Vinyl records and the joy of old Hindi songs.

Listening to your favourite song in the time before the iPod, the boom boxes on music channels, in my generation was restricted to whatever came on Chitrahaar on a single monopoly (Remember DD?), in some cases the radio (Vividh Bharathi) and in other cases tape players if you had enough cassettes and they survived the tropical weather.

For today's instant generation of getting everything on youtube or the variety of stores that proliferate the smart phone market depending on which vendor you want to pay, this is a reminder that there existed something known as the LP record or the gramophone record where you had a needle run on top of a vinyl record (yeah something like that round thin circular disc that you saw Dr. Lode hand to King George VI in the King's speech) . Yes, one can listen to Mukesh, Rafi, Kishore, Manna Dey on a CD that's been digitally reproduced with whatever bit of computing power can be thrown at removing extraneous noises and enhancing certain chords. However there is a certain joy in listening to that needle scratch through an old record and when it manages to get it right as it does right now , the nostalgia evoked with the days of listening to the songs is quite a nice feeling. It getting stuck on a particular track as it does once in a while is another bit of nostalgia. It wasn't just the Hindi film songs that one enjoyed, it was also classical music - having one of the few LP's where the 3 violinist brothers (L Shankar, L Subrahmanyan and L Vaidyanathan) play together, or listening to the MS performance at Carnegie Hall or listening to music from the slightly forgotten figures today ( ChittiBabu on the veena, Lalgudi on the violin). It wasn't just that - waking up on a Saturday morning at 6 a.m. to listen to the Venkatesa Suprabhatam or even the Vishnu Sahasranamam and Bhaja Govindam was a nice thing to listen to even before one got a cup of the truly Tamilian beverage ( filter kaapi).

One of the ways in which one caught some decent music (before the age of the tape recorder) was essentially Vinyl. This was the mode in which yours truly listened to old songs till the time the gramophone at home conked off at which point there was a hiatus of nearly 8 years till a new one was procured in one of the trips abroad. Of-course by then Dad had moved on to listening to tapes and then on to CDs, having supplemented his collection into tapes and later CDs with the result that one inherited the LP collection.

There are a few folks one has to give thanks to here, one is an aunt who instilled the joy of listening to old songs rather than watch TV and of-course the other is Dad for having carefully and meticulously collected, catalogued and maintained a large number of old LPs and 45 rpm records which I've inherited now (some of which are older than yours truly). It would not be right not to thank the cousin S who held on to a large number of these records when there was that long hiatus .

So if anyone is looking to get rid of some old Vinyl Hindi LP records, STOP !! Think twice about it  - we are happy to find a way of accepting such records and giving them a home . Give me a shout !!

Bollywood jai ho.

So, after a long time I've been watching a Bollywood movie and the movie we got out of our monthly DVD service happened to be Dabang. I had seen parts of this during my last trip to India and it appeared to be a laugh riot, so it was worth watching this on DVD compared to what you get on the back of a airline seat. The story is typical Bollywood - take all the cliches, think about a large number, multiply the 2 - then take the result and raise it to itself. Angry step-father, righteously corrupt (Robinhoodesque) police officer, dumb step-brother, favouritism, a corrupt police force that still reaches late to a crime scene, the vivacious but stubborn leading lady with an equally stubborn drunk dad, stunts typically stolen from the Matrix ( replace bullets with flying glass panes in slow motion) , the Transporter ( the oil layered fight scenes) and what not . A villain who tries to shoot sallu with a powerful sniper rifle and misses 25 shots ...

Some of the dialogues were simply laugh riots - chedi singh ham aapke badan mein itney ched kar dengey ki kahaan se saans  logey aur kahaan sey .... Typical Salman Khan dialogues,  some nice music and a nice way of spending an evening with the wife.

The Autorickshaw effect !

Alert readers would remember that a while back I had commented about how to get even with the infamous Madras Autorickshaws . Needing to get to a place where there was unfortunately no MRTS connection I decided that it was time to haggle. Now themadrasi of 3 years since that post is a little more mellow, portly stout chap who beats the heat typically in a cotton shirt and 3/4th of a pant left specifically in the old homestead for precisely the purpose of use in such hot weather. The auction for the contract was unspectacular . Going to Adyar signal - sir, 60 rupees - illai 50 rupees . ok let's go. Having conducted the business I needed to , I needed to find my mobile and then discovered that it was missing. Now losing a mobile phone is a bit of a pain especially as you don't know how many numbers you end up losing. There is ofcourse the spectacular crash in the brownie points index with the wife and the sheer pain of having to try and retrieve the phone number of every person you knew using other means of communication. No this ain't a smart phone that can sync contacts etc. !

Muttering curses to self for being so careless I decided to hunt this down in a systematic and organized manner. First established the fact that the missing mobile phone hadn't accidentally been left at home. Past performance has suggested such a behavior and it was time to nip this rumour in the bud. So, it wasn't at home and the mother based on descriptions of the autorickshaw driver named a name and it was time to go back and try and see if I could find Muthu at the auto stand near home. Thanks to Kutty the other auto-rickshaw driver at the stand, I managed to track down the elusive Muthu and I gratefully received the phone from him. This has been an eventful trip so far and not short of fun, but Muthu and Kutty today managed to restore some faith in the old creed of Autorickshaw drivers. We still agree to disagree on "meter"ing issues .

Themadrasi - 0 Autorickshaws - 10000

Travel o travel o travel - Covering the miles all 1835 of them !

The next day started with a flight out at 730 a.m. from Bombay to Calcutta to be followed by a 3:30 hour train journey from Calcutta to Jamshedpur. Since I had to get to Jamshedpur from Bombay a distance of  1835 km according to google maps, the best way was to actually take the flight to Calcutta ( 2:45 hours) followed by a 3:30 hour journey by train. There were a couple of variables here, one the journey between Dum-Dum and Howrah and the infamous traffic jams on Howrah Bridge and the second was the company that one would get in a sleeper class compartment on the train journey to this place. The first variable was pretty well handled by a competent local cabbie and the journey ended up taking only 1:10 minutes of the alloted 3 hours.

Howrah is one of those huge stations that you love to travel from - well planned with 23 full sized platforms and 4 more planned with each set of 4 platforms has 2 service roads , so folks after the payment of a fee can *actually* alight next to their compartment (no there are no 'a' and 'b' type platforms as in the UK). It is the largest station that I have travelled from and I suspect one of the largest stations in India but no one seems to be able to confirm this suspicion.

Taking the train in a 2nd class sleeper compartment (for those who don't know what these are see the linked photograph though look at the compartment behind the kingfisher.) was an experience after nearly 8 long years . I had forgotten the experience of being seated in a heated tin-can with the sights and the smells of the country-side or urban area that you were going through. Ofcourse the fun bit was in the various cries of caffee cafee or chai jhai and looking out of the window seated in a forward facing seat ! The cheap thrills of looking out of the window on a curve in the tracks to spot the locomotive or the tail of the 24-25 compartment long train are unmatcheable. The company on this trip was a cute little kid who was hell-bent on teaching me ABCD and counting numbers from 1-100. This was interspersed by a few attempts to throw out the latest Frederick Forsyth novel that I was reading .

In the middle of this , the kid also managed to read the book by flicking through the pages, cheated on a spelling game and checked if I could spell G-A-P . Just when you thought that the temperature was reaching it's heights and you would continue to swelter it was time for a refreshing summer shower.

It's remarkable how many times nature manages to cool things down especially one when is going through a really hot summer afternoon, if it were the UK I would have cursed the rain given that we only seem to get a lot of it and it would surely interfere with my cricket game ! , but here it was fresh, pleasant and the smell of fresh rain on what had been a hot muggy and sweltering afternoon was extremely refreshing. The biggest advantage of travelling in a second class compartment is the ability to actually take in the weather, the sights and the smells of the places you go through. It can be tepid, boring and quite ghastly in some of the urban areas but that's all made up by the smell of the first rains hitting a parched ground but if you really want to travel through India there are no places better than a seat in a super-fast second class compartment with the odd forays to the door of the compartment to sit down and soak up the scenery. Soon enough it was time to alight the train at Jamshedpur to be welcomed by the gang of 5 who made sure that everyone at the station knew that I had arrived with garlands, placards, a homemade director of events and quite a few noisy statements .This sometimes begs the question - with friends like this .... I leave it as homework for the astute reader to finish ......

Travel o travel o travel - Part 1 - Bombay

After a frenetic journey over the past weekend it's time to take stock in the hottest of all seasons in a place with just 3 seasons (which reads hot, hotter and hottest! ) . The temperature hasn't been spectacularly high in the places I've been to but the humidity has been the killer. 30+ deg C and nearly 90% humidity in some places has been fun.

So the journey started rather uneventfully till I got to India -  decided to be self-reliant, adventurous and think like a local again ! This meant giving up on the hyper expensive but comfortable AC pre-paid cab from inside the terminal which was 3X the cost of getting an air-conditioned coolcab. Ofcourse the cool-cabs are a bit of a hit and a miss and despite my earnest appeals got a 40-50 year old Premier Padmini which had an air-conditioning system that seemed to work in fits and starts (when the engine ran) . The first initiation to the heat of the day was when the car engine decided to splutter and stop somewhere in the middle of Ghatkopar and hence you had to get down to push and jump-start the cab. Ofcourse despite the attempts of the powerful AC had just kept me on the borderline from sweating buckets ; however this effort repeated thrice more in various busy intersections made sure that I ended up sweating a good bucket or 2 inside the cab. I am sure watching a portly man pushing a cool-cab from behind and then running to the seat to jump in once the car had started after going through some fits and starts would have provided entertainment to a few and much deserved exercise to yours truly. If there is a city full of Premier Padminis it is this, it is this, it is this ! There was one point at which I did decide that if there was one more breakdown I would get out and take an auto-rickshaw ! In the middle of all this the conversation ranged around the cricket, how many taxis he owned, the world-cup win, Tendlya, Dhoni, the traffic, the pace of the new metro , Anna Hazare and his anti-corruption drive and what the taxi-wallah thought about it etc. etc. etc. Time to catch up on all the gossip . Reaching home after that meant that I could enjoy a nice lunch, a nice nap and then a good dinner with family before the next part of the travel kicked in.

The new AC100.

I got a new AC100 today running a Tegra2 and Android 2.1 on it. The first thing I did was to try and make it into a dual boot machine with a usb hard drive connected to it and boy is it spiffy and fast while running something like Ubuntu 10.10 . Thanks to ogra for pointing me towards the necessary bits and the #ac100 channel on freenode.

It's reasonably spiffy and based on recommendations from someone else I decided to get going with chromium and that resulted promptly in a crash because of an illegal instruction which might or might not be a compiler bug ! Talk about eating your own dog food eh !

Firefox does seem a bit heavy on this but reasonable. Flash doesn't seem to work out of the box so you have to rely on gnash and other bits and pieces. The biggest showstopper for my wife adopting it is the lack of sound on this but it might be solved by upgrading the emmc to Android 2.2 . Overall not a bad experience so far.