Tertium Non Data

And so this is goodbye

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 08:33:04 GMT

Not that many people are around to follow this journal anyway, and I want more control over posts, and not screw up the layout by those silly advertisements some of which even bleep and tweet, this is goodbye LiveJournal.

Photos go here : http://vineeth.freecrow.com/photos from now.

Thanks for the ride. One last goodbye memoir post later.

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 15:28:31 GMT

MTR, Bangalore
Because I am in a sentimental mode, and I want to bury myself under the weight of everything gone

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 18:15:34 GMT

diaries, years, lives. swipe.

Sat, 21 Mar 2009 17:15:22 GMT

pork stir fried with basil leaves and capsicum

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 10:40:26 GMT

temperamental march/april
more

Hunger (Ireland, 2008)

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 10:26:44 GMT

It could have been a political movie like Liam Neeson's Michael Collins, but it chooses to make the politics an implied subtext of the movie and instead presents an unflinching look at the sides of the struggle and the toll it took on individual lives.

Visceral in its execution from the opening scene, there are very few movies which pack such a gut wrenching punch, and repeatedly at that. Dealing with the hunger strike of Bobby Sands played by Michael Fassbender (no relation to Rainer Fassbinder, I checked), the movie plays out as a triptych.

The first part takes us inside the prison where the Irish resistance prisoners are jailed, using poetic images which slowly turn your stomach, it would take someone with iron in their heads not to feel incarcerated themselves.

This leads onto a single take dialogue between Sands and a priest, poignant and comic in turns, the camera elaborates the conflict within the Irish people themselves about how the struggle evolved and the stage it reached.

The final segment represents one of the greatest acting performances, not just in the essaying of the character of Sands, but the physical disintegration as the body becomes the one unassailable weapon in the struggle. This final sequence also brings to a crescendo the tension the camera has been building through the movie, but as it draws to a close one is left not with an infinite number of questions but a sense of closure, it is not of the system or of the politics that we are thinking, but of the individuals, leaving us in the realm of the minutiae of life, and outside of aggrandizing philosophies.

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 09:17:33 GMT

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 12:20:33 GMT

burn, dissolve, sublimate.

Wed, 11 Mar 2009 09:47:14 GMT

mozzarella, prepared to acquire a caviar texture. rico's experiments with the molecular kitchen
from wikipedia : Molecular gastronomy is a scientific discipline involving the study of physical and chemical processes that occur in cooking. It pertains to the mechanisms behind the transformation of ingredients in cooking and the social, artistic and technical components of culinary and gastronomic phenomena in general (from a scientific point of view)

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 05:34:40 GMT

my witch

Sat, 07 Mar 2009 13:16:04 GMT

elisabetta

Sita Sings The Blues

Sat, 07 Mar 2009 06:46:24 GMT

This movie was screened at the internal institute movie screenings that happen occasionally, people loved it. The email I sent out to the staff list follows :

Released in 2008 at the Berlinale, single-handedly made (where single-handedly means just that, one woman scripting, editing, doing the sound, animating, producing, post-producing over five years), Nina Paley's Sita Sings The Blues takes a timeless Indian epic myth (one of two epics central to the Hindu faith) and intersperses it with 2 other narratives, of the director's story itself, and three Indians as puppets with delightful wry comments casting a contemporary look at this almost sacred epic.

This movie was so delightful to watch at the Berlinale 2008, that I almost embarrassed the friend I was watching this movie with, by bursting into applause laden peels of laughter. What astounded me then was how an American woman with no previous real contact with the Indian milieu could grasp so astutely the contradictions inherent to a pluralistic country like India.

Told using five different animation styles, each layer a subtle indicator and commentary on the parallel narrative it is being used for, it tells two parallel stories. One of a woman whose husband leaves her over email and decided to settle in India where he is on a business trip (the director's own true story), and the narrative of the myth of a god reincarnated as a king, his finding his wife, Sita, her being kidnapped by an "evil" king, her being rescued, his doubt of her chastity and her self-realization which in these days would translate to "F*** off, you bastard, I am going home". Along the way are the three Indians with their snarky remarks animated as the Indonesian representation of Hindu deities. She then laces the whole telling with Sita breaking into song, no Bollywood masala music here, but proper Blues from the early twentieth century. The animation styles also reference the depiction of gods and godesses on calendars, matchboxes and the like, and the bollywood movies of the 80s and 90s with the zoom in zoom out shots and the classic slow motion "main aa gaya, main bhi agaya" ("I came, I came too") unions.

Simultaneously tackling the story of a heartbreak, an Indian myth, a feminist critique, a commentary on contemporary Indian life, and how this myth has pervaded the Indian consciousness, beautifully illustrated and flawlessly animated (in Flash, no more), it is a movie at the end of which you want to find the director, give her a big hug and thank her for a delightful 90 odd minutes, and showing how irreverence can be so tasty an art.

Though not banned in India, this movie will never see a public release there, as she(the director) said at the Berlinale after the movie, she has received numerous death threats assuring her she will be killed if she sets foot on Indian soil.

Released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license, you can download the movie here.

The 25 Random Things bug

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 15:34:11 GMT

1. I wake up not later than 5.30 am on most days. This is when, how and why most of my reading happens

2. I can make a good latte macchiato, and a good cappuccino without a machine. This is my morning poison on the weekends. http://www.flickr.com/photos/vineeth_s/3302879981/, there's my proof, and there's the foamer.

3. I want to die at 40, I have always wanted to, that milestone hasn't changed in the last twelve years.

4. I love the rain. I kissed for the first time in the rain, and that was a idli-sambhar (steamed rice dumplings and a vegetable dish) and filter coffee laden kiss. He still is the cutest man I have ever known, no, really.

5. I used to be a bicycle devil, now, it has been thirteen years since I got on one.

6. I like taking things apart, I hate putting them back together. The first victim of this was my mother's alarm clock when I was eight. She never forgave me for that but I did not get a hiding either.

7. My best conversations have been the ones I used to have with my mother at 5.30 am as she would brew a liter of black coffee for me to consume over the next two hours.

8. I have gone all the way from wanting to be a priest in a church at sixteen to being a hard boiled atheist. It is hard to believe in a god when you work almost everyday on stuff which has evolution as its underlying principle. I admire people who can work in genetics and still keep their faith, it must be quite the debate in their heads, or a redefinition of god.

9. Coyote Ugly and Sister Act are my guilty pleasures. I would love to do that water hose thing in Coyote Ugly someday with that gyration. Someday.

10. I am a font freak, I obsess countless hours over choosing the right font. I am also a slide freak, I am infamous for spending an hour on each slide for presentations.

11. I cannot swim. Different people have tried at different times, between getting sick and not being able to keep my head under water, I have almost given up. This is a shame given all of my cousins learnt to swim by being hurled into the river after a banana stem.

12. I paid a lot of money for a Leonard Cohen concert ticket, and then someone broke my heart and I did not go. Cohen would have been the perfect balm for a broken heart, or perhaps all his melancholy would have only made it worse.

13. I love trains, I love the idea of long train rides, the best are trains along a river or the sea. My most memorable train rides have been the Konkan railway from Bangalore to Alleppey, and from Nice to Aix.

14. I have travelled a long distance, once, to meet someone I never met before, only to be shocked out of my wits. I squiggled out of the place and roamed an alien city in the middle of the night trying to figure out a bargain place to sleep in a language in which I could only ask "Do you speak English ?"

15. I have been at the Wailing Wall, it was a surreal experience, the carpet of murmurs as a crowd edges towards the wall in layers. I stuck a note in the wall too, there are supposed to be angels who then read your messages to God. This resonated so much when I saw In The Mood For Love where the principal character whispers his secrets into a hole in the wall at Angkor Wat.

16. If I have a religion, it is Wong Kar Wai's In The Mood For Love.

17. I love minimal conversations, minimal not in their length, but in the verbiage. I love abrupt switches in conversation. I know very few people who can deal with that.

18. I once played a game of Go and a game of chess simultaneously, I lost both, but not badly. It was in front a church with a stone yard with a stone ball spun by water rising up, against two of the most beautiful men I have known.

19. I never was into graphic novels, western or japanese, but I swear by them now. I owe their delight to Satya, Felix and Rico, the three of whom have completely different perspectives on the genre, and what works for them.

20. My reading speed is quite high, when people ask me to read something they always assume I am lying when I am done. I can read at almost 400 words per minute.

21. I am a hypochondriac. I also self-medicate. My mother calls me a quack. Being in Germany has helped, because over the counter medicines are severely restricted and doctors are very antibiotic shy. My doctor's favourite line goes "Can you breathe ? Can you eat ? Can you drink ? ... Ok! you will survive"

22. I get bored easily (I have an attention span of perhaps less than a minute) except when I paint. Then, I can spend countless hours drawing exactly the same shape or painting the same stroke repeatedly.

23. When something has impressed me or touched me, I tend to break out into a stomping applause, irrespective of where I am, even when I am alone.

24. I cook now, for someone who started cooking when he was twenty five, I cook well, and can cook for large numbers of people. I even pulled off a very palatable biryani recently, inspired by Lizzie Collingham's Curry : A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors, I followed her recipe to the t, except for the saffron. This was the first time I cooked with a recipe. The book is wonderfully stained and contorted now.

25. Kaizad Gustad's book's title "Of no fixed address" describes me best, or which is how I would like to be described.

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 12:06:49 GMT

spring. ever so slowly

Bommans! (for the uninitiated, Bommans, n. Brahmins(derogatory))

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 10:03:39 GMT

(fodder for you, al_lude)

Having vineeth at gmail as an email address brings in many stories, applications, recipes, inquiries about life in the Gelf, ummas(kisses) and oomas(owls) too. Today I ended up with Brahmin pride

From the email :

[snip]
A R Rahman story

A.R.Rahman was a Palghat Iyer Brahmin who migrated to
Chennai. His name was Dilip & he also studied in the famous Padma
Sheshadri School where Brahmin Students were dominant. I'm proud that
I'm also an alumini of that school & Rahman too is an alumini.
[/snip]

Country, religion, caste, school. What world do these idiots live in!

Thu, 05 Mar 2009 14:28:49 GMT

At the church
I asked for your name

The woman stared over her metal rimmed frame

It was the pink shoe lace perhaps
or that one was pink and the other neon green

We do not give out names here, she said

It is not every day
one finds The Pillow Book in a hand

It is not every day
one finds The Pillow Book go into and out of a church

She had not heard of The Pillow Book

It would be good to find it on the street
I could keep the book and lose you then.

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 18:34:15 GMT

His back arches, like a storm about to break; the rope a river, a snake bought off a relic selling pathetic history

He writhes, a rivulet breaking free off a bark, drunk by the sun up a winding waft, and he dies.

There are ghosts who wander the spires, ignored, they go at the bell, why else would they scream, the bells, in no pattern, screaming like a rope with its hands on a stream of semen sprayed, choking it all back in, to burst and inflate, to inflate and burst.

He breaks.

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 15:11:08 GMT

some stick and some ink, the rest idle

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 10:36:12 GMT

"no one puts flowers on a flower's grave" ~ tom waits

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 09:12:48 GMT

mathias

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 13:53:20 GMT

raskolnikof, dresden

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 17:03:07 GMT

Interrupt XLI

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 12:59:31 GMT

So you are disappearing now
And I rage like a storm refusing to die
Seize the ocean by its hair
and drag it across jagged rocks.

But I know the winds will die
Some pebble will roll down the cliff
and find a home somewhere in the sand.

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 12:33:18 GMT

good afternoon, spring

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 05:19:45 GMT

good morning, weekend