Are you being watched?

June 20, 2008 | Filed Under confessions | 9 Comments 

Something exciting happened in my life today. I came out of my house and was locking the door – when I noticed that there is a cross marked above the doorbell button. I don’t think it was there yesterday.

I immediately thought it was the newspaper guy – he has been giving me newspapers for the last 2 months but hasn’t taken money yet. I haven’t been avoiding or anything – he probably has come around the time when I haven’t been around.

I decided that I should see if anyone else has this marking. Gautam, one of my friends who was over – immediately recommended erasing it. It seemed like some weird shit to him. There are 6 flats on my floor, and only two had the crossed marking.  One more had a tick – like the Nike swoosh. So there is something on for sure. The other crossed mark house is of a muslim. I guess all the muslims on the floor are marked with crosses. I wonder what the tick is about though.

Maybe it is coincidental, but I am planning to check markings on all the floors to see if there is some pattern. I hope there isn’t. It does not do justice to a city, I am beginning to love.

I have half a thot and marking all the houses with crosses – like Marjina did in Alibaba and Chaalis Chor.

I <3 Firefox

June 13, 2008 | Filed Under life's answers | 2 Comments 

One street that will never be unknown to me and yet have many undiscovered nooks is the www. And something that keeps me good company here is the Firefox browser.

There are very few things in this world that are free and yet so beautiful. The open source community aims at creating such things and Firefox is probably it’s best flagbearer.

I have come to love the browser and I don’t think I can use any other now. It has grown on me with time and it continues to make the browsing experience better. The other day I added a plugin called Zotero, which helped me to do a twitter post about the song I was listening on my PC.

Firefox 3 is being released on Tuesday and they aim to create a record for the highest downloaded software in a day. So if you love Firefox, do add to the tally. If you haven’t used it so far, it’s time you gave it a shot.

Youtube = My TV

June 1, 2008 | Filed Under Point of View, songs i love | 1 Comment 

I am towards the end of an evening of watching and hearing many ghazals on Youtube. My gtalk status was set to – ‘listening to ghulam ali on youtube’ during the period. Couple of my friends pinged me to ask what I was listening to. I started off with Ghulam Ali and listened to him quite a bit. Then moved on to Habib Saab, Mehdi Hasan, Farida Khannum, Iqbal Bano, Begum Akhtar, Alongside I was having a discussion on ghazals with Sana and we were sharing ghazals with each other. Prince popped up and he asked me to share what I was listening. I was listening to Farida Khannum and gladly shared it with him.

I had a delightful time. Although I was alone at home, I could still connect with ppl and share my love for what I was watching. This is how TV is going to be in the future. Loneliness with virtual company.

One of these days I am planning to have a classic rock evening, beatles evening, qawwali evening. Youtube truly rocks.

On another note, am planning to host a ghazal/mushaira evening some time in September. Exact dates, venue is still not decided. But if you are interested in presenting or listening, do get in touch with me.