Back to regular programming.

Yomance: Yomance, a word I want to take credit for having invented, is new age short-term romance that a couple willingly gets into, knowing fully well that it will not / should not culminate in marriage. Its short term romance for the yo-generation. I am too old school for Yomance and I still feel like being head over heels in love with one person forever, the trials and tribulations that go with the search notwithstanding.

So the basic classification for relationships would have to be in the following order, just to give you a sense of where Yomances lie:

One night stand << Fling << Yomance << Long Term Relationship << Marriage

Delhi Airport Fundas: I like airports in general. I like train stations too. And airplanes and trains. I detest bus stands. That is beside the point.

The Delhi airport has had fond memories associated with it. On 23rd December 2009, I took a last minute flight from there to Hyderabad to attend my first job interview at B-school.

The flight cost me a bomb and I later realized that with a little more money, I could’ve made two (yes TWO) round trips to Singapore on Tiger Airways. Sadly Tiger Airways only operates from four South Indian airports and Chomland residents have no luck in this regard.

At the airport, I pleaded with all the airlines to give me a flight ticket to Hyderabad at the earliest possible and one ticket opened up on a Kingfisher flight at the last minute. I gave the ticket lady a big hug when she handed over my grossly expensive ticket and every time I end up at the departure lounge to head out of Delhi, I feel like dropping in and saying hi, except for that she’d have forgotten or felt that I was being creepy. Sometimes its nicer to let memories remain so.

Frantic phone calls to our placement department, to friends in Hyderabad and Delhi and elsewhere, shaving without soap / shaving cream / hot water at the airport after picking up a safety razor from some shady kirana store across the road and a random conversation with a guy who had Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal and Chelsea decals on his backpack (I told him he’d get beaten up in every major city in the UK) later, I was on the flight.

As I’d blogged before, I made it for the interview on time and did well, but the job went to a better candidate who rejected the offer, went onto win the Chairman’s award on campus for our batch and has since been elevated to levels of studness regular people like me can only dream of.

Weather Woes: I was in Bangalore, Mysore and Madras over the past fortnight, to attend two weddings and chill out in Mysore. The weather there is so beautiful and so pleasant that I am shocked at how I had taken what I had for granted. The complete absence of a miasma-like feeling that has stifled me up here in the NCR was extreme relief.

Mundu Madness: Wearing a is the best thing one can do in the sweltering heat of Madras. My friend’s wedding was being held during the time that the place was at its hottest and wearing boxers and a mundu with a belt tied strategically to avoid any potentially embarrassing incidents was the best decision. Ever. A certain Sangram Bhalla would no doubt strongly agree.

RSJ Fundaes: Its been more than three years since I’ve begun writing for RSJ and now, most saturdays when I am not traveling out of Delhi, which is most saturdays, I have time to get to the office here and sit and get some work done towards content for the magazine. The new initiatives for the year ahead as envisioned by RSJ are promising and will certainly do a lot for the music scene.

I had a few posts in mind, but they require a lot of time and a lot more contemplation for proper construction and presentation. In other news, I just read my last column post on RSJ only to realize that I’d made a mention of ‘Strategic Innovation Management’ in passing. I don’t remember writing this column because it was in between exams during my last few days on campus and I guess the content in the piece is a reflection of my state of mind then.

Having said that, most of what actually happened in my life last year is stranger than fiction and hence needs no more fraudness to be introduced for this post to sound weirder. If you’re cheesed off by the post already, here’s wishing you a grand 2010 and goodbye.

Before you go, please check out Aadisht’s stunning preview of 2010 which definitely warrants a read. His years in preview are now a regular feature of his bleg.

Moving on to 2009 in review for me in person. A lot of condensation has taken place thanks to the fact that minutiae needn’t be documented, in the interest of time and space and most of all, your attention span and sanity.

January:

• Went to IIT Madras and interviewed Opeth for the cover story for Rock Street Journal. Got promoted from Correspondent to Staff Writer, though I can’t really tell the difference. The latter title definitely sounds cooler. Never felt more powerful as part of the fourth estate till date, except for while shamelessly flashing press card before boarding domestic flights and getting the aisle seat all the time.
• Got two videos (video 1 and video 2) of me dancing along with Gaurav Basu and Abhinav Yogesh, vocalist and drummer respectively of the Bangalore based Inner Sanctum. It is to be noted that TASMAC shops disbursing alcohol in Tamil Nadu close at 10 PM, and our shenanigans were executed in complete sobriety due to the frustration of not having consumed alcohol, as opposed to being inebriated as it might seem in the video. Potential recruiters, please note that this showcases my light side which might come in handy as a future manager in your esteemed firm.

February:

• Admitted to the Indian School of Business’ class of 2010. Sheer joy at not having to work for a year. Eleven months down the line, I realize I’ve worked more in college than in fifty five months at the office. Go figure.

March:

• Last day at work on 20th March, and the anticlimax accompanying the end of my work at the only company that had me employed made me feel grateful that I could switch companies sans emotion. Being in the system long enough afforded a smooth exit, with all friendly faces helping out with the exit formalities. I still miss my close friends at work, and the fellowship (as we called our elitist clique of ‘cool’ people) shall reconvene again!
• Packed and moved back from Bangalore to Mysore, only to move out again in ten days. Had to bid goodbye to all the good friends I had made over five years in the city which I had just begun referring to as home, along with Mysore. Packing and moving sucks.
• Attended a wonderful surprise birthday party for someone. Surprise birthday parties shall never go out of fashion.

April:

• Turned 26. Was unemployed. Did nothing on my birthday except go out for an hour to meet an old college friend. One of my most uneventful and yet best birthdays till date.
• Finished loan formalities. For the first ever time in my life, I owed someone money that I wasn’t in a position to repay in the short term. I’ve still not come to this bridge that I foresee will be a long and arduous one to cross.
• Joined Indian School of Business’ class of 2010 to become a post-graduate student of management. Yeah, this is most of what my life currently revolves around till date, for better or worse.

May:

• Settled into college life, made friends, played pranks like this one and had a lot of fun. Got adjusted to parties, long hours of working / studying, spending atrocious amounts of time in front of my laptop, answering phone calls like I had to go take an urgent dump and other things that management grad students are usually supposed to do.
• Wore a suit for the second time in my life to get a picture clicked for the student handbook. The contortions involved in getting me to pose that way, as can be seen in my linkedin profile can’t ever be replicated, unless under conditions of threat to my life. The first time I wore a suit was for my B-school interview in December 2008.

June:

• The end of the world as I knew it and I felt fine. Correction. I’ll feel fine in due time, and write another cathartic post like this one and things will be brighter and sunnier again. Until then that far away look where one focuses away into infinity and reminisces about the past when one’s mind wanders shall remain.
• The rest of June 2009 remains a blur.

July:

• Getting used to the academic grind, with B-school keeping me busy enough to not even blog, try as hard as I wanted to. Oh, and I got to be President of the Music Club, which meant that anytime someone’s audio equipment malfunctioned, I was asked to come around and tinker with the wires to set it right, or to play top Bollywood hits music at parties where a DJ was unaffordable, or compile playlists for the most randomest of occasions. In all this confusion, a band was formed on campus (a rock band, no less!) and it was called Conjoint. Bwuahahahaha.

August:

• This was the month of theories when out of class creativity was at its peak, and a new genre of music was discovered, the Samson ratio was discovered and the Infinitely Prolonged Social Interaction theory was formulated. This theory, in some other time and some other place might’ve catapulted me to meteoric fame, but alas, all it got me was a blog post with a reasonable number of hits. I’ve made peace with that. I’m so easy to please.
• New nicknames were given to people, some of which will stick for life. Conjoint made its debut performance amidst as little fanfare as was possible.

September:

• Seems like I’d amassed enough street cred to be considered a judge for rock shows and hence was invited by Xtreme Sports Bar in Hyderabad over three weekends to judge Hyderabad bands doing their stuff. Got acquainted with the music scene in Hyd as a result.

October:

• Tried hitting on a girl at a bar when I was judging the final of the aforesaid set of rock shows. My extent of hitting on was to make hajjar eye contact and then not go up and make conversation. At this rate, I might as well hope and pray that females realize that striking conversation with men is part of the whole women’s lib thing that they’re so proud of displaying or that GSBs can convert easily to Buddhism, whichever comes later.
• Spent a wonderful week in Hampi / Anegundi working on an internship project to develop rural tourism and improve the small scale handicrafts industry in the region. Fell in love with the idea of watching sunsets while walking in paddy fields, listening to Sigur Ros.

November:

• Website told jai, MadMan Madhu Menon repaired it for me. God bless him.
• Fell into the standard issue honeytrap that most stupid people in an educational institute fall for, where someone’s charm is used to extract work from someone else. Guess which of the two parties I was!

December:

• Won a free phone at a quiz. The Nokia 5310 is my first phone with camera, mp3 ringtones, bluetooth, video and a wallpaper that moves!!!!!!!!
• Monkee got engaged, among other fun events that took place on December 13th. His phone bill has since quadrupled and his joy has increased asymptotically. Touchwood, good luck and God bless.
• Opened as part of Conjoint for The Raghu Dixit Project.
• Got shortlisted for a job interview, did crazy things including rush from Noida to the Delhi airport in peak traffic with no less than six near-death instances, beg and plead for a last minute flight ticket from New Delhi which cost a bomb, hugged the Kingfisher attendant who booked me the ticket and showed up in time for the interview. Many days and rounds later, I got a reject. Such is life. The effort made it memorable. Also, it doesn’t snow in Thailand. So there.
• The first of my cousins on my Mum’s side got married. She’s the second, age-wise. Guess which moron is the eldest? Yeah, scary. I know.
• Spent New Year’s eve half asleep while watching TV at home. The tame end to the year was as blissful and relaxing as it could get.

2009 will be relegated to the pages of personal history and has earmarked many changes in my life, good and bad. However, like each year that has passed in living memory, it will, without doubt be yet another year that has gone in shaping life as I know it. If you’ve read so far, Happy New Year once again!

*post fades away into the distance, with Green Day’s ‘Time of Your Life’ playing softly in the background*

Well, ok, not so much disco as freestyle dancing. But you get the drift.

At the very outset of this post, I am reminded of some random thing I did in engineering college, in the third and the seventh semester. We had this particular lecturer whose idea of teaching was to walk into class, dictate notes until the end of the hour, take attendance and then leave.

From what our class had heard of him, he was a terror who did not grant gratis attendance, and would remember if you tried to act too funny in his class and then penalize you in the internal evaluations.

That was why I always thought twice about bunking his class, and attended it to take down whatever he dictated and endured it, albeit under extreme duress. It proved to be the ideal way of preparing me for corporate life where I am now able to sit through über-boring, nonsensical meetings while pretending to show interest. In fact, I get paid to do it.

In order to kill one hour, I thought of reading some book in class. But I was a goody-one shoe (half way to being a goody-two-shoes) and did not want to risk getting caught. Nor would I be able to concentrate, given his distracting voice.

Hence, I came up with a brilliant plan to solve this crisis. I decided to take down notes that he dictated in complete earnest.

However, there was a small catch.

I took only four sheets of paper and wrote in as small a font size as was humanely possible, and managed to fill up all the four sheets by the end of the semester. If there was an MS-word equivalent, it would’ve been ‘Hari Shenoy Font, size 1′.

I guess I did the earth a service by saving paper, and this unashamed cheapness on my part is something I am immensely proud of. My marks in those two subjects are a different story altogether.

Speaking of different stories, this one is about travelling cheap, which I decided to do when my mind was wandering and I thought of how I had managed to write so much on so little paper.

I am going to Chennai to cover the Opeth concert for Rock Street Journal, and there is a distinct possibility that I might get to interview Mikael Åkerfeldt and co. This concert will be held at the OAT in IIT Madras as part of the Saarang festival and all that stuff.

I somehow thought it would be cool to spend as little as possible on this trip, from the time I leave Bangalore on the morning of the 25th, till when I return to Bangalore on the 26th in the afternoon. I am planning to spend less than $10 overall, and I hope I can stick to this limit.

As a consequence of that, I have decided to travel in the second class seating section (not that I don’t otherwise, though I’ve been a bit elitist off-late and travelled in a/c on my last four train journeys) and only travel by city buses for intra-city travel.

I am planning to scrounge around for dirt cheap food, while not compromising on hygiene, my appetite or fulfilling my taste-buds’ needs. However, the only possible exception I might make is to head to Benjarong on TTK Road for lunch, should my stomach order me to, in which case a meal for one would cost INR 500. I am hoping that my steely resolve will prevent me from doing so.

In that case, I will have to head to Benjarong in Bangalore to have lunch / dinner to compensate for it, but that will be at a later date.

I also realize that I will have to spend a night in Chennai after the concert, and I’ve concocted all these pseudo-romantic images of sleeping on a park bench within the IIT-M campus, though I realize that I will in all probability end up having extended conversations with some or the other characters present there who, I hope will be as cheap as I am, and not have booked a hotel room.

Even if I end up losing sleep on the night of the 25th, I can make up for it by snoozing on the train on Republic Day, or crashing when I get back home that afternoon.

Right now, I want to know from any good samaritan that will stumble upon this post due to the awesome SEO plugin I’ve installed about the bus numbers that can transport me from Chennai Central to IIT M and back. Also, any info about cheap food places in the vicinity of IIT-M (in a 1 km radius; I plan to walk) would be greatly appreciated.

Opeth ki jai. Motherjane ki jai and of course, Demonic Resurrection ki jai. See you if and when you get there!

PS: Yes, there is an IT slowdown, but this is not a result of that. I’m congenitally cheap.

In case you weren’t aware, there’s a major petrol product supplies crisis due to the combined effects of strikes by the truckers (which has entered its fourth day) and the oil PSU officers (which is now in its second day).

News reports have stated that petrol stations in Delhi and Chennai are allowing customers to fuel only INR 200 worth of fuel to stave off a potential shortage, with vehicle owners across other cities running helter-skelter to fill up their tanks in case these stations run dry.

The government is in the process of invoking the ESMA to prevent the shit from further hitting the fan.

Personally, I don’t give a damn so far as petrol for transportation is concerned, and its high time we stopped our dependance on it and resorted to alternate and viable means of transport instead.

People, smarten up and start cycling!

Be awesome. (like me!) ]]> http://harishenoy.com/blog/2009/01/what-petrol-crisis/feed/ 1 http://harishenoy.com/blog/2009/01/demonic-resurrection-opeth-kryptos-iron-maiden/ http://harishenoy.com/blog/2009/01/demonic-resurrection-opeth-kryptos-iron-maiden/#comments Thu, 08 Jan 2009 12:11:14 +0000 Hari http://harishenoy.com/blog/?p=948 Elementary, dear reader.

Or more like an extension of high school math – ratio and proportion.

So, for those that came in late, Mumbai based Demonic Resurrection is all set to be the opening act for Opeth’s maiden India show to be held on 25th January at IIT-M for Saarang 2009.

When last heard, Sahil Makhija, front man of DR was so overjoyed that he went on a cooking spree in his kitchen, making demonic omlette after demonic omlette and was quoted as saying, ‘I can have my demonic omlette and eat it too!’. (For recipe, please refer to Sahil’s notes on his facebook profile or browse through the archives of Rock Street Journal.)

In news closer home, Bangalore based outfit Kryptos, who’ve been referred to as the fab four of the Bangalore melodic trash metal scene (just once) are all set to open for Iron Maiden, who will be performing in Bangalore on the 15th of February 2009.

While Kryptos’ cullinary skills are in question, their beer-guzzling abilities aren’t, and the day opening acts were finalized, the sales of Kingfisher bottles all across Bangalore hit record highs.

Turns out that there are hundreds of other bands apart from Kryptos who will play before Iron Maiden hits the stage. Among the other bands gracing the stage are Synaps, PDV, the winners of the Campus Rock Idols contest, two British bands – one of which is named De Profundis (a shout out to reader PGK) and Lauren Harris as well.

So, the crowd is in for quite a wait before Iron Maiden hits the stage, but like all good things, the wait is most certainly worth it.

So, on Saturday evening, I left Bangalore for Mangalore via train and returned on Monday morning. It had been almost two years since I had visited Mangalore, and that was in January 2007 for the wedding of a certain friend named Vinayak Kamath, during which time, some of us had walked like Egyptians as the photographer was busy clicking photos of the newly weds.

In the interim thereafter, there were two trips each to Bombay and Chennai, a few to Bylakuppe (as a day tripper), one to Gokarna, one trip to Seattle and I hadn’t had the time to visit Mangalore due to that. My cousin was getting married, and I thought that it was a convenient time to go put ‘O Hai’ to all my relatives.

Little did I realize what was in store for me……..

Yes, you read that right, Opeth (wikipedia link).

This is as big as when Jethro Tull headlined Unmaad at IIMB in 2006 February, and I guess most people in Bangalore aren’t particularly thrilled about the fact that a huge name like Opeth is heading to Chennai instead of coming here.

Once confirmation is received concretely about their playing at Decibels in Saarang, guess people better start booking their means of transport to Chennai (don’t bother too much about the return journey) for around the 24th or 25th of Jan next year.

More updates, if any, to follow.

Update: Opeth’s performance at Chennai for Saarang 09 has been confirmed. Videep (G0dzill4 on comments in this post) emailed Andy Farrow of Northern Music Co. who confirmed it thereafter.

I play the bass guitar for a band named ‘Arth’. Our lyrics are in Hindi, and one can classify our music under the rock genre.

On the first day of the beginning of the second half of 2008, we’ve uploaded three mp3s of our as part of an initial demo we’ve recorded. The instruments were recorded at home, the drums were programmed and the vocals were recorded at G3 studios in Chennai.

This is the link to the band blog from where you can download the mp3s – http://arthband.blogspot.com.

The songs are under creative commons license – free to distribute and download, but please ask us if you want to modify it.

I’d really be appreciative if you were to listen to the songs and spread the word about our demo either through word of mouth (and by that I mean gtalk, heh!) or by putting up something on your blog / LJ that would link to the aforementioned band blog. The more publicity, the merrier.

We’re also on Facebook on the artist’s pages, do join up there as well.

If you like the music, tell the others. If you think it sucks, tell us!

Cheerio!

Although there’s a single instance of validation for my assumption, I think I wouldn’t be unwarranted in making an educated extrapolation.

Blame the absence of my customary simple way of writing on the truckloads of work staring down at me on my windows taskbar. Brains are fried. Apologies.

However, this post is aimed at that miniscule segment of junta that might’ve remained oblivious to the Photowalk concept that Skimpy imported from Chandrachoodan of Chennai (a.k.a Hell, as of two LJ posts ago, but I’ve reconsidered and changed my mind because three of my guitars – 2 bass and 1 electric have now been purchased from there).

Feel free to click on the links pasted above to get a fair idea regarding what I am talking about. It would also be nice if you decided to check out flickr for the photos tagged “Bangalorephotowalk” in case you’re an utter newbie.

Now that we’ve got the lengthy introduction out of the way, here’s to inform you that the third Bangalore photowalk will be held on 29th June 2008, and will start at the intersection of Brigade Road and Residency Road at 0759 hours.

In the early mornings, when the ‘party’ crowd is yet to wake up, these roads are actually nice to walk along on. Kindly leave a comment on Skimpy’s LJ if you wish to participate.

Hope you can make it, especially if you’re the fun kinds. Others welcome too.

I fall in the latter category, but I shall be there nevertheless, as the token slovenly guy in my ‘photowalk shorts’ and the dirty stubble. Call me Aqualung.