Finally some ixellent Indian ‘ip ‘op

I’ve been YouTube-ing like crazy over the past couple of weeks. Found some really nice videos. But this one sticks out… people all over the place have been recommending it, and after watching it, [and listening to it], I can see why.

I’m not too much into hip-hop, though at one time I was impressed very much by Marshal Mathers III, and his protege, 50Cent.

I’ve never liked Indian hip-hop outside of Pettai Rap [Rehman's a genius], MumBhai and maybe a bit of Jay Sean. Now I guess I’ll add these guys [Yogi B and the Natchathiras] to my list.

The video’s completely hip-hop-ish, with oversized clothes, hairstyles, bling, and the locations. The lyrics aren’t completely obscured by the rapping. IMHO, they’ve done justice to the original song by Ilayaraja.

And here’s the video of the original, Madai Thiranthu from Nizhalkal for all you nostalgic ol’ timers, or people who wonder what the original looked like. This is vintage ’80s music video… complete with moustachio’d hero jumping and prancing about.. and this one also has women in yellow sarees with guitars [looks hilarious the first time you come in contact with such stuff].

I also came across this spoof on Omkara by some guys from IITD who call themselves ‘Desires Unlimited’. Good one, IMHO.

What say?

Update: Blog Stats say that a major percentage of people reading this post end up here when they are searching for “Madai Thiranthu Free Download Yogi B Natchathira”. So here’s the song. [right click on the link, save as]. This is by no means original, I recorded it on my laptop as I listened to it on YouTube, saved it as .wav and converted it to .mp3. It stemmed from frust at having to wait an hour to buffer the song everytime I wanted to listen to it.  Happy Listening!

On Anger…

The past couple of weeks have been excruciatingly busy. Thanks to riots and curfew, our classes and exams had been postponed to the last week; the lab exams scheduled for last week got pushed to this week. We don’t have killer courses or anything this semester, but our schedule is hectic to say the least, what with 32 hours a week.

I’ve been increasingly on the edge, snapping at people for the smallest reason. One of my victims lashed back saying, “Why don’t you try to control your…er… anger? Yelling at someone isn’t something you should be seen doing frequently.”

That reminded me of Boman Irani’s character in Munnabhai MBBS. Laughing out loud to control your anger. It’s supposed to work, coz laughter releases endorphins or some such chemicals which ease your blood pressure and leaves you feeling happy and contented. So far so good, but in practice, the idea practically sucks.
A friend of mine begins to shriek out with ear-splitting laughter when she gets tense or excited. Nothing could possibly be worse than finding your working-model not working minutes before the contest starts and your teammate next to it shrieking with laughter.

Well, another more popular way of hiding your anger is by not saying anything about it, just nodding, grinning, agreeing and feeling peeved about it all day long. And being given to arbit rants at the slightest provocation.
A professor I know apparently starts smiling more and more broadly as his temper rises. His face goes red with anger, his voice goes lower and his smile broadens. His sarcasm levels rise exponentially, and it takes people who are not used to this sort of thing quite a while to understand that he’s angry.

I don’t understand these futile attempts to appear civilized by masking your anger. Why do you pretend you are not pissed off when in reality you are? Doesn’t it make it easier for everyone involved if you show you are irritated with them? Why such a roundabout approach?

It’s natural that when a person gets worked up, his expression turns sour, he acquires an unpleasant tone, and he raises his voice. Language breaks acceptable limits slowly, and body language changes visibly to show anger.

This serves as a warning signal for the rest so as to not rub the person the wrong way. When you know a person is irritated, you normally aren’t flippant with them and take care to weigh your words such that it doesn’t hurt the other person. Normally, others broaden their margin of error for whatever the person says.

On the other hand, appearing outwardly cool and calm gives a cold-blooded effect to whatever the person says. He seems to be in perfect control of himself, which cuts on any allowance or margin the others might give an angry person. In effect, the things said are the same irrespective of whether you are giggling to hell when you say it or when you are red with irritation. But the effect created is different.

Whether the person is smiling or frowning, his mental state remains the same [I am not talking about people who are controlling their excitement] and so will the things he will say, so why appear outwardly calm, confusing everyone else? That apart, people simply CAN’T accept that a calm-looking person is put off about something. As for endorphins, you don’t need them in a crisis situation… like why would you want to be feeling ecstastic when the situation is getting out of hand?

In short, when most people are irritated, they still harbour the same old prejudices, feel the same within, say hurtful things, so why act like you’re not angry, that you’re totally in control when you are not? I agree giving full vent to your anger creates ugly scenes, but that’s not what I’m talking about. It’s about showing the normal signs of being angry just to non-verbally communicate to the other person that you are not to be messed around with, you can’t take excessive criticism, your mind is closed for the time being… a big ‘Handle With Utmost Care’ sign on you which can NOT be put across with words, however gentle they might be.

The best way to handle an unpleasant situation is, no doubt, to not lose your cool in the first place, to remain calm, think rationally and not bring up any new communication barriers and talk the whole thing through. But once you have lost it, then I don’t think there is any use pretending. Unless of course, it’s your prospective employer checking how much you score on the patience test.

PS: You don’t have to scream and swear to show you’re angry. It somehow shows. But please don’t confuse the other person [as opposed to adversary] by doing something like laughing out loud just to be different, or due to some cockeyed reasoning like endorphins.

Providence

Just when…

Just when you were feeling life couldn’t get any worse…

Just when mess food couldn’t get any suckier…

Just when you began to think people aren’t meant to be trusted…

Just when you got sick of shouting at the freshies for blatantly misusing and abusing the washrooms…

Just when you thought you CAN’T take another midsem, easy or otherwise…

Just when you really felt you SUFFERED from lack of sleep, and that another nightout would be only to save your life…

Just when you got irritated with the patterns and posters on your hostel room walls…

Just when you were sick of the same ol’ faces asking you ‘Hi, how ya doin?’ and not expecting anything other than ‘Fine, dude!’…

Just when you thought you’ve forgotten what it is to have fun…

Just when the humidity couldn’t get any worse…

Just when even the sight of unceasing waves didn’t calm you…

Just when you couldn’t feel any more wretched…

Just when you needed a break….

You book your tickets home; you’ve got six whole days off [ok, two of them self-declared], and you go home to good food, family, celebrations, sweets, unbroken sleep, pleasant surprises [Bangalore has finally got an international music station, Radio Indigo on FM 91.9. Yeah, the RJs sound rehearsed, but the music is JUST what the doctor ordered], and peace.

Here’s wishing a very happy and prosperous Deepavali to everyone!!!

We’re Alive

It’s been long, almost a month since I last posted here [No, SEO doesn't count as a post]. And it’s been months together since Tuhina even gave a hint of posting here.
Well, a lot has happened since then. For starters… Talking of starters, the NITK GB mess got messier. First, the seniors wanted a change in the menu [we all did, to be frank], so they came up with really innovative ideas which tasted and looked -for want of a better word- horrible when the mess people prepared it. Next we thrashed our year-reps, which did a bit of good, the food did get better. But not for long! Apparently, there is a shortage of LPG, so we don’t get rotis. The food gets suckier day by day… I think NITK Messes Inc. can give stiff competition to VLCC.

Then, we had a season of Branch Freshers, and in true IT spirit we IT-ians [aka Diplomats, IT@NITK is largely seen as a 'Diploma' branch] gave an absolutely rocking one. I guess everyone agrees on that [Other than, of course, my revered un-diplomatic senior TheG], including us third-years, the freshies, the ALs who we were forced to invite coz we had to get the classes and tests they were conducting for us rescheduled [though they were pretty embarassed at the paper dance and left immediately after]…. we’re told it was the best freshers given this year. All I have to say is “IT Rocks!” and “Proud to be Diplomats, yeah!”.

I’m surprised I haven’t posted here more often over the past two weeks, inspite of having net in the rooms.

NO, I’m not kidding, nor am I so overwhelmed by the midsems that I have started hallucinating. NITK has FINALLY decided to grace us with LAN and Internet. The speed is too slow for comfort some of the times, but then, something is better than nothing, and it isn’t worse than the GB Net Centre.

Ahh, now I can breathe a sigh of relief for my SEO strategies… Shaastra Invernesshire Thamesportal Autophytes Zalecenia ahoy!

I guess we guys can start podcasting our own ‘radio station’ now.

Access to more music. More files. More softwares. More viruses too, so I guess we’ll have to convert atleast the entire wing of the hostel, if not the entire block to Linux. TheG, what say?

Me and my crazy neighbor wrote a paper for IgNobel at Shaastra, which got selected for the finals. Pitifully, we couldn’t go thanks to our inflexible mid-sem schedule. Thanks to my school’s extensive worldwide network, I was able to find a junior at IITM who was willing to present it for us. We didn’t win, but ah, it was better than nothing. And… Ujwal, thanks a ton, dude, though we’ll never be able to thank you enough for agreeing, and that at such short notice.

Midsems are on, which means arbit long soul-searing conversations at arbit time after midnight. Topics range from relevance of exams, to rants against the system, why the heck did we choose to take engineering when we’d've rather been elsewhere… So, these are some places where I’d like to be, though I’m not sure I’d fit the bill:

• I want to be making movies… not serious ones or ones with loads of masala elements thrown in. Just stuff that touches your from within, that people connect to, like Yellow Submarine.
• I would really love to design advertizing campaigns.
• One day, I’d like to own a radio station. Er… make that a media-house, with a finger in every pie, right from kids’ magazines, to TV channels.
• And, maybe, rule the world.

But.. but… I guess I’ll have to be content with dreaming about writing my own operating system, maybe working for a top-notch software co. or two, writing software that’s gonna be used by pretty much everyone who’ll own a computer, meeting Paul McCartney, writing a novel/non-fiction that’ll be a legend for the next two hundred years…Coming to what’s on now, I was supposed to have been writing a Theory of Computation exam forty-five minutes ago, which didn’t finally happen, thanks to communal riots in Suratkal [yeah ha ha ha]. Thank God for Assistant Lecturers from Mangalore and Suratkal. Er… actually, it doesn’t make a difference to me.

Now that’s a weekend gone, as I have exams all of next week. *Sigh*.

Addendum: Tuhina’s alive and kicking. Here’s hoping something happens that moves her enough to blog about it.

Addendum2: My Amaz(on)ing aunt Uma suggested that I put up my IgNobel entry for the world to read. So here it is:

The Ad-Libber-Tea-M’s entry for IgNobel@Shaastra