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It ain't over till the fat lady sings.

A new day, a new post, a new look. My blog which had been lately infested with an infectious set of blog posts titled "The one....." decided to just shake it off like a bad bout of fleas. Hmm, so thats done and dusted.

Yesterday night, the time would have been around 10 30 pm. I was adding a couple of finishing touches to my intern report which I had to submit the next day. That's when it happened. Comp crashes, I restart it, try to recover the file, find it has been encoded into some top-secret alien code and when I open it with wordpad, what I get is mere incoherent gibberish. Now I start pacing around the house. That was my two days' worth of hard, hard work. What I needed then was a shot of scotch or atleast something Gaurav "Bolt" Shashittal could conjure up for me. But, "lucky" me, all I could lay my hands on was a jar full of groundnuts.

Yeah, time to execute the contingency plan. After several failed attempts to open the now-corrupt file, I set out on the arduous task of recreating the magic- I mean my report. So after four hours of hard labour, I had finished what I had set out to do. After a couple of curses under my breath, I turned in. Surprisingly, it was a night of more than four rather vivid dreams. Maybe God wanted to set things right with some exhilarating phantasmic experiences.

I woke up at 1 30 pm, found I had 5 missed calls and one of them was from the Americas, Canada I guessed. Then, within the next one hour I got news which left me with a cheshire cat smile and an extra post to my blog. A bunch of my dearest of friends had got into the finals of the NYC B-plan contest. Cheers bros! I actually felt happy...maybe the universe does have a way of evening things out. So let me call it CC- Cosmic Correction.

The one with my blog readability test results

Readability Results

The following table contains the readability results for http://abimopectore-aravind.blogspot.com/ .

Reading Level Results

Summary	Value
Total sentences	1000
Total words	5367
Average words per Sentence	5.37
Words with 1 Syllable	3318
Words with 2 Syllables	905
Words with 3 Syllables	445
Words with 4 or more Syllables	699
Percentage of word with three or more syllables	21.32%
Average Syllables per Word	1.73
Gunning Fog Index	10.67
Flesch Reading Ease	55.44
Flesch-Kincaid Grade	6.86

The one on Lol, Roflmao and the like

I dedicate this post to that dear friend of mine whose propensity of insinuating me to blog again has actually worked. Thanks bro, for putting me in touch with my soul again.

An overdose of reading and listening to irritatingly profound psychobabble brings me to that age-old philosophical question again- why are we here? This is what George Carlin had to say. The earth needed plastic so as to create a new "earth plastic paradigm", but the earth didn't know how to make it. So the earth figured out a mechanism to create plastic, spawn a whole new "intelligent" species called the humans. Funny, you might say, but let me cite here a global phenomenon which challenges the superior intelligence of the human species.

So let me call it the "LOL effect". I remember the good old days when I used to read a book in the company of a dictionary trying to find the meaning of those words which sounded like Greek to me. The so called best way to improve one's vocabulary. Times have changed, practices have changed. Today, I sit in front of my computer , "communicating" with my acquaintances with the help of man's one invention which has supposedly made the world a global village, and when I encounter those words which bring a quizzical grunt from my mouth, I fail to find a dictionary which can temme what they mean. LOL, ROFLMAO, BTW, BRB, TTYL....the list just goes on.

The 21st century has brought in its wake all this amazing technology but the fact of the matter is that it is just making the people dumber and dumber. "The internet was supposed to set us free, democratize us, but all it’s really given us is Howard Dean’s aborted candidacy and 24 hour a day access to kiddie porn. People…they don’t write anymore - they blog. Instead of talking, they text, no punctuation, no grammar: LOL this and LMFAO that. You know, it just seems to me it’s just a bunch of stupid people pseudo-communicating with a bunch of other stupid people at a proto-language that resembles more what cavemen used to speak than the King’s English."- well said Mr. Hank Moody*. You might ask me, why blame others when I myself am a part of the problem. Hence, my self-loathing.

All I can say is this. These near dyslexic symptoms of the new and brave generation will pain the heart of any puritan and denigrate the very beauty and idea of language. It's a dangerous proposition- youngsters learning the language through the debilitated practice of chatting rather than reading good literature. Shakespeare might not be as cool as the guy/gal with the piercing in the weirdest of places, but trust me on this, the man from Stratford-upon-Avon can give you a way better insight into the English language. As millions continue to live these decadent lives, please don't forget to simply and proudly Laugh Out Loud, while you go on LOLing.

* This post has been strongly inspired by an episode of Californication. It's a must watch.

The One on "Thoran", "Dalai Lama", "Kokkarakko" and a historic Night Out

I write this post with bleary eyes and Metallica's "Black" playing in full volume. The people who know me the best would be wondering why I who is known to detest loud noises am listening to "Metallica". The answer lies within the annals of this post.

At times it is fascinating to see and actually experience the transformation one well utilized night out can bring about to a person. It all started when three notable memebers of the mallu gang decided to form a band in tribute to the most influential mallu rock bands of our times- "Avial". Call it lame or even "trippy", but we decided to name our own band "Thoran" (Mallus, I hope u can connect. Others can use it as a tricky quiz question).

What followed were engrossing discussions about the names of our first song and our debut album. It culminated in yesterday's night out where we could compose the basic theme of our song and a few lines of lyrics. (The names of the song and the album have been held back as we would not like to spoil the surprise element. But all Mallu's with an IQ higher than that of Joey Tribbiani's would have guessed it by now from the title of the post).

There might be quite a few of you wondering where the Dalai Lama reference comes from. Lets say certain core members of "Thoran" were inspired by a particular rendition on the Lama by a group of German blokes. The resemblance is uncanny, but then our's is a whole new breed of music.

So why has this night out had a profound effect on my music sense? The answer lies in the high decibel levels and the reverberation Kutty's speakers have been able to produce all through the night. Imagine listening to the same song umpteen number of times in the same night from a speaker which can be heard from a kilometre away (Yeah I did that!!!). This one night changed me more than any other night has ever done. At this juncture I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to the co-founding members of "Thoran" for giving me a totally new perspective on contemporary rock music. (Yeah, nicest try).

Let me take this opportunity to introduce the esteemed members of "Thoran"- "Genpack" Kutty, Panicker, "Snake" Shyam, "The Mikemaster" Shekhar and of course myself. So as Farhan Akthar would say "Rock on"!!!!!

The One where I try to justify the overdose of melodrama in my posts

My first two posts were ones dedicated to two special events in the space-time continuum, which left indelible marks in my already colourful life. The first one being the most exhilarating experience in my recent years and the second one was a tribute to a friend who has sort of changed my whole perception of life in such a short period of time. I hope the sheer significance I attach to the two above snippets, in a way justifies the way I went overboard with the use of imagery and melodrama with bountiful doses of superlatives.

So this post is a sincere apology to the reading world on the nonchalance I had exhibited to your sentiments. The one thing I yearn for is to be a reader's writer. So I wish that I'll be able to fulfill my dreams.

The One on Thunder Man

My summer intern at the Indian School of Business has been filled with experiences ranging from the most enriching to the weirdest. As it trudges towards a docile finish, its time for retrospection. For the past few days, I've been wondering on what was my biggest haul from this brief period of 12 weeks.......hmm...this ain't gonna be easy.

Finally, as if from some Divine Bodhi tree, the realization dawned upon me. Without any doubts or qualms, let me announce to the world that the richest experiences came from my encounters with this great hero amongst ordinary mortals, a super-hero who takes his humility to another level of acting like a super-zero, the stuff of legends, the one and only.......Thunder-Man.

Hailing from Hyderabad, the city of the Nizams and the Biriyani, Thunder-Man moves around under the disguise of a happy-go-lucky, vetti, naive IITian. But few do know the exploits of this sage of a man. Hey when I call someone a superhero, the image which comes to the common man is that of Super-Man or the Wonder-Woman and to some comrades of mine, myself( Thank you!!!!). But the man under scrutiny breaks all the shackles of preconceived notions by coming across as a simple yet serious individual. The incredible phenomenon which lies beneath the layers of unrecognizable facade is known to only a few lucky souls which thank GOD includes me.

Every super-hero must have a super power. Its kind of a universal rule in fact thats what defines a super-hero. In this case, not only are his powers unconventional, but also ones which every male who has crossed the threshold of adolescence yearns to possess. Thunder-Man is simply put, an irresistible "object of desire". He literally oozes charm, seducing, strangely, worthy members of both sex.(A power I should say no other human being has ever called his own).

I would be doing gross injustice to the Thunder-Man by calling him what Angelina Jolie is infamously known for. (Kindly, forgive the ambiguity attached to the above statement. This blog is for little kids too.) Coming back to our discussion, the Thunder-Man is a hapless, "ordinary" human being blessed with certain talents which many have penanced for years to attain, but to no avail. Wielding a smiling demeanour and insurmountable levels of sophistication as his lethal weapons, this hero or "villain to many" has enamoured, loved and broken many a heart.

So all the LLLadies and a few "different" men out there, who were fascinated by this man of gigantic stature, please contact me for any extra details you might need on this wonder-man. One of you might be the lucky one, because the Thunder-Man is for a difference, single for the day. So thats it for now........keep tab of this blog to see many more of the Thunder chronicles!!!!!

So long..............Thunder Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan. Oops...don't forget your thunder wear.