. : : Marc Sez : : .

Light Music - IIT Saarang

I had tickets for the light music concert at IIT Saarang. I’m not sure why I bought tickets for a light music concert. It might be because I’ve never been to one.

So anyway, the concert started off with Lucky Ali singing some decent melodies. Since they were all Hindi I wasn’t really interested. Then Karthik came on for the next half of the show. He sang some Tamil ‘hit’ songs, the same stuff they play on radio channels over and over again.

I then realised that I wasn’t a fan of Hindi music or Tamil music was wondering what I was doing there. I should leave the light music shows to my parents.

Life On Mars? No. Weird Rock Formation on Mars? Yes.

It looks like they found a shape resembling a human form from the pictures taken by the Mars rover. So I entered a search query in Google News to find some pictures.

The first tab that finished loading was The Hindu Business Line. The Hindu, in keeping with it’s policy of boring readers to death, didn’t even put up a picture in that article. No wonder the tab loaded first.

Checking the other tabs, I ended up on some MSNBC Blog (ew, Microsoft!) but atleast they had pictures.

Obviously it’s some natural formation or the other. Remember all the idiotic email forwards about the ‘face on Mars’?

Batman Streetlights!

I’ve wanted to post a photo of the Batman themed streetlights at Madhya Kailash ever since they put them up but never had a chance to photograph them. George’s photos made me remember their awesomeness. Check it out:

Let’s campaign to have one of the Batman movies shot on this road!

Mediator At Madhya Kailash

After the first review we took a ’super deluxe’ bus back. These are just slightly better and much costlier variants of the standard public transport fleet. Where the normal buses are at the point of completely falling apart, these have parts that have only started rusting. Ok enough MTC bashing (though it’s a lot of fun). Since the bus wouldn’t go through Adyar I had to get down at Madhya Kailash along with Gowtham, LN and Jerome. LN went to the MRTS station to get to Parrys and the other two went off homeward.

I was heading towards another bus stop when I noticed a car (Maruthi 800) parked on the side of the road (MRTS station side) and a policeman talking to the driver (the guy was about 35 years old). Probably jumped the signal. I continued walking. Then the driver and the policeman started shoving each other around. What the hell? This was bound to get interesting and I like a good fight so I immediately headed there. You want me to pass up free entertainment?

The cop was telling the driver that he had jumped the signal and taken a right turn and the driver was going nuts. “No I did not!” he was screaming. “You want money! You want money!” he shouted (in English) into the face of the traffic cop while his wife and teenaged son stood by. (They must have come down from the North somewhere. They were all fair skinned.) The cop was really annoyed and told the guy that he hadn’t asked for any money and had just stopped the car since he had jumped the signal. In seconds there was a crowd gathered around the car as is usual in Chennai to see what was happening.

Now this guy was going nuts. He was yelling at the cop to give his key and license back and the cop was shouting back at him. His wife and son were standing on the road helpless. This was going to get ugly and fast. This looked like a job for… me.

I stepped in and told the guy to shut up and chill out (in English). I had to repeat myself a few times and he finally did. Then I told the cop to stop talking to the man since he was clearly insane and do whatever he wanted. “Kadikarran pa!” the cop told me (translation: “He bit me!”) showing me his palm. There was, in fact, a teeth mark there. Now the guy started yelling again. “Why did he take my key? How can you take my key? Give me back my licence!” he screamed. I told the guy to shut up again and explained that cops always take the key away in case the offender simply started up the vehicle and went away. (Of course I didn’t tell him that you should always keep a spare key handy for precisely this kind of situation.) Then I explained that the cop asked for the licence to check if it was valid as they do everywhere. What was wrong with this guy? He was acting like a little kid.

Finally the woman came out of her stupor and started telling me some crap. I silenced her and told her the issue was not them jumping the signal but her husband yelling at the policeman. Especially since the cop was muttering that he wasn’t going to let this guy go and was calling his superiors over his cell phone. I asked them to just pay the damn fine and go. She turned and started talking to the cop. My work was done so i simply walked away, hands in my pocket as is usual. I should have stayed to see what happened after that but I didn’t want to end up as a witness or some shit like that.

What is wrong with these people? Did they recently move here from the U.S. or something? The way to deal with cops is simper, grin and beg until you get away from them. Atleast here in Chennai. Arguing with them will just make things worse.

1000 New MTC Buses? Yeah, Right…

You all heard people talking about the MTC adding 1000 buses to their fleet.

Total crap. If any of these people actually bothered to read the newspaper instead of gossiping about this, they’d get to the actual news.

First, the number of new buses added to the existing fleet is 504. Out of this 379 buses are replacements for old buses. That’s just 125 new buses extra. Of these 7 are those air conditioned fancy buses and 43 are ’super deluxe’ buses which are completely useless unless you are some rich bugger.

So the city is actually getting 75 new buses extra.

Data Source: Newindpress.com

The Wonderful Life

It’s the New Year! That time of year when I am happiest!

So many parties… Which do I go to? I hope I find some imported alcohol. Good shit. Maybe there’ll be some good looking girls that I can hassle. I hope I get lucky and find a drunk rich kid. They are loaded with cash and willing to pay.

- The thoughts of a policeman in Tamil Nadu.

The movie Superbad shows two cops going nuts in the U.S. driving rashly on the road with no regard for traffic rules, busting parties and ‘confiscating’ alcohol. While it was funny in the movie and unlikely to really happen in the U.S. I thought about it and this is actually typical behaviour of the policemen here!

My IOB Account

I went to the Indian Overseas Bank today, Besant Nagar branch. George came along and it was fortunate that he did since they required a compulsory introduction from an existing account holder. So anyway filled up the confusing forms (after some clarification from the bank personnel) and finished the process and paid the initial deposit. They really should make filling up the forms easier. They are so damn complicated. No clear information is given about anything, the terms and conditions are not included in the form (unlike ICICI bank’s form) and they’ll only give me the debit card ten days later. I wonder when they’ll create my account and make it usable. (Reminds me of the horrible year when I had BSNL.)

No More Rain

Well, it’s stopped raining.

Probably a good thing actually. People were dying and stuff. I hope it remains chilly though. I really don’t want to go back to the eternal summer. Damn it’s getting warmer as I speak. Damn Chennai.

Alright, Who Did The Rain Dance?

It’s raining… a lot. I didn’t realise it at first since we have holidays now which involve sitting around at home and never venturing outside. But yesterday I saw reports of flooding everywhere on the local news channels and set out to build a stockpile of food.

Driving in the rain in a car is very challenging. Especially when your car is an old Maruthi 800. All the windows including the rear window fogged up so I couldn’t see around me. Driving involved carefully turning using vehicle lights shining through the fogged up glass an indicators of other vehicles. Also had to slow down now and then to avoid splashing pedestrians and cyclists. I’m nice that way.

So went to FoodWorld/Spencer’s Daily and found that it was closed for renovation. What the hell… However Nilgris is nearby so I went there and got me some toothbrushes (Oral B Exceed, Medium - the only ones I use) and some stuff to eat.

Now if the rain had come a month earlier, it would have gone the way of 2005. Our semester exams would have been postponed and all the schedules messed up. Reports are coming in of flooding everywhere so it’s best not to venture out at all. Unless you have to get to work or something.

Travelling by MRTS

I found an article about the MRTS in The Hindu.

Brutalism At Work
Arvind Sivaramakrishnan

The author pokes fun at everything from the architecture to the train timings.

Well the train — a train, possibly the delayed 8.28, or the delayed 8.47, or the delayed 9.10 (you’ve probably been there long enough for it to be any one of them) — finally appears; and — surprise surprise — it trundles you several kilometres to your destination, in a tiny fraction of the time other forms of transport would have taken you, and certainly at a tiny fraction of the cost one or two other forms of transport would have levied upon you.
I read this article in The Hindu sometime back and was really amused by how well the author took apart the MRTS project.

It’s too funny. Read it.