discography of me- part 1, (albeit a little too hyphonated).

although, the comments don't reflect it, certain sections have subtly (and not so subtly) hinted that its getting too diatribe-ish, vendetta-esque, ranting looney- like (oooh i'm liking this hyphonated odyssey).
so to cater to the palettes of those subtle (and not so subtle) epicurean connoisseurs, i shall present the decent aspect of my personality, my taste in music. when i started writing this blog i thought i'd include music reviews of artists forgotten by the world at large , to serve the double purpose of appearing like an indie- arty-bohemian-chutzpah type and ofcourse attracting more traffic. to be honest i've had notions of people flocking to my site and the stat counter swelling and me getting a fabulous book deal because of my astounding talent and writing the fabled book in an exotic place, say marrakesh,and abetted, by a fabulous bronzed muscle-ey muse. sigh......
anyway, before i start reviewing music by little known artists i thought it prudent to put my own musical history upfront. like everything else, this too is a story.
it didn't begin in 1983. ofcourse not. but much before that. when my mom was pregnant with me and dad decided to play the saturday night fever soundtrack till the tape frayed. then he switched to boney-m , and before they could ra ra rasputin for the billionth time, mercifullly i came out into the world. but relief was shortlived in a house that swayed to "shes crazy like a fool, but what about daddy cool?". it was only a matter of time before dad switched over to cat stevens. i admit i like cat stevens. that song about morning breaking and what not is an eternal favourite. but not too much boney-m or the bee gees, (too girly)
then dad got tranferred to mumbai for nine years and these years i refer to as halcyon days because dad brought some eclectic music from mumbai, marathi bhajjans to samantha fox i listened them all. between dads marathi cuss words and the bhajjans, i can say i even learnt spoken marathi. i developed a huge crush on morten harkett, the lead singer of A-HA who looked like a perfectly chisled norse god.

i had a terrible time in school, during the nascent years, because nothing made sense. everything was confusing and i was always falling sick. i used to fall sick for months on end, and be alone at home with my grandmom. she had this wonderful habit of keeping her pet transistor near my ear and this mellifluous voice, would break out in karnatic rhythms and restructure the haze in my mind. karnatic music is one of those wonderfull genres of music, that bring order among chaos. i loved M.S, gangu bhai hangal and bala murali Krishna , the latter especially, singing, “bhagyada lakshmi baramma”

when the 90's broke and MTV came into our house, i got my first lesson in culture. women abroad dont wear six metres of cloth. it took 3rd standard intelligence to fully comprehend that shock. I was finicky eater (still am ), and would steafastedly refuse to eat lunch, so dad decided to literally hand feed me in the morning with the treat that I could watch MTV most wanted. This is my favourite memory in life. The first video that made an impression on me was chris de burgh’s lady in red. My mornings rocked. I saw the video of November rain and was utterly bowled over. It was so popular that it was requested every morning, I could even guess the timing of the video. Then there was this cool song by john secada, that my father absolutely loved and the food plate would start to sway. But my favourite video was one by Madonna oddly (and we are talking strictly of videos here). It was for this song called “my playground”, and the video was in the form of a photo album and very gimmicky. It was oddly stimulating.

Because of my poor eating habits, my parents put me in another school. I loved it. It had a swimming pool right in the middle. It was so calming, and all the other girls had this snooty habit of calling you a nondescript “girly”. I loved it there. sadly the early morning hand feeding from dad came to an end. The upper class girlies predictably welcomed the backstreet boys with open arms and made them richer by buying their posters by the droves. The snooty clique, whom every would copy, used to coo and purr when BB went “ quit playing games with my heart”, and that whole wet clothes in an basket ball court routine, had the entire school drooling.(retrospectively, Egad!). In an 8th standard hottest men pole. The backstreet boys occupied the first 5 slots and boyzone the other five. In 9th standard, there was a huge upset, boyzone occupied the first 4 slots (Stephen gately declared he was gay, and thus broke hazaar hearts, incidently that announcement saw a massive drop in boyzone merchandise), peter andre came in 5th, while the backstreet boys evidently on the wane, occupied the last 5 positions. Since I was not in the snooty clique, I was not privy to such polling, then some of them got married, many girls shed a lot of tears, BB posters were burnt, the tapes were abandoned , or passed down to hapless 8thies, if you were especially sadistic and everybody parted company in the 10th in relatively good spirits, owing partly to numbers like the Macarena, the spice girls etc.

It was in 11th and 12th that a huge musical tide swept me. This one was of the world music variety. Alyesha and I had become best friends and I avidly drank up her arab music collection. I’ll unashamedly admit to being partial to Amr Diab. No one can quite muster “habibie” like he did. I listened to a lot of arab tribal music, good bit of Arab pop, learnt some fine points about belly dancing and interesting stuff like that. Alyesha also had the entire collection of the Eagles. Since “hotel California” was done to death and literally put out to pasture, piqued, I sampled “hell freezes over” and fell in love. “tequila sunrise” is a song that gives you a taste of what it feels like to be in love. It was a bet between ‘lysh and me that got me listening to simon and garfunkel. Reading the poetry of T.S eliot and listening to S & G, are the memories that stick with me of 11th and 12th. What a charming prelude to the raging inferno that music experience in college turned out to be.

Dan Brown and associated farts

as i stated in a previous post, i finished 148 pages of "Angels & Demons", at the airport book shop before i was shooed off. Since i hate leaving books unfinished, i asked a ardent fan of DB to pass me an E-text of that book. nobody should ever buy any book by DB , infact he ought to pay us for reading his tosh. and what a tosh. Angels ..... had the lamest ever ending of all the books i've encountered, Five findouters included. dear god!!! and what makes me really really angry is that his books get accused of being Literature ( blasphemy) and that he has revived the art of reading among masses. this is to all the "masses", go obese, become fat, drink lot of beer , see t.v develop a high cholestrol but don't for heavens sakes read DB or read DB and say what a effing good author he is because he so is not!!!!!.
DB is essentially a Sidney Sheldon spawn which is what makes him a fart in the first place. he apparently read a Sidney Sheldon book while holidaying in Tahiti. thats what makes him a bigger fart. who reads while sitting on a beach in Tahiti?? what a loser!!!!. and who gets inspired by Sidney sheldon???. Sidney sheldon is another fart, who has an avid fan base in Khalsa college if you please. so DB , all inspired decides to pen an international racy thriller called "Da vinci code". and now i shall gleefully proceed to trash this magnum opus. this book is shitty to say the least. get this, a dead man with arms and legs spread out in the da vinci gallery of the louvre museum, and our hero, robert langdon goes on a pentacle rant. and 80 pages later realises that the "clue" is prolly the vetruvian man. and no sex!!!!. what kind of racy thriller has no sex?? and she was french for heavens sakes!!. bobby is prolly the only protagonist to have made it to the bestseller list without demonstations of virility. sad.
im not angry with DB for laughing all the way to the bank, bill gates, another fart, who makes far lousier products is the bloody bank. no it ain't that. what makes me angry is that this clever manipulator is hailed as the messiah of reading!!!. hes a terrible author with a penchant for ultra lame endings and people who think im wrong can go obese, become fat, drink beer, see T.V and develop a high cholestrol!!!
oh before i forget woe betide any quizzer who uses DB "fundaes", IM Pei indeed, stop being a fart !!!.

as Jack Sparrow says, "Savvy?"

its been an eventful week. not necessarily a happy one, but definitely a happening one. it started off great. we won the KQA metaquizzicks anniversary quiz, last sunday, for the second consecutive year, and i had this nice post i wanted to write then, about how we, Tonic, were the quizzing equivalent of weapon of mass destruction, the australia of college quizzing and barring the moon landing generation, superior to all( yes, including a certain moody liar), but couldn't quite write it because i developed a sore throat and writing isn't fun when you feel like arthropods are scurrying down the hatchet. that sore throat developed into a full fledged fever by monday and by tuesday i was wheezing like steam engine . savvy?
wednesday our guide at IISC decided, that we were a bunch of squeaky clean no goods and ordered us to fill sacks of charcoal, so i was drenched in charcoal dirt and wheezing like an engine, some heat and i would have made stephenson proud. thursday i lost my sex drive. i don't use it much, but i really like the feeling of knowing its alive and kicking. i also saw this newsbyte on NDTV. seems they are about bulldoze Delhi's oldest and beloved dog shelter. and the clearly agitated lady dolittle went " don't they realize that if they bulldoze this place, it will go literally to the dogs!!!!". sigh. she had my sympathy, till she uttered the last sentence. some people are stupid and dogs arn't despicable creatures, they are the visage of heaven.
friday was my brother's birthday. mum decided at midnight, (india time), that we should call him and " all of you yell, loudly, happy birthday!", so thats what we did, it was 5 A.M, where he was and the poor guy could only muster, " couldn't you all have waited", i must say that i thoroughly did my bit. friday i realized that i needed to finalize my seminar topic. on a whim i decided it to be "ergonomics". its not going to be fun.
saturday, i come home to no cable. but it could have been worse. a friend's friend died under a moving train in the same week. it certainly could have been worse.

What a wonderful world.......

......without Air Deccan. personally, methinks, it should be renamed Snare Deccan. If ever there is a death trap in the air, this is it.
when i was informed that i had to fly to hyderabad on Air Deccan, i wasn't too freaked about it, because i'm not too affectionate about AD. everytime i've noticed, the flights are always delayed and how can anybody forget the inaugural flight, when the plane had to make an emergency landing because of engine trouble?. but (as few people know),my byline being " will try anything ....once". i was ready for the experience. atleast i thought i did.
so, unsurprisingly, my flight was delayed by three hours. to pass that time. i went to the airport bookshop and started reading dan brown's "angels & demons". the fun part of reading books for fulooze (free), is that the folks at the book shop are angry but are always too polite to snatch it away from your hand, and heck, i'd never want to own a legit book of dan brown, the man idolizes Sidney Sheldon for heaven's sakes!!!!!. i had finished 78 pages when i got the call for security check. i finally made it to the plane, strapped my seat belts firmly, and insouciantly looked out of the window to see 3 mechanics fiddling with the engine. not a pretty sight considering in a few minutes its going to be air borne. then mechanic 4 runs up with a multimeter and shakes his head in the negative. that was it folks. my flight was cancelled for that day.
since i HAD to go to hyderabad, i was back again the next day to catch the flight, when, surprise, surprise, it was delayed again. this time round i progressed to page 146, when the proprieter of the bookshop gave me the nastiest look ever. i finally found myself on the plane, and it took off, mercifully, when suddenly , insect repellant started emerging from the ventilator system. why? because the the plane was swarming with mosquitoes!!!. people say that the journey is more important than the destination, but with AD, its the other way round.
i learnt how important competition is to the consumer. AD treats its passengers with disdain because it has no competition. its the only ailine offering low fares and ergo it thinks it can behave like a flying cattle van. competition is the only way the consumer can punish the errant airline. i'd never thought i'd say this, but hugs to those chubby mamas of Indian Airlines who dish out soggy sanwiches, atleast they care!.

war of pastry chefs

i dunno if most people see star one. i do. actually it sits pretty between star movies and HBO so i generally end up giving it a dekko. During one such dekko my heart almost stopped. there was Upen patel, a confirmed hottie (*hawt*) making ham quiche on a cooking show called "cook na kaho".now upen has been replaced by another hottie and much better anchor, shyan munshi. so this week, cherie shyan decided to make chocolate brownies. i have no problem with men cooking. it adds a nice dimensiion to their protector & defender image i have of men. the sight of men cooking, those arms doing the sautey or teasing the barbeque is arresting to say the least, but when they go scrambling for oven mittens, its mildly disconcerting. ovens are strictly female territory. truth be told, i've never made brownies, and cherie shyan gave me quite the complex. and to add insult to injury, K popped up a couple of days later , with "what, im making brownies hoy!". k amazes me no end. here was a man making brownies at midnight, because he felt like eating one!!!. between his scrambles to the oven to check on the brownies, i decided, heck i was making brownies too. im not going to tolerate brownie making men anymore. i was going to show them. but first a little history...

he Iddya clan has always taken to baking like fishes to the sea. the mittens are our shields and we swear by our egg beaters. apart from mom, who ofcourse has the magic touch, my brother used to make biscuits and improvise to make interesting condiments. i too have an interesting baking reportoire. apple pies, cinnamon rolls, cakes, souffle , i've done it all. actually the souffle triumph needs clarification. the souffle came out great but the sauce had a little too much cointreux in it. so we all got tipsy and i called a friend of mine aneesha coellho, fat, which ofcourse trigerred a huge altercation and the souffle was pronounced an "unmitigated disaster". but really, since aneesha was responsible for making the sauce, and construed 20 ml equivalent to half the cointreux bottle. i can hardly be blamed can i?. so it was with this illustrious lineage and rich past , that approached my tryst with brownies.
ill save the suspense. they came out great ( no surprise there, haw haw).nice and gooey. dad ate it and gave me a hug. aww thank you daddy.