Friday, November 19, 2004

Music

I have been meaning to post a blog about Carnatic music for the past few days. But as always time eludes the lazy! I am so grateful to my mother, for forcing me to learn music when I was younger. I remember days when I would whine and groan about going to those dreaded music classes, she would say "You may not appreciate this now, but this music will give you peace of mind when you are older". Well I am older now, and I realise how right she was. The pleasure of listening to M.S.Subbulakshmi is unparalleled. There are many reasons, why I choose M.S. over others but the most relevant of them all is that she reminds me of my avva (grandma) who used to sing so well. And at times, I am almost deluded into believing that it indeed she who is singing. I remember times, when we would sit by the kitchen door and avva would sing. Now I regret, not having learnt from her, all that she would have taught me.
I was so shortsighted and wasted my time, focussing on academics. Mere degrees give me only information, but music allows me to appreciate life. I guess it is not too late and have decided to learn atleast a new keerthanam on my own. The moral of the story: Listen to your amma..

-Subbu

Friday, November 05, 2004

Techie Bashing

My husband recently told me about something he had read somewhere - "All techies seem to have a Know it all attitude." And he totally agreed with that,with me being the Prime example! As you can imagine, I was flabbergasted, more because I had always believed that my supposed arrogant attitude stemmed from my genetically inherited Superiority Complex. Now that is something I cannot do anything about.
But his statement did get me thinking and the more I thought about it, the more convincing it sounded.

So why do techies feel like they are a species above the rest? I came up with some possible reasons :

* They have to sit in front of a computer all the time. For lack of anything else to do, they surf the internet endlessly and as a result manage to read more trivia than any normal human being should.

* They display this knowledge in various forms: blogs, forwards, emails,web sites, limited social gatherings and spam the lesser beings.

* Whats more, this information is a conglomeration of all possible view points taken off from various columns. Hey, who really has the time to recognize possible plagiarism ?

* Technology is easy to use and difficult to understand. Luckily it is their job to build technology that everyone uses and so they can go on jabbering for hours about how your home computer has a network problems.
Isn't it funny that you are stupid if you can't figure out why your computer crashed, but are not expected to know how your digestive system works ?

* If you observe a group of techies closely, you will notice that every person in the group has a lap top/ PDA / tablet which is demanding their immediate attention. The icing on the cake is their disdainful expression when interrupted!

I don't know if this is a 'guy' thing coz I am yet to see a group of Girl Geeks behave this way. Maybe in a couple of years ?

Anyways, all you techies out there..Get off your high horses. There is world waiting out there, waiting to be understood!

-Subbu