Sunday, February 18, 2007

Unakkul Naan from Patchai Kili Muthucharam

There is a violin piece in this song which is just fascinating, so much that I ended up trying to figure out the swaras.

Here goes :

s p m p N p m p

g m g m g r s n

g m g m g r s n

m m p

s p m p N p m p

g m g m g r s n

g m g m g r s n

m m p


p N S N G R N p . S

p N S N G R N pp S

n s g m p N p p g

gmpNS NSGRN

g m p N S p RRR.SSN

S N p m g r s n

p n s g m p N S G R G .. S . p .


I think the raaga is Agnikopa

Aro : S G2 M1 P N2 S
Avaro: S N2 P M1 G2 R2 S

It would be helpful if someone could confirm or refute this!

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If you are a non-vegetarian (even a lacto/ovo-veggie) in USA, you should see this

Friday, February 09, 2007

Untraining my writing

My brain needs to understand that writing a blog is not equivalent to writing a paper.

Warning bells ring wildly in my academic-driven-pedantic-mind at the use of a negative in the sentence above. I am disallowed from using "not" in my research writing. A sacred rule that simply must be obeyed. Surely, I can rely on my moderately expansive vocabulary to pen a few words that less than five people read (I include myself twice in this list), without resorting to a thesaurus.

Know your audience and style your writing to suit them. Does this apply to a blog ? As mentioned earlier in Section 3.2 (sheesh), there are about three readers - my mom, my brother and my cousin.

Amma cherishes each post just as a mother will. My brother on the other hand - a famous, successful blogger (with his own fan club on orkut!) - occasionally graces my blog to reaffirm his superiority in the blogger world. I have had to bear taunts such as "I think by blog-rolling you, I have significantly increased your traffic". Maybe he used a different word - significantly fits better in an experimental-results-section. My cousin - an intellectual who loves a debate - chooses to respond to only certain posts that suggest potential-world-wars. This is a confirmation of his elitism. And I mean that in a good way.

So going back to the rule of knowing your audience, the reader (if you did make it this far and are not related to me, thank you *sniff*) should infer that this rule is pretty pointless. I truly believe, a blog is where the writer is the reader and writes because she adores sentence construction, revels in self-mockery and harbors a secret feeling of superiority over all blogs that have less than 3 readers. I think I have managed to "untrain" my writing just a little bit. The title of this post bears little relation to the contents. Reminds me of my research work! :-)

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Thursday, February 01, 2007

You know it is cold when...

  • you start thawing at room temperature
  • your glasses get foggy
  • you resemble an exotic proboscis monkey with a red nose
  • you realize you can feel your ears hurt (they are so quiet otherwise)
  • you begin to wish for snow (it is much warmer then)
  • you cannot think of more than five good reasons