Untangling The Web # 3: The Best 100 Opening Lines From Books / Life / Stylist Magazine

The Best 100 Opening Lines From Books / Life / Stylist Magazine

It's a brilliant compilation of the best first lines from much loved books. :)

Definitely check this out!

And lament the fact that Eat Pray Love is on the list.

And Rebecca is not.

30 Day Song Challenge: A Song That Makes You Sad.

Jeff Buckley's sensuous cover of Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah', is a song that moves me and often springs a tear from my eyes. Cohen's lyrics are beautifully well-crafted and masterfully intricate, and most of the lyrics are poetically open to interpretation. But Jeff completely blew the song out of the water with this cover. The beautiful singer-songwriter that he was, he added an engaging new dimension to Cohen's composition.
Although the Christian word Hallelujah is typically homage to the one up above, I think Buckley's rendition is a homage to love, life and loss. I have often listened to this song in the middle of the night trying to make sense of the world around me, only to be comforted by his warm enveloping voice.

Thank you, Jeff for exploring life's grey areas with unforgettable eloquence.
I'm unimaginably sorry you drowned in the blue.

30 Day Song Challenge: A Song That Makes You Happy.

The Hall & Oates classic, 'You Make My Dreams Come True', is my go-to song when I want to just laugh, dance and sing out loud!
Find me one person who doesn't like this song, and I shall seek him out and kill him.
No matter what mood I'm in, this always lifts my spirits. And I do a mean birdie dance to its tune. :D

All Things Detestable.

Anachronistic advertisements. 

Coke minus the fizz.

Tangled earphone wires/laptop chargers.

Food in airplanes.

Bad photographs.

A fifty plus air-hostess. 

Tattoos of stars, something in Urdu or something as generic.

Ex-best friends. 

Small talk.

Crows.

Cottage cheese.

90210.

People who exceed the time limit during a presentation.

Farmville requests.

Facebook notifications, in general.

Twitter. Narcissism Unlimited.

Hip hop and rap music.

Astonishingly loud children in restaurants, elevators and theaters.

Healthy food. Purely because not much of it is tasty.

Unreasonably expensive public transport and the way the government increases petrol prices at random intervals. It always catches me by surprise, and burns a huge hole in my pocket. 

That Josh Groban song 'You Raised Me Up' which EVERY aspiring singer on a reality show would have tried to reproduce. It isn't even a good song.

Your spelled as you're. And vice versa.

wRiting lyk dis on Facebook.

Saying LOL or OMG in real life.

Incorrect grammar.

People who post really personal stuff on their blogs, and then feel that people have pre-conceived notions about them.

Taking books or movies too seriously.

Parents who make their children learn Chinese, because it is 'the language of the future'.

Parents who drill in the whole IIT-IIM thing into their kids.

People who live their whole lives thinking they have 'potential' because their mom said so.

How my hair gets so tangled up when travelling in an auto that when I comb them later, they make that scary static-filled-I-am-going-to-break-and-leave-you-bald noise.

The times I lose at Scrabble.

The guy who writes crap but calls himself an 'entertainment writer' and not a 'serious writer' to cover up for aforementioned crap writing. Then the same guy regularly writes 600 word editorials in Times of India. Should we assume that you want to be taken for a fool there as well? 

Read: Chetan Bhagat.

Plagiarists who hire a legal team to sue anyone who brings up blatant plagiarism on charges of defamation. All the attempts at rationalizing stealing music are listen up, FAIL.

Read: Pritam

Sentences peppered unnecessarily with swear words.

Racism.

Sexual harassment.

Women being used as weapons of war in regions around the world.

Encounter killings.

Closed cases.

Lack of ambition.

Damn, I hate a lot of stuff.

30 Day Song Challenge: My LEAST Favourite Song

Dil mein mere hai Dard e Disco.
Enough said.

30 Day Song Challenge: My Favourite Song

It's real tough to pick a favourite, but if I really have to, 'Where The Streets Have No Name' by U2 would be it. I couldn't really find the studio version of the song, but this video gave me goosebumps too. :)
Well, for starters, the intro never fails to light up my face. To me, it talks about getting away from the glitter and materialism of big cities. To just travel, explore, to really live your life, rather than becoming a bastion of daily drudgery.
The fact that Bono wrote this song about class segregation in Ireland/American metros/Heaven-these multiple interpretations of the song only enhance its charm.

Hoppipola by Sigur Ros is a close second. :)

Kerfuffle.

Kerfuffle.
Cute, expressive little word, isn't it? Sounds like the name of a Smurf, or puppy. Come to think of it, I may actually name my future pup Kerfuffle.

For a long period of time, I believed that consumerism, materialism and even capitalism, were sustained by the big corporations of the world, that drove hordes of consumers to believe that having Nike shoes were necessary, that Boost was the secret of Tendulkar's energy and a Hallmark greeting card is the sweetest way to brighten up someone's day. They forced you into thinking that you could buy your way to success. To fame. The great paradox is that they made you believe you could buy your way to individuality. You reveal your own character through what you consume. Yes, the manipulative global biggies and news channels. 

Now that I think about it, the conflict between the conformists and non-conformists in every generation, the competition between members of society for status- that is what drives consumerism. This discord between antithetical persons is the turbine that powers the materialistic tendencies of all members of a capitalistic society.

An example:

You are in your teens. Little by little, you are beginning to understand the harsh realities that are operatives in the big bad world. You comprehend the paradox of religion, the paradigm of censorship, the mindlessness of mainstream sitcoms. But you feel saddled with the inconvenience of societal conventions and expectations. You want to escape, and discover the real meaning of life, and the relativity of it all. You oppose popular music, movies, books, cultural icons, and in fact, become an active dissenter of the same. You dig through all the rubble of pop-culture to find obscure bands and like them, read provocative literature, find symbolism in un-appreciated movies. You identify rebels in the prior generations, and those that live on the fringes of mainstream culture. They're the cool ones. They are not driven by the Versaces and Gatorades of the world. They find contentment in their Che t-shirts- the generic symbol for all things idealistic, rebellious, and iconoclasm. Their all black-avatars. Tie-and-dye shirts. The big glasses. 

So, you purchase that Che t-shirt. You get that post-modernist symbolic tattoo. You decide to wear just black. There is no colour in your world, is there?

You may not be rich enough to out-consume each other, but most definitely, you can out-taste each other. Your cleverly chosen, funny, quirky items of purchase define your authenticity in the blur of a mass-produced world. Those vintage 60s glasses. The vinyls. The DVD of the obscure French crime noir . The objectivists. 

Guess what?

You are just another member of the counter-culture that drives capitalism in the first place.You choose to look past the fact that there's someone out there making millions of bucks thanking God you think the way you do, and you choose to purchase the items that you do.

Conformism and non-conformism are inherently relative in nature, and highly subjective. People find their happiness in either. And they may choose to side with any, as long as they are truly happy with their choice. There isn't any wrong or right here. Never will be.
 All I know is that I sure enjoy digging into the kerfuffle of it all. 

On the Indian Identity.

I was on my way back from dropping my sister to tennis class today. Papa's out of town, so the car was miraculously available. That saved me from the post-summer-pre-monsoon humidity. Of course, I got stuck in traffic, even with the sports club being just 5 minutes away. (Mumbai isn't the most populated city for nothing.) Watching the pedestrians crossing the street absentmindedly, I noticed a girl with a nose ring. She looked about my age, was dressed in torn jeans and a black t-shirt that read Iron Maiden in jagged letters. In contrast, there are many thousand middle-class women around the country who get their nose-pierced at a young age. For them, the nose ring is a sign that they adhere to the traditional image of womanhood and femininity in India. But for the pedestrian I'd just happened to notice, the nose ring symbolized the membership of an alternative community, one that exists on the periphery of the mainstream youth. Essentially, the nose ring had travelled around the world, and assumed a fringe meaning, while its traditional meaning remained ingrained in our country's essence.
Same thing with Yoga. And Buddhism. And Chicken Tikka Masala.
What was behenji at first, is now in vogue post a whirlwind world tour.

Walk down Bandra Linking road and you'll see stalls brimming with Judas Priest and Homer Simpson t-shirts alike and pushy salesmen proclaiming their clothes are of the best quality, just a little dirty and torn, madam. Enter the colleges of the city, travel by a local train, peep into a BEST bus, and everyone from the irritable bus-driver to the college peon has such a t-shirt on. In many countries in the West, wearing such items of clothing would automatically make you part of a genre; it would become a lazy conversation starter at the very least. People would be enormously conscious of what band their t-shirt says they like, and it would be a general statement on their music taste. There, a guy wearing a Porcupine Tree t-shirt would probably be condescending to a girl wearing a Miley Cyrus cap. Here, it doesn't matter. A t-shirt is a t-shirt, and nothing else. If it looks good, buy it. There is zero guarantee that a guy wearing a Metallica t-shirt actually listens to the band. People don't really care because they don't really know what it means. And in big cities like Mumbai, everyone is a stranger. You can live anonymously, no matter what your t-shirt says.

The identity of the average Indian is a confused, albeit multi-faceted one, which makes it immensely difficult to stereotype. I'm not sure what made me notice that girl in the metal t-shirt, but if looks could be valid indicators of preferences, my bet is that she just bought it because it looked cool. And her nose ring is just another form of identification to fit into her social circle. Or to break away from it. 

What We'll Leave Behind.

This is what New York Times says:

 "But increasingly we’re not leaving a record of life by culling and stowing away physical journals or shoeboxes of letters and photographs for heirs or the future. Instead, we are, collectively, busy producing fresh masses of life-affirming digital stuff: five billion images and counting on Flickr; hundreds of thousands of YouTube videos uploaded every day; oceans of content from 20 million bloggers and 500 million Facebook members; two billion tweets a month. Sites and services warehouse our musical and visual creations, personal data, shared opinions and taste declarations in the form of reviews and lists and ratings, even virtual scrapbook pages. Avatars left behind in World of Warcraft or Second Life can have financial or intellectual-property holdings in those alternate realities. We pile up digital possessions and expressions, and we tend to leave them piled up, like virtual hoarders. At some point, these hoards will intersect with the banal inevitability of human mortality. One estimate pegs the number of U.S. Facebook users who die annually at something like 375,000."

All this digital litter that future grandchildren will have to sort through is amusing in its own way.
At the very least, the kids of serial photoshopped-profile-picture-changers will have cool bragging rights, and the curious grandchild of a Twitter addict will know every detail of his stuffy boring grand-dad's wild youth.

Personally, I wouldn't mind re-adopting the stone tablet, and scribble my definitive literature in cuneiform. They seem to be able to ride out most calamities.
:P

P.S. My blog turned one, two days ago. Of course, stupid that I am, I forgot.
But 130 posts, 602 comments and 64 followers later, I couldn't be happier. :)

Sitcom Smile.

Maybe we are the way we are because of the people we're with. Or maybe we just pick the people we need. However it works, when you find each other, you should never let go.

- Modern Family, Episode 22, Season 2.