Centaurs

But fix thine eyes beneath: the river of blood
Approaches, in the which all those are steeped,
Who have by violence injured. ' O blind lust!
O foolish wrath! who so dost goad us on
In the brief life, and in the eternal then
Thus miserably o'erwhelm us. I beheld
An ample foss, that in a bow was bent,
As circling all the plain; for so my guide
Had told. Between it and the rampart's base,
On trail ran Centaurs, with keen arrows armed,
As to the chase they on the earth were wont.
- Inferno Canto 12, Dante


As Virgil and Dante descended into the 7th circle of hell, they see a circular river of blood Phlegethon. Murderers, tyrants and others who violently shed the blood of others in life are immersed in it.Centaurs, led by Chiron patrol the river's shores, armed with bows and arrows. they shoot any who attempt to raise his head out of the river.

Centaurs are creatures, half-man, half-horse. In traditional mythology they were skilled warriors,poets,astronomers and physicians. Centaurs nursed and taught heroes of old like Achilles and Hercules. Even though they are romantic symbols in modern storytelling and often portrayed in positive light by classic authors like Ovid and Statius,they are in fact symbols of insane wrath.

Amazing Grace

Something heard .. and noted down... Pardon my lack of posts, other priorities have since taken precedence.

She was Grace,
in name and in essence.
To those she loves,
she exudes strength, life, laughter and light.
To me, also sorrow.
for circumstance had bound her to my best friend,
through whom we met
in the warmth and serenity of her home.
Nothing from the first day I saw her
and no one who has happened to me since
has ever been as frightening
and as confusing.
For no person I have ever known
has ever done more to make me feel
more sure,
more insecure,
more important,
and less significant.

Wonderwall

Can a man ask anymore ? Random lyrics.. random thoughts.. will add more to this post later ..


...said maybe... you gonna be the one that savess me.... and afterall.. you're my wonderwallll..... ..I don't believe that anybody...Feels the way I do, About you now.... ..said maybe... said maybe... maybe. I said maybe....You're gonna be the one who saves me ?...And after all....You're my wonderwall


--

till later

GJ

-------------------------------------------------
"per astera ad astram"

Best Days, Summer Haze

I know I have been absent ever since the knopfler concert back in July and I am truly sorry. Let me fill in the details ( or at least try to ), but first a confession:

This summer has been one of the most amazing four months in my adult life, its possible I might have experienced this state of mind at some point in the past, but it seems so long ago and so far away, the resonants are very faint. It almost seemed as the darkness had finally passed and the demons finally laid to rest. After my trip to Singapore and meeting up with Mahesh, spending time seeing places and things ...art, photography.. I began to remember..
There was a me before all this, there was a time when things were different. There was a world outside Dark City. I remember again. I live once more.

Melodrama aside, Made some significant changes, the major one being moving to my condo permanently. The commute was getting to be a killer and the distance a buzz kill when it comes to party invitations and staying sober all night long so that you can drive back home.

Prominent lunar forces have brought about a sense of calm and purpose in my life. The question is, are these forces temporal or of a permanent nature ?
I suppose their purpose and reasons could be worked out in the following weeks or months. But they demand patience.. should ? could ? may ? shall ?


Summer is coming to an end, and i wasn't able to go rafting this summer, perhaps next year ? I will however do a roadtrip down to the US to Falling Waters. There is a house built by Frank Llyod Wright that I'd like to see. So September is here, the summer is almost over, fall creeps in... and I think of that Killers song 'Change your mind'........

Racey days
Help me through the hopeless haze
But my oh my
Tragic eyes
I can't even recognise myself behind
So if the answer is no
Can I change your mind

PS: Heading for the Oasis concert this weekend. It will be good.

Telegraph road, Telecaster, Knopfler Concert (July 17)

I was 8 and at a Christmas party when I first heard a Dire Straits song. Walk of Life, hit from their album Money of Nothing that was released earlier the same year. One of my dad's friends performed and from what I can recollect, he did a fantastic job at the guitar and the vocals.

20 years later, in another life, another city I finally saw Mark Knopfler live at a concert on Thursday. Can't believe I've waited 20 years to see the man play live. It was amazing. He still got the voice, and the signature guitar strokes. This concert was to promote his new album Kill to get Crimson. He started off with a few new ones, followed by the classic Dire Straits tracks like Romeo and Juliet, Sultans of Swing etc. I was really hoping he would play Tunnel of Love or something from his Shangri-La album.

As the notes played out, each song, an ode cried for a lost memory..Remember listening to that album in our empty apartment in Scarborough? Lady Writer, Romeo and Juliet, Tunnel of Love, Brothers in Arms... Darling Pretty (Golden Heart) .. a song for each... minus one. When he started playing Telegraph Road, something flashed through a series of fail-safes put in place carefully over the years.. and the floodgates burst open... the diffused swam into focus, everything was just obvious... nothings that complex. Nothing is ever completly futile. Nothing...


You know I'd sooner forget but I remember those nights
When life was just a bet on a race between the lights
You had your head on my shoulder you had your hand in my hair
Now you act a little colder like you don't seem to care
But believe in me baby and Ill take you away
From out of this darkness and into the day
From these rivers of headlights these rivers of rain
From the anger that lives on the streets with these names
cos Ive run every red light on memory lane
Ive seen desperation explode into flames
And I dont want to see it again. . .
from all of these signs saying sorry but were closed
All the way down the telegraph road...........


EDIT: The pictures of Knopfler were originally taken by a gentleman who was at another one of his shows. These are some amazing pictures, and he has very generously allowed me to use one or two. For more
pictures here is a link to his site

YouTube video of the above song :

Quacks, Hacks and 60's Tracks

For the last couple of days, as a form of therapy I was compiling this document and was to be posted on the blog, however due to circumstances beyond my current realm of influence, it wont be available for a while.

In other news, the other buddy seems to have begun a blog as well. He is currently using a service, what seemed to be very similar to MySpace. Whats annoying about it is the fact that we can't post anonymous comments ( or comments by users without an accounts ), a typical rookie oversight. I also recently reactivated my deviantart account and posted a few pictures from my summer trip. One or two of them got about 54 hits in one single day. A definite improvement from the 32 hits ( in 3 years for previous submissions ) lol.

Health-wise, its on the severe patch right now. Before the nodding and tsk-tsking begins, I've been actually pretty good the last month or so, alcohol comsumption has droppped a whopping 75% and smoking by about 98%.. not too bad I'd say. But its been rather uncomfortable the last couple of days and I think I might have to finally bite the bullet and see the doc. I hate having going to doctors. Specially the ones i dont trust, and no I don't trust the ones out here, well anywhere for that matter. What really shattered my belief in them is when guys / girls I knew from school started getting into Med school after highschool. Now before most of you start to take offense to this, I must state that I am talking about the select few, yes yes you buddy. I know what sort of a hack job you did through school, and how you passed your science courses both in highschool and college, and i would trust your judgement because......... ?

While on the subject of hackjobs, Microsoft has given a release date on windows 7, vista's successor. This one will be a whole post by itself...Now I'm getting irritated ( but that could also be due to the lack of nicotine...). Time to get some green tea and step out to muse and smok... frak.. yeah step out and muse...

PS: As most of my friends know my Beatle-mania here are three quotes of Lennon that kickstarted my day. Each for particular individual I wish I could say upfront:


     -  Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.

     - You're just left with yourself all the time, whatever you do anyway. You've got to get down to your own God in your own   temple. It's all down to  you, mate.

     - You don't need anybody to tell you who you are or what you are. You are what you are!

John Winston Lennon (1940 - 1980)

Addendum : I was reading through this post later in the day and I really felt bad about the quacks some of my peers turned out to be. This edit is just to emphasize that even though a majority turned into quacks, there are the genuine cases, who I'm sure adhere to the sacred oath and are skilled at the job... I can rattle off a few names off the top of my head.
The Quacks are obvious.

Resonant Echos

I've always enjoyed Edward Norton movies over the years. He is one intense actor, extremely talented and picky on his roles. Right from Fight Club to the new Hulk, Norton always delivers.

One of my favourite movie of all time is one he did called 25th hour. He plays a small-time drug dealer who is busted eventually by the cops. He knows that he has been betrayed by someone and suspects his live-in girlfriend to be the one. He is then asked by the cops to testify against a russian mob he is working for, which he refuses. The result.. him being sent to the worst penetentiary in the state, where he knows he'll be lucky to get out alive.The movie shows how he goes about wrapping up his affairs before serving his seven year sentence and a brief glimse into his childhood and friends, their lives then and where things changed for him and events that led to the present day. Being a Spike Lee movie, it centred around post-911 New York city and the main elements thats unique of NYC.

There is one specific monologue in the movie that struck a cord somewhere when I first saw the movie. It came back to me last night, while driving back home on dark Highway 5 and here it is :

Reboot - back to reality

I finally got back home (how good that word feels) after my amazing two week journey to the Far East. For a person who never belonged anywhere, Toronto is the one place I can finally call home. There probably only one other city that accepted me and I embraced, Bangalore. But that was a long time ago and I doubt I can live there anymore.

The first day back, I decided to go through my notebook for comments or notes to self. Being OCD that I am, I did make extensive notes to follow up on projects and ideas I was trying out at the time. Turning the pages, I was faced with a myriad of symbols, numbers, diagrams and acronyms that was anything short of gibberish. By the time I reached to the end of the list I was completely puzzled and utterly lost. To my horror, I couldn't recall ANY of it !

In a different time it would have set me on a state of panic and would have huffed and puffed till the place blew over. But to my surprise, I found myself folding the sheet of paper twice over and neatly tossing it into the recycle bin and proceeded to go get myself a cup of coffee and meet the natives.

In most computers we've noticed a considerable degrade in performance when left on for an extended period of time. A lot people who work with me know how much I loath re booting my machine. Normally I have it ON for weeks at end till something freezes over and I am forced to re boot. Often accompanied with a string of colourful language and threats of painful death to the pc and os manufacturers. This was pretty the scenario in my case, it was as though the brain underwent a re boot, cleared the cache and started afresh with new vigor. Not sure how my minions feel about that, but
they don't have an opinion anyway.

Overall it was great to spend time with my best friend and do something else other than just 'work'. You might have also noticed how much I love my camera. I have managed to upload almost all the good pictures to my online picassa account. Here is a link to it : Singapore May 2008

I will try to talk about a few places in the coming weeks.

It was a good day.

And to my friend I hope you find what you are looking for. One of the few people I do respect.
(Now since you don't read the blog/know of its existence, I can state it here ! Damn mac users ;-) )

And here's to Wolf, I would have loved to show you these pictures and listen to your remarks. I miss you my friend.

Finally to the minions at oz IT. Exceptional work I am truly proud.

GJ

Salamat Datang !

Greetings from sunny and humid Singapore.

Probably my first and only post when I'm traveling. I think I might have a few posts queued up, I'll check and fire them off when I get back home. This has been an amazing time-off. Sitting on the PC tapping away, the sounds of ghazzals in the background and mahesh dozing in the afternoon, classic flashback to college days.

I did end up picking up a decent tripod from Sing. Trudging through the dusty and crowded streets of Kuala Lumpur I understood why the pros stress on picking up a good light tripod. If this thing was any heavier I'd be half-dead from lugging it around.

There are a ton of pictures I took on this trip you can find a limited albums here

Indonesia
Malaysia
Singapore

I will try to sort out the pictures I have and pick out the good ones and post it. There way more pictures and over the course of the next few days these albums will be updated.

Apparently someone's hackles were raised by my previous post. So just to confirm some of us don't require to carry dictionaries or thesauruses (the little book that tells you similar words, thought I'd spare you from checking the dictionary again) around. Strict curriculum and amazing teachers back in school made sure we had a generally large vocabulary and develop a knack to pick up popular vernacular. But I'm sorry wannabes hardly have any credibility.

DSLRs & Imbeciles

So I finally bit the bullet and picked up a D-40 ( Nikon ) with a kit lens ofcourse. I think I'll wait a few months before I pick out a quality lens. I must say its pretty easy to use, once you've understood the whole shutter speeds, isos, light metering etc. I'll pick up a few accessories out later this week. They say that tripods matter a lot and investing in a good tripod is probably a wise thing.

So that was the first half, the second half, the imbeciles. Had a twat visiting this weekend. Supercilious cock. I don't particularly mind arrogant people, but they better be able to back that arrogance. Throwing ignorance into the mix just changes the way the game is played. When the camera box was opened, the twat jumped on the manual and began to read it cover to cover much to my annoyance as I prefer not to read the manual and turn to it as a last resort. I've always found it to be more fun discovering things on a new toy than completely knowing about its workings before you touch it. After browsing through the manual he exclaims 'Oh this camera has a lot of features and options to expand'. I raised an eyebrow. 'Its almost like my cybershot.' A circuit or breaker went off somewhere in my brain. I almost tore him limb to limb. How dare you compare a bleeding Point-and-Shoot with a bleeding SLR camera!

Twat.

I was warned about a blog on a certain historical-mythical topic and I happened to read the first paragraph or so of it. Poorly researched with no clear defining line between sci-fi and myth and most of it seemed to be the opinion of the individual rather than any core fact. If there were any facts, it was poorly cited. Then again its just a blog.

Twat (2)

Thats my $.02 for the day.

Adieu

Jay's Game and Large People

I got to go to the Jays game last night with ST. One of those last minute things. Wicked seats, 6 rows from the field right behind the home plate.

This is probably the first Toronto game I've gone to and the home team ( TO, be it the raptors or jays ) actually won! and they won good ! final score 5-2 Jays.

So we get there a bit early, find out seats, order the ale and start to settle into our seats... two innings down, and people who had tickets to seats next to us show up. A rather big chick, hey I'm not a broomstick myself. She passes  me and then her boyfriend, I had to step out of the aisle to let the big boy through. No I mean BIG BIG. He was so big that when he sat down, half of him was in my seat!

Not to be talking down about big people, being averagely big myself ( but i did fit comfortably into one of those seats ), but seriously should you even bother coming to a crowded stadium ? I mean I'd have felt bad to oust someone from their seat. I understand you (the big person ) too paid for it ( not the case here ) but would the stadium actually get them to buy maybe 2 seats ? Maybe thats how it should be. These two actually occupied 4 seats at the Rogers Centre.

After about 2 minutes of sitting squished, ST and I moved over to the next aisle. But I argument is that I shouldn't have had to move ! What if the real owners for those seats showed ?  Apparently a few years ago there was a huge stink about having a separate seating area for large people, and how they felt it was discriminatory and was against the Charter of Rights (Canadian). 

Reset the Ticker

If there is anything I'm used to and adapt well to is turning the ticker back to zero and starting again! So I'm going to give it another shot. Currently Day 2.

However this time round, I've been noticeably  less  irritable or edgy. Deep breaths help. :-). The weekend will help  since I generally smoke less on the weekends.

Well Simona, you know how the song goes... 'here we go again.'

Cheers

GJ

Another Year

Over the course of close 3 decades of this current existence, I've come to see many different places, cultures and people. People have always fascinated me. The way they interact, react and reflect on situations.
Again if you pull the sociological aspects and the science of human interactions togerther, they aren't very appealing to me from an academic standpoint.

Then again very few topics are (to me anyway )the minute you affix marks, thesis or academic to it.

Couple of years ago when things were simpler, I was posed a very simple question.. 'so what would you like this year? Although i don't remember what my reply was, I'm sure, in accordance with the time and frame of mind and in the company of the individual who asked the question, it might have been something linear, one-dimensional and most probably fluff.

And I'm rambling.. this song has been in my head for the last couple of years..



And you ask me what i want this year
and i try to make this good and clear
just a chance that maybe we'll find better days

cause i don't need boxes wrapped in strings
and designer love and empty things,
just a chance that maybe we'll find better days

Chorus:
so take these words
and sing out loud
cause everyone is forgiven now
cause tonight's the night the world begins again

and its someplace simple where we could live
and something only you can give
and let's faith and trust and peace while we're alive

and the one poor child who saved this world
and there's 10 million more who probably could
if we all just stopped and said a prayer for them

so take these words
and sing out loud
cause everyone is forgiven now
cause tonight's the night the world begins again

i wish everyone was loved tonight
and somehow stop this endless fight
just a chance that maybe we'll find better days

so take these words
and sing out loud
cause everyone is forgiven now
cause tonight's the night the world begins again

cause tonight's the night the world begins again


Happy Birthday GJ.

Another year in the Tundra

A slight change in the summer plans have left me a bit disoriented. I must admit I do not like being caught off-balance but the recovery is pretty quick. Except for this one thing/time.I was really looking forward to this summer. Somethings will always remain unfed, ignored and abandoned.I can hear the sound of raindrops knocking against my window pane, supercooled droplets that freeze on contact, slowly making the glass opaque, shutting out the light, until all that remains is a diffused glowing portal.February weather, not the greatest. Infact I'd go on to state that by far the most miserable month in the year out here. It right around this time, about 7 years ago, a ragged family from the south-asia made their first entry into this country. Looking at the pictures that scatter lazily around my desk and floor.(always procrastinated putting them up ) .. its curious to see the faces and places, and thinking back , we never once thought that we'd meet here.Chimpu, V.Amma , Mahesh, Wolf, and a couple of other faces, smiling, frozen in time.

Watched a movie the other day, I haven't been keeping up with that scene in a while now. Stardust, the usual fantasy blah.. but somehow it captivated my attention and i actually watched the whole thing.Claire Danes was amazing. Something about her, reminds me... no not of someone...just the idea.. I had a dream where I was on my way to get something, now what it was or what had set me off on this path in my dream, i do no recall. But all i do remember is being curious, a bit blue and going a particular way, not knowing if it were right or not... just had to find ...And all that musing just to get off doing this report thats due
tomorrow. Cheers all. ;-)