The Sun sets over Chennai (17/10/2009)

I was thinking for a few minutes on something clever to start this post with, but as you can see, I am unable to do so. But if you have been loitering here for the past few years, you will know that I am not prone to clever poetry or wordplay. Verbosity passes for wordplay here and so I will just go ahead and say what I want to say.

Right. So, most of you know I have been in Chennai for the past 6 months. Some of you (3 of u, really) have wondered why I am not blogging. Let’s just say that now I have a life. Actually no. I don’t. I am just joking with you. My laptop’s been under the weather and my PC is senile. No really. That’s the truth.

So I landed in Chennai in August and I spent the next month helping the parents prep for the sister’s marriage. Once that happened and the clamor for my plans started increasing in volume with more than one person suggesting that I abandon the US for India.

You see, when I landed, only my sister (amongst my family) & her (then) fiance knew that I had come back for good. So, a week after the wedding the parents were informed of my plans and rather surprisingly, they took it well. Of course the true circumstances and the happenings of the preceding 9 months were not divulged 100%, but luckily they chose to concentrate on the fact that I was now here rather than the circumstances behind the movie. Good for me, I guess.

And then the job hunt started. I had come back to India here without even a hint of a interview opportunity. But I knew I could do something. But the initial responses were rather disheartening with “unconventional resume” being the most common feedback. And about responses from the job-hunt sites, lesser said than better. I got a zillion interview calls for technical writing positions because of the phrase appearing ONCE on my resume with no supporting evidence. On top of it all, the hiring processes seemed slow. It was almost like the openings were really there, but no one was prepared to fill them.

Then a networking opportunity yielded fruit. Two personal interviews and two months after starting to search, I started working in mid November.

Professionally this has been a good 3 months. My commute is exactly 7 mins (door to door) and I have flexible timings. Title-wise, it’s a step down from my project manager position, but visibility wise it is still up there. But more importantly the possibilities for me are endless. While this might sound like one of the spiels of the brainwashed, I can assure you that this is not. After spending the better part of 2009 in an uncertain frame of mind, I have seen enough to know that I am in a good place right now.

Personally though, this has been challenging. The move to India has not been without its struggles mostly domestic in nature. After spending the majority of the past 14 years outside home (barring 2000-2001), it has been a challenge to alleviate the worries that my constantly worrying parents go through. The fact that I am still single gives them additional reasons, though if you ask me, my single status is mostly because of their own insistence/belief structures. That is something I am still coming to terms with. But I try to be patient and understanding. Sometimes I am firm and have to take a stand, but I mostly understand and try to work my way through. But it is still challenging.

Apart from that, I REALLY miss the gang in Jersey, New York and Delaware! I am handicapped by the lack of real life friends that I can just call and hang out with, without having to coordinate over hazaar emails. The friendships I have made in the past few months have been mostly online (you know who you are) and they are all in a fledgling state. My past (over the last year) experience with such friendships has left me a little cynical and so it is going to take some time before I can breathe easy about those. I know some of you think that I am obsessing a little too much about this, but if you had the kind of rocking real life friends I had, I am sure you will appreciate my feeling a little off color.

Apart from that, Chennai has been an awesome experience so far. I’ve been driving a Kinetic Honda borrowed from my cousins all over the place. It’s falling apart and yet keeps up with my need for speed. QFI keeps me occupied every other weekend, and the parents are back to their pre-2001 refrain of “enna quiz quiz nu alayara”. And if I can get to play a sport, anything, cricket, badminton or tennis, I’ll be able to fill up the little empty spaces in my weekly calendar.

So what next?

Now that I am gainfully employed, there are so many things I want to do again. 1. Get a life. 2. READ 3. Revive Blog

The first is a state of mind. I am slow getting there. The second is critical. I was once known as a voracious reader and for the most part of the past 2 years, mostly unread items on my feed reader caught my attention. I am working toward changing that. I have bought more than a few books and am slowly getting through them. Blog revival is happening.

Someone added an item 5 which I wont mention here, but my alternate item 5 would be that I should start taking photographs once again. But, I feel a little more self conscious in Chennai than I used to feel in New York (which was my previous muse, if I may) where every other person is a tourist with a point and shoot.

So that, in a not so small nutshell, has been my life of the past few months. In the future, now that I am back in India, I am going to watch a lot more cricket (just bought tickets for 3 CSK games) and hopefully lot more movies. And hopefully I will read a lot more too. All this means that there will regular posts here. Just you wait.

However while the introduction to the game started early enough, I don’t have any memories of watching actual games then. While I don’t remember watching the World Cup win of ’83 or the WCC win of ’85, I do remember watching the now famous Audi driven around the MCG with every member of the squad in or on it in the TV news clippings.

My first memories of watching an actual game (on TV) is quite fittingly a gripping test match played in Chennai – The Tied Test. I think the excitement of watching the final day’s play with all its turning points, along with a bunch of rabid and yet intelligent fans from the extended family, cemented my interest in the game. Soon I even started having rather vivid cricket dreams – of playing cricket with the likes of Kapil Dev bowling to me on our apartment terrace, with a crocodile infested nook where the forward short leg would normally be (Don’t ask!).

I started reading about cricket voraciously too. I devoured my cousin’s collection of Sportstars repeatedly every evening. I literally believed every word that was written there about Viv Richards’ murderous 110 at St. Johns during England’s ill-fated ’85-86 tour and got into fights after telling people that 12 runs each were given for at least 2 of the 7 sixes that Richards hit that day. I also found my cousin’s hidden copy of a 1983 English season yearbook (including the World Cup) released by Wills, hidden behind his Sportstars. The book interestingly gave me my first look at a nudie pic – a topless woman waving to the cameras from top of a chimney, from where she was watching a county (or was it a World Cup) game.

Around this time I started watching cricket on TV like a maniac. The West Indies tour of India in 1987-88 and the battering India took from the hands of the likes of Pat Patterson and Ian Bishop is fresh, and the heartbreak that was the ’87 World Cup. After Star TV and Prime Sports entered our house around the same time as the ’92 World Cup, there was an hour to be spent every day watching re-runs of the World Cup games, most of which I had seen on live TV too. In the midst of all this, I never once watched a game live at the stadium, at least not until much much later – the 2001 Chennai Test against the Australia!

Since my initiation, I have grown up to be this guy whose first thought, on seeing open spaces, is to plan where the stumps and the boundaries would be. While she hasn’t verbalized it, my mom probably blames herself for it. All my years in school, barring a few months between my 9^th and the 10^th standards (when I was grudgingly allowed to join a coaching program, she relentlessly made efforts to correct her “mistake”. She tried to put one impediment after the other – taking me to work with her during vacations, arranging for violin lessons thrice a week at home in the evening when the other kids were playing. But in spite of all this, I have stayed in love with the game. Not an hour passes without cricket being on my mind, even if it is a fleeting thought.

As most readers know, digression and verbosity are inbuilt features on this blog, but not today. Lunch beckons now. Nevertheless, while I am gone, you can tell us all how your cricket story began. Comments are open. So, will you?

I know I have been awfully silent these past few months. But to quote that BSNL employee who managed to infuriate even the unflappable me last week, past is past. I intend to start regular service on this blog in the next few days once I get past the small task of upgrading WordPress. While there is the small matter of securing gainful employment, I will keep that issue and the related activities in the background like it has been for the most part on this blog.

Here’s to new beginnings…

And in between all this, I (re)discovered Twitter. And I tweeted about all these events.

I was introduced to Twitter in April ’07, before Twitter became what it has now become. After acting like a curmudgeon about it for the most part of 2007 and 2008, I was forced by an ultimatum from certain friends (you know who you are ) to ditch my clever G-Talk status updates [random sample: Dodge Ram: The official truck of the Sangh Parivar (post Tata takeover of Chrysler)] and switch to Twitter instead.

Since then, it’s been Twitter and thankfully my mother (I had to explain every single clever GTalk status, killing the joke in the process) is not on it and so it has been good. I have totally warmed up to Twitter and don’t seem to have any time to blog. Actually I do have *lots* of time to blog, but I totally lack the enthu and for a change it is not laziness that is the reason. All I can say here and now is that, while the reasons are rather private, I will be back for good, soon. Hopefully.

But in the meantime, i don’t want this space to be idle. My closest friends have, in the past year, heard me lament about how I don’t read *books* any more. The past year or so, blogs (and other online media) have slowly started dominating my reading time and I want to change this status quo. Besides, my (virtual) book case is overflowing with books that I have picked up and have not read at all.

So when a friend pointed me to a 20 Books in 2009 challenge, I decided to take it up. For a lot of you, it is probably not a challenge at all, but for someone like me who wants to kickstart a reading habit again, it is a worthy challenge, I think. So to start the challenge, I cheated. Yup! Conveniently I picked up the shortest book available closeby to start out the challenge.

One of the rules of this 20in2009 challenge is that I have to track the books I read with a blog post/separate page. That offers me an avenue to update this blog. I am making it interesting planning to add my own challenge too. Since I am tweeting mostly these days, I want to limit these reviews fit the Twitter character limit, i.e. to 140 characters and post them on my Twitter stream too. One second thoughts, I don’t think a 140 character tweet can do justice to a book review. So, what say, I do 55-worders instead?

Look out for the review later tonight. Needless to say, the reviews will be irreverant (which means I’ll sound dumb, actually), so don’t bother using my reviews to feed your (non-existent) reading habit.

My musical journey began when I was about 6 years old, when amma dragged me by the ear to Iyengar maama ((Iyengar maama, my first guru was our neighbor. He was also the father/guru of this man, known to many as Ilayaraja’s lead violinist and a fine composer in his own right.)) and requested him to give me violin lessons. I think it all began when I once came home bleeding after taking a stone to my forehead. So amma was forced to do something to keep me off the streets while she was at work.  And that was how I started going to Iyengar maama’s house every evening (or was it every other evening) while the other kids continued their stupid game of “catch the stone before it becomes part of your face”. My violin lessons continued till when I was 16, when amma decided that I should study for my boards ((I haven’t played the violin since then, apart from a Absolut fuelled session in ’05, and my cousin has since inherited my old western violin that amma bought used from her colleague)). If only she knew.

But even after a decade of learning classical music, I still cannot remember the names of ragas, let alone misidentify them. I used to think that I wasted 10 years of my life on violin lessons when I could have better spent the time perfecting my straight drive or my doosra ((Honestly, I can really claim neither to be part of my repertoire)).

And then a couple of weeks ago, I had my own epiphany. I was talking to someone who said she had learnt the Bharatanatyam for over 8 years and had gone through the arangetram phase, but *hates* dancing and had gone through the whole rigmarole only because her parents wanted her to. I could sympathize with her, but I realized something.

I don’t hate music by any measure. I am always humming or singing something, much to the irritation of people around me. And I am able to catch subtle similarities sometimes between musical pieces that I quite proudly point out to people (my latest catch is this ad, which sounds so much like this song). I realize now that while I hated the time I spent learning the violin, I now regret that I did not pay attention. For quite sometime I was extremely bitter at amma for forcing me into something that I did not have any interest in, but now I know better. The poor thing was only try to do what she could to keep me out of trouble.

Makes me wonder what if. But then, I think it all evens out when I realize I have had 6 teachers in the 10 years I spent learning. And I have had breaks ranging from a few months to a year whenever there was a transition from one master to the other. And on top of all that, I have had to pretty much start from scratch every time I changed teachers. Every teacher I had (barring the first one and the last one) was of the opinion that his predecessor was crap. Little did they know that the pupil was the culprit.

However, I have to look at the positves. My basics are obviously strong, thanks to the umpteen number of times that the basic lessons were repeated. So, while the sarali and janta varisai pages in the Ganamrutha Bodhini are dog-eared and almost disintegrating, certain other pages are in mint condition.

But it was fun all the same, with the Jones Beach Air Show and the Brooklyn Bridge featuring predominantly in the adventures from the weekend.

… and we will use it like the biggest stage in the world and shout our hearts out.

Without any further ado, presenting…. Ashok!

This post is not about callipygian features. It’s about allegiances and disappointment, specifically my allegiance to the the Old Lady of Mount Road and the disappointment resulting from reading her newest stable-mate.

There was a point, even after I came to the US that The Hindu was the place I’d go first for my news, soon after I walked into the lab in Ohio. And you could argue that I lost my fan-boy like blind following when I found a report in The Hindu about a “100 days” celebratory event for Saamy.

Then, sometime last year I found out that The Hindu had a new stable-mate. This paper, Ergo, is circulated apparently in an “all-color format” and has been described (on its website) as a free sheet targeted at young, salaried professionals of Chennai initially “targeting the IT corridor”. I found that the web edition had a proper RSS feed and almost immediately I added it to my Google Reader feeds.

Then suddenly, the feeds stopped and started again after a gap of a couple of months.But from the feeds, I think that the content leaves much to be desired. With headlines such as “Nicole Kidman poses nude for magazine“, “Jordan set for fifth boob job“, “Christina Aguilera back in shape” and “Gemma Molloy off to party with Hefner“, it looks like Ergo is positioning itself as a supermarket tabloid or what could pass off as one in Namma Chennai.

First thing, who is Gemma Molloy? Apparently she is an Australian model. And Michael Jordan has man boobs? And Cuba, did you get an eyeful of his Airness’s man boobs when you did all those commercials for Hanes? Oh, they are talking about Katie Price? Whew!

Jokes apart, it looks like most of the entertainment news is recycled trash from TMZ or Perez Hilton. Not that there is anything wrong with it, but what’s the point of doing it in Chennai? What’s the core value that this “tabloid” is shooting for? Dumbed down news to the email forward creating, fast food chomping BPO types? Now that would sound like a sound business plan to my father. To me, going by what I see online, it seems like the editorial team’s priorities are muddled.

I am not sure if Page 3 Australian celebrities are worth newsprint acreage in India. I am not sure even Hollywood page 3 celebs are worth it. Wait, am I wrong? Do people in India really care if Kim Kardashian took a public shower in a bikini top and a sarong, which the people from thesuperficial.com very kindly brought to my attention last week (I have thesuperficial in my feed reader, solely for the illuminating commentary about Amy Winehouse’s skin ailments, honest!).

If recycled trash was the first thing that strikes me, the last straw is this gallery that showed up on the Ergo feed today. It made me do a double take and wonder if this was a feed from Ergo or one of those Kollywood type websites that post publicity photos from movies that never get made publicity photos that almost always show skin. You know, the one’s that make you think later that the pictures were probably from one of those movies that ended up as soft porn?

I went back and looked at the About page and found this line -

The team was handed total editorial freedom, with just two riders: to follow the “rule of the land”; and keep a check on issues pertaining to taste.

Well, there is no law that prevents “galleries” such as the one that I linked above, but I thought it was in poor taste for a publication that is a stable-mate of The Hindu.

The website itself looks like it is still in beta, though a footnote in the About page indicates to the contrary. For quite sometime (when the feeds weren’t being updated), on the main page, the link to their feeds took me to The Hindu’s main page. The section naming doesn’t make sense (Featured story 1 and Featured story 2?). This Podcast link leads to nowhere, though there are podcasts available (there is an error in the WordPress category id used in that link). Frankly looking at all of this, I think the beta testing was a sham and the design looks amateurish.

I would be willing to look past the website because I am willing to make the assumption that this was intended to be an offline till someone decided that they should have a web presence. It is stupid to give the online edition step-motherly treatment, but India being India, I guess that happens.

However considering that the website design is credited to a company owned by someone who is considered by many as a doyen among Chennai bloggers and that the “Editor, Publisher and Printer” for Ergo used to be a notable Chennai blogger at one point (if it’s the same person!), I am appalled.

Even then, if someone tells me that the offline version is better, I’d be inclined to believe. The restaurant reviews in the Saapad subsection are pretty informative, considering that I haven’t lived in Chennai for sometime. The Lifestyle section has had some interesting articles that make for nice light reading. And the Entrepreneurs sub section that aims to bring new business models into the open is a brilliant idea.

So if all of those articles (that I read and appreciated in the online version) found a place in the offline paper, then it is all good. However my visibility is limited to the online format alone and frankly if I were to go solely on the basis of this underwhelming online evidence, Ergo is doomed. While I want to root AGAINST that, I don’t think I will win that bet.