Coming back to life

Watching Jodhaa-Akbar in PVR gold class with his girl-friend was a dream come true. A movie was always the part of an ideal date. Watch the second show of a classy movie in PVR gold class, pack some tasty Chinese and go for a long drive on a car. She obliged for the first part. She doesn't like Chinese and he doesn't have a car. They left after watching the last song. The climax fight wasn't worth the time (she thought). She has been working late these days. Some stuff to wrap up.

Driving at 90kmph on the inner ring road is always fun. Especially on a seven-year-old splendor with the ipod playing to its max volume. But the speed limit plummets down when she is there. As he started driving back, he wondered how it all started.

Rehna Hai Tere Dil Mein - RHTDM

He met her at the blind date contest during Oasis 2001. They lost the contest as he was not sure what her favorite color/movie/song were. But he knew something for sure. He likes her. Sudden break. Phew. That lady in Honda Civic, surely drunk, took a sharp left turn in-front of him on hosur road. She asks dreamily something like "What happened". He says "Nothing. You relax.". She could not catch up on sleep of late. Damn bangalore traffic. Damn frustrated bangalore traffic.

Koi Kahe Kehta Rahe - DCH

An occasional 'hi' gave way to a periodic chat. The casual conversations gave way to the regular discussions. The more he met her, the more he knew she was the girl. Both were 19 then. She is already dozing off on his shoulder as the bike cruises at a constant 40kmph; no signals for a long stretch. Rather he would not care to obey them now. Her hair fluttering in the wind. Its fragrance stills makes him dizzy. The static roar of the wind plays the lullaby as the smooth ups and downs of the road rocks the cradle for the sleeping beauty.

Gori gori - Main Hoon Na

Each of the places on the way hold their own importance. The inner ring road, the airport road fly-over, the 100ft road, the corner house, the leela palace barista, the CCD, the Windtunnel road, the Amul icecream shop. Each one of them.

Tum se hi - Jab We Met

They are 24 now and they had to be just friends. Something was not right about the whole thing. The parting was imminent. She is going abroad for her masters and he was shifting job to another city. Both are moving out of bangalore. Bangalore days were the best and the worst days of their lives. Both belive whatever happens, happens for the best. Life is smarter than us humans and chooses the best (always).

Coming back to life - The Division Bell

Time travel -II

What determines the mood of a person? I think just the following:
a) Food
b) People
c) Music/Movie

Our brain (hats off god!) groups files in sets of folders. You try to access just one file among them, you inevitable pick the entire folder. Some association among the files. But the same file can be part of multiple folders. Something like the song Coming back to Life of Floyd being part of 'All time favorites' as well as 'Make her listen these' playlists.

So as you lead your life, you slowly build up a huge database of feelings. What are feelings? I feel happy/Down/High/Low what ever. Its exactly this - The precise level of your hormones - (I know I've mentioned it in one of the earlier blogs). Nothing else. For guys there aren't many where as for the ladies there are innumerable. And the infinite combinations of them. Well thats why the guy doesn't 'Understand how she feels' always (Well, after a while he does say 'I understand how you feel' but I bet its just a statistical observation). So coming back to the point. How are food/music/movies/people/touch influencing the mood. Simple, they set the hormone level.

Take this. You listen to Dil Chahta Hai or RHTDM songs and suddenly you 'feel' nostalgic about your hostel wing (and probably the tasty chola batura in RBM mess!). You watch Swades and remember the day you made job (just because you happen to watch it the very next day). While accessing one file, you pick up the entire folder. This sometimes results in hallucinations. Not just visual. Olfactory as well. How many of you guys feel faintly that you smell your gal's fav perfume when you browse through old college pics or read some mails while rummaging through the inbox.

Well. Try it. Recreate just one (hopefully something strong) scenerio and see how you feel the hallucinations. So, its just the hormones. So, its easy to time travel.

Time machine

Mr. H G Wells, you have spend nights writing about an intricate machine that can take you back and forth in time. I have done very simple to achieve about half of all that. Just rolled my thumb over my ipod and closed my eyes. Jodha-Akbar songs just got me back to that wonderful/painful/joyful/sorrowful first quarter of 2008. I open my eyes and realize that Wesst Kinara (West Coast for the mango ppl) is far far away.

And the limitation that intervening in the past would take me to a different parallel universe (with possibly different outcome of events) still holds good. Einstein & Hawking would become furious otherwise.

Three Quarters & Chinese

That's a nice Chinese restaurant in Bangalore. In the middle of church street, next to Amoeba etc. And the best part is that they have a witty name. They claim to serve three quarters of chinese menu and one quarter of Awadhi menu (Lucknowi - for the tyros to the gastronomical world). Their biryanis and kebabs have earned a reputation for themselves as a real treat (comes second only to Hyderabadi Dum Biryani !)

Well that's not the point. The point is that Quarter is an important denomination in US currency. Get a ride from UCLA to SantaMonica beach, make a phone call to your girlfriend (and I've seen ppl banging their head after doing that), do your laundry etc etc. So  that's the first quarter.

Quarter is a key thing in the california graduate education system. You fall down in Fall, shiver and curse yourself in Winter ( & buy a mac out of frustration & 'making most out of xmas sales') & Eventually Spring back in Spring. That's the second quarter.

Quarter is a significant portion of my house. That quarter of bedroom/bathroom/kitchen/hall for which I am the boss. Surrounded by brat frats. All they care about is Pop, Party & Pussy (no offence really to those amazing greek fraternities). That's the third quarter.

The fourth quarter is the chinese (and japanese, taiwanese, koreans, malaysians, indonasians etc etc...as you see my limited knowledge of geography). You find them all over LA. Customs & Immigrations, Parking lots, Research Labs, Pingpong tables & Everywhere else.

Well, as I finish a quarter of my life, I hope to embrace these other quarters into my life with heart wide open. 

US & USA

My journey to umreekaah started on a pretty glamorous note. Happen to bump into Tollywood's hot chick (Well! Not the latest, Really.) Illeana D'cruz ( http://www.idlebrain.com/movie/photogallery/ileana-pokiri.html ) at Mumbai Chatrapati Shivaji Airport. Took auto/photo-graph etc :-D (ob da!). Well there wasnt anything glamorous for a while after that. Sleepless for a night, we (krishna & me) finally boarded the flight. There was "Indiana Jones" followed by Red-wine, then "Kung-Fu Panda" followed by White-wine and finally "Sarkar-Raj" on the onboard entertainment set well punctuated by short spells of sleep. The 'toast' to america never happened all this while :-( Eventually reached LA, got picked up by a senior and was dropped at another's place.

Had some tough time on day zero night figuring out the inversion in the switch, the absence of the 'MUG' & the ready-made rotis.

Day one was going to campus, getting ID card, opening bank a/c (and talking to that moronic personal banking officer who 'actually' wanted to know what I plan specialize in), having a look at the dingy den that my roommates called an appmnt (for $1800 pm wohow!). The whole thing wasnt atleast as big as my swanky studio in bangalore. Then it struck to me that am in LA. Apart from this another thing struck me. Jet Lag + Fever! For two days there was a three second delay in my neuron network. Imagine having your head enclosed in an airtight glass container & you hear your voice after a delay of three seconds (approx the same round trip time LA-HYD-LA taken by your voice over a phone line). Your vision isnt doing great either. You try to reach for the dish tv remote, crash into the water jug which 'came in your way' & realise it after three seconds. Two days out of calender.

Jet Lags turned into Lets Jag. I woke up finally. Next two days are again out of calender as I went out for house hunting. Its still on. I am skipping all the routine stuff about what ppl write about us of a (neat roads, smooth traffic, courteous ppl, cereals for B/F etc etc).

I can't say it was a smooth landing in US. But it wasn't rough either. The desi seniors are pretty helpful (they dint charge me for that broken water jug & dint finish my mom's ravva laddoos), the univ building is awesome & the mild sunny weather with cool pacific breeze - Fantastic. Probably a beautiful place to watch the sunset sitting in your own sea-facing duplex flat. Smiling. Reassuring yourself why its great to stay single till you are 30 & rich.

So, lean legs!

"In mythical ages, sages had a single minded
devotion in pleasing the gods.
Their efforts were however, sometimes, grounded
by beautiful apsaras and dev-kanyas.

In modern days, grad students toiled
round the clock in pleasing their mentors.
Their efforts are however, always, foiled
by lovely ladies.

Walking slight fast wearing tight shorts;
Smiling rosy bright during cosy nights."

-An UCLA grad student (Circa 2008 A.D)

What is Sexy?

Sexy. It is one of the most thrown around words of this generation. (Ofcourse, after 'Gen'. A universal one word answer to any question. Could well be a boring replacement to Sexy for all these questions).

Q: Hey dude, how was the movie 'Dark Knight'?
A: Sexy mann.

Q: Hey machan, how is the Masala dosa?
A: Its Sexy da.

Q: Mama, how is the latest chiru song ra?
A: Sexy undi ra baabai.

Q: Oye, tera iphone kaisi hai?
A: Bahut Sexy hai yaar.

Guess there isn't a definition of what being Sexy is. And god knows what it has to do with the three letter word. So, I pondered a while on what does it take for anything to be called sexy.

First, is being sexy about meeting the expectations? Or exceeding them. Second, are the expectations realistic or do they have significant dosage of fantasy.

In the case of things, almost always the sexy thing lies in the midway. You know that your fantasy device is a good decade away, but what you have in your hand is something which shows promise. You would want a 5 MP SLR quality camera with Bluetooth, Wifi, GPS, dual-touch screen, media player (which plays all damn formats in 3D surround sound and HDTV clarity) & all those fancy features (Yes Mr.Bond, we do have Satellite Missle Control & for the ladies version, we do have a Virtual online make-up assistant as she smiles at the camera). All in a small box. Oh yeah!! it should be able to send & receive voice calls. Mr Graham Bell & Scarlett-O-Hara would be proud to call this gizmo 'Phone with the mind'.

But what we get is an iphone. Still we call it sexy.

Sexy music calls for different faculties. Subconscious mind probably looks for mathematical patterns when ever it listens to sound. It could activate the pleasure center in the brain if it finds a definite series or a neat signal which could be harmoniously split into specific frequencies (we all unknowingly thank fourier this way). Its no surprise that a melodious vedic hymn in the praise of Lord Krsna also contains value of pi to 32 decimal places. With this universe full of patterns & signals, comprehending a speck of it takes you one step closer to god and no wonder music is a straight forward path in understanding the divinity.

MS Subbulaxmi probably doesn't know Mr. Fourier; Nor does AR Rahman or Harris Jeyraj. But they do tune-out sexy music.

Food can be sexy. A perfect combination of the acids & bases available in your mom's kitchen is guaranteed to bring out the wholesome feeling in you. It gets sexy when the taste buds are excited in the right proportions at right times (and you thought Cooking and Math never intersect! How about a subject called 'Culinery Calculus'?). Those grandma recipes getting passed on from generations are nothing but the counter-parts of solutions to the Quantum electrodynamics or collected papers on Nonlinear physics.

Trust me. Nothing can get sexier than a well prepared Dum biryani, masala dosa, bisi bele bath, Paneer butter masala or Rosogulla.

Dark Knight was indeed a sexy movie. Few can disagree (Few=females). Movies depicting tragic history (like in schindler's list) in a graphic way or those dwelling in a fantasy world with real emotions (ala LOTR ). Like those showing utter terror using innocent characters ( Mr. Norman Bates in Psycho) or dealing with the variations of human psychology (One flew over ..or Forrest Gump). Most of them evoking the deepest of the human emotions.

Many disagree, argue, fight over what makes a movie sexy. I could not find a common denominator among Hitchcock's thrillers, Martin Scorsese's influential films, Hrishi da's art works and K ViswaNath's Classics (Sorry Yash Chopra & Karan Johar, romantic movies are nice and warm but cannot be tagged Sexy). I give up and leave it for the audience to decide.

For human beings, leave aside the most stereotyped physical definitions of being sexy (exaggerated Shoulder-to-waist ratio for men & magic 36-24-36 vital stats for women), and the 'Golden Ratio' for facial beauty ( which says we all pay homage to Mr. Fibonacci when ever we are on the prowl for mating). Being sexy is thought to be as a matter of attitude these days. I think its again a culmination of fantasy and reality. Someone could be pictured with some charactersitics. Being sexy is that person actually having them all. What seems sexy to me might seem 'whattt?' for you. Whom you consider 'god/goddess' might not evoke any emotion in me.

For a man, the wife could be traditionally sexy when she is clad in a Kanchipuram Zari saree after a ShiKakai head bath, her long hair wrapped in a wet towel and heading for Suprabhatam. For this lady, it could well be her man, hearing the sound of her anklets, jumping onto her from his lethargic Filter-Coffee-sipping-Hindu-Newspapaer-reading pose to take a whiff of Mysore Sandal off her shoulders. Or as western as his woman in a white negligee with a red wine glass in one hand; Jazz playing in the background and the other hand inviting. And for her it might be a neatly shaved man in tuxedo reciting shakespeare willing to do a waltz jig.

Tomes of stuff can be written about this topic. All points to just one sentence. Reality meeting fantasy. The fantasy could as well be the almighty. Appreciating his brilliance in creation. We all try to understand universe through the sexy things around. All I can conclude is Sexy is the closest description of god.