Gotcha Suckers!!!!

I say it best, when I say nothing at all. Specially if nothing can be blown up into a 600 +/- 300 word blog post.

Thursday, January 12, 2006

The day the music came back to life

Tony Fadell is a God. An absolute God.
Most of us might not really know who he is, but trust me, we have a lot to thank him for.
Next in line is a gentleman named Jonathan Ive. He is a God too, made one because of Tony Fadell.
I guess at this point in time, if you've been irritated enough for my not having elaborated their virtues, you're probably googling these names to find out for yourself.

Tony Fadell was the guy who originally came up with the concept of the iPod and was hired by Apple later on, and Jonathan Ive was the person responsible for its subsequent designs.
This is not a blog posting extolling their virtues or their contributions to society and to music lovers (and of late, music video and photo lovers too). I have not reached the level yet, where my blog is going to revolve around anyone but me. Tis true, empty vassals make more noise, sort of like empty vessels themselves.

Anyway, for more on these guys and the iPod, go here.

In the last posting I spoke about how the music died, ever since I started work. I thankfully have the good fortune of being able to have 24/7 access to the internet, which I shamelessly exploit by downloading mp3s, among other things.

My comp at work has a sound card, and I am given the liberty of being able to use headphones while at work, whenever it is not required that I listen to someone. This is rarely the case, with a million interruptions about this bug, or that doc update or a whole host of other things that inadvertently ensure that your listening experience is as smooth as travelling on an unserviced pre World War I era bicycle with flattened tyres on the roughest stretches of Bannerghatta road.

In addition, my material assets, allegdly portable, did not warrant being carried around because my built is not conducive to me wearing pants whose pockets are big enough to accommodate a five inch diameter discman, without it appearing as if I have a bulge in my pants. The bulge in the pants would not be such a bad thing if only God made me look more like Adam Garcia, so that it would invite pick-up lines from nubile pretty young things, and not so young nubile pretty things, and not so nubile pretty young things and so on (3 parameters, how many combinations....go figure!). But for the one single time I took it, all that the flattened lunchbox lookalike of a discman that could only play audio CDs and not mp3s invited, was looks from jackasses with mp3 players and compact ear plugs with long battery backups, who made me feel as if I was Leopold, (from Kate and Leopold) minus the charm, the good looks, the charisma, the money and the sex appeal. In short, apart from the fact that my headphones looked like I had robbed a 3 year old of her hairband, and the flattened lunchbox thing which was half out of my pockets when I sat in the office bus, I thought the music had come back to my life.

Note: travel advisory- please travel in office buses without speakers, which keep blaring songs from radiocity 91FM in the morning, for they will induce a feeling that makes motion sickness seem orgasmic!

I don't get paid much. Come to think of it, I think the salary that I draw is about 0.0002 percent of what my CEO's fixed deposit for his pet dog gets as interest, and that divided by 12 is what I get monthly, and minus tax cuts and so many other deductions that leave me as confounded as I did when I tried to understand women from as early as class 2, I am left with this paltry sum of money with which I can barely make ends meet (whatever the definition of that is).

The prospect of listening to music on my antiquated discman was so inviting that I totally overlooked the fact that I couldn't carry the bulky 9V adapter with me in the bus. Hence I had to rely on batteries, and alkaline batteries are about 40 bucks a pair. I didn't for the life of me imagine that I would have to make daily investments of that amount, to be able to listen to 13 songs on a CD burnt when I was a little less musically enlightened than I currently am. In short, it was not exactly a pleasant experience. I decided to switch to standard batteries for some time, but they ran dry so fast, (half a song listened to at volume to drown out radiocity playing on the bus) that I felt that the company that made discmen had some sort of connection with these battery manufacturers to make the lives of the ordinary consumer miserable by draining them out faster than a swimming pool would be drained if Obelix jumped in it. So much for asinine consipracy theories.

After the debacle that was CAT 2005, I figured that I had to do something to get a fresh start to the new year 2006, and made up my mind to get the music back into my life, and do a proper job of it this time.
To cut a really long story to pieces and examine the most relevant part with an electron microscope and present it to you, I zeroed in on an iPod.
A work of art, a wonderful companion, black, stored 30GB of whatever you wanted it to, played videos and stored photos, and was sleek and thin.
A good friend of mine named Vinayak Kamath came down from the US for his engagement, and at the same time, managed to buy me an iPod that meets the above specs.
It was love at first sight, and it felt like a new relationship altogether, me and my iPod.

Life has now become an endless movie soundtrack, and right from the time I take the long walk to the bus stop till the time I get back home, everything feels so good.
The other day, I had to catch a bus, and had to chase it for quite a distance. PF's "in the flesh" was playing in the background, and I could actually visualise myself running towards the bus in slow motion, with other hapless motorists swerving to avoid running me over, to make it to the bus stop and lunging towards the door just in time before the driver could get the bus into second gear. The whole mundane exercise of chasing the bus seemed so romantic that now, I really look forward to even being chased by a ferocious canine at the dead of night, with some appropriate song playing on the pod.

I need to add something to my definition of an ideal life, something I guess I had taken for granted for quite some time.
Good food, good sleep, good shit and good music.

This blog posting is dedicated to an amazingly talented guitarist, someone named Prashant Linus Patrick (fondly called Prashant Anus Fat-dick), who was the lead guitarist of the band I used to play for onceuponatime ago, who lost half a finger on his left hand in an unfortunate accident. Hope he gets to play again.

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1 Comments:

Blogger Aslan said...

ah.. i was right! :)

January 16, 2006 7:48 PM  

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