The song Ek Do Teen from the movie Tezaab just came to mind. The song begins with Madhuri Dixit’s character talking to the crowd, and when they keep chanting her name (Mohini, Mohini), she eventually bursts into song.

The playback singing for this particular song was done by Alka Yagnik, and the initial parts where the conversation takes place with the crowd, also had her voice instead of that of Madhuri Dixit’s.

Since the initial segment in the song involved conversation and absolutely no singing, I am wondering why the producer / director / music director did not record Madhuri Dixit’s voice while dubbing to incorporate in this part, and instead chose to go with Alka Yagnik’s voice.

In any case, a funny super song. Watching this movie at a cinema theatre is my first ever memory of visiting a movie hall (Lido in Mysore), and I can still recall parts of this movie where Anil Kapoor jumps off a tall building and is lying in a pool of blood but still survives, how all the bad guys are beaten up in the end, and how there is a song just before the climax where Anil Kapoor, Chunky Pandey and Madhuri Dixit are riding in a Maruti Omni gaadi.

In retrospect, it was quite a violent movie, I must say! I don’t think my folks read the reviews before they took me to watch it.

Does anyone else’s mind conjure up the following words when itunes accidentally playes songs like ‘lithium’ and ‘drain you’ after eons – ‘WHAT THE FISHSTICKS WERE YOU THINKING?’.

One such instance of discovering new music and getting mesmerized had taken place around May 2007 when my ex-flatmate Kutty had given me a CD titled Adviteeya by a certain friend of his, named Kuldeep M Pai.

The CD is a unique effort, as Kuldeep, a native of Cochin, not only renders the vocals, but also plays the Kanjira, the Mridangam, the Ghatam, the Veena and the Violin among other instruments. Multi-track recording had rendered it possible for Kuldeep to come out with a CD that contains six pieces, for which he’s supplied the complete music as well as the vocals.

I am not trained in classical music per se, with my only first-hand exposure to the same resulting from having been one of the few guys in our class in school to have been selected to attend the music class during SUPW, more as a luck of th draw thing rather than as a conscious choice.

Most of the girls in school opted for music and dance, while guys were also inadvertently bundled in along with them. This provided the girls with a much needed opportunity to make fun of us guys, and was one of the prime causes for most of us indulging in the first of many instances of truant behaviour.

My memories of the music room include that of smelly socks and dilapidated instruments that were placed within showcases safely out of harm’s way, with our music teacher using a tambourine to keep time. Somehow the only two mental images I have of people playing tambourines are those of my music teacher in school playing it and seeing a video of ‘Stairway to Heaven’ when Robert Plant plays it as well.

It would be fun for them to switch spaces, but you’d have to be there, I guess.

In any case, I did not learn any Raagas and only learnt a few Taalas that I’ve promptly forgotten in the absence of practise. However, I think I can spot good music when I listen to it, and Adviteeya is certainly good music to listen to.

I’d given the CD to my landlord to check out sometime last year, and it was quite recently that I decided to ask him for it again, and my mornings now begin with Mr.Pai’s rendition of Mahaganapatim, and I must confess that it sets the mood for the rest of the day. Thank God for the music!

PS – This does not mean I endorse those who sing about Dwarapalakas in open forums. (Inside joke. Once again, you’d have to be there, I guess.)

However, some evening, I was to lazy to go do something else and I ended up watching the first few minutes of the serial, only to see helicopter shots of the Space Needle, the Seattle Center and 3rd Avenue, after which my sister told me that the serial was based in Seattle. It was kinda cool to see an overhead view of the city and visualize myself having walked along those streets for the various arbit activities I’d undertaken.

Familiar streets, some shops I’ve walked past, references to Broadway and more shots of the over-rated Space Needle were enough to bring about feelings of nostalgia. The movie itself is something people can watch when they’re feeling brain-dead, and still enjoy it all.

I’ve gone through only about a hundred pages of that book, given my currently pathetic reading speeds, but so far its not been a bad read.

On my last evening in the city, I had been to a birthday party thrown by some of my ‘native’ friends (I used to refer to American citizens as natives) and while sitting out in someone’s backyard surrounding a fire, sipping slowly on one beer for four hours to as to maintain levels of sobriety necessary to ensure I was at the airport on time the next morning, I was introduced to a S’more, and I can’t honestly think of something else I’ve eaten that’s so brilliantly sweet and tasty at the same time. I gave it my own name at that time, I called it a Hershmellow, because I guess I didn’t think too much of the Graham cracker that was also part of the S’more.

Never pass upon a S’more if given a chance to consume one. In fact, ask for more.

The times they are a-changin, but the memories remain.

The original entry on IMDB has been reproduced word to word here. For cheap thrills and for nostalgia.

Swades is one of the most brilliantly made movies of our time. Within a reasonable amount of cinematic license that Ashutosh Gowarikar seems to have adopted to make things more evident to the viewer (*potential spoiler* like making a hydel power station with limited expertise, and showing electricity crackling through the wires when it actually starts working), the movie is fabulous.

Home is paradise waiting to be discovered.

This whole hoopla leads me to think how simple it was not so long ago, when there was tremendous hype about the release of particular movies only in select circles or in movie magazines such as ‘Filmfare’, ‘Cineblitz’ or ‘Screen’ which I would invariably end up reading from cover to cover while waiting for my turn to have a haircut at the barbershop that I have been visiting ever since I learnt from my class teacher in school that a haircut was the only way I wouldn’t end up having to sit with the stupid girls in class, a school of thought that prevailed in a 10 year old version of me, but something that has been thankfully remedied since. Now a grown-up, enlightened version of me prefers the company of women, but that has already been posted about in my livejournal.

These magazines would result in me knowing which movie Salman Khan would be acting in next, or about a certain rising star named ‘Divya Bharathi’, who died on my 10th birthday in 1993, much to the disappointment of many people who really thought she was cutemax, and about how a certain Tamil music director named A.R. Rahman was creating waves in Bollywood with the release of ‘Rangeela’.

However, it was never the case that one had too much information at one’s hands about a particular movie, and the cinemas retained a certain sense of exclusivity, a particular charm or a mystic allure to their being that somehow could be experienced only through visiting a movie theatre. The alternative was to rent a VCP (not a VCR) from the video circulating library along with a few tapes and then sit and watch them at home together.

It is time for an interesting (?) digression in the insipid narrative here to highlight the fact that though our household was open to books, magazines and printed material of pretty much any kind in much the same way as the Playboy mansion is to promiscuous women, the same openness was not extended towards the movies, and we’d end up watching movies mostly whenever the almighty DoorDarshan deigned to telecast them, invariably with breaks in between for the evening news and other such interruptions. This was one of the reasons why bringing home a VCP to watch movies, which happened about three times in my entire childhood was such a big deal, and we watched movies such as ‘Mr.India’, ‘Dances with Wolves’, ‘Where Eagles Dare’ and ‘The Sound of Music’ during those ventures, which to my delight, have added to my collection of treasured childhood memories.

Going to the theatres and watching movies was a big deal, and it was a ritual that required extensive planning and a substantial amount of time invested in choosing what snacks to buy and which day to watch the movie on, which city bus route to take to get to the theatre and so on. The first couple of movies I saw with a good friend of mine from school were the result of these extensively planned outings, and I remember the movies we watched were James Cameron’s ‘True Lies’, dubbed in Hindi and Mani Ratnam’s ‘Bombay’, in Tamil, which was incidentally when I, as a precocious 12 year old boy just out of class seven fell in love with Manisha Koirala and realized subconsciously that a feeling of vulnerability combined, paradoxically, with a fierce streak of independence in women is indeed a highly attractive trait.

As we hapless consumers, post liberalization of our economy in 1992 gladly bore the brunt of the onslaught of satellite and cable television programs all through the 90′s, it was becoming more and more evident with each passing year that it would be hardly a matter of time before the interlinking of all forms of media would take place, much the same way as physicists such as Planck were intent on propounding a Unified Field Theory for all the various types of forces whose existence was known to man.

This unification meant that the movies would not remain exclusive to those that were actual die hard fans of celluloid, but would turn out to be open access for anyone with a television. The effort one had to put in, or the entry barrier that one had to cross in order to gain access to the magical world of movies had suddenly been reduced to nothingness, as convenience and sloth brought in a new wave of on demand movies, and movie channels of all sorts showing movies so many times that it would have been practically impossible to miss out on watching a movie like, say, Titanic, even if one were to try very hard to miss it on TV.

This next level of dilution of a movie lover’s standing was atleast something that he/she could put up with, because it also resulted in providing one with greater access and exposure to hitherto unknown or unheard of cinema, including the different forms of parallel cinema and indie movies that most people that want to break the mould or want to be cool so fervently swear by, in present times.

However, as one turns on the television today to watch some random program, and all one can see are promos of movies such as ‘U me aur hum’ (whose title could be a dedication to the shorthand using generation that I wish to distance myself from) and ‘Tashan’ (how I hate that word!), which are screened pretty much on the same lines as advertisements, with the producers having purchased time slots on channels, and one wonders why it is that these movies have to hardsell themselves so much if they are good movies that people would be falling over each other to watch. How did movies such as ‘Sholay’, ‘Jurrasic Park’, ‘Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge’ and others gain so much popularity without having to resort to a media blitzkrieg?

I am taking an educated guess here to make an assumption that the contractual agreement that most actors would sign as part of their being cast in a particular film would require their services much more beyond the requisite time they spend on the set shooting for a given movie. Once the movie has been shot, and has undergone post production, they would still have to appear for media interviews, shoot promos which are, one tends to notice, mutually exclusive to the content or plot related to the movie, and that would also contain copious references either directly or through the placement of logos to media houses, fashion houses, restaurants, banks or other commercial establishments that are piggybacking on the movie’s gravy train to further their own causes.

Gone are those days, when most people made movies solely for entertainment, or as a mode of self expression or to portray a certain message that one strongly believed in. I would like to fervently believe that it is only a certian section of movie makers that have sold out, and that most of those who haven’t will remain true to their cause.

However, it is quite unlikely that the magic of movies would vanish just because of a new avatar that they have assumed. Any air-headed romantic person would still believe without a shade of doubt that the best movie moments are those that one experiences in real life, rather than in the theatres.

Caller: Hi! Can I speak to so-and-so?
Me: May I know who’s calling, please?
Caller: I am XYZ.
Me: Hold on for a minute, I’ll just pass on the phone.
Caller: Thanks!

A pretty regular and random exchange between two people, but it was something that seemed like a blast from the past. I began thinking of how long it had been since I had such a conversation with anyone. With the presence of cell phones being the norm, its rare that anyone in the present times would usually get to talk that way.

Before cell phones paved their way into our lives and changed forever the way we went about with our daily existence, the grand old land lines ruled the roost. At home in Mysore, we had an antique piece for our telephone, the one which people used in the late 50′s or early 60′s movies to relay secret messages or locations where the kidnapped would be exchanged for ransom and then fail to show up.

It had an old fashioned dial, and a heavy receiver and with the two together, nobody in our family was required to go to the gym for bicep workouts, and one’s fingers became sturdy and well exercised to bear the brunt of canings received in school for not completing assigned homework, or being late to class, or being inattentive during lessons or for being an errant student, though invariably it ended up being a hitherto unseen ecclectic combination of more than one of the four aforementioned misdemeanours.

Needless to say, the butterfly effects of us having had the phone model we did made my teachers in school healthy as well, and gave them their much needed workout cum catharsis, something that I would get good Karma for. Now who’d imagine one’d be entitled to good Karma for not having been a good student, eh? Loopholes aplenty!

As times changed, and as the locations of the rented houses we lived in changed, so did the corresponding telephone exchange whose jurisdiction we fell under, and it was the norm for each of the telephone exchange officials who came to connect the phone and hand us the telephone directory to implore with us to upgrade to the new telephones, complete with push buttons and speaker phone and caller ID to ignore blank calls.

I was certain the blank calls were because I had turned 13 and hence fallen into the eligible male category, although we later found out that it was some toddler in the neighbourhood whose baby-sitter’s idea of keeping the kid occupied was for him to press random numbers on the telephone. That sort of explains why the voice on the other end was goo goo gaa gaa over me! Story of my teenage love-life.

Repeated requests notwithstanding, it was a collective decision for us not to upgrade to the new models, even though the exchange offered them to us for free! We were dinosaurs and were proud of our prehistoric phone. Plus, the management at home sort of figured out that the most loquacious ones who’d use the phone copiously would be dissuaded from doing so if one got extensively tired of holding up the receiver, or having to repeatedly dial the number in the absence of a lovely redial key.

The increase in telephone bill amounts in arithmetic progression with a high common difference between two successive members of the series disproved this assumption, and other means, including asking the teachers use the cane with greater frequency had to be then resorted to.

That was the saga of the outgoing calls from our phone. The tales related to the incoming calls was something else altogether.

It is a well established fact that until a boy’s voice breaks, and the vocal chords are fully developed at the onset of puberty, that it is sort of hard to tell if it is a male voice, unless one would, at the tender ages between 6 and 12 resort to using expletives with gay abandon. However, at that formative stage of my life when I inculcated within me everything that my folks, the television, the newspapers and Indrajal comics taught me, I was expletive free.

This led to pretty funny situations (in retrospect) as I had been made the de-facto answering machine when nobody else was around to receive their calls. I was mistaken, on some occasions to be my Mum, my sister or my grandma, and they sometimes in turn were mistaken to be me.

Not that I was a stud in voice recognition either. Most of my friends’ sisters I thought were their Mums and so on and so forth. This let to a situation that had a veritable comedy of errors associated with it, as one went about trying to navigate through embarassing situations in order to take the right message or get through to the right person in the household.

There was one instance where a family friend had remarked about the fact that I had impeccable phone manners, and how hard it was for the kids of today to be polite to elders and all that. My head was swollen no end with the praise meted out, as the center of gravity of my body shifted, as a result of which I had trouble walking for the next few days thereafter.

I think I would have been unceremoniously ejected out of my household in order to go out on my own to earn money had call centers sprung up then the way they’ve done now, more so if child labour laws hadn’t been passed by then and the UNHRC hadn’t raised such a hue and cry about it.

Thankfully, all that I got was a pat on the back and a few extra pieces of chocolate as I was indulgently let off to play when the adults continued their conversations, for I had my 3rd grade final exams the next day, and I still hadn’t learnt where the Manasarovar lake was located, and I was not able to plot the course of the Narmada or the Tapti river.

The times they are-a changing now. Everyone at home has their own cell phones. In fact, I am certain that this is the way things are headed in every household in the country, and its not something I am particularly sanguine about.

Its been a move long pending, but over the past three weeks, I’ve finally reached the place where I’ve made up my mind to make minimal use of my cellphone, except under exceptional circumstances or to talk to people I know I can’t see, but would still want to talk to. Friends and family who are geographically removed from my current physical location would fall under that category, and I’m subsisting on the usage of my office extension for intra-office telephone calls.

I’d prefer to meet people the old way as well, plan for a time and a place and make sure to get there as promised, rather than use the cell phone as a mechanism for constant updating of one’s position.

I know cellphones have become a necessary evil, and that although what I am saying sounds nice in theory, and might be hard to put into practise, every time I reach out for my cell to lead me into temptation, my mind wanders back through the recesses of time and space to my old antique earth-quake proof landline with its shiny black dial and 1 kg receiver, and I think of all the fun times that I’ve had thanks to it, and I wonder whether it will ever be possible for things to be that way again.

For better or for worse, I think those thoughts are better off as memories. Plus, my current ring tone, should I ever choose to remove my phone out off silent / vibrating mode is that of an old phone ringing, as a dedication to the times gone by.

Rohit Barker’s Cruise Control was on air, and he was playing some decent songs such as ‘We didn’t start the fire‘ and some other songs that I liked that he labelled ‘classics’, making me feel much older than my current 24 years of age.

He then switched the playlist to some ‘dhin-chak’ contemporary hip-hop that I just didn’t like, and I consequently switched FM channels, trying to sift through the other stuff to see what I could listen to, until I chanced upon Radio One which was playing ‘Tu Cheez Badi Hai Mast‘ from Mohra.

I was 11 when the movie released in 1994, and I have recollections of watching the video of this particular song umpteen times on Philips Top 10 on Zee TV which was hosted by Satish Shah and sometimes had Ratna Pathak Shah co-hosting, in a skit-like format with gags or random jokes between tracks, (complete with an irritating and super-artificial laugh track that made you want to close your ears and bang your head against the wall till you fainted so as not to hear that sound ever again!). This song from Mohra remained on the top 10 countdown for ages, and I know this because used to follow the countdown diligently at that time.

Once this song slipped down the charts and eventually exited, hopefully making way for other songs, another version of this song from the movie, which was shot on Raveena Tandon’s character – ‘Main Cheez Badi Hoon Mast‘ came into the countdown. Though it didn’t last as long as its predecessor, it nevertheless stuck around enough to irritate those that wanted to listen to and watch other songs.

Once tis song was out, yet another one – ‘Tip Tip Barsa Paani‘ also showed its face, also from the same movie. This song went on to become so popular that the music from this track was used by Channel[V] for their program – ‘First Day First Show’ and one had to listen to it substantially.

Rajiv Rai and Viju Shah made for some deadly combination with movies and music respectively, as is evident from Gupt as well, and Skimpy had a belated post on the music of Gupt, which, regardless of having had some hit songs copied from some famous english tracks of that time, did really well in, doing another Mohra on the Philips top 10, with multiple song entries into the charts, one after another.

It was then that realization dawned upon me about how I had so completely misconstrued the notion of movies being ranked in a chart order, whereas it was actually songs that were being graded. However, it made no sense that two songs from the same movie never made it to the top 10. I presume they had some sort of intricate exclusion principle applied in their scheme of ordering the tracks.

This nostalgia filled rambling would be incomplete if I didn’t mention songs from other movies that I had listened to back then – including that song ‘sexy sexy‘ from Khuddar starring Karishma Kapoor which had the censors up in arms, leading to censoring that part of the song and finally having Alisha Chinnai re-record it to replace the offending words by ‘baby baby‘, though the move was as effective as recalling Kaavya Viswanathan’s book on Opal Mehta.

Songs from the movie ‘Rakshak’, ‘Takkar’ and of course ‘Rangeela’ amongst others still make cameo appearances among the songs that come arbitly out of the blue and reside in my head for fleeting moments when I am not actually listening to a particular song or focussed on singing / humming out a particular tune.

TV nowadays doesn’t have much of the kind of programs they did ages ago, though one must say that the good shows are really good whereas the bad ones suck totally, making choices easier for us viewers as and when we can get time off LJ-ing or blogging to actually sit and watch the telly.

Tony Fadell was the guy who originally came up with the concept of the iPod and was hired by Apple later on, and Jonathan Ive was the person responsible for its subsequent designs.
This is not a blog posting extolling their virtues or their contributions to society and to music lovers (and of late, music video and photo lovers too). I have not reached the level yet, where my blog is going to revolve around anyone but me. Tis true, empty vassals make more noise, sort of like empty vessels themselves.

Anyway, for more on these guys and the iPod, go here.

In the last posting I spoke about how the music died, ever since I started work. I thankfully have the good fortune of being able to have 24/7 access to the internet, which I shamelessly exploit by downloading mp3s, among other things.

My comp at work has a sound card, and I am given the liberty of being able to use headphones while at work, whenever it is not required that I listen to someone. This is rarely the case, with a million interruptions about this bug, or that doc update or a whole host of other things that inadvertently ensure that your listening experience is as smooth as travelling on an unserviced pre World War I era bicycle with flattened tyres on the roughest stretches of Bannerghatta road.

In addition, my material assets, allegdly portable, did not warrant being carried around because my built is not conducive to me wearing pants whose pockets are big enough to accommodate a five inch diameter discman, without it appearing as if I have a bulge in my pants. The bulge in the pants would not be such a bad thing if only God made me look more like Adam Garcia, so that it would invite pick-up lines from nubile pretty young things, and not so young nubile pretty things, and not so nubile pretty young things and so on (3 parameters, how many combinations….go figure!). But for the one single time I took it, all that the flattened lunchbox lookalike of a discman that could only play audio CDs and not mp3s invited, was looks from jackasses with mp3 players and compact ear plugs with long battery backups, who made me feel as if I was Leopold, (from Kate and Leopold) minus the charm, the good looks, the charisma, the money and the sex appeal. In short, apart from the fact that my headphones looked like I had robbed a 3 year old of her hairband, and the flattened lunchbox thing which was half out of my pockets when I sat in the office bus, I thought the music had come back to my life.

Note: travel advisory- please travel in office buses without speakers, which keep blaring songs from radiocity 91FM in the morning, for they will induce a feeling that makes motion sickness seem orgasmic!

I don’t get paid much. Come to think of it, I think the salary that I draw is about 0.0002 percent of what my CEO’s fixed deposit for his pet dog gets as interest, and that divided by 12 is what I get monthly, and minus tax cuts and so many other deductions that leave me as confounded as I did when I tried to understand women from as early as class 2, I am left with this paltry sum of money with which I can barely make ends meet (whatever the definition of that is).

The prospect of listening to music on my antiquated discman was so inviting that I totally overlooked the fact that I couldn’t carry the bulky 9V adapter with me in the bus. Hence I had to rely on batteries, and alkaline batteries are about 40 bucks a pair. I didn’t for the life of me imagine that I would have to make daily investments of that amount, to be able to listen to 13 songs on a CD burnt when I was a little less musically enlightened than I currently am. In short, it was not exactly a pleasant experience. I decided to switch to standard batteries for some time, but they ran dry so fast, (half a song listened to at volume to drown out radiocity playing on the bus) that I felt that the company that made discmen had some sort of connection with these battery manufacturers to make the lives of the ordinary consumer miserable by draining them out faster than a swimming pool would be drained if Obelix jumped in it. So much for asinine consipracy theories.

After the debacle that was CAT 2005, I figured that I had to do something to get a fresh start to the new year 2006, and made up my mind to get the music back into my life, and do a proper job of it this time.
To cut a really long story to pieces and examine the most relevant part with an electron microscope and present it to you, I zeroed in on an iPod.
A work of art, a wonderful companion, black, stored 30GB of whatever you wanted it to, played videos and stored photos, and was sleek and thin.
A good friend of mine named Vinayak Kamath came down from the US for his engagement, and at the same time, managed to buy me an iPod that meets the above specs.
It was love at first sight, and it felt like a new relationship altogether, me and my iPod.

Life has now become an endless movie soundtrack, and right from the time I take the long walk to the bus stop till the time I get back home, everything feels so good.
The other day, I had to catch a bus, and had to chase it for quite a distance. PF’s “in the flesh” was playing in the background, and I could actually visualise myself running towards the bus in slow motion, with other hapless motorists swerving to avoid running me over, to make it to the bus stop and lunging towards the door just in time before the driver could get the bus into second gear. The whole mundane exercise of chasing the bus seemed so romantic that now, I really look forward to even being chased by a ferocious canine at the dead of night, with some appropriate song playing on the pod.

I need to add something to my definition of an ideal life, something I guess I had taken for granted for quite some time.
Good food, good sleep, good shit and good music.

This blog posting is dedicated to an amazingly talented guitarist, someone named Prashant Linus Patrick (fondly called Prashant Anus Fat-dick), who was the lead guitarist of the band I used to play for onceuponatime ago, who lost half a finger on his left hand in an unfortunate accident. Hope he gets to play again.