Sunday, June 12, 2005

To Blog or not to Blog

To say that the title is the umpteenth time that the much-maligned Shakespearean line of indecision has been twisted would be an understatement. If Hamlet were alive and had royalty on the line, he would probably be closing in on Bill Gates’ title of the richest man or something. Or maybe, if he had been Spanish, he would have uttered something like 'Estar o no estar'. Or again, if he had been Dutch and if the question troubling him involved the E.U constitution, he would have uttered a vehement Not To Be, along with 4 million other Dutchmen. (Disclaimer: I have no idea what the Dutch population is or how many of them voted against the E.U constitution. The Random Number generator in my head picked 4 million, and so 4 million it is.)

By now, I should make clear that I’m not doing a thesis on what Hamlet should or shouldn’t have said. This is not even an essay on whether the Dutch should have thrown out the E.U constitution or not. And it’s certainly not a piece where I’m showcasing my newfound mastery of the Spanish language (which is considerable, but I’ll do that some other time). Unlike our Superstar’s Chandramukhi, which went through 2 hours of meaningless songs and clichéd dialogues before finally making you sit up and take note of Jyothika’s acting, I shall get directly to the point.

Point being- What does a person do, when he has such a thing called summer vacation, apart from eating, sleeping, waking up, watching T.V, eating and watching T.V, switching off the T.V, switching on the computer, going through the entire library of songs, eating, sleeping, waking up... (If this were a computer language, here is where I would close the iteration loop.)

Seriously... You’re already acquainted well enough with all the VJs on every music channel from MTV through Channel V to Sun Music. And you’ve already seen the episode on Discovery where they build the Eurofighter jet. And you can be sure you know every shot off every ball in Dravid’s 233 in the Adelaide test, having watched it in the name of Cricket Gold or Super Doubles or Team India programming or some such innovative name for a highlights package. And you can’t bear to sit through the torture that they showcase in the form of English movies being dubbed into Tamil (unless, of course, its Titanic... proud to say I watched it the day before my Physics boards.) Oh, and almost forgot the one that beats ‘em all… Formula One commentary in Tamil!!! “Ippo, ivar arumayaga ‘car’ai vaegamaga ottikkondirukkiraar”. Yeah right, genius, the drivers are paid 7-figure salaries to trundle around the track as if they were in a Maruti 800.

And then there is this highly crippling disadvantage of a dial-up connection. If you ever want to feel frustrated with life to the point of crying, I’d recommend downloading a song with dial-up at around 6 P.M. Speeds of 1.5 kbps have been known to send the most stable person into bouts of insanity. So you give-up on that and turn to the songs you already have on your comp, courtesy of an extended source-pool of friends, friends’ friends, friends’ friends’ friends...y’know. But again, how many times can you go through the same Maiden-Metallica, Pink Floyd, Nirvana... and end up at Eminem! And you listen to him trash his parents so much that you wonder why they gave birth to him at all. I mean, surely it was some kind of mistake, y’know maybe... (Here’s where I stop on this particular line of thought... I want to maintain a “family viewing” rating on this Blog.)

So...you tell me. WHAT does one do??? And I’ve got to go now ‘cos all this has put my schedule slightly off track. Gotta go sleep. And wake up in time for the evening snack. And then of course, the evening movie on T.V. And dinner. And…

1 comment:

Manasi Subramaniam said...

Link me to your blog, you terrible human being. That's one useful thing you can do with it.