It’s been a year in Singapore. One very eventful, enriching, happening year where I learnt a lot, made many friends and most importantly, opened my mind in ways more than one.

More of all that later. Just recalled the musical events that I was fortunate enough to catch in the past year:

Kailash Kher: Live in Concert. What a voice, and what an attitude. “People ask me why I do not have extras and dancers in my concerts. I’m here for my music, I just want my music to do the talking. And that will get me my fans and admirers.” Touche!

Dream Theatre: The doyens of Progressive Metal. With the best drummer in the world (No one handles double bass better than Portnoy) and one of the best guitarist (Petrucci) and bassist (Myung), this band that has its genesis in Berklee College of Music is an experience, live. (I hate the lead singer though. Sounds like the bastard child of a tom-cat and a banshee. Anyhew.)

Mandolin U Srinivas: Boy oh boy! The god of Carnatic Mandolin was here. And he was divine. Period. The ragams are a part of him now, they run in his veins. And his fingers do more than his bidding, to say the least. Never heard Carnatic ragams jump out and tease my ears as I did that evening.

Shubha Mudgal: Whatay voice! And this wasn’t even her belting out raags. Just plain old Surdas and Meera Bhajans. But splendidly delectable, every one of her songs.

Harini: A regular concert, nothing too impressive. But good, nevertheless.

Hyderabad Brothers: Enna tavam (Kapi) still gives me goosebumps.

We Will Rock You: Have already written about this mother of all concerts here. ‘Nuf said :)

(2 votes, average: 3 out of 5)

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Poignancy. As the name says; moving, emotional, a feeling that reverberates a sadness, a plea, almost.

Composed 2 weeks ago. Comments welcome.

Download here.

(3 votes, average: 4.67 out of 5)

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Buzz marketing has been around for a while now, but I would like to point out one of the best examples I have seen in recent time.

HP along with Buzzcorps launched a campaign for the launch of the HP HDX Dragon Notebook PC. Very simple campaign, where one had to take part in a simple contest, answer a few questions and win one of these swanky powerful machines for free.

The brilliance of the campaign is not in the concept. Nothing new in that. The secret here is not the ‘what’ or the ‘how’ of the launch. It’s in the focused needle-pointed choice of the ‘where’.

Blogging, tech opinions and gadget acceptance is driven by opinion leaders (lead users, as we know them). These are the people who try new software, new plugins, new platforms, and are the beta-testers and alpha-testers who are always one step ahead and in the know.

Knowing this only too well, the campaign (called 31 days of the Dragon, www.31daysofthedragon.com) was launched in all the key influencing sites (31 of the best read blogs / online tech guides / product review guerillas) and the sites have different interesting tasks (from answering simple questions to posting a video of the existing PC on Youtube). Makes sure that the big guns write about the new PC, makes the visitors participate in hordes, and makes them talk about this to hell lot more people.

In short, pin-point, textbook, buzz marketing. Well executed and well noticed.

p.s: Buzzcorps was started by ex-AMD PR guy Chris Aaron who specializes in blog buzz marketing and influencer marketing. Nice niche to live in, at the moment :)

(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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I usually don’t blog about food or my foodie outings, but this Saturday was an exception. A fricking mindblowing stomach gratifying monster of an exception.

Let me put things in perspective. A week of ok-ish food, and a very early and miniscule dinner on Friday evening left me with a craving for a good meal, desi-style on Saturday morning. (North-Indian, South-Indian, whatever-Indian. Doesn’t matter). And when two of my friends made a plan to go restaurant-hopping in Little India in search for a good meal, I was already smacking my lips and heading right to nearest taxi stand.

After a mistaken try at a shabby restaurant named Gokul (not worth going into details, let me jump to the more important parts here), we sauntered into this quiet south Indian place named Madras Woodlands. Not too much of a groundbreaking name, I’d say, but the food was oh-my-gawd awesome! All of us hungry souls straightaway went for the unlimited meals, and we were in session.

A tangy start with a vettha-kozhambu (spicy and hot sambar variety), with veggies, appalams (popadams) and steaming rice to boot, followed by the mullangi (radish) sambar cooked to the right tenderness; then came the fragrant rasam and more mounds of rice. The grand finale was when after a nice bowl of payasam I was just digging into my curd rice, and the waiter came and dropped mor-moloagais (chilli peppers soaked in buttermilk, dried and then fried). By god, that was a stroke of genius! and I’m totally sold on the restaurant.

After the humongous lunch, we all had to go back and rest for the afternoon. The food had gotten the better of us, and we all woke up and decided to meet for, wait for it, here it comes, a dinner meal :D

This time it was Gult food at Sankranti. The restaurant had opened only two weeks before, and since the four of us were in mood for experimentation, we repeated the sauntering and ordering of four unlimited meals. And this time, it was full steam, hot and spicy Andhra fare, no holds barred. Each one of us topped about seven courses: Masala rice, followed by Gongura, Allam, Podi (Gunpowder plus ghee), Pappu (dal), Charu (Andhra rasam), Perugannam (curd rice). After stacking empty plates and cups, we polished the meal off with a mango and left the poor waiter and manager in wide eyed bewilderment. (I’m lovin it!)

Even though none of us had the energy nor the inclination to even move after that meal, the experience was worth every morsel of rice that we demolished. To those who planned to have pizza / noodles / chinese indian / naan sabji on that day, can please go sit on their respective thumbs and watch us dig into another mound of rice. Or join in.

Next weekend, destination Mumbai Makaan and its steaming vadapavs. Yum!

p.s: Also caught a gult movie after the double meal ordeal (just for the heck of it), which was called Vivaha Bhojanam (Marriage Food) and hence the title of this post. Quite a befitting end to the day, I say!

[image source: www.sailusfood.com]

(7 votes, average: 4.71 out of 5)

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What an evening, and whatay performance. I caught the last Singapore show of We Will Rock You (also known as WWRY), a musical by Queen and Ben Elton, based on Queen songs. Just one word to describe the experience: mind-blowing (no, it’s not two words. It one hyphenated word).

The storyline, the cast, the history are all wiki-able. But the experience was beyond any live performance I’ve seen in perfection, fidelity, energy and the heavenly music. I am a huge fan of Queen, and this was a dynamite package that left me begging for more.

Brilliant performances by the live band, with almost all of Queen’s hits, and I couldn’t care less about the slightly below par story-line. The grand finale with ‘We will rock you’ and ‘Bohemian Rhapsody‘ performed as an encore played a fitting end to a tribute to one of the best rock bands ever.

Thank God I walked into the ticket counter at Orchard and bought the ticket on a last minute impulse. It’s been 2 days and my pod is still looping Queen songs :D

(And in case you are wondering, Galileo Figaro and Scaramoush are words from Bohemian Rhapsody and the names of lead characters in WWRY).

Imagine a situation where you are dumbfounded by a very simple question, that too in front of a million people. Something even a kid with basic education could have answered. What does one do in such an embarrassing position? Grin and bear the shame, and try to learn better or get booed by the audience, or get thrown out of a job? And what happens when a nation has many such illiterates who need immediate re-education? Do you raise a nation-wide alarm and focus all energies on re-jigging your education system?

Hell NO. One makes a TV Show out of it. Called ‘Are you smarter than a Fifth Grader?’, where adults with fully developed brains are stumped by questions that 10 year olds have answered even before the question is finished. And then you coolly walk away with 50 grand in your pocket for accepting that you are, in fact, not smarter than a fifth grader.

The first time I saw it was when I was flipping channels and the ‘#1 game show in American TV’ caught my attention. And when I saw a woman wrong guessing which hemisphere North America was in (to be corrected by a 9 year old and win 10 grand or so in the process), I lost it. And it was when she had no shit clue about the question ‘if y=4x and 4x=12 then what is y?’ that I had an epiphany. Now I know why the ‘idiot box’ is called so.

In India, not knowing that piece of ultra-basic Algebra would mean your sweet ass being whooped by parents and teachers alike. And hell, it’s not even education, it’s basic common sense. Then, I notice that we seem to celebrating dumbness a hell lot. Fear Factor, where one eats worms and gulps ostrich eggs; Fist of Zen, where one has to smell burps for 30 seconds and what not; videos of really dumb people (more so Japanese humor) topping the charts in Youtube; a worrying trend I say.

Humor being dumb, slapstick and brainless is one thing. But brainlessness being considered normal, and even worth creating mass entertainment out of, is plain artlessness (in both senses of the word).

After I shut down the tele, I put on the radio for some musical and not-so-dumb entertainment. And there I was ambushed by another show called ‘Anything also can’. Let me explain. That’s Singlish for ‘anything goes’, or ‘everything is correct’. So in this show, all one needs to do is call up, give some random, totally unconnected answer, and win a prize.

And the kicker, that took away my faith in whatever was left in human intelligence, is that one lady called, and couldn’t answer a question on the show for 2 whole minutes. A show where she could’ve just said ‘I’m uber-dumb’ and still won the prize. But nope.

I expect too much from people, I’m told. Sigh.

(2 votes, average: 4.5 out of 5)

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Today a friend’s friend Y was telling us about her 5 year old nephew. Apparently this loveable kid was being remonstrated at home, and guess for what. He bought the same X-box game twice on eBay. (He just won the bids, he didn’t pay for them, Y tells me amusedly.)

Now lets wait here for a frickin’ minute. This is so wrong on many counts. What’s a 5 year old doing on eBay? Wait a frickin’ minute more. How the hell does he even know what eBay is, let alone how to BUY stuff on the site?

I didn’t know what a PC was until I was 10. The internet didn’t exist. I walked to a neighbour’s home to make phone-calls. I first used a mobile phone when I was in college. I was doing a research paper on Google in my Engineering college, when it was just registered as a company, and people were just discovering search engines. Wikipedia and Web 2.0 is still WOW.

And there’s this new bunch of kids, for whom Google, Wiki, mobiles, broadband, wireless, eBay, cash cards, Pentiums are a given. Like TV was for me. Like radio was for my parents.

Goddamit. I’m already feeling old. And I’m just frickin’ 25.

(1 votes, average: 3 out of 5)

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No, its not metaphorical. And no, its not a joke.

My company is a nice place to work. Really. The people are damn smart, the environment is competitive yet casual, and I can wear my jeans and sneakers to office every darn day.

But then, God save you if you have to pee between three and four in the afternoon.

Let me explain. Of the few simple yet sublime pleasures of life, spraying the cannon after a few minutes with a full bladder is the most gratifying experiences of all. (Or hosing the lamp-post, or letting loose the lone water-pipe or the simple one-number. Whatever you wanna call it. Go pee.) And when an office floor is as cold as mine, it is but natural for a man (or a woman for that matter) to make a few quick stops to the restroom (finally! now I realize why toilets are called restrooms!) and relieve oneself of the unnecessary pressure. Only then can one think straight. You get what I mean.

So imagine this. You are walking towards the restroom (REST-room) after many minutes of foot-tapping and fidgeting with your pen. And just as you take the left turn towards the restroom, you freeze.

Because you see the mop-cart and a warning-sign that reads, ‘Caution. Floor is wet’. Because, there is only one person who cleans the toilets in our floor to a sparkle. And that person is a she.

Don’t get me wrong. This person is unbelievably industrious, excellent at her job, and very efficient. But the way men run helter-skelter when she’s about to enter the men’s-room is indicative that something is wrong somewhere. Karma, Gaya, Yin-yang, whatever.

She’s all of five foot (and maybe an inch). And pretty tiny at that. But six foot giants scoot off when she’s in our floor. I have heard of people catching a lift and going to upper floors just to take a pee. (I’d call that a sneak pee, but it would be too lame, even by poor joke standards). I mean, however proud a man is, one place in the whole wide universe he would not want a woman to walk into him is in front of the urinal.

Many questions arise in my mind (Does she knock; how does she make her entry; what do the guys already trapped inside do; worse still, what about the poor souls using the commode; what kinda sheepish grin do they have to put up when they step out; yada yada) but I let them pass. As I exit to the lift lobby.

Life is funny as hell, I tell ya.

(4 votes, average: 3.75 out of 5)

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I always worried that I would go back to campus after a few years, as a prestigious ‘alumnus’ of the institution, where people would address me as Sir, serve me coffee in the Placecom waiting room, and herd me to presentation rooms and guest houses. When all I wanted was mess chai and walks on the ring road. I worried that by the time I would go back to glean memories, I would be just a ghost, with hajjar memories of the place where no one would know me.

But just then.

Had this opportunity to go back to campus this month. I went to L to tell my juniors about my role and my company. To review CVs, to talk about career choices. To just talk. And it was just fantastic.

The trip was interesting at many levels. On my trip from Singapore to Delhi, I met a sardarji on the plane, who couldn’t speak much of English, and wanted help with his menu, his seat belt, talking to the airhostess etc. Turns out this paaji is a farmer in Punjab, and, the Sarpanch of a village in Jalandhar district, has already toured Sydney, Brisbane, Canberra, Singapore and London. We talked as if we had nothing to do (we didn’t); him chatting me up incessantly in his chaste Punjabi, me replying in Hindi and at the same time trying to make sense of what he was saying. Have had a similar experience once before in my summer internship when I landed in Amritsar. But this was funnier :) (especially when he started talking about which MLAs he was chuddi-buddies with).

Then spent just 10 frickety fricking hours in Delhi Airport (trying to sleep in all sorts of poses in the insanely uncomfortable Delhi airport chairs) because of fog. Reached Lucknow just in time for my presentation (which went pretty well, I think). Then talked and talked with all my friends, about career choices, interviews, companies et al. And ate missi di roti and sarson ka saag in the mess. Then dinner with all my IIC juniors. Bhai, maja aa gaya.

Then the crazy Delhi-Gurgaon story. Had a one day stopover at Delhi on my way back to Singapore. Met with five friends, my aunt, my uncle and my cousin in half a day. And ate Delhi chat at Om Sweets in Sector 14 of Gurgaon. And did I mention the bike ride in the nut-crunching cold without winter clothing? I’d rather not.

Anyhoo. It was a week of meeting old friends, eating good north Indian food, and saying stuff like “are you fuckin’ kidding me?!” while driving past run-down Gurgaon buildings, hearing about prices of matchbox sized flats (1.5 crores INR wonly). Week well spent, I’d say.

(1 votes, average: 3 out of 5)

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You know one of those moments where a word, a phrase, a photo or even a smell takes you years back, into the days long forgotten. That is what happened with me today.

http://www.indianexpress.com/res/web/pIe/ie/daily/19981003/27651124.html

Harish Narayanan of Ruia College won the under-21 rapid chess championship conducted by Gokuldham Chess Club at Bhavan’s College today. In the final round Harish beat L Jerome of Bhavan’s in 26 moves scoring 6.5 out of a possible seven points.

WINNERS: 1 Harish Narayanan (6.5 pts) won by toss; 2 D Ravi Shankar (6.5); V Kartik (5.5); 4 Ajit Nair (5.5); 5 Janvian Rodrigues (5). Best player: L Jerome (u-18); Devendra R Sathe (u-16).

and another one: http://www.indianexpress.com/res/web/pIe/ie/daily/19980904/24750914.html

This was in 1998. Ten fricking years ago. It has been ages since I’ve even touched a chess board, let alone play or win any tournament. But as I was reading these, they brought back fond memories, of a wonderful interest, interesting battles, strategies, brilliancies, competition, patience, preparation and pursuit of the mindsport at professional levels.

Incidentally I also happened to find online, the person who came second in that tournament (the aforementioned Ravi Shankar) today. He even remembers that I had a winning position, what kind of ending we played (Rook and Pawn) and what have been the results of our other chess encounters! Wish I had such a memory.

It was a wonderful time. Chess taught me a lot about concentration and patience, and as a child I understood what strategy and planning was about, along with short term tactics and combinations. I lived in the world of King’s Gambit, Sicilian Defense, Double Check, Discovered Attack, Ruy Lopez, Lucena Position, Bobby Fischer et al. There was a time when I played with, and was good friends with Sasikiran, who is now a well known GM in India. I have seen many upcoming stars as child prodigies, and been coached by many stalwarts of the Indian chess scene. Chess also took me to many towns of Maharashtra (Satara, Sangli, Jalgaon, Nasik, Pune, Bhusawal, Kolhapur, Solapur. All of these places have wonderful and amusing memories I associate with them.) and many towns in India. Thanks to my mom, and her Luna Moped, I toured all of Chennai and its chess tournaments.

Memories: When I beat a national champion and didn’t realize it because I came late and didn’t see the pairing list. When I made my first solo trip out of Mumbai in class 7, and found a teary-eyed mom waiting outside my dorm the next day ( :) I still remember that). When I cried my eyes out in class 4 since I didn’t with the first tournament I ever played in. When I was on a winning streak and found the only winning combination in the whole Rook ending about 12 moves down the line. The first time I blundered my queen. My 9 hour game in my first nationals at Calicut (that ended in a draw). Blind Chess and Simul Chess and Supply Chess. Long chess sessions at the Mylapore house in Chennai with Ravi Mama (my coach) and my chess partner Deepak. My first ever chess lesson about how to checkmate an opponents King with two Rooks. My first ever pan-India event prize. My Sangli tournament trip for ten days where all I carried was Rs.800 in cash. Skipping school, and even final exams to play tournaments. Beating my senior sports secretary on first day of college in KJ Somaiya, playing blind :)

Many more such instances, but am unable to recollect as of now. Need the help of my old friends to remind me of the wonderful times that we had, with the Game of Kings.

(1 votes, average: 3 out of 5)

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