Hmmm..

Been working for 12 hrs a day for three days straight.

Nothing Fancy

One thing great about Illayaraja music is that you don't need fancy equipment to enjoy the music.

Listening to "Mela Mela" from the movie vazhkai on a  zebronic headphone (the one with a mic.).

Mella Mella - Vazhkai - Illayaraja

Airtel Super Singer 2008

I tried hard to stay away from watching this show for two reasons. First, these reality shows bring in more drama then actually any talent. Second, it makes me really really miserable. For seven years I learnt music from a great teacher who tried his best to teach a dumb student like me and here I am wasting it all away. Its been over a year now since I did anything even remotely significant in music (not that I did anything before but at least I was practicing hard). I get extremely jealous and miserable watching these shows.

My mom was(is) addicted to this show and as was coming home early from work for a few months I just couldn’t keep away from it with the TV blaring between 9-10 pm. Strangely, I started liking it. And pretty soon I got extremely addicted and have even gone to extent of blogging about it :). With so many innovative rounds, I thought, for once they had refrained from too much drama and were actually concentrating on the musical talents of the participants. 

Things seemed fine until the finals. I can’t believe they actually let the audience decide the winner. It was completely atrocious and it clearly showed all that the channel cared about was keeping its ratings high. It was a great insult to all the hard work put on by those extremely talented singers.

I may sound arrogant but come on! most the people who would have voted would have had no clue about music. All they know of is ‘Suriya songs’, ‘Vijay songs’, ‘Simbu songs’.. etc. Only if the music director is A.R.Rahman they refer to it as Rahman songs. Yuvan, Harris come next but people like Devi Sri Prasad, Vijay Anthony, GV Prakash don’t even exist. You can easily get popular even if you aren’t talented. Its really easy. I have had some personal experiences. I have given extremely sloppy performances and yet have been praised just too much. I am not being humble here. Its really irritating when people praise you even after a sloppy performance. If someone plays a classical piece and if I play a popular film song with some fancy accompaniment, I can easily get popular. Even if its sloppy. It kind of happened to me in school. The college I studied in wasn’t a big one and none of them had even seen a electronic keyboard and again it was easy to get popular.

Ajesh, the winner of super singer 2008 is a wonderful singer. In fact, all of the top five finalists were pretty good singers. I am in no way trying to belittle the dedication, hard work and the musical talents of Ajesh. Unlike me, he really has pretty good talent. I am only p***** off by the way in which the winner was chosen. I damn sure that Ravi would have been the judges choice. He was far far better than others and had given a very consistent performance right from the start. As a young college goer and with such good talent it was only natural that Ajesh was more popular. Its really disappointing that the winner of such a great show was chosen by popularity count rather than by the music legends like Chitra, Sudha Ragunathan and others who were also present at the finals. I would have had no qualms if Ajesh was selected as the winner by the judges themselves. 

P.S: This post should have been made a long time ago but as usual I was too lazy to finish it up :). I had started on this post long before the finals when I actually liked this program. Fortunately, procrastination has helped me rethink about it.

Slept for two hours one day and then the next day, slept for 13 hours straight. I sure do know how to compensate for loss :).

Thanks for calling

I have a broadband connection from the infamous BSNL. Why?, you may ask. First, In my area no other service provider has coverage. Second, compared to others BSNL has some really cheap plans.

I've been having this connection for nearly 1.6 years now and surprisingly the maximum days I have gone without internet is 1-2 days on 2-3 occasions, which I believe is pretty good in BSNL standards. Also, the maximum time they have taken to restore the service back is only around 12 hrs from the time I make a complaint (the catch is it takes 1-2 days just to get them to pick up your call).

Now, for the last two days I was facing the blackout (not surprising as its been quite a while) and after the usual one day of trying I somehow got someone to pick up the call. For around 20mins they made me play around with the TCP/IP setting and the modem configuration and in the end were successfully able to restore the connection back. I was quite surprised by this as I expected the problem to be on their end which is the case usually and then came the shocker.. the person actually said .. "Thank you for calling"
!!!  

Did you vote?

No, I didn't.

Being alone..

... has never been a problem for me. I've been alone for most part of my life. Have extremely few friends. Have gone for days without even talking to anyone.

Things seem to be different now. Not that I am having any company now ...

... it feels like I have a problem.