Passage 3

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It might have caused some com­ment in a few highly select cir­cles (gen­er­ally located in remote loca­tions, involv­ing lots of white, padded, walls, iron bars and strait­jack­ets) that there have been no posts for a month. The rea­son? you all may ask. (and you may go on ask­ing for that mat­ter). My brain dis­in­te­grated. Or rather, what was left dis­in­te­grated. So go treat your­self to another pas­sage writ­ten by peo­ple who actu­ally know how to write.

 

Good Omens, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

It is said that the devil has all the best tunes.

This is broadly true. But Heaven has the best choreographers.

~ Music ~

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What is music? As I type away on this blog, lis­ten­ing to Desert Rose I real­ize that I have never asked myself this question.

Never.

Have you?

Wikipedia defines music as:

Music is an art form con­sist­ing of sound and silence expressed through time. Ele­ments of sound as used in music are pitch (includ­ing melody and har­mony), rhythm (includ­ing tempo and meter), and sonic qual­i­ties of tim­bre, artic­u­la­tion, dynam­ics, and tex­ture.

Per­haps this may be one of the sim­plest and most artic­u­late def­i­n­i­tions of music ever. Per­haps it may be a bit of junk which just seems good as it uses a lot of big, com­pli­cated words and has 14 links. (Yes, I counted them; per­haps that tells you a bit more about me than I want you to know). For me, the first adjec­tive that comes to mind on see­ing this is bland.

I can­not claim to be an expert; I can­not sing (I can, but the point is no one — in their right minds — would want to lis­ten. This brings us to the all encom­pass­ing philo­soph­i­cal ques­tion: does a man singing make a sound if no one is there to hear him?) nor can I play a musi­cal instru­ment (again, I can pluck strings and thus, tech­ni­cally, ‘play’ an instrument).

Music to me is some­thing that is pleas­ant to lis­ten to; some­thing that affects me in a hun­dred ways, makes my heart pound faster (exer­cise?), makes me drowsy(sleeping pill?), makes me more awake(caffeine?), alle­vi­ates my mood (jokes?), depresses me (the daily News?), occa­sion­ally grabs me by the ears, kicks my brain and refreshes my body.

Is it just the melody that mat­ters? Or is it the words too? For me: both.

I have many favourite songs; they can jump-start me; make me accom­plish what I con­sider impos­si­ble and gen­er­ally ener­gize me. (Should they be clas­si­fied as drugs? They’re very addic­tive too: I keep hear­ing them in my head all the time.)

I lis­ten to all sorts of music; music is as diverse as the peo­ple it is cre­ated by. While I can­not include gui­tar riffs and piano tunes here, I can give lyrics of some of my favourite songs.

I sit and talk to God
and he just laughs at my plans
My head speaks a lan­guage
I don’t understand

(Rob­bie Williams, Feel)

I tried so hard
And got so far
But in the end
It doesn’t even matter

(Linkin Park, In the end)

Imag­ine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imag­ine all the peo­ple
Liv­ing for today…

Imag­ine there’s no coun­tries
It isn’t hard to do
Noth­ing to kill or die for
And no reli­gion too
Imag­ine all the peo­ple
Liv­ing life in peace…

You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope some­day you’ll join us
And the world will be as one

Imag­ine no pos­ses­sions
I won­der if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A broth­er­hood of man
Imag­ine all the peo­ple
Shar­ing all the world…

You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope some­day you’ll join us
And the world will live as one

(John Lennon, Imagine)

There are too many songs for me to put in one post. All of us have our one favourites, whether because of their lyrics their music or some­thing that strikes a chord inside.

I have never yet met a per­son who hates all forms of music. Have you?

Orkut

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Social net­work­ing sites have been spring­ing up every­where like ATM’s did a few years ear­lier. Ini­tially viewed with skep­ti­cism, then with won­der, and finally every­one asks “How did we do with­out them?”. So now we have Orkut, Face­book, and just a few mil­lion more.

I’ve joined Orkut. Made new friends. Regained con­tact with old ones. Main­tained con­tact with exist­ing ones.

So, instead of dis­sect­ing how and why orkut was made (see wikipedia) [read there only if you wish to accu­mu­late trivia & impress (or drive away) your friends], I will dis­cuss cer­tain fea­tures provided.

Con­nected with google accounts / GTalk
This lit­tle fea­ture was added as Google is the owner of Orkut, and what bet­ter way to increase the num­ber of users (and fur­ther your plans of world dom­i­na­tion) than by adding a social net­work­ing site to your portfolio?

Mes­sages
Irri­tat­ing lit­tle things that show an icon on your home­page to act as an in-built orkut e-mail. Essen­tially worth­less and inad­e­quate as it is much eas­ier to use GMail to send emails to friends.

Scraps
One of the most stu­pid and slow­est IM-substitutes. The scrap­ping mech­a­nism works as follows:

  1. Choose whose scrap­book you want to defile with your scrap.
  2. Go to his (or her)… (or it’s) pro­file and click scrapbook.
  3. Write deroga­tory and/or accusatory state­ments in the reply text-box and click post.

Then, the per­son at the other end will recieve your scrap. Read it. Grow angry. And Reply. Of course, as it is not exactly live chat where you can keep ask­ing a per­son “Why don’t you reply?” (until he/she/it replies out of sheer frus­tra­tion or has a brain aneurism and dies in which case you don’t recieve any reply), the per­son can eat/sleep/bathe/go mad/kill 34,678.8 peo­ple and then reply.

Till then, if you’re des­per­ate enough, you wait for their scrap while scrap­ping a few other hun­dred peo­ple you know/are acquainted with/want to irritate.

Tes­ti­mo­nials:
Devel­oped so that every­one can exag­ger­ate about their friends, put them on pedestals (while con­sid­er­ing them … you know what I mean). I was going to ask my friends to write nor­mal, accu­rate tes­ti­mo­ni­als but real­ized that if the tes­ti­mo­nial is not exag­ger­ated, peo­ple will con­sider the nor­mal one exag­ger­ated. (Thus, on pass­ing through the men­tal tes­ti­mo­nial fil­ter — devel­oped by every­one to glean a few grains of truth from beaches of praise — the fact that I occa­sion­ally read books will be trans­lated as : reads 1 novel per year).

Rank­ing Friends:
One of the most devi­ous, despi­ca­ble, devi­ated inven­tions by the (human?) coders at Google. While I sym­pa­thize with their plan of World Dom­i­na­tion (cue strange music) the sys­tem of rank­ing friends seems too low a blow. If, or rather when, (for those among you who rank their friends) this priv­i­leged infor­ma­tion is revealed to all, be pre­pared to be ripped limb from limb or be ren­dered friend­less (which is worse).

There are many more fea­tures but list­ing these and expos­ing their true pur­pose has exhausted me.

(Note: I am a mem­ber of Orkut, visit it daily, scrap friends, wait for tes­ti­mo­ni­als, write tes­ti­mo­ni­als, send mes­sages, swear by GMail and Google Talk. So sue me.)

Passage 2

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As can be evinced by the lack of posts for so many days (for any of you who actu­ally noticed), my lit­tle, bro­ken, over­worked brain has stopped work­ing (the change was barely noticable).

Thud! by Terry Pratchett

‘War, Nobby. Huh! What good is it for?’ he said.
’Dunno, sarge. Free­ing slaves, maybe?‘
’Absol– Well, okay.‘
’Defend­ing your­self from a total­i­tar­ian agres­sor?‘
’All right, I’ll grant you that, but–‘
’Sav­ing civil­i­sa­tion against a horde of–‘
’It doesn’t do any good in the long run is what I’m say­ing, Nobby, if you’d lis­ten for five sec­onds together,’ said Fred Colon sharply.
’Yeah, but in the long run what does, sarge?’

ReAdproofing

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When­ever I make a psot, I check it with my eagle eyes (which are unable to dis­cern a pen kept on an empty table) to find spelling/grammatical errors. Then I pub­lish it, and then re-read it. Then I cor­rect the errors I can find and edit them. This method lev­aes approx­i­mately 100 errors per line of post (which have around 40–50 char­ac­ters). (also prov­ing my genius: I can make more than 1 eroor per char­ac­ter I type). If any­one does read my posts, kindly point out any fac­tual / lan­guage errrors in com­ments to earn my unend­ing grat­i­tude (which, unfor­tu­nately, is not much of an incentive).

Thank You.