Siddhachal (n.): First few days of a new calendar year when one keeps writing the wrong date on cheques, diaries, bills and the like.

Finished Rising Sun by Michael Crichton on my long drawn thirteen hour journey to Bombay. As a story it blew, but the take on Japanese business strategy and the American fear of the industrial might and lobbying power of Japan was pretty interesting.

It’s been almost six months since I’ve been home. Six months since I’ve seen my dad who worked so hard all these years to make sure I get everything I ever wanted. Six months since I’ve met my mom for whom I have been the center of her universe since I was born. Six months since I have set foot on the city that made me what I am, and its local trains and bambaiya and its vadapav. Six months since I met friends with whom I grew up playing gully cricket and went to music lessons with. Six months since I have felt really loved or cared for.

Six months is not a big stretch of time, by any standards. But I know this is only going to increase. Money and success, in their varied avatars, will continue giving me reasons to run the rat race. But is it going to mean letting go of the past, its million wonders, the magic of memories and naive nostalgia? I hate it when people become memories, and memories become nonchalance. And I hate to live with single serving friends and relationships and having to search for those special moments in my everyday.

Anyhoo. I will be in Bombay from 25th December to 5th January. Landing on 24th midnight, ekdum Santa Claus ishtyle. Hope to catch up with everyone.

Music lovers all over the world, lend me your ear. For just this post, I mean. I had a tough time locating good freeware for the pod, and now that I have a set of good open source software/ freeware, I share with you, thus reducing some of your googling time.

Tux on the Pod

ipodlinux. Linux for the iPod. Already completely ported for the first 4 generations of pods, expected soon for 5.5, Classic, iTouch et al.

Features: Linux ported to the pod, File explorer (Podzilla), Themes, Applications, Games, Emulators, and yes of course, Media Player for your music and videos. Online support.

Saywha?: Make your older Nano models play videos. Too bored? try a game of Chess or lets say, Doom on the pod. Or maybe use the Metronome for your guitar practice. It’s open source, so a thousand applications continuously being developed.

Juke it up

Rockbox. The open source jukebox for the ipod. Available for 1st through 5.5th generation iPod, iPod Mini and 1st generation iPod Nano (not the Shuffle, 2nd/3rd gen Nano, Classic or Touch), and a variety of non-Apple music players as well.

Features: An awesome media player (includes gain level, next track info, incredibly loud output, detailed equalizer), access songs stored through iTunes in the pod database, Themes, Applications, Games. Copy-paste music into the pod (without iTunes) and play music from directory directly. Again, open-source, hence a never-ending resource of applications being developed.

Saywha?: No more conversion of your mp3s. Copy and play. Quite an intuitive interface and the sound quality, according to me, easily gives the iPod OS a run for its money. And add to that many other apps and games. I’m currently using it, and am thoroughly impressed.

Goodbye iTunes

Yamipod / Floola. Freeware replacements for iTunes (which is also freeware, I know). Run a lot faster. Look the same, behave the same, (I’m inclined to believe Yamipod and Floola are different brands or versions of the same product. Dunno for sure) and make updating, syncing and loading the pod a breeze.

Features: Copy music to and from the ipod. Update artwork, lyrics and pretty much do everything one would do with iTunes on a day-to-day basis.

Saywha?: No installation required. Standalone software. Very light freeware that does what it says. Easy extraction of music from the pod.

Will keep you updated as I discover more such wonderful programs.

(2 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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Now, now. Wipe that drool off your face. And let me frustrate you (men and women alike) even more by mentioning a minor fact. That this woman has a PhD from Harvard in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, is a Junior Fellow, and leads research on Cancer. And yea, she’s 25.

&@!##!@.

Was going through the Freakonomics Blog, and this headline caught my eye. And then the lady, Franziska Michor more than caught my eye. You need to come across such people once a while to remind thyself of the utter insignificance of what thy has apparently achieved. Frickin’ hell. And I’ve had enough of all those child prodigies, tween American Idols and Cancer-curing 25 year-olds. What ever happened to all the normal people in the world?

I love to write. To imagine that a thousand people are going to read my opinions, be so wowed and overwhelmed by the presence of an infinitely superior mind and perspective. To think that they will be amazed at what clarity and alacrity one can possess about things high and sundry on this planet.

Just that I have not exhibited any such perspicacious intellectual atrocities (yet), and more importantly, I just don’t write enough.

Let me explain. Every day, from two minutes before I wake up to the end of my shower, I have a hajjar thoughts vying for attention, and claiming to be blog-worthy (Yea, I know. It’s a sad life when everything is accosted with a question “Can I write a blog about that?”, but that’s what most of us are thinking. Gone are the good old days when all woman-kind could think of was shopping, and all man-kind could think of was the aforementioned woman-kind completely bereft of the clothes they were vehemently shopping for). But the moment I step out of the shower, Zoop! Nothing. Zilch. Nada. The writer’s block hits me like a quintal of bricks and I’m out for the day.

While I go through my day zombed by data and its many idiosyncrasies, and people and their many more idiosyncrasies; sarcastic comments, ideas, even complete short stories revisit me from the time in the shower. But alas! I’m busy working and too frickin’ lazy to do anything about them. Can’t tell you how many blog-worthy stories have been lost because of not having a pen attached to the toilet paper roll. (Nope. Don’t even try to imagine. Do NOT bother).

Waited for weekend trips to get good pictures. Collected good topics so that one fine day (ONE FINE DAY) I can write about them. Tried picking stuff from work. After work. My brain ran out of disk space. Still too lazy.

So I decided. To just write. About nothingness. Even that seems blog-worthy now. Ha! to you.

(1 votes, average: 4 out of 5)

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Cleopatra Stratan is the name. Must be three years old. Or maybe four. Sings with an amazing clarity in lyrics and notes. Dunno if its a good recording studio and a father who’s a marketing genius, or a little girl who loves to sing and can pull of such songs. Any which way, I enjoyed the song. So will you.

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Books, Books. Just finished Haunted. Re-reading Asimov’s Foundation. Finished The Kite Runner week before last. Half-way through The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (for the nth time) and Malgudi Days.

How many of us feel, time and again, that books that were made into movies later, were much better in print than the celluloid version? LOTR is one that sorta does justice to the book’s fantasy world, but that apart, invariably, books portray brilliant imagination with a vividness that surprises me time and again.

The difference, as one can understand, is that in books, most of the story-building is left to the reader. The boundless imagination of a million minds embellishes each printed manuscript with its own world, its own aura of an existence. Whereas in a movie, visuals, sounds, and experiences are defined by us, by the director, who also happens to decide the pace of consumption of the story.

As humans, stories inherently hold us spell-bound. And here’s something I chanced upon in the Afterword section of Chuck Palahniuk’s Haunted:

A book is as private and as consensual as sex. A book takes time and effort to consume - something that gives the reader every chance to walk away.

A book is about slow consumption, reflection and construction, of an edifice that exists brick by brick, only in your mind; that only you can visit, experience and enjoy. Won’t take more from the Afterword, and yea, this is one book definitely NOT for the weak-hearted. But I loved it all the same, for its creativity. For the way, it kept me hooked, in spite of being one of the grossest books I’ve read.

(No Ratings Yet)

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A delicate dance of nature captured in still life. Singapore, October 2007.

Click to enlarge.

(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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