To Free Speech.

A thinktank of aloof multiplication

A nicotine wish and a Columbus decanter

Retrenchment and hoggishness

The aristocrat choir sings, "What's the ruckus?"

The haves have not a clue

The immenseness of suffering

And the odd negotiation, a rarity

With onionskin plausibility of life

And a keyboard reaffirmation

-"Bushleaguer"

Now a lot of these lyrics don't make much sense to me. They're just a bunch of big cool sounding words strung together in a slightly incoherent sentences.

BUT

That's Vedder dancing with a George Bush mask back in '03. It's a song about the then president and his pro-war policies, and absolute disregard for diplomacy. People may have left the stadium, and there may have been a media uproar back in the U.S. about the lyrics and the whole act. Nothing major, though.

If something like this had happened here, old Bal would have had the guy killed mysteriously in a stampede.

Free speech, I love. :)

On a different note, the India-Pakistan WC semifinal is the first match I've watched all the overs of in my entire life. This despite the fact that my grandfather and Papa call each other every time a match is on and And thank god, I did. Because India won beautifully. Can't wait to watch the final tomorrow.

Kickin' in the front seat, chillin' in the back seat. :/

Who is this amazing female?

A 13 year old with the voice of an angel who will change your perspective to music, life and calendars.

Most of you will pause the video 30 seconds in, but I dare you to watch a Youtube video with 1314814 dislikes. With over 69 million views, this video has gone viral. Times ten.

"Yesterday was Thursday, Thursday 
Today i-is Friday, Friday (Partyin') 
We-we-we so excited 
We so excited! 
We gonna have a ball today 
Tomorrow is Saturday 
And Sunday comes after ... wards 
I don't want this weekend to end"


Profound. Life-altering.


In fact, it has led to all of THIS. :D

Here's an excerpt from an interview of hers I just read in Kansas Times:


Like most elementary school kids, she liked the pop acts that appealed to tweens: Selena Gomez, Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, and, of course, Justin Bieber, a life-sized cutout of whom she keeps in her bedroom. "I've always wanted to be like Justin Bieber," she says.

Wait.
Replay that last sentence please.


"I've always wanted to be like Justin Bieber."


Enough said.

Something more exciting than Rebecca Black.

Do me one huge favour, guys.
Follow this link and experience awesomeness.
http://contradictoryexistence.blogspot.com/view/snapshot

All thanks to this cute little snippet, I read HERE.

Munch on your orange candy, and enjoy. :)

What's on my Mind.

Because I love his music.

And because I don't agree with her, even if she is absolutely right.

I wish he were still alive and sipping some of that gorgeous lilac wine. I'd have loved to watch him live.

                                                 

There, Google and Facebook outsmarted us again. Watch.

起死回生

Who can swear that our unconscious is not expecting this?
Derrida, "No Apocalypse, Not Now"

Statistics show that Japan experiences an earthquake in or around its vicinity every five minutes.

It is home to cutting edge expertise on how to minimize the destruction triggered by an earthquake.

All these words seem so meaningless, in the face of the aerial shots of the devastation wrecked by the quake and ensuing tsunami, that are being aired on loop by news channels around the world. When you see pictures of old women being evacuated from their homes on the shoulders of toughened soldiers, when you see unexplained explosions from nuclear plants, when you see homes turned to rubble and rubble to black debris being carried along by 10 metre high waves destroying more homes, it sinks in:

One is never really safe from the unpredictability of life.

Ironic how the night before the quake struck, I was watching 'Worst Case Scenario' on Discovery, where they showed how to safely get out of a car trapped in the water. My first thought, when I saw the images of cars being swept away by the angry tide, was 'I hope the people in Japan were watching it too'.

*Japanese Proverb 起死回生(kishi kaisei)
Literally: Wake from death and return to life


Meaning: To come out of a desperate situation and make a complete return in one sudden burst.

Your Words or Mine?

Plagiarism.
 People have discussed, debated and dissected the word too many times and in too many forums to count, but I can't tell you exactly what they said, can I? Maybe in my own words, I could. But all the words I know come from a big fat dictionary written by this intelligent man. Now, I can't say his name because one of you might tip him and his lawyer off that I'm stealing his words. (A humble request: Please don't. My life savings account for just Rs.4533.) I could,of course, cite a few references or sources, but then again, I don't have my own system of citation.

This first paragraph is what people call satire. It's something I learnt the definition of in 8th grade. It basically involves saying something really smart, but tricking people into believing you ate Beiber for breakfast. I'll get to the really smart thing I was trying to say. Plagiarism isn't just failing to put a quotation in quotation marks. It isn't easy to understand, and I bet we've all benefited from it at some point of our lives.

There are clear cases when people steal something verbatim from someone else, but more commonly we see people take something and make slight variations with it.
Take the great and much-beloved Shakespeare, for example.
He wrote a very famous play about a prince who attempts to avenge the murder of his father. Hamlet.
But then what about this?

"The Ur-Hamlet (the German prefix Ur- means "primordial") is the name given to a play mentioned as early as 1589, a decade before most scholars believe Shakespeare composed Hamlet. Several surviving references indicate that such a play was well-known throughout the decade of the 1590s, some time before the first published texts of Shakespeare's play (1603, 1604)."
Wikipedia: Ur Hamlet


What if all the characters in Hamlet were just turned into lions? 
Wikipedia: The Lion King 

Does this account for plagiarism? Does Shakespeare's contribution to literature diminish? Is it better to authentically create something that just about anybody could, or to rewrite/remake something into a masterpiece? I think we would prefer the latter. 

Okay, in all fairness, the truth is that plagiarism is bad. If it weren't bad, so many people wouldn't be upset about it. We have this sacred notion of intellectual property and originality is synonymous with creative genius, so of course, it's a bad thing. 
It's just that the lines between original and unoriginal are blurred. The line between plagiarized and inspired is different for different people. When people think plagiarism, they think theft. In my mind, the real crime is unoriginality, not theft. Unoriginality simply implies a lack of ability in developing novel thoughts, not malicious intent, while theft does.
  
Is ownership of words honestly a realistic standard? 
In a world where books, Google and everything in between exist, sadly, I think not. 

Nostalgic for Disaster

When I started blogging, around six months ago, blogging was already a 'thing' but I may as well have been Amish for all I knew about it. In fact, I started blogging when the world had turned to micro-blogging and I was still a blogging snail. (I still am, by the way.) I made my grand appearance on Blogspot and began narrating the mundane saga of my life for those unfortunate souls who did not have ring-side seats to the real deal.


(FYI: Half an hour ago, while I was working on a project, Microsoft Word displayed an unexpected sense of humour by correcting 'defect' to 'defecate'. Nice try, Word. But at least I gave up on the project then.)


Now that I quit the internship and have so much time on my hands, I have no excuse to not write, and if I do write, to write crap on my blog. I owe it that much. (I think.)
Because, I suddenly realized, if I keep spouting rubbish here and many years later, people come back to find this  blog in the cobweb on the ceiling of the internet (Please, it takes imagination to come up with such stupid phrases), it will come back to haunt me.
For example, if I ever write a book, it will be kept beside the "10,000 Love SMSes" collection, whose pages bristle with corny poems and quotes for those spontaneous times you wish to express your love for that special person in the most despicable manner possible, typically by skipping vowels and over-punctuating with <3.
All the people who know me will desert me without a second thought, and I will be left with no choice but to rent friends. Know about that concept? It's springing up all over world, it seems. I read it on BBC or CNN or some such reliable website, so I bet it's true, too.To use the service, you need to sign up, pay a membership fee, and browse for a friend you’d like to hang out with. You then rent their time, paying for all expenses incurred while you’re spending time with them—like buying them coffee or tickets to a movie. Then, when the meter runs out, you bid them goodbye—or maybe take an appointment to meet them again.
How sad and pathetic will my life be if things come to this?


Out of fear more than anything, I pledge to make more sense in all future posts. And not just be a person who knows her grammar and random big words.
Bear with me.


P.S. Abhishek Bachchan needs to get a life. Every time he says 'Get Idea', I feel like punching him in the face.


P.P.S. People who, in the "Favorite books" section of their social networking profiles, list all the books they've read. Please note - it says "favorite". Hence it implies, you pick the ones you liked best. If you liked "One Night at the Call Centre" and "Dan Brown" best, you deserve to die. If your favorite book is "Agatha Christie and Sidney Sheldon," you deserve to be slaughtered.

Life in a Whirlwind

"How... how fragile situations are. But not tenuous. Delicate, but not flimsy, not indulgent. Delicate, that's why they keep breaking, they must break and you must the the pieces together and show it before it breaks again, or put them aside for a moment when something else breaks and turn to that, and all this keeps going on. That's why most writing now, if you read it they go on one two three four and tell you what happened like newspaper accounts, no adjectives, no long sentences, no tricks they pretend, and they finally believe that they really believe that the way they saw it is the way it is... It never takes your breath away, telling you things you already know, laying everything out flat, as though the terms and the time, and the nature and the movement of everything were secrets of the same magnitude. They write for people who read with the surface of their minds, people with reading habits that make the smallest demands on them, people brought up reading for facts, who know what's going to come next and want to know what's coming next, and get angry at surprises. Clarity's essential, and detail, no fake mysticism, the facts are bad enough. But we're embarrassed for people who tell too much, and tell it without surprise. How does he know what happened? Unless it's one unshaven man alone in a boat, in all this... all this... Listen, there are so many delicate fixtures, moving toward you, you'll see. Like a man going into a dark room, holding his hands down guarding his parts for fear of a table corner, and... Why, all this around us is for people who can keep their balance only in the light, where they move as though nothing were fragile, nothing tempered by possibility, and all of a sudden bang! something breaks. Then you have to stop and put the pieces together again. But you never can put the pieces back together again. You never can put them back together quite the same way. You stop when you can and expose things, and leave them within reach until you can bring them back and show them, put together slightly different, maybe a little more enduring, until you've broken it and picked up the pieces enough times, and you have the whole thing in all its dimensions. But the discipline, the detail, it's just... sometimes the accumulation is too much to bear."

— The Recognitions by William Gaddis


I quit my internship at Yrals on 31st. 
I start work with CRY tomorrow.
I finished the Steig Larsson trilogy.
I shall attend the Kala Ghoda festival this weekend.
I'm experiencing a certain clarity in my head today. I don't know what I want from life, but I think I'm getting there.


To loose ends and happy beginnings. :)

How many have you read?

I've been seeing this on too many blogs, and now that I've been tagged in one particular list, I have no choice but to put this up myself. The BBC booklist. BBC is under the impression that most people have read only 6 of the 100 books on this list.

As per instructions, I have marked in bold the ones I've read and shall italicize the ones I've at least started.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma -Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Divine Comedy - Dante

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Final count: I've read 40 of the above. 

What about you? :)