There is an extremely queer phenomenon with most of us including me which I find hard to describe. We tend to become biased with our judgements when something pre-established in terms of popularity comes up for debate. Its not that we like that thing but perhaps we are too occupied to give it a real thought and perhaps we are too blinded by general conception. In due course of time our stance takes the form of a prejudice and we tend to amalgamate ourselves into the flow of mass acceptance, all the time forgetting our duties as rational human beings. Following is a list of some of those things which have come to punctuate our generation and age but which probably deserved a more critical examination on an individual basis. It is by no means comprehensive and by no means universal (just my opinion):

1. Garfield : I must say, if they ever decided to make a cartoon strip with its main character being played by a charred log of wood and its subject mainly consisting of showing that log of wood lying lifelessly in different positions, they could not have made a more morbidly stupid and intellectually dormant strip than Garfield. The strip has come to be accepted widely across the world but nothing takes anything away from the fact that Jim Davis is probably the most overrated retard and his creation Garfield, the most stupid cat even by the standards of dumb cats and Garfield's owner, probably the closest human ever got to be labelled as Jellyfish.

2. Star Wars : Now people may take offense at this but let me just put it this way: The premise of Star Wars is so incredibly stupid that I would rather bang my head on the sidewalk than watch Star Wars. Hell, I would even think about watching KKKG once since that way I can atleast make fun of the movie. If I try to make fun of Star Wars, my comrades, hopelessly caught in the myth that Star Wars represents something deeper than what they show on screen, will sneer at my lack of artistic standards. Here is a newsflash: Star Wars is not any of the following:
a. Social movement
b. Philosophy of life
c. Breakthrough in the art of movie making (watch 2001, A space oddysey)

What Star Wars really is - the incoherent, extremely boring ramifications of a confused mind which when loosely put together, vaguely represents a movie. I say if Star Wars is deep then so are Harry Potter and Eragon.

3. Anything that Mel Gibson does and Forrest Gump: I don't know why Mel Gibson is kept in such high regard artistically but frankly speaking all of his work is pretty darn mediocre. He seems to have perfected the art of playing upon basic human sentiments and emotions just so that people won't be able to pinpoint his glaring failures as a competent actor and director. Whenever I talk about movies like Patriot and Braveheart, people go crazy about how well the movies were made. When I ask so what was so good about those, I am generally met with incoherent explanations elaborately interspersed with Ahs and Ahems. If you have to think twice about whats good in a movie you love, you are just following the tide. Finally, Passion of the Christ is the most blatant exposition of mediocrity elaborately dressed to cash in upon human feelings I have ever seen. If showing the torture of a person for 2 hours is Gibson's idea of a good movie, I for one would be ready to provide him with a roundhouse kick anytime. And yes, FORREST GUMP. I could never really suffer through the complete movie. Ooooooo, "life is like a box of chocolates", I am impressed. Now will you please execuse me so that I could go ahead and commit suicide ? Watching the escapades of an IQ 70 person as he sloths his way through childhood, adolescence and adulthood is not my idea of intelligent entertainment. For those people who have sympathy for Mr. Gump, I have a newsflash: Mr. Gump is not a real person. The probability of a such a person doing the things Mr. Gump does is lesser than my that of my getting the next field medal. Hell, you should have sympathy for me because even though the probability of my getting a field medal is higher, I am still not getting it.

4. Apple : Let me just mention here that I own an Apple laptop and an iPod so I am blaming myself more than anyone else. The problem with Apple's philosophy is that it is trying to sell a lifestyle more than a product. Its products are not necessarily bad but they intend to encourage trend following and elitism in society. Their customers are supposed to be hip and 'in'. People try to find their own individual identity by owning Apple products and forget the inherent contradiction which arises from trying to define your own separate personality upon definitions created by a mulitnational conglomerate. Companies like Apple, Abercrombie and Fitch, fashion designers etc. try to cash in on the basic human necessity of forging individual identity in a society marred with uniformity. They present a universal ideal (Apple presents the hipness, Abercrombie presents sexuality and fashion designers present exclusivity) and drive people to buy products that they would otherwise not need in order to attain that ideal.

5. General trend following: This is one of the most potent weapons if you want to flip me out. Ask me this : "Where is F1 held in US ? " I would say:

"Indianapolis" (and I will pronounce it as Indiana (as in Indiana Jones) + pol (as in pole) + is)
and then correct me with the following pronounciation:
"Indianapolis" (as in India (with the stress on Indi) + NA + polis (as in police but with much less stress))
and I would say:
"You may kindly go to hell"

What the hell man! First of all, Indianapolis is a proper noun and howsoever stunted my knowledge of English language might be, I am certain that no son of a gun in the whole wide world can command me as to how a proper noun should be pronounced. Secondly, whats the point copying someone else's accent if you can convey your meaning properly with your own ? And who the hell decides whats the correct pronunciation for Indianapolis anyways? There is only one person who can have any official jurisdiction over the matter. The guy who first coined the word and I am guessing he is dead now. So while your pronunciation might be more socially conformal, I think I am good.

Oh! meanwhile, I know that some of you might be gunning for my head after reading this. So I have conveniently removed the comments sections :)... Send me your comments at ankit_iitg@yahoo.co.in if you are pissed enough.

Once in a century, a movie comes along and kicks so much ass that the critics worldwide have their face rocked off permanently. Such a movie makes such a huge mockery of established notions of good movie making like story, acting etc. that the critics are just not able to grapple with the possibility that conventional wisdom might have become too arcane to accomodate revolutionary ideas. They wince at the brilliance which pokes at their own limited competence, they sulk at the genius they never could amass, feel jealous at their own limited comprehension of the genius of the movie and go home and write scathing comments over the lack of conventional wisdom that the movie seems to have in spades. Well, this movie is not one of those.

For starters, I am outlining the following points which elevates the movie to the realm of the avant garde:

1. No coherent story whatsoever. Oooooo, what was it ? A fight between humans and homopheagus ? A boy named "six" ? A girl named "violet" ? A movie named "ultraviolet" ? And none of them seem to have any connection between them. What was that antigen you were talking about ? And the anti-antigen ? Do these words mean anything or are they just ramifications of the director's brain wirings gone wrong ? I could have done with a bit more explanation.

2. Lack of credible acting. I am inclined to say that the best actors were those who had already died but then I think that all those inanimate objects like the furniture, guns, dresses had far more character than the movie's most seasoned actors.

Just based on the above two points, you would think that I hated the movie but you could not be farther from the truth. The truth is that I thoroughly enjoyed the movie. It had all the points which really matter in a good movie and it had them in spades. Cases in point;

1. A very attractive lady.

2. A very attractive lady dressed in very attractive dresses.

3. A very attractive lady dressed in very attractive dresses stomping incomprehensible amount of human ass.

4. Atleast 45,000 people killed at the hands of the very attractive lady dressed in a very attractive dress.

5. The very attractive lady driving motorcycles, cars, stomping over choppers, wielding fancy guns, and swords and lasers and dodging bullets, and passing smartass comments.

6. A kid constantly being reprimanded by the very attractive lady for no fault of his.

7. Crazy gadgets everywhere. By crazy I do not mean, the CIA wireless crap. I mean so crazy, the next time you meet Pierce Brosnan in person, you would slap him just for playing with toys at his age.

You see, what else do you need for a great movie. I can only say, Milla Jovovich is a professional butt kicker. She did it in Resident Evil. She more than does it in Ultraviolet.

Links:
Ultraviolet
Running Time: Who keeps track of time when there is so much stuff happening on screen.
Precautionary Measures: Don't watch it if you want to see a movie for good acting or good story. Watch it only if you are bored from the monotonicity of life and want to see some serious kickery elaborately spiced with loads of "Dude!" attitude.

Ha. You guys would be thinking, when did this movie come. Isn't it ? Let me explain as to why you haven't heard of this movie ever.

1. Directed by Francis Coleman who is widely considered to be the worst director of all times, in the esteemed league of Ed Wood.

2. Widely regarded as the worst sci-fi 'B' movie ever, almost as bad as 'Plan 9 from outer space'. Now as a rule, 'B' movies are called 'B' movies for a reason. the reason being their superhuman ineptitude at everything ranging from acting to direction to dialogues to coherence and what not. And we are talking about the worst of them all. You get the idea here.

3. The most important reason you have never seen this movie is probably because not many people have survived to tell the tale after watching this. I barely managed to snatch life from the jaws of death. As the movie came to a screeching halt, I found myself short of breath, my lungs barely being able to supply the much needed oxygen, my heart rate slowed down to almost half the normal, my life functions halted down to almost a trickle. The only reason I could survive the movie was that I have grown upon a steady diet of movies that have defined the term crappy. And boy oh boy, did I need every single one of those experiences to make it through today.

The premise of the movie is as follows. A scientist (played by Tor Johnson, a veteran Swedish wrestler) wanders into a nuclear testing facility (Yucca Flats) where radiation turns him into a beast. He starts killing people in the desert and he inturn gets killed in the end. Oops! Thats it. Thats the whole premise! If you think I am exaggerating the thinness of the plot, be my guest and watch the movie. I am sure by the end of the movie you will find it hard to sum it up in a single sentence (i.e. if you survive), not because of a plethora of nail biting action sequences but because once you are 3 minutes into the movie, your mind goes numb and you are basically overwhelmed by the incredible stupidity that is being played in front of your eyes.

The movie begins with a lady being murdered in the shower. No allusion whatsoever of this incident is made in the movie ever again. When the director is not wasting minutes of footage shooting dusty cars running on dustier roads in Yucca flats, he wastes them on shooting the elaborate parking skills of the drivers driving those cars. Rest of the time, he basically focusses his camera on non-consequential things like non-consequential bushes, non-consequential rocks and pebbles, non-consequential rabbits, coyotes and pigs. He criminally wastes atleast 10 minutes of the movie focussing the camera on the face of a person who does not give even a single expression, does not say a single thing and frankly looks pretty self-engrossed to realize that he has been invested with 1/5 of the running time of the movie. No coherence, no plot, no character development. It almost seems that there was a constant tape of random ideas running in the director's head and he picked at random and decided to make a movie out of the concoction of completely unrelated events.

And I have not yet mentioned the salient feature of the movie. The problem, apparently in the begining, was that they had shot the complete movie without dialogues and when the time came to put the audio in sync with the video, they ran out of budget. The director came up with an ingenious plan at this point. Thanks to his improvisation, there is not a single scene in the movie where the character who is speaking the dialogues is also seen in the video!!! He/She is always somewhere in the background. It would be an understatement to say that the movie was the cinematic equivalent of feeding your hand to a wood chipper. On any given day, I would be ready for the latter option if asked to watch this movie again.

If you have the guts to watch it, here is the link :
Link1 (Warning: A little nudity in the begining)
I would rather recommend watching the Mystery Science Theatre version as it atleast has people passing funny comments during the run:
Mystery Science Theatre version (The movie starts at about 4 minutes into the video)

Duration : 53 minutes. Seems like : 753 minutes
Precautionary measures: Oxygen mask, First aid handy, A friend capable of giving CPR. I advice that don't watch it alone or atleast not in one single sitting.
Disclaimer: I shall not be held responsible for any permanent disabilities or death which might result to those who watch it. No financial compensations for medical expenses shall be incurred upon me in such a situation.

I was just wondering... If ever the world had the insight of appointing me as king, I would make the following changes. To the untrained eye these changes would seem unnecessary and completely uncalled for but I can assure you that they would serve humanity well if incorporated:

1. I would provide a free lunch to everyone in the world atleast once just to debunk the oft repeated, completely unnecessary and stupendously foolish saying : There are no free lunches in the world. Seriously, I can't believe how can people be straight faced and say this even when they had their share of all those free lunches which tolled upon the limited expenses of all those birthday boys who were their friends. What about all those years everyone was at home eating off their fathers' pockets ? Those were all free. And all those marriage parties everyone kept going to even though they had no idea who the bride or the groom were ? Huh... Me:1, Rest of the World: 0

2. No more free coffee in companies. I have lately been dwelling upon this phenomenon a lot. Why do companies give free coffee to its employees ? Its not as philanthropic as you would think. You know what is the one thing coffee has in spades and which these capitalist conglomerates have had the foresight of using to their own benefits ? Its Caffiene. It keeps people awake. Why don't they provide free alchohol or drinks ? Because it doesn't serve their purpose. No more free coffee. On second thoughts, offering coffee or any other stimulant to someone who wants to sleep shall now be a crime. Me:1, Giant capitalistic multinational conglomerates: 0

3. Cricket shall be made the national (well... for lack of a better word) game of the world and Federer the universal god. Anyone playing American football will need to be either below 5 years of age or someone of a similar certified mental capacity. Games like Lacrosse and golf shall be banned and only prisoners shall be subjected to the agony of playing these. Ludo shall be included in Olympics and by the way each and every gold shall, by default, go to India. Why compete when your citizen is the head of the world ?

4. Karan Johar, Ekta Kapoor will be put in jail for life. Oh by the way, for doing so, I will need to create jails for monkeys. No more mediocre stuff on Television. Anyone not able to spell "I AM NOT A MORON" shall not be allowed to make serials or movies. In this way we can be sure that we are never again subjected to the tortures of Mohabbatein or KKKG or their ilk. Anyone not able to tell his 'C' from his 'G' shall not be allowed to compose music so that we can eliminate people like Anu Malik. On second thoughts, anyone ready to sell his principles or the standards of his art for 100 bucks or less shall not be allowed to do what he wants. We don't want people like Jim Davis (Garfield) running around. Its about time we get some decent, intelligent entertainment.

5. No more cute names for kids. How about getting a bit creative. How about naming your kid something like 'MortalKombat' ? How about starting his name with a special character like '&' ? How about sprinkling some more special characters like '&An$%78k23i t' ? Hell, try and name him ' '. That way whenever the teacher is taking attendance and she is quiet for a space of 8 seconds, your son will get up and say 'Present'. If you want more fun, name your other son with 7 spaces. I cannot imagine how great and confusing it would be. Seriously, is there a law which says you cannot do that ?

6. I have discussed this with phantom. There shall be a tax on stupidity. This is the only way by which an equitable distribution of wealth can be achieved. It also says a lot about the general distribution of wealth in the present society. It will have slabs which will depend upon a person's annual income and his IQ. It will be configured in such a way that if you somehow manage to amass as much stupidity as Paris Hilton and still manage to breathe, there shall be a 100% tax on you. Pretty nifty, eh ?

7. Since India is too narrow to have different time zones (USSR had 16 at one point), I would divide the country into horizontal time zones. I understand that it would not serve any purpose but no Indian will ever again have to lower his eyes in shame when asked by an American, how many time zones does your country have ? Huh. 17 ! And we don't even need them. Indians : 1, Americans: 0.

8. No decorative dogs strictly. No more cutefying your dog. A dog is supposed to bark his lungs out. If he cannot do that, his license as a dog will be revoked. If he does not go mad and run after cyclists, he is not worthy enough of being called a dog. No certified dog shall be allowed to be of the size of a mouse or a hamster. No more clothes and ribbons and socks for pets. No more 'great tasting' dog food.

9. Following phrases shall be stricken out of the English language as they don't mean a thing:
a. 'Hi, How are you doing?" (Especially if said by a person on a store counter)
b. 'I was like...' and 'Oh my gosh' (Especially if uttered by a teenage girl. On second thoughts most of the things she utters)
c. 'Live life to the fullest'
d. 'Keep climbing'
etc.

10. When my term is about to end, I will make another amendment proclaiming the throne for five more years so that I could make more of these senseless laws.

The story dates back about a decade. A tense Sunday morning brimming with palpable apprehension. The clock chimes 9 as me and my father switch our Onida on and wait for the match between India and Pakistan to start. Mother is making breakfast in the kitchen and my sister is probably dissappointed that she is not allowed to watch her regular fare of weekly cartoons. The rest of the day is spent clutching the handle of the sofa, sitting still in auspicious positions, shrieking my lungs out at every other Pakistani wicket, missing breaths at every next Indian one, cursing under my breath at every run out chance gone awry. Yes, it won't be hard for me to say that cricket gave me some of the most beautiful memories of my childhood. If it was not for cricket, I probably would never have experienced that rush of pure euphoria which accompanies a boundary, that surge of raw, unbounded emotion which punctuates every wicket, that feeling of 'I would kill the selectors if I ever get hold of them' when a Venkatpathy Raju performed his mediocre antics on the international arena. People might argue today that they have somehow grown up and have started liking more accepted and 'better' games like Soccer, but dammit, on any given day, I would be more than ready to stand on top of a building and claim my unabashed love for the beautiful game. And I would be ready to punch anyone who tries to reason the supposed incompetencies of Cricket vis-a-vis Soccer. Not because I think Cricket is better (well, it is) but because it was my childhood and no one gets to try to reason me out of loving my childhood and then walk away in one piece.

Since Cricket has given me so much to remember and love, it is only natural that I should pay my homage in whatever small way I can. Here it goes, a tribute to the geniuses of game. Names are in random order except the last one who without doubt is the greatest ever:

Wasim Akram: In my book, he is the greatest fast bowler ever, FULL STOP. He might have ruined so many of my days and dreams but none of it takes anything away from the fact that this guy had the greatest freaking control any human ever had over a cricket ball ever since the universe started about 10 billion years ago. He had more control over the trajectory, pace, and orientation of a ball than I have on my optical mouse. He could bowl 6 different balls in an over, probably 12 different ones in 2, each time hitting precisely the same spot on the pitch.

Imran Khan: The greatest captain along with Steve Waugh I have seen play. And he combined it with a truly lion heart, an amazing bowling talent, a formidable batting ability and an overall killer attitude.

Sachin Tendulkar: He is simply a god. I don't have enough words to praise his genius so I will just shut up here.

Shane Warne: The best spinner in history. Yes, Muralitharan might have overtaken him in wickets but his talent is simply insane. His repertoire is incredible. Flipper, Top Spin, googly, leg spin, arm-bowl, slider. You name it and he could produce a textbook, Oxfordian definition of the same on the ground. Some of his wickets are so mindboggling, they should be declared illegal. Case in point: "Ball of the century" where he got Mike Gatting out between his legs.

Brian Lara: That bundle of immense talent, unorthodox technique, nimble feet, lightening quick responses, graceful shotmaking ability, and above all "I can do it any time attitude", his mother decided to name Lara. He has the most beautiful batting technique ever to have graced a batsman. Most importantly, he made records at will. Case in point: 400 against England shortly after Hayden broke his records of 375 by making 380.

Michael Bevan: He had what an average of 70 ? Thats insane. I have never seen any other player who has taken his team to more victories single handedly. If Australia were chasing and Bevan was there and you did not get him out in the first 10 deliveries, you could as well just surrender for no total was too large for him. He had too much of a resolve to lose when comfortable.

Sourav Ganguly: Do I hear, "WHATs" and "HOW THE HELLs" ? Be that as it may, he is the greatest captain India has ever had. If it was not for him, Indians probably would have remained the pathetic losers they were under Azharuddin. He stood up against the establishment for the induction of new blood in Indian cricket at a time when the team was infested with parasites like Azhar, Prabhakar and their ilk and I respect him for it. He gave a fighting face to Indian cricket and that deserves a mention here.

Kapil Dev: "Did he fix matches" ? I don't give a damn. He won India its only World Cup and is that not enough ? He battled alone to make 175 when the team was teetering at 17 for 5 and single-handedly won the match. He took pain-killer injections in his knee and took 9 wickets. What right do we mere mortals have to question his integrity? He was the breath of fire in an age of subdued emotions and aspirations. A raging volcano amidst a calm sea.

Sanath Jayasuriya: People might say that he did not possess the requisite technical ability but so did Vivian Richards. After all the lengthy discourses, the fact remains that he shredded the greatest bowling attacks like no one ever could in history. He changed how the game is played for ever. Not to mention that he single handedly won the world cup for Sri Lanka (with all due respects to De'Silva).

Bradman, The 'DON': This Australian kicked so much ass, they had to change the rules of the game to avoid his kickery. If an inhuman test average of 99.94 does not elevate him to the the position of the greatest ever, I don't know what can. He had 29 centuries in 69 innings, 13 of which were doubles and 3 of which were triples. His lowest series batting average ever was 52 during the Bodyline series. For those who don't know, Bodyline was the name given to the infamous 1932-33 Ashes, a series which caused numerous injuries to Australian batsmen and ended a few careers. For crying out loud, Tendulkar has a career average of about 52 ! The most interesting statistic about his genius is given on his wikipedia page. It compares him to the greatest of other games. The jist of the exercise is that after statistical analysis, if the probability of a soccer player to have the genius of Pele among professional footballers is 1 in 9200, of a golf player to have the genius of Jack Nicklaus is 1 in 4300, of a basketball player to have the genius of Michael Jordan is 1 in 3000, the probability of a professional cricketer to have the genius of Bradman is 1 IN 184,000 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I rest my case.

I know that I have not mentioned the names of Steve Waugh, Gavaskar, Vivian Richards, Sobers, Lloyds, 3 Ws, and many more but it is more due to a space and time constraint and because of the fact that I was not there to watch their games. I am sure they were great and all my respect to those who made the game what it is and who are continuing to make this the greatest game o the planet.

I was strolling my way back from UCSD after a not so productive day of work. Walking silently, listening to Jagjit Singh pouring his mellifluous sonority through my ears, I almost failed to notice a voice which seemed to be calling me. I had just crossed an intersection and the voice seemed to be coming from behind. I turned to notice a car stopped at the intersection (it was not a red light, just a stop sign) and a lady waving at me. Thinking that she needed some directions, I approached the passenger's window of the car and removed my earphones to help her with the directions to whichever place she might have wanted to go.

Lady: Are you from India ?
Me: Yes.

That was how it all started. A conversation between 2 perfect strangers which lasted for half an hour in the middle of a road. For each of those 30 minutes, she sat in the driver's seat, I stood beside the passenger's window, her car's engine kept burning gas and other drivers had to maneuver their ways around her car. She seemed to be in her early thirties, gracefully dressed in a black dress with an overcoat and quiet charming in her overall demeanour. I enquired whether she had ever been to India when she asked me about my specific origins and seemed to know where places like Lucknow, Kanpur, Agra are. It turned out that she was married to an Indian guy and had been in India for about a month in 2005. At this point of time I started thinking if all of this was getting too personal for either's comfort but what followed really swept me from my feet. She started by lamenting that her husband (I think his name was Shobhit from what I could make out) had asked her to come to India but she couldn't really move so he had left her for good. He had married again in India. She on the other hand still felt deeply for him and regularily kept checking for his well being in India even after 2 years of his going back. She said that all she wanted was his happiness and that she, after all these years, had started giving up on those cherished times they had together. I am not really an emotional person, but this really made me feel very sad for her. Here was a lady who obviously loved her husband but now all the contact she has with him are weekly phone calls maybe. On top of that she knows that he has remarried but a faint, continuously dimming hope is still evident in her eyes. She is trying to laugh but her laughter is not able to hide the fact that she is really sad. On more than one occassions, I distinctly detected signs of her almost breaking down and on each of those occassions she tried a fake laugh and reprimanded herself for sharing too much with a stranger. She told me all about her husband's home in Ranchi, his relatives, the places they had been to, the Saris she had tried, the bangles she had worn, Taj Mahal, his mother's religious nature, the hot weather, the spicy food, her broken hindi, some salutations in Urdu etc.

Generally, I am not at all comfortable with strangers and it would be wrong to say that I was comfortable at that intersection. I wanted to leave but she was so engrossed in her past world that breaking her innocent trance almost seemed like a crime to me. I stood there, nodding my head in silent approval, indicating that I was sorry at whatever she had been through, listening to her excitedly talking about her little memories. I waited for the time she gave me permission to leave and left her hoping that she overcomes her situation and that no other Indian is born again with such a cold and possibly vile heart as Shobhit.

I am sure that each one of you in your lives have had atleast one of those days when nothing seems to go right. Its the day when you envy the luck of the dead chicken in your plate, or when you are almost ready to bang your head on the sidewalk for things could not go any worse than they already have. I had one of those days today on the occasion of the annual UCSD graduate student research expo and poster presentation.

As pointless as the act of presenting your research to unsuspecting victims in a 10 minute seminar is, it only gets worse and more difficult when you have to do it on a 36/48 inch poster. So when an email regarding an announcement to the effect happened to wander into my mail address, I did what any self-respecting sane graduate student would do: prompt deletion with another addition to my spam addresses list. Just when I was smiling smugly to myself at having done another task with aplomb and satisfaction, my mailbox showed another mail from my advisor asking me:

"Would I want to put up a poster."

Did you notice something in the last sentence ? It has no question mark. I am not a stickler at formalities but I know when a question is supposed to have an answer and when it is brimming with overwhelming rhetoricism. With extreme inertia, I agreed to make a poster. Then came another mail from my advisor where he asked:

"Would I want to volunteer for the expo." (Notice the absence of '?')

Almost on the verge of strangling myself, I consented to his wish. I would have silently suffered in the misery, had I not recieved another mail from the volunteer committee in which an overenthusiastic official chirped enthusiastically: "Thanks for volunteering. You get to wear a red shirt embossed with a UCSD logo on the day". Can you believe that ? A RED SHIRT for god's sake. They could as well have painted it fluoroscent lime and written "Stupid inside" and attracted less attention.

So well, the day I had been dreading for so long finally came today. Dressed in my immaculate red, I stood besides my poster, surrounded by a host of other posters. I noticed something very peculiar. There was an unusually high density of humanity surrounding each and every poster which surrounded mine. Mankind, due to some reason or another, found it extremely inhospitable to reside anywhere in the vicinity of my poster. Being the eternal optimist I am, I found a perfectly rational explanation for this phenomenon:

"According to the law of conservation of homo sapiens in a closed environment like a poster exhibition, the number of people will remain constant through time. Now when a lot of them are clustered at a few points in space, there are bound to be some spatial coordinates where their density is less. And today those coordinates happened to be those which supported me and my poster. Simple, eh ?".

Seriously speaking, I would like to believe that the human density function today was less a reflection of the hideousness of my poster and my obvious academic ineptitude but more a reflection (well, literally) of the eye scorching piece of crap I was wearing in place of a shirt.

For an Indian who has spent the memorable and nostalgic parts of his childhood waking up unwillingly to the sounds of Vande Mataram being played on radio, raag desh should not really be something unheard. This Bankim Chandra's masterpiece is set to the mellifluous tunes of deshraag and although many varieties of the song came during subsequent years, the one that endears to my heart certainly is the original one. Part of the charm of the original track lies in the inherent beauty of raag desh itself. I have started listening to eastern classical music in a pretty engrossed way lately and to say that I have been overwhelmed by the immense beauty and depth of the music would be grossly understating the fact. I would like to believe that I have developed a preliminary understanding of the field but I am certainly not blind enough to claim anything more. Nevertheless, here is my understanding of a raga with special emphasis on raga desh:

I read in a book recently, "To say that a raga consists of notes would be like saying that a painting consists of paints and a poem consists of words". As incomplete as this description is, a raga does consist of a set of notes but that is not even begining to tell the full story. For those who are comfortable with the Indian musical notation, desh raag consists of the following notes:

आरोह (Ascent) :
सा रे म प नि सा'
अवरोह (Descent):
सा' नि(कोमल) ध प म ग रे सा

As can be seen, गंधार (ग) and धैवत (ध) are not used in ascent whereas a flat निशाद (नि) is used in place of शुद्ध नि in descent. If you just play out the आरोह on a keyboard you would be able to make out the underpinnings of Vande Mataram. The beauty of the raga emanates from the various sur combinations in particular the potent role assigned to रिशभ (रे). A raga also outlines some rules or directions in which a set of notes within that raga should be played. These combinations play pivotal roles in evoking the feelings a particular raag is supposed to evoke. Some of these combinations for desh raag are:

रे म प ध म ग रे, प (म ग रे)

रिशभ in this raag serves as the center of melodic gravity. The intonation of ध म ग रे is crucial and (म ग रे) refers to a changing the sur from म to रे in one continuous sweep, just grazing past ग. This can be done only in continuous or stringed instruments like flute or sitar or violin etc. but I am trying my best to replicate the effect on a synthesizer.

रे नि(कोमल) ध नि(कोमल) ध प, रे म प नि, नि, सा', रे', नि(कोमल) ध प, ध म ग रे
सा रे म प नि(कोमल) ध प, रे प म ग रे, (रे)ग, नि सा

I think my limited understanding does not allow me to speak any further in the subject. The only thing I would like to say is that listening to great masters play and playing some of this myself is almost a mystical experience. The beauty of this music can not be described in words and can only be experienced. Unlike western classical, there is a soul to our music, a throbbing life which permeates every composition, a live heart which resonates with every note and I cannot really expound on it enough for it is too personal for lengthy discourses.