Showing posts with label Random. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Random. Show all posts

November 06, 2006

Some S***


Found some crap in my notes folder. Here's one. All I remember is that I wrote it in a single stretch. It's part fact, part fiction. Don't really know the why or what of this crap. Doesn't make no sense to me. If you find any sense in it talk to me.


Most nights I lay awake pretending to sleep. Playing pretend can be a really engaging activity. Playing pretend has got to work. No matter what you pretend, it’s got to work. I mean, what’s the whole idea of pretending when it’s not logical.

With the click comes darkness. The sub-conscious projector starts rolling the nightmare film. The film is perfect but the soundtrack always comes with an auditorium-echo. It’s like the sub-conscious is trying to up the spook factor with the echo. Most of the times, I am viewing the nightmare in sweeping wide angle shots. I rarely get close-ups, so I can’t figure who’s who.

I lay awake pretending to sleep. In my sleep, I am dreaming. I am dreaming that I am sleeping. I love making those dreams surreal. And what’s more surreal than sleeping in your dreams that you see while pretending to sleep.

Most nights I lay awake pretending to sleep. I don’t sleep because of the nightmares. Those dreadful nightmares. They come right when the sub-conscious starts playing the dreams. In my dreams I am always sleeping. Maybe my dreams are trying to fulfill things I can’t make happen.

The nightmares always begin when someone switches off the lights in my dream where I am asleep. I want to know who puts them off. I want to know if it is deliberate. I fall asleep, in the dream, and there’s this sound, the click of the light switch. Oh, I hear it every time. You know, like you hear sounds yet you know that you’re asleep. These things happen to me, I don’t know if this is an isolated incident.

Click. The light goes off. The nightmare switches on.

November 05, 2006

Remember, Remember.


Remember, remember the fifth of November,
The gunpowder, treason and plot,
I see of no reason why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.
Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, 'twas his intent
To blow up the King and the Parliament.
Three score barrels of powder below,
Poor old England to overthrow:
By God's providence he was catch'd
With a dark lantern and burning match.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, make the bells ring.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, God save the King!
Hip hip hoorah!

***


PS. Thanks to ado for reminding me.


June 20, 2006

Random Thoughts Vol.2

Reasons are the same as before. Hence: Random Thoughts Vol.2

  • Mission Impossible 3 finally arrived in Hyderabad. Saw it releasing day - Friday. Awesome action. J.J. Abrams has made it to my list of great action directors. Tom Cruise, always brilliant. Hoffman came out as a great villain. The slight suspense was no surprise, already knew who was behind it before the intermission. Maggie Q - HOT. I was looking forward to see Billy 'Russel Hammond' Crudup after quite a long time in a huge movie. He was great too. A great movie. No bad things to say except the lack of THE THEME in the movie most of the time. But still, the music was good. The Vatican and Shanghai sequences were brilliantly shot. Will watch again this week.


  • Been reading Harper Lee's To Kill A Mocking Bird. A geniune story of innocence and human dignity. Looks like I finally found the life-changing-book after all. Will write all about it in a post quite soon. Started reading it for the second time. This stuff should be in primary education curriculum.


  • Kal El will return on June 30th in IMAX 3D. Book your tickets, I'm booking mine as soon as advance starts. There will be 20 minutes of 3D Supes. Can't wait. The reviews are good not excellent though. Some say it is more of a Chick movie. Some say Spacey wasn't used much. I say fuck off! I say, "I HEART SUPERMAN".


  • Listening to James Blunt's Back to Bedlam. Listen. Wallow in the beautiful melancholy. Also playing all live performances by Pearl Jam. Also in the loop are the Verve, Soundgarden, Fort Minor, Lynyrd fuckin' Skynyrd, Helen Stellar, My Morning Jacket.


  • Also playing Counter Strike and Condition Zero. Trying to throw a LAN party at Copy Junction, Banjara Hills. Need more friends/players.

June 02, 2006

Random Thoughts

Don't have anything to write about, hence: random thoughts.

  • People are always asking me, "what are you doing?" This is what I am doing these days. Go ahead and click, its an improvisation of a blogger template. It is Work-In-Progress and there's more where this came from. So whenever you need a different looking blog, catch me on Yahoo! IM.

  • Joblo gave it 9/10 and Arrow would butcher his family to see this again. And they saw it at the Cannes. It's my most awaited movie this year. Much awaited than Superman Returns. And I know it won't be released in India/Hyderabad. It's mucho-gloomy and uber-creepy. It's Guillermo del Toro's "El Laberinto del Fauno" (Pan's Labyrinth). Download the creepy trailer, already.

  • Next in line is Richard Linklater's live-action, rotoscopic-animated sci-fi, A Scanner Darkly. Three Words: PHILIP K. DICK (shame on you, ignoramus). It stars some of my favorite actors, Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., and Winona Ryder and Woody Harrelson. I believe I don't have to repeat the trailer line from above.

  • Year's biggest disappointment, Southland Tales, courtesy, Richard Kelly. I had hopes. Damn you, Richard. Please give me a Darko, again.

  • I am back on to music real hard, courtesy: iPod Nano. It's:

    • The Who's Baba O'Riley

    • Elton John's Tiny Dancer and My Father's Gun

    • Helen Stellar's Io (This time around)

    • Fleetwood Mac's Big Love (Acoustic)

    • Pearl Jam doing the Who's Baba O'Riley (live)

    • Wheat's Don't I Hold You

    • Lindsey Buckingham's Shut Us Down

    • Lynyrd Skynyrd's Free Bird

    • D-Mode's remix of Starsailor's Four to the Floor

    • Led Zeppelin's Heartbreaker

    • Beck's Guero

    and more movie soundtracks and scores. I DIG MUSIC. (whoever got it, comment. hint: tiny dancer)

  • Got nothing to read. Going for book-shopping tomorrow. Looking for Harper Lee's To Kill A Mocking Bird, David Vise and Mark Malseed's Google Story and anything minimal (spanbauer, hempel, palahniuk, coupland, camus, lee). Meanwhile, enjoying The Lord of the Rings for the don't-rememberth time.

  • I am also going back to my web devlopment basics. Learning CSS again. Learning Modularization in XHTML 1.1. Trying to learn JavaScript for the nth time. I even have a CSS Reference on my iPod. Thanks, Westciv.


That's all folks! Will return with more thoughts in the near future.

April 27, 2006

Man's Greatest Invention

It is “language” indeed.

I know it’s a Cultural Invention, but an invention nonetheless. It is one invention that is used by every human being. Even the mute communicates with a language. Language breaks barriers. It breaks borders. How? I like to think it’s the human entity that drives languages. The primal need to communicate, to exchange thoughts and to emote, else there’s nothing more to humans. We are what we are because we communicate. What would be fire if the ancient men didn’t know to convey its uses? What would be the wheel?

The magic of language is that it can be so different yet so familiar. Through language we emote. Emote happiness, emote sadness, anger, fear, joy, criticism, appreciation, we emote hate and we emote love.

The words some times become more than just alphabets stuck together to sense. The greatest woman on earth is a mother. And mother in any language means the same. “Mother” in English is “Mutter” in German, “Madre” in Spanish, “Mère” in French, and “Mãe” in Portuguese. The semblance is just love and nothing more. You call her “Mummy” or “Mom”; we call her “Ammi” in the Urdu language or “Maa” in Hindi. Different languages, familiar sounds. These words are not influenced by English since it was used long before English came to India. I don’t know how such things happen. It seems neither co-incidental nor an influential effect.

Very few people regard language as important. I myself believe that languages are beautiful. I love languages. The pronunciations, the exclamations. I love Persian a language that seems ancient and beautiful. I love Arabic, it’s more of an art than a language. I love Japanese, seems to me the most emotive language. The Chinese and Japanese pronunciation accords to their emotion/feeling. Urdu is my own language; it is one of the few languages that have love, respect and richness in it. It is, after all, an amalgamation of three great tongues, Arabic, Persian and Hindi.

Language defines cultures, peoples, and societies. Everyone knows French is a very romantic speech and the French are quite so too. The language defines the people. With Urdu, it is the regard, respect, and esteem.

The inspiration behind my love for languages is my greatest teacher. He himself was quite fluent in as many as 4 speeches, Urdu, Arabic, Persian and English.

He is and ever will be.

I haven’t learned any languages myself nor will I learn in the foreseeable future. It is a task too huge for me. Withal, I would love to learn a new language – Persian, Arabic, and Japanese makes my list.

Language still remains the greatest invention ever. It permits me to learn about everything around me. The realities, the fiction, the comedies, the tragedies and the essence of being human, all of them reason enough to stuff my rack with more books. More words. More language.

P.S.: Today I am going, yet another time, to my personal little used-book store, Frankfurt. Hoping to buy some more book, hoping to get some more language onto my rack.

April 24, 2006

FP Biking

First Ever Video Post!

Here it is some nice First Person Biking experience. I took this with my cousin. There's one more like this, a bit more aggresive. Will post later.



P.S. You'll need some Flash power for this video.

April 15, 2006

The Milk of Human Unkindness

The editorial of today’s Deccan Chronicle Newspaper has quiet a nice little column by renowned author, Paulo Coelho. The Op-Ed page always has a Coelho column at least twice a week. The small column is only rivaled by the excellent Kushwant Singh write up, With Malice towards one and all, which is a Sunday exclusive.

Now, Coelho usually writes some homo-evangelic prose with a poetic twinge, today it was same but with a different perspective. Titled, The Milk of Human Unkindness, the write-up had something that reminded me of, once again, George Orwell’s 1984.

Coelho writes how this Norwegian company sent him three liters of their product that substitutes milk. The company says that scientists have found that “cow milk contains 59 active hormones, lots of fat, cholesterol, dioxins, bacterias and viruses”. The company’s product has its base in plants (cows get their calcium from plants), so you don’t have to use milk for Calcium. “Milk is condemned based on an endless number of studies carried out in a variety of institutes all over the world” says the product literature. All this points out that milk is not good for health. Coelho says that he tried a sip of this product that substitutes the killer milk and it was the foulest thing he ever tasted. As he writes about this he goes into how science and technology has changed us. How people who are now in their 50s used to drive in cars without seat belts or airbags, how children played on the back seat with no cradles or belts to bind them and how their cradles used to be colored bright that are now considered harmful because they contain lead or some chemical. Coelho says that maybe in the future scientists might convince us of the killer milk and ban it and contemplates will we have to get our milk from drug dealers?

The last single line of the column reminded me of the Proles from 1984. For the ignoramus, in the novel, 1984 by George Orwell, Proles are a community who are considered illiterate and live in the slummy part of the city. They live a life of ignorance and indulge in businesses like theft, prostitution and selling illegal items like shaving blades, pens, antiques and such. The milk and the drug dealer can be the perfect metaphor for the Proles. It reminds me of a future where a mere thing like buying milk will be treated as a drug deal.

Why is it that most scientific advances have more disadvantages? Every other product born out of scientific research has much to offer – faster, easier and eventually cheaper. It also offers us a lot of free time which we end up using other scientific products. The ease is great but it is making us, it is making me lazier than ever. A very few machines/technologies come to mind when we think “no side affects”. I’d like you to name some in your comments.

The future does seem bleak when you look through this perspective. Fifty years from now we may live up to be hundred. Fifty years from now we may have forgot the taste of a mere thing say, milk. I love technology. I crave all those gadgets I see over at engadget and hiptechblog. I am a man. It’s built into my DNA, to love gadgets. But I’d never want to see a future where I wouldn’t be able to drink my tea with milk. I’d never ever want to eat something that has come from a lab rather than a sprawling field. Hate is a very strong word. And I hate Organic food. It tastes like dust, and I’ve tasted dust on more than one occasion.

The future is bright. It will be. When you use a radiating nuclear powered light bulb it will be damn bright.

February 25, 2006

Don't know what to write

That's why I can't say what I will write. I don't know when I'll write or if I'll write at all.
That's why Anonymous Content.
I hope I write something.