Quick life updates

• My answer to 'Whoa!Do you live with your parents?' will be yes for the next 3 months.
• Did my second longest road trip 1200 miles (First 2200mi) on the East coast.
• Will have to shop at places like Costco and Wal-mart (where you would need to squeeze wheel the carts between weepy toddlers and confused desis) for few months.
• Carrying lunch to office frequently and sharing it with my American colleagues explaining them the recipes and ingredients .
• Having Idli, Dosa, uppma as breakfast(with the cereal boxes atop my fridge staring) and 3 meals a day after years.
• Part-time home appliance customer support answering calls at my desk. Ex: "How to turn on the dishwasher?" or "How to turn off the fire alarm?"
• Waking up to Suprabhatam or Vishnu Sahasranama (played on my Dell XPS)
• More updates soon..

Excelente

One of the most powerful movies I ve seen in recent times. Javier with yet another mesmerizing performance after No Country for..

Design your happiness

I have been hooked onto TED for some time now for the jaw-dropping, inspiring and beautiful (those are the sort categories on the site) talks on topics ranging from string theory to the intelligence of crows to global warming all of them lasting 15-20 mins only. Once in a while I do bump into goldmines like this which compensates my not-so-worthy-orkut-facebook-Gmail time on the web.
One of the speeches titled 'yes, design can me you happy' was the most amazing for me till date since I could relate to everything that it said. Summarizing the speech the speaker talks about the various designs in his life that gave him happiness. He is a graphic designer by profession which justifies his reason for the happiness he derives from designs. After seeing the video I tried to list down the last few instances in my life when I felt really happy (which was a tough list to put down). Ok I'm not going to list down stuff here but what I realized from the list was that materialistic happiness definitely scored over emotional happiness in my life.Those are probably 2 unheard of terms, let me give you examples of materialistic happiness from my list – when I saw the new Dell XPS laptop, my office and the the designs on the walls (huge gaming product headquarters), when I first saw the ford mustang GT, everytime I browse Flickr, …. And happiness derived from emotions would be from things like friendship, love, satisfaction.
That's probably one of the reasons I love photography for the art and design which you can visualize, I try to analyze patterns very frequently without my knowledge like the formation of the push pins on my office corkboard or the crooked lines between traffic lanes when I'm stuck on the lights. Not that these give me any kind of happiness but when I see some design well done (both natural or manmade) I definitely spend some time to appreciate it and rethink why I would have done it the same way it is done. Having said that I am no way a designer or a connoisseur of design, it's just that i feel i see a lot more of them in my daily life than others do.

Iron Man

Ok this was not premeditated. Agreed that I do get a dose of rotten- tomatoes before I head out to watch any weekend releases but someplace at the back of my skull (not head) there’s this mini-me with the wings and the golden corona which asks me to pay no heed to the critics and of course there’s the satanic me with the spear and the German pitch asking me to go on and do the honors. The thing with me is that I kinda get partial by the writings pretty effortlessly although no one can really stop me from watching the movie if I really want to but again like I said now that I have read about it be it good, bad or ugly I’m leaning at an acute angle for now. I haven’t written much ever like a critic or a reviewer but something about the one I saw last night captured my imagination after a really long time. I realized that I always wanted to be a Tony Stark from Iron Man. (I know this is one thing everybody would dream of and there’s nothing astonishing that I thought of this worth writing a blog entry, but HEY!! This space is about me and what I crave to write, so eat it.)



I’m not going to post a complete movie review here, just Google for that and there are already tons of them. In short what I liked the most about Iron Man; Tony Stark-Robert Downey Jr for his superb portrayal of the sarcastic, jokey, and scotch-friendly womanizer and DIY master engineer. He fit in so well as if he was destined to do that. State of the art CGI/special effects and handsome futuristic technology concepts (Code complied into a 3D hologram, friendly mischievous robotic arms- WOW). This definitely stands out from the other superhero movies in a way that powers here are not inherited from an unknown source or from a spider bite but engineered, modeled and built from scratch which makes it look even more rational and realistic even though it’s supposed to be a yet another fairy tale from Marvel comics, but I liked the adaptation better (ok I haven’t read the comic so can’t really vouch for that). The CGI rendering just gets better with every movie; I like the fact that the dudes who are responsible for this have become sticklers for specifications. If you’ve seen Transformers you’ll know what I’m talking about. Following suit are upcoming releases namely- The Incredible Hulk, Narnia-Prince Caspian and of course the most eagerly awaited Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

The disappointing news is that the sequel Iron Man 2 is slated for a 2010 release, now that’s a long wait.

[Pepper catches him in Iron Man suit.]
Virginia 'Pepper' Potts: What's going on here?
Tony Stark: Let's face it, this is not the worst thing you've ever caught me doing.


ironman, movies

Breathing.

Couple of things over the recent past which made me hyperventilate and rethink about myself and the world:

•The feel of being at home in Seattle one Saturday afternoon déjà vu lazing just about another Saturday afternoon back home in Bangalore circa 2003.
•The routine (not monotonous off late) Mon-Fri/11-7 workdays, Fri Poker nites, Sat nite clubbing and Sunday noon movies.
•Reading about Bangalore on the never ending stories of the urban infrastructure war more choral nowadays on Web 2.0 and eager to contribute one day.
•Waking up each day looking at different career paths and the sensation of wetness behind the ears when it comes to choosing the precise one.
•Looking out for the once in a blue moon sunny day in Seattle.
•Meeting friends from school after a decade at my (and at times their) doorstep.
•Desi Grassroots’ revolution stories, the urge to go green on energy and the To-do post-its on my planner.
•The number of movies I’m guzzling down every week with the hope of scripting/making one someday at any level.
•The IPL extravaganza, reverse outsourcing of entertainment and the inflow of cash.
•High Dynamic Range(HDR) photography, Skydiving, Raghu Dixit Project.

seattle, bangalore