Food for Thought !

The election time is over and we have a new General Secy (Fortunately from our floor). Once again ten days of promises, permutations & combinations and double crossing comes to end. Just hope that the new team can put aside their differences and work for the good of the institute & the students.
I read a post on freedom on my friend's blog (http://comingback2life.blogspot.com). He has raised some questions abt the current generation taking freedom for granted and abt patriotism. Maybe the current generation doesn't feel abt it because we never had to fight for it and hence, we take freedom for granted.
Still continuing with the agenda of seeing good, meaningful Hindi movies. Saw Mr & Mrs Iyer. Its a very nice movie abt how humanity in people comes to the fore in face of communalism with both Rahul Bose and Konkana Sen being perfect in their roles.
Another movie that I saw again was Swades, certainly one of my favourite Hindi movies of recent times and the best performance by Shahrukh Khan till date. The movie always makes me think abt lots of stuff. Let me explain it by an example.
When I was a child, I used to watch BQC regularly. In one of the episodes, the guest personality was Mr Mani shankar Aiyar, current Petroleum Minister of India. Derek asked Mr Aiyar that in India, parents tell children that politics is a bad profession and tell them never to become a politician. To this Mr Aiyar calmly replied that this is the problem. If good men don't go for politics and bad ppl do, u can't expect politics to be good.
Isn't this quotation aptly applicable even now. Many of my friends are appearing for GRE and going abroad for further studies with an excuse that India doesn't have good enough facilities. But if the best people turn away from their responsibilities, how can anyone expect India to become great ?
This is a problem which is visible all around us. For example, Thomso IIT Roorkee's cultural fest. The current team for Thomso is easily the second best because the best people didn't go for any posts. It seems that Cognizance, our techfest will also suffer a similar fate. Do we still have the right to criticize ppl who work for these events ?
Neways, enuff of heavy stuff for now. Hope next post will be a light one.

Books, Movies & Poli

I decided to see some critically acclaimed movies that I had put on the backburner in the last sem because of their duration or because I wasn't in a mood for the heavy stuff. The list also includes two Hindi movies, so here is what I thought of them

The Godfather II

I loved The Godfather but its not the best movie I have ever seen. The reason maybe that the novel was much much better than the movie and comparisons were inevitable. Godfather II has Robert De Niro playing younger Marlon Brando (the part from the book) and Al Pacino as Michael Corleone trying to cement his place. Robert De Niro won an oscar for his performance. The nasal, reasoning voice of Marlon Brando has been portrayed flawlessly by him. I still can't fathom why Al Pacino missed out on an oscar as I couldn't find nething to separate the two. The last scene where he is seen brooding & remembering the family dinner when he didn't want to become involved in the family business is just superb

Black

A long time since I sw an Indian movie like this. B4 this, I thought that Amitabh had given his best performance till date in Deewar (the old one) but I think this performance rates right with it. The role of a mentor for a mentally-challenged girl makes you realize that how much difference in one's life a mentor can make. I don't think that anybody else can come even close to challenging Rani & Amitabh for the awards this yr.

Masoom

I read the novel - Man, Women & Child by Eric Segal in the summers and decided to see Shekar Kapur's movie. Absolutely gr8 songs, presentation and performances. I guess its the only movie in which I liked Jugal Hansraj.

Next up is Muqbool, as soon as I can get it. In terms of books, still reading A Beautiful Mind.

Its time for politics in IITR as Students' Affair Council is to be formed. I see people involved in politics and can't help by wonder. Quite a few of these ppl, criticize Indian politicians accusing them of being two-faced, profit minded etc. But when it comes to them, they do the same double-crossing, buying votes etc. Another thing that comes to my mind from this. I know that ppl involved in various events bamboozle money. Same ppl are the most vocal in GDs abt politicians being corrupt. Can't understand this hypocrisy. I guess, somewhere I am thankful that Indian politicians are illiterate because a corrupt, illiterate politician is always better than a corrupt, literate one.

I think I am getting too senti abt this but this is what I feel. Neways, its raining 2day and I have a three day weekend. What else could I ask for ?

What's In The Name ?

I m back after a long lay off. I hope I shall be able to be more regular in my posts now onwards.

Since the day that I can remember, my name has been one of the unique ones. I mean how many of you have ever heard of a guy named Supriy? Since my school days, ppl have been making unnecessary additions & deletions from my name. The most common variations have been Supriya and Supriyo. There have been some weird combos in which even I failed to recognize that I m the person being referred to like Supbix Shakh, Surya and the latest one in the voters' list of my hostel Suopriy. The last straw was when I googled for Supriy Shah and google asked me "Do you mean Supriya Shah"

In my school days, this used to annoy me a lot with my classmates making fun of me. Slowly, slowly I came to terms with my name and stopped being annoyed.

Some of you might be wondering, why I am blabbering so much abt my name. The most weird case happened on our journey from Indore to Roorkee. There were 4 of us and tkts had been reserved by Kaddy. The ticket attendant came, checked the tkt and asked where is the girl Supriya. We assumed that it was the usual mistake that ppl make but he refused to believe us. On closer scrutiny, we found that the tkt itself had name of Supriy as Supriya mentioned as 21 yr old female. The tkt attendant refused to believe the truth and I would have been penalised for impersonating myself. However, we showed him my insti id and he accepted the error. I wanted to kill Kaddy at that point of time.

I guess that was not the last incident of its type and there will be many more to come. But hey, uniqueness has a price to pay.

In the meantime, I was able to read HP VI on the day of its release and also To Kill A Mockingbird. There have been many more interesting cases too but that for the next time.

Friends, Cards and Kasper

I realized one fact of life about a year ago. I feel closer to my friends from school days than most of my friends from either Kota or Roorkee. Let me clarify this statement in the subsequent paragraphs

I spent my whole school life in the same school. That means I spent 14 yrs in the same institution. In my school days, I was a lot different from what I am now in almost all things e.g my thinking, my hobbies, my perceptions to name a few. Things started to change when I went to Kota to prepare for JEE leaving the security of home. After that, I ended up in Roorkee for my studies. Throughout the course of my studies, I made friends and continue to do this even now.

Most of my friends from school remained in Indore and developed a different kind of personality. This resulted in a difference of attitude towards things, different interests, different perceptions etc. For example, most of my friends are not soccer or F1 fans, almost none of them listen to rock music, read a lot or surf the net. However, my friends from Roorkee and Kota share my interests, perceptions etc. Logically speaking, my comfort level with my friends from Roorkee & Kota should be higher than the one I share with my friends from school.

However, as I mentioned I still feel more comfortable around friends from school. The peculiar thing is that I don't differentiate between friends i.e. all my friends mean the same to me.
I don't know abt opinion of other ppl on this matter. Plz share ur opinion on this & also the reason behind it.

About the second part of the title. On Tues night, eight of us decided to meet at a friend's place for 3 or 4 hrs. The get together started a bit late at 10 pm. What is the best way to pass time when friends are 2gether ? Cards. We brought out the cards and started to play Flash

At 1:30 AM, we packed up and decided to leave. But my family forbid me to travel at so late an hour and so did families of most the friends too. Hence, we ended up playing cards for the whole night :D. It ended at 7:30 AM in the morning. To sum it up, it was a gr8 way to get to meet the friends and spend time with them (Although, I am pretty much sure that my family shall disagree with me)

Finally, to all the fans of our Kaspers. Now that I am in Indore, I get to surf the net late at night and my FG, Kaddy does that in the daytime. We don't get to chat enough to prepare a Kasper. Sensing ur disappointment, we decided to meet in person to compose the next masterpiece. However, we found that its not possible to compose a Kasper in person. We couldn't do it inspite of our best efforts ! Guess Chat Poetry can be done only thru messenger.

We apologize for letting you down. Once our colleges start, we won't be able to do so even more. Hence, our next Kasper could be delayed by a year. But we'll be back. We promise. We would like to take this opportunity to thank the programmers of Yahoo Messenger without whom, Kaspers wouldn't have been possible.

Indore Diary

It has been a week since I have been in Indore. If I would have landed up straight at Roorkee from Bangalore, the culture shock might have been a little too much to bear. Indore is serving as a middle ground to ease the shock.
Our last night in Bangalore was the most awesome night of the stay. Office guys took us out for dinner and we had a blast. That was when I found out that 3 ppl from our office belonged to a Rock Band. One was bass guitarist, one vocals and one lead guitarist. I am so glad that we went to Bangalore instead of trying to remain at home.
Life at home has been decent at best. Firstly, my friends had seen all the movies and so I was left with no company for movies. Also, most of my friends have graduated now and were trying for admissions in respective PG courses with no time to spare. Soccer season has not yet started and so no matches.
But all is not that bleak. I get to spend time with my family, I get gr8 food and can fight with my younger bro.
After a week of lethargy, I finally got to see Sarkar. It’s a pretty good movie. In case any of you are interested, I will review it pretty soon on Literature & Movies blog (Link in my blog roll).
I got to see a F1 race 2day after a loooong time. McLaren have truly overtaken Ferrari as the leaders of F1. I know that Renault & Alonso are leading McLaren and Kimi but still I have a feeling that this year is McLaren’s year. Alonso has won 5 races this year. In the past two races, Kimi was punished by 10 positions in qualifying but still finished on the podium. In one race, there was some problem with Kimi’s tyres and he had to retire when he was leading Alonso by a comfortable margin. Add to this the fact that McLaren were favourite to win the US Grand Prix and it is clear that it is fate which is against Kimi.
Anyways, 2day the winner was Montoya. Since I started following F1, I have maintained that Montoya is one of the best drivers on the circuit but has never been able to do justice to his talent. 2day he proved his talent by leading Alonso for most of the race. Hope he continues in the same form.
I know this has been a pretty arbit post with me jumping between topics. Its more of a diary entry than a blog. Hope u ppl don’t mind.