17 Dec
Scenes from these two movies were enacted out at our wedding. So in certain cultures (such as my wife’s; this isn’t practiced in my mother’s house at least) there is a uniform that brides need to wear – a white or off-white sari with a red border. I think this uniform is there in my [...]
Posted in arbit, descriptive, movies by: skimpy
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06 Sep
Yesterday I upgraded my Tata Sky package to Annual Mega Pack (with the would-be-ladywife wanting all Kannada and Telugu channels, and all movie channles; and with me wanting all sports channels this was most economical). And got service to this channel called MGM which was earlier part of an add-on package I wasn’t sure I [...]
Posted in business, entertainment, media by: skimpy
2 Comments
27 Jul
One of the bands whose discography I have and whose music I listen to when I want to listen to “unknown music” is the Grateful Dead. And while I was listening to them last night, it sounded like it was heavily inspired by Indian classical music (especially Carnatic stuff). The song I was listening to [...]
Posted in arbit, entertainment, music by: skimpy
1 Comment
26 May
Flipping channels an hour back, I happened to stop at this never-heard-before channel called “DD Bharati”. Usha Uthup was giving a concert that was clearly recorded for television. Looking at her, and considering that the program had been recorded in black-and-white film, I would suppose that it was ancient indeed. Maybe from some time in [...]
Posted in arbit, entertainment, media by: skimpy
4 Comments
15 May
One major point of difference I’ve noticed between Indian and Western classical music is about the starting point of scales. Western music has a fixed starting frequency, and all instruments and voices are supposed to be tuned to that. Every guitar is tuned identically, and I’m talking about absolute frequencies of various strings here. Similarly [...]
Posted in entertainment, music by: skimpy
1 Comment
26 Apr
How many of you actually enjoyed your “songs”/music lessons in school? Not too many, I suppose. Actually I don’t think more than a tenth of the students would have ever enjoyed these lessons. And I don’t think there is too much surprise in this given the kind of stuff that is taught in schools. At [...]
Posted in education, entertainment, music by: skimpy
3 Comments
24 Apr
There are times when you want to listen to songs that you don’t know. You want to listen to something that seems very vaguely familiar but something you don’t know. One way to implement this it to put winamp on randomize mode. But then, you are likely to know the songs so it won’t work [...]
Posted in arbit, entertainment, music by: skimpy
7 Comments
25 Mar
Have been practising the violin for a bit of late. Maybe I’ve picked it up some 4-5 times in the last week or so. And some twelve years after I stopped formal lessons it is still a lot of fun. And as I practice I discover that I don’t find it too much fun playing [...]
Posted in arbit, music, personal by: skimpy
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29 Jan
Ok this post has nothing to do wtih Five Point Someone or its related controversies. Yeah, the story is inspired by 5PS more than the claimed 3% but I’ll let Chetan Bhagat and his army of followers fight out that battle. Copying from others is honourable, at least you are taking inspiration from someone. What [...]
Posted in arbit, education, entertainment, movies by: skimpy
3 Comments
28 Dec
While writing my previous post on the film game, I was thinking about simplicity and improvisation. About how if you seek to improvise, in order to improvise well, you would rather choose a simple base. Like how the simplicity of film aata allows you to improvise so much and create so much fun. I was [...]
Posted in arbit, business, entertainment, fundaes, music by: skimpy
2 Comments