About Me

Thursday, July 07, 2005

Space Odyssey: 2040

Walking with Akshay, back to the hostel post a good dinner which ended on the Vadilal offering 'Volcano', I was blessed with a brilliant star-lit night. Akshay, being ever so the bragger about knowledge (sorry for this Akhoy!), helped me see the constellation Ursa Major, better known as the Great Bear. Must have been some Indian thing I guess. Not the Indians that inhabit the eastern hemisphere of the earth, but those wild things in the Americas. The Great Bear. I'm hell sure they must have lent it the name.
I had a funny thought while looking up at the skies. And of course I let Akshay share it with me. I was wondering if The man upstairs, Our Dear Lord the God, with one sleight of the hand might make all the stars vanish from the skies and render total darkness to the horizon. Not even the electric purple that a cloudy night offers; only sheer darkness. Like its out of some horror movie you'd not see with your girl on a Saturday night. But we'd also need some incentive for God to do that. And here is what I think the incentive should be!
200 channels, Hi-definition, in natural chrome, virtual reality meets advanced 3-D projections leaving us with the most realistic theatre experience ever. Now when Gandalf rides the night sky to the Elf Lords, he'd be heard all the way from Mexico to Japan's eastern rim... and as an afterthought maybe even the satellite debris floating all over our solar system. The effect would be so real that you'd wonder if you haven't already been casted as one of the Orcs. I'll be a dwarf, no hassles! But you, yeah! You're gonna be an Orc of the lowest kind only. ;)
Smell as much as it does, of horseshit, I think its gonna be a future thought that would be taken upto its practical end by the screw-space department of NASA or maybe NTT DoCoMo would find that revenue break-even won't even be ten years on this kind of stuff.
There could be multiple stations that, using radio frequency, can project it into space or atleast the outermost layer of the atmosphere. Out there I presume the interference would be restricted to what damage UV might be able to do at best. News can be fed from all the goddam' locations on earth, real time. You'd be able to see the stuff right then and there, projected almost in reality in the skies. All you have to do is tune in your MegaHyperMetropic glasses (MHM for you), into the appropriate frequency and pronto! Ben Kingsley as Gandhi is doing the rounds where The Great Bear was to be hibernating. I'd expect this to help do away with all those televisions and save some extra space in your living room! Maybe that micro-sushi-bar you always wanted won't now be impossible. The TV is gone. All you'll have to do is carry these pair of goggles (Ray-Ban anybody!), sit down where ever you are by the time it is your favourite show on air and find the nearest box of popcorn to grind down.
Err........ my royalties!

Sunday, July 03, 2005

Dancing shoes

The music in the background is set to a hot hindi number. Something to do with lamhe and yaadein. Oblivious to the music, I stepped onto the dance floor at the insistence of a friend.

Move the right leg forward,
Move the right leg back;
Move the other right leg forward;
Hide the dance ability you lack..

Just happens that everytime I proceed to the dance floor from whichever innocous place I am seated or standing at, the left leg mutates itself into another right leg. Looking at my two-right-legs syndrome, everytime I walk upto the dance floor, I wonder if I was destined to join the Travelling FreakShow along in the ranks of the turtle with two heads and the three-legged chicken. The money is not bad I heard and travel is free.
Built at a modest 80kg in a 5'9" frame, my dancing or singing abilities would provide fodder to mocking judges and audience in any talent show auditions. And hence for the past 24 years I've stayed away from dance floors and singing competitions.
Assuming some of you'll may not have had a contact within the walls of a B-school, let me venture out to tell you'll what an 'Insti party' is. If Ambrose in his Devil's dictionary was to put a lexicographic attachment to the phrase, it would go thus -
Insti Party: Warehouse or Depot generally adjoining a football field; Holds 2000 Watts, 10 bottles of Vodka and Whiskey each, 200 fruit juice tetrapeks and at any given point a max of 50 pairs of legs;
Now that the context has been set right, let me get to the brasstacks. Today was another of the insti parties. Without yielding to the pressures of the veins in my body, which were threatening to form a labour union and evangelize themselves into varicose veins, I pulled my body to the Waterloo that an insti party's dance floor to me is. I guess it was the company of the folks I was dancing in - Satish Polekar, Srikanth Kiran D and certainly the better off dancers Shiva, Rubeena and Deepali. The first two mentioned are folks I might have seen every Saturday night at the weekly meetings of 'Support group for the Dance floor suckers', if ever such a group may exist.
Having grown up in 'yenoda SivanChetty Garden' in 'Namma Bengaluru', an island of Tamil in a sea of Kannada, my dancing steps are restricted to what I've seen Vijay, Ajit and the occasional Kamal Hassan pull off - i.e. a general cross between Govinda's tadak-madaks, Urmila's jhatkas and moves of every second guy who solicits his dancing abilities in front of Lord Ganesha statues as they are moved to lakes to be submerged. Surprisingly, those moves on the dance floor came off well, what with Deepali and Shiva definitely impressed with them (Deepali, infact went onto quote that I've begun to dance well) and Rajesh coming up to me an hour later and reiterating what D and S thought of my dance.
So folks, here's the result of it this insti party. I'm left with a few calories lesser, a vodka and four Real fruit juices heavier and a few hours shorter of sleep. And most definitely one step higher on the ladder of great dance moves, with 'Bhangra' only notches higher and 'Cabaret' being left behind.
I have a question for you - Would you do a tapori dance in a crowd where everyone seems to be doing only the waltz.