A R Rahman

As most people in my generation, I am a great fan of A R Rahman's music. I fell in love with his songs right from the day Roja was released. Although his first Hindi movie did not come out till '96, he was immensely popular by then due to his Tamil movies. I remember watching quite a few Tamil movies in that timeframe, only due to Rahman's music. "Gentleman", "Kadhalan" & "Thiruda Thiruda" come to mind instantly among those movies.
I have always wondered why Rahman's music has the universal appeal that it enjoys. But, why don't most of his songs have the quality of "timelessness". i.e I am not sure if all his songs will be equally admired 50 years from now.
Kaushal Inamdar, a Marathi composer from Mumbai, gives an excellent analysis of Rahman's music here. He provides a lot of insight into one of the greatest music composers of the country and at the same time, displays an immense understanding of music. I especially liked the "Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility" analogy that he uses.

Performancing!!

Just installed this new firefox extension called as Performancing. It looks like a complete blog editor inside Firefox. Need to test it out, but the first impression seems good. Will post a detailed review later.

Dance, Monkeys, Dance

A very interesting clip.. Hilarious, but true... At the end of the day, that is what we all are, a bunch of messed up monkeys...

Schumi to retire from F1!!

Finally, he did it! After a lot of speculation on whether he would retire from F1, complete his contract with Ferrari till 2007 or switch to McLaren, Schumi finally led all rumours to rest by announcing his retirement. And what better way to announce the decision, then after winning his 90th Grand Prix.

Retirement aside, Schumi clearly stole the show at today's Monza race. His victory, and also Alsonso's engine failure, means that there is only a 2-point difference between the two leaders. This means that we are in for a real exciting final 3 races of the season. Schumacher definitely would want to finish his career on a high, while Alonso would defend his position to the hilt. Exciting times ahead!!!

The other hero of today's race was young Polish driver Robert Kubica. In only the third race of his career, he rode a brilliant race to finish on the podium. Looks like Alonso needs to watch out for this guy next season...

Well, it's a long wait now till the next Chinese Grand Prix on October 1st. But it's a wait worth waiting for! :-)

My First Post

So, this is my first post of this new blog. This is the typical introductory post. I have officially abandoned my previous blog. Not too tough a task, considering that I had not revealed the URL to anybody :-). A fresh start to a fresh blog..

What am I going to blog about? Well, I have absolutely no idea. I will just go on posting on any vague topic that comes to mind. I guess I am inherently incapable of following any structure in most of the things that I do. So, a blog is perfect for me. I do not need to follow any predefined structure. The topics can be as random as they get. There is no minimum or maximum word limit. And no posting frequency. Looks a great deal from any angle.

I have been intending to start this particular blog since quite a few months. And I have been continuosly procastinating on this issue since. The immediate trigger to start this was the blog started by my friend, Raviraj. While commenting on his post, I realized that blogging is something I have been wanting to do from quite some time, and this is as good a time as any to start.

So, I guess I will end this first post now and start some serious blogging :-)