Barack Obama

Barack Obama is senator #99 in the US senate in terms of seniority. He is in his early forties and was teaching law at the University of Chicago before he became a senator. Obama means "blessed" in Swahili (his father was Kenyan). More importantly he seems to me like the most sensible politician in the US today. BBC has a profile of the guy if you're interested. He gave a talk recently at the National Press Club in Washington DC, which was televised on CSPAN. It might be available here. Very good speaker and comes across as a straightforward and smart chap. Towards the end, when he was taking questions, he spoke a bit about how the republicans are becoming a political wing for conservative Christians. While addressing this issue he mentioned why it was important for the democrats not to come across as secular. In general I get the impression that in the US secular is considered a bad word. In India its quite the opposite. So today I had to see the dictionary meaning to clear things up. The dictionary meaning for secularism is "1. Religious skepticism or indifference. 2. The view that religious considerations should be excluded from civil affairs or public education." For things like government, education etc secularism seems like a good thing to me. From a personal standpoint, I think it should be up to the individual to choose between being indifferent to religion and being deeply religious. Its one thing to be indifferent to religion and another to be against it. Its hard for me to see why in the US people associate the word with something negative.

Northwest China

I saw this chinese movie called Warriors of Heaven and Earth recently. The movie itself isn't very good, but the visuals are great. The movie is shot in the Xinjiang province which is in the northwest part of china. The gobi desert, mountains, rivers, canyons - extremely beautiful place. This region has both the lowest and highest points in china, 155 meters below sea level and 8611 meters above sea level respectively. This is also where most of the islamic chinese people stay. This region like tibet and taiwan are seeking independence from PRC. The region which originally had 6% han chinese people in 1949 has grown to 45% today. This is exactly what happened with tibet which was taken over sometime in the early 1950's. Here is some info on who the native people to this land are and their side of the story.

Ghazals

khud ko maiN baaNt na daalooN kahin daaman-daaman
kar diya tune agar mere hawaale muJhko

Thats a line from jagjit and chitra singh's ghazal - "apne hathon ki lakeeron mein" from the album memorable ghazals of Jagjit and Chitra Singh. Lyrics by Qateel Shifai. Having forgotten a lot of my hindi, and not knowing enough urdu, I often find myself looking for the meanings of some of the words when I'm listening to Jagjit Singh's ghazals. I've finally found this page with all jagjit/chitra singh ghazals (lyrics) and also an urdu dictionary. If only I could find a tamizh dictionary for tamizh songs. The ones with tamizh lyrics ofcourse, not the love'nna love'ih, mananne stove'ih variety.

Kahlúa Pudding

Kahlúa is a coffee based liqueur that comes from Mexico. People use it for many alcoholic concoctions some of which have curiously funny names. Imagine going up to a bartender and asking for a 'duck fart #2' or a 'kinky orgasm' or even better one followed by the other! For more about Kahlúa, interesting drinks and most important of all the nutrition information (like I'm going to be concerned about the number of calories a 'paralyzer' has) - click here . Kahlúa is also used in many desserts. I tried my own recipe for a pudding today where I used Kahlúa. This was inspired when I saw a friend of mine steam an egg. The idea of steaming eggs seemed odd at first. But the result of beating some eggs, adding some salt and water and steaming it was actually pretty neat. The result is egg with a semi solid yogurt like consistency with the taste of...well, egg and salt. So I decided to extend this idea for a dessert. I may have stumbled upon an age old recipe for pudding, but when you 'invent' it yourself you get some extra special cheap thrills. So recipe is - 2 eggs, half cup of milk, quarter cup of condensed milk, sugar to taste, 2 table spoons of chocolate syrup and 1 table spoon of Kahlúa. Beat it all together, steam and cool. Serve chilled. Extremely easy as you can see with pretty good results (after testing it on 4 unsuspecting friends!).

Decent Indian Rock bands?

First things first, if you haven't heard of 'thermal and a quarter', please visit their website . They are this south indian rock band from bangalore. Trippy name, trippy songs. And you can download their recent(3rd) album at their website. They were featured on this NPR program sometime back. So after being suitably excited after listening to their songs, I decided to check out the "rock scene" in India. Stumbled on this website called RSJ which I later discovered stands for Rock Street Journal. Anyway, so I was impressed at first with the number of bands, concerts and reviews etc. And then slowly, actually no, quite rapidly you realise most of it is the same pseud-giri that existed a few years ago. I still remember one of the Saarang rock shows I attended - good god. Anyway, atleast TAAQ is neat.

Greasemonkey etc.

Recently discovered greasemonkey. Its an extension to firefox that allows you to "customize" your browsing experience. With greasemonkey you can write/use site specific scripts which modify the behavior of those websites. For instance, you could get rid of some of those banner ads on yahoo news pages or make all mailto links point to your gmail compose window and so on. Very cool. In case you want to download greasemonkey...You will also find scripts for a lot of frequently frequented websites. Some other discoveries - blogger is quite unstable. But they do have tons of blogs to maintain/support. Discovered some rather interesting ones. What surprised me though was the kind of readership some of these have. And the comments people post. People actually have the time and patience to flame bloggers. And these are not world famous blogs or anything. Just regular blogs - nobody is making money off of them (how much does google ad sense earn you anyway?). What can you say to a person who comes searching for your blog, reads your post and feels the need to say something nasty?

Kieslowski, Kubrick and Kakoos

Kakoos in colloq Tamizh means shit and toilet. I use it to describe something that stinks. I'm half way through Kryztof Kieslowski's (sp?) "Decalogue". These are 10 1hr movies loosely based on the ten commandments. Atleast they are supposed to be - I don't know the ten commandments, so I cannot comment. But what I can say is that I'm missing the point in these movies, if there is one. They dont really stink, but they don't seem to be great by any yardstick. If I hadn't read the critics reviews before I picked up this movie(s?), I probably would have quit half way through. But now I have to see all 10 of them. Just to make sure I'm not missing something. At the end of watching "2001 A Space Odyssey" by Stanley Kubrick I had similar sentiments, except my frustration was a little more pronounced. Now, 2001 was probably fantastic when it came out in 1960 something. Again thats purely from a visual/sound effects standpoint. But calling it one of the best movies ever made - I'm sorry, I can't disagree more.

In search of wildflowers

The southwest US has apparently had a very nice wildflower season this year. Went up to Picacho peak this Saturday to see some. Unfortunately for me it was already too late for this part of the southwest. There were patches of poppies, lupines and brittlebush. But just patches. Picacho is a little peak, a hill really (about 3200 ft), 40 miles north of tucson. With some short and surprisingly nice hikes. The trails that go all the way up have some nice parts where it becomes less hiking and more climbing. Some very nice vertical climbs, where they have chains etc installed. The view from the top is nice. You see vast amounts of flat desert all around and the few "sky islands". Except for the stupid highway on one side ofcourse. There were lots of swallows zipping past. And the odd hawk gliding by. Tons of saguaros at the bottom. Neat.