Tags!

I have been tagged thrice and since I will be gone for a couple of weeks, thought I would take care of it atleast now.

<Read More>.

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Music Tag(Tagged by Neelima)
Total volume of music files on my computer:
In GBs.

The last CD I bought:
The Legend of Bhagat Singh

Songs playing right now:
No Entry(Hindi), Virudh(Hindi), Chinna (Tamil).

Five songs which i listen to a lot or which means a lot to me:
Countless. But here are my recent favorites:
Don't be Shy by Rouge (Pop Album)
Thavam Ondru by Balram, Nithyashree in ABCD (Tamil)
Kannathil Muthamittal by Chinmayi in Kannathil Muthamittal (Tamil)
Nahin Saamne by Hariharan, Sukhwinder Singh in Taal (Hindi)
Piya Bole by Sonu Nigam, Shreya Shoshal in Parineets (Hindi)

Five People to whom I'm passing the baton:
Anyone who is reading it and interested in getting tagged.

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General + Movie Tag (Tagged by Chinmayi and Toerag)

Three Names I Go By:
Anand
aviswan1 (my office id - There were two Anand's in my team and we needed a way to differentiate each other)

Three Screen Names:
anandvis

Three Physical Things You Like About Yourself:
Come on, Let's not get physical! :-)

Three Physical Things You Don’t Like About Yourself:
Same thing here!

Three Things That Scare Me:
Loneliness

Three Things I Want To Do Badly Right Now:
Play Table Tennis
Play Volleyball
Sleep

Three Places I Want To Go On A Vacation:
India (The northern most part of India that I have been to is Bangalore. I really want to travel to all the places in North India)
Singapore, China, Japan, Indonesia, Thailand and all those exotic places.
The Gulf.

Three Kiddy Names I Like:
Have lots of time before I start thinking about those things.

Three Things To Do Before I Die:
Settle down in India.
Live well.
Travel well.

Total Number Of Films I Own On Dvd/Video:
Many, dont have a count. Could be in 100s.

The last film I bought:
If Xbox games count, Doom3 was my last.
My last DVD was the Rambo Series (a few months back).

Three Of Your Everyday Essentials:
Air
Music
Internet

Three Things You Are Wearing Right Now:
Shorts and Tshirt
Glasses

Three People Who Have To Take This Quiz:
Anyone who is reading this and is interested in being tagged.

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Book Tag (Tagged by Cerebral Shangrila)

Total Books I own:
50 to 100.

Last Few Books I bought :
The Wings of Fire by Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam (My first Audio Book and it was excellent)

Last Book(s) I was Gifted:
Da Vinci Code

Last Book I Read:
WCDMA for UMTS :-)

Currently Reading:
Angels and Demons

Five Books that mean a lot to me:
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (My All-time favorite)
Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
The Jackal by Frederick Forsythe

Tag five people and have them do this on their Blogs:
Anyone who is reading it and interested in getting tagged.

Formula 1 2005 US Grand Prix Pictures

             <Read and See More of it...>







I finally got some time to upload these pictures. As most of you would have known, it was one of the worst days in Formula 1 history. Although it was very frustrating, I was happy that I could see Narain drive. I, and several others, thought that he could have easily raced ahead of his teammate Tiago Monteiro, he was holding onto his 4th position more than trying to make a podium finish. Initially he had a 9 second lag with his teammate, but this gradually increased to a wide gap.

About the race experience, to put it positively, I can say that I have seen one of the rare races in the whole world (come on, I paid 105 bucks for the ticket!). And see Narain, the First Formula 1 driver for India finish 4th and get his first formula 1 points. This is a (lifetime) dream come true for him.

In the Flickr photostream here, you will see pictures from the Prosche Race (this takes place before the Formula 1 Race), the Parade of the Race drivers, and several of the racing moments. This time there were a lot of Indian flags. Usually Indians support Ferrari, but this time I saw someone carrying two flags in the same flagpole (Ferrari's and India's), thats was really cool! Some of the cooller ones are attached above. For the rest go here.

Formula One US GP is here!

 

Music Reviews - Recent Hindi Songs

It's been a while since I reviewed Music in my blog, so here are my views on some of them (I didnt write about all of them - If you like anything that is absent here, please do comment about it/them):

Dus:
Dus Bahane by Shaan(aka Shaantanu Ghosh) and Kay Kay(aka Krishna Kumar Menon). Cool Music! The extended version is also good.
Deedar De by Sunidhi is very average. Talking about Sunidhi, here is an interview with her. I consider the Tamil singer, Malathi, to have similar vocal characteristics as Sunidhi. Both of them are good in high-pitched and peppy numbers, whereas Malathi is kind of getting stereo-typed with item numbers and is not getting many good songs. She's got the potential, but needs a good break, I think.
Unse Poochein - Very average song, even the amazing Duet stars Udit and Alka, couldnt add lustre to it. Vishal-Sekhar could have done better, there have been thousands of such songs and am sick and tired of such songs. Skip IT!
Jaaniye Ve - Just ok, sung by Hariharan and Mahalakshmi Iyer. Mahalakshmi is a quite talented singer, although she is among the under-rated ones too. I see her once in a while in SEL's compositions and otherwise not much. Just bad luck, is it?


Mashooka Mashooka (English Version) - Cool song! Sung by Wajid, Nisha, Joy.
I thought the other songs in this soundtrack were just normal.

D:
Some of the songs are good, some of them are quite different (esp. the ones by Prasanna Sekhar - Is he the Prasanna who plays the Guitar and who graduated from IIT, Madras?)
D. Tox [Main Bindaas Ho Jaaoon] - Pretty funny song. Worth a listen. It's just got dialogues and some music in the background.
D. Rox - Reminds me of the Matrix Spybreak soundtrack. That song had been choreographed really well - walking up the walls and stuff like that, and that really stands out even today. If they do something like that to this song, it will be really cool. I like this song because it's got a good and decent foot-tapping background track with Indian instruments here and there and there is an element of thrill added into the soundtrack. Good work by Prasanna.
Other songs are just average.

Paheli:
Was a bit let down with the music by M.M.Kreem (aka Keeravani). Didnt like any of the songs!

Parineeta:
Amazing soundtrack. Good music by Shantanu Moitra(Read an interview with him here).
Piya Bole - Amazing soundtrack and beautifully sung by Sonu and Shreya. When I first heard this song, this is what I noticed: Saif starts off the song and then I was expecting Shaan to take over, but was a bit surprised to hear Sonu's voice. Off late Saif's songs have been done by Shaan. But later realized that Sonu can also sing for Saif and it seemed a bit seemless, although not as perfect as Shaan would've been!
Kasto Mazza - Beautiful Song, sung by Sonu and Shreya again. Didnt like the beginning of the song, but the song as such is very good.
Kaisi Paheli Zindagi - Excellent song, sung by Sunidhi. I like the free flow of the song. Excellent composition by Shantanu Moitra. I would like to listen to such songs in a beach setting.
Raat Hamari Toh - Good Melody by Chitra and Swanand. Chitra's voice seems to get better with her age. I used to hate her for sometime (maybe because I was hearing a lot of her), but in this song and some of the previous ones she seems very likeable.
Hui Main Parineeta - Seems like a very difficult song to sing. Proves the mettle of both Sonu and Shreya.
Overall, an excellent album. Correction to what I had written earlier, Shantanu has already MDed two films (Leela and Hazaron Khwaishen Aisi).

Jaane Hoga Kya:
Dil Dhak Dhak Karne Laga (Remix) and Dil Dhak Dhak Karne Laga (Remix) - Seems interesting! Good peppy dance songs.

Nazar:
Ali Ali - Good song by Shubha Mudgal. It's been a while since I heard her voice. A good Khawali type of song.
Nazar Nazar (Remix) - Good Dance number sung by Kay Kay. But for some reason I keep thinking that this is a song (and the Nazar Nazar song) that I have heard somewhere - Have they reused the lyrics or the music?

Will stop at this for today (will continue with recent Tamil songs in the next post).

S. Gurumurthy's speech about the Arrest of Kanchi Shankaracharyar

Went to S.Gurumurthy's speech in Schaumburg (a suburb in Illinois) alongwith a friend. The speech was titled "The arrest of the Kanchi Sankaracharyar". Although his speech was good, he didnt give any details about the arrest at all (the title of the speech was a gross misnomer - maybe it was just to attract the crowd). He just said two statements about the arrest and then said he cannot comment further on it. During his speech, he made some slightly inflammatory comments about the US (his influence with the RSS group was very apparent here), which made me think that I wasnt going to get out of that place without some lathi-charges! His oratorical skiils are good, he backed up most of his thoughts with statistics and he had a good knowledge about world economics. For someone else's personal account on how the speech was, look at Surya's blog (he has something from the Kanchiforum.org).

Completely Off topic, I have been hearing this very infectious remix kind of song (at 3/4 Bass and Full Treble with 50% Volume in my car - this 50% volume is very loud even by my standards) by Rouge, called "Don't be Shy" and I like it a lot. This song has already made it in a couple of albums, either as the original or as a remix.

Table Tennis

For the past few weeknights I have been pretty busy with Table Tennis. The madness for this game started at work a few months back, and we now play it very religiously. If it's 5'0 clock (thats the unwritten decency limit, any earlier than that and we might start seeing people complain, and eventually get the tables moved from the spot) then mobiles start ringing (with only a 3 second talk between the folks - Best of 5!), messages pop-up in instant messengers (which contain no more than 2 characters - TT). If these dont get the players up from their cubes, then it will be followed by challenges and taunts. We need to feed ourselves with this drug on a daily-basis, else the days feel quite empty! We bet on almost all things like the Xbox 360s or PS3s, each others' cars, next year's bonus and what not! But, sadly (sometimes fortunately) at the end of the game nothing really changes hands. It's all just empty words!

This week, I have started playing TT at my friend's apartment complex, which is right next to mine. This is, usually, in addition to playing at work. The workout in this game (though not apparent) is really good, if you play a lot of shots (or smashes). During my last visit to Madras, I got an assortment of good bats (Butterfly, Kung-Fu and Stiga) which has increased my interest for this sport.

Off topic, I am waiting for Parineeta to get released this weekend. The songs were really good - Music's by Shantanu Moitra (Raaga tells me that he is a newbie). Waiting for the next Rahman's music - Would it be Mangal Pandey or The Rising?

Next Post: About S.Gurumurthy's Speech.

Weekend plans

My weekend is pretty packed: Have a lot of movies and novels that I want to finish up from my backlog : Movies - Main Aisa Hi Hoon (hindi), 6'2", Arindhum Ariyamalaum, Karka Kasadara, Jithan (All tamil) and listen to a lot of new music thats been released (hindi) in the past few days - Dus, D, Fareb, Sehar, Mashooka, Double Cross and Men Not Allowed. Novels - Angels and Demons.

And have a Benz driving event to attend today afternoon in the Chicago Race Course. Plus the usual Volleyball and Table Tennis. We have the annual Volleyball league at the temple going on. I already missed practise today morning at 6am - just couldnt get up that early after watching Naina.

And apart from these, have to connect my new hard disk (got a damn good deal that I couldnt resist - 160 GB for $30!). Plus I have to pull out all the data from my ex-roomie's hard disk.

Might go to Sound Bar tonight.

What are yours?