On the other side…

Sooner or later, we all realize the grass being green is just another illusion. Ethereal, but ephemeral.

Self Denial

Is it a virtue ?

V-Day musings

Over the past few months here,  I have been racking my brains to come up with some purposeful topic that I can write on. But of late, everything seems to be fine – Manmohan Singh’s had a fine recovery, India is winning all its matches, the Super Kings have poached Freddie Flintoff, the temperature has been steadily climbing, my friends are getting calls from the IIMs, so much so that I was really unable to think about anything that can be possibly go wrong with this world – ofcourse, we are avoiding the credit crisis here as the Americans now have Obama leading them. Yes we can, you see.

Everything was nice and fine until we had the good samaritan Muthalik entering the arena. Just when you were expecting if life can get any interesting, he and his social outfit beat up a bunch of girls and teach them a moral lesson. While I am all for Catechism and Moral Science, that is not really my concern now. What really caught my attention was his plans for Valentine’s day. And suddenly, things look exciting on a different level.

Read Muthalik’s matter master plan here.

The implications. When I get to think about it, I am experiencing something on the scale of Mind-at-large.  Imagine.  When you kiss a girl, you either marry her or she becomes your sister.  This leaves a perfect setting for what the American’s and desis who think they are Americans call, a Fling.

These are the people you should keep an eye out for - for the better or worse (Image courtesy - http://www.tundlajunction.com/)

This is to say, if you are interested in a girl physically and just wish to have a “flingy” relationship, or if you are thinking for sometime now about breaking up with your girlfriend/boyfriend, you cannot get a better setting. All you have to do is to take the girl to the most happening place in the city on V-day – because that is most likely to be the place where will you find our saviours – and express your love (in a way you deem fit).  And make sure you do it in their line of sight. And our brethren will just jump into action and take care of the rest. As I mentioned earlier, you will be given the option of either marrying the girl or making her your sister. Ofcourse, we choose the second option after a lot of thought, and wish behenji a happy life and a successful career, while accepting  with overwhelming emotion the rakhi we will be getting in return. (People who haven’t seen a rakhi before can take a look here. You will get something like the fifth image on the grid and not anywhere remotely related to the first four. Just to make sure you are not misled when we mentioned you will get a rakhi).

I am planning to start a franchise of Sri Ram Sena here in the US just in time before V-Day. I bet the Americans will love this idea.

Happy Valentine’s Day everyone !

Radio Nation…

Last week, one of my friends here called me a weirdo when I proudly informed him I got myself a radio for 20$. That he called me names was due to the fact that he could have got me one for 2$ is a different issue altogether.  But it did set off a chain of thoughts within me – about how the humble radio has suffered such a huge decline in popularity from its heydays , the slide that began with the invention of the television and was further precipitated by the onslaught of the internet. And anyone listening to radio ends up being called a weirdo.

I grew up listening to the radio, right from the time when I and my dad used to sit outside our home with a portable radio of the early 90s and crank the tuner, trying to catch the Ceylon AM signal or the Vividh Bharathi commercial radio signal. And listen away till the broadcast ended or I fell asleep. The joy of listening to that the distorted radio signal during the night was something that has stayed with me for my life. And that justifies the 20$ bill I paid for the radio.

But why, you may ask, would someone even bother to listen to a radio in this age of podcasts and Slacker internet radio(TM), let alone buying one. The answers are many and varied.For one, you are not bombarded with a gazzilion options when you want to listen to some good music; the station chooses the song for you – if you don’t like it, meddle with the tuner. And you are done. The kind of music you get to listen to are varied on a radio when compared with a internet radio portal like Slacker or Pandora or while using the Radio Guide in your Media Player, where you are asked to choose the category of music you want to listen to (New or Old, Rock or Hip Hop, Blues or Electronica…). Your listening experience is narrowed down to one category of music. A good old radio, on the other hand, plays every kind of music – from the Beatles to the Black Eyed Peas (MS Viswanathan to Yuvan Shankar Raja for the “south Indian desis” reading my blog ), without you fretting over the options. And when the radio plays one of your favorite songs, old or new, there is this little spark of joy that surges in you – something which a digital online radio cannot recreate.

To many, listening to a radio is all about popping their earphones in and tuning their mobile phones to catch a station on their commute.  While this sounds promising, to know that radio stations are still finding listeners, the true delight in listening to a radio lies not in hearing it play within your ears while you are sitting in the middle of a traffic jam, but when you are working in the stillness of the night, with the radio playing those timeless classics, and all you can hear is that sinful voice singing in the distance (for those still having doubts, try listening to “It must have been love” by Roxette in the middle of the night on a plain old radio at a low volume. Trust me, there is nothing quite compared to this ! ) . What accentuates this listening experience is not the kind of songs being played, but the quality of the audio coming from the speakers. There has always been a distinctive charm to that archaic sound coming out from those dinghy speakers,  that many a time I am left wondering if the 5.1’s output can even be compared with that miniscule piece of magnet.

And you really have good company in the form of the RJ on the radio,  rather than just listening to song after song which brings in a monotony to the listening experience. This is more experienced when you listen to the radio in the middle of the night, when you are all alone and immersed in your work (Yazh Sudhagar’s show on Suryan FM after 2 AM is a classic). I still remember the times when Suryan FM was introduced in Chennai, and the difference it made to the monotonous work of drawing engineering charts through the night !

So why do I encourage you all to listen to a radio ? The reasons are myriad, and personal. The joy of discovering songs while listening to a radio is unsurpassed. Nothing helps you relax while dong a tedious job, like the radio does. Unlike an advanced speaker system with its booming sound and digital rendition, the output from a radio doesn’t overpower your senses. It’s gentle, it’s subtle, and you do not realise its presence until you really begin to concentrate on the radio. And the companionship it provides is unsurpassed.

Such is the magic that I may not be exagerrating if I compare this humble piece of equipment to the solitary reaper that William Wordsworth describes in his poem. But so caught up in our fast paced lives we are, hardly do we find any time to indulge in such simple pleasures that life has to offer. Such as the radio.

Pleasant. Distant. Soulful.