. Who is to say?

When the thing was cooked, one of the waiters would put on his best American accent and announce loudly, "Khhheemmmaa porrotttaa, exxxtrraaa porrrotttaaa!!!". And as his shriek died in the prosopis plants that infested the place, you could swagger up to the counter, and everyone would know you were spending big money tonight.

Quark had a "fountain Pepsi" machine. Remember those things? It is reasonable to suspect that a number of people patronized Quark because they were mesmerized by this hissing-panting consul-general of liberalization and globalization in the midst of our customary squalor. If the Starship Enterprise had landed in the hostel quadrangle and Captain Kirk had invited us to play at the battle bridge we couldn't have been happier. For 5 seconds while the plastic cup filled up and the beaded bubbles started winking at the brim, we were on an American campus.

Dining was al fresco. This is another way of saying the management couldn't be bothered with putting up any kind of roof over our heads or providing any furniture. Which was just as well. The future has come to pass, and a recent visit threw the "advantages" of progress into Stark Relief. Shudder. Instead we had trees, and a bunch of cubical and cylindrical concrete blocks, sturdy specimens that had survived the rigours of destructive testing in the structures lab, now living out their retirement respectably as stools and tables.

The management were also proud purveyors of the sketchiest selection of Hindi and Tamil "chartbusters" of the mid-nineties. They'd rigged up an elementary stereo and loudspeaker system that pelted us with scratchy (yet loud!) versions of such classics is main maal gaadi hoon tu dhakka lagaa, subah ko leti hai, shaam ko leti hai, and sarkai liyo khatiyaa, jaadaa laage.

But those were also the days when Kaadhalan and Rangeela were young, and Gulabi and Bombay were around the corner. And how was one to concentrate on the intricacies of the serendipity element or fathom the thought process behind Terzaghi's theses, when coffee, cigarettes and conversation punctuated by urvasi, urvasi or beat in my heart beckoned?

Perhaps Quark was a metaphor for a campus and a country in transition. The hep name, the unorthodox fare, and the English-speaking wait staff were all harbingers of the fifteen kazillion such eateries that dot metro India today. The Hawaii chappals, crap music, ersatz sundaes and the makeshift seating harkened back to something altogether less complicated.

Fapjprid - An Experiment in Collaborative Verse

In which Ludwig dredges up a almost forgotten work of art from the depths of his hard disk

In the Spring of 1998 we were young and restless. We had more or less just decanted off the Air India 747 at JFK and wended our circuitous way to Amherst, MA. We had successfully negotiated one semester at grad school via masterful inactivity, learned how to prevent the fire alarm from going off when cooking Indian food (wet towel, duct tape), stuck our tongue out at falling snowflakes, and located the closest desi store (Hartford, CT - unless you counted sketchy tinned stuff peddled by our kin from Kamboja on Route 9 in Hadley, MA). We had done our first road trip in the freezing winter of '97, gawked at the stupid ball falling at Times Square, "gambled" (20$!) at the Taj Mahal (misguided nostalgic patriotism) in Atlantic City, and survived close encounters of the wetting pants kind with a number of semis during the course of an icy January night somewhere between Pittsburgh, PA and Hartford, CT.

In short, to sum it up, we were feeling rather content. The s. was on the t. and the l., having astutely observed the advent of Spring, was airborne. As the sun's rays crept into long frozen nooks and crannies of the land and the thaw set in and life sprung anew, like so many gorgeous toadstools after a monsoon, a quantity of undergrad women had begun to appear on the lawns of Puffton Village. Whatever fill-in-the-blanks (umm...unfill-the-unblanks, rather) they left to the imagination could easily be filled in by referring to certain reliable textual and online resources.

Such was the nature of the space-time continuum that Spring, and Ludwig's creative juices were raring to go. Certain sundered but unforgotten friends were contacted, the talk turned to matters of days gone by, and of long and utterly pointless conversations under the Tarams tree, at the dead of night, in a miasma of cigarette smoke, under the influence of several "cup sp. coffees". Three friends decided to try and see if they could recreate some of that insanity.

Thus was born the idea of writing a "chain mail poem". We set to with gusto, and the entire saga follows without major changes. This masterpiece was actually on the web at one point and then removed, but is now emerging after a shelved existence of 7 years.

NOTE: The way to read this poem is to read a line, and then refer to the corresponding footnote (if any). Think of the footnotes as running commentary. It will help immensely if you think of the authors as three 20 year old geeks from a certain kind of institute, possibly suffering from a touch of insanity. If you, in fact, were acquainted with the authors during they time they spent on campus, you will have no need to imagine the insanity, you would've seen first-hand demonstrations. Also remember that this was written in 1998.

---

Fapjprid

This poem was written by three of the weirdest, coolest guys I know, Deski, Prosh and Ludwig. If one of them ever asks you, "How big is spider?", "Some spiders eat birds." would probably be the right thing to say. You get the idea.

It's a really interesting poem, especially if you know the details about its evolution. Click on the line numbers to jump to explanations for the line.

Introduction

The three of us had long contemplated writing nonsense verse. We thought that it would not be too difficult, because this is almost the exact pattern into which our conversations used to fall most of the time.

The interesting thing about this work is that we rotated lines so that each one of us would pen (or rather key) every third line. Ergo Deski wrote lines 1, 4, 7 etc., Prosh wrote lines 2, 5, 8 etc. and I chipped in with 3, 6, 9 etc. The entire poem was written over e-mail during the spring of 1998. Sometimes we would dash off several lines a day. Sometimes it would be a week and several death threats later that one of us would set the ball rolling again.

There are, of course, several pretentious things about Fapjprid like the deliberate creation of new words a-la-Jabberwocky and the references to other great works of yore (Grond ring a bell?). But what the hell, it was great fun and the result isn't too bad.

I have attempted to provide an glossary of sorts and explanations for several features, atleast from the lines I wrote. I'm waiting for the other guys to tell me what they were thinking of so that I can present a complete picture.

The Poem

  1. The fapjprid sang a merry tune, a-walking thro' the glade,
  2. In one hand she had her rolling pin, and in the other two her spade
  3. The fourth was digging thrimungles, her beak was hammering Gronds
  4. She hopped upon her only foot, and squawked "My pant's too long."

  5. With a tear, and a chokgling cry did the pants take to the air,
  6. The fapjprid's endless wailing, was more than they could bear.
  7. I'm off to find my better half, the jirwoc's suit of gold.
  8. Or perhaps I should meet a sage, or a thimble which is bold."

  9. O'er Dorkil Mountain they went, they dived into the Ecsta Sea
10. A soggy and untimely end...alas, nor sweet nor savour-y
11. The oysters sleeping below on their heads got quite a shock,
12. And, out of shame, the fapjprid took to wearing a frock.

13. All clad anew in purple hue, she sallied forth once more.
14. (But ask her not about her pants, about 'em she's still quite sore !)
15. Ere she came to Dorkil Mountain, she met a jirwoc fierce,
16. She turned not pale, a horn of ale gave she to him. Said "cheers!".

17. The knavish ale, laced with poison fierce, at once took its toll,
18. Laid the jirwoc flat, that was that, and skyward rose his soul.
19. She stood on land, saw soul in sky and pants in sea, and laughed
20. And all at once found her head knocked off by a shy B'zaft.

21. But glory be to bark and tree, like a Phoenix she arose,
22. Our twice born friend that cannot end s'long as Ecsta Sea flows,
23. Lingering on like a fermenting wound that reeks of rotting fish,
24. Unharmed, unscathed, unmarked, unchained, no scar or blemish.

25. "Adventure" gumphed the fapjprid "is verily what I need
26. Thrimungles 'n Gronds are rather nice, tho I hate aniseed."
27. She passed o'er Dorkil Mount and came to the edge of Tijus wood,
28. Where three roads forked and a doleful sign read "Go which way you would"

29. Searching in the trees nearby, she caught a four faced coin,
30. One face said head, one said tail, the others were hair and groin.
31. Up spun the coin and landed on her forty 'leventh toe
32. Silence followed, the head then said "Them wood's the way to go!"

33. So she grit her feet and set her teeth and plunged down Middle Way,
34. ("But fapjprids have beak and foot, pray explain!" you may say
35. The reason's simple - 'tis a feat indeed to be fleet with one foot.
36. Ere she'd taken twenty steps, her cerebellum went ka-put.)

37. No matter that...ere long she met a consanguineous har
38. The eyes on his patch made him look really quite bizzare.
39. He was striped, which was odd, for he most surely wasn't a tiger,
40. He twirled his legs, beamed at an X, and went to raid her Geiger.

41. The fapjprid, outraged at this attack on her modesty,
42. Threw a thrimungle at that har which was nobbut lusty
43. "Das har dass war" exploded white and turned into a spider
44. A cutlass in one hand, the others with tankards of cider.

45. Tis' with tender heart and moist eye that we come to this final scene,
46. The sword puts end to jolly breast, alas, God save the bilious spleen,
47. And what of the spider? A more ill-fated creature I have yet to meet,
48. End of tale of jirwoc and ale, and linger thoughts of thrimungles sweet.

Annotations

1. Deski writes the first line. The word fapjprid is obtained by hitting keys at random. We contemplate changing the name to something more pronounceable, but later decide against altering what Fate has ordained. Not only do we use poetic license in creating the word, but we agree to give you, Gentle Reader, the linguistic license to pronounce it as you will. This makes fapjprid the first of its kind in the English language.

2. Here we begin to get an idea about the anatomy of this curious creature. We also learn its sex...or so we think.

3. This is the first line I wrote. Another hand is added to an already well-limbed f. and a beak is thrown in for good measure. Grond is the hammer of Melkor in the Silmarillion and also the name given to the battering ram that the Lord of the Nazgul directs against the gates of Minas Tirith in The Lord of the Rings. My Tolkien fetish makes itself evident in the early stages. What a beak the fapjprid must have to hammer Gronds of any sort...

4. To make matters worse for a fapjprid that is in imminent danger of turning into an octopus, Deski proceeds to give it a foot and pants. Though we are unaware at this moment, this foot will go on to play another, more controversial role in the future.

5. Chokgling, Prosh? Perhaps this is a vague reference that Prosh's subconscious has dredged up, to the Chokkalingam who sells aananda maNakkam outside Guindy railway station, Madras, India?

7. The jirowc now gate crashes the party...

9. Another pathetic attempt by yours truly to introduce new things into the poem. Ecsta Sea is actually a solution of LSD in water, which is why everyone wants to dive into it.

11. The oysters are a veiled tribute to Lewis Carroll's The Walrus and the Carpenter. We are all great fans of Do-do Dodgson and we salute the master.

12. At this point, the fapjprid is clearly confused about its sexuality. It started off being a "she", went on to wear pants, and now is ashamed (in spite of being a "she") to wear a frock? Or else, to retain sanity, one could imagine the fapjprid joining the clergy (frock, capisce?) to overcome the shame it felt.

18. This line is of no particular significance, except that my friend Sujit was peering over my shoulder when I typed it, and he expressed amazement at my great poetic skills.

19. This is really where the fapjprid loses it. It must have been a fairly traumatizing and existential moment. To see your clothes (your outside) and your soul (your inside) leave you, you must be a pretty mean sort of thing in the first place. A hitherto absent philosophical spin is added to the poem.

20. In what he claims is the humanitarian thing to do, Prosh does away with our wonderful creation with a single stroke of a "shy B'zaft". Me and Deski are outraged. Things were just beginning to look good for f. A war of e-mails erupts.

21. In desperate attempt to keep the insanity going, I resurrect the fapjprid from doom. Arthur Conan Doyle needed a whole story to bring Holmes back from the dead, we achieve it in one line with a classical allusion.

22. Deski lends his support to my efforts to revive our protagonist.

23. Prosh reluctantly comes around to our way of thinking. He expresses his disgust with the state of affairs in an eloquent and olfactorily stimulating line.

24. Secretly overjoyed that Prosh is back, I pen this inspirational line. My way of saying, "Prosh, friend! We forgive you!".

27. I decide to immortalize Sujit for complimenting my poetical genius by reversing his name and sticking it into the poem. 6 years later, the guy in the purple jacket who knows this fact, wins the Saarang main quiz in a tiebreak and Rs. 10,000 and is deified in Indian quizzing circles. Abraham Thomas is relegated to a footnote.

28. A nice pun there from Deski...How much wood would a fapjprid prid if a fapjrid could and would prid wood?

29. Prosh has a party on Friday which involves inhalation, injection and drinking of several classified substances. He wakes up at four in the evening on Saturday and writes this line, which is probably an accurate portrayal of his state of mind.

30. I toss tempestuously in bed for a night, trying to come up with a polite word that rhymes with coin. Next day, under duress and out of sheer desperation, I decide to go ahead with groin. I am burnt in effigy in Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN - home of Deski and Prosh.

31. More anatomical complications...

33. I make a cardinal error in referring to the fapjprid's "feet". Remember, the fapjprid as originally conceived has just the one foot (line 4)? Deski sends me e-mail with a few choice abuses that are popular in the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Rim of the Eastern Spiral Arm of the galaxy. A reference to Buddhism, to add more philosophical color.

34. Deski attempts to salvage factual integrity by the ancient method of posing rhetorical questions to an imaginary audience, in brackets.

35. Prosh comes up with this perfect riposite to Deski's question. Somehow, we agree to agree that the matter has sorted itself out.

36. In a fit of shame, I kill the fapjprid, in German.

37. Deski decides to ignore my efforts and introduces a har into the scheme of things. A har is something me and Deski conjured up while chatting over the web. I am no longer sure about what it is. It must have been a pretty neat concept.

38. Now we know what the "patch" on the har looks like.

39. I add stripes to the har. This line too (like line 11) is a veiled reference to The Walrus and the Carpenter. The tiger causes problems. I receive hate mail from Deski enquiring of me, "How the $%@& do you expect me to find a word that rhymes with tiger, you $%^$^&&)(!*@^%#%$?" A detailed description, too obscene and violent to be recorded here, of his plans for my body follows. I buy a ticket for Timbuctoo, Mali and spend a week lying low and enjoy sub-Saharan Africa.

40. Deski, smart young chap that he is, finally does come up with a rhyming word. Life goes on.

42. Nobbut is how someone from Yorkshire would say "Nothing but". I picked this tidbit up from James Herriot's stories. A thrimungle turns out to be some sort of throwable object, like a paper weight or a ball. An error of omission occurs when I do not refer to >The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, it being line 42 and all that...

43. Deski exhibits his German skills and we also see the beginnings of his arachnomania.

44. Prosh continues to display the effects of substance abuse.

45. We agree that there can be too much of a good thing and decide to put an end to things. This time its all very civil. I am particularly keen on stopping at this point because it will mean that all of us will have written the same number of lines and more significantly, I will have the last word!

47. Prosh joins Deski on the spider bandwagon. Its a good thing we have agreed to stop, or else this might end up looking like a cobweb.

48. A nice sentimental line to end it all.

---

Kaiku - I

Which is a Hyderabadi version of haiku

Date: 23 August 2007
Time: 8:30 p.m.
Place: On board a 49M, somewhere between Prakash Nagar and Shyamlal Building

Variation on a theme by T.S. Eliot.


WHAT THE PLUMBER SAID
Saab, main aatoon tho aatoon
Nahin Nai tho nahin nai aatoon

P.S. Yes, it's called "Kaiku - I" because there will be more of them.

Nature and Civilization - A Juxtaposition

Nature (birdie) and Civilization (plastic tank) - A Juxtaposition

Date: 23 August 2007
Time: 10:00 a.m. IST
Location: Balcony, chez Ludwig, Begumpet, Hyderabad, India
Camera: Canon Powershot S45





And you thought Hyderabad was only good for biryanis...

There Be PJs Here

In which the insanity resumes with a PJ

Captain John Foster of Her Majesty's 21st Engineering Regiment was a troubled man. Newly arrived in the tropics, all manners of ailments beset him. The moment he had stepped off the decks of the P&O steamer in Bombay, this vile country with its heat, sweat, crowds and insects seemed to have begun executing a personal vendetta.

When the regiment was posted to Bangalore, the old timers heaved a sigh of relief. There would be polo, and pig-sticking, and chances of being transferred to fight the Jezails or the Dogras were remote. Besides, the weather would be blessedly English.

Unfortunately for Capt. Foster, his woes did not end. Directly he had arrived in the cantonment, and some enterprising colonel had discovered his special talent for earthworks. Foster was assigned a team of coolies and told to get busy and start building the embankment for the new railway station.

Now they were almost done. Most of the embankment was complete and there remained one last bit where the surface needed leveling. They had to be done by sunset, and the evening shadows were beginning to gather around them. Those strange tropical birds were creating pandemonium in the fig trees, and Foster was beginning to feel the need of a bath and a sundowner at the club.

The problem was that the labourer in charge of this last bit was insanely slow. He would shuffle off to pit from where they were digging, root around listlessly for a bit, and come back with a pitiful basket of earth. No amount of staring or fulminating seemed to make a difference. Perhaps he didn't understand the urgency.

Perhaps he didn't understand English. Shortly after this thought occurred, Foster began to cast about for ways to make his point. Foster was rather taken with his own linguistic abilities. In Bombay, he'd managed to pick up a smidgen of Marathi and Hindi, and he could confidently venture into the fleshpots.

But this was a completely new language, and he hadn't (yet) found an opportunity to test his skills. The time had come. What was that fellow's name again? Ah... He wandered over to the pit. The coolie appeared to be poking at the ground with a shovel, apparently he was trying to tickle Mother Earth.

"Hey! Krishna! Nee begane burrow!!", said Capt. Foster.

Curiously enough, an eminent Haridasa was taking his evening constitutional close at hand.

---

Ah. That is so much better than senti claptrap. A few other points. This last Saturday, in Hussain Sagar, we saw coots, purple swamphens, black-winged stilts (or so we think), and pheasant-tailed jacanas. Do the rains have anything to do with this? Lots of baby birds as well, blundering around the reed bed.

[Aside: There must be a song to the tune of mere pyaar ka ras zaraa chakhna from Bade Miyan Chhote Miyan, which we can create with "jacana", no?

apne poonch ko thoda oopar rakhna
oh jacana! oh jacana!!
mere paas waali machhli ko chakhna
oh jacana! oh jacana!!

Scope are there, we feel.]

Ah well. Vijay Cavale's excellent IndiaBirds as usual has much better pictures of said coots, swamphens, stilts, and makhnas.

Another point to be noted is that as of this morning, we are utterly thrilled to report the return of the Jedi.

---

What do you call a medium-sized, colourful, passerine bird with a bladder control problem?

PJ

Har har de har.

The Empty House

In which Ludwig watches Meryl Streep leave home in Out of Africa (again), becomes mawkish, and is reminded of his own house shutting day, aeons ago

Emptying a home and locking it up is the real estate equivalent of systematically shutting down a life support system. As it shuts down, it dies. An empty house is quiet in a way that is different from an inhabited one.

A "living" house, even when it is locked up during a weekend or a vacation, is merely asleep. An empty house on the other hand silent in a more final and irreversible way, a horrible, mute tragedy in of itself. This curious fact lodged itself somewhere in the recesses of my mind one May afternoon in 2004, as I prepared to lock up 32 Clarendon Ave, Cambridge MA for the last time.

The last few days had passed in a blur - of giving away furniture, packing, the movers, hasty goodbyes in oft frequented haunts (Grendel's Den!), a final Red Sox game (we lost!). And the million mundane things that are attendant when you shut shop and uproot yourself from a place that at some unspecifiable point had slid across that ineffable line which divides "house" and "home".

In the middle of the hubbub, I hadn't had occasion to stop and think about what it would mean to perform the last rites of a home.

It was inevitable really, and I should have seen it coming. The signs were all there. When D moved to Philadelphia in that corpse-like winter of no warmth or feeling, that was surely the beginning of the end. P and I ended up trying to search for a roommate but our hearts weren't in it. I think subconsciously we were happier splitting the exorbitant rent between the two of us and going through the motions, rather than actually doing something sensible about our financial situation.

D took some of the spark out of the house. Without her critical eye roaming over the premises, there was no way P and I were going to bother about such quaint practices as vacuuming, mopping and cooking. Exeunt Marcus Aurelius, enter Goths.

When the Berkeley thing came through, another nail was duly driven in. After seven years of mucking around in Massachusetts, the time had come for a drastic change of longitude. It must've made P's job hunting that much less of a chore and perhaps even given it a nudge in a more fruitful direction.

So that was that, we were leaving. What I didn't realize was that during the last couple of years, something inside me had leaked into the house. As we cleaned up, we kept finding the flotsam and jetsam of life. A Wachusett mountain ski lift ticket in a dusty corner, a hat that had been the star attraction at Halloween last year, utility bills even. All were consigned to garbage bags.

And in some ways the house had seeped into us. The memory of a creaky step near the landing, the delicious crispness of the winter air as you slid open the door to the back porch, the goofy ducks on the wallpaper, the couch that was in a "just so" position, the tuneless piano too heavy for the landlady to have taken with her. Homes have memories, clinging to unlikely nooks and corners like lint. When you turn off a home, the memories die. This is what I learned.

P's movers had crated all our stuff into a truck and driven away. The next day, P himself took the morning flight to San Francisco. "It's an odd feeling...farewell. There's some envy in it." It was only when I stepped back into the shell that it all hit me.

The only trace left that we'd ever existed was a lovely, filthy sleeping bag from my Amherst days that I was going to shortly abandon, and a rickety two-in-one to keep me company that night, also slated for abandonment. My backpacks lay near the door, eager to head out, not even looking like they belonged any more.

Memory seems to have been merciful and completely erased that last evening and night, but the next day is still there, all luminous and limpid and asking to be remembered.

The landlady was supposed to show up in the morning and collect the keys. So I waited in the empty house. Sat on the couch and watched the slivers of light bleeding in through the blinds as they made their way across the carpeting. I waited. There were still chores to be done. The kitchen faucet, having discovered that the rest of the place was like a tomb, took this opportunity to drip loudly into the sink. This needed to be screwed shut. And I waited. Somewhere upstairs, blinds clattered and rustled as a summer breeze blew in through an open window. This needed to be closed. And I waited. The stupid radio went on and on unbearably about the weather and Fleetwood Mac and Bob's Fucking Discount Furniture Store, "Come On Down!!!" This needed turning off. And I waited.

It was horrible. There was only one set of keys dangling from the key hanger, a pair of worn shoes nobody needed any longer in the closet. The whole tableau screamed sadness and endings.

It was late afternoon before the landlady called and said she wouldn't be able to make it that day and that I should simply leave the keys on the kitchen counter and let the door lock. One last obsessive compulsive stagger around the three floors, the "one last check to make sure everything is OK". Nothing really registered; it was merely the death rattle of an era.

I lugged the smug looking rucksack and backpack out and pulled the door shut. The click of the bolt sliding had "...all the qualities of the perfect observation. It was brief, unambiguous, and annihilating." And just like that, we didn't live in 32 Clarendon Ave any more.

I hefted my bags, stepped onto the street and started towards Mass Ave, terrified to turn back. The sun-dappled leaves on the trees on the sidewalk twitched farewell. The neighbor’s kids were throwing a ball around in their backyard. Their cries and the thwack of ball against glove filtered in between the houses. It was a beautiful New England evening.

ACE 2007

In which Ludwig bats for a local organization and a local event that is very close to his Teutonic heart

What: The ACE 2007 Corporate Quiz
When: Saturday, 16 June 2007, 1:30 p.m. onwards
Where: Khemka Auditorium, Indian School of Business, Hyderabad



It is that time of the year again. ACE 2007 is upon us. ACE 2006 was reasonably good, although we didn't do too well in terms of sponsorship. Alas, this edition is destined to go the same way, unless something saves us at the last minute. The participation and the questions will be of a superior quality.

Please publicize this far and wide. We need all the sponsorship and participation help we can get!

The gory story of ACE 2006 is here (mit piktures).

1000 Desires Such As These

A thousand desires such as these...

hazaaro.n Khvaahishe.n aisii ki har Khvaaish pe dam nikale
bahut nikale mere armaa.N lekin phir bhii kam nikale

Dare kyuu.N meraa qaatil kyaa rahegaa usakii gardan par
vo Khuu.N jo chashm-e-tar se umr bhar yuu.N dam-ba-dam nikale

[chashm=eye; tar=wet; dam_ba_dam=continously]

nikalanaa Khuld se aadam kaa sunate aaye hai.n lekin
bahut be-aabaruu hokar tere kuuche se ham nikale

[Khuld=Paradise; be-aabaruu=disgrace; kuuchaa=street]

bharam khul jaaye zaalim tere qaamat kii daraazii kaa
agar is turraa-e-purapech-o-Kham kaa pech-o-Kham nikale

[qaamat=stature; daraazii=length/delay; turra=ornamental tassel worn in the turban]
[pech-o-Kham=curls in the hair]

magar likhavaaye koii usako Khat to hamase likhavaaye
huii subah aur ghar se kaan par rakkhar qalam nikale

huii is daur me.n ma.nsuub mujhase baadaa-ashaamii
phir aayaa vo zamaanaa jo jahaa.N se jaam-e-jam nikale

[ma.nsuub=association, baada_aashaamee=havign to do with drinks]

huii jinase tavaqqo Khastagii kii daad paane kii
vo hamase bhii ziyaadaa Khastaa-e-teG-e-sitam nikale

[tavaqqo=expectation; Khastagii=injury, daad=justice]
[Khasta=broken/sick/injured, teG=sword, sitam=cruelity ]

muhabbat me.n nahii.n hai farq jiine aur marane kaa
usii ko dekh kar jiite hai.n jis kaafir pe dam nikale

zara kar jor siine par ki tiir-e-pursitam nikale
jo vo nikle to dil nikale jo dil nikale to dam nikale

Khudaa ke vaaste pardaa na kaabe se uThaa zaalim
Kahii.n aisaa na ho yaa.N bhii vahii kaafir sanam nikale

Kahaa.N maiKhaane ka daravaazaa 'Ghalib' aur kahaa.N vaaiz
par itanaa jaanate hai.n kal vo jaataa thaa ke ham nikale

[vaaiz=preacher]

Carnatic Conundrum

In which Ludwig starts giving voice to unspeakable Friday morning thoughts

If 'Mandolin' Srinivas played the mandolin, 'Flute' Mali the flute, 'Ghatam' Suresh the ghatam, 'Chitraveena' Ravikiran the chitraveeNa, 'Guitar' Prasanna the guitar, and 'Fiddle' Subbaiyer the fiddle (heh!), what, pray, did 'Tiger' Varadachari play?

Bole Re Wagtailuva

In which Ludwig takes pictures and rambles on again about the rain in Begumpet

Summer has been beating down upon us with her usual diligence and fervour. However, the last three days have been unusual. The mornings have been pregnant with expectancy, the afternoons hot and muggy, the evenings windy and leaden-skied. Yes, against all odds, it has been raining (drizzling, anyway) in Begumpet. Wednesday and Thursday weren't very great productions, a lot of wind reeling drunkenly hither and thither, fatal hoardings, but very little by way of precipitation.

But today, finally, the weather decided that it had had enough of the thillana variety stunts and tried to settle down for a proper katcheri. A hush descended over all the land, there was no wind to speak of, the setting sun turned syrupy golden.


And then, quietly, it started to rain. As showers go, it wasn't much to speak of. Garden sprinkler variety output. But it did leave everything wet, and green, and squelchy, which is always good.


We whipped out the trusty Powershot S45 and started clicking like there's no tomorrow. The lights went out, and mercifully put an end to all the lingering air conditioners. Quite appropriately, the laptop launched into bole re papiihara (YouTube, you can find the full audio and lyrics here). Who are we to argue with Fate? We lined up a bunch of "rain" songs and let fly (1).

The kids from the building were playing galli cricket downstairs, and their easy Hyderabadi admonitions floated upstairs, "What re, vy your dooing li' that li' that?", "Notredee-notredee-notredeeeee! Rrrredeeee!!!" . Presently, it stopped drizzling, so we hauled ourself onto the roof to see what was to be seen.


Per usual, the cupolas of our local Kremlin, the Hyderabad Public School, gleamed creamily in the distance. The grotesque new foot overbridge butted its way into our picture, and someone seems to have spilt a palette of watercolours on the sky. After some time, this fellow came fluttering by and with what seemed like visible relief, perched on a handy construction rod.


It was quite tired, wet, and frazzled. It sat morosely there for a bit, incessantly wagging its tail and shaking out the droplets from its fuzzy breast. Eventually, it decided that enough was enough, and let out a few experimental trills. Having discovered to its apparent astonishment that all was in working order, it flitted off towards Hussain to catch the passing 1021 Dn Konark Express, itself all wet and gleaming liveried. It seems like it was this, but alack, we were too busy trying to photograph to notice whether the supercilium was supercilious enough and so on...


And then, the lighting of the lamps...

---

1. There are so many of them...

• bole re papiihara perennial favourite in miyaan ki malhaar
• kahaan se aaye badraa from Chashm-e-baddoor, which we don't listen to as often as we should
• ghir ghir aaye badariyaa kaari, from Sardari Begum, a relatively orthodox rain song
• rim jhim gire saawan (YouTube) from Manzil, of course, even if it isn't (is it?) a rain raagam. Visually, we like the one which Lata Mangeshkar sings, with Amitabh Bachhan and Moushimi Chatterjee wandering through the rain in a stunningly pretty Bombay. For a number with no "skin show", it is stunningly erotic, blows your mind away.
• ek bas tuu hi nahin, a Farhat Shehzaad poem set to miyaan ki malhaar and sung by Mehdi Hasan. Not a raing song, per se, but love this one, because it taught us to (sort of) identify miyaan ki m..

Sadly, we've skipped (PARENTAL DISCRETION ADVISED) this classic and this one, which were...umm...influential...in our formative years.

Beginner's Guide To Winning The Nobel In Physics

So we're sitting around, going from page to page, in that desultory late night fashion, wondering whether one ought to spend a couple of hours in coming up with a theory capable of expressing elementary arithmetic that is both consistent and complete. Yes, yes, we're aware that those two blokes thought they'd cracked it, but actually hadn't . Hardly the sort of thing that would dissuade us, eh?

In any case, in the midst of these travels, we discovered Wolfgang Beirl, who had a link to The Statistical Mechanic, who in turn points to whole bunch of interesting physics blogs. Further, TSM leads us unto Gerard 't Hooft, Nobel Prize winning dude who has some very very useful suggestions on how one goes about becoming a physicist.

It so often happens that I receive mail - well-intended but totally useless - by amateur physicists who believe to have solved the world. They believe this, only because they understand totally nothing about the real way problems are solved in Modern Physics. If you really want to contribute to our theoretical understanding of physical laws - and it is an exciting experience if you succeed! - there are many things you need to know. First of all, be serious about it. All necessary science courses are taught at Universities, so, naturally, the first thing you should do is have yourself admitted at a University and absorb everything you can. But what if you are still young, at School, and before being admitted at a University, you have to endure the childish anecdotes that they call science there? What if you are older, and you are not at all looking forward to join those noisy crowds of young students?

The good professor goes on to list the different things you need to master to be good at physics. Languages, for example.

English is a prerequisite. If you haven't mastered it yet, learn it. You must be able to read, write, speak and understand English, but you don't have to be perfect here. The lousy English used in this text is mine. That's enough. All publications are in English. Note the importance of being able to write in English. Sooner or later you will wish to publish your results. People must be able to read and understand your stuff.

The man is very funny, we're thinking. He goes on to list other subjects: primary mathematics, classical mathematics, optics, statistical mechanics, electronics, quantum mechanics and so on. Read it all yourself. And remember, if you ever get that telegram from Stockholm, your journey started at the choultry.

Plugs for Local Events

Which are more plugs for local events

QuizHyd

Evam

> hi!
> evam is in Hyderabad on the 14th of April 2007
>
> Details are as follows:
>
> orange house
> presents..
>
> HAMLET by evam
> -the original spoof!-
> on saturday,14th April, 7 15 pm
> at Shilpakalavedika, Madhapur,Hyderabad
>
> for details call :9885054191, 9885052368
> so tell ur friends the Evam Team performing their very famous show. :-)

Moving Images

Apparently, they're showing "An Inconvenient Truth" again this Sunday (8th April 2007) evening at the Prasad preview theatre place (near L.V.Prasad Eye Hospital, Banjara Hills). Timings are a mystery. Anyone else know anything about it?

UPDATE: No screening of "An Inconvenient Truth" this Sunday. Watch this space.

Die Beschwerdechor von Lakdikapul

In which Ludwig tries to get a cribbing jam session going...

We have to thank Veena for this, who in turn has to thank the always interesting Abi. Thanks to these worthies, we are now aware of the existence of complaints choirs. This is a simply brilliant concept that originated in Helsinki.

It all got started during a winter day walk of Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen in Helsinki. Perhaps it was due to the coldness of the day that they ended up discussing the possibility of transforming the huge energy people put into complaining into something else. Perhaps not directly into heat – but into something powerful anyway.

In the Finnish vocabulary there is an expression "Valituskuoro". It means "Complaints Choir" and it is used to describe situations where a lot of people are complaining simultaneously. Kalleinen and Kochta-Kalleinen thought: "Wouldn´t it be fantastic to take this expression literally and organise a real Complaints Choir!"

The result was the Helsinki Complaints Choir. The idea is simplicity itself. The algorithm appears to be as follows:

1. Constitute a small core team, including someone who can compose music. This doesn't have to be a latter day Mozart or Ilayaraja.
2. Publicize, publicize, publicize. At the same time, get together the beginnings of a choir. 30 seems to be a goodish number.
3. Collect all the complaints, cribs, gripes, frustrations that ordinary folk in your city have.
4. Do some whittling and pruning of the complaints list, maybe rhymify it, set it to music etc.
5. Practise, practise, practise.
6. Record it. Film the recording. At the same time, film the choir singing in various parts of your city/town.
7. Do a little bit of syncing of song with video, some careful editing, and you're done.

The videos of several choirs are here and on YouTube (search for "complaints choir"). They're stunningly fascinating. The "Complaints Choir" site has a forum where you can learn about other cities that are attempting choirs, advice if you're attempting one of your own, and so on.

We heard the Helsinki, Hamburg, and the St. Petersburg versions and all have their charm. The Helsinkians were the path breakers, but they seem to be relatively benign. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that even in Scandinavia, they have very standard cribs (not getting rich by working, length of vaccum cleaner cords, "bullshitters get on too well in life", "tramline 3 smells of pee" etc.) The cribs about the sauna lend a touch of local colour to the proceedings.

The Hamburgers are kind of a whole lot more sombre and dirge-like at the start. (The Hamburgers are also kind of a very delicious meat patty and bun based sandwich). Then they oscillate between this foottapping rhythm and the Gregorian chantish incantations. Their cribs also, very evocative (mascara always gets smudged, tax declarations are too complicated, "my roommate sleeps with my ex-girlfriend" etc.)

The St. Petersburgers are, astonishingly, not a kind of foodstuff. Not even a sauce. Their choir is probably the soundest musically. Very rich baritone, melodic and all that sort of thing. It actually sounds beautiful, like one of those Russian patriotic/folk songs one hears in movies involving Russian nuclear submarines.

A common thread running through all these north European cities is the anguish about the shortness of the days, the coldness of weather, and in general the annoying behaviour of the cosmos.

Finally, how about getting together a Hyderabad version, eh? Takers? Of course, we'll have to tailor it to local conditions. Maybe do a Tollywood dance thing with the choir and so on. It might be fun. If enthusiasm exists, let us know at choultry AT gmail DOT com, or at our other email addresses.

---

Need help in finding an MP3. We recently came across a ghazal by Faiz, by way of the Worldspace Farishta channel. The ghazal has been set to music and sung by various people. There is a Nusrat version at MusicIndiaOnline, a kind of a repulsive "disco" version (MP3) by Talat Mahmood, and possibly other versions also. However, the one they played on the radio is from the 1986 movie Anjuman. Sung by Khaiyyam and his wife Jagjit Kaur, it is wholly more melodious and satisfying. We are now desperately looking for MP3/online version. Please to assist.

हिर् पुत्थ्र्

In which Ludwig pens the beginning of a faux screenplay


हिर् पुत्थ्र् और् जान्लेवा हेलो
(Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows)
by
Ludwig Wittgenstein

FADE IN:

MONTAGE - DUSK

EXT. BUNGALOW, DELHI SUBURB

-- LAWN. GARDEN -- The sound of crickets -- A big car
swishes down the street -- A dog barks in the distance
-- A gentle breeze blows a newspaper down the street
Expectancy.

NIGHT

INT. BUNGALOW

-- Large LIVING ROOM. Nouveau riche furniture.
-- Dining table in the distance. Dim incandescent
lights. One from a lamp on a side table next
to a sofa -- A Nimbus 2000 broomstick leans against
a wall -- A pink phone on the side table --
Unnaturally loud clock. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.
Tic...

The phone rings. "Om Jai Jagadeesha Hare" ringtone.

MAN enters from a doorway in shadow. We don't see
his face, it is also in shadow. Silk kurta-pajama.
Banian and naada visible. Gold chain(s), ring.
Paunch. Also, wizard's hat. Wand. Walks to phone,
and after a moment's hesitation, picks it up.

            VOICE ON PHONE
        (female, extremely strong Punjabi aunty accent)
    Haylo. Haylo?

            MAN
    Urk.
        (clutches his chest, emits
croaking noises, and slowly collapses onto the carpet)

            MAN'S BODY
    Thud.

            VOICE ON PHONE
    हेलोजी?

            AMRISH PURI
        (offscreen)
    Muhahahahahahaha...

FADE OUT:

OPENING CREDITS:
...

---

1. Thanks once again to The Indian Script Converter.

2. Post 100.

...with you...for you...always

In which Ludwig confesses...

Clearly, the same fellow (there can't be more than one such person, can there?) who comes up with those saccharine "messages" in your average Hallmark/Archies/whathaveyou greeting cards, has also been employed by the AP State Police to jazz up their website. This cousin of Madeleine Bassett is possibly to be found in the musty, file-smelling depths of the police commissionerate, occasionally referring to castor oil stained copies of the Gettysburg Address type documents, thoughtfully chewing on a pen and dribbling ink, while he comes up with such gems as "...with you...for you...always". He is kept in residence through the elegant and time tested ball and chain mechanism. His incarceration makes him crabby and irritable ever so often, and therefore has to be fed through a system of underarm bowling[1].

This post is not about Mr. Hallmark. Aeons ago, on our way back from Why Naad, an incident happened in that den of vice, Bangalore bus station. We lost cash, credit cards, license(s), PAN card etc. Mostly our fault, for leaving the wallet on the enquiry counter, like dangling a juicy full toss...

Preliminary enquiries indicated that to replace license and PAN, we would need that dreaded piece of literature that emanates from the bowels of police stations, the FIR. Being Newtonian (refer to Law I (of motion)), we let things be. After decades of living without any ID proof apart from passport, and having entered a new phase of joblessness, we got our act together and decided to start the process for replacing license and PAN card.

The whole PAN card replacement process, it turns out, is a total breeze. In the year or so that we sat on our butts, they made the whole thing automated, web-ified and so on, and all one has to do (if one has a photocopy of the original PAN card/PAN issue letter) is go online, fill in a fairly simple form, pay by credit card, take a printout, attach mugshot, mail it, and wait. Observe carefully that there is no mention of police or FIR.

The license replacement procedure, on the other hand is a pain in the posterior. One apparently needs an FIR. According to the AP Motor Vehicles Rules (1989), Chapter - II (Licensing of Drivers of Motor Vehicles), Rule 15 (Intimation when license lost or destroyed and application for duplicate) (yes, we are like this vonly), all one has to do is fill in Form LLD, pay the fee, and hey presto. No mention of FIR. However, that High Priest of RTA Shrines, the "RTA agent", tells various family members that an FIR is a necessary precondition for getting a duplicate license. So we girded our loins (disgusting as that sounds), and found out that the following steps needed to be executed:

1. Pay a fee of Rs. 100 to the Police Department at your friendly neighbourhood eSeva centre.
2. Take receipt (from Step 1 above), copy of lost license, and a letter addressed to the Inspector of Police in charge of the police station (PS) with the necessary details, and propagate rectilinearly to the PS.
3. Submit forms, get signatures vagera ityaadi, and you should be able to pick up the thingy.

What follows is a tale of what actually happened. We girded our loins (yes, it's disgusting), and

1. Went to eSeva and paid Rs. 100. Duly pocketed receipt.
2. Next day, showed up at the Begumpet PS, bright eyed and bushy tailed, with the necessary (or so we thought) paperwork.
3. Inspector gaaru informs us that they need a no objection certificate (NOC) from the Police Control Room to issue the papers.
4. *sigh* Set off for the control room. Asked at the building downstairs (where people were lined up paying challans) as to who one needs to approach to get the NOC. Directed to multi-storey building.
5. Asked the "helpful", "enquiry" chap in the lobby where one needs to go. Directed to 2nd floor.
6. Asked vacant eyed individual, directed to the "Computer Section".
7. Asked Bakaasura, and he says, "Your lucky day, dude. I'm da man. However, you needst go downstairs and get Ms. Phoolandevi to sign on your application."
8. Went downstairs and after several enquiries found oneself at the end of the line, back at the challan counter.
9. Paperwork is swallowed by one set of hands, does the rounds, and is spit out of another window by another set of hands.
10. Hurried to Bakaasura. He starts filling out the NOC, and subtly (not) angling for pocket money.
    
    "You see, yours is a Vizag license, and we can't actually issue this NOC here."
    
    "But my friend from Bihar got his license renewed in Hyderabad."
    
    "Ah, that's different, we're allowed to do that."
    ...
    "What do you do?"
    
    "Unemployed, saar."
    
    "What did you study?"
    
    "BE civil engineering, saar, Madras, saar."
    
    [We'd taken care to wear our most unobtrusive check-shirt, khaki pant, for the harmless citizen look.]
    
    Before one could say "Ix", he'd pocketed Rs. 20 and given us the certificate. We were mortified. Ears got all warm and shiny from shame and anger, at having copped out, at not having the gumption to face up to this ogre and get our schtuff done without under the counter transactions.
    
    With burning heart and a conscience that was totally sitting on left shoulder (mit halo) and frowning down, we headed back to PS.
11. We resolved to not bow to such sliminess any more (at this juncture, we must mention that we were in no inconsiderable part influenced by our readings at Fanaa, and handed all the little, sweaty (by now), pieces of paper to the Inspector, who quickly scribbled something in Elvish, and signed.
12. Handed papers over to Grima looking clerical type (out of uniform) in the Computer Section.
13. Grima says, "Oh, you need to photocopy all these. Go to Prakash Nagar and get it done and come back quickly."
14. Off we went, in the mid-afternoon blaze. Duly photocopied, trudged back to PS.
15. Grima takes papers, points to seat in reception area and says, "Wait". So we did.
16. For an age. Went back into the "Computer Section", whereupon he said, "Oh, it won't get done tonight, come back tomorrow morning." (the code words had started). Confirmed that he would be done on the morrow, and went home at 5:00 ish.
17. Girded tiggas (yes), and came back next morning, 11:00 ish.
18. Grima showed up after a bit, and said, "Wait in the reception." and disappeared.
19. Waited for close to 2 hours. SMSed the bejesus out of Kenny, who seemed to be engaged in cutting edge research (i.e. equally jobless). Kenny had lots of good advice ("You should've taken a book.", "You should've at least taken a notepad and a pen, and scribbled Thoughts.", "You should start muttering RTI audibly, so that they know who they're dealing with (i.e. citizen)." etc.)
20. At 1:00ish, went back in and found Grima. Who strikes forehead with palm and says, "Tchah! Come back in the evening, you'll definitely get it then." In the manner of Alistair Maclean characters, a medium sized blood vessel on the edge of our temple (Om...) had started to pulsate. We says to ourselves, "OK machii, this is it. Sisupaala got 100 chances, you'll get one more in the evening." and went home.
21. Meanwhile, perusals of the AP State Police Department's copious RIA page had revealed that the Assistant PIO is the Inspector of Police himself, and that the PIO is the Assistant Commissioner of Police (Begumpet Division). We duly noted this.
22. Went back in the evening. Waited in reception.
23. After an hour so of gazing at the vacuous faced guy in the reception, barged into "Computer Section". Grima, was missing.
24. Another out-of-uniform, clerical type character (looking very harassed), says (to himself), "Why did this moron (Grima) ask people to come back the very next day?" and (to us), "Come back day after tomorrow."
25. That was it. We lost it, my precious. Barged into Inspector's office. Waved papers. Expressed outrage. The dreaded (hopefully) "RTI" phrase was about to be emitted, when, to our utter and pleasant surprise, the gentleman (Insp.) calls a third Computer Section guy and tells him to deal with "this" immediately.
26. We went back to waiting in reception. Half an hour elapsed, and the suitably contrite Computer Section person comes out, hands us the certificate we need, and out we waltzed, into the sunset.

What to say? Mixed results, no? Hope, despair. Defeat, victory. Loins, tiggas. Are things getting better? Maybe... If one hadn't showed attitude (and jeans), would all this have played out in this manner? Perhaps not. What happens to people without attitude (and jeans)? Are jeans a metaphor? (Perhaps. Do ours need to be washed? Definitely.)

P.S.: We couldn't find the helpful Inspector after this whole ordeal. We wanted to wring his hands in thanks. In any case, we did the next best thing. Wrote a letter describing the role of his staff in the ordeal, and his in the salvation, and posted it off to him, his boss (ACP) and his boss (DCP).

Finis.

---

1. Thanks, Larry.

Word Verification

In which Ludwig, inspired by a passing comment from Space Bar, invents a new viral game

Everyone has come across these word verification things, right? On Blogger, Orkut, and so on. We have been pondering for years on what to make of those random pieces of string (which is typed by 7 monkeys on barbiturates sitting at the back end), when we realized what is to be done with them words.

Hear ye, hear ye. From now on, it is decreed that when you post a comment, in addition to whatever blah you have to offer, you must provide an on the spot, off the cuff, encyclopaedia entry for the word verification word.

To show what we mean, we have invented the first one (over at that famous New York reprobate's blob). Reproduced here:

definition: Kpzicie (pronounciation: zzitchy), town, pop. 6,000, Slovakia. Kpzicie is a small industrial town on the Slovakia-Hungary border, roughly 25 k.m. SSW of Kosice. Currently chiefly known for its dominance in the world lugged sprockets market, Kpzcie briefly rose to prominence in the 13th century when the voivode of Trans-Carpathia briefly toyed with establishing his capital on the outskirts, on a mound of Ottoman Turkish skulls, harvested during a punitive raid against Bayezid II (Ilderim).

Also famous for pickled gherkins.

Admittedly not very inspired, but you should've seen what Hilary and Norgay looked like when they got to the top. We trust that our discerning readers (including, and especially the marine mammal variety), will totally run with this.

So let it be written, so let it be done.