Confessions of a Dangerous Mind

Extremely busy with work. Not like I am sitting day-in day-out at work, still its pretty hectic. Living with room mates mean you get precious little time to write. Get home from work. Get some dinner. Watch TV/movie/both (we got a TV, a PC and a laptop!), browse, read, fool around, fight and viola its 2 AM! Sleep late and go to work. Repeat until weekend (I started out in Pascal, all you flashy kids would never know the repeat-until loop unless you started out with Fortran)! Anyway, my writing has been supplanted to a large extent by reading. That brings us finally to the point! I got my pre-ordered copy of the Lost Symbol by Dan Brown on 15th, the release day. Devoured it in one sitting, despite being pretty hammered on the head that day! Lost Symbol is a cookie cutter Robert Langdon book. Its interesting but, way too formulaic. May be I am getting that feeling as I saw Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons back to back just around a month back. Still, you can predict how the story...

All generalizations are false. Including this one. -Albert Einstein Yesterday, a colleague was mentioning about a poster in our office with this quote. At midnight it was proved by Amit Varma . I finished reading the book My Friend Sancho . Autographed by him and you can read the tale of that misadventure here . I was fairly cynical when I read over and over in Amit's blog about the book being a love story. I for one didn't associate his writing with love. I was expecting a lot of humour (there is lots and the book contains several laugh out loud moments) and a lot of libertarian view points (a smattering of it and pretty well meshed into the story). What I got in the end after reading the book was a strong empathy for Abir, the protagonist. I was in his position and tensed which of the three endings he imagined would happen. The protagonist is someone I can deeply associate with. I suspect many other 24 year olds would do the same. He is single. Confident. Loafs around at wor...

Ancient civilization. Dig. Gun. Artifact. Conspiracy. Esoterica. Professor. Prospective authors please note, you will get atleast one buyer for your book if these key words are there on your book cover. It would also help if you get someone to give comments like "Stunning!", "Tour De Force!" etc. I am such a sucker! My book collection has grown because of a few books I bought specifically due to these keywords. A small list which could well be incomplete: The Temple by Mathew Reilly Cover of Temple Peru. Inca. Idol. Guns. Pretty decent. Good read on a lonely day. Seven Ancient Wonders by Mathew Reilly Decent book. Lots of traps and thrills. Moments like the discovery of the Hanging Gardens are really good. Six Sacred Stones by Mathew Reilly Sequel to the above book. Same old stuff. The ending is a cliff hanger though. The Last Testament by Sam Bourne Cover of The Last Testament Palestine. Israel. Biblical artifact. Middle east solution. Peace talks. Okay okay book. ...

Oh well, it was a matter of time before these started coming up. Blog posts bashing Rock On!! I found one through Blogbharti . Blogger is a person who makes some interesting music, but he minces no words in bashing Rock On. When I say he minces no words, I don't really mean that his arguments carry any weight, or mass for that matter! Lets take it one by one, his "claims" of plagiarism: Look at the "Live Your Dream" headline. Notice the cool sign with wings underneath it. Looks familiar? No? Check this out. You mean Harley Davidson? The wings with something in it has been there for a long, long time and used by several bands. Aerosmith anyone? Check out the four band members. All of them are wearing the typical "rocker" outfits: Black T-shirts with "brutal" pictures on them, Jeans and Goggles. Dude, all the rock bands idolise the masters. Its a typical heavy metal band costume. A lot of college bands wear these kind of stuff. If you see th...

Just watched Rock On!! A wonderful movie. Simple storyline, exceptional music, good acting from all involved. In short a great experience. Its not (just!) about rock muic, but about friendship and relationships in general. I would give the movie 4.5/5, the same that I gave at imdb (9). I am not going to dissect the movie, I would rather let you read the review by someone who has actually been there and done that. Check out Praveen's review . P.S: Arjun Rampal seems to be styled after Eric Clapton of the Cream era! Check the pics below! It does remind me a lot of Clapton!

This is something I have been putting off time and time again. A cardinal sin by a rock music fan who happens to be a blogger as well! Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy once again breaks new ground with some awesome music. Last Hindi album I loved wasTaare Zameen Par. They haven't failed th yet again! There is no doubt Farhan Akhtar is a brilliant Director. But he is playing an unfamiliar dual role of the lead singer and the lead actor. The man has got some guts. Does he have the meat to carry it? Lets see! I have been listening to the music for quite sometime now. Decided to play it in its entirety to get a feel of reviewing it. The album opens with an awesome guitar riff. Reminds a lot of the classic guitar solos ala Jimi Hendrix . You get the hints of a different, yet rocking album. Lyrics are very different from the run of the mill Bollywood fare. Lot of English words thrown in the mix. Little existential. Even when the song is about love, it feels different. More sincere. More real. Music ...

I have decided to write more. For that I have to move beyond the usual crap I dish out every month! This time a website review. Just for you! I am a news freak. I read a lot about all the useful and useless stuff. I browse through the rss feeds in Google Reader, visit news sites (usually ibn), get my daily fix of digg etc. Not that I assimilate everything, its rather in the moment thing. I do recollect stuff if really required. Personalised news is something I like. Google News does provide a bit of that, still I think its not cool enough. What do I want from such a site? a) Personalisation (duh!) b) Ability to save certain stuff for future reference. c) Great interface. d) A degree of coolness! Digg provides the facility to view the stories you dugg. But the navigation is a mess and its a big pain to go through all that. Google Reader lets you star the stuff you want. But still it has got something missing. Enter Tiinker ! Tiinker is a personalised news service which constantly learns...