December 15th, 2009

nivedita_n

12:25 am - I love life! So much has happened since the last time I blogged - things that were probably life-changing in one way or the other - that I could probably write a small book out of them. But life is great as usual and I'm loving the challenges it throws at me! :) Besides my own show Pudhuppunal on Doordarshan Podhigai which has now completed almost 50 episodes (and is going strong), I'm now hosting a weekly half-an-hour long Carnatic music appreciation show 'Maithreem Bhajatha' on Sankara TV, which is aired every Saturday at 9 pm. There is a repeat telecast on Sundays at 5 pm. I'm also currently freelancing for Sruti, India's premier magazine for the performing arts. I'm doing a series of interviews with accompanists. The first interview was with Kanjira vidwan B.S.Purushotham, which I think will be published in the December issue. I have been a big fan of Sruti, its quality and content, and consider writing for the magazine an honour :) I'll write a detailed post soon about how TV can change someone's life, just as it has mine. Meanwhile here are a few links that you might want to see. Videos of some episodes of my Podhigai show Pudhuppunal: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CooU1iOr7So&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uu458zWmco&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKvfpMp8pV0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlp62tHTgA0 I recently shot for the first-ever music magazine on DVD, Raagamalika. Here's the trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-u7_L28sHh4&feature=player_embedded# Like last year, I will be hosting this year's Sangeetha Sandippu - Coffee Chat with a Carnatic Celebrity, scheduled from the 20th to 30th of this month, at Sangeetha Okadey's Hall, between 4 pm and 5 pm everyday. Here's the schedule: 20th - Sunday - T.M.Krishna, Sangeetha Sivakumar & R.K.Shriramkumar 21st - Monday - Ranjani & Gayathri 22nd - Tuesday - Ghatam Karthik & B.S.Purushotham 23rd - Wednesday - Shashank & Chitravina Ravikiran 24th - Thursday - Sangita Kalanidhi Umayalpuram K.Sivaraman 25th - Friday - S.Sowmya 26th - Saturday - Unnikrishnan & O.S.Arun 27th - Sunday - Aruna Sairam 28th - Monday - Ganesh & Kumaresh 29th - Tuesday - Priya Sisters 30th - Wednesday - The Sikkil Family Note: 1. Sangeetha will provide free snacks and coffee to rasikas on all days. 2. Free passes for each day's chat can be collected that morning from the venue. 3. Passes will be available on a first-come-first-served basis for about 70 rasikas every day. It was a wonderful experience hosting the event last year and I'm looking forward to it this year! Also, the second edition of Shashi sir's first book Carnatic Funtasktic will be released soon. We've been overwhelmed by the response the first edition of the book has received. I'm sure the second edition will be just as useful to all music students. Another revolutionary book is in the offing. I'll write about that too as soon as we finish it :) I wrote an email to someone today about Shashi sir and these two sentences came from the bottom of my heart: "His innovative teaching methods, immeasurable gyanam, unparalleled dedication and his love and affection have moulded me, as it has several other students. I, for one, adore and worship him; it is to him that I owe my music and my career." Over the past few months, I've done a lot of things, some of which I don't even remember anymore! But it's been a lot of fun; my thirst for creativity and achievement, and my obsession with Carnatic music have been the primary motivators! There's so much to do, so much to achieve, so much to learn and enjoy. I hope I will be able to find the time for everything. Oh, and did I mention, I love life! :)

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December 9th, 2009

aneeta_04

02:08 pm - Food/transport Free Food and Transport is free at work since Monday. Which also means, employees will come, go, eat their breakfast, lunch at the timings decided by the Management. Well, since I stay close to work(7 kms), I still have an option of choosing the facility based on my convenience. It is wise though not to miss the free things in life. The first time, I heard this news, I was quite happy welcoming the change, I planned to convert all my kitchen time into fitness time. Man proposes, laziness overrides better. 3 days since the change, all idle time has been converted into sleep time till now. Well, new routines take time to set in, I hope it does soon. We also have this beautiful message which flashes on the Intranet Homepage with "Your Today's Time-In is " and they have separate color for Late(Red)/Early(Green), which will haunt you for the rest of the day if you are late. And then we have this My_Attendance_Report similar to your school report card, with detailed late time and cumulative late time minus some 101 flexible_working_hours_limit parameters. Well, the report card does not tell you that irrespective of flexible timings, if you come late, you miss free food, the token system shuts down at 8.15 am sharp. Interesting Math, the HR, Facilities and IS teams can expect a good hike this year, and the rest of us folks, dont miss school anymore. And since food is free and its the first week on free food, we dont see the house-wives's husbands with Tupperware tiffin boxes anymore. We stand along with them in the long queues. Some people though continue to bring their food. And the general junta looking at the statistics of men carrying their home-cooked food made an observation that, we now know whose wife cooks really good. The rest seem happy to be off their wives culinary skills experiments ! I also met somebody extra-ordinary who still brings his wife's morning cooked upma but eats his free breakfast and lunch at the office cafeteria. He eats his wife's food as an evening snack, bcos the evening snacks are paid and not free. Well, not to mention about the extra calories I am consuming in the form of parathas, oil and sweets. I do have considerate team-mates..Like today, they let me eat only a spoon of carrot halwa and leave the rest to the bin. I am blessed with diet-coordinators around! This blog post evolved out of self-sympathy actually :) Current Mood: headache Tags: free, office

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December 7th, 2009

appaji

10:16 pm - It has been ... Dear life, It has been a pretty crazy couple of months, had to stay away from most of the things that I would normally breeze through, including but not limited to a few aspects of my real life day job, Debian work, movies, the routine yearly Oct-Nov time vacation that I take etc. Obviously, hobbies took a big hit. Also had to let go of an opportunity to travel to one of my favorite places, IIT Guwahati; something that I don't usually pass up. Sigh! But such is life. Been bouncing back slowly: I finally moved a few domains that I run (including my personal domain) and their email to a linode and I am quite liking it so far (I would've been great if I had some more disk space at my disposal but 16GB isn't all that bad). On the Debian front, finished attending to package sponsorship requests, I've been updating packages (there is one elinks RC bug that I'll fix next) and work is finally under progress for the clang ITP in the Debian GIT repository. There are a ton of pictures in RAW format that I haven't yet had the time to convert to JPEG (I use UFRaw but the output that I got from Bibble Pro is fairly impressive -- perhaps I should consider getting myself a license) but that could wait. Found a decent place to rent (I should be moving in about a month or so). I would've liked a place that isn't an apartment or at least in a smaller community, preferably something in-town but good places are difficult to come by. I am back, Giridhar Current Mood: anxious Tags: personal

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aneeta_04

09:22 am - Introspecting failing relationships.. This weekend, I invested a lot of time talking to a broader set of friends whom I never get to talk to usually and the discussions revolved around the way I badly handle relationships. I do not know why I havent written much about any serious relationships here.. either bcos nothing took off very seriously in the first place except my feelings, or may be I feel embarrassed to write about how low I treat myself to make relationships work and how I never learn from getting hurt repeatedly. Every relationship requires a lot of hard work from either parties and more of forgiving yet not forgetting. Not forgetting so that you dont hurt the other person again by doing the same mistake again. All this applies after knowing a person well and when you have committed yourself to the relationship. What I fail to understand is how do you measure how much you can forgive a person when you are just getting to know the person. Every time somebody hurts me, I blame it on the premature going-to-be-a-relationship phase and tend to forgive the person, only to be hurt again. I think I love myself when I am being patient with people without knowing that I am doing more harm to me than any good to myself or the person. I set an impression of being a door mat where one could dust off his frustrations and temper on me. And who knows the person may not be taking me as seriously as I take him or the relationship. May be most of my getting to know people is based on online acquaintances and I shouldnt be reading between the lines, fishing for love or emotions ! Who knows the mistake is on my side, getting emotional with people who are just looking to spend some online time together. Every person, every relationship is different, but I am angry with myself for not being able to identify the pattern of getting hurt over and over. The only good I can do to myself is by not giving anyone the power to hurt me( which I will be soon forgetting). Rather than getting sad about people not understanding me, I should learn to discard them off my emotional bandwidth ! There is already too much to deal with in life... Respect and treat yourself the best :) And its good to have friends to talk to. Atleast you know not everyone thinks you are bad :) Thank you my dear friends :) Current Location: India, Current Mood: awake Tags: relationships

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December 5th, 2009

bloggeranon

03:11 am - Expression Why I adore Albert Camus: See: http://bloggeranon.livejournal.com/17818.html http://bloggeranon.livejournal.com/17537.html A critic put this in words that needed nothing more from me: "..His ability to conjure landscape in long, long sentences of exact description without resorting to simile or metaphor is extraordinary." Expression should be succinct and powerful, a self-made phrase that randomly evoked 2 sentences from memory: i. J: "Expose the correct level of detail, not too much, just exactly right". ii. About G: "With a handful of salt, he shook the British empire". Expression is what defines us. Current Mood: awake

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bloggeranon

02:48 am - Remembrance of things past Another excerpt from "The First Man" by Albert Camus: 'Ah!' his mother said to him, 'I'm glad when you're here." But come in the evening, I'll be less bored. It's the evenings especially, in winter it gets dark early. If only I knew how to read. I can't knit either in this light, my eyes hurt. So when Etienne's not here, I lie down and wait till it's time to eat. It's a long time, two hours like that. If I had the little girls with me, I'd talk with them. But they come and they go away. I'm too old. Maybe I smell bad. So it's like that, and all alone...' She spoke all at once, in short simple sentences that followed each other as if she were emptying herself of thoughts that till then had been silent. And then, her thoughts run dry, she was again silent, her lips tight, her look gentle and dejected, gazing through the closed dining-room shutters at the suffocating light coming up from the street, still at her same place on the same uncomfortable chair and her son going around the table in the middle of the room as he used to do. She watched him as once more he circled the table. 'Solferino, it's pretty?' 'Yes, it's spotless. But it must have changed since the last time you saw it.' 'Yes, things change.' 'The doctor sends you his greetings. You remember him?' 'No. It was long ago.' 'No one remembers Papa.' 'We didn't stay long. And besides, he didn't say much.' 'Maman?' She looked at him, unsmiling, with a mild and vacant expression. 'I thought you and Papa never lived together in Algiers.' 'No, no.' 'Did you understand me?' She had not understood; he could guess as much from her slightly frightened manner, as if she were apologizing, and he articulated the words as he repeated the question: 'You never lived together in Algiers?' 'No,' she said. 'But how about the time Papa went to see them cut off Pirette's head?' He hit his neck with the side of his hand to make himself understood. But she answered immediately: 'Yes, he got up at three o'clock to go to Barberousse.' 'So you were in Algiers?' 'Yes.' 'But when was it?' 'I don't know. He was working for Ricome.' 'Before you went to Solferino?' 'Yes.' She said yes, maybe it was no; she had to reach back in time through a clouded memory, nothing was certain. To begin with, poor people's memory is less nourished than that of the rich; it has fewer landmarks in the space because they seldom leave the place where they leave, and fewer reference points in time throughout lives that are grey and featureless. Of course there is the memory of the heart that they say is the surest kind, but the heart wears out with sorrow and labour, it forgets sooner under the wight of fatigue. Remembrance of things past is just for the rich. For the poor it only marks the faint traces on the path to death. Current Mood: awake

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December 4th, 2009

bloggeranon

03:48 am - In Search of the Father An excerpt from "The First Man" By Albert Camus: Jacques Cormery did not answer. Surely too many had died, but, as to his father, he could not muster a filial devotion he did not feel. For all these years he had been living in France, he had promised himself to do what his mother, who stayed in Algeria, what she for such a long time had been asking him to do: visit the grave of his father that she herself had never seen. He thought this visit made no sense, first of all for himself, who had never known his father, who knew next to nothing of what he had been, and who loathed conventional gestures and behaviour; and then for his mother, who never spoke of the dead man and could picture nothing of what he was going to see. But since his old mentor had retired to Saint-Brieuc and he would have an opportunity to see him again, Cormery made up his mind to go and visit this dead stranger, and had even insisted on doing it before joining his old friend so that afterward he would feel completely free. 'It's here,' said the caretaker. They had arrived at a square-shaped area enclosed by small markers of grey stone connected with a heavy chain that had been painted black. The gravestones- and they were many - were all alike: plain inscribed rectangles set at equal intervals row on row. Each grave was decorated with a small bouquet of fresh flowers. 'For forty years the French Remembrance had been responsible for the upkeep. Look, here he is.' He indicated a stone in the first row. Jacques Cormery stopped at some distance from the grave. 'I'll leave you,' the caretaker said. Cormery approached the stone and gazed vacantly at it. Yes, that was indeed his name. He looked up. Small white and grey clouds were passing slowly across the sky, which was paler now, and from it fell a light that was alternately bright and overcast. Around him, in the vast field of the dead, silence reigned. Nothing but a muffled murmur from the town came over the high walls. Occasionally a black silhouette would pass among the distant graves. Jacques Cormery, gazing up at the slow navigation of the clouds across the sky, ans was trying to discern, beyond the odour of damp flowers, the salty smell just then coming from the distant motionless sea when the clink of a bucket against the marble of the tombstone drew him from his reverie. At that moment he read on the tomb the date of this father's birth, which he now discovered he had not known. Then he read two dates, '1885-1914', and automatically did the arithmetic: twenty-nine years. Suddenly he was struck by an idea that shook his body. He was forty years old. The man buried under that slab, who had been his father, was younger than he. And the wave of tenderness and pity that at once filled his heart was not stirring of the soul that lead the son to the memory of the vanished father, but the overwhelming compassion that a grown man feels for an unjustly murdered child - something here was not in natural order and, in truth, there was no order but only madness and chaos when the son was older than the father. The course of time itself was shattering around him while he remained motionless among those tombs he no longer saw, and the years no longer kept to their places in the great river that flows to its end. They were no more than waves and surf and eddies where Jacques Cormery was now struggling in the grip of anguish and pity. He looked at the other inscriptions in that section and realized from the dates that this soil was strewn with children who had been fathers of greying men who thought they were living in this present time. For he too believed he was living, he alone had created himself, he knew his own strength, his vigour, he could cope and he himself well in hand. But, in the strange dizziness of that moment, the statue every man eventually erects and that hardens in the fire of the years, into which he then creeps and there awaits its final crumbling - that statue was rapidly cracking, it was already collapsing. All that was left was this anguished heart, eager to live, rebelling against the deadly order of the world that had been with him for forty years, and still struggling against the wall that separated him from the secret of all life, wanting to go farther, to go beyond, and to discover, discover before dying, discover at last in order to be, just once to be, for a single second, but for ever. He looked back on his life, a life that had been foolish, courageous, cowardly, wilful, and always straining towards that goal which he knew nothing about, and actually that life had all gone by without his having tried to imagine who this man who given him that life and then immediately had gone off to die in a strange land on the other side of the seas. At twenty-nine, had he himself not been frail, been ailing, tense stubborn, sensual, dreamy, cynical and brave? Yes, he had been all that and much else besides; he had been alive, in short had been a man, and yet he had never thought of the man that slept there as a living being, but as a stranger who passed by on the land where he himself was born, of whom his mother said that he looked like him and that he died on the field of battle. Yet the secret he had eagerly sought to learn through books and people now seemed to him intimately linked with this dead man, this younger father, with what he had been and what he had become, and it seemed that he himself had gone far afield in search of what was close to him in time and in blood. To tell the truth, he had received no help. In a family where they spoke little, where no one read or wrote, with an unhappy and listless mother who would have informed him of about this young and pitiable father? No one had known him but his mother and she had forgotten him. Of that he was sure. And he had died unknown on this earth where he had fleetingly passed, like a stranger. No doubt it was up to him to ask, to inform himself. But for someone like him, who was nothing and wants the world entire, all his energy is not enough to create himself and to conquer or to understand the world. After all, it was not too late; he could still search, he could learn who this man had been who now seemed closer to him than any other being on the earth. He could... Now the afternoon was coming to its end. The rustle of a skirt, a black shadow, brought him back to the landscape of tombs and sky that surrounded him. He had to leave; there was nothing more for him to do here. But he could not turn away from this name, those dates. Under that slab were left only ashes and dust. But, for him, his father was again alive, a strange silent life, ans it seemed to him that again he was again going to forsake him, to leave his father to haunt yet another night the endless solitude he had been hurled into and then deserted. The empty sky resounded with a sudden loud explosion: an invisible aero-plane had crossed the sound barrier. Turning his back on the grave, Jacques Cormery abandoned his father. Current Mood: awake

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