No really, it is. I try to go to sleep early, really I do, but I just lie there awake until around 3, when exhaustion overcomes me. As a consequence, it’s really hard to stay awake in class and sometimes I find myself being shaken awake at the end of a class not remembering when I fell asleep. It’s not possible to go on like this anymore. Something must be done, holidays must be granted. Please, for the love of god. It all seems so pointless. Like this cat, for instance:
This one is for Marc and Suren: Do you remember The Neutronium Alchemist? I do. Crossroads of Twilight? I do. Pandora’s Star? I won’t forget that either. Thanks for all the help spoiling the story, it’s just what I needed. I’m always the goddamn second chicken.
Chicken: Is this “The Sixth Sense”? Have the robots killed the boy yet??
Other Chicken: Augh!
Tip: Spoiling movies is more fun if you make up new endings
This Sunday, me and the family went for a play by Basheer performed by Perch at the Museum Theatre. Apparently my granddad used to tell my father Basheer’s stuff all the time, so the parents were rather enthusiastic about the whole thing. Pipe and Bikram were there too – gone out of their minds. Anyway, the show was actually pretty damn good, and
It was lots of fun and it had all sorts of memorable characters and the like, and though in the beginning it seemed a bit forced, after a while everyone just slipped into their parts and
I saw Taare Zameen Par(तारे जमीन पर) today with the rest of my family. My mom’d booked the tickets and I didn’t want to go to be honest, but you know how it is — spend time with the family, that sort of thing. Man am I glad I went along because this has to be the best Hindi film I’ve seen. It was a film, not one of those entertainment shows that have all those silly song and dance routines involving people teleporting to fields of flowers and crap like that.
The acting was so natural, especially the
I’ve got to give it to the guy. I hated Mangal Pandey: The Rising, and I thought Rang De Basanti was contrived, but the job he’s done this time is wonderful. He chose a
I was just reading Chetan’s blog the other day when I came upon his old list of Indian Rock Music. So I went straight for a band that I’d heard a bit about a long long time ago, Indus Creed, and man was I blown away or what! These guys were so damn amazing, it’s no surprise that people are still talking about them years after the band broke up. I just know that
They’ve got the good old classic rock feeling going with most of their songs, with a very Indian touch in some with the percussion and flute. It’s not just the music that gets me with this band, it’s the insight and meaning in their lyrics:
Take “Die for your country” for instance, it speaks of war and how those who start it never end up actually fighting it and how the so-called leaders get men to join the army with the nationalistic slogans and mottos, calling for people to “die for their country”. Super. Rock ‘n’ Roll Renegade seems to be about how people claim that rock musicians in the country are spoiling “the Indian Way of Life”.
It’s a shame the band’s no longer around, they deserve to be real famous.
A long time ago, back in the 90s, when I had my first computer I used to play cracked computer games in the summer while I waited for the other kids who lived around to finish
After a while, I found TTDPatch which had all this cool functionality added on. The guys who wrote it, including the creator Josef Drexler, must’ve been some programming geniuses because they modified the original game and added all sorts of unbelievable additions, all in assembly code. Anyway, after a while, along came
Now there’s a new thing going on at TTForums’ OpenTTD Graphics section where they’re making new sprites for the 32bpp mode that OpenTTD has recently implemented. When it’s all done, which doesn’t seem like too long considering the rate at which new sprites seem to be coming, I’m going to give it a spin and see what it’s like playing that good old game. It’s aged well. You can look at all the new graphics at the Exhibition Page on the wiki, along with a comparison with the original graphics.
I returned from Bangalore today after participating in Admit One at the Alliance française there.
Anyway, in the end Ranjitha won Best Director and Rinila – Best Actress, yay! That’s pretty damn good, considering the rest of the outstation teams that performed. Strangely enough, we were one of only two one-act plays ; that was strange because the time allotted was only
Another play that was rather interesting was the LSR‘s adaptation of Woody Allen’s Death; they won the Best Play award finally, but I’m surprised none of the actors got an award because they were plain amazing and their accents were perfect! The script, naturally, was just hilarious.
I missed the Sri Lankan performance, I think, but I didn’t miss UET Lahore who put on a lovely
Afterwards, because we’d been too lazy to book our tickets for a bus or train, we stayed the night and half the next day at Ranjitha’s place, making a mess of the place in the process. Her mom must think I’m retarded or something :D
Lots of fun. Yeah. Unfortunately, I forgot about my camera until the last day.
Footnotes:
[1] Hindu article talking about Admit One
It’s weird, it really is. The whole movie is set underground, in the stations and tunnels of the Budapest subway, with the lead characters being the ticket collectors. It’s a story about ticket collectors, really. The people in the movie are kind of weird, they treat the ticket examiners like scum, and just push them away on their way out of the station. Sometimes they fight the ticket collectors and win, and sometimes they make fun of them and run away, and other times they just ignore the poor fellows. It looks like a sad life, what a job!
There’s drunks, suits, pimps, mischievous travellers – oh, and there’s also women in pinkish bear costumes who does acts of kindness. The main characters are Bulczú’s team, and each member of that team has some idiosyncrasy or the other. The funniest of the whole lot is the incredibly dense Tibi. The first half of the movie is mostly descriptive, but the real action starts after a while and then the movie starts to center around Bulczú and what he does underground (he lives there, never going up).
It’s hilarious and disturbing, this movie, and the ending is rather … confusing. But if you put your mind to it you can probably think up a plausible explanation. Very nice. Very neat.
Some screencaps:
1. Cut-throat competition? Check.
2. The inevitable crowd
Some time ago we did a play at the Chinmaya Heritage Centre, Chetpet, for the Dean Foundation. It was for World Hospice and Palliative Care. There were a bunch of other colleges who did some other stuff too, though we managed to watch only one of them go at it, the WCC girls with their A cappella band which was pretty good. It was fun, though a little confusing. I don’t think the play was meant to be done under lights, with mics and all. Not too bad, though it could have been nicer with more than the 9 days we had. The funniest part was Pipe’s ramblings in Sanskrit whenever he forgot his lines, plain hilarious. Aadi and Varma were hilarious too, the little kids loved Aadi’s Yama’s Messenger act! Anyway, yeah, I could go on about everyone but what made me think of this was that today Sundar (our mridangam dude, totally expert, him and Arundhathi, go see their shows sometime), yeah so Sundar, he tells me that we showed on some local Tamil channel. Yay! If I’d known we were on TV, I would have had “HI MOM!” painted on my chest. Nah, I wouldn’t have, but I would’ve liked to. Here’s a little photo of the show which I managed to get out of the Indian Express (October 10, City Express):
So anyway, after our show, this dude Cary was picking out the winners for the raffle with us MCC crowd making a ruckus in the corner over every win. I nearly managed to fool everyone into thinking I was a girl named Amrita and after accepting my prize and giving my acceptance speech I was ready to go back to my seat but the real Amrita’s friends landed up and pinched my rightful prize. Ah well, next time, next time…
Oh and they gave us surplus women’s talcum powder, those nice folks. I liked the abundance of ‘refreshments’ better though. Very hospitable folks. Real hospitable folks.
In Rainbows can be downloaded off their site for just as much as you’re willing to pay. There you go, you’ve complained for ages about how things are too expensive for you to pay for. You’ve rationalised your piracy by claiming that art should be able to reach even those who can’t “afford” it. You’ve spoken at length on how you’d pay for an album if it were a 100 rupees. Well, go on then. If you like Radiohead, put your money where your mouth is. Show them how much you think their music is worth.
Of course, if you’re one of those cheapskates who can’t put $2 in, don’t download the album. No need to waste their bandwidth.
