internet forwards and oBelIX’s nth law of email

i got another few arbitrary forwards today

1. Most important part of the body
2. A SWEET LOVE STORY
3. NEHRU’s family tree

this got me thinking. why arent there some nice interesting forwards as compared to the crap which keeps filling up my inbox. in a general group of people (the above forwards came from my schoolmates) most forwards are sentimental shit that is uninteresting to most of the people in the group.

this led to

oBelix’s nth law of email
In a general group of people most forwards received are crap

now just for the heck of it i guess we can construct the following arguments

1. The above forwards came from some of the girls
2. Does this mean that girls post junk stuff? probably an unfair genralization :p
3. Do the girls know that this stuff is junk?
4. Does anyone else care about this stuff or do they just Mark as Spam??
5. Why doesn’t someone else post something useful??
6. What would be useful???

The girls I guess wud say that the stuff they posted was useful coming up to a very nice circular argument

Hence the nth law of email holds and should probably be added as a Murphy’s Law

Quad Erat Demonstratum

PS – I am blogging alot, mostly cause I am bored with nothing else to do. So bear with it.

the flowering of indian cinema

Cinema in India has been around for a long time. When I was in school, I would rarely watch indian films. I used to think that they were unreal garbage with unimaginable stuff happening on screen. But gradually my opinion of indian films as such has changed (helped no doubt by my sister who forces us to go and see the latest films). Why this change in opinion??

Well IMHO in the last few years (and correct me if I am wrong) there have been some extremely brilliant films made. It all started with Lagaan. Finally I felt that the indian moviemakers had the balls to make something different. Something with a real story. Not just the regular family crap and stuff like that. That was one film which was seriously oscar material. (actually they wud’ve won the oscar had they edited out that scene with the englishwoman going “My heart is full of a thousand words, I feel eternal bliss” in the song “O Rey Chori”. I guess the west just could not digest that)

The next film that I saw was Devdas. Now this did not have a totally different story like Lagaan. It was much more conventional. However the point about this film was that it was beautiful. I had never before seen such beauty in a film. By beauty here I mean the sets, the general appeal and the colour. Never has a hollywood film come even close to equalling devdas in beauty. Of course casting babes like Madhuri Dixit and Aishwariya Rai helped immensly.

After that there were some entertaining films like Main Hoon Na. That was just pure entertainment. A commercial film made with the sole purpose of making money.

There was also Raincoat. It had some excellent acting. I mean Ajay Devgan (atleast I think it was him :p) and Aishwarya Rai were really really great. The story was nice and to top it all it was the music. The music in that film was brilliant, bloody brilliant. It was to Indian Music what Pink Floyd is to rock.

The film that tipped the scales was Black. I read somewhere that it was a copy of “The Miracle Worker”. Not having seen that film I cant comment on it but frankly I dont give a damn. Black was one hell of a film. The story was amazing and the acting was bloody brilliant. Amitabh Bacchan, Rani Mukerjee and the kid who played the girl were superlative. The direction was amazing. Black seriously deserves an Oscar (or the indian equivalent of an oscar).

Last but not the least was Bunty Aur Babli. Again a purely entertainment film but the point here was that it was really well made. Ok, the songs were kind of a pain in the ass but other than that the plot, the acting etc were excellent. Actually it was much more entertaining than most hollywood films put together.

Recently I saw Paheli. That was a disappointment. Actually expected it to be much much better. All through the movie I was like “When the heck is it going to finish?”. I mean the acting was good, the sets were really nice but the story was a bore and they really really really dragged it. What should have been told in an hour and a half took nearly three.

All in all indian cinema seems to be on a roll. Sure the poor guys dont have as much money as the hollywood buggers but they can beat them hands down in acting. Also we have something which America does not. We have some really awesome culture. We can create stuff which the US cannot even dream of imagining. Also Indian Cinema has music. A lot of our music is present in our films, unlike the west where most of it is in single albums by artists. So all in all here’s to some great cinema …

basket case

Basket Case
Carl Hiaasen

Just finished reading the above mentioned novel. Its the first of its kind that I have read. Hopefully there will be many more. This is a comedy + thriller + suspence all rolled into one. The writing style is new and refreshing and its real fun to read. The point of it all is that it ain’t ur regular Tom Clancy type thrillers, and there aren’t extraoneus long boring passages like Jeffery Archer. Its a nice small thriller with some witty one-liners that will make u laugh while reading it. Overall its an excellent way to pass time.

So that’s the main bit of this post out of the way

neways i took up swimming lessons. today was feeling bloody sick in the morning. so let it be a lesson to everyone. if you go swimming when you have one or more of the following

(a) cold
(b) cough
(c) a eye splitting headache
(d) fatigue
(e) fever

then its a good idea to skip swimming for the day. course i had no such intention of doing so and went anyway. basically you will feel like death while getting to the pool, while changing and taking the pre-swim shower but once you get in the pool it just rocks. actually when you are concerned about survival all these things take a backseat. oh and remember, you’ll feel pretty darn bad once you come out of the pool as well, all the above symptoms will reappear in full force and you will be wheezing like a pachyderm with a few hundred blacksmiths hammering your head. in short you will feel ..ed in the A.

The definitive guide to playing CS:What to do and what not do
Coming Soon

grand theft auto

as of now i am counting the days till i get to play grand theft auto san andreas. i just cant wait to get my hands on that game. supposed to be even better than the previous installments. those of you who dont know what gta is read on …

grand theft auto is a game in which u r a guy in a city. you can drive the cars, interact with some ppl and have to do missions to complete the game. there are interesting side missions as well, for example you can become a taxi driver, a racer a cop etc. basically the games are usually HUGE, there is always somethign you haven’t done, something to do. the last installment was gta vice city, complete with motorbikes , airplanes, helicopters, boats and stuff. there are rampages in which basically u gotta kill lot of ppl, and loads of other wacko stuff.

gta sa is supposed to be huge. where vice city was just 1 city, gta sa models an entire state containing 3 cities and the connecting highways and other stuff. its also got a personal model, ie u can grow fat / thin, ur sex appeal, ur fitness everything is measured and u can grow stronger by exercising, fatter by eating etc.

course i haven’t played the game yet, this is all from websites and ppl who have played the game. i guess i just gotta wait till i get back to IIIT.

now how many ppl know abt the japanese game called suduku (so maybe i misspelled it, go sue me). i started playing it to pass time. and that it does bloody well, i mean u can easily spend 15 mins trying to solve a nice suduku puzzle. basically its a 9*9 board in which u have to fill in the numbers from 1-9 . u cant repeat numbers in a row / column / 3*3 square. so if u’ve got time to kill and nothing to do just grab the paper and solve a suduku. its way easier than a crossword, and while not addictive, its certainly nice timepass

the definitive way of listening to music

for all the uninformed ppl out there, read on for the best music system possible …

there is an mp3 player (portable) out there that absolutely kicks ass.

yeah, i am talking abt the one and only iPod (TM)

made by apple (the same guys that made the iMac) its the most amazing mp3 player i’ve ever seen (course ive seen very few but who cares). it looks stunning, with a nice shiny magnesium (i assume magnesium cause it shines and reflects very well, cud be aluminium) rear and a white front (shudve expressed that in a nicer way). the controls are awesome, really really easy to use. anyway i put a GB of songs onto it and looking for music is easy, it takes a few seconds to find one song out of a thousand. course with a harddisk on it you can take your whole music collection with you.

iTunes, the software that is supplied with it is nice. atleast it does what it’s supposed to do and much more. its easy to sync with the ipod, and it keeps all your mp3’s and stuff updated. also the ipod tracks what you play and kinda rates it automatically, so not only can you make your own playlists you can also listen to the top 25 songs that u’ve rated, and / or the most played songs, etc. it connects via only USB 2.0 or firewire.

but that’s not all you need for the best music system, you need some speakers / headphones to play it with

enter bose – Better [something] [something] with Engineering (I think)

i’d gone to CP once, there at the bose showroom i’d tried on the bose headphones. now these aren’t ordinary headphones, they are really good headphones. they are noise cancelling so you wont hear all the excess envoirnmental noise that’s there, and they are really light. the sound quality is superb, its the best ive heard, much much better than all the fancy computer speakers and crap like that.

so if u’ve got money to spare and are lookign for a really cool music system then you should get

an iPod + bose headphones

that’d probably cost 10-20K + 20K

but then trust me its probably worth it

PS – there are bose headphones available for 9K also …

home, the kingdom of heaven

long time no blog.

mostly due to laziness and …

so today decided to finally write some stuff

saw “Kingdom of Heaven”, nice film, a film which probably depicts history more accurately than others i’ve seen. atleast its not pro-american bullshit in which the english speaking white man conquers all and saves the day and the rest of the world is thankful / angry at him for doing so.

after that i went home, actually this post is from home, where net is kinda slow. neway MTNL the service provider is improving, speeds aint that bad and the conn holds.

life is real good as of now. atleast food is good, and i aint got nething to be doing. atleast some part of the year one should have absolutely noithing to do. its like calvin’s dad when he says that the miserable vacation they take each year makes living in the house like a godsend

since i got nothing to do, i spend a while surfing channels on the good old idiot box. there seems to be nothing good on anyway, thanks to the cable operator.

apparently in my area you can either see star sports or ESPN, but only one cause that guy shows only one channel. so during the champion’s league final it was some snooker on star world and then during the F1 race it was some other arbitrary sport on ESPN. that’s the sort of stuff that is really infuriating. the movies on hbo and star are ok tho, most of the time. still i wish they’d show something better. also i wish that the ads wud improve. the only decent ad that ive seen is the bloody reebok shoe ad. almost all the other ad’s are full of some arbid garbage, like this radio mirchi ad, wherein some kid breaks a cookie jar, and his mom comes in all angry and stuff, and then she starts dancing for no apparent reason. i mean come on ppl. that is the height of ignorance.

i found all the calvin and hobbes books. read them again and again and again. bill patterson is a genius. calvin and hobbes is awesome philosophy. its awesome comic stuff.

rest of the new stuff in the next post, which will be pretty soon i guess …