Music...

The end of a day, music for company, all the day's frustrations forgotten. My homage to Bharathi.


theerththak karaiyinilae therku moolaiyil shenbagath thoattaththilae
paarththirundhaal varuvaen vennilaavilae paanigiyoadenru sonnaay
vaarththai thavarivittaay adi kannammaa maarbu thudikkudhadi
paarththa idaththilellaam unnaip poalavae paavai theriyudhadi
paavai theriyudhadi

maeni kodhikkudhadi thalai sutriyae vaedhanai seygudhadi
vaanin idaththaiyellaam indha vennilaa vandhu thazhuvudhu paar
moanaththirukkudhadi indha vaiyagam moozhgith thuyilinilae
naanoruvan mattilum pirivenbadhoar naragath thuzhaluvadhoa

(Source: http://www.musicindiaonline.com/lr/26/6251/)

I don't understand the lyrics completely but SPB's voice in the soundtrack of 'Varumaiyin Niram Sigappu' is haunting. And a post on this movie sometime maybe. A personal favorite.

So I've been in this city called Daqing for exactly one month today. This place is basically an oil town. Oil money everywhere you look. This town is in the province of Heilongjiang which borders Russia. Anyway I have having this discussion with a client on one of my jobs in the neighbouring province, Jilin.

Amongst other things the Chinese are usually very interested in knowing how far east the use of chopsticks goes. India is usually where they are pretty unsure. A common question that I get asked after i inform people of my vegetarian origins is how we eat in India. Do we use a fork and spoon? Do we use chopsticks? And usually my answer is that we use our hands at home but I guess its beyond me to explain the fact that our choice of equipment for a meal depends on a complex set of societal norms. So I just leave it at that. But there is one issue that I need to clarify usually. At the dinner table for a chinese dinner each person has a small saucer sized plate, a cup for green tea(surprisingly 'Cha' in chinese) , a glass for juice/beer/water and the rice or noodles is usually brought in later once the main dishes have been served. The interesting part is that the plate for each person is not used much in the whole eating process. So the dishes are all placed on this rotating table in the centre and people use their chopsticks to pick up morsels of food from the dish in which the food is placed in and put it into their mouths directly. So very often the saucer size plate hardly comes into play.
Its used occasionally if the piece of food turns out to be too large. As a result of this cultural mismatch I need to quickly explain that we in India use spoons / ladles to first take the food from the common bowl and transfer it to our own plates ( a fascinating concept for many people here) and then proceed to sometimes use our hands.

Another discussion I had was regarding the India-China war of 1962. Now it wasnt a very heated discussion but it was pretty interesting to hear the other side of the story. His story was this. The McMahon line was according to him not the correct boundary between the two countries. And India he said was busy buying loads of weapons from the US and Russia in this period and acting aggresively. As a result the Chinese had to act against this agression. Who know which side of the story is right? There is probably no answer to that question. The truth as always lies in somewhere in the middle, by the wayside.

Music, Sunrise, Sunsets and Movies.

Take life. Add back ground music...Any song will do and you get a movie. I guess thats the beauty of music. Just imagine yourself walking in the evening sun with the long shadows to keep you company. Its not all that exciting. There isnt anything that makes you want to stop walking and start running. But play some music and the moment is transformed into a magical moment. Just the simple event of walking in the evening sun is now worthy of a scene in a movie. Music is a powerful thing and so are sunrise and sunset, they are somehow inherently beautiful events. Despite the fact that they are repeated everyday unfailingly at the exact moment that we can so accurately predict. But yet, every single sunset and sunrise is unique. The uniqueness comes from nature itself, its wonderful ability to create a new picture everyday, like an artist churning out masterpieces everyday.
Music, Sunrise, Sunsets and Movies.

Corn Fields and Canals

Jilin, June 30th , 11:30 PM . I was walking through a maze of non-existent paths in shoulder high corn fields trying to find my way from the rig to the main road where a car was waiting to take me back to what you might relatively call civilization. A civilization of a different kind, civilization in its original form, when man took to agriculutre and settled for living together in a society. I was in the middle of rural china.

Thats the way its been for the past few weeks. Each job is harder than the previous and for some reason known to the Great Mr. Murphy , something always goes wrong. Just when you think, finally tonight I get to sleep in a bed and take a shower, you wake up from your day dream to realise its going to be another long night in the chair or on your feet. Life has been hard, real hard and looks like it will be for a while.
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Hoping for a vacation sometime soon. I guess "He" has to decide and i dont mean God.
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And I have spent a lot of time in the past few weeks cursing myself for not having brought my camera along.
The countryside here is really beautiful, especially when the sun comes up at 3 am and you can see the orange glow of the yellow ball falling upon the greenery which stretches to the horizon. or when you have a really clear night sky and you can see a crisp crescent moon and the stars as a background for the rig. Its a pretty sight.