Music and Me

When I was a kid I grew up listening to my dad playing the Tabla. It is an Indian drum played with your fingers. I remember him playing the Tabla for hours at a stretch. And he would sing in his deep melodious voice and I would listen. That I could not learn the Tabla or Indian classical music is one of the things I rue the most to this day. But I did develop an discerning ear for music. I love to sing now and then and I do it well enough for someone not trained in music. Music has not deserted me at any point of time in my life. I find a sort of solace in music that I have not found in anything, anywhere or anyone else. My introduction to music started with Indian classical and Kishore Da, Mohammad Rafi, Lata Ji, Asha Ji, Hemanta Mukhopadhyay, Manna De etc. And except for a brief adolescent phase I have never found new Bollywood music very attractive. With the progression of years I started to inculcate a taste in Rock music and other alternative sounds. It might have been the hormones and the society that sparked my interest but once I got into it there was no turning back. I found myself in good rock music. I started mild with 80's U2 graduated into GnR, AC/DC and Led Zeppelin then came college, I had briefly heard Pink Floyd previously but soon it became a life line. Psychedelic was around me day and night. In the background I started listening to metal, punk, trance, lounge, alternative, progressive, grunge, indie, industrial and so on. Towards the end of college I started listening to death metal but I will accept the fact that except for a few bands I am not a big death metal fan. I would rather have old school metal music any day. In the fall of 2009 I came to the United States. In a year or so I feel like I have matured more than in the entire 22 years of my life that I spent in small town Durgapur, India. And I have gone back to listening to Indian classical music, not that I do not listen to good rock music anymore. Music has kept me running through out this time. Every day for some time I still close my eyes crank up the volume and go back to my "safe place". Somewhere where there is only me and music and my ethereal love and nothing can harm me and I listen to my favorite songs. The thoughts that they trigger in my head I cannot explain because they are as complex as they are fleeting. Music makes me happy, it makes me sad, it excites me, it calms me down, it soothes my soul. I wish I can always have this refuge to fall back upon whenever I need it.

Friendly Neighborhood Indian

I am fervently Bengali and wholeheartedly Indian. I grew up in Durgapur, in the industrial heartlands of West Bengal. In school I guess I had as many non-Bengali friends as Bengalis. My scores in Bengali were always on the lower side (Just for the record my lowest score in ICSE was in Bengali) and people have made fun of it. I am apparently not Bengali enough because of my ways and how I talk, dress, interact with people and my chaste Hindi. My Hindi apparently being pretty good for people from my part of the country. It does not have a Bengali accent according to some people who have mistaken me for someone from Bihar or UP. But I am not "thet" enough to be identified as someone from the Northern States or Bihar. I have always reveled in this. The uniqueness of India and that you can be from one place and be so different from someone else in your own country and yet the same, yet very Indian. I have also been a butt of a few "bloody NRI" jokes some of which might not have been jokes actually.

But now my friends here tell me that I do not have an "Indian accent". I have heard enough "slurpee" jokes to know what that sounds like, though I have only heard very few people in India talk like that. And I do not know whether to like it or not. I am proud of my Indianness, does it mean now I am a little less Indian now? I swear by the tricolor in my room I am not. I guess I will have to compensate otherwise to make myself more Indian. I wonder what I can do? But until I discover my true being in this incredible quagmire of identities I remain what my friend Arun Krishnamoorthy calls "your friendly neighborhood Indian".



[P.S. an NRI for the uninitiated is a Non Resident Indian or in more clearer terms according to "someone" a bloody backstabber who deserts his own country for greener pastures and a few thousand extra dollars.
"thet" Hindi is another word for chaste Hindi but the connotation is a little more complex and less serious but the complexity is lost in translation.
And Arun I had been writing this for a while but thanks for the ending.]

Who's Gonna Save My Soul Now

I was watching the Future Shorts series on Youtube. I even downloaded a bunch of the shorts. I loved the Black Hole thing and this one too. The animation is awesome and the dialogues incredible.

Beat That Google

On a Wednesday 2/10/2010, Google announced its plans on implementing a revolutionary new high speed fiber network with speeds up to 1 GB per second. Simultaneously Google also issued RFIs to small sized cities in the United States of America that were interested in participating in Google's Beta run of this amazing new network. Which resulted in all sorts of campaigning by the cities. The city of Topeka, KA officially renamed itself Google for a day to catch Google's eye, a feat that was lampooned by Google this April Fools when they renamed Google to Topeka for a day. Google's "revolutionary" new network has had enough publicity without even being operational.

Now comprehend this a single sperm has at least around 37.5 MB, by some estimates, of information coded into the DNA in it. A normal ejaculation results in the release of around 6 million sperms. A simple computation brings total amount of data involved in this to an enormous 1587.5 TB. A normal ejaculation lasts about 3 seconds. Therefore an enormous amount of data is transferred at around 529.2 TBps. Also consider the physical volume that this data occupies and compare it to our conventional means of data storage i.e. HDDs, SSDs, Flash Drives, SD cards and how much data they can store. We still have a long long way to go Google.

Try to think, or rather not to, of this the next time.

More information about the Google project is up on the official Google blog post.

[P.S. Portions of this post were adapted from other sources by yours truly. He is also, in good conscience, not aware of the actual copyright holders so please do not blame him for copyright violations.]

IMAGINE

The First Amphibian

To the ladies. We men cannot understand women, so please do not make it any harder. Be simple and crude in your conversations with your man and there cannot be anything more he wishes for, except for (you know what). There are things that men hate about you. They wish they could tell you but they cannot. Either because they love you too much or because they are afraid of what you might end up doing. I will help my brethren out, I will tell you one of the things that men hate most about women, so the next time one of my friends goes ballistic he can just say "Bijeet". We hate emotions or whatever you call it when we say something and you construe together something completely different in your lovely heads and then react entirely opposite to how we expected you to react. When the first amphibian crawled out of the slosh of its pond and unto an unknown and evidently hostile world, it did not do so to evolve. It was because it was tired of listening to its girlfriend, wife or whoever it was bickering down there underwater; about something that he had in all probability done very innocuously.

He must have gone, "I am tired of this", "Now I am going upstairs, I will grow a pair of lungs and other specialized organs for it or whatever else it takes, but I cannot take your emotions anymore." Men are simple; for men there is "A, B, C, D...."; for women there is "A, B, C, F, Pink, Blue, Clouds, Mountains, Unicorns, Trains, Dreams, Princes....". A man will answer a simple question simply a woman will answer you with a question. Too many emotions I say, way too many.

(P.S. This is not my own creation, I was watching a stand-up show, dunno who the comic was but I liked some of the things he said, pieced them together and added some touches of my own. Do not know if he copied from somewhere. So I am sorry if this infringes any copyrights. Bring on the misogynist accusations.)

Long Hydrocarbon Chains of Grief

I was sitting on the porch behind Chelsea's. It's a good place here in Baton Rouge; to sit down with some friends; have a nice chat; listen to the live band wafting in from the other side of the glass door; through which you can see a collective little crowd of people. And it occurred to me that all our griefs must be hydrocarbon chains; if they had physical existence. And the length of the hydrocarbon chains should be directly proportional to how sad you were. The more the extent of your grief the more complicated the structure of your grieving hydrocarbon. Now there are two reasons behind this apparently fantastical idea striking my head.
Firstly Alcohol, which I had had enough of by that time of the evening; that is if 1 o' clock in the morning qualifies as evening in your book like it does in mine. And we all know what extraordinary results a few glasses of that can bring about. But the second and the more logical reason is Alcohol.
Ah well! if you are lost right now do not fret, you will see my point soon enough. If all of it seems too hard to imagine, go get yourself a peg or two of your favorite ale and tag along with me. My primary question to myself was, why does one feel better when one has had a few pegs? Why does one forget one's griefs, one's pasts and all that is so wrong after a pint? Why no one has ever tried to drown their sorrows in copious amounts of water? The answer my friends must be the fact that our worries and griefs must be long chains of complex hydrocarbons; which are almost always non polar. And water being a polar solvent can according to the laws of nature only dissolve polar molecules in it. Alcohol on the other hand is a much more versatile solvent because it has both polar and non polar groups. It thus dissolves and carries away all our organic sorrows. And you loose them when you visit "the john". Now just because you know this do not go ahead and order a gallon of your favorite industrial solvent, that stuff will kill you. Alcohol on the other hand will not, albeit under moderation given you like me know your limits.