The Show

I was talking to a friend a few hours ago; as we talked we traversed the long winding roads of relationships and theories about life.

Relationship theories cannot be complete without ample references to Seinfeld, and certainly not without due credit given to George. My friend brought up the Show Theory propounded by Costanza in The Visa;

George: Ya gotta put on a show, ya always gotta give them a big show. You always have to be 'on' otherwise why would they like me? They'd just go for a better looking guy with more money.

From the male POV, naturally it's quite upsetting - having to put on a show all the time can be tiring, especially when the chick walks out midway. This makes women sound materialistic and opportunistic. (No one likes sounding materialistic and opportunistic, even if they are.)

This is our take though:

See, we generally don't attend these shows based on newspaper reviews. If you're that frickin' good, you're probably sold out months before the show. Hence, we're genuinely taking a chance, its really more like a very iffy blind date than anything else. I might have been expecting a fine Shakespearean tragedy and I walk in to see an S. Vee. Shekhar play. The latter is great if you enjoy that sort of thing but when you're in the mood for The Bard you genuinely don't want to see anything else. We put the quick exit stage left.

I'll even give that you're putting up an excellent violin recital, when what I was expecting to hear was the sax. You've got our attention, and we're forgetting about the sax we were originally going out to listen to - and then you stop playing, or take a break. Now we're not entirely hooked by your violin recital enough to have forgotten about the saxophone, so can you really blame us if during the long intermission we realize we've somewhere else to go?

To clear this patent mismatch of ideas out, I suggest you stack out descriptions and genres quite clearly outside your hall. Make a little flyer.
"Jazz Only. Tickets to all other concerts must be left at the counter. Fair Software Engineer 24y preferred."


PS:
Tip - Open bar always draws in crowds. Women like their booze and they love it when it's free. Good luck at your next performance.

They Said

Wake up. Clean up. Dress up.

Messed up. Screwed up. Stuck up.

Listen up. Keep up. Wise up.
Step up. Look up. Pick up.

Shut up. Given up. Too fucked up.

-------

There don't seem to be many laughs around these days.

Maybe things aren't that funny these days.

Things have never been funnier. People have just lost their sense of humor.

Things stop being funny when people get hurt.

Au contraire. That's when things get hilarious.

-------

Time will heal. There is true love. There is a point to life. Say no to drugs. Prioritize. See the big picture. There is right and wrong. Love your family and friends. Be normal and happy. Choose life.


Lies.

Scars never heal.
Life is fucking pointless.
What's there to prioritize when life is pointless?
What big picture?
Right and wrong are anthropogenic abstractions.

--------

I am the system. You are mine. You were born here, you will live here, and die here. And as long as you're here, you'll live by my rules. The Freedom Act gives you what you've got - we didn't sign up for free-floating ideals.

And if I don't?

You pay the price.

What's the price? I'll pay it.

What with? You're already paying for your birth with your life and then your death. You have nothing to give us.



--------





As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being - C.G Jung: Memories, Dreams, Reflections

My ten most memorable characters

I compiled this on an unnaturally long journey back to college. Ah, Final Year!

Not necessarily the best roles I've seen, just the most memorable. The kind that make me go Ah! Yeah, i sure remember that one.

10. Val Kilmer as Iceman (Lt. Tom 'Iceman' Kazansky) in Top Gun


I don't know if I remember him this well because he was so bloody hot (and he's Val Kilmer!), but he's definitely the first thing I remember when I hear Berlin's Take my breath away.

9. Whoopi Goldberg as Sister Mary Clarence in Sister Act (1 & 2)

I've seen Whoopi in other movies, and nowhere is she as convincingly funny and in-your-face as she is in Sister Act. I know this movie was totally panned by everyone who watched it, but it's so campy it was actually funny.


8. Edward Norton as Smoochy in Death To Smoochy


It's not easy for an actor like Norton to play someone so utterly and brilliantly naive and stupid. I love him and his stupid Smoochy costume and his 'Well, How'dya like that?'
And because I think Norton is so awesome I'm going to put another of his pictures up here.



7. Ramya Krishnan as Neelambari in Padayappa


This woman is so bloody powerful in her role! She's venomous and vixenish and utterly completely bewitching as Neelambari, and as a testament to the impact her character had in Padayappa, they brought her back for a cameo in BABA. Ramya Krishnan rocks!

6. Pumbaa the Warthog in Lion King

I found it very tragic that Pumbaa's chronic flatulence problem was so mocked (he found his aroma lacked a certain appeal, he could clear the savannah after every meal!)
This warthog was so uncool he was brilliant!


Imho, Pumbaa kicked Timon and Simba's ass each time.

5. Aravind Swamy as Rishi Kumar in Roja

This character was so resilient and fought so strongly in the movie; I watch the movie each time only to see him come alive in it. Why don't we get to see more of him these days?


4. Jeff Anderson as Randall Graves in Clerks 1 & 2

This guy is berserk. Foul-mouthed, insane, crass, berserk. He's amazingly funny and totally memorable for the same reasons. He was way funnier in Clerks 1 though. Goes for the entire movie, really.



4. Heath Ledger as The Joker in The Dark Knight


I know there are two fours.

3. Marlon Brando as Don Vito Corleone in The Godfather


He made me an offer I couldn't refuse.

3. Audrey Tatou as Amelie Poulain in Le Fabuleux destin d'Amelie Poulain

This woman is simply gorgeous. I can't think of anyone else who could have played this role as awesome she did. Her optimism and acute naivete are so infectious!



2. Kamal Hassan as Kameshwaran in Michael Madana Kama Rajan

Enna ellorum meenu-meenunguranga?
Ava English meena sollara da.

This is my favorite role of Kamal Hassan's thus far. He's got an awesome Palakkad accent, is insanely funny in Crazy Mohan's role, and has me rolling with laughter on the floor each time I see this movie!



Nee Tiruppura Sundari alla. Thiruttu Sundari!

1. (After not much consideration)

Jack Nicholson as Col. Nathan R. Jessop in A Few Good Men


You want the truth? You can't handle the truth!

This courtroom scene is one of my all time favorite scenes. I only wish Tom Cruise hadn't nancy-boyed the entire movie. It would have been simply brilliant without him. Aaron Sorkin did a fantastic job, and Nicholson as usual is simply awesome.


Note: I know I might have forgotten several highly memorable characters, but whatever, the Mangalore Express is not exactly conducive to great memory.

For neither love nor money...

Scene at SAC one lazy Sunday morning




...People still make fools of themselves for free.

Harjot

I have a new neighbor.

It's a Surd kid in a little pink turban called Harjot.

All the other kids in my apartment building are badly behaved Tam kids who play cricket and football and break windows and charge into your apartment if your door is left open and break anything within reach on the pretext of finding their greasy ball.

I mentioned Tam kids; so you must understand that there is a lot of coarse swearing in Tam. The new Kids on the Block start off saying idiot and fool and descend within two days to muttal, shaniyan, bemari, somari and within a week, to thevadiya, all lead by a prepubescent but precocious 10-year old named Jagat, (Jaggu).

There are really no other racial, ethnic or linguistic groups apart from these Tam families, not accounting for the odd Marwadi businessman family or Northie DINK couples who come to rent in one of these buildings and soon move away unable to take the accusing stares of the parents of the abovementioned Tam kids (How dare they breathe the same air we do? Bloody philistine foreigners.)

Notwithstanding the fairly multicultural exposure at school, these kids are born xenophobes (as all kids must be, except these are armed to the teeth with expletives and cricket bats and eons of cultural egocentrism running through their veins). So when little Harjot came to play, they did not take to him as friendly little children do. He got called a lot of names (Popular Choice: Urulakazhangu-thalaya or Potato-Head). They grudgingly let him play though.

Jaggu soon came around after his tuitions and Harjot was umpiring. You've got to realize that this is Jaggu's birthright; no one else umpires while Jaggu's around. Unsaid apartment rules. Jaggu started off with some comments which ran on these lines (in tam, of course):

Enna da? Who is this towelhead? He can't be umpire. I'll hit him.

The bullying started all over again, with various kids backing Jaggu up and threatening to beat Harjot up to pulp. This little kid in a pink turban staunchly stood his ground; without saying a word or understanding a word that was said.

Finally, when Jaggu moved in for the kill, Harjot shot out a brilliant left hook contemporaneous with a kick to the shin that took all the wind out of the chubby and overfed Jaggu. He crumpled like a paper doll and subsequently ran off to his mom. The rest of the kids stood, shocked and awed.


Harjot resumed umpiring, and the children quietly took their places.


Languages are merely theoretical boundaries. Who needs words with a left hook like that?

Engineers

There are a huge number of engineers all over the world. This number is made more significant by their importance to the community they live in.

Not looking to give any merit whatsoever to sitcoms or dramas, or make them a barometer of the importance of people, but I'll definitely credit them with being a barometer of the public interest.

There are sitcoms about every possible profession. The law, medicine, nurses, detectives, vampires, PI's, etc. alright, dramatic, interesting.
Also about private practitioners, expats, hotel management, hotels not so well managed (Hotel Erotica, WHAT?) actors, managers, script-writers, teachers, school kids, book-keepers, drug-dealers, deadbeats, car mechanics.. er. not so dramatic now.

In short, about every single profession apart from that of an Engineer.


Not blaming them. Sigh. Who wants to watch a guy in glasses in oversized clothes and a stutter fabricate an IC? Or a boring short woman in badly matched clothes design tray towers?

Face it. We're boring people with boring jobs that no one (including us) are interested in knowing about.


ps: The Big Bang Theory is _not_ about Engineers. The show would fall flat if there were only Wolowitz and similar Wolowitz-like creatures in it.

Things that have irked me in the last few weeks

I spent three weeks at home in Chennai post-endsems and pre-internship, preparing for a farcical GRE, and the trials and tribulations I underwent here due to heat and boredom were severely compounded by the following phenomenons, which when named, must be preceded by a string of the choicest invectives in all possible languages.


In no particular order, they were:
1. Times of India ; Chennai Edition
This lousy paper took over thus far staunchly The Hindu households (not the religious affiliation here.) due to their marketing policy that appealed to the cheapskate preeminent in all Tam-Brahms. At the niggardly sum of Rs. 260 or so, you could subscribe to this paper and get the lousy rag throughout the year, and they threw in a diary and a couple of travel bags for free. I think we paid for the diary and the travel bags though, for who could charge anything for such trash as the TOI paper? I come home from Surathkal, aching for the crossie and the Editorial, and find this vile joke of a newspaper basking in the seat previously occupied by honorables such as The Hindu and The Economic Times. Oh, sin!
Typos are the order of the day; maintaining consistency in article genre clearly means squat to the bunch of juveniles staffing the TOI office. A pathetic attempt at imitating BT Page 3 has often ugly and terribly dressed men and women posing for a cameraman who if he had any self-respect would kill either his subjects or himself. A Tween-times of sorts is clearly a forgery of Young World, and a terrible one at that. Severely demoralizing to see this paper every morning, leading to harsh words exchanged between mother and self lead to the eventual scrapping of this (i don't want to call it newspaper).

My sister claims people in the US refer to TOI more familiarly as the Toilet paper Of India. Well done, I thought.

2. Shobha De

Excuse me while I control my urge to retch and tear my hair out.

She wrote this book called 'Superstar India: From Incredible to Unstoppable' which was reviewed relentlessly by the media.

I quote, from the book ;

-- Your screen cannot display the content here on account of its atrociously inane nature --

In my opinion, Shobha De should be bludgeoned to bloody death by a rumpus of bibulous baseball-bat bearing baboons. The bitch.


3. Women with discount coupons:

I was recently in line at a supermarket behind a woman dressed to utterly blind, where she had about three cartloads of groceries she wanted to bill. The woman at the counter wearily lifted the last box of tissues (There were five, I think. Apparently a woman prone to much sweat.) People were waiting in line behind her, tapping their feet, clicking their tongues, making noises, whatever it is that people do to signify their irritation. This woman calmly, so calmly, takes out her Sodexho coupons and starts counting them. They're marked in denominators of Rs 5, and she has a bill of approximately 3k. I have a vague suspicion of having died and been reborn in the time she took to count to 300 or whatever.


I had a bunch more I wanted to write about, but it's already taken me three weeks or so to come up with this post I first started writing about way back in May, and it's June now.

An Ideal Man

A fascinating dialogue in Oscar Wilde's A Woman of No Importance between three women on the characteristics an ideal man must possess.





Mrs. Allonby: (A woman after my own heart!) The Ideal Man! Oh, the Ideal Man should talk to us as if we were goddesses and treat us as if we were children. He should refuse all our serious requests and gratify every one of our whims. He should encourage us to have caprices, and forbid us to have missions. He should always say much more than he means, and always mean much more than he says.
Lady Hunstanton: But how could he do both, dear?
Mrs. Allonby: He should never run down other pretty women. That would show he had no taste, or make one suspect that he had too much. No; he should be nice about them all, but say that somehow they don't attract him.
Lady Stutfield: Yes, that is always very, very pleasant to hear about other women.
Mrs. Allonby: If we ask him a question about anything, he should give us an answer all about ourselves. He should invariably praise us for whatever qualities he knows we haven't got. But he should be pitiless, quite pitiless in reproaching us for the virtues that we have never dreamed of possessing. He should never believe we know the use of useful things, that would be unforgivable. But he should shower on us everything we don't want.
Lady Caroline: As far as I can see, he is to do nothing but pay bills and compliments.
Mrs. Allonby: He should persistently compromise us in public, and treat us with absolute respect when we are alone. And yet he should always be ready to have a perfectly terrible scene, whenever we want one, and to become miserable, absolutely miserable, at a moment's notice, and to overwhelm us with just reproaches in less than twenty minutes, and to be positively violent at the end of half an hour, and to leave us forever at a quarter to eight when we have to go and dress for dinner. And when, after that, one has seen him for really the last time, and he has refused to take back the little things he has given one, and promised never to communicate with one again, or to write one any foolish letters, he should be perfectly broken-hearted, and telegraph to one all day long, and send one little notes every half-hour by a private hansom, and dine quite alone at the club, so that everyone should know how unhappy he was. And after a whole dreadful week, during which one has gone about everywhere with one's husband, just to show how absolutely lonely one was, he may be given a third last parting, in the evening, and then, if his conduct has been quite irreproachable, and one has behaved quite badly to him, he should be allowed to admit that he has been entirely in the wrong, and when he was admitted that, it becomes a woman's duty to forgive, and one can do it all over again from the beginning, with variations.



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So gratifying to know that nothing much has changed between 18th century England and now. :P