Teenage Affluenza

In a true musicians' life, there comes a point where the petty technicalities, the notations and the never ending debates on ragas and melakarthas become meaningless and obsolete; he dies and all that is left is total immersion of his mind in music, a pure and instinctive creature is born; it thinks and feels in music; music is its language; it is guided by it, and expresses itself through it, its sings out of joy; not vanity, it plays for itself, it plays to feel, to emote. Music is its emotion. It hears naught but notes, but it no longer thinks of music as a collection of notes, but as a whirlwind of passion and emotion; notes are meaningless; they are for the unenlightened; who must grovel and crawl in search of that elusive realization. It no longer needs to study notes to play, all that is required is emotion, and music is his vehicle of emotion; can you not feel the despair and anger of Beethoven in his fifth symphony; his anger at not being able to hear his own music and his audience's applause, his despair at Nature's cruel irony of gifting him the ability to create but not hear his own music?

Video: Beethoven's Fifth Symphony; Conducted by Herbert von Karajan; one of the world's most renowned conductors....

Carnatic thillu mullu

Jus came across a divine article here on kutcheri sterotypes; worthy of Russell Peters himself!!
Here's some samples:

Sing-along Subbalakshmi: Usually a maami who sings at dasara kolus with a lisp and an appalaathu maavu kural (a voice similar to that achieved by coating your throat with papad batter): "Tharatha thaama dhaana, bheda danda thathura.." Insistently sings along with every song in the kacheri to prove that she knows them all. Is also the most glared and hissed at phenomenon in a kacheri, apart from Giggling Gayatri and gang.

Giggling Gayatri: Usually seen huddled in a corner with a bunch of cousins and friends, passing comments about everyone and sniggering throughout the concert. Neighbours who object to the noise are instantly made a part of the giggle club and soon a whole section of the audience is giggling uncontrollably.

The Paradise Flycatcher: The old biddy in the front row, usually an invitee, who enthusiastically plucks imaginary insects out of the air in time to the music. Screams bhale, and sabhaash at random moments in an alapana, and throws the musician completely off sync by loudly clapping out an aadi taalam to a mishra chaapu krithi. The musicians, too polite to fling their silver chombus full of dubious liquid at the rasika’s head, usually screw their eyes tightly shut and sing louder.

The Devaranama/Meera Bhajan destroyer: The sort that is clearly convinced of the superiority of music over poetry, and the irrelevance of the actual words being sung. Hence if Meera sang:"Maii thwo kirithara ge ranku raaaajee", Krishna would still appear, albeit scraching his nails on a blackboard. This artist is also convinced that all devarnamas are composed using the two imaginary kannada words "Hothle and Hidhlu" and will sing an entire purandara dasa kriti using them.

Asalooru Ambis/ambujams - indian born foreign settled boys/girls hovering around popular concert programs (especially Aruna, Sudha, Unni etal) with mineral water in hands


Varaaha Vaidyanathan: For the uninitiated, this is the delicate art of piggyface making. Especially prominent while executing delicate sangathis during a raga: "Thu dhu rin na nu....uuiiium", or during a long phrase in a Thyagaraja Krithi involving words like "munu ju joochuchumu".

Today's video: Maha Ganapathim; a nice jam/remix/fusion version from Morning Raaga. Singer: Bombay Jayashree.

GIVE ME RICE!!! Why are we in a food shortage?

The current food crisis is the most dire event to affect the world today; since of all the unfortunate and lamentable tragedies to plague this planet, the present food crisis has the fatal potential to trigger a third world war; simply because it provides the ultimate rationale for war; the primal animal instinct for survival; when nothing but a few laws and a lame duck global organization (UN)
stand between you and your neighbors' food stocks; it doesn't take a lot to try and grab that to feed your starving millions...... A lot of soul searching has been going on to try and find a scapegoat to blame this on, from the Iraq war and Bush to Al-Qaeda and/or China and India, but the following paragraph probably sums the whole mess up pretty neatly;
(Adapted from
ttp://www.forumgarden.com/forums/showthread.php?s=936b9b9dfdb74c7ce491ca5915bf7f4f&p=838015#post838015)

The social theories of Karl Marx were long ago discarded as of little value, even to revolutionaries. But he did warn that capitalism had a tendency to generate its own crises. Indeed, the spread of capitalism, and its accelerated industrialization and wealth-creation, may have fomented the food-inflation crisis - by dramatically accelerating competition for scarce resources. The rapid industrialization of China and India over the past two decades - and the resultant growth of a new middle class fast approaching the size of America's - has driven demand for oil toward the limits of global supply capacity. That has pushed oil prices to levels five times what they were in the mid 1990s, which has also raised pressure on food prices by driving up agricultural costs and by prompting the substitution of biofuel crops for edible ones on scarce farmland. Moreover, those new middle class people are eating a lot better than their parents did - particularly more meat. Producing a single calorie of beef can, by some estimates, require eight or more calories of grain feed, and expanded meat consumption therefore has a multiplier effect on demand for grains. Throw in climate disasters such as the Australian drought and recent rice crop failures, and you have food inflation spiraling so fast that even the U.N. agency created to feed people in emergencies is warning that it lacks the funds to fulfill its mandate.

Allow me to set up the dominoes that caused this; Paul Krugman has narrowed down the causes into 2; avoidable and unavoidable:
Unavoidable:

First, there’s the march of the meat-eating Chinese — that is, the growing number of people in emerging economies who are, for the first time, rich enough to start eating like Westerners. Since it takes about 700 calories’ worth of animal feed to produce a 100-calorie piece of beef, this change in diet increases the overall demand for grains.

Second, there’s the price of oil. Modern farming is highly energy-intensive: a lot of B.T.U.’s go into producing fertilizer, running tractors and, not least, transporting farm products to consumers. With oil persistently above $100 per barrel, energy costs have become a major factor driving up agricultural costs.

High oil prices, by the way, also have a lot to do with the growth of China and other emerging economies. Directly and indirectly, these rising economic powers are competing with the rest of us for scarce resources, including oil and farmland, driving up prices for raw materials of all sorts.

Third, there has been a run of bad weather in key growing areas. In particular, Australia, normally the world’s second-largest wheat exporter, has been suffering from an epic drought.

Avoidable:
The rise of China and other emerging economies is the main force driving oil prices, but the invasion of Iraq — which proponents promised would lead to cheap oil — has also reduced oil supplies below what they would have been otherwise.

So the dominoes are set up as follows: you have all of the unavoidable factors there; but they have been there for years; why only now are we having such a shortage? The answer lies in the folllowing:

1. Climate change: recent global warming has had a devastating effect on crops worldwide, rice crop failures in Asia; drought in Australia (incidentally the world's second largest producer of wheat. This has had a devastating effect on world food stocks.
2. World food reserves are at their lowest as ironically, national governments are holding less stocks as everyone believed that countries suffering crop failures could always import the food they needed. They didn't count on the fact that everyone could be having crop failures.

So now you have the world food balance in a precarious position, in what mathematicians would term an unstable equilibrium; crop failures in Australia was technically supposed to be counterbalanced by a bumper crop in Central Asia; that did happen; Kazakhstan projected its autumn harvest to possibly reach a record-setting 20 million tons. However, the bumper crop, and this is important, failed to compensate for the crop failure in Australia. That, for lack of a better expression, was the tipping point, that was the first dominoe to fall.

The worsening factor, would undoubtably be the rise of demon ethanol and other biofuels. Krugman, again puts this eloquently:

The subsidized conversion of crops into fuel was supposed to promote energy independence and help limit global warming. But this promise was, as Time magazine bluntly put it, a “scam.”

This is especially true of corn ethanol: even on optimistic estimates, producing a gallon of ethanol from corn uses most of the energy the gallon contains. But it turns out that even seemingly “good” biofuel policies, like Brazil’s use of ethanol from sugar cane, accelerate the pace of climate change by promoting deforestation.

And meanwhile, land used to grow biofuel feedstock is land not available to grow food, so subsidies to biofuels are a major factor in the food crisis. You might put it this way: people are starving in Africa so that American politicians can court votes in farm states.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering: all the remaining presidential contenders are terrible on this issue.

However, its probably a sore point that the US continues to levy heavy tariffs on Brazilian ethanol in an effort to protect corn ethanol, a very stupid move made to appease red-neck farmers, but which resulted in the dilemma; food or fuel? The extra demand for corn from the biofuel industry resulted in there being less corn for food. The whole problem could have been averted if the US simply swallowed its stupid pride and embraced sugar cane ethanol, which incidentally places less stress on the food chain than corn. Though of course you have the problem of deforestation and all.....but thats another story...

The point is as Krugman puts it, cheap food, like cheap oil, may be a thing of the past.
Pretty scary eh?
Video feature: BBC feature on the food crisis.

UMNO party candidates required to have blogs

In yet another knee-jerk, leap-before-you-look, jump-on-the-band-wagon move, the famously ridiculous dagger-wielding, hot-air politicians of UMNO have solemnly decreed (certainly not tongue-in-cheek I suppose)that all candidates who have applied for party positions must have a blog to "introduce" themselves. Abdul Rahman, the party sec-gen declared that "All candidates must have blogs... if not, they are not qualified to be leaders." Interesting piece of reasoning though: I blog, therefore I'm fit to lead. I won't comment further on the speaker; his statement speaks for itself I guess... No mention made of the quality of content though.....Sounds like its fit to be up there with the rarefied company of other other waste-o-time directives by the Govt: Moral Studies for high school students (where you memorise a list of values and the definitions (about 150 in total I think) and pretend to follow them), the Malaysian education system, MSC, and so on.....(Do I hear Proton in the background?)

PS: Heard this on the grape-vine: our beloved PM's throwing in the towel; talks abound that he's gonna hand over to his loving deputy..... Guess Doc M's taunting got to him......wont he (M) ever get over his prime ministerial hangover? Lets hope Mr. B will.....

PS: As a tribute to our brave citizens who risk life and limb to show off their truly wonderful skills, I give you : the Mat Rempits!! And there's a lesson here for our beloved PM: don't give up!! You're surrounded by monkeys of the very same nature as the ones portrayed below; surely no one can do a better job than you......and that includes your predecessor as well...The greatest virtue is not in falling down, but in getting up..(Confucius) Oh yea..don't overlook the pointedly direct reference (tongue-in-cheek as always) to the following video:

Chevron's feel good ads

Of OBC's and Arjun Singh

Perhaps the most ridiculous figure to emerge from the Indian political jungle (apart from Lalloo Prasad that is...but thats for another post), Arjun Singh, the Human Resource Minister, who's probably known for one issue (and is probably staking his Prime Ministerial ambitions on it...); the Other Backward Castes (OBCs) and his holy landish promise of 27% reservation for them in institutions of higher learning (IHLs). Ironically, a supposedly 'corrective solution' which was supposed to bring forward the so-called 'backward' castes in order to let them participate in the Grand Indian Economic Party, has had the opposite effect of sharply dividing the country; with proponents calling for his deification (Messrs Karunanidhi and his DMK are loyal I heard...) and opponents calling for a public lynching in the streets of Delhi........While Monsieur Singh's private motives are almost certainly suspect, one can't help but wonder if his proposal might actually work...the issue at hand is Would a person who obviously had a very poor primary and secondary education (since he/she would most probably gone to a public school, which in India are of horrific standards;and hence would lack the skills and ability to compete with the creme de la creme of India's finest students) be able to survive in an IIT/IIM which has one of the toughest admission criteria in the world? Would it not be better for Mr. Singh to try and revamp the public school system which woefully lacks resources or quality teaching staff; which in turn would churn out students of better calibre, who are able to gain admission on merit? If the good minister is still hell bent on his 27% quota, why not use the income level of a person as a parameter to reserve seats for him/her? Is there any reason why a person of a higher caste but a lower income level be more advantaged than a person of higher income but lower caste? The sad and sorry fact is that India still suffers from caste-ism, not of the malodorous form which existed a few decades ago, but of reverse casteism; OC's, OBC's and the other various acronyms describing India's teeming lower caste population are touted and courted by political fat cats like Mr. Singh who are not in the bit interested in their quality of life, but more in their votes. Which is a pity because in the end the good of the country is sacrificed for the temporal satisfaction of a few. Which brings us to another few issues; If IIT's and IIM's are truly among the best in the world, and that both of these institution are 100% home grown; why is it that the practices and policies that made these two insti's so awesome not applied to every other IHL? Why not turn every engineering college into an IIT, every management school into an IIM, every medical college into an AIIMS? Whats holding them back? Then we should not have to worry about reservations do we? Since every citizen would have a chance at quality education...And the unfortunate consequence of this sorry act by a man in the death throes of his political life further divides a country that's already divided along politico-religious, income , language, state and god-knows-what lines. And it is truly a tragedy when you just look at teeming potential that is India. Whats holding her back from truly taking her place in the world (Not just as an economic superpower but as a cultural and political superpower)? Her leaders and her people. As long as the people continue to be satisfied by loud mouthed politicians spewing anger and hot air and empty promises that promise nothing but freebies, for so long will India remain in China's shadow. You want a measure of India's political maturity? Just look at the DMK's manifesto: free TV, cheap rice, free electricity and god-knows-what...

PS: Just an thought..would our (India's) education system start churning out students like the one below if Mr. Singh has his way? Especially if students are admitted on the basis of their birth and not ability? A very very scary thought indeed........(nervous laughter) :P

Why do we work so hard, yet let ourselves down so hard? You work your bloomin' ass off to get into a good college, then work your ass off some more to get a freakin cap of 4.5 so that you get a job at an big-shot oil company pushing buttons from 9 to 5, 6 days a week, 52 weeks a year for the rest of your miserable, pathetic life...Is this what we worked for? Is this what we fought for? Why give up the chance to make something of your sorry self? Why are those who want to make something of themselves labeled as 'arrogant', they ought to listen to their 'elders', give up these 'wild' ideas? Why are we told to shut up, yet ironically expected to come up with 'creative' ideas? Ironic ain't it? The fact that we let go of our childhood dreams to become what we always dreaded of becoming: MEDIOCRE.....