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.

I realized that I was closing in upon a milestone. By the time this post is online, it will be 5 years since I started blabbering. My first post was posted on Blogger on the 10th of February, 2003. And barring a few months early on and around 100 days in late ’04 and early ’05, I have been posting rather regularly.

Looking at Lekhni’s tag, I realized that she had given me a good chance to take a retrospective look and to reminisce upon these five years gone by. But the problem with my blog is that, as my erstwhile tagline (( I have an ever-changing tagline now, courtesy Twitter?)) goes, it is the record of an egoist’s road trip through life with cricket, music, books, cars and movies for company.

Which means that this blog is about me and me alone. So, as the days go by, it becomes increasingly difficult to remember the odd posts that one has “written” relating to some of the keywords of this tag. Also, the difficulty is compounded by the fact that I took an oath, with myself as witness, that I wouldn’t post anything personal here. So the odd heartbreak has almost never found an outlet here, even if some friends (both online and IRL) have heard me obsess over it.

I have come to a conclusion that wherever I think I won’t be able to fit within the confines of the tag, I will bend the boundaries to my whims and fancies. Hey, this is MY blog and I do what I think is right. Also, my ego prevents me from sticking to the “1 post per keyword” rule of this tag. I will hence go ahead and regurgitate multiple links wherever possible. But let me just make the basic rules clearer to everyone.

The rules of the tag are: Post 5 links to 5 of your previously written posts. The posts have to relate to the 5 key words given (family, friend, yourself, your love, anything you like). Tag 5 other friends to do this meme. Try to tag at least 2 new acquaintances (if not, your current blog buddies will do) so that you get to know them each a little bit better.

Family: As far as family is concerned, my mom offers the single largest (potential) inspiration for posts on this blog, but I haven’t posted much in this regard. Anyways, as much as I denied it then, this post had its genesis in a phone conversation with my mom.

Friends: I think I will use this keyword as a chance to link to a couple of 55 word shorts. This short is about a short lived friendship. Here is another I wrote about what will intrigue some of my vetti friends.

Yourself: The majority of this blog is about me and my overblown ego. I am tempted to link to some of my “infamous” posts here (tulips/volcano, anyone? Or the silly photo meme?). But I have other plans.

Two years ago, I put up an “accomodation wanted post” that the aforementioned vetti friends hijacked and converted into a post that screamed “Looking for a Significant Other” post. Occupied as I was in my worries about finding an apartment and settling into a new job, I edited that post to make it sound less frivolous. But later, seeing where they were coming from and the fact that it did sound like a matrimonial ad, I recovered the post and put it into a private vault, not wanting to lose anything I wrote.

Until today, that is. So here it is – in an unedited, “directors cut” format, my appeal for shared accommodation in the Parsippany / Rockaway area.

Your Love: I don’t know if people realized this. But I started blogging because of cricket and the fact that Rediff and Cricinfo stopped accepting pieces from guest authors. My posts as a guest author/columnist in these portals were perhaps my earliest attempts at putting my thoughts into paper, barring a few emails that I sent to friends from time to time.

So without my ado, here are my earliest Cricinfo contributions to the Writer in You section -

1. About the continued exclusion of Sadagopan Ramesh in March ’02

2. About the test match at Lords in August ’02

3. Thoughts about the first day of India West Indies test match at Bourda in April ’02.

And my contribution to Rediff as a guest author -

1. Musings about the win at Port of Spain in April ’02.

Apart from these, I’m going to link to a pair of long posts about my favorite cricketing pet peeve – The BCCI. These posts (part 1 and part 2), though a couple of years old ring true even now. I also believe that India needs to look at a core competency model for its selection policies, though positive changes seem to have come through in these past couple of years. And lastly this post about playing cricket with a scientific calculator.

Anything I like: I am romantically challenged, but even then I have a soft corner for this post of mine, a what-if tale of romance, from the perspective of a member of the vehiculum futbolus genetrix family. As I do for this one – about PTC/MTC buses in Chennai.

Another interest of mine is movies, so here are a couple – this post about one of my favorite movies, and this one about the general state of Bollywood. I have also pontificated in the past about dancing my heart out – Here and here. Lastly, I dont think this tag will not be complete without this cooking type post.

But before I leave, I have to apparently tag 5 bloggers whose blogs I love to read. Seems like two of them have to be new acquaintaces. Hmmm, let’s see.

In keeping with the trend on this post, I will cheat and tag 7 bloggers instead. I will tag – Smugbug, Arun, Pri, Megha, DoZ, Missus Em and Max Da Vinci.

A couple of these people haven’t posted recently and that’s never good. So I believe this retrospective look will spur them on. Particularly, Megha, whose latest anniversary post was such a cop out! Yo, Can we get a real post now? And DoZ, if you want, I will look away if you include your posts from Stochastica as well.

There, DONE!

Whew, five years is such a long time. But I am not done yet. Keep coming back and please do leave a comment or two everytime. Thanks to Lekhni for this opportunity. Came at the right time and I can’t think of a better way to usher in a new blogging year.A new template would have perhaps been perfect icing to this cake.But thanks to a brain freeze by yours truly, it was not to be. Ah well. Life’s not perfect, either.

And in other news, I seem to have been tagged again. Guruprasad’s tagged me to write about “non-important things/habits/quirks about yourself”. Now that is quite an impossible task because the blog does not have anything else apart from non-important things/habits/quirks about me and 480 odd posts is a large number to wade through.

In fact I think that this blog’s the single biggest reason that I am still single, because so much dirt on me can be got with a simple google search. So I have decided that I won’t muddy the waters any more. Can you excuse me, Sir?

My dirty secret is something that will probably earn condemnation from most of my friends. Some will smile and make polite public noises about how it is all fine and yet privately swear off any association with me in the future. Maybe my inbox will be flooded with emails with “WTF” on their subjects. Maybe people that I haven’t spoke to in years will call and pray to get my voice mail because they don’t want nothing to do with me and yet are forced by social pressures to commiserate with my less than perfect life now.

Such is my probable fate, a fate certainly not pre-ordained, but one that I brought upon myself. You see, ladies and gentlemen, I was once a die hard fan of Shah Rukh Khan. And most inconveniently, that piece of history seems to have come back, ready to bite me on my posterior if I don’t come clean now. Because, lately, even with these historical misgivings and in spite of the revulsion that the infamous 6-pack evokes, I have been doubting my decision to disavow any affiliation with the name Rahul and the most (in)famous bearer of the name.

My induction into the Shah Rukh fan-boy circle happened about a dozen years ago. Being a student in a school favored by the Punju and Marwari crowd in Chennai gave me the unique experience of being in a “indhi” group in a city that was staunchly “anti-indhi”. Even though one’s parents were staunchly against any contact with corrupting influences such as movies, one always managed to catch the most recent superhit “indhi padams” via rental VHS camera prints.

It was via one such VHS tape that one first caught a glimpse of Shah Rukh Khan. Baazigar was not his first on screen stint, but it was certainly his best at that time. Soon he had become the resident psychopath of Bollywood. But he also spoke his lines in a manner more befitting an ass, braying his lines again and again when just a whisper could have done the job. Not that it mattered to his adoring fan-boys ((Not sure if murdering psychopaths are “attractive” to potential fan girls)) like me.

May be it was a conscious attempt to establish a strikingly obvious attribute of the kind that set apart the likes of yesteryear Bollywood heart-throbs like Dev Anand, but it was definitely an attempt that hit the bulls eye. Even now, more than a decade later, his lines have gotten so much following that rumor has it that they may have helped people win JAM contests (in Hindi) at IIM(L) ((Sources in the know, please clarify if its true!)).

Then almost overnight, the psycho-boy underwent metamorphosis into the lover boy and the fan girls took over. And the fan-boys tried to ape the lover boy to get the attention of the fan girls. Even in the farming hinterlands of Tamilnadu, we were not free from his influences. So whether the general populace knew Hindi or not, “Kuchikuchiotha aye” and “Dhilthopaakal aye” were avidly watched.

One was so much of a fan-boy that conscious attempts were made to model one’s wardrobe after his. Pastel shades started to find favor and I think at one point, you could see me walking from half mile away with my fluroscent green and orange tennis hats. And then there was the famous “COOL” chain (( It was substituted from time to time by the oversized metal “bling bling” pilfered from a piece of imitation jewellery that been discarded by my sister. But let’s not go into that.)).

It appeared magically on my neck wore it soon after I got on to the KPN bus to Trichy and disappeared soon after the bus stopped at Tambaram on my way back for the holidays. In the intervening period inside the college, the chain was carefully hidden away from prying eyes and let out during opportunities befitting its stature as the “coolest” fashion accessory.

And then one day, it inadvertently popped out in the presence of a teacher, who asked me about it. Embarrassed, I stayed silent, till a girl who was standing by, volunteered to explain what it was. Everyone else laughed and needless to say, the “cool” fashion accessory was rendered un-cool and soon discarded.

I became more discreet from then on and while movies like Yes Boss and Duplicate were watched multiple times, deniability became the name of the game. While privately his antics were enjoyed and aped, publicly I denounced him for taking every chance to hold his hands apart and go “hhhheyyyyy”. Slowly I really became a hater. The fact that he was a Yash Raj – KJo staple made it simpler.

By 2001, when I came to Ohio, the change was seemingly permanent. Watching Devdas cemented the sense that I had outgrown my fan boy status. It seemed like he was incapable of even swatting a fly without the “hhhheyyyy”. And slowly I stopped watching his movies. Movies like Swadesh did not do much to change my self imposed embargo since they seemed outliers on an overwhelmingly negative statistical curve.

Then a couple of months ago someone pointed me to the most recent Shah Rukh Khan soundtrack – Om Shanti Om. Watching Saturday morning desi tv here in NJ, one found out that Om Shanti Om was going to be Farah Khan’s second directorial venture and that Shah Rukh Khan was going to appear topless in a song, and attempt to emulate Salman (and dirty coal miners). Outwardly I groaned. But soon a sense of déjà vu washed over me.

You see, in one of my pseudo intellectual moods a few years ago, I had vowed not to watch Farah Khan’s directorial debut Main Hoon Naa. Mainly because I had heard that the climax had incorporated a chase sequence with Shah Rukh on a rickshaw with the bad guys in a car. However later, when I finally watched the movie, I ended up eating humble pie because I enjoyed the experience so much. And I was similarly confused for months later.

Fast forward a couple of years, I watched Om Shanti Om a few days ago. Now I am torn between pseudo intellectual hatred for what is essentially entertainment and being the fan-boy that is hidden inside me. Through the movie, I was humming along with the songs and laughing out aloud at the gags. I will clarify that I was offended by the “Enna Rascal-a” gag that draws its vibes from the preconceived notions about South Indians that have been established by yesteryear actors like Mehmood. But at the end of the movie I wanted to get an encore of some of the scenes and at least one song ((NOT THAT outrageous “ewww” inducing number.)).

I am confused. Am I going to be ostracized by my friends for coming out the closet as a Shah Rukh Khan fan-boy? Will people end conversations about me with a “not that there is anything wrong with it”? Will that hot Tamil gal who flashed a smile at the local grocery store last week frown and turn her face away this week? Will my already thread bare social life take a turn for the worst? So many questions. So much confusion.

Jokes apart, the biggest question I really have is – while I have been laughing at Shah Rukh these past few years, has Shah Rukh Khan been laughing with me too?
[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

Sometime during the week, I had a brainwave. I realized that all I needed to do to solve my IE display issues was a “switch and reload”operation with my updated template php files and with those of the virgin KKP Light template that I re-downloaded. And last night, once I started, I realized that the index.php was the file that was corrupted. I went into the index.php and started doing the switcheroo with the internal code bits and voila, within minutes I had a winner.

It appears that the “the_category” WordPress tag was causing the issues. I had the tag set up to display all the categories associated with a post along with a small gif (in the background, set up via the style sheet). For some reason, Firefox rendered the tag perfectly. I kept making changes in the tag’s parameters (separator and parents) and while Firefox had no trouble, IE kept failing everytime. So, with no other option available, I deleted the tag. I have a faint idea that this is also related to my aborted attempt to upgrad WP to 2.2, last Saturday. Before that fiasco, this tag was working perfectly for about 6 months or so.

Soon after solving this issue, I realized that my banners were not being displayed. I have a collection of banners (in case you haven’t noticed before) that keep rotating automatically when you reload the page, based on the “rotator.php” file. And now this is broken.

The only code I have on my “header.php” for the banner rotation is this bit.

<div id=”header”>
</div>

And this “header” is defined in my CSS like this.

#header {
height:126px;
width:700px;
/*random header images from http://automaticlabs.com/products/rotator*/
background-image:url(images/headers/rotator.php);
background-position:top right;
background-repeat:no-repeat;
}

So, for some reason, “rotator.php” has stopped working. For the record, I did not do any edits of any sort to the file in the past 10 months. I mean, it was working perfectly before last Saturday. Do the geeks have any ideas for this php/css/anything other than basic HTML n00b?

I am not a rabid hit-counter. But I have received close to 25K visits (and more than 50K pageviews) in the last 10 months since I moved to my own domain. So when the built-in reports from the WP Google Analytics plugin informed me that no one had come to my blog on the 16th of May, I was certainly taken aback. And now I see that apparently there were just 3 hits on my blog yesterday (the 17th of May). That is certainly not a cause of alarm, for sometimes even I wonder why I get the hits I get usually. But having having said that, like any other self respecting blogger, I do care for incoming links.

Since I moved, I have been getting around 80 hits a day on an average (and 2 to 3 times more when posts got a DP mention). And in the last few days, I know have been linked on itwofs, the tfmpage forums and PutVote, three popular sites on different levels. That why it stuck me as odd yesterday (when I looked at my Google Analytics report), that I had not gotten ANY hits (and ergo no page-views) on my blog at all the day before. That made me really curious to see what caused such a drastic drop.But I then realized that my WP admin page has been showing links from PutVote through yesterday. Now I am starting to think that there was a glitch of some sort. Has anybody else noticed anything like this?

Update: The problem still continues. No more zero hits, but I have seen 56 hits on two (three if I believe my WP Reports plugin) consecutive days. That still bugs me because it is still lower than my average and identical number hits on consecutive days should raise a flag anyways. And in addition, there seem to be discrepancies between the numbers shown on Analytics’s new interface (which perhaps not coincidentally was introduced widely last week) and the older interface that is still available .

But more and more people are noticing similar trends on their sites. The thread that I started in the Troubleshooting section on the Analytics Help Google group on 5/18 is seeing some activity and there are a couple more similar threads open now. I am guessing that as the new interface is rolled out to more and more people, these problems will become more widespread.

What is however disconcerting is the fact that there seems to be no response whatsoever from Google. It’s almost one week now since it happened, so is it too early to expect a response? Are they even aware of this bug? And is it even a bug?

Way to go Oz bhai! Looking forward to seeing more of your work on print.

I’m flattered, considering the state I was in when I wrote the post at 3 am this morning.

• Confessional first post…
• The carnival begins…
• The carnival begins – part deux
• Cricket’s most momentous day – The St. Patrick’s Day massacre
• India vs Srilanka and the group of death… (*new*)